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From the Library of
Rev. Henry H. Washburn
19»3

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

COPY.
ESSAYS FROM AN EDITOR'S DRAWER
ON
RELIGION, LITERATURE, AND LIFE.
THIRD EDITION.
12M0, CLOTH BINDING. PRICE $1.50.

THOMAS WHITTAKER, PUBLISHER,
NEW YORK

fthe Bisfjop ^attoocft lectures for XSS8

The World and the
Kingdom

BY

HUGH MILLER THOMPSON

BISHOP OF MISSISSIPPI

From the Library
OF THE
Rev, Henry H. Washburn

NEW YORK
THOMAS WHITTAKER
2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE
1888

COPYRIGHT, 1888,
By THOMAS WHITTAKER.

RAND AVERY COMPANY, BOSTON,
MADS THIS BOOK.

THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES.

In the summer of the year 1880, George A.
Jarvis of Brooklyn, N.Y., moved by his sense of
the great good which might thereby accrue to
the cause of Christ, and to the Church of which
he was an ever-grateful member, gave to the
General Theological Seminary of the Protestant
Episcopal Church certain securities, exceeding
in value eleven thousand dollars, for the founda
tion and maintenance of a Lectureship in said
seminary. Out of love to a former pastor and enduring
friend, the Right Rev. Benjamin Henry Paddock,
D.D., Bishop of Massachusetts, he named the
foundation " The Bishop Paddock Lecture
ship." The deed of trust declares that, —
"The subjects of the lectures stiall be such as appertain
to the defence of the religion of Jesus Christ, as revealed
5

6 THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES.
in the Holy Bible, and illustrated in the Book of Common
Prayer, against the varying errors of the day, whether
materialistic, rationalistic, or professedly religious, and
also to its defence and confirmation in respect of such
central truths as the Trinity, the Atonement, Justification,
and the Inspiration of the Word of God ; and of such
central facts as the Church's Divine Order and Sacra
ments, her historical Reformation, and her rights and
powers as a pure and national Church. And other sub
jects may be chosen if unanimously approved by the
Board of Appointment as being both timely and also
within the true intent of this Lectureship."
Under the appointment of the board created by
the trust, the Right Rev. Hugh Miller Thompson,
D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Mississippi, delivered the
Lectures for the year 1888,. contained in this
volume.

PREFATORY NOTE.

These Lectures are printed because the conditions
upon which they were prepared and delivered demand
it, and also because the writer hopes they may be
found suggestive, and stimulating (whether of agreeing
or opposing thought is no matter), to those for whom
the Lectures on this Foundation are primarily intended
— students and the younger clergy.
H. M. T.
New York, Lent, 1888.

CONTENTS.

I. The Law of Growth ....
II. The Struggle for the Mastery
III. The Step-Child of Time . . .
IV. The Child in the Manger . .
V. The Seed growing secretly

ii
37 67
93
123

LECTURE I.
THE LAW OF GROWTH.

Then said he, Unto what is the kingdom of God like ? and where-
unto shall I resemble it ?
It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into
his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the
air lodged in the branches of it.
And again he said, Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God?
It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures
of meal, till the whole was leavened. St. Luke xiii. 18-21.

THE WORLD AND THE KINGDOM.

LECTURE I.
THE LAW OF GROWTH.
IF God is to give a revelation of Divine knowl
edge to man, it must be given, being what man
is, under limitations.
First, it must be given in human speech. There
is, therefore, the Divine essence — the revelation ;
and the human clothing of the revelation — human
words. The Divine essence is always the same. The
human expression must necessarily vary. Also,
the human expression may be inadequate, or even
erroneous. The Old Testament revelation was given in
Hebrew words, the New in Greek. The prophet
or the evangelist used his own language, and his
own style in that language, to express the eternal
verities revealed in his spirit by the Holy Ghost.

14 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
The doctrine of a verbal inspiration was never
that of the Church Catholic. It would involve us
in this difficulty, — that, if words be an essential
of the revelation, then the millions upon millions
of Christian men have never read nor heard the
revelation. The great translations — the Sep
tuagint, the Latin Vulgate, Luther's German
Bible, and the noblest translation of them all,
the English version of King James — are, on
that theory, not the revelation of God ; and only
here and there a rare scholar, in all the Christian
centuries, has been able to read the written Word
of God in the original Hebrew or Greek.
We accept this condition, then. We have the
revelation in earthen vessels. The Divine
thoughts are clothed in the speech of men, for
the uses of men. So only does God reach men,
by speaking in their own poor finite speech, as a
mother speaks child-talk to her nursling.
And the human speech is always, perhaps, in
adequate, except to express the infinite love and
tenderness. All human speech is inadequate.
The loftiest words of prophet or psalmist sound
like broken words. They stumble and stagger
and groan, as it were, under the burdens of the
infinite meaning they bear.
Theological controversies have generally been

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 1 5
about the words, the human covering of the
Divine revelation. So have come the bitterness,
the wrath, and the divisions. "The letter kill-
eth, the spirit giveth life." Our Lord drew the
distinction clearly between the Divine essential
of the revelation, and the poor, small, human,
finite words in which of necessity, to reach men,
the revelation must be clothed.
But not only, under the conditions, must a reve
lation be made in human speech, and be capable
of being put into any form of human speech,
existing at the time, or afterwards to exist ; but
it must be made according to the way of human
thinking at the time, and among the people,
when it is given, and be capable of translation
into the way of thinking and the way of looking
at things among people in any age, and of any
race, to the end of time. Else it fails of being
understood. The English language contains, we believe, the
revelation made in Holy Scripture, adequately,
completely. So does the German, the French,
the Spanish. Yet these languages did not exist
when the Holy Scriptures were written. No man
doubts but that any human speech, now existing
or hereafter to arise, will be competent to express
all things necessary to man's salvation.

1 6 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
The language itself may even need conversion
to Christianity, as St. Jerome converted the Latin,
which by nature knew no Christ, no Saviour, and
no repentance. But as Latin was converted, every
tongue may be. All are capable of conversion,
as the men who speak them are.
So the way of thinking, of looking at things,
of considering man and the world, the past and
the future, the beginning and the end, the mean
ing and the purpose, — what we may call philos
ophy, — will be always capable of receiving and
conveying and illustrating the truth of revelation.
This way of thinking, or philosophy, varies as
language does, among different people and in
different ages. It may be as strange and for
eign in some cases as a dead or foreign speech :
nevertheless, the Divine revelation will fit to what
ever truth there is in it, will submit to its meth
ods, walk upon its lines, and find itself in accord
and sympathy with whatever is real, genuine, and
human in it.
At the time when our Lord was on the earth,
there is no question that the way of looking at
things, — the philosophy, so called, — among
thinking and educated people, was a more or
less modified Platonism.
The great Greek had influenced all serious-

THE LAW OF GROWTH. IJ
minded men. I have no fear in saying that the
New Testament may be truthfully called in some
respects Platonic. I have no timid concern to
explain away the fact that St. Paul's anthropology
— his way of looking at man and his nature1 as
three and not two, as body, soul, and spirit — is
distinctly Platonic, as a philosophy. I am not
concerned, either, to explain away the still more
startling fact, that St. John in his Gospel uses a
Platonic word to express an awful Christian mys
tery ; and that the Holy Spirit through him names
the Jewish Jehovah by the Greek and Platonic
word Logos, and lifts it so to heights of which
philosophy never dreamed.
I say I am not afraid nor concerned ; because
with the elder Greek fathers, and, as I believe,
with St. John and St. Paul, I am fain to think that
all wisdom comes from God, all deep, true, rever
ent, lofty thinking rises through the dark to the
light eternal, and that from the seven lamps before
His awful throne faint gleams fall upon all souls
who are humbly trying to grope their way along
those world's altar-stairs
" That slope through darkness up to God."
The truth in human thinking and the truth in
God's revealing must be the same truth. The

1 8 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
eternal Teacher of St. Clement of Alexandria, who
teaches Moses, teaches Socrates also, and is not
only the Logos of St. John, but the Phos, — " the
true Light that lighteth every man who comes
into the world."
One needs not only to remember that theologi
cal controversies have been, I might say largely,
not about the essence — the Divine part — of the
revelation, but about its finite human expression ;
but also, when they have not been about the words,
that they have centred around the philosophy,
" the way of looking at things," that is.
It is no exaggeration to say that half the con
troversies about the deepest mysteries of the faith
have been really controversies between idealism
and sensitism, realism and nominalism, Plato and
Aristotle the masters.
Yet both these find their place, and both have
done theology high service.
As a modern writer of somewhat shallow books
has somewhat dramatically shown, the Christian
Church after many centuries utilized a heathen
philosopher's physical theory to explain the doc
trine of the eucharist, — Aristotle's theory of
substance and accidents, that is, to explain and
justify the new doctrine of transubstantiation in
the twelfth century.

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 1 9
Aristotle's physical theory has met the common
fate of physical theories, and has fallen childish
now ; but the metaphysics, " the way of looking at
things," the philosophy as I call it, is independent
of his physics ; and Platonism and Aristotelianism,
realism and nominalism, have been at the base of
all theological controversies since the fourth cen
tury, and lie at the base of all such now, that have
any thinking or any philosophy at all.
That is, both ways of thinking — any reasonable,
reverent, serious way of considering mortal life at
all — find the revelation capable of talking their
. language and going their way.
Truthful, earnest, human thinking, that is,
strikes an accordant note with the Divine thought
in revelation. Man is made in the image of God ;
and God's high thought, and man's poor small
thought, if it be a true thought, are not at enmity,
but in accord.
Now, the way of thinking in our own time, in
Europe and America, is in some respects a new
way. It has arisen from the study and investigation.
of physical phenomena, which have never been so
enthusiastically pursued as now.
When we examine closely as to actual attain
ment in those studies, we find that, after all, our

20 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
gains nave not been great. The human mind has
driven up at every turn against the profound dark
of the unknown. The advances we have made
have not been in knowing the essence of things,
but in increased skill and facility in handling and
using powers of which we absolutely know nothing
in themselves.
We make the lightning, it is said, run our
errands and light our streets ; but we are as pro
foundly ignorant of what electricity is, as ever.
Our advances and advantages have been gained
for us rather by the practical men who did not
waste their time in studying the science of the
subject, but who set to work at once utilizing their
material, content to let its essence remain un
known. From the locomotive-engine, the telephone and
the telegraph, to the reaping-machine, it is mar
vellously little we owe to the scientific people.
The inventor of the steam-engine did not trouble
himself about the correlation or conservation of
energy, indeed, knew nothing about them under
such names ; and the inventor of the electric
telegraph was content in his ignorance to call
electricity a fluid, use it as he could, and let the
rest go.
The leavening of our daily bread is a thing

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 21
familiar in all kitchens, and has so been for several
thousand years ; but our most learned chemists are
disputing yet over at least three theories of the
process. The unscientific baker happily does not
trouble himself about the science of the subject,
else we should have no rolls for our breakfast.
In a confused and wild way of writing and talk
ing which has become too common, people have
gotten the notion that we have mastered the
secrets of nature, have discovered nearly all things
unknown, and that our scientific men can explain
every thing in nature.
On closer examination we find that we have
discovered amazingly little ; that the great mother
veils her face, and wraps the sombre drapery about
her stately form, and declines to be interviewed
by no matter what scientific committee.
A certain uneasiness, it must be confessed,
existed a while since, under the fancy that our
discoveries in science had become so great that
religion and Almighty God might be found the
superfluous myths of an ignorant past. And so
arose a considerable literature concerned about
the reconciling of religion and science, — a litera
ture, I venture to say, such as our children will
look back upon with little reverence for the wis
dom of their fathers ; a literature where religion

22 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
and science were both at their weakest, and men
were trying to apologize to the temporary theo
ries of an hour, to the finder of a flint arrow-head
or a human skull, for their belief in Almighty
God, and eternal righteousness, and the awful
mystery of human life; a literature only to be
compared with its opposite, — that in which every
experimentalist who had discovered a new microbe
or a new chemical compound felt himself at once
qualified to declare the throne of the universe
vacant, and himself capable of explaining and
accounting for all things seen and unseen.
Such literatures, pitiful and sad in the insin
cerity and abject fear of the one, and in the con
ceit and impertinence of the other, were cast up
like scum and froth upon the surface, in the first
ferment of an ignorant age just entering upon
somewhat larger knowledge, — the bubbles of its
sophomoric vanity. They will be both curious
studies in psychology to the men of the twentieth
century !
But the tide is already on the turn. We find,
after all our boasting, that the world still remains
where it was, and that the old secrets of the eter
nal stars and the gray deeps remain secrets still ;
and our more modest Science folds her hands
before the sphinx, and confesses that she has

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 23
never seen and is now quite sure she never can
see any thing as it is, but only as it seems : her
field is phenomena, not reality. She sees that the
grass is green ; but why it is green, what makes
it green, whether the green is in her eye or in
the grass, what, in fact, green is, all the scientists
in Europe and America are as ignorant about as
their hide-clad ancestors in the time of Csesar.
But while the study of phenomena has never
revealed to us any thing but phenomena, it has
originated a philosophy, a metaphysics, a way of
looking at things, which is peculiar to our time,
and has its influence upon all thinking people.
In plain English, that way is about this : That
things grow; that an oak-tree presupposes an
acorn, a chick an egg, an apple an apple-tree ;
that an effect has a cause ; that things come
regularly and in order ; that beginnings of great
things are . very small things ; that there are
germs for all results ; in fact, that " great oaks
from little acorns grow," according to the old
child rhyme ; that all to-days are the children of
yesterdays ; that you can depend upon things,
therefore ; that law is uniform ; that, as the wise
man said long ago, " There is nothing new under
the sun ; " that times go by turns, and the world
is a world of sowings and of harvests.

24 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
Though the doctrine be announced in sounding
phrase and learned majesty, and call itself devel
opment, evolution, or what not, that is really what
it is in English, — not very wonderful, after all,
nor very formidable, and certainly thoroughly in
accord with revelation up to this point. The
addition made to it, that all this order and rule,
these germs and growths, came by chance, is not
of course Christian ; but also it is not science.
Our scientific people have found this theory
an admirable working hypothesis, at all events.
It is a safe theory to go upon in the study of phe
nomena. One phenomenon is always supposed to
be caused by another. The germ of any thing is
to be supposed, sought for, whether it be the germ
of a world, or the germ in a case of cholera. And
good results may come to men from finding the
germ of cholera, and killing it, or finding the germ
of a newer and better world, and caring for and
fostering it. For we do not want cholera, and we
do want a new and better world.
Now, does revelation find itself at discord with
this philosophy? Or can it express itself and
make itself understood, explain and illustrate
itself, in the language of our modern way of
thinking ? Is it in accord with the spirit of our
time, as it has been with that of other times in

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 2$
which it has given light and leading to the souls
of men ?
It is certainly a very different way of thinking
from that of the last century. We had a brass-
clock world then, wound up some thousands of
years ago, and running by its original momentum
ever since. The Maker occasionally interfered
in the way of what were called special provi
dences, when the- machine got some people into
difficulties, so the religious folk honestly believed
and prayed ; but really the scientific people had
found out so much, as they thought, about what
they were pleased to call the laws of nature, that
after the machine was once started, there did not
seem to science nor to religion either any neces
sity for a God, except to regulate the machine
occasionally. The general idea, I think, was, that
He had gone off, and was taking His ease, well
pleased with His work which He had pronounced
"good," and would not do much in any case, and
generally ought not to be expected to do much,
even for the elect, till the time came for Him to
break the machine all to pieces and burn it up.
And yet men could devoutly read and believe
their Bibles, and find something in them to accord
with even such a poor, shallow, mechanic theory
as this ! We certainly owe it to our scientific

26 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
people, that they have made such a theory of the
world forever impossible among thinking people.
Whether their own theory may not be sent to
keep it company by the scientific people of the
twentieth century, is of no special consequence
to anybody. " Our little systems have their day,
They have their day, and cease to be.''
The verities and realities remain the same.
But we may safely say that if Christian men
could find the formulas of such a theory fit for
their use, and even helpful, as they surely were,
to the steadfastness of their faith and the comfort
of their hope, they now need fear neither the lan
guage nor the formulas of any philosophic theory
whatsoever. Turning to the philosophy, if we may so call it,
of our own time, and its relation to revelation, one
is struck with two facts in the New Testament :
first, the underlying doctrine of the uniformity of
natural and spiritual processes ; and, second, that
development is the law of the spiritual kingdom.
The teaching of our Lord was by parable.
"Without a parable spake he not unto them."
Now, underlying every parable is the doctrine
that the same law holds and the same power

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 2"]
works in the spiritual as in the material. Other
wise there could be no teaching by parable at all.
"Consider the lilies, how they grow." What
point in that, unless the Lord of the lily is the
Lord also of the man, unless the law of lily
growth and care be the law also of human growth
and human care ?
"A sower went forth to sow." He is type of
the Lord Himself. But there is no meaning in
it unless all seed-growth be the same. The law
by which the sparrow lives is the law also by
which the archangel lives. The stars in their
courses are ruled by the same hand that feeds
the ravens. In every parable the Lord assumes
the sameness of the Worker and the sameness
of the law by which He works, in the natural
and in the spiritual both.
You may be perfectly familiar with this line of
thought ; and yet I must emphasize it, because,
in my reading at least, I have not found it in
discussions upon the parables sufficiently dwelt
upon. The whole possibility of the teaching by
parable rests upon the assumption that the law is
the same in the spiritual and the material world ;
that out of the darkness sweeps one small seg
ment of a measureless circle, but that small
segment, understood and measured, will give us

28 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
the magnificent curve of law which encloses the
earth and hell and heaven, and touches the
throne of God.
The Christian man calls it the will of God, the
uniform energy of the unchangeable Lord, who
is present, immanent, creative in all worlds, and
the same in all, so that His working in the lowest
explains His working in the highest, since " in
Him is no variableness, neither shadow of turn-
ing." The scientific man calls it the uniformity of
law, or any name he pleases. The fact is the
same under any name. But surely the revelation
of " Him who changeth not," the Lord " who is
the same yesterday, to-day, and forever," has no
quarrel with a theory which declares that Science
has at last discovered, in her poor way, what that
revelation proclaimed forty centuries ago, and
which, eighteen centuries since, the Lord Jesus
Christ took as the foundation of that most touch
ing, tender, and wonderful of all teaching, — the
teaching by parable, when He spake as never
man spake, and baptized our poor, old, common
place world with the light that belonged to it too,
the one light and the one law of the Father who
is in earth and heaven and hell the same.
But again, in the case of His own kingdom,

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 2g
which He has come to preach and establish, He
makes the law of its growth always a development.
It leads to much that it will be wholesome to
ponder on : that this law should be plainly an
nounced, and lie upon the pages of the New
Testament, and be publicly read and preached
for eighteen centuries as the law of the eternal
and spiritual kingdom ; and that after those cen
turies it should be at last discovered, as a sort
of triumph of human reasoning, to be the law of
the temporal and phenomenal, or what we call
natural, kingdom also !
"The kingdom of heaven cometh not with ob
servation." "First the blade, then the ear, then
the full corn in the ear." "The kingdom of
heaven is like a grain of mustard-seed, which a
man cast into his garden ; and it grew, and waxed
a great tree, and the fowls of the air came and
lodged in the branches." "The kingdom of God
is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in
three measures of meal, till the whole was
leavened." Here is plainly laid down the law of seeds and
germs and cells, of silent growth and unnoticed
working, of development from the little to the
great, of life organizing itself out of- the dark,
of development from the germ.

