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FORMED BY
James Abraham Hillhouse, B.A. 1749
James Hillhouse, B.A. 1773
James Abraham Hillhouse, B.A. 1808
James Hillhouse, B.A. 1875
Removed 1942 from the
Manor Mouse in Sachem's Wood
GIFT OF
GEORGE DUDLEY SEYMOUR

Phillips Brooks's Sermons

In Ten Volumes
1st Series The Purpose and Use of Comfort
And Other Sermons
2d Series The Candle of the Lord
And Other Sermons
3d Series Sermons Preached in English
Churches
And Other Sermons
4th Series Visions and Tasks And Other Sermons
5th Series The Light of the World
And Other Sermons
6th Series The Battle of Life And Other Sermons
7th Series Sermons for the Principal Festi
vals and Fasts of the Church Year
Edited hy the Rev. John Cotton Brooks
8th Series New Starts in Life And Other Sermons
9th Series The Law of Growth
And Other Sermons
I Oth Series Seeking Life And Other Sermons

E. P. Dutton and Company
681 Fifth Avenue New York

The Battle of Life

And Other Sermons

By the
Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D.

Sixth Series

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Ave.

Copyright, 1893
BY
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

First Published as " Sermons " VL

CONTENTS.

Sermon Pass
I. The Mystery of Iniquity  1
"The Mystery of Iniquity." — II. Thess. ii. 7.
(March 19, 1865.)
II. The Valley of Baca  18
" Who passing through the Valley of Baca make it
a well; the rain also fllleth the pools." — Psalms
Ixxxiv. 6. (March 12, 1865.)
III. Homage and Dedication  35
" And tlie four and twenty Elders fall down before
Him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that
liveth for ever and ever, and Cast their Crowns before
the throne." — Revelation iv. 10. (Oct. 26, 1873.)
IV. The Egyptians dead upon the Seashore. 55
" And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the Sea
shore." — Exodus xiv. 30. (Sept. 21, 1890.)
V. The Battle of Life  71
" Eor we wrestle not against Flesh and Blood, but
against Principalities, against Powers, against the
Rulers of the darkness of this world, against Spiritual
Wickedness in high places." — Ephesians vi. 12.
(Nov. 1, 1885.)
VI. The Dignity and Greatness of Faith . 90
" No man can say that Jesus is the tord but by
the Holy Ghost." — I. Cobinthians xii. 3. (1881.)

IV CONTENTS.
VII. The Sanctuary of God  108
" Then thought I to understand this, but it was
too hard for me. Until I went into the Sanc
tuary of God ; then understood I the end of these
men." — Psalms lxxiii. 16, 17. (Nov. 24, 1872.)
VIII. Come and See  129
" Philip saith unto him ' Come and See.' " — John
i. 46. (Nov. 3, 1872.)
IX. The Principle of the Crust .... 153
" Let no man deceive himself. If any man think-
eth that he is wise among you in this world, let him
become a fool, that he may be wise." — I. Cokin-
thians iii. 18. (Jan. 23, 1887.)
X. The Leadership of Christ  171
" In my Father's house are many mansions. I
go to prepare a place for you : and I will come
again and receive you unto myself." — John xiv. 2.
(Sept. 12, 1875.)
XI. Peace in Believing  187
" Now the God of hope fill you with all Joy and
Peace in Believing, that ye may abound in Hope
through trie Power of the Holy Ghost." — Romans
xv. 13. (March 31, 1878.)
XII. Whole Views of Life  208
" ' And Balak said unto him, ' Come, I pray thee,
with me unto another place, from whence thou
mayest see them. Thou shalt see but the utmost
part of them, and shalt not see them all : and curse
me them from thence.'" — Numbers xxiii. 13.
(Sept. 23, 1888.)
XIII. Higher and Lower Standards . . . 224
' ' Dcmas hath forsaken me, having loved this Pres
ent World." — II. TiMOTHYiv. 10. (Nov. 18, 1888.)

CONTENTS. V
Sermon Paoe
XIV. The Natural and the Spiritual . . 242
" Howbeit that was not first which is Spiritual,
but that which is Natural; and afterward that
which is Spiritual." — I. Corinthians xv. 46.
(Oct. 28, 1888.)
XV. The Stone of Shechem  260
" And Joshua said unto all the people, ' Behold,
this stone shall be a witness unto us ; for it hath
heard all the words of the Lord which He spake
unto us : it shall be therefore a witness unto you,
lest ye deny your God.' " — Joshua xxiv. 27. (Oct.
6, 1878.)
XVI. The Nearness of Christ  277
' ' Howbeit, we know this man whence He is :
but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence
He is." — John vii. 27. (Nov. 17, 1889.)
XVII. Prayer  296
" If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you,
ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto
you." — John xv. 7. (July 14, 1867.)
XVIII. The Eternal Humanity  310
" I am Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and
the End, the First and the Last." — Revelation
xxii. 13. (June 12, 1864.)
XIX. The Christian Ministry  327
" And the Evening and the Morning were the
First Day." — Genesis i. 5. (Nov. 3, 1889.)
XX- Foreign Missions  346
" And He said unto them, ' Go ye into all the
World and Preach the Gospel to every Creature.' "
— Mark xvi. 15. (Jan. 20, 1889.)

The dates given are those on which the Sermons were first preached.

SERMONS.

i.
THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
" The mystery of iniquity." — 2 Thess. ii. 7.
In this season of Lent, the one thought which we
want to bring and keep before ourselves is the
thought of our own sinfulness. These weeks are set
apart for the very purpose that we may make famil
iar to ourselves the idea of human sin, its sources, its
nature, its effects, its remedy. "We turn that idea
over and over, look at it on this side and on that, try
to know it by every point of access, try to let it com
pletely get possession and control of us. And thus
there are many subjects which are proper to be
treated — the extent of human sin, its enormity, its
variety, its tenacity, its sorrow, its penalty, the in
gratitude of man in committing it, and the great love
of God in pardoning it — all these are fit and famil
iar topics for Lenten consideration.
In our text Paul suggests another, — not less fit,
though perhaps not so familiar, — " The Mystery of
Iniquity," the mysterious character of human sin.
Let us try to turn one or two of the many sides of
this subject into view to-day and see if we cannot
get some idea of it.

2 THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
What does he mean, then, by the mystery of sin ?
Is not sin the one great present palpable thing which
everybody understands by the clear witness of his
own experience ? But remember what a mystery is.
A mystery I take to be the general name for any
event whose reality or fact is evident, but whose
method or way of accomplishment it is not in our
power to understand. Thus, for instance, we call
the force of gravitation a mysterious power. Every
falling apple, every steady mountain, bears witness
that such a force really exists ; but what it is, how
it works, where its causes and conditions lie, who
can tell? So we talk about the mystery of life.
Life is self-conscious. It testifies itself in every
living action. The fact of life runs in the blood,
beats in the pulse, speaks in the voice, thinks in the
brain. But the mystery lies deeper, in the unfound
methods, in that long-sought something which neither
physician nor metaphysician has yet tracked to its
hiding-place, that unnamed essence in which the
true cause of life resides. And yet again of God —
we speak of Hkn as the great all-embracing Mystery.
You see again, it is not the fact but the method of
His existence that is mysterious. We know that He
is Creation, Providence ; the Human Consciousness,
the Divine Revelation, — all tell us that. How He
is ; what is meant by eternal and uncaused existence ;
how the sacred union of the three persons is bound
into the single life of Deity; what it is to be om
nipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, — these are the
things we do not know. It is our ignorance of these
that makes God a mystery to us. Shall we take yet

THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. 3
another ? Look at death — that one great solemn fact,
which nobody can hide, the gap in a household
that stares itself into our remembrance day after
day — or in a nobler way, the certainty of a won
victory of a soul freed from its earthly suffering and
entered on its endless joy. Either way the fact is
past our doubting, but who knows how it comes or
what it means ? The silver cord is slowly loosed, or
the golden bowl is suddenly broken, and we can only
stand by and wonder into what new ways of life this
death ushers the departing soul.
In all these cases, then, you see what we mean by
a mystery. Some event whose fact is evident but
whose methods and modes are dark. Now, if we
apply this to the phrase of Paul, the "Mystery of
Iniquity," it must mean the same. Iniquity or sin
is one of the great evident patent facts of the world.
No man with his eyes open doubts that it exists. But
the more we have to do with it, the more we feel
that the ways of its existence and operation are
obscure. It is a subtle, elusive, inapprehensible
thing, if we attempt to grasp all its movements.
We understand why in the first sin it took as its
first typical representation the figure of the serpent,
which cheats the eye with sinuous changes of place
continually, refuses to be located, and while it leaves
no doubt of its existence is seen only in flashes and
a wavering indistinctness.
My object to-day is to exhibit in some of its
aspects this mysterious nature of human sin. Do
not suppose that I wish to occupy your time with
a merely curious or speculative study. I have no

4 THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
right to do that. I wish to speak earnestly and
practically, and I think we shall find an abundance
of practical lessons resulting on all sides of us as we
go on.
1. First, then, iniquity or sin is mysterious in its
origin. How did sin begin ? It is the old question
which has rung through all the philosophies as well
as all the theologies and found no answer. And see
how it fulfils our description of a mystery. The
fact of a beginning of sin is one of those which very
few men have had the hardihood to doubt. Not
merely revelation to those who received it, but
even human reason to those who made it their
teacher, has always signified that the wrong was an,
importation, an intrusion, an invasion in the world.
That there was a time when it was not, there was a
moment when it began to be. This has been always
one of the dearest and most precious thoughts of men,
one that they laid hold of the most eagerly, one that
they let go of last. And men have always seemed
to carry a certain sort of proof of their idea about
with them in the very pictures and ideals of perfect
goodness, — which all ages have treasured and kept
alive. I suppose there is no other way of explaining
the strange fact that amid all the personal badness,
and social corruption that is in the world, the human
mind has been able to preserve the ideal of a pure
society and a perfect life, to dream of it, sometimes
to strive after it, except by acknowledging the
reality of an entrance of iniquity into the world,
and looking back to a time before that invasion when
the world was sinless.

THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. 5
But readily and widely as men grant the fact,
this does not touch in the least the method of the
great intrusion of sinfulness. Still the " Mystery of
Iniquity " remains as dark as ever. How the hard
questions crowd up which any of us can ask and no
wisdom yet is wise enough to answer ! If sin came
in, whence came it? Nay, what is it? Is it an
active thing forcing itself violently upon unwilling
humanity, or is it the new result of a fermentation
of the ingredients, the passions, and powers of that
humanity itself? If it came from without, how was
it that a pure will with no evil habit or tendency
could receive or adopt the evil of temptation?
"Where is the bridge by which a nature can pass
over from innocence to guilt ? All these are ques
tions without answers, and in their doubt and dark
ness looms up the great " Mystery of Iniquity."
And this which is true in general history is re
peated in the history of each single life. How does
a new responsible immortal get the taint of sin?
How is it that every being born into the world,
without exception, born sinless, gets the evil habit
into him and begins to sin ? The fact is there —
written clear as daylight whenever man has lived
and sinned. But the explanation is not found
yet. "We talk to one another about " original sin,"
as if that explained it. Well, what do we mean by
" original sin " ? Not surely that each being comes
into the world guilty, already bearing the burden of
responsible sin. If that were so, every infant dying
before the age of conscious action must go to ever
lasting punishment, which horrible theology, I think,

6 THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
nobody holds to-day. Original sin means some sort .
of tendency or possibility of sinfulness. I take it to
express nothing more than something vague and
indefinite — it does not say what — something in
man which makes it certain that as he grows up into
manhood he shall grow up into transgression ;
and that you see is only the statement of the same
" Mystery of Iniquity " in other words.
There is something oppressive, something terrible,
in this great mysterious presence of sin right in
our midst, so that nothing goes on save in its
shadow, — no state is formed, no family grows up, no
social compact is organized, no character matures
without its blighting mixture. Right in our midst,
and yet no voice of man or God is opened to tell us
how it came here. The Gospel does not tell us.
The Gospel finds it here, deals with it, does not
explain it. It stands here shading all life, tainting
all action, the great unread, terrible "Mystery of
Iniquity." My brethren, with such a shadow on the world,
how dare we live the lives we do ? I do not say it
ought to make us miserable, sad, or gloomy. I do
not say it ought to crush us and dishearten us ; but
surely it ought to make us earnest, to put into our
lives something of that quality, call it awe, or
reverence, or solemnity, — the Bible groups it into
its great word " Fear." That quality which should
banish mere trifling and nonsense to the winds. It
ought to make us sober — a happy soberness, but
yet a sober happiness. It ought to make it dreadful
for us to think of the lives that half of us are

THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. 7
living, dancing and singing and idling in a world on
which so vast a mystery abides. It ought to make
us afraid of the miserable frivolity that trifles up
to the very door of Lent, — and then wearies over its
prayer-book and its church-going till the Easter door
shall open to let it out into its butterfly life again.
2. From this mystery which belongs to the very
presence of sin on earth, I pass on now to speak of
some of the mysteries which belong to its special
operations. Remember throughout our definition of
a mystery. Is there not something very mysterious in the per
vasiveness and inveteracy of sin as compared with
goodness ? Look at it. We believe in goodness
as the superior power. "We hold that wherever they
are brought to a fair struggle, goodness as the su
perior power must prevail. "We look for the day
whose signs we think we see already when "the
might with the right and the truth shall be."
This is our creed drawn from the nature of the
things themselves. And all our observation of the
larger experience of the world proves our creed
true. The history of human life shows everywhere
this gradual assertion of the victory of right over
wrong. Civilization everywhere encroaches upon bar
barism, order on disorder, religion upon heathenism,
purity upon corruption. Slowly, surely, serenely,
the banners of God everywhere, with His light upon
them, press forward, and the dark masses of God's
enemies fall back before them. We believe in this
steady gain. Truth is stronger than error, mercy
than cruelty, love than hate ; and yet with this

8 THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
great creed I think few things are more bewildering
than the way in which, in special cases, the evil is al
ways seeming to be more pervasive and powerful
than the good. We all feel as if as soon as there is
one bad spot in a man's life there were more chance
of the life becoming all bad, than with one good
spot of the whole life being filled with goodness. It
is almost an instinctive feeling. You take a poor
miserable reprobate, one of those men who seem to
have no goodness left in them, an outcast, an ac
cepted bad man. Suppose some day some sign of
a better spirit makes itself seen in him ; his life is
a long lie, but somewhere in it an impulse of truth
surprises you; his life is black with impurity, but
at some point a bright and better light breaks in.
What do you say of him ? Is not that glimmer of
good swallowed up and lost in the great general mass
of evil ? You do not look on it as likely to come to
anything. You expect it to go out. But now, sup
pose we have a good man's life, a long, bright stretch
of goodness, clear, almost without stain ; but some
where in* it you discern one taint, somewhere you
find one falseness creeping in among the truth, one
hate among the love, — at once you are distressed and
frightened, at once you picture to yourself this bad
spot spreading till the whole is bad. One bad spot
seems so much more likely to taint, than one good
spot does to purify the whole.
And so of the pervasive power of sin among masses
of men. "We send one good man into a crowd of
villains and we vaguely and dimly hope that he may
make them better. We send one villain into a com-

THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. 9
pany of saints and begin to look at once to see stains
on their robes and tarnish on their crowns. You send
your boy to college, and if he goes there pure you
hardly expect him to purify the air about him. You
only ask, with trembling lips, of God, that he him
self be not defiled. But you hear of your neighbor's
bad boy that has gone there, and in a moment you see
the badness that there is in him spreading itself and
taking root in others. I think we all can recognize
this feeling. Vice is a hardy plant. Let it alone
and it will grow on of itself. Virtue is a delicate
and fragile thing, and needs all the care and petting
it can get. Put this along with our firm belief in
the essential superiority and final victory of good
ness, and it certainly forces on us a conviction of the
subtlety and energy of the power of evil, and is
one of the most perplexing illustrations of the
"Mystery of Iniquity."
3. I ask you again to notice the mysterious per-
sonalness with which sin presents itself as a tempter
to the hearts of men. This is what we usually
hear stated as the doctrine of "besetting sins."
The idea is that every nature is by its constitution
specially liable to certain forms of transgression, and
that opportunities and inducements to transgress al
ways multiply themselves on that side of the nature
which is most inclined to yield. I know how easy it
is for a man to imagine something of this kind, and
to suppose, because the attacks which come to him on
his weaker side give him the most trouble, therefore
there are the most of them ; but still, I think we
have all felt the truth of the personal malignity of

10 THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
sin too often not to recognize its truth. Why is it
that he who is most liable to pride, has such contin
ual incitements to an overweaning vanity ? Why is it
that the poor inebriate trying to give up his drink,
finds the whole world full of beckoning fingers and
tempting voices that keep calling back again his dy
ing passions into life. To .the light and over-frivo
lous character all nature shapes itself into a chorus
and sings siren songs to scare incipient thoughtful-
ness away. To the morose and bitter nature all life
gathers itself up gloriously to deepen and darken the
wicked dreariness of his existence. We get the idea
of a man's being personally persecuted by sin. A man
is proud, and everything seems to minister to his
pride. He is rich, prosperous ; everything goes well
with him. Some day he loses it all. He is cast
down into humility and poverty. What then ? Does
his pride forsake him ? In some form or other you
see the man still proud of his very humility and pov
erty. His " besetting sin " has hunted him out and
found him down in the depths. It is like nothing
but the old* Greek stories of the implacable furies
that gave their victims no rest till they had chased
them into their graves. What one of us sits here to
day and does not know his own besetting sin? Why
is it that everywhere one of us goes, the lips shape
themselves to lie ; wherever another goes, the limbs
sink down into sloth and self-indulgence ; whatever
turn another takes, the air burns hot with passion
which he cannot escape ? It is this personality of
sin, this gradual conviction that certain sins are our
sins, set apart, set down to us — it is this which gives

THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. 11
the sense of helplessness to our condition. We get
at last to settling down and shaping our lives to it,
and making up our minds that there is no hope for
us, but that this one bad thing we are delivered to
do. Consciously or unconsciously we make for it a
standard of responsibility different from that which
we have for all other acts.
And not only on our weakest points, but at our
weakest times does the special attack always seem to
come. This is still more mysterious. We read of
Christ, that He went up into the wilderness, and
"when He was an hungered,"" the devil came to Him.
So it is always. The offer of stones turned into bread
comes " when we are an hungered." Why is it that
just when we are most tried in good works, the road
smooths itself and the banks grow green, and we are
tempted to lie down in slothfulness ? Why'is it that
just when we are poorest, and so find the readiest
excuses for meanness, the sin of meanness comes ;
just when we are sore with some insult or blow, an
other always comes and makes us sin with angry
words ; just at the moment of all moments when
some disappointment has shaken our faith in all
truth and honor, comes a lie into our lips and insists
on being told ? It is very startling and bewildering
sometimes to find the chance of sin occurring just
when we are weakest to resist it. Surely in this
personalness and timeliness of temptation is one of
the most remarkable features of the " Mystery of In
iquity." Now take yet another point in the mysteriousness
of sin — its power of self-disguise. There is some-

12 THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
thing encouraging and something disheartening in
the way in which sin is constantly inducing us to
commit it, by presenting itself to us as something
different from what it really is. It is disheartening,
because there is no sin which people, keeping the
dread of it all the time before their own consciences,
no sin so heinous that people may not be brought to
commit it ; and yet it is encouraging to see that
people do need to have vice present itself to them
under the cloak of virtue before they will heartily
give up to it their allegiance. Is it not wonderful
to see how few sins in this world are done flatly,
fairly, blankly, as sins ? We carry our consciences by
side attacks, by elaborate strategies and artifices.
We almost never charge up in the face of our sense
of right and take it by assault. It is a very rare
thing, I think, much rarer than we are often ready
to suppose, for a man to say to himself, this thing
is bad, bad and not good, certainly and neces
sarily and nothing but bad, and yet I will do it.
Go and sit down by the murderer in his cell, by the
traitor in his 'camp, stand with the persecutor before
his burning victim, look into the hot heart of the
adulterer or the blasphemer, tie the liar down to
give an account of the disgraceful falsehood he has
uttered, and every one of them has his fair mask to
spread before the face of the iniquity to which he
has yielded himself. Covetousness dresses itself in
the decent robes of prudence, idleness calls itself
innocence, prodigality goes garbed as generosity,
they all masquerade through society and trap the
souls of men. This is the meaning of the conviction

THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. 13
of sin, this is what the Gospel does, — it strips the
false shows off, and it is then, when men see their
lives as what they are, when the inner nature of acts
writes out their true titles on their foreheads ; then
that that terrible humiliation comes of which we hear
the subjects of the Gospel speak ; then that some
strong men stand and tremble like children before
the barrenness and wickedness of their whole lives,
and others fall and press their faces in the dust to
shut out the reproaching sight, and cry out before
their convicted selves their wild " unclean ! un
clean!" One cannot stand before a crowd of his fellow-men,
and not think what would come to pass if the Gospel
in one sudden moment did its work for all of them.
O we are self-complacent as we sit and look into
one another's faces here to-day ! We have our sins
here all decently labelled, all decently clad. What
if He came, the Spirit of all truth, and wiped out
every false name and wrote up every true one ! We
tremble to think of what these walls must see.
We should not dare look up on one another's shame
bowed down each with the supreme shamefulness of
his own. We should leap at once into a self-abhor
rence like to Job's. This would turn to a Lenten
afternoon then indeed. " Out of the deep " we
should cry unto God together. Out of the deep of
our honest humiliation ! Of all the mysteries of
iniquity is there any stranger, more bewildering, than
this — this power of self -disguise ? There is no sin
that may not be made to look like holiness, no holi
ness that may not be made the cloak of a sin. What

14 THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
»
does it mean ? Is there a vice for every virtue, a
shadow for every sunlight ? Is there an iniquity cut
into the shape and painted, in the hue of every good
ness ; and is the power of substituting the evil for the
good intrusted to the cunning and unscrupulous
hands of some infernal malice ? What a strange as
sociation and correspondence between the good and
evil it suggests ! Is it that the arch-fiend, the fallen
angel, took with him when he fell out of the skies
the patterns of the heavenly glory, and makes the
curses that he sends upon the earth after their
blessed shapes? However it may come, there is
something fearful in having to live in the distrustful-
ness, and confusion, and perplexity that grows out of
this strange Mystery of Iniquity.
These, then, I have specified as some of the mys
teries in the character and operations of human sin ;
some of the phenomena whose reality we are com
pelled to recognize, but whose methods and means it
is totally out of our power to understand. If we
tried to generalize them, and find out thus something
of the real nature of sinfulness, I do not think it
would be hard to read one general character in all
these various workings. They all show that wonder
ful activity, mobility, facility, malignity, which we
always conceive of as belonging only to a person
ality. We have almost been driven to a personal
phraseology in speaking of them. When we see
some force working its way with restless energy
against the sluggishness of higher forces, choosinc its
persons and points of attack, choosing its times of
action with some marvellous discrimination, putting

THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. 15
on, when need demands it, the cloak and mask of a
diviner power, malignantly, dexterously, with such
strange choice and ingenuity doing its work, what
better conception can we form of it than that which
the sublime language of the Scripture gives us of a
personal evil, a Satan, a bad spirit set to the endless
work of thwarting God and ruining the hope of man !
Reason may find what difficulties she will in the doc
trine of a personal Satan, but she has yet to harmo
nize and arrange, under any other idea, the phenom
ena of human sin. Till she does this, there stands
forth this personal " Mystery of Iniquity," which
Paul, with a sublime realism, sees working his devil
ish schemes in personal freedom and power among
the sons of men.
We have spoken thus of the mysteriousness of sin
in its origin and operations. It would be a cruel, a
false, and an unchristian sermon if I closed without
telling you of the diviner mystery in which human
iniquity finds its cure. The first thought round
which the grand wonder of the atonement grows
into shape is this thought of sin as a real live thing
standing forth to be fought with, to be conquered,
to be killed. Not of a mere moral weakness to
be strengthened, or an intellectual emptiness to be
filled, but of an enmity to be slain, a giant to be sub
dued. To meet that enmity, to slay that giant,
Christ comes forth with his wonderful nature. He
undertakes a distinct and dreadful struggle. The
sublime conflict goes on between Christ and Satan,
in a region apart from, above, and separate from
man. We see its outward manifestation in the

16 THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
agony of the cross. We see, but do not comprehend
even that. All the deeper battle goes on out of our
sight. We know not how it fares till the word of
God comes to tell us that the victory is won by our Re
deemer, and that Satan is trodden into death by the
dying Christ. Of all the Mystery of Iniquity, where
is the Mystery like this ? You see how true a mys
tery it is. Nothing but the fact we know. That we
know perfectly. That shining, splendid fact, that
gracious, glorious fact — the fact of the Lord's vic
tory and of Satan's fall — stands forth so clear that
none can doubt it. It takes its place as the one cer
tain, central fact of hope. By it the living live, by
it the dying die ; in it the glorified rejoice forever.
But who shall go behind the fact, and tell its
method? Who shall say how, wiry, where, that all-
availing victory was won ? Only the divine and
human Christ met the power of sin and conquered
it ; and every human being in that triumph of the
one great humanity stood possibly victor over his
mighty and malicious foe.
O wondroas mystery! Who asks to know the
way? Who does not take the glorious truth and
fasten desperate hands upon it, and draw himself up
by it into hope ? Who will not stand content and
let the clouds cover the awful mystery of his great
Master's struggle, so long as out of the clouds he
hears the assuring voice of God : " This is my be
loved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Whosoever
cometh unto me by him shall not perish, but shall
have everlasting life "?
The Mystery of Iniquity ! This is the lesson of

THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. 17
all that we have said to-day, — that we are living in
the midst of mysterious forces leagued against our
souls, — that our enemy is mysterious, is superhu
man. Mysterious and superhuman, then, must be
our safety and defence. Our foe is a spirit. A
higher spirit, then, even the Holy Spirit of God, must
be our champion. " We wrestle not against flesh
and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places." Where
fore we must take unto ourselves the whole armor
of God. Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of
His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that we
may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil,
and having done all, to stand.

n.
THE VALLEY OF BACA.
" Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the
rain also filleth the pools." — Psalms lxxxiv. 6.
The prayer-book version of these words, you will
remember, is a little different : " Who going through
the vale of misery use it for a well ; and the pools
are filled with water." Let us try to keep both
versions in mind while we are speaking of it.
The verse gathers its beauty from the circum
stances of the Psalm. It is drawn out of the richness
of that picture-land of Palestine. The more we
read the Psalms, and indeed all the Bible, we are
impressed with the remarkable value which belongs
to the Holy Land as representing in a continual map
or picture nf>t merely the localities of certain historical
events, but also by a higher association the geography
of the spiritual life of man and the relations of spirit
ual truths to one another. The sacred names have
passed from being merely the titles of hills and rivers
and cities, and belong to principles and moral verities.
In the world's great heart there will forever be a
holy land besides that to which pilgrims travel half
way round the globe. Though the historic land
which lies between the Mediterranean sea and the
Asiatic deserts should be blotted from the surface of

THE VALLEY OF BACA. 19
the earth to-morrow; though some strange miracle
should roll the whole rough surface of the country
smooth, and mix in indistinguishable confusion hill
and valley, upland and river-bed, still there would be
eternally a holy land. Still all over the world, where-
ever sacred associations had transfigured the old
names, the Jordan would roll down its rocky bed
to the Dead sea; still the hills would stand about
Jerusalem ; still the desert would open between
Judea and Galilee ; still Egypt must mean cap
tivity, and the Red sea deliverance, and Gilgal provi
dence, and Bethany domestic piety, and Calvary
redeeming love, — although the visible places to
which those names belong should cease to be forever.
We little know how much we owe to this eternal
picture drawn in the hearts of men, this mapped-out
Palestine of the inner life.
Our text is one of the passages which have con
tributed to draw this picture. " Who passing
through the vale of Baca use it for a well." Stu
dents have not been able to identify and locate the
valley Baca, but it evidently refers either generally
or specially to those difficult ravines which the
people had to cross in coming up to Jerusalem to
the feasts. The Psalm was probably written by
David at some time when he was kept in exile and
could not go up to Jerusalem. It is the yearning of
a loving and devoted heart for the privilege of
worship. " O how amiable are thy dwellings, thou
Lord of hosts. My soul hath a desire and longing
to enter into the courts of the Lord ; my heart and
my flesh rejoice in the living God. Yea, the sparrow

20 THE VALLEY OF BACA.
hath found her an house and the swallow a nest
where she may lay her young, even thy altars, O
Lord of hosts, my King and my God." Then mount
ing up to the height of his sorrow (that height from
which so often the best and widest visions come to
men) a vision comes to him. He sees the multitude,
whom he may not join, going up to worship. He
watches their winding line from hill to hill as they
draw nearer to Jerusalem. " Blessed is the man in
whose heart are thy ways, who going through the
vale of misery use it for a well ; and the pools are
filled with water. They will go from strength to
strength," he cries, exulting in their progress, " and
unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them
in Zion." Then he falls back upon his own need,
" O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer, hearken, O
God of Jacob. I had rather be a door-keeper in the
house of my God than to dwell in the tents of un
godliness." The lesson of the vale of Baca, the vale of misery,
evidently is, the turning of sorrow into joy. Let
us try to* read the parable and understand it.
Notice, then, it is the turning of sorrow into joy;
the turning into, not merely the supplanting, the
succeeding of sorrow by joy. There are two theories
about this thing : One we may call the theory
of compensation, the other the theory of transfor
mation. The compensation theory is the common
est, the one most easily and so most generally
understood. Even Christians are found continually
confusing it with and so substituting it for the higher
and better truth. Its idea is that the world is full of

THE VALLEY OF BACA. 21
evil and discomfort, and that discomfort is to be borne
only by the assurance that it is not universal or per
petual, that it is varied and mixed up with pleasure,
and that if we can only set our lips tight and walk on
over the sorrow we must come to the happiness by
and by. We are told that if it storms to-day the sun
will be out to-morrow; if this week's speculation
fails, the market is still open and to-morrow's invest
ment or the next day's or the next day's may suc
ceed ; if our country is down in the depths of
trial, another somewhere else is sunning itself on the
summit of success. There is this poise and balance
and make-up all through life. This is a favorite doc
trine of our philosophy. I do not find it anywhere
more strikingly stated than in these words of Emer
son: "Polarity, or action and reaction," he declares,
" we meet in every part of nature, in darkness and
light ; in heat and cold ; in the ebb and flow of
waters ; in male and female ; in the inspiration and
expiration of plants and animals ; in the systole
and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of
fluids and of sound ; in the centrifugal and centrip
etal gravity ; in electricity, galvanism, and chemi
cal affinity. If the south attracts, the north repels.
To empty here you must condense there. An inevi
table dualism bisects nature so that each thing is a
half, and suggests another thing to make it whole ;
as, spirit, matter ; man, woman ; odd, even ; subjective,
objective ; in, out ; upper, under ; motion, rest ; yea,
nay." This endless up and down is the law which
this philosophy assumes to be the great consoler.
And far-sighted faith, hunted and tried by suffer-

22 THE VALLEY OF BACA.
ing, carries this philosophy out far beyond the limits
of this world. To how many Christians Heaven and
the eternal happiness present themselves under the
guise of this compensation theory. This world is the
great down. The next world is to be the great up
which is to make it good. The bad prosper here, the
good prosper there. The Christian suffers now to be
rewarded then. This world is miserable, we must
wait for our happiness, and struggle on with tight lips
and torn feet to find it in the next. The deeper the
misery, the more complete the future joy. It would
be easy to point out passages in Scripture which seem
to confirm this doctrine ; passages in which the su
perior bliss of the perfect life casts the miniature ex
periences of this state of being into a darkened shade ;
but he who accepts it as the general rule of existence
has to do it against the general tone of the Bible and
the general verdict of experience, both of which
declare the possibility of happiness this side of the
grave. It is the idea under whose strange tyranny
some very earnest and conscientious souls have been
made morbidly miserable because, forsooth, they
could not help being happy. This would be the
idea under which the pilgrim through the vale of
Baca would not turn it into a well, but only be kept
up through it by far-off visions of the waters of sal
vation which, when he got to Jerusalem, he should
find flowing out of the mount of God. It would
make earth not a foretaste, an earnest, but only a dis
cipline of Heaven. Whatever truth there may be in
it, it evidently is not the whole or the best truth.
Such a faith, with all honor to its exaltedness and

THE VALLEY OF BACA. 23
nobleness, be it said, resembles that over far-sighted
ness which is a disease, not because it sees things afar
off, but because it sees only things afar off and is
blind to the beauties and helps that lie about its feet.
Souls of less intense faith, who cannot carry the
doctrine of compensation into the next life, keep it
and try to use it in this. Nothing is more sad, as it
seems to me, than the way in which we comfort our
selves and one another for our sorrows, by vague,
unrealized promises that sorrow cannot last forever.
We conceive of life as a great swinging sphere
which must forever run a vast orbit, doomed to per
petual change, and so sure by and by to sweep into
the sunlight, if we can only keep alive and wait. It
is a forlorn and miserable comfort. It loses all the
certainty and personal graciousness of Christianity.
There is no piety about it. No man can get into
the habit of thus comforting himself every day and
seeming to be satisfied with this comfort, and yet
keep a real faith in a real, constant, unchanging, in
finite, good God ; and yet how common it is and how
pious we count it. We sing it into songs that sound
almost religious, and feel as if we were comforted and
resigned when their barren words fall on us.
"Be still, sad heart, and cease repining,
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary."
That means, (if it be not going too far to seek a
meaning in what is perhaps meant for mere sentimen-

24 THE VALLEY OF BACA.
tality,) that there is nothing to do on rainy days but
to sit still and be drenched till it clears up. It is the
theory of compensation. There is so much rain to
fall, and if it did not fall to-day it would to-morrow ;
having fallen to-day, to-morrow we shall have the
sun. There is so much suffering to suffer. If we
get through with it this year, the more certainly next
year will rise clear. I presume it is by no means
certain that that is true in physics, it certainly is
false in morals.
Nor can this barren consolation ever give anything
that is worthy to be called patience or resignation.
Patience and resignation are both calm and cheer
ful. This will be either the dogged and sullen yield
ing of a brute to a burden he cannot escape (losing
cheerfulness), or else the reckless excitement of a
gambler kept alive by the perpetual and unreliable
alternation, losing calmness. These travellers through
the vale of Baca have not even the distant vision of
the holy city to inspire them. They can only plod
along the dusty way in the vague hope that some
oasis will appear where they can get a shadow and
a drink. Such is the comfortless comfort that we
give and take.
This is the theory of compensations. Now see
how different it is from this other theory of transfor
mations. David's pilgrims going through the vale of
misery " use it " for a well. They were looking for
ward to Jerusalem. Their hearts leaped, as every
traveller's must when any greener spot promised
them a richer resting-place ; but their life was not
one altogether of the future, not kept distressed and

THE VALLEY OF BACA. 25
anxious with uneasy alternations. They made the
vale itself a well. It was not simply a sorrow that
was succeeded by joy, not merely a peace promised
and looked for and waited for, it was a peace found.
When they grew thirsty they looked, not merely far
ther on into the heart of the future, but deeper down
into the bosom of the present.
It seems to me the very drawing of this picture
must describe to many a soul its own unspoken need,
and make it recognize it. " Yes, that is what I want.
Heaven is glorious, but it is far away. To-morrow
may be all steeped in sunshine ; but meanwhile to
day is dark. There surely must be something better
to do than to sit down and wait. What is it ? " We
all feel that a religion which lives only on the future,
dwells only in the future, is not a whole, cannot be a
wholly efficient faith. What the world needs is pres
ent work, and what all men need are present work
ing conditions, a present life. Hope is a splendid
power, but I can hope fully, because I can hope in
telligently, only as I already taste some intimation
of the thing I hope for. I can strive after the
streams of Zion only as I strengthen myself out of
the wells of Baca.
If we look, then, to see if this doctrine of transfor
mation be possible, it starts out of that word " use."
Things are what they are used for. So it is all over
nature. There stands a tree in the forest. What is
it — a tree ? Yes, but a tree only as material. It is,
in possibility, countless things. What it shall be, in
reality, depends upon the superior will that uses it.
The savage comes with his use, and the tree is a

26 THE VALLEY OF BACA.
canoe and floats upon the river. The builder comes
with his need, and the tree is a wall of planks and
shields a house. The physician comes with his use,
and the tree-bark becomes a medicine and cures the
sick. The farmer comes with his use, and the tree
turns into a roaring fire to keep the winter out at his
door. So of all things. The artist uses a stone,
and it is a statue ; the mason uses a stone, and it is a
doorstep. And beyond mere nature. See how we use
men. We are each other's raw material. I make you
up in some shape into my life, and you in some way
make me up into yours. But what man is of so
fixed a character that he can be made up only into
one invariable thing? Each man makes of his
neighbor that for which he uses him. Why is it that
two men both know and use one other man of rich
and gracious nature, and one gathers and makes
out of him nothing but envy, and jealousy, and dis
content, while the other shapes into his own life a
largeness, and sweetness, and fineness, like that with
which he has to deal ? Why, except that the de
termining power lies finally, not in the one identical
character of the man who is used, but in the two dif
ferent natures of the men who use him ? So of all in
fluences and motives. The same educations wall and
press upon two lives. One rises on them into great
ness, the other drags them down upon it and is
crushed beneath them into ruin. So, go to Heaven.
The same eternal glory feeds two heavenly spirits ;
the same great throne looks down in loving author
ity on both. They tread together the same glassy
streets ; they wait together for the same far-reaching

THE VALLEY OF BACA. 27
messages; they bend together, looking down into a
wisdom they both crave to fathom. Why is it that
Gabriel stands unstained out of all the glory, gather
ing strength and grace, while his brother Lucifer falls
from his side, full of his hate, and treason, and re
venge ? We need not go to angels. How is it that
men use God and make of him such different things
grow by their use of him to saints or devils ? How is
it that the Pharisee and Publican came down the
same temple steps, one cold, and proud, and bitter,
and the other with his heart full of tenderness, and
gratitude, and humblest charity?
As the world goes on and man becomes a more
complete being, the truth that comes out more and
more must be this of the regal importance of the
using moral force. Man the savage is ruled by things,
— rivers, hills, forests, — they make of him what
their own tendencies suggest ; and on the other hand,
man the citizen, man civilized, rules things, makes of
them what he pleases. Man the child is obedient
and plastic ; man the man is authoritative and de
cisive. Surely there is no picture in history so strik
ing and sublime as that which is the one picture of all
history : the soul of man which seemed at first so in
significant, so weak a thing among all these stupen
dous things and forces, slowly, surely, going up into its
own place, taking its stand in. the very central midst
of all of them, moving them all, making them all be
what it will, deciding their nature by their use.
Now, I said that in this truth lies the key to the
difference between the doctrine of compensations
and the doctrine of transformations. The mere com-

28 THE VALLEY OF BACA.
pensation theory forgets this regal position of the
human life. It puts humanity in the power of
things. Man must be carried where things carry
him, and trust to their continual changes to float him
off to-morrow, if they ground him perchance to-day.
"Nay," says the Christain doctrine of transformations,
" things are in the power of man ; as he uses them so
they are." As God said to Adam about the beasts,
" Whatsoever thou callest each, that is his name."
In him, the user, rests the real nature of the things
he uses. They have no invariable fixed nature apart
from him.
Now, let this great user man, this one moral force,
be called upon to go down into the valley of Baca,
into the vale of misery. He finds there all the cir
cumstances of suffering, poverty, sickness, bereave
ment, sin itself ; what then, these are things and he
is man. They are what he is. Let him rule them,
not be ruled by them. Let him take down there a
religious, trustful nature, a pious, cheerful heart, and
there is mpre promised than just that his cheerful
piety shall be able to support him through ; he shall
exercise his human right of ruling and of using
these, and his cheerful, trustful heart shall come out
with a more perfect joy and a more certain faith than
he had carried in. He shall not come out half-dead
with thirst, just able to drag himself up to the foun
tain at the end, but it shall be as David so beautifully
says, " He shall drink of the brook in the way, there
fore shall he lift up his head."
This, then, is the Christian economy of suffering ;
this is the high theory of transmutation. In a world

THE VALLEY OF BACA. 29
full of sorrow and distress how noble, how benig
nant an economy it is ! Our human instinct craves
something like it. We cannot think complacently
of this life or any part of this life as something just
to be endured, to be got through with, as a prelimi
nary to some unknown happiness in store beyond.
We long for a present religion, a present strength, a
present joy, a present God, and we find them all, not
in any weak ignoring of the misery of life, but in the
way in which that misery may become instinct with
happiness, by the sublime mercy of "the vale of
Baca." If we go on, then, a little farther to try to find
out something about the methods of this economy of
transformation, how it is that suffering is not merely
succeeded by but turned into joy, I suppose the
one great answer that includes all others must be
this: that suffering contains the elements of the
highest happiness because it involves the condition
of weakness, of helplessness, of dependence. If the
condition for which man was made was a religious
condition, that is to say a related, a bound up, a de
pendent condition, then the highest human happiness
must always come with the most complete con
formity to that first idea of human life. If depend
ence, then, be happiness, independence, (which if you
take the word apart means just the same as irrelig-
ion,) independence of God, self-sufficiency, must be
unhappiness. And then since suffering in all its
various departments is the breaking up of self-suffi
ciency, of self-confidence, is it not evident at once
that rightly used it may be the setting free of the

30 THE VALLEY OF BACA.
human soul from an unnatural and forced condition,
into its natural, regular, intended, and so happiest
life ? It is simply the conviction of weakness in one's
self letting a man free to return to the strength in
which he belongs. It matters not what the weakness
be; whether the breaking of a leg, so that the man
who walked and earned his bread yesterday has to lie
still and be fed to-day. Or the death of a friend, so
that he who used to lean on a strong shoulder as he
walked feels for it now in vain. Or the disproving
of a favorite proposition, so that where we used to
tread firm on what we thought was certainty, we now
go cautiously and tiptoe over doubt. Anything in
body, brain, or heart that gets that idea of insuffi
ciency home to us, may set us to digging beneath the
self-surface of -our vale of misery to find the God
below for whom the thirsty soul was made.
There is something very beautiful to me in the
truth that suffering, rightly used, is not a cramping,
binding, restricting of the human soul, but a setting
of it free. It is not a violation of the natural order,
it is only a* more or less violent breaking open of
some abnormal state that the natural order may be
resumed. It is the opening of a cage door. It is the
breaking in of a prison wall. This is the thought of
those fine old lines of an early English poet :
" The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home."
Oh, how many battered cottages have thus let
in the light ! How manv broken bodies have set

THE VALLEY OF BACA. 31
their souls free, and how many shattered homes
have let the men and women who sat in darkness
in them see the great light of a present God!
" Stronger by weakness ! " " Who passing through
the vale of misery use it for a well."
We have spoken thus of irresponsible suffering
only; but in a far nobler way it is true of the re
sponsible suffering which comes of sin. This is
the hardest to believe ; but yet, my dear friends,
this is what we need to believe most of all. Be
yond all suffering which comes by natural dispen
sation or by human weakness there is another
which exceeds them all. A man loses his friend
and he is sorry, he loses his property and he is
crushed, he loses his health and he almost gives
up ; but there is a yet untasted woe of which
that man knows nothing yet. With all his wading
through deep waters, there is a suffering in which
he has not yet dipped his foot. Let that same man
find himself a sinner ; let him wake up and see
how his sin has set him far away from God; let
him feel how antagonistic his whole life is to holi
ness ; let him stand guilty, guilty, without a
plea, without a hope, just with his stained and
frightened soul naked before the eye of God,
and then in the conviction of sin, then he has
found what suffering is — sorrow ! The other sor
rows of his life all fade back out of sight and this
is left alone. He walks the valley of his misery
and all is dark. And can this valley too break
forth in wells ? Can these dry pools be filled with
water? Tell me, O Christians, you who out of

32 THE VALLEY OF BACA.
the conviction of your sinfulness have found a
Saviour from your sin, — tell me, all ye who, bowed
down in the dust in the humiliation of your
worthlessness, have heard there, with your face
close to the ground, what you could never hear
while you stood upright, the streams of pardon
running sweet music down below, — tell me, is
not the well of richest joy right here in the midst
of the valley of completest sorrow ; where sin
abounded does not grace much more abound?
O my dear brethren, if any of you now are going
through that valley, may He who led you there
teach you how to " use it for a well." Every step
as you go through it may you hear a voice beside
you crying, " Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye
to the fountain."
It would be interesting to trace out also, as an ele
ment in this economy of transmutation, the way in
which a man may get joy out of suffering by being
brought through suffering into a deeper knowledge
of the nature and purpose of God. Prosperity, as
we have seen, is unconscious of God. Suffering,
whether it will or no, has to be conscious of him.
And if there be a perfectly unselfish joy, one entirely
and perfectly pure, one in which the human faculty
of joyfulness reaches its highest exaltation, it must
be the earnest delight with which a man who loves
God puts himself aside and is utterly happy in
watching and seeing what God is and how he works.
I have seen a man whom the world called a fearful
sufferer living delightful days in this high study of
the ways of God. Day by day his Maker took some

THE VALLEY OF BACA. 33
strength out of his life, unstrung some nerve, put
some pain in ; but the suffering of a decaying body was
so far surpassed by the rare joy of feeling his Maker's
hands busy on the body and the spirit he had made,
and of studying his wondrous ways of working, that
his hours of sickness were the happiest that he had
ever lived. He saw God glorifying himself, and was
abundantly content ; that was the well of which he
drank. " Who passing through the vale of Baca make it a
well ; the rain also filleth the pools." How beauti
fully the two clauses tell of the responsive positions
of God and the human soul in suffering ! It is a
meeting of water from below and water from above.
The wells fill themselves out of the ground and the
rain comes from the sky into the pools ; yet both
from the same original source. Never so much as in
suffering does the divinity which God gave to man
come out and show itself to meet the new divinity
which he sends down to it out of Heaven. Have you
never been struck by coming suddenly on the face of
a man whom you had known long and well, but who
since you knew him had been a sufferer either men
tally or bodily ; and seeing how his face had grown
finer and nobler, so that you almost were awed be
fore him at first ? Something had come out from him
and something had come into him. His grossness
had grown delicate and his brutishness gentle by his
sorrow. And as with faces, so with characters.
Here we must stop. The Bible calls the world a
world of sorrow ; but the same Bible tells us there is
a way of making the vale of misery to laugh with

34 THE VALLEY OF BACA.
springs and fountains. Remember, it is not just
compensation, but transformation that you are to
seek. Not Heaven yet. That looms before us al
ways, tempting us on ; but now the earth, with all
its duties, sorrows, difficulties, doubts, and dangers.
We want a faith, a truth, a grace to help us now,
right here, where we are stumbling about, dizzied
and fainting with our thirst. And we can have it.
One who was man, yet mightier than man, has
walked the vale before us. When he walked it, he
turned it all into a well of living water. To them
who are willing to walk in his footsteps, to keep in
his light, the well he opened shall be forever flowing.
Nay, it shall pass into him and fulfil there Christ's
own words : " Whosoever drinketh of the water that
I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that
I shall give him shall be in him a well of water
springing up into everlasting life."

HI.
HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
" And the four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat
on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, and
cast their crowns before the throne." — Revelation iv. 10.
It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a more
majestic picture than is presented in this fourth chap
ter of the Book of Revelation. The Church of
Christ, with all her labors done and all her warfare
over, stands at length in heaven, before the throne of
Him whose servant she has been, and renders up her
trust and gives all the glory back to Him. When we
hear such a scene described in the few words of
John's poetic vision, I think we are met with a
strange sort of difficulty. The great impression of
the picture is so glorious that we are afraid to touch
it with too curious fingers, to analyze its meaning
and get at its truth. At the same time we feel sure
that there is in it a precise and definitely shaped
truth which is blurred to us by the very splendor of
the poetry in which it is enveloped. We see on the
one hand how often the whole significance of some of
the noblest things in Scripture is lost and ruined by
people who take hold of them with hard, prosaic
hands. Their poetry is necessary to their truth.
On the other hand, we see how many of the most

36 HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
sacred truths of revelation float always before many
people's eyes in a mere vague halo of mystical splen
dor, because they never come boldly up to them as
Moses went up to the burning bush, to see what they
are, and what are the laws by which they act. Shall
we interpret the poetry of Scripture into ordinary lan
guage or not ? No one reads the commentaries with
out feeling that often it would be better not to do so ;
but no one sees how many of the false religious ideas
and superstitions have come of an intense and dazzled,
but blind, perception of Scripture poetry, without
feeling how wisely it needs to be interpreted and
studied. There is danger of mysticism and vague
ness, if you leave the wonderful Bible images unex
plained. There is danger of prosaic dulness and the
loss of all their life and fire, if you elucidate them
overmuch. It is seen everywhere. The great New Testament
image is the cross of Christ, and any one can see how
on the one hand the cross has become a mere object
of vague and feeble sentiment to multitudes who
have been touched by its beauty without trying to
understand its meaning ; and how, on the other hand,
it has become hard and shallow and commercial, all
the mystery and depth and power of appeal passed out
of it, as men have torn its sacred agony to pieces, and
tried to account on mercantile principles for every
pang that Jesus suffered and every mercy that His
suffering offers to the world.
In view of all this difficulty, what shall we do ? It
is not hard to tell what we ought to do, by every
Scripture image and poetic description, although it

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION. 37
may be very hard to do it. We want to draw out
its truth without forgetting that it is poetry; we
want to get out of it a broad and clear idea, which
shall still keep the glow with which it burned while
it lay still in the fire of poetic inspiration. We want
to leave it in heaven, and yet bring it down to earth.
We want to understand it more, and yet feel it just
as much. Something of this kind I want to try to
do to-day, with reference to the great apocalyptic
image of the four and twenty elders casting their
crowns before the throne of God.
What is the broad idea, then, of this great spec
tacle ? The four and twenty elders have been often
considered to represent the Church in its two great
series, the Jewish and the Christian orders. Twelve
patriarchs and twelve apostles may be considered as
representatively constituting that company who came?
with all the fruits and honors of successful life, to
offer them to Him by whose great strength they had
been won. Such an interpretation seems very likely
to be true ; but in a yet broader way we have here
crowned beings, those who had won some victory
and possessed some kingship, giving the very badges
and tokens of their victory and glory to another
greater than themselves, casting their kingly crowns
before the kingly throne of a royalty mightier than
their own. I believe that the picture has that special
reference to the relations of the Christian Church to
its great Head ; but does it not also suggest to us
still broader ideas which are illustrated through all
of human history, and which find their illustrations
constantly in all our daily life ? Those ideas seem to

38 HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
me to be two. The first is the necessary homage
which the higher natures pay to those that are higher
than themselves, and especially to the highest of all.
The second is the way in which every great attain
ment gets its best value from being dedicated to
somebody or some purpose that is greater still.
These two ideas I see coming up out of this picture,
as the soul of a man looks out upon you from his
face. I want to dwell upon them with you for a while
this morning. I think that they can suggest for us
a good deal about the whole nature of reverence and
worship. Take, then, the first of these ideas — the necessary
homage that high natures pay to others which are
higher than themselves, and especially to the high
est of all. Here are crowned beings casting their
crowns down at the feet of a dimly seen figure
which sits upon a throne so much higher than they
are that even their crowns can only reach his feet.
Shall we take that idea and lay it down by the ex
perience of ordinary life ? Does reverence increase
as men gr<5w themselves to be more and more,
greater and greater ? Think of it first with reference
to the homage that men come to pay to what is
higher than themselves, but not the highest — not to
God. Every strong young man starts in a true
self-confidence. He is the master of everything.
Everything is to be his servant. Centred in himself,
he sees all other things revolving around him as if
they were to be the ministers of his necessities. If
he is going into politics, the country is an arena that
has been spread abroad for the race he is to run. If

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION. 39
he is to be an artist, the laws of the materials of art
are but expedients to utter the beauty and sublimity
that is in his soul. If he is going into business, the
great adjustments of the business world are the ma
chinery out of which is to be wrought his fortune.
There is no reverence in all that. Wrapped up in
himself, the eager young aspirant has not caught
sight of the true and regal dignity of these masters
whom he assumes to treat as servants. But what
comes later ? Let our young man grow really great
in any one of these departments, and I take it to be
a universal truth, a truth which all will recognize,
that the greater he grows the more he will come to
know that those things, which he thought to make
servants of, are really masters, and by and by he
will pass into a region where he is able to pay them
the homage they deserve. The mere tyro in politics
thinks the country is made for his ambition ; but the
great statesman sees his country a great and venerable
being for whom it is his privilege to work and live,
and perhaps die. The flippant beginner in art thinks
that all the laws of art are merely arrangements to
help his genius into expression ; but the great artist
is sure that the noblest task his genius can attempt
Is only to utter in visible material some of the ever
lasting laws of beauty. The confident young trader
thinks the whole market made for him ; but the great
merchant has looked wide over all the earth, and is
proud to be a part in that great system of interlacing
work and mutual credit that covers all the continents.
Thus every man, the greater he grows, becomes ca
pable of understanding the greatness of that with

40 HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
which he has to deal, and so enters into the region of
a new homage. Newton could reverence the power
of gravitation more than the child who ignorantly
tosses his ball into the air and sees it fall. Morse
was more able to honor the subtle and mighty force
of electricity than is the mere telegraph operator
who knows nothing but the mere manipulation of his
machine. It is a universal rule that he is a poor
workman who does not honor and respect his work.
A man has no right to be doing any work which, as
he grows greater within it, does not offer him new
views of itself to call out an ever-increasing rever
ence and honor. And in all the good occupations of
life (one would like to impress it upon every young
merchant, young mechanic, and young student whom
he can speak to) a man's best proof of growing
greatness in himself is a growing perception of the
greatness and beauty of his work.
The same is true of men. The greater a man
grows, the more quick and ready he will be to recog
nize and honor another man who is his better. Here
again there is no test so certain of whether a man
has any greatness as whether he is able to pay intel
ligent and sincere respect to other men who have
more than he has. There seem to be certain states
of condition, as it were, with reference to this.
Down at the bottom an unenterprising mortal looks
with blank and stupid wonder at the really great
men who stand at the top of his race. Up a little
higher he is moved with envy and begins to dispar
age them; but when he comes to be great himself, he
knows how to understand them, and yet recognizes

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION. 41
how much they are above him. He has become ca
pable of truly venerating them. Only those who
are kingly themselves can properly honor the king-
liest. And then think of the worship, not merely of that
which is higher than a man's self, but of that which
is the highest of all — the worship of God. There
it is supremely true that men are capable of it only
in virtue of and in proportion to something great,
something divine in themselves. Only those who
have crowns to cast can do true homage before His
throne. This seems to me to be bound up with what
I have already said. 1 claimed — and I think you
agreed with me — that it was the man most profi
cient in any profession who saw the depth and range
of that profession best, and so reverenced it most
deeply. It is the mere smatterer in any profession
who thinks it slight and is contemptuous about it.
Now, just exactly this is true of life. The more
completely a man lives, the more largely alive he is in
every part of him, — in brain, and heart, and hands, —
the more completely he will comprehend the magni
tude of life, and stand in reverence before the Power
that moves and governs it. The mere smatterer in
life, the amateur in living, so to speak, with his half-
vital movements, never realizes the immensity of ex
istence, the vast variety of its complications, the
infiniteness of its privileges and its dangers, the
range upward and the range downward, and so he
goes on satisfied within himself, and offering no
tribute of adoration to the Power which moves in,
and through, and under all this world of life, which

42 HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
he has never fathomed deep enough to find adorable.
But this moving power of all things is God. His
nature is what the soul finds, when tired and be
wildered, like a frightened bird which has escaped
from its own little cage, it flies through the vast ex
panse of life and comes to the shadow that encloses
it. That follows then which I believe that we
continually see. The man most thoroughly alive, he
who lives most, will be most reverent to God. I do
not mean that he will always hold the correctest
ideas. The very fulness of the current of his living
may sweep out here and there strange eccentricities
and aberrations in his way of thinking, but he will
be most constantly conscious of a power over him,
from which he came, out of which streams of influ
ence are always flowing into him, to which he is re
sponsible, to which he must return. The more a
man loves, the more he realizes the limitations in
which all earthly affection labors, and the more
glorious appears to him the Infinite Love. The
more a man thinks, the more he sees how all human
thought is but a drop of water out of the illimitable
ocean of the thought of God. And when a true
man puts his hand to it and bravely does an honest
piece of work, he sees at once the beauty and the
littleness of the work he does, and comprehends the
glory of the perfect work of Him through whom are
all things, and by whom are all things. Some such
necessary connection there seems to be between the
largest living and the completest adoration. I have
known many scoffers, men who believed that there
was a God, but who did not in any way prostrate

