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YALE
DIVINITY SCHOOL
LIBRARY

Gift of
The Reverend Burton MacLean

THE MIND OF CHRIST
IN ST. PAUL

THE MIND OF CHRIST
IN ST. PAUL

BY THE REV

J. G. GREENHOUGH, M.A.
AUTHOR OF "THE APOSTLES OF OUR LORD," "THE CROSS IN MODERN
LIFE," ETC.

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Yale Div nity Library
New V w\, C-?n%

Printed by Eaiell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, England.

PREFACE
The discourses which make up this volume are a
comparatively small selection from sermons numer
ous enough to fill many volumes, which, in the
course of a long ministry, have been suggested by
the character, teaching, and ministry of St. Paul.
They indicate, therefore, in part, yet very in
sufficiently, the measure of my indebtedness to
the great Apostle ; and the desire to render some
feeble acknowledgment of the debt has been one,
and by no means the least, of the motives prompt
ing and urging to their publication. It is the fashion
in certain circles, and especially in the more critical
schools of Christian thought, to speak in dubious
and disparaging terms of St. Paul's teaching, and
to represent his authority and influence as things
of the past. The fashion is not a new and hitherto
unheard-of thing ; it has often appeared and held
its own for a day in the course of Christian history,
and always with the same result, that it has not

vi PEEFACE
shaken the confidence of the Church in the in
spiration of St. Paul, but rather confirmed his
rightful position as the great interpreter of the
Master. Christ is never more the central figure
of our faith, never more the supreme object of
our reverence and love, than when we sit at
St. Paul's feet and learn of him ; for, above all
preachers, he is the one who hides himself behind
the message, and preaches not himself, but Christ
Jesus the Lord. We forget the earthen vessel
as the glory of the divine treasure which it
holds shines through. In studying St. Paul we
are always reading the mind of Christ, and in
hearing his words we never cease to be under the
spell of that voice which spake as never man
spake. To think that there is any antagonism, com
petition, or even comparison between the Master
and His servant is both an irreverence and an
absurdity. To suggest that we must have less of
St. Paul in order to have more of Christ is a gross
misunderstanding of the relationship between the
two, and of the whole position. St. Paul, at his
best, can never be more than a feeble reflector of
his Lord, borrowing whatever of luminous beauty
his life shows from the majestic splendour of Him

PEEFACE vii
who is the Light of the world. St. Paul's one
purpose in life was to exalt the Master, and his
writings have invariably served that purpose,
except when they have been misconstrued and
perverted. Wherever St. Paul has had his due
place given him in the Church, Christ has been
more fully preached and magnified by the Church ;
and those who begin by making less of him
generally conclude by making somewhat little of
Christ. The cry which in recent years has gone up
from thoughtful Christians of every communion,
" Back to Christ," is one which all Christian hearts
will echo and approve provided that they are
allowed to interpret the expression in a way that
will not violate some of their most cherished beliefs.
If it means that we are to go back from abstruse
theologies, metaphysical creeds, and rigid doctrinal
systems and schools, to the great simplicities which
are in Christ, be it so ! We say heartily, Amen !
But if it means that we are to set aside the
Epistles as of little value, and find our Christ
wholly in the four Gospels, or perhaps in three
of them ; if it means that we are to get behind
St. Paul, as if he obstructed the vision, to see the
veritable Jesus as He lived and moved among

viii PEEFACE
men and wrought out His mission, — we indignantly
demur and protest that the Christian faith would
gain nothing, but would lose immensely, by such
a destructive process of selection.
The Epistles were the outcome of an inspiration
not inferior in degree to that which guided the
compilation and composition of the evangelical
records, and they are hardly less necessary to the
understanding of Christ and the Christian life in
their manifold bearings ; and St. Paul, though he
added nothing to those simple and sublime nar
ratives of our Lord's ministry which have fixed
the matchless Figure indelibly in our minds, yet
was enabled to take a more comprehensive grasp
of the meaning and purpose of it all than was
possible to those who were occupied with the
lovely and fascinating details of it. Greatness is
never truly measured and judged as it passes by.
It needs to be viewed from some little distance
and in what may be called the after-light. St.
Paul had the advantage of this distance and this
after-light as well as a peculiar enlightenment
given for the special purpose, and the image of
Christ as he saw it has a certain magnitude both
of height, breadth, and depth which we hardly find
elsewhere, save perhaps in the pages of St. John.

PEEFACE ix
St. Paul has given us, above all the other inspired
writers, the significance of our Lord's death, the
purport and power of our Lord's resurrection, and
the mighty, far-reaching after-effects of His as
cended life and abiding presence in the Church and
the world. To St. Paul we owe an incalculable
debt for his application of Christ's teachings to the
relationships and business of ordinary life. From
him we get the Christian view of marriage and
domestic life, of parental and filial obligations,
and of the respective duties and claims which are
binding on masters and servants. His words fall
with illuminating force on some of our greatest
modern problems. From him we learn much about
the duties of citizenship, and something about the
authority and limits of government. We learn
still more about the truths which are contained
in Individualism and Socialism, and how the two
are reconciled. He anticipates all our great
modern thoughts about the solidarity of the
human race, the fraternity of nations, and the
evolution of society and collective humanity
into nobler forms ; and he has told us all that we
know about the Church, its constitution, its pur
pose, its large place in the mind of Christ, and its
glorious destiny. In fact, it is not less of St. Paul

x PEEFACE
we need, but more, and certainly more of the Paul
whom the Master knew. The cry " Back to
Christ" might well be followed by another — "Back
to St. Paul " ; back from the hard and unlovely
doctrines which have often been given forth in
his name, to the great, broad-minded, tender
hearted teacher who has enriched our Christian
ideas and sympathies beyond all computation.
With this end in view the present volume has
been prepared, and I reverently and humbly lay
it at the feet of the Divine One who made St. Paul
all he was.
THE AUTHOE.

CONTENTS PAET I
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL

I
PAGE
The Glory of the Blessed God .... 3

II
Some op the Fundamental Things. . . .17
III
The Great Purpose op the Incarnation . . 27
IV
The Liberty which Christ gives .... 38

xii CONTENTS

V PAGE
The Inseparable Love of God .... 47

VI
The Stability op Faith . . . . 56
VII
The Name which is above Every Name . . 65
VIII
The Things which God reveals to Them that
love Him ........ 77
IX
St. Paul's Conception of the Church ... 86
X
The Glory and Power op the Gospel ... 97

CONTENTS xiii
PAET II
THE GREAT THOUGHTS OF ST. PAUL
XI

PAGE

The Great Human Brotherhood .... 107
XII
The Unlimited Possessions of the Christian Life 121
XIII
Foreknowledge and Predestination . . .130
XIV
Two Estimates of Foolishness . . . .139
XV
The Opening op the Eyes  148
XVI
The Higher Opportunism  156

xiv CONTENTS XVII
PAGE
The True Optimism  165
PAET HI
ST. PAUL'S PICTURES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
XVIII
The Burden op our Earthly Tabernacle . .177
XIX
The Joy of Possession and the Pains op Longing 185
XX
An Epistle of Christ  194
XXI
St. Paul's Universals  203
XXII
The Fruit of the Spirit  212

CONTENTS xv

XXIII
PAGE
The Witness of the Life  221

XXIV
Peace in Warfare  230

PAET IV
ST. PAUL— THE MAN AND HIS CALLING
XXV
Obedience the Secret of Greatness . . .241
XXVI
The Resistance of the Half-convinced . .250
XXVII
Life's Main Ends  259
XXVIII
The Privilege and Joy op Service . . . 268

xvi CONTENTS

XXIX
PAGE
Faith on its Practical Side  276

XXX
The True Independence  284
XXXI
The Cry of Human Insufficiency and the Answer
to it  293
XXXII
The Ideals which fail and never fail . . 302

PART I
THE GOSPEL ACCOEDING TO ST. PAUL

CHAPTEE I
THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD
" The Gospel of the glory of the blessed God, which was com
mitted to my trust." — 1 Tim. i. 11.
We read with some hesitation the Eevised Version.
It robs us of that familiar and much-loved phrase
" The glorious Gospel," and we do not let it go
without a twinge. We are as conservative with
regard to old phrases as we are of old friends, and
reluctant to have them touched with the hand of
change. Yet here we need not lose a sentiment
in gaining a larger truth. It is not less the
" glorious Gospel " because it is the " Gospel of
the glory," the Gospel which declares the glory,
which sets in a living picture, clear and unmis
takable, "the glory of the blessed God." It is
the same thought which the Apostle gives us else
where : " God hath shined in our hearts to give
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ," meaning by " face " all that
can be seen, known, and understood of Jesus.
Supplementing each of these sayings by the
other, we get St. Paul's idea of the glory of God
and of the message which is committed to our
trust. 3

4 THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD
I. We have a brief, comprehensive definition
of the Gospel. It is the unveiling and imaging
forth of God in all that constitutes His glory
and blessedness. It is making all of Him known
that it is possible for human minds to know, and
making Him known especially in the face of Jesus.
St. Paul thought that God's choicest gift to men
was and is a picture of Himself, that the most
comforting and inspiring message which can be
conveyed to men is that which tells them in full,
clear, simple language just what God is, which
unburdens their minds of all misconceptions of
Him, removes from their eyes the veils of priest
craft and the gross films of superstition, and
portrays His dear unseen face in its consummate
and undefiled beauty, so that the weary heart
will find rest in beholding, and the hands quiver
with rapture as they are lifted up in prayer.
To know God, that is life — life eternal. And to
make Him known in the one sufficient way
(through Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the
Life), that is the Gospel. That includes everything
else. There are some, perhaps, who narrow the
word down too much, who see nothing in the
Gospel but a divine sacrifice for sin. But that
is mistaking the centre for the circle, and for
getting that the Cross is a revelation of God
as well as an atonement for man. Yet one
should speak tenderly of these, and even confess
that they are never far from the whole truth —
for to all of us, if we have any real part
in Christ, His death and sacrifice are the un
paralleled fact, the solemnity without fellow, the

THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD 5
mystery which more than all others moves us to
wonder, love, and awe. Out of the darkness of
Gethsemane and Calvary the glory of the Incarna
tion rises, and the rainbow of the world's promise.
The cross is the sunlight of the Christian
system. It illumines and interprets all the
rest, and throws its mystic splendour over all the
rest.
All the light of sacred story
Gathers round its head sublime.
The cross must ever be the dearest part of the
Gospel, because it opens out to us the inmost heart
of God, and appeals to the deepest need in man ;
because, in laying our hands on that, we feel most
certainly the throbbing of His love and pity, and
feel our own throbbings cease. Thus in the
largest sense all preaching of the Gospel is a
preaching of the cross; for all right thoughts of
God have a cross somewhere in the heart of them ;
all right thoughts of God have the face of a
tearful, suffering Christ looking out from the
mystery of them. In searching for God, whether
in nature, providence, or Scripture, we must
go with the cross in our hands for a key. That
alone is the " open sesame " which will admit
us to the hidden treasure-chambers of the great
King. Yet all this, as you will see, only emphasises
St. Paul's great thought that the purpose of the
Gospel is to make God known in the largest,
widest sense. For everything depends on that.

6 THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD
Our conception of God determines or moulds our
views of nearly everything else. All our thoughts
of life and duty and of our fellow-men, of the
world present and the world to come, grow out of
that. If there be no clear light shining down from
above the clouds there will be nothing seemly or
beautiful under the clouds. What the eye sees
when it looks upward is, in the main, what it sees
when it looks earthward. The world below is a
dim reflection of the God whom faith beholds or
fears create. Men are, or tend to become, for the
most part what they think heaven is. For each
man there must be a new heaven before there can
be a new earth, and He who sits upon the throne
must make all things new by showing Himself as
the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.
That is the main purpose of the Gospel, then — to
give to all the world right, sweet views of God ; to
show us ourselves and all human things in the
all-interpreting light of His unveiled face ; to
make us know that omnipotence is Love written
large, and that He who rules our lives is one
in whom our best desires can find their satis
faction, in whom all our throbbings, searchings,
tremblings, and aspirations can have perfect
rest. And this thought is enforced by what
follows :
II. Our Gospel is the Gospel of the glory ; and
the glory of God is in the face of Jesus, which
means that the face of the Incarnate One portrays
for us the beauty of God. His tears are the lenses
through which the divine compassions shine ; His
words are the earthly translation of Heaven's

THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD 7
deepest and sweetest thoughts ; His suffering love
is the express image of the eternal throne. Look
ing on the all-round figure of Jesus, from the hour
of His mysterious birth to the moment of His
triumphant ascension, we are beholding, as in a
glass, the very glory of God. There is no word
in the New Testament which ought to bring to
us more gracious suggestions than this. The glory
of Goal — alas ! there is hardly any other word in
the Christian vocabulary which has had such a
sad history, which has been so unhappily perverted
and misunderstood. 0 glory of God, what crimes
have been committed in thy name ! In this name
the sword of the persecutor has been drawn, and
martyrs' fires kindled, and valiant souls been left
to rot in dungeons, and saintly lives tortured on
the gibbet and the rack, and earnest seekers after
God hunted to madness and to death. With this
name the Inquisition sealed all its atrocious orders,
and pope, priest, and bigot defended all their
infamies. Nay, the very prince of darkness, going
forth with this lamp stolen from God's temple and
grinning under his masked visage, has turned the
world into a hell ad majorem dei gloriam — for the
greater glory of God. And all this because men
went everywhere except to the face of Jesus to
find what the glory of God meant. They made it
an ugly nightmare, and even a vampire, when it
ought to have been a vision of perfect loveliness,
a sweetness most ineffable, a thought too deep for
tears. It is that to us now because we see it again
where St. Paul saw it — in the face we love best.
Jn that face stripped of all its priestly veils and

8 THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD
wrappings, seen as it once moved among men,
with all its pathetic tenderness, its holy indigna
tions, its majestic severities, its consuming zeal
against sin, its soul-subduing pities, and its all-
embracing love ! How beautiful to think that the
glory of God is there ! Not in His incomprehen
sible power, but in the gentleness that stoops like
a mother ; not in the majestic sweep of stars, but
in the lowly walk of a patient sufferer ; not in the
splendour of a throne girt by angel throngs, but in
the humiliation of a cross and the mystery of its
tears. We used to read in the old catechisms that the
chief end of man was to glorify God, and that
God's great purpose in creation and redemption
was to glorify Himself. And possibly we thought
strange thoughts about that, because we had never
been clearly taught, or because we had forgotten
what the glory of God meant. When a man seeks
his own glory as the chief end of life we know
what that means. We say that, in greed of power,
ambition, and self-love he is forgetting every
higher cause and purpose. And perhaps we had
an idea, though we did not dare to confess it, that
the phrase had the same meaning when applied to
the Highest. It seemed to our bewildered minds,
though we should have thought it blasphemy to
utter the word, that a prodigious selfishness was
seated on the eternal throne. But how beautifully
is that riddle cleared up when we bring it to the
light of these words ! The glory of God is in the
face of Jesus. He is glorifying Himself when He
is manifesting Himself, when He is coming out of

THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD 9
the darkness of His immensity to let men see Him
as an incarnate Sufferer ; when He is sharing in
the griefs of men that He may purge them from
their sins ; when He is lighting up the gloomy
places of life with His smile, and pouring into
dreary and desolate hearts His joy. He is glorify
ing Himself when He brings His own purity and
blessedness and offers them to His children. It is
God's magnificent, unmeasured giving of Himself
that constitutes His glory. And when all His
outcast and ignorant children have been gathered
to Him, and He has wiped the tears from their
eyes, and sorrow and sin are done away, or when
at least every one of them shall have had a long,
sweet, fair chance of knowing and loving Him,
then will His glory be complete.
And so we can understand what the Saviour
meant when, through all the tearful agony of
the closing scenes, He cried, and again cried,
"Father, glorify Thy name." It was just a
prayer that the Father would open His heart
of love to the gaze of men, and convince them,
even by a cross, how pitiful and beautiful He
was. And we can understand also why it is for
ever set before us as the great end of life that
we are to glorify God. For what is that but to
reveal God to men? to reveal Him by our own
pure, Christlike lives ? to bear witness of Him ? to
draw virtue from Him, that we may touch and
heal our fellows ? It is to show men the Father,
to lead them to His tear-besprinkled throne,
placing their poor blind souls in His light, laying
their parched lips under the droppings of His

10 THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD
mercy, their leprous skins within the reach of His
healing touch, and to make them feel, as we feel
ourselves, that all Heaven is steeped in tenderness,
and all life flushed with beauty, because a loving
Father's face beams through all. Yes, that word
to " glorify " God should be the most inspiring of
words, for it comes to lighten woes here, there,
and everywhere ; to lift the shrouds and darkness
from the sad, guilty faces of men; to mark the
earth with the tread of saintly feet, and paint
the sky with golden lines of hope, and to make the
world know what the greater part of it has never
yet dreamt of — that God is love, that His throne
is encircled by a rainbow of mercy, tender enough
for a child to lean upon, and that " the glory of
God is in the face of Jesus Christ."
III. Our Gospel is the revelation of "the blessed
God " — yes, if you like to express it in a more
familiar term, of " the happy God " ; though
" blessed " is a far deeper and richer word, hinting
at ecstasies and satisfaction such as happiness
can never know— such as eye hath not seen nor
ear heard. This word has a somewhat strange
origin — " the blessed God." St. Paul, I think, was
quoting it from pagan lips. The heathen writers,
and especially the poets of the Epicurean school,
spoke habitually of " the blessed gods " ; they used
the words, perhaps, with a touch of scorn. The
gods were blessed because they cared not for
mortals, and had no part in the changes, toils,
and sorrows of this struggling world below. They
reclined in golden ease, sipping their nectar, quite
heedless of mankind,

THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD 11
The gods who haunt the lucid interspace of world and
world,
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar their everlasting
calm.
In that sense the sad, pessimistic heathen world
understood the blessed gods — yes, and that speaks
volumes of moral meaning. It was their notion
of human happiness likewise. For what we deem
the joy of God is ever the ideal human joy. As a
man pictures heaven, so he tends to fashion his
own life. The gods were happy because they had
no pains and burdens of their own, and cared not
for the wants and wails of the world beneath
them. So man would be happy if he could fill
his own cup to the brim, and, in drinking, forget
the shames and wounds and miseries of the
unnumbered multitude around. Christ has revolu
tionised all that, swept it away in a flood of
human pity. The hand of the Man of Sorrows
smote upon that chord of inhuman selfishness, and,
trembling, it passed in music out of sight. At least,
no man can think in that way any more while he
keeps before him even the faintest image and
memory of the cross. We still speak of God as
"the blessed God," the infinitely happy God ; but
not happy in that way : only happy in the fulness
of His sympathy with men and His perfect love
of men ; only happy because He takes part, in the
way that Christ has shown, in all their sorrows,
burdens, and hopes. In the very heart of God's

12 THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD
happiness there is a cross ; in the midst of His
calm throne the form of One who has carried
blood-drops all the days of old. Christ has
taught us that the deepest and purest joy comes
throbbing and thrilling along the very chords of
pain ; that it is a pearl set in blood-red jasper,
and that heaven's finest rapture is a circlet of
glory girdling a sea of patient sympathy and all-
enduring hopes. The highest blessedness has
always some suffering love and sympathetic pain.
The notion that men can be blessed simply by
having their own sins forgiven, their souls saved,
and their heaven secure is the old Epicureanism
with a Christian wash. We may feast upon a
banquet which is all our own, and find a sort of
delicious satisfaction in it, but there is none of
the joy of God in that. Only when we feel, deep
down in the midst of our burning gratitude and
gladness, thrills of pain and pity for the world
which has no part in the feast, do we touch the
blessedness of God; that comes only in the way
of intense and urgent sympathy, of sorrow for
the great, guilty multitude, and self-forgetting
efforts to pass on to them our own joy. God is
blessed, not because He forgets men's griefs and
has no part in them, but because He feels them all,
because the Christ heart in Him enters into them
all, because He is ever working to overcome
them all, because His government of the world
is one long travail which He endures for the
joy that is set before Him. He is blessed because
He knows that all things are moving on to one
far-off, golden event, and that His mighty saving

THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD 13
purpose cannot fail. And blessedness can only
come to us as it is in Him. It cannot come except
to those who have the spirit of the cross, who are
co-workers with God and His Christ in the great
mystery of pain and redemption, who fill up
that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ in
labouring for the world and bringing it to His
light and love, and who share with the Almighty
Lover of souls in His absolute certainty about the
final result. They have found the secret of the
Saviour's joy ; they are the happy ones.
O happy if ye labour
As Jesus did for men :
O happy if ye hunger
As Jesus hungered then.
Our Gospel is the revelation of "the blessed God."
IV. And now I have but to remind you again,
as St. Paul does here, of that which is at once an
unspeakable privilege and an imperative duty.
This Gospel is committed to our trust. It is our
own, and it is not ours. To make it ours ex
clusively is to violate the condition on which we
hold it. It is a possession which shrivels up and
disappears in selfish hands. We only keep it by
giving it out freely.
God doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves ; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.
And, indeed, those who really know the Gospel
will for ever feel the imperative which it lays

14 THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD
upon them to spread it. To catch but a passing
vision of the glory of God is to burn for ever
afterwards with zeal to make it known. It be
comes as a fire in the bones, so that we are weary
with forbearing and cannot stay. For its power on
our lives is immeasurable, its joy is all-pervading.
It changes everything when we feel that, because
this glorious, blessed God is everywhere, there is
love everywhere ; when we know that above and
round about us, in the centre of all mystery and
on the throne of all government, behind all that
we can see, behind all the forces which drive us
along, greater than all visible and invisible power,
there is a Heart that suffers with us and for us and
is wonderfully and eternally kind. That know
ledge is the one thing which makes life worth
living, and the one thing also which makes it not
death to die. And if the knowledge is to us so
precious, so joy-giving, so infinitely healing and
restful, what greater privilege can there be, and
what more binding obligation, nay, what more
heart-stirring and soul-expanding rapture than to
help in making this light shine over wider fields
and on hearts that are still chained and blind in
the darkness of the shadow of death ? What
sweeter work for hearts that have any sympathy,
any fellow-feeling with their brother men, than
to hold the lamp up which will show them what
they are all ignorantly groping and sighing for —
a mighty, loving Friend and Saviour in whom all
their throbbing, panting, and weariness will find
perfect rest.
This Gospel is indeed committed to our trust —

THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD 15
ours pre-eminently. Some of us read, not long ago,
a striking article written by a heathen Japanese
on the greatness of England. He spoke about our
imperial greatness in a way that would satisfy the
most exacting British patriot, then he showed
what has given us this greatness. We are debtors
for it, he says, to all the world and to all the ages.
Our climate and our sea-girt island have helped
us, and the mixture of races which make up our
national character. The thoughts of all past
times have enriched our minds. Greece coloured
and shaped our literature, Eome gave us our
laws, Hebrew prophets and apostles gave us our
Scriptures, and an Eastern Christ our religion
and the light in which we walk. " Other men
have laboured, and we have entered into their
labours." And then this writer pointed out that,
according to the immensity of our debt, should be
our sense of responsibility, and that we, above
all nations, should feel that we have a mission
in the world to redeem wrongs, to remove op
pressions, to set the captives free, to spread
righteousness, and make our light shine forth
wherever there is darkness. Some of our scribes
poked fun at this concluding lecture. But I am
not ashamed to sit at the feet of this Japanese
when he speaks such words. For they are such
words as God Himself plainly speaks to us through
all our history and all our privileges. We are
indeed the favoured nation — elect, not for our
sakes, not because of works of righteousness
which we have done, but by His peculiar love
and for a high and solemn purpose. We are

16 THE GLOEY OF THE BLESSED GOD
debtors to Greek and barbarian, bond and free.
We are debtors to all men, but first and peculiarly
to those who form part of our vast empire, to the
millions who own our sway and make our great
ness, the children who sit in darkness, whom God
has committed to us, as to a nursing mother, that
we might lead them in the way of light and life.
They are waiting for our message ; sad and weary
because it has not yet come to them. Nay, the
dark world everywhere is waiting, panting, groan
ing for that which we possess. All its cries of
pain are like a child's cries for it knows not what.
But we do know, because the blessed thing has
come to us and quieted our cries.
The world sits at the feet of Christ,
Unknowing, blind, and unconsoled.
And, may we add :
It soon shall touch His garment's fold,
And feel the Heavenly Alchemist
Transform its very dust to gold.

CHAPTEE II
SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS
" I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye
present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and wellpleasing, which is
your reasonable service." — Kom. xii. 1.
We are still discussing, after nineteen Christian
centuries, what are the essential facts and doctrines
of our religion ; and alas ! the various schools — High
Church, Low Church, Broad Church, and Free
Church — are hopelessly divided on this elementary
question. If we could agree about the fundamentals
we should be practically agreed about everything ;
but we diverge at the outset, and ever get further
apart. Now I am not going to debate that question,
but I should like to emphasise what a great Apostle
thought about it who probably knew the mind of
Christ better than any of our modern disputants,
whether Low Church or High, and the verse which
we have read is a good index to his thoughts.
There he tells us in brief what he regarded as
essential features of our holy faith ; not all of
them, but at least three grand cardinal simplicities,
which are a thousand times more important than
the things commonly wrangled about. The three
things are these : the winsome voice of our
17 2

18 SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS
religion, the great motive to which it appeals, and
the reasonable service which it demands.
I. The winsomeness of its language. " I beseech
you " — St. Paul struck the key-note there. It was
his favourite word — he loved to play on the
gentler notes in presenting Christ to men. His
preaching was predominantly persuasive, pleading,
and tender — predominantly. It did not leave out
the severities. There was the voice of God's wrath
in it sometimes, there were visions of the terrors
of the Lord and of a judgment throne ; but he was
always most at home when he assumed the gentle
ness of a mother. " I beseech you." There is the
sweet ring of that appeal in all his Epistles : " I be
seech you, by the gentleness of Christ " ; "I beseech
you by the compassions of Christ " ; "We beseech
you, as in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God" ;
" I might be bold to enjoin thee, but for love's
sake, I rather beseech thee." We are told that in
preaching he lifted up his hand. We can almost
see that raised hand. It is never a clenched fist -r
it is never shaken m the face of a congregation ; it
is stretched out as if it would lay hold of people
and sweetly constrain them. It quivers with
emotion, and there is the sound of tears in his
voice. " I ceased not," he says, " day and night,
for the space of three years, to warn every one of
you with tears."
Tears and beseechings were the main weapons
which he employed, and therein he interpreted
aright the spirit of our religion and the mind of
the Master. For, of course, he had learned this
magic of beseeching from the Master: he had

SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS 19
believed in very different weapons once. There
was a time when he had tried to drive men into
orthodoxy by haling them to prison and scourging
them in the synagogues ; but a vision of the great,
patient, conquering Sufferer had taken all that
out of him. The ministry of Jesus was steeped in
gentleness ; it was for the most part winsome and
persuasive, very sparing of curses and very lavish
of kisses. It was a ministry of soft touches and
pleading invitations. There was anger, indeed, at
times, more terrible than the forked lightning's
flash ; there were woes pronounced more awful
than the thunders of Sinai ; but it was the very
rarity of these judgment words that made them
more significant and tremendous. He never used
them until everything else had been tried in vain.
He believed that men would be sooner moved by
tears than by terrors. Force would never over
come evil, but love might. It was not by holding
men over the pit of hell, but by distilling upon
them the dews of mercy, that the hard heart would
be melted. Christ wooed men, knelt to them,
appealed to them by the love-light in His eyes. His
invitations were like a mother's. "Why will ye
not come to Me, that ye may have life ? " "I want
to gather you, as a hen gathers her brood under
her wings." " Come to Me, all that are tired and
heavy-hearted, and I will give you rest." It was
all expressed in this word : " I beseech you." Nay,
the deepest meaning of the Incarnation is written
there : it was God's stooping to beseech men.
Christianity is mainly that — mainly, not entirely.
It has a sterner side which we are too much

20 SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS
disposed to ignore in our indiscriminate talk about
God's good-natured indulgence to all. It has an
intense hatred of sin in the heart of it; it has a
background of solemn and inevitable judgment
overshadowing it. Our modern preaching, too,
much forgets that, hides it, or apologises for it, in
the desire to make things comfortable all round.
Yet it is there, like a black frowning rock behind
the clinging vine-tendrils and sweet flowers.
That, too, is one of the fundamental things not
to be set aside. Let us give it a place in our
teaching, though not a large place. But you will
prevail more with the beseechings of Christ. If
you would save men do not scold and threaten, but
woo. Most of you know what wooing means — no
compulsion there ; but the pleading eyes, the
beating heart, the touch of the hand with the
sweet, hot fire of love in it, the pathetic earnestness
which will not take a " No." As a woman is won,
so must the souls of men be won. That is the
winsomeness of our religion. " I beseech you, by
the mercies of God."
II. And we have in that word " mercies" the great
actuating force and persuasive of Christianity.
" The mercies of God." Our religion invites and
provokes us to obedience and service, to pure and
right living, in the name of all that has been done
for us, and all that has been forgiven. We are to
do the will of God, not for the sake of future
reward, or for the escaping of future penalty, but
because of the kindness, forbearance, immeasurable
pity, and sacrificial love which have been bestowed
upon us. " I beseech you therefore" says St. Paul.

SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS 21
It is the conclusion of an argument ; it is the
consequence of certain thrilling antecedents. He
has been narrating in the previous chapters that
heart-moving story of divine pity and condescen
sion which is summed up in the words Incarnation
and Eedemption. He has caused to pass before us
the whole drama, beginning with human guilt and
helplessness, and leading up, through the scenes of
Calvary, to the victory over sin and death, to the
manifestation of the sons of God and the assurance
of life eternal. He has emphasised the cost in
divine love and suffering of our new liberty and
strength, our joy and boundless hope. And then
upon the human heart-strings which he has set
quivering with emotion and gratitude he plays
this touching and subduing note : "I beseech you
therefore, by the mercies of God." And that is
always the most powerful and constraining appeal
of our religion. A Christian life is, above all
things, the response of impassioned gratitude
and obligation to God's sacrificial giving and
forgiving. The emotionless moralist will tell you to do
right for right's sake, because goodness is beautiful
in itself and brings its own reward. And the
stern moralist will advise you to pursue the clean
and righteous course because the other way ends
in a harvest of shame and sorrow. And, of course,
both these voices are heard in the Bible ; they
are both used by the Christian preacher; but
they are low down on the Christian scale, they
have little force in the Christian conscience.
There is no ring of persuasiveness in them, be-

22 SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS
cause there is no emotion and no fire. We never
feel the kindling and the inspiration until we get
to the very furnace, the power-producing furnace
of the Christian life, and that is the soul-enthralling,
love-creating mercies of God in Christ.
You mistake the whole spirit and meaning of
Christianity if you do not put that in the fore
most place among the fundamental things. We
are having presented to us, in a great deal of
popular teaching and especially in the columns
of the Press, a Christianity which virtually leaves
out the Incarnation and the Cross— leaves out,
in fact, the furnace and the driving power of it.
We are told that the moral teaching of Jesus,
and especially the Sermon on the Mount, are
the all-essential and sufficient things ; that they
are Christianity in fact. I deny it, with all
possible vehemence. The Sermon on the Mount is
not Christianity. It is only the moral ideal of the
Christian life, and, though beautiful beyond com
pare, of little worth without some grand spiritual
dynamic behind it It is perfect as a marble
statue is perfect. It only wants the hot breath
and pulsing heart of life and force. The Sermon
on the Mount tells men what they ought to be
and leaves them what they are. It is unworkable
unattainable, and indeed impossible until you get
the dynamic of the Incarnation and the Cross
into it. It is the mercies of God that supply
the moving principle ; it is the condescension of
the incarnate God, the tears and blood-drops
of the redeeming God, that make men ashamed
of wrong-doing and set them striving after the

SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS 23
highest. And you have never got to the heart
of our religion, you have never touched more
than its garment's fold, until you begin to say to
yourselves and others : " I beseech you, by Christ's
humbling in the Incarnation, by the loneliness
and forsakenness by which He offered His perfect
offering, by His priestly sacrifice and the bitter
ness and bleeding anguish of His cross, and by
the Eesurrection which opened the kingdom of
heaven to all believers."
Whatever other fundamentals there are, the
greatest of them is here : " I beseech you, by the
mercies of God."
III. And out of this come the nature and
quality of the service which our religion demands
of us. We are to give a " reasonable " service, a
service which is the logical outcome of so much
mercy and so much kindness. We are to offer
a willing and a living sacrifice. There is a sharp
contrast suggested between the old Mosaic sacri
fices and the new and better sacrifices which the
regenerate soul lays at the Master's feet. In the
one oxen and sheep were dragged and driven
unwilling to the altar, and there slaughtered and
presented as dead things. In the other there is
the offering, not of a dead, unfeeling thing, but
of a whole life, with all its affections and energies,
doing the will of the Lord with the prompt
obedience of love, and quivering in every nerve
with the spirit of joy and willinghood. The
mercies of God call for that one kind of service,
and no other. It is the only service which could
on any pretence be called reasonable. There has

24 SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS
been so much willingness in the mercies that
there must be willinghood in the poor return we
make. Love must be answered by love, for any
other answer only wounds it; any other answer
is an insult. If God were some high and mighty
autocrat, driving us by whip and stern law to do
His bidding, it would be a reasonable service if
we reluctantly and groaningly carried out the
bare letter of His commands, gave Him slavish
worship, avoided only the things peremptorily
forbidden, and did as little of His will and as
much of our own as the hard necessity of the
case allowed. That would be reasonable service,
if our God were an unreasonable despot. Then
we might wear the chains through compulsion,
but we could hardly be expected to fondle and
kiss the chains and wear them with joy gleaming
in the eyes and dancing in the heart. But the
reasonable service which God's loving-kindness
deserves is that of the heart brimming over with
joy, and leaping, with love's swift feet, to obey
Him. Do you think He can be ever pleased with
empty forms, elaborate ritual, ceremonial postures
and bowings, recital of creeds by heartless lips,
sacraments substituted for loving faith, prayers
run through as if they were a penance, choral
performances without a throb of devotion in them ?
Are they reasonable service ? They are illogical,
insulting, a mockery and an offence. Our tender
hearted God must weary of them all. The reason
able answer to the Cross and its redeeming pity
is to lay our entire being, with its wealth of
affections, at God's feet, and to obey and adore

SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS 25
Him with a sweetness most ineffable. The sanc
tuary hour should be all gladness and the outgoing
of love. But the worship of the sanctuary is but
a small item of the living service which we owe.
We call sanctuary worship and church parade
Divine Service, by a strange misapplication of
terms. I know not by what right we call that
service. It is unspeakably beautiful; it is im
measurably helpful ; it is absolutely essential for
the healthy maintenance of the Christian life. I
have not a particle of respect either for the in
telligence or sincerity of the thoughtless and silly
people who fling their cheap scorn at the sanctuary
and its sublime exercises, and who tell you that
you could better serve God in fifty ways than
by psalm-singing and praying. This is one of
the stupid half-truths taken up by shallow minds
and echoed by parrot lips until they become
loathsome and the blackest of lies. Of course,
psalm-singing is not serving God — it is telling out
your joy in Him ; and prayer is not serving God —
it is begging something of Him ; but without the
psalm-singing and prayer and the rest the Christian
life would droop and perish and all its larger
services disappear. The sanctuary hour is not
divine service ; but it is the preparation for,
and the inspiration of, all right and reasonable
service of God. From that the Christian soul
gets the steadfast purpose and white heat of de
votion needed for its work in the world. But
the real service of God is done not there and
then, but everywhere and always.
If you only feel the inestimable value of Christ's

26 SOME OF THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS
redemption and the magnitude of the mercy that
has saved you, your whole life will be baptized
and fired with the spirit of glad obedience, with
righteousness, purity, and love, and you will en
deavour to serve the Lord in everything, and
so offer to Him that reasonable offering — a living
sacrifice.

CHAPTEE III
THE GEEAT PUEPOSE OF THE
INCAENATION
" It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners ; of whom I am chief." —
1 Tim. i. 15.
This word takes us back to the alphabet of
Christian truth. It is a lesson for the infant class ;
it is the rudimentary truth which we heard from
our mother's lips. But we have not got beyond it
yet. We are always going back to this truth,
because, the longer we live, the more we feel the
need of it. If we needed it when we were children
we shall need it even more when we are dying
of old age, and I trust we shall be found clinging
to it then, as St. Paul did. He was a comparatively
old man when he wrote this, and when a really
good man is getting old he gets back to the
elementary simplicities. A young preacher is
naturally ambitious to be original ; he talks an
academic language, he soars into the cloudy regions
of philosophy, and probably takes up with novel
ties in doctrine. An old preacher has got beyond
philosophy to the simplicity which is in Christ,
and he talks a language which a child can under-
27

28 THE GEEAT PUEPOSE OF
stand. Further, when a good man is nearing the
end as St. Paul was, he becomes humbler, and
takes a lowlier place at God's feet. He is more
sensible of the mistakes, failures, and general
unworthiness of his life. He is not inclined to
boast then of anything except the cross of Jesus
Christ. He wants just to fall, with a cry for pity
and forgiveness, into the tender, outstretched arms
of the Saviour. That is precisely how St. Paul
felt and spoke here ; he sums up the whole philo
sophy of religion in this faithful saying, as if he
thought that the man who has a grip of that holds
all he needs for life's conflicts and death's sharp
agony: " Christ Jesus came into the world to save
sinners " ; and then he adds the words which
sound strange to us from the lips of such a
man — a man who had been as much a saint as
ever God makes in this world — " to save sinners,
of whom I am chief." It was no mere rhetorical
flourish or affected humility. He felt it. He
had fallen so far short of his calling in Christ
Jesus, he had received so much light and been
favoured with so much grace, that no man, he
felt, needed God's covering and atoning mercy
more than he ; and when we get up to the highest
Christian life that is possible in these earthly
tabernacles, we shall feel that we are just down
there with Paul ; not setting ourselves up as only a
little less divine than Christ, but saying, " He came
to save sinners, of whom I am chief."
Now let us for a moment stoop that we
may ascend ; let us get down from our learned
and lofty thoughts and try to look with clear,

THE INCARNATION 29
simple eyes at the sweetest, grandest thought of
all. I. "He came to save sinners." There is no cir
cumlocution about that, and no possibility of mis
taking it. That was the object of His coming, the
straight, urgent purpose which He ever kept in
view, and the one great work which He undertook
to do. Of course, we may be told that this was only
St. Paul's opinion. Bat the weight of St. Paul's
opinion has been rightly weighed and judged by
the consciousness and consent of universal Christen
dom, which has pronounced this man the most
richly inspired of God's servants, and the greatest
interpreter of Christian truth next to the Master
Himself. Moreover, the testimony of this man is
repeated and confirmed by that of the sacred
writers in the New Testament generally. We have
it in St. Matthew, " Thou shalt call His name
Jesus, for He shall save His people from their
sins " ; in' St. John, " Behold the Lamb of God,
which taketh away the sin of the world"; in St.
Peter, " He Himself bare our sins in His own body
on the tree " ; in the writer to the Hebrews, " Once
in the end of the age hath He appeared, to put
away sin by the sacrifice of Himself."
St. Paul knew what he was talking about, and
he summed up the incarnation and ministry of
Jesus in this sentence, " He came to save sinners."
If we do not read the mind and purpose of Christ
with this key in our hand we shall read it wrongly,
superficially, and upside down; we shall never
get , into its deeper places, but be only walking in
the outside chambers. He came to reveal sin, to

30 THE GEEAT PUEPOSE OF
condemn it, to emphasise God's eternal hatred of
it, to make it hideous and loathsome in His all-
revealing light ; He came to bring deliverance
from it, and forgiveness by offering a propitiation,
and Himself bearing the curse of it. He came
to fight against sin and subdue it, and ransom
those who had been held fast in its deadly bondage.
For this end was He born — for this He died, and
for this consummation He employs His risen and
exalted power for ever. It is the Alpha and
Omega of the Gospel message, and, whatever else
Jesus was and did, we must begin and end there
if we would understand the rest.
It is true enough that He often explained the
purpose of His coming in other words, but they
always pointed to the same thing. He had come,
He said, to show the Father and to do the Father's
will. He had come to be the Light of the world
and to give men life more abundantly. He had
come to be the servant of all, and to set men
an example that they should follow His steps. He
had come to give deliverance to the captives, and
to heal the bruised and broken heart. He had
fifty gracious, merciful, saving ends 'in view, but
they were all included in the one supreme purpose
to save sinners from their sins, to scatter the dark
ness and heal the blindness which sin had made,
to remove the alienation from God which sin had
produced, to heal the hatreds, enmities, and moral
diseases which were the offspring of sin, to re
deem men from the sorrows, heart-burnings, and
fears which sin brought, and to shed abroad in all
hearts the love which sin kills. Man has only

THE INCAENATION 31
one enemy in Christ's thought, though he often
thinks he has a legion. Sin is the enemy, and
Christ's long warfare in living and dying was
against that. " He came into the world to save
sinners." We are having a Christ presented to us now
in many quarters who had very little to do with
sin and the saving of sinners. It is never the real
Christ. It is only a fragment of Him, or a fiction,
or a caricature, and it generally comes from those
who think that the last and least thing they need
to be saved from is their sins. Christ was a great
social reformer, say some ; He came to redress
social wrongs and level up social inequalities, to
be the champion of the poor against the rich,
and of the labouring man against the privileged
classes. It is an utterly one-sided, prejudiced, and
therefore false view. He came not to be the
mouthpiece and defender of one class, but to be
champion of man against the devil and his own evil
lusts. He came not to set class against class, but
to bring them together by destroying their hatred
and selfishness. He came to save rich men and poor
men equally from their hard, covetous, greedy, and
defiled hearts. He came to reform society, not by
sweeping laws and new political systems, but by
purging and recreating each individual member of
society. In fact, He came to save sinners.
And there are some who tell us that Christ was
the great Teacher, the sublime Moralist, who em
bodied His morals in a life and furnished a perfect
pattern of conduct : the Man who said loveliest
things and did them. And of course He was all

32 THE GEEAT PUEPOSE OF
that. Never man spake or lived as this Man. But
if that were all, Jesus would be no more than
any other great world-teacher has been : a thrilling
voice, a sweet, pure song, a teller of divine
romances, and nothing more. There is no salva
tion in the Sermon on the Mount, beautiful as it
is. What good are these pearls to the sinner who
is black with guilt and hungering for mercy and
cleansing? Do you think I would send mission
aries to the heathen world if they had nothing to
take but the moral teaching of Jesus? It is not
fine teaching that men need, but the power to
embody it in a life ; not lofty ideals, but strength
to climb to them, and pity and forgiveness when
they fail ; not visions of holiness, but a Cross that
will save them from despair when they see their
own vileness ; not pictures of what they ought to
be, but cleansing from what they are. They need
something that will meet and answer the cry, " 0
wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from
this body of death ? " That is the need. To get rid
of the load of sin, release from the memories and
legacy of a guilty past, and power to surmount
and to overcome the miserable weakness of our
own nature ; and that is the deliverance and help
which Jesus gives. He came to save sinners.
Our theologies and schemes of social reform are
all wrong, whatever we call them, if we do not
start with the awful fact of sin, as the Bible always
does. If you make little or make light of sin ; if
you cover it with a thin whitewash ; if you fancy
that God regards it leniently, that it can be care
lessly repented of, easily smoothed over, and lightly

THE INCAENATION 33
forgiven ; that it needs no atonement and no cross ;
if, instead of telling men they are sinners, you
flatter them with the notion that they are half
divine, — then you do not understand the needs of
men, and still less do you understand Christ. Your
Christ is only a philosophical fiction, or an
attractive figure in a picture-gallery. The real
Christ is not there. You misread the sighs of
the real Christ, His groans, His prayers, His
burden-bearing, His wrestling in the garden, His
baptism of blood. The clue to all that mystery
is in the fact that He felt the sin of the world,
and the anguish of it, and the curse and shame
of it, and He took it upon Himself to save sinners.
A Gospel which barely recognises the exceeding
sinfulness of sin, and the urgent need for cleansing
and re-creation which sin creates, has no message
for the average man, or for the man in the slums,
or for the heathen world, or for any of us, indeed.
Are we not all morally close akin ? We can see a
heathen man or the worst of sinners any day with
the help of a looking-glass and a little imagination.
And a Gospel which deals lightly with sin always
deals unworthily with Christ, belittling Him. If
we properly believe in sin we must have a mighty
Christ, a sinless, divine Christ, even the Christ of
Calvary, the Christ " who came to save sinners."
II. Further, He not only came to do it, but with
absolute confidence in His power to do it. He
knew that He could save sinners — every class and
race of sinners, the worst of them and the best.
" He saved me," says St. Paul, " the man who
hated His name, slaughtered His saints, played
3

34 THE GEEAT PUEPOSE OF
havoc with His Churches — the proud, cruel
Pharisee ; the stern, uncompromising bigot ; the
obstinate, iron-hearted rebel. And when He
undertook to save me He must have known that
He could save anyone." Jesus despaired of none.
There was a cheery optimism in all His talk about
this matter. There was never the language of one
who was going on a forlorn hope. He had faith
in men because He had faith in His own subduing,
cleansing, saving might. " Him that cometh unto
Me I will in no wise cast out." It was impossible
to cast anyone out until he was beyond recovery,
and Christ never saw that word written on any
face. He knew that if men came to Him it was
just a flickering spark of divinity in them that
lighted their way to His feet. It was a tremulous,
spiritual longing, a feeble sense of moral need or
hunger for God. And He knew that where there was
that much — just the faintest taper-light or mustard-
seed of faith — there was the possibility of more.
Christ's belief in men, in sin-fallen men, was the
finest feature of His humanity and the grandest
proof of His divinity. It is weak, erring man who
despises and despairs of His weaker brother. The
sinless heart of Almighty Love despises and despairs
of none. Christ never once shook His head as
doctors do, and said, " This is a hopeless case — too
far gone." The worst moral leper seemed to Him
to have a clean spot somewhere. The deadest man
had a bit of divine life left. There was at least in
the very lowest a place where the lever of divine
grace could find a fulcrum and raise the corrupt
mass slowly Godward. Christ never despairs of

THE INCAENATION 35
men now, and His true Church never despairs of
men, whatsoever they be. Morality and philosophy
despair of certain classes. Philanthropists, educa
tionalists, magistrates, judges, social reformers, are
often disposed to write over the most disreputable
and criminal class what Dante saw written on the
gates of Inferno, " Let him abandon hope who enters
here." Ethnologists pronounce certain savage
heathen races unredeemable and unimprovable.
But men who are throbbing and burning with
the Spirit of Christ have an unlimited belief in
the salvability of every human creature, though
he be black as pitch and depraved as hell. To
lose that belief is to lose faith in Christ and faith
in ourselves. For really, if I thought there were
one man upon the earth quite beyond Christ's
saving, so dead in sin that Christ's power could
not stir the least motion of life, I should despair
of myself. If Christ cannot save that man I am
not sure that He can save me. But He claimed
all power in heaven and earth. No men are
outside the scope of His healing forces, and that
is the inspiration of all our missionary work.
" He came into the world to save sinners."
HI. Let us, in a final word, remind ourselves
of what we sometimes a little forget — that this
is a Gospel for all of us, for the most worthy
people, reverent church-goers and half -made
saints, and for the benighted heathen abroad, and
the almost equally degraded heathen at home.
St. Paul says it is worthy of all acceptation,
of acceptation by everyone, and he begins by
expressly and emphatically applying it to himself.

