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Lorsquf. le document est trop grand pour Atre raproduit an un seul cliche, ii est filmd A partir de Tangle supAriaur gauche, de gauche A droits, et de haut en bas, an prenant le nombre d'images nAcessaire. Les diagrammas suivants illustrent la mithoda. ® 1 2 3 1 t 8 i 4 5 6 \ n 1 •- J /ha/H/fJ^ir?^o^",, •/ «!J THE CHUR( H OF TO-MORROM^ WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. \ The Threshold of Manhood : Sormons to Youn<,' Men, prcachod in St. John's, Glasgow, Prictt " It if a Bj)l<'ii(lir olofniciipo that can h:irilly l>o road without producinif some iiracticnl elfecton tlio life of the reader." — Churrlc /(c/ffi. The Makers of Modern English : A Popular Guide to tho Poets, Prico 5s. "Mr. Dawson's boolf isamost impartial, discriminatintr, careful, and sympathetic survey, and hIiouUI prove immensely useful to multitudes of cupahio renders whoso leisure for systematic study is short."— K(/ii. " It isthoroujfh and honest, in every sense, the result of careful and loving study of the subject." — G'^ffloir Ucralil, with other Ballads and A Vision of Souls : Poems, Prico «)S. "This is a hook of rcmarkaMo quality. It is dramatic, cmi- nejitly human, and full of thought. Forty years a^o work so jjood as this would have cone far to establish its author's name; and if it fails oven yet to lift Mr. Dawson above the cowd of lessor poets, the failure of justice will be, perhaps, as humiliating as iu any recent case of neglected talent." — Tlic Acmlemy. The Redemption of Edward Strahan : A Social Story, Prici^ '.\a. Od. T/ir- Sjuaker says: "Mr. Gladstone describes this work as 'a powerful hook with a pure and hitrh aim,' and all must admit that Mr. Dawson . . . ha'< produced a book very much aliove thu average. There is somethini? in it that is profoundly moviiij^, and at the Mime timostimulatintf. It appeals to the divinosjiark which lies (in many cases dormant) in every human beiiu?. 'rhe book is writt*"!! with an overmastering earnestness which carries all before it. The writer has seen and heard and fi-lt the things that ho so vividly portrays. It is written with a purpose— that of awakening' ft slumberinvr world to the mighty forces that Ho about and under our feet ; of the volcanoes on which we so lijthtly tread ; of th" misery, sin, nnd de^jradation that lie close about us as we sinj? and dance life away." THE CHURCH OF TO-MORROW A SERIES OF ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN AMERICA, CANADA, AND GREAT BRITAIN. BY W. J. DAWSON. Eonljon: JAMES CLARKE & CO,, 13 & 14, FLEET STREET. 1892. THIS HKCOUD OF A I'AKT OT .MV MINISTRY IS DKDICATF:n TO MY OLD FHIKNDS I\ SCOTl.AND AM) MY NEW FRIKNUS IN THK NEW WOULD. CONTEXTS. I. II. Ill IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. IntroduL'ticm On Catholicity . Nohustan : A Study in Progni.-^f? by Iconoi'liisrn Tlio Failure of flic Supornattiral as m Means of Convci'sion Heroic Doubt ... ... The Candour of Christ The Socialism of Jesus ... The Democratic Christ National Ripfhteousness The Blessedness of Womanlit.oi The Last Analysis of Christianity Wesley and His Work FAOR 1 11 ')'.• 81 105 127 149 181 206 22!) 25:{ fc ' INTRODUCTION. fc I. INTIiODUCTION. » In the late Ecumenical Conference at Washington the tlieme allr 'ted to me ^,vas " Tlie Church of the Future," and I was allowed fifteen minutes for its treatment. Obviously, it was not possible to do more thai, indicate, in the most restricted and least quaHfied way, my general ideas of the subject. I was able only to suggest what I believed would be the four chief characteristics of that Church. These were simplification, the democratic spirit, social aim, and intellectual and organic compre- hension. By simplification I mean a movement such as we have witnessed in science and sociology toward root princiijles, essential truths, ^':e result of which will be to separate keenly l)etween the essentials and accidentals in Cliristian truth, and make it possible for all religious souls to draw nearer together on the basis of those fundamental truths upon which all religious souls are agreed. The theology of the churclies to-day is largely manufactured outside the churches. It is the great secular writers of our time who are makin^r 4 INTRODUCTION. the theology of the future. It is idle to ignore the influence upon popular thought of such writers as. Kingsley and George Macdonald, and the still more penetrating influence of Carlyle and Raskin, of Tennyson and Browning. The main result of this teaching maybe summed up in the famous phrase of Laurence Oliphant, hive the life. And the present drift of things points to the conclusion that we are already moving, and even rapidly moving, towards those points of simplification and combination where the divergencies and distractions of disputed theo- logies will be forgotten in the harmony of a religion which places less stress on dogma and more on life, less on creeds and more on character. There is no need to define what is meant by the democratic and social spirit. Broadly speaking, we are all agreed that we are approaching, if we have not reached, an age of triumphant democracy. The example of America has had a wholly incalculable influence upon the political conditions of the Old World. Every decade adds to the power of the people, and the whole trend of modern politics is toward their fuller emancipation. But democracy in the State means democracy in the Church also. It means 'hat in the long run the Church which is most frankly democratic in its methods must win. Autocracy in church government is doomed. Every new school which is erected, every new philosophical book which is read, every fresh liberty which is gained for the masses of the people by the action of senates and parhaments, is another nail driven inta I INTRODUCTION. the coffin of autocracy. And I think, therefore, that the Church which is most frankly, wisely, and genially democratic will be the Church of the Future. Ko Church which boasts that it ministers to an intellectual aristocracy can take a large hold on the twentieth century. The Church that touches the common people will do that, and the Church of the common people cannot fail to be the Church of the world. Nor is there any need to explain what is meant by comprehension. Comprehension is the child of apprehension. When we have apprehended more truly in what the spirit and temper of Christ con- sists, comprehension in one organic whole will become possible, and not till then. To a dis- passionate student of Christianity as it exists, it must be a wholly amazing thing to note how widely the different bodies of Christians are separated, and yet how little separates them. In most cases the forces of separation spring from organisation rather than creed ; and, even where creeds differ, the dif- ferences are for the most part infmitesimally small compared with the agreements. How little actually separates the Presbyterian from the Congregation- alist, or either from the Baptist or Metliodist ! And one may go much further, and say how vast is the body of truth which the truly pious Komanist holds in common with the truly pious Protestant, compared with the doctrines on which they disagree. It is certain that the Catholic is much nearer the Methodist than is either to the Unitarian; and -♦•♦•' 6 liYTRODUCTION, yet even devout Unitarians, such as Channing or Martineau, are so essentially and thoroughly Chris- tian in sentiment and teaching that it is hard to discover by their v^^ritings in what their divergence from the recognised Christian bodies really consists. It is the consideration of these things which leads me to hope that we may arrive at some new state- ment of truth which may unite all Christians in one, and that, in the final reunion of Christendom, the truth which dwells in Rome may free itself from the corruption, and even Rome may not prove for ever irreconcilable. This, at least, was the hope and aim of Jesus : one fold and one Shepherd. The great peril in discussing subjects like these is obviously that of building a church in the clouds, and forgetting the force of facts. One almost feels that the facts are an irony upon the theory. For instance, English sacerdotalism is marked by a narrower, not a broader, vision year by year, and when it uses the word comprehension it really means absorption. Christ or the Church — which .^ is the question which tests all, and when that question is fairly put, especially in the newer lands of the English-speaking race, there can be no doubt as to the reply. It is not to the Church, but to the living and animating Christ, that the great majority of those who profess and call themselves Christians give allegiance. A common centre must needs mean a common orbit, and, therefore, the dis- passionate observer cannot but ask again, Why is it there is not more unity among those who in the IXTRODUCTIOX. deep things of belief are already . one ? And I answer again that, in most cases, it is organisations ■which separate those whom faith unites. Before any practical step toward unity can be taken we must cease to regard each separate sect as a close corporation, each separate ministry as a still closer corporation, and any recognition of the good points of our neighbour as sectarian treason, and any passage across the Rubicon of artificial separation for the greater good of the whole Church as sec- tarian treachery. In other words, we must cultivate fellowship, and fellowship is a plant which does not flourish without cultivation. We must draw closer together, and care more for truth and progress than for the traditions of organisation. When disputed measures are to be passed through the House of Commons, party-leaders gladly sacrifice doubtf ! clauses if they can secure assent to those clauses which express fundamental principles. There are a great many doubtful clauses in our modern Chris- tianity, and it is too much our custom to postpone all progress by wrangling over these : we are stiff- backed in our crotchets, but lukewarm in our pr^-^iples. This is a concise statement of the ground covered by my address, and, as I have said, the time at my disposal was so limited that any attempt at quali- fication or elaboration was impossible. But, as 1 reflected more and more upon the matter, I remem- bered that for a long time past I had been dealing with these questions in a more or less incidental 8 INTRODUCTION. If ll way, in my public ministry. It occurred to me, therefore, that at a moment when all the great Methodist bodies of the world, representing not fewer than twenty-five millions of Christians, were assembled in fraternal council, I could not do better than so order my various public addresses that they all bore upon this fascinating theme. The addresses thus delivered now find a place in this volume. With one or two exceptions, all have been preached to American or Canadian audiences. It is right to remark that in altered forms some of the addresses had been previously delivered to my own countrymen — the sermon on Wesley in St. Giles's Cathedral, Edinburgh, on the Centenary of Wesley's death ; that on Progress by Iconoclasm before the University of Glasgow, and that on the Socialism of Jesus in the Maxwell Parish Church, Glasgow, as one of a series on Socialism. I do not pretend that they all strictly conform to the title of this volume, but I think they have a unity which is based upon their general aim and spirit, and T publish them for two purposes : first, that they may assist in the march of a Catholic and Christian progress; and, secondly, as a memento of the generous reception afforded me by the churches of the United States and Canada. i ii I' "t I There are so many hnds of voices in the world, and none of them is without sifjnification.—ST. Paul, 1 Cor. xiv. 10. Forth from the midst of Babel h-ought, Parties and sects I leave behind, Enlanjed my heart, and free my thought IV hoie'er the latent tnith I find, The latent trvth u-ith joy to oxen, And how to Jcsn's name alone. John Wesley. II. ON CATHOLICITY. How are we to have a creed and yet avoid rigidity of thought? How are we to hold with all the passion of the soul vital principles, and yet be tolerant of variations of belief and principles in others? How, in a word, are we to reconcile con- scientious conviction with Catholic temper? To those questions St. Paul furnishes the only possible reply. He shows us that fidelity to principle need not mean narrowness of outlook, nor devotion to God contempt of the world. There are, or should be, for every man convictions that admit of no mediation. Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Higho:,c. Cannot confound, nor doubt Him. nor deny • Yea with one voice, O world, tho' thou deniest, btand thou on that side, for on this am I. But the deep-natured man will recollect that the Spirit blows as it hsteth, and while it brings life to all, may bring many different forms of life, just as the same wind of spring calls into various being the grass-blade and the violet, the foliage of the bramble -^' 12 0.\ CATHOLICITY. aud the oak. The remedy for intolerance is very simple — remember other people. Eemember how large the world is, and how small are you. Learn to be broad-uatured and not one-sided, With the argmnent of this particular section of the letter to the Corinthians in its special bearing on Corinthian church-life, we need not seriously con- cern ourselves. Like so much of St. Paul's writing, the incidental rises into the essential — the page meant to deal with some transient condition of things, suddenly flashes forth the star-birth of some great illuminating principle, which is good for all tune. Put in the briefest phrase, the argument of St. Paul is for intelligibility of speech. For it is a prostitution of speech when language is used with- out thought and meaning — when the aim of the speaker is rather to attract men by the marvel of his words than the truth of his message. It is worse than this in the minister of the Gospel, it is an equal mockery of God and man — of God, whose message is betrayed ; and of man, whose desires are disappointed. It was of such a practice that Milton wrote with bitter truth, " The hungry sheep look up and are not fed." It is this vainglorious habit of using unintelligible words of which St. Paul speaks in this chapter, and says with stinging emphasis, " I had rather speak five words with my under- standing, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue." But here another and a very natural thought t ON CATHOLICITY. 13 sug^'ests itself. That which is unintelligible to one may be intelligible enough to sonie one else, for the mind and heart of man have many dialects, even as music utters itself through many instruments. Much of the speech of an educated man must always be unintelligible to the illiterate man, because the wider a man's culture is the larger and more various does his vocabulary become. When Wordsworth, for instance, set himself to write in the exact language of common life, he set himself an impossible task because he was not a common man, and it was not possible for him to restrict himself to the bald and narrow vocabulary of the pedlar or the peasant. The most he could do was to treat of simple themes in a simple spirit, but by the very urgency of his own genius he was bound to use hundreds of words which a Cumbrian labourer would neither use nor comprehend. This, then, is the thought that occurs to the acute mind of Paul, that when we say a certain speaker is unintelligible we must remember that, though unintelligible to us, he may be intelligible to some one else. The world is too big a place for one sort of speech to suit everybody Mind acts upon mind, and the Spirit of God acts upon men through a thousand channels, and by means and dialects wh^"ch are always changing. It does not follow that because a man is unintelligible to you that he is so to others, that because he cannot preach to you. that, therefore, he is called to preach to no one. The world is full of voices — tender, stern, startUng 14 ON CATIIOI.ICITY. V \ — some fallinpf on tired hearts like a mother's com- forting, some ringing like a trumpet peal that makes the pulses leap, some speaking in arraignment of our slotlifulness and some of our restlessness ; voices appealing in turn to the intellect, the heart, and the conscience, calling us to the vision of knowledge or of love or duty — some speaking roughly and plainly, so that the wayfaring man may not err; some speaking in the language of entrancement, ■which can only be understood and felt by the initiated ; but in all these world-voices there is none without signification. What the text points towards, then, is sympathy and breadth of thought, and what it rebukes is onesidedness. To the truly catholic understanding there is nothing in the world without its meaning ; and, if a voice means nothing to us, we may be sure there are others who do not so regard it ; for " there are many voices, but none without signification." There are three directions in which this rebuke of onesidedness may be applied. First of all, we may apply it to church methods, church organisations, and church ideals. That alone might afford us ample field for the illustration of the whole subject ; but let us take a single instance of ihis lesson of comprehension in church ideals. There are two ideals of the Church which have always existed, always more or less in conflict, and always failing to recognise and understand each ether. There is, first of all, the ideal of the Church as a school of personal and spiritual culture; and, consequently, I ON CATHOLICITY. 15 t t of the Christian life as a life of devout contemplation. In all ages men have cried for shelter to grow ripe and leisure to grow wise. They have found that the rude hubbub of the world is hostile to the development of the more delicate graces of the spirit, and have sought the dewy shades of contem- plation, where in silence and repose the spiritual nature might put forth its bloom and grow into the beauty of perfection. To the tired hearts of men the Church has afforded this asylum and retreat. It has rebuked the restlessness of man, and called him aside from the race for wealth or honour to the stillness of a cloistral life, broken only by the quiet bells that ring to prayer. And it is not surprising that the world has always felt the charm of that appeal, and that men, worn out with the frantic struggles of life, have sought the calm of mountain monasteries, where the king lays down his crown, the statesman his perplexities, and the scholar his vexations. The truth which is expressed in such a state of things is a great truth, and one which we cannot afford to forget. It is that man needs silence and repose for the nobler qualities of his soul to be developed, and it would be as foolish for us to expect the rose to become fresh and fragrant without dew as for the gracious peace of the true saint to be won without the ministry of prayer and pious contemplation. Over against this ideal of the Church is set another, which has been equally powerful in all ages, but exceptionally so in our own — the ideal of I 4 I i ^ -' Id ON CATHOLICITY. the Church as a social corporation, a school of disciplined activity, or, to use a familiar phrase, the " Church militant." The kingdom of God, in the nature of things, cannot be quiescent ; its essential ideals are government, service, and con- quest. Kingdoms invoke the soldier spirit, and throughout Christianity from the first there has run a soldierly fibre of courage, of defiance, of organisation, ana of purpose. But to the onesided man those two ideals seemed to be irreconcilably opposed. What, says he, has Thomas a Kempis in common vvith Oliver Cromv^ell? What bond of union is there between St. Bernard, looking down on the world from his mountain eyrie of silence, and Luther, battling in it with many a clanging blow, with words which were half battles ? Or, if we come to our own day, what reconciliation can be found between the quiet worshipper who seeks the sanctuary for its peace, and the busy, eager, irre- pressible Christian worker, to whom the sanctuary is simply the focus of intense activity, where zeal is stimulated, and where strenuous labour finds at once its centre and encouragement? To the onesided man there is no reconciliation between these ideals. The busy Christian sees in the clois- tral Christian simply an idler, whose religion is a sublimated selfishness, and the cloistral Christian sees only in the other a type of fussy zeal and mis- chievous distraction. The one prays little and works much, the other works little and prays much. Each hears his own bell ring for his own particular ox CATHOLICITY. 17 worship, and neither recognises the significance which is in the hell that calls the other. The one does not recognise the qualities of the other, only his defects, and so finally each becomes onesided, deficient in breadth and catholicity, the victim of his own egotistic view of things, and incapable at last of understanding any other type of religion but that Avliich he himself represents, but does not adorn. But in the true Church organisation both these ideals are needed, and all that lies between the two extremes ; and no lesson is taught more clearly than this by Jesus Christ in the selection of His disciples and apostles. He chose not one type of man, but many types, and so different that, humanly speaking, there could be no harmony between them. For what contrast could be greater than the con- trast between John with his mysticism and Thomas with his doubts, Peter with his rude eloquence and blunt realism and Paul with his subtle insight and delicately-balanced mind? And, surely, the lesson is clear enough that, in dealing with a world full -^f people, you may have but one message, but yoa need difTerent men who can translate it into their own dialect, and be free to deliver it after their own mdividual method. Peter is not the man for Mars Hill, nor Thomas for the day of Pentecost, and the geographical distance that lies between Mars Hill and Jerusalem is simply typical of the immense intellectual differences between a Peter and a Paul. Each voice has its own significance, and if Peter cannot always catch the significance of Paul's — and 2 18 ON CATHOLICITY. i ?■); i I he tells us he cannot ; he confesses that his brother Paul has written many things which are hard to understand — yet Paul can always understand the significance of Peter's. And that is one of the lessons we must needs learn, and one we find it most difficult to learn. Let there be the unity of the faith and the bond of peace, but there will also be the difference of administration. We shall win men not by outraging, but by consulting their idiosyncrasies. We must work along the plane of the least resistance. We must overcome the evil by co-operating with the good in them. We must be all things to all men, if we may save some ; and, therefore, we want liturgies, and we do not want them ; we want organs, and we can do without them ; we want street evangelists and scholarly bishops ; we want High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, No Church, and we must learn to say with Paul, " We rejoice in all, if Christ be preached ; even though He be preached of con- tention." The street evangelist may please me, and the scholarly bishop may alienate you ; but it does not follow that what helps me will help every- body, and that what disgusts you will be distasteful to every one. What we have to recollect is that Christianity is not for a man, but for men ; not for a race, but for races ; not for a nation, but for the world ; and that which may be a confused and grating voice to us may ring out full and clear to others with the authentic message of the Gospel of peace. ON CATHOLICITY. 19 Still more forcible is the rebuke of onesided Chris- tian teaching which may be found in this passage. Over the teaching of Christianity infinite disputes have arisen, and what is the nature and history of such disputes ? Now we often say that life follows from teaching, but an equally axiomatic truth is that in the first instance teaching has invari- ably sprung from life. Somewhere in the heart of some one man or body of men, a new illumination has sprung up, and there has flashed upon the consciences of men a sense of the profound significance of certain truths. That which a man believes profoundly he cannot help impressing on others, and there is no power like the power of intense conviction. He may have grasped but a fragment of the truth, but it is truth, and often to him it is all the truth. Gradually round this frag- ment of clearly-realised and deeply-felt truth a new school of thought or a new church clusters. And so long as this particular truth is profoundly felt it cannot help being a force in the world. But gradually the early glow dies away; the body of truth ceases to be warm with life because the spirit has passed out of it, and instead of the leaven that bred life there is left the dry kernel out of which life has departed. It is at that point the theologian is supreme, for in the decay of faith theology always supplants religion. The Church goes on echoing old forms of dogma which were once full of vitality, and becomes creed-bound, stereotyped, lethargic, formal. To have a sound faith is held to be higher 20 ON CATHOLICITY. V i than to bo a good man, and the right creed takes the place of the right Hfe. In a word, the move- ment out of which a great national regeneration sprang has spent its force, and all that is left is a Church that clings tenaciously to its dogmas, and all the more so because it is all that there is left to cling to. That is one chapter in the history of the Church, and alas ! too common a one. And then there is another chapter, which, with more or less delay, and such differences as are inci- dent on environment, is sure to follow. The old order cliiuit^es, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. That which was once good, forceful, vital, is now corrupt, and then new men rise up, who use a new language. Against their life there is no reproach, but men miss in their teaching the ring of old familiar phrases. They cast from them old forms of speech, and utter their message in fref h and living language ; and then, because it is frcon and not stereotyped ; because it is living and not formal ; because the ancient platitudes have given place to new fire of thought and theme — then the theological hue-and-cry begins, for it is always safer to be platitudinarian than latitudinarian. Instead of counting it one of God's infinite mercies that men do rise up who cannot be content with decaying forms, but who in their thirst for truth go down to the bottom wells again and draw the water straight from the rock, men turn upon them and rend them because they will not use ox CATHOLICITY. •1\ the common pump and fill their cup at a choked and feeble fountain. Instead of recognising the pro- found philosophy of the truth that even a good custom may corrupt the world when it becomes stagnant, they refuse to believe in a God of variety, wlio fulfils Himself in many ways, and cling to the idea of a God of uniformity, who fulfils Himself only in one way. And then comes onesidedness, and from it issue rancour and bitterness and division — an evil birth — and the spirit of rehgion is lost in contentions about religion, and there is wasted over the forms of faith the strength that should go for the cleansing of the heart and the conversion of the world. And it was precisely this spirit which is so grandly rebuked by Dr. Johnson in words which surely have a very obvious application to-day : — " Let us not be found when our Master calls us stripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and tongues. Alas, sir, the man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither any sooner in a grey one." In other words, it is not the cut of theo- logical dress that takes a man to heaven, but the heart and life. And the one test of discipleship which Christ gives is this, " He that hath my com- mandments and keepeth them — he it is that loveth Me." I do not, however, say that new teachers may not be themselves intolerant, for there is an intolerance of heterodoxy quite as vile as that of orthodoxy, and a frequent narrowness in so-called latitudinarianism 22 ON CATHOLICITY. I ')f I i: , 1 ! i I; not less offensive than the utmost narrowness of a worn-out dogmatism. In the effort to be broad it is possible to become narrow, and men may be intolerant apostles of toleration, unmitred popes condemning Papacy, dissentient dogmatists de- nouncing dogma, narrowing the whole realm of faith down to the convictions of an individual. But of that I am not the judge, nor will I judge any man ; all I say is that the need for these new leaders — these new teachers with new ways of expressing their thoughts — springs out of the com- plexity and variety of nature itself. And of this let us take an illustration. The force underlying everything is life, but how infinite are the various forms which life assumes. You have the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom, but you have vegetables with the characteristics of animals, and animals with the characteristics of vegetables. You have flowers that are carnivorous, and carnivorous insects shaped and coloured like flowers, which are, so to speak, winged blossoms fluttering on the border line of the two kingdoms, and are citizens of each. You have in the daisy a subtle power of life you cannot measure, and the same mysterious pulse beats and is fed, from the same mysterious source, in bird, and beast, and man. Life everywhere. Life that shapes itself into deformity and beauty — life that clothes itself with obscurity and splendour — life that has its insignificant and appalling manifestation — a million forms, all delicately conceived and expressed, but . ' fl ON CArHOUCITY. 23 the same thinpj in all — the mystery of which no man can fathom, the origin of which no man can find, the miracle of which no man can exhaust — the mystery of life. And so in all these infinite varieties of human thought there is one thing underlying all, and that is Truth. There is no heresy without its touch of truth ; no error that has ever governed men that has not somewhere at its root, like a mysterious pulse of life, a concealed fragment of truth. Truth also manifests itself in a thousand ways ; in rough and definite forms ; in elusive and indistinct creations, like the blossoms that are winged and the wings that are blossoms. Truth breathes .in the fancy of the poet, the arguments of the philosopher, the prayers of the monk, the researches of the scholar, the preaching of heterodox and orthodox alike. And if we could see life as a whole, if we could conceive of the life of any single city as a whole, with its multifarious minds, and hopes, and wants, we should see that all these are needed, and are the Divine complements of each other. All are needed. If the strange voice has no message for me it may have for another, and if the old orthodoxy repel me it may be the very life of life to others, whose spirit is purer and whose hands are quicker unto good than mine. As for me, T hear tlie voices and I hear something of God in all. I can sit in the cloistral calm with Thomas a Kempis ; I can walk in the blackness of darkness with John Bunyan ; I can share the vast enthusiasms of John Wesley. I can rejoice in the sympathetic breadth of Charles 24 OX CATHOLICITY. , I ! i' * ; \: I f r Kingsley, the masculine reason of Maurice, the tenderness of George Macdonald, the insight and charm of Martineau. I can worship with the Cathohc or the Salvationist ; I can hear the clear chime of truth sound through the Unitarianism of Channing; and if sometimes the voice fades upon my ear, I may at least believe that it speaks to some one else, for "there are many voices, and none of them is without signification." That is what we need to recollect, that all these men are really necessary to each other ; that one presents a view of truth the other omitted ; that the truth has many sides, and it needs many men and many minds to express it. We need to recollect that the forms of truth are as complex as the varieties of man himself, but in all and through all the eternal God is uttering Himself. And the whole truth is not contained in your creed nor mine any more than the whole sun is mine because he shines into my window. That sunlight floods other worlds than mine — it is too vast a thing for me to claim and bind. It shines on men I do not know, it gladdens myriads I have not seen ; but its source is one, and it is shed abroad by Him of whom it is said, " He is the light of every man who cometh into the world." And then there is also the implied reproach of these words against a one-sided life. The narrow and ill-balanced ideal of the Church, the petty and partial view of truth, must needs breed the narrow and one-sided life. For just as men get one-sided ON CATHOLICITY. 25 views of doctrines, so they get one-sided views of life, and the general mistake is in the direction of repression — the mutilation of life, and not its de- velopment. Men cut themselves off from this custom and that amusement ; they narrow life down to a few barren axioms and pursuits, until their mental life becomes a sort of one-roomed life, with no space, no air, no outlook. Such men's lives remind me of nothing so much as that cele- brated symphony of Haydn's, in which one by one the instruments cease and the players go out silently, until at last there is but one left upon an empty stage, and in a gathering darkness. For it is the spectacle of the many-stringed music of life gradually ceasing that we see in such a life. Ke- ligion is narrowed to a dogma, and life to a habit. A virtue, some solitary isolated virtue, like the dwarfed fruit of an unhealthy tree, is made to do duty for religion. A bundle of formal habits, un- connected by any vital principle, is thrust forward as a substitute for a character. A moral and in- tellectual pigmy takes the place of that magnificent Pauline conception of a manhood which has risen to the fulness of the stature of Christ, and mas- querades as a sample Christian. Is it wonderful that Christianity is so badly misunderstood by the world, when its own professors so little understand it? What, then, is the Christian theory of life ? It is sanctificativ'^n, not withdrawal, the redemption of the common lot by the infusion of a higher spirit. 26 ON CATHOUCirY. * N There is nothing in the whole round of life, always excepting that which is distinctly sinful in itself, which must be judged common or unclean by the true Christian. It is the spirit of use which deter- mines what the world is to us. We may condemn art, or music, or sport, if we will, and withdraw from them ; but the only result will be that they will go on without us, but along a different and a lower plane. The artist will then no Icnger paint Madonnar, and the musician will compose oratorios no more ; and let the history of the past and the observation of to-day inform us what will take their place. We may sweep into one intolerant pro- hibition things which are innocent in themselves, and which give no evidence of perversion ; things which were once innocent and are now partially perverted ; things which are the expression of natural human tastes, but which are frequently abused ; things which are the expression of de- praved tastes, and admit of no apology ; but do we really gain anything by this undiscriminating cen- sure ? Do we produce at the very best a high type of either manhood or society ? Is not the manhood a thing of shreds and patches, and the society an artificial fabric of shallow virtue, the product of coercion, but all the while secretly resenting the coercion and preparing for revolt '> The testimony of history is again quite clear and unmistakable. The fire which kindles Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities is the fire which will presently light his own stake, and the kingdom of the saints is "^^^^'^"^ ON CATHOLICITY. 27 violently swept away by the immense recoilinfj wave of the Restoration. Ileforms from the outside always fail ; the only reform that can last is from the inside, for that is as leaven, which begins in the centre and leavens the whole lump. And quite apart from this, it is a question which demands reply, " Is the world to be treated as an evil vision by the Christian ? " Is this many-citied globe, this vast collection of hands which labour for each other, and of brains that toil to help all comers, this world wherein splendour and delight are found, music interpreting the inarticulate passions of the soul, and art building up visions of imperishable beauty — is it a thing to be treated as wholly evil ? Should we climb our j)illar like Stylites, and there rot in what we dare to miscall sainthood, esteeming the world at our feet a leper's ward, and all its various life of unnamed charities and natural humanities as a sin-infected thing? Who is the leper — Stylites or the world ? Alas ! for poor Stylites and men like him. He was only the Devil's saint after all. He was what he called himself, though, as is the fashion of such men, he never meant to be believed, From scalp to sole, one slougli and crust of sin, Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven. There are men like him still, who stand upon the pillar of their solitary dogmatism — the dogmatism of a crochet — and condemn all who do not agree with them. But the crowd is right and they are 28 aV CATHOLICITY. ■-i 'V ■'* wrong. They are not saints, they are pseudo-saints, they are rehgious abortions. Sainthood is righ- teousness and soberness and a sound mind. Saint- hood has its root in the common earth, and from that draws the vital sap which feeds the blossoms of eternity. Sainthood is the saving of others, not the saving of self. Sainthood opens a warm bosom to all the unhappy of that toiling crowd ; it is com- radeship ; but it is comradeship penetrated wuth a Divine pity which confesses — Then with a rush the intolerable craving Shivers throughout me like a trumpet-call — Oh. to save these ! to perish for their saving, Die for their life, be offered for them all. I will be tempted to no Stylites-pillar ; I will not see how narrow I can make my life, but how broad ; I W'ill not try how miserable I can make myself, and then blasphemously call my peevishness piety, but how happy I can be, and how happy I can make others, and so I will use the world as not abusing it. Let those who will climb the dismal pillar of their crochets, and starve every instinct of art and joy and beauty which God has given t-hem, every whole- some human craving and deh„'ht. As for me, I hear the voice of singers at a feast, and I am going down to Cana of Galilee to meet Him who dined with publicans and sinners. Do you remember the exquisite lines which Wordsworth wrote about his wife ? She was a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight ; ox CATHOLICITY. 29 L A lovoly !i|))piii-iti(m. soiit To 1)0 ii iiiiimciit's ornament. I saw lior. upon nearer view, A spii'it. yt't a woiiiaj). too; A ereaturo wot too Itright nor good For human nal^nre's daily food. What! is it possible to be too bright or good? Yes, it is ; a great deal too bright and good for human nature's daily food. Tho world has no taste, and still less use, for fastidious and impalpable sainthood. And when men have so withdrawn from the world as to cease to be of use to it, they often say they have gained " the higher life," and if that be the " higher life," I prefer the lower. The fact is, they have lost their life, because they have lost their relation to humanity. For we may safely conclude that he who has ceased to serve humanity has ceased to serve Christ, and that which is " unfit for human nature's daily food " is fit only to be cast out upon the dunghill and trodden under foot of men. But for the healthy man — and health is the true equivalent of religion — there will be an infinite interest in life and in all that concerns life. He will want to see it all, to know it all, to understand it all. A modern writer has spoken of that " mag- nificent rage of living " which throbs in the heart of one-and-twenty ; and that rage of living, that keen sense of the delight and glory of life, which fills the heart of youth, is a natural and a wholesome thing. Not to delight in life is to pour scorn upon God and His works and His ordering of things. To turn h I 30 ON CATHOLICITY. your back upon the finished art of God's hands, the heavens and the earth wlncli He has formed, is simply to insult their Maker. To take the narrowest possible interest in life is to disdain and reject the great education which God has provided for you, and, so far from showin«:f a superior piety, it only reflects an ungladdened heart. Once more the voice of Paul reaches us, and there is the ring of true manhood in its tone : " All things are yours " ; there is only one thing which is not yours — you " are not your own." All things are yours — art and science, nature and books, laughter and sun- light ; only you are ** not your own," for the one condition upon which God gives us so much is that we give ourselves away. He only lives in the world's life Who hath rcnonnced his o\vn. Here, tlien, is full life, broad life, happy life, life as God would have you live it. Endeavour to estimate the full breadth of life, and to find God in it all. Eecognise the significance of those voices whi^h reach you daily through the penetrating tranquillity of nature, the wisdom of books, the suggestions of art, the stormy world - clangours which assail you out of the great Armageddon, where men struggle ceaselessly in political and social causes, and where some strenuous soul is hourly fighting his last battle. World-voices, wind- voices, star-voices ; voices reaching us from the dramas of human life and struggle, from the far ON CATHOLICITY. 31 heights of prayer, from the near valleys of the shadow of death ; voices of wisdom, laughter, hope, sorrowful confession, lamenting folly, obscure heroism ; these— and how many others ?— reach us moment by momjnt, and there is somethir:? of God in all. Seek Him, and you shall find. Be a lover of God, and God will be everywhere for you. And so the world will be transfigured, and you will say — The world's no blot to me. uor ))lank : It means intensely and means good, To find its meaning is my meat and drink. r 'm 't i! ^ ■« 'i \ I Hezekiak the son of Ahaz kiivj of Jndah hegan to reign. Twenty anilfivc years old ivus he when he began to reign. And he did that tvhich was right in the ^ight of the Lord. He removed the high places and hrake the images,and cut doicn the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made : for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense imto it, and he called it ^'ehustan, that is, a piece of brass.~2 Kings xviii. 1-4. ^ lam convinced that the Lord hath yd more truth for us yet to break forth out of His Hohj Word.—JoHS Robinson (1G20), Pastor of the Pilgiiiii Fathers. I. % i k I ! \/ III. NEIIUSTAN. A Study in Peogeess by Iconoclasm. There is a short verse in the Epistle to the Hebrews which looks so like a truism that we are apt to overlook its real significance. " Now that,' says the writer, " which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away." It vanishes away. It crumbles into unnoticed ruin ; it silently withdraws itself hke one of those strange ocean islands which to-day are green with Hfe, and in a year's time are submerged and forgotten. We are familiar with this noiseless exodus of customs, habits of thought, and methods of life : when we ask for them we are told they are not— they have withdrawn. But there is another process by which things which are old and decayed have to be got rid of. You may have age without senihty, and decay without apparent lack of force. The thing that ought to vanish away may stubbornly refuse to do anything of the kind. It is a mistake to suppose that stupidity is a passive thing — it often possesses a deadly activity, a most mi 36 NEHUSTAN. I 1 ' pugnacious energy. So far from vanishing away, evil custom may deliberately block every road of progress, and thus decay — of truth, of knowledge, of religious forms — may be an inert corrupting mass incapable of moving itself, lying right athwart the march of humanity, and breeding pollution and death on every side. What must be done then? Then another force comes into play, Iconoclasm. "What will not withdraw must be expelled; what does not peaceably dissolve before the' presence of a new age must be broken by it. Now, from this point of view, this story of Heze- kiah's breaking the brazen serpent of Moses is one of the most striking and instructive passages in the whole Bible. It is the story of what men would call an act of sacrilege or heroic common-sense, pre- cisely as they are disposed to view it. Hezekiah, in this early section of his life, was one of those in whom the noble Hebrew hatred of idolatry burned clear and strong. He came to the throne in the very tlower of his manhood, and he had given to him that happiest of all fates, power to carry out without hindrance the noblest purposes of his heart. It was not his lot to eat out his heart in silence or prophesy to deaf ears and mocking mouths, as many a prophet had done before him. He had nourished his youth in the fear of God, and now his hour had come. It is easy to picture to ourselves how this manly nature had turned away indignant from the polluted Baal-worship of his time, and had often \ < i NEHUSTAN. 37 longed to strike a blow against that which was the disgrace, the dishonour, and the open sore of his nation. It is easy, also, to imagine the temptations to expediency which would beset one so young, when suddenly there was thrust into his hand the power by which his ideals might be realised. We have all known men who were full of noble purpose when they were impotent, and of ignoble hesitation when they were powerful ; politicians who promised much before the people heeded them, and did nothing when the people trusted them ; govern- ments whose members could propose heroic reme- dies in the days of obscurity, but who have been false to every pledge and promise of the past in the hour of victory. There is nothing easier than to be brave when it is impossible to reduce our words to action, and to forget our vows when the hour for their fulfilment is at hand. Ilezekiah was not one of these. He was no truckler, no time-server, no braggart, prodigal in promise and niggardly in action. He ascended the throne with a resolute determination to do right at all costs, and do right all round. He drew no fine distinction between the Baal-worshipper's sacrifice to an idol and the Israelitish reverence for the brazen serpent of Moses. There was a Cromwellian directness, honesty, and common-sense about him. He saw that Baal's statue in the grove and the brazen serpent in the temple meant much the same thing, and were the causes of the same evils to the people. Each was worshipped, and each was therefore evil. If one 9!S NEHUSTAN. fi * i •.V i . ! was to be destroyed, the other must perish with it : and therefore ** he brake in pieces the brazen serpent of Moses, and said it is Nehnstan, that is, apiece of brass." And it was one of the most daring feats of iconoclasm which the history of the world records. Now let us consider what the brazen serpent of Moses was, and we shall understand the motives for Hezekiah's conduct. First of all, we have to remember that it had been the channel of a Divine grace. Seven hundred years before there had happened a memorable thing in Jewish history. God was making a nation, and the forty years of miserable wandering in the desert was the first stage in its making. The first great lesson which the people had to learn was a profound faith in God, and the wandering in the desert was the school in which that faith was learned. The lesson was difficult and bitter, and we can hardly be surprised that many times the experiment broke down. Think of what it meant for a people who had grown soft and sensuous with slavery to be forced out into a life of uncertainty and peril ; to drift up and down the immeasurable wilderness seemingly without plan, or purpose, or issue; to have no home, no resting-place ; for the dead to be buried where they fell, and the little children to gi'ow up how they could amid the hazards of a nomad's life ; and for this to last not for a year or a decade, but a lifetime, and for years to pass, and the leaders to die one by one without the vision of that promised land, which seemed so immediate and NEHUSTAN. 