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION. 43
themselves before Him, paid Him no homage ; some
of them were very bright men, some of them con
scientious and dutiful, some of them affectionate and
brave ; -but — I do not wholly know why — there was
something imperfect in the development of their
humanity, as it always seemed. They were the men
of unsymmetrical culture; the men in whom some
one power was overgrown and the rest were sluggish;
the men who did not impress you with largeness of
life, but with special, almost mechanical, dexterity of
action ; the men whom you might call upon for cer
tain tasks which require certain skill, but whom you
could not trust with that entire confidence which can
only rest on character. In one word, they were not
kingly men, not men who in any regal way, accord
ing to the old idea of a king, represented their race.
Men with sharp, ingenious tools in their hands, but
no crowns upon their heads. And almost every one
of us knows, too, that in his own life there have been
scoffing and scornful times, periods of irreverence,
when the sacred was not sacred to us, and the vener
able excited in us no veneration ; times when if we
did not scoff at God, it was not because we adored
Him, but because the habits of decent, reverential be
havior were strong enough to carry us through times
of utter selfishness, when nothing seemed great to us
beyond ourselves; times of utter demoralization, when
nothing was mysterious, or inspiring, or sublime.
And what is our impression of such times ? Some
of them were the smartest periods of all our life.
They were perhaps the times when we worked our
hardest — our keenest, wittiest, busiest days perhaps,

44 HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
but not our best, not those which we should choose
even out of our poor, stained, sordid lives, if we
were required to select some which should give a
being of another race some notion of the best life of
a man. Surely we have been our best at those times
when we have most completely worshipped some
thing far better than ourselves. It is when we have
cast our crown most humbly before God that our
crown has been most real, that we have known that
there was indeed a spark of something kingly in our
natures. And then there is one other way of looking at this
matter. Think what company you are in when you
are most reverential and full of the spirit of worship.
When a man is at his business on mere selfish prin
ciples, exercising his business shrewdness, providing
for himself and for his family, far be it from me to
speak with any slight of such practical good occupa
tion ; but yet he is not there about the highest labor,
nor associating himself with the highest company in
the long lines of history. So long as a man is living
for himself and honoring himself, there is an associa
tion, however remote it may be, with all the lowest
forms of selfishness in which men have lived; but
the moment a man begins to live in genuine adora
tion of the absolute good, and worship God, he parts
company from all these lower orders of human life
and enters into the richest and best society that earth
possesses or ever has possessed. Think who you are
with in adoration. When you say to God, " O God,
take me, for the highest thing that I can do with my
self is to give myself to Thee," when you say that to

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION. 45
God, humbly, but with all your heart, kneeling all
apart in your chamber, where no one can see you, it
is bewildering to me to think into what company you
are taken instantly by that prayer of devotion. You
sweep into the current of the best, the holiest, and
the most richly human of our humanity, which in
every age has dedicated itself to God. The wor
shippers of all the world — the Jew, the Greek, the
Hindu, the Christian in all his various cultures, take
you for their brother. You have part in the offering
of Abel's altar, in the worship of Solomon's temple,
in the prison talk of Socrates, in the closet adoration
of all the saints. You are never in such company as
when you are before God's throne offering Him your
brightest and most precious. Yes, men are measured
by their reverences. All human life is like the an
nual procession of the Jews, marching up to Jeru
salem, to the Holy City. The nearer we are to that
place of supreme adoration, the nearer the purpose of
our life is fulfilled. What do you adore, what do
you really reverence and respect? is the real test ques
tion of your life. In an age which makes too little
of reverence, let us not dare to let drop the truth
that only that which is high can worship the highest,
and so covet as the best crown of our existence the
power so to know and feel that we can genuinely
worship God.
And now let us take the second idea which seemed
to be in our text. That idea was, that our highest
attainments always get their best value from being
offered to others who are dearer to us and higher
than ourselves. Go back to our picture again. The

46 HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
four and twenty elders are casting their crowns before
the throne of Christ. Those crowns are the attain
ments of their lives. All that the work of grace had
done in them, all the fruit of their long education, —
they valued it only as they might offer it to Him who
was the object of their reverence and love. How
clearly we are touching here upon one of the uni
versal experiences of men. Is it not true that we do
all things best, when out beyond the thing that we
are doing there stands some one whom we love and
admire for whom the task is done ? The scholar who
is working hard at his problem in order that some
day he may take his triumphant solution of it in his
hands and go to his master who gave him his first
lessons, and say to him, " Take this, this belongs to
you, for I never should have done it if you had not
taught me ; " the soldier who in the midst of battle
is inspired by the thought that if he is brave and
conquers he will give back life to the country that
gave life to him ; the school-boy, who, resisting a
school temptation, is strengthened by the thought of
father and mother at home, who have taught him to
be true and generous, and who comes home after
wards and says, " They wanted me to be mean and to
lie, and I did not because I remembered you, and so
it was your strength that resisted and not mine," —
all these seem to me to be younger brethren of the
elders casting their crowns down at the throne-steps
of their Master ; full of the same spirit, living the
same life.
Such influences are certainly stronger and more
frequent than we know. We are often working in

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION. 41
this way, with a deep reverence for others, when it
seems as if we were doing what we do wholly for
ourselves. A ship captain sails out on a long
voyage, and as he goes it seems as if he carried
all his interests and impulses shut up with him in
that little ship. He finds his plenteous enjoyment
everywhere. He revels in the problems of naviga
tion that his well-trained skill knows how to solve.
He spends long nights on deck, and conquers the
elements that seem to have marshalled all their fury
to decree that the little ship shall not go through.
He rules his crew. He feels the daily joy of diffi
culties overcome. At last he comes to the haven
where he wants to be. There all his business crowds
his days. He is full of intercourse with men. He
accomplishes the purpose of his voyage. He sells
his cargo, and with a new one shipped he sails back,
through months of work and interest and danger, till
he is at the wharf from which he sailed a year ago.
And then — what then ? Why, he goes up on shore
and finds out a little house where a little child, a
mere baby-child,, is living in a nurse's care, and gives
the treasure of his voyage, all that he has earned,
into the little hands of his unknowing child, who
really was the single cause and inspiration of his
toilsome voyage, and really is the reason why he
rejoices in its success. He has not seemed — not
even to himself — to think of her, but really she has
been there in the bottom of his heart all the long
time. The whole success is valuable to him because
he may make an offering of it to her. If you doubt
it, think how it would be if he came back and found

48 nOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
her dead — the house empty, and only a little grave
for him to lavish his love on. Where would be the
value of his treasures then ? Who could wake him
out of the bitterness of his sorrow by rustling the
paper or rattling the money in his ears? How
worthless it would seem when she, the little
daughter for whom he earned it all, was gone !
Such consecrations of our life to others are very
often not less real and powerful because they are
unconscious. Often they are not revealed to us our
selves until some sorrow comes, such as I just de
scribed. How many of us have known what all this
means! We have gone on with our work in life,
thinking that the purpose of our work was centred
in ourselves ! It was our own work that we were
doing. We were working for ourselves. But some
day a friend died — one who was very near to us, one
in whom our life was bound up in many ways.
Who has not known sometimes in life the dreadful
going out of all the interest of living at the time of
such a death ? It seemed as if there were nothing
left to live for. You looked upon your monejr, and
wondered how you ever could have cared to earn it.
The commonest little duties that recurred after the
death was over were weariness to you. You looked
forward, and it seemed as if you never could live out
the long, flat, dreary days that stretched between you
and the grave. The days went by, each with its
twenty-four hours, each with its sunset and its sun
rise, but the zest of them was all gone for you. The
public life, the social life, went on, but it called to
your dead interest in vain. What did you care for

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION. 49
it all ? Then you found that you had indeed been
working for that dear dead friend, that wife, child,
brother, as you never knew. All that you did had
taken its value, not from you, but from them.
When you thought you were working for yourself,
you really had been working for them. And so their
death had taken all the spring and impulse from
you. It was terrible. But it was blessed if you did
not stop there, but, with persistent love that would
not be satisfied until it found the object it had lost,
you traced the precious life on as it left you, till you
followed it into the very bosom of the God who took
it, and poured out there the treasures of devotion
which had no longer any one dear enough to tempt
them on the earth.
One cannot help feeling as he looks at working-
men that this more than anything else is what
makes the difference between them — the presence or
absence in their lives of some distinct superior pur
pose for their work, to which it is all dedicated. It
may be the comfort of a family, it may be a good
cause, the support of education, the fostering of the
great work of the Church ; whatever it is, so it be
something greater than the work itself, so that the
work is turned from an end into a means, it light
ens the pressure of the work most wonderfully, it
relieves the continual burden. Take two men work
ing in the field together — they dig across the field
side by side, but one is always longing for the end
where he can lie down and rest. The other rejoices
in every stroke of his spade as if it were one more
stone laid in the home that he is trying to build, in

50 HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
the cause which he desires to strengthen. And there
is no work so lofty in itself that it does not thus
need something higher than itself to be done for,
something to lift its heavy pressure from the sore and
weary backs of men. Even the work of the Lord
Jesus, that work in which His soul delighted, the
work of telling men of God and saving the world of
sin, — I think no one can read the Gospels and not see
that He was always lifting the heavy pressure of that
work by reminding Himself that He was doing it for
His Father. Is it not very touching He rests,
beyond His own pleasure in His work, upon the con
sciousness that it is His Father's pleasure too. " I
have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do."
That was the perfect satisfaction with which the
Saviour, as it were, folded His hands from His long
task and went to hang upon the cross. That was the
casting down, as it were, of His crown before His
Father's throne.
We have been speaking of the smaller inspirations
that come to men to lighten and redeem their labors,
but they are all subordinate to this, the sense that
the work that we are doing in the world is done for
Christ and God. If a man or woman is able to get
and keep that, there is no drudgery so mean and
crushing that it cannot be lifted and made buoyant —
absolutely none. It is good to think how many men
and women that seemed to live in slavery have really
lived the freest lives, lifted above their slavery by
this continual consciousness of work for God. They
realized another meaning of those wonderful words
of David, — among the most wonderful in all the

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION. 51
Bible, I think, — "I will walk at liberty, for I keep thy
commandments." They would know what those
words that we used in this morning's service really
mean, " O God, whose service is perfect freedom."
This was the case with multitudes of the poor slaves
who have toiled anywhere in their slavery upon the
suffering earth. Flogged to their work, living in
misery, torn from their families, stripped of all the
sweetness of life that comes from having something,
somebody, to work for, what was there to lift off the
load of unthanked and unprofitable labor such as
theirs? There could be nothing unless there came,
as there did come to many a darkened soul among
them, a conviction that their weary work, their
weary lives, were tributes and offerings to Jesus —
that He loved them so, and had so utterly taken them
for His, that He was pleased and glorified when they
were patient and submissive in the wretchedness
from which they could find no escape. As soon as
they saw this, all was completely changed. The
cabin walls opened and it was a temple. The dreary
cotton-field became alread)-, by anticipation and faith,
the field beside the river of life under the towers of
the New Jerusalem, where they who have served Him
faithfully and glorified His name are to walk forever
with the Lamb.
We speak of them because their suffering stood out
strong and picturesque. But the release that came
to faithful Christian hearts among them was nothing
different in kind from that which comes to hundreds
of patient sufferers everywhere, always. When it
enters like a flood of light into the soul of some

52 HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
wretched invalid or some victim of relentless misfort
une, that by a faithful patience under his suffering
he can glorify ,God and show forth the power of
Christ, then what a change comes to him ! How
all is transfigured! How full of beauty the hated sick
room grows ! There is something behind the suffering
for the suffering to rest and steady itself upon. The
light has been kindled behind the dark window, and
all its fair lines and bright colors shine out. In the
purpose of the suffering the escape from the suffer
ing is found ; as when Paul and Silas, in the book
of Acts, sang praises to God by night in prison, when
they turned their imprisonment into a tribute to
their Master, then "the foundations of the prison
were shaken, and . . . the doors were opened, and
every one's bands were loosed."
I am sure that there are many among us who feel
the need to have the labor of our life redeemed, —
merchants, clerks, lawyers, laborers, teachers, house
keepers, one thing or another, — the chosen or fated
task of our life so often seems to be mere drudgery,
crowding us down, pressing the life out of us. It is
strange how soon many young men get to feel this
about the occupations to which they have given up
their lives, and all their first enthusiasm dies away.
Then come the dreary years of unrelieved and un-
enthusiastic work, only enlivened by the unhealthy
excitement of mere commercial rivalry or professional
spite. How many men we have seen restless all their
lives, forever changing their work because they could
not stand the heavy pressure of mere heavy, hated
toil ! Does not what we have been saying seem to

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION. 53
show that the trouble lies not in the kind 01 work,
but in this — in whether men have beyond their work
a purpose to dedicate it to, which can make it light
and buoyant? No doubt some works more easily
find such a purpose than others do, but any work
that is good and honest is capable of it. And this
decides the ranks of works and their effects upon the
men who do them. No work is necessarily sacred in
its influence upon the man who does it, and no le
gitimate work is necessarily secular and secularizing.
It is possible to sell goods for God's glory, and it is
possible (as the Church knows only too well) to swing
censers and preach sermons for our own ; and then
there is no doubt that the man who sells goods gets
more blessing out of his work than the man who
sways the censer or preaches the discourse.
One would wish to urge this very strongly upon
every man, especially upon every young man who is
just beginning his work in life, and to whom his
work, it may be, has already begun to show that in
time it may come to be a weariness and a burden.
What you need is some purpose beyond. What shall
it be ? The possible purposes lie in circles stretching
one beyond another. If you can do your work for a
friend or for a family as well as for yourself, you have
already redeemed much of its sordidness. If you can
do it for a cause, for the progress of society and the
improvement of business, for your country, for your
church, then you have lifted it still more. If you
can do it for God, in perfect, childlike, loving desire
for His glory, then your work, be it as heavy in its
nature as it may, leaps of itself from the low ground,

54 HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.
and, instead of crushing you with it to the earth, car<
ries you up every day into the presence of the God
for whom you do it. That is the continual beauty
of a consecrated life, possible under all sorts of cir
cumstances, possible to every kind of man in every
kind of task.
Need I tell you the only thing that remains to be
told? Need I tell you that the only influence which
can really make us consecrate our lives and works to
Christ is the profound and joyous confidence that
Christ has done that for us, which makes the utter
consecration of ourselves only a feeble token of the
gratitude we owe and want to give ? It is the soul
forgiven — the soul to which the cross is everything
— the soul living every day in the richness of the
new reconciliation to the Father — this is the soul
that values all it has and does, only as a possible
tribute to its Redeemer and its Lord. This is the
soul that casts its Crown of life down at the feet
of the Lord of life, and glories in its Crown's rich
ness not fqr itself, but for the greater praise of Him.
Is there a motive of work conceivable so pure, so
strong, so joyous, so humbling, so exalting, as this ?
— that a man should first take Christ's free love and
then try to live as full and bounteous a life as pos
sible, that he might have as worthy a tribute as pos
sible to offer to his Lord and Saviour?

IV.

THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE
SEASHORE.
"And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore." — Ex.
odus xiv. 30.
It was the Red sea which the children of Israel
had crossed dry-shod, " which the Egyptians essaying
to do were drowned." The parted waves had swept
back upon the host of the pursuers. The tumult
and terror, which had rent the air, had sunk into
silence, and all that the escaped people saw was here
and there a poor drowned body beaten up upon the
bank, where they stood with the great flood between
them and the land of their long captivity and op
pression. It meant everything to the Israelites. It
was not only a wonderful deliverance for them, but
a terrible calamity for their enemies. It was the end
of a frightful period in their history. These were
the men under whose arrogant lordship they had
chafed and wrestled. These hands had beaten them.
These eyes they had seen burning with scorn and
hate. A thousand desperate rebellions, which had
not set them free, must have come up in their minds.
Sometimes they had been successful for a moment;
sometimes they had disabled or disarmed their ty
rants ; but always the old tyranny had closed back

56 THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE.
upon them more pitilessly than before. But now all
that was over; whatever else they might have to
meet, the Egyptian captivity was at an end. Each
dead Egyptian face on which they looked was token
and witness to them that the power of their masters
over them had perished. They stood and gazed at
the hard features, set and stern, but powerless in
death, and then turned their faces to the desert, and
to whatever new unknown experiences God might
have in store for them.
It is a picture, I think, of the way in which ex
periences in this world become finished, and men
pass on to other experiences which lie beyond. In
some moods it seems to us as if nothing finally got
done. When we are in the thick of an experience
we find it hard to believe or to imagine that the time
will ever come, when that experience shall be wholly
a thing of the past and we shall have gone out
beyond it into other fields. When we open our eyes
morning after morning and find the old struggle on
which we ^closed our eyes last night awaiting us ;
when we open our door each day only to find our
old enemy upon the doorstep ; when all our habits
and thoughts and associations have become entwined
and colored with some tyrannical necessity, which,
however it may change the form of its tyranny, will
never let us go, — it grows so hard as almost to appear
impossible for us to anticipate that that dominion
ever is to disappear, that we shall ever shake free our
wings and leave behind the earth to which we have
been chained so long. On the long sea-voyage the
green earth becomes inconceivable. To the traveller in

THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE. 57
the mountains or the desert it becomes very difficult
to believe that he shall some day reach the beach and
sail upon the sea. But the day comes, nevertheless.
Some morning we go out to meet the old struggle, and
it is not there. Some day we listen for the old voice
of our old tyrant, and the air is still. At last the day
does come when our Egyptian, our old master, who
has held our life in his hard hands, lies dead upon
the seashore, and looking into his cold face we know
that our life with him is over, and turn our eyes and
our feet eastward to a journey in which he shall have
no part. Things do get done, and when they do,
when anything is really finished, then come serious
and thoughtful moments in which we ask ourselves
whether we have let that which we shall know no
longer do for us all that it had the power to do,
whether we are carrying out of the finished experi
ence that which it has all along been trying to give
to our characters and souls.
For while we leave everything behind in time, it
is no less true that nothing is wholly left behind.
All that we ever have been or done is with us in
some power and consequence of it until the end. Is
it not most significant that these children of Israel,
whom we behold to-day looking the dead Egyptians
in the face and then turning their backs on Egypt,
are known and appealed to ever afterwards as the
people whom the Lord their God had brought " out
of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" ?
In every most critical and sacred moment of their
history they are bidden to recall their old captivity.
When God most wants them to know Him, it is as

58 THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE.
the God of their deliverance that He declares Him
self. The unity of life is never lost. There must
not be any waste. How great and gracious is the
economy of life which it involves ! Neither to dwell
in any experience always, nor to count any experience
as if it had not been, but to leave the forms of our
experiences behind, and to go forth from them clothed
in their spiritual power, which is infinitely free and
capable of new activities, — this is what God is
always teaching us is possible, and tempting us to
do. To him who does it come the two great bless
ings of a growing life, — faithfulness and liberty:
faithfulness in each moment's task, and liberty to
enter through the gates beyond which lies the larger
future. " Well done, good servant : thou hast been
faithful over a few things. Enter thou into the joy
of thy Lord."
All this is true, but it is very general. What I
want to do this morning is to ask you to think about
the special experience to which our text refers, and
consider how one truth is true of that, and of what
correspond! to it in all men's lives. It was the end
of a struggle which had seemed interminable. The
hostility of Hebrew and Egyptian had gone on for
generations. However their enmity may be dis
guised or hidden, the tyrant and the slave are always
foes. If hope had ever lived, it had died long ago.
Patient endurance, grim submission, with desperate
revolt whenever the tyranny grew most tyrannical,
— these had seemed to be the only virtues left to the
poor serfs. Not to be demoralized and ruined by
their servitude, to keep their self-respect, to be sure

THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE. 59
still that they were Abraham's children and that
Abraham's God still cared for them, patience and
fortitude, — these must have been the exhortations
which they addressed to their poor souls as they
toiled on in the brickyard or by the river.
It does not prove anything, if you please, about
our present life, but it certainly sets us to asking
new questions about it, perhaps to believing greater
things concerning it, when in our typical story we
behold all this changed. Behold, the day came when
the chains were broken and the slaves went free.
Are, then, our slaveries as hopeless as they seem ?
Are we condemned only to struggle with our enemies
in desperate fight, and shall we not hope to see them
some day dead like the Egyptians on the seashore?
Surely it is good for us to ask that question, for
nothing is more remarkable than the way in which,
both in public and personal life, men accept the per
manence of conditions which are certainly some day
to disappear. The whole of history which teaches
us that mankind does conquer its enemies and see
its tyrants by and by lying dead on the seashore,
often appears to have no influence with the minds
of men, all absorbed as they are in what seems a
hopeless struggle. But look around! Where are
the Egyptians which used to hold the human body
and the human soul in slavery? Have you ever
counted? The divine right of rulers, the dominion
of the priesthood over the intellect and conscience,
the ownership of man by man, the accepted ine
quality of human lots, the complacent acquiescence
in false social states, the use of torture to extort the

60 THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE.
needed lie, the praise of ignorance as the safeguard
of order, the irresponsible possession of power without
corresponding duty, the pure content in selfishness —
do you realize, in the midst of the cynical and de
spairing talk by which we are surrounded, can you
realize, how these bad tyrants of the human race
have lost their power over large regions of human
life ? They are dead Egyptians. Abominable social
theories which fifty years ago, in the old days of
slavery, in the old days of accepted pauperism,
men stated as melancholy, but hopeless, truisms are
now the discarded rubbish of antiquity, kept as they
keep the racks and thumbscrews in old castle-dun
geons for a tourists' show.
Is there anything more wonderful than the way in
which men to-day are daring to think of the abolition
and disappearance of those things which they used
to think were as truly a part of human life as the
human body, or the ground on which it walks ? Ah !
my friends, you only show how you are riving in the
past, not in the present, when you see nothing but
material for sport in the beliefs of ardent men and
brave societies which set before themselves and human
kind the abolition of poverty, the abolition of war,
the abolition of ignorance, the abolition of disease,
the sweeping away of mere money competition as the
motive power of life, the dethronement of fear from
the high place which it has held among, aye, almost
above, all the ruling and shaping powers of the des
tiny of man. I recognize in many a frantic cry the
great growing conviction of mankind that nothing
which ought not to be need be. I hear in many

THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE. 61
hoarse, ungracious tones man's utterance of his con
viction that much which his fathers thought was
meant to cultivate their patience by submission, is
meant also to cultivate their courage by resistance
till it dies. " The Egyptian must die." That is the
assurance which is possessing the heart of man.
When any evil does finally perish, then there is
something infinitely pathetic in the remembrance of
the way in which mankind for generations accepted
it as inevitable and drew out of its submission to it
such blessing and education as pure submission to the
inevitable is able to bestow. The poor man, who
thinks his poverty, and the ignorance and servitude
which his poverty entails, all right, comforts himself
by saying that God made him poor in order that he
might be patient and learn to possess his soul in self-
respect. By and by when the iniquity of the system
under which he has lived gives way and he finds him
self admitted to the full rights and duties of a man —
what then ? Infinitely pathetic, as it seems to me, is
the recognition that he wins of the great love and
wisdom with which God would not let even that
darkness be entirely fruitless of light ; but while He
was making ready for the fuller life of which the
poor man never dreamed, at the same time fed him
in the wilderness with manna which the wilderness
alone could give, so that no delight of freedom to
which he afterwards should come need make him
wholly curse or utterly despise the regions of dark
ness and restraint through which he came to reach it.
Is it not thus that we may always explain at least
a part, the best part, of that strange longing with

62 THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE.
which the world, when it has entered into any higher
life, still finds itself looking back to the lower life
out of which it has passed? It is not properly regret.
It is not a desire to turn back into the darkness. The
age of real faith does not covet again the chains of
superstition. The world at peace does not ask to be
shaken once more by the earthquakes of war. But
faith does feel the beauty of complete surrender which
superstition kept for its sole spiritual virtue; and
peace, with its diffused responsibility, is kindled at the
thought of heroic and unquestioning obedience which
the education of war produced. Still let superstition
and war lie dead. We will not call them back to
life ; but we will borrow their jewels of silver and
jewels of gold as we go forth into the wilderness to
worship our God with larger worship. Do you not
feel this in all the best progress? Do you not see it
in the eyes of mankind, in the depths of the eyes of
mankind always, as it turns away from the dead forms
of its old masters and goes forth into the years to be;
the hoarded power of the past glowing beneath the
satisfaction of the present and the fiery hope of the
unknown future ?
Ah, well, there is always something fascinating in
thus dwelling on the fortunes of the world at large,
peering, like fortune-telling gypsies, into the open
palm which she holds out to all of us. It is fas
cinating, and is not without its profit. But just as, I
suppose, the shrewdest gypsy may often be the most
recklessly foolish in the government of her own life,
so it is good for us always to turn speedily and ask
how the principles which we have been wisely apply-

THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE. 63
ing to the world, apply to that bit of the world which
we are set to live.
Do we believe — you and I — in the death of our
Egyptians ? What is your Egyptian ? Some passion
of the flesh or of the mind? — for the mind has its
tyrannical passions as well as the flesh. Years, years
ag°» y°u became its captive. Perhaps you cannot at
all remember when. Perhaps, like these children of
Israel, you were born into its captivity. It was your
father, or your father's fathers, that first became its
slaves. When you first came to know yourself, its
chains were on your limbs. As you grew older you
knew that it was slavery, but it was such a part of
all you were and all you did that you accepted it.
That has not made you cease to struggle with it, but
it has made you accept struggle hopelessly, as some
thing never to be outgrown and left behind. You
have looked forward into the stretch of years, and in
prophetic imagination you have seen yourself an old
man, still wrestling with the tyranny of your covefc-
ousness, or your licentiousness, or your prejudice,
getting it down, planting your foot upon its neck,
even compelling it to render you, out of the unceasing
struggle, new supplies of character; absolutely fixed
and determined never to give up the fight until you
die — to die fighting. All this is perfectly familiar.
Countless noble and patient souls live in such self-
knowledge and consecration. But there comes some
thing vastly beyond all these, when the soul dares to
believe that its enemy may die, that the lust, or the
prejudice, or the covetousness may absolutely pass
out of existence, and the nature be absolutely free —

64 THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE.
sure no doubt to meet other enemies and to struggle
till the end, but done with that enemy forever, with
that Egyptian finally dead upon the seashore.
When 'that conviction takes possession of a man,
his fight is a new thing. The courage not of des
peration, but of certain hope, fills every limb and gives
its force to every blow. The victory which the soul
believes is coming is here already as a power for its
own attainment.
Has a man a right to any such hope as that, or is
it the mere dream of an optimistic sermon ? I dare
appeal to you and ask you whether, in your own
experience, God has not sometimes given you the
right to such a hope ? Are there no foes of your
youth which you have conquered and left dead, pass
ing on to greater battles? I am not speaking of the
vices which you have miserably left behind, merely
because the taste is exhausted and the strength has
failed — vices which you would take up again if you
were once more twenty years old. Those are poor
victories. Those are no victories at all. But I mean
this : Whether you are a better or a worse man now
than you were twenty years ago. Are there not at
least some temptations to which you yielded then to
which you know that you can never yield again? Are
there not some meannesses which you once thought
glorious which now you know are mean ? Are there
no places where you once stumbled where now you
know you can walk firm ? I pity you if there are not.
Other enemies which you then never dreamed of you
have since encountered, but those enemies are done
with. The Moabites and Midianites are before you

THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE. 65
and around you, but the Egyptians are dead. And in
their death your right and duty are to read the proph
ecy of the death of every power which stands up
between you and the Promised Land!
The appeal is not only to experience. It is to the
first Christian truth concerning man. I have preached
it to you a thousand times. I will preach it again
and again until the end. The great truth of Chris
tianity, the great truth of Christ, is that sin is unnat
ural and has no business in a human life. The birth
of Christ proclaimed that in one tone : His cross pro
claimed it in another! And that which is unnat
ural is not by any necessity permanent. The struggle
of all nature is against the unnatural — to dislodge
it and cast it out. That beautiful struggle per
vades the world. It is going on in every clod of
earth, in every tree, in every star, and in the soul of
man. First to declare and then to strengthen that
struggle in the soul of man was the work of Christ.
That work still lingers and fails of full completion,
but its power is present in the world. When He
takes possession of a nature He quickens that strug
gle into life. No longer can that nature think it
self doomed to evil. Intensely sensitive to feel the
presence of evil as he never felt it before, the Chris
tian man instantly and intensely knows that evil is a
stranger and an intruder in his life. The wonder is
not that it should some day be cast out : the wonder
is that it should ever have come in. The victory
promised in the sinless Son of man is already poten
tially attained in the intense conception of its natural
ness. This is Christianity.

66 THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE.
Is not this the change which you can see coming
in the faces of the sinners who meet Jesus and feel
His power in the wonderful stories which fill the
pages of the Gospels ? The first thing which comes
to them, the great thing which comes to them all, is
a change in their whole conception of life. What
used to seem natural comes to seem most unnatural.
That which they called unnatural becomes so natural
that they cannot see why it should not immediately
come to pass. The rich young man's money begins
to fade in his hand, and he feels its tyranny passing
away. The Magdalen's face grows luminous with a
new vision of purity as the only true human life.
Bigotry looks to Nicodemus what it really is. The
simple naturalness in the hope that the children of
God should live the life of God comes and folds
itself around each of them. And in that atmos
phere of their new life the old life with its old bond
ages dies.
You see how positive all this is. And that, too,
seems to me to be depicted in the old Hebrew story,
which we are using for our parable. It was on the
farther seashore of the Red sea that the Egyptian
pursuers of the Israelites lay dead. It was when the
people of God had genuinely undertaken the journey
to the land which God had given them, that the
grasp of their enemy gave way and the dead hands
let them go. You may fight with your enemy on his
own ground, only trying to get the immediate better
of him, and win what he claims for yourself, and
your fight will go on, more or less a failure, more or
less a victory, forever. You must go forth into a new

THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE. 67
land, into the new ambition of a higher life, and
then, when he tries to follow you there, he perishes.
O selfish man ! not merely by trying not to be sel
fish, but by entering into the new joy of unselfish
consecration, so only shall you kill your selfishness.
When you are vigorously trying to serve your fellow-
men, the last chance that you will be unjust or cruel
to them will disappear. When you are full of enthu
siasm for truth, the cold hands of falsehood will let
you go. Get the Egyptian off his own ground, seek
not the same low things by higher means; seek
higher things, and the low means will know that they
cannot hold you their slave. They will lie down and
die. And then the pillar of fire and the pillar of
cloud will have you for their own and lead you on in
your free journey.
With regard, then, to a man's permanent escape
from evil, may we not say these two things, — that it
must come about as the natural privilege of his life,
and it must be positive ? To the soul which has
finally escaped from sin into the full freedom of the
perfect life, the soul which has entered into the celes
tial liberty, must not these two things be clear, —
first, that his old dream of life was a delusion, that
he was never meant to be the thing which he so
long allowed himself to be ; and, second, that the
great interests of the celestial life, the service of God
which has there claimed the child of God, makes
sure forever that there shall be no return to the old
servitude ? And what we dare to believe shall there
in heaven come perfectly, and with reference to all
wickedness, why may we not believe that here and

68 THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE.
now it may come in its degree with reference to some
special sin ? Know that it is not natural that you
should steal, that you should lie ; get rid of the first
awful assumption that it is bound up with your con
stitution, cease to be a weak fatalist about it. That
is the first thing. And then launch bravely forth
into brave works of positive honesty and truth. In
sist that your life shall not merely deny some false
hood, but that it shall assert some truth. Then, not
till then, shall the lie let you go, and your soul count
it impossible ever again to do — wonderful, almost
incredible, that it ever should have done — what once
it used to do from day to day.
I think that there are few things about our human
nature which are more constantly marvellous than
its power of acclimating itself in moral and spiritual
regions where it once seemed impossible that it
should live at all. The tree upon the hillside says :
"Here and here alone can I live. Here my fathers
lived in all their generations. Into this hard soil
they struck their roots, and drank their sustenance
out of its rocky depths. Take me down to the
plain and I shall die." The gardener knows better.
He takes the doubting and despairing plant and
carries it, even against its will, to the broad valley,
and sets it where the cold winds shall not smite it,
and where the rich ground feeds it with luxuriance.
And almost as they touch each other the ground and
the root claim one another, and rich revelations of its
own possibility flood the poor plant and fill it full
of marvel with itself.
Of less and less consequence and meaning seem

THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE. 69
to me those easy things which men are always saying
about their own natures and character. " I have no
spiritual capacity," says one. " It is not in me to be a
saint," another cries. " I have a covetous soul. I
cannot live except in winning money." " I can make
many sacrifices, but I cannot give up my drink."
" I can do many things, but I cannot be reverent."
So the man talks about himself. Poor creature, does
he think that he knows, down to its centre, this won
derful humanity of his ? It all sounds so plausible
and is so untrue ! " Surely the man must know him
self and his own limitations." Why must he ? How
can he know what lurking power lies packed away
within the never-opened folds of this inactive life ?
Has he ever dared to call himself the child of God,
and for one moment felt what that involves ? Has
he ever attacked the task which demands those
powers whose existence he denies, or tried to press
on into the region where those evil things cannot
breathe which he complacently declares are an in
separable portion of his life ? There is nothing on
earth more seemingly significant and more absolutely
insignificant than men's judgment of their own moral
and spiritual limitations.
When the fallacy has been exposed, when the man
has become something which he used to go about de
claring that it was absolutely impossible that he
should ever be, or has cast finally away that which
he has counted a very part and portion of his life, it is
often very interesting to see how he thinks of his cast-
off sin. He, if he is a true man, counts his escape
complete, but he never forgets his old bondage. He

70 THE EGYPTIANS DEAD UPON THE SEASHORE.
is always one whom God has led " out of the land of
Egypt." Egypt is still there, although he has escaped
from it. Egypt did not cease to be when the Egyp
tians with whom he had to do fell dead. Men are
still doing the sin which has now become impossible
for him. He understands those men by his past,
while he cannot imagine himself sharing their life to
day. He is full of sympathy with the sinner, which
is one with, of the same substance as, his security
against the sin. Pity and hopefulness and humility
and strength all blend into the peaceful and settled
composure of his life.
It is a noble attitude towards a dead sin. You look
into its dead face and are almost grateful to it. Not
with a gratitude which makes you any way more tol
erant of its character. You hate it with your heart —
but look ! Has it not given you self-knowledge, and
made you cry out to God and set your face towards
the new life ?
My friends, get something done ! Get something
done ! Do not go on forever in idle skirmishing
with the same foe. Realize, as you sit here, who
your chief enemy is, what vice of mind or body,
what false or foul habit. Cry out to God for
strength. Set your face resolutely to a new life in
which that vice shall have no part. Go out and
leave it dead. Plenty of new battles and new foes,
but no longer that battle and that foe ! Get some.
thing done ! May He who overcame, not merely for
Himself but for us all, give you courage and make
you sharers in His victory and in the liberty which He
attained.

V.
THE BATTLE OF LIFE.
" For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against princi
palities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this
world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." — Ephesians
vi. 12.
" The Battle of Life " is a metaphor which almost
all men at some time in their lives realize and own
as true. It suggests a picture which recalls to almost
every man his own history, if his has been at all an ear
nest life. We may think that it has not been so with
other men ; we may look at some bright and smiling
life, and say with something of envy, with something
also almost like reproach in our tone, "Lo, life has
no battle for him ! Behold how smooth and easy all
the world has been for him ! " The man himself
knows better. And we, if we come close to him, can
see the scars, nay, we can hear the battle of his life
still going on. But whether we come close enough
to him to know the real truth of his life or not, we
know the truth about our own. Life is a battle.
Forever on the watch against our enemies, forever
guarding our own lives, forever watching our chance
for an attack upon the foe, — so we all live if we are
earnest men.
And this universal consciousness of battle is true
to the figure by which we illustrate it in this, — that

72 the battle of life.
it affects different fighters in different ways, it in
spires them with most various emotions. To one
man the fact of the struggle of life is a perpetual
exhilaration : upon another it weighs with an almost
intolerable oppressiveness. To one man the ever-
sounding battle bugle calling men always to the
fight, brings a dismay which paralyzes every power :
another man it seems to distract into the wildest
folly, and he rushes everywhere, striking at random
at friend or foe. It has no uniform effect. It catches
each man as it finds him, and inspires him according
to his character.
But metaphors are delusive, and if we cling too
long and closely to them they grow tiresome. They
are very apt often to blind us to the need of care
ful definition and discrimination. This metaphor, for
instance, — Life a Battle, — may seem so satisfactory
that it may lead us to forget that there are all kinds
of battles, that we do not know much about a battle
until we understand who the enemy is and what the
weapons are. Two tribes of savages hewing away at
each other*in the jungle, the host of crusaders con
tending with the soldiers of the prophets on the
great plain of Galilee, the Swiss peasants fighting for
freedom in their mountain fastnesses, our soldiers
struggling with rebellion, — all these are battles ; but
how different they are! Evidently, before the old
metaphor, " the Battle of Life," can mean anything
very definite or practical to us, we must open it with
the sharp knife of a question. We must ask who is
the enemy with whom the battle of life is being
fought.

the battle of life. 73
The answers which will come are very various, and
more than one answer will be true. See what some
of the many answers are. The men who are engaged
in any of the hard elemental works by which the
earth is subdued to the use of man will tell us that
human life is one long fight with nature. The sailor
on the sea, the farmer in the field, the miner in the
bowels of the earth, the woodman in the forest, — all
of these are wrestling with the outer forces of the
earth, and their hard battle rings in the endless chorus
of axe and hammer which sounds through every land.
Then comes the merchant fighting with the competi
tion of his brethren. Then comes the legislator fight
ing with the barbarous tendencies which still haunt
the most civilized societies. Then come the philan
thropists fighting with abuses and ignorance and
cruelty. And everywhere there is the man, hopefully
or hopelessly, fighting with what he calls his fate, —
the general aggregate of things about him and behind
him which seems set to keep him down and to impede
his way. The world is full of all these ideas of
battle. And then right into the midst of them steps
Paul, with his clear, ringing Christian word, " What
are you fighting with? Do you ask that?" he says.
"Lo, I can tell you. You are fighting with great
evil principles and powers. You are fighting with
forces of wickedness which come into this world from
depths beyond our human nature. Obstinate nature,
the rivalry of men, imperfect institutions, cruel hab
its, all those are ugly enemies, but the real enemy is
Badness itself. The real fight is with that." Surely
there is something very sharp and ringing in his

74 THE BATTLE OF LIFE.
answer. To find out what he means by it, if we can,
will be the purpose of my sermon.
There can be little doubt of what Paul meant
when he first used the word. His thought is per
fectly distinct and clear. He cries to his Ephesians,
"You are fighting with principalities and powers,
against the world rulers of this darkness, against
spiritual wickedness in the heavenly regions, in the
sky or air." They are lofty words, and they are very
definite. He is thinking of evil spirits. He believes
distinctly in a universe all full of unseen forces. The
sky was full of them. They were about us all the
time. As some of them were the friends, so others of
them were the enemies, of our souls and our best life.
How wide that faith has been among mankind ! How
deeply it is imprinted on the pages of the Bible !
How it has been allowed to melt and fade away out
of the belief of hosts of people, even of those who
read the Bible ! And the reason, it seems to me,
why the belief in a world of unseen forces with which
we have to do, which has to do with us, — the reason
why the belief in good and evil spirits has so faded
away out of men's thoughts, is not any essential un
reasonableness in the belief itself. Nor is it merely
the tyranny of the visible world over men's senses,
and through them over men's minds. It is, in large
part, the fact that very, very often the believers in a
universe of unseen spirits have not had St. Paul's
loftiness and wisdom, but have made this unseen
world a field for witchcraft and magic and the play
of influences which the common moral sense of man
kind has not been able to understand. St. Paul be-

THE BATTLE OF LIFE. 75
lieved in spirits good and bad. The beauty of his
belief in them was that, different as they might
be from us in the conditions of their life, they still
belonged to the same great moral system to which
he belonged. The good spirits were not to be
propitiated, and the evil spirits were not to be dis
armed by magic and incantations. He who did right
eousness called to himself the most mysterious
strength of the unseen worlds. He and he alone was
safe against the assaults of the spirits of darkness.
This appears, you know, in the very passage from
which I take my text. " Because we wrestle against
these invisible enemies, therefore take unto you the
whole armor of God, having your loins girt about
with truth, and having on the breastplate of right
eousness." When we think how generally the be
lievers in a world of spiritual forces have grown
fantastic, and have tried to influence the forces of
that unseen world by enchantments which had no
moral meaning, we see how much more dignified
and lofty is St. Paul's position. To him goodness,
morality, was the first condition of all life. Here on
this earth or anywhere beyond the stars, to be good
must be the first condition of all strength. He who
was good, he who was trying to be good, entered
thereby into friendly confederation with all the noble
forces of the universe, and bid defiance to all the evil
powers of the sky and air. For him all good beings
fought ; against his simple righteousness all evil be
ings would beat themselves in vain, and ultimately
must go down and fail, here or beyond the stars.
That is a noble faith. In the simplicity and grandeur

76 THE BATTLE OF LIFE.
of a faith like that, man will some day come once
more to the now almost lost belief in the connection
of his life with unseen spiritual powers. There is an
ineradicable disposition in the human soul to think
that this one little world is not apart from all the
rest. And Scripture finds its sanction in the best
human instincts when it says that he who is doing
righteousness is on the side of the great currents of
universal life, and has not only God but all good
spirits for his friends. I have wandered a little from
our subject, but yet it all leads on to this idea on
which we want to dwell, that whether we fully
realize St. Paul's description of the evil spirits with
whom the Christian has to fight, or whether his ene
mies present themselves to us rather as abstract prin
ciples to which we do not attach personality as clearly
as St. Paul did, still it is something invisible, some
thing spiritual, something behind and deeper than
the mere outward forms of things, within which the
real difficulties of life lie, and with which the true
man must do battle.
In many ways men come to the discovery of this
truth, often in ways that are full of pain and dis
appointment. Some brave reformer has struggled
against a vicious institution, and by and by has
succeeded in breaking it down. The great re
form is carried. Henceforth there is to be no
more traffic in slaves. Henceforth the sale of drink
shall be prohibited. Henceforth corruption is not
to make prizes out of public office. How often has
the successful reformer stood among the ruins of
the demolished institution, and there, just in the

THE BATTLE OF LIFE. 77
first enthusiasm of his joy, been suddenly smitten
with dismay and felt the shout of triumph perish
on his lips ; for lo ! out of the ruins of the ruined
institution rose a spectre, which he saw was the
unkilled soul of the dead institution, and which,
even as he gazed upon it, began to put itself forth
in some new outward shape, to create for itself a
new body, and to look defiance on the poor dis
couraged fighter, who saw how all his work had to
be done over again from the beginning. Happy and
truly brave is the reformer who is not disheartened,
but enlightened, by that sight, and who does begin
again with unabated zeal, striking with ever new
vigor at each new abuse, but learning ever more
and more deeply that not in evil institutions, but
in evil principles, does the real evil he ; and so ex
pecting to see slavery appear in one new form after
another until the soul of the community is free, and
intemperance revive in one new device after another
until the soul of the community is sober, and cor
ruption reassert its power in one new shape after
another till the soul of the community is honest.
When he has come to that knowledge, then the
reformer settles down undiscouraged to the heart of
his battle, and summons the loftiest spiritual powers
to his aid, and perseveres to death. And when death
comes, and he goes, leaving his long work still
undone, the very sight of the reality of spiritual
forces which he wins as, dying, he comes nearer to
their home seems often to make him more sure of
the final victory just when his tired hands are drop
ping their weapons ; and he dies more than content.

78 THE BATTLE OF LIFE.
The same truth comes in much the same way to
the champion of sound doctrine and a true belief.
"Break down this heresy and then men will have
faith," so cries the lover of God's truth as he sits
down in his calm study to show how destitute of
reason is the last superstition of the day. Perhaps
he perfectly succeeds. Perhaps he tears the poor
flimsy argument to tatters, and leaves the fanatic
or the blasphemer not a word to say for his poor
fantasy. And then the weary controversialist goes
to his well-earned rest, and wakes up in the morning
to find the sun shining on a whole city full of new
unbeliefs and misbeliefs, in which the spirit of faith
lessness has embodied itself during the night, and
which stand there facing the sunrise with their
bright new pinnacles and spires, which have taken
possession of the sky as if they meant to shine there
forever. Happy and brave and wise the champion
of the faith who is not discouraged, but enlightened,
by that sight, and who goes out again, ready to
strike down, and disprove each new and special error
as it rises, but who grows always more and more
eager to change the deeper state, the heart and
temper of the life about him, — to bring in faith for
faithlessness, to give a true and deep, and true and
healthy, tone to life, — so that this dreary work of
ever disproving fantasy after fantasy need not go
on forever ; but some day, • — however far away, —
some day the time shall come when out of the heart
of a healthily believing humanity nothing but true
and healthy faith can grow.

THE BATTLE OF LIFE. 79
I turn back for an instant here to what I said
about Paul and his belief in good and evil spirits,
and about the current disbelief in all such beings
which prevails to-day. Is not the method of the
true belief indicated by what I have just now been
saying? How shall the field be swept clear of all
the paraphernalia of ghost stories and the false
supernatural which brings its double harm, degrad
ing the souls that believe in it, and hardening into
blank materialism the souls whom its absurdities or
enormities drive into disbelief ? You may prove one
impostor after another to be false. You may dem
onstrate beyond all question that this or that
phenomenon has nothing supernatural about it, but
you will work in vain until you strike right at the
root of all the folly by taking Paul's ground, and
insisting that whatever unseen presences there may
be about us, we and they and all the universe
must be subject to the eternal, universal sway of
moral law ; that therefore the only way to really win
the good and to really disarm the evil, from whatever
region of the universe they make attacks upon us, is
to live nobly, truly, purely. When men have been
led to think thus of the world of spirits, then I do
believe that we shall see a great restoral of healthy
belief in spiritual presences. The fantastic and fit
ful, unreal and immoral, way of thinking and feel
ing about them will disappear, and calmly, quietly,
without fright, without fanaticism, with a great
deepening of the sense of the moral criticalness of
living, men will know that the universe is larger
than this little earth, and that for a human creat-

80 THE BATTLE OF LIFE.
ure to be good or bad means something out into
unknown, unknowable regions of spiritual life.
I have spoken of the way in which the knowledge
of one truth, that the real struggle of life is not with
institutions or creeds, but with moral and spiritual dis
positions, of which institutions and creeds are only
the expressions, — the way in which this knowledge
comes to the reformer when his work against a bad
institution or a false creed has succeeded and he has
conquered it. Not less important is the power which
that knowledge may have in him while his hot fight
is still going on. I hope that I speak to some men
and women who count it their duty and their right
to set themselves against the wrongs and evils of the
world, and to do everything they can to set them
right. They cannot be unaware of what the dangers
of the agitation against evil are. To let the battle
against wickedness and cruelty pass over into a per-,
sonal hatred of the wicked and cruel man, and ex
haust itself in personal attacks on him for other things
besides his wickedness, — that is the constant peril.
How often floes the hot agitator need these calm,
strong words: "Not against flesh and blood, but
against principalities and powers, and the world-spirit
of darkness, and the evil that is in the air." I know
the answer that will come : " Evil incorporates it
self in men. How can you strike out the evil with
out beating down the men in whom it is embodied ? "
But surely no such statement as that, which is most
absolutely true, can be stretched wide enough to
cover the personal hatred, the wilful or careless mis
representation, the petty spite, with which the earnest

THE BATTLE OF LIFE. 81
advocate of some cause which he thought indubitably
right has very often followed up the man upon the
other side whom he believed of course to be indubita
bly wrong. Just see what some of the personal dis
advantages of such a disposition are. First, it puts it
absolutely out of the angry partisan's power, in case
he is not wholly right, to get any advantage or cor
rection from the opposite light in which his opponent
sees the same transaction which he thinks so wrong ;
second, it robs the furious hater of the chance to
learn charity and personal consideration, for of course
the chance to think tolerantly of a man who differs
from us comes to us when we differ from him, and if,
the moment that we differ from him, we begin to hate
him, it is as if we shut up the door of one of our best
school-rooms and turned the key of prejudice upon
it ; and, third, yet again it makes turbid and heavy
and dull that stream of simple indignation against
evil and love for righteousness which, when it is abso
lutely fresh and pure, is the most strong and persist
ent power in the world. These are the reasons why
it is a sad loss when the fighter with wickedness turns
his struggle against wickedness into angry attacks on
men against whom perhaps their wickedness has first
provoked him, but whom he has come now to hate
for themselves. This was the spirit of our Lord's dis
ciples when they wanted to call down fire on the vil
lage of Samaria. This was Luther's spirit when at
Marburg he lost sight of the simple fight with error
and plunged into a personal attack on Zwingle. It
is the danger of all earnest men. It seems sometimes
to be so inseparable from earnestness that the world

82 THE BATTLE OF LIFE.
thinks that it must not call it a vice or take
any note of it in the earnest man. But no really
earnest man can be so self-indulgent. Ever he must
struggle to know who his true enemy is, and to fight
finally with him alone. With wickedness we may be
unmitigatedly indignant. We may hate it with all
our hearts. Towards it there is no chance, there is
no right, of indulgence or consideration. But with
the wicked man, because he is both man and wicked
ness, we may be at once full of anger and full of love,
and out of the spirit of the highest justice, both to
him and to ourselves, insist always that it shall be the
wickedness and not the man that we hate !
Now let me turn away from words which may ap
pear to be addressed only to certain classes of my
hearers, and let me try to speak of things which must
concern us all. Inside of all the other battles we are
fighting, there is the battle with ourselves. Inside of
the battle with the world for the world, which the
great champions of righteousness are fighting in their
great way, and which you and I, I hope, are fighting
in our little* way, there lies the battle which every
true man is always fighting with himself for himself
— himself the hostile enemy, himself the precious
prize. Oh, how real sometimes all that must become
to the great workers for mankind ! While Howard
is travelling all over Europe, from prison to prison,
while Clarkson has his hand upon the fetters of the
slave, while Francke is gathering his orphans around
him and struggling with their ignorance, while Gar
rison is striving to free the slave, sometimes the
heart of each of them must have grown sick and

THE BATTLE OF LIFE. 83
faint with the freshly heard sound of its own inner
conflict ; sometimes each of them must have turned
aside and shut the door upon all the tumult of the
world and left the great cause for an hour to take
care of itself, while he fought with himself for him
self, — with himself his own enemy, for himself his
own prize. There are verses enough, you know, in
St. Paul's Epistles which let us see that struggle with
himself going on all the time underneath the other
struggle with the men of Jerusalem and Athens.
While the foreign war was raging, the home country
also was all up in arms. How such men must have
thought often within themselves that the foreign war
would be as nothing, would be a very easy thing,
if only there were peace at home. " I could convert
the world easily," the missionary must often find
himself saying, " if only I had a solid ground to
stand upon, if only my own life were not all soft and
weak with sin and doubt." And sometimes, too, the
other thought must come, " What right have I to be
busying myself with the world's miseries while all
this unrest is tumultuous within me ? Why is it not
best to shut in myself upon myself and fight my own
battle out before I meddle with the bigger battle ? "
Such thoughts come naturally; but really it is
good, no doubt, that the two strifes, the outer and
the inner, the strife with self and the strife with the
world's sin, should go on together. The man who
knew no enemy within himself, who was so absorbed
in fighting with the world's sin that he grew uncon
scious of his own inner life, by and by would become
arrogant and superficial. Such men the world has

84 THE BATTLE OF LIFE.
often seen among its philanthropists. The man who
is totally wrapped up in the war within him, the war
with himself for his own life, grows selfish and grows
morbid. The two must go on together. Each keeps
the other healthy and true. Fight with your own
sin, and let that fight keep you humble and full of
sympathy when you go out into the world and
strike at the sin of which the world is full. Fight
with the world's sin, and let the needs of that fight
make you aware of how much is wrong, and make
you eager that everything shall be right within your
self. Here is the balance and mutual ministry of
self-care and world-care which makes the truest man
the healthiest philanthropist.
Surely it always must be full of meaning, that
Christ Himself, before He began his struggles with the
Pharisees and Scribes, went out into the desert and
struggled with Himself. It must have been present
with Him ever afterwards, that wrestling with the
evil spirit and all the knowledge of Himself which it
called out. Many a time the wilfulness, and narrow
ness, and selfishness which He saw in the faces which
surrounded Him in some crowd in the temple must
have been clearer to Him and easier to understand,
because they were just the passions which had tried
to take possession of His own heart, and failed, dur
ing those long terrible days in the dark wilderness.
And oh ! my friends, there is no way in which what
ever personal struggles with faithlessness and sin we
may have gone through can be made to keep their
freshness and power, and at the same time be kept
from becoming a source of morbid wretchedness, no

THE BATTLE OF LIFE. 85
way that is half so efficient as that they should con
stantly be called on to light up for us the same sort
of struggles in other men, and give us the power to
help them with intelligence and sympathy. Demand
that lofty service of every deep experience through
which you pass. Demand that it shall help you
understand and aid the battles of your brethren,
and then the devils of memory which haunt your
life may be turned into strong angels, by whose help
you may do the will of God, and be in some small
way the saviour of mankind.
Our allusion to the conflict of Jesus in the desert
reminds us of how, to this internal strife which a
man carries on with his own nature, St. Paul's de
scription of the nature of all spiritual conflict espe
cially applies. " Not against flesh and blood " was the
wrestling of Jesus always. It was with the sin of Cai-
aphas and Herod, not with Caiaphas and Herod, that
He strove. But here especially in the desert, it was
directly with the spirit of evil, and not with any of its
outward forms or symbols, that He struggled. And
is it not true that just in proportion as all men's
strifes with their own selves grow serious and earnest,
they are always pressing in and in, and growing to
be less and less struggles with the mere forms and
symbols of wrong-doing, more and more profound
contests with our own true selves and with our sins ?
Some young man here begins the noble work of try
ing to be a better man. He knows that it is no mere
hoisting of holiday sails and idly slipping under
pleasant breezes into another life. He knows that he
has got to fight. But fight with what — with whom ?

