lNiECTURES,1878.

¦¦¦KYfliliKiyi j|Uf| llilillllllllP

TINGTON-S.T.D.

HOP OF CENTRAL NEW YORK

mm

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

1935

THE BOHLEN LECTURES, 1878

THE

Fitness of Christianity to Man

BY
F. D. HUNTINGTON, S.T.D.,
BISHOP OF CENTRAL NEW YORK,
Author 0/ Grahame and Lowell Lectures on the "Divine Aspects of
Human Society" "Christian Believing; and Living" "Sermons
/or the People? "Christ in the Christian Year," etc

PRINTED FOR THE RECTOR, CHURCH WARDENS, AND VESTRYMEN OF THE CHURCH
OF THE HOLY TRINITY, PHILADELPHIA, TRUSTEES OF THE
JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP

NEW YORK
THOMAS WHITTAKER
2 Bible House
1878

It was required that the matter contained in this small volume
should be delivered in a church to an audience not differing much
from the congregations that generally gather in cities for worship,
except as it might happen to include a larger proportion of edu
cated minds. It was also demanded by the terms of the lecture
ship that the lectures, having been so delivered, should be forth
with issued in print as a treatise. To almost any student this
twofold necessity must be somewhat embarrassing, as involving
a certain literary incompatibility. It will appear that I chose to
keep before me in writing the assembly of hearers, and have not
thought it worth while to take pains to strike out some forms of
expression and some illustrative passages belonging to a public
address. I had contemplated the use of a considerable array of references
to authorities, and to agreeing or differing authors. But on the
whole I see no worthy occasion for it,, and therefore present only
a few marginal acknowledgments to writers to whom I am con
scious of being indebted. F. D. H.
Syracuse, Easter-Tuesday, 1878.

Copyright, 1878, by T. Whittaker.

7)

The John Bohlen Lectureship.

John Bohlen, who died in this city on the 26th day
of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund of One
Hundred Thousand Dollars, to be distributed to religious
and charitable objects in accordance with the well-known
wishes of the testator.
By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the trustees,
under the will of Mr. Bohlen, transferred and paid over
to " The Rector, Church Wardens, and Vestrymen of the
Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia," in trust, a sum
of money for certain designated purposes, out of which
fund the sum of Ten Thousand Dollars was set apart for
the endowment of The John Bohlen Lectureship,
upon the following terms and conditions:
" The money shall be invested in good substantial and
safe securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called
The John Bohlen Lectureship, and the income shall be
applied annually to the payment of a qualified person,
whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery and pub
lication of at least one hundred copies of two or more
lecture sermons. These lectures shall be delivered at
such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as the

persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from
time to time determine, giving at least six months' notice
to the person appointed to deliver the same, when the
same may conveniently be done, and in no case selecting
the same person as lecturer a second time within a pe
riod of five years. The payment shall be made to said
lecturer, after the lectures have been printed and received
by the trustees, of all the income for the year derived
from said fund, after defraying the expense of printing
the lectures and the other incidental expenses attending
the same.
"The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within
the terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton,
for the delivery of what are known as the 'Bampton
Lectures,' at Oxford, or any other subject distinctively
connected with or relating to the Christian Religion.
" The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month
of May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be
done, by the persons who for the time being shall hold
the offices of Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church
of the Diocese in which is the Church of the Holy Trinity;
the Rector of said Church ; the Professor of Biblical Learn
ing, the Professor of Systematic Divinity, and the Pro
fessor of Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School of
the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
"In case either of said offices are vacant, the. others
may nominate the lecturer."
Under this trust, the Right Rev. F. D. Huntington,
S.T.D., Bishop of the Diocese of Central New York, was
appointed to deliver the lectures for the year 1878.
Philadelphia, Easter, 1878.

CONTENTS.

LECTURE I.
PAGE
Christ among Men : His Approach the Human Heart, 7

LECTURE II.
Christ Declared to Men of a False Religious Cul
ture. St. Paul at Athens,  37
LECTURE III.
Christ in the Presence of Doubt and Disbelief. The
World without Him, and with Him, . . .65
LECTURE IV.
The Religion of Christ in the Power of Action :
its Appeal to the Human Will, . . . .97

LECTURE I.

Oteist nmauQ HUtr. |£is fyppvonxfa
to tXxz fttmau Hawk -

"SHie QXSotls teas maae flesft, ana Wnelt among us." St. John 1:14.
"3Sut Sfeuua . . . ftneto all men, ana nee&eB not tfiat an»
s'oouln testifs of man; for f%t fcneui toljat teas in man."
St. John 2 : 24, 25.
"SBnto j;ou, © men, K rail; ana ins boice is to tile sons of man."
Proverbs 8:4.

Ckrisi itmoxtQ fPDeu :

HIS APPROACH TO THE HUMAN HEART.
" Unto you, O men, I call ; and my voice is to
the sons of man." The voice travels down from
a region outside of nature. The " Wisdom" that
is speaking speaks to Humanity, but is not of it.
" I was set up from everlasting, from the begin
ning, or ever the earth was." In the grand per
sonification Hebrew ideas are beginning to take
the form and color of the Greek, the Greek not
only of the Platonists but of St. John. But be
hind the Hebrew " vision," which has given light
to every later age of the world, and behind the
Greek thought, which has really given law to
its intellectual life, there is a world, having in it
the Fountain of all light and thought and law.
Out of that comes the voice. In the awful bur
den of its meaning it is mysterious ; but in its
language it is like the speech of a mother calling
her child : " Hearken unto me, O ye children ; O
ye simple, understand." Solomon was a king and
knew men ; but something rang through his soul,
not of his crown or his court, which said, " By
me kings reign, — and princes, and nobles, and
judges;" and then it said, " I love them that love
me, and those that seek me early shall find me."

8 MCTURE FIRST.

" Before the mountains were settled, when He pre
pared the heavens, I was there. Whoso findeth
me findeth life" — of all you " sons of men." A
thousand and seventy years after, a son of a Gali
lean sailor, having left his fishing-net to bleach on
the sand, wrote the life of " the Son of man." It
begins in this way : " In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. In him was life; and the life
was the light of men." Wisdom, the voice said,
crieth at the entry of the city, at the coming in at
the doors: "My delights were with the sons of
men." St. John writes, in the proem of his Gospel,
"The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."
.The point, dropping out of account here any
difference between the Hebrew and the Greek
dress of the thought, is, that in the universe, or
whole reality of things, the two spheres, natural
and supernatural, are equally real; in both of
them there is life ; they open into one another ;
life passes, in persons, from one to the other ;
both are for men; and the one living bond of
unity, whose life and light are common to both
alike is "The Word." Whether in the Jewish
mind, which was not metaphysical, or in Gnostic
speculation, " Wisdom " corresponded best with
the second or third person in the Christian Trinity
is not material. The Wisdom of God coming down
to the earth is a divine Man, seen by St. John,  the
man of men, who raises humanity to heaven. The
more we think this thought, and trace it through
its relations, the more we shall find it to signify
"the faith that was once delivered to the saints."

CtiRIST AMONG MEN.

9

By one of these "saints," if we use the
name in its original sense, and for the defence of
that " faith" this lectureship was founded. His
own manhood having been fashioned and perme
ated by its power, when his ripe mind looked
over from the one world into the other, he re
membered the great inheritance of Christendom,
Revelation : — the trust itself, which is the faith
deposited * the trust-deeds, or Christian docu
ments ; the trusteeship, in an imperishable church.
This rose before him, as it had risen first within him,
the one immortal benefit of man. His surviving
representatives, shaping his general and liberal
design, have directed it by the terms of the
Bampton Foundation at Oxford. The first words
of John Bampton, Canon of Salisbury, defining
his plan, were these : — " To confirm and establish
the Christian faith." I am left in no doubt at all,
therefore, what is given me now to do. "In the
bounds of that comprehensive purpose I find
room enough to move with liberty, not reaching
beyond it, but choosing and following a particu
lar line within it. Two questions must be kept
straight before us all the way. There are
believers, and there are deniers. So far as men
believe, can their belief be made more definite, and
by being more definite be stronger, and by being
stronger be more serviceable to the world? So
far as the age denies or doubts, how is faith to
win back the skeptic to her side, naturalizing him
in her house, and training there a race of sons
and daughters as believing and as brave as any
that have ever lived and died ? These are ques-

IO LECTURE FIRST.
tions for the understanding, and to your under
standing the appeal must principally lie. Heart
and hands, I know, have their office, in this nine
teenth century apostleship, of regaining in America
a rationalizing Athens, a sensual Corinth, a law-
worshipping Rome, and a ritual Jerusalem, to the
holy freedom of the Son of God. Infidelity is as
often converted, I think, in any land or time, by
sympathy as by scholarship, by practical good
ness as by processes of the mind, and I hope we
shall see that distinctly, if you go on with me in
order. But here it is for the study of a subject
that you meet, and it is on your understanding
that you will expect me to lay such thoughts as I
can bring.
My plan is this. We start with ourselves as
we are. You and I are the beginning of the
argument. It is a plain postulate. The axiom
is safe; for neither Dr. Strauss nor Blanco
White, Professor Huxley nor Matthew Arnold
denies himself to be. This little personal domain,
the " I myself," may not be a thing very scientifi
cally apprehended ; but with all its complexity it
is familiar, and every fibre is sensitive. Outside,
objective to this living thing, confronting it, a
voice calling to it, searching it, commanding it, is
what we call Christianity. It is more than a voice
—a substantive force, the kingdom of God, a rule
of life, a creed offered to belief—" one spirit and
one body." We have, then, man, and we have a
Gospel. What I propose, with the help of your
attention, is to prove the fitness of these two to
one another, each to each. We undertake to

CHRIST AMONG MEN. \ \
show that the Gospel is to be believed because it
is suited to man. Whatever materials of illustra
tion may be gathered from outward nature, from
books, from society, from history, the sinew and
strength of the demonstration are in yourselves.
This gives me great advantage. The proposi
tion is, The Christian faith is found to be true by its
adaptation to mankind. Man wants it in his consti
tution, grows and ripens in every faculty by its
supplies, and comes to the measure of the stature
of his perfection only by the working in him of
its power. If man is authentic, so is the Christian
revelation. If man has a legitimate place in the
universe, the Gospel has a place there with him,
by the same right.
The Chinese student in the study of Bishop
Boone, representing intelligent humanity at its
farthest modern remove from Christ, speaks the
irresistible verdict of the race. He was a teacher
among his Pagan countrymen, and was taken
into the mission-family to learn English and
translate the Bible into the Celestial tongue.
For a long time he remained insensible to any
thing in the Scriptures but their literary beauty.
Abruptly, one day, he rose from his manuscripts,
with the New Testament open in his hand, and,
with the rapid manner of one who has been star
tled by a great discovery, he exclaimed, " Who
ever made this book made me. It knows all that
is in my heart. It tells me what no one but a
God can know about me. Whoever made me
made that book." What is true of the book is
true of him who is its life. Whoever made you

12 LECTURE FIRST.
a man, and me, is in Christ, reconciling us to him
self. Some special grounds for this affirmation will
be presented by way of introduction, to-night,
found in the person of our Lord, his personal
attraction to men, and his personal sway over
them as they are everywhere. After that there
will be three further divisions of the main subject,
answering to three elements that are in this
human nature, essential to it everywhere, and
conspicuous in proportion as it rises from barbar
ism. First, we shall see man as a worshipping
creature, with a believing capacity, and in the
loftiest conditions of human culture, but without
revelation, as Paul found him at Athens, swing
ing between atheism and superstition ; then as an
understanding creature, with a capacity for
knowledge, and at the same time capable of set
ting his knowing faculty against belief; then as a
creature of action, with the power of will, organ
ized for enterprise and the conquest of nature, as
he rises in the Roman and western world. Liv
ing questions or issues, you will see, fresh to
the interest of the times we are living in, stand
near by, along the whole course of that fourfold
inquiry : the question of faith and reason in order
ing life, of spirit and form in worship, of secular
ism and religion in education, of individualism
and organic force in spiritual movements to
evangelize mankind, and of the relations of the
principles of science to the growth of the king
dom of God in the soul. Through these four ave
nues, if the Spirit of wisdom and of power conde-

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 1 3
scends to guide us in so holy a study, may some
truth and some charity enter in and dwell !
When the heavens were opened down, in the
vision of Patmos, we are told of the descending
city, perfect and everlasting, from God and for
man, having him who is God and man for its
eternal light, that "the city lieth foursquare,"
gates open on every side, the nations bringing
their glory and honor into it : " foursquare,"
" the length, the breadth and the height of it
equal." This evening I lay before you three or four
traits of Christ's Religion, closely connected with
each other, which when they are fairly seen,
stripped of every thing that disguises or disfig
ures them, take a natural hold of human confi
dence. Hitherto, for the greater part, in the eastern
and western theology, the battle has been fought
on one or another of six fields — the biblical writ
ings as a book, their critical sense, their moral
value, prophecy, miracle, and ecclesiastical au
thority. What lies outside of these lines, in the.
patristic, Gallican, German, and Anglican apolo
getics, important as it often is, is rather incidental
than principal. Apologetics is the science of the
defence of the faith. The word is to be divested"
in your minds of the enfeebling impression that
attaches to the idea of an "apology," in popular
use, as if Christianity offered an excuse for its
coming, or asked leave to be. The truth is, the
Church waited for attack before it offered a de
fence. It arose, on the earth, visibly, from Bethle
hem, Calvary, and the broken sepulchre ; but it

14 LECTURE FIRST.
was actually planted downward from heaven, and
stood, a positive institution, on three continents,
holding a document in its hand which has never
been wrenched out of it, witnessing to a Christ
who dwells within it, and working not only in his
spoken name but by his ^-working power. Its
attitude was affirmative, not negative. Its creed
was shorter and simpler even than now, till the
days of Nicaea and Constantinople enlarged the
statement, completed the definition, and handed
over the symbol to after-ages. It had one article
— Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of God and
the Saviour of the world. Denial, heresy, objec
tion — born as much of monastic speculation in the
cave, and mysticism in the desert, where burrow
ing eremites bored and carved the rocks into
mountainous honeycombs, as of humanity earnest
ly facing the problems of life and duty, where
wisdom cried at the entry of the city and by
the paths of men — challenged the orthodox belief.
Then began the great labor of the apologists and
defenders. There must now be negation of error
as it is in Arian, Gnostic, and Ebionite, as well as
affirmation of the truth as it is in Jesus. From
that time forth the walls have been manned, the
gates have been kept, the colors have not sunk,
the city of God still stands ; and the conflicts have
been wag^d chiefly on the six areas that I have
named. But, after all — and this is what I venture to
think has been sometimes forgotten — in every one
of these lines of argument, human nature, after the
Christ revealed, is the principal factor concerned.

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 1 5
You argue for revelation, that it is authentic, that
it is genuine, that it is self-consistent. By what
instrument, then, is your argument measured, and
weighed, and your proof tested, but by the
reason of a man? How does your revelation
" tell ?" Where does it enter ? On what sub
stance does it strike ? What is its terminus ad
quem ? Plainly, whencesoever it proceeds, by
whatever path it has arrived, or by whatever cre
dentials it certifies its errand, its object is the
heart of man. For him, for you, the heavens
were parted, the voice spoke, the prophet fore
told, Jhe miracle amazed the witnesses, the cross
was set up, the two Testaments were recorded.
Those " saints" to whom the faith was once for
all delivered were human saints, men like these
here now. There was something " delivered," to
be sure, that men must apprehend, judge of, take
in by intellectual reception, and hold by faculties
which, having once grasped it, can defend it ; and
then there is something else, another element, in
this revelation, which men must seize, if they are
to have it at all, by another capacity — a receptiv
ity in them not of reason only but of spiritual
sympathy, an answer of the affections, a reaching
out of desire, a welcome into the heart. It is
that something in the religion of Christ of which
man says, " This is for me ; this I must have, be
cause it meets my want, fills my hunger, helps
me when I am weak, saves me when I know I am
in peril, and gives me peace where no peace was ;
it suits me ; it is mine." Will it not be, then, for
the honor of the faith, for the confirmation of it in

1 6 LECTURE FIRST.
those who have a little and can say, " Lord, I be
lieve, help thou mine unbelief," for the creating
of it possibly in some who have refused it because
they have not seen it as it is, if we can once behold
its fitness to our whole nature as we are ?
I. Notice, as pointing in this direction, at the
outset, that before the Gospel was committed to
Scriptures, to a dogmatic or philosophical sys
tem, or to any organization or institution what
ever, it was committed to men, or to man as man.
The beginnings of Christendom are seen in the
last half of the first chapter of St. John. A story
more intensely and simply human is not foujid in
any literature. With the resources of heaven and
earth at his command, the Founder of an empire
which was to lift itself over the throne of the
Cassars, and outlast every structure under the
sun, spoke to a few persons in the most absolutely
human of all conditions, employments, relation
ships. Into these persons he put the kingdom of
heaven. For a long time he was apparently ut
terly indifferent whether the Gospel ever took
any other shape than in the life of a society of
men. When his neighbors and countrymen arose
and followed him, they recognized in him no
other character than that of an extraordinary
man. It was, in fact, humanity in its most naked
condition. Without, education, without patrbrTr-
age, without pedigree, without flattery, without
policy, without an army, without property,
coming out of a village whose very name cov
ered him with contempt, speaking unpopular
words, crossing the prejudices of his people, of-

CHRIST AMONG MEN.

17

fending rulers, alone, misunderstood, this man
rose into a permanent and immeasurable mastery
over every thinking and strong nation on the
earth. Among all the phenomena of history this
is absolutely alone in majesty, in mystery. So
far as we are informed, he never wrote a sen
tence, or ordered a sentence to be written, except
when he stooped and traced on the ground some
words that any passing human foot would tread
out, or the next rainfall wash away. Years
passed before one chapter of the New Testament
was recorded on paper or parchment. He never
hinted that a body of doctrinal divinity was any
part of his apparatus for converting or redeem
ing the world. Yet all this while the entire gift
of the Gospel and grace of his mediation was
alive, and Avas at work among men born of wo
men. Could there be a more striking sign where
he meant the primal attestations of his truth to be
sought ?
The Bible was to come. The place for it was
provided beforehand in a Christly and a churchly
providence. And when it should come its au
thority was to be supreme — all ecclesiastical
councils, creeds, standards, to be regulated by its
unchanging solar light, as sundials by the sun.
No man, no society of men, not the church, east
or west, can touch this finished and sufficient
Word, to add one text, to take away a syllable, to
alter an idea, any more than they can all manu
facture a ministry or create a sacrament. And
yet, in the order of the creating and inspiring
Spirit, the kingdom of God on the earth came

1 8 LECTURE FIRST.
from the Son of man, not first out of a book into
men, but out of men into the book. There is
a profound meaning in a saying of Mr. Coleridge,
that we know the Bible to be inspired " because
it finds man." Were it ever to cease to find him;
it would drop from the hand of our race like a
withered leaf ; for then, either on the volume of
the book, or on the heart of his child, the Al
mighty himself would have let go his hold.
This Master teaches. In any account of his
speech, by evangelist or tradition, there is no
attributing of his attraction to what is called
eloquence — only to the matter of his conversa
tions and the impressions of his person. Yet such
is his mysterious sway that boats are forsaken on
the shore by fishermen, custom-house officers
turn from their tax-tables, and a procession of fol
lowers begins to move along the rural streets,
which lengthens and widens, through countries
and centuries, till it swells to four hundred mil
lions of living men at a time. There is only one
possible explanation. He touches something inside
the human heart which was waiting to be touched.
What else is. meant when he is called " the Desire
of all nations" ?
It is said the common people were his glad
hearers — and by common people are not meant
dull people, or vulgar, or illiterate, or unclean
people, but people who have in them, with least
overlaying, what is common to man.
Take one of the constant topics of his preach
ing. On the pages that report it you find scarce
ly any word more conspicuous than the word

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 1 9
" life." He brings, he offers, he promises, he
gives life. " I am come that they might have
life, and might have it more abundantly." Now,
except in the rare triumph of some commanding
passion, or in the terrible collapse of despair, men
fear and fight and hate death. Christ is born
of a dying race. Unless he is stronger, death is
the one universal king, and will conquer him as it
conquers every man at last. But men do not
want to die ; they want to live. Christ meets
them and tells them, " You may stop dying, who
soever will, and begin to live forever. The life is
in me, imperishable, eternal. Join yourself to
me, be one with me, and this life flows into
you, and lo ! death is abolished." The physical
change remains ; but it is not what you knew
as death. The coffin crumbles — not your child,
your mother, your friend. The pulse stops— not
thought. One kind of fabric dissolves, but from
its ashes there is immortal beauty — a spiritual
body. " Whosoever liveth and believeth in me
shall never die." You wanted to live, and live
you may. A few believed it on his word. He
died and rose, and the faith was never to forsake
the heart of humanity again. No teacher ever
filled that universal and mighty longing for life
but Christ.
Again, the law that matches life is love. Man
is not separable from the social instinct. Spite of
selfishness and care and greed and slavery, he
seeks his fellow, he clings to his kind, he builds a
home, he is stronger for the touch of another's
hand. Can a blind instinct like that be turned

20 LECTURE FIRST.
into a clear-sighted and triumphant principle ?
Where is the wonder-worker that can transmute
a fickle sentiment, which every appetite or insult
can degrade, into a force so majestic and so beau
tiful that it shall heal the misery of every mortal
pain, and bind its illuminated children into a
brotherhood outreaching the bounds of interest
or nationality ? That brotherhood Christ creates.
By that principle he plants and builds a church.
He clears the sweet force of every bitter ingredi
ent and every belittling limitation. He sends it
over the earth from his cross, and, as the charity
of the Gospel, it transfigures the face of the
world by regenerating its heart. Not Confucius,
* or Zoroaster, or Buddha, or Mohammed, or Soc
rates, or Marcus Aurelius, or Shakespeare does
' this. Another deep and broad " desire" of man
is met by the Son of man alone.
Again, humanity, naked and near to the earth
as you please, wants conscious reconciliation with
a power above itself. Travellers and sailors have
now uncovered the globe. We know what sorts
of super-brutal animals it holds. There is no hid
den type left to be dragged to light. The fact is
public that propitiation is a cosmopolitan idea, not
Jewish only but ethnic, with exceptions too insig
nificant to be reckoned. Man wants to be forgiven.
Jesus of Nazareth, first carrying the conceptions
of men to their highest mark by his own life and
lips, embodying a visible divinity in his three
and thirty years, till no explanation of his human
character can be found except in the irresistible
confession of his title " Emmanuel," suffers.

