AARON'S 
 BREASTPLATE 
 
 J. REND EL HARRIS 

 
 *s-n~
 
 BOOKS OF THE INNER LIFE. 
 
 Edited by 
 
 R. F. HORTON, M.A., D.D. 
 
 A Series of Uniform Volumes written or prepared by 
 some of the leading Free Churchmen and forming 
 a complete Library of Devotion. 
 
 I. The Holy Spirit. 
 
 By Rev. W. L. WALKER. 
 
 II. Private Prayers and Devotions. 
 
 By Rev. J. E. ROBERTS, M.A., B.D. 
 
 III. Aaron's Breastplate and other Addresses. 
 
 By J. RENDEL HARRIS. 
 
 IV. Themes for Hours of Meditation. 
 
 By Rev. W. L. WATKINSON, D.D. 
 
 In Preparation. 
 V. Habits of Holiness. 
 
 By Rev. F. B. MEYER, B.A. 
 
 VI. Volume to be announced. 
 
 By Rev. R. F. HORTON, M.A., D.D. 
 
 VII. Songs of the Soul. 
 
 By Rev. T. H. DARLOW, M.A. 
 
 OTHER VOLUMES TO BE ANNOUNCED. 
 
 London: National Council of Evangelical Free Churches, 
 Thomas Law, Memorial Hall, B.C.
 
 BOOKS OF THE INNER LIFE 
 
 III 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER ADDRESSES 
 
 J. RENDEL HARRIS 
 n 
 
 LONDON : NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EVANGELICAL FREE 
 CHURCHES. THOMAS LAW, MEMORIAL HALL, E.C. 
 
 HEADLEY BROTHERS, 14, BISHOPSGATE STREET WITHOUT, E.C. 
 
 MCMVIII
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THHIS little book contains some addresses 
 1 recently given at Free Church meetings 
 during the year in which I have had the honour 
 and happiness of presiding over the Federation 
 of the Free Churches of England and Wales. 
 I am afraid there is not much contentious 
 theological matter here for those who love the 
 noise of battle and the clash of arms ; and party 
 politics find also no space or scope. Those 
 who look for either of these in a collection 
 of Free Church addresses must necessarily be 
 disappointed : we are limited by our organi- 
 sation to the pursuit of love and holiness and 
 such things whereby we may edify one another. 
 Excuse must also be asked for the disconnected 
 character of the subjects chosen. They have 
 been given at various times and places, and 
 are printed in response to numerous appeals ; 
 
 vii
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 but if they are not bound together by any 
 controlling thought, they may serve to give 
 an idea of the teaching and testimony in our 
 united public meetings, as well as at some 
 denominational gatherings, and last, but not 
 least, amongst my friends in the Settlement at 
 Woodbrooke. 
 
 RENDEL HARRIS.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE I 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 ATARAXIA . . . . . 23 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 MARY AND MARTHA . . . 51 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE AND OF THE BIBLE 
 
 TEXT-BOOK . . . . -77 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND . .103
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE TIME-MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION . 123 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT . . . 155 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 AARON'S BLESSING . . .181
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 TN the 28th chapter of Exodus we have 
 what may be called the Ornaments Rubric 
 of the congregation of Israel, an inventory of 
 the externals of the priesthood, with minute 
 directions as to what colours and fabrics were 
 to be employed and the occasions on which 
 the holy vestments were to be worn. There 
 are people who devote themselves to the study 
 of Aaron's wardrobe (as Milton calls it, when 
 he speaks of the Roman and Romanising clergy 
 as decked out from " Aaron's wardrobe or the 
 flamen's vestry," though, as a matter of fact, I 
 believe the vestments of which Milton speaks 
 are only the ordinary fashions of popular dress
 
 2 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 in early Christian centuries) : and those who 
 thus devote themselves do so, either with a 
 view of imitating those early dresses, and wear- 
 ing them on the state occasions of their religion, 
 thus becoming nearer to God by the art of being 
 farther from men, or else that they may extract 
 mystical exegesis out of the biblical accounts, 
 and prove the nature of the redeemed soul 
 out of the interpretation of coats and colours 
 and of the bells and pomegranates that are 
 upon the vesture's hem. 
 
 Now, I am not one of those who extract much 
 comfort or distil spiritual medicine out of these 
 ancient Levitical accounts ; my rule in such 
 matters is Mrs. Browning's : 
 
 " People come up higher : Aaron's tribe is dispossess" 
 
 There is really very little to be got out of 
 the sanctuary and its services, over and above 
 what has already been extracted by the writer 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that will repay 
 the time required to understand them ; and 
 practically the only two things that I have yet
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 3 
 
 carried off as legitimate Christian spoil from 
 my raiding of these accounts are (i) the high- 
 priestly benediction, (2) the high-priestly 
 breastplate. Of these the former is well known 
 to be the benediction in use in the Second 
 Temple. Whether it was in use earlier is 
 uncertain. It is sufficient and significant that 
 it has been in use ever since, so that some one 
 must have struck oil somewhere, and some- 
 when, in a spiritual sense. You recognise it 
 as soon as I repeat it ; it has often been, in 
 detached fragments at least, a part of your 
 own speech and prayer : 
 
 " The Lord bless thee and keep thee ; 
 
 "The Lord make His face to shine upon thee and 
 be gracious unto thee j 
 
 "The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee and 
 give thee peace." 
 
 There is nothing antiquated about that, nor 
 any suspicion that it is, or will be, out of 
 date. When it was first uttered matters little 
 as long as we are sure that it will continue, 
 and that we make a diligent use of it in the
 
 4 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 present. The second Aaronic feature to which 
 I propose to devote attention is the breastplate 
 of precious stones, which we find described from 
 the standpoint of the lapidary and jeweller, and 
 from the point of view of the liturgiologist an 
 account of how it was to be made, and how and 
 when it was to be worn. I am not sure whether 
 there are not two accounts of Aaron's jewellery, 
 for we find in the same connection a description 
 of the making of two inscribed plates or laminas, 
 of onyx stone according to the popular render- 
 ing, but more likely of jade stone, on which 
 were inscribed, six by six, the names of the 
 tribes. The two plates thus designed were 
 attached to his shoulder-gear, and if you like 
 to put it popularly, he carried the people on 
 his back in a sacramental sense. It looks as 
 if this were of the nature of a duplicate of 
 the other account about the placing of twelve 
 stones in a sacred breastplate. Whether it is 
 so is a question for critics, and I don't even 
 spend the time to inquire. For as the breast- 
 plate is so much the more beautiful symbol
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 5 
 
 than the plate of onyx or jade, I stick to 
 that. It has not only the advantage of being 
 more beautiful, but the involved suggestion of 
 spiritual intercession is more clearly brought 
 out, and this in two ways : first, by the greater 
 individuality of the tribes, to each of which a 
 precious stone is attached, and second, by the 
 fact that the holy adornment is worn on the 
 heart and not on the shoulders. The import- 
 ance of these distinctions is obvious. When 
 we are speaking of intercession we are talking, 
 in a disguised way, of love for souls, and that 
 is not a matter that can be dealt with en bloc. 
 Even the tribe has to be disintegrated, and 
 the beauty of souls comes out, on the Lord's 
 side as well as on ours, and even with lost 
 souls, by learning them and loving them, one 
 by one. And as to the difference between the 
 shoulders and the heart, while there are points 
 of view where it means the same thing, as when 
 we equate the sentences 
 
 " He shall carry the lambs in His bosom," 
 and
 
 6 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 " He layeth it on His shoulders rejoicing," 
 there are other considerations, according to 
 which the carrying of people does not necessarily 
 mean the loving them, or, if it does mean it, it 
 means it by an inadequate symbolism. 
 
 So we elect for the breastplate, and leave the 
 onyx stones or jade stones alone. 
 
 Now, when we consider the High Priest of 
 the ancient confession, we may say of his 
 liturgical ornament that the breastplate was a 
 sort of book of remembrance of the people 
 for whom he had to pray. He took them 
 into the place of secret grace and secret glory 
 with him, and when he drew near under the 
 wings of the Shekinah the mysterious light of 
 the sanctuary fell upon his breastplate, and 
 every separate gem began to glow as if it had 
 been a living soul. Thus he stood before 
 the Lord, and began his devotion in the 
 form 
 
 " Behold, I and the children which God has 
 given me." 
 
 You will remember, in passing, how obscurely
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 7 
 
 that passage is introduced as descriptive of 
 Christ in Heb. ii. 14, as follows : 
 
 " And again, Behold, I and the children 
 whom God has given me. 
 
 " Forasmuch, therefore, as the children are 
 partakers of flesh and blood," &c. 
 
 Evidently the writer is working out the 
 thought that the sanctified and the sanctifier 
 are all of one, a truth which is a common- 
 place in the region of Love, however difficult 
 it may be in the district of dogma ; and it is 
 sufficient to say, in this connection, that the 
 appearance of the High Priest in the sanctuary 
 with his breastplate of precious stones is a 
 symbol of the oneness of the sanctified and 
 the Sanctifier. He does not appear without 
 them, nor they without Him. 
 
 To put it, therefore, as we have said, in 
 simple speech, this priestly breastplate was a 
 kind of book of remembrance of the people for 
 whom he had to pray ; for every stone was an 
 inscribed stone, and the names sprang into 
 light along with the glory of the jewels upon
 
 8 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 which they were written. Let us examine the 
 matter a little more in detail. 
 
 i. He carried with him the body corporate 
 of Israel : the " whole family," if we may put 
 it so, was there I mean the whole family as 
 understood in that day. Since then the praying 
 soul has become more imperial ; it has become 
 easier to detect consanguinity in one another. 
 The bounds of our spiritual habitation have 
 been enlarged. Judaism was too short a bed 
 for the Pax Evangelica to stretch itself in. Its 
 tent would not image the sky adequately unless 
 the cords were lengthened, and unless there 
 were a breaking out upon the right hand and 
 upon the left. There must be a " Peace to the 
 far " as well as " Peace to the near." 
 
 But, from Aaron's point of view, his prayer 
 was comprehensive. It took in all the people ; 
 it surveyed the length and breadth of Im- 
 manuel's land ; it flew from east to west and 
 from the north to the south. Dan to Beer- 
 sheba was a sacred motion, a pilgrimage of the 
 spirit. He did not leave out the tribe of Dan
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 9 
 
 because the Antichrist was to come from thence, 
 nor forget little Benjamin because he was little. 
 His prayer for peace and his benediction of 
 peace was in the manner of the Psalmist, 
 " Peace upon Israel " ; and St. Paul only 
 bettered it by extending the connotation of 
 Israel, " Peace be upon them and upon the 
 Israel of God." 
 
 It is no small grace to have our prayers all 
 right, as far as they go ; a defect which is only 
 undue contraction is easily mended. The ex- 
 hortation that prayers be made for all men is 
 only a corollary to the doctrine and duty of 
 love to all men. u Thou shalt pray for thy 
 neighbour as thyself," says the Spirit. 
 
 2. The High Priest carried the names of the 
 tribes upon his heart. Amongst them, not 
 inconspicuous nor forgotten, was the tribe to 
 which he himself belonged. The Book of Family 
 Prayer was bound up in the volume of the 
 Common Prayer. We must stay at home as 
 well as go to church. The Aaronic priesthood 
 says, " My people shall be thy people." I am
 
 io AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 inclined to think the Book of Family Prayer 
 occupies the first place, and there are intima- 
 tions in the New Testament that certain forms 
 of appeal in this part of the book have a 
 spiritual right of way. 
 
 Here is a bit out of an old family Prayer 
 Book :- 
 
 " Lord, I beseech Thee to have mercy upon 
 my son, for he is horribly bedevilled." 
 
 And here is another : 
 
 " My little daughter is even now at the point 
 of death ; come and lay Thy hand on her and 
 she shall live." 
 
 " My mother-in-law is sick of a fever." 
 
 And what shall we say of the woman who, 
 when she could not successfully cry out and 
 pray as a mother, attained her end by barking 
 like a dog : 
 
 " Truth ! Lord : children's crumbs will do 
 for us, or whatever falls from Thy spread 
 table." 
 
 Abraham's greatness was not merely in his 
 believing God, and having it counted to him
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 11 
 
 for righteousness, but in the fact that he 
 claimed something more than the promise. 
 The Lord hung round his neck a precious 
 promise, an elect promise. It was engraven 
 with the art of the jeweller in words to shine 
 through the ages, " Blessed be Isaac." " In 
 Isaac shall thy seed be called." And the man 
 was not satisfied with his gift. He began to 
 suggest that another stone might be given him 
 as a pendant to his chief ornament. " Oh 
 that Ishmael might live before Thee ! " said 
 he. It was an enlarged edition of the Prayer 
 Book, but no doubt there was a blank page left 
 for it in the Book of the Covenant, for it is 
 written, " Concerning Ishmael also I have heard 
 thee." 
 
 3. Under the same head of tribal and family 
 intercessions we must group his prayers for 
 himself, for how could he invoke a blessing 
 on Levi, and be himself outside the blessing 
 of Levi ? 
 
 And it was not in any secondary sense 
 that these prayers were offered. The Epistle
 
 12 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 to the Hebrews suggests that they were 
 first-rank prayers. " He offered up sacrifice, 
 first for himself, and then for the errors of 
 the people." We are to lift up hands of prayer, 
 " both for ourselves and those who call us 
 friend," or relative or tribesman, as the case 
 may be. It is not ridiculous that a man should 
 lie upon his own heart. Peter was upon his 
 own heart when he cried, " Lord, save me." 
 And the poor woman in the Gospel prayed for 
 herself and her daughter in quite a confusing 
 way : " Lord," she said, " have mercy upon 
 me, my daughter," &c. And when she is 
 repelled she cries out, " Lord, help me." Is 
 that tribal praying, or does it not rather mean 
 that she presented her own soul intercession- 
 ally with her daughter's ? But whether the 
 daughter is the pendant to the mother or the 
 mother to the daughter, I will not venture 
 to decide. 
 
 I have drawn attention to this point of view, 
 not so much because people need special encour- 
 agement to pray for themselves, but because
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 13 
 
 some neglect their families and some themselves. 
 So I shall say that we are stones in our own 
 breastplates. 
 
 As we are instructed in the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews to consider the great High Priest of 
 our confession and indeed the writer will never 
 consider the elder priesthood except in the light 
 of the newer and greater office we may ask the 
 question whether Jesus wore a breastplate of 
 the Aaronic model, or similar to it. 
 
 There are some things in the New Testament 
 which suggest that the twelve tribes of Israel 
 were replaced by the twelve Apostles of the 
 Lamb in the early tradition. Yqy remember, 
 for example, how the writer of the Apocalypse 
 has imitated the stones of the breastplate in the 
 foundations of the city, and how he says these 
 foundations are the apostolic men, no more and 
 no less ! And there is no doubt of the nearness 
 to Christ of those whom He had specially 
 chosen to be with Him. But then we must not 
 press this numerically, for two reasons : first,
 
 I 4 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 because if we emphasise the grouping of men 
 around the Lord too closely, we shall find an 
 inner circle of three or four within the twelve ; 
 and second, because we shall find an outer circle 
 beyond the twelve, betrayed sometimes by a 
 stray expression like " Jesus loved Martha and 
 her sister and Lazarus " (which makes a fresh 
 row of beautiful stones on the breastplate with 
 a pearl in the middle, a turquoise on the left, 
 and a crystal on the right). And sometimes 
 the disclosure is made of an infinitely wider 
 constituency of love and service, as when the 
 Master says, " Neither pray I for these alone, 
 but for all them that shall believe through their 
 word." We may say of Christ's intercession 
 that it was a capacious breastplate upon a uni- 
 versal heart. The length and breadth of the 
 Lord is not measured on the same scale as the 
 length and breadth of Aaron ! 
 
 You can see Him clothing Himself with this 
 breastplate along with the other high-priestly 
 vestments ; you can see Him studying each 
 individual stone. This one will fall out and
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 15 
 
 be broken, but " I have prayed for thee, 
 Simon " ; and this one will fall out and be lost 
 altogether, being a Son of Loss, that the Scrip- 
 tures might be fulfilled, whatever that may mean. 
 
 Every stone in this plate was regarded by 
 Jesus as a gift from the Father. You have, 
 no doubt, noticed how often that thought 
 recurs in John xvii., and in how many lights 
 the breastplate sparkles : 
 
 " Those whom Thou hast given Me, I give 
 them eternal life." 
 
 " They were Thine and Thou gavest them 
 Me." 
 
 " I pray for those whom Thou gavest Me, 
 they are Thine." 
 
 And: 
 
 " Keep in Thy Name those whom Thou 
 gavest Me." 
 
 iC I kept those whom Thou gavest Me, and 
 watched them, and none of them is lost 
 except . . ." 
 
 " I will that those whom Thou gavest Me, 
 be with Me."
 
 16 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 Surely it is right to say that Jesus regarded 
 each separate stone, and the whole breastplate 
 of them, as the Father's gift to Him. As 
 such He received them, and as such He re- 
 members them ; or, as the writer to the 
 Hebrews says, " He ever liveth to intercede 
 for them." 
 
 Now, it will easily be seen that this wearing 
 of a priestly breastplate passes over into an 
 experience of the individual believer. 
 
 If, for example, you watch St. Paul at his 
 work, and in his apostolic office, you will find 
 that he is in possession of such an adornment. 
 You can see it in several ways : 
 
 1. He prays for the old nation from which 
 he was sprung : " My heart's desire and prayer 
 to God for Israel is that they may be 
 saved." 
 
 2. He prays for the new people, with whom 
 he is in a common citizenship : " For this cause 
 I bow my knees to the Father ... of whom 
 every family in heaven and earth is named."
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 17 
 
 3. He prays for individual souls and for 
 groups of souls in whom he is interested. 
 " My God," he says, with the confidence of 
 a great intercessor, " my God shall supply all 
 your need." 
 
 4. He prayed for himself, sometimes with 
 close application and threefold repetition, the 
 unanswered prayer betraying by its very men- 
 tion what a commodity he possessed of answered 
 prayers. 
 
 And not only did he pray in this way for 
 himself, but he often turned himself into a 
 prayer stone, and hung himself round the neck 
 of the Church, as though the breastplate were 
 theirs and not his. " Pray for me," he said ; 
 " I hope I have a good conscience ; I want to 
 live right." l We shall succeed, he says in 
 another place, " through your prayer and the 
 supply of the Spirit of Jesus." " Pray for me, 
 that I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak " ; 
 
 1 The quotation is from Heb. xiii. 18, and therefore is 
 not to be taken as Paul's direct appeal. Some anonymous 
 person had a breastplate of the same pattern ! 
 
 3
 
 i8 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 my courage is the effluence of your prayers, and 
 so on. 
 
 The advantage of the study of these passages 
 is that they help us to understand how thoroughly 
 unsacerdotal the Apostle was, and how little he 
 was disposed to unduly differentiate himself 
 from those whom he served and loved. 
 
 And now we must say a word or two briefly 
 about our own breastplates, and the particular 
 intercessions in which our love of souls involves 
 us. It raises in our minds a number of interest- 
 ing questions, such as the following : How big 
 a breastplate can you wear ? How many souls 
 can you carry ? Have we as many as twelve 
 that we never forget ? Are we sure of one that 
 we always remember ? And amongst those 
 whose remembrance is always with us, of how 
 many can we say that we are as sure of being 
 on their breastplates as they are of being 
 on ours ? 
 
 Questions like these take us into the heart of 
 the mystery of the spiritual commerce between 
 soul and soul, and between souls and God.
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 19 
 
 It is a great thing to recognise the beauty of 
 the soul, and to have people to pray for who 
 are given us by God. When I look at my 
 own breastplate I take courage and thank God. 
 When my attention is drawn to the grace and 
 sparkle of some special stone that was once 
 uncut and unpolished, then I praise God 
 mightily ! 
 
 Here is one that I carry about a shy, 
 changeable, mysterious jewel. What is it? 
 Where did you pick it up ? It is an opal ; 
 I picked it up in crossing a certain arid stretch 
 of wilderness, in a solitary place of its own and 
 of mine. 
 
 And here is another, akin to it a pearl. 
 I plunged for it : it was hidden away under 
 the forbidding shells of hostility and mis- 
 understanding. Prayer makes enemies into 
 friends, and final friends, who will not return 
 to the shells from which they have been" 
 extracted. 
 
 And here is another stone, a sapphire this. 
 It dropped mysteriously out of the sky, with
 
 20 AARON'S BREASTPLATE 
 
 the blue of the heavens still clinging to it. It 
 lay at my door, to be either trampled on or 
 cherished. It pays sometimes to look down, to 
 condescend to people of low estate ! 
 
 So one looks from jewel to jewel, from soul 
 to soul, and begins to understand the gift of 
 God to us in one another. May I have this 
 one for my own, wear it, keep it, have it 
 always ? How delightful it must be to have 
 people who really belong to us, of whom we 
 may say, in our little measure, what our Lord 
 says on the great scale, they are those whom 
 God has given us, ours and His ! 
 
