PKEEDOn I 
 
Mabel F. Edwards 
 1880-1952 
 
 L^- M-hVXfA 
 
PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
U-. 
 
PHILLIPS BROOKS' 
 
 ADDRESSES 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 Rev. JULIUS H. WARD 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 BOSTON 
 CHARLES E. BROWN & CO. 
 
Copyright, 1893, 
 By Charles E. Brown & Co. 
 
 Ke?M^fAj6> 2592 1 1 
 
 GIFT 
 
 Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 
 Presswork by S. J. Parkhiil & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 
 
873 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 o^Ko 
 
 Phillips Brooks never spoke on public occa- 
 sions without saying something notable. His 
 Lenten addresses at Trinity Church were so good 
 that people hung upon his lips for the simplest 
 word that he uttered. When he went to New 
 York to give addresses in the venerable old 
 Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, it 
 seemed as if the whole financial world was eager 
 to crowd into that ancient edifice and hear of its 
 duties and have pointed out its way to the king- 
 dom of heaven by this greatest of modern evan- 
 gelists. Phillips Brooks had the rare faculty of 
 never speaking nonsense: he never gushed in 
 religion; he always respected the inborn nobil- 
 ity of men and addressed himself to a sinner as 
 if he were a child of God. This accounts for 
 the almost perfect accord which was at once 
 
4 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 established between himself and his hearers. 
 He did not deal out to them the terrors of the 
 Lord, but he drew them by the silken cords of 
 love to see some phase of the great Father that 
 had escaped their notice, and he left them 
 nearer to the kingdom of God than they were 
 before. He was not simply a great preacher, 
 but a master of the oratory of the heart. It 
 was possible sometimes to say that his method 
 was not logical, and that the intellectual appeal 
 could have been improved, but no one could 
 listen to him for five minutes without feeling 
 that this man had a message from God, and that 
 he was trying to bring men nearer to the Christ 
 whom he loved and served. The greatness of 
 his preaching lay in its complete separation 
 from his own personality. This may seem a 
 paradox; but when one considers addresses like 
 those contained in this volume and analyzes 
 them to see what the method was and what part 
 Phillips Brooks had in it, he is surprised to find 
 that the same things might have been said by 
 any one else, if he knew how to present them 
 with equal grace and truth. 
 
INTBOJDUCTION. 6 
 
 Phillips Brooks was at his best often in his 
 more familiar talks, in his confirmation ad- 
 dresses to his own people, in his conferences 
 with young men, in his Lenten addresses to his 
 own people, and especially in his short sermons 
 at the Noon-Lent service in St. Paul's Church. 
 For several years he was always on the list of 
 special preachers at this service, and for the 
 last two years the ancient edifice has been 
 crowded to overflowing during the days that he 
 spoke. His addresses were listened to eagerly 
 by the brainy men of State Street, the mer- 
 chants and the lawyers of the city, and by the 
 devout women of the Back Bay, and by the 
 poor and plain men who found a sitting at the 
 noon hour in St. Paul's Church in order to see 
 how beautiful life was. as Bishop Brooks was 
 able to set it forth in the Christian light. He 
 knew how to touch all the keys of the human 
 heart, and yet he touched them like a man of 
 genius whose spirit had been consecrated to 
 Jesus Christ. No one could equal him in these 
 appeals and presentations of truth; they were 
 his own fashionings of the Gospel; and in the 
 
6 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 discourses here presented, most of which were 
 taken down from his lips by the short-hand 
 reporters, he finds an utterance that is equal to 
 anything that he ever said. He had the natural 
 way of putting things, the habit of the orator 
 and the preacher who moulds language and 
 thought as the potter does his clay. 
 
 When I once ventured to say to Emerson what 
 his poetry had done for me, he instantly replied, 
 as I sat by his plain table in that memorable 
 study where he wrote his " Essays, '^ " I am not 
 a poet; I have not the lyrical faculty; I can 
 only speak imperfectly in plain prose." I be- 
 lieve that I am the only person who ever inter- 
 viewed Phillips Brooks with his own consent, 
 but I never dared to ask him how he made his 
 sermons. One of his manuscript sermons he 
 kindly loaned to me, and I studied it more 
 faithfully than any boy ever learned his lesson 
 in Greek. It was a sermon printed by his per- 
 mission in the Andover Review for May, 1892, 
 and which let one into the very heart of his 
 intellectual and religious life. I found that it 
 had been used on three several occasions, and 
 
INTRODUCTION, 7 
 
 that it expressed* his theological creed more 
 completely than anything he had ever said 
 before. When I remarked to him, as a reason 
 for asking the loan of this manuscript for a 
 special purpose, that it expressed in a nutshell 
 his intellectual and religious position, he as- 
 sented to my statement, but, though he gave me 
 the opportunity to ask any number of questions 
 in the privacy of this interview, which was to 
 enable me to write correctly of him, I could not 
 bring myself to touch upon any of the reserves 
 of a great soul. 
 
 And yet he gave me in the confidence of 
 this interview more than I asked for, more 
 than I deserved to receive, and I felt after 
 the talk was ended, which was simply to enable 
 me to speak the truth about him, that I had 
 seen deeper into this man's inmost life than I 
 had ever seen into the springs of motive in any 
 other man whom I had been permitted to know. 
 That November day when I sat alone with him 
 in his study, and he allowed me to ask him close 
 personal questions, was a red-letter day in my 
 life, and it revealed to me things about him 
 
8 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 that I had not understood before. Bishop Clark 
 says that he was one of the most transparent 
 men he ever knew, and I found him in this 
 conversation as simple as a child in telling me 
 more about himself than I had any right to ask 
 for. The week before he died, I met him at 
 the Diocesan House and received from him the 
 kindest possible words about a little book of 
 mine, recently published, but he said that I 
 might have been kinder to the Low Churchmen 
 of sixty or seventy years ago than I had allowed 
 myself to be, and when I asked him if I might 
 send a copy of the book to him, his reply was 
 so overwhelmingly gracious that I felt it to be 
 an honor to myself to have this privilege. Alas ! 
 this was the last word that I ever had with him. 
 We shook hands, and his beaming smile was the 
 last gleam of that wonderful face that I was to 
 have in this life. He was the noblest and man- 
 liest person, with the largest heart, the largest 
 charity, and the most comprehensive spirit that 
 
 I have ever known. 
 
 Julius H. Ward. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Beauty of a Life of Service . . 15 
 
 II. Thought and Action 41 
 
 III. The Duty of the Christian Business Man 71 
 
 IV. True Liberty ..." 97 
 
 V. The Christ in whom Christians Believe 119 
 
 VI. Abraham Lincoln . . • 151 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS, 
 
 Portrait, Phillips Brooks . . . Frontispiece 
 Portrait, Abraham Lincoln . . . . .150 
 
THE 
 
 BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 
 
 I SHOULD like to read to you again the words 
 of Je^us from the 8th chapter of the Gospel of 
 St. John: 
 
 "Then said Jesus to those Jews which be- 
 lieved on Him, if ye continue in My word, then 
 are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know 
 the truth, and the truth shall make you free. 
 They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and 
 were never in bondage to any man; how sayest 
 Thou, ye shall be made free? Jesus answered 
 them. Verily, verily, I say unto you, whosoever 
 committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the 
 servant abideth not in the house forever, but 
 the Son abideth ever. If the Son, therefore, 
 shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." 
 
 I want to speak to you to-day about the pur- 
 pose and the result of the freedom which Christ 
 gives to His disciples and the freedom into 
 15 
 
16 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 which man enters when he fulfils his life. The 
 purpose and result of freedom is service. It 
 sounds to us at first like a contradiction, like a 
 paradox. Great truths very often present them- 
 selves to us in the first place as paradoxes, and 
 it is only when we come to combine the two 
 different terms of which they are composed and 
 see how it is only by their meeting that the 
 truth does reveal itself to us, that the truth does 
 become known. It is by this same truth that 
 God frees our souls, not from service, not from 
 duty, but into service and into duty, and he who 
 mistakes the purpose of his freedom mistakes 
 the character of his freedom. He who thinks 
 that he is being released from the^work, and not 
 set free in order that he may "accomplish that 
 work, mistakes the Christ from whom the free- 
 dom comes, mistakes the condition into which 
 his soul is invited to enter. For if I was right 
 in saying what I said the other day, that the 
 freedom of a man simply consists in the larger 
 opportunity to be and to do all that God makes 
 him in His creation capable of being and doing, 
 then certainly if man has been capable of ser- 
 vice it is only by the entrance into service, by 
 the acceptance of that life of service for which 
 God has given man the capacity, that he enters 
 into the fulness of his freedom and becomes the 
 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 17 
 
 liberated child of God. You remember what I 
 said with regard to the manifestations of free- 
 dom and the figures and the illustrations, per- 
 haps some of them which we used, of the way 
 in which the bit of iron, taken out of its use- 
 lessness, its helplessness, and set in the midst 
 of the great machine, thereby recognizes the 
 purpose of its existence, and does the work for 
 which it was appointed, for it immediately be- 
 comes the servant of the machine into which 
 it was placed. Every part of its impulse flows 
 through all of its substance, and it does the 
 thing which it was made to do. When the ice 
 has melted upon the plain it is only when it 
 finds its way into the river and flows forth 
 freely to do the work which the live water has 
 to do that it really attains to its freedom. Only 
 then is it really liberated from the bondage in 
 which it was held while it was fastened in the 
 chains of winter. The same freed ice waits 
 until it so finds its freedom, and when man is 
 set free simply into the enjoyment of his own 
 life, simply into the realization of his own 
 existence, he has not attained the purposes of 
 his freedom, he has not come to the purposes 
 of his life. 
 
 It is one of the signs to me of how human 
 words are constantly becoming perverted that 
 
18 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 it surprises us when we think of freedom as a 
 condition in which a man is called upon to do, 
 and is enabled to do, the duty that God has laid 
 upon him. Duty has become to us such a hard 
 word, service has become to us a word so full of 
 the spirit of bondage, that it surprises us at the 
 first moment when we are called upon to realize 
 that it is in itself a word of freedom. And yet 
 we constantly are lowering the whole thought 
 of our being, we are bringing down the great- 
 ness and richness of that with which we have to 
 deal, until we recognize that God does not call 
 us to our fullest life simply for ourselves. The 
 spirit of selfishness is continually creeping in. 
 I think it may almost be said that there has 
 been no selfishness in the history of man like 
 that which has exhibited itself in man's relig- 
 ious life, showing itself in the way in which 
 man has seized upon spiritual privileges and 
 rejoiced in the good things that are to come to 
 him in the hereafter, because he had made him- 
 self the servant of God. The whole subject of 
 selfishness, and the way in which it loses itself 
 and finds itself again, is a very interesting one, 
 and I wish that we had time to dwell upon it. 
 It comes into a sort of general law which we are 
 recognizing everywhere — the way in which a 
 man very often, in his pursuit of the higher 
 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 19 
 
 form of a condition in which he has been living, 
 seems to lose that condition for a little while 
 and only to reach it a little farther on. He 
 seems to be abandoned by that power only that 
 he may meet it by and by and enter more 
 deeply into its heart and come more completely 
 into its service. So it is, I think, with the 
 self-devotion, consecration, and self-forgetful- 
 ness in which men realize their life. Very 
 often in the lower stages of man's life he forgets 
 himself, with a slightly emphasized individual 
 existence, not thinking very much of the pur- 
 pose of his life, till he easily forgets himself 
 among the things that are around him and for- 
 gets himself simply because there is so little of 
 himself for him to forget; but do not you know 
 perfectly well how very often when a man's life 
 becomes intensified and earnest, when he becomes 
 completely possessed with some great passion 
 and desire, it seems for the time to intensify his 
 selfishness? It does intensify his selfishness. 
 He is thinking so much in regard to himself 
 that the thought of other persons and their in- 
 terests is shut out of his life. And so very 
 often when a man has set before him the great 
 passion of the divine life, when he is called by 
 God to live the life of God and to enter into the 
 rewards of God, very often there seems to close 
 
20 PERFECT FBEEBOM. 
 
 around his life a certain bondage of selfishness, 
 and he who gave himself freely to his fellow- 
 men before now seems, by the very intensity, 
 eagerness, and earnestness with which his mind 
 is set upon the prize of the new life which is 
 presented to him — it seems as if everything 
 became concentrated upon himself, the saving 
 of his soul, the winning of his salvation. That 
 seat in heaven seems to burn so before his eyes 
 that he cannot be satisfied for a moment with 
 any thought that draws him away from it, and 
 he presses forward that he may be saved. But 
 by and by, as he enters more deeply into that 
 life, the self-forgetfulness comes to him again 
 and as a diviner thing. By and by, as the man 
 walks up the mountain, he seems to pass out of 
 the cloud which hangs about the lower slopes 
 of the mountain, until at last he stands upon 
 the pinnacle at the top, and there is in the per- 
 fect light. Is it not exactly like the mountain 
 at whose foot there seems to be the open sun- 
 shine where men see everything, and on whose 
 summit there is the sunshine, but on whose 
 sides, and half way up, there seems to linger a 
 long cloud, in which man has to struggle until 
 he comes to the full result of his life? So it is 
 with self-consecration, with service. You easily 
 do it in some small ways in the lower life. Life 
 
BE A UTY OV A LIFE OF SEE VICE, 21 
 
 becomes intensified and earnest with a serious 
 purpose, and it seems as if it gathered itself 
 together into selfishness. Only then it opens 
 by and by into the largest and noblest works of 
 men, in which they most manifest the richness 
 of their human nature and appropriate the 
 strength of God. Those are great and unselfish 
 acts. We know it at once if we turn to Him 
 who represents the fulness of the nature of our 
 humanity. 
 
 When I turn to Jesus and think of Him as the 
 manifestation of His own Christianity — and if 
 men would only look at the life of Jesus to see 
 what Christianity is, and not at the life of the 
 poor representatives of Jesus whom they see 
 around them, there would be so much more 
 clearness, they would be rid of so many difficul- 
 ties and doubts. When I look at the life of 
 Jesus I see that the purpose of consecration, 
 of emancipation, is service of His fellow-men. 
 I cannot think for a moment of Jesus as doing 
 that which so many religious people think they 
 are doing when they serve Christ, when they 
 give their lives to Him. I cannot think of Him 
 as simply saving His own soul, living His own 
 life, and completing His own nature in the sight 
 of God. It is a life of service from beginning 
 to end. He gives Himself to man because He 
 
22 PERFECT FREET>OM. 
 
 is absolutely the Child of God, and He sets up 
 service, and nothing but service, to be the ulti- 
 mate purpose, the one great desire, on which the 
 souls of His followers should be set, as His own 
 soul is set, upon it continually. 
 
 What is it that Christ has left to be His sym- 
 bol in the world, that we put upon our churches, 
 that we wear upon our hearts, that stands forth 
 so perpetually as the symbol of Christ's life? 
 Is it a throne from which a ruler utters his de- 
 crees? Is it a mountain top upon which some 
 rapt seer sits, communing with himself and 
 with the voices around him, and gathering great 
 truth into his soul and delighting in it? No, 
 not the throne and not the mountain top. It is 
 the cross. Oh, my brethren, that the cross 
 should be the great symbol of our highest 
 measure, that that which stands for consecra- 
 tion, that that which stands for the divine state- 
 ment that a man does not live for himself and 
 that a man loses himself when he does live for 
 himself — that that should be the symbol of our 
 religion and the great sign and token of our 
 faith! What sort of Christians are we that go 
 about asking for the things of this life first, 
 thinking that it shall make us prosperous to be 
 Christians, and then a little higher asking for 
 the things that pertain to the eternal prosperity, 
 
BE A UTY OF A LIFE OF SER VICE. 23 
 
 when the Great Master, who leaves us the great 
 law, in whom our Christian life is sxjiritually set 
 forth, has as His great symbol the cross, the 
 cross, the sign of consecration and obedience? 
 It is not simply suffering too. Christ does not " 
 stand primarily for suffering. Suffering is an 
 accident. It does not matter whether you and 
 I suffer. " Not enjoyment and not sorrow " is 
 our life, not sorrow any more than enjoyment, 
 but obedience and duty. If duty brings sorrow, 
 let it bring sorrow. It did bring sorrow to the 
 Christ, because it was impossible for a man to 
 serve the absolute righteousness in this world 
 and not to sorrow. If it had brought joy, and 
 glory, and triumph, if it had been greeted at its 
 entrance and applauded on the way. He would 
 have been as truly the consecrated soul that He 
 was in the days when, over a road that was 
 marked with the blood of His footprints. He 
 found His way up at last to the torturing cross. 
 It is not suffering; it is obedience. It is not 
 pain; it is consecration of life. It is the joy of 
 service that makes the life of Christ, and for us 
 to serve Him, serving fellow-man and God — as 
 he served fellow-man and God — whether it bring 
 pain or joy, if we can only get out of our souls 
 the thought that it matters not if we are happy 
 or sorrowful, if only we are dutiful and faithful, 
 
24 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 and brave and strong, then we should be in the 
 atmosphere, we should be in the great company 
 of the Christ. 
 
 It surprises me very often when I hear good 
 Christian people talk about Christ's entrance 
 into this world, Christ's coming to save this 
 world. They say it was so marvellous that 
 Jesus should be willing to come down from His 
 throne in heaven and undertake all the strange 
 sorrow and distress that belonged to Him when 
 He came to save the world from its sins. Won- 
 derful? There was no wonder in it; no wonder 
 if we enter up into the region where Jesus lives 
 and think of life as He must have thought of 
 life. It is the same wonder that people feel 
 about the miracles of Jesus. Is it a wonder that 
 when a divine life is among men, nature should 
 have a response to make to Him, and He should 
 do things that you and Ij in our little humanity, 
 find it impossible to do? No, indeed, there is 
 no wonder that God loved the world. There is 
 no wonder that Christ, the Son of God, at any 
 sacrifice undertook to save the world. The 
 wonder would have been if God, sitting in His 
 heaven, the wonder would have been if Jesus, 
 ready to come here to the earth and seeing how 
 it was possible to save man from sin by suffer- 
 ing, had not suffered. Do you wonder at the 
 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 25 
 
 mother, when she gives her life without a hesi- 
 tation or a cry, when she gives her life with joy, 
 with thankfulness, for her child, counting it her 
 privilege? Do you wonder at the patriot, the 
 hero, when he rushes into the battle to do the 
 good deed which it is possible for him to do? 
 No, read your own nature deeper and you will 
 understand your Christ. It is no wonder that 
 He should have died upon the cross ; the wonder 
 would have been if, with the inestimable privi- 
 lege of saving man. He had shrunk from that 
 cross and turned away. It sets before us that 
 it is not the glories of suffering, it is not the 
 necessity of suffering, it is simply the beauty of 
 obedience and the fulfilment of a man's life in 
 doing his duty and rendering the service which 
 it is possible for him to render to his fellow-man. 
 I said that a man when he did that left behind 
 him all the thought of the life which he was 
 willing to live within himself, even all the high- 
 est thought. It is not your business and mine 
 to study whether we shall get to heaven, even to 
 study whether we shall be good men; it is our 
 business to study how we shall come into the 
 midst of the purposes of God and have the 
 unspeakable privilege in these few years of 
 doing something of His work. And yet so is 
 our life all one, so is the kingdom of God which 
 
26 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 surrounds us and enfolds us one bright and 
 blessed unity, that when a man has devoted 
 himself to the service of God and his fellow-man, 
 immediately he is thrown back upon his own 
 nature, and he sees now — it is the right place 
 for him to see — that he must be the brave, 
 strong, faithful man, because it is impossible for 
 him to do his duty and to render his service, 
 except it is rendered out of a heart that is full 
 of faithfulness, that is brave and true. There 
 is one word of Jesus that always comes back to 
 me as about the noblest thing that human lips 
 have ever said upon our earth, and the most 
 comprehensive thing, that seems to sweep into 
 itself all the commonplace experience of man- 
 kind. Do you remember when He was sitting 
 with His disci^Dles, at the last supper, how He 
 lifted up His voice and prayed, and in the midst 
 of His prayer there came these wondrous words : 
 "For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they 
 also might be sanctified "? The whole of human 
 life is there. Shall a man cultivate himself? 
 No, not primarily. Shall a man serve the world, 
 strive to increase the kingdom of God in the 
 world? Yes, indeed, he shall. How shall he 
 do it? By cultivating himself, and instantly 
 he is thrown back upon his own life. "For 
 their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also 
 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 27 
 
 might be sanctified." I am my best, not simply 
 for myself, but for the world. My brethren, is 
 there anything in all the teachings that man has 
 had from his fellow-man, all that has come down 
 to him from the lips of God, that is nobler, that 
 is more far-reaching than that — to be my best 
 not simply for my own sake, but for the sake of 
 the world into which, setting my best, I shall 
 make that world more complete, I shall do my 
 little part to renew and to recreate it in the 
 image of God? That is the law of my existence. 
 And the man that makes that the law of his 
 existence neither neglects himself nor his fel- 
 low-men, neither becomes the self-absorbed stu- 
 dent and cultivator of his own life upon the one 
 hand, nor does he become, abandoning himself, 
 simply the wasting benefactor of his brethren 
 upon the other. You can help your fellow-men, 
 you must help your fellow -men ; but the only way 
 you can help them is by being the noblest and 
 the best man that it is possible for you to be. I 
 watch the workman build upon the building 
 which by and by is to soar into the skies, to toss 
 its pinnacles up to the heaven, and I see him 
 looking up and wondering where those pinnacles 
 are to be, thinking how high they are to be, 
 measuring the feet, wondering how they are to 
 be built, and all the time he is cramming a rotten 
 
28 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 stone into the building just where he has set to 
 work. Let him forget the pinnacles, if he will, 
 or hold only the floating image of them in his 
 imagination for his inspiration; but the thing 
 that he must do is to put a brave, strong soul, 
 an honest and substantial life into the building 
 just where he is now at work. 
 
 It seems to me that that comes home to us all. 
 Men are questioning now as they never have 
 questioned before whether Christianity is indeed 
 the true religion which is to be the salvation of 
 the world. They are feeling how the world 
 needs salvation, how it needs regeneration, how 
 it is wrong and bad all through and through, 
 mixed with the good that is in it everywhere. 
 Everywhere there is the good and the bad, and 
 the great question that is on men's minds to-day, 
 as I believe it has never been upon men's minds 
 before, is this : Is this Christian religion, with 
 its high pretensions, this Christian life that 
 claims so much for itself, is it competent for the 
 task that it has undertaken to do? Can it meet 
 all these human problems, and relieve all these 
 human miseries, and fulfil all these human hopes? 
 It is the old story over again, when John the 
 Baptist, puzzled in his prison, said to Jesus, 
 "Art thou He that should come? or look we for 
 another?" It seems to me that the Christian 
 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 29 
 
 Church is hearing that cry in its ears to-day: 
 "Art thou He that should come? '' Can you do 
 this which the world unmistakably needs to be 
 done ? 
 
 Christian men, it is for us to give our bit of 
 answer to that question. It is for us, in whom 
 the Christian Church is at this moment partially 
 embodied, to declare that Christianity, that the 
 Christian faith, the Christian manhood, can do 
 that for the world which the world needs. You 
 say, "What can I do?" You can furnish one 
 Christian life. You can furnish a life so faith- 
 ful to every duty, so ready for every service, so 
 determined not to commit every sin, that the 
 great Christian Church shall be the stronger for 
 your living in it, and the problem of the world 
 be answered, and a certain great peace come into 
 this poor, perplexed phase of our humanity as it 
 sees that new revelation of what Christianity is. 
 Yes, Christ can give the world the thing it needs 
 in unknown ways and methods that we have not 
 yet begun to suspect. Christianity has not yet 
 been tried. My friends, no man dares to con- 
 demn the Christian faith to-day, because the 
 Christian faith has not been tried. Not until 
 men get rid of the thought that it is a poor 
 machine, an expedient for saving them from suf- 
 fering and pain, not until they get the grand 
 
30 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 idea of it as the great power of God present in 
 and through the lives of men, not until then does 
 Christianity enter upon its true trial and become 
 ready to show what it can do. Therefore we 
 struggle against our sin in order that men may 
 be saved around us, and not simply that our own 
 souls may be saved. 
 