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 21

" One man dies for the people," the magnificent
oracle of a redeemed creation from calculating
Caiaphas' diplomatic tongue. Never before or
since, never anywhere else, was God- seen in
sacrifice. Yet that was the one secret glory
which riot only Simeons in the temple but Mag-
dalens in tears had wanted to see, ever since the
flaming swords on the gate of Eden had closed
the hope of a natural return to innocence. And
now, will that sacrificial sign of forgiveness be so
trusted that another universal longing shall be
filled, and mankind have the Saviour they desired,
from humanity at its highest to humanity at its
worst ? Look high and look low. Take extremes
of humanity so wide apart that between them
there shall be room for every human grade and
pattern. Down by the slimy edges of Indian
jungles, down along the swamps of Congo, down
in the dimness of Dakota, not one but many thou
sands, some of them made heroes and martyrs,
have said or sung, " The blood of Jesus Christ
cleanseth us from all sin," and have risen into
clean lives and the liberty of righteousness. We
look from the bottom of the world to the top. A
line of the loftiest intellects that have led the cul
ture and progress of the race beckon down to us
from their battlements ; the Augustines and Chry-
sostoms, the Raphaels and Newtons, the Faradays
and Keplers and Bunsens of science, of reason
and of art, and they say, " Not unto us." There
is one mind, by common consent, in compass, in
creativeness, in height and breadth and uncon
scious power occupying a place among them that

22 LECTURE FIRST.
is like a throne. In Shakespeare s last will, when
the eye that had ranged through nature was lifted
to the heavens, he wrote this : " I commend my
soul into the hands of God, my creator ; hoping
and assuredly believing, through the only merits
of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker
of life everlasting." I think we shall conclude
there are no ranges of man's mind where the
hunger for pardon, as well as for life and for love,
is not satisfied in the faith of Christ.
It may be said that the purpose of the Gospel
is the invigoration of humanity. What more
conclusive certification could it- have ? Horrible
travesties there have been, I know, even by its
friends, of that benignant movement of heaven
towards man. Irrational piety has put upon it
incredible imputations, and held them up as its
title to honor. But can any candid critic dis
pute this declaration? To every element and
faculty that properly belongs to universal man
Christ imparts a quickening, empowering, enlarg
ing energy. The argument becomes very close.
That which invigorates every force, harmonizes
with every law, and bears towards perfection
every quality of the nature it salutes, must be
true to that nature.
II. From these instances of his teachings turn
to the Teacher himself. In this respect Christiani
ty stands absolutely original and alone ; that from
end to end, as spirit, as doctrine, as law, as life, it
is embodied in a person. Christianity is Christ.
He, not his words, not his ideas, not his prin
ciples, primarily, but HE is the substance of his

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 23
religion. To have him, as one person may have
another, by faith, by one life flowing into another
life, is the essential character of a disciple. All
Christian knowledge is the knowledge of him.
All Christian growth is growing up into him.
All " progress" is progress into his boundless
grace and immaculate holiness. " He that hath
the Son hath life." See the intensity of the
humanity. You talk of a " Gospel of to-day," as
if days had gospels ! The religion of yesterday,
the religion of to-day, and the religion of the
future forever, are the same religion, because he,
the person, is yesterday, to-day, forever, the
same, not parting with his identity. Think of this,
you men, when you hear dreamers in the night
babbling of a " religion of the age," as if ages
made religions, or originated revelations, and
did not themselves all lie like straining but com
forted children in the mighty arms of the ever
lasting wisdom and love of the Lord !
We speak complacently of our "times," our
" age," our " day." Well, then, what day is it ?
What do we say when we would fix the place of
this self-congratulating era? We say, it is the
nineteenth century, or we say, it is the year one
thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight. Have
you thought, you sons of men, how you came to
reckon so? It is the nineteenth century after
what ? It is eighteen hundred and seventy-eight
years since when ? I open Mr. Tyndall's lectures,
Mr. Stuart Mill's essays, Comte's positive philo
sophy, which would have us believe, if they could,
that Christianity was a temporary phase of

24 LECTURE FIRST.
 /
superstitious speculation, and they date their
books this way, like the rest of us. It means that,
in the inmost and awful sense of men, all the his
tory and all the life of all the nations strong, in
brain and strong in arm, turn about one supreme
and central and glorious person; the advent and
redemption of the Son of man, who is the Son of
God. His entrance is the one great hour of time.
As often as you write those figures that mark the
year of the Lord, believer or unbeliever, on your
day-book, or bill of sale, or title-deed, or letter,
you write the concession of the world to the
creed of Christendom. Sciences and arts are
progressive in their nature, because their elements
and materials lie in shifting and struggling minds,
or in beds of matter whence they are gradually
drawn, as experiment and discovery accumulate
their tools. Christianity is not progressive, be
cause Christianity is Christ — absolute life, human
ity perfect, and unchangeably divine.
In' the fourth century before Christ there
appeared at Athens two men, master and pupil,
who in two diverging directions gave an extraor
dinary impulse to the thinking faculty of mankind,
and to knowledge ; an impulse that has never yet
been spent. They gathered up all that the world
had found out, before in the two great depart
ments of matter and mind, physics and meta
physics, reduced it to order, and, by pure . intel
lectual force, one as a logician, the other as an
idealist, may be said to have moulded the mental
character of scholars from that time on ; the two
great schools of thought they led— nominalists

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 25
and realists — being traceable down through all
the early Christian and middle ages, and to
our own time. Even now, language, literature,
philosophy, theology — and consider how much
these four names include ! — show the stamp of
their commanding genius. They have both
largely influenced the intellectual side of the life
of the Church. But these two men, Aristotle
and Plato, did not embody their respective sys
tems. They did not incarnate the two philoso
phies in any such way that you will not get the
whole of what they brought, with no personal re
lation to the men. Scholars from all the Grecian
schools and the cities of the East sat fascinated
at their feet ; and any one of them might be
Aristotelian or Platonist with no influence what
ever from the life of either. To the generations
of all these later centuries their names are names,
and nothing more. The intellectual realm of
each is a kingdom without a king. Four hundred
years after them came Christ. His system and
he are one. It is the person, the man Christ
Jesus, that is preached, and fed upon, in all the
Church. To-night many millions of men would
die for their love of him.
I said that there was no parallel for this
method in history. China, India, Persia, Egypt,
Mediterranean Europe, all had their religious
systems. No one of them rests on a personal or
even an historical basis. None of them can be
seen in the life of a character, living, as Jesus
lived, in the daylight of a well-known historical
period, whose biography is capable of being tested

26 LECTURE FIRST.

by every kind of historical criterion. They are
all mythologies. Mohammedanism, to be sure,
was introduced by an individual. But Mo
hammed himself "claimed no special relation
ship to God," never identified his character
with his doctrine, and propagated his system
by military force.
Nobody here proposes, I presume, to compare
the Koran with the New Testament, or imagines
that Islamism would take hold of any other than
an inferior, unscientific, sensuous race. Much the
same might be said of Buddhism. No claim is
set up that it is a system of historical realities,
verified by historical tests. The shadowy ac
counts of Sakyamani, in some sense the founder
of Buddhism, making him come into the world in
the form of a white elephant, giving -him twelve
thousand names and several successive births, and
enveloping his story in a cloud of legendary ex
travagance, are as utterly unlike the sweet and
simple narratives of the Evangelists as the doc
trines of annihilation, atheism, and despair, which
form that dreary theology, are unlike the blessed
teachings of the Saviour's mercy, sacrifice, and
resurrection. One of the conceits of the most recent rational
ism has been to bring the maxims and medita- ,
tions of the Vedas and Zendavesta into the rank
of the spiritual instructions of the Gospel. Sup
pose they were all that is claimed for them,
close akin to the Christian ethics, or worthy to
be compared with portions of the Sermon on
the Mount, what have they done? What have

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 2*7
they done even for the foul, cruel, lazy popula
tions that have received them ? They have had
those sottish communities to themselves half a
thousand years longer than Christianity has
lived. Buddha and Kung-fu-tse have had no
rivals till the modern missionary preached Christ,
and then Hindostan was pierced with arrows of
light in less than ninety years.
There is a curious and special phenomenon ex
actly to the purpose of my argument. A promi
nent Hindoo scholar, the son of a Brahmin, was
born in Bengal in the last century, and died in
England in 1833. He studied English, edited an
English newspaper, admired the Christian litera
ture, and intellectually outgrew the mythology
of his people. His notion was exactly that of
some of our native American Brahmins, that the
strength of Christianity lies in its ethical and
religious principles, apart from its superhuman
energy in the person, incarnation, life, death, and
resurrection of the Son of God. Rammohun
Roy accordingly published, in both the Bengalee
and English languages, extracts from the four
Gospels, to which he gave the title " The Precepts
of Jesus ; a Guide to Peace and Happiness."
There are a few copies of that volume in the li
braries of this country, but probably not a score
of my auditors ever saw it, or even heard of its
existence. It fell on the strong, warm, passion
ate life of the Eastern world like a crystal snow-
flake on the tropical jungles. Heavenly truth as
it all was, it was not our Gospel. It was the
voice without the living Lord, the moral anatomy

28 LECTURE FIRST.
of the new faith, emptied of its beating heart and
its precious blood.
III. I offer you at present but one proof more.
We pass to a ground of confidence, as catholic
believers, far beyond the possible bounds of the
old apologies.
You are the sons of a scientific age. It is the
honor of real science that she faces all the facts,
makes room for them, and accounts for them if
she can. We claim for Revelation a place in the
convictions and a welcome to the minds of mod
ern men, the most scientific included, on the very
principles which lie at the foundation of all sound
scientific inquiry. The Church presents to sci
ence the fact of Christendom. We say it is as wor
thy of a place and an explanation as any alkali in
your crucibles, any bird-track or ornitholite in
the sand. Somewhere that immense monument
must have had a builder over it ; it commemo
rates, and there must be a thing commemorated ;
a sign, and a thing signified must be behind it.
This enormous tree — St. Paul's temple that grows
— spreading its live branches over sixty gener
ations of souls, and always widening from one
Epiphany to another, where is its root? Your
very botanists and anatomists tell you things do
not grow from nothing. Come with me a few min
utes only, to find an answer to this question.
You here all know the geographic extent of
the Christian provinces to-day. They embrace
the two great continents that control the forces
and lead the advance of mankind. Even of the
remainder of the inhabited territory this Christian

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 2g
cause holds ports of entrance, and many chosen
interior posts, positions that are keys to the sev
eral lands. In the representative sense, as hav
ing access to seats of population, and uttering a
voice there, the great period may be said to have
been reached, predicted by the Saviour, when the
Gospel should be preached to all nations. Under
an impulse — please to take notice — which sprang
up afresh with mighty energy within this passing
century, just when a certain school of philoso
phers have been rash enough to pronounce Chris
tianity a spent force, its institutions superannu
ated and its ideas obsolete, so that men must be
casting about for a new religion or Gospel of to
day — just then, by a general movement of mis
sionary life, whose sweep is as wide as modern
commerce, emanating from the breast of old
Christian communities, the lines of this Cause are
pushing forward from the points just mentioned,
penetrating steadily the sluggish and corrupt
masses of heathenism farther and farther in.
Starting from the Straits of Gibraltar, and mov
ing southward along the trading stations, around
by the Cape to Madagascar, and thence following
the indentations of the Asiatic coast to the further
limit of Kamtschatka, you encounter constant
ly these unarmed but irresistible intrenchments,
bases of aggressive operations. Large groups of
islands, Pagan sixty years ago, are effectively oc
cupied. Traverse either of the two divisions
of America, or the three sections of the Eastern
hemisphere, and as long as you keep on the high
ways of civilization you come upon working cen-

3Q

LECTURE FIRST.

tres, not of a stationary but of an adventuring,
emigrating, colonizing, spreading Christianity.
I ask you to observe that I am not using this re
markable extension of Christianity as a final proof
that it is true ; nor am I bringing mere numbers
or mere activities of self-propagation to convince
any body of Christian principles, as if truth ever
yet had majorities for her criterion, or expected
to win her way by a show of hands. The purpose
of this reference to the broad theatre of Christian
action is particular, and it is this : The whole of
this vast operation has proceeded from one spot
or birthplace on the globe ; it all dates from one
point of time ; it all owes — confesses that it owes,
nay, claims it and glories in it with universal con
fidence and a unanimous joy — its very existence
to one Personage, whose name is forever on the
lips of all its messengers and workmen.
Suppose you put yourself at any one locality
on this immense surface, from centre to circum
ference ; it may be in any of the ancient cathe
drals, built up slowly, layer by layer, of eloquent
masonry, through generations or centuries, by the
patient hands of the same abiding faith ; or in one
of the countless little companies of scarcely shel
tered worshippers gathered together on the fron
tiers of new territories, along the outskirts of
newly-discovered countries, on patches of verdure
in deserts or wildernesses, on the edges of remote
islands of the oceans ; it may be in any one of
the tens of thousands of crowded metropolitan
churches or any one of the hundreds of thousands
of scattered rural sanctuaries ; it may be in Yeddo,

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 31
Jerusalem, Constantinople, Canterbury, Washing
ton, San Francisco, this house, or in a mission-sta
tion like one that the Bishop of Prince Rupert's
Land told me of, in his diocese, from which it
took a letter nine months of travel, by canoes
and dog-sleds and Indian couriers, to reach him ;
or it may be in any single household of the mil
lions of Christian families of all these races and
nations. You ask the question, then, in any of
the groups of these hundreds of millions of Chris
tian souls, whereabouts on earth their religion
came from. Without hesitation, without vari
ation, they point you to a district, not large, well-
defined, lying as much in open light as any other
since the beginning of human history, accessi
ble and familiar always to travellers and chroni
clers. You ask from what time their Christian
religion dates. They all answer, at once, undoubt-
ingly, naming in figures a precise and definite
epoch, or period, less in length than the lifetime
of many individuals, easily determinable by com
parison with the reigns of contemporary Roman
emperors or other historic characters, and with
public transactions. You ask once more for
the one essential item or element in their belief.
Instantly, without exception, everywhere, the
millions of voices becoming one, they reply
by pronouncing ONE NAME, of one Person, one
man — what more than man we are not now
inquiring — but the man Jesus. They know, all
of them, whatever else they know or are igno
rant of, in whom, in what one Person they believe.
They know that he lived among men on the spot

LECTURE FIRST.

and at the time described. They know that of
all that body of facts, or cluster of actual events,
taking place in Judaea, in the five reigns of Au
gustus, Tiberius, Caligula,' Claudius, and Nero,
that Person was the living spring, the originator,
the authority, the mover, without whom nothing
of the transactions would have been. They believe
in this Person as a Saviour, through whom they
are to have life forever. To him, Jesus, every
knee bows ; every tongue confesses.
Christendom is here, and knows that it is here ;
and it knows full well whence it came. Science
must find room for all the facts. Every effect has
a cause. From this world-wide effect you move
straight up, on an unbroken line, till you come to
one spot. There is a child on a peasant woman's
breast. There is the breath of cattle feeding.
There is a story, in the streets, of an anthem,
sung by angels, shaking the midnight air, heard
by shepherds. Then come magi out of the
heathen twilight, the unconscious prophets of a
world worshipping the Son of man, whom it had
waited for and wanted. The ground will be
" hard under your feet " — from effect to cause — all
the way. The voice is to the sons of men.
If, then, you are asked why you believe, and
why you do not join in some wild hunt of restless
seekers after a religion of to-day, as thinking men
to thinking men, as rational disciples of science,
which is one of the daughters of God, speak the
name of your living Lord, and answer that you
could not believe otherwise if you would. Others
of you, having found what that Friend is person-

CHRIST AMONG MEN. 33
ally to your secret life, and that there is no life,
no love, no peace from every kind of pain, like
his, no other remission of your sins, and no other
security for life eternal with those you have loved
here, will go farther and confess that you would
not believe otherwise if you could, or glory save
in him !
Unprofitable enough will be our retrospect
of all this wide and wonderful movement of
the Master across the earth — our speaking here
and your hearing both — if the faith which has
so risen and conquered has not come to • your
own heart and conquered its doubt and cast out
its fear ! The living Christ has come to men.
Have you, O man, or daughter of man, said,
" Come, Christ, to me !" Then " A man, The
Man, shall be as an hiding-place from the wind,
and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water
in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a
weary land."

LECTURE II.

©frrist gjejcXared t* H&etx of % IfaXse
at ^tttjeus.

"Wijoin therefore ge iflnorantlg toorstiip, j>im aerlare K unto
gOU."— Acts 17:23.
" JBati) not CKoa maue foolisj) tje totsaoiu of tjiis tootle?" 1 Cor. 1 : 20.

Gtfexst tlisrtosztl to %$Lm

OF A FALSE RELIGIOUS CULTURE.— ST. PAUL AT
ATHENS.

