COWAN'S 
 
 Old Book Store. 
 
 21 IA POWKI.L ST. 
 San t'r 
 
 ,/TL-h-^n-- 
 
 REESE LIBRARY 
 
 1 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 
 - ^-cessions \o 
 
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 -u~jr-n^ i^ U-JT* 
 
MEMORIAL DISCOURSES, 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. A. L. STONE, D. D., 
 
 Late Pastor of the Park Street Church. 
 
 or THE 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 DPUBLISUEID BY 
 
 NO. 9 CORNHILL 
 
 1866. 
 
 HOYT 
 
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by 
 
 HENRY HOYT, 
 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. 
 
DEDICATION 
 
 To the members of Park Street Church and Society, to whom seven- 
 teen years of happy fellowship with them in the service of the gospel 
 have united the author in bonds which no absence or distance can 
 sever, this volume, as an echo of the ministrations to which they 
 have listened so kindly and so long, is most gratefully and affection- 
 ately dedicated. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 NOT dead, but absent," it was no thought of mine to be " still 
 speaking " to my former congregation of Park Street, or the larger com- 
 munity on whose patient audience I have so often trespassed. But 
 some of my brethren in the pulpits of Boston and its vicinity, and 
 not a few of the people to whom I have ministered so many years, 
 and hold fast to my heart t>y so many ties, desired me to leave behind 
 me, as I migrated to a distant part of the country, something which 
 should be to them a memorial of the labors among them which had 
 thus come to an end. There was no reason why I should not comply 
 with this request except my doubt whether these pages would have 
 any other value to them, or others, than that which their partial 
 friendship should attach to them, and this they overruled. 
 
 They are selected and grouped by no especial law, but as fitly 
 enough representing and continuing the endeavor of the writer to 
 bring the profitableness of "all Scripture" before those with whose 
 spiritual nurture he was charged. 
 
 May they yet be tributary to the Christian growth and comfort of 
 all who, for friendship's sake, or Christ's, shall search them for the 
 truth that honors the Master and saves the soul ! 
 
 A. L. STONE. 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 GOD THE GOVERNOR 1 
 
 THE WORK OP NEW ENGLAND IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY . 14 
 
 GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH 46 
 
 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY 58 
 
 KNOWING CHRIST 86 
 
 GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED 102 
 
 WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS 115 
 
 CHRIST'S CUP 127 
 
 WAITING 142 
 
 INCOMPLETENESS OP LIFE 154 
 
 JOHN'S FAILURE 167 
 
 FRIENDSHIP 181 
 
 FAITH'S VENTURES 197 
 
 PLEA FOR THE MONTHLY CONCERT 212 
 
 HUMAN LONELINESS 229 
 
 THE MINISTRIES OF TIME 242 
 
 SORROWS OF JESUS 258 
 
 BALANCE SHEET ; OR, TAKING ACCOUNT OF STOCK .... 266 
 
 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST 279 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 I. 
 
 GOD THE GOVERNOR. 
 
 FOR THE KINGDOM IS THE LORD'S: AND HE IS THE GOVERNOR AMONG THE 
 
 NATIONS. Psalm xxii. 28. 
 
 rPHEEE are some very special advantages now, in the 
 J- attitude of the public mind, for considering and 
 appreciating the principles and procedures of the divine 
 government among men. It is to be feared that we 
 are not always in sympathy with God in his estimate of 
 the sacredness of Law, and his measures to preserve or 
 restore its inviolability. That estimate we sometimes 
 look upon as mysterious or extravagant, and those meas- 
 ures as high-handed, sanguinary, and cruel. 
 
 It is a grand thing for us, in that great contest of arms 
 in which the nation is engaged, that our stand is on the 
 side of loyalty. There are men as earnest, and perhaps 
 as sincere and conscientious, on the other side. But the 
 whole force of their position and the entire current of 
 their sympathies concur to make not law, but rebellion 
 against it, sacred to them; not the maintenance of 
 government, but its overthrow; not the preservation 
 of Union, but its destruction. The whole educational 
 
2 GOD THE GOVERNOR. 
 
 power of the movement upon them is toward demor- 
 alization and lawlessness. It loosens from about their 
 hearts the bands of governmental restraints, all binding 
 sanctities of covenants and compacts and oaths of fealty ; 
 makes it right and obligatory in their view to assail, 
 tear down, and subvert the majestic fabric of constitu- 
 tional authority, and the public order which it guards ; 
 changes deceit, treachery, and robbery from crimes to 
 virtues ; and presents, on the other side, no countervail- 
 ing rights and sanctities defended and established, no 
 imperilled liberties fought for and bled for, to offset 
 and neutralize the awful nurture of revolutionary and 
 treasonable violence. 
 
 But every outlook of ours upon the great struggle is 
 from the heights of the capitol. We are with the gov- 
 ernment. We stand for the laws. We sustain the ap- 
 pointed and legitimate administration. We strike at 
 hydra-headed anarchy. For, let this rebellion prevail, 
 and government is impossible. All bands of allegiance 
 are like tow touched by fire. Compacts of confederation 
 are ropes of sand. Disintegration as between North 
 and South, between State and State, between one portion 
 of a State and another, between cities and towns and 
 neighborhoods, between man and man, nay, we might 
 say between body and soul in the same man, for there is 
 no final bound to the principle becomes the supreme 
 law. We see the exigency with the eyes of our rulers. 
 It is a perfectly fundamental and radical issue. It is 
 life or death with all constituted authority. It is the 
 whole question of civil and social order. It is just the 
 
GOD THE GOVERNOR. 3 
 
 problem whether men can dwell together in communities, 
 or whether they shall resolve themselves back into indi- 
 vidualism and barbarism, become each an Ishmaelite, his 
 hand against every man and every man's hand against 
 him. And so deep and strong are our convictions that we 
 say, w T e all say; no tongue lisps a whisper of dissent, 
 Government must be maintained AT WHATEVER COST. 
 Constitutional law must be enforced AT ALL HAZARDS. 
 And we suffer no man alive, and no page of history, and 
 no imagination of the thoughts of the heart, to put before 
 us any estimate of the hazard, any computation of the 
 cost, which can make us falter in that stand. Before any 
 possible future, we repeat it with firm lips and steadfast 
 hearts, "AT ALL HAZARDS, AT WHATEVER COST." Here, 
 too, as in the other direction, is an educating power of 
 transcendent force, and the lesson upon us and our chil- 
 dren and our children's children will not lose its special 
 vitality for three generations, at least, of human life, and 
 will abide in our history, a voice of wisdom and authority 
 for all times and histories to come. 
 
 Now, then, finding us in this attitude of mind, God 
 may speak to us concerning his kingdom. He is a Gov- 
 ernor, and he may press us, now, with conclusions af- 
 fecting his administration, which none of us can gainsay. 
 
 If he ask, Shall there be a government at all, set up 
 in his name on earth? we can only now give one an- 
 swer. Sometimes we speak of God as though he were 
 only a father to our humanity, and should confine himself 
 to that. A father's office we conceive to be to furnish 
 us with a home ; to make that home pleasant and safe ; 
 
4 GOD THE GOVERNOR. 
 
 to provide for us there as well as he may ; to call us to- 
 gether around the bright hearth and the smoking board ; 
 to appoint us a pillow of comfortable rest ; to watch at 
 our side with faithful vigils, tender care, and skilful 
 nursing when we are sick, and wipe away our tears 
 when we are sad. We all like to call God, "Father." 
 He appears in such an amiable, smiling aspect when this 
 relation alone is recognized, that we dismiss our fears, and 
 have only grateful sensations as he presents himself thus 
 before us. It is very agreeable to be so cared for and 
 cherished and blessed. So far, we have, none of us, 
 any, quarrel with God. Let him pour his blessed sun- 
 shine upon us all the day. Let him soften our fields 
 with his spring showers, and fill our wells with his au- 
 tumn rains. Let him refresh the arid places of earth 
 with nightly dews. Let him give us the round of the 
 changeful and fruitful seasons. Let him gladden our 
 daily walks with the companionship of kindred and 
 friends, and make our tabernacle musical with household 
 talk. A good father, a kind benefactor. There is not a 
 heart on earth that objects to such a conception of God, 
 or to any such function of his superintending providence. 
 Nay, he may even advise, in a fatherly way, as to the 
 temper we ought to cherish and the conduct we ought to 
 exhibit, and chide us gently, if we miss the mark, and 
 seek to persuade us to better purposes and more filial 
 returns. 
 
 Our eyes are open a little wider now. We see clearly 
 that such an administration will not do. It is not strong 
 enough. It lacks enforcing and coercive power. It is 
 
GOD THE GOVERNOR. 5 
 
 cruelly weak. In a sense, it tempts to rebellion and 
 defiance. God must be a Governor, as well as a 
 Father. He must enact laws, publish ordinances, set 
 up institutes ; come before us not simply with a father's 
 love, but with a ruler's authority. We want to see firm- 
 ness, as well as kindness, on his face. We want to feel 
 that there is a steadfast will, as truly as a paternal pity ; 
 that his throne stands as fast as his promises ; and that 
 his control of us and our fellow-men, and of all things 
 around us affecting our interests, is as wide, searching, 
 and absolute as his exploration of our wants, and the 
 generosity with which all need is met. We shall agree 
 in saying, "If God be good, let him give us a govern- 
 ment, not shadowy, remote, and ineffective, but near, 
 positive, peremptory, that may be felt, relied upon, and 
 ascertained to be real and solid." The fatherhood of 
 God is a very affecting truth, but it does not of itself 
 go far enough for our confidence and our comfort. Not 
 till we read on his vesture and his thigh, that other 
 title, " King of kings and Lord of lords," are our souls 
 at peace. Here we plant our feet upon a rock. 
 
 Again, if God ask, Shall this government be main- 
 tained? our answer is equally prompt and hearty. We 
 have not two opinions about it. We want a strong, 
 steady, abiding government. We desire to know how 
 it is bulwarked ; what forces wait upon its behests ; what 
 executive vigor it possesses. Is omniscience its coun- 
 sellor? Is omnipotence ready to march at its bidding? 
 Does its control sweep the area of its territory, ubiqui- 
 tous in every part? Is it prepared for all exigencies? Is 
 
6 GOD THE GOVERNOR. 
 
 it a fair-weather government, on deck in pleasant lati- 
 tudes, handling the sails, steering the ship, ordering the 
 crew while the winds and currents favor? and does it 
 abdicate if there be gales or lee shores or mutiny? or 
 is it a government for stormy weather overhead and 
 conspiracies on board? What will it do if defied? On 
 that question our chief solicitude hangs. Let God put 
 that question to us. What shall my government do if 
 it encounter combinations and conspiracies against its 
 perpetuity? Shall it give way, retract its edicts, back 
 down, let whoso will renounce allegiance, and throw off 
 the character of subjects, or shall it be maintained? We 
 are ready with our answer. How easy it is to-day to 
 answer ! No hesitation ! Our response is brief, but em- 
 phatic. It repeats the last word of the question with a 
 downright cadence, " maintained ! " 
 
 Suppose, again, the Great Governor asks us how far 
 lie shall go in the maintenance of his government. We 
 reply again, without taking time for debate, and without 
 any qualification, As far as is necessary for the object. 
 Shall he proffer, then, the oath of allegiance to every 
 subject? Yes, to every subject. And if this oath be 
 declined, or, having been taken, be broken by falsehood 
 and perjury, shall he insist upon the supremacy of the 
 government there? Yes, he must insist. But if he 
 commit himself to such a demand, how far must he be 
 prepared to back it up? If need be, with the whole 
 power of the government. But it may call for the 
 waters of a universal deluge. Then let the deluge fall. 
 It may necessitate the ten plagues of his wrathful right 
 
GOD THE GOVEKNOK. 7 
 
 arm. Then inflict them. It may make our earthly Mies 
 run red with blood. No matter, they must run through 
 loyal dominions. It may call for the extermination of 
 the Amalekites. Then exterminate them. It may com- 
 pel the administration to keep a standing army of fam- 
 ines, fevers, pestilences, and storms, and an immense 
 police of aches and pains and crosses and disappoint- 
 ments. Very well, then the administration must do it. 
 It may oblige the government to make a terrible example 
 of rebels and traitors, to hold up their tragic end as an 
 awful warning, to show them to all the States of God's 
 empire gibbeted in eternal anguish and infamy, the 
 shame and condemnation of their great parricide clinging 
 to them forever and ever. Well, if this be needful, it is 
 right. It is therefore good. It is benevolent. The 
 government has no choice. It must be maintained. In 
 the hearts or upon the necks of those who oppose it, its 
 supremacy must be asserted. If it take cycles of proba- 
 tionary centuries, if it cost myriads of subject lives, if 
 it necessitate the laying waste of ten thousand worlds, 
 fortresses of secession and nests of sedition, if it part 
 brother from brother, cut off unnumbered children of 
 God's loins from their Father's house, cast down from 
 the firmament a third part of the stars set therein by 
 God's hand, the infinite good of an established gov- 
 ernment demands and justifies the prodigious outlay. 
 For, government sacrificed, all is lost; no good remains. 
 Better lose a part. The loss is partial and temporary. 
 It can be replaced. The good of a sustained administra- 
 tion is universal and eternal. How clearly we see that 
 
8 GOD THE GOVEKNOR. 
 
 now ! How easy it is to answer these questions here and 
 to-day ! The principles of government are one, on earth 
 and in that august court. How fully God vindicates him- 
 self in our instinctive and accordant judgments ! How 
 absolutely we pronounce, The cost of maintaining govern- 
 ment must not be regarded! That is sanction enough for 
 any and all of God's procedures. 
 
 Again, suppose the divine lips reiterate the question, 
 What shall be done with rebels? Possibly we should 
 suggest, especially to a government undeniably strong 
 enough to deal with them, a course of forbearance for a 
 while ; time given them for soberer thoughts ; attempts to 
 remove their prejudices, to convince them of the benevo- 
 lent intentions and spirit of the government, to awaken 
 them to penitence and shame, to lead them back, if possi- 
 ble, to their allegiance; but when the question returns, 
 They are obdurate ; they will not have God to reign over 
 them ; they have set up for themselves ; they are deter- 
 mined upon independence of the rightful authority ; they 
 are going on under their own flag ; what shall be done with 
 them ? our answer again is prompt and decisive ; the gov- 
 ernment must proceed against them. It cannot allow their 
 triumph. That dishonors the administration before all 
 worlds, and must disaffect the loyal everywhere and for- 
 ever. No knee, on earth or in heaven, will continue to 
 pay homage to such a government, which is no govern- 
 ment. It must deal with these rebels, if it would not 
 have defection and rebellion general. It must put them 
 down. If need be, it must cut them down, it must mow 
 them down, it must utterly exterminate them, if it 
 
GOD THE GOVERNOR. 9 
 
 come to that. Rebellion must be crushed out. Admit it 
 in any corner of God's broad kingdom, and allow it to 
 thrive and live and maintain its little rival empire there, 
 and the weakness and incompetency of the administration 
 are confessed, and it is disrobed of royalty from hence- 
 forth. Put an end to it. Rebellion itself is responsible 
 for the havoc which it provokes. Bring over it the 
 clouds of heaven, open the magazines of electric fire, 
 hang out the flag set with suns of light and striped with 
 red of dreadful vengeance. March the forces of Almight- 
 iness, and let the artillery open its thunders ; bring out 
 the reserves of Jehovah, the chariots of God, which are 
 ten thousand times ten thousand, THE REBELLION MUST 
 BE WIPED OUTL! Can we give any other answer? Put 
 the question 'to twenty millions of people in this our 
 nation to-day, Is God justified in putting down rebel- 
 lion in his dominions, by whatever pains and penalties 
 needful? and twenty millions of voices answer, with a 
 shout that rises above the choral melodies of heaven, 
 " Ay ! " These flags, that have blossomed out, this sea- 
 son past, so suddenly upon all the summer air, symbolize 
 more than the sentiment of loyalty to the great Republic. 
 They float and wave for a more august principle. The 
 mustering and marching among the hills and valleys of 
 our New England homes and across the breadth of 
 prairies and over dividing mountains are in allegiance to 
 a grander call than that of patriotism. All this fervor 
 and self-devotion declare a truth high as the throne of 
 God and eternal as his reign, Rebellion against good 
 government must be extinguished by utmost power and 
 
10 GOD THE GOVERNOR. 
 
 severity. And more than this, they declare that it must 
 be so extinguished, the treatment be so effectual, the 
 warning so memorable, the crushing so final, that never 
 again, while government endures, shall rebellion lift its 
 head. When before was God's scheme of governing a 
 universe so indorsed by man? Never in the long story 
 of time. But we see exigencies and principles now, as 
 our eyes never beheld them in the past. 
 
 If we ask, again, What is the duty of rebels? the 
 same unbroken unanimity replies, To lay down their arms, 
 restore their spoil, and submit unconditionally to the 
 government. No treating with God with arms in our 
 hands. No questioning of his intents, while our traitor- 
 ous flag is flying. No expectation of his clemency, or 
 demand for his forbearance, while we occupy our for- 
 tresses. Submission first. Nothing before that. The 
 government must keep its one aspect, so long as we re- 
 sist and stand out. It can make no terms with treason. 
 All talk of amnesties and pardon must come in on the 
 basis of absolute surrender. 
 
 What is the duty of the loyal? Clear again and un- 
 mistakable. They must take side with the government. 
 There must be no question with any mind where they 
 stand. They must not only let it be known, but make it 
 known, with which party they are in sympathy, whether 
 with the government or with rebellion. There can be no 
 such thing as neutrality. Neutrality is infidelity and dis- 
 loyalty to the crown. It is aid and comfort to treason. 
 God insists, and we shall say to-day that he has a right to 
 insist, that every man shall run up his flag. We feel like 
 
GOD THE GOVERNOR. 11 
 
 insisting upon the same thing in the earthly issue. God 
 calls, "Come out from among rebels." "Confess Christ 
 before men." "Join the fellowships of my people." " He 
 that is not for me is against me." Oh, how impregnable 
 are these positions ! How intelligent is God's earnest- 
 ness, at the head of his government, in insisting upon be- 
 ing openly acknowledged in a time and in a world of 
 rebellion ! ' It is not enough for one of us to say, " Why, 
 I mean to be a just and peaceable man ; I am going about 
 my business ; I am not to be pressed into making demon- 
 strations." That's the mistake. No demonstration is a 
 demonstration. It is disaffection and defection. Men 
 must demonstrate. They must run up their flag, and it 
 must be the right sort of a flag too. We can understand 
 the intense abhorrence with which the lips of God pro- 
 claim it to these neutrals, "So because thou art luke- 
 warm, and art neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out 
 of my mouth." Are any of us neutral as between God 
 and the great rebellion ? Do we leave it in doubt where 
 we are, what colors we secretly prefer ? We have not 
 thought of that matter as we ought, have we? See the 
 unutterable meanness and cowardice and wickedness of 
 that attitude. We don't want to fight, do we ! We pre- 
 fer not to arm ! we choose not to enlist ! When good 
 soldiers are crowned, where shall we be? When traitors 
 are punished, what will become of us? 
 
 Again, can the loyal do anything with happier effect 
 than this one thing, show their confidence in the Supreme 
 administration ? God's plans are large ; they are slow- 
 moving as we reckon time ; they are not submitted to our 
 
12 GOD THE OOVERNOK. 
 
 inspection. Suppose they seem to us too slow ; fail of 
 what we call grand chances ; give up such capital strate- 
 gies of our devising; and we, with the king's uniform on, 
 marching under his orders and officers, and enrolled for 
 the war, stop and shake our heads, and vent our criti- 
 cisms, and propose our emendations, and purse up our lips 
 and shrug our shoulders ; what is the effect ? The effect 
 is to damage the government; to shake its hold upon 
 other hearts ; to interfere with its recruiting ; to pour a 
 contagion of faintness and uncertainty through the ranks 
 where we march. That is not for us. It is for us to obey 
 orders ; to trust the management of the campaigns to the 
 Great Captain of our salvation ; to march when he gives 
 command ; to pitch when the word comes ; to maintain 
 the post at which he sets us, and keep such a cheerful and 
 trustful air that men shall say, " These soldiers are confi- 
 dent of victory. They trust their leader." 
 
 By and by the war will be ended. All rebels will be 
 subdued to penitent allegiance, or punished with final 
 exile and ignominy. The loyal and triumphant forces 
 will gather home to the presence of the King and the 
 glory of the capital. What an ovation will await them as 
 they march in upon the streets of the royal city ! All 
 heaven will be moved at their coming. From lip to lip, 
 the tidings will leap, " The warriors of Prince Emmanuel 
 are returned from the fields of earth." And as the long 
 line comes gleaming on, the angelic welcomes will be 
 heard in farthest spheres, on the outer verge of light. 
 There are they that were stoned to death in riotous cities, 
 martyred witnesses of the truth ; there are the men, few 
 
GOD THE GOVERNOR. 13 
 
 and alone, that defended some " Sumter " of principle, 
 around which roared aloud the world's hostile scorn ; 
 there are they that left houses and lands, and home and 
 kindred behind, to give their lives in the great struggle ; 
 and each scar of battle will be a badge of everlasting 
 honor ; and the rent banners will be hung out over heav- 
 en's battlements, and bathed in living light; and the 
 hand that led the forces on will set upon each brow a 
 crown of glory. 
 2 
 
II. 
 
 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND IN THE 
 FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 
 
 AND THEY THAT SHALL BE OF THEE SHALL BUILD THE OLD WASTE PLACES; 
 THOU SHALT RAISE UP THE FOUNDATIONS OF MANY GENERATIONS; AND 
 THOU SHALT BE CALLED, THE REPAIRER OF THE BREACH, THE RESTORER OF 
 
 PATHS TO DWELL IN. - Isaiah IviiL 12. 
 
 WE cannot to-day be narrow, and shut our thoughts 
 within the limits of the Commonwealth. THE 
 TIMES are educating us all into views and sympathies 
 broad as the land. We stand in these hours on an emi- 
 nence, and our horizon is the borders of the Republic. 
 We are lifted to the dome of our nationality, and our field 
 of vision stretches to the water-line that marks either ocean 
 shore, the blue of the Lakes and the blue of the Gulf. 
 
 We cannot name our State, or any State, without 
 thinking at once of our whole country. We are weaned 
 from the idea that a State is complete by itself. It is one 
 component part of a Federal Government, held to its sis- 
 ters by a deathless bond. It is a branch of a living and 
 fruitful vine, in which alone it has life and fruitfulness. 
 Except it abide in the vine, we may reverently apply the 
 Scripture, it " is cast forth as a branch, and is withered ; 
 
CPTHF 
 
 THE WORK OF NEW ENG^A&& ' 15 
 
 C , 
 
 and men gather them and cast, them into the fire, and they 
 are burned." 
 
 Let the stars in the heavens break from their constella- 
 tions, but let not one on our field of blue part the chain 
 of celestial gravitation and attempt to shine alone. It 
 shall soon become a " wandering star," " going out in the 
 blackness of darkness forever." 
 
 We belong to a nation a nation living still fair 
 and strong and whole, undivided and indivisible, wear- 
 ing still on its brow, for all the jealous kingdoms to 
 read, the old familiar inscription, "E pluribus unum," 
 and girding itself anew for the race of the future. 
 
 And the question which I desire briefly to discuss to- 
 day is this : What is the work of Massachusetts, and of 
 New England, in this near future of the whole country? 
 
 We may say, in the first place, that the life of New 
 England cannot be dissevered from the national life. 
 There has been in some quarters certain idle and flippant 
 talk in reference to such a readjustment of the national 
 boundaries as should leave this old Puritan Common- 
 wealth and her five sisters outside the walls of the new 
 confederation. But our connection with the Kepublic is 
 not a matter of territorial contiguity and geographical 
 lines. Let men run border lines as they please ; let them 
 frame ordinances of separation ; let them build a Tartar 
 wall between us and the great homestead; neither civil 
 nor material barriers can exile us from the family circle. 
 It were just as possible to separate from the loaf the lea- 
 ven that made it light and sweet, or from a human life the 
 principles and influences of its early nurture. 
 
16 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 New England is not a certain limited portion of the 
 national domain, a sharp eastern angle that can be clipped 
 off. No map of the Union gives to the eye her full and 
 proper extent. No engineering art can explore and pro- 
 ject her share of our continental heritage. 
 
 Her life is ubiquitous in the nation. From her foun- 
 tain heart the warm arterial currents have circulated 
 through the whole body and flowed out to the remotest 
 extremities. Her sons have gone forth into every habi- 
 table place of the broad land. They have carried with 
 them her enterprise, her intelligence, her art, her ingenu- 
 ity, the pure and ordered life of her homes, the tranquil 
 securities of her law-abiding communities, her system of 
 common schools, academies, and colleges, her reverence 
 for the Sabbath, the memory and the love of her house- 
 hold altars and public sanctuaries. Their first harvests as 
 they have occupied and opened up virgin soil have been 
 not what the earth yielded to the hand of tillage ; they 
 sowed, first of all, Puritan ideas, the seeds of New Eng- 
 land institutions ; and that which grew earliest beneath 
 their husbandry has been the transplanted life of their 
 own native hills and valleys. Here are indestructible 
 channels which cannot be closed, and through which the 
 fountained abundance of New England's fulness has flowed 
 out and is flowing still across the prairies, and along the 
 central valley, and through the wilderness, and unto the 
 far Pacific coast. New England can no more be divorced 
 from the Union than the maternity of a mother from her 
 children. That maternity is in their form and features ; 
 it gives the coloring to cheek and hair; it looks from 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 17 
 
 their eyes ; it speaks from their tongues ; it runs in their 
 veins ; it beats in their hearts. Not even by miracle could 
 it be separated from them. 
 
 Separate New England from the Union ! Give us back 
 our sons and daughters, more than half a million of them, 
 from all the homes of the land outside our borders ! 
 Give us back our millions of capital that have already 
 changed so -much of the western wilderness to a smiling 
 garden, whitened the length of its rivers with the foarn 
 of swift steamers, and braided over the land the iron 
 strands of trade and travel ; turn back upon us the deep 
 streams of wealth that flow out annually to those granaries 
 of the West for their cereal stores ! Give us back the 
 forceful and fruitful words that have gone forth from her 
 press, her pulpit, her rostrum of public oratory, from 
 every platform and every page on which the eloquent lips 
 of her sons have spoken, words that have quickened and 
 controlled the intellectual life of generations, and guided 
 popular movements in every part of the country ; this 
 public speech of New England that has gone forth free 
 and fresh and vital as the air of heaven, gather it up and 
 restore it to its authors ; separate it from the popular 
 mind and heart, from the principles and the practice of 
 our homebred millions ! Give us back the messengers of 
 a pure gospel that have gone forth at our sending, with 
 large self-sacrifice, to plant the banner of the cross in 
 " western wilds," and bear it on in the very van of our 
 spreading civilization, and with them the churches they 
 have built, and the fair Christian order they have reared 
 amid the outlawry of frontier settlements ! Give us back 
 2* 
 
18 THE WOKK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 the broad, bright river of our charities, that has branched 
 to so many thresholds of suffering through these four 
 tragic years ! Give us back the brave blood that has 
 drenched a hundred battle-fields, and reddened the trail 
 of New England feet wherever the armies of the Union 
 have marched ! 
 
 When all this can be done, when the nation will con- 
 sent to this, then may men talk about " leaving New 
 J^ngland out in the cold." Till then, her place is in the 
 warm hearts of the people, her life mingled with the life 
 of the nation, " one and inseparable." 
 
 We have, we may say, in the second place, to keep 
 New England undegenerate. 
 
 The greatness of New England's influence is not so 
 much in what she does as in what she is. The two go to- 
 gether. When she works, when she speaks, it is the 
 background of character that lends to both their weight. 
 Just as when an individual utters his thoughts, it is not 
 so much what he says as who says it. The chief empha- 
 sis of words and of deeds comes from the heart of the doer 
 and the speaker. There is no premium in the sphere of 
 moral power upon idleness, frivolity, and corruption. 
 Both for men and for communities, if we would have the 
 influence pure and strong, these attributes must first be 
 demonstrated in the character. It is when those who 
 speak in the name of New England can say, "Look at 
 her," that their oratory is beyond tongues of flame and 
 words of fire. We have it in charge, then, to guard the 
 purity and nourish the strength of this home-life. The 
 fountain must be full and clear if the streams are to be 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 19 
 
 pure and copious. We must keep the New England ideal 
 rounded and perfect in her actual. 
 
 There are some things New England cannot be. She 
 cannot be the granary of the nation, a great agricultural 
 producer. A single prairie lot, where the horses trot at 
 the plough in one straight furrow of miles before they 
 turn, and where, later, the reapers seem struggling like 
 wrecked mariners in the wide, tawny harvest sea, 
 
 "Rari.nantes in gurgite vasto," 
 
 would swallow as a little morsel all the farming life 
 within our borders. She cannot be a grower of tropi- 
 cal fruits and flowers, breathing from red, ripe lips 
 the fragrance of tropical airs ; a tiller of the vine, the 
 orange, and the olive ; a nurse of pale invalids hurrying 
 from cold coast winds to seek soft bowers and sunny 
 vales. She cannot show in her granite cliffs and rude 
 ravines the yellow, glittering scales to which the greed of 
 all nations should come rushing and trampling, hewing 
 down her hills, and turning her peaceful wilds back into 
 the bald desolations of old chaos. But she can be the 
 fountain-head of intelligence for the people, kindling in 
 every little vale and hamlet, for the poorest and humblest, 
 the lights of letters and learning, building on favored 
 heights her tall towers of Science, to scatter their rays 
 afar, calling to her classic halls the wisest teachers of 
 the day, shedding upon all the paths of her children, 
 from the untiring enginery of her press, the white leaves 
 of daily knowledge and high research, as orchard trees 
 shed the blossoms of spring, as this January sky sheds 
 
20 THE WOEK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 its snowflakes to-day. She can be the schoolmistress of 
 the land, teaching the alphabet of all good nurture, 
 leading her pupils up through the great volumes of wis- 
 dom, and quarrying out the massive granite of her 
 thoughts for all intellectual builders. 
 
 She can be the mother of art and of invention, so that 
 the right hand of all labor, whether of the mind, the 
 shop, or the field, shall stretch itself out to her for the 
 most facile implements of its craft. 
 
 She can be the asserter and defender of all humane and 
 noble principles, so that every champion of truth and 
 freedom, every lover of the right and of his fellow-man, 
 shall draw inspiration from her words and strength from 
 her steadfastness. 
 
 She can especially be the mother and nurse of men. 
 This is her royal staple. The sands of the Cape are 
 barren and rough, and bleak are the Berkshire hills ; but 
 the barren sands and the bleak hills grow men. To train 
 the generations of her sons and daughters is the most 
 peculiar work of New England within her borders. She 
 does not put her infants out to nurse. Her generous 
 breasts suckle all her babes. She is to take each new- 
 born child of every home, and to solve over it this prob- 
 lem : Given a fresh young life, how to conduct it to the 
 noblest manhood, the purest womanhood ! From the cradle 
 to the fullest prime, and onward to the chamber of rest, 
 she is to be to this life, in all its physical, mental, and 
 moral culture, the institutions that, from first to last, shall 
 develop, mould, and guard it, the atmosphere that shall 
 fill its lungs, and drape it round about, a wise and faithful 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 21 
 
 foster-parent. Beyond all the newer and more unfur- 
 nished portions of our country, she is to provide within 
 her rocky portals a nursery for the children of the Re- 
 public. 
 
 There is one word which, more than any other, holds 
 before our thought the whole New England ideal. It is 
 not only a descriptive, but an inspiring word. It leads us 
 back to the presence and the heroisms of our dead fathers. 
 There throb in it the stern, strong pulses of martyr life. 
 It is keyed to the music of our early forest temples, in 
 which the Pilgrims worshipped God, 
 
 " And the sounding aisles of the dun woods rang 
 To the anthems of the free." 
 
 Oh that our New England might be, late and forever, 
 what she was at first, PURITAN ! Once a word of re- 
 proach, veined with sneering irony, History has written 
 it as our proudest eulogy. To keep it unblotted down 
 the ages is our most sacred trust. 
 
 For this there must be a real, practical, public faith in 
 God. We must believe that he is a God nigh at hand, 
 and not afar off. We must not exile him to the seventh 
 heavens, a cold, remote, hazy spectre. There must be 
 with us a reverent sense of his constant presence and a 
 devout recognition of the mingling of his counsel and his 
 hand in all our private and public affairs. How near he 
 was to our fathers ; they walked with him, and talked 
 with him, and questioned his will at every step of life ! 
 Their eye sought his, their hand touched his in every 
 strait. We must not be afraid to name him, and avouch 
 
22 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 him, and appeal to him, in our proclamations and State 
 papers and legislative acts and judicial decisions. We 
 ought to be afraid to leave him out, and to withdraw our 
 public life from the shadow of those tutelar sanctities. If 
 ever we cease to be here a God-fearing people ; if we drift 
 away from the faith of a divine, revealed religion, and its 
 rightful control of human affairs ; if we give up the Chris- 
 tian Sabbath, as an effete institution ; if we discard the 
 Bible as God's code of laws for individuals and for States ; 
 if we dissociate politics and religion, breaking up the old 
 Puritan bridal, which wedded them, and pronounced over 
 them this nuptial benediction, "What God hath joined 
 together, let not man put asunder ; " if we make our pub- 
 lic days of thanksgiving and of humiliation mere festive 
 holidays, in which we seek our own pleasure rather than 
 to please and propitiate God ; if we divorce thus the voice 
 of the State, the course of law, the decrees of justice, and 
 the popular life from the word and authority of God, we 
 shall have emptied our old baptismal name of all its signif- 
 icance, keeping the form, but not the life ; the shadow, 
 not the substance, and in that hour and in that act the 
 sceptre of New England's power will be broken, her 
 crown lost, and her banner that she planted in the wilder- 
 ness, with its ancient heraldry, " Christo et eccksice," trail 
 dishonored in the dust. 
 
 Let all of us rather conspire to lift up again the old 
 Puritanic ideal. < f It is certain," declares one of the early 
 New England voices, "that civil dominion was but the 
 second motive, religion the primary one, with our ances- 
 tors in coming hither. ... It was not so much their de- 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 23 
 
 sign to establish religion for the benefit of the State , as 
 civil government for the benefit of religion." Another 
 voice, a century earlier, testified that the fathers " came 
 not hither for the world, or for land, or for traffic, but 
 for religion, and for liberty of conscience in the worship 
 of God, which was their only design." 
 
 This sacred interest was first everywhere. "As near 
 the law of God as they can be," was the instruction of the 
 General Court of Massachusetts, in old time, to its com- 
 mittee appointed to frame laws for the Commonwealth. 
 
 Only in the reproduction and general diffusion of this 
 spirit can we hope to make the New England of the past 
 the New England of the future, a power and a glory in 
 the land. 
 
 Looking forward now and beyond our own confines, we 
 may say, in the third place, that it belongs to us to live 
 in and for the future of the whole country. 
 
 This, too, is one part of our inheritance from a Puri- 
 tan ancestry. Our fathers were builders for the future. 
 They lived for all the coming ages. They laid deep foun- 
 dations whereon they hoped there might rise, after their 
 day, the walls of a Christian empire, to stand until earth's 
 " cloud-capped towers " should fall. We are fond of say- 
 ing, " They builded more grandly than they knew." Per- 
 haps that is true in respect to the political fabric of which 
 they laid the corner-stone, and the material results that 
 have followed their work. But they had a vision of a 
 spiritual temple that should rise from their humble begin- 
 nings, until its dome should span the continent and its 
 arches echo the psalms of meeting and mingling nations. 
 
24 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 Foundation-work is congenial to the sons of New Eng- 
 land. It runs in our blood to be pioneers of a spreading 
 Christian civilization. 
 
 We must look forward, for our past is brief. It is 
 kindling and inspiring, but it is yet fresh and new. We 
 have no calendar of hoary centuries, stocked with events 
 and revolutions that have marked off the eras of history, 
 and rich with the spoils of time. Compared with the life 
 of nations and the courses of history, we began but yes- 
 terday. Looking back, a glance reaches the starting- 
 point. More naturally we turn our gaze forward. Not 
 records, but prophecies, hold our eyes. Tin tempted to 
 live on the glories of a dead ancestry, we are inspired to 
 do something for our posterity to commemorate. 
 
 We must look forward, for our ideal is higher than we 
 have reached. We may have been vain and boastful, but 
 none of us can believe that the summit of American great- 
 ness has been reached. The magnificent capabilities of 
 the continent, and the adaptation of our forms of life to 
 all possible progress on such a theatre, rebuke our com- 
 placency in the past, and hold in prospect a sublime goal 
 for which we have yet to gird up our loins and run. 
 
 We must look forward, because revolution leaves us 
 not a finished task, but only a clear track. Give us peace 
 and victory to-morrow, and it brings us only a vacation 
 from fighting, none from work. Revolution does not 
 create a civilization. It opens the door and ushers it in, 
 if it be prepared. If this revolution of ours succeed fully, 
 it will have helped to rid us of some malign forces in the 
 development of American life, at least, of some incarua- 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 25 
 
 tions of those forces ; it will deliver into our hands a na- 
 tion saved from crumbling apart ; but what this nation 
 shall be and do, what it shall live for and realize, is a 
 problem that will yet remain. 
 
 Nations must work, as God works on the earth, for 
 something yet beyond and unmatured. When they pause 
 and say, This is the limit and consummation of our doing, 
 he will say of each of them, " Cut it down, why cumber- 
 eth it the ground ? " At every stage of progress they 
 must renew their devotion to what is incomplete in the 
 divine scheme for man. Casting off all dead and useless 
 appendages, burning their ships behind them as they 
 touch new shores of discovery and conquest, they must 
 follow hard after the guiding steps that are tracking man's 
 way to the calm heights of a perfect social state. 
 
 We may ask, then, in the fourth place, what are the 
 specific tasks to which we are to address ourselves in 
 working for the future of the whole country ? 
 
 The nearest duty of all is to push this war triumphantly 
 through. Persistent rebellion is alone responsible for all 
 the blood and treasure it shall yet cost to maintain the 
 supremacy of the government. That supremacy can only 
 be maintained by showing its power to be, as well as its 
 right to be, when both are called in question. Let no 
 sign of weariness or impatience in the protracted struggle 
 come from us while a rebel banner taints the air. The 
 length of the war has been absolutely indispensable for 
 the full sense of nationality ; the unity and authority of 
 the Federal Government to enter and possess the hearts 
 of the people ; for the radical revolutionizing of the old 
 3 
 
26 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 social system of the South ; for the education of the mass- 
 es up to the political and moral issues of the present hour. 
 Let no voice among us call for peace while treason stands 
 erect and defiant. Let no sigh of complaint freight any 
 wind that blows from the North toward the capitol. To 
 every fresh call for men, let us give quick, consenting re- 
 sponse. The armies that have been marching through 
 the summer and autumn from victory to victory must 
 needs find their ranks thinner, and the final strokes are 
 yet to be delivered. We have to fill the ranks, to stimu- 
 late enlisting, to sound the call for volunteers at all the 
 gateways of our hills and in the streets of our towns, to 
 compensate the forsaken tasks of labor's thrifty hands, to 
 keep a light on the hearth of the absent soldier's home for 
 his wife and babes, and bread on the board and " the wolf 
 from the door." w Fight it through ! " Let the press em- 
 blazon it morning and evening. Let the ministry of Him 
 who came to send the sword on earth before his reign of 
 peace give it voice. Let legislation in town and State 
 give it all helpful practical indorsement. Let the whole 
 heart of New England give it clear and ringing echo. 
 And here, especially, where the word was first spoken 
 that broke the silent terror of the beginning, let that 
 sound have once more full volume and cheerful tone : 
 " The sons of Massachusetts to the rescue ! " 
 
 We have, of course, a duty of ceaseless vigilance. The 
 transition periods of a nation's life are perilous crises. 
 They inaugurate the dynasties of moral forces that are to 
 sway the sceptre for a cycle whose diameter no man can 
 calculate. The fortunes of this nation are in transition 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 27 
 
 now. We have reached the line, sailing on in the Ship 
 of State, and are crossing it into seas unploughed before. 
 In respect to opinions, morals, public leaders, society, 
 and institutions, we are leaving the old and entering upon 
 the new. On the other side of this great chasin that sep- 
 arates our past from our future, our national story is to 
 begin afresh, our annals to open a new volume. Public 
 sentiment is to be reformed ; new banners are to float in 
 the van of national progress ; we are to take down and 
 rebuild many a shattered line of our walls of empire ; we 
 are to legislate and to act upon novel questions without 
 precedents. 
 
 What shall we carry on with us ? What shall we leave 
 behind ? What new elements shall come in to leaven the 
 whole lump? What old elements shall be extirpated or 
 neutralized? What things vital and precious, the legacy 
 of the past, shall be studiously garnered up ? What dead 
 weights shall be thrown off? Who will watch to see that 
 no divine gift of the old civilization is dropped out, no 
 seed principle of our earlier liberties and evangelisms 
 blown away or smothered, no ancient guarantees of public 
 faith and honor and popular privilege weakened or forgot- 
 ten ? Who will scrutinize as carefully the forces that har- 
 ness themselves to the onward movement, and make sure 
 that no wanton, profane hand lay hold of the sacred ark 
 of our hopes ; that no seed principle of mischief be sown 
 where many hands are scattering grain broadcast ; that no 
 insidious attempt to twine around our swelling limbs fet- 
 ters that shall one day cripple our growth and our free 
 motion, shall prosper? 
 
 OF THE 
 
28 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 This is precisely the demand that invokes New Eng- 
 land intervention. Her weight in the wavering scales of 
 our public destinies is not the weight of numbers, nor of 
 territorial greatness and promise, nor of political predomi- 
 nance. The centre of political power has forever receded 
 from the East ; it will visit no more the Atlantic slope of 
 the Alleghanies ; it is crossing meridian after meridian, 
 westward still. Let it pass ; our moral sceptre remains. 
 It is open to us still to sway the nation by the force of 
 ideas, to rule through the royalty of principles that can . 
 never be discrowned. Let the questions which we have 
 just asked get their clear and authoritative answers in the 
 voice and the attitude of this little sisterhood of common- 
 wealths, and we rule the confederacy still, but we must 
 look well at the foundation of the principles which we at- 
 tempt to assert and maintain. They must have an un- 
 questionable right of supremacy. They must be royal 
 "jure divino" They must be no temporary policies and 
 expediencies, but everlasting facts and laws. They must 
 take hold of what is imperishable, have their roots in 
 the very nature of God, and be linked to the car of his 
 omnipotent providence. The divineness of government, 
 the supremacy of law, order imperial, human equality, 
 the inalienable rights of man, intelligence, freedom, 
 law, and religion, the four immovable pillars of commu- 
 nal peace and perpetuity, standing by these, holding and 
 teaching this faith, New England will be a power in the 
 Union forever. 
 
 For these principles, then, she must be jealous with an 
 infinite jealousy in watching* the country through this 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 29 
 
 present crisis. This is the turn of the fever. There must 
 be no negligence nor slumbering now ; every change must 
 be noted ; every pulse must be felt ; the slightest aberra- 
 tion is of moment. We must be Argus-eyed, so that no 
 future disaster shall impeach our vigilance in this critical 
 hour. 
 
 Another duty of ours concerns the deliverance of this 
 land from the bondage of the past. That deliverance is 
 not yet complete. For one, I am restless and anxious 
 until that consummation come. 
 
 We have been in covenant with a great wrong. We 
 admitted it into partnership with our national life. We 
 awarded it rights and immunities. It proved itself a 
 fraudulent partner from the beginning, but we were held 
 by the bond. We kept it. There was an inherent in- 
 compatibility, but the covenant remained. Through all 
 this time our proper national civilization was not born, 
 but only conceived. Jacob and Esau struggled together 
 in this pregenital strife, never dissociated, the one clasp- 
 ing the other's heel. 
 
 It was meant that this land should be a home of liberty 
 and justice for all God's creatures to the end of time ; that 
 the rights of man should stand and grow here as the old 
 forests of the wilderness had stood and grown, their roots 
 striking deep downward, their tops branching upward to 
 the open, free heaven, their arms intertwining, and the 
 streams of a continent watering their lusty life. There 
 was to be one land on the face of the earth in which polit- 
 ical and religious freedom should walk over its length and 
 breadth without let or threat, one where there should 
 3* 
 
30 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 be on the body and on the soul no chain. So our found- 
 ers builded ; so our fathers and mothers suffered and 
 wrought and prayed. And the new temple of promise 
 rose fair and stately, and its light streamed afar, and many 
 feet, weary and wounded, hastened thither to rest with- 
 in this secure asylum. But, alas, what shrines were built 
 within ! Was there one to a pure faith ? Was there an- 
 other to equal law ? Was there a third to maiden Lib- 
 erty? But what other fourth shrine is that, grim and 
 dark, crowding these three? What grisly demon sat 
 within, usurping place in that fair fellowship? 
 
 Alas for the new hope and the new nation and the new 
 world ! Alas for our bright western star so soon turning 
 wan and dim ! 
 
 But God had not joined this compact with evil. His 
 hands were not tied if ours were. He has a way of an- 
 nulling covenants with crime. He found the means to 
 shatter our inviolable bond. He sent the earthquake of 
 revolution to shake down the demon shrined in our sacred 
 temple. It stood strong. It had its foundation deep, 
 and had been buttressed with massive masonry. It was 
 clamped and riveted to the temple walls with many a bolt 
 of iron ; but the earthquake was stronger yet. It shook 
 and heaved and wrenched apart till it seemed as though 
 the temple itself would fall. Many said, It will fall. It 
 did, indeed, tremble and rock, and its lights were shiv- 
 ered ; but it stands yet, with tower and dome catching 
 the light of earliest and latest day, and the dark shrine is 
 overturned. It lies prostrate and in ruins. Its horrid 
 deity is fallen, like Philistia's Dagon before the ark, 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 31 
 
 maimed and broken, with the stump only remaining. 
 Thus is the bond parted ; thus the covenant ceases ; and 
 we have to watch now that no hand rebuilds that demol- 
 ished shrine ; that no malign craft sets up Dagon's stump 
 again in our great temple. Surely, we have felt the curse 
 of this corroding bond long enough. Shall we ever bow 
 our necks to it again ? Shall we suffer any man among 
 men, or any fiend from below, to press its poisonous links 
 into our flesh once more ? We have the shattered mate- 
 rials of that dark altar to sweep out of the consecrated 
 temple, the last vestige of that horrid idolatry to banish 
 and bury forever. This work is not yet done ; it needs 
 finishing. There are those who would knit again the rup- 
 tured strands of the old, rent covenant. Men of New 
 England, legislators of Massachusetts, suffer this never 
 to be ! Here, where the most strenuous voices of the 
 great reformation have been uttered from the beginning, 
 let them still sound forth, full and clear. You will have 
 to watch against cunning, selfishness, and intrigue ; against 
 many a nobler sentiment of mistaken generosity and mag- 
 nanimity and lingering reverence for the Constitution as 
 it was ; and against that foul monster, fouler and more 
 misshapen than Satan saw sitting portress at the gate of 
 hell, PARTY SPIRIT. I do not feel safe or at peace 
 while any legal remnant of this accursed thing clings to 
 us. See to it that this bondage of the past be utterly and 
 forever doomed. Take you care that this incubus of evil 
 never more throne itself upon our national life. 
 
 From this last point, we may rise to a higher and more 
 general affirmation. We must see to it that the whole 
 
32 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 course of this government, both in its constitutional law 
 and in its public administration, shall be determined by 
 strict right and divine principle. 
 
 Have we or have we not yet learned the lesson, that 
 evil built into the templed life of a people is an element 
 of weakness and corruption in the structure? It may 
 seem to the builders a necessity. The whole work may 
 pause as though there could be no further progress with- 
 out allowing the wrong a place. Admitting it, the walls 
 may go swiftly up, as though vindicating the expediency 
 of the measure by a success fair and grand, and not else 
 possible. But God has taught us that this demonstration 
 is a delusion and a terrible mistake. The columns so reared 
 have to be taken down again ; that is the divine teach- 
 ing. It is not real progress to build in with evil, that the 
 work may go swiftly forward ; it goes swiftly to decay. 
 All that is built upon it is lost labor. It cannot stand. 
 While God reigns, nothing propped with wrong shall re- 
 main firm. That crumbling support will one day fail, 
 and the superincumbent pile lean to its fall. Nothing but 
 truth and right will stand. There is not a trumpet tone 
 so loud in all history as that which proclaims it now, that 
 our national disaster is the fruit of national crime, the 
 issue of mingling evil with the foundations of the repub- 
 lic. Are we not educated yet into the conviction that we 
 must build altogether in righteousness, if we build for 
 posterity and the golden future ? Have we not acquired 
 a conscience yet in the heart of this American people ? 
 Shall we not walk at length by its light, without swerv- 
 ing? 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 33 
 
 What is God's idea in a great nation ? Merely the bet- 
 ter carrying on of commerce and the elaboration of the 
 art of comfortable living? Is it not that it shall stand 
 the noblest representation of the principles of his own 
 supreme government, nay, the actual vice-regency of his 
 sceptre among men, a temple of concrete justice, in 
 which no right shall suffer harm, and no wrong find a 
 shelter? If in any of its decrees and procedures it con- 
 tradict his attributes, malign his character, and annul his 
 statutes, will he accept it as his ideal, and write upon its 
 front " esto perpetua " ? Will he not write that other sen- 
 tence in the old Hebrew, "Mene, mem, teJcel, upharsin"? 
 
 We are rebuilding here ; we must take better care this 
 time. It should seem enough to say that right is right ; 
 but we must add that right is safety, right is perpetuity, 
 right is immortality. Wrong is death and destruction, 
 wrong is treason and disloyalty. We are taking stern 
 measures with rebellion now. But every seeming patriot 
 who consents to any unrighteousness in the reconstructed 
 nation is a more insidious and a more deadly traitor to 
 the Union than any man with arms in his hands in all the 
 rebel hosts. 
 
 In this task of rebuilding, only the most resolute stead- 
 fastness, only the most sleepless vigilance, will keep evil 
 out. The demand will be incredibly urgent. "Yield 
 here ! " " Give way there ! " " Consent to this unimpor- 
 tant compromise, and embarrassment will be obviated, 
 and all will go smoothly ! " The pinch will be the sorest 
 when rebellion collapses. With the rebels at our feet su- 
 ing for terms, we shall remember that they were our 
 
34 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 brothers. All our generous sensibilities will be moved 
 toward them. Our bowels will yearn over them. We 
 shall feel that we cannot be hard with them. We shall 
 be put upon our magnanimity. We shall take them by 
 the hand and lift them tenderly up. We shall be in- 
 clined to give them more than they would have the face 
 to ask. We shall desire to show them that the hand that 
 struck down their parricidal weapons was never a hand 
 of hate, but of grieved and reluctant justice. That will 
 be a perilous hour for the constancy of principle. Then, 
 when any voices ask us, in the name and in the spirit of 
 fraternal conciliation, to welcome the erring and the con- 
 quered back with their old properties and relations, in- 
 cluding some remnant of the ancient wrong or some new 
 vicarious wrong, it will be hard to resist. There is, of 
 course, a place and a sphere for compromise. We may 
 yield our interest, we may forego advantage, we may 
 waive opinion and preference for peace and harmony ; 
 but we have it as the most solemn charge of these years 
 of violence and blood, to yield nothing of righteousness 
 and justice to any demand for any gain so long as the 
 world standeth. 
 
 It is a part of our work, which ought to have distinct 
 and formal mention, to deepen in the hearts of the people 
 the sentiment of the sacredness of government. There 
 has been in the very nature of our institutions a chronic 
 and growing strain upon this sentiment. Everything in 
 this land tends to the elevation of the individual. We 
 teach that each man, standing erect in the image of his 
 God, is the peer of every other. We provide for the 
 

 
 IN THE FUTUKE OF THE COUNTRY. 35 
 
 largest training of the individual. He is a graduate of 
 the schools. He is master of tongue and pen. He is a 
 reader of books. He takes at least a daily newspaper; 
 perhaps he posts himself morning and evening upon all 
 the progress of thought and the chronicle of events. He 
 has his opinions. He embraces, it may be, some system 
 of social and political philosophy. More frequently he 
 holds to tenets and prejudices which are his own and un- 
 shared. He is the architect of his own fortunes. Every 
 track is free to him. He may aspire hopefully in any di- 
 rection, and cut for himself steps to any eminence of 
 name and place and power. He has his own religious 
 training and religious creed with no State establishment 
 to coerce him into uniformity. He looks up to no man. 
 He is dependent upon no one. He brooks interference 
 from none. 
 
 The nation is bristling all over with these individuali- 
 ties, as isolated and distinct and as sharp as the quills 
 of the " fretful porcupine." How can these millions of 
 independent thinkers be made to see alike, feel alike, and 
 act alike in the matter of the common supremacy of gov- 
 ernment ? The more intelligent and self-reliant they be- 
 come, the more complete each separate manhood is, the 
 more difficult the problem grows. How can you make 
 any two or more of such constituents take the same yoke 
 and wear it peacefully together ? What but anarchy can 
 come of such diverse and resolute elements ? 
 
 Now if government were something that existed here 
 independently of these self-poised minds, framed for 
 them, laid upon them, with an inherent power to be and 
 
36 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 to constrain subordination, the conditions of the problem 
 were instantly changed. But with all this independence 
 of thought and opinion, each man is himself clothed with 
 political power. He is a sovereign. There is none above 
 him. He is himself a maker and administrator of laws. 
 Of these millions of sovereigns how will you make one 
 harmonious, self-consistent, and authoritative sovereign- 
 
 ty? 
 
 Government is their creature, not their monarch. 
 How will you teach them to revere what their hands have 
 made? They will the government into being. If it 
 doesn't please them, they can take it down and set up an- 
 other. Is it natural that they should fall before it and do 
 it homage? All public officials are their servants, whom 
 they have invested with liveries, and to whom they pay 
 wages. Is it to be expected that they should kiss the feet 
 of their servants? They feel that it is their right and 
 their duty to watch, to criticise, and to rebuke these pub- 
 lic servants ; and in this duty they cheerfully abound. Is 
 this the way to cultivate reverence and submission ? 
 
 How obvious is it that the maintenance of govern- 
 ment, and especially the hallowing of its authority over 
 such a constituency of free, intelligent, independent, and 
 sovereign minds, is one of those problems concerning 
 which there is always the hazard of an ill-omened issue. 
 Disloyalty and treason, and sympathy with both, are the 
 logical inference of this inflated sense of the popular rela- 
 tion to the government of the land. 
 
 We need to insist upon the divineness of human gov- 
 ernment. Our children must be taught it from the 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 37 
 
 cradle, that, however constituted, " the powers that be 
 are ordained of God." If men elect, God crowns. If we 
 lead our rulers to the chair of state, God puts the sceptre 
 into their hands. They become then, not our officials, 
 but his. They are the servants, not of popular caprice, 
 nor the will of majorities, they are the servants of the 
 throned Justice, the supreme Eight. 
 
 The natural philosophy of government ought to have 
 clearer, more impressive, and more constant explication 
 in all the literature that trains the American mind. Our 
 schoolbooks, the press, the rostrum, the pulpit, should 
 discuss with more earnestness and more simplicity the 
 fundamental principles of that philosophy. 
 
 If men are to dwell together in communities there 
 must, of course, be social order. The opposite of this is 
 anarchy, chaos. For order there must be law, equal, 
 impartial, universal law. 
 