39 real when they left the brickfields of Egypt. Pic- ture to yourself that footsore, weary multitude, withered Lge and dawning youth, suffering perpetual eviction and exile, and can you wonder that the bitter cry rose at last, " Wherefore have ye brought us up to die in the wilderness ? for there is no bread, neither is there any water, and our soul loatheth this light bread ! " It was a sensual complaint, and God answered it by sending fiery serpents among them, as if to teach them that there were worse things than lack of meat. And then it was that the brazen serpent was made, and whoso looked on it in faith was healed. Out of the thing which had stung them came healing, as if God would teach them by this strange symbolism that His chastisement was a blessing in disguise. The piece of twisted brass, hastily shaped into the fashion of a serpent, became the channel of a Divine grace. We can readily understand why that curious symbol was sacredly preserved and carried with them through all their tumultuous fortunes. We can partly understand, also, how it came to be looked upon as a charm, till at last incense was burned before it, and to It^ ugly piece of twisted, tarnished brass as it was, worship was offered. And then it was time to break it. A channel of grace which serves one generation may become a source of infection and disaster to the next, and God is not limited to this or that method of healing men, for He is a God not of uniformity, but of variety. When men worship the mere channel of a heavenly grace, and lift no eyes of 40 AEHUSTAN I t \ faith and reverence beyond the brazen serpent to the Eternal God who shines upon them from the heavens, then it is time for some Hezekiah to come and to break the symbol, and to cry, " It is Nehnstan, that IS, a bit of brass ! " But this brazen serpent was also a relic and a memorj-. We know well how natural it is for men to reverence relics of the past, especially when those relics represent great national events. We smile at the Catholic devotee's veneration for the bones of saints, the supposed wood of the cross, the tradi- tional fragments of the raiment of the Saviour ; but, supposing we could be quite sure that those things were real and authentic, who would not look upon them with reverence ? "We crowd to ex- hibitions where we may see the prayer-book of Queen Mary, or the blood-stained tippet which Anne Boleyn wore upon the scaffold, or the pocket Bible which Oliver Cromwell carried with him into the battle of Marston Moor, or the scanty records of early Methodist heroism ; is it a true or false instinct which holds us silent when we look on these things, and which thrills us with a strange awe as we stand within the precincts of the Tower, or tread the time-worn floors of Holyrood ? It is a right instinct, for reverence for the past is one of the secrets of national greatness. The most shallow- minded tourist who stands within the room where Shakespeare was born or George Washington died, can scarcely help feeling some thrill of keen emo- tion in the recollection of all that those names AEHUSTAN. 41 recall, and all that has heen witnessed by those narrow walls in the unrecorded past. For some- thing imperishable has been there, and has left its f,dory. There arose a fountain which has over- flowed the world, a force which has outlived the havoc of mortality. One almost hears the solemn clock of Eternity beating in such a scene, and realises that all our noisy years are but moments in the being of the Everlasting Silence. And if we can feel thus for secular names, how much more for names and symbols which are associated with a Divine glory ? Who would not feci constrained to bow his head in profound emotion, if not in adora- tion, if he could be sure that he was looking on the very wood to which the Saviour's hand was nailed in the agony of Calvary, or the napkin in which they wrapped His head when they anointed Him wdth frankincense and laid Him in the tomb ? And it was thus that generations of Israelites had learned to regard the Brazen Serpent. It was the symbol of a great deliverance, it was the key that unlocked the door of a nation's memories. It was natural and it was right to reverence it. But when it took the place of God, when the sacred rehc is a fetish which obscures the Saviour, when men manifest a passionate regard for the mere sentimentalities an(" symbolisms of Christianity, and live their whole life in habitual defiance of the spirit and temper of Christ, then God raises up some Hezekiah who does His work with a ruthless iconoclasm, and, dashing the precious relic or sacred symbol to the ground, i 4 ■■ ( 42 N EH U STAN. cries, " Behold, it is nothing but Nchustan — a piece of brass." There are natures to which symboHsm iii worship is necessary, and tliere are natures to which all symbolism is abhorrent. But even where it is abhorrent it may still be necessary, and, perhaps, the more necessary because it is abhorient. The hard, practical, unimaginative nature usudly resents symbolism. Are you building a church? Such a man will make it as much like a barn as he can, and it is merely wasting words to tell him that the spire may be a finger pointing to the sky, and the painted window, with its crowned and saintly figures, a spectacle which may liberate and enrich the imagination; and the " height, the space, the gloom, the glory " of the great cathedral roof a fit pathway by which the thoughts of men may travel God ward. Are you arranging your order of service? Such a man will make it as bald as possible, as much like an auctioneer's performance as he can, and the very idea that music may be the servant of devotion and that the sweet voice of the chorister may teach us more of truth and God than all the bitter eloquence of the heated pulpiteer, is to him mere monstrous and repulsive nonsense. No ; to such a man baldness, plainness, ugliness become the very essentials of spiritual worship. Everything about the man reflects the starved instincts of a narrow soul, and he sets up those instincts as a universal standard. He is incapable of understanding what the beauty of the Lord our God is, or of uttering -N' NEHUSTAN. 43 the prayer that beauty as well as strength may dwell in the sanctuary. Every farthing spent beyond tho exact needs of brick and mortar in building God's house is to him a hideous extravagance, and his perpetual Judas-cry is, " Why this waste?" But it is not upon any such plan of Puritanical par- simony that God has framed this world, nor is it for us to give Him our worst who has always given us His best. And this very same practical and unimagina- tive man, if he did but know it, is precisely the man who most needs symbolism in worship, for the imaginative carry their own symbolism with them. It is he who really needs visible ty^os, and the enchantment of a visible beauty, to warm his frigid thoughts and touch his heart with the liberating hand of a true emotion. The immense hold which the Catholic Church has always had, and still has, on the minds of tii.. masses — and let it be remem- bered that the masses are mainly the poor, whose lives are necessarily passed for the most part in sordid and ugly surroundings — is largely accounted for by the fact that Catholicism has always known how to awaken and to satisfy the appetite for beauty. On the other hand, the loss of Protestantism through its wilful contempt for, and neglect of, the instinct of beauty has been beyond all computation ; and when I hear, as I often hear, of the children of stiff Non- conformists turning from the bareness of the meet- ing-house to more ornate services and surroundings, I know that the secret of half these defections Hes in the natural need of the average human nature for il J II,, ^ If ■■ M 44 N EH U STAN. symbolism in worship, or, at least, for such elements in worship as shall make God's House the House Beautiful to the countless toilers on whom no radiance of beauty ever falls. I say that we Protestants have neglected these instincts, and that we still neglect them. In the greatest age of art it was the Church that was adorned with great pictures, representing martyr constancy and holy mysteries of love and passion ; it was for the Church that the great music was composed ; and the Church itself, in its soaring glory of golden cupola or carven spire, was a thing so splendid that it seemed to stand apart from common life, and to overtower it, us tbe proper incarnation of Divine things and thoughts. To be permitted to paint a l^icture w^orthy of the house of God, or to produco a solemn music fitted for its praise or lamentations, was then the most passionate dream of artist and musician. How is it that in small European cities, which at no time were over-prosperous, we find baptistries and churches and cathedrals of such ex- quisite grace or massive splendour, that men travel from the ends of the earth to see them and look upon them, wondering all the while how it came to pass that such creations were begotten in such places ? The reply is plain : these precious gems of architecture exist because men once had a species of reverence for the house of God which has long since passed away. In those days the Church was the sacred depository of all things rare and beautiful. Then a Raphael thought it no disgrace to paint for the banner of a \ NEHUSTAN, 45 common church procession a Madonna and child so lovely that to-day thousands visit the galleries of Dresden for tht^ one purpose of beholding it. How do we now treat our sacred pictures, when, as happens rarely, one worthy of that word is actually produced ? We make money of it by showing it at a shilling a head, and what there is of sacredness in it is killed by the surroundings we provide for it. We have wholly lost the art of cathedral-building ; we have neither the patience nor the inspiration for the work ; we build by contract, and our work does not endure. We say we have a more spiritual reverence than the Middle Ages had ; but our reverence does not go far enough to teach us how to build the house of God with honesty and thoroughness. We say that God dwelletli not in temples made with hands ; no, clearly not in such temples as ours, where the very walls are stucco lies, and the adornments glaring gilt impostures. We say that the true worshipper can dispense with such aids as art and beauty may afford, and this is true ; but how few are these true worshippers, and how many those in whom devotion is a temper difficult of growth, and therefore needing every sort of element which can strengthen or develop it ? We may ignore these desires for beauty if we please, but as long as human natur j exists men will prefer beauty to deformity, and simply because the majority of men are dull in imagination, tlie niajority are always too thankful for any symbolism which enables them the better to understand the deep things of the Spirit. It would be at once the « s' IN , ! : t^ r.'i t ill. I 1 I i' A 46 NEHUSTAN. falsest and the shallowest possible interpretation of this passage, if we assumed that because symbolism is abused therefore all symbols should be abolished. But of what this passage does mean, and how alone it can be understood, we have many lessons in the past history of the Church. Thus, when Jesus said : " This is My body, this is My blood," he used a symbol, a beautiful and touching symbol. He meant to say that the disciple is spiritually nourished with the very life of his Lord, and that this life passing into him changes his vile body to a heavenly likeness, and makes it one with Christ in immortal life. The picture of Jesus standing among His sorrowful disciples on the night of His betrayal, and lifting that simple cup of wine and calling it His blood, is an immortal picture, which has sunk deep into the heart and imagination of the world. It is the poetry of farewell, and for the Christian it is the symbol of etornal love and life. But when men begin to take the words literally, when in pro- cess of time the wafer is declared the very body of Christ, and the wine His very blood, when the priest and his formal rites obscure the Saviour, then a new movement begins in men's hearts, and honest men feel about the Sacrament of Communion as Hezekiah felt about the Brazen Serpent. There is then a revulsion from a symbolism which has been abused and misinterpreted, and men go to the other extreme of a worship which is stripped bare of all symbolism. We may, and do perhaps, shrink from the violent temper of such reformers, but the 1 if NEHUSTAN. 47 iconoclast at his very worst is better than the idolatrous priest at his very best. Better a thousand times to worship in a barn, or on the bleak hillside with the Covenanters, than to bow before an image or a wafer in the most glorious temple ever built with hands. Better that the cathedral shall be wrecked, and all its gathered wealth of art and beauty shattered in the dust, than that men shall make it the place where the symbol is worshipped and the eternal God is forgotten. Man can worship God without symbol or temple, as Elijah did in the desert, as St. Paul did in the poorest homes of Corinth or Thessalonica, where he must literally have held cottage-meetings ; but man ca«; . He vomited his poison out On tlie broad and on the wine : — So I turned into a sty. And laid me down among the swine. And what Blake means to teach is, that even the swine-trough of the prodigal is a likelier place wherein to worship God than the defiled sanctuary where the idolatrous serpent lies coiled in the holy place, and is the thing which men worship. When that happens it is time for Hezekiah to come to the throne and do his work. Nothing must stand in the way ; neither use nor wout, neither memory nor symbolism, neither past service nor present custom, neither the wrath nor the horror, nor the outraged sensibility of the people : the serpent must be broken, and standing on its shattered fragments he shall cry, ''Behold, it is Nchiistan, it is a piece of brass!" How, then, does this story apply itself to oiu' own time ? We may apply it in the first place to the worship which is often offered to creeds. Creeds are good, and he is but a shallow fool wlio thinks it clever to ridicule and despise them, as he would have been a shallow fool who saw nothing noble in the Israelitish reverence for the Brazen Serpent. Creeds represent the toil and prayer of the wisest and best of men, through long centuries. Age after age has bent itself over the Sacred Book, and has sought to reduce its infinite wealth of teaching to some distinct and definite mould, and if the m rtvr has I "S NEHUSTAN. 4f) age ight )rae I lias served his generation, so has the theologian, for with- out the theologian the martyr had not learned how to die. But when the creed becomes everything and life nothing, when men think that a sound faith in certai]] statements of the Church is all that God requires of them, when they make an intellectual assent to articles of faith the binding test of the Church, and disfranchise from the charity of God and fellowship of man all who dare to differ from them, then the creed has become an idol, and it is time for it to be broken. Then some new Hezekiah is sure to rise who will trample it underfoot, and cry, " It is Nchiistan !'' And are there not those still among us who burn incense to the creed ? Have not men a fatal knack of transferring their allegiance from God to the creed? Was it not a fanatical worship of the creed which led Calvin to burn Servetus, and in this what was he better than a Eonner or a Gardiner, who burned men and women by scores because they could not believe in transub- stantiation ? These scenes are apt to reproduce themselves in history, in spirit, if not in form, and then what the age wants, and what the occasion is X)retty sure to develop, is a Hezekiah who will boldly take up the piece of twisted brass and will say, " Beautiful as it is, or sacred, or memorable, it is but a thing of man's devising after all, and we can live without it ; it is Nehustan — a piece of brass ! " The same thing may happen in regard to even the Bible itself. "We may fanatically worship it as a 4 z^ IP ■■ ■* . n .-.— — . 50 NEHUSTAN. \ ti i > Book, as a book which is to be accepted without question down to its very commas and headhnes ; and then God is bound to teach us, perhaps by means that maybe very starthng to us, that it is not a book which we are to worship, but Him, the Living and Eternal One. It is quite possible for men to fight eagerly for the inspiration of the Bible and yet to know little of God ; to hate heresy more than they hate wrong ; to defend inspiration in such a way that it is clear they know nothing of that inspiration of Divine charity which should breathe through their life. Be sure the Book in itself will as little save us as the creed which is based upon the book. There are thousands of persons who read the Bible every day in formal family worship, and are ready to fight for the Bible, and are angry to hear a single verse of it questioned by even the most reverent scholarship, who, nevertheless, are mean and covetous and un-Christlike in every detail of their daily life, so that the Bible is really to them as much a fetish as the Brazen Serpent was to the people of Israel. The same truth applies to all forms of worship, and applies even more cogently. Sometimes the liturgy or the sacrament becomes the fetish, some- times the man. And then it is that in some great and terrible way God has to teach us that neither man nor liturgy shall stand between Him and the living souls of men. He who has preached to others himself becomes castaway, and lips that have s]poken the sacramental absolution are soiled with i I It I I NEHUSTAN. 51 some- great leither id the others have with the mire of pubHc shame. History is full of such lessons, and they abound in the records of the individual life. The very best and noblest tlii.igs may be perverted, and there is no surer way of per- version than the substitution of institutions for God, faith in things for faith in the Eternal. When men get to think that there is only one right way of government, or only one man who can govern them, then the throne is suddenly overturned, or the pillar on which a nation rested is snapped. When English- men paid such an idolatrous reverence to the Crown that they said they would '* fight for it though it hung upon a bush," then a Cromwell arises, who thrusts king and crown aside with mailed hand ; and when Puritan England thinks that none can govern her but Cromwell, then Cromwell dies, and leaves no successor. When men rest in purposes and ambitions which stop short of God, then God sweeps away their wealth in a moment, and teaches them that it is after all NehustaUf a piece of brass, by no means needful to a worthy and a noble life. From first to last God's interferences in history, by which we mean those mighty movements which the least serious have felt to be the hand of God, and God's great men who have been raised up to do His will, have taught the same lesson. He can govern through kings or without them; He can teach men by symbols or without them ; the Lord gives and the Lord takes away ; but the one voice of thunder, which never ceases to reverberate through the lives of men, is the voice of the great I am, uttering the primal command, " I am 52 NEHUSTAN. . ¥ \> I ^ tk li i * the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other God before Me." If these lessons are difficult to learn, let us re- member that there are none more needful. We all have an instinctive dread of falling into a stereo- typed life, have we not? We dehght in freedom, variety, spontaneity. It is the very salt of human life that it is individual ; it is the secret of its charm that it perpetually flows into fresh moulds, and assumes new shapes. History is a great panorama wherein customs, ideals, manners are always chang- ing, and it is this evolution from barbarism, this endless growth and change, which is the secret of its spell. Literature takes different forms in different ages and then exhausts them, so that each age must write its own books, and learn to utter its own thoughts in soms new fashion which is native and natural to it. Science knows no sameness ; it puts forth fresh flowers in every age, and becomes more marvellous with the fulness of its revelations in each succeeding generation. Are, then, the forms of truth and religion alone to remain stereotyped ? Is God alone to be unvaried in His methods of teaching men, and guiding them, and reveaUng Him- self to them ? Is the world of religious thought alone to be unfreshened with any spirit of change which passes over it like a heavenly wind, leaving freshness and fertility behind it ? No ; God also refuses to be stereotyped. He chooses to address each generation with a living voice, and to clothe His message in fresh and fruitful forms. The break- NEHUSTAN. 53 Iress jothe leak- ': ing up of old forms means the inflowing of new life, and " the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." In the eighteenth century it is the Evangelical Eevival, or Methodism, which breaks asunder old forms with the expansion of a new life ; in the nineteenth century it is the Salvation Army ; and when either becomes stereo- typed God will not fail to invent some other and better thing. Let us have faith in God then. What though the tumult and clangour of opinion wax loud and loader round us ? From the hall of unjust judgment and the strife of tongues there is a Voice which speaks on, calm and undismayed. ** For this cause came I into the world that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice." What though we stand amid the wreck of systems and institutions which vanish away ? God owns Himself the author of the ruin ; He calls us to see the desolations which He hath wrought in the earth ; He puts His hand upon our complaining mouths, and says, " Be still, and know that I am God," and when He removes it our lips are cleansed, our heart is quieted, and we cry, " God is our refuge and strength : therefore will not we fear though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea." In our regulation of Christian conduct and policy the same lesson needs to be learned. Customs not less than forms of truth become Nehustan, and have to be cast aside. Society changes, offering new problems, new vices, new difficulties, and then the m -r«- 54 NEHUSTAN. ( 1 attitude of Christianity must change too. The only real heresy, the one deadly sin of which Churches are capable, is to forget thatwe serve a living Christ, who is hourly instructing us, who orders the campaign, and disposes the battle. We are not bound by the words of Jesus spoken in Galilean ears so much as by His spirit and temper, and the messages our own hearts receive. If it be the mere recorded words of Christ that bind us, then we may fairly argue that Christ was not upon the side of total abstinence, nor against slavery, not for the emancipation of woman. Where has He even named such things ? And why has He not done so ? Why has He not given us as distinct a prohibition of the use of wine as Mahomet ? Take the mere words of Christ, and make them the exact standard of morals, and use them in their narrow, legal, inelastic limitations, and you destroy Christianity. You erect an exegetical Nehustan upon the grave of Christ. You reimpose the Mosaic bondage of the letter ; and that is not how Christ designed to interpret Himself to us. No ; He has bequeathed us a certain temper and spirit, the temper of renunciation, the spirit of denying ourselves for the good of others, the law of service which demands that even liberties which are natural and legitimate to us should be curtailed if by any means we might save some ; and it is that spirit we have to re-interpret in the light of modern needs. It is said that when the fishermen, toiling on the banks of Newfoundland, find the masts and rigging so encumbered with ice that the ship's uses seem half-lost, they head for the NEHUSTAN. 55 gulf-stream, which is but a few score miles away, and there, in a few hours, every trace of winter dis- appears, and the ship is herself again, shaking out her sails to the wind like a bird that feels the touch of summer on her wings. And so it is when we pass from a literal to a free and spiritual interpretation of Christianity. The ice melts in the gulf-stream of a larger life, and the Church that seemed a dead thing, encrusted with useless traditions, becomes a living force for the rescue and the help of men. Let the form melt ; let it be ours to know the spirit, and to recollect that we have simply to live our Christianity as we think Christ would, had He lived in the nine- teenth century, and anything that comes between us and the realisation of that Divine ideal is a Nehustan which must be trampled under foot. And so, again, this Living Christ is the only warrant of a living Christian ministry. If the minister be not, in truth, a prophetic man, who hears the heavenly voices and interprets them, he is no minister. It will not serve him merely to reiterate, however eloquently, the outworn thinking of a system which has vanished away. And we may ask, indeed, how can he do so — how can he dare, or be content, to do so, if he believes that the living God is still speaking to the living minds of men, and has His distinct messages, which it is the mission of the true minister to utter to his people ? For the Book of God is not a bjok — something consisting of so many chapters and parables and ethical instructions ; but the Word of God, a series of living inbreathed t 'il r ^ i! k I - li ^, 56 NEHUSTAN. messages, uttered afresh to every true and liumble- hearted teacher. That was a wise saying of an old minister to a young one, who had complained that after three years' preaching ho had exhausted the interest of the Bible : "Young man, sink your shaft deeper, and you will come to water." True, I have felt, as I suppose every man who endeavours to instruct his fellows may feel at times, as thuugh I had reached the limit of my teaching, as if I had nothing more to say, and the utmost boundary and horizon of my poor knowledge were touched. And there has lain the open Bible before me, with the old familiar texts, but no voice, no music, no light in any one of them. So I have sat, sterile, silent, incapable of thought ; and then it has been as if a subtle music suddenly breathed and trembled through the stillness of the room, and a light has shone, and Christ has told me something quite new, something I never dreamed of in my life before, something which I could not have understood till that moment, because until then I had no experience by which to interpret it. Oh ! think of it, for century after century, men have been preaching from these scanty biographical remains of Jesus, this tithe of parables, this little handful of ethics, aphorisms, incidents ; and yet the words are newer, deeper. Diviner to-day than ever they were. So I know, then, that if Christ says nothing to me, it is not because He is not speaking, but because I am deaf, and do not hear. He has many things to say to us, but we cannot bear them now ; we need sorrow to interpret some, and temptation to interpret t J...... 1 NEHUSTAN. 57 of of are ere. me, I to eed )ret ,e others ; for some the silence of the house of lan^our, for others the still more solemn silence of the house of death ; but, most of all, the obedient and respon- sive spirit without which we cannot interpret any. The Bible is a newer book to me to-day than when I first opened it to preach my first poor sermon. I think that I can preach to-day as I coi^ld not have preached ten years ago, and if God gives me grace and life, I shall hope to preach in ten years' time as I cannot preach to-day. And one thinks of the closing words of Maurice. When his wife told him, as he lay dying on Easter Sunday, that it was the hour for service, he said, *' Ah ! I shall never preach again on earth, but, please God, I intend to go on preaching in the worlds that are beyond." Some of you, perhaps, are full of alarm at the broken creed, the broken symbol, or the broken man. You witness with failing heart the destruction of symbols, and the dissolution of creeds. You have leaned upon them, and they have snapped beneath your weight ; or you have leaned upon some human preacher, only to find him faulty like the rest of us, and far better able to preach the truth than to ex- emplify it. We can conceive with what horror the Israelites would witness the daring act of Hezekiah, and it is with similar horror you watch the things in which you trusted going to pieces, till you seem to stand bare and naked under the very eye of God, with no sheltering or interpreting medium between you and the Eternal. If so, be sure that that is just where God means you to stand. Sacrilegious as ,li I k 58 NEHUSTAN. I :« t Hezekiah's act seemed, it is emphatically said, " He did right in the sight of the Lord," and it may be the truest witness that God is still working in the world that these violent disruptions of creed and symbol do occur. But whatever is shaken and destroyed, God and you"" own soul remain. God is a spirit, and they that worship Him need neither *' this mountain nor Jerusalem "; they must worship in spirit and in truth. Lift your eyes, then, above the broken symbol to the Everlasting God. Beyond the rainbow of the symbol shines the sun of the spirit, and without the sun the rainbow had not been. Lift your eyes from the broken man to the Man Christ Jesus, tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. Lift your eyes from the broken creed to Him who lives behind all creeds, the Lord, merci- ful and gracious, the Father who softly calls, " My son, give me thine heart ! " Let the broken creed itself be God's ministry to lead you into closer com- munion with Him, and learn to realise how profoundly true are the well-known lines : Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be, They are but lyrokeu lights of Thee, And Thou, O God, art more than they. :f I J.: //' they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will thaj be per- suaded though one rose from the dead. — Luke xvi. 31. To fall aicaijfrom that tvhich has supreme being towards that which has less being, this is to begin to have an evil will. To wish to find out the causes of these defections, when they are, as I have said, not efficient hut deficient, is tantamount to wishin, to see darkness or to hear silence. Nevertheless, there are both things which we know very well, one by means of the eyes only, and the other only hy means of the cars. St. Augustixe, De Civitate Dei, Bk. 12. 7. h. 1% i^SSGTB I IV. THE FAILUBE OF THE SUPEBNATUBAL AS A MEANS OF CONVEBSION. It is the last word of a conversation beyond the grave which is reported to us in this verse. If we are to reahse its solemn force, we must first reahse that which seldom occurs to us amid the busy vanities and carnalities of our daily life, that there is indeed a spirit- world close to this, divided from it by the thinnest of curtains, and that there is for millions who once lived on this earth, at this moment, a life of conscious thought in that unknown and spectral realm. We have to realise the truth of that quaint saying, " A man is born but not buried, and when he is buried he is not ended." Our friends who once spoke to us with human lips are still speaking, but in another language ; they are still suffering and enjoying ; they are still the centres in which thought and consciousness and action reside, and the drama of their life, which is terminated here, is being played out upon another stage, before another audience, and in a far more solemn environment. This is the point of view which we must reach before i^-«—.^rH« 3^ pn u (f J! i 62 TNE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL the full effect of this parable can break upon us ; and familiar as the parable is, and has been, in the pulpit teaching of centuries, it may be doubted if a tithe of either readers, preachers, or congregations have ever thus become vividly conscious of its tre- mendous reality. We have to recollect, on the other hand, that the entire story of Dives and Lazarus is a parable, and therefore is not to be accepted as literal truth in all its bearings. For what is a parable? It is an illustration, and it is seldom that a flaw cannot be discovered in the aptest illustration, and almost im- possible that any single illustration shall perfectly express a series of complex ethical truths. The parable is that which takes us out of the world of commonplace fact into the world of the imagination, and it exhibits familiar facts to us through the modifying or transfiguring light of the imagination. If follows, therefore, that a strictly literal interpreta- tion of a parable often destroys its true significance, or so distorts it, that the parable may be made to teach the very thing which its inventor would not have desired to teach, and omit the very element of truth which he meant to express. For, if we apply, as is often done, this literal spirit to the interpretation of Christ's parables, what happens ? We find ourselves at once entangled in a maze of difficulties. For example, apply such a method to the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and what do we find ? We cannot help feeling that if the father in that most touching of all stories is i AS A MEAA'S OF CONVERSION. 63 to of irit lat in a Lnd It if is meant to represent God, then there are elements in his character which we could not conceive to be elements of the character of God. For we are not told that the father did anything to restrain his younger son, that he ever reasoned with him on his conduct, that he ever pointed out to him the folly of his course, or that he ever inquired after his welfare after he had left home, and from these facts it would he quite possible to argue that the God of Christianity is a God who is careless of His children, a cosmopolitan Eli, whose sons make themselves vile and He restrams them not. Or take such an illustration as the story of the unjust judge, who is moved to righteous vindication of the importunate widow, not because her cause is just, but because she troubles him ; and if the judge of that parable is meant to be a portrait of the Governor of the Universe, then it is impossible to avoid the inference that the Holy One of Israel is not holy, but un- righteous, and that the Maker of the heavens is not a moral ruler, but an immoral tyrant. Or take the concluding passages of this parable, and we cannot disguise from ourselves, whatever our theological predelections may be, that Dives showed some faint signs of an unselfish spirit in his thought for his brethren, and it is not possible to think of a soul in this state as for ever outcast. These are samples of the peril of an exact and rigid interpretation of a parable. And therefore we have to ask how Christ came to speak the parable, at what point in His argument did it occur, what was obviously intended ' il 'mill liiUln ^^11 I II 111 ill! 04 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL I I 1 to be its broad and general drift ? When we put these questions the reply is simple, for we see at once that what we call the Parable of the Prodigal Son is really the Parable of the Elder Brother, and is meant as a rebuke of Pharisaism ; and that all that Christ would teach in the story of the importu- nate widow is, that men will put a perfect passion of patient endeavour into the effort to recover some paltry money-debt, but will scarcely take the trouble to tell God what they want, or ask anything of Him save with the formal nonchalance of suitors who never expect that He will do anything for them. Fix your eye on these points of tlie parable and you see the pivot on which all moves ; miss these, and the spirit of the parable is wholly lost and ignorantly misinterpreted. Now this parable has a double ethical teaching, and is aimed at two points. The first of these is the responsibilities of wealth, and indeed of all forms of possession, wliofcher amounting to what we call wealth or not. It forces home upon the conscience the truth that a man's use of his property here will shape his destiny hereafter, and that he who has possessed wealth here, and has used it only for per- sonal ends and never for public and social ministra- tions, dies not merely disgraced, but hopelessly condemned. Before the eyes of every selfish rich man in Christendom this parable stands like a spectral menace. The curtain of mystery which shrouds the future, and which Christ would not lift to satisfy the intellectual curiosities of men, is lifted AS A ME A AS OF COiXVERS/OX. 65 le ill ir- la- a ft for a single dreadful instant, that He may teach us our social duty. How many times Christ warned men against the corrupting love of money ! How often did He say that a man's possessions counted nothing with God, and were in effect not so much a blessing as a temptation, which made it hard for the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven ! Here is all that He taught cast into dramatic form, and the last act is played out amid the terrors of Hades, where unhealed woes seek an ineffectual relief, and the mind diseased finds all ministration impossible. If we were not overwhelmed with the spiritual force of the parable, we might pause to notice with what superb power the picture is drawn, with what in- sight and daring, and with what a marvellous mastery of form and art there is compressed within a dozen sentences a drama which would gain nothing if it were expanded by the hand of genius into a dozen acts. But we have no time to think of this. It is the terrible truth of the representation which awes us, and makes us unconscious of the method of its expression. And one wonders, as the solemn sentences of Christ break upon the soul, how it is that for centuries this parable has been read in the ears of selfish and uncharitable rich men without effect, and we see anew how profoundly true was the word of the Redeemer, " Why do ye not understand My speech? Even because ye cannot hear My -.word." . But the second truth which this parable is meant to illustrate is the futility of the supernatural as an ■M* 66 Zy/ii FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL instrument in human conversion. Now that is not a conclusion which is generally accepted ; but I think that it is the distinct meaning of Jesus, and it is clearly in accord with His own repeated say- ings. For Christ did not attach the same importance to miracles that we do. He more than once mani- fested the greatest reluctance to work them, because He saw that their total effect was to excite the curiosity of men, but not to transform their spirit. He repeatedly told those whom He had healed to tell no one, because He did not wish to be talked of as a necromancer, or followed only from those motives of idle curiosity which lead men to crowd round a magician. He never worked miracles of mere power ; there was always some point beyond the miracle at which he aimed, some moral or charitable end to be reached, some blessing of which the miracle was the Divine channel, and which justified it. And, lastly, Christ pathetically appealed to men to believe Him for His word's sake, and it was only when they would not do that, that He implored them to accept His works as His Divine justification. The most, there- fore, that the miracles can ever be is a series of glorious banners borne before the armies of the conquering Christ, the splendid symbols and tokens of His kingdom, but not essential to it anymore than the symbol of the harp or lion on the flag is essential to the existence of the empire which it represents, or the actual winning of the battle into which it is borne triumphant. No ; the total efi'ect of miracles as an instrument of human salvation is relatively V m 1 ."; I AS A MEANS OF COXyERSION. 67 a re- of the 3ns lan bial its, is ^les rely small, and when Dives asks a miracle for the con- version of his brethren, the reply is, " If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be per- suaded though one rose from the dead." Now let us assume the dramatic reality of this picture and examine it. This, or somethin;j; like it, is what this tortured rich man sees and thinks while he talks with Abraham in the dreadful world of spirits. He sees again the house where he had lived, the deep coolness of the luxurious rooms, the orange blossoms waving in the courtyard, the splendour and ease of that home where he once had lived, and whose charm had often caused him an exquisite esthetic joy in the days of his flesh. He sees also his five brethren, who now occupy the palace he has vacated, who are dressed as he was dressed in the soft linen of Egypt and the purple robes of Tyre, who fare sumptuously every day as he had fared on the daintiest food that wealth can purchase, and whose life is in all respects a complete counterpart of what his own had once been. One feature in the familiar scene his brethren do not behold : they do not see the beggar at the gate, for he has gone for ever. But they still remember him. In the old days they could not enter or depart through the courtyard without noticing that huddled mass of misery and beggardom which lay silent at the gate. They knew his features, distorted with disease per- haps, certainly emaciated with hunger, and the slow corrosion of many bitter thoughts. They probably resented his presence, as did Dives, and they doubt- ■'■— itifr'rftii, "nirSTi ■Kii ill l\ I i Vl I 68 r///r FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL less left him to his iiuremembered misery. And now, if the plan of Dives can be carried out, this is what he proposes : He will wait for some night when his brethren are all together, and then, just when the feast is over and the lamp is lit, and there is silence in the room, Lazarus — the erstwhile beggar at the gate, whom they well know to be dead — shall stand among them. He shall stand among them not as he was — a glorified Lazarus, yet the same ; a ghostly presence, with immortality clothing that soiled mortality of his ; incorruption drawn like a shining veil over the old corruption which it heals and obliterates — and he shall reasoj with them. While the low-voiced talk goes round, suddenly a shudder of alarm shall seize the five feasters, and, looking up, they shall behold the spectral visitor. And then this awful presence shall motion them to silence, and shall say : Dives, your brother. I at your gate unhelped. I am now with Abraham in the Paradise of God. Dives, your brother, is now tortured in a pit of flame. He Hved selfishly, and for this he now suffers the penal fire. You live as he lived, and because of this God has permitted me to be the messenger of Dives, and to warn you of your fate. His scorched lips now breathe through mine — mine that can thirst no more ; his agonised soul now utters itself through mine — mine that is bathed in the eternal peace of God ; and he bids you beware lest you also come to his place of torment. Oh, repent, reform, be charitable, be just, be kind ; " I am a messenger from am Lazarus, who once lay ., '■■ i AS A A/EAA'S OF CONVERSIOA. no id lis m t. slmre your abundance with the thousands wlio are now as I once was ; yea, if you will, T can guide you to the hovels where they lie unhelped, for in that brotherhood of misfortune which I once shared we all know each other, and the suffering are known to the suffering when all else, and the happy most of all, forget them." And then the vision would fade away, the mysterious voice would cease, and the sound of the shaken orange-blossoms, lightly stirnng in the evening breeze, alone would fill the room with odorous music — and what then? "Then," thinks Dives, ** my brethren will repent. They will have had terrific proof of the reality of that spirit-world about which they and I were alike incredulous, or, at least, never thought. They will rush forth to find the brethren of Lazarus, and will spend their wealth upon the poor and needy. They will open their doors to the dishoased and disinherited, and say : * Come, for all things are now ready.' The spirit of Lazarus will haunt them, and be a wholesome terror, not to be shaken off ; and when at last the hour comes, they will die as just men and perfect, and will pass to the Paradise which I have forfeited." Will they ? Will all this happen ? Will the single visit of a messenger from Hades accomplish so great a reformation ? Cold and clear, the voice of Abraham replies : '' If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither 'will they he persuaded though one rose from the dead.'' That is the reply of Abraham , and the more we li I r ■■■Iii.1 70 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL consider it the more clearly sliall we see that he was right. Dives deceives himself as to the ^effect of such a supernatural visitation, and if we consider what average human nature is like, we shall at once see how and why he is deceived. For, to begin with, one of the strongest and most general im- pulses of human nature is incredulity about truth, especially when that truth is foreign to men's common thought, and at variance with their common experience. Who believes the revelations of science when they are first stated ? No one ; or at most " a certain acute and honourable minority " ; and it is only by incessant reiteration that they penetrate the average intelligence, and at last find general acceptance. Who believes, under similar conditions, the revelations of medicine, of chemistry, of mechanics, of sociology, of discovery? It is the common testimony of history that it takes generations for a new idea to penetrate the popular mind, and that which we all believe to-day has been universally scoffed at in a yesterday not very far removed. And if this be true of ideas, of state- ments w'hich may be measured by logic, and which appeal to reason, how much truer must it needs be of supernatural revelations ? How many people believe in ghosts? How many people can be got to believe the best authenticated ghost story, and for how long? How many persons would believe in ghosts even though they saw one ? How many, and among them the keenest observers, would shrug the sarcastic shoulder, and say cynically with AS A AfEANS O/' CONVERSIOX. 