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THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS

m«i

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FIRST THINGS FIRST. Addresses to Young Men.
Seventh Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d.

These addresses are short, full of force, and cffectiial in the lessons
they convey. . . . He is no waster of words : he points a truth in a few
brief, incisive phrases, and preaches a sermon in a paragraph. Above
all, they are manly in tone, .-ind hav2 the sterling ring of sincerity." -
Dumifc Alive ■tiscr.

LONDON : HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27 Paternoster Row

THE

TABLE-TALK OF JESUS

AND Other Addresses

BV THE REV.

GEORGE JACKSON, B.A.

LONDON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON

27 PATERNOSTER ROW

.MDCCCXCVI

12646

?."

MY WIFE

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The kindly welcome given by an indulgent press
and public to my First T/niigs First — six thou-
sand copies having been sold within two years —
has encouraged the preparation of this succeeding
volume. As in the former case all the addresses
contained in the present volume have — with one
exception ' — been delivered in the course of my
ordinary ministry. A few have already appeared
in various magazines and papers ; the rest are
printed now for the first time.

I have no wish to excuse literary imperfections,
of which no one can be more conscious than I
am, but I may be allowed to state, that though
these addresses have beeti entirely re-written since
their delivery, they remain addresses still ; the re-

' That entitled The Missionary Motive.

mmmrfaamra

Vlll

T/ie Table- Talk of Jesus

writinjT, like the original preparation, has taken
place with an imaginary audience before me, and
the language of direct address has, without hesita-
tion, been maintained throughout.

More gratifying even than the kindly press
notices of my earlier volume have been the assur-
ances received again and again of its practical
usefulness to many engaged like myself in Chris-
tian work — to lay-preachers, class-leaders, leaders
of adult Bible-classes, and many others of my
own and sister Churches. For this new volume I
can desire nothing better than that it may repeat,
in this respect, the experience of its predecessor.

CONTENTS

The Tahi.e-Talk ok Jesus ....

Euhc xiv. I.
" Ih went into the house of one of the rulers of the Pharisees
on a Sahbath to eat bread. "

I'AUB
I

The Mother of Jesus • . . .

Maxk vi. 3.

"/snot this . . . the son of Mary?"

Ill

The Brotiieks and Sisters or Jesus

iliflath vi. 3.

" Is not this . . . the brother of James, and Joses, and fudas,

and Simon ? and are not His sisters here with us ? ''

IV
What Think YE OF God? . • . . .

Genesis xxxi. 53.

•' And Jacob sivare by the Fear of his father Isaac. "

%\\\t xi. 2.
" When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in Heaven."

I i

The Table-Talk of Jestis

Character and Creed ....

3of)n xiii. 13, 14.

" Ye call me, Master, and, Lord: and ye say well ; for so I am.
If 1 then, the Lord and the Master, have ivashed your feet,
yc also ought to ivash one another'' s feet."

PAGE

■ 65

Chrlst's Lovf roR Man

VII

Wages or Gift?

lilomans vi. 23.

" The wages of sin is death ; but the free gift of God is eternal
life in Christ fesus our Lord."

VIII
The Castle of Mansoul . . . . .109

53roioertjs iv. 23.

" Keep thy heart with all diligence ; fir out of it are the issues

oflifi."

Patience with God

fHattljciu xi. 2, 3.

123

'* Ncnv zvhen John heard iii the prison the ivorks of the Christ,
he sent by his disciples and said unto Him, Art thou He
that cometh, or look we for another i "

^galm xxxvii. 7.
'•'' Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him."

Contents

The Imitation ok Jksus

I'AGE

J^ofjlt xili. 15.
Ihave given you an cxamph; that ye also should do as I
have done to you.-'

The InvLLs ok Bethlehem : A Christmas Sermon

Euftc ii. 15.

" Let us go now even unto Bethlehem^

•53

i\ Ravelt Hasp

The Missionary Motive

XII

XIII

XIV

Questions AM, Answers: A Bible Reading

ittark x. 10, n.

" And in the house the disciples asked Hint again of this
matter. And He saith unto them .. ."

The Dikkiculties ok Unbeliek

XVI
The Backwater ok Lii e

2 ©motijjj iv. 6.
" The time of my departure is come."

167

183

203

219

2i7

mmmmmmm

Xll

T/ic Table-Talk of Jesus

' ■!

XVII

"Never too Latk to Mend"-— Is it? .

I^ebrcius vi. 6.
" It is impossible to renew them again unto repentance.

PAGE

"Wilt Thou?"

XVIII

3oljn V. 6.
" Wilt thou?''

265

PAGE

265

THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS

•aasoF^^rm

, !

THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS

' ^ "-^ ^"^^^^ f'onse of o.e of tl. rulers of tJ. Pharisees
Sabbath to cat bread." ~Imk^ ^iv. i.

on a

JT was the Sabbath day. and a certain wealthy
Pharisee had .nvited Jesus to make one of a
number of guests at his table. The motive that
prompted the invitation was probably a mitd
one ; nevertheless it was accep'^ed, and thaT day
the Pharisee and his friends heard such a plain
searching bit of table-talk as probably they hid
never listened to before. "When He wenUn'o
the house," we read, "they were watching H I'm"

tTiem with ,'r" \ ""' "^ "'» -- -="ch^g

to be°ar""i^'"""/ t" ^''' '"'^'^^''' " '» "««^^aiy
to bear m mind the difference between Eastern

The Table-Talk of Jesus

and Western modes of life. " The Englishman's
house is his castle " is a sentiment that is wholly
unknown m the Oriental world. '* The universal
prevalence of the law of hospitality — the first of
Eastern virtues — almost forces the Oriental to
live with open doors, and any one at any time
may have access to his rooms." ^ It is not, there-
fore, surprising to read that after Jesus had
entered the house, " Behold, there was before Him
a certain man who had the dropsy." Probably
his presence was not an accident. Wc are told,
in an earlier chapter, that the scribes and Pharisees
were " laying wait for Him, to catch something-
out of His mouth," and it would seem as if this
sick man's appearance just now was part of a
pre-arranged plot. So, at least, it seems to have
been understood by Jesus. He " answering, spake
unto the lawyers and Pharisees " ; but they
had said nothing. He has read their unspoken
thoughts, and it is to these He makes answer.

Was there any bound to the heartlessness of
these men ? We are indignant if we hear of a
surgeon experimenting on sick helplessness in a
hospital, but what shall we say of these who are
ready to make of a suffering man their tool, a stick
with which to strike at Christ, and afterwards to
be flung aside when their miserable purpose is
accomplished ? See how Christ puts them all to
shame. " Is it lawful," He asked them, " to heal
on the Sabbath or not ? " But they held their

Farrar's Life of Christ.

The Table- Talk of Jesus

peace. Then He took the sick man and healed
him, and let him go. Then once more He turned
to his persecutors : " Which of you shall have a
son or even an ox fallen into a well, and will not
straightway draw him up on a Sabbath day ? "
But again they were silent : " they could not
answer unto these things." So, for the sixth time,
does Christ vindicate God's thoughts of the
Sabbath against those who were making into a
curse what He meant for a blessing.

Thus once more arc we brought face to face
with one of those grave practical difficulties which
are always with us. The question of " Sabbath
observance " has again reached an acute stage in
our city.^ Our fathers had pretty definite ideas
about these matters ; their creed was a very simple
one, and they were rarely troubled as we are to
know " where to draw the line." For crood or for
ill that day is wholly past. It is not possible,
even if it were desirable, for us to lay upon our
children the yoke which some of our fathers laid
upon us. And the peril of our position is this,
that while the old theory of life is gone, we have
as yet no other to take its place ; with the in-
evitable consequence that at the present moment
there is a tendency to relaxation all round, of
which these discussions on the question of
" Sunday golf" are our latest illustration.

^ The reference is to tlie subject of " Sunday golf," which was
exciting considerable attention in Edinburgh at the time when this
address was delivered.

' 1

b <

)

{

77ic Table- Talk of Jesus

It is worthy of note that those who take what
is called "the broad view" in these matters, often
make their appeal to Christ, whom they claim
as on their side. But now, let us see. It is, of
course, true that Christ was in constant conHict
with the professional defenders of the sacred day,
that He treated with absolute disregard the sense-
less restrictions with which they had fenced it
about. Yet He never blamed them for observing
the day as holy, for marking it off as different
from other days ; He condemned them because
what God meant for a boon they had made into
a burden. " The Sabbath was made for man,"
He said ; but that does not mean " for man to do
as he likes with," as glib quoters of the words often
seem to imply. Those who wish to make the
Day of Rest a day of pleasure-seeking may be
able to give good reasons for what they do, but
they must not quote Jesus. It is a fact significant
of much, that on five out of the six occasions when
Christ came into conflict with the Pharisees on
the question of Sabbath observance, what He
contends for is the right, not of self-indulgence, but
of self-sacrifice, the right to minister to the neces-
sities of others.

And, therefore, if I am asked to vote for
"Sunday golf" I for one must decline. I do
not want any revival of obsolete and impossible
legislation interfering with the liberties of indi-
viduals. If the members of a private golf club
choose to make use of their course on a Sunday,

■i'.^'

The Tablc-l^alk of Jesus

that is no business of mine. But when it is pro-
posed to open the public links, that is another
matter. Of course, if the majority demand it
sooner or later they will get it ; but meanwhile I
claim my right as a citizen to use any little influ-
ence I may have in dissuading them from what I
am convinced would prove ultimately to be an
unwise step.

I appeal to you, w^orking men, in whose sup-
posed behalf proposals of this kind arc generally
made. Many of you are greatly interested in
movements for shortening the hours of labour :
take care that you do not undo with one hand
what you are doing with the other. A wide and
rapid extension of the provision for public amuse-
ment will inevitably mean in the long run more
work for those who have already too much work
to do. After Sunday golf will come Sunday trains
and Sunday trams and Sunday omnibuses ; but
the men to drive them will not be the men who
to-day are clamouring in the newspapers for the
links to be open seven days a week. I protest I
am no lean and sour-faced Puritan ; I want no
impossible ideal ; a certain amount of Sunday
labour is inevitable, but he is no true friend of
the working maii who does not seek to keep it at
a minimum.

The Sabbath is not a tax levied on man's time
by the Great Overseer of human life ; it is a
merciful provision for his need. Its perpetual
obligation is based not so much upon an ancient

i m aiat^ii n i —i

'''

The Table- Talk of Jesus

statute given to Moses, but rather upon the per-
petual necessities of man, for which that statute
made earl)' and wise provision. We may disregard
those necessities, we may give up to idle frivolity
and pleasure -.'-.ceking what God meant for the
deepening and strengthening of all that is greatest
in our natures, but it will be to reap a retribution
not less certain because it is no longer proclaimed
amid the thunders and lightnings of Sinai.

TJie healing of the man with the dropsy we
may suppose to have taken place before the meal
began ; what follows would occur during its
progress.

The next words of Jesus were spoken " to them
that were bidden " — to the guests. He had
marked how " they were picking out for them-
selves " the chief seats ; and when they were
seated. He read them a brief lesson in polite-
ness and courtesy. " When thou art bidden of
any man to a marriage feast," He said, " sit
not down in the chief seat, but when thou art
bidden go and sit down in the lowest place."
Then, as was His wont. His words struck deeper,
and the root of all this unseemly striving for
precedence He laid bare in their self-asserting
pride : " Everyone that exalted himself shall
be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall
be exalted."

The Table-Talk of Jesus

The particular form of Christ's rebuke may
have lost its force for us to-day ; nevertheless His
lesson in politeness and courtesy is by no means
antiquated. 1 venture to think that, speaking
generally, Christian people do not attach anything
like due importance, anything like the importance
which the New Testament attaches, to what may
be called the "minor moralities" of life. \\^ are
rightly anxious that a man should " believe and
be saved," but we are not anxious as we ought to
be concerning the things which a saved man
should " add to " his " faith." A man — a Christian
man, I mean — may be rude, ill-mannered, boorish,
but we are all ready with excuses for him ; these
are his " failings," we say, and we think of them
as we think of the hump on the camel's back —
very ungainly, no doubt, but then the creature was
made so ! According to one of Tennyson's
biographers, when a lady once appealed to him to
explain a certain passage in one of his poems
which she had failed to understand, the poet
replied as follows : " Dear madam, I merely
supply poetry to the English people — not brains ;."
concerning which the biographer remarks, " His
friends always understood that the rough manner
concealed a genuine geniality." But what is the
worth, one would like to know, of a " geniality,"
however " genuine," that is " concealed " after that
fashion? Has not Tennyson himself taught us —

" Manners are not idle, but the fruit
Of noble nature, and of loyal mind } "

1 !

The Table- Talk of Jesus

To my thinking such a letter was positively
brutal.

Are there not many Christian homes where
Christ's lesson is still needed ? Mrs. Waule (in
George Eliot's Middleuianli) used to think " that
entire freedom from the necessity of behaving
agreeably was included in the Almisjhty's inten-
tions about families." We have all of us, probably,
met with people of that kind. I have known
young men who were the pink of courtesy to
every young lady of their acquaintance, except
when that young lady happened to be their own
sister. Let us be sure of this : our religion has a
very great deal yet to do for us if it allows us to
keep all our winning ways and kindly attentions
for the house of a stranger, and to drop them the
moment we set foot on our own threshold.

While I am speaking on this subject, may I
refer to another matter ? I was greatly delighted a
little time ago to see that a distinguished Glasgow
minister, Dr. Hunter, had the courage to speak out
on the question of public smoking. I am not a
smoker; neither am I an anti-smoker; I can enjoy
a good cigar any time, always provided another
man smokes it. But while I have not a syllable
to say against those who choose to smoke in
private, I entirely agree with Dr. Hunter in
condemning the discourtesy of multitudes who
smoke in public. " I question," he said, " whether
a smoker can go the length of a single street
without annoying some one," and probably never a

The Table- Talk of Jesus

day passes in our city but scores of persons of
both sexes suffer the greatest discomfort, because
some thouf^htless fellow seats himself in the front
of a 'bus or tramcar, and lets the wind blow his
dirty smoke and ashes into the faces of his
unhappy fellow-passen^^ers behind him.

Now, perhaps, some of you are inclined to be
offended, and you are beginning to wonder if the
preacher has forgotten that it is Sunday evening
and that we are in church. Well, but religion
ought to have something to say to us about
matters of this kind — and it has, if we would
only listen to it. An old English poet calls Jesus,
" the first true gentleman that ever breathed."
The best manual of true politeness that I know is
the New Testament. "A Christian," says Julius
Hare, " is God Almighty's gentleman." What
Christ cared for is surely worth our caring for,
and if He stopped to rebuke the rudeness of the
Pharisee's guests, and Himself always set an
example of thoughtful consideratencss, ought not
courtesy to be more than an idle matter to us
who profess to be His followers?

Ill

From the guests Christ turns to speak to the
host. " And He said to him that had bidden Him,
When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not
thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor thy kinsmen,
nor thy rich neighbours . . . But when thou

' i^

SkVvi?

•'%

7/it' Table- Talk of Jesus

inakost ;i fca U, hiil the poor, the maimed, the
lame, the hliiul : and thou shah be blessed ; because
the)- have not wherewith to recompense thee : for
thou shalt be recompensed in the resurrection of
the just."

Now, before \vc ijfo further — is this the Christ
you believe in ? a Christ who enters into your
homo, who sits ilown with )'ou at )-our table and
hears you talk ; a Christ who comes into )'our
shop, and behind )our counter, and looks over
your cash-book and ledt^er — is this your Christ?
or have you no dealintjs with Ilim except in the
SNiiag'o^ue ? Then 1 fe is not the Christ of these
Gospels: " //«• went into the //fv/jv," and He has
somewhat to sa)' mito us when we sit down at
table no less than when we sit down in church.

It ought not to be necessary to .say that there
is nothing; in these words of Christ to the I'harisce
to forbid that happy social intercourse, the
friendl)- i;athcrin;^s, and the Christmas i)arties
that add .so t^reatly to the healthy cnjoxinent of
life. An ajjostle bids us " be given to hos-
pitality ;" Jesus Himself was a partaker of such
hospitalit)' at the marriage feast of Cana, and
when Judas would have checked the lavi.sh outflow
of Mary's love, sternK' rebuked him. Common-
sense is needed to interpret the words of Jesus
not less than the words of others.

It may be, indeed, there are some who would
find not only no harm, but great good in a literal
application of Christ's teaching. When we

The Table- Talk of Jesus

mcd, the
; because
l^hcc : for
cctioii of

he Christ

nto your

able and

ito )'our

:iks over

1- Christ ?

)t in the

of these

lie has

down at

hurch.

lat there

I'harisce

use, the

; parties

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to hos-

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10 would
a literal
hen we

remember the time and money that will be
wastetl in Julinbur^h this winter in paying and
rcturninj^ " calls," in dinners of ccjual dreariness
and costliness, which <^nve no real enjoyment to
one single soul, which arc tolerated by host and
guest alik'c only because that mysterious entity
called "society" demands it, one cannot but feel
that the literal application is in some cases,
perhaps, the most needed. Hut even for those
whose luore straitened circumstances will always
save them from the temptation of the well-to-do
Pharisee of this chai)ter there is a lesson in
Christ's words. We have all need to beware of
that subtle selfishness which gives only when it
hopes to receive again. And when I speak of
"giving," f do not mean simply, or even chiefly,
the giving of money or food. Not by material
gifts is the spirit of Christ's words always best
fulfilled. We have all in our measure gifts of
sociality, the power to please, the power to serve.
Do not let us lend these out only where they are
sure to come back to us with interest. Rather
let us seek out the dull and the vacant, the
friendless and the forgotten, those who have
nothing to give in return ; let us give ourselves
to these, and verily we shall be blessed, for we
shall " be recompensed in the resurrection of
the just."

Christ's closing words were prompted by an

Ill

ir ■!
111

T/te Table- Talk of Jesus

observation on the part of one of the guests.
This man felt, perhaps, that the conversation was
taking a somewhat awkward turn, that it was
becoming uncomfortably personal ; and therefore
he let fall a little pious platitude which did not
mean, and was not intended to mean, anything in
particular, but which, he hoped, might have the
effect of bringing the conversation to an end.
" Blessed is he," he said, " that shall eat bread in
the kingdom of God." It was a bit of sheer cant.
" You can see the sanctimonious old hypocrite,'
says Dr. Dods, "solemnly shaking his head, and
letting the words fall unctuously from his tongue."

Christ's answer was the parable of the Great
Supper. An exposition of the parable is not
possible just now, but what Christ meant by it
was, I think, something like this . " Vou talk of
the blessedness of the kingdom of God, do you
think mere talking about it will secure it to you ?
God calls, but even His call is ineffectual if men
do not respond. And how many things there are
that make men deaf to the divine voice ! For
business' sake, for pleasure's sake, for the world's
sake, men miss the highest good. You, you, are
you seeking the blessedness of which you speak
so glibly ? "

Do not Christ's words touch some of us ? We
like to pose as the patrons of religion ; we can
expatiate warmly on the debt which civilization
owes to Christianity ; we subscribe a guinea
annually to foreign missions ; we have even argued

The Table-Talk of Jesus

for the Church as by law estabHshed, and have
written a debating society essay on the superiority
of Jesus to Socrates, And yet, really, almost
anything for which we care is sufficient to make
religion take a second place. Learning calls, and
we say " I come " ; business calls, and we say " I
come " ; pleasure calls, and we say " I come " ;
and God calls, but for Him we have no answer.
Do we know what we are missing ? Christ likens
the kingdom of heaven unto a great feast where
God Himself is the host. You thought religion
meant giving up the sweets of life for dry and
tasteless fare, but Christ says it is a feast. From
the husks that the swine do eat, to the light and
warmth, the welcome and plenty, of the Father's
house — that is Christ's thought of what it is God
calls men to.

And that no man may doubt His welcome,
the King has sent His servant again this day
to say to all, " Come in, for all things are now
ready." " I had a seat at the King's table once,
and tasted the King's good pleasure, but — fool
that I was — I left it ; I shut the door upon
myself. Will he open to me a second time ? "
He will. He will : the door is open now ; come
in, come in. " I have had a glimpse sometimes
of the glory within, and I have wished — but, ah !
I have no right there ; look at my garments, mud-
splashed and torn — there is no room there for
such as I am." Man from the highways and
hedges, the King bids thee enter ; come in, come

■ I

ii'

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The Table- Talk of Jesus

in. " And I, too, long to enter, and for years have
waited, but, alas ! my eyes are dark with doubt,
and fear has seized fast hold upon me. Some-
times I seem to see all clear, and then the dark-
ness falls again until I wonder if the feast, the
proclamation, and the welcome be not all a lie, or
if there be any King at all." Thou art one of
His poor blinded ones, and He has given His
messengers charge concerning thee, that they
should be eyes unto thee lest at any time thou
miss thy way, and that they should bring thee into
His presence. Tarry not, but haste and come ;
the King keeps for thee the seat next Himself.

" Come, all the world ; come, sinner, thou !
All things in Christ are ready now."

I k

If*

THE MOTHER OF JESUS

; T

'' Is not this . . . t/ic son 0/ A/a>y ? "—Mark \l ^.

IV/rY subject this morning is Jesus and His

iVl mother. This, I need hardly remind

you, is a subject concerning which one branch of

the Christian Church — the Roman CathoHc has

had a great deal to say. And, as so often happens
in these matters, exaggeration on the one hand
has led to neglect on the other; and so it has
come to pass that we Protestants, for the most
part, give the subject the go-by altogether.

It is no part of my present purpose to discuss
the various dogmas which, under the fostering
hand of Rome, have grown up around this subject
—the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception, the
Perpetual Virginity, the Miraculous Assumption.
This only I will say, that not only (so at least it
seems to me) are they without one vestige of
scriptural authority, but they are even more,
excluded, as though by anticipation, by the whole

T/ie Mother of Jesus

ili

character and tenor of every one of the few brief
references which the Gospels make to the mother
of our Lord. And anyone who has observed,
however superficially, religious life on the Conti-
nent, and has marked the countless shrines and
images and pictures which appeal to the love and
the imagination of the devout worshipper of the
Virgin, cannot but feel how far in this 'respect, at
least, Roman Christianity has strayed from the
simplicity of the New Testament records.

Nevertheless, Romish exaggeration ought not
to mean Protestant neglect. Of course, we do
believe that Jesus was the son of Mary ; alike
through the " Shorter Catechism " and the
" Apostles' Creed " we declare our faith in Him as
" born of the Virgin Mary." And yet, so fearful
are we of anything that savours of Mariolatry,
that though we habitually think and speak of
Jesus as " Son of God," we almost as habitually
refrain from thinking or speaking of Him as " son
of Mary " ; and so we miss the truth, the strength,
the comfort which God meant should come to us
through this name no less than through that other
and greater name, " Son of God."

