BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
A PRESENT HEAVEN.
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THE
PATIENCE OF HOPE
BY'THE AUTHOR OF "A PRESENT HEAVEN"
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
JOHN G. WHITTIER
ST TENEO ET TENEOR
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTT'ON AND COMPANY
713 BROADWAY




TENTH EDITION.
RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
PRINTED BY H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.




INTRODUCTION.'        HERE are men who, irrespective of
the names by which they are called
Win the Babel confusion of sects, are
endeared to the common heart of
Christendom.  Our doors open of their own
accord to receive them.  For in them we feel
that in some faint degree, and with many limitations, the Divine is again manifested: something of the Infinite Love shines out of them;
their very garments have healing and fragrance
borrowed from  the bloom of Paradise.  So of
books.  There are volumes which perhaps contain many things, in the matter of doctrine and
illustration, to which our reason does not assent,
but which nevertheless seem permeated with a
certain sweetness and savor of life. They have
the Divine seal and imprimatur; they are fragrant with heart's-ease and asphodel; tonic with
the leaves which are for the healing of the na424176




vi           INTRODUCTION.
tions. The meditations of the devout monk of
Kempen are the common heritage of Catholic
and Protestant; our hearts burn within us as we
walk with Augustine under Numidian fig-trees
in the gardens of Verecundus; Fenelon from
his bishop's palace, and John Woolman from
his tailor's shop, speak to us in the same language.  The unknown author of that book
which Luther loved  next to his Bible, the
"Theologia Germanica"  is just as truly at
home in this present age, and in the ultra Protestantism of New England, as in the heart of
Catholic Europe, and in the fourteenth century.
For such books know  no limitations of time
or place; they have the perpetual freshness and
fitness of truth; they speak out of profound
experience: heart answers to heart as we read
them; the spirit that is in man, and the inspiration that giveth understanding, bear witness to
them.  The bent and stress of their testimony
are the same, whether written in this or a past
century, by Catholic or Quaker: self-renunciation, -reconcilement to the Divine will through
simple faith in the Divine goodness, and the
love of it which must needs follow its recognition, -the life of Christ made our own by selfdenial and sacrifice, and the fellowship of his
suffering for the good of others,- the indwell



INTRODUCTION.                vii
ing Spirit, leading into all truth,-the Divine
Word nigh us, even in our hearts.  They have
little to do with creeds, or schemes of doctrine,
or the partial and inadequate plans of salvation
invented by human speculation and ascribed to
Him  who- it is sufficient to know-is able
to save unto the uttermost all who trust in him.
They insist upon simple faith and holiness of
life, rather than rituals or modes of worship;
they leave the merely formal, ceremonial, and
temporal part of religion to take care of itself,
and earnestly seek for the substantial, the necessary, and the permanent.
With these legacies of devout souls, it seems
to me, the little volume herewith presented is
not wholly unworthy of a place.  It assumes
the life and power of the Gospel as a matter of
actual experience; it bears unmistakable evidence
of a realization, on the part of its author, of the
truth, that Christianity is not simply historical
and traditional, but present and permanent, with
its roots in the infinite past and its branches in
the infinite future, the eternal spring and growth
of Divine love; not the dying echo of words
uttered centuries ago, never to be repeated, but
God's good tidings spoken afresh in every soul,
-the perennial fountain and unstinted outflow
of wisdom and goodness, forever old and forever




viii            INTRODUCTION.
new.  It is a lofty plea for patience, trust, hope,
and holy confidence, under the shadow, as well
as in the light, of Christian experience, whether
the  cloud seems to rest on the tabernacle, or
moves guidingly forward.  It is perhaps too exclusively addressed to those who minister in the
inner sanctuary, to be entirely intelligible to the
vaster number who wait in the outer courts;
it overlooks, perhaps, too much the solidarity
and oneness of humanity; * but all who read
it will feel its earnestness, and confess to the
singular beauty of its style, the strong, steady
march of its argument, and the wide and varied
learning which illustrates it. To use the language of one of its reviewers in the Scottish
press: -
"Beauty  there  is in  the  book;  exquisite
glimpses into the loveliness of nature here and
there shine out from its lines, - a charm wanting which meditative writing always seems to
have a defect; beautiful gleams, too, there are
of the choicest things of art, and frequent allusions by the way to legend or picture of the
religious past; so that, while you read, you
* " The good are not so good as I once thought, nor the bad
so evil, and in all there is more for grace to make advantage of,
and more to testify for God and holiness, than I once believed."
-Baxter.




INTRODUCTION.                 ix
wander by a clear brook of thought, coming
far from the beautiful hills, and winding away
from  beneath  the  sunshine of gladness and
beauty into the dense, mysterious forest of human  existence, that loves to sing, amid the
shadow  of human  darkness and anguish, its
music of heaven-born  consolation; bringing,
too, its pure waters of cleansing and healing,
yet evermore making its praise of holy affection and gladness; while it is still haunted by
the spirits of prophet, saint, and poet, repeating snatches of their strains, and is led on, as
by a spirit from above, to join the great river
of God's truth......
"This is a book for Christian men, for the
quiet hour of holy solitude, when the heart
longs and waits for access to the presence of
the  Master.  The  weary  heart that thirsts
amidst its conflicts and its toils for refreshing
water, will drink eagerly of these sweet and
refreshing  words.  To  thoughtful men and
women, especially such as have learnt any of
the patience of hope in the experiences of sorrow  and trial, we commend this little volume
most heartily and earnestly."
"The Patience of Hope" fell into my hands
soon after its publication in Edinburgh, some
1*




x            INTRODUCTION.
two years ago.  I was at once impressed by
its extraordinary richness of language and im
agery, -its deep and solemn tone of meditation in rare combination with an eminently practical tendency, -philosophy warm  and
glowing with love. It will, perhaps, be less the
fault of the writer than of her readers, if they
are not always able to  eliminate from  her
highly poetical and imaginative language the
subtle metaphysical verity or phase of religious
experience which she seeks to express, or that
they are compelled to pass over, without appropriation, many things which are nevertheless
profoundly suggestive as vague possibilities of
the highest life. All may not be able to find
in some of her Scriptural citations the exact
weight and significance so apparent to her own
mind.  She startles us, at times, by her novel
applications of familiar texts, by meanings reflected upon them  from  her own spiritual intuitions, making the barren Baca of the letter
a well.  If the rendering be questionable, the
beauty and quaint felicity of illustration and
comparison are unmistakable; and we call to
mind Augustine's saying, that two  or more
widely varying interpretations of Scripture may
be alike true in themselves considered. " When
one saith,'Moses meant as I do,' and an



INTRODUCTION.                xi
other saith,' Nay, but as I do,' I ask, more
reverently,'Why not rather as both, if both
be true?"
Some minds, for instance, will hesitate to assent to the use of certain Scriptural passages, as
evidence that He who is the Light of men, the
Way and the Truth, in the mystery of his economy, designedly "delays, withdraws, and even
hides himself from those who love and follow
him."   They will prefer to impute spiritual
dearth and darkness to human weakness, to the
selfishness which seeks a sign for itself, to evil
imaginations indulged, to the taint and burden
of some secret sin, or to some disease and exaggeration of the conscience, growing out of
bodily infirmity, rather than to any purpose on
the part of our Heavenly Father to perplex and
mislead his children.  The sun does not shine
the less because one side of our planet is in
darkness.  To borrow the words of Augustine:
"Thou, Lord, forsakest nothing thou hast made.
Thou alone art near to those even who remove
far from  thee.  Let them  turn and seek thee,
for not as they have forsaken their Creator hast
thou forsaken thy creation."  It is only by
holding fast the thought of Infinite Goodness,
and interpreting doubtful Scripture and inward
spiritual experience by the light of that central




xii           INTRODUCTION.
idea, that we can altogether escape the dreadful
conclusion of Pascal, that revelation has been
given us in dubious cipher, contradictory and
mystical, in order that some, through miraculous aid, may understand it to their salvation,
and others be mystified by it to their eternal
loss.
I might mention  other points of probable
divergence between reader and writer, and indicate more particularly my own doubtful pause
and hesitancy over some of these pages.  But
it is impossible for me to make one to whom
I am  so deeply indebted an offender for a
word or a Scriptural rendering.  On the grave
and awful themes which she discusses, I have
little to say in the way of controversy.  I
would listen, rather than criticise. The utterances of pious souls, in all ages, are to me often
like fountains in a thirsty land, strengthening
and refreshing, yet not without an after-taste
of human frailty and inadequateness, a slight
bitterness  of disappointment and  unsatisfied
quest.  Who has not felt at times that the
letter killeth, that prophecies fail, and tongues
cease to edify, and been ready to say, with the
author of the "Imitation of Christ": "Speak,
Lord, for thy servant heareth. Let not Moses
nor the prophets speak to me, but speak thou




INTRODUCTION.              xiii
rather, who art the Inspirer and Enlightener of
all. I am weary with reading and hearing many
things; let all teachers hold their peace; let
all creatures keep silence: speak thou alone
to me."
The writer of " The Patience of Hope" had,
previous to its publication, announced herself to
a fit, if small, audience of earnest and thoughtful
Christians, in a little volume entitled, " A Present Heaven."  She has recently published a
collection of poems, of which so competent a
judge as Dr. Brown, the author of "Horae
Subsecivae" and "Rab and his Friends," thus
speaks, in the North British Review:"Such of our readers —a fast increasing
number —as have read and enjoyed'The Patience of Hope,' listening to the gifted nature
which, through such deep and subtile thought,
and through affection and godliness still deeper
and more quick, has charmed and soothed them,
will not be surprised to learn that she is not
only poetical, but, what is more, a poet, and
one as true as George  Herbert and  Henry
Vaughan, or our own Cowper; for, with all
our admiration of the searching, fearless speculation, the wonderful power of speaking clearly upon dark and all but unspeakable subjects,
the rich outcome of'thoughts that wander




xiv           INTRODUCTION.
through eternity,' which increases every time we
take up that wonderful little book, we confess
we were surprised at the kind and the amount
of true poetic vis in these poems, from the same
fine and strong hand.  There is a personality
and immediateness, a sort of sacredness and
privacy, as if they were overheard rather than
read, which gives to these remarkable productions a charm and a flavor all their own. With
no effort, no consciousness of any end but that
of uttering the inmost thoughts and desires of
the heart, they flow out as clear, as living, as
gladdening as the wayside well, coming from
out the darkness of the central depths, filtered
into purity by time and travel.  The waters
are copious, sometimes to overflowing; but they
are always limpid and unforced, singing their
own quiet tune, not saddening, though sometimes sad, and their darkness not that of obscurity, but of depth, like that of the deep sea.
"This is not a book to criticise or speak
about, and we give no extracts from the longer,
and in this case, we think, the better poems,
In reading this Cardiphonia set to music, we
have been often reminded, not only of Herbert
and Vaughan, but of Keble, —a likeness of the
spirit, not of the letter; for if there is any one
poet who has given a bent to her mind, it is




INTRODUCTION.                 xv
Wordsworth, -the greatest of all our century's
poets, both in himself and in his power of making poets."
In the belief that whoever peruses the following pages will be sufficiently interested in
their author to be induced to turn back and
read over again, with renewed pleasure, extracts
from  her metrical writings, I copy from  the
volume so warmly commended  a  few  brief
pieces and extracts from the longer poems.
Here are three sonnets, each a sermon in
itself: -
ASCENDING.
THEY who from mountain-peaks have gazed upon
The wide, illimitable heavens, have said,
That, still receding as they climbed, outspread,
The blue vault deepens over them, and, one
By one drawn further back, each starry sun
Shoots down a feebler splendor overhead.
So, Saviour, as our mounting spirits, led
Along Faith's living way to Thee, have won
A nearer access, up the difficult track
Still pressing, on that rarer atmosphere,
When low beneath us flits the cloudy rack,
We see Thee drawn within a widening sphere
Of glory, from us further, further back, -
Yet is it then because we are more near.




INTRODUCTION.
LIFE TAPESTRY.
Too long have I, methought, with tearful eye
Pored o'er this tangled work of mine, and mused
Above each stitch awry and thread confused;
Now will I think on what in years gone by
I heard of them that weave rare tapestry
At royal looms, and how they constant use
To work on the rough side, and still peruse
The pictured pattern set above them high;
So will I set MY COPY high above,
And gaze and gaze till on my spirit grows
Its gracious impress; till some line of love,
Transferred upon my canvas, faintly glows;
Nor look too much on warp or woof, provide
He whom I work for sees their fairer side!
HOPE.
WHEN I do think on thee, sweet Hope, and how
Thou followest on our steps, a coaxing child
Oft chidden hence, yet quickly reconciled,
Still turning on us a glad, beaming brow,
And red, ripe lips for kisses: even now
Thou mindest me of him, the Ruler mild,
Who led God's chosen people through the wild.
And bore with wayward murmurers, meek as thou
That bringest waters from the Rock, with bread
Of angels strewing Earth for us! like him
Thy force abates not, nor thine eye grows dim;
But still with milk and honey-droppings fed,
Thou leadest to the Promised Country fair,
Though thou, like Moses, may'st not enter there!




INTRODUCTION.                 xvii
There is something very weird and striking
in the following lines: —
GONE.
ALONE, at midnight as he knelt, his spirit was aware
Of Somewhat falling in between the silence and the
prayer;
A bell's dull clangor that hath sped so far, it faints
and dies
So soon as it hath reached the ear whereto its errand
lies;
And as he rose up from his knees, his spirit was
aware
Of Somewhat, forceful and unseen, that sought to
hold him there;
As of a Form that stood behind, and on his shoulders
prest
Both hands to stay his rising up, and Somewhat in
his breast,
In accents clearer far than words, spake, "Pray yet
longer, pray,
For one that ever prayed for thee this night hath
passed away;
"A  soul, that climbing hour by hour the silvershining stair
That leads to God's great treasure-house, grew covetous; and there
B




xviii         INTRODUCTION.
"Was stored no blessing and no boon, for thee she
did not claim,
(So lowly, yet importunate!) and ever with  thy
name
"She link'd — that none in earth or heaven might
hinder it or stay -
One Other Name, so strong, that thine hath never
missed its way.
"This very night within my arms this gracious soul
I bore
Within the Gate, where many a prayer of hers had
gone before;
"And where she resteth, evermore one constant
song they raise
Of'Holy, holy,' so that now I know not if she
prays;
"But for the voice of praise in Heaven, a voice -of
Prayer hath gone
From  Earth; thy name upriseth now  no more;
pray on, pray on!"
The following may serve as a specimen of
the writer's lighter, half-playful strain of moralizing: -
SEEKING.
" AND where, and among what pleasant places,
Have ye been, that ye come again




INTRODUCTION.                 xix
With your laps so full of flowers, and your faces
Like buds blown fresh after rain?"
" We have been," said the children speaking
In their gladness, as the birds chime,
All together, -  "we have been seeking
For the Fairies of olden time;
For we thought, they are only hidden, -
They would never surely go
From this green earth all unbidden,
And the children that love them so;
Though they come not around us leaping,
As they did when they and the world
Were young, we shall find them sleeping
Within some broad leaf curled;
For the lily its white doors closes
But only over the bee,
And we looked through the summer roses,
Leaf by leaf, so carefully;
But we thought, rolled up we shall find them
Among mosses old and dry;
From gossamer threads that bind them,
They will start like the butterfly,
All winged: so we went forth seeking,
Yet still they have kept unseen;
Though we think our feet have been keeping
The track where they have been,
For we saw where their dance went flying
O'er the pastures, - snowy white
Their seats and their tables lying,
O'erthrown in their sudden flight.




xx            INTRODUCTION.
And they, too, have had their losses,
For we found the goblets white
And red in the old spiked mosses,
That they drank from over-night;
And in the pale horn of the woodbine
Was some wine left, clear and bright;
But we found," said the children, speaking
More quickly, "so many things,
That we soon forgot we were seeking,Forgot all the Fairy rings,
Forgot all the stories olden
That we hear round the fire at night,
Of their gifts and their favors golden, -
The sunshine was so bright;
And the flowers - we found so many
That it almost made us grieve
To think there were some, sweet as any,
That we were forced to leave;
As we left, by the brook-side lying,
The balls of drifted foam,
And brought (after all our trying)
These Guelder-roses home."
"Then, oh!" I heard one speaking
Beside me soft and low,
"I have been, like the blessed children, seeking,
Still seeking, to and fro;
Yet not, like them, for the Fairies, -
They might pass unmourned away
For me, that had looked on angels -
On angels that would not stay;




INTRODUCTION.                 xxi
No! not though in haste before them
I spread all my heart's best cheer,
And made love my banner o'er them,
If it might but keep them here;
They stayed but awhile to rest them;
Long, long before its close,
From my feast, though I mourned and prest them
The radiant guests arose;
And their flitting wings struck sadness
And silence; never more
Hath my soul won back the gladness,
That was its own before.
No; I mourned not for the Fairies
When I had seen hopes decay,
That were sweet unto my spirit
So long; I said,'If they,
That through shade and sunny weather
Have twined about my heart,
Should fade, we must go together,
For we can never part!'
But my care was not availing,
I found their sweetness gone;
I saw their bright tints paling; —
They died; yet I lived on.
" Yet seeking, ever seeking
Like the children, I have won
A guerdon all undreamt of
When first my quest begun,
And my thoughts come back like wanderers,
Out-wearied, to my breast;




xxii           INTRODUCTION.
What they sought for long they found not,
Yet was the Unsought best.
For I sought not out for crosses,
I did not seek for pain;
Yet I find the heart's sore losses
Were the spirit's surest gain."
In " A  Meditation," the writer ventures, not
without awe and reverence, upon that dim, unsounded ocean of mystery, the life beyond.
{'But is there prayer
Within your quiet Homes, and is there care
For those ye leave behind? I would address
My spirit to this theme in humbleness:
No tongue nor pen hath uttered or made known
This mystery, and thus I do but guess
At clearer types through lowlier patterns shown;
Yet when did Love on earth forsake its own?
Ye may not quit your sweetness, in the Vine
More firmly rooted than of old, your wine
Hath freer flow! ye have not changed, but grown
To fuller stature; though the shock was keen
That severed you from us, how oft below
Hath sorest parting smitten but to show
True hearts their hidden wealth that quickly grow
The closer for that anguish, - friend to friend
Revealed more clear, - and what is Death to rend
The ties of life and love, when He must fade
In light of very Life, when He must bend
To love, that, loving, loveth to the end?




INTRODUCTION.                xxiii
I do not deem ye look
Upon us now, for be it that your eyes
Are sealed or clear, a burden on them lies
Too deep and blissful for their gaze to brook
Our troubled strife; enough that once ye dwelt
Where now we dwell, enough that once ye felt
As now we feel, to bid you recognize
Our claim of kindred cherished though unseen;
And Love that is to you for eye and ear
Hath ways unknown to us to bring you near,To keep you near for all that comes between;
As pious souls that move in sleep to prayer,
As distant friends, that see not, and yet share
(I speak of what I know) each other's care,
So may your spirits blend with ours! above
Ye know not haply of our state, yet Love
Acquaints you with our need, and through a way
More sure than that of knowledge- so ye pray!
And even thus we meet,
And even thus we commune! spirits freed
And spirits fettered mingle, nor have need
To seek a common atmosphere, the air
Is meet for either in this olden, sweet,
Primeval breathing of Man's spirit, - Prayer!
I give, in conclusion, a portion of one of her
most characteristic poems, "The Reconciler."
Our dreams are reconciled,
Since Thou didst come to turn them all to Truth;




xxiv           INTRODUCTION.
The World, the Heart, are dreamers in their youth
Of visions beautiful, and strange and wild;
And Thou, our Life's Interpreter, dost still
At once make clear these visions and fulfil;
Each dim sweet Orphic rhyme,
Each mythic tale sublime
Of strength to save, of sweetness to subdue,
Each morning dream the few,
Wisdom's first lovers told, if read in Thee comes true.
Thou, 0 Friend
From heaven, that madest this our heart Thine own,
Dost pierce the broken language of its moan -
Thou dost not scorn our needs, but satisfy!
Each yearning deep and wide,
Each claim, is justified;
Our young illusions fail not, though they die
Within the brightness of Thy Rising, kissed
To happy death, like early clouds that lie
About the gates of Dawn, - a golden mist
Paling to blissful white, through rose and amethyst.
The World that puts Thee by,
That opens not to greet Thee with Thy train,
That sendeth after Thee the sullen cry,
"We will not have thee over us to reign";
Itself doth testify through searchings vain
Of Thee and of its need, and for the good
It will not, of some base similitude
Takes up a taunting witness, till its mood,




INTRODUCTION.                xxv
Grown fierce o'er failing hopes, doth rend and tear
Its own illusions grown too thin and bare
To wrap it longer; for within the gate
Where all must pass, a veiled and hooded Fate
A dark Chimera, coiled and tangled lies,
And he who answers not its questions dies,Still changing form and speech, but with the same
Vexed riddles, Gordian-twisted, bringing shame
Upon the nations that with eager cry
Hail each new solver of the mystery;
Yet he, of these the best,
Bold guesser, hath but prest
Most nigh to Thee, our noisy plaudits wrong;
True Champion, that hast wrought
Our help of old, and brought
Meat from this eater, sweetness from this strong.
O Bearer of the key
That shuts and opens with a sound so sweet
Its turning in the wards is melody,
All things we move among are incomplete
And vain until we fashion them in Thee!
We labor in the fire,
Thick smoke is round about us, through the din
Of words that darken counsel clamors dire
Ring from thought's beaten anvil, where within
Two Giants toil, that even from their birth
With travail-pangs have torn their mother Earth,
And wearied out her children with their keen
Upbraidings of the other, till between
2




xxvi           INTRODUCTION.
Thou camest, saying, " Wherefore do ye wrong
Each other?-ye are Brethren."  Then these twain
Will own their kindred, and in Thee retain
Their claims in peace, because Thy land is wide
As it is goodly! here they pasture free,
This lion and this leopard, side by side,
A little child doth lead them with a song;
Now, Ephraim's envy ceaseth, and no more
Doth Judah anger Ephraim chiding sore,
For one did ask a Brother, one a King,
So dost Thou gather them in one, and bring -
Thou, King forevermore, forever Priest,
Thou, Brother of our own from bonds released
A Law of Liberty,
A Service making free,
A Commonweal where each has all in Thee.
And not alone these wide,
Deep-planted yearnings, seeking with a cry
Their meat from God, in Thee are satisfied;
But all our instincts waking suddenly
Within the soul, like infants from their sleep
That stretch their arms into the dark and weep,
Thy voice can still. The stricken heart bereft
Of all its brood of singing hopes, and left'Mid leafless boughs, a cold, forsaken nest
With snow-flakes in it, folded in thy breast
Doth lose its deadly chill; and grief that creeps
Unto thy side for shelter, finding there