36 THE GEEAT PUEPOSE OF
Yes, we are among the sinners whom Jesus came
to save, and we never get out of that class until
we are raised to be with Christ in glory. Some
people often ask the preacher, " Why do you
not preach more to sinners ? " and the answer
is, he never does anything else. He is always
preaching, first to the sinner in the pulpit, and
then to the other sinners. And if you do not
belong to that class, I cannot imagine what
message he is to deliver to you. So far as I
know, there is no Gospel in the New Testament for
perfect people. No provision of that kind was
made, because the Lord knew it would never be
needed. The moment you are no longer a sinner
you may shut your Bible, for there is nothing
in it that bears on your case, and you may even
dispense with Jesus, for there is little more He
can do for you.
Of course there are differences, vital differences.
There are souls that have been regenerated and
touched with the glory of the Son of God ; and
others still in the mire, all unclean, held in the
grip of Satan, and content to be there. But we
are alike in this, that we stand as much in need
as we ever did of Christ's purging, cleansing,
redeeming power, and of His unwearying forgive
ness and inexhaustible Atonement. There are
hard and selfish thoughts left, and a great deal
that is carnal, and very little of that love and pity
which made Jesus the Saviour of men. Some of
us have been Christians forty or fifty years, and
yet we feel still that our proper place would be
with the publican, crying, " God be merciful to

THE INCAENATION 37
me, a sinner." And it is only that feeling which
will make us urgent to save other sinners. St.
Paul tells us here how he became a missionary,
and whence he got the saving fire that burned in
him. "For this cause I obtained mercy — though
chief of sinners — that in me and through me Jesus
might show forth all His longsuffering to others."
And the thought of Christ's longsuffering with
us, the thought of the mercy which every day
covers our unworthiness, the thought of the
immeasurable love which is heaping up to moun
tain-height our final indebtedness to Him, will
make us zealous, as St. Paul was, to give Christ to
all men, and to make the world know that He
came to save sinners.

CHAPTEE IV
THE LIBEETY WHICH CHEIST GIVES
" Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. " — 2 Cob. iii. 17.
You can almost hear a change in the tone of St.
Paul's voice when he comes to this part of his
letter. You can see his eyes glisten with a new
light as he talks of liberty. He has been discours
ing, so far, on that old system of religion in which
he was brought up. There was no great freedom
in that for anyone, not even for Moses or the high
priest. It was full of restrictions, limitations, and
prohibitions. Thou shalt do this, and thou shalt
not do that. St. Paul had been a very devout,
painstaking, and rigid adherent of that system.
He had kept most scrupulously every detail of the
law, its sacrifices and ceremonies, its Sabbath ob
servances and tithe-paying. And he had found no
joy in it. It had been very wearying to keep the
Ten Commandments and the thousand smaller com
mandments which had been added to them, fastings
and long prayers and worship full of routine and
drudgery. That was not what any man would
do willingly. It was done under compulsion. The
law, with its penalties, held its whip over men, and
drove them along. They went with chains upon
38

THE LIBEETY WHICH CHEIST GIVES 39
the feet and with sullen rebellion in the heart.
There was no love to lighten the burden and make
the way of obedience sweet. It was a house of
bondage, in which one never breathed the exhilar
ating air of liberty. St. Paul had known that, and
groaned under it. Now a vision of the larger and
nobler Christian life passes before him. It is as
when one climbs the northern slopes of the Alps
with painful drudgery, through shaded paths in
which every view is hidden, and stands at last upon
the mountain summit, with all the wealth, bright
ness, and expansiveness of the Italian landscape
at his feet. All that toilsome, weary, joyless
work before, and now all this widespread beauty,
unclouded vision, and heavenly freedom. St. Paul
forgets the past in the glory before him, and
sets down his rapture in this one word, " Where
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." That,
to St. Paul, is the distinguishing feature of the
Christian life. A life of service? Yes, un
doubtedly, but still more a life of liberty. For he
who follows Christ enjoys more of that coveted
blessedness than any other man. That is the
claim which St. Paul makes. " Where the Spirit
of the Lord is, there is liberty."
I. The soul of man pants for liberty as a hun
gry child cries for food. It is, indeed, the hunger
of the soul. Every age and condition asks for it.
The child's conception of manhood is a vision of
freedom. He dreams of a time when he will be
able to go his own way, and do his own pleasure,
with no check or restraint imposed by parents and
schoolmasters. Every youth clamours for freedom,

40 THE LIBEETY WHICH CHEIST GIVES
to be his own guide and his own master, to follow
his own bent, to employ himself and enjoy himself
according to the dictates of his own will, with none
to interfere. He asks for liberty to play, or work
to do or leave undone, to walk in any path which
seems desirable, to think his own thoughts and
pursue his own ends, with no chains of authority
to hold him back. We are all somewhat impatient
of control. We like to drive, not to be driven ;
to hold the reins, and not bite the bit. The servant
wishes he were a master ; the soldier wishes he
were the general giving orders, and not the private
obeying them. We sigh for independence. How
sweet that word is to the drudging wage-earner !
Independent ; with money enough to do without
labour; able to snap one's fingers at routine and
circumstances ; to have life at one's own command,
to shape and use it in the line of one's own wishes.
We do not like to be dependent on the favour and
the good-will, and the permission, and the pay of
others. Even the preacher often sighs for inde
pendence, and wishes he could take his own course
and say his own thoughts, without fear of his con
gregation, or anyone else, except his conscience
and God. We all feel the chains more or less. We
are under law. And nobody loves law; he only
submits to it. Necessity drives, compulsion spurs.
We go as we are ordered, but we go kicking.
We have to do a thousand things which self-love
resents, which pride and dignity recoil from. Not
what we like, but what we must, is for all of us,
more or less, the inevitable lot. And the human
heart is always groaning under its limitations and

THE LIBEETY WHICH CHEIST GIVES 41
bondage, and crying for more room, crying for
liberty! And here comes the Gospel answer to
the cry : " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there
is liberty."
II. Now I do not suppose that any man will
leap up to embrace that answer at once. We have
to think twice, and many times, before we can un
derstand that the Christian life is a life of liberty.
If you look at it from the outside it does not seem
to afford or promise any great amount of freedom.
You are rather inclined to think that it forges a
great many additional chains instead of breaking
those which bind us already, and that it imposes new
restrictions without sweeping away the old ones.
Yes, it would never occur to you to come into the
Christian life to gain your liberty. For its first ap
pearance points all the other way. The Christian
life puts checks upon you which you did not feel or
did not recognise before. It pulls you up at fifty
places and in fifty things, and says you shall not
go there. It nails its stern prohibition on a hundred
of your pleasant desires and self-indulgences. It
tells you, with a sterner voice than any parent or
schoolmaster ever used, that you must not do this
and must do that. It piles up precept upon precept,
and order upon order, and new commandments
which Moses did not know, and requires you to
keep them ; and it brings you into the service of a
Master who asks for unlimited devotion and un
questioning obedience in all things. Freedom in
the Christian life ! You smile at the thought. It
looks uncommonly like chains, restraints, and bond
age. Yet it leads to higher freedom, and the only

42 THE LIBEETY WHICH CHEIST GIVES
perfect freedom which man can have on earth.
" Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
III. Look for a moment at the Lord Himself.
You get in Him, and from Him, the first and most
complete interpretation of these words. You get
a vision of noble, beautiful, untrammelled liberty.
He came not to do His own will, but the will of
His Father. He was under authority, under orders.
That was one side of His life. But the other side
was one of perfect freedom, for His own will and
the Father's will made one music. The Father's
good pleasure and His good pleasure were one,
and never crossed or clashed. Every step that He
took was the step of a free man ; every act that
He did was done willingly, of His own choice.
There was no necessity laid upon Him. He was
not compelled to be poor : He elected to be poor.
He was not compelled to suffer hunger, hardship,
loneliness, man's spite, thankless toil, and tears : He
could have escaped all that, but He took it, by
deliberate choice, cheerfully. He was not compelled
to lay down his life on the cross : He was master
of death, and could have turned it aside. Of His
own will He let men slay Him with cruel hands,
not because He must, but because He freely gave
Himself. The whole charm of that life was its
willinghood. The glory of it was its freedom. He
walked and worked, and taught and healed and
suffered, just as His own glad, great, loving Spirit
led Him. " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there
is liberty."
And that is the liberty of the Christian life, where
the Christian life is lived in the Spirit; that is,

THE LIBEETY WHICH CHEIST GIVES 43
lived with some of the mind of Christ. Of course,
there is no freedom in the practice of religious
things without that — no great sense of liberty in
going to church and repeating creeds and joining
in prayers and avoiding certain forbidden things
if you are simply doing it to escape a penalty and
secure a final reward. It is all a yoke, grievous
to be borne, then. It is only when the Spirit of
the Lord is in a man that there is liberty. You
want His mvrtd, and then you do all things, the
highest things and the lowest things, as He did
them, willingly. Then your feet do not drag, they
leap along the way of new commandments. The
Spirit of the Lord is a Spirit of love, and where
love is it often makes hardest service perfect free
dom. Nobody is a more complete slave than a
woman nursing her own ailing child or her sick
and dying husband. She obeys every look, she
dances attendance to every whim. She has not
a moment to call her own. She is bound hand
and foot. She denies herself every pleasure, and
even sleep. It is all like the bearing of a cross.
And yet love makes it all liberty ; she does it freely,
without a murmur. It is of her own sweet choice.
A young man is a bit of a slave, and more than
a bit of a slave, when he is wooing the object of
his first and true affection. That gentle seraph
is often a hard mistress. She binds him fast with
silken chains, soft but very powerful. She orders
him about, and makes him fetch and carry for
her, and makes him bend his own will to hers. It
is slavery, but it is delicious slavery. He never
feels the chains. He obeys through choice ; he

44 THE LIBEETY WHICH CHEIST GIVES
is glad to obey. Love changes the bondage into
perfect liberty. And where love enters and takes
possession of the Christian life it brings the
liberty. IV. There is freedom in thought and freedom
in conduct where the mind, or Spirit, of the Lord
is. Freedom of thought. There are people who
use that word " free-thought " with a very different
meaning. They claim to be free-thinkers because
they have renounced the Christian creed, shaken
off the fetters of orthodoxy, and renounced the
authority of the Bible. Now, they say, their
thoughts and beliefs are perfectly independent, and
can move without trammels. I do not think there
is a great amount of that independence. I fancy
that most of these people do very little thinking
for themselves. They borrow their thoughts. They
throw off the old authorities and meekly subject
themselves to the new. But they tell us that we
have no freedom of thought. We believe things be
cause we are ordered to believe them, and because
we think it will fare ill with us hereafter if we re
fuse to believe. And we answer, " That is a slander
against the Christian life, and a lying utterance
against Christian men." If we have the mind of
Christ we believe the Bible, we believe the words
of Christ, we believe in His divinity and in His
cross because their inspiration and beauty and
truthfulness and power commend themselves to
our intelligence, lay hold of our deepest sym
pathies, and appeal to all that is best in us. If
we have the mind of Christ we should believe
them just the same if there were no heaven or

THE LIBEETY WHICH CHEIST GIVES 45
hell in the question, believe them because our
whole nature says they are true. We choose to
believe them, with perfect freedom in our choice.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there comes, not
bondage of mind, but glad, glorious liberty,
freedom of thought and freedom of conduct. For
in proportion as we have the mind of Christ we
do all right and noble things, and we shun all
base and degrading things, of our own free and
deliberate choice. At first it is hard to deny
ourselves the forbidden things, to keep ourselves
unspotted from the world, hard to resist and over
come the temptations and drawings towards lower
things. We often want to let ourselves go a little.
The old desires are strong ; we have to hold our
selves back with the curb and restraints of prayer.
But that is because the old elements are still
powerful in us, and the mind of Christ in us still
new and undeveloped. But in time we get more of
the Spirit of the Lord. And then there is less draw
ing towards the evil things, and more drawing
towards the nobler, higher, and Christ-like things.
We begin to dislike and revolt from the base,
impure, vulgar, and selfish ; we learn to loathe
them, and turn from them with disgust. Of our
own choice, under no compulsion at all, we take to
the things that are just and lovely and of good
report. They fasten on us by their beauty ; we
approve them and love them. We could not do
the other things if we would, and we would not
if we could. Our taste for them is gone, our
choice has been given to the things which Christ
loved. We prefer to follow the good way — with

46 THE LIBEETY WHICH CHEIST GIVES
all our hearts we prefer it. Love makes the choice
easy. Love makes the face of duty beautiful.
Love makes it sweet to keep up with Christ.
Love makes the service of goodness freedom.
That is the story of Christian life, as St. Paul read
it, and as we all come to read it when we under
stand its fuller meaning. " Where the Spirit of
the Lord is, there is liberty " ; and there is no
liberty like that.

CHAPTER V
THE INSEPAEABLE LOVE OF GOD
" For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
Lord."— Kom. viii. 38, 39.
We always think of this chapter as St. Paul's
finest composition, and perhaps the most precious
legacy which he bequeathed to the Church. It is
a noble piece of literary work, full of choice
language and deep philosophic thought, and, as a
picture of the Christian life and its possessions
and hopes, it reaches a sublime elevation which is
nowhere else attained except in the lofty sayings
of Jesus. And the best of it is kept to the last.
The climax and peroration are where they ought
to be. They form the grand Hallelujah Chorus
which brings the oratorio to a close. The previous
chapter is a subdued and somewhat mournful
introduction to this higher song. It is keyed to a
low pitch. It is a prolonged confession of human
weakness, intermixed with moans of pain. It
describes a human creature struggling, wrestling,
and over-burdened ; afraid of himself, afraid of the
47

48 THE INSEPAEABLE LOVE OF GOD
forces, within and without, which are holding him
in bondage and fighting against him. It finishes
with a cry of agony — " Who shall deliver me
from this body of death ? " The present chapter
supplies the answer to the cry. The first word
sounds a note of victory, and pitches the glad
song which follows. Not a wail, nor a groan, nor a
sigh of pain is heard now. The heart has thrown
off its load of fear and depression. The spirit
rises above its cumbersome body and all its
carnal environment. It mounts on wings of faith
to the heavenly blue. It moves as a conqueror in
the light and joy and eternal love of God. The
whole chapter is on the ascending scale of elate
gratitude and confident exultation, until the climax
is reached in this exclamation of rapturous cer
tainty : " I am persuaded, that neither death, nor
life, . . . nor any other creature, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord."
Now the man who could say that, and feel it,
had insured his life against all disturbances and
alarms. He had fortified himself to meet all
unwelcome changes and strokes of misfortune.
He had found a source of strength and serenity
which could never fail or run short. And if you
can say this, if by your presence in the sanctuary
you should be helped to say it, nay, if you could
go away only half persuaded that it is true,
clinging to it as something which you would fain
believe, which you long to believe — this would be
a happy and fruitful hour. It would be worth
more than all the successes and gains of the past

THE INSEPAEABLE LOVE OF GOD 49
year. It would strengthen you immeasurably for
what remains of life's hard battle. St. Paul tells
us, in brief, that we are sure of the one thing on
which assurance is most needed, and that from
this one thing, which is the greatest of all, our fickle,
precarious, and unstable lives cannot be separated.
He enumerates all the wasting, wearing, dissolving,
and destroying forces of the world and human
life, and he defies them all. He boldly asserts
that nowhere, either in this vale of tears and
parting, or in the dark, unknown immensity
beyond, will any power be found that can wrench
or weaken the hold upon us of that love of God
which has been revealed to us in Christ Jesus.
I. First, then, we need to be persuaded that we
have each a place and share in the changeless
love of God. That is the greatest article of faith,
without which all the others amount to little or
nothing. You confess in the Creed, " I believe in
God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth, and
I believe in His Son Jesus Christ." And that is
all sound and true, but it is a far grander thing
if you are able to confess, "I believe that God
believes in me, and cares for me, and holds my
single life in His heart of love." That is the
beginning and end of faith, its Alpha and Omega,
its initial step and its highest and hardest attain
ment. It was our earliest religious lesson. For
we all learned from our mother's lips the sweet,
simple truth that God loves us, and yet we are
never quite convinced of it as we might be, and
ought to be. All through life we are fighting to
retain it, and sometimes in hours of doubt it
4

50 THE INSEPAEABLE LOVE OF GOD
nearly slips away from us. To-day it has become
again, as ofttimes before, the very battle-ground of
faith. Scientific men are once more challenging
it, root and branch. The old antagonism between
science and religion, which has slumbered for
a while, seems to be awaking into fierce activity
again. One book after another has come from
the Press, in which this foundation-truth of God's
love for man is scornfully attacked and pitilessly
demolished. They write down human nature at
its lowest figure. They represent man as a
somewhat indifferently constructed animal, a short
lived creature made up of senses, nerves, and
perishable dust, and worth no more in the sight
of God than cheese-mites are to us. And they tell
us that it is only egregious vanity and egotism
which leads any man to think that God wastes a
single thought on him. And sometimes, though
our nobler instincts revolt from this terrible
pessimism, our despondent hearts incline to it.
We ask timorously, " How can God love us, and
why should He ? " We are so many, and we must
be so small in His sight, so insignificant and so
worthless ; we are so frail and foolish, such a
bundle of weaknesses and contradictions ; we are
often so pitiable and even contemptible in our own
eyes, that we are tempted to cry out, " It cannot
be that God holds each one precious, and loves
each one eternally. It must be all a beautiful
dream and delusion." That is what we have to
fight against and fight for. It is the revelation of
the Bible and of Jesus Christ against all our fears
nd against all the teachings which let man down

THE INSEPAEABLE LOVE OF GOD 51
and put him far beneath God's notice. There is
only one truth in the Bible, for all other truths are
summed up in that. There is only one truth in
Jesus Christ, for everything else which He taught
was implied in that, the truth of which St. Paul
bears witness here — that God cares for and loves
each one of us and deems us worthy of His love and
holds on to us for ever. That is the battle-ground
of every man's faith. If he believes that, he
believes everything. If he is victor there, he is
more than conqueror everywhere. " I am per
suaded that nothing can separate us from the love
of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
II. We are to believe in the inseparable, un
changeable, indestructible love of God. That is
the one solid fact in our lives which nothing can
dissolve, which laughs at destruction and triumphs
over death. If we are sure of this, it is the only
thing in our mortal existence of which we are
quite sure. Everything else we have is but a loan,
a temporary possession, a house which we do not
hold in permanence or on any fixed lease. We are
tenants-at-will, liable to be dislodged at a day's
notice, or without any notice at all. To talk to
you of the things from which we are constantly
being severed would be a dreary and melancholy
recital ; unprofitable, because it would only depress
you ; a mere string of platitudes, because you know
it so well ; and endless, because it would run over
the whole range of imaginable things.
Life is made up of the things from which we get
separated in the course of years. It is made up
of guests which come and go. It is made up of

52 THE INSEPAEABLE LOVE OF GOD
greetings and farewells, meetings and partings,
first kisses and last kisses, treasures and friendships
hardly won and easily lost; and at every stage
of the journey is a finger-post which speaks of
separation. You recognise it when you make
your will. All that you have piled up with so
much slavish labour and devotion must go then,
if it does not go before. The lawyer, with all
his technical and elaborate phraseology, is only
spelling out the word " separation." It always
comes to that. There is no holdfast in life.
The pauper and the millionaire are equally desti
tute when they have passed through that door
which waits for all. It is the final and complete
separation. Nay, you recognise the same fact
whenever you think of old age. It means parting
from strength, youthful energy, daring ambitions,
pushful purpose, friendships, and old lovers. You
prove it all through life by the thoughts, opinions,
sentiments, and views which you part from, shake
off, and change for other and perhaps wiser
thoughts. And you even announce it and antici
pate it in that sweetest and most solemn pledge
which human lips can speak — the marriage vow.
Yes, the very wedding vow contemplates the dread
separation, " Until death us do part." You can
never look beyond that in human things. These
words, separation and parting, are written every
where save on that rock where the Apostle stood,
and where I trust we all stand. They are written
everywhere save on that flag which we hold aloft
above the transitory world — that banner of God's
love which is over us for ever. There the words

THE INSEPAEABLE LOVE OF GOD 53
of everlasting promise are written; there human
fickleness and frailty are swallowed up in God's
faithfulness and constancy. We may forget and
change, but He cannot forget. We may even try to
fling Him off, but still He holds on, and no power
can wrench us from the grasp of His love. " I am
persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor things
present, nor things to come, . . . shall be able to
separate us from the love of God which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord."
III. We are assured that this love is grandly
independent of our feelings and moods, changes,
frettings, and infidelities. It does not fluctuate
with our fluctuations. If it did, we should despair
of it some twenty times a day. It does not depend
upon the constancy of our love at all. Were His
love to grow cold every time our love is frozen, it
would long since have been changed to winter.
Alas for us were His kisses only offered when we
return them ! Think how uncertain is the flame of
love in us. It burns intensely in the occasional
hours of impassioned devotion, and then sinks down
into chill, white ashes. We are creatures of moods.
We are thermometers, changing suddenly from
boiling-point to zero. Hundreds of times, if you
were suddenly asked, " Do you love Him ? " you
would be ashamed to say " No " and afraid to say
" Yes." We should lose Him altogether if He were
affected by our affections. In Him the fire burns
on steadily ; no coldness in us can quench or cool
down the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.
Nor can our misdovngs turn it away. It is won
derful how it bears with our infirmities of temper

54 THE INSEPAEABLE LOVE OF GOD
and our manifold yieldings to other and coarser
affections. It is wonderful how it suffers our
doubts, denials, thankless murmurings, and ever-
repeated follies, failings, and inconsistencies.
There are times when we think that God cannot
love us, because we find so little to love in our
selves. It seems well-nigh impossible. And so it
would be impossible if His love were not as far
above the human as heaven is above the earth.
Yes, but He loved some of us when we were far
worse creatures than we are now, and all of us
before we loved Him. That was more impossible,
and yet He did it.
His love is proof against all human unfaithful
ness. We may grieve and wound it, but we cannot
kill it or shake it off. No unworthiness of ours
can separate us from the love of God which is in
Christ Jesus.
Still less can the dark and distressing things of
life come between you and His untiring affection.
Sometimes, when the darkness hangs thick around
you, and the troubles fall fast and heavy, you feel
as if God had departed from you, as if His love
which you once believed in had changed to indiffer
ence or cruel spite. You say, "He has forgotten
and forsaken ; the sad and bitter things have parted
me from His love." But that is because your
poor bewildered minds have lost their judgment
for the time being as well as their faith. How
can such a thing be ? that the highest love
should fail you when you need it most, that He,
of all others, should turn away from you when
your helplessness would most cling to Him? It

THE INSEPAEABLE LOVE OF GOD 55
is unthinkable. It would make Him less than
human, Who is infinitely . more, and kinder than
the best of human. No, there are no warps and
twists, and freaks and fancies, and shady places
in His love, though at times there are clouds in
your own lives which hide it from you. It is
always the same true, strong, unwearying, uncon
querable love. And that is your strength. If
you are sometimes afraid of losing your hold on
Him, He will never let go His grip of you. There
is nothing in all the forces of evil outside, nothing
in the weakness of our own hearts, nothing in
the wear of time, in the throes of death, or in the
spaces of eternity, which can separate us from
the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

CHAPTEE VI
THE STABILITY OF FAITH
" Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable,
always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know
that your labour is not in vain in the Lord." — 1 Cob. xv. 58.
We rarely read this chapter at our ordinary
services. We keep it for our special occasions.
It is associated with the great solemnity of life,
with the funeral procession, the tears of mourners,
and the last long parting. For eighteen centuries
it has been said or chanted by Christian people
over their dead. It has become consecrated and
devoted to that purpose, and we can hardly think
of it in any other connection. And yet St. Paul,
in writing it, had another end in view. It was
not to furnish a dirge and requiem for the dead,
but to confirm the faltering faith of the living.
It is very evident, both from this and previous
chapters, that there had been much unsettlement
of belief among the Corinthian Christians. They
had been tossed to and fro like children by every
wind of doctrine, and had called in question some
of the foundation-truths on which the Church
and its hopes are built. The resurrection of
Christ had been challenged, and the sacrificial
56

THE STABILITY OF FAITH 57
virtue of His death, the personal immortality of
believers, and all rewards beyond the grave. In
deed it was like taking the soul out of Christianity,
and leaving but the decaying body. And this
chapter is St. Paul's magnificent reassertion of
the cardinal truths; of the indispensable, imperish
able truths without which our religion is no better
than a rope of sand or a castle in the air, without
which it is nothing but idle talk, pitiable self-
deception, and a fabric of hope as baseless as a
dream. He declares, with impassioned emphasis,
as well as cogent reasoning, that there cannot be,
and must not be, any wavering in the Christian
mind concerning the facts that Christ died for our
sins and veritably rose again from the dead, and
that all who die in faith will rise with Him,
clothed with a glorious resurrection-body. He
declares that Christ has power to vanquish sin,
death, the grave, and every other enemy, and
that He will never cease to extend His reign
until all enemies are put under Him. Those are
the things, he says, which we ought to hold with
a grip of iron and sinews of rock, and the con
clusion is given in the words which we have read :
" Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast,
unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the
Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is
not in vain in the Lord."
Stedfast and unmoveable. — One is almost tempted
to ask if these words have any application to
present times and conditions. They seem rather
to carry us back into a world which we have left
far behind, a dull, old-fashioned, antiquated world

58 THE STABILITY OF FAITH
in which all things were stationary, and the cus
toms of each generation were handed down to its
successor, and men were contented to follow the
light which had guided their fathers, jogging on in
the old paths, and setting their faces against all
innovations and changes. There is little of that
left now. The world in which we have our being
is perpetually on the move. It is almost in a state
of flux. We are treated to a series of dissolving
views and transformation scenes. The thoughts
and habits of our fathers are thrown off like worn-
out clothes, and hardly anything remains unchanged
except the solid globe, the everlasting hills, the
rolling ocean, and the firmament of sun and stars.
We hear a great deal about the unsettlement in
religion, and the vague uncertainties through
which devout minds are groping for a faith. We
are told that there is no longer any fixity in
religious beliefs ; that cloudy and obscure problems
have taken the place of firm assurances ; that men
are drifting away from the moorings to which they
were securely anchored, and that the very Church
has been driven from its solid ground to shifting
sands. Were this true, which I do not for a
moment admit, save as an extravagant exaggera
tion, it would not be greatly surprising. It would
only show that religion is affected by the temper
of the times, and is feeling somewhat the spirit of
restlessness and change which is heaving, wrestling,
shaking, and disturbing all things.
You cannot point to any department or sphere of
life in which there is stability of thought, unity of
mind, and settled convictions. All questions are in

THE STABILITY OF FAITH 59
a state of solution, all opinions are seething in a
melting-pot ready to come out with a brand-new
face. The air is thick with the sounds of clamour,
dissensions, and debate. Old policies, old principles,
old watchwords and shibboleths, are being tried in
the fire and found wanting. Physical science is
more divided than it has been for fifty years.
Political parties hang together in fragments, and
seem on the point of breaking up ; the old lines
of separation are getting obliterated, to give place
to new parties. Social and ethical questions,
labour and fiscal questions, are passing through
the furnace, to be heated and smelted into other
forms. Everywhere men are groping their way
to solid ground, listening distractedly to contending
voices, tossing on the horns of dilemmas, and ask
ing, almost desperately, what they shall believe.
Eeligion is bound to be touched and influenced by
this deep and widespread unrest. It cannot be
insensible to the heavings which are going on all
around it, yet I venture to say that its vital faith
and root-principles are less disturbed by them than
any other region of human thought. People who
are incessantly talking about the unsettlement in
Christian beliefs forget the greater unsettlement
which is everywhere else, and they make incom
parably more of Christian divisions and uncertain
ties than the facts justify. The wish is often
father to the thought. They see only what they
desire to see. They are men whose own con
victions are unsettled, and always have been, and
they like to believe that their own minds represent
the general mind. They are for the most part men

60 THE STABILITY OF FAITH
who stand outside the Church, or hang on the
extreme fringe of it. They see only its surface
movements, and do not read its deeper heart and
steadfast purpose. In fact, the great marching
host of Christ's people knows very little about the
unsettlement which is everywhere advertised. It
is too busy in the Master's work to take heed to
every changeful wind that blows, and too calmly
confident of its faith to be made nervous by every
shout and whisper of alarm. The bulk of real and
earnest Christian people are steadfast, if not
immovable. We all move with the movements of the age ; we
oannot help it. We feel the pulse of the human
throng, and throb with it. We move as an oak-
tree moves when it grows and expands, and its
branches are shaken and pruned by the storm, but
the roots remain steadfast and unshaken. The
whole Church has moved in the last twenty-five
years, just as you have moved. When some of us
began our preaching we were regarded as ad
vanced, and perhaps not quite sound. Timid faith
was afraid that we were leading into dangerous
ways. And now even the timid faith has grown
up to where we stood, and possibly, in some cases,
left us behind. We all move forward in that way —
I trust into clearer light and larger conceptions of
God and of the thoughts of Jesus Christ. But
there is nothing in the range of modern things
which has been so little shaken in its vital beliefs
and foundations as Christ's Church and the
Christian faith. All the grand certainties which
are given in this chapter abide with us. There are

THE STABILITY OF FAITH 61
few whole-hearted Christians who cannot say, with
St. Paul, " I have kept the faith." There are few
who cannot say, with Jesus, " All that thou hast
given Me I have kept, save that which had to be
lost because untrue." Where everything else has
changed, the great Christian beliefs remain steadfast
and immovable.
And really it is most desirable, and even impera
tive, that we should have a measure of steadfastness
im these things, if we are stirred and shaken in all
things else. The just man lives by his faith, he
cannot afford to have it always in a state of
transition. He cannot afford to have it always
simmering in the melting-pot, and wondering how
it will come out at the next stage. I do not think
it would make life more comfortable if you had
to be continually asking yourself if your wife is
still to be believed in, and your children, and your
dearest friends. I fancy that a wise man will
make up his mind once for all on these matters,
and not be perpetually discussing them de novo,
as if there were always a possibility of getting new
light. And I do not think it is any more helpful
to be everlastingly going back upon our sweet,
strong, religious beliefs, and putting them to new
tests and trials, as if they had never been proved
at all. Life is not long enough for that business.
It is crucifying to have the mind always on tenter
hooks and to have the heart always unsettling
itself to make a new settlement. Some people are
always proclaiming the glory of uncertainty and
the surpassing excellence of doubt. I do not
covet that sort of glory, or aspire to that sort

62 THE STABILITY OF FAITH
of excellence. I would rather have a bit of solid
ground under my feet, and a few things which
I can hold fast. It is often hard enough to walk
and climb up the rugged rock, but it is much
easier than to walk and climb on clouds and vacant
space. You hear a certain type of preacher con
fessing : "I know what I believed last year, I
know what I believe now, and it is not the same ;
but what I shall believe to-morrow I cannot, for
the life of me, predict." And he utters that with
the tone of one who assumes a superior intelli
gence. It is the kind of intelligence for which
I have no envy, ambition, or desire. A man with
out settled convictions is no more fit to be a
leader and guide to his fellow-men than a firefly
or glow-worm twinkling in the darkness. Ships
are only deceived by wavering and wandering
lights ; they read their course by the fixed stars
or the fixed illumination on some lighthouse rock.
It is not generally supposed that fickleness is
strength. It was wisely said by one of old, " Un
stable as water, thou shalt not excel." A man
may change his convictions or change his party
once or twice in a life-time, and be a strong, true
man withal; but he who changes them as he
changes his coat, about once every season, is not
made of adamant, or seasoned with the true salt
of grace.
A man who would do life's work well and help
others to do it must fix himself on certain great
beliefs and regard them as steadfast and immov
able. He cannot waste his energies in perpetual
re-examination and retesting and dissecting of

THE STABILITY OF FAITH 63
them. He has something better to do than go
hopping to and fro between one opinion and
another. Let the unstable heart delight itself on
that sort of vacillating play. He has nobler work
in hand. We ought to make up our minds, once
for all, that our lives are in God's keeping and
under His constant government ; that to do justly
and love mercy and walk humbly before Him
is the grand rule of life, and the certain way to
His reward. We ought to be certain that there is
an eternal future, a personal immortality, and a
judgment to come which no man can escape.
We should be assured that the great Christian
verities cannot be shaken, and be determined that,
so far as we are concerned, they shall not be
shaken ; that the Bible, on the whole, is to be
trusted as God's revelation and our guide ; that
Christ is our divine, unerring Master, whose words
will abide though all things else dissolve, and that,
following Him, we have clear light for the earthly
journey and a safe Pilot through the dark un
known beyond.
It is only when these things are lifted above
the wrangling and debating-ground of fife, and
held with glad, unfaltering grip, that a man can
face his burdens and duties bravely, and make the
best of his life and its energies and aims. As St.
Paul says here, it is only where the heart is
stedfast and unmoveable that there will be the
abounding work of the Lord. The men and
women who are doing God's work in the world, all
but the most insignificant fraction, are not the
men who are shifting with every changeful phase

64 THE STABILITY OF FAITH
of thought and confessing mournfully that they
have no fixity in their own beliefs. The good
work of God is done by those whose faith is
steady as a rock amid all the shiftings, and who
hardly hear even the rumour of that unsettlement
which is talked about but not found in their lives.
There must be some measure of joy and peace in
believing, or there will neither be abounding hope
nor abounding labour. "Wherefore, brethren, be
ye stedfast and unmoveable, forasmuch as ye
know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord."

CHAPTEE VII
THE NAME WHICH IS ABOVE EVEEY
NAME
" Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him
a name which is above every name." — Phil. ii. 9.
We have often been told, and have often repeated
it to ourselves, that there is nothing in a name.
It is only an arbitrary grouping of letters, a mean
ingless sound. What you are called is of little
consequence, and does not change the fact of what
you are. It does not make you a doubter to call
you Thomas, or a beloved disciple to call you
John. It is not the name which makes the man,
but the man that makes the name. So we are
informed, with an air of superior wisdom, by the
man who is a bundle of facts untouched by senti
ment. And we readily admit it, for the sake of
peace. Yet there is a sentimental side of things
which some of us, thank God, are weak enough to
see. A flag is only a piece of coloured bunting,
yet for that flag thousands of men have died.
Names are only sounds, yet they are among the
mightiest forces in the world. They stand for
persons ; they represent great causes and principles.
They bring up, by association, heroic and never-to-
65 5

66 THE NAME WHICH IS
be-forgotten deeds. The letters which compose
them are of no weight, but thp thoughts which
they suggest are well-nigh omnipotent. In the
political world names are often more powerful
than principles. In social life, morals, literature,
and religion they exercise an immeasurable in
fluence. Names have won battles, built up king
doms, swayed the world, and made history. A
name will stir a crowd of people to enthusiasm
when all persuasion and eloquence have failed. It
will inspire passionate love and provoke frenzied
hatred. You can conjure with a name, and work
miracles. Men are awed and subdued by names ;
thrilled, soothed, inspired, fascinated, carried out
of themselves, made mightier than themselves,
filled with heroism, fired with zeal. For a name
they will brave dangers, endure sufferings, and
give themselves to death.
Yes, when you sum up the forces which have
made the world march and brought humanity to
its present stage, you find that names have played
a foremost, if not the foremost, part. And some
thing of this was in the Apostle's mind when he
wrote these words about " the name which is above
every name." Now, if for a moment you carry
yourselves back in thought to where St. Paul
stood, you will feel that this was —
I. A marvellous, and even astounding pre
diction, only surpassed by that divine word, " I, '
if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto Me." The man who wrote this was not only
the greatest of the Apostles, but the most far-
seeing of the prophets. He saw the future with

ABOVE EVEEY NAME 67
clear, assured, wide-embracing eyes. At least, he
read the grandest lines in that yet unopened scroll.
He read the one magnificent secret which the
centuries would reveal, but which was then com
pletely hidden from the eyes of the world. It
seemed, indeed, the craze of an enthusiast, or even
the dream of a deranged mind. He wrote this
when the power of Jesus was unknown and unfelt,
save by a few obscure handfuls of believers. Not
a hundredth part of the human race had ever
heard the " Name," and the greater part of these
had heard it only to scorn. It was too insignificant
to enter into the world's calculation of forces.
Those who thought they were making history —
the writers, thinkers, statesmen, and soldiers —
were either ignorant of its existence or pushed
it aside with contempt. And the air was ringing
with other great names which seemed likely to
endure for ever — Caesars, senators, poets, philo
sophers, builders of empire, shapers of thought,
Names that were deified, for which temples were
built ; names which made millions of men tremble
or fall down prostrate in slavish adoration. It
might have been thought, nay, it was thought, the
wildest of all delusions to anticipate for this name
of Jesus an exaltation so surpassing, a power out
stripping all calculation and imagination, a place
in men's hearts and a sway over their minds which
would fling the influence and majesty of the Caesars
into absolute littleness and oblivion. " We are
fools for Christ's sake," said the man who wrote
it. Fools, indeed ! We ourselves should have seen
lunacy stamped upon it at that time.

68 THE NAME WHICH IS
And yet everyone knows now that the dream has
been realised — not completely, not as it will be,
but magnificently, beautifully, and in such a way
that the greatest effort of mind can hardly take it
in. If Jesus does not yet rule the world, His hand
is far stronger upon it than the hand of any other.
His force is almost greater than the sum of all
others ; His voice commands more obedience than
any other; His name exercises in the world a
charm, a magic, an irresistible fascination, which
is quite immeasurable and out of all comparison
with others. There are many prominent names
of distinguished living men which arrest public
attention and are often on men's lips, and there
are still more illustrious names which figure on the
pages of history like shining stars amid the dark
ness of the past — prophets, apostles, reformers,
pioneers of progress, world-movers. But it is mere
trifling, nay, it is a very profanation, to put other
names alongside His, and weigh against His their
moral influence. He overtops them all, as some
Alpine mountain looks down upon the dust-heap
at its feet. Where His doctrines are least obeyed,
His moral supremacy is acknowledged ; where His
deity is denied, the sublimity of His mind and
character is recognised; where men deride His
miracles, they bow before His spiritual purity;
where the multitude hold aloof from His churches,
they have still a consciousness that never man
spake and never man lived like this Man.
The place which Jesus holds in the world to-day
is beyond all computation. The secret part which
He plays in the world's movements, and the power-

ABOVE EVEEY NAME 69
ful impress which He puts upon the world's ideals
defy all measurement, and it would be as easy to
count the sands of the sea-shore as to count the
pulses of thought, emotion, and endeavour which
come from Him. Never before has He had so
many witnesses and messengers engaged in spread
ing His truth and lifting up His person in the view
of men. Never before has he attracted to Himself
so much reverential love and kindled so much
impassioned devotion. The last century saw and
recorded an unexampled expansion of His power.
There is now not a known land, continent, or
island where His name has not been sounded ; not
a tribe or race of men which has not yielded to
Him its tribute of converts ; hardly a language in
which the story of His life and death has not been
told, and no heathen darkness anywhere in which
the light of His Gospel has not shed some scattered
beams. ' And if you say that His professed ad
herents are still in a small minority compared with
the vaster number who have not yet learned to
call Him Lord, I answer — yes, in count, but not
in power ! The Christian nations are becoming
more and more the mighty nations of the world,
the progressive, ruling nations. Slowly they are
bringing all the world under their influence. Their
thoughts and sentiments, their moral standards and
spiritual ideals, their religious conceptions and
beliefs, are moving irresistibly to universal domin
ance. Not only by the missionary, but by a
hundred other strange ways and instruments, some
of which Christ would not sanction, is He slowly
making His way to the mastery of the world.

70 THE NAME WHICH IS
Ah ! and what His name is to those who love Him,
nor tongue nor pen can show. There is music in
the name. It is sweetness most ineffable. It heals
like medicine, and soothes like an anodyne. It
allays fevers, disperses fears, and illumines despairs.
It imparts vigour and inspires courage, makes
suffering patient and death welcome. It brings
with it a world of gladness and hope. It trans
figures common men, and lo ! they -are heroes,
saints, and martyrs. It is the name we love best.
It is the name we heard first from our mother's
lips. We hope it will be the last name on our lips
ere they are closed in the long silence — the name
which God hath highly exalted above every name.
II. In this adorable name, this name lifted above
every name, there is the one binding force in the
midst of divided humanity ; especially the one and
only possibility of real union in the Church.
Names are mighty both in dividing and uniting
men ; mightier in uniting them, welding them into
one mass, and making their hearts throb together
as the beatings of one heart. An army is con
solidated by a name. Multitudes clasp hands in
brotherhood under the magic of a name. Differences
and disputes, class distinctions and envies, intel
lectual and moral barriers, are swept away like the
filmy web by devotion to a name. And this name
is above every name. Surely all Christians are
feeling this in the sense of unity that is coming to
them. It is because the Church has of late been
slowly, persistently lifting the name into pre
eminence, putting it before all schools, systems of
thought, creed-makers and creeds, founders of sects

ABOVE EVEEY NAME 71
and theologies, because it is feeling again, as in
the Apostolic days, the transcendent power of the
name, that through all its branches there has
come a deep longing, a profound sigh, like the
groaning of a new creation, for more oneness.
And that which has suggested the urgent desire
will bring the realisation. Everything else divides.
Creeds divide — the moment you formulate your
beliefs you accentuate differences — sacraments
divide, orders divide, offices divide, organisations
divide, theories of the Church divide, favourite
leaders and teachers divide, even Apostles have
divided, as at Corinth ; the name only unites. Get
any assembly of Christians together gathered out
of all the Churches, and ask them what they think
of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Whitefield, Spurgeon,
Pusey. Ask them what they think of priests and
ministers, of Baptism and Holy Communion, of the
Nicene Creed or Westminster Confession, of the
Church and its organisations and polity, and who
belong to it, of ordination, and liturgies, and
ceremonies. Ask these questions, and there will
be a tumult of answers as varied and almost as
angry as the voices of Bedlam. But name the
name. Ask them, "What think ye of Christ?"
and all lips will be first silent with profound
emotion, and then they will break forth into one
harmonious, glad confession, " He is the chief
among ten thousand and the altogether lovely."
We shall be all one indeed when we all realise
that — that He is the end of all desire, the crown
of all hope, the sum of all faith, the centre and
soul of worship, the furnace-fire of love that

72 THE NAME WHICH IS
kindles love in all, the one adorable Being whose
face puts every other face into the shade, whose
name is so far above every name of sect and
party that to mention them in the same breath
is an irreverence. We shall be one indeed when
the great object of our Christian endeavour is not
to preserve and exalt our offices and functions and
dignities, not to push our own views and organisa
tions into supreme importance, not even to magnify
and multiply and aggrandise our several Churches,
but to get His power felt, His will done, His
salvation and healing spread, His all-subduing love
made manifest. Then shall we strive together as
we never have done yet to push His kingdom
forward in the world, to carry His light into dark
places, and bring all God's guilty, sorrowing
children to His redeeming feet. All our mission
work, both at home and abroad, will be re-baptized
with the Holy Ghost and with fire when our hearts
and the hearts of all the Churches have in very
truth exalted Him over everything else that we
believe and hold dear, when we have put His name
where God hath raised it— far above every name.
IH. In the joy which this name suggests, in the
absolute supremacy which we assign to it, and in
the unquestioning conviction that it will win
universal pre-eminence, there is all the stimulating
and inspiring power which the Church needs for
its onward march and its warfare against the sin
and darkness of the world. Truly, in this name
lifted above every name, is the source of all
prayerful longing, earnest labour, self-sacrificing
zeal, and missionary fervour, St. Paul has told us

ABOVE EVEEY NAME 73
in these words the secret of his heroic devotion and
sustained energy. He has told us the brief story
of all those who with him " went forth for the
name' s sake." To him and to them the name was
more than wonderful — it was unutterably dear, a
sacrament of mystery and grace. It set his heart
beating whenever he heard it. His lips quivered
whenever he uttered it. It was written on every
fibre of his being, burned as with letters of fire on
all his thoughts and emotions. It represented all
that he hoped for, all that made life worth living,
all possible joy here and beyond the grave. It was
so sweet to name it, to sound it in the ears of
others, to see eyes gleaming as they heard of it, to
spread the savour of it abroad. It commanded
him with its mighty imperative ; it was like a fire
burning in his bones, so that he was weary with
forbearing, and could not stay. " Necessity is laid
upon me ; yea, woe is me if I preach not the
Gospel." Moreover, he and those who laboured
with him knew, beyond a doubt, beyond every
whisper of fear, that this name would get to itself
universal power. " At the name of Jesus every
knee shall bow." It was the profound conviction
embodied in this magnificent assertion that sent
those early witnesses forward to their awful,
majestic, apparently quixotic, but truly heroic,
conflict with the world, which steadied their hearts
in failure, and charged them with indomitable
purpose, and made them all aglow with anticipated
triumph. They were sure that principalities and
powers, spiritual wickedness in high places, thrones
and dominions, philosophies and superstitions, and

74 THE NAME WHICH IS
the whole mass of opposing intellectual, moral, and
material forces would slowly but inevitably yield
to the power of the Cross and the sway of the
Name. The whole world would kneel at the feet of
Him who died for it. The name was all in all to
them, and it would become all in all to the world.
These two things — the sweetness of the name to
them and their assurance of its irresistible power
in the world — made them apostles and missionaries,
made them fervent, enthusiastic, persistent, un-
doubting, fearless, self-denying, and gave them
their victory over the world.
And we shall share their thoughts, sympathies,
and purpose to the full if we have grasped the
import of the name as they did. Do you feel
its power yourselves ? How much does the name
mean to you ? Is it true, as you often sing^
Sweeter sounds than music knows
Charm me in Immanuel's name,
All her hopes my spirit owes
To His birth and cross and shame ?
Is it true, as you have repeated many a time —
Nor heart can sing nor tongue can frame,
Nor can the memory find,
A sweeter sound than Thy blest name,
O Saviour of mankind ?
Is it dearer to you than all the names of pomp,
wealth, ambition, and human distinction ? Is it
dearer, one hardly dare ask you, yet it ought to be,
than mother, wife, or child ? Does it suggest to
you all that is best in life, and all that you can

ABOVE EVEEY NAME 75
bear to think of when this short life is over ? Is it
a name that you would willingly suffer for ? that
you would sooner die than deny ? Would memory
lose its one precious treasure if that were gone ?
would hope fail and die out like some flickering
lamp burned down to its last drop of oil if that
name were blotted out, and the world grow
suddenly dark and a pang shoot through you as
if something were about to break in your heart ?
If the name is that to you — and it is all that
to thousands — then you will wish to say, not in
rhetoric but in sober sincerity, not in transient
gushes of emotion but with abiding purpose :
My gracious Master and my God,
Assist me to proclaim,
To spread through all the earth abroad
The honours of Thy name.
And do you believe, as St. Paul declares here, as
he and all the Apostles believed — for they would
have counted it utmost 'treachery to their Lord
to doubt it — do you believe, as every Christian
believes who is worthy of the name, do you
believe in your deepest hearts, that this exalted
name must have, and will have, universal pre
eminence; that it will not continue to divide the
world with other masters, but possess, as it already
claims, the whole ? Do you believe that every
other name will be lowered and swept aside, and
forgotten, that this may be all in all? Do you
believe that at the name every knee shall bow?
And who, that is worthy of the Christian name,
abates one jot of that mighty assurance and hope ?

