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 1981 
 
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 L161— O-1096
 
 ACORNS 
 
 -FROM AN 
 
 Oak Park Pulpit 
 
 -Sermons by- 
 
 WILLIAM E. BARTON, D. D.
 
 ACORNS FROM AN 
 OAK PARK PULPIT 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM E. BARTON, D. D 
 
 PASTOR OF THE 
 FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH 
 
 OAK PARK, ILLINOIS 
 
 V 
 
 0nk ^ark 
 
 tEfje puritan ^rc£(S 
 
 1910
 
 FOREV70RD 
 
 These sermons, delivered in the First Congregational Church, 
 Oak Park, during 1910, have been printed by the generosity 
 of men of the congregation, and distributed month by month. 
 While each sermon was on the press, 400 extra copies were 
 printed and laid aside to be bound into this present form. 
 
 From many persons, some of them at a distance, gratifying 
 letters of thanks have come during the year. The sermons 
 have been appreciated by people formerly connected with the 
 First Church, by families living at a distance from church 
 privileges, and by others. Some of them have been read in 
 churches temporarily without a pastor. The thanks of the 
 minister are due the men who have given them this wider 
 circulation.
 
 Z5X 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 1 
 
 OUR REASONABLE SERVICE 17 
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING 25 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 33 
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 49 
 
 COSMIC REDEMPION 65 
 
 THE TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS 89 
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 105 
 
 THE DIVINE DEPOSIT 116 
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 121 
 
 THE MEANING AND SIGNIFICANCE OF LIFE 137 
 
 672989
 
 WBi)o More ti)t (Bti)tx Croton? 
 
 M Cfjapter from tte Secret ^igtorp of tfje ^Ib tlTesitament 
 
 And the word of Jehovah came unto me saying, Take 
 silver and gold and make crowns, and set them upon the head 
 of Joshua the son of Jehozadek, the high priest, and speak unto 
 him, saying, Thus speaketh Jehovah of hosts, saying. Behold, 
 the man whose name is the Branch; and he shall grow up out 
 of his place, and he shall build the temple of Jehovah; and he 
 shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule upon his throne; 
 and there shall be a priest upon his throne; and the counsel 
 of peace shall be between them both. And the crowns shall be 
 to Helem, and to Tobijah, and to Jedaiah, and to Hen the son 
 of Zephaniah, for a memorial in the temple of Jehovah. Zech- 
 ariah 6:11-14. 
 
 If you are interested in stories that have a mystery 
 about them, and which invite you to a little detective 
 work, you will enjoy this text. It is our clue to one of 
 the most interesting episodes in the secret history of the 
 people of the Bible. There were two crowns, and one 
 man is declared to have been crowned. What became of 
 the other crown? Moreover, while the one man who is 
 named is crowned, the address of coronation is all about 
 the other man. Here is an inviting mystery, and one 
 which it is well worth our while to solve. 
 
 Let us get one question out of the way at the outset ; 
 were there really two crowns? For some of the old 
 texts speak of only one crown, and represent Joshua as 
 both priest and representative of royalty. No; there 
 were two crowns, and if there were not, the one man 
 crowned was the other man. When we read the pas- 
 sage through carefully we can see why some old scribe, 
 half awake, copying this book in manuscript, and noting 
 that there were two crowns, and that only one man was 
 named, thought to simplify the matter by changing the 
 two crowns to one crown ; and living, probably not earl-
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 ier than the Alaccabean times, when there was a line of 
 priest kings, it seemed to him that the whole matter was 
 made clear by crowning one man, a priest-king. But the 
 scribes do not help us by these little devices. There 
 were two men, and one of them was a priest, who was 
 to sit very near to the king on his throne, and the coun- 
 sel of peace was to be between them both. But with 
 him there was another "son of oil ;" and other "Anointed 
 one," whose person is described under the figure of "The 
 Branch." 
 
 The figure of "The Branch" is familiar to us. Isaiah 
 told the people of his day that a day was coming when 
 "The Branch of Jehovah" should be glorious in Jerusa- 
 lem (Is. 4:2.) He said that this "Branch," who was 
 evidently a man, was to spring out of the roots of David, 
 and bear fruit (Is. 11 :i seq) ; and he drew a glowing 
 picture of the good time coming when this scion of 
 David should break forth out of dry ground, and make 
 the resting place of Jehovah glorious. Jeremiah used the 
 same figure of speech, and in the same sense, saying, 
 "Behold the days come, saith Jehovah, when I will raise 
 up unto David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as 
 king." (Jer. 23:5.) And still again, "In those days and at 
 that time, will I cause a Branch of righteousness to grow 
 up unto David. For thus saith Jehovah, David shall 
 never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house 
 of Israel." (Jer. 33:14-17.) 
 
 Every one in Jerusalem understood what was meant 
 when The Branch was spoken of; it was the lineal de- 
 scendant of David, come to Jerusalem to sit upon the 
 throne of his father David. 
 
 Now the story of this secret coronation, in which 
 there were two crowns, tells us that one of these royal 
 emblems was placed upon the head of Joshua the high 
 
 —2—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 priest, and then in the context it repeatedly described 
 another man ; and to make it perfectly clear to the initiat- 
 ed just who was meant, and what his relations were to 
 the ceremony, it repeatedly calls him "The Branch." 
 "Hear now, O Joshua, I will bring forth my servant, 
 The Branch . . .. and he shall sit upon his throne." (Zech- 
 ariah 3:8.) 
 
 This is not Joshua himself. It is another man stand- 
 ing with him, and representing in the affairs of state 
 what Joshua represents in the temple as a priest. The 
 prophet emphasizes the fact that there were two men; 
 not the man wearing two crowns, but two men. "And 
 he answered me the second time, and said, Knowest thou 
 not what these are? And I said, No, my lord. Then 
 said he, These are the two anointed ones, that stand by 
 the Lord of the whole earth." Nehemiah 4:13-14. 
 
 This makes it perfectly plain that there were two, 
 and indeed the whole story shows it most plainly. i\nd 
 we understand why it was not recorded more plainly 
 when we read in Nehemiah the written ultimatum of 
 Sanballet, charging that the prophets are saying that 
 there is a king in Jerusalem, and threatening to report 
 this fact to the king of Persia. It was not safe to write 
 down in black and white that the prophets had crowned 
 a king; for their city and king and temple were all in 
 danger as it was, and they were surrounded by enemies, 
 eager to report to Darius that they had set up a throne 
 in Jerusalem and were planning for political independ- 
 ence. So they do not tell us that they actually crowned 
 a king; but they tell us that they made two crowns, and 
 that they crowned the high priest. Then they tell us 
 in the same breath who the other man was, beside whom 
 on the throne the high priest was to sit, with the re- 
 sponsibilities of church and state divided between them 
 
 —3—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 both. And they hailed that other man by the Messianic 
 name, The Branch of Jehovah, and they laid up his 
 crown in the temple till the day should come when he 
 could wear it publicly. 
 
 They do not stop with this. They actually tell us the 
 name of the man who was crowned in Jerusalem. They 
 tell us his name, and his descent from David. He was 
 the grandson of Jehoiachin, the young king who reigned 
 only three months in Jerusalem before he was carried 
 into exile, and who died in Babylon. It was his grand- 
 son who was crowned in Jerusalem seventy years after- 
 ward, and his name was Zerubbabel. 
 
 Let me tell you the story of that coronation, for it is 
 one of the most interesting in the secret history of any 
 kingdom. 
 
 Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 B. C. Its last king 
 was Zedekiah, and he and his sons were killed by Neb- 
 uchadnezzar when the city fell. But there was a young 
 man living in Babylon who had been king for three 
 months, a man beloved by the Prophet Ezekiel, a man 
 for whom the nation mourned and prayed; a man con- 
 cerning whom hymns were sung, and petitions offered 
 to God that before the seventy years of exile were over, 
 Jehoiachin might return to Jerusalem and rebuild the 
 throne of his father David. Jehoiachin died in Babylon, 
 but he rose to a position of honor in the later years of his 
 life, and his sons were men of distinction. When the 
 first return from exile occurred in 537, Zerubbabel assist- 
 ed his uncle, who was the leader of it. Ezra gives us the 
 official roster of the families that returned, and the first 
 name is Zerubbabel the prince, and the second is Joshua 
 the high priest. (Ezra 2:1-2.) Joshua was the grandson 
 of the last priest in Jerusalem, Seriah, whom Nebuchad- 
 nezzar put to death. Zerubbabel was the grandson of the
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 last living king who had sat on the throne of David. 
 And on the death of his uncle he became governor in 
 Jerusalem, acting under the authority of the king of 
 Persia. 
 
 Immediately on the return of these exiles, they re- 
 built the altar of Jehovah on its original site, which old 
 men among them were able to identify, and they appear 
 to have laid a part of the foundation of the temple; but 
 there the work stopped, and it was seventeen years be- 
 fore it began again. There was a reason for this. The 
 Samaritan neighbors were suspicious, and Cyrus, dis- 
 turbed by their reports, hindered the work from going 
 forward. 
 
 After a delay of seventeen years, Darius came to the 
 throne, and Zerubbabel received an appointment as gov- 
 ernor. The prophets hurried to urge him to resume work 
 on the temple. They were eager not only to begin it, 
 but to rush it, before any orders could reach them from 
 Persia forbidding it. 
 
 An aged prophet and a young one joined in urging 
 this work. Zerubbabel had built himself a good house, 
 equipped with all modern improvements, but the work on 
 the temple had not been touched for seventeen years. 
 Haggai, an aged prophet, preached a sermon on the ist 
 of September, 520 B. C, urging the work and that it be 
 hastened. It took twenty-four days to get the governor 
 and the people committed to the plan, and that seemed 
 a long time to the preacher ; but on the 24th day of the 
 month, they laid the corner stone. They rushed the con- 
 tract. On the 21 St day of October interest seemed to be 
 flagging, and the people were saying that this could 
 never be a very great temple anyway, as compared with 
 the old one; and then the same prophet preached another 
 sermon, addressed directly to the governor, saying, 
 
 —5—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 "Courage, Zerubbabel 1 God will help you through, and 
 the money will come !" Two months later, on the 24th 
 of December, Haggai preached twice, and still urged on 
 the building. In that sermon he answered the people 
 who were feeling the financial burden. He told them 
 that they must not expect results too soon, but he said 
 that when the temple was finished, God would take Ze- 
 rubbabel and make him a representative of divine power, 
 shaking the heavens, and overthrowing kingdoms. He 
 said, "In that day, saith Jehovah, will I take thee, O Ze- 
 rubbabel, and I will make thee as a signet; for I have 
 chosen thee, O Zerubbabel." (Haggai 2:23.) A signet 
 ring was that with which a king was accustomed to sign 
 his name. God was to make Zerubbabel his power of 
 attorney. It was a large thing to promise. 
 
 On the day that Haggai made this promise, they laid 
 the corner stone upon the foundation. The work had 
 made so much of progress in three months; and this 
 quotation is part of the sermon which Haggai preached 
 at the second service on that winter Sabbath, December 
 24, in the year 520 B. C. 
 
 Did Haggai promise too much? The young prophet 
 Zechariah promised more. He outlined the plan of gov- 
 ernment under the new regime. Zerubbabel and Joshua, 
 representing State and Church, were to have a co-ordin- 
 ate rulership, Zerubbabel was to be ruler of the land, 
 but the land was to be governed by Jehovah, and the 
 high priest was to have a place close to Zerubbabel upon 
 the throne. 
 
 On March 3, 515, after four and one-half years of in- 
 cessant labor, the temple was completed. Haggai did not 
 live to see it, but Zechariah continued to preach in Jerus- 
 alem until after the temple was finished, and he must
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 have had many things to contend with during that long 
 period. 
 
 It was while this work was under way that there 
 came to Jerusalem a committee of four men from Baby- 
 lon, where very many rich and pious Jews were living. 
 These four men are named in the text. They brought 
 with them a contribution of money, and also brought 
 good news concerning affairs of government in Persia. 
 Darius was having troubles of his own, and was not like- 
 ly to interfere with the temple. The old records had 
 been searched, and the original decree of Cyrus had been 
 found, and the work was to be permitted to go on. Per- 
 sian politics were in more or less confusion, so that the 
 Jews, if they proceeded with caution, might hope to re- 
 gain their independence. 
 
 This was good news, and Zechariah was anxious to 
 have some kind of meeting while the committee was in 
 Jerusalem which they could report quietly to their friends 
 in Babylon that would assure them that matters were go- 
 ing forward in Jerusalem. In a vision he saw it all, and 
 he carried it out. A little company gathered in a room 
 of the uncompleted temple. The four men from Babylon 
 were there, and doubtless a few leading citizens in Jerus- 
 alem, but no one was invited who could not be trusted. 
 The prophet had come prepared, for he had caused two 
 crowns to be made. And while they were all gathered in 
 secrecy, and doubtless at night, and Joshua and Zerub- 
 babel were there in the midst, the prophet laid one crown 
 upon the head of the high priest. What he did with the 
 other he never wrote down in black and white, but this is 
 what he said, as he stood beside Zerubbabel with the 
 other crown, "Behold the man whose name is the Branch ; 
 
 —7—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 he shall build the temple of Jehovah, and he shall sit upon 
 his throne."* 
 
 All this is a matter of record. And knowing this, you 
 are at liberty to guess for yourself what the prophet did 
 with the other crown. 
 
 I, too, will guess. And my guess is that when the 
 prophet uttered those words, in the hush of a solemn 
 silence that attended that secret gathering, he laid the 
 crown on no other head than that of Zerubbabel, the de- 
 scendant of David. And then, the lights were hurriedly 
 put out, and the little company dispersed, but they laid 
 up that crown in the temple, as the emblem of their great 
 and secret hope. 
 
 So then it is no Avonder that the Samaritans heard 
 whispers of it, and that in time Sanballet sent to Jerusa- 
 lem, and threatened to tell the king of Persia that they 
 had secretly crowned a king in Jerusalem. 
 
 But the Samaritans never could prove their charge. 
 The secret was well kept. You and I are among the few 
 who really have discovered just what was done that night 
 in Jerusalem. We are of the select and trustworthy few 
 who know who wore the other crown. 
 
 What became of that king, to whom the prophets 
 
 * George Adam Smith, and some other scholars, hold that 
 there was but one crown, and that the plural form is used be- 
 cause the crown contained two or more circlets; but this 
 learned author is emphatic in his declaration that the one crown 
 was worn by the civil, not the ecclesiastical, ruler. "The pres- 
 ent text assigns this crown to Joshua, the high priest; but as 
 we have remarked, and will presently prove in the notes on 
 the translation, the original text assigned it to Zerubbabel, the 
 civil head of the community, and gave Joshua a place at his 
 right hand, the two to act in perfect accord with each other." 
 (Minor Prophets, ii, 308.) 
 
 Most scholars, however, hold the plural form indicates 
 two crowns; but if there was but one, the important corona- 
 tion was that of the civil ruler. See Cornill's "Prophets of 
 Israel," p. 153, 4.
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 preached so many sermons, and on whom the people hung 
 such high hopes? Did he fulfill the hopes of those who 
 tried to see in him a successor of David? We have all 
 too good reason to fear that he was a disappointment to 
 his friends. 
 
 Zerubbabel had a noble ancestry. He had favor with 
 the king of Persia. He had the support and advice of 
 prophets well suited to their time, prophets who were 
 not men of lofty idealism, but who had a genius for prac- 
 tical achievement. He had sympathy and financial sup- 
 port from Babylon. He had the inspiration of men whose 
 great hopes were founded on acquaintances with his 
 grandfather, possibly even his great-grandfather Josiah, 
 and who held before him constant incentives to the best 
 of which he was capable. 
 
 Few men have had so many good sermons preached 
 straight at them as Zerubbabel. The prophets were al- 
 ways reminding him that he had begun this great work, 
 and that he alone could finish it. They were forever say- 
 ing, "Have courage, O Zerubbabel. What if there are 
 obstacles? Before Zerubbabel the mountain shall become 
 a plain! What if the money does come slowly? The sil^ 
 ver and the gold belong to God, and Zerubbabel is God's 
 anointed. You are a great man, Zerubbabel ! You are a 
 king's son, Zerubbabel ! Zerubbabel began this work, 
 and Zerubbabel shall finish it ! Zerubbabel is no quitter ! 
 He is a son of David !" 
 
 And so by praises that were half censures, and by 
 promises almost extravagant, they finally nerved Zerub- 
 babel to go on with the work. But every time a new 
 thing is undertaken, you hear the voice of the prophet, 
 trying to force a little enthusiasm into Zerubbabel. 
 
 I think I can imagine just how Zerubbabel acted when 
 the prophets talked this way to him. He resented it a 
 
 —9—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 little that they should forever tell him what he ought to 
 do ; but it pleased his vanity, also. It made him the central 
 figure in several important functions. It kept his name 
 well in the head-lines, and enabled him to think highly of 
 himself. After each prophetic admonition, he straight- 
 ened himself up, and lighted another cigarette, and re- 
 membered for several hours how great a man he was. 
 Meantime the prophets were ordering another consign- 
 men of building material, and pushing the work as hard 
 as they could while Zerubbabel was in the mood to sign 
 their requisitions. 
 
 I do not want to blame Zerubabbel for not accomplish- 
 ing the impossible. I am not sure that any man in his 
 position could have made Judah independent at that time, 
 I am not sure but that the crown laid up in the temple 
 would have tarnished before it was placed for a second 
 time on the head of any other son of David. It may be 
 that he did as well as could have been expected in being 
 the mere figure-head of a movement which the prophets 
 were able to force through under the harmless little fic- 
 tion of his leadership. We do not know the circum- 
 stances well enough to judge him severely. We have the 
 vision of a moment's lantern flash upon that solemn scene 
 of coronation, permitting us to share with the prophets 
 this old time secret; and then we hear the two prophets, 
 the young one and the old one, preaching about once a 
 month in their heroic endeavor to strengthen the waver- 
 ing purpose of a king whose chief distinction was that he 
 was the grandson of his grandfather. We hear them dis- 
 tinctly hammering him with the declaration that God had 
 said that Zerubbabel's hands had laid the foundation of 
 this house, and that Zerubbabel should finish it. Appar- 
 ently they risked something in that prophecy, but they 
 saw it fulfilled. But of those larger hopes which they 
 
 —10—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 cherished, and which found whispered but exultant ex- 
 pression on that night when the golden circlet in the 
 hands of the prophet rested for a sweet and hazardous 
 moment on the head of Zerubbabel, of those great hopes, 
 alas we only know that they died with Zerubbabel. 
 
 It was long years afterward when the hope of a king 
 revived in Jerusalem ; and when the Maccabean revolt set 
 the blood of Israel leaping with hope of another king, 
 no one remembered that a king to sit upon that throne 
 must be a son of David. 
 
 Zerubbabel is the man who enjoys this doubtful hon- 
 or — with him died the hope of having a son of David to 
 sit on the throne in Jerusalem. Whatever he might have 
 done and did not do, this at least he did for which it is 
 hard to forgive him — he let the hope die out of having a 
 son of David to sit upon his throne. 
 
 He returned to Jerusalem with the dew of his youth 
 still upon him, and his name was foremost among those 
 to whom the sacred task was given, of rebuilding the 
 temple of God. And round him gathered such hopes as 
 seldom have centered about one human life ; and the peo- 
 ple, poring over the pages of the prophets, gave him the 
 holy name which Isaiah and Jeremiah had chosen to de- 
 scribe the Messiah of God. But he settled down in his 
 comfortable house, and though the prophets now and 
 then roused his flagging zeal, and managed to get the 
 temple built, it was the last thing they ever got out of 
 Zerubbabel. He vanished into insignificant obscurity. Re- 
 member it once more, this son of splendid promise and of 
 magnificent heritage and opportunity was the man with 
 whom the hope died out of having a son of David on the 
 throne in Jerusalem. 
 
 Zerubbabel was the man who failed to fulfill prophecy. 
 While in the larger sense every prophetic message had its 
 
 —11—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 fulfillment, and those concerning the completion of the 
 temple in Zerubbabel's day were all fulfilled, thanks to 
 the zeal of the prophets, none of those splendid hopes 
 came to pass that were cherished on that night when 
 Zerubbabel knelt at the feet of the prophet, and the light 
 of the torches flashed on a new golden crown, resting on 
 the head of a son of David, in the old city which his 
 fathers had made great. Zerubbabel was the man who 
 failed to make good ; the man with whom the hope of his 
 nation died. 
 
 Zerubbabel was a young man when all this began. 
 The hope of youth was upon him when he first was 
 made nominal leader of the return from exile. It was 
 given to him while still a young man to stand at the head 
 of the most notable movement of his generation, and to 
 surround himself with the halo of prophetic hope that 
 had inspired his nation through the long days of exile. 
 Men who themselves were to die in Babylon looked to 
 him to bring to their children the blessings which the 
 prophets had declared were to come through a son of 
 David. But after one brilliant achievement, led by other 
 men under the auspices of his almost royal name, he 
 shrank from public view, and died obscure and without 
 influence. So died a man whose life at one time promised 
 so much that a prophet of God made a crown of gold and 
 laid it on his head. Bunyan tells us of the man with the 
 muck-rake who never saw the crown of gold which the 
 angel held above his head; but Zerubbabel saw it, felt 
 the thrill of it as it touched his hair, knelt in reverent 
 awe and listened to the prophetic word, "Thus speaketh 
 Jehovah of hosts, saying, Behold the man whose name is 
 the Branch. Even he shall build the temple of Jehovah, 
 and he shall bear the glory, and he shall sit and rule upon 
 his throne." Zerubbabel heard all this, and felt the hope 
 
 —12—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 and ambition of it for an hour; dreamed of it that night, 
 and forgot it next day; and his kingdom never came to 
 him. 
 
 When five hundred years afterward there came to Je- 
 rusalem another Son of David, the crown has long since 
 disappeared, and the only crown reserved for Jesus, the 
 son of David, was one of thorns. He came with no au- 
 thority from human government, no power or prestige 
 such as Zerubbabel had, but he founded a kingdom that 
 more than fulfilled all the prophetic hopes, and inspired 
 the world with faith in a kingdom that shall endure for- 
 ever. 
 
 I have cliosen this lesson from the almost forgotten 
 history of the Bible because it teaches its own lesson 
 to young men and women of today. As the prophets 
 preached their messages straight at Zerubbabel, so let me 
 preach as directly as I may to the young men and women 
 of this congregation. 
 
 There is no man so unworthy as he who wilfully dis- 
 appoints great and reasonable hopes. When Dr. Cook 
 returned from the northland, he stood before kings, and 
 received garlands hung about his neck by royal hands. 
 And when his story was attacked by a churlish, though 
 honest rival, the world was disposed to believe in Cook, 
 and cherished great hopes that he would prove himself 
 worthy of their confidence. Today his story is discred- 
 ited by the Danish nation that welcomed him with glad 
 acclaim, and by the nation whose flag he has disgraced 
 with a contemptible lie. For if he has lied, he has lied 
 as no other man ever lied. He has lied to the whole 
 world, and that from the meanest of motives, a desire for 
 wealth and honor, stolen from another man who had 
 
 —13—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 faced death to win it, and who rightly deserved it. We 
 hoped he was honest. We believed in him. We wanted 
 him to make good. And now it is well that he hides his 
 dishonored head. There is no spot on earth where the 
 man who has been guilty of such a fraud, who has be- 
 trayed such confidence and hope, can live in the esteem 
 and confidence of his fellow men. He is a man without 
 a countrv. And yet it is but a few days since he sat, all 
 garlanded and decorated, and was the guest of honor of 
 a king. 
 
 The garlands that hung about the neck of Dr. Cook 
 have withered, and another man wears the crown which 
 the people had laid up for him. He has deceived the con- 
 fidence and blasted the hopes of those who trusted him ; 
 and there are few things that a man can do that are worse 
 than that. 
 
 You cannot know how many are the hopes that gather 
 round you. Only dimly do you guess how large are the 
 expectations of your family and friends on your behalf. 
 Many of you are in college, having been sent there as 
 Zerubbabel was sent from Babylon, by those who could 
 not go themselves. All the unfilled hopes of your fathers 
 and mothers for their own lives gather about you. You 
 have been sent on that you may build a temple of strong 
 manhood or glorious womanhood; and there have not 
 been lacking frequent embassies from home, like those 
 of Helem and Tobijah and Jedaiah and Hen, bearing 
 frequent remittances, and desiring information of the 
 progress of the work. Every one of you is a Zerubbabel, 
 a child of honored family and of self-denying faith. And 
 all the hopes of all your friends rest as a crown upon 
 you in your welcome home at this holiday season. 
 
 Shall these hopes die with you? Shall you be content 
 with anything less than the best of which you are capa- 
 
 —14—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 ble? "Beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, 
 and things which accompany salvation, though we thus 
 speak." 
 
 The crown of Zerubbabel was laid up in the temple 
 till some marauding hand stole and pawned it, or some 
 rascally priest sold it to a relic-hunter. There is no hope 
 of your finding it. But there is a crown for every one of 
 you laid up in a place more sure. "Henceforth there is 
 laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, 
 the righteous judge shall give me at that day, and not to 
 me only, but also to all them that have loved His 
 appearing.'' 
 
 And so my closing admonition is no other than that 
 of the beloved disciple, who wrote from Patmos to the 
 young people to whom he could not preach every Sunday, 
 "Hold fast that which thou hast, that no man take thy 
 crown." (Rev. 3:11.) 
 
 We admonish you in confidence and in love. We con- 
 gratulate you on what you have accomplished. And we 
 say as the prophet said of old, "Be strong, O Zerubbabel, 
 and complete the good work which you have begun. You 
 have laid the foundations of noble character, and we are 
 sure you will complete it. All the love of home and the 
 expectations of friends are yours ; and your's shall be the 
 crown of useful lives, and the favor of Almighty God. 
 Let no man take thy crown." 
 
 THE FIVE POINTS 
 
 Just a year ago, in a sermon addressed to young 
 people. Dr. Barton outlined the "five points" of a work- 
 ing system of belief. These five points have often been 
 I asked for, and here are printed by request . 
 
 —15—
 
 WHO WORE THE OTHER CROWN? 
 
 You are lamenting, or perhaps rejoicing, in the passing 
 of the old-time creeds. You are saying that you have no 
 material out of which to fashion a creed ; and you speak 
 slightingly, or perhaps with sorrow, of the creeds that 
 have disappeared. 
 