INTRODUCTION.               xxvii
The wound's deep cleft, forgets its moan, and weeps
Calm, quiet tears, and on thy forehead Care
Hath looked until its thorns, no longer bare,
Put forth pale roses. Pain on thee doth press
Its quivering cheek, and all the weariness,
The want that keep their silence, till from Thee
They hear the gracious summons, none beside
Hath spoken to the world-worn, " Come to me,"
Tell forth their heavy secrets.
Thou dost hide
These in thy bosom, and not these alone,
But all our heart's fond treasure that had grown
A burden else: O Saviour, tears were weighed
To Thee in plenteous measure! none hath shown
That Thou didst smile! yet hast Thou surely made
All joy of ours Thine own;
Thou madest us for Thine;
We seek amiss, we wander to and fro;
Yet are we ever on the track Divine;
The soul confesseth Thee, but sense is slow
To lean on aught but that which it may see;
So hath it crowded up these Courts below
With dark and broken images of Thee;
Lead Thou us forth upon Thy Mount, and show
Thy goodly patterns, whence these things of old
By Thee were fashioned; One though manifold.
Glass Thou thy perfect likeness in the soul,
Show us Thy countenance, and we are WHOLE!




xviii         INTR OD UCTION.
No one, I am quite certain, will regret that
I have made these liberal quotations.  Apart
from their literary merit, they have a special
interest for the readers of "The Patience of
Hope," as more fully illustrating the writer's
personal experience and aspirations.
It has been suggested by a friend, that it is
barely possible that an objection may be urged
against the following treatise, as against all
books of a like character, that its tendency is
to  isolate the individual from  his race, and
to nourish an exclusive and purely selfish personal solicitude; that its piety is self-absorbent, and that it does not take sufficiently into
account active  duties and charities, and the
love of the neighbor so strikingly illustrated
by the Divine Master in his life and teachings.
This objection, if valid, would be a fatal one.
For, of a truth, there can be no meaner type
of human  selfishness than that afforded  by
him  who, unmindful of the world of sin and
suffering about him, occupies himself in the
pitiful business of saving his own soul in the
very spirit of the  miser, watching  over his
private hoard while his neighbors starve for lack
of bread.  But surely the benevolent unrest,
the far-reaching sympathies and keen sensitiveness to the suffering of others, which so nobly




INTRODUCTION.              xxix
distinguish our present age, can have nothing to
fear from a plea for personal holiness, patience,
hope, and resignation to the Divine will. "The
more piety, the more compassion," says Isaac
Taylor; and this is true, if we understand by
piety, not self-concentred asceticism, but the
pure religion  and undefiled which visits the
widow and the fatherless, and yet keeps itself
unspotted from the world, —which deals justly,
loves mercy, and yet walks humbly before God.
Self-scrutiny in the light of truth can do no
harm to any one, least.of all to the reformer and
philanthropist. The spiritual warrior, like the
young candidate for knighthood, may be none
the worse for his preparatory ordeal of watching
all night by his armor.
Tauler in medieval times, and Woolman in
the last century, are among the most earnest
teachers of the inward life and spiritual nature
of Christianity, yet both were distinguished for
practical benevolence.  They did not separate
the two great commandments.  Tauler strove
with equal intensity of zeal to promote the temporal and the spiritual welfare of men. In the
dark and evil time in which he lived, amidst the
untold horrors of the "Black Plague," he
illustrated by deeds of charity and mercy his
doctrine of disinterested benevolence. Wool



xxx           INTROD UCTION.
man's whole life was a nobler "Imitation of
Christ" than that fervid rhapsody of monastic
piety which bears the name.
How faithful, yet, withal, how full of kindness, were his rebukes of those who refused
labor its just reward, and ground the faces of
the poor?  How deep and entire was his sympathy with  overtasked and ill-paid laborers;
with wet and ill-provided sailors, with  poor
wretches blaspheming  in the mines, because
oppression had made them mad; with the dyers
plying their unhealthful trade to minister to
luxury and pride; with the tenant wearing out
his life in the service of a hard landlord; and
with the slave sighing over his unrequited toil!
What a significance there was in his vision of
the " dull, gloomy mass" which appeared before him, darkening half the heavens, and which
he was told was "human beings in as great
misery as they could be and live; and he was
mixed with them, and henceforth he might not
consider himself a distinct and separate being"!
His saintliness  was wholly unconscious; he
seems never to have thought himself any nearer
to the tender heart of God than the most miserable sinner to whom his compassion extended.
As he did not live, so neither did he die to himself.  His prayer upon his death-bed was for




INTRODUCTION.                      xxxi
others rather than himself; its beautiful humility
and  simple  trust  were  marred  by  no  sensual
imagery of crowns and harps and  golden streets,
and personal beatific exaltations; but tender
and  touching  concern  for suffering  humanity,
relieved only by the thought of the paternity of
God, and  of his love  and  omnipotence, alone
found utterance in ever-memorable words.*
In view of the troubled state of the country,
and  the  intense  preoccupation  of  the  public
mind, I  have  had  some  hesitation  in  offering
this volume  to  its publishers.   But, on  further
reflection, it has seemed to me that it might
supply a want felt by many among us; that, in
the chaos of civil strife, and the shadow of
mourning  which  rests over the  land, the  con* " 0 Lord, my God! the amazing horrors of darkness werm
gathered about me, and covered me all over, and I saw no way to
go forth; I felt the depth and extent of the misery of my fcelowcreatures separated from the Divine harmony, and it was greater
than I could bear, and I was crushed down under it; I lifted up
my hand, I stretched out my arm, but there was none to help me; I
looked round about, and was amazed.  In the depths of misery,
O Lord, I remembered that Thou art omnipotent; that I had called
thee Father; and I felt that I loved thee; and I was made quiet
in my will, and waited for deliverance from thee. Thou hadst
pity upon me, when no man could help me; I saw that meekness
under suffering was showed to us in the most affecting example
of thy Son; and thou taught me to follow him, and I said,'Thy
will, O Father, be done!'"




xxxii        INTRODUCTION.
templation of "things unseen which are eternal" might not be unwelcome; that, when the
foundations of human confidence are shaken,
and the trust in man proves vain, there might
be glad listeners to a voice, calling from the
outward and the temporal, to the inward and
the spiritual; from the troubles and perplexities
of time, to the eternal quietness which God
giveth. I cannot but believe that, in the heat
and glare through which we are passing, this
book will not invite in vain to the calm, sweet
shadows of holy meditation, grateful as the
green wings of the bird to Thalaba in the
desert; and thus afford something of consolation to the bereaved, and of strength to the
weary. For surely never was the "Patience
of Hope" more needed; never was the inner
sanctuary of prayer more desirable; never was
a steadfast faith in the Divine goodness more
indispensable, nor lessons of self-sacrifice and
renunciation, and that cheerful acceptance of
known duty which shifts not its proper responsibility upon others, nor asks for "peace in
its day" at the expense of purity and justice,
more timely than now, when the solemn words
of ancient prophecy are as applicable to our
own country as to that of the degenerate Jew, -
"Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and




INTRODUCTION.             xxxiii
thy backsliding reprove thee; know, therefore,
it is an evil thing, and bitter, that thou hast
forsaken the Lord, and that my fear is not in
thee," -when " His way is in the deep, in
clouds, and in thick darkness," and the hand
heavy upon us which shall "turn and overturn
until he whose right it is shall reign," - until,
not without rending agony, the evil plant which
our Heavenly Father hath not planted, whose
roots have wound themselves about altar and
hearthstone, and whose branches, like the tree
Al-Accoub in Moslem fable, bear the accursed
fruit of oppression, rebellion, and all imaginable
crime, shall be torn up and destroyed forever.
J. G. W.
Amesbury, Ist 6th mo. 1x862.
2*                     c








PART FIRST.




"He shall grow up as a tender plant,
As a root out of dry ground."
ISAIAH iii. z.
-9wSlp




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
PART I.
I N Jesus Christ all contradictions are
I reconciled; yet in Him, also, and in.!}Hi'. all that is connected with his person
and office, we are met by a strange
contradiction, —a clashing of opposing attributes. " Who is this that cometh from Edom,
with dyed garments from Bozrah, glorious in
his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his
strength?  He who hath trodden down the
people in his wrath, and trampled'upon them
in his fury."  Is this one with Him the Man
of sorrows and of humiliation, of silence and
long-suffering, despised of men and rejected,
giving his back to the smiters, and his cheeks
to them that plucked off the hair?  Is this Lord
to whom the Lord hath spoken, " Sit thou on
my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy
footstool," Him concerning whom  God speaks




38     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
thus comfortably unto Zion, "Behold, thy King
cometh, meek, having salvation, lowly, riding
upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass"?
is He, the upholder of the bruised reed, one
with Him who shall bruise the nations with a
rod of iron, and dash them  in pieces like a
potter's vessel? is the Interceder one with the
Avenger? the Lamb that taketh away the sins
of the world, one with Him  whose wrath a
guilty world shall not be able to abide?
" Kiss the Son, lest he be angry." Can we
wonder that some among the Jews should have
imagined there would be two Messiahs, —the
suffering one and the triumphant? And what
is the Incarnation, but the fulfilment of these
mighty, yet contending predictions? What is
the life of our Lord and Saviour upon earth but
the conflict of glory and humiliation?  " The
birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise": glorious in fact, yet of ambiguous circumstance; of
kingly descent, yet lowly parentage; born in the
appointed city, yet called a Nazarene; cradled
in a manger, yet worshipped even there by sage
and monarch; dying a death of ignominy, yet
even upon the Cross, in Hebrew and Greek
and Latin, - the three living, ruling tongues of
time, -proclaimed to be a King and a Saviour.
" This is Jesus "; possessed through life of




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.            39
boundless resources, and exerting them on behalf of others, yet himself submitting to the
ordinary conditions of the Humanity he had
taken upon him; hungering, thirsting, wearied,
in all things choosing to be made like unto his
brethren; Lord of nature and of time, yet waiting upon the restraints they impose; overcoming death, yet obedient to that which he overcame.  "He saved others, himself he cannot
save."
And as with the Master, so with them that
are of his Household.  The history of the
Christian Church is a hieroglyph or picturewriting, to which the life of Jesus Christ on
earth is as it were the Rosetta stone, making,
when once mastered, all the rest plain.  The
present aspect of the Church, its past history,
the records of individual Christian experience,
offer us many sorrowful problems; but how
was it in the days when the Word was made
flesh and dwelt among us, and man beheld God's
glory, full of grace and truth? Was there not
even then something which corresponds with
what we now see and feel? - the final and
absolute contending  with  the temporal and
accidental, and often apparently overcome by
them; lofty principles out of harmony with
the things which surround them, - delay, vicis



40      THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.
situde, incompleteness, —" the something still
which prompts the eternal sigh." Is there not
now  in Christ something which  corresponds
with what we trace in the Gospel narrative;
something, I say, which disappoints an apparently reasonable hope like that of the devout * Jews
for the temporal Messiah; disappoints it to fulfil
it far more gloriously, more completely, yet in
a way that contradicts our natural expectations.
Even then, as now, did Christ delay, withdraw,
even hide himself from  those that loved and
followed him, " a deceiver, and yet true."
The history of Divine grace in the heart and
in the world is illustrated by the book which
St. John received from the angel, sweet to the
taste, bitter in the working. Is it the Jew only
who looks in Christ for the temporal deliverer,
the restorer of paths to dwell in, the bringer
again, like David, of all that the enemy hath
carried away?  What finder of Jesus is there
who has not in his first joy exclaimed, with St.
Andrew, " We have found the Messias, that is
the Christ "?  What follower of Jesus is there
who does not learn, as did those first brethren,
that "He must be followed to prison and to
death "?
* It is difficult, perhaps, for a Christian to place himself at
the point of view they occupied so as to see how reasonable this
bope was.




THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.              41
When Jesus says to his disciples, "In the
world ye shall have tribulation," he speaks from
insight rather than foresight; as one who, knowing what was the heart of man, sees in himself
the bringer of a sword within it, that shall never
leave it until all things concerning him are fulfilled.
Let us consider this, -that when Christ took
our nature upon him, he took it as it was; he did
not re-create before assuming it, but assumed it
in order to its re-creation, so that, being found in
fashion as a man, he brought himself into connection, yet into collision, with weakness, with
error, with decay, with all that belongs to man.
The conflict of Christianity is the harder because it is civil; it has allied itself with that
against which it must contend to the death, or
be itself overcome of it. Hence its fierce collisions, its sorrowful victories; hence too its still
more sad, more fatal compromises, its unholy,
unhallowing alliances, "the Woman sitting upon
the Beast," * the compact between the Church
and the World, at the sight of which he who
had learnt so many secrets from  his beloved
Master, yet " wondered with great admiration."
And if the world itself is a field too narrow for
the meeting-shock of such antagonists as grace
* See Williams on the Apocalypse.




42      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
and nature, how fares it in the conflict of whicn
all that passes in the outward Church is but the
history "writ large"; when these two, contrary the one to the other, meet and wrestle
within the heart as those who contend, not for
mastery, but for life itself? Woe, in this battle,
to the vanquished I woe also to the victor I
" For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood, but
this shall be with burning and fuel of fire."
Ellis tells us that during his stay in Madagascar he was visited by a native of rank, himself
friendly to Christianity, and who had suffered
deeply in his family relations in the persecution
through which, as through a fiery and bloody
dawn, its light so lately broke upon that island.
This man looked at the brother missionaries
long and earnestly, when, after almost mechanically giving them his hands, there came over
his countenance, Ellis says, " an expression such
as I have never witnessed in any human being;
an intensity of feeling, neither ecstasy nor terror,
but an apparent blending of both; while during
the whole interview, which was long, there was
a strange uneasiness mingled with an evident
satisfaction."  Was there not here, even in the
twilight of faith and reason, a recognition of
Christ and of all that he comes to work? an




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.              43
intuition in this half-enlightened, half-instructed
soul of what remains long hidden from Christ's
wise and prudent ones, - the stern necessity of
the Christian covenant, that Christ in his members, as once aforetime in his human person,
should suffer many things before he can enter
into his glory? It is hard for Humanity to receive this lesson, to accept this inevitable condition of its initiation into its true life, —the laying
down of that very life, that we may receive it again
in Christ.  Hard for us, as it was for the first
disciples, even with Christ our Master going
"before us" on the foreseen path, to understand
him when he speaks of suffering, of humilation,
of death itself, shortly to be accomplished. Here
too, upon the way, will there be reasonings,
surmisings, something  too within  the  heart
which, with the ardent spirit of St. Peter, will
resist, even rebuke the teaching of its beloved
Lord; which will say unto him, "Be this far
from  Thee."   For what is this which Christ
demands from his disciple?  Even that which he
himself gave.  "Sacrifice and meat-offering thou
wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein."
The idea of propitiation, or the giving up of
something which we hold least precious in order
that we may retain that which we prize most of
all, upon which the sacrifices under the old law




44      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
and those of all natural religions are founded,
finds no place in the Christian Covenant. For
to confirm this between God and man, the most
precious thing of all was offered, and was accepted; " He taketh away the first, that he may
establish the second."
And thus it is necessary that this Man also
should have something to offer.  The need of
sacrifice is not taken away, only its nature is
changed, exalted, deepened; and mild as is the
genius of the New Dispensation, its knife goes
closer to the heart than that of the elder one,
which we are accustomed to think of as so stern
and exacting.  Behold the goodness and severity of Christ  "Skin for skin," saith Job of
old; "all that a man hath will he give for his
life."  And it is this very life which Christ
asks us to lay down for him; this life of which
he tells us, that he who loveth it shall lose it,
and he who loseth it for his sake, shall keep it
unto life eternal.
And when we speak in a spiritual sense of
Life, the laying it down and taking it again, we
speak not of mere existence, but of that which
is to every one of us the root by which we hold;
that which is to each individual heart confessedly " no vain thing, for it is our life."  Take it
away, and all beside is gone; "for in the blood




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.             45
is the life"; in the affections, in the energies
which send their sap through the whole thinking, feeling being. And it is to the root of this
tree of man's life, wrapped round with its most
intimate fibres, —even this, be it what it may,
for which we would give, for which we would
forego, all the world beside, — the will of -man,
that the axe of Christ is laid.
The disciple must be as his master, the servant as his lord.  Why was the sacrifice of
Christ's death so pre-eminently meritorious, so
infinitely prevailing with God? why do the
sacred writers attribute an efficacy to it which
it was impossible that the sufferings of unconscious though innocent victims could possess?
Because, to say nothing of the intrinsic value of
this sacrifice, it was, above all others that have
been ever offered, a free, conscious, and willing one.  The Man Christ Jesus was, of all
created beings, —as far as we know their history, -the only one who chose his own destiny,
who foreknew and accepted its full conditions;
who saw a great need, and responded to it,
"Lo! I come."  " My leave," said the acute
Frenchwoman, " was not asked before I came
into the world," -a saying in which all that
the human heart can urge against God and his
appointments lies hid.  Why should I be called




46      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
upon to endure, to forego so much?  Had the
choice been permitted me, I might possibly have
declined it. Our Saviour's leave was asked. His
fulfilment of his Father's will was voluntary; he
saw the end from the beginning; saw it even in
the beginning, and walked onwards to that end,
seeing his own destiny and feeling his own freedom.  " I have power," he says, " to lay down
my life, and I have power to take it again."
But how is Christ's follower to obtain this
freedom?  How is this great transfer, lying at
the very heart of our spiritual life, the exchange
of our own will for a better one, to be effected
for a being like Man, impelled alike by the
weakness and the strength of his whole nature
to cleave unto the dust from whence he was
at first taken? At this point we must pause a
moment, feeling that our subject has drawn us
into a desolate, even awful region, where, like
the traveller high up among the mountains, we
would fain hold the breath and hurry onwards,
lest a word too lightly spoken should bring down
the impending avalanche. For all thoughts that
lead us from the circumference of faith to its
centre draw us insensibly, and with a force that
becomes irresistible the nearer we approach that
centre, to the sacrifice of the death of Christ.
Motus rerum est rapidus extra locum, placdus




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.               47
in loco.  There is no rest for the soul of the
believer till it settles forever on this magnet.
No rest; I would say, also, no progress for the
soul until it receives within it this great Motive
Power; receives it not only as a fulfilled fact,
but accepts it in its boundless consequences, and
recognizes as first among them that of its own
"baptism unto his death."  The disciple is not
above his master, neither is the servant above
his Lord; nevertheless, every one that is perfect
shall be as his master.  O  blessed saying! O
promise like unto that made to the two chosen
disciples, "Ye shall indeed drink of my cup ";
and what if our Lord's cup should prove to be
the cup of vinegar mingled with gall, it is none
the less the cup of blessing and of full, unreserved communion.  " Kiss me with the kisses
of thy mouth, for thy love is better than wine."
And it is our personal initiation into this
mystery of sacrifice which is, as regards the life
which is in Christ Jesus, its true sacrament,
enabling the soul to pass into real and intimate
communion with him.  Christ our Passover has
been long slain for us; but how do his people,
for the most part, keep the feast? By way of
commemoration only.
But it is they who eat of the sacrifices, and
they only, who are partakers of the Altar. It




48      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
is not enough that we show forth our Lord's
death until his coming again; to draw out the
depths of this great act of love, we must so
unite ourselves to it as to learn what St. Paul
meant when he spoke of filling up that which
was behind of the sufferings of Christ. It is the
bearing of the cross, the sharing of the passion,
that enables the believer to meet and understand
his Lord; "for we being many, are one Body,"
and without participation there can be no communion.
All that are in Christ must be made to drink
into one Spirit, yet often and often perhaps must
He return and ask his chosen ones, "Are ye
able to drink of my cup?" before that free, calm
answer can be given, "We are able "; and
many offerings must be laid upon his altar with
tears and weeping before the sacrifices of joy are
brought there.  For as Christ was made like
unto us, we must be made like unto him, even at
the cost of much that is grievous to natural feeling. His coming within the soul is the bringing in of a new order; and when was there a
painless transition, a bloodless revolution?  It
gives a new aim to the will of man; it sets a
fresh goal before his affections, and one ofttimes to be reached only by passing over the
dead body of all that made up their former life.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    49
"Who will lead me into the strong city? who
will bring me into Edom?"   Before Christ can
gain the citadel of Man's will and affections,
many pleasant places must be laid waste before
him, many  fair and  flourishing  outworks  be
brought low.  These are hard sayings, and if
they are met by the rejoinder, Who can bear
them? the answer is already written, They to
whom they are addressed by Christ, and they only.
"' He who forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot
be my disciple." Christ does not say he cannot
be my servant, does not say he cannot be my
son, but he cannot be my disciple.  There are
many  gains, many losses in  Christ, over and
above that great, inappreciable loss of the salvation of the soul in him. This final aim may be
attained, and yet the hearers who, for love of a
great or of a small possession, depart upon that
saying, " Sell that thou hast, and follow me,"
may have abundant reason for going away sorrowful.  We are made poor by what we miss, as
well as by what we lose; * a little more patience,
* You say in one of your letters, " I feel a solemn pathos in
the lament which the Lord takes up over the defection of his
people:' 0 that my people had hearkened unto me, that Israel
had walked in my ways! I should soon have subdued their enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries'; and after
this follows,' I should have fed them with the finest wheat flour,
and with honey out of the stony rock should I have satisfied
them.' And what, but for a like failure in perseverance might
3                           D




50    THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
a little more constancy, and to what might we
not have attained! to what tender intimacy, to
what satisfying communications, to what power,
what rest, what freedom!
The more clearly we follow Christ, the more
perseveringly do certain truths present themselves to us, - truths with which we commune,
but dare not for a while receive in their full
import, because we know  they would lead us
whither we would not.  Yet they come again
and again, offering themselves to us, like the
Sibyl of old, each time under harder conditions,
till at last we accept them on their own terms,
A Christian may love his Master truly, and be
yet unprepared to follow him whithersoever he
goeth.  How can two walk in a way unless they
be agreed? and the enmity between Christ and
nature is not yet so wholly slain but that there
may be on the believer's part conscious shrinkings and reservations: he knows that it would
be hard to take this thing up; hard, perhaps impossible, to let this thing go, even at tile comhave been our portion,  the finest of the wheat, and honey out
of the rock,' fnd that Rock, St. Paul tells us, was Christ. To
hearken diligently unto him, to walk in his ways, is plainly pointed out as the means through which we first obtain victory over
our spiritual enemies, and then arrive at the feast of good things,
prepared for those only who have come thus far.' I will bring
them into my banqueting-house, where my banner over them
ihaL be love.' "-J. E. B.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.            51
mand of Christ himself. This crisis of spiritual
life, full of pain and perplexity, is one with
which our Saviour may deeply sympathize, for
he knoweth what is in Man; yet it is none the
less a temper which "is not worthy of Him."
He does not trust himself to a divided heart, and
of this the owner of such a heart is well aware.
So that there arises within it a secret craving for
whatever may detach and loosen these bonds,
from which no effort of its own can free it, —
a desire like that which St. Paul so fervently
expresses for the fellowship of his Lord's sufferings, the conformity to his Lord's death, so that
by any means it may attain to spiritual resurrection with him.  There comes a moment in
which the soul, awaking up into the sense of
the deep antagonism between grace and nature,
will exclaim, as seeing no other way of deliverance, "Let us go unto Him, that we may also
die with him"; let us know that we live in
Christ, if it be through being sharers in his pain.
"They were all baptized in the cloud and in
the sea"; this is the register of all Christ's
chosen ones, the pledge of their initiation into
that covenant " whose promises, whose rewards,
whose very beatitudes are sufferings."   Why
does St. Paul so rejoice,* so delight himself in
* Note A.