86 THE BATTLE OF LIFE.
Where is his enemy ? And then see how he begins on
the outside and works inward as the combat deepens.
First the enemy seems to be in the circumstances
and conditions of his life. He fights with those.
He gives up the business that is always full of temp
tation. He breaks off the acquaintance that keeps
him in the low atmosphere. He moves out of the
house where the wicked people live. He abandons
the reading which kept certain bad thoughts before
his mind. All that is good ; but when he stands with
all that done, the sense comes over him that his en
emy is not conquered yet. He has only stripped
himself for the fight. The real fight has not yet be
gun. Then he goes farther in. More personal, more a
part of himself than his associations and his circum
stances, are his habits. If a man's circumstances are
like his clothes, his habits are like his very body.
With these habits he begins to wrestle next. He
will not drink ; he will not swear ; he will not lie.
All that is very good again. Most good. But once
more, when all this is accomplished and the bad
habits are all cast away, still the man stands aware
that his self is not conquered. That mysterious cen
tre of his being which is the He that thinks and feels
and not merely does good or bad, but is good or bad,
is the man ; that still is in deep conflict with itself.
The sin which is internal strife is not yet cast out
there. And then comes very often something else, with
which in these days we are most familiar. The man
who has found that the real struggle of his life is not

THE BATTLE OF LIFE. 87
with his associations and is not with his habits, often
looks back to his hereditation, as he calls it. How
familiar that long word has grown with certain very
estimable kinds of people! "I have inherited all
these bad dispositions. I have to fight with all that
my forefathers have been. Pity me ! pity me ! for
my dead ancestors are too much for my living will."
So the poor victim cries as he feebly settles himself
down to what he holds beforehand is a losing fight.
It has its own despair already in itself, this hopeless
struggle with hereditation which, as so many of our
teachers now depict it, is so peculiarly, so literally, a
wrestling against flesh and blood.
These are the several outer circles. The fight in
them comes to seem either useless or hopeless. And
then at last, if the man is thoroughly in earnest, then
at last the man gets into the heart and centre of it
all. Not in his circumstances, not in his habits, not
in his hereditations, but in himself, in a heart ready to
give itself up to the worse instead of to the better
powers of the world, in a soul that loves baseness, fri
volity, and falseness, there lies the real enemy. Oh,
the great strength which comes when that discovery is
made ! And, feeling that now at last the real battle has
begun, the man solemnly, solidly settles himself down
to the conquest of himself. The army which has
carried by storm one fortification after another and
found that it has only gained possession of an out
post, more or less insignificant, now sits down before
the central citadel and the real siege begins. Then
comes the true calling up of all the powers. Then
comes humility, and by humility self-understanding,

88 THE BATTLE OF LIFE.
and in self-understanding strength. Then comes
that earnest cry for God's help which always brings
its answer. Then comes the giving of the soul's own
weakness into the abundant strength of Christ.
Then comes the great reality of prayer. All of
these, when the man has at last got to the centre of
his sin, and is at last fighting with himself for his own
soul. My friends, do you know the meaning of all that?
Are you fighting that battle for self-conquest? If
you are, you know with what a true exhilaration that
which seems such a cruel and unnatural necessity of
life may occupy and inspire the soul. Almost with a
shout the man exclaims, " I will subdue myself for
goodness and for God ! " And though no shout is
heard, though men beside him do not hear a sound,
though the battlefield is in some inmost secret cham
ber of his most secluded life, though the fairest
flowers of his own self-content are being torn to
pieces by the wrestler's feet, yet still there is — do not
you know it, many of you ? — a deep, strong, solemn
joy as the night draws nearer to the day, and the self
with which we fight grows weaker, and the self for
which we fight grows freer, — a joy deep and strong
and solemn with which no other pleasure in human
living can compare.
And also there grows up a great charity and hope
for every other man who is fighting the good fight
with his sins — a charity and hope which is alone
reward enough for all our pain !
May God lead all of us speedily in, through all the
outer struggles, to this inmost fight of all ! May we

THE BATTLE OF LIFE. 89
begin it now, and never end it till our sin is dead !
May the Captain of our salvation be our leader and
our strength ! May we be full of courage, because the
battle which we fight is not our own alone, but God's,
and at the last may we be conquerors in Him I

VI.
THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH.
" No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost."
— I. Cob. xii. 3.
These words must mean their deepest, or else they
cannot mean anything for us. They were written
long ago when Christianity was new. To say, then,
that Jesus Christ was the divine Lord of the world
was something different in the demand it made upon
a man's powers and character from what it is to-day.
In some respects it must have been much harder then
than now : in some respects much easier. We cannot
tell wholly, I suppose, what Paul's verse meant in the
ears of the Corinthians who heard it first. But when
we bring his words over to our own time and try to
realize them now, it is evident that they mean nothing
unless they mean their deepest. " No man can say
that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost." Evi
dently it is not true that a divine help is needed
simply to declare as an article of one's creed, a con
viction of one's mind, that Jesus Christ is Master of
the world. Thousands of people are doing that all
the time, and doing it evidently by themselves, not
"by the Holy Ghost" at all, often saying the great
words wilfully, obstinately, controversially, with a
spirit and an impulse so essentially earthly that we

THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH. 91
know they did not come from heaven ; with a vehe
mence so unholy and unspiritual that we know it is
not the work of the Holy Spirit. Evidently it cannot
be the mere saying of the words or the mere accept
ance of the fact that proves a divine influence. It
must be the saying of the words, " Jesus is the Lord,"
filled with the most earnest faith and the richest ex
perience ; the saying of them by a man to whom they
represent the deepest fact and the most powerful im
pulse of his life. It must mean this, and, if it does,
then it involves one of the greatest and most urgent
subjects of which we can think or speak. That sub
ject is the dignity and greatness of a faith in Christ.
It is only, so says St. Paul, it is only by an action
which outgoes his own powers and shares the strength
of God that a man is able to own Christ as the master
of his life.
The Dignity and Greatness of faith ! There are two
classes of people, very different from one another,
both of whom deny the proposition which I have
announced and of which I wish to speak. The first
denier is the ordinary flippant church-member or par
tisan controversialist, who treats faith as if it were
one of the easiest and most casual functions of a
human life, and a confession of faith as if it were an
indifferent sort of action to be slipped in almost any
where, between two other acts of wholly other kinds.
Such a man dishonors faith by the trivialness with
which he treats it. His denial of its dignity and
greatness is a practical one, and while he makes it
he may be all the time talking the grandest talk
about the faith which all his life discredits. The

92 THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH.
other denier is more serious, and his denial deals with
the whole idea and theory of faith. Many and many
men there are to-day who most deliberately hold and
teach that the idea of man's depending upon a loftier
power than himself is a delusion of human immatur
ity, that it belongs to the infancy of the human mind,
that for the world or for any man to give it up and
count the human life sufficient for itself is a distinct
advance, that faith is fetich-worship gradually passing
out into the light, slowly becoming that full enlight
enment of man in which, when it becomes complete,
there shall be no longer any such thing possible
as faith. In protest against both denials, the prac
tical denial of the frivolous communicant in our
churches, and the dogmatic denial of the positivist
philosopher, we want to assert the dignity and great
ness of faith. I would like to think that as I speak
I see two faces before me — one the easy, careless
face of the commonplace professor of religion. Look
ing into his trifling eyes I would like to say : " Poor
soul, this earthly, uninspired thing of yours is not
real faith. No man can have real ¦ faith but by the
Holy Spirit." The other face shall be the earnest,
puzzled, eager face of the young man who is trying,
as he has been taught, to despise and pity the victims
of the supernatural. To him one wants to say : " Do
not dare to despise what is the noblest act that man
has ever tried to do. You degrade yourself when
you do that. It is only by a divine, Holy Spirit that
any man can have faith."
Begin with this, then : that the greatness of any
act is to be estimated by the faculties of man which it

THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH. 93
employs. It is a greater act for a man to write a book
than for him to build a fence, because the writing
of the book demands the use of deeper powers. The
man must think, — at least a little, — and arrange his
thought, and give it utterance in language. To govern
a State requires still nobler faculties, faculties rarer,
finer, more profound, faculties that must be summoned
for their work out of yet deeper chambers of our hu
man nature. When I know what faculties any man's
work requires, at once I know where that work
stands in comparative dignity among the works of
men. When a new act of man is offered to me which
I have not been called upon to estimate before, I ask
myself what powers the man will have to use who
does that act, and when I know that, then I am sure
that I can judge it rightly.
This is the test that we must apply here : What
faculties are needed in an act of faith? What powers
must a man use who says with all his heart of an
unseen Jesus, " He is my Lord and Master " ? Let us
see — and first of all there is the power of dealing
with the unseen at all. Back from the visible to the
invisible which lies behind it, the mind of man is al
ways pressing ; and as it presses back, there are new
powers coming out into consciousness and use. The
first man in his immaturity deals with things. Man
as he grows maturer deals also with ideas. The
things are visible and tangible. The ideas no eye has
seen, no hand has ever touched. Subtle, elusive, and
yet growing to be more real to the mind of the man
who truly deals with them than are the bricks
of which his house is built, or the iron tool with

94 THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH.
which he does his work, the great ideas of justice, of
beauty, of sublimity, become at once the witnesses
and the educators of man's deeper powers which
must come out to do their work. The birth of
the power of recognizing and dealing with ideas, the
birth of ideality, is an epoch in the history of the
world or of a man. Or, again, you know your friend
by the seeing of the eye ; all the distinct intercourses
of the senses introduce your life to his; and then
your friend goes away from you, out of your sight,
to China or Peru ; and as your power of friendship
reaches out to follow him, as the thought of him
takes the place of the sight of him, as association,
and memory, and hope, and imagination come out
at your need to bind your life with his, — is not your
friendship growing greater with the new faculties it
requires, has not your love for your unseen friend
become a nobler exercise than any delight in his
visible presence possibly could be? These are in
stances and illustrations of the glories of the faculty
in man by which he has to do with things which he
cannot see. * And when the unseen one is Christ, a
being whom the man never has seen, whom yet he is
compelled to realize, not as an idea, but as a living
person capable of being loved, and trusted, and
obeyed, there surely is a noble demand there for one
of the loftiest of human faculties ; and the loftiness
of the faculty which must be used in doing it bears
testimony to the loftiness of the act which the man
does who says of the unseen Jesus Christ, " He is
my Lord."
Another of the faculties which is involved in faith,

THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH. 95
and whose necessity is a sign that a true act of faith
is one of the completest acts which man can do, is
the faculty of personal admiration and trust. In
its fullest exercise faith is personal. We speak in
deed of faith in principles, and that is a noble and
ennobling thing ; but the fullest trust comes with the
perception of trustworthy character, and the entire
reliance of one nature on another. Is it a great
power or a great weakness in a man's life that makes
him capable of doing that ? I am tempted, in answer
to that question, to point you simply to that which I
am sure that you have all seen and felt, the strange
and sometimes terrible deterioration which so often
comes in men's characters as they grow up from
boyhood into manhood, leaving the years of docility
behind them, pass into the years of self-reliance and
independence. The poetry and beauty and richness
of a boy's life lie in his power of admiration for,
and trust in, something greater than himself. If you
fathers make your homes what they ought to be, the
boys will find the object of that admiration and trust
in you. If you will not let them find it there, they will
find it somewhere else. Somewhere they will surely
find it. And in their admiration and their trust, the
outreaching and uplifting of their life will come.
What does it mean when men as they grow older
become narrow, sordid, and machine-like, when a
vulgar self-content comes over them, and all the
limitations of a finished life that hopes for and
expects no more than what it is makes the sad
picture which we see in hosts of men's middle life ?
Is it not certainly that those men have ceased to

96 THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH.
admire and ceased to trust? The objects of their
childhood's trust and admiration they have out
grown, and like young scholars who imagine that
the story-books of infancy are the only books in the
world, and so, when those books cease to interest the
maturing mind, lay by their power of reading as if
there were no further use for it, so these men, when
they can no longer admire and trust their fellow-men
completely, as they used to do when they were boys,
think that the faculty of perfect trust and admiration
has no further use. The blight that falls upon their
admiring and trusting natures is the token of what
a lofty and life-giving faculty it is which they have
put out of use. It was this faculty which made
them at every moment greater than themselves,
which kept them in communion with the riches of a
higher life, which preserved all the enthusiasm of
active energy, and yet preserved humility which held
all the other faculties to their best work. This is the
faculty whose disuse makes the mature life of so
many men barren and dreary, and whose regenera
tion, when the man is lifted up into the new admira
tion and the new trust, the admiration for and trust
in God, makes a large part of the glory of the full-
grown life of faith.
One other quality I mention which must be in the
man who sends his faith out into the unseen and
fastens it in trust and admiration on a divine person.
I know not what to call it except a hopeful sense of
need, — not only a sense of need, for that, if it be
not hopeful, may merely grovel and despair, — but a
sense of personal deficiency, filled and lighted up all

THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH. 97
through and through with the conviction that some
where in the world, in some place not desperately
beyond its reach, there lies, waiting for its finding,
the strength and the supply that it requires. This is
the faculty in which has lain the coiled mainspring
of all human progress. Barbarism, filled with the
hopeful sense of need, has pressed onward and on
ward into civilization. Ignorance, hopefully know
ing its need, has scaled the heavens and fathomed
the seas and cleft the rocks for knowledge. Man, in
all ages, has struggled and achieved, has wrestled
with his present condition and laid his daring hand
on higher things, under the power of this faculty in
which were met the power of his clear perception of
his deficiencies and his deep conviction that his defi
ciencies might be supplied. Is this a noble faculty
or not? I would be willing to appeal again to your
own consciousness. There are times when this fac
ulty is very sluggish and dull within you, and there
are other times when it seems full of life. Some
days there are when the story of your need falls on
your ears like an unmeaning tale ; when either you
are self-contented and feel no lack in heart or brain
or character, or, feeling it, have no hope but that you
must go on forever the poor, half-developed, crippled
thing you are. Then there are other days when you
look through and through yourself, and any thought
of keeping on constantly just as you see yourself
now is terrible. You know your sin and sordidness.
But at the same time voices are calling you to come
and get the things that you require. The whole
great voice of all the world seems to be promising

98 THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH.
you escape and supply. As deep and strong as the
sense of need is the hope. Of those two days, which
is the greater? On which of them are you the
stronger man ? Is this faculty, which on the second
of these days is awake in you, a degradation or an
exaltation of your life? There can be but one
answer, only one. You know you never are so
great, never so thoroughly a man, as when with
manly honesty you see yourself through and through,
and, filled with shame, are yet inspired and held up
by hope. But all that must come to pass, this fac
ulty of hopeful neediness must wake and live, before
a man can with true faith call Jesus Christ, the
Saviour of the world, his Lord.
And now once more I say, it is the faculties
which any act demands which indicate the degree
of dignity and greatness in that act. Behold, then,
what we have reached. In the act of faith, by
which you or I trust ourselves to the keeping and
make ourselves the servants of Christ, there must
meet these faculties, or else the act cannot be done :
the power of dealing with the unseen, the power of
personal loyalty and trust, the power of a hopeful
sense of need. Those three great powers in their
aggregate meet in the man who is Christ's servant.
Now what I claim is this, that the belief and per
sonal devotion for whose attainment that aggregate
of qualities must meet is a most great and glorious
action. I do not say now that it is an action possi
ble or impossible, or whether the man who thinks
with all his soul that he is doing it is congratulating
himself upon the great fact of his life, or hugging to

THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH. 99
his heart the most shadowy of all delusions. I only
say that the description of the act involves a picture
of the most complete and lofty and thoroughly
human action which a man can be conceived of as
doing ; and that if man, having thought himself
capable of such an action, should be completely
proved to be incapable of it, his whole life would
have suffered an incalculable loss. The world of
human existence would have been robbed of its sun
light and its sky. On this I am sure that we ought
to insist. There are bold, trenchant writers and
talkers to-day who are congratulating the world that
the days of faith are over, that the glorious liberty
of unbelief has come. That certainly will never
do. You must not pluck the jewel off of the fore
head of the man who has counted himself a king and
then ask him to thank you as if you had broken fet
ters from his wrists. You must not pull down the
sun out of the sky and then bid men rejoice that they
have escaped from the slavery of sunlight. If there
is no God whom I can come to and obey and trust,
I want to know the dreadful fact, and not to go on
thinking that there is ; for it is better for every man to
know the fact, however dreary and dreadful it may
be, than to believe a lie, however sweet and gracious.
But that is something utterly different from saying
that it would not be better for us all if faith were
possible, and that to be robbed of the possibility of
faith is the desolation and ruin of human life.
One wants to say the same thing to men who do
believe with all their hearts, men who believe with
all the strength of an experience which no man can

100 THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH.
disturb, in the possibility and the reality of faith.
I seem to hear a certain sort of apologetic tone
among men of faith, which is not good. They some
times seem to plead that their faith may be left to
them, much as a baby pleads that he may keep his
toys, or a lame man that he may keep his crutches.
It is the appeal of weakness. The man who trusts
God sometimes seems almost to say to his unbelieving
brother, " Forgive me. I am not as strong as you are.
I cannot do without this help. You are more strong
and do not need it. But let me keep it still." No
open foe of faith can do faith so much harm as that
kind of believer. Shall the disciple be ashamed of
that which is the glory of his manhood, its highest
reach, requiring the combination of its noblest powers ?
The only thing to be said about such feeble-hearted
faith as that is that it is not faithful enough to know
the essential dignity of faith. It is a sick man apolo
gizing to death because he is not quite ready yet to
die. It is the meagreness of health in him that prompts
his poor apQlogy. Let him grow healthier and he be
gins to look not down to death with apologies, but up
to life with hopes and aspirations. So let the weak
disciple grow more strong in faith, and he will have
no longer feeble words of shame and self-excuse to
say about his trust in Christ ; only his whole life will
grow one earnest prayer for an increase of faith, as
the child's life is one continued hope and prayer for
manhood. O young disciples, whatever other kind of false
ness to your faith you may fall into, may you be
saved at least from ever being ashamed of it. It is

THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH. 101
the noblest, the divinest, thing on earth. You may
have only got hold of the very borders of it, but if
in any true sense you can say, " Jesus is the Lord,"
you have set foot into the region wherein man lives
his completest life. Go on, without one thought or
dream of turning back, and with no shamefaced hid
ing of the new mastery under which you are trying
to live. If your Christian service is too small in its
degree for you to boast of, it is too precious in its
kind for you to be ashamed of. Go on forever crav
ing and forever winning more faith and obedience,
and so learning more and more forever that faith
and obedience are the glory and crown of human
life. But now let us return to our text. We have been
talking about the dignity and greatness of faith.
But St. Paul says something else about it. It is the
gift and inspiration of God. " No man can say that
Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost." Not
merely, it is a great and noble thing to feel through
all life the grasp and influence of Jesus, but this
great and noble thing no man can do unless God
the Holy Ghost inspires and helps him to do it. This
statement of St. Paul seems to me to have at its
heart the profoundest and most beautiful conception
of the relation between God and man. Suppose that
it were not true. Suppose that faith in Christ
being, as I have tried to show it, the crowning act
of man, it were yet an act which man could do with
out any inspiration or help of God; suppose that
in this, or any other of the greatest actions of his
life, man could first conceive the wish to do it all

102 THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH.
by and of himself, and then could quietly gather up
his powers and go and do it all by and of himself, —
have you not in such a supposition broken the abso
luteness, the essentialness, the permanency, of the
whole relation between our life and God's ? The true
idea of that relationship involves the presence of
God in every highest activity of man. It often
seems to me as if men had got such a low and in
adequate conception of all this ! Men talk, very
religious men, as if God were a sort of reserve force
to be called in when He was needed — a sort of last
resort when man's strength failed. And so I some
times think that the whole Christian thought of
man's being dependent upon God continually seems
to a good many people like something cowardly, un
manly, a miserable calling up of the reserve when we
ought to be fighting out the battle for ourselves.
The thought of God which Christ came to reveal, the
thought of God of which all Christ's own life was
full, is something totally different from that. To
Christ's thought God and man are part of one sys
tem — one structure, one working-force. To separate
them is not simply to deny man a power that he
needs : it is to break a unity, and to set a part of
the power to the attempt to do what the whole
power ought to do as one. The strength, the force,
which is appointed to lift your burden, to run your
race, to find your truth, to hold the canopy of faith
fulness over your life, is not you. It is you and
God. For you to try to do it alone is unnatural. It
is almost as if the engine tried to run without its
steam, or as if the chisel tried to carve without the

THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH. 103
artist. It is engine and steam that are to make the
running-power. It is artist and chisel that are to
carve the statue. It is God and you that live your
life. For you to try to live it alone is to try to
do all the work with one part of the power. God
is not a crutch coming in to help your lameness, un
necessary to you if you had all your strength. He
is the breath in your lungs. The stronger you are,
the more thoroughly you are yourself, the more you
need of it, the more you need of Him.
How clear this became in the life of Jesus Him
self ! There was humanity at its best. Could it do
without those supplies of God which the lower hu
manity required ? Did it throw away its crutch and
walk in its own self-sufficient strength ? Oh, no ! It
breathed deeper than any other human life has ever
breathed of the breath of God. It filled itself with
His Spirit. It did nothing by itself, but everything
with, in, by Him. Oh, my dear friends, there is the
everlasting testimony that utter dependence on God
is no accident of man's sin or misfortune, but is the
intrinsic and eternal necessity and glory of man's
nature. And so when man comes to that which I have
claimed to be his completing act, when he says that
Jesus is the Lord, it is not strange that he cannot do
that alone, not by himself, a poor half-life, crippled
and broken. It needs the whole of him — and he is
not the whole of himself unless God is in him. He
cannot do it " but by the Holy Ghost." The man
with a duty says, "Jesus is the Lord," and he is
brave. The man with a temptation says, " Jesus is

104 THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH.
the Lord," and he is firm. The man with a suffering
says, " Jesus is the Lord," and he is patient. The
man with a bewilderment says, " Jesus is the Lord,"
and he sees light. Is it not a true and precious part
of the value of those great experiences, that in each
of them there is both the struggle of the human soul
up to God, and also the uprising of the divine soul
carrying the man deeper into itself — that neither of
those men says " Jesus is the Lord " but by the Holy
Ghost? There is one other point of which I wish to speak
before I close. I have been magnifying faith. I have
been painting it as what I know it is, the consummate
action of the human soul, requiring the soul's best
faculties working at their best. I can imagine while I
speak thus that some hearts here may be asking them
selves, " What then ? If faith be such a supreme act,
must it not be the privilege of a few, must it not be
within the power only of the supreme souls ? Can I,
one of the weakest and worldliest of men, can I do
such an act, an act that needs such powers ? " And
so perhaps* I may seem to have lifted the very thing
which all men ought to do out of the possibility of
many men. I would not leave any such doubt in any
soul. God forbid that in trying to make faith seem
glorious I should make it seem impossible ! But it is
true of God's gifts always that the most complete of
them are also the most possibly universal. Is it not
so? Think of this illustration : wealth is a lower gift
than health, and wealth is evidently limited in its
possibility ; all men are not intended to be rich — but
health is for all men. It is unnatural for any man to

THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH. 105
be sick. And so of admiration and of love. To be
loved is better than to be admired — and admiration
is the privilege of a few brilliant natures, while love
is within the reach of any pure and loving heart. And
so of the subtler beauties of art and the simpler beau
ties of nature. Art is the privilege of the few, but
nature opens her treasures wide. " There is no price
set on the lavish summer, and June may be had by
the poorest comer." But nature is as much more beau
tiful as she is more free than art. It is a splendid law
of all God's world, a law that makes the whole world
shine with the splendor of His love, that everywhere
the finest is the freest. The lower blessings are often
the exceptions, but the higher blessings are meant to
be not the exception, but the rule. If this be so, then
how must it be with that blessing which outgoes all
others, the blessing of faith, the blessing of living
under the perpetually recognized lordship of Christ?
The finest of all gifts of God — may we not look for
it to be the freest too ? Free as the air, which is the
most precious thing the world contains, and yet
struggles as nothing else in all the world struggles
to give itself away — crowds itself in wherever it
can go, and moves whatever will let itself be moved
by its elastic pressure.
And this grows clearer and surer still when we re
member that the part of us to which the pressure of
God, the power of his Holy Ghost asking to be ad
mitted to govern our lives, applies for its admission
is the part which is most universally open and active
in all the degrees of mankind ; namely, the moral part.
Think how often you are ready to listen to a poor ig-

106 THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH.
norant creature's judgment of right and wrong, and
pay the deepest reverence to it, when you would not
care in the least for that same creature's judgment of
any question of the intellect. Think how a little
child can look you in the eye with his pure, clear
glance, as you are telling your well-disguised false
hood, and say, " That is not true," and make you
quail. Think how you can touch a child's conscience
long before you can waken his brain. All these are
illustrations and signs of the universalness of moral
life. It is in all men and in all times of each man's
life. And so a blessing which must enter by that
door can find in every nature a door to enter by. A
Holy Spirit, having its power in its holiness, need not
be shut out of any heart that is capable of knowing
holiness and being holy. Therefore no soul of dunce
or boor or little child is too low to be brought by the
Holy Spirit to the place where, answering back by
the divine within it to the divine above it, it may say
that " Jesus is the Lord." I have claimed already
that no soul is too high to find in that announcement
of its faith the consummation of its life. Here, then,
is where the highest and the lowest meet. Here
is where they have met through all the ages. Glori
ous thinkers, great strong workers, sufferers whose
lives were miracles of patience, all of these singing
as they went their ways, "Jesus is Lord, Jesus is
Lord." And all around them, and in among them,
dull, plodding souls, and minds whose thought was
all confused and bewildered with emotion, and little
children, with their crude clear pictures in their
simple brains, all these too singing, in their several

THE DIGNITY AND GREATNESS OF FAITH. 107
tones and with their several clearness, " Jesus is Lord,
Jesus is Lord."
Would you be able to say that, to join that great
Auman chorus, to claim Christ for your Lord with
3ome especial claim of your own which shall make
the great human chorus which claims Him for the
world a little more complete ? You can do it. But
you can do it only " by the Holy Ghost." Only by
letting God enter into you can you go up to God,
and own with joy and thankfulness the mastery of
his Son. And oh, my friends, remember that the
owning of Christ's mastery here is but the beginning
of the participation in Christ's glory in heaven.
Into that may we all come at last by His great
love J

vn.
THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
" Then thought I to understand this, but it was too hard for me ;
Until I went into the Sanctuary of God ; then understood I the
end of these men." — Psalms lxxiii. 16, 17.
This is called one of the psalms of Asaph. About
Asaph nobody knows very much : only that he was
a friend of David, the master of his music, and evi
dently, from his writings, a man of very beautiful
religious and poetic spirit. If we can distinguish
between his psalms and those of his mightier friend,
we should say that Asaph's were more calm and even
and tranquil, more pensive and placid, with less of
triumphant exultation or of profound depression than
David's. But in this psalm Asaph is sorely perplexed and
troubled. How old the bewilderments of the world
are ! I think it makes our own difficulties harder and
easier at once to bear when we think how many long-
forgotten souls have struggled in them too in the
years that are past. Here almost three thousand years
ago is a poor man who can make nothing out of the
same fact, precisely, which has kept thousands of
people wondering and questioning this last week.
You recognize it the moment that you open the psalm.
"I was envious at the foolish," he says, "when I saw
the prosperity of the wicked." The prosperity of the

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. 109
wicked ! that critical puzzle of all times, the apparent
absence of justice in this life of ours. "They are
not in trouble like other folk, neither are they plagued
like other men." And they say, "How doth God
know, and is there knowledge in the Most High?
Behold, these are the ungodly ; these prosper in the
world; they increase in riches. Verily, I have
cleansed my heart in vain and washed my hands in
innocency." That is the puzzle; as old as Asaph,
as young as some struggling child of God who knows
that his uprightness is keeping him poor and that his
unscrupulous neighbor is growing rich by his side
to-day. And then comes Asaph's escape from the puzzle :
" I thought to understand this," he says, " but it was
too hard for me ; until I went into the Sanctuary of
God ; then understood I the end of these men."
The escape perhaps is not so familiar as the puzzle.
He goes into the sanctuary of God, he goes to
church, and there he finds a light that makes the
dark things clear, and the cloud scatters, and he un
derstands it all. At once we feel that we are talking
with the Hebrew. Here is the man to whom the
temple was the centre of everything. There, not
merely in burning shekinah, but in the deep-felt spir
itual sympathy, his God abode, and there with his
deep, strong, trustful love, and fear for his God, he
was used to go to find Him. It was different from
the way we go to church. There was nothing hard,
dull, or routinelike in it. We cannot read the Psalms
without seeing what a spring and life and freshness,
what a holy curiosity and eagerness and affection

110 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
there was in the hearts of the men who went up to
the temple. " I was glad when they said unto me,
Let us go up to the house of the Lord. Our feet shall
stand in thy courts, O Jerusalem." Nobody can
read the Old Testament without seeing something
very beautiful and grand, almost awful. In the
midst of all the pettiness and wickedness, the small
intrigues and quarrels that show us the littleness of
that wonderful Hebrew people, one sight never loses
its sublimity. It is the yearly gathering of the peo
ple from every corner of the land to the sacred fes
tival meeting at Jerusalem. The land swarms and
hums with movement. The men of the seashore and
the desert and the hills ; they are all stirring. Judah
among his peaceful hills, the wild Simeonites from
their home in the desert, Zebulon and Issachar from
the rich plain-country, Asher from his abode along
the bays and creeks, the Reubenites and Gadites
from beyond the Jordan, and the sons of Naphtali
from the far north, about the very roots of Lebanon,
— they are all coming to appear before God. Every
pass is full, every hill-side is alive. I think we can
not estimate the power in a nation's life of such
a great annual symbolic pilgrimage. Every man
brought his own burden, his own sorrow, his own
sin. The problems of the year, the things that had
perplexed them as they worked in the fields alone, or
debated with their brethren, or met the troubles of
the household — all these they brought to offer to the
Lord, to seek solution for them in the higher, calmer
atmosphere of the temple. There was the place

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. Ill
where their darkened and frightened understandings
would find light and peace.
It is an old-time picture. We do not go to church so
now. Indeed it is not well that we should, altogether.
There is a certain amount of localizing and narrowing
of the idea of Deity about it which is not good. But
there is much in it which it is good to keep, — at
any rate impossible io make light of or despise. It
is the longing for dome sacred and secluded place in
this low beset world. Luther dreamed of it when
as a young monk he went up to Rome as if he were
going up to heaven. As you go through the old
cities of Europe or the East to-day, you see the weary
man or woman turn aside into the cool, deep door of
the great cathedral to say a prayer, or the more ab
stracted Oriental drop his shoes from his feet and fall
prostrate, with the crowd all around him, before the
city shrine as if he were far off in the desert or on
some lonely hill. I am sure we cannot help being
glad for all the good it surely does them, for all the
light they get, however dim, upon the hard questions
of their lives. Woe to us if our more rational belief,
instead of lifting all the earth up to heaven, only
crowds down the hill-tops and leaves no heaven, and
makes our whole earth earthly. It is sad indeed if
our churches have no light to give to the problems
that perplex our houses and our stores.
But having said thus much, I want to speak of the
subject that these verses will suggest this morning,
not in the anc ient Hebrew, but in the modern Chris
tian way. What made Asaph see clearer in the
temple was that he met God there. We have been

112 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
taught that not alone in temples made with hands,
but everywhere in this great world of God the de
vout and loving soul may meet with God. We have
been taught to see already in the distance that world
where there shall be no temple except the present
God. " God Almighty and the Lamb the temple of
it." Not only to the temple, then, but to the present
God, everywhere and always ; not only to the church,
but to the divine presence by our side the problems
of life may be carried. I want to speak of the new
clearness that comes into many difficult questions,
and especially into this question of the unequal lots
of men when we survey them in connection with the
thought of God. How does the bringing of life
into God's presence make it intelligible ?
There are, then, two persons I think to whom life
seems pretty clear : the man who does not think or
feel at all, and the man who thinks and feels very
deeply. It is just like any complicated piece of
machinery. The factory girl who sits at her loom
and feeds it day by day learns just how the machine
takes up the thread she offers it and seems to under
stand the whole. The engineer who has the plans of
all the engineering, from the boiler out to the thin
nest and subtlest steel finger that it moves ; he, too, is
troubled by no problems, but has grasped the working
of the whole. Between the two come all the differ
ent degrees of intelligence and knowledge which see
the mysteries more than the work-girl so as to be
puzzled by them, but do not see them as much as
the engineer so as to understand them. Just so it is
with this world. The sluggish creature who just

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. 113
runs his little fragment of the universe and asks no
questions further is troubled by no doubts. The
finished soul who sees with God's eyes the great
moral laws which govern all God's worlds, he, too,
may rest in peace. Between the two the great mass
of men, seeing the difficulties, but not seeing their
solutions, live in disquietude and questionings. And
when one has once outgrown the first repose of
ignorance and thoughtlessness, he never can go back
to it — there is no hope for him except to go on to
the higher repose of faith and knowledge and sym
pathy with God.
It is the moral difficulties that give men most dis
quietude. It is not the riddles that try the intellect,
but those that perplex the conscience. When we
know that a certain thing is right, and that righteous
ness seems to be ignored in the working of the world,
that is the sort of puzzle that haunts men and makes
them really miserable. And of all moral riddles none
is more perfect a perplexity than this, — that with a
righteous God the Giver of every good gift, those
good gifts should be bestowed upon unrighteousness.
Not here and there as if by accident, or as if an
occasional exception was necessary in the working of
a general law, but so generally as to seem sometimes
universal. Unscrupulousness grows rich. Selfish
ness lives in luxury. We cannot open our eyes
without seeing it. It requires no abstruse proof. The
bewildering fact flashes itself into the poor man's eyes
in the glitter of rich men's windows and flings itself
as if in scorn upon him, as their carriages spatter him

114 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
with mud as he stands waiting and chafing on the
crossing to let them pass.
And first of all, if we feel the puzzle, we are sure
that it is not one that comes to us out of any wanton
ness of God. It is one that we could not be spared.
Let us always be much afraid of making our Heavenly
Father a cruel monster who plays with the joy and
misery of His poor children, and mocks them with
questions for which they have no answers. The
ancients in their fable of the sphinx who asked her
riddles and destroyed those who tried but could not
solve them, had just exactly this idea. They got it
from the same experience of the mystery and con-
tradictoriness of life of which our later days are full.
Let us keep clear of any such thought of God. If
there are riddles in life, He does not set them
wantonly. He is always leading us towards their
solution as fast as we are able to go. We are cheated
by our weakness and our ignorance. He is always
trying to make us strong and wise, and so to save us
from delusion. "God is light, and in Him is no
darkness at all." That is the first certainty about
Him, which we must never lose; for when that is
gone, there is nothing left.
After all, for every trouble and doubt of this life,
except those which come directly from our own
sinfulness, the only consolation that we really need
is explanation. It is a great thing to know that. A
really manly man will ask no other consolation. This
world is not full of blunders of government that
need to be reformed ; but it is full of obscurities that
we long to have enlightened. The fire comes, and

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. 115
the consolation for the loss of your burnt store that
you need is merely to see something of the purpose
for which God permitted it to go, something of the
spiritual blessing that may come to you out of its
loss. Your child dies, and you do not ask for the
child to come back again, but your heart does ache
to know what it all means, to see something of what
it is to die, to trace the dear life that is gone into the
bosom of the Eternal Love that has taken it. Every
where the devout and manly soul asks for explana
tion, and is sure that if it could reach that it would
find all the consolation that it needs. Such trust it
has in God.
And now take the special bewilderment that puz
zled Asaph. Put yourself in his place. It ought not
to be hard to do it, for unless you are either more or
less than man you have been in his place many a
time. You see a man whom you know to be wicked
prospering. Everything he touches turns to gold.
When the city is on fire, his house does not burn.
When the pestilence goes stalking about, his house
hold is unbroken. A brighter life than any other
house can show seems to flash through his glowing
windows, in mockery of the starving honesty without.
Health, honor, happiness, everything is there. That
is what you and Asaph see. And now here, too, the
consolation that your heart asks for is explanation.
You believe in a God so sincerely that you do not
say this state of things is wrong, but you do crave
to see some glimpse of how it can be right. Then
you go into the sanctuary of God; somehow you
come into the presence of the Everlasting Father.

116 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
You fill yourself with the sense of His immensity and
goodness. You see perfect happiness and perfect
holiness brought to their absolute consistency, nay
their absolute identity in Him. Do you not begin
to feel it already ? Is there not coming a calm over
the tumult, a light into the darkness? Is not the
promise being fulfilled, " In thy light shall we see
light?" Already you are beginning with Asaph, in
the sanctuary, to understand " the end of these men."
And what does this mean ? Is it a mere expression
of Asaph's triumph? Is it merely that he sees that
by and by these prosperous men will have their
troubles too, and hugs himself in the comfortable as
surance that if they are the richest, he is the safest,
that he has made the best investment? Is he merely
encouraged to live out his present misery in the an
ticipation of the certain time when things will be re
versed, when they will be down and he will be up ?
By and by their stores will burn. By and by their
children will be taken too. That were a poor conso
lation to gloat over. Some vision of such a spirit
does sometimes appear in some of those impreca
tory psalms, which I hope that we all understand,
that we read in church not as patterns of Christian
temper, but as parts of the complete spiritual biog
raphy of a great but very imperfect man. But I do
not think that the half-savage mood of some of those
psalms is present here. When Asaph says that in
the sanctuary of God he "understands the end of
these men," he means that there became apparent to
him the limits, the essential limits, of the life that
they live. He has fallen into a low way of envying

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. 117
them their wealth, as if wealth was everything. He
has been puzzled, because not being good they were
rich, as if riches were the appropriate premium of
goodness ; but when he comes to stand with God all
that is altered. He comes in sight of larger circles
of bliss. He sees that God has other rewards to give
His chosen besides these little trinkets. Absorbed
in the newly realized beauty of these higher things,
he sees the worthlessness of the lower, and easily
leaves them to the souls they satisfy. " Verily I say
unto you they have their reward." So long as he
knows no higher happiness than prosperity, it puzzles
him that the bad should have it. So soon as he
comes to know the infinitely higher joy of company
with God, and sees that that can be given only to the
good, — " without holiness no man can see the
Lord," — it no more troubles him that bad men
should have the poor counterfeit of happiness, than
it troubles the solid merchant, sitting in his houseful
of plain and solid comfort, to see a miserable fop strut
by in cheap and gaudy finery making believe and
perhaps thinking that he is rich.
I think we can illustrate what I mean. Two young
students start out together. One is conscientious
and thorough ; the other is showy and superficial. In
a little while the patient, thorough worker is sur
prised to find all the world staring at and talking
about bis showy friend. He himself passes un
noticed, but wherever the flimsy scholarship of his
friend goes men clap their hands and stare with
wonder. It puzzles him. It seems all wrong. Does
flippant show, then, win the prize that ought to fall

118 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
to honest knowledge ? But as he goes deeper, as he
comes nearer to the court where the personal majesty
of Truth herself abides, it all becomes clear. The
joy of knowing Truth and being near to her out
shines all those lower glories. He sees that the
popular applause and admiration is just the appro
priate reward of those lower devotions that have won
them. He sees the end, the limit, of his brother
student's life and gladly leaves him the honor he has
won, pressing on himself into the sanctuary of the
Truth, which is his own great reward, far above all
honor and praise of men.
Is not this, then, the explanation which is consola
tion? As we rise higher the larger circles of life
open to us their value, and the smaller circles show
their limits. Abraham is summoned out of his father
land, Ur of the Chaldees, and to every man of Ur who
stays at home it seems doubtless very hard. They
settle down on their snug farms, and are glad they
have not to go. Perhaps to Abraham himself, al
though he goes, it seems hard too and very strange.
But, then, the wider circles open. The Canaanite life
appears. The Jewish life is born. Out of Jewry
comes Christ. From Christ goes forth the Gospel;
Christendom is born. All modern life, all promise
of the millennial earth appears. How small beside
this widening life of Abraham looks the limited life
of Terah and Nahor and Haran, who were left be
hind at Ur ! Who that stands high enough to see it
all, who that has entered into the sanctuary of God,
does not see the limit, the end of those men ?
This puts in their true place, I think, all the lower

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. 119
aims and purposes of life. Because the heart's beat
ing is not the whole of life, it does not make the
heart's beating unimportant. Because the outer life,
the life of business and society, is but the smallest
circle of existence, it is not therefore to be disre
garded. To use it, yet always to use it with refer
ence to its limits, always to understand its end, not
to try to make it satisfy needs for which it has no
satisfaction, this is the true life. The difference be
tween living in order to make money, and making
money in order to live, to live the fullest, most cul
tured, most religious life, this is the difference that
the dullest perception can feel at once between two
business men. We outgrow our lower occupations
not as we outgrow playthings which we come to cast
aside altogether, but only as we outgrow our first
childish slavery to food and come to count it not an
end in itself, magnifying our appetites, but the mere
minister and material of thought and action and
emotion. Thus things fall into their natural orders
and get their true values for us ; we see their limits,
we understand their ends, as soon as we look at
them from a high enough standpoint, as soon as we
go into the sanctuary of God.
I seem to see illustrations of this truth everywhere.
Look at the nations, or at the periods of history,
which may be said to have been fullest of the con
sciousness of a divine rulership. Some ages seem to
be so worldly, so down to the human level as we look
back upon them ; others seem to be trembling and
heaving and rising with the very presence of God.
In some, men have seemed to feel as if God was very

120 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
far off from them. In others, all kinds of men, high
or low, have been haunted in their several ways with
the certainty that God was very near. Some nations
and times seem to be wholly of the earth, earthy.
Others truly have entered into and live in the very
sanctuary of God, a solemn knowledge of His mercy,
a solemn fear of His law. Of nations that seem thus
full of a special sense of God the Jews stand out in
old times ; and of ages that have been most aware of
Him the Puritan times in the history of our own
English race are the most prominent. And no one, I
think, studies the history of either without feeling
that there was in them, roughly marked, because
their character was very imperfect, but yet very real,
a clearer insight into the relative values of things,
a juster estimate of what was little and what was
great, a truer judgment of the necessary limitations
of wealth, honors, fame, success, than the nations
and the times around them could claim. This is
what made the one the most heroic and truthful
nation of its time, and the other the most heroic and
truthful period of our English history.
But men are better illustrations than nations or
ages, and when we think of men we turn at once to
the perfect man, and think of Jesus Christ. He
dwelt with, dwelt in, God continually. He was all
ways in the sanctuary of His Father, and as we turn
the pages of His story what a clear sense we have
that He was always " seeing the end of these men."
Can you picture to yourself that Jesus could possibly
have walked through the richest streets of Caper
naum or Jerusalem, and had it for an instant sug-

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. 121
gested to His mind that it was a hardship to Him
that all those low-minded traders should have been
so rich and He so poor ? Can you fancy Him look
ing into pleasant home-windows as He passed, and
thinking that His Father had wronged Him because
He had no home ? Oh what a shielded and protected
life He always carried ! What false judgment or re
pining bitterness could find a weak spot to break in ?
He saw the end of Chorazin and Bethsaida, and it
was as impossible for Him to envy those foolish cities
their weak folly as it would be for you, familiar with
gold and silver, to begrudge your child the chips and
stones with which he plays at keeping shop ; nay,
as impossible as it would be for God, with the reali
ties of eternity about Him, to want these toys and
trifles with which we amuse ourself here in this
world of time.
Such was the life of Jesus. And Jesus said, " No
man cometh unto the Father but by Me." "By
Him we all have access unto the Father ; " and so
by the power of Christ we may all come near to God
too, and have from out the open door of His sanctu
ary to which we have fled, His view of mortal life
and all its interests. For us, too, this world's exists
ence may subside into its clearly marked circles, and
we may see as God sees where each circle ends ; see
how the selfishnesses soon die out ; see how the affec
tions sweep out into wider lines ; see how nothing
but the highest loves reach out into infinity and sent
life forward into eternity. These times, when we
are nearest to God, are the times when this world's
things show their true values to us. Do you not

122 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
know that ? Do you remember how it all looked to
you when you came home from the funeral, not mor
bid with hopeless sorrow, but seeming to be above
the world, and to be standing with the friend who
had gone, in the presence of the throne of God ? Do
you remember how things changed their relative im
portance to you then, how the last were first and the
first were last, as they shall be on the judgment
day? Could any one have made you wretched then
by coming and telling you of a broken bank ? You
were above complaints and small trials. You had
entered into the sanctuary of God, and you saw the
end of these things.
Some of us who have thought about it must have
sometimes been puzzled just what to think about
the great men who are called the Hebrew prophets,
— Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos. Sometimes they are the
foretellers of future events ; but sometimes they are
apparently only the proclaimers of present duty,
preaching with fearful earnestness and eloquence
the righteousness of God to an unrighteous people.
Which was their office? Are they preachers to a
present or foretellers of a future? Does not what
we have said seem to show that the two offices are
really one ? To see the present deeply enough is to
see the future. Tell me perfectly what a man is,
and I will tell you what he will be, such is the fear
ful logical continuity that runs through our life.
These were men full of the spirit of God, in intensest
sympathy with Him. They abode in His sanctuary,
and so they saw, as He saw, what Jerusalem and
Samaria and Babylon were worth. They saw what

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. 123
sort of life was in those places and the men who
ruled them. So they knew how long their life could
last. They understood the end of these men. So
they were prophets ; and all prophecy that is more
than mere jugglery must be of this sort. All true
foresight must be insight first.
We hear of the men who have the care of the
Atlantic cable, standing with this end of it when it
is broken, and telling just where the interruption is.
They can tell how long the piece is that they hold in
their hands ; just in what unseen spot under the sea
the broken end of it will be found. They say, " It
has broken here, or here, or here." And so there are
some people of acute spiritual perception who can
accurately tell the worth and promise of the men they
meet. Can tell by a sense of touch which they can
not define themselves, how much real vitality there is
in them, how long they will last. You come to such
a person with your latest idol, the new sensation who
has started your enthusiasm, and you say eagerly,
" Here, the coming man has come. Here is the first
bit of the millennium. Here is a man who will have
long influence, and change the current of things to
the end." But he takes your idol's life into his
hands, and feels instantly that it is not what you
think it. He understands its end. He says sadly, " No,
this man is bright and energetic, but he is narrow, he
is selfish, he is false ; his end will be there," placing
his finger on the limit of the man's selfhood, which is
the farthest that such a character as his can reach.
Another sends back its record from a little more dis
tant point. Only when he touches the character of

124 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
a thoroughly unselfish and true soul, given up to
God, does he feel the thrill of a life that has no end,
but runs around the whole circle of duty, within and
parallel to the life of God himself. Such men there
are. Such tests and judges of their brothers' lives, —
not arrogant and self-asserting, but humble and meek.
Such a man's thoughts will not be like our thoughts.
He will know how to estimate the worth of men's
lives. He will know whom to help. He will leave
a man crying for his lost fortune, and go to a sinner
who is struggling not to lose his soul, sure that his is
the deeper need. He will devote himself to a little
insignificant-looking shoot, that just peeps above the
ground, and keeps the burning sun off of it carefully,
leaving the great tall weed by its side to scorch as the
sun pleases. Men may call him foolish, but wis
dom will be justified of this one of her children by
and by, when the weed has fallen and rotted, and
the little shoot is grown to the great tree, with the
fowls of the air among its branches and tired men
resting under its shade. These are the men who
keep alive'true standards in the world. The men
who live in the sanctuary of God, and so understand
the end of these men.
The great question after all is this : Shall we judge
man by God or God by man ? Does light and under
standing flow upward or downward ? If we judge
man by God, at once we have these true and discrimi
nating thoughts of human life. We have absolute
standards. We have a test of the worth of all we
do or see. But if we judge God by man, we only
have over again what the world has been so full of, —

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. 125
the persuasions of self-interest, the disbelief in ab
solute righteousness, the changing standards of the
changing times. Men have gone into the sanctuary
of their own selfishness, the sanctuary of themselves,
and straightway they have seemed to see an end of
God. All sense of a supreme and awful Fatherhood
on which all men depended, to which all action must
go back for judgment, has been lost. No higher
power than the human has seemed to be moving
under and giving meaning to the events of ordinary
life. All spiritual study of the world's course became
impossible. A low and dreary economy became the
main-spring of the universe. How much we have
seen of that spirit just now in relation to this fire in
Boston ! Revolting from the irreverent and repulsive
spirit of religious competency which undertakes -to
say just why the fire came, just why it destroyed this
man's business and spared that other's, just what
God meant to teach men by it, another school has
been very loud in saying that there was no spiritual
teaching in it, that it contained no higher lessons than
those of more careful building and a better govern
ment. That it contained those lessons no wise man
can doubt. God grant that we may heed them ! We
shall surely suffer if we do not heed them. But if
there be a God who cares more for His children's
souls than for their bodies, to whom the body is
always manifestly temporal and the soul eternal,
then for soul as well as body there must be a meaning
in what we still call such a visitation of God as this.
No man may read his brother's lessons and say,
" This is what God meant for you ; " but every man

126 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
must read his own, his lessons of patience, spirituality,
charity, and believe with all his heart that God has
lessons for his brethren too, and pray that in what
ought to be such a Pentecostal time, his brethren, too,
may hear God speak His wonderful things, each in his
own tongue.
But now let us gather and keep the meanings of
this verse of Asaph for ourselves. I am sure that we
need them. I am speaking to men and women who
are in the midst of the pressing moral problems that
cannot be escaped. You see wicked men prosperous,
and you say, "How can I believe in God?" Only,
my dear friend, only by coming close to God, and
learning by deep and sweet experience that He has
better things to give to His beloved than what men
call prosperity. The peace that passeth understand
ing, the calm rest of forgiven sin, and of a soul
trusted away from itself into its Saviour's hands. To
one who knows what those high blessings mean, how
little does it seem that other hands should fill them
selves with, the shining trifles which its hands are too
full to hold. Think how it will seem in heaven !
Standing before the throne, filled with the unspeak
able vision, conscious through all the glory of the
culture that suffering has brought, hurrying with joy
on the high missions of the Lord, who will look back
then and be troubled an instant at the recollection of
how a wicked man sat at a little richer table, or had
a little higher seat in the market-place when we were
here on earth ?
Ah, but, you say, that is not my trouble. It goes
deeper than that. It does not merely trouble me

THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. 127
that others have these things. I cannot keep my
self from seeking them. How shall I overcome the
temptation that is always driving me to let my reli
gion go, and to plunge into this chase after wealth
and comfort? Again the answer is the same : Enter
into the sanctuary of God. You cannot let the lower
go until the higher first has wholly filled and occu
pied you. Come with your sins, and find the peace
and bliss of being forgiven. Come with your lonely
heart, lonely in all its deepest wants, in spite of all
the tenderest companionships of life, and find the per
fect happiness of Christ's communion; then, filled
with this new strength, when you turn round and
say, "Now, let me see if I can fight down my ene
mies, can conquer my temptations," behold your
enemies will be away down there beneath your feet,
you will have passed out above your temptations, and
will only see them raging and tossing impotently, as
one who stands upon the sunlit peak sees the vain
fury of the thunderstorm beautiful and not terrible
below him.
That cannot come in this life, you say. But I do
not know. There have been men and women with
lives so calm and high that they seemed to have
reached it, even on this tumultuous earth. Hardly
a flake of spray from the storm below them ever
seemed to dash up and wet their steadfast and placid
feet. But whether it can come in this life or not,
the struggle for it makes the two lives one. Already
to him who is working towards it, part of its peace is
given. The rock runs out under the sea, 'and your

128 THE SANCTUARY OF GOD.
feet may be firm upon it even while the waves are
still breast high.
Such be the peace in Christ which shall make all
of our lives strong through all their struggle, until
at last we enter into that rest which remaineth for
the people of God.

vni.
COME AND SEE.
" Philip saith unto him, ' Come and See.' " John i. 46.
Twice in the same chapter these same words,
"Come and See," are spoken. Once they are the
reply of Jesus to two of John's disciples, who having
heard John speak of Him, are following Him, and
when He turns and sees them ask Him, " Rabbi,
where dwellest thou ? " Again, they are the words
of Philip, who having himself become the disciple of
Jesus, findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, " We
have found Him of whom Moses in the law and the
prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of
Joseph. And Nathanael said, Can there any good
thing come out of Nazareth? Then Philip saith
unto him, Come and see." And these words,
thus twice repeated, are characteristic words of
Christianity. They have a ring about them that
belongs to all our religion. " Come and see ! " They
invite inquiry. They proclaim a religion which is to
have its own clear tests, which it invites every one to
use. It is an open faith. It will do nothing in a
corner. It will be recognizable in its workings by
men's ordinary perceptions. I need not remind you,
if you know your Bibles, how common such appeals
are everywhere. "Try the spirits whether they be

130 COME AND SEE.
of God." " Prove all things." " Go and tell what
things ye see and hear." " He that hath ears to hear,
let him hear." There are institutions that shut their
doors and windows, and say to the world of ordinary
men, " You can know nothing of what goes on in
here. If you come in you must come in blindfold, and
let yourself be led, and examine nothing. There are
no tests within your power — you must just be blind
and obey." Christianity, however she may have been
misrepresented sometimes, has no such tone as that ;
but everywhere she throws the doors of her secret
places, of her most sacred doctrine and her holiest
character, wide open, and cries to all men as to beings
who in the healthy use of their human faculties are
capable of judging, " Come and see." In that call
she strikes the keynote of intelligent, and so of truly
devout religion.
It is the necessity of Christianity thus to appeal
to the observation of men. She openly declares that
she seeks certain moral results of which men are able
to judge. Think how Christ came into the world
bringing the*mysterious life of a higher world with
Him ! He told plainly what He came for. It was
to renew men's spiritual life. It was to make men
better. It was to save His people from their sins.
There were profounder and more mystic aspects of
salvation, subtle and exalted experiences, serene and
sacred emotions, into which He offered to lead His
followers, where the ordinary eyes of men were not
prepared to follow them ; but every statement of His
purpose involved this as preliminary to everything
beside. That His disciples should first of all become

COME AND SEE. 131
different men in those things which other men could
see and understand, that they should be braver, truer,
humbler, purer. A pure philosophy or a pure mysti
cism, dealing only in abstract thought or feeling, has
no test for ordinary men. They cannot tell whether
it is true or false. But a religion which must make
men's lives different, must change characters, or be a
failure, has to be always open to men's judgment. It
has to work its miracles in the light. It has to take
its man or its generation, and standing out on a plat
form where there can be no concealment and no
jugglery and to say, " See, I will make this man into
this different man. I will make this bad man into
this good man ; " and all the world knows whether
the experiment succeeds or fails. The test is in the
hands of every man who knows the difference be
tween good living and bad living. She cannot fall
back upon certain unintelligible experiences, certain
unseen changes which she says have taken place in
her subject but do not show themselves upon the
outside. If they do not show themselves on the out
side they are unreal. They are such in their very
nature that if they are real they must show them
selves on the outside. If the magician stands before
me on the stage and points to a lion or a dog and
says, " I will change this brute into a man," I have
the test in my own eyes. It will not do for him to
say while I see the brute still standing brutishly
there, " Oh, but the substance is changed too deep
for you to see, and that the old form remains the
same is nothing." A changed form must betoken
the changed substance. I must see the upright figure

132 COME AND SEE.
and watch the intelligent eye, and hear the articulate
voice of manhood, or it is no man — there is no mira
cle. So Christianity by its very necessity is compelled
to be judged of men.
I should like to speak to-night of some of the gen
eral principles of truth-seeking and truth-getting,
first in themselves, and then in their relation to
Christianity. It is the subject that is suggested by
this invitation to observation and experiment, — this
" Come and see " of the convinced disciple, Philip.
There are, then, two great methods by which men
arrive at the knowledge of truth. One is the method
of authority and the other the method of experience.
I know what I know either because some one has
told me of it, or because I have observed it for my
self. To say nothing of the comparative trustworthi
ness of the two methods, everybody can feel the
superior vividness of the second. What I see for
myself is so much more real and vital than what I
hear from another. The best teacher is always he
who says, " Come and see." The brilliant lecturer
on the laws of light stands at his desk, and in the
choicest and clearest English describes to me the
action or the composition of the ray, and I think I
know all about it ; but suddenly he turns to his in
strument and makes me see the ray of light doing
its action or unfolding into its constituents, and my
knowledge is of a new sort. The method of authority
has been changed for the method of experience. We
are like the Samaritans who said to the woman,
" Now we believe, not because of thy saying, for we
have heard Him ourselves."