 For the supremacy of law there must be administrative 
 authority, the right and the power to institute and en- 
 force law. 
 
 For the ground of this right, the charter of this author- 
 ity, we come back again to the will of God, who accepts 
 earthly magistracies as his vicegerents, and clothes them 
 with his own delegated sanctity. 
 
 There is no land under heaven that so needs the popu- 
 lar demonstration and the constant iteration of these 
 truths as ours. And it is but the nearest inference to 
 add that there is none where the righteousness of the 
 statute and the purity of the magistrate are more closely 
 connected with the sacredness of the government in the 
 4 
 
38 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 popular heart. Civil enactments, whose inspiration is 
 partisan intrigue, or mercenary favoritism, an unjust 
 ruler, setting up the dynasty of his own passions, preju- 
 dices, and partialities, a corrupt legislator, writing in 
 the statute-book with unclean hands, a magistrate 
 swayed by self-interest, and purchasable with gold, 
 these give public contradiction to their divine paternity, 
 and make contempt of government and revolt against law 
 the instinct of all noble natures. So far as the popular 
 faith goes, the legitimacy of civil government, as an ordi- 
 nance of Heaven, runs in the channel of purity and equity. 
 For public impression, the proof of divine authorship halts 
 when the divine likeness fails. If we would keep men's 
 hearts among us loyal to civil authority, and help to make 
 the supremacy of law inviolable through the laud, we 
 have it in solemn charge to guard the avenues to power 
 from all profane approach, and to exercise the functions of 
 office, legislative and executive, in all honesty and good 
 conscience. 
 
 I think it is worthy, also, of a moment's separate plea, 
 that we utter the sentiments and beliefs of New England in 
 full, clear, unequivocal speech. We must hold fast here 
 to our birthright of free thought and free speech. There 
 is nothing that concerns the honor and progress of the na- 
 tion, or the rights of humanity, in reference to which it is 
 not our privilege to inquire, to form our conclusions, and 
 to declare them in the hearing of our fellow-men. Every 
 principle, every measure that seeks ascendency in this 
 land, every ancient, every fresh-founded institution, we 
 have a right to discuss. Whatever subtle leaven would 
 
El 
 
 IN THE FUTUKE OF THE COUftTftT. ? 39 
 
 insinuate itself into the life of the nation, whatever comes 
 to us with the imposing front of precedent and authority, 
 and assumes the prerogative to control our history, we 
 may use our sharpest faculties to search out, and to show 
 forth their nature and their claim. The honest thoughts, 
 the deep convictions, the intense sympathies of our New 
 England hearts, frankly and boldly uttered, have been no 
 mean power in the nation in jectifying public sentiment, 
 undermining the security of wrong, and preparing the 
 national mind for generous and radical progress. There 
 have been those who would have laid a finger of iron on 
 New England's lips, and silenced her faithful witness. 
 But she keeps her birthright yet. Let her guard it well 
 for the future. Let her maintain her right to question, to 
 investigate, to form her opinion upon the wisdom and the 
 morality of all that courts the popular suffrage, not as one 
 ambitious to hold a barren sceptre, but earnest to pour 
 her own copious life into the public veins for the health 
 and vigor of the nation's being. This is one imperial pre- 
 rogative of New England, one most sacred obligation, to 
 overstep her own boundaries with the forceful moral influ- 
 ence of her public testimony against all civil and social 
 wrong, her strong protective plea for every imperilled 
 right. Our numbers are few and our territory small ; we 
 have no Valley Stream flowing from our hills through the 
 length of the northern continent. But from the pure, 
 cool fountains of these moral and intellectual heights we 
 
 o 
 
 may send forth a ceaseless utterance for truth, right, and 
 liberty, a deep, broad river, watering all the land. 
 There will come upon us soon a call to help repeople 
 
40 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 and resettle a desolate South. There is one symbol of 
 prophecy upon the brow of which we might write as its 
 most fitting interpretation this word, WAR. It is that 
 "fourth beast," that Daniel saw in his night vision, ris- 
 ing out of the "great sea," "dreadful, and terrible, and 
 strong, exceedingly ; and it had great iron teeth ; it de- 
 voured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue 
 with the feet of it." Under these horrid hoofs, many 
 parts of the South have become a waste more dreary than 
 any untamed wilderness. In the wilderness of savage 
 nature there is nothing suggestive of violence and de- 
 struction. But in following the track of an invading 
 army, we walk amid the wreck of what was once fair 
 and blooming order. 
 
 The fences are gone from the fields once bearing up 
 thrifty tillage and rich harvests. Granaries and barns 
 have sunk into black heaps of coal and cinder. The lone 
 chimney tells where the peaceful cottage rose. A ranker 
 growth of tangled weeds betrays the site of the garden. 
 Rows of stumps recall the once fruitful orchard. The 
 level fields of the farm have been ridged up with earth- 
 works, and ditched with rifle-pits. In the once compan- 
 ionable hamlet not a dweller remains. A house or two 
 may yet be standing above the blackened ruins of its fel- 
 lows, but without doors or window lights, and with wind 
 and storm sweeping through its dismal chambers. Frag- 
 ments of household furniture lie scattered around, half 
 embedded in the earth. A schoolhouse or a church at 
 the fork of confluent roads shows, in its pierced and 
 shattered walls, how the meeting tides of battle surged 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY . 41 
 
 around that salient angle. Within, the floor has been 
 rudely cleared ; for what purpose many a dull stain on the 
 boards gives testimony. The public roads lead you to 
 the bank of bridgeless rivers. There are no vehicles of 
 travel remaining, no implements of husbandry, no tools 
 of art. No flocks nor herds wander in the pastures, no 
 beasts of draft or burden wait for the harness. The nar- 
 row, curving level keeps the memorial of the railway ; 
 but the sleepers are burned, and the iron twisted into 
 rusty contortions. Civilization must begin again with all 
 her tasks repeated, and these melancholy ghosts haunting 
 the scenes of her old triumphs. Immense regions at the 
 South are thus blighted. The obduracy of rebellion 
 and rebellion is still obdurate has brought upon itself 
 this unsparing scourge. 
 
 It seems to me that this tenacity of purpose with the 
 Southern leaders and ruling classes is of God. It wears 
 the aspect of a judicial decree. It is like the hardening 
 of Pharaoh's heart, that the whole Southern system of 
 life, labor, and society may be drowned together in this 
 red sea, and not a vestige of the old malign civilization 
 of that portion of our country survive these bloody 
 years. 
 
 Upon such a radical devastation there will come in our 
 new duties, to explore these wastes, to map out the vast 
 territories over which the ploughshare of extermination 
 has been driven, to open up the promise of these fertile 
 and masterless estates to the keen eyes of Northern thrift 
 and the hurrying tread of emigrant feet, to Americanize 
 the new busy marches that will soon press, with mightier 
 4* 
 
42 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 armies, and with more peaceful weapons, those silent 
 fields, and to send thither the seeds of New England life 
 and institutions, to be scattered broadcast ' and first of all 
 to occupy the ground. 
 
 There will be also a work, worthy our best endeavors, 
 to bring up, ennoble, and save a degraded remnant of 
 Southern population. Here all that is generous and 
 charitable, all that is magnanimous and forgiving in the 
 heart of New England, will have free scope. We shall 
 have to show our former enemies how sincerely and truly 
 we can be and are their friends. We shall have to bless 
 them in spite of their prejudices and all the depressing 
 weight of their old habits. We shall have to show them 
 how much better we can do for them than they have ever 
 done for themselves. We shall need to parcel out for 
 them new estates, to organize for them home industries, 
 to put into their hands the implements of various work, 
 to help them lift a roof-tree over their heads, to inspire 
 them with hope, diligence, economy, and the ambition for 
 self-improvement, to set before them on their own soil 
 the models of our own sweet and comfortable domestic 
 life, to build schoolhouses and churches and send them 
 teachers and preachers, and sift into all their brightening 
 consciousness the light of letters, the issues of the daily 
 press, and a fresh, healthful, evangelical literature. This 
 grand charity will tax our faith and our self-denial to the 
 utmost for years to come. How many voices will call 
 mournfully to us throughout this bereaved and desolate 
 South ! What fragments of broken homes will appeal to 
 us ! How many wandering fugitives, not knowing on 
 
IN THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY. 43 
 
 which side the grave their kindred are, houseless, friend- 
 less, penniless, with tragic memories behind them and no 
 light of hope before, will wait our coming to bless them 
 with a shelter, and renew for them some faint interest in 
 life. 
 
 Of course the future of the African race in this land 
 is a problem that will press us as it will press the whole 
 country with its urgent and difficult conditions. This 
 land that has held them in bondage will have to give 
 them a home. This nation that has been to them a task- 
 master will have to be a foster-parent and a protector. 
 With their restored manhood, they must have such a 
 start in respect to their material interest and their social 
 prospects, as well as in all that relates to their intel- 
 lectual, moral, and religious nurture, that the future 
 shall, if possible, if they enter its open door, grandly 
 overpay their sorrowful past. For this full redemption 
 of the emancipated slave, New England must by wise 
 and unstinted charities, by generous legislation, and by all 
 social magnanimities, do her royal share. 
 
 This is a glance only at the tasks crowding in upon us 
 in the days that now are and the days that are to come. 
 It covers but a small part of the whole field of our duty 
 to our age and oiir race. But there is enough in these 
 few specifications to invoke our most strenuous diligence, 
 our loftiest consecration. It rests with us, and those who 
 shall succeed us, to make this New England of ours 
 by her pure life and steadfast principle, her just laws, 
 beneficent institutions, and stainless morals, her clear and 
 commanding utterance for immortal right, her public and 
 
44 THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND 
 
 private charities, her sense of the grandeur of the ordeal 
 through which this nation and all it involves of hope and 
 promise for man is passing now, and, above all, her faith- 
 ful adherence to the original ideal of a Puritan common- 
 wealth, walking and talking with God, and holding his 
 will everywhere supreme an angel of mercy and guid- 
 ance to our whole land, for this and for all after-times. 
 
 We congratulate the State rather than His Excellency 
 that this occasion signals no retirement from the chair of 
 her chief magistracy. It was not needed for him, for any 
 completeness of personal or official honor, for the very 
 summit of a just and wide fame, that the people of Mas- 
 sachusetts should once more with such large consent put 
 the reins of her public affairs into those tried and skilful 
 hands. She honors herself most by so placing this high 
 trust. She knows, and beyond her borders the central 
 government and the nation know, with what prescient 
 forecast, what timely providence, what hopeful courage, 
 what unquenchable loyalty, what indefatigable diligence, 
 and what thoughtful tenderness her administration at 
 
 o 
 
 home and abroad has been conducted through these dark 
 days of revolution and conflict. Her internal order and 
 prosperity, her renown in the high places of the field, 
 both the spirit and the comfort of her 'sons doing brave 
 battle for the sacred flag, her weight in the scale of right 
 on the grave questions of the hour, are the bright record 
 which justifies the inference that she is governed well. 
 
 If we could spare you, sir, we would give you release 
 from these solemn cares, and follow you with our com- 
 memorative gratitude into the peaceful retirement of pri- 
 
IN THE FUTUKE OF THE COUNTKY. 45 
 
 vate life. But in these stern days of work, when our 
 whole New England has so much to do to inaugurate the 
 elect and waiting future, we pile our public burdens upon 
 you once more, and beseech the God of our fathers to 
 give you strength to bear them as worthily in the year to 
 come as in these historic years that have gone. 
 
 And may the gentlemen of the Senate, the Council, 
 and the House of Kepresentatives, called of their fellow- 
 citizens to the discharge of duties which would at any 
 time have invoked their best wisdom and highest fidelity, 
 be quickened to discern at what a point they stand in the 
 history and fortunes of the republic, and the lengthening 
 scroll of human progress ; and forgetting their own ease 
 and emolument, and rising above every personal and pri- 
 vate interest, give to the care of the State, and the honor 
 and safety of the nation in these troubled times, all their 
 heart and all their soul and all their mind and all their 
 strength ! 
 
 And before the term of official duty which opens for 
 you to-day shall have run out, may we be called to join, 
 with all the people of the land, in keeping such a day of 
 public thanksgiving to Almighty God as has never gath- 
 ered our joy and praise in the past, over a nation 
 saved, united, free, at peace with itself, with all the 
 world, and with the throne of Infinite Justice and Good- 
 ness ! 
 
III. 
 
 GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 
 
 AND THEY CRIED WITH A LOUD VOICE, SAYING, HOW LONG, O LORD, HOLY 
 AND TRUE, DOST THOU NOT JUDGE AND AVENGE OUR BLOOD ON THEM 
 THAT DWELL ON THE EARTH ? Rev. vi. 10. 
 
 AMONG the scenes that rose before the eyes of John 
 of Patmos out of the vast dark future, tracked only 
 by these prophetic lines of light, was one that disclosed 
 to him a company of earthly sufferers gone home to heav- 
 en. There, under the shadow of the sacrificial altar, be- 
 neath the refuge of the atonement, they were grouped to- 
 gether, resting and waiting. They were resting, for 
 earthly pain and woe were past. They were waiting, for 
 their earthly indication yet lingered. It appears that 
 they were martyrs whom the fierce hand of persecution 
 had done to death for their fidelity to truth and Christ. 
 They seem to be aware of the procedures of the divine 
 Providence in the world they have left behind. They 
 know that the cause for which they died is not yet tri- 
 umphant. They see the proud crests of bigotry and op- 
 pression yet unhumbled. Have they given life in vain, 
 suffered and bled for nought? God is holy and hates 
 
GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 47 
 
 evil. Why does he not smile down the crowned wrong ? 
 God is true and will redeem his promises. Why does he 
 not show himself the friend of the righteous ? And their 
 voices, not fretful and querulous, but earnest for the final 
 victory of the right, address the Highest, " How long, 
 O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge 
 our blood on them that dwell on the earth ? " 
 
 There are many souls yet dwelling in the flesh, who 
 echo that cry, "How long? " God reigns, we believe, we 
 know ; but evil also reigns. God is against it ; he has 
 declared that it shall not prosper ; but, despite his holi- 
 ness and his truth, the throne of iniquity stands. Power 
 oppresses, rapacity robs, lust deceives and betrays, de- 
 traction stabs in secret, armed injustice defies law human 
 and divine. "How long?" Men join together in earnest 
 league against some specific form of evil, as of tyranny in 
 government, or oppression in political institutions, or in- 
 temperance in morals, with God on their side and " the 
 good time coming" before them. But what a dubious 
 warfare ! How often are they baffled and defeated ! 
 How deep the roots of evil have struck ! How securely 
 it lifts its towering growth ! They make slow progress. 
 Sometimes it seems as though they did not gain at all. 
 Is God on their side ! Is there to dawn a bright, millen- 
 nial day? The good despond, the bad grow bold. "Be- 
 cause sentence against an evil work is not executed 
 speedily ; therefore, the heart of the sons of men is fully 
 set in them to do evil." Why not? The evil-doer is un- 
 punished ; he walks at large ; no judgments make him 
 afraid ; God doesn't silence his proud boasting. Is it so 
 
48 GOB'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 
 
 certain that virtue has an infinite ally? How these 
 delays of the Supreme Justice lend heart to the wicked ! 
 What do they care for some distant, shadowy terror? 
 Here are the prizes of their corrupt desires right at their 
 feet. Before the crash comes, before the hour of reckon- 
 ing chimes, they will have enjoyed the lawless sweets to 
 the full, and have escaped into some refuge yet to open. 
 And still God is silent ; his hand is motionless ; the 
 heavens are serene. The righteous wait for a sign ; but 
 earth and sky are mute. "How long, O Lord? " Oh, if 
 evil might be at once put down, and wrong righted now, 
 treason to law, liberty, humanity, and all good brained 
 at a stroke, the almighty thunders flashing instant wrath 
 upon guilt and crime, then might the lowly lift up their 
 heads, and the days of darkness would be numbered ! 
 Must we, then, chide these divine delays? Shall we not 
 rather ask if they are not in God's sight both wise and 
 good? 
 
 We must remember for one thing that this world is 
 not a world of retribution. The great harvest law is, in- 
 deed, established in nature, Providence, and morals, that 
 "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." But 
 when and where the full harvest shall be garnered are 
 still open questions. The supreme administration takes 
 position in regard to good ^ and evil, and declares it will 
 visit for all wrong ; but the times and seasons for such 
 judicial visitation are not disclosed ; whether the aveng- 
 ing judgments shall fall sooner or later God gives no 
 pledges. Here and there he drops the bolts of doom 
 visibly and suddenly upon the head of guilt, that men 
 
GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 49 
 
 may not forget that there is a God, and that he rules 
 in righteousness. And then again for long, silent in- 
 tervals, he reserves all his wrath, and the path of crime 
 seems heaped about with impregnable securities. Often 
 the good pass away under a cloud ; the wicked carry their 
 bad ventures through with a high hand, and depart amid 
 the blaze of success. God does not undertake to make 
 things equal here and now. No earthly history writes 
 out the whole of his procedures, or balances the accounts 
 he keeps. All human records of his administrative poli- 
 cies must be fragmentary, if not distorted ; for the pro- 
 cesses of his government pass beyond the ken and the pen 
 of mortal historians, taking in time and eternity. If God 
 wait, therefore, he does not forget. If retribution de- 
 lay, it is not, therefore, set aside ; it only shifts the scene 
 and defers the hour. If some great offender step into 
 the grave before pursuing vengeance overtake him, and 
 they who have watched his course say above the turf 
 that hides him, "Here's a bold, bad man, that came to the 
 end unchecked and unscathed," we may reflect that he has 
 not yet come to the end. The grave is not a refuge from 
 the power of God ; it is only a passage from one state to 
 another. Beneath its portal the criminal has gone for- 
 ward to meet his Judge. 
 
 Instead of being a world of retribution, this is a world 
 of probation. Trial with human character is progressive 
 and continuous. It takes in successive incidents, influ- 
 ences, and occasions. It has its stages of advance, its ebb 
 and flood tides. Its grand crises often come late. Its 
 preparatory processes are often veiled and unsuspected, 
 5 
 
50 GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 
 
 and can only be learned on some great consummation day. 
 Principles, whether right or wrong, grow by slow incre- 
 ments, like oaks on the hill-tops, and by many a wrestle 
 with wind and storm. Were God to rebuke evil with his 
 instant judgments, these deliberate courses of human de- 
 velopment would all be cut short. The gradual ripening 
 and strengthening of the soul's moral life would be made 
 impossible ; the fair blue sky above would be shrouded 
 from human sight; the thunder cloud of wrath would 
 bow low, and black our daily life ; incessantly its fires 
 would gleam and its artillery roll, and underfoot the green 
 earth would be an aceldama of blood ; for sinful man's ap- 
 peal to the justice of a holy God is without intermission. 
 Again God delays his primitive stroke, that his own 
 character may be more clearly revealed. He has all 
 power ; how will he use it ? He hates sin with an infinite 
 abhorrence ; how will he treat it? When we are injured 
 or affronted, having the power to right ourselves, we 
 make haste to get satisfaction. How will God bear 
 wrong? There is no sublimer spectacle in the universe 
 than the patience with which that Supreme One endures 
 man's trespasses. Wave after wave the tossing sea of 
 human guilt breaks at his feet, and dashes its insulting 
 spray upon his robes of majesty; his name is defiled, his 
 attributes denied, his power defied, his purposes contra- 
 vened ; and to all this the sensibilities of his nature must 
 be exquisitely sensitive ; yet there he sits in the bonds 
 of an infinite self-restraint, calm, patient, and forbearing, 
 looking upon the endless succession of the mad waves of 
 human rebellion, .and withholding his hand. He was 
 
GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 51 
 
 strong when he lifted up the heights of the everlasting 
 mountains and curbed the lawless seas, strong when he 
 subdued and hauled from heaven the rebel angels, and when 
 he built the worlds and tossed them out like bubbles upon 
 the flood of ether ; but is he in any act or work so strong 
 as in this awful self-control? All the voices of human 
 blasphemy cannot ruffle it ; all the tragedies of human 
 crime cannot break it down. The day rises and sets on 
 sorrow and guilt ; years of sharp wrong fill out their suc- 
 cessive revolutions; centuries, ages, lapse slowly away 
 under lusty and jubilant evil, and yet God waits, observant 
 of all, feeling all, remembering all, but passing it by 
 without a reckoning. Is this the way to bear wrong? 
 Would he teach us by his own marvellous example to 
 take patiently the spoiling of our goods, the bitter as- 
 saults of malice and all personal injury, and to look 
 also with patient forbearance upon the evils that waste 
 at large in the commonwealth of human happiness. If 
 He to whom vengeance belongeth defers its infliction, 
 shall not we? If that silent endurance of his so move us, 
 shall we not make it an inspiration and a law for our 
 own life ? 
 
 And how this long-suffering calmness heightens the 
 impressiveness of wrath when wrath comes forth ! It is 
 not impulse then ; it is not sudden passion ; it is not the 
 rash outbreak of a vehement and ungoverned temper. It 
 is slow-moving, deliberate, resolved justice proceeding 
 unto execution because it can no longer delay, proceed- 
 ing now inevitably and inexorably because its hour has 
 struck. Nothing is lost from the terror of punishment by 
 
52 GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 
 
 this delay, but rather the dreadful tranquillity out of 
 which it takes its way lends it a fearfulness more overaw- 
 ing than the wildest rage. 
 
 Again, God's delays often respect the measures and 
 agencies by which the guilty are to suffer. Reprisal in 
 kind and manner is one and a favorite law of the divine 
 retribution. This may take time. A son dishonors and 
 outrages the gray hairs of his father. How shall he be 
 punished ? Shall God chastise at once ? Will the turbulent 
 boy see and feel his guilt now, or the keenness of the re^ 
 quital, as he would if he live on till his own locks are 
 gray and his age beginning to be solitary, and then the 
 son of his own loins rise up to take him by the beard? 
 Ah, when that late anguish rises in his heart, he will know 
 how he once wounded a heart that cherished him, what 
 a pang he inflicted ; and as this answering pang stabs 
 his spirit, he will have it to say in bitter remorse, "It is 
 just." Young Jacob drove a dart to his father's soul 
 when, covering his smooth skin with the hair of the kid, 
 he swore to Isaac, "I am thy very son Esau." How 
 shall he be punished for this deceit ? Wait. Come 'again 
 into his presence when, bowed with years, he leans upon 
 his staff, and his sons, cheating him in turn, ruthlessly lay 
 before him Joseph's coat of many colors stained with 
 blood, saying, "This have we found. Know now whether 
 it be thy son's coat or no." Oftentimes the very prize 
 which the guilty hand seized becomes the instrument of 
 torture. Not all at once of course. Gradually its character 
 changes. It is long perhaps before it ceases to attract. 
 Slowly the leaven of a new virus enters into it, and 
 
GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 53 
 
 at last it is worn, like the coat of Hercules, as a poisoned 
 robe, filling the frame with anguish and corruption. 
 
 God would have also human help in overcoming evil. 
 He keeps back the thunders of his power and calls 
 in loyal volunteers. He permits them to fight many a 
 strenuous battle, to become heroes on great field days ; 
 he drills and musters them in all the manly discipline of 
 a soldier's life and matches them against the stubborn 
 wrongs he would subdue. Their feeble arms take up, in- 
 stead of his omnipotent arm, the championship of virtue, 
 lift the gage of evil, and measure themselves against the 
 powers hostile to God's reign. This delays the victory, 
 but it exalts and ennobles humanity, tutors and educates 
 the servants of God, and lends an intenser interest in our 
 hearts to the long protracted struggle. 
 
 It is not always that the nature of an evil thing is seen 
 at the outset. God understands it. But if he smite as it 
 deserves, men may wonder at his severity. They cannot 
 enter at once into his estimate of what he has scourged, 
 because the evil was yet seminal and unexpressed. Let 
 it live and flourish and blossom by and by and bear its 
 ripe fruits before their eyes, and as those baleful apples 
 fall, men will understand better why the lightnings of 
 heaven should scathe and blacken such a growth. Unless 
 the evil came up thus to its full stature, and put on all its 
 deformity before it were dealt with, if it were choked and 
 checked in its young greenness, there were danger of its 
 repetition when the next hour of temptation should chime. 
 Let it stand and grow yet a while, let its swelling propor- 
 tions crowd out all healthful growths,; let men look upon 
 5* 
 
54 GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 
 
 its kingly coronal of Upas leaves, and mark the death 
 that spreads beneath its fatal dews ; let them look upon 
 some vice of character, at first thought well-nigh harm- 
 less, as later it pushes its rank leprosy over the whole 
 soul ; let some political wrong, at first only a hidden fer- 
 ment, break out into rancorous, pestilent eruption, where 
 foul and fast the life itself runs away ; let men see, let 
 history record, let generations feel, what desperate wick- 
 edness lies in the purpose to maintain political ascen- 
 dency for a sectional end; let wasted treasuries bear 
 their witness, and crimsoned fields and desolated homes 
 and broken hearts ; let the punishment linger till the fell 
 spirit, the horrid rapacity, the death-griping wilfulness of 
 this evil thing is stamped upon its brow, the mark of Cain 
 branded in so deep that not all the gloss of the Father 
 of lies can ever efface it ; then let the heel of Omnipo- 
 tence tread it down, and one such demonstration will be 
 enough. 
 
 Good and evil are often so mingled in this life that 
 one cannot be dislodged without uprooting the other. 
 The wheat and tares grow together. For the sake of the 
 wheat, it is often better that the tares remain undis- 
 turbed. There are bad men whose crimes demand signal 
 rebuke, but there are certain precious interests partly 
 resting upon them which would suffer if they were rude- 
 ly struck away. They are men of foul hearts and pro- 
 fane lips, but they are husbands and fathers, and de- 
 pendent lives wait upon their industry, and nestle under 
 their care. They have fields to till and harvests to 
 raise and products of skill and labor to produce for the 
 
GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 55 
 
 adornment and comfort of other lives. They do not fear 
 God, nor regard man ; but God can make them useful 
 nevertheless. Their muscles are strong, and their wits 
 are sharp for him, and their very wrath shall praise him. 
 They shall serve, though unwittingly, as helpers to hu- 
 man advancement, subduing earth's briers and thorns, 
 they are good enough for that, increasing, for selfish 
 ends, useful inventions, sailing the ships of commerce, 
 and manning the ships of war, legislating, ruling, fight- 
 ing in great battles that set forward the progress of na- 
 tions. 
 
 Shall God make no use of them? If all that he ac- 
 complishes by the hands of wicked men were left out of 
 the sum-total of human working, it would greatly change 
 the footing up. Let him delay wrath and subsidize these 
 malign activities for his own beneficent ends. 
 
 Meanwhile look in upon the interior experience of 
 these respited lives. The final sentence which they have 
 provoked holds off; but are they therefore exempt from 
 the penal consequences of ill-doing? Are there no sharp 
 returns for wrong which they find they cannot escape? 
 They live ; so did Prometheus chained to his rock on the 
 bald Caucasus, with the vulture tearing at his liver every 
 day. Is there no cruel beak that is fleshed perpetually in 
 their tortured heart ? Are there not bitter dregs in every 
 cup of sinful pleasure they drink ? Are they not taunted 
 with fears and forebodings ? Can they lay the pale ghosts 
 of accusing memories ? Does not conscience pierce them 
 with her barbed sting? Does not their soul sit in the 
 shadow when it sits alone? Are these criminals really 
 quite at large? If they walk abroad, are they not at- 
 
56 GOD'S DELAY TO PUNISH. 
 
 tended by their jailer who leads them chained, and makes 
 them every now and then to feel the corroding iron ? 
 
 But there is another side of the divine character that 
 comes into radiant vision often in such delays. To show 
 mercy is the infinite delight of God's heart. To recover 
 the erring, to save the lost, to make the dead live again, 
 to bring enemies to his feet in penitent allegiance, 
 these are his most illustrious triumphs. There is an in- 
 tercessor standing between the axe and every barren fig- 
 tree pleading, " Let it alone this year also ! " Spared 
 men may become changed men. They are spared often 
 on this peradventure. They may awake from delusion 
 and folly ; they may see how their feet are snared ; they 
 may meet yet some benign influence that shall prevail 
 over all the solicitation of passion and appetite ; afflic- 
 tions may bring them to their sober selves, and the lips 
 that wantoned with the divine sanctities may call trem- 
 blingly out of the dust, " God be merciful to me a sin- 
 ner." Were not this better than instant and hopeless 
 wrath? Whatever voice asks, "How long?" should we 
 not all answer, " Oh, so long as there is hope ; so long as 
 Mercy, sweet angel, can yet smile ; so long as the golden 
 sceptre of forgiveness and reconciliation can still be 
 stretched out " ? 
 
 Reviewing, then, these possible reasons for the delay of 
 God's just punishment of the wicked, we may say, Let 
 no man presume on such respite ! Delay is not forgetful- 
 ness on God's part. It is not escape on man's part. It 
 may indeed keep the way of return open, but all the 
 while it is but preparing, if such forbearance fail of this 
 end, a more certain and crushing doom. God is silent, 
 
57 
 
 is he? while we grow bold in sin. We look and listen ; 
 there is no sight or sound to alarm us. Ah, that very 
 silence is appalling. Unseen agencies are at work some- 
 where. Below the horizon's rim the storm is gathering ; 
 the air is breathless ; but this hush of the elements pre- 
 cedes the bursting of the tempest. You discern no 
 enemy. Look out, then, for an ambush. Nothing ap- 
 proaches. 'Be sure, then, you will be surprised. If God 
 delays in mercy, let not our presumption necessitate his 
 wrath ; not presumption, but repentance, is the right 
 practical inference from such gracious forbearance. 
 
 And, on the other side, let no man's heart doubt or 
 faint because evil seems to have present impunity. God 
 will prove himself an avenger of all violated rights. 
 Wait. The tide will turn, will rise. Wait. The little 
 cloud like a man's hand will cover the face of the sky, 
 and make it black with fury. Wait. Distant the slow- 
 grinding wheels of doom move on. The vast iron rim 
 turns as though it scarce moved at all. The ponderous 
 arc comes down almost imperceptibly ; but it crushes 
 where it rolls. Have patience ; even a heathen could 
 write, "The mills of the gods grind slow, but they grind 
 fine." The sure, inexorable processes of the heavenly 
 Justice are on their way. Hold on with faith, hope, and 
 good courage. In the end, God and right and truth and 
 virtue will triumph, and wrong will take its hopeless sen- 
 tence. Endure for a little while, maintain the conflict a 
 little longer, keep a good heart above reverses. God 
 delays, but he will come. To some despairing voice ask- 
 ing for the hundredth time, " How long ? " will leap forth 
 his answer, f < NOW." 
 
IV. 
 
 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 FOR I KNOW HIM, THAT HE WILL COMMAND HIS CHILDREN AND HIS HOUSE- 
 HOLD AFTER HIM, AND THEY SHALL KEEP THE WAY OF THE LORD, TO DO 
 
 JUSTICE AND JUDGMENT; THAT THE LORD MAY BRING UPON ABRAHAM 
 
 THAT WHICH HE HATH SPOKEN OF HIM. Gen. XViii. 19. 
 
 gifts of the promise made to him who was " called 
 JL the friend of God " were yet suspended on the condi- 
 tions of parental faithfulness and a household ordered in 
 " the way of the Lord." The divine purpose of mercy 
 and goodness to a pious line takes up, as indispensable 
 links in the golden chain, the right training of each gen- 
 eration in the long succession. If God's favor is to be 
 transmitted from sire to son, the statutes of God are also 
 to be handed down, and a spirit of obedience and con- 
 formity to be, by all strenuous nurture, fostered and se- 
 cured. The family is God's first and fundamental institu- 
 tion for reproducing and continuing, as the fathers die 
 and their sons succeed them, a people to know and serve 
 him. He ordained it before the Church and the State ; 
 or rather it was the earliest Church, the original and ger- 
 minal commonwealth. He builds States by building fam- 
 ilies, attaching their members thus to the soil of their 
 nativity, making patriotism an instinct, and the subject's 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 59 
 
 relation a habit from the cradle. He builds in the same 
 way his spiritual kingdom, spiritual knowledge and faith 
 becoming hereditary through the ministry of the Christian 
 home. For these issues he clothes the head of the family 
 with dignity and authority, confirms his sceptre by strong 
 and positive decrees, and makes his name and person 
 venerable and sacred by the offices he fulfils, and the 
 corresponding instincts of dependence and natural affec- 
 tion. If we lose the family as a school of virtue and pi- 
 ety, we lose the heritage of all covenanted blessings, 
 we displace a unit from the series of God's stepping- 
 stones along our line, breaking off the succession, we 
 sink a chasm between the deep-freighted divine hand and 
 the future it would have endowed with riches. 
 
 The family and the Sabbath God's first institutions 
 for man were put in significant proximity when he 
 ordained them both. If God's six days' work includes, 
 as some think, the creation of woman, and we repeat 
 concerning the day that followed the formula that an- 
 nounced the other completed days, "the evening and the 
 morning were the seventh day, "then the first bridal eve 
 was the Sabbath eve, the first day of family life in Eden 
 was the Sabbath-day. If this be so, the Sabbath brings 
 to each wedded pair the fragrant memorial of those first 
 nuptials, on which 
 
 " All heaven 
 
 And happy constellations 
 
 , Shed their setectest influence," 
 
 and pleads that the union thus formed between itself and 
 the family remain perpetual. Over those bands we may 
 
60 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 hear the great officiating Priest saying, " What God hath 
 joined together let not man put asunder ! " 
 
 Our home itself suggests the Sabbath. All days of the 
 week it is our rest. Wandering amid strangers, rasped 
 by the sharp and hard contacts of life's jealousies and 
 competitions, lonely in solitude, we turn how gladly to 
 the one threshold on which unfeigned welcomes, compan- 
 ionable voices, the gentle ministries of love, will greet 
 us and fill our spirits with tranquillity and repose. The 
 weary laborer in the field looks up to the declining sun, 
 marks his shadow lengthening toward the east, and bends 
 with fresh vigor to his task, as his thought glides away a 
 swift herald to his own cottage-door. Outside that door, 
 life to him is labor ; within it is rest. The implements of 
 toil he lays down before he enters. He goes in to be re- 
 freshed and cheered; to sit, not stand; to have a place 
 of ease at the bright hearth and pleasant board ; to lay 
 his length upon his couch, and let the soft tide of sleep 
 rise over him, and drown his consciousness. Home is 
 his peaceful evening port after the day's rough voyaging 
 for his body and spirit, a perpetual Sabbath. One to 
 whom God has given such a daily Sabbath, so pleasant 
 and beneficent a reminder of the weekly rest, ought to 
 hear with most welcoming thankfulness, as though it 
 spoke with a voice of music, the command, " Six days 
 shalt thou labor, and do all thy work ; but the seventh 
 day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God ; in it thou shalt 
 not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, 
 thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, 
 nor thy stranger that is within thy gates." 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 61 
 
 The first thing, then, for the parent who asks the ques- 
 tion which we have here to answer, " How is the Sabbath 
 to be kept in the family ? " is to feel that his own spirit 
 and example will settle the reverence paid to the day and 
 the manner of its keeping in that little community of 
 which he is the head. He must look to himself first. 
 Before he consider methods and measures, and tax his 
 invention, 'and put his contrivances in operation, let him 
 question his own soul. What is the. Sabbath to him? 
 Does he call it "a delight, the holy of the Lord, honor- 
 able"? Is it the festival of the week to his heart? For 
 his whole nature, body and mind and spirit, does he 
 esteem it a most gracious boon of God? Is he looking 
 upon it as a severe intermeddling ordinance, breaking off 
 his most fascinating pursuits, taking so much from what 
 he calls, with all the eager relishes of his soul, in one 
 intense word, " LIFE, "dooming him to a dull, pulseless 
 pause of existence ? Or is this the culmination, the crown, 
 the zest of desire and hope, the welcome release from 
 worldly care, the banquet-day for a soul hungry and 
 thirsty and denied, amid earthly planning and toiling, fit 
 and full refreshment? There's a compensative beneficence 
 in the Sabbath for the body's need. The weary frame 
 sits at high noon to gather breath and strength before it 
 renews the chase, but the pause is ever too brief. The 
 call afield sounds again before the brow is dry and 
 the swell of the bosom gone down into quiet. The night 
 comes with its anointing dews of sleep, and imparts fresh 
 increments of vigor. But the night is too short. It 
 doesn't impart as much as was expended. The balance 
 6 
 
62 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 is against us still when the morning blows its clarion. 
 The stock on hand, through all the fluctuations, dimin- 
 ishes till the week be spent. Speedy bankruptcy were 
 inevitable, did not the Sabbath come in with compensa- 
 tive relief to supplement the pause at noon and the minis- 
 tration of the night with one solid day, insisting, kindly, 
 from sun to sun, "in it thou shalt not do any work," and 
 joining two reposeful nights by this pleasant isthmus of 
 restful light. Is there in like manner a compensative 
 element in the Sabbath for the soul's need ? How do we 
 think of it ? We run to the fountains of spiritual refresh- 
 ing morning and evening of our toiling days ; we moisten 
 our lips as we kneel down at the springs of comfort in 
 our closet and at the family altar ; we fill a cup from the 
 precepts and promises of the word ; we gather a little 
 manna thus daily as the dew rises and before the sun is 
 hot, a taste of the bread of heaven; but the soul is 
 kept on short allowance. It expends amid worldly cares 
 and draughts more than it thus receives. It will become 
 lean and famished if a special and more bountiful table be 
 not spread for its need. What is it that supplements for 
 the soul's spiritual compensation the closet, the house- 
 hold worship, the daily Scripture reading? Is the Sab- 
 bath welcomed as such a feast-day to our hungry spirits, 
 a day in which we can lie at the fountains of refresh- 
 ment through all the bright hours, hear the governing 
 provider urge his large hospitality, "Eat, O friends; 
 drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved"? 
 
 No strictness of ruling, no stern administration of Sab- 
 bath law, will commend the Sabbath to the fit hallowing 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 63 
 
 of the domestic circle, if the day is not, with the family 
 headship, a loved and choice gift of God's goodness. 
 This little society mirrors the character set over it for 
 guidance and control. Looking into the clear depths of 
 some Alpine lake, you see all the snowy peaks around 
 leaning against that nether sky as in the upper. There 
 below, as above, the torrents foam and the avalanches 
 leap. There float the clouds as overhead, and the lonely 
 and lordly vulture poises in slow flight his broad wings. 
 
 Scarce more accurate is this mirrored repetition of the 
 surroundings and overhangings of the lake than the re- 
 production in the home of the pattern life and character 
 of the family head. Line after line the pattern is worked 
 into their own life by young copyists until the same lines 
 and figures faithfully reappear. With the most youthful 
 members of the circle, long before they can respond to 
 our voices in articulate speech, our words and signals 
 are intelligible, and answering signals give back perfect 
 counterpart of the correspondence. Then it is that what 
 they see and hear in the home, the tones that are uttered, 
 the scenes that are acted, voices of passion and mirth, 
 the hushed and solemn accents of prayer, the quietness 
 around them on the Sabbath-day, or the rude clamor that 
 fills its hours, the postures of kneeling or of revelling 
 households, occupy their mind with images thenceforward 
 vivid, influential, and imperishable. I have thought this 
 ought to be said here, for if the sense of this be not on 
 our hearts as parents, if the question of our personal 
 spirit and example be not our first point of solicitude, 
 and the necessity of honestly being and doing for our- 
 
64 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 selves all that we propose for the household do not press 
 us, it is of little use to inquire further. 
 
 I. There must, of course, be for the hallowing of the 
 Sabbath in the family, as well as out of the family, a 
 refraining from work. It must be seen there that all the 
 workers, so far as possible, rest from labor, cease from 
 their ordinary occupation. This must not be a transfer 
 of the business from the office and the field to the privacy 
 of the home. It is not ceasing from labor to stay in the 
 house, instead of going to the counting-room or the shop, 
 and push forward our business enterprises by letter- 
 writing, posting books, and sifting estimates and calcula- 
 tions. This is to bring the world into the very scene of 
 which we are asking, How shall we keep the Sabbath 
 then? It is invading the sanctuary of the home with 
 what doesn't belong there on any day of the week. A 
 business man ought to leave his knit brow and corrugated 
 face behind him in the workshop, if he can, whenever he 
 comes in across the doorstep of his house; let him go to 
 his wareroom and on 'Change a business man, with all his 
 problems working in the lines about his eyes and lips, but 
 let him come into the family a domestic man, his pack of 
 worldly care and harness of worldly toil depart at the 
 door or further off, and the sunshine of love and joy 
 shining on his countenance. He wants his hands now, not 
 to strike a strong stroke in the earth, or on the anvil, or 
 at trade, but to meet soft and warm palms, to catch and 
 toss aloft his babe. His grim lips may relax for smiles 
 and kisses and gentle words. He comes in to cheer and 
 be cheered as a man who has not only a brain to contrive, 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE 
 
 a skill to execute, a will to hold his own in the world's 
 competitions, but a heart with which to cherish dear ones, 
 affections to come forth into refreshing play. It is a mis- 
 take and an impertinence on any day of the six to trans- 
 fer the shop to the fireside. It is all this, and a crime 
 beside, to make the transfer on the Lord's day. 
 
 As it isn't quite respectable on Sunday to strip the arm 
 for downright work, there are not a few who give up 
 the outward activities of their daily industry and keep on 
 planning. There are plans enough laid on the Sabbath 
 for myriads of fortunes, if God did not cross them, or 
 give them a malign success, plans for business, plans 
 for travel, plans for pleasure, plans for every pursuit and 
 hope of heart and life. The Sabbath is of all days, with 
 multitudes, the day for planning. And this planning fills 
 the walls of many a home with its busy talk, through 
 almost all the hours of the family intercourse. It makes 
 the changeful interest of conversation whenever the silence 
 is broken. It leads out all the listeners and all the par- 
 takers into the dust and heat and glare of life again. 
 They sit together at the family board; the light in the 
 room is perhaps subdued from yesterday's ; to the neigh- 
 bors they seem to be within keeping Sabbath. But they 
 are not within. They are out, going to and fro on free 
 excursion trains, loading and unloading ships, ransacking 
 foreign markets, buying, fashioning, and making up the 
 costume for the season, and settling mercantile and social 
 accounts. I believe it is a great and unceasing desecra- 
 tion of the Sabbath in many a family, this gabbling about 
 what shall be done on the morrow. There can be no 
 household Sabbath where this profanation is admitted. 
 
66 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 It has been well remarked that to rest from work in 
 hallowing the Sabbath is for each worker to cease from 
 that which is his own employment ; that is, each worker 
 is to cease to bo a worker in that matter. But wherein is 
 he a worker ? What constitutes him the man he is in that 
 department of human industr^? Is he a worker only 
 with his two hands, or with the loins of his back? Does 
 he not bring thought and purpose and arrangement and 
 design into his tasks ? Is he not a worker with his inven- 
 tion, his experience, his judgment, his sagacity? But he 
 is to cease to be a worker in his work. Then, in that 
 calling, he must cease from brain work as well as from 
 hand work, cease from planning as well as achieving, 
 and rest his mind as well as his loins from that use of 
 his faculties with which he fills other days. 
 
 The housework itself, that which cannot altogether 
 pause on any day of the year, for any call, human or 
 divine, ought to be restricted and simplified. Every 
 housekeeper knows how to prepare for days of special 
 preoccupancy that interdicts careful attention to the do- 
 mestic management. Such days occur not unfrequently 
 in the progress of secular time, and are arranged for, 
 without much embarrassment. This precast may be ex- 
 ercised as well for the Sabbath, that, as toiling manhood 
 from without comes in to rest, toiling womanhood within 
 may sit down in the same domestic quiet, with few calls 
 to break in upon the calm, and plead for time and 
 thought and strength in household tasks. 
 
 I know that the wives and daughters of many homes 
 are un visited by any such disturbing summons. Are 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 67 
 
 there not the servants? If the table is to be graced 
 with the presence of Sabbath guests, and a sumptuous 
 banquet is desired, or if we choose ourselves to fare 
 more luxuriously than yesterday because we have more 
 leisure to sit and enjoy the dainties, or because the family 
 circle is more full, or because we shall not be driven forth 
 when the repast is ended to intercourse in which all our 
 keenness and alertness will be in demand, but may 
 drowse our dulness away, if we so please, in extension 
 chairs, or on pillowed couches, the special provision need 
 not greatly tax our personal attention or activity. All 
 that we have to do is to give our orders. The cook will 
 serve up at the appointed time our favorite dishes ; the 
 parlor girl and butler will see that the family style suffers 
 no discredit. All will go well. We pay good salaries, 
 and can rely upon having our directions faithfully and 
 gracefully complied with. We need not stay to superin- 
 tend ; we can sit through the morning in our pew, cool 
 and untroubled, our thoughts drifting away occasionally 
 to the entertainment in progress, but not in distressing 
 anxiety, rather in pleasant anticipation ; and in decorous 
 observance we and our favored children keep Sabbath 
 ordinances. Meanwhile at home the work goes bravely 
 on. The kitchen is a laboratory of art. The converging 
 processes that are to meet in the issue are put in motion, 
 each in its time and at its proportioned rate of advance. 
 Fires glow, meats steam, savory clouds thicken, and the 
 grand success looms clearly up through all the apparent 
 disorder. 
 
 But who are these creatures on whom the heat and the 
 
68 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 burden are rolled? Are they machines, automatons? 
 Ah, no. They are men and women, beings with souls, 
 souls as deathless as those that gave out the order for the 
 dinner, and then rolled at leisure to the house of God, 
 with the same large capacities, the same immortal des- 
 tinies pending. 
 
 Oh, the unutterable meanness of these family enter- 
 tainments ! The board is covered with generous cheer ; 
 but they are not generous souls that preside. They have 
 been somewhat thoughtful, they fancy, for their own spir- 
 itual health ; they have robbed the cheaper soul, which 
 they have kept grinding in the prison-house of toil, of its 
 Sabbath sunshine, God's house, Jesus' gospel. They 
 themselves must be edified by the formulas of worship, 
 prayers, music, preaching, and they must dine well. 
 As for the Irish help, why, it wont make much difference 
 with them, and they are well paid, and like the place too 
 well to leave, and really it is somewhat of a pity, but the 
 thing can't be managed in any other way, and this is the 
 day when these friends can best of all favor them, and so 
 there is nothing to be said. No, "nothing to be said" 
 just now ; but there will be something to be said by and 
 by. This is an honorable family, by courtesy a Chris- 
 tian family, but I know that the servants' wages there 
 are paid, if not in uncurrent money, in money which the 
 banks wont receive on deposit ! This family would insist 
 on being taken to heaven, when the time can't be post- 
 poned, in the family coach, though drivers and footmen 
 had to take back the carriage, and thus be themselves 
 shut out ! 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 69 
 
 The Sabbath in the family should breathe its benedic- 
 tion of rest from work along all the levels of the family 
 mansion, and upon every avoidable secular task of hand 
 or thought. 
 
 Another thing in the hallowing of the family Sabbath 
 is* to secure for the household an atmosphere of order, 
 serenity, and quietness. Some of us can remember the 
 Sabbaths of "our childhood in country homes. There was 
 something in the very aspect of the homestead, without 
 and within, that helped the sanctity of the day. The 
 morning broke in unvexed stillness. The plough paused, 
 arrested in mid-furrow. Unyoked, the oxen cropped the 
 dewy grass, or, as the sun rose higher, lay ruminating in 
 the shade. No musical chime from the mower's arm 
 giving edge to his scythe disturbed the halcyon calm. 
 The brooks ran with fuller music, as though they struck 
 a richer melody of praise, and the bees' hum came in with 
 deeper and clearer resonance. A mellower light, as 
 though mingled of chastened elements, mantled the dwell- 
 ing and brooded over the sacred solitudes of the un- 
 wrought fields. The columned vapor from the solid stone- 
 built masonry of the chimney-top rose like morning 
 incense from an altar. Through the east windows, the 
 golden rays streamed in upon a scene of quietness and 
 order. The household furniture was in its place, for 
 even chairs and footstools were not suffered to be irregu- 
 lar on that day, the incitements and accompaniments of 
 childish sports were set aside as not to be handled in 
 those hours, the nameless litter of childhood's treasures, 
 strewn as by fairy hands through the "living room," was 
 
70 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 cleared away, making strange and staid vacancy, and the 
 family clock ticked with a more suggestive and impres- 
 sive stroke. A spirit of cleanliness reigned, and draped 
 the forms that moved slowly about the mansion, as "with 
 fine linen, clean and white," which " is the righteousness 
 of saints." All rude and harsh noises were hushed, aad 
 to our young hearts it was made to seem that the permitted 
 boisterousness of other days would wound the tender sen- 
 sitiveness of this. It was impossible not to discern that 
 this was a day that differed from other days. We felt as 
 though some most reverent presence came nearer than 
 amid the clash of our implements of toil and instruments 
 of mirth, and that we must walk and talk softly beneath 
 that sacred shadow. 
 
 We cannot bring in, in every scene of household life, 
 this witness and echo of Nature to the statute of her Lord. 
 But the tranquil and orderly serenity of the family apart- 
 ments we may strive to secure. The eve of preparation, 
 diligently improved, may anticipate and save the hurry 
 and bustle of Sabbath morning. A studious carefulness 
 may make our movements more quiet, the tones of our 
 voices more gentle. Our children may be taught that 
 some of the shriller stops of their wondrously-varied 
 organ are not to be drawn on Sabbath-days. The loud, 
 ringing laugh and gleeful shout may be hushed into music 
 more subdued; the sonorous footfall, clattering through 
 entries and up and down stairways, taught a softer tread, 
 and passion and petulance chided as jarring on the pleas- 
 ant Sabbath harmony. You are thinking how difficult a 
 thing it is to tone down this sharp-chorded spirit, to key 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 71 
 
 i 
 lower the spontaneous symphonies of those lips, to find 
 
 any Sabbath opiate for those restless and tireless nerves. 
 Yes, do the best you can ; the head of life and energy 
 within the young frame is so high and full that it will 
 force unwitting expression. The school-boy's self- vindica- 
 tion for startling the hum of school life by sending out 
 his breath round and musical from his mouth was almost 
 philosophically correct. f 'He hadn't whistled," he said; 
 "it whistled itself." This exuberance of strong pulsing 
 vitality is not to be harshly repressed, frozen silent and 
 stiff by frigid frowns, but softly hushed down as a 
 gentle sky calms a tossing sea, when all its waves are 
 gambolling at play. What we want is to inspire from 
 earliest life in these young hearts a tender reverence for 
 Sabbath hours, a growing sense that the day differs in 
 sacredness from other days, has other uses, and must have 
 another keeping. Still the problem remains, you say, 
 " How to manage these mercurial spirits, under unwonted 
 restrictions, and deprived of the diversions of other 
 days." Shall we keep from them their toys, deny them 
 the games, the blocks, the picture-books, that amuse so 
 many hours on other days ? Then what shall those little 
 empty hands take hold of? What objects shall those 
 restless, roving eyes fasten upon ? Daytime is long for 
 these small people when unrestricted fertility invents 
 and caters for their entertainment. How can either they 
 or their guardians bear the burden of unoccupied Sab- 
 baths? 
 
 I am not wise enough to answer. Blessed would be 
 the art that could devise and frame for the nursery a set 
 
72 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 of Sabbath diversions ! How many benedictions of 
 mothers, ready to faint by the way, would come upon the 
 head of that fortunate artist ! And that word " diver- 
 sion" is the key to the problem, after all. These young 
 spirits must be diverted from preying upon themselves 
 and upon the rest of the household, in ways that shall 
 come to help the power of Sabbath associations. Occu- 
 pation is indispensable through some medium of eye or 
 ear or hand for the mind. 
 
 I found a group of children one Sabbath-day, with all 
 their secular blocks and cards in the midst of the parlor 
 floor, and engaged in busiest architecture. "But do you 
 play with your blocks on Sunday?" I asked. "Oh, 
 papa ! " protested one eager voice , " we are building a 
 church, and there is the pulpit, and we are going to put a 
 preacher in it, and then we shall have meeting." I did 
 not upset their steepled fabric, but I offered my services 
 as preacher, and was somewhat enthusiastically received. 
 A very extensive and elaborate arrangement of chairs 
 and sofas, harnessed with cords and mounted with foot- 
 stools and cushions, was introduced to me, at another 
 time, as a family coach, the driver in his place, with whip 
 in hand, ready to take the household to the meeting- 
 house for Sabbath worship. A more modest equipage 
 was suggested, occupying less room and attention, with 
 more quiet progress, as better suited to the Sabbath expe- 
 dition, and the apartment was restored to order, while 
 the incident furnished a good text from which to speak 
 of Christ's meek entry into Jerusalem, and of Elijah's 
 chariot and horses of fire. 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 73 
 
 If only there could be a rattle for the babe with the 
 rnimic chime of Sabbath bells, a trumpet that would blow 
 a Sabbath tune, a soldier's array that would help the little 
 heroes to fight the battles that already summon them to 
 be valiant, what a relief it were ! Yes, and what a loss per- 
 haps to the discipline of the parental spirit ! 
 
 After all our wit and self-devotion, it will be needful 
 full often to issue decrees and interdicts that rest on au- 
 thority alone. The Sabbath must say to childhood as it 
 says to manhood, as all divine law says to the subject, 
 "Thou shalt," and "Thou shalt not." It isVeared, I know, 
 that by such strictness we may make the Sabbath repel- 
 ling to young hearts, bring over them a chill when it re- 
 turns, as though a gloomy and cold shadow had fallen 
 upon them, and settle the memory of the day in their 
 hearts as something hostile and unfriendly to their joy. 
 I believe this danger is overrated. I have no doubt that 
 there are homes that are invested with almost funeral 
 gloom on the Sabbath-day, blots in the smiling landscape 
 of good and glad nature, out of which oppressed spirits, 
 feeling as though buried alive, would rush into any ave- 
 nue for the sake of escaping into light and air. These 
 are superstitious rather than Christian homes. They are 
 not homes where the parental heart retains the sympathy 
 of its own youth, or gives itself in sacrificing love to the 
 comfort and improvement of the young. They are selfish 
 homes, most likely, where sternness prevails because it 
 is cheaper than kindness, and peremptory statutes save 
 indolence from self-reproach. But no home is so truly 
 joyful as a well-governed home, a home where wise 
 7 
 
74 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 laws are firmly administered, and wholesome restraints 
 imposed. No home is so miserable to all the inmates as 
 one where childhood and youth have the mastery over pa- 
 rental authority, and freely follow out the prompting of 
 their own lawless inclination. Liberty, guarded by law, 
 restrained by law, and obedient to law, is a happier state 
 than full and wild license. Eeligion itself is a binding 
 of the heart and God and duty ; but it is through all its 
 exercises of penitence and submission, faith and hope, a 
 tenderer joy than the roving freedom on which it casts its 
 bonds. The child-heart is steadied and guided by re- 
 straining statutes ; it touches sure and firm certainties ; 
 the sweet sense of right and of its inward approval gath- 
 ers upon it, and its young feet find themselves, if not in 
 the paths of self-gratification, at least and even more con- 
 sciously, in "the way of peace." Abraham was to com- 
 mand his children and his household after him. It will 
 be often needful that the parent should exercise his right- 
 ful authority during the passing of the Sabbath-day. It 
 is the method by which God teaches the young heart the 
 great and precious lesson of obedience and submission. 
 We need not be afraid as parents, tenderly and firmly in 
 the last issue, to insist upon reverence to the Sabbath in 
 our home, to legislate for quietness and order, sure that 
 in this we are legislating for serenity of spirit and a 
 wealth of happy young thoughts, as well as for many 
 a precious thing in character beside. I can remember a 
 home so guarded by Sabbath-law and the supplemental 
 authority of the family head. I can remember that the 
 whole household group went regularly and reverently to 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. YD 
 
 the house of God. No light excuse passed current with 
 that firm arbitration. Any convenient Sabbath sickness, 
 that was sick enough to detain one of us from the sacred 
 porch, was sick enough to be treated with the bitterest 
 remedy the house afforded, not welcome a second time. 
 In pauses of worship, or in the mellow hours soften- 
 ing toward the evening twilight, the whole household 
 were gathered together, and the good old catechism, 
 each question, with its "variations," " what is enjoined," 
 "what is forbidden," etc., was recited from beginning to 
 ending. I think I can remember that childhood then was 
 a little restive at times under this strict constraint, that 
 keen eyes watched the sun's disappearing behind the 
 western hills, the hour for relaxing the vigilance that 
 had stood on guard till then ; but I can remember and 
 do testify that it was not an unhappy home, the Sabbath 
 was not a gloomy day. Either these eyes cannot see 
 clearly through the mist of tender memories, or there 
 was never a happier, more genial, more loving home. 
 The atmosphere of law and love was one. Law was only 
 another name for love, and love administered law. And 
 the Sabbaths thus spent in such regulated observances 
 were then and are now all bright in the review, because 
 gilded with the smile of approving Heaven. It was such 
 a Sabbath as I am pleading for, through which order, 
 quietness, and serenity reigned together. 
 