71 Coleridfje, that they " had seen too many ghosts to believe in them!" No ; there is another conclusion to the vision of Dives, and a truer one. It is thus that the story should be finished. Presently the voice of Lazarus ceases, the odorous music of the shaken orange- blossoms is again audible in the room, and the shock of terror and surprise dies away, and the five ])rethren begin to say : " 'Tis a strange thing : is it true ? " And the more they think of it, the more certain they become that it is not true. Is it likely that a son of Abraham, a Pharisee, a rich man, a magnate in the city, is in torment, while Lazarus, a nameless beggar, is in Paradise ? Is it likely that Dives would send such a messenger even if he had such a message to communicate ? Ghosts ! What are ghosts ? Who would divide his property with the poor at the bidding of a ghost ? It is a trick that some one has played upon them ; a cunning and well-acted trick got up in the interests of beggardom ; a socialistic ruse of the proletariat to extort money from their masters ; a clever trick, no doubt, but they can see through it, and he would be a fool who could not. So they pass from terror to suspicion, from suspicion to incredulity and anger, and when a night's rest has lulled the brain, and they have once more seen the honest daylight, they can even laugh at the whole thing, and the next night they will feast again in the same room, in the same way, with scarce a thought of Dives, and no thought at all of Lazarus. That is the true sequel of the vision : \ ( ! y , 1; ir , r- .i frighten us out of vice by visions of hell. Heaven and hell are not the alternate sweetmeat and rod of an incapable celestial schoolmaster. In the normal conditions of our life there is enough to teach us how God would have us live, and there are ministries more than enougb io enable us so to live, if we will use them. We have truth enough and light onough to live by already, and a visible ministry of angels could tell us nothing that is not already told us by human lips, by the records of history, by the promptings of natural affection, by r'v.; conscience, and by the Spirit of God, who reveals the things of God severally to every man as He will. If you will not be honest where you are and witli the knowledge yon have, no ministry of angels could teach you honesty. If you cannot find God in the ordinary services of the church, no risen Lazarus would convert you. If in the normal con- ditions of human life, which have been sufhcient to foster the heroism, the unselfishness, the constancy of long generations of saints, and philanthropists, and martyrs, you cannot be a good man, under no abnormal conditions would you ever be a better man than you are. If you hear not IMoses and the prophets, neither will you be persuaded though one rose from the dead. Look yet ogain, and you will see that what ])ives says is in effect an apology, and a feeble one, for the selfish conduct of himself and his brethren. It amounts to this : " If I had known — if they could know." It implies that, through no fault of his, he V . f i . infyg Htwi^WWwi 74 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL Si ^ has made a ruinous mistake in the conduct of life, and now, through no fault of theirs, his brethren are about to repeat the tragic error. And upon whom, then, is the fault to be visited? Who is responsible for the error which has brought Dives to this place of torment? The inference is plain : if the blame does not rest ou Dives, it rests on God. For the w^ords of Dives amount to an accusation of the Almighty, and the accusation is that He leaves His creatures v/ith an insufficient revelation of His will, and then punishes them for unintentional and unblameworthy disobedience. If Dives had known his duty he would have done it ; if his brethren knew their duty they would do it ; if neither knew, then the lack of knowledge is the fault of God, who failed to enlighten them. It is a frightful accusation, but it is as old as the world. Men will blame fate, heredity, environment, their circum- stances, their temptations, and last of all their Maker; but never themselves for the ruin of their lives. The literary biography of the world is full of such apologies. Only the other day I read in the press notices of a certain dead playwright, whose life was notoriously immoral: "For his short- comings he was not resj)onsible ; he was the victim of his organisation." It is a convenient excuse, under wliich every thief, every murderer, every whoremonger may find ample slielter. And if we admit the philosophy of Dives to be correct, tli£n it is quite fair to argue that perhaps in the case of the Diurderer and thief and the whoremonger the reve- AS A MEANS OF CONl'ERSIO.Y. V> it lie lation is not clear enough ; something more starthng and terrific is needed to impress such natures ; if one rose from the dead these, too, might have beheved. And since these are but typical instances of moral callousness, we must needs go further, and claim that a special spectral revelation ought to be inade in each particular case where sin abounds. We are all ready to assure ourselves that some such terrific experience of the spirit-world as this would at once arrest, transform, and convert us. We can all think of cases where, if the dead wife could appear to the profligate husband, or the dead mother to the reckless lad, it might prove a means of Divine redemption. In otlier words, what we begin by demanding as a special infraction of law to meet a specitil case, we should soon be demanding as a iiormal clement in the afi'airs of the soul ; and if commerce with the dead were as normal a condition of life as converse with the living, how long would it be before such ministrations would be dismissed with as contemptuous a pride as the ordinary human ministrations which seek to turn the sinner from the error of his ways ? Where the law and the prophets fail, would the ghost succeed? If every man had his ghostly visitor, what reason is there to suppose that he would, in the long run, treat the messenger from Hades or Paradise with any more respect than he treats his conscience, which is the messenger of God within him ? " You have Moses and the prophets " is the answer to such an accusation, and it is a sufficient answer. 'ii<'iii»iiiiiatii I 7G THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL The law of Moses, in a hundred particuLar and specific instructions, commanded charity, social help, sympatliy with the unfortunate, benevolence toward the suffering ; and the prophets, in a hundred passages which still roll like judgment-thunder on the ears of the world, denounce the man who adds land to land and house to house, and cares little for the poor man's rights and still less for his wrongs and sorrows. That is the answer God makes us, and it may find its application in many forms. If we say to God : " Who is my neighbour ? " the reply is, " The human heart will instruct you, for the revelation of love, and the duty of love, is made to every man, nor can any one misunderstand the revelation who desires to profit by it." If we complain of the intellectual difficulties of Chris- tianity, God's reply is that at least the revelation of duty is made to every man, and he who does his duty as far as he knows it, honestly, fully, sincerely, is a worker of righteousness, and is accepted of God. If we complain that darkness rests over vast regions of the world of thought, and that i;i that darkness we are bewildered and perplexed, God replies that some portion of the truth, Uj least, is revealed to every man, and Christ says that all who are " of the truth," honest truth-lovers and truth- seekers, will hear His voice. The revelation of love, of duty, and of truth is made in some form to every man ; these are the law and the prophets which, if we obey, will make for our salvation. We do know, and nothing but ouu own wilful and wicked AS A AlEAAS OF CONFERS/ON. I ( error can prevent our knowing, the essentials of right conduct and wrong, the things wliich make for our peace or our eternal sorrow and condemnation. We do know that we ought to he kind and loving and charitable that it is our simple duty to he truthful and sincere ; and that is the law and the proj)liets written on the fleshy tablets of every man's heart. We may know much more than this, hut the question is not how much we know, but how much of our knowledge we put into practice. We may believe in a hundred doctrines and dogmas ; we may accept the Death of Christ, the Resurrection of the Body, the Judgment of the Soul, literally and fully ; but unless we practise what we know of love, of duty, and of truth, we shall be in just the same position as Dives, who as a Pharisee accepted all the law and the prophets, and yet lived in such a spiiit as to merit the place of torment. The morality of conduct is that without Avhich no soul shall see God, and there is no possible form of religion or redemp- tion which can rescue a man from the hell which his own daily conduct is preparing for him. Do not deceive yourselves. However much the free grace of God may do for us, it does not permit us to escape the morality of conduct, and the beatitudes of Jesus are not uttered in a single instance on the man who believes something, but always upon the man wlio is something. This saying of Christ's may be said, then, to declare the minimum of what a religious man must be. But if it be the minimum, it is the irreducible m-mm 78 7'/-/E FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL \ I minimum. To possess all the virtues which Dives so conspicuously lacked, to be just and good and charitable, is the minimum of religion. Without these virtues you cannot even understand religion ; you will be as blind and callous as Dives was, who had known the law and the prophets all his life, and yet had never perceived that they had any actual bearing on his daily conduct. The inference which Christ permits us to draw from His words is that if Dives had acted differently toward Lazarus he might have been saved ; and it is, therefore, fair to argue that the just and good man, whoever he ma,y be, will not fail to be accepted by that God who daily scrutinises the conduct of men, and is Himself good and just. But one thing, at least, is certain, that if we are not good and just we shall not be saved ; nor, if we are unsympathetic and selfish as Dives, are w^e saved, though we may say so a thou- sand times with glib insistance, and make the church ring with the emphasis of our so-called " Christian testimony." And once more : if we are not saved, it will not be because of an insuflicient revelation. The demand for a revelation of God's will which shall be fresher, clearer, more personal and supernatural, is a mere subterfuge by which we conceal our contempt for the revelation which is already given. If at this moment in our midst one rose from the dead, and said, " All that this man has spoken is solemnly, tragically, eternally true," I should not expect a single conversion which would be worth anything AS A MJwLXS OF CONVFRSIGN. ro a lug as the result of that attestation. If now Lazarus and Dives were actually revealed to us, the one carried like a tired child in Abraham's bosom, the other hke one of Dante's figures lifting his charred hands out of the unquencliable ilame, I should not expect any one to believe in Christianity to-morrow morning who does not believe in it at this moment. And why ? Because the supernatural has always failed to convert men. Like the friends of Hamlet, men are always ready, when the dreadful vision fades, to question its reality, and explain away its signifi- cance. Pharaoh looked upon the sup(3rnatural in the most appalling forms of death, and pestilence, and terror, yet he hardened his heart more and more. There was a Lazarus who was raised from the dead, yst even after that the Jews sought to kill him. All the miracles of Jesus could iiot save Him from the cross: indeed, they did but whet the cruel anger of h s enemies. Even His r(i.iurrection wrought no change of view among those who had crucified Him. He rose from the dead, and they were not persuaded. No ; it is not more proof we want, but more honesty in practising the truth we already know. It is not the intellectual difficul- ties of Christianity which keep men from Christ ; more frequently it is insincerity and secret sin, and the intellectual difficulties of Christianity are simply thrust forward as an excuse for something wrong in the conduct which they are eager to conceal. You may be imperfectly enlightened, but you can live up to the light you have ; you may I \y ml 80 77//; FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL. be uncertain about theological dogmas, but you can practise the practical virtues you are sure of; for if you hear not Moses and the prophets, neither would you 1)6 persuaded though one rose from the dead. . ou )f; ler he ■I Then said Thomas, vUch is called nn. 7 ill if e '' i Li fnll i V. HEBOIG DOUBT. Jesus is about to do His duty, and the only one of His disciples who is willinf^ to stand by Him is the man who has earned the title of the doubter. As knowledge increases and civilisation becomes more complex, those of the doubtful mind will become more numerous, and the need for dealing witli them wisely will become the urgent duty of the Church. What can the Church say to the doubter ? There is only one clear and immediate counsel that can be given : Do ivhat you can with your doubts, hut do your duty. The case of Thomas called Didymus affords us an excellent object-lesson of all that is conveyed by such counsel, and is, therefore, eminently worth our study. In the incident which is thus related by St. John we have another instance of Christ's own consecra- tion to duty. His sublime sense of destiny, and His consequent fearlessness and absolute serenity. We are apt to smile at men who talk about the star of their destin} . and who have faith in themselves and their mission : but why? Simply because our own V .# \^ IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-S) ^^^^V' :/. <" 1.0 I.I £ lit 1^ ts 110 L25 i 1.4 Will 1.6 ^. y y Hiotographic Sciences Corporation ■1^ ^\ iV \ :\ ^ /> <«> v^\ 33 WEST MAIN STt'.f ' WfBSTEX.N.Y. 14580 (716) 873-4503 «>"^' ^ ''k^ f/. ^. t % ^ ^^> f?!'^ .^ ^^ 1 : u ' . I I 84 HEROIC DOUBT. lives are so desultory and devoid of mission. For^ however often such words may have been found on unworthy lips, nothing can impeach the fact that the great conquerors in the world's battle have always been men who wero possessed with the sense of destiny. Napoleon, when he nourishes his ambition in obscurity with the sense that he has a great part to play ; Disraeli, when he tells a hostile House of Commons that they will hear him one day ; Luther, Knox, Newman, and a score of lesser names in every sphere of action, might afford us examples of the sense of destiny and what it can do for men. In each the ambition is directed to a different object, in each the quality of the ambition differs ; but in each the sense of destiny produces calmness, courage, resolution, a contempt for danger and defeat, a high heroic beating of the pulse, a serenity of temper, a composure of spirit, a definiteness of outlook, which in themselves go far to realise the object contemplated. And we cannot but look on and admire ; we feel that those who could conceive such purposes deserve to be the masters of the world. In a Diviner degree, in an infinitely nobler fashion, this sense of destiny was the strength of Jesus. " Are there not twelve hours in the day ? " He says. *' I work to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected. I must work the works of Him that sent Mp while it is day." These are the breathings of an heroic spirit ; they discover for us the intimacies of the heart of Christ. He is from HEROIC DOUBT. 85 le le le IS the first not merely conscious of His mission, but of its tragic close. He is never deceived by temporary popularity. He knows too well that He brings not peace, but a sword. He has settled matters with Himself, and knows that He will die. But He is equally conscious of two other things : first, that His teaching will live ; secondly, that He will not die till His mission is complete. Before the inward force of this faith and resolution all mean obstacles vanish, and He moves through the world as one •who has already overcome it. It invests Him with a certain indefinable awe. More than once His disciples are amazed and afraid, for a certain unearthly dignity clothes Him, a radiance of inex- pressible majesty streams from Him. And through- out all the troubled close of life His resolution stands out in clear contrast to their timidity, vacillation, and lack of vision. It does so in this instance. He is returning to Judea, and all they can think of is the peril He incurs. Their love betrays their duty, as love so often does. They would fain keep Him from the grave of Lazarus, if they can thereby shelter Him from harm. One only of the disciples shows a nobler temper. He has no clearer concep- tions than the others of the ultimate meanings of Christ's mission, but he can recognise the heroism of Jesus and can share it. He knows, at least, that his place is his Master's side, whatever happens, and with despairing courage he cries : ** Let us also go, that we may die with Him." Now, we are apt to think of Thomas by a single I 86 HEROIC DOUBT. isolated incident, and we do not see the unity of his character. By one of those strange miscarriages of justice which the shghtest care might have pre- vented, Thomas is usually pictured to us as a hard and unemotional man — the man of intellect, as opposed to the man of feeling. It is akin to the error which speaks of Gallio as a cynic, which is the very thing that he was not. That the spirit of Thomas was a questioning spirit is clear, but that it was hard and unemotional is the very reverse of the truth, as any one might know who thrills to that heart-breaking cry of his in the presence of the "wronged and risen Lord." If any man loved Christ with a passionate love it was Thomas. "What more can a man do than be ready to die with Christ? Has not Christ Himself said that to lay down one's life for a friend is the consummation and glory of all sacrifice? It is not from the purely sceptical character that such outbursts of enthu- siastic devotion come. And it is this fact that makes it worth our while to investigate the charac- ter of Thomas. It is not a simple character like Peter's, and for that reason Thomas has been misjudged. Men have not taken the trouble to understand him, because they usually prefer some hasty generalisation to the close analysis of a com- plicated character. But the truth is that most characters are complicated. We are none of us altogether sheep or goats. We have no right to anticipate the last assize in our judgments of men> and the last judgment, be sure of it, will not ignore i HEROIC DOUBT. 87 those complications of character in which qualities and the defects of qualities are inseparably inter- twined. We ma} safely say that no man's character is only black or white ; there are a hundred grada- tions of colour, which are v^'sible to God if not to us, and the justice of God vvill take cognizance of these. The first thing which we discern in Thomas is the union of intellect and emotion, the keenest intellect with the quickest emotion. He is a man who has intellectual vision; he cannot make his judgment blind, and dare not if he could. It is to Thomas that Christ addresses the great words, " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," and perliaps Christ meant in doing so to recognise the intellectual integrity of Thomas. He is one who can see the truth, who loves the truth, who will before all things be loyal to it. For him to love the truth is life, and the way of truth is the one way he will tread. Can we say that of ourselves ? Of how many can it be said ? How few are those who keep tLair intellectual honesty wholly unimpaired ! How great is the temptation to permit a little sell- delusion, a little sacrifice of exactness, a little touch of sophism in our view of things, a little intellectual compromise in our way of putting tuings. Who does not find that a little accommodation of prin- ciple, a little judicious reticence, a little dehcate casuistry are excellent things to smooth away the rough edges of life ; but that plain truth is a very difficult coin to get changed in this world's market ? 88 HEROIC DOUBT. It We know these things, but we know also that in perfect loyalty to truth alone is salvation, self-respect, honour. We all have sufficient moral vision to know where truth lies. There is not a man amongst us who can honestly say he wants more light. What we want is more fidelity to the light we have. We have light enough to walk with- out stumbling ; if we stumble, it is because we have chosen darkness rather than light. We never really need any one to tell us what our duty is ; we know it without telling. We never need to be introduced to the truth ; the truth has already introduced itself to us. But we do need men to enforce duty, and declare and impress truth upon us, simply because there are so few of us honest enough to accept truth without scruple when we know it to be truth. And because Thomas is a sincere man he has the clearest view of truth. He sees with bitter distinctness what the life of Christ means, in its earthly aspects. He needs no one to tell him that Christ means not peace, but a sword. He is under no pleasant delu- sion as to the results of Christ's interference in the lives of men. He sees clearly — He will die ; he feels deeply — let us also die with Him. And 1 say again that it is a most false and imper- fect generalisation of character which ignores this union of intellect and emotion in men. We speak too often as if the servant of truth could never be the servant of love, as if the two were wholly separate and incapable of union. The typical man of emotion we picture to ourselves is a man who y n intellectually cannot see an inch beyond his nose. Generations of perverted emotionalism in religion have impressed it on the minds of men that the rudest form of feeling is superior to the noblest form of thought. It is the same with our common judg- ments of people in daily life. We assume that the man of culture must needs be cold, that the cultured woman cannot be lovable. We might be supposed to believe that the training of the mind meant the choking of the fountains of emotion, and that the more a man knew the less was he capable of love. It is this error in relation to women that Olive Schreiner so finely rebukes in her great romance, when she says : " Do they see nothing, understand nothing ? It is Tant'Sannie (the gross unthinking Boer woman) who buries husbands one after another, and folds her hands resignedly, and says, ' The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away ' — and she looks for another. It is the hard- headed, deep thinker who, when the wife who has thought and worked with hiui goes, can find no rest, and lingers near her till he finds rest beside her. A great soul draws and is drawn by a more fierce intensity than any small one. By every inch we grow in intellectual height our love strikes its roots deeper, and spreads out its arms wider." That I take to be the exact truth, and nobly put. There never was a more foolish error than to suppose that the finest forms of emotion go with the poorest quality of intellect. It is Thomas, whom we call the Doubter, who is overcome with emotion at the n 90 HEROIC DOUBT. if ^ thought of the pjfil of Christ, and says : " Let us also go, that we may die with Him." "When we have, then, to deal with men of keen intelligence do not let us assume that they are sterile in emotion. Do not let us suppose that the questioning mind is the sign of the callous heart. Men have a right to ask questions, and to expect us to answer them. We have no right to ignore the demands of the intellect in religion. If we do, we ourselves justify the contemptuous criticism which regards Christianity as a thing fitted only for fools and fanatics, for the imbecile and the narrow-browed, for the intellectually halt, and lame, and maimed of the human race. To ridicule the doubter, to jibe at his difficulties, to rave with illogical anger at "modern thought," is not merely to prove our- selves fools and worse, but is to betray the cause of Christ. Nothing is more certain than that Christ set an example entirely opposite. How patiently He reasoned with His disciples ! How He tried to make things clear to them ! With what intellectual sympathy does He talk with Nicodemus, and the rich ruler, and the woman by the well of Sychar \ In what a spirit of tenderness does He treat the man who could only say, " I believe : help Thou my unbelief ! " There is no touch of intellectual arro- gance in Christ, no attempt to stifle the honest questionings of men, no desire to dethrone the reason for the sake of the emotions. He was the way, the Truth, and the Life : not one, but each and all. He was the way — the perfect example of HEROIC DOUBT. 91 character and conduct ; the Life, the mysterious source of life in others, communicated in ways which the intellect cannot define ; but He was also the Truth, the lover of truth, the witness of truth, the martyr of truth ; and therefore whensoever He found a love of truth in others He respected it, and preferred the sincerity of honest doubt to the shifting emotionahsm which cries " Lord ! Lord ! " and kept not His words. He teaches us that the claims of the heart and intellect are not rival, but equal claims. To neither must be yielded too much. It is not by blind and unintelligent emotionalism we best serve God, and still less by mere intellectual acquiescence. To the heart we say, " I must not only feel, I must know " ; to the intellect the reply of the heart, heard amid all the sorrowful bewilderments of life, is> Ay, tho' thou then should'st strike him from his glory. Blind and tormented, maddened and alone; Even on the cross would he maintain his story, Yes, and in hell would whisper, / have knoivn. And the will of God is neither the salvation of heart nor mind alone as separate factors, but that the whole soul and spirit and body be consecrated unto Him, which is our reasonable service. We find again in Thomas the union of faith and doubt, the one expressing the thought of the hearty the other of the mind. He doubts the wisdom of Christ's decision to go into Judea, and in this doubt all the disciples share. But he has the faith that works by love, and he has the love which casts out fear, and makes him ready to die with Christ. The ft V2 HEROIC DOUBT. ' Si, I! I t V doubt of Thomas is the despondence of a great spirit. It breathes hke a gentle sigh through that other saying of his : " Lord, we know not whither Thou goest, and hov/ can we know the way?" Ho was, perhaps, one of those men through whose natures a vein of tender melancholy runs. Such men are like delicate musical instruments, the brilliance of whose tone suffers by the slightest change of temperature ; they often suffer by the physical oppression of the robust, who little know how their unsympathetic brusqueness sets sensitive nerves jarring, and how their rough touch sets old bruises aching ; their life moves in an orbit where transitions are rapid and frequent ; they have their bright moments and their dark ; they are of unequal temperament ; - receive all impressions acutely because they acutely sensitive ; their joy is ecstacy, their suffering is agony, their disheartenment is despair. Think of such men as Dr. John Brown, the author of Hah and His Friends, in whom humour and melancholy lay so close together ; of Charles Lamb, whose laughter is the foil to such unutterable despair ; of Coleridge with his gleams of celestial light breaking out of bitter darkness ; of Johnson, with his sturdy faith ever struggling through the inertiae and gloom of hypochondriac fancies ; of Cowper, who can write with such delicate humour, such freshness of touch, such inspired faith and joy, and yet can die saying, " I feel unutterable despair." Think even of a man of action, and heroic action, like Abraham Lincoln, whose laughter was the relief HEROIC Douirr. 93 of hereditary broodinf^ melancholy, and was, as he said, " the vent," which saved him from a frenzied brain or broken heart. Such men may furnish us with a hint of what Thomas called DIdymus mLy have been. I think that his, too, was a tender, brooding, intensely sensitive nature. He dwelt in the exceeding brightness or the blackness of dark- ness. His quick intelligence perceived things with an infinite clearness of vision, and they were things which often he would rather not have seen. He had none of the blindness of Peter to the shadow of coming events. He never debated as John did who should be the first in the kingdom. He followed Christ because he could not help it ; but he knew it was to judgment and death. He doubted not because he would, but because he must ; and it was out of that cloud of unutterable misgiving that he sent forth this heroic cry, " Let us also go, that we may die with Him." Surely he has studied history with small efifect who has not noticed this frequent despondency of great spirits. Everywhere the spectacle meets us, till we are almost justified in concluding that the greater and deeper the nature the more certain is it to know its fits of despondence. Does not Isaiah cry, " I have laboured in vain," and Elijah, " Lord, take away my life, I am not better than my fathers," and St. Paul contemplate the awful possibility that he himself may become a castaway ? Who is not familiar with the saying of Marcus Aurelius, " I shall die, and people will say, We are glad to get rid I d4 HEROIC DOUBT. of this schoolmaster " ; and of Roger Bacon, " Men are not worth the trouble I have taken over them " ? Does not St. Bernard say, "I have done almost nothing," and does not Calvin confess in the bitter- ness of his heart, " All I have done has been worth nothing. The wicked will welcome this word, but I say again, all I have done has been worth nothing, and that I am a miserable creature"? Even so robust and strong a nature as Luther's has its hours of despair, when the reluctant confession is made, ** We must take men as we find them ; we cannot change their nature." Surely such iniL-tinces as these should teach us to be sympathetic with the doubtful. It is not your blunt-natured, thick-witted man, who never has a doubt, nor a scruple of misgiving, nor even a momentary questioning of his own infallibility, who is the highest type of believer, or the one most to be admired. The man who tells me, '* I never had a doubt in my life. Sir," rather reveals a deficiency in his own nature than rebukes one in mine. There are moments, no doubt, when we envy his serene assurance, but a little reflection will soon teach us that he is not to be envied. The nobler soul is that which has been made perfect through suffering ; which has come up out of great tribulation undismayed ; which has seen the worst but still believed in the best, has touched the deep and yet struggled toward the starry height ; the fugitive who has wrestled with the angel in the night and prevailed ; the doubting disciple who from the thick of mortal anguish can cry with the despair of HEROIC Douirr. 95 heroism, "Let us also go that we may die with Him." In such there is wrought out a new nature, and to such there is given a new name ; for they have wrestled with God and have prevailed. Think of this, and measure all that it means, and you will see that the doubt of some men is a truer faith than the so-called faith of others. Then* lives luoiv fjiitli in honest doubt, Believe uie, than in half your creeds. Do not despair, then, ye who doubt. Do not despair when men of different and denser nature utter hard w )ids about you, and treat your doubt as thouph it were a wilful and the worst of sins. Christ never said that. Christ could not have said that. A man's real creed is after all only that which he has won for himself by personal struggle, and no other creed is genuine and vital. I can afford a large wardrobe if I do not pa}' for it, and it is easy enough to have an ample creed, if you have accepted if: without inquiry and on the assurance of others. But I prefer a shorter creed, if every article of it has been a battlefield where I have overcome, and a Bethel where God has met and blessed me. Examine your creeds and realise how little of them you do really believe in your heart of hearts. For in such a self- examination the great rule of Savonarola reigns, and no other : " a man only believes really that which he practices." You believe in Jesus Christ ; do you practise His teaching ? Do you live His life ? Are you of His mind, and temper, and spirit? You 96 HEROIC DOUBT. believe in a final judgment ; do you conduct your business with the ever-present sense that God will one day examine your ledgers, and demand account of you for the way in which every shilling you possess has been acquired and spent ? You believe in immortality ; are you living daily as an immortal creature should, as one who is indeed the heir of God, and the joint-heir with Jesus Christ? You believe in a heaven of the spirit ; are you so shaping your character that heaven may be no surprise to you, but the exact environment for which the spirit of your earthly life has fitted you ? It is by such tests alone that all creeds must be tried. Ft is by the result of such tests that their worth or worth- lessness must be ascertained. And, therefore, I say that a short creed which is real is better than a long creed which has no root in the heart or life ; that an honest doubt is often ** faith in the making ; " that doubt nobly searched and suffered is better than faith lightly held and insincerely paraded ; that to say " I believe, help thou my unbelief," is a nobler attitude of mind by far, than to scy, " Lord ! Lord ! " and do not the words which Christ says. We have intellect and emotion, doubt and faith, in Thomas ; but there is one other combination also — despair and heroism, the doubting mind but the resolved and dutiful soul. He doubts the wisdom of Jesus, but he is not afraid to die with Him. A hundred wild thoughts go whirling through his heart, but there is one supreme thought which abides — his place is at the side of Christ, whatever HEROIC DOUBT. 97 ^er happens. If nothing else is clear, the duty of friendship is clear. Let it be granted that Christ is wilful, foolhardy, reckless in His courage ; that He is rushing upon certain death ; that He is tempting His enemies to violence ; that it would be far better for the cause and the kingdom if He would obliterate Himself for awhile, if He would be silent, if He would retire into a desert place till this strife of tongues is overpast : all this Thomas honestly thinks and believes ; but there is one thing that remains clear, undimmed, absolutely imperative, a star of guidance whioh no darkness can obscure — Christ is the Ivxasttr still, Thomas is the disciple, and with Christ he must stand or fall. He has not eaten the bread of Christ for nothing ; ' he has not dwelt so long in that most tender intimacy to be false now ; he has not witnessed the superb courage of his Lord from day to day to be traitorous and cowardly now. Here is a piece of duty, clear, distinct, indisputable. It is not easy to die for a cause in which you believe ; Thomas is prepared to die for a cause which to him is doubtful. It is the heroism of the soldier who goes with steady pulse upon the forlorn hope, knowing well «jat it is forlorn, and that he will never return. Why does he do it? Because he is a soldier, and has a captain, and has learned to obey. It is the higher courage, not the thoughtless daring of iron nerves and animal vigour, but the still, resolved courage of an intensely-sensitive soul, conscious of shrinking, of fear, of questioning, but resolved to do right 7 98 HEROIC DOUBT. though the heavens fall. You will have heard the story which Napier relates of a young officer riding down into his first hattle, with pale face and trembling hand, when a companion, looking at him, said, " Why, man, you're pale ; you're afraid ! " " I know I am," he quietly rejoined ; " and if you were half as much afraid as I am you would run away." That was courage, the higher courage ; the flesh failing for fear, every nerve trembling, loosened, unstrung, but the soul resolved and calm, ordering the body to its duty. And that was the spirit of Thomas : he can at least die with Christ. Shall Jesus bear the Cross alone And all the world go free ? No ; there's a Cross for every one And there's a Cross for me. That is the meaning of Thomas's speech, and the very fact that he thinks that the peril and the Cross should be avoided invests with a sublimer glory his sacrifice of self in facing them. Few more heroic sayings have ever been recorded m history than this : *' Let us also go that we may die with Him ! " We can all do what Thomas did : we can do our duty. Our doubts and difficulties are not the same as those of Thomas, but they admit of the same solution. He thought Christ mistaken, but he followed Him ; he followed with an agnostic mind but a loving heart. He could not read the secret of Jesus, nor, in another sense, can we ; yet we also can follow Jesus and love Him, and die for Him. For whosoever approaches Jesus Christ is met by I I HEROIC DOUBT 9» four great secrets of Christianity, four great mysteries of the faith : the incarnation, the resur- rection, the atonement, and the promise of immor- tality and redemption through the death of Christ. We are as unable to grasp these mysteries as I'homas was the need for the Cross in the life of Christ ; but that is no reason why we should not follow Him as Thomas did. Who does reallv under- stand theso mysteries ? Is there any theologian who has actually explained either, or made them possible to the human intellect ? Who can compass the idea of God born of a woman, of a crucified One rising on the third day in quickened and liberated life, of a redemption through His death, of personal immortality assured to us through mere faith in Him? Intellectually these ideas are impossible, because we have no symbols of thought by which to express them, no data of knowledge by which to compare them. The keener is the intellect which applies itself to the task the more certain is it of failure, because the more numerous will be the dif- ficulties which it will discern. And that is precisely where men make so fatal a mistake ; they try to force themselves into faith by a process of reason, to appre- hend intellectually that which can only be spiritually discerned. And that is where religious teachers blunder also : they make the intellectual reception of these mysteries the condition of the Christian life, and in doing so they ask more than man can give, more than God demands, alid make intellectual arrogance the stepping-stone to Christian faith. i 100 HEROIC DOUBT. It is an attitude for which no justification is possible. I may candidly own that with my intellect I cannot comprehend the incarnation or the resurrection, the atonement or immortality. I can only say — or, rather, my intellect says with complete reverence, with the humility of a true agnosticism — " I do not know." But it does not therefore follow that I am not a Christian, that I do not believe in Christ, that I am not at this moment conscious of His saving power and blessed presence. I may be alive without knowing anything of physiology ; my heart may beat though I cannot tell how it beats, and have never heard of the circulation of the blood. I may be conscious without understanding the philosophy of consciousness ; I may think without knowing how thought is generated ; I may be a good citizen with but small knowledge of my country's law ; and a good soldier with small understanding of Imperial politics. And so I may be a good Christian, though I can prove neither to my own nor any other person's satisfaction the credibility of the incarnation, the resurrection, or the atonement. It is not stubborn- ness of intellect, but humility, that says in such a case, " I do not know." It is not pride, but honesty, that cries at the feet of Christ, ** I believe ; help Thou my unbelief." I am content to eat of the fruit of life, though I know not how it grew ; to drink of the water of life, though I know not by what springs it came ; to open my heart to Christ, though I know not by what mysterious process He fills my bei. .4. The working knowledge that we HEROIC DOUBT, 101 need for the Christian Hfe is relatively small. Chris- tianity is not a thing of high philosophies and subtle inferences ; it moves along the plane of common life ; it proves itself by the silent revelation of its power to save within the heart. It asks of us nothing more than to do our duty in the sight of God, to let our hearts go out in love toward God and man, to recognise in Jesus Christ the type of all perfection, to surrender ourselves to Him and seek to be like Him by simple faith and daily practice, and thus to rest in Him for redemption. You can begin to be a Christian anywhere, for the elements of Christianity are so simple that none is debarred from the attempt. To do justly and walk humbly with your God, to fear Him and to work righteousness, to live up to the highest light that He reveals to you, to be ready to be sacrificed with Christ as Thomas was, is to be accepted in Him, is to be saved, is to be a partaker of eternal lif " Do you remember that most touching passage in which George Eliot describes the great temptation of Maggie Tulliver? " Many things are difficult and dark to me," says Maggie, "but T can see one thing quite clearly: that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sac^i^cing others. Love is natural ; but surely pity, and faithfulness, and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffer- ing I had caused. Faithfulness and constancy mean something else beside doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean renouncing i ii l\ I t 'I 102 HEROIC DOUBT. whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us ; whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us." So she triumphed. Many things may be dark and difficult to us, and so alone shall we triumph. Here, then, lies the great lesson of such a subject as this. No amount of doubt can remove from us the obligation of duty. A man's first duty is to do right, and properly considered that is his only duty. Do that simply and sincerely, and half the problems which perplex and sting you will recede into the background and be solved of themselves. We may not be sure of many things, but of this we are always sure : that to do right is always the safe course, the right course, the only wise course. We may walk in clouds and darkness intellectually, but here at least is solid ground. It's wiser being good than bad, It's safer being meek than fierce, It's fitter being sane than mad. My own hope is, a sun will piei'ce The thickest cloud earth ever stretched. That after Last returns the First, Tho' a wide compass first be fetched. That what began best, can't end worst. Nor what God blest once prove accurst. There is but one right thing in all the world for any man ; do that, for the way of victory is here alone. When you are perplexed by casuistries of conduct ; when you are tempted to do things which offer great gains at the price of what seems an in- finitesimal loss of self-respect ; when you are told HEROIC DOUBT. 