 Tell me you have a sin that you mean to 
 commit this evening that is going to make this 
 night black. What can keep you from commit- 
 ting that sin? Suppose you look into its conse- 
 quences. Suppose the wise man tells you what 
 will be the physical consequences of that sin. 
 You shudder and you shrink, and, perhaps, you 
 are partially deterred. Suppose you see the 
 glory that might come to you, physical, temporal, 
 spiritual, if you do not commit that sin. The 
 opposite of it shows itself to you — the blessing 
 and the richness in your life. Again there comes 
 a great power that shall control your lust and 
 wickedness. Suppose there comes to you some- 
 thing even deeper than that, no consequence on 
 consequence at all, but simply an abhorrence for 
 the thing, so that your whole nature shrinks from 
 it as the nature of God shrinks from a sin that is 
 polluting and filthy and corrupt and evil. They 
 are all great powers. Let us thank God for them 
 all. He knows that we are weak enough to need 
 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 31 
 
 every power that can possibly be brought to bear 
 upon our feeble lives ; but if, along with all of 
 them, there could come this other power, if along 
 with them there could come the certainty that if 
 you refrain from that sin to-night you make the 
 sum of sin that is in the world, and so the sum 
 of all temptation that is in the world, and so the 
 sum of future evil that is to spring out of temp- 
 tation in the world, less, shall there not be a 
 nobler impulse rise up in your heart, and shall 
 you not say: "I will not do it. I will be 
 honest, I will be sober, I will be pure, at least, 
 to-night." I dare to think that there are men 
 here to whom that appeal can come, men who, 
 perhaps, will be all dull and deaf if one speaks 
 to them about their personal salvation; who, if 
 one dares to picture to them, appealing to their 
 better nature, trusting to their nobler soul, that 
 there is in them the power to save other men 
 from sin, and to help the work of God by the 
 control of their own passions and the fulfilment 
 of their own duty, will be stirred to the higher 
 life. Men — very often we do not trust them 
 enough — will answer to the higher appeal that 
 seems to be beyond them when the poor, lower 
 appeal that comes within the region of their self- 
 ishness is cast aside, and they will have nothing 
 to do with it. 
 
32 PERFECT FBEEDOM, 
 
 Oh, tliis marvellous, this awful power that 
 we have over other people's lives! Oh! the 
 power of the sin that you have done years and 
 years ago ! It is awful to think pf it. I think 
 there is hardly anything more terrible to the 
 human thought than this — the picture of a man 
 who, having sinned years and years ago in a way 
 that involved other souls in his sin, and then, 
 having repented of his sin and undertaken 
 another life, knows certainly that the power, 
 the consequence of that sin is going on outside 
 of his reach, beyond even his ken and knowl- 
 edge. He cannot touch it. You wronged a soul 
 ten years ago. You taught a boy how to tell his 
 first mercantile lie ; you degraded the early stand- 
 ards of his youth. What has become of that 
 boy to-day? You may have repented. He has 
 passed out of your sight. He has gone years 
 and years ago. Somewhere in this great, multi- 
 tudinous mass of humanity he is sinning and 
 sinning and reduplicating and extending the sin 
 that you did. You touched the faith of some 
 believing soul years ago with some miserable 
 sneer of yours, with some cynical and sceptical 
 disparagement of God and of the man who is the 
 utterance of God upon the earth. You taught 
 the soul that was enthusiastic to be full of scep- 
 ticisms and doubts. You wronged a woman years 
 
BE A UTY OF A LIFE OF SEE VICE. 33 
 
 ago, and her life has gone out from, your life, 
 you cannot begin to tell where. You have re- 
 pented of your sin. You have bowed yourself, 
 it may be, in dust and ashes. You have entered 
 upon a new life. You are pure to-day. But 
 where is the sceptical soul? Where is the 
 ruined woman whom you sent forth into the 
 world out of the shadow of your sin years ago? 
 You cannot touch that life. You cannot reach 
 it. You do not know where it is. No steps of 
 yours, quickened with all your earnestness, can 
 pursue it. No contrition of yours can draw back 
 its consequences. Eemorse cannot force the 
 bullet back again into the gun from which it 
 once has gone forth. It makes life awful to the 
 man who has ever sinned, who has ever wronged 
 and hurt another life because of this sin, because 
 no sin ever was done that did not hurt another 
 life. I know the mercy of our God, that while 
 He has put us into each other's power to a fear- 
 ful extent, He never will let any soul absolutely 
 go to everlasting ruin for another's sin; and so 
 I dare to see the love of God pursuing that lost 
 soul where you cannot pursue it. But that does 
 not for one moment lift the shadow from your 
 heart, or cease to make you tremble when you 
 think of how your sin has outgrown itself and 
 is running far, far away where you can never 
 follow it. 
 
34 PEBFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 Thank God tlie other thing is true as well. 
 Thank God that when a man does a bit of ser- 
 vice, however little it may be, of that too he can 
 never trace the consequences. Thank God that 
 that which in some better moment, in some nobler 
 inspiration, you did ten years ago to make your 
 brother's faith a little more strong, to let your 
 shop boy confirm and not doubt the confidence 
 in man which he had brought into his business, 
 to establish the purity of a soul instead of stain- 
 ing it and shaking it, thank God, in this quick, 
 electric atmosphere in which we live, that, too, 
 runs forth. Do not say in your terror, " I will 
 do nothing." You must do something. Only 
 let Christ tell you — let Christ tell you that 
 there is nothing that a man rests upon in the 
 moment, that he. thinks of, as he looks back 
 upon it when it has sunk into the past, with any 
 satisfaction, except some service to his fellow- 
 man, some strengthening and helping of a human 
 soul. 
 
 Two men are walking down the street together 
 and talking away. See what different conditions 
 those two men are in. One of them has his soul 
 absolutely full of the desire to help his fellow- 
 man. He peers into those faces as he goes, and 
 sees the divine possibility that is in them, and 
 he sees the divine nature everywhere. They are 
 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SEE VICE, 35 
 
 talking about the idlest trifles, about the last bit 
 of local Boston politics. But in their souls one 
 of those men has consecrated himself, with the 
 new morning, to the glorious service of God, and 
 the other of them is asking how he may be a 
 little richer in his miserable wealth when the 
 day sinks. Oh, we look into the other world 
 and read the great words and hear it said. Between 
 me and thee, this and that, there is a great gulf 
 fixed ; and we think of something that is to come 
 in the eternal life. Is there any gulf in eter- 
 nity, is there any gulf between heaven and hell 
 that is wider, and deeper, and blacker, that is 
 more impassable than that gulf which lies be- 
 tween these two men going upon their daily way? 
 Oh, friends, it is not that God is going to judge 
 us some day. That is not the awful thing. It 
 is that God knows us now. If I stop an instant 
 and know that God knows me through all these 
 misconceptions and blunders of my brethren, 
 that God knows me — that is the awful thing. 
 The future judgment shall but tell it. It is here, 
 here upon my conscience, now. It is awful to 
 think how the commonplace things that men can 
 do, the commonplace thoughts that men can 
 think, the commonplace lives that men can live, 
 are but in the bosom of the future. The thing 
 that impresses me more and more is this — that 
 
36 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 we only need to have extended to the multitude 
 that which is at this moment present in the few, 
 and the world really would be saved. There is 
 but the need of the extension into a multitude of 
 souls of that which a few souls have already 
 attained in their consecration of themselves to 
 human good, and to the service of God, and I 
 will not say the millennium would have come, 
 I don't know much about the millennium, but 
 heaven would have come, the new Jerusalem 
 would be here. There are men enough in this 
 church this morning, there are men enough sit- 
 ting here within the sound of my voice to-day, 
 if they were inspired by the spirit of God and 
 counted it the great privilege of their life, to do 
 the work of God — there are men enough here to 
 save this city, and to make this a glowing city 
 of our Lord, to relieve its poverty, to lighten its 
 darkness, to lift up the cloud that is upon hearts, 
 to turn it into a great, I will not say psalm- 
 singing city, but God-serving, God-abiding city, 
 to touch all the difficult problems of how society 
 and government ought to be organized then with 
 a power with which they should yield their diffi- 
 culty and open gradually. The light to measure 
 would be clear enough, if only the spirit is 
 there. Give me five hundred men, nay, give 
 me one hundred men of the spirit that I know 
 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE, 37 
 
 to-day in three men that I well understand, and 
 I will answer for it that the city shall be saved. 
 And you, my friend, are one of the five hundred 
 — you are one of the one hundred. 
 
 "Oh, but,'' you say, "is not this slavery over 
 again? You have talked about freedom, and 
 here I am once more a slave. I had about got 
 free from the bondage of my fellow-men, and 
 here I am right in the midst of it again. What 
 has become of my personality, of my indepen- 
 dence, if I am to live thus ? " Aye, you have got 
 to learn what every noblest man has always 
 learned, that no man becomes independent of his 
 fellow-men excepting in serving his fellow-men. 
 You have got to learn that Christianity comes to 
 us not simply as a luxury but as a force, and no 
 man who values Christianity simply as a luxury 
 which he possesses really gets the Christianity 
 which he tries to value. Only when Christianity 
 is a force, only when I seek independence of men 
 in serving men, do I cease to be a slave to their 
 whims. I must dress as they think I ought to 
 "dress; I must walk in the streets as they think 
 I ought to walk; I must do business just after 
 their fashion; I must accept their standards; 
 but when Christ has taken possession of me and 
 I am a total man, I am more or less independent 
 of these men. Shall I care about their little 
 
38 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 whims and oddities? Shall I care about how 
 they criticise the outside of my life? Shall I 
 peer into their faces as I meet them in the street, 
 to see whether they approve of me or not? And 
 yet am I not their servant? There is nothing 
 now I will not do to serve them, there is nothing 
 now I will not do to save them. If the cross 
 comes, I welcome the cross, and look upon it with 
 joy, if, by 'my death upon the cross in any way, 
 I may echo the salvation of my Lord and save 
 them. Independent of them? Surely. And yet 
 their servant? Perfectly. Was ever man so 
 independent in Jerusalem as Jesus was? What 
 cared He for the sneer of the Pharisee, for the 
 learned scorn of the Sadducee, for the taunt of 
 the people and the little boys that had been taught 
 to jeer at Him as He went down the street, and 
 yet the very servant of all their life? He says 
 there are two kinds of men — they who sit upon 
 a throne and eat, and they who serve. " I am 
 among you as he that serveth." Oh, seek inde- 
 pendence. Insist upon independence. Insist 
 that you will not be the slave of the poor, petty 
 standards of your fellow-men. But insist upon 
 it only in the way in which it can be insisted 
 upon, by becoming absolutely the servant of 
 their needs. So only shall you be independent 
 of their whims. There is one great figure, and 
 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 39 
 
 it has taken in all Christian consciousness, that 
 again and again this work with Christ has been 
 asserted to be the true service in the army of a 
 great master, of a great captain, who goes before 
 us to his victory, that it is asserted that in that 
 captain, in the entrance into his army, every 
 power is set free. Do you remember the words 
 that a good many of us read or heard yesterday 
 in our churches, where Jesus was doing one of 
 His miracles, and it is said that a devil was cast 
 out, the dumb spake? Every power becomes the 
 man's possession, and he uses it in his freedom, 
 and he fights with it with all his force, just as 
 soon as the devil is cast out of him. 
 
 I have tried to tell you the noblest motive in 
 which you should be a pure, an upright, a faith- 
 ful, and a strong man. It is not for the salva- 
 tion of your life, it is not for the salvation of 
 yourself. It is not for the satisfaction of your 
 tastes. It is that .you may take your place in 
 the great army of God and go forward having 
 something to do with the work that He is doing 
 in the world. You remember the days of the 
 war, and how ashamed of himself a man felt who 
 never touched with his finger the great struggle 
 in which the nation was engaged. Oh, to go 
 through this life and never touch with my finger 
 the vast work that Christ is doing, and when the 
 
40 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 cry of triumph arises at the end to stand there, 
 not having done one little, unknown, unnoticed 
 thing to bring about that which is the true life 
 of the man and of the world, that is awful. And 
 I dare to believe that there are young men in 
 this church this morning who, failing to be 
 touched by every promise of their own salvation 
 and every threatening of their own damnation, 
 will still lift themselves up and take upon them 
 the duty of men, and be soldiers of Jesus Christ, 
 and have a part in the battle, and have a part 
 somewhere in the victory that is sure to come. 
 Don't be selfish anywhere. Don't be selfish, 
 •most of all, in your religion. Let yourselves 
 free into your religion, and be utterly unselfish. 
 Claim your freedom in service. 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 
 
 I WANT once more to read to you these words 
 from the eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. 
 John : 
 
 " As He spake these words, many believed on 
 Him. Then said Jesus to those Jews which be- 
 lieved on Him, If ye continue in My word, then 
 are ye My disciples indeed ; and ye shall know 
 the truth, and the truth shall make you free. 
 They answered Him, We be Abraham's seed, and 
 were never in bondage to any man : how sayest 
 Thou, Ye shall be made free? Jesus answered 
 them. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever 
 committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the 
 servant abideth not in the house for ever : but the 
 Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore, shall 
 make you free, ye shall be free indeed." 
 
 There are two great regions in which the life 
 of every true man resides. They are the region 
 of action and the region of thought. It is impos- 
 sible to separate these two regions from one 
 41 
 
42 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 another and to bid one man live in one of them 
 alone and the other man live only in the other 
 of them. It is impossible to say to the business 
 man that he shall live only in the region of 
 action, it is impossible to say to the scholar that 
 he shall live only in the region of thought, for 
 thought and action make one complete and 
 single life. Thought is not simply the sea 
 upon which the world of action rests, but, like 
 the air which pervades the whole solid substance 
 of our globe, it permeates and fills it in every 
 part. It is thought which gives to it its life. 
 It is thought which makes the manifestation of 
 itself in every different action of man. I hope 
 we are not so deluded as men have been some- 
 times, as some men are to-day, that we shall try 
 to separate these two lives from one another, 
 and one man say, " Everything depends upon my 
 action, and I care not what I think," or, as men 
 have said, at least, in other times, "If I think 
 right, it matters not how I act." But the right 
 thought and the right action make one complete 
 and single man. 
 
 Now we have been speaking, upon these Mon- 
 day noons, with regard to the freedom of that ' 
 highest life which is lived under the inspiration 
 of Jesus Christ and which we call the Christian 
 life. We have claimed that it is the highest of 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION, 43 
 
 all lives because it is the freest of all lives, that 
 it is the freest of all lives because it is the highest, 
 and it may be that we have thought that it was 
 true with regard to the active life in which men 
 live, it may be that we have somehow persuaded 
 ourselves, that it has seemed to us as if there 
 were evidence that a man who lived his life in 
 the following of Jesus Christ was a free man in 
 regard to his activity. But now there comes to 
 us the other thought, and it is impossible for us 
 to meet together as we have met together again 
 and again here without asking with regard to 
 the other region of man's life and how it is with 
 man there, for there are a great many people, I 
 believe, who think that while the Christian faith 
 offers to man a noble sphere of action and sets 
 free powers that would otherwise remain un- 
 changed, yet when we come to the region of 
 thought or belief, there it is inevitable that man 
 should know himself, when he accepts the faith 
 of Jesus Christ, it is inevitable that there the 
 man should become less free than it has been 
 thought that he was before the blessed Saviour 
 was accepted as the master and the ruler of his 
 life. Men say to themselves and to one another, 
 ^'Yes, I shall be freer to act, I shall be nobler 
 in my action, but I shall certainly enchain mind 
 and spirit, I shall certainly bind myself to think 
 
44 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 away from the rich freedom of thought in which 
 I have been inclined to live." We make very 
 much of free thought in these days. Let us 
 always remember that free thought means the 
 opportunity to think, and not the opportunity 
 not to think. We rejoice in the way in which 
 our fathers came to this country and in their 
 children perpetuated the purpose of their com- 
 ing, in order that they might have freedom to 
 worship God. Do we worship God? Simply to 
 have attained freedom and not to use freedom for 
 its true purpose, not to live within the world of 
 freedom according to the life which is given to 
 us there — that is to do dishonor to the freedom, 
 to disown the purpose for which the freedom has 
 been given to us. I want to speak to you then, 
 while I may speak to-day, with regard to the 
 freedom of the Christian thought. 
 
 I want to claim, that which I believe with all 
 my soul, that he who lives in the faith of Jesus 
 Christ lives in the freest action of his mental 
 powers, and there sees before him and makes 
 himself a ]3art of the large world into which man 
 shall enter, in which he has perfect liberty and 
 can exercise his powers as he could never have 
 exercised them without. It is not very strange 
 to think that men should have sometimes come 
 to think that the religion of Jesus Christ was a 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 45 
 
 slavery that was laid upon the mind of man, 
 because very often those who have been the dis- 
 ciples of that religion, those who have been the 
 preachers and exponents of that religion, have 
 claimed just exactly that thing. They have 
 seemed to say to themselves and to one another, 
 to the world to which they speak, that man does 
 give up the powers of his reason when he enters 
 into the powers of his faith, when he enters into 
 the great realm of faith. Led by some sort of 
 influence, led by some heresy with regard to the 
 capacity of man, or with regard to the dealing of 
 God with man, or with regard to the purposes of 
 man's life upon the earth, they have been con- 
 tent to say that man must give up the power of 
 thought in order that* he might enter into the 
 Christian life and attain to all the purposes of 
 the Christian discipline, they have been content 
 to say that man must give up the noblest power 
 of his nature in order to enter upon the highest 
 life. Well might a man hesitate, hesitate what- 
 ever the blessings that were offered to him in 
 the fulness of the Christian experience, if he 
 were called upon to give up that which made the 
 very centre and glory of his life, that which 
 linked him most immediately to the God from 
 whom he sprang. It would be as if in the storm 
 the ship should cast over its engine in order to 
 
46 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 save its own life. The ship might be saved a 
 little while from going down in the depths of 
 despair, but it never would reach the port to 
 which it had been bound; it never would accom- 
 plish the purpose of the voyage upon which it 
 had set forth. Let us put absolutely away from 
 us all such thoughts. Let us come under the 
 inspiration of Jesus Christ Himself, who says to 
 us, in these words which we have repeatedly read 
 to one another, that it is the truth tliat is to make 
 us free, and that the entrance of the man there- 
 fore into that freedom is the largest freedom of 
 every region of man's life. 
 
 I want to speak to you of the way in which 
 my Master, Jesus Christ, appeals to the intelli- 
 gence of man, of the way in which He comes to 
 us in the noblest part of our nature and claims 
 us there for our true life within Himself. I 
 would feel altogether wrong if I let you depart, 
 if I allowed you to meet here with me week after 
 week and say these words which I am privileged 
 to speak to you unless I did thus claim that the 
 Christian life is the largest life of the human 
 intellect, that in it the noblest and central powers 
 of man shall attain to their true liberty. It is 
 given for us perhaps to ask ourselves for one 
 moment why it is that man thinks, is ready to 
 think, that he must give up the very noblest part 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 47 
 
 of his life, his powers of thinking, in order that 
 he may enter into Christianity. It seems to me 
 that there are certain reasons for it which we can 
 see ; but how fallacious those reasons are ! Is it 
 not partly because man, when he is called upon 
 to live Jesus' life, when he is called upon to be 
 a spiritual creature, immediately sees that he is 
 entering into a new and different region from 
 that in which his reason has always been exer- 
 cised. He has been dealing with those things 
 that belong to this earth, with the different 
 duties and opportunities and pleasures that 
 present themselves to him every day, and that 
 higher and loftier region into which he has 
 entered seems to have no capacity to call forth 
 those i)owers which he has been using in this 
 lower region. And then I think again there is 
 upon the souls of men who deal with Chris- 
 tianity one great conviction which is very deep 
 and strong. It is that the Christian religion 
 cannot be absolutely that which it presents itself 
 to human mankind as being, because it is so rich 
 in the blessings that it offers, because it comes 
 with such a large enjoyment to our human life, 
 and opens such great opportunities for human 
 living. Is it not because it seems to us too good 
 to be true that we sometimes turn away from 
 Christianity and think that if we enter it at all 
 
48 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 we must enter it in the dark, that it cannot pos- 
 sibly appeal to these human natures and make 
 them understand its truth, and let them take it 
 into their intelligence that thence it may issue 
 into the soul and become the guiding power of 
 the life? Sometimes it seems as if Christianity 
 were so high that it was impossible that man 
 should attain to it, as if it were something alto- 
 gether beyond ourhaman^owers. • Do you' want 
 me, a creature with this human body and this 
 human relationship, with this-- body and with 
 these perpetual bindings and connections with 
 my fellow -men, do you want me to mount up and 
 live among the stars and hold communion with 
 the God of all? And if you want me to, is there 
 any possibility of my doing it? Such a life is 
 glorious, but not for me. It goes beyond any 
 capacity that I possess. Ask yourselves, my 
 friends, if something like this which I have tried 
 to describe is not very often in your minds as you 
 hear the magnificent invitations which Christ 
 gives to the human soul to live its fullest life, 
 to man to be his fullest being. There are, no 
 doubt, other reasons which present themselves 
 to men, and of those I do not speak. I will not 
 think that the men who are listening here to me 
 now, in a base and low way shrink from the evi- 
 dence of Christianity and from the life of Christ 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 49 
 
 because they do not want to enter into that re- 
 ligion because it would make too great demands 
 upon them in the sacrifices that they would be 
 called upon to make. It is said sometimes, and 
 I doubt not that it is sometimes true, that men 
 will not see the power and truth of Christianity 
 because they do not want to see it. It seems to 
 me that the other is also often true, and it is that 
 upon which we would much rather dwell. Men 
 sometimes hesitate at Christianity and tremble, 
 and will not enter into the great region that is 
 open to them, because they do not want it so 
 intimately. The critical, the sceptical disposi- 
 tion is very often born just of man's perception 
 of the glory of the life that is offered to him 
 and of the intense desire that is at the bottom of 
 his soul to enter into that life. Who is the man 
 that criticises the ship most carefully as she lies 
 at the wharf, that will see what capacity she has 
 for the great voyage that she has set before her? 
 Is he the man who means to linger carelessly 
 upon the bank and never sail away, or the man 
 who is obliged, if she can sail across the ocean, 
 to go with her? Just in proportion to the depth 
 of interest with which we look upon all Christian 
 truth we must be deep questioners with regard 
 to the truth of that truth. We must search into 
 all its evidence. We must try to understand 
 
60 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 how it commends itself to all our minds. But 
 first of all we want to know certainly what Chris- 
 tianity is, if it is able to deal with the thing with 
 which we are puzzling or never to give an intel- 
 ligent definition of it. 
 