A curious illustration of the unwillingness of
multitudes of Protestants to give to Christ this
perfectly scriptural title is furnished by Dean
Milman's well-known hymn beginning, "When
our heads are bowed with woe." As printed in
our own Hymn Book the last line of each verse
reads, "Jesu, Son of David, hear." What Mil-

The Mother of Jesns

man really wrote was, " Gracious Son of Mary,
hear." And if anyone is interested enough to turn to
Julian's grcciX. Dictionary of Hyiunolog)^ he will find
that there are extant at least ten different versions
of that last line, every one of which owes its exist-
ence to the anxiety of the hymn-doctors to get rid
of the obnoxious phrase, " son of Mary." For my
part, I am utterly at a loss to understand this
strange solicitude. If the New Testament calls
Jesus " son of Mary," why should we hesitate ?
Moreover, see what our refusal robs us of. There
are moments when I love to think of Christ as
my King: on His head are many crowns; in His
hand is the sceptre of the universe ; He is King
of kings and Lord of lords, and I worship Him
throned for ever amid the glory of His Father
and of the holy angels. But there are times again
— times " when the spirit shrinks with fear " —
when I would rather think of Him as "born of a
woman," " bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh."

" Thou hast bowed the dying head,
Thou the blood of Hfe hast shed.
Thou hast filled a mortal bier ; "

therefore,

" When our heads are bowed with woe,
* When our bitter tears o'erflow,

When we mourn the lost, the dear,"

what more fitting, what more beautiful than that
we should pray,

" Jesu, Son of Mary, hear I "

The Mother of Jesus

" Thou au the King of Glory, O Christ. Thou
art the everlasting Son of the Father" — I will
sing it to the music of all the trumpets of God.
liut I will sing this also — " When Thou tookest
upon Thee to deliver man, Thou didst not abhor
the Virgin's womb " " Is not this the son of
Mary?"

Let us think, then fore, for a icw moments of
Mary the mother and Jesus the son. We will
look first at the mother's love for her son, and
then at the son's love for His mother.

The Mother's love for her son. — The references
in the four Gospels, as I have said, are compara-
tively few, and when we piece them all together
they do not amount to much. But their meaning
is clear, clear at least to love's eyes, for love is
always quick to catch love's meaning.

" She brought forth her first-born son." I
wonder, does any mother feel quite the same
about any child as she docs about her first-born ?
And Jesus was the first-born child of Mary, And
then, the strange and sacred mystery of that
motherhood ! As far as words can tell it, it is
told in those exquisite narratives of the birth and
infancy which Luke has preserved for us in the
opening chapters of his Gospel. And I some-
times think that Biblical scholarship never made

The Mot her of Jesus

a happier or a more likely conjecture than when
it suggested that these narratives were taken down
by the evangeh'st straight from the lips of Mary
herself. Certain it is there are in them delicate
little touches that reveal unmistakably the hand
of a inother : " And all that heard it wondered at
the things which were spoken unto them by the
shepherds " — ay, wondered to-day, and to-morrow
had forgotten ; " but Mary kept all these saj'iiigs,
pondering titeui in her heart." So again after the
incident in the Temple we read, "And His mother
kept all these sayings in her heart."

From this time onward it is only stray glimpses
that we get of the Son and the mother together ;
she is with Him at the marriage feast at Cana of
Galilee ; she goes down with Him to Capernaum ;
once while He is speaking to the multitude word
is brought to Him that His mother and His
brethren are on the edge of the crowd seeking to
speak with him ; we see her last with the disciples
in the upper room at Jerusalem waiting for the
coming of the Holy Spirit. But the most beauti-
ful record of all is that which John has preserved
for us : " And there stood by the cross of Jesus
His mother." There are few things in all the
Bible that go to my heart quite like that. While
the multitudes were with Him, Mary was content
to stand aside and to watch ; but now that they
have left Him or turned against Him she is by
His side ; it is her turn now. " Lord, with Thee
I am ready to go both to prison and to death ; I

The Mother of Jesus

s %

will lay down my life for Thy sake." It was not
Mary who said that ; mothers never talk after that
fashion ; but when the boastful disciple had denied
Ilim and fled, "there stood by the cross of Jesus
His mother."

What a pitiless storm beat about that poor
lone woman ! What thoughts crowded in upon
her poor tired brain! lUit yesterday He lay a
child upon her bosom, and now He is dying —
dying before her eyes, yet beyond her reach, dying
like a vile and guilty criminal, pinned there to
that rough cross of wood like some loathsome
vermin. Then she remembered the great words
of the angel : " He shall be great, and .shall be
called the Soji of the Most High ; and the Lord
God shall give unto Him the throne of His father
David, and He shall reign over the house of Jacob
for ever ; and of His kingdom there shall be no
end." How often she had said them over to her-
self when, in the quiet home at Nazareth, year
after year had slipped by, till the child had grown
from childhood to boyhood, from boyhood to
youth, from youth to early manhood, and still
there was no sign — until sometimes her heart had
failed her ! Then she would bethink her of
Simeon's strange prophecy as he took the little
child into his old arms : " Yea, and a sword shall
pierce through thine own soul." Many a time
had she turned the words over as she lay awake
at night ; what could it mean, this sword that was
to pierce her own soul ? Then one day the call

The Mother of Jesus

came, and Jesus went forth. " It is coming now,"
she said, " that promised greatness " ; and as day
by day she heard how His fame spread and the
multitudes thronged Him, and nameless women
blessed her that bare I lim, the sw»'id was forgotten ;
once more hope beat high within her. " Surel)'
now, at last," she said, "the promised kingdom is
nigh at hand." Then with such awful swiftness
all had changed ; praise had turned to scorn, and
love to hatred ; cunning — black, treacherous,
horrible — had plotted and had triumphed ; and the
end of all that promised brightness, of the angel's
word, and of her own high hopes, was here ! — in
death, cruel death, death upon a cross I And )-ct,
was He not hers still ? It seemed, indeed, as if the
earth had opened at her feet and swallowed the
hopes of a lifetime. Yet, was He not hers? Had
He not moved in her side ? Had she not borne
Him? Had she not loved Him? Had she not
called riim "son"? Had He not called her
"mother"? Yes, let come what might come, He
was hers ; she must be near Him to the last.
" There stood by the cross of Jesus His mother."

In all the world is there anything to compare
with the constancy, the hopefulness, the patience,
the long-suffering of a mother's love ? I had got
thus far with my sermon preparation when I took
down, perhaps for the hundreth time, Mr. Barrie's
immortal book A Windozu in Thrums. Of all
our modern writers, perhaps, he best understands
and can interpret the love and pathos you may

77/1' Mother of Jesus

\ \

find iiiulcr tlic humblest roof. This is how poor
Jess mourns for her hoy Joey dead this twenty
years : " (luid is no word for what Jamie has been
to inc, but he wasna born till after Joey died.
When we got Jamie, Ilendr}' took to whistlin'
a^ain at tlic loom, an' Jamie juist filled Joey's
place to him. A)', but naebody could fill Joey's
place to me. It's different to a man. A bairn's
no the same to him, but a fell bit o' me was
buried in my laddie's grave." Years went by and
Mendry and Leeby were laid ''i the burying-
ground, and Jamie, who should i.avc been her
stay, was a prodigal in the great city, no one knew
where ; but Jess still sat at her window and
watched the brae. " If he ever comes back, the
sacket," said one of the neighbours angrily one
day, " we'll show hiin the door ^^Q.y quick." "Jess
just looked, and all the women knew how she
would take Jamie to her arms." " l''iction," do
)'ou say ? Yes, and it is history too. There is a
h}-mn we sometimes sing, " There is a gate that
stands ajar," that I should be inclined to find
fault with — for God's gate does not stand "ajar"
simply, but wide open — were it not that once I
heard that round that simple hymn was twined
the story of a mother's love. A girl had strayed
from home ; -"very night after she was missing the
door was lei . on the latch. " She may come home
to-night," said her mother, " and mother's door
must not be shut." I talked once with a little
bent old woman in one of our Edinburgh stairs.

Tlie Mother of Jesus

I had never even suspected the little tragedy that
lay beneath the quiet surface of her life, but that
day, somehow or other, it all came out. She, too,
had her Jamie : long years ago he went away, no
one knew whither ; she had heard nothing of him
since. And sometimes, she told mc, as she sat
alone in her room, and heard a sudden stei) on
the stairs, her heart would give a leap : " Perhaps
it is he — he's coming home agai?> ! "

What Mary's love did for Jesus, how much lie
owed to it, no one can say. Perhaps t' c debt
was greater than we think. Joseph's probable
early death would throw mother and child the
"more into each other's society. The subject is
not free from difficulty ; but if Jesus " learned
obedience by the things which he suffered," if He
'' grew in wisdom and in favour with God and
man," may not a mother's love bending down over
Him in those unfolding years have helped to
bring tliat fair life to its perfect flower and fruit ?

Of this, at least, we may be sure — and again 1
speak not unforgetful of the necessary limitations
which the subject imposes — sons like Jesus will
be possible only so long as we have mothers like
Mary. And therefore it is that I for one, though
I am no pessimist, view with eyes full of alarm
some of the tendencies in our life to-day. I am
not a political economist, nor the son of a political
economist, but this I say unhesitatingly, that any
system that makes of home only a place to eat
and to sleep in, that forces the mother to the mill

The Mother of Jesus

i \\

or the factory that the Httle ones may have bread
to eat, stands self-condemned. The nation that
barters the wealth of its motherhood for silver and
gold is letting out its own life-blood. Leave us
men, and women who are not mothers, to make
moniy; we need our mothers to make men. I
say I am no political economist, but this is what
one of the ablest of our living political economists,
Professor Marshall, has told us : " The most
valuable of all capital is that invested in human
beings ; and of that capital the most precious part
is the result of the care and influence of the
mother."

Can anything, too, be more saddening than the
freedom with which all sorts and conditions of
men, and women (and I am sorry that a number
of Socialist leaders are amongst them), are
advocating theories of marriage which, if they were
once adopted, would not only empty the great
words " Mother " and " Home " of all their mean-
ing, but — I say it deliberately — would lead society
by a short, straight path to the sty ? You may
find substitutes for some things ; you can find no
substitute for a good mother. In Professor
Drummond's fascinating volume, TJie Ascent of
Man, there is a chapter entitled " The Evolution
of a Mother." Look at the scale of animal life,
he says ; at the one end you have the Protozoa,
the lowest forms of life ; at the other end
Mammalia — Mothers. " There the series stops.
Nature has never made anything since." " Ask

iJu

The Mother of Jesus

the zoologist," he says, " what, judging from science
alone, Nature aspired to from the first, he could
but answer Mammalia — Mothers." Amid all the
rubbish of the old Jewish Talmud there is one
sentence which ought to be picked out and written
in letters of gold : " God could not be everywhere ;
so He made mothers."

Oh ! you n. others, you mothers, let one mother's
son speak this word to you. I am not of those
who fear to give you what are called " woman's
rights," I do not fear — nay, I look confidently
forward to — the day when woman shall stand by
man's side in all things — in all worthy things, at
least — his acknowledged equal ; and yet I do
sometimes fear lest in grasping at the less you
lose the greater. Enter, if you will, the kingdoms
of knowledge and power, so unjustly shut against
you in the past ; but do not, I pray you, forget
that there is one kingdom wherein if you do not
rule as queens, no man may ever rule as king ;
there is one sceptre which if you let fall, our hands
are powerless to grasp — the sceptre that Mary
held, the kingdom wherein Mary ruled, the sceptre
and the kingdom of a holy, loving, almighty
motherhood.

Now, let us turn for one moment to the other
side of the subject — the son's love for the mother.
And if the Gospels have little to tell us of Mary's

if;

T/ie Mother of Jesus

love for Jesus, still less do they tell us of His love
for her. At the beginning of His life, after the
incident in the Temple, we read that He went
down to Nazareth with His parents, and was
subject unto them ; at the end of His life, as He
hung dying on the cross, He tenderly committed
His mother to the care of the beloved disciple.
And this is almost all we know ; but if we knew
everything we could not be more certain than we
are that all was fair and beautiful and good.

It is true that another and an alien note seems
sometimes to be struck. Why from the cross did
He say, " Woman, behold thy son." Why docs
He not call her " mother " ? Why, when she
intervenes at the marriage feast at Cana of Galilee,
does He repel her with what sound like words
harsh and stern ? Why, when they tell Him that
His mother and His brethren are without seeking
Him, docs He speak as though any might stand
as near to Him as even Mary herself? May it
not be to remind us — what the New Testament
' ever anywhere allows us to forget — that though
Jesus was son of Mary, He was not a son as
other sons are ? I cannot pursue the subject
further now, but if you will think of it, I believe
you will find that even in those words of Scripture
that men quote oftenest to prove our Lord's
humanity there is most inextricably interwoven
the surest proof of His divinity.

But, setting this for a moment aside, is it
possible to doubt that Christ's thoughtful care for

The Mother of Jestis

His mother in dying was but the coming to the
surface of a love and tenderness that were always
there ? The death of Socrates and the death of
Jesus have often been compared. But when Xan-
tippe, in her last interview with her husband, before
he drank the fatal cup, gives way to her grief,
Socrates bids his friends put her away, and then
turns to continue calmly his discussion of the
philosophy of pleasure and pain. What a contrast
with that last scene around the cross !

And to all who have eyes to see, what can be
more plain than the tender, sacred regard in which
Jesus ever held the filial relationship ? To the
rich young ruler asking, " What shall I do that I
may inherit eternal life ? " He does not repeat
all the Ten Commandments, but He does not
omit the fifth. No sterner words ever fell from
His lips than those in which He condemned the
rabbinical conjuring that permitted a man to evade
his filial obligations. When He would say how near
they stand to Him who do the will of His Father
in heaven, this is how He puts it : " The same is
My brother and sister and mother." When Luke
wrote the story of the raising of the widow's son
at Nain, was there not something in the accent, the
look, the gesture of Jesus that touched the pen of
that evangelist, till it overflowed with words so
charged with emotion that even now the voice
falters as it reads them : " The only son of his
mother, and she was a widow " — did Jesus re-
member His own widowed mother, I wonder?

■

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T/ie Mother of Jesus

And when He bids farewell to His disciples, He
says, " I will not leave you — conifoytless" says the
Authorised Version, but that was not what Jesus
said : look in the margin of the Revised Version
— " I will not leave you orphans''' ; that is Christ's
word. To Him there was no state so utterly
bereft as orphanhood.

And now remember that He who said these
things, the son of Mary, will one day be the Judge
of ail the sons of men. What then, think you, will
He say to them who ' * 1 against this, one of God's
best gifts to i.i'M-i 'Other's love? Will He

recognise them as "...

I knew a younp- man once, educated at one of
our great Univers.ties. clev ■ ^nd brilliant to a
degree, but eaten up with cyi!tc;:;i:i And I knew
that young man's mother ; it was to her that he
owed his educational advantages. She was not
clever as the world counts cleverness ; but no
sweeter, saintlier soul ever breathed. Her face
was a perpetual benediction ; it shone as though,
to use a little child's phrase, there were " a light
inside." And I have heard that young university
sprig, who was not worthy to unloose his mother's
shoe-latchet, talk down to her, and patronize her
with a but half-disguised contempt, until I could
have struck the man ! Did you ever read this :
" The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth
to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall
pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it " ?
But, I tell you, I would meet that or any doom

The Mother of Jesus

rather than stand at the last great da)- with a sin
hke that upon my head unforgivcn in the presence
of the son of Mary.

On the other hand, can he be wholly without
the root of the matter in hiin who does worthily
respond to a mother's love ? h'ew men of our
day, perhaps, have given so much needless pain to
many Christian people, or have uttered so many
wild and whirling words with such a demure reck-
lessness, as the late Mr. Matthew Arnold. lUit
when I read his recently published Letters, so
brimming with tenderness towards his widowed
mother, I almost forgave him everything. To
some people Thomas Carlyle is little better than
an ill-natured cur, snarling and snapping at the
heels of every passer-by. But let every young
man read Carlyle's letters to his mother ; perhaps
there is nothing quite like them in our lit raturc.
Jean Carlyle was only a humble peasant w^oman
in Annandale ; but her son gave of his best when
he wrote to her ; and for the wondrous love he
bare her shall not much be forgiven him at the
last by the son of Mary ?

Have my words stirred long-sleeping memories ?
Have I touched without knowing it some secret
spring, and set wide open a door that has not
moved for years upon its rusty hinges ? While I
have been speaking have other voices been speak-
ing — voices out of the dim past, words of the
sainted dead? Is it so? Some little scene like
this swims up from the days long gone by : A

The Mother of Jesus

darkened room, with hushed voices, and feet that
tread softly, a white face on the pillow, and then
the words broken and slow, " It is growing dark
— I am going home — meet me where I go." And
then another voice, half-choked with sobs, " I will,
by God's help, I will." That other voice is yours,
changed though it be that even you yourself
scarce know it. Tell me, what have you done
with that " sweet, olden promise " ? I am treading,
I know, on ground that is holy ; I am touching a
string that I have never dared to touch before ;
but, if it vibrates, if there are voices out of the
past like these that can speak to you, oh ! listen
to them ; they will plead as no poor words of
mine can plead ; hear, and follow, and obey.

" God of our fathers I lie tlic God
Of their succeeding race."

: : ,

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THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS
OF JESUS

■pww

I •

I ;i

w^^

III

THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS
OF JESUS

'/s >io/ this . . . the hrolhcr of James, and Joscs, awt Judas, and
Stinon? and are not His sisters here with //J- .^"— Mark vi, j.

T HAVE spoken in a previous sermon of the
J- mother of Jesus. To-day I want us to take
another glance into that little home at Nazareth.

Of the head of the household himself there is
little to be told. Joseph disappears from the-
narrative very early ; and the probability is that
lie died many years before Jesus entered on the
work of His public ministry. But Joseph and
Mary and Jesus were not the only members of the
family. There were at least seven children : five
boys— Jesus and the four whose names are men-
tioned in the text— and (at least) two girls
though of these neither the exact number nor the
names are told, so that the little home would be
very crowded, and very noisy sometimes; and
you mothers, at least, will not need to be told that

The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus

with so many mouths to feed, and so many things
to think about, Mary must have found her hands
very full. It is of these other members of the
family that we arc to think to-day : my subject is,
The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus.

In the first place, are there not some of us to
whom it never occurred before that Jesus had
brothers and sisters just as we have? Indeed,
everything that is human in the life of Jesus is to
some of us more or less unreal. We accept the
statements of theology concerning His humanity,
but with a certain mental reserve. Even when
one of the sacred writers himself tells us *' He was
tempted in all points like as we are," we doubt
whether he meant quite all he said ; and to some
of us, it is to be feared, the temptation in the
wilderness is little more than a scenic display.
We cannot think of Jesus as boy and man, as
son and brother, entering like others into ordinary
human relationships. We must needs picture
Him with a halo of unearthly light about His
head, and, as Professor Rendel Harris has recently
pointed out, even a writer like Dean Farrar cannot
speak of the " boy " Jesus without printing the
word with a capital B, as if to suggest that He
was never like other children. The truth is, many
of us are Apollinarians without knowing it.

It is not difficult to understand the reason of

The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus 39

all this. Ciiiist was more than a man, and \vc
arc jealous — rightly jealous — of I lis divinity, for
vvc know how much hangs upon it. 1 share that
jealousy to the full, and I will be bold to say that
no one who has heard me preach half-a-dozen
consecutive sermons will charge me with lack of
fidelity here. But let us make no mistake ; we
do not strengthen by one jot the proof of Christ's
divinity by doubting the truth of llis humanity.
I know the difficulty of a full and balanced state-
ment of the whole truth. Our only safe course is
to follow the New Testament, and to declare
unflinchingly alike the Manhood and the Godhead
of Jesus, refusing to exalt cither at the expense of
the other. When therefore we think, as we arc
doing just now, of the humanity of Jesus, we must
take care not to go one step farther than the
Gospels lead us ; but we ought also to be careful
to go as far ; and when they describe to us, eg,
the childhood of Jesus, do not let us, by little and
needless devices of our own, throw " an air of
undue mystery about what is perfectly natural "
(I quote the words of Mr. Rendcl Harris again),
and so hinder ourselves from entering into fellow-
ship with Christ's early years.

It is probably a mistake of this kind which is,
in the main, responsible for the different opinions
which still exist as to the exact relationship of
Jesus to those who are here called His " brothers "
and " sisters." The most natural inference un-
doubtedly is that they were the children of Joseph

r ^

40 Th.: Brothers and Sisters oj Jesus

and Mary, born subsequent to the birth of Jesus.
But o\vin<^ to the strength of the feeling — in my
judgment a wholly mistaken feeling — that It was
somehow derogatory alike to the honour of Jesus
and of Mary to suppose that she was the mother
of other children besides Him, two other interpre-
tations have been able to take the field and
command very considerable support. On the one
hand it has been held that the so-called " brethren "
of our Lord were in reality His cousins, the
children of Mar}', a sister of the Virgin, and the
wife of Cleophas. On the other hand, they are
said to be the children of Joseph by a former

marriage.

The difficulties in the way of the first of
these suggested interpretations arc insuperable : it
supposes two sisters each bearing the name of
Mary ; it gives no explanation of the fact that our
Lord's brethren are always named in conjunction
with Mary the mother of Jesus, and never, as we
should expect, if this interpretation be the right
one, with Mary the wife of Cleophas ; and it still
further leaves unexplained the fact that though
there is in the Greek language a word for " cousin "
which lay ready to their hand, the New Testament
writers never once make use of it in this con-
nection. As for the other interpretation, it un-
doubtedly raises fewer difficulties, and is supported
by the weighty name of Bishop Lightfoot. But
even his learned arguments leave me unconvinced.
The natural interpretation is that which I have

The ]h-othci's and Sisters oj Jesus 4 1

already given ; nowhere do the sacred writers seek
to guard their readers against it, and it is difficult
to see what other language they could have used
if that had been the meaning which they had
actually desired to convey. For ni}' part, I cannot
get rid of the idea that had it been any other than
Christ concerning whose relationship the language
of the Gospels had been used, these rival theories
would never have been heard of ; that it is Christ
docs not make them necessary. When shall we
learn that to make the human ties of Jesus as
unreal and as unlike our own as possible is to
render ITim no true and worthy homage?

Assuming then, without further discussion, that
the natural interpretation of the text is the right
one, let us gather together what we know of the
brothers and sisters of Jesus, and of His relation
to them. Unfortunately the records are extremely
scanty ; Jesus was more than thirty )-ears of age,
and the work of I lis ministry had already begun
before we even learn of their existence. Of their
life together during those thirty silent years at
Nazareth we can only dimly conjectuic from what
we arc told after the silence is broken. One fact,
however, stands out with sad pre-eminence, "His
brethren did not believe on Him." Not one of
them belonged to the apostolic group. As Dr.
Stalker says, they never intervene in His life

42 The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus

except to annoy. So far were they from under-
standing the passion which consumed Him, that
on one occasion " they went out to lay hold on
Him, for they said, He is beside himself" Once,
impressed, perhaps, by His marvellous works and
His influence with the people, they urged him to
go up to Jerusalem, and there publicly declare
Himself to the world. Some people can never see
greatness until it is recognized greatness, greatness
duly ticketed and authenticated. At a great picture
sale, when thousands of pounds change hands, it
is not pictures only, but great names that are
bought and sold. And it may be the brothers of
Jesus felt that if only the wise ones in the great
city put their seal upon Him and His mission, it
would be safe and prudent for them to declare
themselves on His side.