COME AND SEE. 133
There is always this distinction ; but yet remember
that where truth seems to be received by the method
of authority, still the method of experience must
have preceded or else the other could not legitimately
have been used. There must have been a previous
conviction of the trustworthiness of the teacher got
by our experience either of him or of some who have
told us about him, or else we should have no right
to believe what he says. So all comes back at last
to the method of experience. The invitation, " Come
aud see," is the invitation into all truth. When
Jesus had risen from the dead, you remember, His
disciple refused to believe till with his own hand he
had felt the wounds in the hands and feet and side.
And Jesus gently rebuking him, compares, as it were,
the methods of authority and experience, of faith
and science, so to speak, to the advantage of the
former when He says, " Thomas, because thou hast
seen thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have
not seen and yet have believed." And yet when we
come to think of it, is not His rebuke really that
Thomas had not used the method of experience
enough, not that he demands it too much ? He re
bukes him that in all the years that they had been
together he had not observed Him deeply enough to
learn His character and understand His words. Is
He not pleading, not against science, but for a higher
science ? Must it not be always so ? Must not all
truth come to us through the faculties that God has
given to us, faithfully employed. Jesus always asked
the people to believe what He told them of heaven,
of the judgment day, of His own mysterious nature,

134 COME AND SEE.
in virtue of what they saw, — the sick man made
well and the poor made rich. " If I do not the
works of my Father believe me not," a direct appeal
to experience. " Come and see, and according to
what you see believe or disbelieve in the awful
unsearchable truths of God and the celestial life."
What follows, then ? Having this method of truth
we have no right to expect the attainment of truth
except in the use of this method. We have no right
to count that as truth which has come to us without
its use, without some steady application of our facul
ties to the matter which is in question. But how
much people do hold to be true or not true which
they have reached in no such way. Men are preju
diced, we say, and prejudice means simply this : " A
judging before ; " a forming an opinion before you
have any grounds for an opinion ; a judgment be
fore evidence ; a making up your mind before you
have come and seen. Do we not recognize our old
vexatious friends ? A man is unwilling to say of any
subject that he has no opinion about it because he
has had no chance to examine it (as any sensible man
must say of a hundred subjects), and so he makes up
an opinion without examination, and it is only a
prejudice that he flaunts in the world's eyes. A man
would like a certain thing to be true, and so he says
over and over again, " This is true." He would like
his house to be just so high ; he would like the Bible
to be verbally inspired; he would like that there
should be no future punishment, and so he says over
and over again, " This is so," and never comes
squarely and fully up to the facts to see whether it

COME AND SEE. ISO
is so or not, or if he does meet the facts some day he
meets them so encased in his armor of prejudice that
they are powerless to break it. A good man — and
this is one of the commonest of things — thinks that
in order to keep the world sound and good and healthy
such and such a statement ought to be true ; thinks
that the world will go to ruin if it is not true, and so
he says, " It must be true," and there is his prejudice
full made. He may be right or may be wrong, but
either way he is prejudiced, and so feeble. He has
never got up to the facts where strength lies. Indeed,
I think this last is one of the hardest cases to make
perfectly clear either to ourselves or others. It is no
doubt a certain presumption for the truth of an idea
that the world would be wiser and better if it were
true. If we could be perfectly sure that the world
would be wiser and better for it, it would be a very
strong presumption of its truth ; but, after all, it could
be no more than a presumption. Finally, we must go
and see whether it be true ; we must face facts, and
our presumption could only send us with more inter
est and earnestness to the facts which alone could
give us an answer.
These are some forms of prejudice as concerns our
estimates of truth. The same is true concerning also
our estimate of persons. Indeed, to this last the term
" prejudice " is perhaps more commonly applied ; at
any rate, it was a case of personal prejudice that
drew out the invitation of our text. Personal prej
udice is the formation of an opinion of a person's
character before we have the ground for an opinion.
Here was Nathanael who heard Philip tell of Jesus.

136 COME AND SEE.
All he knew of him was that he came from the town
of Nazareth. At once he formed an opinion of Him;
He could not be great or good and come from such a
place. " Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ? "
The answer is wisdom itself : " Come and see the
man whom you dislike. Get your evidence and then
make your judgment." I know some one thing about
a man, some one act that he did when he was a boy,
perhaps not even that, something about his parents
or his relatives, something about his birthplace, or
the school he went to, or his place of business, or his
business partnerships. Now, it is almost impossible,
as we are made, that such things should not influence
us, that they should not give us some first impression
of what kind of a man we shall find him when we
come to know him ; but to let such first impressions
magnify and harden themselves into opinions, to let
them influence our action, to let them decide us not
to know the man whom we so rashly judge, this is
personal prejudice. And yet who of us is not guilty
of it? Who of us does not know of some man against
whom he has taken a dislike, whom he would avoid
or depreciate, or perhaps harm to-morrow if he were
brought in contact with him, whom yet he must hon
estly own that he does not know, that he has no real
ground for thinking ill of, a man whose character he
has never " come to and seen," by any such experi
ence of him as can justify him in having any real
opinion about him whatever ? How many men will
go up to the polls and vote for a President of the
United States, some on one side, some on the other,
making believe that they have judgments about the

COME AND SEE. 137
men, when they have really nothing but prejudices ?
They will vote for and against phantoms of their own
fancy, and not clearly understood characters. Why,
take away our prejudices about each other, and how
much do we know of one another's life ? How much
solid judgment is there that is really full of intelli
gent experience ? I think that when we die and go
together to the world of perfect light, we shall have
to begin almost all our knowledge of one another en
tirely afresh. We shall see that these ill-considered
fancies that we have about each other are good for
nothing. They will all be swept away out of the
clear atmosphere of that celestial life. Our deep af
fections, our real loves and hates, we shall keep, our
trivial fondnesses, our foolish likes and dislikes, will
go together. We shall find by our side upon the sea
of glass — if God's mercy bring us there — some saint
whom an inconsistent habit or a scandalous report
has made us think that we dislike, and find, as we
look him through and through with the insight of
that perfect world, and know him for the first time,
that we cannot hate, but must completely love, so no
ble, true, and pure a soul as his. We shall leave these
clouds behind, as we get higher up the mountain.
And this freedom from personal prejudice, this really
sympathetic knowledge of one another, may begin
here, and will be one of the purest earthly foretastes
of heaven.
You see, then, whither we are always being tempted
if we could only hear the invitation. It is to trust
worthy knowledge of the facts of life, away from
phantoms and fancies and our mere imaginations.

138 COME AND SEE.
You think that work is disgraceful and degrading,
and that taste and true culture ripen only in idle
leisure. " Come and see." Set yourself to work.
You know nothing about it. Try it, and see what a
good fife it brings. You think that serious thought
is stupid, that nothing but trifling dissipation is in
teresting and exciting. " Come and see." Try it,
and find that there is an exhilaration about a high
pursuit of ideas that is as far beyond all mere frivol
ity as climbing a mountain peak is better than run
ning races in the valley. This appeal to experiment
and fact is the great hope of mankind. This is the
very soul of modern science. Philosophers had been
making theories about what the world ought to be
and what nature ought to do. " Come and see," said
Bacon. That was the watchword of the inductive
philosophy, and to-day the world is full of men just
patiently seeing what Nature is doing, learning her
by the humble wisdom of experimental science. And
in religion, bigotry and superstition are the result of
men's theorizing and speculating about what God
ought to be. " Come and see ; come and see what
God is," cries the reassuring voice of Him who would
not hide Himself from, but show Himself to, His chil
dren, and out of a devout and humble study of His
words and works, out of a readiness to take whatever
He shall show it, there comes the large, earnest, true
religion which really elevates and saves the soul.
So everywhere this invitation rings through the
world. True, the sight which we send out in answer
to the invitation must be the large use of all our
faculties. Not merely the outward eye must see, the

COME AND SEE. 139
mind must see as weE. It is not answering the
whole invitation unless the whole man goes and sees
with all his powers of vision. The eye sees phenom
ena ; the soul sees causes underlying and connecting
the phenomena. We must not stop merely with
what the eye sees, and, having written down the
facts we have discovered, call that the all of science,
and brand all beyond as superstition. It is not
superstition, not prejudice, but science still, spiritual
science, when the mind sees a causal will, out of
which all phenomena proceed, and the heart feels a
mighty love beating through all the ordered system.
It is not well to live and see only from the eyes and
brain outward.
To every man there is a fundamental division of
this universe that the oldest philosophies have recog
nized. It is not conceit, it is the mere law of his
personality that makes it. He is on one side, and all
the rest of the universe is on the other. I is one di
vision. All the rest, all that is not I, is on the other.
Out of that rest of the universe comes the endless
call to knowledge. " Come and see " whispers in
every wind, seems written in the mystery of every
sunset and starlight, cries pathetically to him out of
every strange movement of this human nature that
his heart hears when to the ear all is still. To every
man it is as if the rest of the universe were made for
him to use his faculties upon, to learn, to know, to
love, to hate, as, stand where he will, the horizon
forms a circle about every man. To say that we
know that world, before our faculties have met and
grappled it, is prejudice and folly. To be at work

140 COME AND SEE.
really learning it, in any part of it, however small, is
noble and makes us noble. That is the everlasting
and unspeakable superiority of any work in life,
however small, that is true, over every work in life,
however great, that is false.
So far I have been speaking of the duty of the
learner, but the duty of every teacher becomes
plain, also, from what we have been saying. And
every man is a teacher, or wants to be sometimes.
Every man sometimes knows and believes something
which he desires to make his neighbor also know
and believe. How shall he do it? If he is wise
he will try to take his friend to the same facts
that enlightened him, and make him see them. He
will not merely try to get assent, but to get convic
tion. He will say, "Come and see," if it is possi
ble. This was the admirable wisdom of Philip.
What had converted him was the personal sight of
Jesus. He had no other religion but that. He
meant to follow Him because he had seen Him, and
was satisfied in seeing Him. He might have gone to
work to argue with Nathanael a multitude of side
questions, to show that Nazareth was not such a bad
place after all ; that Jesus had escaped its contami
nation, or that, indeed, He was born in Bethlehem,
and not in Nazareth at all. But he was too wise and
too eager for that. Jesus Himself was His own evi
dence. To get his friend face to face with Jesus —
to make the guileless Nathanael see with spiritual
sympathy the spiritual Christ. This was his object.
This was what he did. And oh, if every preacher
could only do it too ! If, instead of arguing a hun-

COME AND SEE. 141
dred half-relevant questions, the apostles who fill our
pulpits were all crying like this wise, honest apostle
of Bethsaida, "We have found the Messiah, come
and see ; " and when men hesitated and objected,
crying still, "Come and see," merely laboring to
bring the souls of men into the presence of the per
sonal Christ, to make them look upon His face, and
hear His voice, and feel His heart beating, I am sure
that our pulpits would change weakness for power,
and our churches be full of life. The really strong
and effective preaching that the world has seen al
ways has been just this. Men who had seen Jesus,
wise or ignorant, strong or weak, crying to their
brethren to come and see Him, too.
And so of all teaching. A man insults me if he
tries to force himself on me merely repeating his
opinion and expecting me to receive it because it is
his. But a man honors me if he takes me back to
the source where he found his truth, and bids me
drink where he drank. I cannot take another man's
truth, but he can show me where he got his, and I
will get my own and thank him. A man trying to
make you take his opinion just because he has thor
oughly adopted it and likes it, is like a man who had
been cured of his palsy, thinking that therefore he
can cure yours if he touches you. All that he can
do, evidently, is to take you to the doctor or give
you the medicine that cured him. And yet the land
rings with mere positiveness. On every platform
men are shouting over and over their loud persua
sions, and deafening us into assent. How powerful
it seems at first ! How powerless it is in the long

142 COME AND SEE.
run ! Mere assertion may force assent, but it never
creates belief. Of all the causes and theories and
political and social parties that are vociferating in
our land to-day, it is comfortable to know that none
will finally establish itself by mere vociferation. All
must die out in noise, except the one or two that
shall prove strong enough and wise enough to take
men calmly by the hand, and lead them down to the
foundations that they rest on, and say, " Look for
yourselves," and so finally convince men's minds as
well as deafen their bewildered ears.
And now I want to apply what I have been saying
to Christianity more distinctly. I think it is a ques
tion that many Christians are not wholly clear about.
Are there any clear reasons, capable of statement to
other people, why we are Christians ? There are
people who know that they are Christians, and always
mean to be. But does our religion stand frankly be
fore the world and say to the doubter, " Come and
see ; " and having something really to point to which
can convince, his reason and change his heart? Has
she got just to stand, with her creed in her hand, say
ing, " Believe this or die," threatening the penalties
of unbelief ; or can she do what any honest man would
like to do, — call other men to see what she sees, and
so believe her belief, not because they will suffer if
they refuse, but because they cannot help it. I
believe, indeed, that no man ever loses any truth,
whether through his own fault or not, without suffer
ing for it. It may not be in the way of punishment,
but he suffers. If every truth gained makes a man
richer, any truth lost must make him poorer. I be-

COME AND SEE. 143
lieve that the fear of such suffering for disbelief may
be rightly used to break up men's sluggishness, and
compel them to inquire ; but that is a different thing
from attempting to compel belief by fear. Philip
may say to Nathanael, " You will suffer if you do not
believe in my Messiah ; therefore, ' Come and see ; ' "
but he cannot say, " You will suffer if you do not
believe ; therefore believe without seeing." It is a
perfectly simple distinction, but one that men are
always forgetting. Fear can induce inquiry, but
cannot create belief. In a frivolous age, before friv
olous minds, one may well stand and portray the ter
rible effects of rejecting truth. But when the age is
serious, and when the minds to which he speaks have
lost their frivolity and really are in earnest, then he
must be ready to throw aside his terrors and to lead
them to the reasons of the faith he thinks they ought
to hold. Can our faith thus utter her invitation?
Men almost fancy to-day that she cannot; that she
must hide herself behind vague terrors. If that were
so, not merely we could not make other men believe,
but we could not believe ourselves. Let us see what
the invitation is that Christianity gives to earnest
men really looking for the truth.
1. It is the Bible first that she is holding as she
stands there saying, " Come and see." The Bible,
as the word of God — as the true story of His deal
ings with the world. Christianity holds that out
and frankly bids men come and examine it for them
selves. She cannot escape that, and she does not
want to. The Bible as a book of history and teach
ing, to be examined like other books, first as to its

144 COME AND SEE.
truth and authority, then as to its meaning, this
must always be the first principle of a reasonable
Christianity. That in the four Gospels we have the
story told by His own contemporaries and disciples
of how Jesus the Saviour lived and taught, and died ;
that is the truth which Christianity lays first before
men's eyes. She calls them to examine for them
selves whether the book from which the warrant of
her life proceeds is genuine and true. Men come to
it, and by every trial they can make of it, of critical
study or of spiritual experience, they test this spring
out of which the whole stream flows.
2. And then, secondly, Christianity offers to the
world her historic Christ. Again she says, " Come
and see." Back in the centuries, yet set so clearly
in the light of authentic history that all attempts to
melt His life into a cloudy myth have always failed,
there stands this figure. She claims that this Being
to whom she points is the power and wisdom of God
present upon the earth. You hesitate and doubt.
Then "Come and see," she says. Put yourself in
the presence of this Being. See how He lives. He
is a man surely. In suffering and joy alike, the
identifying proof-marks of our humanity are all
here. But ennoble humanity as completely as you
will, and it will not explain this phenomenal charac
ter and life. There is a simplicity, a largeness of
purpose, which is divine. Explain this phenomenon
of human history, how can you? She says it is
God manifest in the flesh. Come and find another
explanation, if you can. Come, and if there is no

COME AND SEE. 145
other to be found, take this and own the divine
Christ. 3. And thirdly, Christianity calls us to see her
Christian history. She claims that the Christ, for
ever present in human life, is a renewing and com
forting and strengthening power everywhere. You
doubt and hesitate. Again, frank as Philip, she
cries, " Come and see." Then the great books are
opened; the birth and growth of modem history
is shown ; the larger reign of conscience ; the
gradual advance of freedom ; the ever-moving
spiritual element in life ; the refreshed, invigorated
world of modern times. Then here and there a
veil more sacred is lifted from the hearts of single
men. The record of the saints is shown, — men,
women, little children, borne up over their sorrows
so that their voices ring still to us out of the fires
where they burned, — made giants in their weakness,
to do the work of God so that the hard world still
bears the pressures where their feeble fingers laid
hold of it, as if it had been seized with some grasp
of iron. These are the phenomena. Come and see
them ! Come and see them ! Other religions can
show you some of the same sort, no doubt. We
rejoice to recognize the proof that in them too the
divine Spirit has been at work. When the faith of
Christ shows her marks of the divine Power, let
our voices gladly rejoice to acknowledge the divine
Presence. The Bible, the historic Christ, the Christian history,
— these, then, are what the religion we believe in lays
before men who are really willing to come and see

146 COME AND SEE.
whether what she claims is true or not. But is this
all? Is there not another region of evidence from
which the Christian draws his deepest assurance, but
which seems less open to him who is looking at the
faith from its outside. I mean the region of per
sonal experience. Christ says to the Christian, " I
can bless you with spiritual blessings, with a loving,
happy inner life." "Yes," the glad soul answers,
recalling many a bright passage in its own career.
"Yes, surely, Christ can do, will do, has done all that
He says." And so it gladly looks forward and trusts
Him for the things to come. But, then, when that
soul turns to another by its side, and tells of the
richer life, the trust, the hope, the peace, the courage,
the gradual purity which the Saviour can give, and
that stranger soul, weary of a search for these high
things in which it never has succeeded, looks in
credulous and hopeless, can you say to it simply,
" Come and see," tempting it to an experience which
lies wide open to any one, like these others I de
scribed? "How can I?" it replies. "To try these
things implies* already a sympathetic appreciation of
them, which is the very faith I lack and cannot
find." We stand apart. " I say I cannot believe, and
your only answer is, Come and believe." This is
the real difficulty that many people feel when they
are asked to test the reality to its spiritual power
by making themselves subjects of it. Their an
swer, often not captious, but very sad, is that they
cannot make themselves subjects of it until they
do believe in it. And so the weary circle runs
around.

COME AND SEE. 147
Is it a hopeless difficulty ? Some people seriously
believe that it is. They hold that the whole Chris
tian experience is so foreign and so unintelligible to
a soul that God has not called, that it is utterly un
approachable and unattractive to that soul, and they
fix the calling of God at one definite recognizable
point in a man's life. Until that moment comes, it
is as impossible for that man to make his way into
the charmed circle in which they live who live with
God, as for Lucifer to gather up his own shattered
strength and holiness, and go and stand again beside
Gabriel and Michael before the throne of God. To
invite the soul to such an experience is to invite to an
impossibility — it is calling upon a corpse to live.
There is nothing for it to do but to lie helpless and
wait. The father may tell his child of the joy of the
Christian, but the child cannot rise up and say, " I
will go." Friend may cry to friend out of the full
ness of his heart, " Oh, taste and see that the Lord is
good ! " but he is tempting only to a Tantalus feast.
This test of Christianity which lies in the personal
Christian experience can be nothing to you till first
you are a Christian.
I cannot think that this is true. It does not
sound to me like the New Testament. It does not
sound to me like Christ. And its fault seems to
me to be in this assumption, that there is one fixed
moment in a man's life when the spirit of God comes
to him for the first time — that before that moment
he is an outsider, a foreigner, and an alien. If our
first view is different — if we believe that all men
are God's children, and that each of the children

148 COME AND SEE.
from his birth into this world, and how long before
we cannot say, is on the Father's heart and mind ;
if we believe that every truth and goodness that
the most benighted soul finds comes to him from the
one only source of truth and goodness which the
universe contains (and in order not to deny that,
men have been compelled to deny that much which
was evidently truth and goodness was either true or
good); if the hour of conversion is the time when
the soul comes to God, and not the time when God
comes to the soul, that having happened so long
before; if all this different idea be true, then the
difficulty is not so great. I go to my friend and bid
him test Christ by this experience of the inner life,
and he answers me as I described, " I cannot come
to Him till first He comes to me." The answer is, " He
has come to you. All the truth and goodness that
you have He brought you. Your coming to Him will
be only coming into a consciousness, and so a com
plete service of the Saviour who was already with
you." When I invite you, then, to the religious ex
perience, I invite you not to something strange, but to
something which in its rudiments you know already.
You have already seen the opening of the paths that
lead to Christ. You cannot see the depths they lead
to, but they do lead finally to Him. When I urge
you to come to Him, I am urging you to follow those
paths out to the end. You cannot see their whole
course, but you can see one step at least farther than
you have done yet, and so test the steps beyond, so
come nearer to the illumination and assurance that
awaits you at the end.

COME AND SEE. 149
I am sure that this is true: that when I take
a man who says that he knows nothing of Christ,
and yet who owns that he has instincts of duty
and aspirations of reverence to God, and a long
ing for purity, that I believe were put into his heart
by no other than Christ's Holy Spirit, and when I
urge and beg that man to do the duty and to be
lieve the truth which he has had made known to
him, I am leading toward that Christ who is the cen
tre of all duty and all truth. If I found a man who
believed in a God, but not in any self-manifestation
of that God in human life, what would I do ? I
would do all that I could to make that God whom he
did believe in more and more real to him. I would
waken his conscience till it cried out with the sense
of disobedience. He should see that God awful in
His righteousness, more awful in His love, close to
his daily Life. New needs should start out of his deep
ening religion, until only an Emmanuel, a fatherhood
made manifest in brotherhood, a God in Christ, could
satisfy him. So I would try to get him to "come and
see " Christ, where He is most mighty, — in His work
in the soul of man. Only when I found a man who
owned no duty which was yet undone, before whom
there opened no vista of spiritual aspiration that was
yet unfollowed, — only when I found the man per
fectly bounded and contented with this earthly life,
should I feel that I had found one before whom there
opened no way to the Saviour of us all.
This seems to be reasonable, surely. If you knew
that the benefactor of your life was living now in
Europe, though you did not know just where or how

150 COME AND SEE.
to reach him, or what he would do for you, or even
thoroughly and certainly who he was and what he
was, only that he was and that he was there, you
would go to Europe and live there yourself, if you
had any way of getting there, that you might be in
the same land with him and certainly somewhere
near him. If a soul has many doubts and bewilder
ments about Christ, and yet knows that there is a
Saviour, and that that Saviour's home is in the land
of righteousness and truth, then to that land of
righteousness and truth that soul will go by any road
that it can find, eager to get there, seeking a road,
pressing through difficulties, that it may be in the
same country with, and somewhere near, its unfound
Lord. It may be that the clouds that for us mortals
haunt that land of righteousness and truth may long
hang so thick and low that living close to Him the
soul may still fail to see Him, but some day certainly
the fog shall rise, the cloud shall scatter, and in the
perfect enlightenment of the other life the soul shall
see its Lord, and be thankful for every darkest step
that it took towards Him here.
And is this what it means, then, that " Coming to
Jesus " ? That phrase that is so old, so vague, what
ever it means, means for you, first of all, just this
doing the duty which lies next to you, and following
out whatever spiritual conviction you have to its
next result, being true to the light you have, and
waiting, hoping, praying for more. Yes, simply, just
exactly that. If you have any duty that you know
you ought to do, and are cowardly and dishonest
about and will not do it, then to go and do it, if

COME AND SEE. 151
you have any spiritual aspiration that you are keep
ing down under a weight of business and selfishness,
then to set it free, that is what it means for you
now to come to Christ. It may be that Nathanael's
first step when he started with Philip was into the
dark shadow of some Capernaum alley or up the
steep rocky path that led from town to town. After
ward Christ clothed in light upon the lake at mid
night, Christ at the table in the chamber of the
supper, Christ in the room where the disciples were
assembled after the resurrection when the door was
shut. And so for you hereafter, Christ in the high
est experiences, the purest raptures of this life and
the other, Christ in forgiveness, in communion, in
fellowship of work, in fellowship of glory ; but now
Christ in these first steps that lead you towards Him,
in the truthfulness and purity and unselfishness and
humility, in the struggle to do right, and the sorrow
when you have done wrong, which are possible for
you right away.
I am well pleased that our long journey of this
evening has brought us out at last upon this clear
and open ground of immediate duty, — the duty for
to-morrow, the duty for to-day. You are in doubt of
Christ. " How can He be this that you claim ? How
can He be, indeed, at all ? " The answer is, " Come
and see." You say, "I cannot." Say it sadly or
bitterly, " I cannot." I do not know what your im
possibility may be, but I am sure of one absolute
impossibility that may be yours. You cannot see the
highest and the best so long as you are neglecting a
known duty or stifling a known truth. I am well

152 COME AND SEE.
pleased to leave it here. Go home and search your
heart. Let it speak out. Be brave and honest. Take
up your wronged duties and do them. Take up your
wronged truths and really believe them. Enter into
that region of sincerity and faithfulness where Christ
abides, and then sorely some day you will find Him
there. Then not merely the lowest but the highest
evidences of our faith shall become clear to you, even
that highest of all its evidences, the Spirit itself
bearing with your spirit that you are the child of
God and joint heir with Christ.

IX.
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
" Let no man deceive himself. If any man thinketh that he is
wise among you in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be
wise." — I. Coe. iii. 18.
There must have been plenty of people in Cor
inth to whom these words came home. The conceit
of Greece was wisdom, and Corinth was one of the
eyes of Greece. There were the scholars of the
schools. There, in that bright transparent air, every
thing quivering and blazing in the sunshine, the
passion of knowing was the great dominant emotion ;
the pride of knowing was the complacent satisfaction
of men's lives.
And there is no satisfaction so subtle and insidi
ous as the conceit of knowledge — no other posses
sion so becomes a very part of the possessor. The
money which you hold in your hand, the laurel
which men wreathe around your brow, both of these
may disappear and you are still the same, but the
thing you know is part of you. No man can take it
from you. Its subtle essence is in your heart and
character. You are something different because of
it. And so, as a man loves what he is more than
what he has, self-love lends all its intensity to the
pride of learning, and no man is so proud as he who
'* thinketh that he is wise " among men in the world.

154 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
To such men writes St. Paul. St. Paul, himself
the wise man, the lover of wisdom, and he says that
there come times when the great need of life is to
put aside what seems our wisdom, to give it no value,
to make no account of it, to seem to ourselves to
know nothing, and in his strong words, to " become
a fool," and this with the distinct purpose that we
may really get the wisdom which we have thought
ourselves to possess. Surely there is enough of
strangeness in such exhortation to excite our curi
osity, and set us to studying to see what the great
apostle, who always means something weighty and
timely and interesting, means here.
And at the very outset we cannot help feeling how
his words have the same tone with which a good
many other words in the New Testament, and es
pecially in the Gospels, make us familiar. We think
about those words of Jesus when He said, " Whoso
ever loseth his life shall save it; " or those other
words to the young rich man, " Go and sell all that
thou hast ; " or yet those others, " Except ye be con
verted and oecome as little children." And of a gen
eral spirit which runs through all His teaching, that
very much which the world has been elaborately
building up must be pulled down, before the true
city of God, the new Jerusalem, can be established
in the earth. No one can read the New Testament
and not catch that spirit, and whoever catches it,
sees the far-off hope of a perfected humanity only
through falling systems and the ruin of the vicious
and imperfect conditions which must take place first.
Whoever has thoroughly accepted and been filled

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST. 155
with that spirit, is ready to feel how like it is to what
Paul teaches in this text, and that the man who
calls himself wise must become a fool to gain true
wisdom. It is no mere abuse of earthly wisdom, such as
religious teachers sometimes have allowed themselves.
It goes more deep. It comes more down to funda
mental principles than that. Let me try to state the
principle which seems to me to be involved in it.
If I gave it a name I should almost venture to call
it the Principle of the Crust. What I mean is
this: There are two sorts of hindrance or obstacle
which may settle around any object and prevent a
power from outside from reaching it. One of them
is a purely external obstacle, built round it like a
wall, of stuff and nature different from the object
itself. The other is simply its own substance, hard
ened upon the surface and shutting up the body of the
object, as it were, behind and within itself. This
latter is the Crust. The river freezes, and it is the
river's self, grown hard and stiff, which shuts the
river's water out from the sunshine and the rain.
The ground is trodden hard, and it is the very sub
stance of the ground that lies rigid and impenetrable
and catches the seed, and will not let it enter in and
claim the soil and do its fruitful work. The loaf
hardens its surface, and the Crust which confines the
bread is bread itself. This is the notion of the Crust.
It is of the very substance of the thing which it im
prisons. It is not a foreign material ; but the thing
itself, grown hard and rigid, shuts the soft and tender
and receptive portions of the thing away. The in-

156 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
fluences from outside are powerless to reach it. Not
until the Crust is broken, and the ice melts once
more into the stream, and the hardened ground is
crumbled into the general system of the soil again.
Not until then can power and influence easily find
their way in and permeate the whole.
Is not the parable plain ? Can we not recognize
how that which takes place in the lake or on the
road-side takes place also in the ordinary intellectual
and moral life of man. Out of the very substance
of a man's life, out of the very stuff of what he is
and does, comes the hindrance which binds itself
about his being, and will not let the better influences
out. His occupations, his acquirements, his habits,
his standards of action and of thoughts, make Crusts
out of their own material, so that, beside whatever
foreign barrier may stand between them and the
higher food they need, there is this barrier which
they have made out of themselves. That self-made
barrier must be broken up, must be restored to its
first condition and become again part of the sub
stance out of which it was evolved, before the life can
be fed with the dews of first principles and the rain
of the immediate descent of God.
Let us see what all this means in special illus
trations. What is it that we mean by Prejudice?
Simply the premature hardening of opinion. A man
is thinking and studying, seeking after truth. He
is open to all light and influence. He is ready to
be taught on every side. Knowledge is welcome
whencesoever it may come. The surface of his life is
free. But suddenly or gradually the man stops.

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST. 157
As if a cold wind touched the stream and froze it,
the water turns itself into a wall of ice. The degree
of thought and truth which has been reached be
comes a stopping-place. It is no longer a promise
and prophecy of more beyond. It is an end — hard,
stiff, impenetrable, nothing can break through it.
What is it but a Crust? It is itself made of the
thought which it imprisons. It is the toughened
surface of the student's study, making it impossible
for any further light to enter in and play upon the
thought imprisoned in itself.
This is the essence of all prejudice : my tyrant
says to me, " You shall not learn," and shuts me up
behind a wall of brass or iron. My own nature says
to me, " You shall not learn," and throws out its ar
mor of prejudice, made of its own crude conceptions
and half-mastered learning, and within that I am as
helpless as behind the iron or the brass. Those crude
conceptions must be broken up and turned again
into good truth-learning capability before I can once
more lie open to the light.
Another kind of crust is formalism. Truth utters
itself in outward symbols. Belief and resolution
declare themselves in forms. It is the natural law of
expression, and so long as the form remains soft and
pliant, full of the spirit of the belief or resolution it
expresses, all is right. Form and belief are like
body and soul to one another. But when form
hardens into formalism, when the real substance of
belief, instead of remaining soft and pliant, grows
stiff, and will not let belief grow and enlarge, will
not let the food of belief which is new truth come

158 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
pouring in, then you have got the most crusted and
impenetrable armor that can be imagined. Forms
ought to be the medium through which truth comes
to the inner nature, as the surface ground furnishes
the channels through which the warm sunshine
reaches the deeper soil. When forms do not do that,
but shut truth out, and make the inner nature starve
on the stale remnant of what it already has, keeping
no free and open communication with the perpetual
source, then forms have hardened into formalism.
Beware of formalism, — not by discarding forms, but
by keeping them soft, by refusing to let them grow
hard ; and that can only be by keeping them in true
connection with the faiths which they express.
When they cease to express faith, break them up,
return them to the ground again, and ask God to
feed you directly with the ministrations of His
truth. What is a great reformation, a great fresh start
and new departure in the world's religion, but just
the breaking up of a formalism which has become a
crust? TheVays of the church have grown hard.
They are imprisoning, instead of cultivating or
expressing, the church's life. A great explosion
comes. The traditions and habits are all broken to
pieces. The fragments of the crust are swallowed
up and stirred in, and become again part of the
mass of true faith and healthy feeling, which lies
once more open without hindrance to the sunlight
of God. That is what took place in Luther's day.
That is what, in many ways, is taking place in
ours.

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST. 159
Another sort of crust is the conceit of knowing
the world. Have you not all known men who,
sooner or later, came to the conclusion that they
knew mankind? They found some stiff, tight,
narrow conception of what human life amounted
to. It was sceptical of any good. It was cynical
and bitter. It disparaged the good in man which it
could not deny. It was largely the echo of the
man's own selfhood ; the image of his own nature,
accepted as the type and picture of universal hu
manity. However it was formed, there it stood, this
man's knowledge of man. And he was very proud
of it. He thought it was a miracle of insight. It
stood to him as the result of wonderful observation.
He went about the world reading his fellow-creatures
by this key which he applied indiscriminately and
stupidly to them all. And what was the result?
Was that man ready or able to see and own a new,
fresh, singular specimen of manhood when it ap
peared? Could the mystery of human life, its
pathos, its wonderful variety, its suggestion of un
developed power, get any chance of play upon his
imprisoned perception? Surely not. There is no
, blinder bat in all the heavens than this conceited
man of the world who goes about saying, " Oh, I
know man!" and is perfectly incapable of forming
just judgments, or seeing the finest shades and dis
tinctions of men and women. His crust must be
broken up. His crude conceit must be dispelled.
Some experience must teach him how much richer
is the nature of man, how much harder to know than
he has guessed. Then, perhaps, when he had ceased

160 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
saying, "You can't teach me anything," he may
begin to learn.
Out of all these instances does there not issue to
our sight a truth or principle which we recognize at
once? It is that all life tends to encrust itself, to
imprison itself within itself, and that its crust needs
to be constantly broken and returned into the gen
eral mass out of which it was formed, in order that
the best influences may be received. Ever there
must be a return to a primitive simplicity, to a con
dition of first principles, in which the power to
receive may be freshened and renewed. Do you
not recognize that? It is part of the old craving to
begin the game of life again. It is not that life has
been miserable, or has wholly failed, but it has lost
simplicity. We long for that openness in which all
things seem possible. A greater and greater num
ber of things seem to have become impossible. "I
shall never do this ; I shall never do that," we have
come to say of one thing after another, till the things
which there is any chance of our doing seem to have
become very few indeed. Then youth, with its un
limited possibilities, seems bright to you, as it never
did when you possessed it. You cry out hopelessly
for its return :
" Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,
When I heard my days before me and the tumult of my life.''
The same is felt about some special department of
life, or some special kind of knowledge. Have not
you men in your professions often thought whether
you would not gladly give up all the knowledge and

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST. 161
experience which you have gained, precious as you
know it is, if only you could get again the freshness
and eagerness and enthusiasm, the sense of how much
there was to know, and of what a capacity there was
in you for knowing it, which filled the first years of
your life in your vocation ? Have not you readers of
the Bible sometimes wished that you could rise up
some morning and find your Bible a new book, fresh
and strange to you as if you had never seen it before ?
Have you not almost envied the heathen to whom
the story of Jesus came unstaled by countless repe
titions, with no hardness on its surface from the
thoughts and theories which have pressed and
handled it for all these thousand years ?
Oh that I could go back and know nothing, with
my power of knowing and my eagerness to know,
set free from under the weight of helpless knowledge
and unused experience which are pressing on them
now I
And, now, do you not see ? Is not that craving
for a return to simplicity just what St. Paul has in
his mind when he says of the man whom he wants
to see made wise, " Let him become a fool." Is it
not just this getting rid of the crust of life, in order
that life itself may be open to the sunshine. This is
what he means by his strange word "fool," I think.
It may have some reference to what the world will
think of him who accepts the Gospel in its simpleness ;
but more than that, I think it also must refer to that
condition of simplicity to which the nature must re
turn before Christ with all His great enlightenment
can take possession of it.

162 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
There is an illustration and anticipation of this
power of Christ to simplify the nature and break
through its crusts, in the way in which all great
experiences tend to do the same thing, which Paul
says that Christ can do. Do you not know what I
mean when I say, that under all strong emotions,
and at all critical instants, men who have seemed to
be wise among other men in the world, very often
"become fools that they may be wise?" Look at
your accomplished man — which means your finished
man. The man who has got every problem solved
and every question answered ; the ends of life all
gathered up and folded in ; the surfaces all smooth
and hard and shining; everything neat and snug,
and trim and wise. Suppose some great calamity
comes upon him — some one of those terrible things
which tear life up from the bottom and leave no
stone or timber standing where it stood. What is
the result ? How the old settled questions burst to
life again, and will not stay imprisoned under what
seemed their sufficient answers. The adjustments
are thrown all out of gear. The ends are all torn
loose and sent flying out upon the wind. He who
seemed to himself to know everything, seems to him
self now to know nothing. The wise man has become
a fool. A great joy sometimes has the same result. I
become happy beyond my highest dream of happi
ness, and what then? Again my theories of life
give way. They will not hold this overwhelming
pleasure. The sails are torn to tatters with this
tempest of joy. I dare not try to account for it.

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST. 163
I take it in a dazzled ignorance. It is in a fool's
hands that this new preciousness of life is tremu
lously held.
And yet in both these cases this foolishness of a
great experience is only preliminary to and makes
possible a higher wisdom. Into this heart, all torn
and dismayed with sorrow, pours a new sense of the
greatness of life and life's relationships. Into this
soul, all turbulent with joy, there comes a knowledge
of goodness and responsibility, that was impossible
before the great disturbance came. You needed
larger theories, more profound and spiritual thoughts
of things, than those which you had lost. You must
have them. And lo ! they came to you ! Lo there
they were ; filling the depth which had been broken
up. Was it not just the story which Paul tells?
You had seemed to be wise. You became a fool.
And then you were really wise.
And yet, to come back to our crust philosophy
again. That which had shut the higher wisdom out
of your soul was part and portion of the soul itself,
and so when it was broken up and kneaded in, it
became part of the substance which received the new
illumination. Do you see what I mean ? Your ex
perience proved insufficient. Your life had to open
itself again in primal simplicity to God. But the
life, which opened itself, had the experience in it as
an element, and through the presence of that ex
perience in it, it was more fit to welcome the new
wisdom. The new simplicity was not the old.
It was a richer, a completer, a diviner simplicity.
It was the man's simplicity, and not the child's.

164 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
It harmonized all the results of experience within
itself. Your learning was not able to account for
and to satisfy your life; but when the conceit of
learning had been all destroyed, and the real power
of knowing thrown open to the highest truth, then
the discipline of the old thought and study made
that power of knowing a richer thing, more able to
receive its higher gift of truth. Nothing is lost.
Conceit paralyzes even the highest attainments by
making them inhuman. But humility humanizes
them again and causes them to be receptive. It is
the story which Tennyson has told so wonderfully in
his great poem, "The Palace of Art." The spirit
driven out from the home which its selfishness and
vanity have built, then daring to hope that when it
shall itself have grown larger and truer and better
it may come back and find its palace grown large to
receive it.
" Yet tear not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built ;
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt."
It is the wise man going out from his wisdom into
foolishness, but yet believing that he shall some day
come back and occupy the old wisdom in a nobler
spirit. Thus I have spoken of the power of a great experi
ence to turn the wise man into the fool for whom the
higher wisdom becomes possible. But now, to come to
St. Paul's teaching, the greatest of all experiences is
the access of a great mastery. Nothing means so much

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST. 165
to a life as to be taken into the power of another
fife, and lovingly and sympathetically and firmly
ruled by it. And beyond all comparisons, the great
est of all such masteries is Christ's. That which is
true, then, of the effect of all great experiences, is
truest of all about the mastery of the soul bjr
Christ, of the beginning of the Christian life. In
deed Christ and His mastery of the soul seem in
some strange way to have in themselves the power
of all great experiences. To become Christ's servant
does for us that which all great emotions and occur
rences of very different characters can do. It sobers
us like sorrow. It exalts us like joy. It calms us
like satisfaction. It quickens us like suspense. It
deepens us like doubt. It irradiates us like cer
tainty. It warms us like friendship. It disciplines
us like authority. It restrains us like fear. It in
spires us like hope. It touches us with all the hands
of all the influences which our nature can receive.
If this is true, then it is not strange that the power
which, we saw, belonged to all great experiences should
also belong supremely to the mastery of the soul by
Christ. A man transfers the whole thought of life
to Christ. That great, that mighty alteration comes.
The man is born again. New principles, new stand
ards occupy him. The life which he now lives in
the flesh he lives by the faith of the Son of God.
There never was a nobler instance of it all than St.
Paul who wrote those words. And in the man's
doing of that, all the selfish and self-satisfied con
ceptions of life go to pieces. The plans which the
man has made and elaborated and provided with the

166 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
means for their execution no longer seem to be
worthy or sufficient ambitions of a human soul.
The higher, holier, manlier ambitions of glorifying
God and helping brother-man possess the life. The
purposes of life grow personal. They lose their
definiteness and trimness. " What are you living
for ? " you ask the new Christian with' his glowing
face. "Is it to get rich?" — "Oh, no!" — "Is
it to enjoy yourself ? " — " Oh, no ! " — " Is it to make
men praise you and get fame ? " — " Oh, no." — " Is
it to heap up learning ? " — " No." — " What, then ? "
" It is to follow Christ and do His will and grow like
Him by obedience." What a bewilderment that
answer brings ! How he who asked the question can
not understand it ! Has the man then " become a
fool " ? Yes ; in the higher sense, surely he has. He
has found all the ordinary standards of life insuffi
cient, and cast them away. He has gone back to the
elements of things. He has thought of himself
once more, not as the millionaire, not as the scholar,
not as the politician, but as the man — Nicodemus,
Matthew, Pilate, Paul, these are the men in the New
Testament whom Jesus thus dissolved out of their
artificialnesses, and brought down to their essential
manhood. Wonderful was His power, then ! Won
derful is the power, now and always, with which He
says to everybody with whom He comes face to face,
" If any man thinketh that he is wise let him become
a fool." And why ? For what ? If this were all it would
be most bewildering. Sometimes it has been made to
seem as if it were all. Sometimes pious men have

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST. 167
talked as if the breaking up of worldly wisdom were
everything, as if a sort of celestial folly, a sanctified
babyhood, were the consummate achievement of our
Christianity. Not so talks Paul : " Your wise man
must become a fool," he says ; but why ? " That he
may become wise." Behold wisdom is the end of
all ! No less in the Bible and in the church than in
the schools. It would be indeed a dreadful world
in which that was not so. A dreadful world
in which ignorance and foolishness should be the
conditions of the most approved and rewarded life.
The end of all is wisdom. If the Gospel discredits
any of man's achievements, declaring them to be
incompetent to satisfy the soul and educate the
nature, it is always only that it may insist upon a
higher knowledge. Christ was a teacher^ Christ is
a teacher forever. If He declares, as He certainly
does, that no scholastic culture, and no skill in the
arts of life, and no acquaintance with the ways of
men, can save a soul, it is only that He may insist
upon another knowledge, only that He may insist
that man must know his own soul, and the deep
difference of right and wrong, and the infinite holi
ness of God. These are true knowledges. " That
they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus
Christ whom Thou hast sent." It is of all impor
tance that we should know that the Christian life is a
life of knowledge, not of ignorance. It is a separate,
a higher region of knowledge than that to which we
generally give the name ; but it is knowledge still.
It is the apprehension of truths, of those vast truths
which the senses cannot discover nor the intellect

168 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
evolve, but which through the open avenues of the
spirit enter in and occupy the life. Who can tell
what knowledge of the earth, and of the history of
man, and of the things the Rabbis taught in their
solemn school, was in the mind of Jesus Christ, and
yet who doubts His wisdom, who dares to call Him
ignorant or foolish ? In every age and every land,
except the lightest and most superficial, this higher
wisdom has been recognized and treasured. To the
purest and most exalted souls it has seemed to be the
one precious thing on earth ; all other kinds of knowl
edge have seemed to be easy sacrifices, if by their loss
it could be won. Let us beware that we do not de
spise this spiritual wisdom, which is the ultimate treas
ure of the human soul.
And yet I must not seem to talk as if this spiritual
wisdom involved the final and perpetual sacrifice of
all the other attainments of man. I must once more
return to the Parable of the Crusted ground. You
break up the hard hindering surface, and, as I pointed
out, it becomes part of the soil on which the sunshine
and the rain, descend and out of which the flowers
grow. So you break up the crusted conceit of human
wisdom, and its fragments make part of the simplified
and softened human nature into which pours the
higher wisdom of the grace of God.
What is the crust upon your life, my friend, that
keeps out holy influence ? Is it the knowledge you
have gained from books? Is it the multiplied com
plexity of your affairs ? Is it the busyness of every
day? Is it your complicated relations with your
friend? Is it the richness of physical life satisfied

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST. 169
with its abundance, health rejoicing in itself ? It may
be any one of these. What shall you pray to God
for ? Oh, pray to Him to break this crusted hindrance
all to pieces. It need not be that the possession itself
should be taken away. What you want to lose is the
conceit in the possession. You want to learn that it
cannot satisfy you. Then, when you have learnt
that, the real satisfaction, the only real satisfaction,
can come in. And then, when they have been put in
their true place, these things, knowledge and wealth
and health and the complexity of life, which once
hindered the divine wisdom, may become the means
by which it takes possession of and spreads itself
through the life. This is the dream we dare to dream
for ourselves and for our brethren. Now, it is your
learning, your busyness, your physical health which
keeps you from, which keeps from you, the inflow,
the influence of God. Sometime it shall be through
those very possessions — learning, busyness, physical
strength, — broken out of their conceit and made
capable by humble consecration of their true min
istry, that God shall come to you.
What shall bring about so great a change ? Noth
ing can do it but the overwhelming love of God
taking possession of your soul and making you feel
through and through that to know Him is the one
only satisfactory attainment of a human life. Reach
that, and, whatever else you miss, your life is rich.
Lose that, and, whatever else you gain, your life is
poor. Reach that, and then gain everything else you
can, and your master, knowledge. Your knowledge
of God shall dominate it all. Oh, be all the man that

170 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.
it is in you to be, only at the heart of all be God's
man, and then jt will be safe and good for you to be
all the rest.
Such men may all of us be by the power of Christ.
Give yourself to Him simply, totally, and then live
as fully as you can, letting Him claim all your life
and fill it with Himself.

THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST.
" In my Father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare a
place for you : and I will come again and receive you unto myself."
— John xiv. 2.
The disciples of Jesus must often have felt a
strange uneasiness while they were with Him. Close
as He drew them to Him, well as they came to know
Him, there must have always been a sense of how
much greater He was than they were, and so a fear
lest sometime He should leave them. Have we not
all felt something of this sort when we have had a
friend who was far nobler and larger than ourselves ?
We lived in closest intimacy with him ; our power
worked at the same tasks, but all the while we felt
that there were other powers in him which we could
not match. Sometime he certainly must outgo our
sphere, begin to do wider tasks, enter fields where we
could not follow him. Sometime, at least, when he put
forth the wings of his immortality, and entered on the
other life, our friend must leave us, completing himself
in regions far beyond our powers. Such a feeling
had added keenness and pathos to many a friendship.
And we can see traces of it every now and then in
the intercourse of Christ and His disciples. They
cling to Him as to one whom they are afraid to lose.
Whenever He foretells a separation from them, they

172 THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST.
receive it as if it fell in with some misgiving of their
own. Every sensitive reader of the Gospels must
have felt, it seems to me, that sort of tearfulness in
all the love, and anxiety in the midst of satisfaction,
in the companionship of Jesus and the twelve, which
showed how they felt that they must some day lose
Him, that there was something in Him which must
complete and manifest itself outside of their sphere.
"Whither I go, thither ye cannot come." When
Jesus said those words, they were terrible to His
disciples, just because thej' confirmed the unspoken
fear which was lurking in their hearts before.
We must bear all this in mind, I think, or else we
cannot wholly understand the feeling of our text.
I want to speak to you this morning from these
words of Jesus, which seem to me to tell the story
of all His life with His disciples, and so indeed of all
His life with those whom His disciples represented,
— the Christendom and Christian souls that were to
come. They are words which have in them the
whole of Christianity. Think, then, of these disciples
wondering whether they could keep Jesus, fearing
that He must leave them, fearing that the time
would come when His life would outgo theirs and go
to regions of activity whither they could not follow
it. To them, fearing thus, Jesus answers, " No.
Let not your heart be troubled. I am going, indeed,
but I am going for you, not away from you. I go to
prepare a place for you. In my father's house to
which I go are many mansions, and if I go and pre
pare a place for you, I will come again and receive
you unto myself." See what He says : " There is a

THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST. 173
region where we both belong. You as much as I.
I am going forward to enter there so that your en
trance may be the easier. I am going to open the
door, and then am coming back to take you into my
power again and carry you on with myself, and the end
shall be that we shall be together there." Now, for
get that when Jesus said that He was just upon the
point of leaving this world. Forget for the moment
(we will come back to that before we close) that the
first application of the words was to the transfer of
Christ's life, and His disciples' life, from earth to
heaven. Think of it as if it were a saying that be
longed wholly to this world, and have we not in this
utterance of Jesus an account, clear and intelligible,
of the way in which He always led His disciples from
one stage of life into a higher. This is no illegitimate
use of the words. Christ could not lead His followers
from earth to heaven except by the same means by
which He had already led them from one spiritual
stage of earth into another. We have, then, a clear
and definite plan laid down. He says, when I would
lead you forward I go forward first myself. I estab
lish for myself a place in the new region where I
want you to be. You and I belong together, so that
establishing for myself a place there I really set up
your right to be there too. Then I come back to
you, and by the love that is between us I draw you
on into the realm that I have opened. That is the
way I bring the souls that belong to me from strength
to strength, until before the God of gods appeareth
every one of them in Zion.
I remember how once travelling in Syria the guide

174 THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST.
upon whom we wholly depended disappeared. By
and by he came back to us as we rode along and told
us where he had been ; that in the village which we
were approaching and where we were to spend the
night his family lived. That he had ridden on to see
that they were ready to receive him and to prepare
quarters in their house for us, the travellers under his
charge, and now came back to conduct us thither,
and by and by he had brought us where he belonged,
and where through him provision had been made and
a welcome was waiting for us.
Let us look, then, at this plan of Christ's culture.
It is really the same by which any man leads another
who believes in him on to loftier and loftier things.
I spoke about the friend who seems to be perfectly
one with you, yet whom you are always lurkingly
afraid of losing because you feel that there is in him
the capacity for being something which you are not,
and cannot be. Suppose some day that your friend
does leave you, not that his bodily presence is taken
away. Still he walks by your side, perhaps lives in
your house, but all of a sudden he begins some higher
life, enters upon some self-sacrifice for which you are
not ready. Have you ever had such an experience ?
It seems as if you had lost your friend. You reach
out after him, but there he is away above you, walking
on higher ground, doing diviner things. But gradu
ally you find that you have not lost him. Your love
for him, his love for you, continues. You become
aware that he is drawing you upward into that new
region where he has entered, and which through his
entrance has come to seem familiar and not so far

THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST 175
away to you. The self-sacrifice seems not so unnatu
ral or hard now that he is living in it. Your love for
him draws you on into his company, and makes you
attempt unattempted things. He has outgone you
with his goodness, but he comes back after you with
his love. He has gone to prepare a place for you,
and he has come again and received you to himself,
that where he is there you may be also.
Or just reverse the case. Suppose that you are
the more enterprising and ambitious soul. Your friend
loves you, but he lags behind, appears unconscious of
his higher powers, of the higher life that he might
live. How can you start him? Evidently you must
start yourself. You must go out yourself into the
region where you know he ought to be. It will seem
as if you were leaving him. You speak to him some
morning and say, " This is all very pleasant, but I
will live no longer in this easy, self-indulgent life. I
am determined to be up and at work for other people."
Your friend remonstrates. He begs you not to leave
him. But you go on. And though at first you seem
to have gone away from him, your higher life becomes
a revelation to him. Your love is drawing him up.
It seems less and less an impossibility that he too
should live a noble and unselfish life, and by and by
you two are living in a higher fellowship in the higher
land. What is it that has happened ? You went to
prepare a place for him, and then you came again
and received him unto yourself.
Ah ! there is really no friendship worthy of the
sacred name where each of the two friends is not
thus always making ready places for the other in

176 THE LEADERSHD? OF CHRIST.
higher and higher mansions of the Father's house,
where each is not always opening to the other some
higher life. Do not dare to think that friendship is
a mere pleasant amusement. Do not dare to take
out of it the moral responsibility that makes its depth
and sacredness.
Two merchants are partners in a selfish business.
No thought of charity finds any entrance into their
sordid shop. By and by one of them learns the duty
and the joy of helping other people. It seems as if
their sympathy was broken when one has this new
taste, this new desire. But if the other be worthy of the
partnership, the time comes when he wins it too, and
the broken sympathy is reunited on a higher plane.
Two boys are boon companions in each other's frolics.
By and by one of them is touched with the desire of
learning. But if his comrade is worthy of him, he, too,
after a while is brought up by his friend's fellowship
into the realm that he has entered. Husband and wife
live together in perfect domestic sympathy. Not a
thought of either that the other does not share. But
when one of them enters into Christ and knows His
peace and joy, it seems as if for the first time they
had separated. But the soul that has found the
Saviour conies back with its love, and tells the story
of the Saviour it has found, and, Andrew-like, brings
the other soul to the Christ in whose love it has
found a place. Everywhere this ministry of life to
life is finding its illustrations.
And now this is the way in which Jesus had been
treating those disciples of His for the three years in
which He had been with them. The purpose of His

THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST. 177
mission had demanded that He should first of all take
those twelve men and introduce them into higher
thoughts, new ways of living, new standards, new
ideas which they had never known before. How
could He do that? Several ways were open. He
might read them long lessons, give them abstract
teaching. He might put on His power, and, awing
them with His miracles, make them obey Him as he
pointed them to a new life. To one who reads the
Gospels truly, it becomes evident, I think, that He
deliberately chose another way, a way that involved
His own personality and made all His disciples' prog
ress consist in following Him. First He knit His
life in with theirs. The cords were twisted together
as they sat and as they walked together, as He shared
their board and bed. He made them know that He
was what they were, and they what He was. He did
this devotedly, laboriously ; and then when they were
feeling this completely, some day He suddenly took a
step across some border which they had thought im
passable — He stood clothed in light in some new
land which they had counted inaccessible. He did
some act, He manifested some quality, to which they
never had aspired, He put himself close to God ; and
then when they stood amazed and seemed to them
selves to have lost Him He came back to them by His
love without coming out of the new goodness which
He had entered, and He said, " No, I am this new
thing not for myself but for you. By all the oneness
between us, you can be this as well as I, you can be
holy as I am holy. Now by my holiness, come in.
Be holy because I am holy. I have proved it possi-

178 THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST.
ble for such as you and I am. I have prepared a
place for you. Now I am come again to receive you
unto myself."
It was no accidental habit. It was a deliberate
specific culture. It will be well worth while to linger
and point out two or three instances of its applica
tion. They are the old stories which we have known
from childhood. Jesus was going up to Jerusalem,
and He had to pass through Samaria. The Samari
tans would not receive Him, because he was a Jew and
going to the sacred city of the Jews. His disciples
instantly were full of Jewish indignation. "A
miracle, a miracle," they cried, "to destroy those
enemies of the Lord ! " " Wilt thou that we command
fire to come down from heaven to consume them as
Elijah did ? " They looked round for Jesus to keep
company with them in their rage. But where was
He? Afar off, walking in the cool, serene heaven of
Pity and Toleration. " Ye know not what manner of
spirit ye are of," He said. " The Son of man is not
come to destroy men's lives, but to save them." He
had eluded them. He had gone where they could
not follow Him. They seemed to have lost Him. But
still His love was around them, and by and by He
came to them and received them unto Himself ; took
them up into the tolerance where He Himself had
entered. And the time came when Peter and John
were laying hands on these Samaritans, welcoming
them into the Christian churches. Or again, two
disciples came to Jesus and said, " There is to be a
kingdom here upon the earth, here in Judea. Let us
sit, we pray thee, as thy Viziers, one on thy right

THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST. 179
hand, the other on thy left." It was all of the earth,
earthy. They wanted to hear of the cabinet of the
new kingdom. But where was Jesus ? " It shall be
given to those for whom it is prepared of my Father
which is in heaven." He was far away from earth.
It was all heavenly, all spiritual to Him. They did
not understand Him. They had lost Him. But He
came back for them and took them up into His own
spiritual conceptions, for the time came when a new
ambition had swallowed up the old in John, and he
was writing in his Epistle, " We know that when He
shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see
Him as He is." Or take one more. Jesus lived very
near to His mother. They must have understood
each other deeply. But one day He outwent her. He
entered into a new consecration to His Father which
she had not imagined. Her touching words we can
hear still when she seemed to have lost Him. " Son,
why hast thou dealt thus with us ? " But she had not
lost Him. As she " kept all these things and pondered
them in her heart," she saw that for her, too, there
was a mansion of self-consecration in that Father's
house where her Son had entered. And when His
consecration at last completed itself at the cross, she
was with Him there in a compliance as deep as her
suffering. This is Christ's way. Wherever he would have
His disciples go, He goes first Himself, and through the
door which He has opened He draws them by His
love. That is the whole philosophy of Christian
culture. And that is the meaning of the Incarna
tion. God entered into human life ; made Himself

180 THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST.
one with it as He only could have done with a nature
that was originally one with His own. He became
man as He could not have become brute or stone.
Then in that human nature He outwent humanity.
He opened yet unopened gates of human possibility.
He showed what man might be, how great, how god
like ! And by the love and oneness He has always been
claiming man for ttie greatness whose possibility He
showed. As we think of the Incarnation deeply,
these three stages come in one thought. First, the
God in Christ seems very near to us as we think of
His love. Then He seems very far above us as we
think of His holiness, and then again He seems to
bring us very near to Himself as we feel His power.
He is one with us. He goes beyond us, and He
comes again and receives us unto Himself.
Thus we trace Christ's treatment of those first
disciples. And what then? Here we live at this
late day. Is any such method at work, any such cul
ture possible now? My dear friend, one thing is
certainly true about Christ. That all that He has
ever been HS must forever be. All that He was to
those first disciples, He must be ready to be to any
one, even the least of His disciples always. His
power is nothing at any one point if it is not power
ful at all points ; nothing, if not eternal. How is it
possible, then, that Christ should do for you and me
what He did for Peter and John, and Matthew and
Nathanael ? It is not hard to see, and to many people
living just such lives as we live it has become the
most real of experiences. Jesus, the Jesus of the
Gospels, fastens His life to our life. By His life and

THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST. 181
death, bearing witness of His love, He twines Himself
into our being. To love Him becomes a real thing.
He is close by our side. He is right in our lot every
day. Then as we go on living thus with Him some
crisis of our life occurs, some need of action. We are
put to some test, and as we stand doubting, or as we
go and do the act in our low way, Christ, right by
our side, does it in His higher way. Not that His
hands visibly touch our tools and do the work we
have to do. But it becomes evident to us what He
would do under our circumstances, what one only
thing it would be possible for Him to do as we are
situated. It is very different from what we are
actually doing. We are truckling to men's opinion,
compromising principle, telling a lie. And it is made
manifest to us that Jesus in just those same circum
stances would defy men's judgments and stand by
principle and tell the truth. We are not up to that.
We see Him leave us. He outgoes us. But if we
really love Him, if our life has grown one with His,
He does not leave us really. His going on into prin
ciple, honor, truth, and God is a pledge and promise
that in those holy homes there is a place for us, too,
and soon we are restless unless we follow Him, and
the gates of that nobler life which He has opened
shine before us, and His love draws us on to be with
Him. Look at the progress of Christendom. Christ first
touched the world's heart, fastened Himself into the
world's life. He did not begin with a lecture or a
lesson. He began by coming Himself to the world ;
and the world took Him, as it has taken so many of

182 THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST.
His choicest treasures, through suffering and death
into her life. And then having come to her and fas
tened His love upon her, He went away from her. He
set up impracticable standards. He lived an appar
ently impossible life. The world was full of war, and
He preached peace. The world was full of pride, and
He was humble. The world was false, and He by
every word and action said, " Be true." The world,
looking at Christ, said, " We never can be that;" but
more and more the world has become that ; Christ first
touching it by His love has little by little drawn it on
into His character ; and peace, humility, and truth are
no longer vague dreams, but recognized ambitions,
earnest hopes, here and there real attainments, among
men. And so I ask an earnest Christian how he began to
pray, when it first came to seem possible to him that
he should forgive his enemy or live in the realized
companionship of God? And his answer must be,
" Christ, my Lord, having bound my life to His life,
went there first and then drew my life after His. I
saw Him prSy. I heard Him speak forgiveness from
the cross. I watched His feet treading close to God,
and because I must be where He was, I left the old
life and went with Him into the new. My love to Him
was first the revealer of the higher possibility, and
then the power of entrance into it.
This is what I really understand by being saved
by Christ's love. This is what it means, dear friend,
when always you are urged to love Christ so that
you may be saved. It is not that Christ stands jeal
ously and arbitrarily and will not admit you to His

THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST. 183
privileges until you have certain feelings about Him.
It is that only by loving Him can your life be so
bound to His that where He goes you will go with
Him, into holiness and peace. Alas ! that men are
so unambitious. Here is a man who in times of
business trouble is distressed and anxious. He can.
not help letting his troubles depress him. He is
discouraged and disheartened. Is that necessary?
Who is the noblest man that ever lived? Jesus
Christ, you answer. And do you know what He
would be if He were in your place ? " Yes," you say ;
" brave, strong, hopeful, conscious always that thert
are better things than money — ready to lose thf*
fortune if He could get nearer God, calm and serene
and undismayed." Very well, that is what the high
est man would do in your place. And why are you
not doing it ? " Because I am not Christ," you say ;
" I must not expect of myself what He would do."
Ah ! that is just your error. That is just where you
lose the truth of the Incarnation. Whatever Christ
is we can be. Wherever Christ goes we can go.
Say that over and over to yourself. Read the assur
ance of that written on every page of the New Testa
ment. He does go away from you. He leaves you
in your lowness and enters into the higher lands of
God, but only that He may take your soul afterwards
and bring it there to Himself. You are a slave here
to the world, to men, to business. Your only free
dom is in intercourse with Christ. Bind your soul to
His, and it must rise with Him into His liberty. You
know that this is true. You know that you could
not be such a slave of the world, so beaten by temp-

184/ THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST.
tation, so trodden down by trouble, if you really
loved Christ. In that love there must be freedom
and power to go where He is, away from anxiety and
sin into peace and holiness.
There is one feature about the truth which I have
tried to preach to you this morning which is very
beautiful. The truth is that every Christian enters
into every higher spiritual condition not absolutely
and by himself, but through Christ. But one conse
quence of that will be that every higher spiritual
state will shine to the Christian soul that lives there,
not merely with its own lustre, but with the personal
dearness of the Christ through whom the soul has
gained its entrance. Just as a delightful study, into
which some dear friend first initiated you, has always
over and above its own delightfulness a beauty that
comes from your love to him ; so the soul that Jesus
has made holy lives always in the beauty of holiness,
made more exquisite and dear by the loveliness of
Christ. Of every earthly grace as well as of the
heavenly glory it is true that " the Lamb is the light
thereof." Every new attainment which the Christian
makes is but an entrance into another mansion which
his Saviour has made ready for him. He grows brave ;
but Christ was brave before him. He enters into
self-sacrifice ; but Christ leads him with His cross. He
finds the home of his soul at last in perfect commun
ion with God ; but the Godhood is familiar and doubly
dear to him because of the Christhood through which
he enters it. All virtue, all holiness and truth
throughout the universe loses the chill of abstractness
and glows with the warmth of personal love.

THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST. 185
This brings us around to say a few last words upon
the first application of these words of Jesus to which
I just alluded at the beginning of the sermon. He
was just leaving this world for the other when He
spoke them first. When Christ has led His disciple
on and on from stage to stage of spiritual growth, at
last He opens the door and gives him entrance into
heaven. Remember always, what I have tried to in
sist upon this morning, that that new change is of the
same sort as the others that have gone before it.
Whatever other joy and Glory may be waiting for us
in heaven, the Glory and the joy which will be most
to us, and which we ought most of all to anticipate, is
that there there will be new regions of spiritual life
thrown open, new and deeper experiences of the soul
made possible, deeper knowledge of God, deeper
knowledge of ourselves, deeper delight in purity.
If that is really what we are looking forward to in
heaven, then it is easy to realize that the same Christ
who has been our leader in each spiritual advance
which we have ever made here, will be the leader
who will bring us there. Oh, the next life seems all
so vague to us ! We reach out after it. We believe
in it, but how hard it is for us to take hold of it !
How can we ? Only by living here with Him who
is to bring us there. Only by growing so familiar
with Christ that when He outruns us and enters in
behind the veil, when the strings of His influence
outgo our mortal state and run into the darkness,
we may still feel the tug upon them from beyond the
darkness and know the reality of heaven because

186 THE LEADERSHIP OF CHRIST.
our Christ is there. By constant living with the Eter
nal, so only can you realize Eternity.
To one who believes that Christ, having led him on
through this life, will lead him at last by the same
culture to the other world, the supreme expectation
of that other world is that there he will see Christ.
It ceases to be dreadful and far off. When he sees
his friend die, when he gives his little child to death,
there is nothing cold or lonely or forlorn about it.
He knows the Christ to whom they go ; when he
thinks of his own death, it is only of the opening of
another door behind which the Hand, whose pressure
he knows well already, shall clasp his hand a little
more closely to lead him on into a little richer light
and happiness. It is the same Christ who has been
making a place in us for the Kingdom of Heaven who
will at last make a place in the Kingdom of Heaven
for us.
To welcome all His leadings now so cordially that
we shall know our Leader when He opens the last
great door ; to be always following Him so obediently
that we shall»have faith to follow Him even when He
leads us into the river and into darkness, — this, and
only this, is readiness for death. May God grant it
to us all !

XI.
PEACE IN BELIEVING.
" Now the God of hope fill you with all Joy and Peace in
believing, that ye may abound in Hope through the Power of the
Holy Ghost." — Romans xv. 13.
Although I wish to speak this morning of only
one phrase occurring in this verse, I quote the whole
verse, because it will be good for us if we can catch
its spirit and feel the enthusiasm that pervades it.
See how the most glowing words are crowded into
it : " The God of Hope," " Joy," " Peace," " Believ
ing," then " Hope," again, and " Power," and " the
Holy Ghost." Any short verse with words like
these in it must have vitality and vigor. Out of the
centre of it let us take one expression. St. Paul
asks for these Roman Christians that they may be
filled with " Peace in Believing." To see just what
he is asking for them, what " Peace " is, and what
" Believing " is, and how Peace everywhere comes by
Believing, this will be our subject. We feel at once,
I think, that we are dealing with large words, with
words which have something of the manifoldness of
life, and which like life it is hard to reduce to a clear
definition. Take this word " Peace." We all have
our ideas about it. To all of us it represents some
thing very attractive and complete. But I suppose

188 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
that to all men Peace means something different ac
cording to their different characters. And the main
difference must be in the positiveness or negativeness
with which it presents itself to them. To the slug
gish man, peace must mean mere repose, the cessa
tion of work. To the active man peace must mean
merely the power and chance of work free from inter
ference. " Leave me at Peace," says the lazy man,
and as he says it he drops the tools which the world
has thrust into his hands and lies down to go to
sleep. "Leave me at Peace," says the busy man,
and turns to his tools and his task, with the thought
of how much he can do when he and his task are left
to one another. The men of negatives and the men
of positives are everywhere, — the men who describe
things by what they are not, and the men who de
scribe things by what they are. It seems to be one
of the fundamental divisions of human character.
And there is hardly any idea in relation to which
this difference comes out more clearly than in rela
tion to this idea of Peace. But evidently the posi
tive man's hotion of it must be the truest and
highest. Peace must be in its essence something
real in a man's life, and the exemptions and negations
that it brings must be its incidents. And when we
look carefully for a definition that shall be positive
and that shall include the highest idea of peace, must
it not be this ? Peace is the entire harmony between
the nature of anything and its circumstances. That
is what every healthy aspiration after peace is really
seeking for. Whether it be high in its sphere or
low, whether it be the star moving calmly in its

PEACE IN BELIEVING. 189
orbit, or the seed silently wedding itself to the rich
ground in which it is buried, or whether it be the
laborer at his plough or the statesman in the capitol,
wherever there is a nature in harmony with its sur
roundings, so that they call out all its best activities
and at the same time it is able to answer all their
demands, there is Peace. All the disturbances of
peace come from the breaking of this harmony.
Sometimes on one side, and sometimes on the other.
Sometimes the nature has powers and capacities for
which the surroundings offer no employment. Some
times the surroundings teem with demands for which
the nature has no powers. In either case you have
unrest and discontent. But when the two corre
spond, then everything moves smoothly. There is
abundant motion. There is no sleep. But motion
without fatigue, or waste, or need of refreshment or
repair, that is the finished idea of Peace. We talk
about the "Peace of God." Is not this really the con
ception which, carried to its highest, reaches that sub
lime idea ? " My father worketh hitherto and I
work," said Jesus. It is no Oriental apathy. The
Christian thought of God is full of interest, zeal,
emotion, action, only it is always perfectly balanced
with its surroundings, since its surroundings are the
utterance and creation of itself. God and the uni
verse in their unbroken harmony. The universe
never asking anything of God which God cannot do.
God having no power or affection which the universe
cannot utter. That is the Perfect Peace. To match
that consummate Peace in our lower little sphere, to
be to our world as God is to His, to work as perpetu-

190 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
ally and yet as calmly and so effectively as He works;
that is the real thing that we pray for when we ask
for one another the Peace of God.
With this idea of what Peace really is, we can see
where the failures come in of the attempts at peace
which men are always making. The secret of Peace
is in perfectly harmonious relations between a nature
and its surroundings. The loss of Peace, then, will
come either in the abandonment or in the distortion
of these relations. Wherever any being withdraws
itself, and does not have anything to do with those
objects and tasks to which it naturally belongs, it
loses its true peace. Wherever it remains among
them and deals with them, but uses them wrongly, it
too has no peace. It will be clearer if we take an
instance. Here is your nature, and here is its envi
ronment, its surrounding, which is the society in
which you live. The result of your living with that
society ought to be one large, quiet, healthy, active,
restful condition which could be rightly named by
the great name " Peace." You ought to help that
society, to make it purer, wiser, happier; and you
ought to feel it continually helping you, making you
happier, wiser, purer. You lose all the richness of
such a life in either of two ways. You may re
fuse to have anything to do with the society you
live in, make yourself a recluse, or you may enter
into false relationship with it, be arrogant, and over
bearing, and selfish, and try to compel it to minister
to your pride and luxury, or be servile and obsequi
ous, and let it domineer over your conscience and
self-respect. In either case, you are not at peace

PEACE IN BELIEVING. 191
with it, and you live a peaceless life. A disused re
lation, or a misused relation, is fatal to the comfort
able and healthy action of a life. It is as if you had
to travel around the world or through a long stretch
of woods with one companion. To ignore him, and
act as if he were not walking by your side, or to
quarrel with him, or to impose on him, or let him
impose himself on you, either of these destroys the
pleasure and profit of your journey. Only in mutual
helpfulness and respect can you find peace. And
what is true of going through the woods with a
friend, is true also of going through the world with
your wealth, with your conscience, with nature,
with duty, with pleasure, and with the constant
presence of God.
Let us count this, then, our definition of Peace. It
is harmonious relation with our surroundings, and
evidently, then, Peace will become a deeper and deeper
word, a deeper and deeper thing to men as they be
come aware more and more of what their surround
ings are, as they open their eyes to more and more
intimate and sacred things with which they have to
do. And so the opposite of Peace, namely, disquiet,
unrest, will also become more and more real to a man
as he comes to the knowledge of his circumstances,
of the beings and powers which surround his life
with which he ought to be in harmony, but which he
is either ignoring altogether, or to which he is relating
himself wrongly. Let us see a little what the deep
ening degrees of such disquiet in a man's life are.
And, first, most patent of all, so that we often get no
farther in our use of the word "Peace " than its appli-

192 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
cation to that relationship, there is the position in
which a man stands to the world about him and to
his fellow-men. There is one, and only one, concep
tion of the world in which a man necessarily assumes
a right attitude and relationship to his fellow-men. It
is that conception which thinks of the whole world as
God's Family. The instant that that idea is pre
sented and comprehended, peace looms up in the dis
tance as a possibility. Just as fast and just as far as
that idea is realized in a man's own life, he comes to
be at peace — a high, pure, intelligent peace — with
his fellow-men ; not the peace of compromise nor of
armed defiance, but the peace of clearly understood
relationships and mutual love and mutual help. For
just see how the lack of peace shows itself in you as
it concerns your fellow-men. I take you for the
average man, neither worse nor better. If you are
like most men, what is your relation at this moment
to other mortals ? Well, there are probably a few.
some three or four — perhaps, if you are usually
offensive or unfortunate, a dozen — men with whom
#
you have quarrels, you do not speak to them, and
speech is the primary pledge of common human brother
hood. It may be you are all ready to do them
an injury if the chance offers, or, if it is not as bad as
that, you never count them in the number of those
to whom you can do any good ; and, if we think of
it, it is a dreadful thing that almost all of us should
have some such little fragment, reprobate from any
grace of ours, cut out of the great bulk of the human
race. And then, besides these men with whom you
quarrel, there is the vast multitude to whom you are

PEACE IN BELIEVING. 193
entirely indifferent, with whom you think that you
have no concern whatever. And next to them, an
other company whom you are always trying to out
strip and get the better of, people whom you count
your inferiors, on whom you impose your will, whom
you domineer over if you can. And next to those,
another company to whom you truckle, whose author
ity and domination you accept, before whom you
are servile. And then, besides these, smaller groups
towards whom you hold still other unworthy rela
tions. There are children whom you treat as toys.
There are good men whom you dread as bores.
There are false men whom you admire as heroes.
Now, sum all these up, and then remember that Peace
consists in just and harmonious relations to our sur
roundings, and then ask yourself whether you are, in
any true, high sense, at peace with your fellow-men.
You see that it is not by any means the mere amount
of declared war. Out of policy, or out of good-nature,
you may have kept clear of that entirely. But it is
the false adjustments, it is the untrue relationship, in
which you stand to them that make the absence of
peace between your life and theirs.
And all that I have said about our relations to
other men might be said in a true sense of our
relation to all the external world — to nature, to the
physical forces, to the social laws, to everything not
ourselves on which our lives act, and which acts on
them. But the next step takes us to ourselves. It is
only the most superficial people that recognize
merely their relations of peace or discord with the

194 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
external world, and never ask whether they are at
peace with themselves. To be at peace with a man's
own self ! We use the phrase ; we think we under
stand it. There are certain comfortable and satis
fied conditions in which we think we have attained
the thing. But we do not really understand it till
we have got this fundamental idea of what peace is,
the harmony of a being with its surroundings. Now,
every man has these two parts in him : a will en
circled by its cabinet or council of affections, and a
system of powers which that will governs. The true
relation between the will and the powers constitutes
the true peace of the life. Will using powers to
their best capacity. Powers supplying will with all
the instruments it needs. Now turn again, and look
at your own life. Are you at peace with yourself ?
If your will is taking your powers, which were made
to do noble and gentle and generous things, and
forcing them to do sordid and brutal and mean
things ; if you are living a life of miserable drudgery,
treating yourself like a machine ; or if you are living
a life of dissipation, treating yourself like a brute,
then you are not at peace with yourself surely.
Yourself is misusing, is abusing yourself. There
is war between your will and your powers, as
there is war between the harp and the hand that
smites discord from its tortured strings. A man is
both harp and harper. The harp may not complain,
but all the time the music it was meant to make sleeps
in its strings, and it cannot be at peace with the
cruel fingers that make it unmusical. And in your
powers sleeps the nobleness that they were made to

PEACE IN BELIEVING. 195
do, in everlasting protest against the wickedness to
which you compel them. O my dear friends, to be
at peace with ourselves is not to loosely approve
ourselves in what we are. It is to work with our
selves, that we may be all that God made us for.
Evidently it is a great deal deeper discord when
a man is not at peace with himself than when he is
not at peace with his brethren. But there is some
thing deeper, something nearer to us even than our
brethren or ourselves. And that is God. The will
of God, which is the law of holiness, is the deepest
and inmost thing of all this world. And the ulti
mate question of every human life is, whether he is
at Peace with God. Once more remember what
Peace is. It is the being rightly and harmoniously
related with that with which we have to, do. Now,
foe only right relation of man to the will of God
is loving obedience, affectionate and happy loyalty.
What then ? If you are simply ignoring God alto
gether, living as if there were no God, you are not
at peace with Him. Or if you are absolutely defying
Him, doing what you know is wrong, what you
know He hates, then certainly you are not at peace
with Him. Or yet again, remember this, if you are
serving Him in mere slavery, doing His will simply
because you must, disliking it, disliking Him all the
time you do it — in either case you are not at peace
with God. Here we have reached the bottom of
Peacelessness. Indeed, this discord must include all
others. For this discord, in one word, is sin, and I
think we can see at once how inclusive it makes sin.
It compels it at once to be large enough to embrace

196 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
the neglect of God ; not simply the violation of His
commandments by positive disobedience, but the
absence of any thought about Him, the absolutely
worldly life which tries to satisfy itself without Him ;
all this evidently is a discord which makes sin, if
peace be really the completeness of harmonious rela
tions. Are you at peace with God ? The question
comes to some man living his ordinary worldly life,
and he looks up and answers, " Yes ; I pay Him rev
erence ; I never blaspheme His name ; sometimes I
try to pray to Him a little, and I hope that He will
take care of me when I die. Surely I am at peace
with Him." But are you really, if peace means
nothing less than the existence between your life
and His of all the relations and affections which
ought to be between the infinite Father and His
child? Are you really at peace with Him, if peace
means loving loyalty ?
And then, add one thought more. Remember how
no sin belongs entirely to the moment that commits
it ; remember, what you will only need to look into
your own history to know is true, how sin clings to
the nature that has done it, and lays itself like a
shadow between the soul that sinned and the God
against whom the sin was done. Remember this, and
then not only the sin which you are doing now meas
ures the discord between your soul and God — all
that you have ever done, all your past comes in. By
all that you are shut out from peace with Him. Your
relations to His life to-day are broken and distracted
because of all that you have done, of neglect or
disobedience, in all these accumulated years.

PEACE IN BELIEVING. 197
And now look over this account. Is there not
something very terrible in seeing where we stand?
A man, a soul, a will set here in the midst of forces
which are touching it on every side, with all of which
it might relate itself nobly and to beautiful results !
And see what is the case ! Out of our neighbors we
are getting never the best, — often the very worst;
ourselves we are dishonoring, misusing ; the Will of
God we are neglecting or disobeying. There, in those
deep disturbances, lie the real discords, the real
tragedies of life. Not in the mere discontent and
chaffing, not in the querulousness and restlessness,
the envying, the perpetual wish to be away from
where we are, to be somewhere, something else. Not
in these is the deepest, saddest essence of our lack of
Peace. These are only the symptoms. The real
wretchedness is in the essential wrong relations in
which we have set ourselves to fellow-man and our
selves and God. The true picture of Peace is simply
the restoral of true relations, so that each soul of
us should give its full due to, and so get its full due
from, the souls around it, and its own self, and the
soul of God, its Father.
And now, with this conception of Peace clearly
before us, let us go on to what is always the next
question. How can this condition, so precious in
itself, be won ? How can all things be brought to
such a state that they shall do their best and most
harmonious work in the fulfilment of their truest re
lations to themselves and to each other ? And one
answer immediately suggests itself, which I think we
shall find to fall in with St. Paul's verse which is our

198 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
text. As soon as we come to any thoughtful exami
nation of the world we find that everything is finite
and limited, and lives at its best only in relation to
other things. Everything is a part, nothing is com
plete and absolutely a whole. And it is only in rec
ognition of this fact, only in counting itself a part,
only by living along with the other parts, within the
embrace and envelopment of the whole, that every
thing does its best work and so attains its best peace.
This is a universal principle. Everything falls into
disorder, runs wild, loses its symmetry and its effec
tiveness, unless it feels around it, as it lives and
works, the embrace and restraint and protection of
the controlling whole of which it is a portion. And
peace for finite creatures only comes by such envel
opment. The illustrations of this are numberless.
The peace of the family consists in the envelopment
of the household by the father's life. Each child's
life finds its place and plays its part within the girdle
of that authority and love. The father, in the old
Saxon phrase, is the " husband," the " houseband,"
that holds the parts in their places, and makes each
keep its true relation to itself and to the rest. And
so the work of all goes on, and Peace is within the
happy walls. And so a man's life grows peaceful
and effective when it has some great controlling idea
which is bound about it, as it were, to keep each ac
tion and thought in its place, in true subjection and
relation to other thoughts and actions. Within such
an enveloping idea no upstart action or thought
makes confusion by trying to lord it over the rest ;
each tries only to help fulfil that which is the great

PEACE IN BELIEVING. 199
purpose of the living, and so the Peace of the natural
world is preserved by the harmonious working of all
its laws within that one great mysterious enveloping
whole which is so real to us that we give it a name
and call it nature. All our science, finding unity and
simplicity of force everywhere, is making that exist
ence, that being nature, more and more real, contin
ually. So everywhere. A picture has peace when all
its details are harmonized and held within some dom
inant idea. A story has its prevalent purpose ; a
piece of music its controlling theme ; a government
its policy. Everything, in so far as it is a part, is held
in safety and given the chance to do its best work
only as it is included within some greater whole.
That whole in its time becomes a part in some whole
that is larger still ; and so out to the infinite, which
nothing can limit or contain, this system of envelop
ment goes on. I want to state it just as generally as
I can, because I want to show that St. Paul's special
statement of a special Christian truth is part of a
universal law which runs everywhere. All Christian
truth is in harmony with, is but one utterance, is the
highest and fullest announcement of, the universal
truth, the truth of the universe. And so the broad
est statement of St. Paul's utterance here is this :
that everything lives its full fife and does its -full
work, or, in other words, completes that condition of
absolutely perfect relationships which we saw was
what Peace meant, only as it lives and works within
the compass of something greater than itself, which
holds each part into its place, and to which each part
must be loyal, obedient, and true.

200 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
Just for one moment pause and think of that great
idea of Peace by Envelopment. It has no end or limit
until we come to God. The prerogative, the distinc
tion of the divine life is this, that it, and it alone, is
self-enveloping. There is nothing beyond it. It is
held within nothing. It holds all things within
itself. There is nothing to which God is bound to
be true but God. " Because He could swear by no
greater," the epistle says, " He sware by His own
self." Included within His life there lie first the
great primary ideas which are forever true in Him.
Within these ideas, loyal to them, only powerful as
they embody and enforce them, lie the laws which
all men own. Within these laws, held into peace
and power by obedience to them, are all the positive
institutions of mankind, the family, the state, the
church. Within these institutions live the lives of
men, harmonious and effective just in proportion as
they perceive and cordially acknowledge their envel
opment. And then, these lives again envelop one
another. Countless systems are formed and live
within this great system. The larger the envelop
ment that each life is aware of, the more effectively
it works. The greater its loyalty and trust, the more
true it is to itself and to all the sharers of the same
envelopment. Every harmonious and effective work
ing, though it may be aware only of the envelop
ment that touches it most immediately, is really held
within the great all-embracing envelopment of God
Every action is exalted to its highest self-conscious
ness when it feels, through all the intermediate
envelopments, that outermost envelopment of alL

PEACE IN BELIEVING. 201
the holding of God,' and answers back to it, sending
through all inferior loyalties a last consummate loy
alty to Him. " In Him we live and move and have
our being."
And now, what shall we call this law, — the law that
every power comes to its best and most harmonious
action only within a larger envelopment to which it
trusts itself and to which it is loyal ? This faithful
ness to an enveloping principle and power — - what is
it really but belief ? The child believes in its father.
The life believes in its idea. The law believes in its
principle. Everything lives and works by believing
in something larger than itself, until you come to
God. God believes in Himself. With Him alone, in
all the universe, is self-belief, the condition of the
highest life. And so the truth which I have been
trying to state, a truth which in some form or other
breaks out everywhere through all the world, is really,
as you see, the truth which is wrapt up in St. Paul's
phrase, — " Peace in Believing." And if the truth
which I have tried to state is true, there is no peace
anywhere in all the world save in believing. No
high complete activity of anything, no fulfilment by
anything of all its natural capacity, unless it is held
in the hand of something greater than itself. Oh, the
disjointed, distorted little bits of life that such a
truth explains ! All the world, all the society we
study, is full of little fragments of activity, little rest
less bits of movement which vex us with their cease
less action of brain and hand and heart which comes
to nothing. Society and the world often come to
seem to us, I think, like a watchmaker's shop where

202 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
there are small pieces of unattached clock-work
lying scattered about, each running by itself, accom
plishing nothing because each is fastened to no
weight, which it has to move, no purpose which it
is trying to fulfil. Clicking and clattering, they keep
the shop in a perpetual confusion. There is no peace.
Mere motion with no work. Mere action with no
unity. Each separated bit of machinery has no envel
opment, belongs to nothing, believes in nothing. So
is it with a multitude of lives among us. Active
from mere irrepressible impulse, their action is all
restlessness. They belong to nothing. They believe
in nothing. No loyalty to principle or fellow-man or
God envelops them. Their lives inspire us with
continual dissatisfaction, and they are not satisfied
with themselves. There is no better thing to see
than that which comes when one of these bits of
machinery is taken up and set into its true envelop
ment. When a man's activity is rescued from aim-
lessness by learning some devotion, and the man,
beginning to believe in something, gains peace in
believing. This, then, is the general statement of our truth.
And now turn and see what is St. Paul's peculiar
Christian statement of it. His Peace in Believing is
to be distinctly a Peace by Gospel Faith, by faith in
the Incarnation and Atonement of Jesus Christ. Is
this, then, something different entirely from what we
have been speaking of? Surely not. It is simply
the completion and consummation of them all.
Around a man's life fold its various envelopments.
The man's peace depends upon whether he is in

PEACE IN BELIEVING. 203
living and true relations to all of them. Now, the
Gospel of Christ is simply the perfect presentation
of all these envelopments to the soul of man ; and he
who is in the power of the Gospel, he who approaches
everything with which he has to do in Christ, finds
his true relation to everything. Shall we trace this
out? Shall we look one moment in this new light
at the different departments in which we saw that
the peace or the peacelessness of human lives resided?
Peace with our fellow-men. How will that come
about by faith in Jesus Christ ? If Jesus Christ is
the perfect humanity, the consummation of all human
hopes and desires, the visible achievement of that
perfection to which all our brethren's lives are strug
gling, then must not he who sees his brethren not in
themselves, not as if this which they are now were
the end and crown of all that they could be, but in
Him, in Christ, reading their possibility in His com
plete attainment — must not such a man be filled
with Pity and with Hope and with Respect for the
greatest and for the most insignificant of men ? And
these three are the elements of peace. Let me be a
thorough believer in Jesus Christ, let me, that is,
have taken Him with all the revelation of humanity
that there is in Him, and where is the fellow-man
with whom I shall not be at peace ? Is it the man
who domineers over me and bullies me? The
supreme mastery of my Lord adjusts these lower
masteries and compels them to keep their proper
places. When I have learned really to " fear Him
who can cast both soul and body into hell," I am
able indeed not to "fear them that can kill the

204 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
body." The martyr seeing Christ standing at the
right hand of God is at full peace with his mur
derers. Is it the man who vexes me with his
stupidity, whose awkwardness and spiritual sloth
seem even to be hindering the salvation of the world ?
If I believe in Christ, the possibility of that man
opens before me. He is a child of God. Pity, en
thusiastic desire to waken him and call him to the
knowledge and use of his sonship. These may fill
me, but I can have none of that petty personal irrita
tion which is the destruction of peace. No ; there is
no one to whom a true faith in the divine humanity
of the Redeemer does not adjust my life, calling out
my best power of appreciation, and my best power
of help, bringing me Peace.
And then, my discord with myself. It is as old as
that wonderful story in the seventh chapter of the'
Epistle to the Romans. The way in which a Belief
in Christ harmonizes that struggle of the two wills
which makes our inner peacelessness. Deeper than
every revelation that Christ gives me about these,
my brother men being God's children, is His revela
tion to me that I am the Child of God. When He
has shown me that, then I know which of these two
wills in me is master. The other will is not killed
out. It lives, but it is conquered. And just as
there was peace in the land as soon as the Rebellion
was crushed and the power of the rightful govern
ment everywhere established, even though still
rebellious outbreaks here and there showed that the
old fire was not totally extinguished, so there is
peace in me when the divine Christ has become my

PEACE IN BELIEVING 205
master and is strengthening my love of right every
day with His imparted righteousness ; even though
still the evil wishes haunt the dark places and break
out from the outward thickets of my soul. The
peace of a man with his own self when his sonship
to God is perfectly established as the fact, and his
return to his Father is perfectly established as the
law of his life by faith in Christ the Son of God!
Why, here in our country there has been a poor,
unhappy father whose child was stolen from him
years ago, as all the land has heard with a heart full
of sympathy. Think of that child wherever he may
be, if he is still alive to-day ! Think of the restless
ness in his young heart! Think of the dim and
dying memories in conflict with the things that are
around him day by day ! Think how, while others
can find perfect satisfaction in the life he leads,
because they never have known any other, down at
the bottom of his heart there is perpetual unrest!
And now suppose the father finds his child. The
house is open — the home-life folds itself around
him. Where is the unrest then? Still this strange
exile haunts him with its memories and its power.
But the dominion of the life is fixed again where it
belongs, and held in the hand of that dominion, the
jarred and disordered activities of heart and mind
and outward habit begin to beat again truly, and
once more there is Peace.
I need not stop, as certainly I must not stop, to
tell how the third element of perfect peace, peace
with the law of God, comes by the faith in Jesus
Christ. One of the words which we make far too

206 PEACE IN BELIEVING.
little is that great word "forgiveness." It means
more than the mere taking off of penalties. It means
the putting of the soul where penalty cannot find it
any longer, in the restored fatherhood of God. To
the soul so brought back what is the relation between
it and the law of that fatherhood, the law of the
household of God which is to be his home henceforth ?
Hear David cry, " Oh, how I love thy law ! " and as
to the restored child the house is always tenfold
dear because of the exile in which he used to live,
so to the forgiven soul the law which he obeys is
always more precious, and the joy of obeying it more
deep, because of the exile of disobedience in which
he lived, and from which he has been brought back
by grace. " Oh, how I love thy law ! " for to the
soul which knows God in Christ the law of God is
the utterance of God, is God, and obedience is not
only duty — it is love.
I must not dwell on all this any longer. Let the
great truth be clear to us to-day. Peace comes by
belief ; not by ourselves or our own strength, but by
being held in the hand of Him who saved us, do these
disturbed natures of ours come to their true selves
and work harmoniously and to their best results.
Doubt finds its only rest in personal confidence.
Self-conceit, which is the most peace-destroying thing
in all the world, is overwhelmed in consecration to
the Master, and contrition starts from the dust, and
turns into the very angel of hope and growth when
once a soul believes in Jesus Christ.
Oh, then, that over us, perplexed and troubled and
afraid, as over the disciples in the chamber long

PEACE IN BELIEVING. 207
ago, the hand of Jesus might be stretched, and we,
to-day, might hear Him saying, " Peace I leave with
you ; My Peace I give unto you. Believe in Me."
Oh that our souls may say, " Dear Lord, we do
believe in Thee, and so we claim Thy Peace."

XII.
WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE.
"And Balak said unto him, Come, I pray thee, with me unto an
other place, from whence thou mayest see them. Thou shalt see
but the utmost part of them, and shalt not see them all : and curse
me them from thence." — Numbers xxiii: 13.
Many of you will recall the story from which
these words are taken, and the striking picture
which it draws. The Israelites are travelling through
the desert. They are approaching the domain of
Balak, King of Moab. Balak is frightened, and sends
for the Mesopotamian wizard, Balaam, and bids
him curse the dangerous intruders. But Balaam,
filled with a higher spirit than he understands,
blesses instead of cursing. Again the effort is made
and the disappointment follows in another place.
And then it is that there occurs to the monarch the
idea which is recorded in the text. Perhaps if the
prophet did not see the whole host in its multitude
the curse would come more readily. " Let us stand
where we can only see a part of them," he says.
" Peradventure thou canst curse me them from
thence." It was a vain expedient. The blessing came still
pouring forth more richly than before. Why should
it not ? It was not the quantity but the quality of
Israel which drew the blessing. It was not because

WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE. 209
there were so many of them, but because they were
set on lofty purposes and carried in their bosom
mighty spiritual issues, that God took care of them
and made them strong. It was a hopeless hope of
Balak. And it was like a child. It was the trans
parent self-cheat of infancy. So children play with
themselves and one another, saying, " Let us see only
a part and make believe that that is all."
It is this childlikeness, this primitive simplicity
about the incident, which makes it capable of being
expanded and of applying to all life. The wisdoms
and policies of childhood find their illustrations
everywhere. They are so simple that they fit on
every life. A child says a wise word, and the sage
catches surprised sight in it of complication sin his
life of which the little head has never dreamed. A
child does some act of transparent folly, and by it
you easily understand the elaborate superstition or
the intricate villany of the full-grown conspirator or
bigot. The children go about with the keys of our
conditions in their hands. They hold them up before
us, and we take them and unlock our problems and
give them back again, and the children know noth
ing of what they have done.
So is it with this childish act of the barbarian
Balak — so fresh and simple is it that I feel sure I
shall not fail to find the repetitions of it everywhere.
And I do ! It is about its repetitions that I want to
talk this morning. I would speak about the modern
Balaks, who think they can indulge their passions and
scatter their curses as they please, by shutting their
eyes to all but some small portion of that with which

210 WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE.
they have to deal. They are the men who wilfully
take partial views, who will see nothing which will
interfere with that which they have already made up
their minds to think or do — especially the men who
have made up their minds to curse, and who refuse to
look at that part of a subject or a life which will
make cursing impossible, and compel a blessing upon
that which they choose to hate.
Of such a disposition — and I am sure that yourec>
ognize the disposition which I mean — the first thing
that impresses one is its lack of absoluteness. There
is an absolute truth about everything, something
which is certainly the fact about that thing, entirely
independent of what you or I or any man may think
about it. No man on earth may know that fact
correctly — but the fact exists. It lies behind all
blunders and all partial knowledges, a calm, sure, un-
found certainty, like the great sea beneath its waves,
like the great sky behind its clouds. God knows it.
It and the possession of it makes the eternal differ
ence between God's knowledge and man's.
It is a beautiful and noble faith when a man thus
believes in the absolute truth, unfound, unfindable
perhaps by man, and yet surely existent behind and
at the heart of everything. It is a terrible thing
when a man ceases to believe in it, and ceases to seek
for it. He sinks out of the highest delight and pur
ity. For him the great glory of life is gone. Petty
and selfish economies sweep in and overwhelm him.
Not what is true, but what will tell for the advantage
of something which he thinks valuable, becomes the
object of his search. He questions everything, as

WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE. 211
the lawyer questions a witness, in the interest of a
cause. Then comes the Balak folly. Then the man
shuts his eyes to everything which will not tell upon
his side. Then he refuses to look upon the whole of
things, and sees only the portion which will minister
to his passion or his spite. Oh, keep your faith in,
your love for, the absolute, my friends ! Be sure that
it exists. To find it, to come a little nearer to find
ing it, — that, and not the gaining of a new argument
or the sustaining of an old prejudice, is what you
must be craving when you seek for truth.
In the loss of this faith lies the secret of all parti
sanship. The partisan always is a Balak. What is a
partisan ? Is he not simply a man who will see only
a part of truth, lest he should be compelled to aban
don a position which he loves, or to adopt a position
which he chooses to dislike ? How many men are
there to-day — Republicans or Democrats or anything
beside — who are genuinely and really as ready to
give its full value to a fact when, if it is true, it tells
upon the other party's side as if it told on theirs ?
" Behold," you say, " look at the total case. Take
in the entire situation, and then condemn this party
and its leaders and its policies as all foolish or all
false." Your friend looks, and, Balaam-like, to your
dismay he breaks out into telling of the good which
he sees even in this party you despise. What im
pulse is more natural than yours to say, "Come
I pray thee, unto another place. Thou shalt not
see them all. Thou shalt see only that which I
choose to let thee see of them, and thou shalt curse me
them from thence." This is not — he would com-

212 WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE.
pletely misunderstand what I am saying who
thought it was — a mere assertion that there is
good and bad in everything, and the preaching of a
feeble vacillation that could never come to any de
cisive action. There is just the difference between
partisanship and reasonable choice. The reasonable
man who has surveyed the whole condition, by and
by strikes his balance and announces his result. He
finds that which is genuinely and hopelessly bad, the
base, the false, and the impure, and he denounces that
unsparingly. Then, among honest and honorable
differences, he judges what he thinks comes nearest
to the absolute truth, and sustains that with all his
strength. But he has no curse for the man upon the
other side. He will not impute miserable motives.
He is brave as well as bold. He must be just and
generous as well as strong. And so the policy which
he contends for is in the end not weaker, but stronger,
for his breadth of view.
Away with cursing ! Away with vehement de
nunciation which prevents right judgment with the
intensity of personal passion and dislike ! One man
denounces civilization. He sees the wretchedness
and misery of which its streets are full. He hears
the cry of outraged natures and of ruined souls. He
says it is an organized selfishness, and he curses it
with all his heart. Another man denounces educa
tion. He says it is superficial and misplaced. He says
that instead of fitting children, it unfits them, for the
work of life. He says it makes cultivated villains and
,useless burdens on society ; and so he curses education
very loudly. Another man denounces society. He

WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE. 213
tells us how selfish and narrow and corrupting is the
intercourse of man with man. He shows us the
social world all honeycombed with insincerity. He
says, " Is that the way for the children of God to live
with one another?" And so he curses society and
turns ascetic. Another man curses the scientific
spirit. " Behold, how hard it is," he says, " how un
believing ! How arrogant in its self-conceit ! How it
would reduce life to a desert and the world to a
machine ! How it despises the spontaneous affec
tions ! How it worships its idols ! " And his curses
fall upon it furious and fast.
Now notice that all these accusations have their
truth. Each of these mighty and benignant interests
is guilty of the sin with which it is charged,. But it
is only as one shuts out all except a little portion of
it from his view that any man is able to see each of
these interests absolutely given up to its sin, so that
he can curse it. In each case if a man takes into
view the whole of civilization or education or society
or science, he sees its graciousness and beauty, and
cannot curse, but bless. And so it is with life in
general. There are parts of it and aspects of it
which, if they were all, would make existence an
accursed thing. "Come," says the pessimist, "you
shall not see the whole. I will set you where you
shall only see a part, and curse me it from thence."
There is where pessimism is made. The man who
sees the whole of life must be an optimist. I know
dark points of view, grim gloomy crags of moral
vision, hideous observatories on which if a man
stands he can see nothing but the dreadful side of

214 WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE.
life, its wretchedness, its disappointment, its distress,
its reckless, wanton, defiant sin. I can see gathered
on those horrible observation points the despisers,
the revilers, the cursers of our human life. I know
that if I went up there and stood by their side, my
tongue would curse like theirs. But there I will
not go. If there be any point whence I can see it
all, however dimly, through whatever clouds, there I
will go. So will I keep my faith that life is good,
and work with what strength I can against its evils,
knowing that I work in hope.
Upon those dark places of partial vision I know that
I should never find the great Seer of human life, who
is Christ. Christ saw all life in God. That means
that He saw life in its completeness. No being ever
saw the evil and misery as He beheld it. He saw sin
with all the intensity of holiness. But nobody ever has
dared call Jesus Christ a pessimist. He saw the end
from the beginning. He saw the depth from the sur
face. He saw the light from the darkness. He saw
the whole from the parts. Therefore He could not
despair. There was no curse of life upon His lips.
Infinite pity ! A pity that has folded itself around
the world's torn and bleeding heart like a benediction
ever since — but no curse ! And who are we, with
our little feeble rage and petulance, flinging our testy
curses where the Lord's blessing descended like the
love of God ? Oh, if you ever find yourself cursing
life, get your New Testament and read what Jesus
said looking down on Jerusalem from the height of
the Mount of Olives, looking down on man from
the measureless height of the cross !

WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE. 215
Do I talk too generally ? Let me then illustrate
and enforce all this with instances. A man's career —
every man's career, we may truly say — is made up
of struggles and victories or defeats. More defeats
than victories there are in most men's lives, we think.
But, however that may be, at least the defeats, the
weak and wretched failures, the troublesome, exas
perating, disappointing incompetency for the work of
life, force themselves most upon the eyes of those who
watch their fellow-men. And to a very great many
people there is a continual temptation to ignore the
fact of struggle and remember only the fact of defeat.
It is so satisfactory to take a simple sweeping view
about your neighbor's life, to give him one broad
judgment that has no qualifications, to trample on him
in the gutter and never ask how he got there. Then
you can freely curse. Then you cannot merely con
demn the deed, but utterly denounce the doer.
But men do struggle, even those who fall at last
most utterly. It would seem as if anybody needed
only to remember his own history and to study his
own consciousness to be assured of that. You think
of the days when you have sinned most dreadfully.
Are you willing to accept any man's judgment of those
days who simply sees the sin. You know, though
you dare not tell any one besides, of how you fought
with your temptation. You know the nights of dark
ness and the days of hope. You remember the mis
ery of the last yielding, and you say, " He could not
curse me if he knew it all."
This is the meaning of the soul's appeal to God.
" Let my judgment come forth from Thy presence,"

216 WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE.
David cries. Is it that God does not hate sin as man
does ? Certainly not that. It is that God knows all.
The struggle and the fall and the repentance all make
one unit of experience to Him. Therefore He may
condemn and He may punish, but He cannot curse.
And when we thus look at ourselves and into our
own consciousness, must we not look abroad on
other men and say, " No prejudice shall force or tempt
me to a place where I shall see only the blank fact
that this man has sinned ? No desire of my own soul
to simplify and emphasize his life shall shut out of my
sight the wrestling before the fall, the good which
pleaded against his resistance, and which, though out
raged and insulted, is in him still, and will not leave
him at peace in his wickedness?"
There is indeed the other vice. Sometimes a man
insists that you shall stand where you can see nothing
except the good in him with whom you are to deal.
He insists on having you make such allowance for the
temptation that you shall disregard the sin, or having
you give such value to the struggle that the defeat
shall seem a small affair. That is not what we want.
The easy apology or even the profuse admiration
which may come down from that point of observation
is not the true and serious man's greeting and judg
ment of the life of his brother-man. It is as foolish
and false as the curse, however more generous and
kindly it may be.
Neither of these is just and true, because neith^'1
of them is complete. Both of them are partial. It
is a " blessing " that man wants to give to man,
and the quality of a true blessing is that it is com-

WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE. 217
plete. Whenever man blesses his brother-man, if he
is doing the act in all its fulness, it is the complete
ness of one nature taking in all the completeness of
the other. Whatever it is, — the mother giving her
blessing to her boy as he goes out from the home-
gate into the dangerous world, the friend who finds no
words of sympathy for his friend in his great sorrow
except " God bless you," the priest consecrating the
hero as he rushes to his duty in the field, the king
who looks across the millions of his people and pours
upon them all the blessing of his kingly heart, the
people who set their king or president into his place
of burdensome honor with shouts of benediction,
the neighbor who greets his neighbor with sacred
words which have not lost their meaning, or the
children who gather round their father's grave and
drop their blessings on his dear memory along with
their tears, — wherever there is real blessing there is
the sight of the whole nature, there is the compre
hension of the total life. Weaknesses are not forgot-
ten. It is the remembrance of their presence which
makes the voice tremble as it blesses. Struggle is
not ignored. It keeps the blessing hopeful when it
is trembling on the margin of despair. The whole
pathetic mixture of the human life is gathered up
together. Its evil and its good are both in sight.
The danger and the possibility, the fear and the hope,
the darkness and the light, are blended in one great
profound conception of what this wonderful human
life is; and when, standing where it is all clear
before him, one human being says to another, "I
bless you," it is the largest act which man can do to

218 WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE.
man. Rebuke, and pity, and exhortation, and en
couragement, and warning, and exaltation, and prayer
— all are in it. It is soul meeting soul in the highest
region and with the closest grasp.
Jesus " led His disciples out as far as Bethany, and
He lifted up His hands and blessed them." There
was no curse on His lips as He left the poor, frightened,
wilful, ignorant, and stumbling men. " He lifted up
His hands and blessed them." So may the total re
sult of the pressure of our lives upon our brethren's
lives be blessing ! May we see them so largely that
a curse shall be impossible !
I must say a few words upon two other applica
tions of our truth that it is the limited and partial
sight of the things which makes the curse.
The first of them refers to the way in which men
form their judgments about religion. We listen to
the platform orator, we read the novel of the day,
and what impresses us is this : the way in which a
hundred misconceptions have their origin in the per
petual tendency to see a part and not the whole, and
utter vehement and sometimes furious judgments on
that which finds its reasonableness and meaning only
when it is set into the system of which it rightly
makes a portion. Religion is the whole larger life of
man, seen in the presence and the light of God.
The Christian religion is the life of man, seen in the
broad illumination of the supreme and wondrous
Christ. In Him it finds its wholeness, and its parts
grow into reconciliation and significance.
Take for a single instance what is called the fact
of miracle ; not this or that miraeulous event, but the

WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE. 219
whole element of miracle as it appears pervading
everywhere and coloring the Christian story. I wish
that I could tell in simple words how the whole
matter seems to me to stand concerning miracles.
"The trouble with miracles is that they don't
happen," is the cry. And men look up and say,
" Yes, that is true. They do not happen. All moves
on unmiraculously. We see no wonders." Is that
all? Have those eyes, looking up, beheld the whole of
Christianity? Have they seen a Being, strange,
unique, unprecedented, moving majestically among
men with whom He certainly is one, and yet from
whom, both by the words He says about Himself and
by the self-witness which His figure bears, is greater
than the men He walks among, greater than any
man who ever walked upon the earth ? Have they
seen Him, living His most exceptional and lofty life,
and then looked, ready for whatever they might
witness, to see whether obedient Nature had no
response to make to Him greater and richer than she
makes to the long, crowded generations of ordinary
human life ? If not, is it not right to say that they
have shut out a part, and then judged of the part
which still was left as if it were the whole?
Here is the true philosophy of miracle. All the
history of the earth is full of the record of what
Nature has to say to man, of what she does and says
in answer to his invitations, to his very presence in
her courts. That is her natural history as it relates
to man. But what man ? Who is he that speaks to
her and whom she answers ? Is it man in his com
mon capacity and character, the ordinary man, man

220 WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE.
as he has been for ages ? For him miracles do not
happen. To him Nature replies in the same old
sweet and solemn voices in which for ages she has
spoken. But when a new man comes, a new man
hood, a divine man, his newness and divinity being
attested for us not by his miracles, but by his
character, then miracles do happen ; nay, more than
that, it is altogether probable that miracles must
happen, being the natural outflow of his life — being,
we almost may say, no miracles for him — being
as natural in the world of power where he lives as it
is in our world that the echo should fly back from
the mountain, or the seed we planted should come
piercing through the soil.
You must see Christ and the tomb, both of them,
before it can seem possible that Lazarus will rise.
Let any one take you where you will see the tomb
only and not see Christ, and you will of course reject
the thought of resurrection and declare it a supersti
tion or a fraud. You have got the task without the
power, the load without the lifting-strength. Power
and task make one great whole. They greet and
answer to each other. Stand where you see Him, and
miracle is not merely explained — it is demanded.
He is miraculous, and miracle surrounds Him as the
sunshine issues from the sun.
The same is true of many of the questions of
religion. Stand where you cannot see man's great
ness, and the incarnation seems a wild, inexplicable
dream. Stand where no music reaches you from the
deep harmonies of man's present spiritual life, and
it is out of your power to believe in heaven. Lose

WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE. 221
sight of sin, and the darker possibilities of eternity
are hideous impossibilities. The religious truth
which you see by itself, out of its position in the
great whole which ought to hold it, fails to bear
witness of its truth. Strive then for wholes, and let
the parts reveal themselves within them. Strive for
God, who is the whole. Not immediately for particu
lar religious doctrines, but for that vast religious and
divine conception of existence which shall make
special religious doctrines credible. By obedience,
by communion, climb to the height where you shall
be with God, and then the truths about God shall
open their reasonableness, their richness, and their
harmony. So, I think, Jesus was religious. So may
we be.
I must do little more than allude to the one other
application of our truth which is in my mind ; but I
must not let you go without alluding to it. It is the
saddest and most terrible of all. I am thinking of
the desperation and bitterness which come with the
sight of pain without the sight of the higher conse
quences and results of pain. It is the old tragedy of
the Book of Job, and of the books of thousands of
tortured lives. " Curse God and die," seems some
times to be the only outcome of it all. Perhaps, nay
almost certainly, there are some to whom it seems so
here this morning. It is the only outcome of it all, if
the pain you feel or see is all. But if the whole of a
man's life from its beginning to its endless end, from
its surface in to its inmost heart, is capable of being
taken into account, then that desperate outcome is
not the only one. There is a blessing and a thank-

222 WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE.
fulness which may overcome and drown the curse,
Suppose that, looking at pain, and with the curse
just growing into shape upon your lips, a great hand
takes you up and lifts you. And as you rise your
vision widens. And slowly education grows into
your view, surrounding pain, and drawing out its
sense of cruelty, and crowding in upon it its own
sense of love and purpose. Then, in the larger
vision, must not the curse perish ? And if the lips
are not strong enough to open into thankfulness, at
least the eyes, still full of pity, may wait in peace.
This is the fear we have to-day. The sense of
human pain grows stronger all the time. And it
sometimes seems as if the sense of purpose and edu
cation grew weaker in a multitude of souls. It is the
heart of man taken, Balaam-like, to a place whence
it can see the part and not the whole ; and who that
listens does not hear the muttering of the curse ?
Where is the help, first for your soul, then for the
whole great world ? Not in saying that pain is not
pain, not in shutting the eyes to the part which is
so awfully manifest, but in seeing, in insisting upon
seeing, the whole.
" To feel, although no tongue can prove,
That every cloud that spreads above,
And veileth love, itself is love."
That is the only help. He who lets his heart bear
witness, he who lets the experience of countless
sufferers bear witness, he who lets Christ bear witness,
that no suffering ever yet came to any human
creature by which it was not possible that that human

WHOLE VIEWS OF LIFE. 223
creature should be made better and purer and greater,
— he has caught sight of the whole ; and though he
walks in silence and perplexity and suspense, he does
not curse.
And so we come to this, — the sacredness and
graciousness of the whole. He who sees the part,
grows bitter. He who sees the whole, is full of hope.
We curse the part, but not the whole. The reason
must be that he who grasps the whole, touches God,
and the human soul cannot really curse Him. The
whole is sacred. It is more than the sum of its parts.
It has its own quality and character. It is great and
mysterious. In it is peace. He who sees it all finds
rest unto his soul. He who catches glimpses of how
he shall see it all some day has something of the
power of that rest already.
Remember I have not preached to you blind satis*
faction and complacency. I have tried to press on
you the old noble and ennobling exhortation, " Lift
up your eyes," see all you can. What you cannot
see with your eyes, see with your faith. Then go
through life not feebly scattering curses by the way,
but bravely hopeful, strong in God whose being and
love surround it all, blessing and being blessed, at
every step and at the end.

