DAVID SWING'S CHUtRCH.
_  _ __, C5
T _ —/x —_ __-         f,~..r-.,
THE FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCI[ C,(OR.,C';Ul'ERIORT AND] r.USH STS.,
C HICAGO.
lTHE LAEIISDE: [PREBSS CHICA<O0.




DAVID SWING'S
SERMONS.
a     --
CHICAGO:
W. B. KEEN, COOKE & CO.,
1874:




Entered according to act of Congress, in the year I874, by
W. B. KEEN, COOKE & CO.,
In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.




CONTENTS.
PUBLISHER'S NOTICE -----— 4. --------------- -- ----------------------    4
MARY  PRICE COLLIER -------------------------------                -------------   4
SERMON I.
A  Broad Orthodoxy       - -        ------------------- ------------------    5
SERMON II.
Influence of Democracy on Christian Doctrines -. —              -------      -        I12
SERMON III.
The Joyful Sunday. —-------------------------------- 22
SERMON IV.
Soul-Culture-         ---------------------------------------------------  30
SERMON V.
A  Missionary Religion-                                                               38
SERMON VI.
The World's Great Need. --------------------------------------------  46
SERMON VII.
The Gradual Decline of Vice -------------------------------------- —.- 54
SERMON VIII.
A Religion of Words..... —-          -----------------------------------   62
SERMON IX.
The Value of Yesterday ------------------------—..                                   70
SERMON X.
Variation of Moral Motive -----------------------------------------    78
SERMON XI.
Christianity a Life.-............................................... 86
SERMON XII.
Old Testament Inspiration-                                                            94
SERMON XIII.
Salvation and Morality                   -------                             --     Ioo
SERMON XIV.
The Woman's Temperance Revival- ----------------------- -—. Io8
SERMON XV.'On the deaths of Chief Justice Chase and John Stuart Mill......-......... II6
CHARGES AND SPECIFICATIONS......I —1 —------- --------------------- 125
PROF. SWING'S TRIAL- -...........                                                    137
PROF. SWING'S DECLARATION --- - -------------------------------- 138




PUBLISHER'S NOTICE.
This volume contains Fifteen of PROF. SWING'S very best
discourses, all of which  have  appeared  in  " The  Chicago  Pulpit"
and " The Alliance."    Here may be found the celebrated  Sermons,
for utterances in which he was cited to appear before the Presbytery
of Chicago, which will pass judgment upon the Orthodoxy of PROF.
SWING, being impelled thereto by the charges of Heterodoxy against
him, by Rev. Dr. Patton, a Presbyterian Theological Professor, and
editor of The Interior.
The volume embraces Dr. Patton's charges against Prof. Swing,
reprinted in full-also Prof. Swing's Declaration to the Presbytery at
the commencement of his trial.
The following are the Sermons referred to particularly in Dr.
Patton's specifications:
INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE; SOUL
CULTURE; A RELIGION OF WORDS; THE VALUE OF YESTERDAY;
OLD TESTAMENT INSPIRATION; ON THE DEATHS OF CHIEF JUSTICE
CHASE AND JOHN STUART MILL.
Chicago, May, 1874.
MARY PRICE COLLIER.
BY DAVID SWING.
Upon thy grave adorned with flowers sweet,
Whose leaves are bursting in this vernal air,
The stranger comes and drags inhuman feet
Across the tears and lilies mingled there.
The heart that moulders in that lowly bed
Shames the rude mortal on the clay above;
She followed only where her Savior led,
Her life no jarring discord, but a Love.
From wreath of girlhood to the snowy shroud,
The matchless beauty of that life to me
Spoke forth each day in accents deep, not loud,
And now comes back in holy memory.
The Christ unknown where dark accusing word
Fills God's own temple with wild, savage strife,
Burst from her heart, a music swccetly heard,
The Matin and the Vesper of her life.
They that have loved are they that shall not die,
Souls cold and harsh men hasten to forget,
The winter night comes soon, the summer sky
Beams on in Glory though its sun has set.
When times have come and times have gone again,
And God has called the unfeeling mind to rest
In grave unloved and all unknown of men,
Fresh tears will still be falling on her breast.




DAVID SWING'S
SERMONS.
A BROAD ORTHODOXY.*
DAVID SWING.'To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known
-by the Church the manifold wisdom of God.-Ej1lz., iii: io.
The theme drawn from this text for your thought this
morning is contained chiefly in the words "manifold wisdom
of God." The other ideas of the passage may be alluded to
after this one thought shall have been studied.
If, as some suppose, Christianity is to be all summed up in:any one doctrine, then the Bible is an unusually large book for
so simple a purpose. But if God has made the Church and
the Bible a mirror in some sense of His vast and varied
thought as to the duty and destiny of His children, then the
Bible in its immense store of truth between Genesis and the
Apocalypse is only a picture of the manifold wisdom of its,author. Whoever reads the oracles of religion as contained:in our Scripture must feel how fitted they are to the many
forms of human want and character. If there are minds fond
of symbols, they may find all through the Old Testament or
in the vision of St. John a statement rendered almost wholly
in the language of symbolism. When we remember the happiness and the knowledge which the buoyant, poetic years of
youth reach through figures of speech drawn from the material
world, we must rejoice that the book which is to influence their:moral career is so full of figurative language from the Psalms'of David to the last chapter in John's revelation. Although
*Sermon delivered in Fourth Presbyterian Church, April 26, I874.




6                A  Broad Orthodoxy.
an immense amount of time and labor has been wasted over
the effort to make literal prophecies out of John's poem and
to find fulfillment along the path of history, yet, notwithstanding this long error, the poetic part of the world has extracted
a great amount of good theology from those pages so terrific
as to the wicked, so glorious as to the righteous. From that
book comes the New Jerusalem, the White Throne, the River
of Life, the Pearly Gates, the Crystal Sea. When we remember also what a multitude there is of less poetic and more
formal minds, we feel the value of the great apostle who spoke
always as a solid reasoner with definite premises and definite
conclusions. In the world everywhere there is a group, more
limited indeed, but powerful, who study questions of duty as
between man and man, and man and God, and to these what
an exhaustless fountain of thought is opened up in the sermons and words of Jesus. Here the Quakers exhaust their
life and love. This many-sided wisdom of God has, however,
another significance at which it is our purpose more partic —
ularly now to refer. There is a many-sidedness of doctrine
just as marked as the variety of literary or logical style. We
come along with our ardent desire to form a catechism or a
formula that shall include and evermore contain the wisdom!
of God to men, but no sooner do we close up our estimate and
prepare to rejoice over our work, than along comes some new
student or some new age and reminds us of something impor —
tant left out. In his history of Christian doctrine, Dr. Shedd
alludes to perhaps a score of catechisms, all which sprang up
within a small area of space, and all which compilations differed from each other. The variations of Protestants formed
the theme of a long and once called powerful argument against
the Protestant sect. So numerous had catechisms become
before the day of John Knox, and as varying as numerous,
that he announced when he published his that if any friends
discovered some point wherein it seemed to come in contact
with Scripture, he would change it in the next edition. This
multiplicity of confessions of faith must descend from the fact
that the study of God is too high and too broad for man, and
that after his most patient effort he must sit down over the
result saying, " Hast thou by searching found out God? Canst
thou find out the Almighty to perfection?" And next to the
infinity of God as rendering incomplete the theologies of men
comes the wonderful scope of human want and character.
There are myriads of hearts and myriads of minds, and large
must be the volume of truth which shall offer food for all at
all times. There have been timid, distrusting souls which
have gone through life feeding all the way upon a score of
truths culled from the Bible, which truths would have been of




A  Broad Or/hodoxy.                  7
little price had they been repeated to the ear of the extreme
egotist. There have been sorrowful souls, such as Cowper,
and pensive souls, such as Fenelon, over which has daily
passed like an autumnal sigh the breath of only a few sad
doctrines, as if the gorgeousness of summer had gone by and
nought remained but for her faded leaves to fall. When Maria
de-La-Mothe read the Bible, she never passed away from the
New Testament, and seldom from the story of Christ as related
by St. John, for her religion being one of love to Christ, she
passed her life where He was nearest in His words and character. For her, to live was Christ.
This immense scope of the Bible, and this similar breadth
of human life, are facts which render it a vain attempt to
gather up Christianity into a catechism, and thus treasure it up
for ourselves and our children. A " Confession of Faith " can
be only an imperfect index of the book. In some editions of
Homer and Virgil there stands an argumentum at the head
of each canto to tell us what the next thousand lines are all
about; but, oh! how dead that statement is to the mind that
knows what a world of beauty and sentiment, and of joy and
suffering, is beyond, flashing in the sunshine of genius, and
arrayed in the full verdure of the heart and the drapery of
language.
When we behold the magnificence of the world and the
greatness of man, and then turn also to the throne where IHe
sits to whom earth and man are both as nought, we realize
how vain must be the desire of the spirit to find some symbol
in language which shall carry in it the meaning of the great
book of religion lying open for the guidance and salvation of
society. It is amid some of the manifold shadings of doctrine
Paul stands in the letter to the Corinthians, and at the close
of a most eloquent review he names three virtues, and then
declares charity to be the greatest of the three. Whether it
is the enthusiasm of the orator or the caTm easson of the philosopher which speaks is uncertain, but this we know, that he
places faith and hope both in the second place compared with
the heart's love. It would seem to us un-Presbyterian in any
way to slight the faith which has so covered itself with glory
since the reformation, but who ever reads the Bible with any
thoughtfulness will often find his favorite word quite overthrown and the substance of things put in its place. The
worship of words is wonderfully overthrown in that book, and
go to what term you please you will soon hear the commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." No sooner
have you concluded that there is nothing valuable but faith,
than along comes the same Paul and says, "' We are saved by
hope;" and before your soul becomes fitted to this surprise, or




8                A  Broad OrYhodoxy.
can call a council together to announce "hope " as a saving
doctrine, the same Paul has declared that charity is better than
either hope or faith; and while you stand amazed amid these
heresies, James comes along, and declares that "' by works are
ye saved."
Now these are not contradictory voices, but harmonious
tones. Each one of these terms presents a phase of Christian
experience. They are colors in a gorgeous moral landscape.
As among the hills in autumn a company of rambling friends
will say to each other, " What a blue in that sky! what a russet
on that oak! what a crimson in those leaves! what a saffron
here, what a purple there!" so in the words of God the free
mind turning its pages must say, "What faith! what hope!
what works! what baptism! there is in these rules of life and
death." A faithful reading of the Bible is the death of all
words worship. The life and salvation portrayed in it are so
Godlike that they elude exact definition and pass and repass
before us as the heavens move over us by night, with depths
we cannot measure, and with stars we cannot count. Our
books of doctrine are valuable as outline indices of a volume
too large to be fully mastered or retained, but compared to
God's word they are as a skeleton of the dead body compared
with that body itself when, robed in beauty, it greeted its
friends in the street or was the life of the sacred home.
The Immertionist is a person who sat down to read the Testament, and who came to four or five passages which informed him
" that he that believes and is baptized shall be saved," but who
paused before he came to the sixth statement, which would
have omitted the immersion and have said, " He that believes
shall be saved." The Solifidian is nothing but a Bible reader
who, having found five texts that give salvation to faith only,
went away and made up his creed without waiting for any remarks from any quarter about good works or immersion. The
Fatalist is a mortal who has turned the sacred book over to
find passages that should indicate the absolute empire of God
and the abject humility of man, and fixing his whole gaze at
last upon the figure of " clay in the hands of the potter," has
announced the dogma " that man is predestined to his condition on account of nothing he has done or ever could do, but
solely by the will of God;" while the Arminian is one who has
read all such words as " come unto me,"' seek and ye shall
find," " whosoever will let him take the water of life freely."
Hence, much of each creed is only an indication to the world
as to what part of the Bible the makers of it had canvassed.
When a ship anchors at New York, and begins to unload a
cargo of oranges and pineapples, you perceive at once that that
vessel does not come in from all nations, from Greenland and




A  Broad Ortzodoxy.                  9
England and Germany, but from some island or port in the
Southern sea. It is thus in the world of theology. When you
-pick up a confession of faith of any Church and read a few
pages, you perceive at once that the book has not come in from
all the great Bible of the Almighty, but that this particular
ship has received its cargo at Dort or Nice or Geneva. Far be
it from you, I hope, to despise these human compendiums of
truth, for a book is valuable if, in condensed form, it makes only
a tolerable estimate of the divine truth; for going to the Bible
yourself alone you would not be able to deduce so full or true
a philosophy of life and salvation. When the Westminster
assembly sat in council for four years, it is fairly presumable
that they summed up the doctrines of the Bible, as would have
been impossible to the world, that stood in vast multitude
without. Hence it would be folly and vanity not to confess
the value of their great digest. But after all this admiration,
we know that creeds are not the places where divine wisdom
fully expresses itself, but are the places where the hnman mind
fails, places where the human mind gives up and seeks rest.
The creed of the Immertionist only informs us where the student
paused; and the creed of the Fatalist only tells us what verses
he read. Thus all these compendiums are marks set up to tell
us where the toiler quit work.
Do you recall to mind, my friends, how weary Dr. Chalmers
became of these human forms in his later years? After he had
preached his astronomical sermons, and had by scientific study
begun to see how vast a thing the universe is, he seems to have
outgrown the mediaeval theology, and to have placed great
stress upon the general but unpopular idea of being a good
Christian. In Dean Stanley's " History of the Church of Scotland," the historian says, " Even late in life he, Chalmers, was.accused by suspicious zealots of being an enemy to systematic
theology, and his reply was certainly calculated to allay the:alarm." I omit to reply. It was in brief that he preferred
" the New Testament."  Who those " suspicious zealots" were
Dean Stanley does not state, and perhaps it would be impossible for any historian to separate their names from the oblivion
which comes soon and deep to minds that are only " suspicious
zealots" in the great battle of life.
The accusation brought about no reform, for in the debate
over the " Sustentation Fund" Dr. Chalmers exclaimed, "Who
cares about the Free Church compared with the Christian good
of the people of Scotland? Who cares about any Church but
as an instrument of the most Christian good? For, be assured
that the moral and religious well being of the people is of infi-:nitely higher importance than the advancement of any sect."
Chalmers in one of his broad discourses quoted this little
fragment of verse:




IO               A  Broad Orthodoxy.
" The man
That could surround the sum of things, and spy
The heart of God and secrets of His empire,
Would speak but love. With love, the bright result
Would change the hue of intermediate things,
And make one thing of all theology."
These thoughts and this poetry from Dr. Chalmers, too, in
his glorious old age! It is not to be wondered at that under
the leadings of such hearts the Free Church of Scotland sprang
forward to a great career. His was not the only wide soul of
that day. The almost equally great Dr. Duncan expressed
ideas equally heretical and alarming. He said: "There is a
progressive element in religion. It is a mistake to look upon
our fathers as our seniors. They are our juniors. The Church
has advanced wonderfully since its foundations were laid." *
*'" I am first a Christian, next a broad Christian, thirdly
a Calvinist, and fourthly a Presbyterian."
I have drawn these illustrations from history to remind you
that the manifold glory of God is too varied and too vast to be
caged up in the phrases of a few men at some given time and
place. Say what we may in our condensed formulas, the glory
of God will flash on in the New Testament as though we had
taken nothing away from its profusion. Our creed is a few
flowers plucked from the vast prairie between Lake Michigan
and the Missouri.
After you have declared that one is saved by only the deity
of Christ, I turn to the book of books and find the disciples all
busy with His humanity alone. And after you have cried out
" faith alone," I find Magdalen much forgiven because she had
loved much, and Peter forgiven because of his tears of penitence, while the woman who emptied the alabaster box seemed
blessed on account of her good works done in the name of
Jesus. The truth is, salvation seems like the city of Thebes,
entered by any one of a hundred gates, all beautiful portals of
marble or bronze, or glittering brass, but all opening from the
dreary, lonely country into the splendor of society and art and
government. But come in by any gate, it was Thebes you
perceived and reached. So in religion, be the golden gate, faith
or hope, or charity, or penitence, or virtue, it opens out upon
the presence of Christ. He must be the central object, the
motive of the footstep, the vision before the eye, whether the
eye is radiant with a saving hope or bedimmed with penitential
tears.
Now we are informed in the text that the Church was organized to make known to principalities and power this manycolored wisdom of God. To the raptured vision of St. Paul,
to his elevated mind, which never took a common view of any
subject, but to which all the truths of religion loomed up toward




A  Broad Or/thodoxy.               I 
the very throne of the Almighty, it seemed that the Church
was established that it might unfold the glory of God before all
the potentates of earth and heaven. So grand was this redemption of a world to be, that it seemed to Paul even the very
seraphim in heaven would look down upon earth and see God's
love pouring forth through Jesus Christ and flooding the earth,.
not in wrath as in the days of Noah, but with the windows of
heaven open for a new outpouring —that of infinite grace.
As in presence, therefore, of an august company which Paul.
calls " principalities and powers," and to which we, less poetic,.
less divine, and more earthy, add the nations of the earth, the
heathen world, the educated world, the skeptical world, as being the " principalities and powers" that plainly encompass us.
all-in such a presence, let us make the Church a place not
where the narrowness and vanity of man are unfolded, but
where all eyes looking may catch glimpses of the manifold wisdom of God. The manifold discords of man have already-made
sad havoc of this manifold wisdom of the Creator and. Savior.;
The Church has been so narrowed that it would seem not ordained as a gate to heaven, but as a wall to keep the world
away from its bliss. The principalities and powers, looking
down from heavenly places must see the tumults of sects;rather
than the sparkling sea of redeeming love. Oh, may these
scenes hasten away from earth, and may the Church throw open
all the gates of life, that future ages may see the world coming
to salvation by many roads, some by faith, some by love, some
by hope, some by charity, but all by the. one Christ as He is
freely offered to all in the Gospel.




INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON CHRISTIAN
DOCTRINE.*
DAVID SWING.
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.
~cclesiastes I.' 4.
This verse from the Bible is read, not as a text out of which
a discourse may be developed, but rather as a pensive thought,
which suggests a line of reflection, perhaps beyond the meaning of Solomon, and hence beyond the warrant of the passage.
All we claim for the words is that they invite the heart to mark,how generations come and go, bearing away with them their,customs and thoughts in part, and leaving the stage of action
clear for a new scene. Paul also said, " The fashion of this
world passeth away." Cicero said, " The times are changed, and
we are changed in them." Paul in his Corinthian letter confesses that his teachings were modified by the times which he
described as being a " present distress." The greatest Being of
earth declared that some Mosaic customs were authorized on
account of a local and temporary "hardness of heart." Thus
by these voices, sacred and profane, we are reminded of the
changes taking place in the internal and external appearances
of society, in its dress, machinery, arts, beliefs, sentiments and
hopes.
There are a few mortals who, by some strange fatality, have,escaped learning this lesson of a changing world, and who are
ready to denounce as infidel, the mind that presumes any part
of the past to have become the subject of repeal. Antiquitry is
their test of truth.
From this bondage to that which has nothing to recommend
it but its dust, the majority of the public, especially in cities,
has escaped, and in their presence there is no longer need for
proof that the times are always busy reshaping the ideas and
the things of yesterday. The same activity and progress that
are shaping the implements of industry and the material pursuits of men, are shaping also their thoughts, beliefs, motives
and hopes.
A Sermon preached by David Swing, in McVicker's Theatre, April 2o, x873.




Influence of Democracy on Chriszian Docrzine. 13
The whole Mosaic economy was an adaptation of moral teachings to a particular condition, and hence, when the Saviour came,.
His first work was to remove ideas that had lived beyond their
proper time. The law of eye for eye, tooth for tooth, the law
of divorce, the law of caste, were all repealed or modified in
answer to the demands of a new era.
We have thus the highest authority of a personal nature for
confessing and expecting all the ideas of men to be modified,
repealed or enlarged, by the influence of new times and places.
To this authority of person, we add the facts of human life,
which go to show that ideas are modified by climate, and government, and by the popular education. What has been useful
in one age has been useless in another, not because the idea has
ceased to be true, but because it has ceased to be pleasing to
the public heart. The doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty
is just as true as it was in the days of King (Edipus or of Calvin. It will always remain a confessed fact, that God's will
must be the supreme will of the world, but while this is confessed, yet we do perceive that our age as a fact, passes over the
great absolutism in silence, compared with the age of Athens or
Geneva, and God's love and sweet Fatherhood become more
visible than His absolute despotism.
To pass by a truth, is not to contradict it, nor despise it, any
more than to study the la-w is to despise or deny the claim of
science or theology. To pass by a truth is often nothing else
than to sail by England when your destiny is France, or to omit
France when your errand is to England. It is not a condemnation, but a selection. It is not possible that any one age shall
make use of all known truths at once and equally, for truth is
like a grand armory where are stored all the equipments for
warfare, but from which it is not to be expected that every arm
and flag and chariot and signal shall be withdrawn at any one
time. The armory is a place to draw from, but not to exhaust.
The world of truth is always greater than the world of men,
and hence there will always be great truths lying in silence and
in neglect, like fields in fallow waiting for some future season
that shall demand them for a new sowing and harvest.
In the realm of principles, as in the old world of the classics, there are great silences and solitudes. In our American
continent there are vast countries from which man in his civilized
state long since departed, leaving behind him ruins of former
magnificence, now overgrown with the ivy and the cactus.
The vales are richer than New England, and the climate fairer
than that which roars about these lakes, but yet man has gone
away, leaving traces of his heart and mind in the carved rocks,
and terraced gardens. Thus society marches away from one
part of the dominion of truth, and, dying, leaves its children




14  Influence of Democracy on Chris/zan Doctrine.
to roam to some other shore, perhaps more bleak, perhaps more
like to paradise. When one generation passeth away, it will
nearly always be found that it took a great deal with it, movable property, gifts, relics, household gods.  And when the
~other generation cometh, lo! in its arms are strange new things,
very sacred, and the centres of new hopes and action. Fugitives from famine or fire, try to carry with them household.divinities. Exiled generations going from life, have their arms
full of customs and ideas that never are seen again on our
shores - customs which they could assimilate into healthy food
for the soul, but which were rejected by their children.
Next to the supersedure of truths, comes the expansion or,contraction of ideas that remain. About many moral statements there hangs always an indefiniteness that makes it possible for each era to expand or contract them. Physical truths
may be retained in one form. At our national Capitol there:are standards of the inch, the bushel, the quart, the pound, so
that the silk or grain of this year may be bought and sold by
the measurement agreed upon in the past. It is said that the
old kings of Egypt became so anxious that measurements in
that kingdom, should forever remain the same, that they built
the pyramids, that upon their immovable sides, and in their
minute recesses, the empire might always find the standard of;all surveys and measurements, from the miles of the highway,
to the smallest measure of u heat and wine. When we come to
moral ideas, however, we are compelled to do without any stand-;ards. There is no stone pyramid to which we can go to adjust
our line, no hollowed rock in which we can pour our quart of
wine to see if it corresponds to the quart of the Egyptian
kings of four thousand years ago. There are thousands of people who will not confess this to be true, and who will contend
that they do possess a stone pyramid upon whose sides they,can measure all the ideas of religion and duty, but after years
of careful search, you will find yourself unable to discover their
pyramid in the objective world. It is only a mental structure,
a life-long hallucination.
To illustrate this part of our discourse, let us take the idea of
"Church." Let the Episcopalians define it, and certain demands are essential that are rejected by the Presbyterians. Let
the Presbyterian define it, and he has come into conflict with
the Baptist and the Covenanter. Along come the Plymouth
Brethren and define the Church to be a body of men assembling, for the hour, to worship. They may never assemble again,
but while they were together they were a Church. Dr. Hodge,
the most learned thinker the Presbyterians have in this age,,declares the Church to be in the heart, and that each soul that
loves Christ, is a member of the Church.




Influence of Demnocracy on ChrisZian Doctrzine.  15
Now this is what I mean by the elasticity of a moral idea.
These notions are enlarged or contracted, according to the:genius of the generation that comes to them here or there. All
moral ideas, from the conception of God, to the most humble
duty, all doctrines from faith, hope and charity, to the notion
of heaven and hell, suffer or undergo this sliding form of
measurement, and baffle all attempts to render a final and exact
expression. They are infinite in the mathematical sense of the
term.
Having now seen that ideas are wont, in some instances, to
withdraw from the human arena, and in other instances to un-;dergo limitation or expansion, let us inquire what influence
we should expect our land to exert upon the Christian ideas
that have invaded it from foreign shores.  That no changes
would be wrought, could be believed only by those who suppose themselves to possess the standards of measurement, to.own a pyramid of solid rock. This is a small multitude, indeed
not a multitude at all, but a group. That no changes would
be wrought might be the opinion of persons giving no thought
to the matter. Of these, the multitude is large indeed. That
changes, many and valuable, should be expected, is certainly
the conclusion of all who, with free minds, pay any attention
to the common influence of government and climate and
race over the thoughts of mankind. Just what and how many
these changes are, time would fail us here to inquire. You may
at your leisure carry forward the task we begin, and you will
find the whole matter to a high degree, pleasing and useful.
Coming to a land of gigantic human industry, where the
motto is, each one is the builder of his own fortune, to a land
where a farmer boy in Kentucky bears himself forward to the
-place of chief orator, or where a penniless youth lifts himself
up to be a millionaire, and a noble citizen; and where this is
occurring all the time, the daily phenomenon of the last fifty
years, Christianity must expect its fatalism to be shaded, and
its doctrine of human freedom and responsibility to stand forth
in a more brilliant light. The surrender of all things to God,
the resolution of life into a waiting for fate, or into a machine
that was powerless to go or to stop of itself, was a conception'of God suited to an age when citizens possessed no liberty as
to their state, and no industry as to changing their fortune or
fame or happiness. An idle country, and an oppressed, powerless country, always underrate the human will, and overstate
the Divine interference.  Having been denied the privilege
and opportunity of toiling for self, men have at last resolved
self into despair, and God into an absolute despot.
A free country where the human will and personality rise up.into such grand proportions, is theland that might be expected




I6  Influence of Democracy on Christzazn Doclrzinc.
to transform man into a being of personal power, and God into,
a Father, acting in harmony with His children. The monks in
their cells, the middle ages in their bondage to kings, priests
and ignorance, possessed no great consciousness of free agency,
and hence that was the generation to ignore man, and to enthrone a pitiless fate under the name of God; but the age
which, in a perfectly free country. permits every man to carve
out for himself a happiness, and education, and fame, is the
age to develop the consciousness of free agency, and hence the
age to bind more nearly together, man and God, as acting in
concert. Political freedom develops the human consciousness
of free will and responsibility.
This perpetual industry amid external pursuits, also diverts
the mind from the study of mysteries, to the acceptance and en —
joyment of facts, and hence the public mind turns away from
predestination and reprobation and absolutism, not simply be —
cause it has developed a consciousness of freedom, but also
because in the long association with facts, it has lost love for the
study of the incomprehensible, in both religion and philosophy.
In this casting off of old garments, it no more cheerfully
throws away the inconceivable of Christianity, than tne inconceivable of Kant and Spinoza. In this abandonment,there is no
charge of falsehood cast upon the old mysteries; they may or
may not be true; there is only a passing them by as not being
in the line of the current wish or taste, raiment for a past age,
perhaps for a future, but not acceptable in the present.
Out of this enlargement of the office of man's free will, have
come the great missionary movements, and the Sunday and
ragged schools of our land. The philosophy of waiting for
God has been quite superseded by the enormous development
of industry and free-agency that our land has produced. Man
is raised, not to a state of vanity, but of responsibility. He
feels that God waits for His children to come to His help against
the mighty. Here and there a fatalist remains to remind us of
the stupor and palsy of antiquity. A Cincinnati clergyman
has recently published a labored article to show that Christianity is spreading as rapidly as God desires, and that all
human efforts to hasten the world's evangelization are vain and
presumptuous; but this ignoring of man's office as a co-laborer
of God on earth, this assumption of man's living death is a
phenomenon appearing but rarely on the horizon of our republic. Types of men, like types of birds or beasts, pass away
slowly, as sometimes an individual creature is found after
science has declared the species to have become entirely extinct. Thus types of belief die slowly.
That God has assigned man a work to do here in this vale,
and that He has equipped man for doing it, is an idea cast




Ir{/liUcnce of Democracy on Christian Doctrzne.  17
forward greatly by a republic full of human freedom and human
achievements. A religion of repose is killed by a politics of
activity.
Permit me, therefore, to assume that our republic has tended
toward the overthrow of the ideas of human insignificance and
of fatality, and of simple divine despotism; and, transforming
God into a Father, has made man a co-laborer without whose
assistance the moral world pauses just as the plow stands still
when man deserts the field for a life of indolence. Man's
relations to morals and to agriculture are the same so far as
human vision can scan the landscape.
Passing by this illustration of the influence of our land upon
religious ideas we may find another example in the distinction
now made between doctrines, a discrimination that divides them
rapidly in essential and non-essential ideas. In the past, not
remote, not only was there a vast multitude of dogmas but
they were all deemed very vital. To hold to apostolic succession or to immersion, or to psalmody, or to infant baptism, or to
the divineness of slavery was deemed a large part of soul salvation. A free soil politician was an infidel, and on the opposite,
a slave-holder had a poor prospect ot heaven. Here we need
not particularize. You all know by heart all this black page
in church history.
Well, along came a country in which everything was destined
to be vast. It embraced every climate, every wood, every ore,
every grain,and fruit. Its waters assumed every shape from ocean
to lake, from mighty river to mountain brook. Its railways were
to run three thousand miles in a straight line, and, starting among
New England pines, to end among Pacific orange groves. All
nations were to meet in the citizens of this new world. Over
this land so vast there was to float a banner of freedom and
equality, education and industry. Such was to be the character of the new realm except that words are not able to paint
the image in the prophecy. In the gradual fulfillment of this
prophesy, which has already gone beyond the promise, it readily
came to pass that all that is small in religion began to become
manifest as such. The daily struggle amid great things, with
the heart full of only leading ideas, built up early a special
sense that could discern the large and the small in wealth, in
machinery, in agriculture, in character and in Christianity.
Ideas that had once been immense underwent great reduction
in this uprising of thought, and ideas in themselves infinite,
such as Christ, and worship, and faith, charity, virtue, these,
vast as the oceans around and the continent between them,
came at once into power, not by accident, but by the command
of a land of vast spirit and destiny. The whole drift of the
country was toward a sifting of thoughts.




18  /lf/uence of Democracy on Czhriszizaiz Doc/t;-ic.
Not only did the vastness of the land toil toward this resuIt,
but the internal genius of it by which a hundred nations were
contributing different races and tongues to be moulded into
one brotherhood, made it essential that ideas in which the multitudes differed should be speedily forgotten, and that those in
which they agreed only should be remembered and cherished.
Now, the essential ideas of morals and salvation, are the ones
in which only most minds agree, and hence the' nature of the
case u nited with the vast spirit of the country in exalting the
great truths of Christianity and in lulling to sleep the infantine
dogmas. These are not condemned as wholly useless, much
less as false, but are passed by as if in a sweet sleep, which it
were cruelty to disturb.
There are truths in Christianity of infinite worth. Without them, the soul is lost. With them it passes along the
paths of usefulness here, and comes beyond to paradise. It
ought to have been anticipated that a land like this, trained in
an air of greatness, and seeking also a brotherhood that would
bind many minds in its silken links, would find the absolute
essentials in Christian doctrine and give them its hand and
heart. It has done so beyond anticipation, and in its arms,
loving and omnipotent, it is bearing us along, compelling us to
accept of her destiny as our own. It is vain we were taught
the Calvinistic creed, for we perceive the Arminian is borne
along equally toward heaven. It is vain we were taught the
Arminian creed, for we perceive the Calvinist is just as far
toward God's love and bliss.  0 beautiful disregard of names!
The country in declaring all men to be one, and in its greatness.
and in its effort to make a brotherhood in society, has invaded
the domain of the spirit, and, plucking our badges from our
bosom, has whispered, "You are all one brotherhood, also in
religion."  Thus have we built up a state whose soul has outgrown the body politic and has marched into the temple of
God. We remember now the German cottager's dream. His
humble cot, while he slept, lifted up its rafters and became a
cathedral. The chimney became a spire. The windows became gothic and filled with colored glass. His fireplace became
an altar, and his children, living and gone, became seraphim
bending over that mercy-seat.
Thus while you and I sleep our state becomes a sanctuary.
Its liberty, its free will, its greatness of idea, its equality of
man, its brotherhood, all enter our once humble abode and lift
it all upward and outward as in the transformation of that
German dream.
It is impossible for the state to be engaged making us brothers
and the church to be engaged making us enemies and strangers.
One or the other effort must abandon the field. The church




I/Zitence of Democracy on Chrzistzi DoctrZ'nc.  I9
bows justly to the spirit of the republic. In India, two communion tables are spread so that the converted Brahmin may
not touch the cup the poor native of low caste has polluted.
This is an easy result in India, but where the state makes all
one, then religion also hastens to accept of the harmony.
You may. my friends, at your leisure, seek and find further
instances of this modification of Christian belief by the new
surroundings of government. Christian customs will also be
modified along with the creed. Not that something absolutely
better will always be found, but something more demanded by
the accidents of the time. The themes of the pulpit will
always be assigned afresh by each new generation. When our
catechisms were being written, the chief enemy upon the horizon was the Romanist full of error and cruelty, and hence many
are the darts aimed by the Westminster soldiers at the papal
hosts. With the overthrow of the papal throne new arrows
and armor are demanded for new foes. The field of battle
shifts from Paul to Genesis. The thumb-screw of the inquisition is not so much feared as the spade of the geologist. The
mass and prayers for the dead are not so alarming as the crucible of the chemist. It is not Arius and Arminius now that
we fear. It is Darwin and Buckle. New methods also arise.
Once it was enough if the pulpit brought out to the multitude
the statements found in the Holy Scriptures, but now the
public has learned what is in the Scriptures, they ask us to
prove that the Scriptures are holy. To unfold the text was
the easy task of our fathers; to find the warrant of the text is
the more difficult work of their children.  A new method
divested of authority and weighed down with rationalism and
doubt, has gradually displaced the authoritative declaration
and warning of yesterday. Christ comes not announced by a
simple herald, but led by a spiritual and intellectual philosophy.
The soul is asked to receive its own in the name of virtue, pardon and future life. The banner of the cross is borne by the
impulse of its own fitness and beauty, rather than by the command of Buller and Paley. When Tyndall flies to the light
and heat and dust, Christianity flies to the soul. Thus you
will find that the public education has awakened a broader
inquiry into branches of learning connected in some way with
theology, and hence the pulpit is compelled to discuss themes
that were foreign to its office a few years since. With the
growth of rationalism, it must more carefully separate the true
from the false to meet the new love of the real truth and the
new ridicule of all superstition and folly. The truth will no
longer bear a great admixture of falsehood.
In this republic of equality that places the rich and poor,
the laborer and the clergyman, upon one plane, the whole lan



20  otZitil'CnC Of Democracy on Chris/ztiaz   Doc/rizc.
guage of abuse and denunciation has been banished from the
sacred desk, so that Thomas Paine, if now alive, would enjoy
the undreamed of pleasure of hearing his objections met by
hearts of sympathy and tenderness, rather than by the hisses
of an age full, equally, of vanity and revenge. Compared with
former generations this one, most of all, discards the power of
personal egotism based upon peculiar training in peculiar lines
of thought, and, offering the right hand, says with a friendship
that would have melted an old infidel to tears, " Come let us
reason together."
But time fails me. There are some general statements I desire yet to make.
There need be no alarm about this abrasion of an old shore
by a new wave, for we know that what the waters are stealing
from some old bank where men have ceased to live, they are depositing elsewhere and making new homes for a better race, new
streets for greater cities. The wave that carries something away
always gives something back elsewhere to mankind. The coast
changes, not the sea. And furthermore the abrasions upon the
old shore are limited, for the encroaching sea deals only with
alluvium or drift, and, having swept this clean by a hundred
years' toil, it finds at last an admantine rock -an iron-bound
coast where the waters cease their destruction, and, their work
done, praise God in peace or storm.
"And all through winter's storm and summer's calm,
They rise and fall an everlasting psalm."
Thus Christianity possesses within itself, in its central Christ
and doctrines, a coast, iron-bound, where all waves of thought
must pause and become an anthem of divine praise, full of
human hope and human gratitude.
In this rise and fall of ideas it is not very wonderful that we
perceive no great commotion, and nowhere in orthodox denominations perceive any arraignment of individuals for departures
from the faith. This absence of trials for heresy comes, not
simply from the fact that there is little heresy in the case, for
this has never been an influential fact, but this wide and deep
peace comes from two other facts, first, that the age bears all
its ministry toward the essential ideas and absorbs them at
these points; and, second, that so far as there are any new
departures they are universal rather than individual. If they
were the new departures of one man there would be trial and
discord, but they are the modifications of a whole generation,
rather than the light of any individual. Whatever there is of
the new in the present it has come to all equally and gently as
the dew in the night. The jury is particeps crimzinis in the
great case.
So far as my own vision can penetrate, and judgment infer,




Influence of Democracy on Chriszian Doc/rzize.  21
the pastors of this city in the denomination to which I belong,
are of one mind in theological questions. It may be that some
surpass others in admiration of the German maxim that " Silence
is golden," and hence, have a better developed virtue of reticence, but to me, in an intimate acquaintance with all, they seem
all borne along in the wide arms of a country that has been the
instrument under God, of revealing to them all the breadth and
kindness of the Christian religion
Generation passeth away, and generation cometh.   This
means that you will all soon become dust. The great invisible
arms that are carrying religion and all ideas along, are carrying
your body to its place in the waving grass, and your spirit back
to God. Oh my friends, love that religion, that by command
of God fits itself so well to our country, our happiness, our life,
our death. Say not it was for the past. Its superstition was
for that; its truth is for the present and future. It assumes the
image of the soul, and hence, was made, not for woman and
for childhood, but for the human race. Our state builds up liberty. Christianity absorbs the idea and advances to freedom of the
spirit. Our state demands public virtue. Christianity's favorite maxim is, " Blessed are the pure in heart." Our state loves
humanity. Christianity silently points to Jesus Christ. Pass
it not by. Oh may this generation, while it is passing along,
number among its transformations, the transformation of your
hearts into the image of the Saviour, that when, after a few
years, it shall have strewn all your bodies like autumn leaves
upon the earth, it may waft your spirits, redeemed and sancti.
fled, back to your Maker.