 You will remember that Browning brings 
 this meaning out of the similitude of the 
 jewel, as contrasted with the more transient 
 beauty of the flower : 
 
 "Time may fray the flower-face 
 
 Jewel from each facet 
 Flash thy laugh at Time." 
 
 A knowledge of the meaning and scope of 
 intercessional grace will help us to understand
 
 AARON'S BREASTPLATE- 21 
 
 both the beauty of souls and our ownership in 
 them. We must always think nobly of the 
 soul, and we shall only be able to do this as 
 we continue in prayer and abound in the same 
 with thanksgiving. 
 
 Here is a little verse from a recently re- 
 covered poet of the seventeenth century, named 
 Traherne, which expresses something of the 
 same thought : 
 
 " Let's prize their Souls, and let them be our Gems, 
 
 Our Temples and our Diadems, 
 
 Our Brides, our Friends, our Fellow-Members, Eyes, 
 Hands, Hearts and Souls, our Victories, 
 And Spoils and Trophies, our own Joys ! 
 Compared to Souls, all else are Toys. 
 
 O Jesus, let them be 
 Such unto us as they are unto Thee, 
 Vessels of glory and felicity."
 
 ATARAXIA
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 ATARAXIA 
 
 QOHN xiv.) 
 
 \\77E are to study the Christian privi- 
 * * lege which is involved in our Lord's 
 words at the beginning of the i4th chapter 
 of St. John's Gospel, " Let not your heart 
 be troubled," and we are to try to see in 
 what way the injunction or commandment 
 which is there recorded can be translated into 
 practical every-day experience. For I need 
 hardly say that Christ's commandments are all 
 of them practical, if we would take pains to 
 understand them rightly ; that they are not 
 arbitrary injunctions, but ethical precepts ; and
 
 26 ATARAXIA 
 
 that, however remote they may sometimes seem 
 to be from the horizon of our ordinary experi- 
 ence, there is associated with the injunction an 
 enabling grace which makes those things pos- 
 sible to us which we should by nature regard 
 as least possible, and therefore least likely to be 
 seriously required. 
 
 Now, that it is really the case that in this 
 passage we are not dealing with a mere casual 
 remark, only one degree removed from the 
 sympathetic " don't worry " of a concerned 
 friend, may be seen in various ways : first of 
 all, we may actually detect the virtue which 
 underlies the quoted commandment, as thus : 
 The Greek word used in the Fourth Gospel 
 
 (JUT) TapaaataBb) 17 Ka/oSi'a ujuwv) is a verb rapao-aw, 
 
 i.e, (arassu (disturb), from which we can at 
 once form a noun, which shall express the state 
 of disturbance (taraxia]^ and then, by prefixing 
 the negative, we make the word arapa^ia (Ata- 
 raxia), which expresses the undisturbed state ; 
 and when we have made the word, we shall find 
 that it is already a recognised virtue among the
 
 ATARAXIA 27 
 
 Greek philosophers, who knew what Ataraxia 
 was, not merely because they knew Greek, but 
 because they had studied, on one side or another, 
 the very virtue which the word expresses. I 
 propose to keep this word Ataraxia^ because 
 the English word "undisturbedness" is too long 
 and too clumsy, and not sufficiently musical. 
 If it sounds a little foreign at first, we shall 
 soon be at home with it, and not wish to trans- 
 late it nor need to explain it. And at present 
 we simply say that underneath Christ's words 
 there was lurking a virtue, with a very musical 
 name, which virtue He had laid up for them 
 that love Him, and which was a part of His 
 own spiritual equipment. We will come back 
 to the study of this virtue after a little while. 
 In the next place, you will notice that the 
 commandment of our Lord is repeated a little 
 lower down, at the end of the 2yth verse, 
 where again you find the words, " Do not 
 let your heart be disturbed nor fearful " ; 
 and this repetition does more than simply 
 reaffirm the injunction: it verifies what we said
 
 28 ATARAXIA 
 
 just now about the passage being a musical 
 passage, for here the discourse has moved from 
 what we call in music a keynote, and has re- 
 turned to it again. And this movement enables 
 us to dissect out the intervening matter, and 
 edit it as a psalm, a psalm of the undisturbed 
 soul as really a psalm as some of those in the 
 Psalter which address themselves to the various 
 perplexities and distresses of spiritual people 
 who are on the way from trouble to trust and 
 from anxiety to calm. There are keynotes 
 in literary composition, just as there are in 
 music ; we expect them especially in psalms, 
 which are hardly removed from musical com- 
 positions properly so called. We are not sur- 
 prised, for instance, to find that the 46th Psalm 
 which opens so splendidly with 
 
 " God is our refuge and strength, 
 A very present help in time of trouble," 
 
 should end with 
 
 "The Lord of Hosts is with us ; 
 The God of Jacob is our refuge " ;
 
 AT AR A XI A 29 
 
 because the word " refuge " is clearly the key- 
 word to that passage. 
 
 In the same way, when we are studying the 
 great consecration psalm of some unknown 
 but deeply-taught person, near the end of the 
 Psalter (I mean the I39th Psalm), even a 
 merely literary person, with small taste for 
 music, can understand the rhythmical motion, 
 which takes us from 
 
 "O Lord, Thou hast searched me, and 
 
 known me," 
 to 
 
 " Search me, O God, and know my heart ; 
 try me, and know my ways." 
 
 Or, to take a simpler instance, we might look 
 at the iO3rd Psalm, whose opening strain is 
 
 " Bless the Lord, O my soul," 
 and watch the way in which the writer (again 
 a musical soul, if any) is working towards his 
 keynote at the end of the psalm, and gathering 
 back the praise of God, from worlds above and 
 worlds around, into the depths of his own 
 experience
 
 30 ATARAXIA 
 
 " Bless the Lord, ye His angels, 
 Bless the Lord, ye His ministers, 
 Bless the Lord, all His works, 
 Bless the Lord, O my soul." 
 So that we need not be surprised to find a 
 musical element, as well as an added emphasis, 
 in the repetition of the commandment " Let 
 not your heart be troubled." Musical ! yes, 
 certainly musical, as Christ's own heart was 
 musical, returning from a keynote of its own, 
 such as that in John i. i , " The Word was with 
 God," and moving through all varieties of 
 resolved discords, until it comes at last to the 
 place where " He ascends up where He was 
 before." Musical ! yes, certainly musical, as 
 the life of every true believer is musical which, 
 beginning with a " strange warmth at the 
 heart," does not end with "a strange chill" 
 for its last chapter. 
 
 And now let us return to the virtue which 
 we are studying, the virtue of Ataraxia. 
 
 From the Greek point of view, it was ap- 
 proached from two directions, and studied in
 
 ATARAXIA 31 
 
 two very different regards : first, as a descrip- 
 tion of God, second as the character of the wise 
 man, the truly royal person. The first is the 
 point of view of the Epicureans, the second 
 (modified as cnraQtta, or, as we say, " apathy ") 
 of the Stoics. The first describes Ataraxia as 
 the Peace of God, the second as the Peace 
 of the Soul that follows God. And I think 
 we may see that, when we have stated the 
 matter in that way, we have a point of contact 
 between the Christian seeker after God, and 
 the seekers after God elsewhere. The seeker 
 after God is not to be despised ; as Cromwell 
 said, in writing to one of his daughters about 
 a sister of hers, who had joined the sect of 
 the Seekers, " I hear that your sister has joined 
 the Seekers ; it is the next best sect to being 
 a Finder." I think it must have been a great 
 trial to Cromwell, who was far removed from 
 fanaticism himself, to have his daughter go 
 astray like that ; but the comment he makes 
 shows his greatness : " next best sect to being 
 a Finder ! " That is true in Greece as well
 
 32 ATARAXIA 
 
 as in England, amongst philosophers as well as 
 Puritans. And in regard to the definitions 
 which Epicurean and Stoic may give of the 
 Ataraxia of their gods or wise men, the Chris- 
 tian formulas embrace theirs, for they define 
 Christian experience on one side as " the 
 peace of God," with God for " the very 
 God of Peace," and on the other side repre- 
 sent Christian attainment as an experi- 
 mental " peace which passes understanding 
 and keeps the heart and mind stayed on 
 Christ." 
 
 It is related in the Acts of the Apostles that, 
 when Paul came to Athens, he had reasonings 
 with both Stoics and Epicureans, and that they 
 called him by a slang name ; they said he was a 
 SpermologQS, i.e., " a picker-up of Learning's 
 crumbs." We have only a rapid summary of 
 what passed between them ; it implies that they 
 had something in common, but were not dis- 
 posed to treat the matter sympathetically ; but 
 it is lawful to conjecture that, whatever were 
 the causes which provoked their contempt and
 
 ATARAXIA 33 
 
 disdain, if he had ventured on anything like 
 a discourse of Ataraxia, i.e., if he had preached 
 to them the " God of Peace " and " the peace 
 of God," each side of the philosophic audience 
 might have found something in the strange 
 new preacher that was not wholly described 
 under the head of " some new thing, such as 
 Athenians love, or plagiarised old thing, such as 
 Athenians despise." Perhaps they might not 
 have called him a Spermologos at all. And 
 whatever may be the case with the philoso- 
 phers, we may be sure that the mystics of all 
 ages would understand his speech about the 
 " peace of God," because they might almost be 
 defined as a people whose ultimate goal is a 
 deep peace, and for whom there is " no joy but 
 calm." 
 
 It will not be supposed that we are trying 
 to make out a better case for Epicureans and 
 Stoics than the study of their lives and writings 
 would warrant ; we know the weakness of either 
 school, and its limitations and its decline ; either 
 name has suffered from those who bore it, as 
 
 4
 
 34 ATARAXIA 
 
 also has the Christian name ; and the modern 
 connotation of either name is removed a good 
 distance from either early pagan or primitive 
 Christian virtue. But judge them by their best, 
 and they are not so far away that they cannot 
 be made connection with. Epicureanism does 
 not, indeed, make its God of Peace either 
 worshipful or winsome. But it has implicitly 
 a God of Peace. It is true that He does 
 not want us, and we 'should waste time in 
 appealing to Him. You remember the Epi- 
 curean sketch in "The Lotus-Eaters" of 
 Tennyson : 
 
 "For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are 
 
 hurled 
 Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are 
 
 lightly curled 
 Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming 
 
 worlds ; 
 Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted 
 
 lands, 
 Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring 
 
 deeps and fiery sands, 
 Clanging fights and flaming towns, and sinking ships 
 
 and praying hands."
 
 ATARAXIA 35 
 
 There is still a good distance between Chris- 
 tianity as a religion of the Finder, and the 
 " next best sect," is there not ? But we will 
 not spend more time on the Epicureans ; they 
 have probably been a good deal misunderstood ; 
 their judgment, however, of the nature of God, 
 has been set at naught by the Incarnation. 
 And the same thing is true of the Stoics, whose 
 Ataraxia tended to mere apathy, which the 
 Christian variety does not. 
 
 Returning to the question of experimental 
 peace, such as is involved in the state of 
 Ataraxia, it will be seen that this is one of the 
 points upon which the Scriptures become hyper- 
 bolic, whether Old Testament Scriptures or 
 New Testament Scriptures. Thus peace is 
 said to be perfect, for " Thou wilt keep him 
 in peace, in peace, whose mind is stayed on 
 Thee, because he trusteth in Thee " ; it is said 
 to flow like a river, for " Oh that thou hadst 
 hearkened to My commandments ! then had thy 
 peace been like a river " ; and it is said to be 
 amongst those things that exceed the ken of
 
 36 ATARAXIA 
 
 angels or men, for " the peace of God exceeds 
 all understanding." 
 
 Now, when the Scriptures become hyper- 
 bolical, we must either become believing or 
 apologetic. We have our choice : it is too 
 good to be false, or it is too good to be exactly 
 true. The saints say the first, the doubters 
 subscribe to the second. But the saints have 
 always this quality, that, having realised that 
 the life which they are working out has become 
 musical both God-ward and man-ward, they are 
 resolutely set to take the top notes of the music, 
 even though at first they may come nearer 
 screaming than singing. Even the hyperboles 
 of Scripture turn out to be reasonable upon 
 a closer scrutiny : " It ought to be true, even if 
 it isn't," is one of our early criticisms of Christ's 
 promises ; but " It ought to be, and therefore it 
 is," is the later and the reasonable view. 
 
 Why should we say that it is of the nature of 
 hyperbole to describe human experience, when 
 turned into channels of Christian love and faith, 
 as flowing like a river ; is it necessarily hyper-
 
 ATARAXIA 37 
 
 bolical to be continuous or to increase ? If the 
 continuity were broken, where were the river ? 
 If the depth were diminishing as one moved 
 seaward, we might suspect the flood was going 
 to dry up ; but the real rivers don't do that. 
 Or if the river were to lose perceptible flow, 
 and be like the river Cam, of which a clever 
 undergraduate made the description that " in 
 that place there is a river which runneth neither 
 to the East nor to the West, but remaineth always 
 in one place," we might lawfully transfer it 
 from the category of rivers to that of canals ; 
 or if the stream were to be like the Sabbatic 
 river, of which Josephus speaks, which ran only 
 once a week, or stopped once a week (I am not 
 sure which), out of respect for God and Moses, 
 we might reasonably say that it was not a river, 
 but could perhaps be classified as a geyser. 
 The apparent hyperbole of the Scripture simili- 
 tude protects us from believing that Christian 
 peace is intermittent, that it dries up, or stops 
 short, or works only on Sunday, or anything 
 that implies imperfect fellowship between the
 
 38 ATARAXIA 
 
 believer and his Indweller. When we think 
 it is going to dry up we are as unreasonable as 
 Horace's rustic who stood on the bank of the 
 stream, waiting for it to flow by, that he might 
 be able to cross 
 
 " Rusticus expectat, dum defluat aranis, at ille 
 Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum." 
 
 As you can hear the river rolling in that last 
 verse, there is no need for me to translate the 
 passage. 
 
 Now, what is the name of this river which 
 we have been describing ? Well, it is like many 
 rivers on the map, it changes its name from 
 district to district ; but when you get past the 
 cataracts, the name of the river is Ataraxia, and 
 the country is very fertile on both sides of it ; 
 and the open sea, which is its home, is not very 
 far ahead of it. 
 
 Hyperbole on the experimental side is one 
 of the characteristics of a Divine revelation ; 
 while it may perhaps be true, as some one said, 
 that "less grace would find an easier entrance
 
 AT AR AX I A 39 
 
 into our hearts," we should hardly wish to erase 
 the words " He giveth more grace " from the 
 Scriptures, or to subtract from their meaning, 
 which is only an underhand attempt at erasure. 
 Let God promise like God, and do you believe 
 like a child of God. Make a collection of the 
 hyperbolic promises of God, and you have the 
 materials for the dogmatic statement of a full 
 salvation ; set them down: 
 
 " I will never leave thee, never forsake thee." 
 " Neither height nor depth, nor any other 
 creature shall be able to separate us." 
 " All things are yours, ye are Christ's." 
 " The very hairs of your head are numbered." 
 " May be strong to grasp with all saints the 
 length and breadth and height, and to know." 
 
 Write them down, study them, believe them, 
 absorb them ; " do not Jet your heart be dis- 
 turbed, neither let it be fearful." 
 
 We will now see if we can find out some 
 of the characteristics of the undisturbed soul 
 and the undisturbed state. 
 
 We shall fix the matter in our mind by call-
 
 40 ATARAXIA 
 
 ing this passage which we have carved out of 
 the 1 4th of John a Psalm of Jesus. There are 
 bits of dialogue interwoven in it, but they do 
 not disturb the motion of the music. And our 
 Lord is our Conductor in song as He is our 
 leader in prayer. He spun this quiet song out 
 of the inmost knowledge of His own soul ; the 
 warp and the woof of it were the two natures 
 that went to make the Sonship. Christ's song- 
 fulness and calmness may be communicated to 
 us just as His prayerfulness ; and if disciples, 
 overhearing Him when He was on His knees, 
 said, " Lord, teach us to pray," and so were 
 taught, in the same way, when the saints detect 
 His calmness and His brave cheer, they say, 
 " Lord, teach us to sing the psalm of Thy 
 Ataraxia," and they are taught it ; and by 
 making this communication to them He shows 
 them the Father. 
 
 For what was His own experience ? The 
 answer is that it was a deep sea, the calm of 
 whose depths controlled its surface ; or if ex- 
 terior perturbations arose, they did not affect
 
 ATARAXIA 41 
 
 the depth. Here are some lines that may 
 describe that depth : 
 
 " Down where the waves arc still, the sea shines clear. 
 ***** 
 
 Hither shall come no further sacrifice, 
 Never again the anguished clutch at life, 
 Never again great Love and Death at strife. 
 He who hath suffered all need fear no more, 
 ^uiet his portion now, for evermore." 
 
 In a certain sense these experiences are 
 ccmmon property between the saints and their 
 Lord, but they are theirs because bestowed and 
 communicated by Him. And when we say that 
 we must " make the surface as the depth," and 
 that this is Ataraxia, it is presupposed that the 
 depth exists. The Scriptures describe it under 
 the term of a life hid with Christ in God. 
 That is our depth. Ataraxia is only one 
 characteristic of the mystical union according 
 to which the outward life in the world is 
 conformed to an inward life with God. 
 
 If we are to make the surface like the depth^ 
 we may put it another way, and say that we
 
 42 ATARAXIA 
 
 are to make the open sea like the harbour. Faber 
 uses this figure in one of his hymns on the 
 greatness of God, and says : 
 
 "Out on that sea we are in harbour still 
 And scarce advert to winds and tides, 
 Like ships that ride at anchor, with the waves 
 Flapping against their sides." 
 
 He means that the ship he sails in is a steady 
 ship, as steady in an open sea as when anchored 
 in harbour ; it is a very steady ship, the good 
 ship Ataraxia. The goodness and greatness of 
 God, when understood, produce steadiness and 
 induce calm. As Faber says elsewhere : 
 
 " Then on Thy greatness I will lay me down, 
 
 Already life is heaven to me ! 
 No cradled child more softly lies than I 
 Come soon, eternity ! " 
 
 As a matter of fact, eternity is come already. 
 
 I was once staying with some friends in the 
 city of Wilmington, Delaware, and the room in 
 which they put the pilgrim to sleep was adorned 
 with a bed coverlet made out of old brown
 
 ATARAXIA 43 
 
 linen which had been spun in the old days, in 
 some log house of what was then the frontier, 
 by the grandmother of the lady of the house. 
 Over it she had worked with her needle lines 
 from Mrs. Browning to the following effect : 
 
 "God's greatness 
 
 Flows around our incompleteness, 
 Round our restlessness His rest." 
 
 When I came down in the morning they asked 
 me how I had slept, and my answer was, 
 " How could I have slept other than well 
 with such a text as that on top of me ? " The 
 open sea was like the harbour that night. A 
 word through Mrs. Browning had said " Peace, 
 be still." 
 
 An undisturbed soul is a beautiful thing, 
 whether waking or sleeping for, whether we 
 wake or sleep, we live together with Him. 
 When we pray, " Let the beauty of the Lord 
 our God be upon us," this is one of the things 
 we are praying for ; without it we cannot be 
 made perfect.
 
 44 ATA RAX I A 
 
 We have known some souls of this class ; 
 they have not been recluses, living in a region 
 from which disturbance is artificially excluded ; 
 they have been men and women, busy in a 
 busy world. I knew one of them, since gone 
 to his rest, who carried on an active service for 
 his Master in the busiest of all cities, and who 
 selected for himself a telegraphic address which 
 might stand at the head of his notepaper. 
 What do you think this busy man's address 
 was ? It was "this : 
 
 " Undisturbed, London." 
 
 And it always found him at home that is to 
 say, in God so far as I could judge of his 
 dwelling-place in the days when I knew him, 
 before he had run out his leasehold in the 
 Church militant and taken up his freehold in 
 the Church triumphant. Such an one, living 
 at such an address, verifies the truth of the 
 Scripture which says of the good man that 
 
 " He shall not be afraid of evil tidings, 
 His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord."
 
 AT AR A XI A 45 
 
 But perhaps in those days they had no black- 
 edged letters and no telegrams. Whatever they 
 had, they had bad news. I admit that the tele- 
 gram, however, as a test of the state. If we 
 had that medical instrument called a sphygmo- 
 graph attached to our pulse, most of us would 
 show a rise in the index if a telegram came 
 into our hands. It is certainly so, and nothing 
 but persistent communion with God will cure it. 
 A man was attending one of the great reli- 
 gious gatherings in Western America ; he was 
 a farmer, several hundreds of miles from home, 
 and when the spiritual life of the meetings was 
 at its height he received a telegram, saying, 
 "The grasshoppers are eating your corn." 
 What was he to do? He could not tele- 
 graph back to the grasshoppers to stop eating 
 the corn ; he could not get back himself and 
 stop them. So he said : " If my Father wishes 
 to feed His grasshoppers on His corn, I have 
 nothing to say to it." Was that Stoicism 
 or Fatalism ? Neither of these : it was just 
 Ataraxia.
 
