j, ^Beary

THE CALLS' OF GOfrK

- REV. A. F. BEARD, D.D.
'A Sermon Preached in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, May
14TH, 1882, under the auspices of the American Board
of Foreign Missions.

But' ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation,
a peculiar people ; that ye should show forth the praises of him who
hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light'. — 1 Peter
ii- 9-  '
, The call of God comes to man, not to men. But it is to
one, that he may be the word of God to another. Hence
discipleship means fellowship, " a striving together for the
faith of the Gospel." It is personal responsibility collected
and concentrated for the sake of better diffusion.
Those to whom the Apostle was immediately speaking
knew, as a personal fact of life, that they had been called of
God. They were here reminded that their combined powers
were to evidence their calls and their convictions to others.
Theywere not only to be in personal harmony with God's
grace and providence, but to have a corporate service in
their fellowship of faith, and as "a chosen generation, ah
holy nation, a peculiar people," their associated forces were
to be felt in the world's life.
It was not altogether a new thought, to them that God
speaks thus to churches, and through them to peoples, as
He .speaks to persons. We cannot doubt that they
knew that God is always speaking to souls, and not to a
few, but to all; and that they who were without God had
come to this sad condition only because they had ceased to
hear, or to be attentive to his calls.
', The emphasis of their own call must at once have taken
their minds to those who were not in the light, but in
darkness, peoples who were not faithful, to receive, or not
tenacious to hold the calls of God.

2.
At all events the lessons to souls, and thus to churches
and to peoples, and the answers to them remain for
us. On the background of them we may see the great
meaning of our own "high calling."
We will look first at the call of God to the people of
Israel. Speaking "at sundry times and in divers manners,"
Jehovah had brought the Jewish people after and through
long disciplines to such an apprehension of God that it was
signally marked among all peoples for its sense of God.
When David the great King left the church and state to
his son, he left them as, one in opulence and in power. His
injunction was : " Now therefore in the sight of Israel and
in the audience of our God keep and seek for all the com
mandments of the Lord. Know thou the God of thy
fathers, serve Him with a perfect heart, and with a willing
mind, for the Lord searcheth all hearts, and understandeth
all the imagination of the thoughts. If thou seek Him, He
will be found of thee, but if thou forsake Him, He will cast
thee off forever."
And Solomon took the kingdom and put himself abreast
the enterprises of the day. By an extensive and profitable
commerce he laid the foundations of immense national
wealth. He gave impulse to intellectual, progress, and
there was achievment of national splendor. All in the
foreground of this corporate life was brilliant. But they
simply sought to expend their outward glory and did not
seek to communicate their faith. * They said they were
called to privileges but not to obligations. They would
care for themselves. Nevertheless behind their interpreta
tion of their call was the God in history. "If thou forsake
Him," said David, " He will cast thee off forever."
The outward prosperity which this people took on was
short lived. Why ? Because they were false to their call.
They were not left in ignorance of what " the command
ments of the Lord " were. Over and over again they had
been taught that the true religion must represent the out
going love of God. It could not be self-contained or selfish.

It must be universal. They sang their Psalms which were
full of this instruction : "God be merciful unto us and
biess us, that thy Way may be known upon earth, Thy
saving health among all nations. O let the nations be
glad and sing for joy, for Thou 3$halt govern the nations
upon the earth. God shall bless us, and all the
ends of the earth shall fear Him." So, in their common
services their voices sang in accord, " Declare His glory
among the heathen and His wonders among all people;
say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth." All this
was in their songs, in their symbols and in their language,
but it was not in their life. " We are called," repeated they,
"to live to .ourselves." Their prophets and teachers
continued to warn them that this was not the separate-
ness to which they were called. They were a chosen peo
ple to receive that they might give, to hold the wheat of
God's truth which they should scatter among the nations,
to be separate for concentration and for the sake of power
in diffusion. They were never called to be separate in
selfishness more than a person is called in his separateness
from sin and sinners, to have no interest that the wicked
ness of the wicked may come to an end. Thus taught
their prophets, " For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace,
and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest until the righteous
ness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation
• thereof as a lamp that burneth. And the Gentiles shall see
Thy righteousness and all kings Thy glory." For this reason
God in His providence by their commerce arid national
power gave them opportunity. He set before them open
doors. Still, they said that their faith was to be confined
to the bounds of their own favored nation. They had an
exclusive right to it. Theywere the heirs of God to selfish
ness, an interpretation of the call of Israel which some
hold to this day. They were called to receive. Hence
within themselves they held their faith. They put their
religious energies and time upon, their ceremonials and
their creeds. They were zealous in saving their doctrines.
In such a case since their faith did not represent truth,