103 in " everybody does it," as though that made it right ; " nobody will blame you for it," as if that altered its essential nature, then there is but one way of con- quering the Gordian knot ; it is to ask one swift, searching, simple question, Is it right? Is it just? Is it Christlike ? and to abide by the result. Most of our difficulties of conduct disappear instan- taneously on the asking of that question. It is like the shrill cry of the bird of dawn before which ghosts and spectres of the night vanish ; it is the nerald of the light. There is no one of us who can- not apply that talisman, no one who cannot work out his deliverance by its means. Listen, my soul, to that clear ringing voice of Duty ; for — He that ever following her commands, On with toil of heart and knees and hands, Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won His path upward and prevailed, Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled Are close upon the shining table-lands To which our God Himself is moon and sun. To the man who tells me that he does not believe in creeds I reply then, All the more obligation is laid upon you to show the world how much better you can live without creeds than the bulk of men with them. To the man who tells me that he is in doubt as to Christ's teaching or the Church's presentation of that teaching, I reply. You can at least discern the purity, the love, the mind and temper of Jesus, and you can copy them. It is yours to acknowledge Him in your daily life as the Master of your thoughts, the inspiration of your conduct, the type "i h 104 HEROIC DOUBT. of all perfection. You may not speak with tongues, nor know all mysteries ; but you may have that pas- sionate, heroic love which cries, " Let us also go, that we may die with Him " ; and to have that is to be a Christian, for the Christianity of noble conduct is the only Christianity which is worthy of that sacred Name. ues, pas- go, s to luct ihat In my Father's house arc many mansions : if it were not so, I uould nave told you. — St. John xiv. 2. The difficulty of so many intellectual men in these days is to know where the intellectual questions end, and the purely religious ones can he saxd to begin. ... The religions life is hased upm authority: the intellectual life is based upon personal investigation. Philip U. Hamerton. The Intellectual Life. f '■ 1 VI. THE CANDOUR OF CHEIST, One of our best writers, in an excellent monograph on Wordsworth, has quoted certain lines, in which the poet speaks of the advance of age : Age steals to his allotted work Contented and serene, "With heart as calm as lakes that sleep In frosty moonlight glistening, Along a channel smooth and deep To their own far-off nuirmurs listening. And in commenting on them he asks, " What touch has given to these lines their impress of an unfathom- able peace? For there speaks from them a tran- quility which seems to overcome our souls ; which makes us feel, in the midst of toil and passion, we are disquieting ourselves in vain ; that we are travel- ling to a region where these things shall not be ; that so shall inordinate fear leave us, and inordinate love shvll die." It is thus that the spirit of Words- worth impresses all his readers; it is a spirit of unfathomable peace. No one has better described the effect he produces than Matthew Arnold, when 108 THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. I! If I i he speaks of "Wordsworth's healinj:; power." Why is this? What is the secret? The secret is that Wordsworth speaks to a vexed and troubled world as one who has overcome tlie world. He is one who cared little for its praise, and nothing for its blame ; he was strong enough to turn from its crowding ambitions without regret, and humble enough to find in simple sights and sounds suiBcient joy ; and it is this moral fact which gives his poetry such pene- trating sweetness, such pervasive calm. In like manner we may ask what is the secret of that " unfathomable peace, of that tranquility which overcomes our souls," which we discover in this fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel? The secret is that Christ also has overcome, but with a victory beyond our computation. He has attained a peace, but so profound and perfect that it lies wholly outside our analysis. It is the peace of God which passeth understanding ; that is, we cannot at all realise what it means and is by our understand- ing. We can feel it, but we cannot explain it. " It lies round you like an atmosphere. It dwells in you like a fragrance. It goes from you like a subtle elixir vitae." It overwhelms the soul ; it is the very peace of God. Some of the elements of this perfect peace it is possible for us to distinguish, however. The most casual student cannot but perceive that this calm of Christ springs from conquest of self and heroic allegiance to duty. We are sure «hat these are elements in the serenity of Christ, because we know THE CAXDOLh' O/- C//A'IST. \m from all too bitter experience that two-thirds of our common discords and distractions sprinfj from un- subjugated self and neglect of duty. That which men call intellectual doubt is often nothing more than a disease which springs from the unha[)pine88 of self and scorn of simple duty. How often is the doubter an egoist, and, because an egoist, one who shrinks from the homely duties of a common humanity with disdain ! How true is it that when all the other devils are whipped out of the soul, the one little capering devil of vanity remains, and proves more troublesome than all the rest put together ! The only real cure of souls is the extirpa- tion of self; then only is it possible for the peace of God to interpret itself to us. It is in the great stream of service to humanity that the leprosy of egoism is washed away, that the irritation of a miserable vanity is healed, that a new self is developed, tremblingly conscious not of personal pa:ns, but of human sorrows, and so the flesh becomes firm and sound again like the flesh of a little child. This is one lesson of the calm of Christ which is clear to all, and appeals to all ; for it is certain that this cloudless serenity can only belong to one who has lost the uneasy sense of self in larger aims and visions ; it is in truth a peace that " the world can neither give nor take away." Yet the fact remains that Christ has overcome. His peace is something that has been won. The obstructions to peace that we feel are obstructions which He too has felt. The difficult and disturbing <;/ ii J 110 THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. questions that we feel, He too felt and overcame. If we cannot preach a Christ who knew the limita- tions and trials of a real humanity, who did actually taste the cup of bitterness which we taste, who was actually, and by no jugglery of words, *' tempted in all points," like as we are, ** yet without sin " — if we cannot preach this Christ, we have no Christ to preach. No other Christ is serviceable to humanity — to the humanity that doubts, struggles, suffers, and aspires, in a thousand daily agonies. We may not be able to explain in the least degree how it was possible for Christ to fathom the tempta- tions of humanity ; whether by the actual pressure of evil upon Him in daily solicitation, or by the vision of it, in supernatural concision and distinct- ness, or through the power of a sympathy so keen and catholic, that He was able to think everybody's thoughts, to feel everybody's feelings, to know by one swift glance into a man's heart what each heart would know of suffering, so that literally the sins of the world were laid upon Him, because He felt the process of each man's sin, without sharing it or being stained by it — all this we may be unable to explain, nor is it necessary that we should explain it. It is enough to know that in some way Christ did know, and suffered all that we endure of temptation, of whatever form ; that He knew it in its essence, if not in its particular form ; and that He vanquished all. And it is this truth which gives such penett'ating emphasis to this brief sentence : ** If it were not so, I would have told you." It bespeaks at once Christ's ^^^- THE C Ay DOUR OF CHRIST. Ill Dvercame. he limita- d actually , who was '* tempted t sin "—if tio Christ 3eable to struggles, J agonies, isfc degree le tempta- l pressure or by the 1 distinct- ly so keen rerybody's ow by one ach heart le sins of e felt the ing it or unable to xplain it. hrist did tnptation, ssence, if lished all. netrating re not so, e Christ's knowledge of our intellectual temptations, and His candour in treating of them ; and it teaches us the duty of candour in relation to the difficulties of faith. Now, let us examine the spirit and temper of these words, and the first thing that strikes us is a quality which is always rare, and rare even in great teachers — open-mindedness. We feel that we do not stand in the presence of a mere doctrinnaire, a dogmatistwith a few narrow axioms which he forces on us at the sword's point, but a great-hearted, sympathetic Teacher, who admits the difficulties of belief, and the reasonableness of those difficulties. Half the revolt against belief rises from no other cause than the intolerance of believeis. Their very certitude irritates us ; their strident accent of infallibility disgusts and repels us ; their glib dogmatism enrages us. They admit no difficulties where, to the reasonable mind, the way is hedged with difficulty; they hold no j)arleying with our questionings, be they never so honest and intelligent. For the doubter, contact with such men can have only one result : confirma- tion in his doubts, and yet further and angrier revolt from accepted platitudes. To such a teacher himself the result is yet more disastrous ; it is narrowness cf vision and constriction of sympathy. For to be open- minded is to have a mind which is a chamber whose windows stand wide to the universe, looking out upon illimitable distances, and receiving impressions from a thousand various sources ; to be the reverse, of this is to be nan'ow-minded, to have a mind which 112 THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. \ is a chamber wherein all the windows but one are jealously shuttered, and closed fast against any vision which we do not wish to receive. The one-roomed life has its counterpart in the one-windowed mind^ lit only by a narrow sunbeam, and therefore imper- fectly lit, and full of inadequacy and confusion. This was not the mind of Christ, nor was this His temper. His mind was like a broad lake receiving myriads of impressions from shifting clouds and changing skies ; not the little basin of water at the bottom of a well, reflecting some isolated fragment of the blue sky and a star or two. He talked with all sorts of men, and in many different ways. He met men half-way in their difficulties by the kindly omniscience of a great sympathy. He divined their thoughts, their lurking doubts, their uncomfortable questionings, and by His sympathy gave them help in uttering them — and conquering them. And now, as he talks to men who see the whole dream of their life vanishing ; who feel as if with His dreaded departure every certainty of the present and future is departing too ; whose uneasy thoughts flutter over grim depths, and find no resting-place of certainty — now He divines these thoughts, and sympathises with them, and does not rebuke them. It is as though he said : I, too, have asked these questions ; in My temptations I also have met this angel of dark- ness, and heard this awful whisper at my ear ; I know how easy it is to ask, in moments when hope is ruined, when purposes are broken, when life, in its alternate futility, monotony, and brevity seems to mock us, " Is there anything beyond ? " — and, behold, what interest have I in deceiving you? " In my Father's house are many mansions : if it were not so, I would have told you." Here, then, you see a willingness to face the darkest things in human destiny, and in this the candour of Christ is manifest. Christ knew well that from the beginning of the ages men have asked, Is there a God ? Is there a beyond ? Is human separa- tion at the grave transient or final? These are questions which are not peculiar to individuals, or to abnormal conditions of feeling ; every one has asked them, and they have been asked from the beginning. A celebrated Frenchman has painted in glowing colours the spectacle of Lake Geneva, with all its fringe of happy homes, its towns and villages, the glittering robe of civilisation which to-day clothes its shores. But then he recollects there was a time when the song of the vintager was not heard, and the time may come again when a profound still- ness may clothe these shores where to-day the life of man runs its restless courses. And what then ? Why, the lake will still be there, and these moun- tains, which we are tempted to call eternal as we travel to our quiet resting-places at their feet, will still lift into the blue sky their glittering x^innacles and soaring domes, untouched by any breath of change or havoc of mortality. 80, says he, there are questions which are the alps of thought, the primeval questions which underlie all thought, all hope, all civilisation — and these are among them. The savage, trembhng , n % 114 THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. ^i -i I at the passajjje of the storm-wind, which seems the breath of God ; the fire-worshipper, bowed before his mountain altar ; the Faust of mediaeval times, seeking the source of Ufe in his laboratory ; or the Hamlet, pouring out the passionate misery of the universal soul in wild misgiving — all these, and not less the men of to-day, ask the old questions : "Is there a God? Is there a beyond?" The cry is repeated in every awakening mind and beside every deathbed. He would be worse than foolish who, calling himself the teacher of others, ignored such questions, or attempted to shelve them with a plausible excuse. Men who are only too bitterly conscious of the futility of life because their highest ideal is being withdrawn from them, who look with fascinated eyes and breaking hearts upon the spectacle of a vanishing Christ, a lost cause, an imminent cross of shame and defeat, may well be asking these questions now. There will come a time when they will ask no more questions, for they will have looked upon the " wronged and risen Lord." But that time is not yet. This is the hour and power of darkness. Let such questionp be asked then. Let the Master himself recall the desert and the devil when this horror of darkness came upon Him in the hour before the angels ministered unto Him. Let Him, in this supreme moment, discover whether these questions are fully and finally answered for Him — for Him on whom the darkness of Calvary is now gather- ing, for Him who will soon cry amid the infinite blackness, " My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?" That is Christ's thought, and He THE C AX DOUR OF CHRIST. 115 answers these questions with a subHme sincerity, a triumphant promptitude, a profound and most impressive conviction — ** In my Father's house are many mansions : if it were not so, I icould have told you. Do you say, These questions are rarely asked, and are asked only by exceptional men and women in excep- tional circumstances ? I do not think so. Sometimes, aswe walk beside the sea,we become suddenly conscious of a solemn momentary hush. The wind has dropped, the tide is full, the hoarse rush of the withdrawing waves is no longer heard, and for a moment or two the ■world seems filled and flooded with a great silence. So there are occasional moments in every life when the roar of the world is stilled, and in the stillness men begin to ask themselves the profound questions for which life has hitherto left them no leisure. If such questions intrude themselves at no other time, they must come when we are face to face with death for the first time, and see that which an hour ago was sentient and loving now become a thing that is inanimate and corrupt. But men do not wait till -death to ask these questions. Listen to this, a cry as ancient as Socrates or Buddha, yet wrung from the soul of a young University student in one of our great cities, and sent me in a letter : — "7/ a God exist, He wraps Himself in darkness; if He exist, He folds Himself in silence. Leaning as it ivere over the edge of being, men strive to pierce the abyss of the unknown; above, below, they straht their sight, but they see nothing ; they listen, but V 116 THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. 1 1 :' i !•! :\ ' nothing strikes their ear ; iveary, dizzy, they stagger' backward, and loith the darkness pressing on their eyeballs, vmrmiir * God.' " So also the eloquent Frenchman, Naville, to whom I have already alluded, cites a letter from a youth, who describes himself walking up and down all night, in the moonlight, reasoning out these thoughts for himself, until at last he feels the strife is over ; he sees his old, glad, simple life all vanishing, and slowly opening up the vision of his new life — sombre, joyless, unpeopled — and he cries, " The agony of that hour was frightful ! " Do not I also know what that agony is, for have I not tasted this cup?' And I do not doubt that in some way or manner beyond our thought Jesus tasted it also. In that long preparation for His work, of which we know absolutely nothing, in those thirty years of solitary growth in a town notorious for its v/ickedness, in that period which for all men is so full of tempta- tion, He must have felt the deadly impact of these thoughts. Is it too presumptuous to picture the youthful Jesus in many a lonely night-walk beneath the moon of Palestine while the village slumbered at His feet, wrestling with these thoughts ? Is there not some reminiscence of a conquered past that breathes in these words ? Did no earthly cloud roll between the soul of Jesus and His Father ; no temptation of earth threaten for an instant that perfect communion, and teach Him what the souls of men can suffer when they seem forsaken of God? Yes; He also has leaned out. THE C AX DOUR OF CHRIST. 117 over the edge of being and murmured " God ! " He has faced the spectres of the mind. He has ex- hausted every subtlety of thought with fearless sin- cerity, and now at the last he can say, " There is a God, for I live in Him ; there is a future, for I have seen it ; there is an infinite order in the universe, for it is my Father's house ; I am in the Father and the Father in me ; if it were not so, I would have told you." Here, then, is a Teacher w^ho, by the common consent of the highest intelligences of the world, is regarded as the divinest, the highest, the purest ; surely for us His word is worth something. For while it is true that we must fight out our own intellectual battles, it is also true that it is the work of great teachers to help us in the fight, and lead us to victory ; or of what use are great teachers ? By every standard we may care to propose — and I speak now to those who would apply the most rigid and remorseless analysis to the story of Jesus — we must acknowledge Christ as likelier to find the solution of these problems than we are ; is it not, then, our wisdom to accept His verdict in humility ? " If it were not so, I would have told you " — may we not rest somewhat on that ? Even if for the moment, in your whirl of troubled thought, you can grant no deity to Jesus, still is not His word worth some trust, has it not some authority ? Can you not at least accept it as the word of a spiritual expert, of One who spoke from a fulness of divine knowledge such as no other has possessed? For -every day, in chemistry, in science, in mechanics, we t ,!\. \ .4 -j 1^. t ) i III *■ ; ■ i 1 1' 1 1 1 ^i. if 118 TN£: CAADOi-R OF CHRIST. have to receive and trust' in verdicts which we have not worked out for ourselves, and we do so simply because we are fully assured that those who utter these verdicts are competent authorities. When Newton speaks to me on physics or Herschel on astronomy, I beheve them ; is it not as reasonable to believe Jesus when He says, "If it were not so, I would have told you "? Who likelier to knowthan He? Who ever pierced deeper into the secrets of Deity than He ? Whose word may be more safely trusted than His ? And you who doubt all things, who disbelieve equally in God and immortality, has it never occurred to you that it would be wise to doubt yourself also, and the wisdom of your own conclusions ? Might you not by pushing this process of doubt a little further succeed in doubting your own doubts away ? Are you quite sure that your own faculties are equal to the solution of these questions ? Does not science itself teach us that there are a thousand things lying beyond our vision, and not dreamed of in our philo- sophy, which are, nevertheless, real and near to us, and are revealed as man's instruments for detecting them become keener and more delicate ? We have had discovered to us rays beyond the solar spectrum which are invisible to us normally : we were ignorant of the ultra-violet rays until a chemical re-agent made them visible. May it not be at least as likely that but a slight addition to our present powers of spiritual vision and understanding might reveal to us, beyond all doubt, so much of the glory of God as we could bear and live, and of the starry worlds that are His THE CAXDOUR OF CHRIST. 11{) mansions? And if any ever had that added vision, if it l)e possible for us to conceive of any creature in the Hkenessofman who has trodden this earth, with the power of looking beyond it, and of piercinp; the mystery of the unseen, who so likely as Josus ? Who likelier to tell us the truth about ourselves, about the future, about God, and whose word can we more im- plicitly trust than His ? And it is the Christ who, by universal consent, did live the divinest life that earth has ever known, the Christ whose realisation of God was so intense that he declared, " I and the Father are one ; whoso hath seen me hath seen the Father also ; " the Christ whom even his antagonists owned to be a teacher sent of God — it is this Christ who says with solemn emphasis, as he enters on the tragic close of life, " In my Father's house are many man- sions : if it were not so, I would have told yon." The fact is, that we must find a centre of authority somewhere if the fabric of religious truth is to be sustained. The private popedom of every man his own revelation is not workable, and is even ridicu- lously inadequate to the necessity. We must learn obedience, and have some source of obedience, for obedience is the law of universal life ; even the bound- less ocean as it rolls and swells moves within "the bonds of a boundless obedience." Where is that centre of authority to be found ? We have to choose between the individual reason, the Church, and Christ. The first is inadequate because it works to no common end, it announces no common result, it is bounded on all sides by the inefficiencies of ignorance I . I I 120 THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. ^1^ '' ii ( ' Ji /. ;v i ,t- i if ' I I -i U and prejudice. The second fails because it is cum- bered with tradition ; it is a divided voice, and, hke the reason, unites in no common verdict. We are driven, therefore, to the authority of the living Christ for refuge. We must take His word. We must find repose in His complete assurance. We reach and shudder at the last barrier of reason, and there we cry- Can a mere man do tliis H Yet Christ saith this He lived and died to do. Call Christ, then, the illimitable God, Or lost. We implore : "To whom should we go but unto Thee? Thou hast the words of eternal life." And He replies, out of the depth of his infinite calm, " There is no other. To this end was I born that I should bear witness unto the truth. If it were not so, I would have toldijou** As Jesus claimed for Himself an absolute sincerity, 80 we claim it in His name. If it be not f5o, what have we to gain by saying that it is so ? What has any man to gain in the end by saying that the thing that is not, is / I know to whom I am speaking ; I know how commonly it is said that unbiassed judg- ment cannot be expected from those who have a cause to maintain, and that in any case mere personal testimony is worthless. It is enough to point out that such a mode of argument is unworthy of an intelligent man, because it is not argument so much as insult ; it assumes that all Christians are either fools or knaves. For myself I deny the imputation. THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. 121 *' If it were not so," if I were once honestly convinced that Christianity was not credible, I would acknow- ledge my error, and endeavour to get through the world as best I could without a God. However much I should lose in losing Christ, I should know well that I should gain more in gaining truth. But before I could do this, I should have to get rid of more than mere personal testimony : the testimony of Jesus Himself, the testimony of the ages, and the living testimony to the sense of God which exists in the souls of men to-day. There is a moral instinct within us which cleaves irresistibly to Jesus. We say, as James Smetham said, *' This must be true. It is impossible that either fool or rascal could have invented the Fourteenth of John or the Twelfth of Eomans. They are honest to the bone." No further voice counts for much when that profound inner voice has spoken. It is not the voice of the reason or the heart, or of any part of us taken separately ; it is the voice of our whole self speaking ; deep answering unto deep ; the soul replying to the soul's master, with the distinctness of a golden bell, '* Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God ; Thou art the King of Israel." And, surely, to the intelligent man there is an overwhelming force in human testimony, and must always be. To the sincere student there should be something quite as well worth investigation in this phenomenon of belief and conversion as in the stamen of a flower or the armour of a beetle. How is it that an incontestable change does pass over men, 'A 'f H. ' ' J I I" ■' I t ' 1 MMri THE CANDOUR 01- CHRIST. turninf:r the drunkard and the ])roflif]fate, the em- bittered and hopeless man, into the ])iire-minded, kindly, and noble-natured man, who lienceforth gives to the Rorvico of others the powers once squandered in the abuse of liimself ? How is it that for hundreds of years men liave consistently described this cliange as the result of an impression of God received in the heart, an im])ression so vivid, so real, so overwhelm- ing, that it has literally changed the current of a life, and made them new creatures in Christ Jesus ? It is at least unscientific and unphilosophic to ignore this testimony, and how much more foolish to ignore the testimony of the ages to God and immortality. For this is the conclusion of one of the wisest men and noblest thinkers of our time, Professor Max Miiller, in the last of a series of recent lectures delivered before the University of Glasgow, a conclusion reached only after an exhaustive study of all the religions of the world from the earliest dawn of life :— Wc can now repeat the words ivhich have been settled for us centuries ago, and tohich we learnt by heart in childhood. " I believe iii God the Father, Maker of Heaven and earth," ivith a new feeling, with the conviction that they express not only the faith of the Apostles or of Ecumenical Councils, but that they contain the confession of the faith of the ichole ivorld, expressed in different ways, conveyed in thousands of languages, but always embodying the same fundamental truth; fundamental because founded on the very nature of our mind, our reason^ I THE CANDOUR OF C//A'/S/\ Vi:i and our language : — That lolure their are children there must be a father, where there are acts there must be agents, and lohcrc there are many agents there must be a Prime Agent, whom man may know, if not in his own inscrutable nature, yet in his acts as revealed in nature. Thus do the ages witness to God. Generation after generation has leaned out over that dizzy edge of being, hut not without vision, not in utter darkness and forsakenness. For as they have strained outward into that mighty l)osom of night, something has flashed upon the eye, something has fallen on the ear ; a heavenly warmth has touched them, a Divine whisper has thrilled them, a silent love has embraced them, and they have cried, "We believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of Heaven and earth; if it were not so, we would have told you ! " Out of this vision of God and immortality has sprung all that is noblest in human life and aspi- ration ; out of it to-day spring the largest thoughts, the noblest dreams, the saintliest purposes of men, purposes so strong and vital that we refuse to believe that the grave can terminate them. It is not the vision of God only, bat of eternal life in God which has cheered men from the beginning. It is the Father's mansions as well as the Father. It is the place prepared for us as well as the state in in which it is prepared. The vision has been narrowed and distorted, no doubt, but a narrowed vision is better than none, and the dream of a 124 THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. \ <. • ? heaven never so material is better than the blank outlook where no star of hope burns amid the gloom. 1 had rather believe in the Paradise of Mahomet than the unwaking oblivion of the agnostic. And the belief in God has been distorted too, and men have thought they saw the Power, but not the Pity; they have seen the Sovereign, but not the Father. But here again even the narrowest concep- tion of God is better than none ; for to believe in God is the very sign and note and character of man. It is tint belief which makes him man and lifts him above the brute. It is to the refuge of that belief that the torch of reason is meant to conduct him. Let us be thankful for even the most rudimentary faith in God and immortality. However crude, or narrow, or materiahstic it may be, let us welcome it as the evidence of a soul in man. There is no other force that can enable man to stand upright and undismayed beneath the silence of the starry spaces, and in the face of the immutability of nature and the havoc of death. But this force can. It is effectual in the worst crises of life. It is most triumpliant wnen all things are against it. In all ages mcL have found it so. For ever since from the portal Of chaos came forth man. The longin*^ for life immortal Hath coloured every plan. Yes, life, new life, is ever The surety that nature sliows, And to this one law for ever The infinite system goes. THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. 125 :i> So close up your ranks, my brothers. And with hearts too lii«;h to fail, Let us say " Farewell," while the others On the other side cry, " Hail ! " Of that vision of Christ's — the universe as God's realm, in which are many mansions, or abid'^g- places ; a realm where each personal life finds its due place and adequate reward ; where none is forgotten or neglected, because it is not a governor or monarch only who presides over the vast and peopled spaces, but a Father who is kind to the unthankful also — of that far-reaching, sublime, and comforting vision, I do not now speak. Its elements are the thought of God's variety of provision for His children, and of the individual soul as reaching the precise place or sphere which an eternal Wisdom shall assign it. It is the suggestion of an infinite catholicity in God's arrangements : not one man- sion, but many ; not one general state or sphere, in which myriads of widely separated individualities are crowded, but a place for me, a place for you — the place for which we have fitted ourselves, and where we can best serve God. On all this I may but touch now ; but there is one other inevitable suggestion. "If it were not so," says Jesus, with Divine candour and tenderness, " I would have told you." You say, perhaps not with candour, nor with tenderness, nor even with regret, " If it be not so," and j^ou go your way in pride and denial. You turn from Christianity contemptuously, not knowing 126 THE CANDOUR OF CHRIST. I \ what it is you reject, and content to reject it upon the flimsiest of reasonings ; and therefore to your If I oppose another : I say, " What if it be true, after all ■ " What if these sayings of Jesus are absohite and solemn truths? What if it be, indeed, true that we must all appear before the judgment- seat of Christ ? What if this Eternal Power we do not see watches us all the while — this God we deny is indeed He to whom we must render the account of the deeds done in the body ? It is easy to say that Christianity may be false ; it were wise to recollect that it may be true. And if it be true, if this little life be God's great oppor- tunity bestowed on us for serving Him ; if, while we debate and question, the years rush by, and sv/eep us fast and faster to that white throne, where our wasted opportunities will gather to re- proach us — oh ! if all this be true, terribly true, literally true, tragically true, for each of us, " How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard Him?" IfJ As n-e forgive our debtors.— Matthkw vi. 12. The working classes are now demanding that Christianitu ,hnuf i . ined hy the test of its soeial effectiveness, L paver /o "J f// 7^ " Id^ysical, intellectual, .oral, of the great nZs of !ne^ "'•^'"' Bishop Barry. We ought in this life to foster all that makes noodne.s easier n.i sets burners of whatever kind across the flowery JyofZ"" Right Hon. VV. E. Gladstone. ii ;p n € m If ^ f ! I i VII. THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. This is the most difficult passage in the Lord's prayer, the only passage on which Christ thought elucidation necessary, and which He reiterated and emphasised. If we took it in its literal sense, it would be easy to say that it was the utterance of an impossible idealism, and that as a matter of fact it was never acted upon. The late Edward Fitzgerald did indeed once lend a friend i'200, and when interest had been twice paid upon it said, " I think that will do," and flung the note-of-hand into the fire. Shelley also forgave his debts, and when he had little or nothing for himself was perpetually busy in raising loans for his father-in-law — loans which were practically gifts. And these are instances not of saints or apostles, but of two widely different men, one of whom had nothing to say on rehgion, and the other of whom attacked Christianity and rejected it. It is perhaps fair, therefore, to assume that there are many other cases which have never been recorded, and that the forgiveness of debts, in the literal sense, is com- 9 H ^ i ;■ 130 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. )•■ ! moner than we suppose. But, at least, it must be granted that it is neither the principle nor practice of society, and that of those innumerable millions who daily repeat the Lord's prayer there is scarcely a percentage who assume that Jesus meant anything in particular when He bade us pray, " Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." But Christ never uttered unmeaning or super- ficial words, and therefore it is well for us to ask what He did mean. Least of all would He have spoken with impossible idealism in a prayer which He deliberately framed fov the use of His disciples and followers through all the ages. Unless we are prepared to say that Christ was wrongly reported, or that He said what He did not mean, and did not expect anybody to accept as serious, we are bound to assume that Christ had a clear meaning and pur- pose in His speech, which it becomes us to discover. For the practical impotence of pious ideals in re- gulating public conduct arises mainly from this very cause, that we perpetually act as though Christ never said what He meant, and rarely meant what He said : that He was a visionary, a glorious dreamer, a religious rhapsodist. That, at least, was not His view of Himself, when He said His words were not His but the Father's who sent Him, nor Paul's view, when He claimed for Christ all the kingdoms of human action, and told those highest in pride and power of life that their Master also was in heaven. Let us, at least, be honest : if we cannot be that, the sooner we close our church doors and vacate cur M ' M ^H THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 131 pulpits the better. Let us, at least, free ourselves from the vitiating insincerity of an electicism which applauds Christ when He says things we like to hear, but disapproves and ignores Him when He utters words which are trying to the temper or difficult to the understanding. Even though He were but a Jewish Carpenter, who preached an impossible social reconstruction, He would, at least, deserve the respect which sincerity always demands : and how much more when we worship Him as the incarnation of Deity — the Way, the Truth, and the Life. This phrase can only be explained, then, by re- ference to the first clause of the prayer itself, " Our Father who art in heaven." The Fatherhood of God was the central conception of Christ's thought, and coloured everything. It regulated His attitude to Jewish society, to the Mosaic law, and to the world at large. Other religions recognise the majesty and justice of God : it was the work of Christianity to reveal the Fatherhood of God. In majesty and justice there is abundant room for condemnation and expiation, but none for tenderness or comfort or forgiveness. From the majesty and justice of God the splendour and order of the world have si^rung, this great world of exquisitely balanced law, which fulfils itself without error or interruption, whether in the springing of a grass blade, the colouring of an insect's wing, the outspread wonder of the starry firmament, or the secret potency of the ocean gulf- streams. But if God is not only Law but Love, r \ ii w , / 132 THE SOCTALISM OF JESUS. then in human society there must be a place for love as well as law. A world of law alone would be a torture-chamber of incessant and immitigable cruelty to creatures who can not only fear and obey, but who can weep, and pray, and love. If the world is the mirror of the majesty of God, it is also the mirror of the love of Him who is the Father in the heavens- So it follows then that the world is not governed by law alone, but love, and you must leave a place for love also in human society. You who ask love from God must at least be prepared to show love to your fellow-man. If we ask to be forgiven our trespasses, we ask something for which strict law makes no allowance, and we must not press for strict law — the uttermost farthing against our brother, while we expect God to forgive us our whole debt. In other words, if God's relation to us is a fatherly relation, our relation to our fellows is both a fatherly and brotherly relation, and what we expect to receive we must be prepared to give. Now Christ came to explain, defend, and enforce three great rights of man. The first right was the right of life. He taught that man's presence on the earth was not an accident, but the wise arrangement of an infinitely wise Father. That Father had been at infinite pains to care for the least things of His creation. He had woven a raiment for the lily more exquisite than the silk attire of kings, and had clothed the hills with grass, every blade of which surpassed in cunning workmanship the most delicate and skil- ful work of man. Though a million million sparrows 4 THE SOCIALISM 01' JESUS. 133 fluttered their life out beneath tlie blue wide skies, yet He knew each as thouf^ih fed from His hand ; and from the loneliest cleft of the loneliest rock of the wilderness He heard the young ravens when they cried for food. To the infinite there is neither great nor small, and if we can conceive of God as holding the stars in their places by the majesty of His power, we can equally conceive of Him as caring for the sparrows by the omniscience of His love. The birds had aright to live out of the bounty of the earth, and if the birds, how much more had man ? Simplifica- tion was the great key-note of all Christ's social teaching. In the perfect society He sketched there would be no anxiety about the means of life, no fear of privation or covetousness of wealth, no Dives feasting from golden dishes, while Lazarus mumbled his hard crust at his gates, no mean cares about to- morrow's bread for the toiler, and no still meaner cares of appetite or vanity for the opulent ; men would trust the Fatherhood of God and be content, they would be conscious of their spiritual relationship to Him, and would be delivered equally from anxiety and avarice. There was room enough for all as there was for the lilies, and food enough for all as there was for the sparrows and the ravens. If these had a right to live man had a yet greater, and if man could not live, it was the fault of society, and not the fault of God. That was the first great human right which Christ expounded and asserted ; in the most literal sense of the words He came that man might have life, and have it more abundantly. W I i. W I i )■■ ' I i , < 'I [ ii Mir |i 134 TNE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. The second great right which Christ asserted and expounded was the right of liberty. It was not liberty through the outrage of law, but liberty through obedience to the highest law. Man's recognition of the power of law, and his faculty of voluntary obedi- ence to law, was the secret of his greatness. It was this which invested the humblest man with a certain dignity and grandeur — his life was the centre of pro- found and tremendous consequences, his words were reported into the ears of God, and his whispers were trumpeted in thunder from the housetops of eternity. Such a being could not be a slave unless he consented to his bondage. There was that in him which no tyrant could subdue and no terror overwhelm : let him fear not them who killed the body but were im- potent against the soul. The only real slavery was the slavish spirit, the only true liberty was liberty of the soul. That was the true hope of society — the emancipation of the soul of man from its corrupt maxims, and the overthrow of tyranny and wrong would follow. If society was so fashioned that evil seemed everywhere triumphant, that was not the work of God nor the order of God, but was the result of the mischievous stupidity of man. For all social, as for all spiritual difficulties, the solution of Christ was absolutely simple — " ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." The third great right which Christ taught was the right of brotherhood. In every word which Christ uttered that sublime truth was either stated or im- plied. Christ saw men in their essential moral \\ I k '■I THE SOCIALISM rV JESUS. la") nakedness, and stripped of the mere accidents of place it was obvious enough that mankind was one. Kich and poor, high and low, learned and ignorant, were united by things more precious than gold, and more enduring than learning, by the mystery of birth and the agony of dying, by the impartiality of pain and the catholicity of sorrow, and the meanest shared the thoughts of the highest, and the highest the passions of the meanest. No man can aftbrd to i-^athe the leper, he knows not how soon he may be a leper ; no woman can afford to scorn the Magdalen, she knows not what fate awaits the child within her arms or the maiden whose smile makes sunshine in the house. Does thy brother ask thy cloak of thee ? He has a right to ask : give him thy coat also. Does he compel thee to go a mile ? Go twain : he is thy brother. Prejudice has its claim on culture, suffering on happiness, poverty on wealth, for men are not isolated personalities, who can do as they like, but members of one body and members one of another. According to the teaching of Christ, the more a man helped his neighbour the better did he love God, for if a man did not love his brother, whom he had seen, how could he love God, whom he had not seen ? And to these three great primal rights Christ added another — not the right of happiness, which is the great gospel of the political economist, but the right of sacrifice. He taught that the highest glory of man is his power of sacrificing himself for another, and that there is no real nobility but at the price of sacrifice. Love is sacrifice, patriotism is sacrifice, holiness is '■■i l/( 136 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. t \ ' sacrifice. Let the rich youth who would be ];iarfect Bell all his possessions and ^ive to the poor, for cha- racter cannot be perfected without sacrilice. Tjet the man enervated l)y the sweet cup of prosperous days, and the bright wine of Imman love, leave fa>-.lier and mother, and houses and lands, and take up his cross and follow Christ. Let a man sacrifice his anibitions, his poor, mean, trivial, personal purposes, a id lling himself into the world's life. Ho only lives in the world's life Who hath renounced his own. There is no salvation for society but by the cross, no throne so high as Calvary, no crown so Divine as the crown of thorns. Sacrifice is not a bitter neces- sity of life, but a splendid right and privilege, for no other creature but man could conceire the thought of dying for his fellow. Christ came to show us the way, to give His life a ransom for many, to ransom men from selfishness by the sj^irit of His cross, and teach them that the glory of mere personal triumph is a mean and base and even wicked thing beside the glory of personal defeat and downfall for the redemp- tion of men. The satanic and sacrificial were the two poles of the ethics of Jesus, and He taught that men were satanic as they shunned sacrifice, and divine as they endured it. Now, look at this phrase again in the light of these teachings, and you will see that what it means is this, that human society cannot exist on the mere prin- ciples of political economy and bare justice — there THE SOC/ALIS.]r OF JESUS. 137 must be a niarfrin for love. It is not enouf^h to bo coldly just to your iieif^'hbour, you must learn to love your n(3i<,flibour as yours(^lf. God has not treated us on the principle of strict justice alone, and wo know it. For why should He forj^'ive us ? Why should He promise eternal life to those who do His will during the brief space of earthly activity? On what principle of strict justice can you approve so vast a reward for so un- meritorious a service ? Why should Lazarus be car- ried by the angels into Abraham's bosom? How can you justify a compensation so enormous for even such sorrows as Lazarus endured on earHi? Why should you hope to get to heaven ? It is a consum- mation out of all proportion to anything you have ever done or can do. Be life never so hard with you, yet it must be owned that it is but a light aflliction to suffer in view of that eternal weight of glory for v^hich you hope, and on no possible computation of fairness can such a recompense be justified. This is God's way of treating you ; the least you can do is to apply something of the same treatment to your brother. Deal with his debt in the same proportion, use the same divine method of arithmetic, compute his claims with the same generosity : you, who hope for heaven and forgiveness, teach your brother what heaven means by your own charity, and what for- giveness is by your own renunciation. For you will not be permitted, when the great accounts of the world are made up, to get everything and give nothing ; with what measure you mete it will be measured to you again. ( ' 188 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. See how this doctrine of the margin works in home Hfe. The true angel of the home is not Justice but Charity. You may collect a household, but you can- not build a home on mere justice. The best of us are constantly, though unconsciously, unjust to each other in home life. So mysteriously are we made that those who live closest each other in the intimacies of daily union often fail to comprehend each other^ and the one often hurts and chafes the other. And because these attritions must be, there is in the most perfect home a constant need for forgiveness. Conduct the home on the principles of mere justice, and see what comes of it. Do we not know homes where hungry hearts have been crynig out for a little love through a hfe-time, where childron grow up stunted in affection because love has been re- pressed, where the very air of strict justice has been so bitter and nipping an atmosphere that all that is btst in hfe has withered under it, and where the child or mother would gladly barter all the gold of which justice has made them sharers for a single kiss which came from the soul, a mere breath of warmth from the strained lips of the emotions ? Such households are simply a cruel travesty of all that home should mean. The home, as an insti- tution, could not exist a single day without the presence of that love which "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." It ceases to be a home and be- comes a barrack when the forgiveness of love is unknown in it. And the same thing is true of THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 139 society. The ideal society Christ preached was society as a family, and where that ideal is lost, where our brother-man becomes to us a mere cipher in the sum of civilisation, when we think it enough to pay him his wages and never think it our duty to give him also sympathy and love, then the world becomes nothing better than one huge barrack, where men merely eat and sleep, and which it would be an advantage for the great majority at once to exchange for the privilege of a grave. Or see how it applies to business life. It is related of a great employer of labour, recently dead, who bore a character of untarnished probity, that he once had in his employ a man of great promise, who on one occasion acted on his own judgment, and did not carry out his strict instructions. He was instantly dismissed. The man travelled two hundred miles to see his master and make his apology. " And of course you took him on again? " said a friend. The reply was, " Do you take me for a fool ? " There may of course be an explanation of the incident which we do not possess, but as the story stands I say that was a wicked and tyrannical act. It was perhaps strict justice, but it w;( j un- tempered justice, and we can no more b'jar un- tempered justice than untempered light. Who are we that we should deal with one another in this fashion? Do we never make mistakes that we are so quick and unsparing to avenge them in others ? How dare we be hard with one another when we \ 1 i' 1 nil ttii;.i ■ ] I ] [ t 1 ■( \ 1 ( ' 1 '■- . \ y. 1, r 1 r r: ii 140 T//E SOCIALISM OF JESUS. plead daily that God will not be hard with us ? It may be that our brother owes us a debt of humilia- tion and penitence, but not the less we owe him a debt of charity. It may be that he has sinned against us, but we sin yet more grossly against Him when we refuse to forgive him his offence. There must be give and take between master and servant, an elasticity in our relations to each other, a margin for love and mercy in our lives, or else our justice will become a vile burlesque of all that is fair and just, and we shall be like the unworthy servant who was forgiven ten thousand talents, and straightway cast his fellow-servant into prison because he owed him an hundred pence. When you are tempted to be inexorable to the man who owes you some paltry hundred pence, it will be well for you to recollect the enormous debt which God has forgiven you. The teaching has a wider bearing than this. The margin for charity an. I ■. I m : ,'l i h' (I I 1^ 1 11 ! III! 156 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. said. What was Christ's Utopia? What does Christ authorise us to expect, what not to expect? In the first place, it is necessary to repeat that Christ does not authorise us to expect happiness. What is happiness ? It is a state of mind arising solely from ephemeral and exterior conditions. It is a matter of moods, of money, of health, of success, of food, of light, of clothing. Even in what seem its securest forms it fades with waning youth, or failing fortunes, or breaking health, with the wail of shat- tered love or the requiem over open graves. It is built on circumstance, and changes with the ebb and flow of circumstance. It is more inconstant than the wind, more changeful than the colour of the sea, or the rapid transformations of an April sky. But this is what men have sought from the world's begin- ning with an almost frantic quest and passionate thirst. This is what every statesman promises the crowd, and what the crowd perpetually desires. Civilisation is the result of the thirst for happiness. It proceeds, as I have said, on the assumption that the better fed, and better clothed, and better housed a man is, the happier is he. It assumes that happi- ness is the end of life, the one great and all-sufficing aim worth living for. And oh, if this be so, what a tragedy is human life ! What an irony is civilisation ! For how many are happy ? Who gets what he wants, or getting it, is satisfied ? Where is the man who has found wealth the source of happiness, or plenty the secret of peace ? And if these who do obey the axioms of the world, and succeed in getting .».