Was not this one of the secret griefs of the
Man of Sorrows ? He came unto them that were
in a special sense " His own," and they received
Him not. It pained Him when " many of His
d'sciples went back and walked no more with
Him " ; it pained Him more when Judas, one of
the twelve, betrayed Him ; but most of all, I think,
it hurt Him when "even His brethren did not
believe on Him." When He uttered the sad
prophecy, " A man's foes shall be they of his own
household," was He speaking out of the fulness of
His own pained heart ? Some of us know the
difficulty of being loyal to our conscience and our
faith amongst ungodly associates in the shop and

',-

The BrotJiers and Sisters of Jesus 43

the workroom ; but only they who have felt the
far worse pain that want of sympathy at home
can inflict, are able fully to enter into the feelings
of Him who was thus cruelly wounded in the
house of His friends.

But the change came at last, and after Christ's
ascension into heaven we find the brethren
together with the disciples awaiting in the upper
room at Jerusalem the descent of the Holy Spirit.
Exactly how the change was wrought we are not
told ; but perhaps there is a hint of what took
place in one of Paul's letters : writing of the
appearances of Christ after His resurrection, he
says ( I Cor. xv. 6, 7), " Then He appeared to
above five hundred brethren at once ; . . . then
He appeared to James." What one would have
given to have been present at that interview
between the risen Lord and His brother after the
flesh ! May it not have been to it that James
owed his faith in Jesus as Lord, and through him
the Oliver brethren theirs ? And may not James
have had that appearing to himself alone in mind
when in after years he wrote : " My brethren, if
any among you do err from the truth; and one
convert him ; let him know, that he which con-
vertcth a sinner from the error of his way shall
save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude
of sins " ?

The rest is soon told. Of the brethren of our
Lord two are never heard of again ; of the others
one lived to hold a most important position in

mem

^u. /

44 T//C Brothers and Sisters of Jesus

the Church at Jerusalem, and both were writers of
brief epistles preserved for us in the New
Testament. One point in connection with these
letters is worthy of note : neither James nor Jude
ever speaks of himself as " the brother of Christ."
The opening verse of the Epistle of James runs
thus : "James, a servant of God and of the Lord
Jesus Christ," etc. ; of the Epistle of Jude thus :
" Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of
James," etc. ; and in the fourth verse of the same
epistle the writer makes it his chief charge against
certain men who had crept into the Church privily,
that they were " denying our only Master and
Lord, Jesus Christ." Now, consider what this
means. These three, Jesus and James and Jude,
had been brought up and for years had lived
together in the same home. There was a time
when James and Jude did not believe in Jesus as
in any wise differing from themselves. Something
happened, and they came to believe in Him.
From that day He was to them another being.
That they were related to Him after the flesh was
as nothing in comparison with what they now
knew Him to he. He was to them no longer the
man of Nazareth simply, but the Lord of Glory ;
they served God in serving Him ; to deny Him
was the greatest of all sins.

What do we make of this ? How shall we
explain it ? I do not shrink from putting the old
alternative for the hundreth time. Give up your
faith in the Bible altogether, use it to light your

The Brothers and Sisters of Jestts 45

fires with, if you will ; but to deny the Godiiead
of Christ and at the same time to go on believing
in the truthfulness or sanity of the men who
wrote it, is of all mental impossibilities the
maddest.

Ill

Turn again for a moment to the home at
Nazareth that we may see Jesus among His
brothers and sisters. One is tempted to regret
that so little of that home-life is known to us.
But from what we do know of Christ, His teach-
ing concerning marriage, His love for children,
His regard for the filial relationship, we may be
confident that as brother He would not be found
wanting.

The subject suggests one aspect of what may
be termed " domestic morality," concerning which
the pulpit has usually little to say, and on which
even the New Testament is curiously silent. St.
Paul speaks more than once wise words of counsel
to husbands and wives, to parents and children,
to masters and servants, but nowhere does he
address himself directly to brothers and sisters.
Nevertheless the subject is one of considerable
importance at the present time, when there is a
tendency to rebel against obligations once accepted
without demur, and to call in question the value
of institutions which we have hitherto regarded as
part, I will not say of the established, but of the

mmmmmtHm

46 yVie Brothers and Sisters of Jesus

1 1

divine order. Particularly is this true of the
institution of the family. The subject of marriage,
which, I need hardly say, is the key of the whole
Cjuestion, is just now being discussed by men and
women alike in a fashion that may well make the
boldest amongst us wince. But that is a matter
which lies outside the scope of this address, and I
have nothing further to say concerning it just
now. But it is not to be wondered at that those
who would make of marriage " an arrangement
terminable at the will of either party " — I quote
the words of two living writers — should go farther
and pour contempt upon the idea that any par-
ticular obligation is involved in the fact of a
common parentage. Teaching of this sort strikes
a blow at all that is most sacred in life. Con-
sanguinity implies not only a physical but also an
ethical relationship. To ignore it, to treat the
bond of brotherhood and sisterhood as if it were a
gossamer thread which any man is at liberty to
snap whenever it pleases him, is to take a step- —
in my judgment a long step — towards reducing
society to a mere collection of brutes.

I do not wish to set up any impossible ideal.
Hanpily there are many, like Charles and Mary
Lamb, like William and Dorothy Wordsworth,
whose choicest friendships have been formed
within the family circle, but more often our best
and closest friends are found outside that circle.
*' More than my brothers are to me," said Tenny-
son of his friend, and so perhaps say most of us

The Brothn's and Sisters of Jesus 47

of ours. But — you remember Savonarola's ^rcat
words to Romola, flccinf^ from Florence and from
duty — ''Man cannot choose his duties" Morality,
that " stern lawgiver," knows nothing of a con-
venient sliding scale which adjusts our obligations
according to the pleasure which the fulfilment of
them yields us.

Slacken one of the bonds that bind home
together, and you slacken all ; and the end of
that who can tell ? Remember what we owe to
home ; it is the sanctuary that shelters us in our
tenderest years from the world's biting winds ; it
is the school wherein we learn what no other of
life's man)^ schools can teach. Destroy it, and
what will you put in its stead ? The class-room ?
the club-room ? Ah ! it is easy to find fault with
things as they are ; yet it is to home that we owe
the highest of what we are and have ; therefore let
us count well the cost before we lend our strength
to theirs who are seeking its destruction.

We who are brothers and sisters, are we doing
what we can to make home all that it ought to
be ? do we diligently cultivate what some one has
happily called the "art of living together"? " Is
he a Christian ? " asked some one of Whitefield
concerning another. " I do not know," was the
answer ; '' I have never seen him at home." Is
ours a religion that will stand that test ? Rather,
are there not some of us who act upon the tacit
assumption that family relationship absolves us
from all necessity of being kindly and considerate

jj-^.i. J-

48 7//e Brothers and Sisters of fesus

and thoughtful at home ? I have known some
married couples whose stock of little kindly
attentions to one another was so scanty one felt
that it must have been used up during the days
of courtship.

Young men and women, do not treat your home
as if it were only a restaurant or a hotel — a place
to sleep and take your meals in. Do not keep all
your mirth and sunshine for other people's homes,
and be dull and gloomy in your own. If you have
a " best," save it for your own fireside. You may
build a house with bricks, but not a home ; home
is built of hearts. Six people may live together
under the same roof and call themselves a family,
yet there may be no true family life. Home is a
house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens, whose builder and maker is love. May
every one of us be a wise master-builder, after the
pattern of Him who for thirty years lived as son
and brother in the house of Mary !

\\ i

Yes, we think ; and if it had been ours to live,
like James and Joses and the rest of them, in the
same house with //////, how easy it would have
been to be good ! How often do we find our-
selves singing with the children —

" I think, when I read that sweet story of old,
When Jesus was here amongst men ...
I should like to have been with Him then."

The Brothers and Sisters of Jesus 49

Well, there is another side even to that. There is
such a thing as the disadvantage of advantages.
The penalty of living close to the mountain is
sometimes that one never sees the mountain at all.
Perhaps the brethren of our Lord would have been
nearer to Him if they had been farther from Him.
Not until He had gone from them did they come
near to Him.

J^ut what I want us to see is that all may enter
that " Holy Family." When " one said unto Him,
Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand with-
out, seeking to speak to thee, He answered and
said unto him that told Him, Who is my mother?
and who are my brethren ? And He stretched
forth His hand tov/ards His disciples, and said.
Behold, my mother and my brethren ! For whoso-
ever shall do the will of my Father which is in
heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother."
He that doctJi the zvill of my Father in heaven —
he is the man who stands nearest to Christ.
Others might call James " the Lord's brother " ;
he called himself the " servant of God and the
Lord Jesus Christ." The new relationship was
deeper, more sacred even than the old.

And that same fellowship, with all of divine
blessedness that goes with it, is open to us to-
day. Let us come to God, let us lay our hands
in His, let us say to Him, " Lo, I come to do thy
will," and even of us Jesus will say, " Behold, My
brother, and sister, and mother."

•J

WHAT THINK YE OF GOD?

\i i

WHAT THINK YE OF GOD?

" And Jacob swarc by the Fear of his father IsaacJ"—

GiiNKSis xxxi. 5J.

" What yc pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven.^' ~

Luke xi. 2.

THE fear of his father Isaac" — what does
that mean ? The word " fear " should be
printed with a capital F, and you will find it is
printed so in the Revised Version. " The Fear "
—that is the name which Isaac gave to his God.
You remember the incident: Jacob and Laban
had entered into a covenant, and each of them
confirmed the covenant with an oath. Laban, we
are told, sware " by the God of Abraham and the
God of Nahor," that is, he sware by Jehovah, and
by the idol whom their common ancestor wor-
shipped as God. But Jacob — and it is this I
wish to emphasize — sware by " the Fear of his
laiiier Isaac," that is, Jacob sware by Him whom
Isa^c worshipped as " the Fear." All these Old
Tc .ament patriarchs and saints had their own

W/ia^ think ye of iiod'r

name for the God whom they served ; to one He
was " the Rock," to another " the Shield," to
another " the Shepherd " ; but to Isaac He was
" the l^^ear," " the Dreadful One," or " the Terror."

That was Isaac's name for God. What think
ye of God ? How do we name Him ? What is
He to us ? " Nothinc^ is easier," says John Henry
Newman somewhere, " than to use the name of
God and to mean noLhin<j^ by it." " I believe in
God " — so begins the Apostles' Creed ; and we
must all begin there — there is the foundation, the
starting-point. "He that cometh to God must
believe that He is." But now take heed how you
puiictuate Scripture ; there is no full stop there —
''must believe that He is, crfut tJiat He is a
rewarder of them thnt diligently seek UiiiL' That
is to say, we need to be assured not only of the
existence, but of the character of God. You be-
lieve in God ? Good. Hut what sort of a God
do )'ou believe in ? What is He of whom you
speak ? How do you name Him ?

Voltaire has been credited with a poor witticism
to the effect that if God did not exist it would be
necessary to invent Him. There is a sentence of
Mr. Herbert Spencer's which Christian apologists
often quote : " The assuinption of the existence of
a First Great Cause of the Universe is a necessity
of thought." A distinguished living scientist said
not long ago that it is modern science itself that
has dealt the death-blow to atheism. Doubtless
this is all very interesting ; but, practically, I do

IVkat think yc of God?

■»

not see that it helps us very much. A ^rcat
thinker in his study, brooding over the vast
mystery of being, feels himself lost in an illimitable
void. He wants a peg, a starting-point, and so
he posits a 1^'irst Great Cause — in order that he
may think. The world to him is unintelligible,
unthinkable, incomplete ; and so he rounds it off
with a God. A very distinguished race of gentle-
men, the Gifford lecturers, have been during the last
few years enlightening the theological darkness of
the land of Scotland. One of them, a distinguished
Oxford professor, stated in one of his lectures tha.
the only thing to be said about God without im-
pertinence is that " lie is." Well, if that is so, I
venture to say (also 1 hope without impertinence)
that it was hardly worth while saying even that ;
and still more do I doubt whether it was worth
while coming all the way fiom Oxford to Glasgow
in mid-winter in order to say it. A God of whom
nothing is known, of whom nothing can be known,
whose very existence is on.ly postulated as a kind
of intellectual convenience — what basis for religion
have you there ? Do you think the flowers of
love and hope and trust will grow in a soil so thin
and poor as that ? You believe in God ; but
again I ask, What sort of a God do you believe
in ? Until the terms are defined the confession is
worthless.

I am not blowing theological soap-bubbles.
This is not a matter of interest merely to ministers
and students of divinity. I speak to busy men

^tm

«■

■I

PF/ia^ think ye of God?

of the world, and I say that for them this is a
question of the very first practical importance.
That old, miserable, shallow sophism that says it
does not matter what a man believes if only his
life is right, nowhere breaks down so hopelessly,
so pitiably, as it does here. Our idea of God is
determining, regulative, fundamental. As some
one has happily put it, " The thought you make
of God is the thought that makes you."

You may illustrate the truth in a hundred
ways. A very distinguished student of religion
has pointed out in one of his books that, " as is
the Deity, so must ^he faith that is built upon
Him be." "Find out," he says, "the ultimate
beliefs of a people, and you find out the character
of their institutions." And then he goes on to
illustrate. Look at China, where the worship of
ancestors is believed in and practised ; what is the
consequence ? Why, that China, with its eyes for
ever fixed upon the past, is the least progressive
of all the great nations on the face of the earth to-
day. Look at India, where Brahma is conceived
of as the universal soul. F.-om the head of
Brahma (for the idea is worked . ut in detail) come
the men of the priestly race, Ir&m \hc arms and
breast of l^rahma come the warrior class, from the
legs of Brahma come the yeomen, and from the
feet the poor, toiling, out-cast multitudes. So
that, as Dr. Fairbairn says, " in India a religious
theory has become a social tyranny." But there
is no need to go so far afield as India or China.

IV/iai think ye of God?

Read the story, the thrilling story, of our great
Puritan and Covenanting Scottish forefathers, and
if there is anything that history can make certain
to us, it was their thought of God that made them
the men they were.

Or turn to your l^iblcs and see how this same
truth is illustrated for us again and again. Wherc-
evcr the idea of God is real it is regulative. The
Syrians engaged in battle with the Israelites ; the
battle was fought on the hills, and the Israelites
were victors. Now mark what the servants of the
king of Syria said unto him : " Their God is a
God of the hills ; therefore they were stronger
than we ; but let us fight against them in the
plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they."
Theirs was a local God. As " the ancients of the
house of Israel '* practised their abominations in
the dark, they tried to quiet their fears with this
word : " The Lord secth us not ; the Lord hath
forsaken the earth." Theirs was an absentee God.
Listen to the Pharisees : " We are the people, and
the truth shall die with us ; but as for this
multitude, which knoweth not the law, they are
accursed." Theirs was a partial God. And so
one might go on almost endlcssl)'. Read the
twenty-third Psalm again. Tell me, how does it
begin ? With a thought of God, " The Lord is
my Shepherd." I do not wonder that the man
who wrote that wrote the whole psalm. There
are no heights and depths that are not possible to
that man. All the psalm is in that first word of

sai

What think ye of God?

the psalm ; all its music is in the first, grand, full
chord that is struck there. And just as to-day
the full green foliage of the summer is wrapped
in the bare, brown sheath of the springtide, so all
the love and trust and tenderness of which the
psalm is full lie folded there in that first thought
of God — " The Lord is my Shepherd." What
think yc of God ? How do we name Him ? And
remember the answer colours all our life and
determines all our thinking.

What, then, is the true thought of God, and
whence comes it ? where may it be found ? I must
compress very much. For answer we are shut up
to Jesus Christ. Arguments from metaphysics
about the necessary existence of God may carry
us a little way ; arguments from what is called
" design " in nature may do something for us ; but
when you have put them all together, what do
they really amount to ? One whose word on a
matter of this sort deserves to be weighed,
recently said, speaking of the work of a most
accomplished writer and thinker : "If there is
nothing but his reasonings between us and death,
the very grave is at our feet." Never, perhaps,
have men felt the truth of the words of the Master
more than they are feeling it to-day : " No man
Cometh unto the Father but by Me. ' Some
thought of God we may have, some conception of
Him, apart from Christ, but " no man cometh
unto the Father but by me." To the idea of the
Infinite, the Absolute, the Internal, we may clinib.

IV/iiit think ye of God ?

but to " the Father " never, without Jesus. I
think sometimes of modern thought like another
Jacob, wrestling through the long, dark night with
the strange mysterious Presence that eludes it,
crying, " Tell me thy name ; I will not let thee
go except thou bless me." But until it hear the
voice of Christ the clay will never break, nor the
answer " Love " be given. One only has taught
us, and made us certain with His own certainty,
that when we pray we may say " Our Father
which art in heaven." There is the true thought
of God, and it is only ours when we come to Christ
and learn of Him.

I shall not attempt this morning to show )'ou
how, all through His life, Jesus expounded and
illustrated and enforced that great doctrine. I
wish very simply, and following the line already
suggested, to indicate how, if this thought of God
which Christ has given us be fully grasped, it will
affect our whole life.

" When ye pray, say, Our Father." ' Our
Father," not "My Father"; Christ might have
bid men pray so, but the pra) er would have been
a smaller, narrower prayer. " Our J^'ather," mine,
yours, every man's ; and therefore " all ye are
brethren," and the new thought of God is a new
thought of our fellow-men ; " what God hath joined
together let no man put asunder." Sonship — spell
the word backwards and what is it ? Brother-
hood ! Every gift that I receive as son I owe and
I must share as brother ; and every step I take

(

PF/ia/ think ye of God ?

into the deepening mystery of the divine Father-
hood means the tightening of the bonds of human
brotherhood. "If a man say, I love God, and
hateth his brother, he is a liar."

" When yc pray, say. Our Father which art in
heaven." I think that is the alpha and the omega
of prayer. He only has rightly learned to pray
who has learned to say " Father." I do not know
any other word that will silence all the obstinate
questionings of the intellect. Your wise and
learned man asks, " Docs God answer prayer ? "
and then for answer writes a long and learned
book. Ay, and if God is only a Somev.'hat
behind all things, the book will need to be very
long and very learned, and even then all our
questions will not be answered. But if God be
" Father," I think the question is meaningless, it is
irrelevant. For what father is silent in the home
of his children ? I hear sometimes good, Christian
people timidly asking one another, and sometimes
asking their ministers, " Is it right to pray for
this?" "May I pray for that?" With painful
care things arc sifted and separated into what
may be prayed for and what may not be prayed
for. " When ye pray, say Father." Now tell me
what has Fatherhood to do with all these painful
distinctions, these niceties of discrimination ?
" Ask what ye will " ; it is the children's right.
" Ask what ye will " ; then leave the rest with
Him.

See what Fatherhood makes of pain. In the

What think ye of God ?

garden of Gethsemanc the Saviour bowed bcncalh
His awful burden ; the great red drops fell from Mis
worn face ; His hand trembled as it held the cup;
thrice He prayed, "If it be possible, if it be
possible, if it be possible, let this cup pass from
Me." Yet He drained it to its last, bitterest drop.
What was it made Him in that hour of weakness
strong to do and to endure ? " The cup which
My Father hath given i\Ie — which My Father hath
given Me — shall I not drink it ? " I draw a bow
at a venture. Are there not some here listening
to me this day whom desolating sorrows have
driven sometimes almost to the verge of madness ?
It seemed as if they could not drink that cup and
live ; but in that awful hour — how awful let him say
who has passed through it — one thought steadied
and saved them, "It is the cup which my Father
hath given me; His hand mixed it; and He
makes no mistakes."

There is a beautiful story told of a gentleman
who went as a visitor into a deaf and dumb
institution. A number of children were there ;
and as he stood in the presence of the silent little
ones the teacher of the class asked him if he would
care to put a question ^o them. The visitor
paused for a moment hardly knowing what to say ;
then taking the chalk from the teacher's hand he
wrote upon the black-board, " Why did God make
you deaf and dumb, while He has made me so
that I can both speak and hear ? " For a moment
no one moved. Then one little fellow crept

ifli

II ^

';;

What think ye of God'r

noiselessly from his seat, and under the visitor's
question on the board he wrote, " Even so, Father,
for so it seemed good in Thy sight." What more
can one say ?

See what Fatherhood makes of deatlL Once
more I turn to Christ. He stands there with the
little timorous group of disciples, the hot breath of
the last enemv on His cheek, but His words are
strong and calm as ever : " I go unto the Father."
That word is never so often upon His lips as in
these the great crises of His life. That unknown
Beyond, to us so dim and dark, a strange land full
of shadows, to Him it is "My Father's house."
And when at length death came, it was with Him
no leap into the dark : " 1^'athcr, into Thy hands
I commend My spirit."

" A king was sitting with his warriors round
the fire in a long, dark barn. It was night and
winter. Suddenly a little bird flew in at the open
door, and flew out again at the other. The king
spoke and said, ' This bird is like man in the
world ; it flew in from darkness, and out again to
darkness, and was not long in the warmth and
light.' ' King,' replied the oldest of the warriors,
' even in the dark the bird is not lost, but finds
its nest.' " No ; even in the dark that men call
death the soul is not lost, but finds its home.
" Into Thy hands, Father, into Thy hands I com-
mend My spirit."

Oh ! what think we of God ? How do we
name Him ? Is He " Fear," or is He " Father"?

// lial think ye of God ?

An Australian newspaper told some little time
ago of a railway man who used to send a message
to his wife, saying when he would be home, and
often he would put in a little word for his bo)-
Arthur, " Tell Arthur I shall sleep with him to-
night." Hut a da)' came when Arthur lay hot
and feverish in his mother's arms, sick unto death.
" Don't ky, mother," he said, " I sail seep wiv Dod,
'00 know. Send a teledraf to heaven, and tell
Dod I sail seep wiv Ilim to-iiight." I would
rather hear my child talk about God in that
fashion than know that she had all our I'resbyterian
and Methodist catechisms off by heart. What
arc we making of God? What is lie to us?
Mave we learned to call Him h'ather ?

But, perchance — again I draw a bow at a
venture — there may be some man here to-day
whose own bad past will not let him call God
leather. The word chokes him — it sticks in his
throat, it dies away unspoken on his lips. " I
remembered God and was troubled," says one of
the psalmists, and when some men think of God
and then of what lies behind in the days tliat are
gone, thoy cannot but be troubled. The prodigal's
fear lies heavy on their heart : " I am not worthy
to be called thy son : make me as one of thy
hired servants." Oh, man with the broken staff",
and bruised feet, and tottering limbs, haste thee
home again ! Thy L^ithcr calls for thee. Lost
though thou art, thou art still a lost son, and
thy Father v.ill meet all the words of thy

What think ye of God ?

poor self-chiding with His own great words
of love, "This my son — my son" — He will
not let us be His hired servants — "this, my
son, was dead and is alive again, he was lost and
is found."

CHARACTER AND CREED

" Vc call NIC, AfiisltT, a/ui, Lord : and yc say well ; for so I am. If
I then ^ the Lord and the Master, have washed your feet, ye also
ought to 7C'ash one another's feet." — John xiii. 13, 14.

MASTER and Lord" — that is what the
disciples called Jesus ; that is what men
call Him still. The judgment of these poor fisher-
men has been affirmed and reaffirmed by the best
and wisest of all the ages. The world has taken
these great names from off their lips, and made
them its own. True, it has seemed sometimes as if
men were wavering in their faith, as if they doubted
whether after all He was the coming One, and
they must not still look for another ; but to-day,
after criticism and inquiry for eighteen centuries
have done their best and their worst, the old faith
abides in growing strength ; men still call this
Jesus of Nazareth " Master and Lord."

" Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, hoHest manhood. Thou."