and did misrepresent the yearning, outgoing love of God,
it must become impure and void. of spiritual power. This
at once must tell upon character and life. We may- not be
surprised, therefore, that the blight of God came upon them.
The best things are not good to those who are themselves
false to the good. The Love which would have been their
Saviour became their Judge. " The goodness and severity
of God" are in necessary relationship. "God is love," but
love is " a consuming fire " to those who pervert it. And
when Christ came He found the Jewish people wrapped in
a perverted self-love, calling itself " a chosen generation,"
and " a peculiar people," but reaping the fruit of its dis
obedience to God in the absence of every kind of strength.
That which their prophet foretold had come to pass, " Israel
is ari empty vine, he bringeth forth fruit unto himself."
Christ saw this once strong people an object of pity. " He
was moved with compassion towards them because they,
church and people, were as sheep not having a shepherd,"
a failure both as a church and people. A people thus
broken down is a sight for compassion; this disintegration
and disorganization of a corporate life. But whatever other
causes there may have been in the philosophy of history for
the sorrowful failure of the Jewish church and people, this
general one contains them all. They did not meet their callr
This reason also is sufficient, for life like nature is packed >
through and through with the law that he that " loseth his .
life shall save it." Living to self is out of harmony with
God, and must encounter the rebukes of His omnipotence.
N.or is this a singular and exceptional revelation of God's
sovereign purpose, in the peoples that refused to serve Him.
Alongside of this Jewish life was other life. The splendid
empire of Assyria, with great cities, beautiful arts, the
luxuries of wealth and the pride of power; Egypt, with
twenty centuries of wonderful civilization; Greece, which
began as early as the time of the patriarch Jacob, never
surpassed in mind and ip art, now were all of them in their
contrasts of decay. They thought themselves immortal.
They might well suppose this. They were strong, consoli
dated, capitalized. They had every reason but one for

.5
continued existence; they forfeited their lives in the face
of many reasons, because they lacked the one.
Students of history may discover multitudinous causes for
their decline, but they are all contained in one. It is this:
they denied that God is the supreme factor in human his
tory, and they did not meet His "calls." Theywere untrue
to the light they had. God called them with many voices
and in many ways, to know arid serve Him, to be other than
they were, and to do other than they did. They refused,
they sought self-aggrandizement and self-pleasure. They
were in conflict with God. They died of self.
Let us turn now from these failures. The Apostle was
speaking to those who had these histories behind them.
He was saying to people " scattered throughout Pontus,
Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia," "if so be that ye
have tasted that the Lord is gracious," you are a called
people, " to show forth the praises of Him who hath called
you." What will you do with your call ?
This brings us to the history of the early christian
churches. Whatever else characterized them, they were
one in their missionary spirit. They agreed in this, that
they were called to take to the nations the beautiful cer
tainty of redemption and salvation. They were called to
leaven the hearts and lives of men with Christ's truth, and
•we know how early they were in the capital city of the
world; through and over what hindrances they went, over
what terrors of persecutions, with their blessed truths of life,
and what victories they gained ; how the word of God in
creased, and how God justified His strange ways to them
and gave them Rome. It was the triumph of the missionary
spirit, the spirit of Christ. While that spirit lived it won.
It marched from strength to strength. The world seemed
to belong to Christ, as indeed it does.
But now the years passed and these consecrated souls also
passed. Meanwhile with visible power came a less appre
ciative sense of dependence upon the power invisible. The
sense of weakness which takes hold of almightiness began
to yield to self-confiderice. External advantage swelled