 46 ATARAXIA 
 
 I have said nothing in what precedes with 
 regard to the historical setting in which this 
 jewel of Christ's teaching is found. We must 
 not drive sequence too hard, and it is possible 
 that the instinct which places a chapter division 
 at the point where " Let not your heart be 
 troubled " stands is one which internal evidence 
 may justify. On the other hand, it may be 
 argued, from purely spiritual grounds, that it 
 is right to place the words in close sequence 
 with the warning to Peter, so as to read the 
 injunction to Ataraxia into a soul that was 
 already, or would be presently, in a state ot 
 deep trouble. 1 In that case the medicine would 
 have been placed near the disease ; and it can 
 hardly be doubted that Ataraxia is a genuine 
 
 1 The objection has been made that in that case our 
 Lord would not have used the plural in "Let not your 
 hearts be troubled ; believe ye in God," &c. But this 
 seems not to allow sufficiently for the disturbance which 
 was affecting the whole of the apostolic company whose 
 companionship with Peter is intimated in Mark xiv. 31 by 
 the words " And so said they all in like manner." Per- 
 haps this reference may justify the use of the plural in 
 John xiv. I.
 
 ATARAXIA 47 
 
 prophylactic in the spiritual pharmacopoeia, 
 when we consider the language of St. Paul to 
 the Philippians to the effect that " the peace of 
 God shall garrison your hearts." So we may 
 say, if we please, that our Lord mixed this 
 draught for Peter and held it out for him to 
 drink, and that it was the proper antidote for 
 his falling-sickness. Interior calmness means 
 interior and exterior strength. 
 
 Whether we are right or not in our interpre- 
 tation of the sequence in the Fourth Gospel, we 
 can hardly be wrong in the conclusion to which 
 our study pointed us. I find the same truth 
 brought out in a striking passage in a book 
 which I read some years since, called " The 
 Gospel of the Nineteenth Century." I don't 
 like the title of the book, and the less because 
 we are already in the twentieth century. But 
 here is the passage to which I refer : 
 
 " True calmness is the accompaniment of 
 steadfastness of soul. It is the offspring of per- 
 fect trust in God. There is a beautiful figure
 
 48 AT AR A XI A 
 
 employed in the Apocalypse to denote the calm- 
 ness of the soul which arises from the conscious- 
 ness of God's presence. Before the throne there 
 was a sea of glass like unto crystal. The idea 
 conveyed to our minds by this emblem is that of 
 a sea, not of glass, but like glass, a sea the glassy 
 surface of whose waters is ruffled by not so 
 much as a passing breeze, and whose crystal 
 depths are lit up with sunshine, a sea smooth 
 and clear as crystal. The beauty of the emblem 
 is that it combines the most restless, unstable 
 thing in nature with the idea of perfect repose 
 and tranquillity. The sea in its restlessness is 
 a true likeness of the human heart. Every 
 breath of wind disturbs the one, every breath 
 of adversity troubles the other. But there is 
 something which can bring perfect repose to 
 the soul, the presence of God. This is the 
 truth which is taught by this sublime image of 
 the sea like glass before the throne. It repre- 
 sents the calm of a soul which dwells in the 
 presence of God. We think of heaven as 
 calm because it is out of reach of the storms of
 
 ATARAXIA 49 
 
 earth, but this is not the idea conveyed by the 
 vision. The heaven which it reveals is a heaven 
 on earth. The scene of the Apocalypse is laid, 
 not in some far-off sphere, some fabled Ely- 
 sium, but here on earth. Heaven is within 
 the good man's heart. The sea which is before 
 the throne is smooth and clear as crystal, not 
 because it is remote from earthly storms, but 
 because the Spirit of God moves upon the face 
 of the waters." 
 
 I must confess that I do not see why this 
 beautiful place of mystical exegesis should be 
 labelled so unfortunately as " Gospel of the 
 Nineteenth Century " ; that must have been a 
 publisher's title, one would think. The saints 
 have nothing to do with the nineteenth century ; 
 they live in Him who is called Yesterday, 
 To-day, and For Ever.
 
 MARY AND MARTHA
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 OOME one was recently remarking to me 
 ^ that it was not commonly realised how 
 many sermons had been preached on the subject 
 of Martha and her sister Mary ; nor, it might 
 be added, how much heat had been developed 
 by the sermons, especially amongst the feminine 
 part of the community. Every revival of 
 religion, every mystical movement, brings these 
 two sisters on to the screen of the Gospel, and 
 when they are thus projected it is impossible 
 to avoid the question, " Which of the two, do 
 you think, loved the Lord best ? " with perhaps 
 the added and less worthy question, "Which 
 of them do you like best ? " And under either 
 
 53
 
 54 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 head the judgment of the Church has been a 
 divided one. I do not mean that all references 
 to the subject are polarised references ; when, 
 for instance, Milton informs one of his young 
 lady friends that 
 
 " The better part with Mary and with Ruth 
 Thou chosen hast," 
 
 he was as little reflecting upon the fact that 
 Mary had a sister as upon the previous husband 
 whom Ruth was trying to improve upon. But, 
 on the other hand, when Charles Wesley was 
 writing the splendid hymn 
 
 ** O Love Divine, how sweet Thou art ! " 
 especially the verse 
 
 " Oh that I could for ever sit 
 With Mary at the Master's feet ! " l 
 
 1 Some of our modern hymn-books omit this verse for 
 sentimental reasons, or mutilate it : their judgment is 
 faulty : it was, perhaps, right to remove a verse which 
 followed about " beloved John," but this verse is the 
 highest point of the hymn and must not be removed.
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 55 
 
 he was writing at a time when evangelical piety 
 was definitely engaged in dissecting the two 
 sisters, to find out which of them had the larger 
 and the warmer heart. For the question comes 
 up in other Methodist hymns, especially in the 
 form of the eirenicon which suggests that the 
 two sisters might be compounded into a single 
 soul that should find no contradiction between 
 the kitchen of carefulness and the doorstep of 
 delight : thus we are admonished to 
 
 " Serve with careful Martha's hands 
 And Mary's loving heart ! " 
 
 or, in a less pronounced and personal statement, 
 are taught to say 
 
 " My hands are but engaged below, 
 My heart is still with Thee." 
 
 But whatever attention the evangelicals may 
 have paid to Mary and her sister Martha, that 
 is as nothing to the attention which has been 
 bestowed upon them by writers of mystical
 
 56 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 divinity, in whose systems Mary stands for 
 what they call the Contemplative Life and 
 Martha for the Active Life. 
 
 If, for instance, you were to turn to Madame 
 Guyon's Commentaries upon the interior sense 
 of the Scriptures, you would find her discours- 
 ing something like this : 
 
 " Martha receives Jesus into her house ; that 
 is as much as the active life can attain to. 
 But Mary, who signifies the contemplative life, 
 was seated. That * being seated ' expresses the 
 repose of her contemplation ; in that sacred rest 
 she does nothing but listen to the voice of her 
 dear Master, who teaches, nourishes, and 
 quickens her with His own word. Oh ! Mary, 
 happy Mary, to hear that word ! It makes 
 itself heard because you put yourself in a state 
 to hear it : you listened for it, and you rested 
 in that silence and that peace without which it 
 is not possible to hear that word which is heard 
 only in heart-silence ! " 
 
 She continues her commentary with an appeal 
 to those who are opposing the doctrine of the
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 57 
 
 Inward Way. She tells them that this single 
 passage from the Gospel ought to convince them 
 that they are wrong. The whole doctrine of the 
 Scriptures is summed up in these words of the 
 Gospel of Luke which teaches us to leave 
 Multiplicity and Care and Anxiety and Undue 
 Concern, and to enter into Simplicity and Unity 
 of Spirit and Abandonment, and Surrender and 
 Peace and Tranquillity and Silence ; to leave the 
 multiplied worries of action, and to enter into 
 the repose of contemplation. 
 
 She then points out that although one has to 
 abandon the Active Life for the Contemplative, 
 the ultimate intention is their reunion, according 
 to which we shall enter into exterior works 
 without losing interior peace. All the trouble 
 arises from having sought after two states 
 which ought to be united in a single experience. 
 And then she concludes her brief comments by 
 saying that " the Truth assures us that there is 
 only one thing necessary and Mary has chosen 
 it. What has Mary chosen ? To listen to 
 God and rest in Him. That is the one thing
 
 58 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 needful, to be attentive to Him, this is what 
 we are to choose. And, oh ! inconceivable bless- 
 ing, he who makes the choice has the added 
 gain that no one takes it from him. No one 
 can plunder so great a blessing from the man 
 who has it : it is given him in the interior 
 depth, and no man can pluck it up. That is 
 why St. Paul said, * Neither height nor depth 
 . . . shall be able to separate us from the 
 love of God in Christ Jesus,' grounded and 
 established in Him, and apart from all 
 merits of the Creature " ; so Madame Guyon 
 adds the last verse of the 8th of Romans 
 as a pendant to the last verse of the loth 
 of Luke, and they certainly seem to belong 
 together. 
 
 She discusses the same problem in the little 
 book called " The Short Method of Prayer," 
 where a special section is given to the question 
 of the relation of the Human Activity to the 
 Divine Life ; and she defends herself vigorously 
 against the charge of prohibiting some from 
 active service, using often the very same words
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 59 
 
 that we noted above from her Commentaries : 
 " Instead, therefore, of prohibiting activity, 
 we enjoin it : but in absolute dependence on 
 the Spirit of God, that His activity may take 
 the place of our own." 
 
 This can only be effected by the concurrence 
 of the creature ; and this concurrence can only 
 be yielded by moderating and restraining our 
 own activity, that the activity of God may 
 gradually gain the ascendency, and finally 
 absorb all that is ours, as distinguishable 
 from it. 
 
 "Jesus Christ hath exemplified this in the 
 Gospel. Martha did what was right, but be- 
 cause she did it in her own spirit, Christ 
 rebuked her. The spirit of man is restless and 
 turbulent ; for which reason it does little, 
 though it would appear to do much. ' Martha,' 
 saith Christ, ' thou art careful, and troubled 
 about many things ; but one thing is needful ; 
 and Mary hath chosen that good part, which 
 shall not be taken away from her.' And what 
 was it that Mary had chosen ? Repose, tran-
 
 60 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 quillity, and peace. She apparently ceased to 
 act, that the Spirit of Christ might act in her : 
 she ceased to live, that Christ might be her 
 Life." 
 
 So much having been said with regard to 
 Madame Guyon and her mystical interpretation 
 of Martha and Mary, we go on to observe that 
 the allegory of the Contemplative and Active 
 Life furnished by the two sisters is not her own 
 invention, but is a commonplace of the spiritual 
 teachers of the Church. Suppose we try and 
 find out what St. Bernard would think about it. 
 We remember that St. Bernard is not only a 
 monk, but a statesman, a man out of the world 
 and very much in it. So we should expect that 
 he will speak well both of Mary and Martha, 
 and will try to combine their excellences in a 
 sum total of Christian virtue, just as Wesley's 
 hymn tells us to do and as Madame Guyon's 
 explanation also suggests. 
 
 For example, when he preaches on the 
 Canticles, and comes to the text where the 
 Bridegroom says, " How beautiful are thy
 
 MARY AMD MARTHA 61 
 
 cheeks, like the cheeks of a turtle dove ! " r 
 he has to show what are meant by the cheeks of 
 a pious soul, how Intention as he calls it is the 
 whole face, the matter upon which we are intent 
 is one cheek, the cause of our intention is the 
 other, and of course we are to be intent upon 
 God, and for God's sake. If we have to give 
 our mind to outward things, but do it for God's 
 sake, that is Martha's activity, but not neces- 
 sarily Mary's spiritual leisure. He will not 
 say that Martha has reached perfect beauty ; 
 she is still anxious and troubled about many 
 things ; she covers herself with dust in many 
 duties. (Poor, dusty Martha!) 2 However, her 
 pure intention will shake the dust off her by 
 and by, perhaps when she lies down to her 
 last sleep. Meanwhile the ideal beauty is that 
 of the shy and solitary bird, the turtle-dove. 
 We should imitate its shyness and its love of 
 solitude. We should sit solitary, as she does. 
 
 1 This must be the Vulgate of Cant. i. 9 : " Pulcraa 
 sunt genae tuae, sicut turturis." 
 
 2 My comment, not St. Bernard's.
 
 62 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 We have nothing in common with the crowd, 
 nothing with the multitude. Our business is 
 to forget our own people even, and our father's 
 house, and then the King will greatly desire 
 our beauty, and say that our cheeks are lovely, 
 like the turtle-dove ; and so on, through all 
 the praises of a quiet life with Christ, the 
 necessity for which has not been done away 
 because we happen to have seen the weakness 
 and insufficiency of mere monasticism. 
 
 In a similar manner when he comes to the 
 text which says, " My Beloved is mine, and I 
 am His, and He feeds amongst the lilies," he 
 has to explain what and who are the lilies as, 
 for example, that the lilies are conspicuous by 
 their whiteness and their sweetness ; and spirits 
 also have what we call by the same name, a 
 scent and a harmony of figure. And that is the 
 lily-state, which never lacks either purity or 
 sweetness. The Lord takes away from us 
 guile and sadness ; He makes us simple and He 
 makes us happy. And when He is said to 
 feed amongst such lilies, it expresses His
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 63 
 
 delight in pure and gladsome souls. Such 
 were Mary and Martha, to whose house the 
 Lord went to feed and to be fed. (Mary 
 and Martha were a pair of lovely lily-souls, 
 one of them in the front parlour and the 
 other in the kitchen !) l 
 
 In a sermon which he preached on the Assump- 
 tion of the Virgin he discusses what the good 
 part is which was not to be taken away from 
 Mary ; he asks what comfort it could to be 
 toiling Martha to be told of the excellent choice 
 her sister ; he praises a mixed life, of both 
 active and passive elements. For does not 
 David say, " O God, my heart is ready, is 
 ready" ; 2 and in saying "ready" twice over 
 he means that he is ready for a quiet time with 
 the Lord, and ready also to serve his brethren 
 and his neighbours. The better part is the 
 work of devotion to the Lord ; the best part is 
 
 1 Again I epitomise and popularise Bernard's argument. 
 
 3 The Vulgate again : " Paratum cor meum Deus, 
 paratum cor meum." In the English version : " My 
 heart is fixed, my heart is fixed."
 
 64 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 to be perfect in both interior devotion and 
 exterior service. In this house, says he, we 
 must have all three States represented, Mary 
 and Martha and Lazarus Mary to think pious 
 and sublime thoughts of her God, Martha to 
 think kind and merciful thoughts of her neigh- 
 bour, and Lazarus to think sadly and humbly of 
 himself. 
 
 St. Teresa, most practical and level-headed 
 of the ascetical school of mystics, shows an 
 inclination towards Martha and away from 
 Mary, as commonly interpreted ; and we can 
 perhaps read between the lines and conclude 
 that she had been a little overdone with those 
 in her convent who practised too exclusively 
 the cult of the younger sister. Hence she says 
 in her book called " The Interior Castle " (Eng. 
 trans., p. 197) : 
 
 " Believe me, Martha and Mary must go 
 together in entertaining our Lord, and in 
 order to have Him always with us, we must 
 treat Him well and provide food for Him. 
 How could Mary have entertained Him in
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 65 
 
 sitting always at His feet, if her sister had not 
 helped her. His food is, that we should strive 
 in every possible way that souls may be saved, 
 and may praise Him. 
 
 * { You may make two objections : one that 
 our Lord told Mary she had ' chosen the 
 better part ' ; true, because she had already 
 performed the office of Martha, and showed 
 great regard for our Lord by washing His 
 feet, and wiping them with her hair." 
 
 You see that, without stopping to discuss 
 Teresa's harmonisation of Gospel narratives, we 
 must admit that Teresa was in favour of com- 
 bining the virtues of the two sisters in her 
 spiritual ideal. 
 
 It would be easy to give you other instances 
 of the way in which the mystical fancy played 
 round the case of the two sisters ; for example, 
 we shall find that St. Macarius of Egypt is 
 more favourable to sister Martha than most of 
 his brethren : 
 
 " When the work of prayer and discourse is 
 fittingly carried out, it exceeds every other
 
 66 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 virtue and commandment. The Lord Himself 
 is witness thereof: for when He turned into 
 the house of Martha and Mary, and Martha 
 was occupied with serving, while Mary sat at 
 His feet and feasted on the ambrosia of His 
 divine speech, and her sister was blaming her 
 because she did not share the work with her, 
 and came to Christ about it, then He put the 
 chief thing before the subordinate and said, 
 * Martha, Martha,' &c. Now, He did not say 
 this as though He reprobated the work of ser- 
 vice, but in order that He might put the greater 
 before the less. For how could He have stood 
 aloof from service : Himself becoming the 
 pattern of it, by washing the disciples' feet ; 
 and He was so far from hindering it, that He 
 enjoined on His disciples to do the same to one 
 another. . . . However, you see first things 
 claim first place ; but they may spring from 
 the same blessed root." J 
 
 So much having been said with regard to 
 the degrees of virtue reached by the two sisters, 
 1 Macarius : " De Oratione."
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 67 
 
 it is proper to stop and ask whether we are 
 not treating the subject too much as a judg- 
 ment of fair women, from a woman s -point of 
 mew. St. Bernard counts with Madame 
 Guyon in this inquiry, and I hasten to put in 
 the missing factor, in order that the Gospel of 
 the day can be considered Universal Gospel, by 
 showing that there is distinctly a man's side to 
 the question as well as a woman's. You will 
 see it at once if I ask you a blunt question. 
 Did you ever have your papers put in order, or 
 your books dusted ? Was not the person who 
 undertook that arduous task of the opposite 
 sex and of the sisterhood of St. Martha ? Is 
 not the sorting of papers and the rehabili- 
 tation of the outsides of books as much a 
 matter of feminine diaconate as the peeling of 
 potatoes or the beating of eggs? But I need 
 not labour the point : it has been done for 
 me by Dr. John Watson in his story of 
 Rabbi Saunderson. Rabbi Saunderson had a 
 housekeeper whose name was Mrs. Pitillo 
 (Martha Pitillo was her long name, for cer-
 
 68 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 tain), and he tells us of her gifts in the 
 following strain : 
 
 " She had the episcopal faculty in quite a 
 conspicuous degree, and was, I have often 
 thought, a woman of sound judgment. 
 
 " We were not able at all times to see eye 
 to eye, as she had an unfortunate tendency 
 to meddle with my books and papers, and to 
 arrange them after an artificial fashion. This 
 she called tidying, and in its most extreme 
 form, cleaning. With all her excellences, 
 there was also in her what I have noticed in 
 most women, a flavour of guile, and on one 
 occasion, when I was making a brief journey 
 through Holland and France in search of comely 
 editions of the Fathers, she had the books 
 carried out into the garden and dusted. It 
 was the space of two years before I regained 
 mastery of my library again, and unto this day 
 I cannot lay my hands on the Service-book of 
 King Henry VIII., which I had in the second 
 edition, to say nothing of an original edition of 
 Rutherford's * Lex Rex.' It does not become
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 69 
 
 me, however, to reflect on the efforts of that 
 worthy woman, and, if any one could be saved 
 by good works, her place is assured. I was 
 with her before she died, and her last words to 
 me were, ' Tell Jean tae dust yir bukes ance in 
 sax months, and for ony sake keep ae chair for 
 sittin' on.' It was not perhaps the testimony 
 one would have desired in the circumstances, 
 but yet, Mr. Carmichael, I have often thought 
 that there was a spirit of of unselfishness, in 
 fact, that showed the working of grace." 
 
 Later in the same evening Mr. Saunderson's 
 mind returned to his friend's spiritual state ; for 
 he enters into a long argument, to show that 
 while Mary was more spiritual, Martha must 
 have been within the Divine Election. 
 
 My friends ask me sometimes, when I quote 
 the judgment of the experts out of the past of 
 the Church, what I think of the matter myself. 
 
 This question I am now able to answer, in 
 the sense that I think with Rabbi Saunderson. 
 