30 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
And this is declared to be the way and order
of growth, not only of the kingdom of heaven in
its outward organized appearance, but in its
inner spiritual nature, growing in the heart of
a man. "The kingdom of heaven is within you."
But, indeed, need we be surprised? since, going
to the very beginning, we find this : " I will
put enmity between thee and the woman, be
tween thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise
thy head." It was a small germ enough, — such
a promise ; but out of it grew the Jewish Church,
the Law of Moses and the Psalms of David, the
prophecies of Isaiah, the Temple of Solomon,
the Four Gospels, at last all sacraments and
liturgies, all theologies, all churches, and all
missions. A child lies in the feeding-trough of the khan
at Bethlehem. There was another beginning
and another, germ, small enough, humble enough,
in the manger. But the manger held a Roman
Empire converted, the civilization of the rulers
of the coming world, the art of Italy, the law
and literature of Europe, the poems of Shak-
speare, the discovery of America.
The mustard -seed grows, the leaven works
unseen. The whole history, like the whole
teaching, is of germs of life and vital seed devel-

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 3 I
oping, as all things grow in nature, noiselessly,
invisibly, by the will and power of God.
The theology of the Catholic Church, I need
scarcely remind you, has always been in accord
with the Lord's teaching in this matter. The
spiritual life, in her view, has always come from
an implanted germ in the individual soul. Her
position herein has been assailed, and some
times blindly and bitterly; but she has never
faltered in her allegiance to the Master's teach
ing. The germ sown in holy baptism she sowed
in His name in faith and prayer, and looked to
see develop after its kind, "first the blade, then
the ear, then the full corn in the ear." She has
not looked to convert the world by cyclones of
religious fervor, though cyclones have their place,
nor to bring in the kingdom with drum-roll and
trumpet-blare. She has followed and believed in
the power of patient culture, of slow growth, of
watchful care, of hereditary faith, of household
sanctities, of a mother's crooning cradle-hymn,
of a father's prayers, of a faithful pastor's watch
and guard, of catechizing and creed teaching, of
a religion that forms character and grows into
life by the fireside, in the school, in the Church,
among baptized children.
And in all this she has walked with human

32 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
wisdom and science, as with divine. Other the
ories have been noisy, aggressive, condemnatory.
But Wisdom is justified of all her children : and
thoughtful people are fast seeing that here, too,
the growth is by order and law ; that character
comes from seed sown and developed in fitting
seed-beds ; and that the grandest growth, — the
growth of a Christian man, — like the growth of
a lichen, is a growth by' a fixed order which we
can understand and provide for.
Consider, then, with me, what should be our
attitude, as Christian men, toward the way of
thinking of our time.
We must live in our own time. We may mourn
for the "ages of faith," as some have called them,
but it is an unreasonable and weak regret. The
past has gone into the darkness of its dead years,
and taken with it its own difficulties and its own
advantages. Our age is no less a day of God than
any past, and it is clear that a man must do his
work, and fail or triumph, for his own generation.
Whether or no, we are dominated by what the
Germans call the " Zeit-Geist," — the spirit of our
day. He is somewhat of a fantastic oddity who
thinks to live outside it, or to wall it out ; and he
is scarce a believer in a living God if he do not
accept his own century for as good and blessed

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 33
and divine a century as any in which God has
reigned. Men of the day, we are in the tide of the
thoughts of our day. It is where God has placed
us. Let us humbly thank Him therefor, and do
the work that is our own and no man's else.
This, attitude accepts gladly and thankfully all
discoveries, all advance in knowledge, all honest,
helpful, serious thinking which clears difficulties
and brings light. Believing in God, it not only
tolerates but welcomes any fact or .truth of God's,
working reverently, thankfully, and fearlessly.
The truth or fact will find its place at last built
into the temple of God, a carved stone for some
column, or an ashlar for some buttress.
Draw a broad distinction between the revelation,
and our poor human inferences therefrom. Do
not fear lest, when any theory of ours about reli
gion is made untenable, that therefore religion is
henceforth impossible.
There is no threatened destruction of our
divine religion, no breach in its walls, no crumbling
of its towers. Man is a religious animal. What
ever else he is or is not, he is that. However you
may explain his becoming so, that is the fact,
— just as scientific and unquestionable a fact as
the Pacific Ocean, and the Isthmus of Panama.

34 THE LAW OF GROWTH.
It stands facing all theories, with unblenching
eyes. And another fact stands equally a matter of
science, and equally unassailable : that, whereso
ever He has been presented to that instinct in
man, Jesus of Nazareth has been accepted as its
satisfaction and completion, as the incarnate ful
filment of all human ideals, and the Mediator and
Daysman between man and God.
The Catholic faith is a religion of facts, not
of speculations. For Christ is His own religion,
Christ is Christianity. And that faith is corre
lated to other facts, to the world, and to man.
Here lies the heart of the whole ; and a scientific
religion can be built, if it be worth while, upon
this, — Jesus Christ Himself, however, the corner
stone. It is my purpose, in these lectures, to look at
certain matters of religion and the Church of God
in the lights of our own time ; to go with, in some
important respects, and not against, the way of
thinking about us. I think we shall find some
things clearer by that method ; at all events, that
we can use the language of our day reverently and
fearlessly upon the sacred mysteries of our faith,
and think upon the loftiest things in the way men
think upon the lowest. But, O Light and Love

THE LAW OF GROWTH. 35
divine ! without whom no sparrow falls, nor any
star burns out into the dark, how know we what
is lofty and what is lowly, in ourselves, in Thy
worlds, or in Thee ? One thing we know : that
Thou changest not, that Thy Almighty love and
care are over all Thy children, and all the work of
Thy hands, and that Thy works reveal Thee and
praise Thee, whether they be the morning stars
that sing together when a world is born, or an
insect that hums in the noonday beam.
Along the winding shores of the blue ^Egean
went from echoing cliff to cliff the cry one day,
" Great Pan is dead ! " And the Dryads heard it
in the wood, and the Nymphs by the fountains
uttered it, and fled from classic stream and hill
and headland. A religion died.
And later, once again, a cry more mournful
moaned among the rocking pines and along the
desolate fiords of the North, " Balder is dead,
Balder the beautiful ! " And Odin and Thor and
mother Freya faded into the gray mists of their
dim Walhalla forever. A religion died.
Yes, religions have died. But they die before
the face of the white Christ, who died to conquer,
and rose again, and is alive for evermore, King of
kings, and Lord of lords.

LECTURE II.
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful
and fnultiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it. Gen. i. 28.
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between
thy seed and her seed ; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise
his heel. Gen. iii. 15.
And unto Adam He said, . . . Cursed is the ground for thy
sake ; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns
also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee ; and thou shalt eat the
herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till
thou return unto the ground ; for out of it wast thou taken :for dust
thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Gen. iii. 17-19.

LECTURE II.
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
TV /TAN stood an exile at the gate of Eden.
¦*-*¦*- There had been a duty given, and now
also there is a promise. "Replenish the earth,
and subdue it," was the command. " The seed
of the woman shall bruise the head of the ser
pent," is the promise, in the face of the admitted
evil. Here is the revealed starting-point of human
history. Admit the mystery and the dimness of
the making and the fall ; here, at least, is a
beginning which has a rational and scientific
possibility. Man stands facing a wild world, — a world of
briers and thorns, of hostile powers and manifes
tations, a world of frosts and fires, of tempests
and hail, of earthquakes, lightnings, and volca
noes, of evil beasts and evil airs, of pestilent
swamp and reeking morass, of floods and
droughts, — and he is told to master it. It is the
39

40 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
charter by which he holds his place upon it, that
he is subduing it.
And face to face with evil in this guise, — the
evil of apparently lawless power, unsubdued to
rationality and sweet human use, — there comes
to him the warning, " It shall bruise thy heel."
"Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to
thee." There will be sore toil and pain. The
years shall be gloomed with darkness, and their
days and nights thick with human cries and tears.
Thy feet will be wounded on the flints, and thy
hands torn with the thorns. Thou shalt be heavy
burdened and sore smitten all thy years, and die,
and make a passage with thy bleaching bones for
thy children's children to march over. Sickness
and sorrow and death shall be thine, and thou
shalt fail and perish, and in thy day see no sign.
But the end is sure. "Thou shalt bruise his
head." The seed of the woman shall triumph.
Evil, typified by the serpent, even in its outward
manifestation of material unrest and unreason,
shall be trampled down. The mother's son shall
stand at last, bruised, wounded, bleeding, but vic
tor, with the conquering heel upon the serpent's
crest, the world's master, and his own, because
the son of the woman is also the Son of God.
It is the reading of all the myths. We might

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 4 1
expect it so. If, as is most rational to believe,
all myths are shadowy remembrances of a primal
reality, — the common knowledge and faith of the
race before it was scattered, — there is a satisfac
tory explanation. But even if myths be but the
common expression of the common experience of
humanity struggling with its environment, the
sameness is accounted for.
The giants of the frosts and the fires, with
which our Norse forefathers believed the children
of the East — the Aeser — wrestled in sore pain,
and held subdued by force of hourly vigilance and
straining strength, are only other names for the
fiercer and more malignant Rakshasas of India,
against whom men and Indra strive without
ceasing. But, myths apart, it is the fact of history, and
now, at last, the proclamation of science.
From the gray dawn of his birth, as far as we
have history of him in any shape at all, man has
been at spear's point with the world. He has
held his own in it everywhere and always by the
strong hand. Relax his struggle, sleep on his
watch, and he sinks to the savage, half way to
the brute. He tames the world, or the world
imbrutes him. There has never been any other
issue from the north pole to the south, with white

42 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
man or black man. Man, to be a man, must
subdue his environment.
It is the dream of a fantastic and sickly senti
mentality, that man lives well when he lives in
peace with Nature. She has marshes to drain ;
he must drain them, or die of malaria. She has
forests to be felled, burned up, rooted away, or he
starves. She has rivers to wall in, or his harvests
and his house are swept away. She has seas to
wall out, or he must blot brave Holland from ex
istence, and many a fair green land beside. She
has tides and tempestuous seas and the shattering
surge upon the harbor-bar to master, or he is cut
off from his kind. She has mountain-sides into
which he must rend and hammer his way, or he
has no temples for his God and no palaces for his
king. She has caverns to be searched with fire
and iron, or he has no plough for his fields and no
embers upon his hearth. He must delve and
trench and carve, must tear and trample and
burn, wall out and wall in, and be master above
and below, in water, in earth, and in air, or he can
have no London and no New York.
He builds a cathedral because he has subdued.
He gets his dinner because he has subdued, also.
He builds a palace for his learning or his law,
because in so far as he has mastered. He builds

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 43
a cottage in his little field on the same condition.
The Capitol in Washington is a symbol of his
triumph. The log cabin in a Western clearing
attests also the presence of the world-subduer.
Here is a creature, the weakest and tenderest
of all things animal on the face of the earth, with
neither teeth nor claws to rend, nor fur nor
feather to cover him, who can neither fight nor
run nor hide, can neither plunge into the water
nor soar into the air, whom the sun burns and
the cold freezes ; and this creature accepts the
situation, and fights the world in which he lives
tooth and nail for breathing-room and his dinner
to begin with, and then, flushed with his victory,
declines to make peace on any terms save final
abject surrender, heel on head, — tired, wounded,
aching, bleeding, but heel on head, — so only will
he stand when his highest consciousness wakens,
— the savant just as fierce and tireless for new
victories in knowledge, and new grasps upon
Nature's powers, as the hungry savage for the
roots or prey that will supply his wigwam. And
now science, as it is called, comes, and repeats in
its language, as if it were a new discovery of its
own, the old statement of the law of human posi
tion in the world, declared in Genesis, shadowed
dimly in every myth, faint echo of the primal

44 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
experience and the primal command, and told on
every page of human story where there are pages
at all !
"Developing?" Yes, developing since the
dawn ! Always developing, that is the story of
the race. Developing from what? Upon that,
all science is dumb. You may guess, and your
guess may be right or wrong, but it is only a
guess. The known fact is, that whenever man is
found in history, on the book page, on the clay
cylinder, on the hieroglyphic monolith, in the cave
drift, he is always developing, and developing by
fighting his surroundings. Developing to what?
Again science only guesses.
Not a beast of prey, he is always in battle.
His story in Genesis and his story in the Pyra
mids, his story in the Abbeville caves and his
story on the Acropolis of Athens, is the story of
a creature always fighting, always wounded, and
yet always victorious.
It is not a story of uniform victory. There are
repulses and defeats all along the line now and
then. Here and there even a whole wing gives
way and falls to the rear, — a false development
perishes, — but the march is straight on, of the
whole army. Putting aside guesses, fantastic
speculations and dreams of the scientific or other

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 45
imagination, the visible fact is, that, whenever we
deal with facts, man is steadily advancing, steadily
conquering, steadily developing, and more and
more subduing the world.
And mark here, that this development does not
come from any struggle for existence merely. In
man's case it is a struggle for mastery, rather
than a struggle to be. In other cases, the exist
ence secured, the creature is at peace with the
environment. The fish does not fight the sea.
The eagle accepts the air. The tiger is content
with the jungle. Suppose their development, up
to this point, due to struggle with the environ
ment for existence ; having reached it, there is no
effort further.
The strange, unique position of man with refer
ence to his environment is that he declines to
accept it, declines to consider it final ; absolutely
objects to sea and sky and land, to mountain,
valley, or stream, until each has submitted to him
and confesses him master. He refuses to com
promise with the lightning after he has made it
harmless to his roof. He declines to rest content
with Franklin's truce. He insists on collaring it
with iron, and sending it round the world on his
errands, labelled with his name.
His position toward his environment has been

46 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
always that of conscious opposition. We say he
becomes accustomed to the heat, or accustomed to
the cold. In a real sense he does neither. The
Siberian fossil elephant is wool-covered. The
African elephant is hairless. That is, in each
case the environment conquered the animal as far
as such modification. But the Eskimo is quite
as unprotected from cold, as far as his person is
concerned, as is the African. In each case the
man masters the environment. He defends him
self from the cold, and defends himself from the
heat, alike defying both.
But he is modified? Yes, but how much?
Take him in his highest development, and he will
face the Arctic circle one year and equatorial
Africa the next, and you will meet him, un
changed by either, the year after in a New-York
drawing-room. He has beaten the cold, and
beaten the heat, and remains unmodified by
either, — a prosperous, civilized gentleman.
Start at the Gulf, and follow up the great river
to Lake Itasca. Grass and flower, plant and tree,
bird and insect, reptile and quadruped, change as
you go. You leave one form behind, and find
another. The orange of New Orleans disappears
for the pawpaw of Ohio; and the cane-brake of
Louisiana is changed for the cranberry-swamp

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 47
of Wisconsin, for the wild-rice marsh of Minne
sota. The mocking-bird's song is left in the
South, and the loon screams on the blue lakes of
the North. But while all in sky and land and
water has changed, one creature alone has not
changed. The American man is the same in
Louisiana and Minnesota, in Alabama and
Dakota. He declines to change with the chan
ging degrees. He knows no North and no South.
The whole land and the long river are his own :
he has subdued both.
It is not man's effort to come into harmony with
his environment, but to make the environment
come into harmony with him. The farther he
develops, the less is it the question whether he fits
the environment, and the more it is the ques
tion whether the environment fits him. The ratio
of his progress is the ratio of his indifference to
his environment, because it expresses the measure
of his power to make the environment what he
will. The relation of man to the world in which he
lives is that of master, then. It may be in abey
ance for years ; but develop his powers, and that
is the result. He sees no force in nature that he
does not undertake to understand and use. His
instinct is unerring. " I ought to understand that.

48 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
I ought to be able to turn it to account. I am not
able to-day. Some day I shall be." Outside his
power, things are lawless and irrational. They
need to be captured, collared, and branded, and
made to do the bidding of the master. Continent,
island, ocean, all are the same. They need ex
ploring, mapping, investigating, mastering. The
North-west Passage has not been found. But
while men are men, the quest of years will never
be abandoned. Men will not be frighted from it
by the frozen shapes of the pilgrims who have
fallen by the way, nor by the white death that
watches from the ghostly ice-cliffs. The secret of
the pole will be discovered, and the Arctic circle
marked upon our charts some day with no omis
sions of pale crag or shadowy headland.
There is a development, then, of man upon the
earth. And it has an end. The development
results in sovereignty. Nature, if you call her so,
is developing her master. It is unique among de
velopments, but not irrational. The force called
will — personal will: — comes in among the blind
forces, as a special force from the outside at last,
and asserts itself, insisting upon its own pleasure
and its own way. In the highest type of man
there is that sort of imperiousness about it, which
instinctively attacks every other force as hostile,

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 49
until it has brought it to subjection. In fact, it
scarce admits the right of any other force to be,
unless as amenable and obedient to itself.
The revealed idea of the world is that it is an
unfinished world. Pronounced " good," the world
is not absolute, but relative, good for the purpose
of its Maker. And to be good for that purpose, it
must be a developing world, fitted for a developing
master and occupant. It is nowhere represented
as a satisfactory and perfected thing. Man is its
Maker's foreman for completing it, and the first
command is also a commission. Until it is
brought under the control of a personal reason and
will, it is somehow savage and lawless. With
capacities of beneficence and good, these capaci
ties are not developed and made active to a
rational creature, but by the control of a rational
will. I am not disturbed in this view by the fact that
man often misuses the world. It is of the very
essence of his condition as a developing creature,
that he should make mistakes, and even, do great
wrongs ; trials which result in nothing, efforts
which do harm. He develops by his blunders as
by his prudence, grows by his mistakes as by his
wisdom. He can only learn the right way after
trying a dozen wrong ways.