the numbers of professors^ of faith. The churches grew
more splendid and less spiritual. With increase of splendor
and increase of form there was decrease of inward consecra
tion; then a rest in forms; then a formal obedience; then
self-glorifying; then an external religion, and a loss of ag
gressive power. That which .began to save others was busy
deifying itself. A spiritual faith, whose unanswerable argu
ment is its own baptism with the Hply Spirit, was crowded
out by the incoming self, and the forms which were intro
duced to represent faith or to assist it, were made to take
the place of it. Then darkness came in the place of mar
velous light and it was gross darkness ; another failure to
meet God's call. The missionary spirit and church went
down together. The sad results of this failure are not con
cluded. A more signal illustration of" failure may be recalled
in the history of the early christian churches in the
East. The christian faith in the first centuries was strong
in the East. The churches in Palestine, in Egypt, in
Nestoria. in Armenia, in Abyssinia, in Syria and in different
parts of Asia Minor went from victory to victory in showirig
forth the praises of Him who had called them to do this.
You will remember, for example, that when the Council
of Nicea was held, the greatest of councils in the history of
the christian churches as it was the first in time, that of
the three hundred and eighteen bishops attendant upon it,
three hundred and ten of them were from churches in the East.
It is significant also that the celebrated Nicene Creed, as
it wastfirst proposed by Eusebius of Cesarea — who said he
had learned it in his childhood on the plains of Sharon, and
had always taught it — began by a declaration of belief in
the Triune God, and came to its close with the words of
Christ, " Go teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of
the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost!' So
emphatic was the missionary spirit of these early churches.
After this when the Emperor would build a new, unique
and permanent centre of empire upon the pillars of the
christian faith he turned not for his support to the church in

the West, already declining in aggressive missionary power,
but to the East where he looked- for more of it,
He builded wha-t he would have to be not only the
capital of the world but the eternal monument of the power
of Christianity. He spoiled the world to adorn it. He
brought to it imperial patronage. He would put in it
christian ethics and christian consecration. Perhaps no
other city in the world ever had such a chance. The city
uprose in greatness.
, And yet in a little time the churches which by all their
past had hope for perpetuity and increase, declined. They
sank away from strength. Century by century they went '
toward weakness. They lost the secret of life. And the
great city, too, with its external aid of advanced civilization
began to wane, and the vigorous East grew decrepit. What
was the reason ? Certainly these churches had equal
reason for expectant life until the end of things as have the
churches in our fair land. No city in our great republic is
builded on stronger foundations, with a higher purpose or
with a more evident call of God in providence than this
early christian city. No land was ever more assuredly the
land of God's favor than that which held the christians and -
the churches of the East.
Whatever there was of learning in the world the East
more than shared it. There was, e. g., the great University
of Alexandria with its 700,000 volumes, where taught
Euclid the mathematician, Hipparchus the astronomer,
and Aristarchus the critic. Many were the seats of learning.
There was noted Antioch, where the disciples were first
called Christians, and there was Edessa the Athens of
Syria. So in many centres of the East there was all that
scholarship, learning and enlightenment could bestow.
The great city was proud in this kind of pre-eminence. Not
for the lack of outward strength; not for the lack of human
wisdom came decay. The disease was that of the heart.
They somehow lost their desire for souls. They began
to save their doctrines. Their unsurpassed classical educa
tion was a temptation for narrow and fruitless questions on