 Having now delved sufficiently into the past, 
 we may now profitably return to the uncom-
 
 yo MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 merited Gospel, and the most obvious con- 
 clusions that can be drawn therefrom. We 
 shall assume, then, that any separation between 
 the active and the contemplative life is not of 
 the nature of a final settlement. If they are 
 separated for a time, it is that they may be 
 united for ever, for each requires the other for 
 its perfection, and we ought to be able to pass 
 instinctively from one to the other, without any 
 feeling that we have left the temple and gone 
 into the street. At the same time, we have to 
 remember that in this point of view the 
 spiritual has the right of way as over against 
 the material. The elder must serve the 
 younger ; Martha is the elder, as has been 
 divined by an acute exegesis from the Bethany 
 passages in the fourth Gospel, especially from 
 the statement that " Jesus loved Martha, and 
 her sister, and Lazarus." So Martha has to 
 turn into younger sister. But, just as in the 
 first instance, where the words were used of the 
 elder serving the younger, the pair were really 
 twins, so we may say of Martha and Mary, the
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 71 
 
 Active and the Contemplative. It will, however, 
 not be recorded that " Mary have I loved, and 
 Martha have I hated " ; the Scripture has pro- 
 vided against that. For a person is not hated 
 because she is reproved and admonished, and 
 I think we may say that the repetition of her 
 name implies exhortation or reproof of the 
 strongest kind. Jesus had a habit of using the 
 repeated form of address. This has often been 
 noticed ; but few people know how many pass- 
 ages where our Lord is making an address have 
 a various reading intimating that the person was 
 addressed in a double form. We are familiar 
 with " Simon, Simon " ; with " Saul, Saul " ; 
 with ' Jerusalem, Jerusalem " ; all of which 
 are warnings or reproofs, and it is difficult to 
 separate " Martha, Martha " from this group ; 
 but there is another group supplied by the 
 readings of the New Testament, readings which 
 are probably genuine, though neglected by the 
 editors, according to which our Lord calls the 
 dead to life by a repeated address. Thus He 
 said to the maiden, " Maid, Maid, I say unto
 
 72 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 thee, Arise " ; and so, " Young man, young 
 man," in the miracle at Nain ; and last, and 
 most important of all, He said, " Lazarus, 
 Lazarus, come forth." This is not the place 
 to discuss the value of the individual readings ; 
 the early Fathers knew them and drew atten- 
 tion to them. 
 
 Thus Aphrahat says in his 8th Homily : 
 " The Lord in His first advent raised three 
 dead to life, that the testimony of three might 
 be confirmed to us. For when He raised the 
 widow's son, He called him by a double word, 
 ' Young man, young man, arise.' And he 
 arose in life. In the same way He called twice 
 the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue, 
 and said, ' Maid, maid, arise.' And her spirit 
 returned, and she arose. And when Lazarus 
 was dead, He came to the tomb, and prayed 
 and cried out with a loud voice, * Lazarus 
 (Lazarus), come forth.' And the dead man 
 came forth from the sepulchre." 
 
 That will suffice to show that the repeated 
 call was believed to have an urgency of its own.
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 73 
 
 And I shall assume that multiplicity, out of 
 which Martha was called by the repetition of the 
 reproving voice, is, in a way, a kind of death, 
 like the state of Saul, when the voice from 
 heaven called him in a similar manner. 
 
 Now, I am aware that many resent the 
 emphasis which is in this way put upon sim- 
 plicity of life and occupation. They dislike 
 the new reading, " a few things, Martha, or 
 one." They dislike the abandonment of an old 
 interpretation, which has certainly had gracious 
 results attaching to it. " You have spoiled my 
 best sermon," said one of the revisers when the 
 change was agreed on. And certainly it does 
 sound much higher to say that the one thing 
 needful was to choose Christ and attach oneself 
 to Him ; and it looks like a bathos, to make 
 Christ peep into the kitchen and say to Martha 
 not merely that three courses are as good as 
 ten, but that one course is as good as three ! 
 
 Why should our Lord trouble to simplify 
 life and our ideas of what life consists in ?
 
 74 MARY AND MARTHA 
 
 The answer is that both our happiness and 
 our usefulness depend upon the simplifica- 
 tions which we introduce into life, or which 
 He introduces for us. And the limitation 
 works out in this way. It relieves us from 
 distraction, and it finds us the leisure which is 
 necessary for the cultivation of the spiritual 
 life. How important this thought of leisure 
 with Christ is ! In the vocabularies of the 
 early Christians there are two words which 
 are difficult to translate. One is the word 
 2xoXaw (Scholazo] the Christian takes time, or 
 has leisure. It occurs in the First Epistle of the 
 Corinthians ( i Cor. vii. 5) " that ye may have 
 leisure for prayer." So in Polycarp : " The 
 Christian takes time for prayer " (axoAa&t). 
 And the corresponding Latin word vacat is 
 everywhere in some classes of writers : shall we 
 translate it, "The Christian is free for Christ, 
 is free for prayer." Well, it is only by the 
 culture and habits of the spiritual life that this 
 blessed leisure and beautiful vacancy and long 
 expected holiday is obtained. And if we insist
 
 MARY AND MARTHA 75 
 
 on going into all the pleasures, knowing all the 
 people, having everything handsome about us, 
 and the like, we shall never know either the 
 life of the turtle-dove or the perfume and 
 beauty of the lily. 
 
 And we may say nearly the same thing over 
 people that insist on going to meetings every 
 night in the week, and are too tired to talk to 
 the Lord either when they lie down or when 
 they rise up. As St. Bernard says, they are a 
 very dusty people ; and if they had known 
 better, they might have been covered with 
 another kind of dust, of which the Psalmist 
 speaks when he talks of " wings of a dove 
 covered with silver, and her feathers with 
 yellow gold." 
 
 In all this we are careful to say nothing dis- 
 paraging of sister Martha. Her menu was 
 admirable, and no doubt she loved the Lord ; 
 no doubt they all loved the Lord, and there 
 might be a Scripture which says that " Jesus 
 was loved by Martha, and her sister and 
 Lazarus " : but it is one thing to love the
 
 Lord, and another thing to take all the oppor- 
 tunities to cultivate the relation of love with 
 Him. There is the good part, there is the 
 elect portion, there the inviolable right and 
 privilege and advantage, where settled peace is 
 found, and where all is enjoyed which the 
 world gives not nor takes away.
 
 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE AND OF THE 
 BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 
 
 T SUPPOSE that we are all of us agreed 
 that there is a sense in which the best com- 
 mentary upon the Bible is the Bible itself. We 
 do not mean by that to disparage in any way 
 those busy men who have sought to elucidate 
 from all quarters the obscurities of the text. If 
 they were consulted, they would maintain that 
 they always regarded as the leading principle in 
 their interpretations the duty of explaining the 
 Bible by the Bible. And any one can see the 
 reasonableness of this ; for if Paul agrees with 
 himself, then we may ask Paul to explain Paul ; 
 and if John agrees with John, then we take 
 
 79
 
 8o 
 
 John as our guide to the meaning of John. In 
 the same way, if there is, as we believe, a sub- 
 stantial underlying agreement, both in expe- 
 rience and in expression, between the body of our 
 teachers in the New Testament, then the fact of 
 this underlying agreement makes it necessary 
 that we should use one teacher to explain the 
 meaning and to throw light upon the experience 
 of another ; and going one step farther, if there 
 is a connection between the teaching of the 
 Old Testament and the teaching of the New, 
 which makes the latter to be the advance and 
 outcome of the former, it will be necessary to 
 read either one of the Testaments with the other 
 (if it does not sound too Irish to say so) open 
 at the same time. 
 
 And I think this must be what Wesley 
 and others meant when they said that they 
 had become men of one book : literally, of 
 course, this could not be true ; for in that 
 case Wesley ought not to have published his 
 " Notes on the New Testament" which made all 
 his preachers to be men of at least two books.
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 81 
 
 Moreover, the Bible itself is not a single book. 
 It is 39 + 27 books, or 66 books ; and some 
 of these are composite. Some people, for 
 instance, say there are two Isaiahs : it does 
 not affect our reasoning if there should be 
 67 books instead of 66 in the collection. So 
 that to talk of being a man of one book 
 only means that one has chosen to frequent 
 a single library to the exclusion of other 
 libraries. 
 
 But it is certain that the person who most 
 frequents the library in question will, if he is an 
 intelligent and thoughtful person, be the keenest 
 to seek help from all quarters for the purpose of 
 illustrating the volumes that he loves. So that 
 it is almost impossible for him to be a man of 
 one book. Now, suppose that such a person is 
 a preacher of the Word, one who enjoys the 
 privilege of access to the people in the matter of 
 religious teaching and of access to God in order 
 that he may himself be religiously taught. What 
 is the best kind of help that we can recommend 
 such an one in the matter of external apparatus 
 
 7
 
 82 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 for the knowledge of the Scripture ? We shall 
 all be agreed that the inward man must be 
 saturated with the sense of the Divine Presence ; 
 he ought to be a baptized soul, one that knows 
 how to come into harmony with God and how 
 to keep the harmony when he comes to the 
 blessed place where it is his definite and 
 personal experience. 
 
 But while we shall all be agreed that if the 
 first thing to be sought is that we may be 
 charged up to the point of saturation with the 
 influences of the Spirit of God, the second thing 
 is that we should understand how to saturate 
 the outward mind with a knowledge of the 
 Scripture. For a Bibleless preacher to 
 venture upon a Christian platform is as bad as 
 for a prayerless professor to frequent the 
 bedsides of the sick and the dying. The devil 
 laughs at such an one, and very often the people 
 laugh at him too. He may make the most 
 brilliant epigrams, tell the most engaging 
 stories, repeat the tit-bits from the most trust- 
 worthy newspapers (if there are any trustworthy
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 83 
 
 newspapers) ; but after a time the sparkle is out 
 of the epigrams, the stories have become stale, 
 and the newspapers are back numbers. On the 
 other hand, a biblical preacher gives his message 
 in language that is better than his own, and his 
 subject-matter does not wear out or grow old, 
 he is occupied with an everlasting gospel, and 
 the Spirit of the Lord honours his preaching 
 by attaching to it permanent results in the 
 conversion and sanctification of individual men 
 and women. The Bible-preacher does not go 
 out of date, because the Bible itself has not gone 
 out of date : on the contrary, he is more in 
 demand than ever, and the cry of the churches 
 that are eager for spiritual life must surely be 
 very much like the message that was sent after 
 my late friend Edward Millard, who some years 
 since visited the Mission churches in Armenia ; 
 " Send us," they said, " some more Bible- 
 preachers." A persecuted and suffering seed 
 of the kingdom knows what is best suited to its 
 conditions ; and what suits their condition is 
 likely to be also the proper cordial for ours.
 
 84 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 Now, in dealing with the question how to turn 
 our preachers into Bible-preachers, and how to 
 make them saturate with Scripture, I find practi- 
 cally two directions in which I have had a great 
 deal of help ; they are announced at the head of 
 this paper as the concordance and the text- 
 book two of our best practical helps, and two 
 of the most accessible. Neither of them is very 
 costly ; a Scripture text-book, like the one to 
 which I shall presently refer, the " Daily Light 
 on the Daily Path," can be had for a very small 
 sum ; a concordance is more costly, but it is 
 becoming common to bind up with the Bible a 
 concordance of the principal words, at least; and 
 although the matter is complicated by the fact 
 that there are two rival translations in the field, 
 you will find that a book like Dr. Wright's 
 " Bible Treasury " will give you the necessary 
 guidance to find where any word that you are 
 seeking occurs in either of the two translations. 
 So that the apparatus for concordance work is 
 not very costly : you can go into the business, at 
 least in English, with a very moderate capital.
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 85 
 
 Now let us think for a little while what use 
 we are going to make of our concordance when 
 we get it. In the first place, we propose to 
 search the Scriptures for the occurrence of any 
 given word or expression, in order that by com- 
 paring Scripture with Scripture we may find out 
 all that the Spirit-filled men have said on any 
 particular subject. In the second place, we 
 propose to search the Scriptures, not so much 
 for exact words as for parallel ideas, so as to 
 find out what is the spiritual unity that 
 underlies the language of the Spirit-filled men. 
 The study of the parallel words will lead us on, 
 almost insensibly, to the study of the ideas. Let 
 us take an instance. Suppose that you are 
 searching the Scripture in order to get at the 
 meaning of the very first promise in the New 
 Testament, viz., the words, " He shall save His 
 people from their sins." We take the word 
 " save " and study it in the light of the New 
 and Old Testaments. We find plenty of pass- 
 ages, because our God is a saving God, and His 
 message to men in all times is a message of
 
 86 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 salvation. We find every kind of distress, indi- 
 vidual and national, comprehended under the 
 doctrine that the Lord is with His people to 
 save them and to deliver them. We find that 
 the word has an application to time, as well as 
 to particular distress ; it can be said in the past 
 tense, so that some of the salvation is behind us, 
 as when Peter said that the Lord had sent 
 His angel and delivered him from the expecta- 
 tion of the Jews, or when Jude says that 
 " the Lord saved His people out of Egypt," r 
 or when Paul says u He delivered us from so 
 great a death." 2 
 
 But then it can also be said in the present 
 tense, as when we are told by Paul that Christ 
 " gave Himself for our sins, that He might 
 deliver us from this present evil world, according 
 to the will of our God and Father," 3 in which 
 case it is clear that the world is not thought of 
 as passing immediately away, but as a con- 
 
 1 Jude 5 
 
 2 2 Cor. i. IO 
 
 3 Gal. i. 4 (f
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 87 
 
 tinuous present world, in which the believer 
 experiences a continuous present salvation. 
 
 Then there is the further outlook, in which 
 the salvation is contemplated as future, accord- 
 ing to which we are told that " He is able to 
 save to the uttermost all that come unto God by 
 Him," r and the uttermost salvation has for one 
 of its interpretations the meaning that " He is 
 able to save us up to the goal" as my friend 
 Frank Crossley used to put it. 
 
 Taking the three tenses together, we have St. 
 Paul's statement, " who delivered us 2 from so 
 great a death and doth deliver : in whom we 
 trust that He will yet deliver us," in which, as 
 some one said, you have the past, present, and 
 future of the Christian's deliverance. 
 
 But suppose we look a little closer into 
 the passages which we have explored for under 
 the heads " save " and " deliver " in the New 
 Testament. We shall find that the scope of 
 the words is very wide. This becomes even 
 
 1 Heb. vii. 25 ((Toifctj/ <e TO 
 
 2 2 Cor. i. 10
 
 88 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 more striking if we were able to make the 
 examination with a Greek concordance, or if 
 the concordance were arranged so as to give the 
 marginal alternative translations as well as those 
 which are introduced into the text. For instance, 
 we should find Jesus saying to the ruler of the 
 synagogue whose daughter had just died, " Fear 
 not, only believe, and she will be saved" awOriatTai 
 (Luke viii. 50) ; and in the same way, when they 
 bring the sick people to touch the hem of our 
 Lord's garment, we are told that " as many as 
 touched Him were saved" io-w^ovro (Mark 
 vi. 56). So in Acts iv. 10 we should find Peter 
 asking the rulers whether they wanted to know 
 by what means the lame man had been saved 
 (o-arworcu) ; and we should conclude, from these 
 and a number of similar cases where the word is 
 used, that it had almost a medical force, and 
 carried with it the idea of restored conditions 
 and repaired functions. Certainly all of this is 
 involved in the great salvation. 
 
 But then, as I said, we not only want to 
 collect words and compare them, but we want to
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 89 
 
 detect the common ideas which are in the minds 
 of those who use the words, and to watch the 
 way in which the ideas become more and more 
 definite, and more and more spiritual and 
 comprehensive. 
 
 A recent writer l has said with regard to this 
 idea of salvation something very like what I 
 have been saying. He says that " in the 
 classical literature and in the public inscriptions 
 of Greece the words ' save ' and ' saviour ' 
 nearly always refer to material preservation and 
 safety. . . . Any one who consults a concord- 
 ance of the Bible can see how the meaning of 
 the word ' save ' changes and rises as one 
 passes from the Pentateuch and the historical 
 books of the Old Testament to the Psalms and 
 Isaiah. In the earlier stages of Israel's history 
 it has a predominantly worldly and temporal 
 meaning ; at a later time the salvation longed 
 for by the inspired writers is not merely worldly 
 but spiritual, involving a right relation to God 
 and a consequent state in one's self. 
 
 * Percy Gardner, " Exploratio Evangelica," p. 321.
 
 90 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 " Among Christians we find all three of the 
 renderings of the word * save ' in use the 
 lower, the middle and the higher meaning. 
 Some most earnestly desire safety from foes and 
 the mischances of life. Some most frequently 
 and most ardently desire the salvation of their 
 souls after death from the flames of hell and the 
 power of Satan. The more spiritual schools of 
 Christianity rather lay stress on the need of 
 salvation from one's own worse self and from 
 the terrible power of evil habit," &c. 
 
 It appears, then, that we are led by the mere 
 study of the concordance, without any other 
 commentary, to the conclusion that salvation is 
 a word which in the story of the Church is con- 
 stantly putting on newer and higher and more 
 wonderful meanings, both for the world that 
 now is and for that which is to come. And 
 what is true of the Church is also true of the 
 individual soul, which recapitulates in itself the 
 history of the tribe. 
 
 Now, I have selected this instance because 
 it bears on the question of preaching. A man
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 91 
 
 who is called to preach must have one corner 
 of his mind given up to the parallels by which 
 Scripture elucidates itself ; he must find out 
 where a given word is used, and what colour 
 the word takes at particular times and amongst 
 particular peoples. He does not, of course, go 
 into his pulpit with a Bible under one arm 
 and a concordance under . another; but his 
 renewed nature has in it both Bible and con- 
 cordance, and it is a part of the work of the 
 Good Remembrancer, the Blessed Spirit, to turn 
 the pages of the concordance or Scripture so 
 as to bring to light the meaning, and to rein- 
 force what is said by the method of two or 
 three witnesses in whose mouth every word 
 may be established. Sermons preached in the 
 power of the Spirit are often very rich in the 
 parallels drawn from different parts of the 
 Scriptures ; and conversely, when one gets 
 into the habit of noting the parallels, the 
 material is often at hand for enforcing truth 
 in the power of the Spirit of God. 
 
 For instance, here is a little chain of texts
 
 92 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 which I saw hanging on my wall recently in one 
 of the religious almanacs, which chain seems to 
 me to furnish a good ground for a straight talk 
 to Christians ; there were three texts, arranged 
 for three following days, but evidently parts 
 of one idea, and arrived at by the concord- 
 ance : 
 
 1. "Ye did not receive the spirit of bondage 
 . . . but ye did receive the spirit of sonship " 
 (Rom. viii. 15). 
 
 2. " We have not received the spirit of the 
 world, but the Spirit of God " (i Cor. ii. 12). 
 
 3. " God hath not given us the spirit of fear, 
 but of power and love and a sound mind" 
 (2 Tim. i. 7). 
 
 Here is a beautiful chain of experimental 
 verses, all cast in the same mould, all built upon 
 the same pattern, with the negative first and 
 the positive second ; on one side bondage, 
 worldliness, and fear ; on the other sonship, 
 spiritual gifts, power, love, and sanctified 
 common-sense. Try and work it out in 
 detail.
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 93 
 
 Often a very little and unimportant word 
 may furnish the clue to some of the mysteries 
 of the kingdom of God. An illustration of 
 this came to me once in my own experience. 
 The Lord gave me, just before I was going 
 to my regular meeting with my friends, a little 
 meditation on one of the prepositions in the 
 New Testament, a word so small that only the 
 most extended concordances would have regis- 
 tered it, but not so small that it could not 
 furnish an adequate text whereby the Spirit 
 might minister to the saints. It was the little 
 word with. As far as I can recall the subject, 
 it came out in the following way : 
 
 The prepositions in the New Testament are 
 of the nature of theological professors ; they 
 are scribes of the kingdom of heaven ; they 
 have the key of the Divine knowledge. Illus- 
 trate from the verse " Of Him, and through 
 Him and to Him are all things." Or take 
 a single word or expression, like the phrase 
 " in Christ." How mystical ! How deep 
 in the abysses of God ! In Christ, then
 
 94 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 a new creation " I in them and they in 
 Me!" 
 
 Now observe that in the New Testament 
 the word " with " is an experimental word, 
 it is a summary of experimental theology. 
 And we note that 
 
 (<z) It is the charter of incorporation of the 
 new order, and holds the key of the Church 
 door. Christ's first disciples signed no creed, 
 embraced no confession, but " He chose twelve 
 that they might be with Him and that He 
 might send them forth to preach." And in 
 another Gospel we are told that " they went 
 into an house." Thus the door into the king- 
 dom was an house door perhaps our Lord's 
 " own hired house," perhaps a house some one 
 lent Him. In the latter case the owner said, 
 " You can come and bring your friends that they 
 may be with you " ; in the former He Himself 
 said, " You can come in and be My friends and 
 be with Me" and the key-word " with " 
 implies converse and retirement : hence we find 
 it said, " When they were alone, privately, they
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT- BOOK 95 
 
 asked Him," or " When they were come into 
 the house, He asked them." 
 