52      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE
weakness, in persecution, in affliction, but because he knows that without these he can attain
to no close intimacy with his beloved Lord?
And if this be a sore lesson, is it not one for
which the heart may be in some degree prepared, even by its own natural experience? Do
not trials and sorrows (also, it is true, deep joys)
shared between two friends, partings, dangers,
above all, the having stood together in the presence of death, deepen the channel of our affection in deepening that of our existence? Are
not such moments as it were sacramental, bringing us nearer each other in bringing us nearer
God, from whom the poor unrealities of time,
unworthy of us as they are of Him, too much
divide us? It is often through some keen, even
desolating shock, the blasting of the breath of
God's chiding, that the deep foundations of our
nature are first discovered to us.  When the
veil of the temple, even this poor worn garment
of our Humanity, is rent from  the top to the
bottom, we catch glimpses of the inner glory:
the rocks are riven, the graves open, they who
have long slept in the dust come forth, and
reveal to us awful and tender secrets, of which
otherwise we should  have  known nothing.
"They who love," as says St. Chrysostom, "if
it be but man, not God," will know what I




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.               53
mean, when I speak of joys springing out of
the very heart of anguish, and holding to it
by a common and inseparable life; will understand how it comes that the pale flowers which
thrust themselves out of the ruins of hope, of
endeavor, of affection, - yes, even out of the
mournful wreck  of intellect itself, — should
breathe out a deep and intimate fragrance, such
as the broad wealth of air and sunshine never
yet gave," For in things
That move past utterance, tears ope all their springs,
Nor are there in the powers that all life bears
More true interpreters of all than tears."
It needs but a little consideration to perceive
that devotion, self-sacrifice, all the higher moods
and energies even of natural feeling, are only
possible to seasons of adversity.  "Deep calleth
unto deep."  We need not look far into Man's
nature to see that its true wealth does not lie
so near the surface, but that the smooth, grassy
levels of prosperity hide riches such as only a
shock can develop.  The history of both nations
and churches shows us how the very strain and
pressure of calamity can force up social existence
to an otherwise unimaginable height of nobleness; but we must look yet deeper than this,
to understand the strange affinity which Christianity has at all times betrayed with whatever




54      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
is most contradictory to natural feeling, making
it to choose pain and weakness and infirmity as
its natural soil and climate. And here experience, rather than reason, must be our guide; for
what is there in pain, considered in itself, that is
purifying, far less ennobling?   Its connection
with all that is most precious to Christian life
is incidental rather than inherent, and is to be
traced to that deep original wound of our nature
which has set the ideals of Christ and Humanity
so far apart, that the wealth of the one can only
be attained through the minishing of the other.
If the house of David is to wax stronger, the
house of Saul must wax weaker from day to day.
And hence it is that every fuller development
of Christ's spirit within man necessarily takes a
self-subduing character, making asceticism under
one form  or other inseparable from  the true
Christian life. For the glory of the terrestrial is
one, the glory of the celestial is another. The
triumph of Nature lies in the carrying out of
its own will, in identification with some great
object, in adhesion to some lofty aim.  The
triumph of Christ is placed in the subjugation
of that very will, in acquiescence, in disentanglement; in the  stretching  forth  of the
hands, so that another may gird us and carry
us whither we would not.*
* Note B.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.             55
The character which Christ forms within the
heart is one at variance with our ideas of natural greatness; His rule opposes itself as much
to the higher as to the lower instincts of nature.
And that this should have been most clearly
seen by thinkers looking at Christianity from
without, ought not to make us careless of the
truths they disclose; for intellectual and spiritual
contemplation alike lead up to clear, calm summits, and upon them  are strange meetings undreamt of by the dwellers in the valleys and
the plains below.  The keen intuition of the
Thinker places him in possession of truths which
the lowly Christian has learned upon his knees;
and though these two may distrust and be mutually repelled from each other, they have none
the less a common standing-ground, —
" Their speech is one, their witnesses agree."
The sober Christian may possibly feel a shock
in finding Novalis describe his faith as a foe " to
art, to science, even to enjoyment"; yet does
not his own daily experience prove that the
holding of the one thing needful involves the
letting go of many things lovely and desirable,
and that in thought, as well as in action, he
must go on " ever narrowing his way, avoiding
much"?*  And this, not because his intellect
* W. B. Scott




56      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
is darkened to perceive beauty and excellence,
or his affections dulled to embrace them, but
because human life and human capacity are
bounded things; the heart can be devoted but
to one object, and the winning of the great
prizes of earthly endeavor asks for an intensity
of purpose, which in the Christian has found
another centre.
And more than this, the rule of Christ is not
only exclusive but restrictive, and though it
would carry us among too wide and distant
fields to enter upon this subject as it deserves,
we need not look far into either literature or art
to see to how many of their happiest energies
this rule opposes itself.  Their spirit is a free
spirit, impatient of any yoke.  How much, for
instance, of the greatness of Shakespeare and
Goethe consists in a wide Naturalism, which,
as it were, finds room within it for all things,
not only depicting them, but in some measure
delighting in them, as they are.  Could this
genial abandonment coexist with a deepened
moral consciousness, far less, surely, with the
simplicity and severity of Christ?
Again: to a person who has seen in Christianity a certain engaging moral and social aspect, and has not looked into it much deeper,
what Goethe says of it as being " founded upon




THE PA TIENCE OF HOPE.            57
the reverence for that which is beneath us, the
veneration of the hated, the contradictory, and
the avoided," will appear perverse and onesided.  Yet not so, surely, to him  who has
been accustomed to recognize his Lord's features
in those of the forlorn, the ignorant, and the de!
spised, -to him who has found that the print of
his Master's footsteps, if tracked with any degree
of faithfulness, will carry his own far out of the
path of pleasure and distinction, and leave him
amid scenes and among objects in which, save
for this powerful attraction, he would have found
nothing to delight in or to desire. For Christianity, though it may at certain periods and
in certain persons reveal itself under a splendid
and engaging aspect, so as to command the
homage * of the world with which it is at variance, remains true to its first conditions, beginning at Bethlehem, "small among the cities of
Judah," and ending upon Calvary between the
two thieves. Whenever it has been joined, as it
has been joined so often, with the pomp and
riches and glory of this world, this has been but
a State-alliance, from which its heart has fled, to
the cell of the lonely monk, to the workshop of
the humble artisan, to some little band of persecuted men,-to such as, whether solitary or in
families, -
* Note C
3*




58    THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
"Loving Jesus for his own sake,"
have been content for his sake to be men wondered at.*   How  many of the sparks at which
great fires have been kindled, even now enlightening and warming the world, have been struck
from the hearts and brains of men counted fools
and fanatics in their own generation!  Christ is
favorable to the simple and needy.  When we
look into His kingdom, we see that many  of
its mightiest enterprises, now ripening to evident
perfection, have been begun by a few gathered
together in his name, and these few, perhaps,
neither wise  nor rich  nor noble.   Yet even
now, as during our Lord's life on earth, all the
lowliness of his aspect does not conceal the loftiness of his claims, nor blind the world to the
* "He who far off beholds another dancing,
Even he who dances best, and all the time
Hears not the music that he dances to,
Thinks him a madman, apprehending not
The law which moves his else eccentric motion;
So he that's in himself insensible
Of love's sweet influence misjudges him
Who moves according to love's melody.
And knowing not that all these sighs and tears,
Ejaculations and impatiences,
Are necessary changes of a measure
Which the divine musicianplays, may call
The lover crazy, which he would not do,
Did he within his own heart hear the tune
Played by the great musician of the world."
CALDERON, translated by FITZGERALD.




THE PA TIENCE OF HOPE.           59
fact that these are the claims of one who, coming in to sojourn, has made himself altogether
a ruler and a judge over it. "Whom makest
thou thyself? " it will still ask. And this question will be followed by a demand, prompted by
kindred  enmity, "Why makest thou us to
doubt? if thou be the Christ, show  thyself
openly."
And there is much, truly, in the condition of
the Church since our Saviour left it to remind
us of the plant Linnaeus speaks of, -perfect in
its structure, yet showing neither fruit nor blossom above the earth, though it puts forth many
beneath it, blanched from the darkness of their
life. "It doth not yet appear what we shall
be."  Humanity, even at the voice of Christ,
comes forth bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and as one that hath been dead four
days. Therefore we need not wonder if in such
a resurrection there should be paroxysms; if
there should be in every great awakening unto
Christ something to give room for the scoffings
of the profane, the doubts and surmisings of the
prudent.  Christ does not at once remove the
enmity which he finds. He must first bind the
strong man; and before the strength of nature
is subdued and disciplined to carry out the
behests of grace, there is a struggle,- revealing




60    THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
itself among the poor of Christ's flock, unused to
restrain or analyze their own emotions, in forms
which may appear strange and exceptionable,
but from  which, under one form  or another,
none in whose spirit Christ lives can escape.
For the heart and  the world, until renewed
after His likeness, are still heathen in all but in
name; exorcism must precede baptism, and the
baptism from our Lord's hand is that wherewith
he himself was baptized,-signed with the sign
of the cross.*
And while these thoughts throw an incidental
light upon much that is mysterious in our spiritual life, they draw us to the consideration of
that deeper mystery which underlies it all,-the
structure, the schematism of our faith, which
reveals itself through the fair and often smiling
surface of Christianity as the gray rock in some
mountain  district crowns  every  summit, and
thrusts itself even through the sheep-covered
slopes, in keen contrast with their peace and
verdure.  When man finds that, if he would do
God's will, however imperfectly, he must offer
up this continual sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own
* Adalbert, the martyred apostle of Prussia, slain by the fierce
Wends, stretched forth both his arms in dying, saying, "Jesus,
receive thou me," and fell with his face to the ground in the
form of a crucifix, thus, Carlyle says, setting his mark upon that
heathen country.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.            61
will, his thoughts are irresistibly carried to rest
upon that One offering up of a higher than any
human will,* by which Christ has perfected forever them that are sanctified. The more deeply
we feel the existing contradiction between God's
will and that of his creature, the deeper becomes
our sense of the need of somewhat to take it
away, so that the heart draws near to a truth
unapproachable by the intellect, - the necessary
death of Christ. All things in nature, as well
as all things in grace, point to a Redeemer.
Nature struggles, but cannot speak; she remains
in bondage with her children, dumb like them,
and beautiful. Humanity has found a voice;
but where, save for Christ, would she find an
answer?  She has showed him of her wound,
her grievous, incurable hurt; and how has he
consoled her?  Even by showing her His, —
" Reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my
side."
And as the law was our schoolmaster to bring
us to Christ, so does our daily experience become a school, teaching us the same deep lesson
which the book of the Old Testament unfolds.
The events of human life, and the great facts
which revelation discloses, cast reciprocal light
upon each other, so that the believer's course
* See tebrews x. 10.




62    THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
as he advances is ever instructing him, like the
Earlier Dispensation, through hint and sign and
shadow, in the mysteries on which all the visible
dealings of God are grounded.
We begin to see that the whole teaching of
the human race by God is based, like the prophetic songs of the Old Covenant, upon a gigantic parallelism; * that as the Type is not a mere
Sign, but has a realt though unseen connection
with the fact it shadows forth, so has that fact
also its correlative lying deep in the nature of
God  and  man, and  testifying  to the  essential
unity  of those  natures.   And  as through  the
awful imagery which, under the rites and ceremonies of the Old Dispensation, prefigured the
stupendous event of Redemption, we discern a
mighty underworking which threw these figures
of sacrifice and atonement to the surface, and
could not have appeared in any other; so, as our
Christian consciousness deepens, do the things
* Note D.
t Differing in this from a symbol, which, being merely an idea
shown, a species of shorthand or figure-writing, need possess, it is
obvious, no other than an arbitrary connection with the thing it
stands for. A rose, for instance, once adopted, for whatever
reason, as the emblem of secrecy, always conveys that idea to
the mind which, in the absence of any natural association between the two things, has once received them in connection.
But it is far otherwise with a Type, which is, as Warburton
says, "a prophecy in action, one in nature with that which it
represents." - See on this subject the Divine Leyation, 9th Book.




THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.             63
with which we are daily conversant take up a
mute significance; so does all in life, that once
appeared without bearing on our higher destinies, begin  to arrange itself in  the pattern
of heavenly things, "the pattern showed us in
the mount."
And though the great events of Incarnation
and Redemption, casting light upon all that had
gone before them, need themselves,* according
to Gaussen's fine saying, to be illumined by a
light not yet risen, though the Dispensation of
glory has yet to illustrate that of grace, it is in
the heart that the day-star must now arise.
And in every believing heart, the gradual
turning of that heart to Christ casts as it were
an oblique light on the sacred revelations of
Scripture, by awakening within it the sense of
sin, the need of expiation, and the want of a
better righteousness than our own to meet a
standard which even man, when once renewed
in aim and feeling, consciously aspires to. So
that the heart accepts Christ because it needs
him, even while the mind may be unable to
receive him fully, because the orbit of this Star
is so extended as to carry beyond it the sphere
of human intelligence.  " For to this end Jesus
Christ both died and suffered, and rose again,
* Note E.




64      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
that he might be Lord both of the living and
the dead."   We know  not upon how many
points  Redemption' touches;  what unseen
worlds, what unborn generations, what undeveloped forms of being it embraces.  We know
not to what Warfare, to what Accomplishment, our Lord referred when he spoke those
words, "It is finished."  We know not, in short,
as Butler says, what in the works and counsels of God are ends, and what means to a further end, or how what appears to us as final
may be initial with Him. But we see enough
around us, and within us, to show that it was
necessary that Christ should suffer many things,
and after that enter into his glory; enough to
learn that we shall find no higher thing above,
slall pierce to no deeper thing below, than the
Cross and its solemn and tender teachings. If
we would climb up into heaven, it is there; if
we would go down into hell, it is there also.
He alone among men who has clasped this great
mystery of grief and love to his bosom sees, if it
be as yet but through a glass darkly, how pain
and love, yes, joy also, all things that have a
living root in htumanity come to bloom under its
shadow.  And how love that cannot die, and
faith that grows to certainty, and hope that
maketh not ashamed, root themselves about it,




THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.             65
with all fair things that wither in life, and
noble things for which it has no room.  "I
took," said Luther, "for the symbol of my
theology, a seal on which I had engraven a
cross with a heart in its centre; the cross is
black, to indicate the sorrows, even unto death,
through which the Christian must pass, but the
heart preserves its natural color, for the cross
does not extinguish nature, it does not kill, but
gives life. Justus fide vivet, sed fide crucifixi.
The heart is placed in the midst of a white rose,
which signifies the joy, peace, and consolation
that faith gives; but the rose is white, and not red,
because it is not the joy and peace of the world,
but that of spirits."
" Whoso is wise will ponder these
things, and he shall understand the lovingkindness of the
Lord."




SHOW me more love, my dearest Lord,
0, turn away thy clouded face I
Give me some secret look or word
That may betoken love and grace;
No day or time is black to me
But that wherein I see not Thee;
Show me more love; a cloudedface
Strikes deeper than an angry blow.
Love me and kill me by thy grace,
I shall not much bewail my woe.
But even to be
In heaven unloved of Thee
Were hell in heaven for to see;
Then hear my cry, and help afford;
Show me more love, my dearest Lord.
Show me more love, my dearest Lord,
I cannot think, nor speak, nor pray;
Thy work stands still; my strength is stored
In Thee alone; O come away I
Show me thy beauties, call them mine,
My heart and tongue will soon be thine.
Show me more love, or if my heart
Too common be for such a guest,
Let thy good Spirit by its art
Make entry and put out the rest.
For't is thy nest;
Then he's of heaven possest
That heaven hath in his breast.
Then hear my cry, and help afford;
Show me more love, my dearest Lord!




PART SECOND.




"And Joseph knew his brethren,
But they knew not him."
OIN. xliL 8.
4440




PART  II.
C HEN  the Past and the Future cheat
us, it is through a charm to which
we consciously abandon ourselves:
eSS   o we know how much the landscape
gains in each case from the atmosphere through
which we view it. But the Present is the true
deceiver; its clear, cold daylight hides much,
in appearing to conceal nothing from us, for it
is possible to look at things so closely as not to
see what they really are. We catch the mean
detail; we miss the grand, comprehensive outline. We must stand farther off, so that we may
see the whole.  " When the great Athanasius
lived on earth," says Pascal, "he did not appear
in the light in which we now regard him; he
was only a man called Athanasius."  Yet was
the great Athanasius the true Athanasius. And
even thus greatness ever stands among us, as
" one whom we know not"; know not, even
because we think we know it so well.