 None of the great truths have disappeared. They 
 are all with us, and ever will be. I will not undertake 
 to make a creed for you; every man must do that for 
 himself. But I will show you, for I think I can, how 
 much material you have on hand for the making of a 
 perfectly good creed of your own, as good as ever was 
 €xpressed in the Five Points of Calvinism. And this, 
 the guiding star of your faith, shall have five points, also : 
 
 1. If you believe that this universe is to be interpreted as 
 intention, that the Power behind and working through it is 
 Intelligence and Will, and not blind Fate, you believe in the 
 Personality of God. 
 
 2. If you believe that the God who made you and other men 
 with consciences, such that they must approve the right and 
 condemn the wrong, even when they themselves do wrong, 
 must Himself be good, you then believe that Righteousness 
 is the bed-rock of the moral universe, that is to say, you believe 
 that God is Good. 
 
 3. If you believe that Jesus shows us not only how men 
 ought to live, but also what is the essential character of God, 
 so that you can say, "God is the kind God whose human 
 manifestation we discover in Jesus of Nazareth," then, what- 
 ever your metaphysical difficulties, you believe both in the 
 humanity and in the divinity of Jesus the Christ. 
 
 4. If you believe that among all the books of the world, 
 the Bible, with its progressive revelation, shows to us in the 
 consummation of that revelation, or if you prefer to say so, in 
 its best teaching, the most exalted idea of God, and the noblest 
 conception of human duty, then, no matter what your difficulties 
 about the authorship of this book and the date of that, you 
 believe in the inspiration of the Bible. 
 
 5. If you are willing to act upon this faith, and follow 
 Jesus as your Master, doing God's will so far as you know it, 
 in a spirit of loving obedience, then you are a Christian. 
 
 Moreover, you have a faith which cannot be shaken by 
 any discovery of science or of Biblical Criticism. And it is 
 right and fitting that you should join with others like-minded 
 in the fellowship of the Christian Church. 
 
 —16—
 
 (Bm Eeasionalile ^erbice 
 
 I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, 
 that ye present your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable 
 unto God, which is your reasonable service. Romans 12:1. 
 
 It is only in recent years that we may be said to 
 have begun a study of the sacrifices of the Jewish people 
 as related to the history contained in the Bible. We are 
 much indebted to those faithful and much misunderstood 
 students of the Word of God, who have brought new 
 light to us in this particular. Formerly it seemed as 
 though there were a hopeless contradiction between the 
 books which contain directions concerning sacrifice and 
 the historical books in which accounts of various sac- 
 rifices appear. Deuteronomy, and still more Leviticus, 
 describe to us minutely the ways in which sacrifices are 
 to be ofifered; and when we read the books of Samuel 
 and Kings we do not find them offered in that way, but 
 in ways very different from those prescribed. 
 
 For instance, when Samuel and Saul first meet, the 
 prophet blesses the sacrifice, and he and the people sit 
 down and eat it together. When the ark returns from the 
 land of the Philistines, no priest is sent for, but the men 
 laboring in the field prepare the sacrifice, in very different 
 manner from that which Leviticus directs. Israel ap- 
 pears to have spent most of its national life without 
 knowing of these elaborate sacrificial laws. 
 
 This great gulf fixed between law and life, between 
 the directions in the books of law and the record of 
 the books of history, was most perplexing. The only 
 reasonable explanation that has been offered has not met 
 with favor everywhere. Our friends who are known as 
 the higher critics have given us what I believe is the 
 true explanation. They have called our attention to the 
 
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 simplicity of the forms of sacrifice in that first little 
 book of laws which is called "The Covenant Code," con- 
 taining a brief section of the Book of Exodus, beginning 
 with the Ten Commandments. This, they say to us, 
 is a complete code of laws, a criminal code, a civil code, 
 and a sacrificial code as well ; and it was the original 
 law book of the Hebrew people. All the laws which 
 the Jewish people had concerning sacrifice while they were 
 journeying through the wilderness and living their early 
 life in Palestine were these contained in this little book. 
 But later, after Jerusalem became the capital, and there 
 was a temple and a priesthood, the ritual grew more 
 elaborate, and continued its elaboration to a very late 
 period ; and more than once the law book underwent 
 revision, largely by way of addition. And the priests, 
 when they incorporated into that book the ritual of 
 Deuteronomy, and still later the yet more elaborate 
 provisions of Leviticus, did not date their revisions, nor 
 think it necessary to explain that this had been added 
 since the time of Moses. They believed themselves still 
 to be carrying out, in that more elaborate program, the 
 spirit of the Mosaic legislation. 
 
 Now, I am convinced that this explanation, how- 
 ever much it may lack in its incidentals, is correct as 
 to method, and true in its essential conclusions. I 
 believe that sacrifice, as the Hebrews first knew it, and 
 as we find it celebrated in the earlier books of the Bible, 
 was a simple, and often a family matter, a feast, and 
 often one of joy, rather than of confession of sin, but 
 that it grew more elaborate in accordance with the 
 development of a movement which we are coming better 
 to understand. 
 
 It is in the light of such knowledge as this that we 
 
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 are able to interpret the attitude of the prophets toward 
 the sacrifices of their time. We can understand how 
 Isaiah declared to the people that God had not required 
 this at their hands ; that He was weary of the fat of 
 lambs, and had no delight in the blood of animals 
 (Isaiah 1:11-12). We can understand how Amos dared 
 to say that God hated these meat offerings, and would 
 not accept them (Amos 5:21-22), We can understand, 
 what seemed to us very strange before, how Jeremiah 
 boldly challenged the whole system as an innovation, 
 and declared that God had not taught it to the nation 
 when it came out of Egypt (Jeremiah 7:21-23). We 
 understand the bold utterances of the psalms that God 
 desireth not sacrifice. 
 
 Not only so but we understand the attitude of Jesus 
 on this subject, for Christ was a higher critic; and 
 declared that circumcision was "not of Moses but of 
 the fathers," that is, a rite in which the original law of 
 Moses had been overlaid with tradition till it was no 
 longer his. 
 
 And we are better able to understand the attitude of 
 Paul, and of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which these 
 sacrifices are declared to have been weak and unprofitable 
 and temporary. 
 
 But if all this is true, why did not God repudiate 
 them? Why did He permit their incorporation into a 
 system of worship which came to be characterized as 
 his own? 
 
 For this reason, as I suppose, that, imperfect as they 
 were, hateful to Him as the}^ were in their bloodshed 
 and hollowness, they did make real to a primitive people 
 a mighty principle which must underlie all real worship. 
 Sacrifices are temporary, but sacrifice is eternal. 
 
 So when Jesus came to earth, the thing which He 
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 undertook to make real above all others was this, that 
 the heart of God is a heart of eternal sacrifice. The 
 crucifixion of Jesus, and His death for sin, do not con- 
 stitute the final fact. Calvary is overtopped by Olivet. 
 The stone at the door of the tomb is not the finis of faith, 
 but the light breaking forth, that never can be dimmed, 
 streaming from the place where Jesus rose from the 
 dead. And yet the cross is the emblem of our faith, 
 because it testifies to the sacrificial love of God, and 
 appeals to the sacrificial heart of the world. 
 
 In the year 2010, some student of church history will 
 be seeking to explain why Christian Science did not 
 continue to grow and possess the land. He will see 
 that it started with considerable promise and that it 
 grew for a time with quite surprising rapidity, and he 
 will wonder why it did not continue to grow until it was 
 accepted as the authoritative interpretation of Chris- 
 tianity. I can think of four reasons that he will be 
 likely to give, and three of them I will not take time 
 now to tell. But one of the reasons I am confident will 
 be that Christian Science has no logical place for sacri- 
 fice. To alleviate the suflferings of the world by denying 
 them, to seek for one's own self-healing of body or peace 
 of soul, and with that to be content, is not to possess 
 the world, nor to conquer it. Sacrifice is a fundamental 
 law of life, and no religion can permanently survive that 
 denies the fundamental facts of life. 
 
 Yet the Bible does not teach sacrifice for the sake 
 of sacrifice. It does not teach us that pain is desirable 
 for its own sake, or sacrifice a merit in itself. 
 
 Jesus did not endure sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. 
 He does not demand sacrifice from us for the sake of 
 sacrifice. It was for the joy that was set before Him 
 that He endured the cross and despised the shame. 
 
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 God knowS' the joy of sacrifice. Jesus Christ re- 
 vealed the sacrificial joy of God. And he revealed these 
 things to ns that the same spirit of sacrifice might be 
 in us, and that our joy might be full. 
 
 Do you not understand the meaning of those words, 
 the joy of sacrifice? You do understand, every one of 
 you. Not one of you puts into his charity account his 
 expenses for the education of his own children. It 
 has been a joy to sacrifice for them ; and it is the joy 
 of God to give Himself in sacrifice for us. 
 
 Paul might have besought us by some other motive. 
 He knew the terror of the Lord, and by it could persuade 
 men. He knew the desire for the crown laid up for 
 him who is faithful. But he beseeches us by God's 
 mercies, and not by His terror; by His love and not His 
 wrath. 
 
 This is why the cross of Christ brings men to God. 
 It is the standard round which men can rally in the 
 spirit of God, because it is there that they understand 
 the heart of God in something native to themselves. This 
 is why the sacrifice of Christ, try hard as we may to 
 misunderstand it, still appeals to the deepest and truest 
 part of our life. It is the thing which somehow we 
 understand best of all. 
 
 We ought by this time to be able to understand 
 Paul's theory of sacrifice. In so far as it prepares men 
 to accept the sacrifice of Jesus, he is in s3aTipathy with 
 it; in so far as it rises as a barrier between men and the 
 sacrifice of God, he repudiates it. But whether a man 
 comes to God by the red way of the Jewish law or not, 
 the thing he wishes to make plain is this, that God has 
 no pleasure in dead sacrifices. God is not the God of 
 the dead. Christ is not silent in the grave. God deals 
 
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 not with the dead bodies of beasts, but with the living 
 hearts of men. And so Paul's appeal is that men present 
 their bodies, living and normal, and full of hope and the 
 joy of life, a living sacrifice to God. 
 
 It is our reasonable service. And it is much that God 
 cares to put the matter on that plane. The pagan who 
 hurls himself under Juggernaut does so under no de- 
 lusion that this is a reasonable thing for his god to ask. 
 No voice speaks to the heathen mother hurling her babe 
 into the Ganges to make that sacrifice appear reasonable. 
 No one pretends that it is reasonble. Every one recog- 
 nized that it is unreasonable. But God descends to the 
 plane where man lives and sufifers and aspires, and shows 
 the kinship between God and man, and asks of us a 
 reasonable service. That is one of the finest things in the 
 Christian faith. We have no arbitrary God, no arbitrary 
 law, no arbitrary sacrifice grounded on what we know 
 not, but a reasonable service, even as judged by the mind 
 of man. This is the meeting point of God and man, at 
 the cross of Christ. This is where He, being lifted up, 
 draws men to God and to His reasonable service. 
 
 I remember a story I heard an evangelist tell in my 
 boyhood concerning a man who lived not far from the 
 kingdom, who attended an evangelistic meeting and was 
 much disposed to give his heart to God, but who tried 
 to put the thought aside, and returned to his home. Still, 
 the thought was with him, and he walked up and down 
 in his own library, thinking about it. As his eyes ran 
 aimlessly over the backs of the books, he noticed one 
 which he had never read, and which so far as I re- 
 member, he did not open even then, but this title struck 
 him: 
 
 "THE REASONABLENESS OF RELIGION" 
 "Is religion reasonable?" he asked; and the answer 
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 came straight from his own soul, "Yes it is. It helps 
 men to make the most of life; to realize their own best 
 good, and to promote the welfare of their fellow men. 
 It makes this world better, and gives hope for the life 
 everlasting. Religion is reasonable, and I am a reason- 
 able man. I will be a Christian." 
 
 This is as I remember the story, and I recall that 
 the point which the evangelist was making was that this 
 man's conversion was just as real and genuine as though 
 he had agonized for hours at the mourners' bench. It 
 impressed me in my boyhood, and it still impresses me, 
 as a wise and sane illustration, and I give it to you. 
 Is religion reasonable? Very well then; you are reason- 
 able men and women; why should it be necessary to 
 say any more about it? Why not at once decide, and 
 joyfully, to do what is your reasonable service? 
 
 As you hurry through the streets of Chicago, you 
 notice great bunches of handbills fluttering from the 
 postboxes. Those boxes, the property of the United 
 States, are thus used to distribute circulars inviting men 
 to enlist in the regular army. I have pulled one off now 
 and then, and glanced it over on the elevated trains. It 
 is very attractively printed in two colors, and contains 
 a very enticing appeal. It tells how generous the wages 
 are, and how the money can all be saved, because board 
 a!nd clothes are furnished in addition. It sets forth the 
 opportunity to see the world, and very many other 
 pleasant perquisites which accompany five years of serv- 
 ice in the regular army. I have read all this, but have 
 not enlisted. I have a good, steady job, and am not 
 in the least tempted to go and become a soldier. And 
 I have not missed many men out of my congregation by 
 reason of this appeal which is made to them every day 
 as they pass the recruiting offices in the city. 
 
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 But I can imagine how it could all be very different. 
 If on a Sunday morning I should tell you that Central 
 America and Mexico, let us say, had joined to declare war 
 on the United States ; that our country had been invaded ; 
 that atrocities were being committed against our fellow 
 citizens ; that a fanatical spirit of Catholicism had joined in 
 the attack, and that our land and our homes and our faith 
 were all in peril, that would be a very different matter. 
 I can imagine that we might spread out the muster roll 
 on the communion table, yes, on the communion table, 
 which we never use for other than sacred purposes; I 
 can imagine that on this very day we might spread it 
 there, and the appeal might be made for men to fight 
 for their country and their faith. I can imagine myself 
 saying, "I will go and carry a gun in such a cause; who 
 will go with me?" I can imagine that men would enlist 
 who are over the age limit, and boys who are too young 
 would plead to go. It would not be necessary to tell 
 them how large the pay was to be, not how good the 
 opportunity to see the world ; we should not need the 
 attractive hand bills, but only the call to sacrifice. 
 
 Tell me, my friends, tell me how I shall make this 
 appeal for the service of Jesus Christ in that fashion ! 
 I am not willing to think of it as though I were merely 
 hanging out a bunch of invitations Sunday after Sunday, 
 picturing in attractive terms the Christian life, and see- 
 ing them neglected or merely glanced at and ignored. 
 How shall I make you understand that this is an appeal 
 to you? God's government has been assailed. Jesus 
 Christ is fighting the great battle of His life. God, 
 who has offered Himself in sacrifice for you, asks of 
 you this reasonable sacrifice.
 
 Seeing antr Peliebing 
 
 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, 
 thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet 
 have believed. John 20: 29. 
 
 We are much indebted to Thomas for doubting; it 
 makes our own faith the easier when we know that 
 among the disciples were those who were not too easily 
 convinced. Yet there was in the expression of his doubt 
 a certain harsh materialism which we cannot wholly 
 commend. He asked what, for the disciples in later 
 ages, was to be an impossible test. He reduced faith to- 
 its lowest terms of dependence upon the senses. Blessed 
 are they who, with all his stubborn refusal to accept 
 as true what may not be true, still find their assurance of 
 spiritual realities in proofs not wholly material. 
 
 "Seeing is believing." Not always. I saw the sun 
 rise this morning, but I believe that instead of that, the 
 earth turned round. I met a friend in the postofifice a 
 few days ago, and he took a half dollar that had just been 
 handed him in change at the stamp window, and passed 
 it through my hat. I saw it and did not believe it. He 
 laughed and said it was a little trick he learned when he 
 was younger than he now is, and which he performs less 
 frequently than he formerly was accustomed to do. 
 We have constantly to correct the testimony of our 
 senses by our larger knowledge. The little that we see 
 demands for its rational explanation a vast world that 
 we do not see. 
 
 And thus we not only refuse to believe some things 
 we see, but we are compelled to believe very much that 
 is unseen. I never have seen gravitation, nor inter- 
 stellar ether, nor the vibrations of a musical sound, nor 
 
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 SEEING AND BELIEVING 
 
 the waves of a wireless message. All these unseen things 
 are so wonderful, and call for such a strain upon the 
 imagination that I should refuse to believe them if they 
 did not appear, at the present moment, the least possible 
 of all the demands on faith in the unseen to interpret 
 the things which are seen. 
 
 The little we know is very precious ; but the world 
 of our knowledge is an exceedingly small one, and we 
 walk not by faith and not by sight. 
 
 I am impressed with the magnitude of the miracles 
 in when men believe who reject the Gospel. I have 
 frequently known a man who accounts the Gospel to 
 be incredible who reacts to a vastly greater strain upon 
 credulity. Professor Lombroso was a thorough-going 
 materialist, and by his very insistence on evidence that 
 could be weighed and measured, he was prepared to 
 lend his name to the foisting upon the civilized world of 
 that combination of hysteria and palpable fraud, Eusapia. 
 the Neapolitian medium. And our recent magazines are 
 full of her mysterious but stupid and useless and fraud- 
 ulent tricks. I say again, the extreme materialistic posi- 
 tfon, far from guarding a man against impositions, often 
 prepares a hard-headed man to fall an easy prey to them. 
 I should like you to think of all the frauds you have 
 ever known in the realm of the marvelous and the super- 
 natural, and see if there was one of them that was not 
 vouched for by some thorough-going skeptic, who very 
 likely was also a university graduate. 
 
 Think of a Harvard professor exhibiting to a body of 
 learned men in Boston an Oriental religionist, who in 
 proof of his religion, climbed a ladder of swords ! I, too, 
 have seen that trick, and did not believe it. That is, I 
 believed that I saw it, and that the feet were bare and 
 
 —26—
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING 
 
 that the swords were very sharp, for it was broad day- 
 light, and I stood close, and handled the swords and 
 talked with the dervish ; but while I could not explain it, 
 and counted it a wonder beside which all the triumphs 
 of Christian Science over matter are mere child's play, 
 I knew it was a trick, and only a trick. 
 
 Begin by denying anything you know to be true, 
 and you land in intellectual confusion, and prepare your- 
 self for something far less credible than what you 
 have rejected. For instance, deny the reality of matter, 
 and you face the absurdity of your position the next 
 instant. Is it possible that there should be a cavity in 
 a tooth? The cavity being there, do you deny it or fill it? 
 Is it possible to get a cinder in your eye? When it is 
 there, which is the right method of treatment, to remove 
 it or deny it? Every sane man knows the answer; and 
 these two simple questions are all that need be asked. 
 The whole pretentious and absurd system sinks to un- 
 fathomable depths in the cavity of a tooth, or dashes 
 itself to pieces against a cinder in the eye. 
 
 Deny evil, which you know exists, and what happens? 
 What happens to Mrs. Eddy when she wants to write 
 to Mrs. Stetson? She certainly writes as if she thought 
 evil was a very real thing in those who oppose her! 
 And, inasmuch as all evil is now gone, we must install 
 in its place "M. A. M.," a very real and terrible god of 
 intangible evil, whose name spelled out in full is "Ma- 
 licious Animal Magnetism." Before this creature be- 
 gotten of a puerile imagination and of senile terror, we 
 are to stand in greater awe than formerly we cherished 
 toward the devil. I have no special fondness for the 
 devil, nor do I think that any important article of belief 
 depends upon him. I can spare him without regret. 
 
 —27—
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING 
 
 But this recrudescense of the essential forms of belief in 
 witchcraft or of the evil eye shows us how much the less 
 of two evils a good orthodox devil might be. If I must 
 have a devil I want one that will stay put. I refuse to 
 tremble at the name and power of "M. A. M." And I 
 mention it only to show what a red hot leap such follies 
 involve out of the frying pan. The denial of tangible 
 reality means mental chaos. 
 
 I see other things and do not believe them. I went 
 to an evening meeting in which men and women testified 
 to their wonderful cures. Toward the close those who 
 had the meeting in charge challenged any one present 
 who did not believe these things to say so. I had not 
 expected to participate in the meeting, but I rose and 
 said that I was not convinced by anything I had heard ; 
 for if these things proved the truth of that system, 
 they also must be conceded to prove the truth of several 
 others too absurd to be accepted. One of those who 
 had spoken asked me, "Do you believe that these people 
 tell lies when they say they are cured?" I answered 
 that I believed they were honest, but not always truth- 
 ful. I said, "I am not sure how sick some of them were 
 before, nor how well some of the others are now." 
 
 There was one man present that night whom I saw, 
 and whose testimony I heard. He said he had had an 
 error diagnosed as cancer of the stomach, and the doctors 
 had told him he must die, but that he had found this 
 truth, and was well. I saw this man, and heard him, 
 and judged him to be honest, but did not feel in the least 
 convinced. I also saw his case widely published, and 
 recognized it in print ; for that organization has an active 
 press bureau. But with all their admirable facilities for 
 making news of their sect knov/n, they strangely omitted 
 
 —28—
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING 
 
 to tell the public what happened shortly afterward. This 
 same man went home from one of these same meetings 
 and died of hemorrhage, and the autopsy showed that 
 he had just exactly what the doctors said he had, and 
 that he never had been cured. 
 
 There is much that we see and do not believe, and 
 that with good reason. If you degrade the proofs of 
 religion to the merely physical, you enter a region where 
 you are hopelessly out of competition. There is no mod- 
 ern cult now operating in America that can compare 
 for the wonders that it works with some of the super- 
 stitions of the East. If you are to become a Christian 
 Scientist because of wonders which appeal to the senses, 
 the same logic will drive you farther, and give you some 
 religion that does not pretend to be Christian, and which 
 is nearly if not quite as unscientific. 
 
 No man is justified in believing only what he may 
 see. There are other proofs than those that are material. 
 We are finding all the time new spheres in which our 
 knowledge penetrates a little farther into the penumbra 
 of the unknown, but still we walk by faith, not by 
 sight. 
 
 You would believe in God if you could measure His 
 energy in volts and amperes ; yet how long ago was it 
 that you learned anything about amperage and voltage? 
 And for that matter, how much do you understand about 
 it now? 
 
 It is no more incredible that there should be a God, 
 creating and governing all things for a vast moral 
 destiny, than that there should be gravitation, holding an 
 unbounded universe through ages that had no beginning 
 or end, and sustaining worlds unsupported in a vast 
 space in which a million miles' journey would bring you 
 
 —29—
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING 
 
 no nearer to one outside nor take you farther from 
 another. 
 
 It is no more incredible that a wise and loving God 
 should find ways of revealing His truth to men than it 
 is that wireless messages should penetrate the ether un- 
 impeded by material obstacles. 
 
 It is not very wonderful, if God has placed us here 
 in a very strange world, that He should tell us not only 
 what to do, but show us how to do it. His great object 
 lesson of what human life ought to be, and what divine 
 life is, might very reasonably be expressed in terms that 
 are common to both. This is not improbable, but is a 
 rational, logical and entirely credible phenomenon. It 
 makes its own appeal to the hearts of men, and enables 
 them to say not merely that the historic Jesus lived, but 
 that the essential Christ still lives. Then we understand 
 why Jesus blessed those who believe more than they see. 
 We understand why Paul counted spiritual proof the 
 highest proof, and said, "Yea, though we have known 
 Christ after the flesh, now henceforth know we him no 
 more." We understand what Peter meant, when he 
 said of Jesus, "Whom, having not seen, ye love ; in 
 whom though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye 
 rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory." 
 
 I insist that such faith is rational. I deny that it is 
 unscientific. The truly scientific men are they who, in 
 explaining the things we see, compel us to believe in 
 things that we cannot see. No man can be a scientist 
 who believes only what he sees. He cannot even believe 
 in his own brains if he limits his faith to his sight. 
 
 I have great respect for Thomas. I cannot forget 
 his word of fine heroism, "Let us go also with him, that 
 we may die with him." I do not blame him for wanting 
 
 —30—
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING 
 
 proof. But I insist that the sphere within which proof 
 may be admitted is wider than Thomas considered. Our 
 own souls, their aspirations, their needs, their firm af- 
 firmation of the right, their insistant refusal to accept 
 other than truth and life as the final facts, these are part 
 of the proof. 
 
 The chief criticism which occurs to me concerning 
 those who call themselves Rationalists is that they are 
 not sufficiently rational ; and again those who call them- 
 selves positivists that they deal so largely with the things 
 that are negative. It is not rational to ignore the deepest 
 longings and the highest aspirations of the human soul. 
 The things that may be seen and handled are not more 
 positive than those that may be apprehended by the 
 affections. The world without is not more real than 
 the soul within. Matter is not more evident than mind; 
 nor have we any right to affirm that it is less destruct- 
 ible. The soul itself is creative, and so far as any man 
 can know, there is nothing in all the world of sense 
 more real, or more eternal. 
 
 It is reasonable to believe in a God, eternal and in- 
 visible, of whom the visible things from the creation 
 testify, even His eternal power and Godhead. I am con- 
 scious of no logical strain in possessing faith like this, 
 for I am incapable of that larger faith which I should be 
 compelled to hold if I believed that this vast universe had 
 in it and behind it no conscious mind, no righteous plan, 
 no fatherly love. 
 
 It is reasonable to believe in a revelation from God ; 
 and I cannot bring myself to that larger demand upon 
 my faith which would be compelled of me if I believed 
 that God has made us with spirits kindred to His own, 
 
 —31—
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING 
 
 and left us without knowledge of His will concerning 
 ourselves and the world. 
 
 It is reasonable to believe in a Christ, who spelled out 
 in the simple syllables of our earthly life the eternal 
 verities of God's nature and will, and of our human Hope 
 and destiny. 
 
 It is reasonable to believe that all worlds belong to 
 one God ; that all human life partakes of His life ; that 
 this present world is not isolated from the eternal in- 
 terests of the universe ; but that there exists a world of 
 which our own souls give us faint but credible intima- 
 tions, and of which we have had dim though precious 
 glimpses through our tears — a world whose full glory 
 eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered 
 into the heart of man. 
 
 Still, as ever, the things that are seen are temporal, 
 and very full of possibilities of misinterpretation; but 
 the things that are not seen are the eternal things. 
 
 Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have 
 believed. 
 