50 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
A complete and perfect world, all of whose
powers were visible, all its laws plain, all its ways,
all its resources palpable, would be a good world
possibly for some imaginable intelligences, but not
a good world for a creature gradually groping
upward and onward toward higher conditions. A
perfect world requires, and is only fit for, a perfect
occupant. Science has arrived at last at the inspired con
ception of an imperfect world, — a world which is
growing, developing, progressing ; the outcome of
ages of toil and wrestle, and agony, and death, but
yet only the germ of the world that is yet to be.
But Science is necessarily dumb as to the
purpose. She only knows what she sees. She
cannot tell us the beginning of this, nor the end.
Indeed, she is compelled in her unhelped thinking
to say that it has no purpose, no beginning, and
no ending.
Yet such is the quality of the human intellect,
that it will not be content. Its demand is for
reasons and meanings, for causes and purposes.
Truer than science, as sometimes presented, it
demands that things shall be accounted for, that
they shall be rational, that there shall be germs
to develop, and an outcome to the development ;
that every thing means something, is connected

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 51
with a series of other things, is one link in a chain
which is endless ; insists on things being reason
able, that is, and therefore reasons about them ; has
an innate compulsion, driving it to ask, " Why are
these things so ? "
It would be just intellectual suicide to content
one's self with labelling and tabulating phetiomena.
The meaning and the purpose of the phenomenon
— what does the thing mean ? what is it for ? —
is the problem of men. The beast just eats the
phenomenon, or drinks it, and thinks no more
about it.
I think, in the pursuit of a meaning for the
questions of the world and man, the meaning
revealed as the historic faith has taught from the
beginning is entirely rational, and ignores or
distorts no fact.
The world is God's. It is an incomplete world,
a world that yet needs ordering and reducing and
humanizing ; a developing world, as science would
phrase it. Phrasing is of no account : we want
the fact, not the phrase. God is working at it yet.
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work."
And such a world is fitted for an imperfect being
who needs ordering and reducing himself, patient
training, slow growing from the deep descent
where the commission finds him, to the lofty

52 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
heights which are declared to be his goal, — a
developing being, you see, as science phrases it
again ; and again I say the phrase is nothing, we
are looking to the fact.
God gives the earth to this creature of His,
because in every condition, no matter how low-
fallen, how lost and degraded, there is that in him
which broadly marks him from every other crea
ture on the earth : he is capable of mastering it.
He has the seal of a Maker upon him, in his
meanest estate. He is in a peculiar sense the son
of the Maker, and in the image of the Maker. He
is on his Father's ground to obey, to command, to
endure ; for he has a will.
His business is to break the earth in to obedi
ence ; to clean the foul things out, and prosper the
pure ; to restrain the lawless — and his judgment
shall decide what is lawless, with no appeal ; to
destroy the savage, to drive out the evil. It is his
to say whether a mountain shall stand, or be cast
into the sea ; whether a river shall flow at its own
will, or be diked in and driven to the sea as he
wills ; whether a forest shall remain, or a corn
field shall stand in its place ; whether the sands of
Suez shall drift at the wind's will, or a river for
his ships shall flow at human will ; whether the
Atlantic and the Pacific shall be walled apart as he

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 53
finds them, or he shall burst the dividing mountain
barriers and make them for his uses one.
Grant a Maker at all, and this is all rational.
This being is the son and heir, the prospective pro
prietor of the estate. The Maker fits it for other
creatures, — that is all reasonable too, — but the
son is the master, he must fit it for himself. He
must be left, too, to decide what other creatures
shall remain his tenants. As he does not hesitate
to uproot a mountain, or turn a river out of its bed,
or clear half a continent of" its forests, so he does
not hesitate to annihilate ten million buffaloes, and
extinguish a whole animal species, because he
needs the room they occupy. The mastership of
the world he lives in is a part of his consciousness.
He will not hesitate to-morrow to turn Sahara into
an inland sea, if he sees any good for himself in
it ; and in doing it he will be restrained by no fear
lest any thing should go wrong in the ocean's tides
or the earth's rainfall, and by no dread lest he
should extinguish a whole race of animals off the
face of the earth.
The insolence of power, one says ? But by him
self he has no power. As an animal he would
perish in one generation. His power rests in this,
that he has mastered certain secrets and powers
of what we call nature, and has turned them

54 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
against herself. This mastery so far is the pledge
of mastery further. He has lost, so far, any dread
of her, has learned that her strongest forces are
controllable by a will. And he has a will. No
other thing alive on earth has. And his will is
imperial, admits no opposition.
In the play of force between man and his en
vironment, both are influenced. So much Science
can tell us, and has hardly ceased standing as
tounded at its own acuteness in observing so
plain and visible a fact.
But whereas the end of the struggle with the
environment in all other animals is peace and con
tent, man's struggle with his environment never
ceases. The bird builds a nest to suit at last, let
us say, after many trials as some tell us ; but when
the perfect fitness is reached, its descendants go
on building exactly the same kind of nest for a
thousand years.
Man builds a palace at mighty labor and enor
mous cost. But no palace was ever built on earth
which satisfied the builder, or which the next
builder did not at once propose to improve. This
is a type of the whole situation. Man has never
yet made nor found an environment to suit him ;
and there is not the slightest scientific indication
that, upon this earth, he ever will. There is a

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 55
vast difference between Windsor Castle and the
royal palace of Dahomey ; and yet so far beyond
them both is the possible ideal in a highly devel
oped intellect and imagination, that the difference
becomes infinitesimal.
But the clash of forces — personal will against
material obstruction — still trains the man, and
still subdues the material ; develops both, as we
may say.
The end is the making of perfect men, ac
cording to revelation. Is there any thing un
scientific in that ? The end, it seems, of all the
struggle for existence, survival of the fittest,
re-action of environment, and the rest, has been
in one case a perfect tiger, in another a perfect
eagle. We admit their perfection after their kind. It
satisfies our conceptions, our sense of the fitness of
things. In its way there can be nothing better.
The end has come for the striped monarch in the
jungle, for the red-eyed monarch of the mountain
summit, —
" Who clasps the crag with crooked hands,
Beneath the sun, in lonely lands."
But man has not attained perfection. As no
work of his has ever yet satisfied his own ideal,

56 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
so no man (One excepted) has ever yet satisfied
himself or other men.
A case of arrested development we can under
stand, and leave it in its ugliness and ineffective
ness. But here development still goes on. Here
still is the passionate protest against imperfection,
and the determined effort to understand the reason
and remove it.
As man protests against his own imperfection,
so he protests against the world's. He is wrestling
with both. He never saw a field that might not
be fairer, a lake that might not be a clearer azure,
a sunset that might not flame in more magnificence
of purple and golden splendor, nor a sunrise whose
spires of gleaming fire might not burn with a
greater glory of the dawn. He is the world's
critic, as he is his own, and pronounces no work
of either perfect.
Who is this daring being who stands beneath
the infinite blue of the star-sown spaces, on the
green graves where his fathers' bones are bleach
ing into dust again, child of an hour, soon to lay
his own beside them, and arraigns himself, his race,
its sages, its heroes and its demigods, his fathers
for all the ages, as imperfect, failures, abortions
of a splendid possibility, rubbishy attempts at
what man ought to be in his conception ; and who

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. S7
arraigns the world he stands on equally, finds fault
with its days and nights and the procession of its
years, criticises its sunlight and its starlight, the
flow of its rivers, the roar of its cataracts, and the
sweep of its seas ? criticises all in
" The vision and the faculty divine ; "
The light that never was on sea or land."
Is man an exile ? That is the declaration of
revelation, and it certainly accounts for what we
see. The vision of other worlds is about him,
across his dreams comes the splendor that sleeps
upon the hills of Paradise. He is a prince, dis
crowned and wandering, but a prince still, royal
though in peasant's guise; and no wonder the
dim memory of the palaces and the halls raises a
standard impossible when he would garnish the
hut of a peasant, or content himself with the
beauty of the clodded glebe. There can be no
end to his toil until the world is made again in
the image of his home.
I confess I can see no rational way of account
ing for this position of man, except the revealed
way. There has been no theory drawn from
natural knowledge which at all fills the require
ment, except it be in the conceit of the maker.
No generalization of imperfections makes a per-

58 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
feet. Nothing that man has known by the senses
can have created the ideal before which all sensa
tions are poor and mean and pale.
The principle of heredity might give us some
scientific help. These visions, glimpses, dreams
of a perfect world, are they the faint memories of
ancestral condition, as the biologists tell us still
remain in creatures whose customs and habitat
have long since changed? The answer of reve
lation is plain. Whatever one may make of
Paradise and the Fall, it is clearly the story of
an ancestry in other conditions and another envi
ronment. At all events, it is quite impossible,
I think, to get a scientific explanation of man's
peculiar attitude in any other way. And I think,
if the turning-about of the domestic dog two or
three times before he lies down be the remains of
and the evidence for the ancestral condition,
when wild dogs turned thus to break down the
grass for a bed, it is not unscientific to hold that
man's peculiar attitude toward the world, and his
peculiar manner of dealing with it, may be a
reminiscence of an ancestral condition when he
was consciously and knowingly in accord with his
environment, because he was God's vicegerent,
and everywhere the master in a world that obeyed
him.

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 59
By the light of revelation upon the case, he is
struggling in no blind wrestle. There is a pur
pose ahead, and it is definite. Revelation de
clares it to be the recovery of a lost estate. His
perfection has had its type visible upon the earth.
Perfect humanity is not a dream. A perfect
world is not a dream. By the confession of ene
mies and friends alike, one Man stands out from
the historic page perfect, flawless. " Which of
you convinceth me of sin ? " That challenge
flashed out into the face of man has never been
accepted. In Jesus Christ, God sees His ideal of human
nature. Such it was meant to be, such was His
purpose in the making of it, and such it can be
again. Because it can be such, God endures it.
Otherwise one sees not how it escapes being the
most absurd and inconsequential of all things ex
isting. There in the Four Gospels is the story of
a real Man, His words and His acts ; and the rev
elation declares that such a pattern is attainable ;
and the whole purpose of the world, and its devel
opment of man, and his development, the end of
all the centuries of stress and strain, of toil and
endeavor, is to bring man in the individual, and in
the mass, nearer to that likeness.
And this Man must be definitely set outside the

60 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
law of development, as distinct, exceptional, and
unique. To say nothing else, the law requires
that Christianity be a growth like all else, and
improve and differentiate in growing. But the
only perfect Christian was Jesus Christ Himself.
Eighteen centuries of Christianity has brought
forth no Christian to be named with the Founder.
Its perfection is the germ ; and all development
is to get back to the germ again. "I am Alpha,"
but also " Omega," — the First and the Last, the
beginning and the ending.
This Man, no development Himself, out of the
ordinary stream of earthly causation entirely,
claims to be the Son of God, and therefore, in
the only utterly perfect sense, the Son of man.
His life is the genuine human life ; His posi
tion, the genuine human position ; His attitude
towards the world, the perfect attitude of perfect
men.. It is never to be forgotten, that the Chris
tian definition of humanity is Christ Himself,
because He is God's definition.
Now, what was His attitude toward the world,
— toward His environment? He was absolute
Master and Lord of it !
"The winds and the sea obey Him." "Peace,
be still ! " The water is as firm under His feet as
the land. He walks upon the sea. As the earth

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 6l
yields bread to other men by toil, she yielded Him
food for the five thousand at a wish. Leprosy
vanishes at his word. Disease disappears in his
presence. The blind see, and the deaf man
hears, and the lame walks. Death is at His com
mand, and answers to the Master. Everywhere
Nature and all her forces are His obedient ser
vants. He is in all places sovereign. His will
asserts itself, and Nature obeys. It is a perfect
human will, and omnipotent over all things,
because, being a perfect human will, it is one with
the Divine.
And on this matter of the will, observe, He not
only asserts His Own, He appeals constantly to
others to assert theirs. He makes will the power
imperial. He demands faith for the curing, —
that is, in the final analysis, the accord of the
other's will with His own, and the belief in will.
" Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me
clean." " I will ! be thou clean."
It will scarcely meet the case here, to deny
these things which we call miracles. If the re
vealed theory be true, they are simply normal and
natural to the Man who is the perfect man. That
is, after all, the conception of them in the New
Testament. They are revelations of what is pos
sible, what is even necessary, when men are in
their true relations.

62 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
These things the sons of God do, so the one
true Son showed by doing them. This way the
sons of God live, so He showed by living.
" Greater works than these shall ye do," was His
own word.
That men could have conceived such an ideal,
supposing the miracles inventions of men, is a
harder thing to explain than the admission of
their truth. Is it possible to conceive where they
got this idea of what a perfect man ought to do
and ought to say, and how such an one would
stand toward Nature ? For, mark, it is not merely
wonder-works and strange manifestations : these
have been imagined, and may be again. It is
the whole situation, — the works and their sur
roundings, their moral character; and His who
does them. They are a part of the whole concep
tion. They belong to the character; and I hesi
tate not to assert, with thousands of thoughtful
men, that for the men of his day, or indeed any
day, to have imagined and wrought out the con
ception of Jesus Christ, would have been a won
der more unexplainable, more bewildering, than
any miracle or all the miracles recorded in Old
Testament or New.
Observe here that I am not dwelling upon the
moral so much now, but rather upon the physical

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 6$
side of man's mastery of the world. That mas
tery has been too often looked upon as a mere
blind struggle of forces ; and in the explanations
given of it, or the non-explanations, from the
agnostic or material side, that is all it is, and
the end is of no consequence in any case.
We are told that the time is coming when the
poor earth shall be exhausted of all force, and
swing cold and frozen in the blackness of icy
space ; sun, moon, and stars all gone dead about
it. An ingenious gentleman has explained that
cheerful theory as the established "scientific"
one, in a neat little book which is quite seriously
intended. The factors of a Maker, and a tenant in the
Maker's likeness, — so much so that he is taught
to call the Maker his Father, — the factors of
sense and will, eliminated out of the whole affair,
such an end is perhaps natural enough, and at all
events is just as good an end as a stupid affair of
the sort deserves. Indeed, one wonders rather
that it has, being without any sense, kept from
going to some sort of smash so long.
It is a relief to see, however, the common-
sense way in which men that are not scientific
go right on beautifying, bettering, civilizing the
world, making their homes upon it, finding daily

64 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
new riches in it, mastering it continually to
sweeter, fairer uses, — doing just what the Maker
told them to do with it from the first, in simple
confidence in God and in themselves.
For the Christian faith gives us the future, as
it does the present. In the prayer, " Our Father
which art in Heaven," past, present, and future
meet in one eternal Now.
Duty where a man is, the duty at his feet, —
that is for man. To aid the doing of the duty, to
guard the doer, to bless the thing done, and roll
out the future in its order, — this is God's.
What catastrophe may be signified in the awful
words of St. Peter, the Church has not decided,
and no man knows. But that there is among all
the stars that roll, and all the suns that shine,
some special grace and love for the little world
whose bread the Lord ate, whose water He
drank, whose air He breathed, which He baptized
with the sweat-drops of Gethsemane and the
blood and water of Calvary, is a conviction inevi
table to the Christian. Christ, in some sense,
redeemed the earth itself.
So it is a duty, as one of our scientists under
takes to tell us, — leaving his "science" and turn
ing preacher for the time, — it is our duty "to
make some small spot upon the earth better and

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY. 65
brighter." But for this duty we Christians can
give a sanction: "science" can give none, —
science, which tells us that all is upon its road
into icy blackness and the perfect equilibrium of
eternal death.
It is our duty, because the earth is our Father's,
and He has given it to the children of men, His
children; because we are His tenants upon it,
and responsible ; because His eternal Son lived
our life upon it, died, was buried upon it, and rose
from it ; because it is a ransomed earth, once
trodden by the feet of God.
Therefore it is not mere caprice, but duty, that
we toil to civilize it, to make it rational, human,
healthful, kindly, fair, and bountiful. And we do
our daily work under God's blessing, doing it
manfully, dutifully. He shall bring it to a right,
reasonable, and good end.
And some day we shall see that mortal life is
indeed a struggle, a sore wrestle with laboring
lungs and throbbing veins, and straining muscles
and aching brain. But it is not a fight of wolves
or jackals for carrion, that the greediest and the
strongest may survive. It is God's battle, and
man's, a grand fight of knights and brothers and
gentlemen, under the eternal Man our Brother
and our King, shoulder to shoulder, against all

66 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY.
that is foul and false and base and bad, because
these are our Father's enemies and the world's
enemies as they are our own, and have no busi
ness here, in the final idea, upon God's green
world, and under the eyes and hands of the chil
dren of God and the soldiers of our Lord Jesus
Christ.

LECTURE III.
THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are 7iot worthy
to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.
For the earnest expectation of the creation x waileth for the mani
festation of the sons of God. For the creation was made subject to
vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the
same in hope. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from
the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of
God. Rom. viii. 18-21.
1 Revised Version.