 How is it now? I go to a certain man and 
 ask him, "Why do you not believe in Chris- 
 tianity? " and he says, "It is incredible. I can- 
 not believe in it." "What is it that you cannot 
 believe in?" and then he takes forsooth some 
 little point of Christian doctrine, some specula- 
 tion of some Christian teacher, some dogma of 
 some Christian church, and says, " That is incred- 
 ible," as if that were Christianity. Over and 
 over again men are telling us that they do not 
 believe in Christianity, when the real thing that 
 they do not believe in is something that is no 
 essential part of Christian faith whatsoever. 
 They never have given to themselves a real 
 definition of what the Christ and the Christianity 
 in which they are called upon to believe, into 
 which they are invited to enter, really is. The 
 lecturer goes up and down the land and in the 
 face of mighty audiences he denounces Chris- 
 tianity. He declares it to be unintelligible and 
 absurd, to be monstrous and brutal. And when 
 you ask what it is that he is thus denouncing, 
 what it is that he is thus convicting over and 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 51 
 
 over again, you find tliat it is something not 
 simply whicli makes no part of Christianity, but 
 which is absolutely hostile to the spirit of Chris- 
 tianity itself. Many and many a sceptical lec- 
 turer is denouncing that which Christian men 
 would, with all their hearts, denounce ; is declar- 
 ing that to be untrue which no true Christian 
 thinker really believes, that which is no real part 
 of the great Christian faith, which is our glory. 
 Do not think when I speak thus, when I say that 
 there are things attached to Christianity which 
 men do not believe, that they do not believe in 
 the great truth of Jesus, without them, which 
 men denouncing think that they are denouncing 
 the religion which is saving the world. Do not 
 think that I am simply paring away our great 
 Christian faith, and making it mean just as little 
 as possible in order that men may accept it into 
 their lives. I am coming to the heart and soul 
 of it. I want to know, if my life is all bound up 
 with this religion of Jesus Christ, I want to 
 know intrinsically what that religion is. I will 
 scatter a thousand things which in the devout 
 thought of men have fastened themselves to it. 
 It is but clearing the ship for action, the mak- 
 ing it ready that it may do its work, the binding 
 everything tight just before the storm comes on, 
 for that is just the moment when nothing essen- 
 
52 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 tial to the ship itself must be cast away, when I 
 make sure, if I can, that every plank and timber, 
 that every iron and brass is in its true place and 
 ready for the strain that may be put upon it. 
 
 But what, then, is the Christian religion? It 
 is "the simple following of the divine person, 
 Jesus Christ, who, entering into our humanity, 
 has made evident two things — the love of God 
 for that humanity, and the power of that human- 
 ity to answer to the love of God. The one thing 
 that the eye of the Christian sees and never can 
 lose is that majestic, simple figure, great in its 
 simplicity, in its innocence, in its purity and in 
 its unworldliness, that walked once on this earth 
 and that walks forever through the lives of men, 
 showing Himself to human kind, manifest in 
 human kind. The power to receive it, the divine 
 life wakened in every child of man by the divine 
 life manifested in Jesus Christ. That is the 
 great Christian faith, and the man becomes a 
 Christian in his belief when he assures himself 
 that that manifestation of the divine life has 
 been made and is perpetually being made, and 
 he answers to that appeal of the Christ. He 
 manifests his belief in action when he gives 
 himself to the education and the guiding of that 
 Christ, that in him there may be awakened the 
 life of divinity, which is his true human life. 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 53 
 
 Is it not glorious, this absolute simplicity of the 
 Christian faith? It is not primarily a truth; it 
 is a person, it is He who walked in Galilee and 
 Judea, who sat in the houses of mankind, who 
 hung upon the cross, in order that He might 
 perfectly manifest how God could live and how 
 man could suffer in the obedience to the life of 
 God, and then sent forth out of that inspiration 
 and said, " Lo, I am with you always, doing this 
 very thing, being this very Saviour, even to the 
 end of the world." That which the Christian 
 man believes to-day as a Christian, whatever 
 else he may believe in his private speculation, in 
 his personal opinion, is this: The life of God 
 manifest in Jesus of Nazareth, and thenceforth 
 going out into the world wakening the divine 
 capacity in every man. 
 
 You say, " How can a man believe that? "What 
 evidence is there of it? " The personal evidence 
 of Jesus Christ Himself. It is the self testi- 
 mony of Christ that makes the assurance of the 
 Christian faith. Does that sound to you all 
 unreasonable? Do you turn here in your pew 
 or in your aisle and say, *' After all, it is the 
 old story which I have tested and know to be 
 untrue." Suppose yourself back there in Jeru- 
 salem. Suppose the self testimony came to you 
 from the very person of Jesus Christ. Suppose 
 
54 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 the words that He absolutely said and the deeds 
 that He absolutely did bore to you a testimony 
 that some greater than a human life was there, 
 and that then,, as you pressed close to Him and 
 became a part of His life, you found your own 
 life awakened and became a nobler man, ashamed 
 to sin, aspiring after holiness, thinking noble 
 thoughts, lifting yourself not above the earth, 
 but lifting yourself with the whole great earth, 
 which then is taken up into the presence of God 
 and made sacred through and through. I know 
 no man in whom I trust except by the personal 
 evidence that he bears to me of himself. I know 
 no man's nature finally but by that testimony 
 which the nature gives me of him. Bring me 
 all evidence that the man is trustworthy, and 
 then when I am convinced I will go and stand in 
 the presence of that man himself, and he shall 
 tell me. So the world stood, so the world stands 
 to-day in the presence of Jesus Christ. His 
 presence on earth is an historic fact. The words 
 that He spoke are written down in a true record. 
 The deeds that He did are the history of the 
 manifestations of His character, and the story 
 of His Christendom is the continued manifesta- 
 tion of His life, the divine life in the life of 
 man, made divine through Him. Now, a ques- 
 tion that comes in the Christian's mind is '' Why 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION, 55 
 
 don't people believe this?" Why should they 
 not? Is it not written in the historical record? 
 Has it not manifested itself in the experience of 
 mankind? If it has, surely then it appeals to 
 man's reason, and is not merely the act of the 
 blind, stupid thing which we call faith, but it is 
 the noblest action of that hour in which I believe, 
 in the heavens above me and in the earth under 
 my feet, in the brother with whom I have to do 
 in the long course of history, in the total human- 
 ity which has grandly lived. The reason that 
 men do not believe it is that of course there 
 seems to be to them some strange and previous 
 presumption with regard to it, something which 
 makes the story incredible. They say it is the 
 supernatural in it, that it goes beyond the or- 
 dinary experience of man. Ah! it seems also 
 strange to me, the ordinary experience of man. 
 Who dares to dream that human life has lived its 
 completest and shown the noblest power of 
 receiving God into itself? Who dares to think 
 that these few thousand years have exhausted 
 this majestic and mysterious being that we call 
 man? Who dares to think of his own life that, 
 in these few thirty, forty, fifty years that he has 
 lived, he has known and shown all that God can 
 do in and for him? Who dares to say that it is 
 impossible, that it is improbable, that he who is 
 
56 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 the child of God shall receive some newer and 
 closer access to his father, that there shall come 
 some new revelation which shall be written not 
 in a book, not upon the skies, not in the history 
 of human kind, not on the rocks under our feet, 
 but here in our human flesh, that there shall be 
 an incarnation, that the God who is perpetually 
 trying to manifest Himself to human kind should 
 find at last, should take at last the most exquisite, 
 the most sensitive, the most perfect, the most 
 divine of all material on which to write His 
 message, and in that human nature show at once 
 what God was and what man is ? Until there be 
 some exhaustive sight of human nature as that, 
 it is in no wise improbable that there would be 
 that which outgoes our observation, that once in 
 the long music of our human life the great key- 
 note of humanity shall be struck, that once in 
 our great groping after the God who made us He 
 shall seem to draw the veil aside, nay, more than 
 that, shall come and like the sunlight crowd 
 Himself through every cloud until He takes 
 possession of our humanity. 
 
 "Ay," but you say, "those miracles in the life 
 of Jesus Christ, how strange those are; how 
 strange that He should have touched the water 
 and the water become wine ; how strange that He 
 should have called to the dead man and he should 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 57 
 
 have come forth from the tomb ; how strange that 
 He should have spoken to the waters and the 
 storm grow still ! " Ah, my friends, it seems to 
 me that there again we are dishonoring nature as 
 just before we did dishonor man. There again 
 we are thinking that we have exhausted the 
 capacity of this wondrous world in which we 
 live. What is the glory of that world? That 
 it answers to human kind. In the mystic tradi- 
 tion of the book of Genesis it is told how, when 
 God first made man, He set him master of this 
 world and all its powers; and, ever since, the 
 world has been answering to man, who is its 
 master, and every message that comes back to 
 him, every response that the field makes to the 
 farmer, or that the rock makes to the scientist, 
 is but an assertion and the culmination and the 
 fulfilment of that which God did back there. 
 As man has been, so has the world responded 
 to his touch and call. Suppose that to-morrow 
 morning the perfect man should come, not the 
 man simply of the twentieth century or of the 
 twenty -first, who shall be greater in his humanity 
 than we, but suppose the perfect man, the perfect 
 man because the divine man, comes. I cannot 
 dream that nature shall not have words to say 
 and a response to make to him that it will not 
 make to these poor hands of mine. I can do 
 
58 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 something with the rock and field, I can do some- 
 thing with the sea and sky. What shall he do 
 who is to my humanity what the perfect is to 
 the absolutely and dreadfully imperfect? What 
 shall the divine man do? When Paul speaks in 
 that great verse of his and tells us how the 
 whole creation groaneth and travaileth waiting 
 for the manifestation of the Son of God, the 
 whole future history of human science, of man's 
 knowledge and use of the world, is in his words. 
 The world shall know man as fast as man shows 
 himself, and when the Son of God shall be mani- 
 fested, then the groaning and travailing creation 
 shall set all its powers free, and with the knowl- 
 edge with which it floods him and with the 
 usages and service with which it supplies him, 
 it shall claim at last its glory as the servant, the 
 obedient servant of man. The Son of Man has 
 come. You may at least suppose it if you do not 
 believe it. And if He came to-morrow morning 
 would not this whole world lift itself up and 
 answer Him? Who can say what the hills and 
 valleys and trees -and oceans and seas would 
 have to say to Him who at last manifested that 
 which the world had been waiting and groaning 
 for, the manifestation, the complete manifesta- 
 tion of the Son of God? That is the reason why 
 I claim that miracles — I do not know that there 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 59 
 
 have not been fastened upon the miraculous 
 power of Jesus stories of things, thinking that 
 they were done miraculously, which He did by 
 what we choose in our ignorance to call the ordi- 
 nary powers of nature — but I do know that the 
 coming into the world must have been more to 
 this world, that it would have been the most 
 unnatural and incredible thing if the divine man 
 coming here had been to the world and the world 
 had been to him only what it is to us. 
 
 And now the question comes to each one of us 
 — for I must hasten on — how shall a man get 
 within the region of that which perhaps you 
 recognize, which I do not see how you can help 
 believing, how shall a man get within the region 
 of that higher power and let it be the rule of his 
 life, let it manifest itself through him? How 
 do you get within the power of any force, my 
 friends? Here is Christ, a force if He is any- 
 thing, not a spectacle, not a miracle, not a mar- 
 vel, not wonderful to look at, but a force to feel. 
 How do you get within the power of any force? 
 You look out of your window, and men say the 
 frost is freezing, and you see your neighbors 
 wrapping their cloaks about them and going 
 down the street as if they were cold. Men say 
 that a storm is blowing, and you see them shelter 
 themselves against the storm that blows. How 
 
60 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 will you make that storm a true thing for your- 
 self? Go out into it. Let the frost smite your 
 cheek, let the rain beat into your face, let the 
 wind blow upon your back, and then you know 
 by personal experience what you had known by 
 your observation before. And so I say that only 
 when a man puts himself where he can feel the 
 power of the Christ, where it is possible for him, 
 if there be a Christ, if Christ be all that the 
 Christian religion claims that He is, only when 
 a man puts himself where he needs and must have 
 and must certainly feel that Christ, if there be 
 a Christ, only then has he a right to disbelieve 
 if the Christ be not there, only then has he a 
 right to believe if the Christ find him there. 
 And where is that? When a m?ln takes up the 
 highest duties, when he accepts the noblest life, 
 when he lays open his soul to the great exactions 
 and obligations which belong to him in his 
 spiritual nature, when he tries to be a pure man, 
 a devoted man, a noble man, only then has he a 
 chance to know that force which only then comes 
 into its activity. Only when a man tries to live 
 the divine life can the divine Christ manifest 
 Himself to him. Therefore the true way for 
 you to find Christ is not to go groping in a thou- 
 sand books. It is not for you to try evidences 
 about a thousand things that people have believed 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION, 61 
 
 of Him, but it is for you to undertake so great a 
 life, so devoted a life, so pure a life, so service- 
 able a life, that you cannot do it except by Christ, 
 and then se^ whether Christ helps you. See 
 whether there comes to you the certainty that 
 you are a child of God, and the manifestation of 
 the child of God becomes the most credible, the 
 most certain thing to you in all of history. 
 
 It may have been that such moments have 
 been in some of your lives. Think of the noblest 
 moment that you ever passed, of the time when, 
 lifted up to the heights of glory, or bowed down 
 into the very depths of sorrow, every power that 
 was in you was called forth to meet the exigency 
 or to do the work. Think of the time when you 
 . stood upon the mountain top or plunged into the 
 gulf. Eemember that time — it may have been 
 the death of your little child, it may have been 
 your own sickness, it may have been your failure 
 in business, it may have been the moment of 
 your complete success in business, when you 
 were solemnized as the great shower of wealth 
 poured down upon you, and you felt that now 
 yoii really had some work for God to do in the 
 world. Ah, look back to that moment and see if 
 then it seemed so strange to you that God should 
 come into the presence and person of His uni- 
 verse, of His children, and take possession of 
 
62 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 their life. We grow so easily to forget our 
 noblest and most splendid times. It seems to 
 me there is no maxim for a noble life like this : 
 Count always your highest moments your truest 
 moments. Believe that in the time when you 
 were the greatest and most spiritual man, then 
 you were your truest self. Men do just the 
 other thing. They say it was " an exception, a 
 derangement of my nature, an exaltation, a 
 frenzy, it was something that I must not expect 
 again." How about the time when they plunged 
 into baseness and made their soul like a dog's 
 soul? They shudder at the thought of that 
 because they think it would come again. ]N"ay, 
 nay, shudder if you will at the thought of that, 
 but believe that the highest you ever have been 
 you may be all the time and vastly higher still 
 if only the power of the Christ can occupy you 
 and fill your life all the time. 
 
 I said that there were many things that people 
 attached to Christianity that did not belong to 
 Christianity. I know there are. It is impos- 
 sible that a great system like the system of 
 Christ, a great person like the great person of 
 Christ, should be in the world, and men not have 
 speculated and thought in regard to Him. Those 
 are not Christianity. I want to-day, if I may 
 do nothing else, to tell you absolutely how 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 63 
 
 simple and single the Christian faith, the Christ, 
 really is. It is not the insxDiration of this book 
 or any theory with regard to its inspiration. It 
 is not the election of certain souls and the perdi- 
 tion of other souls. It is not the length of man's 
 punishment, whether it is going to be forever 
 and ever, or whether man is to go to his restora- 
 tion. It is not even the constitution of the 
 divine life, the great truth of the way in which 
 God lives within His own nature. None of these 
 are the essence of the Christian faith, but simply 
 this : The testimony of the divine in man to the 
 divine in man that lifts the man up and says : 
 " For me to be brutal is unmanly ; to be divine 
 is to be my only true self." Why do I believe 
 in God? If some man asked me, when on the 
 street, I think I should have an answer to give 
 him. I could give one great reason — two great 
 reasons which are really but one great reason — 
 why I believe in God. I believe in God, my 
 friends, I believe in God with all my soul, be- 
 cause this world is inexplicable without Him and 
 explicable with Him, and because Jesus Christ 
 believed in Him; and it was Jesus Christ that 
 showed me that this world demanded God and 
 was inexplicable without Him ; that made certain 
 every suspicion and dream that I had had before, 
 and Jesus Christ believed in Him. Shall I go to 
 
64 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 the expert about chemistry or geology and ask 
 him the truth with regard to the structure of the 
 world and the meeting of its atoms and forces? 
 And shall not I go to the spiritual expert, to 
 him in whom the spiritual life of man has been 
 clearest, and say, "O Christ, tell me what is 
 the centre and source and end of all? " When 
 he says " God," shall I not believe Him? . 
 
 It is impossible, as I have suggested to you 
 again and again in what I have been saying, that 
 a man can have his mind open to the receipt of 
 the truth of a person unless he be a certain kind 
 of man himself. I do not know but the basest 
 and the wickedest man who lives may believe in 
 the Copernican theory, or that two and two make 
 four, yet I cannot help believing that if he were 
 a better and truer man he would believe even 
 those truths, outside of himself, of science and 
 arithmetic, more fully and deeply. Men were 
 not all astray in the first thing that they were 
 seeking after, though they were wofully astray 
 in many things that they said about it, when 
 they talked about faith and works. Faith enters 
 in through the soul that does a noble deed, and 
 in the coming in of that faith the higher deed 
 becomes possible to him. Hear the words that 
 Jesus said, words that our age must take to itself 
 until it shall be wiser than it is to-day : " Blessed 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 65 
 
 are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
 " If any man will do His will, he shall know of 
 the doctrine, whether it be of God." Ponder 
 those words, my friends. See how reasonable 
 they are. See how important they are. See 
 how they have the secret of your own life, of 
 what it is to do, of what it is to be, forever and 
 ever sealed up in them. These two things, I am 
 sure, are true with regard to the method of belief 
 — that no man can ever go forward to a higher 
 belief until he is true to the faith which he 
 already holds. Be the noblest man that your 
 present faith, poor and weak and imperfect as it 
 is, can make you to be. Live up to your present 
 growth, your present faith. So, and so only, as 
 you take the next straight step forward, as you 
 stand strong where you are now, so only can you 
 think the curtain will draw back and there will 
 be revealed to you what lies beyond. And then 
 live in your positives and not in your negatives. 
 I am tired of asking man what his religious faith 
 is and having him tell me what he don't believe. 
 He tells me that he don't believe in baptism or 
 inspiration or in the trinity. If I asked a man 
 where he w^as going and he told me he was not 
 going to Washington, what could I know about 
 where he was going? He would not go any- 
 where so long as he simply rested in that mere 
 
66 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 negative. Be done with saying what you don't 
 believe, and find somewhere or other the truest, 
 divinest thing to your soul that you do believe 
 to-day, and work that out : work it out in all the 
 action and consecration of the soul in the doing 
 of your work. This I take to be the real free- 
 dom of Christian thought — when the man goes 
 forward always into a fuller and fuller belief as he 
 becomes obedient to that which he already holds. 
 But yet I know I have not touched the opin- 
 ion, the feeling, nay, I will say the black preju- 
 dice that is upon many, many minds. "Ah, 
 but you have bound yourself, " you say. " You 
 have given your assent to a certain creed, you 
 believe certain dogmas. To put it as simply as 
 you have put it to us this morning, you believe 
 a certain person. I, I am free, I believe nothing, 
 I can go wandering here and everywhere and 
 disbelieve to my heart's content." Yes, I do 
 believe something, and I thank God for it. But 
 I deny with all my intelligence and soul the very 
 idea that in believing that something I have shut 
 my soul to evidence. I am ready to hear any 
 man living, any man living to-day who will prove 
 to me that the Christ has never lived and that he 
 is not the Lord of men. I will listen to any man 
 who is in earnest and who is sincere. I will not 
 listen to any trifler, caviller, who is merely try- 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 67 
 
 ing to make a point and to get ahead of the poor 
 arguments that I can use ; but let any f ellow-maii 
 come to me with an earnest face, either of puzzled 
 doubt, or of earnest and convinced unbelief, and 
 say to me, "Are you not wrong?" or "I believe 
 that you are wrong," and I, of course, will talk 
 to him. Do I want to believe anything that 
 cannot be proved to be true, anything that my 
 intelligence shall not receive? Why should I 
 believe it? Shall I trust myself to the ship 
 merely because I have refused to examine its 
 timbers, when men tell me that it is unsound? 
 Shall I throw away my truthfulness simply for 
 the sake of holding what I want, what I choose 
 to call the truth? It is not because it is safe, it 
 is not because it is pleasan^ it is because it 
 seems to the Christian man to be true, that the 
 Christian man believes in the presence, the life, 
 the power of Jesus Christ. Therefore come, let 
 me hear every one of you what you have to say. 
 Let me see where that upon which my soul rests 
 for its very life breaks down; but, until I hear, 
 I will go forward, strong in the assurance of that 
 which takes hold of all my life, convinces my 
 reason, lays hold of my affections, enlarges my 
 actions, and opens my whole being to the free- 
 dom of the child of God. 
 And why should not you, my friends, why 
 
68 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 should not you? I honor the sceptic, the faith- 
 ful land devout sceptic, with all my soul. I am 
 no scorner of the man who, without scorn, finds 
 it impossible to accept that which to my soul 
 seems to be the absolute truth. I will scorn 
 only that which God scorns. He scorns the 
 scorner, and only the scorning man is worthy of 
 the scorn of human kind. But while I honor 
 the sceptic, while I invite him to make manifest 
 his scepticism, not merely for his sake but for 
 my own, I will not hold, I cannot hold that he is 
 living a larger life than the man whom the Christ 
 invites to every noble duty, to every faithful 
 fulfilment of himself. I will feel that he, per- 
 haps by the necessity of his nature, perhaps by 
 his circumstances, perhaps \}^ something which 
 came down to him from his ancestors, is shut in, 
 is a contained and, hampered and hindered man, 
 and I will long for the day when he, lifting up 
 his eyes, sees that Christ walking in the midst 
 of humanity, and yet at the head of humanity, 
 mafiifesting our human nature, but outgoing our 
 human nature, glorifying our streets while He 
 interprets our streets for the first time into their 
 full meaning, giving to our shops and houses a 
 radiancy which they have expected and dreamed 
 of, but never felt, and tempting us always into 
 a deeper belief in Him, which, embodying itself 
 
THOUGHT AND ACTION. 69 
 
 in a completer consecration to the right and true, 
 shall lead us on into the fulness which he fills. 
 Can I, can you, have Christ in human history, 
 Christ in the world, and live as if He were not 
 here ? Will you not give yourself to that of Him 
 which you know to-day? Will you not at least 
 lay hold of the very skirts of His garment and 
 say, " I see that Thou art good, I see that Thou 
 art true. Lead me into the goodness and truth 
 which by communion and sympathy shall know 
 Thee more. Lord, I believe. I believe just a 
 little. Lord, I know that that must come which 
 Thou hast said has come in Thee. I would enter 
 into Thee, to see whether it has indeed come in 
 Thee, and Thou shalt lead me. Thou shalt teach 
 me. Lord, I believe. I have not grasped Thee. 
 'No man has grasped Thee. The man who says 
 that he has grasped Thee proves thereby that he 
 does not know Thee. I know that I have not 
 grasped Thee, but I will follow Thee by doing 
 righteousness, by serving truth, by knowing and 
 acknowledging Thee until all of that shall be- 
 come clear to me. I will follow Thee, and Thou 
 shalt lead me into the glory which Thou Thyself 
 abidest in. Lord, I believe. Lord, I believe, help 
 Thou mine unbelief." The story of the present, 
 the hope, the pure, certain hope of the future is 
 in those great words: "Lord, I believe, help 
 Thou mine unbelief.'' 
 
THE DUTY OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 BUSINESS MAN, 
 
 o>«>4o 
 
 I WILL read to you once again the words whicli 
 I have read before, the words of Jesus in the 
 eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. John : 
 
 " As He spake these words, many believed on 
 Him. Then said Jesus to those Jews which 
 believed on Him, If ye continue in My word, 
 then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall 
 know the truth, and the truth shall make you 
 free. They answered Him, We be Abraham's 
 seed, and were never in bondage to any man: 
 how say est Thou, Ye shall be made free? Jesus 
 answered them. Verily, verily, I say unto you. 
 Whosoever committeth sin is the serv'ant of sin. 
 And the servant abideth not in the house for 
 ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son 
 therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free 
 indeed." 
 