The proposition covering the ground of these
lectures is that the religion of Christ is found to be
true by its fitness to mankind.
In the shortest possible summary, the proofs
brought to support this claim, thus far, are that
Christianity, from the outset, throws into wonder
ful prominence such truths and forces as meet
the moral conditions, elevate the affections, and
perfect the nature of men ; that, without hiding
but rather revealing its divinity, it yet comes em
bodied in a human person, the only complete
man ever seen on earth ; that in him every form
of human life is touched and ennobled ; that this
incarnated Gospel takes a natural hold of human
ity, especially in the great matters of its teaching,
such as life, love, forgiveness ; that this identifica
tion of the religion and the person distinguishes
the creed of the church from every other great
religious or ethical system known in history ; and
that the facts of the planting and spread of this
belief, established on principles purely historical
and scientific, leave no rational escape from the

38 LECTURE SECOND.
conclusion that whoever made men made both
the Bible and the kingdom of Christ.
We now go on to show how this religion, re
garded as a thing preached, or apostolized, in the
highest grade of unchristian society, encountered
the existing shapes of religious worship and
thought, being suited supremely to what we may
call, without disrespect to philosophy, man's fac
ulty of faith.
St. Paul has entered Europe. In his apostolic
person the Gospel now comes in contact with a
new civilization and a foreign religion — a climate
as alien to it, one might think, as the snows of
Mount Olympus to the sunshine of Mount Zion.
Yet underneath Syria and Macedonia alike, and the
Mediterranean between them, is one and the same
earth, and so under all the continents of human
thought, and the seas of human feeling, is one
humanity. Christ took it upon him, and there
fore to Asiatic and European, African and Ameri
can, Christ came in one Catholic Epiphany.
No arrival on European soil ever carried with
it the seeds of such revolutions — not the career
of Minos, or Xerxes, or Alexander, or all of them
together. The struggles of earthly sovereignties
and sciences were to be overshadowed by the
sudden collision of a kingdom from on high with
those ideas and principalities which rule this
world. The most salient incident in this west
ward migration of the Faith was its meeting with
the Athenian mind at Mars' Hill. But even that,
as we shall see, was only the crest of a wave
which was to break all along the western lands.

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 39
Already, to some extent, this second struggle of
the Gospel, its issue with heathenism, had been
begun on the soil of Asia Minor. Now it rises
into the chief place. The wrench that had loosen
ed the bands of a local and national religion from
the limbs of the young church at Antioch was to
be consummated in a more complete liberating
of it at Athens. For that reason we are the
more impressed to find that, after crossing the
Gulf, the apostle, indefatigable as ever in seek
ing his Hebrew countrymen for Christ, in spite of
all their hatred, and though just escaped from the
Thessalonian persecution, still clings to his habit
of proclaiming the message first to the dispersed
of Israel before he turns to the Gentile. " There
fore disputed he daily in the synagogue with the
Jews." If any proof were wanted of his quickness to
distinguish between fair conciliation and cowardly
compromise, and of his stiffness against all con
cession the moment it went so far as to obliterate
the lines of dogmatic truth, we have it in the life
long polemic attitude of his whole mind towards
the Judaizers. This traditional and ritualistic party
in the church was made up, remember, of Chris
tians, and often of an ardent and aggressive type.
One of their chief arguments for adhering to
ceremonial precedents was that it might bring in
gradually the entire old Israel into the Body of
Christ. They contrasted contemptuously the
value of a Gentile convert and a Jewish proselyte
— having it for a foregone conclusion that one
man circumcised was worth at least ten evangeli-

40 LECTURE SECOND.
cals without that patriarchal sacrament. Even
the conciliar decision at Jerusalem, dispensing
with circumcision, only partially controlled this
exclusive policy. Besides, the Judaizer had his
texts. If all nations were to call the Son of Mary
blessed, yet the word was to go forth from Zion ;
if the Light of the Cross was to lighten the Gen
tiles, nevertheless salvation is of the Jews ; if the
law was to be somehow superseded, so was it all
to be somehow fulfilled. Would it not, then, be
advance enough from this Christian Judaism that it
was a Judaism whose Messiah had already come ?
In short, the case on that side was made up in the
alleged interest of the Gospel. Would there be
an acuteness sharp and incisive enough, as well as
a language venturesome enough, to cut the fallacy
asunder ? It was then as it is commonly ; the most
plausible pretext for adulterating the chaste truth
as it is in Jesus, or for veiling its severer expression,
was that such breadth would set forward the cause
by humoring the popular prepossessions which
occupied the field. It is the plea of the tempor
izer as against the martyr ; of the politician as
against the statesman ; of the man of expedients
and party as against the man of faith.
You see the connection with my argument.
Had Christianity come to be the religion of one
race, or of the world? of the Jew, or of man?
The Jew, to be sure, is a man ; but man cannot
always be a Jew. If the Gospel is said to be true
because it suits humanity, and then if one type of
man monopolizes it, even though he got his cere
monial and his law once from heaven, the logic

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 41
breaks. St. Paul, the apostle chosen to that
end, shall deal with that dilemma. He has too
clear a sight of the real breadth and freedom of
both the spirit and the constitution of the church
of the living God to be bewildered for an instant
by the sophistry that would dwarf it down —
this Christian Jerusalem that lieth foursquare
like the superb quadrilateral of Lombardy, with
its twelve gates open — into a Palestinian sect ;
and so, after the tremendous manner of his em
phasis, he shuts the door of accommodation in
that direction tight : " If ye be circumcised,
Christ shall profit you nothing." " Ye are not
under the law." " The letter killeth." " Be not
entangled with any such yoke of bondage."
This Gospel is for man — for Gentile man, for
magi as well as shepherds, for the man of the
West no less than for the man of the East, for
Paul the missionary of the Mediterranean as
much as for Saul of Tarsus at the feet of Gama
liel. Just at this crisis of the Faith we meet him
disembarking at the gate of another continent.
He reaches the seat of the second of the two
schools of faulty religious culture, which, from the
first, have outwardly narrowed or inwardly cor
rupted the breadth and simplicity that are in
Christ. The question will be, Whether these oppositions '
qualify or contradict our position, that human
nature wants the Gospel, and finally, in the long-
run, is satisfied only in Christ. It might go far
to answer that question, and in the negative,
that the same New Testament, the word of Christ

42 LECTURE SECOND.
himself and his apostles, which appeals to man
to accept and obey it by his free faith, clearly an
ticipates and foretells both these two natural op
ponents of its rule.
There are two historically prominent types of
distortion — the externalizing and the rationalizing,-
ceremony and opinion^reverence for the con
crete, outward, visible religious thing, and rever
ence for the unseen spirit or the abstract relig
ious idea. In ethics, or matters of conscience,
they appear respectively as literalism and liberty ;
in metaphysics, as common-sense guided by per
ception, and transcendentalism trusting to intui
tion ; and in the cultus of worship they diverge
naturally into the aesthetic or ceremonial " cele
bration" on the one hand, and into the subjective
" state," or inward experience, whether specula
tive or mystical, according as intellect or emotion
predominates, on the other. One, dprfffxaia, finds
religion as a fact in history and in life ; the other,
yvaxxii, finds it as a conception or a sentiment in
the mind. The one disciple scarcely recognizes
religion except as he sees and touches it in the
church. The other consents to admit a church
as an unessential and variable accessory to his
religion. It is not unusual, and perhaps not un
fair, to characterize the two principles as tenden
cies to opposite heresies. Might it not be as well,
however, to call them the exaggerations of two
half-truths, every half-truth being always in effect,
though not in intent, of the nature of a heresy — in
the original sense of that word — till the other half
comes and is placed by its side to make a whole?

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 43
Limited and controlled, Christianity is not only
large enough and willing to include them both,
but, as a catholic necessity, it must include them.
That they both have a surprising facility of break
ing from their allegiance, especially if organized
and drilled into party, is plain enough not only
from history all, along, but from the fact that we
find them both beside the cradle of the Christian
church, and in the apostolic and sub-apostolic age
threatening the very life of the new-born child. ,
St. Paul deals with the first, Judaism, the party
of precedent, as we have seen, on what may be
called the native soil of the Christian king
dom, among his kinsmen according to the flesh,
" whose are the adoption, and the glory, and
the covenants, and the giving of the law." He
meets the second squarely when he lands at the
Piraeus. That short voyage was more than a pas
sage from one to another continent. He has
emigrated from one to another world of thought.
He has sailed away from Mosaic institutions,
Abrahamic covenants, and theocratic colorings of
social order, save as. he carries them, a Hebrew
of the Hebrews, in his own blood. The syna
gogue looks smaller, the old capital — " beautiful
for situation" — recedes, and the turrets of the
Temple sink behind the rim of the sea. Hence
forth, with a wider horizon, but on terribly
blighted ground, a new work has to be done with
new instruments. Contrary to the prediction of
the Judaists, the incoming Gentile accession was
to be by far the more important. Epiphany
prophecies of a missionary age were to begin to

44 LECTURE SECOND.
be fulfilled. All Europe, and an American child
out of its loins larger than itself — the future of
both being hidden yet under the forests — were to
yield their myriads of baptized disciples to be
" fellow-heirs of the same body."
The seed-grain laid up in the ark was to sprout
into a tree to heal the nations, and grow by a
broader sweep. How broad should it be? Of
what streams should it drink ? Should it offer an
indiscriminate shelter and a promiscuous hospital
ity ? One thing is clear. Directly in the path of
the new Cause stood a huge figure of Idolatry,
a sword in his hand, animal lusts boiling in his
veins, altars smoking with impure fires all round
him. Of this muscular pagan giant Athens was
the brain. Whatever they might borrow, by
way of Alexandria, where all the three leading
Gnostics appeared, from the genius of Philo,from
the Oriental imagination, or even from the liter
ary treasures of the Old Testament, the Greek
schools of philosophy, as the Gospel found them,
had come of an essentially independent stock.
They represent the purely natural or non-Chris
tian working of the human mind, sufficient to
itself, headstrong, not without inborn religious
instincts, but not subject to revealed authority ;
with no object for faith, no Sun of righteousness
risen upon it ; polytheistic here, pantheistic there,
atheistic elsewhere, : but restless and wretched
everywhere, either walking - in a chilly light
or wallowing in a sty of sensuality, as tempera
ment and climate might condition it. Classi
cal usage shows that in the complimentary word

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 45
used by the apostle in this address, rendered " too'
superstitious," there was implied a meaning of
fear, the apprehensive presentiment of evil in con
nection with religion, which ran all through the
heathen mind, and which especially threw a dark
shade over all its faint expectations of a future
life, making rather dreadful than attractive that
Hereafter for which the Gospel publishes the
cheerful tidings of atonement and peace.
We want to know precisely what this diseased
condition was to which Paul spoke. It was not,
as so many expositors have supposed, that anoma
lous mixture and monstrosity to which the Zoroas-
trian, the Egyptian, probably the Buddhist, and
certainly the cabalistic rabbi all contributed their
fantasies ; not that notion of emanations, which
the apostle probably did have in mind as " gen
ealogies" when he afterwards wrote the Pastoral
Epistles, as the angel-worship which he re
bukes to the Colossians, or the " science, falsely
so-called," against which he warns St. Timothy,
and the " knowledge which puffeth up" (" Hellen
istic smoke" is Chrysostom's expression), which
he denounces to the Corinthians ; no, it was stark
heathenism, half rationalistic and half afraid of
gods — an intellectual worldliness haunted by
dreams of judgment. This formed the second
antagonist to the faith of Christ, and it was this
that sat enthroned on the Athenian Areopagus
surrounded by altars.
What is remarkable, and what brings the mat
ter home to us here, is this : in one of those cir
cular movements of thought which have been

46 LECTURE SECOND.
often known in the world, it is the same antago
nist, in substance, which has sprung up even under
the sunlight of Christianity, and is in France, in
Great Britain, in Germany, in America to-day —
only that now it proposes to allow Christianity,
stripped of its divine insignia, and emasculated of
its supernatural vigor, to hold a place, as a sort
of religio licita, in a corner of its eclectic Pan
theon ; patronizing the prophet and his parables,
but rejecting the Redeemer on his cross ; not alto
gether unlike the Athenians themselves, who saw
in the foreign preacher only " a setter forth of
strange gods, because he preached unto them
Jesus and the resurrection."
Who is he, then, that shall carry and defend
The Faith against this its second foe? The
same, it appears, who, as we have seen, would not
suffer it to be walled up in a synagogue or strait
ened or stiffened into a sect. He must be, for
this special vocation, a man who knows some
thing of the peculiar, and subtle forms of mental
activity with which he will have to deal. A pro
vincial birthplace adds to his Jewish training un
der Gamaliel some affinities with Grecian spec
ulation. He has talked with Stoics probably at
Tarsus — for they were there — and has mastered a
scholarship extensive enough to embrace not only
the Aristotelian dialectics, but lyric poets no bet
ter known to the modern Greek student than
Menander and Epimenides. Roman citizenship
affords him the advantage of cosmopolitan rnan-
ners. Experience with all sorts of people, a sin
gular sagacity in seizing on oratorical points sug-

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 47
gested by personal peculiarities as well as the
surprises of popular assemblies ; and, lastly, a
fortitude which there was no scourge sharp
enough or dungeon dark enough to terrify,
from Syria to Spain — these are but accessories to
the original, acute, energetic, versatile, incisive,
capacious mind, which, by common consent, has
not been overmatched anywhere at any time.
Will there be any here, my brethren, so bold as
to disparage learning in the Christian minister, or
ready to reduce among us the standard of liter
ary requirement in candidates for it ? We claim
it here as one of the very proofs that our Christian
ity suits whatever is of the Maker in man, that it
welcomes his highest intellectual service, accepts
the gifts of his learning, and crowns them with its
consecration. Disparage the accomplishments of
the scholar we might indeed, but for what we
behold along with and above them. For they are
all in this man so completely penetrated by one
solemn conviction, so saturated with one holy
affection, so crowned and glorified with loyalty to
one Personal Leader, that he could say, into what
ever city or company he came, " Now, then, it is
no more I — with whatever honors of moral and in
tellectual manhood you may cover me — it is no
more / that live, but Christ liveth in me."
. We have the Gospel again embodied in a man,
not the divine Man, but as completely furnished
a specimen of man purely human as antiquity
affords, and Christianity suits him exactly in
every fibre and gift.
Stand with him at Mars' Hill. Before him were

48 LECTURE SECOND.
spokesmen of two systems: "Certain philoso
phers of the Stoics and of the Epicureans en
countered him." We are not to suppose from
the express mention of these two that there was
any special relation between either or both of
them to the teachings of St. Paul. I recall with
great interest a conversation of the lamented and
genial Greek Professor Felton, at Cambridge, after
his return from the East, in which he referred to
having detected, while standing on that hill, with
the Book of the Acts open in his hand, one of the
" undesigned coincidences," worthy to be placed
with those of Blunt or Paley, which the more con
firm the narrative the more concealed they lie. It
was evident, he said, that the two schools named —
Stoic and Epicurean — were referred to simply
from the accident of their proximity to the spot.
The gardens of Epicurus lay on the south-west,
near the bed of the Ilissus, where the founder
arranged the lovely scenery of his instructions,
bequeathing the grounds afterwards to his follow
ers on condition that they should keep them con
secrated to learning, and observe there a yearly
festival to his memory. Not far eastward, within
the very enclosure of the Agora, was the cloister
which Zeno the Stoic had transformed from the
seat of a symposium of poets into a lecture-hall of
Stoic morality — that stern delusion which aspired
to be indifferent to evil, not knowing it as sin but
despising it as weakness, endeavoring to substi
tute for the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the cheer
less resistance of a stubborn human will.
Take notice, there were two other forms of phil-

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN.

49

osophy, both of which would seem to have much
more in common with the profound doctrines of
Christ and the Resurrection ; why were not their
representatives drawn also about this solemn
foreigner who had deeper things on his lips than
either of the two great pupils of Socrates could tell ?
For the commonplace reason, as Professor Felton
observed, that the Lyceum, with the walks of the
Peripatetics, was situated away at the north-east ;
while in a different direction still, and so far out
as to be suburban, grew the olive groves of the
Academy. It only happened that they who were
in sight of the market-place saw the stir of the
concourse occasioned by the striking stranger,
and went out to inquire what new excitement had
come. Blend Zeno and Plato together, and you have
the pantheist of pure reason ; not the unqualified
pantheist who quite denies a primal Deity from
which all lower life flows, not the gross panthe
ist that Augustine describes, believing in a God
who pervades the universe as honey pervades the
comb in the hive, and not merely the pantheist
of antiquity, but the pantheist of intellectual
self-sufficiency. We have him close by us, for he
moves up and down the land from one lecture-
stand to another, Stoic or Sybarite as may hap
pen in temperament, a Platonist or a Lucretian in
philosophy, brilliant and eloquent perhaps, unit
ing to an almost passionless purity many a grace
that has been borrowed — with interest unpaid —
from the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. To
the Stoic at Athens, as at Paris, London, Philadel-

50 LECTURE SECOND.
phia, the preaching of the resurrection would be
eminently " foolishness ;" for though he might
understand something of the cross, regarded as
a sublime sigh of human martyrdom, he held,
according to Ritter, that the soul, being itself
material, is either consumed at death or loses its
personality by absorption. Even the scenes of
the crucifixion, with their divine tenderness and
human sensibility, would be all remote from the
apathetic endurance of a scheme whose two lead
ers died by their own hands, and which can wel
come no Saviour because its pride acknowledges
no sicknesses to be healed, and no sins to be for
given. As to Epicurus, when the maxims of
Positivism — whose modern doctrine of responsi
bility is a singular reproduction of the old Epi
cureanism — shall become popularized, none of us
here can doubt, I suppose, that they will spread
the same narcotic poison over the conscience that
brooded in the atmosphere of the Athenian gar
den. The Peripatetic sought the knowledge of things ;
the Platonist, the reason of things; the Stoic,
superiority and indifference to things; the Epi
curean, the enjoyment of things.- In mixtures
very various, and more and more as open enemies
to the cross of Christ, they are all here at our
door. If we take, as we surely may without vio
lence, the porch as standing for the party of a
Christless morality, the garden for a Christless
pleasure, the lyceum for a Christless science, and
the academy for a Christless religious culture, we
shall have four incredulous critics which every

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN.