 It follows here naturally to say that it is one office of 
 the family Sabbath to cultivate the domestic affections. 
 The life of the week leads out the members of the family 
 and joins them to various outside fellowships. The mas- 
 
76 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 ter of the home enters the circle of his fellow-craftsmen 
 and exchanges with them greetings and pledges. The 
 mistress looks after the ties that bind her to the social 
 sphere in which she moves. The sous and daughters go 
 to meet their school-day acquaintances or their chosen 
 companions of their age. They are these outside bonds 
 which are strengthened through the six days' contacts and 
 intercourse. Often those that dwell beneath the same 
 roof see but little of one another through the days of toil. 
 They exchange morning salutations, and snatch a hasty 
 meal in company, then drift about till evening brings them 
 together wearied and worn, or thronged still with care, and 
 the night hides them within her curtains. Many a busy 
 man is almost a stranger to his own household ; but the 
 Sabbath brings these parted ones together and holds them 
 together. They are for a few hours, at least, members of 
 no fellowship but that of the home ; they are all there, 
 and all at rest ; they sit side by side, with no hurrying 
 call to bid them " rise and depart ; " they can give ques- 
 tion and answer in long and intimate communion ; the 
 pent-up confidences of their hearts may have utterance 
 now ; fond inquiries bring out the troubling or the joy- 
 ful secret, and heart opens to heart. Then they go to 
 the house of God still in company. They sit again side 
 by side in the same family pew. The great truths of 
 God's word, however absorbing the meditation upon them, 
 do not tend to divide them in thought and feeling from 
 one another, but rather to endear them and draw the tie 
 closer in the anticipation of sharing together an eternal 
 home in heaven. The close of the day and the evening 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 77 
 
 has especial dews of blessing for the life and fragrance 
 of this domestic union. The calm of the clay has taken 
 possession of their spirits. Its influences and associations 
 have rebuked littleness and meanness and envy and jeal- 
 ousy, and they are nearer together than when the day be- 
 gan. They look now more closely upon one another's 
 faces and forms. They seem comelier and lovelier to the 
 eye than on other days. All their attractiveness is fresh- 
 ened up. They are in newer and fairer costume than 
 yesterday's ; they scarce knew that each wore the family 
 features so becomingly, and that each could be so gracious 
 and winning in figure and manner. " It is not unlawful," 
 says Baxter, discoursing on the " divine appointment of 
 the Lord's day," "to be at the labor of dressing our- 
 selves somewhat more ornately or comely than on another 
 day, because it is suitable to the rejoicing of a festival," 
 nor is it unworthy of us to remember, w r e may say, that 
 thus the eyes in w r hich we desire to appear and to be our 
 best may look upon us more fondly and pleasantly. 
 
 It is well that the evening meal be served invitingly, 
 not sumptuously and at the cost of the Sabbath's leisurely 
 calm to any member of the household, but with such 
 festal and relishing appliances as nimble skill can easily 
 furnish within this unoccupied hour, or generous fore- 
 thought provide as the old week goes out. We agree 
 with Ephraim, the Syrian, who exhorts against " glut- 
 tony and drunkenness " on the Lord's day. "Thou, my 
 brother, shouldst not annul the work of God for meat and 
 dainties, nor to favor an insatiable appetite shouldst thou, 
 occupied and distracted with culinary cares, hinder the 
 7* 
 
78 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 sacred purpose of the day. All these things we leave to 
 those whose god is their belly and whose glory is their 
 shame." I am not pleading in the interest of appetite, 
 but in the name of a reunited household keeping the 
 Lord's festival, that their evening meal of itself contribute 
 something to the happy and genial intercourse around the 
 family board. The poet Grahame sings well, 
 
 " Hail, Sabbath ! thee I hail, the poor man's day ; 
 On other days the man of toil is doomed 
 To eat his joyless bread, lonely, the ground 
 Both seat and board. . . . 
 But on this day, embosomed in his home, 
 He shares the frugal meal with those he loves." 
 
 That is the place and hour for thankful reminiscences, for 
 speaking of God's good hand upon them in their house- 
 hold story, for calling up Sabbaths gone and fellow-wor- 
 shippers departed, and drawing the bonds of kindred love 
 and union closer about their hearts. The morrow will 
 strike the golden chain that holds them in one to-day and 
 jar them apart. Let them have their light feast as a 
 grateful celebration of the gladness and goodness of such 
 an hour, a help to its joyfulness and a seal upon its 
 memory. In staid and rigid Scotland the " Sabbath-night 
 supper" has been an immemorial institution, a household 
 sacrament, a sunbeam falling across a sombre cloud. It 
 was seasoned with pious talk, and, as Tertulliau wrote of 
 the same charmed hour, "prayer concludes the feast." 
 So witnesses the bard of Ayrshire, 
 
 " The cheerful supper done, wi' serious face, 
 They round the ingle form a circle wide; 
 The sire turns o'er in patriarchal grace 
 The big ha' Bible, and his father's pride." BURNS. 
 
THE' SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 79 
 
 Add to this chastened festivity music. Most afflicted 
 is that home where there is neither voice, nor art, nor 
 heart for the strains of sacred song. The family har- 
 mony culminates in that pleasant concert. All that has 
 kept any spirit there from any other melts away as the 
 varied notes mingle and blend. They all aim at concord. 
 They produce concord. They have come together in 
 agreement' and unison. They cannot, after singing in the 
 same strains, soaring in company on wings of praise 
 toward the divine presence, remember differences and 
 cherish alienations. There is a charm in this hour of 
 song for all the members of the household. Fretful 
 childhood and querulous age are alike soothed and spell- 
 bound. " I am persuaded," writes Legh Richmond to his 
 daughter, " that music is designed to prepare for heaven, 
 to educate for the choral enjoyment of paradise, to form 
 the mind to virtue and devotion, and to charm away evil, 
 and sanctify the heart to God. A Christian musician is 
 one who has a harp in his affections, which he daily tunes 
 to the notes of the angelic host, and with which he makes 
 melody in his heart to the Lord." 
 
 A Sabbath thus spent cannot fail to endear the mem- 
 bers of the home to one another. This is an issue it 
 were well to have distinctly in view. Whatever can for- 
 ward it, by pleasantness of mien and of speech, by using 
 more freely the language of love, for which, perhaps, 
 there are ears and hearts in our dwelling that are aching, 
 a language that flies our lips in the sternness of our in- 
 terchanges with a selfish world, by entering tenderly 
 into the sharp passages of one another's daily experience, 
 
80 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 rehearsed on this day, by making the rooms of the house 
 bright with firelight and lamplight, or bringing in* flowers 
 to shed both beauty and fragrance around, and helping 
 the festal aspect of the home, we ought to call into ser- 
 vice. We should so keep thejSabbath within this domes- 
 tic retreat as to secure by it the full realization of the 
 highest ideal of Christian domestic life. 
 
 Finally, the Sabbath should be improved in the family 
 as a day for special religious teaching. The great object 
 of the day is to take off our thoughts from things mate- 
 rial, earthly, and temporal, and bring them into commu- 
 nion with things invisible, heavenly, and eternal. This 
 object must be pursued as steadily, and can be secured at 
 least as successfully, with the children of the household 
 as in wider and older circles. The responsibility for this 
 home nurture comes upon the parent or guardian. If he 
 act the part of a faithful and tender provider for these 
 dependent ones in all but this, and carelessly or indo- 
 lently or timidly omit this, he is yet chargeable with the 
 most unkind neglect. To have denied 'them daily bread 
 would have been less cruel. 
 
 He may think himself unequal to so grave a task. 
 But why is he a parent? The relation is upon him. He 
 cannot flee from the duty. 
 
 If he heartily and prayerfully undertake it, he will find 
 himself wonderfully helped. He must, of course, be will- 
 ing to summon his best energies to the work. The Sab- 
 bath will be to* him, not a day of self-indulgent sloth, but 
 of great intellectual activity. Nor will he leave all the 
 burdens of the day for the day itself. He may make 
 large preparation for it before it arrive. 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 81 
 
 It will be his duty to see that his family know the pub- 
 lic ordinances of the day. If he teach otherwise by his 
 own example, in whole or in part, if he prefer for him- 
 self an easy and undisturbed attendance upon preaching, 
 with no restless elements in his pew, he can, in no way, 
 redeem for those young hearts the proper influence of the 
 day. He is teaching error, though he mean it not, by 
 a fearfully-convincing demonstration. 
 
 He may do much by interesting himself in their at- 
 tendance upon the Sabbath-school, aiding them in the 
 preparation of their lessons, looking with them into the 
 library-books which they bring in, inviting their teacher 
 to meet them under their roof and to become acquainted 
 with them in their domestic development, and lending his 
 whole personal sanction to the influence of this beneficent 
 institution in their religious training. 
 
 But this is not the whole, though it is where many 
 parents stop. He may lay up through the week special 
 questions and topics for Sabbath consideration, ques- 
 tions that have arisen in the progress of family discipline, 
 topics suggested by peculiarities of disposition and faults 
 or virtues of character which he has observed from day 
 to day, but could not take thoroughly in hand. He may 
 gather night after night a store of touching and impres- 
 sive incidents from his nightly reading of the press ; re- 
 member his little school, his small home parish, in all his 
 reading and all his seeing and all his hearing, and have 
 more instructive and suggestive matter accumulated in his 
 Sabbath drawer than he can exhaust. 
 
 He must not forget that these young pupils receive 
 
82 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 their most vivid and memorable lessons through the 
 senses. It is worth his own while to make himself as care- 
 fully and fully acquainted as his circumstances will per- 
 mit with the wonders of the earth and the air and the sea, 
 and lead out the exploring and eager young thought to 
 those exhibitions of the divine power and skill and good- 
 ness, with which the visible creation is filled. The pages 
 of nature are all pictorially illustrated to his hand. Stars 
 and dewdrops, rainbows and violets, clouds and their 
 shadows, thunder-storms, the round and the products of 
 the seasons, their own frame fearfully and wonderfully 
 made, animal and insect life, light, heat, frost, let him 
 make these sensible things ministers and revealers of God 
 and his character and his truth. He will find no lack of 
 interest, or of stimulating questioning with his young 
 audience. 
 
 Following the hint of teaching by the senses, let him 
 be sure to furnish the nursery with a pictorial Bible. 
 This emblazoned typology will draw curious eyes between 
 the leaves, and let in the marvellous histories there upon 
 the mind, and they will never be forgotten. Let him 
 seek to make this book of books a charm and a fasci- 
 nation to the circle of little ones. My own father was a 
 fine reader of Scripture narratives. He took pains to 
 read well in his house to the youngest ears that could 
 listen with any intelligence. It was as good as play to 
 hear him give out some of the stirring scenes of the 
 Scripture record. He used to indulge us often in that 
 way on the Sabbath. He was magnificent upon the duel 
 of David and Goliath. The first verse of that grand 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 83 
 
 chapter, as he began, always thrilled our hearts like the 
 blast of a trumpet. The echoes come back yet, as I read 
 it again, from that part of childhood's Sabbath hour, and 
 all ringing with heroic tones, "Now the Philistines gath- 
 ered together their armies to battle, and were gathered 
 together at Shochoh, which belongeth to Judah, and 
 pitched between Shochoh and Azekah, in Ephes-dam- 
 inim." 
 
 By whatsoever volumes and helps, we must teach our 
 households religiously on the Sabbath. Not in set 
 forms, not in systematic lessons, not in dry and hard 
 details. We must be men of parables. It is surprising 
 how rich and fertile one may become in this style of 
 teaching, even the humblest and least-favored mind, by 
 making it an object of a little thought and study. Our 
 children's minds and hearts are ours on the Sabbath. On 
 other days they are school-children, they are apprentices, 
 they are clerks ; they are studying, with other teachers 
 and masters, the knowledge of this world. On this day 
 they are with us. They are sons and daughters only, 
 while the Sabbath sun lingers. They are heirs with us 
 of immortality. We may join hands with them, draw 
 their arms within ours, and walk on with them toward the 
 gate of heaven. 
 
 I feel still that the practical difficulties remain as be- 
 fore. Childhood is restless, volatile, impatient of re- 
 straint, and naturally averse to religious truth. With 
 us both brain and heart are often weary. All our devices 
 fail at times to bring the peace of a Sabbath benediction 
 upon the troubled waters of household unrest. We are 
 
84 THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 
 
 often, as parents, straitened, ashamed, and desponding. 
 I hope I have not added to this feeling of discourage- 
 ment, or if we despair over the ideal which so often 
 rises before us, it may serve to lead us down into the val- 
 ley of humiliation and prayer. God will help us, when, 
 feeling weak, we cast ourselves upon his strength. He 
 will make some of the failures over which we mourn 
 so bitterly those unsatisfying, weary Sabbath-days 
 blessed successes. 
 
 Some wedded heart here is saying, with a great sor- 
 rowfulness, " I stand alone in this formidable effort ; the 
 help I most need of all human giving is withheld ; it is 
 not help, but hindrance. What I say and do for Sabbath 
 hallowing in my home is unsaid and undone, I fear, by 
 one at my side. How strong, how comforted, I should 
 feel, if this interrupted union could only fill itself out by 
 a harmony offering and example in this sacred observ- 
 ance! " 
 
 Oh, lonely wife, I know thee who thou art! Thou 
 canst not bid thy children dishonor their father; thou 
 thyself honorest and lovest him. Thou canst not suffer 
 them to approve ; thou art in perpetual dread lest their 
 feet follow after the ways that so grieve thee and that 
 have to them such persuasive sanction. Beseech the 
 merciful One that, through the kindness of thine heart 
 and the weakness of love, thine own feet go not astray. 
 And thou redouble the mother's faithfulness, prayerful- 
 ness, and constancy, and doubt not that the strong and 
 living child thus trained will yet conduct down the divine 
 blessing. 
 
THE SABBATH IN THE FAMILY. 85 
 
 Oh, husband, father, who takest thine own pleasure on 
 the Lord's day, shall the seeds of that example grow up 
 in young hearts into hardness and crime, and on some 
 tragic day the child, whose eye follows now your 
 thoughtless Sabbath step, look back out of a stained and 
 blasted manhood to this light pleasuring of yours, as the 
 germ of his awful doom? Do you know how you try 
 the heart, every throb of whose womanly tenderness is 
 yours, and which, keeping reproaches and remonstrances 
 silent, smiles, perhaps, upon you because it cannot grieve 
 you, in that over which it mourns? Are there not gentle- 
 ness and manliness enough in your soul if we speak 
 not of the fear of God and the voice of solemn duty 
 to keep you from such a trampling at once upon God's 
 law, a woman's heart, and a child's fate ? 
 
V. 
 
 KNOWING CHRIST. 
 
 "... FOR i KNOW WHOM i HAVE BELIEVED." 2 Tim. i. part 12. 
 
 HOW it is that one who walks with Christ, and whose 
 soul is joined to him in a vital and conscious union 
 knows this Saviour as no other soul knows him, it will be 
 difficult so to explain by any language or imagery which 
 can be employed as to make it intelligible to those who 
 have no experience of it. And yet this is just what many 
 an inquiring spirit desires and waits to comprehend. 
 They stand at a distance and look upon him whom the 
 gospel sets forth as the way of life. They walk round 
 about him without seeing how to approach him, and hav- 
 ing no confidence in any addresses they may offer to him. 
 He is to them remote, indistinct, almost mythical. Per- 
 haps they have not yet settled it in their thoughts who 
 and what he is. If they attempt communication with 
 him, it is all on their side ; they have only their own 
 voices ; there are no returning accents ; all is silent, mo- 
 tionless, and unresponsive. 
 
 " Does he reveal himself to those that believe in him ? 
 Does he come to meet them out of this vague and hazy 
 distance ? Does he break his silence so that they hear 
 
KNOWING CHRIST. 87 
 
 and recognize his voice? Do they know him as their 
 Friend and Eedeemer, and know that they know him, and 
 come into relations of intimacy with him, and exchange 
 with him reciprocities of love, confidence, and sympa- 
 thy ? " So they question. 
 
 If now as those to whom Christ is precious, and to 
 whom he has made himself known, we could open to 
 them all the journal of our hearts, introduce them to 
 scenes of an inward personal experience which never can 
 be thrown upon canvas, tell them how it is that we are 
 sure we have seen and felt and touched and embraced 
 him, what it is we know of him, by what process this 
 acquaintance was made and has ripened, and wherein is 
 the daily consciousness of his presence with us, and his 
 power upon us, it would meet perhaps better than any 
 other demonstration the state of mind in which so many 
 now are. True we might answer in the words of Philip 
 to Nathaniel, "Come and see." But they want to be 
 helped to come, and have their eyes guided to that which 
 is to be seen. We might say, " Here's the guide-book ; 
 read and follow the directions." But it is not strange 
 that they should feel that it is one thing to look upon a 
 map of an unknown region, or to study a guide-book, and 
 another thing to hear from one who has been a traveller 
 that way what his own lips can say about it. 
 
 So they say to us, "Tell us how you know Jesus, and 
 know that he is such a Saviour." It may be that if we at- 
 tempt to tell, we shall often break down through poverty 
 of words ; that we shall often seem to them as speaking 
 without meaning, because the meaning is beyond them ; 
 
88 KNOWING CHRIST. 
 
 that when we lead them out into our experiences, we shall 
 get them presently beyond their depth. 
 
 Just as when one listens to two artisans conversing 
 upon the subject of their craft, or a circle of professional 
 men discussing the matters of their profession, he may 
 understand much of what is signified, but every now and 
 then is made to feel that he is off soundings where they 
 easily touch bottom. Still something surely can be said, 
 and said intelligibly, though it be said out of an expe- 
 rience to which the listener is a stranger, of that exper- 
 imental knowledge of Christ possessed by a renewed 
 heart. 
 
 1. We know whom we have believed not simply as an 
 historic personage, just as we know Washington or 
 Columbus or William Tell. It is not simply that we can 
 say where he was born, and of what parentage, and trace, 
 without the omission of one incident, all the story of his 
 life. This you know as well as we. 
 
 2. It is not that we have opinions about him which we 
 entertain with entire confidence. Mere opinions might 
 be shaken by some style of argument, some show of evi- 
 dence, which we have not yet met. But absolute knowl- 
 edge, of course, nothing can overturn. We have opinions 
 concerning Napoleon Bonaparte and Oliver Cromwell, 
 but not the sort of intimate, experimental knowledge of 
 which we are now speaking. We have opinions concern- 
 ing our neighbors and acquaintances, the men whom we 
 have seen and mixed with for years, and yet none of 
 these men do we know as we know the Lord Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
KNOWING CHRIST. 89 
 
 3. It is not that we know him through the works of his 
 haiid as Creator, and can speak thus of the power 
 that heaved up the mountains and hollowed the oceans 
 and arched the starry skies ; of the wisdom that has 
 executed such masterpieces of contrivance, and flows in 
 the countless channels of design ; of the taste that has 
 tinted the air, painted the sunset clouds, shaped the for- 
 est tree, carpeted the meadow with emerald velvet, and 
 starred it with flowers ; of the goodness that shines in the 
 sun, inarches in the seasons, lisps down in summer rains, 
 and roils its great waves in harvest-time. The mere sen- 
 timentalist knows all this. 
 
 4. It is not that we know him as a Teacher in that rec- 
 ord of his short life. Many another eye than ours has 
 perused that Sermon on the Mount, and many another 
 tongue pronounced it sublime, unequalled. The touch- 
 ing and tender beauty of the parables, their simplicity, 
 aptness, force, and naturalness have been appreciated by 
 other minds, who have written them "exquisite, inimi- 
 table." The faultless and lofty maxims of his morality, 
 the gentleness of his charity, his purely Christian lessons 
 of forgiveness, have had other admirers than those who 
 know him as we know. 
 
 5. It is not that we know him just as an example, 
 have seen how he fulfilled all the relations of life, how 
 patient he was under contradiction, how, when he was 
 reviled, he reviled not again, how diligent and earnest in 
 the work he had to do, how meek, how mild, how long- 
 suffering, how compassionate, how forbearing toward great 
 offenders, how spotless and irreproachable everywhere. 
 All this record is public property, and this example has 
 
90 KNOWING CHRIST. 
 
 even had its eulogies as the crowning purpose of his 
 mission and life. 
 
 6. The knowledge we have of him is a present and 
 current knowledge. We know him now and to-day. 
 We do not in this peculiar apprehension of him go back up 
 the centuries. It is not that we have made his acquaint- 
 tance here in these pages of long ago. Or if we were 
 here introduced to him, we have had another and a later 
 acquaintance with him. We know him in the present, 
 not as the prophet that trod the shores of Galilee, and 
 the streets of Jerusalem, but as to-day and every day 
 with us and showing himself unto us. 
 
 7. We know him thus personally, for ourselves, not as 
 through the testimony of the evangelists, who walked 
 with him and talked with him. We, too, have walked 
 with him and talked with him. It is not of him that 
 we know from those that have been nearer to him than 
 we. We know himself by an intimacy existing directly 
 between his heart and ours. We have had experience of 
 what he is, and have come into personal relations and 
 conscious union to him. 
 
 8. We know him as our sacrifice and peace. When 
 we could not but consent to the law of God that it was 
 holy and good ; when we could not but confess that we 
 had broken it, and deserved its condemnation ; when a 
 sharper sentence was passed against us by our own 
 consciences within, and we carried about this burden, 
 Judas-like, " I have sinned," ourselves our accusers, 
 and knew no way to silence this remorseful accusation, or 
 to escape that condemnation, our peace slain, and a 
 
KNOWING CHRIST. 91 
 
 fearful looking-for of judgment, half slumbering, half 
 wakeful, but always a dull, deep pain, an abiding gloom, 
 in our consciousness, we came one day upon this Jesus as 
 though he had just descended alive from the cross after 
 his agony. He was bleeding in head and hands and feet 
 and side. He looked upon us with ineffable love in his 
 face, and as he fastened thus our wondering eye, he said, 
 " Burdened One, I have brought you a pardon for your sin. 
 Look up and smile ; you are acquitted, you are free." 
 Our first thought is one of rapturous amazement ; with 
 the second a chill questioning comes back upon our heart, 
 and falteringly we ask, " But did not God then care much 
 about our sinning? Was it but a slight injury done to 
 him and his government ? Can he overlook it so easily ? 
 Did our consciences make too much of it, and were we 
 burdened more than we need to have been ? " 
 
 And still that look of love beams upon us, and that 
 wounded hand holds out the pardon, and, with a strangely 
 meaning smile, the voice says, ?p lt is free, it is yours." 
 But our question falters forth again, " The penalty, then, 
 as an expression of God's estimates of holiness and sin, 
 was it too severe ? Is it set aside ? By simply returning to 
 our allegiance, can we make up all the injury done, and 
 are the interests of a moral government cared for?" And 
 the lips sweetly reply, " The penalty is set aside. I have 
 come in God's name, and bringing God's love, to tell you 
 this good news." It is not clear to us yet ; something is 
 evidently held back ; the significance of that smile is not 
 interpreted; we are still troubled in our joy about the 
 way the thing is managed, our conscience still shy of 
 
92 KNOWING CHRIST. 
 
 resting in it, and we look up again, and another question 
 flashes across us, " Because we have not yet seen the 
 ill-desert of sin recognized and met. There is no expia- 
 tion. We cannot have peace even by an act of forgive- 
 ness at the expense of our conscience. But why do you 
 bleed? The pardon is all stained with crimson. What 
 is this that you have suffered?" And the loving smile 
 half answers as we begin to feel that we are somehow 
 connected with that tragedy, and the voice briefly ex- 
 plains, "The penalty was set aside, and another sanction 
 for the law was substituted." " Yes," we reply, eagerly, 
 for we are on the track now, " and that substitute was 
 this great suffering of one so august and sacred," and 
 our eyes fill with starting tears. "Why," it is answered, 
 " I could not show pity to a sinner, and be suspected of 
 sympathizing with his sin; that were still more to dis- 
 honor the law and affront the Lawgiver ; that were treason 
 against the crown. So it was arranged that I should give 
 this testimony for the law and against sin, showing that I 
 am on God's side and the law's side as to sin, while still 
 after this sacrificial testimony I could bless and save you." 
 " Then it is you that have made this pardon so free, and 
 oh, at such a price ! it is for me you bleed, and God's love 
 has found a channel through that mangled flesh ! " " It was 
 a true burden which I felt," says conscience. " We were 
 not mistaken about the desert of sin ; but who could have 
 dreamed of such a way ? " And we fall at those feet and 
 take the pardon, and wash away the flowing blood with 
 faster flowing tears, and pour out our heart there and say, 
 "Lord, thou hast bought me, thou hast bought me." In 
 
KNOWING CHRIST. 93 
 
 this scene we have known Jesus. It could not have been 
 more real to us if it had been between man and man. 
 We have held such an interview with him, and entered 
 into such relations with him. Always when the thoughts 
 of the past trouble us, we see him standing between our 
 sin and our punishment with his bleeding form. Always 
 when we are betrayed afresh into sin, with shame and 
 agony in our hearts, struggling with penitence and love, 
 we see him standing thus our shield from justice. So do 
 we know him ever as our sacrifice and our peace. We do 
 not dream this, we experience it. There is no more posi- 
 tive experience of our life. If you have confidence in our 
 sanity and our veracity, you must receive this testimony. 
 9. We know again that we have communion with 
 him. Our knowledge is that we are admitted to personal 
 intercourse with him. It is not that we believe in his 
 omniscience and omnipresence, and are persuaded that 
 he hears us and understands us and knows our desires ; it 
 is that he makes us feel that bis personal presence comes 
 upon us and around us. We are no more sure, without 
 sight, of the presence of a flower by its fragrance, of 
 fire by its warmth, of the open air by its freshness, than 
 we are of his nearness by what he breathes upon us. 
 There comes before him, as he visits our place of kneel- 
 ing, an influence that heralds his approach. That influ- 
 ence fastens upon our heart and draws it unto him. 
 The influence of the magnet upon steel is not more pos- 
 itive. Love glows, faith clings, hope soars, weakness 
 and want plead, and the whole nature goes to him as his 
 presence draws. It is not imagination that stirs the soul 
 
94 KNOWING CHRIST. 
 
 so deeply and lifts all its passionate waves of trust and de- 
 sire toward this invisible presence, any 1 more than it is 
 imagination that raises the tide wave out of the ocean 
 level, and keeps it rolling round the earth. It is not im- 
 agination that paints before our inner eye the portraiture 
 of that face in whose speaking lineaments we behold all 
 the heart of God. It is not fancy that calls up to our 
 thought just the promises we most need to cheer us, and 
 the precepts indispensable to guide, and makes us hear his 
 gracious whispers of acceptance and benediction. Imag- 
 ination is a waking dream ; but all this is the most con- 
 scious reality, and abides with us in solid results of spir- 
 itual comfort and life. Were they fancies, they would 
 evaporate in bright sentimentalisms, brief and unsubstan- 
 tial as the roseate morning vapors. Imagination could not 
 renew her magic for us thus every day. But commu- 
 nion is, with more or less vividness, our daily expe- 
 rience, and its influence remains a power upon our heart 
 continually. It is not the effect of place and posture 
 with us. We do not go to the closet to meet our Saviour 
 there ; he goes with us, as though he said, drawing our 
 arm through his, "Come, let us be alone together for 
 a while." It is not only in the closet that we have this 
 intercourse. As we do not meet there for the first, so 
 we do not part as we recross the threshold with outward 
 step. This consciousness of communion with Christ at- 
 tends us, so that a glance will look into his friendly eye, 
 a low-voiced call will bring an answering voice, a hand 
 stretched out will meet his clasping hand. 
 
 10. We know thus that we have him to lean upon. 
 
 
KNOWING CHKIST. 95 
 
 The greeting of a new morning wakes us, and we have 
 the day's pilgrimage to set out upon. Whither the way 
 will lead to-day, and how the path will open, we know 
 not. In ourselves we are weak and dismayed before all 
 the uncertainties clustering along the hidden caves our 
 feet are to explore. Then we ask him to join company 
 with us, that we may not go alone ; and straightway our 
 sense of solitude and loneliness departs. We know this. 
 Our spirit feels the fellowship and becomes brave and 
 hopeful in this consciousness. Presently the way be- 
 comes steep ; the climbing steps of arduous duty are to 
 lead us up the acclivities; our panting breath and fal- 
 tering limbs appeal to him, and he bids us lean upon his 
 supporting hold, and we take him at his word, and find 
 that we are resting upon solid strength. The path be- 
 comes obscure and weary ; we turn in perplexity to him, 
 and he goes before us to show the right. Our doubts 
 dissolve. Guiding footprints lead us on without wander- 
 ing. The heat of the noontide becomes oppressive ; we 
 are wearied and ready to faint ; the day is but half gone 
 and we are spent. " Cast thy care here," is the sooth- 
 ing whisper that glides into our soul, "Lay off thy 
 burden upon the Lord," " Lean more heavily ; I will sus- 
 tain you." We do lean ; we make over our weariness 
 to him, and we feel, we know, that we are rested, re- 
 freshed, and recruited. We next see clouds gathering ; 
 the sun withdraws his light ; we plunge down some dark 
 defile ; we are afraid ; it is the shadow of an inscrutable 
 Providence that falls upon us, and our heart fails us. 
 But he makes us know that he is near ; he ever presses 
 
96 KNOWING CHRIST. 
 
 closer to our side, and gives us the comforting assurance, 
 "I will never leave thee nor forsake thee." And so, 
 whatever the experience of the day, when our spirits 
 droop, when we are hard beset, when we know not whither 
 to turn, when our weakness is like the giving up of the 
 ghost, we find this one presence always about us. We 
 cannot be deceived. Every effect must have its cause. 
 We feel the blessed effects of this divine nearness ; we 
 are rallied and reinforced in all- wavering and despon- 
 dency ; we are breathed upon with a freshening vigor, 
 anointed with healing and strengthening oil, and come 
 through the day, because of this help, with a progress 
 to which we know our own feet to be totally inadequate. 
 11. We know thus, not only that we lean upon him, 
 but that he strengthens us. This actual reception of 
 strength, when we are altogether void of it, is a won- 
 derful experience. Some old propensity girds itself 
 against us ; some habit seen in increasing light to be a 
 hindrance to our spirituality and usefulness is to be 
 thrown off; some sin against which we have forgotten 
 to watch surprises us ; some cunningly arranged and 
 mightily enticing temptation gathers before us ; some 
 great cross lies at our door to be taken up ; some diffi- 
 cult, delicate, intricate duty summons us ; some challenge 
 of our powers. of endurance or of action, by God or man, 
 or spirit of evil, confronts us. At first, perhaps, we do 
 not feel our weakness. We adventure in our own suffi- 
 ciency. We try to stand, and cannot; we try to do, and 
 fail ; we match ourselves with our adversary, and the con- 
 test goes against us ; we lift at our cross, and our loins 
 
KNOWING CHRIST. 97 
 
 give way. Our best resolution avails us nothing but to 
 show the absoluteness of our infirmity ; our sharpest en- 
 deavors only reveal how disproportionate they are to our 
 great need. Empty of resources, we turn to Christ; we 
 confess our emptiness and extremity. We beseech him 
 to make his strength perfect in our weakness. Now, 
 what we have to testify is this, that with this resort 
 to Jesus th'e whole aspect of the case changes. We 
 stand, we overcome, we endure, we break the bands of 
 sin, we put to rout the powers of evil, we are more than 
 conquerors through him. We shout aloud our triumph, 
 "I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me." 
 We were fainting and sinking; our powers were over- 
 borne ; there was no help in us. We look to him ; we 
 touch his hand, and as fabled Antaeus, the son of earth, 
 in his wrestling with Hercules, received new strength 
 every time he touched the ground, so fresh forces of 
 divine aid come to our succor at every look upon Christ, 
 every contact with his sacred form. We cannot bo mis- 
 taken in this. It is the result of the thousand experi- 
 ments, all governed by the same law, and all issuing 
 adversely or prosperously as we trust ourselves on him. 
 It is the daily and hourly witness of our lives. 
 
 12. So we know him as our light. We are blind and 
 ignorant, and turning to him for illumination. Not more 
 surely does the day come with the rising sun than guiding 
 beams stream down to our bewildered thoughts as we 
 invoke his shining. We know it by as many historic 
 scenes in our past as there are days in the years we have 
 lived. 
 
 9 
 
98 KNOWING CHRIST. 
 
 13. So is he our life. If the branch of a vine had 
 consciousness, it could not more distinctly testify that its 
 life is in the vine than we can that our spiritual life is in 
 Christ. We look within for it, or without, upon all other 
 helps, and no pulse beats. We look to him, and the vital 
 currents are in motion and the heart throbs with strong 
 and lusty vigor. Our souls feel the living supplies as 
 truly as Nature in all her veins the reviving of spring. 
 We cannot say how this life cuts its channel from his 
 heart to ours ; but we know we receive it, and we know 
 we derive it ; it is not native, it is imparted, and it flows 
 to us, or flows within us, when, and only when, we turn 
 to him. 
 
 14. So he is in sympathy with us. It is not fancy 
 that he comforts us in sadness, for we are really com- 
 forted ; our tears are dried up ; the smile returns to our 
 face and the peace to our hearts ; and this transition from 
 mourning to joy is when we ask him to suffer our head to 
 droop upon his breast. 
 
 15. So we see his unchanged face in all trying events. 
 "It is I," he says, through the darkness and over the wild 
 heaving billows, "be not afraid." "I am Lord of provi- 
 dence, I am head over all things to my beloved ; I am 
 purging my branches, that they may bear more fruit." 
 
 My hearers, there is no end to this testimony. I have 
 striven only to produce specimens of it. To those whom I 
 chiefly wish to affect, I shall have failed, after all, to make 
 the apprehension clear how distinct all this consciousness 
 is with a believer, how separate it is from all that is nat- 
 ural and self-originated within him, how certainly and 
 unerringly he knows it. 
 
j>. 
 
 KNOWING CHm-^ 99 
 
 II. You ask now, Did you know all this at first? Had 
 you this clear perception of a present Christ and his 
 various agency at the outset? I answer, JVo. We only 
 trusted him for it, at the very start. We put our hand 
 in his, but we had no experience of his help along the 
 road, for we were not as yet travellers in it. We had the 
 confidence that he could and would carry us through, 
 a confidence inspired by nothing that we had known, but 
 only by his word of promise. 
 
 III. You ask again, perhaps, how this knowledge has 
 grown upon us. I answer, By two kinds of experience. 
 Our experience of weakness, helplessness, and peril in 
 the great work of escaping from the bondage of sin, and 
 our experience of the actual fruits of resorting to Christ. 
 If I could take a single instance of such a twofold expe- 
 rience, it might make the matter clearer. Suppose, then, 
 that there grows upon me the conviction that a certain 
 trait in my character greatly hinders my piety, obstructs 
 my progress, grieves my brethren, stumbles sinners, and 
 clouds my own soul. I resolve to put it down. I grapple 
 with it. The struggle is long and severe. Sometimes I 
 think I have got the better of it. But I find soon that it 
 is as vital as ever. It needs to be plucked up by the 
 roots. Its tyranny becomes so galling that I cannot en- 
 dure it. I carry it to this Saviour and ask him to under- 
 take my deliverance, and he begins upon it with a process 
 of his own. His treatment is deep and thorough, though 
 trying, his surgery sharp, but final. I am delivered and 
 healed. Can I doubt who has done it? And as these 
 experiences multiply, shall I not more and more come to 
 
100 KNOWING CHRIST* 
 
 know him as a personal Saviour, and with increasing con- 
 fidence carry all my needs to him ? 
 
 IV. Do you ask again, How did this knowledge begin, 
 how can it be entered upon? This is the way. The 
 burden of wanting such a help was upon our hearts, the 
 burden of sin, of captivity to it, and of condemnation for 
 it, of helplessness in ourselves either to escape the latter 
 or break from the former. We heard him set forth as such 
 a complete and glorious Deliverer, as willing and ready 
 to undertake for every soul that would confide its case to 
 him. We said, If this Helper is what he is represented, 
 he is what our great want requires. Tremblingly we 
 approached him and retired again, then drew near shyly 
 and once more retreated. Some single word of his caught 
 our ear, " Come," " Come unto me," and we went in the 
 dark, and said there as we stood, alone, in the dark, " Is 
 the Deliverer near? Let us know this great deliverance. 
 Here we are, Lord, undertake for us." And we ventured 
 to leave our case with him, as a faint echo stole out of the 
 silence and seemed to whisper, " Him that cometh unto me 
 I will in no wise cast out." And we now know what we 
 did not so certainly know then, at once, that he began 
 with us that hour. 
 
 V. Do you ask, Can we begin so? Yes, you can. 
 Speak up to him now in the depths of your soul, 
 " Saviour, Master, Guide, whom as yet we know not, we 
 have heard of thee as a Deliverer from the bondage of 
 wrath and sin. We are in captivity to both. Thou art, 
 we believe, the way of escape. We see not a step of the 
 way. We see not even thee. But we stretch out our 
 
KNOWING CHRIST. 101 
 
 hands to thee ; we empty them of all our idols ; we lift 
 them for thy clasping and guidance. Only lead, we will 
 follow thee. We trust thee, make us know thee." Re- 
 member this, "It is not know and then believe, but 
 believe and you shall see the salvation of God." 
 9* 
 
VI. 
 
 GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. 
 
 . GOD WAS IN CHRIST RECONCILING THE WORLD UNTO HIMSELF. 2 
 
 Cor. v. part 19. 
 
 rPHERE is condensed here into a single line the whole 
 -L breadth of the gospel. Every word is compact and 
 weighty with the force of this great pressure upon it. 
 The story of the incarnation, its necessity, and its purpose, 
 the historic life and work of Jesus in the flesh, man's 
 apostasy and alienation from God, and the sublime and 
 touching spectacle of the infinite Father coming forth in 
 the sacrifice of his Son and the energy of the new-creating 
 Spirit to accomplish the marvels of redemption, all 
 these are here. 
 
 We have nothing that so rounds and completes the 
 description of the gospel as this word, it is a EECON- 
 CILING gospel. It is not merely a refining and educating 
 system, bringing out the occult virtues and graces 
 darkly sphered in human nature, or training to athletic 
 vigor moral forces already vital within us, though feeble 
 and torpid. Its great work is not to polish the rough- 
 nesses of a spirit that only needs discipline and culture 
 to put on the beauty of holiness, just as a lapidary cuts a 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. 103 
 
 new-found diamond, that its imprisoned lustres may shine 
 forth. 
 
 Its chief travail is to reconcile man to God. No other 
 conception of it discerns its true glory, or enters into the 
 purpose of its divine author. If it come to us merely as 
 a code of higher morals, a stimulant to a more self-sacri- 
 ficing charity of living, to open to us the inspiring exam- 
 ple of that sinless Messenger from Heaven, to spiritualize 
 by teachings of heavenly wisdom and beauty our life of 
 sense, to lift us by its elevating truths above meannesses 
 and vulgarities and dishonesties, if this be all, it is no 
 gospel for our deepest and most helpless need. The 
 angels might have hushed those choral chants that broke 
 the silence and lit the darkness of midnight above the 
 hills of Bethlehem. 
 
 It is an atoning gospel we want, not one in the first 
 instance to excite and cheer us in our struggles after hu- 
 man perfection, but first of all to restore us to the favor 
 of God, to slay our enmity to him, and propitiate him 
 towards us, bringing us near to him in harmony and 
 friendship forever. 
 
 And so it announces itself in our Scripture, " God in 
 Christ RECONCILING the world unto himself." 
 
 I. If now this work of reconciliation, proposed as the 
 chief function of the gospel, be a reality in the full signif- 
 icance of the language expressing it, then there is as- 
 sumed here the essential fact of the GUILT and RUIN of 
 MAN. We cannot advance a step in the explication of the 
 text, without conceding that God and man are at variance. 
 The holy inhabitants of heaven need no reconciling unto 
 
104 GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED . 
 
 God. He is forever at peace with them. They have 
 never harbored a rebel thought against him. To reconcile 
 is to reunite in love and confidence those who have been 
 estranged, to reinstate in forfeited favor and friendship 
 one who has offended, to make up and put away existing 
 hostilities and alienations. To reconcile man to God is 
 to bring them back to his favor, to appease his wrath 
 against them, to do away the division that has rived 
 them asunder. If such a work needs to be done, how ab- 
 solutely it argues man an apostate and alien from God. 
 Our first business, therefore, must be to set forth this 
 breach. 
 
 God sustains to this creature man, apart from the work 
 of redemption, relations of an infinite force and tender- 
 ness. He is the Maker of his frame, the Father of his 
 spirit, the Builder of his home, the Provider of his boun- 
 ties, the Preserver of his life, the Benefactor of his days, 
 the Giver of every good and every perfect gift. All the 
 offices involved in these relations God has fulfilled with 
 spotless honor to himself, with immeasurable goodness to 
 the creature. He has moreover made himself known to 
 man, disclosed his character, published his will, and fur- 
 nished him in his law a perfect rule of living. Now the 
 breach is this. There is not one of those relations which 
 man on his part has not violated and outraged. The 
 workmanship of God's power, he has " worshipped and 
 served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed 
 forever." The child of such a Parent, he has withheld 
 all filial love and reverence ; a dweller in God's earth, 
 he has cursed and defiled it with sin ; a receiver of God's 
 
GOD AND THE WOULD RECONCILED. 105 
 
 bounties, he has hardened his heart against all the claims 
 of gratitude ; a subject of God's law, he has set at nought 
 its infinite authority, and lifted the banner of rebellion 
 against his sovereign. This is a weighty accusation, but 
 amply and sadly sustained by the testimonies of Omnis- 
 cience itself and witnessed to in all the rounds of the 
 current human life. Here, then, is sunk a gulf of sepa- 
 ration between God and man. God is of purer eyes than 
 to behold iniquity. He hates sin with a perfect hatred. 
 He is jealous of his honor and right as throned king. 
 He has enacted and sanctioned the law, "The soul that 
 sinneth it shall die." How can he remain in friendly 
 communion with such rebels? Is it any wonder he has 
 withdrawn himself from a race in arms against him, and 
 hung over them the fulminations of his eternal wrath? 
 And on the other side man has rejected God. He has 
 trampled on his laws. He has given his honor unto 
 idols. His affections have gone after other gods. His 
 will has hardened itself against his Maker and Monarch. 
 He is sold under sin, a willing captive to Satan, at enmity 
 with God. How deep and awful this chasm ! Man can- 
 not cross it in the face of the sentinel thunders that guard 
 the divine justice. God cannot cross it, leaving his 
 broken law and shattered sceptre behind, trophies of suc- 
 cessful insurrection. No human prayer can span it, for 
 the condemned cannot plead against this Judge. No 
 divine mercy can overleap it, fettered by the stern neces- 
 sities of a moral government as yet defied and dishonored. 
 So they stand on either side, God insulted and offended, 
 men filling up the measure of their guilt, and the yawning 
 
106 GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. 
 
 gulf between. So they stand, God lifting his dreadful 
 right hand with his glittering sword, man stiffening his 
 puny arm of rebellion. No voice of mercy, no voice of 
 penitence, calls across from brink to brink. If God pass 
 over, it must be to take vengeance, to execute wrath. If 
 man pass, it must be to his trial and doom. Thus is a 
 world divorced from God. The great malign one has 
 wrought fearfully. The Eden intercourse is ended. 
 
 " No more of talk where God or angel guest 
 With man, as with his friend familiar, used 
 To sit indulgent." 
 
 Earth is estranged from God. God has gone up from 
 earth. 
 
 " Foul distrust and breach 
 Disloyal, on the part of man, revolt 
 And disobedience. On the part of Heaven, 
 Now alienated, distance and distaste, 
 Anger and just rebuke and judgment given." 
 
 Can this gulf be bridged ? Can this wandering orb be 
 made to gravitate back toward the central sun ? Can the 
 great breach be repaired and God and man commune again 
 in protecting love and filial trust as in the early Paradise ? 
 And our Scripture answers, " God is in Christ recon- 
 ciling the world unto himself." And this is our next 
 point. 
 
 II. God first moves in the effort for reconciliation. 
 From his side of the dividing gulf, he looks across upon 
 his rebel subjects. They are the children of his loins. 
 Something of the Father's image is on them still. They 
 have lost their inheritance of immortality. Without God, 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. 107 
 
 without hope. Striving to cheat themselves into spasms 
 of fitful mirth, but carrying within them an upbraiding 
 conscience and a heavy heart, and looking out portionless 
 into the dark night of eternity. With all his feelings as 
 a moral Governor, whose authority has been trampled 
 on; with all his care as Sovereign of the universe, 
 whose word and will must be inviolable ; with all his 
 hatred of sin, and his unalterable determination to 
 punish it, he yet loves these wretched transgressors. 
 He cannot see them perish. He yearns over his prod- 
 igal, riotous children. He longs to gather them to 
 their Father's house, and kill the fatted calf. "How shall 
 I give thee up ? " breaks forth his compassionate sorrow. 
 Oh, he will not give them up. Man shall see, and Heaven 
 shall see, and the old Tempter glorying in his triumph 
 shall see, and all the universe shall see what God can do 
 to relight this darkened orb and set it again amid the 
 shining spheres that wheel about his throne. The cloud- 
 veiled heights of mercy, which no angel wing has scaled, 
 no creature eye looked upon as yet, shall be unveiled to 
 the wonder and praise of all loyal intelligences. Oh, 
 what new brightness poured its floods over creation when 
 the cloud moved ! Who before could have fathomed this 
 mighty secret of God's heart? God was holy and just 
 and good ; this they knew. Who could have hit the amaz- 
 ing truth that he could forgive sin, and advance the sinner 
 to crowns and thrones in heaven ? The rebel angels were 
 hurled from their happy seats. God moved to reconcile 
 man unto himself. They who looked to behold another 
 stroke of infinite justice, another province of revolt lopped 
 
108 GOD AND THE WOELD RECONCILED. 
 
 off from the holy and happy kingdom of Jehovah, saw 
 another sight that held them mute with surprise and awe. 
 Man is helpless and hopeless. He cannot rise to God. 
 He can do nothing to bridge the gulf. He can make no 
 overture to God. He is under sentence. His doom calls 
 for him. But God rises in his place. A voice from the 
 midst of the throne pierces the heavens, rends the skies, 
 and rallies the despairing heart of earth, "Lo, I come." 
 III. And he who spake was himself the assurance and 
 type of reconciliation. While yet the gulf is impassable 
 it disappears in the symbol of the incarnation. Look 
 upon the person of Jesus. The lost humanity, the offend- 
 ed Deity, are one again. They are seen united there, 
 blended. God in Christ, ere yet the cross is reared, has 
 taken the rebel nature back to his bosom. He has trav- 
 ersed the distance that separated the two ; he has thrown 
 down the barriers between ; he has bridged the chasm ; the 
 restored humanity is wedded in indissoluble bonds with 
 the pitying Divinity, in and by the reconciling Christ. 
 Though the law be broken, though the creature be fallen, 
 though justice must be satisfied, though the sinner have 
 no offering he can bring, still God and man are met. 
 The outraged Lawgiver, the daring rebel, are joined to- 
 gether, and that mysterious alliance for whatever purposes 
 assumed is clear in this, pledges entire reconciliation, 
 eternal fellowship. It is a promise for the creature reach- 
 ing beyond all the privilege and felicity of his former 
 estate in the garden. Adam and his Creator but com- 
 muned then. They were not one. But this reconcilia- 
 tion after the fall is to elevate and glorify the rescued 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. 109 
 
 humanity to heights attainable by no other rank of created 
 mind. "He took not on him the nature of angels." 
 " Know ye not that we shall judge angels ? " " Thou 
 hast made us kings and priests unto God." I love to 
 linger here, to dwell upon this living prophecy of the 
 incarnation, to interpret its exceeding great and precious 
 promise, to welcome it as God's bond of so perfect a 
 reconciliation, so consummate a union, so glorious a des- 
 tiny, for sinful, outlawed man. 
 
 IV. And now we must inquire as to the actual 
 method of this reconciliation, whose transcendent issue is 
 given us in such a type. What is needful to be done be- 
 fore such a result can be realized ? Clearly the order and 
 supremacy of the divine government must be sustained 
 on the one hand, and the corrupt and alienated heart of 
 man must be rectified and won on the other. A recon- 
 ciliation must affect both parties. The bridge that spans 
 the gulf must have its double pier to rest upon, one on 
 God's side, the other on ours. God cannot reconcile us 
 just by coming over to us. He must draw us to him. 
 He cannot come to us leaving the demands of justice 
 clamoring for satisfaction. He cannot draw us to him 
 without overcoming and slaying the enmity of our hearts 
 and renovating our nature. No part of this work is pos- 
 sible to man. Let him seek to build up a righteousness 
 of his own, and pile his good deeds, his laborious virtues, 
 and costly charities one above another, and raise himself 
 on these mole-hill eminences to match the altitudes of 
 the perfect law. Oh, how those towering Alps, from 
 their pure and far heights, look down upon him ! Never 
 10 
 
110 GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. 
 
 can his sliding feet and his frail strength of climbing reach 
 the sun-white summit. He cannot blot out one sin of the 
 past. His former guilt nothing but his death can expiate, 
 and his actual and current life, however loftily he aim, 
 wins not one smile from approving law, but darkens for- 
 ever under its awful frowns. Equally fruitless are his 
 best efforts to catch his truant affections and desires, to 
 bring- them chastened and loving to his abused and in- 
 jured Father, to pacify his reproachful conscience, to bend 
 his disloyal will, to kindle within the life and power of an 
 earnest, practical, persistent godliness. Nor could created 
 wisdom have devised a plan by which God himself could 
 achieve this marvel, could wed these opposites. What a 
 problem it was to solve ! Given a law of infinite value, 
 with an infinite penalty and a world of transgressors, to 
 make reparation to law, let the transgressors go free, and 
 restore them to their allegiance ! If the sinner be cut off 
 in his guilt, the law Is vindicated, justice is satisfied, gov- 
 ernment sustained, but there is not salvation for the lost. 
 If the sinner be justified and forgiven, while yet there is 
 no expiation for his guilt, it may be well with him ; the 
 mercy of God is illustriously displayed, but the authority 
 of the sovereign Ruler is prostrate in the dust. No more 
 shall the heavenly choirs sing together, "Justice and 
 Judgment are the habitation of thy throne. Just and true 
 are thy ways, thou King of saints. Who shall not fear 
 thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name?" Under such an 
 administration rebellion shall not stop with earth. If 
 there be some unheard-of sacrifice by which God's just 
 hatred of sin and his determination not to suffer it to 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. Ill 
 
 offend with impunity can be expressed, by which thus the 
 guilt of the transgressor, being atoned for, may be par- 
 doned, what force beyond all this shall undertake the 
 renovation of human character, its resurrection from 
 spiritual death into newness of life? " Oh, the depth of 
 the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! " 
 God, in the person of the Son, took to himself a sacrificial 
 humanity, lending it by such alliance an infinite worth, 
 entering thus into a condition under the law, rendering 
 there a perfect obedience, not obligatory on him who was 
 above the law, shedding there the blood of expiation de- 
 manded by inexorable justice, thus lifting again the 
 trampled prerogatives of the crown, and then plying the 
 heart of the rescued sinner by the melting power of that 
 cross, the might of that dying love, and moving upon it 
 with the life-inspiring energy of the new creating spirit. 
 This great transaction solves the problem. God can offer 
 reconciliation in the fulness of his mercy, for his crown 
 is protected, his government upheld. The sinner can 
 come into a cordial acceptance of this offer, and be at 
 peace with this offended majesty, being delivered by the 
 righteousness of Christ from the pain and pressure of an 
 evil conscience, won by the cross of Christ to penitence, 
 gratitude, and love, his will subdued and his nature 
 sanctified by the operations of the Spirit of grace. And 
 so in brief this wonderful Scripture hath its fulfilment, 
 that God is in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. 
 Indignant justice is pacified ; obdurate rebellion is con- 
 quered ; the penal sanction of law is sustained ; the 
 sentence is removed from the penitent criminal ; with 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. 
 
 unfettered love God invites ; with assured confidence the 
 weeping sinner draws nigh. Over the bridgeless gulf the 
 Mediator has laid his own body, and upon it a just God 
 comes with life and peace to meet the now hopeful offen- 
 der, forsaking all for that embrace of love. That which 
 was symbolized in the person of Christ is thus actualized. 
 A new, divine life, flowing free in this unobstructed chan- 
 nel, enters the dead heart of the race, and quickens it to 
 live again. God accepts a suffering Christ as the con- 
 demned criminal's substitute. The sinner receives in his 
 welcoming and believing soul that atoning Christ as his 
 surety with God, bringing to him not only the seal of 
 pardon, but a new force of willing, loving, and obeying. 
 And so the song of joy breaks from his lips. Out of the 
 miry depths his feet are raised to stand on the Rock of 
 ages. What wonder that he sings of the Lamb that was 
 slain ! What marvel that we hear him after death chant- 
 ing on the celestial hills, " Worthy the Lamb ! " 
 
 My friends, the gospel which our churches hold and 
 our ministry preaches is sometimes thought to be and 
 represented to be a stern and harsh system, dealing 
 sharply with human errors, covering with forbidding 
 gloom the face of the Almighty Father, and pressing 
 its unlovely austerities upon shrinking and sensitive spir- 
 its. How unjust and mistaken a thought ! We preach 
 God in Christ, "reconciling the world unto himself, not 
 imputing their trespasses unto them." If we speak of 
 the great divisive abyss the fall has sunk between man 
 and his God, it is to unfold the necessity and the glory 
 of that redemptive system, that mediatorial work, that 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. 113 
 
 throws its indestructible arch across. If we speak of a 
 justice that demands for every sin the blood of expiation, 
 it is to point to the Lamb of God that taketh away the 
 sin of the world. If we speak of the carnal heart as en- 
 mity with God, it is to tell how Jesus died for you while 
 you were yet enemies, to reconcile you to the Father. 
 Our gospel is a gospel of reconciliation. Our ministry is 
 a ministry of reconciliation. The glad evangel put into 
 our mouths is this, " Be ye reconciled to God." There 
 is no other portrait of the divine character so ravishing 
 as this, no overture of God to man so tender, no voice 
 from heaven the burdened conscience so leaps to hear, 
 nothing that so lights the dying eye and comforts the de- 
 parting spirit. No other system of theology can so de- 
 monstrate to earth and heaven that mighty Scripture 
 w God is Love." "Herein is Love," not in the golden sun 
 or soft dews or airs of spring or fruits or harvests or 
 vineyards or all of autumn's generous bounty, " here- 
 in" not in health and friends and social joys and daily 
 good, " herein is Love ! not that we loved God, but that 
 he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for 
 our sins." 
 
