A 54998 4
THE
RISEN
CHRIST
7. BALDWIN
BROWN
BT
480
B88
0681
T FISHER UNWIN
་་་་

FROM THE LIBRARY OF
ROBERT MARK WENLEY
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY
1896
1922
GIFT OF HIS CHILDREN
TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
1
THE RISEN CHRIST
THE
KING OF MEN
BY
JAMES BALDWIN BROWN, B.A.
AUTHOR OF
THE DIVINE Life in man,' 'FIRST PRINCIPLES OF ECCLESIASTICAL Truth,'
THE CHRISTIAN POLICY of life,' 'the DIVINE MYSTERIES,'
THE HIGHER LIFE,' ETC., ETC.
popular ediTION
London
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1890
3-24-39 J. A
If thou doft not withstand,
Chrifts refurrection thine may be :
Do not by hanging down break from the hand,
Which as it rifeth, raiſeth thee.
GEORGE HERBERT.
gt-wenly
3-19-39~
NOTE BY THE EDITOR.
N presenting to the public this volume of
discourses by my beloved husband, a few
words of explanation may be necessary.
The first eight discourses, delivered in the year
1879, form a connected series and represent part
of a book he was preparing for publication. A
great pressure of work at that time delayed its
issue, and soon the effect of the over-pressure was
apparent in a failure of strength necessitating further
delay. This was, alas! the beginning of the end,
and he passed into the Higher Life before this last
design could be accomplished.
The remaining eight discourses illustrating the
result of the Resurrection of Jesus on the develop-
ment of humanity-the Risen Christ in the Risen
World-complete the original scheme of the work.
These have been selected from MSS. set aside for
publication, with the exception of the two Sermons
on 'The Founding of the Kingdom,' which appeared
in the Christian World Pulpit in November, 1882.
6.
NOTE BY THE EDITOR.
With these he resumed his ministry for a brief
period after six months' interval of rest, and they
are therefore among his latest utterances.
I have also chosen a Sermon preached before the
London Missionary Society and printed in pamphlet
form, to close the series, as it contains a forcible
summary of the argument of the whole volume.
ELIZABETH BALDWIN BROWN.
IMMORTALITY VEILED
CONTENTS.
The Foundation.
I.
I am the Lord thy God.-DEUTERONOMY v. 6.
THE PRIMARY LESSON
II.
And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to
fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him,
and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul.-DEUTERONOMY X, 12.
The place of Resurrection in the
Scheme of Creation.
FORESHADOWINGS
III.
For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifesta-
tion of the sons of God.-ROMANS viii. 19.
IV.
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST
The Son of Man which is in Heaven.—JOHN iii. 13.
PAGE
• 13
40
59
• 77
8
CONTENTS.
I
Resurrection as a Fact.
V.
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES
This Jesus hath God raised up, whereon we all are witnesses.—
ACTS ii. 32.
VI.
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL
Remember that Jesus Christ, of the seed of David, was raised from the
dead, according to my gospel.-2 TIMOTHY ii. 8.
VII.
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE
Behold, the world is gone after him.-JOHN xii. 19.
The Risen Christ.
VIII.
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST THE PLEDGE OF
RESURRECTION OF THE RACE
THE
Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according
to the flesh; and declared to be the Son of God with power,
according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the
dead.-ROMANS i. 3, 4.
IX.
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING
These all do contrary to the decrees of Cæsar, saying that there is
another king, one Jesus.-ACTS xvii. 7.
PAGE
99
•
121
• 141
. 161
. 179
CONTENTS.
9
The Risen World.
X.
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM. (I.)
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am
chief.-I TIMOTHY i. 15.
XI.
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM. (II.)
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the worla to save sinners; of whom I am
chief.-I TIMOTHY i. 15.
THE ADMINISTRATION
XII.
The church, which is his body.-EPHESIANS i. 22, 23.
We are ambassadors for Christ.—2 CORINTHIANS V. 20.
THE RULING POWER
XIII.
The love of Christ constraineth us.—2 CORINTHIANS V. 14.
205
220
239
. 270
XIV.
THE FREE CITIZENSHIP. (I.)
. 288
The common people heard him gladly.—MARK xii. 37.
XV.
THE FREE CITIZENSHIP. (II.)
The common people heard him gladly.—MARK xii. 37.
THE NEW HUMANITY.
XVI.
Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given.—ISAIAH ix. 6.
• 309
•
325
The Foundation.
I.
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
I am the Lord thy God.-DEUTERONOMY v. 6.
E live in times when the Christian Apologist
is called upon to defend a conspicuous and
extensive position, which at every point the
sceptical intellect keenly assails. That intellect is
searching and mordant; examining, probing, and
testing, it lays its touch unsparingly upon whatever
stands by sacred conviction, reverence, and love. Its
commission extends in all ages to the shaking of
things which are movable, as of things that are made,
but only, as we are prone to forget, with the final
object, that those things which cannot be shaken may
remain. And since the line of Christian defences,
which the Apologist holds himself bound to maintain,
includes much that had its origin in human frailty,
and has been interwoven through human blindness
and foolishness with the Divine, there is ample, and
at first sight alarming, room for the sceptic's work.
It is indeed necessary in every age that much of
what man calls the truth should be shaken, broken
14
THE FOUNDATION.
up and destroyed. This salutary process goes on.
amid loud clamours that 'the truth is in danger, and
'the adversary is driving the King from His world;
but when we are wise enough to cease from playing
the part of advocates for God and apologists for
truth, and are content to be, like our Master, its
witnesses, we shall attain to something of that
courage and serenity which marked Him at the
supreme moment of His mission, and made the
hour of the Prince of Darkness the crisis of birth for
a new progress of the human race. Till we attain
to this wisdom, the sifting process will always seem
to us a painful one, and in an age like this will excite
no small alarm. The truth must indeed be strong
to endure it, for the intellectual organ which tests
and searches knows no restraint or mercy; but the
truth is strong, and comes forth from each assay to
rebuke our fearfulness, purged and pure.
No one of the Christian doctrines has been more
energetically assailed in these days than the great
truth which forms the theme of the present volume.
There are those who ask us to believe that the whole
development of Christendom for nearly two thousand
years had its starting point in a delusion or a cheat.
The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, they tell us,
was either the dream of heated Oriental fancy, or the
trick of a conscious deceiver of mankind, and the
sphere of Christian faith and hope, which the Life,
Death, and Resurrection of the Lord laid bare, is a
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
15
t
sphere of vain and now vanished imaginings. But
this, we affirm, is a theory that the plain strong sense
of men will never consent to as in any wise credible.
The great world, which is wiser than the teachers,
more keen-sighted than the sceptics, and more
catholic than the fathers of the universal church, will
never rest in the conclusion that the freedom, culture,
progress, and promise of Christendom-that grand
fabric which civilized humanity has been building
through all the ages of the modern world-has for its
foundation only the vapour of a dream; emphatically
will it deny that the realm of spiritual life and
activity, whose atmosphere was as the vital air to
Christ and to the great leaders of men who have
followed in His steps, was a phantom of desire
with no film of substance behind it, and that all its
splendour is but the iridescence of a bubble, which
a breath will blow into mist again, while it is swept
out of sight for ever.
In this realm of spiritual life and activity, the
central fact is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead.
An eminent member of what went by the name
of the 'advanced party' in the last generation once
remarked, that Christian Apologists had no need to
trouble themselves to substantiate anything but the
fact of the Resurrection, for if that could be proved it
carried with it all the rest. Nothing is incredible in
the scheme of Christian doctrine if the raising up of
16
THE FOUNDATION.
Christ be an established fact in human history. The
whole character of Christianity as a supernatural
revelation, and the Divine honour of the Saviour,
follow as a matter of course. If the Apostles spoke
the simple historical truth when they affirmed, This
Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses,
not only is Christianity credible, but the whole order
of the human world, according to the Divine plan
and purpose, must needs wear some such aspect as
the Christian Scriptures reveal. If Christ died that
He might rise and reign, then at the very heart's
core of the Divine scheme for the government of
men there is a work of Redemption, and man's Im-
mortality and the 'eternal destinies' follow in the
train of the Resurrection of the Lord.
This seems so clear that there is no room for
wonder at the attention which is now being directed
to this subject. On the one hand the evidence of
the Resurrection is being reviewed and enforced in
all its cogency, while on the other able and daring
attempts are made to explain it away as a baseless
imagination, or a benignant fraud. Round this fact
the battle of Christian evidence will increasingly
gather; and the Gospel of 'Jesus and the Resur-
'rection' will be, as of old, the power of God for the
accomplishment of His purposes of mercy to the
world.
It is also evident that the historical truth of the
statement, 'Now is Christ risen from the dead,' has
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
17
a vital bearing on the controversy now being waged
upon the subject of man's Immortality. If Christ be
risen, the presence in man of a spiritual nature which
can survive the shock of death, is substantially de-
monstrated, and the earth becomes clearly the
vestibule of a spiritual and eternal world.
This controversy upon the fact of the Resurrection
and its bearing on Immortality, has been the means
of reviving interest in a question which shook the
theological heaven a century and a half ago, when
Warburton published his famous treatise on 'The
'Divine Legation of Moses.' It is a question con-
cerning the place of the doctrine of Immortality in
the literature of the older Dispensation. It is at first
sight a startling fact that the records of the Jewish
Dispensation, which was God's preparation for, the
Advent, appear to contain so few references to this
transcendent doctrine; and this fact, the basis of
Warburton's argument, has in these days again
excited so much interest that it will be advisable
at the outset, before entering on the whole subject
of the Resurrection and its bearing on man's Im-
mortality, to examine with some care this ancient
and much debated problem. Are the Jewish Scrip-
tures silent as to Resurrection and Immortality, and
if they are so silent, why?
The truly remarkable treatise just mentioned, 'The
'Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated,' with which
the name of Warburton will be associated as long as
2
18
THE FOUNDATION.
I
the English language endures, will always remain
one of the most renowned books in English theo-
logical literature. It is a work in which enormous
learning—I use advisedly a word suggesting quantity
rather than quality-and consummate dialectical skill
are employed to sustain the thesis, that the absence
of all reference in the Mosaic legislation to the
doctrine of future rewards and punishments and to
man's destiny as an immortal being, is the convincing
demonstration that the commission of the legislator
was Divine.
Assuming of course that the Jewish equally with
the Christian dispensation was under Divine guid-
ance, Warburton argues that the doctrine of future
rewards and punishments was designedly left out of
sight in the Mosaic law, while its place was filled by
some special manifestation of the Divine power
called by him an 'extraordinary Providence'-which
counterbalanced the loss thereby sustained. War-
burton himself furnishes at the close of his celebrated
sixth book a recapitulation of his thesis, couched in
the following terms :—
'The argument stands thus: If religion be neces-
sary to civil government, and if religion cannot sub-
sist, under the common dispensation of Providence,
' without a future state of Rewards and Punishments,
'so consummate a Lawgiver would never have
'neglected to inculcate the belief of such a state, had
he not been well assured that an EXTRAORDINARY
-
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
19
'PROVIDENCE was indeed to be administered over
'his People: Or were it possible he had been so
'infatuated, the impotency of a Religion wanting a
'future state must soon have concluded in the de-
'struction of his Republic: Yet nevertheless it
'flourished and continued sovereign for many ages.
"
These two proofs of the proposition (that an
'extraordinary providence was really administered)
'drawn from the THING OMITTED and the PERSON
OMITTING, may be reduced to the following SYLLO-
GISMS.
'I. Whatsoever Religion and Society have no
'future State for their support, must be supported
'by an extraordinary Providence.
The Jewish Religion and Society had no future
'State for their support.
'Therefore the Jewish Religion and Society were
'supported by an extraordinary Providence.
'And again,
'II. The Ancient Lawgivers universally believed
'that a Religion without a future State could be
'supported only by an extraordinary Providence.
Moses, an Ancient Lawgiver. . . instituted such
' a Religion.
'Therefore Moses believed that his Religion was
'supported by an extraordinary Providence.'
Such is the argument of the 'Divine Legation,'
*'The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated,' 10th Ed., Book VI.,
Sec. vi.
20
THE FOUNDATION.
and paradoxical as it seems and indeed has been
generally held to be, it has a great truth under-
lying it a truth which Warburton, with all his
erudition and dialectical subtlety, failed to grasp
in all its fulness.I
Warburton was right, profoundly right, in clinging
to the essential unity of the Dispensations; the one
Divine purpose which binds all together in a
harmony of blessing, from the promise in Eden,
through the call of Abraham and the kingdom of
• The argument in 'The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated'
must be taken in connection with the doctrine current among the
Deistical writers of his time against whom Warburton directed his
polemic. Agreeing with the Deists in the view that a knowledge of
a future state, and of rewards and punishments in that future state,
is essential to the order of human societies, he has to answer their
objection to the Old Testament, that it introduces no reference to
future judgment into its code of laws, and so omits what is of essential
moment to the well-being of mankind. Instead of trying to show
that this great doctrine did in fact play an important part in the
conduct of life under the Old Testament dispensation, and so vindi-
cating the Old Testament by proving its likeness to the New, he
boldly accepts the statement of the Deist as to the alleged fact, and
allowing that the Mosaic legislation is silent upon this theme, he
founds on that silence his elaborate effort to prove it divinely inspired.
As will be shown in the text his argument is much vitiated by two
fallacies—(1) his attempted separation of the ordinary from the
extraordinary dispensations of Providence, and (2) his notion of
future rewards and punishments as needful to cover the imperfect
arrangements of Providence in this life-a notion which, however
consonant it might be with the moral ideas and judgments prevalent
in Warburton's day, is miserably insufficient as a justification of the
Divine Character and ways. Strongly as theologians may cling to
it, it is a doctrine sure to be left hull-down in the wake of the moral
and intellectual progress of mankind.
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
21
David, to the hour when the angels sang in the
heights above Bethlehem the matins of Redemp-
tion, and proclaimed, Behold, I bring you glad
tidings of great joy which shall be to all people;
for unto you is born this day in the City of David,
a Saviour which is Christ the Lord. The Jewish
Dispensation cannot be understood without the
Christian, nor can the Christian without the Jewish.
The Dispensation of the Son was needed to com-
plete the Dispensation of the Law. But the Dis-
pensation of the Law was needed to train men
for the Dispensation of the Son; and none can com-
prehend the one or the other who does not see
that the same ideas, principles, and purposes, are
operative in both. The mistake lies in Warburton's
doctrine that an important truth was veiled or with-
drawn in Judaism, to the end that Christianity
might have more excellent glory in revealing it,
while an apparatus of miraculous influence was
created for a time to supply its place. Such a
doctrine lies open to a crushing retort. If, it may
be asked, the future adjustment of the balance could
be kept from the view of one people without moral
injury by a miraculous adjustment of the balance
in the present, why is not this simpler and directer
method employed everywhere, so that there might
be spared all the wear and tear of man's nature and
life which springs out of the contemplation of this
terrible future. If, on the other hand, the know-
*
22
THE FOUNDATION.
ledge is really needful to the complete moral
development of mankind, the hiding it from the
chosen people placed them at a grave disadvantage
as compared even with the heathen around, and
made them not the heralds but the victims of the
Dispensation which should afterwards be revealed.
If it was withdrawn from their view that it might
subsequently be made known in Christ, and its
place was supplied for the time by an extraordinary
and miraculous system—the Theocracy, there seems
no escape from the conclusion that the Hebrews
suffered some loss for our sakes; an idea which
the Deist would not be slow to urge against the
Old Testament Dispensation, and which the Christian
Apologist would find it hard to explain away. It is
much more just to say, that a truth most precious
and of vital importance to man was not at that
period of their development forced on their atten-
tion, because a truth still more precious and still
more vitally important had first to be studied and
mastered; that only then, when this primary truth
had thoroughly wrought itself into the texture
of man's thoughts, beliefs, and hopes, could the
fact of Immortality with all its glorious promise
become a true Gospel to mankind.
The Jews were not placed at a disadvantage by
their ignorance of Immortality, as some choose to
phrase it; they were simply set to learn the first,
the most spiritual, the most profoundly important
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
23
¡
lesson of the Divine school. It ran thus, as Christ
summarizes it: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with
all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy
neighbour as thyself. The Jews had to study and
master that lesson, the great commandment; they
were set to learn to live, not by the law, but
according to the mind, of their holy and righteous
Jehovah; for the root of moral strength and noble-
ness is knowledge of the Name, concord with the
Mind, submission to the Hand, of the living and
righteous God. Here is the force of the moral impe-
rative-the 'thou shalt' of the God who made, who
upholds, who rules all things; and who has ordained
the statutes of life for the great Creation and the
world of men. The man and the people who know
that Name, who accept that Law, who watch for
and who wait upon the motions of that Hand, alone
can be trusted to make noble use of the truth of
Immortality. The Jews were not taught in their
law to look out for retributions in the far future—
I believe that theologians and moralists enormously
overrate the influence of these far-off visions of
judgment on mankind-they were made to see and
to understand that here and now the living God,
the Creator of heaven and earth, is in presence; that
He is hearing, seeing, judging, everything on the
instant; making every experience of life a retribu-
tion—a rendering to man according to his deserts;
24
THE FOUNDATION.
appointing every day a day of judgment, chastising
every sin with a Hand that never falters, crowning
every virtue with an honour and clothing it with
a power which are the marks of God upon it,
here and in eternity.
Un-
But I utterly deny the absolute ignorance of the
Jews on the subject of Immortality. Warburton had
to strain Scripture strangely to maintain it.
doubtedly the eternal future is not in the foreground
of Jewish life as it is in the foreground, for instance,
of the life of a Christian ascetic. It occupies in
Jewish theology no place at all comparable with
that which it occupies in the theology of the
Christian Church. But it is misleading to say that
down to the time of the Captivity the Old Testa-
ment knows nothing about it. It was always more
or less dimly apprehended as lying beyond the
region of this life, and the greatest men, in moments
of supreme experience, rose into the sphere of the
invisible and eternal, and saw with open eye the
great realities of the celestial world of which man is
a citizen, and which a veil only hides from mortal
sight.
What was so universally believed in the ancient
world the Jews could not be absolutely ignorant of,
and it has not been suggested, even by Warburton,
that there had been a miracle wrought to obliterate
the memory of their Egyptian culture, in which
Immortality and the future judgment were quite in
ร
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
25
To
the foreground of the stage, or to render them blind
and deaf to the common beliefs of their fellow men
around them. The mere credence in necromancy,
or the power to call back departed spirits, reveals a
faith in the existence of such spirits and of a world
wherein they dwelt; and if the strong hand of the
law had to be brought to bear with peculiar force
on the necromancers, the belief in the reality of
their power and of the fact which underlay it, must
have been deeply rooted in the popular heart.
me it is blankly incredible that the man who wrote the
Sixteenth and the Twenty-third Psalms had nothing
but the little span of a mortal life before his mind's eye;
I refuse utterly to believe that the words which the
Son of God took upon His lips when He was passing
consciously through a terrible death agony to Resur-
rection and triumph, were uttered by men who be-
lieved that the breath in their nostrils was the only
soul that they could claim to possess, and that man's
life differs only in burden and sadness from that of
the beasts that perish. When Moses trod with
dying step the steep ascent of Pisgah, led by his
Almighty Friend, and surveyed the length and the
breadth of the glorious land for which he had
suffered life-long but which his foot was never to
press,-who dares believe he thought that the next
moment would round his joys and sorrows,
hopes and fears, for ever? The people w
confident that Elijah had been borne in a

26
THE FOUNDATION.
flame into the empyrean realm where he would
behold the face of God and live, must have had
some questionings of spirit as to the destiny of their
own being, when for them too the veils of sense
would be cloven, and the invisible world appear.
It was there all round them—the greater world to
which they would pass through death; and the
vague sense of it lent a solemn grandeur and
dignity to life; it brought some peace to trouble,
some comfort to sorrow, some hope to death, which
made their life another and nobler thing, in other
respects beside the mere range of endowment, than
that of the brutes, and fitted them for living fellow-
ship with the living God.
But there was no assertion of Immortality as a
fact, there was no handling of it as a doctrine, there
was no concern about it apparent in the daily con-
duct of their lives. Why? Because they cared
only to eat and to drink, for to-morrow they must
die? Nay, for precisely the opposite reason; be-
cause they were so absorbed by their personal
relations to a present God. Their history as a
people is fully charged with the idea that the living
God was near them and with them, walking in
their camps, dwelling in their Tabernacle, guarding
their tents, guiding their way. For ask now of the
that are past, which were before thee, since the
God created man upon the earth, and ask
ne side of heaven unto the other, whether

IMMORTALITY VEILED.
27
there hath been any such thing as this great thing is,
or hath been heard like it?
voice of God speaking out of
Did ever people hear the
the midst of the fire, as
thou hast heard, and live? Or hath God essayed to
go and take Him a nation from the midst of another
nation, by temptations, by signs, and by wonders, and
by war, and by a mighty hand, and by a stretched
out arm, and by great terrors, according to all that
the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your
eyes? Unto thee it was shewed, that thou mightest
know that the Lord he is God; there is none else
beside him. Out of heaven he made thee to hear
his voice, that he might instruct thee; and upon
earth he shewed thee his great fire; and thou
heardest his words out of the midst of the fire.
The Jews were so full of the sense of God here and
now, that they had no room or interest for specula-
tion about the far future. Here and now they were
learning to live; the great 'to-day' was their all;
but doubt not that there were those among them
who understood as clearly as we understand it, that
man's to-day is everlasting; that His now is for ever.
They were learning in God's presence the great
lesson of life, 'to do justly, to love mercy, and to
'walk humbly' with their God. They failed again,
and again, and again; but again, and again, and
again, they were recalled. Their prophets took up
the task of Moses, and made them comprehend that
their first work was to live to-day soberly, righteously,
28
THE FOUNDATION.
and godly, with God's eye consciously upon them ;
then all possible glorious things would grow out of
that life, in time.
Thus it was that the Jews began under Moses
precisely at the opposite end of the moral scale to
the Egyptians. The Egyptians had constantly
before them a most elaborate and awful apparatus
of future judgment. They had it painted all round
them in their temples and their tombs; they had
it dinned into their ears at their banquets; they lived
with the most terrible visions of judgment, terrible
as Orcagna's pictures or Dante's lines, constantly in
their sight. And yet their life degenerated into the
life of beasts and slaves; and they became in time
foul, wanton, knavish, to a depth rarely touched by a
people in the history of the world. And it is always
thus. Nothing can be a more utter mistake (though
at the same time it is a very general one) than the
idea that a vivid delineation of the terrors of future
retribution has, on a large scale and in the long run,
a powerfully controlling influence on the manners
and morals of mankind. For another example we
have only to study the period of the Renaissance
in Italy, when poets and painters vied with each
other in the most harrowing delineations of the
horrors of retribution. Men believed in this retri-
bution. The Church held its power over them
because they believed in it. The subject was
always before them. They could not move about
?
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
29
their streets without seeing portrayed on the walls
scenes which make the very marrow quiver in the
bones; they could not enter their churches without
hearing retribution thundered from their pulpits;
they could not read the masterpieces of their litera-
ture without its flashing on them from the page; and
yet how many of the priests, the princes, the nobles
the scholars, the artists of those days lived infamous
lives-lives often as utterly brutal or devilish as have
ever been lived in any age about the world. The awful
crimes with which the pages of any honest history
of that period in Italy are charged, make one
shudder as one reads. And they were all committed
in full face, as it were, of the horrors of hell and the
joys and glories of heaven.
inspired eye of his that this
wrong end of the scale.
Moses saw with that
was beginning at the
He saw that hopes and
terrors in the future were powerless to make the
present noble, pure, and joyful. So he struck a new
key-note, full of glorious promise, which to this hour
rules the music of all the higher moral and spiritual
activity of mankind.
This was the manner of the Commandment:
And Moses called all Israel, and said unto them,
Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I
speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them,
and keep, and do them. The Lord our God made a
covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord made not this
covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who
30
THE FOUNDATION.
are all of us here alive this day. The Lord talked
with you face to face in the mount out of the midst of
the fire.
And it came to pass when ye heard the voice out of
the midst of the darkness (for the mountain did burn
with fire), that ye came near unto me, even all the
heads of your tribes, and your elders;
and ye
said
Go thou near, and hear all that the Lord our God
shall say; and speak thou unto us all that the Lord
our God shall speak unto thee; and we will hear it
and do it. And the Lord heard the voice of your
words when je spake unto me; and the Lord said
unto me, I have heard the voice of the words of this
people, which they have spoken unto thee: they have
well said all that they have spoken. O that there
were such an heart in them, that they would fear me,
and keep all my commandments always, that it might
be well with them, and with their children for ever!
Go say to them, Get you into your tents again: But
as for thee, stand thou here by me, and I will speak
unto thee all the commandments, and the statutes, and
the judgments, which thou shalt teach them, that they
do them in the land which I give them to possess
it. Ye shall observe to do therefore as the Lord your
God hath commanded you: ye shall not turn aside to
the right hand or to the left. Ye shall walk in all
the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded
you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with
may
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
31
you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land
which ye shall possess.
And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God
require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk
in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the
Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy
soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord, and his
statutes, which I commanded thee this day, for thy
good? Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens
is the Lord's thy God, the earth also, with all that
therein is. Only the Lord had a delight in thy
fathers to love them, and he chose their seed after
them, even you above all people, as it is this day.
Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and
be no more stiff-necked. For the Lord your God is
God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a
mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons,
nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of
the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in
giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the
stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of
Egypt. Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God; him
shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and
swear by his name. He is thy praise, and he is thy
God, that hath done for thee these great and terrible
things, which thine
have seen.
Thy fathers went
down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons ;
and now the Lord thy God hath made thee as the
stars of heaven for multitude. Therefore thou shalt
eyes
32
THE FOUNDATION.
love the Lord thy God, and keep his charge, and his
statutes, and his judgments, and his commandments,
always.
And see how it wrought practically. Was it a
question of the care of the poor?-And if thy
brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee,
then thou shalt relieve him; yea, though he be a
stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee.
Take thou no usury of him, or increase; but fear thy
God; that thy brother may live with thee.
And
if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor,
and be sold unto thee, thou shalt not compel him to
serve as a bondservant. But as an hired servant and
as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve
thee unto the year of jubilee: and then shall he depart
from thee, both he and his children with him, and
shall return unto his own family, and unto the pos-
session of his fathers shall he return. For they are
my servants, which I brought forth out of the land of
Egypt: they shall not be sold as bondmen. Thou
shalt not rule over him with rigour, but shalt fear
thy God.
Is it a question of sanitary cleanliness?-For the
Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp, to
deliver thee, and to give up thine enemies before thee;
therefore shall thy camp be holy; that he see no
unclean thing in thee, and turn away from thee.
Everywhere we see clearly the principle of the
legislation. Do right, here and now, because here
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
33
and now the Lord thy God is watching thee, and
seeks-not to terrify thee-but to lay on thee the con-
straints of His redeeming mercy and love. Learn to
live as men, in the world in which God has cast your
lot, and in which your intellectual and moral faculties
can receive the highest culture and the largest
development; live here and now justly, gently,
purely, according to the standard of the Divine
Commandment, because thy God, thy Redeemer,
demands it at thy hands; and leave the future to
grow out of the noble, fruitful present by natural
process in its own good time.
This is the only healthful attitude of a man before
that future which his immortal nature unfolds to him.
Do the duty of to-day, and let to-morrow grow out
of it by the will of God. Those Jews were placed
by Moses on a far higher and surer standing ground
in relation to the issues of life, than multitudes of
Christians are content to occupy who speak of death
as ushering a man into the immediate presence of
God. The immediate presence of God is here.
Acquaint thyself with Him here and now, and it is
well with thee, and shall be well with thee, through
all ages, in all worlds. The Jew who had seized the
inner truth of his law had not to wait for an unknown
future before he should see God face to face, and
live. We only stand well and nobly before the
eternal future of our being, when we stand well and
nobly before the daily duties of life. The moment
3
34
THE FOUNDATION.
we think of the great future except through the
faithful activity of the present, it becomes a snare
to us instead of an inspiration, and may easily be
made the means of moral relaxation and decay. It
was so with the monks of the Middle Ages. With
them the future overpowered the present, eclipsing
it utterly by its splendours; and it was not long
before the monk was practically given over to idle-
ness and carnal pleasure. To the faithful Jew
the present eclipsed the future, so charged was it
with the working of the Divine power, and with all
the interest of a lofty, godly, God-like life. The
less that a man is made to think of far-off results in
the way of joys and terrors, and the more that he is
made to think of the instant Presence of the living
God, giving him a law, claiming his service, seeking
his love, the more the glorious vision of the future
becomes ennobling and inspiring; the more ready is
he to go up to possess and to rule the Canaan of his
Immortality.
I do not know that I can better illustrate the
principle for which I am contending, than by asking
you to recall the accounts, which one sees from time
to time in the public journals, of the dying words
and letters of notable criminals. Some of these
have poured forth the most highly-coloured descrip-
tions of the bliss to which they were sure that by
faith they were swiftly passing, the home with all
imaginable happiness waiting for them on high,
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
35
whither they were eager that all their friends and
kindred should follow them to abide a happy company
through a long eternity! Am I speaking lightly of
death-bed repentance? God forbid. That prayer,
Lord, remember me when thou comest in thy king-
dom, and that answer, To-day shalt thou be with me
in Paradise, could be very ill spared from the Word
of God. But a true repentance in a man deeply
stained with crime would take a different form.
Such a one would not dare to think much of the
delights and the glories. His thought would be of
purifying, not of pleasure; he would look up humbly
through eyes suffused with tears of anguish and
shame, instead of licking his lips over promised joys.
The faith of the Jew, who saw only with clear vision
a present God and a world of duty, was at the
opposite pole to this bastard Christianity. He was
placed at the true centre of being in vital relation to
the living God; only when the idea of man's true
dignity and power as the friend and servant of the
Most High was thoroughly wrought into the heart
of the people, as well by their faults, their follies,
their failures and their miseries, as by their great
achievements and splendid successes, was the cur-
tain round them lifted, and they saw, what they had
dimly felt, that they were moving in the midst of a
boundless, eternal, celestial world.
And this faith of the Jews in the Divine Presence;
their sense of their relation to the Divine King,
36
THE FOUNDATION.
with all the means by which these were brought
home to them, Warburton calls 'an extraordinary
'Providence'! This is an unfortunate and misleading
expression. All that was extraordinary was the
clearness of the revelation, and the record of it
makes the extraordinary ordinary and familiar to us.
In truth there is nothing extraordinary about it. It
is always and everywhere the fundamental fact of
life on the higher, the spiritual scale, which God, by
His servant Moses, makes known to Israel. But we
are always involving ourselves in this confusion.
We start when we see the burning rain pouring down
on doomed Pompeii, and we note it as an extraor-
dinary judgment of the Divine hand; while events
equally disastrous though less appalling-social
diseases which sap the life of nations, disorders
like the deadly fury with which the ministers of
tyranny and corruption are being assailed in Russia-
we regard as occurrences in the regular course of
history. But, indeed, all stand truly in the same
category, and are the revelation, now clear now
veiled, of the hand of Him that judgeth in the earth.
Warburton's 'extraordinary Providence' for Israel,
is but the ordinary, familiar reality of every man's
life-the reality which the watchers behind the veil
look down upon from on high. Christendom lives
and grows just in the proportion in which it accepts,
on this central point, the Mosaic measure of the
relation of things present to things to come.
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
37
I speak advisedly of this 'central principle of the
'Mosaic Economy'-the placing man constantly in
direct and living relation to a holy, righteous, and
merciful God. I am far from unmindful of the many
dark and mysterious features in the Mosaic legisla-
tion, and of the many express Divine command-
ments with regard to which it is hard to see their
consistency with the lofty and spiritual elements of
the legislation on which I have enlarged. But with
regard to any Dispensation it seems to me profoundly
important to remember, that a Revelation must have,
so to speak, both a body and a soul. It must have
a body by which it is related to the men who are to
receive it and immediately to profit by it. It must
speak in language which they can understand, and
it must develop ideas not hopelessly remote from
the ideas which are current among them, and the
inevitable conditions of their life. Revelation is
education; it must have that which adapts itself to
the age of the people whom it addresses, while it
has central principles which lead them on and up
and prepare them for the revelation of higher things.
The Mosaic law was given in the midst of a hard,
rough, selfish, and brutal world. The nation to
which it was given had before it inevitably a stern
struggle for life. To have planted a nation of
Quakers there in the heart of those fierce tribes of
Canaan in those days, perhaps even in these, would
have simply invited their instant extermination. The
38
THE FOUNDATION.
Revelation had in its outward substance, as it were,
to be adapted to their immediate needs, so as to
guide them and uphold them in the tremendous
struggle through which alone they could be saved
and enter into national life. I am persuaded that it
might be shown, that the hard and stern command-
ments which are mixed with the Mosaic legislation
are just conditions of preservation and survival, in
the midst of the fearful storm of battle and of blood
which would be raging around Israel; while within
the heart of the legislation were principles of undying
truth, dignity, and power, which would take charge
of their higher development, and lead them and the
world towards loftier and more blessed conditions of
life.
Accordingly, we find the Jews, age after age, out-
growing the mere body, the shell of their Revelation,
and passing more completely under the sway of the
diviner central ideas. Their prophets strike con-
tinually, by the same inspiration which moved the
great lawgiver, a purer and clearer spiritual key-
note. They proclaim continually higher and larger
views of the Divine kingdom, and the relation of
God to Israel and to all mankind. As you watch
the progress of the Revelation you see how the
prophets tear off and cast away the elements which
belonged to the old, struggling and temporary
conditions of the life of the nation; while the central
principle comes forth with ever-growing brightness
IMMORTALITY VEILED.
39
and force, until the sense of the living presence of the
living God, which was the heart's core of the moral
culture of the legal Dispensation, shines out in
Emmanuel, 'God manifest in the flesh,' bestowing
the gift of gifts, the perpetual Human presence of
God with the world.
!
II.
THE PRIMARY LESSON.
And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to
fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him,
and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all
thy soul.-DEUTERONOMY X. 12.
T is deeply important that we should under-
stand the principle of the silence main-
tained through the Mosaic Economy upon
the fact of Immortality and its issues, which play
so large a part in the theology of the New
Testament.
I cannot hold with Warburton that the silence
is absolute, the ignorance complete. Moses was
not showing at the bush' a thing entirely un-
known to him, and presenting no clear image to
his brain, when he called the Lord The God
'of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God
'of Jacob,' and, according to the express testimony
of our Lord, implied the Resurrection. What was
known so widely in heathendom could not be an
unknown fact altogether in Judaism; nor can some
pregnant passages in the Old Testament be under-
+
或
​
THE PRIMARY LESSON.
41
6
stood, except on the supposition that as Abraham
rejoiced to see' the day of Christ, and saw it
' and was glad,' so the Old Testament Seers had a
prevision of Immortality. It was distinctly not
placed in the forefront of their Revelation, nor was
it the salient feature in their scheme of life; but
it is a dreary mistake to follow Warburton in sup-
posing that it was deliberately withheld, being of
the highest advantage to man, that it might become
the crowning glory of the Christian Dispensation;
while a miraculous system of temporal rewards and
punishments was established under the Theocracy,
to do for the people of Israel in some measure,
what the revelation of Life and Immortality would,
in the fulness of the time, do effectually for the
world.
It was for their own sake as well as for ours
that the Jews were not set to think of their here-
after-for the dignity and power of Judaism as well
as for the glory of Christianity. They had to
master the meaning of Life before they could
explore successfully the mystery of Immortality.
They were not brought under the influence of a
future judgment, because there was a far more
solemn and awful fact for them to master-the
existence of a present, all-seeing, all-searching
Judge, with instant execution of judgment; a
Judge Whose favour is life, Whose rebuke is death.
The far future was shut out from them, you must
42
THE FOUNDATION.
->
understand, not by the things of this material sphere,
but by a present living, and righteous God. They
were placed at once by Moses on the broad firm
basis of moral life and activity; the consciousness
of a direct personal relation to the Most High.
Here is the core of the matter:-And Moses
went up unto God, and the Lord called to him out
of the mountain, saying, Thus shalt thou say to the
house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel: ye
have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how
I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto
myself. Now, therefore, if ye will obey my voice
indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a
peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for alı
the earth is mine. And ye shall be unto me a
kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are
the words which thou shalt speak unto the children
of Israel. It is true that there is plenty about
reward in the legislation and plenty about chastise-
ment, to meet the needs of those who were prone
to elect the lower levels of life and the poorer
motives to duty. They were but children, and
God dealt with them full gently and tenderly,
leading them on by caressing or monitory touches
in a way, the goodness, the blessedness, of which
they would in the end discover. But the central
principle, to which Moses was always referring the
people, which the Lord was always seeking to force
upon their attention, to which the prophets age
THE PRIMARY LESSON.
43
after age recalled them, and out of which all that
was noblest and grandest in their life and literature
arose, was simple, clear, practical, and profoundly
spiritual-Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
strength, and with all thy mind; and it is the
statute of life for man in all countries and ages,
for ourselves at this day, through all time, and for
all eternity.
Judaism, far from being in its essential nature
an exceptional and temporary institution adapted
in all its principles and methods to the crude infancy
of the race, rests on and reveals the central principle
of all religious life and development, which Chris-
tianity simply applies in larger terms to a larger
world. For us as well as for themselves the
Israelites were set to study that fundamental
spiritual lesson. For us, for the world, they learnt
and set forth, as much by what they suffered as
by what they achieved, the first principle of life
and godliness; a principle true of their life, then
and there, in the circle of their tents and paths
lit by the glory of the Divine Presence; and true
also of our life, here and now, which the same
glory haunts-only our eyes are too dim to behold
it-and true, finally, of the immortal life, where the
glory will shine forth in cloudless splendour, around
all who have learnt here to live in eternity.
I referred in the last discourse to the process
44
THE FOUNDATION.
by which Divine Dispensations develop them-
selves, so as to lead mankind continually onwards
to higher levels of thought and life. It is not a
process which involves the revelation of new
principles of action, as Warburton argues; but
rather the peeling off, as it were, and the dropping
away of ordinances which, suitable for particular
circumstances and conditions of life, had gathered
round the central principle, and had to the common
eye obscured and even eclipsed it. Each Dispensa-
tion has that which adapts it for the times, by
which it lays hold upon and guides a people in
a particular crisis or in a particular stage of their
development; but at the heart of it will be found
a principle which is adapted for all time, and which,
as the particular people emerges from the local
and transitory conditions to which special regula-
tions and ordinances were suitable, shines forth
with perfect clearness, and governs the whole
progress of the national life. Let me illustrate this
by a notable instance, of which Warburton makes
much in his argument, and concerning which he
seems to me to miss entirely the key to the Dis-
pensation in question. In this misapprehension he
has been preceded and followed by a great school
of critics, (including many of the so-called 'advanced'
theologians of the present day), who set themselves,
after the fashion of an eminent contributor to
'Essays and Reviews,' to magnify the essential
THE PRIMARY LESSON.
45
contrasts between the Dispensation of the Gospel
and the Dispensation of the Law.
Warburton holds that about the time of the
Captivity something like a new revelation was pro-
claimed by the prophets. New principles of Divine
administration, he says, were announced, and a
change took place in the relations of God to the
people and the people to God, which formed a
stage of transition between the Mosaic and the
Gospel ideas of human life and the Divine reign.
Here is the passage in the Bishop's own words:
'Towards the conclusion of this extraordinary
'Economy, when God, by the later Prophets, reveals
'his purpose of giving them a NEW Dispensation,
'in which a Future state of reward and punishment
'was to be brought to light, it is then declared in
'the most express manner, that he will abrogate
'the Law of punishing Children for the crimes of
'their Parents. JEREMIAH, speaking of this new
Dispensation, says: "In those days they shall say
no more, The Fathers have eaten a sour grape,
'and the Children's teeth are set on edge: but every
'one shall die for his own iniquity
And
'EZEKIEL, speaking of the same times, says: “I
'will give them one heart, and will put a New
'spirit within you, &c.-But as for them, whose
'heart walketh after the heart of their abominable
'things-I will recompense their way UPON THE
'OWN HEADS saith the Lord God." And ag
""

46
THE FOUNDATION.
""What mean ye, that you use this Proverb con-
'cerning the land of Israel, saying, The Fathers
'have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth
are set on edge? As I live, saith the Lord God,
'Ye shall not have occasion any more to use this
• Proverb in Israel. Behold all souls are mine; as
'the soul of the Father, so also the soul of the Son
'is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.
I
Here, it is said, Jeremiah and Ezekiel proclaim
a new principle of administration, so much at vari-
ance with the ancient Mosaic ideas, that according
to Spinoza the Rabbins were in doubt as to the
admission of the latter's prophecy into the Canon.
I venture to think, in spite of the dictum of so high
an authority, that Jeremiah and Ezekiel do nothing
of the kind. It seems to me a dreary mistake to
suppose that this visiting of the sins of the fathers
upon the children was a temporary expedient, to
make up for the omission of a system of future
rewards and punishments from the Law. On the
contrary, it is a profound and, sad as it often seems,
a merciful feature of the Divine government of the
world. It is God's purpose always and everywhere
to make men understand their relation to, and to
feel their responsibility for, each other; and He
begins by binding families together in bonds which
are of terrible stringency where the disruptive force
sin is at work upon them, but of benign potency
vine Legation of Moses demonstrated,' 10th Ed. Bk. V. § v. II.

THE PRIMARY LESSON.
47
་
where the life of the household is love. And the
rule, far from being abrogated, remains in full force
to this hour. Thousands of men and women
amongst ourselves are bearing to the third and
fourth generation the sins of their sires-let us pray
that down our own line we may all of us send a
benediction! What these prophets did was to pro-
claim that the time had come in the development
of the Jewish people, when the full force of the
central and spiritual ordinance of the Law might
be brought to bear in its concentrated energy on
their lives.
In the earlier stages of the history of a people,
the individualizing process goes on slowly. The
tribe, the household, holds closely together; the
unit, so to speak, is the community; and a man
realizes his obligations, and lives his life, mainly as
a part of a great whole in which his own proper
being is mixed and lost. Then step by step the in-
dividual, as it were, disentangles himself, and rises
to a full consciousness of his personal responsibilities
and destinies. He learns what the terrible 'Ego,' the
'I,' means, and he shudders as he learns the know-
ledge is so dread. It is an isolating process, this
stage of development, but it isolates men only in
order to develop them more largely, and to prepare
the way for a nobler and loftier fellowship in time;
thus the family rises into the Church. The means
of the development are partly national strife and
48
THE FOUNDATION.
suffering-the dislocation of the relations on which
a man had been wont to rest, and of the social and
political arrangements which had seemed to mark
out his path; and partly the growing intelligence of
man, the widening of his thoughts about himself, his
fellowmen, and all things, which 'the process of the
'suns' secures. While his polity endured the
Israelite acted, thought, willed, in large measure in
common with the whole body of his fellows; the`
consciousness of his tremendous individual responsi-
bilities was not in the foreground of his life. But
the social and political miseries which followed the
schism in the nation, the ceaseless wars, the constant
changes of belief and worship, and at last the
shattering shock under which the whole framework
of the State broke up in the age of the Captivity,
drove men in, as it were, upon themselves, threw
them out of gear with their fellows, isolated them in
new and strange situations, and compelled them to
study, as of absorbing importance, the problems of
their own individual lives. Then the questions of
personal transgression, personal accountability, and
the needs, the perils, the hopes of the individual
soul, emerged into full consciousness, and man rose
to a higher stage in the development both of in-
dividual, social, and political life. Ezekiel simply
proclaims that that new era had dawned; not a new
age in God's Dispensation, but a new age in man's
apprehension of the principle of this Dispensation,
THE PRIMARY LESSON.
49
and its application to the new experiences and needs
of his own widening sphere.
A precisely similar process went on in Greece
under the tremendous dislocation which followed the
Macedonian wars. In the times of Pericles and of
Plato the common life of a Greek community was
the supreme consideration. Man was nothing except
as a citizen of a State. He moved in the rhythm of
other movements, in harmony with all the social
activity of his time. The high esteem in which the
Greek held the musical art was really based on his
apprehension of the unseen but resistless streams of
influence, which sweep men in communities along
predestined paths, and by the effacement of the
salient features of the life of the individual, make a
cosmos, an orderly system, of the whole. But the
complete shattering of the State life of the people
during the wars of Alexander and his successors, the
constant change of masters, the introduction of new
and strange ideas and habits of life from the Oriental
world, produced the same kind of effect as their
Captivity brought about among the Jews-throwing
men on themselves, and compelling the considera-
tion of the questions which concerned their own
personal being. Men felt then that they were
primarily individual units, with very dread endow-
ments and possibilities; and there was wrung from
them an importunate cry for knowledge, about them-
selves, and God, and destiny. Those who have
4
50
THE FOUNDATION.
studied the history of Greek philosophy from the
age of Plato through the Sceptics to its last outburst
of power in Imperial Rome, will know how, under
the dislocating and saddening influences just de-
scribed, the questions which concern the individual
being with its duties and destinies become more
and more pronounced and pressing, till in the Stoic
philosophy they stand out with something like
Christian prominence, and cry with something like
Christian intensity, 'What must I do to be
'saved?'
I
Some may call this process of the disentangle-
ment of the individual from the community, which I
have called a development, a decline; as if this
agonizing apprehension of the moral and permanent
interests of the individual soul were a step on in the
organization of the selfishness of the world.
should agree with them but for the mystery of
Redemption and the closely-knit bonds of fellowship
which it weaves around human hearts. This pro-
cess, both in Jewish and Greek society, was God's
preparation for the announcement of a Gospel, which,
while it intensified the solicitude of man for his own
personal well-being and well-doing, bound him in
the closest bonds of fellowship with other men, and
laid on him the obligation to devote himself to their
welfare, under the constraint and in the spirit of Him
who came from heaven to this earth, not to be minis-
tered unto, but to minister, and to give his life as a
THE PRIMARY LESSON.
5 I
ransom for many.
from that hour.
Self-devotion was new-born
But I contend that the principle which Ezekiel
expounds, and which Christianity develops, was
there in all its vital force, in the original Mosaic
institution. The living personal relation of the in-
dividual man to the living personal God carries the
whole; it is Christianity in its essence. Each soul
of man was contemplated in the Mosaic economy as
Ezekiel contemplated him—as a being under the
most solemn personal responsibilities to his Ruler
and Judge on high. The words, Ye shall be unto
me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation, ex-
pressed the original design of the Dispensation.
In the early ages of the world, the priest was the
man who represented this principle of spiritual
responsibility, and took charge for the people of their
personal spiritual concerns. But in the scheme of
Moses they were to be all priests; all were to be
alive to their spiritual interests, all busy about their
personal responsibilities and duties, so that there
should be no room among them for priestcraft.
Theirs was to be that lofty, lonely life of freedom;
the life in which, as Moses felt, the human soul feels
itself shut up with God, and must see His face, hear
His word, and feel the touch of His hand, or else
faint under the burden and strain of tasks too high,
too stern, for mere mortal powers. If thy presence
go not with me, carry us not up hence. And he said,
52
THE FOUNDATION.
My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee
rest.
The life contemplated by the statutes and ordi-
nances which Moses, in the Divine Name and by the
Divine commandment, established for Israel, was a
life of very large and lofty dimension, quite too large
to be bounded in its interests and issues by the
material limits of a world like this. It proposed to
man the very highest possible mark of imitation ;
and bound him to study and to emulate it, by the
purest, the noblest, the most spiritual motives which
can be brought to bear on any being in any world.
The Israelites were to aim at a righteousness, a
holiness, a temperance, a patience, a charity, perfect,
spontaneous, and constant as God's. It is im-
possible to imagine a loftier ideal of life than is
set forth in the passage previously quoted from the
close of the tenth chapter of Deuteronomy. The
character of the Being who created, who sustains
and rules all these worlds, in His absolute and
changeless perfection, is the pattern they are to set
before themselves, the mark they are to aim at; and
the one motive which is to inspire them to attempt,
and to sustain them to reach that lofty ideal, is the
love of God, kindled and drawn forth by God's great
love to them. It was a scheme of life which
demanded constant vigilance, ceaseless endeavour,
rigid self-control, and joyful self-denial, with the
patient sacrifice of present pleasures and advantages
THE PRIMARY LESSON.
53
for the sake of duty and the fulfilment of the Divine
will.