5*

preacher and pastor has to see before him, to
question or to answer, and to try with all his
might to convince and convert, as he stands up,
Sunday by Sunday, to preach "Jesus and the
resurrection." The lounging religion-mongers who waited that
day about the ordinary resorts for a new sensa
tion were sure to find it in this fresh thinker, with
his startling ideas and crisp discourse. He is
taken to the Areopagus, some writers have im
agined to overawe him with the august memo
ries of the tribunal where so many judicial sen
tences had been pronounced; others think to
provide him a more appropriate pulpit ; but
more probably than either, as a kind of practical
witticism in the grotesque contrast between the
futile fanatic they took him to be and this solid
bench of public justice — certainly not for a reg
ular trial, which nothing in the narrative sug
gests. The apostle moves up the stone steps
without dismay, meekly conscious that, in his
weak bodily presence, before he has done, Christ's
strength will be made sufficiently perfect — the
only strength any true preacher ever feels within
him ; sure that it shall be given him in that same
hour what he shall speak ; he the real master of
all the masters that have led their pupils along
those streets, and they the " babblers ;" he the
steadfast witness, steady as the rock where he
stands ; they the feathers " tossed to and fro with
every wind of doctrine."
At the very beginning of the address we hear
an accent of conciliation ; but it is conciliation

52 LECTURE SECOND.
prompted by something holier than policy or the
success of his speech. To St. Paul Jesus Christ
is so much more than all successes that the con
verting to him of a single soul subordinates every
other purpose ; and to that end no honest conces
sion, no sacrifice of taste, no rhetorical pains, shall
be spared. To his eyes men exist only to have
Christ formed in them " the hope of glory."
We come now to our fundamental proposition,
lying, as I said, under all the continents of thought,
the seas of diverse feeling, the shifting climates of
men's manners. When the apostle utters the
dignified salutation, " Ye men of Athens," the
thought burns in him that every one of these
men is capable of the great salvation. How
shall he reach them ? Is there one common
idea or feeling between him and them that he
can transmute into a living link to convey to
them this grace of God and this gift of eternal
life? Already these assembling crowds .have
learnt that he has come over the sea as the advo
cate of a foreign religion. Shall some false pride
or foolish audacity in him widen, at the first
stroke, the distance, and repel or exasperate
them ? He is to tell them what kind of meji they
are ; he knows that they are fickle, frivolous, su
perficial heathen men ; and he has courage enough
to say that out if he will. They have provoked
and insulted him ; he who could stand before
kings and councils, making a Felix tremble, can,
if he is so minded, repay ridicule with scorn. He
begins, as you know, with that most candid and
graceful tribute, which the singular infelicity of

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 53
our version so nearly perverts and so completely
hides : " Ye, too, Athenians, are men whose minds
are very religious, eminently curious about dei
ties," deiaiSaifiovESrepoi. " My own eyesight," he
says, " bears witness that what so many travellers
have said of you is true. For as I passed by and
beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this
inscription, ' To the Unknown God ! ' " Here,
then, is established at once a certain bond of com
mon feeling. But lo ! how slender it is ! Their
"religion"? Why, was it not the very saddest
of all the features of their life ? the very abomina
tion that just now had so mightily stirred his
spirit ? Yet out of it he will pluck materials and
proofs of the energetic conclusions he has to pro
claim. He will even take a text cut on one of
their idolatrous altars, if he can thereby win and
gain and save one sinner for whom his Saviour
died. Before an educated assembly like this, it would
be superfluous to go over the aspects of the Athe
nian streets as St. Paul passed through them.
Ancient and modern topographers enable even
untravelled students to follow him, step by step,
from the Peiraic gate to the Acropolis, catching,
at every movement of the eye, some recognized
image — the sculptured monument of some well-
known divinity in a blind and polluted poly
theism. Altar succeeds to altar. Temple rises
above temple. Commemorated orators, artists,
tragedians, soldiers, men of ill-employed strength,
women of wicked beauty, stood as the stone sen
tinels or seducers of a still vital idolatry. There

54 LECTURE SECOND.
was a Latin satire that it was easier to find a god
in Athens than a man. An " altar" would seem
to have been the one thing there that the apos
tle could not name without a cry of indignant
lamentation. His searching glance sees one not mentioned by
other explorers. They have indeed noticed some
traces of an adoration approaching that which ar
rested this quick-sighted missionary's attention ;
for they tell us of several shrines erected to mere
abstractions of the mind — to Energy and Per
suasion, to Oblivion and to Fame, and, what
seemed least likely of all, even to Pity. In the
upward grade of religious aspiration these are
evidently at but one remove from the " altar to
the unknown God."
Whichever of the disputed accounts we accept
o( the origin and sense of the inscription — even
though we take Jerome's reading as the true one,
which makes the noun plural, including all sup-
posable and undiscovered deities — the craving of
the unsatisfied soul which it so pathetically pleads
is essentially the same. There is one unanswered
want in their bewildered hearts, and it is felt.
Yes, man is there, as well as altars. That is
enough. On that one solitary surviving shred of
the divine workmanship in their nature Paul rests
his hope of raising them yet, a regenerated peo
ple, into the kingship and priesthood of the fel
lowship of saints.
The verse I have quoted follows. As I take it,
it is a key that opens the world of unbelief and sin to
the whole heavenly life and power of the Gospel of

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 55
Christ. It unlocks the inner door by which God's
revelation enters the spirit of man. " Whom
therefore ye ignorantly worship." " Whom there
fore ye worship unknowing" (it is only another
inflection of the same verb with the " unknown,"
applied to the God of the sentence before, and
therefore embodies only the Greek's own confes
sion) — " him," this " ' unknown,' declare I unto
you." That is, Christ the God-man brings the God
he incarnates to that in man which needs and is
enabled to receive him. The Gospel alone " finds"
and fills the want. To interpret that want into
a desire, to excite and direct the desire, is the
first office in order of the Christian preacher.
No grown man is saved till he feels in him this
want ; when he feels it, as really a want of Christ's
salvation, he begins to be saved, because the
sense of sin is the first movement to faith. Were
there no reaching and feeling after God, there
would be no free reception of a free redemption,
no coming to Christ. Hence, however he does
it, by whatever one or more than one of the thou
sand evangelic methods that are open to him,
reaching all the way from the most, attractive ex
hibitions of God's love to the most terrible uncov
ering of his Judgment; he unquestionably is the
successful preacher who so goes first to the roots
of human weakness and depravity as to rouse
into unquenchable life in man the longing after
God. Him--whom the world unknowingly ac
knowledges and worships — declare we unto it as
the God in Christ, warning and encouraging
every man.

56 LECTURE SECOND.
The analysis of the sermon at Mars' Hill has
been so often undertaken, from Chrysostom down,
that perhaps every ray of light which can be
thrown to and fro between its several clauses, for
their mutual elucidation, has become familiar to
the Biblical student. The speech contains eight
sentences. Dr. Bentley, in the second of his
Boyle Lectures on Atheism, Dean Milman, in his
History, and Mr. Stanley, in his Oxford Serfnons,
have gone particularly into its negative bearing,
as a refutation of existing opinions. It is certainly
striking that up to that point in the discourse
where the speaker touches on the miracle of the
resurrection, each idea and expression he utters
in order will find one or another powerful pagan
party assenting to it ; while every such party, in
some other portion, would find its tenets traversed
and its maxims denied. Thus the whole listening
assembly would be held in a marvellously skilful
balance throughout, till, at last, the distinctive
and crucial doctrine, which he is there especially
to publish, dissolves this temporary truce, and a
general outburst of derision breaks up the audi
ence. After all, however, what most concerns us
and all Christendom in these compact and weighty
words is their positive affirmations, irrespective of
all temporary or local phases of human thought.
These affirmations are five : 1. The absolute unity,
spirituality, and self-existent personality of the
true God, as the object of Christian worship, and
the prime fact of the Christian creed ; 2. The
origin of the universe in his creatorship, as the
foundation of the redemption, or new creation as

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN.

57

the inheritance of the second Adam ; 3. The per
petual providence, or ceaseless supply of life and
love to this creation, as the foundation of practical
religion ; 4. The universal brotherhood and unity
of the race of man, encompassing all the divinely
appointed bounds of national habitation, as the
foundation for the catholicity of the church ; and,
5. The fact of a literal and personal resurrection
into glory, through the risen Redeemer, with the
correlative fact of a retributive judgment. The
amazing compass of these brief statements, com
bined with their subtile adaptation to the various
shades of speculation and feeling on the spot, to
gether with their logical consecutiveness, and their
rhetorical beauty, including their graceful citation
of a line of verse from Aratus, found also almost
word for word in Cleanthes, these make up the
marvel of this Christian oration, matchless among
all the orators. Nothing from the apostle better
justifies Luther's hyperbole, " The words of St.
Paul are not dead words ; they are living creatures
and have hands and feet." *
* One further expository suggestion only — if it may be par
doned — is offered, not having the support, so far as I know, of
any of the critics. They have universally accounted for the re
ference to the "one blood," or unity of the race, by the arrogant
pretension of the Greeks to be an independent national product.
sprung up on their own soil — avroxQciveS. Is it not, however, as
likely — since the Jew, wherever he came, was known to hold an
offensive sense of superiority, and since, as Bentley himself ad
mits, the same claim of a separate origin was set up by several
other ancient tribes besides the Greeks — that this was only an
other of the apostle's conciliatory overtures, to soften prejudice,
to widen the ground of mutual good-will, towards a better wel
come for the doctrine he has yet in reserve to deliver ?

58 LECTURE SECOND.
The discourse ended, the day's customary ex
citement dies away, and the novelty-loving city
grows still. When Xenophon relates the recep
tion of the news of the Greek defeat in this same
metropolis, at the end of the Peloponnesian war,
he writes, with simple pathos, that " No one slept
in Athens that night." * Had there been a deeper
penetration into the true hiding-places of a peo
ple's strength, and the real signs of the times,
a more awful and anxious vigil would have been
kept there, now that, by one day's preaching, the
Gospel of an everlasting commonwealth, which
subdues and outlasts all earthly empires, had vir
tually conquered pagan philosophy at its centre,
unseating it from its stronghold.f
* See Wordsworth's "Athens and Attica." The earlier and
original authorities as to the localities and their historical and
mythological illustrations are the ten " Books of the Itinerary"
of Pausanias and Cicero's Letters.
\ A Continental commentator has said that Paul never"
preached with less fruit than at Athens. Can we dare say that
he ever preached with more? The moderately-sized church
standing to-day on the Areopagus, dedicated to Dionysius, the
solitary male convert, to be sure, who is mentioned in the narra
tive by name, the first bishop of Athens, is but an inadequate
symbol of the "sound that has gone out into all the earth"
from that single sermon. They that search anxiously for
historical parallels find that it was on the very rock where
Paul lifted up the banner of the cross for the western world that
the Persians pitched their encampment when they besieged the
Acropolis ; and that, while Xerxes attempted ineffectually to burn
out the Greek worship by setting fire to its temples, Paul under
mined it in the minds of its worshippers ; so that the Parthenon
itself, still standing, was at last ennobled by the preaching of
another "wisdom and power," and converted into a kind of sanc
tuary of the Son of God.

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN.

59

The great scene at Mars' Hill passes from our
view, but not the mighty evidence it yields that,
in every nation, humanity at its highest and best,
its loftiest culture and keenest vision of nature, is
yet a creature born to worship, never at rest till it
rests at the cross, finding the Father through the
Son. " Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship,
him declare I unto you," is the ceaseless cry of the
Gospel, "till we all come in the knowledge of
the Son of God unto a perfect man!"
All round us, among those who will not welcome
"the truth as it is in Jesus," there are living signs
of a religious sensibility, tenacious witnesses in
the soul that it somehow seeks the Shepherd, feel
ing blindly after him, while it is sought by him.
Every Christian minister will recognize them ; any
penetrating eye can discover them. The spon
taneous acknowledgments of God that spring to
the lips of irreligious persons in swift and unpre
meditated syllables ; the awe that falls on the
spirits of skeptics in great sorrows or terrible pro
vidences ; the prevalent desire of profane parents
to have their children taught at church ; the send
ing for the clergyman in mortal sickness, or at the
burial of the dead, by scoffers ; irrepressible pray
ers ; a lingering respect for Christian ordinances,
which is not mere fear of public opinion; the
power of Sunday, which is more than secular over
even secular minds ; an almost universal deference
to the words of Scripture, which is neither intel
lectual nor superstitious — each of these is one of
those altars to the unknown God which stand on
every side of us, their very inconsistency with the

60 LECTURE SECOND.
unchristian life joined with them making them
only the more impressive confirmations of the
want of all the sons of men for the Son of Man.
Through the streets of Paris, not long ago,
there moved out to Pere la Chaise a funeral pro
cession of atheists. It halted by an open grave.
There was no hymn ; for atheism was never yet set
to music ; no prayer, for when atheism has time
to consider it remembers that a supplication sent
into the air is either an absurdity or a surrender.
Into that grave was let down the mortal part —
all, those faithless mourners would have said — of
a woman of wit and beauty, the admired sibyl
of a well-known brilliant pagan communistic ora
cle speaking through France. There was a eu
logy. The orator praised the dead, recommended
communism, pronounced creation a dream, and
argued that there is no immortality and no God.
Reaching the climax of his impassioned pane
gyric, swept by the intensity of an extemporaneous
French enthusiasm beyond the bounds of an arti
ficial materialism, he tossed the flowers in his hand
upon the coffin-lid before him, exclaiming, " Pass
on, fair spirit, God is waiting to receive thee ! " To
the stumbling, stammering; mourning children of
humanity in Parisian streets, at the entry of the
city, in human habitations, by open graves,, Chris.--
tendom cries, in the wisdom of Christ^" Unto you,
O men ! I call. Whom ye ignorantfy worship, him
declare I unto you."
We too, here, have all one human heart. Look
down into that. In its deepest places are there
no facts that cry out for Christ, and so bear per-

CHRIST DISCLOSED TO MEN. 6 1
petual testimony to his coming? What do you
make, O unbeliever, of yourself ? " How readest
thou," not thy Bible, but thy own breast, that
Bible in thee, with its Old Testament of law and
its New Testament of love.? Look again. There
is conscience, with all its bitter accusations. There
is remorse, with its uncomforted agonies. There
is affection, with its infinite, mysterious capacities
of pain. There is an instinct of Judgment, fore
boding greater possible miseries to come. There
is aspiration, longing for unattained heights and
glories of a more perfect life — all a riddle without
interpretation if there is no Divine Man. There
is bereavement moaning at the fresh grave, in
quiring, "If a man die, shall he live again?"
There is the natural want of worship, kindling its
altars all over the round world, listening for a voice
from the sky. There is the restless and perpetual
"feeling after God," if haply it may find him.
What do they all mean? Whence come they?
Whither do they reach? Under these familiar
words lie all the tragedy and glory, the shame or
the splendor, the death or the life of the soul of
man. What would all Athenian knowledge and art
be worth to you or me, which, after it had reaped
its splendid harvests in all the fields of nature,
knew no Lord at whose feet it could lay these
treasures down ?

LECTURE III.

Cferisi it* tXte 'gxtsmtt of §oxxht &ut\
iisfejeXtjet %\xz WLoxW xofflxoxxt
Iftra, mxiX xoiVfo ifira.

"glvM tofien theg sato fiim, tfieg toorsbijjieB bimj nut some
SOUUtea." — Matt. 8 : 17.
" Slna some beliebeB tbe tbinas tobicfi toeve sjoften, ana some
beliebeb not." — Acts 28 : 24.
" ffije toorla bg toisBom ftneto not ffioa. . . . jFor tfie Jctos
require a sign, ana tbe ©freefts seefe after toisBom : but toe preacb
ffiijrist cruciffeB, unto tfie Jetos a stumblinn,=blocfc, ana unto tfie
Cffreefts foolishness j but unto tfiem tobicfi are callea, botfi $etos
ana ©freefcs, ffibrist, tbe jotoer of ffioB, ana tfie toisaom of ©foB."—
1 Cor. 1 : 21-29

CJtrist in tltje ^xtsmu of
gmttri anil Qi&b&luf .
Three questions lie directly across the path of
thought where we are moving. They must be an
swered, unless we are willing to come to a one
sided and loose conclusion.
Granted that the faith of Christ is fitted to
mankind, how do we know that the world, without
Christ, would not have reached, in some way, what
Christ has brought? What are we to make
of the fact that, when he and his religion have
come, some minds have always doubted, and
others have vigorously disbelieved ? And, in the
propagation of this Faith, why has the progress
been partial and unequal ? These difficulties chal
lenge explanation. Inquiry is of the intellect ;
and we shall find, I believe, that though it is as a
thinking creature that man first raises the doubt,
yet afterwards, if he is fair and thinks on, he
brings the value of his doubt to trial.
Before you is a piece of mechanism ; it lies in
the daylight. It is complicated ; it is of durable
material ; it is of magnificent dimensions, and of
many delicate adjustments. The machine is
running. Examining it, you are certain of two

66 LECTURE THIRD.
things: that it was meant to do a particular
work, and that it is doing that work badly. We
all say, then, Something is wanting. There ap
pears at our side a man who, by his language and
his touch, seems to understand the principle and
the construction. He speaks as if he might have
been the builder. A probability arises in our
minds that he can remedy the defects which he
points out, and can accomplish a vast and gradual
improvement in the operation, looking with prom
ise to its final perfection. He makes the experi
ment. We come there at a later day, and we
find a manifest reduction of the jars and fail
ures, with a marvellous increase of the original
power of the contrivance. If we have common
sense and common candor, we shall say, This
mending or remaking is due to that mender or
remaker. Here are cause and effect. His claim
to the belief of machinists and of all people is
justified. It matters nothing at all what theories
the most ingenious minds may frame about the
origin, or the nature, or the proper cure, of the
disorder in the mechanism. It matters nothing
now whether certain accounts and letters written
about this person were in every respect correct,
or have been properly copied and kept. It mat
ters still less whether the opinions of certain dis
tinguished engineers as to the intentions of this
master or the performance of his subordinates and
successors are warranted. The thing wanted was
done. There stands the restored construction —
visible, tangible, solid, and running well. That
master restored it.

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 6j

I do no dishonor to human nature when I so
figure it as a product of intelligent design. Be
fore that Life appeared which was lived between
Bethlehem and Calvary, it was the mechanism in
disorder, the instrument out of tune. We are now
to trace the proofs that the hand which healed
was the hand that made it. Drop, then, the me
chanical figure. There is a spirit in man, and
the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him under
standing. I. We shall have to admit that till Christ comes
man does not find what he needs or even know
by his understanding what he wants. As the
Master of Humanity, Christ first interprets the
want, and makes it consciously distinct before
he satisfies it. This law is seen to govern the
Saviour's ministry to persons in Judea, both in
miracle and teaching ; and it appears with equal
brightness in all the vast historical movements by
which he draws the race into his kingdom.
Any exhaustive enumeration of the signs of dis
order in the non-Christian world, signs that human
nature without the Saviour worked badly, is be
yond the limits of these lectures. I can only af
firm to my audience that the sources of accurate
and definite knowledge on that first point are
accessible, and that all trustworthy scholarship is
agreed as to their authenticity.* On these we
may rest several distinct propositions, made neces-
* The most recent accurate account of the public and pri
vate life of human society at the advent of Christ, from original
sources of information, may be found in Prof. Fisher's " Be
ginnings of Christianity."

68 LECTURE THIRD.
sarily concise, touching for the most part the
greater subjects of man's intellectual concern.
You will observe that amidst the entire circuit
of that heathen life there run two streams : first,
the broad river of moral and intellectual failure,
but parallel with that, or amidst it, a slender
and yet persevering and most striking current of
human longing for something better — aspirations
for an unattained illumination, springing from
a haunting consciousness of some hidden capacity
of good never unfolded. At considerable inter
vals you see these tokens of a deep and restless
want in all the ante-evangelical literature and art.
You hear their half-articulate wail or melancholy
undertone in the Greek tragedies and epics, in the
lyric poetry of the East, in the loftier meditations
of Athenian and Latin philosophy. The same un
satisfied yearning for truth, for certainty, for con
solation, is carved into marble, built into pyra
mids, and framed into temples. So that, while
we draw one and the same conclusion, we draw
it from two apparently opposite classes of ancient
testimonials — those that testify to constant error
and degradation on the one hand, and those that
witness to a frequent but blind reaching after the
completeness in Christ, which makes so wonder
fully descriptive his title in prophecy, " the Desire
of all nations," on the other. Both declare with
voices unutterably and most pathetically sad, that
humanity needed Christ, and was waiting for him
when he came.
Let the following positions, then, stand in order :
i. In no one nation of antiquity, in no one non-

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 69
Christian corner of the earth since, was there
ever a steady and lasting advance in moral and
intellectual life. There has been no permanent
non-Christian civilization. Always there was re
cession after progress, decay after vitality, eclipse
after brilliancy.
2. No people was ever lifted out of barbarism,
none was ever regenerated or vitalized, by its own
force, or from within itself; but every people only
by the coming in and coming down upon it of a
quickening power from without and from above.
So profound a reader of the past as Niebuhr says
emphatically : " Civilization is never indigenous ; it
is an exotic plant wherever it is found." Herder
says: "No man has the birth of his mind, any
more than the birth of his body, through himself
alone." Lord Bacon says it. The fable of Prome
theus and other myths confessed it on the spot
where the natural fire burnt brightest. Then it
follows that originally, if you carry back the
search for your regenerating power from one coun
try to another, you must find it, at last, in an upper
country, i.e., in Him who comes from above the
world into it ; and " He that descended is the same
also that ascended up far above all heavens, that
he might fill all things."
3. It is now the settled judgment of competent
judges that in heathendom, with exceptions too
insignificant to be taken into account, all nations,
all tribes, have worshipped ; that man is a worship
ping creature, has an inborn sense of a superior
agency or a stronger force than himself, generally

JO LECTURE THIRD.

a person or persons.* In our day travel and voy
age have virtually completed the exploration of the
planet, and their verdict is that it is extremely
doubtful if there is an absolutely non-religious com
munity, even among the Bushmen of South Africa.
Yet worship never combined the three traits to
gether, of being equally suited to all classes, of
elevating and purifying the moral life, and of satis
fying the worshipper as his intelligence increased,
•except in Christianity.
4. The idea of a divine Fatherhood, central to
Christianity, was absent from every non-Christian
religion ; and yet the parental instinct, in its
mighty and tender energy, is universal — natural
religion thus missing what it wanted most.
5. Recent psychological and experimental sci
ence has decided that the average man every
where has four instincts, which may be considered
as the foundation of all natural religion : the
instinct of somewhat or some one above himself ;
the instinct of immortality, or continued existence ;
the instinct of conscience, or of a law of right and
wrong, as obligatory upon him ; and, as a conse
quence of that, the instinct of alarm or foreboding,
as the effect of doing wrong. These are unwritten
* " Obliged as I am, even by my education, to pass in review the
races of men, I have sought for theism in the lowest and in the
highest, but nowhere have I met with it, except in an individual,
or at most in some school of men, more or less known, as we
have seen in Europe in the last century, and as we see at the
present day. Everywhere and always the masses of the people have
escaped it."— M. Quatrefages, cited by the Archbishop of York in
his " Limits of Philosophical Inquiry.''