fine points of religious exegesis and speculative philosophy.
As christian faith grows,, scholastic, it grows cold. It
loosens its grasp. Convictions- give, way to mere opinions.
The love which burns to give itself away, which uplifts souls
into heroic self-denials and sufferings, which finds its life in
rising to God's thought, which counts nothing too dear, if it
may represent Christ, which consumes all lesser good upon
the altar of sacrifice, which makes missionaries and martyrs
and self-denying christians, which finds its ultimate expres
sion in the missionary spirit; all this yielded to scholastic
questionings, to the display of learning, to logical jangles
over all the niceties of controversy, until this poor stuff
was substituted for the life and spirit and methods of Christ.
Hence endless schisms and theologic contentions. Hence
the departure of the thought and feeling that they were
called to carry salvation to the lost. Hence decline in the
spirit of Christ among the people. Hence decline of
character. Hence decline of national strength and security.
So while the name of religion was as prominent as ever and
the defenders of this name were thinking about everything >
except what they were " called " for, the Saracen came
thundering ,at their gates, and crying " God alone is great,
. and we must submit to God "; and the people which had lost,
¦ their strength went under this overwhelming power. . Yet *
up to the day of their destruction they were contending for ,
their orthodoxy in definition and bombarding each other
with controversies; never more orthodox in their own
esteem and never more false to their call to show forth the
praises of Him who called them, than when Islam smote
them down. Why should they not be smitten ? Self-re
nunciation had ceased and self assertion had usurped the
place. They could not but misrepresent Him who came to seek
and to save the lost. The truth was robbed from its throne.
The faith which should have removed mountains was
puttering over syllogisms. The power of man was thought
to be a substitute for the power of God, and the darkness
which professed to be light gave way to' another kind of
darkness.

With sufficient reason, for there is a philosophy in our
Saviour's teaching which the Eastern churches with all their
theological subtlety did not consider. " He that loseth his
life shall save it. He that saveth his life shall lose it."
When one begins to say, " Soul, thou hast much goods laid
up for many years, take thine ease, eat, drink, and live,"
then God's providence has but one comment: " Thou fool !
this night " — and night it is — "thy soul shall be required of
thee ;" and from the hour that one ceases to energize for
others he begins to die for himself. And when a church
fixes its attention upon itself then it has introduced within
the seeds of death.
There are many ways in which God over all rebukes
infidelity to trusts, not only in the natural loss of tone and
decline of spiritual power, but also at the last, through this
in. outward weakness. If the christian faith had continued
in legitimate power, doubtless there would have been
strength in the East to have withstood Islam, but the
religious decline meant every sort of decline. The govern
ment became base and weak, the daily life of the people
corrupt, and both together an easy, prey to the destroyer.
So the Koran supplants the Bible among a people false to
their call, and our missionaries are this day replanting the
seeds of this sacrificial gospel upon the needy soil of a land
.which invited the judgment of God.
Finally, to us to whom the last days have come, these
voices of the past may be a call of God. When light came
to the darkness in the sixteenth century it came not as. a
light to have and to hold. It came as a torch to pass on,
a light to carry to those who were in darkness. So the
leaders of the Reformation recognized the providence of
God. The high priestly prayer of Christ which He prayed
under the stars for all who should believe in His Name,
" As thou hast sent me into the world, even so send I them
into the world," they were sure was offered for them. This
thought took on power, that to be called out of darkness
into light is a call in itself, to carry the light to the darkness.
It was no strange utterance, therefore, when the Pilgrim