This lofty scheme of life, which is laid out in the
Pentateuch, was no vision of an enthusiastic dreamer;
it was the idea of men who had the strength and
courage to live it, and who yielded themselves utterly
to the fulfilment of the Divine command. There
were men trained under Judaism to whom the fellow-
ship of the Eternal God was as the breath of life;
who sought Him with an eagerness, loved Him with
a passion, obeyed Him with a submission, which no
other revelation has been able to inspire in its
votaries, and which had their spring in the absolute
perfection of the Object of their devotion, and in
the fulness and the everlasting stedfastness of His
love. Boundless was His demand on their zeal and
devotion; boundless was the self-denial, the self-
sacrifice, which men like Abraham, Moses, David,
Elijah, Isaiah, Daniel, offered to Him in their lives.
Bonds, wounds, death, had no terrors for them if their
Lord needed their service; stripped of everything
that man holds dear, naked, hungry, homeless,
friendless,' Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and
'there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee,' was
still their song.
To behold the beauty of the Lord
was the one burning desire of their spirits; to tread
the path of life in His presence was the one soaring
aspiration of their hearts. And did death round all
that, and round it for ever? Were all the springs
54
THE FOUNDATION.
of their life hidden in a world which they were never
to look upon, in a God who trained them for His
fellowship through a long and stern life-discipline,
but whose heaven was as far beyond the range of
their spirits as it is beyond the breath of the nostrils
of a brute? Would there not be a bitter mockery
in the vision which God spread before the eyes of
the dying Moses-having guided his steps with in-
finite tenderness to the Pisgah summit-if He knew
that at the next moment His faithful servant would
be a heap of mouldering dust, and that this would be
all that would remain of the man Moses whom the
Lord knew by name, spake with face to face, and
called openly His friend?
I am not saying that the lives of such men and
women as those who through faith subdued kingdoms,
wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the
mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped
the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made
strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the
armies of the aliens, demanded the compensations of
eternity to justify their sacrifice. Noble souls cannot
take in the thought of compensation. Sacrifice is
simply life to them; necessity is laid upon them to
do this, and to claim no reward. But I do say that
the life of which this is the core has, must have,
other than a brute's span and earth's limitations. I
do.
that it demands for its full unfolding and its
perfect fruit the sphere and the range of Heaven and
say
THE PRIMARY LESSON.
55
Immortality. God would have been ashamed to call
Himself the God of such pilgrims—pilgrims by His
commandment-if He had not prepared for them a
city; if the vision with which they had fed their
lofty natures had no substance behind it in 'the ful-
'ness of joy,' which is in His presence, and the
pleasures which are at His right hand for ever-
more.
And it is surely profoundly significant that when
the people, thus trained 'to set the Lord always
'before them,' and to make His commandment their
absolute unquestionable guide, advancing under the
discipline in spiritual knowledge and power, set
themselves at length to explore the boundaries of
their own nature, it was among them that there
rose up to full consciousness and expression not a
yearning only, but a clear doctrine of Resurrection and
Immortality. And it is still more profoundly signi-
ficant, that He who at length, in the promised ful-
ness of the time, was born of this people to be the
Saviour and the King of men, the Child of the tra-
vail of all the Jewish ages, the Son whom from ever-
lasting that travail was ordained to give to the world;
He who, as a Man, was saturated with the spirit of
the Divine Dispensation, and was indeed the Head of
the glorious line of prophets, priests, and kings
whom it had brought forth, whose life, as the abso-
lutely perfect and self-sacrificing Servant of the Lord,
was the complete realization of all that Judaism had
56
THE FOUNDATION.
been aiming at; He who, as God manifest in the
flesh, spake as man never spake, and did as man
never did should declare that He came to abolish
death and to bring Life and Immortality to light by
His Gospel.
The place of Resurrection in the Scheme of
TH
Creation.
III.
FORESHADOWINGS.
For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifesta-
tion of the sons of God.-ROMANS viii. 19.

T would be a great mistake to imagine that
the noblest and wisest of those who are
doing their best in these days to rob us of
the everlasting consolation and good hope through
grace, which the fact of the Resurrection of our Lord
affords to us, are indifferent on the subject of Im-
mortality. On the contrary it is a topic upon which
some of the ablest of them are continually harping.
They recognize the yearning for it as innate in our
nature; they see that the longing is too passionate
to be denied or despised; and so they set them-
selves to build up for man a constructive Immor-
tality.
The presence of a spirit in this fleshly tabernacle
destined to survive the shock of its dissolution, and
to live on under new conditions, in a world which
will furnish the field and the means for the full un-
folding of its crippled and struggling powers, they re-
fuse to believe in. When the pallor of death blanches
60 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
the brow and its rigor stiffens the lip, the man as far as
conscious existence is concerned has passed, they tell
us, out of the living universe for ever; all that made
him man, the God-like reason, the infinite faculty,
the knowledge, the humour, the sympathy, the
tenderness, the rectitude, the charity, are there in
that inanimate corruptible mass; all that the universe
holds of them is a little grey ashy matter the sub-
stance of brain and nerve, which will soon be but
viewless dust. And yet, they tell us, man shall not
miss his Immortality. The man is gone, gone for
ever; scattered to the winds, gathered in the rains,
and mixed with the common matter of the world; but
his thoughts remain. The mind is gone, dissipated in
dust; but the children of the mind live on; they
enter into other minds, they touch the heart, they
aid the intelligence, they shape the conduct of other
generations; they move according to their weight
and worth in the congress of the living, and are
factors more or less momentous in the life and pro-
gress of mankind. Just as the body of the man is
dissolved and has perished, while its atoms enter
into other organisms, feeding the grass of the
valley and the beasts of the field, and again may
enter as a component into living flesh-so his thoughts
mix themselves with other minds, and enter into the
composition of other lives, though his very name and
memory has perished; and thus he achieves his
longed-for Immortality.
FORESHADOWING.
61
Well! it is a recognition, and an extremely valuable
recognition, of the grand compass of that nature
which God has made and marked for Immortality-
thus to cling to a shred of the Christian doctrine,
rather than to settle into the conviction that in the
end black night rules over all. But I cannot wonder
that men like Mr. Stuart Mill are driven to the con-
viction that the Creator and Ruler of this great uni-
verse, if it has a Creator and Ruler, must be a Being of
either limited power or imperfect benevolence, or
He never could have doomed that passionate longing
of man's nature to find its only satisfaction in this
mockery of Immortality.
I have no need here to enter on any discussion as
to the exact measure of that universality of the belief
in Immortality, and its powerful influence on the
social statics and dynamics of mankind, which it was
needful for Warburton to establish as the basis of
his argument. We
We may take it for granted at any
rate that it is a very wide-spread and deeply-cherished
conviction of our race. In all countries, in all ages,
among the savage and the civilized, in all literatures,
in all religions, it occupies a prominent place among
the ideas which have moulded the character and
guided the progress of the inhabitants of our world.
The most wonderful step in advance which the
human race has ever taken, the most marked era of
development which it has ever known, was the out-
come of the preaching of Jesus and the Resur-
62 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
rection,' and of the revelation—the bringing to light
for all men of Life and Immortality. The greatest
fact of man's nature is his belief that there is that in
him which even in death does not die.
Nor need I enter into any criticism of the curious
speculations which those who deny Revelation have
entertained as to the way in which this wonderful
conviction was born in man's nature, and has taken
such mighty and permanent hold on the imagination
and conscience of all tribes and orders of men. Let
it grow out of dreams, or by any other fancied process,
at any rate it is here, although in some of its forms
it is fantastic enough. Now there are many fantastic
and abnormal things to be met with among creatures
on the successive levels of the Creation, things as
eccentric in the apparent circle of the nature as,
some of our philosophers tell us, is this vision of
Immortality in the limited and mundane nature of
But these fantastic things are always pro-
phetic; abnormal on the lower levels, they look on
to a higher level, where they will fall under a law of
which they are prophetic. Nature is always pushing
forth what some call these tentative efforts, into
regions above and beyond; when the above and
beyond is reached, and
we can survey the
'tentative effort' in the light of proplastic move-
ments which led up to it, and observe how it affords
a new point of departure for new progress, we see
how little is tentative about it; how it lies in the
man.
FORESHADOWINGS.
63
path of a purpose which Infinite intelligence ordained
from the beginning, and which Infinite power works
out to the end. And if this strange yearning for
Life and Immortality, for a home and a field of
development in a future world (which Science asks
us to believe is absolutely a thing of dreams) has
somehow got, not only developed in, but dominant
over the human creature, so as to enter as a most
powerful factor into the conduct of his life, the
analogy of Nature would lead, one would think, a
student of her order to suspect that he had come
upon the trace of a new and higher development of
being, a prophecy of a future and glorious procession
of life.
It is utterly out of the order of all that we know
as 'Nature,' it is confusion by all her rules, that this
faculty for searching into the unseen, for grasping it
as a reality, for making it the home of the dearest
affections and the theatre for the unfolding of the
noblest powers, which somehow has got itself per-
manently enrooted in man's nature, forming its most
striking characteristic and differentiating it absolutely
and finally from the brutes, should have in it no pro-
mise or prophecy of the future; should cast no gleam
on a possible onward path; should have absolutely
no function in man but to blight his present, and to
stimulate him constantly and powerfully to struggle
and to suffer on in a path which can only issue in an
utter and lamentable wreck.
64 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
All things else rest in their orders; a great light
of joy plays round the brow of Nature; there is
indeed longing and yearning and effort-so intense
that to an eye as keen as Goethe's she seemed 'like
'a dumb captive, sighing to be delivered '-but there
is beauty in it all and joy around it, because the
progress never falters, the deliverance never fails.
Everything at which Nature aims, in the end, fulfils
itself; with sore cost and pain, waste and wreck, but
with triumphant power, pressing ever onward and
upward, with Peans of joy and praise. But man,
the head of Nature's procession, the highest outcome
of her effort, the glorious child of her travail, seems,
if the Agnostics are right, to pass under a new sad,
retrogressive law. In him the proplastic endeavour,
the prophetic onlook, are all in vain; they point in
a direction where there is no path, they set his face
against a boundary beyond which there is no pas-
sage. If there be no Resurrection, no Immortality,
we reach here a final limit to the development of
the Creation. Man the masterpiece of Nature, the
complete and final form-for the Scripture describ-
ing him as made in the Divine image stamps the
human type of organization as supreme, and in
nature no hint of a progress in form and endowment
beyond the human appears-is forbidden to look
onward. All things, from the hyssop on the wall or
the limpet on the rock look up to man and on to
man's world. But man, if God, Resurrection, Im-
FORESHADOWINGS.
65
mortality be dreams, must turn and look down
again, and begin to bury the Godlike form once
more in the dust.
Like the races who bore their conquering arms to
the limits of Europe, to the shores of the great
Ocean, man has come to his limit, and peers sadly,
intently, over the sea of darkness for sight of his new
world. A curious dissatisfaction and distress took
possession of our forefathers when they had reached
the boundaries of their continent, and had no new
realms to subdue. There began to haunt their
thoughts visions of a new world beyond the weary
waste of waters. How, whence, why, they came
none could tell; but they were there-prophetic
voices in the literature of the world. For ages the
vision was fruitless. Man stood upon the shore and
gazed over the ocean, but, alas! the land which he
thought he saw resolved itself into mists or sunset
clouds or golden wrack of the sky. Then he
turned and retraced his path eastward. He fell
upon his earliest home, and sought there in the
gorgeous Orient, the empire of his imagination and
hope. In vain; the backward path was always a
sorrowful one. Every Crusade ended in frustration
and something like despair. But again hope cheered
and stirred him, hope of a new and fairer world.
Then in the fulness of the time, when he was trained
to master and to rule this new world, the curtain
lifted, and it shone there beyond the broad Atlantic
5
66 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
waves, fair as Canaan shone across the Jordan to
the pilgrims of the wilderness, even as Eden, as the
garden of the Lord.
Is there no parable in this of the new sphere
of man's higher life and destiny? Is it to be
always longing and aspiration, always straining and
effort, followed ever by the paralyzing conviction.
that in this world he has reached his limit, and must
turn his back on all possible progress for ever?
Strange, miserably, hopelessly strange, if the Power
which has traced, and through countless eons has
constrained the Creation to tread, a path of develop-
ment which makes every age an age of hope and the
hymn of the Creation a song of praise, should con-
fess, when man, the master work, appears upon the
scene, that the progress is for ever ended; that the
spring of Creative power is for ever dry! Has
Nature produced her masterpiece to proclaim that he
only of all her beautiful and wonderful works looks
on to no future? Having placed him on the stage
to struggle and to agonize, does she break her bench,
destroy her moulds, and sit, and bid him sit, in dumb
desperation awaiting the final doom?
For this aspiration of man, which somehow has
become part, and a very vital part, of his nature, is
in the long run a curse to him if there is no reality
corresponding to it, no world where the risen life is
something more than a dream. No doubt it is a
means of stirring him to effort and progress, but at
FORESHADOWINGS.
67
a cost which only the reality of the vision could
justify. And if it is all a delusion, he cannot live in
his fool's paradise for ever. He must awaken to his
poverty and vanity, and then imagine the bitterness
of his malediction upon life! There is nothing which
would give man such a miserable sense of impoverish-
ment as the loss of sure belief in Immortality. When
that belief grows weak, and he feels himself shut up
to his present, there is an ominous tendency manifest
in society to study the art of suicide. We are living
in an age which is becoming profoundly sad, just
because the larger interests and hopes of man are
suffering eclipse. Human life is a grand, a glorious
endowment when the whole range of it is realized
but this little span of it, cut off from the great future,
would not, in the judgment of the majority of man- •
kind, be worth the living if it were the all of exist-
ence; the pain is too keen, the burden too sore.
Our age is getting sceptical, and is letting the world
of the Resurrection fade from its sight. So it gets
sadder, wearier, more hopeless, day by day. Is this
the end of the great development; to make the
strongest, the wisest, the noblest of all the creatures
the most dissatisfied; to make man's most strenuous
spiritual activity a fruitless expectation, and his most
characteristic utterance a sigh! The sense of the
profound melancholy of life presses very heavily
on those who hold that there is no solid basis for
the belief in Immortality; or who try to feed the
68 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
yearning of their spirits by the hope that somehow
their thoughts will live in the world after them, and
that the echoes of their words will still ring on the
air, when they themselves, the minds that created
them, are dust. Few sadder words have ever been
written than some of the sayings of this agnostic
school; and there is a vein of depreciation and
despondency running through their writings, which
forbids the expectation of any high endeavour and
large development, as permanently possible in a
society where their ideas should be supreme.. Hope
is the one inspiration of progress. Blessed be the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which
according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us
again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus
Christ from the dead.
It is impossible to find rest in the belief that the
Divine energy in Nature, having completed its cre-
ative toil in the masterpiece of material organization
-man, has reached the last term in the ascending
scale of development, and leaves to the head of the
Creation a future only of distracting and unsubstan-
tial dreams. The contemplation of the order of
Nature presses us to the conclusion which the Scrip-
ture reveals as the truth, that on the very summit
of material existence, man stands as on the threshold
of new and higher progresses, and in dying to this
world begins to live a life which makes him sharer
of the Nature, citizen of the Kingdom, and child of
FORESHADOWINGS.
69
the Home, of God-that God Whom from the first
dawn of revelation he was bidden to make his mark
of imitation, and Who created him with a capacity to
know Him, to serve Him, and to enjoy Him through
eternity.
1 Again; the world is not immortal.
St. Peter
declares that the day cometh in which the heavens
shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements
shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the
works that are therein, shall be burned up. Science
of old was wont to make merry with the prediction;
but a more advanced science now instructs us that
every syllable will be literally fulfilled. The friction
of our finely-balanced system-it is now understood
—is the cause of a slight but real retardation, and
in the course of the ages our earth will have so far
contracted its orbit and slackened its speed that it
will fall in upon its centre, and will shrivel like grass
in the solar fire. Shakespeare's prevision, in the
track of the revelation of the Bible, will find one
day strict fulfilment, and—
'like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.'
There is a sure limit to mundane Immortality. Is
it conceivable that man's life should be set to such a
70 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
scale, with such capacity for hope and aspiration,
such pining, panting, for a world of immortal activity,
and such power to think out the problems of the
absolute and the eternal, only to be wrecked at last
for ever in such a catastrophe; to shrivel with the
world out of which it has been his joy and glory to
lift himself, and which he believed that in dying he
should leave for ever beneath his feet! The ab-
solute scientific certainty of a catastrophe which will
leave nothing but ash and vapour of this world and
all which it inherit, strengthens immensely, from our
present point of view, the argument for Immortality.
The irony would be too keen, were the long, stern
process of thought, effort and achievement, which
was to emancipate man from Nature and the bondage
of his surroundings, and to bring him into con-
formity with an absolute righteousness and an eternal
truth, transacted in a world doomed inevitably one
day to make of him, as of everything else contained
in it, one vast funeral pyre. Are Gethsemane and
Calvary to perish for ever in one awful conflagration!
Is the matchless tenderness, the boundless self-
sacrificing love of Jesus to be consumed out of the
universe for ever by a breath of devouring flame!
Must all the splendid heroism of Christian self-
devotion, all the toil, the tears, the blood it has
lavished to work out for mankind an everlasting
salvation, curl and crackle like grass in the oven, and
in the shape of a little impalpable dust and vapour
FORESHADOWINGS.
71
mingle itself once more with the indistinguishable
All! Or shall we not rather say that, according to
the Divine idea and scheme of the Universe, those
faculties which transcend in the range of their power
and vision the limits of all material things, and to
which this mundane system in the early stages of
growth offers the most admirable theatre of develop-
ment-that spirit in man which asserts and maintains
its supremacy over Nature-passes into a new and
loftier order of existence through death, which
becomes in this way the starting-point of a more
glorious progress of life; a progress wherein the
Godlike endowment of freedom will be worked out
to triumphant issues, in the new heavens and the
new earth which no breath of fire or taint of death
can touch, where dwelleth and reigneth righteous-
ness for ever and for ever.
But there is another deeply important aspect of
the matter which brings us nearer to the phenomena
of Resurrection. Man is an embodied spirit, at
least he thinks so, and two strong elements within
him are at war. We are told in these days, with
supercilious confidence, that if man is an embodied
spirit, his dog is also an embodied spirit; man's is but
a higher power, a more developed and realized form,
so to speak, of that life which animates the brute.
But then, in the brute we see no traces of an inward
war. All there is calm contentment with the en-
dowments and conditions of life. He is quite
72 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
satisfied with his senses, his occupations, his simple.
and transitory joys. His soul, as far as we can see,
is untroubled by aspirations, his conscience by
remorse, his memory by regrets. In a word, he is
at home and at ease in his world.
In the organization of man, on the other hand,
there is presented a new, strange, and sad phe-
nomenon. He is conscious of something within him
which stands aloof from his more purely animal
nature and examines it in relation to the meaning
and the conduct of life. And this spiritual principle,
as he thinks it to be, finds the movements and ten-
dencies of the flesh distracting and degrading; he
comes, as he studies its laws and influences, to regard
it as an enemy; here, he feels, is part of his being
which is a snare to him, and with which he finds
himself, or what he takes to be himself, in a conflict
not to be terminated while this life endures.
dread may this strife become under the pressure of
spiritual motives and influences, that it may wring
from him the cry, 'O wretched man that I am, who
'shall deliver me from the body of this death;' nor
is the term 'this accursed flesh,' unknown to the
poets and moralists of the heathen schools. Now
here is a strange and startling fact. Here is an
interior conflict raging in a being who shares in the
regular development of Nature, and who partakes of
the life of the Creation in whose animated orders no
sign of an inward conflict appears. Man perplexes
So
FORESHADOWINGS.
73
"
and torments himself as to the meaning and the
issue of the conflict; are these two gods which are
struggling within him, and making his nature their
battle-field, and his being the prize of victory? It
is the readiest, and was once the most popular
solution; but man's instinctive belief in and search
for unity is too strong for his Dualism; in the end
he comes to believe that he must find one. God, one
law, one harmony of elements, or give up the
problem of life in broken-hearted despair.
And here the Resurrection offers to him the
solution of the mystery of his existence. The flesh
is a temptress and seductress to him because a
spirit has risen up beside it, conscious of a higher
law and aiming at ends beyond fleshly touch and
sight. The development of this inward strife is the
sign that the being in its progress is treading the
threshold of a new and transcendent sphere. It is
the preparation by discord for a harmony in the
future, in a world which lies behind the veil of death.
Here on earth the conflict is continuous: The flesh
lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the
flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other. The
principle of the harmony is indicated in the mastery
of the flesh by the regenerate will, and its reduction
to the condition of a submissive handmaid to the
spirit; but here in the body the discord reigns, the
harmony is prophesied, but is never fully attained.
Were man left in this condition, to fight on through
74 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
life with sore stress and pain, and to see the discord
in death triumphant, he would have tremendous
reason to urge on his Maker the question, Why hast
thou made me thus? Is it a god or a demon who is
the author and the master of this miserable moral
chaos? But Resurrection clears up at once the else
insoluble problem. Resurrection connects both flesh
and spirit with one Creator and Ruler, and reveals the
discord as the condition of a lasting and fruitful har-
mony, which grows under the tonic touch of Death.
Life with its struggle, Death with its calm, enter as
factors benign and holy into the life of Immortality.
The flesh is no base and hateful element of which a
demon must be the master, there in the flesh of the
Risen Man it is in holy and beautiful concord with the
spirit, and has put on conditions which make it as a
child at home in God's heavenly kingdom in eternity.
The gospel of Jesus and the Resurrection' alone
delivers man from that Dualism which first maddens
and then destroys him, while it reveals the conflict
under which he alone of all the creatures of the
Creation agonizes, as the first rudimental prelude of a
concord which demands for its full realization God
and Immortality.
Further, within the mystery of embodiment is
hidden the deeper mystery of evil. Where lie the
roots of sin in my being? Are they in the flesh?
Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had
not known lust except the law had said, Thou shalt
FORESHADOWINGS.
75
not covet.
Are they in the spirit ?-then is evil
part of my being. Is it in me, of me; must it
abide in me, my curse, my torment, while my being
endures? From this maddening or paralyzing
dilemma, over which human philosophy is ever
agonizing, the Resurrection offers the hope, the
assurance of deliverance. It gives us a vision of a
flesh which is no longer the tempter and the tor-
ment of the spirit, but its pure comrade and minister,
set in the same concord of holiness and love. The
flesh, to the man who believes in the Resurrection,
is no child of darkness, inextricably, eternally asso-
ciated with sin; like the spirit it is within the order
of the rule of the Father of lights, the God of
purity, the God of peace. He sees that the terrible
wrestling and agony of the conflict, which life-long
man is called to wage against evil, is a purging of
the flesh from all the taint and stain wrought in it
by the sinful passion of the will, while the fallen will
itself is purged from its corruption by the one force
in the universe that has power to accomplish the
task, the redeeming, renewing, restoring 'love of God
'which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'
The believer in the Resurrection reads out the
words: If the spirit of him that raised up Jesus
from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ
from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies
by his spirit that dwelleth in you; and he comes to
see as Dante saw afar off a vision, the beginning of
76 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
'of peace.' There is no ultimate proscription of the
flesh, there is no despairing abandonment of the spirit
to evil, in the Christian presentment of the future.
The body saved, the spirit saved, is the vision
which the Resurrection opens-saved for the holy
and fruitful fellowships of eternity. If the conflict
here, which to the noble and aspiring makes life
one long stern battle-field, be the starting-point of a
process whose consummation will fill the great
Father's home with the music of joy and praise,
then a holy and beautiful order will be seen, a cos-
mos shaping itself out of the chaos; but if the
conflict is to rage on till hushed at last in a sleep
from which there is no awakening, if the hope of
peace is banished, and all that has lit the pilgrim's
tear-stained blood-stained path fades and vanishes
like the images of a dream, then all is dire, dark,
accursed confusion-from which we might cry, may
the blackness of the everlasting night deliver us and
the world-and soon!
But now is Christ risen from the dead and become
the firstfruits of them that slept. For since by man
came death, by man came also the resurrection of the
dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ
shall all be made alive.
The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second
man is the Lord from heaven.
And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we
shall also bear the image of the heavenly.
IV.
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE
OF CHRIST.
The Son of Man, which is in Heaven.-JOHN iii. 13.
ESURRECTION is the natural, inevitable
issue of the life of the Man of sorrows-the
Lord of glory-who came to our world, not
to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give
his life a ransom for many. Unless the universal
life is one great tragedy, that life which from the
first moment of its conscious activity had looked on,
though it would not press on, to Calvary, could not
find the term of that conscious activity in the rock-
hewn tomb, where loving hands laid the crucified
body of their Lord. If that Life, and above all
that Death as the supreme act of the life, did not
mark the birth of a new era in human development,
a new and momentous step in the unfolding of the
purpose, which had from the beginning been work-
ing upwards through the material and temporal to
the spiritual and eternal; if it was quite in the
harmony of the old and only order that the world's
78 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
Christ should be crucified by the world, and that
the inevitable end of devotion and self-sacrifice so
transcendent, so divine, should be the bitter and
shameful Cross-if this is, in the nature of things,
what must be, what necessarily grows out of the
constitution of man and the universe, then the
nature of things tends fatally to confusion rather
than to order, and chaos, not cosmos, is the ultimate
issue of the world.
It is no accident in history, this Life and Death
of Jesus of Nazareth. There are no accidents of
this supreme magnitude in the order of the universe.
It stands out so pre-eminent, it fills so large a space,
it rules so mightily the movement of the great
world's affairs, that it is, as it were, the prerogative
instance, manifesting itself as the key to the
meaning and movement of the whole. That Life
is the centre and core of all human life; that history
is the pivot of all human history. What it means,
all life must be striving to mean; what it expounds,
all life must be seeking to manifest; what it prophe-
sies, all life must be travailing to fulfil. If the end
of that Life is a grave and darkness, the end of all
life must be a grave and darkness, and the gloom of
death must close round the activity and splendour
of the world. But if, on the other hand, the end of
that Life, as it passes for the moment into the
shadow of death, is birth into a new and higher
sphere, into a world of which man through all the
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 79
<
ages of his history has believed this to be but the
threshold, a world which ancient prophecies clearly
unveil, for which the book believed to be the word
of God declares that the whole of the sorrowful
discipline of this life is an education, and of which
the Saviour spake with absolute certainty as His
Home and Realm while still bowed with the pains
and stained with the dust and tears of His living
martyrdom on earth-then all life tends upward
through death to a world of larger, freer, and lasting
development, then man is in life the child of the
'Resurrection,' and dying puts on Immortality. For
ultimately man is as Christ is. He is the Son of
Man, and his life holds the secret of all human
destinies. If Christ is living, man shall live; if
Christ has risen, man shall rise; if Christ is reigning,
man shall reign; and see all that afflicts, degrades,
destroys his being and the world's, for ever under-
neath his feet. If Christ be not raised; if all that
made the Man Christ Jesus, save His pregnant
memory, crumbled in the tomb to dust and mingled
with the undistinguishable substance of the world,
then we are all-
'Such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep; '
and, since all is to perish in time, it matters little
how soon.
J
.

80 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
It seems next to impossible to escape from the con-
clusion that the Life and Death of Jesus of Nazareth
mark, and were ordained to mark, an entirely new
era in the development of our race, an uplifting of
the world, the whole sphere of the human, to a
higher level of existence. It is as if, in the age
which preceded the Advent, the world had come to
the end of the resources which a mere mundane
culture could supply for the unfolding of its social
and spiritual life. The conquests of Rome and the
foundation of her imperial system of universal
dominion, for the moment quickened a new hope in
its sad, sick heart. But as it became apparent that
the Empire but added a new and crushing weight to
its burden and made the corruption more dire and
hopeless, it is hard for us to measure the utter heart-
sickness and despair which seized on the noblest
minds, and the dull, deadly carelessness of every-
thing but the basest pleasure-itself also becoming a
weariness and a plague-which paralyzed the life of
the great mass of mankind, in every place except
where the most startling contrast was presented, in
the animation, the joy, the hope, that were manifested
in the Church of the Risen and Reigning Lord.
Who shall guard the guards? Who shall rule the
rulers ? became the absorbing questions the moment
that the imperial system was firmly established—and
there appeared to be absolutely no answer to them
but that which was supplied by the Resurrection and

RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 81
Reign of the Lord Jesus. From no other source than
that which the Resurrection afforded, could the
needed help be brought. The præsens Jupiter of
the Empire tended in the main and on the whole to
become the curse and torment of mankind. Philo-
sophy struggled bravely with the terrible problem ;
but her noblest utterances were a dirge over the
hopeless corruption and the growing degradation of
human society. Study the history-it is very curious
and interesting-of the university life in Athens
under the Empire, in which Philosophy did her
utmost with very lofty and earnest endeavour to do
for mankind what God was about to do for it by the
gospel of Jesus and the Resurrection;' watch that
movement of which the life and work of Herodes
Atticus was the centre, and you will see how utterly
the wisdom of the world had, even to its own con-
sciousness, lost the power and abandoned the hope
of in any high sense helping, guiding, and saving
mankind.
It was just the force supplied by faith in the
Resurrection and Reign of the Man Christ Jesus, the
Man who had led a sinless and absolutely self-
sacrificing life on earth and who rose in Divine
strength to make the power by which He lived and
died the conqueror of sin and selfishness in man,
and the regenerator of a corrupt and perishing
world-it was just this force which lifted humanity
out of the slough wherein it was fast settling, and
1
6
82 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
gave to it a firm rock-like foundation, on which it
could build victoriously the temple of its higher life.
For we can speak of the temple of man's life from the
age when the Resurrection laid hold upon it, and
lifted it among the heavenly spheres. Nothing, I
believe, can be a greater mistake than to attribute
that revivifying of human society which the age
following the Advent unquestionably witnessed,
simply to the moral influence of the ideas of purity,
righteousness, and self-renunciation, expounded and
enforced in the life of Jesus. This was no doubt a
factor of enormous magnitude in the agencies of
regeneration; but I am persuaded that the deepest
spring of the power, the lifting power, if it may be
so expressed, of the Gospel, was belief in the Reign
of the Risen Christ, which brought the force of the
omniscient Wisdom and the omnipotent Hand to
co-operate with vitalizing impulse in the progress of
those ideas, and to press them with Divine authority
on human consciences and hearts. Had the ideas,
as illustrated in the life, been all, they would but
have repeated, though in a larger, grander circle, the
history of noble and beautiful ideas which in the
earlier ages had swayed men mightily for a while,
and had then passed into the keeping of the sects
who come at length to make the great work of life
either to tell, or to hear, some new thing.
What gave to the Christian ideas such overmaster-
ing power, such a grip on the world's heart, was the
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 83
!
!
belief that these new thoughts revealed by Christ
were the thoughts of God; that the God who made
and ruled the worlds made and ruled them on the
plan which these ideas expressed; that they had
Omnipotence, and the whole system of the universe,
behind them to sustain and to make them powers.
To the men who believed in 'Jesus and the Resur-
rection,' the ideas which were brought to light in the
Gospel were imbedded in the whole structure of
material things around them. The very sun shone
by their lustre, the breezes murmured their messages
to earth and to ocean; the thunders rolled their
commandments, the lightnings flashed their warnings,
the earthquakes executed their dooms; the stars in
their courses obeyed their attractions; their con-
cords created 'the music of the spheres.' The whole
essence of the matter to the men of that time who
were busy following the Son of Man in the regenera-
tion, lay in the fact, that this Christian truth was the
authoritative word of the Eternal God; and that there
was a Risen Man, a Risen King of men, in the world
behind the veil, bending all the energy of heaven on
the task of making these ideas at last victorious over
all the wrong, the sin, and the sorrow of the world.
And this the Resurrection proclaimed, and the
Resurrection alone. It lifted the veil around the
first believers, showing to them their life and the
world's life in the midst of the vast movement of
God's universal empire, and it brought all the
I
84 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
authority of heaven to bear consciously on the life
and progress of mankind. It needed superhuman
power, through the supernatural fact-the Resur-
rection of the Lord Jesus, to lay hold on the corrupt
and dying world with a grasp strong enough to lift
it, and to begin, by underbuilding it with a solid
foundation of Divine truth, the work of its salvation.
The life of Jesus of Nazareth is absolutely unique
among human lives as a revelation of that world to
which the Resurrection opened the pathway, destined,
the Lord tells us, to be trodden by all human steps.
It is not merely by words, it is not by works alone,
that our Lord stands so absolutely apart from and
above all other leaders, teachers, and saviours; it is
by LIFE. The Life was the light of men, and in
Him was Life-that Eternal Life which is the
light of all things, and as He lived it shone upon the
world. The Light coming into the world lighteth
every man. In measure and quality our Lord's
words no doubt surpassed all other words, and His
works surpassed all other works. The exclamations
of the men who saw and heard Him, 'Never man
'spake like this man ;' and ' We never saw it on this
fashion,' are sustained to this day by the unquestion-
ing conviction of Christian society.
But it would be misleading to say simply that the
life of our Lord surpassed all other lives. It stands
apart, unique, incomparable; it alone of all the
lives which have ever been passed on earth, was
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 85
visibly lived in heaven. Words which looked in
the direction of His teaching had been spoken by
the wisest and noblest who had preceded Him;
and works of supernatural power, healing, helping,
saving, had not been unknown in the earlier Dis-
pensations of God's mercy to our race. But this
Life stands alone, as lived consciously and constantly
by One to whose inner sight these veils of sense
and time were impalpable, diaphanous as the air.
The words The Son of Man which is in heaven,
alone explain the whole phenomenon which His life
presented, and which remains unapproached, un-
approachable, through all the ages of human history.
It is not that there is the faintest touch of unreality
about His human life in this human world. He
was 'the Son of Man,' Man of man; He laid a
benign and consecrating touch on every thing
human. The village home, the workman's bench,
the fisherman's net, the husbandman's corn; the
marriage festival, the sumptuous banquet, the dinner
of herbs; the synagogue worship, the temple festival;
the Scribe's wisdom, the sinner's shame, the prodi-
gal's rags-He touched them all, and they all
touched Him, and they have all had new meanings
and new outcomes since the 'Son of Man' mixed
Himself with all the phases and experiences of this
world's life. Nay, so intensely human was He, so
truly did the chords of His nature vibrate in unison
with the movements, and pulsations of the atmosphere
86 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
1
around him, that in the midst of a weeping company
by a new-made grave-a grave which He was about
the next moment to unseal, changing by His touch
of power the lamentations to transports of joy-the
tears rushed unbidden from their fountains, and in
the very moment when He felt the quickening
energy rising within Him which would restore the
dead to the embrace of the mourners, Jesus wept.
Through His whole life course the Son of Man
was nearer than any man to the heart of all human
experiences, and yet He was 'in heaven'! It was
not that he was less here, on earth, a child at home
by the world's hearth-fire; but to Him the barriers
were not. He lived in the broad sunlight of the
Father's universal kingdom; He lived amid the
sights and the sounds of that heavenly state from
which He had stooped and to which He would
ascend; and while here, a Man among men, He
gathered all its influences to His embrace.
It was
not by the words He spake, it was not by the
works He wrought, but by the atmosphere which
He breathed around Him, by the manifest presence
with Him of the things 'not seen and eternal,' by
the spirit of that world in which men saw that
He lived, and of which every word and every work
bore witness, that He wrought His mightiest
work, laid hold upon, uplifted, and saved our race.
There have been legislators who have uttered
commandments and sustained institutions of whose
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 87
substantial reality they had but slight conviction;
but they felt bound to speak the one and sustain
the other for the sake of their bearing on the
conduct and welfare of mankind. At precisely the
opposite pole is the life of our Lord. We talk
about our Lord's commandments, our Lord's legisla-
tion; we search for them in vain; we find only
some scattered fragments, about which theologians
wrangle as to how much may fairly be claimed by
the doctors of Jewish and even heathen schools.
The real commandment of Jesus of Nazareth was
His Life. It was this which laid new obligations
and constraints on men.
A striking illustration of the Saviour's method is
to be found in the opening verses of the thirteenth
chapter of St. John.
Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus
knew that his hour was come that he should depart
out of this world unto the Father, having loved his
own which were in the world, he loved them unto the
end. And supper being ended, the devil having now
put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to
betray him; Jesus knowing that the Father had
given all things into his hands, and that he was come
from God, and went to God; he riseth from supper,
and laid aside his garments, and took a towel, and
girded himself. After that he poureth water into a
bason, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe
them with the towel wherewith he was girded. Then
N
88 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
cometh he to Simon Peter: and Peter saith unto him,
Lord, dost thou wash my feet? Jesus answered and
said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but
thou shalt know hereafter. Peter saith unto him,
Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered
him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.
Simon Peter saith unto him, Lord, not my feet only,
but also my hands and my head. Jesus saith unto
him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his
feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not
all. For he knew who should betray him; therefore
said he, Ye are not all clean. So after he had washed
their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set
down again, he said unto them, Know ye what I have
done unto you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and
ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and
Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash
one another's feet. For I have given you an example,
that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily,
verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than
his lord; neither is he that is sent greater than he
that sent him. If ye know these things, happy are ye
if ye do them.
It is worthy of note also how entirely this is in
accord with the inner spirit of the elder Dispensation,
which I have already endeavoured to unfold. For
the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords,
a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth
not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 89
judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the
stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye
therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the
land of Egypt. Finally, in the wonderful passage of
the First Epistle of St. John, it is carried up into the
highest region; Hereby perceive we the love of God,
because he laid down his life for us; and we ought to
lay down our lives for the brethren.
Here is the deepest spring of the Divine power
which is in Christianity; it is the revelation to man
of the Life of God. The calm authoritative cer-
tainty with which our Lord spake to man of things
beyond mortal sight-the sense of an abiding presence
of the Father which His lips and His life expressed-
the absolute freedom from sin, from selfishness, from
everything which corrupts and defiles humanity, and
the entire absorption of His spirit in the ministry to
mankind-these all combined with the truth to which
He bore witness, and the power over man and nature
which He wielded, to impress on His disciples and
through them on the world the fact that One Who
came from heaven, Who lived in heaven, Who went
to heaven, had been living as a Man among them, and
had brought into this world, and left as His legacy in
this world, the ideas, the influences, and the energies
of the heavenly life. If this manifestation of the
heavenly life be no more than the manifestation of a
dream; if this higher region in which Jesus seemed to
live, whose atmosphere He seemed to breathe, whose
90 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
truth He seemed to utter, whose forces He seemed
to wield, has no reality outside the brain and the
heart of the human dreamers who cherish the imagi-
nation of it, then incomparably the most pure, most
noble, most elevated and powerful thing which has
ever been evolved in our world is utterly hollow,
empty, and baseless; and the one energy which seems
to have power to uplift and quicken and sanctify our
race, has a great falsehood at the heart of it—a false-
hood against which men would have the right, when
they discovered it, to rise up in a very frenzy of rage
and despair.
But if this, the saving energy of the world, is the
great reality of the world, the revelation of the secret
of its order, the mystery of its life; if this spiritual
and eternal sphere which the life of Jesus revealed
and brought to bear upon man's life, be the Alpha
and the Omega of human existence, and contains
within itself the energies which generate and sustain
the living progress of mankind; if, as Jesus testifies,
that life of the human which was born of God, can
only cherish and nourish itself in God, and tends to
God as its great object and end-then what so
natural, so inevitable, as that the Son of Man Who
came to reveal that world, and Whose life was lived
in it, dying upon earth, should open visibly to all the
pathway thereto, and should leave the open passage
as the way to the next great development of being,
to His brethren of the human race. The Life which
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO TIE LIFE OF CHRIST. 91
is the Light of men, in dying must bear the Light
through death to the Light which is beyond, and
which shines for evermore.
In another important respect Jesus of Nazareth
stands alone among the teachers and saviours of
men. He looked to death rather than to life for the
great source of His power to save. He alone of all
the world's great ones felt that the supreme act of
His life would be His death, that the great object of
His mission was to die. He entered on His ministry
with the full prevision of the death which was so
soon to end it. From the first the shadow of the
Cross was on His life. The very term by which the
Baptist had first proclaimed Him must have had this
meaning to His prophetic ear. He is brought as a
Lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her
shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. As He
heard the words, Behold the Lamb of God!' that
sentence could not have been absent from His
thoughts. Very early in His ministry he spake of
the destruction of the temple of His body, and His
words to Nicodemus already to His heart's appre-
hension carried the burden of the Cross. As the
months rolled on the vision was more constantly be-
fore Him; at length He spake openly of His Death
and Resurrection as near. And they were in the way
going up to Jerusalem; and Jesus went before them:
and they were amazed; and as they followed, they
were afraid. And he took again the twelve, and
<
92 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
began to tell them what things should happen unto
him. Saying, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the
Son of Man shall be delivered unto the chief priests,
and unto the scribes; and they shall condemn him to
death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles: and they
shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit
upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he
shall rise again.
<
None can read the great biography thoughtfully
without feeling that the life which it pourtrays had
the shadow of death on it from the first. And yet,
and this is the transcendently wonderful feature, the
atmosphere about it, the sentiment of it, was always
of life, and never of death. There was no trace of
habitual gloom hanging round the daily pathways of
the Lord. All breathed the expression of vivid,
intense, energetic, blessed, victorious life. The term
worship of sorrow' was applied by Mr. Carlyle to
the Christian faith in a noble passage of 'Sartor
Resartus,' which stirred many aspiring spirits
mightily when some of us were young; and for a
time it told powerfully on a fine school of thought.
But it misreads the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
There was no clinging to sorrow, no seeking of
sorrow as in itself a holy and beautiful thing, in
either the words or the thoughts of our Lord. The
holy and beautiful thing with Him was life; if in
such a world as this it led down to the depths of
sorrow, well! It was life which led down, and life
(
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 93
would lead through and lead up. Always the abid-
ing thing, the victorious thing, the beautiful, Divine
thing in the word and the work of the Man of
Sorrows, is Life. With Him sorrow was to joy as
night to sunlight; the sun is master, and for ever, is
the bright Evangel of the life of our Lord. The sen-
timental brooding over sorrow, the sentimental dread
of the 'pain and the sting of things too sweet,' the
sentimental belief that a tear is the most sacred of
tributes, and that the Holy of holies, not of this
sinful life only but of the great universe, is a
mystery of pain-a belief which 'sicklies o'er' so
many of our modern hymns and prayers-is not
Christian by the standard of the life of our Lord.
His life was entirely healthful, robust, and hopeful,
though Gethsemane and Calvary were clearly at the
end of it. The life was never stronger, fuller, deeper
in the springs, than when He looked full-face on
death.
To me there is something profoundly significant,
from this point of view, in the complete unfolding of
the inner life of our Lord as He passed within the
shadow of Calvary, afforded by the Gospel of St.
John. His words and works were those of one who
was not parting with a life but winning one; who
was not loosening His hold on the world but tighten-
ing it; who was not leaving His disciples but coming
to them with new intimacy; who was not forsaking
the world which crucified Him but gathering it
94 RESURRECTION IN THE SCHEME OF CREATION.
more closely to His heart. Compare these, His
dying experiences, with the greatest of His fore-
runners, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist.
Death to them meant manifestly what it means to
us, the end of their conscious transactions with the
world. To Jesus death manifestly meant life, the
acquisition of a new right and a new power to help,
to bless and to save the world. Sir, we would see
Jesus, said some Greeks to Philip, as the last agony
drew near. Jesus answered, The hour is come, that
the Son of Man should be glorified. Verily, verily,
I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit. Shelley, with keen in-
sight, seized the inner truth of the matter,
'A power from the unknown God;
A Promethean conqueror came;
Like a triumphal path he trod
The thorns of death and shame.'
His spirit rose in its calm majesty to meet death,
though it was clothed for Him in unutterable terrors,
as a Conqueror passing to His triumph, as a King
mounting to His throne. What could such a life,
what could such a death, mean but Resurrection?
Life was bursting through death as the agony
deepened, and when with the words, 'It is finished,'
He gave up the ghost, the only thing that died was
Death.
RESURRECTION THE KEY TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 95
Yes! it may be said, doubtless His lofty enthu-
siasm sustained Him patient, nay, triumphant,
through that matchless agony; doubtless in His
passionate exaltation of spirit this dream of
Resurrection and Conquest passed before His
dying sight! But, we reply, the world's history
sustains the dream. Because He dreamed it, you
and I, living men, are living before God this day.
The Resurrection which He foresaw, to which He
forereached through death, has become the vital
spring of human progress, the quickener of the
higher life of mankind. The broad, strong, over-
mastering fact in the history of Christendom is
Resurrection. If the universe demands it as the
fruition of its long stern travail, if in unison with
the vast Creation man importunately demands it for
the full development of his being, and the completion
of his life; most emphatically, most imperatively, is
it demanded by that dying Life, that living Death
of Him Who came to lay down His life for the
world; the only explanation, the only possible
justification of Whose history is His own sublime
affirmation, I am the Resurrection and the Life; he
that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he
live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall
never die.
Resurrection as a Fact.
7
V.
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.-
ACTS ii. 32.
E have seen that the only possible issue to
the life of our Lord was Resurrection—the
standing up again in life of the Man Christ
Jesus, the Man whom the disciples had known and
followed, complete in all the attributes of His
Humanity, and His entrance visibly as a Risen Man
into the invisible, spiritual, eternal world. In that
world He had lived His life while still a mortal Man
among His brethren. The Son of Man which is in
heaven, is the sentence which contains the key to
the innermost shrine of His life. The light of
heaven was shining all round Him as He went
about the Father's business in this world; by the
Galilean sea, in the city streets, whether preaching
on the mount or praying in the wilderness, whether
teaching the disciples or keeping company with
publicans and sinners—always it was, the Son of
Man which is in heaven.
Up
ΙΟΟ
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
This life which on earth was lived in heaven,
brought to bear on man's earthly state all the
influences of the eternal world, of that heaven of
heavens wherein abide the archetypes of all material
things. This life it was which so mastered men,
and made the Advent-the birth of the Saviour,
which is Christ the Lord-the central fact of history,
the pivot on which turns the whole order, progress,
and destiny of human society. He knew and de-
clared that He had come to make that heaven-the
Father's presence, the Father's wisdom, the Father's
love-patent to all mankind; to lay open its depths
to human knowledge, and to bring to bear all its
force upon human life. The powers of the world
(or the age) to come were to be distinctly these
heavenly powers; its life, a heavenly 'citizenship,'
was to be the conscious subjection of all within the
visible earthly sphere to the laws, to the order, of
that invisible world of whose reality man has always
had the clearest apprehension, and in which the
Risen Man Christ Jesus was reigning as King. And
as the life of Christ could only fulfil itself in its inner-
most purpose, in its most quickening core of force,
by Resurrection-by bearing the form which He
wore on earth visibly through death, and revealing
it as a denizen of the spiritual and eternal world—
so in all His previsions and predictions about His
death, He included in death the idea of Resurrec-
tion.
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
ΙΟΙ
He lived to die. Even among the Immortals His
decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem
seemed to be the great interest with which His life
was charged; and this admits of no possible explana-
tion except on the principle that to Him death was
Life, and that the life which he bore through death
would make the death a power to win for Him a
kingdom wherein death should be destroyed for
ever. For precisely such a phenomenon as the Re-
surrection-the resumption of the body which death.
had stricken, and the resumption of the work which
death had interrupted our Lord's language should
have prepared the disciples; and their record is
the more significant inasmuch as the meaning and
bearing of the words were wholly misapprehended
by them. Even when the Resurrection was a patent
fact before them, they record to their shame that its
connection with their Master's previsions but slowly
dawned on their sight. Far from living in an atmos-
phere of Resurrection prophecy and expectation, it
is evident that, to their own consciousness, their
minds were utterly unprepared for it, and that only
when they were compelled by overwhelming evidence
to accept it as a historical fact, did they begin to
understand all that it might mean, and to realize the
regenerative power with which it might be charged
for the world.