This is the great fact of history. Take Christ

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Character and Creed

\ \

for what you will, define His person as you jilease,
there is nothing to parallel the universal homage
paid to Him. Nay, the more you seek to belittle
Mim, the more grudgingly you acknowledge His
claims to supreme divinity, the more astounding
does His sovereignty become. Explain it as we
may, nothing can emjity the fact of its surpassing
wonder.

To one paying his first visit to the Continent
there is nothing, perhaps, more impressive than
this, that everywhere men call this Jesus " Master
and Lord." The traveller finds himself moving
among strange peoples ; they speak a language
which he does not understand, their thoughts are
fed by a literature which he has never opened ;
they are the inheritors of great traditions that to
him are wholly foreign ; they have their own
peculiar temi:)erament, their own points of view,
their own habits of mind — their whole world is
different from his. And yet, amid all these differ-
ences, wherever he journeys — in Belgium, in
h'rance, in Germany, in Switzerland, in Ital)--
alike in the great crowded city, and in some
distant upland glen where the noontide stillness
is broken only by the roar of the avalanche or
the mountain torrent, he finds the Christian church
where men gather to worship Jesus, both their
Lord and his. I said " everywhere " ; 1 ought, I
suppose, to have excepted Turkey, and perhaps
the exception is in its way as significant as any
example could be, for unless the unspeakable

IRB^V

Character and Creed

Turk make haste to set his house in order, tlie
probability is that before the twentieth century is
many years old he will be turned, bat^ and
bagijage, out of Europe altogether.

And if we look at our own land, amid wliat-
ever conflicting signs, the same fact of the sove-
reignty of Christ grows more and more unmis-
takable to all clear-sighted observers. Thcolog)-
to-day is — to use a word that has become popular
of late — " Christo-centric " to a degree that it has
perhaps never been before. " Back to Christ "
has become in certain quarters a kind of theological
watchword, and we are sometimes told, with a
touch of exaggeration, that this age has witnessed
something like a rediscovery of Christ. Have
you ever asked wliy it is that so many good men,
who know the fiicts, steadily refuse to be alarmed
at the results of recent Biblical criticism? It is
because they have come to know that their faith
rests for its foundation upon no book, not even
upon the Bible, but upon the living Christ Himself

Look outside the Ciiurches, and the facts arc
even more significant. A ver}' shrewd observer
of men and thirgs (Mr. Frederic Harrison) de-
clared on a recent occasion ^ that the school of
t'lought represented by Mr. Herbert Spencer and
the late Professor Hu.xlc)', with its religion of the
Unknowable, which made of man "an infinitesimal
bubble on an infinitesimal '^j)eck of sand at the
mercy of blind forces," is to-day wholl\' discredited.

* The ;innivcrs;uy of Cointj's deal!'.

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Character and Creed

Indicaticitns of the change lie to our hand on every
side, Tlie atheist movement once headed by Mr.
Bradiaugh, Mrs. Jiesant, and the National Reformer
has been utterly routed. Mr. John Morley, like
his great master John Stuart Mill before him, is
ijceding farther and farther every day from the
hard and bitter defiance of his earlier writings.
The late Professor Romanes, one of the most
distinguished scientists of his day, left in his desk
for publication a complete recantation of his early
materialistic creed, and died a devout member of
the Church of Christ. Mr. licnjamin Kidd writes a
book to prove that the dominant factor in social de-
velopment is religion, and it is received with almost
universal acclaim. Mr. Gladstone, in one political
camp, spends the evening of his days in sending
forth volume after volume in defence or exposition
of the Christian faith, and in attemi)ts not always
wise or fruitful to bring about the reunion of
Christendom ; while Mr. Balfour, in the opposite
camp, fills up the interstices of a busy public life
writing Notes introductory to the Study of Theology.
And if from these wc turn to the men who are
to-day doing the best work in the world of fiction,
to men like Stevenson, and Barrie, and Kipling,
and " Q," and Crockett, and Ian Maclarcn, the
same hopeful signs greet us ; the attitude of all
these writers toward religion is frankly sympa-
thetic, and in not a few cases their greatest
triumphs have been won in the field of humble
religious life.

ii i!

Character and Creed

Ikit T need not go outside our own lives.
Little as some of us may acknowledge it, is there
any fact so potent there as the Lordshi[) of
Jesus? In all our days there is a difference
because, if not we ourselves, at least the family, the
community of which we are members, has learned
to call Christ " Master and Lord." Why are we
here to-day ? Why in our city arc all the shops
huttcred and all the warehouses silent? You
wrote p letter )-estcrday, and at the top of it you
put "July 1896." 1896 what? Years. Years
sin'-^" n'hcn ? Do you not see that at every turn
of (ur life vvc arc brought face to face with the
great fact of all time, the coming to His own of
our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.

" Ye call me Master and Lord." W lat then ?
\\ h.it does Christ say to them tha. so name
Him?

He accepts the title : " Ye call me, Master, and
Lord : and ye say well ; for so I am." Mark that
calm, unhesitating acceptance of these great names,
and consider what it means. These words do not
stand alone, they are typical of a hundred others.
There arc two strands interwoven all through the
life of Christ : humility the most perfect and
beautiful, such as the world had never kncnvn
before, and side by side with it the most tre-
mendous self-assertion. He said, and men have
admitted that He had a right to say, " I am mccls

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Clia^'acter and Creed

% '

and lowly in heart " ; and yet, when His disciples
call Him "Master, and, Lord," He never for a
moment shrinks ; He never speaks as though
He felt himself unworthy of confidence so great ;
nay, Himself takes the crown from their hands and
puts it upon His brow : " Ye say well ; for so I am."

I low do we explain this ? I know a man who
once suffered unjust imprisonment in a righteous
cause. When the day of his release came round,
his friends organized a great demonstration of
welcome for him in Exeter Hall. Ihunders of
applause greeted him when he stepped on to the
platform ; when he rose to speak the vast audience
was almost beside itself with excitement. He
began something like this : " It is all very kind of
you, and I thank you for it ; but there is
danger in this. You arc making too much of
me ; }ou will forget the cause in the man, and if
you do that, God will shatter me that the cause
itself may not suffer." And all who heard him
knew that he was right.

lUit Jesus never talked so. He never urged
men to " forget Him in the cause." Nay, He
never spoke about a "cause" at all; all His
speech was concerning Himself We talk some-
times of Christianity as if it were a kind of
ecclesiastical " concern " that Jesus Christ had
started, and which we have to keep going. But
Christ never discussed Christianity as a something
ai)art from Himself; Himself was centre, circum-
ference, all. "What tiiink ye of Me?" He said ;

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Character and Creed

" will ye serve and follow Mc?" — that was primary,
essential ; all else was but secondary.

Again, I ask, what shall we say of one who
speaks after this fashion ? Do you say lie was a
great and good man, the greatest and best of men ?
If you cannot say more than that, you cannot say
as much as that. No man, however great or
good, ever spoke concerning himself as Jesus did.
No ; either He was what He said He was, what
He believed Himself to be, and then all is clear ;
or — 1 know the alternative is a harsh one, but try
as I will, I can find no middle path Me stands
self- convicted of the stupidest ignorance and
blasphemy.

But Christ further declared — and this is what
I want specially to emphasize — that they that con-
fessed Him as *' Master and Lord " tJicrcby placdi
themselves under vianifoUi moral obligations : " \'e
call me Lord and Master . . . and ye ought— "
we may disregard for the moment the particular
duty mentioned by Christ ; the point to catch is
this, that while it is right to call Christ " Master
and Lord," it is not enough so to name Him ;
we cannot stop there. If we call Him "Master

and Lord," then "we ought " ; you may fill

in the blank a hundred wa\'s, but remember, the
confession carries the obligation along with it.
And it is this obligation that springs out of and

■ i

Character and Creed

K 11

is part of our faith in Christ as Lord and Master
that I want us fc/ a moment to fix our attention
upon.

I have no sympathy whatever with the attempt
that is often made to set these two things, creed
and character, over against one another as though
they were contrary the one to the other. A
great deal of shallow nonsense which often
manages to get itself passed off as profound wis-
dom is talked nowadays to this effect, that it
doesn't matter what a man believes if only his
life be iij^ht, which is very much like saymg that
it doesn't matter what kind of a foundation you
lay, if only the house be strong ; but inasmuch
as neither a stable dwelling nor a strong life
can be built without a secure foundation, both
sayings verge upon the ridiculous. The Bible
never once makes these wholly meaningless and
mischievous distinctions ; it urges the importance
of right thinking, and it urges the importance of
right living ; which of the two is the more import-
ant it wastes no words in attempting to discuss.
In point of fact the one is impossible without the
other.

Nevertheless we Christians cannot too often or
too sharply remind ourselves of the moral obliga-
tion which is the other half of faith. We call
Christ "Master and Lord"; is His great "ye
ought " sounding through our souls ? Our feet
are at the starting-point ; is our face to the goal ?
Are we seeking to fulfil, do we even realize, the

Character and Creed

solemn responsibilities that lie wrapped up in the
very homage that we pay to Him ? Do we
know that such homage is useless and worse than
useless if it stops short with itself? I am speak-
ing, I know, but the simplest commonplaces, and
I feel the difficulty that every preacher knows so
well, of speaking them in such a fashion that they
shall stick ; but I say to you, and I say to myself,
do not let us give to Christ these great names if
that is all we have to give Him ; do not let us
put the crown upon His head if it be only to
smite the sceptre from His hand, and to refuse to
have Him to reign over us.

Whatever may be said of our thinking on
other subjects, no man's theology is safe that is
not brought into constant contact with actual life.
When I open the Bible, again and again I find its
great doctrinal statements — the texts that are the
basis of all our theologies — side by side with its
plainest moral precepts. It may be true that the
pulpit has usually been more anxious about creed
than about character ; it is certainly no fault of the
Scriptures. Every great revelation of truth there
is followed by its solemn " ye ought." " Hereby
know we love, because He laid down His life for us."
O wondrous word of grace to sinful man ! But
read on ; we have not reached the full stop yet : "and
we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."
Or, take this great passage from St. Paul's Epistle
to the Philippians : " Who, being in the form of
God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality

Character and Creed

with God, but emptied Himself, taking the form
of a servant, being made in the Hkencss of
men; and being found in fashion as a man, He
humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto
death, jea, the death of the cross " ; or this, from
St. Peter's First I'lpistlc : " Yo were redeemed, not
with corruptible things, with silver or gold . . .
but with precious blood, as of a lamb without
blemish and without spot, even the blood of
Christ." Now, does any one suppose that these
passages were simply m.eant to supply " proof-
texts " for theological handbooks ? I do not for
a moment wish to imply that we have no right to
put them to such a use, far from it ; but their
primary significance, as any one may see who will
read the context for himself, was not doctrinal,
but practical. Paul is exhorting the Philippians
to humility, to a thoughtful regard for the things
of others, and he points them to the amazing
condescension of the Son of God. Peter is urging
his readers to be sober, to put away their former
lusts, and their vain manner of life handed down
from their fathers, remembering at how great a price
they had been redeemed, l^ut perhaps the most
remarkable illustration of this iiiterlacing of duty
with doctrine is hidden by the unfortunate division
of our English Bible into chapters — an advantage,
by the way, for which the ordinary reader has
often to pay a heavy penalt)'. Every one is
familiar with the glorious fifteenth of l-'irst Corin-
thians. We have followed the path of its mag-

^^^Il

Characlcr and Creed

nificent argument until we have stood with the
apostle, breathless but triumphant, on its highest
crest ; " O death, where is thy victory? O death,
where is thy sting ? Tiie sting of death is sin ;
and the power of sin is the law : but thanks be to
God, which giveth us the victory through our
Lord Jesus Christ." And then the chapter stops
and the book is shut. Will you open it again
and read on into the sixteenth chapter? "Now
concerning the collection for the saints." Remem-
ber there were no chapters in Paul's letter. When
he had finished hi;, great argument on the Resur-
rection he did not say, " Hring me a new sheet,
let me make a fresh start, what goes before has
nothing to do with what comes after." No ; the
man with these high hopes for the future is the
man who owes most to his needy brethren on the
earth, and the apostle's pen runs straight on with •
out a break to plead the cause of Christ's suffer-
ing poor. Alas ! this is just where so many of
us always fail : our doctrine never affects our
practice ; our beliefs are so many hard and barren
seeds that never fruit. To-day in church we ;;ay
" Master and Lord " ; but to-morrow in business
— ah, that is another matter.

Is there anything the Church so urgently needs
to-day as the filling- up of this gap between what
we profess and what we are ? Ask the first ten
non-churchgoing working men you meet, why it
is that they never attend God's house, and nine of
them will tell you, probably bluntly enough, that

j ■

Character and Creed

they fail to see that they who do go are any
better than they who don't. " And pity 'tis 'tis
true " ; we call Christ " Master and Lord," and
that is all we do,

I do not wish to speak harshly ; I have said
these things to myself many times before I have
dared to say them once to you ; but is it not true
that there are some of us who would do the
Church of God a greater service by quitting it than
we have ever done by being in it ? I do not
mean that the Church has no room for the weak
and the erring ; but it is the last place for us —
and we know it — so long as we are what we are.
Some of you men are office-bearers in Christ's
Church — stewards, leaders, elders, deacons, or what
not — and some of you women are very busy at
mothers' meetings, and Dorcas meetings, and the
like ; but do you know there is a young man in
your shop and a young girl in your kitchen
who say that if ever they are to enter into the
kingdom of God they will need to push past you.
Church members though you are ? To our shame
be it said, but it is true, there are some who will
think better of religion the day we cease to make
any profession of it. "

Oh, the mock homage that is paid to Christ !
" Go, and search carefully concerning the young
child," said Herod to the wise men, " and when you
have found Him, bring me word that I also may
come and worship Him." "Worship!" — what
grim irony ! murder he meant when he said wor-

Character and Creed

ship. "Hail! Rabbi," said Judas, "and kissed
Him" even as he betrayed Him ; and we shudder
at such refinement of treachery. And once again,
when the soldiers in their brutal sport made of
Him a mimic king, and putting a reed into His
hand for sceptre, and a twist of thorns upon
His head for a crown, and some cast-off cloak
about His shoulders for the kingly purple, they
bowed before Him in mock obeisance, crying,
" Hail ! King of the Jews," and smote Him and
spat upon Him, we turn away with hearts shamed
and bleeding.

And yet, and yet, is it not this very thing that
we, with fuller light and knowledge, are doing every
day? We call Him "Master, and, Lord," we join
ourselves to His people, we even put our lips to
the sacred cup and plight our troth to Him in
deathless vows ; and then our vows are scattered,
and from those same lips drop poisoned words of
malice and of envy, and men stay away from
Him, the Master, seeing what we His disciples are.
" Ye call me Master and Lord . . . and ye ought

" Shall we not set ourselves this day to seek

out the things we owe because we call Christ
Jesus, Lord, that henceforth we may walk \vorthily
of Him ^'. hose we are and Whom we serve?

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CHRIST'S LOVE FOR MAN

I THINK it Was Mr. Spurgeon who once said
that if a man wanted to preach about a text
to any purpose, he should wait until it leapt at
him, like a lion from a thicket, and compelled
him to speak about it. A few days ago the
subject I am to speak on to-day laid hold of me
mightily, and I felt I must preach about it. And
yet how to do so worthily, and " to the height of
this great argument," I do not know. Christ's
love for men is one of the great commonplaces of
the Christian pulpit ; and there, perhaps, is my
chief difficulty. For though nothing is so much
needed, nothing is so difficult as the re-stating,
the re-vivifying of the commonplace. Truths,
like the coins that pass from hand to hand, become
worn and defaced, and need ever and again to
have their image and superscription stamped upon
them afresh. But, as I say, the task is never an
easy one ; therefore, before we go farther, let us

> r

;

Christ's Love for Alan

all, preacher and people alike, pray John Milton's
great prayer —

" What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support."

I have three or four passages to give you by
way of text, but instead of reading them all out
at once, I think the better plan will be for us to
take them as we go along. And just as you may
have seen a jeweller take some beautiful flashing
diamond, and set it in its circlet of precious stones,
so I want us to take this great truth, the love of
Christ for men, and set it round with gathered
gems of Holy Writ, that it may catch and fling
back again their many-coloured radiance.

Here, then, is my first text : " A friend of
publicans and sinners." The words were first
spoken with a sneer ; they were the sorry gibe of
the enemies of Christ against Him. But the
word spoken in scorn was a true word : He was
the " friend of publicans and sinners." And
who were they, these " publicans and sinners " ?
Common, vulgar people, with coarse faces and
coarser hearts, rough in speech and rougher in
life ; men and women with no touch of what we
call " refinement " about them, and worse still,
moral lepers some of them, foul and ui. ^ean.
And of such as these men called Jesus, and Jesus

Christ's Love for Man

called Himself, the " friend." His was a love for
the unloving, the unlovely, the unlovable. That
is the first point to notice.

" I love them that love me," said the ancient
Wisdom of the book of Proverbs ; but Christ's
was a love that went far beyond that. "If ye
love them that love you, what reward have ye ? "
He said to His di.sciples : " I say unto you, love
)'our enemies, and pray for them that persecute
you." And the law that He laid upon His dis-
ciples He made the law of His own life. His
love did not wait for something without to call it
forth ; its source was in Himself. He did not
love men because of anything they were, but
because of what He was. He did not love men
because they were good, and He did not cease to
love them when they were evil. Again and again
He declared He had come to seek and to save
that which was lost, to call not the righteous, but
sinners to repentance.

Look at the two classes in society upon whom
in Christ's day the condemnation of their fellows
rested most heavily, I mean the publicans and the
harlots ; and mark Christ's attitude towards them.
He calls a publican, Matthew, to be one of His
own twelve discipl(:s. When He entered into the
city of Jericho, it was another publican, Zaccheus,
whom He singled out from among all the crowd,
and to whom He said, " To-day I must abide at
thy house." Even more wonderful is His treat-
ment of those whom to-day the world calls " fallen

III

CJu'isfs Love for Man

women." Let mc say in passing, I hate that
phrase, and I never use it except under protest.
If there be such a thing as what Archbishop
Trench called " morality in words," then, I tell
you, that hateful phrase will one day rise up in
judgment against the men of this generation. I
have seen your miserable social statistics — so
many thousands of " fallen women " in this city
and in that ; but when we judge righteous judg-
ment in these matters, when we see things with
Christ's eyes, either that column in your statistics
will go, or you will put in a new column by its
side, and henceforth talk about fallen men as well
as fallen women. But now, see Christ's attitude
towards these. The purest woman God ever made
cannot measure His infinite recoil from their sin ;
yet He talked with the woman of Samaria — she
that had had five husbands — until a new life beat
once more under the ribs of moral death ; from
her " that was a sinner " He received love's gift
in the house of Simon the Pharisee, and said
unto her, " Thy faith hath saved thee : go in
peace." And when they brought unto Him a
woman taken in adultery, and she, to Him
asking, " Woman, hath no man condemned thee ? "
answered, " No man. Lord," He also made
answer, " Neither do I condemn thee : go thy
way : from henceforth sin no more." Tell me,
could love for the unlovely, the unloving, go
farther than that ? And such was the love of
Christ for man.

C/in'sl's Love /or Man

With what unwearied persistence did His love
follow man ! He pictured once the good shcphertl
who gocth after the sheep that is lost " until he
find it"; and His own life is the best comm':nt
on the words. Some of us begin that search,
but we grow weary ; and sometimes, alas ! the
ingratitude of man has left us hard and bitter.
liut Christ's was a love that "suffered" and still
was " kind." Mis own brethren did not believe
on Him ; one of the twelve betrayed Him ; once,
in a crisis of His life, many of His disciples went
back and walked with Him no more ; and even
of those who loved Him and remained constant
to Him, all were strangely slow and dull to com-
prehend His meaning. Yet grieved and hurt,
saddened and disappointed, as He often was. His
love never once turned back. Through all, and in
spite of all, He loved man to the end.

Is not this love at its divinest height? All
love is beautiful — the love of friend and friend,
the love of mother and child, the love of man and
woman, what Tennyson calls " the maiden passion
for a maid." But in all these love has something
to call it forth, to strengthen it, to respond to it.
But to love men, not because they are loving, but
though they are unloving ; to love them in their
dirt and grease, in all their physical and moral
unloveliness — is not this love's triumph? And
such, again, was the love of Christ for man.

What was the secret of His love? It lay
partly, as I have already said, in what Christ was

Chrisfs Lore for Man

Himself; partly, also, in His view of men. He
knew how deeply man had fallen ; but He knew
also how high he might rise. J le never lost sight
of the possibilities that lay slumbering and hidden
even in the worst. What He Himself was, He
knew that God purposed every man should be.
Therefore when He looked upon man, He saw
not only the man that was, but the man that
might be. "If there be a devil in man," says
Tennyson, " there is an angel too." Christ saw
the angel in man ; He loved " the possible saint
in the actual devil."

If you and I are to know aught of Christ's
love for man, we must keep fast hold of Christ's
thoughts concerning man. I heard it publicly
stated the other day by one who is well qualified
to judge, that many, especially among " the leisured
classes," who a few years ago were earnestly en-
gaged in various works of social reform, are to-day
gradually edging out of the movement. They
have suffered bitter disappointment and disillusion-
ing ; they thought they were wanted and would be
welcomed, and instead they have been treated with
coldness and suspicion. Their fervour had no
great steadying faith behind it, and when the first
rude shock came they staggered under it and fell ;
and one by one they are going back to their
leisure — their books, their art, their pleasures — to
live over again the old self-centred life. There is
no love that will stand the wear and the buffetings
of life save the love that is rooted firm and deep

Chrises Love for Man

i !

in the faith that Christ had concerning them for
whom lie Hvcd and died.

" Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and
Lazarus : " that is my second text. Christ's was
an individual love, a love that singled men out ;
He loved Martha, and Mary, and Lazarus.

That was ever Christ's way. How He spent
Himself on the twelve disciples ! It was never
enough that the multitudes were with Him ; He
was always saying, in effect, "To-day I must
abide at thy house." He talked with Nicodemus
by night, with the woman of Samaria at the well-
side. Some one has counted no less than nine-
teen such private interviews recorded for us in the
four Gospels. " There is joy in the presence of
the angels of God," He said, "over one sinner —
one sinner — that repenteth." Twice, and twice
only, are we told that Jesus wept : " And when
He was come near He beheld the city, and wept
over it." He remembered all that Jerusalem had
been, all that it was, and all that it might have
been ; then burst His mighty heart : "He beheld
the city, and wept over it "^ — these were the tears
of a patriot. And again, when Lazarus lay dead,
and Martha and Mary were weeping for their
brother, and would not be comforted because he
was not, it is written, "Jesus wept" — these were
the tears of a friend. He who carried about with

.ISi

I f

C/irisi\s Love for Man

Him daily the burden of the city's sins and sor-
rows, shared the humble grief of one little home
in Bethany. VViieii Me hung upon the cross,
dying for a world, Me remembered Mis mother:
" Woman, behold thy son ! " and to John, " J^ehold
thy mother 1 " And when Me came back from the
grave, triumphant over death, it was still the
same: "Then," says St. Paul, enumerating Mis
various appearances, " Me appeared to above five
hundred brethren at once; then Me appeared to
James": to five hundred — then to James. The
one is not forgotten in the crowd ; James is not
lost in the five hundred.