 God is not your enemy. He would be your friend. 
 You are afraid of him, but he will deliver you from all 
 your fears ; your sins cry against you, but he will blot 
 them out with atoning blood and remember them no 
 more forever; you dread the process of making peace 
 with him. Did the father of the returning prodigal afflict 
 him with hard conditions ? But God is so great, so se- 
 renely holy, so girt with majesty and kingliness ! Yes, 
 but he knows what you are, and welcomes you to a 
 
114 GOD AND THE WORLD RECONCILED. 
 
 perfect reconciliation. Would you approach, fix your 
 thought on the Mediator. There he stands in human 
 form, no aspect of inapproachable splendor and power, 
 holding the Father's right hand in one of his, stretch- 
 ing the other to you, a bond between God and you, oc- 
 cupying and filling the whole distance ; human on your 
 side, divine on the other ; shading off humanity into De- 
 ity from you through himself to God ; shading off Deity 
 into humanity, again, through himself from God to you; 
 attaching you, by this mysterious, interlinked vinculum to 
 his Father and your Father, and transmitting divine life 
 and joy from the Father to your spirit. Still that out- 
 stretched hand, with the print of the nail in it, solicits 
 your acceptance. When you clasp it, Jesus is yours and 
 God is yours and heaven is yours. Holding there, Jus- 
 tice cannot strike you ; you belong to the humanity of 
 Jesus, and Justice has smitten there once, and is satisfied. 
 Held by that hand, you are one with the Father and the 
 Son. Those strange words of Jesus in prayer for his 
 disciples on the sorrowful night of the betrayal are ful- 
 filled, "I in them and thou in me, that they may be 
 made perfect in one." Come! Are you not ready? 
 You are unworthy, you are weak, you are timid, you are 
 conscience-stricken, you are shackled by evil passions 
 and habits. Yes, all that is understood; but just such 
 as you are God in Christ calls you, waits for you, by us 
 beseeches you to be reconciled to him. Going hence to 
 some secret place of prayer, will you not give your hand 
 with your penitent heart to Christ, that henceforth, in 
 life and death, in earth's travail and heaven's glory, you 
 may, by that living link, be forever joined to God ? 
 
 
YIL 
 
 WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 
 
 AND THEY CRUCIFIED HIM, AND PARTED HIS GARMENTS, CASTING LOTS ; THAT 
 IT MIGHT BE FULFILLED WHICH WAS SPOKEN BY THE PROPHET, THEY 
 PARTED MY GARMENTS AMONG THEM, AND UPON MY VESTURE DID THEY 
 
 CAST LOTS. Matt, xxvii. 35. 
 
 IT is a revolting scene of greedy cupidity which is here 
 witnessed at the very foot of the cross. The Saviour, 
 stripped of his garments, has been nailed to the wood, and 
 the cross lifted and secured in its place. The mortal an- 
 guish has begun. On the right hand and the left of the 
 chief sufferer hang the malefactors. The daughters of 
 Jerusalem are weeping around. One would think that in 
 the presence of such tragedies even the executioners 
 would be sober and decent. They are inflicting punish- 
 ment upon public convicts, it is true, but those convicts 
 are human, and their dying groans, if unworthy of pity, 
 might well touch a chord in the common nature that 
 should hold observers at least gravely silent. But those 
 whose bloody work has thus far progressed are not look- 
 ing at the face of Jesus. They are looking for his gar- 
 ments. Those are their inheritance. It is a part of the 
 usual price of the job. They are yet warm from his per- 
 
116 WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 
 
 son; but the eager heirs cannot wait. While his sad eyes 
 gaze down upon them, they make partition of the plunder. 
 There are four of them, and they continue to make four 
 parcels of what they have to divide. The division is 
 equalized perhaps by severing the outer garment into its 
 parts, fabric, fringes, and borders, so that each shall have 
 his share. But when they come to the inner coat or 
 tunic, it is perceived that it is not made in the common 
 style, of two parts joined together, but is woven whole. 
 To tear it into fragments would make it useless to any- 
 body ; so they cast lots for this, and one of them appro- 
 priates it as his prize. Look at them in their new gar- 
 ments. Will they know themselves ? Will their friends 
 know them ? Have they not come to resemble Him whose 
 well-known costume they have put on? Especially the 
 man with the seamless coat, may he not be mistaken to- 
 morrow for the Saviour himself, and startle somebody 
 with the reappearance of the crucified Nazarene ? 
 
 The resemblance goes no deeper than the garments. 
 They are wearing what the Saviour wore, but they are 
 like him in nothing else. They have his external appear- 
 ance, but within they are unchanged, and carry still the 
 hearts of thieves and murderers. They are his crucifiers ; 
 though they are clothed as he was while he walked among 
 the living. 
 
 Is there anything significant in this incident ? Is it not 
 by itself a very meaning parable ? Does it not hint to us 
 that there may be many who put on the garments of 
 Christ, but at heart they are no friends of his? May 
 there not be many reasons why men should willingly and 
 
WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 117 
 
 eagerly clothe themselves in the outward mantle of Christ's 
 likeness, and yet rank all the while among those who put 
 him to grief and shame ? 
 
 Let us suggest briefly some of these reasons, and name 
 some of those whom they are allowed to govern. 
 
 Few men who have a bad heart are bold enough to 
 wear openly the costume that really belongs to them. If 
 they were to expose all their vile thoughts and wicked 
 purposes to the public gaze, they would be shunned as 
 men shun pitch, slime, the plague, and other things that 
 work defilement and mischief. They must put on some 
 decent outside covering. They must cover up the cor- 
 rupt desires of their heart. What can they wear so 
 cleanly and unsuspicious as some garment from the vestry 
 of Christianity? These are wolves in sheep's clothing. 
 They learned this art from their "father." For Satan 
 himself is transformed often into an angel of light. 
 
 It is respectable now to put on Christian raiment. The 
 cross decorates imperial robes, and gleams in golden lus- 
 tre on proud temple towers. The religion of Jesus has 
 wrought too long and well in the earth to be despised. 
 The man who has embraced its truths, and is guided by 
 its principles, commands the confidence of his fellow-men. 
 Wherever one can introduce himself thus habited, the 
 garb carries with it a high and worthy indorsement. 
 
 There are some men whose idea of Christianity is that 
 it can be put on as one puts on a garment. With them 
 it is not, in its nature, an inward radical change, but an 
 outward fairness, pureness, and saintliness. It consists 
 in a decorous observance of the Sabbath and its institu- 
 
 i - 
 
 {UNIVERSITY 
 
118 WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 
 
 tions of worship, in a formal daily reading before the 
 household of God's word, and a still more formal address 
 to his presence, or in putting on certain ordinances sup- 
 posed to carry with them gracious forces for the character 
 and life. There is a desire to be Christian for the sake 
 of standing well with God and our own esteem, and these 
 light fabrics are easily fitted to us and are no burden. 
 Conscience is pacified, hope is warranted, the heart at 
 rest, and meanwhile there is no quarrel with the desire 
 and the relish for natural good. 
 
 There are reasons enough in our day for being not only 
 willing, but anxious, to appear invested with the badges of 
 a faith against which none but the worst men openly con- 
 tend, and the confession of which carries with it so much 
 that conciliates universal regard. And if now we come 
 to classes, and ask who they are who clothe themselves in 
 this Christian costume, we may remark, 
 
 1. There are some who make humanity their whole 
 religion. They leave others to talk about the love of 
 Christ. They love their fellow-men. They plead the 
 rights of man. They argue the worth of man. They 
 cultivate the habit of expressing sympathy for human 
 sufferings, and extending charity to human want. They 
 devise institutions to shelter the houseless and friendless ; 
 they spread tables for the famishing ; they make garments 
 for the naked ; they carry about subscription books for all 
 manner of humane enterprises. Their charity is chiefly a 
 charity for the present life, a charity for the body ; it does 
 not busy itself much with missions, or gospel societies, 
 but it throws its arms around the fainting flesh, and seeks 
 
WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 119 
 
 to better all the outward condition. Now this exact style 
 of humanity is, as far as it goes, Christian. It comes of 
 the gospel. It was born out of the teachings and life of 
 Christ. We have learned to see the value of man, to 
 pity the need of man, to comfort the sorrows of man, 
 to understand the dignity of man, to feel the brotherhood 
 of the race, since Christ came into the flesh and wrought 
 for man all 'his works of love, and died for man on Cal- 
 vary. And the very peculiarity of this charity, in look- 
 ing after the earthly condition of men, makes it a closer 
 copy of his kindness, all whose miracles of healing were 
 to lift and straighten and nourish the poor human body. 
 Here, then, is one of Christ's garments, clearly recogni- 
 zable in fashion, texture, and hue as his, worn in the midst 
 of human fellowships. Are the wearers therefore Chris- 
 tian? Outwardly and in doing they are. Are they 
 inwardly? What if they join themselves to those who 
 stoned him because he said, "I and my Father are one," 
 and approve and pronounce again the same ancient rea- 
 son, " For a good work we stone thee not," they are 
 advocates of good works, " but for blasphemy, and be- 
 cause that thou being a man makest thyself God"? With 
 Christ's garment on, and yet rejecting his doctrines, de- 
 nying his divinity, refusing him as an atoning Saviour 
 and expiatory sacrifice, are they not of those who crucify 
 him and then part his raiment among themselves ? From 
 his cross he beholds them consenting unto his death, and 
 putting on his robes for their daily wearing. 
 
 2. Again there are many who accept his doctrines, who 
 call him, r" Lord !.." " Lord ! " but who never receive him 
 
120 WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 
 
 into their hearts. They have been educated in the ortho- 
 dox faith ; they hold the orthodox creed ; they attend 
 upon orthodox preaching. Examine them at what length 
 you will, and you will find them clear and strong in the 
 truth that is distinctively evangelical. Let a stranger ask 
 them at large, "What think ye of Christ?" and no con- 
 fessor of Jesus could give, so far as the head goes, a 
 fuller and more satisfactory reply. " The truth as it is in 
 Jesus," they have put on entire. His seamless coat, un- 
 rent, clothes them. They walk abroad bearing his like- 
 ness to all who look upon their costume. Do they there- 
 fore love him ? Have they joined their souls to him ? Is 
 he their life and joy? He is, in their creed, is he in their 
 heart, their Lord and their God ? In spirit are they trans- 
 formed into his likeness? Oh, how many there are in all 
 our congregations who have the doctrines of Christ, but 
 who hold the truth in practical unrighteousness; who 
 accept all that we teach concerning him, giving their as- 
 sent to the whole system of his redemptive work, but never 
 giving their hearts to his spirit, their lives to his service. 
 You, too, my friends, wear his garments, but you are not 
 like him ; you are not his ; he is not yours. What you 
 yet need is to put on himself. 
 
 3. There are again some who have joined themselves to 
 his visible people, and who wear openly the garment of a 
 Christian profession, who yet seem to lack the inward 
 life and power of godliness. Wherever they go, that gar- 
 ment of profession announces a Christian ; they wear it 
 into prayer-meetings ; they wear it into the Sabbath as- 
 sembly; they wear it to the sacramental table, while 
 
WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 121 
 
 the inward witness to what they thus declare is wanting. 
 Their costume and their spirit are at variance. Their 
 profession and their practice disagree. What they are 
 contradicts what they wear. 
 
 One maintains externally the appearance of great sanc- 
 tity. He is grave of countenance and careful of speech. 
 He is punctilious in all formal religious observances. 
 The household knows the length and comprehensiveness 
 of his daily prayers. He is hard upon the errors of other 
 men, and fastidious even about trifles which a more gen- 
 erous catholicity endures without disturbance. He is 
 hard even upon himself. He keeps himself up by con- 
 stant straining to this rigid standard. But there is noth- 
 ing of the freeness and warmth of love about him. There 
 is no fountain of tenderness in his soul. You would as 
 soon put your infant to nurse with one of the Egyptian 
 Colossi as to put a babe in Christ who wanted cherishing 
 care into these granite arms. He is not a renewed man. 
 Unawares he is a Pharisee, save that he is not a con- 
 scious hypocrite. He has great purpose and stern con- 
 sistency ; there is formed within him a conviction that 
 this rigid dutifulness is piety, but Christ is not formed 
 within him. Still another species of this outward sanctity 
 does cover up conscious inward corruption. The long 
 face is a mask. The man has found out that he is not 
 what he thought he was , a changed man. There is a tide 
 of inward uncleanness surging to and fro in his soul, 
 against which the floodgates are never shut. He cannot 
 put off his sanctimonious habits ; it is agreeable to be 
 thought quite correct and eminently holy. It keeps 
 
122 WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 
 
 curious eyes from peering into his bosom ; the honest 
 acknowledgment of what he is would be too deep a 
 shame for his soul to bear. So he keeps on the garment, 
 and harbors inwardly the carrion birds of impufe pas- 
 sions. 
 
 There is another in the Church who has the costume of 
 self-denial conspicuous on his person. That is a portion 
 of the robe of Christ. " If any man will come after me, 
 let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me." 
 And this man denies himself all the round of what are 
 called the pleasures of life. These gay and costly festiv- 
 ities, that include rich tables, lighted saloons, music, and 
 flowers, draw not one farthing of revenue from him. 
 Is he not practising delf-denial? The personal and do- 
 mestic luxuries of expensive furniture, elegant wardrobe, 
 dashing equipage, a decorated and brilliant establishment, 
 he lightly foregoes, though perhaps strongly importuned 
 in one direction and another by those beneath his roof. 
 Surely, a self-denying man. 
 
 His neighbors expend freely upon transitions with the 
 seasons, in winter into the comfortable city mansion, in 
 summer out to a country retreat, or from place to place 
 on travelling excursions, breathing the air of the moun- 
 tains, sipping salubrious waters, taking the roll of the 
 surf, pacing amid rural fields and beneath rural shades in 
 inland rural towns. He calls all this "fashion," sets his 
 face against it, and practises again his self-denial. And 
 all the while that he seems to be dealing so abstemiously 
 and rigorously with what others find to be their natural 
 or acquired tastes, there is sitting within on the perch of 
 
WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 123 
 
 his heart, a ravening cormorant, that devours everything 
 its filthy beak can gobble. This man might love worldly 
 pleasures perhaps, but he loves something else better. 
 He might be fond of luxuries and festivities and seaside 
 and mountain air and curative springs, but there is an- 
 other thing dearer yet. He loves money. The cor- 
 morant is covetousness. The Christian virtue of self- 
 denial was only a garment, the gilded outside of the 
 cage where he keeps his cormorant. When he says no 
 to a pleasure or a lust, it is not Christian self-denial 
 that speaks, it is a croak of the cormorant. When he 
 says no to the wife and daughters that plead for the beach 
 in sultry August, it is not that he may have wherewith to 
 endow God's poor, it is because his cormorant wants it 
 all. Strange that Christ's robe should cover such a 
 greedy spirit, the plumage of the holy dove this bird of 
 prey ! 
 
 Again there is often a very demonstrative religious zeal 
 which really seems to consume the whole man, but which 
 at some one critical point breaks down. It is very ear- 
 nest for the souls of men ; it will go all lengths for their 
 rescue ; it multiplies means and agencies and importunities 
 to gather these aliens in ; it can give time and strength 
 and toil, will and money, too, to wield whatever hopeful 
 instrumentalities for their salvation. The cause of Christ, 
 the growth of the Church, the augmented fidelity and self- 
 devotion of Christians, absorb it. Here is Christianity in 
 full. The mantle reaches from the shoulders to the feet. 
 There is no scantiness in it. Its ample folds wrap the 
 whole person. Surely, here is a man with whom love is a 
 
124 WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 
 
 universal principle. His soul is full of it. It must over- 
 flow upon every partner of the common humanity with 
 whom he comes in contact. It will bathe and lave every 
 hand he touches. 
 
 Let us accompany this friend as he goes out to make 
 some trifling purchase. He is himself in trade perhaps, 
 and understands that a man who lives by trade must have 
 a fair profit. He sells on that principle. How does he 
 buy? He calls for the article he wishes and examines it, 
 as though disapprovingly. He asks the price. "What, 
 so much for this ? " His tone is offensive to a sensitive 
 mind. Perhaps he remarks that he does not wonder 
 that the sellers of this sort of ware get rich. He ex- 
 amines the article again, with increasing disapprobation. 
 But there is no abatement of the price. He depreciates 
 the quality of the material, the quality of the work, the 
 style and taste of the goods, while all the time it is the 
 thing he wants. He says plainly and bluntly, "You must 
 take less." "You ask too much." "I can't give it." He 
 is told finally that he is at liberty to leave it if he does 
 not care to take. But that does not suit him. He wants 
 it, and he wants to beat the seller down. He wants to 
 get it at a cheaper price. He wants to feel that he has 
 made a good bargain. He seems to forget that there are 
 two of them that have the natural desire to secure a fair 
 trade. He lingers yet and picks flaws, and half turns 
 away and turns back and urges fresh subtractions from 
 the value of the goods, and pushes hard for a reduction 
 of price. It is not a very pleasant scene. I am sorry to 
 detain you in it. At last the man is gone, paying down 
 
WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 125 
 
 his reluctant money. The seller has a little heightened 
 color on his face. He turns to us and remarks, "That 
 customer is said to be a member so and so of such a 
 church. I wonder what sort of religion they hold there. 
 I desire never to see the man in my store again." 
 
 Well, we might call on domestics in families to testify 
 to the impression which religious masters and mistresses 
 make on them. We might call on a wife to give in evi- 
 dence, if she only would, as to the sort of heart in a Chris- 
 tian husband that beats against her own. We might call 
 on clerks and employees to stand up as witnesses and say 
 how an intense Christianity develops in their direction. 
 
 But these points have been pushed far enough. Oh, it 
 is so sorrowful that when we see Christ's vesture we can- 
 not be sure that his lineaments are there too ! It is so sad 
 that those whose names are fairly written out on the roll 
 of the church do under the Christian cloak what brings 
 indelible reproach upon the Christian religion ! It is a 
 matter of such deep, deep searching of ourselves that, 
 having on the garments of Christ, and having, as we hum- 
 bly believe, something of the spirit of Christ, there may 
 yet be so many things in us, such inconsiderate moments 
 and actions, that a keen-eyed world protests, " We see 
 the garments of Jesus, but we don't see anything else that 
 is like him." 
 
 Oh, I beseech you, let the Church be searched to-day. 
 If we keep underneath and mean to keep the qualities and 
 practices of a worldly, greedy, and selfish spirit, let us 
 strip off to the last fibre the vesture of the Master, that 
 the reproach come upon humanity, and not upon the doc- 
 10* 
 
126 WEARING CHRIST'S GARMENTS. 
 
 trine of Jesus. And if we wish a blessing upon us here 
 in our Christian work, let us do more than run to and fro 
 with swift-footed zeal, let us rectify our lives, put away 
 every evil thing, find the dead flies in the ointment and 
 extract them, for Christ wants clean hands as well as a 
 fervent spirit to minister in the holy things of his altars. 
 
YIIL 
 
 CHEIST'S CUP. 
 
 BUT JESUS ANSWERED AND SAID, YE KNOW NOT WHAT YE ASK. ARE YE 
 ABLE TO DRINK OF THE CUP THAT I SHALL DRINK OF, AND TO BE BAP- 
 TIZED "WITH THE BAPTISM THAT I AM BAPTIZED WITH ? THEY SAY UNTO 
 HIM, WE ARE ABLE. Matt. XX. 22. 
 
 SUCH is human nature, even in discipleship, that it 
 was certain that sooner or later the hearts of the 
 chosen twelve would feel the temptation to human ambi- 
 tion. True, in the world's eyes, the Leader, whose per- 
 son and fortunes they followed, was an obscure provincial, 
 a man of no name or mark or rank, from a lowly family, 
 a despised Galilean, concerning whose claims to honor 
 and respectability it was enough to ask the contemptuous 
 question, "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" 
 To acknowledge him was to lose caste in Jewish society ; 
 to follow him, so far from quickening any ambitious aspi- 
 rations, seemed rather the final crucifixion of pride. But 
 the disciples knew more and better concerning the dig- 
 nity of "the Nazarene." In their eyes he was an un- 
 crowned king. The day of his coronation was not dis- 
 tant. The throne of his father David was his. He 
 should sit and reign in a state more magnificent than 
 
128 CHRIST'S CUP. 
 
 Solomon's. Where and what this kingdom was to be 
 were questions upon which they had vague notions. 
 Sometimes to their eyes its wide borders swept around 
 the hills of Canaan, defied and repelled the assaults of 
 Roman power, and their own Jerusalem was its royal 
 capital. Sometimes it took on a more celestial beauty 
 and grandeur, and was a kingdom not of this world ; but 
 Jesus was its Prince ; that lowly head should wear this 
 peerless diadem. And what should they be, they who 
 walked with this heir of royalty every day, who shared 
 all his privacy, who companioned him under reproach 
 and ignominy, whom he called his friends, whom he had 
 himself elected to be with him and to compose his reti- 
 nue, who were the only hearts on earth that showed 
 him kindness and believed in his future ? Would he not 
 have ..royal gifts for them ? As he rose into these high 
 places of empire, should they not rise with him? Should 
 they not be nearest his person, most illustrious in dis- 
 tinction of all who should then do him homage, be his 
 councillors and senate, and share his kingliness as they 
 had shared his lowliness ? And which of them should be 
 first and foremost in this coming elevation ? Probably 
 these questions found secret audience in each heart of 
 this little band, and these visions of greatness floated be- 
 fore every eye. If there was an exception, it may have 
 been the heart of him surnamed " Iscariot ! " One strong, 
 overmastering passion excludes, or at least subordinates, 
 every other. There are not two monarchs of the heart. 
 Avarice ruled in the breast of Judas ! Fill his bag for 
 him, and others might come between him and either side 
 
CHRIST'S CUP. 129 
 
 of Jesus. He was too covetous to be ambitious in that 
 direction. 
 
 James and John were among the earliest called of all 
 the disciples and on the same day with the calling of Si- 
 mon Peter, and Andrew, his brother. They had already 
 been distinguished by their Master, when he surnamed 
 them " Sons of thunder." Perhaps, too, they were ad- 
 mitted all along to special intimacies with Jesus, as Pe- 
 ter and these two seem to have been selected to be with 
 Christ whenever he reduced the number of his followers. 
 It may have been John's place to have reclined next his 
 Lord at every meal. In the distribution of the honors of 
 his kingdom, will he not give them pre-eminence? The 
 time has come for them to make the request. They are 
 on their way up to Jerusalem, and Jesus has spoken 
 plainly of the sufferings and death he shall accomplish. 
 The two aspirants for chief places need an intercessor, 
 and their mother willingly undertakes the office. She 
 leads them near to him, and the three offer him their wor- 
 ship ; and then the matron signifies that she has some- 
 thing to ask. " What wilt thou? " is the gracious encour- 
 agement, gracious and encouraging, and yet it gives 
 her time to pause, if she will, and inquire of her own heart 
 what it is she craves. But her petition finds instant ut- 
 terance,, "Grant that these my two sons may sit, the 
 one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left, in thy 
 kingdom." With a tender and pitiful look, we may sup- 
 pose, and a gentle voice, for so the words seem to read, 
 Jesus makes reply, " Ye know not what ye ask. Are 
 ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and be 
 baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with ? " 
 
130 CHRIST'S CUP. 
 
 And in this question appears the truth which it will be 
 profitable for us, I hope, to revolve for a little. We un- 
 derstand the nature of that kingdom of which Christ is the 
 head better than did the early disciples. "We are not 
 likely to make it a personal prize to sit on a throne with 
 our Lord, either at his right hand or at his left ; but it is 
 a desire with many a Christian heart to come nearer unto 
 the presence of Christ, to share a closer friendship with 
 him, to know a more intimate communion, to drink in 
 more of his spirit, to become more vitally and indissolu- 
 bly joined to him, and to sit ever like Mary of Bethany 
 at his feet, and learn of him. And we may. No voice 
 rebukes this sort of ambition ! There is a way in which 
 this longing of the heart may be gratified and satisfied. 
 And this is the doctrine of our Scripture. The price of 
 personal and pre-eminent nearness to Christ is to drink 
 of his cup and to be baptized with his baptism. The cup 
 of Christ and his baptism refer to all his sorrowful and 
 suffering experience in the work of human redemption. 
 This twofold imagery divides that experience, perhaps, 
 into two parts. Baptism is an outward rite, and touches 
 us only externally. As a symbol it refers to that which 
 comes upon us from without, that which the hand of an- 
 other administers, or which some agency outside of our- 
 selves brings in. But that which we drink we taste in- 
 wardly. Our own hand lifts it to our lips. Its flavor is 
 inwardly appreciated; its bitterness lingers in our 
 mouth ; its fire burns in every vein, and its anguish 
 courses through our whole system. So in the sufferings 
 of Christ there was an outward and an inward smart. 
 
CHRIST'S CUP. 131 
 
 Poverty and weariness and hunger and homelessness and 
 buffeting and scourging and thorns and nails were his 
 baptism. 
 
 The elements of his cup were mingled of the trials of 
 his spirit. They were all the burdens he took upon his 
 soul for man and among men ; all his care, all his com- 
 passion, all his travail of patience and of grief, his ex- 
 perience of contradiction, ingratitude, misappreciation, 
 rejection, and reviling. It was a full cup wrung out to 
 him. There were strange ingredients in it, such as no 
 other lips ever tasted, the dreaded bitterness of which 
 wrung from him the strong plea, " Father, if it be possi- 
 ble, let this cup pass from me ; nevertheless, not as I will, 
 but as thou wilt." But in speaking now of our fellowship 
 in the experience of Christ, we need not be careful to 
 separate the symbols he employed. We may call that 
 fellowship a tasting of his cup, or a participation in his 
 baptism, as our thought shall most naturally take the one 
 mould or the other. If we are to be near Christ, the first 
 cup we are to drink with him is the cup of Consecration. 
 One of his most distinguishing names is, by interpreta- 
 tion, "The Anointed One." As with holy oil he was 
 separated and set apart for his work. We may conceive, 
 for so the Scripture seems to intimate, that there were 
 glories and functions and administrations belonging to 
 him as the eternal Son of the Father which he laid aside, 
 that he might be singly devoted to this work. There 
 were certainly prerogatives and honors and sovereignties 
 which he waived, that it might appear unto principalities 
 and powers in heavenly places that he was engaged in 
 
132 CHRIST'S CUP. 
 
 this one thing, and had accepted all its conditions and limi- 
 tations. When he comes into the field of human view, 
 this entireness of consecration asserts itself with most 
 abounding testimony. There was never for any scheme 
 or object of any creature such a diligence as his. Temp- 
 tation sought to make him swerve for its splendid bribes, 
 " all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them," 
 but he was steadfast there. Ease and place and fame paid 
 court to him, but he would not turn aside. Weary nature 
 and fainting manhood offered their plea, but plead in vain. 
 His friends and followers interceded with him to persuade 
 him off from pain and suffering, but he so rebuked this 
 officiousness that the offence was never repeated. What- 
 ever voice called him to any side issues, his reply was 
 unchanging, "Wist ye not that I must be about my 
 Father's business?" Every journey undertaken was for 
 this sole end. Each morning renewed his tasks of teach- 
 ing and healing, his labors of love, his pilgrimages of 
 mercy. Far on into the night he bore still upon his 
 heart the burdens of the day, and when he sends away 
 his disciples on the sea-shore, and after the sun has gone 
 down, it is not that he may rest, with no human contact 
 to quicken or weary any nerve of body or soul, but that 
 he may enter the shadow of some more straining and 
 mysterious wrestling. True, the methods of his work 
 were various. But it was one work. Its details were 
 not such perhaps as we should have marked out for him. 
 They sometimes stumbled his disciples. They raised a 
 doubt in the bold breast of John of the wilderness, 
 Herod's prisoner. Nothing seemed further from his 
 
CHRIST'S CUP. 133 
 
 thought than the assumption of any royal state. He was 
 a travelling physician. He was looking after men's bodily 
 maladies. He delivered wonderful moral discourses in 
 parables. He roamed through Galilee and Judea, pro- 
 nouncing these beautiful lessons for daily life, and open- 
 ing the doctrines of his coming kingdom wherever he 
 could find an audience. He was present at social festi- 
 vals, dined' with wealthy Pharisees, and mingled with 
 marriage guests, but all and everywhere with one intent. 
 Single-eyed, single-hearted, and in each variety of demon- 
 stration forwarding his great mission. He drank deep of 
 this cup of consecration, and offers it now to our lips, as 
 a bond and seal of union with himself. We are not to be 
 tithed. All idea of self-ownership and proprietary rights 
 we are to give up. We are to take the entire inventory 
 of our personal forces and effects and lay at his feet. We 
 may not check off and separate and divide, this for 
 Christ, this our own. We are not practically to arrange 
 that one day in seven shall be set apart for God's service ; 
 that the evening and the morning of secular days shall be 
 his ; that the amount pledged on subscription books is 
 sacredly to be reserved, and the balance is our own per- 
 sonal revenue from our toil, to be expended as we please, 
 and plead, if special calls are made upon us for service 
 and for charity, "I have not time; I cannot spare the 
 means." In the modelling and mapping out of some 
 professedly Christian lives, the claims of Christ cover but 
 a small part of the whole. A little Sunday domain, 
 rounded off at the corners, is staked out for him ; his 
 claim notches into the day's beginning ; it touches hazily 
 12 
 
134 CHRIST'S CUP. 
 
 the border line of closing day obscured by mists from 
 dreamland. There is a small mortgage in his favor upon 
 the homestead, the interest of which only is paid, and 
 all the rest of the estate is clear for the titled earthly 
 master. Whenever he can steer clear of these definite 
 and limited claims, the whole broad range is free to 
 him, and every fruit that grows there is to sweeten his 
 own palate and grace his own board. Does this man 
 taste of the cup of Christ? Perhaps he does. He may 
 just moisten his lips, but a deep draught he does not take. 
 Oh, he must reserve nothing. He must write upon 
 houses and lands, upon body and soul, upon heart and 
 life, upon all his pleasant things, "Sacred to Jesus. v He 
 must lie down and rise up a consecrated man, a .vassal 
 set apart to the use of his Lord. He must go to shop 
 and field and office and study and wareroom and drawing- 
 room a consecrated man. Is it hard to make over all, 
 to have nothing left, to be only a steward of time and 
 money and personal presence and personal power? It 
 is a great relief from care, for then neither gains nor 
 losses are ours, and we may lay aside all solicitudes about 
 harvest seasons, and spring and autumn trade, and the 
 risks of the sea. Is it a stripping off of earthly authority 
 and dignity, an abdication of the throne ? Well, this is 
 the cup. We can drink or we can refrain. But this is 
 the price of nearness to Christ here and hereafter. 
 
 Again it is written of Christ that he pleased not him- 
 self. A brief and simple phrase, but let one attempt to 
 appropriate and realize it as descriptive of his own style 
 of living, what a breadth of sweep, what a world of 
 
CHRIST'S CUP. 
 
 significance, he will find in it ! A young lady who had 
 just joined herself to the fellowship of Christian people, 
 and whose natural tastes and previous culture lay in the 
 direction of social gayeties and musical entertainments, par- 
 ticularly of the dramatic order, was in conference with 
 her pastor as to the restraints to be placed upon these 
 tastes in future. "You have no one now to please but 
 Christ," he said to her. "But am I never more, then, to 
 gratify my love of music and of society?" she asked. 
 " Never more in ways that would displease him, however 
 exquisite the gratification might be to you," was the reply. 
 " Am I to have, then, no pleasures in life such as others of 
 my age enjoy ? Is that which has been the light of life to 
 me to become darkness? " " Can you not find your pleas- 
 ure, then, in fulfilling the pleasure of Christ? Would you 
 grieve him to gratify yourself? Would you not rather 
 miss from henceforth the taste of every earthly joy to 
 please him instead ? " " But this makes life so dull and 
 sombre," came, after a little, her sad and troubled answer. 
 And then, after another little pause, her frank and ingenu- 
 ous testimony lighting up her face with a look of joy such 
 as mirth never wore, "But I would rather please him." 
 Ah, my child, whoever you are, ready, like our first 
 mother, to shed " a few natural tears " upon leaving your 
 earthly paradise, take the cup ; the first taste seems bitter, 
 but a strange sweetness lingers on the palate. More 
 grateful every day becomes the draught. The thought, 
 "Christ's lips were on the brim before it came to mine," 
 stirs into it an elixir of life no clusters of the vine ever 
 yielded. His eyes have looked into it before yours. His 
 
136 CHRIST'S CUP. 
 
 face was just now imaged there. Drink next to him, and 
 so come near to him, and be one with him. 
 
 And what a sentence is that written of him again, " He 
 carried our sorrows " ! His own hand offers us again the 
 same cup, saying, "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so 
 fulfil the law of Christ." We walk in the midst of earthly 
 wretchedness and distress. We are not to go through 
 briskly and carelessly, gathering our skirts unto our- 
 selves, lest they should sweep within the grasp of some 
 forlorn one and detain us. Here is one in affliction. You 
 cannot restore his loss, but you can stop and weep with 
 him. Here is one in want. Have you nothing to divide 
 with him ? I do not speak of your last crust. It is that 
 which is usually handed out. Can you not share a fresh 
 loaf? Here is one struggling beneath a weight of care, a 
 pale watcher, who has not breathed a breath of pure, fresh 
 air for many a day, a toiling widow with fatherless chil- 
 dren, a deserted wife, or one worse than deserted, allied 
 to brutality and shame. Stop and stoop and step under 
 these burdens for a little, if you may, and let the released 
 one take a run into freedom and open day, doubly 
 cheered by the sunshine in the sky and on your kind face. 
 Here is another struggling with temptation. Ah, the 
 deep waters are about him ; the waves will go over his 
 head. Drop all, plunge in, drag him to the solid shore. 
 All this will keep your hands full, yes, and your heart 
 full, and make your quiet home and your pillow so grate- 
 ful. But you will never suffer from ennui. Time will 
 never hang heavy on your hands. You will be furnished 
 with abundant occupation. The last thought of the day 
 
CHRIST'S CUP. 137 
 
 coming to your soul, like the blessed balm of sleep to 
 your eyelids, will be this, "I have wrought all day for 
 others, dear Master ; I have tried like thee not to seek my 
 own." There's an opiate in that cup for weary nerves ; 
 you will sleep well. 
 
 Again, the cup of Christ includes misappreciation and 
 ingratitude, as the return for good done and favors be- 
 stowed. Do you like that ? We must not count largely 
 upon human thankfulness when we put ourselves greatly 
 out for another's advantage. There are not many that 
 love the yoke of obligation. We keep our friendships 
 best with those who owe us nothing. A quarrel is a 
 cheap way to cancel all claims. We must be prepared to 
 have our motives suspected, our acts misconstrued, our 
 good evil spoken of, to receive a wreath of thorns for 
 coronation, to be counted meddlesome, impertinent, ob- 
 trusive, and fanatical. The very faithfulness that springs 
 from deepest love of the heart shall be reckoned unchar- 
 itable ness, and the hand we freight deepest with bounty 
 shall be the first to smite. Not a pleasant cup this ; the 
 mixture is acrid and stinging as the waters that lie above 
 the "cities of the Plain." But Jesus drank this cup. 
 Around him one day a hundred threatening hands were 
 armed with missives of death. "Many good works," said 
 he, with touching point, "have I showed you from my 
 Father; for which of these works do ye stone me?" 
 Would you stand with him there? Consent, then, not in 
 a spirit of romance, not with a morbid, diseased fretful- 
 ness and suspiciousness, but with cheerful patience, that 
 those whom you chiefly strive to bless shall wound you 
 12* 
 
138 
 
 deepest. Christ gave uncalculating love. He bought 
 every soul that denies him. The young man who went 
 sorrowful and disobedient from his presence he loved, 
 and left it on record that he loved him. He called the trai- 
 tor Judas "friend," and the kiss of betrayal met a loving 
 lip. He loved past all the wounding which secret or open 
 hostility could inflict. It was a patient love. Those dis- 
 ciples were such dull scholars they needed "line upon 
 line." "Line upon line " they had ; but every lesson left 
 them questioning among themselves, and brought out from 
 them the stupidest comments. "Beware of the leaven of 
 the Pharisees," he cautions, them. "Ah," they say to 
 one another, " the leaven of the Pharisees ; it is because 
 we have forgotten to take bread." But he led them on 
 and up to his meaning with such unwearied patience, he 
 took them apart and dissected for them his own words 
 and reduced his wisdom to such simple elements, that 
 these grown-up babes in spiritual knowledge at length 
 could say, " Lo, now thou speakest plainly, and speak- 
 est no proverb." My brother, my sister, is your lov- 
 ing patience stoutly taxed? Take the strain with silent, 
 placid lips. What a hubbub of childish mirthfulness or 
 childish petulance there is sometimes in the home ! How 
 many distracting questions and instant and urgent calls 
 are crowded into that chorus ! It all pours in, perhaps, 
 upon one sustaining heart that needs to be strong. One 
 has a complaint to lodge, one has a hunger to be ap- 
 peased, one has a thirst to be quenched, one has a hurt 
 to heal, one has a pain to soothe, one has a perplexity to 
 solve, one has lost something which must be hunted up, 
 
CHRIST'S CUP. 139 
 
 one has' parted something which must be bound together, 
 and one, the most importunate of all, does not know what 
 he wants. All want a portion, occupation, something to 
 interest, something to absorb. Yesterday's device is stale 
 for to-day. The first suggestion is a failure, the second 
 carries only a minority, the third leaves still a minority. 
 The east wind is sharp without, or the rain is falling, and 
 the sky is lowering. And this task, varied beyond all 
 possible fertility of supposition, was the task of yesterday 
 as well, and must be taken up again to-morrow. Oh, 
 parent, guardian, teacher, are you able to drink this cup ? 
 Sometimes the weary nerves and aching head and heart 
 will plead, "Let this cup pass from me !" Do you end 
 your prayer there ? There was a " nevertheless " in the 
 form you are following. Try again. Remember it is the 
 cup of Jesus. It will seat you at his right hand ; it will 
 make you one with him. He drank of it, and commends 
 it to you. He does not taste cordials, and bid you season 
 your drink with ashes. His cup, his own, he passes on. 
 Raise it to your white, shrinking lips ; take up that 
 "nevertheless," "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou 
 wilt." You look upon breaking fortunes, you look upon 
 alienated friendships, you look upon withering hopes, 
 you look upon failing strength, upon the dark shadow of 
 adversity. Are you able to raise the cup perpetually 
 "nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt"? A be- 
 loved one droops ; languidly the gentle eyes seek yours ; 
 whiter grows the thin cheek; a babe moans in your 
 arms, and then is still. A stalwart boy goes up into his 
 chamber and lies down, and comes not forth again. The 
 
140 
 
 desolation of widowhood darkens toward your door. 
 Would you sit with Christ in his kingdom? Will you 
 have, then, this baptism? Go down with him into swift- 
 flowing Jordan, the chill of Hermon's snows in its wa- 
 ters yet. Take his cup, say your grace over it, " Never- 
 theless, not as I will, but as thou wilt, " and drain it off, and 
 you will find your Master at your side. His kingdom has 
 come unto you. He is on your right hand and on your 
 left ; you will never more be alone. That last baptism 
 of his was under the cold flood of death. There is some- 
 thing written above the Sufferer's crowned head on the 
 cross beside that which is written in Greek and Latin 
 and Hebrew. Its letters gleam down the ages, and one 
 can read them here and now, " Self-sacrifice, the law of 
 Christ" "the law of Christian living." The thorns are 
 sharp, the nails rend cruelly, flesh pleads off, self-protec- 
 tion protests ; but the hand of Jesus beckons. The last 
 taste with Christ is of the vinegar mixed with gall. Oh, 
 are we able ? Have we been crucified with him unto this 
 vain world? Do we know always what we ask in our 
 prayers ? Is it sanctification ? Is it likeness to Christ ? 
 Is it unworldliness ? Is it poverty of spirit? Oh, but if 
 God answer any of these requests, it will be by a baptism 
 as of fire ; it will be by a medicined cup with gall in it. 
 Do we still pray it? Yes, let us venture, for he can sus- 
 tain while he disciplines. Behold the law of Christian 
 advancement ! the way of Christian honor the path to 
 crowns and thrones. It is a way descending into the val- 
 ley of humiliation. It stoops to service. Our Saviour 
 announced it plainly, " Ye know that the princes of the 
 
CHRIST'S CUP. 141 
 
 Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are 
 great exercise authority upon them ; but it shall not be 
 so among you, but whosoever will be great among you 
 let him be your minister. And whosoever will be chief 
 among you let him be your servant. Even as the Son of 
 man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and 
 to give his life a ransom for many." If the path climb, it 
 climbs as the path of Jesus did on the day of crucifixion 
 up the slope of Calvary. Let it be our constant prayer, 
 w Master, take us into thy fellowship and strengthen our 
 weakness for thy sorrowful but blessed baptism." 
 
IX. 
 
 WAITING. 
 
 IT IS GOOD THAT A MAN BOTH HOPE AND QUIETLY WAIT POE THE SALVA- 
 
 TION OP THE LORD. Sam, iii. 26. 
 
 are countries where the climate of the year 
 JL is divided into "the rainy season" and "the dry." 
 But the former is not one uninterrupted period of " falling 
 weather." Here and there, during its continuance, there 
 are sweet, bright, calm days, with not a cloud on all the 
 face of the heaven. The voice which I have taken this 
 morning out of the old prophetic utterances I found in 
 the midst of the Lamentations of the weeping prophet. 
 But it is a cheerful voice. There is no sob of weeping in 
 it. It was a bright hour amid that rain of tears when this 
 word was written. And the sunshine lingers in it yet. 
 We hear in it an echo of that earlier note struck by the 
 harp of David. " Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, 
 and he shall strengthen thine heart. Wait, I say, on the 
 Lord." 
 
 But this word " wait " is a cold word for most human 
 hearing. Even Faith often finds it hard to receive it, 
 and passionate earthly desire meets it as the challenge of 
 an enemy. It is a good word for all times and all hearts. 
 
WAITING. 143 
 
 It is especially good for us here and iiow. As a people 
 we do not find it easy to wait. A chronic fever of impa- 
 tience is in our land, the universal epidemic. It conies 
 partly of our stimulating climate, partly of our circum- 
 stances as pioneers of civilization on a new continent, 
 partly of the rapidity with which we have seen great for- 
 tunes built up and golden dreams realized, partly of the 
 straining competition on every racecourse for every goal, 
 and partly of the natural ardor of the soul eager to touch 
 its prize, and enjoy its good without delay. Speak to us 
 any other word than this. Bid us " run," and we gird up 
 our loins at once. Bid us " act," and the day shall not be 
 long enough for our diligence, the season too short for 
 our harvest. Bid us "dare," and no terror shall make us 
 blench. But "wait," that denies all our longings, post- 
 pones our hopes, removes the feast to which our hunger 
 hastened, dries up the spring to which our thirst was 
 stooping. The salient, the energetic qualities of char- 
 acter are easily cultivated ; the retiring, the passive come 
 hard. Even with those who believe in God, his govern- 
 ment, his promises, his faithfulness, his fatherliness, the 
 virtue of patient waiting is of difficult acquirement. 
 God is sovereign, wise, good, and true. He will perform 
 where he has promised ; but he is slow, and we chafe 
 against the deliberate process of his providence. This 
 fever of impatience burns in all the hearts of our Ameri- 
 can youth. They fret at all apprenticeship, whether to 
 letters, mechanic art, or trade. They are in haste to 
 graduate from all the preparatory stages, and to be 
 launched at once upon the real, earnest life. They hurry 
 
144 WAITING. 
 
 through the ante-chamber to take their place within, with 
 the jostling crowd struggling for the upper seats. When 
 fully embarked on the voyage, they are impatient to see 
 across the breadth of waters the harbor entrance. Blow, 
 breezes, blow, and waft them over the ocean ridges to the 
 destined port ! How slow the log runs out ! Give them 
 a gale rather than a calm. Drive the steam hard, quicken 
 the paddle-strokes to one continuous rush and roar ; their 
 eager feet would leap down upon the shores of their 
 promised land. Our fathers were content to go slow, to 
 gain by small and sure increments, to "retire" when age 
 had silvered their heads, and their natural force was 
 abated, glad and content to touch when almost at life's 
 far boundary a competency. Not so with their children. 
 We want to make one leap from the bottom to the top, 
 forgetting that these large, adventurous leaps may also as 
 easily reverse the process and carry a man from the top 
 to the bottom. We want to be rich in a season, to ripen 
 and reap our golden harvest, as Nature does hers, in a sin- 
 gle summer. We want something left of our youth, and 
 all our manhood at least, for enjoyment. We want to lay 
 hold of our purses, not with the trembling hand of age, 
 but with the firm grasp of a strength not yet on the even- 
 ing side of noon. Give us the morning for toil, if it 
 must be so, but give us a long, bright afternoon, with no 
 unfinished task. Let us earn with sharp diligence and 
 large profits while the hours are fresh and dewy, climbing 
 with braced limbs while the sun climbs. Then from the 
 splendid meridian, in a chariot like his own, gliding eas- 
 ily down the long cloudless decline toward the pensive 
 
WAITING. 145 
 
 shadow of the distant twilight. And this is not merely 
 the fever of youth, the ardor of young men, the impetu- 
 osity of business adventure. It is found in every walk of 
 life. It is the restless haven of every heart's desire. It 
 waits upon every human scheme. It is in the strife of 
 opinions, in the clashing systems of moral reform, in the 
 growth of spiritual character and religious institutions. 
 The progress of mechanical improvements seems to have 
 infected every enterprise and hope of the heart of man. 
 We travel in a day as far as our fathers did in a fortnight. 
 It seems but fair, then, that there should be the same ratio 
 in making our fortunes and winning our purposes. What 
 took fourteen years then should take but one now. Nay, 
 this is rather too deliberate. If there were any way of 
 travelling by telegraph, we should most of us take the 
 " lightning train." It chafes us that thought and spirit 
 can fly so swiftly, and our gross bodies must lag so far 
 behind. We shall never be satisfied till we harness elec- 
 tricity to our travelling-car, and take the risk of breath- 
 ing on the trip. These advances of practical science in 
 locomotion, the transmission of intelligence, and in almost 
 every department of human progress, have made all old 
 methods of living seem intolerably slow. Our veins are 
 inoculated with mercury. Our whole system of life and 
 labor is impregnated with a restlessness that can never 
 fold its arms and be still. Of course it would be an utter- 
 ly vain, as an unwise and uncalled-for, attempt to seek to 
 arrest this ever accelerated tide of human progress. But 
 the spirit which it engenders in the human heart, and its 
 relations to morals and character, present matters of* 
 13 
 
146 WAITING. 
 
 gravest consideration. This impatience betrays many a 
 soul into crime. It is greedy of its ends. It seeks to 
 reach them by swift, sudden courses. It would take the 
 shortest cuts. Those which seem the shortest are often 
 crossed by certain opposing barriers. There are laws of 
 honor and rectitude, there are laws of the land, there are 
 laws of God, that lift themselves against the impetuous 
 desire. There is a terrible temptation to find a way over 
 instead of taking the longer and slower way round. 
 
 Surmount these hindrances, and the goal is so near. 
 Turn out for them, and the circuit is so weary and slow. 
 Here is a premium upon transgression. A formidable 
 rival may be removed or circumvented by a scheme that 
 involves the sacrifice of magnanimity, the dishonor of 
 some mean and dirty intrigue. Oh, would he were out 
 of the way ! How clear the track would be ! Take care. 
 If you consent, there goes the best of your nobility and 
 your manhood. You will have come out ahead of your 
 rival and your honor. A false oath, not so bad as 
 that, a piece of misrepresentation, a little stretching of 
 what some men find to be the elasticity of the truth, and 
 a grand success is possible. A triumph with stained 
 hands, soiled garments, and the prostrate form of truth 
 trodden under feet. Avaricious impatience does not 
 mind the stains. They can be gilded over, covered up 
 by and by with gold leaf. A little trenching on the Sab- 
 bath will round up a fruitful trip. An ungenerous advan- 
 tage taken of superior intelligence and superior opportu- 
 nity over a weaker brother, a forgetfulness in trade of the 
 law we respect in moral codes, loving our neighbor as 
 
WAITING. 147 
 
 ourselves, will materially swell the aggregates of our 
 profits, give us perhaps for a season or for years the con- 
 trol of the market. How can we postpone such an 
 advance for our scruple's sake ? Labor itself is a burden ; 
 the rewards of honest industry are often small ; these 
 steady, trifling gains will take years to foot up anything 
 respectable, that will allow us to lay down our tasks and 
 indulge our tastes. There is money enough with rich 
 houses, in well-filled purses, in the vaults of banks. An- 
 other's name well simulated; a demand, with face and 
 voice disguised, upon a belated traveller ; a midnight 
 operation upon the silver closet of a millionnaire, or the 
 interior securities of, or the trustful day defenders of, the 
 bank ; or a midday operation, striking fraudulent contracts, 
 or giving fictitious value to valueless stocks, and sudden 
 riches and gratifications would reward this single, bold 
 stroke. It is because desire cannot wait, because appetite 
 is clamorous for instant indulgence, because the eager 
 hands would clutch at once the coveted good, that crime, 
 stepping in with its confident but delusive promise, flings 
 its fetters over the soul. Again, this impatience of our 
 hearts impugns the faithfulness of the divine Promiser. 
 In respect to all earthly good, the sacred pledge of God is 
 written in the ancient covenant, in the world's renewal of 
 its youth, that "seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, 
 summer and winter . . . shall not cease." The spirit 
 of this promise repeats itself in many a gracious assur- 
 ance concerning the great Father's care for the comforts 
 and needs of the body, and our portion of natural good. 
 But in some season of special trial the early and the latter 
 
148 WAITING. 
 
 rain fail us, the heavens are brass overhead, the earth 
 powder beneath, the green blade pales to a sickly yellow. 
 How shall we be fed ? How will the garners of autumn 
 be filled ? The very necessaries of life seem to recede 
 beyond our reach ; prices mount on an ascending scale, 
 speedily distancing slow climbing labor and its rewards. 
 The implements with which we wrought are taken from 
 us, and our hands left empty. The field of toil, for which 
 alone we have training and skill, is thronged to repletion, 
 and we are left out. It is deserted of all men, and we are 
 left in it idle and alone, no man hiring us. Each turn we 
 make reduces our strength and disappoints our hope. 
 Inevitable want corners us, and no door of deliverance 
 opens. For us all the divine promises seem repealed and 
 forgotten. Is it not time for some daring, desperate, ex- 
 pedient ? It is very well to hope if a man can see any 
 light ahead, and " quietly wait " for salvation, if there is 
 any coming. It may be written ever so fairly, " Trust in 
 the Lord and do good ; so shalt thou dwell in the land, 
 and verily thou shalt be fed." But a promise wont spread 
 a table, or light a fire, or weave a piece of cotton, or 
 make up a garment, or pay a note, or satisfy the grocer 
 on the corner. We must look out for ourselves lawfully 
 or lawlessly. Necessity knows no law. Then is God for- 
 getful or faithless? Nay. All the while he is working 
 unseen and silently. Behind the curtain his hand is busy. 
 From afar converging lines are bringing up relief. Sepa- 
 rate forces will unite at the point intended. That point 
 will be perhaps man's utmost extremity. But at that point 
 hopeless destitution and the divine fulness will meet. 
 
WAITING. 149 
 
 You remember how, in last autumn's campaign, upon All- 
 toona's thinly-defended works, in Sherman's line of com- 
 munication, moved a whole division of the rebel host. 
 One of Sherman's resolute leaders, by hard marching, 
 flung himself behind those works. The greatly outnum- 
 bering assailants demanded a surrender to spare the 
 effusion of blood. The Union commander was willing 
 to meet the effusion of blood, and the storm broke upon 
 him with devouring fury. Seven hours it raged and 
 seven times his own numbers pushed the fierce assault. 
 Single-handed he fought it out. Where were the tens of 
 thousands of his comrades ? Was he left to his fate ? So 
 it seemed. Why, then, maintain against such odds the 
 unequal strife ? Why not yield while there was anything 
 left to save? Ah, he was there to fulfil a sacred trust. 
 And nobly did he discharge it, till unexpected victory 
 came at last, and the baffled enemy retired. Was he left 
 to his fate? Sherman's eye, from the top of Look-out 
 Mountain, was on every white puff that surged up from 
 those well-served batteries. The strong columns of the 
 army, under laurelled generals, were moving on through 
 all those hours and closing in, and well-nigh encompass- 
 ing the rebel bands. The whole loyal host was engaged 
 in bringing succor to that brave company in the belea- 
 guered town, though they knew it not. So watches and 
 works the all-beholding, faithful God, preparing the fulfil- 
 ment of his pledges when our hearts are ready to faint. 
 Let us be rebuked. Wait, in whatever extremity, and we 
 shall see that " God is not slack concerning his promises 
 as some men count slackness." Again our impatience 
 13* 
 
150 WAITING. 
 
 outruns the divine Providence. God covenants with be- 
 lieving Abraham that in his seed shall all the nations 
 of the earth be blessed. But Abraham is an hundred 
 years old, Sarah is ninety, the promised heir is not, 
 and Eliezer of Damascus stands gaping and ready for 
 the inheritance. It is vain waiting longer; Abraham 
 must help Providence. So he allied himself with the 
 Egyptian bondwoman, bringing sore trouble and sharp 
 discord into his house, and embittering his age with 
 domestic feuds. And at last how simple and easy to 
 almighty power the redemption of his pledge ! how all- 
 sufficient the sovereign providence ! It was revealed to 
 Kebecca, even before she looked upon the faces of her 
 twin boys, that the elder should serve the younger. But 
 dim-eyed, gray-haired Isaac is on his death-bed, and still 
 Esau holds the birthright. Wait, oh, impatient mother, 
 God's word will not fail. But she cannot wait. She 
 must help God by a lie and a crime, and so she puts up 
 Jacob to that act of cruel deception, that almost broke 
 that aged heart, exiled Jacob for many long years from 
 his home, sowed bitter hatred between the brothers, and 
 brought upon the younger a keen reprisal when his own 
 head was bowed with the snows of life's winter. This 
 is the great temptation with an impatient spirit to outrun 
 Providence, to set up its own devices in the place of 
 Providence, and so defeat the nearest methods of God's 
 chosen plans. 
 