For, indeed, the Resurrection was in its very
nature entirely transcendent, and beyond the range
102
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
A
of imagination, though, like all Divine facts, when it
was actually revealed it exactly fitted the great place
in the order of history which was vacant for it-it
justified, explained, and completed the whole move-
ment of the ages, and keyed the arch which but for
it would have become a wreck. We see this from
our high vantage ground; none saw it in the days
when it was proclaimed. It first established itself as
a fact, indisputable as the Passion and the Cross;
then it manifested itself as a power, and re-made
human society. Man might have framed the vision
of the celestial life of the heroic sufferer in the
abodes of the blessed; man might have had some-
thing to guide him in dreaming of a possible return
of Jesus to this earth, to resume the functions and
renew the experiences of His earthly life-but this
Being of two worlds, now a substantial, breathing
Form, now as a Spirit enfranchised from the conditions
of this earthly life, yet in both worlds like a child at
home, and under both aspects absolutely one, and able
to make the wondering disciples feel that He was one
—this is an idea utterly beyond human powers of
invention, an idea which only with sore difficulty
forced its way into the heads and hearts of the
followers of Jesus.
And yet, when it was once received, being of God,
being in the Divine order of things, it seemed the
most natural of all things, the one the only possible
explanation of their own, of Jewish, and of human
}
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
103
history. The Lord's life, as we have seen, pointed to
Resurrection. It is important to note how the very
form of the Resurrection, the bodily restoration and
reappearance, were distinctly foreshadowed in our
Lord's words. The fact that these were not at all
understood by the disciples is disclosed with the
most artless frankness in the narrative; and this
would lend weight to the record were such a con-
firmation needed. But among the evidences of the
truth of the Resurrection, certainly a feature of very
high importance is the express prophetic language
of our Lord.
The point to which I have at present brought my
argument I may briefly indicate, before I pass on to
consider the evidence of the fact which is afforded
by the testimony of the disciples.
I first inquired into the significance of the com-
parative silence of the Old Testament on the subject
of Immortality. I insisted on the word comparative.
Warburton's idea of the absolute and studied silence
can only be maintained by ingenious perversions of
the Divine Word. But the comparative silence is
conspicuous. I endeavoured to show that the whole
Mosaic Economy, so far from dealing with man on
the basis of present interests, fears, and hopes,
was a noble education of his spiritual nature to hold
and to use to the highest purpose the truth of Im-
mortality; an education which Resurrection alone
could complete. We then looked at man in Nature,
104
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
and asked ourselves how the idea of Resurrection
and Immortality arose in the nature of a being who
stands visibly at the head of the material Creation-
the masterpiece of organization; on the apex of the
material system of things. We observed how man,
pressed from within with agonized yearning, desires
to enter and abide in that spiritual sphere which he
discerns stretching out around and above him, a
sphere where he may garner up the precious fruit of
the travail and anguish of his spirit and in the expec-
tation of which he can await with serenity this world's
inevitable wreck. If Resurrection is demanded by
Jewish culture; if the whole education of the chosen
people was a training for this, and was meaningless
if it be a dream, equally does man demand it as
man. Man's life is a travail; he is saved in all ages
by a great hope which entereth into that within the
veil. If through death an immortal life is born, all
is order, progress, fulfilment. If in death everything
that made the man perishes, except, as they tell us,
the fragrance which his life exhales, then all seems
dire and horrible confusion; life, either at the high
strain of the Apostles, or in the base sty of the
Sybarites, is not worth the living; and the night
which is one day to settle over the stormy fever-
fit of life might in mercy hasten its footstep, and
drop its impenetrable curtain swiftly over the folly,
the wrong, and the agony of the world.
I then considered the light which is shed upon
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
105
Resurrection by the life and the words of our Lord.
My course of thought on that subject I have already
briefly recalled. The life of the Son of Man who
was in heaven,' while He lived and moved as a
mortal Man among men, was lived visibly in that
sphere to which it was inevitable that through death
He must visibly pass; accomplishing thus the purpose
of His Advent by creating on earth, through His
Resurrection, Ascension, and Reign, a Kingdom of
Heaven. To this necessity His own solemn explicit
words bear witness. The Resurrection fulfils, and
nothing less than the Resurrection can fulfil, the
clear, exact, and oft-repeated prophecy of the Lord.
This constitutes, as it were, a body of preparation
for the Resurrection. We see the place which it
occupies in the scheme of the world's progress.
It is the one transcendent fact to which all things
point through all the ages in the line and aim of
their development; it is the birth with which they
are manifestly in travail; while it opens to man as a
spiritual being, taught and trained by a costly process
of discipline to know, to commune with, and to live
like, God, a path to worlds where the destinies of the
immortal nature, made in the Divine image, and
renewed in the Divine likeness, may unfold them-
selves, when the material system which nursed their
young germs has passed away for ever.
But the Gospel is not a philosophy of Resurrec-
tion, but a proclamation.
It says nothing about
106
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
antecedent probabilities, about secular preparations,
about aspirations and hopes. These we investigate
and discuss, and are right in so doing. Such a truth
as the Resurrection must have profound and multi-
form relations with all other truths, natural and
spiritual, within the cognizance of the human intel-
lect; it must have bearings on all things in earth
and in heaven, which relations and bearings we are
bound to explore. We have seen, moreover, how it
not only fits but keys the arch of the Creation;
how it completes and closes the lower, and opens
the higher, the immortal, procession of Life. But
what the Gospel proclaims is the historical fact of
the Resurrection, and through this proclamation the
whole world of civilization has come to believe it.
For eighteen centuries it has been about the most
unquestioned fact in human history in the judgment
of the great mass of mankind, that is the mankind
with which for this purpose we have practically to
do. But all rests on the original proclamation, the
credibility and sufficiency of the original witnesses;
the character and amount of the testimony which is
behind the affirmation, This Jesus hath God raised
up, whereof we all are witnesses. We have a very
clear and succinct statement of the evidence in the
words of the Apostle Paul. For I delivered unto
you first of all that which I also received, how that
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures;
and that he was buried, and that he rose again the
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
107
third day according to the Scriptures; and that he
was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve; after that
he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once;
of whom the greater part remain unto this present,
but some are fallen asleep. After that he was seen
of Fames; then of all the apostles. And last of all
he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due
time.
I am not quoting this as the testimony of St. Paul
himself. That is a very important part of the whole
evidence, and has a singular value of its own, as I
hope subsequently to make clear. But the point in
question for the moment is the evidence of the
disciples as here set forth; and it seems as complete
as can well be conceived. The Epistle to the
Corinthians is allowed on all hands to be the work
of the Apostle Paul. There is no doubt that it was
written within the generation which followed the
death and Resurrection of our Lord. The majority
of the witnesses were alive when it was written.
There is no question of the moral honesty of the
testimony. We have no need to argue in these
days that conscious tricksters and imposters could
never have palmed off upon the world a fable of this
magnitude and of this enduring influence. These re-
peated and manifold.appearances to a number of men
-singly-in little companies-in a great assembly
of five hundred at once-men who had known Jesus
in the flesh, who had kept company with Him, who
108
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
·
There
could not possibly be deceived about His person,
which to them none other could for a moment assume,
seem to satisfy all possible rational conditions.
They seem to establish the fact of the reappearance
of the Man Christ Jesus among His brethren, as
clearly as the Evangelic testimony establishes His
birth and the manner of His life—all equally trans-
cendent, and all equally accepted as unquestionable
facts by the concensus of the civilized world. This
thing, remember, was not done in a corner.
was a powerful national party at Jerusalem whose
very existence was staked on proving it a fiction.
Any flaw in the harness, any weak link in the chain,
keen eyes would have hunted out and exposed. In
Corinth, where this summary of the evidence was
read and became familiar to the disciples, there were
false teachers tinged with this 'leaven of the
'Pharisees,' who were spending their whole strength
on discrediting the Apostle and undoing his
work. But there is not a trace anywhere of an
answer to the Apostle's précis of testimony; not a
hint that this argument on the Resurrection had
been answered by denying it as a fact. As St.
Peter expresses it in his firm, strong way in his first
proclamation of the Gospel to the Gentiles: Him
God raised up the third day, and shewed him openly ;
Not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of
God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after
he rose from the dead. Not to all the people, we note,
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
109
for The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.
Imagine the thronging and crushing in the streets
of Jerusalem, the mad excitement, the prompt
rebellion, the blood-stained fields of battle, and the
murderous work of the ruthless Roman sword,
which would have followed any public exhibition of
the Risen Christ in the world, and you will under-
stand how entirely necessary it was that the fact of
the Resurrection should be established after the
method which is set forth in the sacred history.
The witnesses are ample in number, character,
and opportunity of knowledge, and their testimony
is that of men who had not the faintest question
about it, and who had not the faintest idea that there
was any one who could raise a valid doubt on the
subject anywhere about the world.
This leads me to the first feature of the evidence
which we have now to consider. Surely the most
about it is its
prominent thing which strikes one
perfect simplicity and naturalness. Pascal notes
'the naturalness (naïvete) with which Jesus Christ
'speaks of the things of God and of Eternity.'
With the same naturalness do the Apostles speak
of the Resurrection. There is not the slightest
attempt to summon up and to parade evidence.
What is said is said with the most artless simplicity,
as if it concerned a fact which was indisputable and
which had quickly taken its place in the natural order
of their lives. In the account of the meeting of
110
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
Jesus with His disciples at the sea of Tiberias,
contained in the twenty-first chapter of St. John's
Gospel, the naturalness of their communion with
the Risen Saviour is the wonderful thing. Their
terror, their awe, their bewilderment at so tremendous
a supernatural manifestation, are all overmastered
and laid at rest by the joy and bliss of renewed
intercourse with their Master and Friend. Nothing
can be more convincing of the reality of the com-
munion than this. Wonderful, transcendently
wonderful, as it was, they write about it quite as
simply and naturally as about the Sermon on the
Mount or the journey to Jerusalem; and instead of
spending all their strength on parading the evidence
of it, they are more reticent and more artless about
the Resurrection than about many another far less
momentous fact in the history of our Lord. They
might have massed out of these materials with the
greatest ease a crushing weight of demonstration;
but on the contrary they tell a simple tale, just as
they record the journeys by the Galilean sea, and
without further effort they leave the demonstration
to make its own impression. I do not know whether
this method of the Apostles bears to other minds the
irresistible demonstration which it bears to mine,
that it was plain historical fact of which they were
speaking and writing, as unquestionable by them,
and, as they manifestly believed, as unquestionable
ultimately by man, as the sunlight, the spring
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
III
quickening of Nature, or any other of the beautiful,
glorious, and blessed wonders of the world. The
manner in which the Resurrection brought itself at
once so perfectly into the natural order of the
disciples' lives, is to me an absolute proof that they
knew they were dealing with a simple though
profound and far-reaching fact, when they declared,
This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are
witnesses. They write as if the restoration of their
Lord to them, when they had once grasped the fact,
was the most natural thing in the world. The only
key to this is its truth.
But there is one broad feature of the evidence
of these witnesses which is peculiar, and which
demands our close attention. It is entirely the
evidence of disciples, of those who had a deep
personal interest in establishing the Resurrection as
a truth. The testimony is of friends and followers
only, and there is no attempt to supplement it by
evidence from the world outside. When we say
that the witnesses had a deep interest in establishing
it, we must understand what the word interest
means. The notion of a company of interested
followers of Christ, conspiring for their own pur-
poses to palm this tale upon the world, we no longer
need to disprove. It is abandoned on all hands as
utterly inadequate to account for the phenomena
with which it professes to deal. These were true
men, whatever else they might be; they were
I 12
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
neither impostors, liars, nor credulous fools. It was
the power of a real conviction, it is now allowed on
all hands, which created the most momentous of
all eras in human history. The witnesses had the
deepest interest in the truth of the Resurrection,
but it would have been quite worthless to them
except as truth. To persuade men of it, save under
the compulsion of their own belief in its truth, would
have won for them the prison stocks or the crown
of martyrdom; their interest in it was just their
interest in justice, righteousness, and love. They
had nothing to gain but everything to lose by the
proclamation, except in as far as the power of the
Resurrection as a fact lay behind it. They were
the best of all possible witnesses; witnesses whose
supreme interest is truth.
We can, however, well imagine evidence of a
different character, which we are tempted to think,
would have at once forced conviction home on
every rational mind. No one doubts the existence
of Jesus of Nazareth. His name finds record in
the secular histories and in the public acts of His
time. Could not the same testimony have been
secured for the Resurrection? We can conceive
that it might have been so ordered that the question
of the identity of the Risen with the Crucified
Jesus of Nazareth, should have been raised before
the Roman legal tribunals, and that after full exami-
nation of competent witnesses it might have been
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
113
formally and publicly established or disproved. If
it had been proved, say to the full satisfaction of the
Roman procurator, after a review of all the evidence
for and against it, that would have immediately
established it as an unquestionable fact in history.
The whole world would have been filled with wonder
and adoration; while, even supposing that no
such social and political disorders as were spoken of
on a previous page had actually occurred, there
would, at any rate, have been intense excitement
through all the region of the Empire, and beyond
it, and all men would have come bending at the
footstool of this Lord of Imperial Cæsar-the Man
who was risen from the dead. But the actual evi-
dence is a striking contrast to this. It is entirely
of friends; it sought no legal authentication; it
made no attempt to impose itself as a fact forced by
the overwhelming weight of evidence on an un-
willing world. Like the Incarnation, it was to be
a power, and not a portent. In this, too, the King-
dom of Heaven came not with observation; its
mission was to open minds and believing hearts
alone. It came by disciples, because it came only
to disciples. The wonder, the admiration, the
thronging multitudes, the universal homage, would
have been quite foreign to its mission, quite alien to
the idea of the Divine Dispensations, and to their
method of operation in all ages of the world. The
Lord came not with observation' when He came
8
114
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
in the flesh. A few shepherds, a few pious Jewish
hearts, a manger, a helpless infant-that was all. It
was thus that the Lord of Glory first came to the
world. We can imagine that the Incarnation might
have been attended by such a display of celestial
power and splendour, that the most stubborn knees
would have been bowed down in homage to God
manifest in the flesh..
But the display was studiously withheld. What
help would the twelve legions of angels have
brought to the Man who could say, Therefore doth
my Father love me, because I lay down my life, and
who understood perfectly that It became him, of
whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in
bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain
of their salvation perfect through sufferings. The
angels could but have marred the work which His
death would accomplish, and have robbed His brow
of the most lustrous of the many crowns. And so
any demonstration of the truth of the Resurrection
which would have struck the imagination of the
idle world, and brought all men thronging with
open-mouthed wonder to see the Man who was
risen from the dead, would have gone to thwart its
purpose and to dry up its power in the springs.
The spirit which seeks a sign, and the faith which
is nourished on a sign, are alike worthless in that
higher order of things, the spiritual order, which the
Lord came to establish. The spirit which is won
$
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
115
inwardly to love of truth, righteousness, and charity—
in a word, which is turned to God, by the word and
the work of the Saviour is inestimably precious in
His sight, and is a power in His Kingdom of
Heaven. The Lord put deliberately from Him,
through life the homage which He might have won,
and the power which He might have wielded, by
portents and splendours; and obeying the Divine
necessity to trust to the truth alone, He put them
from Him also in Death and in Resurrection. My
kingdom is not of this world, He said through all-
Birth, Life, Death, and Resurrection. To this end
was I born, and for this cause came I into the world,
that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one
that is of the truth heareth my voice.
There is the only force that the Saviour cared to
wield; the only influence which would win results
in His sight worth the cost. His Incarnation was
to be a spiritual power through the truth of the
Divine Nature which it manifested, and which
living faith only could receive. When the devils.
would proclaim Him He silenced them; nay, He
laid the same spell of silence on His disciples. The
truth of God which was in Him should speak for
Him, and this truth alone. And thus was it with
the Resurrection. It was to be a spiritual power to
quicken and uplift mankind; not a portent to take
its place among the wonders of the world. There-
fore it was not made a sign, attracting and com-
116
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
pelling universal attention; but a word, winning its
way as a Gospel by the preaching of disciples who
knew it to be a fact, and who felt it to be a power.
In this way it appealed like the Incarnation to
hearts that were in tune with it, and were ready to
hail it as a message of salvation, and to be raised
by it from the death of sin to the life of righteous-
ness, from the bondage of Satan to the full citizen-
ship of the kingdom of God. The fact then that
the evidence is entirely of the kind described, the
evidence of disciples, of men in spiritual fellowship
with it, and on whose lips and in whose lives it
would be not a portent but a power, is in entire
and beautiful harmony with the whole spirit and
method of the Divine Dispensations, and lies in the
true line of the spiritual culture and development of
mankind.
Granting then that the evidence must be that of
spiritual witnesses to a fact whose whole virtue was
spiritual, can anything be more explicit and com-
plete than the testimony which they bear. The
entire certainty with which they speak of it
throughout their lives, and the emphasis with which
many of them repeat the testimony in death, is
absolutely convincing. To whom should we look
for testimony, but to the men who had known and
loved the Lord! We have not the witness of a
single, possibly hysterical, possibly fanatical, follower.
The evidence was offered again and again to in-
THIE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
117
dividuals, to companies, to a
a great crowd of
disciples, with opportunities of communion, converse,
occular and tactical satisfaction, leaving actually
nothing to be desired. Words were spoken and
are recorded which none but the Risen Man could
have uttered; the invention of such converse as
that between the Risen Jesus and the disciples which
is recorded in the Gospels, is utterly beyond the
compass of the imagination of mankind. And the
demonstration is crowned by the actual effect of the
Resurrection, in the instant and complete transforma-
tion which it accomplished in the lives of the
witnesses. We cannot read John xxi. and Acts ii.
without the conviction that some such fact as the
Resurrection is absolutely needed to account for the
contrast in the narratives. The disciples were not
in a mood even to think about inventing such a fact.
They accepted the Decease as a death-blow to their
hopes. With singular simplicity and healthiness of
moral and mental tone-a state at the opposite pole
to illusion—they went back bravely to their work:
Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing. They
say unto him, We also go with thee. They went forth
and entered into a ship immediately.
Nothing was further from the thoughts of these
disciples than to lead a movement which would re-
construct and save society. And yet, in a few days,
the work is in vigorous progress. As by the touch
of some mighty Creative Hand, these men are re-made.
118
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
They are preaching the Resurrection with a power
which is to shake the whole structure of society,
and they are kindling hearts like flame, in the very
city where the events were transacted and where
they had been keenly debated-preaching among
multitudes who knew everything about the trans-
action, and had ample means of exposing them and
of overwhelming them with shame, if there had
been aught but the most sober truth in their words.
Peter, heart-broken, going back bravely to his
fisherman's toils-Peter, standing out as an incom-
parable teacher and leader of men, the master spirit
in a movement which still bears on with it the
progress of society, endowed with a wealth of
wisdom and energy and founding a Church which at
this day is the strongest institution upon earth-
what links the two, Peter the disciple, who denied
his Master, Peter the apostle, who won for Him the
homage and worship of mankind—what links the
two but the fact of the Resurrection; the fact that a
Risen and Reigning Christ was behind him, lending
heaven's own force to every action, and heaven's
own emphasis to every word. Around that sacred
thread, the Resurrection, all the confused, chaotic
elements of the life of those disciples began to
crystallize and to fall into order. They have an
insight, a grasp of truth, a lordly power over men,
which make them on the whole the grandest and
most impressive figures in history.
THE WITNESS OF THE DISCIPLES.
119
And what happened to them, through the Resur-
rection, happened to the world. The Resurrection
began to work instantly as a tremendous force in
organizing and uplifting human society. The
moment that this truth was proclaimed, the move-
ment began which has created Christendom; and
Christendom means all that is most powerful, culti-
vated, progressive, and victorious in human society.
It is said of a city, there was great joy in that city
when these Evangelists came to it. It is the feature
everywhere. Joy, strength, hope, vital activity, all
by which men and societies grow, sprang up like
willows by the water-courses, wherever the sound
of that Gospel of the Resurrection was heard.
Society morally and politically formed itself anew
around that core. The principle of a vital order
appeared and established itself mightily and per-
manently in our world. For nearly two thousand
years that order has been strengthening its foun-
dations and widening its circuit, and its unquestioned,
unquestionable basis has been and is, the Resur-
rection and Reign of the Risen Lord. And this you
ask me to believe is an imposture or a delusion;
this, which has led the most glorious progress, and
has established the mightiest and grandest order of
which man has ever even dreamed! Well! I may
believe it when I am driven to believe that every-
thing is imposture or illusion; that I am illusion;
that the great world around me and the great heaven
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RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
above me is illusion; that all which man holds noble
and beautiful, all that he thinks worth living for,
worth dying for, is illusion; and that a mocking
demon is the master, the ruler, and the tormentor of
the world.
Till then I believe and preach JESUS AND THE
RESURRECTION.
This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof WE all
are witnesses.
VI.
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL
Remember that Jesus Christ, of the seed of David, was raised from
the dead, according to my gospel.-2 TIMOTHY ii. 8.
HUS wrote Paul the aged, and these were
almost his last words. They are the testimony
of his dying lips to the truth of the Resur-
rection. He had preached it through a long
generation, he had argued for it, fought for it, suffered
for it, and he was about to die for it. He had heard
everything that its keenest opponents could urge
against it; he had tested its power as a truth over
men through the whole realm of civilization, from
the Arabian desert to the Atlantic; he had founded
upon it flourishing and progressive communities in
the chief cities of the Roman world; and now, as he
drew near the hour when he was to stand as he
firmly believed before the judgment seat of Christ,
and to render in the account of his stewardship to
One to whom every secret thought of every human
heart was laid bare-recurring with pathetic earnest-
ness to the truth which had been the chief burden of
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RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
his ministry, by which he had shattered old idolatries,
and founded a universal spiritual kingdom, destined,
as his eye foresaw, to bind the scattered tribes of
men in a brotherhood of truth and love-he wrote
thus to his own son in the faith, to whom, if to any
one, he looked to carry on his work when at last shield
and sword should drop from his weary hand,
Remember that Jesus Christ, of the seed of David,
was raised from the dead, according to my gospel.
A very peculiar value attaches to the evidence of
St. Paul, arising out of the character and endowments
of the man, his special opportunities of sifting out
the truth, his large experience-we may say his
unique experience—as its preacher, and the entire
familiarity with every argument capable of being
urged against it, which belonged to him through
the fact that he had been born, nursed and trained
in the camp of its foes. The evidence of the
disciples, as it stands in the narrative of the apostle,
is simply overwhelming in its convincing power;
apart from his own personal testimony, it is abso-
lutely complete. The testimony of St. Paul may be
regarded as its crown.
When I think of Saul of Tarsus from the his-
torical point of view-his influence on human culture
and development-another mighty shade crosses the
field of vision. Caius Julius Cæsar is the greatest
secular name in history. In the sacred story of
humanity, there is none greater than St. Paul.
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL.
123
They were both of them men of Imperial genius
as leaders. They both founded societies which in
the one case as a political, in the other as a spiritual,
institution have divided between them the task of
shaping the form and guiding the progress of
civilized society. They both had a prevision, almost
unique in their times, of the direction in which lay
the true path of development for mankind. When
Cæsar crossed the Alps on his westward path of
conquest, he obeyed, according to his worldly and
carnal fashion, the same impulse which in an
infinitely purer and diviner form led Paul westward
with his gospel of salvation. That Macedonian
appeal which came to the apostle over the blue
waves of the Ægæan, has had more influence upon
human society than any other event in history since
Abraham crossed the river, westward even then,
to Canaan. The European journey of St. Paul
was the Divine husbandry of that great seedfield
of the Western European nations, which Cæsar's
conquests had laid open to his missionary steps.
But for the westward extension of the Empire of
civilization by Cæsar, the preachers of the universal
Gospel would have been shut out of the field of
their noblest triumphs; and but for the sanctifying,
elevating, saving influence of that Gospel which
Paul preached, the Empire created by Cæsar would
have gone down swiftly and hopelessly to decay
and death. The men who saw with prophetic
[24
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
insight that it was not the rich, wanton and worn-
out East but the young, hardy, and vigorous West,
that was destined to be the theatre of the future
development of humanity, were the founders of the
modern world, and at their head stand Julius Cæsar,
in the field of this world's politics and enterprise,
and in the inner sphere of man's thoughts, beliefs,
and hopes, St. Paul. And this inner sphere rules
the outer absolutely. Whatever a society or a
nation is in that inner world with which St. Paul
has to do, such does it become inevitably in the
outer sphere over which Cæsar rules. Try to
picture what would have happened to the Empire
and through the Empire to human society, had
Paul turned back eastward from Troas, and left
Europe to the gods whom Rome was learning to
despise, and to the social system which had become
utterly inadequate to the demands of the growing
intelligence and energy of mankind.
By the hand of her Cæsars Rome had been
endeavouring to work out the scheme of a universal
Empire. It had dawned before the time of Julius
on the minds of the leaders of the liberal party
in Rome, that the day was coming when nations
should find bands of sympathy and bonds of fellow-
ship with each other, in place of the selfish isolation
and the natural hostility which till then it had
been their pride to cherish. Cæsar and his house
wrought hard by the sword to weld and by political
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL.
125
organization to compact the unity; but the sword
rent wider and wider fissures, generation by genera-
tion, in the structure of society which it appeared to
have solidified; till the fairest fields of Europe were
drenched periodically with her noblest blood; while
the political organization when administered by
tryrannous exactors tended to become a torment
and curse to mankind. Paul landed in Europe
with the Gospel of Jesus and the Resurrection, and
began at once to weave living, and indissoluble
bands of fellowship between men, societies and
nations. He proclaimed men brethren in the
brotherhood of the Risen and Reigning Christ, and
the idea became at once a power; drawing men
into relations of love and ministry, from which have
sprung the most potent energies brought to bear
on the structure of Christian society.
For instance; the Roman sword had forced
Greek and Jew into outward relations of peace and
amity; but they hated each other with fierce
intensity, all the more because they dared not fight.
Paul the Jew landed in Greece with the Gospel of
'Jesus and the Resurrection,' and soon the Greek
was saving something out of his poverty, and laying
it up week by week, to send to suffering Jews at
Jerusalem, whose hardships had moved his pity;
and was ready at the same bidding to do his part
to minister to need and sorrow anywhere about the
world. Paul began by the Gospel of the Resurrec-
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RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
tion that ministry of sympathy and succour to the
want and pain of the brethren of the great house-
hold of Christ, which has been as a spring of living
water to Christendom, yes, and to heathendom,
during all the ages of Christian history. In our
own day it has sent tidings of help from all the
world to Chicago while the very fire was burning,
and poured gifts into drenched and starving Hun-
gary before the floods had begun to subside. The
universal society which Rome had tried to fashion
by the sword, began to take shape when Paul
landed in Europe with his Gospel, and age by age,
as man's policy and force have compacted the outer
framework of civilization, the Gospel which Paul
preached has developed and educated the living
society which is to dwell within it.
When Rome endeavoured to compact a universal
society, she found the very core of that society
-the life of the home-becoming incurably cor-
rupt under her hand. The domestic bond had
fallen into contempt and was everywhere loosened
the foulest and most hateful vices were wasting
society away. Paul entered the Empire with the
Gospel of the Resurrection, and in every place
where its message was heard, husbands became
continent, wives became chaste, parents became
wise and tender, homes became pure, beautiful, and
blessed. A healing process commenced in the very
heart of the corrupt community, restoring it to
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL.
127
health at the spring. Rome, making war and
politics the only business of freemen, had lost
utterly the sense of the dignity of labour; the farms
of the Empire were tilled by vast hosts of slaves,
and under servile hands agriculture perished.
Vast tracts of the richest lands lapsed into wilder-
ness. Social disorder, vice, famine, plague, made
havoc of society. When Paul came with his new
Gospel, the first thing that rose to understand its
dignity and to realize its power was labour, and
the next was freedom. Hear his words to the
Thessalonians: Now we command you, brethren, in
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye with-
draw yourselves from every brother that walketh
disorderly, and not after the tradition which he
received of us. For yourselves know how ye ought
to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly
among you; neither did we eat any man's bread for
nought; but wrought with labour and travail night
and day, that we might not be chargeable to any
of you: not because we have not power, but to make
ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us. For
even when we were with you, this we commanded
you, that if any would not work, neither should he
eat. For we hear that there are some which walk
among you disorderly, working not at all, but are
busybodies. Now them which are such we command
and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with
quietness they work, and eat their own bread.
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RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
Under the inspiration of words like these, man
rose up and girded himself joyfully for labour
wherever that message reached him. Pious hands
lifted tool and guided ploughshare, and the labourer
sang once more gaily at his tasks. The monk
took up the witness from confessors and preachers,
making labour a holy exercise; and this, perhaps
more than any other single influence, wrought for
the elevation and the purifying of the community.
Paul then became the effectual fellow-helper of all
the movements which were aiming at giving a new
form and direction to the social system. Nay, that
but feebly expresses it. In the days of the Advent
secular society was manifestly in travail with a new
age, a new order of things; but it was too corrupt
and exhausted to bring it to the birth; only
through the quickening influence of the Gospel
Paul preached was it possible that it should be
born. The work of the Cæsars created the theatre
for the fertile development of Christian ideas. But
without the Gospel the theatre itself would rapidly
have gone to wreck. The truth, as the truth is
in Jesus, saved everything, even the very frame-
work of the Empire; it held it together until its
work was accomplished, and the time had come for
the introduction of the Western nations. Then it
took charge of the new order, and created what is
known as Christendom, and will be known as
Christendom till the end of time. If, as Mr.
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL.
129
Freeman most justly observes, the Roman Empire
is the key to medieval and modern society and
rules all their development, with more profound
truth may it be said, that the Christian ages derive
both form and spirit from the ideas which Paul
proclaimed to the world.
I have indulged in this rapid historical review,
in order that you may see how deeply Paul's Gospel
and his personal ministry were mixed up with the
most powerful and important movements which
have ever affected mankind. He brought the
power through which alone could be realized the
ideas at which the world of his time was fruitlessly
aiming; he brought the power to heal its corrup-
tion, he brought the power to set it vigorously and
hopefully about the work which it would eventually
have had to abandon in despair. He wrought there
in Europe, at that critical moment, the most potent
practical work ever done by a living man in this
world. Is it possible to believe that the heart's
core of all that, the source of its power, the spring
of its inspiration, its uplifting, sanctifying, saving
energy, was a figment, a dream, a lie? Let who
will believe, I cannot, that the man who bore that
witness and did that work, was a dupe or an im-
postor; and that some optical delusion, some
hysterical vision, or some shameful cheat, lies behind
the greatest movement that has ever touched the
interests or shaped the destiny of mankind.
9
130
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
It is a great mistake to think of the sphere of
religious thought and activity, to which the work
of Paul belongs, as quite apart from mundane
interests and material life; a sphere in which fancy
may expatiate at pleasure, and in which what a man
believes is matter of only speculative concern. On
the contrary, there is not a station or calling from the
monarch's to the beggar's, there is not an art or an
industry, there is not a science or an invention, there
is not a society, a home, a human life, which does
not depend upon this sphere for a portion of its being
and becoming-which is not something stronger,
higher, more fruitful, than it could have been if Paul
had never preached the Gospel to mankind.
We have not to do here with a man of visionary
or fanatical temper, living in a world of his own and
free to dream at his will. St. Paul was a man who
occupied a foremost place in the most important
actions of his times. A man of wide culture, know-
ing the Greek as well as the Hebrew learning, nursed
and trained in a liberal school of thought, he had
the keenest eye for practical considerations; he was
incomparably the most masterly statesman of the
Church. It was precisely because he was distinctly
neither enthusiast, fanatic, nor even doctrinaire, be-
cause he had a keen insight into what was practicable,
and understood perfectly that the everyday work of
the great world must be carried on, that Christianity
established itself so peacefully, and with such slight
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL.
131
I
disturbance of the existing order of society. There
was revolutionary matter enough in its doctrine about
liberty, brotherhood, the equality of all men before
God, the relations of the sexes, the position of slaves,
to have rent the whole framework of society in pieces,
if it had not been handled by a masterly as well as
conservative hand. I never read the Epistle to
Philemon; the passages relating to the order of the
home in 1 Corinthians vii.; to the order of society in
Romans xiii.; to association with the world in
I Corinthians v.; or the words about ritual observance
in Romans xiv., difficult cases of conscience in
I Corinthians x., miraculous gifts in 1 Corinthians
xiv.; or about Christian liberty in Galatians ii.;
about work in 2 Thessalonians iii., together with
many another passage which I might name, without
fresh wonder at the masterly statesmanlike power
which the writer reveals. He had his eye open to
everything which could cement and build up human
communities, and he had the firmest hand against
everything which threatened to pervert, to disrupt,
and to destroy.
St. Paul was a man who could have been trusted
beyond perhaps any other man of his time to take a
calm, clear, and accurate view of any alleged historical
fact and to estimate its practical bearings; and if, after
the whole evidence for the Resurrection had been
brought to bear upon his mind, he felt himself con-
strained to believe and to proclaim it to the dire
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RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
extremity of martyrdom-that fact becomes the
strongest possible evidence for its truth.
The testimony of St. Paul to the truth of the
Resurrection has a double value. In the first place
there is his personal witness, Last of all he was seen
of me also, as of one born out of due time; and in the
second place there is his judgment on the evidence,
the judgment of one who, not of the band of disciples,
could take an impartial view of its bearings, and who
was perfectly acquainted with all that could be said
upon the other side in the hostile camp.
First, the personal testimony. Through all his life
Paul believed and testified that he had seen the
Risen Jesus, had heard His voice, had received His
commission, and had held at critical moments of his
life such communion with Him as a man holds with
his friend. No one now, whom it is worth while to
attempt to answer, questions for a moment the entire
honesty of these affirmations. It is allowed on all
hands that Paul at any rate asserted simply what he
believed to be the truth. It is, in the judgment of
his hostile critics, a case of hallucination, not of wilful
perversion of the truth. Well, men are subject to
hallucinations, no doubt, especially men of genius.
But the world, the hard rough world, is a great dis-
peller of hallucinations. No man lives and works
through a long and intensely active life as the
victim of hallucination; either it vanishes and
leaves him in free possession of all his faculties, or
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL.
133
it makes him incapable of taking part to any real
purpose in the business of his fellowmen. It must
be remembered that this statement of Paul does not
stand alone. It is in harmony with many appear-
ances of Christ after the Resurrection, which rest on
the incontestable evidence of numerous disciples;
and it seemed real enough to make a vital change
in the character, the beliefs, the aims, the life-work
of one of the very ablest, most self-controlled, most
masterly men whom we meet with in the records of
universal history. It was not an enthusiast's vision,
opening the way to an enthusiast's visionary life. On
the contrary it created a career more richly laden
with practical fruits of benediction to mankind, than
any career which the history of those ages records.
Moreover Paul lived in the full tide of active life,
always journeying, preaching, writing, and mixing
himself up with the busy concerns of men. Probably
he saw more cities, had to do with more men and
women of different classes, and was familiar with
more various forms of thought, than any other man
of his time. No hallucination could have survived
in the midst of the intensely energetic and practical
activity in which Paul spent his days. But this idea
of the Resurrection-his belief that he had seen the
Risen Christ-lived on and gathered strength with
the years. He had tested in every possible way his
conviction. He had brought it into contact with all
sorts of people, in many countries, and under the
எ.
134
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
舀
​most varied circumstances; and had, no doubt, again
and again expounded the grounds on which he held
it to be a truth. Everywhere Paul impressed men
with the reality of his conviction. He held to the
truth of the Resurrection more vigorously, if possible,
as the years rolled on; and at length as his long and
arduous career drew to its close and the end began
to be in sight, he reasserted the unquestionable truth
of the whole narrative, under conditions of exceeding
solemnity, first before the multitude and the Council
of his own people; then before a Roman governor;
and lastly before King Agrippa, whom he impressed
so deeply that he might himself have become a
Christian if he had not been a king.
This witness of St. Paul, maintained through a long
life such as I have described, and repeated with the
most solemn emphasis at its close, is absolutely con-
vincing, save only to those who tell us in these days,
'No amount of evidence would convince us, for our
'Science tells us that there is no room for such a
supernatural fact as that in the order of the world;
'it cannot belong to the sphere of things that are, it
'must belong to the world of dreams.' When one
hears that, one cannot but smile and think how
many things there are which Science, with all her
vaunted wisdom, cannot understand, while one re-
members how utterly unaccountable by any of her
acknowledged methods is such a fact as conscious
activity, how inadequate are her organs of search
THE TESTIMONÝ OF ST. PAUL.
135
to gauge the unfathomable mystery-above, around,
beneath of all these worlds.
But there is a second point of view from which
the testimony of St. Paul to the truth of the Resur-
rection is so deeply important.
It is the testimony of one who had mastered the
whole argument in its favour, and who believed it
to be irresistible. Knowing the exact value of it,
he sets it forth as absolutely complete. He had not
been mixed up with those who had been eye-
witnesses-in a sense, it is true, he was himself an
eye-witness but he was not a participator in the ex-
periences of the disciples-he is one, as it were, from
the outside, who heard and weighed their testimony,
and could estimate its worth. He had known the
apostles, and many, no doubt, of the five hundred.
He had talked with them, questioned them, com-
pared their impressions, and he saw that there was
no possibility of mistake, and no room for illusion;
that the evidence established the Resurrection as
clearly as other evidence established the Birth and
the Death of our Lord. There is the calm tone of
certainty about his statement of the proofs which is
invaluable. We cannot examine the witnesses, and
sift their evidence; all the details are beyond our
reach for ever; but we have the proofs sifted for us,
weighed and stamped as valid beyond shadow of
doubt or question by the regal intellect of St. Paul.
It is very significant that in this chapter, where he
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RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
is dealing with those who doubted or denied their
own Resurrection, he uses as his strongest argu-
ment the Resurrection of Christ, as if that really
settled the matter, and were accepted as a truth on
every hand, even by those who doubted of their
own. If Christ be preached that he rose from the
dead, how say some among you that there is no resur-
rection of the dead? The whole tone of the argument
bears ample witness to the absolutely unquestioning
faith both of the Church and of St. Paul.
of
His evidence has, however, a value beyond this,
to which I must call your attention before I close.
St. Paul not only was not a disciple, but he had
been the most bitter and uncompromising enemy
the Truth. Nor had he been a silent opponent.
Though but a youth, by his brilliant powers he had
already made for himself a name of renown among
his countrymen. He was the coming leader of the
people, the rising man, on whom the hopes of the
elders were set as the future champion of the op-
pressed nation in the perilous times which were
manifestly coming on the world. With character-
istic ardour he threw himself into the controversy,
and we see in the earlier chapters of the Acts mani-
fold signs, that he was the right hand of the chief
priests and rulers in their desperate endeavour to
strangle in its infancy this young giant, the Church
of the Risen and Reigning Christ, before it had
time to attract the attention of the Roman Govern-
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL.
137
ment, and imperil the very existence of the State.
There was keen debating, for instance, in the syna-
gogue of the Cilicians (Acts vi. 8-10), and Saul was
of Tarsus, in Cilicia. Who can question that he was
there among the foremost, sustaining the chief brunt
of the controversy with Stephen, and that he
received impressions, of whose depth he was little
aware at the moment, from his masterly and powerful
words. Study together the defence of Stephen, and
Paul's first recorded missionary sermon at Antioch
in Pisidia; the likeness is quite startling, and it is
brought out more clearly by the references to Jewish
history scattered through the Apostle's writings,
which reveal the influence of the words of his ancient
foe. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus was already
begun when he disputed with Stephen. The furious
violence by which he sought to drown the witness of
Stephen and of the disciples in their own blood, was
but the death-flurry of his belief in Pharisaic
Judaism; the frenzy of a man who dreaded the in-
fluence which a new and momentous belief was
establishing over his heart. When he hears the
voice of the Risen Saviour he surrenders at once,
and devotes himself from that moment to preaching
the faith which once he destroyed.'
This is not, however, the point. Disputing with
Stephen he heard everything which could be urged
for the truth by a man of remarkable intellectual and
spiritual power; and it was his business to master.
138
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
and to parade all that could be said against it. He
mixed intimately with the leaders of his people; he
knew all their ideas about this rising sect; he knew
their way of explaining away the phenomena which
were winning belief everywhere; and he would
have known perfectly any flaw in the argument for
the faith if any could have been found. I have said
that the evidence is the evidence of disciples. I
have explained how that is its strength and its glory.
But one longs sometimes to know what was actually
said in the Sanhedrim and in chief-priestly circles
against it. We have no contemporary record of
this; if any was written, no note of it has reached
us, but St. Paul stands forth to supply the want.
His is a voice out of the hostile camp, confessing
that the opposition was in hopeless collapse. The
fact that a man of such keen and eager intellect,
who left no objection unanswered, no nook of argu-
ment unexplored, never condescends in any of his
writings to notice the counter statements of oppo
nents, is proof absolute that there was no validity in
them. They evidently had left on his mind not a
shadow of question, and brought forward nothing
which it was worth his while to trouble himself to
refute. And thus St. Paul seals the testimony of
Stephen, and sets the Amen of a 'Hebrew of the
'Hebrews,' a 'Pharisee of the Pharisees,' to the
witness of the infant Church, which bore the hope of
a world in its young heart-Now is Christ risen
THE TESTIMONY OF ST. PAUL.
139
1
from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that
slept. For since by man came death, by man came also
the Resurrection of the dead.
Then, having borne his witness life-long to the
Resurrection, he died with the testimony on his
lips. The time came as the years rolled on when
the cunning intellect and it was nowhere so
curiously cunning as in Asiatic Greece-began to
sap and pare the truth, and threatened, as it
threatens now, to rob the world of the fact which is
to it as a sun. Paul the aged saw the menace with
which 'science falsely so called' threatened the
central truth of the Gospel, and he lifted up his
dying voice to reaffirm it with all the emphasis and
solemnity with which a dying testimony is charged:
Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David
was raised from the dead according to.my gospel:
wherein I suffer trouble, as an evil doer, even unto
bonds; but the word of God is not bound. Therefore I
endure all things for the elect's sakes, that they may also
obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with
eternal glory. It is a faithful saying: For if we be
dead with him, we shall also live with him; if we
suffer, we shall also reign with him; if we deny him,
he will also deny us; if we believe not, yet he abideth
faithful; he cannot deny himself.
Once again the Risen and Reigning Saviour
appeared to the aged and weary preacher of the
Gospel, to give him firm grasp of the glorious truth
140
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
in death: At my first answer no man stood with me,
but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not
be laid to their charge. Notwithstanding the Lord
stood with me, and strengthened me; that by me the
preaching might be fully known, and that all the
Gentiles might hear: and I was delivered out of the
mouth of the lion. And then burst forth the trium-
phant pæan, which rings as a victorious battle cry
through the ages, and will ring on to the Resurrec-
tion day. I am now ready to be offered, and the time
of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good
fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith
-the faith of Jesus and the Resurrection-henceforth
there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which
the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that
day.
VII.
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
Behold, the world is gone after him.-JOHN xii. 19.
T is important that we should understand
the issue which is at stake in the question
of the truth or the falsehood of the fact
proclaimed by the apostles, on which the whole
fabric of apostolic Christianity rests-the Resurrec-
tion of our Lord. It is a question of the veracity,
the personal trustworthiness, of men whose influence
has been incomparably stronger than that of any
men who have ever lived on the thoughts, beliefs,
aims, and hopes of mankind, and who created and
conducted to a successful issue the greatest revolu-
tion known to history.
The apostles were not, to their own consciousness,
the founders of a new religion; it was not the fact
that they were men of the type of Zoroaster, Buddha,
or Mahomet, profound thinkers and searchers for
truth, separated from their fellows and raised on
high above the mists in which, on the lower levels
of life, the multitude was buried; that they had

1
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RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
visions of things hidden from vulgar sight, which
they were endeavouring to clothe in forms render-
ing them visible and tangible to the common herd
of mankind. They were not men who had hold of,
or had been laid hold of by, new and great religious
ideas, of which the tale of a Resurrection might be
an appropriate vehicle, for procuring them a lodging-
place in the busy, practical world of their time. This
is the picture of the disciples presented by some of
our advanced thinkers, who have not abandoned
their faith in Christian ideas but are anxious to save
their credit as philosophers. The disciples were quite
right, they say, in preaching Resurrection-the rising
out of the death of sin, of vanity, selfishness, and
lust. The world was waiting for that truth; it was
struggling up into a new sphere of vital activity;
it was craving an immense enlargement of its
bounds-Resurrection was its gospel. This was
the vital element, we are assured, in their proclama-
tion, Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the
dead, and Christ shall give thee light, but about an
actual Resurrection their minds were in confusion;
the tale somehow grew round the ideas of spiritual
reformation and regeneration which possessed them,
and it will die away as these ideas root themselves
deeply in the heart of mankind.
Now we must understand clearly that such an ac-
count of the matter is absolutely impossible. There is
nothing to support it in the history. The truth, to the
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
143
apprehension of the disciples, grew out of a fact, and
a fact so palpable to their inner and outer senses
that there was no room for the faintest doubt about
it. The fact came first; that compelled recognition
and demanded proclamation at once; all that it meant
and all that would grow out of it very slowly dawned
on their sight. The one grand feature of contrast
between the religion of Christ and all other religions,
is that Christ is the religion, the Gospel is a Life.
With other teachers it is the teaching, with Christ
it is the Life-the living, the dying, the rising to
reign. Take the instance of Mahomet, whose influ-
ence on humanity in point of breadth and force may
bear some outward comparison with the influence of
Jesus of Nazareth. Had the life of Mahomet been
the gospel of the religion, Islam would have sprung
up and withered like a mushroom of the night. The
vital force of Islam lay entirely in the truth which
Mahomet was commissioned to declare about the
one living and true God, and of which the Old
Testament Scripture was the spring. The life of
Mahomet has profound interest, like the life of
Socrates, or Confucius, or Sakya Mouni; for these
men were fathers of ages, and left a mark on the
world which it bears deeply yet. Every fact, there-
fore, about them is precious. But their lives made
no Gospel-men ask still, not what they were, but
what they thought and said. With our Lord, as
we have already seen, it is quite otherwise.
144
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
i
What He gave to the world was not a compre-
hensive system of religious thought clothed as far as
was possible in deeds; the deeds were the central
matter, and light flowed forth from them as rays
from the sun why? because the deeds were
Divine. So with the Resurrection-the fact stands
first, a Divine fact; out of that the Gospel issues,
round that its interest gathers, from that flow forth
its springs of power. The apostles concentrated all
their strength on their witness to the Resurrection.
Their main effort was to establish it as a fact, and,
when this was accomplished they could leave it to
work its work on the life of the world. So at their
first meeting after the Ascension they ordained one
to be a witness with them of his Resurrection. Peter
proclaimed before the council, after the first miracle
of healing, Be it known unto you all, and to all the
people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of
Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from
the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before
you whole. Immediately afterwards, as we read,
With great power gave the apostles witness of the
Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and on the first
conspicuous occasion when the word was preached
by Peter to the Gentiles the apostle announces,
Him God raised up the third day, and showed him
openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen
before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with
him after he rose from the dead.
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
145
ī
It is in harmony with the whole idea and spirit
of the Gospel that this should be its method. The
religion which is one through all the ages, and which
we may truly name Christianity, is not, like all other
religions of the world, the history of man's thinkings
about God, or the fruit of man's strivings towards
God; it is distinctly the history of God's thinkings,
sayings, and doings among men, the man-ward
words and works of God. It is a religion of fact
from the first chapter to the last, a revelation of
what God is, by the history of what He has said and
done in and for the world.
What was the first message which Moses was
bidden to convey to his people—the fons et origo
of Judaism and Christianity: Go, and gather the
elders of Israel together, and say unto them, The
Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of
Isaac, and of Facob, appeared unto me, saying, I
have surely visited you, and seen that which is done
to you in Egypt: and I have said, I will bring you
up out of the affliction of Egypt unto the land of the
Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and
the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites,
unto a land flowing with milk and honey.
And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I
am the Lord; and I appeared unto Abraham, unto
Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty,
but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.
And I have also established my covenant with them,
IO
146
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their
pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers. And I
have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel,
whom the Egyptians keep in bondage; and I have
remembered my covenant. Wherefore say unto the
children of Israel, I am the Lord, and I will bring
you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians,
and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will
redeem you with a stretched out arm, and with great
judgment; and I will take you to me for a people,
and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I
am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from
under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will
bring you unto the land, concerning the which I did
swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob;
and I will give it to you for an heritage; I am the
Lord.
The beautiful passage in Deuteronomy xxvi. shows
the same apprehension of the essential matter in the
religion: And it shall be when thou art come in unto
the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an
inheritance, and possessest it, and dwellest therein;
that thou shalt take of the first of all the fruit of the
earth, which thou shalt bring of thy land that the
Lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt put it in a
basket, and shalt go unto the place which the Lord
thy God shall choose to put his name there. And
thou shalt go unto the priest that shall be in those
days, and say unto him, I profess this day unto the
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
147
Lord thy God, that I am come unto the country which
the Lord sware unto our fathers for to give us.