Some speakers in the presence of a large
audience depend for half their inspiration upon
eager faces picked out in the listening throng.
But others will speak for an hour and see nobody ;
they are conscious only of a great .sea of faces ;
they recognize no individual face. It was not so
Christ looked upon men. " Who touched Mc ? "
Me said. " Seest Thou the multitude thronging
thee," said Mis disciples, " and sayest Thou, Who
touched Me ? " " Somebody touched Me," Me said
again ; so true it is, as some one has finely said,
" Mankind is all mass to the human eye, all in-
dividual to the divine."

Again, does not Christ's example teach us ? Mis
philanthropy, as Robertson of Brighton pointed
out long ago, was no mere abstraction, it was
an aggregate of personal attachments : He loved
Martha, and Mary, and Lazarus. But we, as our

C/irisl's Love for Man

homely phrase has it, lay hold of the wronj^f end
of the stick. " l.ove everybjjy, love everybody,"
chatters our modern philanthropy, ami that ends
in loving nobody. If yovi would love an)bod)',
sa)'s Jesus, )ou must be^in by lovint^ someb(Kl)-.
CharUitte Hrontc describes one of her characters
in this fashion : " She would <;ive in the readiest
manner to people she had never seen^ — ^rather,
however, to classes than to individuals. Pour /cs
/xiuvres, she opened her purse freely ; against ///<■
/^oor man, as a rule, she kept it closed. In i)hilan-
thropic schemes for the benefit of society at i irge
she took a cheerful part : no private sorrow touched
her." Does not that describe some of \\^} A
more excellent way show I unto you: "Jesus
loved Mru'ha, and her sister, and Lazarus."

III

For my third text we must go to the margin
of the Revised Version : " Jesus . . . having loved
His own which were in the world, loved them
unto the uttermost."

Could anything exceed the tender beauty of
the familiar words .'' Just as a mother, knowing
that the day so long dreaded has come, and that
she and her child must be separated, feels all
her heart rushing to her lips for utterance, and
crowds these last moments with words and deeds
of tender, eager love ; so Jesus, knowing that
His hour was come that He should depart out

■\\

Christ's Love for Man

of this world unto the Father, tightens His grasp
on these lonely men He is leaving behind Him,
and having loved them, now loves them unto the
uttermost.

But, perhaps, we may give to these words a
still wider significance. Christ loved men " to the
uttermost," because He loved men to the death.
•' Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends ; but God com-
mendeth His love to us, in that, while we were
yet sinners, Christ died for us." " Hereby know
we love" — herein is love's uttermost revelation of
itself — "because He laid down His life for us."
It is only at the cross that we see the love of Christ
in all its breadth and length and depth and height,
and come to know that which ever passeth know-
ledge. There may be much about that Cross man
cannot put into speech ; the darkness that fell
amid the closing hours of that great tragedy has
not wholly lifted yet ; perhaps it never will lift to
mortal eyes. But whatever else is dark, this at
least is clear : He died for us because He loved
us, and His death is the measure of His love.
God forbid that we should wrangle about the
meaning of what we call the Atonement, and miss
this, which is its very heart. Jesus was more than
a martyr ; He was not simply a brave man,
paying with His life the penalty of His bravery
in the streets of Jerusalem. His life was His
own, and no man could snatch it from Him : " I
lay it down of Myself," He said. " I have power

Christ's Love for Man

to lay it down, and I have power to take it again."
His death was the voluntary yielding up of
Himself, that we, through His sacrifice, might
live.

Herein was love's uttermost. "All His life
long He had been reveahng His heart through
the narrow rifts of His deeds, like some slender
lancet windows ; but in His death all the barriers
are thrown down, and the brightness blazes out
upon men. All through His life He had been
trying to communicate His love to the world, and
the fragrance came from the box of ointment
exceeding precious, but when the box was broken
the house was filled with the odour." ^ Verily,
this was love's uttermost. After this, love itself
had no more that it could do ; it had given itself
away in the service, and for the sake of the loved
one.

\\ 1

And now, lastly, mark — all that that love was,
it is still. " Unto Him that loveth us," John
cried — and this is my last text — " to Him be the
glory and the dominion for ever and ever." Note
the present term which the Revised Version has
happily restored to us : " Unto Him that loveth
us " not " that loved us." Many years had gone
by since Christ had ascended up into heaven, but
to John His love was as present and as real as in
the days when he walked by His side by the lake

1 Dr. Maclaren.

.» '

Christ's Love for Man

of Galilee, or leaned upon His breast at the last
supper in the upper room.

Now I want you to go over again all I have
been trying to say, and turn all its past tenses
into presents, and say not " This is how Christ
loved," but rather " This is how He loves." For
still He loves the unloving, the unlovely, and the
unlovable ; still His heart hungers to spend itself
on the individual life, and all the wealth of love
of which His death speaks is for me if I will
receive it.

He loves the bad, the vicious, the worthless,
the prodigal. Many waters cannot quench His
love ; even our sins cannot make Him other than
He is. We are all His children. Some are
children in the home, happy and joyous and free ;
and some, alas ! are wanderers, weary and
wretched, and far from home ; yet are we all His
children, and He cares for us all as His own.
Our sins hide the blessed truth from us some-
times, just as I have seen the mist hide the sun
from us, until it hung there in the heavens a ball
of fire, lurid and threatening. Yet a^ter all the
mists come from the earth, not from the heavens ;
get above them, and the sun is shining still
gracious and lambent as ever. Even the prodigal
need not fear to say " Father ! " for, thanks be
unto God, our sonship stands not in our goodness,
but in His love, not in aught that we are to Him,
but in what He is to us.

He loves inc. Whose is the sunshine ?

Christ's Love for Man

" Ours ! " say the giants of the forest, that toss
their great arms to the sky, and warm themselves
in its light, " ours is the sunshine." " Mine," says
the tiny flower, " a violet by a mossy stone, half
hidden from the eye," " mine is the sunshine."
And whose is the love of Christ ? Mine — yours
—every man's.

"Thou art as much His care as if beside
Nor man nor angel lived in heaven or earth."

He loves me, and He gave Himself up for rnc.
For me love did and gave its uttermost.

A young woman who had spent an evil life
lay dying in one of our hospitals.^ Some one
had read to her the words, " He was wounded for
our transgressions ; He was bruised for our
iniquities," and through them she had grasped the
mercy of God. Suddenly, as her friends stood
by, waiting for the end, she pushed one hand
faintly from the cover, and pointing to it with a
finger of the other hand, she said, " There is no
mark here ; He was wounded for my transgres-
sions ; He was bruised for my iniquities." Then
again she lay silent, till once more the hands
moved, and putting them to her brow she said,
" There are no thorns here ; He was wounded for
my transgressions ; He was bruised for my ini-
quities." Again she was still, so still they
thought her gone. But a third time she looked
up, and clasping her hands across her breast she

' The story is told hy Professor Drunimond.

iti

Christ's Love for Man

whispered, " There is no spear-wound here ; He
was wounded for my transgressions ; He was
bruised for my iniquities." Then she passed into
the silent land.

" He gave Himself for me " : what shall I give
to Him ?

11:^1

WAGES OR GIFT?

^'1 i

:?<

•r

■PMH

VII

WAGES OR GIFT?

" The n>ages of sin is death ; but tkc free gift of God is eternal life
in UinstJesHs our Lord. "-Romans vi. 23.

Vy-HAT is the "eternal life" which is here

/k1., T " °^^ ^^ '^ ^"dle^s life, un-
doubtedly, but it is more than that. The adjec
tive points to something beyond mere duration.
Ihis IS clear, even if we do not go beyond the
verse m which the phrase occurs. In the first

wtvi' "^ ^'" '^' ""'''' "" ^^^'^"^ parallelism,

which may be represented thus :—

The Wages
of Sin
is Death.

The (;ift

of God

is Eternal Lite.

And smce it is impossible to explain " death "
as meaning nothing more than cessation of being
It IS equally impossible to regard « eternal life " as
a mere synonym for endless existence. Further
the phrase must be interpreted in the light of the'
words that follow. And here the Revised Version

fi I

lOO

l^a^'c's or Gift ?

i y

renders us, as so often, incalculable service. When
\vc read (as in tiic Authorised Version) "The gift
of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our
Lord," we recognise, as Bishop Westcott says,
" A general description of the work of Christ, of
what He has wrought for us, standing apart from
us." But what Paul really wrote was, " I'Lternal
life in Jesus Christ our Lord," that is to say (to
quote Westcott again), " Life is not an endow-
ment apart from Christ, it is Himself, and enjoyed
in Him." Now we see that the adjective
" eternal " is, to speak after the manner of the
learned, not quantitative only, but qualitative
also ; it indicates not endlessness simply, but a
certain kind of life, the best and highest kind, life
in Christ, the very life of God Himself.

But if this be so, " eternal life " is not a gift
for the bestowal of which we must look in the
world to come. Not till then, indeed, can it be
ours in its fulness, for not till then will the con-
ditions be possible, in which, alone, it can fully
manifest itself; but in measure at least it may be
ours here and now. We read of one who was
dead " zuhile she livetJi" ; but are Sin's dread
wages paid on this side the grav^e, and does God
bid us wait till we are beyond it ? Nay, verily,
" He that hath the Son hath the life." What we
have may be but the " earnest " of what we are yet to
have, but it is the earnest, and the " inheritance "
itself will be but the earnest multiplied — like it
in character, though infinitely greater in degree.

IVagcs or Gift ?

lOI

If now \vc understand somcthinc^ of what is
meant by "eternal life," may wc not say that this
"eternal life" is the salvation which, in the Gospel,
is offered to man ? Now wc arc i^cttini^ in sight
of the one truth which I want in this brief address
to cmphasi/.c. How docs this"ctern?' life " be-
come the possession of man ? The answer — the
astonishing answer — of Paul is, that (to quote the
Revised Version) it is " the free gift of God." The
word used by the apostle ('^dpi(T/xa) means more
than "gift"; every gift is not a ^(^dpKTfxa ; a
'^dpia/xa is a " free gift," a " gift of grace," a gift
in which all merit on the part of the receiver is
unthought of, and only the free, spontaneous love
of the giver is revealed. And it is so, Paul de-
clares, that the eternal life, " the life which is life
indeed," comes from God to man.

Now, remember, all Paul's theology was rooted
in his experience. That is the secret of its
wonderful vitality. " Justification by faith,"
" sanctification through the Spirit," may be to
us mere intellectual counters, the technical terms
of a lifeless theology ; but to him they were vital
processes. And so, when he says, " the free gift
of God is eternal life," he is not speculating ; he
is declaring a fact of experience. He knew that
" eternal life," the life of God, was his ; and he
knew, too, how it had come to him : it was the
free gift of God.

Now that is a conception of salvation that
nowadays is often lost sight of. Salvation, we

(■'

I02

JVao-fs or Gift ?

think, is to be from within, it must be wrought
out by ourselves, it will come to us only as the
last result of long and laborious striving. To
many of us to-day religion means, primarily, the
straining after a high ideal, the girding of the
soul 'b'' high endeavour, the marshalling of all
life's scattered forces at the blowing of the trum-
pets of God. Salvation is to be won, not indeed
by fastings and penance and self-inflicted tor-
tures — none the less it is to be ivon, and so at
last it will be a wage that may be justly de-
manded, rather than a free gift to be humbly
received.

And, of course, there is much in all this that
is profoundly true. Where this striving and this
high ideal are not, the eternal life is not possible ;
where they are, even though they be alone, much
may be accomplished. But it was not so that
Paul conceived the Gospel of Christ. If to us
religion's first and greatest word be " strive, en-
deavour, attain," we are separated from the
apostle by a whole diameter ; for to him it said,
"Humble thyself, and receive." The Gospel was
to him — if I may borrow a convenient distinction
— not good advice, but good news ; it told, first
of all, not of something to do, but of something
done. No word indicates more clearly the whole
drift of Paul's thinking on this matter than the
word " grace." By " grace " are we saved ; and
" grace " speaks not of the doing of man, but of
the giving of God. Salvation is not a hard-won

IVagcs or Gift ?

103

wage paid down by the just Overseer of life ; it
is the bounty of love, the gift of grace.

Thinking over this text has led me very natur-
ally into speaking in this vein, because if there is
one truth which God has of late helped me to sec
for myself, it is this which I have just been trying
to put into words. Of course, I have always be-
lieved in what we call salvation by grace, as dis-
tinguished from salvation by works ; out never until
the last few months has the truth really lived
for me. For years, like so much, alas ! of one's
theology, it has lain — to use the words of a great
writer — in that " dim twilight land that surrounds
every living faith ; the land not of death, but of
the shadow of death — the land of the unrealized
and the inoperative." And now that it is begin-
ning to emerge from the darkness, I want others
to stand by my side, that, if possible, we may see
together the truth that made glad the heart of
Paul. I do not speak as a theologian, but as a
Christian man to Christian men, eager with them
to know the blessedness of eternal life.

If I could sum up in one sentence the differ-
ence between these two opposite conceptions of
the Christian life to which I have above referred,
I think it would be this : the one makes God the
centre of religion, the other finds it in man. I
do not mean, of course, that this distinction is
consciously present to the minds of those who
make it, but that, practically, that is what it
results in. Are we not in danger of reviving in

\:\

! 1

\ 1

» t

I04

// 'ai^n's or Gifl ?

religion the blunder of the old astronom}-, that
made the earth the centre of all thinf^s ? One of
the keenest observers of the trend of relij^n'oiis
thoutrht amon^f us to-day has said: "We are
makiuiT; the experiment of how much religion is
possible, and how much Christianity is possible
without God. We like to have pra)-ers ; but
prayers without Ciod- — -prayers full of beautiful
and graceful thought concerning human life, full
of pathetic representations of the hopes and fears
and struggles of men — prayers which arc so sym-
pathetic and touching, that they soothe and quiet
the heart that listens to them, and make divine
comfort unnecessary — prayers which draw us into
deeper and closer fellowship with the life of the
man who offers them, than with the life of God
Himself We like to sing hymns ; but hymns
about ourselves, not about God ; hymns which
tranquillize us by their pcaccfulncss, charm us by
their beauty, melt us by their sadness, or animate
us with their joy. We like to listen to preaching ;
but to preaching about man, not about God ;
about human duty, human suffering, human per-
plexity, the strength of human virtue, the severity
of human temptation." These words may, per-
haps, need slight qualification ; but no one who
knows anything of the life of the Churches to-day
will deny that they touch a very real weakness.
We often hear it said — and sometimes it is said
with something approaching a chuckle — that the
old Calvinism is dead. Those who say it have

Ilaoc's or Gift?

'05

often no very exact ide;i of wlmt they mean by
" Calvinisin," thoui^jh their roufrh-and-ready jiuln;-
ment is not without a basis in fact. Hut Calvin-
ism, in the supreme place it £;ives to God, in its
unwavering insistence that salvation is of God,
and not of man, is from without and not from
within, can never die. With whatever admixture
of doctrinal imi)urit)', in its abiding; testimony to
these ^reat verities of our faith, it i^: of imi)erish-
ablc worth. Turn to the Shorter CntccJiism and
you will fuid that the definitions of justification,
adoption, and sanctification — "the benefits which
they that are effectually calle 1 partake of in this
life " — all be<nn with these words : " It is an act

^race

of God's free grace." This word
indeed the characteristic word of Calvinism, and
as the writer last quoted has said, there is no
word that we need so much to fjet back, not into
our vocabulary simply, but into our thinking and
life, as this very word " grace."

Now do not let any of you grow impatient,
and tell me that all this may be well enough for
divinity students in a theological lecture hall, but
that it is out of place in a sermon to busy men
and women with little time, and perhaps less in-
clination, to think seriousl}' about matters of this
sort. For so far is this from being a question of
purely academic interest, that I do not affirm one
whit too much when I sa}' that the whole colour
and tone of character of our religious life will be
determined by the choice which (consciously or

■ 1

, t

io6

JVagcs or Gift ?

unconsciously) we make between these opposite
conceptions of the meaning of salvation. " I
believe," says John Ruskin, " that the root
of almost every schism and heresy from which
the Christian Church has ever suffered, has been
the effort of man to earn, rather than to receive
his salvation ; and that the reason that preaching
is commonly so ineffective is, that it calls on men
oftener to work for God, than to behold God
working for them." Let me close with an illus-
tration or two in confirmation of this.

Why is it that so many of us have so little
gladness in our Christian life ? Is it not just for
this very reason that we have put self instead of
God at the centre of it ? We have talked and
lived as if the whole responsibility of our salvation
rested on our own weak shoulders. And since,
naturally enough, we doubt our own strength, we
are never sure, never at rest ; even our joy has the
worm of fear busy at the heart of it. " I am

persuaded that / am able to keep " We dare

not say that ; and as we never knew the apostle's
noble faith, " He is able to keep," we are without
any " persuasion " at all ; and instead of a ringing
certainty, we have only a ghastly fear, or, at best,
a tremulous hope. Some of you have seen the
little engraving that adorns the title page of Dora
GreenwcU's beautiful books : a hand grasping
a cross, and about it this motto Et tcnco ct teneor^
" I both hold and am held." Alas ! that so many
of us have rent the motto in twain. We remember

■imiinr:

Wages or Gift ?

107

that we must hold, but we forget that we are also
held, held of God. Let us speak no more as if
ours were a religion without God ; let us remem-
ber that when we have not strength even to cling,
He still holds to us ; let us dare to believe that
Jesus meant what He said when of His sheep He
declared, " No one shall snatch them out of My
hand."

" Let me no more my comfort draw
From my frail hold of Thee,
In this alone rejoice with awe
Thy mighty grasp of me."

Why is it, again, that we make so little pro-
gress in the Christian life ? Why is our love, our
trust, so dwarfed and stunted ? Again, is not the
answer the same? Self is at the centre where
only God should be. But the soul never grows
by the contemplation of itself. Love cannot be
forced like some hot-house plant. It must be set
in the light and sunshine of love ; then it springs
up of itself. Trust grows in the presence of the
wholly trustworthy. Therefore, " Look unto Mc^
and be ye saved," must be the law of all our life.

And if once more we ask, Why is it that so
many to-day hesitate even to enter upon the
Christian life ? is not one answer at least this, that
they wholly misconceive religion ? They are weary
and overburdened, and religion seems to add new
burdens. How, then, should they seek it ? But
once ag.Jn I repeat, Christianity is salvation from
without. It tells not of something that man must

[

1 08

Wages or Gift ?

do, but of something done for man. " I make
known unto you," Paul says, " the gospel which I
preached unto you " ; and this is it, " I delivered
unto you, first of all \i.c. among the first things],
Jiozv that Christ died for our sins." Ah ! yes ; the
Gospel " does not mock the weary with fresh
demands for toil ; it tells them where they may
lean their weariness." It is not another burden
it offers, but strength, God's strength, wherewith
to carry all our burdens. To all it says, " Believe,
and be saved ; receive, and be blessed." Shall
we not come as humble suppliants, and gladly take
the gift He offers?

i^MfW^MfSl^TZC"

;«

THE CASTLE OF MANSOUL

i ■

■A:

mam

^wgsr^prr..^-- J . ..>'.;.■ m m

VIII
THE CASTLE OF MANSOUL

'• Au-/> thy heart xvith all dUigcmc ; for out of it are the issues
of life:' -Vx^oy. iv. 23.

TN John Bunyan's description of the town of
1 Mansoul, v"'": which the Holy War opens,
we read: "There was reared up in the midst of
this town a most famous and stately palace : for
strength it might be called a castle ; for pleasant-
ness, a paradise ; for largeness, a place so copious
as to contain all the world. This place the king
Shaddai intended but for himself alone, and no^
another with him ; partly because of his own
delights, and partly because he would not that the
terror of strangers should be upon the town. This
place Shaddai made also a garrison of, but com-
mitted the keeping of it only to the men of the
town." That is Bunyan's pictorial way of putting
what he read in his I^ible. The Bedfordshire
brazier was not what we call a " learned " man,
but he had " taken honours " in the Bible and his
own heart ; and all through his books he speaks

\ I

I 12

The Castle of MansoiU

straight out from the fuhiess of his knowledge on
these two great subjects.

By this castle or palace, then, reared up in the
midst of the town of Mansoul, Bunyan means the
heart, and his description of it is just a page out
of the Bible, with one of his own inimitable pictures
as an illustration. Take, for example, a book like
Professor Laid law's admirable Bible Doctrine of
Man, and lay it, with its quiet and sober hues,
side by side with the glowing colours of Bunyan's
vivid page, and mark how perfectly the two
harmonize. " Since, in Bible phrase," writes the
professor, " ' the life is in the blood,' that organ
which formed the centre of the distribution of the
blood must have the most important place in the
whole system. By a very easy transition, there-
fore, ' heart ' came to signify the seat of man's
collective energies, the focus of the personal life.
As from the fleshly heart goes forth the blood in
which is the animal life, so from the heart of the
human soul goes forth the entire mental and moral
activity." That is, I believe, a perfectly accurate
statement of the meaning of the term " heart " as
it is used in the Bible. And it is precisely this
same Biblical idea which Bunyan has in mind when
he tells us, " There was reared up in the midst
of this town a most famous palace," and so forth.

And now, I think, my text needs no further
introduction or explanation, and I may use the
rest of my time in seeking to enforce it. " Keep
thy heart with all diligence " ; or, as the words

The Castle of Mansoul

<;'

113

may be rendered, the better to preserve the
emphasis of the original, " Above all that thou
guardest, keep thy heart." And as both in the
text, and sti'' more manifestly in Bunyan's allegory,
the military metaphor is made use of, I shall not
hesitate to continue the use of it throucrh what
follows.

In the first place, then, the heart is the key of
the situation. He who holds the castle holds
Mansoul. To rule there is to rule in the life. As
are the " thoughts of the heart," so will be the
words of the mouth and the deeds of the hand :
out of the heart are " the issues of life."

Do we fully realise this ? The late Mr. Cotter
Morison said, " There is no remedy for a bad
heart, and no substitute for a good one." Thank-
God, we do know of a remedy for bad hearts ;
but Cotter Morison was right when he said there
was no substitute for a good heart. We are often
concerned about what we do and about what we
fail to do, but are we half enough concerned about
what we are ? If it is important to ask who
holds the outworks, is it not of far greater import-
ance to ask who reigns in the citadel ? We do
well to be anxious ; only let us see to it that our
anxiety busies itself at the right point. We need
to get farther back. Conduct is the stream, the
flowing stream, of our life. Of what avail is it
that we seek to cleanse the stream if the fountain-

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head be impure? We must go higher up the
stream till in the " thoughts of the heart " we
reach the very source of life itself.

I may pray with the psalmist, " Let the words
of my mouth be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord,"
but it will be a useless prayer if I do not, like
him, go deeper, and lay my finger on " the medita-
tions of my heart." It is right, indeed, to be
concerned about the outward man ; yet, after all,
what Peter calls " the hidden man of the heart "
is my real self ; and what he is I am. We are to
bring " into captivity every thought to the obedience
of Christ." Was not this same " inwardness " the
note of all Christ's teaching ? He brushed aside
as so many cobwebs the traditions of the elders —
" washings of cups, and pots, and brazen vessels "
— which rabbinical ingenuity had spun about the
life of man, and taught the truth of God in plain
and homely speech which he who runs may read.
" Hear me, all of you," He said, " and understand :
whatsoever from without goeth into the man, it
cannot defile him ; because it goeth not into his
heart, but into his belly, and goeth out into the
draught. That which proceedeth out of the man,
that defileth the man. For from within, out of
the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed, fornica-
tions, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, wicked-
nesses, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing,
pride, foolishness : all these evil things proceed
from within, and defile the man." " Thou shalt
not kill," said the old commandment : " thou shalt

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not commit adultery." " But," \vc murmur sclf-
complaccntly, " all these things have I observed
from my youth up." But let Christ re-read that
ancient law. The murderous thought, lie says
— that is murder ; the adulterous look — that is
adultery. Now where do we stand ?