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 7 1
prophecies. All the four stand in the front of the
four Gospels.
6. While the cleverest ancient thinkers included
among their beliefs, and oftener among their con
jectures, that of a life after death, there is not the
slightest evidence that the idea of immortality had
any practical influence whatever, either in check
ing vice and crime, or in encouraging spirituality,
a circumstance which goes far to account for the
place given to the resurrection in the first plant
ing of the Christian Church. It was the one doc
trine put with the divine name in the first preach
ing: " Christ and the resurrection."
7. Judging by authenticated descriptions of
ancient society, and by the morals attributed in
mythology to the gods, conscience was both van
quished and corrupted everywhere. Of the Chris
tian ethics, after all the opportunities of eighteen
hundred years to outgrow it or to fault it, a stu
dent who, if not a reluctant is certainly not an
interested witness, says to his friends the ration
alists, " The morality of the New Testament is sci
entific and perfect."*
8. While the prevalence oi expiatory sacrifices
in paganism was proof enough of a vaguely felt
necessity for pardon, there was no conception,
there was no dream, of a propitiation, which, like
the cross, betokened the love of the Deity, or which
revealed the first movement of reconciliation as
stirring in the divine heart, or which drew the dis
ciple, by the sympathy of voluntary suffering, into
* Mr. R. W. Emerson.

72 LECTURE THIRD.
a likeness to the spirit he worshipped. And
therefore the theologian is right who lately said :
" Christianity, and it only, as a scheme of thought,
shows how man may look on all God's attributes
at once, and be at peace" — his terrible justice and
his tender mercy.
9. Among the better minds before the Christian
era -there was an enlarging idea of some principle
of social order that should become universal and
unify nations under a single rule ; and hence the
enormous comprehension of the Roman empire,
just before the nativity at Bethlehem, stretching
from the East Indies to the Atlantic, forcing a
military peace, shutting the gates of Janus, hold
ing the populations of the earth, to the imperial
throne in one hand — a hand which, if not gentle, was
firm, and watching them with an eye which, if not
friendly, was all-seeing on the surface ; this, though
a very metallic, coarse, and heartless symbol, was
still a symbol singularly prophetic of that more
glorious empire— one, eternal, just and merciful
—where the kingdoms of this world should become
the kingdom of the Lord.
10. Man abhors slavery. Slavery hurts what in
him is most human. The welfare of humanity is
bound up with its freedom. The new spirit acts for
liberty, however, not on the political structure
directly, but on the ruling men who, in the long-
run, make the government despotic or free. It is
De Tocqueville, the publicist, not any professed
preacher, who says, " Christianity is the compan
ion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its
infancy, and the divine source of all its claims."

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 73
It is Guizot, not a theologian but a civilian and
statesman, who writes the work which proves the
Christian faith to be the fountain of free institu
tions. This position is not weakened by the fact
that the Church has generally arrayed no organized
opposition against political serfdom or servitude.
From the first, it received from the Saviour a dif
ferent commission ; and it went about its healing
work by touching not the branches of the tree
but its roots. It knew, and it has made the world
confess, that its principle of the brotherhood of all
men, with one Father, where justice and love are
the reigning forces ; where there is neither bond
nor free, male nor female, having separate rights
— " a great Christian commonwealth where all are
one in Christ" — must in the end bring liberty with
it to every class. The early Christian monks re
fused to be waited on by slaves. The Church was
the slave's sanctuary, where the owner's hand,
lifted to strike, was held off. The primitive mis
sionaries " never lost an opportunity of redeeming
slaves. Ecclesiastical legislation declared the
slave to be a man, not a chattel ; laid it down as a
rule that his life was his own, not to be taken
without a trial, and it shut out from the commun
ion the master who murdered his serf."* That
was a clarion of emancipation that rang far down
into the soul of humanity when the Lord said, in
the hearing of the frightened Pharisees and
tyrants of Jerusalem, " If the Son shall make you
free, ye shall be free indeed" — and no man laid
hands on him. * Bishop Harold Brown.

74 LECTURE THIRD.
ii. Whoever thinks imagines. Imagination, in
its broader sense, is the creative faculty. Creation
by man is art — the art of beauty or design. Does
Christianity recognize this department also of
man's mind ?
Turn to the Master himself, taking with you
the three great principles of artistic work. First,
there is intense sympathy with nature. In
three years of most anxious and suffering labor in
the august purpose of re-creating the conscience
and soul of the race, speaking only a few brief
addresses that are. known to the world, Christ
nevertheless so blends his life with the scenery of
his native land and sky, and so weaves the living
and growing things of the earth into the expres
sion of his spirit, that thenceforth Palestine is in
separable from Jesus, and the Gospel and nature
are set into eternal harmony. Men have agreed
to call the language that does that " poetry."
Another essential artistic principle is the presenta
tion of an original ideal under images and materials
that are common and familiar. Christ's original
ideal is a character where such opposites as gen
tleness and power, self-subjection and personal
authority, frankness and reserve, spotless purity
and sympathy with the sinful, pity and indignation,
sensibility and courage, are mingled without one
stroke of discord ; and every image and color of
which that majestic figure is composed is taken
from things familiar in the houses and streets and
farms of the people.
Still another principle of the most perfect pro
ductions in art is unity in variety. You study the

CHRIST IN. THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 75
words of the Saviour, from the baptism at the Jor
dan to the mysterious predictions and farewells
of the paschal night. The range of subjects, the
diversity of illustration, the contrasts of tone and
style, are as boundless as the life of the world that
now is and of eternity. Yet no thinker ever thinks
of Christ as having but a single aim in all he ever
did or spoke.
Can we wonder, then, that his religion from the
first has satisfied that sense of beauty which never
quite forsakes men anywhere, and which rises
and is refined in them as their whole estate is ex
alted ? Can we wonder that this holy Faith, stern
in morality and solemn in prospect as it is, should
welcome the ministry of what is beautiful in shape
or color or sound, if only it keeps Its ministerial
place, and glorifies without materializing the spirit
ual realities of that unseen Kingdom which is, after
all, within and above ? From the moment Christ
took our flesh and slept on his mother's arm at
Bethlehem, to his last agony, Christian art has
preached him to the nations. Can we recall one
signal incident in all his sacrificial way to which
it has not brought an interpretation for the under
standing or a persuasion for the heart? Some
times, to be sure, it has been a Rubens, sensualiz
ing the soul — as what instinct of God may not
depravity degrade ? . But oftener it has been the
Angelico, who, every day, when he renewed his
work on his picture of the crucifixion, shed tears
of faith and love. You might pull down, in a mis
erable iconoclasm, from the walls of Christian gal
leries and dwellings all these pictured sermons of

76 LECTURE THIRD.
your Saviour's redemption : to be sure you would
not shake the cross, or take its saving virtue from
one drop of the precious blood, or blot a feature
from the face of the Son of God ; but you would
bury a perfume which our better humanity has
scattered on the air of the world with the Gospel
— a tribute to him who did not forbid his Evangel
ist to mention of the alabaster-box that it was
costly, and that he accepted it. Sculpture has
done less for the Faith ; and the Church might
learn from that how this religion of the spirit
always subordinates form to life ; for statuary is
to painting what winter landscapes are to summer.
The life is there, but it is frozen. " The letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life." You might
shear off all the spires and towers of Christian
architecture from the scenery of the planet ; you
would only dwarf the cedars of Lebanon into a
field of stumps ; you would not kill the root.
You might- silence the anthems and oratorios of
Christian music, sung by the genius of Germany,
Italy, and England ; but the ear of Christendom
would listen still, through all the feasts and vigils
to come, for some strains of its " Creation," its
" Messiah"— songs of Moses and Elijah, of David
and Isaiah, and Patmos — to be sung once more.
We cannot be wrong in saying that our religion
is human in accepting the service of beauty in the
arts. 12. In the spiritual sphere, the element above
nature, that something which all people feel and
most people acknowledge as belonging to the un
seen/was for the first time made to harmonize

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT J J
with nature, in Christ's ministry. There we find
nature and the supernatural flowing together ; we
pass, in reading the New Testament story, from
the ordinary to the miraculous, and from the
miraculous back to common life, following Jesus
and his apostles, without a break or a jar. There
is nothing like this in any mythology. Earth and
heaven were never so brought together as when
the Son of God, from heaven, stands among men.
Nay, more ; in the same revelation, the space up
wards between man and God is filled up with super
human life. If we start at the bottom of all animated
existence, its lowest grade, and move up from the
monad towards man, natural science shows us
the steps of an unbroken gradation. Rank by
rank the living creatures rise, in one majestic
order of creation, from the first cellular tissue that
was built, to Newton, to Shakespeare, to Fenelon.
And every order, by its own structure and organs,
to the scientific eye, predicts the one coming next
above it. All along you trace signs of anticipation,
of something greater, of a loftier kind of creature
than the one you see. A voice out of the rocks,
out of the sea, out of the slime of sedgy pools, and
the shadows of forests, and the clefts of the wilder
ness, cries forever : " After me cometh one might
ier than I." Given the lowest, the highest must
be. Given your monad, man must be. But is man
your " highest"? Is that immense interval which
stretches between Newton and the Almighty
One an unpeopled waste ? Does your steadily
ascending scale stop at the mortal line, leaving
all the upper spaces of the universe empty

78 LECTURE THIRD.
this side of God ? Does this look like the fulfil
ment of law ? Granted that man is the crown
and summit of nature, yet there haunts his breast
an unquenchable sense of a vast and living world
above him, reaching all the way to the foot of the
throne. Leibnitz, with his searching vision, saw it.
"Nature," he says, "never makes a leap." And
what science, or man at his best intellectual
estate concludes, the Gospel reveals. That spirit
ual world stands open, and its inhabitants — angels
and archangels, cherubim and seraphim — are
visible, moving, ministering, worshipping. From
the first patriarch to the last apostle, Bible-men
behold them. And he on whom they are seen
ascending and descending is the Son of Man.*
II. Observe how this religion is comprehensive.
The East and the West of antiquity were not
more contrasted in their geography or their tem
perament than in their habit of religious thinking
or their theory of man's relation to the other
world. They started from opposite points, and
the difference clung to them all the way, in pro
cess and conclusion. To the oriental mind the
conception of religion was that of the divine
world coming down to the human. The move
ment begins at the upper end of the line. God
or the gods must make a demonstration, having
mankind for its objective point. There is first
* "Each step is a revolution in one point of view ; buf then
the lower state prepared itself fo.r the higher, prophesied, so to
speak, of its coming, and the higher seated itself so easily on the
throne prepared for it that we do not wonder to find it there." 
" Design in Nature," by W. Thomson, D.D.

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. Jg

conceived a supernatural sphere, occupied by
deities or seons, one emanating or derived from
another, often in couples, in a descending series.
This upper universe has a kind of completeness in
itself. Whether Persian or Chinese or Indian or
Egyptian, the system builds itself on ideas of a
heavenly hierarchy or family, independent of hu
manity. Be man what he may, or where he may,
the celestial orders have their own domain and
their own genealogies. If man is lifted up out of
his abjectness at all, it must be by a condescension
which first stretches its arms downward from
above. With Western thought, on the other hand, man
was set to climb upward, with such help as he
could get, towards the gods, perhaps into a god.
Olympus takes its coloring and shaping from
mortal preconceptions. A deity is a man or
woman with ever}' faculty and passion enlarged,
except those which Christ shows to be most really
godlike. The movement starts now at the bottom
of the line. The East, i.e., in religion, sees this
world touched and more or less irradiated by the
sun-fire of the skies. The West sees humanity
struggling and fighting its way heavenward, and
when it gets there, taking a great deal that is of
the earth, and very earthy, with it. The East
humanizes its God ; the West deifies or apotheo
sizes man.
Is it not very easy for us all, then, to see how
the religion of Christ, and that alone, with its equal
adapation to Orient and Occident alike, takes
both these diverse tendencies together and makes

80 LECTURE THIRD.

one Faith for the world ? " He who ascended is
the same also that descended." " The Word is
made flesh." " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all
men unto me." "Now are ye," sons of men, " the
sons of God." " Hereafter ye shall see the angels
of God ascending and descending upon the Son
of man." These are some of the marvellous decla
rations of that glorious unity in which the incar
nation of our Lord becomes the bond of our race.
" That in the dispensation of the fulness of times
he might gather together in one all things in
Christ, both which are in heaven and which are
on earth, even in him— far above every name
that is named, not only in this world but also
in that which is to come, and gave him to be
head over all things to the church, which is his
body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all."
III. Here, however, we meet the contradiction
of unbelief. This is not the place to deal with
the value of the skeptic's arguments, but only with
his doubt or denial taken in itself as a phenome
non in fact. When Christ was alive among his
countrymen, working his wonders, healing their
diseases, there were those whom this divine spec
tacle of charity did not charm or convince.
The Scripture tells us this, with sublime candor,
never caring to make out a case by hiding any
reality. " Some doubted." -The line of doubters
has lengthened, down from Celsus and Cerinthus
to the protean skepticism conspicuous in the liter
ary countries of Europe, with its importations
and imitations in America. What account is to
be given of them, if it be true that man, by

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 8 1

virtue of his humanity, wants Christ and his
religion ?
First, and most emphatically, among all attacks
on the Christian Faith, in any age, only in very
rare and exceptional cases has the assault been
upon Christ himself, upon his own character as
a person, or upon that type of character which it
was the supreme object of the Saviour to create
in mankind. We have now in our hands .the ma
terials for a complete history of skeptical thought
from the beginning ; indeed, it has been compe
tently written, fifteen years ago, in one of the
courses of lectures at Oxford, from which this
lectureship takes its syllabus of subjects.* Noth
ing is more remarkable in that history than that
amidst the varied shapes of infidelity the assail
ants, by a vast majority, have directed their
criticism against other points than the heart of
the spiritual system in the person of our Lord.f
You have to remember how manifold those other
points are, in a system which involves elements
so complicated as these : a body of writings made
up of sixty-six distinct compositions by almost as
many writers, all unlike each other, produced in
* "A Critical History of Free Thought," by Adam Storey
Farrar, M.A., Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. Cf. Lecky.
f An apparent exception might be alleged to exist in the rib
aldry and blasphemy of the French atheists of the last century.
But a more careful inquiry will show that with nearly the entire
school that grew up about Voltaire, Diderot, and the Encyclo
pedic, in Paris, as well as at the court of Frederick the Great,
the declared reasons of disbelief lay in the regions of philosophy,
politics, and the passions, and remote from the real substance of
the Religion of the New Testament.

82 LECTURE THIRD.
different countries, in different languages, at inter
vals of time extending over a period of nearly
two thousand years, belonging to all departments
of literature, full of dates and figures, and touch
ing nearly every topic of human concern and
many nations of the time ; then, the histories and
peculiarities of a large number of persons living
in a remote age ; then, elaborate systems of law,
opinion, and ritual ; then, a series of external acts,
some of them miraculous, running through the
whole period and surrounding the person of Christ
himself; then, the minor teachings or doctrines;
then, the circumstances that attended the planting
of a great institution, the church, in many lands ;
and, lastly, the subsequent historic incidents grow
ing out of this Faith. Must it not necessarily be that
a Christianity including all this, however adapted
its main and central figure might be to human
needs, would provoke, everywhere and always, in
countless details, that critical and skeptical faculty
which is a part also of man's constitution, and is
undoubtedly one of the instruments given him
for distinguishing what is true from what is false ?
Again, man in his organization is not simple but
composite. And whatever his deeper nature in
its more deliberate and rational exercise might
demand, it is evident that in the realm of both his
passions and his interests there must always be
counter-currents of desire. So the love of mortal
life is clearly a permanent and universal trait of
mankind ; yet, in some moods, under certain illu
sions — for pleasure, for money, from sheer audacity
—life is sacrificed. It is evident that the Gospel,

CHIST IN THE rRaSENCE OF DOUBT. 83
precisely because it does fit man as to the high
ends for which he was made, crosses and vexes
him as to his inferior inclinations, and hence, on
the moral side, there always is, and always must
be, in sensuality, in avarice, in every selfish pro
pensity, a tremendous motive to reject Christi
anity itself, and to dispute its credentials. The
religion claims obedience, and will accept no
divided empire over the affections and the will.
The real wonder will be, when we measure the
pressure of this conflict, not that unbelief has
been persistent or prevalent or ingenious, but
that it has been held within the bounds which
have actually restrained it. On the intellectual
side, for the very reason that the Gospel has
conquered, there is to a certain style of mind
a fascination in the bare idea of seeing through
it or defying its power. The history of free
thought proves that in this impatience of au
thority, this pride of an independent reason,
this ambition of the autocracy of the brain, has
been a principal origin of each of the heresies and
denials — Gnostic, encyclopaedic, philosophic, sci
entific, and even mystic. The unbeliever meas
ures his private mental force against the common
belief in the most imperious and unyielding de
mand ever proclaimed. The tempter says, "Ye
shall be as gods ;" and what ungodly mind would
not be a god if it could ?
A third reply to the objection named is that the
Religion of Christ has been again and again dis
carded on account of the foreign matter affixed by
superstition and misconception to its original sub-

84 LECTURE THIRD.
stance. Nothing is sadder to the student of skepti
cism than the constant return of this discovery.
Nearly every form of continental infidelity has
mistaken a mediaeval and half-mythologized Chris
tianity for the pure and primitive faith of Jesus
and St. Paul. Even among the scholarly skeptics
now living there is more than one whose entire
negation proceeds on assumptions that would be
impossible if the skeptic had ever understood
either the primitive theology or the New Testa
ment itself. It is the dismal swing of the pendu
lum over a frightfully wide arc — from error to
blank atheism, from False Decretals to Wolfen-
biittel Fragments, from Calvin to Rousseau, from
the Vatican to nihilism, from Mariolatry and saint-
worship to no worship at all. Before reckoning
the weight of unbelief against the fitness of the
Gospel for man, Ave must deduct the momentum
of this extravagant recoil.
Fourthly, however, the recoil always has its
limits. The proportion of doubt and faith, wher
ever there is intellectual activity and a healthy
freedom, does not shift in favor of doubt, unless
in transient and returning waves. Judging by the
patristic apologies, most of the modern difficulties,
in kind, were started before the end of the fifth
century, or even the fourth. The French infidel
ity of a hundred years ago; the denials in Ger
many of Semler and Eichhorn and Paulns and
Strauss ; the English free-thinking of Bolingbroke
and Herbert and Collins and 'Hume, are all at
this moment, as scholars know, largely spent
forces. " The incontrovertible fact is," a conterri-

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 85
porary student has observed, " that nearly every
prominent German theological school is now
under predominant evangelical influence. Twenty
years ago the Tubingen school in criticism was
formidable. Its hopeless decline has been written
in more than one tongue." " Strauss laughs at
Paulus, Baur at Strauss, Renan at Baur, the hour
glass at all."
The matter of unbelief as springing from dis
coveries in physical science lies apart from this
discussion, except as it may favor a certain skep
tical tendency respecting all opinions received
from the past. I do not enter, by a single step,
the province of purely physical investigation.
But standing at the gate of it — the entry of that
city of material nature — this Christian wisdom
calls to the men who go in and out, and tells them
these four things, which some of them would seem
willing to have unsaid and unremembered, but
which no one of that searching company of stu
dents has yet been able to deny. First, the char
acter of Jesus Christ is a phenomenon in the
realm of fact, which, just because it stands outside
the province of your physical inquiry, cannot pos
sibly be tested by any of your instruments or
chemicals, cannot be disproved by any possible
physical demonstration, and cannot be accounted
for by any theory so entirely scientific as that
which the Christian records and Christian history
supply. Secondly, in similar terms, we say of the
spiritual world and its contents : Personally, you
may refuse the evidence for it to yourselves ; but
you never can establish a negative ; it is impossi-