THE JOYFUL SUNDAY.*
DAVID SWING.
" For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."-aftt/azew, hi.' 30.
Three facts combine to place this Sunday beyond the reach
of the pulpit's prose. We would do well to surrender the occasion to song, and flowers, and the full heart's meditation. It is
a Sunday in springtime; it is a Sunday of the holy communion, and it is Easter Sunday. May your hearts all find in their
own depths a measurement of the occasion which words cannot
express. What help you may not gather from the pulpit's formal words to-day, you may find in the flowers that wreathe the
altar and in the spiritual associations of the hour.  What
remarks you are invited to hear shall be in some way suggested
by the presence and character of the Easter Day.
It is only conjecture that has located this sacred anniversary
upon the border of spring.  Many of those details which are
carefully reported in an age of printing, and in an age of such
restless inquiry as the art of printing has developed, wholly
escaped record and remembrance in the far-off times of the
Testament.  The history of modern events is gathered by
hundreds of busy hands, and hundreds of presses multiply the
exact report, so that the day that witnesses the end of a war,
or the death of a great individual, places in the hand of every
citizen a history of the great war or the great life. History,
worthy in a high sense of the name, begins with the art of
printing. All history, up to the coming of that " art preservative of all arts," is only a poor outline of a world, instead of a
full-faced picture of the great subject. It is comforting to the
Christian, however, to feel that the life of his Master is full
beyond the custom of profane biography, and in detail of the
life, and thoughts, and deeds, and death, surpasses the chronicles the world possesses as to any great character of the far past,
not excepting such a philosopher as Plato, or such an emperor
as Caesar.  The life of Christ is remarkable for the number of
its witnesses, and for the credibility they merit by their honesty
and opportunity.  But they gave us no birthday nor deathday
of theirMaster, and after the old, half-civilized generations in
the Third century had absolutely fought battles over different
* Sermon delivered in the Fourth Presbyterian Church, April 5, I874.




The 703o)ful Sunday.                23
opinions about the time of the resurrection, the Council of
Nice established a day by decree, and since that date the
Christian Church has, so far as it has regarded the event at all,
celebrated the morning which our generation is learning to love
more and more deeply.
Aside from the exact day, it is quite probable that this event
of sorrow and joy occurred in the spring months, for as the
Christian Church followed closely with its life the event of the
cross, it is hardly probable that the oldest persons in the first
century should have possessed incorrect data regarding the
season of the year when their Lord was crucified, and that they
should have located in the spring an event so significant that
occurred in the late harvest or mid-winter. It seems quite certain that the Lord thus died and arose in the spring time, and
thus by design, for there is not much of accident in the world,
associating His life and His religion with the realm of flowers,
and beauty, and hope. Spring is the peculiar property of hope.
We all, from the young child to the most venerable father of
three score and ten years, feel that when the long winter relents
and the wind has begun to blow softly upon the cheek, a new
world is about to come, and each morning bird song seems a
herald declaring a new joy and new existence to the heart.
There are many wonderful harmonies between the God of
nature and the God of the soul. They are so numerous that
the spirit of man can express all its varying conditions by asking us to look upon the world of material. If unhappy, it
declares its sky to be clouded; if happy, its sky to be bright;
if young, it appeals to springtime as its emblem; if beyond
manhood, and forsaken, it cries,
" My name is in the yellow leaf,
The flowers and fruits of love are gone
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone."
Thus there are no shadings in human experience which may
not behold their image in the great temple of nature in which
man lives and dies. The majority of mortals come upon death
in the night hours, as though the great evening shadow which
wraps in its gloom wood and field, and even the loved home
where the sick one lies, were designed of God to be an accompaniment to the shadow about to come to the spirit.  If,
therefore, the God of nature and the God of the heart are seen
to move along in such parallel lines, why may we not suppose
that if a Savior was to come and rise from the tomb in presence of a world, that the infinite wisdom would ask the great
springtime to open her flower beds for that tomb of new life
and hope. It is only one of a thousand harmonies if that sea



24                The 7oyfzl SUnday,
son which casts its best sunshine and happiness upon the shores
of earth, is that one which was asked. to cast the Son of Man
upon the shores of immortality.
When the Easter Sunday became established it was called'
dominica gaudii —" the joyful Sunday"-and thus for fifteen
hundred years this day has journeyed along to receive not the
offerings of dust and ashes, not the worship of sighing and
despair, but the offerings of the sweetest bloom and the worship of gratitude and hope.  A large part of the Protestant
world has faithfully closed its eyes to the reality and value of
this anniversary in Christian history, and thus has robbed religion of one of its beautiful robes, leaving it more and moredependent upon a costume of nothing but sackcloth.  The
reason of this past neglect is manifold. Protestantism in its
puritan and dissenting divisions was a reaction against a service
of an extremely material character. The spiritual seemed forgotten, and the outward symbols to have taken the place of an
" inner life." The pulpit that had been set up in early years
as a teacher of truth, had been crowded almost out of existence
by a great stage filled with bishops, priests, and acolytes, where
eloquence seemed deposed by pageantry. Against a religion
which seemed an extravagant development of the spectacular,
Presbyterianism, and Methodism., and Congregationalism, and
Quakerism, were a form of revolt, for it cannot be denied that
the creed of these new sects was not such a full departure from
Episcopacy or Romanism as was the genius of their new worship, its spirituality and simplicity. Having set forth in a full
dislike of the state Churches, and particularly of the Roman
Church, these independent sects feared and despised everything
Roman, and hence saw the hand of Satan not only in the
" confessional," and in the " infallibility," but also in a Church
organ and in Easter happiness.
A second reason for this neglect may- be found in the fact
that these dissenting sects arose further north than Palestine,
and Italy, and France, and amid hardships of government, of
sky, of race, and hence amid severity of thought; hence reli —
gion omitted much that was beautiful and gentle, and dealt
greatly in the logical and the most practical; and if any furtherreflection is needed to account for the neglect which this day
receives in many puritan branches of the church, we may
remember that the Free sects have been compelled to fight
their whole way along through history, and hence could not
accomplish much with a sword in one hand and Easter flowers,
in the other. The poetry of religion died in the long conflict.
In the joy and gratitude of this day our hearts should not
fail to be thankful that the world has so advanced in the.
enlightenment which destroys prejudice, and in the deeper




The yoyful Sunday.                     25
study of religion, and in the development of a Christian brotherhood, that now at last this day comes back to our sanctuaryand excites no ill will, no past bitter memory of pope or bishop,.
but only remembrances of the open tomb of Arimathea. The
Christian heart universal is so emptied of old animosity and
narrowness that the Protestant Churches rejoice, I believe, to
join this day with the Catholic world in confessing the religious,
worth and beauty of this occasion, and in joining with them,
though at separate altars, in this worship of joyfulness.
In coming up to such a day as this, we have not encountered,
a kind of accident of the religion of Jesus, but have come to
its inmost and permanent spirit.  When the Divine Author of
religion declares that " His yoke is easy and His burden light,"
we may accept of- the words as covering all the days of this
pilgrimage. When looked at from the standpoint of old Jewish law, full of imperfections, full of wrath, and too narrow
either for life or death, whose confines were a single nation, and
whose religion was an external offering of flocks, and whose
great emblem was a Sinai covered with thunderings and vivid
lightnings, Christ's yoke, with its perfection of reason in its
new law, and with its redemption on the cross, and with its forgiveness, and its brotherhood of man and loving presence of
God, became easy and His burden light.
When the Testament in many places assures us that whoever'
would follow Christ must deny himself and take up the cross,
it would seem that Christianity was sent forth on a mission of
sorrow; but much of that language was directed to those imme —
diate times when to follow Christ was to place the foot in a
path which led to martyrdom. It was necessary for a St. Paul
and for tens of thousands around his grave to turn away from
the paths of earthly happiness, and bidding farewell to friends,
to look death calmly in the face as the fate of the morrow not
far away. The prayer of Milton over the martyrs of Piedmont
passes beyond his horizon and becomes full of awful solemnity
when breathed over the first four centuries after our Lord:
"tForget not: in Thy book record their groans
Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their rioans
The vales redoubled to the hills and they to heaven,
Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields."
In view of these dark ages, whose fury it seems was not
wholly to die away for a thousand years, Christ handed down
to His children the form of His own cross to go with them,
the emblem of many a sorrow and many a martyrdom. Thus
I feel that many of the half-melancholy words of Christ were.




26                The yoyful Sztuzday.
spoken as against the persecutions that would follow and did
exhaust themselves upon that special shore, leaving His broadest and everlasting declaration to be that of our text: " My
yoke is easy and My burden is light." Sorrows may come
here and there, to this or that period, or to this or that heart,
but as a general truth embracing all lands and all humanity.
Christianity is the most abundant fountain of happiness of
whose waters the human family may ever drink. If there is
any happiness in this world it ought to be found in the obedience of such morals as are found in the Sermon upon the
Mount, and in such a life of broad love and charitable action
as are seen in the life of Christ, and in that refuge for the soul
found beneath His Cross, and in that hope which there bursts
upon the vision beyond the open tomb.
If I should declare that apart from the fear of persecution
and martyrdom there is no cross to be borne, I should overlook a certain self-denial which does indeed belong to this
religion. But it is almost worthy of contempt, for it is not a
denial of a good self but of a wicked self. We are not asked
to deny self of anything that belongs to the broadest and
highest development of mind and heart, but if there is anything low and satanic in our nature, we are invited to cut off
that form of human energy. Self-denial seems to be a denying the heart the privilege of its own self-disgrace. If not to
steal, not to envy, not to bear false witness, not to despise the
poor, nor be insensible to the wants of one's fellow-men, are a
self-denial, then Christianity is full of it; but if we pass by a
depraved or unworthy nature as being something whose gratifications is a simple disgrace, and if we think of only a lofty
soul and the highest form of character, Christianity is not a
self-denial, but a self-love and self-gratification. Much of the
asceticism which lingers in the Christian philosophy and practice has been gathered up from half-civilized ages, all through
which religion advanced mingled with the horrid ideas of
paganism. As the Hindoos try to please their gods by hookswvinging and by thrusting hot irons through the flesh, so the
semi-Christian times, lingering on the borders of this pagan
darkness, have had their saints of pillar and cave; and as the
children of Bengal have for thousands of years run forth to
see the fakirs coming into the village, cutting their own bodies
with knives, so have the Christian villagers in Europe followed in
wonder and reverence a procession of flagelants marching to a
chorus of whips, and with feet sprinkled with blood. Both
these scenes, one in India under Vishnu, the other in Europe
under Christ, are pictures of the same human heart living in a
native ignorance which was still bringing to bear upon the
new Gospel a folly of logic and of soul that had long been




The.oyfz  S/u znday.              27
producing the deformities of religion along the Tiber and
Nile and Ganges. Wherever a Christian has starved himself,
wherever a Christian has worn a girdle of thorns, wherever a
Christian mother has tried to love her children less, that she
might love her God more, wherever a saint has withdrawn
from the bright sunlight that he might dwell only in the light
of God, wherever any heart anywhere has felt that by self-imposed suffering it might gratify God the more, there all these
well-meaning ones have revealed not the import of Christianity, but the dark shadow of that realm beyond Christ, where
the mother drowns her infant for God's sake, and where strong
men have in the name of God held up their right arm till it
withered, or have gazed at the sun till they became blind forever. Many an age has groaned under what they called the
"Cross," which instead of being a cross was only a follwy.
When Mme. Guyon resolved that she would not feel sad when
her children should die, but would lay them in the grave as
she had put them in the cradle at night, and when we perceive
that this she actually did, and shed no tear, but smiled on
them dead as she had smiled on them living, we must not be
betrayed even by her rank and culture or fortune into the.belief that she was unveiling any of the mysteries of our
religion, but must confess that her great mind and heart were
touched by that shadow of infirmity which has thrown its dark
line in some form across all the intellects which have ever lived,
however great or humble. Every soul born into the world is
born into mistakes. Be the intellect lofty as that of a Demosthenes or a Matthew Hale, be the genius as divine as that of
Dante or Shakespeare, be the heart as sweet as that of Fenelon or Cowper, across it somewhere will fall a dark line, the
shadow of man's frailty, reminding us that there is none good
but God. Escaping from this influence of innate infirmity and
of surrounding barbarism, and coming up face to face before
the actual religion of Christ, we are bound to confess that its
yoke is easy and its burden light. The escape from a low life
to a higher one, the refuge from sin found in the Rifted Rock
and in forgiveness, the new love toward all mankind and
toward God, the better reading of life's significance, and the
perpetual looking to heaven from amid all the sorrows of this
shore, should not be confessed a cross for bowed-down shoulders, but rather a joyful crown for the temples.
There is one consideration which tends to rob Christianity
of that lightness of heart which belongs to the innocence of
childhood and to the absolute pleasure-seekers of mature years.
It has not so loud a laugh, nor so many sunshiny days. But
the reason of this is so vast and so noble that one might well
-accept of its sacrifice of merriment, to gain instead the sober



28                The 7oyful Sunday.
ness that comes from so honorable a cause. Let the human
mind and heart espouse any truth that leads to a deeper study
of man, a philosophy that studies the wants of the human
family in all its races and ages and conditions, a philosophy
which must go along with all these years, and then look over
into eternity, a philosophy issuing from an Infinite sympathy
and which must go where the orphan is weeping and the sick
dying, and this philosophy will be one which, in what we
call merriment, can be surpassed always by the childhood
which knows nothing, or by the empty years of sin and fash —
ion which nothing cares. As the statesmen who, like Cobden,
or Bright, or Lincoln, espouse the destinies of the multitude,,
are borne away from the butterfly joy which they knew in
childhood, and which they can still behold along the fashionable avenues, so Christianity, fully accepted by the soul, brings
with it often a study of mankind and a longing for the world's.
welfare which sobers the waking hours and even invades with
its anxiety the once peaceful and sweet world of dream.
Comnpared, however, with a childish life or a sinful life or an.
empty life, Christianity is not in our century, escaped as it has
from much pagan abnegation, and centering as it does upon an.
era of love and happiness, any longer a bondage, but its yoke,
is easy and its burden light. Its cross was borne by its Christ
that it might not be borne by His children. The cross weighed:
down His body and spirit to the tomb, but to His children it
is worn on the bosom, an ornament of beauty and hope. Once:
stained with blood, it is now wreathed with flowers.
Two Sundays in the year are now dedicated to the spirit of
happiness. The Protestant Church has now for the most part
admitted these two oases into a broad desert, and all that
remains is for us to read the Gospel of our Lord that we shall
seek to make these two " Sundays of joy," these islands in the
sandy plain widen out till the vision of waving palm trees shall
always lie before every traveler in this lonely march. When
modern art and modern ambition had traced a canal from the:
Nile to the Suez station, verdure followed the waters through!
the desert, and now trees wave in blessing where for ages the:
burning sand blistered the foot and filled the traveler's heartwith only a sense of desolation. It is coming to pass, and it
will come to be confessed more fully in future times, that Christianity is a stream flowing through a desert world, only that
more palm trees may rise up and flowers bloom for the joy of
the multitude that move to and fro in these wide plains of life.
Such are our thoughts for the day when the cross of death
is wreathed with the flowers of eternal life. In presence of
this wreath all others of earth fade. The bride wreathes her
forehead in the name of a long friendship, but her beauty and




The Jyojful Sutnday.                 29
joy, her home, would all become dust after a few years, as
perishable as the wreath of her forehead, were it not for the
hope of immortal life which wafts her and all she loves forward
to a world of unending bliss. So the wreathes of statesmen
and philanthropists, of all love and friendship, look to the
great resurrection beyond these narrow confines as fulfillment
of their hopes and reward of their toils. Hence we have come
to-day to the wreath of all wreathes, to the bloom that causes
all blossoming. Oh, blessed Easter flowers! the scattered roses
of every field cast their color and perfume down before your
more sacred import. As the sheaves of his brethren all bowed
before the sheaf of Joseph, in the old, beautiful dream, because they saw that his hands would feed the hungry in far-off
years, when their own grains had perished, so before the Easter
immortelles all the lilies and roses of a wide world may come
to worship, because, gifted with prophecy, they may well see
in these emblems of immortality a beauty which shall reappear
in eternity long after their own leaves shall have been scattered.and their perfume all breathed away into the silent night.




SOUL - CULTURE.'*
DAVID SWING.
For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?-Malt..
xvi. 26. And the Child grew and waxed strong in spirit.-Lu ke ii. 40.
The words soul and spirit aie sprinkled over the pages of the
Bible as thickly as leaves upon the ground in autumn. There is
no evident difference in the signification of the two words.  A
book has been published within the past two years, whose object is to teach that man is composed of three elements-mind,
soul, and spirit; but most readers rise from the book entertained to some extent, but to a greater extent untaught and bewil —
d.ered.
Beyond the grand divisions, mind and soul, it is difficult to
pass. And these two continents are not marked out by definite
coast lines and separated by great neutral oceans, but rather lie
contiguous, like the two tints of a flower, with a beautiful middle ground, where the spectator loses power to announce which
color is more vivid.
But for our purpose we do not need a definite mapping out
of mind and soul, intellect and spirit, knowledge and character; we need only the general truth, that man possesses a certain soul-life, that can grow and can rise and fall like the waves
of the deep.
It is wonderful how much the Bible uses this word spirit. If
you will open your Concordance and see what an array of texts
there are in which this word is master of the proposition, you
will ever after think more highly of the soul within your own
bosom.  You will there see set in order the "spirit " of wisdom, the "spirit " of love, the "spirit" of charity, of peace,
the " spirit " of God, the broken "spirit," the faithful " spirit,"
and, according to Peter, the glorious "spirit."  Reading over
this grand catalogue, made up out of all the deepest thought
of Job and St. John, you cannot but feel thankful that the Creator has poured into your bosom a portion of that soul without
which the whole world would profit nothing.
I have read these texts not for the purpose of leading you
* A discourse delivered March, I872, at Standard Hall, by Prof. David Swing, pastor of the'
Fourth Presbyterian Church.




Soul Cdullue.                      3r
again over the estimate of that deliverance of spirit announced
by Christ, but for the purpose of uttering some thoughts that
ought to be held as preliminary to all consideration of that
blessed redemption revealed in the New Testament.  If there
is offered the world a Saviour of the soul, the world may well
inquire what the soul is, and whether it is desirable that it
struggle much, or long', for a friendship with that great Soul of
Nazareth.  Our inquiry is not a direct application of the text,
but a preliminary reflection.
If one might dare find a defect in the method of preaching
the gospel, it would seenm safe to declare that the method is one
of endless assump)tion of preliminary thoughts, and endless repetition of final truths and conventional terms.  In place of any
discussion of the nature of sin, we are warned silmply as sinners, and the punishment is daily re-announced.  The nature of
faith is passed by in our zeal to urge men to believe; the philosophy and analysis of repentance are crowded out of the world
by the perennial command to repent; and instead of defining
or measuring the inspiration of the sacred Book, it is enough
if we say daily that all Scripture is given by inspiration.
Whether this avoidance of preliminary questions is to be attributed to a want of courage, or want of industry, or to a long
prevalence of dogmatism  which is too vain to admit the importance of an inquiry, we cannot venture to affirm, but must
content ourself with the conviction that there is need of reform
in the topics and mode of the sacred desk. When, however,
we all remember with what labor, and with disappointment often,
men have sought the foundation truths of life, we cannot but
palliate the sin that gives up this path of pursuit, and accepts
of a final word and no questions asked.
All thoughts about the soul must indeed lead us to a wall at
last, which we cannot undermine or scale; but such is the common destiny of truth-seekers that our tears of sorrow will fall
no sooner here, and no bitterer, than along any path our foot
may choose. It is said that Aristotle grieved all his life that
he could not explain the tides of the sea that washed the shores
of his country.  The pursuit of knowledge, like the pursuit
of any pleasure, is a chase of both joy and grief.  All the nets
that drag through the sea of life draw out the good and bad at
last to the shore. All the seventy years are a constant effort
to sift the varied sorrow out of those seventy years; and when
at last we fall, the winnowing fan will be found in the right
hand, trying still to separate grain and chaff. But, unreadable
as all things are in the world, there are always approximations
to truth possible on all hands, andl with these our hearts must
learn to be content.
In this matter of intellect and soul, it is not otherwise.




32                    Soul Culture.
Though there are places where colors blind and are lost, or
where light ends in shadow, yet there is some color and some
light. I am inclined to think that the soul is the conscious life or
being of man, and that intellect is simply its grandest servant,
its daily purveyor. A new fact is valuable because it feeds this
inner life. It helps the soul to some nexw motion or deed of
joy. Knowledge is fuel for this warm flame. The Psalmist
says that while he was musing the fire burned-not the fire upon
the hearth-but the flame in his bosom. He says, "My heart was
hot within me," and while lie mused the fire burned the more
intensely.  That is, as the facts passed along in review before
his intellect, his soul within him increased the flow and power
of its life.
Knowledge is said to be power. It is indeed power, for the
soul converts it into all manner of action-joy, charity, worship,
love, eloquence. As the rich earth drinks in simply water and
light and heat, and then sends forth all manner of fruit and
blossoms, so the soul receives the facts of the intellect, and
makes them  the basis of a vast creation, varied as that which
came from the Almighty.
To the poor negro, lying on the banks of the Niger, what a
narrowness of soul!  What a perpetual stupor!  But how
could his soul live or move?  The facts of the world have nev-,er fallen upon it, as dew upon drooping grass. The vast culture of the world, the vast arts useful and beautiful, its immense history, running back through thousands of years and
over vast empires, have never passed into his brain, and the
soul, having no purveyor, starves within its silent dungeon.
The spirit of this poor savage is a seed that has fallen upon a
rock. There is nothing to nourish its mysterious germ. Tendrils thrown out could grasp nothing; hence there is no unfolding of leaf or flower.
Compare with this desolate soul a Burke that was cast among
the facts of England, or a disciple that leaned upon the heart
of the worldc's Lord, and saw truths turning into soul. Tile facts
of earth are only the food ordained of Heaven for the life of
the spirit. Besides the common five senses, there is an innulerable army of purveyors-history, science, art, relig'ionwhose only calling is that of adding to the emotions and impulses of that mystery called soul. The truths of this whole
career are only the soil of that strange but beautiful growth,
the spirit.
Truth, therefore, sought through simple desire to increase
one's store of acquisition, truth pursued only to learn whlat
comes next, must be much like the miser's pursuit of gold-a
fatal transformation of a means into an end. As money is
worthless, only so far as the blessings of life are bought with




.Souzl Cu/lzure.                 33
it, so the acquisition of knowledge must have its value measured by the outgrowth of sentiment.
The decoration and enlargement of the heart are the direct
end of truth, and, without this result, knowledge is not power,
but is treasure buried and forgotten-like the fabled gold of
Capt. Kidd —by some unknown sea. Florence Nightingale is
all the prison truth and battle-field truth of the world turned
into divine soul. Those gloomy facts were converted into an
infinite love by the strange machinery of man.
A Christian's creed, therefore, is only a first step toward being a Christian or even a good man. He has facts, just as a
successful speculator has money, but whether the man will be
a Christian is as uncertain as whether the gainer of money will
be a noble man or a despicable miser. It is the fire which truth
kindles in the soul that determines the value of all study and
experience and reflection. Hence the grand men of the world
have never been those who have acquired most truths, but
those with whom the world's experience and events have hastened to-put on the garments of divine spirit, those with whom
truth has been only a hand to strike afresh each day the spirit's
harp. Hence it has easily come to pass that the most useless
alcl fovlomu nen vho  xanve li&ed since the woXld began ha'e
been the professional heresy-hunters in the Church. Living
for a certain assemblage of words just as the miser lives for his
labeled bags of gold, they have always left their souls to go
dressed in vile rags and to die of famine in absolute sight of a
land of milk and honey. Not knowing " that an ounce of life
is better than a ton of knowledge," they are but clerks who file
the business transactions of yesterday and await calmly the arrival of some morrow of dispute. These having read a page, or having
had an opportunity of hearing a discourse, do not open their
souls to admit any new warmth, but with Shylock begin to read
the record, and to mutter that " it is not so stated in the bond."
The idea of character never disturbs their brain, but lllman's
prospect of heaven is learned wholly by a comparison of antique bonds. Instead of seeking the grandeur of man in the
soul's alembic, where truth is passing over into the realm of
spirit, they locate salvation in their forty articles, and give to
prejudice and to memory the heavens that God made for the
heart. These have never been the useful or loved men of history. They are the misers of Christianity. But when there
has come along a being with whom a single fact in morals has
fallen in upon that holy place called the soul, and burst forth
into some sweet sentiment, there has come along a being that
was both earth's help and earth's joy.
In Wilberforce, the fact of negro bondage fell in upon his heart'like a flower seed falling into the warm black earth of Italy or




34                    Soul Cullure.
Florida. His one truth produced a tear. His tear increased
into a river of eloquence. The river widened into the modern
Sea of Liberty. His soul absorbed that truth of suffering and
became all colored with a Christ-like humanity, as the snow
white wool drinks in the Tyrian dye. Alongside this Wilberforce place a score of professional heresy-hunters fresh fiom
their victim, and how wretched they all appear in presence of
such an uprising of a single heart!
There is no doubt the notorious Catherine II. held more truth
and better truth than was known to all classic Greece-held to
a belief in a Saviour, of whose glory that gifted land knew
nought; and yet, such is the grandeur of soul above mind, that
I doubt not that Queen Penelope of the dark land, and the
doubting Socrates, have found at Heaven's gate a sweeter welcome sung of angels than greeted the ear of Russia's brilliant,
but false-lived queen. Penelope knew little about our God,
nothing about our Saviour; but what truth she knew  was
transfigured in the white raiment of life-the garb ofimmortality.
"Virtue is knowledge applied," says a thoughtful writer.
And Cicero says: " Why should I study unless to prepare myself for my associations with my fellow men?"  Beautiful
thought of that unrivaled man! Why read the history of
liberty unless I intend to grasp it with a firmer hand, and seek
to break the chains of humanity?  Why study the flowers of
the field unless I am to come home tenderer to my children,
and a better believer in God? Why read over the world's
charity unless I am myself henceforth to be of kinder heart?
Thus the Christian creed is valuable only so far as the soul
can and does draw it into its crucible and transform it into life.
The variations between Methodist and Calvinist go for nought,
because the variations are over ideas that are incapable of being
made into the fibre of soul. They count nothing because they
do not reach the realm where God stretches at last the line of
measurement.
It is not the Trinity that moulds human life, but the doctrine
of God. It is not the eternal possession of the Holy Spirit that
may shape the human soul, but the fact of an ever-present spirit.
That Christ was eternally begotten of the Father is a doctrine
that cannot be appreciated in any way by man's heart, but
the Christ of the New Testament can be grasped and loved;
and hence the responsibility and success and beauty of human
life will be all related to the latter of these statements, and
be wholly discharged from  all the former, without penalty or
costs.
That truth alone is valuable and filled with responsibility,
which might make our life deeper and better. To slight this
is to lose that soul, than which one would better lose the whole




Soul Culture.                    35
world. Those are the responsible facts which lie above our
hearts as the pure snow on the mountains lies ready to bless in
summer time the fields beneath.
Intellect is said to be cold. So it is by itself. But complain
not at the snow that reposes upon the Rocky or Alpine range.
Cold?  Yes. But all summer long, and long is the summer at
their bases, the vineyards and fields and orchards draw their
clusters, their golden harvests, from the kind melting of these
treasures of the frost. Cold, indeed, but all of France and Italy
are made a paradise beneath.
Truth in itself is cold, but in the design of the Creator its
white treasures falling as softly as snow, and falling through
many centuries, daily dissolve and transform the spirit beneath
into a never-fading paradise.
Our material earth is built by many layers wrapped. around
it in its long history. Geologists dig to great depths or go
where the earthquake has made openings miles in depth, and
lo! the lowest ground or rock is found to have been formed by
the failing of leaves and grasses, and by the varied wrappings
of the ages gone. It is now known that the atmosphere is
raining forever an invisible dust upon this ball, making it larger
and warmer and more beautiful. The rock scraped by a glacier
becomes covered, and invites moss and lichen to its breast.
The human soul is such a world. The truths of to-day, of
yesterday, of the whole past are settling down upon it a golden
rain from the hand of God, making the glorious wrappings of
time and of the great futurity. Thus the dark facts of earth,
its slavery, its suffering, its sickness, its calamities, its burned
up cities, its solemn cemeteries of the dead, all may be transformed into human spirit and make the soul come to heaven at
last rich in its tenderness and love. The earthly knowledge
is made into never dying power.  Bulwer says, "Oh how
much greater is the soul of one man than the vicissitudes of
the whole globe!"  And elsewhere he says, "Not in the
klnowledge of things without, but in the perfection of the soul
within, lies the true empire of man."
From considerations such as these, I am inclined to think
that mystery is also a servant of the soul trying to give it
some shade of beauty which no plain fact could even paint
upon it. To eliminate vanity, to overthrow egotism, to check
the footsteps in the path of sin, to keep the soul tender, to
bring the king down to the level of his servant, I can conceive
of nothing more powerful than the mystery of death. When
the mother thinks of it she bids her children good night with a
deeper love and with a more intense prayer that God will be
an angel over them by night. By mystery our philosophers are
made to be as children, and, indeed, the hearts of all educated




36                   Soul Culuure.
beings are lifted up by its sad but strong arms above the dust
of earth, and are borne nearer the infinite throne. As though
the events of earth were insufficient to exalt us, realms are
created where unseen hands smite the heart strings, and where
the air trembles with a grand unknown melody.
It is not probable that the Creator has poured out darkness
around man only to harrass him on life's march. All things
are ordered for good, and it must be that to the facts that educate mankind, mystery adds the shadow of facts, to carry this
education along some new paths. When the world sums up
educational influences, it enumerates success, and acts, and
languages.  But this estimate is too rude and coarse, for a
human friend, deeply loved and long known, often casts over
the soul a culture which all schools would have failed to bestow.
Indeed, from the closets of the great schools, we go forth with
empty hands, compared with the treasures which we carry from
the bosom of the noble mother, where we spent all early years,
and from the earth and sky that were the oceans of our island
childhood.
Into any survey of educational forces, we must admit, therefore, elements that escape the first rude estimate, and find room
for those shadows of awful facts that perpetually hang their
dark curtains before us.
As the depth of mystery is only felt by the most civilized
and advanced soul, and is a cloud of which a savage knows
nothing, it may be inferred, that it comes not as a penalty of
culture, but as a delicate hand to lead it to a still better being.
The solemn question of Hamlet, "To be, or not to be," surpasses the books of the school-house in shaping the spirit of
man. The willow and cypress, that mourn over the tombs of
our dead, impress our hearts the more deeply, because the wind
that sighs through them, and the somber shades they cast, help
us to pass over into the unknown world. Thus, by fact, and
by the wandering shadow of fact, the soul of man is perpetually fed. They are the only manna that falls for it, in this wilderness march.
To the natural power of the world's truths it pleased God
to add the " truth as it is in Jesus." The soil of earth was too
poor to nourish a great soul. Into the common thoughts of
society the heavens opened and poured out the vast truths of
penitence, faith, charity, purity of heart, and heaven beyond.
To live a life amid such surroundings as earth now possesses
must be only to live a career of preparation for a world more
blessed. To lose one's soul must be to pass through this sublime temple without drinking in its virtue and holy worship,
and not only to have re ected the true, but to have suffered the
falsehoods of society to rush upon the delicately-strung harp




Soul Culture.                    37
of the spirit, and break its strings, and hush its melodies.
" Truth," says the great dramatist, "are the wings wherewith
we fly to heaven."
O friends immortal! earth will soon disappear. You will
soon pass from its varied scenes. While you walk yet on this
mortal land, hold most dear those truths that may be embodied
in the heart. Let your creed be measured by the need of your
inner life, and let all the duties and joys and grief of life only
wrap some more beautiful garment around your spirit. Then,
called to go hence, you will bear away with you the good of
earth, as the sun, rising from the sea, draws up after him its
whitest mist and most delicate colorings.




A MISSIONARY RELIGION.*
DAVID SWING.
Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations.-Matthew xxviii: zO.
This being the missionary day of this congregation, it would
be a great neglect of duty and of a great theme of inquiry
should we simply make an annual offering of gifts. Once a year,
at least, we may well look at the cause in its forms of fact and
philosophy, and thus enable ourselves to base our contributions
upon some knowledge of their destination and value.  The
Christian religion is nothing but a great mission scheme, of
which the world is the field, and Christ the first and the chief
of a missionary host. The religious systems up to the Savior's
day were systems only for the porch or closet. Most of the
moralists were only men of seclusion, men of the grove or the
porch, who, pacing to and fro a few steps, spoke as they walked,
and thus were dreamers in a secluded spot, rather than messengers to the world. It was necessary for. the few who knew of
the existence and haunts of these wise men to make long journeys to their presence, and there encamp for a time to drink
in the sweet waters of these rare springs. In all those days of
Roman and Greek and Indian wisdom, moral systems were a
curiosity more than a public cultus, and were studied as a kind
of mental exercise, rather than as a mode of daily life.
Whenever a moral system assumed the form of a worship, and
attempted to spread itself, as in the Hebrew and Mohammedan
states, it spread as a government rather than as a religion. It
sought not so much a universal salvation as a universal empire.
It will, it seems, be sufficiently true if we affirm that the New
Testament religion is the only one that deliberately announced
the idea of a world-wide religious crusade, having for its object
the spiritual enlightenment and transformation of mankind. It
cut religion away from state duties and temptations as from a
deadly hindrance, and sent it forth upon a purely spiritual mission. Separating itself from government, the world became its
field, and man universal became its object of prayer, and love,i
and pursuit. Hence Christ used with wonderful significance
the word " world."  He Himself was the light of the "world,'"
and He sent His disciples into the "' world," and the "world "
was to be preached to by His messengers, and the end of the
* Sermon delivered in Fourth Presbyterian Church,, April 12,, I874.