And the priest shall take the basket out of thine
hand, and set it down before the altar of the Lord
thy God. And thou shalt speak and say before the
Lord thy God, A Syrian ready to perish was my
father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned
there with a few, and became there a nation, great,
mighty, and populous; and the Egyptians evil en-
treated us, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard
bondage: and when we cried unto the Lord God of
our fathers, the Lord heard our voice, and looked
upon our affliction, and our labour, and our oppres-
sion: and the Lord brought us forth out of Egypt
with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm,
and with great terribleness, and with signs, and with
wonders: and he brought us into this place, and hath
given us this land, even a land which floweth with
milk and honey. And now, behold, I have brought
the firstfruits of the land, which thou, O Lord, hast
given me. And thou shalt set it before the Lord thy
God, and worship before the Lord thy God: and thou
shalt rejoice in every good thing which the Lord thy
God hath given unto thee, and unto thine house, thou,
and the Levite, and the stranger that is among you.
It is in close accordance with this character in the
older Dispensation that the Gospel-the crown to
the Law, the benign fulfilment of its promise, the
glorious completion of its work-was, as we have
148
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
seen, distinctly and entirely the history of a Life.
It was no body of doctrine, no digest of laws, but a
simple, veracious history, as veracious as the history
of Cæsar, or Cicero, or Pompeius, or any of the
leaders of men whose words and works have been
put on record for the instruction of future ages.
Nay, it is more veracious-of what great life is there
a record comparable in fulness, in clearness, in
power of portraiture, in revelations of the inner
man, with that which the great Biography delivers
to us? What hero of the past do we know as we
know the Lord? And as the history of an actual
life constituted the Gospel, so that which made the
new, the Resurrection, age of the world's history is
a fact, a Divine fact—not an esoteric doctrine, round
which a record of events gathered; and this fact
was a fountain of spiritual light and power, which
began at once to flow forth from it, has been flowing
through all the Christian ages, and will flow till the
end of time.
+
There is no Gospel of Truth behind Christianity,
if the facts of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of
Jesus Christ of Nazareth could be proved to be
either a dream or a lie.
Understand then the issue at stake. The denial
of the truth of the Resurrection makes the apostles
the men who led the movement for the regeneration
of society, false witnesses of an event which they
insisted upon with peculiar earnestness, which they
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
149
regarded as of supreme importance, and about which
their means of knowledge were so ample, that we
are justified in saying that they must have known
with entire certainty whether the witness they bore
was false or true. St. Paul states this issue emphati-
cally:
Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the
dead, how say some among you that there is no resur-
rection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection
of the dead, then is Christ not risen. And if Christ
be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your
faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false
witnesses of God; because we have testified of God
that he raised up Christ; whom he raised not up, if
so be that the dead rise not.
The apostles would have rejected with horror such
an explanation of their preaching as is sometimes
suggested for them-that they might be mistaken
about the fact, but that they were right about the
spiritual truth of the Resurrection. They would
have regarded any veiling of the fact, and insistance
only on the spiritual idea, as the enervation, the
emasculation, of the Gospel which they were com-
missioned to proclaim to the world.
And that is precisely what it would have been.
A gospel of ideas is always an emasculate gospel. Ths
ideas may be true enough, and deeply important to
the culture and the progress of mankind. But the
generative power is out of them if they are only ideas.
150
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
The life is the light of men. I must constantly recur
to that principle. There is no possibility of rightly
understanding Christianity without it. Ideas that
are generative, that can bud and blossom and bear
fruit in man's life and history, are ideas which have
facts, vital facts at the root of them. This is why
the Resurrection was received by men everywhere
so joyfully, and became a power of new life to the
world. Men heard and believed that Jesus of
Nazareth, the Incarnate Word of God, had been.
raised from the dead, and in human form had entered
into the Heavenly Sanctuary, there to appear as our
Advocate, and to reign as our King. And wherever
that fact was firmly grasped by men or communities,
there was visible at once the glow, the vigour, and
the promise of a new-born life. It was this vital
element in the Gospel which was the power of God
unto salvation to every one that believed. Precisely
that change which took place in the Apostles, making
them new men, instinct with fresh energy, courage,
and insight, took place also in the experience of
humanity everywhere, when these Evangelists pro-
claimed abroad 'Jesus and the Resurrection.'
The truth spread like flame from city to city,
from land to land. Peoples of the most diverse
character and culture, full of antipathies about every-
thing else, agreed joyfully about this; accepting the
Resurrection of the God-man as an unquestionable
verity, they began at once to build upon it the edifice
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
151
of a new and higher order of society.
Everywhere
the most momentous practical results followed from
belief in it. Man in each sphere of his activity was
touched with a vital quickening energy, and started
forth on a career of development which aimed at
nothing lower than ultimate conformity to the Divine
image of beauty and perfectness, revealed in the
Life and in the teaching of the Lord. In Jerusalem,
in the very scene of the events narrated as a Gospel,
where the amplest means of confutation existed had
confutation been possible, it won an instant and signal
triumph. Men accepted it as those who had been
waiting and watching for it. Just as the pious in
Jerusalem were looking for the Redeemer, and had
their minds ready to receive Him when in fulfilment
of ancient prophecies He appeared; so there was a
vague but real longing in the minds of the faithful
for some substantial knowledge of and hold upon the
realities of the invisible world, such as the Resur-
rection offered. Hence it was that, transcendent as
it appeared, in form at any rate quite beyond the
range of man's most daring imagination, it yet
seemed to be quite natural, and quite in the order
of things under the rule of the Higher Hand which
they believed to be busy about their life and the
world's; meeting the deepest yearnings of their
nature, it enlarged the field of their interests and
activities, opened the path of their heavenly pro-
gress, and gave to them a royal mastery of pain
152
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
disease, and death. Peoples too at opposite poles
of character and culture received it equally readily,
equally eagerly. Babylon, with her imperial tra
ditions, subtle and sensuous Egypt, beautiful and
brilliant Damascus, wanton and wealthy Antioch,
pleasure-loving Cyprus, slow and greedy Crete,
fickle but passionate and enthusiastic Galatia, pro-
found and earnest Phrygia, all were one in their
welcome to the Gospel; and all accepted the
Resurrection, on the overwhelming evidence which
established it, as the cardinal fact in the history of
mankind.
But these, it may be said, were in a measure
Eastern peoples, and theirs was more or less of the
temperament which disposes men to accept religious
ideas on slight external evidence; with suci peoples
it would be enough if the Gospel commended itself
to their inner consciousness, if the idea of the Resur-
rection appeared to them Divinely beautiful. But it
is a mere fancy that Oriental peoples would be likely
to give a readier welcome than Occidental to a truth
so strange, so wonderful, so beyond all human ex-
perience as the Resurrection of our Lord. Ma-
homet and the innumerable hosts of his followers
stumbled at that stumbling stone, and are far from
receiving the truth of the Resurrection still. But be
that as it may, the acute, brilliant and highly cultured
Greek, and the sober and practical Roman accepted
it as readily as the semi-oriental peoples just men-
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
153
tioned. Paul planted in each chief city of Greece
a Church which believed in 'Jesus and the Resur-
rection' as its fundamental article of faith, and began
at once with conquering power to win men to its
fellowship.
In Rome the acceptance of the Truth was equally
remarkable. Through the practical, law-giving Im-
perial West, as well as in the homes of philosophy
and of religious fervour, the fact of the Resurrection
secured for itself recognition on the testimony of
unknown and little distinguished men. I say, little
distinguished men. Paul was a man of the highest
distinction, and bore that about with him which men
of all classes and orders-kings, Roman rulers,
captains, magistrates, and common people-recog-
nized as power; but the majority of the witnesses
were men of very ordinary natural capacity, of
obscure station, and limited culture; notable only for
the intense earnestness and the fearless courage
with which they bore testimony to what they be-
lieved to be an unspeakably momentous and pregnant
truth. And this truth won its way victoriously, as
a thing which was sent into the world to conquer.
In mere point of numbers the first converts, the
members of the infant Church, everywhere were
few. The Jews through all ages were a small
slight people, compared with the work which they
did in the world. It was their intense vitality which
told on men. Something went forth from them
154
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
which, on their first settlement in Canaan, inspired
the surrounding nations with something like awe;
and the same influence made them strong with a
strength which is distinctly not the strength of big
battalions, thoughout all the periods of their history,
and in a measure abides with them to this day. So
with the infant Church. It was but a small thing as
far as it could be estimated by numbers, or station,
or wealth, or any of the visible powers which are
reckoned in the world's muster-roll of its forces.
And yet it made a great impression, and filled men
with a great apprehension or with a radiant joy.
There was a stir about these preachers wherever
they moved, the sources of which had nothing to
do with their numbers or personal influence. We
learn this from that curious record of their visit to
Thessalonica, in Acts xvii. 1-6, where they are
described as These that have turned the world upside
down. There were the signs of victorious power in
the preachers and in the communities they founded,
which unconsciously impressed men; there was a
forecast of progress and conquest, for hope was
young and exulting in their hearts and in their
Churches, while in all the world around it was
dying or dead.
And so wherever they planted
themselves a movement began which is like the
beginning of healthy action in a diseased body.
In Rome the truth of the Resurrection planted
itself at once, no one quite knows how, in city,
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
155
camp and court. In Cæsar's household, in the
army, in noble families, among slaves, a knot of
earnest believers gathered around this truth, which
became the core of Christendom and grew till it
filled the world. Before three centuries had passed
this little company of believers in 'Jesus and the
Resurrection,' the number of whose names at the
first was about 120, had increased and prevailed
so mightily, that a pagan Emperor, with all the
legions behind him, besought the prayers of his
Christian soldiers, for he saw that there was a
power in their supplications which had vanished
from the devotions of all the world beside. When
the Empire broke up, and the great German race
appeared upon the scene of its future triumphs, it
accepted with the same readiness, nay eagerness,
the truth of the Resurrection. Everywhere among
the young German peoples the Risen, Christ was
enthroned as the Heavenly King. Through all the
Christian ages, through the revolutions which have
shaken and the reformations which have restored
Christian society, this fact has held its supreme
place, unquestioned, unquestionable; among all
classes and orders, from prince to beggar, from
Pope to friar, the one fact in the history of the past
which has been received with absolute universal
acceptance, is the Resurrection of the crucified and
buried Lord.
This ready and universal acceptance of a super-
156
RESURRECTION AS A FACT.
natural fact as an unquestionable truth, proves be-
yond all doubt the need in man's nature and condition
which it was able to supply. Men of all countries,
ages, cultures, and characters, agreeing in little else,
agree in this, that the Resurrection of the Lord
Jesus is the corner-stone of their history and of the
history of the great world. It means, it can only mean,
that man was made to the scale of the destiny which
the Resurrection opens; and that when the fact was
presented, there was that within man's nature every-
where which testified to its truth. But it did not
grow out of man's nature, any more than the eye
grew out of the light, or the ear out of the music of
the world. There is One above both-above the
eye, above the light-who made them for each
other; there is One above man's nature, and above
the world of the Resurrection, who constituted them
in a harmony, and in His own good time married
them, by raising up a Man from the dead and show-
ing Him openly a Citizen of the spiritual, celestial,
eternal world. All history testifies that it was the
fact of the Resurrection that so impressed and
mastered men. No preaching about Resurrection,
however powerful, earnest, and convincing, could
have compared for a moment in its influence on the
regeneration of human society, with the simple
tale of the Gospel, This Jesus hath God raised up,
whereof we all are witnesses.
I hope in the following discourse to show that it
THE UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
157
was not so much the doctrine of the Resurrection, as
the personal influence of the Risen and Reigning
Christ, the sense of His personal presence in and
Divine rule over the world, which wrought so
mightily in all the spheres of man's vital activity;
and raised the world from darkness to light, from
sin to righteousness, from death to life.
In con-
cluding the present discourse we may say decisively
that this transcendent, supernatural fact, which,
marvellous as it was, won acceptance at once among
all peoples of all orders of character and culture
within the realm of civilization and beyond it, and
gradually but irresistibly widened the realm of its
dominion until all civilized nations through the wide
world accept it as the most unquestionable fact in
history; this fact, which everywhere aroused men
from a deadly moral lethargy and kindled within
them new vigour, new animation, new purpose,
effort and hope; which bound the hostile tribes
and families of men in bonds of brotherhood, and
made Greek and Jew, Roman and Scythian, one in
Christ; which restored the purity of homes, the
dignity of labour and the sanctity of truth, and
started the great world on the career of progress it
is still pursuing this fact of the Resurrection
which has done all this, cannot in the nature of
things be a dream or an invention; it must, if there
be verity anywhere, be a substantial, glorious and
everlasting truth.
The Risen Christ.
VIII
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST THE PLEDGE
OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE RACE.
Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according
to the flesh; and declared to be the Son of God with power, accord-
ing to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.-
ROMANS i. 3, 4.
HE Lord arose from the dead, and He arose
to reign. Peter bore this witness before the
Sanhedrim, The God of our fathers raised
up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. Him
hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince
and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and
forgiveness of sins. And we are His witnesses of
these things; and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom
God hath given to them that obey him. Paul affirms
that He was declared to be the Son of God with power,
according to the spirit of holiness, that is, the spirit
of His divine life, by, not His resurrection from the
dead, but by the resurrection from the dead. Unto
you first, says St. Peter, addressing the Jewish
people, God, having raised up his son Jesus, sent
II
162
THE RISEN CHRIST.
him to bless you, in turning away every one of you
from his iniquities.
We have tried to estimate the significance of the
fact that the Resurrection met with universal accept-
ance. The first converts no doubt were few in
number, but were representative of humanity at
large. A little company of men and women
gathered everywhere around the preachers of 'Jesus
'and the Resurrection,' and not only accepted the
truth joyfully, but made it the basis of a new life-
new in its form, new in its temper and spirit, new in
its aims and hopes-a life which is everywhere
spoken of as new by those who were living it, and
compared with which the old life of Judaism or
Heathendom was in their judgment worthy only of
the name of death. While the life that they had
lived in the flesh minded earthly things, and was
without God and without hope, this new life
deserved rather the title of heavenly, so conversant
was it with heavenly things and heavenly beings.
The Gospel of the Resurrection had come and all
was changed; faith, hope, and charity became the
moving principles of the new risen life of mankind.
This little knot of believers which everywhere
gathered round the Apostles and the apostolic
teachers, was, I say, representative of universal
humanity; it was the firstfruit of the mass of the
great human family. And for two reasons:-
I. It was composed of all peoples and of all classes.
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST A PLEDGE. 163
Nationality, station, culture, character, were abso-
lutely indifferent to it. Greek, Jew; barbarian,
Scythian; bond, free; male, female; all were one in
Christ. The doctrine did not, as it were, studiously
overlook these social and material distinctions, or
entreat men to rise superior to them. It passed
through them as magnetism passes through moun-
tains; these classes and orders and political aggre-
gates were simply and naturally permeable by it at
will. When it had once broken through the crust
and made men in all classes and of all tongues
understand that it had a message for them, it took
no note of anything that divided men; it dealt
entirely with that which constituted their unity. It
found out at once and everywhere that simple,
native humanity, about which the poets and philo-
sophers had said fine things, while they had somehow
failed to discover it or put it to the least practical
use. Just as at Pentecost men of all races and
cultures seemed to hear, 'in their own tongue
'wherein they were born,' the wonderful works of
God, so all men, in all countries, hearing the Gospel
of the Resurrection, seemed to hear their native
speech a word direct from God to them in their
own individual lives. This Jewish doctrine,
preached by men of an exclusive and universally
hated race, and tinctured deeply with the spirit of
their entirely peculiar religious literature, found its
way with the greatest readiness and most command-
164
THE RISEN CHRIST.
i
ing power to the hearts of men, in Ethiopia, Syria,
Asia Minor, in busy mercantile Corinth, in philoso-
phic polished Athens, in practical imperial Rome,
and welded them at once into a community-a
brotherhood in which the members were incompa-
rably more closely knit, and more devoted to the
interests of each other and of the whole, than had
been the case in any community which up to that
time had been heard of, I may truly say dreamed
of, in the world. Diverse as they were, and heirs
by national and class tradition to the most deadly
feuds and hates, the name 'Christian,' which they
had in common, meant more to them than all the
world beside; and the whole force of the Name, of
the power it wielded, of the confederacy it estab-
lished, lay in the relation which each one consciously
sustained to the Risen and Reigning Lord.
It
The Risen and Reigning Christ was the centre of
the whole movement. With the disciples verily the
Kingdom of God in the Gospel of Jesus and the
'Resurrection' was not in word but in power.
was not a theory or a dream about Resurrection,
but a submission to the rule of a Risen and Reigning,
an ever present, though invisible, King. The fact of
the Resurrection was everywhere accepted as part
of a greater fact, the reign of the Risen Saviour
over the world. And it met man's yearning for a
universal kingdom, which should comprehend men
everywhere in one great system of social order,
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST A PLEDGE. 165
resting on one absolute and lasting foundation, and
ruled by one equal and righteous law.
Rome made
the attempt to establish it; the pax Romana was the
fruit of a grand human effort to work out this great
Divine idea; but when the Apostles went forth with
their Gospel of the Kingdom, men had already seen
that the effort was doomed to disastrous failure, and
would but deepen the confusion and misery of the
world. The Gospel met the human longing, and
founded a Kingdom, which, through long strife and
sore anguish of travail, as its Founder prophesied,
is welding into a unity the great human world. And
then :-
II. The little companies gathered by the Gospel
in every city where the Apostles preached, may be
regarded as representative of universal humanity,
inasmuch as they aimed at gathering all the world
to their embrace; and not this only, but they showed
a marvellous power of compelling men of all coun-
tries, tongues and cultures, to come in. They
remembered the word, the last commission of the
Master: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the
Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe
all things, whatsoever I have commanded you: and
lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the
world. That
That very commission rested on the reality
of the Resurrection, and it at once became a power.
Very few years passed before the Samaritans and
166
THE RISEN CHRIST.
the Gentiles were brought into the Kingdom, and
were received into full citizenship as freely as the
Jews. It had in it an adaptive and assimilative
power which from the first prophesied and promised
universality. It was manifestly to every eye the
thing that was growing and would grow, developing
precisely into this form of a universal human com-
munity, relating men to each other in the closest
bonds of obligation, though they might be severed
from each other by half the circumference of the
globe.
This has everywhere been its history. It has
had a desperate, a deadly struggle with the natural
selfishness and self-will of the human, which tends
to divide men faster than the bonds of the Kingdom
can be woven to unite them. Nay, the very chil-
dren of the Kingdom have been through all the ages
the most effectual ministers of strife and division.
Can anything be found in the pages of history more
savage, more fiendish, than the hatred which the
Christian was taught and trained to cherish towards
the Moslem, during the ages in which the crusading
fury was raging in Christendom. The children of
the Kingdom, like some in the lifetime and in the
very presence of the Lord, strangely forgot what
'manner of spirit they were of,' and lent themselves
to the devil's disruptive, destroying work. But out
of the Kingdom, remember, rose up a man like St.
Francis; who went in the spirit of Christian love
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST A PLEDGE. 167
and tenderness to the Soldan, and sought to weave
around him and his people the cords of the Divine
Love. He failed for the moment, but like that
little company at Jerusalem, he was herald and
pioneer of the influences which have since been
working, and are working still, drawing the once
furious foes into political, social, and spiritual fellow-
ship, and prophesying the time when Ephraim shall
not envy Fudah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim.
The universal acceptance then of this fact of the
Resurrection was prophesied by the little companies
of all classes, orders, and nationalities, that gathered
round the Apostles; and set prophetically the seal of
of the whole human world to its truth. A fact so
transcendent, which showed itself able to lay hold on
the heart and conscience of men in all countries and
in all strata of society; which everywhere stimulated
man's higher development and constituted a unique
era in human progress; and which seems able, as a
principle at once of individual and of social develop-
ment, to solve the great problem of civilisation, by
encouraging the free unfolding of the individual
while drawing men at the same time into the closest
bonds of association and fellowship—such a fact,
thus attested, and bearing such fruits, has the very
highest evidence possible that it is not only true
but Divine.
But it is very important that we should under-
stand before leaving the subject, how the fact of the
168
THE RISEN CHRIST.
Resurrection wrought, and what it represented to
mankind.
There is very deep significance in the form of the
sentence of the Apostle Paul which I have taken
for my text, and to which I have drawn attention in
my opening remarks. He speaks of the Lord being
declared to be the Son of God with power, by
the Resurrection from the dead. It is not only the
personal Resurrection of the Lord as an isolated
phenomenon which the Apostle contemplates. It
stands, to his mind, as it stood to the infant Church,
as the typical Resurrection; as connected with and
revealing the Resurrection of the race and its
relation to the world of the Resurrection in which
the Risen Son of Man is King. Remember that the
Resurrection which we are contemplating is the
Resurrection of the Son of Man; the Divine Man
out of Whom, as its root, springs the race created in
the image of God; and in Whom alone can it fulfil
the idea of its creation, and be presented faultless
before the presence of His glory, in the day of the
manifestation of the sons of God. The Resurrection
is a further and essential stage in the development
of the Incarnation. By the Incarnation the Divine
is born into the sphere of the human; by the
Resurrection the human is born into the sphere of
the Divine for ever.
This raising of Jesus from the dead cannot be
contemplated in its relation only to His individual
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST A PLEDGE. 16g
life. He rose because He had power to lay down
His life, and power to take it again; He burst the
bonds of death because it was not possible that He
should be holden of them; but His becoming sub-
ject to them even for a moment was the fruit of a
purpose, a redeeming purpose, but for which He
had never been within reach of the sphere in which
Death reigns. His rising was part of His dying;
His dying was part of His living; His living, dying,
and rising again were part of the Redeeming
purpose which He cherished from eternity, and
which eternity only can develop and complete.
The rising of the Lord Jesus is not simply the rising
of an individual man as an instance, a prerogative
instance of Resurrection; it is the raising up of the
God-man, the Head and King of humanity; it is
the key-stone, so to speak, of the Divine plan for
the government of the world; and, if we accept the
revelation of Scripture, of all the worlds. If there
be no Divine plan in the Creation, no Divine order
in history; if things have brought themselves to
their present lofty level of development by some
blind indwelling force of expansion, without pre-
determined method; if creatures, when they are
brought to the birth, have to struggle for their
places in the world of existence, and either to estab-
lish their right to be and to become links in the
chain of progress, or to perish and to drop into the
wreck-then Resurrection may well seem a fact in-
170
THE RISEN CHRIST.
credible, irreducible to any kind of harmony with
the apparent scheme of the world; though even in
this case clear, indisputable evidence of the fact
might warn men that they were on the track of a
new and till then unsuspected chain of sequences,
opening up a new and infinitely wider sphere of
development to mankind. But for us who believe
that from the first the creation of man as a free
being began a new and higher course of develop-
ment in the creature, to which all things had been
looking and longing from the beginning, and in
which alone the mysteries of the lower order find
their solution, the travail of the universal system
brings forth its fruit-for us the Resurrection is the
inevitable outcome of the process of development,
which had been pressing man from the first, as it
were, to the threshold of the invisible spiritual
world, and had compelled him to seek in its sphere
the true theatre for the unfolding of his life.
When the God-man appeared, man had reached
that point in his history where, unless the spiritual
world had been opened to him by some such fact as
the Resurrection, he must just have laid himself
down in despair, and died there on the outer limit,
the farthest bound, of his material sphere. This
world, the visible and tangible system to which as
an organised fleshly creature he belonged, could do
no more for him. It had done its utmost, and he
had done his utmost with it; it had placed him
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST A PLEDGE. 171
before the closed portal of the spiritual and eternal ;
was there any passage through to the Beyond?-
such was the question of questions, altogether apart
from Revelation, of civilised, cultivated humanity in
the age of our Lord. If not; if the answer to man's
questioning spirit had been the everlasting No,
there was absolutely nothing between man and such
paralysis of despair, as would have been like the
touch of the cold hand of death on a heart that was
only too ready to cease its restless beatings and be
still for ever. The Lord by His Resurrection,
answered the everlasting Yea; unbarred the portal
before which man was wearily but wistfully watch-
ing, and opened to his eager step the sphere of
Heaven and Eternity. Eager I say, for the moment
that the Gospel of the Resurrection was preached
a new and wonderful animation, a new eagerness
and hope, were kindled in what looked like a hope-
less and perishing world. The powers of the world
to come reinforced the exhausted strength, the ex-
hausted life, of man, the creature, who had been
bounded in his interests, joys, and hopes by the
limits of the material system around him, and he
started forth as the child of the Resurrection with
passionate ardour and splendid energy on his new
career. With the breath of Immortality around
him, he rose at once to God-like stature, and earth,
transfigured, became a Kingdom of Heaven.
We shall utterly misapprehend the nature and
172
THE RISEN CHRIST.
bearing of the Resurrection if we imagine that it was
merely a vague proclamation of Immortality; that it
simply opened to man the barred portal, lifted the
veil which hid the spiritual and eternal world from
his apprehension, and left him to make what new
progress he could with that new light shining on his
life. As I have said, the raising of Jesus from the
dead lay in the path of the Divine plan of the
government of the world; it was the key-stone of
the arch of the Divine purpose, and it would alto-
gether have failed of its effect, if it had not proved
itself incomparably the strongest instrument in the
Divine Hand for the righteous government of men.
The Lord came to this world to found and to rule
a kingdom, or rather to demonstrate the reality and
to reveal and enforce the laws of the kingdom,
which an unseen but ever present and omnipotent
King had been ruling from the foundation of the
world. It was as the King of men, the Divine King
-such is the form of Divine Kingship-that the
Lord died on Calvary; died that He might win a
new and resistless power to reign. Those who can
see little else that we can see in the Bible, see that
righteousness is the ruling idea of it, righteousness
in a very practical and even terrible form. They
see that the whole of the discipline which the his-
tory reveals, no matter by whom or how administered,
was a stern and lofty endeavour to compel men
to obey a righteous Law, as the rule of their own
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST A PLEDGE. 173
The
lives and of their relations with each other.
Lord came to preach righteousness more directly and
mightily than mere messengers or judgments had
been able to preach it; His death was the supreme
proclamation of it; Certainly this was a righteous
man, was the testimony to Christ wrung by the
Cross even from heathen lips. But that is not the
point. The personal righteousness of Christ became
by His death a POWER, which He rose to wield from
His throne. The righteousness to which the Jewish
Law had witnessed, which prophets had proclaimed,
which judgments had enforced, shone out as with
heaven's own splendour in the Life and the Death of
the righteous Word of the righteous Father, in Whom
the perfect righteousness-the Law by which the
heavens were made and the universe consists-was
revealed to the world.
The Resurrection was the full and the final mani-
festation of the Law and the force of the Kingdom.
Far from being a vague unveiling of a dim, far off,
unsubstantial world, the Resurrection, as the Apostles
and the infant Church understood it, brought all the
force of a Divine Hand to bear on the regulation of
the life of this world by the standards which are
current on High; and which were manifest to the
world in the Life and the Death of the Lord Who
rose from the dead to reign. The Apostles in their
very first Gospel sermons speak of the Risen Christ
as Risen to Reign, as the appointed Ruler and Judge
174
THE RISEN CHRIST.
of all mankind. Scarcely has the Form of the Risen
Saviour vanished from the scenes which He had been
wont to haunt with His disciples, when this vision
is unveiled: I John, who am also your brother, and
companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and
patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called
Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony
of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's
day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trum-
pet, saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the
last: and, what thou seest, write in a book, and send
it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto
Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and
unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadel-
phia, and unto Laodicea. And I turned to see the
voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw
seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the seven
candlesticks one like unto the Son of Man, clothed with
a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps
with a golden girdle. His head and his hairs were
white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were
as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass, as
if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the
sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand
seven stars; and out of his mouth went a sharp two-
edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun
shineth in his strength. And when I saw him I fell
at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon
me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST A PLEDGE. 175
last : I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold,
I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of
hell and of death.
'A mere poetic imagination,' some of you may
say, and you may extend the same judgment to the
whole Apocalypse. But somehow this poetic vision,
which has much that is Oriental in its external
dress, has such substance of reality behind the dress,
that it has wrought, more mightily than endless ex-
hortations could have wrought, into the heart of
Christendom the idea of the tremendous reality of
this Reign of the Risen and Righteous Lord. So
deeply and vividly did the world grasp the idea of
the rule of the Risen Christ, and of the terrible stern-
ness of His righteous Law, which the infinite Love
expressed on Calvary commended as the benign Law
of life to men, that at last, in the estimation of
Christendom, the Saviour became wholly and lamen-
tably eclipsed by the Judge. The entire system of
Mariolatry and Hagiolatry has arisen from the need
of finding again in some way the Mediator who had
been obscured and eclipsed by the Judge. So real,
so terrible, did the righteous judgment of Christ
appear to men, that they were filled with terror at
the thought of the merciful and tender Saviour-so
hard is it for men to believe the Gospel-and they
lost in large measure the sweet compulsion and con-
straint to righteousness, which was furnished by His
matchless, boundless, all-sacrificing Love.
176
THE RISEN CHRIST.
This, however, makes the fact all the more indis-
putable, that the Resurrection was, in the appre-
hension of the Apostles, the commencement of a
Reign. It was the visible and glorious Enthrone-
ment of the righteous and eternal King. The
music of His Coronation Anthem seemed to stream
down along the path by which He passed up to the
throne; Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever;
the sceptre of thy kingdom is a right sceptre. Far
from being a doctrine which brought man into con-
tact with a vague, shadowy, unsubstantial world, the
Resurrection was the most tremendous practical
reality which has ever been brought to bear on man's
life and destiny. It gave the righteous rule of God
a visible habitation, as it were, and organ of influence
on men. As Paul said at Athens, God by the Resur-
rection commandeth all men everywhere to repent ;
because he hath appointed a day in the which he will
judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom
he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance
unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the
dead. It was when Paul was preaching of the Risen
Christ, that he so dealt with righteousness, temper-
ance, and judgment to come that Felix trembled.
The Resurrection, or rather the Reign of the Risen
Christ, at once entered with its reforming, regene-
rating work, into the forum of man's daily practical
life. It taught men temperance, women chastity,
parents tenderness, children obedience, judges right-
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST A PLEDGE. 177
eousness, rulers gentleness, workmen contentment,
slaves industry. It touched to new and finer issues
the intellectual apprehension, the creative power,
the imaginative production of mankind. It saved
philosophy from suicide on the grave of dignity and
virtue; it saved outcast souls and classes from
dragging society down to the ruin and darkness into
which it was settling, when the Gospel of the Resur-
rection sounded its strange but glorious message of
glad tidings, and the light of Immortality touched the
vapours in which life seemed buried with the gleam
of a rising day. Everywhere and at once the
Resurrection began to apply a new and incompar-
able principle and power of righteous rule to the
world. What is the Apocalypse but the history of
the Reign of the Risen Christ over this world, and
over all worlds; the history of the effort of
heavenly power and principles-the righteous Law,
the sanctifying and saving Love, which Redemption
had displayed-to conquer the selfishness, the lust,
the tyranny, the ungodliness of mankind. A history
of terrible strife and suffering-the Law is so firm
and stern; but a history of victorious effort—the Love
is so jubilant and triumphant. Everywhere it is the
struggle-straining all the energy, occupying all the
faculty, drawing forth all the love of the Risen and
Reigning Saviour-to make righteousness regnant
here, and in all the worlds. And only when the
struggle has ended at last in victory, does the vision
I 2
178
THE RISEN CHRIST.
shape itself—the vision of a perfect and blessed
social order, a fellowship and brotherhood of souls
redeemed to righteousness and love-which shines.
still in the far distance, a hope and an inspiration,
beyond all the strife and agony of the world.
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for
the first heaven and the first earth were passed away;
and there was no more sea. And I John saw the
holy city, new Ferusalem, coming down from God,
out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her
husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven,
saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men,
and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his
people, and God himself shall be with them, and be
their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from
their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither
sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more
pain: for the former things are passed away.
Therefore are they before the throne of God, and
serve him day and night in his temple: and he that
sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They
shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither
shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the
Lamb, which is in the midst of the throne shall feed
them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of
waters.
:
IX.
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
These all do contrary to the decrees of Cæsar, saying that there is
another king, one Jesus.—ACTS xvii. 7.
NE is tempted to say alas! for the world,
alas! for us all, if there be not; if there be
no kingdom in the far future, which can
make a fairer order than the Cæsars and kings of
this world have made or can make in their realms.
The hope of the world is a Christendom in which
Christ shall reign as He reigned once in the Pente-
costal company. A Christendom in which He does
not reign we see, and have seen enough of.
Men are getting very weary of the constant
preaching of the name of Jesus and of the precepts
and principles of His Gospel, while the most cul-
tured and developed Christian races are wasted, nay
are well-nigh devoured, by vice, poverty, and war.
We write the name of Jesus on our temples, nay
even on our exchanges; we conduct our legislation
and our government in His name; On the faith of
'a Christian' is still our most solemn form of affırına-
180
THE RISEN CHRIST.
tion, and it has been hard to make room for those
who deny the faith of a Christian to intervene in
any way in our political activity; and yet, on the
other hand, so full are our cities and even our
country villages of brutal vice and wailing misery,
and so barbarous is the fury and the destructiveness
of our wars, that thoughtful men among us are
discussing gravely the question, Are we Christians
after all? Along with all our Christianity-and our
Christianity remains yet the deepest fact in our
history-we still need men to preach in Christendom,
as the Apostles preached in Heathendom, that 'there
'is another King, one Jesus;' a King to whom all
the selfishness of our Christian politics, all the
craft of our Christian diplomacy, all the fierce
contention of our Christian industry, are hateful; a
King who has left in one command, A new command-
ment I give unto you, That ye love one another, and in
one aspiration, That they all may be one, the key to
His hope and effort for mankind. The world has yet
to try what Jesus can do for it.
visions and poet's dreams has
even for a moment, the future which His Kingdom
offers to the world.
Only in prophet's
Humanity grasped,
There is something terrible to the Christian lover
of mankind, whose spirit is saturated with the ideas
and whose heart has embraced the hope which the
Gospel quickened, in the spectacle that Christendom
after these eighteen centuries offers to the eye of
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
181
•
P
1
man and of God. And it is far from easy to answer
the critics, who say, You have had for centuries the
culture of Christendom, its art, literature, legislation,
government, education, wholly in your hands, and
here is the result! For ages the most powerful
man in Christendom has called himself the Vicar of
Christ, and see what a Kingdom of Heaven has grown
under his hand! It must surely be a dream or an
imposture of yours, this Kingship of the Lord Jesus.
The civilized world has accepted His Kingship, it
has accepted His Revelation, it has conducted all its
intellectual and political activity in His name; and
by this time, if the Kingdom was a power, we ought
surely to see some fair image of it gladdening the
eyes and the hearts of mankind!
It is not easy to answer the objector, but he can
be answered. We who believe in the Kingdom are
not dumb even before the mass of vice, violence
and wrong which disgraces and afflicts the Christian
world. It saddens us; it saddens us profoundly, but
it does not silence us. We proclaim still, as men
proclaimed of old, among the Cæsars of the Church
and the Cæsars of the world, that 'there is another
'King, one Jesus.' We watch with patience the slow
progress of the Kingdom, because we believe pro-
foundly in the Lord's spiritual method of patience.
He foresaw and foretold full sadly that His method
would try the patience and weary the hope of man
to the end of time. There is nothing in England,
182
THE RISEN CHRIST.
there is nothing in Europe at this moment, sad as it
is, which is sadder than the picture which He Him-
self draws of the development of His Kingdom, in
the twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel.
For many shall come in my name, saying, I am
Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear
of wars and rumours of wars: see that
be not
troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but
the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against
nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there
shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes,
in divers places. All these are the beginning of
sorrows.
for
ye
ye
Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and
shall kill
you: and
shall be hated of all nations
my name's sake. And then shall many be offended,
and shall betray one another, and shall hate one
another. And many false prophets shall rise and
shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall
abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he
that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be
saved.
And have we reached yet, think you, the end of
the woes of the Apocalypse! All that saddens us
was before the mind of Christ, as He pierced the
secrets of the future; and sad, dark, as it spread
before His sight, He saw beyond it that which
moved Him to complete the sacrifice, and to pour
out His soul unto death. And I, if I be lifted up
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
183
from the earth, will draw all men unto me :—Christ
saw that in the prophetic hour of His agony, and
He saw all that lies between. We share the patience
of His expectation, because we share the joy and
the assurance of His hope. This method of work-
ing, profound, patient, spiritual, must be long and
obscure. The work is carried on secretly in the
will and the conscience; it is like a heavenly leaven
in the dark mass of the ignorance and the selfishness
of mankind. There is no hope, no possibility, of
brilliant and decisive victories. These belong to
the warfare of this world. The kingdom of God
cometh not with observation; it is secret, subtle,
slow, but in the end victorious, as the processes of
life. Our Lord warned us that we must share His
patience and continue with Him in His tribulation;
and what are eighteen centuries in the life of a world
like this, that we should think the tribulation is end-
ing, and the victorious shout is near. The Lord
saw all that we can see and infinitely more than we
can see; Think not, He said, that I am come to
send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a
sword. To me it is very wonderful that He who
came to die for the world should have a prevision of
all the strife and misery which would perpetuate
themselves under His reign, and yet, 'for the joy
that was set before Him,' should still endure the
Cross and make it the sceptre of His throne. It is
the rebuke of all our faithless doubts and dreads.
-
184
THE RISEN CHRIST.
We are indeed no judges of the slow, deep-seated
processes of vital development. Mark the patience
with which through unnumbered ages the Lord of the
world has been elaborating the chirping apparatus of
a cricket, the feather of the pinion of a bird, or the
spots on the gay plumage of a butterfly's wing-and
yet we faint and lose heart because in a few cen-
turies this great world is not converted to Jesus, and
the harvest, for the sake of which the whole Creation
has been groaning and travailing through well nigh
infinite ages, is not yet reaped and garnered on High.
Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit
of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until
he receive the early and latter rain. Be
Be ye also
patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the
Lord draweth nigh! Long patience! Ah, fretful,
frightened, faithless mortals, we have need of patience,
long patience, patience perhaps in measures which
we little dream of ere the Church shall see the
promise of Christ's Kingdom fulfilled. But she shall
see it. Nothing in this great universe is so certain
as that, because no seal is so sacred as the blood of
Christ by which this promise is assured. We shall
see it. These eyes shall behold it in the eternal
sunlight-not this earth only, but the whole Creation
delivered from the bondage of corruption, into the
glorious liberty of the children of God.
There is another King.
The fundamental question of the whole subject is,
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
185
Why should man want another king? Is not Cæsar,
in all those constantly varied forms which political
power assumes, enough for him? By what right,
in virtue of what need, do men go forth into the
domains of the Cæsars of this world, and preach
' another King-one Jesus?' If we can understand
this we shall discover the first principle of Christian
work.
This is really the most pressing and practical
question which is agitated in our times-Why
should we not leave the secular spirit to take charge
of the interests and to guide the progress of human
society? and to this question I answer, that some-
thing like the form of Christ's kingdom is implied in
and prophesied by the very structure of human society.
When we say that man is a social being, we
mean something differing entirely in kind, and not
only in degree, from what we mean when we speak
of the social instincts and habits of the ants or the
bees. Man's social habits and instincts wear a form
so solemn, and carry such tremendous consequences
in their train, that they direct the mind inevitably
not backwards to those orders in the Creation where
brute matter is struggling into higher forms of life,
but forward to the Kingdom in which shall reign the
spirit of Divine Love. The key to man's life is to
be sought in Heaven and not in the dust.
In man
a new order of being appears. The physical struc-
ture, which has wonderful relations with the lower
186
THE RISEN CHRIST.
structures in the animal world and seems to perfect
their development, is in man possessed and handled
to high purpose by a spirit whose origin in no sense
is to be found in the dust. Man is emphatically the
meeting point of two worlds. In entering the sphere
of human society we come under a higher law and enter
a higher world. Consider man's royal endowment
-the power to 'look before and after '-think of the
anguish which he can suffer from memory and appre-
hension, and the way in which the past and the future
will make him glow with happiness or writhe with
pain. Add to this the fact that all his most exquisite
pleasures and griefs arise out of his relations with
others, out of his social habits and affections, of which
altogether the richest and most blessed elements
connect themselves with his duties and ministries to
the poor, the weak, the helpless; can we believe
with all this before us, that man's life as a social
being is still to be but the struggle for existence in
another form, of which-write as you may about the
gradual development of the instinct of self-devotion
-self-seeking and not self-devotion must be the
law? Are we not pressed to the conclusion that
a Higher Law of relation and action has come in
with this being, whose qualities and endowments
make life an infinitely more solemn and pregnant
thing to him, than it is to the whole Creation beside?
If all this is a dream; if struggle for life is the
highest and only law, then a very awful, a very
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
187
horrible aspect is unveiled to us of the Creation, and
it becomes a scene from which all moral self-conscious
beings would pray that they may escape at the first
possible moment, even into the oblivion of the eternal
night!
I know that it is freely recognized by the apostles
of a philosophy which would exclude everything we
call Christian from the domain of man's thought and
life, that self-denial and self-devotion are demanded
in all the higher activities of society, for its progress,
nay for its very existence; and we are told that
these nobler qualities appear as there is demand for
them, developing themselves out of the rudimental
cell germs' which man's experience in this higher
region of society has created, and which each genera-
tion transmits in more developed form to its heirs.
But everything in life and history seems to me
to sustain the testimony of Scripture, that this
idea of the Higher Life, the life of ministering,
helping, and saving, did not grow up from beneath
but descended from above, and has its archetype in
God. I can see no possible beauty, joy, or hope
in such a world as this which we name human society,
except 'bear ye one another's burdens' be the law.
And I can see no basis for that law, and no assurance
of its supremacy, but in the contemplation of His
life and His living energy who came from heaven
not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give
his life a ransom for many. The knowledge that it is
188
THE RISEN CHRIST.
the law of Christ gives to it its supremacy, and
enables it to bear up against and to dominate the
pressure of all the sins and selfishness of the world.
The very high form in which men are related to each
other; the intense sensitiveness of the heart fibres
which are interlaced; the power of straining thought
and imagination onward into the unseen world, in
which are hidden all man's deeper and more precious
springs, seem to contain the promise, as well as
imply the possibility, of such a state of society as
is presented in the pictures of the Kingdom of
Heaven which the prophets paint for us, in language
of which Isaiah's is perhaps the most glowing and
exultant :-
The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad
for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as
the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice
even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon
shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and
Sharon: they shall see the glory of the Lord and the
excellency of our God. Strengthen ye the weak hands,
and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are
of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not; behold your
God will come with vengeance, even God with a
recompense: he will come and save you. Then the
eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the
deaf shall be unstopped: then shall the lame man
leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing;
for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
189
streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall
become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water:
in the habitation of dragons where each lay, shall be
grass, with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall
be there, and a way, and it shall be called, The way
of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it
shall be for those the way-faring men, though fools,
shall not err therein. No lion shall be there, nor any
ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be
found there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall
return, and come to Zion with songs, and ever-
lasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy
and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee
away.
Just as a skilled naturalist, looking at the structure
of an animal, can forecast its habit of life and its
place of habitation, even so as we look at the
structure of man as a social being, and consider all
that it implies and all that it promises, we can affirm
with certainty, that the habit of his life was meant to
be obedience to the Law of Christ, and the home of
his life and theatre of its development is the King-
dom of Heaven.
And what seems implied in man's constitution is
exemplified in his history.
Among all peoples there are visions and imagin-
ations of which this is the substance. Man's ideal
of society, of human relations and activities, every-
where takes this form; he seems to feel instinctively
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THE RISEN CHRIST.
that only in such a field of Divine service can he
strenuously work, only in such a home can he tran-
quilly rest, only in such a world as the Kingdom of
Heaven can he truly and nobly live. There is a
wonderful unity in the great works of imagination
in which man has given shape to his idea of what
human society ought to be, and there is a con-
spicuous unity of aim and purpose in all the great
Revolutions whereby man has striven to bring him-
self nearer to his idea. There are those who can
see nothing but the dark, sad, side in these great eras
of convulsion, which are to them all passion and
brutality. They are impatient of the tone of those
who look at them with sympathy in order truly to
understand them, and who are sure that all the
critical movements and struggles of society are led
from on High. Those who have an open eye, and
can penetrate beneath the surface of what is passing
before them, see that the dreams and visions of men
in these great eras of Revolution, have something in
them which is in sympathy with the prophetic
Scriptures and the purpose of the Lord. How
wonderfully like a passage from the great evangelic
prophet are the lines in which the foremost epic poet
of Rome hailed the establishment of the Imperial
dynasty and the Roman Peace. The human ele-
ment is prominent in the one, the man's dream;
the Divine element is conspicuous in the other, the
seer's vision; but they answer each other as
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
191
reflection answers substance in a glass. And did
space allow, from Greek, Hindoo, Chinese, and
Scandinavian records, nay, from the literature of
every people cultivated enough to have a literature
at all, my position could be amply sustained. Every-
where there are passages, and these the deepest and
most pregnant, which seem to be human renderings
of the Divine original whose completest form is set
forth in the word of God: Give the king thy judg
ments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king's
son He shall judge thy people with righteousness,
and thy poor with judgment. The mountains shall
bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by right-
eousness. He shall judge the poor of the people, he
shall save the children of the needy, and shall break
in pieces the oppressor. They shall fear thee as long
as the sun and the moon endure, throughout all
generations. He shall come down like rain upon the
mown grass: as showers that water the earth. In
his days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance
of peace so long as the moon endureth.
All the world's great thinkers lead on its thoughts
to a time when that reign of truth and justice, right-
eousness and love, which the Bible associates with
Messiah's Kingdom, shall be realized, and all the
woe and waste and wrong of the world shall be
stayed. It is like the cry of a dumb creature, the
voice of this confused struggle and aspiration of
mankind. It is as though, if it were articulate, it
192
THE RISEN CHRIST.
would cry out for Christ, but now it is
less, as of
'An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.'
vague, aim-
In this deep sense the Lord is the desire of all
nations. How many aspirations, hopes, and en-
deavours are stirring deeply the hearts of men,
which aim, not at Christ-alas! they know Him not
-but at something like Christ, some shadowy image
of His Kingdom, which must remain vague and
dim in the dreamland, unless He give it shape and
substance. It is a truly
It is a truly marvellous history, the
history of man's imaginations, hopes, and disap-
pointments; for his conscious aims and strivings,
quite as much as his constitution and endowment as
a social being, imply and prophesy such a Kingdom
as the Lord has undertaken to establish and main-
tain among men.
But then, it may be said, if men are dreaming
about this and are aiming at this, or something like
it, why not leave them alone to work out their idea?
There is manifestly both an instinct and instrument
of progress in the Creation; through all the strife
and agony, higher, nobler forms of life emerge and
take possession of the stage; why not leave man
alone to grow, to advance, and to create a Kingdom
of Heaven for himself? For an answer to this we
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
193
have only to turn to the actual experience of man-
kind. We have the firmest ground to go upon in
the study of human society when it is in this way
let alone, and we are not without means of ascer-
taining what must come of it without visible Divine
guidance. God did in fact leave man in the Gentile
world alone, as far as concerned the guidance which
Revelation could offer to him, that he might discover
whither the course of things, to which our modern
philosophers trust so blindly, would drift him, and
might be prepared through disappointment and suf-
fering to accept at length the helping Hand which
would be held out to him from on High.
'These do contrary to the decrees of Cæsar.'
There was Cæsar on the throne of the Roman world,
the result of man's development as a social being ;
the progress of civilization had ended in Cæsar and
all that Cæsar was doing in the world. What that
was, how much of shame and misery that meant,
let the pages of Suetonius, Tacitus, and Juvenal
declare. The world's work for itself, by its kings, by
its priests, by its prophets, ends in ruin. The march
of the ages resulted in a condition of the Roman
Empire which, but for the restoring power brought
to bear upon it by Christianity, nothing but a second
deluge could have cured. Let the state of India
before the English came to it, let the state of China
and Africa at this moment, exhibit the result which
comes inevitably to peoples when they try-or do not
13
194
THE RISEN CHRIST.
try, for this is what it ends in-to work out their
own salvation for themselves. It was glad news to
this world that the resources of Heaven for its help
were not exhausted, and that Cæsar'-its own
kings, priests, and teachers, and the civilization
which they could create-was not His helping Hand.