Young men, what do we think about ? What
sort of pictures is Imagination, that great painter
whose colours never fade, hanging on the walls of
our hearts ? " As a man thinketh in his heart, so
is he." " The soul," says Marcus Aurelius, " is
dyed the colour of its thoughts." What is going
on in our hearts ? Are we letting all manner of
foul thoughts riot there ? Are we giving rein to
an unclean imagination ? Then, I tell you, the
enemy is establishing himself in the very citadel
of Mansoul, and after that his possession of the
whole town is only a question of time.

That is the true inward history of many a
man's fall. That damning deed, which has left
its mark on all his after-life — it was not the work
of a moment. The terrible lapse into sin is rarely
the sudden, unpremeditated thing it sometimes
seems. The mind had pictured it, and dwelt
upon it, and grown accustomed to it. The train
had been laid through long months of unbridled
evil thinking, and that deed of shame you see was
only the last and visible result of a long unseen
and inward process.

Keep your eye fixed full upon the " thoughts
of the heart." The evil thought encouraged is

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the evil deed begun. Out of the impure thought
there issues the impure life. He who cherishes
such thoughts is hatching a serpent's brood that
will one day wake into life to hiss and sting ; he
is rearing wild beasts of prey that afterwards will
turn upon him and rend him. Slay them at their
birth, my mthcr. Let them have no place in
your heart Pray with all the passion of your
being, " Cleanse Thou the thoughts of my heart by
the inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit." " Above all
that thou guardcst, keep thy heart."

How is the heart to be kept ?

I. By ivatcJif Illness. As the older and more
familar version puts it, " Keep thy heart with all
diligence^

It is the prerogative of man to control himself.
In the measure in which we lose that power we
lose our manhood. If there be one in whom it is
utterly gone, he is no longer a man but an animal.
But let us remember, self-control does not mean
simply, as I think we sometimes take it to mean,
control of our appetites and passions ; it includes
control of our thoughts. If we say we cannot
control our thoughts, then, I repeat, we are no
longer men. But such a pitiful confession is
really only the worthless plea of the weak man who
will not brace himself to make the needed effort.

And assuredly effort is needed. Encamped

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around us is a foe whose watchfulness never tires ;
and if we do not meet him with equal watchful-
ness we are undone. The town of Mansoul has
five gates, and at every gate the watchmen must
be posted. Some of us need to keep a strict
look-out at Mouth-gate, for still, as Shakespeare
says, " men put an enemy in their mouths to
steal away their brains." But the danger for
most of us lies perhaps at Eye-gate and Ear-gate.
What fools and madmen we arc ! We know our
peril, and yet through these gates enemy after
enemy passes unchallenged into the very citadel
of the soul. This very week we have read books,
or we have looked at pictures, or we have listened
to stories that have filled our hearts as with a host
of traitors ; and even as we sit in God's house
their clamour is in our ears, so that we cannot
hear the voice of God.

" Look to yourselves." As John wrote to the
elect lady, so say I to you : " Look to yourselves."
Watch ye. Without vigilance you are lost. As
the Pilgrim left the cross, he came on Sloth lying
with the irons on his heels between Simple and
Presumption, sleeping like a man that sleeps on
the top of a mast, and there below — a gulf that
hath no bottom ! Is not that like some of you ?
It is said that Alexander used to leave his tent
at midnight, and go round the camp and spear to
his post any sentinel he found asleep. You must
stand sentinel over yourself, my brother ; you
must keep a sleepless vigil —

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The Castle of Mansoul

" Leave no unyuardccl place,
No weakness of the soul."

" Above all that thou guaidcst, keep thy heart."

2. liut if the heart is to be kept, it is not
enough that we repel the evil intruder ; the heart
must be garrisoned ivith good. The empty heart
is a standing mcni.ce, a perpetual invitation to
the enemy to attack. That is to say, dropping
for a moment the metaphor, our aim should be
not merely the repression of evil, but the cultiva-
tion of good. The chief end of man is not
negative but positive ; not so much self-control as
self-development. That, at least, is the Christian
i:- al of life. In the very same breath in which
the apostle bids us " die unto sin," he bids us also
" live unto God." And however in thought we
may separate these two things — the death to sin
and the life for God — in reality they are not two,
but one ; opposite sides of the same great spiritual
fact.

God does not want our life to be like some
garden, weeded and cleansed indeed, but bare
and fruitless. He seeks the blossoming flowers
and ripening fruits. And though I cannot claim
to be even an amateur gardener, I think I am
right when I say that the weeds never thrive so
badly as when the ground is well occupied.
Certain it is, in our moral life, that evil is only
to be finally cast out by good ; and there is no
good of any kind which, if we welcome it into
our hearts, will not be our ally in the day of

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119

battle. He who has learned the delights of
music or painting ; who likes nothing better than,
in Thomas a Kempis' (piaint i)hrase, to sit " in
a nook with a boo): ; " or who has found the
blessedness of one pure and abiding friendship,
has done more to garrison his heart against evil
than by all the bolts and barriers he could devise.
" Whatsoever things are true, and honourable, and
just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report,
think on these things," and they shall be as a
troop of white-winged angels, strong as they are
fair, to keep the citadel of the heart as a virgin
fortress against all the mailed hosts of darkness.

3. Most important of all — and here I go a
step beyond my text — if the heart is to be kept,
Christ must reign in it. " Bringing into captivity
every thought to the obedience of Christ^' wrote
Paul ; and, after all, all that we can do is little
worth if it stop short of that.

Go back again to the words with which I
opened : " This place the king, Shaddai, intended
but for himself alone, and not another with him ;
partly because of his own delights, and partly
because he would not that the terror of strangers
should be upon the town." Mark that last
sentence, " Because he would not that the terror
of strangers should be upon the town." Will not
our own experience interpret that for us ? When
John Henry Newman was a young man at college,
he once wrote home to his mother, in a confidential
birthday letter, that when he looked into his own

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heart he often shuddered at himself. Have you
never shuddered at yourself? Ah, yes! that
" terror of strangers upon the town " of Mansoul
is a very real thing ; and only Christ can deliver
us from it. When the strong man armed is in
possession, only He Who is stronger than the
strong man can cast iiim out. When, like the
temple in the days of old, the heart is polluted
and defiled by sin's unholy trafficking, One only
is able to cleanse it again. " No remedy for a
bad heart " ? If you shut Christ out, it is true ;
bid Him enter, and He w'ii show you straightway
how false it is. Oh, give Him the keys of the
heart, put Him into possession, and He will keep
with all diligence the heart, which, with all our
keeping, we can never keep.

The castle is His ; He built it " for Himself
alone." Yet will He never force His way in. If
He enter at all, it will be just as another — because
we let Him in. The King has committed the
keeping of the castle only to the men of the town,
and He will never violate His own charter.
" Give Me thy heart " — that is how He comes to
us. But He will never beat down the door and
force an entrance.

" Give Me thy heart" He asks for nothing
less. He must reign in the citadel, or nowhere.
In ^ '.en times when an invader besieged our
city, he had never conquered Edinburgh till he
had subdued the castle. His banners might wave
here and there over the city, but not until he had

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121

planted his flaj^ on the summit of the rock was he
really victor. And I have never yielded myself
to Christ till I have yielded my heart to Him.
Do not let us delude ourselves. We read our
Bibles and say our prayers ; we keep the Sabbath
and go to church — that is, we have yielded the
outworks to Christ. But what of the citadel ?
Who is king there ? " Give Me thy heart," He
says : " give Me thy heart." What shall we
answer Him ?

" Take my heart, it is Th' .0 own ;
It shall be Thy royal throne.

Take myself, and I will be
Ever, only, all for Thee."

PATIENCE WITH GOD

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PATIENCE WITH GOD

" Noiij zvhcn John heard in the prison the zvorks of the Christ, he
sent by his disciples and said unto Him, Art thou He that
cometh, or /ook we for another ?" — Matthew xi. 2, 3.

" Nest in the Lord and 'emit patiently for Hini^—VuMM xxxvii. 7.

IT is often very hard for us to be patient with
one another. It is harder still sometimes to
be patient with ourselves. Hardest of all is it, I
think, to be patient with God. It is of this most
difficult kind of patience, patience with God, the
patience that the Baptist lacked, that I wish to
speak for a little time this morning.

i 'i.

Now I take it for granted that the Baptist's
question was the expression of his own personal
doubt. Indeed, I should hardly have thought it
necessary to refer to the matter at all, had it not
been that certain unimaginative commentators, m
their anxiety to save John's credit for consistency,

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Patience ivith God

and at the expense of the plain meaning of the
narrative, have sometimes told us that the dinciples
were sent to Christ, not for the confirmation of
John's faith, but of their own. But we have only
to read the narrative, whether in Matthew's Gospel
or in Luke's, to see how impossible such an inter-
pretation is. It is John who sends the question ;
it is back to John that Christ sends the answer
(" Go your way and tell John ") ; and the Messian's
words in the sixth verse of this chapter, " Blessed
is he whosoever shall find none occasion of
stumbling *r " Te," seem clearly to point to some
fault oil lb <•. '"'f the Forerunner.

How, tk^ii, uo we to explain the Baptist's
doubt ? T'le explanation that Matthew gives is
at first sigh'i. a . '<:le >: 1 "ous. We read that when
John heard, then he doubLcd. If it had been that
since John did not hear, therefore he doubted, we
should not have marvelled. What wonder indeed
if, amidst the silent gloom of those prison walls,
unbroken by any word of Christ, doubts had
sprung up within the Baptist's heart ? But it was
not the silence, it was the hearing that was the
occasion of the doubt. In Luke's narrative this
comes out even more distinctly. A repor^ con-
cerning Christ had gone forth through the whole
of Judaea, and all the region round about ; " and
the disciples of John told him of all these things."
Then immediately, "John calling unto him two of
his disciples sent them to the Lord, saying, Art
thou He that cometh, or look we for another ? '"

Patience ivith God

127

What then is the explanation of the Baptist's
doubt? In order to find the answer we must first
remind ourselves of the Baptist's expectations with
regard to the Messiah. He had proclaimed the
revelation of wrath from heaven ; he had declared
the coming of the great and terrible day of the
Lord ; even now, it seemed to him, the Judge was
at the door. " He that cometh after me," he said,
" is mightier than I " ; and that conception of the
Messiah as the Mighty One, in John's mind seems
to have overshadowed almost every other. The
old earth was to be cleansed by the baptism not
of water but of fire ; the axe was to be laid at the
very root of the tree of evil ; the Messiah was to
stand in the midst of the threshing-floor of human
life. His fan in His hand, to divide the wheat from
the chaff, and to burn up the chaff with unquench-
able fire. To John the coming of the Messiah
meant the coming of the kingdom c f righteousness,
the swift overthrow of the kingdom of evil.

These were John's expectations ; but what did
he see? Christ had come — so at least he had
believed — but where were the signs of His com-
ing ? where the axe, the fan, the fire? The
adulterous Herod still lorded it in his palace ;
while here, in the dungeon of the palace, lay the
Forerunner of the Messiah a prisoner. Pharisaism,
that unclean nest of vipers, was still undisturbed.
Where was the promised kingdom ? W^as it not
still as ever it had been — truth upon the scaffold,
wrong upon the throne ? And Jesus, what is He

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Patience ivitJi God

doing the while ? Healing a few sick folk — so
in the prison they told him — raising to life again
a widow's son, speaking sweet words of tender
grace and love, " This is no Messiah ! " said
John; "this* is no Messiah! Does He think
the walls of evil will fall before these soft, piping
words of peace ? Why docs He not have at
them ? Why, in God's name, docs He not smite ? "
And once more the old warrior spirit leapt within
the man : " Oh that these poor bound hands were
free again, that I might strike }'ct one blow more
for God and for God's truth ! "

And so I think they do the Baptist a grievous
vvrong who hear, in his doubt, nothing more than
a half impatient murmur, because things were
going hardly with him, as if his question to Jesus
had meant, "If the Messiah has come, why am I
left in prison ? Why do I suffer ? Arc others to
be healed, and am I only to be forgotten ? " No,
John's was a larger outlook than that. There are
some, I know, who never feel the world-tragedy
of evil ; but let their own life be touched, and
they will curse God and die. The sun may be
buried in eclipse, and they will never know it ;
but blow out the tiny, flickering taper they carry
in their own hand, and, lo ! their day is turned
into night. All things may be out of joint and
at cross purposes, and it will be )io concern of
theirs ; but let something get a twist in their own
little life, and they will frame an indictment against
the universe. When Marie Bashkirtseff learned

Patiouc with God

i.'>9

that she was smitten with consumption, she wrote
in her diary, "Is it I! O God! I! I!! I!!!" And
there are some who, in their judgments of God,
never get beyond that first personal pronoun ; what
happens to )iic — that determines everything.

But John's soul was of a larger build than that.
Long ago he had accepted it as the will of God :
"lie must increase, but I must decrease." W'hat
might happen to himself, that was of but little
moment ; but was the Kingdom coming ? was the
Kingdom coming? A blinded, mistaken man if
you will — at least it was not selfishness that had
led him astray.

And yet John's question was a mistake. For
what did it mean ? He had said, " If God's king-
dom come, it must come so." But God's kingdom
came not so, but so ; therefore said John, " The
kingdom cometh not all."

" O Son of Man "

he prayed,

" to rii^ht our lot,
Naught but Th)' presence can a\ail."

"And yet," he murmured,

'' Yet on tlic road Thy wliecls arc not,
Nor on the sea Thy sail."

John had not learned to say,

" My how or when Thou wilt not heed ; ''

nor, to pray,

" Come down Thine own secret stair."
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John had forgotten what you and I have so often
forgotten — to be patient with God.

Turn now for a moment to the psahiiist's
words, which I read as a kind of second text :
" Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him."
This man, too, was perplexed. He was confronted
by that old problem that vexed the souls of so
many of those Old Testament saints, and which
finds its sublimest expression in the Book of
Job — the problem of the seeming injustice of
things, the want of harmony in God's moral uni-
verse. " Why," asked these saints of old, " why
do the righteous suffer ? why does the bad man
suffer ? " " How long, O Lord, how long ? "

This man, I say, had his problem ; but he had
also the answer to it : " Rest in the Lord, and
wait patiently for Him." Now I do not say that,
as the psalmist meant it, that was an all-sufficient
answer. If any one cares to affirm that the
psalmist's outlook was bounded by the present
life, that all that he meant was, " Wait, wait ; all
will be well in the end ; the wicked shall be de-
stroyed, and the righteous shall be rewarded ; "
if, I say, any one affirms this, I am not anxious
to dispute the point with him. Take what inter-
pretation you will, have we not here in this answer
of the psalmist one of those marvellous intuitions
of the soul, one of those — to quote Dean Church's

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Patience loitJi God

131

memorable words — " piercing, lightning-like gleams
of strange spiritual truth " that have made the
Book of Psalms what it is in the hearts and
thoughts of men to-day. This man spake a truth
greater than he knew. lie wrote ages before
Christ came, yet Christ Himself cannot make
antiquated a word like this. It is one of the
ultimate truths of all religion, bearing upon it
even in its very form the stamp of a divine
finality : " Wait — rest — be patient with God."

Ill

Our point of view to-day is not precisely either
that of the psalmist or of the Baptist. The world
changes, and with it the thoughts of men. One
generation falters where another trod with firm
and certain feet. Yet be our problems what they
may, the old answer is still valid, and it is still
the best : " Rest in the Lord ; wait patiently for
Him." Is not this a word to lay upon our hearts
in days like these, when the current of impatient
unbelief runs so often swift and strong ?

I think we understand well enough the Baptist's
feeling. Like him, we, too, have prayed that God
would quicken His steps among the stars ; yet
still He seems to tarry, till wondering impatience
cries aloud, " Why does He not hear us ? Why
does He not make an end of sin ? If He be the
Lord, why does He not make haste to save us
and our poor devil-hunted world ? " Was it not

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Patience ivii/i CJod

;

this that led even the sweet and gentle VVhittier
to say once, as he fou,i;ht for the down-trodden
shive of America, " I confess when I think of the
atrocities of shivery, 1 am ahnost ready to call for
fire from heaven." And I have heard of one who,
when speaking of the desolations wrought in our
own fair land by the thrice accursed drink traffic,
crietl in one passionate outburst, " Oh, if only I
were God Almighty for ten minutes!" It is this
" the godless look of earth," as h'aber calls it—
that tries our faith far more than " our mysterious
creed " —

" 111 masters j^ood : yood seems to change
To ill with greatest case ;
And worst of all, the j,''0()d with j^ood
Is at crosi piir[)oses."

And amid it all

" He hides himself so wondrously.
As thoiiyii there were no Clod ;
He is least seen when all the powers
Of ill are most abroad."

And this it is that stirs our doubt and quickens
our impatience till we are ready to ask, " Is God
as man and could not if He would ? "

" Rest in the Lord and ivait patiently for Him,
Fret not thyself becanse of evil-doers. Conunit thy
way nnto the Lord ; trust also in Hi^n and Lie
shall britig it to pass T

Does some one say, " Well, but patience cures
nothing. It is not idle waiters the world wants,
but earnest workers. Surely we have waited long

Patioicc with (lOif

133

enough, atul the time for doitv^ has come " ?
True, true ; but let us make no mistake. I'aticncc
with God docs not mean one moment's truce in
the war with evil. A man may fokl his arms /
and He back in his easy-chair to (heam idly of a
<rood time that is comintj^, and he maj- call that
" patient waitin;^ for God " — he may ; God calls
it by another and a very different name. Let
not that man think he shall receive anythint,^ from
the Lord, .save indeed it be His rod. His frown,
His hot thunderbolts. No ; patient waitini^ is not
a substitute for earnest prayin<^ or faithful doincj ;
it is rather — if I can put it in one sentence — the
spirit, the atmosphere, in which alone are possible
the prayer that prevails, the toil that never flags
nor tires.

Let me show you in a word or tv.o how this
patience justifies itself.

I. Li the first place, to put it negciti\cly, ////- ^
patience never forms a true estimate of evil. Some-
times it over-estimates it, .sometimes it under-
estimates it — I hardly know which is worse — but
it never rightly estimates it. It creates an atmo-
sphere in which everything is blurred and dis-
torted, which never allows us to see things as
they really are. There is a very instructive inci-
dent in the life of Ahaz king of Lsrael preserved
for us in the Book of Lsaiah. Syria and Kphraim
had formed a confederacy against him, and the

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Patience ivith God

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kiiif^ was in yrcat fear : " His heart was moved
and the heart of his people as the trees of the
forest are moved with the wind." Then tlie pro-
phet is sent unto him, and his first word is this :
" Take heed and be quiet " ; as long as you arc in
this flurry and flutter you will do nothing right-
keep yourself still. Then when he has quieted
the fears of the frightened king he bids him look
the facts in the face. These his enemies —
l'4)hraim and S)'ria — that arc causing him to
quake, what are they ? " two stumps of smoking
firebrands ! " " The head of Syria is Damascus,
and the head of Damascus is Rezin " — is he worth
fearing? "And the head of Ephraim is Samaria,
and the head of Samaria is Remaliah's son "—is
he worth fearing? " If ye will not believe, surely
ye shall not be established." ^

Is not this word of the prophet the very word
that we need to hear to-day in face of our modern
problems and difficulties? "Take heed and be
quiet ; keep your eyes open and j-our heart still ;
and do not get into panic." Why, you have but
to mention in some men's hearing " Socialism " or
" the Higher Criticism," and they lose their
heads straightway. The advent of a new idea
affects them as the confederacy of Ephraim and
Syria affected Ahaz ; "after that the deluge," they
think. Until you can quieten tliem you can do
nothing with them, and they will do nothing but

^ I follow Dr. George Adam Smith's admirable rendering of this
incident.

Patience with Cod

T35

mischief. " If I had the power," said wise John
Foster once, " of touchitifj a large part of mankind
with a spell, it should be this short sentence, AV
quiet — l)c quiet!'

2. Impatience, I say, never rif^jhtly estimates
the evil it wants to deal with ; and in the second
place, // alivays misses the remedy. Some one has
pointed out the contrast between the calmness
and sagacity of General Gordon in the presence
of the gigantic slave traffic in Africa and the
crude, hasty, well-meaning, but mistaken sugges-
tions of philanthropists at home. What was the
explanation ? Gordon believed that God's hand
was upon even this iniquity, that even of this
hideous trafficking in flesh and blood God had
said, " Thus far shalt thou go and no farther " ;
and in that faith he could wait and watch and
plan, till he saw the way clearly, which others in
their impatience would never find.

Again, I ask, is there not a lesson here for the
Church of Christ? We behold, as in a vision,
the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them,
and we long for the day >vhen they shall be the
kingdom of our Christ ; and in a moment the
Evil One is at our side : " All these will I give
thee, if thou wilt fall dowi. and worship me."
And some of us, alas ! are paying the price.
Every now and again an African traveller comes
home and assures us that the reports of foreign
missionary work are exaggerated, that if we saw
things as they see them wc should not believe all

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Patience with God

we hear, that — you know the rest. Well, wc
take all that with a pretty big pinch of the pro-
verbial salt : if we have to make our choice
between the " report " of the missionary and the
" report " of the traveller, some of us at any rate
will not be long in making up our minds, ]iut,
perhaps, there is just enough truth in the
traveller's depreciation of missionary work to give
us a not unneeded warning. Who is to blame if
missionary statistics sometimes creep ahead of
actual facts?* Not the missionary abroad, but
Christians at home, who will only give where they
can get " something in return for their mone}'."
You have a guinea a year to give — to whom shall
you give it? "How much Jo your converts
cost per head ? " " Six and eightpence." " And
yours?" "We cannot tell you; we have spent
thousands, and as yet there is little to .show."
And the six-and-eightpenny man gets your guinea.
And then you wonder if twice in a generation
missionary returns get into print that will not
bear a scrutiny ! I say, it is you who arc re-
sponsible for them. And the root of the evil is
just here — we cannot be patient with God ; He
moves too slowly for us ; and so with impious
iiands we seek to hasten Him on.

I have seen the same thing in an inquiry-
room at the close of an evangelistic service. Here

^ Need I say. I am only ixTcriing to a missionary's work on one
side of it? The hest of it, like the best of all Christian work, can
never he scheduled.

Patience zvith God

is a m?/.i seeking salvation ; by his side kneels
another who has found the peace of God. " Why
should not you know it too," he urges, " here, now,
before we rise from our knees?" In nine cases
that may be the right method ; but in the tenth,
another's eager haste may hurry a man faster
than he can go, till he is persuaded into admitting
that he feels what he does not feel, that he believes
what he docs not believe. If Christian men
sometimes almost break their hearts over what
happens when the " Special Mission " is over, and
the revivalist has gone on his wa>' rejoicing,
perhaps the reason lies somewhere there. We
will not learn to be patient with God.