XIII.
HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.
" Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this Present World." —
II Timothy iv: 10.
Of Demas we know almost nothing except what
is suggested in these words. Once in the Epistle to.
the Colossiahs, and once in the Epistle to Philemon,
St. Paul alludes to him as his own fellow-worker, in
tones of sympathy and love. Then in the Epistle to
Timothy there comes this statement of his follower's
defection. With so few facts to restrain us, we may give some
play to our imagination. We may ask ourselves why
and how it was that Demas turned back from the
company of Paul, and gave himself to " this present
world." It may have been mere lightness of nature,
which grew*weary of the severe and lofty life which
the apostle lived. On the other hand, there may
have been something more than that. Demas may
oertainly have been a man of some degree of serious
ness. I can think of him as being first drawn to
Paul and Paul's Christ with real enthusiasm. His
heart was touched. His mind was fascinated. Lo !
here was something greater than the ordinary life,
Here was the true life of man. I can imagine him
thinking that for a long time, and then I can imagine
a misgiving creeping in upon him. " After all," I

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS. 225
can picture him saying to himself, " what is this life
of Paul, my master ? Is there any hope that he can
make the world that which he thinks it ought to be ?
Is he not striving for an impossibility? Is he not
before his time ? Is he not so far apart from common
standards that all his teaching and work must be
only a powerless episode, out of which, when it is
over, no permanent result can come ? Will not the
true, the healthy, the practical man rather seek the
best standards of his time and live in them? " With
thoughts like these, I can conceive this vague and
shadowy Demas, by and by, perhaps with deep regret
and courteous farewells, forsaking Paul, his master,
"having loved this present world."
If any such picture of his history were true, should
we not have in Demas a very interesting study of the
comparative power of Higher and Lower Standards,
and of their relation to one another ? We should see
a man pressed on by the immediate conditions of his
place and time urged to behave and live as his con
temporaries and his fellow-citizens were living and
behaving; then tempted out beyond these immediate
surroundings by the sight of vaster experiences and
the more ideal possibilities of man ; and then again
deliberately leaving and disowning these, and coming
back and saying : " No ! Beautiful as it is, it is a de
lusion. Man must live in his own place, and in his
own time. The universal and the eternal must not
bewilder him. He can identify and integrate his life
only in the moulds of his own race, his own family,
his own class. Let him find his standards there.
Let the bird be the best bird, and the mole the best

226 HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.
mole, that it can ; but let neither lose its distinctness
and special value by aspiring after some vague dream
of universal animal life." This is what we should see
in Demas if our imagination concerning him were
right. And so we should understand the scene when
on some dim and hazy morning he turned his back on
Paul, and went back to the " present world " which
he loved.
Was there ever a restlessness in his soul after
wards ? Did the heaven which he once had dared to
seek haunt him in his lower life ? We are almost
sure it must have haunted him, for not by any one
resolution does a man shut the windows on the
higher standards which once have shone upon him.
He cannot so look to earth that he will not be aware
of the heaven, any more than he can so fix his eyes
on the heaven that he will not know there is an
earth. An old mediaeval legend says that mankind
are the incorporation, the embodiments, of the angels
who in the strife between God and Lucifer could
not determine on which side they ought to be. They
never have 'finally decided. And so this special
fallen angel Demas may, as well as any other man,
give us the starting-point from which to think about
the true relation of the higher and the lower, the
universal and the special, standards to the life of
man. That is what I should like to do this morn
ing. Let us start, then, with the fact that every human
being is born into a group of local, ready-made stand
ards, to which, in the absence of any broader and
more absolute ideas of life, he naturally and legiti-

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS. 227
mately conforms. The child takes it for granted
that what his father and his mother do is right.
The ways of the household represent for him the
perfect life. As he goes forth from the house door
into the school, into the city life, into the Church's
teaching, it is all right for him that each of them
should welcome him into a set of standards all formed
and accepted, which should be presumably the best.
He does not know enough to question them. The
presumption is enormously upon their side. The
very fact of his being born into the midst of them
implies a certain kind of evidence that he brings
such a nature as will be best suited to them, and
such as they will best suit. They represent the same
stage in the development of man. And so the child
in the household, and the scholar in the school, and
the citizen in the State, and the Christian in the
Church, starts with a cordial acceptance of the local
standard, and desires to live as other men are liv
ing in the institution of which he finds himself a
part. In a yet larger way, the same is true about the age
in which a man finds himself set. I am here in the
nineteenth century, and I am presumably in its
spirit, and think it the best century which the world
has seen. The same causes have produced it and
me and the men who are living in it at my side. I
iee its light ; I feel its nobleness. Other centuries
I must go abroad to seek. This century is here. I
breathe its breath ; its blood is in my veins ; its
passions are my passions ; its ideas are my ideas.
And so presumptively, and by the first natural dis-

228 HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.
position of my life, I am a man of my time and
adopt its standards.
This is not something which applies only to weak
and waxen characters, such as easily take the im
pression of their immediate surroundings. Great
genius all the more vividly catches the color of its
time. Plato is a man of all time, but he is also a
man of the fourth century before Christ. Luther
is a German of the sixteenth century. Shakespeare
is part of the age of Elizabeth. Nay, if we come
to that Life of which it might have been expected
above all others that it would leave all local and
temporary influences and associations on one side,
and be simply and universally the life of the Son
of Man, Christ Jesus was a Jew ; He was a Naz-
arene ; He spoke the language, He thought the
thought, of His own people ; He reverenced the
authority of the Scribes and Pharisees ; He justified
Himself out of the Jewish law. It was not merely
a humanity, but a Hebrew humanity of that especial
age, through which He uttered the wisdom and the
love of God.
Influences are powerful, not merely in virtue of
their intrinsic force, but also in proportion to their
nearness or their distance. An idea which ever,
in any remotest age, has held the thought of men
is powerful forever in the world ; but an idea of far
less intrinsic force prevailing here and now will con
quer it, and sweep the life of the world out of its
power. A man in college knows that the stand
ards of the great world of men are wiser, loftier, and
freer than those which are the masters in his little

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS. 229
world ; but the immediate holds him in its power, and
he thinks that he is helpless. It is in vain to argue
with this first power of the present life. That a
man should feel it, is the first condition of successful
energy. Now and then a man comes who does not
feel it, or who pretends not to feel it. " I will not
be an American of the nineteenth century," he says.
" I will be a Greek of the time of Pericles. I will
be a Jew of the time of Moses. I will be a bar
barian of the forest, or an Arab of the desert."
And what is the result ? How he becomes useless
and insignificant and good for nothing ! The great
age takes no notice of the foreign particle. He
adds nothing to its force. He shares nothing of its
glory. Be men of your time. Let no perverseness and
no affectation isolate you from it. There is the man
behind his time, and the man before his time ; and
the time gains something from them both, but
neither of them makes a true part of its vital
strength. There is the other man whom we all
know, who stands with the very genius of his time
inspiring his life. He will stand always in history,
to show what the special humanity of this particular
period was. And now the age for which he stands
is more real for his characteristic life, and does its real
work, in this brief day of his existence, by him and
such as he ; and he himself is real and strong and
solid by this identification with his time.
We say all this with confidence, and then there
come misgivings. After all, will not all this make
a limited and meagre life ? Shall I, because I happen

230 HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.
to have been born in this especial century, or because
I live in this especial land, or because I am a mem
ber of this especial class in college, accept the
standards of my time, my place, my class, and ask
no larger questions ? I cannot, if I am a man. It
cannot be that it is right that I should do so. It can
not be that I am doomed to bigotry because I live
in one place or time, or to scepticism if I live in
another. " That would make me a puny slave, and
make all progress of the world impossible." So men
reason, and they reason well. Sometimes they act
upon their reasoning very badly. Sometimes the
only thing which they can see to do is to throw them
selves violently outside their local temporary stand
ards and live in pure defiance of the state of things
about them, which is nothing but another kind of
slavery. There is a better way. There is a calm, deliberate
search for other standards, which shall not destroy,
but ripen and enlarge, the standards to which we are
immediately committed. There is a way in which,
still clinging" to our time and place, we may fulfil
their influence upon us by more general and more
personal influence, so that they shall not hold us in
slavery and cramp us, but be the starting-point
for larger range and deeper depth. Let fas see what
such other standards are. In general, I think that
they are two, which we may call :
First. The universal human experience ; and
Second. The personal conscience.
Let us look at both.
First. What do we mean, then, by the universal

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS. 231
human experience as an enlargement of the stand
ards of our time or place ? Why, this ! Here you
and all the people about you are living in a certain
fashion. You were born into its ways of living, and
have followed it ever since you were a child. You
have never seen any other. The consequence is,
you have come to think of it as if it were intrin
sically the best way, almost as if it were the only
way. You have practically come to feel as if a man
could not be clean and upright and intelligent and
a gentleman and live in any other way. Now sup
pose your range of vision widens, suppose you come
to see that there are hosts of men who are true,
honest, pure, and fine who never heard of your pet
ways of living. Suppose the curtain of history is
lifted, and you see that whole generations wrought
out strong, healthy human lives thinking things
wrong which you think right, thinking things right
which you think wrong. What is the result? You
do not cast your standards instantly away, but you
revise them. Their tyranny, their absoluteness, is
mitigated. You say, "They may not be right."
You have stepped forth into the presence of the
great humanity.
Take your religious opinions. They are heterodox
or orthodox, but they are absolute to you because
they are the opinions of your place and time. You
have so thoroughly, so totally, accepted them that
you with greatest difficulty are able to believe that
any man is a good man and a true man who believes
that which you disbelieve, or disbelieves that which
you hold true. But lo, across the ocean, if not

232 HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.
nearer, there are men who find what you believe all
unbelievable, and there are men who hold what is to
you incredible, with all their hearts, who yet are
altogether brave and spiritual and devout. What
shall that mean to you ? It must not make you
think al truth indifferent. It must not give you
into the power of the silly idea that it matters not
what a man believes. It must not make me doubt
my truth, but it must make me hold my truth more
largely, and be sure that there are other aspects of
it which may make good and strong men. It must
make me know the larger relations of charity and
faith. Thus every conviction and conception, when it is
taken out into the broad air of human life, grows
clearer and grows truer. " I know this because men
know it," I declare. " I am sure of it because men
are sure of it." But what men ? Why, first of all,
these sharp, clear men whom I meet every day, these
men who must of necessity immediately represent
humanity to me. But what about those other men
who lived *ten centuries ago? What about these
other men who live to-day in China or Paris ? Shall
they have nothing to say in forming my opinion ? If
I take any conception of my own and travel far up
along the stream of history, and there in the far-away
thickets where the stream is very small find men
holding the same thing to be true ; or if I sail with
it across the ocean, and find men of other colors and
other tongues believing it and living by it, — is not my
faith in it confirmed ? Is not the local temporary stand
ard strengthened when the standards of all time and

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS. 233
all the world gather around it and agree with it?
Must it not also be that the local and temporary
standards are regulated and enlarged when the stand
ards of other times and of the whole world show
that they are not in accordance with the great and
deliberate and long-continued movements of the
human mind and soul?
Seeurus judicat orbis terrarum. The judgments of
the world are right. What a great power that prin
ciple has always had over the minds of men ! It
really is at the heart of all appeals to the judgment-
seats of the past or the future. It is the principle
which, consecrated, builds the Church. Under the
power of this principle the standard of the time, the
sect, the set, the land, is always being drawn out for
refreshment and for enlargement and for rectification
into the long and broad standards of humanity. A boy
gets to believe, from the society he lives among, that
all bright men despise religion. He happens to live
in a little narrow, local, temporary set, where clever
wits are sneering at the supreme divine relations of
the soul. He is all ready to fix it as one of the first
conditions of his thought, that one must be either
foolish or blind to say that he believes in God. Let
that poor boy's horizon be enlarged. Let him see
ages filled with the glory of religion. Let him be
hold multitudes of the world's noblest souls finding
their highest nobleness in obedience to an acknowl
edged God, and is he not set free ? Is he not set at
liberty to search and find out for himself the larger
spiritual life of man ? A certain sin is current in a
certain land. The exact point of development which

234 HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.
that land has reached tends to make that sin seem ex
cusable, perhaps almost to make it seem necessary A
man, full of the sympathy of his time and ready to ac
cept its standards, travels to other lands ; and lo, what
ever other sins are tolerated there, this sin is counted
a disgrace. Men turn away from him who trans
gresses in this special fashion with contempt or dis
gust. Is not the traveller's spell broken ? Does
he not go back to his own land with the standards
which it has inspired set right and made large by
what the world has shown him? These are illus
trations of what I mean by the power over local and
temporary standards of the universal experience of
humanity. Second. I said that also the local and temporary
standard was subject to enlargement and correction
by the personal conscience. At first the group of
which a human being makes a part — the family, the
school, the age — overcomes and conceals his self. It
almost is his self. But the true self is there all the
while. This is a human being, different from all the
other beings 'that have ever lived or are living on
the earth to-day. What is the result of that ? Some
day some decision which the family, the school, the
church has made is so important or so strange that it
breaks through the outer crust of life, and finds this
true self, this personal self, down below and wakens
it. And, once awake, it never goes absolutely to
sleep again. The man's own sense of right and
wrong, of wise and foolish, utters its commendations
or its condemnations on the standards of the time or
of the place ; and just in proportion to the true per-

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS. 235
sonalness with which he speaks, his utterances are
more large and absolute.
For it is true that every real man is more eternal
and more universal than his time and place. Every
real man is fresh from the creative hand of God.
He has not come down simply through the genera
tions. He is the son of Him who was, and is, and is
to be. Therefore those standards, which have in
them the limitations of the time and place where
they were born, come to him for their judgment.
They are the utterances of the convictions of all
men. And there is a true sense in which every real
man is wiser, as there is another sense in which he is
more foolish, than his race. At any rate, he is re
sponsible for his own life. His conscience claims
this freedom and makes of it a duty. " What is this
world that I should take its judgments absolutely ?
Behold, my time says that this is right, but I, the
heart of me, the conscience of me, know that it is
wrong. What is the age but multitudes of Me's ?
Shall not this Me have its own rights which it can
not surrender?" And so the personal conscience
revises and enlarges and corrects the standards which
the time and place have formed.
The illustrations which I used before might serve
us perfectly again. The boy, all ready to be overcome
by the flippant and scornful scepticism of his time,
hears the remonstrance which comes not merely from
the utmost bounds of human life, but also up from the
depths of his own soul. The doer of the accepted sin
of the day does it in the face not merely of a rebuking
humanity, but also of his own nature, which knows and

236 HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.
says that it is wrong. Thus the heart of a man, which
is eternal, is always asserting the eternal standards, and
so intensively as well as extensively, in the depth of
his personal conscience as well as in the breadth of his
share in the universal manhood, he is finding the cor
rection and enlargement of the standards of his life.
Let us see, then, what we have reached. Here is a
certain man, — you, we will say, living your daily
life. Where will the standards of that life come
from ? First of all out of your surroundings. You
will do what your household, your class, your time,
your place think right. But on these standards will
be always pressing the claims of the general human
judgments, what men in other times and in other
places have thought and are thinking to be right, and
the claims of your own conscience, that which God has
shown you to be right in your own soul. The result
will be a character of your own time, of your own
place, and yet of all times and of all places, or rather
of that universal being which underlies all times and
all places and manifests itself in each, but loses itself
in and becomes the slave of none.
May I just suggest one or two simple illustrations
which will make more clear and less abstract what I
have been saying. Suppose a young man born in a
certain region of society has adopted a certain scale of
personal expense without a question. He is rich, and
all his friends are rich, and luxury is in the very air
they breathe. He really thinks that a man cannot
live comfortably on less than he spends every year.
Is he to be all his life a slave of those delusions just
because he was born in a particular street and of a

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS. 237
special class ? The things which must save him must
be the widest sight of how the noblest men on earth
are living to-day on not more than a tenth of what he
thinks necessary, and of how luxury has been in ages
the curse of human life, and the protest of his own
conscience that wanton extravagance in a world
where men and women are starving is a sin and
shame. Here is a community where everybody drinks.
You live in it, and you drink too. Why should you
not? What call or right have you to set yourself up
for an exception ? None, if you get your standard
wholly from your time ; but surely reason enough, if
all the world and all the ages speak to you and tell you
how the curse of drink is at the root of a large part of
human misery, and that the earth would almost burst
to blossom if the blight of drunkenness were taken
off. Reason enough, if your own conscience speaks
to you and tells you that you have no right to degrade
your own nature from its best activity, or to put one
grain more of temptation in the way of your hindered
and burdened fellow-men.
There are groups of men, at least, who see no harm
in gambling. Has any man a right to shut his life
into the standards of those groups and give no value
to the fact that the great mass of civilized mankind
has thoroughly believed and proclaimed that for a
man to come into possession of the property of his fel
low-man by a process which is neither bargain nor
gift, but the mere working of accident and chance,
is demoralizing and wrong ? Has any man a right to
let his soul be deafened to its own instincts, which tell

238 HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.
it that for a man to gain money so is wicked ? Here
is where the breaking of the spell must come. Men
in all ages have doubted or denounced the gambler's
life. The gambler's own conscience, if he sets it free,
denounces it. Before the universal human experi
ence and the personal conscience, the standard of
the gaming-house finds itself corrected and rebuked.
I will not multiply illustrations. Do you not see
how they all point the same way, how they all tend
to urge the same kind of life, — a life profoundly
rooted in the here and now, a life that is in quick and
earnest sympathy with what is close about it, a life
that altogether is disposed to think its own time and
its standards right, and yet a life which is always look
ing wider and looking deeper, — wider to the universal
experience of man, deeper to the personal conscience
which it carries in itself ?
I appeal to you whether what I have described is
not the character, the kind of man, whom the com
munity most trusts and honors, on whom it most
learns to depend. The servant of the hour, but not
its slave ; in* sympathy with the day, the place, the
business, the party, the circle of society in which it
stands, but not in blind subserviency to it; ready
to protest and having a recognized right to protest
because of an undoubted sympathy and love ; always
bringing in new elements and forms of nobleness
out of the fields of history, and up from the depths
of its own nature, — is not this the character of
the man of his own age, the man of his own class,
who makes the whole world and all time more rich?
Is not this the timely and yet universal man whom

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS. 239
it may well stir the ambition of any young man to
become? I know but one step more to make, and that, while
it need not take us long to describe it, is a great step,
for it brings all our subject out into the rich land of
religion. We talk about getting into association
with the universal human experience, and about
listening to one's own conscience, and then some one
starts up and says, " Ah, yes, that is all well, but
what am I to do ? I, who am no scholar, who can be
no traveller, and who, when I listen for my con
science, hear only a turmoil of doubts and perplex
ities all in confusion down below." When I hear
questions such as that my thought goes back to Jesus,
and the question which the people asked one another
about Him, " How knoweth this man letters, having
never learned," seems to throw light upon it all. He
was no scholar. They had never seen Him in their
schools. But He knew man and knew Himself, and
by and by they learned that it was because He knew
God. What does that mean for us ? That if we know
God, if we are forever trying to find out what is His
will, if we are seeking for it in the Bible, if we are
seeking for it in Christ, we find in knowing Him the
true enlargement and corrections of the present
standards ; we find, in knowing Him, the revelation
of the universal experience of man and the awaken
ing of the personal conscience.
How true that is ! In every man of God there is a
Oreadth and depth which makes him free of the world
in which he yet most intimately lives. In God there

240 HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS.
is the universal man and the true life of every indi
vidual child of His. Therefore, whoever loves and
serves Him finds in Him the constant enlargement
and adjustment of his life. Demas need not leave
Paul and Paul's Christ in order that he may love
this present world. He will know how to love and
serve this present world all the more completely if
he knows Christ and the great Revelation of God
which is in him.
Oh if I only could make you young men see how
there is here the true solution of the problem of your
lives ! Shall you be God's or the world's ? Be both !
Not in any low miserable compromise. Not by the
effort to serve God and mammon. But by a brave and
filial questioning of God that He may tell you just
how He wants a child of His to live in this peculiar
time and under these peculiar circumstances of yours.
There is a type of universal human life in harmony
with the best life of all the ages. In tune with the
sublimest and finest spiritual music of the universe,
in harmony also with the profoundest dictates of your
own personal conscience, which you can live in your
parlor and your shop ; and that life you can reach if
you are consecrated to God in your own place and
time. If you live that life, the world of the present
owns you and claims you and rejoices in you. The
most distant life of man looks in on you and recog
nizes you as a part of itself, and says, " Well done ! "
Up from your own conscience speaks your self-
approval. And God your Father bends His love
around you, and out of His blessing feeds you with
His strength.

HIGHER AND LOWER STANDARDS. 241
Compared with such a life, what miserable things
are these feverish efforts either to suit the present
world or to reject it and rebel against it. Either
Demas strolling once more in the streets of Thessa-
lonica with his sight of divine things faded from him
like a dream, or some poor starved hermit sitting in
his cave and trying to think that he despises that life
to which his human heart still tells him that he
belongs. How miserable are they both beside the
life which goes like Christ's, from duty on to duty,
from experience to experience, heartily in them all,
and yet above, beyond them all, in hourly commun
ion with God, with the complete humanity, and with
Himself. May we so live ! May we be men here, now, and
yet men there and then ; in the infinite, in the
eternal, while yet the duties of the present world are
claiming us, and we are doing them with hands made
faithful and skilful by the fire of God 1

XIV.
THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.
Howbeit that was not first which is Spiritual, but that which is
Natural ; and afterward that which is Spiritual. — I. Cos. xv. 46.
"The Adam comes before the Christ," St. Paul
declares. And he is simply telling the story of the
Bible. The man of the Garden, untrained, undisci
plined, self-indulgent, incapable of self-control, comes
before the Man of the Cross, who willingly surrenders
the present for the future, the body for the soul, and
Himself for others. And the earthly life comes be
fore the life of heaven. The life of temptation, and
resistance, and surrender comes before the life of
spontaneity, and freedom, and attainment !
These are St. Paul's two great examples ; and then
he seems to gather out of them the wide and general
truth which they contain. He surveys the universe
and finds the same truth everywhere. Everywhere the
higher comes to make the lower perfect. Everywhere
the lower is provided first, to be the basis and oppor
tunity of the higher coming by and by. Everywhere
the lips must be before the speech ; the canvas must
be before the picture ; the candle must be before the
flame ; the brain must be before the thought. It is
the teaching which natural science is giving us pro
fusely- She traces the long progress in which the

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL. 243
material, at first hard and sterile, has grown fertile
with mysterious emanation and clothed itself with
higher and higher life. From the coarser to the
finer she watches the growth of the ever-ripening
world. Her message is the same as Paul's : " That
is not first which is Spiritual, but that which is Natu
ral ; and afterward that which is Spiritual."
The first suggestion which would come from such
a truth is very crude and unsatisfactory. It is that
the natural is helpless until the spiritual comes to
help it. Let the Adam go on in his mere physical
manhood till the Christ appears. Let the mortal
live its lower life until death opens to it the doors
of immortality. The material must lie in its tor
pidity until the spiritual form without itself comes
and puts into it a life of which it was all destitute
before. But our deeper observation teaches us a
deeper truth, and the Bible asserts that deeper truth
convincingly. The material has within itself the
power of spiritual life. Its total story has not been
told until a waiting impulse has been felt within it
dimly conscious of incompleteness, until it has an
swered to the spiritual call and roused itself to life.
The lips are not complete lips till they have spoken ;
the brain is not a whole brain till it has thought.
So in the Bible the first Adam is full of blind Teach
ings and desires, which the second Adam alone ful
fils. The Life of man here upon the earth is capable
of a heavenliness which heaven alone can bring to its
completeness. The whole secret of the physical has
not been read until its power of becoming spiritual
by service of the spirit has been discerned. This is

244 THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.
what Baptism means. It is the declaration that this
new-born life, which seems only a new-born animal,
has in it, bound up with it, a divine nature. Bap
tism is the claiming of that nature. It is the asser
tion of the regeneration, the deeper and higher birth,
the birth from heaven which is coincident with the
birth from earth, and which is to use the physical
basis for its servant and its power of development.
I hope that I make this plain, for it seems to me to
be all-important. A man sees the great world of
spiritual life. He believes in God and godlikeness.
He thinks of genius and of sainthood. He knows
that there are such things as great self-sacrifices and
surrenders. He knows of this spiritual world, but
he also thoroughly believes that he does not belong
to it. He is of the earth, earthy. He is physical,
material, limited to the interests and needs and ex
periences of the lower world. " Sometime, perhaps
at death," he says, " the Power may come which will
snatch me up and carry me away and put me in
another world, in which now I have no share. But
now that ftther world is to me as if it did not exist.
I have nothing to do with it, or it with me. I am
a creature of the earth, and must live on as such
until God perhaps in His own good time carries me
to heaven."
Is not that the simple creed about themselves by
which multitudes of men are practically living ? It
is in protest against that creed that we are bound,
with St. Paul for our teacher, to try to understand
the true relation between the lower and the higher
lives, between the natural and the spiritual as he

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL. 245
describes them. That is what I want to do this
morning. The truth from which we start is this, that so far
as the life of this world is concerned, every spiritual
operation has its physical basis, in close connection
with which it lives its life and does its work. The
illustrations of that truth are everywhere. The
growth of the tree is a mysterious and spiritual
power. No man has ever seen it. It cannot be
detected at its labor when with a sudden stroke of
the axe you tear the tree's trunk open. You are not
quick enough to find it. Your sight is not keen
enough to catch it. And yet how closely, how in
extricably it is bound up with the grosser elements,
in connection with which alone it does its work.
There must be the black earth and the brown seed,
or nothing comes. What growth-power ever made
manifestation of itself, creating out of nothing, in
the air, a tree that had no history and no progenitor ?
The material is first, and then the spiritual. Or if we
look in quite a different direction — the character of
a nation, its advance in cultivation, and in the pro
duction of that special type of national being which
constitutes its spiritual power, and makes it a real
presence, not merely on the map, but among the
spiritual forces of the world — this has its physical
basis. The soil and situation of the country where
that nation lives, the amount and kind of its material
prosperity, these are the first elements which tell in
the production of the nation's life, and in deciding
of what sort its most spiritual productions are to be.
The songs of its singers and the raptures of its saints

246 THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.
will get their tone from the mountains from which
they are echoed, or from the waters across which they
float. And need I even suggest to you how every
man has in his bodily constitution the physical basis
of the most subtle and transcendent parts of his pro-
foundest life? Out from the very marrow of his
bones comes something which his finest affections
never outgo, and which gives a color to his soul's
loftiest visions. His dreams are different from other
men's because of the texture of his muscles and the
color of his blood. It is on the harp of his nervous
system that the Psalm of his life is played. There is
a physical correspondent to everything that he thinks
or fancies. There is a physical basis to his most
spiritual life.
In the story of man's creation in the Book of Gene
sis, a story which, whatever be its relation to history,
contains the Ideas of Human Life most picturesquely
and graphically set forth, this truth of the physical
basis for the spiritual life appears most vividly.
" The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and
man became a living soul." The scene is almost
visible before us. We can almost see the clay-cold
figure laid upon the ground, the corpse which never
yet has lived ; we can almost feel, that which we can
not see, the awful presence bending above the perfect
body and sending through all its limbs and organs
the mysterious thrill of life. Each limb and organ is
ready for the power which occupies it. Each has
within itself the unused fitness for its special work.
The Breath of Life finds each responsive to its sum-

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL. 247
toons, "And man becomes a living soul!" How
true it is to all we know ! The Perfect Body offering
itself for the medium of the Perfect Soul. I do not
know, I cannot guess, what was the nature of the
historical event to which that verse refers. But I do
know that it is absolutely true to that great order
which pervades the universe. Everywhere the earthly
conditions offer their opportunities to the celestial
miracle. The fuel is cut in the woods of earth ; it
is piled, hard and lifeless, on the altar of unheeding
stone, and then from it the flame arises a live aspir
ing column and lays its fiery tribute at the feet of
God. " That is not first which is spiritual^ but that
which is natural ; and afterward that which is spir
itual." There are two truths here, then. The first is that
every lower life is made to reach up and fulfil itself
in a higher, and the second is that every higher life
must have its basis and find its conditions in a lower.
Let us look at these truths in turn, and see if they
are not both rich in practical suggestion.
1. Every lower life is made to reach up and fulfil
itself in a higher. I do not know anything which
furnishes more food for thought than the perplexity
with which men talk about the care of their human
bodies. Is it a noble or ignoble thing ? One genera
tion devotes itself to athletic culture as if there were
no loftier religion; another generation despises ex
ercise, and goes limping and coughing among the
groves of its academy as if to care for health
or sickness were unworthy of a thinking man. A
thousand theories cross and recross one another as

248 THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.
they lie tumbled in upon each other in chaotic con
fusion. Would it not be good, indeed, if these words
should be written in golden letters on the walls of
every gymnasium and also on the walls of every
school of learning and cell of meditation in the world:
"That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is
natural." As they stood on the walls of the gym
nasium, what they declared would be the need of a
strong body for all best spiritual life. As they stood
written on the study wall, they would mean the
utter failure of the strongest body unless a spiritual
life came down from above and occupied it, came out
from within and clothed it with a worthy purpose.
There are two young men who walk our streets, both
of whom have their admirers, each of whom seems in
some eyes to be an admirable fulfilment of humanity,
both of whom, judged with the fullest judgment, are
pitiable failures. One of them is the young student
who has burnt out the strength of his body in his
midnight oil. The other is the young athlete who
has given away to muscle the care and culture which
was meant for mind. The staggering scholar and
the stupid athlete, what failures they both are ! what
sad and helpless fragments of humanity ! The Body
trained as thoroughly, as superbly as may be for the
spirit usesr Health gathered like a great reservoir
of waters to be set free and turn the wheels of high
thoughts, and generous emotions, and benignant chari
ties, — there is the true relationship, there is the per
fect man, there is the balance and proportion which
is written in the noble maxim of St. Paul.
What is the strongest thing to say to a poor young

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL. 249
fool who is wasting his bodily strength in dissipation ?
Tell him about an early grave, and what does he care ?
He talks his easy philosophy about "Let us live
while we live." Scare him with threats of physical
reaction and decay, and he buries his face in the
wine-cup and dreams of suicide. But so long as there
is any spark of nobleness left in him, it must be that
there is a chance that the picture of an intellect weak
ened, and a moral sense dimmed, and a soul made
unfit for any high enterprise by the insufficiency of
the physical basis, out of which their efforts must take
their start and spring, will waken him and make him
think. Do you know, O young men, that there are old
men all through this city whose minds are powerless
for any public work or private pleasure because of the
wrong they did their bodies when they were of your
age? Do honor to your bodies. Reverence your
physical natures, not simply for themselves. Only as
ends they are not worthy of it, but because in health
and strength lies the true basis of noble thoughts and
glorious devotion. A man thinks well and loves well
and prays well because of the red running of his
blood. A community will have higher tastes and
better government and less sordidness and less crime
when its alleys and tenement-houses are no longer
breeding-places of cholera and fever. We build our
schools and our hospitals, and we keep them apart
from one another as if they had no true connection.
Only when in our thought they make one single
system, — and health for the sake of intelligence
and character is what we seek, — only then shall we

250 THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.
be sure that we are serving and saving the whole
man. There is a health of the Community which corre
sponds to the health of the physical body and shares in
many of its laws. It is what is called in general Ma
terial Prosperity. It has its failures and recoveries,
its fevers and its paralyses, its full-blooded vitality and
its white-faced decline. What shall we say about the
Material Prosperity of a Community? Sometimes
it is depreciated and defamed. Sometimes we are
told that all the building of houses and laying out
of roads and increase of the comforts and conven
iences of life is base and has no true connection with
the higher life of man. All that is foolish. The con
nection between the lower and the higher is a certain
fact, and cannot be ignored. And yet the whole way
in which men have asserted and denied that connec
tion is most significant and well deserves our study.
Man's treatment of wealth has been one of the strang
est indications of his mental and spiritual condition.
Think what it has been. He has denounced wealth in
ii
all his most exalted moods. He has mused and de
claimed upon its worthlessness. And yet it has been
the passion of his life to get it, and to get it more and
more. Let the moralist stand at the corner of the
street and tell men as they pass that money will not
bring happiness, and every man who passes will pause
just long enough to nod to the sermon a melancholy
assent, and then the whole river of human life will
pour on to take possession of the last newly opened
field of profitable investment and make a little more
money. Let the satirist utter his stinging denuncia-

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL. 251
tion of the way in which men pursue that which they
despise, and despise that which they pursue. Let all
men say in certain moods that money-getting is a
snare ; nevertheless the pursuit goes on, and in spite
of their contempt of wealth-seeking, the mass of men
spend their nights in dreaming and their days in
working for the universally desired prize of wealth.
Have we ever carefully asked ourselves what all
this means, — this practical assertion that wealth is
good, running along with the theoretical assertion
that the pursuit of wealth is bad ? If we do ask our
selves what it all means, are we not led immediately
to this, that it is exactly the state of things which
would be brought about if some power which ought
to develop into high and fine results were constantly
pursued, without the demand for such development
being forced upon it ; a restlessness which yet should
never be strong enough to shake the pursuer free
from his pursuit ; a search and struggle which should
never grow complacently sure of itself and its own
justification; a spasmodic shame, a constantly re
curring misgiving and yet a constant pressing for
ward in the dubious way? This would be the
inevitable consequence of such an unsatisfactory
condition. I take just this to be exactly the state of things
concerning the pursuit of money among men There
is a wide and deep conviction that material well-being
may be the basis of fine character and noble life. A
rich man has opportunities of goodness which a poor
man does not have. Self-culture and the care for
others lie open to him in his opulent and well-pro-

252 THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.
vided home. The getting of wealth and the using
of wealth both open the chance for the cultivation of
precious qualities. Therefore no baseness of the
actual business world has ever led men's soundest
thought to condemn money-getting universally and
in unsparing terms. On the other hand, the search
for wealth has evidently not been always or generally
conscious of its possibilities and responsibilities. It
has been sordid and selfish. It has not always or
generally produced refinement or charity. It has
rested contented in its immediate results. It has
vulgarly jingled its dollars and not won from them
the true gold of character.
Does not all that suggest what the true issue of it
all must be ? Not by abusing money-getting, but by
insisting that money-getting must have ends beyond
itself. Not by calling wealth wicked, but by calling
wicked the selfish, the licentious, the oppressive use
of wealth. Not by trying to make all men poor, but by
demanding of rich men that they shall be fine, broad,
helpful, in proportion to their riches. So must the
problem of wealth be ultimately solved. None but a
theorizer or a dreamer pictures to himself the time
when either the craving for large personal property
will be eradicated from men's souls, or when by arti
ficial legislation it will become impossible for any man
in the community to accumulate great riches. But
it is not absurd to hope ; sometimes we see already
glimpses and promises that it may come. It is not
absurd to hope for the growth of a private conscience
and a public sentiment which shall some day de
nounce and discredit the rich man who, in his riches

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL. 253
keeps a vulgar soul or a stingy hand. The tree must
bear its fruit, or else it is a cumberer of the ground.
The fountain must not turn into a pool. " That is not
first which is spiritual, but that which is natural;
and afterward that which is spiritual." The natural
is all right and good if it is reaching toward the
spiritual ; but the natural, the material which desires
and promises no spiritual result, is failure and deserves
contempt. That is the application of our truth to
personal or national well-being and success.
What is true of wealth is true of all the manifold
experiences of life. Experiences are the material of
Character, the physical basis of feeling and thought.
Something happens to you, and you thereby enter
into the possibility of a higher and completer nature.
The man of many experiences has the opportunity
of being a man of manifold life. But yet, as we all
know, as we all see, the opening of experiences into
character is by no means a necessary or inevitable
thing. What shall we say about the man who has
gone up and down the world, had part in a vast
variety of occupations, crossed many seas, climbed
many mountains, walked the streets of many cities,
talked with a thousand men, been tossed hither and
thither on the distracting billows of all kinds of life,
and yet is, after all, the same meagre, narrow, unsym
pathetic, unrefined mortal which he was at the be
ginning ? His History is nothing but a Diary. He
himself is only like a much-travelled log. What can
we say except that, in him, experience has failed of
its result. It has not opened into Character. The
man has gathered nothing but recollections. He is

254 THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.
no more a man. He has gathered no strength. The
Natural has never come into the Spiritual.
You see the difference whenever you talk with
two men who have come home from their tour in
Europe, or who have passed through great suffering
and sorrow, or who are nearing the shore which lies
the other side of life. You know at once which of
them has transmuted experiences into intelligence
and character, and which of them brings his experi
ences like so many hard jewels held in his hand, his
treasure, but in no sense a part of him. The first
man might forget everything which has happened to
him, and all that happened to him would still remain
in its essential power in his life. If the other man
forgot the facts of his life, there would be nothing
left. He might as well not have lived.
It is good to multiply experiences. It is good to
do many things and to have manifold relations with
the world. It is good to touch many people and to
see many sights ; but it is good, it is necessary, to be
content with no experience which remains simply as
experience and does not pass on and into character.
Events are great if they make dispositions. The
Natural is precious if " afterward," out of it, comes
the Spiritual. The experienced man is happy, if he
has really drunk the rain and sunshine of the ex
periences which have come to him into his heart and
is the ripened man, otherwise he is only like the rock
on which every passer-by has scrawled his name.
Thus everywhere the lower furnishes opportunities
for the higher, and is a failure unless the higher
blooms out of the ground which the lower has made

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL. 255
ready. It is Paul's groaning and travailing creation.
It is the unity of the universe in which, from end to
end, there is no hardest, commonest, and cheapest
thing which, living in simple healthiness and self-
respect, may not become the gathering point and
manifestation point of the most infinite celestial
light, — no stone that may not make an altar. Rever
ence the simple, the prosaic, the natural, the real,
but demand of every common thing of life, whether
it be your body or your money or your daily experi
ence, that it shall bloom to fine results in your own
soul and in your influence upon the world. Freely
accept the natural as first, but demand that afterward
the spiritual shall not fail.
2. There remains but very little time for me to
dwell upon our second truth, which was, you remem
ber, the other side of that of which I have been
speaking. As the natural must open into the spiritual
or it is a failure, so the spiritual must root itself in
the natural or it becomes vague and unreal. I see
at once how true this is of the two great illustrative
instances which I began by pointing out that St.
Paul uses. The second Adam follows the first
Adam. Christ comes after and completes the hu
manity which had been in the world before His In
carnation. And as that Humanity would have been
sad indeed had He not come to fulfil its glimpses
with His light and to realize its broken hopes, so
He, when He has come, needs and demands the hu
manity behind Him, and roots His own life in the
great universal soil of human life. Ah, yes, the
Saviour's wonderful career was no mere cloud or

256 THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.
sunbeam flung out of the sky and floating vaguely
over a world of which it formed no certain part. He
felt our human blood through all His veins. His
most transcendent miracles were done with human
hands. He loved His age, His city, and His race.
The least and meanest Jew, the least and meanest
man, interpreted to Him his Sonship to the Father.
He knew Himself, and we can know Him only as we
believe in Him, and try to understand Him as the
Son of Man.
Or, if we take Paul's other illustration, the perfect
world rests on and finds its interpretation in this
world of imperfection in which we are living now. I
cannot understand the man I meet upon the street
unless I see in him the man who some day is to walk
in the new Jerusalem. And also the man walking
in the new Jerusalem is unintelligible unless I know
he is the same man who once walked here upon the
street. The fights and victories, the fights and de
feats, which he made here have passed into his nature
and are part and parcel of his life forever.
Here is, tBe key to the true realism. Here is the
sign how false the shallow realism is of which its
artists on canvas or on paper make such base parade.
The real life, what is it ? Is it the wretched, sordid
details of earthly living, uninspired by a single sug
gestion that in their mud and mire there are the
seeds of any spiritual, transcendent fruit or flower?
On the other hand, is the real life a vision of some
experience beyond the stars which has no connection
with the dreariness and degradation of many of the
mortal conditions which it has passed through and

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL. 257
left behind ? Not so. The real life of a man is his
highest attainment kept in perpetual association with
the meanest and commonest experience out of which
it has been fed. When men shall so write and paint
the lives of one another, then we shall have the
true realism, — a realism in which, to use the Psalm
ist's words, " Truth shall flourish out of the earth and
Righteousness look down from Heaven."
In such a completed realism as this lies the sin
cerity and healthiness of personal and social life.
Get hold thoroughly of this idea that the Spiritual
must always feel behind it the Natural from which it
proceeds, and from which it is fed, and then how im
possible it would be for you to despise any part of
your life or to think light of any true work which
you are called to do. If your faith in God is stronger
for every humble task in which you need and get
His aid, then that humble task is necessary to the
fulness of your faith in God. You cannot let go of
it and fly away. It is redeemed. It will go with
you to the world where your Redemption will be per
fect. It will make the music of your celestial life
more firm and solid. If so, you cannot despise it
here or call it slight.
And also there must come a sympathy between the
men whose work it is to lay the hard foundations of
life and the other men whose hands are bidden to
carry up the loftiest pinnacles and spires into the sky.
There are those who seem to be doomed to most
earthly toil; just to be conscientious, and upright,
and thorough, and true. It seems as if that were
everything for them. There are other men whose

258 THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL.
souls leap to triumphant thoughts, and whose eyes
are open to ecstatic visions. The great issue of
all that I have been saying to you this morning is
that these two sorts of men belong together, make
one world, are serving the purposes of one God, and
making ready one celestial kingdom, and deserve
each the other's whole-souled respect. It is not that
the lesser man is making his life successful by mak
ing possible a higher life which some other man may
live, though that is much. It is not possible to look
at it in such detail as that. It is that in this universe,
where natural and spiritual succeed and minister to
one another, he who at any spot is doing good work
of any kind is serving the Universal Master and con
tributing to the Universal Success.
Christ had His word of encouragement and
strength to say to every soldier in His army and to
every worker at His work. He made both Martha and
Mary the servants of His will. It is not only His
loftiest disciples at their loftiest tasks. It is all souls,
all hands and feet that have duty to perform. They
all belong to Him; not merely scholars in their
studies, not merely missionaries in their martyrdoms,
not merely saints in their closed closets, but every
working man and woman everywhere, — they are all
His. The spirit which proceeds from Him may pour
through the whole mass and find out every particle,
and give to each an impetus towards its own next
higher stage of life, and so bear the whole along to
gether towards the completion of each man and the
completion of the whole business and social life, and
politics, and education, and then, as the crown of

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL. 259
them all, Religion. "That is not first which is
Spiritual, but that which is Natural ; and afterward
that which is Spiritual ! " But they are all God's ;
and to make each instinct with what measure of
His life it is capable of containing, that is to build
them all into a flight of shining stairs, sweeping up
ward into even clearer and intenser light, until he
who mounts to the full summit stands by the altar
of God's unclouded presence and realizes the blessed
ness of perfect Communion with Him.

XV.
THE STONE OF SHECHEM.
" And Joshua said unto all the people, Behold, this stone shall
be a witness unto us ; for it hath heard all the words of the Lord
which He spake unto us : it shall be therefore a witness unto you,
lest ye deny your God." — Joshua xxiv. 27.
Joshua had led the people of Israel over the Jor
dan and into the promised land as far as Shechem.
There he halted the host for a most solemn ceremony.
It was a poor and insignificant thing; it made their
great invasion to be only like any restless movement
of one tribe of heathen into the territory- of another,
unless they entered the promised country and began
their new career distinctly as the people of God.
Therefore at Shechem Joshua makes them renew
their sworn dedication to Jehovah. He gives them
once more the old familiar Mosaic message of the
Lord : " Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him
in sincerity and in truth." And when the people
had answered the voice of God with solemn promises
of loyalty, then Joshua sealed the whole ceremony
with a picturesque and striking figure. He took a
great stone and set it up there under an oak which
was by the sanctuary of the Lord. He said, "This
stone has heard what God has said ; here it ^hall
stand as witness to you lest you deny your God."
" You may forget," he seemed to say. " Your minds

THE STONE OF SHECHEM. 261
are soft and lose impressions. They are hot and burn
with reckless passion." Here is this hard, cold stone.
It never will forget, it never will distort the voice
that it has listened to. When you need it for en
couragement and when you need it for rebuke, this
stone which has heard what God has said shall be
here to utter forever His unforgotten words.
All readers of the Bible know how common in its
pages is this simple, majestic, childlike figure which
Joshua employed, — the figure which clothes an in
animate and unintelligent object with perception and
memory and the power of utterance. It is the figure
which children use in their plays. It is the figure
of a primitive and unsophisticated people, and seems
to show how near they stand to nature, how close
they are in the confidence of the rocks and trees and
stars. It is the figure which creates a large part of
the mythologies and is at the root of much of the
monumental instinct of mankind. And in the Bible
it is constantly present in its highest, freshest, and
most vivid form. When Cain kills Abel in the book
of Genesis it is the actual literal blood of the murdered
man that takes a voice and cries out from the ground
so that God hears it up in Heaven. When Job tells
the story of creation, he makes us hear the very
"morning stars sing together in the sky." When
the same Job asserts his integrity and justice, he calls
upon the very earth that he has tilled to contradict
him if he does not speak the truth. " If my land cry
against me, or that the furrows thereof complain,
let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead
of barley." When David goes out into the morning

262 THE STONE OF SHECHEM.
sunlight he hears the " Heavens declare the glory of
God." When Habakkuk is denouncing woes upon
the covetous men and the oppressors of the poor, he
makes their very houses speak and tell of the in
iquity and cruelty which built them. " The stone
shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the
timber shall answer it." When Jesus rides across the
rocky ridge of Olivet toward Jerusalem, He declares
that the rocks under His feet are all ready to break
out in His praises if the voices of the people fail.
"I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the
stones would immediately cry out." And when St.
James upbraids the cruel rich men of his day, even
the coins of which they have defrauded their servants
take a voice. " Behold the hire of the laborers who
have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept
back by fraud, crieth." The Bible is preeminently
the book of man ; but the world in which man lives
and the material things he touches are always pres
ent in the Bible for his sake.
The splendor of the sunshine, the whisper of the
wind, the very smell of the rich ground, are always
there, not for their own beauty or sweetness, but for
their ministries and messages to man ; and man and
nature stand as close to one another as in the child's
fairy story or the poet's dream, which keep the Bible
tone and coloring for all the ages.
I have referred to all these instances only to
remind you how thoroughly Joshua is a man of the
Bible when he sets his stone up at Shechem and calls
upon the people to endow it in their imaginations
with the powers of hearing and of utterance. " This

THE STONE OF SHECHEM. 263
stone hath heard all the words of the Lord." Crowded
away under its hard substance lay the story and the
Commandments which He had uttered. Nothing un
til the new wonder of the phonograph, which packs
a human voice into the matter of a bit of lead and
can keep it there for years, and utter it, with all its
first tones and inflections to a generation now un
born, — nothing until this marvel of to-day has so
made an actual material reality of this imagination
of the captain of the Jews. Think what that stone
must have been to all the people ! It had heard God
speak. The words of God were in it. No wonder
if they almost made it an idol. How it must have
changed with the changes of their lives ! How to
their consciences, acute with certain crime, the word
of God must have spoken out of the stone in stern
and withering rebuke ! How when some Jew was
trying to do right, to resist his temptations, he must
have heard God speak to him out of the stone, giving
him approbation and encouragement and strength !
The very rough face of the rock must have seemed
to those simple and susceptible people to smile or
frown on them as they passed before it, carrying
their conscious experiences in them. All the more
because it spoke no audible word, it must have
seemed to have its own voice for every man.
It is no fancy, certainly, to say that there are
always people who are to the world they live in
what that stone in Shechem was to the nation in
the midst of which it stood. Not voluble people,
not people with their glib and ready judgment
upon everything which goes on about them, per-

264 THE STONE OF SHECHEM,
haps people who seem to the world at large mere
stones. But people who " have heard the words of
the Lord which He hath spoken," and who henceforth
"are witnesses unto us lest we deny our God."
Such men or women I am sure that we have known.
People who some time in their lives had had the pri
mary truth of God, the Divinity of Righteousness,
spoken so into their ears that it has filled their being.
Thenceforward they spoke that word in all its sim
plicity to everybody. All earnest struggle after
righteousness feels their approval and sympathy, and
counts it really God's. All shuffling, cowardly, and
wanton sin hides or hurries away from their rebuk
ing presence. They declare no subtleties and no
refinements. They simply, broadly utter right and
wrong. Such people have a noble place and func
tion in the world. Men who would not own God's
judgments directly, own God's judgments as they
come through them. They purify and bless the
circle, the community in which they live, as that
stone under the oak at Shechem must have seemed
to purify arid bless the whole land of Israel.
But I do not mean to speak too generally of this
piece of picturesque history which seems to me to
suggest a very definite and useful subject for our
thought. I want to speak to you this afternoon of
the real nature and value of association, of that
power which gives to the objects which surround
mankind a sort of human character and make them
vocal with messages of comfort and strength and
rebuke. This is the real subject of our verse.
Joshua's rock was transformed by the power of asso-

THE STONE OF SHECHEM. 265
ciation. One hour it was a great dead stone, as
silent and uninspiring as any other of the stones among
which it lay. The next hour it had been taken up
and separated from all its mates forever, a sacred
stone, a fountain of inspiration, a fire of poetry and
life. It was the association with the solemn self-con
secration of the Jews which had transformed it. And
our association is always the transforming power.
Out of our use of the power of association comes
much of our best education and our deepest re
sponsibility. The work that man does upon the world he lives in,
then, is really double. He makes his changes in its
outward face. He turns it by his toil of spade or
chisel into forms of use or beauty. He sprinkles it
with cities and ploughs it up and down with furrows.
This is the first work. And then more subtly he
fills it with his associations. Without any change in
their shape he sends his history in through the
mountains and the fields, so that it clings there for
ever and never can be separated. He twines the
things that he has done with the scenery of the
earth, so that thereafter they are inseparable. Every
body who has any sensibility sees that this second
power of man over nature is the finer and the nobler.
It is the greater enrichment of the world by man.
Herod builds a temple at Jerusalem. With vast labor
he levels the rough places, and hews the great stone
blocks into shape. When it is done, his temple
shines like a jewel on its hill. Jesus comes right
across the little valley to the Mount of Olives. He
changes nothing outward. He sticks no spade into

266 THE STONE OF SHECHEM.
its surface. He leaves each bush and olive-tree as
He finds it. But there He ofttimes resorts with His
disciples. There He lies prostrate in the struggle of
Gethsemane. There at last His feet touch the earth
as He ascends to Heaven, and ever since those days
the mountain burns in the dearest and most sacred
memory of man. There are men to whom this seems
to be the one value of the external world — to utter
•the men who have lived and displayed their natures
in it. Mere beauty of scenery, mere triumphs of
gigantic engineering which have changed the face of
the earth, have little charm for them except as they
are the background of human history. This is what
makes the Old World richer than the New. It is the
absence of association in our bays and headlands, in
our rivers and our mountains and our prairies, that
makes a sort of vast silence in our enormous West,
solemn enough and infinitely impressive, but wholly
different from the chorus of voiceful memories that
thrills one who lands on the shores across the sea and
finds "Each gray old rock a grand historic thing,
Each bright wave boasting it has borne a king,
Undying footprints on each sandy beach,
Each old wave vocal with heroic speech."
Evidently one great value of this principle of asso
ciation which clothes the world with the memories of
human life, and makes it utter man, is that it keeps in
mind and constantly asserts the centralness and right
ful superiority of man in the world where he lives.
The thinker in whom this principle is strong must

THE STONE OF SHECHEM. 267
always practically hold that man is the centre, that
all else on earth exists for him. And without such
a faith as that, all human experience seems to testify
that man cannot live his best and fullest life. Man
is greater than nature, — nature exists for man.
These are truths upon which, thus far at least, in hu
man history has hung man's power of conceiving the
sublimest hopes and feeling the most pressing sense of
obligation. If ever those truths should be success
fully denied and man dislodged from his centralness,
I think we cannot know how all the highest life of
man would suffer. That self-respect which lies at
the root of all moral struggle and all religion, that
self-respect which is what makes credible to the
Christian the great Christian revelations of the divine
fatherhood and the divine redemption, that self-re
spect which is the real starting-point for true humil
ity, it could not be maintained if man's life should
be shown to be coordinate with all the lives around
it, no more the purpose and interpreter of the rest
than the lives of the lion or the oak. And the actual
preservation of this sense of centralness lies very
largely in the way in which man covers the earth
with his associations and makes the landmarks of
nature take their best value from the stories which
they have to tell of him.
Nor is this secondary character, this monumental
value which the earth acquires, something which
comes from a few great .exploits which wonderful
men have done upon its highest pinnacles of promi
nence. There is a gradually increasing richness in
the earth to which every man who in the humblest

268 THE STONE OF SHECHEM.
station lives a worthy and a faithful life contributes.
The outer world gets the voice of God, not only from
God directly, but from some Joshua who has spoken
it in its presence ; and the world in which we live be
comes vocal with Him to men in future days when
ever any man protests against wickedness, or speaks
a word of truth or charity, or utters the God of
strength in patience in any corner of the most ob
scure experience. I know not how real, how practi
cal, this seems to you ; but I am sure that the world
is a better place for you and me to live in to-day, not
merely for the hundred great pattern lives which
have passed into the heavens and which we call still
by their names, but far more for the countless, name
less multitude of men and women who have wrought
into the very substance of the earth, where at last
they lay their bodies in unnoticed graves, the great,
first, simplest words of God, that man was sacred,
that duty was possible, that self-sacrifice was sweet,
and that love for one's brother was the crown of life.
And you ought not to be satisfied until you find your
self able to feel that the hope of doing something by
your living to make the world in a real, although an
unappreciable, degree more full of these words for
the men who are to follow us, is the noblest and
most inspiring promise which can be set before
your soul.
The world is too large for some of us to think of.
Turn, then, and think about the houses where you
live. How large a part of their influence upon you
depends upon this principle of association. Of the
walls of a house where much life has been lived,

THE STONE OF SHECHEM. 269
where many experiences have been passed through,
might not one say exactly what Joshua said about
the stone that he set up in Shechem, " They have
heard all the words of the Lord which He spake
unto you " ? And indeed the parallel goes farther.
The word which your household walls have heard
from God, and which they are still constantly utter
ing to you if you can only hear it, is the same word
which He had spoken in the presence of the old stone
at Shechem, and of which that stone was a perpetual
witness to the people. What was the witness of
that stone ? It was the necessity and the blessing
of obedience to God. That was what God had com
manded. That was what the people had sworn.
That was what the stone had heard and what it bore
perpetual witness of afterward to those who passed
it and heard with their consciences its silent voice ;
that not by bis own will, but in subjection to a will
far greater than his own, the Jew was to occupy this
new land and to live the new life which was before
him. And not merely this stone, but every monu
ment which had drunk in his nation's history and
stood to utter it perpetually, had the same tale to
tell. The rock where Abraham had carried up his
son and stood with the knife just ready to complete
the dreadful sacrifice ; the stone at Bethel where
Jacob vowed his vow of consecration ; the twelve
stones that the Jews left piled in the bed of Jordan
when they crossed dry-shod, — they all told the same
story ; they all meant the same thing. It was that
Jewish truth of covenant. Since God has done this
for us we belong to Him, we hereby acknowledge His

270 THE STONE OF SHECHEM.
ownership and give ourselves to His service. In that
truth all the land was steeped. And its utterance
came from every rude monument which any Jew or
all the Jewish people had set up to commemorate
mercy and to proclaim dedication. Now think of
any house which by long life of some family in it has
become monumental. Its walls have other and far
deeper values than these for which you or your
fathers paid the architects and carpenters when it
was first built. Those walls are steeped in truth,
and each room speaks it in its own peculiar voice.
What is that truth? Really the same old truth
which was spoken from end to end of old Palestine,
that house of Israel which had heard and kept so
many of the words of God. The necessity and
blessing of obedience. The old truth of covenant
between man and God. It is not put in the hard old
Jewish way as it speaks to you out of the walls of
your Christian home. It is richened and deepened.
It speaks as something essential and not arbitrary,
something which could not be otherwise than as it
is ; but in itl new form it is the same old truth, that
man's life belongs to God, and that there is no true
life for man except in God, and that man lives in
God only by loving obedience. It may be that in
the house where you are living is the room where
you were born. That chamber must sometimes
speak to you of the mere fact of your life ; apart
from all its circumstances, or rather gathering all its
circumstances into the one great fact, the voice of
God speaking to you from those walls within which
your life began to be must say, " You are," " You

THE STONE OF SHECHEM. 271
live," in such a tone that the wondrousness of life,
the blessedness of life, and the tie between all life
and Him who is the ever-living and the all-creating
one, must come out to you as if a voice that you
could hear proclaimed them in your ears. Perhaps
there is some room in your house where for the first
time you faced the awful mystery of death, where for
the first time you watched that slow, sure, gentle,
irresistible untwisting of the golden cord and saw
mortality fade into immortality before your very
eyes. Can that room ever be silent to you again ?
There is where God gave you at once the keenest
pain and the sublimest triumph over pain that the
human heart can know. There He taught you at
once the necessity and the blessedness of submission.
Or perhaps there is some room where you yourself
went up once and looked in silence into the very
door of death. Some Hezekiah chamber where the
message seemed to come to you that you must die,
and where you prayed to God that you might five,
and told Him how you would give the spared life all
to Him. Or perhaps some solemn room where your
new birth came to you, where you fought out the
struggle of your soul's life, where at last you knew
that you, risen as if from very death, had indeed be
gun to live not for yourself, but unto Him who died
for you and rose again. The rooms where your
children have been born. The room where you first
found yourself rich, the room where you first found
yourself poor, the room of your friendships, the room
of your daily bread, all of these, and around them
the whole house with its associations of quiet, un-

272 THE STONE OF SHECHEM.
eventful, but most significant years. They have ail
" heard the voice of the Lord which He spake unto
you ; " and if you have ears to hear, they all " bear
witness unto you lest you deny your God."
Remember that the more rich and full of experi
ences your life is, the more the house you live in
and all its circumstances and accidents will grow
rich. I do not wonder that there are some to whom
all that I have been saying will seem unmeaning
and absurd. No voices come out of their homes,
because no genuine deep life is really lived within
them. This surely is part of what is meant by the
fickleness and transitoriness of our ordinary life.
Men flee from one home to another, from one conti
nent to another, from one occupation to another,
not because anything drives them from the old, not
because anything really valuable and intelligible
draws them in the new, but because they have not
lived deeply enough to make themselves associations,
because they have felt nothing deeply and thought
nothing deeply, enjoyed nothing intensely, suffered
nothing very keenly in the old home or the old oc
cupation, and so any morning they can pack up and
be off with hardly a suspicion of a pang. Your life
cannot be frivolous or vulgar unless you are frivolous
or vulgar. He who complains of his circumstances
really complains of himself and is his own accuser.
He who tires of his house really tires of himself.
The restlessness that comes of a divine desire presses
deeper down into the rock on which it stands to find
the springs of life. It keeps you where you are.
The restlessness that comes of human thirst wanders

THE STONE OF SHECHEM. 273
over the surface of the earth, filling its dipper from
every little pool caught in the hollows of the rocks. It
sends you all abroad. One is sure that all increase
of depth in life must bring a greater stability of
life, fill our towns with more hereditary and ances
tral homes, and give more sacredness to the whole
character of a community.
I cannot help saying how the same thing is true
of churches, and of the easy wandering from church
to church of which we see so much. He who has
lived deeply in any church connection, he whose
church building and whose pew are bound up with
the most profound experiences that man can ever
undergo, may change his old church for a new, but
if he does, it will be a solemn, thoughtful act done
only under the certain stress of duty and true spirit
ual conviction. The church where he has repented
and trusted and grown in grace, the church where he
has met Christ, where he has known himself, will be
his home, from which only some deepest change can
separate him. It may come, for there are demands of
duty to one's soul which cut through all associations
and compel a man to leave the dearest things behind.
But such a change from church to church as that is
wholly different from the flippant and unmeaning
changes which show, not so much what the new
church may hope to do for the wanderer, as what the
deserted church has failed to do.
It ought to be harder and harder for men to do
wrong the older that they grow. For all around
them ought to gather the restraining power of associ
ations. The voice of the Lord ought to speak out

274 THE STONE OF SHECHEM.
of more and more of the things about us, bearing a
continual witness to us, lest we " deny our God." Re
member that to deny our God is not to be what men
call sceptical. It is not to blaspheme. It is simply
to live as if there were no God, — no God to help
us, no God to be responsible to, no God for us to trust
and love. There is no man who does not know that
danger, who does not feel it every day. In your
schools, in your homes, in your stores, everywhere,
the terrible danger of denying God ! Against that
danger God bears ever fresh and present witness of
Himself in your hearts. Every morning His voice
is new. Every evening His voice pursues you to
your rest. But besides this direct continual pres
ence, there is this other testimony of Himself which
I have spoken of to-day. He fills the world of associa
tion with utterances of Himself. Oh, as we grow in
life, the world ought to be becoming to us more and
more full of monumental pictures of human noble
ness, patience, self-sacrifice, courage, meekness, so
that we shall be more and more sure that goodness
and heroism "are possible for man. It ought to be al
ways more and more full of the recollection of times
when we ourselves mounted to enthusiastic faith and
earnest resolution and unselfish action, so that it shall
be less and less possible for us to hide behind a low
conception, a low expectation of ourselves. It ought
to grow bright with more and more luminous points
that never cease to burn with the memory of some
certain experience of the deep, deep, dear love of
God. These are the things which men are tempted
to doubt and to deny, — that it is possible for men to

THE STONE OF SHECHEM. 275
be true and good, that each man is himself bound to
goodness and truth, and that God loves us. Believe
these really, believe these constantly, and it must be
very hard to sin. Blessed is he whose life fills itself
with monumental memories on which these truths
are graven deep. For him the great wide open plain
of life, where his wandering sight and steps seemed
lost, narrows itself till he finds himself walking be
tween the shining walls of righteousness along the
certain road of duty. Less and less does he seek to
wander. Duty, dear for itself and dear for the mem.
ories that hallow it, satisfies him and inspires him.
The past is to him not burden, but wings ; and when
he comes to God at last, it is a whole lifetime rich
with accumulated thankfulness that he lays down at
the Saviour's feet.
And think how with the successive generations of
mankind, each leaving countless new monuments of
divine love and human possibility upon the earth, the
earth itself is growing richer every year. Every
year some new valley gets its consecration from some
new soul's struggle with sin. Every year some new
mountain-top burns with another soul's rapture of
salvation. We read of the promise of the new
heavens and the new earth wherein righteousness
shall dwell. Are not the heavens and the earth ever
growing new, newer, and more full of righteousness
every day ? When the time shall come that every
star in heaven and every stone on earth shall be vocal
with some word of God which it has heard, and in
their midst shall live the race of men, no longer deaf
and obstinate, but quick-eared to hear and loving-

276 THE STONE OF SHECHEM.
hearted to obey those words as they come crowding
in, making the air sacred on every side — when that
shall come — which the world's best pictures of Chris
tian life now suggest and prophesy — shall not the
promise then have been fulfilled, and the "New
Heavens and the New Earth wherein dwelleth right
eousness" be a sublime reality?
What is it possible for us to do? These two things,
oh, my friends :
First, to hear every voice of God that speaks to us
out of any consecrated bit of this old earth where
men have lived so long, and to learn from them all
these first truths of human life, that man can be very
good and brave, that we ourselves are debtors to all
our old resolutions and to the loftiest moments of
our past, and that God loves us.
Second, to live such lives so true, so deep, so rich,
so pure, that the world shall get new monuments by
us, that in some little circle where we lived the re
sult of our living, when the certain day comes and
we pass on to other unseen fields of service, may be
that some stone which our lives touched shall be a
witness to the men and women whom we leave be
hind us, because it has heard the words of the Lord
that He spake through our lives, that it may be a
witness unto them to help them, to restrain them, to
inspire them when they are tempted to deny their
God. Certainly every life to which blessings like these
are given is a rich success.