 —32-
 
 Wf^t l&eligtousi Wisitsi of tfie 3masmatton 
 
 By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the 
 king; for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. Hebrews 
 11:27. 
 
 If Rameses II. was emperor of Egypt in the time of 
 the Exodus, and we have good reason to believe that he 
 was, he was a very real king. He wrote his name on the 
 most stupendous monuments of Egypt. He stands apart 
 from all the great kings of that fascinating land, in the 
 length of his reign and the greatness of his personality. 
 The book of Exodus helps us to locate the oppression in 
 his reign, by giving his name as that of one of the two 
 treasure cities built by the oppressed Hebrews; and we 
 have unearthed one of those very cities and find his name 
 stamped on each of the bricks that represent the cruel 
 task of his foreign subjects. His name to this day is 
 greatest of all names of past monarchs in the land of 
 the Nile ; and in his own day he must have thrown into 
 eclipse all names of other kings in that land and in every 
 other. Yet Moses had a vision that made God more 
 real than Rameses. So real was God that Moses did 
 not fear the king, but forsook Egypt, and "endured as 
 seeing Him who is invisible." 
 
 The ability to see that which is invisible is a gift of 
 the imagination. It is a product of the picture-making 
 power of the human mind. It is that which gives us 
 ability to conceive of objects apart from their tangible 
 appearance. Moses must have been a man of mighty 
 imagination if God seemed to him more real than 
 Pharoah. No man whose field of vision was arrested 
 
 33
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 b}^ the horizon of sense could have done what Moses 
 did. 
 
 It is undeniable that in this present age the imagina- 
 tion is under a certain suspicion. We are the worshipers 
 of "the God of things as they are." We are living in an 
 age whose inquisitive and not always reverent finger is 
 outstretched and ready to penetrate the quivering nail- 
 print of truth. In such an age the imagination falls 
 under the ban. People still employ the imagination, but 
 are ashamed to admit it. They think of the imaginative 
 man as visionary and unreliable, dealing with things 
 unreal. They count him an unsafe guide. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the imagination is one of our 
 most useful faculties. And by no people is it more 
 needed than those who are desirous of knowing actual 
 facts, apart from all that is visionary and unreal. We, 
 more than most people who have lived before us, need 
 the power of imagination. We need it in education ; we 
 need it in exploration after truth ; we need it in our 
 efforts after culture through music and art; and most 
 of all, we need it in religion. 
 
 We are considering this morning, the Religious Uses 
 of the Imagination. 
 
 I.— The Idea of God 
 
 The imagination is necessary to the formation of an 
 idea of God. God is invisible, intangible, and cannot 
 be apprehended by any of our five senses. Our evidence 
 that He exists is partly to be found in the world about 
 us. and partly in the soul within. But having convinced 
 ourselves by a process of reasoning that the world in 
 its creation must have had, and in its operation still must 
 have, an adequate cause, and that the moral sense and 
 
 34
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 conscience of man cannot be at variance with the essen- 
 tial purpose of Him who made us, how can we make 
 God real to our minds? Only by the imagination. 
 
 And even though we know that all our anthropo- 
 morphic ideas of God are defective, yet we cannot 
 wholly be misled by them. We are safe in imagining 
 God as the soul of the universe, vitally concerned in all 
 that makes for the moral welfare of mankind, and in 
 thinking of Him in such relations as make that faith 
 real. 
 
 It cannot be wondered at that men in all ages have 
 sought some tangible form which they could identify 
 with their idea of God. The worship of graven images 
 is the pathetic confession of a limited imagination cry- 
 ing out for something visible that it may call God. But 
 the command which says, "Thou shalt not make unto 
 thee any graven images," and which applies as truly to 
 forms of words and syllogisms as it does to things of 
 wood and stone, as truly to logic as to creations of 
 plastic art, denies to man the poor solace of a visible and 
 impotent deity that it may cast him back on the surer 
 ground of his own imagination. There with the eyes 
 of imagination turned inward to behold what God has 
 revealed of Himself in human life, the worshiper finds 
 God in the mirror of the human soul. 
 
 The men who wrote the Bible were men of imagina- 
 tion. You cannot read the Bible as it ought to be read, 
 you cannot apprehend its glowing figures of speech, 
 without the imagination. We may not be sure just 
 what constituted the quality we term "inspiration," but 
 we may be sure that no man, destitute of an imagination, 
 ever was inspired, or ever could have been. And how 
 
 35
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 is the Bible to become an inspired book except to an 
 inspired man? Paul says it cannot, and Paul is good 
 authority. 
 
 2. — The Interpretation of History 
 
 The imagination is necessary to an interpretation of 
 history. It is only as we are able to think ourselves 
 back into the conditions of past ages that we can under- 
 stand the men and women of the past. It is neither just 
 nor effective for our thinking to take our stand in the 
 present, and by mere strain of intellect to endeavor to 
 understand the past. We can understand David only by 
 placing ourselves in the conditions in which David lived. 
 We can understand the apostles only as we number 
 ourselves among them. There can be no real philosophy 
 of history without the historic imagination. We can 
 understand the men of the Bible only as we live through 
 the successive ages of the Bible. 
 
 And what a demand this makes upon us ! We must 
 go back in our thought to the beginnings of the human 
 race : to the dawn of moral and spiritual ideas ; to the 
 time when God was leading men by the seemingly round- 
 about way of strange worship and bloody sacrifices ; 
 to the time when the first benefactors of the human race 
 were emerging from the chaos and brutality about them ; 
 to the days when mankind was learning the simplest 
 truths about decency and the basis of family life ; to the 
 time when social organizations were beginning in crude 
 tribal combinations for mutual protection. We must 
 go back to those days, and climb up that weary but 
 gainful pilgrimage with our forefathers through the 
 struggle of man against nature, wild beasts, and in- 
 herited tendencies to brutality which they had come to 
 
 36
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 know as sin. And we must see the hand of God in it all, 
 preparing the world for the Gospel. 
 
 Then we must come on to other ages, in which patri- 
 archal governments were established. We must walk 
 with Abraham among his flocks and herds, and hear the 
 call of God as Abraham heard it, sending him forth to 
 found a great nation. It is not enough that we read 
 how Abraham went; we must go with him. 
 
 We must go into Egypt with his descendants. We 
 must be of them, and toil with them in the brick-yards. 
 And, that we may understand both sides of the problem, 
 we must sometimes be Pharoah, proud, haughty and 
 determined to leave a name to all the ages as the greatest 
 of the kings of the land of the Nile. 
 
 We must hide ourselves with Moses in the rushes of 
 the Nile. We must flee with him into the wilderness. 
 We must kneel with him at the burning bush. We must 
 hear the voice that he heard, calling him back to Egypt, 
 and then sending him forth from Egypt, enduring as 
 seeing the invisible God. 
 
 We must follow the Ark through the wilderness and 
 the sea. We must go with it in the long march around 
 Jericho, and follow its fortunes through subsequent years 
 till we enter with it into Jerusalem, crying, "Lift up 
 your heads, O ye gates, and the King of Glory shall 
 come in !" 
 
 We must live in that city with the descendants of 
 David, and witness and share the changes of the years 
 that follow. We must go into Babylon in the Exile; 
 and w'e must enter Babylon again with the conquering 
 army of Cyrus the Mede. We must go back to Jerusalem 
 in the days of the Persians, and rebuild the temple. We 
 
 37
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 must follow the hosts and dwell in the camps of the 
 young king Alexander the Great, whose almost incred- 
 ible conquests brought the world to the foot of his 
 throne. We must fight in the indomitable armies of the 
 Maccabees. We must be present at the coronation of 
 the Caesars. We must witness and share the rise of the 
 Herods. We must follow with the wise men the path 
 of light shed over the sands of Arabia by the Star in 
 the East, and must bow with them in reverence before 
 the manger of Bethlehem. 
 
 All this we must do, and more, and how shall we dO' 
 it except as we possess the rich gift of an enlightened 
 imagination? 
 
 3. — Selfhood and the Ideal 
 
 The imagination is essential to the formation of an 
 ideal for ourselves. The word of the ancient oracle was, 
 "Man, know thyself." But no man knows himself who 
 knows only what he is today. The only man who really 
 knows himself is the man who knows the self that he 
 may become. The present self is a changing self, giving 
 ofif something of itself with every breath, and building 
 new selfhood out of every crust of bread that it eats, and 
 every great truth it learns. To know myself as I am 
 this moment is a thing of interest, and may perhaps be 
 done in part by means of scales and the yard stick. 
 Certain it is that some men have meant little more than 
 this when they have shouted to us "Know thyself," as if 
 that were the final word of wisdom. To know myself it is 
 not enough that I take stock of my present passions, 
 appetites and motives ; I am more than all these. I am 
 these plus my ideals. And the ideals are the most real 
 part of me. In my own heart I am a better man than 
 
 38
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 I ever yet have become. I am climbing toward the at- 
 tainment of that ideal. And shall I judge of myself 
 by what I am alone? As well might I judge of a 
 cathedral by its ground plan. Not till the eye has fol- 
 lowed the lines of the ground plan upward to the very 
 top of the spire do we know the cathedral. Not till you 
 know the topmost flight of a man's ideal do you know 
 the man. 
 
 And so you cannot know yourself till you take ac- 
 count of all that you aspire to be, yea, and of those un- 
 awakened, dormant elements in your own selfhood, 
 which God will yet rouse to life and earnestness through 
 the power of faith, and fellowship in the Gospel. 
 
 "Be what you would seem" is good advice. "Believe 
 you are what you want to be," is equally good advice. 
 'According to thy faith, thy vision, thy belief of what 
 thou canst be, be it unto thee." 
 
 We must have a well developed imagination to save 
 us from unworthy ideals. For the man of limited im- 
 agination, the hard-headed, unimaginative man, is often 
 the first to be imposed upon, and that in the very realm 
 of which he counts himself to be the master. An un- 
 governed imagination becomes a cage of unclean birds, 
 and is a terrible thing for a man to shelter within the 
 sacred precincts of his soul. But a man devoid of im- 
 agination, the man who lives on the plane of the com- 
 monplace, is subject to all manner of deceptions, and is 
 often the first to be carried away by superficial and 
 pretentious delusions from which he might often be 
 delivered by enough of imagination to see the absurdity 
 of his new religion. 
 
 39
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 4. — The Practical Uses of the Imagination 
 
 I hope that these things which I am saying appeal to 
 you as of sufficient value to justify this sermon, even 
 if it did not enter into the realm of the so-called practical. 
 Yet, because there is a legitimate demand that the 
 theoretical shall justify itself by results that are practical, 
 let me say that in every important sphere in life the 
 imagination is essential to practical success. 
 
 Let me call your attention to a few representative 
 men whose work is nothing if not practical. 
 
 Consider the physician. He is first of all a mechanical 
 expert, reducing fractures and removing foreign bodies; 
 and after that he is a chemist, to whom the human body 
 is a laboratory with certain definite reactions following 
 certain acids, alkalis and salts. But is that all? The 
 successful physician is more than a mechanic and a 
 chemist; he does more than treat humanity as a machine 
 and a laboratory. He is a man of imagination, sug- 
 gesting the results he hopes to produce, and picturing to 
 the patient the well man he wants him to be. Every 
 true healer is a faith-healer. Every true cure is wrought 
 through faith and prayer. 
 
 Consider the lawyer. He is not content merely to 
 mass his evidence and marshal his facts. He makes a 
 constant appeal to the imagination. The black motives 
 of the opposing side form but a background against 
 which he paints the full-length portrait of his angelic 
 client. 
 
 Note the method of the politician. He is not con- 
 tent to stand on the rock-ribbed platform of his party. 
 He "points with pride" to its illustrious record, and he 
 
 40
 
 RjELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 "views with alarm" the disaster which is sure to follow 
 the success of the opposing party. 
 
 As for the teacher, if he teach but facts, he is a mere 
 stick in the school room ; facts are but the raw material 
 of his instruction. These live when he makes them real 
 to his pupil; and that is the province of the imagination. 
 
 As for the inventor, he never yet blessed the world 
 with any mechanism that released the weary hand from 
 its too confining task, or lifted the load from the bent 
 back of labor, but he saw the machine in his imagination 
 before as yet a single lever or pulley or wheel of it ex- 
 isted in the world of fact. 
 
 Of all this I have a further word to say, but I desire 
 to emphasize the truth that, judged by these tests, the 
 religious uses of the imagination are eminently practical. 
 
 We need the imagination in religion because there are 
 tendencies in modern life which stimulate the imagina- 
 tion in manners unwholesome save as they yoke them- 
 selves to righteous motives and practical courses of con- 
 duct. The reading of novels and the witnessing of 
 theatrical exhibitions become an easy peril if these waken 
 the imagination and stir the sympathy, but give us no 
 immediate act to perform for righteousness. But the 
 glory of the religious imagination is that it joins itself 
 at once to some practical end. It shows us how to do 
 what Emerson enjoined, when he advised us to hitch our 
 wagon to a star. It saves us from the delusion of the 
 commonplace man who insists that a star cannot pull 
 a wagon ; for it shows him the moon, smallest of stars, 
 pulling the tides in ceaseless procession round the globe, 
 and sets him to wondering what a really great star can 
 do with the wagon of a reasonable man, when wheels 
 
 41
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 are oiled and the wagon is headed in the direction of 
 the procession of the stars. And then on the other hand, 
 it saves us from the undisciplined imagination which is 
 only a star, and hitched to nothing, the mere comet of a 
 capricious mind, fl3^ing amuck through space, and finally 
 knocking itself into a wreck through lack of an orbit. 
 
 Dickens tells of a certain Mr. Gadgrind, who con- 
 stantly demanded facts. There are such people, and they 
 count themselves very reasonable ; but men do not live by 
 facts alone, but by faith, and hope and love. They do not 
 live in the present alone, but in the strenuous struggle of 
 the past, and in the glorious triumph of the future. 
 
 The proper cultivation of the imagination saves us 
 from the Gadgrind bondage to facts ; it saves us also 
 from sky-rocketing through the empty spaces of the 
 unreal in search for the impossible. And therefore it 
 justifies me in saying that of all people who should favor 
 the cultivation of the imagination in things religious and 
 truly spiritual, the first should be those who insist upon 
 those things that are practical. ' 
 
 5. — The Scientific Uses of the Imagination 
 
 In this exercise of the imagination in the sphere of 
 religion, we are not going beyond what becomes neces- 
 sary in the sphere of science. Great scientists have 
 recognized this, foremost among them Professor Tyndall, 
 who in the beginning of his second lecture on Light, says 
 what he expresses more fully in his "Fragments of 
 Science." He says of the true scientist that from the 
 very outset he is dependent on his imagination : 
 
 "He cannot consider, much less answer, the question, 
 'What Is Light?' without transporting himself to a world 
 which underlies the sensible one. and out of wh'ch m 
 
 42
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 accordance with rigid law, all optical phenomena spring. 
 To realize this sub-sensible world, if I may use the term, 
 the mind must possess a certain pictorial power It 
 has to visualize the invisible .... This conceptio:i of 
 physical theory implies, as you perceive, the exercise of 
 the imagination. Do not be afraid of this word .... 
 I do not mean a riotous power which deals capriciously 
 with facts, but a well disciplined power whose sole 
 function it is to form conceptions which the intellect 
 imperatively demands." (pp. 34-5) "He must visualize 
 the invisible." So said Professor Tyndall of the scientist. 
 "He endured as seeing Him who is invisible." So says 
 the Bible of the man of faith. The two sound very 
 much alike ; the}' ire alike. 
 
 All we are claiming for the super-sensible world is 
 what Professor Tyndall claims for the sub-sensible 
 world. And really these two, and the world of sense, 
 are one world, three in one ; and no one of the three 
 is apprehended wholly without the imagination 
 
 All great scientists, therefore, are men of imagina- 
 tion, and hence of faith. I do not wonder that Professor 
 Tyndall thought necessary to warn men of the scientific 
 mind not to be afraid of the word, for some of them do 
 not know how much they owe to their own imagination, 
 and to their faith. I could imdertake to add some verses 
 to the eleventh chapter of Hebrews and to place upon 
 the list of the faithful a long roll of names of men of 
 science, whose imagination was that of faith. 
 
 P>3' faith Columbus, when he was called of God 
 to discover a new continent, went out not knowing 
 whither he went. By faith he sailed strange waters, 
 
 43
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 with Cabot, Alagellan, Vespvicius and Balboa, the heirs 
 with him of the same promise ; and they beheld rising 
 from the waters, new heavens and a new earth, fresh 
 from the hand of God, and bestowed upon men through 
 faith. 
 
 By faith Copernicus lifted the earth from its solid 
 base and set it to moving in rhythmic order round the 
 sun ; by faith he beheld all the suns and suns of suns with 
 planets in bright array, circling round the throne of God ; 
 and this he wrought by faith. 
 
 By faith Galileo, when he had been forced to recant, 
 still testified that the earth moves ever at the decree of 
 God ; by faith he endured persecution till the mind of 
 his fellow men found its orbit in the same true faith. 
 
 By faith La Place understood how the worlds are 
 made from star-dust, and framed by the word of God, 
 so that the things that are seen in the making take their 
 place in the established order of an infinite God of good- 
 ness and might. 
 
 By faith Newton beheld in the fall of the apple the 
 demonstration of an all-pervading force, operating by the 
 unchanging will of God, so that the worlds are held in 
 place and that not by the things that do appear. 
 
 By faith Paracelsus, when he was a-dying, bequeathed 
 to those who followed him an imperfect science, much 
 mixed with error, but left the inspiration of his name to 
 others through whom the indivisible elements of earth 
 and the laws that combine them were made known. 
 
 These all died in faith, not receiving the promises, 
 but were persuaded of them and embraced them and 
 moved toward them, and bequeathed to others the 
 heritage of their faith. 
 
 44
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 By faith men suffered persecution, ridicule and 
 povert}', and walked from ofifice to office wearily and in 
 threadbare garb, trying- to enlist the sympathy and faith 
 of their fellow men in things the world thought vision- 
 ary, choosing rather to suffer affliction as the children 
 of faith than to sell their vision for bread. 
 
 And as for Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall and 
 Spencer, these, too, were men of faith, and their faith 
 gave substance to the things they hoped for, and led 
 them from experiment to hypothesis, and from hypoth- 
 esis to theory, and from theory to discovery, and from 
 faith to sight; these also were the children of faith. 
 
 And what shall I more say? For the time would fail 
 me to tell of vStevenson and Fulton, of Morse also aiKl 
 Edison, and Roentgen and Lister, and Cyrus Field and 
 Bell, of Marconi and Wilbur Wright, who through faith 
 made iron float, yoked chariots to the invisible power of 
 steam, caused the human voice to be heard at a distance 
 of a thousand miles, brought the mind of man into touch 
 with that of his fellow man beyond the sea, filled the 
 air with voices inaudible to the ear alone and intelligible 
 only to the mind of faith, and lifted the bodies and minds 
 of men on wings of wonder and set them to sailing amid 
 the clouds. 
 
 Through faith they built railroads, irrigated deserts, 
 and crossed the trackless ice to the poles, led by faith in 
 the compass and the friendly stars. By faith they sub- 
 dued climates, overcame hardships, out of weakness 
 were made strong, added to the span of human life, 
 wrought wonders incredible, and filled the pages of 
 scientific periodicals and the columns of the daily press 
 with the news of their achievements that ceased to be 
 
 45
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 wonderful through their very incredibility and their 
 certitude. 
 
 Now they who do such things see visions of them 
 before they come to pass, and thus are men of faith. And 
 these all, and they who labored with them and before 
 them, lived in faith, and those who died died in faith, 
 that all who follow may add their knowledge to that 
 which is gone before, and the world by the gift of ail 
 men of faith at last shall be made perfect. 
 
 We have made this apparent digression that we 
 might remind ourselves that this use of the imagination 
 in the sphere of faith is no monopoly of religion. And 
 now having justified it by reminding ourselves that it 
 belongs also to science, let us proceed to two other con- 
 siderations. 
 
 6. — The Imagination and Our Neighbor 
 
 We require the imagination to understand the Golden 
 Rule. The Golden Rule is a constant demand upon the 
 imagination. It is a reminder that you are to stir up that 
 gift within you before you pass judgment on your 
 brother. It is a command to use the imagination in 
 matters of the judgment. "Put yourself in his place" is 
 the fairest rule that can be given to a man who must 
 judge the motives of his fellow men. And how shall you 
 put yourself in his place, without the imagination? 
 
 How shall we make our appeals for charity save 
 through the imagination? 
 
 We read that three hundred miners have lost their 
 lives in a disaster in a mine, and we are not moved. But 
 '.some one who has visited Cherry tells us about it so 
 -vividly that we see it all, the long rows of houses and not 
 
 46
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 a man in a whole row ; the women sobbing about the 
 mouth of the sealed shaft; the miners keeping up their 
 courage by song and prayer; the little church, and the 
 faithful minister and nurse, and we see it all, and live it 
 all, and we send a thousand dollars to Cherry. 
 
 7. — The Imagination and the Life to Come 
 
 We need the imagination to prepare for heaven. 
 
 Is there a life beyond the grave? The man of sense 
 and of sense alone, sees dust return to dust, and answers, 
 "Death ends all." But life itself makes a tremendous de- 
 mand on the imagination. Our present life is strange and 
 wonderful past all belief. It requires imagination to ac- 
 count for the present union of matter and spirit in these 
 bodies of ours, for who understands it? And why should 
 it be thought a thing incredible that God should raise the 
 dead ? 
 
 And when we come to believe in heaven, we still have 
 every appeal to the imagination in making our belief 
 a motive in righteousness. So the Bible tells us in 
 material figures a few things that furnish material for 
 the imagination. The gates of pearl, the streets of gold, 
 the ever-blooming flowers and the trees bearing fruit all 
 the year, the nightless day, and the unending song — 
 these are the raw materials for the sanctified imagina- 
 tion, to help us to make real to the soul the things that 
 eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered 
 into the heart of man. 
 
 We walk by sight, but not wholly, for we walk by 
 faith. And our appeal for clean streets, for righteous 
 politics, for the banishing of the saloon, for the uplifting 
 of mankind, and for the heaven that God hath prepared 
 
 47
 
 RELIGIOUS USES OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 for them that love him, is an appeal to that sanctified 
 imagination which fruits in faith. 
 
 So let us rejoice in the glory of the human mind, its 
 power to know, its ability to love and rejoice, and its 
 creative strength of will. And with it all, let us cultivate 
 that power of seeing the invisible, of forming and 
 cherishing ideals, and of framing an impelling faith, 
 through the enlightening influence of that great gift of 
 God, Avhich gives substance to things hoped for, and 
 affords evidence of things not seen. So shall we add our 
 names to those who endure as seeing Him who is in- 
 visible, and share in the triumph of faith. 
 
 And so I am ready to meet the practical man who 
 asks if religion is not largel}^ concerned with the imagina- 
 tion, and admit to him that it is. But I also remind him 
 that all his hope for the betterment of human life, and 
 all his inspiration for the life that is to come, necessitate 
 an appeal to the imagination. And I will go farther and 
 say that nowhere is that appeal more sane or practical 
 than within the sphere of religion. Whether it be to 
 make real my brother's hunger to the practical end that 
 he may share my loaf, or whether it be that the soul 
 shall be elevated out of the weary round of the common- 
 place and find fellowship with the hosts immortal, the 
 appeal is to the imagination. The glorious company of 
 the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the 
 noble army of martyrs, these are the inspiring com- 
 panions of the man with the sanctified imagination. On 
 his ears fall the sweet melodies of the choir invisible, 
 and his solitary race in the lonely .arena is cheered by 
 the applause of the cloud of witnesses. And he endures 
 as seeing Him who is invisible. 
 
 48
 
 Wf)t ^robisal fton anb tf)t Atonement 
 
 Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. 
 It was meet that we should make merry and be glad: for this 
 thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is 
 found. Luke 15:31-32. 
 
 Sir Arthur Sullivan's oratorio of The Prodigal Son 
 ends with the return of the wayward boy, and his wel- 
 come to the father's house. That is where the parable 
 ends for the most of us. I presume the composer of 
 the oratorio never considered the question of adding the 
 other scene. I imagine if he had been asked to do so he 
 would have answered that the result would be an inev- 
 itable anti-climax. Partly I sympathize with him. I 
 have been preaching to you through this Lenten season 
 a series of sermons on the great doctrines of the Church, 
 based on the teachings of this parable. If I were seeking 
 merely an oratorical climax I would not seek to add a 
 sermon to those that you have heard already. I would 
 end the series with the echoes of the song and the dan- 
 cing in our ears. I would not risk the possible anti- 
 climax of another scene that opens dark with the frown 
 of the elder brother. 
 
 But the parable is not complete without it. Nay, I 
 believe that just here by implication are found those ele- 
 ments which men are accustomed to say the parable does 
 not contain. And as each of the preceding sermons has 
 related itself to a doctrinal theme, I intend before we 
 are through to say something about the doctrine of the 
 atonement as it is implied in this parable. But first I 
 
 49
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 want to fit it to what we have been thinking in the ser- 
 mons that have gone before. 
 
 Everybody knows that this part of the parable is neg- 
 lected. Everybody feels that the doctrine of the atone- 
 ment ought somehow to find expression in the parable. 
 What then if we should find the missing doctrine in the 
 neglected part of the parable? 
 
 I am not without sympathy for the elder brother. To 
 stay at home, to be true to one's own family, to pay one's 
 honest debts, to keep out of jail and out of the poor 
 house, are virtues that we cannot afford to despise. And 
 the elder brother's problem is complicated because the 
 prodigal has come to assume that repentance carries with 
 it some claim upon the robe and the feast. The elder 
 brother is willing, sometimes, to help the prodigal to 
 where he may array himself in the righteousness of the 
 Father's best robe ; but the prodigal wants an old coat 
 which he can pawn for beer ; the elder brother is willing, 
 sometimes, to see the fatted calf killed; but the prodigal 
 wants a lunch ticket which is negotiable over the bar. 
 All these experiences give the elder brother some ground 
 for complaint. He sees his tax list swelling, and finds 
 the prodigal well cared for in hospitals which he endows, 
 in charitable institutions to which he is an annual sub- 
 scriber, or in jails for which he is taxed. All this the 
 elder brother has experienced again and again, and he 
 has become conservative. We cannot bring a railing ac- 
 cusation against him. 
 