76 THE NAME ABOVE EVEEY NAME
Your faith is but the whispered humbleness of a
trembling apology if it thinks that other masters
and other religions will continue to share with
Him possession of the world for which He died.
Your allegiance to Him is hardly worth as much
as the breath which confesses it if it does not
assert His coming right to every human heart and
crown Him Lord of all.
If you believe this, you will pray for it, you will
speed it on. You will bless God for every sign
of its coming. You will have part in that grandest
hope and dream of the Church and each Christian
heart, when the name shall have brought music to
every ear, as it has to yours, and every knee shall
bow under the thrall of its subduing force.

CHAPTER VIII
THE THINGS WHICH GOD EEVEALS TO
THEM THAT LOVE HIM
" Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the
heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that
love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit."
1 Cob. ii. 9, 10.
We often use these words in relation to the life
beyond. We quote them as if they referred to
the songs of the redeemed, the raptures of glorified
spirits, and all those inconceivable visions and joys
which belong to the heavenly state. In this sense
they are employed in one of our favourite hymns :
Glories upon glories hath our God prepared,
By the souls that love Him one day to be shared ;
Eye hath not beheld them, ear hath never heard.
And no doubt the words are quite true with
that application. But that was not what the
writer of them meant. He was thinking, not of
the mysteries of the future, but of things in the
present time which -are hidden from coarse and
unenlightened eyes, and revealed to those whose
souls have been touched to finer issues.
St. Paul was answering the contemptuous criti
cism of those who called his preaching foolish-
77

78 THE THINGS WHICH GOD EEVEALS
ness. The cultured men of Corinth had weighed
his message in their intellectual scales and rejected
it as worthless. They had found his speech
defective in the graces of oratory, and the doctrines
which he announced offensive both to reason and
good taste. That a crucified Jew should be the
Son of God, the Eedeemer of the world, and the
final Judge of all men, seemed to them the delusion
of ignorant and crazy minds, not to be entertained
for a moment by men of sound judgment and
intelligence. And St. Paul replied to them here
with pride as great as theirs, though of a loftier
kind ; and with scorn too, like a keen-edged rapier,
though scorn which had a touch of pity in it. He
declines to submit the mysteries of God to their
handling. He repudiates their tests. These things
are not judged by the sight of the eyes and by
the hearing of the ear, nor even by the trained and
well-balanced intellect. They require for their
perception a culture which no schools can give, a
culture which comes direct from the Spirit of God
to the spirit of man, and which is only bestowed
upon them that love Him. In fact, he claims for
himself and his fellow-Christians a certain superior
insight and receptiveness, an endowment peculiar
and unique, an apprehension which others have
not of the things which make up the higher
and diviner life. " Eye hath not seen, nor ear
heard. . . . But God hath revealed them unto us
by His Spirit."
I. Now this truth has often provoked the wit
of the satirist and the sneer of the infidel. They
have laughed at the idea that anything could be

TO THEM THAT LOVE HIM 79
revealed to the soul of faith which is not open to
the eyes of the intellect. And sometimes, alas!
their sneer has been not without provocation, for
the truth itself has many times suffered in the
hands of those who have abused and perverted it
for their own ends. The priest has claimed it to
silence the laity ; the bigot and the persecutor
have employed it to stop inquiry and quench the
highest aspirations of men. And often the vulgar
and self-confident preacher, talking the grossest
absurdities, has denounced those who reasonably
objected to his utterances as carnal, unspiritual,
and incompetent to judge. It is open to anyone
who is perhaps equally devoid of modesty and
grace to use this as the cover of his own ignorance
and arrogance, and to say, " We know these things,
and you do not." All this is inevitable. You have
read miserable parodies of the loftiest poems, and
seen wretched caricatures of the noblest faces.
So the sublimest truths may be easily turned into
coarseness and buffoonery ; but the truths remain
great and immortal, in spite of that.
II. There is a spiritual faculty given to men
which makes them wiser in the things of the spirit
than all which the wisdom of this world knows, and
the merest child in faith may feel and know what
the intellectual giant has no perception of. There
are simple things in every-day life which are close
akin to this. You know people who are clever
enough in their own department, and yet blind,
deaf, unfeeling, and unappreciative concerning the
things which are profoundly interesting to you;
men who know fifty times more than you know

80 THE THINGS WHICH GOD EEVEALS
about the world of books, yet have no more
sensitiveness than a stone to the music which sets
your heart beating with inexpressible raptures ;
men who could run up a column of figures whilst
you are stumbling over the first of them, and who
are no more affected by the most exquisite poetry
than your favourite dog might be. There are
men to whom the most beautiful painting which
the great masters ever executed suggests less
thought and less delight than the gilded frame
in which it is held ; but they would be able to
tell you the exact date, quality, and cost of the
wine on your table. There are coarse natures, to
whom sunsets and flowers and the infinitely varied
landscapes of nature are utterly unattractive and
meaningless, whilst the banquet which awaits them
at the end of the journey is like a vision of heaven
itself. As Mrs. Browning writes : " Earth is
crammed with heaven, and every bush on fire with
God " ; and then adds, with a flash of scorn, "But
in that bush most people see only blackberries."
There are people on whom wit and humour are
as much wasted as if you were expending them
on a brick wall, and people on whom the finest
touches of pathos are lost, just as if you dropped
them into some echoless pool.
These differences run all through life. They
determine whether a life shall be coarse and empty
or refined and abounding with joy. There are
perceptions which no training can give, which no
schools can create: they are the endowment of
nature, or rather the gift of God, and they are
often in the possession of the child, or the untutored

TO THEM THAT LOVE HIM 81
woman, and even of the unlearned preacher, whilst
the most omnivorous reader and bookworm may be
destitute of them.
And if you think of this you may well allow, if
you do not understand, that the same truth holds
in the life of faith and religious emotion. Take
St. Paul as he stands chained before Agrippa, or
Festus, or Felix, and flings out, in face of all their
splendour, his proud, pathetic challenge, " I would
that ye were altogether such as I am, except these
bonds " — a saying which, in its very tenderness,
expresses the utmost contempt for all that these
men enjoyed and were living for. Life meant
for these men sensual pleasures, pompous shows,
command of money, power and ambition — cups
most of which St. Paul had tasted. He knew the
quality of them, knew the measure of satisfaction
they would yield. And he had stepped up from
this to a higher platform, to a life in which vulgar
ambitions were forgotten, and the pleasures of the
senses pushed out by mightier joys; to a life in
which enthusiasm, hope, love, great aims, the
friendship of God and fellowship with Christ, were
supreme. Standing there, with the chains upon
his wrists, despised or pitied by all the spectators,
he felt a joyous liberty, a serene calm, a fulness of
unutterable emotion, a lofty grandeur of soul, such
as he knew that they had never felt and known.
He was quite sure that life meant more and deeper
and nobler things to him than had ever entered
their hearts to conceive. There had been revealed
to him the things which " eye had not seen, nor
ear heard." 6

82 THE THINGS WHICH GOD EEVEALS
And it is always thus with the souls to whom
God has spoken His deeper things. The joy which
they have is so refined and pure that they can
look down with solemn and pathetic contempt on
lower joys. If you do not at times feel some
thing of this, one may well question whether you
have any real religious f eeling at all. Surely there
are hours in your lives when you get above all
your ordinary pursuits and strivings, and all the
pleasures which you share with worldly men ; when
you get above them, and take the measurement
of them from that higher platform ; when you your
selves feel that you have vastly overrated them,
and that the things which are dearest to you, and
of infinitely greater importance, are those hopes,
emotions, and communions which belong to you as
children of God, which are the gift of Christ to
you, and which are no more understood by the un
believing world than the pleasures of the intellect
are understood by the man who cannot read or
spell. If the best part of your lives is not hidden
from the world, then it is to be feared that you
have no Christian life at all.
III. It is simply impossible for the secrets of
the Christian life to be revealed to those who have
no Christian beliefs and sentiments. People say to
us : " Your joys are imaginary, your perceptions of
God are self-delusions, your assurances, and hopes,
and peace of mind, and consciousness of forgive
ness, are your own creations ; they are things
which we do not feel, and do not understand, and do
not believe." Precisely ! It would be a wonderful
thing, indeed, if they did understand what they

TO THEM THAT LOVE HIM 83
have never felt. You cannot make a deaf man
understand music, though you spend years in
instructing him. Nobody but a mother can quite
understand what a mother's love for a child is.
You might read all the volumes which treat on
that affection, and ransack the whole dictionary of
love, without being much wiser as to the real
mystery of it. The only way to find that out is to
become a mother. And the only way to discover
the sweets of divine forgiveness is to be forgiven.
Plato draws a picture of the worshippers in the
old pagan Mysteries. They are going through the
sacred dance to the sound of sweet music which is
being played in the midst of them. But there are
/Spectators watching them from the hill-side afar off
who say these dancers are mad. The spectators can
see the movements of joy, but they cannot hear the
music. And people outside the Christian life are
like these spectators. They cannot hear the music,
and all the rest is strange and inexplicable. They
do not know the raptures which are felt when the
load of sin is removed ; when God, who has seemed
far off, comes as near as a familiar friend ; when
life moves in heavenly places, overshadowed by
the love of Jesus, and there is a singing in the
heart sweeter than all earthly music. They cannot
know. They must taste before they can experience
the things which God hath revealed to them that
love Him.
Nay, you may be Christians in a sense, and yet
have the finer and deeper things of the Christian life
hidden from you, if you have little of that love
of which St. Paul here speaks. Suppose your

84 THE THINGS WHICH GOD EEVEALS
Christian life is mainly, if not entirely, a regard
for matters of worship and morality. You are
just walking on the circumference of faith, knowing
little of the heart and centre of it. You have a
belief in God ; you believe in and adore Christ as
the great Master of Truth ; you respect all His
commandments, you recognise all His moral pre
cepts as binding, and you are endeavouring, in a
measure, to order your lives in obedience to them.
Your religion consists chiefly in doing certain things
and avoiding certain other things — living what
you call fairly good lives. But there is hardly any
emotion in your worship. There is hardly a single
pulsation in your hearts of deep, genuine, fervent
love of God, or love of Jesus Christ. Well, you
may be Christians ; I would not, for the world,
deny your title to the name. But I will say this,
that the greatest things in the Christian faith and
religion are entirely hidden from you. The best
parts of the Epistles and the sweetest parts of
the Gospels are as unintelligible to you as if they
were written in their original Greek and Aramaic
and had never been translated. And the sermons
which touch the higher chords and keys of the
Christian life will have no more effect upon you
than the breeze has which sweeps over a frozen
pool. You will say these sermons are dull, dry,
heavy, mystical, and you do not understand them.
No, that is the pity of it ; and you cannot unless
you love God, for it ,is only love that com
prehends the greater things. You never really
believe that God loves you until, with your whole
heart, you begin to love Him. You may accept

TO THEM THAT LOVE HIM 85
it as a thing that has been often told you, and
in an unquestioning, because unthinking, way ;
but you do not feel it, and get expanded with
the joy of it, until your own hearts are alight
and alive with some returning flame. God does
not give Himself fully save to those whose hearts
go out to Him with a sweet and glad affection.
It is not Christian morality, but Christian emotion,
that brings us in to the deeper things.
It is to those who love that God makes His
presence felt. To them He makes known the
height and depth and breadth of His own tenderness
and everlasting loving-kindness. In their hearts
He breathes peace, courage, cheerfulness, and
fulness of joy. They alone understand how much
of heaven this earthly life can bring. Eye hath
not seen, nor ear heard, but God reveals them by
His Spirit to them that love Him.

CHAPTEE IX
ST. PAUL'S CONCEPTION OF THE
CHUECH
" The house of God, which is the Church of the living God,
the pillar and ground of the truth." — 1 Tim. iii. 15.
Oub Lord spoke often about the Church, but He
never explained what He meant by the word or
the institution. He dropped a few hints and drew
one or two word-pictures, and that was all. The
Apostles followed His example. They were con
stantly talking about the Church, particularly St.
Paul, but they gave no precise definition or descrip
tion of it. They had evidently no rigid plan of it
in mind. It was not a dead thing, shaped and fixed
for ever in one mould. It was a living thing, sub
ject to growth, and beautiful with all the diversity
of life. It would never conform to one pattern.
It would never be tied down and bandaged by
ecclesiastical red tape into a stereotyped, uniform
respectability. It would be manifold, like the
manifold wisdom of God: "Where the Spirit of
the Lord is, there is liberty."
The claim which certain people make to impose
their particular form of church life upon the
whole of Christendom and to treat as schismatics
86

ST. PAUL'S CONCEPTION 87
and outsiders all who do not don the one uniform
is not worth discussing in these days. It is a
claim which common sense rejects, as well as
common charity. And the claim has ceased to
be offensive because it has become distinctly
absurd. The Church of the New Testament has
no cast-iron limitation, and no one channel or
chain through which divine grace flows. It wears
no uniform except the armour of God and the
robes of righteousness, and it is as varied and as
wide-embracing as the mind of Jesus.
Yet St. Paul gives us here what is the nearest
approach to a definition of the Church which we
can find. It is a beautiful little picture, which
contains all the essential features of a Church and
of church life. And it is, or ought to be, equally
true of the Church universal, and of every Chris
tian community which, having Jesus in the midst,
rightly takes the name of a Church. It shows
us the constitution, and the purpose of a Church
according to the divine idea.
I. The Church is an elect assembly, representing
for ever the living God. The ecclesia of the living
God, so St. Paul expresses it. It was Christ's
word, though our Lord never coined a new word
for a new and divine thing — the new word would
not have been understood. He took the name of
some human thing or institution which bore a
certain resemblance to the new thing, and applied
it with a new meaning. Ecclesia was the well-
known name which the Greeks gave to their
council, or parliament, the company of elect men
picked out from the multitude to be their repre-

88 ST. PAUL'S CONCEPTION
sentative leaders and guides. Our Lord deliberately
chose that word to describe the company of
believers. He meant that they were to be God's
appointed representatives, a moral and spiritual
aristocracy bearing ceaseless witness for Him.
They were to be men of spiritual light and leading,
interpreting God's law, and showing their fellow-
men the way to a diviner life. That was Christ's
magnificent idea of the Church in its relation to
the world. It consists of a body of men and
women separated from their fellow-men for the
sake of their fellow-men ; elevated in thought
and life that they may work for the elevation of
all. " Ye are the salt of the earth " ; " Ye are the
light of the world." That is divine election, and
it is the only election which the Master of our
Faith recognises. We need not be afraid of the
word because it has sometimes been used in a
narrow and perverted sense. It is Christ's word.
It is the root-meaning of the word ecclesia : the
elite, or elect ones, called out by God for a purpose.
God always brings the world forward by the
method of election. He ennobles the few that they
may lift up the many. He gives light and truth,
sanctity and goodness, to a select number, that
they may share out their gifts to the world at
large. The sunlight shines on the mountain-tops
before it reaches the valleys below. God, as
Shakespeare says, kindles no torch to burn and
shine for itself. When He fills a soul with light
He makes windows in that soul, so that all the
surrounding darkness may see it.
All exceptional gifts are bestowed on this prin-

OF THE CHUECH 89
ciple. They are not for private enjoyment, but
for public distribution. Shakespeare and Milton
were endowed with genius that the whole world
might be enriched by their thoughts.
The artist, poet, prophet, and apostle have
visions of truth and beauty that they may be
as eyes to the blind. " Art was given for that,"
writes Browning. " God uses us to help each
other, thus lending our minds out." And what
is given directly to one is given indirectly to all.
The Church is the embodiment of that great
divine thought. It is the steward or trustee of
God's truths, not the owner. It receives freely
that it may freely give. It is a company of men
and women to whom He lends Himself that the
world may feel His presence in them and become
a little less undivine itself. Let us never forget the
old definition of the Church, which has entered, in
varied forms, more or less into the creeds of all the
Christian communions : " A company of regenerate
and faithful men and women realising the pre
sence of Jesus in the worship and sacraments,
and obeying the law of God through the Spirit
of God who dwells in them."
We always get wrong when we get away from
that. The Church, says St. Paul here, is " the
house of God" — that is, the house in which God
dwells. He is not speaking of a building, but of
living souls, the souls of believing, Christ-loving
men. God dwells in them pre-eminently and
peculiarly. Do not let us be carried away by
all the specious and flattering talk which is going
on about the Divine Immanence in all men — talk

90 ST. PAUL'S CONCEPTION
which virtually sweeps away the distinction be
tween the Church and the world. Of course, there
is a grain of truth in that, as there is in every new
extravagance. St. Paul recognised that grain of
truth : " He is not far from any one of us, for in
Him we five and move and have our being." But
St. Paul never confounded that with the presence
of God in His Church, with the indwelling of the
Spirit of God in the hearts and lives of those who
love Him. That is a quite unique thing, the
great transcendent mystery which is not to be
frittered away in the flattering unction which tells
every graceless person that the Spirit of God
dwells in him as much as in the noblest saint.
The Church is the communion of faithful souls
devoted to Christ, and bearing their witness by
virtue of the Divine Spirit within them. It is
not the clergy and ministers, it is not the indis
criminate host of baptized persons, or persons that
repeat catechisms and creeds. It is not a hetero
geneous association of well-meaning people who
are engaged in various good works. It is not
the all sorts of people who may be brought under
good influences in connection with a sanctuary.
Church Institutions, as we call them — and I like
that word far better than Institutional Churches,
which may be dangerously misleading — Church
Institutions may be, and often are, admirable,
and needed things in their place, if the Spirit of
Christ rules in them. But make no mistake : the
mixed people whom they draw to recreation and
social intercourse are not the Church. The Church
is the foster-mother of the Institution, and we shall

OF THE CHUECH 91
need to be always on guard lest the Institution
outgrow and push out the Church ; lest the Insti
tution, like an unnatural child, devour its own
parent. For the Institution will speedily become
corrupt and perish, if it be not controlled by a
spiritual Church.
The Church is always one thing : the body of
men and women who have acknowledged Christ
as their Lord and the Holy Spirit as their in
dwelling Guide. The Church is the elect assembly
of the living God.
II. The Church is the household of God as
well as His house, His peculiar dwelling-place ;
for the word which the Apostle uses has the
double significance — house and household — and
that word, God's " household " or family, is an
illuminating picture of the Church. It gives you
in a flash a whole volume of tender thoughts and
relationships. The Church is God's family, united
in kinship and affection by the common Father
hood of God and the dear, condescending Brother
hood of Jesus ; and there we clasp hands and join
hearts in trust and love, conscious that faith has
made us peculiarly the sons and daughters of the
Almighty, and levelled us up to an indisputable
equality. The Church is home life lifted to a
higher plane. It is a sphere of common interests,
sorrows, and joys. It is, or ought to be, a sort
of sheltering roof to which every wanderer can
turn when he is weary of the world's coldness
and estrangement, and a place where the most
friendless will find himself in a hallowed com
munion of sympathetic souls.

92 ST. PAUL'S CONCEPTION
A Church is born of love ; it breathes love, and
feeds on it. It is girded with love ; it is all ablaze
with the pure flame of love divine. The heart
beats of a Church are love, and when those heart
beats are not felt the Church is dead. The
household of God, and therefore not the household
of class and party. The common distinctions of
the world have no place there. There is no upper
circle and no lower orders. A Christian Socialism
is established, without redistribution of goods ;
built up, not by parliamentary enactment, but by
the free movement of God's Spirit and the con
straint of Jesus' love. The rich and poor meet
together, and forget both their envies and their
prides in the thought that divine grace equally
exalts all, and that Jesus is the equal Saviour of
all. We know, alas ! that our actual church life
too often perpetuates class divisions. The rich
and the poor will not meet together — the workman
will not kneel with the master. Prejudices on
both sides are equally strong. The classes refuse
to mix even before the mercy-seat and the cross.
There are Churches of the upper class, and Churches
of the middle class, and Labour Churches ; but
these are all woefully heterodox ; they are direct
contradictions of the divine idea. They do
violence to the word Church who claim it for
one order of men. We shall never see the
Church shaped after the mind of Christ until we
see one in which all sorts and conditions are
equally welcome and equally at home.
The household of God — keep the emphasis on
that. It is God's household, and therefore wider

OF THE CHUECH 93
than party ; inclusive of all parties, in fact. A
Church of Jesus Christ has no political bias ; it
wears no political badge or colour. It keeps both
its worship and its work free from the party
political atmosphere. It welcomes to its fellow
ship men of all parties who hold the fundamental
faith. And when it becomes the servant, ally,
or advocate of one party it ceases to be a Church
and degenerates into a narrow sect or a club.
In fact, a Church is not and cannot be political in
the ordinary sense without destroying itself as
a spiritual and divine institution. We cannot
have it both ways. Throughout its long existence
the Church has never given itself over to politics
without ceasing to be spiritually minded. It has
never united itself to one political party without
withering up its right hand of power. And its
ministers have never plunged into the stormy and
contentious arena of politics without ceasing to be
soul-winners and the spiritual guides of men. The
individual members of a Church may be as keen
for party as they please, but pulpit, communion
table, mercy-seat, and cross are above party, and
a Church, as a Church, degrades itself and forgets
its high calling when it becomes the annex of
a party and ceases to be what it ever ought to
be — the all-embracing household of God.
III. The Church is the witness and upholder
of certain great, everlasting, and changeless
truths, the pillar and groundwork, or support
ing basement, of the truth. It is a figure which
almost interprets itself. The truth is Jesus and
the divine and eternal things which He revealed.

94 ST. PAUL'S CONCEPTION
The truth is the once crucified but now risen and
ascended Jesus, crowned with glory and out of
the world's sight, like some lofty, cross-crowned
dome of a stately building which is hidden in the
passing clouds or fog, yet beneath which are the
supporting pillars and basement, which can be seen
of all. And the Church is the pillar and basement.
The Church, in fact, has been appointed to make
known, maintain, perpetuate, and keep for ever
before the world those divine, eternal, and saving
truths which Christ lived and died to reveal, and
which He committed to His Church as a sacred
trust. The Church throughout the world is essentially
one — one in spite of all its divisions, because it
has essentially one faith. There are , certain great
momentous truths concerning God, and Christ's
Divine Sonship, and all that He taught and suffered,
which are believed, held tenaciously, jealously and
tearfully defended by the whole Church, and by
all who have any clear right to claim membership
in it. There can be no real spiritual union and
communion without great beliefs held in common.
There may be immense diversity in details, and on
the surface, but underneath there must be certain
rock-principles, strong convictions, great cer
tainties held by all. The oldest of Christian
communities, and in some lands the most corrupt,
has held together some fifteen centuries or more
and realised in a measure the communion of
saints, because, in spite of all its errors, pagan
additions, and worldly policy, it has held tena
ciously and unswervingly the great cardinal

OF THE CHUECH 95
verities of the Faith. Without that the grandest
society in the world is but a thread of beads or a
rope of sand. Without that a Church becomes
simply a fortuitous concurrence of atoms loosely
connected for a little time, perhaps, by the charm
of some attractive personality and bound to dis
solve in no great length of time. Men are trying
to-day — they always have been trying — to establish
Churches — Christian Churches they call them —
without a creed, with hardly a common faith of
any kind. Men may believe what they like if they
are only actuated by good motives, drawn together
by brotherly sentiments, and inclined to philan
thropy. A Church of that sort always falls to
pieces like a child's toy-house or a palace in
the clouds. Sentiment is beautiful enough, in a
way, but without solid truth and firm convictions
at the base it is only the beauty of a dissolving
dream. The sustaining strength of the whole
Church, and of every Church, is in its deep-rooted
beliefs which go down to the very foundation
of things and its hold upon truths which cannot
be shaken — such truths as the Incarnation mystery,
the sinless perfection, the divine personality and
sacrificial work of Jesus, the resurrection of the
dead, the judgment to come, and the life eternal.
The Church goes on through all the changing
times and changing fashions of men ever lifting
up the same voice and reiterating the same inde
structible message, whether its truths are accept
able or the reverse, whether the wisdom of the
world praises or derides them, whether the spirit
of the times runs with them or against; the

96 ST. PAUL'S CONCEPTION
Church holds on without faltering, never shifting
its ground from the fundamental things, ever
assured that the truths which it holds are not for
a day but for eternity, without change or shadow
of turning, and that the world at last will take
them because it cannot do without them. " The
household of God, which is the Church, the
pillar and ground of the truth."

CHAPTEE X
THE GLOEY AND POWER OF THE
GOSPEL
" For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ : for it is the power
of God unto salvation, to every one that belie veth." — Eom. i. 16.
To us, now, it seems a small thing to say, " I am not
ashamed of the Gospel of Christ." Why should we
be ashamed ? It is an easy thing now to be proud
of the Gospel of Christ, for we stand in the presence
of its accomplished facts, and we see it recognised
as the greatest and the ever-increasing force in the
world. No, it requires no boldness and proves no
merit to glory in that which all men speak well
of; to swell the triumphal procession of an ac
knowledged victor. If St. Paul could have thrown
himself, in imagination, into the place where we
stand to-day, and been able to look back, as we
do, upon nineteen centuries of Christian labour and
advance, there would have been nothing very
wonderful in this saying, " I am not ashamed of
the Gospel." But at that time all that we are
witnesses of had yet to be proved. The Gospel,
then, had won only a few scattered adherents,
chiefly among the poor and uncultured. It had
no church buildings, no organised ministry, no
97 7

98 THE GLOEY AND POWEE
standing in respectable society. No school of
thinkers and writers had recognised it ; no govern
ment or magistrates or civil power had noticed it,
except to curse it as a disturbing pest; no poetry,
art, genius, or literature had been brought into its
service ; no eloquence had extolled it ; no wealth
had been laid in tribute at its feet. It had been
rejected by all rulers, priests, and dignified
personages. In the eyes of the general world it
was nothing but a vulgar story of an obscure
Galilsean peasant who had been put to death as
a criminal — put to a death so shameful that polite
lips hardly cared to mention it. Think of all that,
and then the weight of these words of St. Paul
impresses you. It was wonderful, indeed, that he
could speak with such absolute confidence about
this Gospel, calling it the great power of God,
anticipating the time when the despised name of
Jesus would be incomparably mightier than
Caesar's, and when the truths which had their
centre in the cross would have prevailed over
all the magnificent pride and intellectual glory of
that ancient world. Yes, it required a great
prophetic vision to speak these words then : " I
am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ : for it is
the power of God unto salvation, to every one that
believeth." I. It requires no prophetic vision now. We can
hardly imagine any man, with his eyes half open,
talking about being ashamed of the Gospel now.
There are, perhaps, a few fierce and malignant
unbelievers who think that the world of the future
would get on better without it, and who would be

OF THE GOSPEL 99
glad, if they could, to sweep it away. But these
are hardly sane men. An unnatural hatred has
disordered their vision, or the love of evil has
darkened their hearts. The vast multitude of men
who live in Christian lands, even though the
Gospel has little hold of them, think with a sort
of pride of Christianity, and all who have yielded
to its power never think about it save with a sense
of glorying and exultancy. For the triumphs of
the Gospel confront us everywhere. In every
great city the masterpieces of architecture are
those which Christian art has raised. Wherever
we travel, unless it be in heathen lands, the most
attractive buildings are those around which cluster
long Christian memories, and which owed their
existence to Christian devotion. In every famous
picture-gallery the paintings which charm us most,
and speak to us with the inspiration of genius, are
those which show us apostles, saints, and heroes
of the long Christian warfare. When we read the
records of the past, every page that is best worth
reading, which we read over and over again, tells
us of some of the doings of men who owed all
their courage, goodness, and grandeur to the faith
of Jesus, and learnt all their self-forgetting virtues
and service at the foot of His cross. The story of
humanity for the last eighteen hundred years
would be a dull, monotonous record of crimes,
cruelties, and degradations were it not relieved of
its dulness and illumined with bright constella
tions by the figures of noble men and women who
counted all as loss that they might win Christ, and
hold fast His truth and receive from Him the

100 THE GLOEY AND POWEE
reward of duty well done. And when we look
around on the world of to-day, Christian thought
and endeavour meet us at every turn in forms of
beauty and devotion and transcendent grace.
There is no book worth reading which has not
borrowed some of its tone and feeling from
Nazareth and Calvary. Our literature through
out, save that portion of it which reverent and
decent minds avoid, is tinctured with the spirit of
the Sermon on the Mount. Our politics dare not
openly avow any other principles than those of
peace and justice towards all which the great
Cross-bearer taught. Our very Socialisms, Secular
isms, Agnosticisms, where they are bold enough
to deny His name, clothe themselves with the
sentiments of brotherhood and charity which they
have taken unconsciously from Him.
And everywhere the works of the Gospel are in
evidence. You see them in Sunday school, ragged
school, refuges, homes for the fallen, orphanages,
hospitals, and institutions countless, which lay His
healing hand upon the ignorant, diseased, and miser
able, and preach a message of recovery and hope to
the most abject and desperate. You see and hear of
hundreds of thousands of homes and private lives
into which this Gospel brings patience, strength,
courage, and gladness. You cannot count or
estimate how many hearts are nerved by it to
endure the disappointments of life, the rebuffs of
fortune, the stings of the world's malice and
neglect, the weariness of sickness, and the blows
of bereavement ; how many are made brave to
struggle on through all the fierce and ungenerous

OF THE GOSPEL 101
competitions and keep their heads lifted above
the deep waters, and face death when it comes
with a cheerful smile, because they have Him with
them who saved the sinking Peter in the days of
old, and took the sting from death by bearing it
Himself. Think of all this — nay, think of only a
small part of it; fix your eyes on but a narrow
strip of that wonderful panorama of Gospel achieve
ments which is constantly passing before your eyes,
and then you will say, indeed, with a great out
burst of gratitude and joy, " I am not ashamed of
the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God
unto salvation, to every one that believeth." You
are not ashamed of Christianity. No. The grandeur
of its works, the magnitude of its triumphs, the
immensity of its power in the world, forbid that.
II. But bring the thought of the text a little
nearer home. Men may have nothing but respect
ful and reverent, and even proud, thoughts of
Christianity, and yet have little hold upon the
Gospel as regards themselves. St. Paul meant
two things here — first, that he gloried in the
Gospel for himself, gloried in confessing it; and,
secondly, that he had unlimited confidence in its
power over others.
First, he gloried in the thought that he himself
was a Christian, that the Gospel had laid hold of
him, and held him fast in chains of love ; that
its truths and promises and hopes had taken
entire possession of him and formed the strength
and joy of his life. They were nine-tenths of life
to him, and the other tenth also. And he wanted
all the world to know of it, if the world cared to

102 THE GLOEY AND POWEE
know. He was eager to confess it in every scene
and company. " I, Paul, who was once a Pharisee
and the chief of sinners, am now Christ's man, and
to be that is all the world to me." That was
what St. Paul meant by " I am not ashamed of
the Gospel of Christ." Now, could we all use these
words with the same meaning ? Most of us, I
trust, could. You think of your Christian faith
and your Christian hopes as the glory of your
lives, as a richer treasure than all your other
possessions, and as the croWn of all the honours
you enjoy. You believe that when you make a
public profession of faith in Christ you are mak
ing the grandest avowal of your lives, and you
are really glad to have it known, anywhere and
everywhere, that you are endeavouring to be fol
lowers of the great Master. It is not so with all.
We would it were ! There are some who have not a
little Christian feeling and belief. In their secret
hearts they have a great deal of loyalty and genuine
love towards Christ, and they are trusting in Him
for salvation. But they rather take pains to hide
it all. They rather shrink from being marked
out in public as Christian men and women. And
in no company in which they move do they let
it be known, in any distinct way, that they are
disciples of Jesus. Never do they speak these
words, in any confident tone, " I am not ashamed of
the Gospel of Christ." I fear that they are just
a little ashamed of it. And there are others who
would like to take the honest and noble side.
They are often drawn to it — many a time their
hearts half yield to the Gospel; but then they

OF THE GOSPEL 103
always draw back, out of cowardly shame. They
do not even attempt to live as Christians. They
follow with the multitude, often even to do
evil. Yes, possibly you are afraid to be a
Christian because the Christian life is not a popu
lar thing among the set, the companions, the
work-people, the class, in which you move. They
care for none of these things. They despise and
sneer at them, and you would be visited by their
witless laughter and shallow ridicule if you stood
out as a believer. And therefore you do it not;
you are ashamed of the Gospel of Christ ! Yet you
had better be ashamed of the sunhght, or ashamed
of your own mother and wife, or ashamed that
you have a soul within you to be saved.
Secondly, St. Paul meant by these words, as he
tells us, that, as a Christian worker, he had un
limited confidence in the Gospel, and in the divine
forces which are represented by the Gospel. He
behoved that they were the power of God unto
salvation to every one that believed. No matter
where he went, among what class of people,
Eoman, Jew, barbarian, he was sure that the
weapons which he carried would be effective in
breaking down intellectual and moral barriers,
melting hard hearts, and converting enemies into
soldiers of faith. It was because of this assurance
that he so mightily prevailed. He never knew
fear or despair, though he had to meet heathenism
and degradation in their most revolting forms,
though he had to, deal with the grossest sensuality
and the most obstinate unbelief.
The Gospel of Christ's love had won victories

104 GLOEY AND POWEE OF GOSPEL
over those things, and would still win them. And,
believing this, his ministry never failed to secure
subdued and renewed souls for the Master's service.
Oh that God would give to us who are fellow-
labourers with St. Paul more of this grand con
fidence in the weapons of our warfare — in the
message we preach and teach, in the Cross-power
which we bring to bear upon the hard and unwil
ling hearts of men.
We all need more of it, whether we are preachers,
Sunday-school teachers, mission workers, or simply
parents praying for the conversion of our own
children. We are frightened by the hardness of
heart we encounter, by the stubborn wills that
repel our efforts, by the deep-rooted habits of sin
and stony prejudices which meet us, or by the
callous indifference which turns our earnest appeals
to wasted breath. We forget — nay, we hardly
believe — that the very power of God is in our
words and prayers, and that the Spirit who speaks
and works through us is mightier than all these
things. There is not an evil force in this world of
any kind which has not yielded a thousand times
to the all- victorious power of the Gospel we preach.
And, if we have sufficient faith in our message,
these forces will yield again. Would that we could
always labour, pray, preach, and teach with the
feeling that Christ's cross can do almost impossible
things ; yes, things which men deem absolutely
impossible. According to the measure of our con
fidence will be our success. " I am not ashamed of
the Gospel of Christ,"

PART II
THE GEEAT THOUGHTS OF ST. PAUL

CHAPTEE XI
THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD
" For we are members one of another." — Eph. iv. 25.
The words mean that each individual of the human
race is related to every other, just as the several
organs and limbs of our body are related. The
assertion is usually made of those who are united to
Christ by faith, as if they were one, the connected
parts of one body. Here, however, the truth is given
a wider range. It is applied to every man's neigh
bour, and if we ask, " Who is my neighbour ? " the
answer is given in a certain parable which we are
not likely to forget. The Apostle is repeating here
one of his favourite thoughts, a thought insisted
upon in one Epistle after another, and expressed
in a variety of ways : " None of us liveth to him
self " ; " There is one family in heaven and earth."
Each life is part and parcel of the larger universal
life. Humanity is one bundle strung together by
its Creator. We are connected like the fibres of a
rope, like the links in a chain, like the branches of
a tree, like the waves of the ocean ; or, to use the
Scripture figure again, like parts of the same body.
It was St. Paul who gave us this particular figure,
but it was St. Paul's Master who gave both him and
107

108 THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD
us the truth. Christ spoke it, breathed it, lived it,
wove it into all His teachings, exemplified it in
His sufferings, glorified it in His death. To Him
humanity was one. He saw it almost as we see
one face ; He felt it almost as we feel the beatings
of one heart. He carried its griefs, infirmities,
and sins, and just as if they had belonged to
one heart and life. It was all a living part of
Himself, joined together and joined to Him in
inseparable bonds of sympathy and fellowship.
When He became incarnate it was the Divine One
entering into the whole race ; when He died He
grasped the whole of humanity in His own person,
and died for all ; and when He rose again the
whole family was lifted up to a new life with Him.
If we could understand this, if we could realise
how completely He identified Himself with the
race, and the race with Himself, we might come
far nearer to a comprehension of the Atonement,
how He bore our sins and guilt, our darkness and
shame, our very penalties, in His own body on the
tree. The mystery is dark and insoluble to us
chiefly because, in our separate individuality and
isolation, we never feel one with our fellow-men as
He felt with all. To His thoughts and sympathies
the mass of men were always as one man, and that
one man part of Himself. They were one family,
one brotherhood ; one connected and interdependent
organism, one heart with innumerable throbbings
and emotions ; or, as St. Paul expresses it, " one
body." "We are members one of another."
Now this was one of the greatest strides which human
thought ever made. When St. Paul saw and an-

THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD 109
nounced this truth he lifted himself two thousand
years and more ahead of his own generation. He
grasped, in prophetic vision, what the world would
only learn after long, weary centuries of pressure,
strife, conflict, suffering, failure, and progress.
We, in this age of boasted enlightenment, are
only just beginning to take it in. Our vaunted
civilisation has got so far on the road to omni
science that it is still in the rear of a converted
Pharisee who lived in the time of the Caesars !
Our wisest and best men, perhaps, do now see this
truth as through a glass darkly, while the great
bulk of men have, so far, no inkling of it at all.
Yet, were it fully grasped and habitually acted
uponr it would solve most of our anxious social
problems. It would settle most of the disputes
of parties and classes. It would put an end to
the perpetual jealousies and antipathies which em
broil the nations in war, and it would quickly
change the face of the world. Let me remind you
of some of its applications — how it is true both
in the particular and the universal, affecting us
in things near and in things remote. " We are
members one of another."
I. It is exemplified in the home circle. There we
get our elementary lessons in it, and learn to
understand its wider applications in the world
outside. God teaches us all the rudiments of
religion in that primary school. A well-ordered
Christian home gives us the truest picture that
we can find on earth of the heaven above. In
the tender love of parents we get our first and
best conceptions of the Divine Fatherhood, and in

110 THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD
the pains and burdens which a mother suffers for
her child is the everlasting type of that vicarious
principle which is seated and enthroned in the
very heart and government of God. Around the
fireside, on the domestic hearth, we are for ever
unconsciously weaving the " pattern of things in
the mount." There, especially, we are reminded
of the mystical bonds which make many lives one.
The family is indeed one body. It is overshadowed
with the same anxieties, it trembles with the
same fears, and is thrilled with the same joys.
Parent and child, brother and sister, are roped
together, and for the most part climb and fall
together. The dishonour of one is the disgrace
of all ; the misfortune of one is the sorrow of all ;
the promotion of one is the elevation of all. When
a son takes to evil ways he does something more
than blacken his own character and imperil his
own future : he darkens the lives of those about
him, he wounds and half breaks the hearts that
love him best. Each member of the household
has the power of blessing or cursing the whole of
it ; each one can put the glow of pride or the
blush of shame on every cheek ; each one can
set music playing or torturing worms gnawing in
every heart. Whether it be father, mother, son,
or daughter, not one of them " perishes alone in
his iniquity." If one suffer, all suffer in a greater
or less degree, and alas ! those who suffer most
are often those who deserve it least. In many a
home in which sin is done there is a miniature
Calvary where innocent ones bear the guilt, and
perhaps in part expiate it; and in many a home

THE GEEAT HUMAN BROTHERHOOD 111
where one lives near to Christ virtue flows from the
garments of that one which more or less heals all.
We often cry out against that tragical law
which the Scriptures emphasise : " The sins of the
fathers are visited upon the children." " Grossly
unjust ! " we say ; " morally illogical ! an incompre
hensible mystery ! Why should guilt be allowed
to transmit its loathsome legacy to those whose
angels do always behold the face of the Father ? "
Yes, but do not forget that this law has its
golden, transverse side. The righteousnesses, vir
tues, prayers, noble lives, successes, and honours
of the fathers are equally visited on the children,
and they are blessed, beyond all their deserts, for
the fathers' sakes. It would fare ill with some of
us were we not daily gathering the harvest sowed
by the patience and devotion of praying sires.
It is, in the main, a wholesome and saving law, a
powerful corrective of evil, a mighty incentive
to goodness. It restrains a man at every step.
It preaches righteousness to him at every turn of
life — at least, it ought to do, and will do unless
he has either the heart of a beast or the irre
sponsible frivolity of a fool. The thought that in
his life and course of action others are involved,
that in falling he is dragging them down, that in
fighting life's battle worthily he is paving their
way to victory, is like a warning sentinel or
pleading angel arresting or directing one's way
ward feet. There would be far more sin and
sorrow in the world were it not for this awful,
solemn binding of lives together for better and
for worse. " We are members one of another."

112 THE GREAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD
II. This principle is enforced in every aspect of
Church life. There, however, it does not always
come to the surface and declare itself so con
spicuously as in the home. In the Church we are
often only half conscious of it, and in some Churches
it hardly finds a place. There are fashionable
sanctuaries where the communion of saints is
advertised in a creed, and never realised as a
solemnity. Strangers meet like touching circles,
and edge one another off with the cold salute
or glance of frigid unconcern, and never dream
that that name of Jesus, which they all repeat,
is mocked on the lips unless it kindles tenderness
and affection in the heart. There are few of us
who feel as sweetly akin as we ought to do when
we kneel together at our Father's feet. We rarely
take upon ourselves the troubles and anxieties of
our fellow-members, as we bear the misfortunes
that fall upon parent, child, or brother. Our
Christian fellowship never more than approximates
to the ideal which the Master showed. And yet,
only a prejudiced unbelief would deny that there
is more of warm and living sympathy, more
endearing friendships and blessed fraternity among
those who revere the Name than in any other
assembly, club, or society, in the world. And
wherever Christ's Presence is really felt there the
sweet words of John Fawcett find an echo in
every heart : We share our mutual woes,
Our mutual burdens bear,
And often for each other flows
The sympathising tear.

THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD 113
The Church is the household of God, subject to the
same common impulses, movements, and conditions
as an ordinary home. In moral and spiritual things,
especially, we are bound intimately together. If
a man disgraces his Christian profession he throws
the shadow of that disgrace upon all with whom
he is associated. The whole body feels the stab
and tingles with the shame. Yes ! and a few
exceptionally saintly lives put a halo of sanctity
on a whole community. It is said that disease is
contagious, while health keeps its virtue within
itself. You may tell that in Gath and Askelon,
but tell it not in Jerusalem. Whisper it not in a
church. There one gives out the sweetness and
grace that are in him. There is a certain temper
or atmosphere in a church which affects all its
members. If there be a spirit of worldliness, it
creeps over all hearts. If there are choking fogs
of doubt, all breathe them. If there is icy coldness,
all hearts get frost-bitten. Zeal is contagious,
missionary fervour is catching, enthusiasm spreads
like fire, revival quickenings touch the deadest
heart with some emotion. God cannot bless one
without blessing many. When the high tide fills
one channel, it tends to the same level in all
connected channels. We share out our gifts, and
he who climbs to the mountain-tops of faith
draws others after him. Everywhere in the
religious life there are these mighty currents of
sympathetic feeling and action. We are carried
forward and backward together on the same
flowing and ebbing waves.
The thought has a far wider range. Not only
8

114 THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD
are the members of one Church woven together
in the same spiritual movement, but all the
Churches. Christendom is linked together, in spite
of its divisions. The same lethargies, at times,
creep over it all; the same mighty impulses
sweep over it all. There are periods when the
polar airs of negativism nip off all its buds and
arrest all its fruit-bearing, and seasons when its
faith is clear and strong as the sunlight and its
branches laden with summer fruit. Whenever
there are great religious upheavals and awakenings
they are not, and cannot be, confined to one quarter.
The power which first quickens one slumbering
or torpid Church presently sets the dry bones
shaking everywhere. The Eeformation which
gave new spiritual life to the Teutonic races
roused in all the Catholic nations more religious
zeal and activity. The fire which set Luther and
John Knox and Latimer aflame with evangelical
fervour sent Jesuit missionaries to China, India,
and Africa. The Methodist revival cleansed and
almost re-created the faith and energy of all the
•Christian communities in this land. Every true
revivalist has, like John Wesley, the world for his
parish, for the whole Christian world is more or
less stirred by the forces which energised him,
and there is " nothing hid from the heat thereof."
If there be a deepening of the religious sentiment,
every religious heart has part in it. Every prayer
for the outpouring of the Spirit is a prayer for
the whole body of Christ. God spurns our limita
tions. We ask for showers of blessing on our own
garden, and lo ! they come down plentifully on our

THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD 115
neighbour's garden as well. God made the Evange
lical Free Churches one before the National Fede
ration recognised it. He bound them by a hundred
sympathetic ties. We are all rich or poor to
gether. We advance or retreat together. It is
madness to suppose that one can be strengthened
at the cost of another. As well might a navigator
try to fill his sails with the winds stolen from his
companions' ships. You cannot bottle up the
breezes of heaven and make them private pro
perty. When they blow fresh from the hills of
God they bring health to all our cheeks. " Who
is weak, and I am not weak ? Who is offended, and
I burn not ? " " We are not divided, all one body
we." When Pentecost is about, all the sects realise
it as the heart of one man, and the sacred fire is
on the lips of all. One may get it sooner than
another, just as the old beacon-fires were kindled.
But the lighting of one signalled the lighting of
the next, and the next, until all the hills were
ablaze. We are fools and blind if we think that,
like Jacob, we can rob our brother of his blessing
without impoverishing and disinheriting ourselves.
There are Christian people in this land who wish
and pray that the Free Churches might decline,
waste away, disappear. I stretch the word Charity
to its utmost limits when I call them Christians.
The thing is impossible. To us it is almost un
thinkable. But were such a thing to happen all
the religious fervour and strength of the land
would be carried away on the same back-flow;
and the Established Church itself would be left
spiritually defunct, in possession of endowments,

116 THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD
orders, and the empty shell of its ceremonies, and
with nothing else but the corpse of its former self.
Again, we are often told that we Free Churchmen
are enemies of the Established Church, that we
are seeking to destroy the Church. How much
longer will that railing accusation find currency ?
How much longer will that bugbear be used to
frighten children ? Were we capable of such be
sotted folly and guilt we should forfeit every right
and title to the name of Christ — nay, we should
be engaged in an act of felo-de-se. To wound
any Church is to give back-handed strokes at
ourselves. We want every Church made strong
for Christ, weaned from its trust in princes and
parliaments that it may hold harder to the Master,
freed from its crutches that it may walk at liberty,
delivered from the crushing nightmare of priestism
that it may expand with the fuller life of the
Spirit. And perhaps the best way to effect that
is not so much to denounce the evil that is in a
Church as to overcome that evil with our larger
good. Let our Churches have a revival of spiritual
energy. Let the channels of evangelicalism be
filled to overflowing with the waters of life, and
those waters will stream over all the locks and
floodgates into the channels of our episcopal neigh
bours, sweeping away all the carnal, worldly,
sacerdotal stuff on a diviner tide of power. God
help us all to realise more our vital connection ! —
that we are " members one of another."
III. And now I ask you to take the words in
their widest range. They are true of the greater
world outside the Church, true of the nation and

THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHERHOOD 117
of the whole human family. We are constantly
having the fact brought home to us that all souls
are God's, and therefore ours ; that humanity is
one, that all sections, classes, communities, and
races are governed, swayed, or affected in varying
degrees by the same forces, influences, agencies,
and movements. A nation is like a mass of nerves
in the same body. If there are troubles, calamities,
bankruptcies, panics, labour disputes, they touch
all sections, some more than others, but all in a
measure. Nay, more. There is no event of any
magnitude taking place in any quarter of the
globe which does not spread out, like the widen
ing circle on the water, to every part of the globe.
Silver crazes, bimetallic manias across the Atlantic,
are felt in India, China, and Britain. High tariffs
imposed in countries far away shut up factories
close to our own doors. Sugar bounties in Germany
make destitution in Jamaica. Famines and plagues
in India stop the looms in Lancashire. A failure
of the harvest in Russia means less bread for the
children of our poor. If there is commercial stag
nation in Australia, thousands of people suffer for
it in the home-land. It is the most suicidal folly for
one nation to suppose that it can permanently en
rich itself at the expense of others. The poverty or
enrichment of all ultimately fall and rise together.
Tariff walls are built by well-meaning but blind
men, who have lost sight of their own best interests
in losing sight of the law of Christ. The world is
joined by sympathetic cords. Eailways, ships, and
electric cables are all helping to reveal to us God's
thought of His one family. He maketh the winds

118 THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD
His angels, his messengers flaming fire, and all
events, when rightly understood, enforce the Gospel
truth that " He hath made of one blood all nations
of men." " We are members one of another."
Think how, in the every-day occurrences of our
city life and national life, we suffer with one
another, and often for one another. Think how
the selfish people who imagine that the sorrows,
sins, woes, degradations, and despairs of others are
no concern of theirs are constantly having it
brought home to them, in painful ways, that their
egotistical philosphy is contrary to God's law, and
opposed to human facts. No man can live in
luxurious wealth and ease, heedless of the penury
and squalor about him, without sooner or later
paying the penalty. We cannot have filth and
disease in the courts and hovels of the poor but in
due time some breath of infection will steal into
the perfumed chambers of the wealthy. If there
is fever in the sweater's den, where perhaps the
rich man's clothes are made, that fever, in some
unlucky day, will be carried into the mansion. If
there are ignorance, drunkenness, and discontent
among workmen every manufacturer and capitalist
will be the poorer for it. If there are swarms of
neglected children, or unhealthy, or taught little
of morals and religion, or children whose language
is lewd and profane growing up to manhood, it
means coming mischief, anxiety, and sorrow for
all classes of society. However you try to separate
classes, you cannot. Mightier forces sweep away
your barriers with a laugh of scorn. You say
" Am I my brother's keeper ? " A thousand voices

THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD 119
answer, in tragic tones, "Yes ! " And if you refuse to
recognise the fact, God will, in one way or another,
make you pay for it. Do you take no interest in
the moral well-being of the town you live in ? Is
it nothing to you whether good men rule its affairs
or men of the indifferent sort? By and by the
enormous folly of this selfishness will be demon
strated to you, for the immoralities, vices, corrup
tions of any class recoil in a hundred ways upon
those who have neglected to deal with them. We
are indeed bound together. Yes, sometimes in a way
which it makes one nervous to think about. Give
a passing thought to the awful visitation which,
not many years ago, played havoc in the town of
Maidstone. Some thousands of lives were imperilled,
and I do not know how many graves filled, merely
because a few wretched, unclean creatures out of
the London slums had crept out of their filthy
surroundings to pick hops in the fields and by the
water-brooks of the fair Kentish county. A terrible
thing, you say, that those innocent Maidstone
people should suffer thus for the neglects, vices,
and sins with which they had nothing to do. And
it is, indeed, terrible. Yet all through human
society the same principle is at work.
In every quarter you find vicarious suffering.
You find the good involved in the evil of the
wicked, the just bearing the cross laid upon them
by the doings of the unjust. Do you complain
that it is not fair and right and equal? Well,
perhaps it is not fair, in your limited view. But
you have to submit to it. It is God's established
order, and it is done in God's wisdom and mercy,

120 THE GEEAT HUMAN BEOTHEEHOOD
too. It is all to force upon us this truth, which we
are very unwilling to learn — that we " are members
one of another." It is all to destroy the selfish
instincts in us, and make us care for our brothers
more. If each man suffered just for his own sins,
and no other, it would harden pity, quench sym
pathy, and almost kill love. It would make the
righteous careless what became of the unrighteous.
It would cut us off from all participation in the
sufferings of Christ, and all realisation of His joy.
We are joined together that each one may be in a
measure forced to be his brother's keeper. It is
not enough to be just ourselves ; we must seek to
make others just. In our limited degree, the sins
of the world are laid upon us, as they were upon
Christ. So long as the world has its sorrows, woes,
wrongs, moral diseases, and spiritual darkness, we all
feel the burden, the pain, and the shame of them.
And by these things God teaches and impels us to
take part with Him in saving others. By these things
He is always condemning our narrow interests and
blind self-love, and urging us to nobler efforts of
the Christ-like sort. By these things He is ever re
minding us that none of us can live unto himself.
God grant that we aU, and all our Churches, may
rise to a truer conception of our relationship to the
great world around, may feel, as the Saviour felt,
the throbbing heart of our one vast human brother
hood, and prove, by the energy and compassion of
our saving work, that our love has no limits and
our kinship no boundaries, that all men are dear to
us as they were to Him, because we " are members
one of another."

CHAPTEE XII
THE UNLIMITED POSSESSIONS OF THE
CHRISTIAN LIFE
" As poor, yet making many rich ; as having nothing, and yet
possessing all things." — 2 Cor. vi. 10.
This is one of a series of paradoxes, delightful
contradictions, beautiful puzzles — yet only puz
zling to those who read without thinking, only
puzzling to those who stop at the outward form,
and who have no vision of the inner truth. Things
and attributes apparently as opposite as light and
darkness are asserted in the same breath of the
same persons, and the man with just mind enough
to make him a logician, and without the heart-power
which opens the deeper and higher chambers of
life, will say, " How can these things be ? Sorrow
ful, yet always rejoicing ; dying, yet intensely
alive ; unknown, yet well known ? " But every
one who truly lives the life of faith knows that a
hundred things meet there which the dull senses
cannot reconcile, but which the profounder spirit
clasps together in strange unison. Is not every
Christian a sinner and a saint ? a child of heaven
and a clod of earth ? an eternal building of God
and a frail perishing tabernacle ? a spirit winged
121

122 THE UNLIMITED POSSESSIONS
with hope and lifted up to raptures, and a creature
weighted and crippled by the earthly environment
climbing slowly, through fears and stumblings and
humiliations, to see the face of God ? Any one of
us in whom divine thought and purpose move
amid the human encumberment could write a
string of contradictions as startling and true as
those which the Apostle gives us here.
Now, in the particular words which we have
read, St. Paul speaks of the poverty and affluence
of the Christian life. In appearance — that is as
ordinary eyes take its measure — it is in a state of
destitution, but actually, as God surveys it, and as
it feels in its own deep, secret experience, it is
abundantly rich, its possessions are beyond count ;
no table of figures, no arithmetical calculation can
express them. " As poor, yet making many rich ;
as having nothing, yet possessing all things." Let
us not forget that the point and force of the
antithesis are supplied by the actual worldly
circumstances of the Apostle and his fellow-
believers. The contrast is not so sharp, it even
disappears altogether when we take into view the
average Christian congregation of to-day. I would
fain believe that you have the higher possessions
in which St. Paul rejoiced — that you are rich in
faith and hope and spiritual treasures ; but I could
not, without a touch of irony, describe you as
poor and destitute of goods in a worldly sense.
You complain of straitened circumstances some
times when demands are made upon your
generosity ; but everyone knows what that means.
The days are gone by when Christianity was

OF THE CHEISTIAN LIFE 123
linked with grim poverty, and men went out empty
and disinherited to wage their grand warfare with
the world. This man Paul was as poor as his
Master had been, with hardly money enough to
purchase food and lodging on his missionary
journeys, and owning nothing, in fact, but the
raiment which he wore. The Christians to whom
he wrote in Corinth were generally people of
scanty means, most of them slaves who, in point
of law, owned nothing, not even their own wives
and children, or their own bodies. It is necessary
to remember this if we would appreciate the power
of such words as these: "As poor, yet making
many rich ; as having nothing, yet possessing all
things." But now, what means this apparently extravagant
assertion that Christ's servants and witnesses are
masters of unlimited wealth ? Is it a flight of
rhetoric, or a piece of sober truth ? We must
settle, first, what it is that makes a man rich. And
here we may take either the lower or the higher
ground ; we may be content with the superficial
view, or we may grasp the deeper thought.
I. And, first, it may be asserted, without question,
that a man's real wealth is not in anything outside,
but in himself. It is what you are that makes
you indisputable owners, and not what you have.
The more you advance in knowledge and experi
ence of life, the more deeply you are convinced of
that fundamental fact. You began, perhaps, by
reckoning as your possessions only the external
things to which the law gives you a title : the
goods and chattels, the money, houses, and estates

124 THE UNLIMITED POSSESSIONS
which minister to your pleasures and gratify your
sense of power. And the vulgar, sensuous nature
never gets beyond that coarser valuation. But in
course of time, as your thoughts expand and the
deeper channels of emotion and joy are opened
out, you learn to think of other possessions as
more and dearer than these. You acquire certain
tastes, sympathies, modes of thought, and moral
habits, which separate you from low and ill-bred
people. You gather stores of knowledge. The
mind is enriched from many sides. You learn to
appreciate things lovely in art, literature, and
music, in the world of nature and the world of
humanity. Your heart broadens out to embrace
friendships, affections, love of wife and child,
love of all good men. Then you enter the
religious life, and lo ! there grow in you the
qualities of reverence, aspiration, trust, patience,
gentleness, courage, and hope. There is some
thing God-like in you. You can think God's
thoughts, you can feel His pities and affections.
And you know, then, that all these endowments
and qualities of mind and spirit are your own,
your possession — yes, in a far deeper and truer
sense your possession than material property can
be, for wealth is only life's garment which a man
may put on or put off, and remain in himself
substantially the same ; but these other things are
part of the inner life of the man. They are
inseparable, they cannot be taken away from him
by any freaks of fortune. And when you have
these you feel that you would not barter them
for all the material good in the world. Our out-

OF THE CHEISTIAN LIFE 125
ward possessions we hold on lease, and the lease
may terminate any day ; but these inner qualities
which make the very substance of life we hold in
indestructible right. They are ours for ever ; they
make us what we are and shall be beyond death
through all the life to come, unless we cease to be
ourselves. Yes, that is the true, grand idea of ownership to
which every man comes who reads the problems of
life aright. It is what he has within that con
stitutes his wealth : the mind enriched with the
highest knowledge and the purest truth, and the
heart inspired with goodness responding to all that
is noble and God-like, and beating with all the
sweet, brave impulses of prayer, devotion, and love.
Where that is, you may well say, " As having
nothing, yet possessing all things." And if you
start from that point you are led on to take a still
larger account of your possessions.
II. All things belong to you which serve in
any way to develop the inner life, and to make
you rich in noble qualities and inspiring thoughts.
We talk proudly about being heirs of all the ages,
and in a surface sense it is true of everyone who
lives amid our modern civilisation ; but in its
deeper meaning it is only true of those who aspire
to live the good and divine life. The Christian of
to-day is indeed the heir of all the ages ; he enters
into all their best legacies ; he is in possession of
all the highest things that they did, said, and
thought. We have a real property in all the
saints and martyrs, in all who fought the battle of
faith and righteousness, in all the inspired men,

126 THE UNLIMITED POSSESSIONS
all the prophets, psalmists, and apostles, all the
God-endowed men who have helped to illumine
the human mind with heavenly truths and to
stimulate the human will to fruitful endeavours.
They were lights kindled at heaven's pure fire, not
for their own glory, but to shine upon the face of
humanity through all coming ages, investing it
with some of the radiance in which they walked.
They belong to us. We live in their company for
ever; they talk to us as their familiar friends.
We think their thoughts ; we are fired by the
fervour of their devotion, and unconsciously in
fluenced by their example ; we are soothed by their
psalms, swayed by their appeals, cheered by their
predictions, lifted Godward by their spiritual soar
ings. We pray in the language they taught us ;
our hymns are full of their sentiments. Our spirits
constantly feel the impulse of their spirits, the
kindling sparks from their impassioned love and
glowing energy. Our whole nature is steeped in
the legacy which they bequeathed. Nay, not
only these greater souls, but innumerable other
good men and women have given us something
of themselves : all the precious lives that we have
read of, all the brave and saintly men and women
with whom we have come in contact, parents who
prayed for us, teachers who suggested to us noble
thoughts, books which spoke to our best manhood
from writers whose faces we have never seen, men
who lived as they prayed, women who showed in
their faces the face of Christ. It is no exaggera
tion to say that thousands of good men and women
have laid their treasures at our feet, and contri-

OF THE CHEISTIAN LIFE 127
buted to make us all the best that we are. And
their work in us abides. It makes our real wealth.
In a very true sense we own them and all that
they did for us. " Having nothing, yet possessing
all things."
III. If a man's wealth is what he is and what he
hopes to be, then all the experiences of a Christian
life should contribute to his possessions and make
him richer in those treasures which are inalienable.
They minister to the building-up of the Christ-like
man. Is life haunted by the dread shadow of
change ? It should help surely to bind the heart
fast to the unchanging Love and Power. Is life full
of uncertainties ? Out of that come prayer and
trust. Does the sun shine on a course of con
tinued prosperity ? It should inspire only the
exalted sense of gratitude. Are there sorrows to
bear ? They are to make us brave and patient.
Is there a bitter cup to drink ? It is to bring
us into fellowship with Him who drank the bitterest
cup of all. Are you disappointed and cast down ?
It is to give you larger and purer hopes, and to
brace you for new endeavours. Does the shadow
of death constantly flit by ? It is to rebuke our
idolatry of earthly things, and set us on immortal
strivings. Do we fear to lose our loved ones ? It
is to make us more gentle and careful towards
them while they live. Are we surrounded by evil
men ? It is to make us hate the evil and strive
more resolutely after good. Is there moral dark
ness around ? The more need for our light to
shine. Are we in the midst of true and earnest
men ? Their example should inspire us. Do we

128 THE UNLIMITED POSSESSIONS
walk with the ungodly ? It is a distinct call to
bear witness. Do we mourn over the vast evils,
wrongs, and sorrows of the world ? It is God's
summons to us to bear ourselves valiantly in the
fight. What Christian man can look upon the
great mass of life which moves around him, this
ocean of unutterable longings and awful heavings,
of unbelief and ungodliness, and the sorrow which
comes from sin, without feeling an impelling force
which sends him on to labour and to wrestle, to
sympathise and pray, and take his part in the
noble warfare of faith ? All these things are ours,
to make us better men, to enrich life with God-like
feelings, energies, and sympathies.
The past is ours, with all its hallowed traditions,
its sacred memories, its beautiful legacies of truth,
examples, and illustrious names. The present is
ours, with all its trying experiences to establish
our faith, its temptations to prove our integrity,
its needs to teach us prayer, its griefs to purify
our emotions, its great volume of human woes to
draw out our pities, its innumerable calls for service
to make us obedient and earnest men.
And the future is ours, to paint the prosaic
dulness of the present with colours fetched from
a more heavenly clime, and to fill whatever dreary
hours we have with the golden pictures of hope,
and to make us strong for all that labour to which
we are called.
For truly, the future belongs to none except the
Christian. The democracy says, youth says, the
nations across the Atlantic say, the world of
science, and a multitude of voices say, " The future

OF THE CHEISTIAN LIFE 129
belongs to us." None have a right to say it save
those who have made themselves companions in
the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. The
future belongs to the men and women who are
linked with Him in saving purpose, in righteous
aims, in the endeavour to walk in the light and
spread the light. All things come to them, and
will come. And the steadfast belief in this sustains
them in all labour and glorifies with hope the
whole firmament of heaven and earth. So the
Christian owns everything, for everything adds,
or should add, to his strength and wealth and
joy in God, to the fulness of life here and life
hereafter. And you can understand what St. Paul meant
when he said, " Having nothing, yet possessing all
things."

CHAPTEE XIII
FOEEKNOWLEDGE AND PEEDESTINATION
" For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be con
formed to the image of His Son, that He might be the Firstborn
among many brethren. Moreover, whom He did predestinate,
them He also called : and whom He called, them He also justified :
and whom He justified, them He also glorified. " — Eom. viii. 29, 30.
One rarely ventures, or even dares, to preach from
this text now, though he may have been preaching
half a lifetime. And that itself is an indication
of the change which has passed over religious
thought, and of the transference of our affections
from speculative doctrines to things more practical.
The texts which our fathers loved, which they
regarded as the very cream, honey, and gold of
the Gospel, have been well-nigh banished from the
pulpit. The themes on which they meditated and
conversed with inexhaustible curiosity and delight
would provoke nothing but drowsiness and im
patience in a modern congregation. Milton, in
" Paradise Lost," represents the angels in heaven
engaged in lofty talk about the mysteries of God's
foreknowledge, and man's free-will and predestina
tion and effectual calling. These were just the
topics to which the religious minds of Milton's
130

FOEEKNOWLEDGE— PEEDESTINATION 131
time were continually drawn, and he thought that
the things which interested mortals would have
a supreme attraction for angelic minds. That
world of speculation is not our world at all. We
have left it far behind. Moreover, we are de
cidedly shy of such texts as this, because they
were once made the battle-ground of hostile
creeds, and wrangled over by Calvinist and
Arminian until all the sweet life-blood was let out
of them, and their true meaning hidden in the
blinding dust which the strife stirred up. That
strife is dead now, well-nigh as dead as an
Egyptian mummy, and we have almost buried the
texts which supplied its weapons in the grave
thereof. Yet surely St. Paul had a noble thought
in these words if we could only read it with fresh,
unbiassed minds, and deliver it from all the hard
and unlovely misconceptions with which it has
been loaded.
" For whom He did foreknow, He also did
predestinate." It was an awful doctrine which
our fathers found in these words : that a privileged
few were foreordained from all eternity to enjoy
the favour of God and the raptures of heaven
for ever, and that all the rest, the vast majority,
were created and sent into the world with their
terrible destiny fixed by unchangeable decree,
pre-doomed to reprobation and everlasting pains.
It seems inconceivable to us that such a thought
of God could be held, as it was, by good and
tender-hearted men who had sat at the feet of
Jesus, and saw the pity and love-light in His
eyes. It would hardly be possible to name it now

132 FOEEKNOWLEDGE
without producing a shudder, and a fierce revolt
of indignant emotion against the monstrous in
justice and cruelty of the thing. It has gone for
ever, driven out, slain, and extinguished by the
gentler thoughts of a nobler and more Christ-like
faith. Whatever St. Paul meant, we feel that he could
not mean that, and even if he did we should
decline to follow him. We should hold to the
justice and mercy of God, in spite of all. But
what the great Apostle had in mind was some
thing vastly different from that. He declares here
that God, from the first, had a vision of a nobler
race of men, who would be sons of God indeed,
who would be chosen and called to share the
mind of Christ and be His witnesses among men.
God, who foresaw and predestined the Incarnation,
the gift of His well-beloved Son to the world,
and that life of spotless purity and matchless
sorrow, foresaw and predestined also that there
should gather round this Christ men after His
own heart, swayed with the same purpose, who
should be themselves Christs on a smaller scale,
so that, instead of one Son of God, there should
be many, and that He, the great Forerunner, should
be as the Firstborn among many brethren. That
was what God foreknew and determined long
before it came to pass — that there would be loyal
and obedient hearts who would yield to the charms
of Jesus, and take up the cross with Him, and
follow Him in the service of self-forgetting faith,
and in the service of humanity. God foreknew
them, and when the time came He called them

AND PEEDESTINATION 133
out, and endowed them with the Spirit of the
Master, and sealed and equipped them for their
appointed work. That is St. Paul's idea of election,
and the divine idea of election which runs through
all the sacred writings; and every other idea of
election is but a travesty and a caricature of that.
There is no mention here of a favouritism which
sets a few apart for the enjoyment of heavenly
bliss. That may be implied as an after-result, but
if St. Paul was thinking of that at all it was quite
a secondary thought.
The purpose of the predestination was to shape
men in the image of Jesus Christ, for toil and
work and patient endurance in this world, and to
bestow upon them spiritual gifts and graces, that
they might labour and suffer for, and guide and
lead, their fellow-men as He did. " Predestinated
to be conformed to the image of Christ." And
we know what that means. The image of Christ
is ever before us ! The Man of toil and long-
suffering, the Man of meekness, pity, and forgive
ness, the Man whose heart was a fountain of love,
the Man who made Himself the servant of all, and
stooped under every burden, and drank every
bitter cup, that He might be the world's Healer
and the Saviour of the lost. To make men of that
kind is the purpose of God's electing choice. There
is no selfish pampering and divine partiality there,
but divine love calling out men to do the works
of love, and enriching them with noble gifts that
they may undertake beautiful responsibilities.
You are sometimes afraid of these words "election"
and "predestination." You have almost dropped

134 FOEEKNOWLEDGE
them out of religious speech. They have a savour of
Pharisaical pride and smug self-complacency. Pos
sibly you say you do not believe in the thing at all,
and it is not desirable that you should believe in it
as it was once believed in. But I should like to re
mind you that the thing itself is a beautiful and
dread fact to which no one can be blind. It runs all
through life, and you cannot get away from it.
There is predestination everywhere, confronting
you in forms both sad and lovely. It was a pre
destination, with which you had nothing to do,
that fixed the place of your birth, the quality of
your parentage, and the manner of your training.
It was predestination that made you the child of
a praying home, and that caused you to be born
and educated amid sweet and hallowed influences.
It was predestination that endowed you with a
wholesome heritage of mind and body, with energy
and perhaps exceptional gifts, with powers which
have put you foremost in the race, and with
soul qualities that have made you earnest servants
of God. It was predestination, nothing but that.
And, alas ! there was predestination also in the
thousands of crippled, disabled, and sin-born lives
that know nothing better than the glare of the
gin-palace and the reek of the slums. Election !
it is the omnipresent thing, shining with golden
glory and privilege over some, with a huge shadow
of despair over others. And it would be well for
all of us if, instead of forgetting and denying
the thing, we thought more of it and felt it more,
and grasped the divine side of it, and realised
more profoundly the solemn and tremendous

AND PEEDESTINATION 135
obligations which it brings. If we were predestin
ated to nobler things, it was not for our own sakes
chiefly, but for the sake of others. Every special
gift imposes the burden of sacred duty and
imperial pity. If we were called to faith and
worship and godly endeavour, it was not that
we should " sit and sing ourselves away to ever
lasting bliss," but that we should burden ourselves,
as Christ did, with the sorrows, ills, and darkness
of our fellow-men; that we should be conformed
to the image of Him who loved and prayed for
everyone, and fought life's battle, not for Himself,
but for the world. It is that doctrine of election
which the whole Church needs to bring back
again and grasp with a firm, sweet, tender hand.
That was St. Paul's thought: "Whom He did
foreknow, He also did predestinate to be con
formed to the image of His Son, that He might
be the Firstborn among many brethren."
He called them out, says the Apostle, to be made
like Christ, and then He justified them ; and, finally,
those whom He justified He also glorified. And if
we were here to follow the old lines of thought we
would have to talk about effectual and final calling,
and justification by faith, and imputed righteous
ness, and complete sanctification, and the crowns
of glory which are reserved for the elect. But I
would rather get behind all that doctrinal phrase
ology to the simpler and far greater thoughts
which were passing through the Apostle's mind.
Surely he meant that the men who are formed
in the image of Christ and called out to do the
works of Christ are justified by God, though

136 FOEEKNOWLEDGE
the world perhaps does them no justice at all.
Scant justice did the Lord of all get save from
the Father who sent Him and the few disciples
who believed in Him. He was tried at Pilate's
bar and the world's bar, and convicted of mad
ness, foolishness, and even crime. Scant justice
did those who followed Him get from princes and
rulers, and the blind multitude who were swayed
by those rulers. We read often that they were
denounced as madmen, hunted as criminals, de
spised, hated, and cast out as the offscouring of
the earth. No wonder St. Paul fell back, as his
Master had done, on the larger justification of
unerring wisdom and love : " Whom He called,
them He also justified."
I think that even now the truly called of God
have to fall back upon that larger justification.
The world does not bestow too much justice upon
them. The men and women who are most like
Christ in patience and faith and lowly, self-for
getting service are not, as a rule, the world's
favourites. They are not dowered with popularity
and praise ; they are not generally called to fill
the seats of honour. It is rather the clever, the
intellectually gifted, the successful builders of their
own fortunes, the men who push themselves to the
front of wealth and fame, who are made the world's
favourites and triumphantly justified. Those who
walk by faith, and set their main affections on
higher things, and live near the Man of Sorrows,
bearing their burdens with His cheerfulness and
spending themselves in humble ministries of love,
are often thought a little foolish and a little

AND PEEDESTINATION 137
dreamy. They are sometimes pitied and occa
sionally even derided, and they are regarded as
men and women who are deliberately missing and
sacrificing the best things of life. The world does
not justify them. They have to look higher for
that — to Him whose judgment never errs and whose
love never forgets : " Whom He called, them He
also justified." And the end of it always is that
those whom He justifies He also glorifies. It is
no crowning with golden crowns and encircling
the face with an aureola of splendid light — not
that sort of poor material glory, but rather the
bringing out and showing to all the world that
which was hidden from it, and which God only has
seen. It means the manifestation of qualities and
lives which have been buried in obscurity, denied,
rejected, and forgotten. It means that whom God
justifies will, soon or late, be justified by all men,
vindicated at the great trial scene, and shown in
their real beauty. All faithful and Christ-like men
have that wider justice done to them in time.
Jesus, who was most of all despised, is now lifted
above all names in acknowledged beauty, divinity,
and goodness.
Every sufferer for righteousness, every holy
martyr, every patient saint, every earnest life
spent in tearful services and in works of love,
is gradually revealed. They cannot be hidden
always. They may be covered for awhile by pre
judice and pride, calumny and rejection, but the
soul that is beautiful in God's sight becomes
beautiful at length in the eyes of all men.
" Eest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him.

138 FOEEKNOWLEDGE— PEEDESTINATION
He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light,
and thy judgment as the noonday."
And so these words of St. Paul, which have been
made to do such ill service by men who fought
over the body and shell of them and lost the spirit
— these words come again to us with all their sweet
significance and present-day application : " Whom
He predestinated, them He also called, and justified,
and glorified."

CHAPTEE XIV
TWO ESTIMATES OF FOOLISHNESS
" Let no man deceive himself : If any man among you seemeth
to be wise in this world, let him become a, fool, that he may be
wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God." —
1 Cor. iii. 18, 19.
St. Paul touched a sensitive place when he talked
in this way. If there was one thing which a
Corinthian could not bear to have pricked it was
his conceit in the matter of wisdom. To call that
in question was the unpardonable insult. He was
not particularly vain of his personal appearance,
of his clothes, or his property ; but he was always
more than a little puffed up with intellectual pride.
Of the two he would have much preferred an
empty purse to a thinly furnished head, and he
would almost rather be known as a criminal than be
regarded as a fool. These words of St. Paul must
have been like needles to him, unless he laughed
them away as sheer stupidity. " If any man
among you seemeth to be wise, let him become
a fool, that he may be wise."
I fancy we have all some part in the feelings of
that Corinthian gentleman. We do not like to be
thought exceptionally wicked, we shrink almost
139

140 TWO ESTIMATES OF FOOLISHNESS
more from being known as very poor ; but I think,
after all, the thing we dread most is being called
fools. Many a man will violate any one of the Ten
Commandments, or all of them, to escape that, and
he will plunge over head and ears into folly in his
anxiety to be thought clever and wise. We are
always doing things we should not do, and leaving
undone things we ought to do, because of that
fear. It is such a terrible thing to hear somebody
whisper, " He is a perfect fool." And yet it would
help us a great deal if we could make up our
minds to this, that we are liable to be charged
with folly, whatever we do. If you have an idea
that you can go through the world without being
called a fool, dismiss it as soon as possible, for the
thing cannot be accomplished. One half the world
will always call the other half by that not very
flattering name. Each man thinks his own way is
best, and if you are taking some other way he will
certainly call in question your wisdom, and pro
bably have doubts about your sanity. You think
that a young man is foolish who is' sowing to the
flesh, sowing the wild oats of sin to reap ruin and
corruption. You more than think: you know it.
But he is perfectly sure that you are the fool for
sowing to that very unsubstantial thing called " the
spirit." He thinks that you are expending time
and energy to produce an airy nothing. There
are scores of men in every town dawdling and
lounging through the Sabbath day in their draw
ing-rooms, almost at their wits' end how to kill
time and get through the tedious hours. It never
occurs to you that they are particularly wise, and

TWO ESTIMATES OF FOOLISHNESS 141
yet they are flattering themselves all the time that
they are not such simpletons as you, giving the
hours up to dull religious services and to Christian
work, which neither bring quiet to the mind nor
puts money into the purse. And if you are in the
habit of praying, there are people who smile with
a knowing look of cleverness, and are very positive
that, if you had your heads put on in the right
way, you would not waste your time on that
unprofitable business; whilst you are just as sure
that the man who never prays is, as Tennyson says,
" no better than a brute." You feel that if prayer
were only a perchance, if there were only a bare
possibility of prayer being heard and answered by
an Almighty Helper, no thoughtful or sane man
would throw away that chance. He thinks you are
stupid for praying ; but you are absolutely certain
that he is blind and irrational who never prays.
And thus, whatever course you take, some part of
the world will throw this disagreeable word at you;
and the best way is not to be over-anxious about
it, but to take care, if you must be called fools, that
you win the name in doing God's will, and not in
the ways of the ungodly. For the first point on
which the Apostle insists here is —
I. That there are two estimates of folly — God's
estimate and the world's estimate ; and these two
are often as contrary as light and darkness. " The
wisdom of this world is foolishness with God."
And if a man seems to be particularly wise in the
eyes of the world the best thing he can do is to
become a fool in men's eyes in order to be called
wise by God. That is St. Paul's extreme way of

142 TWO ESTIMATES OF FOOLISHNESS
putting it, and it sounds extravagant. And yet it
covers a profound and unquestionable truth. A
man who is living for this world alone is not
generally regarded as a fool, especially if he is
moderately successful. The rich man in the parable,
who was heaping up immense stores and goods,
planning to build new barns wherein to bestow
them, and calculating on an easeful, luxurious, and
well-endowed old age, had not the slightest idea
that there was any deficiency of sense in these
proceedings. He was smart and thrifty, notably
shrewd, with an eye on the main chances. It never
occurred to him that anyone would regard him as a
fool ; and the probability is that all his neighbours
applauded his prudence, sagacity, and judgment.
Yet God, taking stock of this man's thoughts and
conduct, applied this brief epithet to it, " Thou fool,
this night thy soul shall be required of thee." And
perhaps the man himself, when the summons came
to him, if he had a little time given for thought,
would be somewhat of the same opinion, and feel
that he had been pursuing a rather senseless busi
ness in making all that preparation for old age,
and no preparation at all for what came after.
" The wisdom of this world is foolishness with
God." And, on the contrary, what seems to the
world folly is often, in God's sight, the highest
and divinest wisdom. St. Paul and his friends knew
quite well what the generality of people thought
about them. They were under no mistake. " We
are fools for Christ's sake." Festus and Felix and
Agrippa, and all of that class, regarded them as
deranged, and it certainly did seem an absurdity

TWO ESTIMATES OF FOOLISHNESS 143
for any man deliberately to choose such a life as
that which St. Paul lived— a man well born, well
educated, with marvellous energy and exceptional
intelligence. There were few positions in the
Jewish nation, perhaps not a great number in the
Eoman Empire, to which he might not have
aspired. He certainly had it in him to acquire
great wealth and distinguished honours. Instead
of that he preferred a career of obloquy, poverty,
and continued hardships, with tears, stripes, and
imprisonment at every step, with no money at
the end, no reputation — only ignominy, a violent
death, and an unknown grave. If such a man were
found to-day three-fourths of the people would call
him just what the world called St. Paul. It was
only in God's eyes, then, that he was supremely
wise. But now we all know that God's judgment
was true. This man has a name that will endure for
ever. It stands second in Christian history to the
Master's name — a long way behind, yet second.
He has influenced and shaped the thoughts of our
progressive Western world more than any other
person who was merely human. He has won a
crown of eternal honour, and, if we had our choice,
every one of us would a hundred times rather be a
St. Paul, with all his sufferings, than the prosperous
man of the parable of whom the Master's lips said
" Thou fool."
Nay, was not the Blessed Lord Himself charged
with madness by those who persecuted and crucified
Him? His life, with its hunger, loneliness, and weari
ness, its high ideals and daily rejections, and its ap
parent utter failure at the last, seemed to that dark,

144 TWO ESTIMATES OF FOOLISHNESS
blinded world a senseless, aimless, insane infatua
tion. Yet now we declare that in Him are hid all
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And the
world which called Him a fool adores Him to-day
as divine.
And so you may well be advised not to be over
anxious to win a vulgar reputation for cleverness,
smartness, prudence, and worldly wisdom, and not
to fret your hearts away if coarse minds some
times fling this name of "fool" at you. They are
sure to do that if you tread in any of the real
steps of Jesus. An honest life will not be always
called wise ; a Ufe of purity will occasionally win
cheap sneers. If you pursue great ideals, if you
kneel often in prayer, if you spend your energies
in self-denying labours, if you give freely to help
your fellow-men, if you often lift your eyes from
the dust toward the heavenly crown, if you seek
God's " Well done ! " rather than the praises of men,
you are sure to be called by the baser sort, as
all good men have been called — fools. Take it
with a smile. Pin the name upon your breast as
a mark of honour. For it is an honour to have
that name given by those who have no greatness
of soul. You are in the way of God's wisdom,
and it is of infinitely more consequence, both now
and hereafter, that you should not be deemed a
fool by Him, whatever you are in the eyes of
men. For what He thinks folly now all lips will
call folly some time, and the wisdom of this world
is foolishness with God. The second thought
which St. Paul gives us here is —
II. That a man is never wise until he feels

TWO ESTIMATES OF FOOLISHNESS 145
himself a fool, and just trusts in that higher
wisdom which is not his own. " If any man
seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become
a fool, that .he may be wise." Some of us have
learned that lesson by sad experience, and most
of us might have learned it if we had had our
eyes opened. We have made blunders enough
through trusting to our own understanding and
thinking ourselves sufficiently clever to make our
way through the difficulties of life. Most of the
mistakes into which we have been betrayed, most
of the perplexing coils in which we have involved
our feet, most of the unwise courses and unwise
choices we have taken, and all the grievous sins
which have left black spots on our memories,
have been owed to the fact that we had far too
great a conceit of our own powers, moral and
intellectual. It never occurred to us that we were
fools, and therefore we tumbled into folly. We
went our own way, never stopping to ask if it
was God's way, because we were sure that our
wise heads could not judge wrongly. One may
venture to say that, if in your past life you have
taken some egregiously foolish step which you
regret to this day, and will always regret, that
step was taken with perfect satisfaction in your
own judgment, and it never occurred to you to
kneel down, hesitating and trembling at God's
feet, confessing yourself a little child, and asking
for light and guidance. We think we know so
well, until we have fooled and fallen a few times ;
and some go on fooling and falling to the end,
because nothing can convince them that they are
10

146 TWO ESTIMATES OF FOOLISHNESS
foolish; and nothing ever drives them out of
their self-conceit to Him who is the Light of life.
But some of us have had this grace given, to
know that the human will is weak and the heart
often prejudiced and darkened, that the most
cultured mind cannot see a step before it, and
the wisest mind stumbles unless God illumine,
direct, and show the way. And we feel that we
dare not take any important step in life until
we have laid it before God in prayer. It is then
that we become wise — then when we say :
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light ;
" Show me Thy way, 0 Lord " ; " Take Thou my
hand and lead me." Then do we understand what
St. Paul meant when he said, " If any man among
you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him
become a fool, that he may be wise."
And in the same way we have to become fools
before we understand at all the mysteries of life.
There are some people who think they know these
mysteries ; at least, know them so well as to sit
in judgment upon them, and pronounce them
impossible, contradictory, unreasonable, and un
true. They say that the Incarnation is too
improbable a thing to be believed, and the world's
redemption by a cross so extravagant as to be
incredible. They cannot think that this world of
sorrows and pain can be ruled by a merciful and
fatherly heart, and they say that the idea of a
particular providence is opposed to the ordinary
facts of life, and that if God cared for each one,

TWO ESTIMATES OF FOOLISHNESS 147
and answered the prayers of each one, nine-tenths
of the injustices and griefs which afflict the world
would have no place. And they cannot see that
there is any evidence in reason or fact for the
belief in an after-life, with all its joys and
solemnities. They fancy that they are wise
enough to say that these things cannot be.
And we may at once admit that, if these things
are to be dealt with by human wisdom, they are
quite beyond us, and not things which we can
readily believe. And, therefore, we just put aside
the presumption that we can see and understand all
that is to be seen. We kneel at the feet of Him
whom we call Master, and say, " I am just a fool.
I do not know anything about these things of
myself, but I have trusted Thee once for all, and
I believe that Thy words are true and faithful.
I remember that all the best and bravest men that
have lived in the world for some nineteen hundred
years have just confessed their folly and ignorance
in the same way, and through this very foolish
ness have been made wonderfully good, strong,
and wise."
And if anyone tells me that I am a fool for
believing these things, I answer, " That may be ;
but it is noble fooling. It brings me into the
society of an innumerable company of noble saints
and inspired fools, and it is the strength and joy
and splendour of my life."
" Therefore, if any among you seemeth to be
wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he
may be wise."

CHAPTEE XV
THE OPENING OF THE EYES
" That the eyes of your understanding may be enlightened." —
Eph. i. 18.
This is part of one of St. Paul's prayers. The
whole prayer is lovely, like a cluster of jewels, and
this is the central gem of it. He prays that they
may have a clearer vision, a quicker understand
ing, that their faculties of apprehension may be
sharpened, that their eyes may be washed clean
from the dust and relieved from the veils which
have darkened them, and that thus they may be
able to see the great and good things of God.
Now, surely, you say, this is a prayer for the
unbelieving. He must be thinking of those to
whom Christ has not been revealed. No, it is
nothing of the kind. It is a prayer for the saints
of Ephesus, for people who were walking in the
sunlight of divine love. And if it was good for
them, it is good for us, whether we be wise or
foolish, and whether we have hardly taken a step
in the Christian life, or, which is not very likely,
we are high up in the climb to sainthood. I can
think of hardly anything which we need more
than to have "the eyes of our understanding
148

THE OPENING OF THE EYES 149
enlightened." And if you could quote to me all the
most beautiful prayers that have ever been uttered,
all the divinest liturgies that have ever been
composed, I should be almost prepared to say there
is not one of them better suited for us, better fitted
to express the universal human need, than the
simple, pathetic cry which a certain blind beggar
by the wayside once sent up, " Lord, that mine
eyes may be opened." Our Lord Jesus told His
disciples that one great purpose of His mission
to the world was to give men sight. " I am come
that they which see not might see." And the Word
of God throughout makes much of sight. It speaks
of men as blind until the light of His revelation
breaks upon them. It describes a wicked, god
less age as a time in which there was no open
vision. It calls all its prophets seers, and all its
apostles and saints men who have the eyes of
their understanding enlightened, and it promises
all good things to the seeing eye and the hearing
ear. There is no figure which better describes
the change wrought in conversion than this —
an illumination ! a breaking-in of light ! an unseal
ing of the vision before the great and beautiful
realities of life ! You have lived in your little
world of selfish interests, small frivolities, narrow
round of absorbing pleasures, petty cares, and
vulgar ambitions. You have been shut in — you
have seen nothing beyond, nothing greater than
yourselves. Suddenly you are brought into the
larger world of God and eternity — a world of
imperial duties and solemn obligations, a world
of immeasurable love, boundless hope, and un-

150 THE OPENING OF THE EYES
limited fellowships, a world in which life stretches
out in breadth and depth and height beyond all
limits, and all things are transfigured in the light
of a new creation. Do you not say instinctively
of yourself, then, " Whereas I was blind, now
I see " ? Yes, there is one miracle which Christ
works unceasingly, world without end : " The
blind receive their sight."
Truly, the best thing that God can do for us is to
open our eyes. There is nothing which makes so
much difference between one human life and
another as the quality and degree of their powers
of vision. It is the most precious of all gifts and
endowments. It makes the artist, the poet, the
prophet, the philanthropist. It is the amplest
source of joy, of real wealth, and of blessed con
tentment. It is like the lifting up of the dull
earth to the gateway of heaven's glory. Most men
and women see very little, though they think,
probably, they see all that is to be seen. They
are like prison walls, with only narrow chinks to
let in the innumerable rays of sunlit beauty which
beat upon them. Other souls have large, clear
windows in the walls, and the gleams and flashes
from the encompassing world of truth and beauty
stream in with copious flood. With them the
lovely and the glorious things are always there:
not unfelt, not invisible. How dull and blind we
are when we deem ourselves most acute and sharp-
sighted ! The world is full of God, and we some
times walk all day without finding a trace of Him.
The air is all alive with the music of His love, and
we hear no sound of it. The faces of noble men

THE OPENING OF THE EYES 151
and saintly women pass by us constantly in our
daily walks, and we recognise them not in our
intentness upon lower things. A thousand things
in our daily path suggest to us thoughts too deep
for tears, yet we move on without the faintest
perception of them. My little child, nay ! my
little pet dog, humbles me, makes me ashamed
of my own attainments, for the dog knows a
tender-hearted, honest man sooner than I do, and
the child finds a heaven in scenes where I am full
of a weary discontent. What fools we are to call
the children ignorant ! The good things of God
are revealed to the babes, and hidden from the
wise and prudent.
It matters not where men are or what their sur
roundings if they have what the Bible calls the seeing
eye. They will have a world of lovely and divine
things about them. Plato said of his master
Socrates that, when Socrates was put in prison,
the prison ceased to be. The narrow cell expanded
into a grand and richly illumined palace whose
top reached the heavenly places. It was in the
Athenian prison that he saw his noblest visions
and spoke his grandest thoughts (about the soul
and immortality and the life to come) and John
Bunyan, in a common felon's gaol, had heaven
all about him and saw delectable mountains, and
lands of Beulah, and rivers of light across which
stood the pinnacles of the City of God. It is the
seeing power that gives to life its fulness, beauty,
and sweet content. "A man is not rich because
of the abundance of his possessions, the number of
his servants, the wide circle of his flattering

152 THE OPENING OF THE EYES
admirers and friends, and he is not happy though
he can purchase for himself all the delights of the
sons of men. He is only rich in proportion as he
has the faculty of vision. A millionaire may be
poorer than a common tramp, because he is for
the most part blind. We have all enough to
make life brimful of joy if we can only see it.
Joys ! they are everywhere ! we tread upon them,
they lie like neglected flowers covering the path
we walk. For all of us there is more of sunshine
than shadow, more of plenty than want, more
of beauty than ugliness, more of ecstasy than pain.
Love abounds, and touches of God, and human
affections, and sweet high thoughts, and hints of
immortal things. There is far more always to be
thankful for than to groan over. It is a Father's
hand which has made the world and life, and He
has made most things good in them if His chil
dren's eyes were but opened. Do you remember
St. Paul's words : " Having nothing, yet possessing
all things"? and again, "All things are yours"?
Yes, if only, as he prays here, " the eyes of your
understanding be enlightened." St. Paul was all the
way through a richer and happier man than that
Caesar to whom he appealed, though Caesar was
master of the world and St. Paul owned nothing
but his clothes. For he saw so much more ! He saw
an infinite creation in every man that he met,
a world of possibilities in every child, raptures
of love in every saint. He saw eternity in the
background of every time-picture, and God's
unchanging purpose writing golden lines of
promise under every page of human sorrow and

THE OPENING OF THE EYES 153
sin. He saw heaven's rich colours transfiguring
every earthly scene, and all things working together
for good to them that love God. And therefore
His life was full of joy, full to overflowing. " As
sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." "Eye hath not
seen, nor ear heard, . . . the things which God
hath prepared for them that love Him. But God
hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit."
" That the eyes of your understanding may be
enlightened." Yes, that is the prayer for all of
us, if we would but believe it. It is written, many
a time, of holy men of old that they saw visions
of God ; and we either do not credit that, or we
think it belonged to an age of miracles. If a man
were to stand up in the market-place and tell
us that he had had a vision of God we should
set him down as a lunatic. And when we read
about the prophets seeing God in His holiness
and hearing His words and walking consciously
in His presence, the hard-headed man sets it down
as a fantasy and delusion. We hardly believe
it possible for any man to see things of God
which are invisible to us. Yet the savage Indian
will trace a path unerringly through trackless
forests where we can see no guiding marks at
all, and a simple mariner will read on the surface
of the sea a thousand signs of rocks and shoals
and deep waters beneath where our eyes see
nothing but one monotonous colour. Their eyes
have been opened by long intentness on this very
thing. How mad we are to suppose that those
whose lives were one long searching after God
could not see and feel more of Him than we do !