86 LECTURE THIRD.

ble to test spiritual substance by material analysis ;
find what you may to be true of the nerve-centres,
bioplasm, -the brain, or the geologic antecedents
of our race, that can never exclude from the uni
verse a class of facts which, by their very nature,
if they exist at all, are as far beyond the laws of
matter as its forms. Thirdly, so far not an ap
proach has been made to the fixing of the origin
of natural life elsewhere than in a personal God ;
and as to motion, the only parent of change — and
nature is change — inertia being a law of matter,
matter could never move or stir itself, but must
have had a mover, or else there is an effect with
out a cause,* and therefore both the creation and
* See a forcible demonstration of this point by the Rev. Prof.
W. D. Wilson, D.D., LL.D., etc., of Ithaca. He says: "Spen
cer's theory is faulty in another respect. The state of ' complete
equilibrium or rest,' whether first, last, or midst, is one from
which the matter of a universe could never emerge without some
' outside agency,' which is not material at all. It must have been
rather a spontaneous person.
" In ' complete equilibrium or rest,' no atoms or particles can be
acting upon one another — or if several of them are acting upon
each other, their activity is so balanced that they are at rest.
What shall start them into action ? Shall some outside substance
bring them nearer together so that they can begin to cohere ?
Shall something change their temperature so that they shall be
gin to unite chemically, resulting in change of gravity and so in
motion ? But what is this outside agency ? Not matter, of
course, for all the matter of the universe is supposed to be in this
state of complete equilibrium or rest. Shall the atoms begin to
act of themselves ? Then they violate the laws and conditions
of inertia, spoken of above. Or if we look in the other direction
— to the second stage of rest, we shall encounter the same diffi
culty. When in motion they may be said to have a certain mo
mentum or vis viva, but with a state of rest this becomes noth
ing, and cannot of course, therefore, start them into motion or

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 8 J
the re-creation by the Father of Man and Christ
are superior to science, and the creatorship is in
dependent of nature, on which it acts. Fourthly,
inasmuch as there is not one department of sci
ence where inquiry goes on without the working
of the human faculty which we call faith,* there-
activity again. And if matter is eternal, it must have passed
through these maxima and minima not once or twice only, but
an infinite number of times. These maxima and minima are
real ' dead points' from out of which materialism can find no
means of producing life or motion. But here the materialist
resorts to some one or another of his 'forces,' which as we have
seen are as 'dead' as matter itself at these ' points.'
" Hence if matter or 'the universe' is ' self-existent ' or eter
nal, it must be forever and always in one and the same condition,
with no development or evolution, unless there is some ' Exter
nal Agency ' who may as well have been its Creator — to set in
motion and keep it moving in the process of evolution. And
that is about all that mere science can know of creation."
* Since these lectures were delivered there has appeared in
print an address presented at a recent meeting of the German
Association of Physicians and Naturalists at Munich, by Prof.
Rudolf Virchow, of Berlin, a name of the very highest scientific
authority in Europe, equally eminent in anthropology and chem
istry, containing the following passage among others, clearly de
signed to check and qualify the tendency to rash conclusions
among his unreligious associates : " In reality, even in science,
there is a certain domain of faith, wherein the individual no
longer undertakes to prove what is handed down to him as true,
but accepts it as simple tradition ; and this is precisely the same
thing which we see in the church. Conversely, I may observe —
and my view is one that is not rejected by the church itself — that
it is not belief alone which is taught in the church, but that even
church doctrines have their objective and their subjective sides."
In the same paper occur these ominously judicial sentences, in
tended for the benefit of the school of Darwin and Prof. Vogt :
" Only ten years ago, when a skull was found, perhaps in peat
or in lake dwellings, or in some old cave, men always fancied
that they detected in it evidences of a savage and quite undevel-

88 LECTURE THIRD.
fore the same faculty cannot be discredited in re
lation to the unseen and the unknown, presented
to it in the revelation and person of Christ.
Already it is beginning to be allowed by candid
minds on both sides of the dispute, that the pros
pect of a final antagonism between the two classes
of facts, or between revelation and nature, is di
minishing. Christian theologians admit evolution.
Evolutionists admit an intelligent or thinking ori
gin of life. As to the Bible, it is generally agreed
oped state ; in short, they were ready to find the monkey type.
There* is now much less of this sort of thing. The old troglo
dytes, lake inhabitants, and peat people turn out to have been
quite a respectable society. They have heads of such a size that
many a person now living would feel happy to possess one like
them. I must say that our fossil monkey-skull or man-ape
skull, which really belonged to a human proprietor, has never
been found. As a fact, we must positively acknowledge that
there is always a sharp limit between man and the ape. We can
not teach, we cannot designate as a revelation of science, the doctrine
that man descends from the ape, or from any other animal."
Quite as striking, perhaps, though of less scientific gravity, is a
concession publiclymade a short time ago to a prominent Ameri
can Association of Free Religionists, disciples of Mr. Theodore
Parker, by a well-known speaker of such radical opinions as Mr.
Wendell Phillips, a defiant doctrinaire: " I am proud to be your
lecturer, but your doctrine will not work. Tested by history,
tested by philosophy, tested by human nature, you will find it
will not work.1'
Every fair-minded Protestant must accept with sincere satis
faction the strong declarations of the agreement of Religion and
true Science, put forth in the late Pastoral of the present Pope
while he was Archbishop of Perugia, so entirely in contrast with
the doctrines of the Syllabus of his predecessor. Great names in
knowledge, the common possession of the modern world, are
there set forward as those of deeply religious men who " rejoiced
to adore the Creator in his works ;" and the triumphs of the
study of nature are held up as contributions to the glory of God'

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 89
that science has no right to quarrel with it, be
cause it has no scientific purpose or pretension.
It is only trivial and superficial contestants
that can enlarge any more on the battles of
Faith with science, because the old war was not
waged by Faith herself, but by men who dreaded
innovation, not more for religion than for every
other conservative instinct and interest, and as
often by metaphysicians and politicians as by the
ologians. Finally, against the disbelief of the
scientists, set the immense activity of modern
Christendom, not matched through all the eight
een centuries before, in literature, in education,
in social charities, in missions. Since the outgoing
of primitive powers in the apostolic and sub-apos
tolic age, there has been no such wave of gospel
light, no such magnificent sweep of unselfish obe
dience to Christ's commission, on the two hemi
spheres, as in the last two generations. Set that
movement over against the entire rationalistic
demonstration, and compare the two by any test
of vitality that your physics or metaphysics will
furnish.*

• In the United States, since the beginning of the Revolution
ary War, the increase of population has been a little over eleven
fold. The increase of churches has been thirty-sevenfold. The
members of these churches were then as one to seventeen hun
dred of the people. Now they are as one to six hundred. It
seems that six houses of Christian worship are finished some
where in these States each working day of the year, and that fifty
millions of dollars are spent yearly on objects connected with
them. There are thirty-two millions of Bibles printed annually,
and they are all distributed. There are three hundred and ninety-
eight colleges, and more than eight hundred seats of a high secu-

90 LECTURE THIRD.
IV. We can take society intellectually at its
worst or at its best. If we ask how Christianity
has fared with men in the inferior classes, the an
swer is positive. Not in Galilee or by the Jor
dan only, but everywhere Christ's first welcome
has been with the common people, because in
them what is common to man is least encumbered
and acts with most spontaneous liberty. Pass,
then, to the mountain ranges of humanity. Start
ing at the Ascension, the peaks that are high
enough in antiquity to be seen across the ages
still have on their foreheads the cross. You can
count the exceptions on the fingers of one hand.
Give time for thought and doubt to do their best.
Give a thousand years ; that is certainly liberal.
Part, then, your lines of mental grandeur, and let
them run as they will. What names of creative
genius will you place near the four that stand in
supreme splendor? Dante's face, sculptured. in
classic majesty, is illuminated by the Christian
sun, and his august epics are of worlds that only
faith can see. This world is less real to many liv
ing in it than heaven was to Milton, or than Mil
ton made it to England. , Michael Angelo, whose
genius found itself in possession of all arts rather
than mastered them, who said, " I will hang the
Pantheon between earth and heaven," and more
than fulfilled his promise, wrote in his old age to
Vasari :
lar education, nearly all of them founded by believing men.
That does not look as if Christians were much afraid of science,
or as if knowledge were the friend of skepticism and the foe of
faith.

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 9 1
" Well-nigh the voyage now is overpast,
And my frail bark, through troubled seas and rude,
Draws near that common haven where, at last,
Of every action, be it evil or good,
Must due account be rendered. Well I know
How vain will then appear the favored art,
Sole idol long and monarch of my heart ;
For all is vain that man desires below.
And now remorseful thoughts my soul alarm,
That which must come, and that beyond the grave ;
Picture and sculpture lose their feeble charm,
And to that Help Divine I turn for aid
Who from the Cross extends his arms to save."
Shakespeare knew the Bible better than he knew
courts, or Athens, or anatomy ; and in his last tes
tament, I reminded you, he bequeathed his soul
for pardon to the Redeemer. Where was the
early eloquence of modern France if not in
her pulpits ? Where is the debt of all late phi
losophy if not to Continental and Scotch and
English Christians ? The foremost philosophical
historian of Germany, after disbelieving, commits
his son to be trained in the Christian creed.
There is a modern German, who, as well as any,
unites the finest culture to original insight — Jean
Paul Richter. He deliberately writes : " He who
was the holiest among the mighty, and the might
iest among the holy, has, with his pierced hand,
lifted heathenism off its hinges, and turned the
dolorous and accursed centuries into new chan
nels, and now governs the ages." There is an
American, who, as well as any, unites the keenest
logical subtilty with the grandest power of gen
eralization in jurisprudence and in statesmanship.
He said, in a most lucid hour, " The Gospel of

92 LECTURE THIRD.

Jesus Christ must be a divine reality. This belief
enters into the very depth of my conscience."
And on his sepulchre by the sea, made ready in
his lifetime, he caused these words to be cut:
"Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief" — a
creed, and a prayer. There is a man who, be
sides having the brain of a mathematician and
the courage of a soldier, and a most penetrating
insight into other men, has proved a greater con
queror than Alexander or Caesar. He is at St.
Helena. Three biographers and all scholars
agree that he said this : " Can you tell me who
Jesus Christ was? I think I understand some
thing of human nature ; and I am a man. Jesus
Christ was more than a man. Across a chasm of
eighteen hundred years Jesus Christ makes a de
mand which is of all others difficult to satisfy.
He asks for the human heart ; he will have it en
tirely to himself. He demands it unconditionally,
and forthwith his demand is granted. Millions
of men to-day would. die for him. This proves to
me convincingly the divinity of Jesus Christ."
Do we need to look any farther along the
heights of history for signs that the Religion of
the Son Of Man is suited to mankind ?
The longer you look the more every mist of
doubt melts away ; the more sharply and firmly
the outline of the great historic realities which
gave Christianity its life stands out.
Most effectual of all helps to this blessing of
trust is the cultivation of a personal intercourse
with him, whose personal power and grace
are the glory of all - time. It is, I believe, the

CHRIST IN THE PRESENCE OF DOUBT. 93
experience of most men who have dealt with
the difficulties of doubters, that the greater
number of those minds that are brought home
to faith are drawn by some new feeling of what
Christ is, and what his love is worth, rather
than by any argument. The hours come — they
are sure to come — they come to the strongest
heads and the gayest spirits, when, by some "hard
blow or secret voice, by the sorrow of bereave
ment and broken-heartedness, or the more myste
rious and sometimes heavier sorrow of mere
satiety of self and weariness of the world, we
know, at last, that there is no other place for the
sick head and the faint heart and the sinful con
science but a place close to the Son of God.
Some one from the house may be gone out for
ever. A hollow heart that we trusted may be
uncovered. The mere dull wearing out of dis
appointed hopes may turn the eyes to the hills
from whence cometh our help. We lie awake
alone, conscious of eternity, and hear " time
flowing through the middle of the night." Some
strange pain in your body prophesies the end
and the Judgment. The past is dead ; the future
is dark. You know your sin. Men and women,
at their best, cannot forgive this sin ; cannot satis
fy this thirst for a true life — this hunger after God.
Then there will come to you a new reason for
faith, better than all the evidences of learning
or logic together. You need your Saviour Christ,
and looking unto him you know, believing, that
you are saved.

LECTURE IV.

gftje §LeIifli0tt of ©faeist in tfoe ptfttiw
0f uctxou : its J^jxprjeaX to tfr*
gwroau WW.

"K am reaBg to jjreacb tfie ffiospel to gou tfiat are at
3&ome also." — Rom. i : 15.
" ffifie KinflBom of ®foa is not in toora but in notoer."—
z Cor. 4 : 20.

Cforisl <&nx&mQ plan's
Actions hxj a gUatrjettlg %%xo.
In the great historic transition from Greek to
Roman society we encounter a fresh demonstra
tion that Christ embodies the essentials of human
ity, and that his religion is not limited by national
lines. Between the two societies themselves the
contrast is immense. Whatever Greece had done
at the Christian era to colonize its language, its
arts, or its vices in Italy, Rome was Rome imperial
still. A skeptic of the reign of Nero might have
said, Granted that your Galilean has prospered
east of the Adriatic by some oriental tinge in his
blood, these western lands and armies, with robust
practical energies, will own no such crucified
Master! Yet silently, but swiftly, as we shall
see, the faith of the crucified Master entered
in, without sword or policy, and, by such arms
as never tried the gates before or since, con
quered Rome. The Gospel suits every social
type it encounters, because it is " not in word
but in power." It is no more Semitic than Aryan,
no more Syrian than Tuscan, no more Arabian
than Gothic. You find a Christian on the Tiber,
among ^Norsemen, jn Ceylon, in Carthage, and you

M

98 LECTURE FOURTH. -
know him by his Master. The man is no more and
no less a Christian, however temperament may
modify his religious emotions, for a torrid or a
frozen climate, for sand or forest, for his color,
for his tongue. One ethnic family takes on the
stamp almost as freely as another, and the Christ
formed within is independent of all the tribal
moulds or traditions. It is so on every continent
to-day. From the river of Christ's baptism to the
ends of the earth you know the Christian as a
Christian. What does it mean, but that Christ
has and is, in himself, what is characteristic of
man, and can be separated by no bounds from any
race? The government may be imperial, patri
archal, feudal, military, democratic ; that avails
nothing to unfit its subjects for the universal citi
zenship. Each polity is left free to develop it
self by other laws, except as they are all modified
in their moral complexion, and tempered in their
spirit, by the celestial law of charity. Christ is
larger and deeper than any or all of them. So of
the several arts of beauty. We recognize styles
of painting, music, sculpture, architecture, and
schools of letters. Christianity does not interfere
with them, and is not' excluded by them. It deals
with character. It is behind the colors, the mar
ble, the sounds, the shapes, a more sublime essence,
gradually purifying and elevating their genius,
but too catholic to be provincialized, or national
ized, or suborned to any aesthetic domination. It
is human, and includes all that is human, because
it is also divine. This would all be otherwise if
this religion, instead of being dynamical, were

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 99
merely literary or artistic ; if it were in word and
not in power, an opinion or a ritual only and not
a spirit and a life.*
Moving westward from Judea with St. Paul,
the Gospel entered Europe through two great
national doorways, the Athenian and the Roman
mind. In each of these two intellectual moulds
the original truth of Christ, still undivided and
identical, took a distinct working form ; and it
was a distinction which has been preserved ever
since, in the differing characteristics of the eastern
and western branches of the church. By this
" diversity of operation" it seems to have been
the plan of God that the common faith, springing
from Jerusalem at the Christian Pentecost, as the
* It can scarcely be necessary to show here in particulars that
both directly and indirectly, by precept and example, Christianity
harmonizes with all the better natural impulses, like courtesy,
hospitality, the joyous use of the faculties in common lines of
action, ceremonial homage, affections of kindred, marital devo
tion, special friendship, patriotism. In regard to some of these,
it indisputably provides such beneficent regulation as insures
the largest and most lasting welfare of the natural capacity or
organ of enjoyment. That all efforts of its enemies to convict
the Gospel of asceticism have failed, no more needs to be now
asserted than that time has turned the impious wit of Voltaire
and the French court of the last century into a ghastly absurd
ity. Rousseau's ingenious idea that Christian faith extinguishes
the love of country and annihilates political responsibility, by
transferring man's interest from this world to another, has been
refuted over and over again, while it never needed to be re
futed at all. Mr. Herbert Spencer's recent papers on " Cere
monial Government," whatver else they prove or are intended
to prove, establish an ample foundation in human nature for as
much of the ritual element as was ever contended for in the
Primitive or Protestant Church.

IOO LECTURE FOURTH.
law had reached out from the same centre before,
should control the governing nations of the earth.
Of the Latin race the predominant attribute was
the will. The two capacious hands with which
Rome seized the world were, colonies and armies.
And as the will is the executive faculty in man,
so the Latin or Western Christianity became re
markable for its practical drill, moving every
where with the precision of a military array — •
orderly, obedient — its aggressions kept well in
hand, but ever pushing its way to occupy and sub
sidize, if it could, in an outward rule, the coun
tries of the globe.* Accordingly, the most con-
* The contrast is carried into other but kindred regions in a
passage in Freeman's "Principles of Divine Service," vol. i.,
P- 273-
" The east is more uniform and unchanging ; the west more
multiform and variable. While the west brings countless
changes, according to the season, on the same essential idea, the
east prolongs it in one unvaried and majestic roll from the
beginning to the end of the year. The east, again, is more soft,
the west more intellectual. The east loves rather to meditate
on God as he is, and on the facts of Christian doctrine as they
stand in the creed ; the west contemplates more practically the
relations of man to God. The east has had its Athanasius and
its Andrew of Crete ; the west its Augustine and Leo. Hence
psalms and hymns in more profuse abundance characterize the
eastern ; larger use and more elaborate adaptations of scripture
the western offices. The east, by making the Psalms all less
meditative, seems to declare her mind that praise is the only
way to knowledge ; the west, by her continued Psalm and lec
tion system, that knowledge is the proper fuel of praise. While
the east, again, soars to God in exclamations of angelic self-forget-
fulness, the west comprehends all the spiritual needs of man
in collects of matchless profundity ; reminding us of the alleged
distinction between the seraphim, who love most, and the cheru
bim, who know most. Thus the east praises, the west pleads.

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. IOI
spicuous aspect that the new religion put on
among the churches of the west was that of an in
stitution for the regulation of human life and the
shaping of society. Of the Greek people, the
prominent traits were mental liberty and versa
tility. Art, poetry, eloquence being the instinc
tive manifestations of their genius, every thing
ran to expression. Even their cities were not so
much strongholds of dominion as " theatres of
scenic pomp and beauty," their navigation not
merely " expeditions of war" but " ventures of
curiosity" or a commerce whose gains made the
seaports aesthetically brilliant and gay. In their
very games or trials of physical strength the lite
rary feature was about as salient as the muscular,
and Olympia was almost as much the " garden of
great intellects" as the arena of bodily gymnastics.
Hence when the missionary apostle, planting the
cross along the shores, crossed over from Asia
Minor to Athens or Philippi, he struck upon com
munities whose culture and originality chose the
channel of speech rather than of organized action
— a people gifted, famous, and sometimes victori
ous, with their tongues. They came to one
another in the wisdom of " words."
But the word or name is never the thing itself;
the sign is not the matter signified ; the carrier is
The one has fixed her eye more intently on the glorious throne
of Christ, the other on his cross. Finally, the east has been
more inquisitive and inventive in the departments both of
knowledge and praise ; the west, more constructive, has wrought
up, out of scattered eastern materials, her exhaustive Athanasian
Greed and her matchless Te Deum."