 I do not know what the prodigal says when he 
 comes into the office of a business man. But I can tell 
 you that one of the most trying features of his appeal to 
 a minister is a certain arrogant assumption that the ring 
 
 50
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 and the robe belong to him ; that he deserves to be trust- 
 ed because he has proved untrustworthy; that he has 
 right by reason of his very depravity to demand some- 
 thing better than the opportunity that belongs to an 
 honest man. These features which I find constantly in 
 my dealing with prodigals give me a large measure of 
 sympathy with the elder brother. 
 
 And yet the elder son is held up to our sure and 
 righteous condemnation. We may not always analyze 
 it correctly, but we know he is in the wrong. Listen to 
 the words in which he seeks to condemn the father, but 
 really condemns himself: 
 
 "Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither trans- 
 gressed I at any time thy commandment ; but as soon 
 as this thy son was come — " 
 
 That was where his virtue broke down. 
 
 And now we strike an interesting and important rev- 
 elation. The man who had been faithful in his duties 
 to his father failed in his duty to his brether. In a recent 
 volume Rev. G. A. Morrison reminds us that the elder 
 brother is not charged with wronging the servants, and 
 it is expressly said that he was faithful to his father ; but 
 he failed in his duty to his brother. 
 
 It would not be so hard to do our duty to God, if 
 that could be separated from our duty to men. It is 
 very simple to read the Bible, recite creeds, and ofifer 
 prayers; but the difficult part of religion is to apply our 
 faith to life. For the elder son to be dutiful to the 
 father and considerate of the servants was well enough 
 as far as it went, but it was not all. It is easier to be 
 good to those above us and to those below us, but hard 
 to be just to our equals. 
 
 51
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 Did you ever have a visit from a friend from the 
 country, and try to make it pleasant for him? Did you 
 realize how hard it was to keep from being a snob? You 
 showed him over your house with its steam heat and its 
 porcelain bath tubs, and you took him to dine with you 
 at the club, and you showed him the city; and he went 
 back and told his friends that you were a great man in 
 Chicago, prospering, and not at all spoiled by your pros- 
 perity. But now I will tell you what he did not sus- 
 pect, and that is much to your credit. Every five min- 
 utes you had to check yourself from the uprising spirit of 
 the snob. You hated yourself for it; you did not let it 
 conquer you ; but you were surprised and ashamed to 
 find how easy it was to be proud and patronizing to your 
 old friend. If you made him feel at home in your house, 
 and sent him back the happier because he had seen your 
 prosperity, you did a difficult and tactful thing, and you 
 deserve his good opinion of you. 
 
 What bitter things one may hear about physicians 
 from physicians ; about artists from artists ; about law- 
 yers from lawyers. And sometimes ministers are not the 
 most charitable judges of their brethren in the ministry. 
 
 Do you think it strange? Here is an artist who for 
 years has toiled laboriously at his art, and with a plod- 
 ding measure of success. He has attained to the distinc- 
 tion of having his pictures hung at exhibitions ; and now 
 and then has been able to sell one at a price sufficient 
 to reward him reasonably well. Now up from the ranks 
 of the imknown comes a new artist, and suddenly his 
 name is in all the art journals. People flock to see his 
 canvases, talk about his shadows, his technique, his 
 genius, and pay for his picture at the rate of hundreds of 
 
 52
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 dollars a square foot. And his fellow artist thinks he 
 sees through his little trick of spreading paint. The pic- 
 tures have a certain merit, he will concede, but nothing 
 in proportion to what the public thinks it sees in them. 
 And the other artist, shivering in his studio over can- 
 vases that he may never sell, cries out to the public, 
 "Lo, these many years do I serve thee; and always have 
 I done good work; and I have barely a living to show 
 for it. But as soon as this freak had come, who violates 
 every rule of art, thou hast given him the medal and the 
 gold coin !" 
 
 Here is a physician who has made faithful prepara- 
 tion for his work, and has gained the confidence of a 
 small but increasing number of patients. He seems in 
 sight of a modest and not unreasonable income. Sudden- 
 ly there comes to town a new doctor, and hangs out a 
 little brighter shingle; and the success of his phenomenal 
 cures is buzzed about where people talk over their com- 
 plaints. One woman says to another, "Why don't you 
 try Dr. Newcomer? I am sure he could help you," and 
 she leaves the man she has learned to trust, and goes to 
 the stranger. The old doctor, driving by in his one-horse 
 buggy, sees the new doctor's automobile at the door of 
 his former patient, and cries out within his soul, "Lo, 
 these many years have I served that family, from the 
 cradle to the grave ; and I thought I had won their grat- 
 itude ; but as soon as this quack has come, whose chief 
 qualification is his use of more gasoline than I, they have 
 given him the place which I had rightly earned." 
 
 What we call professional jealousy is not wholly un- 
 reasonable. It is the angry protest of the elder son 
 against the awarding of the ring and the robe on other 
 
 53
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 grounds than those of merit. The world in its charity 
 for the prodigal and its fondness for new sensations has 
 given its jewelry and its raiment with quite sufficient dis- 
 regard for the man who has put hard work into his craft. 
 
 It is because it is so difficult as to be almost impossi- 
 ble for us rightly to adjust the status of the prodigal in 
 his relations with the elder brother that we eliminate this 
 part of the story. And it is precisely at this point that 
 religion becomes difficult. 
 
 David has been much commended because he said, 
 "Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned." Men have 
 counted it the perfection of his repentance that his vision 
 of the magnitude of his sin against God prevented his 
 thinking of the home he had ruined and the man he had 
 murdered. I do not think the prophet Nathan would 
 have agreed with these admirers. He said little about 
 God, but told David that he was as contemptible as a 
 sheep-thief by reason of his sin against his fellow man. 
 
 It is easy to confess your sin before God, but it is 
 very hard to confess it to your brother, Jesus tells us 
 that confession to the brother must come first. "If there- 
 fore thou art ofifering thy gift at the altar, and there re- 
 memberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, 
 leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; 
 first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and 
 ofTer thy gift" (Matthew 5:24). It is not so hard for 
 Jacob to wrestle with the angel as to meet the wronged 
 and wrathful Esau ; but not till he is willing to meet his 
 brother has he prevailed with God. 
 
 The Christian religion is the most natural and the 
 easiest religion on earth, in all respects but one. In that 
 one it is the hardest; namely in that our duty to God at 
 
 54
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 every point must square itself with our duty to our 
 brother. "If any man say, I love God, and hate his 
 brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother 
 whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath 
 not seen? And this commandment have we from Him, 
 that he that loveth God love his brother also." (I John 
 4:20-21). 
 
 If we have made any mistake here it is in assuming 
 that love to God is so much more important than love to 
 man that we have forgotten that the two are inseparable. 
 That is uncomfortable for us all. It would be so much 
 easier to love God if we were at liberty to neglect our 
 brother. It is in our dealings with our brother that we 
 show the weakness of our love to God. 
 
 We are celebrating the week of our Lord's Passion. 
 And we are remembering how Jesus suffered at the 
 hands of sinful men. But it is definitely on record that 
 if they had known who He was they would not have 
 crucified the Lord of Glory. Why then did God send 
 Him to be crucified? 
 
 Have we not here the very secret of the Incarnation? 
 God reveals himself in such form that we may prove our 
 loyalty to the Father by our reception of the Elder 
 Brother, God is not content with our loyalty to Him, 
 as God, but insists that we shall prove it by our faithful- 
 ness to God revealed as our fellow men. 
 
 "Art thou a king?" Jesus claimed none of the exemp- 
 tions due him. Pilate and the high priest must deal with 
 him as a man and a private citizen, a lay preacher from 
 Galilee. 
 
 Nor is there anything strange and exceptional in that 
 test. In the incarnation God meets us on the human 
 
 55
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 level, that we may learn this hardest and most important 
 of the lessons of our practical religion. As we deal with 
 our Elder Brother so deal we with the Father ; and 
 what we do tp the least of these our brethren, we do 
 to Him. 
 
 Our theories of salvation are defective because they 
 are not social. We eliminate from our thought the 
 elder brother and the community of the home life and 
 think only of the prodigal and the Father. God, who 
 saves men, saves them to something, which something 
 is not realized without a society of efifort. One man is 
 sufficient, thank God, for a man's work ; yet where one 
 chases a thousand, two can put ten thousand to flight. 
 The plan of God involves the uniting of Father and elder 
 brother and younger brother in a holy bond wherein the 
 unwasted wealth of the elder brother shall keep the prod- 
 igal, and even the prodigal's sad experience shall have a 
 moral value in developing the energies and sympathies 
 of the more favored children of God. 
 
 The younger brother needs the elder brother's help. 
 There are some men whom the love of God will not 
 bring back so long as the elder brother stands scowling 
 in the door, or sits content in the end of his pew and tells 
 the usher to seat the prodigal in the gallery. There are 
 prodigals who have gone back to the far country and 
 the swine because they got near enough to the Father's 
 house to see his elder brother, self righteous and indiflfer- 
 ent, or complacently censorious, and they would not in- 
 trude where they were not welcome. There are whole 
 regiments of men who march past the church with din- 
 ner pails six days in the week, and on the seventh go to 
 the ball game or the saloon, or God knows where. Where 
 
 56
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 is their elder brother who has received so much of what 
 belongs to the Father? Is he unwilling to share it with 
 the unclean and unstable prodigal? 
 
 But the elder son needs the younger. His hardness of 
 heart shows him a stranger to sympathy. He enjoys too 
 good health to be sympathetic with weakness ; he is too 
 clean to be patient with dirt; he has seen too little of 
 temptation to know how to pity men who struggle 
 against it. And hence he, as truly as the prodigal, is un- 
 developed in his finer qualities. The return of the prod- 
 igal will be a blessing to the elder brother. It will try 
 his patience often, and humble his pride and cause him 
 anxiety; sometimes the elder son may almost wish that 
 the younger one had never come home to disgrace the 
 family. But the elder son will grow in grace by reason 
 of the experience. 
 
 It is commonly admitted that parents are desirable 
 for children; but I have learned that children are still 
 more necessary to parents. I have always believed that 
 the younger brother needed the elder ; I am learning that 
 the elder needs the younger. Were there no weakness the 
 strong could learn no sympathy ; were there no ignorance 
 the learned would grow arrogant ; were there no poverty 
 the rich would grow proud. It is God's will that the 
 strong shall bear the infirmities of the weak, and not 
 please themselves ; that the rich shall give to help the 
 poor, and so lay up treasure in heaven ; that the wise 
 shall instruct the unlearned, and so themselves become 
 wise unto salvation. The prodigal himself becomes a 
 helper, bringing out his brother's latent virtues, though 
 sometimes by counter irritation. 
 
 It must not be assumed that the forgiving of the prod- 
 
 57
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 igal made the father poorer, or permanently diminished 
 the resources of the elder brother. It is only temporarily 
 that Christ is made poor for the sinner's sake; for this 
 very reason God hath highly exalted Him; and as for 
 his patrimony, we have nothing better promised than 
 that we shall be joint heirs with Christ. 
 
 When the prodigal is forgiven, he ceases to be a 
 waster; he becomes a producer. Even God is richer 
 when a repentant soul comes back. Sin is waste; it is 
 sin, not forgiveness, that diminishes God's wealth. Noth- 
 ing makes God so rich as his giving, and his forgiving 
 adds eternally to his glory. 
 
 It has been noted by all commentators that the Para- 
 ble of the Prodigal Son contains no doctrine of a sub- 
 stitutionary atonement. It is very common to say in what 
 passes for explanation, "Jesus did not intend to teach all 
 doctrine in one parable." But to this are two answers : 
 first, that Jesus certainly did mean to teach the way in 
 which an erring soul comes back to God; and secondly, 
 that the kind of doctrine which sometimes has called 
 itself, though without the slightest right, the orthodox 
 doctrine, not only is not in the parable, but that no possi- 
 ble room can be made there for it. 
 
 If Jesus had believed that the only sanctions of the 
 moral law are penal, and that God cannot forgive with- 
 out punishing (which would be the same as to say that 
 God cannot forgive at all) he could easily have put that 
 doctrine into the parable ; the father could have whipped 
 the elder son before he forgave the younger. The only 
 reason Jesus did not put that kind of atonement into the 
 parable was that he did not believe it. Any theory of 
 that character is incredible, and opposed to the whole 
 
 58
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 method of Jesus and the spirit of the God of the Gospels. 
 
 And yet there is an implication of such a doctrine, if 
 only by contrast. It was because the character of those 
 whom Jesus addressed required the rebuke implied in the 
 story of the elder brother that Jesus could not put into 
 the parable a likeness of himself. Had the elder brother 
 been as much like Jesus as the father was like God, the 
 parable would have been different in just one, and that 
 a very important, particular. It was because the elder 
 brother was un-Christlike that the father had no messen- 
 ger to the far country, and the prodigal had to find his 
 way back alone. 
 
 The most pronounced suggestion of the relation of 
 Christ to the returning sinner is shown in what we in- 
 stinctively look for and find lacking in the story of the 
 elder brother. How readily does this brother impute to 
 the returned prodigal the sins which are common to prod- 
 igals. Whether they were really his or not we do not 
 know ; very likely they were. But our Elder Brother ex- 
 hibits the mind of the Father, not imputing even our own 
 trespasses to us. (2 Cor. 5:19). The elder brother in 
 the parable harbors the memories of the sinner's mis- 
 spent years ; but our Elder Brother says : "Go and sin 
 no more." The elder brother in the parable is sullen and 
 self-righteous ; our Elder Brother is merciful and gra- 
 cious, and His righteousness is a mantle of charity to cover 
 the sins of the world. The elder brother in the parable 
 has spent his life with the father and never has learned 
 the father's spirit ; but our Elder Brother is one with the 
 Father in the gracious work of reconciliation. The elder 
 brother in the parable was angry and would not come in 
 to the feast; our Elder Brother comes out to meet and 
 
 59
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 welcome the returning sinner. The elder brother in the 
 parable hoards that which he and the father have accu- 
 mulated, selfishly reckons on the fruits of his own indus- 
 try and economy; but our Elder Brother grasped not at 
 His own possession in the Divine Nature, but impover- 
 ished Himself that we through His poverty might be 
 rich. 
 
 We are far wrong if we say that this parable has no doc- 
 trine of vicarious sacrifice. On the contrary it iriustrates 
 the eternal necessity of such sacrifice. The heart hunger 
 for such a doctrine and the disappointment that the elder 
 brother here proved incapable of it, account for the fre- 
 quent omission of this part of the parable from our pub- 
 lic reading. The heart of the Gospel is in another para- 
 ble, which is the life of Christ itself. In Him we see a 
 Divine Son making effective the Father's forgiveness by 
 His own gracious and vicarious work for sinful men. 
 
 Christ is "the Way" by which the soul returns to God. 
 He is not in the way. He is the ladder which God lets 
 down beside the wanderer's stony pillow, and by which 
 God's messages of love descend and the wanderer's as- 
 pirations rise to God : He is not a barrier between the 
 soul and God. To come to God in Christ is to come in 
 the easy, the natural, the all-inclusive way. A man need 
 not strain his faith in an effort to compel himself to come 
 to God through Christ. He who truly comes cannot 
 come amiss. The man who accepts the Father's pardon- 
 ing love, and in all sincerity commits his life to God, 
 need not disturb himself because he does not see clearly 
 how his coming to the Father is through Christ. He who 
 is truly God's child is Christ's brother, an heir of God, 
 and joint heir with Jesus Christ. 
 
 60
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 There is nothing artificial or arbitrary in this. My- 
 self, my brother and my God, these three enter into the 
 very structure of the Christian faith. It would not be 
 enough that the parable should take the prodigal home, 
 and reconcile him to the Father; for the relationship of 
 every man to God involves a relationship with his fellow 
 man. It is most logical, most true to life, that the para- 
 ble should bring us face to face with what was lacking, 
 in that home, that in its lack we may understand the mis- 
 sion of Jesus Christ, the well-beloved Son, by whose 
 coming and sacrifice we are reconciled to his Father and 
 our Father, his God and our God. 
 
 "Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." Al- 
 most. Not quite. We want the human element in God; 
 Brotherhood as well as Fatherhood. We cry with 
 Browning in his Saul for, — 
 
 "A Face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by forever; a hand like this hand 
 Shall throw open the gate of new life to thee; see the Christ stand!" 
 
 If only the elder son in the Parable had been like 
 God's well beloved Son, the parable would have required 
 very little changing, the mere reading into it of a few of 
 the abundant words of Scripture concerning the redemp- 
 tive ministry of Jesus; but how wonderful would have 
 been the change! For really, when we read into this 
 parable the contrast which it inevitably suggests, what 
 is this parable but the story of the redeeming love of 
 God, set forth in the ministry of Jesus Christ? 
 
 Now I will tell you what God is like, and I will tell 
 you what Jesus Christ is like. 
 
 A certain man had two sons: and the younger of them 
 said to his father, "Father, give me the portion of thy sub- 
 
 61
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 stance that falleth to me." And he divided unto them his 
 living. And not many days after the younger son gath- 
 ered all together, and took his journey into a far country ; 
 and there he wasted his substance with riotous living. 
 And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine 
 in that country: and he began to be in want. And he 
 went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that 
 country; and he sent him into his fields to feed the swine. 
 And he would fain have been filled with the husks that 
 the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him. 
 
 But one day as he sat there amid the swine, there 
 came to him a man whom he almost recognized, and 
 whose face was like his own yet most unlike, who re- 
 called to him, though dimly, his faded memories of better 
 things, and he said to him, "How many hired servants of 
 thy father's have bread enough and to spare, and thou 
 dost perish with hunger !" 
 
 And he replied, "Yes, but I have sinned against heaven 
 and my father, and am no more worthy to be called his 
 son !" 
 
 "Nevertheless," said the stranger, "Thy father is rich 
 in mercy ; come ; rise, and go to thy father, and lo, I will 
 go with thee !" 
 
 And he arose, and went to his father, the stranger 
 helping him, and the prodigal kept saying, as he limped 
 along, "He will make me as one of his hired servants !" 
 
 But while he was yet afar ofif, his father saw him, and 
 was moved with compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, 
 and kissed him. And the son said unto him, "Father, 1 
 have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight : I am no 
 more worthy to be called thy son." But the father said to 
 his servants, "Bring forth quickly the best robe, and put 
 
 62
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 it on him ; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his 
 feet : and bring- the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat, 
 and make merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive 
 again ; he was lost, and is found." And they began to be 
 merry. 
 
 And there was one who led the rejoicing, and the 
 prodigal knew him, for he it was that had brought him 
 home, and behold, it was the elder brother, who had 
 gone to the far country to find him that had gone astray, 
 and bring him home again. 
 
 And the father said to the elder son, ''Son, thou art 
 always with me, and all thkt I have is thine." 
 
 And the elder son said to the father, "Father, I will 
 that this my brother be with me where I am; for all 
 things that I have received from thee, I would share with 
 ni}' brother." 
 
 And the father said, "Let it be so." 
 
 And the elder son to the younger, "All things are 
 given me of my father; all the glory that the father hath 
 bestowed on me, I have given unto thee, that we may be 
 united, even as the father and I are united, that we may 
 all be made perfect in our united love, and that the world 
 may know that the father sent me, and that he has loved 
 thee, even as he loved me." 
 
 But even this would not tell the whole story of the 
 love of Christ. For the younger brother learned that the 
 elder brother on his way to the far country, fell in with 
 other prodigals in their carousal ; and because he would 
 not join with them, but rebuked them for their sins, they 
 hated him, and struck him, and wounded him, and cast 
 him into a pit, and thought they had killed him. But 
 this did not deter him, but he rose up and went on, in 
 
 63
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON AND THE ATONEMENT 
 
 pain, but with heroic courage, until he found his brother. 
 
 And when the younger brother knew this, he cried, 
 "O my brother, this was the love I sinned against, thy 
 love and the father's ! I can never be worthy of it, nor 
 have I any worth to plead for my welcome ! Thou hast 
 been wounded for my transgressions; thou hast been 
 bruised for my iniquities; the chastisement of my peace 
 was upon thee; and with thy stripes have I been healed !" 
 
 All this is really in the parable, for it is the contrast 
 of that type of righteousness which saved itself with that 
 which gives itself in self-sacrifice for the salvation of the 
 world. It is the contrast of self-seeking rectitude with 
 the sacrificial righteousness which makes for the at-one- 
 ment of God and sinful men. And that is why we must 
 never say again that the parable of the Prodigal Son 
 contains no doctrine of the atonement. 
 
 64
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 For the creation was subjected unto vanity, not of its 
 own will, but b}^ reason of him who subjected it, in hope 
 that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the 
 bondage of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the 
 children of God. Romans 8:20-21. 
 
 It is said to be an ill wind that blows naebody guid ; 
 but there appear to be such winds. And for some of 
 them we cannot justly blame either ourselves or our 
 neighbors. Neither did this man sin nor his parents, yet 
 he was born blind. Neither did this child sin nor the 
 doctor, but she died, and the next week the medical jour- 
 nals announced a nev/ cure for that very disease. It is a 
 shallow philosophy, false as it is cruel, that attempts to 
 account for all the evil of the v/orld as the result of sin. 
 When we deal with the problems which this situation 
 involves, we face the enign"^ of existence, and we need all 
 the wisdom of human reason and of divine revelation. 
 Not to the problem as a whole do I invite your thought 
 this morning, but to certain phases of its general aspect 
 as these appear in the philosophy of Paul in the passage 
 from which I have chosen this text. 
 
 LET US FACE THE FACTS AS THEY ARE 
 Paul does not claim that all is riglit with himself; he 
 admits the contrary. There is something so wrong with 
 himself that when he would do good evil is present with 
 him. But Paul claims that he is not the only thing in the 
 world that needs to be changed. The world itself is 
 
 65
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 subject to vanity, by which he means instability, unde- 
 sirability. 
 
 Not every spot on earth has a perfectly ideal climate. 
 Not everywhere and always does it rain just when crops 
 need it most. Lightning strikes, and sometimes kills 
 good people. Storms beat, and that upon the just as 
 well as the unjust. Good people sometimes slip on icy 
 places and break bones. Good people sometimes suffer 
 from earthquakes and floods and unseasonable frosts 
 And disease and death are undeniable realities. 
 
 There are several ways of accounting for this "vanity" 
 of nature. One is to deny that sickness, death and pain 
 exist. That is simple, but every one knows it is false. 
 
 Another explanation is that the earth itself is all that 
 could be desired, but that man is bad. That, too, has 
 the virtue of simplicity, and gives the ground of an 
 appeal to men to be at least as good as the world in 
 which they live; but men ought to be better than their 
 environment, less fickle than the weather, more stable 
 than the climate, and more discriminately just and man- 
 ifestly kind than nature. 
 
 There is another explanation, and it has homiletic value, 
 namely, that everything was perfect when God made it, 
 but that when man sinned, he carried the world down 
 with him under the condemnation of God. But we lack all 
 proof either that the fall of man has changed the climate 
 or orbit of earth, or that God's method is to make things 
 perfect out of hand. The present tendency is toward the 
 conviction that Paul is perfectly right in saying that God 
 makes things subject to "vanity." It may seem a strange 
 way for God to make things thus, but the consensus both 
 
 66
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 of scientists and theologians is that this is the way God 
 does it. 
 
 Let us face the fact as Paul does, that the world we 
 live in is not perfectly ideal in every particular. Let us 
 admit that we ourselves are less than ideal; but let us 
 not blame ourselves for God's part of it. Let us insist 
 with Paul that climate, fatigue, pain and death are not 
 wholly conditioned on the moral states of man, and 
 while we are admitting, let us admit that all the ex- 
 planations above fail to explain. What then? Is creation 
 a chaos? 
 
 There is another explanation. It is Paul's explanation, 
 and the explanation of the modern mind, 
 
 I do not make this last statement lightly. Nor am I 
 asserting more than is true of the Apostle Paul. I have 
 never taught or believed that the Bible should be held to 
 teach the form of scientific instruction in this present age, 
 or that its inspiration should be judged by its literal con- 
 formity to current scientific opinion. But when I read 
 the works of modern thinkers I turn back to this eighth 
 chapter of Romans, and it seems to me the profoundest 
 piece of logic in all the literature of philosophy, and 
 needing no forcing of its essential thought to justify the 
 claim that it is essentially modern and fundamentally 
 scientific. 
 
 Let us approach the explanation of the imperfection 
 of ourselves and of the world, and particularly now of 
 the world, as nearly as we may from the standpoint of 
 Paul, and in the scientific spirit. There are certain prop- 
 ositions which we may deduce from the philosophy of 
 Paul. 
 
 67
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 GOD IS IN FULL CONTROL OF THE SITUATION 
 At the close of each creative period God pronounced 
 His work good. At the end He called it very good. He 
 has never called it perfect. We talk of the "total de- 
 pravity of inanimate things," and not without some rea- 
 son. Paul tells us here that creation has been 
 made subject to vanity, not because it has a wicked 
 will of its own, which thwarts God's will, but 
 by the deliberate will of God, and that the redemp- 
 tion of creation from this subjection to vanity is a 
 part of the hope of the universe. We are living still in the 
 dawn of the creation Sabbath. God seems to be resting 
 from His labors, but really the Father worketh hitherto, 
 and our work is a part of His, and the dew is still on the 
 leaves. This is Paul's explanation of much that seems to 
 to us awry in the universe. It is awry, he says, but it is 
 not completed. It was made subject to vanity, instabil- 
 ity, liability to decay and wrong usage. Nor is it entirely 
 of its own perverseness nor yet of the will of man that it 
 is so; it is in process of completion. It has been so made 
 by a conscious act of God, causing it intentional subjuga- 
 tion to powers from which it is yet to be redeemed. 
 God's plan is to be judged, not alone by the uncompleted 
 work which is now seen, but more by the final redemp- 
 tion of all that He has made. This redemption begins 
 with mankind, and through the revelation of our divine 
 sonship is to be wrought the redemption of creation from 
 the bondage of corruption into the liberty of our own 
 glory as the children of God, 
 
 That is, Paul does not affirm that God started a ma- 
 chine which He has permitted to get beyond his control, 
 
 68
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 and that He is now desperately pursuing it in the ahuost 
 hopeless effort to regain it. Paul says that God is on the 
 throne, and ever has been. This is a tremendous assump- 
 tion, but it is scientific. Paul says the creation, that is, 
 the world, as we know it, is unfinished ; it is the 
 germ of the world that is to be. It is coming to the 
 birth. The past is pre-natal. These "vanities" and sins 
 and sorrows are the birth-throes of God's ultimate pur- 
 pose. There is to be a delivering of the creation, a cos- 
 mic redemption. 
 