A  Misszonary Relzgion.               39
"world " was to follow this wide evangelization. If you will
read carefully the Testament for this purpose, you will perceive
that Christianity announced itself not as a world-wide state,
but as a world-wide religion. We seem to hear those sacred
pages saying, " Long enough have there been local forms held
in some Jerusalem, available only after long journeyings; long
enough have there been wise men of the temple and the porch
who have stood afar from the people, muttering their for the
most part obscure soliloquy; long enough have the sibyls sung
their ambiguous words from hidden caves whither none but
kings or warriors could come. Full time is it for a word that
shall go forth to the people, be they of empire or republic, rich
or poor, and upon any shore." Such seems the announcement
upon the face of the New Testament, and in grand harmony
with this professed idea Christ moved from place to place the
friend of all; and the apostle to the Gentiles sailed from island
to island and land to land, the ambassador to the world. It is
said that Paul even crossed Spain, and at the Atlantic coast
found, as he supposed, the limits of the world. That broad
wave turned him back.
The fact that the Christian Church was first named an ecclesia
points out not obscurely its ideal scope, for that word had for
hundreds of years indicated a convention of the people. The
Ecclesia was the Greek house of representatives-a house which
stood as a check upon archons and senates, a mediator between
the multitude and the ambition of orators and generals. As
the public throng was called by heralds who passed along from
street to street, the meeting was so named " the called out," or
the "ecclesia," and from such associations it has descended to
us. Thus all the parts of Christianity-its Christ, its apostles,
its avowed object, its ignoring states, its simplicity of doctrine,
and its very Church name-confess it to be a religion for the
whole people, and hence nothing but a holy crusade against the
sins of the wide world.
Such being the avowed design of the founder of this religion,
we who profess to believe it are in the path of duty only when
we are in sympathy with this large design, and are shaping our
thoughts and feelings and actions to this immense scope of the
Gospel. We, as a Christian nation and as private Christians,
are here to-day in what religious truth we have, only because
the religion of Palestine assumed the form of a mission rather
than of a local faith. Palestine had held its Hebrew ideas for
two thousand years without having sent outward one single
chapter from Isaiah or one single psalm from David. Wonderful and divine as was the Deism of the Old Testament compared
with the polytheism of the classic states, and sacred as were
the hymns of the temple compared with any religious songs of




40              A  Misszionary Rezgzion.
the surrounding lands, yet none of the theology of the Hebrews
seems to have broken out of its national confines into the
classic world, and not a psalm of David seems ever to have sent
its music over to where Homer held a harp, or to where Virgil
was devoting his life to a chaste and an elevated poetry. Palestine lay beside Greece for hundreds of years, with only a fragment of the Mediterranean between; and yet between Athens
in her glory and Jerusalem in her almost equal splendor, no
exchange of creed, or prayer, or hymn seems ever to have taken
place. What thoughts these two cities had of each other must
have been in the line of wondering when the armies of one
might thunder at the gates of the other. The active idea with
both was, not how they might spread their poetry, or their
psalms and their worship, but how they might advance and
support their thrones.
Born into such a spirit, Christianity would have remained in
Palestine, just as Hebraism had remained there. But Christ
reversed the genius of religion. He separated it from state and
attached it to man as a citizen of the world, and moved it from
its narrow borders, and from that hour the psalms of David and
the songs of the new Church began to cross the sea by every
wind that wafted the merchant's ship. It must have been a
thrilling passage of eloquence when one of the Roman orators,
in perhaps the second century, arose in the public assembly and
said: "Your altars and temples are all becoming vacant; your
laws are passing away before the temple and laws of this
Christ."
The violent deaths suffered by the early apostles and disciples prove that this religion did not confine itself to the home
of its birth or attach to the existing temporal powers, but did
so cast itself forward as into a wider destiny, that each petty
governor feared it as being the embodiment of a most unbridled
ambition. Paul so waked up the world by his eloquence that
he was put to death at Rome, as though like Caesar he was
reaching forth for a crown; John was banished to Patmos, after
having been put to torture; James was hurled from a battlement in Jerusalem, and thus crushed to death; Matthew was
put to death in Abyssinia; Simon Zelotes received his crown
of martyrdom in Persia; and in Persia, also, Jude was slain by
a cruel death; the death of Thomas took place on the coast of
Coromandel; Philip was hanged to a pillar in Hierapolis; Andrew was crucified at Patrata in Achaia, and James of Zebede
in Asia the Less. Thus in this bloody death-page, where every
land is seen to have opened its bosom to receive the mangled
form of a disciple, we read in these crimson letters that Christianity is the religion of all which may claim the glory of having taken the whole world into its heart. All these widely




A  Mzssionary ReligzVon.              4I
separated tombs tell us that from the cross itself the testament
religion began at once a march which was to pay no more regard to geographical and national lines that Christ paid when
He died for humanity.
How much the Christian philosophy differed from either the
Mosaic or the Indian you may infer from the two facts, first
that no Hebrew hymn passed over to Greece or Rome in 500
years, though the lands lay upon one small sea and under one
sky, and yet in fifty years after Christ his form of religion had
penetrated to the British islands. Bishop Stillingfleet says
"there is good evidence that the Christian Church was planted
in these islands in the first century;" perhaps alluding to the
evidence of Eusebius, who says the apostles passed over the
ocean and preached in the British isles, and to Theodoret, who
says " the Britons embraced the religion of the fishermen and
publicans and tent-makers." In the former part of the second
century the Gospel had reached Germany, Scythia, Spain,
Gaul, and Briton, and in view of this wonderful contagion an,orator by the name of Arnobius said: " Is it not a powerful
argument that in so short a time the sacraments of Christ are
diffused over the world? That orators and rhetoricians, lawyers and philosophers now love this religion and despise what
they formerly trusted?"
It would seem from these facts that the religion we cherish
was in the very outset a world-religion, not confessing any distinctions of place and people such as have marked all other
forms of human worship. The Hebrews looked over their geographical lines with only covetousness or anger; the Chinese
built a wall that they might have no intercourse with the mul-titudes beyond, and calling their own land the "Celestial empire," they despised all other climes; and so all through India
it was the effort of thousands of years to build up such a law of
caste as would include certain persons in favor and exclude,certain others forever. In the very face of all this habit of
society, both in its social and political and religious practice,
Christianity came as a world-wide creed and worship, the most
universal, the most democratic, the most generous, the most
God-like of all religions in which the knee has ever bent in
prayer.
This missionary spirit, which is bound up in the words of the
text and which sent the apostles in all directions spreading out
from the tomb of Christ like radiating light from a sun, and
which scattered their tombs over all the known world, approached our Canadas and Floridas when the natives were worshiping a devil and pouring out the blood of innocent children each new moon to appease his wrath. When the Spaniards founded their New Spain on the Florida coast, they found




42               A  Missionary Relgzion.
the natives offering human sacrifices, and were actually drowning children in the lake to please their horrid deity. Though
the Spaniards were seeking only wealth, yet they had with them
the Catholic religion, and that Gospel they planted and began
at once to overthrow the inhuman customs of the new world.
It was the painful degradation of America and of several
lands which travel was bringing into notice, which called to the
front such heroes as Xavier in the sixteenth century. You
have heard, once before at least, the noble response Xavier
made when his friends attempted to alarm him and dissuade
him when he was about to sail upon his great mission:
"Hush you! close your dismal story,
What to me are tempests wild?
Heroes on their way to glory,
Mind not pastimes for a child.'Tis for souls of men I'm sailing,
Blow ye winds north, south, east, west;
Though the storm be round me wailing
There'll be calm within my breast."
It was the advent of a few such heroes that won for the eighteenth century the name of the " Missionary century," but our
century has come now to rob the past one of its special fame.
That era laid great foundations and our century builds upon
its solid rock, thus dividing the honor of the world's evangelization.
Thus stands that great religious work toward which you are
asked to contribute your mites to-day, gifts which will perhaps.
express not your pecuniary ability so much as your thought or
care about this vast benevolence among your fellow-men. A
gift does not always express one's power, but often only the
amount of his information and his sympathy. Thousands give
little because they know and care so little about the matter in
whose name the offering is made. It ought to be enough of
information, the single remembrance, that our religion is all a
misssonary action and a missionary result. The condition of
this land compared with the old centuries of cruelty is
to be credited to the outgoing religion of Jesus that cuts the
cables that bound their ships, and sent our fathers hither
when the land was a wilderness and the very sky full of wintry
storm. It was not the richness of the soil, not the flowing rivers, not the chains of lakes, not the timber of the forests, not
the ores in the earth, which have given our country its happiness and varied excellence, for the Indian roamed all over
this grand continent, but remained a savage still; it was not
civil liberty alone that made us a great people, for the Indians
enjoyed the most perfect civil liberty all over this broad prairie
and mountain world; it was rather the religious and ethical
ideas which were sent over in the Christian ships that marked




A  Missionary Relzgzon.                43
out a future nobler than the career of the savage. Money was
gathered just as we ask for it to-day, and brave hearts sailed
away from home and country, just as now the missionary sails,
and that gave us America, just as your gifts and a hundred
years will give the world a Christian India or a Christian Chinese Empire.
Not as the conquerer comes,
They, the true-hearted, came
Not with the roll of stirring drums,
And the trumpet that sings of fame.
"Not as the flying come
In silence and in fear'
They shook the depths of the deserts gloom,
With their hymns of lofty cheer."
This poem recalls the cause of American greatness, and the
deep foundations of her destiny, but this hymn is nothing else
than a repetition of the sentiment that moved Francis Xavier,
and Paul, and the divine Master of all.
In our country all this form of benevolence merits a special
respect, inasmuch as the Protestant Churches have ignored the
distinctions of sects which prevail at home, and for almost a
hundred years, dating from the London society, have gone to
the benighted lands in the name of great leading truths of
Christianity instead of in the name of a multitude of sectarian
ideas. Although recently certain fields have been assigned to
certain great denominations, yet this has been done in the name
of efficiency and economy rather in the name of sectarianism.
After the hundred-year experiment, there is no probability
that any missionary gold will be exhausted upon any indoctrinational of the heathen world in denominational ideas,
for the tendency of the present is to abandon sectarian
ideas at home; hence there will be little disposition to
inculcate abroad doctrines which are rapidly dying by our
own  firesides.  The Church of England  joins with  the
dissenting Churches in India as a fact, and cares little for the
apostolic succession in a land where the Brahmin can so far
outdo it in the quality and absurdity of holy touchings and holy
pedigrees. And there the Calvinist conceals his five points, for
the crowd of Indian philosophers can always propose ten points
far more obscure, and thus all the Protestant sects approach
the whole pagan world with the Gospel reduced to its simplest
expression. Blessed era it will be when we shall be as fully
ashamed in America of the things that divide us as we are when
our feet touch India or Japan. Can it be possible that it requires home training, that is, local and youthful prejudice, to
enable us to see the immense worth of our dogmas, and that
approaching foreigners not fully drilled in the sectarian method
and tactics we fear their smile of unbelief or derision? It is




44              A  Missionary Religion.
ominous if, having a score or so of peculiar ideas, we should all
get together and agree to say little about them to this Chinaman and that Brahmin. Such a condition of things would
seem to indicate one more step along this path, an agreement
to say little about these differences to persons not pagans and
not upon foreign shores.
We have come to-day to a survey of Christianity in its truest
significance, and hence in its wanderings about from race to
race, from island to continent, from river to sea, we may learn
what are its most essential parts. A student shutting himself
up in his room may, from the Bible, elaborate a perfect system
which shall omit nothing regarding the human will or the mode
and quality of everything, but the world in actual experiment
may not need, nor even faintly appreciate, one-tenth part of this
closet-made system. But when the Gospel is observed out
among men in India and America, there in the faces and life
of its votaries one may make out such a true bibical theology
as no closet can ever produce. The whole mission work at
home and abroad is the best interpretation of Jesus Christ that
we can anywhere find, for it determines for us what truths on
the sacred page are most valuable for the vast stream of life that
is pouring along across earth to eternity. If this spectacle is not
badly read it indicates that what the world needs is a perfect
combination of Christ as an example and Christ as a mediator,
a full confession of man's power and God's power, a full conversion and a high enlightenment. The world reveals three
great wants-pardon through Christ, light through Christ, a
new heart through the Spirit. Give a soul these, release from
its guilt, a new heart for new deeds, new light that its deeds
may be right, and it has found the inmost heart of Christianity.
Not only does the great mission movement at home and abroad
reveal the valuable part of theology, but it declares to us what
Christianity is in its essence. It is only a perpetual crusade.
It is not a life-long encampment in the midst of luxury and
ease, but is a march in search of the happiness and holiness of
society. Hence, the great awakenings of the past have come
from Christians who were almost homeless and Churchless, who
were light-armed and unencumbered, fully out in the world for
a campaign. Mankind does not run to a new life from an instinct. Men make long journeyings to fields where diamonds
are sown, and to where gold sparkles in the sand, but they do
not seek a spiritual religion thus. It makes the journeyings and
bears the cross, the hymn and prayer, to Greenland's icy mountain and India's coral strand.
It is the glory of these missionary centuries that they have
inaugurated a religion which does not withdraw into a little circle marked out by wealth, or ease, or selfishness, and there wait




A  Missionary Relzgion.             45
for a wicked world, and a neglected and unwelcome world, to
come and beg to be let into the mercies of Christ hidden by
the cruelty of man, but a religion which issues forth from the
disgraceful repose of past ages and sings its hymn and offers a
loving invitation out in the wide world by every shore, under
every sky. The world has seen enough of a religion which
wraps itself up in indifference and knows and cares nothing of
the human family. Greece had such a type of morals, Rome
had such a form of spiritual death; and enough has the world
had of religion that was bound to state and had no destiny but
that of empire; and ready now is society for a Christlike faith
that goes forth like the perfume of roses free to child and king
alike, a fragrance which climbs over walls and out of palace
windows, and mounting into the chariot of the summer wind
crosses the field of the poor laborer and the highway of the
traveler, a breath from heaven, an emblem of God's grace.




THE WORLD'S GREAT NEED.*
PROF. DAVID SWING.
Ye must be born again. —yon iii. 7.
The great pursuit of the wisest, and best men that have ever
lived has been to help onward, and upwards the morals of the
people. By common consent the names of Socrates, Seneca,
Marcus Aurelius, Luther, Calvin, Knox, Penn, George Fox,
are the grandest of names. Beside such stars of fame, the
lustre of a captain in bloody war, or of a Cresus, or Rothschild, fades away as glow-worms at sunrise.  Nations have
always looked with love, and confidence upon their moralists.
Mark the Chinese love for Confucius, and American love for
the morals of Washington, and Franklin.  There is a common
feeling that in such men lie the reasons for national success,
and the basis of security. Out of them seem to issue the nation's moral life, as the tree grows from rich soil.
Now what is it that exalts these few moralists? What is it
that determines at once that such men are the jewels of their
century, or State?
Morals do not please as does music, painting, or eloquence.
Morals do not make us laugh, or weep; and hence Paul, and
Daniel, and Luther, and Fox must be lifted up in the world's
esteem by some new, and peculiar kind of fact.
It seems to me we find this fact in the public conviction of
the utter depravity of the masses, and in the public approval
of any soul that can, or will help a depraved race upward.
Paul is loved the more because the world feels deeply that such
morals are a stranger to it, and yet are its only hope. Suppose the world to have been quite free from sin, Paul's moralizing would have been without significance. Martyn's trip to
Persia would have been only the roamings of a traveler.
It is the world's confessed wickedness, it is the world's universal, and inborn depravity that makes the Christian, and
*A sermon preach ed in Standard Hall by Prof. David Swing, pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian
Church - (destroyed by the fire).




The World's Greal Need..                47
moral leaders flame like suins in the human sky. The fame of
every such man as Paul, or Socrates, or Seneca is a public confession of depravity. Those mIen are thrown up by a great
want. Their fame is the confession of old sorrow, old grief,,old tears. It is the awful fact of universal sin that renders
these names so precious. Their wreaths are woven by the
fingers of Sorrow. What rendered the life, and words of
Marcus Aurelius so beautiful? It was the fact that not a living
mortal known to the whole Roman world had lived, or could
live after that fashion. He was bright by reason of the dark
background.
It is not worth while, therefore, to quarrel with the Bible
when it says, " I was born in iniquity;" "the heart is deceitful;" "the heart is desperately wicked;" and " man must be
born again."  The conspicuousness of Christ, of Paul, of
Penn, of the great Elliott among the Indians shows that the IBible
is only a picture of human life, and that men do need to "Ibe
born agrain."  You may quarrel with theologians if you wish,
who have taken Bible texts into their labratories, and have
re-appeared after long stirring of the crucible having in their
hands some strange compound of mysterious color, and questionable use; but with the plain Bible - with its words, " Ye
must be born again "- let us have no debate. It was the
effort of the old chemists to turn all things into gold, but the
old theologians seemed to have l)ossessed the faculty of changing gold into all things else; and taking a pure, priceless truth
from the Bible were wont, unconscious of its worth, to join it
to their amalgam, and then emerge with a poor oroid — their
very faces meanwhile crying out the old, "Eureka."  With
these, one may dispute, but as for the simple words of the
Bible, they are the picture of the world's facts. They are the
mirror, which reflects back to us nothing but our face with no
dleformity, or charm left out. Those words are deeply written
on all the generations, and their meaning is only too vivid. It
makes the heart, and the head to ache. Let us confess that
one of the most prominent facts of society is its moral weakness, its depravity. It ought to " be born again."
It is generally assumed that a child is born with certain
mental predispositions; with a gift for llancguage, for mechanics,
for poetry, for reasoning.  Hence it was said thousands of
years a(o, " A poet is not made by study, he is born."  The
great English dramatist says, "1 How hard it is to hide the
sparks of nature."  Another says, " Nature may lie hid for a
time, but at last she will reveal hlerself."  Thus it has always
been assumed, that when one is born he is hurled into a certain,orbit where he must journey forever, as calmly, and resistlessly
as the planets.




48             The World's Great Need.
This sentiment is not true to the letter, but it shows what;
Christ meant when He said, " Ye must be born again."  He
meant that the soul  must be hurled into being a second time.
Its first life was a failure. It ought to be reborn so that a new
genius, a new drift might be possible.
Oh! what a vast change is here indicated - a change in the
depths of our nature -a tearing down and re-building of the
very soul.
Now  the world's greatest fact being its degradation, its
greatest want is to be expressed by the wvord "; recreation," or
"reborn."
This is the world's great want.  It is its greatest want —
this reconstruction of the human soul so that it will no
longer love to lie, nor cheat, nor sin in any form, but will love
God, and all moral beauty. Even old Egypt, thousands of
years ago taught her citizens that after death the soul stood
before God, and a Council of two and forty just men, and had to
make the following statement: " I have not blasphemed. I have
not stolen. I have not stirred up strife. I have not slandered
any one. I have not practiced any crime. I have given food
to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked."
Unless the soul could make this statement truly, it was at once
stricken from  existence; but if it could make this statement
truly it went to heaven. These creeds Champollion has deciphered from  old carved rocks unread for years, far in the.
thousands.
Yes, the great want of earth is a society living in honor, and,
virtue; loving God, and mankind. Such a result would be
Heaven. To approach it, and finally reach it, is the mission of
religion.
There are several Christian sects that do not sufficiently
magnify this idea of conversion, or new life. They believe in
it, but do not make it the great central thought of their teaching.  With the Methodists, and Presbyterians, and their
kindred schools, the first effort is to help convert men, and
and hence their great question to the candidate for membership is, "Do you feel that you have undergone a change of
heart; do you hate sin; do you love holiness?" And persons
enter the Church, or remain out, according to the responses to
these inquiries. It matters not if some assert a change who
have really met with none, and if some assert a falsehood knowingly. The questions are exactly in the line of the world's
reform; they are the great questions to be asked, and hence
the religion that most patiently asks them, and most lovingly
seeks affirmative answers, will always secure better results than
a Church that passes them by in silence, and assumes that all
is well in the soul.




The  World's Great Need.                   49
The perpetual effort to build up a new spiritual life, the unchanging conviction that soul needs a profound reform now,
and the accompanying belief that such a new drift of being
may be found by the heart, has all the advantage to be found
in all direct effort toward a result. The pure rationalist will
assure you, that the quantity of education, or wealth in a land
will be, as the quantity of zeal, and longing, and will - power in
those two directions.  We are informed, that the good elocution of a Greek orator, was the result of long conflict with a
natural foe, and that the culture of all Greece, was the result
of a national zeal along one narrow channel of feeling, and
thought. From the universality of such facts, has grown up
the maxim that " the gods help those who help themselves."
In a world subject to such a law, it is cruel to strike from religion the intense longing for a new heart, and the absorling
belief in its necessity, and then wait for moral progress to come
in by some unknown gate.
It has counted wonderfully in the race of usefulness that the
Methodists, for example, have for one hundred years, turned
their longings, and efforts toward the immediate reconstruction
of the human spirit. Notwithstanding the weakness of shoutings, and the frequent discord in their old hymns, the long
pursuit of a better life has given at last to our land, millions
of the best citizens. The Presbyterians present a similar spectacle.  Guilty often of fanaticism-guilty of midnight meetings, and of falling to the floor in the struggle with the old
Satan, they have nevertheless surpassed rationalistic methods
in the great work of recasting the soul.  In some of the villages of Persia, there is to-day a sudden, and vast reform
taking place under the mission banners, in the name of the
actual pursuit of a regenerate heart.  What llen seek, they
find. Only that gate opens at which men knock.
It is useless to reply, " We do not believe in a miraculous
conversion of the soul, but only in a conversion brought about
by study, will-power, hymns, and prayer;" for it is of a change
of heart only I speak.  I have said nothing about the agent in
the new creation.  The pure rationalists believe in a " changed"
heart, and would seem bound, therefore, to make this "new
heart " a vital thing in their Church life. For it is the world's
greatest want, its greatest longing, its only hope.  Some orthodox sects pursue with more zeal this one object —the transformation of the heart-and hence seem to be more in the path of
the highest human duty-more fully in the path of reform.
From Dr. Ryder's* letters, you will perceive that his philoso* Referring to a correspondence in the Chicago Tribune between Wm. Ryder, D.D., of St. Paul's
(Universalist) Church, and E. O. Burgess, D.D., of the Christian Church, growing out of a sermon preached by the former on Rev. George H. Hepworth's renunciation of Unitarianism.




50            ~The 1Vorld's Greal Need.
phy believes in a new heart, but in securing this new heart,
instead of increasing the labor, and whole pressure in this life,
lie prolongs the time. He diminishes the l)olwer, and doubles
the time. He allows us future centuries upon the other shor&e.
in which to come to a harmony with God. But the orthodox
limit us to a few years here, and hence pursue with more enthusiasm, and with deepest feeling the work of reforming their
fellow men. They shorten the time, and double the impulse;
and when we remember that what this world needs is good
men on this side of tile grave, rather than saints on the other,
we cannot but feel that orthodoxy is the best friend of the life
that now is. When we consider that the great enemy of
society is sin, the religion that makes a change of heart its
chief object, seems evidently the better one for the great end.
Only those efforts count in the progress of the centuries, which
harmonize with the world's great need-c which become parts
of God's work —parts of the development and growth of
humanity.
It is to be admitted that education, books, art, reason help to
convert the soul —to change it —hence all enlightened pulpits
are full of usefulness. But when to these influences a Church
adds an additional effort, pointed and urgent to convert the
heart, it may well claim a special usefulness. A Church will
be useful according to the depth of its realization that men
must "be born again" — not hereafter, but in these passing
da ys.
Let us come now to a comparison of the means for creating,
or producing this new heart.
There are sects that expect a new heart to come from the
common means of civilization. A new heart as to sin, is just
like a new taste as to learning, or music-a simple result of
culture.  They call in no special agents, no superhuman influellce.
The truly orthodox, to the influence of all natural means,
add the special influence of God's Spirit, and of a di-ine
Christ. In the very outset one might conjecture that a religion
claiming help from God, and from a divine Savior, would most
sowerfully affect the heart. None of the influences of civilization are left out, but in addition to these the heart opens up a
communion with God; opens up a study, anmd soul-communion
with Jesus Christ, and thus casts itself into the presence of
infinite purity, power, justice, and goodness. What are the
ordinary forces of civilization compared with such a fellowship
as this?  The element to be eliminated from man is sini. Now
civilization bears within itself a great remnant of sin. Civilization is not holy. It is not infinitely just, and pure. But the
Spirit of God is the very opposite of sin. The soul, therefore,




The World's Great Need.                  5T
coming to God, comes to perfect purity, and sees its own wickedness as it can never see it in human culture.  Before this
soul-communion with God, the influence of human agencies
fades in feebleness.
It may be that, here and there, an individual might seek
moral perfection, without being influenced by the idea of God.
In sober years, here and there, a soul might seek what might
be called morals, as being a refined temperance of life. I think
Stuart Mill has said, he could imagine a religion of humanity,
where man would seek uprightness from a love of himself, and
of society's peace; but these possible theories, count nought in
presence of the sweeping fact, that all morals have revolved
around the idea of God. God renders virtue necessary, and
beautiful, and is to be its reward. As the eyes of servants
look unto the hand of their masters, as the eyes of the maiden
unto the hand of her mistress, so our eyes, wait upon the Lord
our God, until He have mercy upon us.
While God is Creator of material worlds, yet the heart feels
that they are but decorations of His temple, and that the rational soul is the chief end of the world in its height, and depth.
Hence the greatest relation of Deity, is the relation to the soul.
Hence God must be the God of morals more extremely than
the God of matter.  If, as Hamilton says, "there is nothing
great on earth but man, and nothing great in man except his
soul," so we suspect, that there is nought so great in the sky
as God, and no attribute in that blessed One so vast, as His
moral beauty. When, therefore, the heart thinks of its sin, it
must at once, in fear, or in hope, feel the weight, sweet, or
sorrowful, of that sinless One, all around like the air, or sunshine.
In seeking a new moral nature, the soul must fly to this vast
bosom, and seek its new life there -
" Go when the morning shineth,
Go when the noon is bright,
Go when the eve declineth,
Go in the hush of night."
Hence, when we seek the conversion of the human race, give
me that religion which leads the wicked heart up to a communion direct with God, and with Jesus Christ. Where God
is, there is no sin; and the heart that believes most in God,
and looks most to Him for help, will become separated most
widely from the love, and pursuit of vice.
It is an attribute of human nature, that it is educated by
objects outside of self. Before each scholar, there stand some
great scholars of the past alluring, and detaining, and transforming the mind of to-day. We are all lesser lights, revolving




52             The World's Great Need.
around some central sun of immense light, and heat. Without
this influence we make no progress.
In religion it is not otherwise, and hence, most useful must
be that form that makes of Christ a divine Being, and invites
the heart to move about such a centre of power, holiness, and
love. Its theory would seem at the outset to promise most for
society. The moment you declare Christ only a human being,
you have weakened His influence upon the soul. The light,
and warmth are eclipsed, and the poor soul gropes about, and
tries to find in civilization a power denied it in the realm of
the divine, and infinite. To part with ignorance, let us go to
the learned; to part with sin, let us go to the presence of the
holy.
As the planets get further from the sun their light, and heat
diminish. Their flowers, and fruits lose sweetness; their summers shorten. What must it be in the most remote Neptune -
three hundred times as far away as our earth! Oh, star of
perpetual ice, and winter; without bird, or flower, or leaf!
But to chill the central sun would give the same result. Now
in the soul's universe, there is a scene as dreary. Christ is declared to be only man-only fallible man. And thus the
human race is crowded back, far away from the old centre of
Divine warmth, and light; and many is the soul which this
theory has left without a flower, or leaf, or trace of summer
time.
Mr. Hepworth excites hope only in this, that he has kindled
a little better central sun for his heart -has declared Christ
to be Divine, above other measure of divinity believed in by
many of his sect. He redoubles the radiance, and the warmth
of that character that has always shone in rejuvenating, converting power upon the heart. Men looking upon civilization,
or culture only, may not be reborn in spirit; but looking upon
a divine Christ in love, their souls are affected by the holiness,
and immortal life in the great vision.
Instead of man's revolving around humanity, Mr. Hepworth
invites him to revolve about the Divine. It is a step upward,
but not an espousal of orthodoxy, not even a departure from
the old Unitarian Creed. To preach fully his gently orthodox
ideas it seemed not necessary to withdraw from associations long
and sacred; able in themselves to clothe his words with power
-for the creed of his denomination embraces his ideas in its
grandest books, and many are the hearts in his Society that are
willing that the soul of Channing should come back to the
half-desolate home. I feel that there are thousands in the
Unitarian body who are willing, even anxious, to have a common, fallible man plucked from the centre of their system, and




The World's Great Need.              53
to see replaced there a divine Savior, drawing all hearts by
His love, and he avenly attributes.
The world will, sooner or later, be compelled to go to the
Divine presence - not to human presence - for its new heart.
Mankind has not holiness enough to entice any heart from its
sins -has not love enough to persuade, nor power enough to
alarm. It is the conception of an ever-present God; it is the
sublime divinity of Jesus; it is communion with these characters; it is a belief in the infinite love, and power, and justice,
and in the all-pervading presence of Deity, that can give to
this world noble, converted hearts, and can bear earth along
toward the new birth - the new genius of human life.




THE GRADUAL DECLINE OF VICE.*
DAVID SWING.
"It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah."-Matthew xa: US
The names of these two cities, over whose ruins the Dead
sea is supposed to roll its bitter waves, are read before you this
morning as words that may remind you that the present is not
the only age of vice, but that great sins lie back of our times.
I announce as my theme " The Decline of Vice." The discourse before you last Sunday closed with an appeal to you to
gird up your strength against the evils of the age; but that we
may all possess some general, truthful view of the work on
hand, of its magnitude and despair or hope, it seems desirable
that an hour should be given to inquiry as to the present attitude of human depravity compared with the long yesterday.
This inquiry may lead us along two paths, the one leading
through the a priori question, What should be the result of
the increase of knowledge? The other leading through the
actual facts with the question, What has been the history of
sin? The relation between knowledge and virtue is, as a general truth, the relation between a cause and an effect. While
no one will contend that knowledge will fully regenerate the
heart and make a saint out of a sinner, yet the tendency of
information is to raise the individual to a higher plane of morality. Our penitentiaries, and also our observation, teach us
that ignorance is the mother of vice.  Says an old Greek,
" Better to be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root
of misfortune." The great Robert Hall said, " Ignorance gives
an eternity to prejudice; a perpetuity to error." The majority
of convicts in the dungeon or upon the scaffold cannot write,
but use that fatal emblem called " his mark." All through the
Scriptures virtu; is represented as a light, and sin as a darkness, and in obedience to this distinction, Satan is the prince
of darkness and Christ the light of the world. Every motion
man makes is along the line of his information, it being the
great path maker for him in the wilderness, his pillar of fire and
cloud in all his long journeying.
If you find an Indian planting a few seeds in wild Oregon,
or setting forth with his spear to kill fish, or with his treacher* Sermon delivered in the Fourth Presbyterian Church, March 29, 1874.




The Gradual Decline of Vice.            55
ous arrow to attack his enemy, he is moving along the lines of
his information, and he will use all his light about planting his
maize, or spearing the fish, or waylaying the white man. Over
his dead enemy he will shed no tears, for he knows nothing of
a golden rule, and nothing of the rights of man or the sacredness of life. All moralists or causists so feel the causal relation
between ignorance and crime that they hold the heathen world
to be responsible for not having sought such light as might
have improved their virtue, thus confessing that the order of
nature is "light " and then "virtue."  When a mind like that
of William Penn, or Richard Cobden, has made a study of man,
and has looked into the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness, it becomes incapable of the atrocities which give
actual pleasure to the untutored Modoc of the West. Penn
and Cobden are rays of light upon the heart, emblems of that
softening of soul which God's great truth always brings.
God's moral world and His physical world being covered all
over with a net-work of laws as numerous and delicate as the
tenderest webs in the spider's web, the first equipment for living in this world is a wide information as to these laws of body,
and mind, and society, and religion. A knowledge of these is
the sun which must turn night into day, and sleep into life.
It is now seen that under the increase of knowledge in the
medical art, the average of human life has risen, and is now
ascending.  The relation of air, and exercise, and food, and
sleep, to health has been so studied from the standpoint of science and experiment, that this new light pouring around the
body lengthens its years, and makes them not only longer, but
happier. But God's world being all founded upon the same
fundamental law, information will play the same part in morals
that it performs in the medical art, and will tend to add to the
quantity of virtue as truly as the study of pathology has
extended the human lease of life.  In such vast empires as
India and China, where murder, and theft, and infanticide are
customs allied to those of religion in a wonderful, but senseless partnership, the entrance of light alone, omitting any
religious principle, has gone as far toward checking the bad
customs as the new steam plow in Turkey has gone toward
supplanting the old crooked stick that was once dragged
through the fields.  It is a great mistake to suppose that all
the ills of mankind come from their not being religious or conscientious, and that all the human family needs is a sudden
conversion to our Christianity.  Conversion will only check
those actions which the mind knows to be wrong, but will only
add fuel to a line of bad conduct, which the mind supposes to
be right. Religious conversion brings only an increased desire
to follow the right, but it does not designate a new right for




56          The Gradual Dechine of Vzce.
the mind. Hence, in the dark ages, a religious revival among
the Catholics was always attended by a new slaughter of Protestants, because the new zeal in the heart did not bring any
new information to the intellect, but only fanned the existing
ideas into flame. What is demanded along with a well-disposed
heart is a well-informed intellect. However good a man may
be, it will be perfectly impossible for him to escape a vice unless
he knows it to be such, and hence information or knowledge is
an absolute condition of morality or manhood. The opiumeaters among the lowest classes in China, and the dirt eaters
and whisky drinkers among the Indian tribes, do not descend
from an origin of sin only, but from an ancestry of ignorance.
Their noble life will come not simply from a study of religion,
but also from a study of physiology and all the laws of health
and refinement. Men are bad enough through sin, but they
are wretched beyond this through ignorance. In India the
most devout fakirs, who live for nothing but God and the soul,
will once a day roll in the mud, or in the foulest gutter, in order
to show their contempt for the sinful thing called the body.
Now what those fakirs need is not an increase of religion, but
an increase of sense. They need to learn that sin is not in the
body, but in the soul, and that the true God is not a being worshiped by a beastly conduct, by a wallowing in the mire, but
by a noble, perfect soul in a pure, perfect body. When Christ
forgave His murderers, on the ground that they knew not what
they did, He reaffirmed for us the proposition that much of the
world's sin and evil comes from an ignorance that thinks in the
midst of awful actions that it is doing God's service. It serves
Satan under the supposition that he is God. The evils of the
world are wider than the direct desire of mankind to commit
sin, for millions do wrong supposing it to be right; hence, in
order to find some foundation as broad as this dreadful superstructure, we must combine ignorance and wickedness, and
then we have the base adequate for the fabric.
Having thus found that ignorance is a vast cause of the world's
great evils, we infer from the gradual spread of intelligence
that the great vices are on the gradual decline.  If the cause
is declining we need no a posteriori inquiry to show us that the
effect must be so far on the wane. If the supply of food has
failed in India, we need not wait ninety days in order to learn
the effects from the actual dying beds of mothers and children;
and if a rich harvest soon comes, we need not wait to learn the
result from the strong men in the streets next summer, and
from the ringing laughter of children.  God's world is so
unbending in its relation of cause and effect that the moment
a cause is abated one jot you may assume an equal abatement
in the result. Now, much of the evil of society coming from




The Gradual Decline of Vice.            57
ignorance, we may, so far as ignorance is being dispelled, congratulate the world upon a decline of its moral sorrows.
Having thus alluded to the influence of increased knowledge,
the question that remains is, Has human knowledge increased?
Has ignorance been modified? Has this plague been somewhat
abated? We think that no one will deny that knowledge has
gradually increased in those nations which have in twenty-five
hundred years spread out from the Mediterranean.  Light
steadily advanced in the Hebrew nation from Abraham to Daniel; and from the Greek and Roman starting points down
through the great nations of Europe and America, information
in all departments has been steadily amassed and handed down.from one era to the next. Especially in the last three centuries has all truth become an object of pursuit and love; and
hence every science, from politics to chemistry; every inquiry,
from the rights of the throne to the most practical physiology;
every theory of health, from a study of health to a study of
exercise, has been unfolded in new breadth and new affection.
The sciences of chemistry, and physiology, and hygiene have
marshaled their startling truths in front of the great vices of
the social evil, and intemperance of drink and of food, and
have battled them for a hundred years, and the attack increases
in fierceness each generation. Hence, if there be some relation between ignorance and vice, that ought to be abating the
vice which is confessedly so abating the ignorance.
But we behold another great light shining down from the
Mediterranean shore, a light better than the stars that shone
from the sky of Greece and the sky of Italy. While all information in Christianity, or politics, or philosophy, has its secret
influence in favor of virtue, yet it must be confessed that a
knowledge of all the high duties of man, man as related to
self, and to friends, and to society, and to God, is of all the
best, and if any truth will check sin, that relating to duty and
soul and God must be that powerful knowledge. Looking back
we see a star that makes all others fade. Its light, radiating
out from nothing but a manger in the outset, and from a rude
cross at last, has for eighteen hundred years diffused itself all
over the Western hemisphere, embracing Russia, Germany,
France, England, America, all as a mother throws her arms
around the children who were lost but are found. Christianity
set forth, not as a conversion alone, but also as a light for the
mind. Pontius Pilate may have been sincere, but he was ignorant of duty, and weak in its moral attributes. Christianity
moved upon the world not as a simple zeal, but as a light, and
hence, if to know what the body is, and what the soul is, and
what earth is, and what death is, what heaven and hell may
be; if to have some just conception of God, if to hold some