Behind them, beyond them, above them, there was
this Kingdom of 'one Jesus,' Whom Paul preached
to men, and Who would in the end fulfil their most
soaring aspirations, their most daring and glorious
dreams. What was Cæsar' to these unhappy
Greeks and Jews? About the personal character of
each new wearer of the purple there was the most
dire uncertainty; upon the best the possession of
absolute power might exercise a corrupting influence,
and the worst were brutal or fiendish tyrants. While
destructive wars, stirred by disputed successions to
the Empire, desolated the provinces already groaning
under the merciless exactions of the administrators,
while the Imperial Court was too often an example
of the most wanton and wasteful luxury, what was
Cæsar to his subjects but the ruthless enemy of their
nobler aspirations, the pander to their baser nature,
summing up in his own person the most disastrous
of all the influences which were wasting, tormenting
and destroying civilized society.
We need only look round us at this moment in
Europe, to form some just estimate of Cæsar and his
work. We have had modern Cæsars in our day,
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195
enthroned in the centres of civilization; and the end
of their sway has everywhere been wreck. The
leading peoples of Europe, under the guidance of
this secular spirit, seem bending their whole thought
and energy on the things whereby nations may
cripple and ruin, and not edify each other. And
has it brought blessing to us, or to any people upon
earth, this insane un-Christian strife for mastery;
this magnifying of the strong hand and the wily
brain as the supreme arbiters of human affairs?
Was the world ever more burdened, more sad, more
anxious, more full of foreboding alarms? Have its
Cæsars, French, German, Russian, Papal, saved it?
Have they helped it any way save into debt,
slaughter, and shame? Blessed be God that there
is another King, 'one Jesus;' for man's experi-
ments in government are failures, and must be
failures; Cæsar can but make the ruin in the end
more dire. The experiment has been conducted in
Christendom, under the highest conditions. Who
can look round on this mass of poverty, ignorance,
vice, and misery which besets us, and say that it has
been a success. God pity us if there is to be no
other success for us than this!
But is it not a stain on God's righteous govern-
ment, does it not reveal a flaw in His Will or in His
Power, that things in human society, thus left to them-
selves, tend to dissolution? Surely not: it was never
intended in the scheme of Providence that man should
196
THE RISEN CHRIST.
Y
:
work out his own salvation or the salvation of
society. It would be no sign of disorder, for in-
stance, in the constitution of the world, if a nation
of Amazons, women shut up to themselves, made a
speedy wreck of their society. No! Neither is the
man without the woman, neither the woman without
the man, in the Lord. So neither Christ without
Humanity, nor Humanity without Christ. It is
Humanity in conscious, intelligent, loyal, loving
sympathy and concert with Christ, which alone
can develop the possibilities and work out the
destinies of human society.
These all do contrary to the decrees of Cæsar, say-
ing that there is another King, one Jesus. What is
the relation of this other King to the kingdoms of
this world? The officers of Cæsar were naturally
alarmed. Another King, according to their views,
could but menace the Imperial dynasty and aim at
the establishment of a new despotism on the ruins
of the State. This is what perplexed and alarmed
Pilate. Then Pilate entered into the judgment-hall
again, and called Jesus, and said unto him: Art
thou the King of the Jews? Jesus answered him,
Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it
thee of me? Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine
own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee
unto me: what hast thou done? Jesus answered,
My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom
were of this world, then would my servants fight, that
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
197
I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my
kingdom not from hence. Pilate therefore said unto
him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou
sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and
for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear
witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth
heareth my voice. There was little that was kinglike
there, in Pilate's sense of kingship. And yet he was
anxious and afraid, though why he could not tell.
There are things which make us tremble, though their
character and the conditions of their action quite escape
us, and of the nature of these hidden things is the
Kingdom of the Lord. But men are slow to believe
in a Kingship which makes no sign before the world.
They hear of the King, and if they care about Him
at all they are for making Him a kingdom, like
those Galileans who came round Jesus to take Him
by force, and seat Him on a throne; or like His
brethren who said, If thou do these things, shew thy-
self to the world. What Leader is He that gathers
no following around Him; what means the Royalty
that wields no sceptre and wears no crown? Assert
Thy power and men will fear Thee, exhibit Thy wis-
dom and men will believe. In all ages there have
been those who were for making Christ's Kingship
what they called a real one; giving Him a position
of substantial power and influence in the world.
the question is, what is the true relation? Shall we
sweep the world clear of the Cæsars, make the New
But
198
THE RISEN CHRIST.
Testament our statute book, and set up a government
which shall administer everything by decree of Christ,
and in His name? This is the idea of the 'Fifth-
'Monarchy,' which in very subtle ways still influences
many of our schools of religious thought. The
Ultramontanes are the Fifth-Monarchy men of our
times. The world will never be right, they say, until
we have got rid of or subordinated secular govern-
ments, and put the secular spirit under a ban; until
we have made Christ visibly and confessedly the
practical Ruler of men.
Here is the grand, the fatal mistake into which we
are all prone to fall. We are for making Christ
King. We have but to bear witness to Him, and
leave Him to make Himself King. Any kingdom
which we could make for Him would be but our own
kingdom under a sacred name. The reign of Christ
in this connection means practically the reign of the
saints, and the reign of the saints has always proved
in the end the most terrible of the tyrannies that tor-
ment mankind. Man's reading of Christ's statutes
is always narrow and hard; man's wielding of Christ's
sceptre is always fearfully rigid and stern. No! the
true Kingdom is a Kingdom which penetrates,
searches, and purifies all other kingdoms, just as
the electric force pervades Creation, everywhere felt,
never touched and seen. There is an energy in the
Creation which moves through the masses and thrills
them just as spirit thrills through the frame; disturb-
THE RISEN CHRIST AS KING.
199
ing none of their forms, breaking up none of their
harmonies, leaving them to their own laws and native
affinities, but penetrating and possessing them, and
kindling into new fervour the very essence of their
life. This is the relation of the Lord's Kingdom to
all the governments, the arts, the industries and the
literatures of the world. It abolishes only those
things which clog and stain; it quickens, sweetens,
purifies, and perfects all. It is no wrong to Cæsar's
kingdom but an unspeakable help, to tell a man and
make him feel, that he must for Christ's sake be just
and merciful, gentle and patient, self-denying and
abundant in service and ministry, as becomes the loyal
subject of the King who bears the legend on His crown
'Mighty to save.' We do nothing contrary to the
decrees of Cæsar in preaching that there is another
'King, one Jesus.' He works entirely from within;
what of blessing can come to the world by making
men wiser, purer, more unselfish, more brotherly, that
He bestows. But this breaks up nothing which the
progress of humanity, however realized, would not
break up;
it consolidates everything on earth which
stands square with truth, righteousness, and God.
Christ has one way of working out the regeneration
of human society; Cæsar, under all the various
shapes and forms of government, has another. The
One works purely from the inward outward, and heals
and cleanses at the spring. The other cleanses for
awhile the outside, but finding itself powerless to
1
200
THE RISEN CHRIST.
cleanse the inward, finally gives up its work in
despair. How many times through the ages has
society been broken up, reconstructed, reformed,
redressed, only to fall back again more hopelessly
into the darkness. The one grand need of society
everywhere, in Heathendom, in Christendom, is
some Kingdom which can renew, purify and perfect
its subjects, and spread through the wide world that
vital Reformation, which once re-made the hearts
and the homes of the scattered companies that
were touched by the Pentecostal fire. For this
Kingdom alone aims at and promises the complete
eradication of the sin which poisons and the selfish-
ness which lays waste society. Truly said they
'another King;' apart, absolutely apart from all
other kings and kingdoms; fighting against one
only adversary, sin; aiming at one only end, the
blessing of mankind. For this purpose the Son of
God was manifested that he might destroy the works
of the devil. And this underlies all creeds and
theologies, all Church platforms and confessions.
Whatever hates and strives against sin is of Christ
and in the sphere of His Kingdom, however man
may name it. Whatever temporizes with sin and
cloaks it is not of Christ, though its garments be
hung all round with phylacteries bearing the sacred
Name. Christ came to abolish the evil one and his
works; to expel man's great tyrant and tormentor
from the world. There is one thing which is
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201
destroying men, evil-in its manifold forms of
injustice, cruelty, knavery, impurity and lust.
Heathen and Christian have one arch enemy, the
devil. Heathen and Christian have one true
Saviour, the Lord. We say that there is another
King, one Jesus, and send the glad tidings of His
Gospel through the world, because man needs
supremely a Saviour, and there is but one King
in the universe that can save, and that King is
Jesus.
Guilt is oppressing, sin is corrupting, and selfish-
ness is wasting humanity everywhere. The King
whom we preach cares nothing for His Royalty,
save in so far as it can lift that burden, heal that
corruption, stay that waste. Those agonies of the
soul that drive men to immolate their dearest
treasures, nay to immolate themselves, that they
may deaden the intolerable anguish, some may treat
as morbid fancies of a sick brain or heart, which a
little wholesome discipline will cure. But these are
agonies which the world, left to itself, would never
escape, or if it escaped it would be but to fall into
moral indifference and corruption; its only refuge
from the shadow of the dread problem. That is
its gospel which proclaims that there is One who can
deliver it from the terror. We preach 'Jesus and
'the Resurrection.' Resurrection from sin, Resur-
rection from the sphere in which selfishness reigns
and in which struggle for existence is the law, into the
202
THE RISEN CHRIST.
world of truth, righteousness, and charity; the world
in which the life of Christ is the supreme example,
the mind of Christ is the perfect rule, the love of
Christ the inspiring passion; and in which the Risen
Christ reigns as King through eternity. And be-
cause man without Christ is everywhere dying, while
in Christ he everywhere lives and clothes his life
with noble fruits, we proclaim this Kingdom, we
preach 'Jesus and the Resurrection.' We claim the
right to preach it, we profess ourselves bound to
preach it, to every human creature under heaven in
whom is a Divine image marred, which may be
restored. Amid the schemes and hopes of politicians,
the bustle of our industry, the splendour of our
civilization, our conquests and governments of men ;
amid our new ideas, new constitutions, new nationali-
ties, new thrones, and all by which man is striving to
change the sad aspect and to renew the dying life of
his world; we say that 'there is another King, one
'Jesus,' Who can lift and bear the burden which sooner
or later man flings down in despair; a King Who
can reign in rightousness, and rule in judgment; Who
can be a hiding place from the wind, a covert from
the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
The Risen World,
X.
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM. (I.)
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.—
I TIMOTHY i. 15.

VERY great nature has the law of its life
within. The reason of all its doings and
efforts is there. The man lives the life
which he must live, and does the work which he must
do. In strength or weakness, happiness or misery,
sunned by the glow of the inner glory or shadowed
by the wing of the outer darkness, it matters not;
the life must be lived, the work must be done, what-
ever may befall. No calculation of results, no
reckoning of the 'far-off interest of tears,' lies at the
root of the noblest actions and sacrifices of men.
The great human leaders are tuned to the pitch of
His life, Who, in the midst of God-forsaken dark-
ness, groaned the most bitter groan that ever broke
from human lips, and still endured even unto death.
But, none the less, the greatest lives must be lived
and the greatest deeds must be done in the atmo-
sphere, if I may so speak, of Immortality; while an
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THE RISEN WORLD.
inward necessity, the pressure of the Divine Life
within, is the motive power-I live; yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me--they must have the vision, often
flashing a gleam of kindling sunlight on their lives,
of those glorious issues of the life of sacrifice which
will outlast eternity. I know whom I have believed,
and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which
I have committed unto him against that day.
It seems to us at first sight incomprehensible that
such a man as Paul, matchless in toil, in endurance,
and in service to mankind, should have borne
through life the burden which the words 'chief of
sinners' reveal. I say it is hard to comprehend, and
it sounds to some like rhetorical exaggeration-some
who can conceive of St. Paul stooping to rhetoric.
But he means it-means it to the depth. To him
there was a peculiar horror in the thought of the
agonies which in his persecuting madness he had
inflicted on the purest, the meekest, and the noblest
of mankind; the frenzy with which he had striven
to quench the one hope of the world in blood. As
he lived on and saw more clearly what a Christian
meant, and what Christianity could do for man, we
may be sure that the horror deepened. When he
wrote his Epistle to Timothy his soul was stirred
profoundly; every nerve was strung to the highest
pitch, and he realized, as even he had never realized
before, the unspeakable value of that Gospel which
he had striven to destroy. Martyrdom, too, was
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
207
before him and around him; and there were moments
without question when memory gathered a dark
cloud over his spirit, the gloom of which would have
been intolerable but that the light of forgiving
mercy was ever shining through and scattering it;
and through that very experience enabling him to
understand more perfectly the infinite depth of his
Saviour's compassion and love.
The Epistles to Timothy reveal the deepest per-
sonal feeling. Paul here lays bare his very heart.
He saw that a critical era in the history of the
Church was approaching. It was entering on the
second great stage of its development; it was
passing from infancy into childhood; and with the
anxious eye of a parent Paul watched the process,
and forecast, not without some dark forebodings
as often happens with parents, its immediate issues.
Of the ultimate issue he had not a shadow of doubt.
He knew whom he had believed; and this, too, he
could leave with unclouded confidence with Him.
But his sympathetic heart trembled at the pain
and the distress of the immediate future. He saw
a spirit rising whose malignant work he dreaded.
He was in doubt about the Church, he was in
doubt about Timothy, he was in doubt about the
influence of the Gnostic spirit on the fundamental
verities of the Gospel. And you will find, if you
study these Epistles closely, that he was moved to
speak with peculiar, emphatic earnestness about
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THE RISEN WORLD.
the historic facts and the vital truths of what we
are wont to call in these days the good old Gospel ;
we over whom has gathered the shadow of a
new and more deadly heresy, which has its root, as
of old with the Gnostics, in the intellectual sphere.
Paul recites the facts and insists on the vital
truths of the Gospel, especially on the key of the
whole, the historical Resurrection. Remember that
Jesus Christ, of the seed of David, was raised from
the dead according to my Gospel. And remember,
too, the burden of the Saviour's ministry-sin and
salvation; and be deaf to every word which utters
itself as a Gospel, which has not this burden, the sal-
vation of sinners, in its heart. It is a faithful say-
ing, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am
chief. Paul the aged, after a long life of. Apostolic
service, and unequalled opportunities of observing
the influence of the Gospel on man, and man's need
of the Gospel, instead of attenuating historical facts,
explaining away miraculous agencies, and sublimating
into opalescent mists of thought and imagination the
vital force of Christianity on the one hand, and the
deepest experiences of humanity on the other, like
some of our modern theologians, who simply leave
out God from His Gospel-falls back with deeper
earnestness even than in his young days on the
Christ in Christianity, Jesus and the Resurrection;
the one power of God unto the salvation of a soul,
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
209
the one hope of heaven for the salvation of a
world.
And to us, who have fallen upon times, or rather
upon whom times have fallen, which present features
offering an altogether singular likeness to those of
the close of the Apostolic age when the Gnostic
spirit was beginning to work in the Church, this last
deliverance, as it were, of the aged Apostle is full of
the deepest significance and instruction; full of
warning of the gravest perils on the one hand, and
full of suggestions of the most sustaining and com-
forting hopes on the other.
I cannot enter here into the grounds of my con-
viction that the great Gnostic heresy was beginning
to work, if not in a very malignant yet in a very
menacing form, in the Church and specially in
certain churches, in the latter Apostolic days. Paul
saw clearly enough that a desperate struggle was
impending, and that the next stage in the develop-
ment of the Church would be a tremendous conflict
with the wisdom of this world—and I use the word
in no scornful sense-in which the very Gospel itself
might seem to faithless eyes to be in danger of
perishing out of the earth. The 'Gnostic heresy' has
a very formidable sound, and the ideas with which
it was conversant seem-I emphasize seem--so
remote from our Western thought and the habits of
the European mind, that we find it hard to attach
any definite meaning to the phrases employed.
14
210
THE RISEN WORLD.
:
But the thing is really simple at heart. The Gospel
in the post-Apostolic days had, so to speak, to run
the gauntlet of the philosophers. It had inevitably
-the Gospel cannot escape the necessity nor is it
well that it should try to escape it-to settle its true
relations with the best results of the philosophic
speculations and discussions of the time. It had to
justify itself to the thinkers. The Gnostic idea of
the whole scheme of things, of the meaning of man
and the meaning of the world, was one thing; the
Gospel scheme of things, of man, of life, of the
world, was another. There were many Gnostic
schools, and some of them propounded amazing
dogmas-we have some hints about the tenets
and practices of Gnostic teachers in the second
chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians,-but the
underlying ideas in all the schools were very much
the same, and were diametrically opposed to the
ideas of the Gospel. It took them some three cen-
turies to fight out their battle. There were times
when the current of Gnostic thought-much occupied
with the idea of the essentially evil constitution of
the world and of the body, 'this accursed flesh,' as
a Roman satirist has it-seemed to be winning the
mastery, and threatening to turn the Christian life
into a paralyzing ascetic discipline, and the truth of
the Gospel into a baseless philosophic formulary,
with no meaning and no promise to the great heart
of mankind. But remember, the Gospel triumphed.
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
211
The struggle but enlarged, elevated, and confirmed
on sure intellectual foundations, the influence of the
Church. It was mainly by the power of its life,
what it could do for the world, what energy it could
quicken, what charity it could kindle, what hope it
could inspire, that it conquered; but in conquering
it despoiled its assailants of the truth that was in
their contentions; and the conflict left the Church
the manifestly dominant power in the field of civi-
lization; with the Apostolic Gospel, It is a faithful
saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners, enshrined
as the power of God in its heart.
In our days, the Gospel is entering into a yet
graver and more menacing conflict with the new
Gnosis-the scientific knowledge of material things,
and things that grow out of the material-which
is now loudly asserting its right and its power to
undertake the guidance and government of mankind.
'Let us know things as they are,' it cries, 'their
nature, constitution, and the laws which govern
them, and we shall have the only Gospel which we
'need. Organized knowledge of Nature and of our-
'selves as part of Nature, will be the only Bible that
we shall want to study: and wise digest of positive
'truth and the methods which it suggests, will accom-
plish "the salvation of sinners" with a facility and a
'completeness casting the abortive methods of
'Christianity finally into the shade.' The Gospel has
212
THE RISEN WORLD.
had its day, it is said, and done its work of mingled
good and evil, but now its day is done, and the new
knowledge with which science is furnishing us in a
form and in a measure truly wonderful, will hence-
forth take in charge the education of man and the
regeneration of society.
We are living in the midst of the tremendous con-
flict which is waged between these two ideas, the
Gospel view of the nature and condition of humanity
and the way in which it is to be helped and saved,
and the cold dry light of knowledge shining from
the Pharos of the schools, and casting its forward
beam on the path which, they tell us, the absolute
unchanging law of things has prepared for the
progress of mankind. Natural Religion and Spiritual
Religion-resting by faith on Revelation-are at
present, as they mostly have been, in fierce contro-
versy with each other; and the battle is fought with
a fury which seems to betray a conviction on both
sides that the conflict is a deadly one, and that in the
end one or the other must go down. Quiet observers
-I mean those who try to keep out of the heat and
the dust of the arena, and who can avoid contracting
that blindness to the real questions at stake which
the struggles and the war cries of the combatants
are apt to generate-may comfort themselves with
the belief that in the end a basis of reconciliation
will reveal itself, which, retaining the Spiritual in its
true place and force on the one hand, shall vindicate
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
213
for the Natural its true power and function on the
other. Nature and Spirit, we must remember, are
set in opposition by man and not by God. What
He is must be the basis of all His self-manifestation,
both in what He creates and what He reveals. The
Natural and the Spiritual, starting from God, enclose
two hemispheres, and meet in God again.
The fundamental question in this present contro-
versy is as simple as it is profound. It is really,
whether Law is at the heart of all things, or Love;
the Love of a living Being, who can write this record
of Himself, God so loved the world, that he gave his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him
should not perish, but have everlasting life. Hereby
know we love, because he laid down his life for us.
Far back as we can go, deep as we can pierce into
the mystery of things, is this what we come to-a
Love yearning over the Creation which It has
begotten, and cherishing its growth, its progress, its
well-being in a tender, vigilant, and compassionate
Heart; sternly righteous, but meaning and caring, as
the end of all the groaning and travailing of Creation,
that the creature shall be blessed-or is it Law, ab-
solute, impassive Law, a nameless force working
with calm, resistless certainty along the ordained
lines and by the methods which the necessities of
things prescribe, and utterly indifferent to all the
varied experiences of the creature; a force which
upholds all that moves with it and ruthlessly crushes
214
THE RISEN WORLD.
all that crosses it, like the lightning's flash, the
torrent's rush, or the earthquake's tramp, entirely
heedless of everything but its path to its goal? Is
this all that is behind the phenomena of Creation, is
the question. And a great school of thinkers answers,
It is all. We have searched, not to, but towards,
the heart of all things and nothing but Law
appears.
In this scheme there is absolutely no room for
the whole world of being, for the thought, influence
and experience, with which the Christian faith is
conversant, the reality of which it calmly assumes
as unquestionable, and in the light of which and
by right of which, it has led the progress and taken
charge of the destiny of mankind. If there be no
free volition in the universe outside the domain of
Law, we Christians are walking in a world of
dreams. God, Christ, Revelation, Sin, Redemption,
Resurrection, Immortality, are mere words which
correspond to no realities. They have been factors
of tremendous moment in the world of man's
practical activity through the sense which he has
attached to them; but they mean nothing, the ideas
they represent have no place in the movement of
the great sequences, the chain of cause and effect,
which is really the universe and comprehends
everything that really is; while man with his
grandeur and his power, made as he thinks in the
image of God and destined to play high part in
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM
215
eternity, sinks down into 'such stuff as dreams are
'made of'; and ‘his little life is rounded with a sleep.
Yet these champions of the universal and uncom-
promising reign of Law are right after a fashion.
They come at a critical time to instruct us how
vast, how profound, how benignant, it is. The
Church has failed utterly-I might well say miser-
ably to grasp the grandeur, the sublimity of this
great realm of Law. It has been prone to conceive
of the Divine Kingdom as an empire under despotic
rule a wise, righteous Despotism, no doubt, but
with the personal Will always apparent, and not
seldom under forms which, in human kingdoms,
would pass for caprice or tyranny. Indeed in
Roman Catholic countries for the great mass of
'the faithful,' the religious sphere is little else than
contact with a jealous, cruel, or capricious God.
So that these teachers of our time who see nothing
but Law in the universe, and leave no room in their
scheme of things for Will, for Love, will be seen
in the end to have done us good service by com-
pelling us to recognize how immense, how far-
reaching is that realm of Law in which and by
which the Love is working; which the Hand that
established it so rules and guides, as to constrain
it to work out His purposes who crowns the
revelation of Himself by the sentence, God is
Love.
It is again as of old, the question of the new know-
216
THE RISEN WORLD.
.
T
ledge and the old Faith, arrayed, alas! almost inevi-
tably-so partial and short-sighted is man-in jealous
and suspicious opposition; and again, as of old, the
same experience will repeat itself, and the same result
will issue. The Church, the shrine of the Christian
Faith, will gain an enormous expansion of its horizon
and enlargement of its life, through the knowledge
which is the heritage of the schools, and which
they will force into its understanding; while it will
cherish its central truth, the Redeeming Love and
Power of God in Christ, with more passionate fervour
than ever in its heart. The circumference of the
thought and work of the Church will be immensely
widened; the centre of radiating force, God in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself, will be
yet more intense and vivid; more charged with
joyous, quickening energy to the limbs and organs
of the Church on the one hand, and with heal-
ing, saving power to the great world on the
other.
I thank heaven that I have not a shadow of
doubt, and the certainty has grown clearer as I
have pondered more and more upon the problem,
that the ultimate result of this tremendous clash-
ing of ideas and forces arrayed by the world's
overwhelming wisdom against the facts and the
truth of the Gospel, will be to inscribe its central
message, the mission of Christ to save, blazoned
in lines of living light, on the great temple of human
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
217
history. I know and am persuaded, and nothing
can dim that knowledge or weaken that faith, that
when this stormy generation has passed away, when
the stormy centuries and millenniums have passed
away, and the earth is being swept towards the
vortex of the final fire which sooner or later must
certainly engulf it, the great sentence of the Apostle,
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all accepta-
tion, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save
sinners, will still be the very marrow of its Gospel.
Only the word Salvation will then be understood
to bear an immensely larger meaning, and the saving
of sinners will be seen to meet the need and touch
the interests of an immensely larger world. To
the last, and through eternity, the legend on the
Redeemer's crown will shine brighter and brighter
yet before men and angels, I that speak in righteous-
ness, mighty to save.
Meanwhile, it is well for us to look again to the
foundations, and reassure ourselves that it is a faith-
ful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners; and
further, that He came sent of God to fulfil that
purpose which the Love of the Father had cherished
from eternity, and to conduct to a triumphant issue
that great enterprise of Redemption of which this
earth of ours was created and organized to be the
theatre; the results of which, the fruit of the patient
and tearful seed-sowing of the Redeemer, are to
218
THE RISEN 'WORLD.
1
be gathered up and stored in the garners of God
on High.
This, remember, is the Christian Faith. Many
who reject utterly the claim of the Bible to inspira-
tion, and who regard the Saviour no otherwise
than they regard the great heathen teachers and
leaders of mankind, would see a good deal of true
meaning in the sentence, Christ Jesus came into the
world to save sinners. They might even recognize
in Him, as compared with Socrates, Zerdusht, Con-
fucius, or even Buddha, a unique devotion to the
work of salvation, and a unique power over human
hearts; but that is not Christianity. The Faith
once delivered to the saints maintains, that this
mission of Christ was the self-ordained mission of
God to the world of conscious, intelligent beings
whom He had created in freedom, but who had so
used or abused their freedom as to bring themselves
into great wretchedness and despair; that Christ.
came from God, and as God, to proclaim the
unutterable Love of the Father to the wandering
and perishing prodigals of His home on earth, and
to educate them, by all the discipline of the Christian
life, for noble work and service in His home on
High. Christianity sets this work of saving sinners
before us as a Divine work, the outcome of the
Love of God for His creatures-that Love which
lies behind Law; the work which is regarded on
high as central to all the manifold operations of the
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
219
wisdom and the power of God in the Creation; the
work in which alone, in all their fulness, the Wisdom,
the Power, and the Love of God can be expressed.
In this work of salvation by Christ Jesus we see
the fulness of him that filleth all in all.
XI.
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM. (II.)
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.—
I TIMOTHY i. 15.
1
HRIST JESUS came into the world to
save sinners. Christ Jesus! In the begin-
ning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. The same was in the
beginning with God. All things were made by him ;
and without him was not any thing made that was
made. In him was life; and the life was the light
of men. And the Word was made flesh, and
dwelt among us. He who had been from eternity
•
the Creator and the Ruler of all worlds, whose hand
guided the stars in their orbits and upheld the con-
stellations on their thrones, came to our world in the
form and under the limitations of our nature. He
lived among us, taught among us, suffered among
us, and died among us a death of anguish and
shame, that he might save sinners; that one object
drew Him to this earth; that one object occupied
་
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
221
the thought, tasked the energy, and filled the heart
of Incarnate God. And why? Because to the eye
of God, who sees the end in the beginning, God who
surveys all issues, who forecasts all destinies, the
saving of sinners is the one work which supremely
needs to be done in our world. And that, not in the
interest of our world only but of all worlds, of the
great universe, as will be seen in eternity.
It seems a little place, this world of ours, to be the
scene of such transcendent actions. But size, as we
measure it, counts for nothing on High; as far as we
can see, it is the method of God everywhere to
work from what man calls insignificant centres over
vast areas of life. It is emphatically thus in history.
England is but a little country, Greece was less,
Judæa least of all; and yet, from these intense
radiating centres influences have streamed forth
which will be fruitful of high results throughout
eternity. The cultivated homes of men are but
little oases in the midst of desert and ocean spaces
of vast extent and dreary monotony; fruitless and
useless in our weak judgment, though we are now
beginning to see that they are essential to the high
development of the limited regions which can nourish
the noblest forms of life. Who shall tell what is to
grow hereafter out of the transactions of which this
little, but most highly developed and glorious, earth
has been the theatre ?
In man, the universal groaning and travailing of
222
THE RISEN WORLD.
Creation has, under the guiding pressure of the
Higher Hand, evolved a new order of creatures ;
free spiritual beings, knowing good and evil and
having the choice of good and evil, through whom
the creature can rise into the closest and the most
intimate relation with God. The significance of
man's life; the activity for good or for evil of man's
free spirit; the battle between light and darkness,
order and confusion, blessedness and misery, life and
death, which is being fought out in our world; have,
the Bible teaches us, become of supreme moment to
the future of being, to the evolution of the deepest
counsel and the fulfilment of the most far-reaching
hope of God. Not without deep meaning is it said,
Into these things-what is being transacted here in
you, in me, in man—the angels desire to look. And
on earth the saving of sinners is the one work which
supremely needs to be done. It lies at the root of
all personal, social, and national problems. Save its
sinners, that is, bring them into harmony with God's
eternal laws, by bringing them into loving fellowship
with God Himself, and the world will govern itself
under His guidance, and the ideal dream of the
world's greatest political thinkers and rulers will be
fulfilled.
It is just this sin, from which Christ comes to save
the world and from which He will save it before
His work is done, which is the moralist's, the states-
man's, the philanthropist's, despair. It saddens and
•
TIIE FOUNDING OF TIIE KINGDOM.
223
degrades every soul, every home, every State on
earth; it jars and rends all bonds of human relation;
it mars all duties; it fouls all manners; it breeds
perpetual discords and miseries in all societies and
fellowships of men. It clogs all wheels of govern-
ment; it violates all rights; it inflames enmity and
murderous passion in the children of the great
human brotherhood; and it offers in every generation
to Moloch, to Venus, to Bacchus, its hecatombs of
slain. It is the one root, the bitter root, of all
human misery, for sin makes all the pure misery of
mankind; while it poisons for every man the springs
of his personal thought and volition, and makes his
life, if there be no salvation from it, more ghastly.
and terrible than death.
And let us thank God that through Christianity
there is an ever-widening recognition of its deadly
character and its destroying work.
All govern-
ments within the circle of civilization are now trying,
after their fashion, to deal with it. They see that the
moral evil is the fatal canker in communities; and
that unless it can be mastered, it will be the death
of souls, and homes, and States. Wonderful and
noble efforts are being made, by just laws, wise
statutes, and improved social organizations, by pure
air, good food, and healthy surroundings, above all,
by sound instruction, to educate the moral sense and
improve the moral tone of society. And the good
influence of all these movements is well-nigh incal-
224
THE RISEN WORLD.
culable. They are absolutely essential to the
creation of that moral and social atmosphere, if I
may use the expression, in which alone the higher
life of society, as it gets developed, can be main-
tained. But none of them reach to the root of the
evil; governments and organized human movements
can, at best, but work by the methods and on the
lines of Law; and 'what the Law could not do, in
'that it was weak through the flesh,' is-the extir-
pation of sin. It is the Love of God in Christ which
alone can search out its root-fibres and kill it there.
And so Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of the
Father, came into the world to save sinners. This
seeking of sinners is the crowning enterprise of
heaven; Salvation is the most God-like act of God.
The supreme problem also of personal being
states itself in the problem, What must I do to be
saved? A thousand grave and anxious questions
are raised by the thinkings, the willings, and the
doings of a free, responsible spirit with a nature
like ours and in a world like this. A thousand
issues of moment, issues which stretch on to eternity,
depend daily on what you think, say, will and do.
But one question underlies all other questions, one
need underlies all other needs; the word Salvation
for you, too, represents the one thing needful for
time and eternity—a heart right with God, and
therefore with the whole system of things which is
of God and with which for ever you will have
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
225
directly and momentously to do. Christ represents
the whole order of things which God has constituted,
the Wisdom which made, the Power which sustains,
the Law which rules this and all the worlds. You
may live, if you will, in perpetual collision with it;
but you cannot overthrow it; you cannot deflect it
by a hair. It is, and it will be, master; elect to
make pleasure your good, and self-will your law, and
the whole system of things is against you. You will
suffer day by day pains and shocks that carry no
solace, that are redeemed by no hope; and the Law
which you defy, the order which you violate, will in-
evitably-it is certain as sunrise on the morrow-
close on you and crush you. You cannot bend the
universe to your will; you must bend yourself to its
righteous Law which is God's will, or perish in
despair.
But accept the Salvation which is by Christ Jesus,
make Him the Master and Ruler of your spirit, let
the shout of that King be heard in the camp of your
being, let the humble, hopeful language of your soul
be, Lord, what will thou have me to do, and then it
is, it must be, well with you. The great system of
things which is ruled by the Almighty Hand enfolds
you then with cherishing tenderness. All things
have commission from God to bless you; and you
shall, you must, be blest. Shocks you will have,
sharp stings of pain, from the discords and the
wrongs which sin has generated; and which, for the
15
226
THE RISEN WORLD.
sake of working out to a triumphant issue this grand
experiment of freedom, God for the time suffers to
be; but there will be no darkness, no horror, no
anguish in the suffering. A heart right with God
knows nothing of misery; suffer as you may, while
the Everlasting Arms are around you and your soul
is at rest in Christ, neither earth nor hell can rob
you of the 'peace that passeth all understanding,'
and the ‘joy that is unspeakable and full of glory.'
I beseech you, with all the earnestness which a
yearning heart can throw into my words, not to hide
the reality of things from the eye of your own
spirits; not to 'walk in a vain show' by saying,
Tush, it does not much matter; sin is just a means
of experience; it will all come right at last. Terribly
real and terribly stern to the sinner is the law of
things to which he presumes to oppose himself.
Serve sin, and inevitably, sooner or later, it will find
you out with its retributions. The one thing that
you supremely need is to be saved from sin, and out
of Christ there is no Saviour; no Saviour but Christ
for you; no Saviour but Christ for the world.
Therefore, seeing what wretchedness, what ruin, sin
is working and will work, and seeing what strength,
dignity, and hope for man grow out of the Salvation
which is by Christ Jesus, surely the most blessed
sentence that can be spoken by human lips is this
affirmation of the Apostle, This is a faithful saying
and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
227
'Believe on the
into the world to save sinners.
'Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.' 'Look
'unto Him and be ye saved; all the ends of the
' earth.'
And why is this to be regarded as a faithful saying,
and worthy of all acceptation; why, when these
agnostic schools propound to us a scheme of things
which finds absolutely no place for this seeking,
saving, Love of a Divine Redeemer, do we repeat
with new and deeper emphasis the affirmation of the
Apostle, I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ ;
for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one
that believeth? The subject is vast and profound.
He who would give the whole answer must under-
stand fully, man, God, and the constitution of the
worlds. Let each one search into the deep things
of God, by the help of the Spirit, for himself. One
or two principles which seem to me to be central I
shall endeavour to lay before you.
I. It is worthy of all acceptation because it is the
complete development of the theme with which
Revelation is charged; it is the full outcome of all that
God has been aiming at in His providential guidance
and government of men, from the first days of the
Creation to the hour when the Child was born, the
Son was given, whom He had from of old promised
to the world. From the first chapter of Genesis to
the last chapter of the Apocalypse, the main thread
in the Scripture is this work—the saving of sinners.
228
THE RISEN WORLD.
And if we study the subject we shall find that it is
the vital spring of all the great movements of human
society. The Bible opens with the statement that
the great burden of man's existence here is sin, and
that the great need of man's being is Salvation. I
am not at all concerned with the view which you
may take of the third chapter of the book of Genesis
regarded as history. With the new light which is
now being shed on the early history of man, the
historical character of this chapter may be fairly
regarded as an open question, if indeed it can be
regarded as any longer open; but it will always,
remain to me a profoundly important feature of
Revelation. The inner meaning of it is true for
all time and is the key, I believe the Divine key, to
human history. The theme is sin, wilful, conscious
transgression, revealed as the root of all man's in-
firmity, degradation, and misery. It intimates in no
vague terms that the experiences connected with
transgression would be the deepest and most preg-
nant experiences of humanity through all ages; that
the history of human development would be the
history of the painful, even agonizing, conflict against
sin; while the promise of the final and everlasting
victory is from the very beginning held forth to
mankind.
The theme thus stated in the beginning, on the
threshold of the higher development of being, is
pursued throughout the whole course of Scripture,
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
229
by all manner of writers, in all manner of scenes
and conditions. Historian, lawgiver, judge, psalmist,
prophet, in succession, dwell upon it continually;
always they are enlarging and deepening man's
view of sin, and kindling to a brighter glow man's
hope of Salvation. They have a thousand other
subjects; everything which concerns man's personal,
social, and political life falls within their sphere.
But this is the one topic which stands out among
them all as the great burden of their ministry. It
stands out more and more clearly in their pages as
the ages roll on, until the evil is seen to culminate,
as was foretold, in the slaying of the Holy One and
the Just, the killing the Prince of Life, which sin
meant to be the destruction, but which God made
the Salvation, of the world.
That saying is worthy of all acceptation, which
sums up all that God had been teaching, and all that
man had been learning by life's varied discipline
through the ages; which convinced him effectually
and finally of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and
brought him trembling but joyful and hopeful to
Christ, that he might be saved. The Gospel, by
which the conviction of sin was driven into the
conscience of humanity while it offered the means
of deliverance alike from its anguish and its power,
was the complete outcome of Revelation, its finished,
final word, and is worthy of all acceptation' by
every human heart. So infinitely worthy was it,
230
THE RISEN WORLD.
that the most large-hearted and far-sighted of Apos-
tolic preachers dared to utter the sentence, If any
man preach any other Gospel unto you than that ye
have received, let him be accursed. The very core of
that Gospel is this sentence of our text. This is a
faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that
Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.
II. It is worthy of all acceptation, for it alone
explains and justifies the whole course of human
history. Only in the light of this declaration is its
true order revealed. Mr. Carlyle once said, 'I
should not have known what to make of this world
'at all if it had not been for the French Revolution.'
I suppose he meant that, looking at all the wrong
and misery which the poor, God's poor-the poor of
whom He proclaims Himself the defender and
keeper-have suffered through all these ages at the
hand of what calls itself Christian society, he would
have found it hard to believe in the righteous rule
of the great universe, unless the wrong and the
wretchedness had been avenged by some such tre-
mendous catastrophe as that; some great and terrible
uprising of the human, against the inhuman institu-
tions of Christian society. And looking round us
now throughout Christendom, and surveying the
crushing and grinding of the poor and of the toilers,
the firstborn of industry, between the upper and
nether millstones of our armed national camps and
the principles of our industrial civilization, we may
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
231
say with certainty that another dread catastrophe is
before us; we cannot hope to pass from such an
accursed order of things as that which names itself
Christian in armed and garrisoned Europe, with its
teeming hosts of paupers, profligates, harlots, and
outcasts, without some dread experience, the tale of
which will cause men's cheeks to pale and their ears
to tingle to the end of time. Depend upon it, there
is no way out of such a Kingdom of Heaven as our
selfish passions have made, into that Kingdom of
Heaven which God has in store, but through dark-
ness, tears, and blood.
But that is not the matter in hand. If a moralist
could not understand history without the French
Revolution, a Christian may say, that without this
mission of Christ to save sinners it would be blankly
impossible to understand the constitution of man
and the annals of the world. The creation of such
a creature as man and such a world as this, meant
from the first a Mission to Save. Redemption was
implied in the creation of free, intelligent, responsible
beings in a world which affords the utmost licence
to freedom to stray. This life of ours is altogether
too sad, too burdensome, too dark a thing to be
suffered still to exist, if there be no great hope for
the future to lighten it. The world is very beautiful
and glorious, you may say; it is a happy thing to
be born with faculties finely touched like ours into
a world like this. Yes, unspeakably beautiful and
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THE RISEN WORLD.
glorious is this earth of ours, and our life here might
well be a paradise of pure delights. But sin poisons
all. Despite of all the beauty, all the joy, the great
masterpieces of human thought and utterance are in
the minor key. Sadness is the dominant tone in all
our literature, sorrow is the staple experience of
mankind. I say frankly, that if I were compelled to
look at life and the world cut off from all the comfort
and hope which streams down upon us through the
Christian Faith, I should be sorely tempted to the
conclusion of the pessimist philosophy, that there
has been some terrible bungling and blundering in
the constitution of the world. But set in the heart
of it all Christ's Mission to Save, and the darkness
is lit up in a moment. This dread experience of sin
becomes through grace a stage in an unending pro-
gress. The wailing of anguish which drowns the
joy-notes in the Psalm of life, becomes the moan of
a travail which will issue in a new birth of beauty
and joy. This school of our discipline, this house
of our bondage, this field of our conflict, is but a
stage of development, a step of progress, and all its
deepest experiences have relation to blessed and
glorious issues in eternity. When I look at this life
of ours, so full of battle, shame, and pain, in the light
of the great hope which is before it, and the great
Love which is above it and around it and which
moved the Mission of Christ to Save, I not only
accept with submissive patience its stern conditions,
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
233
but I can lift up my voice and join with rapture in
the everlasting hymn, Great and marvellous are thy
works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy
ways, thou King of saints.
III. It is worthy of all acceptation for it is
essential to the dignity and the worth of life. Is
life worth the living? Yes, a thousand times yes,
if it is the life of a forgiven man in a redeemed
world. While sin reigns, as it has reigned and but
for Christ must reign, there is always a great cloud
between man's soul, man's life, and God. Man
lives and works under a dark shadow; in gloom
which he fears to be deepening into an endless
night. He can get rid of the gloom, the dread, for
the moment; but it never fails to close again denser
than before. No generation has succeeded in per-
manently throwing off the burden, and in going
dancing and singing on its way. The end of such
an effort has always been deeper misery and darker
despair. There is but one firm, strong, lasting
standing ground for man, that of a justified soul, a
forgiven son, in a redeemed world. What man
needs is not to forget sin, to make light of it, to shut
out the world of spiritual terrors which it unveils.
It will not be shut out. What man needs is free,
loving, and righteous forgiveness-forgiveness which
is not a weak winking at transgression, or an idle
'Peace, peace,' where there is no peace; but a for-
giveness resting on an atonement which reveals
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THE RISEN WORLD.
righteousness, magnifies law, and satisfies the deepest
convictions of man's righteous conscience on the one
hand, and the holy heart of God on the other.
We live in days when men make light of the idea
of atonement. Listen to this. A very able writer
on Buddhism thus summarises its doctrine about
sin. 'The outward condition of the soul is in each
'birth determined by its actions in a previous birth;
'but not by the balance struck after the evil has
'been reckoned off against the good. A good man
'who has once uttered a slander may spend a
'hundred thousand years as a god in consequence of
'his goodness; and when the power of his good
'actions is exhausted, may be born as a dumb man
'on account of his transgression; and a robber who
'has once done an act of mercy, may come to life in
'a king's body as the result of his virtue, and then
'suffer torments in hell for ages, or as a ghost with-
' out a body, or be re-born many times as a slave or
'an outcast, in consequence of his evil life.'
This horrible doctrine of the absolute indelibility
of transgression has been the cause of untold
anguish through all the ages of human history. We
must remember that these dread words are no specu-
lative dogma of the philosophers; they represent
the thoughts and the fears of hundreds of millions of
our race. Contrast with this dread of life the
Christian idea of justification—the sinful man, with
all the burden of his guilt, the shame and sorrow of
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
235
his sin, hearing the words, 'Son, thy sins be for-
given thee,' from the lips of One who has the right
and the power to forgive; knowing that there is no
condemnation against him; that beneath him there
is the rock of God's truth, and above him the heaven
of God's love; entering with new and joyful strength
into the conflict against evil, with the hope, the
certainty of being made free from sin, having his
fruit unto holiness, and the end thereof everlasting
life. No doubt the Hindoo is right in a sense. Sin
must fruit in sorrow; and forgiveness cannot annul
the act of sin, or obliterate its issues. But there is
an infinite difference between the experience of the
man who is working out the penalty of sin, with the
sense that behind the sorrow there is the vindictive
hand of the Law-giver who will exact the uttermost
farthing of retribution, and that of the Christian, who
knows that behind all that he endures and is entirely
reconciled to enduring, is the eye and the hand of
the Almighty Father of his spirit; an eye which
watches his struggles and sorrows with the tenderest
compassion, a hand which is guiding and ruling all
the discipline to blessed and glorious issues in
eternity. This is a faithful saying, and worthy of
all acceptation; for through it, where sin abounded,
grace did much more abound; that as sin hath reigned
unto death, even so might grace reign through right-
eousness unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord.
IV. It is worthy of all acceptation, because, while
236
THE RISEN WORLD.
it lends dignity and worth to life, it alone lends hope
to Immortality. Is it to be always this dread round
of sin and suffering while my being endures ?-is the
agonizing question of man's heart, when he sets him-
self steadily to contemplate the future. Sin and
sorrow are wedded by a bond which no hand in the
universe can unloose. He who sins must expiate
his guilt in anguish, here or in any world. Terribly
stern is the sentence, terribly sure. Firm as the
pillars of the everlasting throne is righteousness
established as the foundation. An essential part of
the benign work of Love is the reconciliation of man
with Law. Forgiveness is a blessed fact, unspeak-
ably blessed, but chiefly as the means of realizing a
still more blessed fact-purification. On that abso-
lutely rest the well-being and the bliss of the soul in
eternity. And what is the cry of all the nobler
heathen faiths ?-deliverance from self. What is
the loftiest and most constant aspiration of humanity?
The new man, a new nature, a new power of life;
that of which the Saviour spoke when He said,
'Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born
'again.' O God! deliver me, not from the terrors of
hell, but from the power of sin-is the agonized
outcry of man's spirit. Save me from myself, my
miserable infirmity, my broken purposes, my abortive
efforts, my dull aspirations, my carnal longings, my
earthly desirings, my vanity, my selfishness, my
cleaving to the dust! While these cling to me they
THE FOUNDING OF THE KINGDOM.
237
must torment and madden me; must they ever cling
to me; is there no escape? Must death but usher
me with this accursed Nessus-shirt of impurity into
a larger and longer life of sin, suffering, and despair?
This is a faithful saying and worthy of all accepta-
tion, because it is charged for man with the promise
of Eternal Life; not Eternal existence under these
dread and soul-crushing conditions, but Eternal Life,
free, pure, noble, blessed life, finding its spring of
perennial joy and fruitfulness in the sunlight of the
face of God. The Salvation which is by Christ Jesus,
offers to man not only pardon and peace, but renew-
ing, restoration; a new heart, a new life, a new
power, a new supreme attraction, drawing man ever
by its sweet but resistless constraints into closest
and holiest fellowship with the Life of God through
eternity.
And this is Christianity. This is the faithful
saying, poor tormented slave of sin, wretched, hope-
less, despising and hating thyself, afraid of life,
afraid of death, afraid of eternity. THIS IS A FAITH-
FUL SAYING, AND WORTHY OF ALL ACCEPTATION, THAT
CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SIN-
NERS; to heal, quicken, and save, by the power of a
Divine Life. 'I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me.' 'Christ in you, the hope of glory!' And now
again is Christ in presence. Again He is set forth
evidently crucified among you. Again you see His
tender glance, again you hear His pleading tone,
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THE RISEN WORLD.
again His hand of Love lays hold upon you, and
draws you to His heart. Is it still to be steeled
against Him, against Love, against Life, against
Hope for eternity? Is this to be the moment of a
new and, it may be, a final rejection of your
Saviour? Issues the most momentous are waiting
on the decisions of this instant. Now is the
"
accepted time, behold, now is the day of salvation.'
Come, for all things are now ready! Come!
O sin of man, O love of God,
Here in this hour your strength is tried;
Let victory remain with love,
The Christ of God, the Crucified !
XII.
THE ADMINISTRATION.
The church, which is his body.-EPHESIANS i. 22, 23.
We are ambasadors for Christ.—2 CORINTHIANS v. 20.