 I do not know how any man can stand and 
 plead with his brethren for the higher life, that 
 71 
 
72 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 they will enter into and make their own the life 
 of Christ and God, unless he is perpetually con- 
 scious that around them with whom he pleads 
 there is the perpetual pleading and the voice of 
 God Himself. Unless a man believes that, every- 
 thing that he has to say must seem, in the first 
 place, impertinent, and, in the second place, 
 almost absolutely hopeless. Who is man that 
 he shall plead with his fellow-man for the change 
 of a life, for the entrance into a whole new 
 career, for the alteration of a spirit, for the sur- 
 rounding of himself with a new region in which 
 he has not lived before? But if it be so, that 
 God is pleading with every one of His children 
 to enter into the highest life; if it be so, that 
 God is making His application and His appeal 
 to every soul to know Him, and in Him to know 
 himself, then one may plead with earnestness 
 and plead with great hopefulness before his 
 brethren. And so it is. The great truth of 
 Jesus Christ is that, that God is pleading with 
 every soul, not merely in the words which we 
 hear from one another, not merely in the words 
 which we read from His book, but in every influ- 
 ence of life; and, in those unknown influences 
 which are too subtle for us to understand or 
 perceive, God is forever seeking after the souls 
 of His children. 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 73 
 
 I cannot stand before you for the last time 
 that I shall stand in these meetings, my friends, 
 without reminding myself and without remind- 
 ing you of that ; without reminding myself also 
 and without trying to remind you of how abso- 
 lutely conformable it is to everything that man 
 does in this world. The g^re at richness of nature/ 
 the great^ri(£li]i£sjs.,af Jife,.>C£^ under- 
 
 stand that behind every specific action of man 
 there is some one of the more elemental and 
 primary forces of the universe that are always 
 trying to express themselves. There is nothing 
 that man does that finds its beginning within 
 itself, but everything, every work of every trade, 
 of every occupation, is simply the utterance of 
 some one of those great forces which lie behind 
 all life, and in the various ways of the different 
 generations and of the different men are always 
 trying to make their mark upon the world. 
 Behind the power that the man exercises there 
 always lies the great power of life, the continual 
 struggle of nature to write herself in the life and 
 work of man, the power of beauty struggling to 
 manifest itself, the harmony that is always 
 desiring to make itself known. To the merchant 
 there are the great laws of trade, of which his 
 works are but the immediate expression. To 
 the mechanic there are the continual forces of 
 
74 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 nature, gravitation uttering itself in all its 
 majesty, made no less majestic because it simply 
 takes its expression for the moment in some 
 particular exercise of his art. To the ship that 
 sails upon the sea there are the everlasting winds 
 that come out of the treasuries of God and fulfil 
 his purpose in carrying his children to their 
 destination. There is no perfection of the uni- 
 verse and of the special life of man in the uni- 
 verse until it comes to this. The greatest of all 
 forces are ready without condescension, are ready 
 as the true expression of their life, to manifest 
 themselves in the particular activities which we 
 find everywhere, and which are going on every- 
 where. The little child digs his well in the 
 seashore sand, and the great Atlantic, miles deep, 
 miles wide, is stirred all through and through to 
 fill it for him. Shall it not be so then here 
 to-day, and shall it not be the truth, upon which 
 we let our minds especially dwell, and which we 
 keep in our souls all the time that I am speaking 
 and you are listening, that however He may be 
 hidden from our sight God is the ultimate fact 
 and the final purpose and power of the universe, 
 and that everything that man tries to do for his 
 fellow-man is but the expression of that love of 
 God which is everywhere struggling to utter 
 itself in blessing, to give itself away to the soul 
 of every one for whom He cares? 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 75 
 
 It is in this truth that I find the real secret, 
 the deepest meaning, of the everlasting dissatis- 
 faction of man that is always ready to be stirred. 
 We moralize, we philosophize about the discon- 
 tent of man. We give little reasons for it; but 
 the real reason of it all is this, that which every- 
 thing lying behind it really signifies: that man 
 is greater than his circumstances, and that God 
 is always calling to him to come up to the ful- 
 ness of his life. Dreadful will be the day when 
 the world becomes contented, when one great 
 universal satisfaction spreads itself over the 
 world. Sad will be the day for every man when 
 he becomes absolutely contented with the life 
 that he is living, with the thoughts that he is 
 thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when 
 there is not forever beating at the doors of his 
 soul some great desire to do something larger, 
 which he knows that he was meant and made to 
 do because he is the child of God. And there 
 is the real secret of the man's struggle with his 
 sins. It is not simply the hatefulness of the 
 sin, as we have said again and again, but it is 
 the dim perception, the deep suspicion, the real 
 knowledge at the heart of the man, that there is 
 a richer and a sinless region in which it is really 
 meant for him to dwell. Man stands separated 
 from that life of God, as it were, by a great, 
 
76 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 thick wall, and every effort to put away his sin, 
 to make himself a nobler and a purer man, is 
 simply his beating at the inside of that door 
 which stands between him and the life of God, 
 which he knows that he ought to be living. It 
 is like the prisoner hidden in his cave, who feels 
 through all the thick wall that shuts him out 
 from it the sunlight and the joyous life that is 
 outside, who knows that his imprisonment is not 
 his true condition, and so with every' tool that 
 his hands can grasp and with his bleeding hands 
 themselves beats on the stone, that he may find 
 his way out. And the glory and the beauty of 
 it is that while he is beating upon the inside of 
 the wall there is also a noble power praying 
 upon the outside of that wall. The life to which 
 he ought to come is striving in its turn, upon its 
 side, to break away the hindrance that is keep- 
 ing him from the thing he ought to be, that is 
 keeping him from the life he ought to live. 
 God, with His sunshine and lightning, with the 
 great majestic manifestations of Himself, and 
 with all the peaceful exhibitions of His life, is 
 forever trying, upon His side of the wall, to 
 break away the great barrier that separates the 
 sinner's life from Him. Great is the power, 
 great is the courage of the sinner, when through- 
 the thickness of the walls he feels that beating 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN, 77 
 
 life of God, when he knows that he is not work- 
 ing alone, when he is sure that God is wanting, 
 him just as truly, far more truly, than he wants 
 God. He bears himself to a nobler struggle 
 with his enemy and a more determined effort to 
 break down the resistance that stands between 
 him and the higher life. Our figure is all imper- 
 fect, as all our figures are so imperfect, because 
 it seems to be the man all by himself, working 
 by himself, until he shall come forth into the 
 life of God, as if God waited there to receive him 
 when he came forth the freed man, and as if the 
 working of the freedom upon the sinner's side 
 had not something also of the purpose of God 
 within him. God is not merely in the sunshine ; 
 God is in the cavern of the man's sin. God is 
 with the sinner wherever he can be. There is 
 no soul so black in its sinfulness, so determined 
 in its defiant obstinacy, that God has abandoned 
 his throne room at the centre of the sinner's life, 
 and every movement is the God movement and 
 every effort is the God force, with which man 
 tries to break forth from his sin and come forth, 
 into the full sunlight of a life with God. Do 
 you not think how full of hope it is? Do you 
 not see that when this great conception of the 
 universe, which is Christ's conception, which 
 beamed in every look that He shed upon the 
 
78 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 world, which was told in every word that He 
 spoke and which was in every movement of His 
 hand — do you not see how, when this great con- 
 ception of the universe takes possession of a man, 
 then all his struggle with his sin is changed, it 
 becomes a strong struggle, a glorious struggle. 
 He hears perpetually the voice of Christ, " Be 
 of good cheer. I have overcome the world. 
 You shall overcome it by the same strength which 
 overcame with Me." 
 
 And then another thing. When a man comes 
 forth into the fulness of that life with God, 
 when at last he has entered God's service and 
 the obedience to God's will, and the communion 
 with God's life, then there comes this wonder- 
 ful thing, there comes the revelation of the man's 
 past. We dare to tell the man that if he enters 
 into the divine life, if he makes himself a ser- 
 vant of God and does God's will out of obedient 
 love, he shall then be strong and wise. One 
 great element of his strength is going to be this : 
 A marvellous revelation that is to come to him 
 of how all his past has been filled with the power 
 of that spirit with which he has at last entered 
 into communion, to which he has at last sub- 
 mitted himself. Man becomes the child of God, 
 becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, and this 
 marvellous revelation amazes him. He sees that 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 79 
 
 back through all the years of his most obstinate 
 and careless life, through all his wilfulness and 
 resistance, through all his profligacy and black 
 sin, God has been with him all the time, beat- 
 ing himself upon his life, showing him how He 
 desired to call him to Himself, and that the 
 final submission does not win God. It simply 
 submits to the God who has been with the soul 
 all the time. Can there be anything more win- 
 ning to the soul than that, anything that brings 
 a deeper shame to you, than to have it revealed 
 to you, suddenly or slowly, that from the first 
 day that you came into this world, nay, before 
 your life was an uttered fact in this world, God 
 has been loving you, and seeking you, and plan- 
 ning for you, and making every effort that He 
 could make in consistency with the free will 
 with which He endowed you from the centre of 
 His own life, that you might become His and 
 therefore might become truly youself ? Through 
 all the years in which you were obstinate and 
 rebellious, through all the years in which you 
 defied Him, nay, through the years in which you 
 denied Him and said that He did not exist, He 
 was with you all the time. What shall I say to 
 my i>iend who is an atheist? Shall I believe 
 that until he comes to a change of his opinions 
 and recognizes that there is indeed a ruling love, 
 
80 PERFECT FBEEDOM. 
 
 a great and fatherly God for all the world, that he 
 has nothing to do with that God? Shall I believe 
 that God has nothing to do with him until he 
 acknowledges God? God would be no God to 
 me if He were that, if He left the man absolutely 
 unhelped until the man beat at the doors of His 
 divine helpfulness and said, " I believe in Thee 
 at last. Now help me." And to the atheist there 
 appears the light of the God whom he denies. 
 Into every soul, just so far and just so fast as it 
 is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats 
 His life and gives His help. That is what makes 
 a man hopeful of all his fellow-men as he looks 
 around upon them and sees them in all the con- 
 ditions of their life. 
 
 And this could only be if that were true, if 
 that is true, which we are dwelling upon con- 
 stantly, the absolute naturalness of the Christian 
 life, that it is man's true life, that it is no foreign 
 region into which some man may be transported 
 and where he lives an alien to all his own essen- 
 tial nature and to all the natural habitudes in 
 which he is intending to exist. There are two 
 ideas of religion which always have abounded, 
 and our great hope is, our great assurance for 
 the future of the world is, that the true andlpure 
 idea of religion some day shall grow and take 
 possession of the life of man. One idea, held 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN, 81 
 
 by very earnest people, embodied in very faith- 
 ful and devoted lives, is the strangeness of re- 
 ligion to the life of man, as if some morning 
 something dropped out of the sky that had had 
 no place upon our earth before, as if there came 
 the summons to man to be something entirely 
 different from what the conditions of his nature 
 prophesied and intended that he should be. 
 The other idea is that religion comes by the 
 utterance of God from the heavens, but comes 
 up out of the human life of man ; that man is 
 essentially and intrinsically religious; that he 
 does not become something else than man when 
 he becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, but then 
 for the first time he becomes man ; that religion 
 is not something tnat is* fastened upon the out- 
 side of his life, but is the awakening of the truth 
 inside of his life; the Church is but the true 
 fulfilment of human life and society ; heaven is 
 but the New Jerusalem that completes all the 
 old Jerusalems and Londons and Bostons that 
 have been here upon our earth. Man, in the 
 fulfilment of his nature by Jesus Christ, is man 
 — not to be something else, our whole humanity 
 is too dear to us. I will cling to this humanity 
 of man, for I do love it, and I will know nothing 
 else. But when man is bidden to look back into 
 his humanity and see what it means to be a man, 
 
82 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 that humanity means purity, truthfulness, ear- 
 nestness, and faithfulness to that God of which 
 humanity is a part, that God which manifested 
 that humanity was a part of it, when the incar- 
 nation showed how close the divine and human 
 belonged together — when man hears that voice, 
 I do not know how he can resist, why he shall 
 not lift liimself up and say, "Now I can be a 
 man, and I can be man only as I share in and 
 give my obedience to and enter into communion 
 with the life of God," and say to Christ, to Christ 
 the revealer of all this, " Here I am, fulfil my 
 manhood." 
 
 And do not you see how immediately this 
 sweeps aside, as one guf h of the sunlight sweeps 
 aside the darkness, do not you see how it sweeps 
 aside all the foolish and little things that people / 
 are saying? I say to my friend, "Be a Chris-/ 
 tian." That means to be a full man. And he I 
 says to me, " I have not time to be a Christian./ 
 I have not room. If my life was not so fulli 
 You don't know how hard I work from morning 
 to night. What time is there for tne to be a 
 Christian? What time is there, what room is 
 there for Christianity in such a life as mine?" 
 But does not it come to seem to us so strange, so 
 absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man 
 should say such a thing as that? It is as if the 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 83 
 
 engine had said it had no room for the steam. 
 It is as if the tree had said it had no room for the 
 sap. It is as if the ocean had said it had no room 
 for the tide. It is as if the man said that he had 
 no room for his soul. It is as if life said that it 
 had no time to live, when it is life. It is not 
 something that is added to life. It is life. A 
 man is not living without it. And'for a man to 
 say that " I am so full in life that I have no room 
 for life, " you see immediately to what absurdity 
 it reduces itself. And how a man knows what 
 he is called upon by God's voice, speaking to 
 him every hour, speaking to him every moment, 
 speaking to him out of everything, that which 
 the man is called upon to do because it is the 
 man's only life! Therefore time, room, that is 
 what time, that is what room is for — life. Life 
 is the thing we seek, and man finds it in the ful- 
 filment of his life by Jesus Christ. 
 
 Now, until we understand this and take it in 
 its richness, all religion seems, becomes to us 
 such a little thing that it is not religion at all. 
 You have got to know that religion, the service 
 of Christ, is not something to be taken in in ad- 
 dition to your life; it is your life. It is not a 
 ribbon that you shall tie in your hat, and go down 
 the street declaring yourself that you have ac- 
 cepted something in addition to the life which 
 
84 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 your fellow-men are living. It is something 
 which, taken into your heart, shall glow in every 
 action so that your fellow-men shall say, ^^Lo, 
 how he lives! What new life has come into 
 him?'' It is that insistence upon the great 
 essentialness of the religious life, it is the insist- 
 ence that religion is not a lot of things that a 
 man does, but is a new life that a man lives, 
 uttering itself in new actions because it is the 
 new life. " Except a man be born again he can- 
 not see the kingdom of God.'' So Jesus said to 
 Nicodemus the ruler, Nicodemus the amateur in 
 religions, who came and said, "Perhaps this 
 teacher has something else that I can bind into 
 my catalogue of truths and hold it." Jesus 
 looked him in the face and said : " It is not that, 
 my friend, it is not that ; it is to be a new man, 
 it is to be born again. It is to have the new 
 life, which is the old life, which is the eternal 
 life. So alone does man enter into the king- 
 dom of God." I cannot help believing all the 
 time that if our young men knew this, religion 
 would lift itself up and have a dignity and great- 
 ness — not a thing for weak souls, but a thing 
 for the manliest soul. Just because of its man- 
 liness it is easy. " Is it easy or is it hard, this 
 religion of yours? " people say to us. I am sure 
 I do not know the easy and the hard things. I 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 85 
 
 cannot tell the difference. What is easier than 
 for a man to breathe? And yet, have you never 
 seen a breathless man, a man in whom the breath- 
 ing was almost stopped, a drowning man, an 
 exhausted man? have you never seen, when the 
 breath was put once more to his nostrils and 
 brought down once more into his empty lungs, 
 the struggle with which he came back to it? It 
 was the hardest thing for him to do, so much 
 harder for him to live than it was for him to die. 
 But by and by see him on his feet, going about 
 his work, helping his fellow-men, living hi-s life, 
 rejoicing in his days, guarding against his dan- 
 gers, full of life. Is life a hard thing for him? 
 You don't talk about its being hard or easy any 
 more than you talk about life itself. The man 
 who lives in God knows no life except the life 
 of God. Let men know that it is not mere 
 trifling, it is not a thing to be dallied with for 
 an instant, it is not a thing for a man to con- 
 vince himself by an argument, and then keep as 
 it were locked in a shelf : it is something that is 
 so deep and serious, so deep and serious that 
 when a man has once tested it there is no more 
 chance of his going out of it than there is of his 
 going out of the friendship and the love which 
 holds him with its perpetual expression, with 
 the continued deeper and deeper manifestation 
 
86 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 of the way in which the living being belongs to 
 him who has a right to his life. 
 
 Now in the few moments that remain I want 
 to take it for granted most seriously, most ear- 
 nestly, that the men who are listening to me are 
 in earnest, and I want to try to tell them as a 
 brother might tell a brother, as I might tell to 
 you or try to tell to you if sitting before my fire- 
 side, I want to try to answer the question which 
 I know is upon your hearts. "What shall I do 
 about this?" I know you say. "Is this all in 
 the clouds? Is there anything I can do in the 
 right way?" If you are in earnest, I shall try 
 to tell you what I should do, if I were in your 
 place, that I might enter into that life and be 
 the free man that we have tried to describe, of 
 whom we believe certain special and definite 
 things. What are they? In the first place I 
 would put away my sin. There is not a man 
 listening to me now who has not some trick of 
 life, some habit that has possession of him, which 
 he knows is a wrong thing. The very first thing 
 for a man to do is absolutely to set himself 
 against them. If you are foul, stop being licen- 
 tious, at least stop doing licentious things. If 
 you, in any part of your business, are tricky, 
 and unsound, and unjust, cut that off, no matter 
 what it costs you. There is something clear and 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN, 87 
 
 definite enough for every man. It is as clear for 
 every man as the sunlight that smites him in his 
 eyes. Stop doing the bad thing which you are 
 doing. It is drawing the bolt away to let what- 
 ever mercy may come in come in. Stop doing 
 your sin. You can do that if you will. Stop 
 doing your sin, no matter how mechanical it 
 seems, and then take up your duty, whatever 
 you can do to make the world more bright and 
 good. Do whatever you can to help every strug- 
 gling soul, to add new strength to any staggering 
 cause, the poor sick man that is by you, the poor 
 wronged man whom you with your influence 
 might vindicate, the poor boy in your shop that 
 you may set with new hope upon the road of life 
 that is beginning already to look dark to him. 
 I cannot tell you what it is. But you know your 
 duty. No man ever looked for it and did not 
 find it. 
 
 And then the third thing — pray. Yes, go to 
 the God whom you but dimly see and pray to 
 Him in the darkness, where He seems to sit. 
 Ask Him, as if He were, that He will give you 
 that which, if He is, must come from Him, can 
 come from Him alone. Pray anxiously. Pray 
 passionately, in the simplest of all words, with 
 the simplest of all thoughts. Pray, the manli- 
 est thing that a man can do, the fastening of his 
 
88 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 life to tlie eternal, the drinking of his thirsty- 
 soul out of the great fountain of life. And pray- 
 distinctly. Pray- upon your knees. One grows 
 tired sometimes of the free thought, which is yet 
 perfectly true, that a man can pray anywhere 
 and anyhow. But men have found it good to 
 make the whole system pray. Kneel down, and 
 the very bending of these obstinate and unused 
 knees of yours will make the^soul kneel down in 
 the humility in which it can be exalted in the 
 sight of God. 
 
 And then read your Bible. How cold that 
 sounds! What, read a book to save my soul? 
 Kead an old story that my life in these new days 
 shall be regenerated and saved? Yes, do just 
 that, for out of that book, if you read it truly, 
 shall come the divine and human person. If 
 you can read it with your soul as well as with 
 your eyes, there shall come the Christ there walk- 
 ing in Palestine. You shall see Him so much 
 greater than the Palestine in which he walks, 
 that at one word of prayer, as you bend over the 
 illuminated page, there shall lift up that body- 
 being of the Christ, and come down through the 
 centuries and be your helper at your side. So 
 read your Bible. 
 
 And then seek the Church — oh, yes, the 
 Church. Do you think, my friends, you who 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 89 
 
 stand outside the Church, and blame her for her 
 inconsistencies, and tell of her shortcomings, and 
 point out the corruptions that are in her history, 
 all that are in her present life to-day — do you 
 really believe that there is an earnest man in the 
 Church that does not know the Church's weak- 
 nesses and faults just as well as you do? Do you 
 believe that there is one of us living in the life 
 and heart of the Church who don't think with all 
 his conscience, who don't in every day in deep 
 distress and sorrow know how the Church fails of 
 the great life of the Master, how far she is from 
 being what God meant she should be, what she 
 shall be some day? But all the more I will put 
 my life into that Church, all the more I will 
 drink the strength that she can give to me and 
 make what humble contribution to her I can 
 bring of the earnestness and faithfulness of my 
 life. Come into the Church of Jesus Christ. 
 There is no other body on the face of the earth 
 that represents what she represents — the noble 
 destiny of the human soul, the great capacity of 
 human faith, the inexhaustible and unutterable 
 love of God, the Christ, who stands to manifest 
 them all. 
 
 Kow those are the things for a man to do who 
 really cares about all this. Those are the things 
 for an earnest man to do. They have no power 
 
90 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 in themselves, but they are the opening of the 
 windows. And if that which I believe is true, 
 God is everywhere giving himself to us, the 
 opening of the windows is a signal that we want 
 Him and an invitation that He will be glad 
 enough to answer, to come. Into every window 
 that is open to Him and turned His way, Christ 
 comes, God comes. That is the only story. 
 There is put aside everything else. Election, 
 predestination, they can go where they please. 
 I am sure that God gives Himself to every soul 
 that wants Him and declares its want by the 
 open readiness of the signal which He knows. 
 How did the sun rise on our city this morning? 
 Starting up in the east, the sun came in its 
 majesty into the sky. It smote on the eastward 
 windows, and wherever the window was all 
 closed, even if it were turned eastward, on the 
 sacred side of the city's life, it could not come 
 in ; but wherever any eastward window had its 
 curtains drawn, wherever he who slept had left 
 the blinds shut, so that the sun when it came 
 might find its way into his sleepiness, there the 
 sun came, and with a shout awoke its faithful 
 servant who had believed in him even before he 
 had seen him, and said, "Arise, arise from the 
 dead, and I will give thee life." This is the 
 simplicity of it all, my friends. A multitude of 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 91 
 
 other things you need not trouble yourselves 
 about. I amaze myself when I think how men 
 go asking about the questions of eternal punish- 
 ment and the duration of man's torment in 
 another life, of what will happen to any man 
 who does not obey Jesus Christ. Oh, my 
 friends, the soul is all wrong when it asks that. 
 Not until the soul says, " What will come if I do 
 obey Jesus Christ? '^ and opens its glorified 
 vision to see all the great things that are given to 
 the soul that enters into the service of the perfect 
 one, the perfect love, not until then the perfect 
 love, the perfect life, come in. A man may be 
 — I believe it with all my heart — so absolutely 
 wrapped up in the glory of obedience, and the 
 higher life, and the service of Christ, that he 
 never once asks himself, " What will come to me 
 if I do not obey? " any more than your child asks 
 you what you will do to him if he is not obedi- 
 ent. Every impulse and desire of his life sets 
 toward obedience. And so the soul may have 
 no theory of everlasting or of limited punish- 
 ment, or of the other life. 
 