 GOD HAS A LOGICAL PLAN AND METHOD 
 
 If we are sure of this, it is no small gain. The method 
 of God is discernible in part, and very perplexing in the 
 the parts we do not understand, but there is a soul in the 
 universe, working out a logical result. 
 
 Great minds have sometimes endeavored to reproduce 
 the sensation which an intelligent being might have ex- 
 perienced if present at creation. He would have been 
 filled with wonder and reverence at the unfolding of the 
 divine plan — so the}- assume. But it is more probable 
 that such a mind would have been completely bewildered 
 at the apparent contradictions, the long delays when 
 nothing seemed to be accomplished, and the unnnml)ere<l 
 centuries in which the work of creation seemed to have 
 been abandoned by God to the play of wild and conflict- 
 ing forces. At infinite cost earth-crust was formed to 1)C 
 submerged in the seething caldron of eruption and up- 
 heaval. Beds of rock which took centuries to form disap- 
 peared from sight in a single subsidence. Spots that 
 seemed preparing for an Eden were engulfed in a deluge 
 when the fountains of the great deep were brokctt up. 
 
 69
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 Forests grew for ages to be buried beneath sand which 
 hardened into rock, and the loss seemed irreparable and 
 inexplicable. We could not have understood it haa we 
 seen it in progress. Hence, I say, there has been vast gain 
 that the progress of creation, still incomplete, may now 
 be discerned; that an end, a purpose, or a series of pur- 
 poses, may now be discovered by an intelligent mind. 
 
 Prof. X. S. Shaler, in "The Interpretation of Nature,'" 
 says that there has been a perceptible progress among 
 scientists in the recognition of purpose in creation. "In 
 the study of the succession exhibited by plants and ani- 
 mals, it has been perceived that the march of events from 
 the primitive simplicity toward greater and greater com- 
 plication, culminating in man, requires us to assume the 
 existence of something like permanent guiding influences 
 in the world of matter. ... In other words, it seems 
 to me that the naturalist is most likely to approach the 
 position of the philosophical theologian by paths which 
 at first seemed to lie far apart from his domain" (pp. 
 
 46. 47)- 
 
 If this be true, and the naturalist and theologian, one 
 working from the standpoint of observed phenomena. 
 and the other from axiomatic or revealed truth, and one 
 ])v induction and the other b}^ deduction, meet at length 
 like the workmen from the two ends of the Hoosac tun- 
 nel, each complementing the work of the other, and each 
 affirming the discovery of what Prof. Shaler calls "some- 
 thing like permanent guiding influences" in creation, im- 
 mense gain has been made that man has been able to dis- 
 cover these purposes ; and a new teleological argument of 
 great cogency is added to those formerly in our pos- 
 session. 
 
 70
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 A truth is more than doubly vahiable when thus 
 doubl)- discovered. It is valuable for what it is in itself, and 
 for the confidence in both processes which may result in 
 other discoveries. When Leverrier and Adams, in 1846, 
 separately computed the position and orbit of a yet un- 
 discovered planet, and Galle, in Berlin, and Challis, in 
 England, following these calculations, found the planet 
 Neptune through the telescope, the discovery was worth 
 more to science than many separate discoveries, either 
 1)y mathematical calculation or fortuitous telescopic ob- 
 servation. So when the student of the Bible and the stu- 
 dent of natural history come by independent lines of re- 
 search to substantial agreement upon a truth, the value 
 of that discovery is more than doubled. It shows us that 
 the lines of study which seem to us divergent really 
 focus somewhere, and this gives us reason to believe that 
 our study, fruitful in this instance, will be increasingly 
 so in other discoveries. 
 
 GOD AND WE ARE WORKING OUT THE REDEMPTION 
 
 OF MAN 
 
 In his declaration of what the world is and what it 
 ought to be. Paul does not forget the individual man. 
 his perplexities, sorrows and sins. On the contrary. 
 Paul begins with him and relates his redemption to that 
 of the universe. He says two things by way of explana- 
 tion of the "vanity," as he calls it, of creation, as related 
 to our personal life. The first is that even amid these 
 adverse conditions, many of which, taken singly, are 
 evil and only evil, the development of righteous character 
 is not only possible but may be furthered by the resultant 
 of these conditions. This is great comfort. If we never 
 
 71
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 get any further, this affords solid satisfaction, tliat all 
 things work together for good to them that love God. 
 That does not mean that each in itself is best: nor have 
 we a right to insist upon that, if we know how "all things 
 work." 
 
 But Paul says more than this about our personal re- 
 demption. 
 
 This is Paul's reasoning: As many as are led by the 
 Spirit of God are the sons of God. Our spirit within us 
 cries out in glad recognition of its divine paternity. Nor 
 is it possible that this is a delusion of our own minds. 
 God's Spirit concurs in the testimony that we are sons of 
 God, and if sons, then heirs. To be the heir of God 
 means something so great that we cannot measure it 
 aright except as we reflect that we are to share 
 the inheritance of Christ. Creation is ours by divine right. 
 God's redemptive work is in ])rogress through us. The 
 whole creation groans with groaning like that which we 
 ourselves utter, waiting for the manifestation of our 
 divine sonship for its redemption. We groan within our- 
 selves, waiting for the redemption of our bodies, but this 
 is not the extent of our redemptive work. Creation was 
 made with necessary formative crudities, and waits for its 
 full completion and glory for that in hope of which God 
 created the world and us, that, blessing and being blessed, 
 redeeming while we are being redeemed, we may cause 
 creation to come into the liberty of our glory as the sons 
 of God. 
 
 This is an inspiring philosophy ; but I do not hesitate 
 to say that we need something more than a philosophy. 
 To us it is no academic question. Important as it is that 
 we feel assured that God reigns, and that our lives are 
 
 72
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 part of His infinite plan of good, our interests are so 
 personal and so large, we have a right to insist that 
 some evidence be adduced to show that things are ac- 
 tually in progress in the work of our redemption as re- 
 lates to the redemption of creation. 
 
 WORLD REDEMPTION IS IN PROGRESS AND IS 
 DISCOVERABLE 
 
 Let m^ instance two or three "permanent guiding ten- 
 dencies" which have been discovered, jointly by theolog- 
 ians and naturalists, and which make for the redemption 
 of the world. 
 
 1. First was the redemption from mere force, and sub- 
 jection to life. Tiny and impotent appeared the first 
 forms, the infusoria and the lowest forms of vegetable 
 life, yet life came to rule, though it came humbly. Soon 
 huge forms of animal life and towering forests of vegeta- 
 tion established their sway over earth, and lifeless force 
 reigned no longer supreme. 
 
 2. Then by distinct advances came the enthronement 
 of mind. Animal forms with nerve centres distributed 
 feebly and sparsely throughout the body, acknowledged 
 the sway of higher forms with more centralized and pow- 
 erful nerve centres and organs of special sense. Forms 
 vast in bulk and strong in limb and wing, but inferior fn 
 power of brain, disappeared as higher forms appeared 
 with more highly organized powers of brain ; or, if they 
 did not disappear, ceased to be masters, excepting within 
 restricted limits. Force exists apart from mind, but 
 mind, after all, is enthroned. 
 
 3. Then came man and with man came the dominion 
 of soul. Man passed through each of the preceding 
 
 73
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 stages. First in human government was the supremacy 
 of force. The race was ever to the swift and the battle 
 to the strong. Then came the supremacy of mind. No 
 longer the strongest, but the shrewdest, ruled. 
 
 4. There is a fourth and final ascent in which comes 
 the supremacy of the good. Mind and mechanical 
 force have still their place, but there is distinct progress 
 toward the domination of all by the good. At least, on all 
 hands this domination is recognized as desirable, and 
 there is much gain even in this recognition, and the 
 recognition of desirability must ultimately lead to its 
 establishment. 
 
 MAN IS REDEEMED IN ORDER TO WORLD 
 REDEMPTION 
 
 The human will is a first cause, just as the Will of God 
 is a first cause. The enthronement of the soul of rnan in 
 the world of matter and force is so marvelous a fact that 
 we must pause to consider the stages by which it comes 
 to pass. Certain general movements we discover, and 
 the student of history, of biology and of Scripture is 
 agreed upon them. It is a great advantage that from 
 different points of view we see the past essentially alike. 
 Man began at the bottom, not the top of the hill. The 
 short time spent in Eden does not at all afifect the con- 
 ditions out of which man as he is has come. The resi- 
 dence of the race in Eden had no appreciable effect upon 
 it, and the fall into sin was quick and terrible. Man has 
 never been perfect. He was once perfect in innocence, 
 but very imperfect in strength and experience and ability 
 to resist temptation. He is, upon an average, more near- 
 ly perfect, if judged b}^ the best specimens of the race, 
 
 74
 
 SX PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 than he appears ever to have been. He is not so inno- 
 cent as he was in Eden, nor so strong or fleet as he was 
 when he dwelt in a cave and fought tooth and nail a suc- 
 cessful battle with the beasts, but man as he is today is 
 a nearer approach to God's ideal, so science would seem 
 to teach, and so the theologian must believe unless God's 
 work through the ages has failed, than any stable type as 
 yet inhabiting the earth. Yet when we say that, we say 
 a sad thing. Man as he now lives upon the earth is far 
 from perfect, so far that we debate doubtfully whether 
 indeed perfection be possible for him. Much is yet to 
 be attained. Man, as well as the rest of creation, is sub- 
 jected to vanity. 
 
 But man redeemed becomes a redeemer, at every stage 
 of his uplift his mastery is redemption. 
 
 The redemption of man into his heritage as a son ot 
 God involves the redemption of the life of the globe 
 from no small part of its strife and terror, and enables the 
 meek to inherit the earth. The lamb is no longer at the 
 mercy of the lion, for man drives out the lion and pro- 
 tects the lamb. 
 
 In a certain part of Pennsylvania (I understand 
 this to be a true story) the people are said to 
 use the word "creature" to mean a horse. Other ani- 
 mals if called creatures, have a nominal adjective, but 
 horse is simply "a creature." "In a village in that region, 
 a church was in need of horse sheds, and there was much 
 delay in their erection. The minister at length felt 
 moved to preach to his members upon the subject, his 
 thesis being that the animals under their keeping, which 
 had been groaning and shivering together until now, had 
 reason to expect from them, as professing Christians, 
 
 75
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 Christian care and protection. All the doctrine which 
 he needed to give his proposition Scriptural basis he de- 
 duced from the text, "'The earnest expectation of the 
 creature (that is the horse) waiteth the manifestation of 
 the sons of God." I do not say that that was infallible 
 exegesis. But I affirm that that was within the meaning 
 of the text. The erection of horse sheds was a test, so 
 tar forth, of the divine sonship of that congregation. 
 In their redemption their horses ought to share. The 
 earnest expectation of that part of the creation waited for 
 them to show, by their humanity, that they were indeed 
 sons of God. That is really what the text means, that 
 when men become sons of God, they will so manifest that 
 fact that the whole creation, human and animal, animate 
 and inanimate, shall feel the redemptive power of it. 
 
 You must not fail to notice the little change in the 
 Revised Version concerning the liberty into which the 
 creation is to come. It is not the glorious liberty of the 
 children of God — that would be impossible. But it is to 
 be redeemed into the liberty of the glory of the children 
 of God, that is. a liberty which comes from our glory as 
 God's children. You cannot cause a horse or a tree to 
 become a son of God. But you may cause either to re- 
 ceive a glory which comes of your heritage as a son of 
 God. In fact, we have done it. We found the horse 
 barely evolved from the insignificant three toed creature 
 Avhose fossil remains we find in the rock : we have cared 
 for him through successive generations, choosing 
 whether he shall be swift or strong, until now we have 
 him, a creature of power and beauty, finding enlarged 
 ioy of existence in his relation to man. Who can doubt 
 that existence has enlarged meaning and increased joy 
 
 76
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 to the modern carriage horse, knowing his master and 
 responding with signs of glad intelligence to his care 
 and command, than to the inferior creature from which 
 the horse has developed? 
 
 I do not like the needless killing of any inoffensive 
 thing. And I profoundly believe that when good women 
 rise to their full heritage as the daughters of God, they 
 will not wear the plumage of song-birds, nor become 
 accessories, even after the fact, in the murder of God's 
 innocent and beautiful creatures. 
 
 The redemption of man is a redemption of inani- 
 mate nature. Man at the beginning was the sport and 
 plaything of the elements. Storm and drought and wind 
 and wave, heat and cold, fire and lightning, consumed 
 him almost at their pleasure. To perpetuate the race and 
 cause it to subdue the earth and redeem it was God's first 
 command to Adam. In obedience to this command man 
 penetrates the jungle, and makes it a garden. He makes 
 his home upon the prairie and at will causes a forest or 
 a city to grow about him. He enters the wilderness and 
 makes it blossom as the rose. He exalts every valley and 
 lays low the mountains and hills and makes the crooked 
 straight and the rough places plain that he may build 
 his steel highways. Over the waves that once over- 
 whelmed him, he rides in triumph. Across the isthmus 
 that once forbade his progress, he digs a canal and sails. 
 He mines in the earth for her secret treasures, and from 
 her grudging hoard enriches his kind. He makes a sub- 
 way or an elevated road as he prefers, and will yet sail 
 in the clouds. He creates land and a nation where once 
 was ocean, and will yet bore artesian wells and cause the 
 rain to fall in Sahara. The thirsty land shall become a 
 
 n
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 well, and parched place shall become a pool, and in the 
 habitation of dragons where they lay shall be grass with 
 reeds and rushes. 
 
 All this is meant to be taught in the text. It is not 
 God's final purpose that there shall be any Desert of 
 Sahara, any more than that there shall be what once, but 
 no longer, appeared on our maps as "The Great American 
 Desert." The creation was made subject to adverse con- 
 ditions, not accidentally nor through its own inherent 
 perversity, but in hope that man might redeem it and 
 make earth receive of the glory of His redemption. Once 
 the fever-parched sufferer died beneath the tree whose 
 bark would have saved his life. The discovery of quinine 
 is a part of the redemption of earth. The ocean west of 
 the Canary Islands had existed only as the home of 
 fabulous monsters to strike terror to the heart of the 
 sailor. The crossing of the Atlantic by Columbus, the 
 circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan, these are part 
 of the redemption of the earth. The lightning for cen- 
 turies had existed only as the deadly foe of man. When 
 Franklin stood in the storm with his kite, and received 
 harmless into his knuckle the spark of what but the day 
 before had been a universal terror, and made it the slave 
 of man instead of his master, it was a part of the re- 
 demption of creation from vanity and corruption into the 
 liberty of the glory of the sons of God. When any man. 
 realizing his divine sonship, rises to the height of his 
 privilege, and utilizes some force of nature which hither- 
 to has gone to waste or has appeared the foe of man, 
 whether it be the harnessing of Niagara or the turning of 
 a city's wheels with gas that before had promised its 
 atmosphere, or the discovery of the medicinal properties 
 
 78
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 of a hitherto noxious weed, he is assisting in the redemp- 
 tion of which Paul wrote. 
 
 It has become the privilege of man to perform great 
 things. By great things I mean such as this — to plant 
 in the spring a kernel of corn and with profound faith in 
 God and in the gifts bestowed on man, to tend it for 
 months and stand in the autmmn with the ripened ear 
 in hand. Does the man who does this great thing think 
 of his accomplishment simply with the thought of the 
 number of bushels per acre and the number of cents per 
 bushel which his yield will afford? Then he is living 
 below his privilege. He ought to fall on his knees and 
 rejoice that he made a co-worker with God, God's heir, 
 with creation for his inheritance and joint occupancy. 
 God pity the farmer who does not know that he ought 
 to be, and may be a son of God. There is a difference 
 between potential and actual sonship. The man who has 
 learned to combine a few grains of different kinds of 
 matter into a compound that will move tons of kindred 
 matter, has demonstrated his potential sonship. If he 
 uses dynamite to blow up his fellow-man, he shows that 
 his sonship is not actual, and that in spirit he is a son of 
 the evil one. And he may use it for higher purpose and 
 not understand the full significance of what he does. 
 What shall he do, for instance, when he has tunneled be- 
 neath a rock in the path of commerce, and filling the 
 cavity with his new explosives, touches an electric but- 
 ton and sees it bloAvn to fragments and sink harmlessly 
 into deep water? Shall he simply deposit his check and 
 say, "That job paid well?" He is welcome to his check, 
 and it ought to be large, and he ought to be glad to get 
 it, but as he reflects on the increased safety of navigatioa 
 
 79
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 and the benefits accruing to human kind through his 
 wonderful deed, he ought to thank God, who, for 
 humanity's sake, has given him to know of His infinite 
 my"steries, and enabled him to receive faith to say to a 
 mountain, "Be thou removed, and cast into the midst 
 of the sea." 
 
 The apple which Eve gave to Adam in Eden was a 
 wild crab, sour and bitter, and possibly with a worm at 
 its heart ; for the worms were here long before man. The 
 apples that sell for five dollars a barrel never grew in 
 Eden ; they belong to man's moral mastery of the world. 
 The roses that bloomed in Eden had five petals each, and 
 not one of them had more. The loving and intelligent 
 care of man multiplied the petals and made them fifty. 
 The potato that grew in Eden was a close relative of the 
 "'deadly night-shade" to whose family it' belongs, and 
 whose toxic qualities it barely misses. It was man who 
 look this almost poisonous tuber and with it in the time 
 of the Irish famine kept a nation from starvation. 
 
 Man found the wild almond tree with a bitter, inedible 
 ■drupe. He enriched the soil about it, and kept the worm 
 from its root, and planted the choicest of its fruit on a 
 north slope where its blossoming was deterred until the 
 frosts were gone, and pruned its useless branches that 
 more strength might go to the fruit, and created the 
 peach. God's work in creation was not finished until man 
 had made the peach tree. It was not finished then : for 
 man went on and created the apricot, and that also was 
 adopted by God as His own, and Heaven smiled upon it 
 and it bore a new fruit after its kind whose seed is in 
 itself. It is not finished yet : it would be rash to prophesy 
 the next new creation in this or any other department of 
 
 80
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 man's co-operation with God. Man does it because he 
 is potentially a son of God : if he is not actually so, it is 
 ten thousand pities. It would multiply the meaning of 
 life to yon man with the pruning-knife if, looking up 
 through the branches of the tree which he and God are 
 together creating, he were to recognize God. "Thou 
 madest him a little lower than the angels?" — I am not so 
 sure about that: "Thou hast made him but little lower 
 than God," was what the Psalmist said. To which of 
 the angels said he at any time, "Thou art joint heir with 
 Jesus Christ." 
 
 This is not saying that man has improved upon God's 
 plan : God's plan was not complete without man's best 
 and most skillfully consecrated effort. God left, tem- 
 porarily, a spot on the shore of Lake Michigan, a barren 
 waste of sand and stutited trees. The building of the 
 White City was a part of God's original plan for the 
 redemption of that spot from its vanity and uselessness. 
 What wonderful thing He intends to place there a thous- 
 and years hence is beyond our imagination : for eye hath 
 nor seen nor car heard, neither hath entered into the 
 heart of man the things that God hath prepared to place 
 on earth for those that love Him. 
 
 No part of this redemption is complete that lacks the 
 moral element. The world is not to be saved simply by 
 steam engines and el^ectric motors. It is not the wheels, 
 but the spirit in the wheels. When we have learned to 
 control the forces of nature we have made progress possi- 
 ble ; when we have actually taken control of them for 
 good, we have made real progress. No discoveries in the 
 arts and sciences will redeem men, but as soon as these 
 are claimed by the sons of God, that through their rule 
 
 81
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 over earth and Christ's rule in them, He may rule over 
 all, God blessed forever, then is the end attained. We 
 must never be content with the scaffolding. The king- 
 dom of Heaven is not steam and electricity, though it 
 needs both. It is not dry-goods and drugs and piles of 
 masonry, though all these are part of its equipment. The 
 kingdom has come and is yet coming, and it is among 
 3'^ou. Your redemption fs an end, but yet a means. In 
 the realm of morals, as' in physics, every effect becomes 
 a cause. We still groan within ourselves waiting for the 
 adoption, the complete emancipation of our bodies from 
 the lower laws of the fleshly appetites to the higher laws 
 of spiritual holiness, but the creation is waiting for the 
 manifestation of the degree of sonship which we have 
 already received. Something of His fulness we have 
 already received, and grace there to supersede each grace 
 with higher grace till our redemption, and that of crea- 
 tion through us, i:^ complete. 
 
 WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE? 
 
 ■ This redemption is to permeate and transform all 
 human society. Such a consummation seems very far 
 away, does it not? It is far away, but it is less far than 
 it was. Men are just beginning to believe in it. The 
 employer in his office and~the employe in his workshop 
 are both to recognize, each himself, and each his brother, 
 as a son of God. Through the redemption of the individ- 
 uals composing society all social relations vv^ill be re- 
 deemed. Not only our prayers but our commerce and 
 our legislation will be full of praise to God. 
 
 Does anyone say, ''This sounds well, but it is a delu- 
 sion. The world is old and wicked and near its end?"
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 I'eople have been saying that for two thousand years. 
 But it is a mistake. The world is new and wicked and 
 its end is so far away that all time spent in talking about 
 the need of it is wasted. The world is only on its trial 
 trip. The engines were not in until Christ came. That 
 was the time which Paul recognized as the beginning — 
 all has been preparatory, pre-natal, "until now." The 
 l)earings are rough and the crew is raw, and the fires are 
 badly tended and the water gets below in the boiler, and 
 some of the crew are mutinous and the log shows a 
 crooked course, and every day someone falls overboard, 
 but God has been too many millenniums building it to let 
 it l)low up a few days after the launching. Spite of all 
 our incompetence and sin and our fears for the future, 
 God is at the helm. 
 THE PRESENT JUSTIFIES FAITH IN THE FUTURE 
 
 And we have actually made progress. Character is 
 steadily advancing. The best specimens on earth today 
 are better than the best specimens the world has ever 
 exhibited. Man began at the bottom of the hill. His 
 experience in Eden did not count in his favor in his up- 
 ward struggle. It has done us good in two respects, it 
 keeps us from saying that the race would have done bet- 
 ter had it started with a fair chance, and it keeps before 
 us the thought that this terrible struggle with want and 
 lal^or and sin is not what God intends for the race ulti- 
 mate) v. But did you think that God had simply undertaken 
 to produce as good character as that with which Adam was 
 created? Character is the one good thing God cannot 
 create. It is a growth. Adam had no character before his 
 sin, and his character after that event, the character he 
 beciueathed to the race, was almost hopelessly bad. We 
 
 83
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 inherit no more from Eden than if the race had never 
 been there. But as to x\dam's character — if we may 
 imagine him to have had a fragment of it in his inno- 
 cence — it was to the best character of today as the amoeba 
 is to the vertebrate. Never was a sin committed upon so 
 shamefully slight provocation. Adam did not steal the 
 fruit because he was hungry: I can show you men who 
 have been hungry to starvation and have not stolen. 
 .\dam knew that in the day he ate he would surely die, 
 and he ate and died : I can show you men who have in- 
 herited an appetite for drink, and to whom it is revealed 
 afresh, perhaps after years of dissipation, that in every 
 day they drink they die to all good, and who stop by the 
 grace of God, and thereafter do not drink, but struggle 
 with the appetite every day with such heroism as Adam 
 was incapable of showing, and finally trample temptation 
 under foot and live. I can select a man and woman with 
 all their inherited tendencies to sin, but with some other 
 tendencies as well, a young husband and wife, children 
 of Christian parents, having early given themselves as in 
 infancy they had been given to God, and I will place 
 them, not in Eden, but him in the office or shop or fac- 
 tory, with all the temptations of modern social and busi- 
 ness life, infinitely greater than Adam experienced, and 
 her in the home with all its cares and weariness and 
 vexations, and in fift}^ years show you the same couple 
 with faces deeply furrowed with marks of their struggles 
 against want and care and sickness and sin, but with 
 those wrinkled features shining like the face of Moses 
 when he came down from the mount. They have not 
 been perfect — far from it. But the tenor of those lives 
 has been one of consistent well-doing, and the result is 
 
 84
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 character beside which that of Adam and Eve deserves to 
 be mentioned only by way of contrast. And the ten- 
 dency toward righteousness which they transmit to their 
 posterity shows itself as unmistakably as the tendency 
 toward sin transmitted by our first parents. We have 
 much yet to gain, but, thank God, the gain already made 
 is not small ! You, my brother, who have not claimed 
 your privilege as a child of God, and view this struggle as 
 though you had no part in it, I am not afraid that for 
 lack of your co-operation God's plan will fail of its ac- 
 complishment ; I am only afraid that you will not get in 
 in time to share in the glory. I know how good a man you 
 think you are, and I share, to a considerable extent, your 
 opinion ; but others struggled, generation after genera- 
 tion, to make it possible for as good a man as you to be 
 born and live, and the whole creation, with its centuries 
 of pain and groaning, is waiting now for the manifesta- 
 tion of your divine sonship in Christ. 
 
 Perhaps I have been using the term redemption of 
 things so material that some will deny its applicability. I 
 believe that all that we have been considering is part of 
 the redemptive plan of God, a plan that cuts through all 
 the strata of the creative and progressive ages. But I 
 should be most unwilling to stop with this. The first 
 thing, as Paul tells us, is that the Spirit of God in Christ 
 shall so quicken us that we, too, shall be children of God, 
 not merely potentially but actually ; and that Christ shall 
 thus become the first born among many brethren. To as 
 many as receive Him, and in proportion as they receive 
 Him, to them gives He the power to become what God 
 made them to be, the sons of God, and the creators with 
 God of the world that is to be. 
 