154 THE OPENING OF THE EYES
If we longed for Him as much as they did, if
we spent as many hours at His unseen feet, if we
held ourselves in hours of silence listening for His
voice, He would make Himself known and felt
in a thousand sweet and unmistakable ways of
which we have now no perception. It is because
we seek Him so little that we find Him not, and
that He is hidden from us in the crowd of common
affairs. And do we not all miss a thousand joys,
a thousand inspirations, a thousand hallowed sug
gestions and divine helps every day, because our
eyes are dim, because the smoke and dust of the
world are upon them ? What do our depressions
and despondencies mean, our irritabilities and
complainings and weariness and thankless moods ?
Is it not that we are half blind to the unceasing
approaches and visitations of God ? blind to most
of the sweet, pure, and good blessings which He
drops upon us as He passes by ? The glories of
nature, think of the long catalogue of them, the
exquisite delights of happy friendships, the noble
thoughts and aspirations, the calls to duty, the
thrilling hopes and sanctities of religion, the Provi
dence that is so careful of us, the Divine Father
hood which enfolds us in its gentle arms, the
infinite love of Jesus which clasps us in a sweeter
than motherly embrace, the promises which
girdle our lives with unspeakable splendour, the
assurance of immortality, the great future which
is our inheritance, the mercy which heaps its
forgiveness upon us, and the long-suffering which
bears with us and is never worn out !
God is always seeking to make our lives full,

THE OPENING OF THE EYES 155
to show us all the bright and joyous things, and
to awaken in us rapture and hope. And if life
is scant and meagre and dull it is the fault of our
own vision.
I would that we could all have our eyes more
fully opened to the things we talk about in the
sanctuary, that we could see with new, clear vision
those greatest things ai all which we constantly
name but never understand : the glory and the
dignity which we have in Christ ; the splendour
of our relationship to Him; the incomparable
wonder and mystery of His cross and love ; the
unutterable sweetness of His salvation. We need,
indeed, that His hands should be laid often on
these eyes of ours, that His own beauty may be
come more to us ; that we may read God's great
thoughts concerning us with clearer understand
ing ; that the good and pure and great things of
life may be more attractive ; that all dark and
sorrowful things may appear with the light of
His promise about them, and that we may see a
Father's Presence at every step of our course.
Now may " the God of our Lord Jesus Christ . . .
give unto you the Spirit of wisdom and unveiling
in the knowledge of Him, that the eyes of your
understanding may be enlightened."

CHAPTEE XVI
THE HIGHEE OPPOETUNISM
" I am become all things to all men, that I may by all means
save some." — 1 COR. ix. 22.
There is one lesson which we have to learn before
we can do any good in the world — nay, if we are
to push our way through the world without stir
ring up animosities, making needless enemies,
wounding and alienating friends, offending those
whom we would like to conciliate, and more or
less quarrelling with everyone we meet ; and that
one needed lesson is this that, though " God has
made of one blood all nations of men," He has
made no two men alike. There is a singular
family likeness which proves that they all came
originally from the same parent, whether that same
parent was Adam or Adam's Maker, God ; but,
though they all have the same family likeness,
there is not one whose portrait would do exactly
for another, and especially if the portrait showed
you the mind and not merely the face. The variety
in human beings is the most wonderful thing in
this world. We do not see things with the same
eyes as another, or judge them with the same mind,
or feel them with the same emotions. We are
156

THE HIGHEE OPPOETUNISM 157
not impressed by the same arguments, affected
by the same appeals, driven by the same passions,
or wrought upon by the same motives. There
are certain things, indeed, which are common to
all, certain things which all good men approve, and
certain things which all except idiots believe ;
but beyond that there is a vast range of things
on which we all feel differently, and concerning
which we cannot judge another from our own
experience. You know what octaves are in music. There
are seven of them on an ordinary piano. And
most of us can hear every musical note which a
piano sounds. But there are both higher and
lower octaves which certain instruments and voices
reach, and which many human ears cannot take
in. Some can hear the higher notes, but not
the lower, and with others it is the reverse. We
all differ in the same way with regard to the
things which impress us, catch hold of our ima
gination, appeal to the best and worst in us, and
bring out our evil and our good. There are
sermons preached in every sanctuary which move
some to tears, stir them to impassioned devotion,
and lift them up to the very gates of heaven.
Yet when those very sermons have been preached
you will hear others declaring that the preacher
has been quite out of form, and that his words
were wearying and unprofitable. And it by no
means follows that they are not good and earnest
Christian men. It only means that the preacher
has been touching chords which are not found in
them. And verily, the preacher who wishes to

158 THE HIGHEE OPPOETUNISM
move all sorts and conditions of men will vary
his message to the varying needs ; he will run
over the whole scale of moral and religious things,
sounding every Gospel note in turn, high and low,
soft and strong, tender and fierce, pitiful and
awful. He will " become all things to all men,
that he may by all means save some."
I. You often hear it said that the Bible is God's
book for man. It is, indeed, for this very reason :
it is the one divine book in the world, and it is
also the most intensely and thoroughly human
book. It was written by all sorts and conditions
of men, that it might appeal to all sorts and con
ditions. Think how varied were its authors, all
inspired for this one work : men brought up in
Pharaoh's Court, men who spent most of their
lives in prison, men trained in the sheep-fold like
David, men born to the purple like Solomon, states
men like Isaiah, choristers like Asaph, poets and
dreamers like Ezekiel, herdsmen and vine-dressers
like the minor prophets, fishermen, tax-gatherers,
and physicians like those who wrote the Gospels,
Eoman citizens like Paul, rich and poor, learned and
unlearned. What a strange and varied society !
God spoke through all these diverse lips, that He
might make known His manifold wisdom to the
manifold hearts of men. And when you turn over
the Bible, you find that it appeals to every mood,
touches every side of man's nature, fetches its
illustrations from every field, and plays on every
conceivable string and organ in the human heart.
It is eloquent and homely, it soars high and descends
low. It has stories and songs, sermons and fables,

THE HIGHEE OPPOETUNISM 159
philosophy for the wise, and almost baby lessons
for the simple. It makes you weep, and it makes
you laugh. Here it sparkles with humour, and
there it is blood-red with pathos. It satirises and
rebukes, it pleads with tears in its eyes, and it
lashes with whips of scorpions. It is terrible in its
anger and womanly in its pity. There is nothing
in man which it does not find out, stir up, and
provoke. It speaks to every man at the point
where he is most susceptible. It is the wonderful
work of God. There is nothing like it in the
world. It is, in truth, the voice of One who
" becomes all things to all men, that He may by
all means save some."
II. Think of our Lord Jesus Christ : His ministry
was a sort of living epitome of the whole Bible. He
was the Bible incarnate, showing all its variety of
methods and teaching in His own sweet deeds and
gracious words. We read that He knew what was
in man. He knew what was in every man before
He was told. He read the secrets of each heart as
if their bodies had been transparent glass, and as if
their most hidden and silent thoughts had been
expressed in words. And He handled all men
differently, because He measured them so accurately
and understood so perfectly their varied needs.
He hardly ever treated two persons exactly in the
same way. He whipped the greedy, sacrilegious
merchants in the temple, He took the little children,
like lambs, in His arms ; He wept with the mourn
ing sisters at the grave-side, He chided some other
mourners for making so much ado ; He poured
forth a torrent of fiery invective against the

160 THE HIGHEE OPPOETUNISM
hypocrites, He let penitent harlots wash His feet
with tears ; He spoke to some about the worm
which never dieth, and the fire that is not quenched,
to others of the pitying love and forgiveness of
God, which nothing can wear out. To those who
despaired of themselves He said, " If you can
believe, all things are possible " ; to those who
were over-confident He said, " Many that are first
shall be last, and the last first." To the weary He
offered rest, to the hungry He gave food, to the
broken-hearted He whispered hope, to the jaded
and worn He spoke of abundant life. The young
He called to work, to the old He spoke of the life
beyond. With the stubborn and impenitent He
was angry, with the wise He reasoned, to the
ignorant He talked like a mother. 0 that ministry !
what a world of varied needs it covered ! If it
does not find you out, whatever you are, one may
almost despair of you. It comes down to the level
of everyone. He makes Himself the Saviour of
everyone. He becomes " all things to all men, that
He may by all means save some."
III. St. Paul had learned this lesson. He had
learned it from the Master. He had learned it also
from his own experience, from his failures and
successes. And it helped to make him the mightiest
of preachers and soul-winners for Jesus. He varied
his message. He was like an organ that sends
forth a thousand sounds, but one music ; which
plays as if there were fifty instruments in it, and
not one, but all worked by the same powerful
hand. To the Jew he said, " I am a Jew ; my
Master was a Jew ; I believe in the law, as you do.

THE HIGHEE OPPOETUNISM 161
I tell you of One who came to fulfil the law."
To the Eoman he said, " I am a Eoman ; born a
Eoman citizen. I preach to you an Almighty
CaBsar who came to save the world, and will one
day rule all the world." To the slave he said, " I
am a slave of Jesus Christ. I make known to you
One who has no respect of persons, and before
whom master and servant are equal." To the
free man he said, " I am Christ's free man. I want
to tell you of One whose service is perfect liberty,"
To the wise man he spoke : " In Christ are hid all
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." To the
ignorant he said, "God hath chosen the foolish
things to confound the wise." To the poor he
declared, " Christ became poor, that we, through
His poverty, might be made rich." To the rich
he spoke of higher riches, even the unsearchable
riches of Jesus Christ. "All things to all men," that
he might " by all means save some." It was always
with that motive in all the varying attitudes and
voices which he assumed. It was not to please
men, but to save them ; not to win their favour and
applause, but to win their souls.
IV. Take these words of St. Paul without the
final words, and you rob them of all their beauty,
reasonableness, and divinity. You take them out
of God's service and enlist them in that of the
Prince of Darkness. They have been quoted and
used a thousand times, unworthily, falsely, and
meanly. They are the boast of the time-server,
the excuse of the coward, the argument of the
unscrupulous, and the weapon of the unprincipled
and the knave. They express a philosophy of life
11

162 THE HIGHEE OPPOETUNISM
which has no sense of honour, which finds no room
for convictions, which sacrifices every higher thing
for ease and gain. The politician becomes all
things to all men, that he may by all means keep
in power. The candidate for municipal or parlia
mentary honours promises all things to all men,
that he may by all means secure votes. The writer
in the Press echoes and flatters the thoughts and
prejudices of his readers, that he may by all means
promote the sale of his journal. The hunter of
popularity beslavers all men with praise, that by all
means he may get them to exalt him. The com
mercial man agrees in opinion with everyone with
whom he has to do, that by all means he may
secure orders. The preacher preaches to suit the
tastes and requirements of his hearers, that by
all means he may retain them and offend none.
And the very Prince of Darkness puts on fifty
different suits and faces, that he may make himself
palatable and pleasing, and by all means catch
some. A man makes himself an incarnate lie if he
adopts this as his rule of life. One never knows
what he is. We only know that he is constantly
appearing what he is not. And, alas ! we are all
tempted to fall into the ways and repeat the senti
ments of those into whose company we are thrown.
We are afraid of being singular, and perhaps afraid
of being thought disagreeable. We laugh with
those who sneer at higher things, and we talk of
them with respect and approval to those who believe
in them. We show our best when we are with the
best, and put on our worst when we are face to
face with the worst. We acknowledge Christ

THE HIGHEE OPPOETUNISM 163
when Christ's people are around us ; we deny Him
in many ways when those who love Him not are
in our presence. At least, that is our temptation.
It is the sin which doth easily beset us, and against
which we should ever be on our guard. We are to
become all things to all men, not because we are
cowards, but that we may by all means save some.
St. Paul, with all the changes that he assumed, was
ever intent upon the main thing. He put on many
a dress, but the Christian soldier was seen through
them all ; he spoke with many voices, but the ring
of the Master's words was in them all. Nobody
ever mistook what he was and whom he served.
Everyone felt that there was one motive operating
in all that he did — the wish to commend the Master
to men and by all means save some.
If you wish to do your Master's work and press
your Master's claims, do not haggle about fads and
prejudices, but get hold of great principles and
urge them. Yield in a thousand little things, if
necessary, that you may win the great thing. Do
not insist upon your views and opin ions, but insist
upon the mighty matters of faith. Get men to
believe in Jesus, and do not fret your heart to get
them to believe in you. Do not be determined to
make them good just after your pattern and notion
of goodness. If you can only get them to accept
Christ as their Master, that is the main thing, and
the rest will follow. Do not suppose that every
thing which seems wrong to you must necessarily
be wrong to them. Do not force your conscience
upon them — they will be judged by their own
consciences, not yours. Do not stake all your

164 THE HIGHER OPPOETUNISM
influence on matters that are not vital; use it in
bringing them to Christ's feet, and He will complete
the work. So far as you are able, show that side
of Christ to men which will appeal to them most
forcibly. Tell young men and women that He
wants them for good work and a noble life. Tell
the old men that He will be with them, even to
grey hairs. Tell the weary that there is rest in
Him, and the sick that He is the great Healer.
Tell big sinners that He died for their sins. Talk
not to the broken-hearted about their sins, but
about Him as their great Comforter. And there
are some to whom you had better not talk religious
things at all. They will only resent the talk. Try
to prove to them what a Christian life is by living
it. So you will " become all things to all men."

CHAPTEE XVII
THE TEUE OPTIMISM
" And we know that all things work together for good to them
that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose."
—Rom. viii. 28.
A preacher who takes this text ought to begin
with a prayer and an apology. A prayer for light,
and an apology for presuming to think that he
can deal with it. He should, at least, be modest
enough to know that its depths are beyond his
fathoming, and all that he can attempt is just to
touch it from the outside and offer some meagre
hints as to its possible meaning.
We often quote the words, not so much because
we believe them as because we would like to
believe them. I envy the man who could announce
them, as St. Paul did, with unhesitating, unques
tioning conviction. His grand certainty really
startles us, as well as the sweeping universality of
the statement : " We know that all things work
together for good to them that love God." If he
had said "most things" we might have given a
reluctant consent ; but the all things puts a
tremendous strain upon our faith. Everyone can
run through his mind fifty exceptions. He can
165

166 THE TEUE OPTIMISM
tell of disagreeable things, offensive things,
hurtful, immoral, soul-destroying, heart-breaking
things, which work nothing but pain and mis
chief, whether to saint or sinner, and which no
imagination can render helpful and beneficial.
We are always hoping, if we are of a cheerful
mood, that the affairs of our own lives, and
the affairs of the world generally, are moving on
to a more restful and golden day. But that is
about as far as our faith goes when faith is at its
best. We think that evil will at last be overcome
by good, but it is hard to believe that evil itself
will be used to perfect the good. Yet to this
height of faith the Apostle bids us climb. That is
the philosophical and religious certainty in which
he rests : " We know that all things work together
for good to them that love God, to them who are the
called according to His purpose " ; and I say, again,
the thought is immensely difficult, and if we can
get the faintest gleams of real light on this great
mystery it is about as much as we can hope for.
I. Let us note, first, then, that this cheerful out
look of St. Paul was confined to the godly and the
God-loving. He was a decided optimist, if we may
use the word which has now become one of our stock
terms and taken its place in the language of the
streets ; but his optimism was built up on morality
and God. There are certain amiable dreamers who
leave out that moral element. The philosophical
optimist paints everything with gold and rose-
colour. He thinks that everything is just as good
as it can be in the best possible world. He thinks
that what we call sin, and guilt, and strife, and

THE TEUE OPTIMISM 167
hatred are just a lower form of good ; that wrong
is right, and darkness light, and that all things
are working to produce the greatest amount of
happiness for everybody in some coming time.
" Let things alone," he says, " and out of the
hissing, roaring furnace of sin and trouble, pain
and chaos, the pure gold will emerge and make
all creatures rich." St. Paul's optimism was not
an indolent, sentimental dream of that sort. He
believed in the eternal distinction between wrong
and right, between good and evil. He believed
that there was a huge mass of sin in the world
which was hateful to the Creator of the world, and
which was producing nothing but misery and
death for those who continued to indulge in it.
Whether, as the poet says —
Good may fall
At last — far off — at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring —
was a question which he either never asked him
self or never attempted to answer. He was only
sure that, for those who deliberately pursued
the way of evil, there could be no peace and no
fair outlook, but a fearful looking-for of judg
ment, while for the faithful, the righteous, and
the God-loving the prospect was always bright.
To them the golden future and the promises
belonged. God was pledged to make all things
their allies and helpers. That was St. Paul's
optimism. Not that things would work in the
best way for all, but for those only who set their
faces Godward. " We know that all things work

168 THE TEUE OPTIMISM
together for good to them that love God, to them
who are the called according to His purpose."
II. Further, when the Apostle declared that all
things worked for good, he was thinking of good
in God's sense of that word. Happiness is one
thing, good is another and very different thing.
Goodness, in the long-run, will no doubt bring in
its turn perfect blessedness ; it will bring unsullied
and unmixed joy ; but goodness is not happiness,
goodness is not freedom from strife, care, and pain.
If you think that all things work together to give
the godly man all he desires, to deliver him from
trial, trouble, worry, and distress, to make him
prosperous, smiling, contented with everything
about him, and unruffled in temper, person, and
estate, you entirely misread these words, and you
will in all probability be woefully disappointed.
A great many people think that the chief end
of life is to secure ease and happiness, and they
say that the object of all our social and politi
cal endeavours should be to provide the great
est possible amount of happiness for the greatest
number. That may be good utilitarianism, but it
is not Christianity. It is not the divine idea. If
this world had been mainly intended to make the
people who live in it perfectly happy, we can
only say that it has been constructed on wrong
principles ; we may even say that the Creator of it
has committed a huge blunder. We can easily
conceive of a world in which there would be a
vast deal more happiness than there has ever
been, or ever will be, in this. God had a higher
purpose. He has a higher purpose with us. It

THE TEUE OPTIMISM 169
was to make the world a moral school, a training-
place for character ; a place in which patience
might be learned, and righteousness and strength
of soul, and Christ-likeness ; a training-place which
was to prepare for a better and fuller life hereafter.
Those who are called after God's purpose are
called for this — to be conformed to the image of
Christ. And St. Paul was thinking of this end,
and of this end only, when he used the words,
" All things work together for good to them that
love God."
III. And now, thirdly, if you bear this purpose in
mind you will see at once that St. Paul's assertion
is not so extravagant as it seems. In fact, it is
not extravagant at all ; it is borne out by the
whole history of the world, and even by common
experience. All things do work together to bring
out and perfect the best in the God-loving men
and women. It is not only the sorrow of the
world, but the very sin of the world that dis
ciplines and develops into goodness those who
strive, and labour, and suffer with their faces up
lifted towards God. It was that which made
Christ — the Christ whom we know, the Christ
whom we worship — the crown and flower of
humanity, the altogether lovely. What Christ
would have been in a world without sin we can
not imagine. He would have been a totally
different being from the actual Christ, the Christ
we have in mind. He, as we are told, was
perfected by suffering. He was perfected by
trial, temptation, opposition. We may almost say
that He was perfected by the divinity which was

170 THE TEUE OPTIMISM
in Him and by the evil which surrounded Him.
It was the suffering which brought out all His
strength and patience. It was the fight with
temptation and sin that revealed and proved His
purity and unspotted holiness. It was the malice
and hatred of men that drew forth His unlimited
forbearance and forgiveness. It was the pains,
miseries, and despairs of men that provoked His
pity, tears, sympathy, compassion, and love. All
that background of evil was needed to paint that
living picture of everlasting beauty. There would
have been no Christ for us at all without the sin
and pain against which He did battle, and for
which He bore the cross. The very worst things
had their part in producing that perfect Image of
the invisible God. All things worked together to
make Him the Prince and Saviour of men and the
joy of heaven and earth.
IV. And all things work together to produce the
men and women who are most like Him. Eeally
there would be no high types of goodness in the
world without the sin and suffering which are
elements in producing them. I do not know what
goodness would be in a world in which all men
were moderately good and fairly happy. It is
beyond our conjecture. What we do know is that
all the best men are developed in the fight with
wrong, in the struggle against darkness, and in
the wrestle with pain. Men are not made happy
by these things, but they are made noble, long-
suffering, brave, and God-like. There would be
no beautiful lives, there would be no lives worth
reading, were it not for the dark and evil things

THE TEUE OPTIMISM 171
against which they have valiantly contended, and
which they have nobly overcome. Where would
be the heroism of heroes and the patience of the
saints, and the holy fire of martyrs, and the zeal
of philanthropists, without the injustice and the
wrongs, the oppressions, hatreds, and miseries
which they have withstood or endured, and against
which they have done battle ? History would
be a long, blank, dreary, vacant, monotonous
record but for the good men who have been
trained and perfected in the school of trial and
in the conflict with the dark and hellish forces of
the world. There is no pure gold without the
blood-crimson setting, there is no glory without
the cross. And even now the bad and distressing
things in the world, and in our own lives, have the
greatest part, next to the Spirit of God, in pro
ducing all that is best and most God-like in
ourselves : the patience, the forbearance, the
unselfish thought and care for others, the prayer-
fulness and trust in God, the strength to bear, the
quenchless hope of better things, the pity, the
sympathy, the kindliest tears, the dearest affections,
the willingness to forgive. We should have none
of these if there were no sinners to vex us, no
oppositions to cross us, no pain in our cup, no
suffering in the lives of those about us. You wish
the world were vastly different from what it is ;
we all wish that. We wish that we and all the
people around us were both better and happier men.
Yet the world as it is, with all its sad and crooked
things, makes the noblest possible lives for those
who are not overcome by the evil of it, but who

172 THE TEUE OPTIMISM
use the sadness and the pain and the evil of it as
Christ did, in doing the works of God. And that,
I think, was mainly what St. Paul meant : " We
know that all things work together for good to
them that love God."
V. And lastly, in thinking more especially of our
own lives, we slowly learn, as we get older, that
there is far more truth in this sublime philosophy
of St. Paul than we first supposed. Things do work
for good— sometimes for our lower good, and always
for our highest good — things which seemed to be
nothing but irritating, hurtful, and evil. The
bitterest disappointments, the events which we
called misfortunes, the failures of early life, the
blows which struck down our favourite projects
and hopes, and left them bleeding, dying, and dead,
were not always — they were not often — what we
feared and supposed at the time. We set our
faces Godward. We determined to make the best
of what was left. We took the strokes in the
spirit of Christian men, and ere long we discovered
that those things had not been enemies at all, but
perhaps our best friends. They had turned our
lives into a truer and more fruitful path, and
made us both larger-hearted, wiser, and happier
souls. We are always too ready to say that the
things which happen are against us, because we
do not see beyond to-day. When we get a little
further on, if we keep to the right and godly way
we find out that those very things were for us.
The}' have somehow been woven into the texture
of our lives, not as ugly and disfiguring things,
but in lines of grace and strength. They have

THE TEUE OPTIMISM 173
helped to make us the best that we are. And one
may be sure of this, that if a man's heart is right
with God ; if he is not full of idolatry, covetousness,
and the love of the world's coarser things ; if he is
a man of daily prayer; if he loves noble things and
is set on doing them, — then everything which falls
to his lot, whether it be pleasant or painful,
whether it be a chaplet of honour or some heavy
burden or bleeding cross, it will make him a truer,
larger, more generous soul, humbler and wiser,
more pitiful and more patient, and perhaps more
worthy to be partaker of the inheritance of the
saints in light. The crosses and ills of life do not
lift that man up whose thoughts are coarse and
downward. They sometimes kill all the bit of
good that was in him.
But most things, if not all, work together for
good to them that love God and know that God
loves them.

PART III
ST. PAUL'S PICTURES OF THE
CHRISTIAN LIFE

CHAPTEE XVni
THE BUEDEN OF OUE EAETHLY
TABEENACLE
" For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened ;
not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that the
mortal part may be swallowed up of life." — 2 Cob. v. 4.
In this sentence the Apostle speaks of our body
under a double figure — as a tent which shelters us
and as a garment which enfolds and clothes us.
In Eastern lands, where tents are used, the same
article serves the two purposes. When the sun is
blazing at noonday the traveller fixes up his
canvas-house, and sits under its shadow; when
the night brings the chill winds and the cold dew
he wraps the thing around him for warmth. But
in any case the somewhat cumbrous bundle has to
be carried day by day wherever he moves. And
this suggests the present application of the figure.
Our life in the flesh is a pilgrimage, a burdened
and often weary pilgrimage, St. Paul says ; groan
ing under the weight of tbe bodily house or vesture
which it has to carry as it journeys on, ever
toiling up the hill to its higher abode. The think
ing and feeling life in us is immortal, yet cabined
and chained in a mortal structure which sadly
177 12

178 THE BUEDEN OF
fetters and hampers all its nobler endeavours.
" We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being
burdened." That, I venture to say, is a just and true picture
of most human lives. Probably young people do
not feel excessively the burden of the body, and
are not disposed to groan heavily and constantly
under the pressure of its imperfections. We can
all remember the time when body, mind, and spirit
felt as light and free as the air about us, when
they harmonised together with hardly a jar, and
we had no cause to find fault with any one of them,
or to wish we had been differently made. But as
life moves on some of the things which in youth
were but a feather's-weight get loaded as if every
stage of the journey had left its troublesome
legacy, and we begin to feel like Jacob when he
halted upon his thigh. And certainly to every
one, be he young or old, who is striving after the
godly life, and fighting any sort of moral and
spiritual battle, the body is a vexatious encum
brance, a terribly difficult companion to walk with,
and at times a puzzling mystery which almost
drives us beside ourselves. " We that are in this
tabernacle do groan, being burdened."
I. We " groan" under it, says St. Paul, with a little
shiver ; and then adds, with a more palpable shiver,
" not that we would be unclothed." It troubles
him to have it, but it would trouble him more to
be without it. He wishes he were rid of it, yet
he cannot think of the parting. Sometimes he
cries, " Who will deliver me from it ? " but when
his enemies propose to do that for him, he thanks

OUE EAETHLY TABEENACLE 179
God that they have been frustrated, and that he
is in the body still. You can understand these
contradictory moods. We all have them in a
measure. We continually scold the body and
complain of it, but it is very much as a mother
declares that some child will be the death of her ;
yet, propose to take the child away — what then?
No ! we do not wish to be released from it.
" Better bear the ills we have than fly to others
that we know not of." We speak hard things
of it, yet cling to it with desperate eagerness and
love. For, after all, it is a fair tabernacle, fearfully
and wonderfully made. It is a piece of divine
workmanship, far outstripping the highest results
of human genius. It is the most exquisitely
fashioned thing in the world, at least among
visible things, the most curiously wrought. It is
a whole creation shut up in a little space, a bundle
of inextricable complications and awful mysteries.
And we have always had it with us ; we cannot
think of ourselves without it. It is so woven with
our intellectual, moral, and spiritual being that
we cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
There is no dividing border-land. Soul and body
are one, married in closer bonds than the truest
wedding vows can make. No wonder that we,
like St. Paul, have an instinctive shrinking from
the separation. " Not that we would be unclothed."
II. And yet we that are in this tabernacle do
groan, being burdened. Especially if we want to
get through a quantity of honest work. The
spirit is always willing, whilst the flesh is con
stantly having its fits of weakness and weariness.

180 THE BUEDEN OF
Especially if we wish to live pure lives, with
nothing but clean and wholesome and beautiful
thoughts ; especially if we wish to be generous
and just, even-tempered and cheerful, as becomes
the children of light, and if we are the sort of
men and women who aspire to the higher levels,
and to show some faint resemblance to the Christ.
The body plays sad tricks and works grievous
havoc at times among these higher purposes. It
is our servant, or ought to be, but it often takes
the master's place, and it is the most despotic,
whimsical, and foolish master that servant ever
had. It makes us pipe to all its humours, and
sometimes its humours are very bad. It changes
with every wind, and drags us through all its
variations. It takes a fit of sulkiness at times
when duty requires most effort, and lo ! our spirits
become languid and flaccid. It goes out and takes
cold, and sends us home with tempers almost
brutal. It swallows indigestible food, and visits
its folly upon the patient soul by filling it with
ugly doubts, darkening creation and blotting out
the face of God. Sometimes, when we begin
to fancy that we are almost angels, it mocks us
by sending a troop of ugly thoughts into our
fair palace, and proving to us that we are still
akin to the other thing, and occasionally it thrusts
unclean things into our very devotions, as the old
saints at their prayers used to see the devil's
face leering in at them, or something very like
it. Yes, it makes the endeavour after patience
and purity and goodness very hard. It is con
stantly catching our heels and pulling us back

OUE EAETHLY TABEENACLE 181
as we climb, or sitting heavily upon our shoulders
like Sinbad's Old Man of the Sea, when the ascent
is so steep that we need wings instead of that
encumbrance, and there are times when we are
almost foolish enough to wish that we could be
taken to pieces and put together again with all
the worst parts left out. We are fashioned divinely,
with immortal longings and God-like aspirations ;
but oh ! so strangely and with such a mixture !
" We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being
burdened." What then ? Well, just this, as St.
Paul says —
III. That the great endeavour and end of every
godly life is to get the weak, sinful, mortal part
clothed upon with that which is stronger, spiritual,
and immortal, and swallowed up in victory. The
greater thoughts and feelings in us, the nobler
spirit, the divinely given nature, are slowly to
acquire a perfect mastery, and conquer that which
is fickle and feeble, fleshly, sensual, and devilish.
It is to be one long wrestling of prayer and faith
against that lower self which, if indulged, becomes
our deadliest enemy. People ask why we were
made in such a way as to render this fight in
evitable ; why was the soul fastened to such
an unruly yoke-fellow? And there are some
scribblers with a little shallow cleverness, and
much more irreverent self-conceit, who waste paper
and ink in showing how differently they would
have done if they had been God. It is an in
estimable mercy for us that they never had the
chance. We do not know the why, but I am
humble and trustful enough to believe that God

182 THE BUEDEN OF
had better and wiser reasons for this particular
arrangement than we can imagine or guess. And,
in any case, we must submit to the arrangement,
and by His help make the best of it. The great
thing is to believe that the weaknesses and sins
and impatient humours and unruly passions of our
mortal flesh can be slowly overcome by watchful
prayer and earnest cultivation of the diviner spirit
which He has given, and that it is not impossible,
even with the load of this tabernacle upon us, to
live a noble, patient, beautiful, and comparatively
pure life. The worst thought that you can enter
tain, the most pernicious philosophy that you can
lend yourself to, is that your mortal weaknesses
and faults are an essential and ineradicable part
of you which must always go with you, like the
name you bear and the memories you carry, and
that, in fact, you are in no real sense responsible
for them. We hear far too much of this sickly
stuff talked now. Our passions and tempers and
animal appetites belong to us, it is said. They
are inherited, they were born with us; Nature or
God made us so, and therefore it is ridiculous to
find fault with or try to change that which God
made. Nay ! whatever a man does, though he
wades through a very slough of filth and flings
his soul and honour away in shameful and criminal
actions, he finds a weak sentimentalism ready to
condone and pity and multiply excuses for him
on the ground that his mind is unhinged, or that
his body was constructed in such a diseased and
crooked way that he could not do otherwise.
Such maudlin sympathy as this strikes at the root

OUE EAETHLY TABEENACLE 183
of all morality, and, if carried out consistently,
would make the world a gilded asylum for the
wrong-doer and a hell for everybody else.
IV. We are responsible for the deeds done in the
body. The body is strong, but there is something
which is stronger if it be incessantly cultivated.
And if the one was made by God so was the other,
that the fight, if honestly waged, might not be
unequal. We should be far less troubled with
the ill-humours and fretful despondencies, and
sullen wearinesses and greedy passions of the body
if from youth up we did our best to keep it simply
healthy. If through all the earlier years of life
we lived soberly, temperately, practising day by
day a watchful self-restraint, we should not find
the tabernacle half so burdensome and troublesome
in after-years. To be sound in body makes it
far easier to be cheerful and pure and healthy
in heart and mind. And even if it has come to
this, that you have a weak, frail, often ailing body,
which trembles at every change of temperature,
and is never quite equal to the work which it is
asked to do, yet even then the brave and praying
spirit can make a noble fight of it, and win un
expected victories, and do almost impossible things.
I think of the Apostle who wrote these words,
who groaned so often under the burden of this
tabernacle, I think of him as one of the most
striking instances in the world's history of grace
magnifying itself in bodily weakness, and of a
sanctified will proving its victorious power over
fleshly encumbrances. This man had passions
enough in his little body — unruly passions, as he

184 OUE EAETHLY TABERNACLE
knew too well. Did he not call himself a wretched
man because of the evil desires which struggled
in him? He was as full of human nature as
David, with big prides in him, and fierce tempers
sometimes breaking out, and unclean things not
quite dead and buried. You hear him saying, " I
buffet down my body and bring it into subjection,"
and you can picture what that means. Yet did
the might of God in him conquer that nature, and
make it sweetly obedient, pure, and saintly.
Nay, more : it was a frail body. We know that
by many a pathetic complaint and confession. It
never enjoyed perfect health. It had always some
thorn, some crippling inability. It was well ac
quainted with aches, pains, and tremblings. It was
strung together with fragile threads. It was a
bundle of sensitive nerves. Yet how fearless,
unwearying, patient, joyful, strong, and mighty
was the spirit in that feeble tabernacle ! He
worked for thirty years with unflagging devotion.
He did the work of a giant — nay, ten giants. " In
labours more abundant " than they all. No wonder
that he wrote, " The life which I now live in the
flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, yet
is not I, but Christ that liveth in me."
And we can all have that spiritual force which
made St. Paul conqueror over fleshly, hindrances,
trials. Faith is mightier than fears; God within
us greater than all our tempers and desires. "In
this tabernacle we groan, being burdened," but,
"thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ."

CHAPTER XIX
THE JOY OF POSSESSION AND THE PAINS
OF LONGING
"And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first-fruits
of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to
wit, the redemption of our body." — Rom. viii. 23.
The Apostle has been speaking of a universal
travail. He has pictured the whole creation
groaning and struggling in birth-throes, labouring
to produce some higher life than it has yet known.
He has represented the whole creation quivering
with pain and impatience, as it feels its bondage
and imperfections and moves wearily towards
more perfect things. We know that this is pro
foundly true. What we call nature is never satis
fied with its work. It is always bringing out of
pain and death new forms of life. The human
race is ever fretful with a large discontent, pur
suing progress through paths of warfare and
suffering. Nations move forward, goaded by in
cessant restlessness, to larger destinies, and each
class and order of men have their feverish am
bitions, sullen murmurings, or ardent hopes, ever
longing for something that does not yet appear,
ever in pangs because the hunger of their desires
185

186 THE JOY OF POSSESSION
is so much larger than their realisations. That is
what St. Paul meant by the groaning and travailing
of creation. Then follow the words which we have
read, wherein he declares that the Christian life
also has part in this experience. The Christian
is a redeemed soul bound to an unredeemed body.
He longs to soar, but is caged and fettered. He is
risen from the dead, but cannot shake off his grave-
clothes. He is thwarted in his endeavours, crippled
in his aspirations, his feet clogged and chained, as
he tearfully presses forward. Thus a profound
sense of pain, struggle, and imperfection is inter
fused through his deepest and serenest joys.
" Even we also, which have the first-fruits of the
Spirit, groan within ourselves, waiting for our
adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body."
Now, nowhere can you find a truer picture of the
Ufe of faith than this — the life which is always
sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; rich beyond
measure, yet ever poor ; which has found the
secret of rest, yet is ever restless ; which by its
title-deeds possesses all things, yet in its actual life
is absolute master of none ; which is the most
puzzling of contradictions, yet the grandest of facts.
St. Paul's words tell us of the joy of possession
and the pains of longing, and I wish to emphasise
these two aspects of the Christian life.
I. There is the joy of possession. " We have the
first-fruits of the Spirit." We are already richer
than words can tell, though there is ever a sort of
tearful longing for something more and beyond.
Men who know nothing about it say that the
Christian life is all expectation — hope deferred, a

AND THE PAINS OF LONGING 187
dreamy waiting for what the future may bring,
and then, maybe, they quote the stale proverb, "A
bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," and
fancy they have said something wondrously wise.
But, in fact, they have only exposed their own
ignorance. In truth, we hold the bird in the hand
just as surely as we hope for the two in the bush.
We are not clutching at the shadow and losing the
substance : we have a partial grip of the substance
now. If we had nothing to tell you about Christian
experience except that it feeds on predictions of
good things to come, and that the light in its eyes
is only the light of happy dreams all unrealised,
we should have no great confidence in our message.
Were all God's promises like bills dated forward
indefinitely, and never accompanied by the sight
and touch of real treasure, we might well be sus
picious of the inheritance held in reserve for us.
No ! the proof that He will in due time pay every
thing which He has promised is furnished in the
fact that He pays not a little now. " We have the
first-fruits of the Spirit." The winter is past, and
the time for the singing of birds is come. The soil
has opened to the light and warmth of spring, and
life is awakening everywhere to shake itself from
the dust and put on garments of beauty. Always
lovely are the first-fruits to the eyes which have
grown weary with looking on the bare, hard features
of winter. Sweet and welcome are the early snow
drops and the first primrose, and the tiny shoots of
verdure and jewelled buds which glisten like open
ing eyes on the grim skeleton branches. They are
like the first streaks of morning after a long night

188 THE JOY OF POSSESSION
of pain, or as the first morsel of food to an invalid
after long fasting. Precious in themselves are the
first-fruits, and more precious still because they
come laden with glad prophecies. Every modest
violet that peeps under the hedgerows is throbbing
with the same large life of nature which will ere-
while carpet the earth with splendours. It bears,
written on its leaves, a sort of divine promise of
all the glories which are to come. " We have the
first-fruits of the Spirit." St. Paul could hardly
have chosen a more exquisitely beautiful and true
figure of the Christian life than this. The colours
of the Christian life are delicate, but they are of
God's painting ; its leaves are feeble and trembling,
but they pulsate with the very divine life. The
chill winds blow around it, and the clammy soil holds
it down, and its growth is slow, but it has verily
risen from the dead and feels in all its veins the
motions of eternal love and joy. The Apostles
are for ever assuring us that we have the earnest
of our inheritance, the first instalment of the
treasure which is to be ours in full ; or, changing
the figure, they speak of a banquet of which we
have already the foretaste, or they tell us that now
are we the children of God, immature and un
developed, but having within us all the germs and
beginnings which will expand into the heavenly
life and the perfect man. They always glory in
that which is now as well as in that which is
to come, and when scornful men ask, " Where are
the signs of your present wealth and blessedness ? "
they answer, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,
neither have entered into the heart to conceive the

AND THE PAINS OF LONGING 189
things which God hath prepared far those who
love Him. But God hath revealed them to us
by His Spirit." Yes, we have got our cluster of
grapes from the Promised Land that we may taste
thereof and know the wealth of it. Heaven will
show us nothing but what we have hints and dim
visions of already. Are there not hours amid the
turmoil and fever of your lives when you feel
almost as perfectly at rest in the goodness and
fatherly care of the Lord as if you already beheld
His face ? Do you not often feel that the joy of
being loved by Him is better than all that the
world can give ? Do you not often say in your
deepest hearts, Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon Thy face?
You feel the blessedness of being in a world which,
with all its sin and sorrow, is a portion of the
Father's house. You rejoice in every virtue you
have gained, in every fight with temptation you
have won, in every thought of truth and purity
which you have made your own. You know some
thing of the sweet approval of conscience, something
of the ecstasy of doing good ; you know a little of
what it is to love even as Christ loved. You have
large and happy fellowships, you have a share in
God's sympathies and thoughts, you have the
strength and help of prayer. Your heaviest
burdens have an Almighty Arm underneath them,
your profoundest sorrows are set in the sunlight
of hope, and your sins and failures are covered by

190 THE JOY OF POSSESSION
an infinite forgiveness. All this is yours now,
yours in assured possession. " We have the first-
fruits of the Spirit." But alongside that are —
II. The pains of longing. For the fact that we
have seen Christ and had a vision of life in its
highest form makes us impatient and dissatisfied
with the imperfect, broken life which is ours now.
In one of the old Greek stories we read that men
who had once heard Apollo, the master, singing
never heard their own voices again with pleasure,
but henceforth sang with an underlying wail of
confession that their music was but discord com
pared with that. Give a man a taste and glimpse
of the highest life, and you make him weary and
discontented with all that falls below it. That
groaning and travailing of creation of which the
Apostle speaks is felt chiefly by the strongest and
best part of creation. The lowest members of the
human family, the lowest nations, which have
never seen and known the wider and nobler
possibilities of life, seem to fall asleep in dull
content. There is no pain and travail with them,
because they have seen nothing to awaken
aspiration. It is the progressive nations which
have already reached far forward in human de
velopment that are ever groaning with a noble
dissatisfaction, and filled with intense aspirations
after something better. The least knowledge of
Christianity, the dimmest vision of the Christ, seems
to give a nation a spirit of unrest, a spirit of
struggle toward happier and higher things. And
so it is with individuals. Let human life settle
down in the ruts and slough of ignorance, sin, and

AND THE PAINS OF LONGING 191
blindness, never having known anything better,
and it seems to lose all consciousness of its miseries
and to drop entirely the wings of hope and endea
vour. But give it a taste of the upland breezes,
give it the least bit of experience of the mountain-
tops, and the greater happiness of which man is
capable, and never again will it he dull and asleep
and contented with its old condition. It will be
filled with the pains of longing.
Thus it is by the very elevations of the Christian
life, by the clearness of its visions, and the gladness
of its heavenly hours, that it is made conscious of
its weakness and want, its defects and remaining
bondage, and filled with a painful longing to be
free, to rise higher, to be completely redeemed.
When you read the lives of the Apostles, and
find them so full of heroic courage, of uncom
plaining patience, of almost virgin purity and self-
forgetting love, you are tempted to think that
manhood showed its highest types there ; that the
Divine Spirit had conferred on them the very
fulness of His power and grace. Yet these are
the very men who confess, " We have only the
first-fruits of the Spirit." Nay, they speak as if
they had not yet realised sonship ; they cry out,
indeed, as if they were in intolerable bondage,
" Who shall deliver me from this body of death ? "
It was because they had seen the Christ so clearly,
because they had tasted so much of the highest
human and divine life, that they kept on sighing
evermore for the full possession of it. And so
shall we if we have had the same sort of ex
perience. The man who moves confined in the

192 THE JOY OF POSSESSION
shallow ruts of a Christian profession, who has
never been lifted into heavenly places with Christ
Jesus, will feel none of that painful impatience
with himself of which the Apostle testifies. He
who has had none of the profound joys and
splendid moral victories of the Christian life will
feel none of its pains and humiliations. He will
never feel its bonds, because he has not touched
its liberties ; it is the more earnest Christians
who feel that. In proportion to our present
advancement do we know the pains of progress.
You who have the richest experience of God's
Fatherhood, and the fullest share in the workings
of Christ's Spirit, who have already the most
mastery over the body, and its lusts, the world and
its temptations ; you who pray most, love most,
rejoice most, — you are the people who will be for
ever fretting and reproaching yourselves because
of the hardness of heart, and selfish passions, and
un-Christlike qualities which are still part of your
mortal environment.
In fact, the higher the Christian life reaches
the more it will suffer from the pangs of a holy
discontent. The better you are serving Christ
the more intensely will you grieve because you
are serving Him so indifferently. The ideal grows
larger as life climbs higher, and the more we attain
the more we are unsatisfied.
Do not think you are losing ground, that you
are falling back, because you have a deepening
consciousness of sin, imperfection, and unworthi-
ness ; because you feel that your life drops so
far behind y our prayers ; because at times you

AND THE PAINS OF LONGING 193
almost blush to hear yourself called a follower
of Jesus Christ; and because every step forward
is so hard to gain. It is rather a proof that you
have seen the height more clearly, and have a
deeper sense of what you ought to be. It is rather
a proof that the Spirit of God is working more
mightily in you and spurring you on through the
pains of discontent to the deeper and better things
which He has prepared. For the more we feel
the possible magnificence of the Christian life
the less we shall be contented with its meagre
beginnings. We have the first-fruits of the Spirit —
only that ; and we groan within ourselves, waiting
and travailing in pain until the harvest comes.