 Again this spirit of impatience misses in its haste the 
 higher good. Samuel, the prophet, anointed Saul king 
 over Israel, and sent him before him to Gilgal, bidding him 
 
WAITING. 151 
 
 wait seven days till he himself should come and offer up 
 the sacrifices. Seven days Saul waited, but the Philistines 
 were mustering strong at Micmash, the men of Israel were 
 falling away from the king, battle was imminent, and 
 the sacrifice yet postponed. The seventh day is nearly 
 spent ; the host of the uncircumcised approaches. Samuel 
 will not come, and the rash, impatient king himself offers 
 the sacrifice. He has gained this preparation for the bat- 
 tle, and stayed perhaps the desertion of his people. But 
 what has he lost ? Scarce has he ended the rites before 
 the prophet comes, and announces that, for that act of 
 public disobedience, God had rejected Saul from the 
 kingdom. Obedience is better than all which disobedient 
 haste can hope to secure. Strength of character is better, 
 patience is better, calm submission is better, heroic en- 
 deavor is better, the steadfast passive virtues, born of 
 trial and made tough and abiding under the strain of 
 some wearing delay. How often in trouble we are blind 
 to this truth ! Oh, give us relief! Take off the burden I 
 Relax the tension upon nerve and spirit ! Give us an 
 antidote for the pain ! Come, Lord, ere our brother die ! 
 Ah, sisters of Lazarus, let the Saviour linger. Two days 
 he abode still in the same place where he was. It seemed 
 indifference, cruelty, anything but love. But the mar- 
 vellous experience of the next four days, those precious, 
 precious tears of Jesus, the grand and gracious miracle 
 that stirred all Jerusalem from centre to circumference, 
 were well worth waiting for. Bear his absence a little 
 longer. Oh, tired and troubled spirit, the larger shall be 
 your deliverance, the sweeter your joy. 
 
152 WAITING. 
 
 Over the delays of our personal sanctification we are 
 sometimes weary of waiting, impatient of our slow prog- 
 ress. It seems to us fitting that we should be. So 
 many weak sides, so many vulnerable points, so many 
 redoubtable and unhumbled foes, such frequent falls, such 
 shameful defeats. Oh, shall we ever grow strong and 
 have the mastery of our spiritual enemies? Yes, by suc- 
 cessive conflicts ; wait till the appointed hour brings them 
 on ; by oft-repeated trials they will rise upon us one after 
 another, by God's wise methods and seasons of spiritual 
 nurture. Let him introduce them, each in his time, and 
 we shall wear at last the victor's crown, and sing his 
 song. 
 
 We are impatient often in our own sphere of Christian 
 labor, that the gospel seems so powerless. There are so 
 many yet resisting souls that we long to see brought in as 
 the trophies of its conquering efficacy. Look how they 
 stand up in the midst of us, men, more than we count, 
 on whom the truth has broken many a lance without ever 
 piercing their shield. Oh, for more frequent appeals for 
 a sharper weaponry out of the sacred arsenal, for more 
 puissant hands to wield it, for new modes of attack and 
 new secrets of overcoming. " Wait," said Jesus, to the 
 assembled disciples, ready to storm Jerusalem and sweep 
 over India, "tarry in the city, wait for the promise of 
 the Father which ... ye have heard of me." And they 
 waited, and with a sound "as of a rushing mighty wind," 
 though all the air was still, and no leaf stirred on Olivet, 
 came the descending spirit, and then each flame-crowned 
 apostle went forth clothed with might and with salvation. 
 
WAITING. 153 
 
 Let us wait as they waited, wait in faith, wait in prayer, 
 wait in submission, wait in confident expectation, hope- 
 fully, quietly, with zeal and labor like Paul's, with cour- 
 age like Daniel, and we shall see in every field of hoping 
 and of toiling the salvation of the Lord. 
 
 Difficult but precious lesson, the lesson of patient 
 waiting, of cheerful content under divine delays, of joyful 
 assurance, though the desire of our heart and the God of 
 our promises do linger long. 
 
 OF THE ^i 
 
 IVERSITT) 
 
 
X. 
 
 INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 
 
 AND THE LORD SAID UNTO HIM, THIS IS THE LAND WHICH I SWEAR UNTO 
 ABRAHAM, UNTO ISAAC, AND UNTO JACOB, SAYING I WILL GIVE IT UNTO 
 THY SEED : I HAVE CAUSED THEE TO SEE IT WITH THINE EYES, BUT THOU 
 SHALT NOT GO OVER THITHER. Deut. XXXiv. 4. 
 
 AS we move onward in the journey of human life, there 
 are many reminders by the way of the coming end. 
 The sickness that lays us up for a while in the midst of 
 our vigorous days, the decline of each setting sun, the 
 death of summer verdure and the autumnal fall of the 
 leaves, the lapse of the year, the passing of each of our 
 life's four seasons, the dropping from our side of the com- 
 panions of our way, each of these is intended, and usu- 
 ally serves, to turn our thoughts forward to the final 
 arrest of our steps, the mortal sickness one day to seize 
 us, the going down of our last earthly sun, the winter of 
 our year. There is nothing unkind in sending us such 
 reminders. We need them. And they are given in 
 faithfulness and mercy. 
 
 And one of the impressions most vividly produced 
 upon us at such seasons is of the disappointing incom- 
 pleteness of our life on earth. The fever comes in the 
 
INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 155 
 
 midst of our plans and toils, the closing day reproaches 
 us for many a brave purpose of the morning unfulfilled, 
 and the waning year cuts short the schemes which we had 
 hoped to see rounded with full success. This impression 
 is probably present on every heart as we stand here to- 
 gether on this shore of the last Sabbath of the year and 
 see its months, like waves broken and spent, all behind 
 us. HOW T much that we meant to have effected before we 
 were called to stand by the pillow of the dying year is 
 still unachieved ! What good that we hoped to have at- 
 tained to is yet in the future ! What dear desire eagerly 
 followed is yet unpossessed ! And as it is to-day, so it 
 will be at the last. Each human life, longer or shorter, 
 wherever it pauses, and however it be protracted, will be 
 visited at its close with the sense of disappointment and 
 incompleteness. If Moses had been told, when he led 
 out the tribes from Egypt, that he should never lead 
 them into the promised land ; that he should march at 
 their Lead forty years in the wilderness, but should never 
 cross the Jordan with them ; that he should come in sight 
 of their goodly inheritance, but should never set foot in it, 
 never taste of the milk and honey, never sit under the 
 shadow of its fruitful vines, it would have been so sad 
 and depressing a sentence that faith and resignation could 
 hardly have struggled against it. There was always be- 
 fore his eye and his hope the vision of that great triumph 
 when he should stand at the head of a redeemed nation 
 on those sacred hills of promise, and be permitted to lift 
 up with his own hand the banner of the holy people 
 higher than all the ensigns of earthly royalty. But it was 
 
156 INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 
 
 never to be. He was to come near it, but short of it. 
 It was to be almost within grasp, but not touched. One 
 only narrow stream of all that had separated him from 
 this prize still flowed between ; across it and far beyond 
 he could see with his eyes, but he was never to go over 
 with his feet. There he stood on the very border, the 
 gate ready to open, the goal before him, when God said 
 to him tenderly, but firmly, " Come up into this mountain 
 and die ! " It was a trying word to Moses, and for one 
 moment he plead against it. "O Lord God, thou hast 
 begun to show thy servant thy greatness and thy mighty 
 hand. I pray thee, let me go over, and see the good land 
 that is beyond Jordan, that goodly mountain and Leba- 
 non ! " And then came the final word, fatherly but sov- 
 ereign also, "Let it suffice thee ; speak no more unto me 
 of this matter." There followed indeed the glorious com- 
 pensative vision from that salient summit of the Moab 
 range, but the work and the hope of a life seemed to miss 
 of their crown. Touching illustration of that incomplete- 
 ness attending every human career in this world, upon 
 which we may briefly meditate as we are held awhile in 
 the grasp of this old year so near its end. 
 
 There is more than one sense, to be sure, in which 
 the briefest and most fragmentary life may be considered 
 filled out to utmost completeness. As to God's provi- 
 dential purpose in it, it is as long and as productive as it 
 was meant to be. Just as it is, it fits accurately into the 
 ever-developing divine plan ; no more and no less was ex- 
 pected from it. It is complete as a link between the gen- 
 erations of men and the stages of human progress. It 
 
INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 157 
 
 takes the living torch from the hand of its predecessor 
 and passes it over to the hand of its successor. Then its 
 function is ended, and it may cease to be. 
 
 It is often complete in the balance of its own propor- 
 tioned seasons. It sports in the sunny hours of child- 
 hood. It drinks in the fervid inspiration of youth. It 
 shares the consciousness of manhood's strength. It wears 
 the white and honorable crown of age. It is a full life 
 year. It has had a spring, a summer, an autumn, a win- 
 ter, treading the full round of all the circling months. 
 There is sometimes, too, whatever the heart has longed 
 for, not yet attained, there is sometimes, let us thank 
 God, a full-orbed sense of satisfaction with our work and 
 the length of our working day. A dying patriot and 
 statesman could say as he faltered in the midst of the toil 
 which, gray-haired and bowed with years, he still main- 
 tained, "This is the last of earth; lam content." And 
 another gray-haired laborer on whom the hand of power 
 was laid with despotic violence could write it as his 
 peaceful testimony, " I am now ready to be offered, and 
 the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a 
 good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the 
 faith." 
 
 Still how much that this same heroic veteran had hoped 
 to secure of the victories of the truth must have rested 
 upon his mind as visions, upon whose fulfilment he might 
 look down from another world, but was never to see in 
 this! 
 
 This incompleteness will come into clearer recognition 
 if we consider how little a human life accomplishes in 
 14 
 
158 
 
 INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 
 
 comparison with the plans of God. Those divine plans 
 are large. They reach from age to age, from generation 
 to generation, "from everlasting to everlasting." They 
 cover the beginning, the progress, the final periods of all 
 human history. They take up, employ, and dismiss suc- 
 cessive workers, while yet some miner detail only is 
 wrought out, and the vast integral scheme is scarcely at 
 all set forward. A single task may fill and weary the 
 hands of one laborer and another and another before it is 
 concluded, and in its completion seem only a trivial con- 
 tribution to the general progress. Measured by the co- 
 lossal, slow-moving system of God's providence, the 
 turning of this vast wheel that rolls on the designs of 
 the all-wise Mind, a wheel so high, so broad, that, 
 though always moving, its motion, like the growth of the 
 seasons or the procession of the constellations, is imper- 
 ceptible to our eye, how brief, how fragmem^iry, how 
 evanescent is the little life and work of man ! God will 
 call him out of the families of earth a peculiar people. 
 Who shall have the founding and building of this elect 
 nation ? How much shall any one chosen instrument ac- 
 complish in the piling of this slow-rising architecture? 
 Abraham hears the voice of God on the plain of Mamre, 
 and moves out to begin the work. He dies, and Isaac's 
 hand catches the slackened thread of progress. Jacob 
 goes over Jordan with his staff only, and comes back a 
 double band. Joseph disappears beneath the dark portal 
 of an Egyptian prison, and reappears in the second char- 
 iot of royalty. The babe of the Nile turns his back on 
 the court, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the peo- 
 
INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 159 
 
 pie of God. Joshua inherits the captaincy of the tribes 
 after him. Warriors, judges, and kings in long succes- 
 sion follow on. Jerusalem itself sinks under sorrowful 
 judgments ; the abomination of desolation stands in the 
 holy place, and from the loins of David's line comes forth 
 a later and a mightier Leader to conduct the lingering 
 but sure march of the Church unto that triumphal hour, 
 when " the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of 
 the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to 
 the people of the saints of the Most High." But what 
 hero of the leadership, whose truncheon so many hands 
 have borne for a while, can say concerning this imperial 
 conquest, w Behold what I have wrought " ? How small a 
 space in such vast reaches of progress does the span of a 
 single life cover ! How broken and fragmentary, com- 
 pared with this sublime whole, must that life appear to 
 itself and the great Supreme One ! We rise up and 
 deliver a stroke or two, and then sink faint and over- 
 borne almost at the point where our toil commenced. It 
 is to compare great things with small, as though all the 
 tillers of earth had it in charge to makes its rough places 
 smooth, and to convert its deserts into gardens of bloom 
 and fruit. But the most that each can do is to bring a 
 single field into culture, and, having sown his first har- 
 vest, which another shall reap, the night cometh and his 
 work is ended. How insignificant the plat which has 
 compassed his utmost of diligence, as compared with the 
 broad continents and the boundless Saharas yet to be sub- 
 dued ! How incomplete the earthly life as judged by the 
 all-comprehending plans of God ! We had thought, in 
 
160 INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 
 
 our day, to help forward the kingdom of truth, to sup- 
 plant wickedness on the earth with righteousness, to carry 
 the light of salvation out over the dark seas and unto the 
 dark isles, and to help Jesus to his throne, and see him 
 begin to reign ere our eyelids should droop in the final 
 sleep ; but the evening twilight has descended, and our 
 lips can do little more than repeat the old challenge of 
 our enemies, " Where is the promise of his coming? For 
 since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they 
 were." What incompleteness in such living ! What a 
 fragment is such a being ! What an humbling conscious- 
 ness must possess it at last of the unattained, now forever 
 beyond it ! 
 
 So it will be also, not merely in reference to God's 
 plans, but in reference to our own private schemes, of 
 working, whether for earthly fruits or spiritual. You 
 shall hear some aged patriarch say, as he walks feebly 
 forth into the sun from his cottage-door, and gazes upon the 
 acres over which his hand has guided the plough for half a 
 century, " I always meant to have blasted out that ledge 
 of rock, to have levelled that ridge, to have drained that 
 swamp. It has been my purpose for years to have cleared 
 that boggy and stony pasture field for tillage and meadow. 
 I have often thought of opening a vista through that for- 
 est growth ; of sinking that steep ascent in my carriage- 
 path, by a cut to the heart of that knoll, into an easier 
 grade ; of digging a well in that upland range for my 
 herds ; of breaking that abrupt slope on one side of my 
 lawn into terraces ; of detaching my barn from my house, 
 and adding to the mansion a wing for more capacious 
 
INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. "' 161 
 
 domestic accommodation ; but I have never seen just the 
 time when I could enter upon these improvements, and I 
 am too old now. My sons after me may perhaps effect 
 some of them ; but I shall never undertake them." And 
 he turns back to his easy-chair with a sigh over his inter- 
 rupted work. Age and infirmity caught him before his 
 dreams were realized. The end is near, and what remains 
 undone must, so far as he is concerned, remain undone 
 forever. He has seen it with his eyes, but he has reached 
 a bound over which he may not go to possess it. And 
 where these hopes and plans have reference to spiritual 
 interests, the experience is the same. We had hoped to 
 have seen some one puissant enemy of the truth subdued, 
 and to have had a hand in the triumph ; to have secured 
 the evangelization of certain spiritual wastes always ap- 
 pealing specially to our heart ; to have witnessed the 
 growth and establishment of some Christian enterprise, 
 whose foundations we had hoped to lay ; to have rejoiced 
 over the conversion of some dear friend and neighbor ; to* 
 have had a jubilee in the home over some lost one found, 
 some wanderer returned to his father's house and his 
 father's God. But we have gone as far in our instrumen- 
 tality for these precious ends as we are permitted to go. 
 The end is near. Our words are feeble. A few more 
 prayers, and we must lay our burdens down and rest, 
 where nothing shall disturb or gladden us any more. 
 These unfinished holy endeavors, we behold their con- 
 summation in vision, but we are not to touch them with 
 living hands. So also there is personal good, long-covet- 
 ed privileges, we hoped to have enjoyed, but the taste of 
 14* 
 
162 INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 
 
 which is never to sweeten our mouths, that valley stream 
 of Jordan meeting our feet sooner than we had thought. 
 What the failure will be none of us now can say ; but wo 
 may be sure our life will be incomplete in respect to some 
 of these crowning expectations. Hope always outstrips 
 pursuit, and " Hope springs eternal in the human breast." 
 Some hope will reach across the river, and the swift cur- 
 rent will forbid our crossing over. We had hoped to have 
 carried our children through their process of education, 
 or to have seen them settled in their calling and winning 
 good successes, or to have sat beneath the new-sprung 
 roof of their home life, to have taken their children into 
 our arms and read the future of our lineage in their young 
 eyes. We had hoped to have cleared off certain incuni- 
 brances from our earthly estate, and to have accumulated 
 a certain definite sum as our competence for age and an 
 inheritance for our sons and daughters. We had hoped 
 to have seen certain great aggressive movements in the 
 redemption of man from the bondage of prejudice, appe- 
 tite, and vicious habit prevalent, before our eyes should 
 close ; the true meaning of Christ's gospel settled and ac- 
 cepted by all professed believers ; the salvation of be- 
 nighted parts of our land coming forth out of Zion ; the 
 final overcoming of our own spiritual enemies ; the full 
 conquest of evil passions in our heart ; the peaceful set- 
 tlement of some long perplexing, practical question of 
 our personal religious life; our full conformity to the 
 image and will of Jesus. But when we stand there on 
 the bank of the river, we shall assuredly see some of 
 these hopes beyond us. Pursuit will stop at the water's 
 
INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 163 
 
 edge. Possession will mock us from the farther shore. 
 There will be some good our hearts have intensely craved, 
 our hands wrought for diligently, our feet hastened after 
 far and wearily, which we shall see only with our eyes, 
 and, seeing thus, know that it is not to crown our earthly 
 lot, and confess in this baffled search, this postponed de- 
 sire, the incompleteness of this mortal life. 
 
 And if we ask now for the lessons and the uses of this- 
 sense of incompleteness, how obvious it is that it is meant 
 to impress us with the conviction of God's all-sufficiency. 
 He does not lean so heavily upon his human helpers that, 
 when they fail him, his work pauses and his plans are ar- 
 rested. He does not build so confidently on these frail 
 pillars that, when they crumble beneath the load, the 
 fabric of his great scheme of Providence totters. His 
 stoutest champions, his foremost agents, the leaders of 
 movements that carry in them most of the conditions of 
 human progress, and the richest promise of human wel- 
 fare, may vacate their trust and lie down in silence and 
 darkness, but the divine counsels and the divine resources 
 suffer no bereavement. Men ask, How can such great 
 losses be made up, and who is worthy to succeed to such 
 honors laid down? But God is not disturbed. His plans 
 are not hindered. He can call whom he will to the vacant 
 posts. He has his successors already in view, in train- 
 ing, and under appointment. His own all-sufficiency im- 
 presses itself upon us through this, his independence of 
 short-lived, frail, and fainting human workers. 
 
 In the same view his sovereignty appears more august 
 and kingly. It is his hand that fixes the limits of this 
 
164 INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 
 
 fragmentary human life. He has appointed to each man 
 his bounds, which he cannot pass. He breaks in upon our 
 plans, our vitality, our strength, and decrees the arrest 
 of all our hopes and labors. He does it in ways so varied, 
 so unexpected, so startling, so discriminating, as to leave 
 the impression on men's hearts that there is a supreme 
 Disposer on the throne, who takes counsel of himself in 
 such arbitration, and acts his wise and sovereign pleasure. 
 
 Another use of this dispensation is to quicken our dili- 
 gence. Oh, all the voices of the frailty and brevity of 
 life bid men be up and doing. The morning and the 
 evening, the evening and the morning, in their quick suc- 
 cession, the rapid flight of the seasons, the swift tread 
 of the years, the lapse of fleetness and vigor in the human 
 frame, the changing shadows as our sun crosses the me- 
 ridian, all unite in this salutation with every dawn, re- 
 peating it with each stroke of the hours, "Work while 
 the day lasts, for the night corneth in which no man can 
 work ! " Some tasks are sure to be crowded out of 
 life, some labors commenced to be left unfinished. Then 
 " what thou doest, do quickly ! " 
 
 And again the lesson is that, while redoubling our dili- 
 gence, we moderate our expectations. We are sowing for 
 magnificent harvests. We are toiling for splendid suc- 
 cesses. We are investing for richest returns. We are 
 climbing toward loftiest and most radiant summits. For 
 all our present hardship and rigor, there shall be a gol- 
 den future, and in the light of it, as it rises above the far 
 horizon and advances to meet us, our eyes glisten and 
 our step is more buoyant. Ah, how many have gone for- 
 
(UNIVERSITY) 
 INCOMPLETENESS Oi^QTR^JFORNlA: 165 
 
 ward, their feet sandalled with such hopes, and stepping 
 as though they trod on air, who found that the river in- 
 tercepted their path before they reached the goal ; that 
 their confident expectation was only a view from Pisgah's 
 top; that fruition lay beyond the stream, and their feet 
 touched those cold waters while yet their hands were 
 empty. Be moderate in desire and expectation. Tone 
 down this brilliance and eagerness of life's hopes, so shall 
 life's disappointing incompleteness be less bitter to our 
 spirit when the cup is raised to our lips. There is a pe- 
 culiar chastening for age in this arrangement of Provi- 
 dence. Age is the harvest time for which we have sowed, 
 and in which we expect to rest with our sheaves thick 
 around us. But how often does age stand by its empty 
 granaries with no field on all its estate yet to reap. The 
 land of promise toward which it travelled so long is be- 
 yond it still. Instead of sitting beneath its vines and 
 tasting the grapes of Eshcol, it is sitting on the bank of 
 the river somewhat desolate and alone, waiting rather 
 than enjoying. We wonder often why good men, whose 
 years have been given to works of beneficence and piety, 
 should have such sharp discipline in age, the loss of 
 health, the loss of property, the loss of those on whom 
 they expected to lean, the grief that comes from looking 
 upon the sorrow or the shame of some whom they love 
 and being powerless to help them. Ah, they were not 
 quite weaned from earth, not fully ripe for heaven ! 
 These last touches of a gracious discipline are for their 
 final perfecting, the mellowing of the fruit before angel 
 hands gather it. And under this earthly completeness 
 
166 
 
 INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE. 
 
 our eyes look forward and upward for what is denied us 
 here. We shall not indeed go over this Jordan of disap- 
 pointment and inherit on the other side ; but there is an- 
 other Jordan which we shall cross. We shall not have 
 our home in the earthly Canaan, nor tread its vine-clad 
 hills; but we shall enter that celestial land of promise, 
 and sit on those serene heights where angels cluster, and 
 on which shines the light of God. We may not inherit 
 fully here ; we may advance only into the cold shadows 
 of poverty and neglect, as we go forward leaning on our 
 staff; but there, as heirs of God and joint heirs with 
 Christ, a full and satisfying inheritance will crown and 
 gladden every desire, and all earthly disappointment be 
 swallowed up in eternal satisfaction. This lifts the peo- 
 ple of God out of all the sadness that settles on life's 
 shattered hopes. On this mount of faith their feet can 
 stand as on Pisgah's top, and all the glory of the goodly 
 land appear before them, and loftier and whiter than 
 the snowy crown of Lebanon the dazzling mount of the 
 throne of God, and ho voice of stern interdict pronounces 
 the decree, " Thou shalt not go over thither," but a wel- 
 come of soft music calls to them, " Come, ye blessed of 
 my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from 
 the foundation of the world." 
 

 XI. 
 
 JOHN'S FAILUKE. 
 
 AND HE SENT AND BEHEADED JOHN IN THE PRISON. Matt. xiv. 10. 
 
 WHEN the angel Gabriel announced to the aged Zach- 
 arias that his old age should be no longer childless, 
 the announcement carried with it this assurance concern- 
 ing the unborn babe, "Thou shalt have joy and gladness, 
 and many shall rejoice at his birth, for he shall be great 
 in the sight of the Lord." And when that more illustrious 
 prophet heralded by the son of Zacharias had commenced 
 his public work, he bore his witness to the dignity of his 
 messenger and forerunner, "Verily, I say unto you, 
 Among them that are born of women, there hath not 
 arisen a greater than John the Baptist." But how brief 
 was the earthly career of that greatness ! How suddenly 
 it paused ! In what obscurity it went down and went 
 out ! It seemed to end, too, in failure, a failure all the 
 more disastrous and reproachful (perhaps in our eyes) 
 because it would appear to have been met off the track 
 of the preacher's legitimate calling, and might so easily, 
 with a little care and prudence, have been avoided. " See 
 what comes," we say, "of his interference with the morals 
 
168 
 
 of sovereignty and power. He was not court chaplain. 
 He was not the keeper of the conscience of Herod. He 
 was not sent to regulate the domestic relations of the 
 Tetrarch. He had one message to deliver, one cry to lift 
 up. He was a herald running before the coming of Zion's 
 King to proclaim, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is 
 at hand," "prepare ye the way of the Lord." If he had 
 confined himself to that, kept within his sphere, preached 
 that doctrine of repentance and wrath to come, and the 
 near advent of one mightier than he, he might have 
 escaped the prison and the axe. "Possibly." And what 
 effect had his rash and obtrusive protest upon those im- 
 plicated in the evil ? It kindled a revengeful and remorse- 
 less hate in a woman's heart. It drew into sympathy 
 and fellowship with her in a new crime the heart of her 
 daughter. It led the guilty Herod, not to repentance and 
 reformation, but to a deeper and more tragic guilt. It 
 must have held up the name of the chief magistrate to 
 obloquy and odium, and brought a scandal upon the ruler 
 of the people. It set the example of disrespect to digni- 
 ties, and tended to insubordination in the subject. It 
 ended in the silencing of a voice to whose stirring words 
 thousands had listened, and the sacrifice of a life that 
 might yet have gathered unnumbered trophies of its ear- 
 nestness and fidelity. " Yes, all that." He had a field of 
 labor. It was broad and unoccupied. No man disputed 
 his precedence in it. His sway there was without a rival. 
 There was no narrowness in its limits to make him feel 
 shut in and straitened. Up and down the Jordan valley, 
 across the length and the breadth of the Judean wilder- 
 
JOHN'S FAILURE. 169 
 
 ness, he could range at his pleasure. He was bishop 
 there of all the desert, and he was fitted for his place. 
 He was at home in the desert life. His lungs played 
 freely in its congenial air. He had taken upon him, in 
 body and soul, the rude, stern, grand type of its nurture. 
 He coveted no purple robe. The locust oPgrassy valleys 
 was to him instead of fowl and fatling, and the wild 
 honey was sweet to his taste. He could dispense with 
 the home, the city, and social life. Night in the wild was 
 his pavilion, and the stars above the river his companions. 
 Brave, bold, rugged, strong, and young, he was the man 
 for this missionary work. He had gainecj a hearing too. 
 He spoke not to the echoes of the Moab mountains. 
 Jerusalem and all the region round about had heard of 
 him and gone out to him. He had touched the popular 
 heart. He struck, and every chord vibrated. And it was 
 not mere curiosity or sentimental interest that he excited. 
 He roused the conscience. He alarmed the fears. He 
 won his hearers. They forsook their sins. They came 
 to his feet broken-hearted penitents, and were baptized of 
 him in Jordan unto a new life. There was no flagging of 
 this power over them. He was in the full-tide of this 
 popular movement on the crest of the wave. And if this 
 field had suddenly become barren, and yielded no longer 
 any harvest, he might still have pushed forward in the 
 van of that conquering kingdom, uttering to new people 
 and tribes the word, "It is at hand," and pointing over 
 his shoulder to the shadow of one whose shoes' latchet he 
 was not worthy to unloose. 
 
 All this opening for a life of usefulness, this splendid 
 15 
 
170 JOHN'S FAILURE. 
 
 harvest which he had begun to reap, he staked and lost 
 on one adventurous throw. He must needs intermeddle 
 with matters of state. He must go up from the Jordan 
 to Jerusalem to rebuke wickedness in high places. He 
 must beard the lion in his den, adulterous Herod in the 
 very insolence of secure crime and unlorded power. In 
 this he failed, by this one step he lost all. Was it a mis- 
 take and an error? Did he lose all? Was the life of 
 John in this turn of it and sacrifice of it a failure? 
 That is my question. We cannot so conclude because he 
 died early and by a death of violence. Then are the 
 death of youthful patriots who fall in victorious battle a 
 mistake and a failure. Then were the death of martyrs 
 at the stake and in the amphitheatre a waste of generous 
 blood. Then were the sacrifice of Christ himself what 
 it seemed to his murderers, the defeat of his work and 
 the final triumph of his enemies. No. Death itself is 
 often the noblest victory. We may give much for a good 
 cause, and keep back life. We may give toil and prayer 
 and gold, and testify thus our sense of the soundness of 
 its claims. But when we throw in this final contribution, 
 when it is seen that we count life itself cheap before the 
 preciousness of some holier and worthier thing, that is a 
 testimony that silences all gainsaying. It is not certain, 
 then, that life given in sacrifice is thrown away, goes out 
 in waste and failure. John was true to his convictions. 
 At once we side with those convictions. We are sure 
 that he was in the right. Our hearts front the tyrant 
 who had inaugurated adultery as the morality of the court 
 and echo the calm, steady utterance of those unfaltering 
 
JOHN'S FAILURE . 171 
 
 Hp Sj "It is not lawful for thee to have her." It is a 
 great and rare thing for a life to be true to its conscien- 
 tious judgments, to swerve from them neither from fear 
 nor favor, to refuse to be bribed or awed into dishonest 
 silence, to act and speak as the free soul, the untram- 
 melled thought impels, to keep that soul free, and that 
 thought without a shackle, and carry the sustaining con- 
 sciousness that the outward and the inward correspond. 
 This noble assertion of moral liberty may bring the body 
 into chains. Is it better, then, to wear the fetters within, 
 to have no shackles on the limbs, to boast, "I am at 
 large," while the spirit is imprisoned in its own cowardice, 
 and thought and speech are in the ignominious chains of 
 falsehood? Which is success, and which is failure, to 
 sit within dungeon walls a true man, or to stifle the moral 
 sense in a deeper darkness and ride in a chariot ? The 
 man who abides by the right, who confesses it with heart 
 and life and lip, who moulds to these inward facts of his 
 moral convictions the outward shaping of his way, who 
 keeps life true to this inward light, who will have it, and 
 who makes it at any cost correspond with what God has 
 given him to know and believe and feel, has gloriously 
 succeeded, whether he be canonized living as a saint, or 
 be broken on the wheel. By this test the life of John 
 was no failure. He kept his truth. He brought his con- 
 victions into the incarnation of action. A fire burned 
 within his bones, a fire of indignant remonstrance 
 against a public and notorious wrong. He would not 
 smother that fire* He would not be untrue. No fear, 
 no policy, should mark his face in flattering and smiling 
 
172 JOHN'S FAILURE. 
 
 obsequiousness before the face of Supreme Power. He 
 maintained his freedom, and the voices of the ages say 
 above his headless trunk, "Here lies a true man." I can- 
 not call that a failure ; I call it immortal success. 
 
 Again, John was a witness to the disinterestedness of 
 truth. If it had been seen in that trial of his constancy 
 that truth could be bought and sold, that truth coveted 
 preferment, that it ceased to be truth when danger and 
 suffering threatened, that it was a bidder like avarice and 
 ambition and every light and false thing for personal gain 
 and popular favor, that it loved ease and comfort and 
 emolument better than its own purity, that it was what it 
 was only for the sake of what it could win by it, and 
 when threatened with loss, changed sides like a politician, 
 if this had been the witness of John, it would have been 
 more corrupting than the sin of Herod. But he stamped 
 it on his life, he stamped it on this historic page, he wrote 
 it on his prison walls, he preaches it still with the voice 
 that pierced the heart of the desert, "Truth has no price." 
 Again, the testimony published then and left to us is that 
 Truth is no respecter of persons. If when publican and 
 harlot appeared before him, when the humble and name- 
 less crowd surrounded him, John had preached "Repent," 
 ringing it rough and full, "repent, flee from the wrath 
 to come ! " and when the sensual and cruel Herod was in 
 presence, spoke not at all, or spoke softly, rounded off 
 the angles of that sharp word Repent, and spoke of the 
 desirableness of some improvement, of the probability 
 that his excellency might some day reject the infelicities 
 of his present position, and begged permission, in courtly 
 
JOHN'S FAILURE. 173 
 
 phrase, to point out some of the consequences of what he 
 hoped he should be pardoned for saying he could not re- 
 gard but as a grave and serious error, that majesty of 
 Truth would have been brought into contempt ; he would 
 have been a traitor to her queenly dignity. He would 
 have interpreted her message in one dialect to an obscure 
 offender, and in quite another to the man who gilded over 
 his crimes with the gloss of wealth and station. That 
 would have been a failure for the world's pity and scorn. 
 The other was a success for the world's admiration, for 
 God's encomium. And now who knows the whole effect 
 at the time of that fearless and noble protest? It was 
 needful in God's dealings with Herod that this rebuke 
 should come in as a part of his history and experience. 
 It brought a holy God near to him and before him. It 
 held up right and lawfulness in outlines clearer and a 
 demand more audible than princes are often permitted to 
 see and hear. It was instead of a public sentiment, antic- 
 ipating judgment upon the vileness of a crowned poten- 
 tate, and dared to come near enough to make sure of being 
 heard and understood. It was the hour of God's mercy 
 to this ruler. It gave him one of those golden opportu- 
 nities which come to us all to acknowledge and forsake 
 guilt, to fall down and pray, "God be merciful to me a 
 sinner." It may have arrested the evil influence of that 
 vicious example in a station so commanding and influen- 
 tial, and have kept back multitudes from following in the 
 path of so bold and shameless a demoralization. It set up, 
 we cannot say before how many minds, a divine standard 
 of what is lawful, and educated the conscience of thou- 
 15* 
 
174 JOHN'S FAILUKE. 
 
 sands, perhaps, to reverence and obedience. "Thrown 
 away and wasted ! " that earthly life may have been in- 
 stead of the eternal ruin of thousands of its contempo- 
 raries, may have held back a nation from lower deeps 
 of debauchery, and have saved from relapse, and have 
 confirmed in the faith and virtue of a new religion, the 
 tens of thousands of converts whom John had baptized. 
 We are not competent yet to pronounce that life a failure. 
 We are too distant, too ignorant, so to pronounce. Again, 
 it may be well enough to remark that the great work as- 
 signed in Providence to this life seems to have been 
 achieved. His herald task was performed. He had seen 
 the hour when he could say, "This is He of whom I said, 
 After me cometh a man which is preferred before me." 
 Publicly he had baptized to an infinitely more glorious 
 and eventful mission than his own that greater and 
 mightier Prophet. The way of the Lord had been pre- 
 pared. The forerunner had turned the attention of the 
 people to this illustrious advent. His final discourse had 
 weightier tidings for the world's ear than any he had pre- 
 viously pronounced, "Behold the Lamb of God which 
 taketh away the sin of the world." He could add nothing 
 more to that. It was time to hear another voice speak. 
 There came a revolution in the popular heart, and instead 
 of the eagerness to rush forth into the wilderness to see 
 that more than prophet, the new quest was, "Sirs, we 
 would see Jesus." Already it had been told to John by 
 some of his own half-zealous adherents and followers, 
 "Eabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to whom 
 thou bearest witness, behold the same baptizeth, and " 
 
JOHN'S FAILURE. 175 
 
 oh, hard trial to the natural heart "all men come unto 
 him." Not thrice, nor twice, has there been in all the 
 annals of humanity a nobler victory over self than the 
 answer of John evinces, "A man can receive nothing ex- 
 cept it be given him from heaven. Ye yourselves bear 
 me witness that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am 
 sent before him. He that hath the bride is the bride- 
 groom. But the friend of the bridegroom which standeth 
 and heareth him rejoiceth greatly because of the bride- 
 groom's voice. This, my joy, therefore, is fulfilled," and 
 he adds, without one rebellious thought, his self-triumph 
 moving us almost as deeply as that of Abraham before 
 the altar of Mount Moriah, words that poor human nature 
 finds it hard to speak calmly, but with the same great joy 
 on his face, "He must increase, but I must decrease." It 
 was not an incomplete life pausing where it did. As 
 truly as Paul the aged after him, could this youthful hero 
 sing, " I have fought the good fight, I have finished my 
 course, I have kept the faith." His work was done and 
 well done. His crown was won. Herod's hand placed 
 it on his head. His doctrines remain. His utterance 
 sounds down to us. What it is to prepare the way of the 
 Lord, what preaching it is that rouses and changes men, 
 he has taught us. A finished, consummated life, nothing 
 fragmentary, no failure here. "We are wrong to measure 
 success by outward and visible results. The true meas- 
 ure of success is in one word, FIDELITY. When laurels 
 are distributed by God's hand to the victors of earthly 
 warfare and struggle, the eulogy of the divine lips does 
 not recount the trophies of that valor, more or less in 
 
176 JOHN'S FAILURE. 
 
 number, w Thou hast been faithful in few things, I will 
 make thee ruler over many. Enter into the joy." It is not, 
 " Thou hast been successful, thou hast been popular, thou 
 hast drawn crowds of followers and disciples after thee," 
 but simply, " Thou hast been faithful." The world says, 
 perhaps, of some obscure laborer, if indeed she speak of 
 him at all, w This man has toiled in vain." The Church may 
 ask, if she will, "Whom has he converted?" The year 
 books shall bear record that others have made and bap- 
 tized more disciples than he. Against ill-success, against 
 discouragement and false judgment, he may have wrought 
 all his life, and seemingly at last succumbed to the diffi- 
 culties and impracticabilities of his position, and the first 
 cheering word he has ever heard may come to him when 
 God beckons him across the river and greets him with, 
 " Well done, good and faithful servant." But we should 
 omit perhaps the grandest refutation of the idea that the 
 life of John was a failure, if we should neglect to notice 
 the power of it for evermore as a kindling and inspiring 
 example. Ah, there stood a hero. There was no blanch- 
 ing in him. So should truth front wrong, his example 
 declares. It should dare first to speak, then to seal its 
 testimony with blood. For us he was constant, faithful 
 and fearless. It did not conquer Herod, but it has waked 
 and kept on fire the martyr spirit in other lives all down 
 the lapsing ages. It has rallied steadiness and endur- 
 ance ; it has animated Christian boldness and courage 
 since, in hearts no man can number. When the pinch 
 comes, the sight of one resolute face, one form that 
 quails not, puts manhood into a thousand breasts. Men 
 
JOHN'S FAILURE. 177 
 
 have looked back to John in many a crisis of hard-fought 
 fields and dubious days. There he stands, between the 
 prison and the headman's axe on the one side, and inces- 
 tuous Herod on the other. He seems to see neither 
 prison nor axe. God above and duty before him are all 
 he sees, and he wavers not for one uncertain moment. 
 We catch his spirit. We copy his deed. We see him in 
 the same line with later and earlier conquerors. This 
 side of him, Peter dauntlessly saying, "Whether it be 
 right in the sight of God to hearken unto you, more 
 than unto God, judge ye." Beyond, far up the ages, is 
 Daniel, with one window of his chamber looking out to- 
 ward Jerusalem, the other toward the den of lions, and 
 the voice of prayer rising from his kneeling form. Had 
 Peter died then and there as he stood, had the lions had 
 the mastery of the young Jewish prince, doubtless illus- 
 trious and kindling would their example have been. It 
 were not, well to have earthly deliverers attend always 
 upon Christian heroism. That would mix an earthly ele- 
 ment with the triumph of faith. Let some of these con- 
 querors pay the penalty of their faithfulness, refusing 
 deliverance. So shall their championship of truth and 
 right be a purer and more unquestionable witness to an 
 inward power sustaining them against nature's weakness. 
 Sometimes we have in current earthly histories exam- 
 ples on the field of strife of so-called failures, worth 
 more as quickeners to valor and helps to a soldier's vir- 
 tue than most brilliant successes. Such was the scene in 
 the late Crimean War when, on a dull October morning, 
 thirty thousand Kussians appeared over the hills of Bala- 
 
178 
 
 klava, in the rear of the allied armies of France and Eng- 
 land, and swept the feebly-defended Turkish redoubts 
 crowning the heights. Retiring then a little to choose 
 their ground, plant their batteries, and reform their army, 
 they seemed to be making preparations to bear off the cap- 
 tured cannon of the allies. A somewhat confused order 
 was given from the English commander-in-chief, confused- 
 ly transmitted and confusedly interpreted, for the cavalry 
 to advance and frustrate the enemy's design. The effect 
 of the order thus understood was the world famous charge 
 of the Light Brigade, that hurled a little band of gallant 
 gentlemen against an army of horse, foot, and artillery in 
 the chosen position. Surprised at the order, misgiving 
 alone, unsupported, but lending their hearts to the work, 
 they rode through grape and shell, trampling under feet 
 a cloud of skirmishers, right over the fatal battery, cut- 
 ting through a mass of five thousand Russian cavalry, and 
 turning on their course, each man matched against a host, 
 pierced by lance-thrusts, hacked by sword-cuts, and rid- 
 dled by bullets, regained the camp by twos and threes, 
 riding out six hundred and seventy strong, returning with 
 scarce two hundred saddles filled. A waste of heroic life 
 and gallant blood we say. And yet it struck a chill 
 through Russian hearts, and bannered every English war- 
 rior in every succeeding fight. It taught lessons of the 
 soldier's obedience, the soldier's loyalty, and the soldier's 
 truth which the wars of centuries and a hundred gazetted 
 triumphs could not teach so well. It stirs the warm 
 blood in a soldier's bosom, more than the general's word 
 or the bugle's note. The memory of it will be the pride 
 
JOHN'S FAILURE. 179 
 
 of the English soldier, and fire and sustain his noblest 
 daring, so long as men shall learn the art of war. There 
 is to-day no aristocracy so peerless, no order of nobility 
 so illustrious, among all England's titled ranks, as that 
 little surviving company, concerning which men say as 
 they point out a solitary passer-by, " There goes one of the 
 'Light Brigade.'" There is no victory on all the plains 
 which English blood has moistened the island bards shall 
 love so well to sing, the plumed cohorts shall boast with 
 so generous an emulation, as this wasteful, useless, un- 
 equalled charge. 
 
 " "When can their glory fade ? 
 Oh, the wild charge they made ! 
 
 All the world wondered. 
 Honor the charge they made, 
 Honor the Light Brigade, 
 
 Noble six hundred." 
 
 No, my friends. 
 
 Nothing that is true to honor and courage and fidelity, 
 nothing heroic and self-devoted, is ever in vain. The 
 hearts of Christ's warriors on earth shall ever feel the 
 thrill of brave blood at the name of John ; the bards of 
 Heaven shall celebrate his failure as one of the grandest 
 victories of God's human champions. Young men, breth- 
 ren, fellow- workers, go and do ye likewise. If you stand 
 for a truth, a principle, a sample of conscience, a price of 
 morality too high and pure for your associates to appre- 
 ciate ; if in any of these issues you stand alone ; if for 
 your persistent virtue the narrowing circle of neglect and 
 want shut in about you like prison walls ; if well-meaning 
 
180 JOHN'S FAILURE. 
 
 friends chide your too fastidious conscientiousness ; if 
 you fail to carry your principle by the acclamation of 
 majorities, and find that you must suffer for it instead in 
 a minority of one ; if you are moved to give your young 
 life to the country that calls now for all her valiant sons, 
 and the thought of finishing your career so soon, on some 
 fatal field day, instead of living on in serene tranquillity 
 and amid household ties to a late old age, wrestles with 
 your spirit, look back again to that lonely prisoner, that 
 heroic youthful preacher and confessor, done to death for 
 his faithfulness, and accept your lot, listening the while 
 to this watchword from overhead, w Be thou faithful unto 
 death, and I will give thee a crown of life." 
 
XII. 
 
 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 .... THERE IS A FRIEND THAT STICKETH CLOSER THAN A BROTHER. 
 
 Prov. xviii. 24. 
 
 WE speak a very tender and sacred word when we 
 call one our "brother." But a brother may not be 
 a friend. All the household ties may be complete upon 
 a heart that yet feels that it has not one friend. The in- 
 timacies of the home may be coupled together, leaving 
 this heart unmated. And where love is not denied, the 
 love that is rendered us in the natural ties scarce seems 
 to us the tribute of the free heart. It is mixed with in- 
 stinct. It comes not so much as a matter of choice, 
 because the eye has seen and the heart has felt a charm 
 that cannot be resisted, but as a matter of natural instinc- 
 tive prompting, quickened by common blood, strength- 
 ened by common interest. 
 
 It may not be a personal homage when those who are 
 cradled together are found content with one another's so- 
 ciety. Nature has joined them rather than elective affec- 
 tion. The fellowship is close often rather by force of 
 habit than by clinging tenderness and mutual sympathy. 
 
 The heart wants more than this. It wants one upon 
 16 
 
182 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 whom it can bestow its love and esteem, to whom it can 
 impart all its confidence, and from whom it can receive 
 the same, as a voluntary offering, the expression of a 
 good will which it has won not by blood, but by its own 
 qualities, not the dictate of nature, but the full, free 
 choice of the heart. 
 
 Sometimes this want is supplied within the circle of 
 the home, not as the fruit of nature, but above nature. 
 More frequently, perhaps, I had almost said more nat- 
 urally, this intimate friendship is with one outside the 
 home, the soul exercising its liberty, finding its happi- 
 ness in giving without the constraint of nature, and crav- 
 ing in return that which is spontaneous and uncon- 
 strained. It would love and trust, not of debt, but of 
 free will. 
 
 Give me a friend. I am not myself till I have a 
 friend. My nature is locked up ; my friend has the key. 
 Till he open, how can I know, how can another know, 
 what my heart is capable of? I am restricted, stifled, 
 suppressed. I do not grow up and out to the light and 
 the air. I do not think my own thoughts, nor speak my 
 own language, nor warm into true, loving, and genuine 
 confidence till my friend come. If I have no friend, I 
 shall be likely to remain unexpressed, and so to be less 
 and less what I might be. My friend carries my devel- 
 opment beyond all my old consciousness of capacity. 
 What does a stranger or a mere acquaintance do for 
 my truer self? He takes a careless greeting, a light 
 courtesy, a civil word, a touch of my listless hand. Is 
 this all I have to give ? Is this all I am ? 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 183 
 
 "What a transformation one hour of intercourse with a 
 friend effects ; how my heart opens ; how I venture down 
 for its deepest mysteries, and lead them up to day ; how 
 I dismiss the shyness that kept the sanctuaries of my soul 
 veiled ; how the soul itself walks forth like Adam in the 
 garden, unrobed but not afraid, meeting in the paradise 
 of friendship no eye that brings a blush ; how I speak 
 what my lips never uttered before ; how I feel what my 
 heart never felt before ; how the hidden fountains at this 
 breath of spring the rigid frost all dissolved well up 
 and pour forth their fresh, unchecked streams ; how my 
 nature revels in this genial clime, whose brightness is the 
 face of my friend ! Is this myself? I knew it not. I 
 should never have known it but for this touch of friend- 
 ship's magic wand. It is not my old solitary self. 
 
 It is my occult, my begotten, my possible self, and I 
 come into actual and demonstrative being in this natal 
 hour. I was never fully born until now, and knew no 
 complete maternity till I knew the cherishing nurture of 
 friendship. 
 
 How much, then, do I need that friendship itself should 
 do for me? If I can put into speech all that my soul, in 
 its deepest asking, wants of a true friend, what shall I 
 plead for? 
 
 I want a friend that shall meet the craving of my heart 
 for a perfect loveliness and beauty. I cannot be satisfied 
 with loving fair and beautiful things that are inanimate. 
 The rose is perfectly beautiful in its way. My heart 
 springs toward the faultless arch and brilliant coloring 
 of the rainbow ; the wooded lake, far away from the 
 
184 FKIENDSHIP. 
 
 haunts of men, and un vexed by the intrusion of human 
 life, is quietly and exquisitely lovely. I admire these 
 charms of nature ; I stand fascinated with gazing upon 
 them; I pronounce their loveliness without a blemish, 
 but I am alone while with them. There is no tenderness 
 in my love, no warmth of sympathy in it ; there is no 
 exchange of soul. My taste is educated and refined, but 
 I have seen no face that answers back to mine. 
 
 I want an incarnate beauty, a loveliness living and 
 vocal, moving in the plane of intelligence, capable of ap- 
 preciating and reciprocating what I feel, so that I can love 
 and be loved after my kind. I want a being, a character, 
 a person, a soul, to whom I can say, " Thou," and who will 
 understand my offering when I lay down there all that I 
 have. And I want the fairness to be exceedingly fair, 
 the loveliness exceedingly lovely. I want to gaze and 
 gaze and see no blemish. We all have within us an ideal 
 of a grace and beauty that are faultless. Matching this 
 ideal and kindled by it, we have all of us an aspiration to 
 find and obtain this perfection, making the prize ours for- 
 ever. We are looking for it on every hand all our life 
 long, a nature all truth and purity and gentleness and 
 tenderness and benevolence and strength, with no false 
 thing, no harshness, no prejudice, no fickleness, no 
 weakness in it. Shall this ideal mock and elude us 
 always? We question each bright face of earthly kin- 
 dreds to see if it be there. We hold a moment each 
 hand that touches ours. Is this the ideal friend, constant, 
 loving, sympathetic, above all meanness, selfishness, de- 
 ceitfulness, and mutability? We listen to each tone that 
 
FKIENDSHIP. 185 
 
 falls upon our ear, if haply that one true heart still 
 searched for spoke there. Where we give our love and 
 confidence, it is as much our ideal we love and trust as 
 anything real which our eyes have discerned, often more. 
 We think we are looking upon the real when we have only 
 projected out our ideal and flung its charm over the 
 object of our gaze. And the disappointments of life 
 come often from the growing perception that the real fails 
 to coincide with what we thought we saw and were about 
 to possess. Indeed, we have learned, most of us by expe- 
 rience, even the most favored of us, that in the real we 
 must subtract more or less largely from the ideal, consent 
 to imperfection, find our best friends and truest not all 
 that we thought them, at least, not all that we could con- 
 ceive, come upon qualities or limitations of qualities that 
 demand our forbearance, even as we must ask, for our- 
 selves, from them, large forbearance in return. 
 
 This consciousness and discernment of mutual faults 
 makes our human friendships very tender and touching, 
 secures many sentiments in loving hearts, the exercise of 
 which would otherwise have found no place, sentiments 
 of generosity, carefulness, forgiveness, and charity, 
 but it denies to us forever our ideal. That perfect image 
 unmated anywhere, finding amid all varieties of human 
 life no mirror for its fairness and symmetry, comes back 
 to our hearts, like Noah's weary dove to the ark, and 
 hides within the chamber of our soul. We gaze upon it 
 still, but it is only an image. We refresh ourselves by 
 the contemplation of its surpassing attractions, but it is a 
 picture, and no more. Is there no original for this pic- 
 16* 
 
186 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 ture? Shall we never behold this image realized and 
 vitalized? Shall this hunger for a perfect loveliness 
 nowhere and never be satisfied ? Is it merely an internal 
 aspiration, a standard which our own soul has set up, and 
 is it to help us only as an educating ideal, but never to 
 gladden and enrich us as something with which we can 
 make a close and satisfying alliance ? 
 
 Let us rest this question here, unanswered, for the mo- 
 ment, and pass on. 
 
 We want again, as a natural and inalienable demand of 
 the heart, a friendship that shall draw out our whole 
 capacity of loving. The heart delights to give love, to 
 go on giving so long as there is no check, to feel that it 
 can give without restraint or limitation. But suppose it 
 presently find that where it has begun to bestow love, 
 it cannot love there any more ardently; that it has ex- 
 hausted or outrun the attractive power ; that it is like a 
 forest tree growing in a box in a greenhouse, its roots 
 hemmed in and confined by that narrow crib, and its 
 boughs met soon by the low roof and clipped to that dwarf- 
 ish standard, roots that would pierce the earth for many 
 a rod, seeking deep springs of remote watercourses, 
 boughs that would rise into the mid-air and toss with a 
 giant's strength in dalliance with the full gales of heaven. 
 Suppose the heart awake to this consciousness that it has 
 given to its friendships all that those friendships can com- 
 mand, and has yet an indefinite capacity for loving unem- 
 ployed ; that it could give more love and yet more, but 
 cannot give more to these objects, outreaching and over- 
 growing them as a luxuriant vine outtops and overruns a 
 
FKIENDSHIP. 187 
 
 low and scanty trellis ; what, then, shall comfort and por- 
 tion it ? What shall it do with this superfluous capacity 
 of loving ? Is it superfluous ? What was it given for in 
 such excess ? Shall this fountained fulness find no outlet, 
 and for want of channels set back and stagnate and breed 
 the malaria of ceaseless discontent, a perpetually chafing 
 restraint. When the heart questions, as it must if it 
 make no positive discoveries, if it were willing to love on 
 blindly ; when it questions, as at times it cannot avoid 
 doing, the wisdom of bestowing such vast affection upon 
 the frail, perishable, and imperfect objects of earth, and 
 the still outreaching vine seek something loftier and 
 larger to climb and spread upon, that it may show what a 
 vigor of life and productiveness is in it, shall it forever 
 droop unsupported to the ground, and plead with all its 
 vacant tendrils in vain? 
 
 We want, again, a friendship that can enrich us indefi- 
 nitely. This is not a selfish desire so much as a noble 
 aspiration. Being incomplete in ourselves, we seek to 
 draw completeness from our friend. He must have what 
 we have not. He must not fall below what we have. If 
 he be poorer and weaker in everything than we are, he 
 will not help us up, but will drag us down. If we choose 
 as our friend one whom we can contain and measure on 
 every side, we shall either some day despise him or shall 
 sink content to his level, wronging our own more vigor- 
 ous soul. He that chooses wisely chooses where he 
 will have gain of something that he lacks. A true friend- 
 ship should be mutually improving. We also may give, 
 though we acquire. We may have something to impart 
 
188 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 where we have much to receive in this interchange of 
 bounty. We want a friend, therefore, whom we cannot 
 exhaust in a day or a season, one in whom we can 
 make new discoveries of wisdom and of worth every day, 
 one who has something beyond still in every disclosure he 
 makes to us of his thought and of his heart, one whom 
 we can never fully read as we peruse a printed volume, 
 coming at last to the end and saying, " I have finished," 
 as we close it and lay it down. We want to feel that he 
 gives us richly of his abundance, and that, had our 
 want been greater, he could have given more, or that 
 he gives all, and yet could give again, as a cloud empties 
 itself, and passes, and returning on a changed current, 
 pours a fresh deluge down. 
 
 But while we desire thus a superior for our friend, 
 we want one who cannot despise us, one whose wisdom, 
 where he is wise and we are ignorant, will bear with our 
 ignorance ; whose strength, where he is strong and we are 
 weak, will bear with our weakness ; whose address, where 
 we are untutored, will guide and teach without humiliat- 
 ing us. We want to feel it safe safe for our self-re- 
 spect to show him our deficiencies, that he may supple- 
 ment them, and yet not look down upon us. We have 
 even a longing to show not only our weakness, but our 
 corruption, to confess that we have moral diseases at 
 heart, to beseech that we be not better thought of than 
 we deserve. We may indeed exercise modesty and hu- 
 mility in our earthly friendships, but we cannot show 
 there the evil imaginations that haunt us, lest we sully our 
 friend's purity too. Were there one to whom even this 
 
infirmity might be disclosed and our soul have help, and 
 yet our place be secure in his esteem and affection, oh, 
 what a friend were that ! 
 
 We want in a friend quick perception and intelligent 
 sympathy. He must not stride in with rude and blun- 
 dering steps among our delicate sensibilities. His offers 
 of help must not be in a voice that jars upon our hear- 
 ing when we are sensitive. He must understand us, not 
 after long and reiterated and wearisome explanation of 
 our feelings, he must understand us instinctively, read 
 our mood at a glance, penetrate to our trouble or our 
 joy with one diving look, adapt himself to the changes 
 of temperature beneath the sky of our soul without too 
 keenly feeling himself the variations of climate, know 
 how, in one word, to rejoice with us when we rejoice, 
 and to weep with us when we weep. 
 
 We want one, and here is where our quest among our 
 human kindred utterly fails, who can come in upon that 
 region of interior loneliness, where we are so often weak 
 and desolate with none to help. 
 
 We have sorrows that we can never tell to any mortal 
 ear. Oh that there were one who could sit down and 
 hear the long sad tale and pity us and comfort us ! 
 