70      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
And as of individuals, so of ages. It seems
hard to be generous, not easy even to be just,
to the times upon which our lot is cast. The
very expression "our present day" conveys
with it somewhat of disparagement, implying a
contrast with other ages in whose very silence
we find an eloquence rebuking the clamor that
surrounds us.  Yet much that we now  look
upon as prosaic, and perhaps decry as unreal, if
read as history, would enchain our imaginations;
if spoken as prophecy, would stir our very souls.
Future chroniclers will make it their wisdom to
decipher the Runes we are now dinting, and
will understand their import better than we who
leave them on the rock.
Ours is a sober enthusiasm, patient because it
is so strong. A Work is set before the day we
live in, a Necessity is laid upon it; it sees and
accepts its calling, content to labor in the thick
smoke, and weary itself among the very fires
of speculation.  Let but our age apprehend a
cause, or an idea, as worthy of its devotion, and
it will not fail to be furnished with apostles, with
confessors, yes, if need be, with martyrs; so
strong is the passion of its onward march, so
steadfast the ardor of its perseverance.  And
thus in how many a fair and still extending
region of human thought and labor we have
already arrived




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.              71
" At the winning and the holding of a prize,
The hope of which would have been once deemed madness."
But with our spiritual and moral conquests
it has surely fared less brightly; here, among
many leaders, we have as yet no Columbus,
"the naked pilot, promiser of kingdoms," bestowing more than he had promised; no prophets, such as science has been blessed with, who
have lived to see the wonder of their dream
surpassed by its sober interpretation.  Yet ours
is none the less an age of generous experiments, of failures more noble than the successes
to which the world decrees a Triumph.  How
many laborers are now among us, literally watering God's garden with their foot! - a holy and
blessed work; but one in which we must not
forget that the country in which our work lies
is a land rich in itself, full of fountains and
depths springing out of its own hills and valleys,
" a land that drinketh water of the rain of
heaven."  You say to me in one of your letters,
" We hear so much around us of doings, so
much of Christian exertion and charitable endeavor, that in witnessing the comparatively
small result of much devoted labor, I have been
led to believe that we work too much upon the
surface.  The waters of life lie below it, and
few pierce deep enough to unlock them for them



72      THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.
selves or others. Our endless external reforms
are, after all, only channels, too often dry ones,
while every believer in whom his Lord's promise
has been fulfilled,' I will be to him a well of
water, springing up into everlasting life,' is a
fountain, hidden it may be to the eye, but discernible in the greenness and moisture that surround it."
We have more than enough of systems, of
machinery, which, whether more or less perfect,
will not go of itself.  We may have done all
that of ourselves we can do, and the moving
spring may yet be wanting.*  " The spirit of
the living creature in the wheels."
And just where our national dread of enthusiasm is the strongest, we have surely many
enthusiasts among us; soldiers who go upon a
spiritual warfare at their own cost, and builders
who expect with such materials as earth can
furnish to reach even unto heaven.  Yet God
is a spirit, and Man is also a spirit, and all work
that is done between God and Man must be
done in the spirit, - must be wrought from the
centre outwards.  The life that lies at the circumference of its guiding idea lies there but in
faint outline, feebly drawn, like the outermost
ripple on disturbed waters. We are anxious to
* Ezekiel i. 19, 20; x. 16, 17.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.            73
spread the knowledge of God.  This is our
work, the end to which Christian exertion is
chiefly directed, but before we can pursue it to
any true result, God must also work a work
within us, upon the deepening of which the extension of Christ's kingdom naturally, inevitably
follows. For they who are rooted in the Lord
will in him bud and blossom, and fill the face of
the earth with fruit. All who have ever been
strong for God, have been strong in Him, and
have known too, as Samson did, where the
secret of their strength lay, —in a dependence
out of which they would have been consciously
weak, and as other men. The Church has
always borne witness to this truth; her every
prayer and confession proves that she has seen
how it is that which binds her to her Lord, that
strengthens her in him, so that the chains which
are about her neck have become " an ornament
of grace upon her head."  But here, too, she
may take a lesson where her Lord has sent her
to look for it.
Even from this Generation. Full of faith and
power in the resources of human energy, and
in that faith and power working marvels, if it
believed in God as firmly as it does in itself,
the seed it would raise to serve Him would be
of no degenerate stock, and the Church would
4




4 s     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
once more, as in the days of its youth, take up
its ancient hero-song, sweeter than was ever
earthly Saga.  But are we as Christians what
we are as men?
God has showed us earthly things, and we
have believed.  Man has taken his own measure, and found it "the measure of an angel." *
Human intelligence, once a bold guesser after
unproven truth, has learned the extent of its
own resources; hence its sure, yet extended
aims, and hence its glorious acquisitions. Opinions with us are rooted and seeded things, able
to raise up the life which they contain within
them.  We embrace facts, not abstractions; we
live as men in the reality of that which we speculatively accept as true.  But can we say this for
ourselves as Christians?  Have we believed
when God has showed us heavenly things, or
yet taken the measure of a man in Christ?
Are we as conversant with the Second Adam as
with the First; as familiar with the capabilities
of the renewed spirit as with those of the living soul? The facts of revelation are accepted.
The Gospel is made the basis of law  and of
society; it is a framework holding all together;
a code, like the great Roman one, upon which
the medieval world kept its hold so long after
* E. B. Browning.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    75
the power and spirit of the empire were but a
tradition..
But how  few  among  us are of it upholden.
How few, fastening upon God through the awful relations it discloses, can say from the deep
and  ground  of the  heart, " 0  Lord, by  these
men live, and in them is the life of the Spirit."
And thus a strange weariness overtakes us; *
* I leave these words as they were written. Yet, since then,
even within the last few years, a change has come, far more gradually than is generally supposed, over the climate of the Christian world; as if some mighty current, like the Gulf Stream, had
set in, sending a warm breath across the universal Church, and
breaking up the deadly ice of ages of unbelief and indifference.
And though this change may be, and will be, accompanied with
shocks and splittings, it is surely the prudent, not the wise Christian, who will on this account withdraw himself from its wide,
soul-enlarging influence. For it is evident that this is not a work
of extension only; in every community, and in every heart where
God has already had a work, that work has been lately deepened.
"' The river of God is full of water." He has not only sent rain
upon the dwellings in the wilderness, but caused it to descend
into furrows long since drawn. Experienced Christians are the
natural guides and comforters of those whose hearts have been
but lately made soft with the drops of heaven; in every Pentecostal outpouring there is something to recall the deep unconscious truth of that saying, " These men are full of new wine ";
and it is their part to see that the wine is not spilled, neither the
bottles marred. And while it is easy to cavil at the phenomena
connected more or less remotely with this change, the fact, not to
be affected by any of them, remains, that a great moral and spiritual
change is taking place at our very doors; that the poor among
men are rejoicing in their Maker; that multitudes of people are
at this very moment lifting up praying hearts, and this, for no
temporal blessing, no sectarian end, but simply for the clearer




76    THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
uneasy in ourselves, we do not find rest in God,
and become aware of a deep question, underlying all the shallow ones that now vex the current of religious speculation.   We  feel, each
one of us for himself, that the point at issue is
still concerning "one Jesus," whether we shall
say  with  the world  that he is dead, or with
Paul steadfastly affirm him to be alive, and still
the resurrection of the spiritually dead, the life
of them   that believe.   For human  society  is
even now, as in the days when the Gospel was
first preached, made up of Greeks enthralled by
outward sense, of Jews resting in an outward
law; and out of the midst of these a people has
light of Christ's Cross, the fuller manifestation of His Presence.
"I will hear, saith the Lord; I will hear the heavens, and they
shall hear the earth "; the heart of man seems set upon attaining
to this closer correspondence with his Maker, set, too, upon obtaining it through the Man whom he hath sent. They who seek
the Lord shall praise him. On all sides there is a sound of abundance of rain; so that the Christian feels that, deep and many as
may be the trials yet in store for the Church, it has turned over,
perhaps forever, one leaf of sorrowful experience, that of its long
ploughing in the cold, each laborer apart, and uncommunicating.
The days of harvest are sultry and arduous, but the reapers work
in bands, and are cheered by many a song: —
"' Brother, take thy brothers with thee,'
Speak the silver-winding brooklets
To the mighty mountain torrent;
Take us with thee to the ocean
That with outstretched arms awaits us, -
Oft, alas! in vain awaits us.




THE PA TIENCE OF HOPE.    77
need to be yet more fully called, to find Him
who is the end of the law to every one that
believeth:  "Christ the  power of  God, and
Christ the wisdom  of God."
Even now, said St. John, speaking of his own
day, there are many Antichrists. Since then
there have been many forms of denial, sundry
kinds of spiritual death. Christ has long stood
in this world's judgment-hall, and suffered many
things from them that throng it. From age to
age false witnesses have risen up, laying to his
charge things that he knew not. He has heard
the defaming of the multitude, and borne in his
bosom the rebukes of many peoples long gathFor in sandy wastes we filter
Drop by drop, until the sunbeams
Drink our blood; until some hillock
Locks us to a pool. 0 take us,
Brother, with thee!' Then for answer
Swells the Flood, and on its bosom
Lifts its kindred, lifts and bears them
In its rolling triumph down.
Lands take Name, and cities Being
From its ceaseless march; behind it
Tower and turret rise; upon it
Float the goodly ships of cedar,
Fair, with many a flying pennon
Waving witness to its pride.
Bearing in its joyful tumult,
Bearing still its brothers with it,
These its treasures, these its children,
To the waiting Father's heart."




78    THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
ered to the dust of silence. But the day of insolent derision is over, and it is after another
manner that'we behold Christ rejected, and set
at naught by  this generation.   We  are  met,
comparatively speaking, by little direct opposition to revealed religion; its moral teaching is
respected; the sacred person of its Founder is
held in reverence; it is as a power that Christianity is denied.* Our age has nothing in common  with  the degrading  scepticism  of the past
century, which cast its scorn up to God through
the foul dishonoring of His image. We believe,
as I have said, in Man; and our noble and tender faith in  Humanity is one which  works by
love, showing itself in persevering and arduous
efforts after social amelioration. But here also
we may find a fulfilment of our Lord's saying,* The lightest leaf will show the way the wind is setting, and
I know not where we are met by a plainer expression of this
tacit, and in some degree respectful denial, than in the popular
literature of our day. Here we see a systematic ignoring of
Christianity, combined with a rather inconsistent exaltation of
the benevolent aspect peculiarly belonging to it. We find in such
writings many flowers to please us, but see that, as in a child's
garden, they are stuck into the ground by their stalks only, and
have not grown where we now see them. We know that even the
lily floating on the waters, the orchid hanging in the air, keeps a
tenacious yet unseen hold upon something beyond itself, without
which its nourishment and life would fail; and all this bloom and
verdure is suggestive of a root, possessing, it may be, no beauty
for which we should desire it, yet detached from which the leaf
of humanity will wither and its flower fade.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.           79
"I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not; another will come in his own
name, him  shall ye receive."  The prophets
who come in their own name, the apostles of
human development, of social progress, find a
willing hearing; but where is our recognition of
a divinely appointed agency? where is our faith
in that which hath appeared to man?
But because we believe in Man; because we
reason, if not always aright, of truth, of beauty,
of perfection, and are full of reverence, full of
pity for the nature in which we find ourselves so
fearfully and wonderfully fashioned; because our
age, with all its wants and errors, is still a loving, a believing, an essentially human age, there
shall yet come to pass concerning it the saying
which is written, "In that day shall A MAN be
more precious than gold, than the golden wedge
of Ophir."  The heart of this age is in its right
place, and with that heart it may yet believe
unto righteousness, and escape the downward
path towards which so many of its intellectual
tendencies are. dragging it. We have not yet
drawn forth the true bitterness of the fruit
whose mortal taste is already so plainly to be
discerned among us, or many a yet noble and
tender spirit would exclaim, "Let not the pit
shut her mouth upon me," — Materialism, the




80      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
grave of all that is human, as well as of all
that is heavenly, within man. F The heart craves
what the world would take from it; Man needs
what no system invented by man has yet promised, far less given, —a Comforter, an enlightening, guiding Spirit, wanting which lie remains
a mockery even to himself, the sport of circumstance, a Samson blind and fettered in the hall
of the Philistines.  "The world knows but a
Creator, spirits claim a Eather."  And O that
we could see that He has already come forth to
meet us; that we could, even in this our day,
perceive the season of our heavenly visitation,
and see to what its rejection tends, —a moral
atheism, blotting out God from the region of
spiritual life, as surely as the denial of a Personal cause excludes Him  from  the visible
world.
" There is a Spirit in man," faithful to its instincts even when astray as to their true object;
it wanders often, yet feels through very sadness
and weariness how far it has got from home.
And hence come those utterances (of which you
tell me), strange prophetic voices, a groaning
and travail-pain of Humanity, which, even in the
hearts of those who reject revelation, testify to
its waiting for some great Redemption. If man
refuses the bread which came down from heav



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.            81
en, never was it so hard for him to live "by
bread alone" as now. His very wealth and increase has brought with it a sense of poverty, -
because he has become rich, and increased in
goods, he knows, as he did not before, that he is
wretched, and miserable, and blind, and naked.
The energy of his wrestling with the things of
time and sense has awakened instincts of which
but for the ardor of that struggle he might
have known little. He conquers kingdoms, and
weeps like the ancient conqueror. The world
which he has vanquished cannot satisfy him.
He feels himself to be greater than the universe,
yet feebler than the meanest thing within it
which can follow the appointed law of its being.
The splendor of his material acquisitions is but
a robe too short and thin to wrap him from cold
and shame. He can do great things, but what
is he?  To have all, and to die saying, " Is tis
all?" is the epitaph of many a rich and wasted
life.2 Every fresh region man breaks into reveals new wonders, and with them  new enigmas, calling upon him to solve them or perish.
There is a social complication, a pressure in our
present day, which is not to be answered by an
unmeaning clamor against rational enlightenment. We cannot stay the current that is bearing us onwards so swiftly, but we may guide
4*                     F




82      THE PA TIENCE OF HOPE.
our course upon it, looking to the stars above.
" Light is good," good for its own sake, whatever it may show us. In an anxious and inquiring age, "when men shall run to and fro, and
knowledge be increased," we are told that " the
wise shall understand."- They shall find their
safety, not in placing faith and science in an unreal opposition, not in closing their eyes to the
revelation of God's power, but in opening their
hearts to the secrets of his wisdom " double to
that which is." *
And, now especially that thought and authority are at open issue upon many questions, may
not some among us, ever ready to judge those
who are without, lay to heart the solemn declaration of the Apostle, that judgment must begin
at the house of God! It is so easy to be orthodox in creed and statement; so safe to rest in
a merely traditionary belief, that many a decorous Christian fails to perceive the sure though
invisible connection between the lip-confession
and life-denial of a merely outward profession,
and the broader form  of denial by which all
such profession is derided. Yet between Christ
nocked and Christ rejected there is but a step;
-who shall say how easily it is taken, or how
quickly we may pass from the hollow homage,
* Job xi. 6.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.   83
the "Hail, Master " which mocks our Lord,
to the smiting and buffeting of open outrage?
When Christ is invested with but the show of
sovereignty, the reed placed in his hands will
be quickly taken, as by the soldiers, to smite
his head. S This reed is nominal Christianity, a
strange slip of a degenerate vine, beneath whose
blighting  shadow  a poison-growth  of unbelief
never fails to root itself.
And  it is certain  that this most mournful
characteristic of our age — the disposition to
think slightingly of Christianity,* to ask it what
it has done or can do for the world    has been
helped forward by a want on  the part of the
professing Church of whole-hearted faith in its
renewing, transforming energies. Is it strange
that the supernatural revelations of the Gospel
should  be  looked upon  as foolishness by  the
world, while they remain-who shall say  to
how many among us —a stumbling-block, one
that we dare not remove? but surely there are
* When Jesus was taken before Herod, the king hoped, it is
said, to have seen some great thing done by him, " and he questioned him in many words, and He answered him nothing." The
attitude of our day is not that of an utter rejection of Christianity.
Like Herod we appreciate and examine into it, questioning it in
many words as to what it can do for the world, just as we put the
same question to the schemes of science and philosophy. But to
an age which, like Herod, is deficient in real faith in its Author,
Christianity often answers -nothing. - J. E. B.




84      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
systems now in favor, temples made with hands,
into which we find it hard to fit the stone cut
from the rock without hands. Human nature
has been ever in love with a modified Christianity, slow to receive Divine truth simply, and
as it is given. Hence the dressings and undressings to which Christianity hlas been subjected.  Roman Catholicism has accommodated
it to human sense; Rationalism accommodates
it to human intelligence, or rather strives to
do so; for are those who would make man the
measure of all things sure that they have found
man's true measure? If the doctrines of Revelation are mysterious, are the facts of Life less
so? Are "the things of a man" and the things
of God fitted, so to speak, by the mere cutting
off of all that transcends reason, — itself but a
part of man?  Reason has its outposts, from
which it is continually driven back defeated; it
rules, but under a perpetual check; it cannot
take account of its own wealth, or fill the
region it presides over. It is but a noble vassal,
"one that knoweth not what his lord doeth."
Man reverences his reason, and trusts it, as far
as it will lead him, but that is not his whole
length, for he feels that he, the reasonable Man,
is something greater than it is. Sometimes his
dreams are truer than its oracles, and this he




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.             85
knows.  Therefore one deep calleth to another,
and the answer to this call is Faith. Faith addresses itself to man's whole being,-it sounds
every depth; it touches every spring; it calls
back the soul from its weary search within itself,
full of doubt and contradiction; it presents it
with an object, implicit, absolute, greater than
itself,-" One that knoweth all things." It provides for every affection, every want and aspiration. Faith stretches itself over humanity as
the prophet stretched himself above the child, -
eye to eye, mouth to mouth, heart to heart; and
to work a kindred miracle, to bring back life to
the dead, by restoring the One to the One,-the
whole nature of Man to the whole nature of God.
Christianity, under its merely preceptive character, has done much for the world; received as
a law, it has contributed greatly to social order
and well-being; but thus received, it is, like the
Law, too weak to accomplish for any individual
soul the mighty change through which it becomes alive unto God. For this work is more
than reformative; it asks for a renewing element
-"fire upon earth" - which none save One
coming down from  heaven can kindle.  Our
cold, decaying Humanity must be fed by a fuller
life than its own, must be nourished in a warmer bosom, before it can attain to any enduring




86      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
heat of nobleness or love. If we look through
the long generations that have gone before us,
we shall find that every nobler deed has been
wrought, every fairer life lived, "not after the
law of a carnal commandment, but after the
power of an endless life."  The sum of that
great unwritten  history lies folded in few
words, —"All these lived in faith," in living
faith in a living Person.   Shall we look for
those who have done great things for Christ or
for the world among the philosophical admirers
of Christianity, among its formal adherents?
Shall we find them even among those just
persons to whose righteous hearts it is indeed
a law and honorable, but not as yet the law
in which is the spirit of life?  Nay, rather
among such as have sought and have received
a Sign, the sign of the Son of Man in heaven,
and in this sign have fought and conquered.
Among superstitious men, believing in many
things, yet believing in Him; among ignorant
men, knowing literally nothing but Jesus Christ
and him crucified, yet knowing him upon no
earthly testimony. Here too lies the quiet, per.
haps unspoken secret of those lives of holy, unselfish beauty, in which no communion has been
more rich than our own, - to all of these Christ
has come, not by water only, but by blood.*
* Note F.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.             87
The foolishness of God, that which man
counts dark and incomprehensible, is stronger
than man, and nothing else is stronger.  Man
loves his own ease, his own labors; there is a
sweetness in the natural vine which he will not
leave, even at the call to a kingdom, except for
a cause shown.  And hence comes the power
of that mighty appeal, the attraction of which
He who knew what was in Man prophesied
when he said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw
all men unto me."  When God, says Bunyan,
would tune a soul, He most commonly begins
at the lowest note; so has it been in the tuning
of the world's wide discord. In the depths of
the great atonement God has sounded the lowest note, and to this every life, lived during the
last eighteen hundred years in harmony with
him, has been attuned.  In heaven and upon
earth there are
" Two vast spacious things,
rhe which to measure it doth man behoove,
Yet few there be that sound them, - Sin and Love."
We know little of either until we learn of them
at the Cross.  There are abysses whose depths
can only be guessed at by the weight of the
plummet which is required  to sound them.
Such is sin; it remains, as it has been from
the beginning, a dark enigma, drawing thought,




88    THE PA TIENCE OF HOPE.
as through  some terrible  fascination, to fasten
itself on the. problem  of its existence.*    Here
Reason  has transgressed its limits, and  Faith
outrun  her heavenly guidance.  Wise men, in
their despair of accounting for the origin of
evil, have been driven to deny its existence in
theories too thin to cheat any heart that has
been pierced, yet enlightened, by its sharp reality; and pious men, falling into the snare which
Job's integrity declined, have "spoken lies for
God, and argued deceitfully for him."   Hence
dreams like  that of Optimism,t  fictions, such
as evil being but the privation of good;-  names
matter little; sin desolates as widely, pain racks
as keenly, whether we account for their existence upon a positive or a negative theory. Yet
it is remarkable that our Saviour, while he does
* NOTE BY THE IEDITOR. -4! And I inquired what iniquity was,
and found it to be no substance, but the perversion of man's will
from Thee, the Supreme, towards lower things." - St. Augustine.
"The Scripture, and the Faith, and the Truth say, Sin is
naught else but that the creature turneth away from the unchangeable Good, and betaketh itself to the changeable, that it
turneth away from the Perfect to that which is in part and impe fect, and most often to itself."- Theologica Germanica.
" There is no sin but selfishness, and all selfishness is sin."Julius Muller.
t It is scarcely necessary to observe that the Christian optimism is as unsatisfactory as the philosophic, and must remain so,
as long as there is no sight so common as that of unsanctified
sorrow and unchastening pain.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.            89
not explain this awful problem, does not explain
it away.  To the old, ever-recurring question,
"Whence these tares?" he answers simply,
"An enemy hath done this."  Man has striven
to bridge over this chasm between his soul and
God with theories contradictory to the reason
they profess to satisfy, and false to the moral
sense they desire to soothe; but He who spake
as never man spake does not reason upon this
subject. He sees this great gulf set; he knows
what its mouth has devoured of earth's best
and noblest: one thing most precious of all
remains; —he flings Himself within it.
And though this gulf still yawns wide, and
stretches itself even unto hell, though it still
underlies Nature's fairest scenes, and earth's
pomp and beauty and rejoicing descend into it
daily, the beginning of the end has been made.
Sin and pain and death continue their ravages, upheld by him from whom their strength
is derived.  The Beast lives, yet it has received a deadly wound; its dominion is taken
away, though its life is prolonged for a season
and a time.
Although the work of renovation is a hid.
den work, a slow one, "for there are many
adversaries "; though it proceeds as yet among
checks and hinderances, as a fair city might




90      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
rise from its ruins behind a broken and still
beleaguered wall, yet the sure foundation has
been laid. Deep and wide as decay has struck,
the remedy has pierced still deeper.  If we
must come to the Cross to learn of sin, here
too must we come to learn of love, —a love
of which we know but little until we see it in
its crowning work. For our God is one that
hideth himself.  Nature, yea also Providence,
is thick with dark anomalies; day unto day
these utter speech, and night unto night declare knowledge,  a language of sign  and
parable, where the voice is not heard; One is
there, only One, who has shown us plainly of
the Father.  God's bow lies upon the cloud of
Circumstance, yet light does not break through
it until we see it in the face of Him in whom
the excellency of His glory shines.  Human
life is beset with contradictions, at the solution.
of which we are but guessers, until Christ solves
the riddle that was too hard for us, — bringing
forth food and sweetness from  the very jaws
of the devouring lion. /" If thou wouldst havec
me weep," said one of old, "thou must first
weep thyself."  God has wept. In the strong
crying and tears of the Son, in the great drops
of sweat as it were blood falling down to the
ground, lie the witness to the travail of the