102 LECTURE FOURTH.
not the freight conveyed. It is only when the mind
of a people has become thin and light, its habit
artificial, its education "weak and literary,"
that the two are. confounded, and you have a Delia
Cruscan period in letters, declamation at the
forum, or cant in religion.
I have submitted hitherto that Christianity is
suited to man everywhere, because man is a crea
ture of affections, and yet finds no perfect love
answering his own, except in the person of Christ ;
because he is also a creature of worship, and finds
no worship that raises, or purifies, or comforts
him except in Him whom St. Paul at Athens
" declared " to the Athenians ; because he is
a creature of thought, or intellectual curiosity
and invention, and finds at last no rational expla
nation of the past history of his race, and no key
to the problems of his destiny, except in that
Lord of the intellect who needed not that any
should testify of men, because he knew what is in
them. I submit now that Christianity is suited
to man because man is a creature of will, i.e., of
action, and yet finds no perfect law to act by
except in the will of God meeting and ordering
his own, a law proceeding from the king of that
kingdom which is not of this world.
Without this king the world had its best legal
training in the Roman jurisprudence. It grew
up finally to the Pandects of Justinian, from the
rudimentary twelve tables, dating back nearly
five hundred years before the Christian era ; yet
Justinian himself was a tyrant, an extortioner and
a libertine, and his wife a harlot. The system has

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 103
had its effect, both as precedent and pattern, on
all the subsequent legislation and judiciaries ; on
the laws of the Ostrogoths and Lombardy, the
Bulgarians, the Franks of Gaul, the law schools of
Italy in the middle ages, the minds of the Magna
Charta barons of England, and the courts of near
ly every modern European state. The Praetorian
Edicts had expanded it. The law of nature, jus
naturale, had deepened and exalted it. Cicero,
in his treatise De Legibus, rises to a certain lofty
conception of a universal republic under a single
rule or code. " This universe," he says, " forms
one immeasurable commonwealth and city. And
as in earthly states certain particular laws gov
ern the particular relationships of kindred tribes,
so in the nature of things does a universal law,
far more magnificent and resplendent, regulate the
affairs of that universal city where gods and men
compose one vast association." (L. i., 7.) Mani
festly not only in the better intelligence of juris
consults and emperors, but in the people, there
was a reaching after equity and a groping aspira
tion for justice between nations, as between man
and man.
Place with this grand action of the will by law,
in the western empire, its superb system of inter
communication.* Out from the imperial city ran
five vast and costly national roads, with solid
basaltic pavements, branching to all the quarters
of the globe, ramifying into a network of graded
* Both these topics are more fully treated by Prof. Fisher, in
his " Beginnings of Christianity," with references to various
authorities.

IO4 LECTURE FOURTH.
and secure highways that stretched wherever an
army would march or a caravan creep. They
were in " straight lines, crossing mountains and
bridging rivers, binding together the most dis
tant cities, and connecting them all Avith the capi
tal." " A journey might have been made on Ro
man highways, with only brief trips by sea, from
Alexandria to Carthage, thence through Spain
and France northward to the Scottish border,
back through Leyden and Milan, eastward by land
to Constantinople and Antioch, and thence home
to Alexandria," a total distance of seven thousand
miles. Along all these paths the traveller could
measure his distances by milestones. " Maps of
the route, with information of stopping-places for
the night, facilitated the travel." Augustus estab
lished a system of postal conveyances, used by offi
cers, couriers, and other agents of the government.
Thus the intermixture of peoples was far beyond
the common modern notion of it. " Greek schol
ars," says a German student, "kept school in
Spain ; the women of a Roman colony in Switzer
land employed a goldsmith from Asia Minor ; in
the cities of Gaul were Eastern painters and
sculptors ; Gallicans and Germans served as body
guards of a Jewish king at Jerusalem. Jews
were settled in all the provinces." Bands of mer
chants poured along all these avenues, plying an
inland traffic. Commerce comes with peace, and
the empire was peace. It was a peace won first
by the sword and preserved by law. Along
those roads moved the police of invincible armies,
and the praetorian eagles. It was one mighty

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 105
reign of law. Into such a world Christ was born
at Bethlehem, a Prince and a Saviour.
But if we ascend into the region of morals, what
has law done there ? With the Stoic, everybody
knows, self-murder is no crime. Zeno, and that
very Cleanthes whom St. Paul quotes at Athens,
took their own life, as did Cato. No room is
made among the sterner virtues for charity,
which with Jesus is the fulfilling of all law, the
root of morality, and the crown of character.
Lucretius, the poetical interpreter of Epicurus —
brought back lately by one of our ambitious natur
alists to instruct nineteenth-century Christians,
leaving us to marvel
"That star-eyed science should have wandered there,
To waft us back this message of despair" —
bids his countrymen forget to ask when a man
dies whether he shall live again. And yet in all
these breasts, if we study them deeply, there is a
yearning for a lawgiver like the Son of Man. In
their voices there is an undertone of sadness, a
wail of despair, a cry for Christ. I believe that if
Aureliusand Plutarch and Cato had seen him,
they would have followed him. They dreamed
of another republic, under a new and'diviner com
mandment. Rome, such as she was, was an image
of the common country of the human race. Plu
tarch says man may find his country everywhere.
Christ says every man is my neighbor, my
brother. Justice is not a thing worked 0i.1t on the surface
of the lands, written in codes, or comprehended
in a standing army of 340,000 men. Was humanity

106 • LECTURE FOURTH.
safe? Did man rest satisfied and upright and
pure, under the shadow of the throne or the shield
of the magistrate ? Look again. Family life, so
cial life, the moral life of the individual, were
rotten with vice and black with crime. The sen
suality of all the dissolute blood under the sun
trickled into the population of the Seven Hills,
reckoned at a million. The iniquities are too ter
rible to be named, unless we quote the hints of
St. Paul's first chapter to Roman Christians.
Two hundred years before Christ religious cere
monies and orgies, imported to Italy, had so
much murder and debauchery in them that even
the consuls were obliged to interfere, three thou
sand fanatical poisoners being executed in a year.
So much for Roman law as the regulator of Ro
man life.
Cicero divorced two wives, and marital infi
delity was only screened by marriage. Seneca
mentions women, and calls them illustrious, who
reckon time not by the common calendar, but by
the number of their living husbands in succession.
To kill infants, if they are troublesome, was law
ful. Roman women hired slave-whippers by the
year to scourge their servants. The spectacles
and games were public schools of indecency. The
pantomime was obscene. In the arena, in Trajan's
time, eleven thousand wild animals were slain in
four months. Children of luxury, boys and girls,
laughed at the torture of human captives, writh
ing in the agonies of death on the sand, torn by
the teeth of lions.
You take your place on one of those Roman

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. \OJ
roads, it may be almost anywhere, in the days of
Trajan or the Antonines — from the opening of the
second century till near its close. St. John, the
last of the band of twelve who stood around the
Original Person to receive his mind and execute
his orders and plant his church, will have gone to
his rest, his visions closed. We will imagine that
any written trace of any Christian record before
that, any book, biography of Christ, memoir of an
apostle, or fragment of any Father's apology is no
where to be found ; they may either have never
existed or been burnt up around the stakes of
some of the earlier martyr-fires, or buried in
caves. We shall be able to find out from other
sources in what cities and countries the Gospel
has secured a foothold. They extend all the way,
at intervals at least, from the East Indies, over a
broad belt branching both sides of the Mediter
ranean to the Pillars of Hercules, and round to
Great Britain. Christians are beyond the Euphra
tes — in Parthia, in Arabia. They are strong in
northern Africa. The energy and valor of the en
terprising Scandinavians, Saxons, and brave Celts
have acknowledged Christ as the mightier Master,
his love as the highest law, and his cross as the
supreme throne, in the forests of Europe, from the
mouth of the Danube to the Orkneys. Even
Gibbon estimates that of the entire population of
the Roman empire at the Edict of Milan by
Constantine, in A.D. 313, when toleration closed
the ten persecutions, about a twentieth part was
Christian. The proportion may have been less, but
at the period we are supposing, say the middle of

108 LECTURE FOURTH.
the second century, if, as Gibbon reckons, there
were one hundred and twenty millions of people,
the Christians may have been four, or perhaps six
millions. TertuUian, of Carthage, who before his
conversion was a lawyer, the son of a Roman
centurion, and who was in his prime in A.D. 200,
wrote defiantly and without fear of contradiction
to the imperial authorities, " We outnumber your
armies : there are more Christians in a single
province than in your legions. We are but of
yesterday, and we have entered every thing that
is yours — cities, castles, council-halls, free towns,
the very camps ; we have even the senate and the
forum." Christianity went everywhere, because it was
alive ; in caravans, in solitary pilgrims, staff and
scrip in hand, journeying, sailing, climbing, swim
ming, to the ends of the known world. Notwith
standing all it had against it, though it crossed
all selfish passions and rebuked with unflinching
severity all popular extravagances and sins ;
though it struck kings in the face and made the
rich purge out their luxuries and change their
lives, yet in two generations after the death of its
founders it had risen to a recognized rank among
the statesmen, soldiers, authors, orators, and men
of learning of the day. Was not " the kingdom"
with "power"?*
* I have been unable to consult the Rev. G. Matheson's
" Growth of the Spirit of Christianity from the First Century to
the Dawn of the Lutheran Era ;'" but from an epitome of its con
tents in the Saturday Review (March 30), appearing as the proof-
sheets of these pages pass out of my hands, it will appear that,

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 109
America is the youngest child of the western
civilization. The caravan halts on the Pacific
shore. The " star of empire" takes its way west
ward no further. Will it shine forever here on
the same faith, alive and in action, and eternally
young, that the star of the magi stood over, born
with the young child at Bethlehem ? That prob
lem besets all minds that think at all, and gets
an utterance of some sort, if not an answer, on al
most every tongue.
Shall he who is the head of our race, Jesus
Christ, continue to be acknowledged as its head by
these enterprising western men ? Shall the revela
tion which has guided humanity thus far from the
outset, in the great steps of a divine order, and
which claims to have completed itself beyond the
possibility of amendment in the recorded story of
the Son of God, guide man still, under its con
clusive authority, as the law of his action and the
power of his life ? Shall the nations that lead the
world, shall this Anglo-Saxon and American race,
in particular, be permanently Christian ?
You have already the answer of our general
proposition. Christ is man's eternal master, be
cause man always continues man ; and without
Christ he never understands, interprets, com
pletes, satisfies, or comforts himself.* But we
while some of the colorings and conclusions of the author must
be open to objection, his historical researches afford direct and
weighty support to the statementsjn the text above, and to sev
eral other points taken in these Lectures.
* It is no part of the object of this reasoning to enter the pro
vince of Natural Religion, and to offer this pre-adaptation as a
proof of the existence of a personal God. At the same time,

HO LECTURE FOURTH.
must see Christianity at work, if we would know all
its fitness for mankind. Its strength against every
kind of disbelief, whether atheism, new religion,
free religion, or against speculative or scientific or
literary skepticism, lies largely in its being a sys
tem of action and a power of character. Much has
undoubtedly been lost to the progress of the
Christian faith, especially in later times, by mak
ing it too much a matter of opinion or feeling.
Opinions are individual: they are therefore things
of difference and debate : they are invested with
changeableness and uncertainty. So with the feel
ings or emotions, which are the most variable part
of us. In the religion of Christ both these in
gredients have place, because that religion belongs
to our whole life, touching it at every point, hal
lowing every part ; but as surely as you make
piety either emotional or speculative out of pro
portion, you enfeeble it ; you lay it open to the
dissecting-knife, if not to the broadsword, of the
here as much as in the region of matter, or the phenomena of
instinct, the argument from design or contrivance, which, in
spite of the objections of the anti-teleologists, has lately been
so ably extended downward by Prof. Cooke and others, from
organic to inorganic substances, seems to admit of a legitimate
application. Design exists where such adaptation is found as
implies prearrangement, an intelligent perception of the quali
ties of the objects mutually fitted together, a distinct precon
ception of the end to be obtained by the adaptation, and a
rational use of the means necessary to reach that end. All these
marks appear in the adjustment between the constitution of man
and the Christian religion. Whether the human mind is able to
conceive of such an intelligence as these conditions imply, as
being otherwise than personal, is a question for consideration,
but not belonging in this place. .

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. Ill
i ¦* -   . 
unbeliever. The modern church has opened the
gate to many of the doubts which have puzzled
it, because, keeping the " word" of the faith, she
has let go its " power." It can be said, I sup
pose, without dispute, that as the Latin hierarchy
damaged Christianity by excess of outside appa
ratus and coercion, the tendency of Protestanism
has been to etherealize and rarefy it, to lose
sight of its solid base and its concrete events, its
transactions, ordinances, monuments, verities, in
a continual taking to pieces and analysis of its
organs and rationalizing of its heavenly mysteries.
The New Testament deals to a wonderful ex
tent with actual things in the person and per
sonal history of our Lord. Follow the apostolic
preaching ; the substance of it was the Cross and
the Resurrection — two facts. Look at the apos
tolic practice ; you see baptizing, missionary jour
neys, a diaconate with alms and charities for the
poor, a sacramental communion, layings on of
hands, palpable gifts of the Spirit. Faith was
the necessary inward movement which impelled
the whole man to reach out and take hold : — but
what he takes hold of is a living and visible Jesus,
a Saviour, with the acts of his mediatorial career.
Beneath the things done, to be sure, were all the
while things unseen; but the seen things and
the doing of the things made the matter definite
and real. Had the primitive church been more
absorbed than it was in constructing speculative
systems, separating doctrine from historic inci
dent, missionary sacrifice, means of grace, real
life and the living Christ, it would have been

112 LECTURE FOURTH.

more like much of the modern type of piety,' —
morbidly introspective, anxious, dubious; and it
would have been liable to all sorts of hurts from
a robust heathenism. When it became needful
to make a creed, lo ! it was on hand ; it had already
made itself ; for it was simply a putting together
of the few chief realities contained in or cluster
ing around the Son of Man, the creed which clings
to man, repeated here to-night. No wonder the
church repeats it, for it has become the flag of
her practical triumph as well as the norm of her
belief. From the incarnation of Jesus proceeds
historically and logically the whole visible and
invisible system, one spirit and one body, one
faith and one baptism. If our contemporary
Christianity is in danger of being wordy, disput
able, mutable, and divided against itself, we had
better turn so much the oftener to the original
pattern lying independent of the little "systems"
which "have their day and cease to be." The
Holy Spirit " works," and by an ever-working
body. The tree Igdrasil, not a lifeless Parthenon or a
carved Sphinx, is the better type of the living tem
ple. It is a growing thing ; one sap-stream ani
mates each smallest fibre, and it feeds the whole
body with one spirit.
Come to the apostle's conception : " The
kingdom of God is not in word but in power."
Notice the leading term, " kingdom." Had the
religion which was embodied in Christ's person
and preached in his Gospel been intended to
tarry in the world merely as a sentiment or idea,

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. I I T,
feeling or thought, it would certainly be unaccount
able that both he and his evangelists should so
carefully and constantly use this term to describe
it, because it is not possible to conceive of any
such thing as a kingdom or commonwealth
otherwise than as having certain characters
quite beyond any mere individual forms of life.
To any "kingdom" there are plainly certain
things essential — a head or king, laws, members
or subjects, organization, ordinances, boundaries,
and unity. If against this it is objected that,
after all, Christ's kingdom is not literally in
sight as a concrete thing, we reply it is in sight
just as every other kingdom is, through its insti
tuted forms of operation and constant agencies
of " power." As a matter of course, its moral
foundations, its reasons, must lie in the minds of
men, and not in a material structure ; and that
is as true of the civil commonwealth as of
the spiritual. But all these seven attributes
none the less are actual, and they imply neces
sarily a corporate life. The simple recognition
of them in a hearty and practical sense, is
loyalty to the kingdom. When we find our Lord,
therefore, and his apostles, in proclaiming the
Gospel, constantly using this term, — when we see
it reappearing from the first opening of the
Saviour's lips in Galilee after his own baptism
to Paul's preaching at Rome between two sol
diers before he suffered, — everywhere " the Gos
pel of the kingdom," and not the Gospel of the
private mind alone, the conclusion is unavoid
able. They had a meaning in it, the same mean-

I 14 LECTURE FOURTH.

ing that St. Paul had when he said that there is
one body, of which the Spirit is the life. In
this conclusion we should be obliged, I think, to
rest, even if they did not go on to tell us as
plainly as they do, though, not in the manner of
hunian constitution-makers, what the laws and
the ordinances and the offices and the unity are,
as well aswhoare ¦ tj^llgpiirJtiu? gmaLjvlio^yil)^
everlasting head, and to give thiSKmgclom its
. evangelic name, the Church of Christ. Were
this conception, Roman but more than Roman
because Catholic, to be lost out of the mind and
heart of Christendom, it would carry with it the
loss, in the last result, of Christendom itself ; for if
it was the Gospel of the kingdom that Christ de
livered, then a Gospel without the kingdom
could not be Christ's Gospel.
There is a sharp contrast, " word" on one
side, and " power" on the other. It raises the
question, Wherein does the real strength of our
religion here and now consist ? Granted that the
original constitution was perfect, because it was
divine, holding stored up within it the living
treasures of God's truth, something else is want
ing besides that provided economy to bring
these spiritual resources out into their intended
operation. That second factor is man's activity.
Unless the two are brought together, the whole
outward establishment — no matter whether it is a
hierarchy under Gregorys and Hildebrands, or
a co-ordinate with the state politic under Tudors
and Stuarts, or a free church as in the primitive
age or in the United States — as to the grand

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 115
purpose of its founding, is only a mass of inert
mechanism. Till the latent energy sleeping
in it is quickened by the personal arising of its
personal members to their work, it is only like the
frame-work of the first day of the natural crea
tion ; the Spirit broods upon the deep, but the
universe sleeps. There is no life born by action.
There is no demonstration of the Spirit, no " power."
Traces of the same law are seen in the king
doms of physical nature. Two agencies must act
together to move the mass. A sower went out to
sow his seed ; he goes out over all this continent
every spring-time, with the seed-corn in his hand,
how often forgetting the parable it preaches to
him of his own better life ! In the dull-colored
thing between his fingers there is, to be sure, a
prophecy and z.potentia of life to come ; but then,
if you let it lie in dry air, or seal it up in wax,
it will sleep on under the same insignificant and
fruitless rind through a thousand Aprils. In each
grain there is a force slumbering. But it is not
force in life, not vital power, till husbandry gives
the earth's moisture a chance to unclasp the
crust, and then the blade,' the stalk, and the full
corn in the ear publish the latent beauty to the
eye, and return a harvest. Nay more, botanists
tell us that inside the husk itself two different
agents wait, side by side — the germ where the
life is, and the albumen prepared to feed it
as soon as it is quickened. When the sunshine
and showers rouse them, they put their soft
hands together, and lift up the green plumule
into the light, and sway it there, a kind of

Il6 LECTURE FOURTH.
banner in the air, for the triumph of life. What
was sown in weakness is raised in " power." A
finished piece of machinery stands on the track
waiting, etery bright bolt and strong lever and
elastic spring of the engine perfect in its place ;
and yet the whole of it is nothing but a splendid
heap of misused iron and' worthless skill, a block
in the way, unless a touch of a human hand lets
on the propelling energy, adding to the beauty of
construction the power of action. In all the
kingdoms, the principle is the same. The " power"
comes by bringing together in their appropriate
conditions those vital forces where the Creator
has generated these capacities of life, holding them
ready for their work.
To me nothing in this subject is more clear than
that, for the greater confirmation of the faith of
Christ in our age, we want not a more wordy, or
symbolic, or controversial, or speculative Chris
tianity, but a more operative or working Chris
tianity, taking the kingdom given, and carrying
its principles into society ; opening the windows
to the Spirit, and then going out in the strength
of light and air to let the Spirit work through us.
Most of the ecclesiastical troubles would settle
themselves speedily, it seems to me, if Christians
were bent upon turning their Christianity into
character. The model is ever before us. We take our
stand by the side of Christ's first men, men who
knew his mind the best, in the morning hour of
the Gospel. I am confident of your agreement
when I say that the most manifest mark stamped

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 117
on the church as the Lord made it, and the
apostles worked it, is action. The whole body
is astir, and by that we know that it is alive. Evi
dently the men are possessed with the belief that
something is given to each one to do. As soon as
a Pagan or a Jew is converted, he arises and is
baptized, and that is action. Their worship is
active worship, responsive, body and soul adoring
in sympathy, and all the heartier because they
come to it from labor, and are getting new strength
from it to carry back to labor. The praise is joy
ous, and lifts them up. The prayer is penitential,
and they kneel down. The alms go always with
the prayers, a sign of sincerity, and the token of
active charity to the brotherhood. Every minis
ter is a missionary. They travel, they lodge on
the sand, they swim rivers, they climb mountains,
they take ship, they seek, especially cities and
seaports, the nurseries of commercial and intellec
tual vigor ; they, go into synagogues — for so confi
dent are they in their vital consciousness that
even the dryness of a synagogue does not frighten
them. As soon as there are poor, there is an
order of Deacons to take care of them. Action,
you see, is written on every thing. There is no
dead fuel, not much mere "nominal Christianity"
yet — a religion known by its " words," however
fine the words may be. It is as if the lands grew
light by torches naming up in every Christian's
hand. " Words" are spoken, no doubt, and winged
words they are, sjtea nrepoEvra, in a sense that
Homer did not know. Chief among them, you
hear one word, a Name, and in that Name on