3, And in the end — howsoever sharp her trials
meanwhile may be — patience shall be justified.
TJie Lord reignetJi ; therefore ought men to work
and to pray, and not faint. The Lord rcignctJi ;
therein is the vindication of our patient waiting.

'' This fine old world of ours is but n child
Yet in the yo-cait. raticncc ! Give it time
To learn its limbs : there is a hand that guides."

Alas ! we forget the hand that guides. The
noise of the water-floods is in our ears, that we
cannot hear the voice of IHm that sitteth as
King above the floods. Still the old cry goes \\\>
to heaven : " How long, O Lord ! how long
before Thou come again ? ''

" Still in cellar and in garret and on moorland dreary,
The orphans moan, and widows weep, and poor men tnii
in vain."

I I

'^ I

138

Patience ivith God

And still does the answer come back to us :

" Blind ! I live, I love, I reign ; and all the nations through
With the thunder of my judgments even now are ringing."

" Be patient ; stablish your hearts ; the coming
of the Lord draweth nigh."

Sometimes when days arc dark and hearts are
sad we whisper to ourselves of things which eye
hath not seen, nor ear heard, which have not
entered into the heart of man, prepared of God
for them that love Him. But is it not well also to
remember that in the Old Testament prophecy, of
which Paul's great words are an echo, the promise
of the revelation of these things is not to them
that " love," but unto them that " wait " ? " It is
good that a man should hope and quietly wait
for the salvation of God." " Wait on the Lord ;
be of good courage, and He shall strengthen
thine heart. Wait, I say, on the Lord."

' I

■V«pi||B^P«IV^«lpiUi.,>H tmimuMLm

r ii

11.5

(

Till-: IMITATION OF J1<:SUS

" / /lai't: givni yon an (waiii/'li; thai yc aha should do as I have
done lo you''- y^wy' xiii. 15.

IIIAVl'^ hcic a small, unpretentious- looking
volume that you may buy at almost any
bookshop for a few pence. And yet, with the
exception of the liiblc, it is probably the most
remarkable book in the world. It was written by
a Roman Catholic in the dark, bad days before
Luther came ; yet Protestants by the thousand
read it without once sto[)pinfj to ask what the
writer's creed was. It was written nearly five
hundred years ago ; and yet no one feels it old -
except as the sunshine is old, and the stars, and
the spring flowers. The man who wrote it lived
for seventy-one years in a monastery, where nothing
ever happened ; and we who read it are in a big,
busy world, full of loud voices and stirring activi-
ties ; and yet so it is, that when wc put back the
thick octavo on the shelf, and the long rows have
nothing to say to us, this tiny volume brings its

nimi

142

The 1)11 it at ion of Jesus

own quiet iiic.ssai;o of iinfiiiliii<^ strcui^th and hope.
And the reason is not far to seek : this Utile book
speaks not to Catholic or to Protestant, not to the
fourteenth or to the nineteenth centmy, but to the
universal heart, to all centuries and to all men : it
is Tlic Imitation of C/irist, hy Thomas a Kempis.
When I say that A Kcnipis speaks to the
universal iieart, I am usini;- no nuM'e fii^ure of
speech ; 1 am statinij a simple fact of history.
With the one excei)tion of the Bible, the Imitation
has probably had a wider circulation than any
book in the world. In this respect even the
/'//i,'V7///'jr P/og/rss has to take second place ;• for,
while the picture of "Giant Pope" in Bunjan's
allei^ory must naturalh' ^ive offence to the devout
Catholic, the Imitation^ as I have said, is read by
Catholic and Protestant alike. The little book
weaves its spell about lives that have scarce one
thought or feeling in common. One of John
Wesley's first publications was an edition of A
Kempis. Voltaire once, in a chance moment,
read the book, " and the presence passed into his
soul, and found a lodging in one tiny corner,
whence no sneering scepticism could banish it."
Every reader of T/te Mill o)i the Floss knows with
what a strange thrill of awe George Eliot first
listened to this voice out of the far-off Middle
Ages ; the book became her life-long companion ;
it was on her pillow by her side when she died.
And General Wolseley — to take but one example
more — has told us that when he sets out on some

The huitation oj Jesus

143

long niilitary expedition, between his 15ook of
Common I'rayer and liis Soldiers' Pocket- Hook,
goes his Iinitatio Christi.

What manner of man was this in whom men
so different have found delight so great? Here
is a little portrait of him, etched by a loving
disciple's hand : — " A little, fresh-coloured man,
with soft brown eyes, short-sighted, with a knack
of stealing away quietly to his cubiciiluin when the
conversation grew lively ; somewhat bent in the
shoulders ; who sto(;d upright when the psalms
were chanted, and even rose and fell on his tiptoes,
with his face glancing upwards ; genial, if some-
what shy, and given to making small puns. lie
liked psalms better than sahuon, he used to say ;
but he liked best of all ' little books and quiet
nooks.' lie wrote a little bo(jk On C/uiri/y —
systematic giving, we should call it — and his
fellow-monks made him receiver of doles for the
monastery ; but he was too ' found of contempla-
tion ' — which, I supi)ose, is the fifteenth-century
phrase for being absent-minded — and the brethren
had to depose him. He did not know what an
event meant. Only two incidents stand out in
his ninety years of vegetating : once a man fell
into the convent well, and Thomas cannot find
words enough to praise the ready skill and daring
of the monk who threw off his cloak, and letting
it drop within grasp, pulled the drowning man
out. That was the man who has made himself
part of so many thousand lives."

>«4m>.m III ii^'^'**

144 7 Vie I in it at ion of J c^ us

Is Thomas a Kcnipis on your bookshelf?
No ? Then i^ivc him a place there before you
are twenty-four hours older. i\nd when you have
the book, do not " dip into it " merely ; make it
your daily friend ; and if this volume do nothing
more than introduce you to the wise, deep words
of this holy man of God, you will give thanks all
your da)s that you read it.

But, after all, the real subject of this brief
address is not Thomas a Kempis, but Thomas a
Kempis' Lord, and its chief aim is not so much
to urge the study of a book, but rather the imita-
tion of a J'erson. Now, I grant that " imitation "
is not the first nor the last, nor the deepest word of
the Christian Gospel. Indeed, as we shall see in
a moment, the imitation of Jesus is itself possible
only as a result of some more vital process. Never-
theless, imitation has its place among the Christian
duties : " Be )'e imitators of God, as beloved
children," says St. Paul ; " imitators of me, even
as 1 also am of Christ." The Thessalonians, he
says, " became imitators of us and of the Lord."
And even where the word is not used, the same
truth is often taught : " Have this mind, in you
which was also in Christ Jesus " ; " he that saith
he abideth in Him, ought himself also to walk
even as He walked " ; " Christ suffered for you,
leaving you an example that ye .should follow
His steps." And when Paul and John and Peter
say these things, they do but repeat what their
Master had said before them : " I have given you

The Imitation of fcsjis

145

an example that ye also should do as I have done
to you."

But it is necessary to understand a little more
clearly in what sense Christ is our example. The
necessity is emphasized by the incident — the
washing of the disciples' feet — in connection with
which the words of Christ just quoted were spoken.
It is on the act of Christ's therein described that
the Roman Catholic Church grounds its custom of
the " feet- washing " on the day known in its
calendar as " Maundy Thursday," that is, the
Thursday of Passion Week. Hut is the observance
of this custom exactly what Christ desired when
He said, " I have given you an exami)lc, that ye
should do as I have done to you " ? Take another
example. \i\Qry one has heard the legend of
St. Francis of Assisi, how that, praying in an
ecstasy of devotion, it was granted unto him to
receive into his body — his hands, his feet, his side — •
the marks of the dying of the Lord Jesus. Is it
to a likeness to Christ after that fashion that we
are called? Or put it in yet another way. It is
sometimes said by those who do not believe that
the New Testament gives any sanction to the
principles of total abstinence, " But Christ Himself
was not an abstainer ; He made wine at Cana of
Galilee ; He drank it with His disciples in the
upper room at Jerusalem." Quite .so ; and I
suppose that, like every other Jew, Jesus would
wear a turban on His head, and sandals on His
feet; and we know that He was never married.

\ i

1-4, 1 ni l HWi,,

99RtS

i4<3

The Iniitaliou of Jcsiis

Ikit if fi man to-da)- should remain sinjjlc, and
prefer a turljan to a hat, and sanchds to boots,
wouUl an}' one be so fooh'sh as to ar^iic that
therefore lie was the more Christhkc ?

Clearly, then, it is of little use to say that
Christ is our l^xamplc if we do not understand in
what sense He is our r'xaniple. Now, the jj;rcat
fact to be kept steadily in mind is this, that the
standard of life set before us in the New Testament
is to be found not in a code of laws, but in a
character. " Wc are called," says Dean Church,
" to the study of a livin^^ Person, and the following
of a living' Mind." It is not the letter, but the
spirit of Christ's life which is binding upon us.
Unfortunately, that has often been interpreted
to mean no obli^^ation at all ; none the less, the
distinction is a valid one. Ours is not the impos-
sible task of slavishly copyin<( lino by line, and
detail by detail, the life of Jesus. The difference
in the external circumstances of our lives and His
alone would make that impossible. " Have this
mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus," and
the rest can be left to take care of itself.

Two or three years ago a well-known journalist
wrote a book entitled, If Jesus Christ came to
Chicago. Many took exception alike to the answer
and to the form of the question. I have nothing
to do with either just now ; but this I will say,
that until we ask not only what did Jesus do
eighteen hundred and fifty years ago, under circun
stances wholly differing from our own, but alsc

immmmm

The Iuiitatio)i of Jesus

what would Jesus do if He were here in my place
to-da\', wc arc not even within si^ht of a rit^ht
interpretation of I Us life, or of the aiiplication of
that life to the life of to-day. To live so that
Jesus "would ap[)rove our life" -I (juote John
Stuart Mill's well-known words — is the only
imitation of Ilim that is worthy of the name.

Do I need to spend one moment in provinij,
or rather in affn*min;j^, Ch'i.a to be the J'erfect
Example? Alone of all the sons of men lie was
without sin. " The prince of this world cometh,
and hath nothinj^ in Me." lie could lotjk up to
heaven and declare, " I do always the thitifrs that
please Thee." Me could turn to I lis enemies and
ask, " Which of you convicteth Me of sin ? " The
claim is still undisputed ; the challenge is still
unanswered ; and when Mis own apostle Peter
declares " Me did no sin, neither was guile found
in Mis mouth," the whole world writes its " Amen "
under the great affirmation. But the "sinlcssncss
of Jesus" — to borrow a phrase of the theologians
— is altogether too negative a term adequately to
express the perfect symmetry of the character of
Christ. Mis was a perfection full-orbed and com-
plete, lacking nothing. We speak sometimes of
the "characteristics" of great men, meaning the
particular excellences in which they shine pre-
eminent. But who can name the "characteristics"
of Jesus ? I have preached on " The Manliness of
Jesus," and I have preached on "The W^omanliness
of Jesus," and I believe that both terms can be

'^:

•\iBU*4U« '.'J '*«UV- 1..U ■> J I • ..i II'.' JA~

148

7/^c^ Imitation of Jesus

justified. What we call the manly virtues, and
what we call the womanly virtues, all meet in
Him. With the erring disciple, with the bad man
turning from his badness, with all that are more
sinned against than sinning, He is gentle, tender,
beseeching as a mother with her child. But to
the self-seeker, the hypocrite, the oppressor. He is
clad with severity as with a cloak : on these and
such as these His words fall like flakes of burning
lava. Yet He is never " in a passion " ; no dark
fumes of hate mingle with the clear, bright flame
of His indignation against sin. How in Him,
too, the life of action and the life of contempla-
tion meet ! The cloistral smell, the monastic
gloom, the continuous turning-in of the soul upon
itself, that sometimes offend us in the pages of the
Iniitatioit, are nowhere to be found in the record
of the Perfect Life. And when over and above
all this we remember how manifold, notwithstand-
ing the limitation imposed by His divine nature,
were the relations of our life into wiiich He
entered we begin to realize how worthy He is to
stand for ever as the world's great Example.

How, then, can we imitate Christ ? How can
we become like Him ?

(i) If we would grow like Christ we must
know what Christ was like. A very simple,
obvious thing to say, and yet a thing .hat needs
to be said ; for how many of us do really know
even yet what Christ was like ? To your Gospels !
ye churchmen and churchwomen, to your Gospels !

I
1

■

;

The Imitation of Jesus

149

One meeting a iveek less and one chapter a zveek
more may not be a rule for everybody, but there
are multitudes of Christian people in whose
spiritual health that simple change of diet,
honestly followed out, would soon work wonders.

(2) If we would grow like Christ we must
keep Him steadily before us. Did you ever
watch a child taking a lesson in model-drawing ?
— never two strokes of the pencil without a glance
at the model. And the first law and the last law
of the imitation of Christ is just this — " looking
unto Jesus." We must fix our eyes up ,n Him ;
we must hold Him steadily in our hearts and in
our minds, until just as the sunlight prints the
object on the sensitized plate of the camera, so we
" beJiolding are transformed into the same image
from glory to glory." Supernatural ? Yes, and
yet very natural too. You remember the child of
the grief-stricken Margaret, in Wordsworth's lovely
poem —

" Her infant babe

Had from its mother caught the trick of grief,

And sighed among its playthings."

We grow like those we live with, those we love ;
every day beholding we are transformed ; and tiie
same law holds here. If we arc so little like
Christ, is it not because we are so little with
Him?

vVe must be with Christ, we must learn what
He is like — is that all? is there no more to be
said? Then can I never be like Him. His

- ' -til. ' L"j. >c ra:i S 3 t»«»^

.-.^\Vv

- — ■^■:rSf^\.::~,Ljyi..,-A lL-..,-i_Jl'-,-*slUJt'A

f5o

77/^ luiitation oj Jesus

is the perfect example, I know. I follow that
life through all " the sinless years that breathed
beneath the Syrian blue," till my whole soul
throbs with the wonder of it. But imitate it
— how can I, I with my weakened will, my
besetting sins ? " He left us an example," says
Peter, the headline for life's copybook ; ^ but my
hand is trembling and palsied — how shall it trace
the fair characters? "Imitate Him"? It is too
high for me ; I cannot attain unto it. How shall
these weak, stumbling feet ever climb that fearful
steep ?

There is the great problem, not the ideal, but
its realization. That is the test which has
brought system after system to the ground. The
world had its ideals before Christ came ; men
were not perishing for lack of good examples ;
the trouble was, they were powerless to reach
them. To lift the ideal as Christianity has
done, and to do r:othing more, is only to leave us
in worse plight than ever. Therefore the more
imperative docs the old question become — How
shall I become that v.'h^'rh afar off I see and
admire ? And if Chris.'anity cannot answer, it
will pass, as other systems before it have
passed.

Thank God, it can answer. He Who is our
Example is also our New Life. Why — if I may

' I I'd. ii. 21, i'Toypa/x,a6s : "« wri/in^-io/'y, including all tlie
lulleis of the alphabet, j^iven to beginners as an aid in learning to
draw llieni." — Grimm's I.cxuon.

•w

The Imitation of Jesus

151

borrow an illustration of Dr. Stalker's — is the
child like the mother? Ikcausc the child watches
the mother, and consciously imitates her ? Partly
so, but chiefly because the child's life is the mother's
life, because the mother lives in her child. This is
a great mystery ; but I speak concerning Christ
and II is people. "That Christ may dwell in
your hearts through faith," that " Christ may be
formed in you " : it was the prayer of one who
himself had learned to say, " I live ; and yet no
longer I, but Christ liveth in me," and it is the
purpose of God. Here verily, if not the first, is at
least the last and the deepest word of the Christian
Gospel. It is the indwelling Christ Who alone
can make possible the Iniitatio Cliristi.

TPIE IDYLLS OF BETHLEHEM

^'r

^ J

(; 1

XI
THE IDYLLS OF BETHLEHEM

A CHRISTMAS SERMON

" l.d us go now even unlo /k/hkhiiii.''—l.VKV. ii. 15.

SO said the shepherds one to another on that
first Christmas eve, when they had heard
the message of the angels, and had seen the
shining glory round about them. Shall we follow
them ? For Christmas has come again, and once
more the thoughts of men everywhere are turning
to that little village far away on the uplands of

Judaea.

Lovely stories cluster about the little place,
stories of simple human joys and sorrows, hopes
and fears, lo"es and disappointments, — stories that
carry us far back into the dim past, and, above
all, the "old, old story" of how, in the city of
David, there was born unto us a Saviour, which is
Christ' the Lord. I want us to listen to some of
these stories now. We have all read— sometimes
with laughter, sometimes with t-ars, always with

i \

1 56 The Idylls of Bethlehon

delijjht — what so many recent writers have told us
of the humour, the pathos, the tragedy to be
found under tlie humblest peasant's roof, idylls of
Lisconncl, of Troy Town, of Galloway, of Drum-
tochty, of Thrums : to-day we will listen to the
idylls of Bethlehem.

There, on a narrow limestone ridge, some five
miles south of Jerusalem, and two or three thousand
feet above the level of the sea, lies the straggling
village with its flat-roofed houses. The lofty table-
land of Judaea is, for the most part, stony and
barren. But about Bethlehem the land is fertile ;
sheep pasture on the long rolling uplands, and on
the terraced slopes of its valleys grow the olive,
the vine, and the fig-tree. The village is called
sometimes Bethlehem, sonetimes Ephrath, and
once by the double name Bethlehem-Ephrathah.
Both names bear witness to the fertility of the
neighbourhood : " Ephrath " means " fruit," Beth-
lehem, " house of bread."

Just outside the village, on the main road that
runs from Bethel in the north to Hebron in the
south, stands a little domed dwelling, dear alike to
Christians, Jews, and Mussulmans. It is around
this spot that our first story centres ; for here is
the grave of Rachel, the wife of Jacob.

The patriarch had journeyed as far as Bethel,
according to the command of the Lord ; and there

« •

The Idylls of BctJilckem

157

V '

Deborah, the old nurse of his mother, cUed ; and
Jacob buried her under " the oak of \veepin<j." It
was a heavy blow, for it was the snappinyj of one
of the few ties with the past that were still left to
him. l^ut a still heavier blow was yet to fall.
From liethel Jacob moved towards Bethlehem, but
ere he reached it, when just within si<^ht of its
Walls, Rachel's child was born ; Rachel herself was
dead. " And as her soul was in departinf^," she
whispered, " Call him Bcnoni, the son of my
sorrow." " So Rachel died, and was buried in
the way to l^phrath. And Jacob set up a pillar
upon her grave ; the same is the pillar of Rachel's
grave unto this day."

That day scored its lines deep in Jacob's
memory. Long years after, when the old man
lay upon his deathbed, and Joseph, Rachel's child,
and Joseph's children, stood by him to receive
his last blessing, he lived it all through again.
" As for me, when I came from I'adan, Rachel
died by me in the land of Canaan in the way,
when there was still some way to come unto
Ephrath, and I buried her there on the way to
Ephrath."

Ah, me ! how like our life to-da}- is to life in
those far-off days ! The years have grown to
centuries, and the centuries to millenniums ; but,
with whatever changes, in all its deepest things
our life remains the same. Birth and death,
sorrow and pain, love and joy, these are with us
still ; and when we think of Jacob in his lonely

158

The Idylls of In/l/liltcm

^litf tluTo within si^hl of the walls of licthlchcm,
the intervening )-ears are ^one, and we arc one
with him ; for we, too, have chunk of the cup
whereof he chank ; we, too, have been haptizeil
with that baptism wherewith he was l)apti/ccl.

lUit the stories of Hethlehem are not all sad.
Listen to this one.

It was in the days of the Jud^^es, and the
famine was sore in the land. Driven, perhaps,
by want, a man of Hethlchem and his wife —
Mlimclech and Naomi b)' name — and their two
sons went to dwell in the land of Moab, the
coimtr}' that )'ou see as }'ou look across the awful
jToriTc of the Dead Sea to the lon^ line of pmplc
hills that shuts in the land of I'alestine on its
eastern side. And it came to pass that ICliinclcch
tlied ; his sons married, but they also died, and the
three widowed women Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah
— were left together in one home.

Ikit Naomi could not rest. ICvcry night she
could see the sun set behind her loved Juda^an
hills ; the famine they told her was over, and she
longed for home. " Go," she said to her daughters-
in-law, " return each of you to her mother's house :
the Lord deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt
with the dead and with me." Then Orpah kissed
her mother-in-law and returned unto her own
kinsfolk ; but Ruth clave unto her. " Intrcat

t .,

riic Idylls of rH-dililicm

' 59

mc iujI to leave tlu-c," she said, " oi" to return
from followiii^^ after thee: for whither thou ^'oest,
I will ^o ; and where thon lod^esl, I will lod.ije :
thy people shall he my people, and thy (iod my
(iod; where thou diest, will I die, and there will
I he buried: the Lord do so to me, and more
also, if auLjht hut death part thee and me." " 'I'hc
most beautiful confission of love in all the
world," saj's iJr. W'hyte ; "the world has nothing,'
after Kuth's confession of her love like il." And
lie is ri^ht.

'Ihe rest of the story every child knows ; how
Ruth, ^deanintj for her mother-in-law and herself,
her hap was to li^ht on the portion of the field
belonL;in^ to Moa/,, one (jf her own kinsmen, and
how

" WIk'II, s'k 1< lor lioinc,
She stood in (cars amid the alif.'ii corn,"

\\o\\7. himself saw her, and spake kintlly unto
her, and afterwards took her to be his wife. Then
the ^lad day came, when Naomi's (jld arms carried
a little child once more ; and the women, her
neighbours, rejoiced with her, saying, " IJlesscd be
the Lord, which hath not left thee this day with-
out a near kinsman, and let his name be famous."
And they called his name (3bcd ; and Obcd was
the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of
David. And so the fair Moabitcss has her place
in that long line of which, in the fulness of time,
was born Jesus, which is called Christ.

i6o

VVic Idylh of Iklhlclum

III

t
'■•i

From the story of Rutli to the next chapter in
these vilhif^e idylls the step is natural and easy ;
for it was after Ruth's j,aeat-^randchild that
Bethlehem came to be known as "the city of
David."

And yet at the first little David seems to have
been of but small account in the big family of
Jesse the Ikthlchemite. When one memorable
day the aged j^rophct Samuel came at the com-
mand of the Lord to the house of Jesse to anoint
one as king over Israel, it was not until seven
sons had passed before him, and of each in turn
the Lord had declared, " neither hath the Lord
chosen this," and the prophet liad asked, " Are
here all thy children ? " that Jesse seemed to
bethink him of David at all. But when the
ruddy youth stood before him, then the divine
voice bade the prophet " Arise, anoint him ; for
this is he." So was David " taken from the
sheepfolds, from following the ewes great with
young, to feed Israel according to the integrity of
his heart, and to guide them by the skilfulness of
his hands." And if those old walls could speak,
what stories they could tell us of the days that
followed, when David came to be at once the hero
of a hundred fights and Israel's sweetest singer !
One such has been preserved, and it is too good
to be forgotten.

'l1ic Idylls of iH-thlchciii 1 6 1

Diivid was hiding'' in the cave of Adullain.
Anointed king as he was, he had not yet come to
his own ; his Hfe was rather that of an outlaw
chieftain hiding among the lulls. Suddenly a
fierce longing seized him. " Oh," he cried, " that
one would give me water to drink of the well of
Bethlehem that is by the gate!" The day was
hot ; overhead a fierce sun beat down ; but it was
not water simply that David longed for — it was
water from Ikthlehem ; he was not thirsty only,
he was homesick.