* .-.*..!- -' ■m--\ 4*m.--*>m..f^--A\-» THIt DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 157 ate the res. 3SS. lat ed pi- ng a n! he an or do fng the coveted rewards of life, are still unhappy, what of those who never get them? What of the famished poor, whose life is one long drudgery — the lives that know neither fulness of bread nor fulness of love, the hearts and bodies that waste uncomforted, and perish unregarded? Yet so certain are men that happiness is the end of life, that even the Declara- tion of American Independence declares in its preamble that one of the "inalienable human rights" is the *• pursuit of happiness." Oh, that is where all our social schemes fail, we seek to make men happy instead of seeking to make them good. Christ has once and for all exploded the fallacy that exterior conditions can necessarily develop the soul's growth and peace, in the two terrific parables of Dives and Lazurus, and the Rich Fool. And He has also summed up the whole matter in one tremendous sentence, which seems to burn its way like a shaft of lightning right into the most secret places of our thought, when He asks, " What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" It is significant that once only does Christ use the word, and then He says that men are "happy" if they know His commandments and do them. Thrice only do His Apostles use the word, and then it is to assure us that we should be '* happy " when we suffer for Christ, when we bear reproach for Him, when we endure in His name. Another word was ever on His lips — Blessedness. He taught that the mind was its own place, the heaven or heil of moii ; \ 1 158 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. V m iji ' \ W\. ( ! 1 ' 1 H f 1 u* that the Kingdom of God is within us or nowhere. He gave us a spell by which we become indifferent to circumstance. He has taught men to use it ever since, and to declare, as a man of our generation whose life was outwardly a failure, declares : " When Job said, * Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him, no wealth could enrich him after that. He had reached his climax." Christ said that He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. " To be ministered unto," that is the final exposition of happiness : to feed delicately and sleep softly, and be sheltered from rough winds and ill sights ; to lay man and nature under contribution for our personal delight, to set a thousand weary feet running our errands, and have a thousand weary backs bowed to win us wealth ; to build our palace of ease in its garden of roses, careless of the wasted hands that beat against its golden gates, or the pollution that is splashed against its walls, that is the price at which happiness is bought. Christ came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, to put His hand upon the aching sore and close it, to be servant of all, to stoop as low as man can sink, to shun no risk, no pollution, no hardship, no agony, if by any means He could save some. He was the friend cf publicans and sinners, and was blessed in their friendship. Christ's Utopia, again, does not promise us a remedy for human ills by the abolition of either labour or poverty ; that were as vain a dream as the pursuit of happiness. As regards labour, no true man would desire its abolition. The h (I ll THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. ir,o IS a It her leam lour, The social paradise of such writers as Edward Bellamy is little better than a strictly-regulated hell. It turns the world into one vast prison-house. It is a state in which only the brainless could be content. Labour and purpose are the music of life, the salt of health, the springs of purity. If anything be taught us by the Carpenter's Son, it is the dignity and perennial nobleness of honest labour. The lowliest toil is a diviner thing than the most luxurious idleness ; nor is poverty without its compensations. Lazarus hears angels' music as he sleeps upon his pallet of rags, and is borne by angels into Abraham's bosom. To be poor is no sin : none was ever poorer than the Christ, and poverty may be made to yield infinite blessings. Christ recognises that society must divide itself into grades, and he will render unto Caesar the things which are C;rsar's. It is only the blind and ignorant who can invent no better way of remedying social inequalities than by the spoliation of the rich, and the enrichment of the spoiler. There is Lazarus at the gate, but you will not redress his wrongs by burning the palace of con- temptuous Dives. You will redress them if you can make Dives the friend of publicans and sinners — if you can make hmi feel the Divine force of brother- hood, that the man at the gate has a claim upon him, and that God made them both and is no respecter of persons. There is not, and cannot be, equaHty, for Lazarus is a leper and Dives is not ; Lazarus is dying, and Dives has yet many days to live ; Lazarus has a soul within him, but Dives has drowned his in V <, \\ A \ rr 160 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. ; 1 ! ! , 1 ± ' 1 i sloth and gluttony, and is really poorer than Lazarus. There is not equality, and cannot be ; for golden chalices and heaped-up silver, silken raiment and beds of down, cannot cure the pain of those dreadful sores. No ! the only true equality conies not by change of state, but by change of heart. When the Divine doctrine of human brotherhood is learned, when the Divine friendliness of Jesus is practised, then the middle wall of. partition between rich and poor will be broken down, and Dives will save his soul by dividing his wealth, and Lazarus will be healed of a sorer pain than any bodily, even the isolation of a poverty for which no man cares, and a suffering which only angels pity. Equality comes of itself, and in its only possible form, by the recogni- tion of human brotherhood, when we recollect that " All we are brethren, and one is our master, even Christ." At this point, even at the risk of misconception, it is necessary to affirm what has been called the inwardness of Jesus. It cannot be claimed that Christ ever troubled Himself much about the outside condition of things. It was not because He was indifferent to them, but because He saw that they could only be changed from the inside. It is a mis- take to claim Christ as a social reformer in the usual sense of the words. He was as little a social as a political reformer. He offered no panacea to a diseased society ; He offers none still. To selfishness He uttered one pregnant word, ** Ye must be born again " ; to poverty, " The Kingdom of God is within THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 161 >» the hat lide as ey is- ual s a a ess rn lin you. " The whole force of His teachinp; was to make men subhmely indifferent to the purely external con- ditions of their life. He aimed at a hijjjher point : He taught the drudge he had a soul, the child of want that he was a child of God, the publican and harlot that they might be changed and ennobled from within. His spirit infected His disciples with a noble i»ontempt for what we call the good things of life. It worked out in them a new nature which held the world lightly, as it was afterwards to work out amongst the lowliest classes of society, in many a great city, a spirit of sublime content ; as it worked among the Puritans a vivid sense of the reality of eternal things alone, and has begotten in modern missionaries an heroic renunciation of the world. The one saving clause in such a statement is, that while He communicated the secret of a profound equanimity to His followers in regard to their own secular environments, His spirit was destined to create in them an equally profound sympathy with the sorrows of others. If, then, Christ does not authorise us to expect either happiness or equality, if it be admitted that He busied Himself little with the outside condition of things, what, then, does He authorise us to expect ? What are the elements of His Utopia ? Simple and inefficient as the answer may seem, yet the great element is that Divine friendliness which made him the helper of the publican and sinner. For that Divine friendliness meant, in its essence, the rights of humanity as humanity. To judge the 11 I" V II H? ■^ 162 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. V^' '■■.i 1 ■ ' ii ,( I' revolutionary force of Christ aright, we have not only to recount His words, but to estimate the spirit and intention of His life> with the constant re-incarna- tion of that spirit in the lives of others. We cannot, for example, find a single word which He said about chivalry, or slavery, or many kindred topics. Perhaps not ; but what did it mean that in a time of the deepest social darkness, when patriotism was quenched and military glory supreme, when one-half the world was mortgaged to the other half, when the most rigid caste separated class from class through- out the world, that a Working Man should come from Nazareth, and, by the force of ^Tis teaching, draw into an actual brotherhood all sorts and con- ditions of men? It meant the abolition of caste, it was the portent of a great liberty. Behind Him came the dawn, the morning of a new social era, and with the invisible weapons of His words He shattered the whole fabric of a corrupt and tyrannical society. We could almost imagine that, throughout the dungeons of the world, every chain shook and slackened when He came out of Nazareth, preaching liberty to the captive ; and every slave felt the thrill of a new hope when He preached deliverance to them that were bound. He abolished slavery from the inside ; its germ was killed when the democratic doctrine of Christianity over- spread the Eoman Empire. True, it took centuries to die ; it retreated from land to land. But ever as the leaven of Christ's spirit worked, the bitter wrong of slavery was felt ; and if to-day slavery has ceased THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 163 ords and lat, very out and He He illed ■over- uries 3r as Tong eased to exist, it is the democratic influence of Christianity which lias abohshed it. Or what did it mean, aj^ain, that, in a day when Roman law gave the parent a complete right over his child, so that the child had practically no rights, Christ should put a little child into the midst of His disciples, and make the child the type of His teaching, the symbol of His kingdom ? It was the assertion of the dignity of the little child, of the claim of frailty, of the honour that men should pay to innocence ; and it meant a new era for children. Or what did it mean that holy women accompanied Christ upon His ministry, that fallen women found in Him a friend, that they Avere at the Cross to wrap the body in fragrant spices, and early at the sepulchre to weep upon the Easter-dawn ; that it was a woman to whom Christ first appeared, that women were in the earliest councils of the Church, that they were among its most unselfish servants, and the first to claim the prize of martyrdom ? It meant a new era for woman — her true emancipation, and the birth of all that we call chivalry. It freed her sympathy, it invested her with sacredness, it has made her for many centuries now the light of the home, the minister of purity, the consoler of suffer- ing, the helpmeet of man, the purifier of society, the benign custodian of virtue. Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale are the direct fruit of the Cross of Christ : without Christ such lives were impossible. The era of humanity began with the Working-man of Nazareth. \ t, ' 164 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. \ \ ^"' That which the friendliness of Jesus Christ really meant, then, was the sense of the individual worth of men and women. For Him there was nothing common nor unclean in humanity. However low it had sunk it could be raised, and to save it was worth dying for. It was that individual worth of men and women which was forgotten in Christ's day, and is in ours also ; it was that which He remembered when He suffered the woman who was a sinner to touch him, and told the story of the good Samaritan. I do not say that it was wholly forgotten then, still less that it is wholly forgotten now. If the world is as sweet as it is, if it is not yet a hell, it is because that truth has been pressed home on men. And it is Christ who has made the world conscious of this truth, and has given us all the salt which saves civilisation from corruption. To see a man or woman as a soul, as a living spirit made by God, as something immeasurably higher than all created things, is to see a very great and very awful thing. It is like looking on God Himself; it thrills and solemnises us. It was thus Christ looked on men and women, even though publicans and sinners ; it is thus He taught His disciples to regard them : so that it is more than a noble touch of poetry, it is a profound truth, which that true poet, Mr.|Myers, states, when he makes St. Paul say : — Only like souls I see the folk thereunder, Boiind who should eonqiter, slaves who should be kings ; Hearing their one hope, with an empty wonder, Sadly contented in a show of things. |i i I w THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST 165 'ers, 2S; To see that vision is to master at a glance the science of altruism ; it is to make us ready to be offered up if we can redeem others. That was how the heart of Christ beat toward the publican and the sinner; and the perfect explanation of what Christianity means, is in the Christ of whom Pascal says with noble truth, that whereas Mahomet founded his kingdom by killing, Christ did so by suffering Himself to be killed. Do we share these feelmgs? Are our hearts the Bethlehems of the new incarnation of the Son of God, so that the Christ who is born again in our hearts lives again in us, and through our kindly hands, our anointed lips, our serviceable lives. His life streams out again upon the world in love and healing ? That is the scheme for our own salvation and that of society with which He presents us. We must suffer with Him if we would reign with Him ; our selfishness, our egoism, our exclusiveness, our callousness to suffering which is not personal, our hardness to sinners, all this must die, and be crucified with Him, before the day of the world's redemption draweth nigh. How, then, do these principles apply themselves to us, and to our own times ? They unmistakably suggest the question of what churches are for, and what is the church? Christ was the friend of publicans and sinners ; the Church, if it represent Christ, then, is the friend of the friendless, the asylum of the hopeless, the haven of the unhappy. Every separate community which calls itself a church is a segment of the kingdom of Jesus, a sample \ \ si \ \ •"H^ 166 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. \\ ^^1 i I ' f t by which we measure the whole, an object-lesson of what He means to make of the whole earth when His work is finished. The Church is the manu- factory of character. Where\ ^r we see the church- spire soaring above the homes of men, we have a right to say, " That is a type of the sky- ward aim of Christianity; beneath that roof character is being made ; the people who assemble t^ ire are the present-day ncarnations of the mind of Christ." It is no less a burden than this that Christ lays upon His Chuich. He describes Himself as the Vine, and His disciples as the branches, through whom the vital sap flows ; His aposfcles describe the Church as the Body, of which He is the Head. He bids ns be perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect. It is true we cannot be perfect in the same way or degree ; but in perfection there is neither high nor low, great nor small. The grass-blade is as perfect ci thing as the royal oak beneath which it grows ; the lily of the field is as exquisite a creation as the noble flower that blossoms once in a decade ; the drop of water is as perfect in its own completion as the star which it reflects. Within our natural limitations we are to be Christs to this sinful world. The Church is to be the multiform in- carnation of Him who was the Friend of publicans and sinners. It follows, then, that if the Church is the in- carnation of Christ, it will be animated by His infinite friendliness ; the Church will exist for the people, not the people for the Church. Suppose, if the he as aral iful iu- jans in- His the e, if THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 167 you can, some entirely uninformed person arriving in this country, and asking in all simplicity what are these buildings we call churches ? " The prison," says he, "lean understand: that is for criminals; the hospital : that is for the sick ; the school : that is for the young; but what is the '^hurch for? It represents a great deal of money ; it seems a plea- sant place for any one who cares for masic or oi^atory — ^/hen you can get them ; it appears to afford p very comfortable way of spending an hour or two, and its occupants look by no means un- happy, ill-paid, or out-of°elbows. But all that can be said of a theatre, a lecture-hall, a concert-room. What, then, differentiates a church from these?" In many cases it would be impossil)le to return any very intelligible answer. Look at the modern Church and compare it with the democratic Christ. Is it democratic ? Does it seek to be the friend of the friendless ? Is it not true that in all great cities the tendency is to leave the crowded neighbour- hoods of the poor and to follow the comfortable and wealthy classes " up town," and there to erect com- fortable conventicles for their convenience, v/hile the publican and sinner are forgotten ? Do the rich and poor really meet together in God's house ? Is it not our modern method to have one church for tht^ rich and another for the poor? " Little Bethel" is our too common embodiment of the Cliristian Church. In Little Bethel the democratic Christ has no place. The religion of Little Bethel is by far the most numerous of religions, and it has never taken any ^1 ! ti i Ul i ?! I i . i i A km ! ; fl 168 77/^ DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. account of that vast entity "the common people." It is a rehgion of narrow, priggish, ignorant, other-world- liness — except on week-days. It consists of knots of men who think that churches exist for them, for the display of their talents, their ambition, their social prejudices, their greed of power. Little Bethel knows nothmg about publicans and sinners, and does not want to know. It sits upon its money bags, and, as long as pews are let and finances prosper, does not care who comes or goes. It stub- bornly refuses to adapt itself to the problems it ought to solve. It does not ask what tlie people need, Imt v/hat the people ought to like, and acts accordingly. It acts accordingly, and with the result that in most great cities the central churches wear an air of squalid bankruptcy. They are forlorn and deserted, and, with a larger population round them than ever they had, have no one within their walls. The infinite friend- liness of the democratic Christ it has never so much as dreamed of. It is strange, it is lamentable, how all religion seems to have an inherent trend toward Pharisaism. It almost seems as if with the building of churches, the establishment of regular and reputable services, the tide of prosperity which comes with public confi- dence, the very spirit of religion is apt to exhale and vanish. The note which Clirist struck, and which it is for us continually to reproduce, is not Pharisaism, but friendliness. If Christ was specially the friend of publicans and siimers, the first friendship of the Church must be for these. It is these who ought i) i THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 16a to be found within every church. The Church should be the friend of labour, the friend of the disreputable, the friend of all lonely, soiled, insignificant, unfriended, and unconsidered people. It should be the haven of the doubtful, the discouraged, the tempted, the miserable, the outcast, and if these are not attracted to it that church is a failure. It may have money, but it has not Christ. It may have highly reputable officers, but it has not the Holy Ghost. It may be a most elegant Little Bethel, with a most select assortment of most reputable souls in i^, but it is assuredly not the incarnation of the democratic Christ. It is the temple of modern Pharisaism, not the friendly asylum of hope, comfort, and redemption which He designed. " What man shall there be among you," says Christ, " that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath-day, will he not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much, then, is a man better than a sheep? " The implication is that we care more for sheep than men, more for respectability than the salvation of men. Our chief beatitude is, " Be respectable and you will die respected." k. sheep has a value and is worth care ; but there are so many of us, and human flesh is so cheap, and the publican so unpleasant a person, that for men and for the one man we care nothing. And men lie in deep pits all around us — in pits of ignorance, and defilement, and lovelessness, of dul- ness, of hopelesa drudgery ; and if we do not lift them out, even at the expense of respectability, we do not fulfil the spirit of Christ. These are the I s» ir t •1 f J ^' 1 ■■ .( . '1 ( - 'l :^# 1 i '),'!' 'I h ■r /■■ i! e 1 170 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. people who most want a friend. Christ saj's, ** I will be friends with you." He comes with joyous alacrity and pulls them out of the pit, and seeks to brighten their dull souls with hope, and any agency which lifts men out of pits, which brings them into moral, intellectual, or spiritual daylight, is doing the work of Christ, and is really a segment of His Church. But it is with much more than the interior spirit of churches that we are concerned. The Church is set in the world as a governing and leading force^ through which the whole earth is to be redeemed. If it be the incarnation of the democratic Christ it will powerfully affect the civil, commercial, and political life of nations. It will set a higher type and make that type respected. Is the type of busi- ness morality so very mnch better within the Church than M'ithout it ? Is the average Christian man so much better a citizen than the unbeliever? Y7e 3an^ of couisj, think of many individual instances, but the question must be answered in a different way. We must remember that the Church has had cen- turies in which to proclace this impression on the world, and then we must ask what are the condicions of life in countries called Christian, and ho" v far do they incorporate the spirit of Jesus ? I can only reply that the social conditions of life to-day in countries called Christian are in themselves the most crushing reproach which can fall upon the Church of Him who was the child of Labour, and the friend ofi)ublicans and sinners. What, for example, is the avowed principle of business life ? It is un- THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 171 governed competition, with a view to the accumula- tion of rapid wealth, and what would Christ have said to such a principle ? Broadly speaking, it means buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest, which, within certain honourable limitations, may be a useful axiom of trade, no doubt. But it means much more than this in practice. It means underselling your neighbour, and choking him oif the market to enrich yourself ; it means the un- scrupulous creation of rings and corners which bring want and famine to thousands of homes that an individual may be enriched ; it means grinding the poor and pushing the workwomen into vice ; it means a supreme carelessness of how others live, if only you can snatch an added morsel for yourself out of the vile scramble for food. It means that every trade is overstocked, that the principle of every man speaking truth with his neighbour is practically suspended in business, that tradesmen stoop to lure the public to their shops by shameful tricks, and that the public are demoralised by a wicked cheapness, and never conceive it to be a moral duty to give a fair price for a good article. And it means, also, that you do not get a good article even when you pay a fair price ; that workmen have no honest pride in their work, and masters lind that the workman's supreme aim is to do as little as he can for the largest wage he can demand ; that weary eyes have pored themselves blind over the clothes we buy, that your babes are clothed in garments which have been washed with the tears of shame, and that the reek of death 172 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. Jli { ) '((> f and the smell of the fire of human anguish cleaves to the goods we buy so cheap, and will not buy other- wise than cheap. It is a foul and inhuman state of things, a new slavery not less shocking than the old, for, save that our white slaves have the liberty to cut their throats or drown themselves without inflicting loss on their masters, it is hard to see how they are better oil" than the negro knocked down to the highest bidder or whipped to death in the cotton fields. If the friend of publicans and sinners spoke to-day, would He not point to many a man of business, who sits to-day in church and is honoured by the Church, and say, " Ye are they who for a pretence make long prayers — and devour widows' houses. Ye hypocrites ; how can ye escape the damnation of hell ? " Or look, again, at modern life in relation to the actually outcast. We know the sense in which Christ used the word "sinner" of a woman We know that the woman who is a sinner is still with us, and probably one midnight spent in the streets of Loudon could show us more of this uttermost degradation of humanity than Jesus saw in His whole ministry in Jerusalem. We cannot go home to our happy children but that worn, hollow face will show itself like a dead face, tossed up into sight a moment on the insolent waves of our city life. We shall see it ; shall we think of all it means ? Shall we picture it as it once was, dimpled with innocent laughter, angelic in innocent sleep ? Shall we read the tragedy written in those sharpened features, the anguish shuddering through the false gaiety out of ■ ti THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST 175 it a We we cent ead the of t those tired eyes ? Such a woman came to Jesus Christ. Those lips, soiled with corruption, kissed Him. Those eyes that had seen so many evil sifjhts shed penitent tears upon His feet. Do we ever permit such to come near us? Does the Church make any real, organised, and strenuous effort to save them ? Do we not take their presence as a matter of course? We do not mean to he hard, but we are careless ; we are touched when we do think of it, but we seldom think. " So between hard-hearted people, thoughtless people, busy people, humble people, and cheerfully-minded people, the giddiness of youth and the pre-occupation of age, the philo- sophies of faith and the cruelties of folly, priest, Levite, masquer, and merchant man, all agreeing to keep their own side of the way, the evil that God sends to warn us gets to be forgotten, and the evil that He sends us to be mended by us getf. left un- mended." And again we may ask what would the Friend of sinners say to this if He spoke again, and in our midst ? Are not our hymn- singings and pious festivities a solemn insult to Him, while no man careth for the soul of these ? Every Church ought to maintain a home for the sick, the poor, or the fallen, and where one Church is unable to do this, a combination of Churches can accomplish it. We have to f^eek that which is lost, for the lost have to be sought, and that which is not sought will not be found ; and if we do not this, those whom we have not strived to save will rise before us in the judgment, pale with agony, scarred with shame, yet I ■;! 174 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. ! •• ■\ It' M ('y aflame with anger, the solemn passionless anger of a supreme reproach which will crush us and confound us utterly when their stained lips cry against us: ** Inasmuch as ye did it not to us, ye did it not to Him!" We may say that we are not wholly to blame, nor are we. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation, in Church matters as in all others. If the Church had from the first consistently remembered who it was it worshipped, what His life was, what His spirit and temper were, how different a world would it be to-day ! If the Church had known that the very seed of its life was in democratic and social sympathy, how nearly might the Kingdom of God already have come on earth? But let us have done with reproaches, and attend the cry of the earnest and sincere, who ask, " What can I do P" 0, brother, so many things, if you will but try. You can at least give a fair price, and refuse to sell your sense of right for gain. You can see to it, if you be a master, that you give your workman just and honest wages, and if you be a workman, that you give your master full and ungrudging service. You can for- swear that most common and damnable form of " other-worldliness," which consoles itself with thoughts of making your own calling and election sure, and blinds itself to the wickedness and misery of the world that is. You can be the friend of publicans and sinners, gentle to the erring, tender to the weak, merciful to the wronger and the It, I '< THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 175 ll of ider the wronged. " I met a beggar," says a Russian poet, *' and he stretched out to me his coarse, ugly hand, blue with cold, and asked an alms. I felt in ray pocket, and was ashamed to find I had nothing. I said, * Brother, I have nothing,' and I gave him my hand. * Thank you, brother,' he replied, ' that too is an alms.' " That beggar felt that brother- hood was more than alms, and so it is. To the individual it is always possible to be the friend of publicans and sinners. And through this spirit in individuals the State will become changed, and in no other way. The inwardness of Christ's method is vindicated by its unfailing success. To whom can we appeal save the individual? And therefore it is to 5^ou I say that all social, all municipal, all political questions are religious questions, and must be treated as such if the Kingdom of God means anything. In the end the religious question is the only question. If we do not solve these questions in the Spirit of Christ they will solve themselves without us, but in another way. Look at your streets and see if that other solution of the problem is not already indicated there. In the oldest countries of Europe are not the great cities full of hollow eyes and famine- stricken faces, the scapegoats of our greed, the lepers made by our neglect ? And are even the newest cities of the new world without this same dreadful menace ? And does not the tide gain on us ? Do not these miserable forms swarm up fast and faster, and as they shuffle out of the light into their holes r:i r 176 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. [| I •li n \- ')\ ; and warrens, turn upon us an^jry, wolfisli eyes, as thou{T[h to say, " Yet a little while, and our turn will come ; we only wait the leader, and the word, and of all these splendid piles and streets of palaces not one stone shall be left upon another ! " Is that treason ? No ; it is prophecy. It was even so Christ spoke when He warned Jerusalem that she was neglecting the things that were for her peace, and would be left desolate for ever. We may well have ceased to believe in the second advent of Christ with any ardent hope, for who would not fear if Pie were to come? Who could dare to say, "Behold, Lord, here is Thy Kingdom : take Thine own." If He were here would He not again enter the temples, and overturn the money-tables, and seize the silver chalices, and tell us that our best way of remembering His passion would be to sell all that we had and give to the poor ? Nay, if He came what Church is there fit to receive Him : and is there not but too much truth in the savage saying of Carlyle, that if Jesus returned a benevolent peer or two might invite Him to dinner, but that in a year or so we should try Him at the Old Bailey, and execute Him without fail? No ; we are not ready for Christ; the best of us must needs say, '* Spare us yet another year," not "Even so, come, Lord Jesus." But, evil as we are and weak, we will not give up this hope of a perfected earth. We will remember that great saying of Luther's : " We tell our Lord plainly that if He will have His Church He must look after it Himself. We cannot sustain it, and if ■n t- ..I ) I I ! THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 177 we [im the Ither we could we sliould become the proudest asses under heaven." We do not <,'o this war at our own charges. We have the Hvin<,' Clu'ist with us : all that we have to do is not to resist Ilis incarnation in and throuf,'h us. If we believe in Him we cannot be pessimists. Pessimism is a disease of shallow minds, which attacks mainly the less forceful and efhcient natures among us ; the wider and deeper natures have too much vitality to succumb. Despair is a disease : the sane and sound nature must needs be hopeful. A little thought, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous thing ; a little more thought will often take us out of the storm-belt into the far-reaching sunlight. The very fact that these problems do move men intensely, that it is possible to preach about them, that we are v/illing to hear honest con- demnation of ourselves, honest exposure of the errors of ecclesiasticism and civilisation alike, is in itself a proof that at heart we are still sound. There never was a time when the person of Christ attracted so much attention as now. There never was a time when the Christian conscience was so sensitive to the social problem as now. May I not also add, when I remember all our great philanthropies, our hospitals, refuges, and homes, our great social missions, our University settlements in great cities, our hosts of heroic workers of whose work one hears nothing until the earth closes over them — there never was a time whfaj the spirit of Jesus was so power- fully moulding the ^\'orld as now. If there is any principle of fair] /ess between rich and poor, if any 12 \^. y IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) \ {./ y. .7<^' i &• ^ 1.0 I.I 11.25 Mi, 1 2^ 1 2.5 m 1.4 11.6 V] <^ n ^i ^ '^ y Hiotographic Sciences Corporation 'li <• 'SST MAIN STRICT WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716) 873-4503 iV iV K \. ■^ o « 6^ ^ •^^ i^^^n i/i .^o \ t li / p i \i i 11 178 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. rigfht of labour has been conceded, it is the work of Him who was called the Carpenter's Son ; if brother- hood has become anything more than a word and an aspiration, it is the Church of the democratic Christ alone that has given even the most transient and imperfect expression of the fact. And if we reproach ourselves, and are keen to see where Churches are unlike Christ, and so-called Christian civilisation a burlesque on His scheme of life, it is because we have been increasingly enlightened as to what Christ demands of us, and increasingly anxious to do His will. These are the only two real d uties for us to per- form : the first is, not to resist the incarnation of Christ in us by any insincerity or selfishness, for if Christ lives in us His kingdom must be set up through us. The second is, to trust Him, to keep thelight of a great Hope burning, to believe that His will is being done, that He is still working in the world, that He must conquer, that every doubt is really bring- ing us nearer in the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. When I have done all I can then I take refuge in Luther's daring saying. I believe that Christ knows how to do His own work, and is with us always, even to the end of the world. More than once in those long nights I spent on the Atlantic I went on deck when all was still, and felt how insignificant a thing was man, in all that lonely immensity of sea and sky. There was no sound save the cry of the wind among the spars, the throb of the great engines, the sound of the many waters rushing round the vessel's keel. I felt the THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 17» Lore the and bbat no tho lanjr the mystery of life ; I was conscious of " the whisper and moan and wonder and diapason of the sea." And then out of the stillness there came a voice, clear and ringing — the voice of the man on the look- out — cr3ang to the night, " AlVs well, and the lights burn bright ! AlVs well, and the lights burn bright!^* How did I know all was well ? What knew I of the forces that were bridled in the mysterious throbbing heart of those unceasing engines, of the peril that glared on me in the breaking wave, or lay hidden in the dark cloud that lay along the horizon ? I knew nothing ; but the voice went sounding on over the sea : " AlVs well, and the lie /its burn bright!'' And the wind carried it cvvay across the waters, and it palpitated round the world, and it went up soaring and trembling, in ever fainter reverberations, among the stars. So I stand for a little while amid great forces of which I know little ; but I am not alone in the empty night. The world moves on to some appointed goal, though by what paths I know not ; it has its Steersman, and it will arrive. And, amid the loneliness and mystery, the peril and uncertainty, I have learned to hear a Voice that cries, ''All's well !" and tells me why all is well : it is the Voice of Christ saying, " Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world." ff (l\ ; : H II: 4 I For as the lightning cometh out of the East, and shineth even unto^ the West ; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be. For where- soever the carcase is, there will the eagles he gathered together — Matt. xxiv. 27, 28. Times which have ceased to believe in God and in immortality may continue illogically to utter the holy words" pi-ogress" and "duty"; hut they have deprived the first of its basis, and the second of its sanction. — Mazzini. / shall always respect war hereafter. The waste of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Life, Eternal Law, reconstructing and upholding sodefy.— Emerson. 1 i ' I kit Jir M; / / • if IX. NATIONAL BIGHTEOUSNESS. WhexN we speak of progress, we must ask, Whither? When we speak of duty, we ask, To whom or what ? Progress must have a goal. Duty must have a source. There is a progress which is progress back- ward ; or, if we dismiss the antithesis, is progress in a circle, travelling along a road which seem^'s to go forward, but in reality is the beaten track along which the innumerable empires of the past have marched to ruin. There is only one real progress— Godward ; there is only one direction in which we can soar— upward ; there is only one duty laid on any man— the duty of righteousness. When these principles are lost individuals and nations alike perish. They present the spectacle of a moral corruption, waited on by an inevitable retribution. In this saying of Christ's we have two illustrations of these truths, each striking and even terrific. Christ is picturing the dissolution of society, the break up of old forms of life and government, the retributions of iniquity. There will come a time. He says, of infinite disquiet, suspense, fear ; of wild i r I' ' i # 'II i- ■ I" 184 NA TIONAL RICH TRO US NESS. I 1 mj i i }} questionings and mocking answers, the firmament of life full of confusion before a storm, as the sky is piled up with huge impending clouds before a tempest breaks. In other words, there is a day of judg- ment at hand, and its symbols are the lightning and the vulture : " For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles or vultures be gathered together." One of these illustrations is familiar, one un- familiar. Let us look at them. We all have occasion from time to time to know what the lightning is that cometh out of the East and shineth even unto the West. A.fter many days of heat and sunshine there comes a brooding pause in nature. Suddenly the singing of birds is hushed in the woods, and in the intense silence the troubled whispering of tne leaves falls upon the ear with an ominous distinctness. Slowly the wings of the storm unfold, and above us huge mountains of cloud sail along, darkening all the world as they go. The air grows thick and dense, and the earth seems to cower in suspense, as before the blow of some invisible assailant. Then at last the silence is broken by the tremendous artillery of heaven. The storm breaks "like a whole sea o'erhead"; height replies to height, and the foundations of the world seem shaken. Upon those vast cloud-towers an awful light burns, and their edges flame with a blinding fire. For a little while the whole world seems given over to warfare, turbulence, confusion ; then, suddenly as it began, the rain ceases, the lightning dies away in fitful splendours, and the sudden singing of a blackbird in the hedge-row tells us that the hour of terror is over, the storm has passed. That is a scene we have all witnessed ; and what is its meaning ? The veriest child can answer us that the lightning is one of the great sanitary officers of nature. When the air grows thick and turbid, and long heat and drought infect the atmosphere with corruption, God sends His thunder out to sweep the world clean, and His lightning to destroy that which is a menace in the health of men. The lightning purges the atmosphere, and restores to it those qualities of purity and vitality which it had lost. Where the carcase is, where pollution and corruption lurk, there comes the hghtning, the swift judgment of God, a terrible but wholesome force, the benefi- cence of the Almighty manifested in flames of judgment. Look at the other illustration, familiar enough ta an Oriental, strange only to us. In the long march er the desert some man or some animal falls, and the dead body lies festermg in the sun. The sky is absolutely cloudless ; for weary mile on mile there stretches a profound solitude. But scarcely have ten minutes passed over that dead body when a small black speck is seen on the infinite blue of the horizon. From afar the vulture, hunting his prey through the pathless fields of heaven, has scented corruption, and with an unerring instinct has dis- covered it. Unseen himself, at some immeasurable height in the firmament, he has seen all that has ^ 1 I T ■i I 'I 186 A'/l riONA I. RIGH TEOUSXESS. J ( \ \ ll'i happened, and drops like an arrow on his prey. He is the sentinel of an army, and in a few moments the heaven is darkened with the rush of wings, and his brethren join him in the dreadful feast. How it is done we know not ; it is one of the standing miracles of Nature. But we know that it always happens with the precision of a great law, and if you pass that way upon the morrow nothing is left but a few white bones bleaching in the fierce sun of the desert. The vultures or the eagles have done their work, and no trace of corruption is left. So, says Jesus Christ, it is in the moral world. At a certain stage of decay destruction becomes inevitable. There is a law whirVi works perfectly — one had almost said auto- ra lly — against every species of impurity ; and 8^ . ds the unthinkable rapidity of the lightning, unerring as the flight and instinct of the vulture, the messengers of vengeance fix upon moral decay. It is the first duty of God to keep His world clean, and the blame and vengeance which sweep away cor- ruption are in reality beneficent forces, and the evidence of God's fatherly thoughtfulness for His creatures. We, who fear the lightning and do not care to think of the dreadful work of the vulture, are apt to regard them as hateful accidents in what we are pleased to call " the beneficent order " of Nature. But they are not so ; they are proofs of the bene- ficence ; they are visible expressions of God's good government, the law of which is that where the air is thick the thunderstorm bursts, where the carcase is there the eagles are gathered together. 1 j\'A TIOXAl. RIGHTEOUSNESS. 