1 18 LECTURE FOURTH.
every tongue is the hidden source of all the
"power." But the most unfriendly critic could
not look on this early church and say that there
the kingdom is in " word," or mistake it for a mere
week-day worldliness that goes sentimentally to
hear Sunday preaching.
Had the Gospel brought in nothing but new
theories of religion, new orators, new philoso
phies — why the. whole eastern world was surfeited
with them already, and its hills were hollow
with dreaming hermits' cells. Mankind wanted
a faith, and a faith in action ; not more mystics,
or more monks, or more sophists, or soothsayers,
or incantations. Christ's living witnesses arose ;
and wherever they came among these empty-
hearted nations they were like magnets let down
among loose particles of steel. They drew and
grappled to them the hungry souls of men. Ac
tion was the whole church's rule, and the king
dom was with power. I infer, then, -that the
church of God, being alive, has its energy not
only in its tongue but in the steady activity of its
hands and feet, in all its organs and members : and
that, where it is so alive, men press into it and it
lives on.
You say, those were the days of pentecostal
wind and fire : and so they were. But the wind
that blew in the upper chamber blows still, and
the fire that was kindled spreads. Has one of the
original principles or first features of the kingdom
been altered by time ? Not a single truth of its
teaching, or article of its creed, or law of its
operation, or condition of its success, or promise

CHRIST GUIDING MANS ACTIONS. ng
of its victory, has undergone the shadow of a
change. From what the church was then, Ave
know Avhat it ought to be now.
The Corinthians, Christians and all, were exces
sively fond of handsome speech. They made a
great deal of their schools of rhetoric, and even
imagined they could tell truth itself by its style.
They were essentially a Avordy or literary peo
ple, a quality in which Greeks and Americans
are. not Avholly unlike. Letter was put before
spirit; word before power. Among preachers,
Apollos doubtless had the largest following. St.
Paul, however, always adroit in taking men as
they are, seizes on this trait and turns it to great
account for his energetic argument: " Where is
the disputer of this world" — sophist and logoma-
chist ? Artificial Avords are the tools of the pre
tender. So he makes them stand for all sorts of
substitutes for hearty Avork. Another community
might be given to dry dogmatics, another to a
frivolous ceremonialism, another to feverish and
transient excitements; — and Ave could easily
enough, if it Avere civil, call the names of relig
ious bodies where each of these mistakes has
done its mischief, — while others still, who Avould
be in every household the most numerous of all,
would slide, through carelessness and selfishness,
into a perfunctory sort of piety, having the form
of godliness without the power. But " the king
dom" is an organization of life.
All along we may try the doctrine by that cri
terion. At certain epochs there are luminous
tracts, belts of unusual light. They always lie

120 LECTURE FOURTH.
along the high-Avater marks of spiritual action.
Because men prayed with unwonted simplicity,
or fervor, which brought them up stronger to
their feet, or because the laity joined their hands
to the ministry, or because some great wrench of
providential revolution snapped the hardening
crust and tore open the eternal fountains again,
therefore the primitive streams broke out, and
the old energy revived. Examine these splendid
periods and you always find them signalized by
three special signs. One is that in the faith and
teaching of such seasons there is a specially
marked sense of the presence and influence of the
Holy Spirit. Secondly, there is a strong realiza
tion of the Person of Christ, with a devoted per
sonal loyalty and love to him in both priests and
people. And thirdly, besides the ordinary offices
of preaching and church-going, there is a general
co-operation of church members in devotional,
charitable, and missionary action. Laymen take
church enterprise into the range of their busi
ness tact, experience, and profits. They strengthen
every practical arm of the church's benefac
tions — hospitals, schools, orphan-houses, reforma
tories. They gather in and consecrate the floating
philanthropic impulses of the people, so that sec
ular benevolence is not left the chief channel for
men's instinctive generosity. I believe these
three marks are never absent from the church's
times of refreshing, her places of triumph, and
her periods of " pOAver." The best spiritual" hon
ors the middle-age Christianity earned were not
earned at the Vatican or in the monasteries of

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 12 1
Europe, but in the fever swamps of South Amer
ica, in China, Japan, the northern forests, and
later along the St. LaAvrence and the Mississippi,
and in Houses of Mercy. Protestantism has
had its purest life when it Avas freighting ships
with the Gospel-store for Iceland, Labrador,
India, Cape Town, and Burmah. The Avonderful
Inner Mission of Germany and the City Missions
of this country are salt that saves a great mass of
Mammonism from absolute rottenness.
We can look higher than all this, and find a
more conclusive proof. Follow up the Christian
stream to its source. Even with our" gracious
Lord himself it Avas not chiefly what he said that
redeemed our race. It was Avhat he did. Mar
vellous as those heavenly discourses were that
drew to him the listening multitudes, though he
spoke as man never spoke, it Avas not the Sermon
on the Mount, not the parables, not the precepts,
which made him the Avorld's Saviour. There is a
higher attraction, and it acts on a deeper neces
sity. The closing eyes of the dying generations,
age after age, the breaking hearts in all their
mortal agonies, the penitent prodigals and har
lots, the mourners, Avhither do they turn ? Not
first, and not last, to the hills of Galilee or the
streets of Samaria ; but to Gethsemane, to Cal
vary, to the opened sepulchre. These are the
scenes of the Saviour's action. Wonderful is the
teacher, but more wonderful and mightier in
power is the atoning sufferer. Wonderful the
prophet, but more Avonderful the priest and king.
It is " the labor of his dying love," the mediatorial

122 LECTURE FOURTH.
work, that creates the kingdom, and saves the
world, and fills the heart of man.
So Christ's religion is a living creature — him
self its life. A gospel is not merely something
spoken to man, but something wrought for men and
in them. There is to be not only an oration, but an
operation — as a " liturgy," in the original sense, is
not an oral effusion but a " service." The church
holds in her hand the inspired Bible — her Avarrant,
her charter, not her substitute, for she herself is the
breathing bride of the bridegroom ; and his glory
on the earth is her love and trust toward him, her
chastity, her eyes of pity, her feet of mercy swift
and beautiful upon the mountains, her hands of
human help for human Avant, tender and strong.
I see no eternity for the Faith if it is only
something to be said, an " excellency of speech." I
see only a feeble future for Christianity if Ave
build churches to hold rostrums and platforms
only, or ordain a ministry to do nothing else but
discourse ; for so Ave turn the grand office of
preaching — Avhich is grand Avith the grandeur . of
the Gospel in its sphere — into a human usur
pation. There are wants that this Avill never sat
isfy. Three great parts make up this religion —
Christ, the Kingdom, Righteousness — a practical
trinity of our dynamic Gospel. Unless that Cath
olic conception of it prevails, the world's sci
ence, suffering, toil, — thinking, groaning, weary,
— will reach away from it, feeling sadly after some
more solid salvation. All honor to a voice, crying
in the wilderness, crying at the entry of the city,
crying anywhere, if it is Wisdom's voice! But

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 1 23
a sinning soul's repentant faith, its tears, its love,
are for him alone who comes "travelling," —
'through the agonies, the toils, the tears, the temp
tations, the deeper deserts of our humanity, on to
the cross Avhere the sorrows are conquered, and
up to the Father's right hand where he liveth
to make intercession for men.
Real in itself, in the intensest sense of that word,
the character of Christ presents to every age, and
to every age equally, the ideal of humanity. It is
not the ideal of a period, or a country, or a class.
Instead of passing beyond him, the whole progress
of the race only grows up tOAvards him. Mankind
as a whole have far more sympathy with that char
acter now than they had when it first appeared.
Group together all the highest moral aspirations
expressed in every literature, and they point,
with sure consent, to a pattern which, line for
line, is found in the life of Jesus ; there is not so
much as a pretence anywhere, by friend or
enemy, that they are satisfied in any other.
The more men study that character, the better
they agree that it is higher than the highest on
the earth, and so much higher that no merely na
tural hypothesis explains it. Take, for instance,
Mr. Lecky, Avriting eloquently the history of Eu
ropean morals, apparently in sympathy with ra
tionalism, and representing its very ripest culture.
These are his words : " It was reserved for Chris
tianity to present to the Avorld an ideal character
Avhich throughout all the changes of eighteen cen
turies has inspired the hearts of men Avith an im
passioned love ; has shown itself capable oi acting

124 LECTURE FOURTH.
on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions ;
has not only been the highest pattern of virtue,
but the strongest incentive to its practice ; and
has exercised so deep an influence that it may be
truly said that the simple record of three short
years of active life has done more to regenerate
and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of
philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
Amid all the sins and failings, amid all the priest
craft and persecution and fanaticism that has de
faced the church, it has preserved, in the ex
ample and character of its founder, an enduring
principle of regeneration." What else is this but
a scientific acknoAvledgment that, regarded simply
as a fact or phenomenon, this one supreme human
power must be accounted for, and that the account
of it is not found elsewhere than in the simple and
modest records which portray it ? That is, it is
of God, for man.
" Unto you, O men, I call," once more. Let me
. say, as earnestly as I can, that it becomes the men
of faith to bestir themselves, if only for the skep
tic's sake, and to become men of action. If there
is dulness or stupor inside the church, Avho can
wonder that there is not much attraction to her
outside ? The church that is to arise and shine
between these oceans, on the tops of these moun
tains, filling all the valleys Avith light, must be a
church whose plans of help for the poor and
the weak are on some scale of magnitude com
mensurate with the energies of the intellectual as
well as the industrial and national elements, the
drifts of emigration, and the dimensions of the con-

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTION'S. 125
tinent. There is an irresistible fascination in all
progressive life. Such is the movement, or rather
the momentum, of these material forces, that one
sees no hope of any thing but burial and an epitaph
for a Christianity that only looks over its own
shoulder, a church Avhich relies on nothing but its
constitution for its health, which repeats its creed
no othenvise than memoriterj Avhose only perform
ances are imitative or automatic, and Avhose sole
pride is in its pedigree. There is a remarkable
passage of Lord Macaulay Avhere, after sketch
ing \'igorously Avhat the new philosophy of Lord
Bacon, as it came to be called in the time of
Charles II., has done for mankind, he concludes :
" These are but a part of its fruits, and of its first-
fruits. For it is a philosophy which never rests,
Avhich has never attained, Avhich never counts itself
perfect. Its law is progress. A point Avhich yes
terday was invisible is its goal to-day, and Avill be
its starting-point to-morrow."
In a time like this, then, which you and I and
all the preachers cannot alter if we will, and would
not, I hope, if we could, a church that is stationary
in the business for Avhich a church exists has no
place and no business to be. It is an anachronism.
It is not only out of date, but out of the plan of
God. Men may tolerate it, as they tolerate in
firmity and mediocrity elsewhere, but they will
not esteem it, or listen to it, or give God hearty
thanks Avithin it.
We separate here, and go our Avays. These few
hours that Ave have spent together at the Master's
feet — the common Master of our common heart

126 LECTURE FOURTH.
—have created, on my part at least, something of
that human interest which our subject, as it has
opened all along, has revealed as an element of
constant attraction and power in the Faith itself.
That subject at last becomes inevitably personal-
I cannot bear to leave it Avithout coming as close
as you will let me to the vital point of the matter.
Remember there is no loyalty to the kingdom
without loyalty first to Jesus Christ. Whether
you and I are true or false, the Tree of Life stands
eternally, its leaves for the healing of the nations.
But whether you and I live from it, and so live
the noblest life we can for other men, and live
forever, is a personal question. States are not
strong without loyal citizens ; armies are not
strong without loyal soldiers ; universities are not
strong without loyal scholars. The church is
strong in her divine commission and in her Lord ;
and yet, in the demonstrated strength which men
reckon and feel, the church is not strong and
never can be, without loyal Christians on earth.
The " power" must Avork within first. Then you
are able to sa)r, " It is no more I that live ; but the
life that I live here in the flesh I live by the faith
of the Son of God," who makes God's life to be
the life of man. Within God's eternity and in
finitude of love our little lives are safe, hoAvever
swift they run, if He and we are friends.
It is not unmeet that the argument should rise,
as it ends, into a higher strain. You Avill be ready
to take up with me, I think, the blended notes
of confession and triumph coming to us across the
sea from a brother of our own blood and language

CHRIST GUIDING MAN'S ACTIONS. 12J
and faith, as profound in his experience as he is
eloquent in his Averse.*
" Through paths of pleasant thought I ran ;
False science sang enchanted airs ;
She told of nature and of man,
And of the godlike gifts he bears.
But, when I sat down by the way,
And thought out life, and thought out sin,
The burning truths that round me lay,
And all the weak, proud self within ;
Still in my inmost soul there wrought
The sense of sin, the curse of doom,
Till slowly broke upon my thought
An eastern olive-garden's gloom :
Hung on Thy cross 'twixt earth and heaven,
I saw Thee, Son of Man, divine !
To Thee the bitter pain was given,
But all the heavy guilt was mine.
I know the serpent touched my heart,
I saw his trail on hand and brow — «
No sinless thought, no perfect part,
But sullied breast and broken vow.
And then I felt my need of Thee,
And pride's illusions passed away ;
And oh ! that Thou hast died for me
Is more than all the world can say.
The wounded fawn, in yonder glade,
Beside the doe seeks rest from harm ;
The babe that scorned its mother's aid
Flies to her at the least alarm.
And thus I feel my need of Thee,
When sin and pride would tempt me most ;
And oh ! that Thou hast died for me,
Is more than all the skeptic's boast."
* Bishop Alexander of Deny.

SPRIN-G- 1878.
Books iot % (Ukrgjj,
JheOLOQIC/L jbTUDENTS AND JaAY ryEADEr\S.
These Publications are for sale by Booksellers generally.
Copies sent by mail, post paid, on receipt of price.

BRAND, (Rev. W. F.) What Marriages are
Lawful ? An inquiry addressed to the members of the Pro
testant Episcopal. l2mo, paper, 35c. ; cloth, . .60
BROWN, (J. Baldwin.) The Higher Life: Its
Reality, Experience and Destiny. Third Edition. i2mo,
cloth  $3.75
 The Battle and Burden of Life. i2mo, cloth, . $1.25
 The Doctrine of Annihilation in the Light of the Gospel
of Love. i2mo, cloth,  $1.25
CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND MODERN
OPINION. A Series of Discourses delivered in New York
by Clergymen of the Church. i2mo, cloth, . $1.25
DAVIES, (J. Llewelyn, M.A.) Theology and
Morality. Essays on Questions of Belief and Practice, with
an Introduction by Rev. Henry C. Potter, D.D. i2mo,
cloth  $2.00
EVANS, (Robt. Wilson.) The Bishopric of Souls.
With an Introductory Memoir by Edward Bickersteth,
D.D. i2mo, cloth  $2-75
HALL, (C. H., D.D.) The Valley of the Shadow.
Eight Sermons on the Doctrine of Future Punishment.
l2mo, cloth,  $1.00
T. Whittaker, Publisher, 2 Bible House, New York.

BOOKS FOR THE CLERGY.
HART, (Rev. Samuel.) Bishop Seabury's Com
munion Office. Reprinted in fac-simile. With an historical
sketch and note. i2mo, cloth,  75
 Mozarabic Liturgy for the First Sunday in Advent.
Translated with notes. i6mo, paper, . . . .20
HENRY, (0. S., D.D.) About Men and Things.
Papers from my Study-Table Drawer. l2mo, paper, .75
Cloth, ........ $1.50
 Satan as a Moral Philosopher, with other Essays and
Sketches. i2mo, cloth, ..... $1.50
HOBART, (J. H., D.D.) Mediaeval, Papal and
Ritual Principles. Stated and contrasted. i6mo, cloth, .75
HUNTINGTON, (Rt. Rev. P. D., D.D.) The
Fitness of Christianity to Man. The Bohlen Lectures for
1878. i2mo, cloth, .... (Nearly ready).
JACKSON, (Abner, D.D., LL.D.) Discourses;
containing, besides Baccalaureate and other Sermons, an
Essay on the Proofs of the Existence of God. With a Pho
tographic Portrait. i2mo, cloth, . . , $1.50
JACOB, (G. A., D.D.) The Ecclesiastical Polity
of the New Testament. A Study for the present Crisis in
the Church of England. Verbatim Reprint. Fifth Amer
ican Edition. 8vo, cloth,  $2.00
JACOX, (Francis.) Scripture Proverbs, Illus
trated, Annotated and Applied. 8vo, cloth, . $4.00
LIGHTFOOT, (J. B., D.D.) The Christian Min-
istry. Sq. l6mo, cloth,  75
T. Whittaker, Publisher, 2 Bible House, New York.

BOOKS FOR THE CLERGY.
MUHLENBERG, (William A., D.D.) Evan
gelical Catholic Papers. Edited by Anne Ayres, Sister
Superintendent of St. Luke's Hospital and St. Johnland.
First Series : A Collection of Essays, Letters, and Tractates
from his writings during the past forty years. 8vo, cloth, $2.00
Second Series : Comprising Addresses, Lectures, and
Sermons from his writings during the past fifty years. With
steel plate portrait. 8vo, cloth, ...» $1-75
NEWTON, (Rev. R. Heber.) The Morals of
Trade. Two Lectures : I. An Inquiry into the actual Moral
ity of Trade. II. An Inquiry into the Causes of the existing
Demoralization, and the Remedies thereof; Given in the
Anthon Memorial Church. i2mo, cloth, . $1.00
NORTON, (John N., D.D.) Every Sunday. A
Course of Sermons for the Christian Year. 8vo, cloth, $2.00
 Golden Truths. A Course of Sermons for the Christian

Year, with a Special Series for Holy Week. 8vo, cloth, $2.00
OXENDEN, (Rt. Rev. Ashton.) The Pastoral
Office. Its Duties, Difficulties, Privileges and. Prospects.
i2mo, cloth,  $1.00
PERRY, (Rt. Rev. William Stevens.) Hand-
Book of the General Convention of the P. E. Church. Giving
its History and Constitution, from 1785 to 1877. i2mo,
boards, $1.00. Cloth, . . . . $1.50
 Life Lessons from the Book of Proverbs. l2mo, cloth, $1.75

SMITH, (John Cotton, D.D.) Miscellanies, Old
and New. i8mo, cloth,  $1.25
T. Whittaker, Publisher, 2 Bible House, New York.

BOOKS FOR THE CLERGY.

SPARROW, (William, D.D.) Sermons. 8vo,
cloth,  $2-50
SPECTRE OF THE VATICAN; or, The Ef
forts of Rome in England since the Reformation. l2mo,
cloth,  $1-5°
WASHBURN, (E. A., D.D.) The Social Law of
God. Sermons on the Ten Commandments. i2mo, cloth, $1.50
WELDON, (Geo. Warburton, M.A.) Unity in
Variety. A Series of Arguments based on the Divine Work
manship in our Planet, the Constitution of the Human Mind,
and the Inspired History of Religion. i2mo, cloth, $1.50
WILLIAMS, (Rowland, D.D.) Life and Letters
of. With Extracts from his Note-Books. Edited by his
Wife. Two vols. 8vo, cloth  $6.00

J^-PARISH, SUNDAY SCHOOL AND PRIVATE LIBRA
RIES SUPPLIED WITH THE CHOICEST BOOKS ON
THE MOST FAVORABLE TERMS.

||f- SECOND-HAND THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE
BOUGHT, SOLP OR EXCHANGED. ESTIMATES
FURNISHED.

(^IMPORTATIONS MADE BI-WEEKLY. CATALOGUES
OF OLD ENGLISH BOOKS FURNISHED ON APPLI
CATION.
T. Whittaker, Publisher, 2 Bible House, New York.

"YACETJNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 9002 08867 8165