LECTURE III.
THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
OUR battle with the material world, which
God put us upon the earth to fight, goes
bravely on, these days, they tell us. There is
loud boasting, in some quarters, of our success.
We have found out, it is said, so many secrets, we
have mastered so many resources, that we may
consider ourselves at last certain of the victory,
and may even claim the estate for our own, and
refuse to recognize the Landlord !
And this conceit, natural enough under the
circumstances, has made us arrogant and pre
sumptuous, as if we possessed all knowledge and
could answer all doubts, and get on very well
without a God or a revelation of His will.
This also, an intellectual effervescence of the
time, is not to be wondered at ; nor, surely, should
we wonder that in some quarters there should
be a feeling of fear and distrust, as if faith were
endangered by material knowledge, and men
69

yO THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
were about to be left lost children on the shore
of an infinite black deep, from whence can come
no answer to their cries but the moan of winds
and the sullen plunging of desolate seas.
There are voices prompt to say that this is the
position into which we are forced by science.
We must be content to consider ourselves prod
ucts of the earth we are mastering, beginning
with it, ending with it, — not sons of God and
heirs of the infinite, but temporary products of
an hour, growths of the dust, to return again to
the dust without hope.
Now, granting freely our increased knowledge,
and being thankful therefor, one asks, first of all,
Wherein has it profited ? Are we nearer than
were our fathers to reading the riddle of exist
ence ? Have we solved a single one of the origi
nal questions that are vital to humanity ? Have
we made life one whit more worth the living?
We have made some beginnings toward the
great triumph of reason and will over the brutal
stupidity of things without mind. Let the boast
ers, for the present, make the most of our small
attainments. To me they are mainly valuable as
an earnest of the vaster knowledge coming, and
the vaster power. But is human life happier ?
Have men become more content ?

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. "J\
Because we travel by rail and not by stage
coach, have our messages sent by electricity and
not on horseback, our clothes stitched by machines
and not by hand, oleomargarine on our breakfast-
tables instead of butter, and instead of sugar
glucose, are we so much wiser and better than
our fathers ?
How many Chicagos are the equivalent of one
Athens ? How many millionnaire manufacturers
of lard from cotton-seed go to the making of one
Plato ? How many glucose-factories equal one
Parthenon ? Would you swap " Macbeth " or
"King Lear" for the longest railroad in the
United States ? or " Paradise Lost " for all the
pork ever packed, or all the lard ever adulterated ?
George Washington never rode on a railroad, nor
sent a message by telegraph, and sewing-machines
and'lucifer matches were alike unknown at Mount
Vernon. It does not occur to any one that we
have much improved upon him in the way of
Presidents of the United States !
It is not knowledge, nor the advantages won
from Nature, that much affect man in what makes
him man. His life, the heart and reality of him,
are inside, and distinct from his circumstances.
The things nearest him, the essentials of his posi
tion, his character, and his hope, are never touched

72 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
by any power or any knowledge won from matter.
The primal questions of humanity are here yet,
and before them science is dumb.
It is idle to tell us they are insoluble, that our
time is wasted in the asking; for men will just
keep on asking them in the teeth of all " science."
They will not down at any man's bidding. There
is nothing to charm them into silence in any
knowledge of matter and its ways.
Pain, sorrow, heart-break, the pit dug across
every man's road, the skeleton that keeps the
keys, right, wrong, sin and its penalties, the dim
hereafter in which all men instinctively believe,
— these things are with us, and these things will
stay. They are as real as the Alps. They belong to
ignorant people and wise people, to the savage
and the civilized. They are persistent facts of
human nature.
A genuine science dare not ignore them. It
must find a place for them in any theory, —
must at least try to account for their being, though
utterly helpless to explain them.
For there is but one thing unchangeable on the
earth, as far as we know, — the human soul. All
else is phenomenon. The waters wear away the
stones, the mountains crumble downward to the

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 73
plain, the rocks decay and fall; but the soul of
man changes not. Across six thousand years he
tells us the same story when he has had voice
at all.
And his profoundest utterance has never been
for food or drink, for clothes or shelter. His cry
to the stars above him and the abysses below,
across the wastes of an empty land and over the
sullen moaning of far-plunging seas, has been to
the invisible, the unknowable, the awful powers
that lie above him and beneath him. " How am
I connected with them ? for I am connected. It
is idle to talk to me of the things about me as if
they were all ; for they are not mine, nor am I of
their family. I can walk no road that does not
lead me at least to the awfulness of the un
known, and that unknown holds the things that
I must meet and deal with."
Why, the very men that tell us there is no
sense in wasting our time on things invisible, for
we can know nothing about them, are driven
themselves, out of all experience, out of all knowl
edge, out of all fact of the senses, to found their
whole present theory of the universe upon an
invisible and unknowable atom, — a pure concep
tion of the human intellect.'
Look upon man's position upon the earth among

74 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
all living things, and consider. He is the step
child of Nature.
She cares for every thing else that lives. She
declines to care for man. She spreads a table
for the tiger in the jungle, for the buffalo on
the prairie, for the dragon-fly above the summer
brook. She clothes the crawling worm, and the
painted butterfly, alike the white monster of the
northern seas, and the jewelled bird in southern
forests. Food, covering, shelter, are provided for beast
and insect, for fowl of the air, and fish of the sea.
Man is turned out helpless and bare, to scorch or
freeze, to be lashed by the rain, pelted by the
hail, burned by the pitiless sun. Material Nature
faces him as a foe. He lives by fighting her.
He scars her face with his furrows to make her
yield him bread ; he tears open her bowels to find
the tools to master her, the warmth for his hearth
and the power for his engines ; he ransacks her
hills and fells her forests to build his home ; he
drains her marshes, dikes out her seas, walls in
her rivers, to make his dwelling with her possible.
And everywhere she resists, and turns a cold,
mocking, cruel face upon him, till he conquers her.
Every new land he settles fights him with strange
diseases, kills him with strange deaths. His

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 75
march is over the graves of a fallen vanguard.
Malaria stands guard at all the gates of the
gardens of the Hesperides, and claims the fore
most. " Thorns also and thistles shall the earth
bring forth to thee." It is the law of the case
for man. He holds his place by the strong hand.
The crown of his empire over the material is a
crown of thorns, and his sceptre is a hammer of
iron. All tribute is wrested by sheer force of
blows, by ringing hammer and shattering sledge.
And the higher he rises, the more he becomes
manlike, the more bitter is the toil, the fiercer the
struggle. Where Nature is kindest to him, the
beast attains his perfection. Where Nature is
kindest to man, man sinks the lowest. She is in
her caresses a Delilah to the Samson her lord.
She shears his locks, and gives him over to the
Philistines, to grind in their mill, — blind.
But marked as this difference is between man
and the animal in their relation to this world, it is
not the only difference, nor the greatest.
Nature comes into accord with all other living
things. She remains at discord with man. Bird,
beast, and insect lie close and lovingly in the arms
of the great mother. They are happy. The joy
of the bird on the bough, of the deer on the
prairie, of the fish leaping through the flashing

J-6 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
foam, — the joy of mere living, — fills earth and sky
and sea. Who has heard the mocking-bird in a
moonlit night in Mississippi, and has not had born
in him the sudden revelation of the bird's joy in
mere living? Acres of air quiver with the ecstasy
of his notes. The little creature shivers, one is
conscious, in every fibre with the gladness of its
own song. Its song and itself are a part of the
rich harmony of the summer night, like the flood
ing moonlight, the snowy drifts of the magnolia-
blooms, and the musky perfume of the jessamine.
But summer moonlight, bird's song, perfume
and shimmer of lovely half-tropic woodlands —
Ah! yonder rises the roof built by him who owns
the forest and the green slopes of flowery mead
ows ; and beneath its shelter human hearts are
breaking, and human souls crying out into the
night. Sorrow, bitter agony, wringing of empty
hands, appeals to the dumb sky, from the nest
the lord of all this beauty has built to shelter the
treasures of his life.
And Nature sheds no tear for the anguish of
the man. She is deaf and blind to the broken
cries of the one creature whom she does not
understand. She weeps her night dews in bless
ing on humble grass-blade and towering oak
bough. She drops no balm into the parched and

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. JJ
tortured soul of man, bending over the coffin of
his first-born.
There is a blind wrestling in human nature with
its environment. Its struggle is not merely a
struggle for existence, but a struggle to be
happy in that existence ; in which struggle it
fails, and fails in precise proportion to its culti
vation and its development, to the perfection of
its manhood.
It cannot wring happiness out of its surround
ings. The attempt to do so is an instinct of the
animal nature, which experience and reason de
clare vain.
Put an ox in a fat pasture beside a clear stream,
and the ox is as happy as an ox can be. The
hungry tiger, with smoking jaws tearing the
slaughtered buffalo, is happy to the utmost limit
of tiger-nature. But it is a commonplace of
human experience, that a man in a palace is no
happier than a man in a hut. Neither at the
banquets of Lucullus, nor in the Golden House
of Nero, does man find content. No people ever
gathered the spoils of the world to such degree,
none had its resources of luxury, art, beauty, and
refinement at such command, none rode upon the
heights of time in guise so sublime, none were
lords so irresponsible over the world and its

78 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
resources, as the Roman patricians of the later
republic and the earlier empire.
Mr. Arnold has painted, with a few strong
strokes, the despair and disgust of the masters of
the world. " In his cool hall, with haggard eyes,
The Roman noble lay ;
Then rose and drove, in furious wise,
Along the Appian Way.
He made a feast, drank fierce and fast,
And crowned his head with flowers;
No easier and no swifter passed
The impracticable hours."
One's thought comes to our own time, where
there is a wiser and a better grasp of the place
of lordship and command, and goes over sea to
night, where the heir of an empire lies dying, and
where with darkened heart the daughter of a hun
dred kings has been for weary months waiting the
messenger whom no armed guards can challenge
and no palace-gates shut out, to summon the
light of her life, the husband of her youth, from
her love and a great people's, and to drape her
soul in the mantle of a lifelong sorrow, and put
out the lights in imperial halls, and quench the
house-fires in palaces.

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 79
Nay, there is a hunger in the heart of man
which refuses to be satisfied. We advise content,
but man declines contentment. Never satisfied
with getting, never pleased with to-day, this
strange denizen of the world is driven on, rest
less, impatient, protesting, under a divine dis
content which refuses to be satisfied.
The moralists tell him he ought to be content.
The preachers preach that he ought to be con
tent. Some of us think, if we were in other
men's places we would be content, and wonder
that these others are not.
But why quarrel with a fact of life ? Why not
take the fact, rather, and see its meaning ? For,
like every fact, it has a meaning, if we can find it.
Why blame a man for not being content with a
million ? It is enough, you say. Yes, but enough
for what? If a man has found how to make a
million honestly, why should he not use his knowl
edge, and go on and make another million ? What
compulsion upon him to be satisfied with a million,
any more than with one hundred thousand or ten
thousand? If it be that he has enough to live
upon, the answer is plain. To many a man, ten
thousand or even five thousand would be sufficient,
as he would use it to supply all his wants.
But it is not a question of supplying wants. It

80 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME
is a question of the human constitution. No man
ever yet was satisfied with getting. Give him
the United States for an estate, and he would
want Alaska for a summer residence. Give him
the whole earth, and he would want the moon for
an ice-house. He is never content with getting
money, or what money represents. He is equally
never content with getting power, fame, or knowl
edge. He is insatiable. Why quarrel with him ?
Why preach threadbare moralities at him ? Every
acquisition is but the vantage for a new one in
wealth, honor, or knowledge ; and every success in
any only reveals the vastness which still remains
unwon. The richest man living has gathered but
a poor fragment of the earth's possible wealth ;
the wisest man, a poor lichen or pebble of its
possible wisdom ; and the most famous man, but a
whisper of its fame. Each sees, as others do not
see, some vision of the dim realms unwon.
A wise man, many centuries ago, who had at
tained in largest measure all that men desire, who
had tried in all ways known to men to reach con
tent and happiness on the earth, and who wrote
" MaTaiOTT}-; /j.a.Ta.LOTrJT(j}v — Travra /xaraiorr;?," as the Sum
of all, over crown and palace and human knowl
edge and human fame, — gave his solution : " God
hath set eternity (the world) in their heart."

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 8 1
For here is this strange fact, that a creature,
to the outward view and by the outward theory
a product of the world like all the rest, should live
his life in a perpetual conflict with the forces
which produced him, and in a perpetual protest
against the world and its gifts.
The point I emphasize is not that he struggles
merely. It may be said, all other animals do
that in a way, — the struggle of existence, they
call it. But the peculiarity in the human case
is, that Nature never gives him success in his
struggle. He is always winning, but always
defeated. He blasts his way into the earth's treasure-
stores. He drags them forth, and is not content.
He sounds her deepest seas, and brings their
drowned riches to adorn his crown, and is not
content. He masters her powers, fetters her
lightning, chains her stored sunlight to his car.
He finds the hiding-places of her strength, and
makes it his own, and fights Nature with her own
arms. He builds to defy her tempests. He
mocks, in his chambers of comfort, at her bitterest
cold. He drives his ship into the teeth of her
hurricanes, sweeps the whirlpools of her roaring
seas, and carries the harvest of his victories to
every haven. He lords it over matter now right

82 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
royally, and with a sceptre which gives pledge
over vaster fields.
And the point is, that all these victories are
barren, as far as his earthly life goes. His rela
tion to Nature is one utterly alone. He protests
that all is fruitless, though he rises for the fight
to-morrow. He is led by illusions, and toils for
phantoms. For all past success has not made
human life one whit more in accord or content
with its environment. It is all vanity and vexa
tion still, and we can give no promise that it
ever will be otherwise. The entire discovery of
Nature's secrets, the entire mastery of her powers,
would leave, we are bound to believe from all
experience and deduction, man just as restless, as
full of sorrow and of care, as ever.
We are compelled by reason and common-sense
to find a place in any theory of life for this fact.
We find it in this, as it seems to me : that man
is under process of development ; that, such pro
cess being temporary, it is impossible it should
ever bring content ; that while the perfection of
every other living creature after its kind may be
reached by its development upon this earth, man
does not reach his, is not meant to reach it, and.
is forever driven onwards by necessity, or lured
onwards by illusions, until when the earthly end

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 83
comes he is still unsatisfied and incomplete.
And we are driven, as it were, by our innate
sense of the fitness of things, to declare that this
temporary discipline is only a preparation for a
development to come.
His development in that which makes his per
fection as a man is not physical. Strength, swift
ness, mere physical power in any direction, is not
advance for man. At some loss of these he wins
his road. His heroes are not physical giants,
his world-conquerors and kings of men have not
been marked for animal power. It is down
among the savages that we find leaders chosen for
their power of arm. The higher man rises, the
more victorious he becomes as man, the less mere
thews and sinews count, — the more will stead
fastness, moral courage, high sense of rectitude
and honor, count. The perfection of his breeding
lies on no parallel line with that of ox-breeding or
swine-breeding. His development is not upon physical lines at
all. And he closes his life with a development
incomplete, and which the environment about him
so far is quite incapable of helping farther.
For the ideal of a perfect horse, which we hold
in thought, there are all the elements of realization
complete in this world. The means are all here.

84 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
For the development of a perfect man, the
means are just as evidently not here. No man
ever yet lived, save One, who other men do not
plainly see was poorly developed and incomplete,
measured by our ideal ; wanting in intellect, and
wanting in moral power, — the development spe
cial and peculiar to man.
What can we say, save that the development
is only begun here ? This unique being, pro
testing and warring at every step with his envi
ronment, is led on step by step by the promises of
a morrow which never comes, — is driven on step
by step, by a relentless destiny, to the end.
The fable of the Wandering Jew is a parable of
human life. Still incomplete, and knowing him
self incomplete, only the beginning of what he
might be, — the germ only of a possible manhood,
— he comes to the door that opens out into the
dark. He comes under protest. In every age
and in every condition, he makes that protest.
He is conscious that he is incomplete ; his yearn
ing for immortality, which some explain as only
an egoistic conceit, is the declaration of his sense
of incompleteness, — the common prophecy, in
every germ, of its future.
Shall we stop with the grave and the burial, —
"dust to dust," and so the end? It is dust to

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 85
dust, and ashes to ashes. The Church of God has
chanted the words over every coffin. So far, she
and agnostic science sing the same anthem. The
accord is perfect. But Science turns dumb in
this crisis, as she does in so many others.
While the tears fall, and the sobs relieve the
burdened hearts around the grave, and the clods
drop on the coffin, she might suggest the advan
tages of cremation, and so cheer the mourners ;
but I am not aware of any thing else she could
say, or any thing else she pretends to say.
She has been dealing with an animal, in her
blind persistency against facts which have chal
lenged her at every turn. She has gotten her
animal buried ; and there is positively nothing
more for her to say, except to stare round upon
the mourners with her big owl-eyes, and deliver
a lecture on the best way to dispose of the re
mains ! Exceedingly comforting to the mourners,
you say ? Well, you see, Science takes no account
of mourners. That these hearts are breaking,
and these souls are clothed in darkness for all
their days on earth, is not within the scope of
" Science." It is her business to find out the
number of inches an Alpine glacier moves in a
year, exactly, or the number of vibrations a mole
cule of protoplasm makes each minute in the

86 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
spike of a nettle ! Those tremendous facts, and
not human grief nor human heart-break, are the
important things for the study of mankind !
For, poor thing, she is very cowardly, very
easily scared.
What has become of the man ? The dust is not
the man. The ashes are not the man. We bury
these, or burn these, or sink them in the sea.
What matter ? But where is the man gone, —
the brother, the father, the son, the husband ?
Where is the intellect, the force of thought, the
will to master, the rapid vision to see, the clear
reason to announce, the judgment to guide and
control, the truth, the love, the tenderness, the
whole power that made the man we knew and
loved and mourn ?
Why cannot even Science venture on the road
of common-sense so far as to say, according to
her own doctrine, " These have not perished. No
force is destructible. In some form it always is.
That force you knew and loved, which blessed
and upheld and enlightened, is not dead, — can
not be dead. Somewhere, somehow, I cannot
tell you where nor how, it lives, and must live
forever." But we who stand about the sodded grave hear,
from the deeps beyond the stars, a voice fall