 85
 
 COSMIC REDEMPTION 
 
 THE EVANGEL FOR TODAY 
 Cosmic redemption, social redemption, redemption of 
 every kind, depends upon the redemption of the individ- 
 ual soul. We shall not come to any socialistic scheme for 
 the wholesale regeneration of the world that ignores the 
 individual. The message to the redeemed nation is, as 
 of old, that the wicked individual must forsake his way 
 and the unrighteous man his thoughts and return to 
 the Lord. But we do not live in isolation, but in social 
 relations. We are bound together by myriad ties, do- 
 mestic, commercial, civil and political. The regenera- 
 tion of the individual makes in increasing ratio for the 
 redemption of all these relations. It is not a dream, but 
 a vision from Heaven, and we must never lose it. Our 
 politics will be redeemed from its corruption. Neither 
 the greed of the capitalist nor the lawlessness of the 
 laboring man shall rule in the industrial world. Neither 
 "the submerged tenth" in the slums nor the uselessly 
 ornamental "four hundred" shall be the permanent type 
 of society. Neither partisan bigotry nor private spec- 
 ulation shall dictate our legislation. The hour cometh 
 and now is for the uttering of a new redemptive message, 
 yet old as the Protevangelium. The groaning has been 
 until now: it is time for the redemption to begin anew 
 and in earnest. 
 
 The holy city, the New Jerusalem, is coming down 
 from God, yet it is to be fashioned of boards and bricks 
 and mortar and stones and iron, by men. It cometh not 
 with observation. We need not stand gazing up into 
 heaven for it. This same Jesus who ascended, is now 
 descending in like manner as He ascended, — unrecog- 
 nized by the world at large, and undiscovered by those 
 
 86
 
 ST. PAUL AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 who go out into the wilderness or into the secret cham- 
 bers following the cry "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" Let 
 us awake, for our salvation is nearer than when we first 
 believed, and nearer than we are now ready to believe. 
 The world lieth in evil — partly, but its redemption dawns. 
 God never hurries: a thousand years with Him is as a 
 day, but He works to no uncertain purpose. How many 
 generations must pass ere the work is complete, no man 
 knoweth; but there are some standing by who see daily 
 the increasing glory of the redemption for which the 
 Father worketh hitherto, and Christ and His brethren 
 work. 
 
 87
 
 Eort), ^Jjoto Wisi ^Tfje Jfatter, anb 3t ^ufficetfj Mjs. 
 
 Oh, Mary's Son, if thou be man, and only man indeed. 
 Still hath thy life and word a power to meet my spirit's 
 need; 
 And thou shalt still my pattern be, for thought and word 
 and deed, — 
 Thy will my law, thy life my aim, thy word my faith 
 and creed. 
 
 Oh, Mary's Son! If in thee dwelt a life still more divine. 
 If thou didst work as God alone could work with power 
 and sign, — 
 In Thee I find those attributes which I to God assign; 
 What God would mean to lives of men, thou, Christ, 
 shalt be to mine. 
 
 Oh, Mary's Son! What e'er I doubt, or fail to understand, 
 Thee, Thee I know, and God in thee, and part that God 
 hath planned; 
 And thou henceforth my Lord shalt be, for all thou dost 
 command. 
 And all thou would'st I yet can do, if thou wilt hold my 
 hand. 
 
 Oh, Son of God! When weak my faith, and fails my trem- 
 bling heart 
 When God grows silent in earth's din, or hid behind its 
 mart. 
 Show me my God; show me thyself; for what God is, Thou 
 art! 
 And in thy gracious, saving work. Lord, grant to me a 
 part! 
 
 William E. Barton.
 
 tKije Cemptationsi in tfje 
 OTiltrernesis; 
 
 Text: "And a voice came out of the heavens, saying, Thou 
 art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased. And straight- 
 way the Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness. And he 
 was in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and he 
 was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto 
 him." Mark 1: 11-13. 
 
 The moral lessons of Holy Scripture are writ large 
 upon the surface of the narrative. The difficulties in- 
 cidental to its interpretation lie for the most part well 
 below the sphere of practical duty. This is as it should 
 be, and is one element in the power of the Bible over 
 human lives. The lessons of the temptation of Jesus 
 Christ are plain before the vision of the untutored reader 
 of the Bible and easily discernible by the child in the 
 Sunday School. Jesus, the son of God, was not too 
 divine to share our human temptations; having Himself 
 been tempted He is able to help the tempted. Jesus 
 resisted Satan, and, though tempted, was sinless. In 
 this He is our constant example and inspiration. Jesus 
 being tempted called to his aid his childhoon knowledge 
 of the Word of God ; even so should we arm ourselves 
 with the promises of God, which shall be for our salva- 
 tion in times when we are tempted to do wrong. 
 
 These are the plain, simple lessons of the temptation 
 of Jesus Christ. A wayfaring man, though a fool, need 
 not err therein; nor can a little child go far astray in 
 appropriating their spiritual value. 
 
 It is only when we enter into the subjective meanings 
 
 89
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 of the temptation of Jesus that difficulties lie in our path. 
 It is because we are seeking to go somewhat deeper than 
 our ordinary studies that we are likely to encounter these 
 difficulties in our consideration of this subject today. 
 Perhaps we would prefer not to meet them, to be sweet- 
 ly content with the manifest lessons which we find at 
 the threshold ; and there is nothing to compel us to go 
 farther unless we choose to do so ; but if our faith in- 
 cites us to a somewhat more thorough and systematic 
 study, then let us go on and endeavor to make real to 
 ourselves if we can the character of the temptation con- 
 sidered as a crisis in the spiritual life of Jesus. 
 
 The temptation of Jesus, following immediately after 
 his baptism, compelled our Lord to answer certain defin- 
 ite questions thrust upon Him by the consciousness 
 of his divine Sonship. What these questions were and 
 hovv^ He answered them, we are endeavoring to find in 
 the study of this hour. 
 
 And now if wc are to undertake this study at all, let 
 us not begin by denying the narrative. Quite too often 
 good people have felt under obligation to explain away 
 this incident. They have assumed that because Jesus 
 was divine there could not really have been any tempta- 
 tion in the sense that Jesus felt any impulse to yield. They 
 have even said that being the Son of God He could not 
 possibly have yielded ; and so in their praiseworthy at- 
 tempt to be reverent, and their wholesome fear of an}^ 
 implied denial of the divinity of Jesus, they really have 
 denied the truth of the Scripture narrative. 
 
 This story means nothing at all, and can mean noth- 
 
 90
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 ing, if it does not mean that Jesus passed through a 
 tremendous struggle in which He balanced all the mo- 
 tives involved in a series of real and terrible tempta- 
 tions. Unless we are all willing to understand this, it 
 is better that we stop where we are and decline to con- 
 sider' the temptation at all ; but assuming that we really 
 believe that there was a temptation, that Jesus was not 
 enacting a superficial part in a mock tragedy that had 
 no meaning to His own soul ; assuming that the story 
 involves all that it seems to involve, let us try to find, so 
 far as we can, what the temptation meant to Him. 
 
 First of all, let us notice the startling juxtaposition 
 of the baptism and the temptation. The voice out of 
 heaven spoke to Him, "Thou art my Beloved Son; in 
 thee I am well pleased," "And immediately" (the word 
 of Mark permits no interval after this moment of high 
 spiritual exultation), "immediately the Spirit driveth 
 Him into the wilderness." The word "driveth" is one 
 of holy violence, and is startling in its close relationship 
 with the story of the descent of the Spirit of God upon 
 Him. 
 
 Some of the early fathers refused to believe that it 
 was the Holy Spirit that drove Him into the wilderness; 
 it must have been the evil spirit they said, the spirit 
 by which subsequently He was tempted. But the Scrip- 
 tures do not permit of this dualistic interpretation. The 
 same Spirit that descended upon Jesus in the form of a 
 dove, the same Spirit that testified that He was the 
 Son of God, that Spirit drove Him into the desert to 
 meet the devil in a hand-to-hand encounter. 
 
 Startling as this sequence is, we cannot fail to feel 
 
 91
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 the truth of it in life. The moment of high consecra- 
 tion which Jesus experienced in baptism brought its 
 swift and mighty reaction within the soul ; the very glory 
 of his divine consciousness had its penumbra of ques- 
 tionings and decisions. If we are at liberty to interpret 
 the experience of Jesus by our own, we can the more 
 readily understand this situation. 
 
 Do you remember the bravest deed of your life — 
 the time you did the thing that made every one wonder, 
 and you wondered at yourself? Not at the moment did 
 you wonder; you never stopped to think of yourself; 
 but when it was all over you found someone throwing 
 water in your face. So mighty was the reaction from that 
 moment of heroism. And you never yet have been quite 
 able to understand how you did the heroic act. Some 
 of the greatest things in life are done in that way. We 
 walk straight to the baptism of our new resolution, and 
 we feel the descent of the Spirit upon our hearts, and 
 then comes a sudden moment in which we demand of 
 ourselves what in the world we are doing; and whether 
 we are sincere; and then we hasten into the wilderness 
 to meet our own soul face to face in the solitude of self- 
 hood, and give a reason for our faith and deed. 
 
 And this enables us better to understand that instead 
 of three temptations, there were four. "If thou be the 
 Son of God," said Satan. What a temptation was im 
 plied in the word "if !" The moment Jesus was by Him- 
 self, must He not have demanded of Himself, what was 
 this presumptuous thing He had done, and how was He 
 to face the consequence of so rash a step as He had 
 taken? "If thou be the Son of God!" Was He really 
 
 92
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 the Son of God? Was this the meaning of those boy- 
 hood wonderings, those questions of adolescence that 
 had come to Him in His studies, those recent longings 
 and resolutions? Was this what He had come out into 
 the wilderness to see, not merely John the prophet, but 
 Himself, His very self, the long predicted Messiah? Was 
 He, the peasant Jesus, the Son of God? How did He 
 know it? How could He know it? And yet He did 
 know it. "This," He said to himself, "this is my mis- 
 sion ; this is the answer to the thousand questions of 
 my thirty years. I am the Messiah, the son of David, 
 the expected king; I am He of whom Moses in the Law 
 and the prophets did write; I heard the voice, I saw 
 the dove, I feel the witness in my soul ; I am the Son 
 of God. But am I ? These hands, are they not the hands 
 of a carpenter, calloused and rough with toil? My ed- 
 ucation, has it not been that of a peasant lad? My 
 associates, what one of them has ever thought of such 
 a thing? What will my friends and neighbors say when 
 I go back and tell them of it? What will the priests in 
 Jerusalem say about accepting a prophet from Galilee? 
 Can I tell them about that vanishing vision of the dove? 
 Can I assure them that I heard a voice out of the 
 clouds? Shall I call upon Caiaphas and, sitting with him 
 in some splendid chamber of the Temple, tell him that 
 I, Jesus, a village carpenter, from a town of which he 
 never has heard, am the Christ? 
 
 The dove was no longer visible, the voice no longer 
 spoke, there no longer was a halo above Him, only the 
 hostile glare of the desert sun; the heavens and earth 
 were silent with the intolerable silence of the wilderness; 
 
 93
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 nothing could He hear save the questions of His own 
 heart, and the voice of the tempter. Was He indeed 
 the Son of God? 
 
 To all great souls come these moments of reaction 
 when the spirit with violence driveth them into the wil- 
 derness, and puts their faith to the test of solitude. I 
 do not suppose that Satan was visibly present. I have 
 no thought that there appeared before the Master any 
 terrible being with hoofs and horns. The voice of the 
 tempter was the voice of doubt within His own heart, 
 demanding that He prove His claim before the bar of 
 His own conscience and reason. 
 
 "If thou be the Son of God;" the divinity of Christ 
 met no severer test than that which self-imposed He met 
 in the silence of the wilderness. 
 
 Jesus could no longer assure Himself by anything ex- 
 ternal ; He could not command the heavens to be con- 
 tinuously resonant with the voice crying out, "Thou 
 art the Son of God ;" He could not compel the Spirit 
 to be forever descending upon Him to assure his wav- 
 ering faith. Nothing could assure Him now save the 
 Spirit of God within His heart, bearing witness with His 
 spirit that He was the Son of God, and if a son then an 
 heir, and the inheritor of the promise of God to His 
 Messiah. 
 
 Thus, was He "tempted like as we are," even as the 
 Apostle declares, because as the New Testament assures 
 us He learned obedience by the things which He suffered, 
 and so being tempted He becomes our deliverer. 
 
 The second temptation is that which is commonly 
 
 94
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 counted as the first. "Command these stones to be made 
 bread." He had need enough of bread, for He was 
 hungry. He had need enough of something to assure 
 Himself that He could make bread out of stones if He 
 chose to do so. Whatever the Christ was to do, He 
 would have followers who must be fed. He had never 
 wrought a miracle. Would it not be well to practice a 
 little and assure Himself that He could do it when He 
 needed to? And what better time and what better rea- 
 son than just now, when He was hungry and con- 
 scious of his power? And if He could indeed make bread 
 from stones, his future was secure. 
 
 Surely we can understand this temptation of the 
 Master! There is no man of power who does not meet 
 it, and the higher he rises the more subtle is the temp- 
 tation. The commercializing of the gift of God is one 
 of the most insidious of temptations of every age, and 
 is the peculiar peril of this present age. It is the more 
 a peril because it runs so close to human need. We 
 have to live by the talents God has given us, and 
 whether we live richly or by a bare meeting of life's 
 sternest necessities depends in a great measure on the 
 number of our gifts and the use we make of them. 
 The world has agreed that it is right, that he who has 
 ten talents and adds other ten shall be ruler over ten 
 cities. This also appears to be the judgment of heaven. 
 But at what point in this process of making commend- 
 able use of an opportunity do we meet the danger of 
 commercializing God's gifts? When shall we assure 
 ourselves that we may properly exercise our talents for 
 the feeding of ourselves and those dependent upon us, 
 
 95
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 and when must we go hungry that so the deeper work 
 of grace may manifest itself within us? 
 
 There are temptations which spring out of our bitter 
 needs; and Jesus met this kind when He hungered in 
 the wilderness; but there are other temptations which 
 grow out of our conscious power, and they appeal to 
 us through our knowledge that we are favored of God. 
 There is not a man in any position of power or influ- 
 ence who does not meet at the very threshold of his 
 self-discovery the temptation which Jesus met. We are 
 hungry ; and hunger is the legitimate need of food. We are 
 accustomed, just as Jesus had been, to sell our labor 
 in the market and feed ourselves with the results of it. 
 This is legitimate and right. Who now shall forbid 
 us, in the current language of the day, "to charge all 
 the traffic will bear" and "make hay while the sun 
 shines"? We are living in a prosperous era of the 
 world's history ; an age in which the pauper is better 
 fed than the prince of yesterday ; an age when the pro- 
 ducts and resources of the world oflfer themselves in 
 tempting response to our legitimate desires. How shall 
 we gratify these real honorable needs of our physical 
 lives and not commercialize the gift of God? 
 
 Consider how real the temptation is. The farmer en- 
 ters into partnership with the sunshine and the rain and 
 the soil and produces an acre of corn, — a joint product 
 of God's labor and his own, — and his first and, too often, 
 his last question is, "For how much can I sell it a 
 bushel?" The miner digs in the earth and strikes a rich 
 vein of ore and bores and finds oil or gas. Rightly he 
 rejoices in his prosperity, but how shall he learn that 
 
 96
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 he has another question to ask than how much will be 
 the premium on his mining stock, or the price per gallon 
 of his oil? There is a point at which such a question 
 is legitimate; there is an invisible point at which it 
 passes into a corroding peril of the soul. Milton wrote 
 "Paradise Lost," and its value to the world is not to 
 be measured by the $25 which the publisher paid him 
 for it. Yet we tend to and, almost inevitably, do measure 
 all things by this standard. Consider how far this goes 
 and see how the temptation grows out of the very fact 
 that within certain limits the process is legitimate. 
 
 An artist has painted the face of Christ, and from 
 his canvas the eyes of the Son of God look into the souls 
 of men. How much can he sell it for? A singer sings, 
 "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth," and there springs 
 up in the souls of those who hear the mighty triumphant 
 hope of everlasting life. How much can she get a night 
 for singing it? 
 
 A physician discovers a cure for diphtheria or cancer. 
 How can he utilize it in order to make him rich? 
 
 A man makes a mighty invention and learns to dive 
 to the ocean's bottom, or takes the wings of the morn- 
 ing and flies through the air with the swiftness of an 
 angel, and in that discovery the dream of his soul has 
 become actual; he has discovered himself; the vision 
 and the voice of God are his as well as the acclaim of 
 men. For how much can he capitalize his patent? 
 
 A lawyer makes an able plea; he stands as the advo- 
 cate not only of a particular client, but as the repre- 
 sentation of God's eternal justice demanding the right- 
 
 97
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 eousness of heaven at the hands of a lawful tribunal 
 of earth. How large is his retainer? 
 
 A man is elected to a public office by a vote that in- 
 dicates that he. has won the confidence of a thousand or 
 so of his fellow citizens. How shall he capitalize that 
 confidence and use the honor and the trust of his fellow- 
 men to get and to gain for himself the utmost of finan- 
 cial advantage? 
 
 A minister preaches the Gospel with the power of the 
 Spirit of God, and souls are born into the kingdom of 
 God and sinful men have begotten within them the 
 power of a new life "hid with God in Jesus Christ." 
 How much will it help him toward a call to a church 
 that will pay a larger salary? 
 
 Now there is a point at which every man must earn 
 his bread by the gift of God operating through his own 
 personality. There is a point at which in that process 
 comes the temptation of the devil, and he .needs to cry 
 out like the Apostle of old, "Thy money perish with 
 thee because thou hast thought to buy the gift of God 
 with gold." There is no man called of God to do a 
 thing worth doing who does not need to meet in the 
 solitude of his own heart what Jesus Christ met at the 
 threshold of his ministry. It is the question which 
 the Spirit drives us to consider, and he who fails to 
 consider it by assuming that the only meaning of his 
 business is to turn stones into bread or bread into cash, 
 that man unconsciously has met the devil and the devil 
 has had his way with him; but the man who, living in 
 the world and earning his bread by honest sweat, realizes 
 that man does not live by bread alone, and that even 
 
 98
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 his business has a larger meaning than the mere pro- 
 duction of food, that man shares with Jesus Christ in 
 the glory of his triumph over temptation. 
 
 The third temptation is on a higher plane. It comes 
 to a man who has met and settled the first and second 
 questions; he has assured himself of his divine mission 
 and has resolved that he will use it for some higher need 
 than mere bread. 
 
 Jesus had to ask Himself how He should announce to 
 the world that He was really the Messiah. He thought 
 of the various ways in which He might do it. In imag- 
 ination He saw Himself in the Temple at Jerusalem. He 
 found a door by which He might climb to the roof and 
 take his stand upon some dizzy height that would at- 
 tract to Him the gaze and apprehension of the crowd 
 below. Just as all eyes were fixed upon Him He would 
 leap down among them and declare Himself to be the 
 Messiah. With what pride could He announce it; with 
 what joy that His divine Sonship meant His elevation 
 above the common lot of other men. The peculiar thing 
 about this temptation is that it is the temptation of the 
 good ; it is the temptation of the man of recognized merit 
 to put himself where men shall gaze at him and applaud 
 his goodness and his power. Jesus never flung Himself 
 from any pinnacle to be seen of men. The wonder of 
 His ministry is that He proclaimed it in a way so differ- 
 ent from our theories about Him. 
 
 Take the next book you happen to see on "The Di- 
 vinity of Christ" and note the method of its argument. 
 First, Jesus was divine because He claimed to be divine; 
 
 99
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 secondly, Jesus must have been divine because He 
 wrought miracles to prove His claim, and so on and so 
 on. Now see how different was the method of Jesus. 
 The method of the theologians is the method which 
 Satan proposed, but the method of Jesus was that which 
 we decided at the very outset, that His career would not 
 be that of a professional miracle worker. The wonders 
 which He reluctantly wrought grew not out of His am- 
 bition, nor were they primarily an attestation of His 
 divinity. Jesus left His divinity to be discovered by 
 men. Flesh and blood did not reveal it unto them, but 
 the spirit of God, and upon the Rock of that discovery 
 of His divinity He built His church, because that truth 
 was not founded upon external signs and wonders, but 
 upon the revelation of the spirit of God within their 
 hearts. The self-revelation of Jesus Christ is not more 
 wonderful than the self-repression of Jesus Christ. His 
 declaration that He was the Son of God is in itself less 
 wonderful than the marvelous patience which He 
 showed before making that revelation. The whole min- 
 istry of Jesus is a testimony to the completeness of His 
 conquest of this temptation; and only those who them- 
 selves are in some place of promise and of power, only 
 those who have risen to a higher plane than mere lust 
 for bread and have met the tempter again and con- 
 quered him upon this higher plane, can truly understand 
 something of what it meant to Jesus. 
 
 The final temptation of Jesus came in a vision of 
 power. From the high hill, which tradition points 
 out as the scene of the temptation, Jesus could look 
 
 100
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 across to the hills of Moab and of Edom; toward the 
 sunset lay Judea and the Great Sea with all the king- 
 doms of the world centered about it. In imagination 
 He saw them all, and below Him in plain sight lay 
 Jericho, the seat and capital of Herod, the king. How 
 did Herod become king? Herod's grandfather was a 
 provincial like himself, but rose to be governor of Idu- 
 maea. Taking advantage of the political confusion of 
 his time, he steadily increased his power till Rome found 
 it easier to come to terms with him than to attempt the 
 hopeless task of conquering him in so inaccessible a 
 country. Herod, who now ruled in this very city of 
 Jericho and bore the name of king, was a man of only 
 moderate ability and reigned in part by force of circum- 
 stances and partly by making good use of favoring con- 
 ditions. Conditions were ripe just now for a man of 
 ability and leadership to make himself a power. Not 
 only so, but the people were eager to be led. The 
 preaching of John was crystallizing their age-long hope 
 of a deliverer; John himself would be the eager prophet 
 of such a movement. John's followers, a multitude in 
 number, were only waiting the word that would surely 
 rally them around such a standard as Jesus could in- 
 stantly raise. Did the undertaking involve peril? It 
 was less perilous than not to do it. It would be peril- 
 ous indeed to disappoint such hopes. As a matter of 
 fact, it proved fatal to disappoint them. The people 
 rose up and killed Jesus becavise He did not do the thing 
 which they expected Him to do. To fall in with the 
 eager impulse of the crowd, to make the most of the 
 
 101
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 popular movement, this was the very real, nay the 
 almost overwhelming temptation of the Son of God. 
 
 Did these temptations make their appeal to Jesus? 
 We are certain that they made a very real appeal to 
 Him. To have yielded was not only possible, but to re- 
 sist was difficult and costly. But Jesus recognized these 
 impulses of His own hunger, pride and ambition to be 
 the temptations of Satan. One by one He met and con- 
 quered them all. So fully had He appropriated the 
 Spirit of God that came on Him in His baptism. 
 
 I need not indicate more fully how like these tempta- 
 tions are to our very own. If they were unlike ours 
 they could have very little value to us. Truly did the 
 apostle say of Him that "He was tempted in all points 
 like as we are, yet without sin." His temptations are 
 an ascending series, a cycle that parallel our own ex- 
 periences all the way from the most common-place lust 
 for bread, through spiritual pride, ambition and the 
 very denial of his mission. He was tempted to make 
 the great refusal ; to face the world with a blank athe- 
 istic doubt, to live on in a negative denial of that which 
 God had sent Him to perform, or to do with His gift 
 all the possible things that might inure to His advan- 
 tage. He was tempted to commit sin against the Holy 
 Ghost; that denial of His own spiritual power which 
 some men make through mere indifference and unwill- 
 ingness to face their mission as God would reveal it to 
 them. Through doubt, passion, pride, and power Jesus 
 rose by successful conquests, and when He went forth 
 from the wilderness a new glory shone from His face ; 
 
 102
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 and John saw Him and in reverent adoration said to his 
 disciples, "Behold the Lamb of God." 
 
 I spent a Sunday a year ago in the home of Anton 
 Lang at Oberammergau. He met me at the train, and 
 his children accompanied him, driving a little donkey 
 hitched to a cart; and they took my bag in the cart. 
 It was the very same donkey on which nine years before 
 he had ridden into Jersusalem in the play. I looked at 
 the little, lazy, patient playfellow of the children, who 
 for nine years had been petted and whipped about by 
 them, and considered how in a few months he would be 
 the most famous animal in all the world. The donkey 
 did not know this, but Anton Lang did. As I walked 
 with him through the street, as I sat with him at table, 
 as I went with him behind the scenes of the passion- 
 theater and he explained to me how they suspended 
 him from the cross, and by what apparatus they ele- 
 vated him into heaven, I wondered how he lived in his 
 own heart ; how he bore about in his soul this conscious- 
 ness that he, a village potter, had laid upon him the 
 wonderful and perilous joy of representing before men 
 the passion of the Son of God. It had its commercial 
 value to him, and he could not fail to know it. He was 
 working hard in his little pottery to make vases that 
 would be sold a year later. But I did not find his soul 
 corroded with the lust of gold or love of fame. So far 
 as 1 could judge, he had kept himself unspotted from the 
 manifest temptations of his position. He could have a 
 thousand dollars a week in an American theater; but 
 if he remains true, as God grant he may, he will remain 
 a village potter, seeking not merely to show the form 
 
 103
 
 THE TEMPTATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 and appearance of the Christ, but to live the Christ life 
 among his fellow men. 
 
 After all, I said to myself, his problem is not so very 
 different from mine, and that of my fellow men. And it 
 was very like the temptation which Jesus Himself met 
 and conquered in the consciousness that He was the 
 Son of God. 
 
 Having been tempted in all points like ourselves, Jesus 
 is able to save us in our temptations. Having met 
 Satan on every plane from that of human passion up to 
 such ambitions as have wrought the ruin of angels, the 
 Son of God stood true. 
 
 So did He become our Saviour. So did He prove true 
 to His divine Sonship. And we as we meet temptation 
 with Him, shall enter into His possession of the Sonship 
 of God, being heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 104
 
 ^Ije Morlti to Come 
 
 For unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the 
 world to come, whereof we speak. But one in a certain 
 place testified, saying, What is man, that thou art mindful of 
 him? or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Hebrews 2: 5-6 
 
 There are three great surprises in this text. The 
 first is, that God has a world too good for the angels ; 
 the second is, that the world which is too good for 
 the angels God is preparing for men ; the third is, that the 
 world which is too good for angels and which God is 
 preparing for men is the world in which we live. This 
 is one of the most wonderful texts in the whole Bible, 
 and each of these surprises demands consideration. 
 