 () This preposition " with " is the word 
 which gives historical value to the testimony 
 which the witnesses bear concerning him. They 
 could say, " We were with Him." Like the 
 earlier companions of St. Francis, they could 
 say, " Nos qui cum eo futmus" " We who were 
 with Him." And it is recognised by others 
 to whom their testimony comes that the value 
 of the testimony turns on this single word, " and 
 they took knowledge of them that they had 
 been with Jesus." 
 
 (r ) This preposition can lecture on the con- 
 tinuity of the Church and upon the apostolic 
 succession. Professor With's lectures on the 
 Church are the only ones worth listening to. 
 For imagine that if there was no reinforce- 
 ment of historical truth by direct communion, 
 we should be getting farther and farther from 
 Christ as the days go by, and our testimony 
 would be a continually extended and a con- 
 tinually weakened chain. The only succession
 
 Q6 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 worth talking about is of those who have "seen 
 a man in the clouds and heard Him talk with 
 them." 
 
 (</) This preposition can discourse to us not 
 merely out of the past and concerning the 
 present, but it gives special lectures on the life 
 to come. Some one says " to be with Christ 
 which is far better." He was not a man who 
 had climbed the outward mountain of trans- 
 figuration along with those who saw the glory. 
 His feet had never trodden the dusty highway 
 along with those who first heard the command 
 to " leave all, and follow Me." Yet he does 
 not talk in a lower spiritual strain than the very 
 chief of the apostles. It is not merely that he 
 is "in Christ," or "after Christ," but " with 
 Christ," that is his theme, and when he gets 
 on that theme, he is as affectionate as St. 
 John. He defines the life to come by one 
 single preposition, " We shall be ever with 
 the Lord." 
 
 (?) And from this we learn finally what 
 shape a true Christian hope takes. It is a
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 97 
 
 renewal of a companionship, known in the days 
 of His flesh, or in the period of ours, which 
 renewal is the ultimate definition of heaven. 
 For we say with Baxter : 
 
 " My knowledge of that life is small, 
 
 The eye of faith is dim ; 
 But 'tis enough that Christ knows all, 
 And I shall be with Him." 
 
 You see, even a little preposition of four letters 
 can talk great truths to us, and, incidentally, 
 you see how Quaker sermons are made. 
 
 Now let us pass on from the question of the 
 use of the concordance to the spiritual men ; and 
 let me draw your attention to that other great 
 help, both for Christian living and Christian 
 preaching a Bible text-book. And by this 
 I do not mean a book like the birthday text- 
 book, arranged with a single text for every day 
 in the year, though such a little manual is useful 
 enough, especially for intercessional purposes. I 
 mean something more extended ; such a book 
 as " Daily Light on the Daily Path " is the
 
 98 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 best that is known to me. It was of incalculable 
 comfort to my wife and myself when we were 
 travelling in Armenia, where over and over 
 again the promises for the day seemed to have 
 been especially designed for the very needs and 
 difficulties in which we found ourselves. " It is 
 a precious little book " we often said one to 
 another. 
 
 However, I am not concerned so much with 
 the use of such a little book in individual 
 guidance as with its value in suggesting subjects 
 for orderly spiritual meditation. I happen to 
 know that a great deal of prayer went to the 
 making of this little book, and any one who 
 uses it will come to see that it is a handbook of 
 experimental theology. The best way to see 
 this is to take a specimen page or two and 
 verify whether such a page is not really the sub- 
 structure of a real spiritual discourse. How 
 will the following bear examination ? 
 " October loth. 
 
 " The whole family in heaven and earth. 
 
 " One God and Father of all, who is above all,
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 99 
 
 and through all, and in you all. Ye are all the 
 children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. That 
 in the dispensation of the fulness of times, He 
 might gather together in one all things in 
 Christ, both which are in heaven and which are 
 in earth, even in Him. 
 
 " He is not ashamed to call them brethren. 
 Behold My mother and My brethren. Whoso- 
 ever shall do the will of My Father which is 
 in Heaven, the same is My brother and sister 
 and mother. Go to My brethren, and say 
 unto them, I ascend to My Father and your 
 Father. 
 
 " I saw under the altar the souls of them that 
 were slain for the Word of God, and for the 
 testimony that they held : . . . and white 
 robes were given unto every one of them ; and 
 it was said unto them that they should rest for 
 a little season, until their fellow-servants also 
 and their brethren, that should be killed as 
 they were, should be fulfilled. That they 
 without us should not be made perfect." 
 
 I think we must allow that this little chain of
 
 ioo THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 passages brings before us, in a series of rapid 
 glances and instantaneous photographs, the 
 whole structure of the Church of God, its inner 
 relations, its tribulation, its militancy, and its 
 final triumph, in such a way as to contain prac- 
 tically all that Evangelical theology has to say 
 on the subject. 
 
 Here is another one of a more individual and 
 experimental character, evidently composed 
 with a view to the comfort of those who 
 are in the borderland between this life and 
 the next : 
 
 "November I4th. 
 
 " How wilt thou do in the swellings of 
 Jordan ? 
 
 " For Jordan overfloweth all his banks all 
 the time of harvest. 
 
 " The priests that bare the ark of the cove- 
 nant of the Lord stood firm on dry ground in 
 the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites passed 
 over on dry ground, until all the people were 
 passed clean over Jordan. 
 
 " We see Jesus, who was made a little lower
 
 AND OF THE BIBLE TEXT-BOOK 101 
 
 than the angels, for the suffering of death, 
 crowned with glory and honour ; that He by 
 the grace of God should taste death for every 
 man. 
 
 " Though I walk through the valley of the 
 shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou 
 art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they com- 
 fort me. When thou passest through the 
 waters, I will be with thee, and through the 
 rivers they shall not overflow thee. 
 
 " Fear not ; I am the first and the last ; 
 I am He that liveth, and was dead : and 
 behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen : and 
 have the keys of hell and of death." 
 
 What a lovely little liturgy for the visitation 
 of the sick and of the dying ! How full of 
 the comfort by means of which we may com- 
 fort those that are in trouble and may be 
 ourselves comforted of God. 
 
 The text-book, when constructed on the 
 lines of " Daily Light," really takes precedence 
 of the concordance as an aid to spiritual medi-
 
 102 THE USE OF THE CONCORDANCE 
 
 tation. But as you have probably noticed, it 
 has the concordance behind it at every point ; 
 where it differs from a concordance is that 
 it does not proceed so much from verbal co- 
 incidence as from the coincidence and the 
 growth of spiritual ideas ; and it is these 
 spiritual ideas that we want to bring home, 
 as far as possible in biblical language, to 
 our hearers, when we have the opportunity 
 and the privilege of speaking in the name of 
 our Lord.
 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE 
 LAND
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE LORDS SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 
 
 T^HE psalm which we are going to study is 
 one of the most familiar to us. Every- 
 one knows the I37th Psalm and its refrain, 
 " How shall we sing the Lord's song in a 
 strange land ? " In one of its earliest English 
 paraphrases it was known to Shakespeare, and 
 began something as follows : 
 
 " When as we sat in Babylon, 
 
 The rivers round about, 
 And in remembrance of Zion, 
 The tears of grief burst out, 
 We hanged our harps and instruments 
 
 The willow-trees upon, 
 For in that place men for their use 
 Had planted many a one." 
 105
 
 106 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 
 
 So that perhaps it was a favourite psalm with 
 our Elizabethan ancestors. Of course we do 
 not sing it all now. The closing verses are of 
 an imprecatory character, and we have to say of 
 them what Marjorie Fleming said of the 
 murder of Haman's family, that " then Jesus 
 was not come to teach us to be merciful " ; but 
 apart from these closing verses, it is a very 
 simple and beautiful psalm. It does not require 
 very much criticism in order to elucidate it, for 
 if the subject of the psalm is the Exile of 
 Israel, we can only assume that it was written 
 during the Exile or after the return. I cannot 
 see that any other critical question can arise as 
 to its date. It would be quite absurd especi- 
 ally in view of the fact that the psalter itself is 
 a gradual accretion, and this psalm is near the 
 end of the collection to imagine that any one 
 uttered these lamentations prophetically. 
 
 Just in the same way as we are obliged to 
 refer to the time of the Exile the passage in 
 Isaiah which says that " Our holy and beauti- 
 ful house where our fathers served Thee is
 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 107 
 
 burned up, and all our pleasant things are laid 
 waste," so we are obliged to say that the I37th 
 Psalm is either contemporary history or retro- 
 spective history, and the only critical question 
 relates to the choice between these two alter- 
 natives. 
 
 For myself, I am quite satisfied that the 
 psalm is a post-exilic product, and that in it 
 the experiences of the exile are viewed from the 
 standpoint of the return. If any one should 
 feel uncomfortable at the thought that the Book 
 of Psalms, or at least part of it, should be des- 
 cribed as a post-exilic product, such an one may, 
 perhaps, find consolation in the fact that if the 
 psalm itself is post-exilic, it is in evidence for a 
 pre-exilic psalter ; for does it not say, " for there 
 those that wasted us required of us mirth . . . 
 and said, Sing us one of the songs of Zion," so 
 the songs were well known, not only at home 
 but abroad, and had come down out of the past. 
 
 Now let us try to realise the situation for 
 ourselves. The daughter of Zion is asked to 
 sing by the daughter of Babel, and she says,
 
 io8 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 
 
 " I cannot sing. Do you not see that I am in 
 mourning ? How should I sing ? " The situa- 
 tion is something like this. Let us imagine 
 ourselves to be at an evening party ; in the 
 course of the evening some one suggests music. 
 " There is Mrs. S., she is a beautiful singer, let 
 us ask her to sing." But the suggestion is 
 immediately checked by the observation : " On 
 no account ; do you not see she is in mourning ? 
 She has lost her husband ; she cannot sing ! " 
 Or the suggestion is made : " There is Mrs. X., 
 she has a beautiful contralto voice ; I will ask 
 her to sing the most pathetic of all the Scotch 
 ballads, whether for words or music ' Will 
 Ye No' Come Back Again ? '" And again the 
 suggestion is checked : " Do you not know 
 that her husband has deserted her ? She 
 cannot sing ! " 
 
 This, then, is the situation of the daughter of 
 Zion a deserted wife, a refused and forsaken 
 woman, grieved in spirit. And we can appre- 
 ciate to some extent the depth of her conscious- 
 ness of desertion by observing how frequently
 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 109 
 
 the prophets labour to remove that spirit from 
 the minds of God's people, and to assure them 
 that they shall no more be termed ** forsaken," 
 and that, " though they may forget, yet will I 
 remember thee." But even after the return 
 from the Exile Babel was remembered as a place 
 of mourning and desertion, when it seemed as 
 if JAHVEH had forgotten Israel. It was the 
 place of the silent harp and of the suppressed 
 song. Those that carried them away captive 
 had wasted them and required of them mirth, 
 but they had devastated not merely the land, 
 but the music. 
 
 (i) And now to proceed to an orderly dis- 
 cussion of the subject before us. We see in the 
 first place that there are some circumstances in 
 which the song of praise seems to be out of 
 place. For an ideal illustration of such circum- 
 stances we might take the case of Moore's 
 " Minstrel Boy " who went to the wars with 
 his wild harp flung behind him, but on return- 
 ing tore its strings asunder because its songs 
 had been made for the brave and free, and the
 
 no THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 
 
 singing of them in slavery was not to be 
 thought of. Or we might take an actual 
 instance from my own experience. 
 
 I remember well how on our first relief 
 journey in Asia Minor, after the great massa- 
 cres, we came to the city of Malatiya, the 
 ancient Melitene. The city was in great dis- 
 tress. In one ward only a single Christian 
 man was left alive. The Protestant Church 
 was a heap of crumbling ruins, and everywhere 
 one saw the remains of the wild orgy of passion 
 and violence which had swept over the com- 
 munity. We took an amateur census of the 
 orphans who were starving in the streets of the 
 city, and found over 1,500 in number. Now, 
 obviously in this situation one not only had to 
 relieve, where possible, the outward necessities 
 of starving people, but one had to minister to 
 their spirits, so I arranged for a Sunday meet- 
 ing in a certain garden, and at the time 
 appointed the wretched people crowded into 
 the place. It was difficult to know how to 
 begin a Christian meeting in the face of such
 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND in 
 
 misery. I suggested that they should sing one 
 of their hymns, but they sent up word to me that 
 since the massacres they hadn't sung anything, 
 and that they could not sing. I said to one of 
 the American missionary ladies by my side, 
 " Begin and sing something and see if they will 
 join in." She did so, and after a while first 
 one and then another quavering voice took up 
 the ancient music. The spell was broken and 
 we had a powerful meeting, but at all events it 
 was true that there were circumstances in which 
 the song of praise seemed to be out of place, if 
 not impossible. 
 
 (2) In those very circumstances, however, the 
 evidential power of the song is evidently the 
 greatest. Here, again, we turn to our classical 
 illustration of song, where all seems to forbid 
 song. ' I mean the case of Paul and Silas in the 
 prison of Philippi, where the stocks and the inner 
 prison at the midnight, following upon the 
 scourgings and public shame, might have fur- 
 nished a climax of protest against the possibility 
 of the heavenly music ; but it was precisely in
 
 H2 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 
 
 those circumstances that the evidential power of 
 the song was felt when the prisoners heard them, 
 and we may say that the songs which Paul and 
 Silas sang were the very gospel for the situa- 
 tion, and perhaps the only gospel possible under 
 the circumstances. 
 
 (3) It seems, then, that the very gospel for 
 Babel consisted in that song which Babel un- 
 thinkingly called for and which Zion unhappily 
 could not sing. Let us suppose that ijn response 
 to the appeal the song had actually been sung. 
 Let it be one of the ancient psalms of the pre- 
 exilic Psalter say the 23rd Psalm, with its 
 sacred shadows, and its spread table, and its 
 joy-anointed locks. What would have been 
 the effect upon the listeners to hear it said 
 " Thou preparest a table before me in the 
 presence of mine enemies, and Thou anointest 
 mine head with oil, and my cup runneth over"? 
 Certainly such a song as that must have had an 
 evidential value even the enemies themselves 
 being judges. Or let us suppose that instead 
 of the ancient Psalter our modern Book of
 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 113 
 
 Praise had been accessible, what should we have 
 sung in response to such an appeal, which would 
 have at once set our own hearts at liberty, and 
 produced conviction in the minds of the 
 oppressors ? Would this kind of psalm serve ? 
 
 "Begone, unbelief, 
 
 My Saviour is near, 
 And for my relief 
 Will surely appear," 
 
 and especially that verse which, by the way, I 
 see some of the hymn-books enclose in brackets 
 as being less suitable for singing or too extended 
 an expression of the spirit (though it is the most 
 powerful experimental verse in the hymn) : 
 
 " His love in times past 
 
 Forbids me to think 
 He'll leave me at last 
 
 In trouble to sink ; 
 Each sweet Ebenezer 
 
 I have in review 
 Confirms His good pleasure 
 
 To help me quite through." 
 
 Such .* psalm as that may be doggerel on the
 
 H4 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 
 
 literary side, but it is doggerel which the be- 
 lieving heart cannot do without. A more 
 polished song would never mean the same to 
 us i.e., to those of us who have sung it in the 
 midst of affliction or in the face of death ; and 
 certainly if the song had been sung in Babel, 
 they would have proved what Babel half sus- 
 pected that Babel's songs could not compare 
 with the songs of Zion ; thus the appeal to song, 
 especially in unsongful situations, is an appeal 
 to discriminate between the God who is and 
 those who are called gods and are not. The 
 God that answereth by song, let Him be the 
 God. 
 
 (4) We have already seen that such music 
 as convinces souls is the product of dark 
 places and of desolate times, at all events is 
 most full of meaning in such places and at 
 such times. We must be prepared to sing in 
 the shade. We must expect, and expect joy- 
 fully, that " in the night also His song shall be 
 with me, and my prayer shall be to the God of 
 my life," for we shall never be God's night-
 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 115 
 
 ingales if we only sing by day. Madame 
 Guyon is a good illustration of this ; she not 
 only could sing in retirement, as in this 
 verse 
 
 " The calm retreat, the silent shade, 
 
 With prayer and praise agree, 
 And seem by Thy sweet bounty made 
 For such as follow Thee ; 
 
 ***** 
 
 There, like the nightingale, she pours 
 
 Her solitary lays, 
 Nor asks a witness of her song, 
 
 Nor thirsts for human praise " ; 
 
 but she belongs to the singing fraternity of 
 whom Paul and Silas are the patron saints, 
 for many of her most beautiful spiritual songs 
 were actually composed either in the Bastille 
 or in the Castle of Vincennes ; and speaking 
 of her own experiences at such times, she 
 says : "I regarded myself as a little bird 
 which you were keeping in a cage for your 
 pleasure, who must sing to fulfil her condition 
 in life. The stones of my prison seemed like
 
 ii6 TtiE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 
 
 rubies ; that is to say, I esteemed them more 
 than earthly magnificence." The actual hymn 
 which she refers to is known to many of 
 us ; it begins like this 
 
 "A little bird am I 
 
 Shut from the fields of air, 
 And in my cage I sit and sing 
 
 To Him who placed me there, 
 Well pleased a prisoner to be, 
 Because, my God, it pleaseth Thee." 
 
 That is real Paul and Silas music. 
 
 (5) Now, if such conviction lurk in sacred 
 song, it is a serious thing when either individuals 
 or communities lose the power of praising God ; 
 for instance, it is one of the sad signs of the 
 times that none of the Evangelical Churches is 
 producing hymns. Once they were all in song, 
 and the value of their music to the Church at 
 large is inestimable. Dr. Watts, for instance, 
 whatever fault we may find with the crudeness 
 of some of his beliefs, at least to the modern 
 mind, was a master of song, and left us many a
 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 117 
 
 permanent expression of the praise of God ; and 
 the time would fail me to tell of Wesley and 
 Robert Robinson, and Williams the Welshman, 
 who, as they say, " had the song," and Bernard 
 Barton the Quaker (for even Quakers sing 
 sometimes). Their music flowed over from 
 their own borders into the nearer or more 
 remote churches, as in the case of Sarah F. 
 Adams, " Nearer to Thee," and J. H. Newman, 
 "Lead, Kindly Light." 
 
 When the great revival comes again upon the 
 Churches, it will be either the cause or the 
 effect of sacred song, and perhaps both. Already 
 our hymn-books are in evidence that there is 
 such a thing as interdenominational religion 
 however much it may please some people to talk 
 of the Bible as if it were a Nonconformist book ! 
 
 (6) Now let us resolve, as a result of our 
 study, to sing by Babel's stream and in Babel's 
 streets. Let us raise the songs of the Flowery 
 Land in the Black Country. 
 
 Mrs. Browning has given us a beautiful 
 illustration of this in a poem which she calls
 
 n8 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 
 
 " My Doves," which she heads with a quotation 
 from Goethe to the following effect : " Divine 
 Wisdom ! Thy speech is dove-like." I The 
 poem is a parable drawn from two little doves 
 which she possessed, which had been brought 
 from the sunshine of India to the Cimmerian 
 gloom of London. 
 
 " My little doves have left a nest 
 Upon an Indian tree, 
 Whose leaves fantastic take their rest 
 And motion from the sea : 
 For ever there the sea-winds go 
 With sunlit paces to and fro. 
 ***** 
 
 And God them taught, at every close 
 Of murmuring waves beyond 
 And green leaves round, to interpose 
 Their choral voices fond, 
 Interpreting that love must be 
 The meaning of the earth and sea. 
 ***** 
 
 'Tis hard to sing by Babel's stream, 
 More hard by Babel street ; 
 
 1 O Weisheit ! du red'st wie eine Taube
 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 119 
 
 But if the soulless creatures deem 
 Their music not unmeet 
 For sunless walls, let us begin 
 Who wear immortal wings within." 
 
 (7) It may be inferred from what has been 
 said that we, upon whom the obligation of song 
 rests, are either in exile or on pilgrimage. 
 Sometimes we seem to be the one, sometimes 
 the other. Sometimes we seem to be God's 
 banished ones, and far from our heavenly home. 
 At other times a sense of pilgrimage is with us, 
 and then we desire a fatherland, and declare 
 plainly that we are seeking it. Then the cockle 
 hat and shoon become our most sacred emblems. 
 
 I think it will be found that the best songs of 
 the Church are pilgrim songs, and so are some 
 of the worst ; by the worst I mean those that 
 have an unnatural worldliness which is not the 
 true character of God's children. It is one 
 thing to say that " There is a land of pure 
 delight," and quite another thing to sing 
 U O Paradise, O Paradise!" 
 