 Simply now, here, he must have that without 
 which he cannot live, that without which there 
 is no life. Jesus the soul must have, the one 
 yesterday, to-day, and forever; He that is and 
 was and is to be. Men dwell upon what He was, 
 
92 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 upon what He is ; I rather think to-day of what 
 He is to be. And when I see these young men 
 here before me looking to the future and not to 
 the past, — nay, looking to the future and not to 
 the present, valuing the present only as it is the 
 seed ground of the future, the foundation upon 
 which the structure is to rise whose pinnacle 
 shall some day pierce the sky, — I want to tell 
 them of the Jesus that shall be. In fuller com- 
 prehension of Him, with deeper understanding 
 of His life, with a more entire impression of 
 what He is and of what He may be to the soul, 
 so men shall understand Him in the days to be, 
 and yet He shall be the same Christ still. The 
 future belongs to Jesus Christ, yes, the same 
 Christ that I believe in and that I call upon you 
 to believe in to-day, but a larger, fuller, more 
 completely comprehended Christ, the Christ that 
 is to be, the same Christ that was and suffered, 
 the same Christ that is and helps, but the same 
 Christ also who, being forever deeper and deeper 
 and more deeply received into the souls of men, 
 regenerates their institutions, changes their life, 
 opens their capacities, surprises them with them- 
 selves, makes the world glorious and joyous 
 every day, because it has become the new incar- 
 nation, the new presence of the divine life in 
 the life of man. 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 93 
 
 Men are talking about the institutions in -which 
 you are engaged, my friends, about the business 
 from which you have come here to worship for 
 this little hour. Men are questioning about 
 what they care to do, what they can have to do 
 with Christianity. They are asking everywhere 
 this question : " Is it possible for a man to be 
 engaged in the activities of our modern life and 
 yet to be a Christian? Is it possible for a man 
 to be a broker, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a me- 
 chanic, is it possible for a man to be engaged in 
 a business of to-day, and yet love his God and 
 his fellow-man as himself?" I do not know, I 
 do not know what transformations these dear 
 businesses of yours have got to undergo before 
 they shall be true and ideal homes for the child 
 of God ; but I do know that upon Christian mer- 
 chants and Christian brokers and Christian law- 
 yers and Christian men in business to-day there 
 rests an awful and a beautiful responsibility : to 
 prove, if you can prove it, that these things are 
 capable of being made divine, to prove that a 
 man can do the work that you have been doing 
 this morning and will do this afternoon, and yet 
 shall love his God and his fellow-man as himself. 
 If he cannot, if he cannot, what business ^ have 
 you to be doing them? If he can, what business 
 have you to be doing them so poorly, so carnally, 
 
94 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 SO Tinspiritually, that men look on them and 
 shake their heads with doubt? It belongs to 
 Christ in men first to prove that man may be a 
 Christian and yet do business ; and, in the second 
 place, to show how a man, as he becomes a 
 greater Christian, shall purify and lift the busi- 
 ness that he does and make it the worthy occu- 
 pation of the Son of God. 
 
 What shall be our universal law of life? Can 
 we give it as we draw toward our last moment? 
 I think we can. I want to live, I want to live, 
 if God will give me help, such a life that, if all 
 men in the world were living it, this world 
 would be regenerated and saved. I want to live 
 such a life that, if that life changed into new 
 personal peculiarities as it went to different 
 men, but the same life still, if every man were 
 living it, the millennium would be here; nay, 
 heaven would be here, the universal presence of 
 God. Are you living that life now? Do you 
 want your life multiplied by the thousand mill- 
 ion so that all men shall be like you, or don't 
 you shudder at the thought, don't you give hope 
 that other men are better than you are? Keep 
 that fear, but only that it may be the food of a 
 diviner hope, that all the world may see in you 
 the thing that man was meant to be, that is, the 
 Christ. Ah, you say, that great world, it is too 
 
THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 95 
 
 big ; how can I stretch my thought and imagina- 
 tion and conscience to the poor creatures in 
 Africa and everywhere? Then bring it home. 
 Ah, this dear city of ours^ this city that we 
 love, this city in which many of us were born, 
 in which all of us are finding the rich and sweet 
 associations of our life, this city whose very 
 streets we love because they come so close to 
 everything we do and are, cannot we do some- 
 thing for it? Cannot we make its life diviner? 
 Cannot we contribute something that it has not 
 to-day? Cannot you put in it, some little corner 
 of it, a life which others shall see and say, "Ah, 
 that our lives may be like that ! " And then the 
 good Boston in which we so rejoice, which we 
 so love, which we would so fain make a part of 
 the kingdom of God, a true city of Jesus Christ, 
 we shall not die without having done something 
 for it. 
 
 I linger, and yet I must not linger. Oh, my 
 friends, oh, my fellow-men, it is not very long 
 that we shall be here. It is not very long. This 
 life for which we are so careful — it is not very 
 long; and yet it is so long, because, long, long 
 after we have passed away out of men's sight and 
 out of men's memory, the world, with something 
 that we have left upon it, that we have left within 
 it, will be going on still. * It is so long because, 
 
96 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 long after the city and the world have passed 
 away, we shall go on somewhere, somehow, the 
 same beings still, carrying into the depths of 
 eternity something that this world has done for us 
 that no other world could do, something of good- 
 ness to get now that will be of value to us a mill- 
 ion years hence, that we never could get unless 
 we got it in the short years of this earthly life. 
 Will you know it? Will you let Christ teach it 
 to you? Will you let Christ tell you what is the 
 perfect man? Will you let Him set His sim- 
 plicity and graciousness close to your life, and 
 will you feel their power? Oh! be brave, be 
 true, be pure, be men, be men in the power of 
 Jesus Christ. May God bless you! May God 
 bless you ! Let us pray. 
 
TRUE LIBERTY. 
 
 o><Ko 
 
 An earnest appeal to all that enter that Lib- 
 erty. May I read to you a few words from the 
 eighth chapter of St. John? " Then said Jesus 
 to those Jews which believed on Him, If ye 
 continue in my word, then are ye my disciples 
 indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the 
 truth shall make you free." 
 
 Let us not think, my friends, that there is 
 anything strange about the spectacle which we 
 witnessed this morning. The only strange thing 
 that there could be about it is that anybody 
 should think that it is strange that men should 
 turn aside for half an hour from their ordinary 
 business pursuits, that they should come from 
 the details of life to inquire in regard to the 
 principles, the everlasting principles and pur- 
 poses of life ; that they should turn aside from 
 those things which are occupying them from day 
 to day and make one single hour in the week 
 consecrated to the service of those great things 
 97 
 
98 PERFECT FBEEBOM. 
 
 which underlie all life — surely there is nothing 
 very strange. There is nothing more absolutely 
 natural. Every man does it in his own sort of 
 way, in his own choice of time. We have chosen 
 to do it together, on one day of the week during 
 these few weeks which the Christian Church has 
 so largely set apart for special thought and prayer 
 and earnest attempt to approach the God to whom 
 we belong. It is simply as if the stream turned 
 back again to its fountain, that it might refresh 
 itself and make itself strong for the great work 
 that it had to do in watering the fields and turn- 
 ing the wheels of industry. It is simply as if 
 men plodding along over the flat routine of their 
 life chose once in a while to go up into the moun- 
 tain top, whence they might once in a while look 
 abroad over their life, and understand more fully 
 the way in which they ought to work. These 
 are the principles, these are the pictures which 
 represent that which we have in mind as we 
 come together for a little while each Monday in 
 these few weeks, in order that we may think 
 about things of God and try to realize the depth 
 of our own human life. The first thing that we 
 ought to understand about it is that when we 
 turn aside from life it is only that we go deeper 
 into life. This hour does not stand apart from 
 the rest of the hours of the week, in that we are 
 
TRUE LIBERTY. 99 
 
 dealing with things in which the rest of the week 
 has no concern. He who understands life deeply 
 and fully, understands life truly ; he has forever 
 renewed his lifej and if there comes into our 
 hearts, in the life which we are living, a perpet- 
 ual sense that life needs renewal, a richening and 
 refreshing, then it is in order that we may go 
 down into the depths and see what lies at the 
 root of things — things that we are perpetually 
 doing and thinking. It is this that brought us 
 together here: it is that we may open to our- 
 selves some newer, higher life. It is that we 
 may understand the life that we may live, along 
 side of and as a richer development of that life 
 which we are living from day to day, which we 
 have been living during the years of our life. 
 How that idea has haunted men in every period 
 of their existence, how is it haunting you, that 
 there is some higher life which it is possible to 
 live ! There has never been a religion that has 
 not started there, lifted up its eyes and seen, afar 
 off, what it was possible for man to do from day 
 to day, in contrast with the things which men 
 immediately and presently are. There is not 
 any moment of the human soul which has not 
 rested upon some great conception that man was 
 a nobler being than he was ordinarily conceiving 
 himself to be; that he was not destined to the 
 
100 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 things which were ordinarily occupying his life ; 
 that he might be living a greater and nobler life. 
 It is because the Christian Scriptures have laid 
 most earnestly hold of this idea, it is because it 
 was represented not simply in the words which 
 Christ said, but in the very being which Christ 
 was, that we go to them to get the inspiration 
 and the indication, the revelation and the enlight- 
 enment which we need. I have read to you these 
 few words in which Christ declares the whole 
 subject, the whole character of which His life is 
 and what His work is about to do, because it 
 seems to me that they strike at once the key-note 
 of that which we want to understand. They let 
 us enter into the full conception of that which 
 the new life which is offered to man really is. 
 There are two conceptions which come to every 
 man when he is entering upon a new life, chang- 
 ing his present life to something that is different 
 from the present life, and being a different sort of 
 creature and living in a different sort of a way. 
 The first way in which it presents itself to him 
 — almost always at the beginning of every re- 
 ligion, perhaps — is in the way of restraint and 
 imprisonment. Man thinks of every change that 
 is to come to him as in the nature of denial of 
 something that he is at the present doing and 
 being, as the laying hold upon himself of some 
 
TRUE LIBERTY. 101 
 
 sort of restraint, bringing to him something 
 which says : " I must not do the thing which I 
 am doing. I must lay upon myself restraints, 
 restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. 
 I must not let myself be the man that I am." 
 You see how the Old Testament comes before 
 the New Testament, the law ringing from the 
 mountain top with the great denials, the great 
 prohibitions, that come from the mouth of God. 
 " Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other — 
 Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not steal. 
 Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not 
 covet thy neighbor's goods." That is the first 
 conception which comes to a man of the way in 
 which he is to enter upon a new life, of the way 
 in which the denial in his experience is to take 
 effect. It is as if the hands were stretched out 
 in order that fetters might be placed upon them. 
 The man says, " Let some power come that is to 
 hinder me from being this thing that I am." 
 And the whole notion is the notion of imprison- 
 ment, restraint. So it is with all civilization. 
 It is perfectly possible for us to represent civil- 
 ization as compared with barbarism, as accepted 
 by mankind, as a great mass of restrictions and 
 prohibitions that have been laid upon human 
 life, so that the freedom of life has been cast 
 aside, and man has entered into restricted, re- 
 
102 PEEFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 strained, and imprisoned condition. So it is 
 with every fulfilment of life. It is possible for 
 a man always to represent it to himself as if it 
 were the restriction, restraint, and prohibition of 
 his life. The man passes onward into the fuller 
 life which belongs to a man. He merges his 
 selfishness into that richer life which is offered 
 to human kind. He makes himself, instead of a 
 single, selfish man, a man of family; and it is 
 easy enough to consider that marriage and the 
 family life bring immediately restraints and pro- 
 hibitions. The man may may not have the free- 
 dom which he used to have. So all development 
 of education, in the first place, offers itself to 
 man, or seems to off'er itself to man, as prohibi- 
 tion and imprisonment and restraint. There 
 is no doubt truth in such an idea. We never 
 lose sight of it. No other richer and fuller idea 
 which we come to by and by ever does away with 
 the thought that man's advance means prohibi- 
 tion and self-denial, that in order that man shall 
 become the greater thing he must cease to be the 
 poorer and smaller thing he has been. But yet 
 there is immediately a greater and fuller. When 
 we hear those words of Jesus, we see immediately 
 that not the idea of imprisonment but the idea 
 of liberty, not the idea of restraint but that of 
 setting free, is the idea which is really in His 
 
TRUE LIBERTY. 103 
 
 mind when he offers the fullest life to human 
 kind. Have you. often thought of how the whole 
 Bible is a Book of Liberty, of how it rings with 
 liberty from beginning to end, of how the great 
 men are the men of liberty, of how the Old 
 Testament, the great picture which forever 
 shines, is the emancipator, leading forth out of 
 imprisonment the people of God, who were to do 
 the great work of God in the very much larger 
 and freer lite in which they were to live? The 
 prophet, the psalmist, are ever preaching and 
 singing about liberty, the enfranchisement . of 
 the life of man, that man was not imprisoned in 
 order to fulfil himself, but shall open his life, 
 and every new progress shall be into a new 
 region of existence which he has not touched as 
 yet. When we turn from the Old Testament to 
 the New Testament, how absolutely clear that 
 idea is! Christ is the very embodiment of 
 human liberty. In His own personal life and 
 in everything that He did and said. He was for- 
 ever uttering the great gospel that man, in order 
 to become his completest, must become his freest, 
 that what a man did when he entered into a new 
 life was to open a new region in which new 
 powers were to find their exercise, in which he 
 was to be able to be and do things which he could 
 not be and do in more restricted life.- It is the 
 
104 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 acceptance of that idea, it seems to me, that 
 makes us true disciples of Christ and of that 
 great gospel, and that transfigures everything. 
 When my friend turns over some new leaf, as we 
 say, and begins to live a new life, what shall we 
 think of him? I learn that he has become a 
 Christian man, that he is doing something, that 
 he is working in a way and living a life which 
 I have not known before. What is my impres- 
 sion in regard to him? Is not your impression, 
 as you look upon that man, that somehow or 
 other he has entered into a slavery or bondage, 
 that he has taken upon his life restrictions and 
 imprisonments which he did not have before? 
 And you think of him, perhaps, as a man who 
 has done a wise and prudent thing, who has done 
 something that is going to be for his benefit 
 some day in some distant and half -realized world, 
 but as a man who, for the present, has laid a 
 burden and bondage upon his life. That is 
 never the tone of Christ ; it is never the tone of 
 the Christian gospel. When a man turns away 
 from his sins and enters into energetic holiness, 
 when a man sacrifices his own self-indulgence and 
 goes forth a pure servant of his God and his fel- 
 low-men, there is only one cry in the whole gos- 
 pel of that man, and that is the cry of freedom. 
 As soon as he can catch that, as soon as I can 
 
TUUE LIBERTY. 105 
 
 feel about my friend, who has become a better 
 man, that he has become a larger and not a 
 smaller, a freer and not a more imprisoned man, 
 as soon as I lift up my voice and say that the 
 man is free, then I understand him more fully, 
 and he becomes a revelation to me in the higher 
 and richer life which is possible for me to live. 
 But think of it for yourselves, for a moment, and 
 ask what freer life really is. Try to give a defi- 
 nition of liberty, and I know not what it can be 
 said to be except something of this kind : Liberty 
 is the fullest opportunity for man to be and do 
 the very best that is possible for him. I know 
 of no definition of liberty, that oldest and dearest 
 phrase of men, and sometimes the vaguest also, 
 except that. It has been perverted, it has been 
 distorted and mystified, but that is what it really 
 means : the fullest opportunity for a man to do 
 and be the very best that is in his personal 
 nature to do and to be. It immediately follows 
 that everything which is necessary for the full 
 realization of a man's life, even though it seems 
 to have the character of restraint for a moment, 
 is really a part of the process of his enfranchise- 
 ment, is the bringing forth of him to a fuller 
 liberty. You see a man coming forward and 
 offering himself as one of the defenders of his 
 country in his country's need. You see him 
 
106 PEBFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 standing at the door where men are being re- 
 ceived as recruits into the army of the coun- 
 try. He wants liberty. He wants to be able 
 to do that which he cannot do in his poor, per- 
 sonal isolation here at home. He wants the 
 badge which will give him the right to go forth 
 and meet the enemies of his country, and he 
 enrolls himself among these men. He makes 
 himself subject to obligations, duties, and drill. 
 They are a part of his enfranchisement. They 
 are really the breaking of the fetters upon his 
 slavery, the sending him forth into freedom. 
 He is like a bit of iron or steel that lies upon 
 the ground. It lies neglected and perfectly free. 
 You see it is made by the adjustment of the end 
 of it so that it can be set into a great machine 
 and become part of a great working system. But 
 there it lies. Will you call it free? It is bound 
 to be nothing there. It is absolutely separate, 
 and with its own personality distinct and indi- 
 vidual and all alone. What is to make that bit 
 of iron a free bit of iron, to let it go forth and do 
 the thing which it was meant to do, but the tak- 
 ing of it and the binding of it at both ends into 
 the structure of which it was made to be a part? 
 It seems to me the binding of a man, — it seems to 
 me that the binding of the iron is not the yield- 
 ing of its freedom. It is not merely after finding 
 
TBUE LIBERTY. 107 
 
 its place within the system that it first achieves 
 its freedom and so joins in the music and par- 
 takes of the courses with which the whole en- 
 ginery is filled. Is not it, then, for the first time 
 a free bit of iron, having accomplished all that 
 it was made to do when it came forth from the 
 forge of the master, who had this purpose in his 
 mind? This, then, is freedom; everything is 
 part of the enfranchisement of a man which 
 helps to put him in the place where he can live 
 his best. Therefore every duty, every will of 
 God, every commandment of Christ, every self- 
 surrender that a man is called upon to obey or 
 to make — do not think of it as if it were simply 
 a restraint to liberty, but think of it as the very 
 means of freedom, by which we realize the very 
 purpose of God and the fulfilment of our life. 
 It is interesting to see how all that is true in 
 regard to the matter of belief, doctrine, and opin- 
 ions which we are to accept. How strange it 
 very often seems that men go to the Church, or to 
 one another, and say : " Must I believe this doc- 
 trine in order that I can enter into the Church? " 
 " Must I believe this doctrine in order that I may 
 be saved? " men say, with a strange sort of notion 
 about what salvation is. How strange it seems, 
 when we really have got our intelligence about 
 us and know what it is to believe ! To believe 
 
108 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 a new truth, if it be really truth and we really 
 believe it, is to have entered into a new region, 
 in which our life shall find a new expansion and 
 a new youth. Therefore, not " Must we believe? " 
 but "May I believe?'' is the true cry of the 
 human creature who is seeking for the richest 
 fulfilment of his life, who is working that his 
 whole nature may find its complete expansion 
 and so its completest exercise. We talk a great 
 deal in these days and in this place about a 
 liberal faith. What is a liberal faith, my friends ? 
 It seems to me that by every true meaning of 
 the word, by every true thought of the idea, a 
 liberal faith is a faith that believes much, and 
 not a faith that believes little. The more a man 
 believes, the more liberally he exercises his 
 capacity of faith, the more he sends forth his 
 intelligence into the mysteries of God, the more 
 he understands those things which God chooses 
 to reveal to his creatures, the more liberally he 
 believes. Let yourselves never think that you 
 grow liberal in faith by believing less ; always 
 be sure that the true liberality of faith can only 
 come by believing more. It is true, indeed, that 
 as soon as a man becomes eager for belief, for the 
 truth of God and for the mysteries with which 
 God's universe is filled, he becomes all the more 
 critical and careful. He will not any longer, if 
 
TRUE LIBERTY. 109 
 
 lie were before, be simply greedy of things to 
 believe, so that if any superstition comes offer- 
 ing itself to him he will not gather it in in- 
 discriminately and believe it without evidence, 
 without examination. He becomes all the more 
 critical and careful, the more he becomes assured 
 that belief, and not unbelief, is the true condition 
 of his life. The truth that God has entered into 
 this world in wondrous ways and filled its life 
 with Jesus Christ, the truth that man has a soul 
 and not simply a body, that he has a spiritual 
 need, that God cares for him and he is to care 
 for himself, that there is an immortal life, and 
 that that which we call faith is but the opening 
 of a gate, the pushing back of a veil, — shall a 
 man believe those things as imprisonments of his 
 nature, and shall it not make him larger? Shall 
 it not be the indulgence of his life when he enters 
 into the great certainties which so are offered to 
 his belief, believing them in his own way? Let 
 us always feel that to accept a new belief is not to 
 build a wall beyond which we cannot pass, but is 
 to open the door to a great fresh, free region, in 
 which our souls are to live. And just so it is when 
 we come to the moral things of life. The man puts 
 aside some sinfulness. He breaks down the wall 
 that has been shutting his soul out of its highest 
 life. He has been a drunkard, and he becomes a 
 
110 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 sober man. He has been a cheat and becomes a 
 faithful man. He has been a liar and becomes 
 a truthful man. He has been a profligate, and 
 he becomes a pure man. What has happened to 
 that man? Shall he simply think of himself as 
 one who has crushed this passion, shut down 
 this part of his life? Shall he simply think of 
 himself as one who has taken a course of self- 
 denial? Nay. It is self-indulgence that a man 
 has really entered upon. It is an indulgence of 
 the deepest part of his own nature, not of his 
 unreal nature. He has risen and shaken himself 
 like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from his 
 mane, and all the great range of that life which 
 God gave him to live lies before him. This is 
 the everlasting inspiration. This is the illumi- 
 nation. I don't wonder that men refuse to give 
 up evil if it simply seems to them to be giving 
 up the evil way, and no vision opens before them 
 of the thing that they may be and do. I don't 
 wonder that, "if the negative, restricting, impris- 
 oning conception of the new life is all that a man 
 gets hold of, he lingers again and again in the old 
 life. But just as soon as the great world opens 
 before him then it is like a prisoner going out 
 of the prison door, is there no lingering? Does 
 not the baser part of him cling to the old 
 prison, to the ease and the provision for him. 
 