 I. THE FIRST SURPRISE— God Has a World Too 
 Good for the Angels. 
 
 Early Hebrew theology gave small attention to angels, 
 but on their return from Babylon the Jewish people 
 brought back with them a highly developed demonology, 
 and with it a large appreciation of the sphere and func- 
 tion of angels. In time it came about that they con- 
 ceived of almost every really important thing intermed- 
 iate between God and the world to have been done by 
 angels. In fact, it grew to be a most dangerous and 
 persistent error, shtitting God out of actual contact with 
 His own world, and approaching material things and 
 even the soul of man through a series of receding 
 emanations. It was a chain which really did not con- 
 nect at either end ; it left God unapproachable and man 
 inaccessible. 
 
 105
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 Yet the doctrine was not always held in this extreme 
 and untrue form. In its more true and beautiful forms 
 of statement, it relieved the isolation of God and peopled 
 the heavens with winged and jubilant messengers, the 
 echo of whose heavenly music sometimes reached the 
 ears of men, and whose unseen presence cheered the 
 soul, averted evil, and gave guidance in hours of per- 
 plexity or danger. 
 
 The Jews came to believe that their law had been de- 
 livered to holy men of old through the ministry of 
 angels. The author of the Epistle of the Hebrews 
 neither affirms nor denies that this is true. He takes it 
 for granted that many of those whom he addresses be- 
 lieve it, and he undertakes to prove that even so the 
 new covenant is better than the old. He is writing to 
 Jews who honor the Temple, the priesthood, the sac- 
 rifices, the covenant of God with Abraham, and the 
 Law delivered by angels unto Moses and through Moses 
 to the people of Israel. He undertakes to prove that the 
 new covenant is better than the old covenant; the great 
 High Priest superior to the Jewish hierarchy ; the one 
 supreme Sacrifice of God for human sin more efficacious 
 than the sacrifices of all the streaming, smoking altars 
 of the Temple at Jerusalem ; and he declares that even 
 a law given by angels — beautiful and sacred as such a 
 law must be — would still be subordinate to the word 
 of eternal truth and grace revealed through the living 
 Son of God. 
 
 "For unto which of the angels said He at any time. 
 Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee?" 
 
 This is how the angels appear in this interesting and 
 beautiful argument. They hover in the background of 
 
 106
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 this text with suggestions of a varied and beautiful 
 service. 
 
 It can do us no harm in our busy, practical life if now 
 and then we think of the beautiful ministry of the glori- 
 fied spirits who live close to the throne of God. Our 
 knowledge of them is small, but the appeal which they 
 make to the enlightened imagination is full of spiritual 
 comfort. John Hay, in one of those dialect poems which 
 he later came to dislike, told of the brmging back to 
 camp of the lost little lad, and in the language of a 
 rough frontiersman attributed his recovery to the good- 
 ness of the angels. He expressed the conviction that 
 "hunting up little children and bringing them back to 
 their own" was a better occupation for angels than sanc- 
 tified idleness in heaven. Very likely we should agree 
 with him. We may be sure that whatever the occu- 
 pation of angels, they are not, cannot be idle. 
 
 II. THE SECOND SURPRISE— The World Which 
 Is Too Good for the Angels Is the World Which God Is 
 Preparing for Men. 
 
 I have no disposition to speak disparagingly of angels, 
 but I am inclined to think that few of the angels 
 have assigned to them a work more glorious than 
 God has even now entrusted to men. It is not wholly 
 an evidence of depravity in young people that causes a 
 small boy to revolt against singing "I Want to Be an 
 Angel." There is something to be said on behalf of the 
 boy who said he did not want to be an angel and play 
 the harp ; he would rather be a stage-driver and beat a 
 bass drum. 
 
 Among the great men of Boston was Father Taylor, 
 
 107
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 for many years pastor of the Seamen's Bethel, Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson, who had a genius for novel classifica- 
 tions, said that America's greatest poets were Daniel 
 Webster and Father Taylor. 
 
 Father Taylor had a rare gift of eloquence, a wit as 
 keen as the edge of a rapier, and a heart as soft as the 
 breast of a dove. A stern apostle of righteousness, he 
 was most considerate of human frailty; a staunch de- 
 fender of orthodoxy, he loved, and was loved by, those 
 who did not accept his creed. Toward the sailor boys, 
 his own boys, he opened his heart so wide that it be- 
 came to many of them a haven of refuge amid the storms 
 of doubt and passion. Father Taylor lay dying and 
 someone whispered in his ear, "You soon will be with 
 the angels," but the strong, old man roused and replied, 
 "I don't want to be with the angels; I want to stay here 
 among folks !" 
 
 The Son of God did not want to stay among angels; 
 He wanted to live here among folks. The author of 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews says that the work of re- 
 demption, which made Jesus for the time "a. little lower 
 than the angels," crowned Him at last with glory and 
 honor, gave Him a place above all angels, and exalted 
 all who have fellowship with Him into the rich com- 
 panionship of His redemptive work. 
 
 So, I am quite willing other people should sing, "I 
 want to be an angel." For myself, I want to be a man ; 
 a child of God, and a joint heir with Jesus Christ, and 
 take my own humble but reasonable share in the enter- 
 prise of God which this world represents. 
 
 108
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 III. THE THIRD SURPRISE— The World Which 
 Is Too Good for Angels and Which God Is Preparing 
 for Men Is the World in Which We Live. 
 
 What is the world to come, as it is here considered? 
 It is ''the world to come whereof we speak ;" that is to 
 say, the world which the writer has just been talking 
 about. What world has he been talking about? Of 
 another planet; of some part of heaven? Not at all. 
 It is the world into which Christ came ; the world into 
 which God brought His first beloved, saying, "Let all 
 the angels of God worship Him." There is no possible 
 question which world he is talking about. The world 
 which is too good for angels and which God has prepared 
 for men, is this present world. Yet it is not the world 
 as it is at present. It is the world as it is coming to be ; 
 it is the new order of things established by the redemp- 
 tive work of Christ; the world which is evolving into 
 its perfection through the continuous operation of the 
 spirit of God in human life. That is the world to come. 
 
 Let us dwell a little on this third surprise, for it is 
 just here that the doctrine makes a larger demand than 
 our limited faith may prove adequate to entertain. 
 
 There are two accounts of the creation of the world ; 
 the one is in Genesis and the other in Geology. Apart 
 from certain quibbles as to precise divisions of periods 
 and exact order of events — questions that have their own 
 scientific or theological interest, but are utterly negligi- 
 ble as matters of faith — these two accounts agree. That 
 is to say, the first chapter of Genesis and the story which 
 God has written in the rocks both testify that this world 
 began in chaos and emerged into its present form 
 through a series of progressive and orderly develop- 
 
 109
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 ments, wherein was manifested the continuous and pa- 
 tient operation of a never failing plan. In the begin- 
 ning God created the heaven and the earth, and when the 
 earth rolled out from the hand of God, a great ball 
 swinging free in its own orbit, the morning stars sang 
 together and the sons of God shouted for joy. "And 
 God saw that it was good." Everybody else thought 
 it was complete, but God said, "Tomorrow we shall have 
 the world to come." 
 
 Then God began again, using his new world as raw 
 material for a better one. Continents emerged and were 
 clothed with green ; mountains and oceans took their 
 place upon the map ; and new anthems of wonder and 
 of praise made reverent reverberation through celestial 
 spaces, "God saw that it was good" and said, "Tomor- 
 row we shall see the world to come." 
 
 Then vegetable life appeared ; great forests clothed the 
 earth, and the continents grew green beneath the smile 
 of God. Again there was joy in heaven, and God smiled 
 and said, "All this is good ; but tomorrow we shall see 
 the world to come." 
 
 It came with flood and thunder; with signs and 
 wonders and tumultuous upheaval ; forests were sub- 
 merged and the earth looked like a wreck, and the 
 heavenly host stared on in fear and wonder. But the 
 eye of God looked deep into the heart of the earth, where 
 forests were crystallizing into coal, and God said, "All 
 this is good ; and tomorrow we shall see the world to 
 come." 
 
 After awhile came man. He seemed so innocent and 
 happy, and the outer conditions of his life appeared so 
 full of all that was attractive and inspiring, that to this 
 
 110
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 very day good people in their folly look back to that 
 experience and sigh for conditions such as surrounded 
 that first man. But God said, "All this is very good, 
 but there is something better even than this. By and 
 by, we shall have the world to come." 
 
 It came and, oh, how sadly ! Angels hid their face 
 in shame and seraphs wept in their disappointment when 
 man went forth from the Garden to dig a living and a 
 character out of the earth and to discover in his hand- 
 to-hand conflict with soil and climate, with tempest and 
 with sin, the meaning of the world to come. But what 
 we call the Fall of Man was a part of the plan of God. 
 The purpose of God was never more steadily marching 
 forward than when the angel barred the gate of Paradise 
 to keep man steady at his job in hope of the world to 
 come. 
 
 This world has always been a puzzle to the race that 
 has lived upon its surface. We have felt ourselves 
 strangers upon it. It is our mother, our bodies are born 
 of its dust. And it has been kind to us and furnished 
 us our homes, and given of its flowers for our adornment 
 and of its fruit for our support and of its hidden stores 
 for our warmth and wealth. Yet ever have we felt 
 lost upon it, and have sought in each other or in the in- 
 vocation of spiritual powers to be saved from being 
 alone upon the earth. No man wants the earth. If he 
 had it to himself, or any small part of it, he would be 
 wretched. We want the earth only for the sake of hav- 
 ing a place to stand, like Archimedes of old, and we 
 want then a lever to move it out of our way. 
 
 And the world as it has been has been such as to appall 
 men and cause them dread and fright. Above them have 
 
 111
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 echoed its thunders and flashed its lightnings, and upon 
 them have beaten its storms. If one day they have re- 
 joiced in the luxury of its springtime or the fruitage of 
 its autumn, the next they have been parched by the 
 heat of its summer or chilled by the blasts of its win- 
 ter. The earth has oppressed man with a sense of his 
 own littleness. He has felt hopelessly small beneath the 
 shadow of its mountains, or the depths of its forests or 
 on its boundless prairies or when tossed on the waves 
 of its oceans. He has dug a living from its bowels, or 
 fished it out of the depths of its waters, but ever with 
 toil and fear, and ever in peril of his life. Is there no 
 return to Paradise; no recovery of the joy of yesterday? 
 None whatever. The face of the human race is toward 
 the morrow. We look for the world to come. 
 
 This is the view also of Peter in his second epistle, where 
 the world, as it then was, is contrasted with the world before 
 the flood, and is contrasted also with the golden age that 
 was to follow the gathering up of the heavens. It is the view 
 of Paul in his wonderful 8th of Romans. It is the concep- 
 tion of John in his vision of the Holy City descended to 
 abide on earth. 
 
 The world, as it is, stands always in contrast to the 
 world that is to come, because there is always a world to 
 come. God's method is one of unlimited progress. When 
 the fire comes, and the elements melt with fervent heat, 
 there is ever a chariot. When the flood comes there is ever 
 an ark, and there is always a rainbow that promises that 
 that event shall have no repetition. There is assurance 
 with every change that a permanent advance has been 
 marked. God has many kinds of flood, and the old is ever 
 
 112
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 passing away, but its noblest fruitage saved as material 
 for God's next venture. 
 
 It is probable that the world has never been so near to 
 God's ideal as now. Man's real progress did not begin till 
 he got outside of Eden. Men have looked back to it with 
 longing. So did they to Egypt and its flesh pots. But 
 the wilderness, with all its drought and serpents, was better 
 than the sheltered bounty of Egypt ; and the world, with 
 its temptations and toils and sorrows and sins, through 
 which we are working out the coming of the world that 
 God wants, is better than any paradise, where men maintain 
 unstable equilibrium in weak and untried innocence, that 
 is good only because it knows not how to be bad. 
 
 The world has much raw material gathered in the course 
 of centuries for the making of the world to come. Tt has 
 so far subdued earth as to make cities grow where there 
 were wastes ; to make parks that promote health and bless- 
 ings where there were malarial swamps ; to change measur- 
 ably the face of nature in the removal of forests for the 
 building of homes ; in the digging of mines, in the exalting 
 of the valleys and laying low the mountains and hills. 
 
 And it has made moral progress. The thirst for knowl- 
 edge, the remorse for sin, the love of honor and beauty, 
 the aspiration after that which is better than we have had 
 or been, the love that can suffer and be Brave — all these 
 show how much better is man than mere animal and 
 how much material there is in what we call the natural 
 man, out of which to make the spiritual man. God always 
 makes things out of others that he has previously made. 
 Poor material as men are. He can make of them something 
 better than angels and because God is creating the man that 
 is to come. He is creating for him and through him, the 
 world to come. 
 
 113
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 There are good people who hold as the very essence 
 of their faith that man's lost Paradise must come back 
 to him again ; that God is somehow, sometime to take 
 a backward step and restore something on which human- 
 ity long since turned its reluctant back. But that is not 
 the message of history, nor is it the message of the 
 Bible; not backward, but before us is the future of the 
 human race. Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither 
 hath entered into the heart of man what God is even 
 now preparing for those who love Him. 
 
 Here is the world for which Christ died. It requires 
 a very meager faith to prophesy a heaven in which all 
 shall be made right that so puzzles us here, but it re- 
 quires a great vigorous faith and a sanctified imagina- 
 tion to affirm that here and now God is working out a 
 great future in the human race and that the kingdom of 
 God is not only to come, but even now is coming. 
 
 "As in those blindfold years, long passed away, 
 
 Men held the earth a plain with boundaries, 
 
 And met with hatred sages grown more wise. 
 
 Who would have taught them whence came night and day; 
 
 So only souls who in thick darkness move 
 
 Set man-made limits to Eternal Love!" 
 
 God has other worlds to come. I do not know where 
 they are nor how many. 'l am confident they are all good 
 worlds. I do not believe that God is ultimately to have 
 any worlds that are not good worlds. There are to be new 
 heavens as well as new earth. Every new earth compels a 
 new heaven. Every new political economy requires a new 
 theology. Every advance of man compels us to believe in 
 a greater God. And this must be in all the world to come. 
 
 114
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 I have spoken of only one world to come, this present 
 world. But I am sure the others are for us. And I have a 
 vision now and then of what those worlds must be which 
 makes me confident that to one who lives in this world as 
 he ought, and who helps roll it on into the sunlight of God, 
 it will be no strange or startling thing to find himself a resi- 
 dent of heaven. 
 
 "When we've been there ten thousand years, 
 
 Bright shining as the sun, 
 We've no less days to sing God's praise 
 
 Than when we first begun." 
 
 But we shall not do all our singing in any one heaven. 
 When we've been there ten thousand years, or more years 
 or less, I would not venture to guess how many, we shall 
 wake some glad celestial morning to other and wonderful 
 surprises. 
 
 When we have lived in heaven just long enough, and not 
 a day too long, we shall rise some morning to meet the joys 
 of a new glad day, and shall hear some beautiful messen- 
 ger from the Father saying to us, **I am glad you have 
 enjoyed this beautiful heaven: but this is not the only one, 
 nor yet the best. Come, let us go on, and discover the 
 world to come!" 
 
 115
 
 Cije Bibme Beposiit 
 
 But all things are of God, who reconciled us to himself 
 through Christ, and gave unto us the ministry of reconciliation; 
 to wit, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto him- 
 self, not reckoning unto them their trespasses, and having com- 
 mitted unto us the word of reconciliation. 2 Corinthians, 5:18-19. 
 
 In these two verses it is twice afifirmed that the mission of 
 God in Christ was a mission of reconciliation. God was in 
 Christ, reconciHng the world to Himself. There is in that 
 simple affirmation a whole doctrine of the Incarnation and 
 of the Atonement. Notice that it does not say that God 
 came in Christ for the purpose of reconciling Himself to the 
 world. Neither here nor anywhere else in Scripture is any 
 such thing as that declared. Men have been very bold in 
 forming their theories as if it were God who needed to 
 be reconciled; but what the New Testament teaches is 
 that it is man who needs to be reconciled to God. This 
 text says so very plainly, and says it twice. 
 
 But the text also makes another important statement, 
 and that relates to the manner in which God is making the 
 work of Jesus effective in human life. God who set forth 
 this mission in Christ "gave to us the ministry of reconcil- 
 iation;" and this affirmation, also is repeated, namely, that 
 God has "committed unto us the word of reconciliation." 
 You will note that the margin of the American revision 
 says "placed in us ;" and it might very properly have been 
 translated that God has "deposited in us the word of recon- 
 ciliation." 
 
 It is this deposit about which I want to speak. You will 
 note again that the nature of the deposit is twice defined, 
 
 116
 
 THE DIVINE DEPOSIT 
 
 and the fact is twice affirmed ; both repetitions relate to 
 this deposit. 
 
 One of the sayings which Origen and many of the early 
 Christian fathers believed to have come from the lips of 
 Jesus, though not contained in the Gospels, was "Prove 
 yourselves tried bankers." By this they understood Jesus 
 to have meant two things : first that we should be able 
 to distinguish between that which is true and that which is 
 counterfeit ; and secondly that we should prove worthy of 
 our trust. Whether in the special form of this saying or 
 not, Jesus certainly taught both these lessons. 
 
 Yet do not mistake the lessons of this text by supposing 
 that what is referred to as deposited with us is what we 
 call our talents. What the text affirms the Lord has de- 
 posited with us is more than our personal gifts and graces. 
 It is something vastly larger than what we are accustomed 
 to think of as the divine investment in our lives. 
 
 What is this deposit of which Paul speaks? 
 
 In the first place, it is the apostolic testimony to Jesus. 
 It is what the first disciples saw and heard and felt when 
 they were with Him, and which they promised sacredly 
 should never be forgotten by men living in the world. 
 They did not contemplate a written Gospel. They merely 
 told people what they had seen and heard of Jesus. They 
 had no printing presses to destroy their memories or make 
 their personal testimony seem superfluous. We have 
 printed Bibles, and not only that but concordances and 
 other modern apparatus, by means of which we relieve our- 
 selves from the necessity of even knowing, much less of 
 telling very much about Jesus. The early apostles, I think, 
 would have said it were better for the Bible never to be 
 printed in a book if the result were to be the losing of it 
 
 117
 
 THE DIVINE DEPOSIT 
 
 out of the lives and hearts and memories of men. They 
 did not expect a salaried ministry to preach for them and 
 pray for them and save them the trouble of preaching and 
 praying for themselves. They had no such notion as we 
 have acquired of a clergy whose business it is to make it 
 unnecessary for the laity to possess and to repeat the ex- 
 perience of their own hearts. They expected that it would 
 continue to be necessary for every generation to tell people 
 about Jesus. And they were right. It is necessary. We 
 need a campaign of personal testimony. A printed Bible, 
 a professional clergy, are not ends in themselves ; they 
 may indeed defeat the very end for which they are de- 
 vised. The living voice of testimony to the loving power 
 of God to save men from sin in Jesus Christ — this is the 
 deposit which belongs to us. 
 
 But in the next place this deposit is sound doctrine as 
 distinguished from error. To keep the testimony of Jesus 
 pure was the ambition of his followers. From their words 
 and lives men must know of Jesus ; the world would ap- 
 prove or condemn Jesus as the world knew Him in his 
 followers. "O Timothy, guard the deposit!" wrote Paul 
 (I Tim. 6:20). He wrote of sound doctrine, of the simple 
 truth as it was in Jesus. 
 
 These two things the apostles meant when they talked of 
 the ministry of reconciliation as deposited with us. It is 
 not our own to keep ; it is not given us as an exclusive gift, 
 whose benefits are to terminate upon ourselves ; it is a 
 deposit, a sacred trust, to be kept pure and passed on. It 
 is not merely a fixed and stable body of truth ; it is a 
 growing body of experience. It is not a sacred relic of the 
 past ; it is the living witness of the present. It is not to 
 be hoarded but used; not buried but invested; not hid 
 
 118
 
 THE DIVINE DEPOSIT 
 
 within the heart but spoken by the Hps and lived in the Hfe. 
 That is the divine deposit. 
 
 It is the most precious thing God has. It is the ministry 
 of reconcihation for which God revealed Himself in 
 Christ. Nothing less than this is what He has deposited 
 with us. It is this that is to save coming generations, the 
 living power of Jesus transmitted through our fidelity. 
 
 Think of the honor of it ! Think of the courage of God 
 in devising such a plan ! Think of the trust we bear ! 
 Every man and woman of us ought to grow a head taller 
 as we stand to our full height in the dignity of this trust. 
 What other trust could possibly be so great? All that God 
 invested in the world in Christ He has deposited with us! 
 
 No one other than God would have trusted us so fully ; 
 and none other knew us so well. I grow in my esteem 
 when I remember that God would not have trusted me 
 if He had not believed me trustworthy. And I resolve 
 to be worthy of His trust. 
 
 When a bank fails, it is not the stock-holders whose in- 
 terests are first attended to. The law says, and it is just, 
 that these may be required to lose all, and then add as much 
 more ; but the depositors must not lose a penny. So sacred 
 a thing in the eyes of the law is a deposit. 
 
 Yes, and men have died for such trust. Some years 
 ago a mill located on the West side of Chicago fell down. 
 I remember for months, yes for years afterwards, the great 
 gap in the buildings showed from the elevated cars. When 
 the floors fell in, the cashier was buried in the ruins. They 
 found him at the door of the safe, having made secure the 
 money and accounts before he attempted to save his own 
 life. Do not make the mistake of saying that such a man 
 dies to save the money or the account books. If that were 
 
 119
 
 THE DIVINE DEPOSIT 
 
 all, it would be his duty to run and save his own life. 
 When such a man dies, he dies for a great ideal, the ideal 
 of fidelity to trust. It would be a libel to say "He died 
 to save the firm's money." He died to make good the 
 sacred trust deposited in him. 
 
 Now here is the most sacred trust which ever was given 
 to men. That which God revealed in Christ, the ministry 
 of reconciling the world to Himself, He has committed to 
 us in the assurance of a great and beautiful trust. My 
 brother, shall we not aspire to be worthy of the confidence 
 of God? 
 
 There is just one other thought which I must bring to 
 you. We have deposited' something with God. Our faith 
 that He is good ; our belief that Jesus Christ has brought 
 God's saving love to our very hearts' doors ; our hope for 
 this life and the life to come — all these represent our trust 
 reposed in God. On this trust the same Apostle Paul 
 has a fine word of assurance for us. Considering the 
 magnitude of that which he has so entrusted — the sum of 
 his spiritual assets for this world and the world to come — 
 he says, 'T know Him whom I have believed ; and am per- 
 suaded that He is able to guard that which I have deposited 
 with Him, against that day." 
 
 God will not fail us ; let us not fail God. 
 
 120
 
 tKlje (§\ovp of Jfatf)er!)oob 
 
 In Emporia, Kansas, lives a newspaper genius named 
 Walt Mason, who disguises his verse as prose. A few 
 days ago he published the following jingle: 
 
 "Last eve I sought the church and heard a gifted 
 pastor preach the Word. He talked of men whose days 
 were o'er two thousand years ago or more. He talked 
 of kings whose bones were dust, whose sceptres were 
 reduced to rust so long ago their stories seem like frag- 
 ments of a summer dream. He said no word of those 
 who strive in this old world, intense, alive, who fight 
 their battles every day, obscurely, in their feeble way. 
 I'd just as soon be in the dark concerning Father Noah's 
 ark ; I care not for the tents of Baal, or Joseph's corn, 
 or Jonah's whale ; I want to hear my pastor talk about 
 the people on this block, whose lives are full of stings 
 and smarts, whose problems often break their hearts. 
 I'd rather learn some way to cheer some hopeless toiler 
 struggling here, than learn how Pharaoh blew his dough 
 about five thousand years ago. The dust of kings in 
 ancient ground is worth a half a cent a pound ; and 
 Ashur's widows' tears were dried before old Julius Caesar 
 died ; the things of which my pastor talks are dead as 
 Adam's brindled ox, but all around us there are cries, 
 and wringing hands and weeping eyes. He'll have to 
 get his text on straight, and bring his gospel up to date." 
 
 I have my own interest in archeology, and believe that 
 the past has lessons for the present. There are times 
 when I preach about some of the topics condemned in 
 this poem. But today I want to talk "about the people 
 in this block." T invite your attention to a neglected 
 theme. 
 
 121
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 ''After this manner, therefore, pray ye: Our Father which 
 art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy name." Matthew 6:9. 
 
 This verse is a wonderful tribute to the character of 
 the boyhood home of Jesus. We have been very timid 
 and fearful lest if we speak of Joseph in his putative 
 relation to Jesus we shall be understood as denying- 
 some essential doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. Such 
 a fear is cowardly and unworthy, and has prevented us 
 from doing justice to one of the world's rare heroes. 
 
 With questions of controversy we have no present 
 dealing. We are assuming that Jesus was, as He claimed 
 to be, the Son of God and the Son of Man ; but in what- 
 ever way Jesus was born into the world, there was a 
 man who stood to him in the legal relation of father. 
 It was Joseph's willingness to stand in that relation that 
 saved Mary from unmerited reproach ; and out of that 
 relation grew very many wonderful and significant facts, 
 which we have almost overlooked in our study of the 
 Gospels. Whatever may now be necessary for the 
 purposes of Christian doctrine, it was necessary for the 
 Jewish law that the ancestral line of Jesus should be 
 traced through Joseph, and both the Gospel genealogies 
 so trace it. Jesus was born into a home, the home of a 
 happily married man and woman. Hilary taught Him to 
 call Joseph, father, and said to Him, "Thy father and 
 I have sought Thee sorrowing." Other people called 
 Joseph his father. "Is not this Joseph's son?" they 
 asked. Even the disciples came to Him, saying, "We 
 have found Him of Avhom Moses and the prophets did 
 
 122
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph/' We have 
 no reason to suppose that any of the disciples thought 
 otherwise. 
 
 These passages do not prove anything concerning the 
 technical doctrine of the Incarnation, but they do prove 
 a great deal concerning the moral and spiritual value of 
 the relationship of Jesus and Joseph. 
 