10
Fathers declared that their ultimate reason for coming to
these shores was " a great hope of laying some good' founda
tions for propagating the gospel of the kingdom of Christ
in these remote parts of the world." Their plan was a
missionary plan, and in that were founded their churches
and institutions. Their children who will keep the secret
of life must not fail to see that to give is to live and to deny
is to die. If there is any continuous lesson in the chronicles
.of the past it is that our hope of perpetuity as a. christian
people rests in. the measure of our fidelity to this spirit.
A church must be missionary in its life to keep itself pure.
It needs the reactionary influence upon itself. . It needs to
be constantly confirmed in the power of the truth which it
holds. It needs to have victories. It needs to see them.
It needs the inspirations which come under the manifesta
tions of its power over those whom it seeks and saves. It
needs the correction of selfishness, to be kept from termi
nating itself with itself. Otherwise the past must repeat
itself. Speculations and controversies will come to take
the place of the desire and purpose to save the world.
What vigor there is will go into polemics, or hide away
under forms and dogmas. Religion will grow selfish and
worldly, until those who now enjoy the secondary blessings
of a faith which they do not confess, will lose even these,
and we shall prove anew that " from him who hath not shall
be taken away even that which he seemeth to have."
So true is this, that should the millenial state appear and
the churches begin to seek and enjoy the comforts and
consolations of hope with no forth-putting of energies to
increase others in the know-ledge of the Lord, and should
cease self-renunciations and the spirit of missions, the
" falling away '' would come ; and if Heaven itself were to
be a cessation of outspreading and outgoing service for
others it would be false to its name and would no longer
represent God.
It is not my purpose here to sound any false alarms. It
is true that our churches have great reason to rejoice in
their relative usefulness, and to hope that we as a christian

II
people may be stewards of the manifold grace of God
until the world shall be redeemed. At the same time it
would be folly for us to close our ears to history, or our
eyes to the facts which confront us. The cause of God is
not carried forward by an irresistible fate. As men and
nations sow they reap. That which brought failure to
others as hopeful as we are, can bring failure also to us.
We are not indeed expending ourselves wholly upon our
ourselves, but who does not see that'we must be resolute
against the tendency, and who does not see that it were
possible to meet the calls of God to save the world far
more worthily than we do. Let it be so, that the sacri
ficial spirit in our churches is established in many forms of
benevolence and in care of the humanities about us, and
that many take to their hearts the peril of those who are
in darkness in lands of darkness; it remains that the great
body of our church members the country over is represented
as yet by the merest fractions of benevolence as compared
with their call and their power. Distribute what is given
annually by the Protestant world among the unevangelized
and they would each receive what is represented by the
value of one cent, while the problem before us is nothing
less than the redemption of them all from sin and its curses,
Moreover, in this problem, is that of our own life and
health as churches and a people. Both problems are still
in solution.
The doors of the world are opened both for the salvation
of the heathen abroad and of the churches at home. If we
unhappily shall add to the list of failures another people who
did not meet their call, it will not be because we lack warn
ings of duty or teachings of the way of life. It is a sad and
guilty word which we sometimes hear that " we have enough
to do for ourselves," and " the heathen must wait." If it were
-so, that the heathen could wait, we wait at our peril; for then
we exhaust our resources upon ourselves and history comes
with its repetitions of unbelief, sterility' and death.
This may seem an idle fear to some, with our wonderful
land, resources and civilization. We have — they say — a

12
right to continue and all conditions for perpetuity. So had
others as good, and he must be unobservant who does not
see that there are many , explosive materials in our
society; and many evil forces not unready to take possession
when the churches lose their power, their saving power.
Let us also build for ourselves, and cease to be aggressive;
make the forms of our Christianity elegant, and content
ourselves with saving our doctrines, more than with saving
souls, and we can prove as well as others, that the lack
of saving power for others is fatal for ourselves. Not long
would it take our churches to be engrossed in intestine
discords, in the cultivation of theories without practice, in
the elegancies of personal luxury, in most idle speculations
and philosophies, until the divine life should be gone.
We have riot yet met the severest tests of our faith as a
people. Let it never be written of us that we were unequal
to them, and with an open door of life before us did not
enter in. For history is something more than the fact that
one thing follows another, coming and going without
government and without judgment. Humanity is not on a
shoreless sea left to mere chance, steering on but heading
nowhere. Events are pregnant with principles, and there
is One who both governs and judges, and whose decrees
are in all times and in all nations and over all the world,
They are blessed who work together with Him until all the
children of men " shall come in the unity of the faith and
of the knowledge of the Son of God " unto and info the
fullness of His great salvation.

YALE UNIVERSITY L

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