13

CHAPTER XX
AN EPISTLE OF CHEIST
" Ye are manifestly declared to be an epistle of Christ." —
2 Cob. iii. 3.
" An Epistle of Christ ? a letter of Christ ? There
is no such thing in existence," you say ; and you
are right, if you confine the word to its literal
meaning. We never hear of Christ writing a
letter, and we know that He never wrote a book,
though He has prompted and inspired other men
to write thousands of them. Once only in the
Gospels do we hear of Him writing at all, and then
it was not with a pen. He stooped down and
wrote upon the ground with His finger, and
nobody will ever know on this side the grave what
words His finger imprinted there. The one thing
which He wrote is lost. The world has thought it
a strange thing that He whose words were worth
more than all treasures never committed any of
them to parchment or paper. He, the greatest
preacher and teacher that the world has known,
never used a note or left a scrap of manuscript.
But it was not needed. He knew that His words
would not be forgotten. For He wrote them on
the hearts of disciples who loved and worshipped
194

AN EPISTLE OF CHEIST 195
Him, who treasured all His sayings as finer than
the finest gold, and whose memories were wonder
fully inspired and sharpened so that they let
nothing slip which it was good for the world to
have. Jesus wrote nothing ; we sometimes wish
He had. You would travel a long way to see a
bona fide piece of Christ's penmanship. If such a
thing were on exhibition in any old church or
museum thousands of people would go half round
the world to view it. A rag of faded old parch
ment with the very signature of Jesus upon it
would sell for countless gold. And I think, if you
had it, no millionaire could offer enough to draw
it from you. A genuine letter of Christ ! What a
stir it would make in the world ! And yet, here
is St. Paul telling us that letters of Christ do
exist, and are to be found and read, without any
journeying or searching in museums — letters of
Christ, " written, not with ink, but with the Spirit
of the living God." He has, in fact, been writing
letters of this kind ever since that hour when He
breathed upon the disciples and said, " Eeceive ye
the Holy Ghost." He is writing them now. You
may find them in every Christian assembly ; some
of them are to be seen in your homes, and in
most large business places and factories there is
sure to be one or, happily, more than one.
But it is certain that Jesus never ceases to write
letters of the kind that St. Paul speaks of here.
These letters are always coming fresh from His
hands, and they furnish the best of all proofs
that He is alive for evermore. You never re
ceive letters from a dead man. If you see words

196 AN EPISTLE OF CHEIST
written and signed in the well-known hand and
dated only yesterday, you are sure that the
friend who sent them is alive, or was then. And
Christ has been giving that witness of Himself
through all the centuries. The Christians of
Corinth were freshly written letters of Christ ;
the real Christians of London or Leicester are the
same to-day. Every true Christian is a new proof
of Christ's Eesurrection. For nothing less than a
risen and living Christ could make one.
I. In what senses are Christian men and women
epistles of Christ ? Think what is the object of
a letter, if it be an honest letter. I say an honest
letter ; for a great many letters are written to
flatter and deceive ; they are full of false pro
fessions. But an honest letter is intended to
convey the thoughts and mind of the writer.
And if it is carefully written it does show the mind
of the writer, better even than his speech. When
you read the biography of some good or great
man, you always find, as in the life of Dr. Arnold
or of Gladstone, a large number of private letters
included, because those letters help to show you
the man's real character better than anything
else could. Thomas Carlyle gave us the best
account of Oliver Cromwell's mind and character
which has ever appeared in print. Yet Carlyle's
book is made up chiefly of Cromwell's own letters,
with comments thereon. The sincere letters of a
man are the faithful portrait of the man ; they
represent him to you. Now, is it possible for
Christians to represent Christ in that way ?
St. Paul says, " Yes ! The believers of Corinth

AN EPISTLE OF CHEIST 197
were doing it." What! those people, with all
their contentions, rivalries, parties, and lamentable
defects? Yes, those people. They were by no
means a perfect Church. They were by no means
clean and spotless reflectors of the Master's face.
Nevertheless, they stood out in such marked con
trast to the unbelievers around them, their general
bearing had so much of the temper and spirit of
Christ, that St. Paul could point to them as to an
open letter, and say, " Eead that ; the mind of
Christ is there. There is the plain handwriting
of the living Lord." Most truly, then, you can be
letters of Christ, though you are not immaculate
saints, though you are conscious of innumerable
imperfections and infirmities. A writer who
wishes very much to send a message can make
use of very poor and unlikely material if it
is the best he has : half a leaf torn from a book,
or a bit of rag ; a broken pen, or a pointed stick ;
ink as thin as water, or as thick as mud. And
yet he will manage to convey his thoughts. Many
have done that. And Christ can use us in the
same way. We are not the best material, not
quite like superfine cream-laid notepaper; we are
more like bits of stained, blotted, and torn waste-
paper. Yet Christ will manage to write on us if
we will let Him. You can show His patience by
your own patience ; and His endurance and cross-
bearing by your own cheerful cross-bearing. You
can show a faint copy of His gentleness and
sympathy and forgiveness and self-forgetting by
your own. You can manifest a little of His glory
by your own gracious deeds and speech. In a

198 AN EPISTLE OF CHEIST
word, you can be so different, in temper and
conduct, from the people around you as to make
it certain that the mind of Christ is expressing
itself through your mind, and you can thus be
manifestly an epistle of Christ.
II. Now, observe that these letters of which St.
Paul speaks are conscious letters. They feel and
know themselves, first, all that they convey to
others ; they are written, not on unfeeling paper
or wax, but on fleshy tables of the heart, on
feeling and understanding hearts. We have to
feel and know ourselves the things of Christ before
we can convey them to others. That is the
peculiarity of these letters. The little packet or
sealed epistle which the post brings you is a dead
thing. It knows nothing of its own contents, nor
does the postman know. It |may be bringing you
agony or rapture, but he has no part in either
feeling. But when Christ uses us as letters He
makes the letters themselves thrill and burn and
glow with feeling before they can communicate
any of it to others. You can only show and give
out to your fellow-men, to your friends and
children, just as much of Christ as you have made
your own. It must be your very own in its
sweetness and beauty and power before others will
take it from you. People sometimes try to teach
religion to others when they have not felt its
quickenings in their own hearts. Preachers, in too
many Churches, set themselves to preach Christian
truth when it has got no vital hold on them. It
is their function and profession to do it. They
always make a pitiable failure of the business. In

AN EPISTLE OF CHEIST 199
a great deal of the talk which you hear about
religious education it is stupidly assumed that
anyone can teach religious things if he has first
committed them to memory. And so he can, in a
way, very much as a parrot or a talking-machine
might do it. He can teach children to repeat me
chanically the, to them, meaningless words of a creed
or catechism. He can teach the Ten Command
ments, and the Lord's Prayer, and the Sermon on the
Mount very much as he would teach the multipli
cation-table, without distinct appreciation of their
spiritual beauty. And such teaching is, perhaps,
little better than none at all. But to show Christ
to a man or a child, to make Christ and Christ's
words alive and quickening to another, that can only
be done by one who is throbbing, quivering, and
almost burning with the ineffable sweetness, com
passion, and love of Christ. We all know in
stinctively whether a man is repeating good things
from memory or speaking them from his heart and
soul. And the one is a dead thing, and the other
a live thing. Get Jesus Himself breathing, speak
ing, inspiring, gladdening, in your own hearts, then
you can teach Him, then you are bound to show
Him to others. You can no more help showing
Him then than the sun can shine without being
seen. He writes Himself upon the fleshy tables of
the heart, and then we become, as St. Paul says,
" manifestly an epistle of Christ."
III. One thing more. The letters of which we
read here are living letters, newly written. That is
what gives them their power: not letters written
long ago, but written now. The ink on them is

200 AN EPISTLE OF CHRIST
hardly dry, the paper is quite fresh. As you read
them you can almost feel the breath of the writer
on your cheeks. You can well-nigh touch His hand.
The letters that move us most are from living
friends. Sometimes we fall upon letters whose
writers have been long dead, good and noble letters
of great men, distinguished authors and states
men, and we are always interested in them ; but
they never move us in the same way and in the
same degree as the hving letters which the post
brings us from some mother, child, or friend who
is absent. No, when we press them to our lips
it is almost as if we were kissing the faces of those
who sent them, and we can all but hear their
voices, though they are hundreds of miles away.
A living letter is a sort of telephone which bridges
over distances. So when Christ writes His mind
upon the hearts and lives which are moving about
us at this present time, when He shows His quali
ties and His graces in you and me and other persons,
He appeals to men and to the world far more
powerfully than He can by old letters. The
Christian life which you are living to-day, if it be
any degree worthy, will stir men's hearts far
more deeply than anything which St. Augustine,
or Luther, Wesley, Spurgeon, and other great
preachers and saints wrote. Nay, the very Bible
itself, and its prophecies, Gospels, and Epistles,
are to most men like the beautiful dead letters —
wonderful things, sacred things, but rather old
and faded, speaking rather of what was once than
of what is now. Very few people are convinced
that Christ is alive for evermore by merely reading

AN EPISTLE OF CHEIST 201
the Evangels and Epistles. It is when they see
actual men and women in the flesh whose lives
are a good deal like the Evangels and Epistles,
when they see men and women whose lives are
like newly written letters of Christ, then they
begin to believe that there is a divine power at
the back of all this. They say, then, " Yes ! the
Bible must be true, and Christ is verily alive and
doing His great works as He did in the olden time."
It is mainly in this way that souls are won to the
faith, and brought into the service of Jesus. They
see Him in the faces and conduct of downright
earnest and beautiful Christians, and that slowly
draws them to Him. A little child that loves Jesus
in an irreligious home will often do more to make
that home religious than ten thousand tracts would
do. A gentle, Christ-like girl in a factory or shop
will sometimes do more to spread Christian in
fluences in that particular place than all the
Churches and all the street-preaching in a city.
And a mother's sweet life, breathing out purity,
kindness, and unselfish love, will prevail more than
the mightiest eloquence which rings from pulpits.
Indeed, in these days we have almost too much
street-preaching and church-preaching, and too
little of the sermons without words which St. Paul
is speaking of here. Men who are anxious to get
souls converted and brought to Christ think that
the only way in which it can be done is to talk
Christ and preach Christ, and to be for ever
preaching and talking. I myself have had a large
share of that to do, and I trust, in God's mercy, it
has not been all in vain. The world would be

202 AN EPISTLE OF CHEIST
poorly off without Christian preaching; but the
other thing is more effective — to show Christ in
your lives. And if you can be a real letter of
Jesus Christ, you need not fret because you cannot
be a great talker. You need not be ambitious to
stand up in the streets or on a platform with a
congregation or a crowd at your feet. You are
doing a work which will probably have quite as
big a place as that in the Lamb's Book of Life.

CHAPTEE XXI
ST. PAUL'S UNIVEESALS
" Be patient toward all men. See that none render evil for evil
unto any man : but ever follow that which is good, both among
yourselves and to all men." — 1 ThesS. v. 14, 15.
The first thing which strikes us here is the uni
versal and indiscriminating sweep of the injunc
tion. St. Paul liked the word all; it suited his
big heart. It was in accord with the grand
comprehensiveness of the Gospel. In fact, he had
learned it from the Master. It was just the echo
of Christ's " Whosoever." He allows no excep
tions. He says, " Be patient toward all," " Do good
to all," " In all things give thanks." We hear
the ring of such words through the whole of his
Epistles. He often groups a number of these
universals together, as in the words before us —
as if he would say, " The promises are good for
all needs, the injunctions are fitted for all circum
stances, the rules apply to every possible case."
He knew how fond we all are of making excep
tions, how ready we are to say, " Oh yes, that is
an admirable precept generally, but it will not
work and fit in here." And once we begin to
make exceptions it is like the little rift in the lute
203

204 ST. PAUL'S UNIVEESALS
which, slowly widening, marreth all. It is like the
one little rent in the garment which tends to grow
bigger until the garment is past mending. Your
exceptions speedily become the rule. If you find
one case to which your Christian principles do not
apply, you will quickly find a second, and a third,
and fifty more, until all your Christian principles
are thrown over, bag and baggage. If God's
Word is good for anything it is good for every
thing. The Master's orders are thorough, not
meant to be obeyed only when it is agreeable
and convenient to obey them, but also when it
is not agreeable, when it goes against the grain.
And they are the Master's orders which St. Paul
gives us here, though he puts them in his own
words. I take three of them ; they will be quite
sufficient, and more than sufficient, for our brief
talk. I. We are to be patient and forbearing with
all men. That is a large demand; it is about
the greatest demand which can be made upon
human nature — yes, even Christian human nature.
You will probably say it is beyond human
nature in its unsanctified state. There are few of
us who get through a month or a week without
saying, "I have no patience with that man or
that woman," or perhaps that child, and we think
that we are justified in losing patience with them.
" They are exceptions, to which the Christian rule
does not apply. They would spoil the temper
of a saint," you say ; " they would wear out Job's
patience." And you are right — Job's patience has
been greatly overrated. If you have no more

ST. PAUL'S UNIVEESALS 205
than that, you will fall a long way short of St.
Paul's injunction. It needs the spirit of Him who
endured the contradiction of sinners to be patient
toward all men. It is very hard to be patient
with obstinate and self-willed and unteachable
people ; with ignorant and foolish people, who
are wise in their own conceit ; with easeful, lazy,
self-indulgent people ; with people who are always
irritating you by saying and doing the wrong
thing ; with people who repeatedly commit the
same faults and neglect the same duties ; with
people who constantly misunderstand and mis
judge us, and people who will not see what is for
their good, and refuse to be convinced of what
is clear as the noonday. And there are always
enough of such people about to make life a bed
of nettles unless we have learned to bear, unless
we have been baptized into the long-suffering and
gentleness of our patient Lord. "Be patient to
ward all." You say, " Ah, but that man is so pro
voking ; he is so incorrigibly stupid and such a
fool ! " Well, a wise man bears with fools. It
is only when he is a good deal of a fool himself
that he cannot tolerate them. It is of no use
scolding a man because he is stupid. He deserves
your pity rather. To get into a furious temper
with him because he has not your intelligence
is no great proof of wisdom ; it rather proves
that an intelligent man may be very stupid at
times. If you pride yourself on being clever
and sharp-witted it should make you generous
towards those who have not been endowed in
that particular way. " We that are strong ought

206 ST. PAUL'S UNIVEESALS
to bear the infirmities of the weak." If God gave
you ten talents it was certainly to make you bear
and suffer a great deal from the man who has
only one. The more gifted a man is the more he
ought to practise this : " Be patient toward all."
Some of you, possibly, have almost abandoned
hope of better things concerning some one person
with whom you have had much to do. It may
be one of your own children. He is so deter
mined in his own way, and always in the wrong
way, so stubborn and unbendable. Well, let
patience have its perfect work. I should not
be surprised to hear that he is what people vul
garly call " a chip of the old block." There was
doubtless a bit of that same iron stubbornness
in you before God melted your heart. The child
is often just the father over again, as the father
was before divine grace softened and changed
him. Be patient with your child, your son, as
God was with you, and he will probably turn out
just as well as you have done, and perhaps a little
better. The hard, granite-like stuff often makes
the best man, and even the best Christian. I
should think that Saul of Tarsus, when he was a
boy, gave his mother a great deal of trouble. He
was not the sort of youth who was likely to die
of early piety. He was not moulded into a good
shape as easily as a piece of wax. I know that,
before his conversion, he gave the Lord Jesus a
good deal of trouble ; but he was worth it. He
became all the mightier, as an Apostle, because
he had been so unyielding as a boy. It may be
like that with some who almost drive you desperate.

ST. PAUL'S UNIVEESALS 207
Hope on, still pray without ceasing,and " be patient
toward all." Carry this patience into your Christian
work ; you can do nothing without it there. You
have been trying for weeks and months to get a
saving hold on some particular man, to rescue and
lift him up ; and he defeats your purpose again
and again. He is so willing and yet so weak;
he vows, promises, takes pledges, and quickly
breaks them. To-day you have him on his better
side, and he is all remorse and tears ; and to-morrow
drink, or the devil, has got him on the other side,
and down he goes into the slough again. It makes
you angry, it makes you desperate. " Very well,"
you say, " let him go his own way." " No," says
Christ, " have patience." Think what an awful
fight it is for him. You have never had his awful
struggles and severe temptations. You do not know
what a legion of devils are pulling and tugging
at him. Follow him up, give him another chance,
and another; forgive him seventy times. The
seventieth time will do it. It is patience that wins,
and patience is mightier than very hell ; and when
your patience is failing, remember the infinite
patience which has borne with this foolish, mad,
thankless, guilty world for thousands of years;
remember the divine long-suffering, which has
clung lovingly to you through the freaks and
follies and miserable shortcomings of years.
Bethink you how you have tried the patience of
your Master, Christ, and it will help you to " be
patient toward all."
II. The second injunction is twin sister to the
first. Show goodness to all, as God sends His rain

208 ST. PAUL'S UNIVEESAL
and sunshine to all, whether they be evil or good.
The face which you carry about is a Christian
face, and that Christian face is to be shown to all
— Tio other face. You are not to show a hard and
unloving face because you are dealing with hard
and unloving people. Our lives are not to be like
looking-glasses, giving back the image that falls
upon them ; they are to show the features of Jesus
towards all people. It is not to be " tit for tat,"
measure for measure, giving back as good as we
get or as bad, paying with the same coin we
receive, whether it may be bad coin or true. It is
not to be the law of retaliation, hitting back every
time you are hit. That philosophy appeals to the
fighting instincts of men, and may capture an
audience on a political platform ; but it is hardly
the sort of teaching which was given in Judae
long ago. We are to give back, not what is worst
in others, but what is best in ourselves. We are
not to cut off our noses to spite our faces because
they do it. " See that none render evil for evil to
any man." You are not to forget that you are
a Christian because other people treat you in an
unchristian way. They may do it, because they
are not actuated by Christian motives ; but you
cannot do it to them without setting your Christian
principles at nought. If people throw mud at you,
or sneer, or slander, it is a great temptation to hurl
back mud at them. But why should you stoop to
that unclean work because they like it? Mud
thrown at you can be easily washed off, but the
mud which you fling sticks, not to the other person,
but to yourself. It is stupid to give back what

ST. PAUL'S UNIVEESALS 209
you get: that is the rule of dogs who answer
snarl by snarl. What is the good of answering
a fool according to his folly? Why should you
make two fools when there need only be one ? If
a friend loses his temper and calls you all sorts of
ill names, why should you spoil your temper and
descend to his level ? If he does you a mean,
spiteful turn, and you remember that you owe him
something, pray do not forget that you owe your
self more. The shabbiest action done to us furnishes
no justification for doing another shabby action in
return. That is only multiplying one by two. You
may say he right well deserves it, and probably he
does, but why should you forget your self-respect
because he is destitute of that commodity ? You
hear that a man has spoken a number of ill things
of you, exaggerated and untrue, and straightway
you dig up from memory unpleasant things which
you have heard of him, and report them. But
what is that but tarring yourself with the same
foul brush ? Because he tramples on truthfulness
and charity, are you to stamp your feet on them
also ? Because he has a spiteful nature, are you to
fill your soul with venom and vinegar ? You want
to pay him back ? Yes, probably you can make
him feel. You can sting and hurt him a Httle ; but
you hurt yourself far more. And really, the most
effective and cutting way of paying him is to show
that you have a soul above all these things. If we
are Christians we cannot afford to degrade ourselves
by copying the ways of unchristian men. The
laws of their lives are not to rule ours. We have
a dignity to maintain, and a conscience to keep
14

210 ST. PAUL'S UNIVEESALS
clean. " See that none render evil for evil unto
any man."
III. And the third injunction is : Act Christianity
wherever you go, and among all sorts of people.
Follow good among yourselves, your fellow-Chris
tians, and among all men. The moral surroundings
are to make no difference to us. We are not to
let our company change our attitude and temper.
Our Christian professions are to stand good in
every place, and the rules we have learned from
Christ to be binding on us in every society. That
is a great and difficult thing. It is most difficult
to carry the feelings of the sanctuary into the
workshop and the streets, and to be in the presence
of the worst people what we try to be in the
presence of the best. It is easy to fall into the
language and thoughts of those about us. It is
easy to yield like clay ; it is hard to resist like
rock. We want to be sociable and companionable,
we want to please and not make ourselves dis
agreeable. And then comes the temptation to a
weak and cowardly and even wretched conformity.
I often tremble for those who have to spend
their week-day lives in factories and other places
where Christians are scarce, where unbelief and
scoffing at religion abound, and perhaps profanity
and lewd speech. To be always Christians there is
no child's play. It is more like the grim struggle of
faith's giants and saints in dark places. To walk
on a high level there with undefiled speech and
thought, to answer scorners' words with silence,
or patient gentleness, to be as living epistles of
Christ — this is hard work enough, impossible save

ST. PAUL'S UNIVEESALS 211
to those who are strengthened with all might
by His Spirit in the inner man. And it is to get
that strengthening that you come to the house of
prayer; it is for that you take part in the memorial
feast of the Lord. There He renews your faith
and courage by the most inspiring of memories,
and girds you again for the battle by the most
cheery assurances. May all of us who need it
most — and who is there that does not need ? —
get that help again this day.

CHAPTER XXII
THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT
" This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the
lust of the flesh. . . . But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." —
Gal. v. 16, 22, 23.
There were two contending parties among these
Galatian Christians, both of whom needed plain,
straight words of warning and rebuke. There
were the ritualists, who wished to make Christian
faith a bit of patchwork or ornament stuck on to
the Mosaic system, and who asserted that the keep
ing of the law and all its ceremonies was indis
pensable to salvation ; and there were those who
called themselves the spiritual party, who dispensed
with all the Mosaic observances, flung off even the
moral law, and claimed that Christian liberty
allowed a man to do whatsoever he pleased. There
was not much practical Christianity in either party.
One made outward forms of supreme importance
and pushed Christian virtues out, and the other,
in its lofty claim of spirituality, ignored the Ten
Commandments and sundry other elementary things.
And they were wrangling and snarling and de
nouncing each other with genuine sectarian bitter-
212

THE FEUIT OF THE SPIEIT 213
ness, as if they had never heard of the love,
gentleness, and meekness of Christ. Against all
this St. Paul pleaded in the Epistle. The greater
part of it was directed against the ritualists,
but the words of the text were addressed to the
other party, the spiritual men, as they called them
selves. They had made great use of this word
" spiritual." They had used it as a sort of shibbo
leth, or catchword, and flung it in the faces of their
opponents. They do not seem to have known very
clearly what it meant, but it had been a favourite
word of their teacher, St. Paul, and it implied some
thing mystical, supernatural, and divine, something
grand and superior, something that placed them
above everybody else in discernment and favour
with God. And here St. Paul lets them down from
their loftiness, from their vague talk about the
superiority of the spiritual man, and tells them
that to walk in the Spirit is just to live a sweet,
humble, loving Christian life, and to put forth the
fruits of faith and righteousness. " It is nothing
less," he says, " than gross self-deception to call
yourselves spiritual if the lusts, desires, passions,
and envies of the flesh have free play in you. The
Spirit of God has no place where these things are.
They are the offspring of the carnal, devilish mind.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-
suffering, gentleness, goodness. Walk in the
Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh."
And these words may well suggest to us thoughts
for Whit-Sunday. We are reminded to-day of the
spiritual life, and the divine Author of it ; we are
reminded of the coming of the Holy Ghost, and of

216 THE FEUIT OF THE SPIEIT
the spiritual man. That, and that only, is what we
understand, and what we should understand, by the
spiritual life. We speak of a religious meeting as
being intensely spiritual. We speak of a sermon
as pre-eminently spiritual. They only deserve
that name when they have made us forget for the
time everything that belongs to sense and selfish
interests, and the envies, ambitions, and gains of
the lower world ; when they have made us for the
time despise all these things and lifted us into that
region where Jesus is enthroned, and where the
love of Him and everything that He loves has
become all in all. We speak often of a spiritual
Church, and there, again, a Church only deserves
that name when there are no parties in it, no
classes, when humility and dear brotherhood bring
all together, when love breaks down all distinc
tions, bridges over all gulfs, and makes blessed
peace, when forbearance and meekness and charity
pervade the atmosphere like perfume from heaven,
and the name of Jesus is exalted above everything
that belongs to the self within and the world
outside. That is spirituality; there is no other.
By its fruits shall ye know it. " The fruit of the
Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentle
ness, goodness, faith." Further, we may say —
II. Where these fruits are the Spirit of God is.
We sometimes say, with our short-sighted and
foolish limitations, that the Spirit of God never
works except in those who have believed exactly
in our way. We say, " They must have been
convicted and regenerated, and brought into the
acceptance of certain articles of belief, before they

THE FEUIT OF THE SPIEIT 215
deadness into the verdure, beauty, and splendour
of spring-time and summer. "The wind bloweth
where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof,
but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither
it goeth : so is every one that is born of the Spirit."
You cannot tell how God joins Himself to the
human soul and produces in what is naturally
selfish, proud, pleasure-loving, greedy, and covetous
the graces and feelings which are the very opposite
of all these. It is of no use discussing the philo
sophy of it ; it passeth understanding. The Apostle
simply fastens us down to this : that it is known
by its results. " The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy,
peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness," and the
rest. We are not on doubtful ground there. The
spiritual man is one in whom the lusts of the flesh
are held down by a higher power, who no longer
loves with all the burning passion of his nature
the things that can be seen, touched, and tasted,
the things of the senses and appetite, the glitter,
show, and gains of the material world, but who
loves best and desires most what Christ loved —
goodness, purity, soul-beauty, and likeness to God.
The spiritual man has the mind of Christ. He is
the soul of gentleness. He is patient toward all,
forgiving and forbearing toward all. He is not
always pushing forward himself and his own views,
but full of graceful yielding and self -forgetting.
The goodness which is in him is always flowing
forth. He is brave to bear; he is long-suffering
in trial; he loves, pities, sympathises with all.
He shows Christ in all His actions, attitudes, and
thoughts. That is St. Paul's beautiful picture of

218 THE FEUIT OF THE SPLEIT
these, and only the Spirit can produce them — love,
joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, and goodness.
m. It is only where these fruits of the Spirit
are that there is any real understanding of divine
things. St. Paul is always claiming for the spiritual
man superior discernments, claiming for him the
power of judging all things, claiming for him joys
which are unknown to others. But this power
is not a thing of the intellect : it is a perception
of the heart. It is where love, long-suffering, and
gentleness are found that the things of God are
understood. It is only to these that God tells any
of His secrets. You cannot prove to yourself
or to others the simple fact of the existence of
God, much less the supremely good, loving, and
tender character of God, by logic and arguments
drawn from nature, and arguments which appeal
to reason only. You can only prove these things
from the love, goodness, pity, and compassion
which are in your own heart. What learned
doctor or master of eloquence ever demonstrated
to a single doubting mind the Fatherhood and
infinite pity of our great Creator? It is never
proved in that way, by force of reasoning ; no,
it is the deeper volume of the heart's own cries
which proves that. It is the pathetic tenderness
and pity shed abroad by Christ in our own nature
that help us to know and believe that. When we
become a httle more meek and gentle towards
others, when we find compassions welling up in us
like those of Christ, when we are full of forgiving
thoughts, pitiful and kindly thoughts, towards all,
then we know, and cannot doubt, the everlasting

THE FEUIT OF THE SPIEIT 217
can have any part in the spiritual helps which
God gives." But we only show our ignorant pre
sumption when we talk in that way. God refuses
to be bound down by our little plans and schemes.
The heart of the Eternal is larger than all the
creeds. And though He only gives His Spirit in
all its fulness and power to those who cling to
Christ in earnest faith, He does not withhold
it altogether from others. We insult the Holy
Spirit by claiming Him all for ourselves, by con
fining Him to our orthodoxy. Every right, pure,
and noble thought comes from Him. All Christ
like virtues spring from the same Father's bosom
in which the Christ Himself was begotten. " Every
good and perfect gift cometh down from the Father
of lights, with whom there is no variableness nor
shadow of turning." Take care that you do not
sin against the Holy Ghost by calling His works
carnal. The Holy Ghost broods over the hearts
of all, and is for ever producing in the most
unlikely places some faint images of Himself.
Wherever these fruits are the Spirit is. Where
you find in men and women something that is
far higher than the sensual and animal ; where
there is courage and self-f orgetfulness, and patience
in sorrow, and compassion and tenderness towards
others, and pure thoughts and striving after nobler
things, there you may be sure that God has not
left Himself without witness. These are the gifts
of His good Spirit ; they cannot come from any
other. No more can all these graces grow where
God is not than grapes can grow on thorn-bushes
and figs on thistles. The fruits of the Spirit are

218 THE FEUIT OF THE SPIEIT
these, and only the Spirit can produce them — love,
joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, and goodness.
HI. It is only where these fruits of the Spirit
are that there is any real understanding of divine
things. St. Paul is always claiming for the spiritual
man superior discernments, claiming for him the
power of judging all things, claiming for him joys
which are unknown to others. But this power
is not a thing of the intellect : it is a perception
of the heart. It is where love, long-suffering, and
gentleness are found that the things of God are
understood. It is only to these that God tells any
of His secrets. You cannot prove to yourself
or to others the simple fact of the existence of
God, much less the supremely good, loving, and
tender character of God, by logic and arguments
drawn from nature, and arguments which appeal
to reason only. You can only prove these things
from the love, goodness, pity, and compassion
which are in your own heart. What learned
doctor or master of eloquence ever demonstrated
to a single doubting mind the Fatherhood and
infinite pity of our great Creator? It is never
proved in that way, by force of reasoning ; no,
it is the deeper volume of the heart's own cries
which proves that. It is the pathetic tenderness
and pity shed abroad by Christ in our own nature
that help us to know and believe that. When we
become a little more meek and gentle towards
others, when we find compassions welling up in us
like those of Christ, when we are full of forgiving
thoughts, pitiful and kindly thoughts, towards all,
then we know, and cannot doubt, the everlasting

THE FEUIT OF THE SPIEIT 219
kindness, long-suffering, and pity of our heavenly
Father. He speaks to us of Himself through the
things in ourselves which are likest Him and
which He has created there.
So with immortality. It has never been proved
to the intellect. Philosophy has striven in vain,
for thousands of years, to demonstrate it through
the mind. It does not come in that way. But
when our own hearts have realised the power
of human love in its best forms, realised how love
can hold on for a lifetime and bear all things, and
be as strong when death comes as at the beginning,
when we discover that all the best things in us
are independent of bodily waste and decay — then
the proof is given, and we understand how God
does not intend to let us die, and can never let
us die. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the
things which God hath prepared for them that
love Him " ; but He makes them known to those
who have the fruits of the Spirit.
And to-day we are reminded again of all these
things. We are reminded that there is something
supernatural in the Ufe of faith, that everyone
may have a portion of the Divine Spirit who
honestly desires it and asks for it, and that we
who kneel at Jesus' feet and call Him Lord may
have it in great abundance. We are not dependent
on natural forces, mental forces, or human forces ;
we have not to fight our battle with sin and
temptation, and bear our burdens and difficulties
with our single and unaided strength. The Spirit
of the Almighty is about us, underneath us, and
within us. The very power which gave Jesus His

220 THE FRUIT OF THE SPIEIT
uniform victory over sin, guilt, and sorrow, was
bequeathed to us. It lives and works in us again,
as it lived and wrought in Him, and wherever it
is enjoyed it brings peace, self-mastery, and all
other fruits of the Spirit. May Christ, as in the
olden time, breathe upon us again this day, that
we may receive the Holy Ghost!

CHAPTEE XXIII
THE WITNESS OF THE LIFE
" That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, with
out rebuke . . . holding forth the word of life." — Phil. ii. 15, 16.
You can hardly read one chapter in St. Paul's
letters without coming to a sentence of this kind,
to some prayer or hope expressed that those who
called themselves Christians might order their lives
in such a pure and blameless way as to disarm the
criticism of the unbeliever. St. Paul watched over
those young Churches with the anxious interest of
a mother. When he heard of their moral failures
and backslidings, it was like a sword-stroke ; when
he received testimonies of patient continuance and
unstained conduct, it was hke a vision of the better
land. He was far more concerned about quaUty
than quantity ; not the number of converts, but
their moral weight, character, and Christ-likeness,
and he often confessed, as he does here, that his
labour would be thrown away, and the very sacrifice
of Christ in vain, if they did not result in a company
of men and women who proved, by their manifest
and undeniable superiority to the world around,
that the Spirit of the Master had shaped them.
St. Paul was reasonably anxious. The world was
221

222 THE WITNESS OF THE LIFE
watching these early disciples, as disciples have
never been watched since ; watching them with
keen, unfriendly, and malevolent eyes. They were
conspicuous by their singularity, by their avoidance
of temple and theatre, by their claims to a higher
life. They were like a city set on a hill. Daily
they came under a fire of criticism, of criticism
eager to discover dark spots and flaws. Constantly
they were on their trial before the world's cold and
merciless judgment-seat, and every proved weak
ness and failing was fastened, not on them only,
but on the Master whose name they bore. And,
no doubt, there were a few noble-minded un
believers who watched them with a kinder interest,
who were really wishful to know, for their own
guidance, whether this new faith did or did not
produce a higher type of men. Thus were these
Christians scanned and waylaid, their rehgion
judged, and the Lord Himself judged, by their
character and life. Well might the Apostle,
jealous over them with a godly jealousy, entreat
them often in such words as these : " That ye may
be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without
rebuke . . . holding forth the word of life." You
will see, then, that St. Paul is enforcing here the
very truth which his Divine Master and ours had
continually taught —
I. That Christianity is to be proved, preached,
and defended by the life. The disciple is to be
as his Master — a Christ on a smaller scale. He
was the Light of the world ; they also are to shine
as lights in the world. He is called the Word of
God, and each one of them is to be, by his walk

THE WITNESS OF THE LIFE 223
and conduct, a word of God. They are all to be
copies of Him, reproductions of his beauty ; lesser
incarnations of God, as He was the great Incarna
tion, so that the world, in beholding them, shall
always be reminded of the invisible Christ. St.
Paul was only repeating here the words with
which our Lord Himself has made us familiar.
He defined discipleship by the words " salt " and
"light." Each of His followers was to be a centre
of illumination, a moral fountain,, a well-spring of
sweetness, a savour of life and health to the
multitude around. They were to form a moral
aristocracy. Their righteousness was to exceed
all the recognised righteousness of the times.
Their purity and justice, charity and patience,
were to be distinctly higher than anything else
which could be found in the world or had been
known in the past. His purpose was to produce
in His immediate followers, and to perpetuate in
the Church when He had departed, a stronger,
nobler, and lovelier type of manhood than the
world had heretofore seen, and by means of this
to convince the world of His divine authority and
power. The world was to believe that He had
risen from the dead by witnessing the exalted lives
of His followers, and their moral and spiritual
qualities were to be the one sufficient proof that
His saving and sanctifying power abideth for ever.
That was the grand idea in the Master's mind.
His reUgion was to win its way, not so much by
the perfection of its doctrines as by the radiance
of its purity ; not so much by the energy of its
defenders as by the meekness of its professors ; not

224 THE WITNESS OF THE LIFE
so much by the eloquence of its preachers as by
the speechless beauty of the lives that it pro
duced ; not by the awe of its terrors and the
allurements of its promises, but by the manifest
superiority of its ethical results, by the serene
majesty of its courage, patience, self-mastery, and
strength. For there is no doctrine which the
world will not dispute, no argument or miracle
which the sceptical mind will not question, no
terror which wickedness will not defy, no promise
which sensuality will not despise. But wherever
there are brave, gentle, lovely, unspotted lives
of fairer temper and spirit than the world can
produce, scepticism is dumb and doubt half
believes and frivolity stops and thinks, and the
slumbering conscience is stirred and says to itself,
" Verily this is of God." And, truly, Christianity
has held its ground and won its way mainly by this.
Its supernatural and divine claims have been
proved by its moral fruits. Some men wiU tell
you that the Church is maintained from one age
to another chiefly by its organisations, its priests,
temples, and preachers, its sacramental machinery,
its able apologists, its officially regulated succession
of Apostles. Christ would teU you, No ! All these
things are of small weight, some of them only a
dead weight. The Church survives for ever be
cause He Himself is in it, multiplying fair images
of Himself, creating an unfailing succession of
beautiful souls worthy to bear His name, making,
as the Apostle says, " Sons of God, blameless
and harmless, and without rebuke . . . holding
forth the word of life."

THE WITNESS OF THE LIFE 225
II. The whole power of present-day Christianity,
and of the Church, is in its blameless, witnessing
Uves. The Church, in this land at least, owes all
the noble and mighty influence which it enjoys to
the ethical superiority of its members. By virtue
of this its influence is great over the host of people
outside it, and this compels even those who are
hostile to speak of it with respect. They say that
its evidences are defective, that all its arguments
can be refuted, that its sacred oracles yield to
careful criticism ; but they can neither deny nor
explain the wonderful fact that goodness, purity,
righteousness, and self-sacrifice are for ever and
still for ever reproduced when its beliefs are
held and the name of Jesus loved. None but the
most prejudiced and embittered unbelievers ever
venture to deny these greatest of miracles — that
Christ and faith in Christ have still the power
to create beautiful lives, and a multitude of them.
There are scores and hundreds of thousands of
people in all the Churches and denominations of
this land who, in every feature of character, in
sobriety and purity of conduct, in human love and
sympathy, in lofty tone and temper, are unmis
takably the salt of the community and the elect
of the earth. No doubt there is a considerable
sprinkling of goodness outside the Churches, but
the great mass of goodness is within them. The
pitiful, compassionate, generous, and pure-hearted
lives are mainly found there. We often hear,
indeed, from scornful or thoughtless lips the charge
that Christian people are no better than others ;
that in business they are no more just, and in the
15

226 THE WITNESS OF THE LIFE
race for wealth no more scrupulous ; that in social
intercourse they are no more kindly, and in public
life no more conscientious — in fact, that their
professions are hypocrisy, and their claim to moral
superiority is an imposture. You hear that con
tinually, but the people who say it hardly believe
it; and certainly the world generaUy does not
beheve it. The great majority of the irreligious
have, in their deepest hearts, a conviction that
there is a goodness in Christian men and women
which is rarely found elsewhere. They may fling
ridicule upon them in the light and profane talk
of the factory ; they may delight in throwing mud
at this and that professor, and sneering at the whole
tribe of Christian teachers ; but they know well to
whom to turn for public services, for unselfish
benevolence, for disinterested labour. They know
well to whom they must appeal when dark days
come, when sickness and suffering are at their
doors. They know in whose hearts sympathy
beats with most freshness, and kindness and pity
well forth. It is to Christian men and women that
suffering and want constantly appeal, for in that
quarter alone is the appeal sure of an answer.
And it is just as unmistakably true that to bear
the Christian name and be known as a Christian is
to command trust. It is a certificate of honesty,
integrity, and honour. The trust is sometimes
betrayed. Men will oceasionaUy use Christ's name
for dishonest and infamous purposes ; yet the trust
is given by thousands and thousands of people
who would hardly caU themselves Christians. And
men would not give it, and continue to give it, if

THE WITNESS OF THE LIFE 227
it were not in the vast majority of instances de
served. It is still the goodness and moral beauty
of Christian men and women that give the Church
its place and power in this land. I repeat, in this
land. There are parts of the Catholic Continent
where a widespread revolt of terrible hatred of
the Church is going on. In Spain, Portugal,
Austria, France, we read daily that the mass of
artizans and city life are rising up with indignation
to fling off the priest, the Jesuit, the Church, and
all their doings. It is not a revolt against religion,
but loathing and scorn of a Church which has be
come immoral and a cloak for immorality. Honest,
clean-living men say, perhaps unfairly, " We must
remain outside this Church if we would remain
honest ; for this Church, instead of making for
goodness, excuses, forgives, cloaks, and encourages
all impurity and vUeness." That may be an unjust
charge ; but every Church will become a stench
in men's nostrils when its fruits are not health
but corruption, just because the very opposite is
expected from it. Thank God for all that we have
of clean and sweet Christianity, undented by lewd
priests and confessional-boxes, and for all who are
maintaining the influence of the faith by the
witness of blameless and harmless conduct, "hold
ing forth the word of life."
III. Let us each one be earnest in applying this
truth to himself. Eemember that the faith which
we love, which is aU in all to us, which we want
to spread everywhere, can only be maintained and
advanced by the proof which we furnish in our own
lives of its purifying, elevating, sanctifying power.

228 THE WITNESS OF THE LIFE
The worst enemies of Jesus Christ are not those
without, but those within. He is wounded, as
the prophet says, in the house of His friends, by
those who bear His name and have none of His
Spirit ; those whose thoughts move on a low level,
whose actions are vulgar and selfish, whose aims
and ambitions are coarse, whose tempers are harsh
and overbearing, whose habitual conduct is hardly
one whit superior to that of the world around
them. There are, alas ! hundreds of such men and
women scattered about among the greater host of
true, faithful, and beloved— men who obtain a
place in the Church to which their conduct gives
them no right, who go forth into the world labelled
as Christians, only to bring ridicule and contempt
upon the Name. And they are the most grievous
and formidable hindrances to the progress of our
religion. You talk about the foes of Christianity in this
land, and the forces of evil which arrest its way.
They are not nearly so much to be feared as the
people who attend church and live Uves in the
world that have hardly one touch of Christian
sweetness, patience, charity, forbearance, and
beauty. One of these does more harm to the
cause of Jesus Christ than fifty of the sinners out
side. If there is any weakness and paralysis in the
Church it comes from them. God save us, whether
we preach in the pulpit or worship in the pews,
from destroying Christ's power in that way, and
dragging our hallowed professions through the
dirt. We, too, are watched, only less vigilantly
than the early Christians. Fifty voices repeat, and

THE WITNESS OF THE LIFE 229
pass on with a smile, every word we utter and
every action we do that are unworthy of the
Name, and any one of us may give occasion for
the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, or even
prevent a soul from coming to Christ. Eemember
that the dear Name, and even honour, of the
blessed Lord are committed to us. The world
judges Him, and the faith of Him, by those who
bear His name. There is no darkness in us which
does not cast a shadow over His face, no imper
fection, uncharity, or ugly temper in us which
is not, in a measure, flung back on Him. By
every unchristian act which Christians do they
put Him to open shame. They make the world
say, " Christ has no power in these people. Christ
is only a dead theory in these people." And, there
fore, may the good Lord who died for us help us
to live for Him, " blameless and harmless, the sons
of God, without rebuke . . . holding forth the
word of life."

CHAPTEE XXIV
PEACE IN WARFARE
" And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall
keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." — Phil. iv. 7.
" Let us put on the armour of light." — Rom. xiii. 12.
One of the saintliest of men was accosted by an
earnest, but perhaps not over-judicious, evangelist
with the words, " Have you found peace, my
brother?" The answer was given in a moment.
" No, my brother, I have found war." They were
both looking at the same Christian life, but viewing
it from different angles. In the grand experience of
faith we are always seeking peace and praying for
it. Sometimes, in the more blessed moments, we
find it. Yet we never fail to find war as well. We
are never allowed to put off the armour of light.
That Bible which is our text-book and manual of
devotion is mainly a military book. People who
are content to think of nothing but peace must
leave out or skip over by far the greater part of it.
In all its earlier pages, through histories, psalms,
and even prophecies, we seem to hear continually
the clang of trumpets, the clash of arms, and the
rustling of banners. There is always the promise
of a coming rest and peace, but the promise tarries,
230

PEACE IN WAEFAEE 231
and is never fulfilled. The later portions of the
Bible show us the battle-field again, though the
warfare has assumed a nobler and purer form.
The Epistles are almost as military in their
language as the stories of Joshua and David.
They speak of helmets and shields, swords and
spears, of the conflict against principalities and
powers, the world, the flesh, and the devil, and the
book well-nigh winds up in the Apocalypse to
the sound of battle with dragons, and Antichrists,
and Satan let loose to torment the world until he is
held in chains for ever. It is only in the Gospels
that the war-sounds cease. I say cease — no, we
catch distant echoes of them there when Jesus
says, " I came not to send peace upon the earth,
but a sword." But the language of the Gospels is
almost entirely of the other kind. " Peace " was the
word which lingered on the lips of Him who spake
as never man spake. Peace was the boon which
He enjoyed, the promise which He brought, the
gift which He imparted to His disciples and be
queathed to all His followers. The noise of battle
is hushed around His person, and where He walks
there is a heavenly truce, and the air is quiet as
a restful sleep. But no sooner are His disciples
left to carry on the work than the din of conflict is
heard again, and the rest to which He called men
has been changed into the good fight of faith.
And that is the twofold picture of the Christian
life which St. Paul gives us in these two texts :
" The peace of God, which passeth aU understand
ing, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ
Jesus " ; " Let us put on the armour of light."