 When Jesus said, "After this manner pray ye: Our 
 Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name," 
 He paid a wonderful tribute to the home in which He 
 had spent his boyhood. The people to whom He spoke 
 knew what kind of a home that had been. He could 
 hardly have used that name for God if there had not lain 
 behind Him the memory of a beautiful, sweet home 
 life. The people to whom He spoke could hardly have 
 understood Him if they had known that Joseph com- 
 pletely failed in the relation of fatherhood. Joseph, the 
 carpenter of Nazareth, contributed to the boyhood of 
 Jesus a background which enabled Him to give to the 
 world the dearest of all names for God. The sweetest, 
 tenderest, holiest name which man in his need has ever 
 breathed into the ear of infinite compassion grew more 
 or less directly out of the fidelity of a humble carpenter 
 of Nazareth. 
 
 Do not be afraid of esteeming Joseph too highly. He- 
 was a knightly, chivalrous gentleman, with an unstained 
 name and a strong arm with w-hich he sheltered the 
 good name of a virtuous but maligned woman. In one 
 of his most subtle poems, "Count Gismond," Browning 
 puts into the lips of a woman speaking to her friend out 
 of the bitter-sweet memories of years long past, the 
 story of the knight who rose as her champion in the 
 
 123
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 hour when envy and bitter hatred cast a stain upon 
 her name. Remembering his fine courage she prayed: 
 
 ■'Christ, God, who savest men, save most 
 Of men, Count Gismond, who saved me." 
 
 Count Gismond, buckHng on his armor and riding 
 
 full tilt to unhorse and slay the slanderer, was not more 
 
 knightly, not more an unsullied hero without fear and 
 
 • without reproach than Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth. 
 
 For Jesus' sake he moved to Egypt, and was skillful 
 enough at his trade to earn an honest living there, and 
 when he returned to Nazareth his honest workmanship 
 was not yet forgotten and he found his place again in 
 the life of the community and earned the bread that 
 nourished the little boy. He taught that boy to read and 
 spell, and made Him master of a trade and told Him 
 tales of the heroes of his nation, and quickened within 
 Him the ardor of his radiant young soul. This was 
 the man to whom Jesus looked back with happ}' and 
 honored memories. Through Joseph He knew what 
 fatherhood deserved to mean in courage and capability, 
 in strength of arm and tenderness of heart. In all that 
 went into making of simple manliness and generous com- 
 passion Jesus learned fatherhood from Joseph ; and He 
 taught his disciples to pray to God and say. "Our 
 Father." 
 
 Had his childhood been one of cruel beatings, or harsh 
 and unreasonable scoldings, and constant, unsympathetic 
 nagging, should we ever have known the name by which 
 we now call God? Whenever we pray to God and call 
 Him by the name Jesus taught, what an unconscious 
 testimony we unconsciously bear to the character of 
 that humble but great man whom Jesus called father! 
 
 124
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 Since the day in which Jesus taught his disciples to 
 pray the words of the Lord's Prayer, He has compelled 
 every father, good or bad, to assume this tremendous 
 responsibility,, of representing God in the terms of his 
 own fatherhood. In proportion as any man exalts the 
 ideal of fatherhood, God is honored in him ; in propor- 
 tion as he dishonors that ideal, God suffers in his mis- 
 representation. He has no choice whether he shall thus 
 represent God or not : he may choose only how worthily 
 or how unworthily he shall represent Him. 
 
 The glory of fatherhood is a neglected theme among 
 us. There are lands and there have been ages in which 
 men have gloried in their fathers, but we are living in 
 an age when men obliterated themselves in those qual- 
 ities which hold them up to personal esteem on the 
 part of those nearest to them. Men seek to be known 
 to the world as great financiers, as captains of industry, 
 as men who bring things to pass ; but for those elements 
 which go to the making of the lives of the new genera- 
 tion they all too willingly concede the labor and the 
 glory to their wives. Suppose you wished to buy for 
 some friends at Christmas time a book on "The Glories 
 of Fatherhood." You could not find such a book. You 
 could find a hundred books that glorify motherhood, 
 but no man has the courage to write a book on the dig- 
 nity of fatherhood, and if he were to write it no one 
 would buy it. 
 
 "Mother, Home and Heaven" is a title which would 
 sell most any book. Someone has proposed as a satire, 
 "Father, the Club and Hades." The name father does 
 not inspire such holy associations as it deserves to in- 
 spire in the hearts of men and women. 
 
 125
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 We are living in an age in which men measure their 
 civilization by their esteem for womanhood. It is a good 
 measure, too. All good men honor women, and so, 
 thank God, do most bad men. And men are trying to 
 say as good things as they know how about women, 
 and women are holding conventions and lauding women. 
 The bouquets are largely going one way. Men in their 
 mass meetings never introduce resolutions lauding man 
 as man ; the man who introduced such a resolution would 
 be laughed out of the room. But women owe to men 
 as men a reverence different from, but just as sincere, 
 as that which men gladly pay to women. There ought 
 to be genuine reciprocity of esteem and honor. Woman 
 owes man honor, and man owes woman honor. It must 
 not be all upon one side. 
 
 If we want to discover to Avhat an abyss of mawkish 
 sentiment this present one-sided tendency can take us, 
 we shall find it in the utterances of those silly people 
 who insist upon talking on "the motherhood of God." 
 To such inanity and vapidity has our thought of the 
 holiness of fatherhood descended. 
 
 We are not the first to have done this. The men 
 of the Middle Ages found need of the intercession of 
 the Virgin Mary, because they made their God an irre- 
 sponsible demon, malignant and revengeful, full of arbi- 
 trary wrath ; and they even froze compassion out of the 
 heart of Christ. 
 
 l\Ien forgot the brotherhood of Christ, and so forgot 
 the fatherhood of God. They thought of Christ either 
 as a babe in the arms of Mary, or as a victim nailed 
 to the cross, or as a wrathful judge come to slay his 
 enemies, not as a Brother, Companion and Saviour. 
 
 126
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 When the great truth of the brotherhood of Christ van- 
 ished from the hearts of men, the truth of the father- 
 hood of God went also ; and men invented a "mother of 
 God" to save God's children from the wrath of their 
 Father. Fatherhood suffered immeasurably by reason 
 of the doctrine, and it suffers still, and will suffer until 
 we restore the thought of fatherhood to where it belongs. 
 
 All names of God are symbolic ; no name can fully ex- 
 press the whole of God. If any name expresses truth- 
 fully some single attribute of God in terms that are 
 pure and sweet to us, that name justifies itself, whatever 
 it be. It is the business of the men of this world to 
 elevate their conception of human fatherhood to a plane 
 where they can call God, Father, without blushing. 
 
 It is my firm conviction that there is no one need 
 of the present time greater than the establishment of a 
 new ideal of fatherhood. I am not unsympathetic toward 
 the advance of woman in material prosperity, in social 
 independence or in individual attainment. All these 
 things are good in themselves ; whether they are good 
 in their relation to the needs of society as a whole, may 
 not always be so certain. So far as I have ever been 
 conservative in the matter of the growing liberty and 
 the larger life of woman, it has not been through any 
 lack of sympathy with aspiring womanhood, but only 
 by reason of some questions or misgiving as to what 
 these might come to mean in their relation and pro- 
 portion to certain other equally valuable assets of so- 
 ciety. 
 
 The home is the most precious thing we have on 
 earth. Even the State and the Church are second to it 
 in inherent worth ; the family is the oldest and holiest 
 
 127
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 of all institutions. We are rightly taught concerning 
 it, that it is "an holy estate, instituted of God in man's 
 innocency," signifying to us the mystical union of Christ 
 and the Church. It is to me a profoundly significant 
 fact that the first miracle, which Jesus wrought in Cana 
 of Galilee, was performed as a part of the service of re- 
 joicing which consecrated a new home. 
 
 Every man ought to be the head of his house. This 
 does not mean that he should uniformly or arbitrarily 
 liave his own way. Only by mutual concessions, only 
 by much reciprocal giving and taking, forgiving and 
 forgetting, can the perfect home be maintained. But 
 there come times when questions cannot be left in per- 
 petual suspense ; times when someone must speak the 
 authoritative word, and it is just and right that that 
 word be spoken by the father. Sweet, gracious and 
 wonderful as is the authority of the mother, hers is 
 rarely, when at its best, the authority or final dictation. 
 Credited though she be with "having the last word," 
 the last word is really seldom hers to say. Even though 
 the last word be an assent to what she wishes, that last 
 word should be spoken by the husband and the father. 
 
 We need a new affirmation of the dignity and suprem- 
 acy of manhood ; we need to deliver ourselves from the 
 utterly indefensible notion that while the feminine ele- 
 ment in the home is sw'eet and pure, there is something 
 inherently gross in its masculine complement. Neither 
 in Scripture nor in human life is there any justification 
 for the notion that while motherhood is holy, fatherhood 
 falls inherently to a lower level, or that the essential 
 nature of fatherhood resides in the fiesh, while that of 
 motherhood belongs in the sphere of the spirit. The 
 
 . 128
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 glory of fatherhood has been wronged, maligned and 
 treated with unmerited contempt. A procession of toil- 
 ing men, earning their living by the sweat of their brow 
 and working too hard that their wives and children might 
 work less than was good for them, has marched home, 
 weary from their day's labor, to the strains of some- 
 body's phonograph singing, "Everybody Works But 
 Father." It is one of the outrages of our contemporary 
 life, growing out of a mawkish, unwholesome and in- 
 consistent sense of chivalry to woman ; and it has de- 
 throned our conception of the glory of fatherhood, human 
 and divine. 
 
 Every man should be a priest in his own house. Even 
 if he is not a very good man ; even if he is not a pro- 
 fessing Christian, even if he can frame no prayer of his 
 own, he should stand the representative of the unity of 
 the home, as the minister of Christ in the service of 
 family devotion. There ought to be family prayers in 
 every home, and the father should oflfer those prayers, 
 even if he be not a very good father. Few fathers would 
 pray a wilfully sinful prayer in the presence of their 
 children. 
 
 I have said a score of times, and say again, what I 
 believe to be profoundly true, that a country which has 
 no standing army needs more than other countries the 
 element of manhood in its educational system. Nations 
 which take every boy at the age of i6 or i8 and keep him 
 for two or three years in military life, subject to the 
 orders of men and with the ideals of manhood before 
 him, do something for their young men that cannot be 
 done in countries whose public schools and Sunday 
 schools are so largely taught by women, and in whose 
 
 129
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 homes the father is very nearly a stranger. In my judg- 
 ment it is one of the growing needs of the present day, 
 that we should set ourselves to work with all diligence 
 to glorify anew the thought of fatherhood in all that 
 fatherhood implies, and by a constant and untiring effort 
 enlarge the element of manhood which enters into the 
 influences forming the characters of both our boys and 
 our girls. 
 
 Girls have quite as much need of a father as boys 
 have. Girls ought not to get their ideals of manhood 
 wholly from the boys of their own age, nor yet from 
 reading novels, nor from the stage. As truly as a boy 
 needs a mother, a girl needs a father, and she needs him 
 through all the years of her growing life. She needs 
 the masculine point of view to assist in the forming of 
 her judgments in all questions that confront her grow- 
 ing womanhood. She needs the dignity of his virility; 
 she needs to love him, to believe in him as the best and 
 dearest man in the world ; she needs the authority which 
 belongs to the masculine mind ; she needs to see some 
 elements of the hero in her everyday father. One rea- 
 son for the qualities in our womanhood which people 
 of foreign nations like the least is the absence of a proper 
 balance between the sexes in the control of the home 
 and the definition of its ideals. 
 
 I hear rumors now and then of the wholesale demoral- 
 ization of our boys and girls. I do not credit them. I 
 believe our boys are clean and strong, and our girls are 
 sweet and pure. I believe that anything that can truth- 
 fully be said to the contrary is distinctly exceptional. 
 
 But now, talking not as a minister to laymen, but as a 
 father to fathers, I want to ask this question: 
 
 130
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 You are the father of a young girl in high school, 
 working too hard, under too great a nervous strain, and 
 at a period of her womanhood too critical for her to 
 come to prayer-meeting one hour froom 8 to 9 o'clock 
 on Wednesday evening. About how many evenings a 
 week ought she to spend at the theater from 8 to 11? 
 About how often ought she to dance from 8 to 12? She 
 is a good, sensible, pure, wholesome girl, but emotional, 
 and with the necessity of passing through the successive 
 stages of silliness and nonsense which are normal to 
 young womanhood, and which she may be trusted to 
 pass safely if she is helped and guided aright. But how 
 often ought she to key her emotions up to these excite- 
 ments? 
 
 To be sure, the other girls know just what play was 
 on the boards last week, and what is to be next week, 
 and the relative merits of this and that actor; but is it 
 wholesome? 
 
 I sometimes go to the theater. I sometimes let my 
 children go. I speak not as a fanatic on this subject. 
 I simply ask you as fathers, about how often do you 
 think a young boy or girl ought to go to the theater? 
 
 And if you have any convictions upon this subject, who 
 ought to settle the question? Ought the young girl to 
 settle it on the plea that "All the other girls go"? Or 
 ought you throw upon the mother the responsibility of 
 settling it? You know, or ought to know, better than 
 the mother, and you certainly know a great deal better 
 than the girl, what is best in these matters. Who is the 
 head of the house where you live? Who settles questions 
 when your knowledge and experience ought to have 
 weight? Do you throw the whole responsibility upon 
 
 131
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 the mother? Or do you let the children settle these 
 questions alone? 
 
 I am not speaking against the theater. I am speaking 
 about the father's duty to rule his household well. Am 
 I speaking wisely or not? Speaking as a father to 
 fathers, how many times in a school term ought a young 
 girl, or even a young boy, to be out late and unguarded, 
 attending the theater? 
 
 And is it good for them to have the feeling that they 
 must be able to compare this week's play with last, and 
 to take it for granted that they are to see the next, and 
 to be able to discuss actors and actresses, and compare 
 them familiarly? About how large an angle ought that 
 sort of thing to fill in the life of a growing boy or girl? 
 Has the father no duty in this matter? Or is it entirely 
 the prerogative of the mother, or is it to be left to the 
 will of the child? Speaking as a father to fathers. I 
 ask you, what do you think about it? 
 
 The most interesting and significant fact in the social 
 life of the human race is its division into two sexes. 
 This is a permanent fact, which has existed from the cre- 
 ation and must exist as long as the human race endures. 
 It is impossible for either sex to exist in isolation and 
 to perpetuate itself. The sexes are mutually and perma- 
 nently interdependent. The human race can no more 
 be kept alive with one sex severed from the other than 
 the human body can live if cleft asunder from head to 
 foot and divided into two halves. The race would die 
 in a single generation. 
 
 In view of this fundamental fact it is perfect folly for 
 man to talk of himself as man and woman to talk of 
 herself as woman as though either of these facts con- 
 
 132
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 stituted an end in itself. The fact of sex indicates a 
 compulsory division of labor, and upon that permanent 
 division the home is established. 
 
 In many ages and in many nations the family has been 
 too definitely and dominantly masculine, and the part 
 of woman in the home and in society has been ignored. 
 That is not our present tendency. The problem of today 
 is to bring the man out of the mere laboratory and pow- 
 er-house and put him with his wife into the very center 
 of the home, and he cannot have his proper place there 
 unless he is recognized as the head of the house in things 
 spiritual as well as temporal. To him belongs the right- 
 ful leadership in the educational and spiritual life of the 
 home. 
 
 I am not seeking to put the clock back. I am not 
 opposing the growing independence of woman. I do not 
 even oppose giving woman the ballot. I am not doing 
 any shouting in favor of it, for I think we shall have 
 our problems here after that change comes. But I would 
 rather tone up the manhood of our nation than to add 
 an extra burden to womanhood. And while I often speak 
 in praise of mothers, just for today, I would rather ele- 
 vate fatherhood to its rightful place than to talk plati- 
 tudes about motherhood, which has a great and radiant 
 glory of its own. And I would rather have woman to be 
 man's companion than his competitor. 
 
 The neglect of 'paternal honor and authority is re- 
 sponsible for much decay in the spiritual and political 
 life of our time. "Honor thy father" is a command \ve 
 need to obey, for the sake of our institutions of every 
 sort. Homes are being established which are insecure 
 
 133
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 because of lack of the discipline which would have come 
 with more masculine influence within it. 
 
 A friend of mine, living in New York, recently said to 
 me that it is simply appalling the number of young 
 couples who come to that city, reared in supposedly 
 Christian homes, whose religious life is after all so super- 
 ficial that when they enter into the life of the city they 
 become wholly worldly and are lost to the church and 
 its work. And much of it he traces back to this very 
 defect in the homes from \\'hich they came. 
 
 A new definition of the spiritual value and the responsi- 
 bility of fatherhood is one of the crying needs of this 
 present day. The father himself needs it for his own 
 soul's sake. His wife needs that this shall be so for her 
 sake, no less than for his. But for the sake of the fam- 
 ily ; for the sake of society ; for the sake of good citizen- 
 ship and abiding righteousness in coming generations, 
 a unified home life with the father as the spiritual head 
 of the house is one of the great needs of a free church 
 and of a righteous, democratic government. 
 
 Not only is this true, but every young man ought to 
 live in the light of prospective fatherhood. To every 
 man is committed a brief period of responsibility during 
 his life in the present generation, but an immeasurably 
 greater responsibility for the influence he shall bequeath 
 to the world through his posterity. Whether he himself 
 is rich or poor, happy or miserable, is a question of in- 
 finitesimal importance compared with the question, what 
 kind of blood is to flow through coming generations by 
 reason of his contribution to the future of the race. 
 Whether he is good or bad, whether he goes to heaven 
 or hell, is less important than this. A thousand years 
 
 134
 
 THE GLORY OF FATHERHOOD 
 
 after he is dead and forgotten the manhood of the world 
 will be richer or poorer, better or worse, by reason of 
 his having lived. It is better for him to burn barns, rob 
 banks and murder his fellow men in cold blood than to 
 bequeath to the future a dozen generations with body and 
 mind enfeebled and will less strong by reason of his 
 unholy living; on the other hand, where any man puts 
 into the blood of the race an added ring of iron he con- 
 fers upon society a benefit compared with which endow- 
 ment of colleges or the building of libraries is not to be 
 mentioned. 
 
 My plea is for a higher honor to be paid to fatherhood. 
 I ask that it be raised to a plane level with that to which 
 we have exalted motherhood, that these twain which God 
 hath united may not be put asunder. I ask for clean, 
 brave, upright manhood, fit for the companionship of 
 pure, sweet womanhood, fit for healthy, righteous 
 fatherhood. Let us render to fatherhood a new honor; 
 and let all fathers seek to be worthy of that honor. For 
 this is the crowning glory of our manhood, that God has 
 permitted us to be called by that holy name which Jesus. 
 gave to men. 
 
 If ever you are truly to hallow the name of God, you 
 must hallow your ideal of fatherhood. Jesus compelled 
 this when He taught us to pray, "Our Father, who art in. 
 heaven ; Hallowed be Thy Name." 
 
 135
 
 A PRAYER FOR MEN 
 
 The lack of any adequate h3'-mns -or anthems appro- 
 priate for such a theme as that treated in this sermon 
 compelled some original features in the music which 
 accompanied it. The following words were written for 
 the occasion : 
 
 A PRAYER FOR MEN DONIZETTI 
 
 Music of Dresser's arrangement of The Sextette from "Lucia." 
 Words by Dr. Barton. Arranged by Mr. Kinsey. 
 
 We have thanked Thee for our mothers, 
 
 And we thank Thee still again; 
 Now for fathers and for brothers, — 
 
 Lord, we thank Thee for good men! 
 
 For our fathers who begot us 
 
 And who paths of patience trod, 
 And whose righteous manhood taught us 
 
 Of the Fatherhood of God! 
 
 Bless our brothers and our neighbors, 
 
 In their tasks of hand and brain; 
 Strengthen all men for their labors, 
 
 Help them bear the load and strain. 
 
 Bless the men who face the dangers 
 
 Of the battle and the sea; 
 Guide the men who roam as strangers 
 
 Making paths where roads shall be. 
 
 Save the manhood of our nation; 
 
 Guide us with Thy staflf and rod; 
 Make each coming generation 
 
 Know the Fatherhood of God. 
 
 For our sisters and our mothers 
 
 Oft we've prayed and pray again; 
 JSIow for fathers and for brothers. 
 
 Father, hear our prayer for men!
 
 Kf\t Vaim anti ^ignifiente 
 of %\tt 
 
 Text: "For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that ap- 
 peareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." James 4:14. 
 
 We hardly need to be reminded of the brevity of life. 
 
 It is the universal testimony of old men that to them 
 life has seemed short. Even a life of three score years 
 and ten is a restricted life, and if by reason of strength 
 the years be four score, yet the life is soon cut ofif. 
 
 All of our plans are made with the knowledge that 
 we may not live to carry them out. We press through 
 the world with a feverish haste as those who are not to 
 be here long. 
 
 The Apostle James was speaking well within bounds 
 when he compared life to vapor. Measured in the pro- 
 portion of its length to the boundless extent of time, 
 the life of any one man is too brief to be represented by 
 a vapor ; measured by the proportion of his bulk to the 
 mass of the universe he is altogether too insubstantial 
 and insignificant to be thought of even as the tiniest 
 speck in a vapor. 
 
 If the man of science be asked concerning human life 
 in its relation either to the stretch of time or the bulk 
 of the universe, he would say what James said, and say 
 it more emphatically. 
 
 If we take a handful of marbles, one of them large 
 and glistening, the others small, and varied in size, 
 and roll them around in a silk hat, we might get a 
 
 137
 
 THE VALUE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF LIFE 
 
 scale for the measurement of our solar system in its 
 relation to the rest of the univese. 
 
 Placing that solar system in Chicago, with our world 
 perhaps as a pea among the marbles, one might start 
 and walk to Cleveland one way and to Omaha the 
 other before he began to fmd many of our nearer neigh- 
 bors among the fixed stars, and the world is not wide 
 enough for us working upon that scale of proportion to 
 reach anywhere near the edge of the visible universe 
 in which our sun is a mere speck of golden dust — one 
 of the smaller stars in the Milk}^ Way. 
 
 In such a universe, what is a solar system like ours? 
 
 What is our world, and what is man? 
 
 "God made a million atoms, each by mortals called a 'world;' 
 Like dust-motes in a beam of light, they dartled, circled, whirled; 
 Yet all these million worlds, compared to all His might did rule, 
 Were in the Universal Whole one tiny molecule. 
 
 '"The mortals on these shining specks spake of God's space as 
 
 'far,' 
 And every bright companion-mote they hailed as 'world' or 
 
 'star.' 
 (They should have known the Eternal Mind no need for 
 
 measures hath; 
 God looketh down the Milky Way as down a garden path; 
 The distance from our outmost sun unto His throne, no doubt, 
 Is a handsbreadth in His seeing, or too small to measure out.) 
 
 '"These manikins then fought and died on many a shining 
 
 mote — 
 For what they dubbed as 'empires' s\A^orded one another's throat; 
 Each nation on its anthill swarmed and sang a patriot song, 
 And stormed another anthill to avenge an emmet wrong: 
 And thus they hated, loved and lived until the end of time. 
 While up the weary rounds of life a million worlds did climb. 
 
 '"Then flash! Two molecules collide and worlds exhale in mist. 
 And back into a fiery ring do melted empires twist. 
 And cities in solution hang and drop in fiery rain, 
 And the sinew of the tiger fuses with the poet's brain; 
 All back into one element trees, mountains, oceans, glide. 
 And not one life is left to strut and swell in pompous pride — 
 
 138
 
 THE VALUE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF LIFE 
 
 ''Then some far-worlded telescope which chance did thither turn 
 Beholds this starry funeral pyre minutely flame and burn. 
 'Lo!' thinks the awed astronomer, his star-map at his side. 
 'Upon yon utmost verge of night a star was born and died.' 
 "And so they numbered eons there, and cherished histories gray! 
 Oh, but they battled, loved and dreamed for a clock-tick in 
 God's day!" 
 
 — Harry H. Kemp in The Independent. 
 
 Life is a vapor. But what is a vapor? It is all that 
 it ever has been. It was a pearly raindrop that fell down 
 from the skies : and as it fell, it brightened and made 
 beautiful the flower in whose golden heart it lay, and 
 then, dropping to the earth, watered the root that there 
 might be other flowers ; and then, by subterranean 
 channels breaking forth into a spring, it flowed singing 
 to the sea, turning the wheels of industry as it w^ent, 
 and laughing in the sunlight as it bore great ships upon 
 its blue bosom. 
 
 The sun caught it up and it vanished into heaven, smil- 
 ing as it rose. All this the vapor was and is; all this 
 it did and does. It appeareth for a little while and then 
 vanisheth away. 
 
 But when it vanishes it rises fragrant with the odor of 
 the flowers it has refreshed, dignified by the burdens it 
 has borne, radiant with the honor of thirst it has 
 quenched, and jubilant in the memories of service it has 
 rendered. 
 
 It vanishes away, but as it vanishes, the sun catches 
 it up into heaven pours through it the sevenfold glory 
 of its prismatic splendor, and imparts to it a radiance 
 fit for the diadem of God. 
 
 It vanishes away, but as it vanishes it smiles in the 
 glow of promise of joyful service still to be, and its 
 rainbow gladdens the eyes of men and reminds them 
 
 139
 
 THE VALUE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF LIFE 
 
 of the covenant of God. 
 
 There are lives like that. They appear for a little time 
 and then vanish away. But they come to earth trailing 
 clouds of glory, and they vanish fragrant with the 
 memories of a beautiful and varied ministry to their 
 fellow men. 
 
 They flow through the channel of their years, leave 
 behind them holy and sacred memorials, and when they 
 vanish they overarch the two worlds ; at this end are 
 glorious memories, and the gold at the other end of 
 their rainbow is the pavement of the city of God. 
 
 And the vapor is not lost. It is one of the certain- 
 ties of modern scienc that every particle of the vapor 
 abides. It disappears, but it is indestructible. We see it : 
 
 "Like the snowdrop in the river, 
 
 A moment white, then fades forever." 
 
 Forever? No! It has fallen, faded, risen and blessed 
 
 the world a million times ; and unborn generations will 
 
 see it, taste it, and be refreshed by it. 
 
 There are lives like that. They come to earth, live, 
 love and pass away. But they are not lost. The sweet 
 influences by which they made life better are added to 
 the invisible cords that bind the world to the throne 
 of God. They are not lost. They live, and live forever. 
 
 140
 
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