 We have burdens to bear to whose lifting we can call 
 in no human hand. Oh that there were one who could 
 come to us when we are bowed and our strength is spent, 
 and with friendly hand lift at those burdens or sustain us 
 as we falter beneath the load. 
 
 We have temptations pushing us hard in unseen con- 
 flicts, to whose withdrawn battle-fields we cannot invite 
 
190 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 any with whom we associate to repair, lest they also re- 
 ceive some wound that will be henceforth reproachful to 
 us. Ah, if we knew a friend who could be our champion 
 then, himself invulnerable, and his friendship unchang- 
 ing, not to be forfeited by such a fellowship in our strug- 
 gle with evil, what a note of triumph we could sing ! 
 
 When friends have counselled us and entreated us, and 
 shown us the way of safety and the path of honor, we 
 have still a remaining weakness in which they cannot 
 come to our aid, a weakness of will, an infirmity of pur- 
 pose, a wavering heart, a halting choice, which is often 
 fatal to our peace and welfare. Ah, if there were one 
 who could show us duty and counsel us to walk in it, 
 helping us to will and to do the unerring right, what a 
 friend were he in the crises of our life ! 
 
 When my frame is prostrate in sickness, when I cannot 
 lift my fainting head, nor scarce stretch out the right hand 
 of my strength, when it is too great a task to speak aloud, 
 or to frame question and answer for any who come to my 
 bedside, give me then a friend whom physician and nurse 
 can safely admit to my presence, who can salute me with- 
 out disquieting me, sit with me without imposing the 
 burden of his presence, whose presence itself is a benedic- 
 tion of rest and peace, who can interpret my feebly-mur- 
 muring lips without making me repeat my whispers, who 
 is calmly wakeful when other eyelids droop, who watches 
 as vigilantly and tenderly the pulses of my soul as the 
 physician those of my body, and gives me the sweet and 
 reposeful sense of being always cared for, the comforting 
 assurance that neglect is impossible, and I can bless the 
 painful captivity that shuts me up with such a friend. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 191 
 
 There will come some day a sickness that cannot be 
 healed, a hurt that is mortal. The final hour draws on. 
 My friends are about me. I see their love and sorrow. 
 I am setting out on a strange journey. Will any of that 
 weeping circle go with me? No, they are there to see 
 me off while they stay. They take my hand not to join 
 me as I depart, but only to say "Farewell." They bend 
 over me, not to whisper the sustaining pledge, "I will 
 never leave thee, nor forsake thee," but to breathe a last 
 "adieu." 
 
 As I enter the shadow of the dark portal, I see them 
 clustering together behind me, leaving me to go forward 
 alone. "Oh, my friends, desert me not now, walk a little 
 way with me on this fearful unknown road." But how- 
 ever anguished my appeal, not one of them passes to my 
 side to bear me company. They weep, but their feet re- 
 main rooted to the ground. To my outstretched hand 
 they extend theirs, but it is only to wave the parting 
 signal. 
 
 Must I tread that shadowy valley with no companion- 
 ship? Is there no rod, no staff, that can comfort me? 
 Not one of all that have loved me to whom I can then 
 say, "Thou art with me, I am not afraid " ? And when I 
 have gone down thus to the dark river, and have crossed 
 over, what do I know of the farther shore ? Must I land 
 a lonely stranger on that shore of eternity, that dim vast 
 shore, with no guide, no welcome, no kindred, no tie from 
 the past, that holds firm and strong, no familiar friendly 
 voice that shall make me feel at home ? 
 
 These are some of the thoughts and questionings of my 
 
192 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 heart when I muse upon the friendship I need, and as I 
 muse and question, I perceive more and more the diffi- 
 culty of securing such a friend. Oh, rare and precious 
 treasure that should fill this great want of my soul and 
 my life ! Where shall I find him? -Who is he? What 
 is his name, and where his home? 
 
 And I turn to read my Scripture again. " There is a 
 friend that sticketh closer than a brother." Does not 
 Solomon, mean more here than the failure of natural affec- 
 tion, and the exalting of real and abiding affection above 
 natural ties? Is he not writing more grandly than he 
 knows? Does he not hold a prophet's pen? Is he not 
 sketching a likeness, the original of which should come 
 afterward? Is he not publishing an unconscious testi- 
 mony which one who was to arise in the fulness of time 
 should take to himself? How is it that all hearts agree 
 that this ancient utterance fits now but one name of all 
 that have been spoken among men ? Jesus of Nazareth, 
 the Son of Mary, the Son of the Highest, the Friend of 
 man, is this "Friend that sticketh closer than a brother." 
 
 He is " fairer than the sons of men." I can find no spot 
 or blemish in him. In him is no excess and no deficiency. 
 All that I have ever conceived of innocence and purity 
 and goodness, of patience and gentleness and sincerity, 
 are realized in him who did no sin, neither was guile 
 found in his mouth. My ideal is met at last. 
 
 There I can love without qualification and restriction, 
 with no guilty sense of idolatrous extravagance. I can 
 expend my whole power of loving. My heart cannot en- 
 large itself beyond the attractiveness of this beloved ob- 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 193 
 
 ject. Love as I may, growing in loving capacity and 
 fulness through all immortality, I can never feel that I 
 have loved him enough. I only feel how mean, how poor 
 the offering of affection which I bring when compared 
 with his inexhaustible worth, and sing at last when my 
 one heart is emptied at his feet, 
 
 " Had I a thousand hearts to give, 
 Lord, they should all be thine." 
 
 And as I cannot overtop this attractive power by any 
 luxuriance of my heart's love, so neither can I exhaust 
 the fruitfuluess of that friendship for me. Successive 
 harvests may reduce the fertility of the soil ; the drought 
 may drink up river and lake ; but however much I draw 
 from the bounty of Jesus, from his love, his light, his 
 power, his faithfulness, I feel that there is an infinite ful- 
 ness left. These resources, and the kindness that makes 
 them mine, I cannot drain. 
 
 And pensioning my wants on this enriching friendship, 
 I never feel my relations to it degrading. I am never 
 despised, never reproached, never treated as a mere 
 hanger-on, a wearisome dependent. The more I ask of 
 this friendship, the more it gives, and the better it is 
 pleased, and there I may show all the indwelling corrup- 
 tion of my soul, and hear no word and catch no look that 
 puts me to shame. I may show it as freely as one with a 
 hidden cancer betrays the secret to a trusted physician, 
 receiving in return only an access of healing care. 
 
 Here I am understood. What I cannot express is 
 known. The sympathy of Jesus makes no mistakes. 
 17 
 
194 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Deeper than my consciousness is his insight into my 
 trouble, and his manner as gentle as his intelligence is 
 wise, soft words tenderly spoken, rest for weariness, 
 strength for weakness, comfort for sadness. 
 
 In the solitudes of my soul, where no human footstep 
 can tread, he is at home. I can find rio chamber so inte- 
 rior and secluded where a grief may hide from him, or a 
 wounded spirit lie tossing without his knowledge and 
 presence. The balm which no human hand could reach 
 me for my secret hurts his wounded hand brings in ; the 
 temptation, whose severity I could not make known to 
 any intimate of my earthly fellowships, he foils with his 
 ever-ready skill and power, for I am willing that he 
 should know, and he is more than willing to defend. 
 The weak and wavering will he steadies and rallies and 
 girds with conquering energy. 
 
 He makes all my bed for me in my sickness ; comes in 
 with a step that never jars ; exacts nothing of effort and 
 action, but only asks peaceful trust; excites no sensi- 
 tive nerves, but only calms both body and soul; keeps 
 unwearying vigils while he " giveth his beloved sleep ; " 
 makes every wakeful hour bright with his dear, comfort- 
 ing presence, so that the silent, dark night is a chamber 
 of radiant communion with him, and when my eyes ques- 
 tion him of the issue, lays his finger on his lip and smiles 
 till I am satisfied. 
 
 And on that lone, last journey, when friend and lover 
 and brother retire from me, he gathers my arm in his, he 
 leads me on through the darkness. I feel no weight of 
 the sable gloom. I feel no fright at unseen awful terrors. 
 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 195 
 
 I ain with him, and a dawning light paves soon my ad- 
 vancing path, and I see a pearly gate, and I enter a gol- 
 den street, and my Guide and Friend presents me fault- 
 less before the presence of the excellent glory. 
 
 Is not this the friendship we want ? Can we live with- 
 out it ? Can we die without it ? If it were offered, could 
 any heart that was not mad reject it ? 
 
 They gave him his name of old, scornful lips, but 
 they spoke the truth, "Friend of publicans and sinners." 
 He stands near us now and makes his gentle overture, 
 "Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you." 
 
 Will you have his friendship? Will you sacrifice 
 everything else to make him your friend ? 
 
 Take this hymn of trust and make it yours : 
 
 holy Saviour, Friend unseen, 
 Since on thine arm thou bidst me lean, 
 Help me, throughout life's changing scene, 
 By faith to cling to thee! 
 
 Blest with this fellowship divine, 
 Take what thou wilt; I'll not repine; 
 For as the branches to the vine 
 My soul would cling to thee. 
 
 Though far from home, fatigued, oppressed, 
 Here have I found a place of rest, 
 An exile still, yet not unblest, 
 Because I cling to thee. 
 
 What though the world deceitful prove, 
 And earthly friends and hopes remove; 
 With patient, uncomplaining love 
 Still would I cling to thee. 
 
196 
 
 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Though oft I seem to tread alone 
 Life's weary waste, with thorns o'ergrown, 
 Thy voice of love, in gentlest tone, 
 Still whispers, " Cling to me ! " 
 
 Though faith and hope are often tried, 
 I ask not, need not aught beside; 
 So safe, so calm, so satisfied, 
 
 The soul that clings to thee!" 
 
XIII. 
 
 FAITH'S VENTUKES. 
 
 BY FAITH ABRAHAM, WHEN HE WAS CALLED TO GO OUT INTO A PLACE 
 WHICH HE SHOULD AFTER RECEIVE FOR AN INHERITANCE, OBEYED; AND 
 HE WENT OUT, NOT KNOWING WHITHER HE WENT. Heb. XI. 8. 
 
 IT was a sublime venture in the strength of which 
 Abraham went forth from Ur of the Chaldees in 
 search of a strange land to be shown him of God. No 
 geography of that unknown country lay before his eye. 
 All the map he had of it was this misty sketch, without 
 features or outlines, in the divine promise, "A land that 
 I will shew thee," His home was in the rich, alluvial 
 pastures of the lower Euphrates. That was his country, 
 the place of his nativity, the place of his kindred and of 
 his father's house. All the pleasantest and all the 
 strongest ties of his life held him fast to that spot. 
 Ancestral associations made the place sacred to his heart. 
 There he himself had lived till he was now seventy-five 
 years old. He was not a young man, standing alone, 
 just beginning the world, and free to strike out whither 
 he would in search of good successes ; he was a man of 
 family, with wife and aged father and youthful orphan 
 nephew and a considerable household attached to his 
 17* 
 
198 
 
 FAITH'S VENTURES. 
 
 movements and sharing his fortunes. The Canaan to- 
 ward which the heavenly call bade him journey was at 
 least four hundred miles away. All between was a path- 
 less wilderness ; there was no public road along which he 
 might take his domestic tribe, following securely in the 
 track of travellers who had gone before him. Swift 
 streams unbridged, mountain chains with passes unex- 
 plored, secluded valleys, the hiding-place of robber bands, 
 and the horrors of desert-life were certain perils to be 
 encountered. And what precisely should be the reward ? 
 Something large, but vague. 
 
 But Abraham's faith was equal to the test. Ah, he 
 had the strong, sweet comfort of a sure call from God. 
 He knew what voice had spoken to him. There was no 
 doubt about the word of command. That was audibly 
 divine. And he so believed the Promiser that it was 
 easy for him against all dissuasives to obey, or, if not 
 easy, that great faith won the victory. 
 
 I think it was well for Abraham that that call was 
 to an unknown future. It would have been a tougher 
 strain upon his faith if he had seen what was to be 
 written of him in the years to come. Doubtless he 
 would still have triumphed, but it would have been after 
 a sharper conflict. The promise that leads him out is 
 this: "I will make of thee a great nation." When he 
 arrives in Canaan, a stranger amid its powerful and pop- 
 ulous tribes, the covenanted blessing in its repetition 
 seems to recede. " Unto thy seed will I give this land." 
 He flits about from mountain to mountain and vale to 
 vale, building an altar here and another there, but not 
 
FAITH'S VENTURES. 199 
 
 settling or pausing by any of them, moving southward, a 
 pilgrim from day to day without a home, and presently 
 driven quite out of the country by a grievous famine. 
 Is this the goodly country, the land flowing with milk 
 and honey ? From the pursuing jaws of the famine he 
 hastens down into Egypt, and is soon in trouble with the 
 court and the king, and in peril of his life. Then back 
 again into flie south of Palestine, in trouble on ac- 
 count of Lot, from the invasion of hostile kings, in 
 trouble in his own family, in trouble for the doomed 
 cities of the plain, in further and stranger trials of faith, 
 and dying at last with nothing of all that splendid inheri- 
 tance his own but a tomb, which he had bought with his 
 own money, in which lay his dead wife, Sarah, and in 
 which he himself, but for that one field still a landless 
 exile, was buried at her side. Truly he went out not 
 knowing whither he went, and not imagining. Among 
 all the pictures which, under the inspiration of his faith, 
 he drew of the future, probably not one of those hard re- 
 alities was sketched. 
 
 And this has been, ever since the peculiarity of our 
 earthly trial, the one record of every man's story. He is 
 called of God at each stage of his way to go forth, he 
 knoweth not whither. The call he hears, but what it 
 leads to he cannot foretell. The consummation he may 
 feel sure of; but the method, the process, the path that 
 lies between, even the nature of the prize he is to touch, 
 described in material terms and as though close at hand, 
 but changing for possession perhaps to some remote spir- 
 itual interpretation, all this is hidden from him, an 
 
200 FAITH'S VENTURES. 
 
 enigma which only the future itself can solve. Each 
 morning of our life, each fresh enterprise for a day or for 
 an hour upon which we embark, is a call to us to enter 
 into the unknown, by simple faith in Qod. 
 
 I wish to dwell upon the influence of this peculiar fea- 
 ture in our earthly trial, this venturing of faith upon 
 the unknown that lies outward from the present. 
 
 It is, in the first place, no dissuasive from going for- 
 ward. Every man has it to say as the light of morning 
 flashes under his opening eyelids, "I know not what the 
 day will bring forth. It may have some great disaster 
 in store for me. As I go out into the street I may en- 
 counter some shock of violence that shall shake the very 
 citadel of my life, my wareroom and all that it con- 
 tains may be shattered into wreck; the day's business, de- 
 spite my best sagacity, may prove the most unfortunate 
 stroke of industry my hands ever delivered. It is all un- 
 certain. My whole labor may be vain and worse than vain." 
 This is not the mere musing of a hypochondriac. It is 
 all the soberest truth. Shall this man, therefore, add, "I 
 cannot take a step amid such hazards. I cannot go for- 
 ward till the mist clears up. This walking I know not 
 whither is too rash. I will not rise. I will keep my pil- 
 low. I will adventure nothing because I cannot see the 
 end I " Would you commend him for his wisdom and 
 prudence in such a decision? Would you not bid him 
 shake off both his fears and his sloth and, taking an in- 
 spiring draught of faith, gird himself for his clay's journey 
 and his day's work ! Shall the husbandman, because he 
 knows not what floods or drought or blight may come 
 
FAITH'S VENTURES. 201 
 
 upon his fields with the season's progress, refuse in the 
 young summer to plough and sow, lest there should be, 
 after all, no harvest for him. Shall there be no enterprise 
 of pith and moment undertaken because the issue lies 
 hidden under a cloud ? Shall our ignorance of the future 
 paralyze all our diligence, and will none but the headlong 
 and desperate venture to plunge forward into the dark ? 
 Faith never" gives such counsel, nor worldly wisdom, 
 borrowing her lamp for the darkness of the way. Faith 
 says, "Go forward!" She tells us, "God knows what 
 is coming," and he bids us be up and doing. His eyes 
 survey all that is hid from us, and ours can look into his. 
 It is enough that he is not blind, and cannot be taken by 
 surprise. From shore to shore the wide, dim sea lies 
 level to his gaze, and he calls to us to sail on. There are 
 storms ahead, and sunken rocks, and fugitive icebergs, 
 and ships steering to meet us in our own track, and red- 
 handed pirates, and hungry swarms from foundering ves- 
 sels, and ten thousand other nameless perils of the deep. 
 Yes, all these possibly. But there is God overhead, 
 observing all, controlling all, guiding all. That is enough 
 for faith. And as to the matter of prudence, why, our 
 dangers do not come exclusively from motion. Sittino- 
 still may keep us in the very focus of harm. The flames 
 may wrap the house from which we refuse to go out, the 
 bed from which we refuse to rise. There is no work of 
 life on which we do not proceed without knowing whither ; 
 but the believing heart simply says, " God knows," and 
 moves cheerfully and trustfully forward. 
 
 Again. The unknown of faith's heritage saves our 
 
202 
 
 weakness from being crushed. We can bear our griefs 
 and disappointments, by God's help as they come upon 
 us, one by one. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil 
 thereof," sufficient for our strength, sufficient for our 
 knowledge. And only one day's evil can in the present 
 divine arrangement come upon us between the rising and 
 the setting sun. But God has not made us strong enough 
 to take upon our hearts in one burden all the evil of life. 
 That vision would quite break us down. Suppose in en- 
 tering upon the family relation we saw at one straight 
 glance forward all the trials that are to wear our strength 
 and make our hearts bleed, the pain and grief of little 
 children, their wrestling with strong diseases, anxious 
 days and sleepless nights on their behalf, the dimming eye 
 and whitening face of one and another, and the dreary 
 hush as they fall asleep, the heavy solicitude that comes 
 later when the problems of their character and destiny 
 are waiting solution, the sharp anguish of praying for 
 them in their times of temptation what seem to us un- 
 answered prayers. All the changes of that coming and 
 unwritten family story, its migration from scene to scene 
 and home to home, its struggles in dark days when want 
 is doorkeeper of the house, the infirmities of human tem- 
 per that sometimes darken its interior lights, the perplex- 
 ing questions it is to stagger under for burdened months 
 before responsibility sees an open path of duty, we could 
 not go to the bridal hour with so bright a face and light a 
 heart as now. We should turn pale with dread and mis- 
 giving, and ask ourselves doubtfully whether we should 
 be found sufficient for such a future. And yet who of us 
 
FAITHS VENTURES. 203 
 
 in looking back over such a record would wish he had 
 
 o 
 
 otherwise chosen? Gathering in one all our sicknesses, 
 all our labors, all our sorrows, all our defeats, wringing 
 all life's bitterness into a single cup, and offering that cup 
 to our lips to be taken at one draught, who could lift his 
 hand to that cup and welcome that draught to his palate ? 
 That would make a Gethsemane darker than nature's mid- 
 night. Whatever the alternative were, we should be 
 tempted to plead, "Let this cup pass from me!" It is 
 better that we go forth not knowing what lies before us. 
 
 Again. The unknown to which faith leads us out 
 stimulates hope and aspiration. If we were not quick- 
 ened by the view of grand possibilities, there is little we 
 should attempt. Cold, absolute, certain knowledge would 
 be the blight of hope, the death of aspiration. We do 
 not know the future, but we can paint it. Give us our 
 colors and our brush, and stretch the canvas for us, and 
 move our easel near. Our way is to be onward along 
 sunny vales, by pleasant river banks, through gardens of 
 delights, with richest fruitage hanging low to desire, and 
 all hearts that beat in contact with our own -catching 
 strength and joy from ours. You need not tell us that 
 this is a fancy sketch. For once it may come true. Say 
 not that scenes as fair have been painted before, but have 
 been uniformly overlaid by more sombre hues of reality ; 
 we are going to the unknown, and the unknown may be 
 even more radiant than our vision. Other men's lives in 
 the past have failed of their ideal, but ours may come 
 nearer. We see where they mistook ; we shall avoid their 
 errors, and achieve the success they missed. The flight 
 
204 FAITH'S VENTURES. 
 
 of other men's hope has been amid cold clouds, pelted by 
 storms, beaten down by the great rain and hail, and has 
 come fluttering and out-wearied to the ground, but our 
 eagle will spread a more soaring pinion, and ride the 
 tempest with a stronger stroke, and hold his steep way 
 straight on for the sun. There are better prizes than hu- 
 man hands have gathered ; we may reach them, loftier 
 heights than human . feet have trodden ; we may stand 
 upon them. Many a gallant ship has struck in the 
 voyage ; ours shall come into the harbor. It may be the 
 divine will that the successes denied to those who have 
 gone before us shall crown our endeavors. Our friend- 
 ships shall prove more constant and prosperous than 
 those of which we have read. From our bridal altar a 
 pleasant highway shall lie onward amid bloom and ver- 
 dure unfading. Ah, what may not God purpose for us 
 of triumph and enjoyment? Faith takes hold of his 
 whole power and goodness. The unknown is what is 
 possible to him. Believingly, hopingly, faith-inspired, we 
 go forward, not knowing whither or to what, but dreaming 
 of the brightest. 
 
 And then again, going thus in faith to meet the un- 
 known, we are saved from the bitterness of disappoint- 
 ment. The particular hopes we have cherished may miss 
 of their fulfilment. But, then, we did not stand upon 
 hope, but upon faith, and that rock is steadfast still ; that 
 never moves. Our bright dreams fade out one by one, 
 but God does not change. Our ignorance, in which we 
 drew pictures, has not affected his wisdom. The real 
 ground of comfort and of confidence has not yielded by 
 
FAITH'S VENTURES. 205 
 
 one particle. He has brought to pass what he would. 
 It is not what we expected, but it is what he saw to be 
 best, and therefore it is best. It is better than the gay, 
 flimsy pattern our pencil sketched. It has undiscovered 
 connections with a richer and greater good than we have 
 seen. These trying events, so different from what we 
 had hoped for, are not final ends of God's dealing. They 
 reach forward into a future still unrevealed and worthy of 
 our most ardent aspiring. They are parts, humble parts 
 or costly parts, of a whole, which no eye but God's has 
 yet seen, and whose majesty and grandeur will fill the 
 soul when we apprehend them with infinite content. 
 You cannot convince us that failures are what they seem. 
 They are simply such uses as the great Designer chose to 
 make of us and our working for a scheme that cannot fail. 
 Faith's unknown is capacious enough to hold within its 
 globed sphere such issues of the divine beneficence, such 
 rewards for hoping, believing, and toiling, as shall make 
 all our anguish in journeying toward them a forgotten 
 travail in the joy of their new birth. In this view disap- 
 pointment has no deep sting to wound and rankle in our 
 souls. It is only in faith's rendering a correction of our 
 misconception as to the methods by which God will reach 
 through us his full, transcendent ends. 
 
 The effect of this arrangement upon character is one of 
 its most peculiar and most precious influences. If at the 
 outset of our way, at the threshold of every new enter- 
 prise, we could climb some height from which all the com- 
 ing road were visible, the long reaches to be traversed, 
 the hills to be climbed, the streams to be forded, the 
 
 18 
 
 sZ&S 
 
206 FAITH'S VENTURES. 
 
 sharp angles to be turned, the dark ravines to be thread- 
 ed, from which also the distant end lay full in view, it 
 would be natural for us to keep our eye upon that revela- 
 tion. At every forward step we should recall that map 
 of the road, and measure our progress and graduate our 
 expectation by what we could retain of that vision of the 
 whole journey. We should be looking steadily and 
 sharply for the features and way-marks of the road which 
 had impressed themselves most deeply upon our minds. 
 We should thus walk by sight, and make our eyes our 
 guide. But now, as we turn our eyes forward, there 
 hangs before us the thick, impervious veil that separates 
 us from the unknown. We can look back and gather the 
 record of the past, and listen to the voices of experience. 
 But as to coming events, we can only look up. There is 
 but one Being who sees the end from the beginning. For 
 our comfort and guidance, he offers us, in our weakness 
 and ignorance, the alliance of his perfect knowledge, his 
 infinite wisdom, his overcoming strength. We are taught 
 thus to walk by faith. We cannot see, but we can trust 
 him. We know not the road, but we can follow him. 
 We cannot tell what is coming, but we can look to him to 
 prepare us for all. The road forks, and we are utterly at 
 a loss which hand to take ; we peer into either opening, 
 but the unrevealing mist lies thick on both ; we can only 
 watch our Father's face, and lift our hand to touch his, and 
 wait the intimation of his choice. These necessities keep 
 us near him, awake our concern at anything that divides 
 us from his presence, and hold us in suppliant and de- 
 pendent intimacy with him. 
 
FAITHS VENTURES. 207 
 
 If a promised blessing, some expected reward, seem 
 to recede as we advance, we study the promise more 
 deeply, we find new capacities of meaning in its terms, 
 we get glimpses of some better thing than that which we 
 thought so near at hand, and look forward to a grander 
 consummation than our life histories had ever dared to 
 hope for. If that which we dimly saw, and supposed just 
 before us, is yet afar off in some untravelled remoteness, 
 like a mountain peak, which at dawn of day we thought 
 we should reach ere noon, but find even as the day wanes 
 that it seems as far away as ever, what a majestic pile 
 must it be, to keep itself so along above the horizon, and 
 send forward its kingly salutation to such distant travel- 
 lers ! 
 
 We have a Canaan in pledge and in prospect. We 
 travel on toward its border. Our feet are on its soil. 
 The land we touch is called Canaan, but it does not seem 
 our land of promise. It has sweet vales and goodly hills, 
 its vines are fruitful, and butter and honey flow down its 
 rocky shelves, but we are not put in possession. We are 
 a hungered and unportioned still, and must journey on. 
 Why, then, our Canaan is still beyond and before us, and 
 its vales must be fairer than these, and its hills greener, 
 and some goodlier Lebanon lift its white crown above it, 
 and clusters richer than those of Eshcol be ripening for 
 our coming. We are looking for a home and a rest, for 
 the soul is sure " a rest remaineth ; " that cannot fail us. 
 And we have come, we think, upon our sweet possession. 
 Now, soul, be comforted, and, heart, be at peace. Now let 
 the dear, strong ties of kindred, manifold bands of love 
 
208 FAITH'S VENTURES. 
 
 and sympathy, gather upon us, fasten their clasping coils* 
 around body and soul, intertwine their thousand-fingered 
 tendrils with the chords of our very life. Here we are at 
 home. Our pilgrimage pauses here. Our tent life is at 
 an end. We shall have no more any feast of tabernacles. 
 Let us build of stable and durable material, and bid our 
 household gods accept their permanent shrines. God is 
 good and has kept his promises well. We will take the 
 harp and sing But what is that he says ? " Arise ye and 
 depart, for this is not your rest ; it may by and by be your 
 tomb, but never your restful home." Why, then, we must 
 strike our tents again and take our staff and journey once 
 more. But a rest remaineth, and it is across the river, and 
 its name is Canaan ! Yes, it remaineth, but we are learn- 
 ing to think, we are beginning to know, that it is that 
 other and darker river which we are to cross before we 
 find it ; that we are to tread the celestial heights, that we 
 are to enter the promised rest, the sure inheritance, only 
 as we enter the city of God. 
 
 Truly each pilgrim of faith goeth forth not knowing 
 whither. He pitcheth at close of day as though at his 
 journey's end, and is not aware that he must move again 
 with the morning. God keeps his hope still just before 
 him, just before him, but never grasped, so that he 
 may run still with outstretched hand and eager desire ; 
 and then the hope is lifted higher, and God's lips smile 
 the assurance, "Here it is at last," and we see that we 
 have been running for nothing less than an immortal 
 crown, for no transient home, but for an eternal heaven. 
 This is faith's large and full inheritance, her magnificent 
 
FAITH'S VENTURES. 209 
 
 unknown. The earthly disappointments are only step- 
 ping-stones each toward these serene final summits ; the 
 restlessness of earth, only the traveller's enforced dili- 
 gence in pursuing his road quite to its goal. Our igno- 
 rance, that stumbles and halts so often, and catches up 
 such inferior good as though it could be content with it 
 as a portion, and grieves so to lay it down, covers this 
 heritage of Everlasting joy and peace. All the busy, 
 earnest years that lie between the starting-point and the 
 goal, all the rich investments of our heart's deep love, 
 the fond, warm covenants in which we pledge a union not 
 to be sundered, all personal and domestic ties, all so- 
 cial bonds growing out of our life with the full vitality of 
 nature and of grace in them, are but the training and dis- 
 cipline for our nurture unto his great and blessed pur- 
 poses ready to be revealed in us at the last. 
 
 If we saw now and beforehand as clearly as we shall 
 see the meaning of each particular part of the grand 
 scheme, we should miss the full power of its ministry 
 upon the growth of our souls toward the stature of their 
 immortal manhood. Let us give faith's rendering to the 
 poet's rhymes. 
 
 " When another life is added 
 
 To the heaving, turbid mass; 
 When another breath of being 
 
 Stains creation's tarnished glass; 
 When the faint cry, weak and piteous, 
 
 Heralds long-enduring pain, 
 And a soul from non-existence 
 
 Springs that ne'er shall sleep again; 
 When the mother's passionate welcome, 
 
 Sorrow-like, bursts forth in tears, 
 
210 FAITH'S VENTURES. 
 
 And the sire's self-gratulation 
 Prophesies of future years, 
 It is well we cannot see 
 What the end shall be! 
 
 " When across the infant features 
 
 Trembles the faint dawn of mind, 
 And the soul looks from the windows 
 
 Of the eyes that were so blind ; 
 When the incoherent murmurs 
 
 Syllable each swaddled thought 
 To the fond ear of affection 
 
 With a boundless promise fraught, 
 Kindling great hopes of the morrow, 
 
 From that dull, uncertain ray, 
 
 As by glimmering of the twilight 
 
 Is foreshown the perfect day, 
 
 It is well we cannot see 
 
 What the end shall be ! 
 
 " When the boy, upon the threshold 
 
 Of his all comprising home, 
 Puts aside the arms maternal 
 
 That enlock him ere he roam ; 
 When the canvas of his vessel 
 Flutters in the favoring gale, 
 Years of solitary exile 
 
 Hid behind its snowy sail; 
 "When his pulses beat with ardor, 
 And his sinews stretch for toil, 
 And a thousand bold emprises 
 Lure him to that eastern soil, 
 It is well we cannot see 
 What the end shall be! 
 
 " Whatsoever is beginning 
 
 That is wrought by human skill, 
 Every daring emanation 
 Of the mind's ambitious will, 
 
FAITH'S VENTURES. 211 
 
 Every first impulse of passion, 
 
 Gush of love or twinge of hate, 
 Every launch upon the waters, 
 
 Wide horizoned by our fate, 
 Every venture in the chances 
 
 Of life's sad, oft desperate game, 
 Whatsoever be our object, 
 
 Whatsoever be our aim. 
 It is well we cannot see 
 What ,the end shall be ! " 
 
 "It is well we cannot see 
 What the end shall be; " 
 
 but best of all that, not seeing, we can both hope and 
 trust. 
 
XIV. 
 
 PLEA FOR THE MONTHLY CONCEET. 
 
 AND WHEN THEY WERE COME, AND HAD GATHEEED THE CHUECH TOGETH- 
 ER, THEY REHEARSED ALL THAT THE LORD HAD DONE WITH THEM, AND 
 HOW HE HAD OPENED THE DOOR OF FAITH UNTO THE GENTILES. Acts. 
 
 xiv. 27. 
 
 TlOE, graphic and even romantic interest, there is no 
 -L other book of the Bible that surpasses this book of 
 the Acts of the Apostles. As its name indicates, it is a 
 book of action. You are led by it along a story of mar- 
 vellous adventures. There is not one dull chapter. 
 Every page is stirring and eventful. Neither history nor 
 fiction ever traced a chronicle more crowded with strange 
 and thrilling scenes. And the line of adventure is not, 
 either in its inspiration or its consequences, frivolous and 
 transient. The scheme that marshalled the journeyings 
 and the sufferings of these heroic actors was nothing less 
 than to " open the door of faith " to nations ignorant of 
 Christ and his salvation. What a lyric and picturesque 
 touch of the pen of Luke in this expression, "opening 
 the door of faith" ! A door of light upon deep darkness, 
 a door of deliverance for the bondmen of superstition 
 and idolatry, a door beneath whose grand arch, and 
 
PLEA FOR THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 213 
 
 through whose stately portals, the long, bright procession 
 of the Christian virtues should enter in and possess the 
 realms of barbarism, degradation, and cruelty ! Perhaps 
 it will be popularly, though it cannot be to Christian 
 hearts, a less taking version if we say it is a record of 
 missionary labors, missionary trials, and missionary suc- 
 cesses. It is the first volume of the long work -of the 
 Church in obedience to that command, at once so full of 
 the love and the authority of Jesus, " Go ye into all the 
 world, and preach the gospel to every creature." 
 
 In the scene outlined in our text, we are introduced into 
 a missionary meeting, whose special purpose is the com- 
 munication of missionary intelligence. To the disciples 
 at Antioch belongs the honor of the first mission ever sent 
 forth by a Christian Church. Moved by the Holy Ghost, 
 with fasting and prayer, and the laying on of hands, they 
 had set apart Barnabas and Saul to the missionary work. 
 (You read concerning this inauguration service at the be- 
 ginning of the present chapter.) From such "Farewell " 
 these two intrepid brethren had gone forth from city to 
 city, with various fortune, through perils and sufferings, 
 with ever increasing boldness, preaching the death and 
 resurrection of Jesus, and salvation through him. At 
 length, after persecutions and stonings, rejected of the 
 Jews, but with great and good success among the Gen- 
 tiles, they had completed their tour, and now stood again 
 among their brethren at Antioch. The whole Church 
 came together to hear these returned missionaries. There 
 was no need of urging an attendance upon that meeting. 
 None said, " It is only a missionary meeting ; it will be 
 
214 PLEA FOE THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 
 
 dull and tame." There were no attractions within all the 
 city that could divert a disciple from the scene where 
 these missionary laborers were to tell their simple story. 
 Their hearts were bound up in hearing how it had fared 
 with those whom they had sent out to preach the new 
 gospel, and how r that gospel was winning its way in the 
 earth. No strains of music, whether sacred or profane ; 
 no lips of eloquent orators, charming never so wisely; 
 no scenes bright and pleasant with social festivities, could 
 compete with the interest of that rehearsal which was to 
 tell how a Christian mission had prospered. They had 
 not prayed and fasted and commissioned their brethren 
 to this work, to be indifferent to its record, and turn 
 carelessly away from the story of its progress, its difficul- 
 ties, and its triumphs. 
 
 In nearly all the elements of interest attached to this 
 occasion of long ago, and in some additional elements of 
 a grander scope and deeper power, we have this scene 
 repeated in our own times every month, in that " CON- 
 CERT or PRAYER " now so widely observed by the modern 
 Christian Church. Eighty years ago last June, the ob- 
 servance of this Concert began with an association of 
 Baptist ministers of Nottingham, England. Forty years 
 earlier an attempt had been made, by a number of Scotch 
 ministers, to secure more united and concerted prayer for 
 a general effusion of the Holy Spirit " on all the churches 
 of the Redeemer and on the whole habitable earth." The 
 Saturday afternoon and Sabbath morning of each week, 
 and more solemnly the first Tuesday of each quarter of 
 the year, were specially commended to Christians for 
 
PLEA FOK THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 215 
 
 such seasons of agreeing intercession. Many pious hearts 
 in Great Britain, and some on this side the ocean, caught 
 the flame of this quickening influence, and "praying so- 
 cieties " were gathered and maintained in various places 
 in both countries. The sacred fire touched the heart of 
 our own Jonathan Edwards, who was moved to write an 
 elaborate essay, entitled " An humble attempt to promote 
 explicit agreement and visible union of God's people in 
 extraordinary prayer for the revival of religion and the 
 advancement of Christ's kingdom on earth." These ef- 
 forts and influences culminated at length in the adoption 
 of a resolution by the Nottingham Association, in 1784, 
 "recommending the setting apart of the first Monday 
 evening in every month for prayer for the extension of 
 the gospel." The circle of churches acting upon this 
 suggestion widened, though somewhat slowly, every year. 
 A few American churches, it is believed, kept alive the 
 old Quarterly Concert from its institution, before the 
 middle of the last century. A few more began the ob- 
 servance of the Monthly Concert at about the time of the 
 sailing of the first missionaries of the "American Board." 
 But the observance of this Concert did not gain very gen- 
 eral prevalence until the year 1815, when it was urged 
 and enforced by the Panoplist, and almost immediately 
 welcomed by large and increasing numbers of local 
 churches. After some twenty years, it was found that 
 not a few pastors and churches, from the difficulty of 
 gathering a full attendance upon Monday evening, had 
 transferred the Concert to the first Sabbath evening of 
 the month. Several missionary and ecclesiastical bodies 
 
216 PLEA FOR THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 
 
 favored this change ; the subject was discussed at the 
 meeting of the American Board in 1838, and though no 
 action was taken, it would appear that this change had 
 been widely though not universally approved. 
 
 With such a past, this sacred season has come down to 
 us. Its observance, maintenance, and transmission are 
 now in our hands. It is no longer a novelty ; neither is 
 the Sabbath, nor Christianity itself; but none the less for 
 that ought our interest in it to be fresh, lively, and ten- 
 der. Our fathers and mothers loved it and honored it. 
 They would as soon have turned their backs on the Lord's 
 day and the sacramental supper as on this hour of prayer 
 for the conversion of the world. The first Sabbath of 
 each month was with many of them the communion Sab- 
 bath. Most appropriately they came from the table of 
 their Lord to pray that the memorials of his love and 
 death might be set before all the perishing. In their sac- 
 ramental hymn these two verses came always together : 
 
 " 'Twas the same love that spread the feast 
 
 That gently drew us in; 
 Else wo had still refused to taste, 
 And perished in our sin. 
 
 " Pity the nations, our God ! 
 
 Constrain the earth to come; 
 Send thy victorious word abroad, 
 And bring the strangers home." 
 
 There is some reason to fear that, with the present 
 new generation of Christian believers, this Concert has 
 less interest and sacredness than with the generation re- 
 tiring. They felt that it was as divine as the very insti- 
 
PLEA FOE THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 217 
 
 tution of missions ; that the Church at home could not 
 otherwise obey the command to go forth preaching the 
 word to the ends of the earth ; and that it was treachery 
 to the Lord, and to those whom they had sent forth in 
 their name to disciple all nations, to lay upon them such 
 a commission, and send forth with them no volume of 
 united, agreeing prayer. They had too faithful a spirit, 
 too tender a conscience, toward this observance, to al- 
 low in them the omission of any possible respect to its 
 most honored keeping. We wear the bands of fealty to 
 this venerable ordinance more loosely and lightly. With 
 us it is only one of a great many ways of spending the 
 evening of the Sabbath, between which one and any of 
 all the rest we are free to choose, as convenience, ease, 
 and personal inclination may dictate. The Sabbath even- 
 ing has come to have a thronging pressure upon it, such 
 as our fathers never dreamed of. It is our evening for 
 sacred operas, I mean concerts, for oratorios, for 
 paid 'declamation, for every department of humane and 
 moral enterprise, for the recitation of perilous adventures 
 in our modern land of bondage, for inaugurating new 
 police regulations in the metropolis, for well-nigh every 
 cause that can find an advocate, hire a hall, and that 
 wishes for an audience. These manifold channels, with 
 others less questionable than some of these, sluice off 
 the attendance upon the venerable Concert of Prayer, 
 and leave it sometimes stranded dry and high, like an 
 abandoned hulk on the shore. 
 
 Such a depletion and desertion of this meeting is a 
 great loss to the cause of missions, a great subtraction 
 19 
 
218 PLEA FOE THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 
 
 from the power and faithfulness of the Church in this main 
 artery of Christian life and labor, a blast and a blight 
 upon the intelligent and principled piety of the youth of 
 our communions, and a sad omen for the type of piety 
 that shall hold the ascendency with us in coming days. 
 
 Let me now take some one of you by the hand, whom 
 I see here this morning, but never see on the Concert 
 evening, and set before you the persuasive claims of this 
 Monthly Concert of Prayer. 
 
 Consider, first, its contribution to your intellectual cul- 
 ture, and to the amount of your positive knowledge. 
 Missionary explorations have now been pushed out over 
 the four quarters of the globe. They have traversed 
 the length and breadth of the continents. They have 
 searched the sea for hidden islands. They have made 
 the acquaintance of every barbarous people. They have 
 occupied the seats of ancient civilization. Toward the 
 poles, they have gone as far into arctic and antarctic win- 
 ters as the most dauntless navigators. Under the equa- 
 tor, they have braved the heat of tropic suns. The men 
 who have conducted these Christian inarches have been 
 men of good ability, of studious habits, and of disciplined 
 mind. Most of them have been graduates of our colleges, 
 and not a few of them men of the highest promise in 
 scientific tastes, literary accomplishments, and intellectual 
 force. These men have gone out into these varied re- 
 gions of the earth, with their eyes open and their minds 
 alert, to observe and record all that came within their 
 field of vision. They have told us of the novel aspects of 
 these strange shores. They have opened to us the inte- 
 
PLEA FOR THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 219 
 
 rior of these mighty continents. They have mapped out 
 these island groups. They take us up picturesque val- 
 leys, and over rocky ridges, and across nameless rivers, 
 and pause with us on the margins of inland lakes, veiled 
 hitherto from all but native sight, and climb with us the 
 dome of volcanic mountains, until we see with them all 
 that their eyes have gazed upon. They tell us the 
 growths of the field and the forest, what the hand of 
 nature rears, and what the hand of tillage. They paint the 
 portraits of the races dwelling in these far-off scenes, in- 
 troduce us to their houses, their social life, their temples 
 of worship, their religious rites, their traits of character, 
 their governments, their manners and customs. They 
 are not flying tourists, skimming over the soil as by ex- 
 press, and sketching only what they see by daylight from 
 the windows of a lightning train. They go into these 
 new climes to dwell there. They make themselves at 
 home among the people. They observe deliberately, and 
 by many a verification, all concerning which they testify. 
 They have the deepest practical interest in studying the 
 hearts and lives of these strange races, and they are men 
 whose testimony can be taken as the witness of truth and 
 honesty. The rehearsal of these testimonies, from be- 
 neath the face of the whole heaven, mast needs bring lo- 
 gether a vast amount of the most wonderful and the most 
 reliable contributions to human knowledge which our en- 
 lightened age can boast. It is knowledge not merely of 
 the dead past, but of the living^present. On parallel 
 lines with our life at home, all these distant nations and 
 tribes are moving forward in their own current, daily his- 
 
220 PLEA FOB THE MONTHLY CONCEKT. 
 
 tories. And every month, at least, we may look over, 
 eastward and westward, into these contrasted courses of 
 human progress, and keep a calendar of the whole drift 
 of the race. There is no periodical that comes upon the 
 table of the savant that contains within the same space a 
 juster, wider, more varied view of man as a mortal and 
 an immortal being his condition, his dwelling-place, his 
 graduated interrelations on the full scale of humanity 
 than the monthly " Missionary Herald " of the American 
 Board. Scholars quote it, ambassadors pay tribute to its 
 writers, science, geography, history, study and appro- 
 priate it. These are the pages, such are the facts, that 
 come month by month before the minds of those who at- 
 tend these missionary meetings. To some extent these 
 facts would be accessible without such attendance, in the 
 printed periodical ; but, practically, they would not be 
 gathered. If read, they would not be made so impres- 
 sive and memorable. A young man who should resolve, 
 for his intellectual enriching alone, never to fail of at- 
 tendance upon this monthly resume of the world's getting 
 on, might, to his advantage, accept it as a substitute for 
 libraries and lyceums and lectures, and would, when in 
 years, find himself possessed of a sum total of mental ac- 
 quisitions which no pecuniary value could measure. No 
 young man who desires any breadth of intelligence con- 
 cerning the day in which he lives, and his contemporaries 
 of the great common family, can afford to neglect this 
 one source of intellectual training and furnishing. 
 
 But it is more vital to the idea of Christian culture to 
 say that nowhere else can you obtain such vivid con- 
 
*' 
 
 PLEA FOB THE MO^TY CONCERT. 221 
 
 ception of the depth of man's moral and spiritual ruin. 
 Human nature is the same with all the races, and in 
 every land and clime. But we see it at home under the 
 ameliorating power and the decent restraints of the Chris- 
 tian faith. Take away these restraints, go before this 
 renovating power, where the dawn of this travelling day 
 of light and order has not yet risen. Oh, how deep and 
 total the darkness ! What forms are moving about in it ! 
 What scenes are veiled in it ! What degradation is 
 there ! Follow the missionary's torch as he lights up 
 dimly the revolting reality. What faces are there ! Are 
 they human? Is that the mouth made to smile with 
 sweet and gentle affections? Is that the brow piled as 
 the throne of thought? Are those the eyes filled with 
 the light of intelligence ? Look upon the retreat where 
 that life kennels, translate its speech, trace out the rudi- 
 mental family relation, speak to them such words as vir- 
 tue, goodness, purity, benevolence, truth. Yerily you 
 are talking in an unknown tongue. Are these our fel- 
 low-men, children of our own ancestors? Alas, what has 
 sin wrought ! This is the world that has departed from 
 God. This is what God saw and loved. This is what 
 Jesus saw, and died. Can any of us see it and think sin 
 a little thing ? Can any of us see it and doubt the doc- 
 trine of man's depravity? Can any of us look upon it 
 habitually, and not appreciate the world's need of the gos- 
 pel ? If there be in our modern Christian development a 
 less burdensome sense of man's utterly lost and ruined 
 condition than our fathers had, if we have come to speak 
 pleasantly, tolerantly, and hopefully of human nature as 
 19* 
 
222 PLEA FOE THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 
 
 only needing a little smoothing and polishing to be accep- 
 table to a holy God, may not this defection be traceable 
 to a neglect of these dark exhibitions of human guilt and 
 shame ? 
 
 Here, too, perhaps, as nowhere else, we learn to appre- 
 ciate the power of the gospel as a restoric system. Can 
 it clothe these naked savages ? Can it lift these dull and 
 sensual eyes heavenward ? Can it transform these brutal 
 instincts to holy aspirations ? Can it change these fero- 
 cious tempers to meekness and love ? Can it lead out be- 
 fore these gross and debased minds God and good angels 
 and all the purities and sanctities of Christian living? 
 Can it displace the kennel with a Christian home, and es- 
 tablish within the decent order and propriety of a Chris- 
 tian household ? Can it change the wild, vile speech of 
 those untamed lips to words of prayer and songs of 
 rhythmic tenderness and worship ? Can it harness tyran- 
 nic and domineering idleness and improvidence to dili- 
 gence and thrift, and turn the wilderness into a garden, 
 the desert into a fruitful field ? Can it lift up the swarm- 
 ing tribes of such human outcasts, and build them into 
 the fair proportions of a Christian nation, and set it as a 
 gem of light and beauty on the bosom of the deep, the 
 loveliest thing God's eye looks upon on the broad Pacific 
 Sea ? How such a view exalts the gospel before us ! 
 How it rises and towers up God's great work with 
 new sublimities of power, more kindling, inspiring, and 
 quickening to our homage than we have ever elsewhere 
 seen it ! If we would know how much God has invested 
 of his wisdom and greatness in this redemption scheme, 
 
PLEA FOE THE MONTHLY CONCEET. 223 
 
 these are the scenes in which to acquire that knowledge. 
 No month shall pass without bringing some of these 
 amazing triumphs of the love and grace of Jesus before 
 us, to move our wonder and excite our adoring praise. 
 
 What other scene helps us to come into such full and 
 tender sympathy with Christ as this ? How does he feel 
 toward our lost race? How does he look upon these 
 "dark place's of the earth, full of the habitations of 
 cruelty"? What are his thoughts of this vast, sunken, 
 heathen world ? Is it for us only that he died ? Does he 
 long for us, and none beside? Are not his compassions 
 waiting, waiting, waiting, till some voice speak his 
 name in the ears of these far-off ransomed ones, and some 
 hand lead them to him for pardon and crowns of life? 
 What is his dearest wish, what is his grandest purpose, 
 on the earth ? Is it not to be known as the earth's Saviour 
 and Lord? Can a Christian heart be in sympathy with 
 Jesus and indifferent to missions ? Can that heart enter 
 into the feelings of that divine bosom, and prefer, on the 
 Concert eve, to spend the hour somewhere else? Find 
 me a place upon which the regard of the Saviour is more 
 intensely fixed upon the first Sabbath evening of the 
 month than that scene where the Church assembles to 
 pray, " Thy kingdom come," and to watch and listen unto 
 the answers to that prayer. Whither will you guide 
 me ? Shall it be where light hearts gather to be exhilar- 
 ated by artistic singing? Is Jesus present there with 
 warmer sympathies than where those prayers ascend, and 
 the ends of the earth send in responses? Shall it be 
 where some question of municipal polity is discussed ? 
 
224 PLEA FOR THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 
 
 Shall it be where trained elocution is reciting the sen- 
 tences of famed orators for our literary entertainment? 
 Shall it be where an indolent household circle takes neg- 
 lige posture in easy-chairs and on soft lounges? What 
 other purely religious gathering even, however solemn 
 and spiritual, can have an object so grand, so comprehen- 
 sive, so near the deep core of the heart of Christ, as this 
 that has met to take up his great commission, and to bring 
 him his chief and long-delayed joy and reward ? If our 
 personal predilections, our itching ears, our roving pro- 
 pensities, our thirst for outside spiritual stimulus, our 
 desire for self-gratification, control our movements, why, 
 we may go hither and thither, as far as our vagrant feet 
 and our more vagrant fancies shall carry us. But if sym- 
 pathy with Christ marshal our steps on this one Sabbath 
 evening, if we mean to be where he lingers with tenderest 
 interest, and to come under the most welcoming glance of 
 his eye and his warmest smile, can we doubt that this 
 scene of conference and prayer concerning the evangeliz- 
 ing of the nations is the scene whither we should be led ? 
 It will be acknowledged, of course, that the Church 
 owes a duty to Christian missions, and that each individ- 
 ual member of the Church shares in that debt. What is 
 it that is owed? A little treasure, an annual gift, an 
 occasional utterance of the Lord's Prayer, without any 
 special emphasis on the missionary petition therein, more 
 than we put on that for our daily bread, a glancing of 
 the eye over the missionary column of the family religious 
 newspaper, if such a column can be found ? This cannot 
 be all. And yet it is likely to be about the whole, if one 
 
PLEA FOR THE MONTHLY CONCEET. 225 
 
 neglect the Monthly Concert. It is, with multitudes of 
 professing Christians living in such neglect, practically 
 the whole. Nay, we are to meet and hear freshly, again, 
 that great missionary command, with all the stress of 
 Jesus' heart in it. We are to meet and send out our 
 cheer to the faithful brethren who have gone in our place 
 to the distant idolatrous tribes, and who look back with 
 straining eyes to see whether they are remembered still, 
 and how many of us come together to hear their saluta- 
 tions, and to waft them, in prayers, our united benedic- 
 tions. We are to meet to kindle in our souls afresh the 
 missionary ardor, to draw in a deep inspiration of the 
 spirit of self-sacrifice, and of the rescuing pity and yearn- 
 ing love of our Lord. The missionary life, which is, 
 more than any other form of expression, that which em- 
 bodies and conveys most of the heart of Jesus, most 
 nearly identical with that spirit of Christ without which 
 no. man is his, cannot be vital and earnest with one who 
 chooses to live in habitual non-attendance upon this scene 
 of sacred missionary interest. 
 
 If there is any one scene that secures the full and sym- 
 metrical development of the Christian character, crowns 
 and wreathes it with all its graces in full bloom and fra- 
 grance, it is still this scene of the Missionary Concert. 
 Here -is height, for we go up to the throned heart of 
 Jesus. Here is depth, for we gauge the abyss of man's 
 ruin. Here are length and breadth, for our thoughts 
 and sympathies and prayers run swiftly from pole to pole 
 of the habitable earth, and wrap the globe around, like 
 the tidal wave of its oceans. Here Christian pity is 
 
226 PLEA FOE THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 
 
 taught to weep her softest tears. Here Christian endur- 
 ance faces its sharpest conflicts, its heaviest strain, and 
 Christian heroism wins its greenest laurels. Here our 
 faith wrestles with hardest problems, and again looks upon 
 its brightest rewards. Here we come to feel that we are 
 nothing, and less than nothing, before the mountain bar- 
 riers that bar the gospel's way, and again that our faith, 
 instrumentally, is mighty through God to the pulling 
 down of the strongholds of error and sin. Here the love 
 of souls becomes a consuming passion, and the longing 
 insupportable that our crucified Lord should see the fruit 
 of his anguished travail and be satisfied. Here our search 
 grows eager for the ancient promises, and we sift the 
 word of God to trace out that covenant of the Father 
 that pledges to the Son the heathen world as his inheri- 
 tance. Humility, patience, perseverance, self-denial, 
 ceaseless gratitude for the things wherein we are made to 
 differ from our benighted kindred, the spirit of importu- 
 nate prayer, a discernment of, and a consecration unto, 
 the true and noble end of Christian living, all these re- 
 ceive here, every month, a fresh baptism, wherein they 
 are sprinkled from the dust of earthliness, and show a 
 divine purity and beauty. The hold of our ambition, our 
 greed, our craving for luxuries, our all-encroaching world- 
 liness, are relaxed; and here, if anywhere, here almost 
 assuredly, we write upon body, soul, and estate, "All for 
 Christ." This makes a broad, vigorous, healthful Chris- 
 tian development. Nothing narrow, sickly, and dwarfing 
 in this experience. Here the disciple grows to his full 
 stature. He lives not in the confining cell of his own 
 
PLEA FOR THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 227 
 
 prejudices and his selfish enjoyments. He lives in the 
 wide world over which the cross-bannered host of God's 
 elect is marching, beneath the open sky, where the shadow- 
 ing wings of the missionary angel bear on that glad her- 
 aldry, calling down, through the airy spaces, " Peace on 
 earth, good will to men," and within the full circumfer- 
 ence of that large love that bought the world with a sacri- 
 ficial death. ' 
 
 My dear people, I do not think any of us can afford to 
 dispense with this school of Christian nurture. I think 
 many of us need a higher appreciation of its priceless 
 worth. I believe there is nothing that we can do for our 
 Christian growth, no influence under which we can sit for 
 our personal quickening and enlarging, no service which 
 we can render to the Master and the great scheme which 
 he carries on his heart, in any one hour of all the month, 
 at once so profitable to us, so fruitful for human good, so 
 grateful to Christ, as this attendance upon the meeting for 
 missionary intercession. Will any of you say that these 
 meetings are not interesting? That is your mistake. 
 They are. You cannot tell in any tone, by any utter- 
 ance, from any lips, the story of the struggling and 
 triumphing 4 gospel, the story of man's degradation and 
 sinfuluess and woe, the story of our Christian comrades 
 pioneering the paths of saving truth in the far-off lands 
 of superstition and darkness, without interesting any 
 heart in sympathy with Christ. Will you stay away be- 
 cause the meetings are thinly attended ? Is that a remedy 
 for that evil ? The single element of a thronged house , with- 
 out one other feature changed, would fill the meetings with 
 
228 PLEA FOR THE MONTHLY CONCERT. 
 
 life and power. The presence of numbers, the warmth 
 of so many hearts beating together, the ascending clouds 
 of intercession from so many souls in unison, the inter- 
 acting inspirations from so many sympathies, all drawn 
 out in one direction, and coursing together through the 
 changes of the meeting, would make the place as solemn 
 and privileged as the council-chamber of the Deity. 
 