UR great King Alfred, in a memorable
passage setting forth the ideas with which
he took his shattered realm in charge, says
that it is above all things necessary for a king that
he have in his kingdom prayer-men, and army-men,
and work-men. These, he says, are his tools to
work with, and without these no kingly work can
be nobly done. It is true emphatically of the
Divine Kingdom, with this grand distinction, that in
that Kingdom the prayer-men, and the army-men,
and the work-men are one. Behold he prayeth was
the unquestioned, unquestionable credential of the
bravest soldier, the strongest workman who has
ever fought in the battles or wrought on the
tabernacle of the Lord. And if Alfred felt that his
work as a king must fail miserably unless he could
gather round him a strong band who could work,
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TIIE RISEN WORLD.
and fight, and pray, how much more does our King
demand for the spread and the consolidation of His
Kingdom, a strong brave band of disciples who are
filled with the Master's spirit, and who, as satellites
receive and radiate the light of their sun, will reflect
that Light of Life which is in Christ on all who
come within their sphere. Even in the matter of
earthly kingdoms the vital question is not one of
good constitutions, good laws, good rule, but of
industry, energy, and faith in the subjects-the mass
of the people who compose the State; and what is
true of earthly kingdoms, in this lower sphere, is
truer still in the highest sphere, of the Divine.
We hear much in these days of the 'notes of a
'Church.' There is but one 'note' which is worth
anything, or can do anything, in a high and lasting
sense-Life, the Life which is the Light of men,
glowing in the members, and making its heat and
its splendour a power to enlighten and kindle the
world. In the main, the Kingdom, as a power, will
be as its disciples are; on them—the band of the
disciples, the Church, which is his body-hangs its
progress, nay its very existence, in the world.
And never surely was Kingdom set up so entirely
bare of apparatus of an outward kind, wherewith to
maintain and to extend its sway. The Lord came
to the world on a Mission upon which the destinies
of the universe were hanging; He came to fulfil the
Eternal counsel of the Father, and to work out to
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241
Divine completeness the purpose with which He
made the worlds. He lived and died submissive to
the Father's will, and breathed out the pregnant
word 'it is finished,' as His lips stiffened in death.
And what did He leave behind Him in the world
which by His own bitter suffering and sacrifice He
claimed as His realm? Did He leave a complete
constitution of government, an elaborate digest of
law, a grand apparatus of administration? Nothing
of the kind. He left upon earth only the memory
of a Life, shrined-no other word will express it,—
shrined in the hearts of a hundred and twenty poor,
ignorant, and helpless disciples. The fountain of
the force which was to conquer the world for Him
and hold it to His allegiance was these. And it
was in the full harmony of His method from the
beginning. It was as a babe, wrapped in swaddling
clothes, lying in a manger, that His first subjects
found Him; it was as a Man of Sorrows, the Son of
Man with the full inheritance of all the weakness,
the pain, the humiliation of the human, that He
made His claim on, and won His influence over,
human hearts. The pomp of His splendour, the
awful power which His hand controlled, He laid
aside absolutely when He came to take His place as
a Child at home by the world's hearth fire. Through
life He trusted one thing and but one to work for
Him and to win Him empire, the Spirit of heavenly
truth, purity, and charity which the Father sent
16
242
THE RISEN WORLD.
Him to manifest to the world. When some Greeks
came to Philip, saying, We would see Jesus-the
man who can still the storm and raise the dead-
Jesus answered, Except a corn of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit. Pass on to Calvary, the
great Apocalypse-the Apocalypse of Divine Love-
is there!
The Church, we are told, must have external
'notes' to indicate it, and to direct men to the
quarter in which they may seek hopefully the bread
and the water of life. But the Church that turned the
world upside down, that bore the Gospel through the
whole realm of civilization and planted the standard
of the Kingdom in every region from the Indus to the
Atlantic, had no outward apparatus and worked only
through vital power. Men charged with the spirit
of Jesus went forth with His word on their lips, His
love in their hearts, and the world everywhere
recognized these as Divine, bent down in worship,
broke forth into praise. And it is the power of the
Kingdom at all times and in all places. Let the
spirit of Christ in the hearts of disciples plead for
Him and urge His claims; it is all that He asks to
win for Him the empire of the world. It is because
the Church has trusted its constantly enlarged
apparatus, its documents, its sacraments, its conse-
crated priests, its Ecumenical Councils, its infallible
Popes, instead of the mind and the spirit of the
THE ADMINISTRATION.
243
Master, that it is still as a voice crying in the wilder-
ness, and Christ is still waiting for the throne of the
great human world.
I know that it may be said, 'Spirit' is a vague
term; the spirit of Christ, who knows exactly what
that means? Words we can understand, documents
we can interpret, external marks and notes we can
apprehend; here we are on safe ground. But the
'spirit of Christ' how are we to recognize it? If
we leave men to search for it, and to hail it when
they think they find it, they are certain to go astray.
This is all very specious; but they who urge it are
stone-blind to all the most notable facts both of the
Apostolic history, and of the mightiest of those
Reformations which have stirred the Christian world
to its centre, and kindled new life in its worn and
weary heart. It was just the manifestation of the
spirit of Christ, with but the slightest external
apparatus of influence, which mastered man's heart
everywhere and established the Cross as the Divinest
symbol that ever has been known, or ever can be
known in human history; and it is just the number
and the earnestness of Christ-like men and women
who are about in the world and at work upon it in
any age, which settles the nearness of the Higher
life of that generation to the Kingdom of Heaven.
When the Lord left the world, not that He might
abandon it to its doom but that He might make His
redeeming Love a power to save it, He left in it the
•
244
THE RISEN WORLD.
Church which is his body, prolonging, as it were, the
Incarnation, and establishing as the fundamental
basis of the Kingdom, the human experience and
sympathy of God.
The Church, which is his body. What is a body?
What is its definite function and use? When men
speak of the Church as a body, they at once think
of it as a thing of elaborate organization, manifold
instrumentalities, complicated apparatus of action.
These are all important enough but they do not
make a body; any amount of them compacted with
the cunningest art cannot make a body. A body is
simply the shrine and the organ of a spirit; the
means of its manifestation and action on the world.
It is that in which a spirit dwells, which it pervades ;
and spirit is Will-living force, ruled and guided by a
conscience, kindled and inspired by a heart. When
you look at a human form, the first thing you search
for, the main thing you care for, is the presentment
which it offers of the spirit which is within. What
looks out of its eye, what moves its gesture, what
modulates its tone? Is that noble and beautiful ?
it lends fairness and grandeur to all the visible
frame; is that foul and ugly? it smirches it with the
stain of pollution and infects it with the taint of
decay. What you supremely care for is the vital
energy of the spirit. If that is strong and pure, a
very poor organization will do noble service; if that
is weak and dull, a very powerful organization will.
THE ADMINISTRATION.
245
be so much matter wasted, or put to ignoble, perhaps
disastrous use.
The body which the Lord left in the world to
speak for Him and work for Him, was instinct with
the expression and was vivid with the action of a
Divinely noble, beautiful, and loving Spirit; the
Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, and
charged with the whole message of God's truth and
God's charity to the world.
Here is the picture of a life of Christian ministry
painted by St. Paul:-
And from Miletus he sent to Ephesus, and called
the elders of the church. And when they were come
to him, he said unto them, Ye know from the first day
that I came into Asia, after what manner I have been
with you at all seasons, serving the Lord with all
humility of mind, and with many tears, and tempta-
trons, which befell me by the lying in wait of the
Jews: and how I kept back nothing that was profitable
unto you, but have shewed you, and have taught you
publickly, and from house to house, testifying both to
the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward
God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. And
now, behold, I go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem,
not knowing the things that shall befall me there:
save that the Holy Ghost witnesseth in every city,
saying that bonds and afflictions abide me. But none
of these things move me, neither count I my life dear
unto myself; so that I might finish my course with
246
THE RISEN WORLD.
joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the
Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of
God..
And now, brethren, I commend you to God, and
to the word of his grace, which is able to build you
up, and to give you an inheritance among all them
which are sanctified. I have coveted no man's silver,
or gold, or apparel. Yea, ye yourselves know, that
these hands have ministered unto my necessities and
to them that were with me. I have showed
you all
things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the
weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus,
how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.
Here again, is the form of the Christian life as
sketched in the Epistle to the Ephesians:-
Put off, concerning the former conversation, the old
man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts;
and be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and . .
put on the new man, which after God is created in
righteousness and true holiness. Wherefore putting
away lying, speak every man truth with his neigh-
bour: for we are members one of another. Be ye
angry, and sin not; let not the sun go down upon
your wrath: neither give place to the devil. Let him
that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour,
working with his hands the thing which is good, that
he may have to give to him that needeth. Let ro
corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but
that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may
THE ADMINISTRATION.
247
minister grace unto the hearers. And grieve not the
holy spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day
of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and
anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away
from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to
another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even
as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.
When men experienced such ministry and wit-
nessed such life, they saw a light, they caught a glow
which gladdened them to their inmost heart. They
were drawn to it as the steel dust is drawn to the
magnet; they were in the full stream of that vital
current which shapes and sways all things in the
inner, the spiritual world.
The work of the Church in all ages, its impact
on the world, its constraining, compelling force, is
according to the measure of the Spirit which abides
in it. And because men have thought and talked
of the Church as if it were a scaffolding, an external
structure upon which they are to work from the
outside on that which is within, instead of its being
the shrine and organ of a Spirit which works from
within, first on the organ perfecting its adaptations,
and then by the organ on the outlying world; be-
cause they have built up a body in the hope that a
Spirit in time would dwell in it, instead of praying
for the Spirit in the conviction that a body would in
time grow round it meet for all the uses of its
life-because of this the world is still hesitating
*
248
THE RISEN WORLD.
and questioning, Did Christ come forth from
God?
What Christ seeks then and demands for the
work of His Kingdom is a Church which shall be
His body; that is, at once the means of His mani-
festation to the world, and the instrument of His
action on the world.
I. The means of His manifestation.
Paul has a remarkable expression, Ye are mani-
festly declared to be the epistle of Christ; an epistle
written not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of
the heart. The Lord did not even leave behind
Him an authoritative record of His life. Everything
which we know about Him, all that has made the
life and the light of Christendom, was enshrined in
the sacred memories of a few human hearts; out
of those human hearts under the guidance of the
Spirit, the New Testament, the Church, and Chris-
tendom have come forth. But the life of Christ has
been written; the portraiture of Christ has been
presented in large full outline to the world.
would be wrong to say that men are absolutely
It
dependent on the living band of disciples for their
knowledge of the Name and the work of their
Redeemer. There is the written Word, there is the
great Biography. But life is the light of man, not
words. The Church, the living organ, tells with
incomparably greater weight than the most explicit
word on the beliefs and the hopes of mankind.
THE ADMINISTRATION.
249
The written Word, precious though it be, is a thing
of the past; the Evangelists are silent; but the
Church is the living Evangelist the word of the
Gospel for to-day: the manifestation of Christ's
presence with mankind.
And what is it set to
manifest? What is its living word? What does
it declare to and urge on men? The centre and
core of the Christian Revelation-THE CROSS; all
in God out of which that springs; all the benedic-
tion with which it is charged for our race. The
Love which seeks the lost, which saves by sacrifice,
which gathers a dying world to the clasp of its arms,
and lays the crushing burden of humanity on its own
strong heart-this is the Spirit of Jesus. Let this
glow in the life-blood of the body, the Church, let
this gleam from its yearning, tear-dimmed eye, let
this thrill in its pleading tones, let this strain forth in
its longing gesture as it bends to poverty, ignorance,
guilt and sorrow with intense consuming desire to
help, to comfort, to purify, and the world will grow
glad as of old when those first Evangelists came to
it, and scoffing will be changed into Hosannas—
Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he that
cometh in the name of the Lord! A Church that
shrinks from sacrifice, that minds earthly things, that
. grows rich and powerful, that holds religion to be a
necessary restraint for sinners and a valuable con-
servator of the interests of a worldly, sensual, and
self-satisfied society-search and look whether we
250
THE RISEN WORLD.
have not got it amongst us now-blots the fair page
of Revelation so that simple souls can hardly read
it, and leaves men agonizing desperately over the
question, Is this vast system of moral influence an
angel from the innermost heaven, or an exhalation
from the bottomless deep?
II. The Church His body, the instrument of His
action on the world.
Think of this. Christ came to do the Father's
Will, to finish the Father's work-that Will decreed,
that work sought, the salvation of the world. He
departed from the world, and left 120 poor men and
women behind Him to speak for Him, and His whole
visible apparatus for the accomplishment of His
work was there-in those men and women, and in
those too who, generation after generation, should
believe on Him through their word. He would not
ask for twelve legions of angels to save Himself
from the shame and anguish of Calvary; He would
not, He will not, summon the angelic troops to be
His Evangelists to flash and to thunder His Gospel
through the earth. We are, or ought to be, His
angels; to us has He committed this heavenly
ministry.
We are ambassadors for Christ.
The word ambassador strikes at the root of the.
sacerdotal idea of the ministry of the Gospel. The
ambassador has to represent a person, not to fulfil a
function or repeat a message; we have to stand
THE ADMINISTRATION.
251
before men and plead with them in place of Christ.
As though God did beseech you by us, we pray you
in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. God be-
seeching, here is the inner core of the Gospel,
God loving, God seeking, God beseeching as love
only can beseech, the world to be saved.
The sacerdotal idea of the ministry has reigned
in all ages of the Christian Church. It is the
natural outgrowth of man's idolatrous heart; but it
has no countenance, not even the shadow of a
countenance, from the Word of God. I say the
Word of God. I hold that the Old Testament is as
anti-sacerdotal as the New, when we read its inner
word. A kingdom of priests and a holy nation was
God's idea of the estate of Israel; and to this view
of their calling He was ever striving to lift them, by
the word of His truth and the discipline of His
hand. The great leader of the people was no
priest and no lover of priests; their liturgy was
mainly created by a monarch; the consecration
prayer at the dedication of their temple was com-
posed and offered by their king. The prophets
whom God sent as His ambassadors, when the
temple service grew into a system, were mostly lay-
men, and their influence on the nation was at the
opposite pole to the priests; and, finally, it was not
from a priestly but a royal household that 'The Child
'was born,' 'the Son was given' to the world. The
Old Testament, rightly read, is charged with anti-
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THE RISEN WORLD.
sacerdotal ideas. In the New Testament the priest
utterly vanishes, and the man who can speak for
God, who can plead for God, who can beseech men
as with the lips of God, because his own soul is
aglow with Divine zeal and love, occupies his room.
The priest according to the Roman and High
Anglican idea, is the man who is sent of God to
fulfil certain functions, to do certain acts which are
the ordained channels of grace whereby souls must
be saved. The Romish Church holds, and holds
rightly from her point of view, that the personal
element is not the supreme one in the priestly
function; it would be terrible if the sacraments
which are supposed to be necessary to salvation,
depended for their virtue on the spiritual life of the
priest. Men would be in perpetual torment if sin in
the priest could vitiate the sacrament, and so the
Church cares supremely to have certain things done
rightly according to the ordained rules; and then
does her best to get as much spiritual earnestness
and power in the priesthood as possible.
·
•
But now then we are ambassadors for Christ.
The spiritual earnestness, the spiritual power, are
indispensable; we have not to do certain acts, to
celebrate certain mysteries; we have to stand as
persons in the name of the living Christ before our
fellowmen, and to bring Him into direct personal
contact with their consciences and hearts. We are
never to put ourselves in place of Him, as though
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253
of ourselves we could be anything or do anything
effectual for their salvation, but we are to speak for
Him, plead for Him, reveal Him, commend Him,
so that men may seek Him, know Him, love Him,
and cleave to Him for themselves. It is the living
Saviour whom we have to set before the eyes of
men; and the one question which concerns our
fitness as His ambassadors is the livingness of our
personal relation to Himself. I live; yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in
the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who
loved me, and gave himself for me. It is the contact
of the Life which is in Christ with souls dead in
trespasses and sins which quickens and saves; and
the Church which is full charged with that Life is
God's effectual instrument for the accomplishment
of His largest purposes of mercy to mankind. His
effectual and His sufficient instrument-this is all
He asks; give Him this, and His Spirit working
with it will win the world to the sceptre of His Son.
It is precisely because this ministry of the Church
has largely failed Him through all the Christian
ages, and the priest has set himself and his mechanical
functions forth in its room, that the Kingdom has
advanced in our world so slowly, and men have come
to count it as a selfish and obstructive institution,
instead of the leader of all possible progress which
shall be healthful and fruitful, the pioneer of the ad-
vancing generations of mankind. We are His
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ambassadors, but if we are not representing Him,
His person, His counsels, His spirit, His aims and
hopes, we are useless and worthless; nay worse, we
are found false witnesses of God, and that is the
most cruel wrong which we can inflict, the most
destructive snare that we can spread for mankind.
There are three qualifications which are essential
in an ambassador, which alone can fit him in any
measure to fulfil his commission and represent his
Master in the world-
i. He must be instructed in his Master's counsels.
ii. He must be penetrated, possessed, by his
Master's spirit.
iii. He must be devoted to his Master's ends.
i. It is the primary qualification that he must be
instructed in his Master's counsels.
An ambassador is not simply a spokesman to
repeat a message, or an agent to fulfil instructions.
An ambassador represents a person; he is as far as
may be in place of that person; and must be
thoroughly informed of the mind of the person whom
he represents, so that in the light of that mind he
may adapt his words and his influence to the various
conditions which may arise, and may in the end
accomplish the objects which he who commissions
him has at heart. A large freedom of utterance and
action is accorded to an ambassador; he has to
represent and act for one at a distance, and do the
best that he can in every contingency to carry out
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255
his designs. The best ambassador will be he who
strives to speak and act as in the presence of his
master, and to do what he would do were he on the
spot himself. And we have to represent One whom
we cannot make visible to the bodily eye, and cannot
in any way bring in contact with the senses of man-
kind. Therefore it is profoundly needful that the
Christian ambassador should be intensely, vividly
penetrated with the belief, not only that Christ is,
but that His Being is the great reality with which
every man has to do. He must believe, with a faith
which by its very intensity persuades men, in the
Risen, Living, and Reigning King; for we live in
days when such witness, the witness of men who
know by close personal fellowship the Living Lord,
is more precious than perhaps at any previous period
in the history of the world.
'Our philosophers nowadays,' says Mr. Ruskin,
'will not believe in God, because they cannot find Him
' in a bottle.' It is a keen, sarcastic way of express-
ing the real truth of the matter as regards the
attitude of an influential portion of the scientific
school towards the realities of the spiritual world.
The things not seen and eternal, though they have
wielded an incomparably stronger influence on man's
life and destiny than the whole sphere of the visible
and tangible which surrounds him; though they have
seemed to the noblest and strongest spirits, the true
fathers of the ages, the master-builders of the
256
THE RISEN WORLD.
temple of history, the only realities with which man
has to do; though they lend to his daily occupations
their supreme dignity, and to life all that makes
it worth the living-because they give no evidence
of themselves to the balance and crucible, submit
themselves to no analysis and leave no ash, are dis-
missed as phantoms, whose only substance is in the
brain that dreams them. It is a wonderful scheme
of things in which we are landed after millenniums of
stormy, struggling, passionate effort to conform
man's life to unseen standards and to raise it to the
fellowships of the invisible celestial sphere, that all
which seems to uplift, gladden, and inspire us is
illusion, and that our only realities are the things
which we have to look for about our feet in the dust!
But think, I beseech you, of the profound worth to
the world in these days, of ambassadors of the
unseen but ever Living and Reigning Christ, who
'know whom they have believed'; who can speak
that which they have known, and testify that which
they have seen, tasted, and handled of the Word o
Life, and can make the Lord as real a presence to
their fellowmen as He is to their own hearts. Learn
to speak for Christ, to plead for Christ, as one who
sees Him that is invisible; to whom the veils of
sense are transparent; to whom incomparably the
most vital fact in earth's history is the Reign of
Christ in Heaven. And that you may know Him,
speak with Him, live with Him, pour out your soul
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257
to Him; let Him be your Friend closer than a
'brother'; bring to Him the problems of life over
which you agonize and let Him solve them; bring
to Him the burdens that crush you and let Him lift
them; bring to Him the cares and anxieties that
bury your life in gloom and let Him scatter them by
the sunlight of His sympathy and love. Lean on
His breast when you are weary of the strain and
rest; lift to Him the eyes blinded with tears and be
gladdened; tell Him your doubts and fears about
the future and hear His answer, Fear not, I am with
thee; I have taken thee by the hand, thou art mine;
and then go forth and speak for Him by lip, by life,
as a man speaks for the friend whom he honours
unspeakably, whose love is his most sacred pos-
session, and bear home by vital force the knowledge
of His Name, the holy beauty of His Nature, the
sweetness of His sympathy, the glory of His love,
the power of His salvation, to human consciences
and hearts.
Joined to this vivid sense of the living reality of
Christ's rule over men, there must be in His ambas-
sadors that knowledge of his mind which will qualify
them to speak for Him, and which is something
quite different from and deeper than familiarity with
His words. It may seem a strange thing to say,
but
nothing is easier that to misrepresent a man's mind
and spirit utterly while repeating his words. The
Pharisees knew the words of Jehovah perfectly, and
17
258
THE RISEN WORLD,
could repeat them to a letter; they knew nothing
and could tell nothing of God Himself. It is un-
fortunately quite possible for the man who most
prides himself on appealing to the words of the
Saviour, and who quotes them most largely, to mis-
represent Him most completely to mankind. You
want to know the Teacher as well as His doctrine; to
study His character, to stand at His point of view, as
far as possible to look at all things, man, life, and
God, as He looked at them, and so to be prepared
to say what He would have said, and to act as He
would have acted in the various circumstances in
which you have to speak and act for Him; His
ambassadors should be familiar with Himself as well
as with His sayings, and know what His sayings
mean by knowing His mind and heart. And what
was the core of Christ's counsel, what was the in-
tensest conviction of His spirit, what lay behind
every thought, word, and action of His life?
The one thing which was emphatically character-
istic of the Saviour's teaching, and not of His teach-
ing only but of His whole mental and spiritual
attitude, was the constant reference to a Higher Will.
It is well that we ministers and all teachers should
understand how little advocacy of God's cause there
was in the Saviour's teaching, and how much patient
witness to His truth. We ministers too easily fall in
with the notion that we are God's advocates, retained
to set His truth in the most attractive aspect, to
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259
parade the arguments which support it, and confound
and put to shame its foes. It asks little of such
help at our hands. It asks witness, faithful witness,
by word and by life; it will advocate itself. George
Fox was right: there is the witness to God's truth
in every man; to reach that witness is the one work
of Christ's ambassador; and nothing will reach it so
quickly or so deeply as the truth itself. We have
involved ourselves in a maze of argument about the
Being of God, the Government of God, the truth of
the Bible, the claims of Inspiration, the influence of
Christianity, and the like, and this is just the reason
why the Christian world is so full of wrangling and
unbelief. Nothing can much help us but a return
to the method of Christ-bearing witness to the
truth, and leaving it to speak to human consciences
and to do its work in human hearts. The Saviour
lived and spoke as a Teacher under the most in-
tense conviction that there is but one thing which is
greatly important for man, knowing and doing the
Father's Will; the Will that created all things, the
Will that rules all things, the Will to be in harmony
with which is life, to be at discord with which is
death. He knew that man's is a subject nature,
made to serve, but to serve only the God that made
him, the perfectly good, holy and righteous Being,
Whose service is perfect freedom. And the Saviour's
life was the example, the Divine example, of sub-
mission. His one thought, His one care, was to do
260
THE RISEN WORLD.
the Will of the Father. Even when His heart was
literally breaking with the pressure of His agony,
His prayer was, Father . . . not my will, but thine,
be done.
man.
It is the main work of the Christian ministry to
interpret that Father's Will to man. And the first
condition of a faithful interpretation is the pro-
found, the intense conviction that to be at one
with the Father's Will is the only thing needful to
The Church bears witness to men that they
come from God, that they are under the law to God,
that they owe account to God, and that the relation
of their souls to God determines the destiny of their
being through eternity. We must believe this our-
selves, deep down in our heart of hearts-we must
believe that nothing matters greatly but this—and
then we shall be able with all the earnestness of a
personal pleading, with all the energy and persistence
of a heart that yearns like Christ's, to 'pray men in
'Christ's stead' to be reconciled unto God. The
initial truth of the message which the Church has
to deliver is that 'the natural man' is at enmity with
God, and out of harmony with all things that obey
the Will of God; without God in the world, he is
without hope, without peace, without joy, without
all that makes life worth the living, and death worth
the dying; he is restless, miserable, and tending
downwards to darkness and despair.
The good
news of the Gospel is that in Christ there is recon-
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261
ciliation. The Incarnation, the Atonement, the
Mediation of the Risen and Reigning Saviour, are
God's means of drawing man to a fruitful and blessed
reconciliation; a reconciliation which meets all the
depths and the heights of human and Divine neces-
sity, and opens to men a path of progress, whose
final stage is the bliss and splendour which are the
inheritance of the elect spirits before the eternal
throne. And having before us the fear of God;
knowing what toil and anguish the well-beloved Son
endured that the world might not perish in its deadly
sin; knowing what man must suffer, what pangs of
conscience, what hunger of heart, while he is alien-
ated from the God whom he was made to love, serve,
and glorify; we are bound to throw the whole passion
of our hearts into the embassage with which Christ
has entrusted us, to the end that through the Church
'which is His body,' His Spirit may make Himself
known to and act upon mankind.
ii. The ambassador for Christ must be possessed
by his Master's spirit.
It was more by His spirit than by His word that
our Lord laid such hold on human hearts. It was
the spirit of absolute unselfishness. Christ pleased
not himself, was said of him. I came down from
heaven not to do my own will but the will of him that
sent me, are His own words, and they strike the key-
note of His life. In nothing is it more profoundly
important that His ambassadors should be like Him.
262
THE RISEN WORLD.
They should be men who have laid self on the altar
of sacrifice, and who have one object in view, speak-
ing truth and doing good. This was the secret of
the marvellous influence which men like St. Bernard,
St. Francis, St. Louis, wielded over all that ap-
proached them; men knew that they were absolutely
unselfish, the devoted servants of duty, always on
the watch to help and to bless their fellows, no
matter at what cost. From nothing has the Church
suffered so much as from the spread of the profes-
sional spirit among its ministers. The professional
spirit, and we are saturated with it, is fatal to its
noblest work. Everything depends on the inspira-
tion which men recognize in the preacher. If he is
repeating a tale, fulfilling a function, transacting an
affair, the interest dies down at once, not in him
only, but in his Gospel. If he speaks because he
must speak, if he can make men feel that he is stand-
ing where God has placed him and delivering the
message which God has put into his lips, and that
no worldly temptation could avail to make him
preach another Gospel or occupy another post; then
men will listen to him, will observe him, as they ob-
served his Master, will hang upon his words, and be
ready to believe that God has of very truth visited
His world. Who shall estimate the influence of the
life of the great Saints with their pure unselfish de-
votion to duty, in renewing and restoring faith in the
reality of 'the spiritual.' The suspicion of mercenary
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263
motive is fatal to a ministry, and robs it of its natural
power to serve Christ and mankind. When the
Church has been poor, and its ministers more ready
for martyrdom than for mitres and thrones, it has
gained its greatest triumphs; the spirit of Christ
'who pleased not Himself,' who came not to be
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life
a ransom for many-it is this which wins, it is this
which impresses, it is this which constrains mankind.
Nor has this spirit of Christ lost any of its power;
when men see it they are drawn to it, drawn by it;
they confess, when it shines on them, that of a
truth God is with us.
It was, moreover, a spirit of the loftiest elevation,
conversant with the unseen eternal realities, seeing
through the shows of things to the substance beyond;
and yet full of genial sympathy with everything
human, and of tender compassion for the worn, the
weary, the sad, the sinful, yea even the outcast.
It is important to note when on the subject of the
spirit of Jesus of Nazareth, that, Divine though He
was, He was manifestly One with whom men could
live in very frank and genial fellowship. There was
nothing to overawe in His aspect or bearing, every-
thing to win and cherish, as sunlight cherishes the
buds in spring. Once it is said that the disciples as
they followed were 'amazed' and 'afraid'; but that
was when He set His face on His last journey to
Jerusalem, and the shadow of the Cross fell darkly
264
THE RISEN WORLD.
on His heart, and theirs. But the fact that it is
noticed is significant. Manifestly in habitual inter-
course he gladdened as well as guided them, and
won their friendship as well as their deeper and
more reverent love. How much noble influence
on men has the Church missed in every age, through
not remembering that in this matter too she was to
be the ambassador of her Lord. There was nothing
of the repellant Stand by, I am holier than thou'
about the sinless Jesus. People burdened, maddened,
by their sin were drawn to Him; the malignant
alone He repelled. The Church has never dared
to be as gentle and patient with sinners as Christ-
except when she had profit to make by her absolu-
tions. Her ministers easily fall into that tone of
serene superiority to the world and its ways, which
irritates and alienates men. The sinless One drove
none away from Him but the self-righteous; and
mixed freely with all the social activity, and some of
the gay festivity of His times. And yet, though He
was no restraint to genial enjoyment, He was always
a sanctifying Presence, and men felt it while they
did not fear. Somehow we have quite missed the
spirit of our Lord's relationship to the world of His
day, with its pleasures, its business, its sin. We
have frowns where He had a quickening and purify-
ing smile. We have anathemas, where He had
searching and cleansing rebuke. We have isolation,
timid, trembling isolation, where He had bold and
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265
victorious contact. We carry about with us the
aspect and attitude of those who have to save them-
selves and to save their charge out of the world;
He everywhere mixed Himself with the world that
it might be saved.
Both the Church and its ministers need to get into
a new key of relation to mankind. And thank God
we are getting into it. Ministers are beginning in
earnest to remember that they are men very much
like their fellowmen around them; and that their
only claim to be heard, their only power to act on
the world as Christ's ambassadors, is the truth of
Christ which they can make known, and the spirit of
Christ which they can manifest to mankind. And
'the Church, which is His body,' is coming slowly,
but surely, to take Christ's view of the world, its
weakness, its folly, its sorrow, its sin. The spirit of
the word, Father, forgive them: for they know not
what they do, is passing into us; and passing out
from us as a healing touch on the evils we are sent
to cure, and the souls we are sent to save. Our
dogmatism, whereby we have wandered as far from
Christ's spirit as possible, is much humbled in these
days; tender sympathetic compassion for even the
doubts and unbeliefs of men is beginning to occupy
its room. Oh! what needless agony has the Church
inflicted on noble and honest hearts, what atheism
she has generated, what blasphemy she has taught
the world, by the dogged persistence with which her
266
THE RISEN WORLD.
priests and doctors have branded Doubt with their
anathema as Sin. The issue of it is the age in which
we are living; an age in which doubt parades and
glorifies itself as the formula of freedom, as the
highest attainable attitude of the soul. The Church
in the past has been the unconscious author of much
of the scepticism and atheism that has swept like a
lava flood over her vineyards and gardens; God
grant us, in time to come, more of the spirit of the
Master, to whom sorrow, pain, perplexity, doubt,
despair, were like magnets to draw forth His sooth-
ing, comforting, healing, power.
iii. The ambassador of Christ must be devoted
to His Master's ends.
Christ was among us as one that serveth, the
Servant of man for the Father's sake, and filled with
a consuming desire-for which 'the enthusiasm of
'humanity' is a miserably weak expression-to give
His life to mankind. Servants of man for the
Lord's sake, is the true description of His ministers,
men who have given their lives to carry out His
great purpose of mercy and benediction to the
world. And in this region the Church has been less
absolutely faithless to the commission of her Lord.
Sad enough, terribly sad, has been the condition of
the sick and weary world through all these ages.
It would have been simply desperate, hopeless, but
for the ministers of the Christian Church. Some-
thing at any rate Christ's ministers and almoners
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267
have done to make men feel, as well as believe, that
there was One pitying it all, and helping it all on
High. A good minister of Jesus Christ will be con-
stantly and eagerly on the watch, to comfort all that
needs comforting, to help all that needs helping, as
he moves through the world. Need is the one
appeal which to him is absolute. Necessity is laid
upon him to respond to that appeal, yea, woe is unto
him, if he shut his heart and pass it by! Then, too,
Christ was the Healer of sick bodies, as well as the
Saviour of sick souls. Go and shew John again those
things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive
their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed,
and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the
poor have the Gospel preached to them. I think that
a considerable part of a ministers duty lies in
organizing, directing, and stimulating ministries of
mercy to all that is sick, sad, ignorant, wanton, and
vicious, in the locality into which he is sent to be
an ambassador for Christ, and the conductor of the
healing and saving power of His Gospel. Above
all he must by every means win the sympathy and
trust of the poor; make them understand that they
have a Friend on High; and friends on earth who
cannot rest till their burden is lightened and their
wrong redressed. He should be the link of con-
nection between the sundered classes, should teach
them to know each other, to care for each other, to
trust each other, that they may one day in Christ
love each other and be at rest.
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THE RISEN WORLD.
But the Church is something quite other than a
Charity Organization Society, admirable as that is in
its method, and blessed as that is in its work. The
Church is something far higher; and here is the
essential difference. The Church is taught to regard
the wretchedness and anguish with which alas! the
world is filled, as the symptoms of a 'deep-seated
moral disease which a supernatural Power alone can
cure. She lends herself earnestly, eagerly, to foster
and develop all the agencies by which the outward
conditions of man's life may be sweetened, purified, and
elevated, and the whole level of life may be uplifted
into a purer air, a brighter sunlight, a serener
heaven. But she does not mistake that for Salvation.
You may raise wages, shorten hours of labour, abate
nuisances, improve dwellings, diffuse education,
cheapen food, and emancipate and stimulate trade,
till you attain to the Economist's heaven--but you
have not solved the problem, or made the life of earth
what Christ had before Him when He preached the
Kingdom of Heaven. Deep in man's nature there
is the hunger for truth, for the inward freedom, for
the light and the love of the living God; and till
that hunger of the heart is satisfied, till he knows
God and has tasted the joys of His salvation and
has laid hold on the hope set before him in the
Gospel, he will remain restless and wretched under
all his outward prosperities, and be still a prey to
temptation and a victim of despair. And therefore,
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269
while we assist joyfully every effort to help and up-
lift man, and to build on a nobler plan the structure
of his life, we throw the whole strength of our souls
into the proclamation of the Gospel :-God was in
Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not im-
puting their trespasses unto them; and hath com-
mitted unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then
we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did
beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be
ye reconciled to God.
XIII.
THE RULING POWER.
The love of Christ constraineth us.-2 CORINTHIANS V. 14.
HETHER they were right or whether
they were wrong, the men who founded the
Church and bore through the Roman world
the Gospel of the love of God which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord, believed profoundly and intensely, that the
Lord Christ was One who as God demanded,
compelled their worship, while as man He claimed
and constrained their love. The exclamation of
Thomas, My Lord and my God,' expressed the
entire belief as well as the reverent homage of their
hearts. And we may be permitted to question how
they could have believed otherwise, with the Scrip-
tures of the Old Testament open before them full
of prophetic forecastings of the Incarnation; and the
words and the works of the Man Christ Jesus
patent around them, stamped with the impress,
which even demons could read, of God manifest
in the flesh.
It is the habit now of an influential theological
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271
school to draw a decisive line of demarcation be-
tween what are called the Synoptic Gospels and the
Gospel according to St. John, representing the latter
as the main support of the doctrine of the Divinity
of our Lord. The first three Gospels are treated by
this school as setting forth the Lord as a Divine
Messenger, a direct, perfect, and altogether unique
organ of God in the world, but not in the absolute
sense of the word Divine; while it is allowed that
in the fourth Gospel, which we are told is of quite
later date, the idea of His Divinity is made promi-
nent, and is set forth substantially as He is regarded
in the Creeds of Christendom, and has been wor-
shipped in the Catholic Church through all the
Christian ages until now.
This is, however, far from being the case. The
truth is that, if even we imagine St. John's Gospel
utterly lost to us, the Divinity of our Lord would
stand forth with ample clearness in the narratives
of the Life of Jesus which would be left to us, and in
the teaching and history of the Apostolic Church.
Each of the Gospels has, let us thank God, its dis-
tinct individual features and character.
By the
variety of their style and method, and even through
their surface contradictions, we get a wider and
deeper insight into the mind and the life of the
Lord Jesus than any one portrait, however full and
elaborate, could convey. How wonderfully, for
example, words of discourse and touches of narra-
3
272
THE RISEN WORLD.
tive in St. John, fill up lacunæ, harmonize discords, and
explain movements which find their place in the earlier
Evangelists! On the other hand, though much is made
of the peculiar form and character of our Lord's dis-
courses as John records them-so unlike the character
of the discourses which the other Evangelists have
preserved—and though there is, without question,
a special loftiness and intensity in the discourses of
our Lord to the Jews at Jerusalem, with which
mainly St. John concerns himself; yet such a
passage for instance as Matt. xi. 25-27, especially
in the last of these verses, All things are delivered
unto me of my Father; and no man knoweth the Son
but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father,
save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will
reveal him, is entirely in the manner of St. John,
and would, indeed, at once be set down, on the
score of internal evidence, as belonging to the
fourth Gospel.
,
With regard to the whole question of the Gospel
of St. John, of nothing do I feel more firmly per、
suaded than that the attempt to refer it to a later
date than the Apostolic age, would be simply con-
fusion. It is as clear to my mind as the sunlight,
that the man who wrote it was himself an auditor
of the words and a spectator of the scenes which he
records. The whole tone and spirit of the book
declare that one who had seen and heard was
testifying that which he had seen and heard. And,
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273
further, there never was a generation in which that
Gospel could have been written but the generation
which still heard the echoes of the voice and traced
the footsteps of the Lord. A Gospel must have
been lined in the age in which that masterpiece of
Evangelic narrative was written.
Supreme works of genius and power never appear
in an age alone. They always stand as the apex of
a pyramid of great kindred productions. Shake-
speare, for example, wrote the world's dramatic
masterpieces in an age when all men were busy
about drama. It was the theme of universal
interest; it was the form into which the master
poetic mind would be inevitably constrained to
throw his work. In the great age of Elizabeth
the drama was so much in vogue that the log-book
of a ship lying at Sierra Leone, records, as we
learn from Hakluyt, how the officers and crew had
a play of Skakespeare acted three times in one
week. In the same way the intense`intellectual
activity of the age of the Sophists of Athens,
created the atmosphere in which alone the master
works of Greek philosophy could be conceived and
executed. The strong excitement and interest of
the people about the subject themes, in these great
eras of intellectual creation, generated the vital heat
through which alone the supreme work of genius
which the age produced could be given to the
world. We could as soon believe that Shake-
18
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THE RISEN WORLD.
speare's dramas could have been written in the age
of the Restoration, as that St. John's Gospel was
the product of a century later than that which gave
birth to the Synoptic Gospels.
It.
In succeeding centuries the Church had drifted
away from the standpoint of the Evangelist. It
was busy about its organization, and not about its
Master's spirit. The priest and the sacrament were
in the foreground; who was thinking or caring
about such a sublime spiritual Form as John pour-
trays? His Gospel was out of tune with the whole
temper and tendency of the age, in which our
destructive critics would have us believe that it was
written, and in tune with the whole thought, interest,
and effort of the age in which the Gospel was being
preached as a new Revelation to the world. Only
the man who had seen, heard, and known, and who
was telling with the severest truthfulness what he
had seen, heard, and known, could have painted the
portrait which remains, and will remain while the
world endures, its most precious possession; that
which makes God most real, and draws man most
potently to the Divine fellowship and love.
Nor, we may affirm as surely, could the Church
ever have been established, the Kingdom of Heaven
proclaimed, and the world won to Christ, had there not
existed in full strength and clearness in the hearts of
all the preachers, that central belief which the Gospel
of St. John expounds most deeply, but which is
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275
entwined equally with every utterance of the earlier
Evangelists, and with the teaching and preaching of
the whole Apostolic Church. This is the belief that
the Cross on Calvary expressed the love of God to
man as it could be expressed only by One who
suffered as God for man. It was this which lent
such overmastering energy to the Apostolic pro-
clamations; and it was this truth that men every-
where received with a passion of joy and devotion
which made the first converts to the truth the great
confessors and martyrs of the Lord. As a thirsty
land sucks in the showers, so did men's thirsting
hearts take in the Gospel; and when they knew in
very truth that God had dwelt among them, to share
as a Brother-man in all the toil, burden, and tempta-
tion of their human lot; had Himself endured a more
terrible anguish under life's sad, stern conditions
than any that they could be called to suffer; had
drunk to the dregs a more bitter cup than any
which they could be called to lift to their lips; then
the doctrine spread at once like magic; it sprang
from heart to heart, from city to city, from land to
land, and with a truly marvellous rapidity overran
the whole Roman world. It stirred man to an
intense hatred of the evil which had wrought such
anguish; to a passionate devotion to those great
ends of Christian ministry which drew the Redeemer
to our world; and to a lofty occupation with the
realities of that Higher sphere to which the God-man
276
THE RISEN WORLD.
had visibly re-ascended, and had lifted for ever the
hopes and the destinies of the race. But understand,
that in the heart of it all lies the Divine fact em-
bodied in the Apostolic tradition, Without contro-
versy, great is the mystery of godliness: God was
manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of
angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the
world, received up into Glory.
THE LOVE OF CHRIST CONSTRAINETH US-To what?
To what did it constrain the Apostles and the
Apostolic Church? To what is it equally effectual
to constrain us, and man to the end of time?
I. It constrained the Apostles and should constrain
us to take service as Christ's soldiers against sin-
that evil which wrought the agony and bloody sweat,
the cross and passion, the death and burial of
Incarnate God.
It would be an utter mistake to imagine that man's
struggle against evil had its origin in the ministry of
our Lord, or even in Revelation; it is the oldest,
the primæval battle. Man has never ceased to
struggle fitfully against the sin which had enslaved
him, though his struggle, in the end, seemed only to
rivet more tightly his chains; he has never been
heart-whole in the service of the devil who had
made him captive; always there was inward protest
against and hatred of the yoke. The ultimate fruits
of sin are so bitter while its immediate pleasure is so
keen; the wild demand of passion is so imperious while
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277
the inward witness against it is so clear and strong,
that men in all ages have been kept in a state of
distraction, drawn two ways, rent in sunder by the
opposing claims of the immediate and the ultimate
good. There has been groaning and struggling in the
chains, but the fascination of the tempter has been
too strong; and the evil one has had his way, sin has
reigned unto death in all countries and in all ages of
the world. This is at root the tragic element in
life. Every great religion has had its spring in the
uprising of man's nature against evil. This, too, is
the source of all the great reformations and revolu-
tions of society-for Revolution is just Reformation
too long delayed. They express the passionate
desire of men and peoples to rise, if it may be
possible, no matter at what cost-men are reckless
of cost at such eras-to a nobler, holier, and Diviner
life. In the end, however, the evil has seemed
always to be master. No doubt these all were
steps of progress to the eye of Him to whom all
things are naked and open; but looking merely at
the outward aspect of society, the spiritual battle
seemed to be going against man, until the only
begotten Son of God invaded the domain of evil and
wrested the sceptre from its hand for ever.
As a
consummate general when he appears upon the scene
of a confused and apparently hopeless struggle,
gathers up to a head all the forces that are spending
their scattered strength in vain, puts new heart and
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THE RISEN WORLD.
hope into the feeble dispirited bands, re-arrays them
and leads them to renew the conflict with sure hope
of victory; so when the Lord appeared, 'Emmanuel,
'God with us,' all the conditions of the conflict were
changed, and the face of the great human host was
set for victory.
Evil was never seen to be evil in all its deadly
malignity until it had slain the Holy One and the
Just, and laid the Prince of Life dead in a world
whose hope it sought to destroy. Then there arose
what I can only call a mighty passion of hatred
against evil, and the struggle against the Evil one
acquired the solemnity and fervour of a Holy War.
Men touched by the love of Christ rose up against
the author of this tremendous anguish; and in
every form in which they could see evil malignly at
work it was met and mastered by hearts fired with
this Divine love. It was the beginning of a vital
moral reformation, how widespread, how profound
the history of Christendom witnesses. Alas! it has
been working slowly, we cry in our impatience,
but yet, blessed be God, its work has been sure, and
is very visible over the range of the ages, through
all the spheres of human thought, activity, and life.
It is the love of Christ Jesus which has strengthened
men to lay deep down in the very foundations of
all human things the basis of a restored, a purified,
a progressive, in other words a Christian, order of
society.
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279
And now in the same strength and with the same.
ardour let each one arm himself against Christ's
great enemy, and ours; against the adversary of
all that is righteous, the destroyer of all that is
beautiful, the corrupter of all that is holy, the
murderer of all that is living, in us and in the world.
The one invincible antagonist of sin is Love. Sin
is self-enfolded, Love is self-renouncing, loyal to the
true Lord and King. And Love is the overmaster-
ing passion. It is when the love of Christ inspires
and constrains a man that Satan falls like lightning
from the throne of his heart. Sin, the love of the
world and of the things of the world, is the deadly
malady; it drains the
it drains the energy of its victims,
their hope, their joy, at the very springs; their
dulness and unconsciousness of its insidious work
are the sign and measure of the paralysis creeping
over their being. Awake! awake thou that sleepest,
and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee
light. Christ shall pour a tide of vigorous joyful life
through all the ducts and channels of your numbed
and paralyzed frame. The love of Christ shall
arouse you, arm you, and send you forth His
soldier, His champion, to that battle-of which
all other noble battles are but the echoes-the battle
against the sin which is tormenting, degrading,
destroying you and the world. Look at the evil
of your own heart and of the world in the light
of Christ's holiness; study its malignant character,
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THE RISEN WORLD.
overthrow and
and work under the shadow of that gloom in which
on Calvary it buried the Lord; and then vow
yourself Christ's champion for its
destruction. Begin here and now. Who is on the
Lord's side in this great battle of the universe, let
him come hither and arm himself for the fight.
The love of Christ constraining you, your march
shall be from strength to strength, from conquest
to conquest, until the time when, sin and Satan
beaten down beneath your feet for ever, you
stand at last among the white-robed throng, and
wave before the throne of the great Captain of
Salvation the palm of your glorious and everlasting
victory.
II. The love of Christ constrained the Apostles-
and let it constrain us-to be Christ's ministers and
fellow-helpers in the work of the Regeneration; the
work which fills His heart and occupies His
energies on the throne to which the Father hath
highly exalted Him, and on which He reigns,
subduing all things to Himself.
The first work wrought by the love of Christ
for man was the deadly antagonism to evil which
has just occupied our thoughts. This is funda-
mental. Until a man has felt before the Cross the
true measure of his sin, has bewailed before the
Cross his proneness to transgression, and has
gathered from the Cross the strength, the courage,
the earnest resolution to free himself from the
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281
bondage and put his foot upon the neck of his
hitherto triumphant foe, he has not looked into
the heart of the Divine mystery of peace. It is
the Cross which has lent and still lends to man's
struggle against evil the dignity and the intensity
of a Crusade. But the next great need of heaven
for which the love of Christ lays its constraints on
men, is the need of ministry; the help of willing
hands and hearts in the work of the regeneration.
Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sick-
nesses. The world is still full of the bitter fruits of
transgression. Every relation of life is desecrated,
every spring of joy is fouled, every beautiful thing
is marred, every holy and blessed thing is tainted
and may be made a minister of corruption and
death. And the love of Christ-the love of the
Holy and Blessed One whose mercy drew Him
from on High to take on Himself the burden of
human pain, misery and sin-called forth a host
of eager untiring ministers to every form of human
need and woe. There was a marvellous uprising
of man's ministry to man, when that mighty Love
had wound its constraints around human hearts.
The beautiful picture which is presented in the
Gospel of St. Matthew, in that wonderful but much
misread parable of the sheep and the goats, was
abundantly realized. I was an hungered, and ye
gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye
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clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in
prison, and ye came unto me. In this region, at
any rate, the plea of the Christian apologists was
triumphant, none could gainsay it. The slave's
fetters were struck off, the sick were visited, the
harlots were reclaimed; nay, even the plague-
stricken found men and women who, for the love
of Christ, would touch and dress and even kiss their
sores, and enfold them, miserable outcasts as they
were, in an embrace of love. The world became
full of emissaries, tender, devoted, wise, and constant,
who went everywhere searching out the springs of
human want and wretchedness, and casting into the
fountain of bitter waters the salt of Christian purity
and devotion. I say 'searching out the springs'
of human woe. I have always thought it a noble,
a most Christian, passage in the Book of Job in
which the patriarch, recalling the glories of his
fatherly rule over his tribe, declares, The cause which
I knew not I searched out. It is easy to pity and
to help the miserable who are thrust under our
notice; what the world wants and the love of
Christ supplies is those who will search out the
hidden causes of the want and the woe of mankind.