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    91
Father's soul.  "Herein  is love," consoling,
rebuking love, -love that has no consolation so
strong as the rebuke it administers.  "Behold
my hands and my feet!" these testify to a necessity endured, an anguish shared. It is our
brother's blood that cries unto us from  the
ground: "A  spirit hath not flesh and bones,
as ye see me to have."
I often think of George Herbert's homely and
affecting verse, 
"Death, thou wast once an uncouth, hideous thing;
But since our Saviour's death
Has put some bloo4 into thy face,
Thou hast grown sure a thing to be desired
And full of grace."
Our Saviour's death has put blood also into
the face of life.  That which robs death ot its
sting robs life of its bitterness.  When we once
realize that the Son of God, in taking humanity
upon himself, took something which he keeps still,
and will not relinquish throughout eternity, we
become alive to an awful consolation.  We see
Creation and its great High-Priest standing as
those whom God hath joined together never to
be sundered; and through this living bond,
"even his flesh," the anguish of the burden
laid upon us, down to the groaning of mere
animal existence, arises through  a  softening




92      THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.
medium.  An  old Greek  litany  supplicates
Christ by "His known and unknown sufferings."  Who shall say how much the first were
exceeded by the last, or fathom the depth of
those words, " He tasted death for every man "?
Of the intensity of Christ's sufferings we know
and can know little; as little, perhaps, of their
limits and duration.  What was the weight of
the burden He took upon him in being found as
man, and is it altogether laid aside?  Has He
who was once acquainted with grief unlearnt
that lesson? Has the Man of sorrows, in the
persons of his afflicted  members, altogether
ceased to grieve?
Was it only for those three and thirty years
that the chastisement of our peace was laid upon Him? only upon the cross that he bore the
weight of that which he takes away, - the sins
of the whole world? The Word on this subject
contains utterances into whose depth of meaning
only the Spirit can admit us. I allude to sayings like that of the Master, " Saul, Saul, why
persecutest thou me? " to declarations like that
wherein the servant affirms his rejoicing in the
sufferings which fill up that which is left behind
of the afflictions of Christ.* These intimations
* How are we to understand the words which tell us of Christ
being crucified afresh, and put to open shame by our backslid



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    93
are not dark, neither are they thinly scattered;
they witness to a union more close and intimate
than that through which Christ, before his coming in the flesh, redeemed and pitied his people,
and carried them all the days of old. Yet when
we cease to hold to things by the heart, how
little of them  do we really retain!  We let living facts stiffen into doctrinal abstractions, until
ings? of the Spirit grieved, interceding for us with unutterable
groanings?  Are such expressions to be received as merely figurative? Are we, as so many divines have taught us, to believe
that God in using them is but accommodating himself to the
weakness of our human conceptions, and allow ourselves to be
cheated out of the assurance of a Divine sympathy, through the
shallow glosses which have robbed so many Scriptures of their
meaning? God's anger, as inward and outward desolation testify,
is a real thing; so are His love and His pity real,- real as the
nature they spring from, the misery they meet; " and his compassions fail not, his mercy endureth forever."
" Veritas est maxima caritas."
The Reformers lay such an almost exclusive stress upon the
work of Christ, that which he doesfor us, that an outside feeling
has crept within the heart of Protestantism; we have light blazing on us from many windows, but we miss the warmth wh ch
Catholicism, even Roman Catholicism, has retained, because it
recognizes far more fully than we do the intimate personal communion ever existing between Christ and his body of Elect.
And in this, and not in any idea of meritorious works (a tree
twice dead, plucked up from the very roots), lies the secret of
their extraordinary sacrifices for Him; more particularly as
shown in outward beneficence, and sympathy with the wants
and woes of the human body,-that body of our Humiliation
which He who once condescended to its weakness still bears
upon Him in power.




94     THE PATIENCE OF HOP!.
Truth itself begins to wear a cold and fictitious
aspect: it is not in fact truefor us until we have
made it our own through needing it, and loving
it. It is not through a merely intellectual recognition that the human spirit can give its Amen
to the yea of God. We see how firm a hold the
Church of the Early and Middle Ages kept upon
this great truth,- the actual presence of Christ
with his people; how this belief revealed, and
as it were transfigured itself in legends which
superstition itself cannot rob of their undying
significance. When St. Francis stoops down to
kiss the leper's wound, and sees that his place
has been taken by the Saviour; when St. Martin hears these words in his vision, " Behold,
Martin, who hath clothed me with his cloak,"
we see that the Church to these men is not the
mere tomb of Christ, but his warm and living
body, sending a pulsation through every member.  There is now among us a disposition to
separate the principles of Christianity from the
facts upon which they are founded. We might
as well attempt to separate the soul from the
body without destroying the Man.  For these,
its supernatural facts, are the very life and
breath and blood of Christianity; its principles
can only take root in a re-created humanity.
"Give me a point," said the mechanician, "and




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    95
I will remove the world."   When Man's soul is
effectually moved, it is from a stand-point beyond
itself.   Experience shows us (as I have said)
that Humanity  has never been truly built up
unto God, but upon the foundation rejected of
earthly builders, the mysteries of the Christian
faith.   Christianity is a building  of which  as
much lies sunk beneath the surtace as is reared
above it.  It is a tree whose loots strike down as
deep into the earth as its branches spread wide in
the air above, and when we seek to pluck up any
one of these roots, a groan goes through its universal frame.  We say of earthly things, "that
which comes from  the heart goes to the heart";
so it is with heavenly.  When  Man's heart is
touched, it is through that which comes straight
from  the heart of God.  These mysteries, the
life and death of God in the flesh, his spiritual
resurrection in the reconciled soul of Man, are
messages, they are God's authentic * love-letters,
showing us plainly of the Father.
* Joseph Alleyne, in dying, would often commend the love oi
Christ, " often speaking of his sufferings and of his glory, of his
love-letters, as he called the holy history of his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and his second coming, the thoughts of which
would ever much delight him."
And to say that the mystery of our Saviour's passion lies at
the heart of the whole of man's life in Him is to say little, for it
is that heart itself; let love or sorrow pierce but a little deeper,
and we shall find it even in our own. There is surely something




96    THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
Those  who  were  first in  Christ lived  vrv
near the heart of these awful yet tender mvsteries. We find them connecting every fimctlon
of the soul's renewed life with what has been
suffered  and  obtained  for it through  another
life, "of whose fulness we have all received."
It is scarcely possible to read the Epistles without feeling that  Jluther's often-quoted  remark,
" There is much religion in the possessive pronouns," may be fairly extended to prepositions,
so threaded are the whole apostolic writings with
these minute, adhesive fibres, -small members
of our universal speech, yet boasting great things,
as steps in the ladder by which the human spirit
ascends even unto heaven.
very affecting in the fact that the sufferings of Christ should lie
so much closer to the hearts of his people than all that those
sufferings have won for them; that it should be ever the Anguish
endured, and not the Glory obtained, which touches all the finest, deepest chords of the renewed nature. I find a proof of this
in the fact that dying believers, soon to enter upon
" Zion's habitation,
Zion, David's sure foundation,"
seem to care comparatively little for hymns descriptive of the
joys and glories of heaven, beautiful as many of these are. It is
to the cross, not to the crown, that the last look turns, the lingering grasp cleaves; and the latest conscious effort of the believer is
sometimes to lift himself to Him who was lifted up, through the
half instinctive repetition of some words like those of Gerhardt's
Hymn on the Passion, the grandest of uninspired compositions:
0 head so full of bruises,
So lull of scorn and pain."




I'IIE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    97
By and through and of and in One " of whom
are all things, and we in him." It is interesting
to observe that, while the Saints of old appeal
simply to God through his revealed attributes,
his mercy, his faithfulness, his goodness which
endureth forever, it is upon God manifested in
the flesh, in the facts of our Lord's life, and the
relations which that life has established, that the
Apostles found their claim.  They rest not so
much upon what God is, as what he has become
to men, their neighbor in Christ Jesus, and as
such bound, as an old divine says, to love them
even as Himself.
"What hath man done that man may not undo,
Since God to man hath grown so near akin.
Did his foe slay him? he shall slay his foe;
Hath he lost all? he all again shall win;
Is sin his master? he shall master sin."
And if here, as elsewhere, the congregations
of the ungodly have robbed us; if in the confusion which reigns in the visible churches, it has
become hard for believers to recognize the fact
of their living membership with Christ and with
each other, let us seek more earnestly for the
light* which  makes these relations manifest.
We shall not find it in the phosphorescence of
any dead man's candle; exhalations from  the
tombs, though they be the tombs of saint and
* 1 John i. 7.
6i                        o




98      THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
martyr, give but an uncertain glimmer.  For
it is not galvanic, but organic life we need, and
this is not to be obtained by descending into the
Past to touch the ashes even of a prophet's bones.
They who stand by the grave, even of Christ
himself, may behold, with the devout women, a
Vision of Angels, but him they see not.  "He is
not here, he is risen.  Belold, he goeth before
you into Galilee."
"Man's soul has widened with his world." It
is evident that prescriptive authority must have
now less weight with him than in ruder, less
thoughtful ages. A child believes things because
he is told them; a man believes them because they
are true.  To the human spirit is now that word
spoken, -" He is of age; ask himself."
And it is plain that there was never in this
world's history a time in which, to speak after a
human manner, it was so easy to miss Christ, so
hard to do without him, as now.  For it is not
only the outward courts that have become wide,
yet crowded; science continues to open up infinite yet densely peopled spaces, lengthening out,
although every link be golden, the chain between
man's soul and God, so that even the Christian
thinker must respond with sadness to the bold
and satirical saying of Hazlitt, "In the days of
Jacob there was a ladder between heaven and




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.            99
earth, but now the heavens have gone farther off,
and are become astronomical."  The very revelation of God's power has tended to weaken the
sense of his immediate presence; yet it is not
here, but in another region, still richer, fairer,
and more perilous, that our peculiar danger lies.
Man, within the limits of his own nature, has
broken into a world of which former ages, and
these the most intellectually subtile and refined,
knew nothing.  The time is past when all things
within that nature could be mapped out in broad
and even lines; how many motives and impulses
do we find at work within us of which we cannot say that they are good or evil, only that they
are natural, human.  Therefore is there a difficulty, ofttimes an agony, introduced into the
Christian life, of which earlier ages were unconscious; partly because the forms of good and
evil were then more definite, and partly because
what Goethe says of the individual holds true for
the race he belongs to; the easy-hearted, even
reckless simplicity of youth, carries it unawares
past many a danger where to pause and to inves
tigate would be to be lost. For there are voice.
that even to hear is bewilderment; shapes that
but to look upon is madness. Our path is beset
with such, alluring, beckoning, inviting us we
know not whither; must we parley, must ve




100     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE
wrestle with each of these to compel it to utter
a clear message, to assume a certain likeness?
The way is long, the day is short; we must onwards, though the leaves above our head mutter, though the flowers that we would pluck are
charactered, though each simple and familiar
thing beside our way has become instinct with
a terrible consciousness, linking it with our own
being. Literature and art, even Nature herself,these which for freer spirits had a charm of their
own, and needed not any other,- now breathe
and burn in the fulness of a parasitical life; the
fever of man's conflict has passed across them;
their bloom and fragrance feeds and is fed by
fire kindled far down at the central heart. The
shadow of Humanity falls wide, darkening the
world's playground, and games, be they those of
Hero and Demigod, can no more enthral us.
What is Science itself but a gigantic toy, which
may delight but can never satisfy the heart,
which, even through its sadness and perplexity,
has learnt that it is greater than all that surrounds it?  Which confesses that, though the
light within it is too often darkness, still is that
very light " more worthy than the things which
are shown by it "; still are Man's errors greater
than Nature's order, his miseries nobler than her
splendor; still is he




'THE PA TIENCE OF HOPE.           101
" Chief
Of things God's hand hath fashioned, sorest curst,
Yet holding still the First-Born's birthright, first
In grandeur and in grief."
To know  more of ourselves, and to know
meanwhile no more of God, makes our present
anguish and desolation. But what if even here
were our safety? What if it were through this
very wound that the good Samaritan as he journeys designs to pour in the wine and oil of his
consolation? What if, in learning* more of the
awful and tender mystery of our own nature, we
become acquainted with the yet more awful, more
tender mystery that encompasses it?   Never
did the heart assert itself so strongly as now;
highly strung and sensitive, it finds inward contradiction and outward circumstance bear hard
upon it; yet, beset by a thousand warring impulses, it has learnt its own weakness and its
own strength, and out of the pressure and straitness of this siege it can take up its appeal to
Christ out of the depths and into the depths of
a common Nature.  It can say, with the blind
man, "Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy
upon me."  It has had its own voice thrown
back upon it from the rocks; has seen its own
form transfigured upon the mountains; it has
had enough of echoes, of illusions; it seeks corn* Note G.




102     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
munion, reciprocity; it needs that which can
alone understand, alone answer it; therefore the
one flies to the one,- the heart to Christ.
And let the heart of man be comforted; it
cannot outgrow its Christ; yes, let the heart be
comforted in him  out of its poverty and its
riches alike.  When we remember that Christ,
in taking unto himself Man's nature, took upon
him all that it would become, in how glorious -and
serene a light do the acquisitions of science
stand!  This thought gives, as it were, music
and measure to the onward march of humanity;
changes it from an outbreak of tumultuous forces
to steady and disciplined progress.  And if,
turning from the world of action, we flash the
light of this truth within the dim  and manychambered region that lies beneath it all, here
also we shall discover that in Christ there is a
provision, though we may not at once find it,
for the growth and expansion which has made
Humanity without him like a fruit too heavy for
the stalk it hangs on, dragged and trailed to
dust by its very weight and splendor.  Even
through the wealth and apparent waste of tendrils and suckers it is now putting forth, it may
cleave closer, drink deeper unto Him.  For all
that awakens a sense of need within us draws
us by so much nearer Christ; no spiritual truth




THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.             103
being our own until we have needed it; as long
as we can do without these Divine friends, they
stand in some degree aloof from  us, -feeble,
wounded, even despairing, we must cast ourselves upon their very bosoms before they will
receive or return our clasp.
And let us not be discouraged because the
life in Christ has grown less simple than it once
was.  In earlier ages, even in times not very
far removed  from  our own, the  Christian's
course was "as straight as a rule could make
it," because the license which surrounded him
compelled him  to cast aside all things so as to
secure the one thing alone needful; to use a
simile of your own, he was like a swimmer casting off his garments, a hard-pressed rider throwing aside his weapons, -to breast the wave, to
win the goal, was all in all.
When the pressure upon faith comes -chiefly
from  without, this very pressure forces up the
life in a direct, unswerving line like that of the
palm-tree, lifting up its golden abundant crown
to heaven; the same life would now resemble
that of a banyan, touching earth at many points,
but at every one drawing forth fresh life and
vigor; less commanding in austere majesty, but
more resembling the tree of prophetic vision,
". harbor for fowl of every wing."  We must




104     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
open our minds to this great fact, that all existence is organic; we cannot be, so to speak, one
thing mentally and socially, and another thing
Christianly, as if the life in Christ and the life
in Adam  flowed on together yet distinct, like
two unmingling currents.  The rational man
will see Christ, as he sees all things, from the
level upon which lie, the rational man, stands.
Man cannot see Christ at all except by light
from above; on the hill, as in the valley, we are
in darkness until the dawn breaks; but if sunrise finds us upon the mountain-peak, is it not
evident that the prospect its light discloses must
be infinitely wider and more glorious than if it
had overtaken us many degrees lower down?
Now that the whole table-land of existence is
lifted into a higher region, we must discard such
commonplaces as this, that there is no belief like
that of the peasant and the child, and with them
the dark and confused notions of Faith upon
which all such axioms are founded.  Faith is
not an extrinsic thing, an outgrowth of the mind
opposed to its rational convictions, its clear and
intimate intuitions.  It is reason enlightened by
its Lord and Giver  it is feeling reconciled with
its great object; it is in an emphatic sense " the
right opinion of that which is."  As Christ is a
living Person, so is Trutll a living tling, that




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.   105
cannot be nailed like some foreign substance to
the mind, but must permeate it, as like draws
near to like. Until we see clearly that there
is a harmony between that which we receive and
that which we are; until we admit that Divine,
like human influences, can only do their work
upon the soul through finding a point of contact
within it, we are scarcely so alive to the deep
moral significance* of life as to see how it is
through  that which  we  believe, approve, yes,
even through that which we like, that the soul is
prepared to receive the impress of Casar or of
God.  "He  that is of the  truth, heareth  my
voice."   This is a deep saying; so also is that
of the prophetic psalm  which  declares plainly
that our  Lord  reveals  himself under  aspects
varying with the moral and spiritual conditions
of those who look upon him: "With the merci* A significance which runs through it all. Every book, for
instance, has a moral expression, though, as in the human face,
it may not be easy to say what it consists in. We may take
up some exquisite poem or story, with no directly religious bearing, andfeel that it is religious, because it strikes a chord so deep
in human nature that we feel it is only the Divine nature, " God
who encompasses us," that can respond to what it calls forth.
From some books, especially such as treat of sin with levity,
an odor of death escapes; about others there is an almost
sensible savor of life unto life.  Some quaint old English
poems and devout essays send a fragrance into the very soul;
to look into them is to open the tomb of a saint, and find it full
of roses.
r.q*




106     THE PATIENCE  OF IOPE.
ful, thou wilt show thyself merciful; with the
upright man, thou wilt show thyself upright;
with the pure, thou wilt show thyself pure; and
with the froward, thou wilt show thyself froward."
If spiritual truths were things self-evident,
like mathematical propositions compelling the
assent of the mind they are addressed to, it
would be hard to understand the extraordinary
value which, under the Gospel dispensation, is
attached to Faith. It would be hard to see how
the possession of this one attribute could embalm
as it were a man's whole soul and life; how a
human being could become dear to his Maker,
simply because he saw that which those around
him were not sufficiently enlightened to perceive.
But is it not evident that this gracious disposition
is one in which the whole man is included?  Is
there not something in the very nature of spiritual Truth which demands for its reception more
than the mere intellect, let it strive as it will,
can compass, and something, too, in our own
nature which makes us, as responsible beings,
answerable for what, as regards this Divine truth,
we see and hear?  To put this in other words,
Can a spiritual truth be apprehended otherwise
than sacramentally? In all cases there will surely
be a proportion between the soul's receptivity




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.             107
and the fulness that is poured within it; a meas.
wre between what it brings and what it finds. And
this St. Paul intimates, when he desires for his
Ephesian converts that they may be so rooted
and grounded in love as to be able to know that
which passeth knowledge; to enter into that
which lie in vain attempts to shadow forth beneath the figures of length and breadth and
height and depth, - the love of Christ,- Love's
secret, which only love itself can make intelligible. " The love of God," saith one of old, "passeth all things for illumination."  One drop of
this love shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy
Ghost; one expansion of the renewed mind in
pity, in forgiveness, in love to the Father, in
good-will towards men, will teach us more of
what God really is than we could learn from
a thousand disquisitions upon the Divine character and attributes.  And that which is the
fulfilling of the law is also, in a great degree,
the understanding of that which it fulfils: for
love has an access, an intuition, of its own; it
attains the end while others are disputing about
the means; it needs not to have every word
explained, defined, interpreted; it is enough for
it to know the voice, the voice of the Beloved, to
follow whithersoever that voice leads.
And the voice of a stranger the heart will not




108   THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
follow, even though it be the voice of Christ
himself; therefore would it see more, know
more, have more of Him, faith's sole, sufficing
Object, without whom love in this world would
be too sorrowful, and hope too vague a thing. It
is interesting to observe how the practical spirit
of our day asserts itself in this great demand,
already audible to ears that listen to the underswell that rises faint, yet clearly, above the agitating tumult of opinion. We need the living,
spiritual Christ; and ours are not the needs which
can be satisfied by gazing on his lifeless body,
however curiously embalmed by formalism with
rite and ceremony, neither will we allow mysticism to come by night to steal away his body, and
fill its place with ideas and imaginations of its
own.  For that great demand, " a philosophy of
fruit," has been moved from the kingdom of nature to that of grace; here too we ask for a vintage, and desire to pass from speculation to that
intimacy with its occupying subject which alone
deserves the name of knowledge.* Is there not
among us, even amid the very heat and dust of
contending opinion, a manifest weariness of dis* "There is only one kind of knowledge which can justly be
called wisdom, - sapientia; meaning properly a knowledge partaking properly of the nature of a taste; an intelligere in which
there is at the same time a sapere which appropriates and takes
in its object with a lively relish." - ULLMANN.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    109
cussion? And this from no indifference to dogmatic truth, the sure, the only foundation for all
that we can know or can receive of Christ, but
grounded upon the deep, ever-increasing conviction that even Truth itself, according to Locke's
fine saying, will not profit us so long as she is
but held in the hand, and taken upon trust from
other men's minds, not wooed and won and
wedded by our own.
And here it is that, as regards many questions now at issue, the plain matter-of-fact thinker and the ardent, inquiring Christian find a
common stAnding-ground.  The first will often
ask of those who, whether for scriptural truth or
for apostolic discipline, call upon him to come
and behold their zeal for the Lord, " Where,
among so many notions about the thing, is the
thing itself? Has the fire gone out, or is it still
smouldering beneath the fagots that have been
brought to mend it?"  The other, with a deeper
meaning, will inquire, "What is the difference
between placing our confidence in something
which we do, or placing it in something which
we think? We may as well rest in an ordinance
as in an opinion, so long as we rest in either for
its own sake, and not for the sake of that which
the confession encloses, the form  embodies, -
even the Spirit, which, not to be contained in




110     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
these, yet working through them  all, converts
them  into things having life."  And thus we
have begun to tire of watchwords, to suspect
that there is no necessary antagonism between
the word which God has spoken and the sign
which he has ordained. The Word itself has
been made flesh, and has dwelt among us: will
objective truth be less valued, Catholic institutions less loved, when each is held dear for the
sake of that which it conveys? -  even that inward and spiritual grace, the gift obtained by
our Lord for us men, the breath, the soul of
spiritual life,- a soul which we shall not surely
expect to possess more, simply through possessing less of its body. For it is not by rejecting
what is formal, but by interpreting it, that we
advance in true spirituality; the Spirit of God,
even as the spirit of a man, works, and, as far as
we yet understand the conditions of our being,
lives, only through "the body which has been
prepared for it." By things which we can see
and hear, by things which our hands can handle,
by words and forms, by doctrines and institutions, men live, and in them is the life of man.
For it is neither by that which is merely natural,
nor by that which is purely spiritual, that man's
complex nature is nourished and sustained: he
lives neither by bread alone, nor yet upon angel's




TIlE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    111
food, but upon that in which the properties of
each are included, -  "the bread which came
down fiom heaven to give life unto the world."
With regard to many of the truths of Christ,
we are surely learning to be no more children,
ever looking at things " in part," but men, able
to appreciate them as they bear upon each other,
and upon the facts with which life brings them
into relation. And that peculiar condition of
our being which makes it hard for us to be altogether "without partiality," which renders it
certain that there will be to each believer some
one aspect under which his Lord is, above all
others dear, some ordinance in which He is
above all others present, may, on the whole,
help forward the perfect apprehension of Christ.
Each individual soul, fiom the very constitution
of our nature, will fasten upon that portion of
Divine Truth which meets and answers to its
own peculiar need; and when we learn to look
at Christianity as a living, organic whole, made
for man, and corresponding with what he is, we
shall the better understand that deep saying of
the Apostle's, " There are differences of administrations, but the same Lord "; and understand
also how it is that Christianity assumes a distinctive character * in certain ages, among cer* Note H.