XVI.
THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
" Howbeit, we know this man whence He is : but when Christ
cometh, no man knoweth whence He is." — John vii. 27.
Very different and contradictory are the demands
which men make of that to which they are moved to
give their reverence and service. Most men ask of
their religion that it shall be familiar, that it shall
have to do with daily life, that it shall seem to issue
from the heart of common things and clothe those
things with a light which makes them radiant.
They dread mystery. They hate to be bidden to lift
up their eyes and to look far away. This verse out
of the Gospel of St. John has just the other story.
In it the men of Galilee are speaking and telling
why Christ is not acceptable to them. He is too
familiar. They knew him from His childhood.
He has come out of a household which they have seen
beside them all their lives. " We know this man,
whence He is." All this seemed to make it incredi
ble to them that He should be the Christ for whom
their people have been waiting all these years. The
fulfilment of a hundred prophecies, the answer to a
million prayers, it could not be that when at last He
came it should be thus. The sun had shone in glory,
the mighty clouds had gathered, and the luxuriant

278 THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
rain poured down. They had stood and waited for
a worthy issue of it all, and here came quietly, pierc
ing through the sod which the sun had mellowed, a
little flower which the rain had fed. Where was the
chariot of the skies ? Where was the awful mystery ?
It was all too simple, too familiar. " When Christ
cometh no man knoweth whence He is. But we
know this man whence He is. This cannot be the
Christ ! "
There is one distinction in the world's geography
which comes immediately to our minds when we
thus state the different thoughts and desires of men
concerning their religion. We remember how the
whole world is in general divided into two hemi
spheres upon this matter. One half of the world,
the great dim East, is mystic. It insists upon not see
ing anything too clearly. Make any one of the
great ideas of life distinct and clear, and immediately
it seems to the Oriental to be untrue. He has an
instinct which tells him that the vastest thoughts are
too vast for the human mind, and that if they are
made to present themselves in forms of statement
which the human mind can comprehend, their nature
is violated and their strength is lost.
On the other hand, the Occidental, the man of the
West, demands clearness and is impatient with mystery.
He loves a definite statement as much as his brother
of the East dislikes it. He insists on knowing what
the eternal and infinite forces mean to his personal
life, how they will make him personally happier and
better, almost how they will build the house over his
head, and cook the dinner on his hearth. This is the

THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST. 279
difference between the East and the West, between
man on the banks of the Ganges and man on the
banks of the Mississippi. Plenty of exceptions of
course there are. Mystics in Boston and St. Louis.
Hard-headed men of facts in Bombay and Calcutta.
The two great dispositions cannot be shut off from
one another by an ocean or a range of mountains.
In some nations and places, as for instance among
the Jews and in our own New England, they notably
commingle. But in general they thus divide the
world between them. The East lives in the moon
light of mystery, the West in the sunlight of scien
tific fact. The East cries out to the Eternal for
vague impulses. The West seizes the present with
light hands, and will not let it go till it has furnished it
with reasonable, intelligible motives. Each misunder
stands, distrusts, and in large degree despises the other.
But the two hemispheres together, and not either one
by itself, make up the total world.
But of course such geographical suggestions are
most immediately interesting as they represent what
reappears in every man. There is an east and a
west in each of us. In one hemisphere of our being
each of us is mystic and transcendental, and in the
other hemisphere of our being each of us is limited
and practical and concrete, demanding the tangible
and clear. No man is destitute of either side. You
think you have found the man in whom one side or
the other is totally absent ; but watch him long enough
and some day the missing hemisphere catches a flash
of light and shows that it is there, little as you
dreamed of it, stoutly as he may have denied that it

280 THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
was there himself. The problem of every man's
character and career is what the coming problem of
the world's life evidently is, how these two halves,
the east and the west, are to be proportioned and
related to each other, and into what sort of union
they may come to make something greater and more
human than either of them is by itself. The foot set
on one present spot of present earth, and the eye
which ranges the world of stars, to see which way
the foot should walk. Imagination which questions
the remotest possibilities and prudence, which
studies the immediate conditions. Hope which per
ishes if it defines itself, and Duty which must know
the very thing which now needs to be done. It is
the proportion and relationship of these in a man's
life which mark what sort of a man he is. Every
education of a man's life, every consciousness which
a man has of himself, every religion which seeks to
be a man's illumination, and leaves out either side of
a man's nature, is partial and so false. The world's
religions have failed, and are failing here to-day.
They have Been too much either mystic exaltations
or hard methods of economy. Surely there is some
thing better which they might be by being both.
Such the complete religion must be when it is per
fectly revealed.
The perfect religion which will do its work for the
whole human nature — the coming of the Son of
Man, which, as Jesus said, must be " as the lightning
which cometh out of the east and shineth even unto
the west" — will comprehend within itself all that the
partial religions ever had of good. It will be no

THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST. 281
mere compromise. The base meetings of ideas or
men are in the region of compromise. Their noble
meetings are in the region of comprehension. Com
promise leaves out the essence and strength of two
truths and then makes a barren union of the color
less remainders. Comprehension unites the spiritual
substance of both with a larger truth than either,
and then lets the new unity create its new form with
perfect freedom. One grows to believe in methods
of compromise less and less, in methods of compre
hension more and more. We talk of reconciling one
truth with another. How impertinent it is ! Who are
we that we should thrust in our petty persons be
tween Kings, and think that we can make them know
each other? Who are we that we should dare to
undertake to tell majestic truths what each of them
must give up in order that the other shall not be
offended? Such reconciliations by compromise al
ways fail. No ! let us give the great truths souls and
lives large enough to meet in, and they will know
each other without our help, and mingle as two
kingly streams mingle their water in the sunshine
to make the yet more royal river.
Here, then, are these two truths, both of them cer
tainly true. One of them is that religion is sublime
and far away, and outgoes our life. The other, that
religion is familiar and close at hand. One is for
ever looking for the Son of Man coming in the
clouds of Heaven. The other is always craving
the presence of Jesus of Nazareth at the fireside
of the home. Each truth demands assertion. Each
grows restless when the other seems to be taking

282 THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
possession of the field and monopolizing Christi
anity. When we ask after the comprehensive conception
of religion which shall freely include both these
truths, at once we recognize that before we can
get hold of it we must first grasp more fully than we
do the largeness, the many-sidedness, of the nature
of man. Religion is for man. To discuss religion
apart from man, as if it were a system of abstract
truth, is futile. It is not a religious system, but a
religious man, that we are after. Religion is a life, a
nature, a being, not a system or a law. Therefore
to understand religion you must understand man ;
and to see how the great ultimate religion must
freely comprehend both of the two truths which have
claimed religious thought by turns, we must first
take in the largeness of human nature wherein both
of these thoughts are embodied, and which the great
perfect religion, when it comes, must fully satisfy.
And now, of all the facts concerning man, none is
more manifest than this, that in his nature are two
elements, to his fife there are two sides. One is
familiar and domestic, the other is sublime and
transcendental. Look at him ! See how he deals
both with the earth and with the heavens. With
the earth which is his daily home. He treads upon
its soil ; he delves into its bosom ; he plants his seed
in it and eats the fruit that it produces ; he drinks
of its streams ; he sails upon its oceans ; he builds
his house upon its plains ; he trades in its wealth ;
he flourishes or fails according to its changing for
tunes ; and then, while he is walking on the earth,

THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST. 283
all the while his head is among the stars, and his
sight goes far beyond them. His deeds are clear,
definite, concrete, but his motives go out into regions
where he cannot follow them. His principles, which
come to the most commonplace applications, are
themselves but re enactments of the foundations of
the universe. The lightning strikes this special, hard,
visible, tangible piece of timber, and sets it into
flame. But the lightning was born in the myste
rious bosom of a cloud which no eye can penetrate.
The sunlight shines upon the tools of man's most
ordinary task ; but the sun from which the sunlight
comes is a deep world of fire which withers and flings
back his gaze. Everywhere man is this double thing.
The living which he makes is narrow, practical, pro
saic. The life which he lives is a fragment of the
life of God. Now he is busy with the multiplication
table to count up his income or his rent ; and now
he is on the summit of Sinai with Moses, taking
the tables of the Eternal Law out of the hands of
God. I do not say that these two elements of his nature,
these two sides of his life, stand wholly separate from
one another, as they appear when I thus describe
them. It is not so. They are in closest connection.
The familiar task is always being elevated and en
larged by the greatness of the infinite principle.
And the infinite principle is always being concen
trated and embodied in the familiar task. The
dream and the duty, the prayer and the bargain, are
always claiming each other as portions of the one
same life. But do you not know how they still are

284 THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
two, and how strangely they divide your human life
between them?
It is one of the first results of this fact concerning
man, that he is to himself at once intelligible and
mysterious, mysterious and intelligible. "As un
known and yet well known," said St. Paul about
himself ; and he might have said it about any man.
Do you not know what I mean ? Are there not
moments in your life when it seems as if you under
stood and knew yourself through and through? You
have listened to this clank of your machinery so long,
that you know every sound it makes. You have
handled it and watched it, and are entirely familiar
with the way in which every shaft of habit moves,
and how each toothed wheel fits into the next toothed
wheel, and what you did yesterday gave birth to
what you are doing to-day, and will have its grand
child in what you are to do to-morrow. And just
then, when everything seemed perfectly transparent,
has the distance never opened round you, and deep
ened and deepened till you felt that if there was any
thing which you did not know, it was yourself — this
self which had to do with the ends of the universe
and the eternity behind you and the eternity before?
" Know myself ! " You say, " Indeed I do," grasping
your own warm, hard flesh. " Am I not this, which
lives thus ? Why should I think myself mysterious ? "
And then instantly, " Know myself ! God forbid !
Who am I that I should enter into the bosom of the
Eternal purpose, and study there what only there has
real and final being ? Let me stand in awe before my
unknown self and wonder." Poor and mangled U

THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST. 285
the life which has not thus seemed both to under
stand and to be ignorant about itself. It must be
either useless or visionless.
And now, to come at last to the point for which
all this long study has been undertaken. This nature
of man decrees the necessary nature of his religion.
Here is man, familiar and mysterious, known and
unknown to himself and to his brethren. What
must the Christ be who shall be that man's Saviour ?
Must He not come to man in both parts of his double
life ? Must He not speak to man here, where all is
definite and plain, here by his work- bench and his
fireside ; here where man needs a brother's sym
pathy; here where duty must be just as clear as
daylight ; here where man must know whether he is
doing right or wrong by unmistakable words of re
buke or praise spoken directly in his listening ear?
And then, no less, is it not true that in the farthest
depths of his own mystery to which he can go, man
still must find Christ waiting and hear Christ speak ?
Out of the heart of the unknown must come the
Christ he knows so well, saying, " I am here too."
He who is Son of Man must be also Son of God.
It is not possible to lose either of those hemi
spheres of His power and not lose Christ. Lose one,
and He is a vague wind haunting the universe, dis
turbing, not directing, us. Lose the other, and He
is a prudent counsellor who has nothing to say to
our highest aspirations, and no answer to our deepest
questions. Keep both, and He is the whole Christ,
the Alpha and Omega, so enfolding and outgoing
any possible reach of our existence, that we dare go

286 THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
forth to our farthest possibility, sure that we shall
find Him there, and dare come in to our most famil
iar domesticity, sure that there, too, He will be
present with His sympathy, His understanding, and
His help.
I read the Gospels, and this Christ is there. Who
is this that feeds the hungry crowd at the lakeside,
and that same night comes walking on the water to
His frightened followers ? Nay, who in the very feed
ing of the crowd is close to their human hunger on
one side, and close to the heart and power of God
upon the other ? Did any soul come near Him and
not hear at once the voice of the brother Jew and
the voice of the celestial wisdom in the tones, so in
timate and yet so strange, which fell upon his ear?
I open the story of the Christian Church, and
there too is this Christ. He is the rule of life and
the infinite satisfaction of the soul through all the
Christian ages. When the Church has allowed Him
or bidden Him to be only the one or only the other,
she has lost His power. Both periods there have
been in her history. Sometimes she has made her
Christ a beautiful, impracticable vision. Sometimes
she has harnessed Him to human machineries, and
made Him almost a drudge ; but always He has
claimed the fulness of bis Saviourship, and been, in
spite of her, at once the known and unknown, the
familiar friend and the transcendent inspiration of
the Church's life. May the Christ of the Gospels
and the Christ of the Church be our Christ, my
friends, our whole Christ, in all the fulness of His
Christhood !

THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST. 287
I have spoken thus of the double presentation of
the Christian faith, and we have seen how the result
is that dangers present themselves on either side.
It is the danger upon one side only which our text
records, and of that I would now speak exclusively
in the remainder of my sermon. The Jews com
plained of Jesus that He was too familiar, that there
was too little of distance and mystery about Him.
" We know this man whence He is." Is not our first
thought about their complaint this : that it shows
how little in earnest they were ? If they had really
been in earnest, the nearer they could have got to
Christ, the closer they could have brought Him to
themselves, the more familiar He could have seemed,
the more they would have rejoiced. While your
faith is a subject of speculation, or an object of per
sonal pride, you are ready enough to throne it in
some far-off splendor, and drape the curtains of dark
ness around it where it sits; but when the time
comes that you need it, that you must have it or you
will die, then you cry out for it to come down from
its high seat and be close to your aching want, and
open to you the very secrets of its inmost being.
Oh, what a history is here of the experience of
many souls ! They were jealous for the divinity of
Christ. In asserting His divinity they would sepa
rate Him from the sordidness and turmoil of our
commonplace existence. They would make Him
different in sort from us. They would deny that we
could know Him by what we found in ourselves.
And then some day there came the stress and strain.
The commonplace became transfigured and became

288 THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
tragical. The ordinary human incidents — birth,
death, success, failure, love, hate, aye food, and drink,
and poverty, and wealth — were things of spiritual
criticalness. And then their Christ could no longer
sit upon a distant throne. The mystery must open ;
we must have Him here and now. The Son of God
must be the Son of Man. We must know by our
own hearts what He is. His pity, and patience, and
indignation, and delight in faithfulness, whether it
succeed or fail, must be revealed to us by these same
powers, as they feebly display themselves in us. We
will not drag Him down, but our whole life mounts
up and claims Him. It is worthy of a God, and so
the God enters into it ; and lo ! we know Him whence
He is. He ceases not to be God, but He is Man, all
the more human because of His divinity.
This is the revelation, and the light, and the
change which has come to countless souls. When
they intensely needed a Christ whom they could
know, then the Christ whom they had thought it
reverence not to pretend to know, revealed Himself
and claimed their knowledge. The great difference
in men's theology is this : To one man, theology is
totally different from life ; to another man, theology
is the culmination and fulfilment of life. To one
man, Deity hovers over humanity as a foreign
heaven, made of other substance, unintelligible by
any sympathy of common being; to another man,
Deity underlies humanity as the earth underlies the
countless trees which grow out of its bosom, bearing
witness of what it is, making its silent qualities vocal
in the chorus of their shooting branches and whis-

THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST. 289
pering leaves. Great, infinitely precious, is the hour
when that revelation comes to a young man's soul.
Sometimes in sunny stillness, creeping on with the
bright growth of gradual life. Sometimes with a
sudden tempest, smiting the clouds asunder and
letting the broad light pour in. Come how it will,
the hour when a young man knows that Christ
wants to be known of him, that all his life is full
of revelation of Christ if he can hear it, that hour is
the hour of his new birth, henceforth there is no
common or unclean for him — Christ is glorious in
everything, and everything is glorious in Christ.
Such an illumination of a man's Christianity, of
his whole thought of Christ, when it has once come,
runs everywhere ; it sends its power through all he
does and is. The close association of Christ with
human life does not degrade Christ, but exalts
human life, because Christ is stronger than life
and dominates it. See one or two places in which
this is true.
Sometimes we shrink from recognizing that Christ
is the Saviour of society. It seems to make Chris
tianity a mere police force if we say that men live
more peaceably with one another, and are more
thrifty, and more independent, and more helpful to
each other where the Christian Church is thriving
and the Christian Gospel is earnestly preached and
thoroughly believed. But surely such a feeling as
that must come from too base an estimate of the
value of a community and of its best life. If society
is sacred, if the living together of a group of God's
children on God's earth has infinite meaning and

290 THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
infinite issues, then that Christ, the power and wis
dom of God, should be power and wisdom in society
is not strange. It would be strange and dreadful
if He did not come to it and purify and elevate all
its life. When the people of Nazareth said, " He
cannot be the Christ, for He is one of us. His
brothers and sisters, are they not here with us ? " it
was not Christ, but Nazareth and brotherhood and
sisterhood, that they were dishonoring. If they could
have seen how essentially sacred those things were,
then Christ would have been all the more Christ
because of His sympathy in their sacredness.
And so of your own personal life. You say, in
some moods, " What can Christ care for my tempta
tions and my struggles ? I should think less of Him
if He did care for them. Let the great Master lead
the army and lay out the broad campaign, but it is
not work of His to be going up and down among
the tents seeing how it fares with the sick soldiers,
strengthening the cowards, and comforting the
lonely hearts." But then, perhaps, the fact becomes
indisputably'manifest to you that He does do just
that. And the fact that He does do it brings you
revelation. You see what a soul is. What the peril
of a soul is in the light of Christ's strange watchful
ness for it. And when you have once seen that, then
the watchfulness is strange no longer. The Cross on
which Christ dies for man shows man that man is
worth dying for. So the Cross makes itself credible,
and bows the sceptic, proud and yet humble, at its
foot. And even of things less critical than struggles and

THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST. 291
temptations, if, indeed, there be anything in which
struggle and temptation are not consciously or un
consciously included. Does it disturb your thought
of Christ when you ask yourself to consider whether
he cares how your house stands, how your table is
spread, how your trade prospers, whether you get
or miss the learning which you aim at, whether you
gain or lose the game you play? Ah, is not the
story of Christ feeding the hungry people at Gen-
nesaret a true part of the Christian Gospel ? Could
you tear it out of the New Testament, and have the
whole Gospel still? Does it disturb and lessen?
Does it not confirm and enlarge the truth of Christ
to you as you read it between the death of John the
Baptist and the sermon to the Pharisees ? " He was
known to them in the breaking of bread." Re
member that. You must know what you, the whole
of you, are to Christ, the whole of Him. And then
it will be clear how even your comfort and your joy
concern Him — how He wil) care for them, ready still
to call for their sacrifice if higher things demand,
but showing you His Christhood in one of its most
precious sides as He sympathizes with those interests
which make so large a portion of His brethren's lives.
Even in the great question of the soul's forgiveness
for its sins, does there not sometimes come misgiving ?
Does it not sometimes seem as if men thought that
God would be greater and more awful if He did not
stoop to forgive ? Who are we that He should care
for us ? What is it whether we enjoy or suffer, that
the Infinite Goodness and Happiness should go out
of its way to save us from the consequence of our

292 THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
iniquity ? The heathen deity who sits sublime and
watches while things take their resistless course,
Nature pitiless in all her bounty, these sometimes
seem the types of grandeur, and all that is different
from them has a touch of weakness in it. Then
comes Christ with His revelation to the heart which
listens and is convinced. " Lo ! " He says, " God does
care for man, and is most God when He cares most
tenderly. Lo ! pity is not weakness : it is strength."
He lets us see the purpose of forgiveness, which is
not release from punishment and pain, but entrance
into life, and shows us how well worth forgiving man
is, by showing us what man forgiven may become.
Thus everywhere Christ comes to man's commonest
and most familiar needs, and there, in them, bears
witness of His power. How shall that make us
think of Him ? Shall it make Him seem less than
God's anointed ? " As for this man, we know whence
He is ; but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth."
That will depend, as I think that we have seen, on
how man seems to us. If he is mysterious in his
very nature, then the mystery of the Christ is not
lost in the Christ's entrance on man's homeliest
estate. Did those Jews know of Jesus, as they said
they did, " whence He was " ? Ought not His birth
and life among them to have so revealed to them the
essential wonder of birth and life that they should
have willingly accepted His and stood in awe before
their own ? Is not this the whole lesson of the In
carnation, that when man is himself God can dwell
in him?
If you knew the hand which fed the child Shake-

THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST. 293
speare, would you not honor it ? Would you not
know that to have been allowed to minister to the
humblest wants of that sublime nature was a privi
lege which king or queen need not refuse ? It was
to help to make possible Hamlet and Macbeth ; and
the real wonder of Shakespeare was not that he was
Shakespeare, but that he was man. Be sure that you
mount up to Christ by gaining His view of yourself,
and that you do not drag Him down to yourself by
your selfishness, and then you may freely claim Him
in your commonest life, and bid Him do, and honor
Him for doing, the work which He craves and delights
in when He says, "I am among you as He that
serveth." I know full well how all this doctrine may appear,
how it has often appeared, to many men ; how it has
seemed as if we made for ourselves a Christ out of
our own necessities, and said, " He must be this,
because this is what I need." People have said,
"Ah, you believe in Christ because you want to.
He comes not out of the certainty of demon
strated truth, but out of your own fancies con
cerning your own wants. You think you must have
Him, and so you bid Him be." I know the delusion
which those words expose, and yet I gladly accept
the account which those words give of at least one of
the ways in which Christ comes to the soul. It is
because the soul needs Him that it finds Him. There
is no revelation from the sky which could bring Him
to our knowledge if the heart with conscious want
did not demand the very salvation which He brings.
I will be studiously on my guard not to mistake the

294 THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST.
cravings of my nature for the voice of the coming
Christ, but I will not silence those cravings of my
nature when they welcome the coming .Christ, — I
will bid them speak, I will listen for God's answer to
them, and when Christ does come it shall make the
witness of His coming perfectly conclusive and com
plete that it is not merely in the clouds of heaven,
but through the worn and torn avenues of my con
scious human necessities, that He comes.
Has He come so to you, my friend? Do you
believe in Jesus Christ to-day, not simply because of
the great splendid evidences which all the world can
read, not merely because of the trumpet-voice of
Christian history and the convincing splendor of the
life of miracle, but because of the witness which He
has borne to your own soul in His answer to your
soul's own needs? Do you believe in Him because
when you wanted comfort He comforted you,
and when you wanted wisdom He enlightened you,
and when you were a coward He made you brave, and
when you were weak He made you strong? Do
not distrust that evidence. It is good proof. When
Christ comes out of Nazareth it is not Christ that is
dishonored, but Nazareth that is glorified. Let your
whole nature glow and burn with the mysterious
capacity which it has shown to need and long for
Christ, and then accept Christ because, first having
made your nature fit to long for Him, He has then
rejoiced to satisfy your nature with Himself.
Other truths about Christ there are which we will
preach on other days. I have tried to preach this
truth to-day, that no familiarity of religion, no pres-

THE NEARNESS OF CHRIST. 295
entation of it as a regulative force, no offer by Christ
of Himself as the friend of daily life, must seem to
us to depreciate the power of our salvation or make
it appear to us other than the touch of God. There
will come to you hours of great exaltation ; you will
go up to mountain-tops of vision. The Divine Voice
will speak to you out of the sun and out of the
cloud. Those will come in their time as it is best.
But let no experience and no expectation of them
make you careless or distrustful when out of com
monest things, out of daily tasks, and daily difficulties,
and daily joys, and the simplest needs of your nature,
and the most domestic familiarities of life, God speaks
to you and offers you His Son. Know His voice so
truly that you cannot mistake it from whatever un
expected quarter it may speak. Watch for the
Divine Light so anxiously that you may never say
that it is not divine from whatever humblest quarter
it may shine.

XVII.
PRAYER.
" If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask
what ye will, and it shall be done unto you." — John xv. 7.
In one shape or another the religious question
which gives thoughtful, religious people the most
trouble is probably the question of Prayer. We
cannot doubt that it has always been so. We feel
sure that in every condition of religion, down to the
lowest, in which men are moved to supplicate God
at all, the struggle between the two feelings, be
tween the instinct that God must hear and answer,
and the doubt whether God can hear and answer, has
been always going on. It is not a struggle of our
days alone ; it is not a question which certain pecul
iar tendencies of our time have brought out. It is
as old as David ; nay, as old as Job, as old as all
religion. Is it possible for the great First Cause to lay Him
self open to appeals which originate in human wills,
and so to yield to causes behind Himself in governing
his action ? You see our very jealousness for God's
honor comes and lays itself across the path by which
our timid souls are creeping to His mercy-seat. The
very greatness which tempts us to trust Him seems to
forbid us to ask Him. Is prayer, then, all a delusion ?
Is it a mere arrangement for a soul's own discipline,

PRAYER. 297
incapable of influence upon the action of God ? Is
there a possible reality about it ? We cannot help
feeling that in trying to give answers to these ques
tions, Christians too often bewilder their minds with
hopeless speculations, instead of going to Christ and
seeing just what He has said about this hard subject
of prayer. Let us take up one verse of His this
afternoon, and see how clearly He deals with the
whole difficulty, how exactly He tells us what we
want to know.
Christians, who long to pray, but sometimes
almost fear to ; who are distressed by doubting just
how far prayer may go, just how confidently it is
to expect its answer ; around whose closets natural
law and the majesty of the Almighty seem to gather
with an oppressiveness that almost stifles the half-
formed petitions, — let us come to Jesus and beg as
the Disciples did, " Lord, teach us to pray," and
see what He means when He tells us in reply, " If
ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall
ask what ye will, and it shall be done."
"If ye abide in me." What is it to abide in
Christ? That is the first question in settling the
qualities of him who can hope to pray successfully.
The phrase becomes familiar to us in the New Testa
ment; and indeed we might find a parallel that would
explain it to us in several of the different kinds of
relation that exist between human beings. For in
stance, we should all understand, I think, what was
meant if it were said of a young and dutiful child
that he abode or lived in his parents. The child's
earliest years are so completely hidden behind the

298 PRAYER.
parents' life that you do not look upon him altogether
as a separate individuality, but rather as almost a
part of the same organism, one expression of the
parents' nature ; so that, just as the arm, the tongue,
the eye, are several media for the expression of the
parents' will, in the same way, though in a higher
degree, the child is another limb of the parental life
and utterance of the parental nature. The law
owns this, and reaches the child only through the
parent. We all expect children's opinions on mat
ters of religion, of politics, of taste, to be echoes of
their parents'. The father acts and thinks for the
child. The child acts and thinks in the father.
Thus, until the time when the gradual departure
takes place, the child's home is not merely in his
father's house, but in his father's character, — he
abides in him.
Or take another case : the army and the common
soldier "abide in" the general. The army does
what its general does. As an army, it has no
thought or action out of him. It moves when he
moves, stops moving when he stops moving. We
say the general has gone here and there, and we
mean the army has gone. It lays aside all faculty
of decision, or rather contributes it all to him, and
he with the combined responsibility of the great
multitude upon him goes his way, carrying their life
in his. There is perhaps the most complete and
absolute identification of two lives which it is possi
ble to conceive of.
Now, we can get probably a better idea from these
examples than we could from any careful defini-

PRAYER. 299
tions of what it is for a human soul to " abide in
Christ." The child abides in the father ; the
soldier abides in the general. For the soul to abide
in Christ, then, is for it to be to Him what the child
is to the father, what the soldier is to his captain.
It is for it to give up its will to His as completely as
the surrenders of will are made in the family and in
the army. Nay, the "giving up of will" does,not
entirely express it, because that implies something
like reluctance and resistance. But the child has no
will except the father ; and the soldier's will is so
entirely at one with his captain's upon the great
general purpose of the war, which is victory, that he
rejoices to accept that captain's will in all details and
make it his own. Christ is at once our Father and
our Captain. Perfect affection and perfect loyalty
combine to shape our attitude towards Him ; and the
result of the two is that complete identification of
our life with His life by which we " abide in Him."
Jesus Himself uses another figure for the same
idea : " The Branch cannot bear fruit of itself except
it abide in the vine." There is the same identifica
tion of life, the same complete dependence, and the
same transferrence of responsibility.
In this truth of the Believer's " abiding in Christ "
there are two notions involved, — of Permanence and
of Repose. It is not a mere temporary harmony of the
human nature with the divine. Not a mere glancing
of the Christ-life upon the man-life in some of its
higher and more spiritual promontories, but it is an
assured, final entrance of the human into the divine.
It is the entire abandonment and destruction of

300 PRAYER.
man's old homes to take up with and settle down in
new. The man who abides in Christ stands on the
heights of his new life, and strains his sight forward
into eternity, and sees but one will, which is both
his and Christ's, which is his reconciled to and swal
lowed up in Christ's, flowing straight on, beyond
his sight, towa. ds the Endless End. Its permanence
comes from Lie fact that it is a new life, an entire
change ; the soul's deliberate removal from the
kingdom of earth into the Kingdom of Heaven,
before his eutrance upon which a man " must be
born again."
With this permanence comes Repose, Rest, an in
ternal harmony with a man's self, answering to the
external harmony with Christ, that freedom of the
spiritual nature for its best activity, which Christ
calls " His Peace." There is a new tranquillity which
is not stagnation, but assurance, when a life thus
enters into Christ. It is like the hushing of a million
babbling, chattering mountain streams as they ap
proach the sea and fill themselves with its deep pur
poses. It* is like the steadying of a lost bird's
quivering wings when it at last sees the nest and
quiets itself with the certainty of reaching it, and
settles smoothly down on level pinions to sweep
unswervingly towards it. It is like these to see the
calm of a restless soul that discovers Christ and rests
its tired wings upon the atmosphere of His truth,
and so abides in Him as it goes on towards Him.
It is strange how such a truth, deeply realized,
purifies religion, how it clears out of the way with
quiet, unnoticed evaporation, removing them, not as

PRAYER. 301
the wind removes clouds, but as the sun removes
them, — all the morbid and perplexing questions that
have blinded the spiritual sight. To the soul that
does not " abide in Christ " Christianity seems either
a very heartless system on the part of God or a
very selfish system on the part of man. The Gos
pel is to be obeyed. Why ? Is it that Christ may
be glorified? That is very heartless in God, man
says, to shape this hard law of life only for His and
His Son's glory. Is it that the obeyer's soul may be
saved ? That is a very low and selfish motive for the
Christian, — just to get out of the region of unhap-
piness, just to get into the realm of joy. But
"enter into Christ" and the difficulty is gone. We
are no longer servilely and blindly doing His unknown
commandments, nor mercenarily seeking our own
good. The two natures are harmonized; our wills
unite. We want the world converted, and sin cast
out, and the Kingdom of Holiness set up. He is
glorified when our souls are saved. The salvation
of our souls is in glorifying Him. All is changed
when we are made the confidants and sharers as well
as the mere agents of His purposes. This is the
transfer, the advance which He Himself describes a
few verses later in the chapter, when He says, " Hence
forth I call you not servants ; for the servant knoweth
not what his Lord doeth: but I have called you
Friends ; for all things which I have received of my
Father I have made known unto you." This is what
is meant by " If ye abide in me."
And "If my words abide in you." This is the
second condition of the successful prayer. The

KU2 PRAYER.
keeping for continual and instinctive reference of the
definite, explicit teachings and commands of Christ.
We can see, I think, why this second condition must
necessarily be added to the first. That first relation,
— the abiding of the soul in Christ, — if it were perfect,
would be enough. An entire sympathy between you
and the Lord would make it impossible for you to do
anything but just what was the Lord's will. But
that first relation, that sympathy is not complete ;
it is very imperfect and unreliable here. Therefore
God cannot trust to man's oneness with Him to ensure
man's always unerringly discovering His will. He
must make some positive and definite announcement
of it. He must give him not merely His own spirit,
but His own words. The soul's abiding in Jesus
will make him ready to accept Jesus' words, and then
the words will come to lead the soul into a deeper
and deeper abiding-place in its Saviour. This gives
us the true place of the Bible, its true relation to
the more immediate communion of the human soul
with God's, where no printed book or spoken word
intrudes. And this is perfectly carried out into the
two illustrations that we used. The father trusts
his child and the captain trusts his soldier, in virtue
of the identification of their lives, to do his will en
tirely ; but it is by reason of the imperfect sympathy
which hinders the inferior from perfectly appre
hending the superior's will that the father and the
captain must have codes of government and issue
orders of the day for their subordinates.
The Bible is a temporary expedient; the oneness
of the soul with God is an essential and eternal

PRAYER. 303
necessity. The one we may outgrow, the other
we can never do without. In Heaven we shall need
no Bibles. Who will be patient to look down upon
a page and read that God is Love, when the Eternal
Love is burning there upon the throne, and our full
eyes may look into His depths unhindered ? Who
will want to read the faithfulness of Jesus when the
" Faithful and True," with feet of brass and holding
the stars in His unchanging hands, stands there before
us in the midst of the candlesticks? We hold our
Bible tightly, full of the precious words of God; but
who does not hold them, ready to let them go when
the great " Word " Himself shall take us perfectly into
His sympathy to abide in Him forever ?
But now, for the present, we hold them. We
must not merely abide in Him, but have His words
abide in us. I will tell you how this last clause
seems to me. There seems to be a sort of faintly
sketched picture of a solemn council-room in the
heart of the true Christian, around which sit in beau
tiful and holy chairs the judges of our lives, — the
words of Jesus. Every act that the true Christian
does he compels to pass upon its way from concep
tion to execution through that council-room, and
every word of Jesus sitting in its place must give its
sanction to every act. No deed must go forth that
cannot carry the approval of every utterance of Him
to whom the Christian has given up his will. We
do not trust even our personal feelings for our master
as a final test. So long as we have His words, telling
us what we must do and what we must r'ido, we
fear the distortions of feeling that we know too well,

304 PRAYER.
and rejoice in that judgment-room within us where
the words of Christ are throned.
You see, then, what is added when we are told that
we must not only abide in Christ, but also have His
words abide in us. We are to keep them as test-
words to try our lives by, and see how deeply we
abide in Him. " If ye love me, keep my command
ments." Is not that Christ's own summary of the
two conditions ? He in whom they are both fulfilled
is the full and symmetrical Christian, keeping affec
tion always true by obedience, and obedience always
fresh and glowing with sympathetic love. This is to
abide in Christ, and to have His words abide in us.
And now what have we reached ? It is this full
and symmetrical Christian, — the perfect man in
Christ, — of whom Christ says that he " shall ask
what he will and it shall be done unto him." Does
it seem strange, the large, unconditional promise?
The simple question is, " What will this regenerated
man, this child in perfect sympathy with his father,
this Christian abiding in Christ, — what will he ask
of God ? Evidently he will ask, he can ask, nothing
but Christly things in Christly ways. His will has
become an echo of the will of Christ. What can he
desire that Christ does not desire ? Try to put upon
his lips a prayer that God would not grant, — a prayer
of presumption, or uncharitableness, or self-indul
gence, and it drops off. It will not stay upon, it
will not go up to heaven from, lips like those. He
cannot pray it so long as he abides in Christ. He
must go outside of his abiding-place ; he must sepa
rate his will from his Lord's, before his mind can

PRAYER. 305
shape or his mouth utter an unchristian prayer.
True, the most earnest Christian may err about the
will of God. He may pray for sunshine when it is
the will of God that it should rain. He may ask for
comfort when it is God's will that he should suffer.
But this can only come in superficial things. In the
one central thing of all — his own spiritual life — he
cannot err. He knows that " this is the will of God,
even his sanctification." He may cry out for that
with perfect certainty ; and for all other things, if he
prays as every Christian ought, submitting his prayer
to God's revision, "Nevertheless, not my will but
Thine be done ; " then, whether the special blessing
that he asked is sent or not, the larger petition with
which he covered in and included his lesser one is
surely answered. The thing he really " willed " is
" done unto him."
Or take the other condition. Can he in whom the
words of Christ abide pray an unanswered prayer ?
God leaves unanswered among earnest prayers only
those which His own character and plans make it im
possible for Him to answer. And can the soul that
tests every petition by the Bible pray any such
prayers as those ? Can he in whom this word of
Christ abides — " Seek ye first the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness" — go on clamoring with
miserable mercenary prayers for houses and lands,
for food and drink, as if they were the first things to
seek ? Can he in whom this word of Christ abides —
"I say unto you, love your enemies" — torture his
lips into uncharitable and malignant petitions, be
seeching God for vengeance on his foes ? Or he in

306 PRAYER.
whom this everlasting word of Christ abides, — " In
the world ye shall have tribulations," — can you con
ceive of him as vexing God with querulous suppli
cations to be released from suffering, and not de
lighting God with holy petitions that he may be
brave and patient under it, that he may be purified
and made perfect by it? Oh, my dear friends,
how many of our prayers must go unprayed, if we
sent them up to the mercy-seat through that judg
ment-chamber where the words of Jesus sit ! How
many times we have complained that our prayer
brought no answer, when it was a prayer we never
could have prayed unless we first drove out every
word of Christ from its abiding-place within us ! Is
there a Christian here who can declare before God
that he ever prayed to God in perfect submission
to Christ's will, in perfect conformity to Christ's
words, and got no answer ? Not here ; not in all the
world ; not in all the ages !
This is the meaning of Christ's promise : The true
Christian must always have an answer to his prayer,
because he can never pray a prayer incapable of
answer. Does it sound like a mere truism? Is it
an insignificant conclusion that we have reached?
Does it amount to nothing to say that Christ will
grant all good men's prayers because they cannot
ask anything that He is not willing and anxious to
grant already ? Surely there is no weakening of the
thought of prayer in this. How would you strengthen
it ? Would you say that the good man may ask of
God things that He is unwilling to bestow, and gain
tjiem ? But why is God unwilling to bestow them

PRAYER. 307
except for one of two causes : either that the giv
ing of them would injure the soul that asks them, or
that it would interfere with some plan that the
divine wisdom has shaped for the universe at large ?
In either case can you conceive of a true and filial
prayer demanding the unwilling boon? Grant that
the Christian has the power, will he use it ? Must
he not in using it depart out of that harmony with
Christ which is the very condition of his success,
cease to abide in Him, and so fail of the dangerous
gift that he desires ?
You see it all when you look at a child asking a
father for some benefit. Prayer is no fiction between
those eager lips that beg and those other gracious
lips that cordially bestow the boon. There is no
sham in that petition. The whole scene is purely,
beautifully real. The blessing really comes in
answer to the prayer. But it is not necessary that
the idea of a conquered reluctance should come in.
The father wants to give as much as the child wants
to receive. The child, if he be truly dutiful and in
telligent, will desire to receive nothing that the
father does not want to give. It will be only as he
abides in his father, and his father's words abide in
him, that he will expect that he can ask what he
will, and it shall be given unto him.
This is imperfect. Take the perfect scene of
prayer, the Son of God praying to His Father : was
there a conflict of wills ? Was there a conquering of
reluctance? Nay, that is carefully excluded. Al
though the Son abides perfectly in the Father, so
that He and His Father are one, and therefore He

308 PRAYER.
surely may ask what He will, " and it shall be done,"
yet the very chance of His will conflicting with the
Father's will is anticipated, and the superiority of the
Father's will provided for. " Not my will but thine be
done." In the desert, on the mountain, by the table,
wherever He prayed, there was the picture of the per
fect prayer. Towards the condition of the praying
Christ all our prayers strive, and are to be measured by
the nearness with which they approach that union of
perfect sympathy with God and perfect submission to
God with which He laid hold of the divine willing
ness to help.
The result of our whole study of Prayer to-day
seems to be this, that it involves far more than we
ordinarily think, — a certain necessary relation be
tween the soul and God. The condition of prayer is
personal ; it looks to character. How this rebukes our
ordinary slipshod notions of what it is t6 pray ! God's
mercy-seat is no mere stall set by the vulgar roadside,
where every careless passer-by may put an easy hand
out to snatch any glittering blessing that catches
his eye. It stands in the holiest of holies. We can
come to it only through veils and by altars of puri
fication. To enter into it, we must enter into God.
O my dear friends, there is not one of us that can
live without praying. We all know that. But pray
ing is not " saying our prayers," not shuffling through
a few petitions morning and evening, nor clamoring
with imperious voices before God's presence, setting
up our own will, however earnestly and vehemently,
against His. " Lord teach us to pray," we ask ; and
the first answer is, " If ye abide in me and my

PRAYER. 309
words abide in you," then ye shall pray successfully.
We must be Christians first. We must enter into the
new life, and, once there, Prayer will grow wonder
fully easy ; as easy to pray on earth, " Lord Jesus,
have mercy upon me," as it will be to praise in
heaven, " Thou art worthy, O Lord, for thou hast
redeemed us."

XVIII.
THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.
" I am Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First
and the Last." — Rev. xxii. 13.
With all the other deficiencies in our ordinary
Christianity, every earnest Christian thinker is con
tinually thrown back to feel that its fundamental
defect is an imperfect knowledge of its great head
and centre, Christ. Christ is Christianity. He does
not merely teach, He is the religion which we hold.
To know it, we must know Him. He is not merely
the revealer, but the truth. Hence comes the high
ambition to know more of the Saviour in order that
our share of the salvation may be more complete.
Who is He ? What is there in Him that fits Him for
His work ?• When did His work begin ? By what
continual power does it go on ? The New Testament '
comes in answer to these questions to tell us all that
we may know of Christ. This verse from the Revela
tion of St. John may help us to much knowledge of
Him, and I invite you as Christians, this afternoon,
to a short study of the truths which it contains.
For the verse comprises Christ's declaration of
Himself. He asserts His own eternity. He is the be
ginning of all things and the end of all things, — an
eternity of the past, an eternity of the future. His
power . for man resides in these, His two eternities,

THE ETERNAL HUMANITY. 311
each of which, His life as Alpha and His life as
Omega, has its peculiar benefits for us.
And remember, at the very outset, what such a
declaration must include. Christ says, " I am
Eternal." Now, that must mean not merely that He
has existed and shall exist forever, but also that in
the forevers of the past and the future He is eter
nally Christ; that the special nature in which He
relates Himself to us as Saviour never had a begin
ning and shall never have an end. Now, what is that
special nature ? — Christ ! The word includes to our
thought such a Divinity as involves the human ele
ment. Christ is the Divinely human, the humanly
Divine. It is the Deity endowed with a peculiar
human sympathy, showing by a genuine brotherhood
the experience of man. That is to say, there are
two words: God and Man. One describes pure
deity, the other pure humanity. Christ is a word
not identical with either, but including both. It is
the Deity in which the Humanity has part ; it is the
Humanity in which the Deity resides. It is that
special mediatorial nature which has its own double
wearing of both, the ability to stand between and
reconcile the separated manhood and divinity.
Keep this in mind, and then see what it will mean
when we are told that this Christ nature, this divine
human, has existed forever. Are we not in the habit
of talking as if the redemption which called for an
anointed Redeemer were a late thought in the uni
versal history? Untold ages after the dateless time
when God began to be, His almighty word was
spoken, and a new world with a new race to live on

312 THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.
it shaped itself out from the void. In that new
world a new experiment of moral life brought a
catastrophe unknown before, to meet whose terrible
demands the great Creator came Himself and took the
nature of this last creature living in His last creation.
God was made man, and Christ the God-man was
made manifest before the worlds. Here we make
man, you see, a late thing in the history of the
universe ; and how is it possible, then, that Christ,
who is God with the element of human sympathy,
should be eternal? And just here, as it seems to me,
there comes in one of the key-passages of the Bible,
which we are always far too apt to overlook. It is
that verse in Genesis : " In the image of God created
He man." God made man like Himself. Ages before
the incarnation made God so wonderfully in the
image of man, the creation had made man in the
image of God.
Now, if we can comprehend that truth at all, it
must be evident that before man was made the man-
type existed in God. In some part of His perfect
nature there was the image of what the new creation
was to be. Already, before man trod the garden in
the higlfglory of his new Godlikeness, the pattern of
the thing he was to be existed in the nature of Him
who was to make him. Before the clay was fashioned
and the breath was given, this humanity existed in
the Divinity; already there was a union of the
Divine and human ; and thus already there was the
eternal Christ.
Stop here one minute, and see how this exalts the
human nature that we wear. In the midst of the eter-

THE ETERNAL HUMANITY. 313
nity of God, there bursts forth into being the new life
of man. What shall we say of it ? Is it just a creat
ure of the moment which witnesses its birth ? Is it
just another of the world's ephemera, with a little
longer span of life than some of its tinier brethren ?
Is it a new type of being made to be born and die ?
What if this other truth be true ? What if the type
of this life I live were part and parcel of the ever
lasting Godhead ? What if it be the peculiar glory
of one of the persons of that Godhead that He has
worn forever, bound with His perfect deity, the per
fect archetype and pattern of this humanity of mine ?
What if there be a Christ who is the Alpha, the
beginning of all things ; who only brought out into
exhibition when He came in human flesh that genu
ine human brotherhood which had been in him for
ever ? At once is not my insignificance redeemed ?
Every power in me grows dignified and worthy,
catching some of the importance of the eternal type
it represents. My love, — poor, feeble, grovelling
thing, that licks the dust and twines itself round
rubbish, — lo, it is one with, it is capable of being
like, the perfect affection with which from all eter
nity the holy Christ has loved all holy things ! My
indignation, that blazes its strength away in all sorts
of impotent furies, has a sublime identity with the
sacred wrath which burns in Christ's bosom when
He looks at sin. My hope is the dimmed copy of His
power of eternal prophecy. I go through my nature,
and I trace out in these blurred and dimmed lines
the copies whose originals are all in Him. Here is
the tragedy of human life, dear friends. When the

314 THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.
swine wallows in his mire, or the butterfly trifles his
sunny life away, it is a base or little nature given up
to base or little ends. When you or I live the lives
of brutes or butterflies we are taking that man-
nature which is eternal, whose image and plan was
a part of Godhead through all the infinite forever of
the past ; we are taking that man-nature which
copies on earth the uncreated life of Christ in Heaven,
nay, (shall we say it ?) we are taking Christ and
making Him contemptible with the drunkenness of
low debauchery, or setting Him in the idle whirl and
meaningless waste of fashionable folly. Oh, with
what shame and reverence we should carry through
the world this human nature if we really knew that
it did not begin to be with Adam, but existed for
ever in the eternal Christ !
I hold, then, that the Incarnation was God's com
mentary on that verse in Genesis, " In the image
of God created He man." Yes, "from the begin
ning " there had been a second person in the Trinity,
— a Christ, whose nature included the man-type. In
due time this man-type was copied and incorporated
in the special exhibition of a race. There it degen
erated and went off into sin. And then the Christ,
who had been what He was forever, came and brought
the pattern and set it down beside the degenerate
copy, and wrought men's hearts to shame and peni
tence when they saw the everlasting type of what
they had been meant to be, walking among the mis
erable shows of what they were.
If this truth be so, then we cannot but feel that
there is much in it to enable us to feel rightly with

THE ETERNAL HUMANITY. 315
regard to every one of the new theories which
look to a confusion and a loss of the distinctive type
of manhood. We have all had our interest excited
by the apparent tendencies of modern science
towards a depreciation of what has always been
considered the unshared honor of humanity. Wise
men come forward and tell us of a course of structural
development, wherein man becomes not a new cre
ation, for whom a new word was spoken from the
creative lips, a new gesture made by the creative
hand, but merely the present completion of the
natural progress of lower natures working up thus
far by some process of selection whose law is resident
within itself. The gorilla in his generations is seen
climbing through the gradations of a more and more
perfect apehood, to attain the summit of his life in
man. "Man is in structure one with the brutes."
" All are but coordinated terms of nature's great pro
gression from the formless to the formed ; from the
inorganic to the organic; from blind force to con
scious intellect and will." These are the theories
that men are talking of. However they differ in de
tails, the one first effect of all of them must be, the
depreciation of the individuality of man, the loss of
his special type of being, and inevitably the confu
sion of his human responsibility in the intricate
series of the apes. What am I ? Anything but one
link in an endless chain, that over self-moved wheels
runs on forever, working out a progress so mechani
cal that in it morality is lost? What am I? Only a
higher attainment of these poor, dumb brutes, digging
the earth a little deeper for the roots I am to eat, piling

316 THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.
a little more delicately the den I am to live in, cry
ing a little more articulately the pain or pleasure
that I feel ? And then suppose I go to Revelation to
see what it can say about these things. Suppose I
find there this sublime truth, that the man-type for
which I am so anxious has had an eternal existence
as a part and parcel of the Deity ; that, however this
manifestation of it has been reached, there is mani
fest in every man the image of a pattern-life that is
in God. Let me carry away from Revelation the su
preme truth of the eternal humanity of Christ, and
then my moral life, my reverence for the nature
which I share, my high ambition after its perfection,
all this is unimpaired. Let science show me my af
finities with the lower life : a mightier hand points
me to my connections with the higher. I go back
beyond the first rudiment that curious hands have
found buried in the slime of formless worlds ; I go
back beyond the forming of the world in which man
was to live, back to the beginningless Alpha of all
being, and, lo, in Him I find the eternal pattern after
which my nature was to be fashioned, the eternal
perfection which my nature was to seek.
But the highest importance of this truth of Christ's
past eternity must always be to the great Christian
doctrine of the Atonement. You know what that
doctrine is. It tells us that when man fell from
holiness to sin, there appeared in the whole universe
only one nature which had in itself a fitness to un
dertake the work of reconciliation and restoral.
Only one nature stood forth saying, " Lo, I come ! "
Christ the incarnate God assumed the work and

THE ETERNAL HUMANITY. 317
manifested the one necessary fitness in His union of
the divine and human natures. Then comes the
question, When did that fitness of the Christ be
gin ? Was it a nature given Him when He was born
of Mary ? Was it a new assumption of an element of
life which had before been wholly unfamiliar ? If so,
the atonement becomes — what? A late expedient
for patching up the breach in God's experiment;
a special provision for an unforeseen catastrophe.
The precious element of Christ's humanity becomes
only the tardy and pitiful consequence of human
sin. But take the deeper view. What if this fit
ness of nature were an everlasting thing in Christ,
only coming to special utterance when He was born
Jesus the child of the Hebrew Virgin ? What if He
had borne forever the human element in His Divinity,
anointed Christ from all eternity? What if there
had been forever a Saviourhood in the Deity, an
everlasting readiness which made it always certain
that, if such a catastrophe as Eden ever came, such
a remedy as Calvary must follow? Does not this
deepen all our thoughts of our salvation ? Does it
not teach us what is meant by " the Lamb slain from
the foundation of the world " ?
And see how such a truth tallies with all God's
ways. This natural body of ours has in itself the
fitness for two sets of processes, — the processes of
growth and the processes of repair. You keep your
arm unbroken, and nature feeds it with continual
health, makes it grow hearty, vigorous, and strong,
rounds it out from the baby's feebleness into the full,
robust arm of manhood. You break that same arm,