232 PEACE IN WAEFAEE
I. We are assured that in the life of faith there
is the possibility of a great rest. God makes, us
partners with Him in the mystery of His peace.
St. Paul is always telling us of the two great things
in God which we know and yet cannot know,
which in their vastness rise above our comprehen
sion, yet stoop down to enfold us in their blessed
ness. The love of God and the peace of God :
who can understand them or measure them ? What
plummet can sound their depths ? What eye can
read their secrets ? What language can express
them ? Human thought breaks down on the outer
most rim of these divine mysteries. And yet He
has revealed them to us in a measure, and, better
still, He brings us into the realisation of them.
The peace of God passeth all understanding.
The changeless, untroubled calm of the Almighty
is a bewildering puzzle to every finite mind. It
seems inconsistent with the weary, troubled, ever-
restless world which His eyes behold and His power
governs. If He were outside all the evil turmoil
and vexation of things we might comprehend it.
If he were like the Epicurean deities, sipping
nectar in some far-off heaven, and heedless of the
moans and pains of mortal men, we might explain
to ourselves His peace. But how can He be the
God of pity and yet have perfect peace ? How
can He be a kindly Father and yet possess Himself
in unbroken serenity ? How can He survey with
absolute quietness of mind the things which are
going on even to-day in this poor, burdened,
trembling world of ours ? The wrongs unredressed,
the injustices which cry out for vengeance, the

PEACE IN WAEFAEE 233
rising and revolts of misgoverned nations, the
seething disaffections, the crimes, assassinations,
and conflicts, the sorrows and heartbreak in the
private Uves of those who love Him ! What an
awful panorama is spread before His eyes con
tinually ! And yet there is peace where He
dweUs. Verily, it passeth understanding. And yet
it is not altogether beyond us. We reach it through
Christ Jesus. He has shown us a picture of it in
that fair and fearless life. The Man of Sorrows, at
least, knew that incomprehensible divine peace.
He carried it about with Him as God's proof-mark
of His divinity. If we wished to single out His
one distinguishing superhuman feature, we should
say it was that His life was a centre of peace in a
world of storms — a heaven of restful thought in
a bedlam of strife and sin. There was no worry,
no feverish haste, no fretful anxiety. It was ever
the same, no matter where or when, whether sur
rounded by the excited crowd or kneeling in lonely
prayer, talking with friends or confronted with
foes, in the quiet of Bethany or amid the rabble of
Jerusalem, standing before the mocking Herod,
receiving the traitor's kiss, or hearing the wild
shout " Crucify Him ! " Whether loved or hated,
followed or deserted, rejoicing or sorrowing, re
jected, despised, forsaken, mocked, and defeated,
there was always the same wonderful calm, the
face unmarked by fear, the voice which betrayed
no inward strife, the heart which the world's
shakings could not move. For He knew that all
things were going well, though they seemed to go
so ill. He knew that an Almighty Purpose pursued

234 PEACE IN WAEFAEE
its way through all human disturbances. He knew
that God's thoughts and God's love would be
victors in the end. He knew that the future
belonged to Him and to the Father in whose
name He spoke. He knew that the wrath and sin
of man were but as the white-foamed breakers that
rage and roll around the steadfast rock. That was
the peace of God which passeth understanding.
The mystery of it remains ; yet we know that it
has once been incarnate on the earth, and that
He who felt it Himself can impart the secret to us.
He does, in a measure, impart the secret to all
who walk with Him in the communion of trustful
thought and prayerful love. He gave it, in their
wrestle, to His disciples ; He gave it to St. Paul in
His bonds and distresses ; He has given it to
thousands who have endured shame and hatred for
His sake, and surely there are some of us to whom
it is not altogether strange. There are moments,
and perhaps hours, in our lives when we are hidden
in some quiet resting-place from all our prevalent
fears, disquietudes, and alarms, when we have no
anxious forebodings of to-morrow and no haunting
memories of the past, when we say to ourselves
concerning the great world's, broils, ambitions, and
wild heavings, " The Lord reigneth, let the earth
rejoice"; and say, concerning our own fears,
"If God be for us, who can be against us ? " We
feel that there is a careful, all-regarding provi
dence over mortal affairs, a wisdom that never
halts, a foresight that never forgets, a love that
never fails. We place our trembling hands upon
an immovable throne, and become ourselves im-

PEACE IN WAEFAEE 235
movable. We look into the face of the strong
Son of God. We feel His touch, we hear His
voice, we drink in His promises, and there steals
into our hearts His own serenity. The words of
St. Paul are fulfilled : " The peace of God, which
passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts
and minds through Christ Jesus."
II. We are told that everyone who finds this
peace finds also war. " Let us put on the armour
of light." There is for every man of God an earthly
foretaste of the heavenly rest ; yet every man of
God must speak also in this wise : " Talk not to
me of rest here below. I am a soldier of the great
King, and the resting-time comes only when the
battle is over, and the eternal Sabbath begins." In
this world of unrighteousness there can be no truce
for those who are on the Lord's side ; there can
only be peace within and fightings without. There
is rest in knowing that all things are working
together for good to them that love God; there
is rest in knowing that the thoughts of the
Almighty are being slowly worked out; there is
rest in believing that " through the ages one un
ceasing purpose runs " ; there is rest in the assurance
that evil will be steadily overcome ; that the forces
of God are mightier than all the devil's armoury
and craft. Yes, that is the peace which passeth
aU understanding. But you may misinterpret all
that to settle down into the easy, good-natured
optimism which declares that everything is as it
ought to be ; that it is perfectly useless for us to
waste our strength in pottering and mending what
God has made, and that a higher power wUl bring

236 PEACE IN WAEFAEE
all things right in the end without our meddlesome
interference. That is not the peace of God : it is
the ignoble slumber of the fatalist and predes-
tinarian ; it is the self-indulgent paradox of the
faithless dreamer. There is no peace of that kind
for any man who has the soul of goodness in him,
or the least sentiment of pity for human woes,
or the least glimmering knowledge of the love of
God and the mind of Christ. There can be no rest
for the Church until the last stronghold is con
quered and the last foot of land possessed. God
never gives His peace except to fighting men. It
comes, not to end the battle, but to those who are
in the battle. The reason that so many of us rarely,
or never, enjoy God's peace, is that we are taking
no part in the Christian warfare against the wrongs,
and unbelief, and devilry which are in God's
world. Let them alone, and the very love of God
will desert you, and His peace will follow it. We
always despair of the world's evil so long as we
are striking no blows against it. The perfect day
seems to shift farther off to those who idly watch
for its coming and have no share in the wrestling
for it. It is the man who works, and prays, and
flings himself into the battle, who sees with his
eyes God working, and believes in his deepest
heart in the fulfilment of all the visions which
tarry. To him alone the peace of God is revealed,
because he puts on the armour of light. There
has been no man in modern times who enjoyed
more of the peace of God than that man who was
martyred at Khartoum — General Gordon. He
never knew fear ; he never hesitated in presence

PEACE IN WAEFAEE 237
of the most terrible dangers. He was like one
wrapped round and bathed in the mighty pro
tecting love of God ; yet all his life was spent in
warfare. Wherever he saw wrong done, iniquity,
oppression, cruelty, misgovernment, there he hurried
to find his battle-field, to strike for God and the
right. Someone has told the story of his life
in the words, " One man against fearful odds, but
with God always on his side." That was the
secret of his wonderful peace. It came to him
because the sword of the Spirit was in his hands,
and around him the armour of truth and light.
The peace of God wUl either never come to you
or never remain with you unless you are in some
sort a soldier of faith, doing battle against your
own sins, or the sins of others, or both. Some
of us have the utmost confidence in God's power
to keep us from falling ; we believe that the evil
in us will be slowly overcome, that all our besetting
sins will be trampled under the subduing feet of
our Master. There is great peace in the thought ;
but the only men and women who are ever
strengthened with that assurance are the men
and women who persistently, prayerfully, day by
day, are making a fight against their temptations
and known weaknesses. It is in the very conflict
and grim wrestle with your sins that you get the
divine peace which speaks to you of the coming
complete, final victory. There is no real peace in
this world save that. There is a peace, perhaps, of
the man who takes the Christian life easny, who
declares in his heart that he is quite safe for
eternity, and has no great need to fight, and watch,

238 PEACE IN WAEFAEE
and pray. If you know such a man, go down upon
your knees and pray for him, that his eyes may
be opened. It is not the peace of God which holds
that man's soul.
No, it is in the midst of all our wars and fightings,
our failures and renewed struggles, our efforts,
often baffled, to get righteousness and God's will
done, in our work for the world, our work for the
Church, our patient bearing of the burdens of
others and our own, our manifold wrestling
against the lust of the flesh, the prides of the world,
and the infirmities of our own poor selves — it is
in the midst of all these, and often when the battle
is fiercest, that the great peace descends upon us
like the calm of a golden evening. The selfish
man knows nothing of it. The man absorbed in
his own cares and business and pleasures and
gettings is an utter stranger to it. It is when you
put on " the armour of light," that you enter with
Jesus Christ into " the peace of God which passeth
all understanding."

PART IV
ST. PAUL— THE MAN AND HIS CALLING

CHAPTER XXV
OBEDIENCE THE SECRET OF GREATNESS
"Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the
heavenly vision." — Acts xxvi. 19.
The greatest of Christians teUs us in this brief
sentence the secret of his greatness, tells us the
underlying principle of his life, and gives us
unconsciously the explanation of all that he be
came and all that he was enabled to do. He was
unmistakably the greatest of the saints, though
in his modesty he called himself less than the
least. There was no other life which exemplified
more beautifully and completely the possibilities
of Christian manhood, or followed more closely in
the steps of the beloved and divine Master, and
perhaps no other man ever did so much as he to
extend the name and kingdom of that Master.
He was wonderfully Christ-like. Coleridge says
of him that " he was the finest gentleman in the
world," and that is not small praise, if you take
" gentleman " in its true and not in its conventional
sense. So brave, so pitiful, so full of soldierly
daring and of motherly tenderness, so humble
and yet so dignified, so courteous to the lowly,
241 16

242 OBEDIENCE
so fearless and independent before the great, so
sternly moral and yet so sympathetic, so self -forget
ful withal, that the feeblest saint or guUtiest sinner
was almost dearer to him than his own life. It
seemed as if, when Christ left the world, He deter
mined to leave behind this brave and beautiful
image of Himself, this servant and foUower who
embodied in his noble life all that his Master
had taught and been ; and who proved, by the
very magnificence of his tearful and lowly service,
how omnipotent the ascended Christ was in repro
ducing Himself in His followers.
Now, if you ask what it was that made this
man so great and so lovely, so well worth studying,
I can think of no one answer that will suffice save
that which St. Paul himself gives here: "Where
upon, 0 King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto
the heavenly vision."
That, to begin with, was the explanation of his
conversion, if such a thing can ibe explained. St.
Paul's conversion was hardly like that which takes
place in the majority of converts. Itwas not a change
from carelessness and indifference to seriousness
and anxious religious thought, still less was it the
adandonment of an immoral and shameful course
for one of virtue and purity. It was simply this —
that there came to him a clearer, truer vision of
what he ought to be and do, and he immediately
f oUowed it. St. Paul had never been what we gener
ally mean by a bad man. He had never been a
frivolous, giddy-headed votary of pleasure. He had
never even been an irreligious man. There had
always been in him God-fearing qualities, a deep

THE SECRET OF GREATNESS 243
vein of earnestness, and a great deal of that fiery
energy which cannot be happy unless it is engaged
in some big work. Do not believe, for a moment,
that such an energetic, enthusiastic nature as St.
Paul the Christian missionary was suddenly made
out of some indolent, self-indulgent young man of
the world. The fire burned in him before it was
refined and changed into a flame of impassioned
devotion to Christ. He had always been a soldier
before he became a soldier of the Cross, imbued
with the soldierly spirit of obedience, full of
fighting energy against what he deemed error and
against what he thought was opposed to God.
Pharisaism had called him, and he had gone out
in fuU militant array to defend it. The religious
orders, priests, and others had summoned him to
prop up their decaying authority, and he had flung
himself with ardour into the business. These were
the highest voices that he knew then, and these
were the fairest visions he had seen, and he
followed with the same whole-hearted obedience
which he afterwards gave to the Master Himself.
His very zeal against the young Church and its
saints was but an index of his sincerity of purpose,
a prediction of the intenser devotion which in
another field was to make his witness irresistible.
What I mean is that the spirit of his life had been
a spirit of obedience, a spirit which promptly
responded to each call of duty as he heard it, and
followed the course which seemed to him the
highest and divinest. And when that heavenly
vision burst upon him on the road to Damascus,
that light brighter than the sun which pierced

244 OBEDIENCE
through all the films and errors of his blind rage,
when the voice of the hated Nazarene spoke to
him in such a way that he knew it was the voice
of God, when that amazing revelation showed him
that he had been a misguided fool, following
wandering lights, and making of his life a huge
and terrible blunder, he bowed himself at once with
the same submission and the same unquestioning
obedience. It was enough for him to know, beyond
doubt, that this was a vision of higher things, a
heavenly voice, that the true Master had at last
found and called him. That once settled, there
was not a moment's hesitation, not a thought of
the ridicule, shame, and loss which would fall upon
him as turncoat, renegade, betrayer of his em
ployers ; not a thought of the scorn which would
follow him for turning back on aU his old pro
fessions. He gave up all things as a child might
fling away its broken toys — friends, wealth,
prospects of honour — took up the cross and went
straight after Jesus. "Whereupon, 0 King
Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly
vision." That we may caU the key to his life-story, the
secret of all his moral greatness, and of all the
immense service which he rendered to his feUow-
men. He always obeyed when he knew, or thought
he knew, what he ought to do.
And that is the key to every noble story. If
ever there is a great life, if ever there is an
exceptionally good life, fruitful in service, the
simple explanation of it is there. They were
accustomed to obey; they followed the vision of

THE SECRET OF GREATNESS 245
duty which they saw, the higher voices which they
heard. They did the work and walked in the path
to which each day plainly pointed them. They
made their convictions purposes, and they carried
these purposes into action. They did not trifle
with these things, or attempt to choke down the
higher voice, or forget it, or put it off to a more
convenient season. They just obeyed the voice
straight off, as soon as they were fully assured that
it was the voice of conscience, or the call of truth,
or the order of God. They went out at His bidding,
like Abraham or like Paul, not knowing and not
asking whither it would lead them ; and it led them
on to be the men they were.
And now permit me to bring this thought home
to ourselves, and more particularly to the younger
life. Possibly you think that the great lives which
I have referred to, and especially a life like St.
Paul's, are altogether out of your range and above
your level. The very language of the text you
say marks him out as one who was extraordinarily
favoured and miraculously endowed. He had
heavenly visions, and things of that sort do not
come to people now any more than angels in white
robes meet them in their walks. But there we
need not agree with you. The prophets and
Apostles had not quite a monopoly of these things.
All our young men see visions, all our maidens
dream dreams. They do not come to us quite as
they came to St. Paul, but they do come. Light
shines around us at times which is not the sun
light, which is rather made up of rays which
fall from the face of God. We have hours of

246 OBEDIENCE
revelation, what have been called "Apocalyptic
hours," when we see and feel noble things, yea,
heavenly things, and a distinct voice, coming from
without or within, invites us to enter the f eUowship
of brave, pure, earnest, God-fearing lives. These
visions come in the sanctuary, or the hours of quiet
thought, or when we are reading some bracing
and inspiring book. And we know that they are
heavenly visions; we know that we ought to
obey them ; but, like the rich young man in the
Gospel story, we turn away from the vision.
Perhaps we turn away sorrowfully, with many a
backward look, feeling that we are probably losing
a great deal, but still preferring to lose that rather
than lose what we love better. We are too
cowardly, or too self-indulgent, too limp altogether
to be obedient to the heavenly vision. That is
why so many of our lives remain on the same
low, coarse level ; why they do not rise ; why
they even degenerate, and slowly lose whatever
of strong and holy purpose they had. That is
why the young eyes which have at one time
glowed and brightened as they looked on higher
things get dull and heavy untU eventually they
see no more visions at all.
My brother and sister, when the visions come,
turn not away from them. They are God's best
gifts to you. They are the sweet touches of His
love. Whatever caU it be that shows you the
possibility of living a purer and lovelier Ufe delay
not to accept it, for that way lies the true
wealth and happiness. Reject it, and your loss
is unspeakable. You are like that base Indian

THE SECRET OF GREATNESS 247
of whom Shakespeare speaks, who threw away a
pearl richer than all his tribe.
Now return for a moment to the great Apostle.
Think how his obedience to the heavenly vision
led him always along the path of clearer illu
mination. Little did he know at that moment
which we call the moment of his conversion. He
was still full of prejudices and errors, many of
which clung to him for a long time, and impover
ished his ministry. The very light within him
was stiU dark. " Who art Thou, Lord ? " he asked.
He did not know. For some time he thought of
Jesus as only the Saviour of the Jews. He had
the most limited notion of Christ's work, what it
meant, and how far it was to go. He did not wish
to preach Him to the Gentiles. He wished to
retain his Jewish sympathies. There was stiU
darkness on his mind for some time to come.
But as he obeyed one heavenly vision he was
brought into the way which gave him another
vision, and another, ever clearer and fuller, until
he saw his work and calUng, and saw Jesus in
aU the splendour of their completeness and grace.
AU that is beautiful, because it is all so full of
promise to us.
There are young men and women found in every
congregation who are fuU of uncertainties and
questionings about religious things. They do not
know how much or what to believe. They are
groping for a faith ; and perhaps they hardly like
to confess their doubts for fear of provoking
anger, or because they wiU meet with no sym
pathy. Never let us think of or speak to these

248 OBEDIENCE
harshly or unsympathetically. For, indeed, it is not
these minds that cause the preacher most concern,
not the minds that are earnestly seeking, but the
minds that are too frivolous and careless to seek,
who never think of higher and diviner things
at all.
If you are really anxious to know what is right
and true, what you ought to believe, and what
you ought to do, one need have no great anxiety
about you. Only obey each higher vision as it
comes, however faint and indistinct it be ; that is,
be prompt to answer and follow every call that
you receive to better things. Only believe some
thing, however little it be about God, and His
demands upon you, and act up to that belief, and
each day's obedience will add something to your
knowledge and your faith. God will give you
fuller and fuller light, making what is dim and
uncertain clear, and showing you all that you
need for life's work.
And remember that the heavenly vision comes
in very humble and every-daylforms, not in visits
of angels or light flashing down from the skies.
It comes in the simple guise of duty : the thing
which you ought to do to-day, and which you
know that you ought to do. That is the heavenly
vision of the moment. You are to give up that
sin, you are to deny yourself that pleasure, you
are to undertake that bit of work for others, you
are to break from certain habits and companion
ships. That is what God says to you at the
moment. You are sure of it. It is the vision
that you have to follow — follow it ! Begin with

THE SECRET OF GREATNESS 249
that act of obedience, and to-morrow God will
show you something more — some higher things.
There will be nothing wanting at the last if you
make, each day, this honest confession : " I have
not been disobedient to this day's heavenly

CHAPTER XXVI
THE RESISTANCE OF THE HALF-
CONVINCED
" It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." — ACTS ix. 5.
Perhaps I ought to take it for granted that you
all know the meaning of this figure — yet it will do
no harm to repeat it. In our land we rarely see
oxen yoked to the plough. Obedient horses do
that work in our fields. But in the lands of the
Bible oxen were employed in the task, and they
did not take kindly to it until they were broken
in. They were often in rebellious mood, and
flung their heels back in angry protest against
the beam or shaft of the ploughshare. They
stood and kicked instead of moving on. To stop
this a somewhat cruel device was applied. The
beam was faced with small, sharp iron spikes, and
when those rebeUious limbs of theirs were flung
furiously back it was only to have them pricked
and sorely wounded. The most stubborn oxen
speedily got tired of that self-inflicted torture ;
settled down to the yoke and the labour, and
submissively went whither the ploughman drove.
A curious figure, anything but complimentary to
250

RESISTANCE OF HALF-CONVINCED 251
apply to a man, but distinctly forcible. And this
was the figure which our glorified Lord used to
that haughtiest and most headstrong of men, Saul
of Tarsus. Here he was, a very great personage
indeed, entrusted with a most important mission,
armed with letters and credentials from the most
imposing authorities in his nation, lifted up with
the intoxication of rage and self-assurance, re
solved to destroy at a blow this new pernicious
sect of Christians which had sprung up, and
doubtless expecting to win great glory in doing
it. And Christ appeared and knocked down his
pride with this little word : told him that he was
like one of those stupid oxen who, in refusing to
do what they were ordered to do, only inflicted
suffering upon themselves. " It is hard for thee
to kick against the pricks." Now, how did the
figure apply to him ? What was the resemblance
between this man, driving forward on his mission
of persecution, and the ox refusing to be driven,
and wounding himself in sheer wrath and ob
stinacy ? Saul understood it quickly, and so may
we. It meant that God had laid hold of him and
yoked him to the higher service — appointed him
and fastened him to the ploughshare of the Gospel
— and that all this furious zeal against Jesus and
the saints was just an effort to escape the yoke,
to resist the power that was driving him, an effort
which was bound to fail, for go he would most
certainly when he had had enough of kicking
against the pricks.
I. Yes, he was already yoked. A Master's hand
was upon him, and he was trying to fling it off and

252 THE EESISTANCE OF
could not. Saul's conversion was, perhaps, com
pleted on that day when Jesus appeared to him ;
but the beginning of it dates back to many a day
before that. It has often been called a sudden,
almost instantaneous, conversion. It was nothing
of the kind. We may well question whether there
was ever a conversion which could be rightly
called instantaneous. There is often a sudden
shock, a flash of light, a conscience smitten as with
an arrow, a deciding moment; but hundreds of
forgotten things have been preparing for it. That
blaze of lightning which bursts out of a thunder
cloud is instantaneous, but the atmospheric con
ditions which prepared it have been a long time
gathering to form that thunder-cloud. Conversion,
when it is most sudden, has behind it days and
even years of passing religious thought, and
conscience-pricking, and spirit-striving. It is only
when the hands are on the hour that the clock
strikes, but through the whole sixty minutes the
whole machinery has been moving towards this
very thing. The clock struck in this case on the
way to Damascus, but the wheels had been going
round a long time bringing it to this point.
Christ's unseen hand had been laid upon him more
than once, and he had felt it, and shaken it off,
half in fear and half in anger. He felt it on the
day when Stephen was martyred, and when the
murderers who flung the stones laid their clothes
down at his feet. Someone has said that the
martyrdom of Stephen converted Saul. That is
overstating it ; but the blood-drops of that sufferer
were the seed-grain of Saul's changed life. He had

THE HALF-CONVINCED 253
heard the courageous testimony, watched and seen
the face which in its dying agony was as the face
of an angel ; seen with what absolute fearlessness
a Christian could suffer and die. And he had
noted it all with his sharp eyes. It had preached
to him through his obstinately closed ears ; it had
pricked his heart and left a sense of pain. He had
crushed it down many a time, but it rose again.
It was like a fire that still burned and would not
be quenched. It grew fiercer, indeed, the more he
tried to quench it. He fanned his hatred against
the Christian sect ; he followed them, hunted them,
laid fierce hands upon them, dragged them off to
prison, got them scourged and stoned and slain.
What of that ? It only brought him face to face
with them. Through every one of them Christ
spoke and pleaded. He saw their patient heroism,
serenity in suffering, cheerfulness in dying. He
could not help asking himself the secret of it.
What was it that nerved and inspired these men ?
There was something here which he had never
found in his own orthodox Pharisaism, and what
was it ? Could Christ be true ? Was the Nazarene,
indeed, the Son of God? and in slaying these
people was he murdering the saints of God ? " Am
I living a lie ? " the voice within him said, " and
shall I be obliged to confess it, and lose my proud
reputation, and acknowledge to all the world that
I have been a fool, a bigot, and a monster ? It is
too horrible ! it must not and shaU not be." These
were the voices, these the questions ever arising in
Saul's uneasy conscience, troubling him in every
moment of quiet thought, and filling him with a

254 THE EESISTANCE OF
nameless fear. And, to stifle these voices that
would not be stifled, to deaden the conscience
which was aU the more tremblingly alive, to cast
out and overcome these dreadful misgivings about
himself which were torturing him, he plunged
more furiously and deeply into the work of perse
cution. He wanted to prove to himself that he
was right, while something mightier than himself
was telUng him that he was wrong. " I wiU not be
convinced," his actions said, "I will not believe
that this is Christ ; I will deny Him more vehe
mently, and hate Him more madly, and destroy all
those who follow Him more relentlessly." Yet all
the while the conviction deepened, the fire grew
hotter the more he tried to quench it. He was
fighting against the inevitable, and always wound
ing himself, until Christ settled the matter by that
vision in the way. God had yoked him to the
plough long ago, and he had resisted in vain. You
can now understand these words : " Saul, Saul,
why persecutest thou Me ? It is hard for thee to
kick against the pricks." That is a story worth
telling for itself, even if there were no direct lesson
in it for us. But there is. It shows us God's
wonderful ways with men. It shows us how He
deals with some of us still.
II. Are there not Christian people — perhaps
more than a few — who did a great deal of that
kicking before they submitted to the yoke of
Christ ? Christ held them fast long before they
acknowledged it, and even when they were most
determined to be quite loose of Him. Years be
fore you were truly converted there were things

THE HALF-CONVINCED 255
working in your hearts that prepared and forced
the way of conversion. There were seeds of
truth slowly growing into convictions. Maybe
you came in contact with some beautiful Christian
life like that of Stephen. Possibly you saw some
Christian die, and it left a picture which you
could never forget ; or in one of fifty other ways
you had Christ brought before you. You half
believed in Him ; you felt that He had claims
upon you; you felt that the religious life had
claims upon you ; something drew you towards it ;
voices within you kept on saying at times, " That
is the way I ought to go " ; and the more these
voices spoke the more you were determined not
to go. "la Christian ? No ! do you think I am
going to fasten my life down in that fashion,
give up my liberty, give up the pleasures I love
best, give up delightful companions, spend Sab
baths in the dreary sanctuary? No, I wUl not."
You even spoke of it with scorn; you sneered
at the whole thing, at religious people, and all
religious exercises. You raged against it in your
anger. In fact, you were angry because it held
you and you could not shake it off. The yoke
was upon you, Christ's mighty power ; and there
you were kicking against the pricks all in vain.
He conquered you at last in some sweet moment
of conversion, and oh, how glad you were to be
conquered ! How glad you were that the struggle
was over ! For there had been no rest for you
whUst Christ was pulling one way and your own
fierce will the other. Oh, if we could have flung
Christ off in the days when we tried our best

256 THE EESISTANCE OF
to do it, there would have been no place for us
in the godly life. But He held us with too firm
a grasp. We are Christians, not by our own will,
but by the stronger wiU of Him who loved us
better than we loved ourselves.
I hear some men now, at times, raging almost
furiously against religion. It is all a pack of
inventions, they say, and religious people just a
set of hypocrites. They fling stones at the
Bible, they fling mud at the Church, they half
blaspheme and curse, as Saul did. You are
horrified at the hot rage into which they have
worked themselves. And you say, " Surely these
people are given up to the Evil One. They are
as far removed from conversion and the kingdom
of God as one pole of the earth is far removed
from the other." Do not be too sure. This zeal
against religion is possibly put on to fight down
the drawings which they have towards it. If they
did not believe a little they would not be so
anxious to prove to themselves and others that
they believe nothing at aU. It is more than
likely that the Spirit of God is striving in them,
and they are striving wrathfully and stubbornly
to resist Him. And the end will be not what they
say. Many a one has begun, as Saul begun, by
cursing Christ and His religion and ended, as Saul
did, by kneeling at the Master's feet and saying,
" What wilt Thou have me to do ? " If the Lord
has got His hand upon you, you will submit at the
last, however wilfully you refuse for the moment,
for you will get tired of kicking against the pricks.
I have, on the whole, more hope of the people who

THE HALF-CONVINCED 257
tell me, in the most resolute manner, that they
never will be Christians, that they hate the whole
thing, who keep on insisting, " No, never." Yes, I
have more hope of them than of the people who
never think enough about religion even to pro
test against it, to whom it is just a matter of
supreme indifference. Christ can kill direct oppo
sition, but indifference well-nigh kiUs Him. If
a man says every day, " I will not go," he is
often going, in spite of himself. It is the man
who never troubles himself at aU about it that
goes not ; nor is he likely to go.
There are some of you, possibly, more especiaUy
young people, who are just in the stage of kicking
against the pricks : not reviling Christ, not speaking
against religion, but simply fighting against the
influences which would draw you into His service.
There are a hundred right thoughts in you which
are pleading and pulling in that direction. Many
a time you are on the point of yielding to them,
then you draw back. " I wiU and I won't " are ever
at cross purposes in your Uves. You try to quench
the Spirit within you, and you cannot. You try to
put God away, and still He is with you. The best
and the worst in you are always clashing and fight
ing, and there will be no peace while this is going
on. How will it end ? In one of two ways. You
will decide as Saul of Tarsus, and find rest in the
service to which Christ calls you, or you will at
last, by determined persistency, silence, overcome,
and crush down all that draws you to the better
life. And if you do that you will never be a
happy man or woman again. Men who have
17

258 EESISTANCE OF HALF-CONVINCED
never felt God's strivings may pass through life
with fairly comfortable feelings, undisturbed ; but
those who have half yielded to Him, and then
refused, carry with them always the pricking
memory of something that might have been and
which is hopelessly lost.
In any case, " it is hard for you to kick against
the pricks."

CHAPTER XXVII
LIFE'S MAIN ENDS
" For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." — Phil. i. 21.
This is a text which has been preached from times
without number, wisely and unwisely. It is a say
ing which we have heard read, repeated, and admired
more frequently than thought or memory can tell.
And. yet to assert it of ourselves is almost more than
any of us dare. There is not one Christian in
ten thousand who could give that as the full and
truthful account of his life's meaning and purpose.
I am not sure that we honestly beheve that to
die is gain. We are so accustomed to hear death
spoken of as the greatest and most terrible of
losses, that it requires a great effort of faith and
imagination to think of it in any other light, and
it is only when we see it coming, and see the
world slipping from us that we fall back on the
promises, and grasp by faith the better things
beyond. It takes aU one's Ufe to learn that dying
is gain, and most people never learn it.
Still less can we confidently declare that to live
is Christ. With some of us, happily, Christ is a
great factor in our lives. He occupies so large
a part that were He gone it would be almost like
259

260 LIFE'S MAIN ENDS
taking the sun out of our sky, and with all of us
He fiUs a place greater or less. But He is not
all in all. We have fifty other ambitions and
desires which compete with Him and occasionally
crowd Him out. If we serve and love Him best,
we serve and love other masters far too well.
And at most times these words of St. Paul are far
too high for us. We can only utter them with a
prayer that they may become more and more
applicable and true. They express the highest
Christian faith, and that only.
St. Paul said them because he had a right to
say them. The whole of his Christian course had
proved them, and burned them into him in living,
ineffaceable letters. The fact is that he had given
himself up wholly a long time ago to one work,
to one service — to exalt and glorify Jesus Christ,
to get other men to believe in Him, to spread
His truth, push forward His kingdom, and to
receive the Master's reward for that when it had
been weU and faithfully done. For that he had
cheerfully sacrificed every other ambition — the
getting of wealth, the acquisition of honours, the
joys of family life and friendships. That had been
the great business of his life, indeed the sole
business. There had been no divided purpose,
no scattering of energies on many lines. He had
concentrated mind, heart, and strength on that
one line. It was still true. He had nothing else
to live for. With Christ gone there would be
nothing left of life but the fraction of a fragment
a chaotic void, a hopeless blank. But with Christ
waiting for him beyond, that life beyond would be

LIFE'S MAIN ENDS 261
a continuation of the same service, only in a nobler
form. For him, therefore, the words were strictly
and sublimely true. " For to me to Uve is Christ,
and to die is gain." We take the words, therefore,
as the exceptional words of an exceptional man,
and yet we may also say that they indicate the
direction in which every believing life ought to
tend and aspire. If there cannot be all of this
in each of us, there ought to be something of it
in all.
I. It speaks of a definite aim and purpose in life
— something which stands in the front and puts
everything, else in the second or third place, some
thing which determines the main bent of our
thoughts and compels us to a little concentration of
energies. Many of us would find it difficult to say
whether we have such a leading object or not. We
are interested in half a dozen or twenty things, we
spread ourselves impartiaUy over them all, but there
is no one of them which becomes predominant and
mighty, head and shoulders and half the body over
everything else. Youth often plays with a dozen
purposes before he settles on one. He wanders
round a score of ambitions, a little in the butterfly
fashion, fluttering over one, sucking at another,
giving brief pursuit to a third, until at last, per
haps, he faUs in love. Then, for the time being,
all his Ufe is focussed at that point. There is no
more scattering of energies. He has found some
thing to gain and something to live for, and where
his heart is there goes the stress of his thought, and
the main current of his forces until he has changed
his mind or the end be gained. And it is question-

262 LIFE'S MAIN ENDS
able whether we gain anything unless we put that,
for the time being, first. You may win a boat-race
in one season and gain a top place in the tripos
the next, but you are not Ukely to do either if in
the same days or weeks you divide yourself equaUy
between the two. If a man wants to catch a bird
with each of his hands, both birds wiU slip away
and leave him clutching air. Success calls for
concentration. You cannot excel in a sport with
out going in for it with all your body and about
three-fourths of your mind. You cannot make a
business prosperous if you are in it only knee-deep
and the other part of you given to the sporting
newspapers and the occupations which they sug
gest. You cannot be a student, or a scholar, or a
writer, or a minister, or even a good mother, unless
you believe that that is a principal business of your
lives, and worth doing with a vast expenditure of
brain and soul ; and you cannot be a really reUgious
man unless your religion takes hold of the biggest
part of you, and you take hold of religion with
a grip that means holding on and pursuing to the
end. St. Paul, like all men who attain to anything,
like aU men who use their powers instead of wasting
them, had a definite aim before him, an end and
purpose which was more than all things else : " For
to me to live is Christ."
II. These words suggest the question, " Have we
grasped the real meaning and highest purpose of
life ? Do we read its meaning on the noisy and
showy surface, or in the silent, hidden, eternal
depths ? " What are the things which constitute
your ideas of life ? What are the things which

LIFE'S MAIN ENDS 263
you deem best worth doing, having, and being ?
For me to live is — what ? There are people every
where, young and old, who would hardly dare to
answer that question to themselves, much less to
others, if they answered it truthfuUy. There are
answers which no one would have the courage to
give in the sanctuary, in the presence of God, and
in the searching light of the Bible. The popular
philosophy of life is summed up in the word
" happiness " — the greatest amount of happiness
for oneself and perhaps for others. We have come
back, in these advanced times, to the very thing
which the Greek Epicureans were announcing in
St. Paul's time, and which that Apostle pitilessly
condemned. He spoke of it as the doctrine of
beasts : " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die." People talk that philosophy in other words
when they do not know it. It has come to be
accepted as a thing that needs no apology that a
man's main business, and indeed his only business,
is to enjoy life ; perhaps in an innocent and healthy
way, and without doing harm to others ; perhaps
in an inteUectual, artistic, and thoughtful way, if
he has inclination and brains enough, or in a more
frivolous and superficial way, if he is one of the
lighter-headed ; but the great end of life is to get
as much out of it as possible for oneself in the
way of pleasure, comforts, excitement, exercise
of power, physical and mental recreation, and
material good. " That is life," a thousand voices
tell us. And it is so incessantly repeated that
people take it up, and echo and adopt it without
the least thought that there is anything very

264 LIFE'S MAIN ENDS
objectionable, without the least feehng that it is
shameful. Yet, if the Bible is true, that view of
life is a lie. It is a debasing and degrading and
demoralising and soul-destroying view. It robs life
of all its dignity, and manhood of its chief ex
cellence, and in the end it would be fatal to all
the virtues. You ask, then, " Are we not to enjoy
life ; are we not to make the best of its pleasant,
recreating, and exhilarating things ? " Certainly ;
that is not the point at all. You might as well
ask, "Are we not to eat, drink, and clothe and warm
ourselves, and take exercise ? " Certainly you are ;
you would find it difficult to live at aU if you
dispensed with these things. But the end of life
is not to eat and drink and put on clothing. Of
course you are to enjoy life, but you are not to
live for enjoyment. Enjoyment is to colour and
lighten life, and not to be the substance and body
of it. Enjoyment is to be as the sunshine and
blue in your sky, and not your whole horizon and
your heaven. Keep it the second or third thing,
and it is comely, it gives health to the body and
cheerfulness to the soul. But make it the principal
thing, and it becomes animal and devUish.
III. We were sent into the world for some
thing more and better than that. First, we were
sent to be, as well as to suffer and enjoy. It
ought to be everyone's purpose, over and above
aU that he works for, gains, and enjoys in the
world, to make himself, by the help of God, a
worthy man, a good man, a truth-speaking, truth-
loving man, a righteous man, a merciful and
tender-hearted man. That purpose should be set

LIFE'S MAIN ENDS 265
before aU the lower things. However earnest you
are in business matters, in pleasure matters, and
intellectual things, the attainment of character,
integrity, goodness should stand first. Every man
and woman should say, " Whatever else I win and
do, I will keep steadily in view, and keep always
in front, the building up of a strong, moral, healthy,
just, pure, and kindly manhood. I wUl carry on
a daily fight against all the things which would
tempt, seduce, and defile my thoughts and affections.
I will fight against the selfishness, passions, and
appetites of my own nature, and keep them in sub
jection. In fact, my foremost endeavour shall be to
become a good, true man or woman." That was
what St. Paul meant, in part, when he said, " For to
me to live is Christ." His great object concerning
himself was to have his life shaped in Christ's mould
and after Christ's pattern. He wanted his life to
grow into that perfect life. And that will be, with
every Christian, life's main end, so far as concerns
himself, to strive after conformity to the man
Christ Jesus, and to attain at last to all that Jesus
was and is.
But every thoughtful and honest life will have
another leading object, which has to do, not with
himself, but with God, the world, and his feUow-
men. We were sent into the world, not principally
for our own enjoyment, but to be helpers of our
feUow-men, and to share with them whatever of
light, sweetness, and good we know. If life has
not, on the whole, a ring of sympathy, a ring of
unselfishness, a ring of human love in it, then all
the ring of it is false, base, and hoUow. We are

266 LIFE'S MAIN ENDS
here to do good, as well as to get good. We are
only cumbering the world if we are not striving
to make it a little better. We are here to spread
all the truth we see, all the goodness we know.
We are here to add our atom to the forces which
make for good, and to join our feeble hands with
the hands of aU those who are warring against sin,
ignorance, and suffering. We are here to get God's
will done among our fellow-men. St. Paul believed,
as every Christian believes, that the best and the
only effectual way of doing that is to spread the
name, influence, and saving power of Jesus Christ.
Everything else will come if we can get the cross-
power of Jesus established — His purifying, renew
ing power — if we can get Him and His love and
pity built up in society and in the hearts of men.
" The object of my life," says St. Paul, "is to do
that. For me to live is to help on Christ's pur
pose and victory."
Here, then, you have the two objects which are
to be in the forefront of life. Put the others where
you please ; give them as much attention as you
can spare, and as much as they deserve ; but
these two are to stand in front — the winning of
Christ-like character and goodness for yourselves,
the spread of Christ's goodness, truth, and power in
the world. Save your own lives in a noble sense,
and help to uplift and save the world's life. That
sums up the whole thing. That is the Christian
philosophy of life ; that is the reading of the text
which comes to everyone : " For to me to live is
Christ " ; and, if you have laid hold of that, you
may add the concluding words, " To die is gain."

LIFE'S MAIN ENDS 267
And it cannot be gain to those who have lived
by lower rules. To the man whose philosophy
has been just " Enjoy yourselves " death will
be an awful awakening and a terrible nakedness.
Everything that he has striven for and done
wUl be left behind. It wiU be loss, loss, loss — being
stripped of all things. You cannot carry your
pleasures and gains across the river of death ; you
can only carry torturing memories and a sense of
guilty waste and neglect. Death means irretriev
able loss to everyone who has had no high
purpose in living.
Death can only be a gain to those who have
believed throughout that this life is but the
beginning of a longer life, and who have been
gathering here something that will abide there.
Eighteousness, love, joy, purity, tenderness of
heart, God-likeness, service faithfully rendered, the
consciousness of the Master's reward, the assurance
of His forgiveness, and the companionship of the
Master — these things wUl go with you through
the gates of death. They will be strengthened,
increased, and made perfect in that higher sphere.
And Christ Himself will be nearer and infinitely
more precious there.
Where these things have been Death is not the
king of terrors, but the great promoter. And if in
any most unworthy yet true sense you can say,
" For to me to live is Christ," you will be able to
say also, in humble confidence, when the hour
comes, " and to die is gain."

CHAPTEE XXVIII
THE PEIVILEGE AND JOY OF SEEVICE
" But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear
unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the
ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the
Gospel of the grace of God." — Acts xx. 24.
It would be difficult to find, even in the Bible,
braver and nobler words than these. They were
characteristic of the man — a man who absolutely
forgot fear, and every prompting of the lower
nature in the passion of a mighty enthusiasm, in
entire devotion to a great cause. He was bidding
farewell to those dear friends at Ephesus among
whom God had given him great fruits for the
Gospel, and whose hearts he had unconsciously
won by his gracious character and ministry. It
was a tearful parting, for something told him that
they would never look on each other's faces again.
He was on his way to Jerusalem, following one of
those impulses of the Spirit, obeying one of those
secret orders of the King which came to him often,
and which were to him imperative. A power not
himself, a voice within mightier than his own
spirit, called him now to Jerusalem, as he had once
been called to Macedonia, and he forthwith girded
268

PEIVILEGE AND JOY OF SEEVICE 269
himself for the journey and started out, as many
another prophet had done, as Jesus Christ Himself
had gone to be crucified. It was the city which
had killed so many of the prophets and slain the
messengers of God that were sent to it. St. Paul
knew that for him, as for his Master, the way to
that city was through the valley of the shadow of
death. He could not foresee the end, whether it
would be a cross or a scaffold — the end was
hidden in profound darkness ; but he saw some
thing of what awaited him before the end was
reached. In one place and another, as he passed
along, there came to him dreams by night or
visions in the daytime — visions of chains and
dungeons, of weary confinement, and lonely, use
less hours prolonged in prison, of a captivity from
which there would be no outlet save that which
death brings at last to every captive. He saw all
this before him, but not for a moment did he
pause or question the order which sent him
forward. It was enough that the Master required
his witness there. " None of these things move
me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so
that I might finish my course with joy, and the
ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus,
to testify the Gospel of the grace of God." Two
main thoughts find expression here. He regarded
Christian service as a privilege which more than
compensated for all pains. He earnestly desired
that he might have a spirit of joy in doing it to
the end.
I. Christian service a privilege. So St. Paul
speaks of the ministry which he has received of the

270 THE PRIVILEGE
Lord Jesus. It is the boon which he has received of
the Lord's dear hands ; it is Christ's invaluable gift
to him. He knows that it is leading him on now
to bonds and imprisonment. No matter ! — to have
it and to exercise it is worth more than all which
it wiU cost. He remembers, he can never forget,
that it has brought him, year after year, sufferings
and penalties of many kinds— stonings, scourgings,
hootings, hatred, loss of honour, loss of friendships,
deprivation of all comforts. According to aU
appearances, that gift of Christ had been a fatal
gift, involving him in every conceivable misfortune.
No matter ! he is immeasurably proud of it. The
cost is not worth counting in view of the sacred
splendour of the gift. It is the one treasure, next
to Christ's love, which makes life sweet — just the
blessedness of serving ! It is invariably in this
language that he speaks of it. The prophets used
to call the service of the Lord a " burden." It was
an awful weight upon them which they would have
gladly laid down if the Lord had permitted. Never
once does the Apostle use that word " burden."
It is not something that he carries. It is some
thing that lifts him up, gives lightness to his feet,
expansion to his heart, magnifies him in his own
eyes. He always speaks of the mercy and love
which have caUed him to serve, the condescension
which has stooped to use him, the infinite grace
which has entrusted the divine treasure to such
a poor earthen vessel. " I thank God that He
counted me worthy, putting me into the ministry."
" Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints,
was this grace given." Never does he speak of it

AND JOY OF SERVICE 271
as a hardship, only to be endured for the sake of
what will follow ; never as a toiUng and weary
workman thinks of his labour — something to be
got through with a view to the wages. Only very
occasionaUy does he refer to the rewards, the
heavenly rest, and the crown of righteousness
which will be given him at the end. The service
itself is a great and almost sufficient reward. To
have been chosen for this thing,'appointed to it by
the King's command, to be a vessel in the hand
of the Almighty, bearing witness of His grace and
sharing with Christ the glory of serving — that is
the grand thing. " None of these things move me,
in view of the ministry which I have received of
the Lord Jesus."
Now let us not imagine that this refers merely
to the preacher's work ; let us not thus narrowly
Umit the word ministry. We use it of the pastor's
work ; we call that the ministry. Paul used it in
the widest possible sense — of every kind and degree
of Christian service. Whatever your work for
Christ, whatever the sphere in which you have to
sustain the Christian character, whether your duty
is to be done in school, mission, home, workshop
or sanctuary, whether you glorify His name in
some prominent and public capacity or simply
bear witness for Him in obscure ways and private
places, you have been put into what St. Paul calls
" the ministry." It is the ministry which you have
received of the Lord Jesus. Do you regard it as
St. Paul did ? Alas ! how often we talk of Christian
service, or at least think of it, as if it were just
what we mean by service and nothing more ; as if

272 THE PRIVILEGE
we felt all the hardness of it and had little
appreciation of the honour ; as if the bondage far
outweighed the privilege ; as if the cost which it
demanded far outweighed the joy ; as if the loss
of worldly pleasures far more than balanced
the blessedness of being Christ's companions ; and
as if the thought of it were only made tolerable
by that hope of better things to come which is
linked on with it. To those who understand it, to
those who know anything about its real, deep
nature, it is a grand thing, it is a magnificent
privUege just to be a Christian, to have received
the heavenly caUing, to have been appointed to
the humblest place in the fellowship of saints,
to have any part, however small, in testifying of
the grace of God, and to be permitted even the
most insignificant work in companionship with
Jesus. It is worth a hundred times more than it
costs to be able to say, "I am in the service of
Christ by the will of God " ; " None of these things
move me, in view of the ministry which I have
received of the Lord Jesus."
II. Think of the continuous joy of service. " None
of these things move me," says St. Paul, " if I may
only finish my course with joy"; that is, HteraUy, " if
I may only run the whole of my race up to the end
with joy." He did not wish simply to run it as one
getting more and more weary of it, and thankful if
he has just strength enough left to carry him, half
fainting, to the goal ; but to run it aU with light
and happy feet, as one moves to the sound of music.
He wished to feel the work as sweet and welcome
at every following stage, and at the finish, as it

AND JOY OF SERVICE 273
had been at the beginning. And he did not ask
for it in vain. It was given him. He testifies,
in his last Epistle, that he had finished his course
and fought the good fight, always with the same
gladness of heart.
It is a good thing not to grow weary in well
doing, to hold on to it with any sort of faith and
patience ; but it is a far better thing if we never
cease to have joy in doing it, if we can do it all
with a sweet singing in our hearts and a happy
willinghood beaming in our faces. One of the
most disheartening things in the Christian life is
that, with most of us, the shining face of it gets
bedimmed and dust-covered, and the joy which
began with a pure rich flame falls into a feeble
taper-light, or even a smoking torch. The rich,
full emotions, which were like a fountain over
flowing, sink down into dry, insipid feelings, in
which there is no banquet at all. How wonder
ful, to some of us, were the early charms of the
Christian life ! How golden and rosy the first
buddings of faith's spring-time ! What thrilling
romance there was in the story of Christ's love
for us, and the swift beating of our hearts in
responding love to Him ! How beautiful to feel
that heaven was near, and the very skies Uke
window-panes through which we could look up to
God's face ! We thought that life would be, as the
poet says, " one long, sweet song." But by and
by the romance is past. The morning freshness
changes into the dusty heat of the day, and the
impassioned love cools down into a sluggish
affection which needs much stirring. The face of
18

274 THE PRIVILEGE
Jesus loses some of its attraction because we have
looked upon it so often, and joy is an angel that
we only see on rare occasions. We do not give up
the Christian life. Comparatively few of those who
have once tasted of the grace of God lose all relish
for it. Comparatively few of those who have loved
Jesus cast Him out of their hearts altogether.
But many lose the rapture and the ecstasy, and
they plod on in the path of faith somewhat wearily,
" faint yet pursuing," only caught up now and
then on the wings of freedom and fervent delight,
only now and then expanded with the sense of
unutterable joy.
And this is especially true of what we call
Christian work. It is so difficult to see it always
with the shining face, to see it always with the
glory of the Master settled upon it, to see Christ's
handwriting upon it, those dear lines which teU us
that the work is His, and that we are appointed
to it. Our preaching, our deacon's service, our
teaching in the Sunday school, our labour in the
mission — you know how hard it is to keep the fire
burning and the interest fresh. It is like trundling
the wheels of God, and pushing them laboriously
forward without feeling the Spirit of God in them.
There is so much routine, so much that seems
almost mechanical, so much that is hardly better
than drudgery, so much repeating and walking
over again the same oft-trodden ground ! Oh, if
we were employed, like the seraphim, to carry fire
direct from God's altar to human lips, it would
be so exciting and deUghtful ! but to go on with
the same prosaic, monotonous task just because it

AND JOY OF SERVICE 275
is the King's command, to fill our little sphere of
unrewarded duty not knowing how it is to glorify
God — that is hard; and nothing but a constant
reflooding of our hearts with the love of Jesus
can enable us to continue our course with joy.
Yet that wiU do it. I speak these words particu
larly to those who are in the work, and looking
forward, perhaps, to those winter months in which
Christian organisations are supposed to be busiest
and Christian activities more manifest. It is pos
sible always to carry on our work with joy ; but
that can only be if we never lose the sense of
privilege, if we believe that every bit of work
we do is truly by the King's command ; that it is
the exalted work of God, though it seems the
merest drudgery of human toil. That can only be
in so far as we keep aloof from those doubtful
things of the world which breed a certain distaste
and weariness of higher things. That can only be
if we try to put our Christian work first and every
thing else behind. And, above all, it can only be
in so far as we keep the Master's face in view, as
we think of all His labours and the joy of spirit in
which He did them, and as we realise the sense of
His presence, and the " Well done ! " which awaits
us, not at the end only, but every time we have
done some poor service for Him.
And so I pray for you and for myself, that glad
ness may never fail us at any stage of the journey ;
that, like St. Paul, we may " finish our course with
joy."