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 87
through the silence : " I am the Resurrection and
the Life."
And we say to scared Science, " We are not
afraid, in this extremity, to declare our faith in
your own doctrine, to which revelation gives cohe
rence and a purpose."
The man I loved, whose body lies under this
red mound, was, I know, and he knew, but the
poor beginnings of his possibilities. Strong brain,
true vision, kind heart, — he was all that, and to
me far more. God-loving and man-loving, he did
a brave day's work here, and helped his fellows
well. But he had only started. None knew it better
than he. And is this the end ? These green
leaves from the sprouted acorn ! Is the acorn
developed ? Yes, I should say so, had I never
seen an oak. Having seen an oak, I know better.
Having read the Gospels, I know the man I
mourn has only begun to grow.
The human mind is incapable of imagining a
more grotesque absurdity than this grave, if this
grave holds my friends The universe turns in
Titanic laughter, and jeers and mocks with all
its infinite voices, at the comedy of human life,
and the farce of human pain and human death.
If there be reason in the universe at all, — and I

88 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
take it that the reason in man will always compel
him to believe in a reason in the universe, — then
one is driven to admit that the ultimate develop
ment of human nature must be looked for out
side this world, and beyond this life.
There is no escape in reason, I dare to say,
from the conclusion. There is no escape in
science. The law, let us admit, is the law of
development. Here is one creature, found upon
the earth, and, we admit, developing upon it.
The higher he grows, the more completely he
develops, the less does he find his environment
helps him. The more his disgust increases, the
more his contempt for its pleasures or its pains,
the more his conviction that the one and the
other are folly to his reason, and abject to his
demands. So day by day he plods a weary road, to which
there is no ending. As he grows more and more
into manhood, and leaves the beast and the
beast's wants more behind him, as he becomes
more and more master and lord, — so more and
more does his discontent/, his contempt, and his
hunger grow.
It is not Christian experience only : it is Stoic
experience, Buddhist experience, all experience
where the human asserts itself, where that which

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME: 89
differentiates man from the beast is strongest and
clearest. In the highest types it rises, and some
times asserts itself in very strange fashion, in
contempt for the environment, for the world and
all it holds, and all it can give or refuse. Satiated
with its pleasures, its honors, its wealth, its
power, the man asserts his manhood by proclaim
ing all sometimes a fraud, or a folly, and asking
from the heights of power, of knowledge, or of
enjoyment, " Is life worth living ? "
And the rational answer is, "No." If this be
all, life is a grotesque absurdity.
The only conclusion which can give coherency
to the riddle is that man on earth, developed to
his highest, is but a germ of what man is to be
come in other conditions. Hungry-hearted, sore
burdened, weary and worn, he is driven step by
step through life to its ending.
The simulacrum of him, the organic construc
tion which gave him connection and partnership
with the material life, dissolves.
But the dead man of this life, as St. Paul said
long ago, is the planted seed of another man, to
develop in another life. So far the earth has
done for him, and stops. As far as he is con
cerned, its powers are ended. She passes the
germ over into new conditions, — into the land of

90 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
eternal realities and the environment of the
infinites: Driven to the door, protesting, sick, weary,
beaten, though victor, he waits the opening of
the awful valves, and passes through into the
dimness, — dimness to faith even, folded curtains
of darkness to science.
But in every land, among every people, he
passes with the human instinct of another life.
Shall we say he alone of all creatures shall
come to no issue ? have no completeness ? never
reach the vision of himself ? never be what every
thrill of brain and nerve has suggested he might
be ? Shall he be the one gigantic joke of all the
world, — the non-sequitur of the universe ?
Revelation flames its torch across the darkness,
where human knowledge leaves us, but makes no
contradiction in that knowledge, and reveals
nothing which that knowledge can call inconse
quential or irrational.
"This irfan that has passed," it cries, "beyond
your ken, but not beyond mine, lives. He has
grown so far, in the world down here. He has not
been lost in the passage where you saw him not.
Centre of life and power, by the endowment
of the Maker, he has entered upon a new develop
ment under a new environment. His infinite

THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME. 91
longings are satisfied now with the infinite. His
restlessness finds rest in eternal endeavor; his
energies, in eternal work ; his satisfaction, never
granted him here, in eternal success in the work.
"There he will become a very man, and the
delusive vision of his earthly years will be ful
filled. To what heights or depths he will attain,
you cannot tell, nor can I ; but being one of the
Lord's servants, he will become a genuine man,
and more and more the likeness of the Man who
is also God. There is endless advance, and pure
joy in the advance forevermore, rest in ceaseless
work, content in ceaseless endeavor. 'We know
not what he shall be ' at any point ; but always
we know he will be a man, and always more and
more a man forever."
The light that falls on the graves where we lay
the dear dust of our dead pales not before the
lamp of human science. It flames and flashes on
the marble of every tomb, from the open sepul
chre in the garden of the man of Arimathasa.
We make no apology for its existence. While
we look with tear-dimmed eyes on dead faces
which yet are luminous in that unearthly light, we
feel that our hope is not irrational, that we and
they are not all of the earth, that the land from
which that " daylight of eternal glory " falls is our

92 THE STEP-CHILD OF TIME.
land as well as this. We are not unscientific, we
believe, in holding what the faith reveals, that the
dead-seeming germs of the earth may spring to
life and grow and blossom in the airs of Paradise,
and that this world may turn over, after its own
abject failure, the perfect outcome of all its de
velopment, the crown of all its possibilities, to
other, vaster worlds, and other, grander, and
more awful conditions, as a germ to be developed
to a growth unattained and unattainable here, and
yet always prophesied as possible.
But let us step out of the twilight, into the
enveloping splendors of the faith revealed.
"The whole creation groaneth and travaileth
in pain together until now."
Out of the pain, out of the writhings, out of the
sobs and cries of the dying Old, shall the eternal
New be born. It is the law of the revelation, it is
the law of nature. It is on the pages of the Bible,
of human history, of the rock-ledges of the earth.
And " I am the Resurrection and the Life," saith
the Son of God. He was also the Son of man.

LECTURE IV.
THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.

What think ye of Christ ? Whose son is he ?
Matt. xxii. 42.

LECTURE IV.
THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
NEARLY nineteen hundred years ago, lying in
the feeding-trough of an Eastern khan, some
shepherds found at midnight the new-born child
of a Jewish artisan's young wife.
There are always vast possibilities in childhood.
You cannot tell what may be the growth from
any new - prepared cradle. The sages and the
heroes, the leaders and the lords of men, have all
lain in swaddling-clothes — as have the tyrants
and the greatly evil, the criminals, the misleaders
and the destroyers of men.
The cry of the child is the proclamation of a
new day. God rules by men, makes and unmakes
the ages by men ; and when the man-child is born,
all is possible. The mother croons over the world's
teacher or the world's master, sings her lullaby
over the guide of a hundred generations, over the
lord of a thousand legions — who can tell ? All
things are possible when the child is born. 95

96 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
Every philosophy, every religion, every discov
ery, every government, has slept in the cradle
with some child. The babe in swaddling-clothes
is the germ-seed of all power on earth.
Even in sending His own Son into the world,
we Christians confess, God sends him, to all
appearance, as He sends other helpers, guides, and
deliverers of men. His common way of working,
God never drops needlessly. The Son of God
does not come with blare of trumpet, and clash
of cymbal, and the tramp of attending legions.
That is not God's method upon the earth. Only
to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear,
does the star shine and do the angels sing. To
outward seeming, the Eternal Son sleeps as any
child may sleep under a mother's watch, and
His cradle-song is the familiar song of Judaean
mothers. Yet that cradle in the khan at Bethlehem
sways the world. Augustus is the echo of a
name, hollow-sounding on the blasts of the dim
years. The Child in Bethlehem is the mightiest
living present force on earth; and millions of the
vanguard of mankind bend round that cradle, as
the centre of the world's life and their own, across
the vast spaces and the long years.
The Child of Bethlehem was a germ then. God

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 97
works, in the revelation of Himself and the salva
tion of the world, as He works in other things,
concerning men, at least. We recognize the
eternal method and the eternal wisdom in the
Babe come to save a world. " The kingdom of
God cometh not with observation."
But how to account for Jesus of Bethlehem, —
Jesus Christ of Nazareth ? Can you account for
any ultimate germ ? Science is dumb on inti
mates. It traces up causes from effects, link by
link of the long chain. At last one link is
reached, and beyond there is nothing. Omne exit
in mysterium. The last step is into the profound.
But is the end reached ? Are there no causes
and no consequences beyond the touch of mate
rial hand and the sight of material eye ?
We can account for other men by things upon
the earth : can we account for Jesus Christ ? Is
He a product of the earth, and can we find that
out of which He grew ? Is He, like other men,
a development from visible sources ? Is He
explainable by sufficient causes ?
All other men are. In a most true sense, every
man is a development. Let Him be as exceptional
as you will, He is the natural product of natural
causes upon which you may lay your finger.
Plato is as genuine a Greek product as the

98 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
Parthenon. Under no other sky could the one
have grown, or the other been builded.
Men are the result of race, nationality, culture,
hereditary tendencies, and so on, in the making of
their characters, — the kind of men they come to
be. One can generally, after due examination,
discover and lay down the causes of the develop
ment into such a shape.
William Shakspeare, exceptional as is his vast
genius, is an Englishman in every fibre, just as
natural a product of English soil and English air,
as an English oak or an English daisy. There
are causes sufficient, if not to account for his
exceptional genius, quite enough to account for
the form that genius took, for his whole moral
make-up and tendencies, for his character and his
influence. Of all the lands on earth, we are sure
England alone could have given him birth.
And not only England, but England at a par
ticular time. He is a man of his country, but
also a man of his day ; a product of his race, but
a product at a particular point in its development.
He is an Elizabethan Englishman. He belongs
where Spenser, Bacon, and Raleigh belong. He
has the common stamp of the great Queen upon
him, as they all have. Before or after there could
have been no Shakspeare, as there has not been.

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 99
Only when " the tawny lioness " held her island
lair secure, could William Shakspeare have lived
and written.
I name another name on the roll of poetic fame,
the only one perhaps to be named beside him ;
his to whom the little children pointed as the man
" who had been in hell ! " the awful soul who trod
the hills of Paradise and the dread profound of
the abyss, and sung the story of what he saw
for the hearing of all time, — Dante. We ran,
again, account for him. He is a natural product
of his race and time. He is an Italian, and of all
Italy an Italian of Florence, and of Florence in
the thirteenth century.
Take the exceptional and representative man of
any name, and he is always clearly an outcome.
Voltaire is a French, Goethe a German. George
Washington is a natural outcome of Saxon and
Norman England, — the representative of a race
of independent, God-fearing English gentlemen
and Churchmen, transplanted into the American
Colonies, but into one special colony, Virginia.
You see what I mean, and also why we nat
urally, I might almost say instinctively, turn to
the examination of the causes which have pro
duced any special character, and expect to find
them. They may, indeed, themselves be the

IOO THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
germs of great consequences, the original sources
of vast results ; but they are not ultimates. They
have their own causes on the earth, and are but
single links • in the vast chain which stretches
backward into the unknown past, as it does on
ward into the unknown future.
Is it thus with Jesus Christ ?
And here, mark, Jesus Christ was expected.^ It
is his own claim, that he was expected ; that he
was the fulfilment of the expectations of thirty
centuries ; that he was looked for, longed for,
prayed for. No other man ever was expected.
Christ is singular in this.
The literature of a whole people is filled with
an expected man. Indeed, on close examination,
the expectation of a man is the central meaning
of that literature. The kind of man desired is
clearly laid down. There is no place either to
doubt the character of him who was to be the
culmination, the splendid blossom, of a long his
tory and a nation's epic. The ideal is magnifi
cent, and it is also distinct.
It is the vision of all the seers, the proclama
tion of all the prophets. It begins at the gate of
Paradise, with the seed that tramples on the
serpent ; grows clearer to Abraham and Jacob ;
distinctly defines itself to Moses; is sung by David

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. IOI
to his lyre ; in Solomon's great temple, swells in
magnificent chant upon the incense-laden air,
while the trumpets peal, and the harp-strings
quiver iri the chorus. Amid the ruins of the
temple and the city, the expected man is still the
burden of Isaiah's song ; and his splendid com
ing flames afar through Jeremiah's tears. In
captivity, by the waters of Babylon, still the
man is expected. And the literature of a whole
people ends where it begins, with a prophecy of
his quick coming, and the manner of his appear
ance. Malachi closes the Book. It is still the
old story. " The Lord whom ye seek shall sud
denly come to his temple, even the messenger
of the covenant, whom ye delight in ; he shall
come, saith the Lord of hosts."
It is this that gives a peculiar character to the
Old Testament. It is a national literature, re
member. It is unique in this, — that it is a
literature of hope. It is always looking on, and
the vision it beholds is never dimmed by any
vapors of the lower atmosphere.
When Babylon falls, no Chaldaean sage stands
among the ruins to prophesy in stately strains
of a new Babylon, and a new and wiser Chaldaea.
When Rome falls, no voice in Forum or Senate-
house, no orator, no poet, tells or sings of a newer

102 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
Rome to be built upon the ruins of the old.
Only a voice from far away, trained in the cadences
of Hebrew speech, — a Christian voice, — St.
Augustine's, chants the grand epic of the City
of God, and is not drowned in the crash of an
empire thundering to the dust.
But when Jerusalem falls, Isaiah, and Jeremiah
while he breaks his heart in lamentation, stand
amid the ruins of city and temple, and in a land
made desolate, and sing triumphantly of a new
Israel, a new and eternal temple, another David
and another Solomon who shall reign forever.
The fringes of the darkness of the day of blood
and smoke are luminous with the glory of the
eternal day that waits behind the far-off hills for
its full arising.
All other races have dreamed of a golden age,
but their golden age lay behind. Themselves
walk upon an earth of iron, under a heavens of
brass. Things had been growing worse and
worse since the splendid dawning, and shall
grow worse and worse until the last crash and
final wreck of time and hope.
But the Old Testament always places the
golden age before. The great Day of the Lord,
in gloom or glory, is a day coming. It waits
behind all temporal shadows. Whatever else

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. IO3
fails, it shall not fail. The best is yet to come.
The brightest is yet to dawn. And so the nation
in its darkest hour of failure, in defeat, in captiv
ity, in ruin uttermost to outward seeming, never
despairs. Its wailing litanies by the waters of
Babylon, burst at last into chants of victorious
anticipation; and their refrain is, "Glory to the
Lord who redeemeth Israel."
And so this nation never dies. All others
crumble to the dust, — the proudest and the
strongest. Vanquished or victor, Israel lives, and
lives yet, scattered and peeled, but somehow vital,
virile, persistent. Israel is the heir of hope, the
race that always looked forward.
And the man expected is a Prince, a Conqueror,
a Deliverer. He comes in might. He comes
with joy, he comes with terror. " Who may abide
the day of his coming ? Who shall stand when he
appeareth?" "A refiner and purifier of silver."
By the red furnace-mouth he sits, and the white
flame leaps and glows ; and there in the fierce
blinding heat he tries the souls of men.
Surely the brooding of three thousand years
shall bring its birth. Surely a nation's long
yearning after its ideal shall see the ideal real
ized. If there be power in ancestral desire, in
hereditary type, in the fixed conception of the

104 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
generations, we shall know the man when he
comes, and say, " Out of a race's throes this
man was born. He bears the marks of his de
scent. The race has stamped him for its own,
and acknowledges its son, — the son of its heart,
and its long desire."
And is this the outcome ? This Child the
shepherds find in the cattle-trough ? Does the
vision of ages end in this ? a nation's hopes fulfil
themselves here ?
Do you wonder " His own received Him not " ?
I say He claims to be the one expected, and lo !
He is denied. " He hath no form nor comeliness,
that" they "should desire Him." The verdict of
the race was, that He was not a development from
anything among them. They declined to recog
nize Him as any product of their religion or their
prophecy. He was a blank disappointment. And
above all men they ought to have known.
The way all connected with His coming flatly
contradict the expectation He came, according to
Himself, to fulfil, is surely startling. He seems as
if he set Himself directly against all that was con
ceived of Him, or said about Him. The angels
sang, " Peace on earth, good-will to men." Within
a few days, in consequence of His birth, the
mothers of Bethlehem were wailing over their

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 105
murdered babes. And when He comes to teach,
he declares, " I am not come to send peace, but a
sword." It is surely, on any but His own explanation,
a very curious thing this, — that, claiming to be
the Messiah, He flatly refuses to be the Messiah of
the whole-race's conception, and is a Messiah after
an utterly new type and model, without existence
in the national consciousness.
There can be no clearer way of declaring that
He declines to be held the product of such con
sciousness. He has no mark or likeness of it.
As far as that consciousness goes, He is entirely
new. He is not rooted in, does not spring from,
it, or grow out of it, — is in all ways alien.
But if the age long yearning for a particular
type had no result in this Man, if three thousand
years of intense national character and national
desire cannot account for the Man who claimed
to fulfil that character and be that desire, can
the existing national character and condition at
the time account for Him as its result ?
His environment is distinct enough. The
national influence into which He was born was
one of the most powerful and well-marked ever
known. Is there any thing in it to account fpr
Jesus of Nazareth ?