58          Thez Gradual Decline ofj Vice.
correct view of our neighbor and all the reciprocal duties of'
life, if to know the golden rule and that the pure in heart shall
see God, are truths of any value, then Christianity comes as
the profoundest information which has ever burst through the
clouds and shone down upon the world of man. Looking upon
Christ as a moral light, and looking as far as a feeble intellect
can grasp such an effulgence, we ought to conclude that vice
has suffered a shock in that so lnuch of its foundation of ignorance has been swept away. But we reminded you that evil
had two elements in its foundation, the one ignorance, the other
hostility to the truth, even when well known.  Christianity
attacks both these foundations of evil, and works equally with
the intellect and the heart, revealing duty and making the soul
love duty.
Seeing, therefore, a gradual increase of knowledge from the
great Eastern sources, Greece, Rome, and Palestine, and seeing
this knowledge spreading out westward in all that varied magnificence of science and gospel, of crucible and cross, of body
and soul, of human liberty and divine love, and then remembering the invention of printing which has poured this varied
wisdom into every house as sunlight pours into the window, I
must reach the conclusion that the vices of the civilized world
ought to be on the decline. There are agencies abroad in the
world which appear adequate to a reduction of the quanity of
wickedness.
Our second inquiry was designated as being a survey of the
actual facts in the case. Having seen what the spread of light
ought to accomplish, we may inquire whether there has been
any such moral achievement. First, let me warn you against
supposing that the loud outcry now raised on all sides against
every form of vice and dishonor, indicates that evil is on the
advance and goodness on the decline, for the present turmoil
proves only that the public sense has progressed so far that it
will no longer submit silently to great wrongs and follies. The
judgment and the moral and prudential senses have been so.
developed in the past, especially in the recent past, that silence
is no longer possible. What former ages endured easily because
of the feeble public light and public conscience, raises now a
vast uproar when seen in the new light and morals of the passing century. The great emancipation war which raged in our
land from I830 to I86o did not arise from the new barbarism
of slavery, for, as a fact, bondage had not grown more inhuman,
but arose from the fact that an old evil had encountered a new
intellectual and moral development, and hence came the great
conflict. It is with such reflections we look upon the present
conflict over. intemperance and the social evil. These monsters
have not absolutely gained in vice and ferocity, but the public




The Gradual Decline of Vzce.            59
conscience has grown until it has not the indifference to vice
which marked the world when kings lived for glory and pleasure, and nobles for banquets and the fox chase. These monsters,
which we call by the general name of vice, have been dragging
their foul lengths along over hundreds of years, and much of
battle is located in our time, because it has so gathered light
from reason and Christianity that it can no longer endure such
great wrongs.  The sin has been stationary, but the public
impatience has advanced.
Leaving these suggestions to the judgment of each of you,
it remains to allude only in a brief manner to the historical
facts in the case. Whoever would deduce any conclusions
regarding the moral progress of society, must deal only in
long periods, for earth is a star whose physical days are indeed
composed of twenty-four hours, but whose moral days are each
as a thousand years. Coming up out of God's eternity, where
ages sink like snow-drops in the ocean, our earth brought with
it this awful disregard of time, and makes little count of the
days of you and me, looks upon a summer and a winter as only
grains of sand upon its mighty shore; and all our three-score
*years sink into its mighty life as autumn leaves fall upon the
mountain side and are only received tenderly into its mold, but
create no jar in the wide and deep foundations of adamant.
To estimate the morals of the human family, to mark an increase or decrease of sin, you must look away from this day,
this year, this generation, and so far as possible behold all the
impressive spectacle that reaches from the old Eden to the
newest America.
What was that past? The words Sodom and Gomorrah
recall at once some of the early forms of the world's corruption. The vices of that period, as revealed in the history and
conduct of Lot, were not the incidental vices of a savage tribe,
but the vices of the most civilized nations, for the Hebrew
commonwealth, as far as the age of David and Solomon, repeated the sins of Sodom, only upon a diminishing scale, and
thus was a mirror, not of barbarism, but of the best type of
old civilization. The history of Egypt is a history of mingled
science and splendor and sin. The Egyptians actually worshiped gods of vice, and in all respects equaled the reputation
of Sodom and Gomorrah for indescribable depravity. The
exhuming of Herculaneum and Pompeii has lifted a veil from
the customs of the Greek and Roman worlds, for those two
civilizations were combined there, and there at that mountain's
base those two cities sat while nature suddenly embalmed them
for far-off generations. The excavations there reveal equally
old wealth and old vice, art and dishonor, a cultivated intellect




6o          The Gradual Decline of Vice.
and a darkened conscience, a light upon canvas and marble,
but little light upon the soul.
Passing by the notorious immorality or impurity of the
Greek and Roman and Egyptian lands, look upon some features of those ages not so commonly alluded to in these surveys of antiquity. Slavery was universal. The rights of man
as man were unknown. The Greeks knew the rights of Greeks;
the Romas the rights of Romans; but neither knew the rights
of man. Hence, no citizen did anything which a slave might
do. If pecuniarily possible, the literary man lay upon a lounge
while slaves wrote down his thoughts, or brought and took
away a volume, or prepared a glass of fragrant wine. Marriage
was a frail partnership, and the courtesan often more honored
by statesmen than the more refined, home-loving wife. The
amphitheatres were a full blossoming of the ignorance of the
rights of man, and of the absence of mercy from the heart.
In days when ten thousand innocent men were dying in one
reign, in presence of eighty thousand spectators, composed of
the best citizens of Rome, Cicero was justifying the bloody
spectacle; and in one instance when no exhibitions had been
given for a time, a petition was sent to the district governor,
or prefect, that he would order a show at the amphitheatre,
and he graciously said " that not to grant their request would
be cruelty."
All through this Roman splendor parents held the power of
life and death over their children, and infanticide was very
common; and next in cruelty to that was the exposing of infants, under the law that whoever found the exposed child
could claim it as his slave forever. Its chance was for death
or bondage. Mothers who did not choose either of these barbarous resorts, could sell their infants into bondage in open
market.
Lecky says the classic religion exerted no influence upon
public morals, for when it taught any valuable truth there was
no religious zeal that would nourish the truth into life. At
your leisure, my friends, look into the picture of Roman and
Greek life, and you will rise from the study thankful that you
live in even this wicked city, and that between your home and
antiquity the light of a new knowledge and a new religion has
fallen in heavenly beauty. As to the great special vices, intemperance and the social evil, which so injure our land, it ought
to cheer the heart that these powerful foes are only two out of
a large host which once attacked society, and that these two
are feebler than they were a hundred years ago. The social
evil was almost universal in Europe from Caesar to Napoleon.
Montaigne says there were no virtuous men in his day, and,
indeed, we all know that the social vice has swept over the old




The Gradual Dech'le of Vice.            6 
world as no pestilence or war ever desolated its cities and
homes. As to the use of drinks, it may be said that abstinence was almost undreamed of before our generation, and an
intemperate use of liquors, from ale to distilled drinks, is as
old as the genius that invented the villainies.
We need not descend into particulars. You can recall them.
Called upon as you are to contend to-day against the vices of
our land, you all seem fully authorized to feel that knowledge
and religion do gradually wear away these hard rocks, and give
the world a better soil for the moral growth of this generation
and its children and the myriads to come. God is no more in
the law of gravitation than I-Ie is in the laws of reform, and
hence as the Niagara has cut its deep ravine back from Queenstown, so the moral power of education and religion are as surely
carving a channel through the mass of wickedness on earth.
God's word, His truth, will not return unto Him void. As the
sun's heat always melts the snow of our fields, and always will
while sun and snow continue, so the word of truth spoken by
anyone anywhere always will add something to the progress of
mankind. God is not only immutable in the law of chemistry
and all physics, but in the laws of His love, and if His children
assail ignorance with truth and sin with conscience, every movement of the humblest Christian will record itself for good in
the bosoms of those that come after the record. Let us look
at these great facts and always be of good heart, for although
viewed by itself alone, the present looks dark in its sinfulness,
and although the efforts of Church and press seem powerless,
yet looking away from our few years and reading the changes
of society as recorded upon the centuries, we plainly perceive
that every good word and deed of each day is embalmed in
the great brain and bosom of mankind. As each tree helps
make the green of the distant forest and does its part in the
impenetrable shade, so the truth of all lips to-day and the
prayer of each heart are, in some manner unseen to us but
seen of God, handed down to those who shall come when your
lips and heart are dust. To a child looking upon the cold sky
of March it seems impossible that spring and summer are coming, or can come, but the older mind looks beyond the single
morning, looks beyond April and May, and beholds in June a
continent covered with waving grasses and trees, and in soft
morning air dripping with dew-drops from Maine to Oregon.
Thus gradually mankind advances toward an era when the
banner of knowledge and the banner of the cross shall wave
over every city, and light and love and virtue shall be in every
soul. Such a destiny is read in the nature of man and in the
character of God.




A RELIGION OF WORDS.*
DAVID SWING.
Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he
that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Matthew vii. 2r.
Spirituality is one of the highest stages of civilization, and
therefore comes latest in the course of human development.
Material associations are the first, hence man first makes up
his language and his pantheon of gods out of the solid substances that surround him.  The first man was of the earth,
earthy; the second man was the Lord from heaven. That is
first which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.
And as man has borne the image of the earthy, so shall he
bear the image of the heavenly. The first Adam was made a
living soul; the second Adam a quickening spirit.
In this great transition from the material to the spiritual,
years are consumed in the life of the most earnest individual,
and in the advance of society in this path a thousand years
count only a little. The most sincere heart escapes from materialism so slowly, and so slowly resolves itself and its God
into a quickening spirit, that an infinitely long existence would
seem to be foreshadowed in this leisurely evolution. To that
which grows slowly we attribute long time. The glacier and
the accumulating shore of the sea, and the vast oaks of the
Pacific slope ask us to allow them long periods in which to
have developed their peculiar plan. So the slowness of human
unfolding asks us to grant to the individual and to society a
vast field called immortality. Instead of drawing only sadness
from this tedious march we also find in it an assurance that
there are many years beyond.
But our theme for the hour is that a spiritual religion comes
last in human experience, and before it comes a religion of
things and of words. To offer things to God was earth's first
form of being religious. The old temples were full of bows,
arrows, shields, helmets and jewels put away from human use
*Preached in McVicker's Theatre to the Fourth Presbyterian Church, by the Pastor, Rev.
David Swing.




A  Religion of TlWords.              63
by a solemn gift-making to the gods. Horace reveals the fact
in one of his poems that the sailor rescued from drowning,
hung up in the temple what he wore on his body when the
divinity rescued him from the grave. A gift was the only
known acknowledgment.   Different cities vied with each
other in making their gods rich. What gold! what garments,
what jewels, what armor in the temple of Juno, and what
luxuries there were in the temple of Jupiter!
The Athenians, upon the eve of a battle, vowed to Apollo
that if he would grant them success they would offer to him as
many kids as there were slain of the enemy on the field of
battle, and so bloody was their success that the classic nation
did not possess flocks enough to meet the vow of the worshippers, and the state funded, as it were, the promise, and offered
five hundred a year through successive generations.
Worship was thus conducted by offerings. From baskets of
fruits and flowers to thousands of valuable sheep and oxen,
gifts were heaped upon the altars. At the dedication of his
temple which was itself a costly present to Jehovah, Solomon
sacrificed twenty-two thousand oxen and one hundred and
twenty thousand sheep as an offering to Him who had brought
them out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage. All the earth was covered with this religion of gifts.
Hindoo and African, Jew and Gentile, Indian and Roman,
Parthian and Greek, accomplished the life of religion by offering some things to their favorite deity.
Good came from the custom, for, that spiritual worship is the
highest form of religion, does not make useless or harmful a
form full of material things and ideas. The gift-making worship only takes a second position, inferior, but not useless nor
absurd. In Solomon's days not to offer a lamb to Jehovah
was to be an infidel, for the religious thought and feeling of the
times flowing in that channel, the heart that made no offering
was an infidel heart. Each age has its own atheist and infidel
fashioned out of its own shape of life. Solomon's vast offerings,
aside from any relation to a coming Calvary, were, in the current hour, an act of religion, just as an imperfect song is music
to those who love it, or as a rude log-hut is a sweet home to
those, perhaps half-starved and half-clothed children, who have
lived only by its door-sill and its hearth. To laugh at what
others possess and to base that laugh upon the superiority of
what is our own, is often a mild form of ignorance and selfconceit. Each age has drawn honey out of its own flowers,
even if the flowers were wild and of pale single leaf. A gift
was a surrender of self, a confession of dependence and a first
leaf of charity.
The gift-worship at last passed away. Christ long borne in




64              A  Relzgion of Words.
such an earthly casket outgrew the narrow confines and
appeared in fullness and broad liberty.  In Palestine, the
religion of gifts terminated virtually in the Sermon upon theMount, and in the marvellous spiritual life of Jesus. The gift
of himself ended the whole gift idea by divine appointment,
and by its excessive grandeur, and the purely spiritual philosophy of Christ and His apostles flying on the wings of the
Roman language, and Roman fame and power, passed over the
world in a circling, rapid flight. All the ends of the earth had
felt the Roman power of arms, of letters, of law, of genius, of
energy, so that Christianity, climbing into the chariot of Rome,
was rapidly borne to all human hearts within the civilized empires of that era. Gifts disappeared from all the temples, lambs
and oxen from all the altars, and religion began to resolve itself
into a prayer, and penitential tear, and a faith and a hope.
While property measured the value of man and of his god,
the surrender of it by man was the most obvious form of service, and the favor of heaven was bought not by a change of
human character, but by a bestowal of human goods.
With the uprising of Christ, religion began to withdraw
from presents to the Deity and betake itself to the heart.
"Blessed are the pure in heart."  " Blessed are they that
hunger and thirst after righteousness." " The hour cometh
and now is when the true worshipper shall worship the Father
in spirit and in truth for the Father seeketh such to worship
I-im."  "The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this
mountain nor yet in Jerusalem worship the Father."
In this second state of religion a new heart became the chief
object to be reached, and rewards from God were promised, not
to him who would bring richest presents, but to him who would
bring the purest life. But mankind was not ready for this
cardinal idea. At least mankind will do nothing hastily. It
will not pass to perfection in a day. It will not suffer itself to
be hurried, but, like the glacier, must have its own rate of
speed - the inseparable trait of its character. No voice has
ever found instantaneous obedience. A spiritual religion announced, and a spiritual religion accepted, are different matters.
A divine being and a few followers may announce one, but the
world is always far below the leading divine souls, and hence
after heavenly words are announced it will continue for a time
in paths much like those of yesterday. A resemblance is
demanded.
From a religion of gifts the world soon hastened to a Christianity of words. Words were the outward sign and in that
the heart paused.  There were a few generations of simple
piety such as St. John revealed, but the measurement of Chris



A  Rehgzon of Wllords.               65
tianity was soon found in the propositions to which one was
willing to subscribe.
Words are the forerunners only of deeds. They are heralds
that announce a coming king, but the king's chariot is slow.
Hence when you find in the times of Caesar or Louis XIV., or
Calvin, the finest statements about purity and charity, that is
no sign that there was any public purity or charity. They had
simply been announced, just as a vessel has been signaled
when it is yet far out at sea, and perhaps falling back before
storms. Words precede actions often by a thousand years.
And thus the Sermon on the Mount is not so much man's law
as man's prophecy. The world is grand, not when a prophecy
is uttered, but when the fulfillment comes.
Millions were finally put to death in the long Christian centuries when they would not repeat the words of the party in
power. Honesty of life, religious devotion, prayer, kindness at
home, purity of deed and thought, counted nothing if the regular words of the ruling power were not pronounced. The
most exemplary men, the tenderest mothers, the most gentle
daughters, fathers whose families were dear to them beyond
language, were hurried to the flames or rack because they could
not say the words fixed upon by the pope or the tyrant in
power. It was words, words, words, and death everywhere.
No estimate was placed upon the inward life. Myriads died
singing or praying to the spiritual God and their lives had been
full of purity.
Elizabeth imprisoned for life all who conducted religious
service without using her Prayer Book. Persons not believing
in bishops were branded with an iron. Anabaptists and Arians
were tortured and then hung. As internal piety was little
dreamed of as being a religious test, it was as absent from man
as from God. God was a being partial to a prayer-book or to
a bishop. Forms were everything. Knox declared that one
mass was more fearful to him than ten thousand armed enemies
landed in any part of the realm, never harboring, for an instant,
the idea that beneath the service of the mass there might be
a pious heart. There was no weighing of soul; it was all a
listening to words, and a crowding to the fagot those whose
words deviated a hair's breadth from the model held in
the hand of some bloated ruler or licentious priest. In this
awful reign of iron sentences little girls of childhood innocence,
and mothers whose love is an emblem to earth of love infinite,
went down to early tombs in the double agony of flesh and
heart; but the heart of a dove counted nothing in an age of
vowels and consonants. Catholic words killed thousands of
Protestants, and Protestant words killed thousands of Catholics.
All imaginable doctrines have, in the long, bloody period,




66             A  Redzgzbon of Wl4ords.
been made a ground of life or death. Words about baptism,
words about the Trinity, words about the pope, words about
transubstantiation, words about the Virgin Mary, words about
the Eucharist, words about the doctrine of purgatory, about
astronomy have exposed the body to the stake and the soul to
perdition.  The holiness of Galileo were of no avail if he
taught that the earth turned round each day. It was not an
inner belief that was demanded, but an outward unity of
dogmas. Hence life was offered to heretics if they would only
repeat the rejected dogma. What he really believed was not a
matter of importance, if he uttered the conventional creed.
No change of heart was expected or thought of, for the soul
was not so much thought of as church unity. The outward
othodoxy was the grand consideration. Hence when Galileo
consented to the idea that the earth does not turn and that
the sun does go around it, he descended from the public penitential platform saying in a whisper, " The earth moves." No
one cared for his inner thought if he only stood by the public
words on the subject.
This zeal for dogma resulted from two causes. First cause,
the fact that man comes slowly to a spiritual religion. That is
the perfection of worship, and hence like all perfection must
come slowly and come last. To get away from the outward
and to throw one's whole being into the idea that what God
demands is a pure heart is a condition of mind to which only
Christ and the angels have yet come.
A second cause of the enthronement of dogmas lay in the union
of church and government. A new dogma might build up a
new party, a new party might displace the party or power. The
class believing the earth to turn around might become so powerful as to overthrow the party that plainly heard the Bible
declare the sun to rise and set, and that saw the sun set every
day. The inner life of a man was nothing, the silent belief of a
philosopher was of no moment, but the perpetuity of the party
in power, the long continuance of power and incomes was very
desirable, and hence the dogmas held by the party on the throne
must be spoken to the crowd by all, and by all constantly and
everywhere. Certain assemblages of words stood for the pope.
Other words might exalt an astronomer or a Pantheist and his
followers. Thus forgiveness was always offered a victim even
on the pile of fagots if he would repeat the pet ideas of the
church, because the church meant not salvation, so much as
poWIr and seguk  inmAmes!
In our own country it has been the sorrow of us all to see a
doctrine regarding slavery made more conspicuous, for a half
century, than the doctrine of a pure life, rendered a test of othodoxy not because of any heaven or hell, but because of Con



A  Relzgzon of Words.                67
gress and patronage, and high and low caste. Thus in these
two causes - the difficulty in the way of a spiritual religion and
the identity of church and state one may find the influences
that gave mankind a religion not of the soul, but of many and
intricate, and often contemptible doctrines.
That there are great doctrines, the obedience of which is life,
the disobedience of which is death, is very evident. Truth is
the food of life, the stuff that life is made of; but these truths
are few compared with that assemblage of ideas that can be
seen on the bloody field of history. Each aspirant had a discrimination of idea upon which to base hope, not of heaven so
much as of earth. Certain ideas stood not for a virtue, but for
a party in the church or state. They were not paths of spiritual salvation, but the emblems of authority. Like the secret
words of masonry, they were not words that converted a soul,
but words that stood for an empire. Morgan was put to death
not because the ideas he uttered were valuable, but because
they had been agreed upon and stood for a masonic order. So
heretics were burned, not because what they said interfered with
virtue, but because it interfered with some mitre or crown. A
new idea was treason. This was all done in the name of sincerity for it was easy for the Deity, who had once been a Deity
of gifts, to become one of dogmas. God became a Being to be
worshipped with dogmas. A man not baptized was so offensive
to God that hell was only too good a place for that soul! An
infant not baptized died hopeless, God was so partial to baptism! If this baptism were not administered by the proper
church, it was still worse than no baptism, God was so partial
to a particular church! And thus onward, until the blessed
God was wholly occupied in the protection of a hundred forms
of speech, and the human soul was occupied, not with purity of
heart, but with repeating the terms pleasing to the ideal Deity
and the pope. This pope was not always Catholic; sometimes
he was Protestant.
Now salvation is a term whose meaning depends upon that
which is lost. If one has lost property, his salvation will be
the recovery of that property or its equivalent. If one has
lost his good name by false accusation, his salvation will be
found in the emblazonment of the falsehood, and on the return
of public good will. This man does not need much dogma but
rather, he needs acquittal and a better fame. If the soul has
lost virtue and piety, then salvation will be found in a return
to piety and purity, and the truths of salvation will be those
that lead him to that one result. This is the destiny of Christ's
mediation. Hence the essence of religion is found in the one
event or phenomenon, a righteous heart. Gifts to the Deity
were the infant creepings of religion, the shadow of a coming




68              A  Reldzgz on of Words.
reality, the manifestations of an incipient love that did not
know how to express itself. Not knowing that what God most
wished was a pure heart in His children, they loaded His temples
with their jewels and raiment, and His altars with their lambs.
Then came the days that brought God an offering of words.
Imagining Him to be a God of articles and forms, they repeated thousands of words and baptized their guilty foreheads in
much or little water as an act of salvation.
And now the world awaits the last transfiguration of human
worship, into a spiritual condition, into a soul lifted above sin,
and exulting in a nearness to the image of God. The nations
await with tears of past sorrow, a religion that shall indeed baptize men and children, either or both, but counting this as only
a beautiful form shall take the souls of men into the atmosphere
of Jesus, and into the all-pervading presence of God, and detain
them there, until sin shall have become a hated monster, and
perfection of spirit the heaven of this life, and that to come.
Terms must give place to righteousness and communion with
God.
In our day the empire of words still lingers. The churches
are still wedded to quantity more than to quality, but wedded
by bonds that are growing weaker under the uprising of the
" inner life " philosophy. The churches still eagerly keep count
of their membership, and publish the members that joined
their bodies last year, but keep no record of the number of
Christians that lived dishonorable lives in the last decade, quantity rather than quality still being a ruling passion in our halfcivilized world. But Jesus Christ was not gifts, nor words, nor
quantity, but quality; and surely as the world shall last, mankind, under His leadership shall march nearer and nearer to
the world of spirit, where quantity and words shall all be overwhelmed by the sweet music, " Blessed are the pure in heart."
If Christ was anything, He was spiritual perfection. He was
not a voice saying " Lord, Lord, " but He was a spotless soul.
Hence the world coming up to His religion, at last, will find itself in an atmosphere not full of the tenets of Elizabeth, or
Mary, or Calvin, but full of that transcendent whiteness that
indicates that sin has been washed away and that the righteousness of Heaven has come to the heart, like a joyous morning
in paradise.
In this coming era upon whose margin I do feel that the
world is standing now, like Florida upon the border of flowery
spring, our citizens,our fathers, our brothers, our friends, our children,will move before us, not with conventional words upon their
lips, but with faces radiant with the consciousness of a nobler life.
The good deeds of yesterday, the good deeds of to-day, the
perfected goodness of the morrow, a deep love for man, a con



A  Reize-zon of Words.               69
sciousness of the presence of God M ill fill the whole face with a
nobleness and happiness to which earth has thus far been
willingly a stranger. This will be a salvation and Christ will
be a Saviour.
And as for those dear ones, who in the long past have died
because of words, the Covenanter children, whose parents were
burned before their eyes in fires of agony and orphanage; the
Quakers, flying before the vengeance of outraged dogmas; the
Catholics murdered because they looked toward Jesus through
some symbol, will all come back to a spirit-shore, where
Christ will know His children by the golden thread of love in
their hearts and where no fallible human judgment can ever
come to separate a Christian soul from the realm of perfect liberty, perfect justice, and perfect happiness. Man as a ruler, as a
tyrant, has perished. He lives only as a brother. The dominion and power have returned to the Infinite One- infinite in
tenderness.




THE VALUE OF YESTERDAY.*
DAVID SWING.
For ask now of the days that are past. Deuteronomy, iv:32.
Time is one of the incomprehensible things. If we gaze up
into the blue sky, and thus shut out all lowly objects, and then
repeat the word time to our soul, we will find ourselves absorbed in a deep mystery. Each breath M e take lies partly in
the past, partly in the present, partly in the future. One of the
most beautiful sentences uttered over the name of Jesus Christ
is that one of Paul-" Christ, the same yesterday, to-day and
forever.
Time divides itself into these three continents-yesterday,
to-day, and to-morrow, each grand, and each peculiar-and
each measureless. The divinity that presides over to-morrow
is called Hope; the present has no guardian by name, and the
divinity of yesterday is called Memory. There is no eloquence,
no poetry, no process of reasoning that can do justice to the
beauty and influence of any one of these periods. Looking
backward and forward the heart becomes overwhelmed with the
weight and mystery of the theme.
The study of the distances in the heavens in which we find
that there are suns whose light could not have reached our
world in less than a million years, is scarcely less bewildering
than this contemplation of the yesterday and the to-morrow.
Led by its own impulse the human heart has always prized the
morrow more than the present, or the yesterday, and hence
has written the most of its poetry in the name of Hope. Hope:
has always been the popular goddess of earth's children. When
all other shrines are vacant, this one receives its daily offerings.
of flowers. When the seven classic philosophers were holding a.
banquet together, it was asked of them, "What is the most.
universal possession?"  The reply agreed -upon as most accurate was the word hope, for he that has nothing else has hope..
But this extreme popularity and worship of futurity constitute a reason why the mind should guard against a total ob-.
livion of all else and form an excuse for reading before you this.
morning the words of the text, "Ask now the days that are past."
For the hour let us oppose the orators and the poets and the
* A discourse del;vered in McVicker's theatre, Sunday morning, June i, I873, by Prof. David
Swing.




Tce Valuc of YeCsferdat,.             7 
youth and beauty of the realm, and speak in behalf of yesterday. We shall not find the same loveliness of person that belongs to Hope, but what is wanting in bloom and smile may find
compensation in wisdom and pensiveness.
The days that are past are like a mother whose youth and
powers of mind and affections have all failed in the life-long
devotion to her children. The marks in her forehead, the whiteness of her face, the solemnity of her heart are only proofs that
her bloom and vivacity have journeyed over to her loved ones,
and their life, their love, their works, their language, their song
are a direct inheritance from the one who is soon to be recalled
from their sight. Thus Yesterday, going back to the tomb of
Solomon or Moses, or in that longer journey proposed by recent sciences is, whether we go back a thousand or a million
years, the mother of us all, and the tomb, and ruins of all the
nations are only marks upon the forehead of this great parent;
they are the whiteness of that face which faded in behalf of new
life and new happiness. The lonely silent pyramids, the brilliant ruins of the Acropolis, of Palmyra, of Thebes, the deeply
entombed streets of old Jerusalem, all the ivy-covered minsters of Europe, Catholic or Protestant,are fragments of that home
where Yesterday lived and taught the new generations playing
about her feet.
The greatness of man as pictured in the future may be a dream
so far as our life, or our nation's life is concerned, but the past
is a great fact of which nothing can rob us,and whose worth no
fancy can over-estimate. In order to behold the presence and
kindness of God, it is not necessary to draw upon the powers
of hope any more than upon the powers of memory. It is
a confessed truth that by nature we look for the most and
and highest good in the future, and, since God is the ideal of
goodness, the soul beholds Him unveiling himself in days that
are to come. We say, "Our Father in Heaven," more in anticipation of what He will be than in confession of what He has
been; for the sin and suffering of earth make it logically necessary for us to select the future as the arena of the Creator. But,
having confessed this logical superiority of the future, the past
yet remains a vast field of religious truth and sentiment.
Let it be granted that there is a personal God whom we define as the sum of all perfections, yet we could not prove that
it was necessary that this God should have expressed all His attributes in the very first years of human life. If it was lawful
for the human race to begin in a childhood that could neither
speak nor walk, and if it was lawful for all science and art to
begin with simple lessons and slowly work forward, it would
seem equally lawful that the Creator should not unfld all His
glory to the first generation, but should strew it along for a ten




72             The Value  of Yesterday.
thousand or million years period. All the beauties of earth are
progressive beauties, all the arts are progressive arts, all the sciences are progressive sciences-and hence one might expect
that the infinite love of God would be subject to a slow manifestation of itself. A priori reason would suppose, perhaps, that
a God of love would be found proceeding as such from the outset in the history of a creature like man, and that man would
never know a year or a moment of sin or pain, that barbarism
and depravity would be impossible for a day or an hour. But
being driven by the facts away from the use of a priori logic we
must fall back to the second best logic, and, following the phenomena of science and art and all human activity, must suppose
that God selects not a day or a year for His own full emblazonment, but a vast epoch such as is demanded by geology or the
study of the stars. With this confession in our minds we can
" ask now the days that are past," and see in man's face and
language and laws and arts the gradual unfolding of divine wisdom and love.
A child taken from our public schools at the age of twelve
years and examined in reading, in conversation, in knowledge,
in music, will be found to possess a language that consumed
six thousand years in its construction; it will be found to possess knowledge that has been wrought out by the toil and perhaps sorrow of a hundred generations. It will sing perhaps a
song,' My Country'tis of Thee, or " Home Sweet Home," that
is the upshot of thousands of years of sentiment and thought
about liberty and home. What then is a bright pure school
child to-day, but a place where God's love and wisdom in days
that are past have treasured up their tenderness as the earth treasures up the dust that for millions of years has filtered down
upon it out of the invisible either in which the worlds all float?
But pass from the school child to all the school children, and
to all the adult minds and hearts that move upon the earth,
listen to all their wisdom and music and industry and eloquence,
and do you not feel that this multitude measures a great revelation of God above that day when earth possessed but one
man or family, and that one without language and without
learning and without virtue?
There are two theories about the origin of man. The one that
he was made in his present form by the Creator by a simple
instantaneous command, the other that man is the result of
a long development and mutation of species. Thus the only
dreamed of theories give us only one human being in the outset, and that one a human being defective in language, in art,in
learning, in hope, in memory. Defective in language because
there was nothing to be said; in art for there was no one to admire
the skill; in learning because there was no language in which




The Value of Yesterday.               73
to express facts; in hope because there was no realization of
any imperfection or death; in memory because there was
nothing to be remembered.
In the first human being therefore, God could no more display His perfections than a musician like Mozart could unfold
his genius to an infant, or to a South Sea Islander. Could the
divine virtue be perceived by a being that had not perceived
sin? Could the divine immortality be appreciated by an individual who was a stranger to death? Could the divine omniscience be felt by a being that had not yet learned or developed the love of knowledge? By no means. Could the sun reveal its power and beauty if it had nothing but a clod to shine
upon? Give it a planitary system, skies, stars, clouds, continents, seas, fruits, flowers, and it possesses then an arena for its
play of color and light.
In order that God should reveal himself, a race was necessary,
not only moving in vast multitudes, but moving along vast
periods of time; and hence, recalling the days that are past, the
heart in the least religious may perceive a Creator scattering
the attributes and truths of His own being.
You tell me God is sinless. Looking into the future we perceive only a dream, and turn away uncertain, but, looking into
that vast realm called Yesterday,and perceiving that sin has always brought sorrow, and that virtue has brought beauty of
face, and life and peace of heart, I come back from that survey
feeling that righteousness is a divine attribute. The sins of
men are so inwoven with the sorrows of men that this very tumult and perpetual weeping are only an announcement of the
benediction, " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God." But it is impossible to descend to particulars. We can
only say that the immense past of humanity may be viewed as
a field in which the arts and the industries and the philosophies and religion, taking the form at last of Christianity, have:gradually found opportunity for the revelation of their glorious
natures.
But, turning aside from thoughts about God's own emblazon-ry, think of man himself and his immediate personal relation to
the days that are past. As we said in the outset, great is
*the office of hope. We have no word too good or extreme for.that faculty, but we would enter a plea in behalf of the value of
yesterday in its relations to mind and heart. Hope is a grand
sentiment, but it conveys no information. All the information
of the soul comes up from the days that are gone. Hence one,of the best thinkers said," Not to know history is to be always a
child." The value of the ideas that enter into human life is
chiefly to be learned by watching their evolution and workings
in that great workshop called Yesterday. Take the idea of lib



74             The IValue of Yeslerda3,.
erty, and no dreamer who looks into the future can behold its;
length and breadth, but'he alone can measure the import of the
term who hears the cry of the slave from the days of the Romans down to the career of our own land, and who sees the
prosperity of freedom from Athens to Florence, and from Florence to England and America. Take the idea of home,and if you
would feel the import of the word, look not forward into poetic
haze, but back into human experience, in the tears of sadness
and joy that have fallen by the feet of any exile going away
or coming back; or look into your own childhood and consult
its memories and then the term unveils itself with no
light or shadow left out.
Beyond the unfolding of truths Yesterday possesses another
power-that of softening and modulating the mind and heart.
Egotism draws its vanity from a perfect forgetfulness of yesterday.
Self-consciousness and coming greatness erase all else from the
mind, and the egotist stands great in his possibilities. He is
just about to conquer a world or greatly surprise one. Any
deep study of his own or of the world's yesterday would drain
his heart of the last drop of personal vanity, for there was an
arena and he did not conquer nor astonish a world-and there
all those who were more highly endowed are sleeping in forgotten dust. If the past utters anything that is of value it is
that all self-worship and glorification are the weakest shape human nature can assume, and that there is nothing worth living
for except the general mental and moral progress of self and of
mankind.  The great graves are those which cover the
dust of hearts that did sonie work that entered after them into
the public welfare and happiness.
There is no vanity away from man. The sea gives us her
music without egotism. The rainbow spreads out her gorgeous
lines without boasting. The nightingale sings her notes herself unseen among the wild thorn, in the silent night. The
floral world in June fills the air with perfume, and the sight
with her indescribable tints, but without any ostentation. Man
alone has vanity; not because man alone has soul for this would
be to degrade soul below the standard of dumb life; but because man alone has wandered from the divine path. This wandering has been aided and abetted by his blindness to yesterday, and by living only in the proud thrones and crowns and
glories of to-morrow. Vanity draws its chief nutriment from
the future. This is, perhaps, the reason why nearly all of us
pass through a vain period in early years. Fortunate is the
heart that did not, in early life, pass through a score of years
of personal greatness.  The animal spirits and poetry of
youth make it despise the past, and dwell only in the
land of hope, and as the future contains nothing that can




The Value of Yesterday.               75
humiliate, contains no tombs, no disappointment, no dust
of the heart, it carries the young soul away from truth
and decorates it in its own regal and gaudy drapery. But
when the past begins to be recognized by the mind, when the
soul looks back at its own path and the great path of mankind,
a spirit rises from that wide, silent ocean that drives away all
self-worship and makes man stand up in a combined strength
and humility-the only combination worthy of man or his
Makcr.
It may, perhaps,be a beautiful providence that young persons
look only into the future, for there certainly should be some
years of life set apart for a happiness without much alloy-and
such a joy does come from  a steady gaze toward that realm
whose gates are not only always garlanded; but are always open.
But if this be so, then I know there is another providence also
that makes man as he draws near the noontime of life, labor and
usefulness, begin to look back and find in the history of man
a sober truth and a self-forgetfulness and love of mankind which
the rosy future could not give. Hence despise not the years
when you find your reflection begins to look back, for God has
not without reason placed behind the human race a long five
or ten thousand years, and it is not without reason that thisl
past is constantly becoming more immense and more varied..
It is the soil out of which man grows and is to grow, and the
longer the rains wash down the mountain sides, and the more
of yesterday's leaves and grasses mingle with the mold, the
greater will be the productions of to-morrow.
Yesterday contains all the battlefields in which freedom was;
gradually wrought out from many threads all dipped in blood.
Yesterday contains the experiment and the failure of all despotisms. Yesterday con tains the onset and defeat of every form.
of sin and vice. Yesterday holds the ashes of all beauty, and,
of all life except that of the soul with God. Yesterday is full of
past usefulness and of its ways and means, full of tears and
their causes and cures. In that shadowy domain there stands.
the cross, and there is the Saviour dying for the vast myriads.
of a race. God has not without reason thrown such an immense history behind His children of to-day. It must be that
out of the world that has been there is always flowing down:
to those who are living a stream of wisdom and character that
bears onward to a sacred destiny.
The past is the long, uniform trade-wind that bears the spirit
along toward its far off haven. The ship striking those winds
has around it a friend that shall for days and nights and for
weeks, without calm or storm, bear it along over the wide sea..
The human spirit, if it will guide its course properly, may pass




;76              The Value of Yesterday.
into such a moving air, that, without storm or calm, will day
and night throw it along toward a better,nobler home.
The poet Dryden bequeathed us a poem upon this great dream
of to-morrow:
Trust on and think the morrow will repay,
The morrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse, and while it says you shall be blest,
Steals all the pleasures that you once possessed.
Aware of the value and beauty of hope, and not daring to,depreciate it in the least,yet I do wish you all to feel that there
are two other powerful influences in human life,in each individual life, to-day and yesterday. A bad yesterday is the saddest
condition of the soul. If one can only look back upon a good
yesterday, the future need not be feared; but if yesterday was
marked by a great crime or folly I do not see how there could
be an eternity long enough or purifying enough to wash it
white.   There  may  be  some river Lethe  known  only
to God and created by  His mercy, dipped into which  the
soul may forget its vice and crime, but reason looking upon the Catherines de Medici, or upon the violent murderers of our own land, cannot see anything in the countless
years of eternity that could erase the vision and memory of
the black spot.  " Things past," Livy says," may be repented,of, but never erased." Yesterday is nothing but to-day passed
over by our mind and heart. The great duty of the hour is,
not to gaze with poetic rapture into the future, but to weave
out of the present a glorious past.
One of our poets says: " To-morrow do thy worst for I have
"lived to-day." And the old Martial says: "Didst thou say thou
wilt live to-morrow? He is the wise man who lived yesterday."
To-day is the sublime part of life because it is continually making that yesterday which will always follow  us go where we
may in this life or one to come. Aristotle says there is one
thing which God cannot change and that is yesterday. If this
is so and we all feel that it is, then there is one thing better than all high resolve-namely noble deeds already done.
Better therefore than hope of great things to come is the mem-,ory of good already performed. Shakspeare says:
"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have only lighted fools
The way to dusty death."'
Oh my friends before whose feet the stream of life is running




The Value of Yesterday.               77'
sweetly to-day, and above all oh ye young hearts who have
as yet no yesterday, but in whose hands its destiny is lying
all untouched and ready to be formed for joy or grief-do
not despise to-day, and fill your eyes with only the vision of
glittering hope; do not sit upon the banks of this stream
waiting for its waters to run by and bring you the beautiful future, but pour out your heart's powers and life upon
the present, because it is creating a Yesterday whose smile,
if it wears one, will never perish, and whose tears of sin, if
it has them, not even a merciful God can wipe away.
The chief part of your life is not that which spreads out
before you, but it will soon be that which shall lie back of
you. The impulse of a river is not in the broad expanse
where it emerges into the sea, but is far back of that in the
table lands and mountain ranges of a vast continent, all which,
having caught the rains and having dissolved the snows of
yesterday crowd the stream forward in a majestic sweep. The
wide mouth of the Amazon is the result of the storms and
snows of a thousand winters. Thus life should notgo on allured only by poetic hope, but pressed forward by the
momentum and majestic flow of days that are gone. Heaven is a height to which men climb on the deeds of this life.
Hence the Bible speaking of the dead coming to heaven,
says: " Their works do follow them." Oh yes, these works make
the soul; they weave its life out of their golden threads; they
fill it with wisdom and love and humility, and then throw it
forward to heaven as the south wind carries northward in
spring the song of birds and the garlands of flowers. Hope
is herself founded upon the past. It is a glorious past only
that produces a serene, glorious hope. Yesterday is the
foundation of the Heavenly City. Hope is the sweet blue
sky in which the structure rises. Oh friends, combine both
hope and memory. Coming to the grave he only can look
forward with joy who can sweetly look back.