318 THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.
and the same nature sets her new efficiencies at work,
she gathers up and reshapes the vexed and lacerated
flesh, she bridges over the chasm in the broken
bone, she restores the lost powers of motion and
sensation, and beautifully testifies her completeness,
which includes the power of the Healer as well as
the Supplier. So it is to me a noble thought, that
in an everlasting Christhood in the Deity we have
from all eternity a provision for the exigency which
came at last, — a provision, not temporary and spas
modic, but existing forever, and only called out into
operation by the occurrence of the need.
It seems to me that all this must increase the im
pressiveness of the thought of the Atonement, both for
its rejecters and its accepters, and must increase its
deep solemnity for all who preach it. A man puts
aside the offer of Salvation by Christ Jesus. What
is it he rejects ? Is it a sudden thought, a new ex
pedient of God? Is it a hurried plan which God has
made ready on the moment to repair this failure in
His fallen world ? If this were all, it would be bad
enough. But when I see a man deliberately raise
his hand and ward off from his life the operation of
one part of the divine nature which has been aiming
at the result of his salvation from eternity, how
shall I utter the tearfulness of his sin and of his peril ?
I look back to the untold times before the world
was made. Then, then, before man was, lo, Christ
already is, with the provisions of salvation in His
nature ! Among all other lives His life is unique, for
it alone contains the fitness to save — if it should ever
need it — the yet unborn world. I see man spring to

THE ETERNAL HUMANITY. 319
life. I see him sin. I see, born of his sinning stock
and sinning like your fathers, in these late genera
tions, you, man in your capacity, man in your
reality of sin. And then comes forward this Eternal
Saviour. I see Him lay His long-kept mercy on your
soul, born in these latter days to need it. At last
the mercy that has waited all through eternity has
found its purpose. It comes to save you. And if
you will not be saved, if you turn your poor soul
away, what can I say but that you are insulting God ?
What can I do but tremble for you ? O my dear
brother, how shall you escape if you neglect so great
salvation ?
And when an earnest soul accepts this everlasting
Christ, is there not a new glory in his salvation when
he thinks that it has been from everlasting. He
looks back, and lo, the Saviour was his Saviour before
the worlds were made ! The covenant to which he
clings had its sublime conditions written in the very
constitution of the Godhead. It was not spoken
first on Calvary ; nay, it did not begin when it was
told to David, or to Moses, or to poor Adam crushed
into the dust with his new sinfulness outside the
garden-gate. Before them all, in the very nature of
the Deity, was written the prophecy that if ever in
the unfolding of the ages one poor human soul like
mine should need salvation, the eternal Christ, bring
ing His credential of Eternal Human Brotherhood,
should come to save it. The ages rolled along ; my
soul was born, and sinned ; it cried out to be saved,
and lo, Christ came ! What is there left for me to do
but cling to Him with a love strong as His precious

320 THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.
promises and a faith firm as His Everlasting Saviour-
ship? Let these be the lessons which we gather up as we
think upon the Christ of the eternal past. He is
the Alpha of our faith. See what it means. It is
the Truth of an eternal manhood in the Godhead.
It teaches us the glory of this human life we wear
as being a thing whose type and pattern was eternal,
and it teaches us the magnitude of the grace which
saves us as being the necessary effort of one part of
the uncreated Deity. He who has learned all the
great lesson of this Christ the Alpha must be filled
with a sublime reverence for his own humanity,
must reverence it and keep it pure and sacred as a
holy thing; and he must lay hold with a sublime
confidence on that redemption which he sees stretch
ing back and anchoring itself in the uncaused pur
poses and qualities of God.
And now, if the term "Alpha" asserts a past eternity
for Christ, it remains for us to go on and see how
the other term " Omega" declares for Him an eternity
in the futufe. He is not merely the beginning, but the
end; not only the first, but the last; not merely
there has always been, but there shall always be, a
Divine Human in the Godhead. This, too, is a truth
which we are liable to forget. As we think the mar
vellous nature of the Saviour began in the manger,
so we sometimes feel as if its elements were sundered
in the last agony of the cross. Practically a great
many of us believe in a Trinity only for thirty-three
years of history. Is not this the value of those
passages fn the New Testament which show us the

THE ETERNAL HUMANITY. 321
ascended Saviour speaking or acting still in the same
genuine humanity which He had worn on earth?
While Stephen stands waiting for the crash of mur
derous stones, " he looks up steadfastly into heaven
and sees Jesus the Son of Man standing on the right
hand of God." Saul, prostrate on the Damascus road,
cries out to the rebuking voice, " Who art thou,
Lord?" and the answer is, "I am Jesus." And as the
last Revelation closes and the curtains are gathered
together, to be opened again only for the final
coming of the Judge, the last voice that comes forth
is the voice of Christ, still wearing His human name
and lineage, " I Jesus have sent my angel. I am the
root and offspring of David." What is all this for,
but to assure us of the everlasting manhood in our
Lord ? The human hand still weighs ; the human
voice still speaks; the human heart still loves.
He is not only Alpha, but Omega. As all our hope
shines from the truth that there ever has been, so it
all centres in the truth that there forever shall be, a
divine and human Christ.
The highest use of this truth of Christ, the Omega,
must be the light which it sheds upon the realities of
the judgment day. Christ Himself said, " The Father
judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment
unto the Son." Why is this ? Is it just because He
has worn, is it not rather because He shall forever
wear, the human nature which shall make Him fit to
judge, with the intelligence and sympathy of brother
hood, the lives of men? I think that none of us have
any idea how much we shelter ourselves away from
the terrors of the judgment day behind the unfamil-

322 THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.
iarity of God. He is so far off, so different from us.
We cannot really think that He is going to take
these acts and motives of ours, so different from His,
and test them accurately, jddging us all according
to the deeds done in the body. How can He, — He
is so different from us, so far away? We do not
put it to ourselves thus; we do not put it to our
selves at all ; but at the bottom this is the way that
half of us escape the pressure of responsibility. But
take this truth : What if it be a true man that is to
judge you, not merely with the far-off memory,
but with the present consciousness of manhood?
What if the conviction that awaits us there is no
other but just that with which brother-man condemns
our sin ? As a pure human look makes our impurity
blush its own sentence to the guilty face ; as a true
eye loosens the sophistries of falsehood and makes it
own its lie ; as our humanity quails before a brother-
humanity that knows its impulses and temptations
through and through, — so shall we quail before the
Christ. He is to be our judge, passing by His man
hood into a knowledge of the sin which in His God-
hood He will punish.
And if human sin needs a humanity to judge it,
do not these weak and struggling efforts of our life
after goodness crave some sympathy to which they
can appeal as they go up to judgment ? What ! shall
I send these poor pretences of holiness up to heaven,
this ineffective virtue which is not a being good, but
only a trying to try to be so, — shall I send them
up to lay themselves against the fiery purity of God
and be burnt off like spots of blemish from the white

THE ETERNAL HUMANITY. 323
light of His perfectness ? Oh, no, give me a man !
Though He be perfect, He will know what human im
perfection is. Though holiness be divine without a
struggle in Him, at least He will comprehend what
my poor struggles mean, and take them as the feeble
efforts of a soul that is trying, not to purchase heaven,
but just to praise Him who has already bought it. If
we look deep enough we ought to feel every time we
see a little child at night trustfully laying his day's
life, made up of faint desires, feeble efforts, and con
tinual failures, into the hands of God, what a blessed
thing it is that there is in that God an everlasting
Christ, an undying humanity, which will take that
day's life into a brother's hands and count it precious
with all the intelligence of sympathy.
And is there not great beauty in this truth of
Christ, the Omega, as we relate it to the dead ? We
have all lost dear friends out of this world. We
have all stood upon the margin which was the far
thest, which feet untransfigured by death might reach,
and sent some beloved soul into the unknown world.
Where have we sent it? To God, we say, bowing
our heads with resignation. But is there no bleak
ness, no f orlornness in our answer ? God is so far off.
However loving, kind, or wise, He is all God ; the
child we sent Him was all man in his fresh, genuine
humanity. But what if there be a humanity in God
to which they go ? What if, since it went out from us,
that human nature, made first in the image of Christ
the human, has touched again that perfect nature
out of which it sprang and finds itself at home?
Yes, let me set this Christ eternally in the midst of

324 THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.
the other world, and then the human soul that goes
there goes to its own. It meets no strangeness on
the other shore. The human affections just loosened
on the one side fasten into a completer unity and as
surance on the other. The child is gathered into
the arms of a fatherhood and knows no strangeness
or surprise. The brother clasps hands with a newer
and more trusty brotherhood. We can commit them
to a God who knows them and is waiting for them.
They go to Jesus and rest in Him, and wait for us till
our humanity, made perfect too by death, shall find
its place beside them.
This, then, we mean by Christ the Omega, a
Christ of the everlasting future, Alpha and Omega
together. His life bridges all eternity, and bearing
our hope backward fixes it firmly in a security which
has no beginning ; bearing it forward crowns it with
promises that have no end.
There is another view of this whole subject, which
we must not enlarge upon, but which we must not en
tirely omit. We have spoken of the eternal life of
Christ as rounding and embracing the great life of
the world. Is it not true likewise of every single
Christian experience that Christ is its Alpha and
Omega, its beginning and its end ? A soul enters on
the higher life, passes by the doorway of conversion
from disobedience to obedience. When does that
soul find Christ ? Is it after it has passed, by some
power of its own, over the threshold, that there, on
the inside, it finds the Lord waiting to be its leader?
Oh, no ! it looks back and cannot tell the moment
when it was not led by Him. It finds no earliest act

THE ETERNAL HUMANITY. 325
of its which did not spring out of some yet earlier
act of His. It came, but He called. It answered,
but first He spoke. It said, " I will ; " but before that
He said, " Wilt thou ? " Yes, we begin, but Christ
always began before us. As before all humanity the
primal human was in Him forever, so before all
Christianity the source and root of all is Christ,
out of whom all Christianity must flow. He is the
Alpha of our religious life, antedating every act of
man's obedience by the eternal promptings of His
spirit and the eternal freeness of His grace.
And, then, He is its Omega too. As all Christian
influence has its spring in Christ, so no Christian
duty has any result except in Him. We look for
ward, dear friends, into the perfectness that is
promised us, and what is it ? Simply that we should
attain to Him. We may go far in the eternal de
velopments of holiness, but we can never outgo
Him. He will be present at the end of every period
of everlasting progress, to round and close it for us
and to introduce us to a new one as He introduced
us to the first, for He is exhaustless.
Oh that we could learn this truth of an exhaust-
less Christ. We build our Christian lives out from
themselves as if Christ were the starting-point from
which the first joint grew; but every new joint must
hang, itself upon its predecessor in the lengthening
chain. Oh that we could learn that the life of
Christ, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and
the end, stretches from beginning to end under
this life of ours, and that each of our weak acts,
instead of fastening itself on the consistency of the

326 THE ETERNAL HUMANITY.
weak acte that have gone before it, ought to pierce
down and root itself directly and freshly in Him.
May I plead with you for this ! Strive for continual
freshness in the higher life. Let it not build itself
upon itself as mere habit. Let it grow ever out of
Him as a true life. Let each act distinctly find
its motive, find its strength in Him. Keep striking
roots into His personal helpfulness all the way along.
Make Him your Alpha and Omega ; from Alpha to
Omega make Him the source of every strength and
truth your nature seeks.
"Of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all
things, to whom be glory forever." That is Paul's
summary of our truth. " Of Him," the Alpha —
"To Him," the Omega— " Through Him," from
Alpha to Omega, the Everlasting Christ. The fault
of our religion is that we do not know enough of
Christ. May God grant that if we have at all learned
how He begins the Christian life in man we may go
on learning new lessons of His wondrous power
every day, till some day, in the perfect world, we
learn the'perfect lesson of how He can glorify a poor,
weak, human creature with Himself, and, gathering
all its culture into Him, take our souls for His and
be our Omega, our End as He has been our Begin
ning, the last complete fulfilment of the last prayer
that we shall ever pray, when prayer ceases because
need has ceased forever 1

XIX.
THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
" And the Evening and the Morning were the First Day."
Genesis i. 5.
There are many mysteries about the days of
Genesis concerning which we need not trouble our
selves to-night. But this one verse may guide our
thoughts in the direction in which we have come ex
pecting that they should be led. It is a noble be
ginning of the world's history. It declares of the
first day that it was made up of an evening and a
morning. It is not so that we ordinarily reckon the
world's days. We think of them as moving on from
morning to evening, opening in freshness, and exu
berance, and hope, ripening through hours of activity
and strength, and at last closing in peaceful exhaus
tion, like a fire that has burned itself out to ashes.
Not such is the first day of all the days. It begins
with evening, with the fulfilment and completeness
of the dayless period which had gone before, and
moves forward into the morning, into the exuber
ance, and hope, and freshness of untried ambitions
and attempts. " Evening and Morning were the first
day." As time went on, within each of those unities
which we call days was summed up and pictured this
truth, that every fulfilment has at its heart the power
of a new beginning, that nothing is ever finally done,

328 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
that all is ever doing, that all the gathering of the
results of one period's experience has for its purpose
and natural issue the opening of a new period in
which that experience shall become effective with
new form and face.
It is a depressing doctrine in some moods, that
nothing is ever done, that all is ever doing, that
nothing finishes except that it may instantly begin
again. It is a noble and inspiring doctrine when we
are at our best, for the absolutely done would be
the absolutely dead, only the thing to be, stirring at
its heart, proves that the thing which has been is still
alive. The evening gathers with its dusky peace;
work ceases ; men sit by quiet firesides ; they count
the gains and losses of the completed hours under the
quiet stars ; the glare and rush grow dim and still.
It would be dreadful if it only meant a finished day.
It is glorious and beautiful because it means a day
all ready to open ; nay, already opening in this calm
completion. It is St. Paul's great teaching that
" Experience worketh Hope."
Is not -this first day, then, the type of what all days
of human life should be? Does it not, set there in the
forefront of history, bear perpetual testimony to the
truth that no completion is complete or can be truly
understood, unless it stands in close connection with
a new commencement? Does it not give us the sug
gestion which we want when we are gathered here
to-night to commemorate the honored completion of a
long period of faithful work ? You close your youth
and pass on into middle life. You close by and by
your middle active life and pass on into old age.

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 329
You leave one place where you have lived and move
into another. You are no longer able to hold one
form of faith but a more generous faith opens to wel
come you. One sort of company in which you have
been much at home dismisses you, and your life hence
forth is to be lived among new faces. You finish a
piece of work which has long occupied you and take up
new tools to work on new materials. At last you
go from life to life, and with one " longing, lingering
look behind " resign this " pleasing anxious being."
In every case it means a vast difference whether you
join together in your thought only the old beginning
and this fulfilment, or this fulfilment and the new
beginning which it makes possible, upon whether the
morning and the evening or the evening and the morn
ing are your day, upon whether the forty years of
journey as they close are filled more with recollection
of the Egypt out of which he came or the Canaan into
which they have brought the traveller.
If we get at the real heart of the difference it lies
in this, that he who has lived in the form of an expe
rience looks back, while he who has entered into the
substance and soul of an experience looks forward.
" The outward man perishes," as Paul says, " but the
inward man is renewed day by day." The perishing
of a form and method in which we have lived may
naturally bring a pensive sadness like that which
always comes to us as we watch a setting of the sun,
but he who is in the true spirit of the sunset turns
instantly from the westward to the eastern look.
The things the day has given him, — its knowledge,
and its inspirations, and its friendship, and its faith,—

330 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
these the departing sun is powerless to carry with it.
They claim the new day in which to show their power
and to do their work. Live deeply and you must live
hopefully. That is the law of life. I should like to
try to make this clear and real to you by a few illus
trations. 1. Here is a man who has believed a truth, and it
has been clear to him as daylight ; its lines have been
invariably distinct ; its colors have been always bright
and vivid. But by and by there comes a change, —
the lines grow dim and wavering ; the colors become
faint and blurred ; it is not all as definite and cer
tain as it used to be; the twilight, the evening of
his faith, has come. Many of you know that of
which I speak, and you know how to two men who
stand side by side, this evening of their faith, which
comes to both alike, means totally different things.
To one it means blank unbelief, the melancholy
death of faith. To the other out of the dimmed ob
scured doctrine came a light even richer than it had
ever shed in its clearest days. The character which
he had gathered in believing it grew stronger and
claimed richer truth to satisfy it. His faithfulness
grew greater while his formal faith grew less. And
visions came to him with wonderful assurance of a
new dawn of faith in which he should believe again
as he had never believed before. So it has been with
many of us about the Bible, and about the nature
and the work of Christ. The evening of some half
faith which we used to hold has bound itself close to
the morning of a new and precious and completer
faith which we know that we shall hold forever.

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 331
2. Or let it be not your faith, but your fortune. The
evening of your abundant prosperity arrived. The
darkness gathered in about the radiant luxurious
life which you had lived. No longer did it seem as
if the sun shone and the flowers bloomed and the
seasons came and went for you. You said, " It is
all over. I have had my day." I cannot help hop
ing, I cannot help believing, that to some of you,
since you said that, there has come a great surprise.
What seemed all over has proved to be but just
begun. The day which you thought you had had,
you can see now that you had hardly touched.
Prosperity has come to mean to you another thing.
The hours in which it meant plenty of money, plenty
of friends, seem now so thin and superficial. To
work, to help and to be helped, to learn sympathy
by suffering, to learn faith by perplexity, to reach
truth through wonder, behold ! this is what it is to
prosper, this is what it is to live. You did not really
begin to live till the darkening of your happiness
brought you into the knowledge of a happiness which
can never darken. The evening and the morning
have been your first day.
3. I need do no more than just allude to the way in
which all this is illustrated in the best friendships,
which make so large a part of our lives. The even
ing gathers round a friendship. Some circumstance
suspends the daily intercourse which has been our
daily satisfaction and delight. Perhaps the great
circumstance of death comes in ; and then it is
proved whether our intercou rsewith that friend of
ours has been only a thing of outward contacts, or

332 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
a thing of spiritual sympathy. If it has been a
thing of spiritual sympathy, no circumstance, not
even death, can break it. It has been gathered, with
all its past history, into that great, cold hand, only
that thence it may be given out into a larger and
more abundant life. Who of us has not known the
dead in closer knowledge than he ever knew them
when they were living ? To which of us has there
not come the certainty, as he stood by some friend's
dying bed, that his intercourse with that friend and his
understanding of him was but just beginning ; that
all they had been to each other was really precious
as the foundation and the promise of what they were
to be to each other in the unseen life forever ? The
eye through its tears looked backward for an instant,
and then strained its gaze forward with eager curi
osity and hope.
When Jesus was parting from His disciples all this
was very real to Him. " These are in the world and
I come to Thee," He said to His Father ; and then to
His disciples, "Lo, I am with you always." The
evening gathered round His active, patient life, but
the Christian world has always thought of those last
chapters of His incarnate story, not with reference to
the past which went before them, but with reference
to the future for which they prepared ; not as an end,
but as a beginning. The evening of the Passion and
the morning of the Resurrection are the first day of
the Lord's power. It was "expedient that He
should go away," not because His work was done,
but in order that He might begin it.
This is the value of experiences. They are en-

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 333
folded into the transitional moments of life, and
thence their essential power goes forth to make itself
felt in new achievement. Such moments are like
locks upon the stream of time. They lift the boat
to a new level, and then send it forth, the same boat,
on the same stream, still to swim on up towards the
springs among the hills.
If experiences were not capable of being thus
enfolded and transmuted, how insignificant they
would be. Mere facts without fertility, mere stones,
not seeds, encumbering the soil. Whether there
were few or many of them would make but little
matter ; whether the man died at twenty years old
or at eighty would be hardly worth the asking. But
if every experience makes a new element in the great
complex future, never lost, contributing something
which it alone can give, then this instinctive desire
for a full life, for many experiences, which is in us
all is natural and right. Then to lose any of the
legitimate experiences of a full human career is a loss
for which one will be poorer forever. This is the
reason of the sadness which no faith in immortality
can dissipate, belonging to the death of those who
die in youth, — the sense of untimeliness which we
cannot reason down. You, a man of sixty, recall to
day some friend of your boyhood with whom you
started life forty years ago. He died at twenty-one.
The two brave ships had scarcely started side by side
upon their voyage before one was drawn off by an
irresistible current out of the broad sunlit stream
into the mysterious ocean which lies always dark
beside our human life. What do you think of as

334 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
you remember him, and remember what a rich thing
life has been for you since he departed ? Do you
not pity him for what he has missed ? Whatever
eternity may bring him he will never know what it
is to be a human being here upon the earth, first
twenty-five years old, then thirty, then forty, then
fifty. Each of these ages is a separate experience.
It means something special. It contributes some
thing distinct. That contribution his career and
character will never get. We do not doubt the com
pensations. Something has come to him in the un
seen, celestial life which has made up for the loss ;
but still the loss is there. That special thing he can
never be. That particular knowledge he can never
have. But you who have passed through each
of these regions with sensitive, receptive nature
have the power of them in you forever. No dream
of celestial life will ever drown them. No fire of the
unveiled sight of God will ever burn them out of
you. Their form is gone past all recovery ; but their
substance is more than your possession ; it is part of
you. The experiences, in all the real vitality they
had, have been enfolded into you, and shall be un
folded into the work which you shall do, the life
which you shall live forever.
When one thinks of this, he feels like turning
aside and exhorting the young people to live as fully
and vividly as possible at every period of life, that
there may be as much of power as possible to be en
folded into the evening of life and opened into the
eternal morning. It is good to multiply experiences,
if only they are things of the substance and not

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 335
merely of the form. Do not let the certainty that
you will outgrow any period of life keep you from
making the most of it and getting the most out of it
while it lasts. The bee takes the honey and is con
tent to leave the flower. Live as abundantly as you
can. The kind of life is most essential, but the
amount of life, that, too, is vastly important. The
direction of the stream is the first thing to care for;
but when it is pointed the right way, then do all you
can to increase its volume. The stronger it runs, the
more it will keep the right direction.
But now I want to turn a little more closely to
what is in our minds to-night by asking you to see
how all that I have said of long-continued life in
general is especially true of a life long-lived in
the Christian ministry. There, most of all, experi
ences gather themselves into character, and so make
the material of future living. I should expect this
to be so, because in its idea the ministry is not merely
a noble form of human life, — it is identical with
noble life. All noble life is ministry. All ministry
is noble life. Every true man is a minister. In pro
portion as a minister is a true minister, he is a true
man. Therefore I should expect that in the Christian
ministry more than anywhere else experiences would
richen the life they come to and make great futures
possible. I want to claim that no other occupation of man
kind can compare in the richness of its experiences
with the Ministry of the Christian Gospel. Let me
sing for a few moments, in the presence of this
beloved and venerated pastorship, the excellence and

336 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
abundance of the life which the Christian pastor
and priest is given the privilege of living. It ripens
to its full maturity like a growing tree. It has its
seed-time and its leaf-time and its bud-time and its
blossom-time and its fruit-time, and each of them sends
forward its contribution and makes its preparation
for that which is to follow. And in each of them the
minister who lives in it has at least the opportunity
of the richest relations with the two great sources of
human strength, — the divine life on one side of it,
and the human life upon the other.
Think of the minister's possible relation, nay, if
he is trying to be a true minister, his necessary rela
tion, to God. God is the granary from which he
must be immediately fed, the armory from which his
weapons must be immediately drawn. Study and
thought and contemplation of divine things are not
merely his occasional luxury, they are his perpetual
necessity. He must sanctify himself that the people
may be sanctified through him. He is forever being
driven in<to the deep waters of humiliation for his
weakness and of penitence for his sins. He is
always trying to understand God's will. " What is
the divine intention in this man's joy, in that man's
tribulation?" He is kept constantly aware of the
infinite and perfect purposes by conscious sympathy
with them. " What God wants he wants." He is
forever being rebuked and encouraged and enlight
ened and disturbed and settled, and then redisturbed
by influences which come directly out of the heart of
God into his heart which is laid upon it. Can you
conceive of a life richer in the profoundest experi-

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 337
ences than that. Beneath the calm surface what tem
pest and what sunshine, what tumult and what peace!
And then turn the other way and think of the
Christian minister's relation to mankind. Every
thing which touches man touches him. The dramas
of his people's lives are all replayed on the stage of
his sympathies. He triumphs with the conqueror,
and is beaten with the vanquished soul. He goes
into business with the venturesome boy, and seeks
truth with the enthusiastic student, and goes to Con
gress with the politician, and grows rich with the
prosperous merchant, and fails with the bankrupt,
and enters into peace with the old man who has
weathered the storms and anchored in the harbor of
his fireside. Whatever tells upon his people's char
acters he shares with them. Their temptations and
their victories are his. He goes with them up into
the heavens and down into the depths. His personal
life is multiplied by theirs. And then what sight and
study of the effects of circumstances on character!
What admiration of silent, secret heroism which no
other eyes see but his and God's ! What knowledge
of human strength and human weakness, — strength
often where the world thinks that all is pitiably
weak, weakness often where the world thinks that
everything is absolutely strong! What anxious
feeling here and there all over a nature with eager
hands to find the spring which shall set free its better
life ! What glimpses of unexpected educations of
God ! What fears and hopes, what visions of the
mystery of man !
I am not talking of this or that actual minister.

338 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
Certainly I am not daring to intrude into the sacred
secrecy of that long and rich ministry which we have
gathered to congratulate to-night. I am not even
limiting my picture to what any actual minister has
ever actually attained. I am talking of the idea of
our profession. I am talking of that which glows
before the eyes when the young men see their visions
and the old men dream their dreams. There are
base hours in the ministry in which the minister's
relation to the world is mean and meagre, perhaps
there are whole base ministries to which any of this
richness of experience never comes ; but I am talking
of the ministry as it is in its idea and as it is in large
degree realized by every earnest laborer for the souls
of men. There is no stupider mistake than that
which pretends to think that the minister is an in
nocent, ignorant, amiable soul, shut out from life,
living in cushioned security, where no tumult of the
wicked world and no breath from the breezy hilltops
of speculative doubt ever can intrude. It is not
true. He is no silly optimist in spite of all his hope.
He is no dead log of belief in spite of all his faith.
Oh, my friends, do not think that because a minister
sees the capacity of human nature in the light of the
Gospel, he does not therefore see its danger. I hope
the tragical peril of existence does not seem to other
men more terrible than it always seems to him. I
hope the faces which they meet upon the street are
not more pitiable or pathetic to other eyes than they
are to his. I hope the house-fronts do not grow
transparent and reveal the mean and miserable life
within, the corpses and the skeletons, to other men

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 339
as the minister sees them after his long service in the
crowded town.
And will you talk of him as if his ordination had
been a spell which had placed him forever beyond
the reach of doubt ? Will you think that he has had
somewhere in a Book or in a Bishop the ready answers
to all the fierce questions which tear the souls of
other men ? It is not so. Just in proportion to his
love for the truth must be the intensity of his wres
tling for it, his sense of the strength of all its ene
mies. He sits upon no mountain of assurance looking
down upon the world of struggling men. He is in
the thick and centre of the struggle. He has no
scorn of doubt. He knows its strength too well.
And yet while he is in the midst of sin and doubt
— here is the privilege of his position — he cannot
cease also to see goodness and faith. The wonders
of patience that he meets ! The splendid victories
of spiritual assurance which he sees ! Ah, my friends,
it is not possible to talk of such a life as that man
lives in the way in which foolish people sometimes
talk of it. It is no dead break on the wheels of time.
It is no burnt-out cinder among the glowing coals of
life. It is a very wheel itself. It is the livest coal
in all the furnace, making the other coals seem cold
beside it. As Christ in Jerusalem made the hot
Hebrew life look tame and worthless; as Paul in
Athens "frustrated the tokens of liars and made
diviners mad, and turned the wise men backward and
made their knowledge foolish."
The time must come again, as it has come in other
days, when our young men shall feel the vitality of

340 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
the Christian ministry, and seek it with the heroic
consecration of their lives. If they could only know
that it is of all lives richest in experience, that in it
the passion to live finds fullest satisfaction ! What
is it to live? To crawl on in the dust, leaving a
trail which the next shower hastens to wash away ?
Is it to breathe the breath of heaven as the tortoise
does, and to bask in the sunshine like the lizard? Or
is it to leap and run and quiver with vitality to do
things, to learn things, to become things every day?
Is it to touch the eternal forces which are behind
everything with one hand, and to lay the other on
the quivering needles and the beating hammers of
this common life ? Is it to deal with God and to
deal with man ? Is it to use powers to their utmost
and to find ever new power coming out in them con
stantly with their use ? If this is life, then there is
no man who lives more than the minister ; and the
generous youth whose cry is, " Let me live while I
live," must some day feel the vitality of great ser
vice of God and man, and press in through the sacred
doors saying, " Let me, too, be a Minister."
I must come back out of my eulogy, my Psalm of
the Ministry, which I hope has not carried me too
far. We must return to the truth on which we were
dwelling, and see how in this life of the ministry, the
richest in experiences, the law of the evening and
the morning, the law of the enfolding and unfolding
of experience, especially applies. No life, I think,
more than the ministry has a true continuousness, and
yet none more distinctly divides itself into periods,
each of which unfolds into new activity the expe-

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 341
rience which has been enfolded by the period which
went before. It goes back almost to the beginning
of the life. First came the personal religious history,
before the boy had begun to think of ministries or
rectorships. The early touching of the nature by
the grace of God, the first mysterious knowledge of
the greatness of the world and of the Sonship to the
Father that gathered itself into a focus and revealed
a " call to the ministry," the only call which has any
true significance or value, the earnest desire to bring
Christ to men and men to Christ, the " Woe is me, if
I preach not the Gospel." The call to the ministry
completely recognized opened the long and happy
time of education, the search for truth and the discov
ery from year to year of the subtile and rich corre
spondences of truth with the soul of man. Education
in this special phrase of it being completed, then
came ordination, the ever-remembered day, separate
always among all the days of life, in which the young
man brought all that he had and was, and gave it to
the service of his Lord. It is not a day merely, — it
is a stage in the career. It is not a point only, but
a period, so clear a series of spiritual activities does
it include, — recognition, gratitude, humility, submis
sion, privilege. It is like the sunrise as it stands
between the dawning and the day. Then comes the
earliest ministry, — that which our church means to
express by the Diaconate, — that first delighted awe
struck touch upon the souls of fellow-men. What
minister ever forgets it ? To what minister does it
not stand forever separate and distinct? All that
first ministry expands then into the richness of a

342 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
full Priesthood, — those broad glorious days of the
noontime of life, when, rector, pastor, servant, friend,
the minister goes in and out among the people with
a recognized right which yet never loses his sense of
his own privilege nor his reverence for their sacred-
ness, and sees them in their joys and sorrows, by
their joys and sorrow, ripen and deepen through the
grace of God. There is nothing to compare in rich
ness with those years in any life of any man, and yet
the end has not been reached. Another unfolding
comes as the minister's life attains its full maturity,
and at last he stands a veteran, perhaps in the same
parish where once he stood a boy, and a new in
fluence goes forth from him, which is the power of
all the enfolded experience of all the finished years.
" At evening time it shall be light." That promise,
which has been again and again fulfilled for him,
finds its completest fulfilment at the end.
Is there not here a most remarkable power of
renewal ? Does not each evening open into its morn
ing with ever fresh vitality? It never ends, — the
minister never retires from the ministry, and is a
minister no longer. His ministry changes and en
larges, but never dies. Our Bishop Williams in
Japan gives up the cares of his Episcopate, but it is
only that he may go on with all his rich experience
into some native village and begin again, burying
himself like a seed that has in it all the packed rich
ness of the sunshine in which it has ripened. " The
man was above forty years old, upon whom this
miracle was showed." So cries the author of the
Book of Acts in wonder as he sees Peter and John

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 343
heal the lame man at the Gate of the Temple. Upon
the ministry of forty years still comes new influence.
It never loses the capacity of newness. It is ever
receptive. It is never dead. " Thy raiment waxed
not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell those
forty years." That is not merely a record of the past
demanding gratitude. It is a prophecy of the future
bestowing hope. At the very end comes Pisgah, the
mountain of the evening and the morning. The
Desert lies behind, — the Promised land before.
The servant of the Lord sees for the people of the
Lord here on the earth great regions of faith and fife
into which he cannot lead them, into which they
will not enter till he has passed away. He is thank
ful for them. And for himself the old servant of
the Lord catches dim inspiring glimpses of an unin
terrupted and ever-deepening service which he shall
render to his God in the unseen world, of a ministry
which shall be his privilege forever, — and so he is
content, thankful, and hopeful.
Thus I have asked you to think to-night upon the
ever-renewing power of all good life, and especially
of the life of the Christian Minister. I will not close
till in a few last words I beg you to remember what
is the secret of that power of renewal. It is the per
sistency, the eternity of God. Not the minister's life
nor any other life renews itself. The life which has
nothing but itself to drink of dries up. It is only
as it draws forever of the timeless and eternal life
that any life gets freshness and perpetual renewal.
If I am right in what I have been saying to you, and
the life of the ministry has this special power of re-

344 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY.
newal, it is solely because it dares to stand, because
in some sense it is compelled to stand, in peculiarly
intimate and conscious relationship with the eternal
God. The ministry which is not near to God, and
tries to subsist upon itself, lives feebler and dies
quicker than any other work of man. But it is not
only on the ministry that there rests this necessity.
All life which would not grow stale and monotonous
must feed itself from God. All life which would
make to-day the transmutation place where yester
day shall give its power to Forever must be full of
the felt presence, of the love and fear of Him in
whom yesterday, to-day, and forever all are one.
I beg you, oh, my friends, if sometimes you are
trembling at the possible degeneracy and drying up of
your life as you grow old, to see that here is your
salvation. Fasten your life to God, and it must be
young with his perpetual youth ; it must be forever
renewed in Him. Remember how He promised by
His prophet that " They who wait on the Lord shall
renew their strength." Only the soul which waits
on Him knows such renewal. It cannot conceive
of, certainly it cannot dread, senility. It sees in its
vision perpetual renewal securing perpetual youth to
all eternity. It lays down each task to take up a
greater. It goes out of each room to enter into a
larger. It sees each evening set, only to turn in
stantly and look for a new sunrise. To us, whatever
be our life, may life be that! Then thankfulness
and expectation shall meet in every crystal moment.
At every moment we shall say as Christ said, both
"I have glorified thee. I have finished the work that

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 345
thou gavest me," and also, " Now, oh Father, glorify
thou me with thine own self." To be able to say
the two together is to hold Evening and Morning
blended together in one great Day of the Lord.
Such lives which cannot die, may it be given to us
all to live!

XX.
FOREIGN MISSIONS.
" And He said unto them : * Go ye into all the world and preach
the Gospel to every creature.' " — Mark xvi. 15.
Once more, this morning, these old familiar words
press forward and demand our hearing. Once more
the Master stands with His disciples on the Mount
of Olives, and, looking abroad over the wide earth,
claims it all for Himself. As we look upon the pict
ure, two other mountain scenes rise up before us,
and we recognize that they belong to the same spirit
ual world with this. First we see Moses on Mount
Pisgah looking into the promised land which he
might not enter with his people, but into which they
should carry the spirit and the strength and the laws
and the hopes which he had given them. So Jesus
could not go in bodily presence into Christian his
tory. He cpuld not visibly lead down the centuries
the ever-increasing army of His disciples. Some
times we wonder how it would have been had that
been possible. What would the Christian ages have
been if, somewhere on the earth, there had lived on
the bodily presence of the Incarnate Christ. So the
Jews, conquering Canaan, must sometimes have
stopped in weary march or furious battle and said to
one another, " O for a sight of Moses ! " but it was
better for them, and it is better for us, as God or
dained it.

FOREIGN MISSIONS. 347
The other picture is the mountain of the Lord's
temptation. There, at the beginning of His ministry,
Satan had said to Jesus, " All these kingdoms of the
earth will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and
worship me ! " Now, standing upon the Mount of
Olives, Jesus saw how good it was that He refused
the tempter. Behold, they were His without Satan,
His by the gift of His father and the redemption of
His cross. It was as if He took formal possession of
them when He spoke these words, " Go ye into all
the world and preach the Gospel to every creature."
We must give these words their full and pictur
esque importance before we can rightly treat them as
declaring Christ's idea and purpose for His Gospel.
When we do thus conceive them, they make us see
Him standing and surrounding the whole vast circle
with one sweep of prophecy. He asserts, not inci
dentally and casually, but most deliberately and
solemnly, that His Gospel is to be preached to all the
world. These disciples and their successors are to
do it.
When we hear of a determination or a purpose of
the divine Christ, we must remind ourselves how
much it means. It is not merely a resolution of His
will, — it is also a declaration of the necessity of
things. God resolves that which must be. His de
crees of what shall be, are really announcements of
what is. His knowledge and His will are not, as
they are with us, two things, — they are but one.
When, then, Christ says to His disciples, " This Gos
pel of mine is to cover all the world," He is really
declaring that the nature of His Gospel is universal.

348 FOREIGN MISSIONS.
It is such that only in covering the world does it
fulfil its being. We are forever trying to make the
universal partial, and to make the partial universal.
We tug and stretch and pull to make that which has
in it only the capacity for some service broad enough
and long enough to overspread that for which it is
all incompetent, and so it cracks and breaks. On
the other hand, we try to narrow and fold some great
principle or power and set it to little uses which are
not worthy of it, and so " to partly give up what is
meant for mankind." There is no such folly in the
adaptations which God makes when He says, " O
wind, go blow ; O sun, go shine unto the uttermost
parts of heaven or earth," — it is because there is in
wind or sun an energy which only the uttermost
parts can satisfy. When He builds around some life
a narrow wall, and bids it work its seventy years in
that small circuit, if the wall which surrounds it is
really of His building, it is because there its concen
trated strength can work its best result. And so
when Christ said, "This my Gospel is for all man
kind," it was an utterance which told of what the
Gospel was as well as of what it was to do. Not
merely its destiny, but its nature, was universal.
When, then, the Christian faith having begun its
life almost immediately began to spread itself abroad,
it was doing two things. It was justifying its Lord's
prophecy, and it was realizing its own nature. There
came at first a moment's pause and hesitation. We
can see in those chapters of the Book of Acts how
for a few years the faith could not quite believe the
story of itself which was speaking at its heart. It

FOREIGN MISSIONS. 349
heavd the ends of the earth calling it, but it could
not see beyond the narrow coasts of Judea. But
the beauty of those early days is the way in which
it could not be content with that. It is not the ends
of the earth calling in desperation for something
which was not made to help them, which had no
vast vocation, which at last started out desperately
to do a work which must be done, but for which it
felt no fitness in itself. The heart of the church
feels the need of going as much as the ends of the
world desire that it should come. It is "deep an
swering to deep ! " He who studies the early ex
pansion of the Christian truth feels himself standing
between a world which must be saved and a Power
of Salvation which must give itself away. The
world is only half conscious of its need. The Power
of Salvation does not understand the tumult at its
heart ; but both are real, and they are reaching out
for one another. And the student of those days
feels the inspiration as he stands between them. It
is like standing between the sun and the earth in the
morning. This is the fundamental meaning, the fundamental
truth of foreign missions. It goes as deep as the
nature of the Gospel. It is written in the necessities
of the human soul. And now comes in another prin
ciple, which is, that when a force meant for a large
expansion is denied the large expansion which its
nature craves, it does not merely fail of the larger
work which it is not allowed to do, but it loses its
best capacity and power in the narrow field to which
it is confined. It is unfortunate that we can never

350 FOREIGN MISSIONS.
speak of foreign missions without remembering and
taking into account the objections to them, the dis
belief in them, which are in many Christian people's
minds. All such objections and disbelief must, as
it seems to me, be met by the broad principle which
I have just now stated. Any arrested development,
any denial to a power, of its true range and scope,
not merely limits it, but poisons it ; not merely shuts
it out of regions where it wants to go, but makes it
work feebly or falsely in the region to which it is
confined. You forbid a limit its right to grow to its true
size, and your stunted limit is apt to be not merely
small, but sickly. You fence a city round with
narrow walls, and, shut in on itself, it festers and
corrupts and fills its crowded streets with misery.
You shut an idea out from all opportunity of appli
cation, and it becomes fantastic and insincere. This
is where cranks and fanatics are made. It is not in
ideas going too far, it is in their being denied some
true and legitimate activity that they become un
healthy. Whatever goes in the direction of its
nature, and is not pressed beyond the power which
it naturally possesses, and is not hindered or ob
structed till its work is done, works healthily, and
neither grows peevish nor grows dead. It is the
fire which you shut in tight that either goes out or
explodes. The glory of liberty is this, that it gives everything
its chance, it lets each thing do that which it was
made to do. To force anything to do that which it
was not made to do is not liberty, though sometimes

FOREIGN MISSIONS. 351
it usurps the name. It is only another slavery. But
the curse of ordinary slavery is the curse which be
longs to all arrested development. Not merely it
shuts power out of fields which belong to it : it makes
it work feebly or falsely in the fields where it is un
naturally confined.
This has always been true in the history of the
Christian Church, wherever its outward tendency,
its missionary activity, has been hampered, its inward
life has suffered. Perhaps there has been no illustra
tion of this more striking than right here in our
own New England. The Puritans who came first to
our shores were deeply, overwhelmingly religious
men. They came here for religious purposes. Their
minds were always busy with religious problems.
Their souls were eager with the passion for spiritual
growth. They tried to live, they did live, very near
to God; but they had little immediate missionary
spirit. They expected the ultimate submission of the
world to Christ, but they felt themselves summoned
to very little instant action coward the great result.
Their thought was more intensive than extensive
in its character. Except where the irrepressible pity
of Eliot and his companions touched the Indian life
they may be said to have had no missionary work.
There is much to account for the fact in their history
and their circumstances, but the fact is clear.
And what was the result ? The arrested develop
ment of that intense religious life wrought its inevi
table consequence. You all know something of what
a confusion of intricate, complicated, and practically
^comprehensible dogma the New England theology

352 FOREIGN MISSIONS.
became. The endless discussion of fantastic ques
tions occupied a large part of the people's thought.
The minute and morbid study of their spiritual
conditions distorted and tormented anxious souls.
Strange theories of the atonement grew like weeds.
A willingness to be lost was made the dreadful con
dition of salvation. Heresies sprang out of the soil
where orthodoxy lay corrupt and almost dead. It
was the sad fate of a religious life denied its due de
velopment and shut in on itself.
It was not till this century began, not till at
Williamstown, behind the summer haystack, the little
group of students consecrated themselves to the ex
tension of the Gospel ,- not till the missionary spirit
took possession of the New England churches, that
the mists began to scatter and a healthier condition
began to prevail in religious thought and life. The
old intensity we fain would see again, but not exactly
as it was. If the extensive impulse shall go forth
unhindered, there must be a new intensity in time
which shall be better than the old. Already we think
we begin t6 see some of its signs. They make us
dream of what it may be in the fulness of its power.
And every sign it shows, every dream which we dream
concerning it, connects it closely with the missionary
spirit, with the sending of the Christian Gospel abroad
throughout the world.
I must not linger long upon my way to bid you
think how true all this is with respect to the per
sonal and individual religious life. A man is made a
Christian by the grace of God, and for what? Not,
as we have said a thousand times, to get him into

FOREIGN MISSIONS. 353
heaven, but in order that through him, the grace of
God may go abroad and some piece of the world be
saved. Let the new Christian give himself to that
idea, and how the religious life thrives in him ! How
healthily, how vigorously it grows ! How it bears
witness of itself at every moment that it is the soul's
true life ! Let it lose that idea and think of itself
alone, and two results must follow : first, regions of
life which ought to have been blessed by it go with
out their blessing ; and, second, the spirit of selfish
ness takes possession of the faith itself. Hardness,
uncharitableness, bigotry, fantasticalness, that which
I think one comes to dread more and more in religion,
the loss of simplicity, the loss of humanness, which
means the loss of divineness : these invade the precious
substance of the man's religion. It is possible to state
what occurs in various ways. It is possible to say
that the Christian neglects his duty and God punishes
him. It is also possible to say that the outgoing flood
of life is stopped and hindered and thrown back upon
the soul, which, overwhelmed by it, is like the dreary
marsh over which the stagnant water spreads itself,
which ought to be energetically pressing out to sea.
I like to state the case under this latter form, be
cause it seems to assert the truth, that missions are
not an occasional duty, but the essential necessity
of Christian life. It is not an exceptional enterprise
to which man is occasionally summoned, it is the
fundamental condition without which man cannot
live. It is not like an army summoned once or twice
a century to repulse a special foe, feeling itself un
natural, expecting from the moment of its enlist-

354 FOREIGN MISSIONS.
ment, the time when it shall lay down its arms and
go back to the works of peace. It is like the daily
activity of the city, taken up naturally every morn
ing, constituting the normal expression of the city's
life, never to cease while the city lives, the pulse
which shows at any moment what degree of vitality
the city has, — such is the missionary spirit to the
Christian Church.
Of all I have been saying there has been one great,
ever-instructive illustration in history which is the
experience of the Hebrew race. Have you ever
thought how exactly the modern Christian who " does
not believe in foreign missions " corresponds to the
Jew of the Old Testament? He has not indeed the
excuse and self-explanation which the best Jews had.
He does not say to himself as they said, that it is for
a purpose and a deliberate design of God that his
religion is shut up in himself and forbidden to go
abroad. But, without the excuse or explanation, his
condition is exactly the same as that of the old Jew.
His is a perfect modern Judaism. Look at him. Con
scious of privilege, perfectly aware that God has
given to him truth and light which are inestimably
precious, holding the tables of a divine law in his
sanctuary, feeling the illumination of a divine wisdom
burn in the jewels of his breastplate, he is perpetually
aware of how his life belongs to God, and, looking
forth from the observatory of his privilege, he sees
the whole dark world. Sometimes he pities it, some
times he despises it, sometimes he almost hates it.
We can see each of those three emotions, now one
and now another, in the wonderfully distinct, ex-

FOREIGN MISSIONS. 355
pressive face of the Hebrew which looks out from
the wondrous Book.
This modern Hebrew sometimes recognizes how
the same spirit which is clear and strong in him shows
signs of faint and feeble working in the great mass
of uncalled, unprivileged humanity, just as the old
Jew could not always shut his eyes and ears to the
working of the Spirit of God among the Gentiles.
Sometimes he hears the beating of the waves on their
restriction, and catches glimpses of some possible
day when they will break through and claim the
world ; but, for the present, now, he is here and the
world is there, — the river on this side and the sea on
that side shut him in. He will not cross either of
them to find those who lie beyond. He prays his
prayers, and they are real prayers , he believes his
truths, and they are real truths ; he does his tasks,
and they are real tasks, — but what is the spiritual
life of the Esquimaux among his snows, or the Asi
atic in his jungle, is nothing in the world to him.
The very question smites his ear with no reality.
This is our Judaism ! Do you remember Peter on
the housetop at Joppa? Can you not see that
stanch, sturdy Hebrew figure stepping eagerly along
the road to Cesarea after he had seen the vision?
Can you not hear the words which come pour
ing out of his lips as he stands at last in the presence
of the listening heathen, " God hath shown me
that I should not call any man common or unclean " ?
There is a delight full of surprise, " A wonderful
truth," he seems to say, "and yet how strange
that I did not see it all the while. How strange

356 FOREIGN MISSIONS.
that I ever should have imagined that God could
think any of his children unclean or common ! " So
we all feel when our Judaisms at last break open.
So we look out on a new life and are amazed that the
old life ever satisfied us. So the Christian, made
the missionary, seems for the first time to have
known what his faith really is.
I have said that when, with the arrest of its devel
opment released, the Christian faith goes forth in
missionary effort, part of the blessing which results
is the increase of health and life in the home Chris
tianity out of which the missionary impulse starts.
No part of that return of power is more valuable
than the way in which the personalness of the relig
ious life is kept alive. Do you see what I mean?
The ordinary long-established Christianity tends to
organization. It loses the person in the institution.
It seems to trust to forces which have little of in
dividual freedom. It runs to machinery. But the
great truth which missionary history bears witness
to is that all missionary effort must be supremely
personal. It is not an institution, but a man, that
hears the appeal of Macedonia and sails across the
sea. From Paul all the way down through all the
ages it is a line of shining persons, each kindled with
his own faith, each working in his own way, that
makes the continuity of missions. They own the
church; they are the church. But they are the
church n that personal expression of its strength
which always has been and always will be the most
real and powerful. The shutting up, then, of
missionary activity is the deadening of the per-

FOREIGN MISSIONS. 357
sonal life of the church. The non-missionary church
is the most hide-bound in creed and organization.
As we bear this in mind, our eyes and hearts
become impatient for a sight they long to see. It
is not simply a waking up of the church in a
missionary direction that we covet; it is not
simply the opening of stingy pockets and the pouring
out of vast wealth, — it is the want of men; it is the
standing forth of brave young Christian souls saying,
" I want to go. My message burns upon my lips
until I tell it. Send me ! " Are there none here ?
The choicest and the best are none too good. Are
there none here ? I tell you, friends, the foreign mis
sionary work waits for nothing but that strong, first-
rate, leading men, full of the simple faith that God
is the world's Father, and Christ is the world's King
— the missionary work only needs them to show its
strength, to claim the souls of waiting multitudes to
the world's end, and the abundant confidence and
support of Christians here at home. Whenever such
a man has appeared, his power has been wonderful.
Men, far inferior, have done enough to show through
all their failures what a great missionary might ac
complish. That he will come, the Christian heart
believes and waits.
Until he comes the church goes on obedient to
her idea, keeping the field open for his coming.
Here is the real uncertainty of foreign missions.
No man can say when the true missionary will ap
pear. It is not by boards and committees and estab
lishments that the Gospel of Christ is ultimately to
be spread throughout the world. Only by fiery-

358 FOREIGN MISSIONS.
hearted preachers of the truth and workers in the
cause of Christ can that be done. Just as it is not
by schools and academies, but by great minds, great
thinkers, great discoverers, great scholars, that knowl
edge makes vast advances and ignorance is dispelled.
But schools and academies hold fast the ground
which has been gained, keep the ideas of learning
vivid, and furnish the cradles out of which the great
creative geniuses proceed. So all our ordinary mis
sionary operations furnish the basis for great personal
work, tempt and make possible the strong efficiency
of ardent souls, and occupy that which the pioneer
has won with the strong grasp of permanent posses
sion. But never can we forget that it is not by machin
eries or institutions, but only by human natures, only
by men, that any great victory of light over darkness,
of truth over error, is achieved. Therefore we pray
and look and long for men. Let them appear, and
all the apparatus of work may be most primitive and
incomplete, still the work will be done. Let them
be wanting? and with the most perfect apparatus there
is no result. Institutions embody ideas and offer
opportunities and hold results, but only men do the
world's work. Very interesting, very precious is the
church as an organization, with its history, its order,
its symbols, and its forms ; but " how beautiful upon
the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good
tidings, that publisheth peace ! "
As a religion becomes more deep and spiritual, the
preservation of its essential spirit will of course be
come at once more difficult and more important; and

FOREIGN MISSIONS. 359
if, as I have all along been saying, the effectiveness
of a faith depends upon the absoluteness with which
its spirit is preserved, there will possibly enough
come times when an inferior faith may seem at least
to do a work in which the supreme faith of Chris
tianity appears to fail. This, as I take it, is the real
fact regarding that of which much has been said in
certain quarters very lately. It has been declared
that Islam, the religion of Mohammed, is making
great progress both in India and in Africa, where
Christianity moves very slowly. It is ever pleaded
that perhaps only by a previous conversion to
Mohammedanism can the lowest forms of heath
enism mount gradually to the spiritual heights of
Christian faith. It is not easy to learn what the
exact facts are; but if, as it is probable, the lower
faith makes converts where the higher fails, it is
not because the higher is too high, certainly not
because it is less true, but because it needs stronger
men with purer inspirations, and those it has not
found. Let the divine flame of the love of Christ
the Crucified and of all His Father's children for
His sake burn as intensely in a thousand bosoms as
the fanatical enthusiasm of the prophet blazes in a
thousand swords of his disciples, and the victory
cannot be doubtful. That is the temporary weak
ness of Christianity which must be its final strength,
that it can fight with no false weapons, and is strong
only in proportion as it is pure. Not by an Islam
Christianity of terror, but by a true Christianity of
love the struggle must be carried forward and the
victory finally obtained.

360 FOREIGN MISSIONS.
The close association of the quality of Christi
anity with its quantity, if I may so call it, of the
sort in which it exists at the centre with the power
which it exerts at the ends, gives great importance,
from the missionary point of view, to every change
of thought and feeling which Christian faith under
goes where it has longest been established.
In general, it may be said that there are two great
conceptions of that faith, within one of which or the
other all lesser differences may be included. One of
them makes Christ and His religion to be unnatural
to man ; the other counts them most supremely
natural. I do not now argue which is true. I doubt
not there is truth in both ; I doubt not there are
points of view from which the whole idea of incar
nation and redemption may have its value in its
strangeness, may seem to bring as its appeal, in virtue
of its being a terrible necessity, an awful and almost
violent remedial interference with the headlong
ruin of a rebellious world ; I doubt not that there
is another point of view from which the coming and
the work of "Christ must seem to be the flower of all
hopes and struggles which humanity has had from
the beginning, " the Desire of all Nations," the most
natural, perhaps the inevitable utterance of that
Divinity, which has always been in and under human
life, made violent and tragical in its manifestation
only by the false crust of inhuman sin and selfishness
through which the divine fire was compelled to
break. I do not now argue which of these conceptions of
Christianity is true. I only ask myself, with the

FOREIGN MISSIONS. 361
second of them so largely, so more and more largely,
occupying men's devout and thoughtful minds, what
will be the effect on Christian missions ? I ask
myself, and I cannot doubt the answer. That mis
sions will fail because one aspect of Christian truth,
deep, tender, strong, has claimed the Christian heart
out of which missionary impulse must proceed, I
cannot for a moment think. That truth which, just
so far as it is true, enlarges the sympathy of man,
breaks down the walls of self-conceited privilege, and
makes the lowest true shareholders in the highest,
— that truth cannot by any possibility paralyze, it
must by every certainty invigorate, the outgoing
energy of missionary zeal. It may, it must, change
and modify and color, but it cannot destroy, the mis
sionary spirit.
If we believe that, then we may well put to our
selves the questions, — and with the putting of these
questions we shall be ready to close our missionary
thoughts and pass to our missionary offering, — we
may well put to ourselves, I say, the questions,
What has the simpler, broader, and more natural
Christianity to say to the missionary ? what to the
heathen? what to the false and imperfect faiths?
And what will it expect as the result of missionary
work? What will it say to the missionaiy ? It will say,
" Go, like your Master, not to judge, but to redeem
and save. Go, not with threats of what will come
without your Gospel, but with glowing promise of
what may come with it. Go, and make men be, by
teaching that they are, the sons of God. Go simply,

362 FOREIGN MISSIONS.
naturally, not 'carrying Christ' across the sea, but
knowing well that you cannot find any darkest spot
on earth where He is not already."
What shall it say to the heathen ? " Whom ye
ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you. The
life you are living is not your true life. You are
made for the light. Behold the Light of Life ! Let
Him redeem you. Lo ! through the awful cross He
saved you, if you will be saved from death."
What will it say to the false and imperfect faiths ?
"I cannot hate you. I cannot denounce you, save as
the evil of man has mixed itself with your truth. I
reverence you ; I pity you ; I would interpret you
to yourself. It is my Christ that you are feeling for.
Come, let us seek for Him together."
What will it look for as the result ? A great free
service of Christ throughout the world. Each con
tinent, each nation, each soul, serving the same Lord
in its own way, with its own worship, its own work.
One chorus of obedience and growing goodness in
a thousand tones, swelling up forever from the re
deemed Earth to the King and to the Lamb.
The truth which carries such messages and has
such hopes as those must be dear to God's heart, and
is a noble truth for men to believe in and live by.
But, after all our thoughts and speculations, may
God give us pity for the heathen, and help us to
send to them that Gospel which is our Glory and
Joy I