106 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
There was intense race prejudice and coherence.
The Jew was a narrow, isolated man, who would
neither dwell nor eat with any not a Jew. All
other men were counted alien from his sympathy
or association. Could the Man who told the
story of the Good Samaritan — and the Samari
tans were most hated and despised — be the
product of the Jewish feeling of his time ?
And their religion. It had a profound formative
influence upon character, none ever stronger or
more profound. Out of which of its rabbinical
schools come the words, "But I say unto you,
Love your enemies ; bless them which curse you ;
pray for them which despitefully use you " ?
That religion had reduced itself in His day, and
indeed long before, to a perfunctory observance of
outward ceremonies. It had formulated a shrewd
casuistry, by which it proposed to keep the law in
the letter, and break it in the spirit. From birth
to death a man was surrounded by its mechanism,
and his whole life was fettered by its minute
rigidity of ceremony out of which the soul had
long since fled.
Whence came the word, "The hour cometh
when ye shall neither in Jerusalem nor yet in this
mountain worship the Father. God is a Spirit,
and they that worship Him must worship Him

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 107
in spirit and in truth !' ? Or this : " It is the spirit
that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth nothing" ? Or
this : " The kingdom of God is within you " ?
Nay, one need not dwell upon the wonderful
differences. I am aware that there are those who
have claimed to find Christianity in the Talmud.
Unhappily for the fancy, the Talmud is far too
recent for the purpose. What we know is the
character of the practical Judaism when Christ
came, and we know also the judgment of the
people and the people's leaders, of the common
folk and the priesthood and the teachers ; and
both agreed that instead of Christ's doctrine and
character being a natural outgrowth of Judaism,
they were so great a contradiction and outrage
upon it, that the inevitable end for them was :
"We found this fellow, perverting the nation.
Away with him ! crucify him ! " Far better than
any scholar, of whatsoever name, brought up in
a Christian atmosphere with Christian influences
all about him, did the men of his own day know
whether Christ Jesus was a natural product of the
national sentiment and the race faith.
His life was spent wholly in Judaea. There is
no record, not even a suspicion, of His having
been subjected to any other than Israelitish in
fluences. He was, like His great apostle, a

108 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
Hebrew of the Hebrews ; but not like him a
Roman citizen, and a man trained in Greek phi
losophy. But, admitting it possible that Roman and
Greek influences were in the air, can one or both
together account for Jesus of Nazareth ?
There is no mistake possible about the outcome
of Greek thought, or the character that Greek in
fluence would form. There was the worship of
beauty in sculpture, painting, or literary expres
sion ; the passionate search for, and admiration of,
clear human thinking and its expression. "The
Greeks seek after wisdom." There was the pride
of culture, and the confidence in human reason ;
and a contempt for the uncultured, the barbarians,
in fit ratio.
Is this word from the Academy or the Porch ?
" Blessed are the meek ; blessed are the poor in
spirit ; blessed are they that mourn."
One can scarce imagine any thing more foreign
to Greek thought and Greek philosophy, than the
whole teaching and the whole life of Christ.
Whatever else may be said of Him, the slightest
knowledge of the question compels one to say
this man was no Greek.
Was he a Roman ? Born in the Roman Empire
he was, and about Him were the Roman laws and

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. IO9
the Roman arms. Was He a product of the mighty
force that built the seven-hilled mistress of the
world, and ruled the nations at her feet ?
There was formative power enough in the Ro
man national character. No more mighty force in
moulding men after one type ever existed, and the
type is unmistakable. The echoing tramp of
the legions shakes Europe. The Roman stamps
himself for all time wherever his foot treads. He
is "the lord of things," the law-maker and the
law-executor. Iron-handed, iron-hearted, he goes
everywhere, to trample down, break in pieces, and
compel peoples to his obedience. His pride is
beyond weakness. It is sublime. He meets no
superior on earth. He scarce acknowledges a su
perior in the heavens. He and his race and his
city, his senate, his legions, and his laws, are
a part of the fixed order of the universe, and
eternal. "Blessed are the peacemakers." Is that word
an echo from the Senate-Chamber or the shouting
Forum? "He that is greatest among you shall
be your servant." " The Son of man came not
to be served, but to serve." Can one imagine
words more utterly against every Roman concep
tion of human life and fitting human opinion ?
And the manner of the life, and the end of the

Il6 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
life, both outrage every Roman sentiment of
duty, fitness, and human dignity.
By the law of the case, there must be cause
sufficient to explain every man. He is what he is,
from sufficient power to make him so. He is a
product. Heredity, environment, and the rest
make him. But when you try the law on this
Man, it fails. The human intellect is challenged
to explain Him by the known methods of making
men. He has no race-mark. He bears no birth
mark. Intellectually, morally, he is like his
shadowy type in the elder day, — Melchizedek,
" without father, without mother, without descent,
having neither beginning of days nor end of life."
He stands in lonely majesty a Man, simply the
Son of man as He called Himself, the type of the
race as it should be, with no narrower character
upon Him than manhood ; so infinite a manhood,
that Jew and Greek and Roman accept him as
their Brother and their King, that savage man and
civilized man, black man and white, the man of
Jerusalem and the man of New York, alike recog
nize Him as their vision of human perfection, of
human beauty, wisdom, goodness, and power.
He is of no race, therefore he is of all. And
each sees in him his own. The painters are our
witnesses. The Italian, filled with his conception

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. Ill
of the perfect humanity, paints an Italian Christ ;
the German, putting his ideal upon canvas, paints
a German Christ ; and the English painter makes
the face looking down upon you an English face.
Even the poor village artist of Central America,
working with pigments from the leaves and roots
of the forest, to make a picture for the rude parish
church, will paint an Aztec Christ.
Jesus Christ is Himself, then, one of the ulti
mate producing forces. We are driven back to
that. The Child in the manger is an ultimate
germ ; the Seed itself, as He is the Branch ; the
Root of Jesse and of David. " If David calleth
Him Lord, how is He then his Son ? " We can
answer: —
Into the realm of the natural, a new force was
born that night in Bethlehem. The Divine en
tered upon the plane of the human. No other
explanation is adequate to the facts.
But Nature is God's ; the human is God's ; and
even here the new force and life, in coming, comes
as God works in the realm of His appearing. He
comes not as a man crowned with power, or
laurelled with wisdom, triumphantly entering on
his career. He comes, the new life of men, as a
germ out of which light, life, and salvation shall
develop. It is in strict accord with all we learn

112 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
from God's working, that He should come as a
child, and be found in the cradle. The small hands
hold the earth. The small manger contains the
seed to sow the world for all time, — the seed and
the sower both. But only they that have eyes see
the Child ; only the scientific intelligence sees the
oak of centuries in the small acorn at one's feet.
But while the revelation is that of an ultimate
germ, which has no cause nor antecedent in time
or matter, — the beginning of a new life for man
upon the earth, — and while, upon examination,
reason accords with revelation, the same revelation
shows again that the environment of the germ, so
to speak, the place and soil and circumstances,
were what we call natural developments of the
earth ; that is, they are such part of God's working
as we can see and note, and draw inferences about,
which is what we mean and all we mean by
natural. For this Child was born in the fulness of time,
at a particular period and in a particular place,
when the world was ready for him, and the devel
opment might begin.
To speak in the tongue of our time, the environ
ment was prepared by natural development for
the new germ, while the germ itself was a new
seed, to begin a new era.

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 1 1 3
And why should one stumble at this ? Human
history is not a succession of accidents. There
is a law in the story. Things grow from one
another, and events have natural beginning, and
a reasonable course and end, if we can but find it.
It is this that philosophic history seeks to
trace, else the story is a mere bundle of dates.
You make a chronology, and a chronology is not
a history. The story moves upon its various lines, and the
lines converge and focus themselves in some out
come, some crisis ; an ending of the old, a begin
ning of the new ; the fruit of one series, the germ
of another; an ending and yet a beginning.
So Church historians have shown us how the
past gathered itself into one present, for the
coming of the Lord. And they are right and
scientific. But He, as we have seen, is not the
outcome. That outcome is the world preparing
itself and making ready for the cry, " Behold, the
kingdom of heaven is at hand."
For that day all Jewish history had been look
ing and waiting. The nation, in its slavery in
Egypt, in its wandering in the desert, in its
conquest of the land promised, and in its peace
and rest under Solomon, in its splendors and
its decay alike, had been preparing. Moses gave

114 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
the law for it, Joshua conquered the Canaanites
for it, David fought and Solomon ruled that it
might come. And over all the world the people
were scattered, and their land was a Roman prov
ince, that Moses might be "preached in every
city," and that the synagogues might be ready
for the first preaching of the faith.
At no time as at this time, — before certainly
not, and after certainly not, — was the situation
of Israel such as to make the preaching of the
gospel to all nations effectual from itself as a
basis. But now everywhere throughout the em
pire, in Rome as in Corinth or Alexandria, was
the idea of a one unseen, eternal, and only God,
to be worshipped without image, altar, or bloody
sacrifice, made common among polytheists and
idolaters. The synagogue worship, uncommanded
in, extraneous to, the Scriptures, seems to have its
Divine authority sufficiently in this, — that every
where it was holding up its testimony of the
Divine oneness, and that God is a Spirit, to be
worshipped in spirit, and that so the synagogue
stood ready for the apostle when he came to
complete the testimony by preaching that " God
hath revealed Himself in His Son."
But not Israel only had been guided for this,
and in this its story made coherent, purposeful.

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. I15
Babylon rose for this, and fell ; and Nineveh,
and Tyre and Sidon, and Tadmor in the wilder
ness. And in the dark, unnoticed, by the Tiber,
the outlaws built their first rude fortification,
and founded Rome. And slowly, still unknown
to the great Oriental peoples, the germ so planted
grew. The little tribal wars, so insignificant in
themselves, were fought. The kings were ex
pelled, and the Republic made its consuls. The
whole story of the building of Rome unfolds
itself in battles, intrigues, struggles ot leaders,
writhings and fierce pains of the people, — a very
wolf's litter, bloody and hungry on the prey, —
till out of all comes the great, strong, masterful
people, who, " dreadful and terrible and strong
exceedingly," lorded it over a submissive world.
For their laws had grown, and their order and
discipline, and a certain conception of life as a
place of duty and labor. There had grown,
amidst all the cruelty and wrong, some types of
manful character, of strong, righteous men, of
pure, faithful women. Noble examples stand all
along the story ; and, like all other peoples, they
got their day's wages, — the thing they had
worked for and deserved.
But is the end of all Rome's splendid story to
be the later Caesars, and the overwhelming rush

Il6 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
of the barbarians? Had Rome no purpose?
Did the she-wolf's litter roam the earth for
naught? Nay, we dare to say, the purpose of
Rome was a divine purpose, and the great empire
was built on the foundation, laid in mire and dark
ness, and the sweat and blood of men, for the
new Kingdom of God.
The great roads ran from the city to the
empire's bounds, that St. Paul might travel swiftly
to preach the gospel. The Mediterranean was
whitened with the sails of the ships, that the
story might be carried by the winds and the
waves. One power ruled, that under its shadow
there might be protection ; for even an apostle
to fulfil his purpose might need to say, " Civis
Romanus sum" and appeal to Caesar.
And when persecution should come, as it was
sure to come, fierce and exterminating, there
was a limit even to its madness in the fact that
the persecution, after all, was in a land of law, and
must be conducted under forms ot law. Christi
anity might have been exterminated in Rome as
it was in Persia, except that the bloodiest Roman
emperor was still a constitutional ruler, and there
were laws which even a Nero or a Tiberius could
not always trample on. The forms of law and
the sacred Roman right stood between the perse-

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. WJ
cutor and the victim ; and Christians could not,
behind them, be slain so fast as Christians were
made. To make the world ready for the Child in the
manger, and what the Child should bring, the
legions marched, and the pro-consuls ruled,
the Senate decreed, the augurs looked for the
auspices, the "Twelve Gods" stood in marble
silence behind their altars.
For this, Pompey conquered the East ; for this,
" the foremost man of all the world " shook the
German forests and the far-off shores of Britain
with the onset of the invincible arms ; for this,
Augustus ruled with all his political cunning ; for
this, he decreed that "all the world should be
taxed," — for this : that the Child should be born
in Bethlehem, be cradled in the manger of the
crowded khan, and die, at last, a Roman death,
under a Roman indictment, by the cross, and not
a Jewish death by stoning.
But Roman preparation was not enough, even
in its ripeness. The hour waits till Rome has not
only done her own work, but absorbed the work
of others, reaching her own crisis, gathering into
herself the past.
Not peace only, and an ordered world, and the
settled facilities of intercourse over vast spaces,

Il8 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
among the men of three continents, were needed
for the carriage and the spread of the world's new
story from the manger ; but a language in which
to tell it, a universal tongue spoken in Asia, in
Africa, in Europe, in Marseilles, in Alexandria,
in Jerusalem, and in Rome, — a language of com
mon intercourse in the mart and on the quay, that
common men might hear, and yet a language so
developed by orator and poet and philosopher that
it might fitly hold this most wondrous of all
stories, and convey the spiritual power it in
folded. The Roman had no word for repentance, no
word for Saviour, none for the Anointed Himself.
He did not repent, the stern materialist, the stoic
of time. He needed no Saviour. The pilum and
the short-sword should save him, or he died. His
tongue was barren of spiritual power. It must
be converted itself before it could say the alpha
bet of the Child.
The Roman must absorb Greece before he
found a language for the good news of Bethlehem.
And there the language waited for St. Paul at
Athens, for the Gospel of St. John, for the plain
though hesitating pen of St. Peter.
The richest and most wonderful tongue ever
spoken among men receives into its most perma-

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 119
nent literature, and as the choicest treasure it
holds for all ages, the New Testament, all penned
by foreign hands, all filled by thought foreign to
Greek intellect.
And we may say that Homer wandered and
sang the " Ballad of Troy Town," that ./Eschy-
lus wrought high tragedies, that Demosthenes
thundered in the Agora, that Socrates questioned
among his scholars, and Plato taught and thought
and wrote, that Themistocles and Miltiades
fought, that Alexander conquered, that Athens
shone white across the sea, and the Acropolis
gleamed in pillared splendor, — that all the story
of Greece, like all the story of Rome, unrolled and
developed till the time came for the Child in the
manger !
It is a line of thought familiar, no doubt. But
it bears recalling, for it is reasonable and true.
In the visions of strange things seen by the
waters of Ulai, the future unrolls itself to Daniel.
But that unfoldment is a genuine development ;
and when the vision becomes history we can read
the ordered law by which all things moved in
their sequences till the kingdoms of the ancient
world had made ready the time for " the eternal
kingdom of the saints of the Most High."
So there is a half-truth in the thought of those

120 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
who imagine the faith a development. There is
a half-truth in every falsehood. The divine reli
gion has its human side as well as its divine. The
"treasure," in the largest sense, is "in earthen
vessels." The environment for Christ and Chris
tianity is developed in what we blindly call the
natural order, but the environment does not make
Christ. I say, "blindly call the natural order." For, to
one who believes in a living God, that "the Power
behind phenomena " is present, imminent, with
will, purpose, judgment, righteousness, and mercy,
— that, in truth, God rules and reigns among the
kingdoms of men, and all things move according
to an all-wise will, from an empire's ruin to a
sparrow's fall, — the natural is itself the super
natural, and the world's secular story is divine.
The principle gives us the Christian philosophy
of history, — all things developing the time and
place for the cradle once, all things since working
and- unfolding for the great day of the King's
coronation, a redeemed earth and a ransomed
humanity. And so as when the promise was given to man,
beginning his world-long fight with evil, "The
woman's seed shall bruise his head," we are still
the heirs of the future, "the prisoners of hope*."

THE CHILD IN THE MANGER. 121
Still the great splendor gleams afar. Still we
keep our Advents with our Lents, and look for
the day of His appearing ; while we turn daily
to the temptation, the struggle, and the failure of
the common life.
For we know not the small nor the great, nor
whether this from our hands shall grow or that.
But we do know that the great harvests of God
are ripening ; that the great year of God, for man
and the world, is coming ; that all things, day and
night, develop to a new crisis for a new Seed that
shall make a new world.
We are content, in all the dark and doubt, to
believe as our great Christian poet sings, —
" In one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."
We have seen the Divine seed, root, and germ,
come in His time, when the time was ripe, —
come Child in the manger, and grow to master
the world and men, and give a sense and purpose
to human life.
Shall not the long, blind writhing and groping
of the ages grow into that other day, — always
rosy on the far-off hills, always palpitating down
into the dark again, which yet leads us, as it led
our fathers, — the day when the Babe in the

122 THE CHILD IN THE MANGER.
manger shall be crowned " King of kings and
Lord of lords " ?
Yea, for this God worketh hitherto, and man
worketh. There, too, the Divine and the human
meet ; and, mystery that it is, the Divine waits
upon the human, — the seed waits the seed-bed.
And it is ours to hasten or delay the Day of
God!

LECTURE V.
THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.

" But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall
smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if
any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him
have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile,
go with him twain. Give to him that asketh of thee, and from
him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away. — St. Mat
thew's Gospel, v. 39, 40, 41,42.

LECTURE V.
THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
THREE chapters of the Gospel according to
St. Matthew consist of what is called " The
Sermon on the Mount."
It is the first recorded teaching of our Lord
at length, after His entrance upon His ministry.
The circumstances are sufficiently striking.
"Great multitudes," gathered by the fame of
His miracles and His strange words, surrounded
Him; and while these thronged the slope, He
took his seat upon the mountain-side, and taught
them. He had come to begin a new era, — to found
the long-expected kingdom of God. His speech
on this occasion, so carefully preserved, may be
looked upon as a proclamation, as, in fact, the
official declaration of the organic law of that
kingdom as a living power upon the earth.
The Sermon on the Mount has therefore, very
naturally, held a unique place among the utter-
I25

126 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
ances of the Lord. It has been held to be
the . very heart of Christ's religion as a law of
life. Men have gone so far as to say that all
the rest counts for little, so this be left us ;
that miracles and mysteries — even the Incar
nation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascen
sion — are of small consequence, so that men
live by the Sermon on the Mount ; that so wise
are its words, so divine are its principles, that
they are self-evident moral truths which need
only to be uttered to be accepted, and therefore
need no support from any supernatural authority.
Now, we who believe in the Son of God, and
who therefore accept mystery and miracle as the
law of His earthly appearing, yield to none in
our lofty estimate of these words so new and won
derful, while so calmly uttered on the Judaean
hillside. In truth, to us the words are so wonderful that
we are compelled to take them as the words of
God. They come from beyond. They are the
rules of living in the eternal kingdom of God
in. heaven. They are as much as men can under
stand of the constitution of God's moral uni
verse, eternal as God Himself, some shadow of
His divine nature ; absolute therefore, and neces
sary, whether we can understand or not.