187 Now this passage affords us an insight into the great laws of God's government and judgment. Let us see what these laws are, and what are our errors in relation to them. First of all, the commonest form of human error is to think of such judgments as though they were controlled by no law at all, or, what is worse, to invent mean theories of law to suit our imperfect understanding of the facts. Between calamity and judgment there is a wide difference, but one which we are often quite in- capable of discerning. Thus the Jews took the fact of blindness as an evidence of sin, and reckoned the men upon whom the tower of Siloam fell as sinners above all men. It is so that so many still interpret the solemn calamities of life, as the editor of a cer- tain irreligious " religious journal " did, when he explained that the Tay Bridge disaster was God's visible condemnation on the sin of Sunday travelling. When we read such blasphemies we cannot but rejoice that the thunderbolts and fiery arrows of judgment are not entrusted to the cruel hands of men — and religious fanatics are ever the cruellest of men — but to the wise hands of Him who alone sees where immedicable corruption is, and destroys nothing that is worth saving. But our errors about God's judgments are not only in our misreading of their method, but also of their essential nature. What, for example, is more common than to think of God's government as arbitrary and capricious ? For how many cen- V • I I % 188 NA TJONA L RICH TliOUSMESS. i ' Ij h turies has not the world cowered under the fearful gloom of a theology which asserts that God elects whom He will and rejects whom He pleases with mere tyrannical caprice. "Who, as it pleases best Thyscl', Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell, A' for Thy glory. And not for any guid or ill They've done afore Thee. When men get to think of God in that way two things always happen — iirst, they never think of God as loving, but as tyrannical ; and, secondly, human self-complacency is sure to lead many of the most v/orthless of men to judge themselves as the elected, and to apply God's judgments with the narrowest fanaticism to their personal antagonists and enemies. That is one of the sure effects of the doctrine of ^.redestination, as it has been preached. Men have made God the patron of their evil passions, their prejudices, their envy, and their vanity ; and in reading the sorrowful mystery of earth, they have arrogated to themselves something of the omniscience of the Almighty. And the result has been that they have had no accurate con- ception of what God's judgment means, but have habitually thought of it as arbitrary and capricious, and have sought to conciliate Him with vain sacrifice and formal duty. We have feared Him for His power, and not served Him for love of His law ; we have obeyed Him as slaves, and not done His will as children. And then when His judgments NA Til )NA L RIGHTEO USSESS. I8y have broken on the world, we have not been able to understand them, and still less to interpret them to others. We have spoken of them as the dark ways of God and the secrets of the Almiglity, not with any real understanding of those profound phrases, but as though tliere could be the darkness of unrighteousness in Him who is the Light and Life of the universe. To those who ■ ive assailed us and our theology with not unnatural .ncredulity, we have had no reply save the stolid non j^ossumus of an unreasoning fanaticism. When thyy liave cried, in t^nir despair, that it is impossible to believe in a God of caprice, we have not seen that the God of the Bible is never capricious, because we have con- sistently ignored those revelatio'.is of God which declare Him to have no variableness, neither shadow of turning, but always to be found acting within the sphere of invariable and righteous law. The worst result of our narrow interpretation of God's judg- ments is not so much that we have injured our- selves, but that we have injured others ; for the infidelity of the world is the direct outcome of the theology of the churches. For, next to the great question, Is there a God at all ? the supreme question for every human creature is. What sort of God is He, and does He reign ? To that question the reply of the noblest souls has always been, "The Lord reigns, let the earth be glad ! " That is to say, the nature of God is such that it should be a gladness to the earth to know that He reigns. He is the centre of all authority, VI « r 1J>0 NA TIONA L RIGHTEO US NESS. t- H l^ M i ' and He is righteous : " Tlie soul of the universe is lust." Who could live in a world that was governed by no fixed laws ? What sort of a world would that be where caprice ruled everything, where the seasons came as they liked, and the day dawned as it chose, and the tides followed no intelligible law? Yet that is the sort of moral world which many people imagine they inhabit. They think of God as plastic to th*' most foolish of human appeals, as a sort of throned paternal amiability, and they act — to quote one of our most brilliant commentators — " as though a fool were on the throne of the universe." We could not be glad that such a God as that reigned. It would be no joy to the earth to be governed by such a being. Nor does such a God reign, and the first thing we have to record about God is that He works within the realm of unalterable and righteous laws. We may sing, if we will, for it is true — There's a widencss in God's mercy Like th(! wideness of the sea, but we must also add — There's a kindness in His justice Which is more than liberty. And this is the meaning of Christ, that God is neither arbitrary nor capricious in His love or in His judgments ; both move within an intelligible sphere, both have a clearly-discerned orbit, and the law of the judgment is, that " Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together." Here, then, is the first truth which illumines this 18, liis saying of Christ's : that judgraeni is the sure result of corruption, corruption the sure precursor of judg- ment, and there is no arbitrary or capricious element in the calculation. The vultures do not gather where there is no carcase ; the lightning does not scatter its winged fire where there are no elements of foul- ness to be burned up. The more we know of nature, the more wonderful and complete does her orderliness appear. Why, there is not a leaf amid the million leaves of the forest that dances in the sunny breeze, not a bird that pours out its solitary music, not a grass-blade that clothes the liills and raises its tiny column of green life out of the warm earth that in not fulfilling all the time some law in the perfect ordev of nature. It is in vain that we seek in nature for the arbitrary or capricious element ; the humblest life has some mission, some particular function to fulfil, some special work to do. Even v/here we find seemingly useless beauty, a closer inspection always proves that the very beauty itself is the servant of some concealed use, and the output of some hidden law. In our blindness we often mistake these meanings of nature, and then nature punishes us. Thus, it is said that some time ago the people of the Riviera in their passion for gain thought the swallow useless, and when the weary birds arrived from thoir long flight over the sea, thev were met with an electric discharge in the wires on which they alighted, and were slain by thousands for the service of feminine fashion inParis. But the wise swallows soon discovered the trick, and ceased to come, and then I 192 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS % the people of the Riviera would gladly have given thousands of pounds to bring them back again, because they discovered too late that their vineyards were devastated by myriads of insects which it was the mission of the swallow to destroy. Be sure of it, wherever you find a fact in nature, behind that fact there is a law. And, says Jesus Christ, it is even so in the moral world. There are certain laws, in- variable as the rising of the sun, inevitable as the flowing of the tide, which may be ignored, but cannot be evaded, and which sooner or later make their presence felt in every human life. When a pestilent gloom hangs over the world, then the lightnings waken, and go forth upon their roads of flame ; when the laws of health are ignored, then the plague calls together his grisly armies and camps in the abodes of men ; when nations grow emasculated with luxury and drunken with pride, then war marshals his banners and calls on death and destruction to lead on their hosts to slaughter : for " where the carcase is, there the eagles gather together." And there is nothing wanton in it; it is the action of a law which is in itself beneficent ; and when the carcase is swept away, and once more the pure winds blow across an untainted earth, we caii learn to say of God's judgments as Wordsworth said of duty : Stern lawgiver, yet Thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace ; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon Thy face. NA TIONAL RIGHTEO US NESS. 193 Flowers laugh before Thee in their beds, And fragrance in Thy footing treads, Thou dost preserve the stars from «f rong. And the most ancient heavens through Thee are fresh and strong. Or we may put the same truth in another way. If we ask, What is the order of judgment which •Christ reveals to us ? — the answer is, that righ.eous- ness is sure of Divine help, unrighteousness is secure of retribution. The Son of Man comes, suddenly, terribly, as the captain and avenger of the righteous; \7ith Him fly the war-eagles and the vultures for the destruction of wickedness. Amid the noise of thunders that shake the world, of iron wings and cruel eyes which darken and terrify it, the Son of Man comes, and by Him the world is judged. It is a judgment which goes on every day. It is not the long-deferred anger of the Son, revealing itself in this or that great consummating act of justice. The Judgment-day is that which " was, and is, and is to come." It was yesterday, it is to-day, it will be to-morrow. Its trumpets peal with every dawn. The everlasting doors are daily lifted up, that the King of Glory may ride forth to judge the nations and the people with equity. The sheep and the goats are already separated, and every sunset is the seal of destinies. For every sunset marks the completion of some slow- working corruption, and overhears "' the voice of that man in the twilight, like a late bird chirruping, * Soul, take thine ease, eat, drink, •and be merry,' " who knows not that " he is singing his death-song, and that he will come no more to 13 194 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. *li I ■ the haunts where he has worn out and expended the Hfe of his spirit." We are told to-day that the maintenance of life is a more complex thing than many of us suppose, depending on the fulfilment of many conditions, and that every breath we hreatbe is virtually a victory over the forces of destruction which surround us. We are like men who are safe only as long as we move ; when our active vigilance ceases death instantly drags us down to the dark chambers of corruption. We must maintain ourselves in a certain physical state for the air we breathe to invigorate us, for the same air which is life to the living is the force that works disejise in the sickly and putrefaction in the dead. To the healthy man the world is full of the joy of life, to the sickly man of the peril of death. So Christ's teaching is that all the forces of the universe are upon the side of the good man, and against the bad man. To the strong traveller who pushes his way over desert and mountain the vulture is no terror, the eagle is no foe. He looks up, and sees the great golden wings of the eagle of the mountains, like a burnished shield flashing m the sun, and be rejoices in the vision of his strength and beauty. He sees the black speck which he knows is the hover- ing vulture, but he knows that he is his friend, who clears away putridity from his patliway, and makes it safe for him to travel where many have perished. He watches the gathering storm, and knows that \ oh the lightning comes the rain which will make his path to-morrow fresh and fragrant, and the It So the his no iins, Lhe He bver- Iwho lakes Ihed. I that lake the NA TIONA L RIG 1 1 TEO US NESS. 195 V awful rolling of the thunder is the voice of a friend and helper. Thus the force which is terror to the wicked is salvation to the righteous. The pillar is darkness to these, but light to those, llighteousness need not fear the vulture ; the vulture has no power against the living ; it is only where the carcass is that the eagles gather together. And now let us ask, Are these principles real ? Can we indeed distinguish them ? Is not the world after all a mere unintelligible puzzle? What evidence have we of this just and discriminating force of judgment of which Christ speaks? Let us see if it be not true in relation to physical righteousness. It is not without profound meaning that the words holiness and health spring from the same root, and have a similarity of significance. The holy man is he who has absolute health of nind and soul and body. He has full control of himself ; his desires are temperate, his passions are held in leash, he uses life with just measurement and sobriety, and the consequence is that for him the joys of life last long, and the vigour of life is preserved unto old age. But let a man give himself over to sins of impurity or appetite, and the record is soon graven on the body in weakness, suffering, decay. It is no fanatic fancy, it is the solemn verdict of universal experience that the wicked man does not live out half his days. Notable exceptions there are and may be, but that is the rule, and it is beyond question. Tlie vital forces of life are wasted in pursuit of pleasure, and the oil in the lamp of life burns down in premature dark- er • t 196 NA riONA L RIGHTEOUSNESS. w ill' /;< I ! n* ■'■; 'i h \ ness. The vultures of retribution scent from afar the odour of moral corruption, for the carcass is there, the corrupt framework of a man who is dead in trespasses and sin, from whom the living spirit which makes a man a nobler and divine creature has already departed. We know that this is so. Already over some of us, so high we cannot see him, but there nevertheless, silent, steady, vigilant, the bird of death hovers, and, unless the process of corruption is stayed by the miracle of God's grace, will presently drop on us like a bolt out of the blue, and the judgment of God will consume us. There is no chance in the calculation ; it is the working of inevit- able law, that where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered ; and the vulture is simply the winged judgment of God that waits on moral putrefaction. Or look at the working of the law among nations, for it is of a nation that Christ speaks. There have been two tremendous instances in our own times, enacted in all their tragic warning under our own eyes. In the Southern States of America, a quarter of a century ago, slavery was fast destroying the national conscience, and the open sore of its defile- ment was poisoning the world. To the unthinking there was no visible sign of decay or retribution ; everything witnessed to an " unexampled prosperity." The blue sky had no thunder-cloud hanging on its edges, and in its cerulean splendour few noticed the solitary black spot, a mere moveless speck in the wide expanse of sunlight. But there were prophetic ->'t 'I A'A TIONAL RIGHTED USNESS. 107 eyes in the North that recofifnised the siptn.and knew that it was the vulture poised in watchful patience above a gatherin<:][ decay. In vain the warning was given ; in vain the silver trumpet of Channing's eloquence and the warning note of Lowell's and Longfellow's and Whittier's poetry rang in the ears of a heedless nation. Thexj recognised the deep abiding law of God, that where the carcass is, there the vultures gather together. Then, at last, the hour came when the vulture received the mysterious signal which sent him swooping upon his prey, and before the righteous anger of a regenerated people the pollution of slavery was swept away for ever. Even yet more striking is the case of France under the last Empire. Every one in those days knew that Paris had become the moral plague-spot of Europe. Every one knew that the " Goddess of Lubricity," as Matthew Arnold phrased it, had there set up her court, and that the leprosy of an un- restrained lasciviousness was eating into the very bone and sinew of the people. But few saw the vul- ture poised in the cloudless heaven, waiting for his hour. France never seemed stronger, her fame was never more brilliant, her power never more feared, than in the hour when the cry rose in the streets of Paris, a Berlin ! The judgments of God on corrupt nations had been wholly forgotten or ignored, and no one supposed it possible that within a few months a nation boasting the strongest armaments of Europe could be crushed into utter suppliance. Who thought of it, or believed it, when the hosts of Napoleon ^ -•'-«■«.■ -*■.-. 198 NA TIONAL RIGHTED USNESS. t: & \\ 'i ! 1 It thronged out of Paris for the Bhine? Who prophesied it when the first telegram came with its flourish about the baptism of fire at Saarbruck ? But, as the days wore on, there could no longer be any doubt that the vultures were gathering to their work. Corruption was there : a rotten court, a rotten capital, a rotten army ; a mass of hideous disease which could no longer be hidden or healed. In a single day the Empire fell. The vulture rose glutted from his feast — it had passed away. We see it all now. We know now what it meant. Even the most careless and least serious of historians is con- strained to admit it. Once more the iron wheels of God's judgment chariots had rolled through the natioiis, the voice of His thunder was heard, and the earth trembled, His righteousness was vindi- cated, and where the carcass was, there were the eagles gathered together. Nor does it in the least weaken the lesson to reply that in such judgments the innocent suffer with the guilty. That is altogether inevitable. Nothing in my visit to the States struck me with so profound a pathos as those vast national cemeteries, where often thousands lie buried, without a name, unknown but never unforgotten, the sacrifices of a nation on the altars of liberty and righteousness. If there were, indeed, no after-world, if this life were all we had, how irreparably cruel and unjust all this would appear. What wrong had these done that they should be thrust out of the sunlight into unrecorded graves ? But, just because this hfe is not everything, NA riONAL RIGH TEO USNESS. 199 we may surely believe that God has great compensa- tions hereafter for those who suffer innocently in the earthly punishments of guilt. We may say with Lowell — Abstract war is horrid, I sitjju to that witli all my heart ; but must we not also recollect that Civilisation does get forrid, Sometimes iipon a powder-cart ? War is the price of progress, the price of liberty, of commerce, of nationality. Shall we not be some- times content to pay the same price for purity, for faith, for righteousness, for virtue? War is the solemn martyrdom of nations. It is, on a vast scale, what personal martyrdom is on a small s -ale. These thousands who perish unnamed and unregarded, " in one red burial blent," are surely, then, among those who lose their life that they may save it. They are the nameless martyrs out of whose agony the heahng of the world comes, and they will not be forgotten when God awards the palm, unconscious as they may have been of anything great or splendid in their sacrifice. But it is of more importance to recollect how such lessons apply to our own national life. It is so easy to watch the judgments of God upon others, as men may watch a distant thunderstorm with an almost comfortable delight in its aesthetic grandeur, and to forget that lightning travels from the east unto the west, aud is no respecter of persons or nationalities. I sometimes think that there are signs that we, too, I rW »r . ( a 200 NA TIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. i U }\ in England are growing? ripe for the jiidpments of God upon corruption. There are vices which are eating our life out, as they have the life of the nations which have gone before us. Think of the frantic shamelessness of the race for wealth, the avarice of commerce, the cruelties of competition, the wide-spread profligacy and drunkenness ; our heedlessness to the cry of national suffering, our complacent pride in the presence of the rising anger of the underpaid and famished drudges of society, the many blots upon our social life and our national policies, and say if there be no signs of tribulation, no need to scan the sky anxiously to see if the firEt sentinel vulture be not already posted there? I know not : I pray that it may not be so. But this I know, that for us, as for every people since the world began, corruption is the sure precursor of re- tribution. Neither historic fame nor present wealth can save us. When the love of righteousness ceases to inspire us, when public virtue perishes, and the old pious fear of God, and the old patriotic sense of duty are exchanged for the unrestrained selfish- ness of individualism, then nothing can save us from the vulture. Already the vindictive lightning writes its fiery scroll of warning on the heavens, and happy shall we be if we obey the signal, and seek healing before decay is complete, and remedy impossible. It is by the younger citizens of all great Christian peoples that these lessons most need to be learned. The future of the nation, of the Church, of the h NA TIONA I. Rh :// TE VSNKSS. J(H US world is with you. You must needs 1)6 the mer- chants, the writers, the senators of the future. The battle of life sweeps on, and the devastation of the years will soon leave you in the forefront of the fight. You will have to face awful diapason of the guns, and he carried onward with the rush of battle ; and ths banners that fall from the tired hands of to-day, it must be yours to bear on into the illimitable To-morrow. What sort of world are you going to make of that world of To-morrow ? When Quebec was to be taken the War Office called its generals one by one and asked them what they thouglit of the project. The oldest said it was impossible. The middle-aged said it was so difficult as to be nearly impossible. All declined the task, until they came to Wolfe, the youngest ireneral of all. He said, " I will do it, or die in the attempt " — and he did both. There spoke the voice of youth, and it is to the young that we must look for the enthusiasm, the moral valour, the heart of daring that is to redeem the future. But if you are to be the saviours of the future you must first ground yourself on the belief that God reigns, that God is righteous, that the only greatness of men or nations is righteousness. This was the soul of the old Puritanism, and this must be the animatingpulse of the new. What men this solemn, awe-inspiring sense of the righteousness of God pro- duced in the men who laid the beams of empire in New England ! What an England, great and strong, indeed, sprang up at the touch of this profound faith in the righteousness of God when Cromwell was its '1 li- 2(J2 N/. TJONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. ruler ! And it is by this, and this alone, that any kingdom of the saints can thrive. There "will be no fibre in your morality, no continuity in your reforms, no permanence in your great movements, unless this is behind and at the root of all. Go out, and as with the Trumpets of the Dawn proclaim the new Puritan- ism ; declare that no moral leper shall legislate for Christian peoples ; declare that what is morally wrong cannot be politically right ; declare an equal punishment for unchastity in man and woman alike ; declare your ceaseless crusade against drunkenness and profligacy and gambling, and all the vices that spring from an immoral use of money, and live to build up the Greater Britain of the greater soul, the New World of the nobler life ; but remember that first of all and chief must come this awful vision of God's law, this awe-inspiring sense of God's righteousness. Get that, and you have got the vision that made martyrs strong and reformers confident. One thing, at least, the meanest youth can do for the world — he can die for it. One thing the humblest may accomplish — he may live a life of faith in the Son of God, and act " ever in the great Taskmaster's eye." You can fear God aud depart from evil ; you can make the force of a noble character felt by all who know you ; and in doing that you will have done something to build up a righteous nation. So nigh is gi'andeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, " Thou must ! " The youth replies, " I can ! " X/l 771 )A'A /. A7( ,7/ 77': O C/SA'7:SS. 203 'I I Let us be glad, then, that there is a will higher than ours at work in the world. There is a Power mightier than armies, and more omnipotent than kings, before which all the thrones of earth and all its empires are but the playthings of a child. There is a force that streams round us and through us, which shapes the world, and overrules its vast designs, confederacies, and purposes. When Robert- son of Irvine was once travelling in the Tyrol, he had for comrade a sceptic, and as they climbed higher into the black mouth of the mountains, dis- cussing as they went, a sudden storm broke, and the live lightning leapt from crag to crag, and the thunder called like a voice from pinnacle to pinnacle of torn rock and gleaming ice-peak. "Hark!" cried Robertson, "cannot you hear what it says? It says, *I AM, that I AM, yea. Thou art ! And, ' says Robertson, as he narrates the incident, " again the thunder pealed along the cliffs, as if God called ' I AM, that I AM,' and the reverberations of the dis- tant mountains to the Brenner and the Bernina answered, ' Yea, Thou art ! '" If we care to listen that voice reaches each of us out of the events of history, and the common order of the daily life. It rebukes the shallow sentimentalism which discerns only the patience of God and not His righteousness, which exalts His love, but says nothing of His justice. There is no such separation of qualities possible in God. His judgments are His beneficences. His thunder clears the pathway for His sunlight, and the lightning and the light are one. If it be of the ' t 204 NA TIONA L RIGHTEO US NESS. Lord's mercy that we are not consumed, it is equally of the Lord's mercy that evil is perpetually con- sumed. If goodness deserves to live, it is the plainest of corollaries that evil deserves to die. If there be no judgment of evil, neither can there be any coronation of good, for goodness can only exist by the extirpation of evil. And if we are not willing to acquiesce in the destruction of evil, it is because we do not love good with any true virility or depth of passion. When we love good with all our hearts we shall realise what these truths mean ; we shall learn to praise God even for His judgments, and from the lips that are pale with the terror of the tempest, not less than from the lips that laugh and sing with the innocent joy of the sunlight, there will rise the perpetual litany: "We praise Thee, God, we acknowledge Thee to be our Lord ! " i'H Blessed art thou among women. — Luke i. lis. And they worshipped Him.— Matthew ii, 11. This, then, I believe to be — will you not admit it to be ? — woman's true place a7id power. , . . She must be cnduringly, incoj"ruptibly good. Instinctively, infallibly wise — ivise, not for self-development, but for self- renunciation ; wise, not with the narroivness of insolent and loveless pride, but vnth the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service — the true changefulness of woman. — John Ruskin. II' I )• li hii U V i THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. K *' And they worshipped Him," not her ; the infant, not the mother ; and thus the supreme note of tlie Gospels is struck. Some irapartation of Divine wisdom, some gleam of Divine insight guided these men to the true object of worship. We may be sure that they were not insensible to the appealing pathos of the scene. It was a scene which poets have de- scribed and great painters have painted over and over again, with every grace and force of human art and eloquence. Motherhood is always beautiful ; but here it found its apotheosis. Here was the woman who had become the mother of the world's Hope, who had given birth to the world's Redeemer. Pale with that pain of birth, she lay there in the humble lodging, and on her bosom slept tlie uncon- scious Child. Up to this point she had been the sacrifice ; she had borne the shame and agony for the healing of the world. But from the moment the Divine Child is born she recedes into silence and insignificance. It is He who is worshipped ; she who is forgotten. It is He who is to move onward in the gaze of the world ; she who is to stand aside in meek seclusion and silence of heart. For thirty years, at 208 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. ! ( J i' 'A h least, her Son is to pass His life beneath her eyes. All that she does for Him in this period finds no record. *' To live, to suffer, and to be forgotten ; that is woman's saga" says a great poet ; and that is the noble summary of Mary's life. We catch but faint glimpses of her during her Son's troubled ministry. She is at the cross, and at the first meeting of the disciples after the ascension, and then she disappears utterly from history. She has lived and suffered, and is forgotten. She has ful- filled the mission of woman's great renunciation. To-night* I speak to those who are filled with the first ardour and hope of youth, and I may seem to strike a wrong note when I speak of renunciation. To say so much seems to cast a shadow of dishonour on Mary and all womanhood. To be forgotten is not felt to be an enviable fate. Most of us are eager for applause, for recognition, for remembrance. It seems to us little less than an insult that he who has done or suffered much for others should pass into obscurity unrewarded and even unrecognised. But we have to rec<^!iect that most of the best work and the real heroism of the world is performed by quiet souls, to whom fame would seem an affront and publicity a sort of dishonour. How much did Mary do for her Child, of which all the world reaps the fruit to-day? Was it not her voice that first instructed Him in truth, and taught Him to teach others? In the hours of childish sickness and * This addross TPas delivered as the Matriculation Sermon of the Woman's College, Baltimore. 3h did reaps first teach i and rmoii of THE BLESSEDXESS OE irOMAXHOOD. 20J) trouble, whose hands but hers nursed tho Hope of the world? Well may Whittier pray for all mothers : Make her hands like the hands of Jesus, Blessing the little one ; Make her lips like the lips of Mary, Kissing her blessed Son. And how much of the strength of Christ's hfe came from that quiet home in Nazareth, where this most blessed of women moved like a sacred light, and shed a holy fragrance on the air ! She asked no higher sphere. To be the mother of the Christ was enough for her. To stand behind the scenes un- known, unapplauded, unseen, was all that she desired. And thus we learn that woman's work in the world is different from that of men ; her sphere is different, her spirit and temper are different ; and to estimate the life of Mary aright these things must be recollected. Now, to put the truth in this way may seem to teach the inherent inferiority of woman ; in reality it teaches nothing of the kind. The difference between man and woman is not a difference of degree, but of order. Woman does not and cannot emulate man in many departments of physical activity. It is not for her to lead armies, to guide fleets upon the ocean, or to stand in the more laborious ranks of toil upon the land. It is for her to share all the knowledge, all the wisdom, all the intellectual activities of the world. But essentially man is ever the worker and fighter, the bread- winner, tbe husband or band of the house, cement- 14 i/l !' 1,'i 210 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. ing its walls with the sweat of labour, and guarding it against the forces of dissolution which are with- out. The glory of a young man is his strength ; and in so far the pagan ideal of manhood has a truth to express and enforce. On that ground woman cannot challenge or displace man. For woman is not undevelopt man, But diverse ; could wo make lior as the man Sweet love were slain ; liis trnost bond is this, Not like to like, but like in difference. But difference does not imply inferiority. There are other qualities which go to the making of perfect human life besides strength, just as there are other qualities besides the untempered wealth of sunlight which make the spring-tide and the summer. Per- fect human life needs sweetness as well as strength, the element of tenderness as well as of force. Life is not all lived in the arena and the street, and behind the victories of the market-place lies the fact of the home. When a man steps out into the glare of public labour he is already what the home has made him. It is the eternal and inalienable heritage of woman to mould man ; to nurture his body into strength and his mind into soundness ; to equip him for the warfare of life and inspire him for its victories ; to breathe through him the wishes of her soul, and teach him how to gain the ideals which her purity reveals, her ambition craves, her love demands. The good woman by her intuitions reaches a realm of truth often denied to man in his most logical deductions, and then she becomes 11- OD. guarding re with- th ; and a truth woman IS. There f perfect L-e other sunhght r. Per- trength, Life is behind t of the glare of IS made itage of dy into uip him for its s of her which er love tuitions n in his )ecomes THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD 211 virtually the inspiration of man, and it is thus woman who makes the world. " The souls of little children," says one of the noblest women writers of our time, " are marvellously tender and delicate things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on them, and that is a mother's, or, at least, a woman's. There never was a great man who had not a great mother ; it is scp.rcely an exaggeration. The first six years of our life makes us ; all that is added later is veneer. The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have which they cannot take from us." It is a mistake to say that this is the only education, but, at least, is it not a great education ? What higher dignity can we conceive than the dignity of shaping in silence and patience the forces that mould and guide the world ? Can that sphere be called narrow from which such potent influences stream ? That which woman confers on man is moral light and sweetness — Till at the last she set herself to man Like perfect uiiisic unto nohle words. There is no strife for pre-eminence between them, no superiority or inferiority. The difference is of order, not degree, and that is what St. Paul means when he •says that " woman is the glory of the man." Now when we come to ask wherein the blessed- ness of Mary's womanhood consisted, the first answer is, in its exquisite purity. It is as the t \ 212 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOyFANHOOD. ■7 i-^i ).\ /'• ;' Virgin Mary she is spoken of in the creeds and remembered by the world. From the first moment when she appears upon the stage of action there is an affectinf]f simphcity, a dehcate, flower-Hke purity, which distinguishes her and makes her the queen of women ; and it is this conception which has sunk deepest into the minds of the great artists who have endeavoured to hmn those unknown features. There is not a single painter who has violated this tradi- tion. Mary always looks out upon us with the placid gaze of an untroubled purity, the grace of mingled innocence and sorrow, the charm of a soul undefiled and separate from sinners ; and in this she is the type of all that is highest in womanhood ; the crown and sum of what womanhood can be in its noblest development and most regal grace. We naturally ask, What is purity ? Purity is innocence, but something more than innocence ; it is modesty, but something more than modesty. It is the sacred fire which glows behind both, and illumines the whole nature. It is the Divine armour in which womanhood is defended ; it is the invisible raiment in which womanhood is clothed ; a sort of garment woven of the light, a luminous and intangible attire through which we see woman as in a mystic transfiguration. It was no vain allegory of the poet that the lion crouched before the maiden ; that there was something in that virginal purity and freshness which subdued the savage passion of his heart, and tamed the brute pulsations of his blood. Mean and gross things hate the presence of purity r !f OD. ieds anct moment there is 3 purity, queen of las sunk ho have ;. There is tradi- he placid miufijled mdefiled le is the le crown i noblest 'urity is ence ; it sty. It 3th, and armour invisible \ sort of Dus and an as in allegory maiden ; rity and >n of his is blood. f purity THE BLESSEDNESS OF IVOMANflOOD. 213 as base reptiles of the dust shrink dismayed before the sunlight ; and for various reasons, reasons largely based on temperament and education, purity is the crowning quality of womanhood. It is the bloom of human life which cleaves to woman longer than to man, and is sacredly preserved from rough winds by the providence of birth and the very order of human society. In woman man has always realised the ideal of purity, and her impurity is a shock to all that man holds dearest. Purity is, indeed, the weapon by which she masters man, and the pure woman is thus to him something angelic, the very pride and glory of the world. There is in the National Gallery of London a pic- ture which has always impressed me, and which has quickened and refreshed my imagination for many years. It is the picture of St. Helena receiving the vision of her martyrdom. She is asleep, and a most moving and exquisite tranquility fills the face, as with a gentle light. The heavy eyelids have faint purple sliadows round them, the full, eager lips are gently parted, the brow is smooth with the benedic- tion of repose, the pose of the figure is full of a pathetic languor ; and above her, seen through parted clouds, is the impending Cross. The whole secret of womanhood is in that noble figure ; for the purple shadows speak of suffering, the broad, calm brow of thought, the full lips of vigorous life, while the dress falling in its simple folds speaks of volun- tary poverty, the drooped, uuringed hand of re- nunciation, of work well done, of calm and quiet VI 214 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. ■;« .i\ El '. 'I I .! fct ■: / \ pnlses, of a lovable austerity. There is no tremu- lous prophetic aureole upon the brow, nor is one needed: we know at once this woman is a saint. We know at once what that deep langour means : it is the repose of one who works so unrestingly for others that when sleep comes it is a divine ex- haustion which draws the soul forth gently into starry visions. Yet it is no ethereal saint we see. There is a breadth about the figure, a suppleness and grace that speak loudly of a healthy life. The gladness of the sun has passed into that smiling face, and the freshness of the earth, and the glow of human hopes. But what we chiefly feel as we gaze is the vital force of purity which streams like a subtle magnetism from the figure. Base thoughts are not possible in the presence of this woman. If those eyelids lifted we know well what we should see : the clear, un- troubled gaze of a wise innocence, which would pierce into our souls, and shame us out of mean and evil passions. And it is thus that every woman should impress the world. It is the gift of every woman who is true to the innocent thoughts of girlhood to carry with her an atmosphere of purity which brings with it cleansing for the world. And thus the humblest woman may be a saint, enthroned within some sacred niche of the temple of humanity, and inspiring reverence for all thnt is good and true and beautiful, because she herself is reverent of purity, and truth, and goodness. And this very instinct of man which clothes woman with reverence, and makes her the ideal of virtue. OD. THE BLESSEDXESS OF lV0.\fAXH00n. 215 ) tremu- r is one a saint, eans : it ngly for /ine ex- to starry There is id grace .dness of and the n hopes, tal force ,gnetism ssible in is lifted ear, un- [ would ean and woman )f every ghts of ■ purity And ;hroned manity, ad true rent of woman virtue. confers on you an awful power. According as the ideal is high, so is the shock of disappointment wlien it is overthrown. When we find in you neither the meekness of faith nor the obedience of service ; when no serious purpose fills your life ; when life for you appears to be a thing of mean and trivial aims, a vain and restless search after amusement, full of wasted hours and idle hopes, then, whether you know it or not, you are inflicting an infinite damage on the world. Woman will always be reverenced as long as she deserves reverence. When men cease to re- verence women it will be because women have utterly destroyed their own claim to honour. You do that when you waste in dress and gossip a life given for sympathy and service. You lead the world, then, to believe that the old chivalrous dream of reverence for women was only a dream because there is nothing in you to merit reverence, and that saint- hood was the delusive fantasy of medisoval times, because you show how impotent you are to sanctify these modern times. This glory of purity, of purity which inspires reverence and wins blessedness, is the first glory of womanhood ; I pray you to preserve it. And re- member, even for the girl most delicately reared and sedulously defended that is not altogether an easy task in a day like ours. There is no cloistral seclu- sion in a land where liberty of printing is allowed. The basest secrets of life are betrayed to the gaze of the young and innocent in the daily Press, and the Press is no respecter of persons. And over and above all \ 210 TIIE nr.ESSEDAESS OF WOMANHOOD. this, there is a so-called literature of realism to-day — a realism of the sewer, which rakes the gutter for offal, and sees nothing but the base and hideous side of life and cares to paint nothing else, and that is a perpetual menace to female purity. It passes like an insidious disease across the thresholds of the most carefully-guarded houses, and finds its prey in boudoir and workroom alike. In a single hour it travels over the pure mind like a withering blast, and leaves barrenness where there was bloom, and exchanges springtide freshness for sterility. It strikes most fatally ut those in whom the imagination is most ardent and the intellect most curious. It is a de- stroying angel which haunts the schoolroom and the street ; it finds its most numerous victims among the most defenceless of the race — the ^'onng, the guile- less, the undefiled. I have seen books in women's hands which it were a shame to read and an offence to write. I have known, when I have seen such sights, that whatever qualities of intellect such a woman might possess, there was an ineradicable stain and taint upon her nature ; and I have lived long enough to know whai; the fruit of such reading is. Therefore, I pray you to remember that what no force can capture may be sapped from within. Remember that touching line of Landor's : Modesty who, when slie goes. Is gone for ever ; and remember that there is a modesty of the intellect as of the demeanour. The power of woman is ! M THE BLESSEDNESS OF IVOMANHOOD. IM departed when the freshness of her vir^'inal UKxlesty is destroyed, and henceforth the blessedness of woman is denied her. The second element in the blessed womanhood of Mary was her tenderness and meekness. We cannot doubt that the charm of that home at Nazareth was in the tenderness of Mary. We know that with His brethren Christ had little in common ; but between the Divine Son and the blessed mother there was a bond of perfect sympathy. She alone understood Ilim. There were an;4el presences, angel messages, and human prophecies, and the many significant signs of a Divine childhood which she pondered in her heart. It was not possible for a motlier to forget those marvellous occurrences which surrounded the birth of her Child. There was the link of a Divine secret between them, a secret which, no doubt, she imperfectly comprehended, but which would certainly colour her relationships to Him with a strange tenderness. And her meekness was conspicuously displayed on the very threshold of His ministry. When the hour had come for His first miracle, the hour had also come for the re- nunciation of her maternal rights in Him. Hence- forth He was the world's, not hers. He was the Son of Man, not the Son of Mary ; and the merely human bonds which bound Him to Nazareth were snapped, and snapped for ever. He knew that when He said, not with rude abruptness, as we often im- agine, but with a sigh of infinite love : " Woman, what have I to do with thee?" It was Christ's 218 TIfE ni.ESSEDNF.SS OF WOMANHOOD. I Hi ¥ 'I. ■ ,( \..'