TRUE LIBERTY. Ill 
 
 to the absence of anxiety and of energy? I 
 think there can hardly be a prisoner who, with 
 any leap of heart, goes out of the prison door, 
 when his term is finished, and does not even look 
 into that black horror where he has been living, 
 cast some lingering, longing look behind. He 
 comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, 
 to the necessity of making himself once more a 
 true man among his fellow-men. But does he 
 stop? He comes forth, and if there be the soul 
 of a man in him still, he enters into the new life 
 with enthusiasm, and finds the new powers 
 springing in him to their work. And if it be 
 so with every special duty, then with that great 
 thing which you and I are called upon to do — 
 the total acceptance by our nature of the will of 
 God, the total acceptance by our nature of the 
 mastery of Jesus Christ. Oh! how this world 
 has perverted words and meanings, that the 
 mastery of Jesus Christ should seem to be the 
 imprisonment and not the enfranchisement of 
 the soul! When I bring a flower out of the 
 darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sun- 
 light come streaming down upon it, and the 
 flower knows the sunlight for which it was made 
 and opens its fragrance and beauty ; when I take 
 a dark pebble and put it into the stream and let 
 the silver water go coursing down over it and 
 
112 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 bringing forth the hidden color that was in the 
 bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, 
 the flower and stone rejoice. I can ahnost hear 
 them sing in the field and in the stream. What 
 then? Shall not man bring his nature out into 
 the fullest illumination, and surprise himself by 
 the things that he might do? Oh! the littleness 
 of the lives that we are living ! Oh ! the way in 
 which we fail to comprehend, or when we do 
 comprehend, deny to ourselves the bigness of 
 that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child 
 of God! Sometimes it dawns upon us that we 
 can see it opening into the vision of these men 
 and women in the New Testament. Sometimes 
 there opens to us the picture of this thing that 
 we might be, and then there are truly the trial 
 moments of our life. Then we lift up ourselves 
 and claim our liberty or, dastardly or cowardly, 
 slink back into the sluggish imprisonment in 
 which we have been living. How does all this 
 affect that which we are continually conscious 
 of, urging upon ourselves and upon one another? 
 How does it affect the whole question of a man's 
 sins? Oh! these sins, the things we know so 
 well! As we sit here and stand here one entire 
 hour, as we talk in this sort of way, everybody 
 knows the weaknesses of his own nature, the sins 
 of his own soul. Don't you know it? What 
 
TRUE LIBERTY. 113 
 
 shall we think about those sins? It seems to me, 
 my friends, that all this great picture of the 
 liberty into which Christ sets man, in the first 
 place does one thing which we are longing to see 
 done in the world. It takes away the glamour 
 and the splendor from sin. It breaks that spell 
 by which men think that the evil thing is the 
 glorious thing. If the evil thing be that which 
 Christ has told us that the evil thing is — which 
 I have no time to tell you now — if every sin 
 that you do is not simply a stain upon your soul, 
 but is keeping you out from some great and 
 splendid thing which you might do, then is 
 there any sort of splendor and glory about sin? 
 How about the sins that you did when you were 
 young men? How can you look back upon those 
 sins and think what your life might have been 
 if it had been pure from the beginning, think 
 what you might have been if from the very 
 beginning you had caught sight of what it was 
 to be a man? And then your boy comes along. 
 What are the men in this town doing largely in 
 many and many a house, but letting their boys 
 believe that the sins of their early life are glori- 
 ous things, except that those things which they 
 did, the base and wretched things that they were 
 doing when they were fifteen and twenty and 
 twenty-five and thirty years old, are the true 
 
114 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 career of a human nature, are the true entrance 
 into human life? The miserable talk about sow- 
 ing wild oats, about getting through the neces- 
 sary conditions of life before a man comes to 
 solemnity! Shame upon any man who, having 
 passed through the sinful conditions and habits 
 and dispositions of his earlier life, has not car- 
 ried out of them an absolute shame for them, 
 that shall let him say to his boy, by word and by 
 every utterance of his life within the house 
 where he and the boy live together, "Eefrain, 
 for they are abominable things ! " To get rid of 
 the glamour of sin, to get rid of the idea that it 
 is a glorious thing to be dissipated instead of 
 being concentrated to duty, to get rid of the idea 
 that to be drunken and to be lustful are true and 
 noble expressions of our abounding human life, 
 to get rid of any idea that sin is aught but 
 imprisonment, is to make those who come after , 
 us, and to make ourselves in what of life is left 
 for us, gloriously ambitious for the freedom of 
 purity, for a full entrance into that life over 
 which sin has no dominion. And yet, at the 
 same time, don't you see that while sin thus 
 becomes contemptible when we think about the 
 great illustration of the will of God and Jesus 
 Christ, don't you see how also it puts on a new 
 horror? That which I thought I was doing in 
 
TBUE LIBEBTT. 115 
 
 the halls of my imprisonment I have really been 
 doing within the possible world of God in which 
 I might have been free. The moment I see what 
 life might have been to me, then any sin becomes 
 dreadful to me. Have you ever thought of how 
 the world has stood in glory and honor before 
 the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ? If any 
 life could prove, if any argument could show on 
 investigation to-day that Jesus did one sin in all 
 his life, that the perfect liberty which was his 
 perfect purity was not absolutely perfect, do you 
 realize what a horror would seem to fall down 
 from the heavens, what a constraint and burden 
 would be laid upon the lives of men, how the 
 gates of men's possibilities would seem to close 
 in upon them? It is because there has been that 
 one life which, because absolutely pure from sin, 
 was absolutely free ; it is because man may look 
 up and see in that life the revelation and possi- 
 bility of his own; it is because that life, echoing 
 the great cry throughout the world that man every- 
 where is the son of God, offers the same purity — 
 and so the same freedom — to all mankind ; 
 it is for that reason that a man rejoices to cling 
 to, to believe in, however impure his life is, the 
 perfect purity, the sinlessness of the life of Jesus. 
 When you sin, my friends, it is a man that sins, 
 and a man is a child of God; and for a child of 
 
116 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 God to sin is an awful thing, not simply for the 
 stain that he brings into the divine nature that 
 is in him, but for the life from which it shuts 
 him out, for the liberty which he abandons, for 
 the enthrallment which it lays upon the soul. 
 There is one thing that people say very care- 
 lessly that always seems to me to be a dreadful 
 thing for a man to say. They say it when they 
 talk about their lives to one another, and think 
 about their lives to themselves, and by and by 
 very often say it upon their death-bed with the 
 last gasp, as though their entrance into the eter- 
 nal world had brought them no deeper enlighten- 
 ment. One wonders what is the revelation that 
 comes to them when they stand upon the borders 
 of the other side and are in the full life and 
 eternity of God. The thing men say is, " I have 
 done the very best I can." It is an awful thing 
 for a man to say. The man never lived, save he 
 who perfected our humanity, who ever did the 
 very best he could. You dishonor your life, you 
 not simply shut your eyes to certain facts, you 
 not simply say an infinitely absurd and foolish 
 thing, but you dishonor your human life if you 
 say that you have done in any day of your life 
 or in all the days of your life put together, the 
 very best that you could, or been the very best 
 man that you could be. You! what are you? 
 
TRUE LIBERTY. 117 
 
 Again I say, The child of God, and this which you 
 have been, what is it? Look over it, see how 
 selfish it has been, see how material it has been, 
 how it has lived in the depths Avhen it might 
 have lived on the heights, see how it has lived in 
 the little narrow range of selfishness when it 
 might have been as broad as all humanity, nay, 
 when it might have been as the God of humanity. 
 Don't dare to say that in any day of your life, or 
 in all your life together, you have done the best 
 that you could. The Pharisee said it when he 
 went up into the temple, and all the world has 
 looked on with mingled pity and scorn ^at the 
 blindness of the man who stood there and paraded 
 his faithfulness ; while all the world has bent 
 with a pity that was near to love, a pity that was 
 full of sympathy because man recognized his con- 
 dition and experience, for the poor creature grovel- 
 ling upon the pavement, unwilling and unable 
 even to look upon the altar, but who, standing 
 afar off, said, " God be merciful to me a sinner ! " 
 Whatever else you say, don't say, " I have been 
 the every best I could." That means that you 
 have not merely lived in the rooms of your 
 imprisonment, but that you have been satisfied 
 to count them the only possible rooms of your 
 life, and that the great halls of your liberty have 
 never opened themselves before you. Shall not 
 
118 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 they open themselves somehow to us to-day, my 
 friends? Shall we not turn away from this hour 
 and go back into our business, into our offices, 
 into the shops, into the crowded streets, bearing 
 new thoughts of the lives that we might live, 
 feeling the fetters on our hands and feet, feeling 
 many things as fetters which we have thought 
 of as the ornament and glory of our life, deter- 
 mined to be unsatisfied forever until these fetters 
 shall be stricken off and we have entered into 
 the full liberty which comes to those alone who 
 are dedicated to the service of God, to the com- 
 pletion of their own nature, to the acceptance of 
 the grace of Christ, and to the attainment of the 
 eternal glory of the spiritual life, first here and 
 then hereafter, never hereafter, it may be, except 
 here and now, certainly here and now, as the 
 immediate, pressing privilege and duty of our 
 lives? So let us stand up on our feet and know 
 ourselves in all the richness and in all the awful- 
 ness of our human life. Let us know ourselves 
 children of God, and claim the liberty which God 
 has given to every one of his children who will 
 take it. God bless you and give some of you, 
 help some of us, to claim, as we have never 
 claimed before, that freedom with which the Son 
 makes free! 
 
THE CHRIST IN WHOM CHRIS- 
 TIANS BELIEVE. 
 
 o>«<o 
 
 I WANT to read to you again the words of Jesus 
 in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. John : 
 " Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed 
 on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye 
 my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the 
 truth, and the truth shall make you free. They 
 answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were 
 never in bondage to any man : how say est thou, 
 Ye shall be made free? Jesus answered them. 
 Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever com- 
 mitteth sin is the servant of sin. And the 
 servant abideth not in the house for ever : but 
 the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore 
 shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." 
 The service of God is not self-restraint, but 
 self-indulgence. That is the first truth of 
 all religion. That is the truth which we 
 found uttered in those words of Jesus when we 
 were thinking of them the other day. That is 
 the truth to which we return as we come back 
 119 
 
120 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 again to think of those words and all that they 
 mean and all that the speaker of them means to 
 us and to our lives. When we remember that 
 truth, when we recognize that no man is ever 
 to be saved except by the fulfilment of his own 
 nature, and not by the restraint of his nature, 
 when we recognize that no man, no personal, 
 individual man, is ever to be ransomed from his 
 sins except by having opened to him a larger and 
 fuller life into which he has entered, we seem to 
 have displayed to us a large region, into which 
 we are tempted to enter, and which is so rich 
 and inviting to us that we immediately begin to 
 ask ourselves if it is possible that there should 
 be such a region. It is simply a great dream 
 that we set before us. It is something that we 
 imagine, something that comes out of the imagi- 
 nations and anticipations of our own hearts, 
 simply stimulated by the possibilities of the life 
 in which we are living. It would be very muph 
 indeed, if it were only that. It would bear a 
 certain testimony of itself, if it simply came out 
 of the perpetual dissatisfaction of men's souls, 
 even if there were no distinct manifestation of 
 that life and.no possibility of entering into it at 
 once with our own personal consecration, with 
 the resolution of our own wills. But if it were 
 simply a dream, ultimately it must fade away 
 
THE CHRIST, 121 
 
 out of the thoughts of men. It is impossible 
 that men should keep on, year after year, age 
 after age, this simple dream of something which 
 does not exist. It would be like those pictures 
 which the poet has drawn, something which 
 appeals to nothing in our human nature and 
 stands only as a parable of something that is a 
 great deal lower than itself. The poet pictures 
 to us in his imagination those things which do 
 not appeal to our life, because they find nothing 
 to correspond to their high portraits, to show 
 those transformations of nature into something 
 that is entirely different and foreign to itself. 
 If religion be simply the dream that some men 
 hold it to be, if it simply be the cheating of 
 man's soul with that which has no reality to 
 correspond to it, then it will be no more than 
 this. Is there any assurance that is given to us, 
 that is before the soul of man, of some great new 
 life which it is given for man to seek, without 
 which it is given for no man to be satisfied? I 
 do not know where any man could find that 
 assurance absolutely and entirely, unless there 
 had stood forth before us the person of Him who 
 spoke these words and who manifested them in 
 His life. And therefore it is that, having pict- 
 ured to you the richness of the life which is 
 open to every man, his own true life, the large 
 
122 PEBFECT FBEEDOM. 
 
 freedom into which he may go if, giving up his 
 sins he enters into the fulness of the life of God, 
 I cannot help now calling you to think about 
 Him who gives, not merely by His words, but by 
 the whole of His own person and life, that mani- 
 festation of the reality of the divine existence 
 and tempts us to follow after Him. In other 
 words, we come to-day to think of Christ, 
 Christ who claims to be the master of the world, 
 Christ from whom the revelation of that higher 
 life has come, not in its first instance in the 
 manifestation of the words which he spoke, for it 
 had been the dream of human hearts through all 
 the ages, but who made it so distinct and clear 
 that ever since the time of Christ men have been 
 able to cease to seek after it, men have never 
 been able to give up the hope and dream that it 
 was there. It is our Christ in whom we Chris- 
 tians believe. It is the Christ in whom a great 
 many of you listening to me now claim to believe 
 — I do myself — in whom many of you do be- 
 lieve, whom many of you have followed into that 
 newer life. I would to God that I could so set 
 Him before you to-day, could so make you feel 
 his actual presence in the life which we are liv- 
 ing, which we may be living, that there should 
 be no question in any man of the power that is 
 open before him to enter into the higher life and 
 
THE CHRIST. 123 
 
 to fulfil his soul to God. What I want to do, in 
 the few moments which I may speak to you this. 
 morning, is — laying aside all the theological con- 
 ceptions regarding Him, laying aside everything 
 that attaches to the complications and mysteries 
 in which His nature has been involved in men's 
 dreams of Him, laying aside everything which 
 the churches are holding as the special doctrine 
 of their especial creed — to go back to the very 
 beginning and see if we can understand anything 
 of what it is — this personal Christ, who lives 
 here in the world and manifests the power of 
 God and opens the possibility of every man. 
 Surely it is good that we should know something 
 about Him of whom we speak so much, that there 
 should be some clear and directest conception of 
 one whose name has been upon the lips of. men* 
 for eighteen hundred years; and it is possible 
 for us, in the simplest way, to understand how 
 His power has come into the world and to see 
 where it is possible that it should come and 
 enrich our lives and make us different men. We 
 go back, then, to the very beginning of the aspi- 
 ration after God, which is in the heart of man 
 everywhere. There has never been a race that 
 has been without it. There has never been a 
 generation that has not reached forward and 
 thought there was a higher life, a fuller liberty, 
 
124 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 to which it could come. It has been in all the 
 religions which have been not simply fears, but 
 which have been the highest utterances of all the 
 different races in all the different generations of 
 mankind and all the different countries of the 
 world; and there was one especial race in one 
 especial part of the world in whom that aspira- 
 tion was especially strong. We will not ask how 
 it came to be there. There it was in this strange 
 people living on the eastern shore of the Medi- 
 terranean Sea, and in all its history marked out 
 by the strange peculiarity that it was a spiritual 
 people, that in the midst of all its sins, blunders, 
 and weaknesses it was forever lifting up its soul 
 to God and striving to find Him out. Very often 
 it blundered strangely and sadly. Very often it 
 'failed to get that for which it was seeking, by the 
 very impetuousness, rashness, and earnestness of 
 search. But it was always seeking after Him. 
 And the years rolled by, and by and by in the 
 midst of that great nation there was a little com- 
 pany of men who, accompanying one another 
 from the beginning of their lives, had been 
 searching after this God and trying everywhere 
 if they could find Him. And one day they heard 
 that down by the river which ran through their 
 country, which was sacred to them from the 
 multitude of old national associations, there was 
 
THE CHRIST. 125 
 
 a great teacher come, who was declaring that for 
 which iihe human soul was forever reaching after, 
 the need of escaping from sin and entering upon 
 and leading a higher life. This little company 
 went down and met two disciples of John the 
 Baptist, and learned from them everything that 
 they had to teach them. Their souls were stirred 
 by that which he had to say. But one day, 
 while he was teaching them, it seemed as if they 
 had come to an end of that which he could teach 
 them. He looked up, and there upon the hill 
 just above the river there was passing one upon 
 whom the gaze of the fishermen by the river 
 immediately kindled, and he lifted his hand and 
 said, " He is the one who is to teach you now. 
 You must go after him. Behold the Lamb of 
 God, which taketh away the sin of the world." 
 Great and mysterious words, that filled in that 
 which men had believed in all the records they 
 had read and the thinking they had done before ! 
 And they turned away from John and went after 
 this new teacher and, following to His house, 
 there they abode with Him during that day and 
 the days that followed after. Little by little, as 
 we read the story of their being with him, we 
 can see them taken into His power, we can see 
 how there was a certain fascination in His pres- 
 ence which laid hold upon them. It seemed at 
 
126 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 first to be purely human, to be the way in which 
 one strong man takes possession of his, fellow- 
 man and compels him to rely upon him. It was 
 upon purely human ground. It was in the mani- 
 festation of the excellence of this human nature 
 of ours that they believed in Jesus and gradually 
 became His disciples. Little by little it so com- 
 manded them that at last the moment came when 
 it was impossible for them to separate themselves 
 from Him; and one day, when the people were 
 turning away from Him when He was preaching 
 and saying things that it was hard for them to 
 understand, He looked around upon them and 
 said, "Are you going also, will you leave me 
 now? " And then there burst forth from the lips 
 of one of them, the most strong and characteristic 
 act of the little company, those great words that 
 declared how He had become necessary to them : 
 "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the 
 words of eternal life." You see the power that 
 Jesus had acquired over these men. You see 
 the way in which He had taken them absolutely 
 into His dominion, simply because of the mani- 
 festation of character and life, simply because He 
 had shown them what man might be and opened 
 the springs of the better life in themselves by 
 the words He had spoken to them. And then 
 they lived on with Him still, and by and by they 
 
THE CHEIST. 127 
 
 had become so convinced by His truth and wis- 
 dom, His character had so taken possession of 
 them, that they were ready to believe anything 
 that He said. One day He lifted up His voice 
 and declared that which had gradually been 
 dawning upon them all the time, that He was 
 more than they were, that He had brought in 
 some mysterious way a divine life into this world 
 and had much to communicate to them. He told 
 them that He was the Father from whom His 
 life and their life had come. He told them that 
 He and the Father were one. He told them, not 
 in theological statement, not as men have worked 
 out since in their desire to know it fully, but in 
 the simple statement of the truth that could be 
 the inspiration of their life, that in His presence 
 there was here the very presence of God among 
 them. It was not strange to them, though human 
 creatures, though men, that the highest aspira- 
 tion of their humanity had never thought God 
 so far from this world that it seemed to them 
 strange that there should be in very human 
 presence the divine life here with them. They 
 could not explain it and did not try to explain it. 
 Here it was, that which they had seen shadowed 
 in the divine st men whom they had known, that 
 which they had recognized. Here it was before 
 them in this being who had won such a power 
 
128 PERFECT FBEEDOM. 
 
 over them that they were ready to accept His tes- 
 timony with regard to Himself. Oh ! my friends, 
 let us not feel that the evidence of our Christian 
 faith fails when it is seen to rest upon the word 
 of Christ Himself. My neighbor knows more of 
 himself than I know of him. I know more of 
 myself than any man can know of me, if only I 
 be earnest and sincere. And that the greatest 
 of men who ever trod this earth should not know 
 more of His nature than any other man should 
 know, and that therefore His word should not be 
 the richest revelation of that which is in His life 
 and makes His power over mankind, that is 
 incredible. Therefore the men were right when 
 they believed Jesus' own word and looked to 
 Him for the divinity which He said was present 
 with Him upon the earth. Then His life went 
 on, and by and by fulfilled itself in the one great 
 action in which He declared those two things 
 which He longed to know, the life and newness 
 of God and the power of their human nature. 
 He gave His life for them, indeed, in the awful 
 suffering that preceded and that culminated 
 upon the cross. He gave His life in crucifixion 
 for them, and in that crucifixion opened the 
 divinest doors of His life, when opening a sanct- 
 uary of sorrow ; and He bade them enter in and 
 know there the absolute life of God and the great 
 
THE CHBIST, 129 
 
 capacity of human nature to sacrifice itself for 
 God. And before He died, and afterward, He 
 again appeared to them. He spoke great words 
 which said that this was not the end of things, 
 that after they had ceased to see Him and touch 
 Him and hear His voice He still was to be present 
 in the world. He said that the mysterious pres- 
 ence of those who had passed away, which all had 
 known, was to culminate and be fulfilled in Him. 
 "I am with you alway, even unto the end of 
 the world." Wherever you " are together in my 
 name, there am I." Words and words and words 
 again like those He spoke, in which He declared 
 that He was to be an everlasting presence among 
 mankind, and therefore that which had taken 
 place in the life of those disciples might forever 
 take place ; that that which Jesus had done in 
 the days when He was present upon the earth 
 should be continually repeated, in that He was 
 forever to do that which He had been doing, giv- 
 ing Himself to human kind for their inspiration, 
 for their elevation, for their correction, for their 
 reproof, as He had been doing, their salvation, as 
 He had been doing in those days in which He- 
 was here among them. Men have believed that 
 simply. They have recognized that word of 
 Christ, and found the fulfilment of it in their 
 own lives j and that has been the Christian re- 
 
130 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 ligion, — just exactly what it was in the old days 
 when Jesus was present in Jerusalem and Gali- 
 lee. Just exactly what men did then men have 
 been doing in all the generations that have come 
 since. Just exactly what was possible then is 
 possible for them now — that we may become the 
 followers of that same Christ and the receivers 
 through Him of the divine life, by which alone 
 the human life is perfected and fulfilled. 
 
 That is the Christian religion. That is the 
 Christian faith. Is it not clear and simple, 
 whether it be true or not? My friends, you may 
 believe it or you may disbelieve it, but the Chris- 
 tian faith is clear and simple enough surely in 
 this statement, stripped of a thousand difficulties, 
 perplexities, and bewilderments. That is it, that 
 there is in the world to-day the same Christ who 
 was in the world eighteen hundred and more 
 years ago, and that men may go to Him and 
 receive His life and the inspiration of His pres- 
 ence and the guidance of His wisdom just 
 exactly as they did then. If you and I had been 
 in Jerusalem in those old days, what would we 
 have done, if we were more than mere creatures 
 of others, more than men merely absorbed in 
 our business, if there were any stirring in our 
 souls after the deeper and diviner desires, could 
 we, would we have been satisfied until we had 
 
THE CHEIST. 131 
 
 gone wherever He might be, — in the temple, in 
 the courts, or on the country road, — and found 
 that Jesus, and entered into some sympathy with 
 His life, that He might give to us what revelation 
 of life and what guidance of will it might be pos- 
 sible should come from Him to men who trusted 
 Him, until we had entered into sympathy with 
 Him and the fascinations of His character? 
 That is the Christian life, my friends, the thing 
 we make so vague and mysterious and difficult. 
 That is the Christian life, the following of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 What is the Christian? Everywhere the man 
 who, so far as he comprehends Jesus Christ, so 
 far as he can get any knowledge of Him, is His 
 servant, the man who makes Christ a teacher of 
 his intelligence and the guide of his soul, the 
 man who obeys Christ as far as he has been able 
 to understand Him. What, you say, the man 
 who imperfectly understands Christ, who don't 
 know anything about His divinity, who denies 
 the great doctrines of the Church in regard to 
 Him, is he a Christian? Certainly he is, my 
 friends. There is no other test than this, the 
 following of Jesus Christ. So far as any soul 
 deeply consecrated to Him, and wanting the 
 influence that it feels that He has to give, follows 
 Christ, enters into His obedience and His com- 
 
132 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 pany, and receives His blessings, just so far He 
 is able to bestow it. I cannot sympathize with 
 any feeling that desires to make the name of 
 Christian a narrower name. I would spread it 
 just as wide as it can be possibly made to spread. 
 I would know any man as a Christian, rejoice 
 to know any man as a Christian, whom Jesus 
 would recognize as a Christian, and Jesus Christ, 
 I am sure, in those old days recognized His 
 followers even if they came after Him with the 
 blindest sight, with the most imperfect recogni- 
 tion and acknowledgment of what He was and of 
 what He could do. 
 
 And then, again, is it not very strange, cer- 
 tainly, that there should be, in these later days, 
 in all these centuries that have passed between 
 the day of Jesus Christ and us, that there should 
 have come a vast accumulation of speculation 
 and conjecture, of theorizing and thought with re- 
 gard to Christ and what He was, and that a great 
 deal of it should have been very strange and 
 should seem to us to-day to have been very silly, 
 a great part of it should have seemed to be but a 
 work of intelligences that were half dulled and 
 blinded, full of prejudice, and shrinking from 
 the error and the danger in which they stood? 
 What does it mean — all these complicated the- 
 ologies that we say are keeping us away from the 
 
THE CHRIST. 133 
 
 simple following of the grandest figure that has 
 ever presented Himself before human kind? I 
 know not how else it can be when I see what has 
 been the power of Jesus over thoughts and homes 
 and hearts of men through all these years. It 
 seems to be a previous necessity that He who most 
 fastens the heart and life of man, who seems to 
 be most necessary to the soul of men, shall so 
 attract their thought, shall so draw them all to 
 Himself that their crudest speculations, that their 
 most erroneous conceptions, shall fasten upon 
 him, and they shall be in some true way a testi- 
 mony of the way in which He has always held 
 the human heart. This is the way in which all 
 crudities of theology, all the weaknesses of spec- 
 ulation, all even of the most strange and foul 
 thoughts in regard to the life of Jesus and His 
 manifestation in the world, have accumulated 
 around that gracious figure, so simple and strong, 
 which walks through our human life and mani- 
 fests to us the God. Surely it is in one concep- 
 tion of it, and the true conception of it, the great 
 perpetual testimony of how men have cared about 
 Jesus, that they have speculated about Him in 
 such strange perplexing ways. But He about 
 whom the world does not care walks through the 
 world and bears His simple being. There is 
 nothing that fastens upon Him, that perplexes 
 
134 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 His life, that makes mysterious and strange the 
 life He lives. But where is the great man in all 
 the history of human kind that has not gathered 
 about his person and work the speculations of 
 those whom we find, with their crude and un- 
 guided minds, have formed their theories in 
 regard to Him? It is the very abundance of the 
 strange speculations with regard to Christ, it is 
 the very strangeness of the theories that have 
 been formed with regard to Him, that has shown 
 me how He has drawn the hearts of men, how He 
 has not let them go, but compelled them to fasten 
 themselves to Him, to think about Him and try 
 to follow Him in such poor, blind ways as they 
 were able to give themselves to Him in. This, 
 then, is the Christian faith. This is the way in 
 which the larger life opens before mankind, by 
 the following of a person, by the giving of the 
 life into the dominion and the guidance and the 
 obedience of one who goes forward into that life, 
 himself thoroughly believing in it — for Jesus 
 believed in it with all His human soul. 
 