112     THE PA TIENCE OF HOPE.
tain races, even in certain individuals. Christ
does not so unite himself to Humanity as to
obliterate its native characteristics. Personality
is a sacred thing, being the very stamp and
print of God upon each human soul: I would
say also, it is an awful thing, being that which,
whatever else we may gain or lose, we keep
through time and through eternity, through it
knowing and being known.  And sacred also is
that characteristic impress which, whether in
religious or national society, gives life and individual expression to the community that bears
it.  "Common sense," "public spirit,"- are
these mere words?  Words truly, but testifying,
used or misused as they may be, to the fact of
our being, in Adam and in Christ, members one
of another, enjoying not only a separate but a
corporate existence, the functions of which can
only be exerted through fellowship and union.
" Have we not one Father? hath not one
God created us? and did He not make ONE? " *
All civil, as well as all Christian society, is based
upon this confession, yet with this difference,
that the social is the outward, and in some degree conventional, recognition of Brotherhood;
the Christian, its hearty, inward acceptance,
without which the distinctive mark of savage or
* Mal. ii. 10, 15.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.              113
animal life will reassert itself in the very bosom
of civilization. (.Selfishness, or selfism  (as it
stands in its old form), tends continually to separation, -  solitariness.; Nature, it is true, tells
us that we cannot do without each other, if we
would advance or prosper; she bids us use each
other, Christ bids us love each other, " even as
he hath loved us," with no single, no self-centred aim.  He alone setteth the solitary infamilies, by giving, in his own Person, that common
centre for hopes, interests, and affections, which
is the principle of family, —united life. Nature
draws men together, but even in this drawing
there is a disuniting principle at work; in social
life, for instance, so admirable in its ideal outline, we find practically something in ourselves
and in others which makes it hard, even impossible, to fulfil the obligations that we see most
clearly. We find ourselves in the midst of contending wills, of confused, sometimes contradictory relations, -a strain is laid upon Humanity
which, weak through a civil discord, it is not
strong enough to bear unaided.
"In Adam  all dies "; the flaw runs through
to the foundations, the sword reaches even to
the life.  " The earth," saith Christ, " is weak,
and all the inhabiters thereof; I bear up the
pillars of it." Nature and humanity fail; their
H




114     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
great charter is written in fading characters, dis
tinct, it is true, in outline, but not clearly legi.
ble till held to the warmth of a heaven-kindled
flame. In nature, even as in Christ, no man
liveth, no man dieth, to himself; and of this
human society, even under its most limited conditions, makes us aware, by showing the action
and reaction ever at work between the individual and the community he belongs to.  We see
that a man really becomes better or worse morally, advances or retrogrades socially, according
to the standard of life which prevails around
him,- a standard which he himself is at the
same time helping to depress or raise. This is
a truth which we meet by the wayside, and as
often pass without heeding it. Yet once in the
course of this world, in the history of a Man
who lived, who died for the people, who had no
personal interests (as we are accustomed to conceive of them), and whose life, on any materialistic theory, would have been an impossibility, this
truth has been taken up upon the Mount, and
there so transfigured and glorified, that men who
toil and struggle below, seeing it in its beauty,
"running to it, salute it."  In the life and in
the teaching of Christ, a clear ideal has dawned
upon men, and we must not be discouraged
though we should find it, like all other ideals,
hard to be realized in this present life.




THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.            115
The pang of all true spirits in political, in
social, in Christian life alike is this, to see
clearly what we cannot as yet embrace wholly.
Nor must we despair if this pang should grow
keener with increasing light;
"As the day lengthens, the cold strengthens."
Two principles are at work within Christianity,
twin-existent, of which as yet, travailing and in
haste to be delivered, she crieth out, —the desire for unity, and the passionate love for truth.
These desires, under the present limitations of
human nature, are antagonistic, and have often,
in darker ages, torn the bosom  at which they
were fed. Yet they are no less of Christ, bringing, according to his prophecy, a Sword into the
world.  We see in the Gentile world no desire
for unity,-a desire ever founded on the love,
either in earnest or in possession, of some fixed,
indisputable truth.  And of this they had so
little conception, that Pilate's question, "What
is truth?" expresses, as it were, the sense of
the ancient world.. He did not wait for an
answer, because he did not believe there was
any to be found; all things being true for those
who held them to be so.  We see how sociable,
to use their own expression, the old religions
were in this; how ready to adopt and ingraft




116   THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
any new  idea or form  of belief which seemed
good for use, or even for ornament, in social life.
We see, too, how opposed to this plastic genius
of the Old World is that, the arrow of the Christian Church, which has rankled so sorely in past
ages, and even now diffuses a bitterness which,
however, if rightly probed, discloses less the bitterness of hatred than that of love, -of love,
chilled and mortified, desiring to knit up the
ancient bond, yet repelled even while it is attracted, because the iron and the clay are so
mixed together that only the heat of charity at
its whitest glow can weld them into one. The
bosom of Christ is the grave, the only grave of
religious acrimony; we learn secrets there which
render it possible for us to be of one heart, if we
may not yet be of one mind, with all who lean
upon it with us.  For, slightly as we may think
to heal long-festering hurts, there is no cure* for
religious dissension except that of spiritual acquaintance with God, as revealed to us in the
mind and spirit of Christ Jesus.  To " acquaint
ourselves" thus with God is "to be at peace,"
for it is to learn how far more strong than all
* Of this the soul's good Physician makes us aware in His
memorable answer to his disciples, Luke ix. 54, 55. Even in
rebuking their uncharitable temper, he reveals to them its
cause and remedy: " Ye know not the Spirit of whom ye are
the children."




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    117
which separates is that which unites us in Him.
So long as the external is more to us than the
vital, the accidental dearer than the essential, so
long, in short, as we are more Churchmen, more
Protestants, more anything than Christians, religious acerbity will continue. It ceases so soon
as the pure language becomes more familiar to
our lips than the dialects in which we are apt to
merge it, and they who are in Christ, hearing
each other speak plainly, discover that they are
one in Him, even as he is one with the Father.
" Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity
with itself"; that which moulds itself from within is free. Who that knows anything of what
unity really is, -how deep its root, how kindly
and unconstrained its expansion, —can be very
solicitous for uniformity, —the outward union of
" cold and neutral and inwardly divided minds,"
the rigid, corpse-like symmetry of that which
cannot of itself either live or go, but must be
ever kept up by that by which it can be alone
produced, -the strong pressure of the compelling
hand?  Human spirits are only to be drawn together and held together by the living bond of
having found something in which they really do
agree. And, though we may yet be far from
the dawning of that day, known unto the Lord,




118     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
when Opinion and Truth will be no more at
variance, the "One Day* when there shall be
One Lord and his Name One," we are, perhaps,
not so far removed from a time when devout
men, although they be of every nation under
heaven, may hear each other speak of the wonderful works of God in their own tongue, - the
tongue in which they were born, -a speech after
which many among us have begun to yearn too
fervently to be any longer occupied in framing
shibboleths to prove our Brethren.
Is not a day coming —yea, unto them who
watch for the Morning, has it not already
dawned? - when we shall grow so covetous of
good, of grace, as to turn our swords, too often
sharpened against each other's bosoms, into
ploughshares, to break up the fallow ground
that lies within and around us? when we shall
beat our spears into pruning-hooks to dress the
abundant increase of the days, when the sower
shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of
grapes him that soweth seed?
Already we are beginning to attach a spiritual meaning to the prophecy, "Ephraim shall
not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex
Ephraim"; to look forward to a time when
enmity within God's kingdom shall so far cease
* See the conclusion of Zechariah's prophecy.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.   119
an to allow  the kindred zeal of his people, -zeal
which is but love under its more ardent aspect,
-to be  turned  against the  common  enemies
of their king,  and to  find  there its triumphs.
"They   shall  fly  upon  the  shoulders  of the
Philistines towards the west; they shall spoil
them of the east together; they shall lay their
hand upon Edom and Moab, and the children
of Ammon shall obey them."
"In  the evening  time there shall be light."
Evening brings with it the thought of home and
rest, the desire for communing round the hearth
with  those  of our own  family  and  household.
Many  steps are now  surely,*  though  perhaps
* "The second Pentecost preceding the coming of our Saviour promises to be of a very universal character.  Blessed
time! I now read the Old Testament promises of a great blessing' on all flesh' as if I had never read them before: they appear
in a new light. Is not that prophecy of Zechariah striking,-'And the inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying, Let
us go speedily to pray before the Lord, and to seek the Lord of
Hosts: I will go also. Yea, many people and strong nations shall
come to seek the Lord'?
" Those beautifil, questioning words of Isaiah about the Gentiles often occur to me:' Who are these who fly as doves to
their windows?'-a flock of doves speeding to their home,
their ark of refuge. Noah's one dove, like the solitary Jewish
Church, took refuge there from the wild waste of waters; but
all kindreds, peoples, tongues, and nations shall fly to their
stronghold in latter times, their feathers of gold and their wings
covered with silver, white and lovely, though they have lien
among the pots." - J. E. B.




120     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
half instinctively, seeking the Father's house,
there is a sound of home-going feet, a murmur
of anxious, loving recognition.  The approach
of night brings with it a sense of need and
dependence, and in this, the World's great
evening, the heart has become more alive to the
pulsation which is ever at work throughout the
whole of Christ's Mystical Body, a secret perhaps not to be entered upon very early in the
believer's day.  For the characteristic of the
religious or seeking soul is solitariness.  It is
the withdrawal of the soul into the wilderness,
there, in that deepened sense of personal accountability in which most religious convictions
begin, to plead with God face to face, of individual sin, for individual redemption; its cry is,
"Lord, save me, for I perish."
The characteristic of the godly, the accepted
soul, so joined unto the Lord as to be of one
spirit with him, is fellowship; in awaking up
into Christ it awakes unto its brethren; its exclamation is that of the Psalmist, "Behold,
there are many with me."
And though the believer often seems, like his
Master, to tread the wine-press alone, neither his
conflicts nor his triumphs are ever really solitary.  "Multitudes, multitudes," if unseen, are
ever round him.  Our Lord in his last solemn




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.   121
hour speaks of sanctifying himself for the sake of
those whom his Father had given him, that they
also might be sanctified through the truth; and
though we may be unable as yet to pierce to the
heart of all that is included in those words,
" Because I live, ye shall live also," * we know
enough even now to be aware that heaven and
earth are drawn so much the nearer each other
for every soul in living communion with Christ.
As every  waste  and  barren  spot becomes a
centre for noisome exhalations to gather in, a
haunt for doleful creatures to repair to, so
for every piece of territory reclaimed unto God
the whole garden of the Lord advances by so
much nearer its final blossoming as the rose.
And  as our seasons grow  milder and  more
healthful because a marsh has been drained or
a forest cleared in some remote district, so will
the blessing which faith draws down extend far
beyond the age or region whence its voice arose.
Our warfare with the sins and sorrows of our
* Our Lord says, "I am come that ye might have life, and
that ye might have it more abundantly"; life in its abundance,
not in its mere continuity, which, at least to some spirits, would
offer little to attract or satisfy. But what if we receive the saying in its intensity, - " the fulness of life," - extended capacities,
enlarged affections, with infinite wisdom and love to meet and
answer them? " My people shall be satisfied with my goodness,
for I have satiated the weary soul, and replenished every sorrowIul soul."
6




122    THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
spirits may be accomplished in some far-distant
field, and they who have tarried at home may
thus divide the spoil with the mighty.  The
lowly Christian, lifting up holy hands to God, is
at that moment strengthening those of some unseen brother; the ground upon which he kneels
may continue dry as was the fleece of Gideon;
the object upon which his heart's desire and
prayer is set may fail; yet his labor has not
therefore been in vain in the Lord.  The blessing he has sought may drop far hence upon the
dwellings in the wilderness, may help to bring
down floods upon the dry ground which has
not of itself craved after the increase from on
high.
And knowing that neither the word which
God sends forth, nor the holy impulse which
that word quickens, can ever return to him
void, are we not justified in much hope, in long
patience?  You say to me, "We ask for the
continual dew of God's blessing; but need we,
in days when the enemy breaketh in like a
flood, despair of seeing floods descend upon a
waiting world in answer to secret, persevering
prayer?"  "I will pour floods upon the dry
ground."  The ground is dry, yet it still contains within it that Root which sprung of old
"out of a dry ground"; a root which at the




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    123
scent of water will bud and bring forth boughs
like a plant. "Revive, 0 Lord, thy work in
the midst of the years I"
"Awake, 0  north wind, and come,
thou south; blow upon my
garden, that the spices
thereof may
flow out."
ID
I~e








PART THIRD.




"Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
And bring her into the wilderness,
And speak comfortably to her;
And I will give her her vineyards from thence,
And the valley of Trouble for a door of Hope."
HosrA ii. 4, 15.
~<DQ(P




PART  III.
i [    BY  soul is athirst for God," saith
the Psalmist, " even for the living
God."
There is a point beyond which
neither the experience of others, nor even the
utterances of the inspired Word can instruct or
comfort the heart; it must have rejoicing in
itself, and not in any other; it must learn of its
Lord as none save himself can teach. Its prayer
is, " Make me to hear thy voice." It knows much
about Jesus, but it desires to know him; it can no
longer rest in opinions, in ordinances, in Christianity received as a system, in anything save
in Christ, and in actual communion with him.
But whence comes this sigh, the broken language of every Christian heart, "More of
Christ!"  How is it that our Lord hath been
so long time with us, and yet wo have not
known him?




128     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
Who among us has not experienced moments,
and these perhaps often recurring, in which the
heart has communed with itself and been sad,
desiring that Jesus would himself draw near, yet
ready, in its discouragement, to ask whether, in
the very urgency of its desire and its endeavor,
it may not be exacting too much of itself, may
not be expecting too much of God?
For have we, -in this urgency, enough considered that saying of our Saviour's, " I have yet
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear
them now "?  The natural man dies hard within
us; the man from heaven is not born * without
a pang; first the Anguish, then the Joy. Are
our souls willing, yea, are they able, to endure
that anguish, ardently as we may desire the joy
which makes it to be remembered no more?
When the fulness of time is come, the fulness of
strength will be given to meet it, and not before;
and, meanwhile, the way of life continues to have
its own ache,t a sadness peculiar to itself.
A certain degree of impatience seems natural,
even befitting to Man, a being of keen though
limited vision, of stringent though narrow grasp.
* " We know not," says Bacon, speaking of natural life, " whether
to be born may not be as painful as to lie."
t Kein Reisen ist ohn Ungemach,
Das Lebensweg hat auch sein Ach.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    129
His mind, as one who has sounded its very
depths has taught us, is naturally enamored of
order and system; he finds within himself the
Surmise of a perfection which outward nature
does not respond to, and for this he the more
delights to trace a sequence through all her apparent confusion; to discover that by earth and
air and ocean there is a path such as the vulture's eye hath not known. And if science, as
has been truly said, mourns to find a gap, every
here and there, in her great chain of cause and
consequence, -a link broken, perhaps dropt
through forever, -how is it with the Christian,
if in the ladder which joins earth to heaven
there should be some rounds wanting?  How
is it when Man, who loves to track the end from
the beginning, to see the flower wrapt up in the
bud, finds that the life of the soul, like that of
the insect, must pass through strange metamorphoses, through sundry successive kinds of
deaths? when he discovers that the life of the
Divine seed, set so deep in the heart and in the
world, instead of being one of consistent growth,
of free, harmonious development, may be the
most fitly illustrated by the well-known simile
of an acorn set within a jar of porcelain; a
mighty plant that must shatter its frail earthen
tabernacle in its growing.
6*                    i




130   THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
And here we are reminded of what the
prophet tells us, that God's thoughts are not our
thoughts, neither His ways our ways. God has
time for everything, and he has room  for everything; but it is far otherwise with his creature,
and the tendency of all human effort is to gca
straight to a desired aim, putting on all possible
strain  and  pressure.   Thus,  adding  what we
conceive of infinite  power to what we know  of
finite will, we have arrived at an idea of Omnipotence,* the exact opposite, surely, of that to
* An idea in which we lose sight of the fact that God, no lesrs
than man, has a nature, and within that nature laws by which
he is irresistibly governed, and ends to which his designs infallibly tend; and it is probable, indeed certain, that, if we could
see clearly into the depths of the Divine counsels, we should find
nothing arbitrary or adventitious in any of the works or decrees of the Almighty; nothing, I mean, which could have beets
otherwise than that which it is. Choice is the glory of humanity,
its distinctive attribute; raising a man as high above the inferior
creatures as it sinks him below Deity, for to choose is obviously
as human as is to err; infinite wisdom can see and take but one
way.
God, as his Apostle tells us, cannot deny or contradict himself
and upon this, His moral obligation, the moral freedom of ma'
is founded, -a freedom which the gospel of life and immortality has brought to light, and which it alone reveals. All systems
founded upon nature gender to bondage; behind which of these,
whether Pagan or Pantheistic, do we not see, or rather feel, the
dark background of power only, - in other words, Fate, decreeing, creating, devouring all things, - the blind, impassive womb
and grave of rational and sensitive life?
" God is a spirit." What is Predestination, the Christian form
of Fatalism, but this, - the everlasting purpose of God toward,




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.   131
which  all we see of the Almighty's works would
lead.   We accustom  ourselves to speak  of his
dealings, whether in grace or nature, as being
sudden, irresistible, one in design and in execugood, which sin by its very nature contradicts, and naturally
opposes, so that that which is exceeding good becomes the exceeding evil ("anguish, tribulation, and wrath") of those who
resist it. The ungodly, unless, through repentance and faith in
Christ, they fall back, as it were, upon God's plan, must perish
with all that runs counter to it. Consider in this light the maledictory passages in the Psalms, and the awful denunciations of
the Prophets against national sins; they are declaratory, having
to do with what is, as much as with what will be. The spirit
instructed in God's unchanging counsels (knowing His mind and
purpose) reads the Present and Future by one light, and is
able to interpret the one by the other. What has been (in this
sense) will be, must be; under -certain conditions certain results
follow.
NOTE BY THE EDITOR.- The awful question here touched
upon has been too often presented by theologians in such a way
as to shock the moral sense, by a necessary inference that the
Divine economy is alike conservative of evil and good, misery
and happiness. Implacable hate, immeasurable revenge, insatiable cruelty, - all that is abhorrent in man, - have been attributed by the veriest blasphemy of logic to God. Eternity of evil, an
endless, aimless horror of discord, torment, and despair, believed
in as an end and purpose of creation, would seem to make heaven
itself impossible. Our author, while admitting the fact of future
suffering and loss, refers it to that conscious freedom of choice inseparable from man as a moral being, the denial of which in this
life or the next involves the loss of his personal identity and accountability. The dark problem has no other solution than that
which is reached through simple faith in the Divine Goodness.
Shall not He do right?  Can we not leave all in His hands? If
we, when nearest to Him in feeling, yearn with tenderest pity
after the sin-sick and suffering, how much more He whose name
is Love? Overwhelmed by a sense of our own moral infirmities




132   THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
tion; yet Nature, so soon as ever we pierce below
her broad surface-smile, betrays on every hand
the marks of care, of patience, and adaptation.
All that we learn of God in this region tends
and the evil about us, we are too prone to question the sufficiency
of His love; bound down, as it were, in the grave-clothes of
spiritual death, we too often distrust " the power of His resur
rection."  " Infinite Goodness," says the Countess de Gasparin,
"finds us more sceptical than infinite justice."  Sin indeed
throws a baleful shadow upon the future; but who shall set
limits of time and place to the mercy of God, which " endureth
forever "? "When," asks the author of this book in her closing
paragraph, "were Love's arms stretched so wide as upon the
cross?"  Looking thitherward, may we not tremblingly and
reverently trust the larger hope, which, secretly cherished in the
inmost heart of Christendom from the times of Origen and Duns
Scotus to those of Foster and Maurice, has found its fitting utterance in the noblest poem of the age?
"  yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt and taints of blood:
" That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not one life shall be destroyed
Or cast as rubbish to the void
When God hath made the pile complete:
"That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.
"Behold  we know not anything:
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last,- far off, - at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring."




THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.              133
more and more to bring his works out of the
domain of the magical, to convince us that it is
the human, and not the Divine energy, which
craves for its purposes the signet-stamp of full
and speedy accomplishment;
"For we are hasty builders, incomplete;
Our Master follows after, far more slow
And far more sure than we, for frost, and heat,
And winds that breathe, and waters in their flow,
Work with Him silently."
And turning to God's inner kingdom; here,
too, where the good to be desired is so great,
the evil to be avoided so imminent, even here,
also, we must confess that God wraps up his
great designs in a husk or envelope, which will
not fall from off them until the appointed time
be come.  What is the sacred history, from  its
very beginning, but that of a labor working to
a mighty, far-seen, and remote end?  What is
Christianity, though it has in its cradle contended with and crushed the serpent?-  even now
but "an infant of days."  We think, naturally,
that God might make all things as he wishes
them to be at once; but we find that it is not.
his way to do so.  God does not heal us with
a touch.  He uses means and processes, tedious
often and peculiarly  afflicting,-" He giveth
medicine" for our mortal sickness; a life-long




134     THE PA TIENCE OF HOPE.
remedy for a life-long ill. And when we feelas what Christian act times does not?- an impatience with the slowness of our own growth,
let us look from ourselves into the universal
Church of Christ, and ask this self-answering
question of our hearts, How shall the growth of
the part be rapid, when that of the whole has been
so slow?  Let us consider the nature of the
Earlier Dispensation, and recollect under how
many costly and cumbrous folds of rite and
ceremony the treasure of the world lay hid.
Let us remember that this is still a hid treasure; that to the outwardly Christian, no less
than to the Heathen World, the great mystery
of redeeming love remains that world's Open
Secret, declared, yet uncommunicated, plain to
the ear, yet dark to the sense.  Let us consider the slow, the uneven, the painful advance
of the Mystic Spouse, -  she that cometh up
from the wilderness, leaning upon the arm of
Her Beloved, - and we shall see that she, like
her Lord, is wounded in her heart, her hands,
and her feet.
And that these things are so, the Christian
must fain confess. Yet he would fain see them
otherwise; would fain behold if it were but
the initial fulfilment of those deep, instinctive
prophecies which  overcharge his heart, —a




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    135
heart too large for the body through which it must
for the present work. Yet, among many yet
unfulfilled predictions, he must look upon one
evermore fulfilling itself, and read in all that
passes within him and around him a comment
upon the Eldest-born of Prophecy: "'Thou
shalt bruise his head, and he shall bruise thy
heel."  He must see evil following hard upon
good, following because of good; Satan exalting
himself against Christ; the Gates of Hell advancing upon that against which they shall
never prevail. Therefore is he often in this life
perplexed and baffled, as one that knoweth not
what his Lord doeth. And it is this which
gives such terrible, even blighting power to the
words and writings of unbelievers, which barbs
and sends home many a dull scoff that would
otherwise fall harmless, - that they touch a conscious, ever-rankling wound.  What they urge
against Christianity  is true.   The  believer
knows, already knows, all that the infidel can
tell him; the eye of love can see as clearly as
that of hate, and it has already mourned over
all that the other exults in; has seen springs
sink down suddenly among the sands of the
desert; has looked upon bare and stony channels, now ghastly with the wreck and drift of
ages, yet showing where once a full, fair river




136     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
bore down life and gladness to the ocean.  The
Christian would fain explain, account for, these
long delays, this partial efficacy, this intermittent working.  He feels that he is in possession
of the key which is to open all these intricacies,
but at present he finds that, like that of the Pilgrims, " it grinds hard in the lock."   He sees
Jesus, but he sees not yet all things put under
him.  The world around him is the same world
which crucified his beloved Lord, and he must
listen from age to age to its insulting cry, "If
thou be the Christ, come down from the Cross,
and we will believe."
There is something sorrowful, even perplexing, in every life which is guided by a standard
which those around us do not recognize; to be
living by the dial, when all around us go by the
clock, brings a contradiction into the life of
which the lives of those who are in league with
circumstance, "the slaves and the masters of
every day," know nothing.
There is a sadness in all Idealism; it lifts the
soul into a region where it cannot now dwell;
it must return to earth, and it is hard for it not
to do so at the shock of a keen revulsion, the
dashing of the foot against a stone.  But in no
life does the secret of all tragedy,* the conflict
* Interior freedom and exterior necessity, these are the twc
poles of the Tragic World. — F. ScIMI.L;;.




THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.             137
between the Will and Circumstance, so unfold
itself as in that of the Christian; he, of all men,
feels and mourns over that sharp, ever-recurring contrast of our existence,  the glorious
capabilities, the limited attainments, of man's
nature and destiny below. For his possibilities
are at once more glorious and more assured
than those of other men; yet, as regards actualities, he among all men must be content to
have the least to show.  And this, if we examine deeply, will be found at the root of all
sincere fanaticism. It is the agony of the spirit,
its strict, convulsive embrace of some glorious
truth, the soul's first love,* for the sake of which
it refuses to perceive the limitations to which all
things here have been made subject.  Having
tasted of the fruit of the tree of life, " good for
food, pleasant to the eyes, and to be desired to
make one wise," it forgets that old, unrepealed
statute, that man, in the Second Adam as in the
First, must till the ground from whence he was
taken.t  Until he returns to the earth, he must
turn to it, nourishing and being nourished by it;
if he would stretch forth his hand and live by
what he can reach of absolute truth, he will
quickly come across the flaming sword turning
every way to keep the way of the Tree of Life.
* Note I.             t G.+csis iii. 19, 23.




138     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
"We trusted it had been He which should
have redeemed Israel."  Under whatever form
this hope encounters us, —from  the wild excesses of the Fifth-Monarchy Men and Munster
Anabaptists, to the simple expectation of the
Dorsetshire peasant, who in Monmouth's rebellion talked about " King Jesus," - there is always something affecting in its expression; and
the more so, because the foreseen sadness of its
disappointment is one which connects itself with
the natural experience of Christian life. How
much is there in this to remind the believer of
what the two chosen disciples must have felt
when they descended from the Mount of Transfiguration! For he, too, has known moments,
perhaps hours, on which the calm  of eternity
seemed already to rest,-still, blessed seasons in
which he has beheld, not only Moses and Elias,
but his own life also, transfigured in his beloved'Lord; times in which things present were intelligible, things distant clear. And he, too, has come
down, like them, to meet the full shock of this
life's perplexity, to be met by human anguish,
the struggles of the demoniac, the tears of his
father, to witness and perhaps share the discomfiture of his brethren, " Why could not we cast
him out?" to listen to their perverse disputings
as to "who among them should be greatest."




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.   139
To  whom   shall he  declare the glorious revelation?  to  whom   shall he  even  speak*  of the
things  which  he  has  seen  and  heard?    Yea,
even while he thinks upon the Vision, even before it has had time to fade, he may find, by a
sudden blank and stillness in his own spirit, that
"it has been received up again into heaven."
" A  little while! " said the disciples; " what is
this he saith?   A  little while I    we cannot understand what he saith." A little while, and ye
shall not see me,  a hard saying to the loving,
confiding heart, which would fain abide forever
where it has found it so good to be, - a hard but
* "All that Ihold worthiest," says David Scott, of the high
ideal objects to which his life was devoted, "seems to remove me
from  the sphere of other men."  A kindred sense of isolation
must often overtake the Christian, and it is one which he must
learn to meet with a prepared and patient heart. We must be
content faithfully to speak out what we feel and know, without
expecting that others will be proportionably affected. These
things have been shown to us by God himself, worked by His
Hand into the very frame and texture of the soul; can the mere
telling, even though of truth itself, affect as sensibly?
Besides this, we must remember that it is not only spiritual
things that appear " foolishness " in the absence of enlightened
receptivity. Young people, for instance, do not, cannot, believe
what the old tell them of life and its trials; and what mere
jargon, to one uninitiated, appears the talk of two enthusiasts
upon literature and art! It gives him a secret irritation; he is
not only uninfluenced by their zeal, but scarcely believes that
they themselves really feel what they express so strongly,
knowing that the world to him goes on very well without this
foreign element, and could dispense with it forever.




140     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
inevitable saying. There is a severity in our
Lord's inner discipline which reminds the believer of Joseph's making himself strange unto
his brethren. For it is not the natural man
only that has to be humbled and chastened by
Him, the spiritual man also must become as a
weaned child, and for him there is " a secret,
low fire " kept long burning. In Christ, as well
as for Christ, they are to be counted happy who
endure; who bear all things, — silence, delay,
aridity, for thus he trains his Athletes.
The spiritual life is a world within itself; with
joys, with sorrows, I would say also with temptations, peculiarly its own; and he has not advanced far within its borders who has not learnt
the truth of that saying, " I beheld, and, lo! by
the very gate of-heaven was there a road to
hell," who has not prayed with holy Herbert
for deliverance "from the arrow that flieth by
noonday."  There is much even in the renewed
mind which, if suffered to remain there, would
gradually eat away the heart of its strength and
purity; something in each believer, which he
imagined he had left behind when he forsook all
and gave himself up to follow Christ, but he
finds that it has rushed after him, like Care in
the ancient proverb, and holds to him with as
tight a grasp as ever.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    141
How many tendencies, and these not to be
numbered among such as are the least worthy,
will seek, like Clovis and his Paladins, for a
hollow, hasty baptism, that they may be called
by Christ's name, and fight his battles, remaining just what they were at first I Therefore the
believer, as he advances in  self-knowledge,
learns to bless and to adore those piercing yet
enlightening experiences of his own weakness,
which, as it were, let daylight within his whole
spiritual being. He learns, even in exclaiming,
" Who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?" to rejoice in those its deep-seated infirmities, against which he continually prays and
strives,- he finds many things within him, pitiable rather than sinful; hinderances from which
he longs to free himself, yet learns even in these
to recognize his true though humble friends and
helpers; him they compel to bear the cross; and
even in that compulsory bearing, his heart so
grows to it, as to desire no independent strength
or virtue.  "Blessed are ye poor."  Blessed are
the souls in whom not the strength of nature
only, but that of grace, has been so brought low,
even to the very dust, that they have learnt to
call nothing that they have their own.
Often must the believer, like Antaeus, grow
stronger for having touched the ground; often




142   THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
must he experience the sentence of death in
himself, —must feel himself a Being without
heart or hope, incapable and even insensible, so
that he may learn to trust, not in himself or in
any other, but in Him who raises the spiritually
dead.   The  Christian  must hold  on  to  God,
through conflicts and agonies; he must fight
while his blood runs down and glues his hand
to  his sword, so  must he  hold  on, when  that
hand* is benumbed  and stiff with  cold; when
strength and consciousness seem gone together,
and only an instinct remains through which the
soul is able to fling itself like a dead weight upon
Christ. Yet even here is
* The fluctuations to which spiritual life is subject show the
wisdom and goodness of God in making so much of it to reside in
duty, a principle independent of the variations of feeling. There
are long seasons of banishment from  God's presence, unconnected, perhaps, with any sense of His displeasure, in which the
soul must say, " Make me as one of thy hiredi servants," and
during which, even in the absence of sensible love and joy and
fervor, it may be able to testify that " Great is the peace of them
that love thy law."
There are spaces and silences in the Christian life, times
which it is impossible to describe, because " full desertness " in
souls, as in countries, " lieth bare," - times when the soul seems
devoid of the capacity, even of the desire, for communion with
its Lord, yet even during these its delight in His service may
continue, because the excellency of His commandment has truly,
however imperfectly, become its chief and chosen good. " The
poor," saith our Master, " ye have ever with you, but Me ye have
not always." A continual service of love, but a communion not
as yet abiding.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    143
" An overthrow
Worth many victories."
Through being chilled and mortified in the smallest, most inwardly humiliating things; through
being beaten away from the broken cisterns of
self and of all creatures, we learn, as we could
never without this have done, to look to Christ
as our well of life, and so to find all our fresh
springs in him, as to be able to say with a simple
and sincere heart, " Lord, give me evermore of
this water, so that I thirst not, neither come
hither to draw."
"He that believeth shall not make haste."
Blessed are they, thou good Joseph, who love
thee even as thou art; who trust thee in spite
of thy silence and thy strangeness, thy long delays, thy repeated questionings, thy withdrawal
into thy secret chamber, thy protracted tarrying
there. "Blessed is he who shall not be offended
in Me."
For Wisdom, even in this world, is justified
of her children; most so of all in Him, her chief,
her only beloved Son, without Whom was not
anything made that was made, yet who rejoices
in the habitable parts of the earth, and whose
delights are with the sons of men. I know not
how to speak of that great era in the Christian's
soul when, whether through the Strength of a




144    THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
patient following, or through the sweetness of a
loving  recognition, it finds Him   whom   it has
long loved, and passes,* in that finding, from the
straitened life within itself into the free outlooking  from  self into  Christ.   When  it ceases to
confer with flesh and blood, to watch over its
own  changes and  fluctuations, for the sake of
attaching  itself implicitly  to  Him   who  is the
whole of what we have in  part; when  it lives
no longer by faith,t but by Christ, holding Him
* " I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with
loving-kindness have I drawn thee." After long conscientious
serving of God, refreshed by little feeling of joy or comfort, there
are moments when the soul seems suddenly made aware of its
own happiness, - when, either through outward circumstances or
without them, an appeal is borne in upon it as direct, as pleading,
as distinct, as that which was made of old to Peter, "Simon, son
of Jonas, lovest thou me?" and it is able to answer out of its
very depths, " Lord, thou knowest."  Its love for its Lord being
as surely felt, as little to be doubted as its own being, it answers
as steadfastly as if asked whether a parent or child was loved -
it dares even to appeal to the omniscience of the heart-searching
God, -" Thou knowest."  Such moments are surely more to us
than a passing comfort. Do they not teach us something of the
depth of those words, "We love him because he first loved us.
For is not this also of the Lord, —this tender attraction, this
warmth, at which the frozen waters of the heart break up and
flow forth as at the breath of spring? And does not this seeking
of our love on Christ's part convince us that he is ever loving us
in our colder as well as more fervent seasons, and that, in being
drawn by his loving-kifidness, we have laid hold on his everlasting love, - a chain which runs backwards and forwards through
all eternity?-J. E. B.
t Note K.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    145
too surely to think of that it holds by, —it
has done with self-questioning, with self-analysis; it believes in the love by which it lives, and
can appeal for all answer to the fact of its own
life.
And I know not what should more cheer and
gladden a Christian than to see his spiritual life
losing everything of an exotic character; to have
it set in the open air, welcoming the wind from
every quarter; acquiescing in all things becau-s
depending only upon one. A free and sustained
spirit becomes habitual to him, who, in the breaking of his daily bread, has found that Real Presence which sanctifies and glorifies our life's poor
Elements.  When the heart has found its true
gravitation, it leaves that Rest slowly and returns to it quickly; disturbing influences will
be felt from time to time, but their power is
gone, -" that which is the strongest must win."
A firm, assured patience grows upon the Christian, enabling him to hold upon his way, undeterred, unchilled, by whatever he may meet
upon it; enabling him  also, I know  not to
what inner music, to build up his spirit to a
Strength of calm, reliant conviction, even with
the stones he finds there, as a brook lifts up
a more clear and rapid voice for flowing over
pebbles.  Roughness and littleness, indifference
7                      J




146     THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.
and contradiction, for all of these the heart that
has made room for Christ finds room, in a steadfast, not scornful allowance.
The strain upon the inner life has passed over
from  self to Christ, and with that strain the
uneasy pressure which may once have tended
to something of exaggeration and eccentricity.
Time was when the believer was often fain,
with the Gaul of old, to decide a doubtful question by violence, to fling his sword within the
wavering balance.  He can now afford, like the
practised archer in sending home his arrow, to
allow for the set of the wind it flies through.
His heart has grown wise, instructed, tolerant,
tender with weakness, patient of imperfection:
"Who is blind as he that is perfect,
And blind as the Lord's servant?"
How quiet such a life is! how fruitful — fruitful because it is so quiet; it works not, but lives
and grows.  The uneasy effort has passed out of
it; unresting, because it rests always, it has done
with task-work and anxiety; it serves, yet is
not cumbered with much serving; it has ceased
from that sad complaint, - " Thou hast left me
to serve alone."
Such a life will seem less spiritual only because it has grown more natural; the soul moves
in an atmosphere which of itself brings it into




TIE PATIENCE OF HOPE.   147
contact with all great and enduring things, and
it has only to draw in its breath to be filled and
satisfied. I know not how to describe the grandeur and simplicity of the state that is no longer
self-bounded, self-referring; how great a thing
to  such  a freed  and rejoicing  spirit the life in
Christ Jesus seems; a temple truly "not of this
building," too great to be mapped out and measured;* too great to be perfect here.  A  thought
for which our mortal life,-a language as yet
too broken and confused to
"Catch up the whole of love and utter it," -
can  find no corresponding  word.t
Yet  Experience,  even  the  deep  assurance
of our present imperfectibility, worketh Hope.
Though  the  Church, like  the  moon, seldom
reflects the clear outline, never the full splendor
of the light she shines by; though  the shadow
* Note L.
t De Quincey, speaking of the grandeur and subtilty of the
human spirit, says most beautifully, that all of our thoughts have
not words corresponding to them; many of them in our yet imperfectly developed nature can never express themselves in acts,
but must lie, appreciable by God only, like the silent melodies in a
great Musician's heart, never to roll forth from harp or organ.
In connection with this idea, in how sublime a light does His
Name - THE WORD - pl:ce our Saviour. Jesus Christ is the
Word of God, him in lWhom the Father's thought has found full
and perfect utterance. " For I know the thoughts that I think
concerning you," saitl the Lord, " thoughts of peace, and not of
evil, to give yout an explected end."




148     THE PATIENCE  OF HOPE.
of earth is too often cast between her orb and
Him, she  is still "the faithful witness in
heaven," weakness girt about with power, the
Woman clothed with the Sun, a Wonder in
earth and in heaven.  Though the believer is
no plant grown  up  in his youth, fair and
flourishing, without blight or mildew; though
he may be far indeed from sealing up the sum,
"full of wisdom  and perfect in beauty," still,
in spite of every warp and hinderance, he has
grown, and his life has become to him but a
Prophecy of the life it keeps warm within it," Close comprest,
Our Present holds our Future, like a Rose
That may not yet its perfect Soul unclose,
Lest angry winds should scatter or molest."
And as the Christian advances upon his way,
a sweet and solemn sense of the unity of life
grows upon his spirit.  "We are complete in
Him"; much of our life, if viewed in itself
only, would appear purposeless and broken, yet
Christ has said, "Gather up these fragments
that remain, so that nothing be lost."  We
learn to look at life as a whole thing; not to be
discouraged by this or that adverse circumstance, remembering how  much there is and
will be in that life which is "like frost and
snow, kindly to the root, though hurtful to the




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.   149
flower," fatal to the bloom and fragrance, the
lovely and enjoyable part of our nature, but
friendly to its true, imperishable life.   Looking
at ourselves, we may see that, under a slight,
sometimes a very slight, modification of inward
bent, or outward circumstance, we should have
been far more happy, more beloved, apparently
more useful than now; yet we may also see as
plainly, as we confess it humbly, that we have
attained, through all these losses, to that to
which every gain is even present, appreciable
loss.  And here I would gladly say something
of those gracious outward providences through
which  God will sometimes visibly visit and
refresh the spirit, turning over, perhaps forever, a tear-stained page of contradiction, and
unfolding a fresh leaf of richer, happier experience;
"For not forever will he continue thus to thresh it,
Not to vex it with the wheel of his wain,
Nor to bruise it with the hoofs of his cattle.
In just measure when thou inflictest the stroke, thou wilt
debate with her,
With due deliberation even in the rough tempest."
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the believer
will find the current of his existence sweeping
into a broader channel; will find " doors opening" upon him, doors of happiness, doors of




150     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
usefulness, which will be to him  a Gate of
Heaven; " windows opening," letting in the
breath of summer upon his soul, filling it with
sunshine and sweet air; suddenly too, in the
deep emergencies of life, some new interest,
some friend, will appear like the Great Twin
Brethren, or Saint of old, in the thick of the
battle, vanishing perhaps when the fight is over,
yet blessing him  even in vanishing from  his
sight.
For that terrible saying of Anne of Austria
to Richelieu holds true for mercy as well as for
judgment: " My Lord Cardinal, God does not
pay at the end of every week, but at the last he
pays."  God may put his faithful ones upon a
long and painful apprenticeship, during which
they learn much and receive little, - food only,
and "that in a measure," — often the bread
and water of affliction. Yet at the last he
pays; pays them into their hearts, pays them
into their hands also. We may remember long
seasons of faint yet honest endeavor; the prayers of a soul yet without strength; the sacrifices
of an imperfectly subdued will, bound even with
cords to the altar; we may remember such
times, or we may forget them, but their result
is with us. Some of the good seed sown in
tears is now  shedding a heavenly fragrance




TEIE  PATI ENCE  OF  HOPE.              151
within our lives, and some of it will blossom,
perhaps bear fruit, over our graves.*
There are moments in the Christian life upon
which the spoil of a long conflict seems heaped,
in which it can rejoice even with the joy of
a late yet abounding harvest.   Seasons, too,
sometimes  prolonged  ones, which recall what
the historians of the Middle Ages tell us of the
Truce of God, - set, appointed times when the
land  had rest, and war and violence were no
more  heard  within  its borders; so are there
blessed intervals, wherein the soul reckons up
many  desolated  Sabbaths, and  enjoys a Godgiven, God-protected rest.
Light is good, and it is a pleasant thing to
behold the sun.  Yet far dearer than outward
peace, far sweeter than inward consolation, is
that, the ever-during stay, the solace of the
Christian's heart, the imperishable Root of which
all else that gladdens it is but the bloom  and
* "I have remarked," says Palissy, "trees and plants which
felt their decay approaching, and which before death hastened to
bring forth fruit and grain before the accustomed time. - What if
I spoke of men?"
We may compare what our Saviour says, " Except a corn of
wheat di6, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit," with the fact that his brethren, who did not believe on
him during his life, were, after his death, in two known and
other probable cases, his devoted followers and martyrs.