! farewell to the home. Henceforth He had no place to lay His head, and to that irreconcilable separation she assented with perfect meekness. She knew that His obedience to her was ended. In a moment the relations were reversed, and she obeyed Him. She assented without a murmur to this obliteration of her ri[,dits of motherhood, and it is the voice of an exquisite womanly meekness wliich says : '• Whatsoever He saith unto thee, do it." Tenderness and meekness — tlie claim of tender- ness you allow, do you resent the cliar^e of meek- ness? Does it seem a signal of inferiority to con- fess that the heritaj^e of woman is obedience and meekness ? Eecollect that these are the hi^diest and rarest of all Christian virtues. Eecollect that in intellectual pursuits humility has always been the note of all great minds. Kecollect that Ciirist did not praise power, but submissiveness ; and did not say, •' Blessed are the strong," but, " Blessed are the meek." Perhaps you do not understand the word, and therefore you resent it. You interpret it as sub- servience, whereas it means nothing of the kind. When I want to interpret meekness, I think of my mother, and of all that motherhood means. I see her taking no place in the restless publicities of life, but moving contentedly in the sphere of house- hold toil, with fingers that were often weary but rarely rested, and a spirit which recognised no drudgery in the service of life. I see her, not in- curious on the controversies of the hour, but turning from them to the contemplation of God, and re- iti • I' THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 21{> posing in meek reliance on His Word, while others doubted and deserted. I see the spectacle of the infinite considerateness of motherhood, and you have seen it too ; and what does it teach you if not thij^, that it is the obedience of woman to the instincts of her heart which makes her life a blosbodness, and the meekness of woman in her religious faith which keeps alive the pieties of life. The triumph of woman's obedience is the human home, whore daily tasks win neither wealth nor praise, and the value of her meekness is its capacity for faith. It was only a woman, I think, who could have written : — I ask Thocfor a thoiif^jlitful love, With constant wjitcliinj^ wise, To TiH'ct tlio j^lad with joyful sniilcs, And wii)(; tlie wcc^pin^ «'y<'s; And a, heart at h'iwuro from itself To feci and HynipathiHC. I would not have the restlesH will, Tiuit wanders to and fro, Seekinij; for soiui! ^reat thinjjj to do. Or Heeret tiling to know ; 1 woidd he treated as a tihild, And f^uided wh(jre 1 ^o. Oh, tliat is the very distillation of the purest spirit of Christianity; the very essence of the law of Christ. And it is for you to keep alive the fires of human piety. You do so when you teach the little children to lisp their prayers at night, and when you fill th(5 household with the serenity of your trust in the day of sorrow. You do so when you teach the world the value of daily self-sacrifices and denials, without V \J if r< ?M 220 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD, ui !. »i V 5 ' » r which children could not be reared nor the sanctity of the home maintained. You do so when you turn from the heated atmosphere of theological discussion to the place of prayer, or to the service of the sick, and vindicate thereby the power of faith and the God-likeness of human charity. That is the realm in which you move, or may move, with undisputed mastery. The name of Adam signified "red earth " ; the name of Eve signifies " the living one." And in the realm of faith man is still ** of the earth, earthy " — a questioning, halting creature ; but woman is the living one, with whom trust is the breath of life. We look to you to keep the faith. The first words of prayer that whisper in our ears of an eternal hope we hear from you ; the last hand that soothes the pain of dying men, and closes the eyelids of the dead, is evermore a woman's hand ; and when by your meekness you keep alive the piety of man, you do more for the world than those who found empires or explain philosophies ; you become the glory of the man, and you earn the supreme blessedness of womanhood. The third great quality of Mary was the quality of sile7it service, and this is the third element f iier blessedness. It is not enough to say that the glory of woman is that she is the helper of man. No great cause succeeds without woman. No nation can be great that does not reverence woman, and does not offer the freest scope and sphere for her influence to be felt ; and I confess that we, as Protestant Churches, have not yet recognised to the full the ', r THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 221 M power of service that is in woman. We have left it to Catholics to form sisterhoods of merciful visitation. "We, in our dread of Mariolatry, have forgotten the women who ministered to Jesus, and have ignored the presence of women in the Church. Not alto- gether, indeed ; we, too, have had our Dinah Morrises in the early days of Methodism ; we have to-day our Sisters of the People working in the slums of London ; and here and there we have had our Protestant St. Theresas, our Florence Nightin- gales, our Elizabeth Frys, our Sister Doras. I do not say that every one of you should go and do like- wise. This is not the lesson or the message of Mary's life. You cannot all find your mission in the slums, in the prison, in the hospital ; but I will tell you what you can do — you can attain the private saint- hood of self-denial and sympathy; you can find some sick sister to whom your visit would be sunlight ; some little child to be made cheerful with your love ; some obscure spot of earth to be brightened by your charity. You cannot row out against the darkness of the night, as Grace Darling did, to rescue the fliipwrecked ; but you may find next door to you bume forlorn soul, tossed in the wild storms of life, to succour and to save. You cannot find cloistral seel I ;ion, as the virgins of the early Church did, nor is it well you should ; but you can make the nurser}-- a cloister where the fruits of God ripen ; and the store, the school, the home, a place where the fragrance of holiness may be felt. Many of you will toil all your life for bread ; many 't i 222 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. %:. t ! of you will be condemned to something worse than that — the inactivity of a life which is removed from, the strenuous need for work. Some of you may never know what it is to have a home of your own, and life may seem to you to spell defeat. But whosoever you may be, whatsoever is your lot, you can ^3 blessed among women by your helpful sympathy ^reat causes, and your example of perfect and ompassionate purity. " They also serve who only stand and wait ! " Is that an in- ferior lot which teaches the great lesson of self- abnegation to a selfish world, and supplies the impulse of endeavour to those who toil, and of re- signation to those who suffer? Is not she who passes her life in household duties doing that which the mother of Christ was not ashamed to do ? Is not she who brightens childish eyes doing what He did who blessed the little children, and who Vt'as always ready to obey the voice that called Him to the suffering? Is the ministry of love nothing, nor the ministry of peace ? Oh, you have a great heritage ; a unique and noble glory is yours. It is yours to be the purifiers and ennoblers of human life, and this is the blessedness of woman. This, at least, is certain — that whatever rights yoa have Christianity has given you. The debt of woman to Jesus Christ is simply incalculable. It is He who has emancipated her from the tyrannies of human lust, and recognised the true domain of her powers and endowments. It is Christianity which has broken the yoke of unjust laws, and has rolled THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 223 away the stone from the sepulchre where woman- hood was entombed. It is from Christianity that all future emancipations of womanhood must come. And the return of womanhood to Christ has been always unstinted faith and love. She has broken the box of precious frankincense upon His head, and has washed His feet with tears. Have you done that? Have you recognised your Deliverer? Have you consecrated your sympathies to Him and to His service? You then become not only the glory of man, but the glory of the Man Christ Jesus ; for in your womanhood Christ is glorified, and through you He again reaches out His hands to the world in love and healing. These, then, are the great qualities of Mary which make her supremely blessed among women, and they are the qualities which make all womanhood blessed. Yet the wise men worshipped not her, but her Son. And why should they worship not Mary, but Jesus ? Because those very qualities are the qualities of Christ Himself. They were His blessedness as well as hers. If Christ had been only man, or if Christ had been only God, there might have been a need to supplement His qualities with the softer virtues of the Virgin ; but He was more than man and more than God — He was humanity. ^* In Him all fulness dwelt " ; the fulness of woman- hood as well as of manhood. It is impossible to study the life of Christ without feeling how entirely feminine He was as well as masculine. He was man in His courage. His contempt of peril, His ) * a'l i I ' ' t yiU . I. I I : I f .'It ' I A \ U I ) 1^ i i r ! 1 ^1 h 1 1 ! 224 7'HE /i/J':SSE/)NESS OF UV.]/.L\7/0()/). definiteness of idea, Tils public activity, His pas- sionate liatred of hypocrisy, His broad and luminous perception of thinj^s. But it was the womanliness of Christ we meet in Him who took strange children in His arms and blessed them, and we))t beside tlie grave, and sat at supper with the head of John upon His bosom. We camiot, alas ! conceive of a man as womanly without contempt, or of a woman as manly without disgust. We conceive of each as having virtues and qualities of their own ; but in Christ's nature these two sets of qualities were truly one. In Plim there is neither male nor female, bond nor free. No soldier had more of moral courage, no mother more of compassionate tenderness. He can defy Herod as " that fox " — there breathes the man ! He can wash His disciples' feet and bless the children — there acts the woman ! And all this He teaches usinllis oft-riiterated title, " The Son of jMan," by which He means the Son of humanity ; the con- sunnnate flower of the tree of human life, the exhi- bition of all tliat is manliest and womanlicst alike ; the one perfect nature which met the wants of all and embodied the highest virtues of all. And thus Mary in her purity, her meekness, and her service is but the reflection of a yet more perfect purity and meekness and service — the purity of Him whom no man could convict of sin ; the meekness of the Lamb of God ; the service of Him who gave Himself a sacrifice upon the cross for the world. Shakespeare speaks of a man's tears as " the mother in his eyes ; " so we may speak of Christ's tenderness as the mother I I I I iii I). is pas- iniiious jiliness liildren ide the lU upon a Mian man as uicli as but in re truly e, bond •af^e, no [ie can e man ! iliildren teaches an," by he con- lie cxlii- ahke ; of all d thus service pnrity whom of the himself sspeare eyes ; " n other Id . THE BLESSEDNESS OF \VO.\[ANHOOD. 225 in His heart — the motherhood of the world which lived tlicre in His infuiite compassion, as thouf,di, so to speak, Mary's nature were included in His, and reincarnated in His most womanly sympathy. But if we ask, Why, then, does a vast proportion of Christendom worship Mary to-day? the answer is very simple. It is because this womanly tenderness of Christ has been forgotten. Those little shrines which the traveller sees in Catholic countries ; those rude images and paintings of the mother and her child, before which the peasant lays his offering of mountain flowers as he goes to his work at dawn ; or those rapt Madonnas of the old masters before which half the world stands in admiration, and a great section of mankind in adoration still — oh, it is easy enough and cheap enough to despise them ! It is easy enough to laugh at a peasant laying ilowers before a tawdry doll, or bending his knees before a rude daub of a mother and a child ; but I do not laugh, because I see the idea for which this stands. That doll, that mother with the child, typifies to millions of lonely and troubled human suuls the secret of a Divine tenderness. The bruised heart wants no philosophies or ethics, it simply wants love, compassion, sympath}' ; and because the early Church made the fatal error of exalting Christ as Judge of the quick and dead, and forgetting Him as the tender human helper, the world turned to ^lary, the blessed mother, to fill the gap in tiieir conception of the Divine. When the Church forgot the Man who wept, and remembered only the Man who judged; 15 I II 'h jl!i. 220 T//£ BLESSEDNESS OF IVOMAXJIOOI). when the words of the (t()0(1 Shepherd were lost in the fierce music of the Dies Inr, and throuf^di the churches of Christendom the peal of anfjjry judf^nnent trumpets sounded, and in tlieir terrible reverbera- tions the appeals of the Son of Man were drowned, then the insatiable thirst of the human heart for tenderness led it to the vision of the mother of God, the womanly and pathetic figure of the most sorrow- ful and blessed among women. Tlie instinct was right, its direction was wrong. We acknowledge the instinct, and we give it the true direction when we proclaim the tenderness of Jesus. In Ilini, I say once more, all fulness dwells, and because He meets all the needs of this various humanity, to Him alone every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is both Man and God to the glory of the Father. Jesus is the True Vine, the Life indeed ; but not the less we are right in gathering from the Virgin's example such lessons as we may for the perfection and strengthening of character. We should indeed err if through fear of overhonouring the most blessed among women, we neglect to learn from her as we learn courage from the example oi Stephen, or peni- tence from the life of Peter. And what is it that this life of Mary most clearly teaches us ? It is the beauty of self-renunciating love, and that such a love is a source of blessedness indeed. We know of no marvels in her deatli but this, of no assumption into heaven which vies with her Son's in glory, of no power of intercession which is hers in the eternal i '!ill;fl i ,! II u ID. I lost in \v^\ the idf^nnent verbora- ,1'owned, leart for of God, sorrow- inct was ledge the when we 111, I say luse He anity, to y tongue ,he glory but not ) Virgin's erfection d indeed t blessed er as we or peni- is it that It is the ch a love ow of no )tion into y, of no eternal e THE lUJlSSEDXESS OE \V0}TAXH00n. 227 world that every other ransomed spirit does not shart , But we do recognise her simpHciLy, and modesty, and sweetness, the touching meekness and unselfishness of her life ; and for these things we honour her, and would fain liave her copied. The very essence of the signification of that life seems to lie in its humility ; that it made no claim to honour ; tliat it craved no remembrance ; tliat it was content to toil and be forgotten. And so the greatest Catholic writer of our times, in describing her death, has said : " It became Him who died for the world to die in the world's sight. It became the great Sacri- fice to be lifted up on high as a light that could not be hid. But she, the Lily of Eden, who had always lived oat of sight of man, fittingly did she die in ';he gard'v iu's shade amid the sweet flowers in which slio had lived. Her departure made no noise in the world. The Church went about her common duties, preach- ing, converting, suffering. There were persecutions ; there was fleeing from place to place ; there were martyrs ; there were triumphs : at length the rumour spread abroad that the mother of God was no longer upon the earth." Yes, her departure made no noise in the world ; but that is the fate of the loveliest and noblest lives the world has ever known. To be contented, if such be God's will, with a life of humble tasks and simple joys, to do good day by day with- out supposing that we earn thereby either praises or reward — oh, these are more difficult things than they appear, harder almost than the soldier's heroism or the martyr's sacrifice. But in this life which is con- \ A I i m ■i; M, •^28 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. tent to love, to suffer, and be forgotten, is the secret of a great peace, an infinite blessedness. Such was the life of Mary, such was her supreme blessedness. '* Blessed are the pure in spirit : for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit the earth." If i I . i lOD. the secret Such was essedness. irs is the : for they \ "Love is the fulfilling of the Zaic."— Romans xiii. 10. "For love is of God, and every one that loveth is horn of God, and knoweth God." — John iv. 7. " Men may die ivithout amj opinions, and yet be earned into Abraham's bosom ; but if we be without love, what will knoivledge avail ? I xvill not quarrel ivith you about opinions. Only see that your heart be right with God. I am sick of opinions. Give me good and stibstantial religion,a humble, gentle love of God and juan,"— John Wesley. i 1 1 m hm I ii XI. THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHBISTIANITY. » ' There are two desires in man of which we are all conscious, though we are not always conscious of them, and they are the deepest de ires of which the human nature is capable. The first of these is to he the highest that we can become. All religions arise out of this need in man to be something which he is not, but which he dimly feels that he ought to be. For man is haunted by a vision of moral excellence which disquiets him, rebukes him, and allures him. He is like a child reared under the shadow of a throne, and born in the purple, who by some untoward fate is left to grow up in squalor and poverty, and who cannot forget the "glories he has known and that imperial palace whence he came." He covets that which is above him ; he sees dim shapes of power and light and sweetness that ever move before him ; he longs for the moral excellence which he does not possess. It is to that instinct which all religions appeal ; they are the more or less imperfect answers which are made to that passion for excellence and goodness and moral perfection which has stung man •it 232 THE LAST ANALYSIS .r'lS; with a Divine hunger and thirst from the beginning of the ages. The second dominant desire of man is to attain and to enjoy the most that he can ; and this desire takes a hundred forms. He wants to be strong, to be wise, and to be happy. He seeks strength for the glow of vitality is bliss, and knowledge, for know- ledge is power, and happiness, because there is within him an unappeasable appetite for joy. In one the desire for joy takes noble forms, and he craves the visions of art and the rapture of music, and seeks to live in a radiant atmosphere of delight and beauty. In another it takes grosser forms, and the liesh is lapped in pleasurable sensations while the spirit perishes. In one the supremacy of learning is coveted, in another the supremacy of power ; in one the intellectual part is dominant, in another those practical faculties which seize upon the good things of life with an iron grasp and retain them at all hazards. Before this tremendoui^ fact of man's passion for joy Eeligion has often stood reproachful, vindictive, and almost paralysed. It has not known how to grapple with it, and therefore has denounced it ; it has replied to it with the hair shirt and the whip of the flagellant, with the sombreness of a Catholic or Puritan asceticism, the home where the happy instincts of childhood are extinguished, the convent or the monastery, where the flesh is cease- lessly macerated; and then what wonder is it that men have eagerly turned to the Prince of this World for help, and have sank under the charms of his terrible \ ginning ) attain 3 desire ig, to be for the • know- 3 within 3ne the ves the eeks to beauty, llesh is B spirit •ning is in one r those things at all man's )achful, known ounced nd the of a re the sd, the cease- atmen rid for errible OF CHRISTIANITY. PS3 y^ sorcery ! "What marvel that men have rebelled against a religion which has made the world joyless, and have taken refuge in a paganism in whose lips laughter lives and in whose lap the rose leaves of pleasure lie heaped for our delight ! Let it be put down as one of those facts which nothing can alter, that man is created with a faculty for joy, and be sure of it that is no Divine religion which attempts to crush that faculty. We must enjoy. We turn instinctively to bright skies, to bright colours, and to bright natures, and we repudiate the sombre and the grave. The only question, therefore, is how shall we enjoy ? What is true enjoyment, and how is it to be obtained ? A.nd it may be noticed, further, that of these two desires — the desire to be and the desire to attain — the first desire often dies away, but the second lasts. Men cease longing to he something ; they never cease longing to possess something. They give up the quest of character ; they never give up the quest of happiness. They follow that false grail of the world's delight through fen and bog, by crag and moor, by pathless waste and haunted wood, with ever a new hunger growing in their heart, content if it gleams upon them but for a momt ut in splendid witchery, and if they may but drink of the cup of its exhilarating sorcery once before they die. How wonderfully do men recover themselves from the defeats of life ! How they rise up again under the arrows of outrageous fortune, and gather the torn robe of their happiness about them, and begin again >> f ; Iff*" wffiiitir » < i « ri-i i f« ni V afc i Mw 234 THE LAST ANALYSIS t ;J r f< ^ i t 1 H i i ; ( 1 ! to weave the shining weft ! How they race after bubbles, fight for trifles, pluck the thorns of failure from their flesh, and again renew the quest after that fragile shining shape of earthly happiness, that seems to glide through the glimmering woods before them, and call them with bewitching incanta- tions ! And then at last men grow weary — very weary — and they want to die. They have sought and they have not found. They have spent their money for that which is not bread ; they have built their palace of delight with the stones of darkness and the walls of confusion. The end we all know. The paganism which deifies mere happiness has never had but one ending, either in the life of ancient Greece or modern Europe ; the end is disillusion- ment, disappointment, and desire for death, and its death chant, its confession of failure, is still heard in the song of the modern poet, who sings : — From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank, with brief thanksgiving, Whatever gods there be, That no life lives for ever, That dead men rise up never, That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. That is the end of the quest of mere happiness — the desire to possess outliving the desire to be ; nothing left but this — to rejoice that life is over» to rejoice in the hope that it cannot be re- K e after failure it after ipiness, woods icanta- r— very sought it their ve built arkness 1 know. ess has ancient illusion- ;h, and is still b, who nness — to be ; IS over» be re- OF CHRISTIANITY. 235 newed, and that it sinks at last into that infinite void where Sun nor star shall waken, Nor any change of light, Nor sound of water shaken, Nor any sound or sight ; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night. Now these two passages are at once the ratifica- tion, the justification, and the explanation of these two desires — to be and to enjoy. You wish to be something, do you ? Then here is the law set before you — a series of Divine landmarks setting the course by which you may travel to moral excellence. You wish to enjoy, do you? Here is the command, " Learn to love." Learn to be rid of peevishness and jealousy and envy ; learn to be tender and com- passionate and self-sacrificing, and you will have lit a fire upon the altar of the hear liich will keep Liie whole life in a glov/ of delight, even in the darkest night of Time. But you say, " I caiiii't obey the law." Yes, you can. If you once learn to love properly you will obey the law, " for love is the ful- filling of the law." So then you see these two desires to be and to enjoy are fused into one, and they admit of one answer. Love is the secret of becoming anything that is great and noble in this life ; and to be great and noble with the excellem c with which love clothes us is to attain the very sum of human felicity. And the significance of these two texts is that here you have Christianity in its final solution, in its last analysis. Doctrines fade away, <.■ i \ \ f I 236 THE LAST ANALYSIS ■i I '-!:!' / %r^ V i prophecies fade, complex ethical axioms are for- gotten, the metaphysics of theology are all swept aside, and there is one thing only which remains — that is love, and love is Christianity. Believe what you w^ill and do what you will, become what you may, and enjoy the highest as you may, if you do not love you are not a Christian, and you have not found the true triumph of life. Paul and John both found this to be true in their own experience. It is no unconsidered language, it is the wisdom of a life- time ; it is no mere personal confession, it is the exposition of a great principle which is to change the world. They do not underrate doctrine or theology, but they see that there is something more important than either — to love God and man with a perfect heart. They have, in fact, reached that standpoint which is always gained by all great rehgious souls, the standpoint from which love appears to be every- thing, character all in all ; the standpoint of Wesley, when he wrote — My brethren, friends and kinsmen these "Who do my Heavenly Father's will, Athirst to be whate'er thou art, And love their God with all their heart. " Love is the fulfilling of the law." " Whosoever loveth is born of God." Now these texts admit of a series of definite propositions which may be, so to speak, a series of golden stairs up which we may climb to that coign of vantage where these two Apostles stood. The first golden stair is this : We ask, What is OF CHRISTIANITY. •J37 the origin of love? Christianity answers, hove, is of God. Hatred, then, is not of God ; it is of the devil. Selfishness, jealousy, envy, all that spoils the gentle and the perfect life in us — lieedless- ness of others, forgetfulness of the wishes and the hopes of others, the egoism which ignores others, the strenuousness of personal purpose which i)ushes them aside, to say nothing of the sarcastic tongue which delights to inflict pain, and the vanity which will sacrifice a reputation for a stroke of wit, or the ambition which hustles all weaker folk aside that it may ..each its own coveted goal — all this is not of God : it is of the devil. The original impress of God upon this world was an impress of Love. There was a time when gentleness, tenderness, considerate- ness stamped the whole creation, and therefore an unbroken peace covered the world as with a garment. Wherever you find these qualities still, they are of God ; they are Divine relics of His workmanship, something saved out of the wreck of man, fair stretches of green landscape not submerged beneath the flood of evil, or else recovered from it. Wherever love exists it is a flower of God's growing, for He alone possesses the seed. God is Love, and love is of God. " Every one that loveth is born of God." Does anyone ask. What is love? Are we in any doubt as to what it is? Do we ever mistake it when we meet it ? Or do we think of love habitually as a matter of mere sexual attraction, or as a sort of family quality? That is just where so wide a gidf yawns between paganism and Christianity. The ) 1 1 ? 1 238 riFF. LAST ANALYSIS K god of love ill pa,o;anisin is — wliat ? Cupid! A mischiovoLis boy, a winj^ed and beautiful sliape, a trouble!' of men's hearts, a fuf,ntive and iiTesponsil)le visitor, who sets the nerves tinf:jlinLr with passion, but does not touch, and cannot touch, the moral nature. The God of Love in Ghristianit}' is Christ, who went about doing good, and pleased not Him- self, but gave His life a ransom for many. Compare these two visions, if comparison be possible, and mark how vast the difference. Whac wonder is it that love, as described by the ancients, is usually a bitter heritage, a golden apple of passionate con- tention, and that its records are the records of the ardour, the distress, and the unavailing sorrow of the individual ? But the love whicli Christianity presents to us is something that forgets itself and is lost in a renunciation which is beatitude. It is not limited, personal, or egotistic ; it overleaps all common human relationships, and finds higher re- lationships with all loving hearts. Tt comes with no purple wings, beating a delicate and ]ierfumed air, and stirring the mere nerves of a man with passion- ate delight ; but it comes as a Divine power, which enters his heart and transforms it. It creates a brother in every man and a sister in every v/oman. It binds a golden girdle round the globe, and claims all within it in the name of the love of God. It entcxo every avenue of human life, and sanctifies it. It is mercy when it meets the criminal, sympathy when it meets the fallen, compassion when it meets the suffering, ial>our when it meets the lost, re- or CHiusTiAxiry i>:"!f> nniiciation wlieii .'t meets the {)()or, sacrilico Avlieii it meets the sinful, and it is in all a Divinn powei which men cannot help rccomiisinjjf to h-^ Divine. Jesus Christ is the incarnation of tlie love of God — love itself incarnated and em])odied in the flesh, and and those who would learn what love is must learn of Him. It follows, tlien, that there is a second ,f,'olden stair which we may climb. " Love is of God "—that is the first stair. The second is Love bi moyaHtji. "Love," says the Apostl(> Paul, " is the fulfillin^^ of the law." Let us pause again, and ask, AVhat, then, is law? Law is a series of instructions and restraints to make us like God. It be.i^ins at the very lowest level of things, and tells us not to steal, not to covet, not to lie, and not to nuu'der. But these crimes and vices are not so much causes as effects. Look at them, and you will see at once that they are the fruit of something else. For example, were we not, I think, about a year ago liaving a terrible illustra- tion of what this means. For we were then readin^^ day by day of a murder that had been committed in the swamps of Niagara, and such was the sohdarity of the human race that that isolated deed was discussed right round the globe. We saw it all enacted, like some stage drama, before our very eyes. We saw this man, an Oxford graduate, a man of good family, a man reared in honourable traditions, leading his victim on and on to some lonely spot in that dismal swamp, and then the pistol shot rings, and without remorse he turns away, leaving his victim — who has I'- V ) / I . I<» 77//-; /.AST AA'A/.VS/S \ r-i :: eaten with liiiii, jcisted with hini, atid tnistoil in him — to (lit! inisorably and uiipitiod. We tried this man for murder, but tliat red blossom of murder was only the outward si^Mi of something else. (lo deeper to the root, and you will see that he wants to steal, and he covets, and he lies before he wants to murder. Tliese were the active causes of the crime ; this was the black sap which fed the tree upon which this hideous blossom of murder at last sprang into life. And reduce all these things to a sentence, and you have said everythmg when you liave said, "This man did not love." If he liad loved his friend he would not have lied to him ; if he had loved hini he would not have coveted his money ; still less could he have pushed him out of life for the sake of i^altry gain, vvliich — such is the irony of crime — he never even handled. For that unha[)i)y youth literally love would have been the " fulfilling of the law." And you may take the Commandments one by one, and apply this test to them, and you will see at once that they would not have been needed if only men had loved one another. Do you need to be told not to murder any one you love, not to defraud him, not to covet his possessions, not to dishonour liis home ? Why, we not only cannot do it, we simply cannot conceive the thought of doing it. Get love, then, and you cannot help keeping the law. Get love, and you cannot help being moral. It may seem but a scanty equipment to produce perfection, and so the seven notes of music may seem to be a scanty I I.I tit' I)/' L/f/x/S77A.\n'V 241 u of y one , once y men 1 not 11, not nine ? aiinot 11, and and l3ut a so the scanty equipment to produce the lieaven-born melodies of a Handel or J-5eethoveu. But see how they use them — of what inliiiite and glorious combinations are they capable ! How the highest and deepest emotions of our nature fnid liberation and a language as we thrill to the majestic strains Avhich purify and exalt us, which give us visions of truth, of self, of heaven, of God, and of tlie joy of God, which no speech could utter and no articulate array of words could express. Yet there are but seven notes of music in it all, something a child might learn in an hour, but whicli a llandel or a Beethoven caimot exhaust in a lifetime. So it is with this supreme quality of love ! It is capable of -all but infinite combinations and interpretations; it utters the grand music of heroism and the soft lute- music of courtesy; it is patriotism, it is altruism, it is martyrdom; it stoops to tlie smallest things of life and it governs the greatest ; it controls the temper and it regulates the reason ; it extirpates the worst qualities and it develops and refmes the best ; it reforms and transforms the; wliole man into the image of God, for there is no height of character to whicii love cannot lift a man, and there is no height of character possible without it. Love is character. "Love is the fuliilling of the law." Go one step further. Love is of God ; love is morality; now you find that love is religion also. "Every one that loveth is born of God." How often do we lind in the communion of otlier churches men who surprise us by the spirituality 242 THE LAST ANALYSIS A ' ' and tho saintliness of their lives! We hold such churches, perliaps, to be in error; we can point to a dozen doctrines which to us are unbelievable, and are rejected by us with noble and justifiable incredulity. We know that whosoever enters such churches has to subscribe to those doctrines, and therefore we should logically conclude that the man who lives beneath the shadow of a corrupt church cannot be pure, and the man who assents to false doctrines cannot be a child of the truth. But love laughs our poor inquisitive logic to scorn, and when a man like Cardinal Newman dies, the whole religious world, without distinction of denomination or sect, feels that a dedicated life has ended, that a light from God is extinguished. Love looks into the secret of his character and proclaims, " He that loveth is born of God," and all who do truly profess and call themselves Christians praise God for the image of God in Cardinal Newman. Or how frequently, again, do we fmd that people who profess piety lack something which we expect them to possess, and people who make no profession of piety often have that indefinable charm of a gracious nature, which makes us feel somehow that religion is a reality. Without apparent effort such people dilYuse happiness around them, because they are sweet-tempered and quick to help and considerate of others, and inconsiderate only of themselves. We know all this, yet we are troubled about them, because no definite profession of piety is upon their lips. We feel the Divine charm of their presence, ih ■:>. cl such int to a ind are edulity. ties has fore we 10 lives inot be Dctrines Lghs our a man •ehgious or sect, a Ught nto the [e that profess for the people expect ofession fm of a ow that ort such use they siderate es. We t them, on their )resence,. OF CHRISTIANITY. 243 yet we are concerned because they hide in sacred reticence the deepest feelings of their hearts. We know that their whole life is a life of love — dis- interested and laborious love — ministering to others and seldom ministered unto, yet we permit ourselves insolently to wonder if they are born of God. Wonder no longer ! " Every one that loveth is born of God." How often has it happened that the sweetest and most gracious of lives closes without sign, is with- drawn without opportunity for religious profession or farewell. Perhaps it is some fair girl, whose flower- like maidenhood has been a fragrance and a joy, whose short life has been pure and loving and blameless, and yet you are troubled because those closed lips made no positive profession of faith in Christ before the end. And do you think so ill of God's insight, of Christ's understanding of your child's life, as that ? Do you suppose the Father does not know His own ? Poor mourning, troubled heart, behold, I say to you, in the name of Christ, " Let not your heart be troubled," " Every one that loveth is born of God." It is easier to quote Scripture on a death-bed than to live a life of love, and these chose that more difticult and better part which shall not be taken away. And remember that this is the brief summary of all the teaching of Jesus : in the story of the Good Samaritan ; in the parable of the Prodigal Son ; in the incident of Dives and Lazarus ; in His words to Peter about forgiving seventy times seven ; in His apology for Mary IMagdalene, that she loved much r ) •«. t % '^.k H :14 THE LAST ANALYSIS >i •' •! iM and therefore was forf;iven much ; in His own con- duct to His disciples, both before and after the resurrection ; in His Beatitudes and in all His words, all His deeds, the ^reat lesson that Christ tries to teach us is that the supreme quality is love. He sums up the whole human race in Himself, and makes humanity the coi:jrete Christ whom we are to love. He docs not ask us for adoration, for praise, or for worship, but He commands us to love all men and to see Him in the lowest and most forlorn of all. He specifically says that an act of kindness is a thing which cannot be forgotten, even at the Judgment Seat, and that when we stand there the one supreme test by which we shall be all tried will be : Have we loved or not? And that is, after all, the only possible test when you think of it, because love is the real flower and fruit of all religion. It is religion, it is piety, it is more than either faith or hope — it is the very soul of both. " Love is the ful- filling of the law." ** Now abideth Faith, Hope, Love — these three, but the greatest of these is Love." And then take one more golden step. Love is of God ; love is morality ; love is religion ; lastly, love is life, love is immortality. " Every one that loveth is born of God" — born into a larger life, born into the spaciousness of an eternal life. We sometimes permit ourselves to debate whether life is not more than love. There are times when we are impressed with the spaciousness of this life of ours, when we suddenly realise the joys of living, and are cthirst to drink a full draught of life. We want to know every- i i OF CHRISTIANITY 245 n con- er the words, tries to e. He 3lf, and we are • praise, love all , forlorn dness is at the lere the •ied will Lfter all, because 1. It is faith or the ful- pe, Love )ve." ove is of itly, love tit loveth lorn into imetimes lot more npressed when we thirst to )w every- thing, we want to understand everythiiii];, we would fain mix in the most crowded places of life and feel the pulsations of the tide of humanity, and move amid its swiftest currents, and in sucli an hour we ask ourselves. What is love? Surely it is nothint^ more than a mere episode in the great drama, one of the many fruits of life — perhaps the clioicest, but that is all. For when that passion of mere living possesses us it eclipses all other passions, and then we turn away from love because we see that it is a yoke, because we believe it to be a renunciation of the fulness of personal life, because it is the subjuga- tion of our nature to the exigencies and the needs of another nature. The man or woman who does this usually lives to learn that love, after all, is the one thing worth living for, and they often know what it is to sit amidst the ruins of life in a friend- less old age, amidst gains and gauds that have lost their charm, and to long with inexpressible yearning for one drop of that cup of love which they once so contemptuously rejected. For the truth is, that love is life ; it is the only true and eternal life ; it is the birth of a man's soul into a higher state of being. Look back over the past and tell me what are the Pisgah moments which stand out in the retrospect of life, what are those hours that are most distinctly recollected as the supreme hours in a life time? They are the moments when we loved the most, and when we gave ourselves away, when we lost the sense of self — then the bells of life rang with a mellow chime indeed, and there was no II. ,» r « 246 THE LAST ANALYSIS discord of sweet bells jangled. Then our nature did actually find its full expression, its highest exposition, for then we were filled with the spirit of love, and we were sharing the life of the God of love. You will never know the fulness of life until you know the ful- ness of love, for " every one that loveth is born of God." There, then, as I have said, is the last analysis of Christianity, and I pray you to accept it. Like all profound things it is really simple ; it is, in fact, so simple that men doubt whether it can be true. Men cannot make themselves believe and understand that Christianity is merely love : that a great church is simply the temple of love ; that what all this elaborate organisation of v/orship and preaching aims at is this — to teach men to love God, to love each other. Men cannot be brought to understand that when they have once learnt to love, all social problems will be swept away and all social sores will be healed. And because men cannot accept a solution of Chris- tianity so simple they go on inventing, from age to age, hundreds of other definitions, and they overlook one thing which is everything. Let your definitions go ; do not try to narrow and belittle Christianity to suit your own narrow creed. Do not try to pour the ocean into a pint pot. Christianity is as broad as the heavens, religion is as vast as the sea, and its true definition is : "Every one that loveth is born of God." And by whatever public test we may measure Christianity, we do in our private thoughts and our habitual actions apply this test and no other. We drop our theology out of sight when we have to deal I'l (I > OF CHRISTIANITY. 247 ure did osition, and we ^ou will the ful- )f God." ilysis of jike all fact, so !. Men md that [lurch is all this Lng aims )ve each ,nd that roblems healed. Chris- a[je to )verlook finitions anity to Dour the ,d as the its true of God." measure and our ir. We ! to deal with each other in public, in commercial and family relationships. IL is impossible to persuade any jury of intelligent, observant men that the man who is mean and avaricious in his commercial transactions, ill-tempered, or violent, or peevish in his family relationships, spiteful and contentious in his social life and conversation, is really, after all, a good man, because he firmly holds certain articles of belief, and is a man to whom great deference and respect are paid in the church on the Sabbath day. It is impos- sible, I say, to persuade any jury of intelligent men tliat the man who is a domestic tyrant, a hard master, an austere and loveless man in the home, shunned by his children, dreaded by his wife, disliked by his servants, is really, after all, a child of God because he reads the Scripture every morning, and can define and illustrate, with copious quotation, every dogma of the Christian faith. Yes, and it is equally impossible to persuade men that the patient mother, toiling unweariedly for her childrcL', the good and gentle girl, whose presence in the home spreads serenity, the one whose hand was ever ready to help us in our childish troubles, whose voice Lias often soothed our later griefs and desolations, is, forsooth, not a good woman, not a child of God, because her face is no*" familiar in the select companies of the earthly saints. We measure sainthood by other tests than these ; our measurement may be rough, but at least it is true and it is safe. We say this man is a good man, not because he says he is converted, but we say he is converted because we ■I \ 248 THE LAST ANALYSIS have found out that he is good. We say, * he can't be wrong whose hfe is in the right,' and that much controverted phrase of Pope's is, after all, but a paraphrase of the word of Christ, ** He that hath my commands and doeth them, he it is who loveth me." When we meet these lives of silent goodness we know them to be Divine creations by whatever names they are called. Sometimes they are the holy sisters who with wakeful eyes Watch by the sick in dreary hospitals, Close to the battlefield. Sometimes we see The face gleam out beneath a Quaker hood, With exquisite eyes of silent blessedness. Then all our spirit rises up in praise Because God's world holds in its wrecked design His image still, who made it very good. This may be heresy, but it is not my heresy ; it is the heresy of the Apostle John, who has defined the only true Catholic and Apostolic Church when he says : ** Every one who loveth is born of God." And as I close there seems to pass before my mind a vision of how these principles may apply in all directions, how they may radiate like a Divine light, and lift the darkness of the world. There, for in- stance, is Buddhism, with its lovely story of Gautama. We hear Gautama saying, as he goes forth from his palace to live and die for the poor : — Thou knowest how I muse these many moons, Seeking to save the sad earth I have seen, And how my soul yearns sore for souls unknown, And how I grieve for griefs that are not mine. Or, if it be objected, that this is but a poetic inter- % *» > OF CHRISTIANITY. 24J* le can't t much but a ath my bh me." less we hatever es sign jr; it is [led the hen he y mind in all 3 lights for in- Dry of e goes )oor : — 'n, pretation of the legend of the Buddha, we make take Gautama's own words : " Never will I seek or re- ceive private salvation, never enter into final peac^ alone ; but for ever and everywhere will I live and strive for the universal redemption of every crea- ture." Is there no Divine accent in this ? Can any who attain to this spirit ever fail to please God? Can any please God without attaining to it ? Here is the teaching of Christ upon the lips of Gautama : here is the love which redeems, and surely as we think of it a new hope dawns upon us, and we see that in the Day of Judgment there may be those who shall come from the North and South and from the East and West, of whom we have never dreamed, and shall sit down in the kingdom of the Father, because every one that has learned the spirit of Christ, howsoever he has learned it, is born of God. There is the great preacher yonder, whose ortho- doxy and heterodoxy were the conversation and the discussion of all the Churches around the world. I see him as he preaches his last sermon, not knowing it to be his last. Then, when the lights are lowered and the crowd has gone, there come into the church two little ragged, wretched lads, and I see the great preacher talking to them of the love of Christ, and stooping over them with tender fatherliness. Then he tells the choir to sing for them : I heard the voice of Jesus say, " Come unto Me and rest ; " c inter- and lays his hand in blessing upon those little waifs. 250 THE LAST ANALYSTS I Si I 'f . •! VH i^ ^ and thus Henry Ward Beecher leaves the church where he has ministered for a hfetinie, and goes home. Do you think I want to hear any more chatter ahout his orthodoxy and heterodoxy ? I have looked into the very heart of the man, I have had a vision of the inmost essence of his life, I have seen the spring and fountain of it all : and I know that he has the great compassionate Christlike heart beating in him, and " Every one that loveth is born of God." And so I look into the great world of common- place life round about me, and I see how this text radiates the light everywhere. There was a student once who asked Robertson of Irvine the old schol- astic quibble, whether he could tell how many souls could be supported on the point of a needle. " Oh ! dear me, yes," said he ; " that is easy enough. I can tell that." "How so?" said the student. " Well," said Eobertson, " as I was walking home the other night along the seashore, I passed a house where a poor widow lives ; her husband was drowned at sea last winter. She has five little children, and as I looked througli the window I saw in the fire- light two little golden heads in the bed yonder, and another little golden head in the cradle, and two other children sitting at the mother's knee. She was working away with her needle, and it was flash- ing in the fireliglit, and was going as hard as it could go. So," continued Robertson, "I know how many souls can be supported on the point of a needle — five, don't you see ! " OF CHRISTIANITY. i>51 > churcli Lid goes y more )xy? I , I have I have and I iristUke )veth is )inmon- liis text student i schol- ly souls " Oh! ugh. I student, g home a house rowned Dii, and he fire- er, and Lud two She is flash- t could V many eedle — And as I look through that window I seem to look upon the whole vision of domestic life, on mothers toiling and never calling it toil, on the vision of innumerable women all the world over who give themselves away, and are not so much as thanked for it, on the silent heroisms which redeem life, and which are its uuuttered poetry, its saving salt, its divine attestation. And these heroisms which are the birth of love are everywhere. The most defective human souls are capable of them. In any pure love, however partial and imperfect its scope, there is always something that transforms — nay, that trans- figures. Every bit of common glass can reflect the sunlight, and every heart that loves, in the very act of loving, reflects some broken ray of the love of God. To love is essentially a religious act. Do not think, then, of religion as a new, strange, beautiful graft upon the tree of human life — it is of its essence. Do not think, then, of the Church as a company of elect and select souls gathered out of the moral ruins of the world — the Church is larger than we think, and Christianity is larger than the churches. Christ comes not to destroy human nature, but to fulfil it, by guiding it to its highest development. And in all lands, and among all peoples, in obscure directions undiscerned by us, in all lives that love and suffer and sacrifice themselves uncomplainingly for the good of others, these higher developments already exist, and are not unrecognised of heaven. The calendar of saints is known alone to God, and there are strange names in it, the <. .'H ■■'■ tu i ii; Ml -II I I: J ,i|t m iiil f;t| f i '1 ,' ^ • It • ! h ■ i ; -i ' 1 i ' ■ If ; jl !il f N Hi .!i h 252 r///f LAST AXALYSIS OF CHRrSTTAATFY. names of secret saviours of the poor, of hidden helpers of the needy, verily a great multitude which no man can immber. And so I rejoice. I see a world that is not out- cast, not wholly evil, and not forsaken, for love works in it still, and God is Love, and love is every- where. Like a great bell of hope, mellow, ceaseless, glorious in its music, the words of John ring across the world, " Every one that loveth is born of God, and kuoweth God." There was a man ^raf /mm Go,!, whns,' naw.r ,/-„s ./„/,,/. /'/,,• ,„me '■amcfor a n'itnns>^, to hear wUnc^^ „/ //„■ [/„jhl . Ih„' aJl nvn Utr<.a<,h Him might hdivrc. — John i. (J. And the common people h-ard Hhn 'jladhj. —'Mxhk xii. :\7. The Idniidom- of heaven !s like unto leaven, whleh a iroman took, ■nid hid in three measure:^ of meal, till tlie whole was leavened.