The world's need is as sore in our day as it was
of old, perhaps sorer. At least we know it better
and can take juster measure of the forces which are
required to meet and master it, and to bring the day
when the Divine Kingdom shall come, and the
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283
Divine Will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.
With the sphere of our light the sphere of our dark-
ness widens, and each new attempt at vital reforma-
tion but reveals new wastes to be tilled, and further
ruin to be restored. But the sphere of light does
widen through the ages-the Christian Cosmos, in
which the principle of a Divine order is working, and
winning continually fresh domains from the realms.
of Chaos and of night. Christ is pleading with and
constraining us to meet the need, which is thus un-
folding itself, with an ever-widening range of holy
ministry. In the name of Christ, by the love of
Christ, I call you the young especially who are just
entering on life—I pray you, as if Christ did beseech
you by my lips, to come up to help in the work of
the Regeneration, the work of making His Love
triumphant over all the woe, the wrong and the sel-
fishness of the world. Seek out the ignorant, the
sick, the sad, the sinful, and under the constraints of
His love teach, heal, comfort, save. That love will
lend a gentleness to your bearing, a tenderness to
your touch and tone, a depth to your consolation, a
quickening energy to your word which will make your
ministry a power, and will prepare the way for the
coming of the Lord to their hearts. Many are doing
this work nobly and effectually. The most hopeful
feature of our times is, perhaps, the multitude of
ministries having Christ's Life for their inspiration
and guide, which are abroad in the world and are
•
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THE RISEN WORLD.
busy consciously and joyfully about His work. But
the harvest truly is plenteous while the labourers are
few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that
he will send forth labourers into his harvest. And
while you pray, Come, Come!
III. The love of Christ constrained the first dis-
ciples to regard themselves as citizens of a heavenly
State; while still bound by the necessities and nobly
loyal to the duties of this mortal life, to be subject to
the laws, stirred by the interests and bound by the
fellowships of that city which hath foundations, whose
builder and maker is God.
It is the love of Christ which has consecrated
man's Immortality. Man is a being of two worlds;
his feet press the dust, his face fronts the heavens.
It is the love of Christ which lifts his being heaven-
wards, redeems him from the sphere of the beasts
which perish, makes the day of his being eternity,
its home God's everlasting kingdom. The earnest
expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifes-
tation of the Sons of God. Through the love of
Christ this manifestation will be complete. This
belief in Immortality, in the blessedness and glory
of the heavenly state which is to be born out of all
the pain and travail of our present, was the essential
condition of that victorious battle against evil and
that strenuous ministry of charity, by which the
world in the apostolic days was being blessed and
saved. All the sources of healing lie for man in that
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285
upper sphere. The Church of the apostolic age
could say truly, All my springs are in Thee. I know
whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is
able to keep that which I have committed unto him
against that day, was the language, not of St. Paul
only but of the whole apostolic band. Therefore
they wrought with an intensity of energy, with a
victorious force, which nothing could withstand.
The powers of the world to come were over those
men, were before them, behind them, within them,
and what chance had the power of this world in the
shock? Verily we wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities, against powers, against the
rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual
wickedness in high places. And the weapons of that
warfare, stirred as it is and sustained from on High,
are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pull
ing down of strongholds; casting down imaginations,
and every high thing that exalteth itself against the
knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every
thought to the obedience of Christ.
It was the love of Christ which constrained men
thus to lift their thoughts, their hopes, their loves;
and so intense, so absorbing, was their passion, that
the bonds of earth grew light as silken threads; it
needed no straining to snap them, and to leave their
spirits all unbound from earth, ready, eager, to soar
to that celestial sphere. Paul had a desire to depart
and to be with Christ; which is far better. But the
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THE RISEN WORLD.
love of Christ had taught him to think not of what
was best for himself, but what was best for man.
And so, if it was needful for his brethren who were
in the flesh that he should still abide with them, he
was willing to stay and to endure. This steady
devotion to the duties of earth in spite of longing
for the glories of heaven, which characterized the
early Christian teachers, is surely one of the
strongest witnesses that the Lord Who inspired them
was Divine. Nor could bonds and afflictions move
them; tortures lost their power to affright; they
could glory in their anguish if it did but bring them
closer to the fellowship of their Lord, and open the
path to His presence.
Out of that higher world, to the fellowship of
which the love of Christ constraineth us, have come
forth all the nobler influences which have wrought
benediction for the individual man and for human
society. Cut the bonds of association with that
world, as some are trying to cut them; kill man's
spiritual trust and hope, as some are trying to kill.
them; and understand that you cut at the same time
the sources of strength of all the most persistent
efforts to help and to bless mankind.
Be it ours
+
This is the
to keep the communications open!
Church's true function, to make the things of that
world the abiding realities of this, to hold the veil
lifted that men may see how in Christ the two
worlds are one. And we can only fulfil that function
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·287
by living ourselves in that world and breathing the
breath of its life. Let us fill our eyes with its forms
of beauty, let us bathe our hearts in its atmosphere,
and then go forth and so live before our fellow-men
that those who look upon us may be constrained to
take knowledge of us that we have been with
"Jesus.' Risen with Christ, let our thoughts, affec-
tions, and hopes frequent that sphere in which He
reigns. Let us lift up not our voices only; but our
lives, as witnesses to the reality of that spiritual
world; and then that love of Christ which has
inspired our life-long battle with evil, our life-long
ministry to mankind, shall lift us at last, when the
battle ends in the shout of victory, to share the joy
of the great Captain of our Salvation on His glorious
everlasting throne.
:
XIV.
THE FREE CITIZENSHIP. (I.)
The common people heard him gladly.—MARK xii. 37.
ET us look a little closely at the nature, the
conditions, and the needs of the class which
listened most gladly to the teaching of the
Lord; never forgetting that it comprehends at least
nine-tenths of the human race, and is substantially
the world which Christ came to save.
The common people.
"
It is the toiling multitude that is designated by
the word; the class which lives by labour and finds,
on the whole, life hard and its conditions stern, but
which is in close contact with the great realities
of being, the 'ought' and the must.' Knowing
little of life as a school for the culture of the rich
and varied faculties of the being, and little of the lofty
joy which culture brings, the common people miss
much which those above them in the social scale
find so beautiful and gladdening, and which for
them balances largely the toil and care so few are
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289
•
free from; but they are mostly learned in the lore
which is taught by the stern and yet benignant task-
masters-Necessity, Duty, and Love. The world
is full in all ages of a great, and, in the main, a sad
multitude, who share a common lot with little to
break the monotonous dead level of their lives; a
mass with common habits, experiences, and needs;
obedient to common masters, and bound down to
constant, often wearing, toil for bread. They are
the common people' because they belong to so
wide a communion; nevertheless it is in their life,
condition, and destiny, and not in those of the
privileged few, that the problem of the human must
be studied; it is in the helping and saving of them
that the great purpose of God is to be wrought out
to full completeness, and the method of God is to be
vindicated in creating and ruling such a world as
this. The fairest test of the measure in which a
religious teacher is in harmony with the life of God,
is the power which he wields over the hearts, and
above all, over the hopes, of the poor.
Now it is very easy to be foolishly sentimental
about the toils, burdens and miseries of the poor.
Nothing comes more readily to the hand and
nothing is more tempting to the imagination of a
Christian philanthropist, than drawing in startling
lines the contrast between what seems on the sur-
face the easy, gay, sunlit lives of the upper classes,
and the groaning, sweat-stained, tear-drenched lot
19
290
THE RISEN WORLD.
of the conscripts of labour, whose existence here is
one long round of grinding toil, whose only amuse-
ment is coarse dissipation, and whose only friend, we
are sometimes told, is death. Very easy is it, too,
in the manner of Victor Hugo, to gather up all the
vices and woes of the 'miserables' of society, lay
them at the door of our political and social institu-
tions, and say with dramatic fervour, There, that is
all society's work; the aristocrats have to answer
for that before God, and God will demand the
account!
Such words are effective enough but contain very
partial truth. We may be sure that there is a
greater evenness of advantages in the various lots
than a casual glance reveals. We may be sure that
there is some profound meaning in the words of
Christ, Blessed be ye poor. The lot of the poor
cannot, on the whole, be in such dire disproportion to
the lot of the well-to-do classes of society, as we are
sometimes tempted to suppose. The rich and the
cultivated have their full share of the burden and
the strain of life. The most wretched lot in Europe
is probably that of its most Imperial Despot. Culture,
while it enlarges the circle of our interests and
delights, lends to the nerves a keener tension and
widens the circle of our cares and our pains. Suicide
is not specially the poor man's refuge, rather the
contrary; among the poor suicides are rare. The
sorrow of th 'Man of Sorrows' had little to do
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291
with His poverty, perhaps His poverty brought
Him within reach of His richest joys; His purity,
His heavenly-mindedness, His sympathy, His self-
sacrifice-these were the deepest springs of His
human pain. Blessed be ye poor, He said, and He
knew their lot for He lived among them and shared
their hunger, their want, nay the homelessness of
their outcasts. And
And yet He gave His benediction
to this lot as, on the whole, nearest to the blessing of
heaven. No doubt we must understand that the
full range of this blessing stretches on through
eternity. Blessed be ye poor,' said Christ, and He
meant there and then; the blessing is not wholly in
the future, but at the same time the blessing is not
wholly in the present. It seems to me quite idle to
imagine that within the little limits of this mortal
life this blessing in its fulness can be reaped by the
poor; and I say frankly that, if you deny Immortality
to man, I see no possible justification of the methods
of the Creator and Ruler of such a world as this. It
is mainly in the ethical culture, the education and
the discipline of the moral faculties, that the bene-
diction of Christ is to be realized; and it is just the
first school-lessons of the Divine Wisdom which the
sons of toil are set to con in this life. It would be
dire and hopeless confusion, if all the threads of the
woof are to be snapped, and all the lines of the
development broken off, by death.
We talk of the toiling masses. Ah, how hard
292
THE RISEN WORLD.
they toil, and at what cost! Many have not the
faintest notion of the ceaseless, wearing toil which
is the portion, life-long, of the great mass of the
peasantry, especially the peasant women, in France,
Switzerland, and Italy. The whole peasant popu-
lation of North Italy is being scourged by a new
and terrible disease, through nothing but the miser-
able food with which they try in vain to nourish
their strength for their exhausting tasks. And
there are hundreds of millions of Hindoos and
Chinese, toiling with a steadiness and constancy
which our strongest European workmen fail to mate,
who live on rice or offal, and in times of pestilence
and famine perish like gnats in the lightning's blaze.
From far Japan the same sad tale is repeated.
Light carriages have lately been introduced there,
a recent traveller tells us, which are drawn on level
ground some forty miles a day by men.
We are
informed that 'men can make so much more by
'drawing them than by almost any kind of skilled
'labour, that thousands of fine young men desert
'agricultural pursuits, and flock into the towns to
'make draught animals of themselves; though it is
'said that the average duration of a man's life after
'he takes to running is only five years, and that the
'runners fall victims in large numbers to aggravated
'forms of heart and lung disease.'¹ It is the case
of our own needle-grinders at Sheffield over again;
Miss Bird's "Japan," i. 18.
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293
the condition and the result are the same all round
the world. And this condition of the common
people would be a burning stain on the wisdom and
goodness of the Maker and Ruler, Who holds in His
administration to the method of freedom whatever
it may cost, but for the Revelation of Life and
Immortality; but for that boundless future in which
He will work out His benignant purposes, and
reap from the toils and tears and groans of this
life great harvests which will enrich and gladden
eternity.
But even with this vision of the future the problem
is a hard one, and God demands a large, strong
faith. God takes a long day to work out His
purposes, and age after age He hears, and we hear,
the sighing and groaning of the poor. It is the
distinctive honour of the Bible that from the first it
has faced this problem, and has made the estate of
the poor the special subject of its care. Hearing
the word of its Prophets and Psalmists, men have
been made to understand that the poor had God for
their Defender and Keeper, and that their sorrows
were a burden on His Fatherly heart. I believe,
too, that further acquaintance with the ancient litera-
tures of the world will reveal, that this thought
about the wrongs and miseries of the poor is not so
exclusively confined to Revelation as we have been
in the habit of thinking. An Egyptian of the time
of the Exodus has left behind him a literary work of
294
THE RISEN WORLD.
no little merit, in which there is a very powerful
description of the ills which the Egyptian peasant
endured in those days, as he endures them still.
But that which is special in Revelation is the clear
and strenuous legislation on the subject, and the
manner in which it is forced upon the heart and
conscience of rulers. The mind of the people was
saturated with the idea of God's care of the poor, so
that it broke forth in their Psalms and Hymns of
praise-Blessed is he that considereth the poor; the
Lord will deliver him in time of trouble; while it
lends the chief interest to the most magnificent,
perhaps, of all the Psalms, the lxxii., in which David
prophesies in strains of almost matchless splendour,
the glories of Messiah's reign :-
All kings shall fall down before him; all nations
shall serve him. For he shall deliver the needy when
he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper.
He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the
souls of the needy. He shall redeem their soul from
deceit and violence: and precious shall their blood be
in his sight.
A series of passages in the Old Testament shows
how in successive ages, God, by His Lawgivers and
Prophets, was taking charge of the condition of the
poor. Take the following noble verses from
Deuteronomy:-
If there be among you a poor man of one of thy
brethren within any of thy gates, in thy land which
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the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden
thy heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother;
but thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and
shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that
which he wanteth. Beware that there be not a
thought in thy wicked heart, saying; The seventh
year, the year of release is at hand; and thine eye be
evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him
nought; and he cry unto the Lord against thee, and
it be sin unto thee.
Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall
not be grieved when thou givest unto him; because
that for this thing the Lord thy God shall bless thee
in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine
hand unto. For the poor shall never cease out of the
land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shall
open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor,
and to thy needy, in thy land.
The same idea is drawn out at greater length in
Leviticus.
live
And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in
decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him; yea
though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may
live with thee. Take thou no usury of him, or
increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may
with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon
usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase. I am
the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of
the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, and
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to be your God. And if thy brother that dwelleth by
thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee, thou shalt
not compel him to serve as a bondservant: but as an
hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with
thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubilee :
and then shall he depart from thee, both he and his
children with him, and shall return unto his own
family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he
return. For they are my servants, which I brought
forth out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold
as bondmen. Thou shalt not rule over him with
rigour, but shalt fear thy God.
In a similar strain Isaiah reproaches the people of
his time.
Behold ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite
with the fist of wickedness: ye shall not fast as ye do
this day, to make your voice to be heard on high. Is it
such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to
afflict his soul?... Is not this the fast that I have
chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the
heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and
that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread
to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are
cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that
thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from
thine own flesh?
These passages, and many kindred ones scattered
through the whole Word of God, instruct us, more-
over, in the Divine method, in God's deep and far-
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reaching plan for righting the wrongs, healing the
wounds, and drying the tears of the world. They
indicate, too, the true answer to the communists'
very natural but very short-sighted question, 'Why
'does not God, if this burden of the want and
'wretchedness of the poor presses so heavily on His
'heart, mend it all by a stroke; making equal distri-
'bution of the gifts of His Providence, and dividing
'to each of His children enough and to spare.' The
answer is, because He is doing something much
better, in its ultimate and everlasting issues, than
could be secured by an equal distribution of the
gifts of His Providence, which would satisfy every
man with nourishing food, and fill his veins with
healthy blood, his senses with tingling joy. There
can be no question that the plan of equal distribu-
tion of gifts, advantages, and possessions is not the
plan on which God has constituted and maintains
human society. He works by the method of indi-
vidual freedom and responsibility, of inequality of
gifts and endowments, of transmission of qualities
and conditions from generation to generation, and
of the ultimate dependence of material blessings on
moral qualities and powers.
When the Church
was founded, and the Kingdom of Heaven was
proclaimed to the world, in the first fervour of feel-
ing there was a distinctly Communistic movement
among the early disciples.
this was not adopted as the
But it is evident that
system of the Church,
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and soon died, as was best for it, a natural death.
The Church, beyond question, recognized the
wisdom of the Divine plan, and threw her whole
energy into the work of saving the poor according
to the counsel and method of Heaven. That
method contemplated the action, through a long,
long, day of moral influences, on the poor them-
selves and on all who have to do with the poor,
that is on all classes and orders of the community.
It is a slow method, and the reverse of striking to
the eye and the imagination. But it is sure; it saves
men in and by their freedom, and it effects a re-
generation of human society which is final and
complete. When men have learnt in freedom to
obey God and to love each other, the lesson is learnt
for all time, and for all eternity.. God will have no
surprises, no coups d'état, in His Kingdom. Slowly,
firmly, with wonderful patience, age after age, He
adheres to His method, and makes the salvation
of the poor a part of the moral regeneration of
human society.
II. While the condition of the poor is the gravest
factor in the problem of God's providential govern-
ment, it is the chronic burden of human societies;
it is the statesman's difficulty as well as the theo-
logian's; the problem of problems with the far-
sighted ruler as well as with the Christian philan-
thropist. When society knows what to do for and
with the common people, how to make the masses
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contented and progressive, the problem will be
solved which has perplexed and distracted the
world's wisest and noblest thinkers from the dawn
of civilization until now.
The first taunt which was flung at Christianity
was that it was the religion of the workman and
the slave. It was true; and the fact was at once
its glory and its power. The growing poverty and
misery of the common people, and the growing
degradation of the ever increasing multitude of
slaves, were destroying the whole fabric of Roman
society, when One appeared Who saved the poor
and the slave by hope, and by saving them saved
society. 'Latifundia perdidere Italiam,' says Pliny.
Great farms were tilled by slave labour and managed
by slave bailiffs; honest peasant industry vanished,
all manual labour fell into contempt because slaves
were everywhere employed upon it; and the days
when a Cincinnatus was called from the ploughshare
to the Dictatorship, were remembered by the faithful
few as a bitter satire on the age of the Cæsars.
The greatest social and political benediction which
Christianity brought to man was the restoration of
the sense of the dignity of labour, and the quicken-
ing of some heart of hope in the poor. 'The dignity
' of labour' has been a familiar idea to man since the
Lord of glory was born in a workman's home, and
shared the toils and privations of a workman's lot;
and by the dignity of labour Christendom to this
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day lives and grows. Always it has been a noble
doctrine of Revelation; the manual labour of the
Jews was the brightest, gladdest, and most strenuous
in the Old World; the labour of the Christian man
who has heard the command, Let every man, wherein
he is called, therein abide with God, is the brightest
and most strenuous labour still. And on this and
all that is connected with it, depends mainly the
prosperity of the State. No society is really at
heart more strong, healthy, and prosperous than its
poorest class; just as no chain is stronger than its
weakest link. The society, the State, is as its poor
are, and the saving of its poor is the saving of the
community. If they are rising steadily in the scale
of manhood, becoming continually more strong, free,
and productive, the State lives and flourishes. If
they are continually sinking in the scale, as in Athens
and Rome of old, the State dwindles, withers, and
dies. In the palmy days of Athens the State was a
limited band of freemen ruling a vast body of slaves.
Such a State is doomed to perish, and Rome also
had to learn this lesson in time.
Here in England, it is in Lambeth and not in
Belgravia, in Bethnal Green and not in St. Stephen's,
that the 'to be or the not to be' of our English nation
is being settled. The statesman and the lawgiver
may do much; as may the physician in treating
disease or in maintaining the tone of health, but
the real question is the vital vigour which he has to
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act upon, if that is strong his treatment tells swiftly
and powerfully, if that is weak and languid he
exhibits his drugs in vain. Whether this noble
England of ours is to live and grow stronger and
more fruitful, or whether it is to grow sickly and
decay, as nations have decayed before this, depends
ultimately on the common people. Our statesmen
cannot save us, our nobles cannot save us, our
jeunesse dorée cannot save us, our merchants
cannot save us; what saves the common people
saves the nation; their degradation in the end
drags all the classes down with them to ruin,
while their elevation and development send a glow
of animation and a tide of energy through all the
organs and pulses of the national life.
When a great religious Teacher appeared Whom
the common people heard gladly, not because He
flattered their pride, confirmed their prejudices or
pandered to their passions, but because He spake
to them as none other ever had spoken to them
or ever could speak to them, of truth, righteousness,
purity, mercy and charity-that is, the things by
which souls and States live and grow strong-then
the politics of the world set themselves to a new
key. I use the word 'politics' advisedly, all great
political movements begin in the spiritual sphere;
and human societies then felt joyfully the stirrings
of a new-born life. Infinitely the most important
political fact measuring its importance by its
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practical influence on the relations, dealings, and
doings of men in this work-a-day world-which that
century or any century has witnessed, was the
appearing of a Divine Teacher, Who could purify
social and domestic relationships, restore the dignity
of labour, and put a new heart of hope into the
poor. Christianity wrought chiefly in the lowest
stratum, choosing the poor of this world rich in faith,
while not many wise men after the flesh, not many
mighty, not many noble were called. Some, it is true,
were called who were the very wisest and noblest,
for the Gospel takes all to its bosom, and com-
prehends all human classes and interests within
its sphere. Still it wrought most effectually in
the humblest classes of society, and the renewing
spread upwards through all its orders and restored
its life. The Divine renewing works from within
outwards, from beneath upwards, and so permeates
the whole. Man's renewing, his philosophical
reformations, work from above downwards, and
never reach far; they never touch the chronic
danger of all societies, the restless discontent of the
poor.
When the French Revolution was beginning to
stir in the hearts of the peasants and workmen of
France, Voltaire wrote to D'Alembert, 'We have
'never pretended to enlighten the cobblers and the
'maid-servants; we leave that to the apostles.' Well
within twenty years the cobblers and maid-ser-
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303
vants had in their hands the political destinies of
France and of the Continent of Europe. Because
Voltaire and his philosophers left the cobblers and
the maid-servants to the apostles, and the Gallican
Church had no apostle to preach to them-nothing but
mummeries on the one hand and anathemas on the
other—the very gutters in the streets of Paris ran
red with blood, and thrones went down like straws
before the Revolutionary shock. And because Eng-
land had apostles to send, and by her Wesleys and
Whitfields laid the restraining hand of God's
righteousness and love on passions which would,
had they burst forth, have thrown even the horrors
of September massacres into the shade, England
passed through the Revolutionary paroxysm not only
unharmed, but ennobled, elevated, purified, more
deeply Christian; and entered with high resolution
on that career of large, free, fruitful development,
which she still pursues. 'French Revolutions,'
with all their unutterable atrocity and horrors, are
just the bursting forth of the lava flood which is
always seething in that dread abyss, the wrongs and
miseries of the poor. That which saved our country
from kindred horrors (or darker, for our people are
more terrible than the French when their passion is
fired) was the kindling of some holy and beautiful
hope in the oppressed and wretched through the
preaching of the great Evangelists, whom the
common people heard gladly, as they heard their
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Master, because they seemed to bring some blessed
assurance that the God of Heaven watched and cared,
into tearful, toilworn, and desperate hearts. John
Wesley did more than any man in the eighteenth
century, to give to our political Revolution a character
of noble, free and lasting progress; because he
touched so deeply the springs of spiritual hope and
joy in the heart of the common people. Whatever
the Evangelical School may have come to now as a
theological party, or Methodism as an ecclesiastical
system, one cannot think without a shudder of the
horrors, from which they saved this country when
the demon of Revolution stalked devastating through
Europe, and held in her high places the very Satur-
nalia of lust, blasphemy, and blood. And it is the
one salvation of societies still; the kindling of a
heaven-born hope in the heart of the great mass of
the people. Those who can kindle it are the
saviours of their times, as He was the Saviour of
all times, Whom the common people heard gladly
when He made known to them, as He only could
make known to them, the great mercy, the great love,
and the great hope of God.
And the common people, with their toils, their
burdens, their cares, their pains, and the hard, often
terribly hard struggle of their lives, not only claim
but strain the sympathies of every generous and
compassionate heart. Their estate is a heavy
burden on man's heart as well as on God's. There
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are many who would be startled, shocked, distressed
beyond measure could they follow moment by mo-
ment, say for one week, the life of a poor family
in the heart of a great city, or in some fair sweet
country village where wild rose and honeysuckle
load the air with fragrance, and the birds trill hymns
of praise on every bough. The vision, the realiza-
tion of all that hard poverty means and the life to
which it dooms its subjects-I will not say victims,
for while God lives and reigns we dare not regard
the poor as a prey-would poison all their springs of
enjoyment, and make them cry with impassioned
vehemence, as saints and prophets have cried in all
ages of the world, 'Awake, O arm of the Lord;
'awake, to help and to save!' There are times when
a minister of the Gospel is just ashamed to enter
his own comfortable, warm, well-kept home, fresh
from the miserable scenes which he has had to look
upon; times when he can understand that transport
of sympathy among the early converts which moved
them to 'sell their possessions and goods, and dis-
'tribute to every man as every man had need.' Then
he is checked by the reflection, as the Church was
checked by the reflection, that such distribution
would but perpetuate, intensify, and enlarge the
mischief. If Communism would right the wrong
and supply the need, it would have been done long
ago; but the intelligence of mankind instructs them
that Communism would be but a step deeper down
20
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THE RISEN WORLD.7
(
into the abyss. Most of us, to whom the 'lines are
fallen in pleasant places,' 'eat the fat and drink the
'sweet,' and rest ourselves pleasantly when our day's
task is done in our warm bright homes by our
winter fires; or we travel forth gaily to refresh our-
selves with the fairest scenes of beauty that earth
can spread before us, we delight our cultured facul-
ties with the vision of the splendours of Nature or
the glories of Art, and we say 'Life is good, the
'world is fair, it is a blessed thing to be,' because we
realize so feebly what existence means to a great
multitude of our fellow-men around us, and are
content with a mere surface inspection of their lot.
The Japanese have a proverb, If you hate a man,
'let him live'—one of the most terrible proverbs, I
think, in human literature. Those who have studied
the matter closely and with impartial eye are con-
vinced, that one great reason why Christianity spreads
so slowly among Oriental peoples, is its doctrine of
Life and Immortality. Life is the thing which
they chiefly dread. Think of the existence of the
peasantry under the brutal Oriental despotisms from
the days of Nimrod until now, and you will not
wonder at it. Life is to them a terrible endowment,
and the Gospel which promises life, wakens no glad
echoes in their hearts. The more that generous,
earnest and compassionate natures are brought into
contact with the life of the common people, the more
are they possessed and absorbed by the sympathies,
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the anxieties, the distresses with which it burdens
them. I have known many whose health was worn
and wasted by the sorrow which they daily pressed
themselves to look upon; which they dared not turn
from, because Christ has taught them that the only
truly noble life is a life which occupies itself in large
measure with the welfare of the masses of mankind.
And for such, charged as human history is with the
tales of heroisms, of glorious achievements and more
glorious sacrifices, gemming with heavenly lustre its
sad coloured woof, the very brightest page of that
history is the chapter which records, that One who
spake as no other man ever spake, and did as no
other man ever did, in whom all the thought of
Heaven about man's life found utterance, and on
whom all the help of Heaven to man's life was laid,
gathered the poor in throngs about Him, won their
confidence, braced their energies, kindled their hopes,
and made life seem to them noble and beautiful once
more. He so filled them with joy and thankfulness
for all that God had done for them, and all that God
could be to them, in their humble workshops, their
lowly homes, their wretched lairs, that they would
have scorned to change their poor estate with all its
toils and burdens for the riches, the thrones and
the palaces of kings. They too were kings, Christ
had taught them, and their toils and burdens were
training them to reign. The common people heard
that Teacher gladly, and the preachers whom He sent
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:
forth. The Gospel of the Love of God, the name
Father and all the promise with which it is charged
not only reconciled them to life's hard conditions,
but filled them with peace, with hope, with bounding
joy, in place of their restless pain or dull despair,
and human society was saved.
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THE FREE CITIZENSHIP. (II.)
The common people heard him gladly.—MARK xii. 37.
N the preceding discourse we have considered
the actual condition of those classes of society
embraced under the term 'the common
'people,' and have glanced at the problem which their
lot presents to us, whether we regard it from the
point of view of the theologian, the statesman, or the
philanthropist. Let us now go on to study a little
closely the relation of the poor to the teaching of
Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven. The common
people heard him gladly. Why, and with what re
sult?
It is very important that we should clearly under-
stand the method which Christ adopted when dealing
with the common people; for this struck, as it were,
the key note of the teaching and influence of the
Christian Church. It was distinctly not as a class-
with class interests and class hatreds and jealousies—
that our Lord gathered the common people round
Him, and preached to them the Kingdom of Heaven.
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THE RISEN WORLD.
+
It was by the humanity which was in them that He
attracted them; it was the Son of Man who drew
these children of men to His heart. And it is just
because of the unsophisticated humanity, the common
human needs, experiences, and hopes which they
exhibit, that in all ages the poor have been brought
into such close relation with the Gospel, and have
been ready to believe that they were chosen rich in
faith, and heirs of the kingdom. Now it is easy to
gather people in throngs to hear burning denunciations
of those whom they hate. It is easy to kindle and
inflame social jealousies and antipathies, and to lead
vast mobs to the assault of the citadels where the
privileged classes store their wealth and maintain
their state. But Christianity, wonderful to relate,
harmonized discords, calmed passions, and cast out
jealousies and hates. It had the most revolutionary
doctrine about the natural equality of men, proclaim-
ing that there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision
nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor
free, but that all were one in Christ Jesus. With
such explosive moral and political material we
might have imagined that it would shatter in pieces the
whole framework of society, and build upon the wrecks
a new order of things, based on a visible equality.
Christianity came into a world in which nobles were
a privileged class, in which women were domestic
serfs, and in which the business of life was in-
creasingly carried on by slaves. But instead of
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311
conducting a violent social and political revolution,
it proved itself, in the true sense, eminently con-.
servative of existing institutions, while laying deep
down the foundations of a new and nobler order of:
society. The whole visible result of its influence
was to compact and to edify homes, fellowships, and
States. I emphasize the word visible, because I
believe that what in the end was really fatal to the
Roman Empire was Christianity. The preaching
of the Gospel was the death warrant of the Imperial
tyranny, but its disintegrating, disrupture force,
wrought only through the course of generations;
the immediate result of the preaching of the Apostles:
was to bind more closely the nexus of the community.
The Gospel lent its strength everywhere to compact
and consolidate society, while introducing into the
heart of all human relations the principles of a radical,
that is a vital, reform, By far the mightiest power
which has ever been brought to bear on the political
aggregate is the ministry of our Lord.
Him, a class with a
And we can only understand this truly wonderful
result when we study the real relation of the common
people to His teaching; the heart of the secret lies
there. It was not, as I have said, as a class
that He called them to
grievance, with complaints of other classes, with
class wrongs to redress.
to redress. He cared little about their
class contentions and social jealousy. The grievance
which occupied His thought and which He cared to
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THE RISEN WORLD.
:
relieve was the burden with which the devil had
bound them; the contention which He cared to
inflame and direct was the contention against sin,
and all the weakness and wretchedness of which it
was the parent in their hearts and in their lives.
But to what are called grievances in the political
sense He was strangely indifferent. One came to
Him once with a grievance and thought to enlist
His aid. Master, speak to my brother, that he divide
the inheritance with me. And he said unto him, Man,
who made me a judge, or a divider over you. And
he said unto them, Take heed and beware of covetous-
ness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance
of the things which he possesseth. This, and a terribly
startling parable, was all that he took by his appeal.
There was another inheritance in peril there, the
inheritance of the Father's Kingdom. Christ thought
of that, and tried to stir the poor complaining sup-
pliant to care for that, and let the beggarly elements
of this world fall into what order they could.
This does not imply that it was of no moment into
what order they fell. The Gospel is no doctrine of
indifference about the things of this world. On the
contrary it has set man's thought and work about
these things in a new and altogether higher key.
The influence of Christianity has been felt mightily
on liberty, on art, on literature, on commerce, on
handicraft, and on everything which a man may law-
fully pursue. But, 'attend first to the things that come
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:
1
'first,' is Christ's command. Care supremely for the
things which are supremely important; and all other
and lower things will then arrange themselves in a
better and truer order than can possibly grow out of
caring supremely for the poorest and lowest things.
And this seeking first the kingdom of God, and his
righteousness will, by the full and noble develop-
ment of the faculties which it secures and the energy
which it throws into the life, continually increase the
possessions, the products, and the commodities of
mankind.
Christ then drew the multitude to Him not as a
class with interests separate from, and often opposed
to, those of other classes, but as men and women in
whom the common human needs were as fully de-
veloped as in any Rabbi, Scribe, or Priest, and whose
hearts were hungering, though they knew it not, for
that which Heaven alone could send. His whole
appeal was to that which lay beneath all their class
distinctions and wrongs; to a region in which, in any
time of great excitement when the deep things of
human hearts come forth and reveal themselves,
prince and peasant find themselves strangely one.
Truth, righteousness, purity, charity, the love of
God, the worth of the soul, the issues of life—these
concern man as man, and have to do with that part of
his being in which there is as little note of social
dignities and humilities, as there is of earth's moun-
tains and valleys from the height of some distant star.
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Hence our Lord when He gathered the common
people around Him, brought them nearer to their
brethren, by drawing out their interest and hope to
objects which claim the attention and demand the
homage alike of all human hearts. By appealing to
the human in the poor He made all humanity closer
and dearer to them, and wove sweet bonds of charity.
around classes whom it would have been so easy to
lock in furious and deadly strife. Hence, too, the
rich men, who had the human heart left in them,
who were conscious of common sympathies and
needs, heard Jesus as gladly as the multitude, and
were content, nay glad, to be among the common
people and as the common people in all that con-
cerned the Higher Life and the Kingdom of Heaven.
And so in all ages Christianity, while preaching a
broad and grand doctrine of equality and maintain-
ing with stern simplicity the right of the poor, has
been a uniting principle in all progressive societies;
it has rebuked class jealousies, mitigated class
enmities, and harmonized class discords; binding
by the cords of a man with bands of love all sections
of humanity at once to each other and to God.
And there are reasons, very high and solemn
reasons, why the poor should listen thus eagerly to
the teaching of Jesus, and why they should draw from
it in all ages those vital influences which would
purify their hearts and renew their lives, and through
them renew and purify human society.
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:
B
For the poor are truly religious; religion is a daily
need in their hard sad lives, and they know it; any-
thing like a Gospel always stirs and warms their
hearts; and if in any generation the poor are exten-
sively indifferent to Christian teaching, it is because
something not born of heaven has come between
them and the living voice and touch of the Lord.
But the religion must be vital, deep and stirring or
it will not touch them, and such religion they found
in Christ's life and words. There was a reality and
power about His teaching which was a new thing in
their sad experience; something came forth from
Christ which pierced to, and gladdened their hearts.
The teaching that they were used to had about it
neither light nor glow. They listened to it drearily—
as men and women in modern churches listen when
the preacher has nothing to say from God-but no
word ever reached them which drew forth a penitent
tear, kindled a holy resolution, or lifted a thought or
hope to Heaven. The words of Christ entered the
inner chamber of their spirits where Divine visitants
were rare, and dwelt there like angels gladdening,
kindling, inspiring new hope, new life in their dull
dead hearts. Emotion stirred, conscience stirred,
aspiration stirred; the men and the women who
heard Him wondered at the gracious words which
proceeded out of his mouth. Like bread to a man
dying with hunger the words of this great Teacher
set at rest the craving of their spirits, and sent new
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streams of vital energy along all the channels of
their being. What light is to the eye, what sound
is to the ear, what the myriad splendours and glories
of Nature are to that counterpart of Nature, the idea-
charged mind of man—just this the words of such a
Teacher are to the human spirit; the bread which it
was made to hunger for, by which alone it lives.
I have said that the poor are truly religious.
Some may be startled by the statement. I will
explain what I mean. It is to the religious instincts
and yearnings of 'the common people' that Founders
of new Religions have appealed in all ages; nor have
they appealed in vain. Whenever a Religion has
been preached to the people as were Buddhism,
Islam, and Christianity, there has been an immense
ingathering of the poor to its fold; an ingathering
which has changed the course of the great world's
affairs and given a new point of departure to human
history. It is when the Religion gets out of the
hands of its apostles into the hands of its priests
that the interest of the poor either dies down or
becomes a base superstition, paralyzing alike to
sense and soul. We hear a great deal about the
irreligion of the masses; and we hear most about it
from the men that do much to cause it by their
narrow, perfunctory, and selfish proclamation of the
Kingdom of Heaven. Philosophical scepticism is
the luxury of the cultivated. If the masses are
sceptical and scornful about religion, be sure that
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317
the sin lies in some large measure at the door of a
rich, worldly, and selfish Church. Bread of chaff
the poor have no real appetite for. They are easily
deluded, they fall readily into debasing superstitions,
and may be led hither and thither by designing
demagogues at their will; but still I believe that
there is no class which has such a quick ear for the
ring of reality in a teacher's words; which is so
ready to respond to the truth when it has a chance.
of hearing it; and which is stirred so deeply by the
manifestations of the Christ-like life. We have so
wearied them with 'words, words, words,' that they
hear our Gospel coldly. But where would a pure
unselfish Christ-like spirit be hailed with such joy,
and honoured with such reverence as among the
poorest of the poor? These knew that the Lord's
words were words of the profoundest reality and
truth, and that His life preached them as well as
His lips. They heard Him gladly. 'Never man
'spake like this man,' they cried. And more than
once the tide of their enthusiasm burst all bounds;
they would come and take him by force to make him a
king. They swept in joyous triumphal throngs
around Him, with waving garments and rustling
palms, Hosanna!' they cried, Blessed is the King
of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.
True, the multitude is impetuous and passionate,
and lacks the calmness and stability of culture; it
sways swiftly to wide extremes. True, that jubilant
6
318
THE RISEN WORLD.'
throng was soon afterwards stirred, for the moment,
by their priests and rulers to drown the Hosannas
in murderous execrations, and to drop the palms for
the spear, the thorn-crown, and the Cross! But the
Hosannas were the truest and most profound utter-
ance of their spirits. How many of that mocking
multitude, when the brief Saturnalia was over, were
pricked to the heart by the first Gospel preachers,
knelt in adoration before the Cross of the Crucified
Saviour, and took their lives joyfully in their hands
as they went forth to win for Him the spiritual
supremacy of the world!
A second reason why the common people heard
Christ gladly, and why they always should hear
gladly the teachings of that Master, is His revela-
tion of the Father; the awful unknown name of God
fashioned itself to 'Father' on His lips.
This is a dread universe to live in to those who
know nothing of its Ruler, who have no knowledge
of His character, no trust in His mercy, no hope in
His love. The common people have a deep sense
of the mystery of life and of Nature, though they
would find it hard to put their feeling into words,
and part of the secret of the wonderful attraction of
Christ's teaching was the clearness and certainty
with which He declared to them the Name, the
Nature, and the purposes of God. This is why they
recognized at once that he taught them as
having authority, and not as the scribes. As One
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319
•
:
Who had seen and known, He spake of heavenly
things. Our Lord carried the conviction home to
men that He knew. It is a passionate longing of
man's heart to know the mystery of his own nature,
of the world, and of God, and the man who can help
him to a little knowledge is his lord. The acknow-
ledged masters, the kings in the world of thought
whom men honour with their homage through the
ages, are the men who have cast the fullest light on
these mysteries. And He is the great Master, the
King of kings in the spiritual realm, Who had power
'to cast Heaven's own light upon them, and to illu-
mine the darkness to the very depths. Since that
Teacher spoke, there has been a calm, clear cer-
tainty in man's knowledge of things spiritual and
eternal; there has been a blessed assurance that
behind all the stern and terrible aspects of Nature
and life a Love is ruling and guiding all, Whose
measure was revealed on Calvary; and this cer-
tainty has filled life's discipline with new and
benignant meanings, and has lit the future with a
glorious and boundless hope. The burden of the
Saviour's ministry was the revelation of the Father's
Love, as lying at the root and in the depth of all
things. Perhaps it is the very strongest evidence
of the powerful hold which Christ has established
on human hearts, that the poor, whose daily sur-
roundings and experiences might seem most incon-
sistent with the rule of a Father, have in all ages
320
THE RISEN WORLD.
:
heard most gladly, and have most strenuously clung
to this Revelation. He has shown to them the
Father, and it has sufficed them.
The common people heard Him gladly because
His ministry was intensely charged with strength
and consolation.
Put it as you will about life's myriad joys and
pleasures, man is still born unto trouble as the sparks
fly upward. Life is largely a struggle to all of us,
and its experience is largely a pain. The Lord
recognized it. He hid nothing of the burden; He
made light of none of the pain. He earned for
Himself the name of the Man of Sorrows, and He
spake home to the hearts of the children of Sorrow,
of whom you are sure to find a great company in
any gathering of the poor. And He alone of all
great teachers taught them not to bear trouble only,
but to rejoice in it. We glory in tribulations also—
they were poor men mainly to whom His apostle
wrote these words. What man needs day by day
is comfort and strength to endure. The comfort
comes when One stands by us in the trial, strong to
help, able to save. He promised to them the
Comforter. And the Comforter meant a God of
infinite tenderness, ordaining, controlling, and sanc-
tifying all that they endured. Come unto me, all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest-the common people heard such words gladly.
They were quite new to them. When had such a
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321
parable as 'The prodigal son' or 'The two debtors'
fallen from a Pharisee's lips? And the very heart
of strength was in the words of Christ because they
were charged with a sure and everlasting hope.
He lifted His hearers into regions where the eternal
sunlight was shining; He gave them a vision of the
splendours and a foretaste of the joys of the ever-
lasting mansions. There those who were worn
with life's pain should rest, and those who had con-
quered in life's battle should reign, and those who
had mastered life's temptations should be crowned.
And what were poor homes, hard fare, ceaseless
toil, weary muscles, and aching hearts when such
visions were unfolded! The pain, the strain, the
sadness vanished; the gloom broke into splendour,
the tears flashed into glories; the struggle of life
was lost in triumph, and death itself was swallowed
up in victory. Christ brought life and immortality
to light by His gospel, and men could joyfully
declare: Our light affliction, which is but for a
moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and
eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the
things which are seen, but at the things which are not
seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but
the things which are not seen are eternal.
Lastly and chiefly, the common people heard
Him gladly, and still hear gladly the preachers who,
however feebly, have caught His method, because
He preached Salvation, and the common people
21
322
THE RISEN WORLD.
know in their heart of hearts that they need to be
saved. The word Saviour alone explains the hold
which the Lord won and maintains on the heart of
mankind. Man needs help in many ways, in all
ways; but he has one supreme need, and he knows
it; he needs to be saved-to be saved from the sin
which is destroying him, from the selfishness that is
eating like a canker into his nobler life. It was the
supreme element of power in our Lord's ministry
that it was the ministry of Salvation; it is its
supreme element of power still. Leaving all man's
minor needs, not despising them but putting them
in their true place, it pierced at once to the heart of
the matter, laid its finger on the sores that were
draining the vital springs, and touched the seat of all
the unrest and misery of the world. He knew that
there was one thing needful, and they knew it.
Because He drove in that conviction upon them,
and made them understand that sin was the one
deadly thing that they had to dread, and that a new
heart was the one good gift that they supremely
needed to seek from God, they gathered round Him
with eager interest and hope, and were sure that the
Deliverer promised by God to their fathers had at
length appeared in the world.
sophisticated about religion.
need saving, and as a rule are not afraid or ashamed
of saying it; this was the secret of the attraction
of John the Baptist's ministry for the people. When
The poor are not
They know that they
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323
a man is quite clear that he understands perfectly
all God's counsel, and needs no further enlighten-
ment; when he prides himself on the assurance that
his name is inscribed indelibly in the Book of Life,
however vast may be the throngs that are doomed
to be swept into destruction; he is in the way to be
worthless for the highest service of man and of
God. But the poor have an open ear to the
preaching of righteousness. They have a thousand
burdens, trials, cares, and difficulties, but the worst
of all, they know, are their own passions and lusts.
He who tells them plainly of their peril, who can
give them strength to fight against their lusts and
conquer them, he is the teacher to whom they will
listen. He will stir in many of them fierce resist-
ance; ‘it is a hard saying, who can hear it,' will be
their language. Still, nothing will master them like
such preaching; and the fidelity with which Chris-
tianity has clung in all ages to its mission of Salva-
tion, is the secret of the transcendent spiritual power
which it has wielded, and above all of its hold on
the hearts and the hopes of the poor.
What the poor want is help against sin, victory
over the devil and his works. The word which
tells them of that they will hear gladly, as of old.
And the men who are preaching it with any measure
of the Master's power are accomplishing a work for
the world's culture, for the world's deliverance, for
the world's Redemption, which casts all other agen-
324
THE RISEN WORLD.
cies of education and reformation into the shade.
God prosper all agencies and influences that aim at
man's culture, elevation, and happiness; God mul-
tiply them a thousandfold! But we pray above all
that He may multiply the company of preachers
whom the common people will hear gladly, because
the sound of their Master's feet is behind them, and
the accent of His truth and His tenderness is on
their lips. For on Christ and on His teaching
hangs the future of the world. And at the last day,
when the great company is gathered, and all who
have helped and blessed mankind pass up to the
fellowship and joy of their Lord; foremost of them
all, honoured supremely among the founders of
States, the fathers of Reformations, the captains of
industry, the teachers of wisdom, the doctors of
science, and the masters of art, will be the men who
bear the blessing of the poor to present as their
memorial before the Eternal Throne.
XVI.
THE NEW HUMANITY.
PREACHED ON BEHALF OF THE LONDON MISSIONARY
SOCIETY, MAY, 1875.
Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given.—ISAIAH ix. 6.
ROPHETS and poets discern that the life
of the Creation is a travail; The whole
Creation groaneth and travaileth in pain
together until now. The fruit of that travail is
Christ, the God-man; and all that the Incarnation
brings forth for the world. Whatever may be the
measure of truth in the doctrine of evolution, it is
confessed on all hands by all intelligent schools, that
there is a profound relation between man and the
whole inferior order of the Creation. Blessed be
God that the eye of faith can trace a relation pro-
founder still between man and the whole order of
the superior sphere. He was no student in our
modern scientific schools, who wrote,—
'For Man is ev'ry thing,
And more. He is a tree, yet bears no fruit ;
A beast, yet is, or should be more :
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THE RISEN WORLD.
'Man is all symmetrie,
Full of proportions, one limbe to another,
And all to all the world besides :
Each part may call the farthest, brother :
For head with foot hath private amitie,
And both with moons and tides.
'Nothing hath got so farre,
But Man hath caught and kept it, as his prey.
His eyes dismount the highest starre :
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Finde their acquaintance there.'
The key to all the processes of Nature in her
secret laboratories, her obscure tentative movements
and pressures in what the Psalmist calls the
'lowest parts of the earth,' is there, in the being who
stands erect on its surface, his foot in the dust, his
head up to Heaven and God. The hairy tentacle
of the smallest microscopic organism has close
kindred with the hand and the foot which are the
masterpieces of Nature's mechanism, and are the
organs of a living spiritual being who is educating
himself for Heaven and for Eternity.
Whether the creative act has been manifold and
reiterated or single, there is no possibility of
questioning that one formative thought has been
busy on the whole structure of the universe; and
that man's organization is the result of a process
which commenced when the first primordial organism
came into being, and began under some mysterious,
THE NEW HUMANITY.
327
inscrutable pressure to work upwards to more com-
plex forms and modes of life.
With infinite pain, but to a result of infinite
beauty and splendour, the evolution has been
accomplished. There has been a groaning and
travailing of all things, through ages to which
imagination can set no bound, under the eye and
the ear of Heaven. With sore strain, and what
looks like anguish to beings who have the experi-
ence of anguish to interpret it, the successive strata
of organized creatures have lifted themselves out
of the wreck of the orders that gave birth to them,
and have perished themselves in giving birth to their
heirs. Finer, compacter, more highly organized
creatures appear on the theatre of existence, as the
ages roll on. Where the procession of life begins,
where it ends, Great God, Thou only knowest!
But still, if the Creature be all, all is confusion.