 But then, we ask ourselves, is it possible that 
 we can gather from such a life as Jesus lived so 
 long ago, a life that was lived back in the very 
 dust of history and that has come down to u$ in 
 records which seem sometimes to be flecked with 
 tradition and obscured with the distance in which 
 
THE CHRIST. 135 
 
 they lived, is it possible that I should get from 
 him a guidance of my daily life here? Am I, a 
 man of the nineteenth century, when everything 
 has changed, in Boston, in this modern civiliza- 
 tion, — can Jesus really be my teacher, my guide, 
 in the actual duties and perplexities of my daily 
 life and lead me into the larger land in which I 
 know he lives? Ah! the man knows very little 
 about the everlasting identity of human nature, 
 little of how the world in all these changeless 
 ages is the same, who asks that; very little, 
 also, of how in every largest truth there are all 
 particulars and details of human life involved; 
 little of how everything that a man is to-day, 
 upon every moment, rests upon some eternal 
 foundation and may be within the power of 
 some everlasting law. The wonder of the life 
 of Jesus is this — and you will find it so and 
 you have found it so if you have ever taken your 
 New Testament and tried to make it the rule of 
 your daily life — that there is not a single action 
 that you are called upon to do of which you need 
 be, of which you will be, in any serious doubt for 
 ten minutes as to what Jesus Christ, if He were 
 here, Jesus Christ being here, would have you 
 do under those circumstances and with the mate- 
 rial upon which you are called to act. Men have 
 tried to go back and imitate the very activities 
 
136 PEBFECT FBEEDOM. 
 
 of the life of Jesus Christ, to do the very things 
 that He did. Souls have fled across the sea and 
 tried upon the hills and in the plains where 
 Jesus lived to reproduce the life that has so 
 fascinated them. They were poor and unphilo- 
 sophic souls. The soul that takes in Jesus' 
 word, the soul that through the words of Jesus 
 enters into the very person of Jesus, the soul 
 that knows Him as its daily presence and its 
 daily law — it never hesitates. Do I doubt — 
 I, who see myself called upon to be the slave of 
 these conditions which are around me — to do this 
 thing? Because it is the custom of the business 
 in which I am engaged, do I doubt for a moment if 
 I turn aside and open this ISTew Testament, which 
 is Jesus' law with regard to that thing? I, 
 with my passion boiling in my veins, leading me 
 to do some foul act of outrageous lust, have I a 
 single moment's doubt what Jesus would have 
 me do if He were here — what Jesus, being here, 
 really wants me to do? There is no single act 
 of your life, my friend, there is no single 
 dilemma in which you find yourself placed, in 
 which the answer is not in Jesus Christ. I do 
 not say that you will find some words in Jesus' 
 teachings in the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
 and John that will detail exactly the condition 
 in which you find yourself placed; but I do say 
 
THE CHBIST. 137 
 
 that if, with your human sympathies and your 
 devoted love, you can feel the presence of that 
 Jesus behind the words that He said, the personal 
 perfectness, the divine life manifested in the 
 human life, there is not a single sin or tempta- 
 tion to sin that will not be convicted. 
 
 There is where we rest when we claim that 
 Jesus Christ is the master of the world, that He 
 opens the great richness and infinite distances of 
 the human life, that He shows us what it is to be 
 men. It would be little if He did that simply 
 with the painting of some glorious vision upon 
 the skies beyond; but that He comes into your 
 life and mine, into our homes and our shops, 
 into our offices and on our streets, and there 
 makes known in the actual circumstances of our 
 daily life what we ought to do and what we 
 ought not to do — that is the wonder of his reve- 
 lation ; that is what proclaims him to be the Son 
 of God and the Son of Man. Think, as you sit 
 here, of anything that you are doing that is 
 wrong, of any habit of your life, of your self- 
 indulgence, or of that great, pervasive habit of 
 your life which makes you a creature of the 
 present instead of the eternities, a creature of 
 the material earth instead of the glorious skies. 
 Ask of yourself of any habit that belongs to your 
 own personal life, and bring it face to face with 
 
188 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 Jesus Christ and see if it is not judged. A 
 judgment day that is far away, that is off in the 
 dim distance when this world is done — it shall 
 come, no doubt. I know none of us can know 
 much with regard to it, except that it is sure. 
 But the judgment day that is here now is Christ; 
 the judgment day that is right close to your life 
 and rebukes you, if you will let Him rebuke you 
 every time you sin, the judgment day that is 
 here and praises you and bids you be of good 
 courage, when you do a thing that men disown 
 and despise, is Christ. Therefore it is no figure 
 of speech, it is no mere ecstasy of the imagina- 
 tion of the preacher, when we say that in the 
 midst of these streets of ours, more real than 
 the men that walk in them, more real than the 
 sidewalks that are under our feet, and the build- 
 ings that tower over us, there walks an unseen 
 presence. An unseen presence? Yes. Are you 
 and I going to be such creatures of our senses 
 that we shall not believe that there are powers 
 that touch us that we cannot see? Am I going 
 to be so bound down to these poor fingers and to 
 these poor eyes that I shall know myself in no 
 larger connection with the great, unseen world? 
 I will not. No great man, no manly man, has 
 ever allowed such a limitation of himself. There 
 is the unseen presence in the midst of our life, 
 
THE CHRIST, 139 
 
 and he who will feel it may feel it, and that 
 unseen presence speaks to him continually. It 
 knows every one of us. It knows the rich man 
 and knows what his wealth has made of him. 
 It knows whether it has made him seliish. Shall 
 I say it? He, the Christ, the present Christ, 
 knows whether the rich man's riches have made 
 him selfish and base and mean, covetous and 
 poor and little-souled, or whether he has been 
 glad to rise to the greatness of his privilege, and 
 be the very utterance of the ben,eficence of God 
 upon the earth. He knows the poor man and 
 his struggles, he knows the poor man and his 
 self-respect. He speaks to the poor man's soul, 
 who has been kept poor because he will not enter 
 into the baser methods and motives of our mod- 
 ern life, and is despised, and says to him, ^' Be 
 of good courage, for I know what you are." He 
 speaks to the poor in distress and poverty. He 
 speaks to the wretched in their disappointment 
 and their pain. He is their comforter. He 
 knows every sin. He knows every sorrow of 
 our life. He goes, unseen on earth, into the 
 chambers where the dead lie dead, and where the 
 sick lie dying, and He speaks His words of con- 
 solation. He opens up the glory of the perfect 
 life. He lays his hand upon the mourner whose 
 soul is bowed down to the earth and says, " Look 
 
140 PEBFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 up," and points into eternity and heaven. All 
 these things Christ can do not merely, but Christ 
 is doing. He is the inspiring power of this life, 
 that keeps it from rotting in its corruption and 
 degradation. We dwell too much, I think, upon 
 some of these things ; we cannot dwell too much, 
 perhaps, but we dwell out of proportion, it may 
 be, to the thought of Jesus Christ, the comforter 
 of sorrow. He is the comforter of sorrow, for 
 he knew and he knows what sorrow is. In His 
 own crucifixion, in that which came before His 
 crucifixion. He knew the suffering of this earthly 
 life. There is no human being who ever has 
 known the misery of man as Jesus, knows it, and 
 so He comes to all sorrows with tender consola- 
 tion. God grant, God grant He may come to any 
 of you who have come into these doors to-day 
 with a sorrow, with a fear, with a dread upon 
 your hearts, with souls that are wrung, with 
 bodies that are suffering! God grant that the 
 Christ may comfort you, may comfort you ! But 
 not only that. Shall there be no Christ for those 
 who for the moment seem to need no comfort? 
 
 Shall there be no Christ for the strong men 
 who have before them the duties of their life, 
 and who want the strength with which to do 
 them? Shall there be no Christ for the young 
 men, the young men standing in danger, but 
 
THE CUBIST. 141 
 
 also standing in such magnificent and splendid 
 chances? It is great to think of Christ standing 
 by the sorrowing and comforting them. It is 
 great, — we will not say it is greater, — it is very 
 great, when by the side of the young man just 
 entering into life there stands the Christ, saying 
 to his soul, with the voice that he cannot fail to 
 hear: "Be pure, be strong, be wise, be indepen- 
 dent; rejoice in Me and My appreciation. Let 
 the world go, if it is necessary that the world 
 should go. Serve the world, but do not be the 
 servant of the world. Make the world your ser- 
 vant by helping the world in every way in which 
 you can minister to its life. Be brave, be strong, 
 be manly by My strength." Oh! young man, if 
 you can hear the Christ speak to you like that 
 behind all the traditions of the street, behind 
 the teachings of the books, behind all that the 
 wise and successful men say to you, behind all 
 the cynics and sneerers say to you, the great, 
 strong, healthy voice of Jesus Christ, who be- 
 lieves in man because He has known man filled 
 with divinity, and believes in you because He 
 knows that which has been set before you by 
 your Father in the sending out of your life, and 
 who longs and prays and waits to strengthen 
 you, that you may do your work, that you may 
 escape from sin, that you may live your life. 
 
142 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 this great figure of the present Christ that 
 Christianity can produce — it is not the memory 
 of something that is away back in the past, it is 
 not the anticipation of something to come in the 
 future. We talk about Christ the Saviour, and 
 think about Calvary long ago. We talk about 
 the Christ the Judge, and think of a great white 
 throne set in some mystic valley of Jehoshaphat, 
 where some day the world is to be judged. We 
 do not so get hold of Christ. The Christ who is 
 in the past is not our Christ unless His power 
 holds forth, the power of His spirit, which is the 
 whole knowledge of the life in which we live. 
 We think of the Christ of the future, for whom 
 all the world is waiting. He will never enter 
 into us and lead us unless we know that He is 
 here and now. It does seem to me sometimes 
 that if men would only take religion as a real 
 and present thing, and if, instead of worship- 
 ping it in the past and expecting it with fear 
 and dread and vain hope in the future, it 
 could be a real thing with them here and now, 
 something in which they are to live, not to which 
 they are to flee in moments of doubt, not of 
 which they should make rescue, but in which 
 they should do all their work and live, then re- 
 ligion would be to the soul of man so that it could 
 not be cast aside, so that they must enter into 
 
THE CHRIST, 143 
 
 it and take it into themselves and make it their 
 own. Religion is not the simple fire-escape that 
 you build, in anticipation of a possible danger, 
 upon the outside of your dwelling and leave 
 there until danger comes. You go to it some 
 morning when a fire breaks out in your house, 
 and the poor old thing that you built up there, 
 and thought you could use some day, is so rusty 
 and broken, and the weather has so beaten upon 
 it, and the sun so turned its hinges, that it will 
 not work. That is the condition of a man who 
 has built himself what seems to be a creed of 
 faith, a trust in God in anticipation of the day 
 when danger is to overtake him, and has said to 
 himself, I am safe, for I will take refuge in it 
 then. But religion is the house in which we live, 
 it is the table at which we sit, it is the fireside 
 to which we draw near, the room that arches its 
 graceful and familiar presence over us ; it is the 
 bed on which we lie and think of the past and 
 anticipate the future and gather our refresh- 
 ment. There is no Christ except the present 
 Christ for every man, unto whom all the power 
 of the historic Christ is always appearing, and 
 who is great with all the sweet solemnity that 
 comes from the knowledge of what in the future 
 He is to be to the world and to the soul. I am 
 anxious to-day to impress this upon you: that 
 
144 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 the Christian faith is not a dogma, it is not 
 primarily a law, but is a personal presence and 
 an immediate life that is right here and now. 
 I am anxious to have you know that to be a 
 Christian does not mean primarily to believe 
 this or that. It does not mean primarily, al- 
 though it means necessarily afterward, to do this 
 or that. But it means to know the presence of 
 a true personal Christ among us and to follow. 
 Here is the only true power by which a religion 
 can become perpetual. Men outgrow many 
 dogmas which they hold. The lines in which 
 they try to live change their application to their 
 lives. But I know a person with a deep, true 
 life; I enter into a friendship with one who is 
 worthy I should be his friend, and he is mine 
 always. What is the meaning of this sort of 
 talk that we hear about a faith that they held 
 once, but they have outgrown? What is the 
 reason of this expectation that seems to have 
 spread itself abroad, of necessity that the boy 
 who had a religion should lose his religion some 
 time or other, and that by and by he should take 
 up a man's religion somewhere upon the other 
 side of the gulf of infidelity and godlessness, 
 through which he has passed in the meanwhile? 
 You expect your boy of ten years old to be re- 
 ligious with a child's sweet, trusting faith; and 
 
THE CHRIST. 145 
 
 you hope that your man of forty and fifty, beaten 
 by the world, is to have found a God who can be 
 his salvation. But the years between? What do 
 you think of your young men of fifteen, twenty, 
 twenty-five, and thirty years old? To have 
 outgrown the boy's faith, and not to have come 
 to the man's faith? That' seems almost to be an 
 awful fate and destiny which you expect for 
 them. But if our faith be this, then there shall 
 be no need, no chance that a man shall outgrow 
 it. Know Christ with the first conceptions, im- 
 perfect and crude, of his boy's life, and he shall 
 go on knowing more and more of that Christ. 
 That friend, the Christ he knows at twenty -five, 
 shall be different from the Christ he knew at 
 ten, just exactly as the friend I know at fifty is 
 different from the friend I knew at thirty, twenty 
 years ago; and yet He is the same friend still, 
 forever opening the richness of an ever richer 
 life, filling it with new experiences, with new 
 manifestations of Himself. Let him drop some 
 thing which seemed to him to be a part of the 
 religion, but was only a temporary phase or 
 condition of it, going forward with the soul all 
 through the opening stages of life, and at last 
 going forward with the soul into the life where 
 it shall see as all along it has been seen, and 
 know as it has been known. The old legend waHs 
 
146 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 that the clothes of the Israelites, which the Bible 
 said waxed not old upon them in the desert dur- 
 ing those forty years, not merely waxed not old 
 those forty years, but grew with their growth, so 
 that the little Hebrew who crossed the Eed Sea 
 in his boy's clothes wore the same clothes when 
 he entered into the Promised Land. It is the 
 parable of that which comes to the man who has 
 a true Christian faith, a faith which comes in 
 the personal friendship of Christ, a faith which 
 comes not in the belief of certain things about 
 Him, not in the doing slavishly of certain things 
 which it seemed as if it had been said by Him 
 that we must do, but in the personal entrance 
 into His nature in a life for Him, in which He 
 is able to send His life down into us. 
 
 Then there is another thing that people are 
 always thinking, that I hear very often from 
 men, and that I have no doubt that I should hear 
 from many of you, one by one. You talk about 
 your earlier religion as if it had been some sort 
 of a bondage from which you had escaped. How 
 common it is to hear men, especially in this 
 region, say : " I would be, perhaps, religious, ex- 
 cept that there was so much religion forced upon 
 me in my earliest days. I was driven to church 
 when I was a boy, in those old Puritan days. 
 I went to school, where they forced prayers upon 
 
THE CHRIST. 147 
 
 me all the time. I was made to be religious, so 
 now I cannot be religious." Was there ever a 
 more dreadful thing than for a soul to say that, 
 because, it may be, of the unwisdom, or the 
 imprudence, the overzeal and the mistaken zeal 
 of other men, we have not got the full blessing 
 of that rich, open, free life with Christ which 
 the youth may have, and therefore we will aban- 
 don the privileges of our higher life which is 
 given to us in our manlier years? It all comes 
 of this awful way of talking as if religion were 
 the duty and not the inestimable privilege of 
 human kind. The Christ stands before us and 
 says, "Come to me." You say, "Must I?" 
 And He answers, " You may." He will not even 
 say, "You must." You may. And duty loses 
 itself in privilege, and the soul enters into inde- 
 pendence and escapes from its sins, fulfils its 
 life, lays hold of its salvation, becomes eternal, 
 begins to live an eternal life in the accepted and 
 loving service of Christ. 
 
 Now just one word, my friends. If this be so, 
 whether you to-day are ready to make Christ 
 your master and your friend or not, do not, I 
 beg you, let yourselves say that it is a silly or 
 unreasonable belief, thus to know of a spiritual 
 presence which is here among us, in which God 
 is really in humanity. Do not let yourselves 
 
148 PEliFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 say, my friends, that the man who gives himsel% 
 to Jesus Christ and earnestly tries to enter in 
 deeper and deeper into his life and tries to do 
 his will, that he may know the Christ and know 
 himself in the Christ more and more — dare not 
 call that brother a fool, as you have sometimes 
 called your Christian man who watched scrupu- 
 lously over his life and prayed, yes, prayed, the 
 thing you think perhaps the f oolishest thing that 
 man can do, the thing that is the most reasonable 
 act that any man does upon God's earth. If 
 man is man and God is God, to live without 
 prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an 
 infinitely foolish thing. When a man for the 
 first time bows down upon his knees and prays, 
 "Oh! Christ, come unto me, reveal Thyself to 
 me, make me to know Thee, that I may receive 
 Thee, make me to be obedient that I may take 
 Thee into my life," then that man has claimed 
 his manhood. I beg you, I implore you, I adjure 
 you that, if you be not ready to be Christian, 
 you at least will know that the Christian life is 
 the only true human life, and that the man who 
 becomes thoroughly a Christian sets his face 
 toward the fulfilment of his humanity, and so 
 for the first time truly is a man. "As many 
 as received Him," — so the great Scripture word 
 runs of this Christ of whom we have been talk- 
 
THE CHBIST. 149 
 
 ing, — "As many as received Him, to them gave 
 He power to become the sons of God." 
 
 Just think of it ! — the sons of God ! The 
 power to become that to as many as will receive 
 the present Christ. 
 
* /*" 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.^ 
 
 "He chose David also His servant, and took him away 
 from the sheepfolds ; that he might feed 3raeob His people, 
 and Israel His inheritance. So he fed them with a faith- 
 ful and true heart, and ruled them prudently with all his 
 power."— Psalm lxxviii. 71, 72, 73. 
 
 While I speak to you to-day, the body of the 
 President who ruled this people, is lying, hon- 
 ored and loved, in our city. It is impossible 
 with that sacred presence in our midst for me to 
 stand and speak of ordinary topics which oc- 
 cupy the pulpit. I must speak of him to-day; 
 and I therefore undertake to do what I had 
 intended to do at some future time, to invite 
 you to study with me the character of Abraham 
 Lincoln, the impulses of his life and the causes 
 of his death. I know how hard it is to do it 
 rightly, how impossible it is to do it worthily. 
 But I shall speak with confidence, because I 
 speak to those who love him, and whose ready 
 love will fill out the deficiencies in a picture 
 which my words will weakly try to draw. 
 
 1 A sermon preached in Philadelphia, while the body of 
 the President was lying in the city. 
 151 
 
152 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 We take it for granted, first of all, that there 
 is an essential connection between Mr. Lincoln's 
 character and his violent and bloody death. It 
 is no accident, no arbitrary decree of Providence. 
 He lived as he did, and he died as he did, be- 
 cause he was what he was. The more we see of 
 events, the less we come to believe in any fate 
 or destiny except the destiny of character. It 
 will be our duty, then, to see what there was in 
 the character of our great President that created 
 the history of his life, and at last produced the 
 catastrophe of his cruel death. After the first 
 trembling horror, the first outburst of indignant 
 sorrow, has grown calm, these are the questions 
 which we are bound to ask and answer. 
 
 It is not necessary for me even to sketch the 
 biography of Mr. Lincoln. He was born in 
 Kentucky, fifty-six years ago, when Kentucky 
 was a pioneer State. He lived, as boy and man, 
 the hard and needy life of a backwoodsman, a 
 farmer, a river boatman, and, finally, by his 
 own efforts at self-education, of an active, re- 
 spected, influential citizen, in the half -organized 
 and manifold interests of a new and energetic 
 community. Prom his boyhood up he lived in 
 direct and vigorous contact with men and things, 
 not as in older States and easier conditions with 
 words and theories ; and both his moral convic- 
 
ABBAHAM LINCOLN. 153 
 
 tions and his intellectual opinions gathered from 
 that contact a supreme degree of that character 
 by which men knew him, that character which 
 is the most distinctive possession of the best 
 American nature, that almost indescribable 
 quality which we call in general clearness or 
 ^truth^nd which appears in the physical struct- 
 ure as health, in the moral constitution as hon- 
 esty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in 
 the xegioia^pf active life as practicalness. This 
 one character, with many sides, all shaped by 
 the same essential force and testifying to the 
 same inner influences, was what was powerful 
 in him and decreed for him the life he was to 
 live and the death he was to die. We must 
 take no smaller view than this of what he was. 
 Even his physical conditions are not to be for- 
 gotten in making up his character. We make 
 too little always of the physical; certainly we 
 make too little of it here if we lose out of sight 
 the strength and muscular activity, the power 
 of doing and enduring, which the backwoods- 
 boy inherited from generations of hard-living 
 ancestors, and appropriated for his own by a 
 long discipline of bodily toil. He brought to 
 the solution of the question of labor in this coun- 
 try not merely a mind, but a body thoroughly in 
 sympathy with labor, full of the culture of labor, 
 
154 PEBFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 bearing witness to the dignity and excellence of 
 work in every muscle that work had toughened 
 and every sense that work had made clear and 
 true. He could not have brought the mind for 
 his task so perfectly, unless he had first brought 
 the body whose rugged and stubborn health was 
 always contradicting to him the false theories 
 of labor, and always asserting the true. 
 
 As to the moral and mental powers which dis- 
 tinguished him, all embraceable under this gen- 
 eral description of clearness of truth, the most 
 remarkable thing is the way in which they blf^pd. 
 with one another^ so that it is next to impossi- 
 ble to examine them^ In separajlon.^ A great 
 many people have discussed very crudely 
 whether Abraham Lincoln was an intellectual 
 man or not ; as if intellect were a thing always 
 of the same sort, which you could precipitate 
 from the other constituents of a man's nature 
 and weigh by itself, and compare by pounds 
 and ounces in this man with another. The fact 
 is, that in all the simplest characters the line 
 between the mental and moral natures is always 
 vague and indistinct. They run together, and 
 in their best combinations you are unable to dis- 
 criminate, in the wisdom which is their result, 
 how much is moral and how much is intellect- 
 ual. You are unable to tell whether in the wise 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 155 
 
 acts and words which issue from such a life 
 there is more of the righteousness that comes of 
 a clear conscience, or of the sagacity that comes 
 of a clear brain. In more complex characters 
 and under more complex conditions, the moral 
 and the mental lives come to be less healthily 
 combined. They co-operate, they help each 
 other less. They come even to stand over 
 against each other as antagonists ; till we have 
 that vague but most melancholy notion which 
 pervades the life of all elaborate civilization, 
 that goodness and greatness, as we call them, 
 are not to be looked for together, till we expect 
 to see and so do see a feeble and narrow con- 
 scientiousness on the one hand, and a bad, un- 
 principled intelligence on the other, dividing 
 the suffrages of men. 
 
 It is the great boon of such characters as Mr. 
 Lincoln's, that they reunite what God has joined 
 together and man has put asunder. In him was 
 vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the 
 goodness of real greatness. The twain were 
 ^£2.,fl£sh^ ^ot one of all the multitudes who 
 stood and looked up to him for direction with 
 such a loving and implicit trust can tell you 
 to-day whether the wise judgments that he gave 
 came most from a strong head or a sound heart. 
 If you ask them, they are puzzled. There are 
 
156 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 men as good as he, but they do bad things. 
 There are men as intelligent as he, but they do 
 foolish things. In him goodness and intelli- 
 gence combined and made their best result of 
 wisdom. FqrjDerfect truth consists not merely 
 in the right^JCQnstituen^^ of character, but in 
 their right and intimate conjunction. This 
 union of the mental and moral into a life of ad- 
 mirable simplicity is what we most admire in 
 children; but in them it is unsettled and unprac- 
 tical. But when it is preserved into manhood, 
 deepened into reliability and maturity, it is that 
 glorified childlikeness, that high and reverend 
 simplicity, which shames and baffles the most 
 accomplished astuteness, and is chosen by God 
 to fill his purposes when he needs a ruler for 
 his people, of faithful and true heart, such as he 
 had who was our President. 
 