VARIATION OF MORAL MOTIVE.*
DAVID SWING.
The love of Christ constraineth us.- Corinthians v.: 73. Love is the fulfilling of the law.Romaans xiii.: lo.
The world is so vast that no human foot can travel over it,
and no heart occupy all places with its home. Going to
Florida in winter, or Switzerland in the summer months, or
to the New England hills in autumn, one feels that in each of
these wonderful kingdoms of nature, he should build his home,
and live his whole life. Coming to the borders of a sweet lake
in our own Northwest, looking down from a silent forest into
the waters that are clear as glass to the depth of hundreds of
feet, the heart suddenly feels that it is good to be there, and
wishes to build three tabernacles for self and friends, upon the
spot where such divine beauty seems transfigured.  We forget
our limits of space and enjoy a feeling of infinity of space and
of perpetual life.
Then the thought comes that one cannot live every where.
Do all we may there will be beautiful spots where we can
possess no house. There will be waters we cannot look into,
bird songs we may not hear. It is sorrowful that there are
seas whose waves do not beat for us. Building by the lakes a
voice comes up from the Mexican gulf inviting us to its
early spring. Building by a mountain solitude the city sends
out to us its joyous shout, its music, its art, its eloquence-and
the mountain home is tempted even to ruin by a counter
charm. Sad warfare between finite man and infinite beauty!
In this bewilderment of the beautiful there is no alternative
left the heart but to conclude that the world is too large for it.
It cannot go all over it, cannot hold it all in its arms. Life
is too short for the enjoyment of all the grand days that open
their morning ptortals between the St. Lawrence and the Amazon, between the Black Sea and the Golden Gate. There is a
tomb in the grass that cuts short this wandering from joy to
* A discourse deliveredat Staidamd Halls Sunday morning, June 23, 1872, by Prof. David
Swing.




Value of JMoral 3Motive.              79
joy. The tomb is the author of all eclectism. With traces of
sorrow perhaps, but with resignation, the limited mortal heart
must say, the world is too large for me, and must select its
spot for life and for death. It must plant a few vines and trees
and make the most of its narrow realm. We cannot pluck all
roses, the hand being made for but one.
So the moral world of our God is too large. It outreaches
our mind and affections. It hath motives too many for any one,
but just enough for all; too many for a life, but enough for all
lives. All mankind make up a kind of infinity of mind and
heart, and an eternity of time, and in this vast sea of humanity
all God's moral beauties and forces find demand. But in any
one soul fluttering along over only a few years, as a winged
butterfly flits only over one summer's foliage, the divine
motives cannot all find full field of action. The heart not
being able to live every where must contentedly pitch its
tent in some vale, and say, " Here will I live and die." We
would not narrow down life from choice, but accept the order of
necessity. We would struggle to grasp as much as possible,
but with the full assurance that to comprehend and enjoy all is
denied us in God's decree.
The text, embody one of the fragments of the great realm of
motive. Christ's love of man and man's love of Christ, cause
and effect, make up a grand incentive to virtuous action. These
are not the whole of truth. They are golden branches plucked
from a great tropical wilderness. For the love of Christ is
not the only thing that restrains, nor is love the only fulfilment
of the law. In Oriental language a part is a whole, and one
beautiful thing is a complete world. The fear of punishment
also restrains. The fear of Christ restrains, and love is often
found in great- depth and yet the law is not fulfilled. Paul had
just said, " Knowing the terror of the Lord we persuade men,"
and, " We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ."
Such souls as Peter had, loved deeply, and yet had fallen into
sin; so that love did not fulfil the law. The "terror of the
Lord" was invoked to help restrain, and yet, amid these
phenomena come the words, " Love is the fulfilment of the
law" and "The love of Christ constraineth us."  Beautiful
transformation of what we love into a whole universe.
The philanthropic leaders in our age are wonderfully constrained by the love of mankind. Pity for the poor human
race, daily moves the best hearts that have ever lived. Before
this immense influence hundreds of our best men bow as before
a divine command. Thus we perceive that the world of moral
motives is as rich as the world of physical beauty, and if a
single heart cannot build its home by every beautiful vale, but
must go from the many to the one; so, in the world of morals,




80             Value of JMora l llo/zive.
the heart cannot but retreat from the whole universe, to take
refuge in a part. Its house must be by this river or lake, but:
not by all waters that sleep or run. The love of Christ is a.
beautiful part of the moral world. It is stated as if a universe;.
but this is a statement of love, rather than of logic. Lovealways confuses its dream with the picture of infinity. "Loveis the fulfilling of the law," is also a sublime part of the
moral world. It is quoted as being the whole, but this too, is
the language of admiration rather than of logic; for if this,
were the whole truth, it would only be necessary for men to be
sincere in sentiment, and their love would be the same as perfection. In the midst of a universe so vast, what can the
poor limited heart do, but accept of some one great impulse
an impulse acquired by taste, by locality, or by inheritance,
and build there its earthly house for it's few years here below?
There is a sect of Christians now rising up in our land, orrather coming into the world a second time, who have reached
what they call the higher life. Led by such noble minds as Pro —
fessor Upham and Dr. Boardman, and Inskip, they have de —
veloped a piety, which has eliminated, not only all doubt from
their mind, but all care and sorrow from their heart. To them
no pain can come. They are glad when their friends die, forthey see heaven so near, and they say that God is so with
them, that this earth is a border of Paradise. They have
reproduced with additional beauties the quietism of Madame
Guyon of the seventeenth century. Turning their gaze upon
only peace in God it has become a universe and all else has
faded from their horizon.
Thus in tranquility of soul there is found a motive of life, a
power that hurls into the sea of oblivion the sin that comes from
this world's temptation, and the sorrow that comes from its
physical pain and death. The grave is the cradle from which
earth turns away and leaves the sleeping child to be rocked of
angels and to awake with God. These fresh hearts may be in
error to-day, as that woman and the great Fenelon were two
hundred years ago; but they illustrate the general fact, that
one or two motives are all that the heart can carry, and
these become to that heart a whole world. They are to it im —
mensity and eternity.
To the city of God there are many paths, paths for different
centuries, different meridians, and different individuals. Therewas something in the times of Calvin and Luther and on to
Jonathan Edwards, that enabled the motive of punishment to
be very influential for good. To inquire whether anything
would have done as good service, would be about like the in —
quiry, whether some other method of light and heat might not
have been resorted to by the Creator, that would have made:




Value of Moral Motlive.              8I
our existing sun unnecessary. It is certain that "the terror
of the Lord" wielded a mighty influence on the past centuries;
and the same impulse of virtue will always be extant and
active; but to the millions of a subsequent age a new impulse
is liable to arise, and, expressing itself in the words, " the love
of Christ constraineth us," may, for a time, be a complete universe to the existing heart. The horizon is daily swept for
new clouds.
New motives are always unfolding and blossoming with new
colors. Our fullest roses were once single leafed. Some seek
riches for fear of a poor-house at last, or the jail for debt.
Nobler minds seek wealth, because of the education and beauty
it will buy for the dear loved ones, or for the brothers in the
street. Each age and each form of government is fashioning
a religious argument for itself, despotism admitting the element of authority, republicanism admitting the sweeter influence of good result, caring less for ipse dixit than for the fitness of things. Motives come and go along with the coming
and going of new times and new men. The arguments for a
holy life change. The old ones do not become false, but they
fail to please. New ones are demanded by the new minds and
hearts coming into life. In the childhood of you in this hall,
who are oldest to-day, it was customary to frighten young
hearts into virtue. We little children feared a dark room for
reasons good then, but poor now. All misfortunes were the
vengeance of our Heavenly Father following some bad act of
the past week or day. We did not hear much about the text,
"Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth."  But the Christian
children of to-day, are led along virtue's path, by being shown
the lovely side of Christianity. Music, books, Christmas festivals, tender Sabbath-school teachers and a thousand inventions
of love, draw their spirits up toward that Being, who gave existence and name to Christianity. The new motive rises like a
star. The love of Christ constrains them.
There can be no one impulse to virtue that shall monopolize
all souls and all times. Mind is too full of variety. The times
change too much and we are too much changed in them. If
there be one word deeply carved upon God's works that word
is variation. In the strata of the earth, on its surface, in the
faces of men, in the pursuits of society there is the record of a
God who is infinite in forms and qualities. Next to the beauty
of God's unchangeableness in principles, comes the beauty of
His variety in non-essentials The laws of vegetation are perpetual, but the leaves and flowers and fruits vary. The peach
was born yesterday, but trees, in the eternity past. God is fixed
as to righteousness for himself and for His children; but the
motives to it among men assume new shapes with the shifting




82               Value of Moral Motive.
time and place. It is always purity that lies before the soul;
but whether the heart shall be led to it by the intrinsic goodness of the object or by the fear of punishment for seeking the
opposite are details that admit of variation. A deliberative
mind will be influenced by both ideas the passionate heart
by only the goodness of virtue, seeking it as the hungry child
seeks food; the cowardly, timid nature will seek it from fear.
The variety of motive will be demanded by the variety of
mind.
A deeply religious woman objects to the hymn,
" Prone to wander Lord I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love,"
saying that she feels no proneness to wander none to leave
the God she loves. She says, " How would it sound in our ear
for a mother to sing to her child,'Prone to wander child I feel it
Prone to leave the child I love'"?
To a nature of this kind the motives of Christian life are
formed on Christ himself. All considerations of perdition are
out of the question. The love of Christ constraineth. Love is
the fulfilling of law in all this passionate heart. It was so in the
school of Madame Guyon and Fenelon and the Wesleys- and
will always be so whenever the soul rises to a passion in love
and faith. Perfect love casteth out fear.
The higher life of religion will find its motive in religion
itself. As the musician finds his motive, not in the pain of discord, but in the sweetness of music, so the higher order of
Christian life will find its impulse, not in any fear of hell, but
in the beauty and good of Jesus Christ. As art is not the
avoidance of deformity, but the study of positive beauty, so
Christianity is not a flight from wrath, but a loving development and enjoyment of the more perfect life. God is not to be
sought because there is a Satan, but because there is a God.
When patriotism runs low and there is impending war it is
necessary for the State to repeat the law that treason is death.
This law is a perpetual fact. This law will never be repealed,
but it is kept in existence only by the low form of patriotism
possible here and there. But the true citizen lives above it,
and ignores it, and wholly forgets it, for his positive love of his
native land constrains him.  It fulfils the law.  Behind the
mercenary Persian troops went the driver with his whip, a man
with a whip behind each squad, and the victory came not from
love of country, but from fear of the scourge; but the moment
a country becomes worthy of love and its citizens become
intelligent enough to love it, the whip behind the soldiers is
superceded by the honor and happiness in front. The flag
overhead with its red, white and blue carries a divine impulse




Value of Moral Mo/ive.               83
in its waving folds. Its threads are the threads of life-its red
is the blood of men's hearts. Before this banner of beauty the
fear of a Persian whip falls out of all use and even remembrance.
It would be dreadful if Christianity were less noble than patriotism and must be expected to draw its activity from a whip
on the field of battle. The banner of salvation is grander than
any that ever waved over bloody fields, even of human liberty.
It rustles in the winds of immortality. It is not the flag of a
transient state full of the graves of our children, but the flag of
that great Fatherland where there is no death and no tears.
Under its snowy white and its heavenly azure soldiers in the
higher life need no impulse but the love of their passion-full
hearts.
Hence the better men become, the more Christ-like Christians become; the more will the world of punishment give place
to the world ot peace and joy in the presence of Jesus Christ,
and the more intelligent and cultivated men become, the more
will they be moved by the positive side of religion; by its excellence rather than by its penalties.
But amid all the fluctuations of patriotism the law of death
for treason remains written on the statute book of nations.
And so in Christianity however any class or any age may rise
above the influence of penalty for sin, yet punishment remains
a perpetual fact in the ecomony of our God. Its dark cloud
will rise or fall according to the quality of humanity. Wherever there are hearts that can see no goodness in holiness, none
in honesty, and in charity, none in Jesus Christ, none in the
worship of God, wherever there are minds incapable of being
led by the intrinsic good of religion, there this dark cloud
of divine wrath is ready to descend and to envelop with its
thunders the soul that cannot and will not be enveloped by
love. The result of sin expressed in all religions by the word
"hell" is a perpetual influence, liable to go and come as
humanity advances or retreats in the path of intelligence and
morals,-but it must be a perpetual fact in a world of beings
capable of being immoral. A world of sin must be a world of
penalty.
As we said in the outset one heart cannot live in all the
beautiful places of earth, neither can it be led by all the motives of entire humanity. What is true of a mind may be true
of an age. It is possible for a whole age to become like Guyon and Fenrelon, enamored of one idea, and, forgetting the
gloomy hell,- draw all its spiritual life from a vision of Jesus
Christ and of His redeemed earth and happy paradise. The
love of Christ may constrain a whole age. This ought particularly to become the case in an age of unusual education and




84             Value of Moral Mo/ive.
culture, and in an age that develops the goodness ana benevo.lence of Jesus Christ. An age that loves the poor, that feeds
and clothes the destitute and famine stricken, that pours out
millions upon a burned up city. that governs its children by
love instead of torture, that enthrones kindness in public
schools and even in prisons and jails, and that does all these new
things in the name of a positive study of Christ, will not be an
age that will constantly threaten mankind, but an age that
will gently lead men toward the divine Jesus of Nazareth.
In dayswhen men cannot whip their children, in days when
men are arrested for cruelty to dumb beasts, in days when we
teach our children beautiful hymns and when we reward them
for any act of goodness, in days when there are homes for the
friendless and for the fallen, and millions are poured out for colleges where anybody can learn any science or art without
charge, in days when a child need not be a beggar, in days
in which Russia and America are fresh in the glory wreaths of
having set free 60,ooo,ooo of slaves it can hardly be expected
that the pulpit, ignoring this grand uprising of tenderness, will
daily point the horrors of perdition while the very street is
being enchanted by this vision of love. Oh what a betrayal
this would be of the pulpit's trust!
It must be confessed that the motive of virtue found in the
word punishment exists.  It will always exist; but if there
comes along an era that is blinded to this argument by having
its eyes fixed upon the love of God and the Saviour, then let
the public heart enjoy to the full this new, and powerful passion.
The terrors of the law have had whole periods allotted to
themselves and they produced the middle ages, and before them,
the Mosaic age. It is possible that an era that shall study the
positive side of religion and shall fly to Christ, not because
there is a Satan, but because there is a Christ, may work out
for the human race better things than came from the age of
monastic scourgings or from the penaltiesof Moses. A book
loved under the name of " The New Testament " declares that
"ye are not come unto a mount that might be touched and
that burned with fire, nor unto blackness and darkness and
tempest *  *  *  *  so terrible that Moses said'I exceedingly quake and fear,' but ye are come unto Mount Sion and
unto the city of the living God." The words spoken indeed
to Christians do nevertheless announce to all mankind the
ruling passion of the Gospel.  Its great spectacle is not a
Sinai but a Mount Sion, not a fiend devouring men, but a
Saviour and a heavenly Father reaching out the open arms of
infinite love to gather in us children.
If we have come to an age that seems to take up this domi



Value of Moral aMolive.               85
nant impulse of Christianity and to depress other motives we
cannot but bless God that He postponed all our cradles and
graves for this era of faith and love and peace. We are, I trust,
all more than willing to give our hearts to the spirit of our
own times, and would not for any gold go back to the age of
terrorism in politics, in domestic life and in Christianity. Confessing punishment to exist as a potential idea, confessing
prisons to exist for criminals, and death to threaten all traitors,
and divine justice to hang like a cloud over sin, yet we must
rejoice in all tendencies of ages and of men to base their moral
life upon the attractiveness of the good.
A French writer living in the time of Louis XIV says:
" Bourdaloue in his sermons astounds me." This was enough for
one tongue.' Massilon frightens me."  That also was well.
*' Bossuet makes me believe." " Fenelon makes me to hope and
love." Oh beautiful power of each of this matchless group!
If individuals thus have a channel in which their souls must
run all their life if it would go with any power or any happiness, so a whole generation may have its path, not as wide as
all truth, but very beautiful to it and leading straight to paradise.
The preaching of religion from the standpoint of fear is the
shortest mode, is the easiest method, if quantity of thought is
considered, for it is only necessary to breathe familiar anathemas over all the sinful race of men.  It is a longer and more
difficult work to trace out the application of the Gospel to all the,details of human life — to politics, to home, to childhood,
middle life and old age.   To gather up the rationalism  of,Christianity, its spiritualism - and its humanity, to unfold its
Jesus Christ - its Holy Spirit, its faith, hope and charity - to
develop in infinite riches of thought and feeling, is a hard, long
task:compared with the authoritative announcement of infinite
sorrow to almost the whole human race. But let us all rejoice
that the age demands of us all, pulpit and pew, the longer and
more thoughtful method of proclaiming the manifold riches of
Christianity.
The love of Christ that constrains us is not only a passion of
that divine heart, but it is a wisdom and kindness penetrating
a philosophy. This love of man flows and reflows through all
the doctrines and precepts of the Gospel. In the golden rule,
in the blessing of children, in the law of liberty and equality,
in the doctrines of salvation, faith, penitence and purity, in
the vision of God as a Father, in the delineation of immortal
life, the love of Christ is perceived - like a beautiful soul inhabiting a beautiful body. It constrains us. It is not a simple
passion of Christ for man, but it is a wisdom, an adaptation so
kind that men call it love, — it being too full of warmth and
tears to Je called a philosophy.




CHRISTIANITY  A  LIFE.*
DAVID SWING.' For the law of the spirit of life in Christ hath made me free from the law of sin and death." —
Rom. viii: 2.
In the verses adjoining our text, Paul clothes the sinful nature of man with the attributes of a person or spirit, and thus
while in man's intellect there is a spirit of good, there is in his,
body at large a spirit of evil. Instead of teaching the Manichman idea of two souls, he seems only using the varied forms
of illustration admissible in rhetoric, and in this liberty speaks.
of a good in the mind and an evil in the flesh. From this figure
he passes to that of two laws, one that is spiritual, and one
that is material, of the flesh, and when he would do good at
the command of the former, he suddenly does bad at the command of the latter. As in a dream one often in his whole mind
wishes to fly from danger but finds his feet unable to run or his
voice to sound the alarm, and thus is wholly baffled by the
conflict between his wishes and his feet, so Paul stood still, his
life being neutralized between the conception of a noble life
which lay in his reason and the instinct of a wicked life that
lay in his flesh. He delighted in the law of God, but he saw
another law in the members warring against the law of his mind,
and bringing him into a captivity, and thus, oh wretched man
that he was, with no one to deliver him from a body full of
death, from a flesh that warred with the spirit. Thus might a
dreamer, whose feet would not move in the moment of peril,
pray to be set free from such a body of death that the released
soul might escape. Commentators inform us that prisoners.
were often fastened to a dead body as part of their punishment;.
but evidently here Paul would love to be delivered from his
own flesh, which carried in it such perpetual discord as to the
spirit's highest ideal. He had a dead body of his own. While
Paul was thus dragged in two ways by two equally balanced
forces, there came to him a new force, even Christ, who turns.
the tide of battle, and soon the triumphant apostle said that.
the spirit of life in Christ had made him free from the law of
sin and death. The influence of a life in Christ was so spiritual
that the law of the humble, depraved flesh had retired from the
strife, and had left the law of the mind free.
*Sermon delivered in Fourth Presbyterian Church, March. 22,, I874.




Chrzi'stia nzy a Life.              87
From these seventh and eighth chapters springs up much of
the "holiness" idea of some of the Methodists, and from them
sprang the German mysticism of the fourteenth century; but
to us living in a less impassioned age comes the plain lesson
that Christianity is a Life. That spirit of life which was in
Christ, that spirit of being, so far above the sins and wickedness of common humanity, developed also those who were " in
Christ," and they walked no more after the flesh, but after the
spirit. By common consent, if not by actual demonstration, it
is affirmed of material things that they will perish. From the
great gardens of Babylon to the hut of the peasant, from the
splendor of marble palaces to the blooming roses, all, all, the
the cheek of youth, the eye of beauty, will fade and become
dust. So perfect is this desolation, that even the heavens must
pass away as a scroll and the elements all melt with fervent
heat. Along with this perishable organic world will go all the
mental actions and emotions that were based wholly upon it.
Appetite, passion, ambition, all states of mind that grew up
from the material of earth, point downward toward that dust
whence they came, and as the poet says,' Here the sword and sceptre rust,"
along with them will perish the passion that drew the sword or
the tyranny that swayed the sceptre.
On the other hand, by common consent, the world accepts of
a spiritual realm which is the antithesis of the great dust-seeking kingdom, a world where all the ideas and sentiments and
actions are tending away from the grave, and are reaching up
toward where God dwells, to the land of immortal life. Love,
charity, friendship, righteousness, benevolence, belong to a certain upper life called the life of the spirit.
Passing by the inquiry how the humble, dust-loving soul may
be transformed into such a spiritual character as that one which
came to Paul at Damascus, we come to the simple idea of the
text that Christianity is a spiritual life as compared with a
material or fleshly life; that it is a life regulated by a law of the
spiritual world, the opposite of a life regulated by the law of sin
and death.
When some of the former centuries came up to these two
lives, the one of spirit and the other of flesh, they came to a
great truth, but they ruined the great principles by their false
definition of both the lives. They made the whole circle of
human joy and industry and pleasure to be the life of sin and
death, and they made a life of retirement and self-denial to be
the ideal of spiritual existence. Hence came all that development of human sorrow seen in the old monastic, ascetic system.
When we remember Pascal, who tried to eat his food without




88                ChrisItzanzify a Lzfe.
being conscious of its pleasant taste, and who would not permit
his sister to address him kindly, lest he might experience the
weakness of a human friendship; and when we read that a'Kempis did not look upon the glory of springtime, because
such material beauty might make him forget the moral beauty
of God, we perceive the doctrine of a sinful and a higher life all
ruined by the false definitions of the two shapes of being. They
grasped the truth that religion is a life, but failed to know what
life is in its truest significance. They thought the whole outer
world a sin and a dungeon, the only arena of virtue. Our century having reached a new measurement of life, having defined
the word "flesh" to mean only sinful pursuits, and having
enlarged the spiritual life until it embraces all the pleasures and
honors, all the faculties of body and soul, having reversed the
past by declaring all God's world to be the arena of virtue, and
a monk's cell to be the soul's eclipse, it should now come up
afresh to the proposition that Christianity is a Life and by its
new wisdom restore a truth which the past has already ruined
by its folly. Before mankind will consent that Christianity is
to be their life, they will need to know what you mean by
" life," for if you indicate by that term the asceticism of Pascal,
or the narrowness and severity of the Puritans, they will reject
the religion as rapidly as all the pulpits can offer it. Only in
the current year has a pamplet been issued by a clergyman,
calling the attention of this synod to the alarming fact, that
there are Churches all through the land in which have been built
a kitchen department, and do in many ways thus dare to combine the temporal and the eternal. And last week we read a
printed letter from some religionist, who was arguing with great
zeal against the common household games of every kind, as
being only stepping stones to the great games played for a
stake. With such intellects ("' If shape that can be called which
shape hath none") to throw down before a community not naturally partial to the Gospel a definition of life, is to cast before
the pulpit not only the common obstacle of original sin, but the
additional stumbling-block of fresh, monkish absurdity. But
for generations the Gospel has had to contend, not only against
the "total depravity" of the world, but against the almost
"' total infirmity" of the Christian intellect, for, with the New
Testament declaring Christ to be a life, the Church has almost
drowned the voice by so defining " life," that educated persons
could, with great difficulty, be persuaded to seek or even to
admire it. With life defined as a solemnity, as a sorrow, with
home transformed into a prison, of which the father was the
jailer, with the Church conducted as a penance, with all the
pleasures of life identified with sin, laughter being a form of
evil spirit in the young, with Sunday weighed down by auster



C/ristzanily a Life.                89
-ities, the Church, instead of making men free from the law of
sin and death, rather perfected the bondage, and brought, if
not sin, at least a death of the intellect and the heart.
Before we can preach Christ as a "' new life," a life of the
spirit, it is necessary that we declare before all the world that
the spiritual life is wide and deep and beautiful. It is not the
life of Pascal nor St. Bernard. It is not the life of the early
Calvinist. It is not the life of the later Puritan, nor of the
Quaker who despises music and literature, not of the pietists
who have discarded reason, and who wait for the Holy Spirit to
tell them when to sleep and when to wake, when to read and
when to walk! No! Life must be defined with the map of
earth before us, and into its pleasures must enter all the landscapes and all the seasons, all the fruits and flowers, all its forests, plains, and mountains; must be defined with the map of
the mind before us, with all its faculties of conscience and reason and imagination and sentiment; must be defined with the
map of society before us, with all the obligations and duties
which spring from the presence of our fellow-men in all their
conditions and destinies, and above all must be defined with
the outlook of the soul before us. with its wonderful, almost
divine, relations to God and the Savior, and to worship here.and eternity hereafter. That it has called the infinite career of
man as to this world by the name of " flesh," and has frowned
upon it as being subject to the law of sin and death, is a caJlamity out of which our generation is struggling hard to escape,
that it may find a religion which the young may accept without chilling their hearts, and which the educated may accept
without exchanging a broad world of study for the narrowness
and complainings of a monk.
Our century perceives that under all the pursuits and pleasures of this existence the law of a spiritual nature may lie, and
that a naturalist, or a statesman, or a queen, or a musician, or.a judge on the bench, or a young heart in the open fields, may
be wholly within the spiritual life introduced to our gaze by the
Savior. The law of the spirit of life in Christ is nothing more
-than a grand, broad human life, all pervaded by righteousness,.and a certain elevated sentiment toward God and man. A
spiritual life is only a life purified and elevated. It is not an
existence narrowed as our ancestors thought, but a life sweet-.ened by holier impulses. Compare the politics of Charles Sumner and the politics of Henry VIII. Under that of the American lay a spiritual law, lifting all his words up into the higher
air of God; under that of the English king lay the law of the
flesh, dragging the throne down toward the infernal world.
Thus all through human being spirituality is not a shrinkage of
the heart into the limits of a cell, but a purification of its vast




90               Christianity a Lzfe.
natural breadth and depth. The middle age Christianity was~
a destruction of man, but the true Christianity is an expansion
of the whole human intellect and sentiment. As the philosophy of Guizot or Cousin was only expanded by their spirituality
above the philosophy of Epicurus, who said, " Let us eat, drink
and be merry, for to-morrow we die," so all human life, from
its love of nature and love of friends and love of truth, to all
its powers of progress and enjoyment, is only enlarged by the
spirituality which Christianity casts into these many streams of'
its action and being.
It is with such a definition of life before us that we gladly
announce the proposition that Christianity is not a group of
doctrines, not a long, hard creed, but is a life. A creed is much
like the architect's plan of a house. If competent workmen
should follow those plans a house would be the result, so when
any one possesses an orthodox creed in his mind as being true,
he is in the situation of a man who has plans for a palace or a
ship or a home. He has all except the palace or the ship or thehome. When any one comes to us boasting over his perfect
creed, we should remind him that if he will only live that creed
he will become a Christian.
We all remember when the Hungarian patriot journeyed all'
over our country carrying with him a written constitution
of a free state. He even issued bonds in the name of the new
republic of Hungary.  That parchment was the creed, but
inasmuch as a state is not a creed, but a life, the great Hungarian must sit down in sorrow and wait for death to remove him
from a world of blighted hope. The creed of the Church is
just such a written constitution. It has been read long and
loud at all cross-roads, but I will leave it for you all to answer
whether we have the house or only the plans of the architect,
whether we have the state or only a good constitution for one:
in some far-off futurity.
It is a most singular fact that in this great temperance reform
there is one special multitude of intemperate men, and a large
multitude it is too, which sustains full membership in an ortho —
dox Church, in a Church that surpasses all others in assertingthe divinity of Christ and the expiatory atonement.  No
Church can equal it in delineating the pains of hell and the joys
of heaven, and yet with all these cardinal doctrines flaunted
upon its silk banners and intoned by all its priests, this most
profoundly orthodox Church sends forth from its bosom, especially from its Emerald Isle, a swarm of human beings almost
wholly ruined by poverty, ignorance, and vice. They land upon
our shores by the thousands every week, and against their coming we do not object, for all Christian hearts ought to welcome
them from a land of famine and bondage to one of plenty and




CGrislfzanity a Life.              91
liberty; but coming, they prove that an orthodox creed no
more indicates actual Christianity than poor Kossuth's constitution was equivalent to an enlightened state. The sorrows of
Ireland all come from the fact that no Christianity has ever
been given them, except that of a complex series of articles;
the spirit of life which was in Christ has not been busy these
hundreds of years, freeing them from the law of sin and death,
but instead of this spirit of Christ's life being preached and acted
before them, a hundred articles have been repeated over their
darkened minds and enslaved hearts, with the accompaniment,
"Believe and go to heaven, or disbelieve and be lost."
In this awful treatment of human souls the Catholic Church
did not alone approach Ireland, but accompanied by a vast
Protestant Church, which, repeating the same creed, did not
exact even that fragment of piety to be found in an intellectual
assent, but only so much of the " spirit of life in Christ " as is
found in heavy taxes imposed upon the poor to support an idle
royalty. Between the Roman Church, which carried nothing
to Ireland but words, and the English Church, which sent them
nothing but an armed posse to drain rents, the poor island has
groaned for hundreds of years under Paul's law of sin and
death. But I often think that God at times selects some spot
of earth to be an example, and there permits some of man's
errors to culminate, that other lands may see the awful outcome
of their own religious and social philosophy. What would Ireland not have been to-day, with its rich soil, its perpetual spring,
its ocean roads connecting it with all nations, with its great
race of Celts and Gauls, which race is the best of all history,
if only the Roman and English Churches had gone with a
Christianity that was a life, instead of with one which was only
forms and taxation? There can be no Christianity without a
new spiritual life. Its first move is to rise above intemperance,
above all bad passions, above ignorance, above idleness, above
barbarism, which is only a general name for sin, and to this end
it is a light to enlighten and a spirit to transform; and under
these forces the soul becomes freed from the law of sin and
death, and rises like Paul up toward the higher being. But
instead of going to the Green Isle with this spiritual regeneration, two of the largest Churches in Christendom, the Roman
and the English, repaired thither-the former with nothing
but a poor belief, the latter with taxes and with the same belief,
only modified far enough to become unwelcome. Between both
these good Samaritans money and education and virtue and
self-respect and industry and hope disappeared; and now all
the poor Irish at home and abroad can do is to celebrate each
year, in March, the memory of one Christian saint who once
touched that island, a thousand years ago. It is to be hoped




92                Chris/ianizy a Life.
the story is true, for so few Christians have touched those shores
since, that we would better as long as possible cherish this lonely
legend.
I have dwelt thus long over Ireland because, as I said, it is
only a spot where a philosophy that exalts a creed and depresses
a life has come to full maturity, and thus points out the destiny
that awaits our land so sure as we fail to make our religion aim
at the education and morals of men.
The danger of being misunderstood when one thus speaks
about creeds, or of being misinterpreted by those who do not
wish to understand, is fully appreciated; but the fact in the
case is so true and so alarming that the danger of my being
misunderstood is nothing compared with the danger of public
morals, if Christ should not be more fully represented as a life.
He must lift upward the whole mental nature until all intemperance, all dishonesty, all uncharitableness, shall be loathed as
a deep dishonor. Christ must be an education, a refinement, a
purity of heart; not a history attested by four evangelists and
confirmed by Josephus and Tacitus, and hence believed, but a
spirit entering the heart and sweeping away the law of sin and
death. An intemperate Christian, or a dishonest Christian,
must be confessed to be the real infidel, for whatever his lips
may say, his soul is against Christ. There are islands in the
Pacific which it is said had no vices until Christians went
there; and that awful scourge under which one nation groans,
and by which our city is deeply injured, is said to be the peculiar invention and favorite of Christian lands. It will remain
so until the whole Church moves from an external history of
religion to an internal spiritual state, and makes the spirit of
Christ the true test of discipleship, and the sole object of all
preaching and of all houses of worship. In this chapter from
which our text is taken it is affirmed that " if a man have not
the spirit of Christ he is none of His;" but the Church has
never believed it, but has offered heaven to misers and drunkards, when once a year they have shown some zeal for an external creed. The difficulty in Christianizing India lies in the pitiable characters revealed there by the British officers and subjects,
all of whom have sworn to the thirty-nine articles. The German pietist Tauler was right when he said Christianity is an
experience within, and one thought of God is beyond the worth
of the external world.
The world has tried external doctrines to the most extreme
limit. It has taken the ideas of the Testament, and has stated
them in a thousand ways, and has called them everything from
Arianism to Calvinism, from Lutherism to Wesleyism, from
Romanism to Protestantism, from Mysticism to Quakerism,
until the creeds of the Church would form a large volume;




Chr islzanity a Lzfe.                  93
and yet not a soul from the atmosphere of any of these creeds
has ever been anything except so far as he cast himself simply
upon the spirit of Christ's life, and suffered that vast spirituality to separate him from his body of death, to crush the law,
that when he would do good evil was present with him; and
whenever any soul has done this he has risen up in the same
spiritual beauty, whether he was a Catholic like Fenelon, or a
Methodist like Wesley, or a Calvinist like Chalmers-risen the
same, because there is no rising at all for a Christian except
right up out of the spirit of Christ. Christianity is in man a
" well of water springing up," and hence no one can distinguish
between the Catholic Massillon and the Protestant Robert Hall,
because they came not from an external, changing creed, but
from the life of the Lord. Let our sun sink where it may, the
same gold gathers about the west in Oregon that hangs out its
banners in England or on the mountains of Asia, because the
atmosphere is the same and the sun is the same, and the clouds
are the same everywhere; and thus true Christians are all one,
because they come not from manifold doctrines, but they are
the same soul colored by the same Christ, whether he is seen in
old Judea or new America.
My friends, we are living in an era of great vices. The fact
that there are such vices so sweeping-vices which seek the
sanction of law, and which already laugh at the puny arm of
religion-should make us doubt whether the ages of simple doctrines do not, by their failure, invite us to a Christianity of life
which shall plead for all reforms, and shall by education and a
love of the dissolute multitude which shall lead us to espouse
whatever will tend to lift them above ignorance and wickedness, help them, not to our long theology, but to such a life of
spirituality and purity and moral grandeur as is spread out
before them in that golden page of Bethlehem. To build up
this "higher life" in the multitude let us omit nothing. From
school-house to church, from entreaty to prayer, from reason to
divine spirit, from the intercession of man to the intercession
of the cross, use all, not in the name of an external history,
but in the name of a most radical reform.
"Our course is onward, onward into light!
What though the darkness gathereth amain!
Yet to return or tarry, both are vain.
How full of stars when round us dark the night!
Whither return? What flower yet ever might,
In days of gloom and cold and stormy rain,
Enclose itself in its green bud again,
And hide itself from tempest out of sight "




OLD TESTAMENT INSPIRATION.*
DAVID SWING.
Psalms xxiii and cix.
The Mosaic age presents to the Christian and general student
a topic of uncommon interest. The interest is rendered uncommon by the questions of inspiration and policy, and by the
entanglement of the Mosaic writings with the questions of
geology, and other sciences, on the one hand, and with questions of morals on the other.
Approaching any other old writings, we are permitted to read,
and accept or reject, because they are confessedly human; but
the contents of the Hebrew books are spread upon a background of inspiration, and this claim excites a clamor and debate.
In our remarks this morning we shall speak of the Mosaic
writings only as related to morals, leaving the geological question to future times when that science shall have become more
exact. In order properly to estimate the morals of the Hebrew
Scriptures, it is necessary to define inspiration, for upon that
definition will depend the answer to the inquiry whether the
Old Testament is inspired.
If, by inspiration, one is to understand a perfect invasion of
the human heart and mind by the Infinite Spirit, so that the
human is borne away from itself, and thinks only in the words
and thoughts of God, then, we should have no hesitation in
saying that there was no such inspiration in the souls of the
writers of the Mosaic age. God is perfection. Hence a human
mind penetrated by the Deity would deal only in perfect ideas
and actions. But, if by inspiration we may understand Divine
assistance given to man, such that he became enabled to think
wise thoughts and better, and devise useful things above the
-ordinary thought and utility of the times, then, the Old Testament affords abundant evidence of inspiration.
God never at once thoroughly equips man. Minerva is fabled
to have leaped forth full-armed from the brain of Jupiter, but
aside from fable there is no record of any such event. The
*A discourse delivered Sunday morning, Nov. IO, 1872, by Prof. David Swing, Pastor of the
Fourth Presbyterian Church.