 (8) But if we are in exile or on pilgrimage,
 
 120 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 
 
 then our life is characterised by constant and 
 unexpected changes ; they are not all of them 
 what Ruskin would call " enchanted changes." 
 Some of them are very difficult and very 
 menacing, and we need a few rules for the 
 change of state which the pilgrim's condition is 
 constantly subject to. One rule relates to our 
 outward gear. We must rid ourselves of sack- 
 cloth as being at once a superfluity and an 
 incumbrance, an ugliness and a discomfort. 
 There is no room for sackcloth in the experience 
 of a true pilgrim. It is not a New Testament 
 product ; it is not a fabric of the kingdom of 
 heaven ! Black is an un-Christian colour. We 
 ought not to put it even at the bottom of our 
 box when we travel ; let us keep to the rule, 
 " The Lord shall be thy everlasting light, and 
 the days of thy mourning shall be ended." In 
 our present state of tarriance we may expect the 
 fulfilment of the promise that sorrow and 
 sighing shall flee away. This means that in 
 every change of state we put the bridal dress on 
 the top of [the trunk, and the sackcloth no-
 
 THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND 121 
 
 where ; but we may put the harp on the top of 
 everything else, and let it be the first thing that 
 we take out when we reach the next stage of 
 our journey ; thus we shall open every new ex- 
 perience by putting on the garment of praise 
 afresh, and by singing the songs of Zion anew. 
 Then we shall find that 
 
 " Through every changing scene of life, 
 
 In trouble or in joy, 
 
 The praises of my God shall still 
 
 My heart and tongue employ"; 
 
 and be able to say with the psalmist that 
 " Thou hast taken from me my sackcloth and 
 girded me with gladness, to the end that my 
 glory may sing praise unto Thee and not be 
 silent : O my God ! I will give thanks unto 
 Thee for ever."
 
 THE TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED 
 TO RELIGION
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 \V7E are most of us familiar with the imagina- 
 * * tive works of Mr. H. G. Wells, and in 
 particular with that invention of his which he 
 calls the " time machine," by means of which an 
 observer at any given time and in any given 
 place is enabled to project himself into any 
 other time, riding meteorically across the cen- 
 turies as easily and as rapidly as a good motor- 
 car down a secluded road where there is no 
 policeman. And it is obvious that Mr. Wells's 
 supposed invention would be of the highest 
 value if it had two qualifications. The first is, 
 that the machine should be fitted with a 
 reversing gear ; for of what use to us is the 
 knowledge of the future without its counter- 
 
 125
 
 126 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 poise in the dark backward and abysm of time ? 
 And the second qualification is, that the 
 machine should be capable of an application 
 to ecclesiastical history, as being the most 
 interesting side of human history, and the most 
 perplexing. No doubt it will be at once urged 
 that as the greater includes the less, the pro- 
 blems of Church history are included in 
 universal history, and that the former is only 
 a phase, and conceivingly a passing phase, of the 
 other. The one is a broken arc, with a starting- 
 point, and perhaps a destination, the other may 
 be an unlimited line extended both fore and after. 
 It would be, for instance, difficult to refute a 
 man who stated the proposition that there was 
 a time when the Church did not exist, and 
 there will be a time when it will cease to be. 
 Such a case was very nearly stated by the late 
 Dean Stanley, only with the word " clergy " 
 substituted for " Church." The analogy of 
 the statements shows how dangerous, at all 
 events, it is to identify the Church with the 
 clergy rather than with humanity (including
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 127 
 
 the case where ministers are supposed to 
 be the equivalent, in the world of thought, 
 of their congregations). But the problem is 
 really not so simple as Dean Stanley made 
 it. For the question of the Church and 
 its pre-existence or post-existence cannot be 
 raised without the question of the Christ, and 
 the early Fathers were well aware of the con- 
 nection between the two. Long before the 
 Council of Nicaea had elaborated the formula 
 which forbids a Christian man to say of Christ 
 that " there was, when He was not," and before 
 the clerical powers, who habitually sit in Moses's 
 seat, had, to use Theodore Parker's phrase, 
 climbed up also into the seat of the Messiah, 
 we find early Christian Fathers protesting that 
 the true Church is spiritual and existed before 
 the sun and the moon, using the very expressions 
 which later theological minds accepted as the 
 definition of the Christ. The audacity of 
 these flights is well known to every patristic 
 student. I only allude to them here with the 
 view of making the statement that if any one
 
 128 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 supposes that, by means of a Wells motor 
 adapted to the study of human history and 
 capable of motion in either direction, he will 
 soon come to the end of what is called the 
 Church, he will have to pass on the road a 
 number of objections made by Fathers of the 
 second century, such as Hermas and the so- 
 called Second Clement, who will assure him, as 
 he passes, that his tyres will be worn out and his 
 petrol exhausted before he reaches his destination. 
 
 Mystically, then, and according to early 
 patristic teaching, the Church is one of the 
 eternal ideas, and exists in a Pattern in the 
 Mount. But we will not venture farther on this 
 line of Platonic thought at present. It is a 
 safeguard against the belief that the Church 
 represents our united capacity for the main- 
 tenance of fictions. If we do not care to 
 follow Plato so far up stream as into the 
 Land of Eternal Ideas, we may content our- 
 selves by saying that there was an Ecclesia 
 in the wilderness. 
 
 Let it be granted, as Euclid says, that a
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 129 
 
 time machine exists, and that it is capable 
 of indefinite motion in either direction, and 
 let it be applied to the study of human history 
 on the side of religion. The first thing that 
 you would notice in such a case would be the 
 following : that, if you took an ecclesiastic 
 on board, he would instinctively feel after the 
 reversing gear. It is a clerical habit : but 
 they do it, as St. Paul says of certain preachers 
 in his own day, not sincerely but with the hope 
 of "adding afflictions to my bonds." The chief 
 use they make of the threads of continuity is to 
 twist them into ropes for flagellating the backs 
 of those who do not equate Nicasa with Jeru- 
 salem nor think that Chalcedon is a harmless 
 variant for Galilee. And the one thing they 
 forget is that, when the reversing gear is once 
 applied the machine itself is capable of going on 
 in the direction in which it was started, and that 
 it will run back, past priesthoods and behind 
 sacraments and organisations, and fulfil for 
 St. Peter, in a new sense, the promise that 
 " another shall carry thee whither thou wouldest 
 
 10
 
 130 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 not." What we describe pictorial! y is what is 
 actually going on in the region of historical 
 criticism and in the domain of anthropology. 
 But it is not every one who wants to ride back- 
 ward. Do you ever read the British Weekly ? 
 do you systematically delve in its pages ? I do not 
 mean in those pleasing ethical problems to the 
 right solution of which prizes are attached, nor 
 to those pictorial studies of contorted human 
 frames which provoked a grateful writer recently 
 to write to one of the leading journals and 
 thank the editor for his interesting articles on 
 incurable diseases ; I am not referring even to 
 its politics, breezy and honest as they are and 
 sometimes right ; the gold-mine of the British 
 Weekly is on the first page ; the precious metal 
 of the old Gospel protrudes through the scoriae 
 of the advertisements of modern books about 
 the Gospel. And it will probably be right for 
 all of us to thank God for that, in our time, as 
 probably never before, literary excellence has 
 been joined with spiritual insight and with 
 evangelical fervour in prologues addressed
 
 to the people. And I remember a remark- 
 able article which appeared not long since on 
 " The Future of the Church," in which Dr. 
 Nicoll took a motor ride down the ages to 
 come, and made one feel that if he had lived 
 in the second century he would have written 
 an Apocalypse of the first order an Apoca- 
 lypse, too, that would contain a rich and rare 
 deposit of jewels from contemporary writers. 1 
 do not think Dr. Nicoll cares much for very early 
 history ; apocalypse is much more his metier. 
 
 Now, I am no apocalyptist : my business is 
 to explore apocalypses, and, if need be, to 
 explode them, to delve beneath them into 
 the historical situations which produced them 
 and the like. Most of my work is, in this 
 regard, a backward motion, though I am not 
 an ecclesiastic and run no risk now of ever 
 becoming one ; but there is also an inward 
 motion, over and above these backward and 
 forward strainings, which is beyond the region 
 of history and criticism, where the problem of 
 life, considered as communion with God, is
 
 132 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 opened, expressed in terms of its own and in 
 treaties of peace which no man knows except 
 those who set their hands to them. These 
 are the things that interest me, and which I 
 know also to interest those who are engaged in 
 the spiritual service of man. There is, then, 
 the forward outlook or prospect, the backward 
 or retrospect, and there is the inward or intro- 
 spect, but the greatest of these is the introspect. 
 Suppose we really were able to get back to 
 the original Christ, to the first Gospel, and to 
 the primitive Church, should we be glad of the 
 motion ? Should we rejoice in the change of 
 view ? What is it that we should find in 
 primitive Christianity? Is it the thing that 
 we desire to find ? In any case, what advan- 
 tage hath the primitive Christian ? For it is 
 certain that he had many disadvantages. When 
 St. Paul looked backward and asked a similar 
 question, his reply to the inquiry " What 
 advantage hath the Jew?" was that he was 
 the warden of the Divine oracles. There were 
 other advantages, but this was the chief. That
 
 was before they had broken up the oracles, and 
 labelled them with letters of the alphabet. I 
 wonder what St. Paul thinks of it now. And 
 I wonder still more what he would, from our 
 point of view, say when the question is asked, 
 " What advantage then hath the primitive 
 Christian ? " Come, brother Paul, jump into 
 your motor and set the index for 1908 A.D. 
 and tell us if this is the right answer. The 
 advantage of the primitive Christian is much 
 every way, but chiefly because he is the witness 
 to the joys of the kingdom of God, and because 
 he has gladness and singleness of heart. Is it 
 true that these are the features of the Christ 
 and of His Gospel and of His Church ? that 
 he had them, that the Gospel proclaimed them, 
 and that the Church inherited them ? If that 
 is the case, and it should chance that we have 
 lost either simplicity or sincerity, if our locks 
 are dry of the holy anointing of gladness, it is 
 time some reversing or proversing or inversing 
 gear was set in motion for us or by us. 
 
 When we talk of going backward, we have
 
 134 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 to remind ourselves that we are engaged in 
 historical and critical study, and cannot evade 
 that kind of investigation. In actual experience 
 we go forward, and of necessity : all our efforts 
 to think and act as the first century Christians 
 thought and acted have a fault of impractica- 
 bility. We cannot unthink, when the race is 
 thinking, except to a very minute extent. One 
 sees this on every side. For example, it used to 
 be said of certain regions of the study of man 
 that there was a notice-board put up to warn 
 trespassers, inscribed with the words 
 
 "No Road this Way." MOSES. 
 
 I went by the place recently and the old 
 board had been taken down, and replaced by 
 
 " Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum" DARWIN. 
 
 It was the man that had taken most steps 
 backward intellectually, in the sense of retro- 
 spective research, who prohibited to-day our 
 return to the beliefs that we were brought 
 up on ! Hence, when we try to reproduce 
 previous strata of thought and life, we are,
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 135 
 
 for the most part, doomed to miserable failure. 
 To go back for the sake of going back is 
 pure superstition, impracticable superstition, 
 and there are things that no one would go 
 back for, if he could ; who is there here to-day 
 who hungers and thirsts for the restoration of 
 the baptism of the dead ? And who is there 
 that does not hunger after the baptism with the 
 Spirit ? What shall it profit a man if he gain 
 the whole of the obsolete and lose his own soul ? 
 But even a question like this requires that we 
 should define the obsolete, and all is not obsolete 
 that seems so. So we get into our car again 
 and ascend the course of time in search of the 
 non-obsolete. The moment we talk of such an 
 expedition, we are joined by the critic and the 
 archaeologist. They, too, are going up-stream. 
 "You can come in our boat," they say, "and 
 help to pull it." Meanwhile the inward monitor 
 whispers its warning to us. What advantage 
 hath the critic or the archaeologist ? Does he 
 recover oracles to us, or is he acquainted with 
 joys ? The answer, at first, is hesitating and
 
 136 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 uncertain. He does not make us superlatively 
 happy, and if sometimes he dances, it is more 
 often over the dead bodies of his antagonists 
 than the Davidic measure before the Ark. He 
 disappoints us more often than he delights us. 
 Sometimes, indeed, he seems to offer us more 
 gospels. But, on the other hand, remember that 
 your critic offers you less gospel when he is 
 assiduously talking of more gospels. It is not 
 easy to see the advantage of his judgment and 
 dissections to the plain man or to the old- 
 fashioned Sunday School. We remember that 
 noble passage in Erasmus's Preface to his Greek 
 Testament which Westcott and Hort trans- 
 ferred to the title-page of their Greek Testa- 
 ment. You will remember how he speaks of 
 the Gospels as containing the lineaments of that 
 sacred Mind and adds : " You would see Him less 
 if you saw Him with your very eyes " (Minus 
 visurus sis, si cor am oculis cons^icias}. And 
 apparently the editor of the Fourth Gospel 
 agrees with the later editors of the Four 
 Gospels, in thinking that much was super-
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 137 
 
 fluous which might be thought to be neces- 
 sary. And certainly he would have endorsed 
 Erasmus in the first sentence which Westcott 
 and Hort quote from him, to the effect that 
 " Most literature brings no small regret to the 
 man who spends his time upon it." " You have 
 enough," he says, and we most of us feel that 
 something is to be said for him. Indeed, that 
 must be enough which, as in the case of the 
 Fourth Gospel, accomplishes the object of the 
 writer to the reader, viz., the attainment of ever- 
 lasting life. And what advantage, then, has the 
 painful retrospect of research, or the diligence of 
 him that grubs among papyri ? If joy lies that 
 way, it must be, one would think, the joy of 
 the very few, and not the greater happiness of 
 the larger number. 
 
 But here we are checked in our thought, and 
 part company with the editor of the Fourth 
 Gospel. From this point of view a whole 
 gospel is not necessary ; one verse might 
 suffice for one person. In the same way a 
 single visit to Christ might suffice for the
 
 138 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 making of an apostle did suffice in one well- 
 known case. Such an experience might make 
 a man say, as Myers makes John the Baptist 
 say, " I carry Jesus with me till I die ! " 
 But no one who had known the Lord that way 
 would be satisfied with his flying visit. He 
 would say, " Rabbi, where dwellest Thou ? " and 
 come to spend the day, in order that the hour 
 might be made perfect. He would say, " Not 
 a brief glance I beg, a passing word." And 
 the real judgment of the critic will be whether 
 he takes us in the end to the Christ and leaves 
 us there. If, then, the Christ of the first days 
 is a clearer, lovelier Christ than we know, or 
 than the one we put in stained glass windows, the 
 going back to Him will be the highest wisdom. 
 When we ask a similar question concerning 
 the primitive Church, we are in a similar diffi- 
 culty. The Church, like the gospel, is one of 
 the ways to the Christ. When we lay our 
 hands upon the Church history, however stained 
 and defaced the record may be, and, at first 
 sight, negative to faith, there is a resulting
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 139 
 
 conviction that here you have the gesta Christi. 
 And the importance of this consideration will 
 be evident to any one who compares the 
 Christian religion with the most active and 
 aggressive of its rivals. Take, for example, the 
 religion of Mithras, whose importance, as a 
 rival of Christianity, all students are coming to 
 recognise. It is not merely that Mithraism is 
 dead, but there are no gesta Mithr<e ; there 
 never were any. I admit that there is much 
 that is repellent about the history of the 
 Church. A fellow-student once said to me 
 that he regarded the Church history as the 
 greatest argument against Christianity. And 
 we are certainly not going to be satisfied with- 
 out some archaeological restoration of the primi- 
 tive fabric. If we regard the Church as a kind 
 of gospel, it must, like the gospel, be capable 
 of presentation in its primitive simplicity. A 
 mediaeval text will not do. The fact is the 
 work of the archaeologist is more needful for 
 the restoration of the lines of the original 
 Church than it is for either the lineaments
 
 of the Christ or the text of the gospel ; for 
 in the latter, at any rate, whatever be the state 
 of the text, we can still say with the writer to 
 the Hebrews, " We see Jesus," but in the life 
 of the Church there are whole periods where it 
 is one of the commonest experiences to have to 
 say, " He may be risen, but He is certainly 
 not here." 
 
 It is, then, a peculiarly evangelical task to join 
 hands with the critic and the archaeologist in 
 restoring the lines of the first confession and 
 retracing the portraits of the first confessors. 
 And we shall often find ourselves as the result 
 of the investigation falling into comparisons 
 made in Shakesperian language, and saying, 
 " Look on this picture and on that ! " And 
 provided the comparisons are made without 
 over-exaggeration, and we do not make their 
 heaven too much higher than ours, nor contrast 
 too sombrely this mournful gloom with that 
 celestial light, we may obtain lasting advantage 
 from the investigation. Only we must not go 
 back to smaller views, as to a geocentric cos-
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 141 
 
 mology, or an unnatural psychology, or a too 
 lurid eschatology, but simply in order to know, 
 and to compare, and, if you please, to pick up 
 any treasures that the Church may have dropped 
 en route. 
 
 Dean Stanley records somewhere an impres- 
 sion made upon him by the descriptions of the 
 primitive Church in the Book of Acts, where 
 we are told that " they did eat their meat with 
 gladness and singleness of heart ! " He dwells 
 upon this passage, not in order to get the 
 Eucharist into it, but to deduce the primitive 
 Christians' joy out of it. He expounds the 
 two Greek words used, regarding them as 
 characteristic of the Christian experience, 
 ayaXXiacrie and a^tXoTrje. The second of the 
 two words lent itself readily to comment, as 
 being the word describing the state of a field 
 out of which all the stones have been gathered. 
 Any one who knows Syria, of which the 
 Easterns say that the devil passed over it with 
 a bag full of stones and a hole in the bottom of 
 the bag, will appreciate the word with Dean
 
 142 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 Stanley. But is it true that the result of 
 investigation is to take us back to such an 
 exulting people and to such a well-tilled land ? 
 A few moments spent on the subject of the 
 newer knowledge of the elder Church may be 
 profitably employed. My experience has been 
 cast in a time when a stream of surprising 
 biblical discoveries has been current. When I 
 began my biblical and patristic studies almost 
 the first thing that fell across my path was the 
 " Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." It was 
 a startling document. Westcott said of it that 
 he " could have cried to find how different the 
 early Church was from what he had imagined 
 it to be ! " Not long after I was myself privi- 
 leged to discover the lost "Apology of Aris- 
 tides the Athenian Philosopher," a document 
 which was so altogether altruistic in its ethic, 
 and disclosed a people so utterly happy in the 
 faith into which they had been brought, that 
 one might have blushed to find the difference 
 between their spiritual temper and our own. 
 Westcott's dissatisfaction was with the outside
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 143 
 
 of the ancient Church, ours with the inside of the 
 modern Church. The Teaching of the Twelve 
 has, however, a sturdy ethic of its own, though 
 it is clearly the ethic of a lower civilisation than 
 ours. But it is a document that is fatal to 
 Catholic claims, that knows nothing, or next 
 to nothing, of Catholic orders or Catholic ritual. 
 Its Eucharist is certainly not the mediaeval or 
 modern bread- god, nor its Communion the 
 modern fasting Communion. Here is matter 
 enough for deploring, for those who wish to 
 deplore. But turn now, for a moment, to the 
 " Apology of Aristides," and read the descrip- 
 tion of Christian ethics in the early part of the 
 second century, and see how it tallies with the 
 description given in the Acts which Dean 
 Stanley so much admired. Project yourself 
 into the atmosphere of Aristides and his 
 friends, and see if " the heaven's breath " does 
 not " smell wooingly here ! " How will this 
 do for a description of Christian virtue ? 
 
 " They abstain from all impurity, in the 
 hope of the recompense that is to come in
 
 another world. As for their servants or hand- 
 maids, or their children, if they have any, they 
 persuade them to become Christians for the love 
 they have towards them : and when they have 
 become so, they call them without distinction 
 brethren. They do not worship strange gods : 
 and they walk in all humility and kindness, and 
 falsehood is not found among them, and they 
 love one another. From the widows they do 
 not turn away their countenance : they rescue 
 the orphan from him who does him violence : 
 he who has gives to him who has not, without 
 grudging. When they see the stranger they 
 bring him to their dwellings and rejoice over 
 him as over a true brother ; for they do not 
 call brothers those who are after the flesh, but 
 those who are in the spirit and in God : but 
 when one of their poor passes away from the 
 world, and any of them sees him, then he 
 provides for his burial according to his ability ; 
 and if they hear that any of their number is 
 imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their 
 Messiah, all of them provide for his need, and
 
 if it is possible that he may be delivered, they 
 deliver him. And if there is among them a 
 man that is poor and needy, and if they have 
 not an abundance of necessaries, they fast two 
 or three days that they may supply the needy 
 with the necessary food. They observe scrupu- 
 lously the commandment of their Messiah : 
 they live honestly and soberly, as the Lord 
 their God commanded them ; every morning 
 and all hours on account of the goodnesses of 
 God toward them they praise and laud Him, 
 and over their food and their drink they render 
 Him thanks. And if any righteous person of 
 their number passes away from this world they 
 rejoice and give thanks to God, and they follow 
 his body, as though he were moving from one 
 place to another. And when a child is born to 
 any of them, they praise God, and if again it 
 chance to die in its infancy, they praise God 
 mightily, as for one who has passed through 
 the world without sins. And if, again, they see 
 that one of their number has died in his iniquity 
 or in his sins, over this one they weep bitterly
 
 and sigh, as over one that is about to go to 
 punishment. Such is the law of the Christians 
 and such their conduct." 
 