152     THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.
odor; the dry tree   that shall flourish when
every green tree of delight and of desire fails.
It is to the Cross that the heart must turn for
that which will reconcile it to all conflicts, all
privations; which will even enable it, foreseeing
them, to exclaim, " Yet more."  When Christ
is lifted up within the believing soul, nothing is
too hard for it to venture upon or endure; it
rests upon a power beyond itself, and can bring
its whole strength to bear upon generous, exalted enterprise.  Show thy servant thy work,
and his own will be indeed easy    Let this
powerful attraction be once felt, the heart's, the
world's great and final Overcoming, and all
other bonds will weaken, all other spells decay.
"Midnight is past,"  sings the sailor on the
Southern Ocean, - "Midnight is past; the Cross
begins to bend."
Outward duties weary, inward consolations
fail. Charity never faileth. Let us now turn aside
and look upon this great sight, — of Love that
burneth with fire, yet is not consumed; of Love
that, having poured out its soul unto death, yet
liveth to see of that soul's long travail and to be
satisfied with it.  "Behold the Lamb of God,
that taketh away the sins of the world." When
were Love's arms stretched so wide as upon the
* Ezek. xvii. 24.




THE PATIENCE OF HOPE.    153
Cross? When did they embrace so much as
when thou, 0 Christ, didst gather within thy
bosom the spears and arrows of the mighty to
open us a Lane for Freedom!
"Thou art gone up on high; thou hast led
captivity captive: thou hast received
gifts for men; yea, for the
rebellious also, that the
Lord God might
dwell among
them."








NOTES.








NOTES.
NOTE A.- Page 51.
LORD, what a wonderful spirit was
that which made St. Paul, in setting
forth of himself against the vanity of
Satan's false apostles, hand in his claim
here that he in Christ's cause did excel and surpass
them all? What wonderful spirit was that, I say, that
made him to reckon up all his troubles and labors,
his beatings, his whippings, his scourgings, his shipwrecks, his dangers and perils by water and by land,
famine, hunger, nakedness and cold, with many more,
and the daily care of all the congregations of Christ,
among whom every man's pain did pierce his heart,
and every man's grief was grievous unto him?  0
Lord, is this Pauls primacy, whereof he thought so
much good that he did excel all others? Is not this
Paul's saying unto Timothy, his own scholar, and doth
it not pertain to whosoever will be Christ's true soldiers? Bear thou, saith he, affliction like a true sol



158                 NV OTES.
dier of Jesus Christ. This is true; if we die with
Christ, we shall live with him; if we suffer with him,
we shall reign with him; if we deny him, he shall
deny us; if we be faithless, he remaineth faithful: he
cannot deny himself. This Paul would have known
to everybody; for there is no other way to heaven but
Christ and his way." - BisHP RIDLEY'S Farewell
Letter to his Fellow-Prisoners, and those who were
exiled for the Gospel of Christ.
NOTE B.-Page 54.
"     NOW  you what our Saviour says to his dear
Peter?' When thou wast young, thou didst
gird thyself, and didst walk where thou wouldst: but
when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy
hand, and another shall gird thee, and lead thee whither thou wouldst not.' (St. John xxi. 18.)
"The young scholars in the love of God gird themselves; they choose their penance, resignation, devotion; they do their own will in doing the will of God.
But the old masters in that love suffer themselves to
be bound and girded by another; they go by ways
which they would not choose according to their own
inclinations; they stretch forth their hands, allowing
themselves to be governed willingly against their
will; they say that'obedience is better than sacrifices'; they glorify God, crucifying not only their
flesh but their spirit." - St. Francis de Sales.




NOTES.                  159
NOTE C.- Page 57.
N one of Vinet's works on the Christian life are
some excellent remarks on St. Paul's words, "the
feeble members are the more necessary."  Their
silent, unseen work, so humble in its mode of action
that sometimes its value is first learnt through the
sensible blank its withdrawal leaves, is lasting work
because it is real work, done and followed, if followed at all, " for the work's sake." But it is evidently far otherwise when genius, learning, or extraordinary force of character, things which have a powerful
attraction in themselves, are consecrated to the service
of Christ. In spirits thus gifted-its burning and
shining lights-the Church must be willing to rejoice
"for a season," for much that they bring with them
will depart when they go; the foreign elements will
break up and scatter when the cord which binds
them together is slackened by absence or unloosed
by death. We see this in the lives of all men who
have been, like Xavier and Schwartz, greatly beloved by man as well as by God. Much of their
work seems to vanish with them, reappearing after a
time under humbler forms.




160  NOTES.
NOTE D. —Page 62.
"   -I HE poetry of the Psalms is formed, not like. that of modern languages, by the response of
answering syllables, but of answering thoughts. This
peculiar form of composition was perhaps originally
founded upon that correspondence which a devout
soul perceives to exist in all the creation of God,
between the thing seen and unseen, —a correspondence upon which the teaching of all our Lord's
parables is grounded. The two things, the thing expressing and the thing expressed, exist together, side
by side in fact, and so they fall together, by a natural
process, side by side, in the poetry which describes
them.  Thus in Psalm ciii. verses 11-13:
The height of the heavens illustrates the boundless nature of
God's mercy:
The expanse from east to west the distance to which he has
removed our sins.
The love and pity of an earthly father:
The love and pity of a Heavenly one.
"'So consider the works of the Most High, and
there are two and two, one against another.' (Ecclus.
xxxiii. 15.) "- Plain Commentary on the Psalms.




NOTES.                  161
NOTE E. -Page 63.
BSERVE what vivid brightness was cast upon
all parts of the Old Testament at the first appearing of the Son of God, and learn from this what
will be the radiance of the Scriptures at His Second
Advent. The true disciples under the Old Covenant
were ever waiting, "searching," as St. Peter says,
" to discover what the Spirit which was in them did
signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of
Christ, and the glory which should follow."  But
looking back to the time of Jeremiah, the Maccabees,
or that of the Second Temple, how strange must
many passages of Scripture, now sparkling before
our eyes with divine lustre, have appeared to the
rationalist of the ancient synagogue! How puerile
in some parts, how exaggerated and inexplicable in
others, how devoid of learning and utility must have
appeared to them many chapters and verses which at
this day feed our faith, and fill us with a sense of
the majestic unity of Scripture, cause our tears to
flow, and bring weary and heavy-laden sinners to the
feet of Jesus.  What said they to Isaiah liii., to
Psalms xxii, lxix., and many others? How strange
and little worthy of the Lord must have appeared
much that was contained in these, and in other
psalms, prophecies, and types descriptive of Him.
Yet what gospel truth has come forth from these!
What unfolding of redeeming love! Let us thereK




162                NOTES.
fore await even more glorious revelations in the day
when our Master shall descend from heaven, for, says
Irenaeus, "the Scriptures contain difficulties which
grace even now enables us to resolve; but there are
others which we leave to God, not only as respects
this generation, but those to come, in order that it
may be God perpetually teaching, and man perpetually learning from God the things that are of God."
Yet then shall we see the full meaning of many
prophecies, facts, and instructions, whose Divine character is now only seen in detached features: then
will be known the import of those parables, even
now so impressive, of the fig-tree, —of the master
returning from a far country, —of the bridegroom and
bride, - of the net drawn to the shore of eternity, -
of Lazarus, — of the guests, - of the husbandmen
and of the marriage-feast. Then will be known all
the glory of such expressions as these: " The Lord
said unto my Lord,' Sit thou at my right hand, until
thine enemies be made thy footstool."' "Thy people,
Lord, shall be willing in the day of thy power."
"The dew of thy youth shall be of the womb of the
morning."  "He shall wound the head of him who
rules over a great country."  " He shall drink of the
brook in the way, therefore shall he lift up the
head."
Then also thou wilt reveal thyself to us in all thy
glory, Lord Jesus, Saviour, Comforter, Friend of the
desolate, our Lord and our God! Thou who hast
seen death, but who art alive forevermore.  Then




NOTES.                  163
will all the knowledge of heaven be centred in Thyself,-the knowledge which the Holy Ghost even
now imparts, the knowledge in which Scripture even
now instructs us, for " the testimony of Jesus is the
spirit of prophecy." —See conclusion of Theopneustia.
NOTE F.-Page 86.
SEE on this text a sermon by Krummacher. —
Tower Church Sermons.
NOTE G. —Page 101.
IT is often through the sore trouble of the soul that
the spirit, the part of us in which God lives,
is renewed from day to day. When " God," says
Jeremy Taylor, " would save man, he did it by way
of a man "; yet devotional authors seem little familiar with that fearful and beautiful thing, our sensitive
and rational nature, and in their writings slender
allowance is made for all that middle region of feelings and tendencies which, themselves neither good
nor evil, blend with and color for evil and for good
our whole spiritual life, with which they are linked
far more intimately than we imagine. In such writers, we trace but little communion with the joy and




164                NOTES.
sorrow and beauty of this earth. "glad, sad, and
sweet," so that we sometimes wonder if they have
known any enjoyments, pangs, or conflicts, but such
as belong to the life that is in God. To be assured
that they had joyed and sorrowed, and loved as men
and women, and as such had felt Christ's unspeakable
consolations, would be a touch of nature making
them our kin. But it seldom comes. St. Thomas h
Kempis, for instance, dismisses a whole world of feeling in two lines, " Love no woman in particular, but
commend all good women in general to God."  In
Madame Guyon and Edwards we long, and long in
vain, to see the hand of a man under the wings of the
cherubim, and to feel its pressure. There is something deeply consoling in a betrayal of personal
feeling, as when Doddridge laments for his little
daughter.  "This day my heart hath been almost
torn in pieces by sorrow, yet sorrow so softened and
so sweetened, that I number it among the best days
of my life. Doest thou well to be angry for the
gourd? God knows I am not angry, but sorrowful he
surely allows me to be. Lord, give unto me a holy
acquiescence of soul in thee, and now that my gourd
is withered, shelter me under the shadow of thy
wings." Here we see the man (most a saint in being
most a man) agonized like his Master, and like him
strengthened from on high, but by One greater than
tha angel.




NOTES.                 165
NOTE H.-Page 111.
W      HILE, as regards the great essentials of
Christianity, things remain as they are,*
not as we wish, conceive, or think of them, we cannot
but perceive a diversity in the way in which we are
led up to them, which answers to the infinite variety
of the human spirit. We see how the great Apostle
of the Gentiles, determined as he was to know and
preach nothing among them but Christ and Him
crucified, knew at the same time how to be all things
to all men, meeting each one upon his peculiar
ground, while he held his own with immovable tenacity. As that which he had to declare remained fixed
and absolute, he did not change the truth to render
it acceptable to his hearers, but, as he himself words
it, he changed his voice, so as to bring truth before
them under the aspect to which native bias or previous training rendered them most open.
We find in Mysticism a tendency to trample out
rather than to train and modify the bent of nature,
and this from an ardent desire for union with the
Divine essence, which touches at every point upon
Pantheistic absorption, and tends to substitute a blank
uniformity for the energy and feature of Christian
life. "Because I live," saith our Lord, "ye shall
live also," and as living, be partakers in that which
belongs to Life.- freedom, expansion, and variety.
* Taylor.




166                 NOTES.
It has been often remarked, that each one among the
branches of our Lord's great family preserves some
portion of His teaching more faithfully, reflects some
aspect of his character more clearly, than is done by
the rest; and passing from churches to individuals, we
shall find that they who are in Christ will resemble
each other in so much as they resemble him; they
will be like each other (as in earthly relationships)
without being alike. Our natural characteristics are
not obliterated; rather is the man renewed after
Christ's likeness restored to Himself, that excellent
thing for which God made him at the first, the type
from which he had consciously fallen away.
NOTE I.- Page 137.
W    HEN, and to whom, has the perfect circle
of Truth been visible?  Certain portions
of it seem always in the shade, though no portion of
it can remain there long. It seems God's will that
earnest and faithful-minded men should be continually
from age to age bringing forward such fragments of
it as have fastened on their own minds in such strong
and (relatively) undue prominence, that they are constrained to present them to the world as they arise,
where, like plants set in the ground with reference to
fitness of clime and season, they wither, but not before
they have fructified and shed seed, which, falling on
a more prepared soil, brings forth fruit to perfection.




NOTES.                   167
The heat and extravagance with which it was at first
accompanied fall off like husks from the ripened ear,
and the truth which these have kept warm, while it
had to push its way through cold, earthy obstructions,
unfolds in its fulness. In the physical world this
holds true of the secrets which disentangled themselves from the follies of alchemy, and perhaps applies to many systems of our present day, which, containing a vital essence of truth, overlaid with much
that is fantastic, will themselves die out; yet, under
other conditions, exert an influence on general science.
So in the moral and spiritual world we see forms
perishing because of the life that is in them. We say
Quakerism  has decayed and dwindled; but why?
even because the wide and loving principles it promulgated in an age of dreary spiritual exclusivism,
have been, since the days of the Early Friends (the
first apostles of so many a holy cause), gradually and
silently incorporated into the thoughts of Christian
men in general.  They, as Howitt says, have missed
being a great people, but the truths they so simply
and perseveringly advocated have not failed of their
mark. Neander, speaking of reformers of the heart
only, guided by the pure will without the reflective
wisdom, says, "Their efforts are as a fire catching
rapidly at all around it, but working rather destructively than as an abiding warmth or a clear, diffusive
blaze.... Before the coming of a great light, its
approach is heralded by lesser lights, which, after
shining in the darkness, seem to disappear. Before




168                  NOTES.
a decisive and general triumph of the right, its way
is first cleansed by the blood of victims who have
fallen in its cause, and by attempts that miscarry because they were untimely.  But a voice from  the
Past (the world's history) assures us that he who
goeth forth to do battle for the right simply is sure
of victory, as, although he should be himself overpowered, and his work for a season defeated, he has
yet thereby contributed to the final triumph of the
right in its proper time."
The design of the Almighty is like that of the vast
cathedrals of old at which many generations of workmen were content to labor in succession; each helping to carry out some part of the magnificent plan,
each building up some part of his life and strength
in the mighty structure whose completion he could
never hope to witness.
" They shall perish, but thou remainest;
And they all shall wax old as a garment,
And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up,
And they are changed;
But thou art the same; and thy years shall not fail;
The children of thy servants shall continue,
And their seed shall stand fast in thy sight."
NOTE K.- Page 144.
A"    ND  I, my loving Brentius," writes Luther,
"to the end that I may the better understand this case, do use to think in this manner, name



NOTES.                   169
ly, as if in my heart were no quality or virtue at all
which is called faith or love, but I set all on ChList,
and say, my formalis justitia, that is my sure, my
constant and complete righteousness, in which there
is no want or failing, but is, as before God it ought to
be, Christ my Lord and Saviour."
Faith saves us; but how? - by making us aware
of Christ, who saves. Faith does not make things
what they are, but shows us them  as they are in
Christ.  Certain systems lay a pressure upon the
subjective side greater than the spirit of man is at
all times able to bear; working out all things from
the depths of individual consciousness, as if truths
were not there at all until they are (manifestly) there
for us. Wesley, for instance, felt and preached
Christ both freely and fully; yet, from the central
importance his teaching gives to a conscious spiritual
work in man, it tends, in some degree, to withdraw
the soul's eye from Christ, to fix it upon what is going
on within itself.
Happy for us, if Christ can look there and find ils
own image reflected, however faintly; but we must
look at Him, at the sun in the heavens, not at the sun
in the brook, its broken and ever-varying reflection
So long as we are resting in anything within our.
selves, be it even in a work of grace, there remains,
at least to honest hearts, a ground for continual restlessness and continual disappointment. To know that
we have nothing, are nothing out of Christ, is to know
the truth which makes us free.
8




170                 NOTES.
NOTE L. -Page 147.
T    HE Christian's life is no Drama planned to
correspond with certain prescribed Unities of
time and situation; but, because it is a life, it is too
solemn, too real a thing to be bounded by any such
limitations. The Bible prescribes no fixed routine
of religious experience, and I know  not how  to
express my sense of the crudity, I would also say
cruelty, of such religious writings as insist upon certain phases of feeling as being essential to every true
conversion; thus making sad the heart of the righteous whom God hath not made sad. "The Gods,"
said the wise Heathen, " give not all things to men at
all times." Have Christians yet to learn that certain
feelings are only proper, say rather are only possible
to certain stages of experience?  That when we are
able to receive things we do receive them, and until
then must be content to wait, abiding in the truth,
growing up in it from day to day, but forcing nothing
either upon ourselves or others.
How carefully should we guard against the passing
of a religious truth into a religious conventionalism!
The deepest expressions of feeling, as when St. Paul,
seeing so far into his own nature, and into God's
purity, is able to call himself the chief of sinners,
become false, commonplace, when taken up by those
who do not feel, but merely repeat them - when they
are out of all harmony with the life and consciousness of the speaker.




NOTES.                  171
We may apply this also to the crude admonitions
so often addressed to afflicted people; the set phrases
in which, without any consideration of his fitness to
receive such sayings, the sufferer is referred to the
will of God, the love of Christ, for compensation.
Yet the loss of a felt, experienced good, even
of an earthly kind, can only be made
up for by a comfort equally felt
and experienced, and how
can that be a comfort
which has never
been a joy 








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The name of Faber is associated with that of Keble, by all who love and appreciate devotional poetry of the highest order. - Church yournal.
His Hymns are among the sweetest and most spiritual in the language.Literary World.
An elegant volume, which will be carefully treasured and frequently and not
in vain referred to for encouragement in weakness and comfort in affliction. -
Boston Transcript.
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BROWNE ON THE THIRTY-NINE ARTICLES.
EXPOSITION OF THE THIRTY-NINE ARTICLES. Historical and Doctrinal
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Bishop Browne's treatise is at once the largest, the most comprehensive, the most trustworthy, and by far the ablest and most satisfactory of
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to its latest development, and corrects many popular errors respecting
their growth and historical development. Its doctrinal value may be
stated thus: It proves the truth of the doctrine formulated on articles of
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Church. - English Churchman.
THE CHURCH IDENTIFIED. By a re'erence to the
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We hail with pleasure a new edition of this invaluable work. It
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VAUGHAN ON PUBLIC WORSHIP AND THE LITURGY. With an Introduction by the Rev. H. C. POTTER, D.. 16mo,
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THE ANNOTATED BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER;
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SERMONS UPON THE MINISTRY, WORSHIP,
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OUR CHURCH AND HER SERVICES. By the Rt.
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WHY I AM A CHURCHMAN. The Pitts Street Chapel
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PRESBYTERIAN CLERGYMAN LOOKING FOR
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Valuable Theological Books.
THE LIFE OF CHRIST. By the Rev. F. W. FARRAR,
D. D., Canon of Westminster, London. One vol., 8vo, 500 pp. without
Notes, $2.50; two vols., 8vo with Maps, Notes, and Appendix, large
print, cloth, reduced to $6.00; two vols., 8vo, half calf, $10.00; two
vols., 8vo, Turkey morocco, $15.00.
Dr. Farrar may certainly be congratulated upon a literary success to
which the annals of English theology present no parallel.- Quarterly
Review.
These volumes go far beyond any of their predecessors in presenting
Jesus of Nazareth with most vivid life-likeness. -Rev. Dr. Cuyler, in
the Evangelist.
Stands apart as the most valued contribution to religious literature
that has seen the light for years. - Inter- Ocean.
WESTCOTT'S INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY
OF TIIE GOSPELS. With Historical and Explanatory Notes. By the
Rev. B. F. WESTCOTT, D. D. 8vo, 476 pages, $2.00.
This work, ever since its first publication in England, has been recognized by scholars as one of rare value. It meets a want which nothing
else on the subject can, and answers the objections which have been
brought against the genuineness and inspiration of the Four Gospels in a
most satisfactory and successful manner...    It is a work whose
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Churchman.
BAPTISM  TESTED BY SCRIPTURE AND HISTORY. By the Rev. WILLIAM HODGES, D. D. Third edition. Revised
and improved. 421 pp., $2.00.
Among the many excellent works that we have on the subject, I know
none that comprises the same range of research and fullness of argument
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It is a perfect " Thesaurus " on a subject that might well be termed
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AN EXAMINATION OF THE TESTIMONY OF THE
FOUR EVANGELISTS, BY THE RULES OF EVIDENCE ADMINISTERED IN
COURTS OF JUSTICE, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE TRIAL OF JESUS. By SnooN
GREENLEAF, LL. D., late Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University,
author of " Treatise on the Law of Evidence."  With an Appendix,
containing the varying versions of the most ancient manuscripts as
compared with the King James Bible. By CONSTANTINE TISCHENDORF.
Large 8vo, 638 pp., cloth, $5.00.
One of the most interesting and convincing arguments for the truth of
the Gospel narratives to be found in any form. - N. Y. Observer.
We do not see how any clergyman can afford to be without a knowledge of Prof. Greenleaf's work.- Bp. Huntington, in Boston Transcript
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