Old Testament Inspiratzon.            95
-Divine Spirit never creates a perfect man, but sets him going
with the permission to become perfect. The plan of God is
that of perpetual assistance. He fills the earth with ores, with
coals, with the power to produce harvests of grass, fruits and
grains, and then endows man with an expansive faculty, such
that he can develop the world and himself. The world, as God
gave it to His children, is one of opportunities and outfits, and
not of completed things.
Inspiration would therefore assume the form of a help rather
than of a full occupation of the human intellect and feelings,
and would no more be a perfect unfolding of God's whole,character than the wild Indian is an expression of God's perfect
ideal of the creature man.
Eternity being the time, and immensity the arena of Deity,
there would seem demanded a graduated method, such, that
to-morrow might always promise something better than yesterday, to-night, or to-day brings. In harmony with such a
presumption, nature is full of simple beginnings and grand
openings.  Coming to inquire about revelation, we should
expect the phenomenon of imperfection, but of great help,
also, and' great progress.  A revelation that should wholly
relieve man from further effort and inquiry along the path of
truth, would be in discord with the economy of earth, for man's
success comes from the perpetual struggle into which he is cast
by the world's method. The Creator would no more grant
man a perfect revelation than He would furnish man with ready
made furniture, or houses, or clothing.
In the Mosaic economy, therefore, we must expect the human
element to predominate, and to be still engaged in the common
struggle after more and better truth. It would be unwise to
suppose the Old Testament a perfect image of God - the ideal
Infinite. There is no emblazonment of God anywhere. Do
you imagine that when you find man in the state of natureman as seen in the islands of the South Sea, or as seen in the
wilds of our America-the red man, you have found an emblazonment of the Deity? By no means. You have found
only the place where God has made a beginning; the place, not
where God has finished a palace, but where the earth has been
broken for a foundation, and where a stake has been driven.
Upon earth, when men are about to build a marble structure
destined to be full of elegance of finish, and full, perhaps, of
works of art', they first build a wide fence about the area, and
then descend into the wet earth and work in rough rock. Thus
the Creator proceeds in His universe, and there is no perfect
manifestation anywhere of His full glory or wisdom.
The Mosaic economy was nothing else than a progress.
Earth had come to Polytheism, to Pantheism, to Feticism.




96            Old Testament Inspiration.
The idea of a Superior Force was universal, but it had not been
gathered up into a great central point and perceived to be God.
Each thing that had power, such as the sun and moon and
sea - each object that was far away, stars and sky - each
creature that was terrible, such as serpents and crocodileseach animal that was very useful, as the cow and the horse,
became deities, and were worshipped as such. The air was full
of superhuman powers. Disease was a bad spirit. Thus the
idea of a superhuman being was broken up into fragments, and
was found in a serpent or stone, or in the fire or wind. Under
such a discordant belief, morals were discordant, and customs
horrible. With a serpent or a crocodile for a deity, man became
cruel. He could slay his children, or eat his fellow, for his
Fetich was a bloody devourer, and the worship must become
such.  The slaughter of children became common.  Even
Rome could crowd her vast amphitheatres in order to see captives eaten by beasts, or slain by each other in contest.
It is necessary for the superhuman power in the air to be
called away from the many into the one. It is necessary to
dismiss the sun with its flame, the lightning with its tongue of
fire, the serpent with its poison, the crocodile with its sharp
teeth. It is necessary to dismiss the iron-hearted Jupiter, and
the Apollo with rattling arrows, and Juno full of resentment,
and come to a Being, called God, infinite and unchangeable in
His being, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.
With such a sublime centre, life moves afresh. The serpent
becomes only a rude form of brute life. Things thought to be
gods sink to the level of the dust, and no longer influence
human hearts, passions and hopes and fears, but, instead of
these, there is one vast influence, pure and unchanging, drawing
all men up to it. The greatest single idea possible to mankind
is the idea of God as a Being, only one all-wise, all-good, allpowerful. Looking up to this, nations cast away their barbarism, and the individuals, Elijah-like, ascend in a beautiful
chariot.
The Mosaic age was the bearer of this idea. How far it may
have known the truth as to geology, I know not, and care not
There may be men that know, and men that care, but, amid
these indeterminate questions, one thing is clear, that the'
Hebrew age was the perfect filtration and purification of the
idea of God. Perfect as compared with all before it and about
it. There is the source of our Christianity and civilization. It
was the Hebrew philosophy and its immediate result, Christianity, that swept away the iron Jupiter, and bloody Mars, and
revengeful Juno, and all bonds and stakes and stones of the
terrible past -swept them away, and gave us the uniform
morals and humanity of the nineteenth century.




Old Testament lnspzirazwlit.           9 7
But, while the Jews were cherishing and developing this idea,
they did not cease at once to be men, and become the perfect
image of God. From the method of the world thus far, it is
probable it will require ten thousand years for humanity to
produce a perfect civilization.  Six thousand years having
already passed, it is perfectly safe to say that four thousand
years more will be needed. Such being, in part at least, the
fact, the Jews in their brief life could only have moved over
part of this vast circle, and must necessarily reveal the ordinary
attributes of mankind in the details of their career. Whatever
was human custom would be their custom. If wars of extermination were the rule of that age, and were necessary in order
to advance the Hebrew Theocracy, then they would appear
with Moses and Aaron as leaders, just as naturally, as though
Hannibal or Caesar were leading the Israelites. The age was
not one in which the Deity had displaced man, but one in which
man was blessed with one or two new truths.
For example, let it be granted that Watt was inspired to
invent the steam engine. Mankind needed a new motive power.
Unaided, man had failed to reach any thing better than the
horse, the ox, or man-power, on land, and than sails on the sea.
Watt is at this crisis divinely aided to the discovery of steam.
But this would not imply that his engine was perfect, or that
anything about it should cease to be human. The machine
was rude. A boy stood by to work the valves. Its motion
was only in a straight line. It worked a pump, but could not
turn a wheel. Here it was in the mines, powerful but imperfect;
inspired but incomplete. The inspiration began and ended in
a single idea -a simple beginning. The engine was developed
until the instrument has reached a beauty and perfection
undreamed of by the originator himself. The first instrument
is set aside by the new development, and yet, the first one was
inspired, and the second one human. Again, the inspiration of
Watt's engine not only was imperfect as to the engine, but it
did not extend beyond it. The men who worked it were
common men. They were profane, they stole, they told falsehoods, they fought, they were more or less indolent, they abused
their children and their wives after the fashion of all the colliers
and all ignorant classes of that age. And this, too, with the
inspired machine in the centre of their daily life.
This illustrates the only intelligible theory of the Mosaic age.
It was carrying forward an inspired idea -an idea that was to
outlive all Polytheism, and transform the face of society. But
the inspiration hung around the idea and did not wander from
it. The instant you left the idea, you touched humanity. The
people fought and cheated, and held and sold slaves, just as the
Greeks and Romans did, and acquired land after the fashion of




98            Old Testament Inspirazion.
the barbaric period. But this is no objection to the inspiration
of their idea of God. It might as well be objected to the
inspiration of Watt's engine that the coal-heavers fought and
lived dishonorably. Regardless of the customs of men, the
idea of the steam engine was grand on the outset. And so the
Mosaic age, regardless of its particulars, was sublime in its
crystalization of the ideas of God.
The character of individuals is often a thing distinct from the
character of their work. The men that discovered America, or
that settled Virginia, may have been freebooters, as some claim,
and yet, their vessels may have sailed by a divine inspiration.
The inspiration would not include their character, but would
look to the future - far off —of America.  God is always
suffering the individual to fall away, and disappear, leaving
behind him something about to become divine.
Thus Moses and all his compeers walked in a human world
having one divine element in it. Holding to a true idea of
God as a single spirit, eternal and indivisible, they stole land
like men at large. Separating Deity from a Fetich, they sold
slaves like the old Persians. Appointed to bear religion a few
steps onward, they still claimed a plurality of wives like the
Philistines, and falsified like the heathen world. But, as on the
freebooter's ship, there may have sailed once the civilization of
England from the shores of old Rome, or as on the gold-seeking
ships of Spain there was borne the coming grandeur of America,
an invisible passenger sleeping in the festoons on the vessel's
bow, so, in the great Hebrew vessel sailing across the dark flood
rolling between the Amalekites and the nineteenth century,
there was an invisible passenger of divine spirit and purpose;
but the men who worked the sails, and handled the cargo, and
cast and heaved the anchor, were tumultuous, sinful seamen,
after the fashion of the times.
These thoughts bring me now to the structure of the psalms
of David. Many of them being deeply religious, and suitable
to all religious hearts everywhere, there are others that belonged
only to the days when they were sung. If it was permitted
the Israelites to destroy their enemies, and thus establish the
better their Monotheism, it was necessary they should sing
battle-songs, and that much of their hymnology should be
military. In days of an American struggle with England, the
song of "The Star-spangled Banner" might be useful and
truthful. It might impel men along the best path of the period.
In France a few years the " Marseillaise" was rising with power,
for it was necessary for the people to check the reckless ambition of Louis Napoleon. These hymns might be confessed to
possess a temporary inspiration. That is, their good is unmistakable. But let the world and civilization advance, let war




Old Testament Inspiration.             99
become a crime and a barbarism, let peace become not only an
article of religion but a policy of all nations, let all disputes be
settled by arbitration and payment of damages, and in that
golden age the war songs of America and France become a
poor dead letter, and no heart remains so warlike as to sing them.
Thus with such psalms as the one hundred and ninth. They
had a temporary significance depending altogether upon the
kind of work the Hebrews had to perform. If it was necessary
for them to go to battle, it was desirable they should have a
battle song, a Marseillaise. If their hands must do bloody work
they were entitled to sing a terrific psalm. But the moment
the Hebrew method of life passed away, the moment their war
for national existence ceased, that moment the one hundred
and ninth psalm lost its value. For if the bloody Hebrew war
is over, so is its battle-song. There is no logic in perpetuating
a war-cry after the war itself has passed away.
But when you read the twenty-third psalm, or a majority of
the whole collection, you have not the war-cry of a generation,
but the yearnings and feelings of all humanity. Hence I would
say that the one hundred and ninth psalm was the good of an
hour, the twenty-third psalm is the good of all human life this
side the grave.
There is, it seems to me, no other conceivable method of
treating the Old Testament than that found in the word
eclecticism. We must seek out its permanent truths, follow its
central ideas, and love them the more because they were eliminated from the barbaric ages with so much sorrow and bloodshed. He that can give the Mosaic age and the old Jewish
people only a contemptuous sneer, is a person of little reflection
and gratitude. Much as our feelings all rise up against the
severity of those ages, yet, in those very times there was being
wrought out for us a religion that should introduce Christianity,
and thus our morals and our liberty.
Looking back, we perceive not only Washington, and then
Luther, and then the old Saxons, and old Romans, and Greeks,
but we perceive David and Solomon, and all their grand
associates, living and toiling, and dying for you and mestanding with stout hearts and bleeding hands between the low
idolatry of primitive man and the civilization of the nineteenth
century. David and Solomon were preludes to the blessed
Saviour. Faltering in some of their accents, with imperfect
music, indeed, they sang a hymn that carried the world sweetly
along toward the grand melody that was soon to appear in the
Sermon on the Mount, and in the divine chants of the children
of Jesus Christ.




SALVATION AND MORALITY.*
DAVID SWING.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness   for they shall be filled'.
Matthew v: 6.
The Sermon upon the Mount may be offered as the text and
warrant of the discourse this morning, and from the text you
may easily conclude that the subject of remark will be Salvation
and Morality.
It is so difficult to make the discriminations demanded by
professional theologians, descended often from dark and narrow
periods, that we often feel like abandoning forever, not the truths
of the Bible, but the hope of saying words that shall please or
profit minds that belong to the exact and exacting class in theology. In our own denomination there are so many always
ready to complain that " he preaches a religion of morality, he
ignores the work of Christ," that one may well hesitate between
an utterance that brings complaint and a silence that secures
peace. We all love peace. It is the natural wish of most
hearts that their life shall be made up of halcyon days, days
when no wind ruffles the waters, and when the sun pours upon
them in full beauty and warmth. To gratify this wish, there
is constant temptation to speak only such words as will blend
with the past, and not jar its peaceful sleep. In face of this
temptation, we must confess that it does seem high time something were said about a religion of morality, or if the terms be
better- salvation and good works.
We must premise by saying that, in our opinion, exactness
is impossible in theology.  It seems wholly beyond  human
skill to define faith and charity and salvation with a material
exactness.  There are instruments by which a measurement
of one millionth of an inch may be readily made, but the moment you get away from the material world, this instrument is
powerless,and there seems none to take its place. In this poverty
of instrumentation, it appears we shall never be able to tell
the world just what faith is, just what salvation is, just what
*A discourse delivered in McVicker's Theatre to the Fourth Presbyterian Church, by the
Pastor, Rev. David Swing.




Salvation and Morality.                 0 I
the office of the Saviour is, and just what that of man's will and
of the Divine Spirit is.
Outside of theology, men have never been able to determine
just what literature is, what poetry is, what eloquence is, what
the motive of virtue may be, what is the exact value of democracy, or pleasure, or wealth, or education. Paley contends that
the greatest happiness is the foundation of morals. Victor
Cousin says, " Morals is its own foundation. We do a right
thing because it is right."
It would be wonderful if thinking men, by simply passing
over into the field of theology, should find a realm full of exactness, and offering the most perfect definitions to any one in the
least partial to such pursuits. How is it that the words, literature, eloquence, poetry, civilization, right, are so reluctant to
accept of rigid analysis, and that theology is so willing to lie
down under the knife of the demonstrators of moral anatomy?
How comes it to pass that the question "What is liberty?" or
" What is civilization?"will always refuse the world a precise answer, and the question " What is salvation?" may be answered in.a moment by the nearest professor in the schools of the church?
We recall now the anecdote of science, by which some savan
attempted to entrap Franklin, or Columbus, or Pythagoras.
" How comes it to pass," inquired Science, "' that if a cup be
filled to the brim, and then many fishes be put gently into the
cup, the water shall not overflow? Instead of explaining the
phenomenon, the ideal Franklin or Pythagoras tried the experiment, and the water did overflow.
Thus in our theological world. The question " How comes
it to pass that salvation may be so exactly defined?" is to be
answered, " It does not come to pass at all. The glass does
overflow." The definition, when exact, is so far false; for in
order perfectly to define a saved soul, it would be necessary for man to read the judgment of God, and to perceive
all that in,the last day will be counted in or counted out in the
solemn estimate. As it will be the office of God only to assign
places to the:spirits called away from this life, with Him must
rest the detailed facts upon which the sphere of the soul shall be
prescribed for the vast hereafter.  Hence, the Infinite One
only knows the full import of the word salvation, knows its
essentials, its limitations; He only knows exactly what hearts
will ascend from the scenes of earth up to a supreme bliss.
One of our hymns says with truth,
There is a time, we know not when,
A point, we know not where,
That marks the destiny of men
For glory or despair.
It is a'true thought, but I would not limit the mystery by the
idea of time and place only, but also by the quantity and qual



102              Salvatzon and Morality.
ity of religion in the heart. There is no measurement by
which man can determine just the soul that shall receive the
smile seen in the words, " Well done, good and faithful servant,"
just the soul that shall tremble at the sentence, "Depart from me
ye accursed."
Thus interpreting the hymn, it becomes to my heart powerful
and thrilling -
There is a line, by us unseen,
That crosses every path,
The hidden boundary between
God's patience and His wrath.
Oh, where is this mysterious bourn
By which our path is crossed;
Beyond which, God himself hath sworn,
That he who goes is lost?
In this shadow realm we would not wish to throw down the
exact response that "he that believes" shall safely pass the
mysterious bourn; for faith is such a broad, indefinable word
that to substitute it for the term salvation, would be to leave
us still in the air obscure. "Faith in Christ," would be a
phrase still indefinite, for not only has faith many forms, but
many forms also attach to the person of Christ. He was a
sacrifice, but sacrifice has many significations. He was an example. He was a mediator.  He was an unfolding of the
divine image.  Faith in Christ is a phrase which is at once seen
to be made of words that are like the bits of colored glass in
the kaleidoscope, forming many pictures and all very beautiful.
The faith of a little child in Christ, would differ essentially
from the fa.ith in Jesus of a person come to education and deeper thought.  In the child's estimate there could enter no.
analysis of the Saviour in the theological sense of the term. His.
offices of atoning lamb, of example, of image of God, would all'
be crowded out of the young heart by the enthusiastic reception of Christ as a loving, glorified, heavenly friend. If to such!
a child what is called salvation could come, then must we confess that salvation must elude scholastic definition, and make
of itself new pictures according to the hand that turns the magical glass. The words must possess an elasticity greater than will
be admitted by the schools founded to promulge an  exact
idea.
Now, this refusal of salvation to be defined in language
rigidly exact and sharp, ought to make us all very unwilling to
separate it in any way from  good works.  There is such a
growing together of these two ideas in the whole New Testa-,
ment that any separation of them seems an act of ignorance or
vandalism toward the life and history of Christ. The entire
Sermon upon the Mount is a union of morals, and salvation.




Salvatzon and Morality.              I03
It is the most careful unfolding of a religion of morality that
was ever uttered or read upon earth. From its outburst, in
which heaven is assigned to the poor in spirit and pure in heart,
to its last verse, where doing good works is the foundation of
rock, upon which every man's hope should be built, the divine
discourse marches along to the key-note of morality.
There is no evading the significance of the fact that in all the
days and hours of Christ's life upon the earth, the doctrine of
good works was the cardinal idea in every speech, and even in
the most solemn prayer of Gethsemane. Into the brief, model
prayer, into which we may suppose this divine intelligence
gathered up the most useful. petitions, he taught mankind, that
to forgive and be forgiven, to be delivered from temptation and
evil, were the blessings needed by the soul, and hence, the essence of its salvation.
Between us and a salvation, the teachings of Christ about an
upright life, stand with such a broad depth and sublime height,
that it would seem like presumption and egotism in man to
announce for the soul a safety in which good works should perform no prominent part.  If what is called in exact theology,
"faith," is the sum and substance of salvation, it is almost
wonderful that the great Captain of our salvation, instead of setting forth this idea in His earthly discourses, in almost every
case gave the impulse and sanction of His career to the doctrine
of an upright, religious life. With the words of Jesus before us,
far be it from us ever to utter a word that would seem to give
hope of heaven to a soul not building up a personal righteousness.
The alarm expressed by many pulpits, that many are
relying too much upon a life of morality, seems to jar at once
with all the words of the Saviour, and with the events of the sad
times in which our country lives.
In this Credit Mobilier phenomenon, I see no tendency on
the part of public men to base their soul's salvation on good
works. That list of names that is at the same time associated
with the church and with the acceptance of bribes, does not seem
in the least injured by any reliance upon good works for salvation. Their hope of heaven must be based upon faith alone.
The righteousness they dream of must be wholly an imputed
righteousness. In presence of Sin, bursting forth in high and
low places, like as plague issuing from the plains of India; Sin,
with one hand full of bribes, the other dripping in blood, we
should tremble, as a servant of Christ, to utter one word that
would warn mankind against placing too high an estimate upon
the value of a sinless life. Upon all the horizon we cannot behold any encroachment of this evil. The only persons visibly
wedded to the moral life, are certain followers of William Penn,




10o4           Salvatlon and Moralzty.
and in the group of bribe-holders, between Kansas and the Atlantic, no one of these " mere moralists" seems visible. Caution
against salvation by good works would, therefore, seem premature. With the Catholics buying righteousness with a price,
so many pardons for a sinful soul, and with many Protestants,
warned against placing confidence in anything but faith, the
time for being alarmed at any over-development of Quaker
morality, appears not yet to have come.
Standing amid the scenes that surround us all to-day, if there be
any connection spoken of in the Bible as existing between a man's
morals and his destiny, this would seem like the year and our
country the place, in which all such relationships should be
brought out in all the theological schools and rostrums in the
land. There has never been a time when the morality of the
Quakers could be so well endured. Would that there might be,
in all the schools of the land, a Quaker professorship of honesty
endowed along with the chair of saving faith. Unable as we
all may be to see what influence upon heaven a salvation by help
of good works might exert, whether it would leave that blessed
realm to be a solitude, it must be confessed that actual human
righteousness would be very valuable to this star and this generation.
If Christ by His death wrought out a salvation for man, man's
heart must be the prize bought with the sacred life and death.
There is no salvation for a sinful soul except a pure life. Hence,
if Christ effectually assists man to this pure soul, He is man's
Saviour, and the pure soul is the salvation. If good works are
the salvation, Christ is still the Saviour. Hence, salvation by
good works and salvation by Jesus the Redeemer are so inseparably blended that any effort to separate, must result in an insult
to the Cross on the one hand, and to the Sermon on the Mount
on the other. It cannot be that Christ would save a race in
their sins, but from their sins, and hence, the flight from sin is
always a flight to the bosom of God. This is therefore the essence and soul of Christianity, this upward flight.
If to us, lost in a wilderness, without a sun, nor a star, nor a
path to guide, there comes a benevolent hermit, a dear Mentor,
and leads us to the right path, and sets out faces homeward, he
is at once our saviour; but no perfect salvation will come from
our going that path. Our " going" and the Mentor combine in
the escape, and yet he lives in memory as the kind saviour of
our bewildered hearts.
Thus Christ may be the Saviouir of mankind, and yet leave our
morality as the final embodiment of His salvation. All the work
of Christ contained in the word Calvary, or atonement, is only
the objective part of the soul's rescue, whereas, man's own personal righteousness is the subjective salvation, the thing for




Salvation and Morali'ty.              I05
which the other exists.  Good works are the explanation of'Calvary.
The words and life of Christ show that what He most desired,
-was the spiritual perfection of His children. " Be ye perfect,,even as your Father in heaven is perfect," was the ruling wish
of His heart. All His eloquence was aimed at, not simply acts;ofsin, but even sinful thought. In the transcendent light of'His morals, the Ten Commandments faded like a snow-drop
uapon the bosom of ocean. The heaven of Jesus was both a purity and a place, and hence, the final analysis of salvation will,show us a sinless soul, at one with Christ, as He and the Father
are one.
There is no conflict, perhaps, between Paul and the Saviour.
I use the word "perhaps" only as a further confession of the impossibility of determining with scientific exactness the whole
of Paul's thought on the one hand, and the whole of the
Saviour's thought on the other. Assuming inspiration, there
of course is no conflict. But not thus begging the question
and appealing only to rationalism, there seems no discord in
the two strains of music. Paul unfolds salvation from without.
He tells what is necessary outside of man. Hence Calvary
and law and imputation and satisfaction come upon his horizon
at all hours. There the Jewish altar is transformed into a
cross. The first Adam and second Adam meet. The past sins of
humanity are gathered up mountain high, and a price is to be
paid for them, paid in blood and death. While these scenes of
objective salvation are pictured in intense colors upon the sky
of the saint, the scenes of the subjective salvation are passing
along through the mind of the Saviour - souls full of virtue,
full of brotherly love, souls from which even evil thoughts have
been banished forever. Paul is busy with the paths to a des-;tiny; Christ with the beautiful destiny itself. There is no:necessary conflict, but Christ remains as always everywhere the
greater. He never halts in any vestibule, or sits down upon a
confine. He passes into the holy places of the soul and utters
the final wisdom and prayer and destiny of the poor mortals
-waiting for His words.
In this salvation which hath two parts, the way and the
going in that way, the hand is rash indeed that would separate
the human character from the salvation. In order to do this
it is not only necessary to abandon all the Gospels of Christ,
but it is necessary also to misunderstand Paul and torture him
upon the rack of a system. In a world where the absence of
integrity, the absence of righteousness is so remarkable as to
fill society with alarm by day and by night, and in an era, too,
where what is called salvation by faith alone has been crowded
forward with wonderful ability and success, as to accept



io6            Salvation and MoraliZy.
ance, it seems high time the scholastic meaning of salvation
were made to expand until it should receive into its polluted
heart the Sermon on the Mount and the morals of Jesus. The
faith demanded by this sinful race is one that will not simply
look upon a price for its sins, but upon a career of individual
virtue, a faith that believes in Christ, not only upon Calvary,
but in the Gospels, Christ not only in Mosaic types, but
Christ in the spotless parity recorded by Matthew and St. John.
A religion is needed that will not dare tell mankind that works
are of no significance, that will not dare cast contempt upon
any righteousness except an imputed one, a religion that will
not dare spurn the entire life and words of Him who spake as
never man spake.  This is not a salvation without Christ.
The difficulty will be found to be that it has too much of
Christ in it. To the teachings of Calvin and Luther it adds
the teachings of the Saviour as an important supplement.
The divine Jesus with His morality, with His curse upon one
who even called his brother Raca, with his prayer " Be ye perfect," with His benediction for him who did the least commandment and taught men so, with His whole career full of
man's subjective salvation, is an object too vast to be swept
from the Christian sky by the besom of any school, past or
to come. Be you anywhere, my friend, in the journey of life;
in youth, or middle life, or old age, do not suffer any voice to
confuse your heart as to the need of a personal obedience rendered the teachings of the Saviour. The precise meaning of
salvation may elude your power of definition. You may not
be able to find that line that crosses every path
" The hidden boundary between
God's patience and His wrath,"
but whatever darkness may gather around you, amid the obscure definitions of men, there will always be in the imitation
of Jesus Christ a place where no shadow can come. A religion
that will make the Sermon on the Mount play a second part in
your earthly career, comes it under any name, Calvinist, Methodist, Baptist or Catholic, that religion decline, or abandon so
far, and draw nearer to Him who knew better than all the
schools, wherein lies the best destiny of the soul.
All through the life of Christ the music of heaven sounded to
the pure in heart, and an awful thunder rolled in all the sky, overthe spirit that sinned in deed and in thought; and when a generation after the Saviour's death, the heavens opened to the vision
of St John, and this divine Being stood a radiant star on the
border of earth, there came the same music again for the virtuous,
the same thunder in the futurity of the wicked. " Blessed are
they that do His commandments, that they may have right to




Salvalion and Morality.              I07
the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates of the city;
for withoat are dogs and sorcerers and murderers and idolaters
and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." Here the morals of
Jesus return to us in awful significance. Let us not add to nor
take away from the words of the prophecy of this book.
We have come to evil days -days when public men who
stand forth as members of the Christian church, even of the
churches called orthodox, hesitate not to carry in the sameheart a salvation by faith and a willingness to receive bribes..
Among the public men now charged with glaring dishonor
there may be some who can establish innocence, but the awful
fact is everywhere confessed, that there are thousands of Christians who are getting their salvation by faith and their fortunes
by rascality. If the parties could be found who have in the:
past brought about this divorcement between salvation and
good works, they should be urged to come forward and confess
their sin before the nineteenth century, so injured in all the
sacred places of its soul. In the name of injured virtue, in
the name of public calamity, come and coming, they should
read and preach, not only the grand philosophy of Paul, but
the still grander morals of Jesus Christ.
There is a Christianity that will save the world.  It has not
only a faith, but it has a morality as essential as its faith. It
not only says " Believe and be saved," but it assigns damnation
to him who leads a wicked life. There is a Christianity that will
not only fill heaven with saints, but earth with good citizens.
In it Paul and Christ are not rudely separated, and the human
placed above the divine, but the morals of the Gospels come
back to mankind, and the anxiety for faith is no greater than
the hungering after righteousness.
In the pictures and images of the Cross seen in all homes in
this era of tenderer sentiment, there is often to be seen a gar
land of flowers, surrounding the cruel wood in their loving embrace. Emblems of life and death indeed! but may they be
to us always, emblems of the Sermon upon the Mount, inwreathing the atonement, forming a part of the indefinable salvation - inseparable.  The Christ that gave the world the
Cross, wove also the garland of morality that completes its
adaptation to the wants of man.




-THE WOMAN'S TEMPERANCE REVIVAL.*
DAVID SWING.
"She hath done what she could."-Mark xiv,: 8.
Much as the present boasts of its liberality as to woman, a
liberality expressed in both statute law and public sentiment,
yet when one turns to a study of the facts, he closes up history
uncertain whether woman is as free in America as she was in
Greece, or even in Palestine. It is probable that a more universal education leads a larger number of female minds to the
front, to stand among the writers and thinkers and moral workers, but that the woman of our age possesses any great legal
or social advantage over the woman of the best ancient nations,
is a question not so easily determined. The presumption in
all young and in all sanguine souls is in favor of the present,
for with such the past seems only a good thing to have moved
away from, a good region for man's infancy but inadequate for
adult mental action. Against this presumption, however, facts
xise up, so far as woman's history is concerned, and both in
sacred Palestine and in Rome and Athens there are to be seen
pictures of life which may well make us doubt whether the
boasts of our times along this special path are founded upon
fact or only upon self-complacency. Although in Palestine
woman had never reached the intellectual power and genius
which she had attained in Greece, and perhaps not the social
distinction, yet in that land where the patriarchial system had
made the father and the son so prominent, there are histor;c
scenes in which the Marys and the Marthas and other grand
names are very prominent in the public and private works of
religion. It would seem from Paul's restriction upon woman's
work, that there must have been places or congregations where
-this second ereature in the scale of creation was presuming to'be first, and thus the letters of Paul become a mirror in which
we perceive the great liberty of Mary and Martha in that day,
mirrored not as desirable but as a fact. The publication of a
law against a certain course of conduct is proof that such conduct was on the horizon threatening to become universal.
Thus the restricting law of Paul confesses the surrounding lib-erty of woman; and aside from that law there is evidence that
she must have possessed and exercised great power in the early
(Church. The whole history of primitive Christianity is full of
*Sermon delivered in Fourth Presbyterian Church, February 22, 1874.