— -Matthew xiii. ;;;?. Theocranj. Government of i.'od, is preeisely tlie lhin;i to /,- stru,j,jh;l j'or. We vill praige tlf Uero.'prirsI , wlio doe>^ what is in him to l,riu,j f-hem in -. and wears out, in toil, ralummj, eoul rwlivtion, a nulde life to make God's Kingdom of thix Earth. — Thomas Carlvle. if IhM ii I 1 i' XII. WESLEY AND HIS WOBK. I AM aware tliat between these passages of Scripture there is no exenetical colierence ; but tliey may servo to furnish us with su,<,^gcstions for the grt^t occasion which attracts our attention to-night. They may be justly said to sum up a great hfe and a great movc- meiit, and thus tliey have a vital, if not an ex(>getical coherence. They in turn explain the character of Wesley, the nature of his work, and the philosphyof its success. To the whole u^orld that life and work- have long afforded a fascinating study. It is said that art knows no frontiers, and neither does Chris- tianity : and all the demarcations of sect disappear and are forgotten in the common interest we feel in a chapter of Christianity — the most wonderful and far-reaching in its effects since tlie Heformation. We do not celebrate the success of .Methodism : we celebrate the triumph of Christianity, We do not ask you to join with us in the laudation of a man or a system; but to thank God for one of the most fruitful forces that has ever worked in the world for the exaltation of human life and character. Men liod inCS/J'lY AM) HIS \\\)RK. W like Wesley l)el()n<,' to no Church : they are the ])roperty of Christendoiii. They have ori<^iiiate(I not local iuul limited, hut pervasive and universal forces. To mention tlnur names is to hreathe the larf^er air of a Cathohc charity where oidy the broader aspects of tliin^^s are remembered, and the petty and sectarian are fv)r;L,'otten. We can scarcely speak of sucli a man as Wesley as dead : he is enthroned in the imchanmnj? exaltation of those dead i)nt sce])tred monarchs who still rule us from their urns : he has f, Joincil tlir choir invisil)l(> ()t tli(xsL' iiinuortiil dead who live a^ain In miiida made licttcr by tlieir pn'seuec" — live Tu tlioiiLrlits siililinii' tluit piorc'c tlu' iiiLnlit like stars, And with tlu'ii- mild persistence ur<;e man's seai'ch Tt> vaster issues. ■i/ !, ' U l!' T. Now, the fn-st passage describes a phenomenon with "wliich we are famiUar in history— the advent of the ]\Ian with a Mission. John the Baptist ^vas a burniiifj^ and a sliiniug liglit — the very type of the man ^vitll a mission. When an age lias grown utterly corrupt, when morality has lost its security and religion its impulse ; when the Church has become lethargic, and good customs themselves only swell the general corruption, because the spirit of their observance is pharisaic and not sincere ; or W'hen secular liberties are lost, and tyranny is militant and unrebuked, and wealth remembers its privileges, and ignores its responsibilities ; then the man with a mission usually appears. It seems as > WEsr.EY Axn ffis iroRk- •u are the i filiated uiversal atho the )uly the and the scarcely \ : he is of those rule us ke stars, seai'ch oiiieiiou 1(1 vent of st was a )e of the IS grown security urch has lives only spirit of cere ; or I'anny is nbers its then the seems as thouf.'h God tried the patience and faith of men to its last limit l)y postponing:; the appearance of the deliverer till things are at their worst, and some- times the deliverer himself comes as a Scourge, an Iconoclast, a Sword that is whetted for vengeance. The awakening of the European democracy and their emancipation came tlirough the person of a Bonaparte, and by a long succession of wars in which every throne was shaken, aiid crown after crown was tumbled in tlic dust. The awakening of the demo- cratic instinct in the religion of Europe came through Luther, and in each of these cases it was the very degradation to which things had sunk whicli made the awakening possible. Whoever misses tlie psychologic moment in common politics, (iod never misses it in the government of His world. The hour is timed to the man, and the man is prepared for the hour. When that hour strikes the man always stands ready, and the word for which ages have waited is spoken, the deed is done, the mission is fuHilled, and the burning and shining light is with us for a season. But in the religious sphere this phenomenon has two conditions, and the first is, that such a man always has the consciousness of a direct relation to God. He lives as ever in the Great Tasknuxster's eye ; but not only that, he lives as seeing the in- visible. An awful consciousness of the infinite and eternal is always his. By signs that are indubitable to him, by the secret and mysterious assurances of his own spirit, by those delicate results which ex- 17 258 WESLEY AND HIS IVOA'A'. Mil perieiice rcf^isters on his consciousness, and which are the data of a true spiritual science, he knows in whom lie has beheved, and is absohitely sure of the rciiht}' of unseen tilings. When this temper is carried too far it ends in mysticism, and then all power of action perishes. Wesley has himself expressed this temper when he says, "It is so far from being true that there is no knowledge after we have quitted the body, that the doubt lies on the other side, whether there be any such thing as real knowledge till then : whether it be not a plain, sober truth, not a mere poetical fiction that All these are shadows which for thini^s we take Are but the empty dreams which in death's sleep wc make. It is, indeed, the temper of Shakespeare when he says, * We are such stuff as dreams are made of " — and of Burke, when he cries over his dead Absalom, " What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue." But from this paralysing quietism the man with a Divine mission is saved by the predominance in him of the x^ractical faculties. He feels the overwhelm- ing presence of God indeed ; his eye is always up- lifted to the infinite ; but a supreme urgency of endeavour possesses him also. And the practical force of his life thus draws its strength from his convincing sense of the unseen. lie stands in direct contact with God as the channel through which a Divine force flows. He is secure in a Divine strength, nourished with a Divine ardour, conscious of a Divine f \ I \.- WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 259 d which nows in sure of temper nd then himself is so far after we 1 on the ^ as real in, sober we make. ivhen he }of"'— Absalom, ows we Q with a in him rwhelm- ^ays up- eucy of )ractical om his n direct which a trength, a, Divine power which uses him at its will, but alwa3's for the best. He is serene, courageous, ser^ure, because he is not his own. Thus Christ with majestic traucpiillity fronts His enemies and says His hour is not yet come ; and Knox, rowing in the galleys, sees afar the towers of St. Andrews and assures himself he shall yet preach beneath their sliadow ; and Newman says, as he lies at the gates of death, " I have a work to do ; I shall not die." In other words, this man is a man who is sent of God — and who is supported in the perils and discouragements of his work by the sense that behind him there is an infinite Power which has -commissioned him, and will sustain him. The second condition of such a life is that it dis- plays the candour and sincerity which are always the marks of the highest minds. "If it were not so, I would have told you," says Christ, thus striking the note of a supreme candour which desires nothing but the truth, and is willing to sacrifice all tilings to the truth. "But now ye seek to kill me, a man who hath told the truth which I have heard of God," he says again, and therein expresses a supreme sincerity too. In the man with a re- ligious mission, these two qualities must always be the governing qualities. For what is the work of such a man, but to declare that which he has heard of God? That is his "sign, and note, and character." lie is, in truth, a prophetic man, who hears the heavenly voices, and looks into the unseen mysteries, and speaks the words which are for the hiealing of the nations. But those words are not his \^ ) ■| /' I I ■'^ 260 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. own, but the Matter's who seiiu him. If he be over- come by personal ambitivm or love of power ; if he listen but for a mom a\\> to the voices of expediency and compromise; if he be deflected from the sim- plicity and docility of the learner who seeks to know and do the will of God, by anv power of prejudice, by any pride of will, by so mucl. lias he lost the power to b] ^ss his generation, and to interpret to it the things which have been hidden or forge jten. By so much he ceases to be a prophetic man, and his mission is betrayed. For to fulfil that mission, the clearest sincerity, the utmost intellectual candour, are needed. When the bright lustre of this spiritual sincerity is dulled, he no longer has the instrument by which the will and truth of God are perfectly reflected. And thus the second great characteristic of the religious reformer is that he is a witness to the Light. He dwells in the brightness of God, and declares it ; he sees the truth, and is absolutely loyal to it; he prefers the truth to all personal prejudice or predilection ; he speaks it to his own dismay, his own loss of esteem and reputation among men ; but through the truth he is strong, and becomes one of those enduring forces which defy the havoc of the centuries, and the insolence of man's contempt. These are the two great characteristics of the religious reformer : he is a man sent of God, and he is a witness to the light of God. Here, then, is the keynote to the character and life of Wesley, nor can any phrase describe him better than this : he was " a man sent of God, to bear II 5 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 261 be over- r ; if he pediency bhe sim- to know iidice, by power to le things so much lission is clearest e needed, icerity is i^hich the sd. And rehgious ght. He es it ; he le prefers ;ion ; he esteem truth he ig forces and the the two ler: he is the hght r and Hfe m better to bear witness of the Light." Think for a moment of the development of his convictions, and see how admirably these conditions of the consciousness of a mission, and the temper of spiritual candour, are fulfilled in him. We see him growing uy* in a youth of grace and virtue, for, like John MiUon, he had kept his life unsullied. His youth, indeed, has many things in co:nmon with the youth of Milton. He leids an equally strenuous intellectual life ; he is in great repute as a youth of noble parts ; there is a gracious austerity about him, a fastidious purity, a certain loftiness of aim and demeanour which keeps vice at a safe distance ; he is skilled as poet, logician, and linguist ; and in the ordinary course of things such a youth would have passed into a manhood of dignified scholarship and easy esteem. But from the first a sense of destiny at times oppresses him. He writes his brother Charles that he must set certain doubts at rest by getting clearer views, because clearer views may be of incalculable service to uncounted genera- tions. This is extraordinary language in a youth who has done nothing to show that he has a great part to play, and it can only be explained by the sense of a mission which was already growing in him. Consider this youth, then, bred in clerical seclusive- ness, and mark how eager and candid he is in his search tor truth. He is always seeking some one who can teach him. He has a singular openness of mind, and is ready to receive instruction from any one who can confer it. Long before he has found the light he is the most prayerful of students, and his fellow- 11 262 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. I»M m *: ■^n collegians notice that his face shines with an inwarcf glow after he has spent! hours in prayer. So w© follow the familiar story — tracing Wesley's progress through ritualism and mysticism, marking how earnestly he strives for thej^ delayed light, how per- fectly he lives up to the hght which he possesses — until we come to that supreme moment, when Peter Bohler, the Moravian, makes clear to him what true religion is, and how it may be obtained. How willing he is to be led ! How humbly has he followed every clue of truth which has been his ! And now, after thirty-five years of slow and doubtful progress, on this memorable night of May, a hundred and fifty-three years ago, in the old room in Aldersgate Street, he feels his heart strangely warmed, and " felt that he did trust in Christ, Christ alone — for salvation." It was the moment of "Wesley's conversion ; the hour when his mission was realised. There arose a force which has overflow^ed the v/orld : in that little room Methodism began, and its cardinal truth was that men could be converted — and know that they were converted. Baptism, confirmation, sacraments — all that made the early religious life of Wesley — sank into the background, and a living faith in Christ became everything. For Wesley " the birthday of a Christian was shifted from his baptism to his conversion,. and in that change the partition line of two great systems is crossed." It was to witness to that great truth that Wesley henceforth lived ; it is that truth which everywhere illumines the poetry and teaching of both the brothers ; it is that truth which has in* WESLEY AND HIS U'OKk' 203 L inwarcf So we progress nc: how low i^er- ssesses — en Peter hat true kV wiUing ed every )w, after ;ress, on fty-three treet, he ; that he on." It he hour e a force tie room was that ley were nts — all lank into became Christian iversion,. TO great lat great lat truth teaching h has m a hundred and fifty years built up the largest Protestant community upon the face of the globe. And thus Wesley, in the most literal sense, was a witness of the Hght. The most perfect counterpart of liis life was the life of St. PauL St. Paul also described himself as a witness, who testilies to the "Gospel of the grace of God." Paul's crowning argument was himself. He had no theories to expound, no speculations to elaborate, no new philosophy to establish. He entered ^he great centres of Greek learning, not to add another cult, or play the part of a new Socrates ; his was a subhmer and far simpler mission. He came to tell them that once he was blind and now he saw ; once he was in bondage, but now he was free ; once he was a blasphemer, but now he was a missionary of the Name he ignorantly blasphened. His constant test was experience. What he had been he knew others were : what he was he knew others might become. With sublime egotism he called attention to him- self as a living fact, and said, "I, Paul, once a blasphemer and injurious, now an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, salute you." He was a witness to two things: that he was a sinner — • that he was a sinner saved. He took it for granted that all were sinners ; the fact was indisputable. "What he had to tell them was how they might know the truth, and how the truth might make thetufree. To the mere speculative opinions of philosophy he paid no heed. He said, " I, Paul " — never mind how you explain creatj ^n and the origin of things — > 264 WESLEY AXD HIS IVORk' . :\ < \ r^ l;i W! Ill how do you explain me ? To the question how this great change was wrought in him, he had one invariable reply — " by the grace of God, I am what I am." Before synagogues and Sanliedrins, mobs and magistrates, keepers of gaols and Konian governors, wherever we follow him, he founds his whole doctrine U])on a great personal experience. And that was precisely the work of Wesley. Against the scornful criticisms of men he set tlie experience of the individual. He found the miracle of his own sudden conversion repeated in the lives of thousands. Gradually there drew around him a unique multitude — men who had been the terror and curse of a country side ; magistrates who had begun by up- braiding and denouncing him ; men who had been diunkards, profligates, and notorious evil livers, whose lives had incontestably been changed, and who were ready to stand up in every market-place of Great Britain and witness fco the grace of God. They all witnessed one thing— the thing that Wesley witnessed to in Aldersgate Street — a suoreme spiritual fact which outlives every age, and accommodates itself to every class of man — the kiiowledge that sin may be forgiven, and that men may know it is for- given. And is not this doctrine of experience the one great argument for Christian life stiil ? Is not the fact that men are somehow converted, and that the whole bias of a life is obviously changed by some Divine process which may happen in a moment, as verifiable a fact as any of the facts of modern science? Is it not as well worth the attention of WESLEY AND HIS IVORK, 2G5 ow this id one what I )bs and '•ernors, whole nd that ist the ence of lis own usands. altitude L'se of a by lip- id been livers, id, and 3t-place of God. Wesley :)iritual iiodates hat sin is for- mce the Is not id that )y some ent, as nodern tion of the philosopher as the life of earth- worms or the laws of iij^dit ? For Wesley that was the fact of all facts — the surest of the sure, the clearest of the clear ; the one supreme event in a human life ; and Methodism anjse out of his passionate desire to declare this truth which he had rediscovered. And thus from tlie lirst — and may it always continue ! — Methodism has been built upon fellowship rather than doctrinal tests, upon ex- perience, not on do^ana ; and hence its elasticity, its life, audits extraordinary growth. II. Such was the character of Wesley ; now look at the nature of his work ; and there can be no better description of that work than this : " The common people heard him gladly." To estimate that work you have first of all to realise what the England of Wesley was like. That picture has been drawn for us in unmistakable colours i)y every writer who has described the eighteenth century. It was an age of religion without faith, of politics without honour, and of life without morality. Kobert W^alpole said, not with noble scorn, but with sincere conviction, that every man had his price ; nor is there any reason to believe that he ever found him- self wrong in his estimate of those with whom ho had to deal. Dr. Johnson again tells us of Walpole that he always talked grossly at his own table, be- cause he found that this was the only species of conversation in which all could indulge. There is not a page in the biography of the public men of the time that does not bear witness to the venality and ill ! [I if i "d •; ' ■■: ; li: ifh; li i k\0 I \ M li ;\ ^'' ^/' ■ / 1' ir ^' 266 r^^/T.V/./T]' /7i^'/) ///.S //7)A'A'. defrraclatioii of pnhlic life, and equally to tho coiT:ip- tion of f^enoral morals, AMieii tho customs of tlio upper classes wen; Avliat they were, it is not sni'- prisiiij:,^ that the life of the lower classes was incon- ceivably brutal and de'_,'raded. The most instrnctive commentary on lower class customs is found in Hof^arth's ]-)ictures and John Wesley's journals. In the Beer Street and Gin Lane of the p'eat artist there is aivcn tlie most hideous ]>ictiire of drunken- ness that ])ainter ever drew, and it is drawn from tlic life. In the journals of the ,£rreat cvan^^elist there are chronicled tlic faithful reports of an eye-witness, who hi]ew the life of ICiiffland as no other man did, from tlie Tweed to Land's End, and what do we gathei' from his pages? Everywhere we r(\ul of the ignorance and hopelessness of the poor ; how the churches of those who should have aided him were closed against liim ; how magistrates did all they could to silence him ; how everywhere there were violent mobs ready to rise at the first chance of mis- chief. The inhumanities of num to man were incon- ceivable, and a general moral callousness had ensued. London was called the City of the Gallows, for at whatever point you entered it, by land or water, you passed through a long lane of gibbets, where the corpses of felons hung rotting and bleaching in the light. Slavery was encouraged, and slaves were advertised for sale in the public Tress. The press- gang was a constant terror. In some parishes every fourth house was a tavern, and drunkenness was general and unrebuked. For tlie Church had ceased U'KSLEY A.\n Ills WORK. •l^H they to be a power, and there were cler<,Tiii('ii who liad as little faith in vital ("liristiaiiity as the Popes of Luther's day. That was the hhiudand of Wesley's day; and is it any wonder that immediately on his conversion AVesley's humanitarian sympatliy was kindled ? And yet we cannot hut pause a<^ain to rememl)er who he was, and what his history had heen. lie was a scholar and a ^i,u'ntleman, a man of jioetic genius and reflective mind, with a strong tendency towards mysticism. J lis natural associates were men of culture, and his friendship with h)r. Johnson is the best ^^roof of his capacity for pleasinf,' cultured men. Jjut from the fust lie sought to l)o tlie apostle of the conrmon jieople. His nol)le maxim was to go, not to those who iieeded him, but to those who needed him most. He saw tlie multitude as sheep having no shepherd, and he liad conrpassion on them. IJ^e set himself to care, not only for their souls, bit for their minds and bodies. Every modern social movement may be found in the germ in Wesley's practice. For the poor he wrote grammars, histories, and numuals of medicine ; lie translated and abridged standard works, |)ublishing some two hundred volumes in all ; he was the in- ventor of cheap literature, and the first man to print his sermons and sow tliem broadcast. He had incomparable common-sense and invincible courage. He was ready to adopt any plan that was for the salvation and welfare of the people, and, once decided on a course, no man could turn him back. h M ! '! si ir ;'f > ' ii: I 1 ' 1 ! 1 ■/ ■ i •: ■' ■ . ifif 1 ' . 1:1 t f' ' 1 < 1 mil 1 iL ;■ ': •( f 208 \\1':si.i-:y a.\d ins work. PIg had faith in Lhu coiiiiiioji people, in ati a;4o wlieii every man of JiitelhL^L'iico -jithur desj)isud or feared them. lie eommittfid to converted ei>lHers and pri/e-fi,£,diters the care of tlie souls which he liad plucked as l)raiids from the hurninj^, and liis trust was seldom hetrayed. The work ,L;re\v, and it reads like a romance. \\\ one [)lace the chjthes are torn from his back by a brutal mob; in anoth(;r lie is struck with stones, and l.)leedin^s ])ut ^oeson preach- iii;^' as thou^^h nothiuL;' had hapj)ened ; in yet another a prize-lighter is awed by his serenity, and defends him from the mob. The fact that the churches were closed a^Minst him turned out to be an un- speakable blessing. Jle thereupon began to preach in the open-air, and often to innumerai)le multitudes. He preached three, four, and live times in a day, and often his sei-mons exceeded an hour. He thought nothing of travelling sixty to eighty miles a day on horseback. He preached iji taverns while liis horse was baited, on village greens, in streets and market-places. AVe see, as we look back, the great silent throngs, as the voice of Wesley floats over them in the early morning stilness, and we hear the cries of the penitent, and the great ilood of sound, when thousands of voices joined in the hymns to which the movement had given birth. The common people heard him gladly. There was no part of the kingdom where at last he was not known and revered. There is no part of the civilised world where he is not revered to-day ; the world was his parish, and the world is his debtor. WPlSr.l'.Y A\n Ills Wi^RK M!> af^'c when or feared Uiers and 3h lie had 1 his trust tid it reads s are torn ither lie is on preacli- ■et another lid (Ih fends e churches he an uu- i to preach multitudes, in a day, hour. He hty miles a erns while streets and :, the great liloats over 'e hear the of sound, hymns to ;ie common part of the ind revered, here he is inirish, and Tt was said at a recent uroat council, siinijar to this, that the cliurches rcpri^sontod there \v\\ no mission to the common people. The Conure- ^^atioiial C'hurr'h was not for the common ])eo|)le, hut for tlie " iiiti^llectual aristocracy" of the middle- class(>s. I will not pause to asic wluilhcr this statement is true or justiliod, hut 1 say it expresses a temptu' which is an outra'^^o on Christianity itself. Christ was a common man, [(is disciples were common men, and it was amoii'.;- tlie common pe(q)le, and hy their ardour of uncon(|uorahlc heroism, that the Church was founded. Looked at in the hic^diost w-ay, we ou,L,dit to remoniher tliat Christianity recognises no class-distinctions. We do not minister to classes, we minister to the world. r)iit it is ohvious enough that common people make the vast majority of that world, and, therefore, it is to them we must go first. ^lethodism has never known anything of "intel- lectual aristocracies ; " it is the Church of the people. It has s])rung from the people ; it is supported by the peoplt^ ; it exists for the people ; and the greatest glory which any Church can earn is not that intel- lectual aristocracies applaud it, hut that the common people hear it gladly, and hy it the poor have the Gospel preached to them. And the success of Wesley washasedou two facts : he preached the love of God, and ho emhodied it. It is an entire mistake to suppose tliat ho ailected the great multitudes he addressed by any vivid pictures of hell, or the common rant of a cheap and vulgar evangelism. He had as keen a dislilvo to cant and t k' I Ui . . f ill k' J t 1 I. 1 1 i 1 i 1 ! 1 > 1 ) ■ i '■ l- i M 1: Ik 1 h 1, 1 •1 '' 1 1 1 ■ i; 1 270 IVES/.EY AM) HIS WORK. rant as any iiuui wlio over lived. IIu says he pre- fers a sermon on \.\in)\ temper to wliat is vulj^arly called a " (lospel s(;rniou," " The term," says lie, *' has now heconie a mere cant word. I wish none ol' our Society would use it. It has no determina- tive meaning'. Let but a pert, selt'-sul'licient animal, that has neither sense nor ^jrace, bawl out something iibout Christ and His hlood, or justifica- tion by faith, and his hearers cry out, ' What a hne Gospel sermon!'" It is equally a vital error to suppose that there was anything austere and priggish in W^esloy's Methodism. He says, " iieligion is love : as it is the hai)[)iest, so it is the cheerfulcst thing in tlie world; it is utterly inconsistent with luoroseness, sourness, severity, and, indeed, whatever is not according to tlie softness, and sweetness, and gentleness of Christ Jesus." He tells his preachers that they are to hate nothing but sin. Wherever he goes, especially i)i his later life, \\v carries with him a peculiar serenity, cheerfulness, and vital joy. The great message he had for the multitude was that God loved them, and the multitude saw in the life of Wesley the evidence that God had not forgotten them. George ]']liot has caught the real tone and spirit of early Methodist ])reaching in her noble and pathetic picture of Dinah Morris preaching on the village green ; and that was a study from the life. When Wesley faced great sinful multitudes, his voice quivered as the voice of Dinah Morris did, and his words had the same yearning of inetfable compassion in them. He did not know liow to spare himself. I'll WESLEY AND If IS ]\'i)Rk'. 271 G pre- lys lie, I noiiG fiuiiia- iVicieiit Avl out stifica- a line L'l'or to uiggish fioii is ii'falcst it witli hatever ss, and eacliers hcrever H with tal joy. as that hfe of lr<:jotteii no and )lc and on the 10 Hfe. s voice ud his Kission imself. At Cardil'l" ho says, " My heart was enlar^jjod ; T know not how to f,qve over, so tliat wo continued three liouis." He ])reaclios on his father's toinl) at I"j[) worth ono lovely June evening; for " near three liours," and tliis was his fourth service in the day. It may almost 1)0 said tliat he rediscovered the lost art of preachin;jj to tlie common ])eopl(\ and <,'ave it a now lease of life. A^'ain, one catches a f^dimpse of those f,a*eat multitudes, and sees the face of Wesley rapt and solemn while he preaches, or we hehold him, as (.'rahhe llohinson descrihes him, helped into the ])ulpit in extreme old a>^a^ by two of his brethren — a saintly fif,nire with clear eyes and lon<; white hair — to the last tostifyin;:^ of the ,i;ospel of the f^jrace of God. Is it wonderful that the nef^lected poor crowded to him? Do they ever fail to crowd to the man who conies to them clothed in the compassion of Christ ? Is it not there that our work as ministers and churches still lies ? The common people — the if^norant, the poor, the outcast, the great unchurched masses for wlioin the decorous worship of the sanctuary has no charm, and the formal ])riest and Lovito no balm of healing — this is your groat con- stituency, O churches ; those are they who need you most ; these will repay you with the quickest faith, the kindliest welcome, the noblest gratitude ; and was it not among these that Christ found almost His only sym])athisei>, :nid from them selected the a])ostlos who have changed the world? ILL W'p ^l.-'iice lastly at the Philosophy of the Growth of Wesley's w'ork. Wesley introduced a new m IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) V /. o % .^^ .% < % % V4^ o 1.0 t^ 1^ I.I 11.25 ...,. I 22 1^ V] c^ ^1 '^ > o ^e: /a 7 Photographic Sciences Corporation 3? WEST MAIN STREf T WEBSTER, N.Y. USSO (716) 873-4503 ,-\ ^ 4? o 4^ 6^ I 6^ 272 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. idea into tlie life and religious thought of the people, and it has taken root all over the world, till there are not fewer than twenty-five millions that own his spiritual sway. His work began in the most insigni- ficant of ways, .>ud in this it resembles every great religious movement, and even Christianity itself. And it is at this point that the illustration of the leaven asserts itself, and we see how singularly felicitous it is. What is leaven ? It is so humble a force that one can scarcely call it a force at all. Yet there is a secret potency and pervasiveness about it which is omnipotent in its own sphere. When once it has begun to ferment it will go on fermenting till the whole mass of dough is leavened. And in this respect nothing could more aptly illustrate the vital force of ideas and of spiritual movements. Jesus applies the illustration to His own words and work, and this is the supreme example of its meaning. Think of what it means that here are certain words of Jesus spoken long since from some obscure hill- side of Palestine — words of deep spiritual originality and significance. They were heard by a company of peasants in the most insignificant country of the world. No telegraph caught them up and flashed them round the globe ; no printing press for fourteen centuries was to give them permanence and currency. They were uttered in a slender space of time measured by minutes ; the clear air stirred with their vibration for a few seconds, and then was still again as though no voice had spoken. Presently the crowd separated ; very soon the speaker w?s unjustly condemned, and I FES LEY AND HIS WORK. ♦^73 vords hill- lality ny of ►f the shed rteen ency. sured •ation ough ated; , and His lips were forever silenced on the Cross. But those words were not lost ; they were preserved on something more permanent tlian parchment ; they were stamped on the living hearts and memories of men. One by one men felt their potency and signi- ficance, and surrendered to their spell. Yet so slow was the process — so silent and gradual — that it seemed to the casual onlooker as if nothing had happened. It was as Jesus said it would be : men would say there was no kingdom of God at all, because they were incapable of recognising the pro- gress of silent and secret forces. The true strength of those forces we can now measure. We know now that ideas are more powerful than empires ; that he who utters the truth has crowned himself with a supremacy which the centuries cannot destroy. Empires have perished, the whole face or the world has suffered infinite and multitudinous change, but the ideas of Jesus live ; they live in added strength ; they are as leaven working through the hearts and minds of men still, till the whole shall be leavened. But the force of the text is to teach us not only the vitality of ideas, but the value of insignificance. The Kingdom of God is to be victorious by the aggrega- tion of little things, the conversion of peasants, the change which passes over the life and thought of innumerable obscure and uninfluential individuals. Is not that lesson of the value of insignificance one of the lessons continually taught us by the brilliant dis- coveries of modern science ? The raindrop is a little thing, yet it is the power of raindrops to denude 18 fr' 274 WESLEY AND HIS WORK'. ■:y f I continents of their soil, and to wear a course through the hving granite, and to shatter mountains and hterally remove them into the sea. It is the rain- drop which has built up in the deltas of the Mississippi, from the sand and silt of continual storm water, a tract of land larger than Ireland ; it is the raindrop which is hourly fretting away the spires and rock towers of the Matterhorn^ transforming their adamantine fronts, and yearly reducing their height and majesty. The sand- storm is a little thing, but it can bury cities^ and cover the Sphinx in a thick drift, from which no human power can extricate it. The particles of the air we breathe are so minute as to be actuallv invisible ; but from their united strength is born the storm which wastes forests in its passage, and over- whelms the stablest works of man with desolation. There are a hundred chemic substances that appear but as useless dust, and yet they have power in them to dissolve the toughest metals, or wholly change their character. There are a hundred organisms so minute that the best microscope can hardly discover them ; but they have power to carry death and suffering through an empire, and to utterly depopulate the most prosperous country. Insignificance ! Pray, what is insignificant ? Has it not been said that there are forces hidden in a dew-drop which, if liberated, might wreck a world ? And what is more insignificant than the individual man — the poor, obscure, human entity, whose days are as a shadow that passes away, and whose life ia IVES LEV AND HIS WORK. 275 can but a few troubled breaths between two eternities ? Yet every great mc/ement which has changed the world is the result of changes in the individuals, who have first received, and then . '^read the force of a single idea. It is so Jesus says His kingdom will come. It will touch individuals, and through them change the world. Men will not know that any- thing is happening till the kingdom has come ; they will treat as insignificant that which is the agent and power of God, and is His manifestation among men. When Christ changes you His kingdom has advanced one stage the nearer; through you and me the force will stream on and on and touch others; it will be as the leaven that leavens the whole lump. To dwell further upon the means by which the leaven of truth was spread by Wesley and his Evan- gelists is needless. There have been brotherhoods and religious orders in the world before ; but cer- tainly none more extraordinary than these early Methodists. They were trained to bear suffering without murmur, and poverty without complaint. They gladly submitted themselves to the rule of Wesley, and at his will were moved hither and thither to do their great work. How many un- known Dinah Morris's have lived and died heroi- callj' in those early days ! How many gracious women have submitted to the yoke of comparative penury to help the cause for which they lived! How many children have been born in this hard Methodist cradle, and have grown up to bless the 276 WESLEY AND BJS IVORK. M r kindly rule of Wesley ! And as the paj^e unfolds, we see Wesley's crusaders in other hemispheres than ours ; we follow Asbury in his rapid pioneer journeys in America ; we see Whitefield standing with the sinking candle in his hand to the last pleading with the people on the night in which he dies ; we hear Wesley's soldiers praying with each other on Euro- pean battlefields ; we watch Coke dying just as he sees afar the turrets and battlements of the great Indian empire which he longed to win for Christ; we see in latter days Fiji civihsed and Christianised by the heroic labours of Hunt and Calvert; and from strange lands there come to us the echoes of the old hymns, the record of the old experiences, told in the old familiar phrases, which in Wesley's day often stirred the souls of thousands as they prayed in Gwennap pit, or held their joyous love-feasts or solemn watch- nights in many a meeting-house of Cornwall or Northumberland. ** The simplification of life " — that great key-note which was struck in the Great Revolution, and is still heard so clearly in the poetry of Wordsworth — was the note which Wesley sounded before either. He saw that true riches consisted in the fewness of ar wants — not in the abundance of our possessions ; and he urged on all his converts the utmost frugality of life. He himself set the example. It is com- puted that he gave away not less than £30,000, the profits of his publications, and, until he was a very old man, he never rode in a chaise. He introduced WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 277 the same note of simplification into relif^ion. He thought little of creeds, and never imposed one on his followers. He said — "Is thy heart right, as my heart is with thine ? I ask no further question. If it be, give me thine hand. For opinions or terms let us not destroy the work of God. Dost thou love and serve God? It is enough. I give thee the right hand of fellowship." He defined a Methodist, in the broadest of terms, as " one who lives according to the method laid down in the Bible." He wrote once : " The Methodists do not impose, in order to admission into their Society, any opinions whatever. The Presbyterian may be a Presbyterian still; so may the Quaker, and none will contend with him about it. They think and let think. One condition, and one only, is required — a real desire to save their souls." His definition of his own work was that he aimed at spreading Scriptural holiness throughout the land. He began life with i bsolute submission to the Church : he ended it with absolute submission to the living Christ alone. He knew how to descend deep and deeper into himself, till nothing but a clear and undivided voice was heard — " a voice that does away with doubt, and brings with it persuasion, light, and serenity."* He taught that to follow that inward voice was life ; that for every man there was that specific assurance, and in that teaching he simplified theology and brushed away its techni- calities. The result was that religion was made I f * (C Amiel's Journal," p. 10. i»78 WESLEY AND HIS WORK'. clear and simple to the most ignorant, and became a thing of freedom, of cheerfulness, of certitude and unfading joy. But the leaven of Methodism is not seen alone in the creation of a sect or church. It has touched and changed all other churches. Its best elements have long ago been incorporated into the common life of Christendom. It has liberalised the theology of all the churches. Never himself a dogmatist, always ready to prefer conduct to creeds, declaring himself " the friend of all, and enemy of none," animated by national rather than sectarian aims, Wesley has been an unmeasured and immeasurable power in purifying the religious life of the whole world. The man who declared that doubtless Marcus Aurelius was one of those who would sit down in the kingdom of Christ when the children of the kingdom would bo cast out, could not help infusing into the life of his nation a new breadth of thought, a new tolerance and charity. What he did by his preaching, Charles Wesley did by his poetry, and it was his glorious task to create a magnificent hymnology, in the hosijitality of whose praise all churches are united. The modern Church of England is the creation of Wesley ; and, far as it may have travelled on lines the opposite of his, it was he who gave it the new impulse which makes it a great and living power to-day. Nor \'6 this all. All historians are now agreed that it was Methodism, or, to use the larger and more Catholic phrase, the Evangelical Eevival, WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 27i> new )Ower which saved Great Britain from a revolution which might have been as bloody, as disastrous, and far more prolonged than the French Revolution. The very men who would have made magnificent mob- leaders, Wesley subdued and made class-leaders ; the men who would have fought with tue ferocity of mastiffs behind English barricades, Wesley enlisted in the great crusade of righteousness, and made soldiers of Jesus Christ ; and while France rang with the fierce music of the Marseillaise, sung to a frightful accompaniment of lust, and pillage, and slaughter, John Wesley and his helpers were going up and down the land singing the Marseillaise of Methodism, — that the world might taste and see The riches of His grace : The arms of love that compass me Woxild all mankind embrace. And thus, when the great revolution came, fifty years of the great revival had done its work, and it was only the torn and futile edges of the storm-cloud that swept along our shores. To-night, we look back to that simple but memorable scene which took place a hundred years ago in that little room in City Road. Wesley literally died working — Languor was not in his heart, Weakness not in his word, Weariness not on his brow. In his eighty-fourth year be gave the first five days Vh 280 WESLEY A.\D JUS IIVA'A'. h< i I of the New Year to the task of walking throuf^h the streets of London, soHciting ahiis for the rehef of the poor. His last letter was a nohle protest aj^ainst the liorrors of slavery. A few weeks only before his death he com]>leted his lonj; literary labours by trans- lating for the use of his people a French treatise on the happiness of the future state. In those last days wherever he appeared in public men regarded him with the veneration due to a saint, and to their friendly greetings his habitual reply was, " Little children, love one another." It was his custom to conclude his meetings in these days with the lines, — • that without a. linj^pvinj? fjroan 1 may the welcouie word receive— ay lio(ly with iiiy char<^(,' hiy down And cease at once to work and live. And his prayer was answered. He preached his last sermon on the 23rd February, 1791, and came home to die. Never, surely, was the place of death more sacred, more lovely, or more visibly the vestibule of heaven. It was not dying : it was euthanasia. To the last the happy old man sang : I'll praise my Maker while I've breath, And when my voice is lost in death. Praise shall employ my nobler powers : My days of praise shall ne'er be past While life, or thou<»ht. or being last, Or immortality endures. Then, with the memorable word, '* The best of all is, God is with us," and a whispered " Farewell" to one iv/:sf.i:y A.\n n/s ivoh'K. jsi all is, ;o one of liis best-loved helpers, the spirit of Wc^sley passed to the l)eatific vision. So passed away John Wesley — the {greatest re- lij/ious refonntn* of modiMii times. The secret of his siiccesH is found in his faith, his ])i'artic'al sajjjacity, his boldness of invention, above all, in that enthu- siasm for humanity which possessed him. He started a movement, which comnnmicated its conscious or unconscious impulse in turn to A\'iil)erforce and Howard, to Kaikes and Pounds, and in our own day has liorne abundant fruit in a thousand lives of sacri- lice, in enterprises of charity and ])hilantiiropy which have covered the world, in the {gracious development of compassion, in the miti^^ation of the human lot, in the sanctification of the common con- science, and the redemption of thegenei'iil life. I'\)r all of us, life will soon be ended, and we sliall be silent, " gone with the tumult that we made, and the roUinj; and tramj)ling of ever-new f^'enerations will pass over us, and we shall hear it not any more, for ever." Upon us each, day by day, and more and more, there presses the <:freat j^roblcm of human misery which Wesley sought to solve. AVe have an organised and intelligent Christianity unknown in his day ; we have a thousand a])pliances for the work of social redemption which he lacked ; are we living in his spirit? Are we consumed with the passion for souls which he feltV Have we in us the elements out of which the soldiers of this new crusade of Christianity are formed ? Or docs this saintly and courageous spirit rebuke and shame 19 in:s/./:v ,i.\/> ///.s jt-o/:/:. 1; s '^ and coikIuiiiii us for our iiuuiilest unlikcness to his exanii)l(3? To iitti'iiipt to cxliiliit i]\v lessons of rucIi a life is a Jieedluss task. How many aro tlutse h^ssons, liow easily ixTccivcul, anti yot liow hard to learn ".' May we, and all Christendom ho to-dav haptised anew for the dead ! May we see with n(!W clearness of vision what it is that makes life really ;:reat, and wliat alone makes death a trium|)li. May W(> learn, in the spirit of this <'reat life, to dedicati. r .'selves anew to the service of luimanity ; aiivl ahove all. may we attain to a stron^'er and si'iipler faith in the Gospel of Christ, when we see how mii^ditily it was used hy him to the redemj)tion of nni.ltiludes. Such men are not j^'iven only for our admiration, })ut our emulation. We cannot do all that they did, and no douht times and opportunities are chan^'ed ; but how much more can we do than we are doin*,'? l^'or the worth of such a service as this is, as I have said, not that we laud a man, or ];raise a system, hut that we measure ourselves hesi(U^ his sin;4le-mindedness, his self- sacrifice, his heroic devotion, and try to ho like him. The end of the true evolution is to lift all men to an lieroic level, to an equality of faith and service. That is the «,n'eat hope which we inherit — the future toward which W(> move if we be worthy. 1^ roi^i't'ss IS Tilt' law of litr; mail is not man as yet ; Nor shall I tlcfui his ol.jcct sfi-vcd, his end Attaiiu'tl. his <^cinrmc strni^th jint fairly forth. While only ln-rc and tlicrt' a star dispels The durkuesb— here and there u toweriu'' mind ii'/:s/.r;\ .n/, ,iis ii;,ka- ..„■,. <>'-rl"..k»il»|„-.«t,af,.r,.||,.,v,, «l„.„,|„, i„ , '"■'•>■'"■-""- "»«.n,.n,i i„r;,,„.v, "■'■ "';'; "' ^^.■••^■'■y "'o <>i' ■ .. s„,,„.„„. ,.„„„„,„,. '-Ull us,,c.n,.s<,f..,„i,,,.,,,.,, to ui,H.|, thol,,,,,,,, "Y atu,n. \\i.,„ ,,i,„.,„„„„ „,. ,,,..„, Jf ^ bo ,et«v..,M,s an.n.inUMatlK. spirit nfl„s Id,, n.;. CO n.„o„ s|, „,,.c, nn.i sl„„o with th.. s.u,,,. ki,„ . r-Imuco. .\,ullK.l,ol,l,"T),ey that Lewis 1,, ..„e as the. l.H.l.tnossofthon„„a,,,,.nt,a,ult he at^,,„, „.any to righteousness as the sta ., f: .^ LONDUK : W. SFEAIOUT AND SONi^, PBINTER9, FETTKR LANE. 13 «y M, ri.EET STREET, LONDON. 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