 It is one evening of a month* Give it to this service. 
 Set it apart and consecrate it, and make it sacred to this 
 observance. Write a vow before God, in your closet, to 
 keep this Concert. Let nothing but his peremptory hand 
 upon you keep you away. I would have no regular en- 
 gagement, of whatever sort, that should bereave me and 
 Christ of this attendance. Come, young and old ; come 
 in fair weather and foul; come fresh or weary; come 
 though angelic choirs give concerts in pavilions of gold, 
 though silver-tongued orators promise strains of elo- 
 quence sweeter than song. Come, to please Jesus, to 
 take upon your willing hearts the tender pressure of his 
 last command, and your souls shall reap a full reward j 
 the welcomes of your waiting Lord shall greet you and 
 rest upon you, and the world's redemption shall be 
 hastened on. 
 
XY. 
 
 HUMAN LONELINESS. 
 
 IF THOU BE WISE, THOU SHALT BE WISE FOR THYSELF ; BUT IF THOU SCORN- 
 EST, THOU ALONE SHALT BEAR IT. PrOV. ix. 12. 
 
 DRIVE at midnight through the mazy streets of some 
 great centre of human life. Here and there a lamp 
 is faintly burning. The crowds have melted away. Si- 
 lence has settled down between the dark ranges of man- 
 sions and warehouses. The eye glances up and runs 
 along the surface of the tall, dim walls. What is hidden 
 there within? What secrets do those shuttered homes 
 enclose? If one could look into all that seclusion, what 
 strange elements of society, what varied and perhaps 
 startling experiences, personal and social, would meet his 
 view ! High up, half shaded, but struggling feebly out, 
 a light burns obscurely. What is there, sickness, wake- 
 fulness, plotting crime, or only deep slumber watched 
 over by that friendly ray? Imagination revels at will.' 
 But night, silence, and the dark masonry, with its curtains 
 and blinds, keep their secrets. We cannot explore or 
 know. And if all those windows were to flame out with 
 a sudden illumination, if we could take the wings of the 
 bird of night and fly over the thronged city, and every 
 20 
 
230 HUMAN LONELINESS. 
 
 roof were transparent, we should know not much more 
 than we now know while pacing slowly and wonderingly 
 along the dark street. The interior scenes of those 
 guarded shelters would be visible, passages, stairways, 
 and the furnishing of occupied apartments. We should 
 look upon faces and forms, hear the heavy respiration of 
 sleepers, or perhaps human voices interchanging murmur- 
 ing confidences. But the real mystery of life is more 
 darkly shrouded. Wake all the unconscious thousands 
 there, and let them offer their opened eyes and their or- 
 dinary daily face to our gaze, we should be but little 
 nearer the solution. There are more impenetrable walls, 
 there is a deeper night around that mystery, than the re- 
 tiring day and the hand of man have made. Only God 
 above and the heart within know the facts of experience 
 and character. 
 
 Each human life is an isolated life. It may have its 
 alliances and its contacts, but it never loses its identity 
 and its individuality. The stars are by our science, for 
 convenience' sake, set in systems, grouped in constel- 
 lations, but each is, for all that, a separate sphere, with 
 its own unexplored interior world. So the human soul 
 is an orb by itself. Its peopled chambers compose a 
 world apart from all other worlds. Amid crowds or 
 amid solitudes the man sits ever by himself in the solitari- 
 ness of his own uninvaded consciousness, with secrets 
 which he could not, if he would, make clearly intelligible 
 to any fellow-man, with questions and issues which he 
 must meet alone. 
 
 I wish to lead in our thoughts out of the world of broad 
 
HUMAN LONELINESS. 231 
 
 and general sympathies, to disengage each of us from our 
 associations and clanships, to separate us from the sweep 
 of the tide, in which we seem blent with kindred drops, 
 our career and our destiny merged with those of our clas- 
 sification and fellowship, and to bring us in face to face 
 with our own single selves. That is the intent of our 
 Scripture to single us out from a massed humanity, to 
 isolate us within our own personal orbit, to discover to 
 us the singularity of that orbit, to make us feel that un- 
 divided responsibleness that burdens ourselves, and to 
 recall us to the conviction that we are to meet the real 
 problem of life solitary and alone. The solitariness of 
 human life is the point specially to be illustrated. 
 
 1. Each man is alone in the original, native singleness 
 of his being. He was born alone into this world of his 
 kind, a unit of life, a single fresh soul from the Creator's 
 hand, with his own private and personal outfit of mental 
 and material forces, his own adjustment and proportions 
 of mind and body, their interchanges and relations of of- 
 fices and effects special and peculiar to him. His cerebral 
 development is his own. The intellectual and the animal 
 divide him up and share him by appointments never ex- 
 actly repeated. The physical serves well the rational, or 
 disappoints and cripples it, or shades off toward the one 
 extreme or the other. He is of a hardy or tender spirit- 
 ual constitution; his sensibilities, frigid and stern, or 
 warm and sympathetic. His temperament is his own. 
 The whole balance, poise, and composition of his man- 
 hood are individual and unique. The elements of the 
 Common humanity are there, but differently mingled in 
 
232 HUMAN LONELINESS. 
 
 him from what they are in any other fellow specimen. 
 God's creative versatility and variety never run low. In 
 all the forest no two oaks in limb and trunk and shade 
 stand alike. On the seashore each grain of sand is in- 
 dividual and distinct. The wintry air is full of falling 
 snowflakes like blossoms shaken from the trees of para- 
 dise, but each is crystallized with a conformation of its 
 own. In breadth and height and hue the grass-blades 
 vary, and " one star differeth from another star in glory." 
 The diversity of the human form is a symbol of the real 
 diversity of the human life, and of itself helps by no 
 mean contribution to constitute that diversity. Souls are 
 as unlike as bodies. One may seem twin to another, as 
 in the fleshly form, but in stature, color, texture, or what- 
 ever expresses the dimensions and qualities of spirits, 
 each has its own specialty and vindicates its separate type. 
 
 The very object of creating men single and distinctive, 
 that their function and work may fulfil the Creator's de- 
 sign, keeps them in their identity apart. They may touch 
 at many points, they may compose little societies, they 
 may join their voices in the same strain of music, they 
 may lift together at the same burdens of human travail ; 
 but each voice has its own tone, each nerve its own force ; 
 this singleness of their own individual make always at- 
 taches to them. In that, each is forever himself, himself 
 alone, and not another, and those limits and boundaries, 
 those descriptive lines that mark him off from the world 
 at large, shut him in to a personal and perpetual solitude. 
 
 2. Again, each man is alone in the citadel of his own 
 consciousness. He has an outward eye and an inward 
 
HUMAN LONELINESS. 233 
 
 eye. With the outward he looks, and this map of earth 
 is unrolled before him. There rise the mountains, there 
 spread the plains, there the valleys are scored, there wave 
 the forests and murmur the brooks, and chase one another 
 in the play of Titans the colossal waves of lights and 
 shadows over the harvest fields of summer. There heaves 
 the sea, now in stormy tumult, flinging its angry billows 
 against all its bounds, and now sobbing itself to sleep like 
 a child wearied out by its own passion, and again bright 
 and sparkling in the gleam of sunny weather. Above 
 bends the sky, sometimes gusty and howling with winter 
 winds, or all still and black with a rayless gloom, or cur- 
 tained with impenetrable and chilling mists, or weeping 
 softly in summer rain ; and then again, with a deep, 
 pure, and unfathomable blue, across which the crescent 
 moon cleaves her way, or the sun rides royally, or through 
 which, as a transparency, the starry lights of celestial 
 windows and avenues show far and clear. This is the 
 outer world, with its sea and sky, its landscapes, seasons, 
 and changes. And I have outlined its map, because it 
 has its counterpart within. The inward eye looks over 
 an inner world as broad, varied, and marvellous as the 
 outer. There rise the ridges of its controlling thoughts, 
 its grand and stable beliefs ; there gush the fountains and 
 murmur the streams of its sensibilities. There wind the 
 channels of its habitual purposes and courses of soul ; 
 there is the expanse of knowledge over which the mind 
 ranges ; the long, branching vales of memory ; the 
 heights imagination scales ; there come and go the April 
 lights and shadows of its changeful moods ; there surges 
 20* 
 
234 HUMAN LONELINESS. 
 
 up in tossing swells, or lies in calm repose, the great deep 
 of its emotions; the forests are musical with birds, or 
 silent and gloomy above the covert of the passions that 
 have their lair there as beasts of prey. Above, to Hope 
 and Faith, in the atmosphere of this soul, there are some- 
 times clouds and driving and bitter blasts ; sometimes 
 blessed revelations seen remote like stars, and sometimes 
 the effulgence, the full splendors, of glorious sunlight. 
 This can hardly be called a fancy sketch. The outer per- 
 petually symbols the inner, nay, it scarcely has any 
 meaning or reality save as the soul finds correspondences 
 for it and glasses all its features and vicissitudes in its 
 own more conscious life. Upon this inner world of con- 
 sciousness there rests only one human look. The soul 
 walks therein alone. It never can admit society there. 
 It is not in its power to open up these interior vistas to 
 any other eye. We may notice an air of abstraction come 
 upon one of our companions ; he seems lost in revery ; he 
 has forgotten our presence. But that is all we see, his 
 face and form and vacant, assorbed manner, no more. 
 But what does he see within the narrow chamber of his 
 brain, whose walls and dome we can cover with our two 
 hands? There is a world broader and statelier than earth 
 itself. His thought glances across continents of won- 
 drous being, ferries itself over oceans all quivering and 
 throbbing with vitality, soars to a cope no eagle's flight 
 ever touched. Who can follow him? Who can read the 
 strange chronicle of his musings? Who can watch the 
 processions that sweep along those covered highways, 
 and say how they are draped, whether in mourning sable 
 
HUMAN LONELINESS. 235 
 
 or festive white? In the sphere of consciousness each 
 man dwells alone. 
 
 3. Again. Each man is alone in the daily current of 
 his existence. I mean he lives his own life. It is him- 
 self, and no other, that wakes where he lifts his eyelids to 
 the light of morning. It is his own feet that begin again 
 his journey, as he takes up his pilgrim staff, girds his 
 loins, and sets forth. He thinks his own thoughts ; he 
 summons before him his own aims ; he feels a craving 
 that reports itself to him alone ; his ideal good, his ideal 
 life, flit before him, visible only to his own eye, and 
 beckon him on. He has something to achieve every day 
 which is his personal prize for the day. He walks with 
 his own gait ; the footmarks left are his ; he lifts in his toil 
 his own strokes, hurried or measured, strong or feeble ; 
 he has gained or lost as the day closes in a sense which 
 touches him as no other life. He may have yoke-fellows 
 in his toil, closest intimates in his schemes and dreams 
 and affections, but still his stream of life flows by itself. 
 If it join some companion stream, it shall be like the 
 union of the Aar and the Rhone. They have united, they 
 fill one channel, they flow on between the same banks, 
 but far down below the point of confluence, they are seen 
 to be as distinct as when the one slid from beneath its 
 mighty glacier, and the other came roaring down the 
 Grimsel pass. So for many a league they pour onward, 
 side by side, the blue Rhone, the yellow Aar, one, yet 
 divided. Each man has his own moulds of action, in 
 which he runs all his conduct. His method of viewing 
 motives, of reasoning upon premises, of arriving at con- 
 
236 HUMAN LONELINESS. 
 
 elusions ; the springs within him, whose play is the most 
 constant, whose volume the largest, upon which whoso 
 would move him must lay a finger ; the force he expends 
 hour by hour, and the direction in which he advances ; the 
 threads he weaves in and the threads he drops, and con- 
 sequently the pattern that grows under his fingers, all 
 these constitute and proportion his life, but no other in all 
 the compass of humanity. When he hears the record 
 read out at last, when that one leaf is turned in the eter- 
 nal book, and the original of that biographic story is sum- 
 moned, there will be no need to call his name ; he will 
 know the portrait; he will step out of the throng to own 
 that life as his ; no other man will move ; the identity will 
 be so clear there can be no mistaking. 
 
 4. And each man, again, is alone in his sifting. There 
 may pass over his head peaceful and happy years ; fair 
 behind him lengthens out the pathway of his life, but 
 the night of his wrestling shall come. The one distant 
 terror, unknown for half a lifetime, or known and forgot- 
 ten, or remembered and yet postponed, in God's provi- 
 dence kept aloof, suddenly approaches, like Esau and his 
 armed band sweeping down from Mount Seir upon Jacob 
 and his company. It was years ago that the younger had 
 so grievously injured the elder brother, and fled for his 
 life. God has greatly blessed him since, and he has 
 prospered exceedingly ; but the crisis he has shunned so 
 long at last darkens toward him. To-morrow that aveng- 
 ing presence will be upon him, that brother's dreaded 
 right arm must be met. And the night leads him into 
 that terrible and mysterious conflict. The struggle must 
 
HUMAN LONELINESS. 237 
 
 come for every man. There is that in his nature, there 
 is that in his story, there is that in providence of testing 
 and trial, which he must meet. The ghostly shadow will 
 assume that one form which he feels he has chief cause 
 to dread. He must grapple with it for his life ; no eye 
 shall look on ; no crowds shall cheer ; no champion shall 
 come to his rescue. Alone, the night about him, singly 
 contending against a strength whose resources he cannot 
 measure, no release till a determinate issue be reached, 
 that issue, life or death, glorious victory or shameful de- 
 feat, he must fight it out. There is a temptation be- 
 fore which each man is personally and peculiarly weak. 
 Perhaps we have battled with it already, possibly that 
 sorest conflict is yet before us ; but whenever and where- 
 ever we meet it, we meet it alone. It will sift us ; 
 God will let us feel our weakness. Another man's trial 
 we could lightly bear ; that which vanquishes him we 
 could easily put to rout. No wonder, perhaps, he was so 
 soon overcome by such a foe. But there is some spirit- 
 ual antagonist as formidable to us. Just when we are 
 reproaching, perhaps, our fallen brother, our own Go- 
 liath of Gath enters the valley to meet us. Ah, if we 
 could know the history of every tempted and sinning 
 man, the long, weary wrestling, the slow, sad night 
 shutting in the strife, the manful resistance, the waning 
 strength, the inward anguish, the self-loathing, the shame 
 like that with which naked Adam fled and hid in the gar- 
 den, if we should consider that a stress may yet be 
 laid upon us beneath which our best powers shall wither, 
 no words so gentle, tender, and loving should ever pass 
 
238 HUMAN LONELINESS. 
 
 our lips as those we should utter over the erring. Let 
 us remember it. So far as human strength goes, each 
 must wrestle alone with the most triumphing temptation 
 that can assail him. Job's three friends sat by his side, 
 but they left him still alone ; the toils were his, and not 
 theirs ; and so with all the evils of his lot. So will it be 
 with us, each of us sifted and tested by himself. 
 
 5. Each man is alone in dealing with God's truth and 
 spirit. The gospel is preached by one utterance to a 
 thousand souls ; but to each man it is as if he sat there 
 uncompanioned in the house of God. God has only 
 spoken to him. The question raised is, What will he do 
 with this divine message ? Personally will he have Christ 
 to reign over him? The sun shines for him and his 
 neighbor ; the air is their common inheritance ; the same 
 fragrance of flowers they may inhale together. But out 
 of all that hear the offers of pardon and life only the soul 
 that in the solitude of its own voluntariness yields to the 
 moving spirit, steps forward for itself, and takes and 
 kisses the hand of the Sovereign, will find itself included 
 in the amnesty. Each must hear for himself, each must 
 resolve for himself, each must act for himself. Alone 
 with God, singled out from a world gone astray, God's 
 eye upon it, God's Ibve wooing it, the bleeding hand of 
 Christ stretched out to it, the world, the flesh, and the 
 devil pleading against it, the soul must conclude in that 
 solitude this high debate, and choose for good or for evil, 
 for the death that never dies or the life that is everlasting. 
 
 6. Alone the soul must encounter the struggle of dy- 
 ing. The hand may be held in some warm, loving clasp ; 
 
HUMAN LONELINESS. 239 
 
 underneath the drooping head may glide a strong embrac- 
 ing arm ; the white cheek may rise and fall to the breath 
 of some cherishing bosom, and the friends dearest in life 
 may stand around ; but the soul enters upon that dread 
 path alone. The fleshly hands meet, but no spirit of its 
 fellows walks hand in hand with the departing traveller. 
 What it sees, it only sees ; what it suffers, it only suf- 
 fers ; the progress is all its own, the opening marvels, 
 the clearing shadows, the awful verities ; the other at- 
 tendants, though so near, are by the breadth of worlds 
 behind. We may have stood many a time by the side of 
 the dark river, and seen others go down into the chill 
 waters, and the way may seem familiar ; we may think 
 we know it ; but when we assay the current, when the 
 cold waves rise higher and higher, and we gasp and falter 
 and feel for firm footing, and look to see what welcome 
 waits us on the further shore, what forms come to meet 
 us and environ us around, that experience we must try 
 alone and by ourselves. It is coming to us, that solemn 
 hour ; it will take us into its solitary custody ; it will 
 single us out from the crowd and whisper in our ear, un- 
 heard by any other, either this inspiring message, "The 
 Master is come and calleth for thee," or this stern arrest, 
 " Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." 
 7. Alone, too, each shall rise in the great day ; alone 
 each shall be judged, each sentenced alone. Though that 
 trumpet blast shall wake all that sleep, each shall open 
 his eyes with sensations all his own upon the scenery of 
 that day. Though all the generations of earth shall stand 
 together before the judgment-seat, yet each man's story 
 
 or THE 
 
240 HUMAN LONELINESS. 
 
 shall be recited amid the hush of a listening universe, and 
 the final word, " Come ! " or "Depart ! " shall fall on each 
 heart as though none beside knew such joy or such grief. 
 
 So solitary, though amid dearest fellowships and closest 
 intimacies, is human life in all its stages, from its dawn 
 of being till its destiny is fixed forever. Come, then, 
 my friend, and look your isolation full in the face. You 
 stand a single individual soul in God's sight, responsible 
 for yourself, living your own personal life, moving toward 
 your own definite future. No crowd conceals you, no 
 general movement sweeps you in, no vague fellowship 
 provides for you apart from .your personal, individual act- 
 ing. Alone you have sinned, alone you must repent, be- 
 lieve, and obey. Oh, the vital question of salvation is one 
 between you and God ! It must be settled hi the chamber 
 of your own spirit. You yourself are to confront all the 
 weighty issues of your being in time. Keligion is your 
 own personal matter, a life that is to be special to you, a 
 new vitality to come into the privacy of your own heart. 
 
 The deep solitariness of your whole existence admits of 
 one grand qualification. Into those lonely chambers one 
 glorious Being may come. Over the fields of conscious- 
 ness you may stray with one Friend by your side, who 
 shall see and know and feel all that you feel and know 
 and see. In the weighty conflict, this healing and vic- 
 torious presence may succor your fainting strength and 
 wounded form. Along the changeful highway, in the 
 shade, in the shine, the meek Pilgrim from Nazareth may 
 keep you company and share your experience. In all 
 trouble and anguish one tender Heart shall pulse with 
 
HUMAN LONELINESS. 241 
 
 yours, as truly at home at the core of your sorrow as you 
 that suffer. You shall enter the shadowy vale singing, 
 "Thou art with me." As all of earth recedes, you shall 
 whisper again, "These have left me alone, yet am I not 
 alone, for my Saviour is joined to me, and we twain are 
 one spirit." And passing on and out, your watchword 
 at heaven's gate shall be, "Forever with the Lord." 
 Come, O lonely life, and be united to the Lord of life. 
 O solitary spirit, be made one with the Father and the 
 Son, your solitude opening thus upon infinite riches of 
 sympathy, love, and communion. 
 21 
 
XVI. 
 
 THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 
 
 I THE LORD WILL HASTEN IT IN HIS TIME, Isaiah Ix. 22. 
 
 GOD is sovereign and omnipotent, but he waits the 
 ministration of Time. He could force seasons and 
 laws, but it is his way rather to work through them and 
 by them. He has ordained them as servitors of his will. 
 His purposes on the earth, in the conduct of human af- 
 fairs, had, in respect to their accomplishment, a germina- 
 tion, a process, and a harvest-hour of consummation. 
 
 Time is the prime-minister of Providence, and brings 
 to pass in due order, at their full periods, and at the ap 
 pointed juncture, the patient counsels of the Most High. 
 There is no hurrying and no sickness of deferred hope on 
 that eternal and tranquil mind. "One day is with the 
 Lord as & thousand years, and a thousand years as one 
 day." It lends a new dignity and a sterner and loftier 
 majesty to Time, when we consider it thus, not imperson- 
 ally, as the passing away of our days, the swift, mute 
 lapse of the stream of life sliding down the vale, but 
 as a strong, executive angel, a sceptred and conscious 
 force, that has it in charge to reveal and fulfil the hidden 
 plan of God. 
 
THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 243 
 
 Man is strong, and works great changes upon the earth 
 and his fellow-man. Art is strong, and produces its rapid 
 marvels. The forces serving the human will are nimble 
 and muscular. Heat and frost lift up monuments of their 
 might and magic. The fires of earth's centre, the winds 
 that sweep over the surface, the seas that thunder along 
 her shores, these have their power and their trophies. 
 But Time is the great magician. All these latter forces 
 are sinews of its own arm. The changes, the revolutions, 
 the histories of this world, are only chronicles of the vice- 
 regency of Time. 
 
 It is fitting, as the swift shuttle glances past again, 
 drawing another thread into the woven fabric of God's 
 scheme for earth and man, bringing out yet more clearly 
 the parts in the pattern for the whole, that we pause to 
 consider 
 
 This ministry of Time in accomplishing the divine 
 pleasure. 
 
 If the whole scope of the supreme administration may 
 not be known thus, we may gather at least some of the 
 principles and particulars that unite at last to perfect that 
 consummate whole. We shall see that Time is, among 
 men, the revealer, the attester, the vindicator, the recti- 
 fier, the fulfiller. 
 
 Time tests the principles of human conduct. I speak 
 here of avowed principles consciously, perhaps boldly, 
 proceeded upon, set in contrast or antagonism with one 
 another. There is a difference among men, both in the- 
 ory and in practice, in respect to these principles. The 
 diversity and the divergence illustrate themselves in in- 
 
244 THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 
 
 numerable ways. Look in upon two scenes of family 
 training. In one of them the idea is, with the controlling 
 head, that the true end of domestic nurture is social suc- 
 cess. Special stress, then, will be laid upon the accom- 
 plishments whose chief grace is external. The manner 
 is a matter of first concern. The gloss of an outward 
 polish is. of great price. The step must be put under tui- 
 tion. Motion must be artistic, graduated to rule and 
 canon. Exits and entrances must be fashioned after a 
 model. The introduction into society is a grand and sol- 
 emn crisis. Acquaintances must be made. The young 
 lives must be launched upon the social world. What if 
 they should be neglected, thrown out of the current, 
 stranded high and dry upon the bank, the stream of their 
 generation flowing merrily by, and leaving them, as it 
 were, only to serve as landmarks for the progress of the 
 gay, iris-tinted bubbles that float, with music and laugh- 
 ter, ever on amid greenness and bloom ? This must not 
 be. A social triumph must in some way be achieved. 
 And all the care and painstaking converge to this issue. 
 In the other the commanding object is the formation of a 
 right character. The interior life of gentle manners must 
 be gentle thoughts. The only external polish that will 
 never grow coarse is the outshining of inward purity and 
 kindness. The law of love is the sufficient code of polite- 
 ness and etiquette. The best social furnishing is the 
 wealth of the soul's virtuous intelligence, an appreciation 
 of what is true and beautiful in nature, in mind and mor- 
 als, the utterance of generous sensibilities and of a self- 
 respect that prefers its own calm approval to admiration 
 
THE MINISTKIES OF TIME. 245 
 
 and flattery, and sets the price of its modesty too high to 
 offer itself as a prize for social bidding. You shall hear 
 now the first of these two systems remonstrating with the 
 other, predicting social isolation, social failure, urging the 
 demonstrative and forcing culture, adopting it for the 
 sons and daughters under its guardianship, and resting 
 cheerfully and complacently in its superior discernment 
 and wisdom'. This subject carries me back in thought to 
 my own early rural home. I look in again upon the fam- 
 ilies that were so ambitious of social conquests. I see 
 the youths and maidens there planning festive entertain- 
 ments, and delighting in gay assemblies. The fashions 
 and the gayeties were, to be sure, somewhat on a rural 
 scale ; but it was our world, and a miniature in all essen- 
 tial features of the most brilliant metropolitan life. And, 
 to be sure, the sober, puritanical portion of the rising gen- 
 eration there were left quite outside this conventional so- 
 ciety, their faces were not seen, nor their hands sought 
 in the ball-room. The winter evening ride, the rural 
 party, and generally all scenes of youthful merry-making 
 in which the set came together, were made up without 
 their presence. Here there were smiles and laughs and 
 romps and dances and cards and all the staple of vain and 
 thoughtless fellowship and enjoyment, from wilich our 
 graver style of young life was self-exiled. And so the 
 issue was made, and the trial of the two systems entered 
 upon. And iff the one circle, quick friendships were 
 formed, a score of acquaintances were added to one's list 
 in a single evening. No danger of being lost sight of so- 
 cially, dropped out of social recognition ; here the doors 
 21* 
 
246 THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 
 
 stood wide open to social settlements and domestic alli- 
 ances. And sometimes it was felt, I know, on the other 
 side, that all such doors were shut against them. They 
 seemed isolated from those of their own age ; their seclu- 
 sion was uninvaded ; they could improve their minds, cul- 
 tivate their taste, study the secrets of happy, dignified, 
 and well-ordered homes, quite to themselves. Who would 
 know ever whether they were prizes or blanks? The 
 drawing would be all in the other circle, and the more 
 worldly policy looked like a success. There all was 
 bright and glittering. Here lay a shadow. There, there 
 was mating and marrying and giving in marriage. Here 
 all relations were undisturbed. Taking life as it is, this 
 more select discipline promised to be barren of results. 
 But principles are everlasting verities ; they change not ; 
 they are of slow development often ; their seed lies cold 
 and motionless long ; their harvest comes late, but it 
 comes. Such issues are not to be settled in a day. Their 
 trial takes in, in its progress, more elements than are at 
 first seen to be included. The earlier appearances are 
 not reliable exponents of the final consummation. Across 
 the breadth of years I look and read the story truer. The 
 paths of life from those two circles, the streams from 
 those separate fountains, are visible before me. The 
 gay, brilliant type quickly darkened and degenerated. 
 That was its best. It never rose higher. There were 
 early excesses, there were early and dishonored graves, 
 there were floating wrecks of vice and dissipation, there 
 were sad, sad tales of shame and anguish, there were 
 miserable disappointments. Those that were specially 
 
THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 247 
 
 decked and tutored for proudest triumphs, somehow, al- 
 ways missed their goal. What they won was trash, or 
 worse, and for the most part they drew utter blanks. It 
 all came to nought. The glittering bubble burst, and 
 there was nothing in the hand but the stain of defiling 
 moisture. 
 
 And on the other side, once more, there was always a 
 wealth of personal resources ; there was a growing but 
 unconscious refinement ; there was fostered a selecter and 
 more discriminating taste ; solid and abiding qualities 
 grew with the passing youthful season, and when more 
 difficult and fastidious minds came searching for fresh, 
 unsoiled natures, and an outfit for wider and higher 
 spheres, they found the golden fruit hidden beneath the 
 over-shadowing leaves, and gathered it with pride and 
 joy. I have lingered too long upon this, but it is a most 
 instructive page. And the record is repeated at ten thou- 
 sand social centres, only it" cannot be written at once, or 
 read at a glance. Like Chinese writings, the lines stretch 
 down the lengthening scroll of Time. Time is the slow 
 scribe, the sure expounder. 
 
 One man argues that, "Take the world as it goes, and 
 you must practise upon it to gain your ends. You must 
 manage a little ; you must move subtly and dexterously to- 
 ward your aims ; you must not show your hand ; you need 
 not tell the whole story out ; you must ask more than you 
 expect to get ; you must put the best face on a thing it 
 can be made to wear ; you may well enough leave sharp 
 eyes and keen wits to explore and interpret your silence. 
 The universal system is such that if we do not adopt this 
 
248 THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 
 
 policy, we shall be left hopelessly behind." Another man 
 plants his foot immovably upon the conviction that hon- 
 esty is the best policy. He must be frank, transparent, 
 true. More or less, his gains must bring within his doors 
 no reproaches. Poverty is a pleasanter household com- 
 panion than remorse ; strict right with a crust, rather than 
 wrong with princely dainties. And the two procedures 
 start together on the track. The first success is almost 
 always on the side of cunning. Slow-moving, downright 
 honesty is speedily distanced. One holds a court, the 
 other- sits in solitude. The proverb hardly expresses a 
 truth for "the life that now is." Ah ! wait a little. Hear 
 the witness of Time. Intrigue and practising cannot 
 always escape the light, and the light they cannot bear. 
 Men once bitten grow shy of traps. Nobody loves to be 
 practised upon. Wily natures always come at last to be 
 distrusted. These little business and social treacheries 
 invariably, in the long run, lose the operators their richest 
 capital, confidence. And the tides ebb away ; and now 
 it is honesty's turn. It comes late, but it is final. There 
 is nothing after it. Here is perfect trust, unsuspecting 
 security. Here we find bottom, and stand firm. The 
 proverb was altogether right. Principles have had their 
 development, and each after its kind borne its fruit. 
 Time has ripened and gathered it, apples of Sodom for 
 the one; apples of gold, nay, golden-globed sweetness 
 from the tree of life for the other. 
 
 This is the demonstration of principle that cannot be set 
 aside, the demonstration of Time. 
 
 Again, Time is the test of friendships. Where is the 
 
THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 249 
 
 love that never grows cold, that outlives youth and bloom, 
 that was founded on deeper and more vital attractions 
 than those that pass away with life's roseate morning? 
 Where are the hands that used to clasp ours ? Have they 
 warm and welcoming palms for us still ? Where are the 
 lips that smiled upon us once ? Do they keep smiles or 
 sternness for us now ? We used to listen to such earnest 
 and tender Expressions of interest in our fortunes, delight 
 in our society, regard for our persons, and appreciation 
 of our characteristics. Are all those utterances silent 
 now? How much of youthful and ardent friendship has 
 survived those summer days? How many of our later 
 associations have kept their first gushing promises in truth 
 and faithfulness ? 
 
 And yet we must not judge harshly. If there is any 
 lesson which Time letters most legibly on all the pages of 
 our story, it is, that our hard, reproachful judgments, our 
 morbid protests that all is false, deceitful, and hollow, 
 that truth and honor have forsaken the earth, that none 
 can be trusted, that no heart is sincere, that real kindness 
 and genuine good-will are not to be found among men, 
 are extravagances that would be ridiculous if they were 
 not so false and injurious. We have been deceived and 
 betrayed, but we must not generalize from that instance. 
 We have broken through the ice here and there, but there 
 may be yet broad fields of it as firm as a marble floor. 
 The very hearts that we pronounce alienated and estranged 
 may rather have become wearied than chilled. Dislocated 
 from one side, tfre broken ftbres of social affections must 
 cling somewhere. Thrown upon other fellowships, the 
 
250 THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 
 
 tendrils have caught and twined about fresh objects. 
 Once they were all free to turn and choose as they listed, 
 but they have been pressed long since into new alliances, 
 and have responded to the new appeals as once they re- 
 sponded to ours. But in this very fact they show that 
 their nature is unchanged. To human love, if not to our 
 personal memory, they still are true ; yes, and bring back 
 the old relations, and we, it may be, should not find them 
 wanting. This is what Time teaches. 
 
 And then, again, Time tries his tests upon character. 
 Sorrowfully, often, we are made to watch this process. 
 All seems fair outwardly. We have unbounded confi- 
 dence. We surrender our gravest trusts. We rest upon 
 this tried and approved integrity. It becomes a standard- 
 bearer in the most salient advances of Christianity. It 
 wins a good report. It stands a pillar, straight, strong, 
 and upright. Lay your weight there, build thereon ; and 
 we build, and feel secure for solid years. And, one day, 
 there is a crash. It was only the shell of a pillar ; either 
 within it was all rottenness and hollowness, or a sudden 
 and violent wrench twisted it out of place, and down it 
 came, fallen and broken. It is a mournful lesson Time 
 has read us. Whom shall we trust? What shall we 
 build with? Character that has stood seemingly all 
 severer tests, passed unsullied amid youthful passions .and 
 summer temptations, met the hour and call of solemn 
 duties, took on the sober livery of its autumn staidness 
 and ripeness, cannot this be confided in? Are life-long 
 -victories over manifold forces of evil no security ? Ah ! 
 one test remains. It is a silent, patient, long-waiting de- 
 
THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 251 
 
 tective. At last it gives in its report, and we are stricken 
 dumb with surprise and grief. Hastily, perhaps, we say, 
 " All is over ; this is the end ; there is nothing left there ; 
 here shuts down the gate of life and hope." And Time 
 may yet correct this too hasty conclusion, and read us an 
 unpublished story that would draw deep upon our tender- 
 est sympathies, and forbid us to pass capital sentence 
 upon our brother on one indictment only, when we are 
 impeachable in many points, and lead up out of the valley 
 of humiliation a chastened penitent, a restored wanderer, 
 whose lore in divine grace and infinite compassion shall 
 surpass all that we have known, whose fitness for rare and 
 special service shall be tempered in this fiery furnace, and 
 whose evening of life shall yet show a serene and glowing 
 west. Hast thou, O Time ! and thou, O wondrous Grace 
 of God! such revelations in store? We will pause, and 
 hope and pray till the future draw back its veil. 
 
 Is there a ghost in every house, a phantom dogging 
 every man's footsteps, a secret in every bosom? Here 
 and there, there is a seemingly calm and self-possessed 
 spirit, that faces tranquilly the light of day and the gaze 
 of all-searching eyes, as though the waters flowed trans- 
 parent with crystal clearness over a pebbly bed, in which 
 the while there is yet beneath this surface-sparkling, a 
 deep, dark pool, and at the bottom a grim, slimy monster 
 that never comes to the light. There lurks that leviathan 
 for unsuspected years. No ripple above, no commotion 
 on the surface, gives signs of the horrid life in the dark 
 depths. The man walks amid his fellow-men as though 
 with a consciousness never disturbed. No infirmity of 
 
252 THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 
 
 nerve ever sets him to trembling. No pause in his un- 
 sleeping vigilance betrays him into fatal admissions. In 
 his utter solitude he sometimes faces this untold story. 
 But no lips can ever tell it. It lies within the compass of 
 no single knowledge. It is broken into fragments, like a 
 shattered ring, or a fatal bond torn apart and distributed 
 into remote and alien hands. Can those fragments ever 
 be gathered, those parts ever be reunited ? Alone and by 
 itself, each means nothing, reveals nothing. What simul- 
 taneous impulse shall move these " disjecta membra " to 
 come together ? The thing can never be ; and the keeper 
 of the shameful secret passes on reassured. Then Time 
 waves his wand. The hand that held one fragment mould- 
 ers in dust, .and the eyes of executors scan curiously the 
 torn and yet ominous leaf. From opposite meridians, as 
 though led on by fate, come up, at the only juncture that 
 could serve the issue, the remaining witnesses. The mu- 
 tilated memorial is again a whole, but it is written in 
 cipher, and the dream of security lingers yet. And the 
 magic wand is lifted once more, and the hidden key drops 
 from its hiding-place, and all is legible and patent. Time 
 has become the minister of justice. And the last words 
 of every dying year wake in guilty breasts this dreary 
 echo, " There is nothing covered that shall not be re- 
 vealed, and hid that shall not be known." 
 
 And yet there are those to whom this word is not 
 dreary, but animating; not a menace, but a long-sustain- 
 ing promise. They have been under a cloud. Their 
 charaoier has been unrighteously aspersed. Men have 
 believed evil of them. They have been the victims of 
 
THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 253 
 
 mistakes or of circumstances or of malignant conspiracy. 
 The baleful torches of calumny have flared upon them and 
 blackened them all over. Their simple assertion of inno- 
 cence has been taken as brazen-fronted hardihood. Many 
 a hand has been withdrawn from them ; many a face has 
 turned away. Friends once trustful and beloved have 
 passed by on the other side. So they have walked on in 
 the cold shadows of the long night, waiting for the dawn ; 
 and the slow hours rolled away. They had no hope but 
 in God, and God sent to then? this championship of Time. 
 And one day the solution of the mystery was suddenly 
 uncovered, and men saw how they had been deluded, and 
 how falsely they had believed. And this patient inno- 
 cence shone forth like a rising sun, the brighter for its 
 obscuration, all the more revered that it had suffered long 
 in uncomplaining silence. And it is seen that character is 
 not committed to human keeping. No enemy can take it 
 from us. We need not fear, in our innocence, the face of 
 mortal, the malice of infernal. We can calmly defy all 
 machinations ; and when girt about with hissing serpents, 
 who boast that they have us in their own den and power, 
 we can stand in the heroism of this single truth : w The 
 Lord is on my side, I will not fear ; what can man do unto 
 me?" 
 
 Again, the real struggle of a man's life, the crisis of his 
 moral history, Time often holds in reserve. It comes not 
 in his sheltered boyhood, over which bend only bright and 
 genial skies. His youth glides past him, a peaceful stream 
 flowing on through gentle meadows. Manhood takes him 
 by the hand, and there has been as yet no faltering in 
 
254 THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 
 
 his step. He seems to have conquered in the fields of 
 life, to have mastered his passions without a conflict. 
 And, perhaps, gray mingles with the native hue of his 
 hair, the seal of his confirmation in settled integrity. He 
 knows not, and no man knows, the strength of his pro- 
 pensities. The hour of trial has never fairly fronted him. 
 What a mutinous crew slumber under the hatches there 
 he suspects not ! What combustibles are gathered be- 
 neath the fair fabric of his unsullied name ! What a train 
 might be fired, what a fight he might be called to maintain, 
 with upleaping and furious foes and flames, he never for 
 a moment dreams ! It may happen to him to know better 
 by and by. The ripe hour hurries on. It is all the more 
 perilous that he has never faced real and mortal danger. 
 He has no lore of warning experience. The train is fired, 
 and the tumult begins. Let him gird himself like a man. 
 The combat rages. What a fearful strife ! Forward and 
 backward the tide ebbs and flows. No such strain as this 
 has ever tested the might of his arm. He has called him- 
 self a soldier, but he has never had a field-day till now. 
 What if it should go against him ? He pants and bleeds 
 and falters. Oh ! woe the day, if he have not a divine 
 Helper, or if he forget to look up for heavenly succor ! 
 Let no man speak harshly of the fallen ; let no man plume 
 himself upon his own immaculateuess. Our day may 
 come. Low behind the bending west the distant cloud 
 may even now be rising. Be meek, charitable, watchful, 
 and prayerful. 
 
 God even commits his own vindication to Time. He 
 delays, both to visit for daring wrong and to reward pa- 
 
NIVERSITY 
 THE MINISTRIES OF ^CIME. 255 
 
 tient faith. His threatenings and his promises seem laid 
 aside, forgotten. The impious cry, derisively, " Where is 
 the promise of his coming?" and the believer, "Lord, 
 how long ? " But there is no demonstration from the si- 
 lent heavens. That sovereign hand begins its work afar 
 off. It rolls up not a single event, but an ordered and 
 massive system. The good die while yet the consumma- 
 tion hoped for lingers. The vile triumph, and their seed 
 seems established in the earth. Then on the vast, dim 
 dial, the index points to the appointed hour, and ven- 
 geance and deliverance do their work; and amid blas- 
 phemy confounded and righteousness exultant, sounds 
 the blessed voice, "I the Lord will hasten it in his time." 
 
 In the individual life the grandest spiritual truths are 
 learned late. Here, as in all learning, there is an alpha- 
 bet first, and more wondrous revelations afterward. For 
 these deeper -and more radiant mysteries there must be 
 often a peculiar preparation. The soul must have a past 
 to look back to, to build upon. The path up the snowy 
 Alps is at first along rugged and earthy ravines ; by and 
 by it emerges, and the dazzling peak shoots heavenward. 
 The time of need, the hour of trial, the crisis of sharp ex- 
 perience, must bring the moment of revelation. We 
 must suffer our converts to be babes ; we must expect 
 for ourselves more glowing and rapt discoveries of God's 
 grace and loving-kindness than our poor attainments . in 
 the past have ever mastered. 
 
 But these ministries of Time touch heart-nerves in 
 passing. They play sorely on tender chords. The mu- 
 sic is solemn, wailing, and dirgelike. There are weep- 
 
256 THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 
 
 ing kindreds here who dreamed not a year ago, in their 
 glad security, what Time had in store for them ; that he 
 should lead their best beloved away from their circle ; 
 that he was weaving ever, while they smiled and slept, a 
 winding-sheet for tender, fair, and manly forms ; that, in 
 the silence and in the darkness, he was digging a grave, 
 and lettering some sweet household name in marble ; that 
 soon he should shroud their joyousness in the darkness of 
 the tomb, their festive garments in the sable of mourning. 
 But this he had in keeping for them. He has lent 
 strength and grace to many a life ; he has piled up boun- 
 ties at every door ; he has filled our garners with his 
 loaded wains ; but, alas ! he has stolen from hearthstone 
 and fireside what he can never replace. 
 
 And yet Time has a ministry of consolation too.' He 
 heals where he wounds. It is of God that his touch has 
 such a balm in it. He wipes away tears ; he uuknits the 
 furrowed brow ; he brings back the smile to the quiver- 
 ing lips ; he leads the captive forth into the sunshine ; he 
 gathers upon the bereaved the tender and soothing spell 
 of memory ; he plants flowers in the path where bleeding 
 feet have walked, pierced by the thorns. 
 
 O Time ! what dost thou yet keep back from us ? 
 What commissions hast thou to execute upon us in these 
 fresh, opening days of the new-born year? Whither 
 along this track that glides always into the shadow of to- 
 morrow dost thou lead our feet ? What of joy or of sor- 
 row, of conflict or of suffering, art thou marshalling even 
 now? Vain guess! No voice answers. Into the mist 
 opens no vista of light. But this we know, Time is a 
 
THE MINISTRIES OF TIME. 257 
 
 creature of God. It waits upon that sovereign will. It 
 comes to us a guide sent from heaven, to conduct us on- 
 ward into the good pleasure of One whom in life and in 
 death we can trust with our mortal and immortal hopes. 
 O Time ! roll on the year, bring up the forces of the 
 hidden future. With one hand clasping the divine hand, 
 and a mutual good cheer, which we make a prayer to- 
 day, we go forward in faith and hope. 
 22* 
 
XYIL 
 
 SOKROWS OF JESUS. 
 
 A MAN OF SORROWS . . .- Isa. liii. part 3. 
 
 w 
 
 HEN mention is made of the sufferings of Christ, 
 our thoughts turn naturally to the scene in the 
 garden, where nature, overstrained, gave her witness in 
 crimson drops, and to the slow agonies of the cross, kill- 
 ing, not by any single mortal stroke, but by the sharp- 
 ness of conquering pain. This habit of thought fails to 
 appreciate the deep significance of such an expression as 
 that we are to dwell upon now. 
 
 It need not, necessarily, be a mournful and saddening 
 subject for us to consider. There is nothing depressing 
 in recalling the hardships and wounds of a soldier who 
 has come home victorious and laurelled from the wars, 
 nor in speaking of the storm and wreck and thirst, the 
 great fight with the elements through which the much- 
 enduring mariner has returned safely and prosperously to 
 port, nor in listening to chronicles of the long, dreadful 
 arctic night from one who sits at our warm fireside and 
 tells of the conflict and the triumph. Our Saviour has 
 endured the cross, passed beneath the shame, carried his 
 
SORROWS OF JESUS. 259 
 
 sorrows and ours, and gone home to his glorious throne, 
 made perfect by sufferings, filling out thus the whole 
 spherical idea of substitution and personal sympathy, and 
 announcing himself as " he that liveth and was dead, and 
 is alive for evermore." To speak of his "sorrows " may 
 fill our eyes with tears, but they will be tears of grateful 
 tenderness, of glad thanksgiving, and will leave the eyes 
 that weep clearer and brighter to discern his peerless ex- 
 altation who thus suffered and triumphed for us. 
 
 The expression we are contemplating of its own force 
 indicates, not the crowning and closing specialty of suffer- 
 ing which Jesus endured, but the tenor of his life, the 
 current of his daily experience, the habitual consciousness 
 of his soul. It takes in, of course, as a part of its mean- 
 ing, that consummation of extreme and dying anguish, 
 but it covers the whole story beside. When we say of 
 one " he is a man of few words " we mean not that he of 
 whom we speak was particularly silent on a given occa- 
 sion, but that he is of a reserved and unsocial habit at all 
 times and everywhere. Our description has the same 
 breadth of extent when we speak of another as a man of 
 strong passions or prejudices, of another as a man of keen 
 observation, of another as a visionary man; we refer to 
 the general character and experience, and not to isolated 
 instances. 
 
 The life of Christ was a sorrowful life. It moved from 
 beginning to ending in that zone. Sorrow was his meat 
 and drink. It bathed his spirit with daily immersion. 
 In that shaded and thorny vale his feet walked always. 
 He never rose quite clear from this valley mist, this at- 
 
260 SORROWS OF JESUS. 
 
 mosphere of sorrow that drooped about him and clung to 
 him. Ah, it makes our hearts ache, not, indeed, with a 
 sensation all of pain, but with a tender and burdened ful- 
 ness, which has its witness in our eyes, to follow this 
 Master thus, and remember it was all for us. The human 
 in him was altogether sorrowful. The expression fastens 
 our eye upon his humanity. He was a man of sorrows. 
 Those experiences of life which in us are mingled of 
 lights or shades, those avenues of entrance into the human 
 soul which in us are avenues to many a joy as well as 
 to here and there a grief, were in him experiences alto- 
 gether on the shady side, avenues along which trooped 
 and pressed for admission a thronging procession of 
 griefs. To share the bright lot of our human nature in 
 its frequent providential story, to sit in our earthly sun- 
 shine, to taste the sweets of our earthly vines, to inhale 
 the fragrance of our earthly flowers, to be ministered 
 unto by seasons and climes, to hold delighted converse 
 with congenial spirits, and see the smile of friendship and 
 hear the words of love, humanity with such an allot- 
 ment, if this were all, were not so great a trial even to an 
 exalted spiritual nature. But to take it with its ca- 
 pacities of joy and suffering only to have them filled with 
 the latter ; to take it with its deep sensibilities alive both 
 to pleasure and pain only to find it all sensitively thrilling 
 to pain, this is another sort of transformation for a 
 blessed and holy nature, and it was with such an expe- 
 rience of manhood that Jesus entered. 
 
 Let us glance down the catalogue of these sorrows and 
 name such of them as meet our eye with most prominent 
 
SORROWS OF JESUS. 261 
 
 lettering. We shall not have time to dwell, only to let 
 the list linger a moment on our rapid hearing; and 
 those unnamed will seem to some more worthy of com- 
 memoration, perhaps, than those to which we now lend 
 speech. 
 
 We need not make much of his poverty perhaps. 
 Other men have suffered and do suffer poverty. They 
 are pinched and distressed. They see the sad eyes of 
 unprovided ones looking up to them daily, and cannot 
 look back with an eye that relights the lamp of hope. 
 They are hungry and cold and have the faintness of want 
 and the heartache of despair, and all without any con- 
 sciousness of some high and infinitely blessed end to be 
 thus served and compassed. We know not that Jesus' 
 sufferings of destitution were more acute or in any wise a 
 sorer tax upon patience and manhood than that of many 
 over whom the heart of charity bleeds amid our own 
 homes. And yet we do not know all the history of that 
 poverty. Not much is said about it in the Gospel his- 
 tories. There are glimpses here and there. We know 
 what the circumstances of the family were when that 
 infant form was cradled. We know that Jesus wrought 
 with his own hands, probably through a long and toilsome 
 youth, to add something to the comfort, or take something 
 from the sharpness, of need in his own father's house. A 
 single line tells us in plaintive confession, "The foxes 
 have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son 
 of man hath not where to lay his head." But there are 
 wide, blank intervals of his life, in respect to the comforts 
 necessary to the body, where the narrative is altogether 
 
262 SORROWS OF JESUS. 
 
 silent. The more refined and sensitive a nature is, the 
 more delicate in its perceptions and tastes, the more the 
 coarseness of poverty's rude shifts must chafe and press. 
 As the humanity of Christ seems to have been left to feel 
 to the full its earthly experience, there may have been 
 under the shadow of this meaning silence such ever wear- 
 ing trials, such single scenes of intense suffering as we 
 cannot easily conceive. But we have said enough about 
 this. 
 
 Look at that sorrow of loneliness. His own family 
 understood him not, and his loved and loving disciples 
 were perpetually puzzled about him. All whom he chose, 
 and between whom and himself there were ties of kindred 
 and friendship, were yet so far off from him, looked upon 
 him with wondering and doubtful eyes. Even the mother 
 who held him in her arms, held him as it were at arm's 
 length, and wondered over her strange babe. John might 
 lie in his bosom, Peter might touch his hand, the twelve 
 might sit around him at table and feast, but within the 
 humanity that came in contact with theirs, in his own 
 thoughts and feelings and cares, there was another and 
 inner sphere into which no man entered with him. There 
 was no equal, congenial, and brotherly companion into 
 whom his eyes could look, without speech, all the contents 
 of his heart, and read in return a perfect intelligence and 
 sympathy. He need not have gone away from his dis- 
 ciples to be alone. He was ever alone. 
 
 " Cold mountains and the midnight air 
 Witnessed the fervor of his prayer." 
 
SORROWS OF JESUS. 263 
 
 But his loneliness was a mere solitary mountain height, 
 a deeper midnight for his uncompanioned soul. It seems 
 to have come over him now and then, and he speaks it 
 with such a voice it would seem as though the thrilled 
 and startled earth might give back a groan. "Alone," 
 and yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me. Think 
 of walking over this earth and through the midst of its 
 circles and kindreds without one companion for a day or 
 an hour of a lifetime ! 
 
 We have spoken under our first head of his spirit as 
 gentle and refined, and of its hard and harsh contact with 
 the coarseness of want. But think now of its coming into 
 contact with all earth's rude and coarse types of life, its 
 nameless abominations, the things seen and heard and 
 understood which we cannot write, sharp speech, evil 
 railing, mutual suspicions, wicked jealousies, taunts, re- 
 venges, ugly and tyrannical tempers, plottings and coun- 
 terplottings, the looks which a human eye can give, the 
 expressions which a human face can wear, the words 
 which a human tongue can utter, sharper than daggers, 
 more brutal than blows. Go on in your own imagina- 
 tion, of which however you need not much help. Only 
 fling the coloring of facts upon the canvas, and then see 
 what to such a spirit must be the sorrowful mingling with 
 such a race. 
 
 Think, again, of the sorrow of his sympathy and com- 
 passion. If he could have gone through the world hard- 
 hearted, he could have escaped this pain. But all grief 
 was his grief ; every woe came upon his inheritance ; he 
 bore our griefs, he carried our sorrows, he entered into 
 
264 SORROWS OF JESUS. 
 
 the burden of every tried one. The weeping sisters at 
 their brother's grave ; he catches sight of their faces, he 
 looks upon the tomb and oh, look upon his own face ! 
 the tears are flowing there he sees a multitude around 
 him in the wilderness an hungered and athirst, and it is 
 written he had compassion upon the multitude, because 
 they were as sheep not having a shepherd. What would 
 it be to take all suffering of others upon one sustaining 
 heart, to see tears, hear sighs, intense wretchedness of 
 any kind, and make it all our own? Could one of us 
 bear it? 
 
 Then there was the depth of human ruin into whose 
 abysses his gaze searched. Oh, what had sin wrought ! 
 He saw its utter, sad devastations, the effects of the fall, 
 such malice, such hardness of heart, such hatred of truth, 
 such lying, murders, and lusts, such ungrateful and de- 
 termined hostility to their Redeemer bringing them salva- 
 tion ! What must it have been for him to have to say 
 to them such words as he used to warn and rebuke, " O 
 generation of vipers ! " He explored the depth of that 
 great gulf of man's apostasy as no other human eyes ever 
 did before or since. 
 
 Then the burden of those ruined ones, we cannot fathom 
 the love that looked out of his eyes, the yearning that 
 made his heart bleed, the restlessness to subdue, win, and 
 deliver. An earnest Christian knows a little of it. His 
 soul is a little fountain of such impulses, but in that soul 
 a great ocean heaved and swelled. 
 
 Then his disappointment, the fruitlessness, to so many 
 of his great mission. Oh, what thoughts were his when 
 
SORROWS OF JESUS. 265 
 
 he sat on Olivet, and apostrophized the city lying there 
 beneath him, " O Jerusalem ! " Matt, xxiii. 37. And 
 what a tone lingers yet in such words as these : Ye will 
 not come to me that ye might have life " ! And then 
 this most desponding utterance, so tender that the tears 
 drop through it yet, " If I had not come and spoken unto 
 them, they had not had sin." But we cannot now go on. 
 We are here 'to commemorate a Saviour's dying love, and 
 all sorrow to-day may plead unto Jesus. 
 23 
 
XVIII. 
 
 BALANCE SHEET; OR, TAKING ACCOUNT 
 OF STOCK. 
 
 "WHAT PROFIT HATH A MAN OF ALL HIS LABOK "WHICH HE TAKETH UNDER 
 
 THE SUN ? Eccl. i. 3. 
 
 IT is a wise and needful custom in mercantile life to 
 pause periodically in the current of buying and selling, 
 review the work of our fiscal year, and take account of 
 stock. It were a piece of wilful folly, in neglect of such 
 review, to launch out upon new enterprises, to adventure 
 fresh charges and expenditures, or to dream and drift 
 drowsily onward, careless whether the past had added to 
 or diminished our resources. Of such a reckless and 
 blind confidence there could come, sooner or later, only 
 bankruptcy and ruin. We need to ask what we have 
 gained, what we have lost, how the sum total of capital and 
 effects at the year's close compares with that at the year's 
 beginning ; whether our trusted investments are produc- 
 tive ; what there is to add to, what there is to subtract 
 from, our whole wealth. 
 
 Equally wise and wholesome is it for us, in the revolu- 
 tions of our natural and moral life, to have our points of 
 self-reckoning, to arrest thereat the swift-gliding stream 
 
BALANCE SHEET. 267 
 
 of our planning, toiling, and hoping ; to call up the past 
 for its honest report ; to raise the question, What have we 
 gained, what have we lost, in the true wealth of our 
 being ? and with careful arithmetic work out our balance 
 sheet of character and spiritual standing before setting 
 forward on the new reaches of our way. 
 
 The chimes that toll the death of the old year, and 
 then, changing their tone, ring out joybells for the birth of 
 the new, strike for us a fitting hour for such a faithful 
 reckoning. 
 