The Woman's Temperance Revzval.           I o9
names and sketches of active women, if not preaching women,
at least of women whose words and deeds were a confessed
agency in the first onward. movement of the new faith. Christ
was attended everywhere by the faithful matrons, and upon
the pages of subsequent history the name of the great Augustine is scarcely more conspicuous than the name of Monica,,
his mother. So the names of Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Gregory, and Theodoret are associated with the names of their
mothers who equaled these illustrious sons in education and
active piety. Helena, Flacilla, St. Pulcheria, and Placidia, are
names which have come down to us covered with the glory of
an association with the teaching and defense of the faithThere was an order of ministering women in the apostolic
Church whose duties seem to have been to teach and visit, and
to fill indeed about such an office as is now filled by our city
missionaries and evangelists. Aside from this study of fact,
there are two considerations which might make us infer " a
priori" the wonderful liberty and activity of woman in the
early Church. The first consideration is that the Roman empire had in the lifetime of Christ, or very near that date, wholly
emancipated her as to state law, and had made her the equal
of her husband in all particulars. She could make contracts.
Her father's property came to her alone, and hence the satir —
ical poets of that period often in comedy brought upon the
stage the character of some husband who was borrowingmoney of his wife and paying her large interest. In those
days the Roman empire was the world. Its laws were the
laws of all the lands that were washed by the Mediterranean,
and its customs were the standard customs; and hence the
Christian Church rising up in that atmosphere would naturally
give to its female membership the great, surrounding Roman
liberty.
A second consideration is to be found in the internal character of Christianity. If ever there was a religion, actual or only
dreamed of, which seemed by its doctrines and methods to invite woman to be its advocate, the religion of Christ is that
one among all the world has seen. Christ, in His characterand in His teachings and in His work, seems to tell mankind
that the religion of violence and terror had passed by. From
Sinai mankind had moved over to Mt. Sion; and, away from
the thunderings and lightnings, had pitched their tents among
trees full of flowers and fruit, and under heaven's sweeter sunlight. While the Hebrew religion was often called upon to
move against the infidel nations with fire and sword, its servants were necessarily men of war, with iron chariots and
many a spear; but when Christ came and arrested all violence,
and transformed an army of warriors into a prayer-meeting,,




:IIO      The Woman's Temperance Revziva.
and converted the sword of steel into a " sword of the spirit,"
and throwing down the heavy shield of metal gave the soldier
"' the shield of faith," and plucking from the forehead the helmet of brass, placed there the " helmet of salvation," then, in
that sublime spiritualizing of religion, woman seems to have
been divinely called from shadow into light. The religion of
masculine attributes alone had been revoked, and one had
been given for all humanity, and especially given to the care
of any division of the human family which might lie nearest
to its own tenderness and world-wide sympathy. When religion threw away all violence, when it announced faith, hope,.and charity as its great spiritual states to which the world
must come, when it reared the cross as its symbol, and hailed
such a being as Christ as its only guide and impulse, it especially called to its aid forever that being who is by nature
-nearer to a reform which advances by kindness, and who, by.all her thoughts and sentiments and sacred interests, stands
nearer to this divine, central figure of the Testament. Thus
the universal liberty and equality which the. Roman empire
had established, and the fragrance of which must have been
wafted all along those sea-washed states, indicate to us that
the woman of the early Church must have acted in the name
of those broad rights; and then when to this legal and social
status we add the internal character of Christianity, all doubt
passes, and we easily behold in the primitive Church a position
and an activity of woman which perhaps shames the laws and
customs of our country, and the humble place she fills in our
efforts to reform the multitudes at home and abroad. When,
therefore, we all thus look back and recall these facts, and to
these considerations add the long list of names, not only of
those who toiled for Christ, between the Mary of the first century and the St. Helena of the fourth, but that vast throng of
sisters who died the martyr's death, and whose names are.graven to-day only upon the Infinite heart, we may well wonder, and not without some misgiving, whether in respect to
God's sanctuary, woman enjoys in our nineteenth century the
social liberty and the encouragement to usefulness which she
enjoyed when Constantine was emperor of Rome. Although
society at large has made immense progress since that day, yet
there may be here and there a path along which the feet of
this progress have not run; and as often families flying from
fire or flood forget some most precious thing, taking with them
the less valuable, so often nations, full of progress in fact and
spirit, often forget some branch of reform, and leave the slave,
or the enchained woman, or the child, or some useful art unthought of for a thousand years. It is possible that the feudal.system and the monastic system, and then the puritan system,




Th e Woman's Temperance Revival.          III
-which culminated in the blue laws, drove women back into
retirement, from which, at the bidding of wealth and luxury,
she comes forth at last a creature of fashion, rather than a
full member of thinking and acting society. Be the facts and
causes what they may, it does appear that woman's relations
to Christianity are little better in the nineteenth than they
were in the second or fourth centuries. The words of the text,
"She hath done what she could," can only be applied to an
individual here and there; but as to the vast female army, the
bad customs of society, the irony of men, the overgrowth of
dress as a pursuit, and the temptation which riches offer to
idleness,-all these stand between woman and the fulfillment,of the Scripture which praised the poor devotee who gave her
precious gift to the Lord. No age thus far has permitted
woman to do what she could.
In the days now passing we all witness a new spectacle, that
of an attempted temperance reform conducted in a strange
manner and wholly by woman. This movement has assumed
such a magnitude, and is so sincere and earnest and religious,
that it merits from all who are only the spectators a calm and
careful investigation before they approve or condemn. And it
is in the spirit of a sincere inquiry I am submitting all these
thoughts to-day. The preliminary remarks as to the position
of woman in the days nearest to Christ have a bearing upon
the question of the hour, for if Christianity set forth as an entreaty, as a pleading with the wicked; set forth not from the
porch of philosophy so much as from the recesses of a divine.and human heart; if its solicitude for the sinful was to be
even unto tears, then when woman is pleading with the man
who sells drinks, full of poison for soul and mind and body,
however far she may be standing from our approval or from
American ideas of propriety, she certainly is not standing very
far from the gospel and presence of Jesus Christ. It is more
than questionable whether we may set up the peace of our
homes and the etiquette of our parlors, or the indifference of
our counting-rooms as a standard by which we are to award to
this uprising an estimate of merit. It is doubtful whether the
pulpit itself has not become so wedded to old theology and so
separated from human welfare of earth, dreaming only of that
in heaven, that its first impulse may often be false, asking for'peace to come to this sea of new, strange storm. In order to
judge rightly this movement, it is no doubt necessary that we.all pass up into the higher atmosphere of the world's Savior,
and look down upon these pleading ones from that height
-which is sacred with not only the tears but with the poured.out blood of Him who plead for a world. There has never,come a reform in a manner acceptable to established customs




112      The Woman's Temperance Revival.
of the drawing-room: for the genius of the latter is peace,
while the atmosphere of the former is at least that of great
unrest. Neither Luther, nor Peter the Great, nor the great
Mme. Guyon, nor the shouting Methodists, nor the itinerent
Whitfields has dared consult the etiquette of the marblepalaces or marble homes, but have been compelled to over —
look the wishes of fashion and placid culture, and draw warrant and inspiration from the overwhelming calamities of mankind. There is much in the new temperance uprising which
jars like a discord against my own feelings, and you all will
make, perhaps, a similar confession; but I make my confession
remembering that just thus have all peace-loving souls been
jarred in all ages, and from Paul to Luther, all these reform-.ers have been looked upon by the adjacent citizen-soul as
being " mad by much learning," or possessed of a devil, whereas
they spoke the words of truth and soberness. This discord
which rises in our feelings to-day disappears in our philosophy,
Rising above our personal prejudices, we see an evil, the greatest now known to earth, attacked by those who have suffered.
the most from its ravages, and who can look to the future as.
to only a continuance of their long sorrow. This is the briefest
statement of the case. Let us make a wider, fuller statement
of the grave affair. It does not come within the grasp of any
mind to express in words the length and breadth of this worldwide curse, but it is permitted us to see some vague outline of
this awful scourge. In our own land it consumes a thousand.
millions of dollars a year; turns that much of wealth or labor
away from education, and morals, and home-comfort, and from
all the arts, and from all the Christian and human virtues, and
visits the effects of this immense diversion of money upon the
innocent of each generation. But if the use of these liquors
were only a vast withdrawal of labor from useful paths, the
world could endure the loss. If this thousand millions of labor
were simply destroyed, men could forgive and forget; but on
the opposite, it is absolutely applied to the increase of public:
ignorance, public vice, public crime, and public unhappiness.
Our city congratulates itself that henceforth it will have
$50,000 a year for the purchase of books, and is delighted to
dream of the citizens who will borrow good books from this
great free library; but while this sum is being disbursed the
citizens who seek the poisonous cup will spend $14,000,000 in
this city alone; and the army.which will march up to the bar
will every day in the year be more than 50,000 strong. But
this city is only a measuring unit of the nation, and is repeated
in the whole country one hundred times. Philadelphia spends
$30,000,000, New York $6o,ooo,ooo a year, and from all the
saloons in the land, in city and village, go 5,ooo,ooo drinkers




The Woman's Temperance Revival.           13
each day, and from that multitude five hundred and fifty persons fall each day into the drunkard's grave. We would that
these figures were permitted of God to be the banks of this
river of wretchedness over which the wave could not flow, but
oh no! the laws of society compel us to see a deeper wrong,
for as from a pestilential march a plague rushes out and strikes
the whole family, the whole city, and makes new Memphis or
old London all weep, so this mania of drink passes from the
manhood which enters the charnel houses over to the mother,
the wife, the children at home, and tearing down the rose-vine
from the window, and removing the food from the table, and
the clothes from the wife and children, and putting out the
fire upon the hearth, it spreads over all these faces the paleness
of coming death, thus hinting that home with its former joys
is being transformed into a tomb, of hope at first, and soon of
life itself.
Having glanced now at the great calamity against which
woman has at last risen in a deep earnestness, let us recall also
the fact that it has been into her soul this evil has been pouring most of its grief for a hundred years. Her home, her
brother, her father, her husband, her children, her whole world
has been ravaged by this one vice more than all others combined into one. And out into this same atmosphere we expect
her still to send her sons and to see to it that they shall come
home at night without injury for twenty-one years, and shall
reach full manhood without having agonized her heart or
threatened society by crime against its laws, or by sin against
God. In circumstances which, because so familiar, have ceased
to be appalling, it need not be wondered at that woman, weary
of law which men have not the moral power to pass, nor, if
passed, to execute, has begun once more the general crusade
against an evil which will not of itself ever abandon her home,
her brother, her children.
It may be that her efforts will exhaust itself in one springtime as to its present form, but inasmuch as in the past third
of a century this temperance reform has been wide-spread and
active, we can only look upon the scene of the present as one
more protest from reason and Christianity, in a long series of
protests which will no doubt come, in louder and deeper accents, while this vice remains on earth. This is a foe we shall
not dare neglect. It will more and more force itself upon the
attention of legislature, and press, and courts, and pulpit. It'
is the " irrepressible conflict," the "' impending crisis " of the
passing age, and if the hymns and the prayers of tens of thousands of women shall only make the merchant look up from
his ledger, and the fashionable lady look away from her jewels,
and the pulpit look away from its abstraction, and the "vain




114       The Woman's Temperance Revival.
repetitions," and all citizens turn and see afresh and in awful
truthfulness the curse of the land, so dear in its liberty, not a
hymn will have been sung in vain in all these days and nights.
No evil has yet fallen except by long-repeated blows, well
struck by the children of men. Earth has always been a battle-field in which mind and soul have reached their development and crown by a warfare against foes which seem to have
come into life under the very cradle in which our infant world
was first rocked. Under the long struggle against kingcraft, a
battle that reached from Leonidas to Lincoln, liberty has gradually unfolded itself, as though a strange flower, asking two
thousand years for elaborating its color and perfume from the
deep blue air. Thus, also, our improved religion has come
from amid long insults and varied follies, and even through
seas of blood, up to a condition in which God begins to be
unveiled as a Father in heaven. But one of the first acts of
this religion was to rear a cross. Thus all reforms advance by
successive steps of labor and sorrow. That peace which settles
over all your homes is not a token to you that all is well in the
wide world without, but is perhaps only the sweet refuge into
which the mind and heart can fly for rest, but from which they
come forth again to resume the life-long struggle with some
defiant host. Crucifixion is the word that indicates the world's
genius, while peace points out its final destiny. It is, therefore, more than possible, that before the moral forces of society
shall make such progress against intemperance, the composure
of the boudoir and the whole theory of woman as an ornament
alone, or as a domestic, will need to be crucified, and her mental and moral force set free from that bondage of fashion and
repose which has been to her a "body of death."  In looking
upon this new adventure, let us remember that when woman
has desired to enter the pulpit we have told her not to come
there, and have reminded her of the immense moral field apart
from its special office; and when she has; knocked at the doors
of all the professions, we have again reminded her of the
breadth of the world aside from all such paths of employment;
and when she has wished to influence all public morals by seeking the right to vote, we have again hastened to assure her that
the realm of usefulness is wide, apart from any human relation
to the ballot-box; and now, when at last she ventures forth,
without pulpit, without profession, without suffrage, but clothed
with that moral influence about which the public men have
discoursed so long and so sweetly too, perhaps the time for
silence on our part, if not for loud approval, has come, because
a complaint here might indicate that all past restriction of
woman had been only a prejudice instead of a philosophy.
The results of this uprising will be these: Multitudes of the




The Woman's Temperance Revival.          I 15
young will this year keep back from the intoxicating cup;
hundreds of villages, where all know each other by name, will
form a temperance friendship which will purify their home
atmosphere for years to come; our towns and villages having
been morally improved, the ruin in the cities will still leave the
nation a moral hope in the nobler millions outside; the hope
of America being not in its cities but in its almost infinite
country life, come and yet to come. Rising up out of religion,
by its impulse and following its entreaty, this commotion will
go far to compel sects to stand upon one level, and will compel
the pulpit to abandon the endless definition of Christianity in
favor of an application of its blessedness to the strong men
bowing beneath a dreadful vice, and to the hearts of their
families bowing under hunger and cold and all private neglect
and public disgrace. After so long a time the use of Christianity will now follow its discovery. From woman the cause will
pass to the columns of the newspaper, and to the legislative
halls, and to the bench of the judge, and bosoms of the jury.
Hence we cannot but hope that this awakening will go forward, spreading out like a storm cloud over parched fields in
June, and that whereas in the dark ages crusades were made
in the name of Christianity in search of only a tomb in dead
rocks, where at best nothing ever had been but dust, and as
now a few devotees are making pilgrimages to the crypt of
some phantom saint, may it bethe glory of the women of the
nineteenth century that they are making their pilgrimages to
rescue, not an empty tomb from infidels, but souls from death,
and are chanting their hymns, not where some old name is
carved on a rock, but to living hearts made in the image of
God, and capable of nobleness here and blessedness in the life
to come.




DEATHS OF CHIEF JUSTICE CHASE AND JOHN
STUART MILL.*
DAVID SWING.
" One star differeth from another star in glory."-r- Corinthians xv: go.
This passage comes often into mind when we observe the
diversity of character reached by eminent men living and dying
in our sight.  The excellence possible to human life never
reveals its whole self in any one soul, but seems to divide itself
up into fragments and to parcel out these fragments to the care
of different hearts. As a kind father surrounded by dutiful
children, coming at last to the end of life, makes a final will
and testament, dividing up his immense estate to the dear children, so that each has a part, thus nature, rich in all the shapes
of genius, talent, and virtue, portions out her immense fortune,
and many children beloved come away from her presence
carrying some precious gift.
The soil that grows men is much like the soil that grows
plants and flowers.  This literal soil, lying in its blackness
beneath the sun, is ready to produce an oak or rose, a clambering vine or a violet. Often we find in June by some stream
a rich spot, which with rare prodigality has sent upward a whole
bouquet of species, and colors, and perfumes. The soil that
grows men is such. They emerge from it with different shadings of intellect and sentiment, and taste and genius.
The illustration of Paul, that one star differeth from another
in glory, finds an increased meaning in the modern time, for
astronomy has discovered that some of them are suns that shine
with a pink, or emerald, or amber light. And hence the planets around these suns are not bathed in a white light like our
day, but in a flood of pink, or gold, or amber.
The human soul presents this variation of glory, and hence
fills the spectator with an outlook that never wearies with any
mnonotony. Thousands of minds come and go surrounded with
and sending forth their own peculiar light.
If you would realize this truth you need only look upon those
who have just gone from earth, for there is always something
in the word death that causes the peculiar tint or color of a
*Sermon delivered at McVicker's Theatre, May I8, I873.




Dealhs of Chase and  HMil.             II 7
soul to flash up suddenly before us. The solemnity and sorrow of the tomb arrest both our attention and our sympathy,
and for the first time we see the image of the soul that has
gone hence. The grave, though full of literal darkness, is full
of spirit light. The soul becomes most visible to us when it
has entered that great shadow.  The recent months have
afforded us frequent opportunities for this full view of great
souls in their rich variety. The hunger for empire flashed forth
in the spirit of Louis Napoleon. A worship of the common
people and a wonderful industry and information was visible in
the memory of the great editor who died last autumn in the
sorrow of defeat. A noble form of Christianity, perhaps one
of the best embodiments it has enjoyed in our generation, may
be observed now in the pale image of Bishop McIlvaine.
Uprightness and moderation, and devotion to free principle
are evident in the character of Chief Justice Chase, while all
that was most intellectual, and dignified, and powerful in the
human mind, shines forth now from the name of John Stuart
Mill. How these stars differ from each other in glory!
It has long been the custom of our land in its religious press,
and in its pulpit also, to draw whatever lessons they could from
the great soldiers or politicians that pass away in their presence. This partiality comes in part from the public benefits
that descend direct from such men, and from the absence of
such characters as the world now laments in the name of Stuart
Mill. There is no evident reason why we should all speak of
a great soldier, or great editor, or great Chief Justice, and pass
in silence a man great in his acquisitions in his rational faculty,
in his humanity, in his morals, in his disposition, and in his
domestic life. It would not be fitting this sacred day should I
speak of this illustrious man in his relations to logical forms
and political systems, and metaphysical inquiries, for mankind
has set apart six days of seven for reflection and all toil in these
departments of thought; but it will seem becoming the hour
if I shall recall to your minds some of those points in the life
and character of Mr. Mill, at which he came into contact with
the world of religion. Into the world of Christianity proper he
never entered, but in the splendor of an intellect which revealed
a divine origin in his devotion to his brother man, in his elevation above the world's vices and strifes, in his love of truth, and
in his domestic life, he illustrated powerfully the ideal humanity
pictured in the pages of the New Testament.
The Scriptures are full of delineations of character. From
the writings of Solomon to the sermon upon the mount, and to
Paul's letter to the Romans, there is a perpetual effort to paint
a human character in such lines that society may not mistake




I18          Deaths of Chase and Mill.
the good God has set before it, and in reaching which it will
find its perfect success and happiness.
After Solomon had exhausted his maxims, Christ came, saying, Blessed are the pure in heart, the merciful, the peacemakers.
And then Paul comes with many a chapter of summing up of
human virtues attainable in this life. The reader of the Bible
will see that character is the object of all these earthly years,
the thing to be sought by all alike from king to subject, from
philosopher to child. Such being the life-work of man, he may
well gaze upon any beauty and impressiveness of character,
come whence it may, in politics or philosophy, or in the humblest walks of earth.  Even if Stuart Mill stood nominally
outside of the Christian religion, yet there is a sense in which
he stood, not by choice, but by necessity, within the boundaries of the New Testament. It is within the power of an
individual to reject the special doctrines of a religion; but if
that religion has moulded his country for centuries in all its
morals and aspirations, then each individual born into that
atmosphere is colored with its hues, however much he may
repudiate its cardinal dogmas in after life.  It is possible for
a free will to expatriate one's self from one's country, but go
where he may, he will always be the Englishman or American
of his formative years. Lady Hester Stanhope tried to escape
her country, weary as she was of its political griefs, but in the
mountains of Lebanon, in Arab dress, and with only Arabs
around her, she was still only an Englishwoman. In Christian
lands Christianity, besides being a set of dogmas, is also an
atmosphere, and hence those who at last feel called upon to
deny the propositions most difficult of belief continue still the
children of the place, and if they do not carry the public baptism upon their foreheads, they bear the Christian character in
their heart. Hence, to find a beautiful character outside the
Christian Church may yet be to find a good illustration of
Christian ideal and Christian destiny, for the ideal becomes a
public inheritance, and flows beyond the walls of the church,
as the light of the cottager's lamp pours out of the window,
far away from the loved family group. Of this eminent man
a prominent passion was his love of truth. To know the facts
in the common affairs of life was so deep a wish in his soul that
it became a passion so strong that all other passions died around
it as the shrubs of the forest die when the oak begins to overshadow them. In his writings we perceive a heart without
enmity, without partizanship, moving along in the vast sea of
truth, occupied wholly in search of a shore habitable by the
pilgrim humanity. One of our own leading statesmen, having
been asked why he never became angry, replied that he could




Deaths of Chase and Mll[.              II9
not afford it. Life was too short to be consumed in part by
such a passion.
Mr. Mill's style is the picture of a sincere intellect from Which
all malice had been eliminated, all language of abuse, and into
which had been gathered the breadth of a Plato, the learning
of a Milton, and the humanity of a Wilberforce. In the careers
of such gifted men as Theodore Parker and Charles Sumner,
there is so much partisanship and individual pride that the pursuit of truth with them seems too much like a contest for office
or fame. The heart that reads these writings has at last such
feelings as must have filled the bosoms of the Romans seated
at their gladiatorial shows, but reading Stuart Mill you feel that
the light around you is not that of lightning, but of a morning
sun shining not as any terror, but in benevolence.
If, therefore, the Bible speaks of truthfulness; if Solomon
declared the glory of just balances; if the gospels speak of our
being without guile; if another sacred writer said, " He that
would see good days let him refrain his tongue from evil and
his lips that they speak no guile," we may call to memory this
English name and know what all this Scripture signified.
It was this love of truth that made Mr. Mill such a lover of
liberty. Not only must the unbiased seeker of truth naturally
become a lover of personal liberty, on the ground that such
freedom makes the pursuit of all truth of government and
science and religion possible, but he must love it because all
despotism is itself a falsehood-a fraud-a crime.
The world of truth being too large for any one foot to travel
over, it is parceled and assigned in districts to different men.
While Tyndall seeks the truth of the inanimate world, and
while science at large seeks the truth of nature, it was the province of Mr. Mill to seek the truth of human conduct as pertaining -to the individual or society. Hence, loving truth, he further
dignified his name by developing the truth of conduct rather
than of geology,or mechanics, or of material things. This
noble path led him to cast himself into the study and development of civil and spiritual liberty. All the falseness and cruelty
of tyrannyin State and Church stands forth in all its deformity.
The light of Mr. Mill's reason is so powerful that it dispels all
the fogs of centuries -and fully reveals the world of freedom
long dreamed of bult unseen. The few tears we were all accustomed to shed over Galileo and a few martyrs he multiplies into
a great rain and sheds them over the human race up to the last
hour of yesterday. Our tears fell only for a black man in chains;
his fell wherever a subject was slave of a king, or wherever
woman was the slave of her employer or her husband. His
judgment was simply universal, and as just as is possible in any
one man in this generation.. England had in his sight impris



120          Deaths of Chase and Mill.
oned a man of perfect integrity, for uttering his disbelief in
some Christian tenets, and had forbidden a foreigner from testifying against a thief because he confessed that he held no
particular religious persuasion.  Mr. Mill found a thousand
Galileos where the Church had supposed there was but one,
and his calm eloquence and logic, poured out for a generation,
fought and won over again, the battle of personal freedom-not
for an astronomer, but for a race. Unquestionably, freedom is
the only soil upon which educated men can grow. Bondage is
at once the enemy of intellect and religion. Men cannot grow
where they are cramped either by a thing or by a fixed system.
If, therefore, the day shall come, and come it no doubt will, when
the advent of reason shall have overthrown the falsehood in Romanism and Protestantism, and when the enthronement of
individual liberty shall have made the English establishment
shakes hands with the Dissenter, and the Jew sit down in friendship with the Christian. Much of this humane brotherhood
will go back for its origin to that name written this month upon
the grave. It has often been necessary, in the history of the
Christian Church, that heavy blows should be struck against it
by minds outside of it and intellectually hostile to it. Selflove, prejudice and vanity always make self-reform difficult.
This wish of the poet, that
Some one could the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us! 
points out not only a weakness of an individual, but of a,
Church or a government. A despotism or a monarchy never
doubts itself. It is necessary for some outside man, some Republican Kossuth or Patrick Henry, to spring the first doubt,
So with the Church universal. Blinded by self-love, it has had
to accept of reform at the hands of those standing outside of
its atmosphere of mutual admiration. The Calvinistic faith
could indeed reform the Armenian, and the Armenian the Calvanistic, and so on, until each sect had pruned away something
from its neighbor's folly; but beyond this slight work there is
a vast region in which all the denominations sat down together
in a deep and mutual admiration, fatal to all sense of fault and
to all hope of reform. It is necessary in these hours that blows
should come from parties outside of itself.
All the Christian Church held to the justice of persecution
even to the death. From Rome to Geneva and Edinburg, the
stake and the gag-law were as universal as the Ten Commandments. In this awful condition of things, it was only a kind
Providence that turned the French infidels loose into that field,
dripping with the blood of the innocent Huguenot, and Covenanter, and Catholic. So the Church once sustained such rela



Deaths of Chase and Mill.                12!
rions to slavery that light could not dawn upon it out of its
own horizon, but was poured upon it by a free-thinking world
moving in an orbit beyond the realm of the sanctuary. The
relation of the Church to science and to woman awaits also a
schooling from her enemies, and while it will never accept the
whole argument of scientists, nor the whole declaration of wo —
man's rights, as set forth by Mr. Mill and his school, yet by
these outside voices it will be led into some new world of truth,.
brighter with the glory of both man and God.
There was another feature in the character of Mr. Mill that.
illustrates a cardinal idea of Christianity. You know the Bible
is full of the idea that the soul is the chief thing. The Bible is
the book of the soul. Christ came in the name of the soul..
He himself had no property, no office, no empire, no equipage,.
no retinue, because he came in the name of the mind divineand immortal. The New Testament is the grandest delineation of the soul's greatness that ever came to earth through the
lips of men. If you read the pages of profane history, you,
read of wars, armies, palaces, diadems, royal families. But,.
opening the New Testament, you read only of the immortal
spirit. Over each page the golden word " soul" might well be
written. In all profane history, the last word is dust; but of
the Testament, the last word is always immortality, be the.
writer John, or Paul, or the Savior.
If it were not for such men as Mr. Mill coming here and.
there in human life, we might fail to know what that thing called
soul is. I do not know where, in the public men of our land,
we can see so well the picture of human dignity swayed out of
balance by a love of office and gold; disturbed by a storm  of
bad passions, our public men reveal the soul, not in its noble —
ness, but in some shape that begs for pity and forgiveness.
Our great men are all said to die disappointed and half broken-hearted, because they fail to catch a four-year baubles
from the tumultuous crowd. To run for President, and then,
die in glory or in cloud, according to the counting of the votes,
has become a brief history of one of our greatest men. It is a
sad remembrance of Mr. Greeley and Mr. Chase, that their failure to reach a great office turned their days into a winter of
discontent.
All over our land, it seems to be forgotten that a human soul
may be something to which no office can add anything, and
from which no political defeat can take anything away.
God has in no way connected human greatness with a ballotbox:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that rank and fortune e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour;
And paths of glory lead but to the grave.




122          Deaths of Chase and Mill.
From such a scene it is sweet to turn to a man who might
have honored any office, but whom no office could have hondored. Nothing lasting for four years could have added to a:soul great before the four years and great afterwards. Mr. Mill
would scarcely have known when an earthly honor came to his
forehead, or when it departed. Like Marcus Aurelius, whose
laurels of virtue were greater- than the throne of the Roman
Empire, Mr. Mill's own forehead was nobler in itself than it'could have been rendered by all the political wreaths of his
*generation.
True greatness never reveals nor cherishes much ambition,
for the gift of mind and the possession of a profound character
leave little for the soul to wish or for earth to confer. Hence
in the blessed life of the Savior we perceive no trace of popular
ambition, but everywhere simple greatness of spirit, as if that
were the supreme destiny of rational being.
Oh, what an era would begin in our land if, instead of waiting
for something outside of self to come to us and honor us, our
citizens should unfold the glory within them as a flower sends
forth beauty and perfume from its own opening heart!
Let me ask you now to come to one more point where Mr.
Mill illustrated a truth that belongs by adoption to the family
of religious ideas. The Catholic Church makes it a sacrament;
the Protestant churches little less than that. But let the ceremony be considered civil or religious, the relation itself is all
inwoven with the past and future of Christianity. There is no
debate so loud and so apparently disgraceful as that now filling
-the civilized world over the nature and obligations of the marriage relation. It seems now to have been the good fortune of
Mr. Mill to unfold by example this great form of friendship
that was established in earth's first paradise. After the Greek
and Roman picture in which the wife was a semi-slave, after
the French and American picture in which the wife is an inferior or a creature of fashion, it leads us up to the old ideal of'God when we behold the wife of a Stuart Mill to have been the
perfect equal of him in education, in dignity, and in liberty. By
educating our youth along difficult paths, man seeks to hold
converse with man.  He talks the highest thoughts to his
brother, the humbler at his home. To this difference of education there is added the influence of the possession of power
and authority held by man for thousands of years. Separated
by long-cultivated vanity and long-assumed authority on the
one side, and by difference of studies on both sides, and bound
only by a transient sentiment called romance, the marriage
bond of to-day stands exposed to constant peril of unhappiness
or separation. It is a structure moved from its base. But in
these two souls now gone from this shore we behold marriage




Deaths of Chase and Mill.               123
triumphing in an education exactly parallel, and in a companionship that extended all through the divine spirit of each. It
was a partnership of mind, a vast friendship and vast love mingled as an interweaving of intellect, and sentiment, and equality.
Before the spectacle of such a friendship all the modern dis-,course about the bondage of marriage appears as a madness.
That flood of platform eloquence that. rising in our Atlantic
border has spread Westward as the Black Death that once
spread out from Asia, seems to roll back from this tomb as
though God stood there, saying, " Thus far and no farther."
These two studied the same works and alternated with each
other in writing for the Reviews and in the deep work upon
human liberty.
With these two souls before us, all the modern words about
affinities, in the recent sense of that term, come to us as from a
world of mingled vice and brutism, and leave us rapt in the
admiration of an affinity of mind, of spirit, of purity, of immortality.
It may be that not many can reach such a vast, faultless
friendship; but there it stands, the only ideal worthy of ven-.eration or pursuit.
Of this marriage, divorce forms no more an element than it
-forms an element in the father's or mother's love for her child.'The mother demands no exchange. There is no romance that:may transfer her love from her child to that of some foreign
home. This friendship is baffled only by death. Marriage is
just such an imperishable, unalterable thing.
When one of our leading citizens, a few weeks since, wrung
his hands in agony upon the banks of the river while his only
son was dying beneath the waves, when the eye could- not see
him nor the hand help, we beheld in that scene a friendship
that nothing but death could terminate. The only divorce of
a father's love for his son is death.
While the tears of Stuart Mill were falling over the tomb of
his unrivaled wife, the civilized world perceived that the marriage designed of God is one that nothing but the grave can end,.and then by a profound sorrow.
But there is no perfection upon these shores. And now vwe
-come to the shadow that falls across this grave by day and night.'Thact Mr. Mill did riut accept tlie orthodox- creed, is trot w*at.:a liberal world need regret the most, but that he revealed little.of the religious sentiment and hope is what we must confess to
be a shadow upon his memory.
His career verifies what I have said here so often that it has
become, I fear, wearisome to you, that the intellect alone does
not lead to a Savior or a God in the religious sense. Mr. Mill,
like Locke and Buckle, Darwin and Tyndall, so idolized the




124           Deaths of Chase and Mill.
rational faculty, so idolized the visible, the tangible, and the
immediate, that the sentiments seem to have perished by neglect.
When the human mind will go no farther than it can see
clearly, it cannot go far from its cradle. It argues little against
the central truths of Christianity that these great brain powers
have rejected their claims, for they have gone further, and
have, for the most part, dealt with deism itself just as with
Christianity. Their hearts do not fail of Christianity, but of
all religion.
This phenomenon of thousands of practical philosophers
parting with religion does not teach me that the religious world
is a fable, but does teach me that there are sentiments in the
heart which, if slighted, will convert the earth into a laboratory,
and death and love and wisdom and virtue all intoust.
Victor Cousin, of France, was the rival of'Stuart Mill in; wisdom. in genius, in intellect; and so Guizo t. These three were
si.iil:.r and strikingly great. But the two latter possessed the
power of sentiment. That golden atmosphere of love and hope
that hangs around religion enveloped Victor Cousin in its lifegiving folds. Setting out from the same points of thought,
Cousin always came up to God and Heaven, and Mr. Mill. to
the practical of this life; to the happiness of man here, and
then paused. Oh, what a deep mystery of human; life is here:
From the same father's side,
From the same mother's knee,
One journeys to a gloomy tide,One to a peaceful sea.
And Cousin and Guizot teach us that there is no mental
greatness too large for religion. That religion depends, upon
the world's credulity; but they teach us, even beside the grave
of the lamented Mill, that religious sentiment is a divine part
of human character, and ought to make its sunlight play in
every bosom; and that the more gifted the genius the sweeter
and more divine may be its colors in the soul's horizon.




THE CHARGES PREFERRED AGAINST DAVID
SWING
BEFORE THE PRESBYTERY OF CHICAGO.
THE NOTIFICATION.
To the Reverend, the Presbytery of Chicago, in session in the
Third Presbyterian Church, in the City of Chicago'.
DEAR BRETHREN: In the month of August, I873, I published in the Interior an editorial review of Professor Swing's
-sermon on "Old Testament Inspiration." It was written in
*the spirit of kindness, with no thought of controversy, and
with no idea that it would lead to a judicial inquiry. To the
discussion between Professor Swing and myself I need not
refer, except to say that it was the occasion of a careful exam-.ination of his theological views as they appear in his writings.
I have adverted to some of these views, as you are aware, in
the columns of the Interior. Indeed, fidelity to the church of
-which I am a minister required me to do so. It would have
given me great pleasure, as I know it would have been a great
satisfaction to many others of his ministerial brethren, had this
-discussion resulted in a vindication of Professor Swing from
any imputation of heresy,: and in showing that he is a sincere
believer in the doctrinal system of that church'in which he has
been so honored and loved; and, since this is not the case, it
~would. have been more in accord with my feelings if some older
member' of the! Presbytery could have assumed the responsibility of bringing the erroneous views of Professor Swing to
your notice.
Circumstances, however, have combined to impose this painful task on me. Permit me, therefore, to call your attention to
the accompanying charges, with their specifications, which I.ask leave to prosecute at your bar.
An thpe saemfn duties which wis devAe upo us as a couUxt of
Jesus Christ, I am, very sincerely youris:in the bonds of the
gospel,..'     FRANCIS L. PATTON.
"CHICAGO, April 13, I874. -..:.