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. \2J
Behind the gentleness and divine reasonable
ness of the words, sleep thunders more awful
than the thunders of Sinai. The law there
was bare command, outwardly. Here on the
Mount of the Beatitudes, the law is from within
the veil. Tables of stone cannot contain it. It
is a law living and aflame, for hearts and con
sciences, dividing joints and marrow, — the law
that preserves the inmost heavens, the law that,
outraged, burns and scorches in hell.
So awful, as well as so beautiful, are the words
to us, that we hold them to be the words of God.
We can see no other adequate origin. They tran
scend all human experience. They are no out
growth of hereditary influence. They deliberately
contradict, to all appearances, maxims upon which
society stands, — even maxims held necessary
for its own preservation.
All theories of the origin of morals among
men, builded in smallest degree upon the needs
of society, upon the survival of the fittest indi
vidual or the fittest association of individuals ;
all theories which have any thing to say of heredi
tary impressions growing by generations into
consideration for others, as well as the theories
founded on self-interest, or pleasure, or greatest
good to the greatest number, — are swept away

128 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
by these calm words, before which the world has
stood dazed, and yet strangely moved and influ
enced, since they were uttered.
For we can imagine a morality — an ethical
code — growing out of human experience and the
needs of men living in association. Whatever
we may believe to be its root-origin or its sanc
tions, we can imagine it thus growing amid play
of opposing forces, and the give-and-take of the
universal struggle, into some definite system,
better or worse. And the worst moral system
that ever existed is this much better than the
moral system spun out of their own theories by
some of our philosophers : that it does not con
demn men for a breach of the law of the uni
verse, inasmuch as they care for the blind and
the lame and the leprous, and thus make the
unfittest survive, and, with no fear of the law of
heredity before their eyes, build asylums for the
orphans of the sickly and improvident, and even
reformatories for the children of criminals !
The point is, that in the Sermon on the Mount
the ethics are, at first view, destructive of all
society, — destructive, indeed, of the individual
himself, — contradictory of every principle on
which it has been thought by philosophers to
found a system of morals.

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 29
So with all its sweetness and beauty, and with
all the acceptance it has received from believer
and unbeliever, the Sermon on the Mount has
stood a stumbling-block. One strange thing here
also is this : that whereas there was instant pro
test made against other utterances of our Lord
as hard sayings, which no man could receive, here
there is none. Yet these other hard sayings have
been explained and accepted, while no man has
explained and no man accepted the Sermon on
the Mount.
Do not imagine I so far mistake myself as to
think I can explain it. I desire only to say some
things concerning it which have helped me to rec
oncile apparent difficulties, and so help others, —
set them at least thinking concerning the matter,
whether they agree with me or not, which is of
the least possible importance in any case.
For the fact is to be first noted, that the Ser
mon on the Mount has never yet been lived save
by Him who uttered it. I dare make no omission.
No apostle, no martyr, no doctor or father, no
Christian man of any period or of any name, has
ever utterly lived by the Sermon on the Mount.
In fact, I may say the Sermon has never been
proclaimed as a possible code of life at all, except
by its Author. It seems, in large measure, to

130 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
have dropped out of the Christian consciousness
from the first, if it ever found lodgement there at
all. Those who have commented upon it or tried
to explain it have explained it away. They do so
yet. Hostile critics have declared, that, carried
out, it would break up human society. Some
fantastic efforts have been made, at times, to live
by its declarations, and have failed utterly under
whatever name. Practical people, living* in the
world, have, whether Christians or not, agreed to
ignore the existence of a great deal of this won*
derful speech, or to consider it as, at least, not
expected to be lived.
Non-resistance to evil, turning the one cheek
when the other is smitten ; when robbed of the
coat, to surrender the cloak; compelled to do a
thankless service, to do the double ; to feel bless
edness when one is reviled and abused cause
lessly, and to love and bless the abuser and the
reviler, — this is a part of the teaching ; and we
are told by good Christian men and wise men
that to act upon this teaching would turn every
organized human society into anarchy, the Church
included ; that the world would be uninhabitable
by any but evil men ; the good would be extin
guished from its face, only the swinish and the
tigerish left.

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 131
Of course the Lord could not have contemplated
a result like this, therefore His words must be
capable of some other explanation than one that
would involve this. There is evidently, it is vir
tually said, some mistake somewhere. Resistance,
resentment against injury, swift vengeance upon
the wrong-doer, either by the one injured or soci
ety acting for him, is essential to the being of an
ordered life upon earth ; and our Lord could never
have contradicted the plain facts of human life
by laying down propositions destructive as these.
But the difficulty is not so easily removed. In
the cases where not the letter, but the spirit, is
in the mind of the Teacher, He is very plain. There
seems to be no allegory or parable here. The
Sermon on the Mount contains plain statements
concerning conduct, and they all stand upon the
same footing. " Give to him that asketh thee^
and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou
not away," is no more mystical, is uttered in no
other tone, than " Whosoever shall put away his
wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth
her to commit adultery," or, " After this manner
therefore pray ye."
It is very dangerous" to make distinctions in
the words, of the Lord. He makes none in this
sermon Himself. All is uttered in the same

132 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
unruffled calm of Divine wisdom. No haste, no
passion, here. Precept and prayer alike stand
together; and these things are taught, that "ye
may be perfect, even as your Father which is
in heaven is perfect." And at the close He con
firms all with that beautiful and awful parable of
the wise man who heard these sayings, and did
them, and so built, amid the floods and storms,
his house upon a rock ; and of the foolish man
who heard, and did not, and so built upon the
sand, and in the hour of tempest and rising flood
had the shelter of his life swept away.
Let us frankly say, then, that no explanation
which weakens or obscures the words can be a
true or reverent explanation. It is possible surely
to find a point of view where they shall retain
their force, and yet be words possible and hopeful
for man.
Remember, then, that all the words of the Lord
are seed-words. He Himself is the sower who
went forth to sow. His words are living and life-
producing germs. They are germs which need to
grow, which are sown that they may grow. They
demand an environment, and they demand time.
Men's words are generally dead formulas. They
have usually one short meaning, and the utter
ance has an end. Sometimes even to men, how-

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 33
ever, since they are in the image of God, it
comes to utter words of power, words that live
and grow and after many years are vital and
productive, words whose full meaning only time
reveals. But the Lord's words are such in infinite meas
ure. They are not formulas, but the announce
ment of principles. They are not words only, but
things. They have creative power. They are
germs of spiritual forces. " They are spirit, and
they are life." We err if we imagine that one age
understands them or one meaning exhausts them.
Eternal, vital, and creative, seeds of things, they
are cast into the seed-bed of the world and time,
to grow as the world grows, and develop as time
develops, their full outcome and product only to
be hoped and dimly guessed afar by men upon
the earth. " He that hath ears to hear " can
gather something, however, from the first, though
the seed grow secretly, and the green blade hath
not yet burst the brown mould.
Many words in the Sermon on the Mount, let
us frankly admit, seem to us impossible. The
day of their power has not come. We can in a
degree understand the situation from certain
other words which when first uttered were as
strange as these, but which to us now are words

134 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
of power, and in their truth self-evident to the
Christian conscience.
Shall we confine the idea of a development in
the kingdom of God only to its outward growth ?
Shall we say the mustard-seed and tree refer only
to the visible organization ? Can we say that of
the parable of the leaven ?
Or shall we extend the idea to the development
of doctrine, as a certain class of Roman theolo
gians do, and stop there ?
Is there not also a development in ethics ? Is
not that rather the development referred to, the
connection of the words considered, when our
Lord speaks of "first the blade, then the ear,
then the full corn in the ear " ? Is it not the
development of spiritual insight and power in
" the kingdom of God " which " is within you " ?
" Blessed are the peacemakers." Consider
where those words were spoken, and to whom.
Cast out from the great Sower's hand, they fell,
a seed of life from heaven, upon the prepared
or unprepared hearts of men.
And, looking at the men and the time, one
would say, of all the seeds sown this is least likely
to find due soil for growth.
"Nay," said the Roman, "the word has no
meaning. Blessed are the war-makers, rather."

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 35
His whole race-instinct, his hereditary impulse,
and the universal sentiment of his people, revolted
against the word. Blessed might he be, indeed,
who made peace as the result of war, if that
peace were won even by the creation oi a desert ;
but the blessing came not from the peace, but
from the war that preceded the victory.
The most blessed man in all the world, the
man who trod the heights of life and time in
splendor, was the imperator returned from victory,
crowned in his triumphal car, with the spoils of
conquered provinces behind him, and the captives
at his chariot - wheels, drawn slowly through
Rome's shouting millions, up the Sacred Way,
to the Capitol, in the day of the great triumph.
" Nay, blessed is the victor ! Honor, thanks,
triumph, to the successful war-makers and con
querors of men ! Woe to the vanquished ! Woe
and sorrow to the weak and the failing ! Happy
are the strong, and thrice happy he who leads the
legions to war, and returns for the laurel crown
and the Senate's and the people's thanks ! "
Here was the Roman sentiment ; and the
Lord's words were spoken in the Roman Empire,
where, after all, that sentiment was predominant.
But was it not Jewish sentiment as well ? Among
the Lord's own kin were the war-makers not

136 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
blessed, from Joshua the son of Nun, to Judas
Maccabaeus ? No fiercer soldiers than the sons
of Jacob ever fought, and no men more ready to
follow and honor, and count thrice blessed, him
who should make successful war on Rome, drive
the legions from the sacred heritage, and set up
the throne of the warrior David.
And yet the seed fell and grew. Among
Romans, as among Jews, it grew. The strange,
heavenly - sounding word fell gently upon the
wrathful voices ot a hateful and warring world,
and the sound was not lost in all the fierce
discordancy of human strife.
The years pass on. The seed-word germinates.
In the dark it grows strong. And now the chil
dren of a race more warlike than the Roman at
its fiercest, the children of the men that con
quered Rome and drank the joy of battle as the
wine of life, these children, no less warlike than
their fathers, a brigade of whom could scatter
like chaff the best army ever led by Caesar, these
children say, "Yea, blessed are the peacemakers.
They are the children of God."
The greatest soldier of the century — " the
great world -victor's victor" — said, "There is
nothing so dreadful as a great victory, except a
great defeat."

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 37
And the greatest soldier of our own land said,
"I never wish again to see even a single regi
ment under arms for battle."
So that seed -word sown upon the mountain
side fell into the world's forbidding furrows, and,
covered by the rough clods of trampled battle
fields, germinated even so, and grew. And now
all Christian men accept it as a truth self-evident,
an unassailable principle of action, an eternal
law of the kingdom of God.
Here is another seed-word of the great Sower :
" Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exer
cise dominion over them, and they that are great
exercise authority upon them. But it shall not
be so among you ; but whosoever will be great
among you, let him be your minister, and whoso
ever will be chief among you, let him be your
servant." It is hard for us now fully to understand the
idea of kingship or sovereignty when these words
were spoken. It was entirely irresponsible in its
highest conception. The great Oriental despot
isms were governed as if existing for one man's
pleasure, or one man's glory. Only in Israel, as
far as we can see, had there been the sense that
a king was responsible ; and it was a sense only
kept alive by all the prophets and all the judg-

138 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
ments of God. Otherwise, kingship and author
ity were held as private property for the glory
and grandeur and pleasure of the owner. He
gratified his insane desire for power, or his brutal
lust for sensual pleasure, with no sense of respon
sibility to the gods or to men. Types surviving
have come to us in some of the modern rajahs of
India and in the king of Dahomey.
The Roman emperors imported the type into
Europe, and fastened it upon the prostrate Repub
lic. The emperor lived, and pursued his pleasure,
gratified his brutal or his bloody lusts, and con
sidered that he was there to do so, that this
was the purpose and meaning of his supreme
authority. He sat upon the world's high
places, with abject millions under his feet,
that he might by their means pursue his own
delights, and have his brutal will in spite of
gods and men.
A frightful portent on the earth, this diabolic
perversion of the Divine idea of leadership and
masterhood ; and yet it lies in murky red, as of
the pit of hell, upon the pages of all history, and
men were content to have it so. There was no
other theory held in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we
may say, when the Lord spoke.
And here is a strange word to fall into such a

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 39
world. Who could receive it ? It must lie for
centuries slowly germinating in a world red by
wars, darkened by tyrannies, groaning under
cruelty, or dumb with despair, under the brutes
that trampled its millions down. Who of all
that heard that word could have received it as
the law of man's government, because it is the
eternal law of God's ?
Society, as men then understood it, would be
broken up in the attempt to rule on such princi
ple. Even the apostles themselves had no under
standing of the principle. They, too, dreamed of
thrones and dominions for their own aggrandize
ment in the very kingdom of heaven. High-
seated, with feet upon the necks of prostrate
men, — this was, up to this moment, their notion
of the high places Christ promised. Not till He
died that men might live, not till the cross be
came his throne, and the crown of thorns his
diadem, and his own blood his coi-onation purple,
did they understand the infinite sweep of that
law so passionlessly uttered by the Master. And
it has been a hard thing to learn. All things
were against it. The existing state of things
gave no welcome to the germ-thought, nor
would any existing state of things for ages to
come. The seed was buried out of sight and

140 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
out of knowledge, among civilized and barbarian,
Christian and heathen, equally.
But divine germs do not die. In due time the
tiny shoot breaks the stained and trampled sod.
It grows in storms, roots itself in a rocking world.
And to-day, after eighteen hundred years, all
Christian men acknowledge that the Lord in that
utterance laid down the fundamental organic law
of human society.
Authority exists not for the benefit of him who
exercises it, but for the benefit of those upon
whom it is exercised. The high place is no pri
vate possession. It exists that high service may
be done. Its height is a vantage from which to
work for those below. Only by the work done
does any man hold title to the place. Excep
tional in power, genius, leadership, foresight, he
is sternly held to strict accountability. Under
penalties, he must not use these great gifts for his
own glory or his own pleasure. They are trusts
to be used in human service. And the man most
wonderfully endowed, and sitting on the necks of
kings, as our own century has given us instance,
is hurled from his high place and swept from all
his greatness by an indignant human sentiment
when he uses the great gifts and the great place
for his own service and not the service of men.

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 14I
So has that little seed-word dropped in Palestine
grown, that it is a self-evident statement of fun
damental truth. Our civilization stands upon it,
all our constitutions, all the order of our settled
government, all our political freedom.
Whether in our own Republic or in the consti
tutional sovereignty of the mother-land, whether
it be president, king, queen, or emperor, whatso
ever the form, the law lies below the same, —
" Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be
your servant."
Our own chief magistrate puts the principle in
political phrase, but the same principle neverthe
less, — " Public office is a public trust." And
the greatest emperor of the age lies under the
rain of his people's tears, his long life one un
broken witness to the principle that he and his
were to wear the crown because no man in Ger
many toiled as the emperor toiled, and that day
and night, from youth to ninety years, he was the
servant of his people, and therefore their greatest.
So we find some germs of the Master-Sower have
grown. Shall we despair of others of which we see no
movement yet, no stirrings in the dark furrows of
the world ? Shall we say, because they have not
shown green above the clods yet, that they are

142 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
not living seeds at all, or that the Lord's action is
misunderstood, and He did not sow them ?
I prefer to believe we have here examples of
the condition and of the law of growth. The
time is not ripe. But the seed is not dead.
"The word of the Lord endureth forever." "In
the heavens " at least it liveth, and the heavenly
germs sown on earth have that eternal life, and
wait their resurrection.
" I say unto you, that ye resist not evil."
" Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek,
turn to him the other also."
They are hard sayings, we confess. Who can
hear them ? But they are no harder sayings to us
than other sayings, in whose divine light and
gentle human truth we now delight ourselves,
once were to our fathers.
I think, even now, one can see some stirrings
in the dead dust that covers them. The world
grows a gentler rule. Revenge has taken up its
dwelling among savages and half -savages. There
is consideration for the meek, there is room in a
selfish world for the poor in spirit, for the un
aggressive, the non-resisting, the weak.
The cry of " Vae victis ! " is heard on no battle
field longer : nations take no vengeance. The
conquered are lifted from among the trampling

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 1 43
horse-hoofs, and the red cross of relief is alike
sacred to contending hosts.
It is yet a wild, half-savage world, full of
cruelty and unreason and brutality. But the
clouds are lifting. I believe no man need fail to
see the promise of the coming day. More and
more the kingdom of the Child grows mighty.
More and more the power of love and gentleness
reveals itself. More and more revenge and wrath
and hatred are hiding in the pit whence they
came ; and more and more pity, forgiveness, gen
tleness, and love are seen to be human, as we
have so long preached them to be divine.
I can believe the hour is coming when men will
accept the Lord's law of forgiveness as a self-evi
dent spiritual statement, as they have accepted
others I have named. It surely is the eternal law
of the. kingdom of God, the law on which, to the
very letter, He Himself lived and died for our
salvation. Being so, it shall some day surely be
the visible and universally accepted law for men.
They may be slow to act upon it, after its ac
knowledgment, as they have been slow upon
others. Deeds will fall far short of professions,
and many failures will obstruct. But that the
day will come when the unprovoked wrong-doer
will be looked upon somewhat as a madman or an

144 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY.
idiot is looked on now, I doubt not ; when men
will stand shocked and amazed at the smiter upon
the right cheek, as upon some strange monstrosity
of human nature, who must be kept in safety,
examined, pitied, cured, and made human if it be
possible, I doubt not. The world has seen
growths as strange as this !
For we Christians are still the prisoners of
hope. God's kingdom rules the future. We wait
with patience. The kingdom cometh not with
observation. Our hope justifies our attitude. Christ's religion
has not failed. After eighteen hundred years we
are not shaken when men tell us "there has
never yet been a Christian according to Christ's
measure. No church, sect, or party has ever
dared to lay down His plain law, and demand lives
measured by it. And if He Himself should come
and live, as He lived in Judaea, there is not a
Christian community in which He would not be
seized and restrained as an outcast or insane."
I say we are not shaken, because we see the
Lord put His kingdom into the world subject to
what we call natural laws, that is, subject to the
way of His own order and working in the- world.
So He Himself declares. I have no right in rea
son or Scripture to expect it otherwise. The

THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY. 145
growth is slow. Its slowness was foretold. It
awaits the procession of the years, the words and
works and thoughts of men. But there is
growth, development, and I can see them with
my eyes. "First the blade." It is possibly only
blade-time yet. Certainly it is not the time of
the full corn. But the blade is full earnest of the
bending ears of the harvest.
And if God can wait, we can wait. Still from
the lips of His Church will fall the words that
find no ears that can hear. Still half our preach
ing is of things half understood, not believed,
certainly not lived. Still the voice cries in the
wilderness, and only its own echo comes back.
But we have the sure promise of the Master,
and can confirm our wavering faith by past expe
rience, that His Word shall endure forever, and
that, some day, every utterance of the Eternal
Word shall stand upon the earth and before the
eyes of men confessed a living word of power, a
law of the eternal kingdom of God in heaven
and in earth alike.