 Now, it is quite clear that if we were by any 
 means projected back into the religious atmo- 
 sphere described by Aristides, we should not 
 find ourselves amongst a party of South Sea 
 savages. Or if they were to come down to us, 
 we should not be able to regard them as a group 
 of undesirable aliens. On the contrary, we 
 should either claim them as our very brethren, 
 or if that seemed too great an audacity for 
 persons so slack in charity and so feeble in 
 illumination as ourselves, we should say of 
 them, individually and collectively, " O cum 
 talis sis, utinam noster esses." There can be 
 no doubt that this apologetic picture corre- 
 sponds very closely to the " gladness and 
 singleness of heart" which attracted Dean 
 Stanley. These people must be of the same 
 class as those who are addressed in the epistle 
 of Barnabas as TEKVO tiH^ooo-vvrje, God's gladsome 
 bairns, But they are not simply a group of
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 147 
 
 ecstatics. They have taken forward steps in 
 religion, and are clearly progressives. For 
 instance, they mark the abandonment of the 
 old Jewish principle of hereditary religion. 
 There is not a trace of " We are Abraham's 
 children." Children are persuaded to become 
 Christians. Yet the writer is sure that it is 
 all right with children who die young. The 
 magic of baptism is absent (I do not say that 
 baptism is absent). They must have taken 
 somewhere a forward step in declining the 
 fiction of child membership and in insisting on 
 the sincerity of man and woman membership. 
 " For the love that they have to them, they 
 persuade them to become Christians." Where 
 persuasion is, there is multiplication and exten- 
 sion ; where it is not or where the result of it 
 is assumed, there is spiritual decline and dis- 
 integration. Consider, too, their extraordinary 
 solidarity. We remember how the French, 
 who started with a formula of liberty, equality, 
 and fraternity, have begun to change the 
 formula by the substitution of "solidarity"
 
 for "fraternity." The latter word seems to 
 them to be too individualistic and to express 
 imperfectly the unity of the human race, and 
 the ideals which spring from the thought of 
 that unity. The early Church had both 
 fraternity and solidarity fraternity in the 
 highest sense ; for they do not call those 
 brethren who are after the flesh, but those who 
 are in the spirit and in God. They call them 
 without distinction brethren ! The same thing 
 comes out in the matter of solidarity " He 
 who has gives to him who has not without 
 grudging." Examine also their treatment of 
 the stranger, the regulations for the burial of 
 the dead, the deliverance of those who are 
 imprisoned for the sake of the Messiah. 
 These are features of genuine solidarity : 
 many of the customs referred to persist, or 
 reappear in the great mediaeval guilds, which 
 are really Churches in petto. How contagious 
 must that happiness of theirs have been, when 
 it even prescribed laws to Death, that he should 
 not cast a shade upon a Christian burial.
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 149 
 
 " They rejoice greatly ; they follow his corpse 
 as if it were the removal of an emigrant that 
 they were celebrating ! " This feature of early 
 Christian life is the more remarkable because 
 it is just at this point of contact with Death that 
 the human race is most conservative, and each 
 generation insists upon being the model to the 
 next. But you cannot find any trace of black 
 or sordid raiment amongst the Christians whom 
 we are considering. They rejoice over the 
 departed : they rejoice with the departed : 
 only one exception is made, the case of the 
 wilfully impenitent. Few things will show 
 more clearly than this case of " gladness and 
 singleness of heart " what the early Church was 
 like, and what the later Church became. My 
 discovery, if I may say so, is greater than 
 Tischendorf's on the same holy mountain. 
 For while his upset the traditional text, mine 
 upsets the traditional practice. One ethical 
 variant is worth fifty biblical emendations. A 
 modern critic I think it was the late Dr. 
 Salmon said of the changes in the organisation
 
 150 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 of the early Church, and the transition from the 
 original Presbyteral government to the later 
 Episcopal rule, that the Church of the second 
 century passed into a tunnel. We saw it enter 
 and we saw it emerge, but the evidence of what 
 went on between the two known historical 
 points is obscure. What Dr. Salmon says of 
 the organisation of the early Church we say of 
 their experience it passed through a tunnel. 
 But Dr. Salmon could not say, and it was 
 hardly proper for him to say of the mere 
 outwardness of the Church, whether the tunnel 
 took them from a more favoured region into 
 the contrary, or whether conversely they 
 passed into clearer lights and larger liberties. 
 In the matter of experience, however, we can 
 speak with some confidence ; they passed from 
 Italy in sunshine into Switzerland in shade or 
 in snow : and with some exceptions they have 
 remained on the colder and darker side of the 
 range of mountains through which they have 
 passed. And if this be so, it is a lawful feature 
 of the return to the Christ and to the Scriptures
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 151 
 
 and the Church to desire that we may get back 
 again into primitive heart-happiness. Or if some 
 one shall object to our pictures as being over- 
 coloured, then it must be our most gracious 
 mark that we desire to get forward into real 
 heart-happiness, for it will be as true of us 
 as it was of Paul and his Philippian friends, 
 that we are the circumcision (i.e., the real people} 
 who worship God in the Spirit, rejoice in Christ 
 Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. 
 
 When Goldsmith described his ideal parson, 
 he drew the climax of his qualification in the 
 fact that he " allured to brighter worlds and 
 led the way." As the passage is no clerical 
 preserve, but the description of all faithful souls, 
 I will repeat a line or two more of it : 
 
 " And as a bird each fond endearment tries, 
 To lure her new-fledged offspring to the skies, 
 He tried each art, reproved each dull delay, 
 Allured to brighter worlds and led the way." 
 
 It does not need any recovery of ancient 
 documents to tell us that we ought to be 
 more alluring than we are. All around is a
 
 152 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 new-fledged offspring, which has not yet found 
 its wings or its songs. They can only flutter, 
 they do but twitter. It is a high calling to be 
 alluring in Christ's stead, a wonderful calling. 
 He can make every bird that He snares into 
 a decoy, every fish that He catches into a bait, 
 or into a fisherman, every captive into a loyal 
 
 soldier. All genuine Christian experience is 
 
 
 
 alluring. The man who escapes the horrible 
 
 pit and sings his new song on the margin of 
 the miry clay is alluring. The man who stands 
 firm where Christ has set him sentry is allur- 
 ing : a wreath of heaven's laurel is already 
 materialising over his head. The man who 
 breasts Jordan's waves and shouts on the banks 
 of deliverance is alluring : let me die the death 
 of the righteous, let my last end be like his. 
 But it is not only the man strenuous in action 
 or strong in death that is winsome. Anywhere, 
 everywhere, the soul made happy in Christ's 
 love is alluring. 
 
 You remember that famous passage in the 
 " Grace Abounding " where John Bunyan tells
 
 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 153 
 
 how his spirit was quickened by hearing some 
 poor women who sat in the sun and told their 
 experiences. " Methought they spake as if joy 
 did make them speak ! " Good gospel that, with 
 good illustration of gospel in the sunshine where 
 they were sitting. But it would be equally 
 good gospel if they had sat in the shade, and 
 joy had made them speak. The fact is that it 
 is at this point that we are certain to become 
 powerful preachers. There is always some one 
 overhearing our happiness. The typical illus- 
 tration in the Scripture is well known, Paul and 
 Silas in prison, in the inner prison, in the stocks, 
 at midnight, with sore backs and glowing hearts, 
 singing praises. As I heard some one once say, 
 " we should hardly have got beyond a prayer- 
 meeting." In that case the allurement would 
 have been wanting, for the attraction was in the 
 song, and it is song that makes song. 
 
 "What is this psalm from pitiable places, 
 Glad where the messengers of peace have trod ? 
 Whose are these beautiful and holy faces, 
 Lit with their loving and aflame with God ? "
 
 154 TIME MACHINE AS APPLIED TO RELIGION 
 
 From all of which it appears that the attraction 
 of the Christian religion does not consist in the 
 internal harmony or splendour of its doctrines 
 (much less of its rites or buildings), but in the 
 experience of its worshippers. There is a chain 
 of Catholic joy, as well as a transmission of 
 Catholic doctrine. Each nightingale teaches 
 the next its note. It is as necessary to be 
 sound in the happiness of the faith as it is 
 to be sound in the faith. To be happy in 
 God and in God's will is the highest ortho- 
 doxy that His creatures are capable of : and we 
 shall certainly allure to brighter worlds when 
 we ourselves live in them. From such an in- 
 ward spring may we preach and teach and live, 
 and by it fulfil the description given in one of 
 the apocryphal books of the service of those 
 who become " friends of God and prophets," 
 that " in the time of their visitation they shall 
 shine, and run to and fro like sparks among 
 the stubble."
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 Christian Church has a calendar of 
 * festivals that are to be observed through- 
 out the course of each year ; and although 
 some branches of the Church have longer and 
 more highly evolved calendars than others, it 
 will probably be correct to say that every 
 Church has something in the nature of a 
 calendar. The most extended calendar is that 
 of the Roman Church, followed closely by 
 those of the Greek and other Oriental Churches, 
 calendars which contain, not only festivals com- 
 memorative of the leading events in the life of 
 Christ and the fortunes of His people, but 
 
 which also include many fictitious memorials 
 
 157
 
 158 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 designed (as I have elsewhere shown) to incor- 
 porate the cult of pagan deities and heroes, 
 often under the thinnest of disguises. 
 
 If the Roman calendar is the most highly 
 evolved, we may place at the opposite scale the 
 calendar of the Society of Friends, which is 
 limited to the selection of a particular week in 
 the month of May for the purposes of an 
 Annual Meeting ; and between these two 
 extremes we may group the various calendars 
 of the individual Churches. Now, it will 
 readily be seen that all the Churches which 
 keep a series of Christian festivals throughout 
 the year do so with the intention, as far as 
 possible, of co-ordinating those festivals in a 
 proper sequence. They do this almost of 
 necessity, for is not the calendar intended to 
 serve as a mirror of the Life of Christ, reduced 
 to one Annus Mirabilis, one acceptable year of 
 the Lord? In that case history will enforce 
 sequence, and there will be a reason why certain 
 festivals occur in a certain order. 
 
 But then, this order will be not merely
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 159 
 
 natural, as reflecting historical events, but it 
 will endeavour to express spiritual truth in the 
 language of history, and unless it did so the 
 Christian year would lose much of its beauty 
 and meaning. It is something more than 
 history which tells us that Good Friday does 
 not fall in Easter week ; it is spiritual necessity 
 which places Good Friday and Easter in a 
 certain order, for, as the Apostle says, " if we 
 be dead with Christ, we shall also live with 
 Him " ; or, as the Salvation Army lassie said 
 when she was telling her experience, " I had to 
 learn that Good Friday came before Easter 
 Day." There is, then, a sequence and co- 
 ordination observable in the festivals of the 
 Church, which is especially patent in the case 
 of a pair of closely related festivals whose 
 nexus is not merely natural but spiritual. I 
 suppose every one will recognise this in the 
 case which I have brought forward, because 
 Good Friday and Easter are hardly two 
 separate festivals at all ; but the case is not 
 so simple nor the fact so readily observed in
 
 160 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 the case of another pair of festivals to which 
 we must now draw attention. I mean the 
 Ascension of Christ and the Descent of the 
 Holy Ghost. One does not instinctively con- 
 nect Ascensiontide and Whitsuntide together ; 
 the historical links are obscure and the spiritual 
 links are not obvious, except to those who 
 search for them. There is a great difference 
 in kind between the two festivals of Ascension 
 Day and Whitsunday. The former is a festival 
 of heaven, the latter belongs entirely to the 
 experience of the Church on earth. If we 
 consider the first Ascension record, we can only 
 say it is so brief as hardly to be a record at all. 
 It amounts to this, that Jesus blessed His dis- 
 ciples and disappeared. They had no triumph, 
 no rapture, no exultation ; only there was a per- 
 plexity in the minds of disciples who were too 
 ignorant as yet to appreciate what had happened 
 and yet wise enough, in view of what they did 
 know, not to relapse into unbelief or its com- 
 panion, grief, over what they were not able 
 to comprehend. The Ascension, then, was a,
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 161 
 
 festival of heaven ; it was there that the bells 
 were ringing, not in the most heavenward- 
 reaching of our towers ; it was there that they 
 unloosed the bars of massy light and let the 
 King of Glory in ; it was the angelic company 
 that had the rapture, who had followed Him 
 all His life through 
 
 " Oft wondering where and how at last 
 The mystic scene would end. 
 
 ***** 
 
 They brought His chariot from above 
 
 To bear Him to His throne, 
 Spread their triumphant wings and cried, 
 
 ' The glorious work is done ! ' ' 
 
 In a word, they crowned Him Lord of all ; 
 but of the fact of the coronation, in any sense 
 that should provoke a festival record, there 
 does not seem to have been a suspicion in the 
 minds of the primitive believers. And it was 
 not until ten days afterward that the news of 
 heaven became the property of earth, and the 
 saints below began to sing in concert with those 
 that were above and to say that " God has 
 
 12
 
 162 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 made this same Jesus both Lord and Christ," 
 " He is by the right hand of God exalted, He 
 has received of the Father the promise of the 
 Spirit," which we now experience. They had 
 linked together the two festivals and made the 
 conjunction of heavenly and terrestrial bliss. 
 It is, therefore, quite clear that these two 
 festivals are a co-ordinated sequence. The 
 Pentecost becomes intelligible when it is seen 
 to be a festival of the exalted and glorified 
 Christ. So much having been said with regard 
 to the calendar and its external apparatus for 
 the illustration of spiritual things, let us try 
 to get at the spiritual things themselves. For 
 at its best the calendar is only a help, and 
 a help that easily passes over into a hindrance 
 if we limit ourselves too much to days and 
 times. When, for example, we are reading 
 George Herbert's verses on Whitsunday and 
 find him pleading for the restoration of this 
 day to its ancient and miraculous right, we are 
 obliged to stop and ask ourselves whether the 
 crowning Pentecostal experience can really be
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 163 
 
 limited to a particular calculated and appointed 
 day. We may agree in the main with the 
 poet's desire : 
 
 " Lord, though we change, Thou art the same, 
 
 The same dear God of Love and Light ; 
 
 Restore this day, for Thy most holy name, 
 
 Unto his ancient and miraculous right " ; 
 
 but when we have affirmed the unchangeable- 
 ness of God in His power and grace and in 
 His willingness to fill His people with the 
 sense of His presence, we must not take away 
 from the thought by imposing upon it a 
 calendar limitation. The experience of Pente- 
 cost is not marked by any other chronology 
 than that of obedience and faith ; and these 
 will make a Pentecost anywhere and at any 
 time. Perhaps we shall see this more clearly 
 if we turn to the account of the great and 
 notable day in the Acts of the Apostles ; when 
 we do so we find that the stress is laid on 
 time, place, and concord : a day fully come, a 
 place conformed to the habit of an expectant
 
 164 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 people, and a united spirit of faith. Now, 
 suppose we ask the question, Which of these is 
 the most important, in which quarter did the 
 magic lie, from whence did the grace proceed ? 
 From the time ? Not necessarily, for the 
 phenomenon repeated itself many times. From 
 the place ? No, for it occurred outside Jeru- 
 salem, however much it began in and from 
 Jerusalem. From the concord ? Certainly 
 this is the mark of every such outpouring and 
 visitation ; it is the result of an understanding 
 between God and man and between one man 
 and his brethren. Thus we arrive at the 
 underlying truth that the day of Tentecost was 
 not a day^ but an agreement. 
 
 We are now far away from the calendar and 
 well on the road towards the heavenly things 
 themselves. 
 
 And now let us see some of the features 
 which made this visitation of God so great and 
 notable ; let us come to the experience itself. 
 
 We will speak of it in two of its results : 
 first, as being an equipment in personality ;
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 165 
 
 second, as being the reception of the apostolic 
 and Christian credentials. 
 
 Now, with regard to personality, may we not 
 say that the Holy Spirit is the missing factor in 
 our personality, and that without it we cannot 
 be altogether ourselves, as God wants us to be ? 
 For we notice that an abiding gift means an 
 abiding change in the person to whom the gift 
 is made ; and this is an abiding Gift : it is said 
 that " He shall abide with you for ever," and " we 
 will come unto Him and make our abode with 
 Him." So, then, if the Holy Spirit is a Divine 
 Abiding, the result of the gift will be found 
 in personal equipment and change. The fact 
 being, as we have stated, that we cannot be 
 completely ourselves apart from the presence 
 and work of the Holy Spirit, we are obliged to 
 recognise that He operates as transforming 
 grace in the conversion and in the sanctifica- 
 tion of the souls of men, and to this all the 
 saints bear witness. To keep the matter simple, 
 and to keep it also forcible, we will call for a 
 few testimonies as to what the work of the
 
 166 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 Holy Spirit in the transformation of personality 
 is like. Here is one, to begin with, of a very 
 simple character : 
 
 "It was in November, 1823, but what day 
 of the month I do not know. I remember this, 
 that everything looked new to me the people, 
 the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new 
 man in a new world. I spent the greater part 
 of my time in praising the Lord. I could say 
 with Isaiah, ' O Lord, I will praise Thee, for 
 though Thou wast angry with me, thine anger 
 is turned away and Thou comfortedst me ' ; or 
 like David, * The Lord hath brought me up out 
 of a horrible pit of mire and clay, and set my 
 feet upon a rock, and established my goings, 
 and hath put a new song into my mouth, even 
 praise to my God.' 1 was a new man alto- 
 gether. I told all that I met what the Lord 
 had done for my soul. I have heard some say 
 that they have had hard work to get away from 
 their companions, but I sought mine out, and 
 had hard work to tell them what the Lord had 
 done for me. Some said I was mad, and others
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 167 
 
 that they should get me back again next pay- 
 day. But, praise the Lord ! it is now more than 
 forty years, and they have not got me yet. 
 They said I was a wW-man, but they meant I 
 was a /W-man, and, Glory be to God ! I have 
 been glad ever since." 
 
 Such was the striking experience of that 
 apostolic man Billy Bray, the Cornish miner, at 
 whose feet we have often sat in the spirit ; a 
 position which has not needed any apologetic 
 explanation in modern times, since Professor 
 James, of Harvard, has re-discovered Billy and 
 put him in his gallery of Varieties of Religious 
 Experience. Observe the note of this testi- 
 mony, the conscious sense of personal renewal 
 by the Holy Spitit. Here is another well- 
 known example from another quarter, belonging 
 to a somewhat more advanced experience, but 
 inwardly parallel to the one we have just quoted. 
 George Fox tells us of a certain wonderful visi- 
 tation of heavenly life that he experienced, as 
 follows : 
 
 " Now was I come up in Spirit, through the
 
 168 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All 
 things were new, and all the creation gave 
 another smell unto me than before, beyond 
 what words can utter. I knew nothing but 
 pureness, innocence, and righteousness ; so that 
 I was come up to the state of Adam, which he 
 was in before he fell." 
 
 Clearly here is another new man talking ; his 
 symbols are mystical, but there is no doubt in 
 his mind, or in ours, that he has undergone a 
 transformation. We may not quite understand 
 about the flaming sword, but since we find the 
 man carving it upon his seal, and mentioning 
 this particular seal in his will, there can be no 
 doubt of the importance of the experience to 
 him. It had made him other than he was and 
 more than he had been. It was, as his subse- 
 quent life showed, an apostolic equipment, a 
 personal renewal. 
 
 And here is another testimony equally decided, 
 and in many ways quite similar to the preceding. 
 Madame Guyon tells us of a certain remarkable 
 spiritual experience of hers as follows :
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 169 
 
 *' My heart was quite changed ; God was 
 there ; from that moment He had given me an 
 experience of His presence in my soul not 
 merely as an object intellectually perceived, but 
 as a thing really possessed after the sweetest 
 manner. I experienced those words in the 
 Canticles, ' Thy name is as precious ointment 
 poured forth : thereforth do the virgins love 
 Thee.' For I felt in my soul an unction which 
 healed in a moment all my wounds. I slept 
 not all that night, because Thy Love, O my 
 God, flowed in me like delicious oil, and burned 
 like a fire that was going to destroy all that was 
 left of self in an instant. I was all of a sudden 
 so altered that I was hardly to be known either 
 by myself or by others. I found no more those 
 troublesome faults, or that reluctance to duty 
 which formerly characterised me. They all 
 disappeared, as being consumed like chaff in a 
 great fire." 
 
 Here we have again the same testimony to 
 personal renewal and expansion and completion 
 through the indwelling of the blessed Spirit ;
 
 170 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 and the two or three witnesses coming from 
 such opposite points of view to the same con- 
 clusion may be a sufficient establishment of the 
 reality of the work of which they speak. 
 