 Another evident quality of such a character 
 as this will be its freshness or newness ; if we 
 may so speak. Its freshness or readiness — call 
 it what you will — its ability to take up new 
 duties and do them in a new way, will result of 
 necessity from, its truth and clearness. The 
 simple natures and forces will always be the 
 most pliant ones. Water bends and shapes it- 
 self to any channel. Air folds and adapts itself 
 to each new figure. They are the simplest and 
 
ABBAHAM LINCOLN. 157 
 
 the most infinitely active things in nature. So 
 this nature, in very virtue of its simplicity, 
 must be also free, always fitting itself to each 
 new need. It will always start from the* most 
 fundamental and eternal conditions, and work in 
 the straightest even although they be the newest 
 ways, to the present prescribed purpose. In | 
 one word, it must be broad and independent and / 
 radical. So that freedom and radicalness in the / 
 character of Abraham Lincoln were not separate/ 
 qualities, but the necessary results of his sim-/ 
 plicity and childlikeness and truth. f 
 
 Here then we have some conception of the 
 man; Out of this character came the life which 
 we admire and the death which we lament to- 
 day. He was called in that character to that 
 life and death. It was just the nature, as you 
 see, which a new nation such as ours ought to 
 produce. All the conditions of his birth, his 
 youth, his manhood, which made him what he 
 was, were not irregular and exceptional, but 
 were the normal conditions of a new and simple 
 country. His pioneer home in Indiana was a 
 type of the pioneer land in which he lived. If 
 ever there was a man who was a part of the 
 time and country he lived in, this was he. The 
 same simple respect for labor won in the school 
 of work and incorporated into blood and muscle j 
 
158 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 the same unassuming loyalty to the simple virt- 
 ues of temperance and industry and integrity; 
 the same sagacious judgment which had learned 
 to be quick-eyed and quick-brained in the con- 
 stant presence of emergency; the same direct 
 and clear thought about things, social, political, 
 and religious, that was in him supremely, was 
 in the people he was sent to rule. Surely, with 
 such a type-man for ruler, there would seem to 
 be but a smooth and even road over which he 
 might lead the people whose character he repre- 
 sented into the new region of national happiness 
 and comfort and usefulness, for which that char- 
 acter had been designed. 
 
 But then we come to the beginning of all 
 trouble. Abraham Lincoln was the type-man 
 the country, but not of the whole country. 
 This cKaracter which we have been trying to 
 describe was the character of an American under 
 the discipline of freedom. There was another 
 American character which had been developed 
 under the influence of slavery. There was no 
 one American character embracing the land. 
 There were two characters, with impulses of 
 irrepressible and deadly conflict. This citizen 
 whom we have been honoring and praising rep- 
 resented one. The whole great scheme with 
 which he was ultimately brought in conflict, and 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 159 
 
 which has finally killed him, represented the ^ 
 other. Beside this nature, true and fresh and 
 new, there was another nature, false and effete 
 and old. The one nature found itself in a new 
 world, and set itself to discover the new ways 
 for the new duties that were given it. The 
 other nature, full of the false pride of blood, 
 set itself to reproduce in a new world the insti- 
 tutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew 
 the structure of the feudalism which had been 
 corrupt in its own day, and which had been left 
 far behind by the advancing conscience and 
 needs of the progressing race. The one nature 
 magnified labor, the other nature depreciated 
 and despised it. The one honored the laborer, 
 and the other scorned him. The one was sim- 
 ple and direct ; the other, complex, full of soph- 
 istries and self -excuses. The one was free to 
 look all that claimed to be truth in the face, 
 and separate the error from the truth that might 
 be in it; the other did not dare to investigate, 
 because its own established prides and systems 
 were dearer to it than the truth itself, and so 
 even truth went about in it doing the- work of 
 error. The one was ready to state broad princi- 
 ples, of the brotherhood of man, the universal 
 fatherhood and justice of God, however imper- 
 fectly it might realize them in practice; the 
 
160 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 other denied even the principles, and so dug 
 deep and laid below its special sins the broad 
 foundation of a consistent, acknowledged sinful- 
 ness. In a word, one nature was full of the 
 influences of Freedom, the other nature ^/as full 
 of the influences of Slavery. 
 
 In general, these two regions of our national 
 life were separated by a geographical boundary. 
 One was the spirit of the North, the other was 
 the spirit of the South. But the Southern nat- 
 ure was by no means all a Southern thing. There 
 it had an organized, established form, a -^.ertain 
 definite, established institution about w ich it 
 clustered. Here, lacking advantage, it lived in 
 less expressive ways and so lived more weakly. 
 There, there was the horrible sacrament of slav- 
 ery, the outward and visible sign round which 
 the inward and spiritual temper gathered and 
 kept itself alive. But who doubts that among 
 us the spirit of slavery lived and thrived? Its 
 formal existence had been swept away from one 
 State after another, partly on conscientious, 
 partly on economical grounds, but its spirit was 
 here, in •every sympathy that Northern winds 
 carried to the listening ear of the Southern slave- 
 holder, and in every oppression of the weak by 
 the strong, every proud assumption of idleness 
 over labor which echoed the music of Southern 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 161 
 
 life back to us. Here in our midst lived that 
 worse and falser nature, side by side with the 
 true and better nature which God meant should 
 be the nature of Americans, and of which he 
 was shaping out the type and champion in his 
 chosen David of the sheepfold. 
 
 Here then we have the two. The history of 
 our country for many years is the history of how 
 these two elements of American life approached 
 collision. They wrought their separate reac- 
 tions 1 each other. Men debate and quarrel 
 even uqw about the rise of Northern Abolition- 
 ism, aliTiut whether the Northern Abolitionists 
 were right or wrong, whether they did harm or 
 good. How vain the quarrel is ! It was inevi- 
 table. It was inevitable in the nature of things 
 that two such natures living here together should 
 be set violently against each other. It is inevi- 
 table, till man be far more unfeeling and untrue 
 to his convictions than he has always been, that 
 a great wrong asserting itself vehemently should 
 arouse to no less vehement assertion the oppos- 
 ing right. The only wonder is that there was 
 not more of it. The only wonder is that so few 
 were swept away to take by an impulse they 
 could not resist their stand of hatred to the 
 wicked institution. The only wonder is, that 
 Cipnlj one brave, reckless man came forth to cast 
 
162 PEBFECT FBEEDOM. 
 
 himself, almost single-handed, with a hopeless 
 hope, against the proud power that he hated, 
 and trust to the influence of a soul marching on 
 into the history of his countrymen to stir them 
 to a vindication of the truth he loved. At any 
 rate, whether the Abolitionists were wrong or 
 right, there grew up about their violence, as 
 there always will about the extremism of ex- 
 treme reformers, a great mass of feeling, catch- 
 ing their spirit and asserting it firmly, though 
 in more moderate degrees and methods. About 
 the nucleus of Abolitionism grew up a great 
 American Anti-Slavery determination, which 
 at last gathered strength enough to take its 
 stand to insist upon the checking and limiting 
 the extension of the power of slavery, and to 
 put the type-man, whom God had been prepar- 
 ing for the task, before the world, to do the 
 work on which it had resolved. Then came 
 discontent, secession, treason. The two Ameri- 
 can natures, long advancing to encounter, met at 
 last, and a whole country, yet trembling with 
 the shock, bears witness how terrible the meet- 
 ing was. 
 
 Thus I have tried briefly to trace out the 
 gradual course by which God brought the char- 
 acter which he designed to be the controlling 
 character of this new world into distinct colli- 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 163 
 
 sion with thejig^tile character which it was to 
 d estroy andfabsorVJ and set it in the person of 
 its type-marTin the seat of highest power. The 
 character formed under the discipline of Free- 
 dom and the character formed under the disci- 
 pline of Slavery developed all their difference 
 and met in hostile conflict when this war began. 
 Notice, it was not only in what he did and was 
 towards the slave, it was in all he did and was 
 everywhere that we accept Mr. Lincoln's char- 
 acter as the true result of our free life and in- 
 stitutions. Nowhere else could have come forth 
 that genuine love of the people, which in him 
 no one could suspect of being either the cheap 
 flattery of the demagogue or the abstract philan- 
 thropy of the philosopher, which made our 
 President, while he lived, the centre of a great 
 household land, and when he died so cruelly, 
 made every humblest household thrill with a 
 sense of personal bereavement which the death 
 of rulers is not apt to bring. Nowhere else than 
 out of the life of freedom could have come that 
 personal unselfishness and generosity which 
 made so gracious a part of this good man's 
 character. How many soldiers feel yet the 
 pressure of a strong hand that clasped theirs 
 once as they lay sick and weak in the dreary 
 hospital ! How many ears will never lose the 
 
164 PEHFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 tlirill of some kind word he spoke — he who 
 could speak so kindly to promise a kindness 
 that always matched his word! How often he 
 surprised the land with a clemency which made 
 even those who questioned his policy love him 
 the more for what they called his weakness, — 
 seeing how the man in whom God had most 
 embodied the discipline of Freedom not only 
 could not be a slave, but could not be a tyrant ! 
 In the heartiness of his mirth and his enjoyment 
 of simple joys; in the directness and shrewd- 
 ness of perception which constituted his wit ; in 
 the untired, undiscouraged faith in human nat- 
 ure which he always kept; and perhaps above 
 all in the plainness and quiet, unostentatious 
 earnestness and independence of his religious 
 life, in his humble love and trust of God — in 
 all, it was a character such as only Freedom 
 knows how to make. 
 
 Now it was in this character, rather than in 
 any mere political position, that the fitness of 
 Mr. Lincoln to stand forth in the struggle of 
 the two American natures really lay. We are 
 told that he did not come to the Presidential 
 chair pledged to the abolition of Slavery. When 
 will we learn that with all true men it is not 
 what they intend to do, but it is what the quali- 
 ties of their natures bind them to do, that deter- 
 
ABBAHAM LINCOLN, 165 
 
 mines their career ! The President came to his 
 XDOwer full of the bloody strong in the strength 
 •of Freedom. He came there free, and hating 
 slavery. He came there, leaving on record 
 words like these spoken three years before and 
 never contradicted. He had said, "A house 
 divided against itself cannot stand. I believe 
 this Government cannot endure permanently, 
 half slave and half free. I do not expect the 
 Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the 
 house to fall; but I expect it will cease to be 
 divided. It will become all one thing or all the 
 other." When the question came, he knew 
 which thing he meant that it should be. His 
 whole nature settled that question for him. 
 Such a man must always live as he used to say 
 he lived (and was blamed for saying it) "con- 
 trolled by events, not controlling them." And 
 with a reverent and clear mind, to be controlled 
 by events means to be controlled by God. For 
 such a man there was no hesitation when God 
 brought him up face to face with Slavery and 
 put the sword into his hand and said, " Strike 
 it down dead." He was a willing servant then. 
 If ever the face of a man writing solemn words 
 glowed with a solemn joy, it must have been the 
 face of Abraham Lincoln, as he bent over the 
 page where the Emancipation Proclamation of 
 
166 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 1863 was growing into shape, and giving nian- 
 Jiood and freedom as he wrote it to hundreds of 
 thousands of his fellow-men. Here was a work 
 in which his whole nature could rejoice. Here 
 was an act that crowned the whole culture of his 
 life. All the past, the free boyhood in the 
 woods, the free youth upon the farm, the free 
 manhood in the honorable citizen's employ- 
 ments — all his freedom gathered and completed 
 itself in this. And as the swarthy multitudes 
 came in, ragged, and tired, and hungry, and 
 ignorant, but free forever from anything but 
 the memorial scars of the fetters and the whip, 
 singing rude songs in which the new triumph of 
 freedom struggled and heaved below the sad 
 melody that had been shaped for bondage; as 
 in their camps and hovels there grew up to their 
 half-superstitious eyes the image of a great 
 Father almost more than man, to whom they 
 owed their freedom, — were they not half right? 
 For it was not to one man, driven by stress of 
 policy, or swept off by a whim of pity, that the 
 noble act was due. It was to the American 
 \ nature, long kept by God in his own intentions 
 l\ till his time should come, at last emerging into 
 \ sight and power, and bound up and embodied in 
 jthis best and most American of all Americans, 
 CO whom we and those^poor frightened slaves' al" 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 167 
 
 last might look up together and love to call him, 
 with one voice, our Eather. 
 
 Thus, we have seen something of what the 
 character of Mr. Lincoln was, and how it issued 
 in the life he lived. It remains for us to see 
 how it resulted also in the terrible death which 
 has laid his murdered body here in our town 
 among lamenting multitudes to-day. It is not 
 a hard question, though it is sad to answer. We 
 saw the two natures, the nature of Slavery and 
 the ■ nature of Freedom, at last set against each 
 other, come at last to open war. Both fought, 
 fought long, fought bravely; but each, as was 
 perfectly natural, fought with the tools and in 
 the ways which its own character had made 
 familiar to it. The character of Slavery was 
 brutal, barbarous, and treacherous; and so the 
 whole history of the slave power during the war 
 has been full of ways of warfare brutal, barbar- 
 ous, and treacherous, beyond anything that men 
 bred in freedom could have been driven to by 
 the most hateful passions. It is not to be mar- 
 velled at. It is not to be set down as the special 
 sin of the war. It goes back beyond that. It 
 is the sin of the system. It is the barbarism of 
 Slavery. When Slavery went to war to save its 
 life, what wonder if its barbarism grew barbar- 
 ous a hundredfold ! 
 
168 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 One would be attempting a task which once 
 was ahnost hopeless, but which now is only 
 needless, if he set himself to convince a North- 
 ern congregation that Slavery was a barbarian 
 institution. It would he, hardly more necessary 
 to try to prove how its barbarism has shown 
 itself during this war. The same spirit which 
 was blind to the wickedness of breaking sacred 
 ties, of separating man and wife, of beating 
 women till they dropped down dead, of organiz- 
 ing licentiousness and sin into commercial sys- 
 tems, of forbidding knowledge and protecting 
 itself with ignorance, of putting on its arms and 
 riding out to steal a State at the beleaguered 
 ballot-box away from freedom — in one word 
 (for its simplest definition is its worst dishonor), 
 the spirit that gave man the ownership in man 
 in time of peace, has found out yet more terri- 
 ble barbarisms for the time of war. It has 
 hewed and burned the bodies of the dead. It 
 has starved and mutilated its helpless prisoners. 
 It has dealt by truth, not as men will in a time 
 of excitement, lightly and with frequent viola- 
 tions, but with a cool, and deliberate, and sys- 
 tematic contempt. It has sent its agents into 
 Northern towns to fire peaceful hotels where 
 hundreds of peaceful men and women slept. It 
 has undermined the prisons where its victims 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 169 
 
 starved, and made all ready to blow with one 
 blast their wretched life away. It has delighted 
 in the lowest and basest scurrility even on the 
 highest and most honorable lips. It has cor- 
 rupted the graciousness of women and killed 
 out the truth of men. 
 
 I do not count up the terrible catalogue be- 
 cause I like to, nor because I wish to stir your 
 hearts to passion. Even now, you and I have 
 •no right to indulge in personal hatred to the 
 men who did these things. But we are not 
 doing right by ourselves, by the President that 
 we have lost, or by God who had a purpose in 
 our losing him, unless we know thoroughly that 
 it was this same spirit which we have seen to 
 be a tyrant in peace and a savage in war, that 
 has crowned itself with the working of this final 
 woe. It was the conflict of the two American 
 natures, the false and the true. It was Slavery 
 and Freedom that met in their two representa- 
 tives, the assassin and the President; and the 
 victim of the last desperate struggle of the dying 
 Slavery lies dead to-day in Independence Hall. 
 
 Solemnly, in the sight of God, I charge this 
 murder where it belongs, on Slavery. I dare 
 not stand here in His sight, and before Him or 
 you speak doubtful and double-meaning words 
 of vague repentance, as if we had killed our 
 
170 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 President. We have sins enough, but we have 
 not done this sin, save as by weak concessions 
 and timid compromises we have let the spirit of 
 Slavery grow strong and ripe for such a deed. 
 In the barbarism of Slavery the foul act and its 
 foul method had their birth. By all the good- 
 ness that there was in him; by all the love we 
 had for him (and who shall tell how great it 
 was) ; by all the sorrow that has burdened down 
 this desolate and dreadful week, — I charge this 
 murder where it belongs, on Slavery. I bid 
 you to remember where the charge belongs, to 
 write it on the door-posts of your mourning 
 houses, to teach it to your wondering children, 
 to give it to the history of these times, that all 
 times to come may hate and dread the sin that 
 killed our noblest President. 
 
 If ever anything were clear, this is the clear- 
 est. Is there the man alive who thinks that 
 Abraham. Lincoln was shot just for himself; 
 that it was that one man for whom the plot was 
 laid? The gentlest, kindest, most indulgent 
 man that ever ruled a State ! The man who knew 
 not how to speak a word of harshness or how to 
 make a foe ! Was it he for whom the murderer 
 lurked with a mere private hate? It was not 
 he, t)ut what he stood for. It was Law and Lib- 
 erty, it was Government and Freedom, against 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 171 
 
 which the hate gathered and the treacherous 
 shot was fired. And I know not how the crime 
 of him who shoots at Law and Liberty in the 
 crowded glare of a great theatre differs from 
 theirs who have levelled their aim at the same 
 great beings from behind a thousand ambuscades 
 and on a hundred battle-fields of this long war. 
 Every general in the field, and every false citi- 
 zen in our midst at home, who has plotted and 
 labored to destroy the lives of the soldiers of the 
 Kepublic, is brother to him who did this deed. 
 The American nature, the American truths, of 
 which our President was the anointed and su- 
 preme embodiment, have been embodied in mul- 
 titudes of heroes who marched unknown and fell 
 unnoticed in our ranks. For them, just as for 
 him, character decreed a life and a death. The 
 blood of all of them I charge on the same head. 
 Slavery armed with Treason was their murderer. 
 Men point out to us the absurdity and folly of 
 this awful crime. Again and again we hear 
 men say, *' It was the worst thing for themselves 
 they could have done. They have shot a repre- 
 sentative man, and the cause he represented 
 grows stronger and sterner by his death. Can it 
 be that so wise a devil was so foolish here? 
 Must it not have been the act of one poor mad- 
 man, born and nursed in his own reckless brain? '' 
 
172 PERFECT FREEDOM. 
 
 My friends, let us understand this matter. It 
 was a foolish act. Its folly was only equalled 
 by its wickedness. It was a foolish act. But 
 when did sin begin to be wise? When did 
 wickedness learn wisdom? When did the fool 
 stop saying in his heart, "There is no God/' 
 and acting godlessly in the absurdity of his im- 
 piety? The cause that Abraham Lincoln died 
 for shall grow stronger by his death, — stronger 
 and sterner. Stronger to set its pillars deep into 
 the structure of our nation's life; sterner to 
 execute the justice of the Lord upon his ene- 
 mies. Stronger to spread its arms and grasp 
 our whole land into freedom; sterner to sweep 
 the last poor ghost of Slavery out of our haunted 
 homes. But while we feel the folly of this act, 
 let not its folly hide its wickedness. It was 
 the wickedness of Slavery putting on a foolish- 
 ness for which its wickedness and that alone is 
 responsible, that robbed the nation of a Presi- 
 dent and the peopl f^ nf ?^- father . And remember 
 this, that the folly of the Slave power in strik- 
 ing the representative of Freedom, and thinking 
 that thereby it killed Freedom itself, is only a 
 folly that we shall echo if we dare to think that 
 in punishing the representatives of Slavery who 
 did this deed, we are putting Slavery to death. 
 Dispersing armies and hanging traitors, impera- 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 173 
 
 tively as justice and necessity may demand them 
 both, are not killing the spirit out of which 
 they sprang. The traitor must die because he 
 has committed treason. The murderer must 
 die because he has committed murder. Slavery 
 must die, because out of it, and it alone, came 
 forth the treason of the traitor and the murder 
 of the murderer. Do not say that it is dead. 
 It is not, while its essential spirit lives. While 
 one man counts another man his born inferior 
 for the color of his skin, while both in North 
 and South prejudices and practices, which the 
 law cannot touch, but which God hates, keep 
 alive in our people's hearts the spirit of the old 
 iniquity, it is not dead. The new American 
 nature must supplant the old. We must grow 
 like our President, in his truth, his indepen- 
 dence, his religion, and his wide humanity. 
 Then the character by which he died shall be in 
 us, and by it we shall live. Then peace shall 
 come that knows no war, and law that knows no 
 treason; and full of his spirit a grateful land 
 shall gather round his grave, and in the daily 
 psalm of prosperous and righteous living, thank 
 God forever for his life and death. 
 
 So let him lie here in our midst to-day, and 
 let our people go and bend with solemn thought- 
 fulness and look upon his face and read the les- 
 
174 PERFECT FBEEDOM. 
 
 sons of his burial. As he paused here on his 
 journey from the Western home and told us what 
 by the help of God he meant to do, so let him 
 pause upon his way back to his Western grave 
 and tell us with a silence more eloquent than 
 words how bravely, how truly, by the strength 
 of God, he did it. God brought him up as he 
 brought David up from the sheepfolds to feed 
 Jacob, his people, and Israel, his inheritance. 
 He came up in earnestness and faith, and he 
 goes back in triumph. As he pauses here to- 
 day, and from his cold lips bids us bear witness 
 how he has met the duty that was laid on him, 
 what can we say out of our full hearts but this 
 — " He fed them with a faithful and true heart, 
 and ruled them prudently with all his power." 
 The Shepherd of the People ! that old name that 
 the best rulers ever craved. What ruler ever 
 won it like this dead President of ours? He fed 
 us faithfully and truly. He fed us with coun- 
 sel when we were in doubt, with inspiration 
 when we sometimes faltered, with caution when 
 we would be rash, with calm, clear, trustful 
 cheerfulness through many an hour when our 
 hearts were dark. He fed hungry souls all 
 over the country with sympathy and consolation. 
 He spread before the whole land feasts of great 
 duty and devotion and patriotism, on which the 
 
ABBAHAM LINCOLN, 175 
 
 land grew strong. He fed us with solemn, solid 
 truths. He taught us the sacredness of govern- 
 ment, the wickedness of treason. He made our 
 souls glad and vigorous with the love of liberty 
 that was in his. He showed us how to love 
 truth and yet be charitable — how to hate wrong 
 and all oppression, and yet not treasure one 
 personal injury or insult. He fed all his people, 
 from the highest to the lowest, from the most 
 privileged down to the most enslaved. Best of 
 all, he fed us with a reverent and genuine relig- 
 ion. He spread before us the love and fear of 
 God just in that shape in which we need them 
 most, and out of his faithful service of a higher 
 Master who of us has not taken and eaten and 
 grown strong? "He fed them with a faithful 
 and true heart." Yes, till the last. For at the 
 last, behold him standing with hand reached out 
 to feed the South with mercy and the North with 
 charity, and the whole land with peace, when 
 the Lord who had sent him called him and his 
 work was done ! 
 
 He stood once on the battle-field of our own 
 State, and said of the brave men who had saved 
 it words as noble as any countryman of ours ever 
 spoke. Let us stand in the country he has 
 saved, and which is to be his grave and monu- 
 ment, and say of Abraham Lincoln what he said 
 
176 PERFECT FREEDOM, 
 
 of the soldiers who had died at Gettysburg. 
 He stood there with their graves before him,, 
 and these are the words he said : 
 
 ** We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we can- 
 not hallow this ground. The brave men who struggled 
 here have consecrated it far beyond our power to add or 
 detract. The world will little note nor long remember 
 what we say here, but it can never forget what they did 
 here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated to 
 the unfinished work which they who fought here have 
 thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be 
 here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, 
 that from these honored dead we take increased devotion 
 to that cause for which they gave the last full measure 
 of devotion ; that we here highly resolve that these dead 
 shall not have died in vain ; and this nation, under God, 
 shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government 
 of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not 
 perish from the earth." 
 
 May God make us worthy of the memory of 
 Abraham Lincoln, 
 
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