There is nothing in the very loftiest of the
animal forms which explains, or even hints at the
explanation of the painful patient processes of the
Creation; there is nothing that justifies the pain;
there is nothing that compensates the waste. The
emergence of man at the head of the orders was
like the flashing of the morning sun over a mist-
enveloped world. When man appeared we can
well believe that 'the morning stars sang together';
the end of all the travail was accomplished, the
reason of all the groaning, the infinite effort and
328
THE RISEN WORLD.
patience of the Creature, was made plain. Unto us
a Child is born, unto us a Son is given, might be
the hymn whose music floated from all the spheres
of Creature existence to the upper heavens; when,
as the fruit of parturient Nature, man, the Lord of
the Creation, stepped forth into his world.
But man took up at once the keynote of the
groaning. The dew of the Maker's benediction
had rested but a moment upon Eden, man had but
touched for a moment the true range of his dignity
and power, when he too became subject to vanity.
By his own act and will he made himself sharer
of the travail of Nature: struggle, pain, and death
entered and took possession of the human, as they
had already possessed the inferior spheres. Then
began a new, more solemn, more awful travail. It
became manifest that the birth of man, instead of
ending, but prolonged the struggle of Creation.
The conflict was carried up into a higher region-
the region of conscious intelligence and moral free-
dom. The pain of progress grew more intense as
a conscious and provident being, endowed with the
reason which 'looks before and after,' became
subject to it; and it seemed in the earlier stages of
man's history as if the struggle must end in con-
fusion, as if a horror of great darkness must eclipse
at last all the beauty and splendour of the world.
The first human blood that stained the earth was
shed by a fratricidal hand; the first child of the
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329
first human home groaned in his misery, My punish-
ment is greater than I can bear. All that was
darkest and saddest in the struggling life of the
Creature, seemed to reproduce itself more darkly
and sadly in the human sphere; and but for the
first promise—the promise sown with the first germ
of the higher human development which dates from
the fall, and sanctifying it from the beginning—the
whole travail of Creation, through the ruin of its
head, seemed to be ending in death.
But for the first promise, I say. That word—
and it bears its own evidence that it dropped from
heaven-I will put enmity between thee and the
woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall
bruise thy head; that word, spoken in the hour
of man's transgression, introduced a grander and
more fruitful travail into the realm of life. The
first Adam, the natural man, born as to the flesh
after the law of the development of Nature, was in
peril through sin of plunging into ruin the whole
Creation, of which he was the representative and the
head ; but from the beginning it was prophesied that
One would be born from man, as the fruit of this
spiritual strain and anguish, who should destroy the
sin which was destroying the Creation, and redeem
the whole to glorious, blessed, and eternal life.
That promise made man from the first hour of his
wanderings the pilgrim of hope. The joyous song
of the Creation, the concord of the morning stars,
330
THE RISEN WORLD.
which had been drowned in lamentation when the
diluvial waters burst in on a guilty earth, was
destined to be again heard on High over the re-
deemed, regenerated worlds. The Seed of the
woman should bruise and crush out of the restored
Creation all that desolates and destroys. The
absolute and eternal triumph of Life, the destruc-
tion of death out of the living universe for
ever, not by annihilation but by Redemption, is
the victory which we celebrate when we sing our
Advent Hymn, Unto us a Child is born, unto us a
Son is given, and the government shall be upon His
shoulder; and His name shall be called Wonderful,
Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father,
the Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His
government and peace there shall be no end, upon the
throne of David, and upon His kingdom, to order it,
and to establish it with judgment and with justice,
from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the
Lord of Hosts will perform this.
This promise of a Deliverer has lit up the march
of all the human generations; it has been the
fountain of the fairest gleams which have crossed
the darkness of the heathen world.
And it is out of the bosom of Humanity that the
Redeemer must be born-the Christ must be the
human Child; the King must be the Son of Man.
The real root of King and Queen is 'Kin.' The
King is not the 'able' man but the 'kinsman' of
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331
the race.
All our fundamental social and political
ideas have their root in the patriarchal home, as the
researches of Sir H. Maine and other able scholars
have established; and in the King the whole
'kindred' is represented-UNTO US A CHILD IS
BORN, UNTO US A SON IS GIVEN. The King who
rules in righteousness, mighty to save, is the Son of
Man, the Divine Kinsman of our race: Forasmuch
then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood,
He also Himself likewise took part of the same.
The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.
The very first principle of the Gospel is the pure
and perfect Humanity of the Lord. He was more
than man, for In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God;
but Man He must be, perfect in all human attributes,
to fulfil the hope of the groaning Creation, as
Redeemer of the world.
The essential point lies here-Redemption is not
a process wrought by the right hand of power, so to
speak, from without; the act of a Being of Almighty
power, who, seeing man in desperate extremity
through sin and frustrating utterly the purposes and
preparations of Heaven, stooped to lay hold on
him, to lift him out of the abyss in which he was
sinking, and to place him by a sovereign act on a
foundation where he might rest in safety, and work
and grow.
grow. Not at all after this fashion is God's
Redemption of our race; not at all after this
332
THE RISEN WORLD.
fashion is God's living work in any of the
spheres. Development, through all the ascend-
ing stages of the Creation, is always and every-
where by the pressure of a life, of a formative
principle from within. New things, new forms
and organs grow out from within; they are
never pieced on from without. They grow out
of the substance of the creature, and in harmony
with its whole structure; they help it towards the
end for which it was fashioned, and to which it
blindly works through all the movements and mani-
festations of its being. A power from on High may
descend into it, such as descended on man at his
creation; but that into which it descends must be
the perfect outcome of all the propulsive movements
and tendencies which have expressed-moulded
out-the progressive developments of life.
And it is from within the bosom of Humanity that
the Redemption is to be wrought which is to save
Humanity. It is by the outward and upward
pressure of a Life which is truly and fully human,
which has buried its Divine force in the very heart's
core of our nature and is 'bone of our bones, and
'flesh of our flesh,' that man is to be lifted to the
levels which are above the sphere of tears and death
for ever. It is by and through Man that man must
be redeemed: Since by man came death, by man
came also the resurrection of the dead. Levi was
yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedec met
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333
him.
Christ was in a sense in the womb of Eve
when her sorrow fell upon her, and pain and shame.
took possession of her life. The conquering Seed
of the woman was spoken of in that hour; from
that moment all the higher interest of history
gathers around the Child who was to be born in the
fulness of the time out of the long human travail,
that He might open Heaven as the theatre of the
eternal and glorious development of the race which
He then took into living and indissoluble fellowship
with Himself.
You see how essential is the idea of the Incarna-
tion.
The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.
It is not said that the Word took a veil of flesh that
He might bring Himself into contact with us and
find a medium of intercourse. No. The Word
became flesh, partaker of flesh and blood like the
children; One of us, One with us; man one with Him,
humanity bound up with His destiny for ever. It is
from within the very core of the human, that the
Redemption of the human is to be wrought out-
the lifting of the human to the Divine. As Novalis
puts it in his way, 'The Humanization of God is the
'Divinization of man.' Redemption, then, is no
accident in the Creation; no scheme devised by
mercy to repair an accidental flaw, or to restore an
accidental waste. It lies in the line of true develop-
ment of the human creature. A Man, the Son of
Man, the Child of human pain and travail, comes to
334
THE RISEN WORLD.
work that inward transformation in the human which
makes man, the child of the pain and the travail of
the Creation, partaker of the Divine nature; He
delivers him from the corruption that is in the
world through lust, and relates him for ever to the
Immortal Celestial sphere.
I say He was not only the Son of Man, He was
the Child of human pain and travail: He was born
out of the sadness and the anguish of the world.
He must be 'the Man of Sorrows,' because man
was the child of Sorrow, born to trouble, bound for
death. What is it essentially which makes man's
life a struggle and its experience a pain? Not sin,
but righteousness, paradoxical as the statement may
seem. Could man embrutalize himself he would end
his sorrow with his freedom; he would settle down
to a brute's activities and indulgences, turn his eyes
to the dust, and forget the stars from whose sphere
comes all his pain. He cannot play the brute, and
hence his struggle. At least, he can play the brute,
but he cannot be the brute; the endowment of his
higher nature clings to him-a Nessus' shirt torment-
ing him to madness if he is bent on evil; the robe
and the diadem of his manhood, if he seeks those
things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the
right hand of God.
It is the law of righteousness within man which
torments him in his sensual madness; a spirit which
cannot make sin a pastime, or worship the devil as
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335
God. It is out of the nobler part, the part which
the breath of God embreathed, that all his sighing
and groaning issues. There is a Spirit Who maketh
intercession within us with groanings which cannot
be uttered. It is but the highest expression of the
universal complaint, the voice of the aspiration which,
through the whole progressive order of things, the
same Spirit inspires. Man is in the concord of
the whole Creation in sighing to be delivered
from the bondage of corruption into the glorious
liberty of the children of God. Of this dim blind
struggle and aspiration Christ is the Redeemer.
To none of its effort, its anguish, its hope, is He a
stranger. He knows all profoundly to their deepest
depths. He comes as the Head, the Highest, of a
long line of confessors and martyrs, who for the sake
of truth, righteousness, and God had been counted as
sheep for the slaughter. He came to justify the life
of the martyr, and to declare the essential glory of
his death. All man's hope He came to realize, and
to seal as the sure possession of the human spirit,
giving fruition to man's desire, victory to his struggle,
order to his confusion, a Child to his yearning heart.
Hence the ring of exultation in the angelic voices;
hence the joy-notes of the song which woke the
gladness of the world. It is the voice of the mother
when the child is born from her pangs; it is the
voice of the victor when conquest crowns the toils
and dangers of the field; it is the voice of a long
.
336
THE RISEN WORLD.
strain that is ending in blessed and lasting achieve-
ment, Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given.
They shall call His name Emmanuel, God with us.
Unto us is born. This is essential; from the
womb of the human the Lord was born; but He
who was born the Head and Redeemer of the race
was the God after Whose image man was fashioned,
and through Whose Incarnation only could man fulfil
the lofty promise of his life. There is nothing final
in the Adam of the Creation. If Nature had but
brought forth the weak, sorrowful, struggling being,
whose lordship seems but a bitter mockery, her
travail had ended in abortion. It is in the God-man
that the meaning of 'man' is developed, and man's
place in the universe is assured. The scale of
man's nature and its experience, find their key in
the Child who was given from heaven to the world
-Man to the innermost fibre of His nature, God of
God, Light of Light, very God of very God; the
only begotten of the Father, in Whom the image of
God, which had been flawed by sin, is renewed to a
completeness of which Eden held but the faint fore-
shining, and by Whom all the meaning and all the
issue of natural and human travail is laid bare. We
see Jesus, and all the mystery becomes plain.
(Heb. ii. 6, 10).
There is a strong tendency in these days to slight
this mystery of the Incarnation. It was no Divine
influence brought to bear upon man, enabling him
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337
to live a higher life, with higher aims, and hopes,
and issues. It was distinctly the Life of God entering
into man- God manifest in the flesh'-and making
man by that assumption partaker of the life-the joy
of the life, the burden of the life, the destiny of the
life of God. The Divine life mixed itself with that
which is most human in human life; God became in
Christ the Child of the race which He created for
Himself, which He would redeem unto Himself,
and which He would bind to Himself eternally by
the bonds of an all-suffering, all-sacrificing love.
Through man redeemed, new-born in Christ, par-
taker of the Divine Nature, the Natural passes up
into the Spiritual celestial sphere. The groaning
Creation in man is delivered; but the child that is
born of the Redeemer's travail, the child of the new
Creation, of the world of the Resurrection, passes up
into a higher region, masters the death which makes
havoc in the realm of Nature, and enters into Life,
the Life which is eternal. Whosoever liveth, saith
Christ, and believeth in me shall never die. And so
it came to pass that there were in the same country
shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their
flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came
upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round
about them: and they were sore afraid. And the
angel said unto them, Fear not: for behold I bring
you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all
people. For unto you is born this day in the
22
338
THE RISEN WORLD.
city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the
Lord.
And now let us take a rapid glance at the world
into which the Lord was born, which He came to
save as Redeemer, and to rule as King. I have
spoken of 'man' as the fruit of the travail of the
Creation; and of the Son of Man' as the fruit of
the more solemn travail of the human world. But a
few generations before the Advent the word would
have been meaningless. Jew and Gentile, Greek
and Barbarian, freeman and slave, were terms full of
meaning; but 'man,' what could that mean? Even
Aristotle found it hard to discover a common term
which would cover the life of the freeman and the
slave. But as the hour of the Advent, 'the fulness
' of the time,' approached, through a very wonderful
chain of agencies and influences, in the linking
together of which the Hand which guided the
culture of the Jewish people to the fulfilment of the
primal promise is very palpably manifest, the idea of
a common human nature, with common attributes,
common sympathies, needs, and interests, and capable
of a common life, the life of the universal human
society, began to haunt the minds of men. The
thought of St. Paul, God . . . hath made of one blood all
nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth,
struck sharply across the insolent belief of the
Athenians in their origin and their destiny. But it
THE NEW HUMANITY.
339
*
is more important to note that it put into clear and
powerful form the vague impressions which, from
manifold causes, were beginning to shape themselves
in the imagination of mankind.
I will not dwell on the well-worn topic of the
Augustan Empire, the fact that in those days a
decree could go forth from one centre, from one
human potentate, that all the civilized world should
be enrolled. The terribly bloody but not altogether
destructive Revolutions which established in suc-
cession the Assyrian, the Chaldean, the Medo-
Persian, and the Macedonian Empires have their
bright side. The stir and the strain which they
involved developed the faculties and called forth the
energies of men; the intercourse and the mixture
of peoples forwarded culture; growing commerce
fostered civilization ; and conquest continually
widened the bounds of the civilized world. But
very terrible anguish attended, and exacted the
price of, the progress. The world grew wiser,
stronger, richer, but at the same time sadder dạy by
day; the most beneficent Revolution in its promise
was that which established the supremacy of the cle-
ment, just, and politic Romans; and not a word can
fairly be said in depreciation of the last Revolution,
which abolished the Republic and established the
Cæsars as the masters of the Roman world. Caius
Julius Cæsar trod over nothing but wrecks to empire;
and any decent central tyranny was better for man-
340
THE RISEN WORLD.
kind than the rule of the harpy Pro-consuls of the
dying Republic. But again the cost of the Revo-
lution was tremendous; one shudders to imagine the
human agonies which moaned around the million
corpses which Cæsar is said to have left in his tracks.
The Augustan Empire, when universal peace first
became possible, was like a vision of Paradise to the
imagination of the thoughtful of the time; and the
whole earth was at rest, though little in a mood for
singing, for the first time in its sad, sad history.
But the vast advantages of the political Society, when
for the first time there was free course for men, for
ideas, for books, for institutions, and for the mes-
sengers of the Son of Man, through the civilized
world, can hardly be estimated. Common speech,
common literature, common culture; the mixture,
the fusion, of very diverse types of social, political,
intellectual, and religious life; all tended to create an
atmosphere, in which the idea of a universal Gospel,
a message to man as man, would find itself cherished
genially and stimulated to fruit.
It is curious to trace the steps by which the idea
of a world-wide humanity grew. Perhaps the first
form of it in the history of civilization had birth in
those great Oriental despotisms, whose fashion we
Westerns are apt perhaps unduly to decry. In the
collision between Europe and Asia in the Greek and
the Roman eras of conquest, our sympathies go
naturally and righteously with the champions of
THE NEW HUMANITY.
341
intellect, liberty, and political life. Of what the East
had to learn from Greece we are constantly reminded ;
less justice is done to the lessons which the East had
to teach to Greece and Rome. Among the fruitful
ideas which travelled westwards from the realm of
the great king, was this idea of universal Empire.
These Oriental despots had a large, grand view of
their position and function in relation to the world.
There was something more than Oriental bombast
in the proclamation: Unto all people, nations, and
languages, that dwell in all the earth. They were at
the opposite pole to Athenian autochthonic narrow-
ness and pride. They regarded themselves as kings
of men. They transplanted peoples at will through-
out their dominions. Very ruthless were their
methods but under all there lay the idea of a world-
wide community of men, over which the noblest of
them felt with a kind of awe that they were called to
rule. The contact of the Greek mind with these
Oriental ideas was an immense enlargement to it.
The education began in Themistocles that ended in
Alexander's splendid Empire, and in the foundation
of Alexandria as the centre at which three continents
should become one. The intercourse and mixture of
peoples during the next three centuries raised deep
and fruitful speculations about the true relations of
men and nations. Men found that the more closely
they were drawn to each other the more they dis-
covered that they belonged to each other; and that
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THE RISEN WORLD.
artificial limits of political societies, and natural limits
of language and race, were dominated by a greater
unity, the human; the idea of 'humanity' began to
appear.
The conquests of Rome, the fair concord
of the most diverse races and cultures within the
peaceful bosom of the one World-Empire, carried to a
higher point these speculations; and developed those
ideas of human relation, human communion, and
human duty, which, beautiful as they are, seem but
cut flowers in the 'Meditations' of Marcus Aurelius;
but are living ideas, with root and fruit, in the bosom
of the universal Church.
But while this idea, the unity of humanity and
the sacredness of human relations, was growing to
fulness during the ages which intervened between
Salamis and the Advent, there ran parallel with it a
very remarkable development of the sense of man's
individual responsibility, duty, and destiny. Man
became growingly conscious of all that lies involved
in an individual life. In the later Greek philosophy,
one thing is very prominent, the growing interest
of men in questions which concern the individual
being and destiny. Whence am I? What am I?
How may I best play my individual part? What
is my individual destiny? are the questions which
pass to the front.
The causes which led to this it is not possible for
me to trace at length. One very important cause
was political. That breaking up of the little, clearly
THE NEW HUMANITY.
343
defined, compact societies, which is known as the
fall of the Greek Republics, broke up the framework
of men's lives. They found themselves abroad on
a great sea of uncertainty. New ideas, new political
institutions, new masters, constantly changing rela-
tions with distant regions and peoples-kept life
in perpetual fermentation. They were called upon
continually for new decisions, as members of a much
wider community than the walls of their city could
comprehend. In the great world to which their
Oriental conquests led them out they had to think
and to act for themselves in critical moments.
They became parts of a much larger whole; but
because it was so large they were more conscious
that they were units, that they had each an indi-
vidual life to care for, and an individual destiny.
This, joined to the growing confusion and sadness
of the times, the moral dissolution to which all
things seemed to be tending, developed the sense,
which came to be a very sad sense, of the burden
of individual responsibility and destiny; and ques-
tions as to the best furniture of man for the tremen-
dous battle which he found himself fighting with a
sensual nature and a hostile world, took the fore-
most place. These questions of the personal being
gathered intensity, generation by generation; until
in Seneca and Epictetus the cry for a firm standing-
ground and a clear law for the individual life,
became importunate, and even agonizing. The
ת.
344
THE RISEN WORLD.
question of questions with the heathen mind after
a heathen fashion was, 'What shall I do to be
'saved?'
Here, then, are two very distinct features of
human development during the ages which preceded
tne Advent of the Lord. Men were feeling after
the ground and the conditions of a universal human
society; and they were searching for the basis and
the law of personal conduct, as beings endowed with
moral and intellectual faculties which might be a
rich blessing or a terrible curse to them and to
mankind. To this point humanity had progressed,
moved from within, led from on High. Was the
higher progress possible to heathen society? Was
there power in heathenism to lift man into this
sphere of universal brotherhood, and to expound
the mystery of his being and destiny? None, abso-
lutely none. Heathen society, with all its brilliant
civilization, was utterly, hopelessly exhausted. The
Lord was born into a world of wreck.
A very able Frenchman has recently discussed this
question at large, with great learning and with calm
impartiality, and he affirms and establishes the con-
clusion to which all thoughtful study of the history
of the first century leads us, that there was no
power left in heathen philosophy, heathen religion,
or heathen Empire, which could carry human deve-
lopment further. But for Christ all must have
perished. The world which the Lord came to save
THE NEW HUMANITY.
345
was groaning beneath the wrecks of the most hope-
ful political, philosophical, and religious efforts and
achievements of mankind. A world of wreck! And
yet there had been splendid progress. The Empire
was filled with precious heirlooms of the past, which
we treasure still as priceless. Age by age man had
been lifted bodily to a higher level of thought,
energy, culture, and political life. An immense
access of power of every kind marked the age of
Augustus. Man's life was enlarged in every direc-
tion, but the highest. To the eye it was an age
of singular prosperity and splendour, and yet, if we
look into its life, we shall find that it was the saddest
age, the most heartless age, the most hopeless age,
known to history. Every great experiment in the
direction of human liberty, human elevation, human
belief, had ended in utter, hopeless failure; and a
world-wide despotism-benign, for the moment but
offering no possible guarantees, with its splendid
material civilization, with bread, home, and posses-
sions made tolerably sure--was all that was left
to humanity in its room. I never study that first
century without feeling that the stage is peopled
by shrivelled and decrepit forms; the taint of the
grave is in the breath of its life. In truth, it was
an old and worn-out world; though the power was
at work which would make it young again. All the
civilization, the art, literature, commerce, and political
organization of the age were just like the finished
346
THE RISEN WORLD.
form in clay, waiting the Promethean spark, and
missing it doomed inevitably to perish. Just as
the travail of Creation had been abortive if man
had failed to come forth, so all the culture and
progress of Humanity, up to that wonderful time
when a decree went forth from Augustus Cæsar
that all the world should be enrolled, would have
ended in utter and hopeless ruin if man had not
felt the touch of his Redeemer, Christ.
It was a world of political wreck. The first con-
dition of human well-being is freedom. When
Imperial Rome became the mistress of the nations
three great experiments, by which man had nobly
striven to solve the question of political liberty, had
confessed their failure and left nothing but dull
despotism in their room. The seats of these experi-
ments had been Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.
Now it is idle to charge it as a sin on Alexander
that he crushed the freedom of the Grecian cities,
on the Romans that they crushed the freedom of the
Jewish Commonwealth, or on the Cæsars that they
crushed the freedom of Republican Rome. Alas!
there was nothing left to weep over in any of these
freedoms when they perished, but the hope which
they had inspired. They were rotten to the heart's
core before the heel of the conqueror crushed them
into wrecks. They had made their effort for a time
nobly; they had won rich gifts for men which
they had power to bequeath; but in the end they
THE NEW HUMANITY.
347
failed miserably, and left the world bankrupt of
political hope. Study the state of the Greek cities
under Philip, of the Jews before Herod's reign, of
the Roman Republic before. Cæsar, and you will
understand how even a central tyranny might seem
a deliverance.
But do not suppose that men did not mourn—the
noble consciously, the ignoble unconsciously-over
the failure; do not cease to note that a deep sadness
settled on the heart of society, when it was seen that
there was nothing left but a military despotism to
make order in the civilized world. The hope of
freedom was dead. The inspiration which had made
Marathon and Thermopyla names of renown was
cold. A Cato had no longer any mission in the world
but to die. Doubtless the mild, firm, politic rule of
Augustus was an immense deliverance to a world
that had long been the prey of harpies. But alas!
with Augustus you must take Tiberius and Nero,
with Vespasian you must take Domitian, with Marcus
Aurelius, Commodus, with Severus, Caracalla, with
Theodosius, Arcadius. And this is no accidental
sorrow. It lies in the nature of things; it is the
essential misery of all despotisms, it is the chronic
agony of a tyrant-ridden world. And the age of
the Advent saw no hope of escape from the misery.
As the generations rolled on the sadness deepened,
and hope expired. It is the most terrible reading in
history, the tale of those ages in which the world
+
348
THE RISEN WORLD.
was writhing in the hand of Rome. Literature, art,
commerce, morality, purity, decency, all withered
under the upas-tree. The progress was a progress
in desolation with no bourne but destruction in sight.
As far as the world could help there was no instru-
ment of deliverance. As far as heathendom was
concerned, the battle was over; man was beaten,
evil was triumphant-all must perish if there was no
hope of Redemption from on High. We must read
the history of those terrible ages, sickened by the
slaughter and maddened by the moans, if we would
catch the full sweetness of the music of the words,
Behold a king shall reign in righteousness, and
princes shall rule in judgment. And a man shall be
as an hiding-place from the wind and a covert from
the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place; as the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
And philosophy, which had struggled nobly for
the rescue of man and society, was a wreck.
Some few centuries before the Advent there had
been a splendid outburst of moral and intellectual
power in Europe and in the far East, which had
aimed strenuously at reformation and restoration.
The Greek and the Oriental thinkers of what we
may call the philosophic revival concerned them-
selves, in their way, intensely with the work of
regeneration. The noblest moral qualities were called
constantly into action; schools whose philosophic
tenets gave little promise of it exercised themselves
THE NEW HUMANITY.
349
in severe moral discipline, and even in their theory
of pleasure aimed at a moral result. This period is
probably on the whole the most brilliant in human
history. The aim of the schools was to reform man
and society by means of what they could themselves
discover of the universe and of God. Very wonderful
were the unfoldings of truth which were vouchsafed
to them, very beautiful was the joyous activity of all
man's powers and faculties which their energy
inspired. If ever from this source the regeneration
of society could spring, then and there the work
would have been accomplished. But generations
passed away and the moral element in morals, if I
may use the expression, died out. Moral ideas
became the curious questions of intellectual dis-
putants, and the balancing of probabilities was
accepted as the most reliable organ of truth. At
the head-quarters of the movement, a keen observer
tells us, men spent their time in nothing else, but
either to tell or to hear some new thing; while in
the higher official regions of the Empire, Pilate's
question, 'What is truth?' expressed the utter moral
obtuseness and indifference, which we know from
other sources had taken possession of the most
active spirits of the Roman world.
At the same time understand that philosophy, too,
had shared in the general progress of the time.
Seneca in the Imperial Court, morally weak and
vulgar as he was, had a clearer view in many ways
350
THE RISEN WORLD.
of the mysteries of truth than had Socrates. The
world somehow had got on. It had larger and
deeper thoughts about life and God-so large and
deep, in fact, that a Christian influence on such men
as Seneca is suspected. But there is no ground for
the notion; except that I believe that justice is
hardly done to the general bracing of the moral
atmosphere wrought by Christianity, and to the
influence of the feeling that there was certainty
somewhere, which at that time (largely through the
agency of the Jews scattered about the Roman
world) began to steal abroad. The Stoic philosophy
revived under the Empire, and grew strong. It is
deeply significant. Men under the Empire seemed
instinctively to cleave to a philosophy which taught
them, as the chief tradition of its schools, how to
suffer with calmness and to die with dignity.
Stoicism is not enthusiastic. But once, at any
rate, Seneca kindles to enthusiasm, and his theme is
suicide. The only bride whom those Stoics loved
with a touch of passion was Death.
But before philosophy vacated the intellectual
throne a great and much-suffering teacher arose.
He was a Stoic too, but a man who, like Socrates,
cared for doing and living; and whose philosophic
teaching, which is the last pure splendour of the
heathen schools, embraced the whole conduct of a
virtuous and noble life. Epictetus is never to be
mentioned without reverence by any Christian
THE NEW HUMANITY.
351
thinker and lover of truth; and he trained the
character of the last completely noble heathen ruler
of the civilized world. The history of Epictetus,
who lived in Domitian's evil days when Christianity
was just beginning to touch the great world, is as
full of interest as his sayings are of pure and lofty
truth. But it is profoundly sad, and that sadness
runs through his strain. He is as 'the voice of one
crying in the wilderness;' a lonely lover of truth,
while all were loving lusts and lies.
To me there is the deepest meaning in this out-
burst of an anguished and well-nigh desperate heart.
Mark it well, I pray you: it is the death-knell of the
philosophic effort to regenerate mankind. 'Show
'me a Stoic, if you have one. Where, and how
should you? You can show indeed a thousand
'who repeat the Stoic reasonings. But do they
repeat the Epicurean less well? Who then is a
'Stoic? As we call that a Phidian statue which is
'formed according to the art of Phidias, so show me
some one person formed according to the principles
'which he professes. Show me one who is sick and
'happy, in danger and happy, dying and happy,
'exiled and happy, disgraced and happy. Show him
'to me, for by heaven I long to see a Stoic.
'you have not one fully developed! Show me, then,
one who is developing, one who is approaching to
'this character. Do me this favour. Do you refuse
'an old man a sight which he has not yet seen?
But
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THE RISEN WORLD.
'Let any one of you show me a soul who is desiring
'to be in unity with God, not to accuse either God
'or
or man: . . not to be envious, not to be jealous;
' in a word, from a man desiring to become God; and
' in this poor mortal body desiring to have fellowship
'with Zeus. Show him to me. But you cannot.'
Ah! could he but have stood face to face and heart to
heart with the man who wrote:-We, then, as workers
together with him, beseech you also that ye receive not
the grace of God in vain... giving no offence in
anything, that the ministry be not blamed; but in all
things approving ourselves as the ministers of God, in
much patience, in afflictions, in necessities, in dis-
tresses, in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in
labours, in watchings, in fastings; by pureness, by
knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy
Ghost, by love unfeigned, by the word of truth, by the
power of God, by the armour of righteousness on the
right hand and on the left, by honour and dishonour,
by evil report and good report; as deceivers, and yet
true; as unknown, and yet well-known; as dying,
and, behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; as
sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making
many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing
all things. Soft as the dew of the morning would
the words of this Gospel have fallen on the poor,
world-weary Stoic's heart. The philosophic move-
ment had failed utterly. The people cared nothing
for it; to them it was all as an unknown tongue, A
THE NEW HUMANITY.
353
few lonely, lofty spirits far up in the height cherished
the tradition. Epictetus utters the last fierce wail
of its conflict. Marcus Aurelius, a gentler spirit,
breathes its last sigh. The people listened with
utter indifference. What is truth? was the question,
the jest, the doubt—whichever way you may take it
-which heathen philosophy bequeathed as its last
legacy to the Roman world.
And the wreck of the religion was more utter
still. The world had fairly outgrown it.
It was
godless, because it had come to the end of its gods.
The poem of Lucretius was an atheistic poem : for
such gods as he had heard of, he had nothing but
keen scorn; but in the mysterious attractions and
affinities which he found in Nature, there is some-
thing of closer kin to a nobler theology than a casual
reading of his words would disclose. Faith in the
Roman Pantheon was utterly, hopelessly dead;
meanwhile the religious fervour, the religious passion,
was feverishly active. It sent abroad for gods.
Oriental Deities were imported wholesale into Rome,
and their worship-shall we say their orgies-
became the fashion. Frenzies of foolish devotion,
which Romanism emulates in these days, but made
the void more deep, the want more dire. Then the
magicians preyed on the world's aching and hungry
heart. There were gods innumerable everywhere,
even in the brothels; and the foulest and most brutal
witchcraft was supposed to be the master of the
23
354
THE RISEN WORLD.
order of the world. The mass of the people grew
unspeakably debased and brutalized; the thoughtful
few grew mad with disgust and shame. Everything
was worn out to which man could look to bear
him up in his struggle against evil, and the most
worn-out thing of all was the religion.
'Seek fellowship with Zeus,' cried Epictetus, in
a last, eager, desperate appeal. Alas! it was the
Zeus that was wanting; and to find him Epictetus
must pass on his disciples to a higher school. There
was a yearning for God, for personal fellowship with
God, for personal likeness to God, unknown to the
older ages; marking a grand advance in the aspira-
tion and effort of the noblest and most far-seeing
spirits. But who is the Zeus, the god of whom
'you talk, that I may believe on him,' was the cry
which grew more hopeless and agonizing generation
by generation; to which tradition had no answer, to
which philosophy had no answer, to which religion
had no answer; to which no answer was possible
until One stood on the earth and said, 'No man hath
'seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is
in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.'
Then man began to look up and live.
When that Child was born to humanity, when
that Son took His place by its hearth-fire, a new life
entered into the world. That age of the Advent is
very manifestly the age in which some transcendently
stimulating, quickening influence penetrated the life
THE NEW HUMANITY.
355
Faster
of men, and began to make all things new.
than the old civilization decayed, the new power re
organized and restored. It was not in the political
society of heathendom, it was not in the intellectual
society, it was not in the religious society. Every-
thing in heathendom grew sadder, darker, fouler,
generation by generation. To watch the heathen
side of the Empire is to watch corruption; the taint
poisons the air, the wreck covers the ground. But
wherever a company of believers in this Gospel was
met, there was the glow of life, the flush of anima-
tion and of hope. It was like a fresh tide of life-
blood in dying veins. Wherever the Church was, there
was counsel, purpose, energy, mastery. The lusts
and wrongs which were destroying society withered
before the truth and the charity of the Gospel; and
man everywhere held up his face joyfully against
poverty, pain, and death.
The sense of an exhaustless spring of energy
within, and a boundless sphere of blessing above,
brought forth into quick and splendid activity all the
loftier faculties of mankind. Truth, honesty, purity,
righteousness, liberty, charity, which heathenism had
struck with palsy, bloomed into new beauty and
bore fruit of priceless benediction to the world.
Into every sphere of domestic, social, and political
life, which the Church could touch, the new energy
entered; it made man master in his house of life;
it made him the free, fearless citizen of two worlds.
356
THE RISEN WORLD.
"
Thy son is dead,' said one to a heathen philosopher.
'I did not think that I had begotten a god,' was the
patient answer. Thy father is dead,' said one to a
Christian monk. Thou liest; my father is im-
mortal!' And this victorious power touched the
whole life of society. It began at once that recon-
struction of human relations, on the basis of truth,
justice, and charity, which Christendom has been
painfully pursuing through all these ages, and of
which, in the purely unselfish rule of our Colonial
and Indian Empire, we are beginning to see some
real political fruit. There was a power there which
began at once to make rulers righteous, masters
just, servants loyal, and slaves patient while claim-
ing their liberty at the hand of Christ. Marriage
was sanctified; the home relations were hallowed
and beautified; parents learned fresh tenderness, and
children fresh reverence and love; woman was
lifted to man's holiest and loftiest fellowship; the
sick were tended with assiduous devotion; the weak,
the ignorant, the poor, were made the sacred charge
of the wisdom, the patience, and the gentleness of
mankind. A wonderful tone of exultation rings
through every utterance of the young Church, as it
grew to its lusty and masterful prime; and glorious
floods of power poured forth, which drew from a
poet, who wrote himself 'atheist,' though he believed
more deeply than he knew, this splendid burst of
acclamation,-
THE NEW HUMANITY.
357
(
'A power from the unknown God;
A Promethean conqueror came;
Like a triumphal path he trod
The thorns of death and shame.
A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapour dim,
Which the orient planet animates with light;
Hell, Sin, and Slavery came,
Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor preyed until their lord had taken flight.
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set :
While blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon
The cross leads generations on.'
Mr. Mill, in his 'Representative Government,' has
this remarkable passage:-'A very small diminu-
'tion in these exertions'-exertions put forth for
good and worthy objects-'would not only put a
stop to improvement, but would turn the general
'tendency of things towards deterioration, which,
once begun, would proceed with increasing rapidity,
'and become more and more difficult to check,
' until it reached a state often seen in history, and in
'which many large portions of mankind even now
'grovel; when hardly anything short of supernatural
'power seems sufficient to turn the tide, and give a
fresh commencement to the upward movement.'
Mr. Mill, in this passage, seems almost to touch the
spring of the higher movement and progress of
mankind. It was precisely the impact of a Power,
not almost, but quite supernatural, which lifted
society out of the slough into which it was settling,
358
THE RISEN WORLD.
and laid for man a firm basis on which to build the
fabric of life and of society, in the knowledge of
himself as a Spiritual and Immortal being, of the
world as the theatre of the Incarnation, and of his
Father God as the Ruler of his life and the Arbiter
of his destiny. And I cannot read in the history of
Christendom that any weaker power than that which
first quickened continues to sustain and develop its
life. It is 'power from on high' which has wrought
salvation and development for man in all ages of
Christian history; He 'who was delivered for our
'offences,' was 'raised again for our justification.'
All that has greatly nourished the higher life of
men, all by which Christian society truly lives, has
had its spring in the fellowship of man's spirit with
the Risen Christ in the Risen World. THE RISEN
CHRIST IS THE CHRIST OF HISTORY. Loyalty to
the Risen and Reigning Saviour has drawn forth in
all ages the noblest activities and the most self-
devoted ministries of mankind. Precious is the
remembrance of the martyr, the Christ who once
lived a holy and beautiful life among men, and died
an unutterably pathetic and beautiful death. But
the sacrifice of Calvary means something quite in-
finitely deeper than martyrdom, something which
the Risen and Reigning Christ makes 'the power of
God' to the Salvation of the world. The living
Christ is there, and in Him are all our springs.
"
But what of the Christendom around us? These
THE NEW HUMANITY.
359
are brave words about the saving mission of the
Gospel. 'Look round,' a man may say; 'look
'round on Christendom. Is this thing that you see
'salvation?' I believe that one of the main sources
of the unbelief with which in these days we have to
struggle, is the idea that Christianity has failed to
fulfil the promise of its youth, and to save society.
And to answer this we must study the profound
method of God. He has set His King on His holy
hill of Zion. He alone can 'reign in righteous-
'ness ; ' He alone is 'mighty to save.' But there is
no effort to force the demonstration of that on one
single human heart. God will rule men in freedom,
and save men in freedom. He suffers them to
exhaust every possible effort and combination of
their own strength and wisdom, to the end that,
emptied at length of faith and hope in the creature,
they may rise to the true dignity and glory of man-
hood, by becoming one with God. Progress is by
a series of costly experiments which, futile in suc-
cession, have left man for the moment bankrupt of
hope. But something within has stirred him to
strive onwards and upwards still. This, at any
rate, there is in Christian society: the idea that, in
some way or other society is to be saved. Kings
have tried their hand at saving, the noble has tried,
the philosopher has tried, the priest has tried, com-
merce has tried, Cæsar has tried; and now Demo-
cracy, of whose word Mazzini is quite the noblest
360
THE RISEN WORLD.
prophet, cries, Your efforts are abortive; make way
'for the sovereign people; the people only is divine.'
And the people will try what they can do in the
strength of man's wisdom and will to right all
wrongs, to hush all moans, to dry all tears, and to
establish order, peace, and charity in a distracted
world. We are entering on another grand experi-
ment. God grant that it may be the last! God
grant that the time may be dawning-the grey sky
flushes over the eastern hills-when men, weary of
their own kings and saviours, shall bend before the
Cross, and accept from Him who wears still on His
glorious throne the symbols of the Passion, the law
of their duty, and the bread of their life.
I confess that I look with the very largest hope
on the characteristic movements of our times.
Men, honest and earnest as our thinkers and leaders
are now, can do 'nothing against the truth, but for
'the truth.' They may treat for the time the Cross
as a worn-out symbol, and the Gospel as an old-
world tale. We of the Church have tempted them
terribly to do it. But Christ has firm hold on men,
quite other than our hold; a hold which the world
can never shake off. The ideas which men cherish
and pursue, the great aims and hopes of society, are
Christian to the heart's core. They are born out of
the Gospel, and the Lord of the Gospel alone can
nourish them and bring them to fruit. One teacher
may tell us that righteousness is the one thing of
THE NEW HUMANITY.
361
which we must talk and think; that if men will
study that lesson they will regard as mere sur-
plusage much that man has in all ages clung to as
the Gospel. God speed him! Let men set them-
selves in earnest 'to seek after righteousness;' they
will learn full swiftly the meaning of 'the righteous-
'ness which is of God by faith.' Another may tell us
that devotion to an ideal Humanity will feed that
passion of love and self-sacrifice which is to purify,
heal, and save society. God speed him! The more
he makes men yearn to his ideal Humanity, the more
will they be ready to hail the message that God has
made it real for them, in the Son whom He hath
given; and the more will they find in that Love
which suffered and conquered on Calvary a fountain
of infinite power.
Others may say, 'Your theology is all an unknown
world to us; the law of the Universe is enfolded
'within its bosom ; let us alone to search out the only
'realities which man can have to do with, the physical
'phenomena of life and of the world.' God speed
them! God has not so made the world that the
honest study of it will in the end lead men away
from Him. They are as yet but on the threshold
of the mystery of Nature; the deeper they search it
the clearer the signs which they will find of God.
And man was made to know, as well as to believe
and to live. Always there are two processes at
work, though the Church is prone to forget it.
362
THE RISEN WORLD.
There is the process which enlarges the sphere
of knowledge, and the process which quickens the
life of faith. Greece was as essential as Judæa in
the Divine plan of the culture of the world. Know-
ledge enlarges the field and sweetens the atmosphere
of man's higher life. There are some estimates
which the Church will be compelled to rectify. For
instance, the influence of what one must call the
Pagan revival in the heart of Roman Catholic
Europe about the dawn of the Reformation, on the
immense enlargement of the sphere of spiritual life
which the Reformation secured; or the relation of
the speculations of the English Deists and French
Encyclopædists, which re-imported humanity into the
divinity of the Church, on the wonderful Evangelic
outburst which has marked these latest generations.
God speed the philosophers! We sorely need to
have our view of man and the Universe enlarged
and elevated. The wider the sphere of knowledge
which they conquer for us, the wider the realm which
Christ will one day make all His own.
And what of Heathendom? Some may think
that I have forgotten it. I have had it in view in
every word of this discourse. I have endeavoured
to unfold the first principles of a Missionary Gospel.
It is the Son of Man who sends us to preach to
The one broad basis of our missionary enter-
prise is loyalty to Him. There are many grounds
on which the duty of preaching 'to the heathen the
men.
THE NEW HUMANITY.
363
'unsearchable riches of Christ' is urged on us. They
are grovelling in vice-save them from wretched-
ness; they are fierce and murderous-save them
from extinction; they are desolate and hopeless-
save them from despair; they are in peril of hell-
save them from perdition. At root there is but one
reason; they are Christ's, save them for Him. One
thing, and one thing only, can endure the strain and
win the prize of a missionary career, the constraint
of 'the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our
'Lord.' These are my Lord's redeemed ones for
whom He died on Calvary. I go to seek them and
to unfold to them the riches of His love. Great is
the mission of commerce, great is the mission of
civilization, great is the mission of philanthropy; but
the missionary of the Cross has a greater mission,
to bear abroad the Word which quickens, redeems,
and saves.
Mr. Mill instructs us that large portions of man-
kind are grovelling in a condition from which hardly
anything short of superhuman power can save them.
Blessed be God that we have superhuman Power
with us in our efforts to turn the tide of degradation,
and to give a vital impulse 'to the upward move-
'ment.' But for the superhuman Power we might
be as despairing about Nature and life as the
philosophers. Precisely that relation which, in the
ages of exuberant vigour of which we have been
speaking, the Christians sustained to the Heathendom
364
THE RISEN WORLD.
us.
lying around them, we Christian Englishmen sustain
to the Heathendom of the wide world. The great
world is to us what Europe was to the Roman. We
mix with it everywhere. Our ships are on every
sea, our merchandise is in every port; in every
region, however far and rude, men are at work for
In the heart of Africa, on the highlands of
Thibet, in American wildernesses, in Pacific islands,
in Arctic ice, we stimulate the industry and absorb
the produce of mankind. The rivers of the world
are the highways of our traffic; its mountain passes
are trodden by our caravans. We touch it at every
point; we stir it in every organ; and the saddest
thing upon earth, from the human point of view, is
the certainty that our touch will but stimulate the
corruption, unless we can infuse into it some tincture
of that virtue which goes forth from Christ to revive
and to purify.
Precisely the work which the young Christianity
accomplished for the Heathendom of the Empire, we
are called to accomplish for the Heathendom of the
world. They preached 'Jesus and the Resurrec-
'tion;' and stagnant, corrupted heathenism began to
stir and throb, and thrill with the pulses of a new-
born life. And heathenism is stagnant everywhere.
It lacks the inspiration to strain onwards, and to un-
fold its life. It waits now, as the Empire waited, the
superhuman touch. Sir H. Maine, in his luminous
treatise on Ancient Law,' remarks, 'The stationary
C
THE NEW HUMANITY.
365
'condition of the human race is the rule, the pro-
'gressive is the exception.' 'In spite of over-
'whelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen
'of Western Europe to bring thoroughly home to
'himself the truth that the civilization which sur-
'rounds him is a rare exception in the history of the
' world. It is indisputable that much the greatest
'part of mankind has never shown a particle of
'desire that its civil institutions should be improved,
'since the moment when external completeness was
'first given to them by their embodiment in some
'permanent record.'
It is profoundly suggestive. Like the Empire,
heathenism has in itself no spring of permanent
renewal. Left to itself it tends to stagnate, and in
the end rots and expires. It wants the quickening
touch. The knowledge of himself as a Spiritual
and Immortal being, through the knowledge of the
Father which the Incarnation unveils, is the starting
point of the higher progress for a man and for man-
kind. Heathendom is weary, worn, and hopeless.
Profoundly pitiful is the cry, 'Come over and help
'us,' which seems to reach us from all the ancient
idolatries of the world. I know that there is a certain
weariness of the ideas and methods of Missions
among the wise and able ones who are busy in the
foremost places of our time. Civilization, commerce,
intercourse of peoples, settled government-develop
these first, is the cry, and the Christian preacher can
366
THE RISEN WORLD.
follow in their train. Preach Christ, is our answer,
and now as of old, in the steps of the 'beautiful
'feet,' all goodly seeds in time will spring. They
have tried the mission of civilization, of commerce,
of 'regular government' in Africa. Read Sir S.
Baker's 'Ismaïlia,' and then read the tale of Moffat's
missionary labours in South Africa; compare the
sanguinary retreat from the smoking and blood-
stained ruins of Masindi, with the heroic march
of Livingstone's daring and devoted followers to the
coast, bearing the body of their great leader with a
courage, a resolution, a reverence, a tenderness,
which would have crowned with honour the picked
men of the world. Read and compare, if you want
to know whether we shall send first to the heathen
the Bible or the rifle, the teacher or the trader, the
father or the ruler, the man in whose footsteps bloom
confidence, industry, and charity, or the man who
leaves behind him as the mark of 'civilization' wide
tracts of desolation and death.
We live in days which are paralyzing to large and
generous enterprizes. Criticism is so keen, and
intellect is so solvent to enthusiasm, that a man is
sorely tempted to hold his peace 'even from good,'
lest the critics should find out how much mischief his
good is doing; and to stay his hand from helping and
blessing lest he should suffer rebuke as a transgressor
of the laws which rule the social development of
mankind. Nor can Missions escape.
We are
THE NEW HUMANITY.
367
assured that in these days they are an anachronism;
that in the end they are utterly useless to the
idolaters; that they inoculate them with the ideas of
a strange and uncongenial civilization, and pervert
their natural development, where they are not
serenely contemptuous, into ungainly moulds. It is
well, amid the pitiless hail of criticism with which
every Christian enterprize must now expect to be
assailed, to be able to fall back on the broad com-
mission of the Master, to do His commandments,
and to leave the results of our work with Him. We
preach to men because Christ died for men; and
wherever a man lives and suffers, we believe that
there is an Immortal being whom Christ has bound
by the bands of an everlasting Love to His heart.
The Lord who died for him knows well what to do
with him; He has a work for him on earth; He has
a place for him in His triumphal train in eternity.
And if, in the profound and far-reaching method of
His wisdom, He has made the knowledge of His
Gospel depend on that ministry of man to man,
which it seems to be the main aim of all earth's dis-
cipline to develop, be it ours to justify His ways.
The Power which created Christendom has to win
kindred triumphs in a yet wider world. Its energy
is exhaustless, its beneficent range is boundless.
Age cannot wither it, nor use impair its infinite
fecundity. The Love which wrought redemption on
Calvary must reign omnipotent in all the spheres.
368
THE RISEN WORLD.
He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be
satisfied. What shall satisfy the heart of Christ?
What but the reign of the Love which redeemed
Humanity, not over all peoples only, but over all
worlds. We have yet to learn the meaning of the
Incarnation; what it promises, what it assures, to
man. It is because we so miserably narrow and
hamper it, that men are tempted to deny it, and to
prefer pure Humanity to such a partial and crippled
God. Christ, when unto us that Child was born,
when unto us that Son was given, laid hold on
Humanity and claimed it for Himself. To give to
Him Humanity we send our preachers forth. And
faith, soaring above the mists and fogs which en-
velope our selfishness, sees a glorious vision fashion
itself in the golden sunlight of the far future-
Humanity redeemed, sanctified, and consecrated to
Jesus, fulfilling the ministries of His boundless mercy
through all the worlds.
'Then the end! Beneath His rod
Man's last enemy shall fall.
Hallelujah! Christ in God,
God in Christ, is all in all.'
•
UNWIN BROTHERS, PRINTERS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.

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