 Now let us think of the way in which this 
 visitation of the Holy Ghost furnishes the 
 credentials for Divine service. St. Ephraem the 
 Syrian tells us that the children of Israel 
 believed Moses when he came down from the 
 mountain because the rays of light from his 
 face furnished a testimony to the truth of his 
 word ! It was necessary that Moses should 
 have credentials, for " whereby shall it be known 
 that Thou hast sent me ? " the man might ask. 
 So Moses came down from the mountain, sup- 
 ported, not by the conventional two or three 
 witnesses who shall confirm his word, but by 
 two or three thousand convincing and convert- 
 ing sunbeams, declaring without fear of contra- 
 diction that " this man is come to you with a 
 message from your Lord." The right preaching 
 is that in which something about the man com- 
 mends the message. And we may say, therefore,
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 171 
 
 that it is of the nature of a true Pentecostal 
 experience to produce a congruity between the 
 message and the messenger. Now certainly this 
 was the case with our Lord Himself. The 
 people who heard Him were blessed before ever 
 he opened His mouth and said, " Blessed are 
 ye." They were rested before ever He said, 
 " I will give you rest." The Gospel was 
 Christ even more than it was the word of 
 Christ ; and there was a perfect congruity 
 between the Christ-Person and the Christ-word. 
 And this being his experience, we may be 
 sure that something like it appears in the ex- 
 periences of the apostolic men and women, the 
 earlier and later saints, and believers generally. 
 They have a gospel which has to be proclaimed, 
 but it has also to be commended ; it has to be 
 announced, but it has also to be adorned. The 
 kingdom of heaven is to be spoken of, but it 
 must be within those who speak : to have it 
 around us or among us will not suffice, when 
 He said it was to be within us. The Pente- 
 costal congruity between the Messenger and the
 
 172 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 Message arises from this inward experience, this 
 reign of God in the heart and conscience. And 
 it is this visitation which puts the beauty of the 
 Lord upon His willing people, and when it is 
 there the question is sure to be asked concern- 
 ing those who are in the lesser apocalypse which 
 is asked of the triumphant saints in the larger 
 vision : " What are these, and whence came 
 they ? " And the Holy Ghost will fall on 
 those who hear the word, when it has first 
 fallen upon those who speak the word. It 
 will make them able where they have before 
 been weak ; it saves them from impotence, 
 reluctance, and disability. It takes the words, 
 " I can't " out of the vocabulary, and writes 
 over the vacant space instead, " I can do all 
 things through an indwelling and strengthen- 
 ing Christ." Negatively also it removes from 
 the life those wayward desires which choke the 
 word, impede the life, and postpone the king- 
 dom. Thus the visitation of the Holy Ghost 
 is only another way of describing the effect 
 which Christ has upon willing and surrendered
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 173 
 
 souls : the visitation is, in fact, the vision. It 
 instructs us to follow after Him, and to 
 become fishers of men. It does in continuance 
 what a single visit or interview used to do in 
 the days of His flesh. It is not a different 
 kind of grace from that which came to the 
 woman of Samaria, when a single talk with 
 One who told her all that ever she did made 
 her an evangelist and (may we not say ?) an 
 apostle. 
 
 And to her also He spoke of an inward 
 fountain which should spring up into an 
 eternal life ; and it would be difficult to 
 describe Pentecost and its experience in more 
 exact terms. The fact is that the Samaritans 
 of her day believed her in precisely the same 
 way as, at a later date, they believed the word 
 of the apostles themselves when they came 
 down to them with the freshness and glory of 
 the Upper Chamber, and brought great joy 
 with them. In the one case they believed a 
 shaded one that had abruptly turned into a 
 shining one ; in the other they received and
 
 174 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 believed the word of a company of shining 
 ones. But if Churches go back in search of 
 apostolic foundations, Samaria will go back 
 farther than St. Peter or St. John. But in 
 any case the credentials were the same, the 
 joy of the Holy Ghost, the love of God shed 
 abroad in the heart. 
 
 Perhaps it will be thought that we are 
 unduly restricting the credentials in thus 
 emphasising the necessity and importance of 
 the Pentecostal experience. Was there no 
 creed promulgated on that elect day, nothing 
 which should distinguish between sheep and 
 goats, between orthodox and unorthodox ; no 
 book of rules nor handbook of discipline, no 
 articles of religion nor of catholicity in religion ? 
 Apparently none of these things belongs in the 
 Pentecostal connection. As far as orthodoxy 
 goes, they were orthodox already, Thomas as 
 orthodox as John, however long it may have 
 taken him to get there. Pentecost adds nothing 
 to the equipment of doctrines : it adds every- 
 thing to the equipment of the teachers. The
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 175 
 
 equipment of doctrine stands where it did. It 
 is expressed in words like these out of the past 
 of the learners : " Lord, I believe," " Thou 
 art the Christ," " He is really risen," 
 " Thou knowest all things," and the like. 
 What, then, is the real increment ? A little 
 more faith in the Lord, and a great deal 
 more of resulting experience ; a sense of 
 personal union with Him and of personal 
 interest in His grace and His promises ; a 
 conviction that the promise is to us which 
 will enable us presently to say to some one 
 else that " the promise is to you " ; a conviction 
 for holiness which will result presently in a 
 confession of holiness, as the Spirit of Truth 
 shall lead. But all of this is outside the 
 region of dogmatic Christianity, which stands, 
 after Pentecost, just where it did before, with 
 one foundation of God laid, and every man 
 diligently building thereon. The right way 
 to understand the difference which the great 
 Visitation made is to imagine what would have 
 happened if they had gone on without it, if
 
 176 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 they had not tarried in Jerusalem for the 
 Divine equipment. They could have gone on 
 without it ; they already were a Church ; their 
 names were written both in earth and heaven ; 
 they had a message to the world (exactly the 
 same message substantially on either hypothesis, 
 whether they preached as baptized or as un- 
 baptized of the Spirit). So they might have 
 made some progress. And perhaps it might 
 not have been altogether unlike the experience 
 of some modern Churches, where they do not 
 preach upon the text, " The little one shall 
 become a thousand," but where they discuss 
 whether they are keeping up with the popu- 
 lation and its normal growth. In that case 
 Peter might have said to the first believers, 
 " We are now a hundred and twenty in 
 number, and Christ is risen ; perhaps by the 
 end of the year we shall be a hundred and 
 twenty-one." But what saith the Scripture ? 
 " The same day there were added to the church 
 three thousand souls." That was the differ- 
 ence. The little one became a thousand under
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 177 
 
 their eyes, and they could see the mustard-seed 
 grow and become a tree as they watched it. 
 But it may be urged that although the bases of 
 belief were fixed before Pentecost, and most of 
 them long before, yet in regard to the par- 
 ticular doctrine of that special elect day there 
 must have been some increment of knowledge 
 and of teaching. Or are we to say that the 
 experience of the Day of Pentecost involves no 
 more than a personal application of truths 
 already believed, as though the seal and the 
 wax had long been in the neighbourhood of 
 each other, but now the wax was softened and 
 the seal applied ? 
 
 I do not care to define too closely in such 
 matters. To put the matter plainly for 
 practical people, the Pentecostal gift is, to a 
 large extent, one of the lapsed experiences of 
 the Christian Church. Every believer ought to 
 have the experience ; only a few really have it, 
 and confess it. For us, then, it is not a ques- 
 tion how the first believers reached the blessing, 
 but how may modern believers get back to it. 
 
 13
 
 178 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 As far as we are concerned, the gift and grace 
 of which we speak lies in the Spiritual Lost 
 Property Office. And if that is so, I say with- 
 out hesitation that a minute description of the 
 lost property is not necessary to the establish- 
 ment of a claim. The fact that you are seeking 
 something which you have lost is presumptive 
 evidence in your favour. 
 
 My wife once lost her gold watch in London, 
 and I went to Scotland Yard in quest of it. 
 They asked me, " What sort of a watch was 
 it ? " I said, "A gold watch with an inscription 
 inside the case." " What was the inscription? " 
 That it " was given to Helen Balkwill on the 
 occasion of her marriage by the ladies of the 
 Temperance Association of Plymouth, Stone- 
 house, and Devonport." The official said, " You 
 are wrong." I should have said, " Of the Three 
 Towns." But he handed over the watch. My 
 identification was sufficient, even if it was not 
 exact. 
 
 And while we value exactness in spiritual 
 things, wherever it can be obtained by creatures
 
 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 179 
 
 as normally inexact as ourselves, we need not 
 think that it all turns on an exact definition. 
 The theology of the experience is not abso- 
 lutely necessary to the experience. What is 
 necessary is that we should hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness. What is certain is that if 
 we do so hunger we shall be sated.
 
 AARON'S BLESSING
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 AARON'S BLESSING 
 
 YV77E began this little volume of addresses 
 * with a talk on the breastplate of Aaron ; 
 we will conclude it with a few thoughts on the 
 high-priestly benediction. You will find it 
 recorded in the sixth chapter of Numbers, 
 where it runs as follows : 
 
 " On this wise ye shall bless the children of Israel, 
 saying unto them : 
 
 The Lord bless thee and keep thee : 
 
 The Lord make His face to shine upon thee, and be 
 gracious unto thee : 
 
 The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and 
 give thee peace. 
 
 And so shall they put My name upon the children 
 of Israel ; and I will bless them." 
 
 183
 
 184 AARON'S BLESSING 
 
 The Scriptures are rich, characteristically 
 rich, uniquely rich, in the matter of doxologies 
 and of benedictions ; if only these two forms 
 of worship, the exercise of the soul respectively 
 towards God and man, were to be collected, 
 what a lovely little book would be made by 
 the process of selection ! what mountain tops 
 of dogma would be reached, what Pisgah sights 
 of Christian experience would be rolled out 
 before our eyes and before our feet that is 
 to say, before our faith so that we might 
 acknowledge the grace and possess the land, 
 the good land which the Lord our God giveth 
 us! All that has ever been said of the Divine 
 Nature would be in the book, for the doxolo- 
 gies and the benedictions use the same theo- 
 logical language. If one says " Holy, holy, 
 holy is the Lord God Almighty," the other 
 responds with " The grace of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, the love of God, and the communion 
 of the Holy Ghost be with thy spirit," so 
 that the Benediction is itself a creed, and a 
 creed which is a life, and a life which is love.
 
 AARON'S BLESSING 185 
 
 No stronger statements, no deeper insights into 
 the full meaning of salvation, can ever be 
 obtained than those which fall upon our ears 
 when the Lord or His messengers are set to 
 bless the people. And this is not only true 
 of the New Testament, it occurs and prevails 
 throughout the Old ; if the degree varies, the 
 benediction is the same in kind : the same 
 grace and the same glory from the same Lord, 
 who is rich unto all that call upon Him in 
 truth, especially when they call upon Him for 
 others. 
 
 Now, the benediction of which we are 
 speaking, the one in the Book of Numbers, 
 will be found located in the midst of matter 
 of all degrees of spiritual value ; so that, if we 
 were reading continuously, we should stumble 
 upon it unexpectedly, and pass away from it, 
 when we had read it, much as we would pass 
 from an oasis into a desert. For it is preceded, 
 in the biblical narration, by the rules for the 
 manufacture and the administration of " curs- 
 ing water," of which one can only say that it
 
 186 AARON'S BLESSING 
 
 is a leaf out of an old magic-book, and that 
 its spiritual value is absolutely nil. In the 
 same connection we have the law by which 
 the Nazarite separates himself from wine and 
 strong drink ; and while, perhaps, we shall have 
 to admit that the Nazarite went into the 
 region of ethical extravagance in refusing to 
 touch even the seeds of the grape, we can 
 hardly say that Nazarite vows are out of date, 
 or that they have lost their spiritual value. 
 So the benediction is preceded by matter that 
 cannot be uniformly classified when we are 
 estimating spiritual truth or utility. And we 
 notice, further, that it is followed by the story 
 of the offering of silver dishes and golden 
 spoons by the princes of the congregation, an 
 account which instinctively provokes a criticism 
 that such benefactions are not always as holy 
 as they look, for even in our own day we have 
 many opportunities of observing how money 
 is made irreligiously and then bestowed reli- 
 giously ; how the stock-gambler adorns the 
 altar and the distiller builds the cathedral, and
 
 AARON'S BLESSING 187 
 
 how both give as the world giveth, including, 
 amongst other features of generosity, the deter- 
 mination to give no more if the gift should 
 not be allowed to act as an ethical anodyne. 
 And if such gifts, at least in our own day, 
 represent a varying spiritual value from zero 
 upwards, there is also a critical question (into 
 which we cannot go here) as to how such a 
 plate-audit as is here described in the Penta- 
 teuch, expressed in troy-weights of the sanc- 
 tuary, can have taken place in the wilderness. 
 But, doubt as we may about the setting of the 
 benediction and the relative value in morals 
 or in history of that in the midst of which it 
 is found, we can have no doubt about the bene- 
 diction itself. That, at all events, is pure gold, 
 and if we do not find it possible to be enthu- 
 siastic over the surrounding matter, we may 
 say that the Scriptures vindicate themselves by 
 the suddenness of their enchanted changes, as 
 Ruskin used to say of the Derbyshire dales. 
 
 From this form of blessing we learn that 
 God makes his face to shine upon us, and it is
 
 i88 AARON'S BLESSING 
 
 easy to infer that He does this either directly 
 or by reflection. Nor will it be easy to decide 
 in which of these two ways the illumination 
 may come, whether from the immediate life 
 
 
 
 and light of God or from the dwelling of God 
 in some neighbour soul. For it is constantly 
 happening in each of the two ways. To use 
 the similitudes of the Holy Grail, we have first 
 the case of Percival's sister who sees the vision, 
 after long prayer, and fasting, and patience, 
 in her own cell, upon whose white walls the 
 Heavenly Vision descends, and the sweet Grail 
 is seen 
 
 " Rose-red with beatings in it, as if alive." 
 
 That is the first form of the vision, according 
 to which "God has a few of us" (and one 
 is tempted to ask, "Why not many ? ") "whom 
 He whispers in the ear." Or to get back to 
 biblical language, " In all ages Wisdom enters 
 into holy souls, and makes them friends of God 
 and prophets." That is direct vision and 
 immediate audition the seeing for oneself of
 
 AARON'S BLESSING 189 
 
 x 
 
 which Job talked. But then, still on the line of 
 the Holy Grail and its lessons, there are those 
 who see through the eyes of the one that has 
 seen, such as Percival and Galahad when the 
 message comes to them that " the holy thing 
 is here again among us, brother." 
 
 " She shot the deathless passion in her eyes 
 Through him, and made him hers, and laid her mind 
 On him, and he believed in her belief." 
 
 That is the indirect vision ; it leads on to 
 direct vision later, but it begins, as Galahad 
 confesses, with what " thy sister taught me first 
 to see." This is a Scriptural method ; it is in 
 the Old Testament, in the form, " O taste and 
 see how gracious the Lord is," and in the New 
 Testament in the form, " That which our eyes 
 have looked upon declare we unto you." Such 
 being the distinction between the vision direct 
 and the vision reflected, it seems clear that we 
 must be prepared for either form of illumina- 
 tion, and be willing to learn fresh truths about 
 God, either directly or by intermediaries. The
 
 igo AARON'S BLESSING 
 
 first of the two methods is the doctrine of 
 immediate inspiration ; it is individualist to the 
 last degree, expresses itself in the first person 
 singular and in the second person singular, and 
 not at all in the third person plural. Its descrip- 
 tion is of the form contained in the words, 
 " And the Lord said unto Moses, I saw the Lord 
 sitting upon a throne," or "The word of the 
 Lord came to John the son of Zachariah in the 
 wilderness." 
 
 The second method of illumination consists 
 in seeing God in other people and by other 
 people. It is socialist in character, closely con- 
 nected with the structure of the Church, by 
 which the manifold wisdom of God is made 
 known, even to principalities and powers, and 
 it involves a willingness to receive, which is 
 often a harder grace to obtain than that of 
 giving. Its watchword might be, " They 
 glorified God in me," or "The children of Israel 
 saw the skin of the face of Moses that it 
 shone" ; or the same thought may be expressed 
 in a stray testimony which has come down out
 
 AARON'S BLESSING igi 
 
 of the early Church to the effect that "thou 
 hast seen thy brother, thou hast seen thy God !" 
 I have a conviction that it often pleases God 
 to humble us by the means which He chooses 
 to illuminate us. It is related of Jacob Behmen, 
 the great German mystic, that the immediate 
 cause of the revelation which changed his whole 
 life was the reflection of a sunbeam upon him 
 from a bit of glass or tin that was lying in the 
 road. From that bit of tin he became illu- 
 minated and illuminating. William Law sat 
 at his feet, and so, they say, did Hegel and 
 ever so many more noble souls. All that, shall 
 we say, from one little bit of tin ? Well, that 
 will serve for allegory. Suppose the bit of tin 
 to be a human soul, the humblest of souls, 
 humbler for its very vision, less because it has 
 become more ; how often does the Lord send 
 us to school to such, that they may tell us the 
 secrets of the Kingdom, and instruct us how 
 we may more effectively lose ourselves and find 
 Him ! It pleases Him to perfect praise in a 
 choir of babes and so to still the enemy and
 
 IQ2 AARON'S BLESSING 
 
 the avenger ; He sets the old to learn of the 
 young, the rich of the poor, the scribe of the 
 illiterate. It makes for solidarity, too, when 
 maid-servants prophesy, and when old men and 
 young men are able to exchange their dreams. 
 
 Now, if this be the case, then it follows that 
 we must prepare ourselves in advance to learn 
 great truths of unlikely people. This is a 
 great grace, and almost all great souls have 
 it. John Wesley, for example, was con- 
 spicuous therein. He went to the Moravian 
 meeting to hear some one read Luther's Pre- 
 face to the Romans, and the whole world is 
 richer for his going. True, he went reluc- 
 tantly, but he went ; and a strange warmth 
 at the heart was his benediction. I am afraid 
 if he had lived in the present day he would 
 have run the risk of putting himself under 
 vows never to drink of an unauthorised 
 spring ! How many there are who make 
 themselves and their world the poorer because 
 they promise their guides never to attend a 
 Nonconformist meeting, or, to speak more
 
 AARON'S BLESSING 193 
 
 generally, who refuse in advance to go where 
 grace entices them. But I can hardly think 
 that Wesley could have been permanently 
 made into a man of such narrow outlook ; if 
 he had been, he would never have had the 
 world for his parish. 
 
 And if we are right that great truths are 
 often to be learned of unlikely teachers, I 
 believe it will be found that this is especially 
 true in the region of the inward life, where 
 our progress so often turns upon our losing 
 sight of or inverting the scale of values which 
 prevails in the world and in the Church. The 
 doctrine of sanctification, for instance, is seldom 
 learnt from those whom we should naturally 
 elect to teach us. Madame Guyon learnt it, 
 or one branch of it, from a beggar on a bridge, 
 whom she saw once, if I remember rightly, and 
 no more. In this region of the spiritual life, 
 at all events, it pays to look down. 
 
 But we must return to our benediction ; and 
 it would not be proper to pass away from the 
 Old Testament presentation of it (it is, as we 
 
 14
 
 194 AARON'S BLESSING 
 
 have implied, neither old nor new, but simply 
 eternal) without asking what becomes of the 
 high priest who is, under the ancient theo- 
 logy, God's benedictional delegate. Must it 
 not be that this delegated power to bless 
 inheres in the Church and is the privilege 
 of the believer, and that even if Aaron is 
 caught away his office remains ? It was said 
 to Abraham, " I will bless thee and be thou 
 a blessing." Is there any one of us that ought 
 to be less richly endowed, either in reception 
 or in transmission ? Is not the priestly and 
 intercessional man and woman with us yet ? 
 Do they not still put the name of the Lord 
 on the children of Israel, and lift hands of 
 prayer and say, "The Lord bless thee and 
 keep thee " ? And from some souls over 
 some souls the fountain of intercession plays 
 night and day. If we watch them at their 
 work we shall soon learn some of their secrets ; 
 one is that they do not " ask in prayer that 
 which others may not share," by which means 
 prayer is continually retranslated into bene-
 
 AARON'S BLESSING 195 
 
 diction ; another is that they are always 
 wishing for others more of the joy of the 
 kingdom of heaven than they have them- 
 selves ; and a third is that they rejoice in the 
 work of other of God's people as if it were 
 their own. And, last of all, they are as skilled 
 in saying, " Hast Thou not a blessing for this 
 one ? " as in the necessary art of asking, " Hast 
 Thou not a blessing for me, even for me ? " 
 For those that are of such a spirit the fields 
 are always white to the harvest ; they 
 continually gather fruit unto life eternal.
 
 Ube (Bresbam press: 
 
 UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, 
 WOKING AND LONDON.
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
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 STAMPED BELOW.