<Parisf) lectures

ON THE

draper Bootu

By WM. A. SNIVELY, D.D.
260 Pages.
Cloth Binding
Price $1.25.
From the Presiding Bishop.
Dr. Snively's "Parish Lectures on the Prayer Book " seem to me
admirably adapted for the purpose for which they were written. They
are simple, clear and to the .point.
They are certainly an excellent help in that duty which is by canon
laid upon "ministers of this Church, who have charge of parishes
or cures," that they be " diligent in informing the youth and others in
the Doctrine, Constitution, History and Liturgy of the Church.''
Very truly yours, J. WILLIAMS.
From " The Churchman."
As these lectures are for parish use, they do not enter upon doubtful
or disputed topics. They are eminently conservative, but they are well.
guarded from the danger which might easily follow of being common
place. There is a clearness and directness- of style which makes their pres
entation of even the most obvious truths regarding the Prajrer Book' in
teresting and felicitous.
This volume seems to us to be admirably adapted for the use of
those who are desirous to know more about the Church services than
mere acquaintanceship with their customary order can give.
There are many more people than one commonly supposes, who
would gladly know more about the Prayer Book than they do, and yet
are diffident about asking.
We find that Dr. Snively's book fills this important place, and we
are glad to call our readers' attention to it.
From " The Brooklyn Daily, Eagle."
"Parish Lectures on the Prayer Book" is one of the most sumptuous
looking religious publications of the season. It is from the "DeVinne
Press."

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
. -Publisher,

2 and 3 Bible House,
New York.

Sttotng Voices

OF

Xtbtng jftflen.

Practical Sermons by Bishops and other Clergy of the
Church, intended for Family and Lay reading.
256 Pages, 1 2 mo.
Cloth Binding.
Price $1.25.

They are what most of us desire such productions to be — plain, prac
tical and brief. — Mail and Express.
We observe no extravagance or straining for effect, yet in every case
the tone is devout and practical, and the volume is adapted to do great
good. — N. Y. Observer.
There is no need of an extended criticism of this volume, the title
and table of contents speak for themselves. We are sure that no com
mendation of ours is needed to increase the sale of this timely and valua
ble collection of sermons. — The Churchman.
The preface from the graceful pen of Dr. Cushman excites the desire
to read the sermons, and the desire grows by what it feeds upon. Here
are sermons by men whom we know and admire, who are eminent in the
teaching office. It was a happy thought of Mr. Whittaker to publish this
volume, and we cordially join the hope expressed in the preface that it
will meet with such a welcome as to justify not only a second, but an an
nual volume of like character. — Living Church.
The whole spirit and purpose of the discourses is the inculcation of
such practical truths as are of every-day need in this busy, vexing, per
verse, distracting world, to uplift, to cheer, to strengthen and to inspire.
The love of Christ (subjective and objective) is the key-note of the vol
ume, and from this come strains that tell us of content, purity, work, hab
its, friends, temptations, worldliness, decision, and paradise. — The Critic.

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
Publisher,

2 and 3 Bible House,
New York.
(OVER.)

3
Prebendary Row on Eternal Punishment.

pUTURE PETRI BUTTON,
Viewed in the Light of Reason and Revelation.
By
THE REV. C. A. ROW, M.A.

Octavo, Cloth binding. Price, $2.50.

"A very valuable book which will bring out in a very strong
light to all careful readers, the remarkable discrepancy between the
reticence of Scripture, and the confidence with which ecclesiasti
cal literature has treated the subject. . . . We feel very thank
ful to Mr. Row for stating the question plainly, and making its direct
bearing on our faith in the justice of God, as clear as he does." —
Spectator. " Every reasonable Christian would be a gainer by reading
this book." — Daily Telegraph.
" Mr. Row's style and manner is just what it ought to be —
plain, calm, and dignified, like the great Church of which he is a
Canon. Such books as this meet a grave want of the day in a
manner calculated to deepen alike its reverence and its rectitude."
— Pall Mall Gazette.
" This is certainly one of the most important contributions
ever made to the study of Christian Eschatology. . . : : It has
a fulness of systematic treatment which belongs to no previous
treatise on the subject." — Church Bells.
"An earnest, skilful, and interesting book." — The Critic.

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
2 and. 3 Bible House, - - New York.

4
The Late Bishop of Ely's Sermons.

Sermons on Subjects from the Old
Testament.

Sermons on Subjects from the New
Testament.
By JAMES RUSSELL WOODFORD, D.D.,
Sometime Lord Bishop of Ely.
EDITED BY
HERBERT MORTIMER LUCKOCK, D. D.,
Author of " After Death," Etc.

2 Volumes, i2mo, Cloth. Price, $2.50.

" It is the reality of faith which gives to the words of the preacher their
living effect, and this reality was one of the ingredients in James Russell
Woodford's oratorical power. His renown, as a preacher, was not the result
of place or position. * * * Another qualification which is conspicuous in
these Sermons is the unpolemical character of his mind. His mode of meeting
error was by confronting it by positive and dogmatic teaching of the truth.
He rather left the truth to speak for itself instead of wrangling with an oppo
nent. And a. third quality, which is essential in a preacher, is that of
sympathy. This was a marked feature of the character of Dr. Woodford, and
maybe traced in both these volumes. It was a. sympathy which arose from
self- forgetfulness and was not merely the expression of an emotional nature."
* * * These volumes form a solid contribution to the homiletic literature
of our Church. — The Literary Churchman.

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York.

TWO WORKS FOR BIBLE
READERS.

A Handbook of Biblical Difficulties ; or, Reasonable Solu
tions of Perplexing Things in Sacred Scripture. Edited by
Rev. Robert Tuck, B.A. With ample indexes. 568 pages.
8vo, cloth, $2.50.
" This book, we think, will prove very helpful to many minds.
Ours is a sceptical age. Never before has the Bible had to meet
so many and such fierce assaults. It has been attacked by the
critic, the scientist, the historian, and the moralist. Its difficulties
have been exaggerated and its meanings misrepresented. Objec
tions are brought against it everywhere, among the working as
well as among cultured scholars. And what we need is a fair
reasonable reply to these objections ; a satisfactory explanation of
the difficulties which every thoughtful mind encounters in reading
the Bible. This is furnished us, to a large extent, in the book be
fore us. It is the work of a calm, judicious scholar, who seems to
know just what is required by perplexed minds at the present
time. It is characterised throughout by good sense, avoiding on
the one hand the manufacturer of difficulties, and not shrinking,
on the other, from such as are real." — The Church Press.
Echoes of Bible History. By W. Pakenham Walsh, D.D.,
Bishop of Ossory. With fifty illustrations. i2mo, cloth,
$1.50. " It is a valuable work, and we do not know where so much
knowledge can be obtained concerning recent discoveries, in so
small a compass." — Churchman.
"Very little that has occurred in the annals of Biblicnl
Archaeology during the last half century is here omitted." — The
Critic.

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
2 and 1 Bible House. - - New York.

Sermons Preached to Harrow Boys
In the Years 1885 and 1886.
By REV. J. E. C. WELLDON, M.A.,
Head Master of Harrow School.

12mo, Olo-fcla- IrPirrio©, $1.50.

" This is a very interesting and admirable series of Sermons. Mr. Welldon
seems thoroughly to understand a boy audience. He puts his mind fairly to
theirs, shows them his own familiarity and sympathy with school life, uses the
illustrations and relates the anecdotes that will tell best with them. As a rule
the sermons that will tell with the boys are also very useful for children of larger
growth. It used to be said of Macaulay that he wrote like a schoolboy, and
both schoolboys and men are voracious readers of his volumes. It would as
well that the fathers of the Harrow boys should read these sermons as well as
the boys themselves. The list of the subjects is singularly attractive, for in
deed Mr. Welldon seems extremely well en rapport with the subjects of discus
sion that are at present uppermost, and indeed will always be uppermost, less or
more, to thoughtful minds." — The Literary World, London.

The Bird's Nest and Other Sermons
For Children of all Ages.
.By THE REV. SAMUEL COX, D.D.
Late Editor of " The Expositor."

12mo, clotiL. Price, $1.50.

' ' An excellance should be noted as pervading the volume : The absence
of false sentimentality and the presentation of motives that tend to foster a
sturdy, thoughtful, earnest Christian life in the boys and girls. Children need
such motives, and, in fact, they prefer to listen to discourses which make such
appeals. They are far less easily deceived by clap-traps and tawdry sentiment
than many older people. For this reason the expository method seems especially
flitted to interest as well as instruct them. The volume will suggest to many
pastors the correct view of preaching to children." — The Sunday School Times.

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York.

1
THE GROWTH OF CHURCH
INSTITUTIONS.
By THE REV. EDWIN HATCH, D.D.,
Author of Bampton Lectures on the ' ' Organization of the Early Christian
Churches."
i2mo, cloth, $1.50.
"Dr. Hatch places himself upon the ground of an original investigator. He borrows little
from previous explorers ; he treads in the steps of no other student ; he collects facts with un
tiring assiduity, and draws his conclusions with bold and serene independence." — The New
York Independent.
" We are struck, as we read, by the dispassionateness of the present writer, his aim to be
not controversial but simply historical being evident on every page." — The Living Church.
"It will be read of necessity by every bright divinity student and certainly by every
thinking clergyman in the United States within the year, and will do more to put our eccles
iastical matters upon a secure and sensible footing than any other work of its kind, always
excepting its precursor in the Bampton Lectures of the same author, that has appeared in
English during the present century." — The Boston Herald.

Dr. Cheyne }s New Work.

JOB AND SOLOMON,
Or the Wisdom ofthe Old Testament.
By THE REV. T. K. CHEYNE, M.A , D.D.,
Oral Professor of Interpretation at Oxford. Author of " A Commentary ori the
Prophecies of Isaiah," etc.
8vo, cloth, $2.25.
"Professor Cheyne is one of the leaders in that English school of Biblical Criticism which
unites with the thoroughness and fearlessness of the Germans, candor, good judgment, and
reverential spirit peculiarly its own. In the present volumes he treats from the critical stand
point the books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus ; and the preface holds out a
hope, which we trust may be realized, that in a future volume Psalms, Lamentations, and the
' Song of Songs' may be similarly discussed. Such books are a boon to educated Christians,
putting within their reach, in not too abtruse or bulky form, the results of modern scholarship
and inquiry. If they combat on the one hand, many received traditional notions, they give,
on the other hand, much more than they take away, imparting fresh interest and value to many
passages which are in general reverentially ' skipped ' as mysteriously obscuie, or used as arse
nals of texts, to be taken out singly and fearfully misapplied in the service of dogmatic theol
ogy-' ^—Christian Union,

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York.

Two Books for the Times.

The Vine Out of Egypt. By Rev. Wm. Wilberforce New
ton, Rector of St. Paul's Church, Pittsfield, Mass. 12 mo,
paper covers. Price, 50 cents.
The volume is a history of the growth and development of the Episcopal
Church in America with especial reference to the church life of the future.
The author gives a history of the movement towards federated unity which
resulted in the formation of the congress of churches. The last chapter is an
appeal to the church not to risk i's leadership by the perilous policy of a change
of name. The volume will undoubtedly create quite an interest among the
thinkers of the day, and its advent is awaited with eagerness.
Protestant Episcopal Church Doctrine and Church
Unity. By the Rev. C. M. Butler, D.D., Late Prof, in
the Divinity School, West Philadelphia. i6mo, cloth, 60
cents ; paper, 25 cents.
From The Church. — "The book is eminently worthy of perusal, and a
careful perusal, by men of every school of thought in our Church. The author
brings to the subjects of which he treats a fair and open mind, as well as a
mind fully instructed in that particular department of ecclesiastical knowledge.
. . . The question is a most important one always, and a superlatively im
portant one just now : What is the position of the Protestant Episcopal
Church, doctrinally considered, as defined by herself? This question Dr.
Butler undertakes to answer, gathering his answer from the Prayer Book, from
its 'Offices' and 'Articles.' What is the position of our Church in her
teaching concerning the Church Catholic and her own relation to it ; what con
cerning the Episcopacy ; what concerning the Sacraments ; and how do all
these bear upon the subject of Church Unity, now so prominently brought before
us by the action of the House of Bishops in the late General Convention ?
These are vital subjects, and in this book are handled in a masterly way, with
ample knowledge and a strict logical acumen. . . . We would be glad to
see such a book widely distributed and published in such a form as would make
its widest distribution feasible. Benjamin Watson."

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York.

9
Reduced in Price from $2.00 to %i.oo, net.

RELIGION;
A Revelation and a Rule of Life.
SERMONS AND ESSAYS
By THE REV. WILLIAM KIRKUS, M.A., LL.B.

i2mo, cloth, uncut, $1.00. Net.

From The Churchman. — " Mr. Kirkus is so well known not only as an elo
quent and stirring preacher, but also as one of our ablest and clearest writers,
and the present volume thoroughly sustains his well-deserved reputation. The
reader is so carried on by his glowing, inconventional style, and by a freshness
of tone and freedom of touch rarely found in sermons, that he is sure to be in
terested even if he cannot always agree. . . . Sermons like these ought to
be in the libraries of every clergyman in the country. "
From The Christian World, London. — "It is a living, thoughtful and
powerful exhibition of the writer's best intellectual and religious convictions,
which will be cordially welcomed by his old friends and admirers.''
From The Church Record. — " It is refreshing in these days of lcose think
ing and careless speaking, when sentimental fancies are substituted on account
of their novel beauty for the verities of the olden faith, to take up a book so
strong, vigorous, and scholarly as the one before us. The writer, whose keen,
critical insight and power of separating the wheat from the chaff, are wt 11
known to thinkers in the Church, has herewith given us a volume that will bear
reading, and repeated reading, and both furnish abundance of digested thoughts
and be fruitful in stimulating thoughts in others." .>¦

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York.

RECENT SUCCESSFUL BOOKS.

Records of an Active Life. By Heman Dyer, D.D. 8vo,
cloth, beveled, gilt tops,. $2.00.
" Few men in ecclesiastical life have had better opportunities of knowing
the affairs and men of the time, and fewer have used their opportunities with
such wisdom. Dr. Dyer has, through a long and varied life, shown all the gen
tleness of Dr. Muhlerberg, and all the wisdom of Bishop Potter. This gentle
ness made him great in the best sense of greatness, and his wisdom made him
powerful. " — The N. Y. Observer.
The Recent Past from a Southern Standpoint. Reminiscen
ces of a Grandfather. By the Rt. Rev. R. H. Wilmer,
D.D., Bishop of Alabama. With five portraits. 8vo, cloth,
$2.00.
' ' Fact, humor, wit, and strong feeling mark the strong man, and this
mark is very plain upon every page of the 'Recent Past.'" — The Church
Magazine. Liturgies and Offices of the Church. For the use of
English Readers, in Illustration of the Book of Common
Prayer. By Edward Burbidge, M.A. 121110, cloth, $2.50.
Ecclesia Anglicana. A History of the Church of Christ in
England from the Earliest to the Present Times. By
Arthur Charles Jennings, M.A. i2mo, cloth, red edge,
$2.25.
The Gospel and the Age. Sermons on Special Occasions.
By W. C. Ma-gee, D.D., Lord Bishop of Peterborough.
Crown octavo, cloth, $2.00.
The Spirit in Prison, and Other Studies on the Life After
Death. By E. H. Plumptre, D.D. New and Revised
Edition, Fifth Thousand. Crown octavo, cloth, $2.00,

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York.

The Theological Educator.

EDITED BY THE

REV. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A.,
Editor of " The Expositor."

Under this title will be published a series of Manuals which
will give a solid and trustworthy grounding in all branches of
Theological study. It is remarkable that, while such works on lit
erature and science abound, the field in Theology is still unoccupied.
The books will be written by men recognized as authorities
on their subjects. They will be specially adapted to the needs of
those preparing for examinations in Theology, as well as for pop
ular instruction. While the manuals will be specially useful to Theological
Students, the clearness and simplicity of their style will, it is hoped,
attract the many laymen interested in these subjects ; while their
freshness and scholarship will make them interesting even to pro
ficients in Theology.
The price of each Manual will be 75 cents, net ; and will be
published at short intervals. Early orders solicited for either
single volumes or the entire set.

NO W READ Y.
A Manual of Christian Evidences. By the Rev. Preben
dary Row, M.A.
"It discusses the principal questions involved in a vigorous and popular
style. It is an admirable compend and worthy of a wide circulation." — The
Interior, Chicago,
An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New
Testament. By the Rev. Prof. B. B. Warfield, D.D.
" It supplies precisely the hand-book which teachers in this field can place
in the hands of their students, confident of its accuracy and conformity to the
latest and best sources of information."— The New Englander.

A Hebrew Grammar. By the Rev. W. H. Lowe, M.A,, Joint-
Author of "A Commentary on the Psalms,,: &c, &c,; Hebrew
Lecturer, Christ's College, Cambridge.
"It is well furnished with tables and pedigrees, and with a Bible and
dictionary at hand the student will find most of the barriers* to. his progress re
moved." — The Independent.
A Manual of the Book of Common Prayer, showing its
History and Contents. By the Rev. Charles Hole, B.A.,
Professor at King's College, London.
A Manual of Church History. In Two Parts. By the Rev.
A. C. Jennings, M.A., Author of " Ecclesia-Anglicana,"
&c.
The Apostle's Creed. By the Rev. J. E. Yonge, M.A., late
Fellow of King's College, Cambridge ; and Assistant Master
in Eton Coliege.

IN PREPARATION.
A Grammar of New Testament Greek. By the Rev.
William Henry Simcox, M. A., late Fellow of Queen's Col
lege, Oxford, &c
An Introduction to the Old Testament. By the Rev. C.
H. H. Wright, D.D., late Bampton Lecturer, &c.
An Introduction to the New Testament. By the Rev.
Marcus Dods, D.D.
The Thirty-Nine Articles. By the Rev. H. C. G. Moule,
M.A., Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge.
Preaching. By the Rev. Canon S. Reynolds Hole, M.A.
A Guide to Theological Literature. By the Rev. Marcus
Dods, D.D., and the Editor.

THOMAS WHITTAKER,
2 and 3 Bible House, - - New York.