126             The Charges Preferred.
CHARGE FIRST.
The Rev. David Swing, being a minister of the Presbyterian
Church in the United States of America, and a member of the
Presbytery of Chicago, has not been zealous and faithful in
maintaining the truths of the gospel; and has not been faithful
and diligent in the exercise of the public duties of his office as
such minister.
Specification First.-He is in the habit of using equivocal
language in respect to fundamental doctrines, to the manifest
injury of his reputation as a Christian minister, and to the injury
of the cause of Christ: that is to say, in sundry sermons printed
in the Chicago Pulpit, and in sundry other sermons printed in
the Alliance newspaper, and also in sundry other sermons,
printed in a volume entitled "Truths for To-Day," said sermons all purporting to have been preached by him, the
references to one or more of the following doctrines, to-wit:
the person of our Lord, regeneration, salvation by Christ, eternal punishment, the personality of the Spirit, the Trinity, and
the fall of man, are expressed in vague and ambiguous language; that said references admit easily of construction in;
accordance with the theology of the Unitarian denomination;
that they contain no distinct and unequivocal affirmations of
these doctrines as they are held by all evangelical churches.
Specification Second.-That the effect of these vague and
ambiguous statements has been to cause grave doubts to be,
entertained by some of Mr. Swing's ministerial brethren,
respecting his position in relation to the aforesaid doctrines;
that leading Unitarian ministers, to-wit: Rev. R. Laird Collier
and Rev. Minot J. Savage, have affirmed that his preaching is.
substantially Unitarian; that Mr. Swing, knowing that he is.
claimed by Unitarians as in substantial accord with them, and
of the doubts existing as aforesaid, and moreover, having his.
attention called in private interviews to the ambiguity and
vagueness of his phraseology, has neglected to preach the doctrine of our Lord's Deity, the doctrine of the Trinity, of
Justification by Faith alone, and of the eternal punishment:
of the wicked.
Specification Third.-He has manifested a culpable disregard
of the essential doctrines of Christianity by giving the weight
of his influence to the Unitarian denomination, and by the
unworthy and extravagant laudation in the pulpit, and through
the press, of one who is known not to have believed ill the
Christian religion; that is to say, that some time in the past
winter, and during successive days, he was advertised to lecture
in the city of Chicago in aid of a Unitarian chapel, and that
he did lecture in aid of said chapel, and in doing so aided in




The Charges Preferred.               12 7
the promulgation of the heresy which denies the Deity of our
blessed Lord; that in an article written by him, and published
over his name in the periodical called the Lakeside Monthly,.
bearing date October, I873, and entitled " The Chicago of the
Christian," a passage occurs, which, taken in its plain and obvious sense, teaches that Robert Collyer, a Unitarian minister,,
and Robert Patterson, a Presbyterian minister, preach substan-.
tially the same gospel; that the gospel, meaning the Christian,
religion, is mutable, and may be modified by circumstances of
time and place; that the " local gospel," meaning the gospel.
of Chicago, is a " mode of virtue " rather than a "jumble of
doctrines;" and moreover, that on the Sabbath following the
death of John Stuart Mill, a well-known Atheist, Mr. Swing
preached a sermon in reference to Mr. Mill, the natural effect
of which would be to mislead and injure his hearers by pro-.
ducing in them a false charity for fundamental error.
Specification Fourth.-In the sermons aforesaid, language is,
employed which is derogatory to the standards of the Presbyterian Church, or to one or more of the doctrines of said
church, and which is calculated to foster indifference to truth,
and to produce contempt for the doctrines of our church; that
is to say, that he has at sundry times spoken disparagingly of
the doctrine of the Trinity, Predestination, the Person of
Christ, Baptism, the Christian Ministry, and Vicarious Sacri-.
fice; that by insinuation, ridicule, irony, and misrepresentation,
he has referred to the doctrines of our church in such a way as,
to show that he does not value them; and that by placing in,
juxtaposition true doctrines and false minor points in theology
and cardinal doctrines of evangelical religion, he has treated,
some of the most precious doctrines of our religion with contempt. The reference is particularly to sermons entitled " Soul
Culture," "'St. Paul and the Golden Age," "Salvation and
Morality," " Value of Yesterday," " Influence of Democracy
on Christian Doctrine," "Variation of Moral Motive," "A
Religion of Words," all published in the Chicago Pulpit, and
to " Religious Toleration," " Christianity and Dogma," " Faith,'"
"The Great Debate," " Christianity as a Civilization," published
in " Truths for To-Day,'" and in, the sermons entitled " The.
Decline of Vice," "Christianity a Life," and a " Missionary
Religion," published in the Alliance newspaper. The followingpassage illustrates the allegation: "Over the idea that two
and two make four no, blood has been shed; but over the
insinuation that three may b1e one, or one three, there has often
been a demand for external influence to brace up for the work
the frail logical faculty. It is probable t;!at no man has ever
been put to death for heresy regarding the Sermon on the
Mount. Its declqratioQs, dOemand QIo, tortwres to aid humai




12 8            The Charges Preferred.
faith; but when a church comes along with its' legitimacy,'
or with its Five Points, or with its Prayer Book, or its Infant
Baptism, or Eternal Procession of the Holy Ghost, then comes
the demand for the rack and the stake to make up in terrorism
what is wanting in evidence."
Specification Fifth.-Being a minister of the-Presbyterian
Church, and preaching regularly to the Fourth Presbyterian
Church of this city, he has omitted to preach in his sermons
the doctrines commonly known as evangelical - that is to say,
in particular, he omits to preach or teach one or more of the
doctrines indicated in the following statements of Scripture,
namely: that Christ is a "propitiation for our sins," that we
have " redemption through His blood," that we are "justified
by faith," that"' there is no other name under heaven given
among men whereby we may. be saved," that Jesus is " equal
with God," and is " God manifest in the flesh," that " all Scripture is given by inspiration of God," and that " the wicked shall
go away into everlasting punishment."
Specification Sixthz.-He declares that the value of a doctrine
is measured by the ability of men to verify it in their experience. In illustrating this statement he has spoken lightly of
important doctrines of the Bible; that is to say, that in a sermon entitled " Christianity and Dogma," printed in the volume
called " Truths for To-Day," the following and similar language
is used: " The doctrines of Christianity are those which may
be tried by the human heart." " The doctrine of the Trinity
as formally stated cannot be experienced. Man has not the
power to taste the oneness of three, nor the threeness of one,
and see that it is' good.'" " If you, my friend, are giving your
daily thought to the facts of Christianity, and are standing
bewildered to-day amid the statements of science and Genesis
about earth or its swarms of life, recall the truth that your soul
cannot taste any theory of man's origin cannot experience
the origin of man, whatever that origin may have been."
Specification Seventh.-In the sermons entitled respectively,
"Old Testament Inspiration," and " The Value of Yesterday,"
published in the Chicago Pulpit, and in sermons entitled' Righteousness," "Faith," "The Great Debate," printed in "Truths
for To-Day;" also, in the "Decline of Vice," printed in the
Alliance, he has used language which, taken in its plain and
obvious sense, inculcates a phase of the doctrine commonly
known as " Evolution " or " Development;" that is to say, he
uses the following and similar language: " Low idolatry of primitive man," meaning Adam. " The Bible has not made religion,
but religion and righteousness have made the Bible. Christianity it not forced upon us-our own nature has forced it up out
of the spirit's rich depths." " The Mosaic economy was nothing




The Charges Preferred.               I29
else but progress.; earth had come to Polytheism, to Pantheism,
to Fetichism. It was the Hebrew philosophy and its immediate
result, Christianity, which swept away the iron Jupiter." " This
multitude measures a great revelation of God above that day
when earth possessed but one man or family, and that one without language, and without learning, and without virtue."  " In
the first human being God could no more display His perfections than a musician like Mozart could unfold his genius to an
infant or to a South-Sea Islander." These passages conflict
with the confession of Faith, Chap. 8, Sec. I; Chap. 7, Sec. 3,
4, 5; Chap. 4, Sec. 2.
Specification Eighth.-In a sermon entitled " Influence of
Democracy on Christian Doctrine," published in the Chicago
Ru/pit, and preached April 20, I873, he has made false and,dangerous statements regarding the standards of faith and practice; that is to say, he uses the following and similar language:
" When we come to moral ideas we are compelled to do without any standards." "You may, my friends, at your leisure
seek and find further instances of the modification of Christian
belief by the new surroundings of government. Christian customs will also be modified along with the creed."  "In this
casting off of old garments, it no more cheerfully throws away
the inconceivable of Christianity than the inconceivable of Kant
and Spinoza." "In this abandonment there is no charge of
falsehood cast upon the old mysteries; they may or may not be
true —there is only a passing them by as not being in a line of
the current wish or taste — raiment for a past age, perhaps for
a future, but not acceptable for the present."
Specification Ninth.-He has given his approval in the pulpit
to the doctrine commonly known as Sabellianism, or a Modal
Trinity, and has spoken slightingly of the doctrine of the Trinity, as taught in the standards of the Presbyterian Church
(Confession of Faith, Chap. 2, Sec. 3); that is to say, in the
volume " Ttuths for To-Day," he uses the following and similar
language: " But the moment that He (Jesus) has uttered our
text, that'Those which man can subject to experience are the
doctrines that be of God,' reason rises up and unites its voice
with that of simple authority. The doctrines of Christianity
are those which may be tried by the human heart."  "The
doctrine of the Trinity, as formally stated, cannot be experienced. Man has not the power to taste the threeness of one
nor the oneness of three, and see that it is' good.' " " Hence,
Christianity bears readily the idea of three offices, and permits
*the one God to appear in Father, or in Son, or in Spirit."
Specification Tenth.-In the sermons entitled, respectively,
"' The Great Debate," and " Positive Religion," printed in the
volume called "Truths for To-Day," false and dangerous state



I30             The Charges Preferred.
ments are made respecting our knowledge regarding the Being
and attributes of God: that is to say, that the following and
similar language is used: "When Logic informs you and me
that God is a law, or a widespread blind agency, let us not be
deceived, for all it has done is to take away our God." "' Perfect assurance is just as impossible to a free religionist or Atheist,
as it is to the Christian. Remembering, therefore, that there
is no moral idea of beauty or love or soul that may not be
denied, and remembering, too that the assurance that there is
a God is always logically equal to the opposite belief."  "We
know not what nor where is our God, our heaven."' (Confession of Faith, Chap. 2, Sec. I, and Chap. 2.)
Specification Eleventh.-In a sermon entitled "' A Religion of
Words," published in the Chicago Pulpit, and in the sermon
entitled "' Religious Toleration," he uses language in regard to
the Sacrament of Baptism inconsistent with the doctrinal
standards of the Presbyterian Church (see Confession of Faith,
Chap. 28, Secs. I, 2, 3, 4, and Chap. 28, Secs. I, 5;) that is to
say, he speaks flippantly of infant baptism, and, in the sermon
above mentioned, uses the following words: "The nations
await, with tears of past sorrow, a religion that shall indeed
baptize men and children, either or both, but, counting this as
only a beautiful form, shall take the souls of men into the
atmosphere of Jesus," etc.
Specification Twelfth.-He has used language in respect to
Penelope and Socrates which is unwarrantable and contrary to
the teachings of the Confession of Faith, Chap. Io, Sec. 24;
that is to say, in his sermon entitled " Soul-Culture," the following passage occurs: "There is no doubt the notorious
Catherine II. held more truth and better truth than was known
to all classic Greece-held to a belief in a Savior, of whose
glory that gifted soul knew nought; yet, such the grandeur of
soul above mind, that I doubt not that Queen Penelope, of the
dark land, and the doubting Socrates have received at heaven's
gate a sweeter welcome than greeted the ear of Russia's brilliant but false-lived Queen."
Specification Thirteenth.-In a sermon printed on or about
I5th September, I872, from Peter iii: 9, he made use of loose
and unguarded language respecting the Providence of God.
Specification Fourteenth.-In a sermon preached at the installation of the Rev. Arthur Swazey, D. D., as pastor of the
Ashland Avenue Presbyterian Church, Chicago, and previously
preached about January, I872, in Standard Hall, Chicago, he
repudiated the idea of a call to the ministry, and taught that
the office of the ministry, like the profession of law and medicine, is the natural outgrowth of circumstances; that is to say,
he said in substance, that the merchant is called to his business,




The Charges Preferred.                13 
the lawyer to his profession, just as much as the minister to the
duties of his office, and other statements contradicting the
teachings of the Confession of Faith in Chap. xxv., Sec. 3, and
Forms of Government, Chap. i. See Confession of Faith,
Chap. xxx., Secs. I and 2. Confession of Faith, Chap. xxvii.,
Sec. 4; Chap. vii., Sec. 4; Chap. xxix., Sec. 3.
Specification Fifteenth. —He has made false and misleading
statements respecting the Old Testament sacrifices; that is to
say, that in the sermon entitled "A Religion of Words," he
speaks of the aforesaid sacrifices as "gift worship," and uses
the following and similar language: " Gifts to the Deity were
the infant creepings of religion; the shadow of a coming reality, the manifesting of an incipient love that did not know how
to express itself. Not knowing that what God most wished,
was a pure heart in His children, they loaded His temples with
their jewels and raiment, and His altars with their lambs.'
See Confession of Faith: Chap. vii., Sec. 5; Chap. viii., Sec. 4;
Chap. xiv., Sec. 3. Larger Catechism, Q. 34.
Specification Sixteenth. —In the sermon aforesaid, religion is
represented in the form of a mysticism, which undervalues the
evidences of revealed religion, and is indifferent to the distinguishing doctrines of Christianity; that is to say, that in the
sermon preached on the occasion of the death of John Stuart
Mill, above referred to, and in the sermon called " Positive Re.
ligion," printed in "Truths for To-day;" also, in the sermon
entitled' The Decline of Vice," printed in the Alliance news,
paper; and in the volume called "'Truths for To-day," the
following and similar language occurs: "'That Mr. Mill did
not accept the orthodox creed is not what a liberal world need
regret the most, but that he revealed little of the religious sen.
timent and hope is we must confess to be a shadow upon his
memory." "Victor Cousin of France was the rival of Stuart
Mill in wisdom, in genius, in intellect; and so Guizot. These
three were similar and strikingly great. But the two latter
possessed the power of sentiment.  That golden atmosphere
of love and hope, that hangs around religion, enveloped Victor
Cousin in its life-giving folds. Setting out from the same
points of thought, Cousin always came up to God and heaven,
and Mr. Mill to the practical of this life; to the happiness of
man here, and then paused."
Speczfication Seventeenth.-In the sermons aforesaid, he employs the words used to indicate the doctrines of the Bible in
an unscriptural sense, and in a sense different from that in
which they are used by the Evangelical churches in general,
and the Presbyterian Church in particular; that is to say, that
he so uses such words as "regeneration," "conversion,"




132             The Charges Preferred.
" repentance," "Divine," "justification," "new heart," "salvation," " Savior."
Specification Eigh/teenth.-He, in effect, denies the judicial
nature of the condemnation of the lost, as taught in the Confession of Faith, Chap. iv., Sec. 4, Chap. xxxiii. Shorter Catechism, q. xix., q. 84; that is to say, in the sermon entitled' Faith, and Christianity, and Dogma," printed in the volume
called "Truths for To-Day,"' he uses the following and similar
language: "'The least trace of infidelity lessons the activity;
unbelief brings all to a halt, and damns the soul, not by
arbitrary decree, but by actually arresting the best flow of its
life. Unbelief is not an arbitrary but a natural damnation."
Specizfication Nineteent/h.-He teaches that faith saves, because it leads to holy life; that salvation by faith is not peculiar
to Christianity; that salvation is a matter of degree, and that
the supremacy of faith in salvation arises out of the fact that it
goes further than other Christian graces towards making men
holy, that is to say, in the sermons entitled " Faith," printed
in the volume called " Truths for To-day," the following and
similar language occurs: " Faith in Christ is a rich soil
out of which righteousness is a gorgeous bloom."' If there
were enough truth-truth of morals and redemption in the
Mohammedan or Budhist system to save the soul-faith
would be the law of salvation within these systems." " Salvation by faith is not a creation or invention of the New Testament, but is a law that has pushed its way up into the New
Testament from the realm without." " No other grace could
so save the soul. Charity may do much. It softens the heart,
and drags along a train of virtues; but it is limited by the horizon of this life. Voltaire and Paine were both beautiful in
charity toward the poor, but that virtue seems inadequate;
and, of the highest form of charity, a religious faith is the best
cause, and hence charity must take the place, not of a leader,
but of one that is led. Even penitence is a poor' saving grace,'
compared with faith."  See Confession of Faith, Chaps. xi., xvi.
Specification Twentieth.-He teaches that men are saved by
works; that is to say, in the sermons entitled " Good Works,"
" The Value of Yesterday," " A religion of Words," and other
sermons, the following and similar language occurs: " There is
nothing society so much needs to-day as not Divine righteousness but human righteousness." " Heaven is a height to which
men climb on the deeds of this life."  "Coming to the grave,
he can only look forward with joy who can sweetly look back."
" The good deeds of yesterday, the good deeds of to-day, the
perfected goodness of to-morrow, a deep love for man, a consciousness of the presence of God, will fill the whole place with
a nobleness and happiness to which earth has thus far been




The Charges Preferred.                I33
willingly a stranger. This will be a salvation, and Christ will
be a salvation?" [Confession of Faith, Chap. xi., Sec. I4.]
Specification Twenty-first.-He denies the doctrine of Justification by Faith, as held by the Reformed Churches, and
taught in the Westminster Confession of Faith; Chap. 9, that
is to say, in the sermon entitled " Good Works," he uses the
following and similar language: " Works, that is, results-a new
life-are the destiny of faith, the reason of its wonderful play
of light on the religious horizon. Faith, as a belief and a
friendship, is good, so far as it bears the soul to this moral perfection."
Specification Twenty-second. —He misrepresents the doctrinal
views of those who believe in Justification by Faith alone, by
using language which is calculated to produce the impression
that those who hold the doctrine aforesaid divorce faith from.
morals, and believe that men may be saved by an intellectual
assent to a creed without regard to personal character.
Specification Twenty-third.-He has spoken of the Bible, or
portions thereof, in terms which involve a denial of its plenary
inspiration as held in the Presbyterian Church and taught in
the Confession of Faith, Chapter i. and also in the following
passages of Scripture, (2 Tim. iii: I6; Acts i: I6-20,) that is to
say, in a sermon entitled " Old Testament Inspiration," and in
sundry articles written by him and printed in the Interior newspaper, he refers to the Iogth Psalm as a "battle-song," as the
4"good of an hour," " a revenge;" and in an article printed in
the Interior Sept. i8, I873, he uses the following and similar
language: "The prominence given to the Iogth Psalm in my
remarks arises only from the fact that it has long been a public
test of the value of any given theory of inspiration. This is
one of the places at which the rational world asks us to pause
and apply our abundant and boastful words. Most of the
young men, even in the Presbyterian Church, know what the
historian Froude, said of this psalm a few years since;' Those
who accept the Iogth Psalm as the word of God, are already
far on their way toward auto-da-fes and massacres of St. Bartholomew,' and while they may, for a time, reject these words,
they will soon demand a theory of inspiration very different
from the indefinite admiration of the past."
Specification Twenty-fourth.-He has spoken of the Bible, or
portions thereof, in terms which involve a denial of its infallibility, and which tend to shake the confidenee of men in its
divine authority,-as taught in Confession of Faith, Chap. i.,
that is to say, in the sermon on " Old Testament Inspiration,"
the following passages occur: " There is, it seems to me, no
other conceivable method of treating the Old Testament than
that found in the word ecleticism. We must seek out its per



134            The Charges Preferred.
manent truths, follow its central ideas, and love them the more
because they were eliminated from the barbaric ages with so
much sorrow and bloodshed." Moreover, in the article ill the
Interior above mentioned, he says that " Christ declared the
Ten Commandments defective;" also, in the article written by
him and printed in the Interior, Sept. 4, I873, he speaks of
" battles"'-meaning the battles of the Israelites-engaged in
with the approval and by the command of Jehovah, " that surpassed in cruelty those of Julius Caesar." He also teaches that
the Mosaic legislation was cruel and unjust, and uses the following and similar language: "If David's personal character
had been preceded by generations which dripped in blood, by
generations which punished over thirty forms of offenses with
death, by generations which slew women and children, by generations which punished impurity by a fine of one animal from
the flock; and, if reared in such an atmosphere, David sent
Uriah to the front and thus secured Uriah's beauteous wife,
one certainly should not attribute this immortality to any lack
of revelation, indeed, but rather to an absence of that quality
of revelation found afterwards in the morals of Jesus." Moreover, in an article written by him and printed in the periodical
known as the " Sunday School Teacher," and bearing date
July, 1873, he uses the following and similar language. And,
moreover, in a sermon entitled " St. John," printed in the volume called " Truths for To-Day," he uses the following and
similar language: " There are no prophecies of literal events in
the Apocalypse any more than there is in Tasso, or Tennyson,
or Whittier." * * * " For us to inquire the meaning of
the several seals, and to inquire whether Rome be not the
Babylon,' would be for us to seek the' Deserted Village' of
Goldsmith or the' Beulah Land' of John Bunyan."
The foregoing charge with its specifications may be proved
by the printed sermons and articles of Mr. Swing, as above
mentioned, and by the testimony of the following witnesses:
Oliver H. Lee, Horace A. Hurlburt,William C. Gray, Charles
M. Howe, Leonard Swett, William C. Ewing, Mr. McClurg
(of Jansen & McClurg), Messrs. Carpenter and Sheldon, the
Rev. W. C. Young, the Rev. J. B. McClure, the Rev. R. K.
Wharton, the Rev. C. L. Thompson, the Rev. R. Laird Collier,
the Rev. J. Minot Savage, C. O. Waters, the Rev. Arthur
Swazey, D. D., F. A. Riddle, the Rev. R. W. Patterson, D. D.,
A. D. Pence, John McLandburg, the Rev. Robert Collyer,
Henry G. Miller, William C. Goudy, the Rev. J. H. Trowbridge.
CHARGE SECOND.
The Rev. David Swing, being a minister of the Presbyterian
Church in the United States of America, and a member of




The Charges Preferred.                I35
the Presbytery of Chicago, does not sincerely receive and adopt
the Confession of Faith of this Church as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.
Specification First.- -Since he began to minister to the Fourth
Presbyterian Church he has declared to the Rev. Robert Laird
Collier, a Unitarian minister in charge of the Church of the
Messiah, in Chicago, in substance, that he agreed with him,
Collier, in his theological views, but thought it best to remain
as he was for the time, as he could thereby accomplish more
good for the cause.
Specification Second.-He does not accept and believe doctrines contained in the Confession of Faith, viz.: the doctrines
commonly known as predestination, the Perseverance of the
Saints, and Depravity.
Specification Third. —That he has declared, in a letter to
George A. Shufeldt, Esq., about the year I867, that he had
long before that time abandoned three of the five points of
Calvinism affirmed by the Synod of Dort, naming the three,
meaning three of the doctrines adopted and taught in the Confession of Faith.
Specification Fourth.-That in a sermon delivered in the
Fourth Presbyterian Church, April I2, I874, he made statements which, by fair implication, involve a disbelief in one or
more of the leading doctrines of Confession of Faith, to-wit:
Of Election, Perseverance, Original Sin, the Vicarious Sacrifice
of Christ, the Trinity, and the Deity of Christ, that is to say,
he uses the following and similar language:
" After the hundred-year experiment, there is no probability
that any missionary gold will be exhausted upon any indoctrination of the heathen world in denominational ideas, for the
tendency of the present is to abandon sectarian ideas at home;
hence their will be little disposition to inculcate abroad doctrines which are rapidly dying'by our own firesides."
" The Church of England joins with the dissenting churches
in India as a fact, and cares little for the apostolic succession in
a land where the Brahmin can so far outdo it in the quantity
or absurdity of holy teachings and holy pedigrees. And there
the Calvinist conceals his five points, for the crowd of Indian
philosophers can always propose ten points far more obscure,
and thus all the Protestant sects approach the whole Pagan
world with the Gospel reduced to its simplest expression.
Blessed era it will be when we shall be as fully ashamed in
America of the things that divide us as we are when our feet
touch India or Japan."
" Can it be possible that it requires home training, that is,
local and youthful prejudice, to enable us to see the immense
worth of our dogmas, and that, approaching foreigners not fully




136             The Charges Preferred.
drilled in the sectarian method and tactics, we fear their smite
of unbelief or derision? It is ominous if, having a score or so.
of peculiar ideas, we should all get together and agree to say
little about them to this Chinaman and that Brahmin. Such a
condition of things would seem to indicate one more step along
this path, an agreement to say littlte about these differences to
persons not pagans, and not upon foreign shores.
"' We have come to-day to a survey of Christianity in its
truest significance, and hence in its wanderings about from race
to race, from island to continent, from river to sea, we may
learn what are its most essential parts. A  student shutting
himself up in his room may, from the Bible, elaborate a perfect
system which shall omit nothing regarding the human will or
the mode and quality of everything, but the world in actual
experiment may not need, nor even faintly appreciate, onetenth part of this closet-made system."
The specifications contained under Charge I are relied on as
contained under and in support of Charge 2, the same as if repeated, excepting the sixth, tenth, and sixteenth.
The foregoing charge with its specifications may be proved
by the printed writings of Mr. Swing, as above referred to, and
by the testimony of the following writers: Robert Laird Collier,
George A. Shufeldt, and also of the witnesses named in Charge I.




DAVID SWING'S TRIAL.
The Chicago Presbytery met in the lecture room of the First
Presbyterian Church, corner of Twenty-First street and Indiana
avenue, at half-past IO o'clock, on Monday morning, May 4,
I874, for the purpose of trying Prof. Swing, upon the charges
of heresy and unfaithfulness, preferred against him by the Rev.
Dr. Patton. The Moderator, the Rev. Arthur Mitchell, occupied the chair, and there were present, the Revs. Dr. R. W.
Patterson, L. J. Halsey, A. Swazey F. L. Patton, W. C. Young,
A. H. Dean, J. V. Downs, J. M. Fairs, W. M. Blackham, E. W.
Barrett, G. C. Meyers, W. Forsythe, W. J. Wood, John Covert,.
E. R. Davis, E. L. Hurd, W. F. Browne, E. Scofield, J. B.
McClure, J. Munroe Gibson, J. H. Taylor, Joseph H. Burns,
A. Mitchell, J. H. Trowbridge, J. H. Walker, M. M. Wakeman, J. McLeod, W. R. Downs, J. T. Matthews, P. Cardin,
C. L. Thompson, C. Wisner, D. J. Burrell, A. E. Kittredge,
Glen Wood, L. H. Reid, Jacob Post, E. H. Curtis, David
Swing, D. S. Johnson, William Broteston, James Harrison, R.
K. Wharter.
The roll of churches and their lay representatives was next
called, and the following responded: First Church, J. A. Otis;
Second Church, J. S. Gould; Third Church, J. M. Horton;
Fourth Church, O. H. Lee; Fifth Church, Elijah Smith;
Eighth Church, J. E. Fay; Jefferson Avenue Church, Tuthill
King; Grace Church, George H. Frost; Ashland Avenue
Church, F. A. Riddle; Westminster Church, J. D. Wallace;
Evanston Church, A. L. Winne; Hyde Park Church, H. A.
Hopkins; Highland Park Church, S. B. Williams; Lake Forrest Church, D. R. Holt; Manteno Church, C. A. Spring;
Homewood Church, J. Caldwell; Joliet Central Church, R. E.
Barber; Maywood Church, J. H. Hurlburt; Reunion Church,
A. H. Merrill; Englewood Church, A. Drysdale; Dunton
Church, W. H. Dunton; Fullerton Avenue Church, Morton
Lewis; Ninth Church, George H. Leonard; Joliet First
Church, W. P. Caton; Wilmington Church, William Hart;
Peotone Church, Henry Marsdon. In addition to these, there
are about 200 spectators, principally ladies, who occupied seats
outside the Presbyters, the latter sitting in the body of a semicircle.
The proceedings were opened by spending a few moments
in silent prayed, and then the Moderator asked God that the
spirit of a true Christian brotherhood might be spread over the
assembly, that he would be with them, and guide them to just
conclusions.




DAVID SWING'S DECLARATION.
Prof. Swing then approached the Moderator's seat, and as
he stepped on the platform, the audience applauded loudly.
The Moderator-The Moderator must call the audience to
order. T think that they will appreciate that, in an assembly
of this kind, in which we are sitting in a judicial capacity, it is
entirely inappropriate for members of the Judicatory, and certainly still morc for those who are not, to indulge in any expression of feeling of this kind. I hope silence will be observed in the future.
Prof. Swing-I wish to state, Mr. Moderator, that the form
in which I shall bring my case forward is one about which I
have great doubt, as I have had no conferences, and feel that I
can only read my statement by a sort of charity on the part of
the accuser.
The Professor then read as follows:
To the Members of the Chicago Presbytery.
Called upon in the outset of these proceedings to enter my
plea to the charges and specifications presented by Francis L.
Patton, I beg permission to submit the following: I object to
the charges as too vague, and as embracing no important offense, yet, not wishing to raise any technical objections, I enter
the plea of " Not guilty." I admit the extracts from sermons
and writings, but I would ask the Presbytery to consider the
entire essay or whole discourses from which the extracts are
made. I avow myself to be what, before the late union, was
styled a New School Presbyterian, and deny myself to have
come into conifict with any of the Evangelical Calvanistic doctrines of the denomination with which 1 am connected, and I
beg permission to enter as a part of my plea the following
statements:  I. Regarding my relations to the Liberal
Churches. 2. Regarding my relation with the Presbyterian
Church. Of these I shall speak in their order.
By way of explaining the quantity of the public offense, I will
state that of fifteen lectures delivered in this city for benevolent purposes, all but two were on behalf of the Evangelical
Churches, and, in all cases but one, remuneration was declined.
Hence the spirit that prompted such lectures must have been
not any marked partiality for the so-called liberal societies.
This much as to the quantity of the alleged offense. Upon
the quality of the conduct, I would submit the following observations:




David Swing's Declaration.            I 39
I. There is no valuable theory of life except that of " Good
will toward all men." It is only upon the basis of a wide friendship any one can live well the few years of this existence, and,
hence, to decline to lecture on behalf of a Unitarian chapel
would be doing more harm to the mutual good will upon
which society is founded than it would do good to an orthodox
theology, or harm to a liberal creed.
2. If the object of the Evangelical pulpit is to promulge its
better truth, it can do so only so far as its ministry reveal a
deep friendship toward all mankind, and so far as they unfurl
the banner of their own love, while they are presuming to
speak of the impartial love of their Divine Master. There remains no longer any power of authority in the pulpit. The
time when the civil police drove a halting sinner into the true
Church has disappeared, and the modern pulpit must communicate its ideas along the chords of friendship, and he will
persuade the most men whose heart can gather up the largest
and most diverse multitude into the grasp of his pure affections.
3. But let us come now to the grandest reason why a Presbyterian may express in many ways a kind regard for these
so-called Liberal sects. The sin of the "lecture" as charged,
must be based upon the assumption that the Unitarian sects
are outcasts from God, having no hope in the life to come.'The names of Channing, and Elliott, and Huntington and Peabody, in the pulpits of that sect, and the Christ-like lives of
thousands in the congregations of that denomination, utterly
exclude from my mind and my heart the most remote idea
that in showing that brotherhood any kindness, I am offering
indirect approval to persons outside the pale of the Christian
religion and hope. The idea that these brethren are doomed to
wrath beyond the tomb, I wholly repudiate. It is, indeed, my
conviction that they do not hold as correct a version of the
Gospel as that announced by the Evangelical Alliance a few
years ago, yet I am just as certain that the blessed Lord does
not bestow his forgiveness and grace upon the mind that possesses the most accurate information, but upon the heart that
loves and trusts Him. It is possible that the venerable Dr:
Hodge, of Princeton, holds a more truthful view of Jesus than
may be held by the distinguished Peabody, who has just lectured from his Unitarian standpoint before the Calvinists in
the Union Theological Seminary, but we can point to nothing
in the Bible that would indicate that Heaven is to be given to
only the one of these two giants, who may possess a clearer
apprehension of the truth.  It may be assumed that God
grants the world salvation only on account of the expiatory
atonement made by a Redeemer, but that God will grant this




I40          David Swing's Declaraion.
salvation to only those who fully apprehend this fact, is an
idea not to be entertained for an instant, for this would give
Heaven only to philosophers, and, indeed, only to those of this
small class who shall have made no intellectual mistake.
Looking upon the multitudes who need this salvation, and seeing that they are composed of common men, women and children, who know nothing of the distinctions of formal theology,
we cannot but conclude that paradise is not to be a reward of'
scholarship, but of a loving, obedient faith in Jesus Christ.
When we remember these things, and recall that Dr. Isaac
Watts was accused of being a Unitarian, so difficult often is it
to perceive the dividing line, we cannot for a moment place
these persons called Unitarians outside the great and generous
love of the Savior. I stand ready, therefore, at all times to
express toward these sects a friendship not only human, and
wise, and social, but also Christian.
The harmony existing between all these brethren and myself'
is not a harmony of views in the mind, but a harmony of love in
the soul. They each and all know that I differ widely from
them, but this they and I know: that only the most gentlemanly treatment in public and private will we all receive
always from each other. Much as I love Presbyterianism, a love
inherited from all my ancestors, if on account of it, it were nec —
essary for me to abate in the least my good will toward all
sects, I should refuse to purchase the Presbyterian name at so
dear a price.
The second point to be alluded to, was my relations to Presbyterianism. A distinction evidently exists between Presbyterianism as formulated in past times and Presbyterianism
actual. A creed is only the highest wisdom of a particular
time and place. Hence, as in States, there is always a quiet
slipping away from old laws without any waiting for a formal
repeal, as some of the old statutes of Connecticut are lying
dead, not by any legal death, but by long emaciation andL
final utter neglect of friend and foe; so in all formulated creeds,.
Catholic or Protestant, there is a gradual, but constant, decay
of some article or word which was once promulged amid great
pomp and circumstance. And yet, no Church is willing to
confess its past folly and repeal the injurious or untrue. All,.
Catholic and Protestant, simply agree to remain silent.
In the Presbyterian Confession of Faith there are about 200
formulas of truth, or supposed truth. It is a wonderful argument in favor of this compendium that not one-tenth of these
have been found false to the Bible or false to the welfare of
society. To designate these 200 as Calvinism is a gross injustice, for they are almost all only valuable truths, common to all
churches, and gathered up from the sacred page.




David Swzing's Declaration.           14 
But from a few statements out of this large number the actual
Presbyterian Church has quietly passed away. Conventions
cannot be called every few years to amend or repeal some one
article. It would entail endless debate and expense, and perhaps promote wide discord thus to call from time to time a new
Westminster Assembly. As a Christian world avoids a revision,of the translation of the Bible because of the tumult such a new
version would probably create among the sects, so each particular Church postpones as long as possible any formal modifica-tion of its historic statements of doctrines. But meanwhile
individual minds cannot be slaves; they cannot suspend the
use of their judgment and best common sense. Hence, unable
to revoke any dangerous idea by law, the Presbyterian Church
permits its clergy to distinguish actual from the Church historic.
To the Presbyterian Church actual I have thus far devoted my'life, giving it what I possess of mind and heart.
Chief among the doctrines which our church has passed by as
being incorrect, or else an overdevelopment of Scriptural ideas,,are all those formulas which look toward a dark fatalism or
which destroy the human will, or indicate the damnation of:some infant, or that God, for His own glory, foreordained a
vast majority of the race to everlasting death. It has been
my good or bad fortune to speak in public, and in private to a
large number of persons hostile to our church, and in nearly all,cases I have found their hostility based upon the doctrines
indicated above, and in all ways, I have declared to them that
the Presbyterian Church had left behind those doctrines, and
that her religion was simply evangelical, and not, par excellence,
the religion of despair. In my peculiar ministry a simple silence'has not been sufficient. I have, therefore, at many times
declared our denomination to be simply a church of the com-:mon evangelical doctrines.
Besides the formulas of its books, our church has suffered
more than pen can record from the wild utterances of some of
its great names, and from these it has been my frequent duty
to try to separate her fair and sweeter present. There were
ages when mothers wailed in awful agony over a dead infant
because they had been taught that children " not a span long"
were suffering on the hot floor of hell, and that each new-born
"infant was only a "lump of perdition;" and, under the awful
lashing of these thoughts, mothers used to baptize their deadborn little ones, piteously beseeching God to ante-date the
sacred rite. In the midst of this wail of infants damned,
Luther himself says:' God pleaseth you when He crowns the
unworthy; He ought not to displease you when He damns the
innocent."
Against the doctrine of fatalism, as implied in the perfect




142          David Swing's Declaralion.
independence of God's decree as to all human con ct, against
the ultra form of human inability it has been my constant duty,
as it seemed, to protest, and thus defend our church from the
influence of ideas so repudiated by modern thought. An eminent churchman, perhaps Luther, said, " All things take place
by the eternal and invariable will of God, who blasts and shatters in pieces the freedom of the will."
Next to the baneful Calvanistic estimate of the will, comes
the overstatement of the idea of salvation by faith all along
through the Presbyterian history. Said Luther, " You see how
rich is the Christian. Even if he would, he could not destroy
his salvation by any sins, however grievous, unless he refuse to
believe." " Be thou a sinner and sin boldly, still more boldly
believe. From Christ no sin shall separate, though a thousand
thousand times a day we should commit fornication and murder." In my ministry I have toiled the harder to unite faith
and holiness, because of this dreadful page of history written
down against the Calvinistic branches of the Protestant Church.
Next to the injury the Presbyterian Church has sustained
from its errors as above mentioned, it has become a source of
actual infidelity by its terrific doctrine of hell. Even to the
day of Edwards, and since, the pictures of perdition have been
such as at first, indeed, to frighten the multitude, but such as
afterward to destroy the idea of God. Look where men might,
it was perdition to all but his sect, and, to look upon other
sects in the pains of hell, was to form a part of the happiness
of the blessed. The faggot, the rack, and the boiling oil were a
resort of potentates, for, if God was so glorying in the torment
of heretics just beyond, it was a small matter if the church
tormented them slightly on this side the tomb. We need not
disguise the fact, my brethren, that the dark side of Calvanism,
gave birth to infidelity in that age when the church was narrow
in its love, broad only in its damnation. But permit me to
quote from one who has not been arraigned for bad teaching,
but whose words have just been published by the American,
Tract Society-Theodore Christlieb. He says: " It was the
former century which prepared the way among ourselves for theprevalence of rationalism. Was it not the petrifaction of evangelical faith into dry forms of a dead orthodoxy? The sermons
of that period were for the most part * * * about CryptoCalvinists, Syncredists, Synergists, Majorists, Antinomians,
Osiandrians, Weigelians, and Arminians.  *  *  *  At such
a time, when a cold orthodoxy was almost everywhere substituted for living faith, when a slavish adherence to the
church's standards was put in place of a free inquiry into the
sense of Scripture, and a fresh bondage to the letter was introduced, it became a simple necessity for energetic minds like




David Swing's Declaration.            143
Lessing to come to an open breach with traditional Protestantism. *  *  *  Rationalism was right in contending for simple
morality in opposition to a theoretic orthodoxy." " It must be
confessed that the church theology of the last century was
chiefly to blame for the general apostasy from the ancient faith
which then began. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the first third of the nineteenth, the chief
authorities in pulpits and institutions of learning were promoters of rationalism. * * * For this spirit we theologians
have only ourselves to thank. We are now reaping what we
ourselves have sown."
Such are the words of a profound thinker who, to his fame as
a thinker, adds a parallel fame of piety. Amid some of the
unparalleled doctrines of our Church arose the intellectual revolt of the present times, and we can only check the progress
of the evil by withdrawing the cause. It is an ominous fact
that the liberal creed which the charges in this case so attack
has sprung chiefly from that land which once lay wholly subject
to the severe tenets of the Puritans.
It seems to me the world is now fully ready for an orthodoxy
that shall firmly, yet tenderly, preach all of the creed except
its plain errors or dark views of God and man. Not one of
you, my brethren, has preached the dark theology of Jonathan
Edwards in your whole life. Nothing could induce you to
preach it, and yet it is written down in your creed in dreadful
plainness. Confess, with me, that our beloved Church has slipped away from the religion of despair, and has come unto Mount
Sion, into the atmosphere of Jesus as He was in life and in
death, full of love and forgiveness. And yet it is only in thenarrow field just pointed out that I have in any way departed
from the doctrines of the Presbyterian Church.
One of the most distinguished of our theological teachers in
the East has written: " There is not enough in the indictment
to convict one of heresy. All these commotions only point to
a time when sectarianism will disappear, and all Christians will
meet on the platform of a common faith in one Christ and one
Savior, and, fastening all their faith upon Him as a Redeemer,
will cast off many of the forms which now perplex them."
Beloved brethren, I, holding the general creed as rendered by
the former New School Theologians, I will, in addition to such
a general statement, repeat to you articles of belief upon which
I am willing to meet the educated world, and the skeptical
world, and the sinful world, using my words in the evangelical
sense: The inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, the Trinity, the
divinity of Christ, the office of Christ as a mediator when grasped
by an obedient faith, conversion by God's spirit, man's natural
sinfulness, and the final separation of the righteous and wicked.




144          David Swing's Declaralion.
I have now read before you an outline of my public method
and of my Christian creed. It is for you to decide whether there
is in me orthodox belief sufficient to retain me in your brotherhood. Having confessed everywhere that the value of a single
life does not depend upon sectarian relations, but upon evangelical or Christian relations, I am perfectly willing to cross a
boundary which I have often shown to be narrow; but, going
from you, if such be your order at last, it is the evangelical Gospel I shall still preach, unless my mind should pass through
undreamed of changes in the future.
From the prosecutor of this case I would not withhold my
conviction that he has acted from a sense of duty; therefore, to
him and to you all, brethren, I extend good-will, and hope that
in a wisdom religious and fraternal you will be enabled to do
what is right in the sight of God.
Yours, with love,          DAVID SWING.