 We do not need an argument to prove that no man's 
 life stands still. There is inevitably growth and progress 
 with every man in some direction. God's is the only 
 nature without advance or change. Each influence that 
 tries its powers upon us produces some positive effect. 
 If it be yielded to, it governs the pulses of the hour, per- 
 haps of all the future. If it be resisted, its visit is still 
 memorable, as strengthening the forces that have over- 
 mastered it and establishing their supremacy. Every day 
 brings up such influences to levy their pressure upon us. 
 These silent visits will have their record in perhaps the 
 imperceptible but real changes of our convictions, our 
 principles, and our purposes, the gradually fading or 
 deepening hues of the coloring of our thoughts and 
 our days. The long procession of such visits that suc- 
 ceed one another through the days of a single year 
 must inevitably affect the man, if not his demonstrations ; 
 the worker, if not at once his work. These influences will 
 be of every variety. They will be ordinary and spe- 
 cial. They will come from men, from books, from na- 
 
268 BALANCE SHEET; OK, 
 
 ture, from Providence, from the depths of our own soul, 
 from God's word and spirit. They will make up in their 
 aggregate the whole story of our experience ; and this 
 experience will either sharpen our wits or dull them, 
 quicken or stupefy our sensibilities, bring us increments of 
 knowledge and power, or squander and waste the hours 
 and the occasions that ought to have helped our stores of 
 wisdom, and our stability in goodness and virtue. 
 
 Let us ask, then, to-day, on this first Sabbath morning 
 of the opening year, looking back before we look forward, 
 and with honest desire to ascertain all that the past can 
 reveal to us, what results of the old year's record must 
 we set down on the side of loss ? What may we carry to 
 the side of gain ? What " profit have we had of all our 
 labor which we have taken under the sun " ? 
 
 First, then, on the side of loss, there is an actual dimi- 
 nution of our capital in Time. We embarked on life's 
 career with this capital at its maximum. At what num- 
 ber we could then write the units of its sum total, 
 we knew not then, we never have known since. But 
 God is merciful beyond the appreciation of most minds 
 in this among other tokens of his tender regard for our 
 comfort, that he lays not on human hearts the fear of 
 daily dying. He permits his creatures to rise up and lie 
 down, to go forth to their work and their labor until the 
 evening, without this cold conviction pulsing through 
 their souls, and uttering itself in doleful tones whenever 
 their lips open, " I shall die perhaps to-day. I shall wake 
 no more perhaps with another morning." He has abun- 
 dantly taught in his word and in his pavilion that human 
 
TAKING ACCOUNT OF STOCK. 269 
 
 life is frail, that it is short at the longest, that it is as a 
 vapor that appeareth for a little time, then vauisheth away ; 
 that its continuance is uncertain. We see the heavy 
 sheaves gathered in, manhood in its prime laid low, 
 youth drooping in its summer, childhood's blossom and 
 the red bud of infancy nipped by untimely frosts. But 
 God so sustains our hearts that the arm of industry is 
 not paralyzed ; hope rises with us every morning and runs 
 at our side, or glides on before us all the day. We send 
 out our ships on far voyages ; we sow and wait for future 
 harvests ; we invest when years are to roll forward their 
 salient changes before our dividends shall make us rich. 
 Undoubtedly we forget too often life's frailty ; the heart is 
 overbold and courageous ; we need to have it said to us 
 at least daily, as to the Macedonian of old, " Philip, thou 
 art mortal ; " but what comfort and tranquillity in laboring 
 and in gathering the fruits of God's goodness and human 
 toil, notwithstanding the sentence that arches us all, 
 " Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return " ! God 
 has permitted it to be written that our eyes may see it, 
 and our spirits know the buoyancy of this narrated hope, 
 "The days of our years are threescore years and ten." I 
 think it is not his pleasure that every man should enter 
 upon his day's work saying to his heart, " I shall die to- 
 day ;" but still, as though he might, the man who is 
 always ready can toil in perpetual hope and perpetual 
 tranquillity. 
 
 But whatever our capital at the start, in respect to the 
 years ordained for us, we have lost another unit of that 
 loan from God. One year less to expend upon all our 
 23* 
 
270 BALANCE SHEET; OR, 
 
 earthly schemes ; one year less in which to toil for our 
 families, learn the lessons and fulfil the high ends of life ; 
 one year less in which to prepare for the life to come ; 
 one year less between us and that last chime of the clock 
 wound up to men only with the beating of our heart be- 
 tween us and the grave, and that which is after death, the 
 judgment. And if the completion of each year suggests 
 this thought, the completion of a decade of years makes 
 it more solemn and impressive. Seven such decades 
 touches the utmost bound. You and I have lived two of 
 those seven, three of them, four of them (the plural 
 "we" becomes less comprehensive as we advance) five of 
 them, six perhaps, and cutting in upon the seventh. 
 Look back, not far, to youth, childhood. How near 
 those bright, lawless days ! Only yesterday ! Measure 
 forward an equal reach, and where are we? Sleeping be- 
 neath a green ridge, with a white slab at its head lettered 
 with our name, and that little Latin word " Obit" departed, 
 completing the sentence. 
 
 But when I raise the question of lost time, I mean 
 much more than the obvious and universal fact that our 
 years drop off one by one, and that another has now gone, 
 taken from the side of the capital yet unexpended to be 
 added to that which is spent. Have there been no days 
 of this year otherwise lost, lost because unimproved ? 
 Have we been frugal of time ? Have we been lavish of 
 moments? Have we idled away no swift, underlying in- 
 tervals between rising and the morning meal ? After that 
 meal, and before our industry put on its harness, in loiter- 
 ing along while the working hours shone bright overhead, 
 
TAKING ACCOUNT OF STOCK. 271 
 
 in drowsy animal indolence through the shades of even- 
 ing, in sleep beyond the ministries of needful refreshment 
 and recuperation? Nay, is it not possible that our busiest 
 moments, our intensest activities, are those that ought in 
 a faithful reckoning to be carried to the side of loss? 
 Strokes of labor, hours of work given to pride, worldly 
 grasping, self-indulgence, any issues of flesh and sense, 
 any ends that terminate upon the life that now is, are 
 not these lost to us ? Shall we count them finally among 
 our gains? Have they helped our land riches? Have 
 they not robbed us of so much that might have been, if 
 otherwise devoted, grandly productive ? All that has been 
 squandered on the needs or the desires and lusts of the 
 present with no other, no higher thoughts or ends has 
 gone hopelessly against us, lost days, however crowded 
 with diligence, however gladdened by successes ; for life 
 is one whole, not a little payment here in time ; it has one 
 story of progress and character and destiny, unrolling 
 from the here into the hereafter. Every truly faithful 
 work must take hold of life as a whole, as imperishable 
 and immortal, and the question of gain or loss must be 
 settled by those balances that can be carried forward to 
 the eternal enriching, or that are placed only momentarily 
 on the side of profit to disappear in the tremendous offset 
 of a whole probation wasted. 
 
 So that diligence, strong nerved and careful and gainful, 
 is not the true redemption of time. Many a man who 
 pauses in his routine of work to aid in the direct nurture 
 and happiness of his home is saving time ; to cheer the 
 comfortless, to guide the perplexed, to hear the sad stories 
 
272 BALANCE SHEET; OR, 
 
 of temptation and remorse, and administer to such forlorn 
 spirits is saving time ; to sit down at the board and in 
 the evening circle with wife and children, imparting 
 knowledge and diffusing light and joy, is saving time. 
 
 I dwell no longer on this point. Let us look to it, each 
 of us, and give it the place in our reckoning which we 
 judge belongs to it. 
 
 With some of us, again, I suppose there has been an 
 actual loss from the capital of strength and vigor. Per- 
 haps we cannot perceive it. We had better ask our 
 friends. Perhaps, again, we know it better than they, 
 are aware of signs not visible or palpable to them, the 
 foot not quite so light, nor the step so elastic ; the form 
 not so perpendicularly upright, or, if so, not so sure a 
 match against weight and pressure ; the muscles failing a 
 little in hardiness and roundness, the sinews relaxing, the 
 hair changing its hue by single threads of a new coloring, 
 the power to do and to endure drained of something of its 
 fulness and volume. We weary sooner than we did. We 
 like easy appliances to which we were ever indifferent. 
 We shrink a little from sharp encounters with difficulties 
 which once only put us upon our mettle. We turn over 
 some of our hastening and hurrying to our boys, to 
 younger men. Is it so? Put it down, then, on the side 
 where it goes. 
 
 Have there been special opportunities, conjunctions of 
 favoring circumstances for doing some particular work, 
 which have come and gone unimproved, to return no 
 more, a kindness to be shown, declined ; help to render 
 in a dark day refused, and the day not past by ; a soul to 
 
TAKING ACCOUNT OF STOCK. 273 
 
 warn and succor in its crisis ; a providence to improve 
 and impress in the family; a co-operation to render in 
 Christian enterprises that were calling earnestly for vol- 
 unteers ; a good for our own souls possible to some con- 
 secration of a day or an hour to that end ; a word to 
 speak for truth and right and humanity and God when 
 men's ears were open? What account must we make 
 to-day of these precious hours of the year, its most inesti- 
 mable opportunities, the real and most momentous con- 
 nections it had in God's purposes with our life, the ends 
 for which God gave it ? Eeckon them in our lost oppor- 
 tunities, our forfeited occasions of doing and getting 
 good? " Oh, how often we wish backward ! " 
 
 Has there been any loss of purity and delicacy and con- 
 scientiousness ? Have the finer sensibilities and the more 
 delicate and retiring sentiments of our soul been toyed 
 with, wantoned with, handled and sullied, made coarse 
 and common, so that our thoughts and feelings are less 
 select and sensitive, less kept within doors and out of the 
 glare and soot of street exposure. Have we become 
 world-hardened and world-soiled, so that we laugh where 
 we used to blush, and can permit a jest where once a light 
 word gave us a wound ? Let us look and get the exact 
 state of the balance here, and put the item in where it 
 belongs. 
 
 What have we done with special acts of discipline in- 
 tended for special effects upon us ? We needed humbling, 
 we failed in submission, we were afflicted with chronic 
 discontent, we were fluttering with perpetual levity and 
 vanity, we were deep in the soleinnest, gravest, and in- 
 
274 BALANCE SHEET ; OR, 
 
 tensest worldliness. God saw and meant us a special 
 mercy, and sent a chastening and helpful providence, a 
 little sharp lesson in his own heavenly tuition, to show us 
 our need and help us to realize a blessed amendment. 
 How have we received these offers and ministries of help ? 
 Did they produce their desired and destined effect, or did 
 we overlook their real intent, disappoint their aim, and 
 lose their most invaluable aid? Set them down, if so, 
 so much to our loss. 
 
 Has there been with any of us a loss of hope and trust 
 and good courage for truth and right? Have we been 
 ready to give up the proverb that honesty is the best pol- 
 icy ? Have we come to feel that it is vain to contend for 
 righteousness and humanity and justice? Have we been 
 so bereft of confidence in God as almost to doubt whether 
 he was on the side of a manful fight for principle and 
 piety? Have the dark clouds that lie with thunderous 
 blackness on our country's horizon caused us to bate one 
 jot of hope or effort for the incoming of the day when 
 involuntary servitude shall float away among the relics of 
 the grim and iron ages reaching along the past of human 
 history? Do we feel as though expediency, as against 
 right and principle and love, were the doctrine of the hour? 
 For ourselves in our own private personal story has so 
 sable a night hung over us that we doubted whether God 
 could bring the day, almost whether there were any sun 
 that shone anywhere? Has the strain upon faith been 
 too long, too severe, patience drawn out to its last nerve 
 of endurance, and the soul settling into the gloom of 
 hopeless insubmission ? This loss of confidence in the 
 
TAKING ACCOUNT OF STOCK. 275 
 
 great Euler and Father was a dreadful loss. Is it an 
 item in any soul's experience? If so, let it go in. Give 
 it a place on the balance sheet. 
 
 Possibly there has been with some soul a loss of char- 
 acter and moral standing. The hour of temptation came. 
 It found you alone, unaided, forlorn, in deep need. No 
 friendly companion to shield and strengthen you. The 
 whisper of evil was delusive, so plausible, no evil in- 
 tended, the snare so subtle, the wiles so hidden, the 
 meshes so soft and silken, that 3^011 were hopelessly en- 
 tangled before you dreamed of captivity, and now your 
 soul wrestles with mighty fears, with gloomy memories, 
 with black remorse, with environments of blank ruin that 
 stare at you as with Gorgon face, turning your heart to 
 stone. Oh, sad loss ! but always in this life when loss is 
 seen and known, if it be any loss short of the soul itself, 
 there is hope, because there is mercy in God. It is a 
 woful history, an experience such as you never dreamed 
 of writing for yourself; but put it down ; it belongs to the 
 record of this year gone. It may be a stepping-stone to 
 great riches, but in itself it is a terrible loss. It must 
 stand now on that side of the account. 
 
 There may have been another loss, of which there is 
 always danger, concerning which none of us perhaps can 
 ever know with certainty, the loss of the soul. I do not 
 mean with some who have entered eternity. I mean with 
 some of us who are to-day living men. If the records of 
 a human life teach anything clearly, it is that that life is 
 full of crises ; that on these critical points turn the issues 
 of punishment for the present and the future; that on 
 
276 BALANCE SHEET; OR, 
 
 some one of these critical moments the destiny of the soul 
 is settled, and that frequently before, perhaps long before, 
 that soul enters upon eternal scenes. Thus the wave of 
 some great providence, of some special blessing, or some 
 sharp affliction, or some visit of the Holy Ghost, or some . 
 melting urgency of truth, lifts the soul nearer to God and 
 to duty and to a newness of life than ever before. It was 
 the grand swell that was appointed as its hour of greatest 
 hope and opportunity. Unimproved, settling back into 
 the old color and the old track of life, it is by and by 
 seen, seen perhaps in the hour of dying, seen clearly 
 in the light of eternity, that there and then that soul came 
 the nearest to salvation that it ever came, that never again 
 was the prize of a blessed immortality so within its grasp, 
 so nearly possessed. Every year some such history must 
 be enacted. There are some here who ought, with trem- 
 bling hand and pale cheek, to write down on the side of 
 their losses, the words w my soul," and put an interroga- 
 tion point beyond. 
 
 Oh, it is a solemn reckoning we are holding ! It par- 
 takes of the character of the final judgment, only here, 
 blessed be God ! for every loss but one there is possible 
 yet an infinite gain that shall well-nigh utterly extinguish 
 it. 
 
 With many the year has been full of gain all along. 
 With all of us a year of God's kindly, nourishing, pater- 
 nal care. Put that down to gain, four seasons of his 
 prodigal mercies, day and night ministering bounty, seed- 
 time and harvest smiling each in turn as with the radiance 
 of the divine countenance. 
 
TAKING ACCOUNT OF STOCK. 277 
 
 There is the gain of so much and so many of life's 
 finished work and tasks. There is the gain of so much 
 service for God and man, the service itself, not its suc- 
 cesses, counting as gain for character and reward. There 
 are special lessons of truth and heavenly wisdom which 
 God has taught us, and which we could not barter for a 
 solid orb of gold, precious secrets of spiritual living that 
 used to be nlysteries, and are now a part of our daily 
 magic of overcoming. There are fruits of discipline, in 
 patience and contentment and resignation, and sweet sub- 
 missiveness and serenity of spirit, worth more than any 
 language can tell or any currency measure. There are 
 new spiritual traits nurtured within us and upon us which 
 we have so long coveted and almost despaired of, and 
 concerning which we now sing with broken heart, bro- 
 ken in tender joy, " Oh, to grace how great a debtor ! " 
 
 There are new views of Bible truths, God's deduc- 
 tions, rich promises, and positive precepts which clear up 
 many doubts, guide .us out of long wandering in weary 
 paths and brighten all our sky as with sunbeams. 
 
 There is a vantage ground for future conflicts and vic- 
 tories shown us, in which our feet have become divinely 
 established, and on which we may wait with celestial 
 allies the assaults of the great adversary. 
 
 There are sweet daily mercies that have fallen for us 
 every morning as the manna fell for Israel on the face of 
 the desert, and the taste of which was as wafers mixed 
 with honey. 
 
 Oh, how these gains foot up ! What song of gratitude 
 can fully utter our hearts' recognition of this long column 
 24 
 
278 BALANCE SHEET. 
 
 of God's contributions to our growing riches ? Even amid 
 sorrows we count still our profits, friends departing, 
 chairs and chambers left vacant, the earth opening her 
 arms and taking to the rest of her bosom those whom our 
 arms were clasping and would fain have detained ; but so 
 God came nearer to our circle than ever before ; we felt 
 his blessed presence and comforting; we saw how faith 
 could triumph over nature's fainting, and looking up when 
 the last sigh went outward from fading lips, we saw the 
 heavens opened and caught a glimpse of white-robed 
 spirits entering into joy and rest. 
 
 So stand the accounts with us to-day, a monition from 
 the past for the future, a sober arrest for thought and life 
 on this transition point. Yes, pause here yet one moment 
 longer. All our losses ALL, let us hope God may blot 
 out now with the gift of his most generous pardon, the 
 overflowing wealth of his favor and love. 
 
 Oh, leave no such fearful balance against you, my 
 friends, as those items foot up which we have dwelt upon ; 
 drag not such a debt forward into the burdened future. 
 Come to the great Proprietor, that these peculations upon 
 his estate intrusted to you may be graciously and pitifully 
 blotted out, and your way lie onward for all coming labors 
 and ventures with the everlasting gain of his friendship. 
 
XIX. 
 
 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 FAREWELL SERMON DELIVERED IN PARK STREET CHURCH, 
 FEBRUARY 4, 1866. 
 
 . . . BUILT UPON THE FOUNDATION OF THE APOSTLES AND PROPHETS, 
 JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF BEING THE CHIEF CORNER-STONE. Epll. ii. 20. 
 
 THE firmness and security of a building depend not so 
 much upon what we can see of the structure as upon 
 the parts which are mainly hidden and unseen. As we 
 approach from a distance, the pile may look fair and 
 stately, with broad front and lofty walls and crowning 
 turret and tower, and we may be ready to pronounce it 
 massive and strong. But we cannot know whether it be 
 so in truth until we have come nearer, and have examined 
 that lowlier and less visible part upon which the super- 
 structure rests. The strength of the edifice is not in lofty 
 wall or decorated porch or crowning dome, but in the 
 foundation. When all the materials are piled aloft, when 
 the tempest rocks it and the earthquake heaves, it stands 
 only if the foundation be solid and unyielding. 
 
 And the foundation, too, is distinguished into parts, 
 both for its honor and its security, its glory and crown. 
 The corner-stones take the chief burden of the super- 
 incumbent mass. To them the foundation lines are 
 
280 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 clamped and joined. In their steadiness the whole is un- 
 shaken. Among these, one is " Chief," the Head Stone of 
 the corner, the Key of that compacted strength, of cost- 
 liest material and most careful workmanship, to whose 
 setting in its place is gathered whatsoever can do it grace 
 and reverence, to whose keeping are confided the treasured 
 memorials which are to be preserved unto coming ages 
 and generations. 
 
 The scriptural Church as a whole, and so with each 
 particular church, both as a vital part and as a represen- 
 tative of the whole, is described as a building, a living 
 temple fitly framed together, resting on a certain definite 
 foundation with one chief corner-stone. 
 
 That foundation is nothing laid by the hand of man, or 
 found within the compass of man's nature and capacity. 
 It is what God revealed to prophets and apostles, what he 
 gave them to know and to build upon, the truth and the 
 life which they experience and to which they bear witness, 
 themselves as witnesses to the words and works of their 
 Lord. And the Head of the corner is that Stone elect and 
 precious, which the pride of the builders rejected, but 
 on which God has built his Church so firm that "the 
 gates of hell shall not prevail against it." That rock is 
 Christ. In him the foundations meet in unity and 
 strength. In him the whole building is compacted. No 
 forces of nature, not all the powers on earth or beneath, 
 can overturn a structure so founded. 
 
 We have, then, from our Scripture this cheering and 
 comforting truth, the all-sufficiency of Christ for his 
 Church. 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 281 
 
 There will be in our communion at this time so much 
 that belongs simply to the occasion, to be said, that we 
 must pass briefly and rapidly over points that were 
 worthily dwelt upon with largest treatment. 
 
 And I remark, in the first place, that we find enough in 
 Christ for the doctrine of the Church. The Church must 
 have a doctrine. It will live only as it holds living truth. 
 Its conquests' are victories over minds. It gains and holds 
 its subjects not by the terrors and constraints of power, 
 the sword in one hand, the keys of destiny here and here- 
 after in the other. It has to persuade men, to secure the 
 convictions of their souls, to show them something to be- 
 lieve, on which the longing and inquiring heart can rest. 
 And it brings forth this grand compendium of its teach- 
 ing, " God manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, 
 seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in 
 the world, received up into glory." Here are height and 
 length and breadth and depth. "It is a broad land of 
 wealth unknown." There is no narrowness here to disap- 
 point and fret the exploring mind. There are background 
 and foreground to this truth. Touch it at whatever 
 point, come upon it in whatever aspect, and you are led off 
 either way into the Infinite. It is not a little round of 
 human working, or of earthly moralities in which the 
 preacher of this doctrine treads. He need not be com- 
 passionated of the reformers and the philosophers because 
 he is shut up to the doctrine of Christ. If he determine 
 not to know anything, as a religious teacher, but Jesus 
 Christ and him crucified, he is no captive in a cell that 
 denies him range of feet and thought. The universe of 
 24* 
 
282 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 God's nature, God's government, and God's providence, 
 the eternity of God's purposes, the everlasting principles 
 of justice and right compacted in law, the wonders of re- 
 demptive mercy and vicarious love, the marshalling of 
 human histories in all their annals of blood and crime and 
 heroic achievement, their dark shades and their light 
 shades, their progressive civilizations, their painful experi- 
 ments, their sciences and philosophies and acts as tributary 
 to the reign of Christ, this is the limitless field, the 
 sphere without walls or cope, in which the preacher of 
 Christ and his salvation ranges at will. Here is enough 
 to stimulate the mind, to gird every power for strenuous 
 wrestling, to feed it, to expand it, to hold it in awe, and 
 to satisfy it that God has worthily broken silence to make 
 a revelation of his will vocal to the race. 
 
 Here, again, in the doctrine of Christ is sufficient for 
 the attraction of those outside the Church. God loving 
 his human children astray and lost, guilty and con- 
 demned, and coming among them in the incarnation, 
 moved by that great love to take their sicknesses, sor- 
 rows, and sius upon him, and through his sacrificial death 
 -in the flesh to reconcile them unto himself and restore 
 them to the heirship of heaven and immortality, is a story 
 men will stop to hear. There is an earnest element 
 under all the light frivolities of human consciousness. 
 There is a deep voice in the heart to whose pleading 
 nothing less than the atonement wrought by the Lamb of 
 God can make answer. There are dark solitudes of hu- 
 man experience in which each man walks alone repeating 
 after the false disciple, that traitor Judas, "I HAVE 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 283 
 
 SINNED." It does not meet such an experience to call to 
 this man to listen to a song, all whose strains are bor- 
 rowed from nature's minstrelsy, the notes of birds, the 
 chant of streams, the "deep, profound, eternal bass" of 
 oceans ; or to lead him up before some exquisite picture 
 in which the loveliness of human nature is painted ; or to 
 exhort him in pleasant words to be just and true and gen- 
 tle as a man and a brother among his fellow-men. This 
 treatment does not go deep enough, I mean deep 
 enough powerfully to attract and hold the interest of 
 men. But this great tragedy of the cross has power in 
 it. It conies to deal in earnest with earnest matters. 
 It is full of dramatic life and force. It does not at- 
 tempt the adjustment of sinful man's relation to a holy 
 God with smooth words and surface manipulations. It 
 goes to the root of the difficulty. It cuts through the 
 fair bloom of the surface to the hidden diseased core. It 
 is downright radical, and thorough in its treatment of 
 human hopes and fears. Every voice from this doctrine 
 commands attention. If sick men or wounded men call 
 in a physician or surgeon, they want to be healed. They 
 want thorough, effectual treatment. Pleasant drinks and 
 opiates are not an equivalent for health and soundness. 
 And men's religious wants are not met, their souls are 
 not at rest, they are not satisfied with hearing, till they 
 hear of a slain Lamb that taketh away the sins of the 
 world. It is found that an earnest gospel gathers men to 
 its proclamation. The words of Christ are verified, " I, 
 if I be lifted up, lifted on the cross, lifted in human teach- 
 ing as the object of attraction before the world, will draw 
 
284 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 all men unto me. The pulpit that preaches Christ cruci- 
 fied need not run out into literature, or social life, or cur- 
 rent providences, or the sweep of reform movements, or 
 advertise quaint and whimsical themes, to supplement the 
 charm of that gospel. The dying of Jesus for human 
 salvation touches the world's heart. Publish these glad 
 tidings, and the feet of men run together to catch that 
 message. 
 
 Again, Christ is sufficient for the pastoral care of his 
 Church. He shepherdizes each flock and guards every 
 fold of his people. He is the good Shepherd, ever faith- 
 ful, constant, and vigilant, and giveth his life for the 
 sheep. He leads them out into green pastures and beside 
 still waters. He taketh the lambs in his arms and car- 
 rieth them in his bosom. It is he who appoints under 
 shepherds to go in and out with the flock, to guide and 
 feed and defend them. But he does not himself retire. 
 The under shepherds are responsible to him. He fur- 
 nishes and strengthens them for their calling. They are 
 a living bond between him and the souls for whom they 
 watch. They hold their office from him. They derive 
 all their authority from him. They have so much au- 
 thority as his spirit and his truth dwelling in them and 
 communicated through them confer upon them. It is his 
 voice, and not theirs, which the sheep are to hear from 
 their lips. If they are unfaithful, he does not cease to 
 care for the flock whom they mislead or neglect. If they 
 die or remove, he resumes all their functions. The flock 
 is not left shepherdless. Forever he leads them and 
 feeds them and keeps them. He never changes his place. 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 285 
 
 He never breaks the tie that binds him to them. Loving 
 once, he loves unto the end. They are never bereaved of 
 him. Whoever goes, he remains. Whatever post is va- 
 cant, whatever office work resigned, he may always be 
 found. To all that call upon him he is ever near. 
 
 Is not this sufficient for the comfort of believers ? It is 
 natural that they should look for the words of Christ and 
 the consolations of Christ to those whom Christ has set 
 over them for this very ministry ; that they should feel in 
 their times of doubt, of sickness and pain, of sorrow and 
 anguish, that they must have this representative of Christ 
 to stand by their side, to bend above the pillow, to bow 
 low with their prostrate forms and breathe the salutations 
 of Jesus. And it is natural that they should feel that if 
 this messenger of their Lord be not their, helper in such 
 hours of trial, their burdens will weigh heavily, and their 
 hearts seek relief in vain. Who will come to their cham- 
 ber when the strong fever is on them and lay on their 
 brow a gentle touch, as though his hand had brought from 
 Jesus' palm some virtue of soothing ? Who will meet the 
 look of their upturned eye searching for some promise 
 that invites the unworthy to be at peace, and answer it as 
 though Jesus replied, "I do not condemn thee, go and 
 sin no more " ? Who will have the first burdened confes- 
 sion of the penitent wishing to be led to the hand that 
 distributes pardons? Who will open tender arms for 
 their babes at the font of baptism ? Who will bless the 
 bridal hour when their sons and daughters stand at the 
 altar of wedded love ? Who will listen to the ever vary- 
 ing tale of their personal and domestic history, now with 
 
286 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 smiles and now with tears, with looks that give and words 
 that speak love and sympathy in all that can befall them 
 as pilgrims through earth ? Who will hold their hand 
 and repeat words of promise and strength and pleasant 
 voices out of heaven when their heads droop in the last 
 faintness and the scenes of time grow dim to their failing 
 sight? 
 
 He whom they have known and loved so well arid chosen 
 for all these sweet and sacred offices may have gone to be 
 a dweller with another people, and will fill no more any 
 of these wonted relations to their life. Yes, but Christ 
 abides. He is sufficient for all these wants of the heart, 
 these vicissitudes of an earthly experience. He comes to 
 the solitary mourner, whispering, " I will never leave thee 
 nor forsake thee." He stretches out his arms toward the 
 babes of the nursery and pleads, " Suffer little children, 
 and forbid them not to come unto me." He calls all the 
 weary and heavy-laden to his presence to find rest at his 
 feet. If there be no human face bending above the sick, 
 the sad, the fearful, the self-condemned, will they not look 
 with clearer eye and straighter glance into the face of 
 Jesus? Is there any sting of bitterness he cannot re- 
 move, any sorrow he cannot comfort, any burden he can- 
 not lighten, any ministry of strength and growth and 
 fruitfulness he cannot fulfil? Is he not sufficient for all 
 the pastoral care of his people ? Will not that even be a 
 happy hour to many of them when they cease from com- 
 munion with his messenger and come nearer to himself, 
 with neither man nor angel between ? 
 
 And if our thought were not of individuals and fami- 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY ft S I T T 
 
 ood, in all that con 
 
 lies, but of the whole brotherhood, in all that concerns 
 their prosperity ; if any of you ask, with troubled fore- 
 boding, what will be the future of this church and people ; 
 who will throng its porches and fill its interior spaces ; who 
 will adhere to it now and who will desert it ; who will 
 break unto us the bread of life and draw water for us 
 from the wells of salvation ; who will help us to meet 
 with just sentiment, earnest purpose, and vigorous action 
 the great practical living questions of the day, to which the 
 gospel is to be applied, and the Christian life to be adjust- 
 ed ; whose hand will lift our banner and carry it in the 
 fore front of the host of God in their onset upon the 
 kingdom of darkness and of evil, oh, let every heart 
 rest on the solid rock of this assurance, Christ is suffi- 
 cient for all this need of coming days ; he will not see 
 his flock perish of hunger or thirst ; he will not leave 
 them defenceless in the presence of ravening wolves ; the 
 honor of his name is bound up with the honor of yours ; 
 both are inscribed together on the folds of the flag, and 
 he will not suffer that banner to trail in dust and shame. 
 He loves this church. He will take care of its future. 
 It is built on him. It cannot be overturned. Let none 
 of you say or think or dream that its prosperity has cul- 
 minated, its power to bless the world has passed the 
 meridian, for you do thus dishonor the " strength of 
 Israel," and show that you confide more in man's weak- 
 nesses than in almighty love and grace. 
 
 Christ is sufficient for his Church as a bond of union 
 among its members. For a deep and abiding harmony in 
 Christian fellowship there must be an overcoming of the 
 
288 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 natural selfish tempers of the heart. Each must be able 
 to look on the other, and through whatever variety of 
 feature and of expression, see a likeness that speaks of 
 brother's blood, and publishes the fact of a common family 
 tie, a household unity. This common likeness must be, 
 more or less distinct, a likeness unto Christ. Only in 
 partaking of the spirit of Christ can the wilfulness and 
 wantonness of our corrupt natures be so corrected as to 
 blend in self-forgetful amity. To keep Christ's ordi- 
 nances, to obey his commands, to commemorate his life 
 and death, to help one another grow by transformation 
 unto his image, and to bring strangers to love and serve 
 him as his children and friends, is the ideal of Christian 
 association under Church covenants. Of such a union 
 Christ is at once the object and the strength. 
 
 Is it not in him, my brethren, that you are one? Is 
 not he the crystallizing centre of this household of ours ? 
 Is it not his body and blood that have made the sweetness 
 of our sacramental feasts? Is it not his presence that 
 has made our place of weekly prayer as the vestibule of 
 heaven ? Is it not his truth that has held you to its Sab- 
 bath utterance in these thronged aisles ? Is he not the 
 head and heart and soul of which we are the body and 
 members visible? Has your fellowship been merely in 
 the strength of your attachment to a man ? Will you say 
 this with your lips and publish it as your withdrawing 
 feet pass outward from this family home ? Will you let 
 the world discover that this is the seal of a Christian cove- 
 nant? Will you set up a man as rival of Christ, and put 
 the human above the divine as a bond of the fellowship 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 289 
 
 of believers? If this is our household relationship, the 
 tie has not been severed any too soon. It had better 
 never have been formed. If this be all, it is no matter 
 how quickly we fall apart as a rope of sand, nor how widely 
 we scatter to be henceforth indistinguishable on all the 
 surface of the earth and unknown in heaven. 
 
 But it is not so. It is in the love of Christ and in the 
 service of Christ you have been joined. It is in the like- 
 ness of Christ you see eye to eye. This bond you will 
 not dishonor. This bond is indestructible. While this 
 remains first in your regard, you cannot grow cold toward 
 one another or wish to* part. Proclaim it by word and 
 deed that you are one in no temporary surface agreement, 
 no passing touch and clasp of a human hand, but one for- 
 ever and indissolubly in Christ. 
 
 As I think of my personal relations to you, and of the 
 many years in which we have walked together, in the fel- 
 lowship of the gospel "from the first day until now," 
 there is one expression of the heart of Paul toward his 
 brethren of Philippi, which perpetually recurs to me : "I 
 thank my God upon every remembrance of you." Happy 
 church concerning which the chief apostle could bear 
 such a testimony ! How must that line have been read 
 and heard as they came together at the tidings that Pan) 
 had written to them out of his captivity at Rome ! Hap- 
 py Paul who could so write, not in the mere forms of 
 hollow courtesy, but as the honest voice of his truth-lov- 
 ing soul ! In all his past with those beloved brethren 
 in whatsoever demonstration of theirs toward him, there 
 was no "root of bitterness," nothing that rankled, nothing 
 25 
 
290 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 to be forgiven or forgotten ; " every remembrance " was 
 so sweet and pleasant to him as to be a matter of joyful 
 thanksgiving to God. 
 
 It is my exceeding felicity that I can borrow this wit- 
 ness of the apostle and give it public utterance to-day,, 
 without qualification or reserve concerning this beloved 
 church and people. If there were anything in all your 
 treatment of me that called for the charity of oblivion, I 
 hope I should be equal to such generosity. But I find 
 here no occasion for the grace of magnanimity. 
 
 There is no incompatibility of any sort that makes it 
 needful that we should part. It seems to me that we 
 could dwell together in unity and harmony through time 
 and eternity. If there are any of you who cannot echo 
 this sentiment, you have left me in utter ignorance of 
 such dissent. 
 
 It is a voice from across the continent that persuades 
 my reluctant feet away from you, the voice of God in the 
 shout of a new-rising empire beyond the mountains and 
 on the Pacific coast. 
 
 Our Eepublic is to be continental. Our eastern wall 
 and our western are to be washed by Atlantic and Pacific 
 waves. There must be no risk, which we can avert, of 
 such a strain across the ridge of the Rocky Mountains 
 that the country shall by its own weight break and fall 
 apart. We must secure the bridal of that occidental 
 realm with our own by bonds that cannot be riven. Lives 
 that are deep-rooted here must stretch out their pendant 
 boughs and take root there, and make and keep the na- 
 tion one by clasping fibres which cannot wither or die. 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 291 
 
 Our American Zion must be continental also. We can 
 hold no inch for nationality's sake which we w r ould not 
 hold more eagerly for Christ. Wherever the Old Flag 
 goes and receives fealty, there must the banner of the 
 cross be planted too. We cannot content ourselves with 
 a Christian civilization at the East, and see with uncon- 
 cern all its sweet charities and gentle decencies struggling 
 with barbarism on those new shores. The hunt for gold 
 pushed fiercely forward by rough and adventurous men, 
 carrying with them no homes, no society, no Sabbath, no 
 civil order, no code of law, and making that rude materi- 
 alism their idolatry, of course has tended to barbarism. 
 There was need of a vigilance committee, there was need 
 of purer and cleaner elements of civil and social life, there 
 was need of the watch-towers of religion, and clear-voiced 
 prophets to proclaim from their summits the divineness 
 of government and justice, and all the softening and re- 
 straining influences of a gospel of peace and love. There 
 was need that a Sabbath should be carried over, and that 
 the lawlessness of wild spirits flushed with gold and 
 strong drink, and making of that day a carnival of greed 
 and rioting, should hear its calm, holy voices, and be led 
 back from their frenzy to decency and sobriety. 
 
 There has been, in such reforming and refining influ- 
 ences, great and good progress. But the struggle is still 
 going on. "Come over and help ! " is the cry on every 
 Western breeze. There is abundance of energy there, 
 acuteness, daring, and resolute force. But the sweeter 
 and gentler graces of life are crowded in such rude con- 
 tact quite into the background. They must be reinforced 
 
292 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHKIST. 
 
 and held in countenance and made all-penetrating and 
 pervasive by the entering in of a more demonstrative 
 Christian culture until the whole lump of this vigorous 
 society is leavened. Men who carry that culture with 
 them, who have it as the atmosphere of their homes, and 
 the breath of their own life, who can stand up amid all 
 deteriorating and roughening influences without being 
 dragged down by them, and lift other men to their fairer 
 level, men who will go in with the charm of refined 
 Christian households, and the sweet contagion of a godly 
 and gentle life, as well as with the messages of an ele- 
 vating and sanctifying gospel, are yet heeded, oh, in 
 what numbers ! to enter into this unfinished strife and 
 help goodness and purity and charity to their full tri- 
 umphs. 
 
 There is power there, alert and girded, ambitious of 
 large success and great achievements, power unmatched, 
 perhaps, in sharpness of intellect, boldness of will, and 
 keen ambition in any other community of our land, young 
 or old; but as to the work it shall accomplish, the in- 
 stitutions it shall build, the future of which it shall be the 
 architect, not so certain as it would be and ought to be 
 either of its direction or inspiration. 
 
 The great tides of strong life surge to and fro waiting 
 the orbed influences of heaven, ready enough to follow 
 any masterful leadership, though it head toward error and 
 evil. How readily those tides, now so easily turned, 
 might gather a motion and momentum which the reform- 
 ing work of years could not check, and the happy future 
 of that new land be postponed for half a century of hard 
 and costly reformation ! 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 293 
 
 Now a great multitude of voices there, full, clear, and 
 earnest, are asking, " What next ? " in their march toward 
 the inheritance of coming days. Who shall stand among 
 them to answer such questions and to lift an index hand, 
 kept parallel with the divine counsels, and point forward? 
 
 How shall the longing be met on that distant shore 
 that turns ever back to this, giving it, as tidings come 
 from it, as steamers sail for it, as the heart revisits it amid 
 the business of the day and the dreams of the night, no 
 geographical name, but only that one, dear, all-compre- 
 hending word, "Home"? Who will carry New England 
 out thither, import it into the midst of them, its honest 
 Yankee faces, its holy chimes of Sunday morning, its law- 
 abiding habits, its plea for order and organic growths, its 
 soft light of evenings at the fireside, and the gentle minis- 
 tries of wives and children crossing inward and outward 
 the sunny threshold of domestic life ? 
 
 Who will join to the breadth of all this outflowing 
 Christian nurture the divine passion for saving souls, and 
 go down into all dark and slimy depths to bring up and 
 polish these living gems for the diadem of our Lord? 
 There are churches of Christ already there, and many an 
 earnest and true ambassador of the Master setting forth 
 his kingly claims. But these fortresses of truth and sal- 
 vation are lonely and distant one from another. They do 
 not stand so thickly, as here at home, that hill- top can call 
 to hill-top, and vale answer back to vale. They are few, 
 and the field is broad and the work mighty, and the pres- 
 sure great, and fateful decisions imminent. 
 
 It is one of these burdened churches that has been plead- 
 25* 
 
294 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 ing with you and with me for this year past, and we could' 
 not choose but hear its voice. It did not seem at first as 
 though that voice ought to prevail with us. And it 
 sought many another audience, and plead with many an- 
 other representative of New England life and Christianity. 
 But it searched and plead in vain. And out yonder the 
 great issues that hold all our hopes for Christ, country, 
 and humanity on that deep western border were swiftly 
 forming and ripening, and the solicitudes of men who 
 carried these great spiritual burdens on their souls were 
 ever more and more weighty and oppressive. Could no 
 one be found to man this particular post and make it 
 strong in the eventful conflict? And when that voice, all 
 the more importunate because none would listen to it, fell 
 again upon my ear, calling in the name of Christ and the 
 future of Christian America, " Come ! " it seemed to me 
 that I heard in it diviner accents than before, and that its 
 counterpart called to me out of heaven, " Go ! " 
 
 Yes, it were easy to go if there were no detaining 
 bands. As I set my face toward the sunset, the ties of the 
 present tug at me, the memories of the past come back 
 upon me, ties sweet and strong, memories tender, pleas- 
 ant, priceless. 
 
 "I thank my God upon every remembrance of you." 
 I remember your first welcome to me here when I had 
 the grief of that original parting in my soul as I was torn 
 from my first love, and a great doubt whether I had fol- 
 lowed a divine leading in coming weak and young to this 
 ancient and honored church, to be its banner-bearer in 
 coming years. Ah, many of those who shared in that 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 295 
 
 welcome are not, for God has taken them. I see in the 
 densest crowd their vacant places. I look wistfully for 
 their absent faces, my early friends and helpers. I miss 
 the touch of their hands and the greetings of their warm 
 words. But some of you remain of those whom I first 
 looked upon here as my people, companions, and lovers 
 of many years ; whose faces have never been turned away 
 from me ; whose homes and whose hearts have always 
 been open to me ; who have borne with me so long and 
 /et have not wearied of me ; to whom I have looked for 
 cheer and help and strength, and never looked in vain. 
 Your remembrance remembrance of the living and of the 
 dead I have on my heart to-day, both for tenderness and 
 gratitude. 
 
 I recall our early hopes and fears as we began our work 
 of serving the kingdom of Christ in building up this 
 church, and all our later efforts and burdens in the prose- 
 cution of that work unto the present time. How much 
 better has God been to us as a co-worker and rewarder 
 than our expectations or our faith ! How often has he 
 visited us with the refreshing influences of his quickening 
 and reviving Spirit ! Scarce a season has passed that we 
 have not enjoyed something of such a visitation. Scarce 
 a communion Sabbath has come and gone without adding 
 
 o o 
 
 some to our fellowship. In all, nine hundred and fifteen 
 have been joined to us since our fellowship in these labors 
 and cares commenced, of whom four hundred and four- 
 teen were newly gathered from the world. What glad, 
 burdened, tearful, rejoicing, intense days we have lived 
 through those harvest times ! How pleasant to remember 
 
296 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 them now and to lay up their memories for the refreshing 
 of our immortality ! This church has believed in revi- 
 vals, has prayed for revivals, has labored for revivals, and 
 refused to be comforted unless revivals came. I do not 
 mean that is singular among our churches in this respect. 
 It would have been singular had it repudiated such pente- 
 costs. Be, still and ever, true to this past ! But seek to 
 have the home work always deep and thorough ; to have 
 every heart in the church broken and contrite, and newly 
 baptized with the comfort and power of the Holy Ghost. 
 We may have restricted the fruitfulness of our harvest 
 days by being eager to run out upon demonstrative labor, 
 to subsidize all agencies and activities in forward move- 
 ments, before the burden of our own sinfulness and the 
 burden of souls had brought ourselves low enough 
 into the dust of humility and penitence. Set a watch 
 here for coming days. Be not less active, but strive for 
 a deeper personal experience of the condemning and sav- 
 ing truths of the gospel in your own souls as your best 
 and indispensable preparation for the rescue of other 
 souls. There is no rebuke or reproach in this counsel. 
 Our summers of grace are a precious part of my thankful 
 heritage out of the past. 
 
 I look here upon many now in the bloom of youth, who 
 were laid in my arms as a parent's offering to God in that 
 rite which seals his covenant with believers and their seed. 
 The seal was affixed long ago; the years have gone by, 
 each testifying to God's faithfulness, each calling upon 
 you to take the vows of that covenant upon your own 
 willing heart and consecrate yourselves to be the Lord's. 
 
I 
 
 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 297 
 
 No other and later pastor can ever have such right as I 
 have to ask you whether you have truly entered into 
 that covenant relation with God, and are walking with 
 him in love, reverence, and obedience every day, seek- 
 ing unto him, serving him, and kept by him along every 
 youthful path? Is it so? When shall it be so? I am 
 a witness for Christ, my babes of years ago. You 
 belong to him. Give him his own. 
 
 I see those whom I have joined at the bridal altar. 
 There is more soberness, but not less peace, upon your 
 faces than on those bright evenings gone, when of twain 
 you were made one. I have a grateful remembrance of 
 being so associated with your domestic history and joys. 
 It is, I think, always my prayer in such official duty that 
 the new home may be a Christian home, that the family 
 altar may be built in it even on the bridal eve, and that 
 morning and evening incense may be kindled thereon 
 daily. I may question you, therefore, intimately and ten- 
 derly, as none other might in my place, whether the 
 voice of household prayer and praise is indeed heard in 
 your dwelling? Oh, build the altar, if it be not built ! If 
 it have been built, keep its sacrifice ever burning. 
 
 I search here amid the crowd for those who are so often 
 overshadowed in the home and in the Sabbath congrega- 
 tion by full-grown adult life, the little ones of our fami- 
 lies. It has always seemed to me that that were a most 
 neglectful and incomplete shepherd care that should for- 
 get the lambs of the flock, and most unlike the heart of 
 Christ. I have felt that you had a right to share in the 
 pastoral ministrations, not only as they sought you within 
 
298 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 the household circle, or joined themselves to the conduct 
 of the Sabbath-school, but as they uttered the messages of 
 Jesus from the pulpit on the Lord's day, I have had no 
 more inspiring or rewarding audiences than when your 
 earnest eyes and bright faces have been turned toward me 
 in the house of God, to listen to his word. And in how 
 many friendly and festive scenes have we mingled, when 
 we were all young together, our faces putting off their 
 gravity, our feet their staid decorum, light hearts sitting 
 visibly on smiling lips, and every harp string of our souls 
 swept by the fingers of joy ! Oh, my lambs, I have 
 gathered you in my arms, I have carried you on my heart, 
 I stretch my arms out for you still ! My heart shall never 
 lay off that pleasant burden. I shall remember you and 
 write to you from afar. But you must be Jesus' lambs as 
 well, more than you are mine. His arms are always 
 stretched out to receive you. His heart is longing for 
 you. Make him your Shepherd, his embrace your safe 
 and happy fold. 
 
 Some of you here to-day I might count you perhaps 
 by hundreds are my spiritual children. I saw your first 
 tear of penitence fall, heard your first burdened inquiry, 
 " What shall I do to be saved ? " kneeled with you in your 
 first prayer of consecration, and caught the earliest sweet- 
 ness of your new song of praise. There is a tie between 
 us that can never be sundered. Eternity will only hallow 
 and strengthen it. That connection with your present 
 and your immortal future I would not part with at any 
 price earth could offer. I can never be robbed of it. 
 None that come after me can take it from me. I would 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 299 
 
 not stand, you would not let me stand, between you and 
 Jesus. If I led you right, I led you to him. He must 
 be nearest and dearest. He must increase, and I must 
 decrease. But I shall stand with you at his side here and 
 now, yonder and hereafter, and say to him, "I and the chil- 
 dren thoii hast given me." Oh that I could add to these 
 the names of some not yet written here on the scroll of 
 the disciplehood ! My dear friends whom I have so often 
 invited to come to Christ, let me call you once more to 
 make him your Saviour and portion. How have I failed 
 of commending him to your love and trust ? There is no 
 earthly favor for myself which you would suffer me to ask 
 of you in vain. But when I plead for Jesus, I cannot win 
 you. Must that close the record of my ministry in its 
 effect upon you ? Is our parting of to-day ominous of an 
 eternal separation? Shall we meet but once more, per- 
 haps, before the great white throne, and then pass from 
 each other's presence forever? I linger yet a moment 
 even as I grasp your hand in parting to draw you toward 
 that long-waiting divine Friend, who is ready to enter into 
 everlasting covenant with you. This day of our weeping 
 together would be to me the happiest of all these years, if 
 I might have now the assurance that I have not preached 
 Christ to you in vain. 
 
 Pleasant among the thankful remembrances of this 
 hour are the kindnesses, I have received from you all, 
 through these seventeen years. It would be a long story 
 and many pages that should recite them every one. It 
 would count up every smiling salutation, every hearty 
 hand-shake, every token simple and costly of love and 
 
300 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 remembrance, sympathy with me and mine in the times 
 of trial, tender vigils with my sick, tears that seemed to 
 fall as warm and fast as my own over my beloved dead, 
 care for my bodily health and comfort, long leaves of 
 absence when I was weary, permission to visit the " Sum- 
 mer Isles," to go abroad amid Old World wonders, even 
 to the sacred hills trod once by the feet of the Lord, the 
 city he loved, the stream in whose margin he and John 
 stood together for his baptism, and the generous provi- 
 dence that has kept my board spread and my house bright 
 and warm through all these summers and winters until 
 now. To bring back this generous past of your ministry 
 to me and those dearer to me than life would be to live 
 over again day by day the experience which has made 
 each season of the past, since that wintry day that 
 plighted our vows, a festival of your love and care. 
 
 I have written ineffaceably on the record of my heart 
 your ready and fervent response when the dark days of 
 our country's trial came, when many minds were per- 
 plexed and many souls fearful, and some were faltering 
 and lukewarm; and the 'call was sounded here for all 
 loyal hearts to be true and steadfast, and for our young 
 men to go forth armed to the defence of the capital and 
 the flag. The young men stood up. They buckled on 
 the sword. They took hold of the rifle. Old men blessed 
 them. Fathers and mothers said " Go ! we have nothing 
 dearer we can give." Fond sisters gave both tearfully 
 and cheerfully the parting kiss. Young wives unclasped 
 their arms from about the necks of young husbands. 
 And they went forth, our fairest, our noblest, our bravest. 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 301 
 
 And you who went not remained to pray (there were 
 none but loyal prayers here) , remained to give your nim- 
 blest industry to the soldier's comfort, to forward all 
 bountiful supplies for the sick and the wounded and the 
 prisoner ; you lent your pastor for a campaign of nine 
 months ; you kept good courage and unfaltering loyalty 
 and a spirit of large self-sacrifice and triumphant hope to 
 the last. And the young men, our elect hundred, have 
 come back to share the ovations of a rescued and grateful 
 country, bringing with them many and honorable scars, 
 shattered limbs, and dismembered frames, leaving behind 
 many a sod stained with the best blood in their veins, 
 leaving behind, alas, some of their gallant comrades whose 
 dust sleeps in safety and honor beneath the victorious 
 flag, whose names are written in our hearts and on our 
 country's long scroll of heroes, names which no distant 
 and coming generation on our soil will willingly let die. 
 Oh, had you been recreant in this great crisis of our na- 
 tion and of humanity's long struggle, you and I should 
 have parted long ere this. But I thank God that the 
 record of this church for loyalty, patriotism, and valor 
 at home and in the high places of the field is without 
 blot or stain. 
 
 Our co-working here in this vineyard of the Lord will 
 cease from to-day. The official tie is severed. But that 
 is all. Every other bond holds. One who goes out from 
 the home of his kindred to far-off lands does not cease, 
 because of such distance, from the household relation. 
 He is a son, a brother, a kinsman, just as truly and with 
 just as near a tie of blood and love as before. Nothing 
 26 
 
302 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 shall dismiss us from one another's confidence, affection, 
 and memory. When you think of me or hear of me on 
 that other shore of our common country, let your hearts 
 answer, He is ours. And forever, no matter how time or 
 distance or other and new relations may protest, I shall 
 call you mine. Such mutual ownership has no statute of 
 limitation. It never expires. 
 
 This is no plea against what you owe to my successor in 
 office. Your hearts are large enough to hold us both. 
 He is on his way to you. God has already chosen him 
 for you. Pray for him. Let every unseen step of his 
 toward this place be paved by your intercessions. With- 
 hold no cordiality of welcome from him. Say not, one of 
 you in the deepest solitude of your soul, I will never love 
 him as I have loved. Transfer all your kindness and 
 fealty. He may not be the choice of you all. Be gener- 
 ous and forbearing, in such case, and let your majority 
 draw after it and carry with it unanimity. 
 
 Be to him all that you have been to me. He cannot 
 wish for more. You could not render more. 
 
 Sustain him as you have sustained the ministry that 
 yields this place back to you to-day. Gather here as you 
 have gathered on the Sabbath-day whether the sun shone 
 or the storm raged. Go to your meeting for prayer. 
 Oh, keep that room below thronged with your praying 
 hearts, vocal with your songs of Christian communion. 
 "It is your life," the life of your individual piety, the life 
 of this church as a power for good. Remember the con- 
 cert eve. Be true to Chi-ist in his longing for the out- 
 lying nations. Keep the missionary flame burning bright 
 on these altars and in your souls evermore. 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 303 
 
 Welcome the calls, the incessant calls, of a world-wide 
 charity. I have few pleasanter recollections than those 
 which are associated with the almost weekly summons to 
 you from this pulpit to contribute of your substance to 
 relieve the wants of men's bodies and souls. I presume 
 I have often been urgent and importunate in such ap- 
 peals. My memories of them may possibly be pleasanter 
 than yours, But I do not believe you would recall one 
 such appeal and put the seal of silence upon it. I do not 
 believe you regret one offering which you have laid, un- 
 der such stress, at the feet of your Lord. Be as you 
 have been, an open-handed church, eyes to the blind, feet 
 to the lame, a mother to the orphan, causing the widow's 
 heart to sing for joy, and gathering the grateful memo- 
 rials of the ends of the earth. 
 
 Cling together. Oh, let none fall out of the ranks 
 now, unless by order of the Commander-in-Chief. Do 
 you know what one word is the deepest reproach and the 
 guiltiest shame a soldier can wear on the eve of battle ? 
 Will any of you take upon you, when the pinch comes to 
 this church, the name of "Deserters"? Lock arms and 
 stand firm. Are you friends for bright days and not for 
 dark days ? They are dark days that try the soul and 
 show what our friendships are. Stand by one another till 
 another hand lift the banner at your head and bear it for- 
 ward. 
 
 Give me your blessing and your prayers ! You will 
 not say nay to that request. But if you say yes, you 
 must do the same for that church and people to whom I 
 go. How am I to be blessed if they are not blessed in me ? 
 
304 ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
 
 You must love them and pray for them. Have they for- 
 feited their claim to this because their need is greater than 
 yours? There is no other church in the land to which 
 you will stand in so tender a relation. Take them on 
 your hearts from this day and bear them perpetually be- 
 fore God for his richest favor, and such praying will be 
 doubly blest, the suppliant and the subject sitting together 
 beneath heaven's wide-open window. 
 
 Every step forward is into the unknown. God may 
 accept me that it is in my heart to build for him on that 
 Western shore. But he may not let me build. The At- 
 lantic waves are first to be crossed. I may never cross 
 them. The Pacific crests lift themselves between. Their 
 white interdict may bar my way. Instead of that distant 
 Golden Gate, my feet may pause earlier at the gate of 
 pearl. Danger, disappointment, sickness, death, these 
 may be the near heritage to which I seem in such haste 
 to be gone. Say not in such issue, " He would have 
 done well to have stayed." That would not thus be made 
 certain. The willing mind is what God accepts. The re- 
 sults that lie beyond make no proper part of his estimate, 
 or of ours, of the value of obedience. 
 
 And so we take leave of one another. It does not seem 
 real to me yet. Is this my last Sabbath with you? Am 
 I preaching my last sermon here? When another Sab- 
 bath dawns, will its rising sun come up for me out of the 
 sea, and its setting sun go down into the sea? And are 
 none of my Sabbaths any more to lead my feet hither? 
 And yet it will be a short leave. God may permit us 
 some greetings again by the way. He will soon bring us 
 together never to part. 
 
ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 305 
 
 I leave with you the labors of seventeen years, still, if 
 God will, to bear fruit among you. I leave my manifold 
 imperfections and frailties to your charity, that they may 
 be forgiven. I leave for your occasional watch one little 
 grave in the shades of Auburn, where my first-born sleeps. 
 I leave my memory to be cherished and guarded by you, 
 if you will accept the trust. I leave my love, my thanks, 
 my prayers. . My feet may go and bear my body forth, 
 but I leave my heart behind. 
 26* 
 
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 UNIVERSITY