CHAPTER XXIX
FAITH ON ITS PRACTICAL SIDE
" And when he had thus spoken, he took bread and gave thanks
to God in presence of them all." — Acts xxvii. 35.
It was a favourite saying of Thomas Carlyle that
" a hero is a hero at all points of him, in the secret
heart of him first of aU " ; that is, his heroism
comes out on all occasions. He needs no specially
prepared platform to show his qualities. Wher
ever he treads is his platform. Place him wherever
you please, he cannot help being just what he is,
just what God has made him. This, at least, was
magnificently true of St. Paul. We see him dis
puting with Athenian philosophers, we see him
in prison, we see him before howling mobs, we
see him standing before magistrates and kings,
and in all these scenes he is unchanged. It is
always the same calm face that confronts us, and
the same brave heart, strengthened with God's
might in the inner man. And now we see him
in an entirely new and unfamiliar position, not
facing the wrath of man, but exposed to the terrors
of the sea. And it may be truly said that he
never showed himself to more advantage than on
the deck of this storm-shaken, half -foundering ship.
276

FAITH ON ITS PRACTICAL SIDE 277
This enthusiast, fanatic, and dreamer, as most men
called him, this visionary and impractical idealist,
as most men deemed him, proved to be the most
shrewd, cool-headed, clear-sighted man on board
when the extreme danger put them all on their
trial. He knew nothing of the mariner's trade.
He had served no apprenticeship on that line ; but
he had learned to keep his eyes open, his mind
steady, and his pulses calm. He had been trained
to despise danger, and to look without blanching
into the grim face of death. He knew how to do
the right thing at the right time, and was able
to do it without flurry or excitement. All that
served him now. It is not so much skill that
avails in hours of peril, but the unshaken nerve,
the steady hand, the heart that beats evenly, the
courage that rises to the occasion. This was St.
Paul's qualification in that scene which lent itself
to panic. He faced the storm there, as he had
faced many a furious crowd, as he faced the great
Cassar afterwards — sure of himself because sure
of -his God, having that within which mastered
fear, and subduing other people's terrors by his
own undisturbed serenity ; he made them all feel,
from the captain of the ship down to the hum
blest cabin-boy, that they were in the presence
of a master-mind, that there was inspiration in his
example and safety in his counsels. Better still,
he made them all feel that God was near, because
he was so sure of it himself. We have here two
or three pictures of the Christian man worth
studying. I. We have the Christian life on its practical

278 FAITH ON ITS PEACTICAL SIDE
side, in its plain week-day clothes, taking up the
common work which happened to be nearest,
and doing it in such a way that it could not be
better done. This man, St. Paul, was a missionary,
preacher, saint ; a man who saw visions, who lived
above the ordinary world, in a world of higher
thoughts and ideas which Christ had created for
him; a man who had his being among spiritual
things. Of such men the world is always ready to
say, " They are good for nothing except their own
special business. Put them to anything which
requires a bit of common sense and practical
judgment, and they are no better than children."
Most of you have an idea that a preacher out of the
pulpit is hopelessly incompetent, and hardly better
than one of the foolish. That was exactly what
the sailors thought of St. Paul and his missionary
companions. Imagine the surprise when they saw
these saints throw off their coats and handle ropes
and tackles as if they had been bred to the trade.
" The third day," says St. Luke, who was one of
the company, " we cast out, with our own hands,
the tackling of the ship." We did it, in fact,
because the others had all collapsed. They had
lost heart, and flung down their work in despair.
The cry went round, " All is lost ! No use fighting
against destiny ! " And then these preachers and
saints took the work with a cheery, nil desperandum
spirit, and shamed the others into foUowing their
example. A real man of God will always act in
that way. If a saint does not lead the way in
doing the duty of the hour, whatever it may be, a
fig for his sainthood ! What is religion, indeed,

FAITH ON ITS PEACTICAL SIDE 279
but highest equipment for duty ? Educate a man
wisely and thoroughly, educate his heart and wiU,
as well as his head ; and, wherever he goes, that
education will stand him in good stead, and help
him to do every bit of work that falls to his
hand in a more efficient way. And religion is
education of the highest kind. It never lifts a
man above work, but shows him how to do it,
helps him to do it honestly, and take a pride in
doing it well, even if it be of the humblest kind.
I like to look on that great saint, Paul, that sub
lime Apostle, that heavenly minded enthusiast. I
like to look on him as he works there with the
sweat on his brow, the ropes in his hands, showing
the sailors how to do it. He was teaching as
fine a lesson of godliness there as when he wrote
those noble Epistles which have borne witness for
Christ through all the world.
And let not this feature pass, that, while that
work was in hand, he gave himself to it as if his
whole heart and purpose were in it. He did no
preaching, no religious talk, no audible praying ;
his secret soul was praying, no doubt, but there
were no words. It was not the time for that ;
there was an immediate duty to perform. The
ship had to be lightened, and needed all hands.
Weaker men would have neglected work for
prayer. Nervous and excitable Christians would
have shrieked out, amid the ship's din, that they
were all going to be lost, and that they must
prepare to meet their God. Sentimental religion
sometimes grows frantic on such occasions, and
makes itself a nuisance. St. Paul understood his

280 FAITH ON ITS PEACTICAL SIDE
work better — his Master's work. In this hour
hands were wanted, not words. The first thing
was to save the lives of the ship's crew. The
time for dealing with their souls would come later.
All through the voyage he had been waiting
anxiously to speak to these men about the higher
things. All those days in which they were fighting
with the storm it had been hard for him to keep
silent. " After long abstinence," says St. Luke,
after a long restraint upon himself, he spoke. The
words had burned on his lips, but it would have
done no good to utter them until the fit time
came. The men were not in the mood ; they were
too busy, too excited, too feverish. Men like St.
Paul know when to speak as well as what to
speak. There are times when to speak of sacred
things is but to profane them ; when, to force our
religious professions and appeals upon men's atten
tion is but to offend, and even invite ridicule.
Thoughtful Christians reserve their solemnities for
seasonable hours. They feel men's pulses and
heart-beats before they speak. St. Paul worked
on, and spoke not until he had won the confidence
of the men by his fearless attitude and bold leader
ship, until the storm had spent its wildest force,
and the extreme perU was over. Then to those
weary and anxious toilers of the sea he spoke the
truths which were more than life to him, and in
the words spoken here he gives another picture of
the Christian life —
II. The Christian life on its radiant, uplifted,
joyful side. The first thing he told these men was
to be of good cheer, and the last thing he said

FAITH ON ITS PEACTICAL SIDE 281
to them was much the same. It was the word
which he had learned from the Master. "Be of
good cheer." They were in the.hands of God. They
were not at the mercy of the waters and the winds.
They were in the power of One who could direct
and subdue the angry waters at His own good
pleasure. "I have no fear for myself," said St.
Paul, "and I have no fear for you. The Master
whom I serve has told me that my work is not yet
done, that I have yet to bear witness for Him in
many places. He will preserve my life until He has
no further need for my service here. I shall not
perish on this ship, nor will you. A Voice which
has never deceived me tells me that every life on
board will be saved. Therefore, be of good cheer."
He spoke like a prophet ; his tone was inspiring,
They felt that some, supernatural force was behind
this certainty. The words ran with thrilhng and
convincing force through them ; they beheved
him, and were of good cheer. Then the days
passed on — the dreary days in which there was
no sunlight, and the ship went plunging through
the storm helmless, mastless, ungovernable, driven
by the winds and currents through the darkness,
none could guess whither. At last they were close
to land, well-nigh on the breakers. The anchors
were dropped in the deep darkness, and the men
had nothing to do but wait for daybreak.
Then St. Paul spoke again, and proposed a
communion-feast, a feast of thanksgiving and
gladness. It was Uke a sacrament. It was indeed
the Lord's Supper on ship-board, and never was the
Lord's Supper observed in a stranger scene and

282 FAITH ON ITS PEACTICAL SIDE
place than that, with those rough men as com
municants. But, you see, the key-note of all that
he said and did was gladness and good cheer.
These men had been fasting more or less for
fourteen days. They had been afraid to eat meat,
or eat anything more than barely sufficed to
keep body alive. They had fasted religiously.
It was the bit of dark, cheerless religion they
had which taught them this abstinence. They
were heathen men, and their gods were cruel;
their worship, when they worshipped at all, was
dark and fearful ; there was always a sort of
shivering in it. Religion had no bright and com
forting side with them. They thought now that
the storm had come because the gods were angry,
and that they must appease the gods by going
hungry and miserable, and all through those wild
days they had been engaged in this sad business.
Now the Christian man preaches to them a gospel
of gladness : " No good in afflicting your souls and
starving your bodies to make God propitious.
The God in whom I believe, and would have you
believe, is kindness, goodness, pure Fatherhood,
and the worship which He loves best is simple
trust and gratitude, and faces lifted up to Him
radiant with joy. I pray you to take some meat ;
you need it for strength and health. There is not
one man of you going to perish." And then he
took bread and gave God thanks in presence of
them aU. And they all caught the contagion of
his serene confidence and happy hopefulness, and
they aU joined in the thanksgiving feast, and were
aU of good cheer.

FAITH ON ITS PRACTICAL SIDE 283
Is it not, throughout, a lovely story ? Is it not a
perfect picture of what the Christian life should
be ? Practical and ideal, full of action and full
of prayer, ready to do the commonest work, and
able to walk on the highest level, bearing witness
for Christ by simple honesty in labour, by the
exhibition of a dauntless spirit, by fearlessness in
danger, by preaching and appealing at the fit
time only, profoundly solemn yet aboundingly
joyful, filling the whole atmosphere with the pulses
of elevated thought, steadying men, leading them,
inspiring them, acting as a king and priest among
them. The story is worth studying again and again
as a proof of what the real Christ-like man can
do in scenes which are unfamiliar and uncongenial
to him, as a proof of the masterhood which his
faith gives him over aU other minds. This prisoner
saved two hundred and seventy-six lives, not by
his skill, but by the simple steadiness of mind and
heart and the spirit of hope which his trust in
God supplied. It came to pass as he had pre
dicted concerning them all. Some swam to shore,
and the rest, some on boards and some on broken
pieces of the ship, and so it came to pass that they
escaped aU safe to land.
And we cannot do better than pray for more
of the Christian power which made this man so
great.

CHAPTER XXX
THE TRUE INDEPENDENCE
" But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of
you, or of man's judgment : for He that judgeth me is the Lord." —
1 Cos. iv. 3, 4.
There were two features of this man's character
which made him more like his Master than almost
a.nj other figure in the New Testament. One was
his tender, self-forgetting consideration for every
one around him, and the other was his noble in
dependence of everyone about him. Like the
Master, he made himself one with all men, yet
held himself, in a sense, above all men. He was
at once their servant and their master. He loved
all, but feared none. He would do anything in
the world to conciliate and win their trust, except
perhaps the one doubtful thing which they wished
him to do, and he would not do that to win the
world. It seemed as if contradictory qualities met
in him. Yet they were not contradictory ; they
belonged to the same fine Christian soul. He was
one of the humblest of men, and the proudest.
He called himself the least of the Apostles, yet,
when it came to a dispute, he carried his point
over all the Apostles. He was always stooping,
284

THE TRUE INDEPENDENCE 285
yielding his own wishes and laying himself out
to please men, yet inflexible, and immovable as a
mountain when they would have drawn him away
from the principles which his conscience approved
and the course which his Lord directed. A little
chUd could lead him, but all the forces in the world
could not drive him a hair's-breadth from a con
viction. In fact, he was ready to serve all the
world, and yet he was servant to none except that
one Divine Master to whom he had given his life
unreservedly. And this, his absolute independ
ence of every authority but Christ's, made him
the fearless, strong, commanding man he was ;
invested him, in spite of himself, with a sort of
pre-eminence in the apostolic band, and gave him
an influence incomparably greater than that of
any other in shaping the thoughts of the Church
through all ages. If we must go to other scenes in
his life to discover the gentler and sweeter features
of the man, it is in such words as these that we read
the secret of his strength : " With me it is a very small
thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's
judgment : for he that judgeth me is the Lord."
Now these are very noble and bold words,
the speech of a spiritual giant. They have been
repeated and acted upon, in substance, by all the
great leaders of men, and they define the attitude
which should be assumed, more or less, by every
servant of the Lord Jesus. But they need reading
carefully, soberly, and wisely, and he who preaches
about them should measure his sentences and
tread circumspectly, or he will just talk im
practicable and foolish things.

286 THE TRUE INDEPENDENCE
I. In the first place, it is not easy to tread an
absolutely independent course, to be guided solely
by our Master's orders, and to stand for ever, as
it were, before His judgment-throne. It is terribly
difficult, indeed, to keep the compass fixed in one
direction straight and true, when a thousand in
fluences, like powerful magnets, are playing upon
it, and, half unconsciously to ourselves, pulling
it aside. We are carried along by the currents
of human opinion when we think we are steering
by heaven's light alone. We secretly yield when
we fancy that we are most boldly resisting. Our
very consciences are shaped and coloured by the
atmosphere in which we do our work, and we
dance to the piping of the world when we
think aU our movements are swayed by music
of a diviner sort. There are times when heaven
seems a long way off, and the human forces
around us painfully and oppressively near, and
it needs an heroic heart, indeed, to hold on to the
true like rock, and not have our feet lifted up and
borne away by the rush of custom, habit, and
sentiment in which our lives are placed.
II. And, further, one should be very sure of his
ground before he takes this attitude, and he should
only take it after incessant prayer for guidance
and enlightenment. There is a world of difference
between St. Paul's sublime independence and the
self-conceit of the man who thinks that he is
right and everybody else wrong, and yet it is
very easy to mistake the one for the other and
to fancy that we have attained a noble height
of righteousness when we have fallen into a fit

THE TRUE INDEPENDENCE 287
of obstinacy and pride. When a young man —
or an old man for that matter — sets at defiance
the well-considered judgments of all whose advice
is weighted with disinterested goodness and the
experience of years and takes his own course
with determined step and unbending will, it is
far more likely that he is following the torchUght
kindled by his own passions or vanity than
going where the light of conscience or heaven's
radiance shows the way, and his independence
is more likely to bring him the promotion of
fools than the reward of heroes and saints. It
is taking upon ourselves an awful responsibility
when we claim for our own judgment a sort
of infaUibility, and treat as mistaken or pre
judiced the contrary opinion of those who have
the best claims upon our trust. And this should
never be done save in the great emergencies
of life, and only then after deliberate thought and
wrestling prayer. Take care that conscience is
free from bias and passion and that God is
wholly with you before you assume an attitude
so exalted or so defiant.
III. Moreover, we ought not to treat lightly the
judgment of other men, unless they are of such
a character that their judgment has no moral
weight. St. Paul says he wUl not be swayed
or moved out of his course by the judgment of
those cavilling critics and would-be authorities
in Corinth. No, for they were not men whose
opinion was commended by wise action and
ChristUness of thought. They were ambitious,
vainglorious, frivolous, full of dissensions and

288 THE TRUE INDEPENDENCE
envies, carnal, and even sensual. It was not
likely that he would attach great value either
to their censures or approvals. " With me it is a
very small thing that I should be judged of you —
or of any man," he adds, with just a flash of
indignation. In fact, any man's judgment was
small compared with the judgment of his Lord.
Yet not small when out of that comparison, for
St. Paul himself does not always speak in such
terms as these. He had an absolute contempt for
the opinions of crafty, dishonest, vulgar-minded
men, and nothing but respect for the judgment
of those whom he loved and trusted. He wished
to stand well with good men. Their approval was
dear to him, their censures and misjudgments gave
him sharp pain. He was constantly defending
his own doings, and vindicating his motives to
clear away misunderstandings and to secure their
trust. He was not a man who walked his sohtary
way careless and defiant of what the world thought
of him. He was sensitive, in a high degree, to the
favourable opinion of everyone who was morally
worth considering. The great thing was to have
his Master's "Well done!" And after that, if
it could be, the approval of all who did and
sought righteousness.
And that will be the attitude of every man and
woman who is trying to live in a brave and
Christly manner. It is the merest affectation or
the cant of bravado for a man to say he does not
care what the world thinks of him. He does care,
unless he is a hardened profligate or devoid of
feeling, and he ought to care. "We are members

THE TRUE INDEPENDENCE 289
one of another." We ought to please one another,
and conciliate and yield to one another, so long
as we can do it without sin. And we aU like to
be thought well of, to see the Ught of kindly
appreciation in the eyes of those about us ; we like
to have our labours recognised and our abuities
treated with respect, and our honesty believed in.
All this is both natural and pardonable, and even
beautiful. It is only wrong when we degrade
ourselves to disarm the censures or secure the
approval of the unworthy. To be sensitive in that
direction is to be an abject coward. We should
only be afraid of the judgment of our peers ; that
is, of those who are morally equal or superior to
us. But to be afraid of the chatter and clatter of
flippant tongues, of the shallow criticism of un
thinking minds, of the cheap sneers of moral
weaklings, to deviate from the right course for
fear of losing popularity and favour with those
whom we inwardly despise, is to sell our conscience
for votes, or a breath of flattery, or a mess of
pottage. It is, indeed, to make ourselves the
obedient slaves of those over whom God has made
us moral masters. It is always that which lets
us down to weakness, inconsistency, and moral
fickleness. We are in such mortal fear of what
smaU souls will say about our doings, words, social
position, and other matters; in fear of what the
empty-headed and depraved-hearted wUl say, if
we do not skip and run to their piping, that it
kills all the valour in us and haU the honesty.
Seek the good opinion of those whose lives and
thoughts give weight to their judgment, and you
19

290 THE TEUE INDEPENDENCE
cannot go far wrong — not far — and concerning all
the baser sort let your language be : " With me it
is a very smaU thing that I should be judged of
you: for He that judgeth me is the Lord."
IV. Yet sometimes, not often, thank God ! you
have to go alone, as St. Paul did many times,
leaving even the good men out of your company.
You have to do what God and conscience plainly
show, though those whom you most trust, and who
have consciences as sensitive as yours, do not see
that your way is right and best. You have at
times, though — I repeat the word — not often, to take
your choice between violating your deepest con
victions and losing the confidence and approval
of some of the truest of men. They shake their
heads, they are doubtful, they pity you, they think
you are making a huge blunder, they even faU
away from you. Then it is for you to say, " Even
at that cost I must obey the voice of God." For,
when it comes to that, a man's own prayer-
enlightened conscience is to be the supreme judge.
AU the world together does not know so weU what
is right for him as he knows himself, and to his
own self he must be true, or he loses everything.
And if you take that course, regardless of imme
diate consequences, it will come about, in nearly
every instance, that the tide which has gone against
you will eventually return and be with you. The
men who believed you wrong will slowly discover
that it was the right and godly way you took, and
in the end you will win back the favour and
approval which, for an hour of loneliness and dark
ness, were withdrawn. The very world comes

THE TEUE INDEPENDENCE 291
round at last to those who have steadily followed
the clear light of duty, and made God's will their
supreme law, and if you do not get that reward in
the present world, because life is not long enough,
and you have not had time to wait for it, it will
surely come in the life beyond, and both here and
there you will have the greater approval of the
Master, which is, after all, far better.
Indeed, though I have talked so much about the
approval of men, it would hardly be a Christian
sermon if it did not lift the Christian life above
human judgment-thrones into the all-searching
presence of Him whose judgment is final and
whose simple " Well done ! " is worth infinitely
more than aU the volumes of human praise.
It would be a poor thing for the world if brave
lives were only lived and good deeds only done
with an eye turned to the public and an ear open
to the sound of kindly human approval. The
world is sweetened, and half saved, by the innumer
able lives of goodness and acts of seU-sacrifice
which owe aU their inspiration to the love of the
unseen Master and the hope of His " WeU done ! "
The world has little knowledge of them ; the
public eye passes them by ; they are not criticised
or praised by human lips. Here and there one
knows of them, and God knows them — and that is
enough. There are men who, day by day, are suffering loss
through sheer scrupulous honesty ; winning sneers,
perhaps, because of their excessive scrupulosity
and purity of motive. There are men and women
who are bearing their own sorrows patiently and

292 THE TEUE INDEPENDENCE
bravely, without a word of complaint, and taking
also a large share in the burdens and pains of
others ; men and women who, in a thousand fields,
little noticed and unrewarded, are sowing seeds of
goodness, fighting the fight against the evil, and
spending themselves for the Name's sake.
These are the beautiful souls who most of all
prove Christ's presence among men. Moved by
the imperative of duty, constrained by love divine,
cheered by the hope of the Master's final accept
ance and " WeU done ! " they carry themselves
sweetly through life. And they, indeed, could say
with St. Paul, "With me it is a very smaU thing that
I should be judged of you : for He that judgeth me
is the Lord."

CHAPTEE XXXI
THE CEY OF HUMAN INSUFFICIENCY
AND THE ANSWEE TO IT
" And who is sufficient for these things 1 " — 2 Cob. ii. 16.
" Not that we are sufficient of ourselves : . . . but our sufficiency
is of God."— 2 Cob. iii. 5.
If you read what goes before and then these
words you are startled by the sudden change of
voice. There is an abrupt fall from the triumphant
Hallelujah Song to this low wail of pleading weak
ness : " Thanks be unto God, which always causeth
us to triumph in Christ " ; " And who is sufficient for
these things ? " It is like the cry of the spent
and wounded warrior following immediately the
shout of the victor. Down he drops from the
glorious heights to the valley of fear and trembling.
And then, in the next moment, he is on the hill-tops
again : " But our sufficiency is of God." St. Paul
was full of these contrasted moods. One hour
absolutely fearless in the all-conquering power of
God, and then shaking like a reed in the wind at
the remembrance of his own weakness. The foes
outside never disturbed him ; he was Uke a granite
rock against their assaults. But the foe within,
the treacherous weakness in his own heart! He
293

294 THE CEY OF HUMAN INSUFFICIENCY
was all of a tremble when he thought of that. He
feared no man except himself, but he was terribly
afraid of himself. There were these alternations
of up and down continually. And all this helped
to make him a preacher. For the preacher is
made up of heights and depths, raptures of faith
and tremblings of feebleness. He cannot under
stand your temptations unless he is sometimes
humbled to the dust before his own, and he cannot
lift you to the heights unless he often mounts to
them himself. Nay, the very saint is made up
in this way : mighty in God, and weaker than a
child in himself. At times he treads the sunny
hill-tops of faith with the serenity of heaven about
him ; then he comes down and toils along the
dusty, level road of cheerless duty ; whilst ever and
anon he drops down into the dusky valleys of
humiliation. When he thinks of his feeble self
and the forces arrayed against him he cries out
like a frightened child, and only when he forgets
himself in the divine power which girds him round
does he know the joy, peace, and confidence of
believing. And, truly, we are all made up of these
contrasts if we are fighting life's battle under
God's orders. "Who is sufficient for these
things ? " " Our sufficiency is of God." " Thanks
be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph
in Christ."
I. We take, first, this cry of the human in man,
" Who is sufficient for these things ? " Sooner or
later it is wrung from all our lips. No man gets
through life without uttering that groan far more
than once. Youth sometimes escapes it. There

AND THE ANSWEE TO IT 295
is a glorious self-confidence in youth which has not
yet discovered the limitations of its power. We
go into the battle merrily, with courageous steps
and a light heart, and perhaps with a spice of
contempt for the foe. We think we are well able
to overcome. We have not yet grappled with the
big problems, or stooped under the big burdens, or
writhed under the cruel strokes of disappointment ;
but we meet all these things as we pass along, and
they take some of the conceit out of us, and make
us bite the dust at times, and occasionally take the
heart out of us, as well as the conceit. For the
battle is so much harder when we get into the thick
of it, and the bravest man has fits of cowardice,
and the cleverest man begins to feel that he is not
too wise, and we all have occasion to repeat this
text before we get through. " Who is sufficient for
these things ? " It comes sooner to the man with
an earnest purpose and religious ideals. Every
one whose thoughts move on a higher level, every
one who wishes to carry into the thick of the
struggle a sensitive and enlightened conscience
and to make righteousness the girdle of his loins,
everyone who accepts the Christian calling and
binds himself by its obligations, must feel at times
that he is unequal to the strain, that the burden
laid upon him is greater than he can bear, and
that, on the human side, he is most inadequately
equipped for so great a battle.
Possibly you wiU not feel this so much, or at all,
if your aims are low and vulgar. If it is merely
a question of getting on, pushing yourself into
fortune or notoriety without much regard to

296 THE CEY OF HUMAN INSUFFICIENCY
the means, then you may force your way
through to a coarse success without the least
sensitive feeling of your own inability. But the
moment you direct your thoughts and strivings to
nobler ends, that moment you bid fareweU to the
arrogant self-conceit of coarser minds, and begin to
repeat these trembling words of St. Paul. Who
can set before him the Christian ideal without a
shiver of fear ? It is high ; it is terribly high ! It
overwhelms us, it terrifies us, we fly from it into
forgetfulness, or into the arms of a compassionate
God. We listen to some of the lofty sayings of
Jesus ; we hear Him repeating the sublime demands
of the Sermon on the Mount, and our poor hearts
answer, " It is high ; we cannot attain to it " ; or, like
the disciples, we groan out, " Who, then, can be
saved ? " Nay, we hear His interpretation of the
Ten Commandments, we hear Him sum it all up in
the brief words, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy strength, and thy neighbour as
thyself." And we sigh, " How can it be ? " Human
nature stops paralysed before this awful height.
"What man is sufficient for these things?" It is easy
to say, "Fear God, and keep His commandments, for
that is the whole duty of man " ; but to do that
whole duty is as hard as a daily martyrdom. It is
never easy except when you shirk it, it is never a
light burden except when you preach it and do not
practise it. In all departments of human life
human nature is severely taxed, and at times
pressed beyond measure if it would keep the true
purpose always in view, and save its best ideals
from being trampled in the mire. In the business

AND THE ANSWEE TO IT 297
world, and the world of public life, there are
enormous temptations and appalling difficulties in
the path of him who would preserve a conscience
void of offence, and deviate not a hair's-breath
from the principles of rectitude. I do not wonder
that you are sometimes impatient with the preacher
when, with his scant experience and knowledge of
the grim realities, he bids you walk as unspotted
angels through the muddy streets and slimy alleys
of competition. You murmur angrily, "What
does he know about it ? " or perhaps you sigh
painf uUy, " Who is sufficient for these things ? "
It comes to those who have only domestic worries
and cares — though why say " only" ? They are often
heavy enough to exhaust all the sweetness and
break down all the patience of a woman's heart.
One needs the temper of a seraph or of a Christ to
keep all things straight in a home and the many
wheels moving without jar, squaring income and
expenditure, meeting sometimes unreasonable
demands and complaints of the least unamiable
husband, and bearing with all the whims, caprices,
and self-will of the least vexatious chUdren. In
every home where a good woman lives there is a
soul which has to train itself to endurance by
patient prayer, and which, in spite of prayer, will
often ask, in half-suppressed sighs, " Who is
sufficient for these things ? " Yes, and there is for
us all, if we have the Christian mind, that battle
between the flesh and the spirit which St. Paul often
felt and acknowledged with groans. It is so hard
to keep the body down, to get the better of the
sensual and the carnal, to rise above our gross

298 THE CEY OF HUMAN INSUFFICIENCY
material selves, our lusts and prides, envies and
vanities, and walk on that higher level of spiritual
purity and self-mastery which the Christian rule
requires — so hard, in fact, that the strongest will
trembles at its own weakness and the firmest faith
is frightened by its own insufficiency. And never
more does the thought come over us than in the
bitter and sorrowful things of Ufe, when the
journey reaches the dark places, when the things
we trusted in fail, and heart and flesh despair.
Then, indeed, our poor human nature is tortured
and distracted by the thought of its feebleness.
0 God ! how helpless we are in life's agonies and
loneliness if we have only our own pitiful selves to
lean upon ! " Who is sufficient for these things ? "
II. The answer of faith to this human cry :
" Our sufficiency is of God." " Thanks be unto
God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ."
So far as I understand, there are three possible
answers to the question — only three. And one of
them need not concern us here. It is the answer
of the Stoic, the answer of the comparatively few
men who have the sternly philosophic mind, who
are proudly moral without being religious, who
suppress their feelings, and bear the ills of life
with an intellectual fortitude that would deem it
a weakness to complain. " We are sufficient for
all things," says the Stoic, " if we only nerve our
selves to grin and bear them, and quietly yield
to what we cannot avoid." But not many of us
are Stoics. The second answer is suggested by
repeated failures, or perhaps by failure and
cowardice together. " Who is sufficient for these

AND THE ANSWEE TO IT 299
things ? " " No one," says the man who has never
aimed high, or who has made a few attempts in
that direction and speedily wearied of them. You
sometimes hear that answer from men and women
of the nobler sort who have made determined
efforts to maintain their lives on a high moral
level, and have been pulled down, driven back,
thwarted, saddened, and perhaps soured by re
peated discomfiture. " The thing cannot be done,"
they say. " The forces of the world, the flesh, and
the devil are too strong for pure ideals. In the
very nature of things human nature must fail in
the endeavour to lift itself above human nature.
The Christian life is only fit for angels, and we
are but men with soiled feet, and without the least
symptom of sprouting wings. We cannot over
come the weaknesses inherent to the flesh. We
must be what appetite, passion, temper, inherit
ance, and environment make us. We cannot
escape from the force of fashion, from the bindings
of habit, and the shapings of the atmosphere and
mould in which we find ourselves. Unworldly
ideals belong to the region of poetry and the
pulpit. They are Utopian and not actual. They
might be attained in some imaginary world of
saints, but they are impossible in the world in
which we happen to be placed. Elevated aims
in public life, strict righteousness in business,
cleanness in all one's private thoughts, angelic
tempers amid all the things that provoke explo
sions, they are all beautiful, no doubt, but all tall
talk and absolutely unreachable." So hundreds of
men and women speak to themselves or others ;

300 THE CEY OF HUMAN INSUFFICIENCY
men and women, in certain cases, who began well,
who began nobly, and have slowly let down their
wings and given up all thought of ascending.
" Who is sufficient for these things ?" They answer,
" It is out of the question. Man is human, and
you must not expect him to be superhuman."
And there is the third answer, given by God to
all who trust Him, given by Christ to His disciples,
given by St. Paul here, and in many other places :
" Our sufficiency is of God " ; "I can do all things
through Christ which strengtheneth me " ; " Thanks
be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph
in Christ." That is the answer which saves a man
from moral cowardice, which sets him up again
after every fall, and makes him always brave
enough to renew and continue the struggle.
Never did any man feel more than this Apostle
the hardness of the higher endeavour. Never
did any man confess more frequently and more
humbly the inadequacy of human resources, the
inability of the human to carry the battle through
to victory. He felt it as painfully as the most
tempted and weakest of us all : " When I would
do good, evil is present with me " ; "0 wretched
man that I am : who shall deliver me from the body
of this death ? " He fears the battle ; he is ap
palled by the magnitude of it ; he is pressed beyond
measure ; he shakes like a leaf at the thought of his
own feebleness. Yet never does his purpose falter ',
never does he regard the Christian ideal as un
attainable. Persistently he presses towards the
mark with a bold and confident front, sure that
at last he will lay hold of it. He is always crying,

AND THE ANSWEE TO IT 301
" I cannot, and yet by the grace of God I can."
For always, along with the sense of human weak
ness, he feels that he is compassed about and
upheld by a power far mightier than himself.
The Almighty is supplementing all that is weak
in him, and saving him from himself. The human
spirit is not left alone in the unequal conflict. It
is girded around and supported by Omnipotence,
and much greater than all that is against it. Each
day's prayers bring down unseen allies to fight
against the visible foes, and divine force which
makes the shivering heart firm as rock again. " It
is not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me." It is
not one man against the world, but that man
and God with him. That, verily, is the Christian
answer. Let it be yours. Do not yield to the
thought that God has called you to do and bear
impossible things.
Be it temptation, or sorrow, or thorns in the
flesh, whatever it be, you will have strength for
the hour and the need. God puts a very giant
into the heart of a child when a giant's work has
to be done. " Who is sufficient for these things ? "
Everyone who can say, with Paul, " Our sufficiency
is of God."

CHAPTER XXXII
THE IDEALS WHICH FAIL AND NEVER
FAIL
" Not as though I had already attained, either were already
perfect : but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for
which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus." — Phil. iii. 12.
The Apostle here speaks of his past and his
present life under a well-known figure of speech.
Before his conversion he was like a man running
a race, a race of his own, with his eyes set on a
lower goal. And then Christ apprehended him,
caught hold of him, turned him round, and set him
running towards another goal, and he is pursuing
that goal yet, and it is still a long way off. "Not
as though I had already attained." In the days
when he was a young, proud Pharisee, the rising
hope of his party, petted, praised, and flattered for
his zeal and cleverness, he had regarded himself as
well-nigh faultless. The ideal of Pharisaism was not
very exalted and sublime, and if you are content
to aim low you soon get abundantly satisfied with
yourself. But Christ had come and given him
a model which was not so easy to follow. Christ
had shown him an ideal which soared mountains
above him. He had been pursuing that for years,
302

THE IDEALS WHICH FAIL 303
and it was stiU out of his reach. " He caught me
up to make me a great preacher and apostle
and valiant soldier, to make a saint, perfect with
His righteousness, a man all new-made in Him.
And I have not caught yet what He caught me
for. Not as though I had already attained, either
were already perfect : but I follow after. Yet I still
keep the ideal before me, and am ever praying,
aspiring, and labouring towards it." And I think
that gives us almost the best and truest description
of the Christian life, and of every good and noble
life which we can find. It is a life which is always
disappointed with itself, never in the least degree
disposed to boast of what it has been and done,
always grieving, rather, that it has not attempted
and attained more, and yet never cast down, never
ceasing to hope and to believe that aU things are
possible, and never slacking in the endeavour to
reach and grasp the prize of the heavenly caUing.
" Not as though I had already attained : but I follow
after." We have here —
I. The cry of a man who is grieving over an
unrealised ideal : " Not as though I had already
attained." There runs through all St. Paul's
writings a cry like that, a murmur of impatience,
a complaint against himself, as if his life had been
more than half a failure ; as if he had not done
what he hoped, and not gained what he sought.
In the bright young morning of his conversion,
when the vision of Christ had burst upon him in
a dream of surpassing loveliness, and made the
whole world new, his thoughts had mounted high
indeed. He saw himself transformed speedily into

304 THE IDEALS WHICH FAIL
the image of Christ, the chains of sin broken, and
the whole of his old life buried and done with. He
fancied that he would win a complete victory over
himself, and equaUy swift victories over the world
of unbelief. He would draw the Jews, his fellow-
countrymen, to Christ; then perhaps he would go
conquering everywhere in Gentile fields. The whole
future wore the triumphant colours of a brave en
thusiasm. Alas ! these lofty hopes had been rudely
handled and half shattered in the rough experience
of life. Everything had faUen short of his expecta
tions. The Jews had stubbornly refused his message ;
the Gentiles had only sparingly responded to his
sweet piping ; and he himself had not become the
man of his dreams. Some of the old nature had
clung to him. The human infirmities and lusts
had proved too much at times for the diviner
spirit within him, and he had to groan out, " 0
wretched man that I am : who shall deliver me
from the body of this death ? " He was not the
man he had purposed to be. He had not accom
plished the great things he projected. He was
obliged to confess that he was only the least of
the Apostles, and less than the least of all saints.
The ideal was unrealised. " Not as though I had
already attained."
And we are aU like that, all of us, at least, who
had in early life an earnest purpose and a pure
ambition. As we get on in years there comes
a sense of moral disappointment. We look back
and see the ground strewn with broken ideals.
We have found it harder to live a good and noble
life than we supposed, and we are conscious of

AND NEVEE FAIL 305
partial or total faUure in some of the best and
highest things. It may be that in the lower
spheres we have succeeded beyond expectations.
Some have acquired wealth and high standing
and public honours and the prizes of inteUectual
power, greater than the most glowing hopes of
youth pictured. In these things we may not have
been disappointed : the reality has outstripped
the dream. But we have all faUen short of our
moral and spiritual ideals. We are not the men
and women that we saw in the prophetic glass of
youth's fair hopes, when the heart was beating with
true purpose ; we are not the Christian men that
we determined to be when Christ caught hold of
us, and we began to run the race as if our hearts
were on fire and our feet had wings. We were
going to do such great things, and rise up as
eagles above the flesh and the world. Alas ! there
have been no eagles' wings ; there has only been
the toUsome climb of heavy and tired feet, with
many a halt and many a downward slip. " We
that are in this tabernacle do groan, being
burdened." It is always a cumbrous labouring
after something far above us, with many a pang
of humiUation because the advance has been slow.
" Not as though I had attained." I may be par
doned, this once, for making a personal reference.
Twenty-five years to-day I preached my first
sermon to the people whom I am addressing
now. It was from the text " We preach not our
selves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves
your servants for Jesus' sake." I announced the
purpose to preach Christ Jesus in aU His breadth,
20

306 THE IDEALS WHICH FAIL
fulness, and beauty, and to hide self behind the
divine message and seek no personal ends in
exalting His name and glory. I think I spoke
modestly then, as became one who was just putting
on the harness. And, if one does not boast then,
stui less likely is he to boast when he is putting
it off. He has never anything, then, but a sense
of ideals striven for and always unrealised. He is
disappointed, not with others, but with himseK.
For, however much a true man may have reason
to complain of others, he always finds far more
reason to be dissatisfied with himself. Through
aU these years there has been a growing im
patience with my own work ; always there has
been the humbling sense of ideals unattained,
of things that might have been better done, and
failure in the things wherein there seemed to
be most success. The hours in which praise
has been most lavish have been the hours in
which self-censure has been most keen. I have
never preached a sermon which has yielded me
satisfaction ; never spoken in my Master's name
without a feeling that I had done Him injustice.
I have tried to preach a great, many-sided, all-
saving, all-majestic, and all-lovely Christ, and
faUen woefully short. I do not know Him myself
yet; I only comprehend him through a glass,
darkly. StiU less have I been able to present
His breadth, and height, and depth to you.
Twenty-five years, and I am only just beginning
to feel my way into the mysteries of His grace
and sweetness, and now my preaching, to you at
least, is finished, over, and it has to be left, as every

AND NEVER FAIL 307
human work must be left, with the cry, " Not that
I have already attained ;' ; and that is what we all
say, no matter what our strivings have been.
Something has been done, a Uttle gained ; but
more not done, and much that might have been
better, and all the greater things are still waiting,
far beyond us, and always unrealised. " Not as
though I were already perfect : but I foUow after."
And in these words the Apostle reminds us —
II. That in every real Christian life the ideal is
not lost or abandoned, it is only deferred. It is
always a divine promise that waits to be fulfilled,
and cannot faU. " I follow after, if that I may ap
prehend that for which also I am apprehended of
Christ Jesus." There is a prophecy in our very
failures ; there is an assurance of better things in
our sharpest disappointments. The very sense of
impatience with ourselves is God's word of hope in
us. We are dissatisfied with everything that we
have done and are, just because His higher things
have been revealed to us, and because we feel that
they are possible. The groan of discontent is the
voice of God's Spirit within us, preparing for the
richer song, and the pains which come with the con
sciousness of imperfection are the growing pains,
through which we reach a diviner stature. A
good man's dissatisfaction with himself and his
life is always the proof and pledge that God has
greater things in store than he has ever tasted
yet. These things point on to the perfect day.
" I follow after." St. Paul never entertains a doubt
concerning the end. The ideal wiU be reached,
though it is now very far off. There are waUs of

308 THE IDEALS WHICH FAIL
disappointment, the groans of the burdened spirit,
and the sigh for the things that have not been
attained ; but through aU that there runs the
melody of triumph, strength, and coming victory.
He is sure that the carnal mind wiU die and the
spiritual mind become supreme. He is sure that,
in the conflict between the body of sin and the
indweUing Christ, the victory wiU incline more
and more to the diviner part, until body, soul, and
spirit shall be presented blameless before Him,
and he shall come into the fulness of the stature of
the man Christ Jesus.
And that is the one thing which separates and
differentiates the Christian soul from the man of
the faithless world. He never lets go the ideal
and the belief in its realisation. The worldly man
says : " I am just what I have made myself or
circumstances have made me, and it is vain to
suppose that there can be any great change for
the better. I had my dreams and ideals once,
but they are gone, done with, dead and buried
all along life's track. No use starting off after
them again ; I found out slowly that they were
impossible, and, as a practical man, abandoned
them " ; but the Christian says, " I follow after," —
always that. " Of course," he says, " I am not the
man I hoped to be. Many a noble purpose and
ideal which I cherished has been defaced and even
trodden down in the hard battle of life ; but I
wiU not believe that those ideals are dead and
buried. I shaU see them again, restored to beauty,
and I shall reach them too, and grasp them in
God's good time. All that I have failed to win

AND NEVER FAIL 309
is stUl held out to me. All the good that I have
striven for, and perhaps missed, is still reserved in
God's great storehouse, and there is better work
before me than I have ever yet accomplished,
some of it in this life, and more in the life beyond ;
and there are clearer visions awaiting me, of aU
truth, and the face of Jesus Christ, than I have
ever yet seen, and there are larger gifts to exercise
and wider spheres of service, and more of the
thoughts and power of Jesus Christ, my Lord;
and life's nobler dreams are not deceptions of the
credulous brain, but blessed realities of the living
God; and the chances of the sons of God are
never exhausted, but are always coming fresh and
illimitable, and every promise will be fulfilled be
yond man's poor reckoning of it ; and by the eternal
love and power of God I shall yet be and do all
that my best desires have wished and sought. ' I
f oUow after, if that I may apprehend that for which
also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.' " So
speaks everyone who has been touched with the
mind of Christ.
And let me remind you and myself that the
only sad and painful thing in a Christian Ufe, the
one unchristian thing, as we may caU it, is just
the dropping of the ideal, the lowering of it, the
practical abandonment of it, and the duU contenting
oneself with the lower things.
You may say it is humiUating to feel that we
have not attained, that we have not fulfilled, any
one of the hopes with which we commenced the
Christian life, that we have fallen short of aU our
best prayers and purposes. Yes, that is humili-

310 THE IDEALS WHICH NEVER FAIL
ating, but that need not suggest discouragement,
still less despair. No, there need never be dis
couragement, with the mercy of God to cover
all failure, and the mighty Spirit of the Master
to give new starts.
The only mournful and really distressing thing
is to lose the ideal — to leave it quite behind, to
despise and forget it, because we no longer believe
in it, to resign ourselves to the thought that
Christ has failed to make of us what He promised,
and must always fail.
The Lord save us from that, for it is the saddest
thing that can come into one's life. The Lord help
us to believe always in the divine things which
are coming, and must come. The Lord help us, in
all those hours when we are most sensible of the
unworthy past, and the things badly done, to find
heart of grace, and hope again in the unlimited
possibilities of His love. And whenever we cry,
" Not as though I had already attained," may there
always be this cheerier onward cry, " But I follow
after."

Printed by Hastll, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 9002 05046 2275

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