Now let the heart interpret. Once again, I
think, the intervening years have vanished, and
we are by David's side. Do we not know that
heart-hunger ? Some one who hears me to-day,
perhaps, is spending his first Christmas away
from home. What pictures crowd in upon the
memory ! You have only to shut your eyes for
a moment, and though it be in Princes Street, in
a flash you can see it all : the little village in
some Highland glen, or English .>,hire, or among
the hills of Wales — the home, the friends, the
cheery welcome.

Scotch people do not make much of Christ-
mas, but no one understands the feeling for home
better than they. You remember Alan Breck, a
wanderer in exile, but every year finding his way
back to Scotland. " France is a braw place, nac
doubt," he said, " but I weary for the deer and the
heather." And Stevenson himself, driven by our
harsh winds to a sunnier land, has told us that

l62

The Idylls of Bethlehem

the words that went to his heart Hkc no others
were these : —

" It's ill to loose the baiuls that (loil decreed to bind ;
Still will we be the children of the heather and the wind,
Far away from lionie, O it's still for you ;ind me,
That the bloom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie."

And amonij the last words that came from his
[jen was this prayer — a prayer, alas ! never to be
answered -

" lie it granted nic to behold you again in dying,
Hills of home!"

It is this Old Testament story over again :
" Oh, that one would give me water to drink of
the well of Jk^thlehem which is by the gate ! "

The sequel is soon told. Three brave fellows
overheard their chieftain's wish. They were
strong.' of hand and stout of heart. Many a fierce
brush with the enemy had they had. One of
them could remember how that once he had
fous/ht until his stiffened hand clave to his sword.
To-day Ikthlehcm was in the hands of Philistines ;
it was twelve miles as the crow flies to the little
white town on the ridge, and their path lay
through a country intersected with deep ravines,
where at any point their foes m!,T[ht lurk in
ambush. It looked like certain death, but they
never hesitated. Up the steep limestone cliffs
they clambered, till the well was readied, the
water was drawn, and they were back once more

'WHrwm

The Idylls of Bethlehon

at tlie cave in safety. And nou one begins to
understand the deathless devotion that bound
these rough, wild men to their outlawed leader ;
the water was in his hands, but " lie would not
drink thereof" — bought at such a price it was too
sacred. " Shall I drink the blood of the men
that went in jeopardy of their lives?" he said;
" be it far from me, O Lord, that I should do
this." And in the presence of them all he poured
it out as an offering unto the Lord.

Three hundred years and more pass by and
we hear of Bethlehem again. It was in the days
of Isaiah. In an obscure village on the other side
of the great watershed of Jud;ea, in that No-man's
land where Philistines and Israelites so long con-
tended for the mastery, lived Micah the prophet.
He v,-as a simple countryman and a son of the
people ; and he knew the people's wrongs, not
merely because, like Isaiah, he had seen them,
but because he had suffered them. He si:>eaks as
one into whose soul the iron had entered. In
sharp, piercing sentences he lays bare the iniquity
of the land : " The judges judge for reward " ;
" the piiests teach for hire " ; " the prophets divine
for monc}'"; Zion is cemented with blood, and
Jerusalem with iniquity. And for all these things
Cometh the swift judgment of Jehovah : " there-

"HH i» ^J

»^

The Idylls of Bethlehem

fore s^loall Zion be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem
shall become heaps."

But if to-day was dark the morrow was bright
with hope ; a Deliverer should yet arise to save
his people. And once aijain the prophet's eyes
turned towards the house of David. It was
under him that Israel had enjo)ed its golden
age ; and when the present like a hideous night-
mare had vanished, it was in a descendant of him
that Israel should recover her lost glory. " Thou,
Bethlehem-lqjhrathah, which art little to be among
the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall one
come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel ;
whose goings forth are from of old, from everlast-
ing. . . . And he shall stand, and shall feed his
flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty
of the name of the Lord his God : and they shall
abide ; for now shall he be great unto the ends
of the earth."

« ..

Now I come to our last story about Bethlehem ;
and if there had not been this to tell, you and I
would not have been here to-day to listen to the
others.

The centuries rolled by, the darkness grew
deeper, the voice of prophecy was silent, and
still its great word was unfulfilled. The yoke of
the foreigner lay heavy upon the neck of the chosen
people. Here and there devout souls waited, cherish-
ing the hope that ihey should not see death till

The Idylls of Bethleheiu

■65

the/' had seen the Lord's Christ, liut, for the most

part, the people sat in darkness and the shadow

of death. Then it was that throuj^h the tender

mercy of our God, the Day-sprinjT from on hic^h

visited us ; and on the plains of Bethlehem there

fell the first gleams of that holy light whif^.i was to

guide men's feet into the way of peace. " And

there were shepherds in the same country abiding

in the field, and keeping watch by night over

their fiock. And an angel of the Lord stood by

them, and the glory of the Lord shone round

ibout them : and they were sore afraid. And the

angel said unto them, Be not afraid ; for behold,

I bring you goofl tidings of great joy which shall

be to all the people : for there is born to you this

day in the city of David a Saviorr, which is Christ

the Lord." Then said the liepherds one to

another, " Let us nov,- go even unto Ijethlehem,

and see this thing that is come to pass, which the

Lord hath made known unto us. And they

came with haste, and found both Mary and

Joseph, and the babe lying in the manger."

Every one knows how much the art and

imagination of the Christian poet and painter

have done for that scene : they have made that

manger-cradle bright with an unearthly light ;

they have sung to us how that

" All about the courtly stal>lc
liiiglU-hariicss'cl angels sat in order serviceable."

For once, I wish them all away. To me the
plain simplicity of the Gospel story is more

• •JffV^4 -* tf'. -.-^:r:

Tl^n'tTT ;;;.**-

f! -

1 66

77/^ Idylls of Bethlehem

beautiful than any adornment can be ; to add
here is really to subtract. Iktter than them ail
I like one who sings —

" They all were looking for a king

To slay their foes and lift them high :
Thou cam'st, a little baby thing
That made a woman cry."

** Let us go unto Bethlehem." And there,
what is it that we see and hear .? This is the
beginning of a wonderful history ; but it is more
than that — it is the beginning of a Gospel :
" Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy
which shall be to all the people : for there is born
unto you this day a Saviour"

How do wi stand to this Gospel? "This
child," said Simeon — and there was a flash of
divine insight in the old eyes before they closed
for ever in death — "is set for the falling and
rising up of many in Israel." It was true then ;
it is true still. What is this Christ to you ? F-vcn
in His cradle He divides men. One there was,
Herod, who came only to kill and to destroy ;
some there were, in the inn, careless and indiffer-
ent, knowing nothing of what was going on so
near them ; and some there were who came from
afar to worship and adore. With whom are we
this Christmas day ?

"Ocome let us adore Him"; let us seek
Him, for we need Him ; for this is He, Jesus,
given to save His people from their sins.

A RAVELT HASP

■ l»l »•

■BBWii T ir-fir

XII

A RAVELT HASP^

WE arc come to the last Sunday of another
year. That in itself should be enough
to set us thinking without many words of mine.
Shallow-minded persons may mock at the serious-
ness with which we are wont to watch the passing
of the old year and the coming of the new ; they
may tell us that our divisions of time are wholly
arbitrary, that there is nothing in reality corre-
sponding to what we speak of as the turning of
a new corner, the opening of a new chapter in
our life ; that, indeed, the whole business is only
one of those foolish iinaginings with which vv'e are
wont to delude our foolish selves. Be it so. l^^or
my part, I am thankful for anything that will
make a break in the even flow of my years,
anything that will bid me cast a look back upon
the road by which I have come, and forward on
the way that still lies before me — anything that
will help me to remember what is no foolish
^ ''lea'-heil on the last Sunday evening of tlu; year.

1.70

A Ravelt Hasp

delusion, but a great sober and sobering fact, that
" when a few years are come, I shall go the way
whence I shall not return." And so, perhaps, as
" a verse may find him who a sermon flies," the
season to-day may *' find " some of us whom the
preacher would fail to touch.

For once, though I hope I shall say nothing
that is not perfectly scriptural, I venture to go
outside Scripture for my text. In that beautiful and
far too little known volume of essays, Alexander
Smith's Dreaintliorp^ there is one chapter named
" A Shelf in my Bookcase," in which, in his own
delightful fashion, the author chats about some of
his favourite books. On that shelf in my book-
case — for I suppose every book lover has such
a shelf — stands David Gilmour's Pcv Folk and
Paisley IVeavers, a book which only one reader
here and there has ever heard of, but for which
those who have discovered it do not fail to give
thanks. One of Gilmour's weavers shall give us
our text to-night : " The Lord'll fin* mine a ravelt
hasp," says Henry Buchan ; " it was sairly dis-
ordered, I whiles think, or it cam my length ; but
He has the hank in's ain han', an' maun dae wi'
me as it pleases Himsel'."

From David Gilmour I turn to Samuel Ruther-
ford. This is how he writes to William Gordon
of Earlston, or Earlston the younger, as he is
sometimes called — he it was who fell fighting at
Bothwell Bridge, who has an honourable place in
John Howie's long gallery of " Scots Worthies,"

A Ravelt Hasp

171

and of whom many of us have been reading lately
in Mr. Crockett's Men of the Moss Hags. " Twenty
times a day," writes Rutherford, " I ravel my
heaven, and then 1 must come with my ill-ravelled
work to Christ, to cumber Mim (as it were) to
right it, and to seek again the right end of the
thread, and to fold up again my eternal glory
with His own right hand, and to give a right cast
of His holy and gracious hand to my marred and
spilled salvation. Certainly it is a cumbersome
thing to keep a foolish child from falls, and broken
brows, and weeping for this and that toy, and
rash running, and sickness, and bairns' diseases ;
ere he wins through them all, and wins out of the
mires, he costeth meikle black cumber and fashcry
to his keepers. And so is a believer a cumber-
some piece of work, and an ill-ravelled hasp (as
we used to say) to Christ. But God be thanked ;
for many spilled salvations, and many ill-ravelled
hasps hath Christ mended since first He entered
Tutor to lost mankind." Thus far Samuel Ruther-
ford. Now hear Rutherford's best interpreter, our
neighbour and friend. Dr. Alexander Whyte :
" Rutherford told young Earlston how terribly he
had ' ravelled his own hasp ' in the days of his
youth ; and he tells another of his correspondents
that, after eighteen years, he was not sure he had
even yet got his ravelled hasp put wholly right.
Young Edinburgh gentlemen who have been born
with the silver spoon in their mouth will not
understand what a ravelled hasp is. But those

172

A Ravelt Hasp

who have been brought up at the pirn-wheel in
Thrums, and hi such like hand-loom towns, have
the advantage of some of their fellow-worshippers
to-night. They do not need to turn to Dr. Bonar's
Glossary or to Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary to
find out what a ravelled hasp is. They well re-
member the stern yoke of their youth, when they
were sent supperless to bed because they had
ravelled their hasp, and all the old times rush
back on them as Rutherford confesses to Earl-
ston how recklessly he ravelled his hasp when he
was a student in Edinburgh, and how, twenty
times a day, he still ravels it after he is Christ's
prisoner in Aberdeen. When the hasp is ravelled
the pirn is badly filled, and then the shuttle is
choked and arrested in the middle of its flight, the
web is broken and knotted and uneven, and the
weaver is dismissed, or, at best, he is fined in half
his wages. And so," said Rutherford, " it is with
the weaver and the web of life, when a man's life-
hasp is ravelled in the morning of his days."

Here, then, we have got both text and exposi-
tion ; and though both perhaps are rather long,
no one, I think, could wish them shorter, for they
have given us ail something to ponder on this
last Sunday evening of the old year.

" Mine is a ravelt hasp," says Henry Buchan ;
" twenty times a day," says Samuel Rutherford,

A Ravclt Hasp

" I ravel my heaven." Now, before we 540 further,
let me ask : Do you ever examine jourself like
that? Do you ever take stock of yourself after
that fashion ? I^id you ever sit down soine New
Year's eve, before the clock had chimed the mid-
night hour, and instead of joining in the festivity
and merry-making, find out how th'ngs were going
with your own soul ? Do you ever talk with your-
self, hold a dialogue with your own heart, probing
it with sharp, lancet-like questions ? " The hidden
man of the heart " — have you ever got face to
face with him ? " God opens a very wonderful
book for our instruction," says Fenelon, " when
lie sets us reading our own hearts." You have
read newspapers and novels in abundance this
year ; how often have you looked into that other
book ? You are an eager man of business, and
this year has taught you many of its secrets, and
given you a feeling of certainty such as you never
had before amid its intricate paths. That is well ;
but your self — do you know it any better? have
you mastered any of its hidden secrets ? Or you
are interested keenly in the course of public affairs,
and you have watched every move of the nations
down to this unhappy American crisis, and the
bdd trouble in the Transvaal ; yes, but do you
know, too, how it fares in the ce useless struggle
nearer home, in that vast empire that we call
"myself"? Or, perhaps, you arc a student at
our university, and this year in the class-room you
have studied the structure of the human frame,

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174

A Ravelt Hasp

you have learned how fearfully and wonderfully
man is made ; but did you ever stand like a
surgeon over yourself on the dissecting-table, till
those " hidden parts " wherein God desireth truth
lay open to your gaze ? This physical structure —
this blood and bone and tissue — this is not inc, it
is only the house I live in. Can it be that you
have given a whole year to the study of the house,
and not one hour to the tenant who dwells in it ?
" I am a large diocese to myself," says the good
archbishop I quoted a moment ago, " more over-
whelming than the external one ; " and yet, alas !
with* most of us, the external diocese gets a
hundred thoughts where the inner scarce gets
one.

I do not forget the dangers of overmuch self-
examination, the habit of morbid introspection
which is sometimes the outcome of it. Everybody
kno.vs Carlyle's grim satire against Methodism,
" with its eye forever turned on its own navel ;
asking itself, with torturing anxiety of hope and
fear, ' Am I right ? am I wrong ? Shall I be
saved ? shall I not be damned ? ' What is this
at bottom," he says, " but a new phasis of Egoism
stretched out into the Infinite ; not always the
heavenlier for its infinitude ? " An ugly picture,
truly ! though, so far as Methodism is concerned,
rather a caricature than a portrait. But, granted
that this is what self-examination may, and some-
times actually does, lead to, nevertheless it ought
not and it need not. Because some have learned

A Ravelt Hasp

175

the lesson amiss is not less but greater reason
why we should seek to learn it aright. Every
master in the deep things of the spirit of a man
repeats unweariedly that great New Testament
word, which is itself the sum of a hundred kindred
words of Scripture : " Let a man examine him-
self" What bundles of inconsistency we are !
Any business man will tell you that if he is to
prosper he must keep a strict look-out, that, as
he sometimes puts it, he must " know where he is ; "
and yet that self-same man, who can go over his
accounts for a year, and tell you where every
penny has come from and gone to, if you set him
to reckon up matters in the world of the spirit,
is utterly at a loss, unable even to make the
simplest calculation.

Twelve months more you and I have sat at
the loom o^ life weaving, weaving, weaving. A
few hours, and the work of this year will be folded
up and put by. Before it pass for ever from our
hands, let us run our hand over it, and test it, and
pass judgment upon it. Oh ! pity on us, pity on
us, if we never come to look at the web that we
are weaving, till God take it into His own hands,
to pass judgment on it Himself.

And we shall not go far, I think, in this so
greatly needed work, before we shall feel that the
Paisley weaver and the saintly mystic have both

m^ f ^ m M

176

A Ravclt Hasp

described our own case in describing theirs ; ours
too is a sorely ravelled hasp.

It may be our thinking that has got ravelled.
A year ago we thought we knew where we stood ;
we thought our beliefs had crystallized into their
final shape ; we could utter our " credo " with
unfaltering lips. But one day a friend put a
book into our hands, the work of a master mind ;
we were not prepared for it, and it went crashing
through all our poor thinking like a bombshell ;
and to-night we hardly know where we are, or
what we believe. Or, perhaps, it is some great
sorrow that has wrought the mischief. We do
not murmur when death shakes the ripened fruit
from the bough ; but when he plucks off the
sweet young blossom, what can we say ? Every
little child's death seems like a blot on the divine
goodness. How sorely trouble of that kind may
ravel a man or a woman's thinking, any whose
own experience has not taught them may learn
from Mrs. Besant's painful Autobiography.

But worse even than this is the confusion
wrought by sin in our life. It was only the
other day that I heard a gray-headed man con-
fess, bitterly and bluntly, that the devil had made
" a sad mess " of him. Perhaps if we would be
equally honest with ourselves, we should have to
make a like confession. Do you tell me that the
fault is not our own, that multitudes amongst us
never had a chance ; that, as the Paisley weaver
put it, the hasp was ravelled ere it reached their

A Ravelt Hasp

177

usion
the
con-
made
Id be
ave to
lat the
gst us
weaver
d their

hands? Well, I do not want to fight against facts.
A man cannot choose his own parents — which is
only another way ot" saying that neither the outfit
— physical and mental — with which he begins his
life, nor its circumstances, are within his own
choice. All these things which go so far towards
determining the kind of Hfe he is to Hve are
settled for him ; with this apparent result — I say
" apparent," for this is a matter in which you and
I can only see a very little way — that multitudes,
in the terrible phrase of Charles Kingsley, are
" damned from their birth." That is far too large
a question for me to discuss now ; and I am not
so foolish as to think it can be disposed of in half
a dozen oracular sentences. Perhaps I had better
not have started it ; but as it lay directly in our
path we could hardly avoid meeting it. One or
two simple things let me say —

(i) Where we do not know and have no right
to judge, God's knowledge is perfect and His
judgment accordingly. The world thrusts its
prizes into the hands of the man who is first
past the winning-post ; God asks not only where
did a man stop, but where did he start.

" What's done we partly may compute,
We know not what's resisted."

We do not, but God does. I may struggle with
temptation ninety-nine times and conquer, and no
man be the wiser ; it is only the struggle that
ends in defeat that the world hears of. But God

■ 78

A Rave It Hasp

M '

is witness of the whole hundred. Therefore, when
you meet the man who has had " no chance," do
not judge him, hold out a helping hand to him ;
then leave him and his ragged life -hasp with
God : " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do
right ? "

(2) Take heed that you ravel no other man's
hasp. I wish I could whisper that word in the
ears of some of you every day this week. You do
not need, me to tell you how difficult our social
customs make it for many men to keep their feet
at this festive season of the year ; and how easily
what is meant as kindness may become a stone
of stumbling and rock of offence. I am delighted
to see that one of our city Temperance Societies
is endeavouring at this moment, by the issue of a
vigorously-worded appeal, to create something like
a public conscience on the question of '' treating."
No wiser or more timely step could possibly have
been taken. Only this last week I talked with a
working man, whose business is the delivery of
coals from house to house ; for years the drink
has been a snare to him, and he told me how he
dreaded the coming of the days that would bring
with their every hour the offer of what to him was
death. Do not think I am advocat-ng stinginess
or closefistedness ; our temperance fi-iends must
take care to be above that suspicion ; to check
the season's openheartedness would be hardly less
than a public misfortune. Only let our gifts be
such that they will bless both him that gives and

A Ravelt Hasp

179

when
e," do
him ;
) with
ith do

man's

in the
lovi do

social
cir feet
J easily
\ stone
;lighted
ocieties
ue of a
ing like
eating."

ly have
with a

very of
le drink

how he
Id bring

lim was
linginess

Is must
check

[dly less

gifts be

Ives and

tj^

him that takes ; and remember the whisky-bottle
does neither.

(3) But what I want above all to emphasize is
this, that whatever may be the truth about others,
so far as most of us are concerned, conscience tells
us plainly enough, if only we will listen to it, that
the responsibility for our ravelled hasp is our own.

With some of us it is the morning of our days
that is the perilous time. " I must tell you,"
writes Rutherford to Earlston the younger, " that
there is not such a glassy, icy, and slippery piece
of way betwixt you and heaven £.s youth ; and I
have experiences to say with me here, and to seal
what I assert. The old ashes of the sins of my
youth are new fire of sorrow to me. I have seen
the devil, as it were, dead and buried, and yet rise
again, and be a worse devil than ever he was ;
therefore, my b. other, beware of a green young
devil that hath never been buried." God help us
who are young, that we may take heed to our-
selves, and that, as Rutherford says, we may have
sanctified thoughts, thoughts made conscience of,
and called in and kept in awe ! So shall the
years bring to us not a weary load of bitter
memories and vain regrets, but the peace and
calm of the man who has triumphed over self.

And some of us there are, who — however it
may be with us at other times— always get our
hasp ravelled and our web broken at this Christ-
mas and New Year time. To multitudes in our
city this week will be a veritable Vanity Fair.

^f'

! 1 '

|i*

.1 I

I 80

A Ravelt Hasp

It lies there in the path ; they cannot help them-
selves ; like Christian and Faithful they must
needs pass through it. But, oh ! the peril of it,
the peril of it ! I shall carry some of you on my
heart all through this week, and pray that God
will bring you safely through it. And do you
look to yourselves, and set a watch upon your-
selves, "that ye enter not into temptation"; or
you may sit down at the loom for your New
Year's weaving with a hasp ravelled and torn at
its very beginning.

And not the young only, but all of us — and
not at Christmas and the New Year only, but
always — need to keep a sleepless vigil. For the
cause of the mischief lies not either in age or in
circumstances : it is rooted deep in the evil of our
own hearts. A man's worst enemies are not those
he meets from without, but those he carries about
with him within. " No hell in any remote place,"
says William Law, " no devil that is separate from
you, no darkness or pain that is not within you,
no antichrist either at Rome or England, no
furious beast, no fiery dragon, without or apart
from you, can do you any hurt. It is your own
hell, your own devil, your own beast, your own
antichrist, your own dragon, that lives in your
heart's blood, that alone can hurt you."

Ill

Here, then, we are on this last Sunday evening

A Ravelt Hasp

i8i

of the dying year, young and old alike, — some
have strayed in this way, and some in that, — all
of us with our ravelled hasps ; what shall we do ?
To begin with, let us be thankful that at least we
are enough concerned about ourselves to ask that
question. " What shall we do ? " I suppose the
first thing we all try is to put matters right our-
selves. A very natural thing ; but did man ever
put his hand to such a heart-breaking bit of work
as that ? With aching fingers and tear-dimmed
.eyes we have bent over it and toiled at it ; but.
alas ! things only grow worse : they were ravelled
past our mending. Some of us can remember
how, when we were bairns, we tangled our mother's
knitting ; and how, when we tried to right it, and
to gather up the lost threads, we only went from
bad to worse, till at last there was no way out of
it, but just to put it all back into her hands for
her cleverer fingers to deal with.

" Twenty times a day," says Rutherford, " I
ravel my heaven." But twenty times a day, he
tells us, does he come with his ill-ravelled work
to Christ to cumber Him to right it, and to seek
again the right end of the thread. " God be
thanked," he cries, " for many spilled salvations
and many ill-ravelled hasps hath Christ mended
since first He entered Tutor to lost mankind."
And to this same gracious Christ let us make
haste to come that He may do for us what so
often He did for His prisoner in Aberdeen. Oh !
brethren, is it not time to be doing something.

•5«i ^ »A wifc" ■ '^**tl>f "W

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A Ravcll Hasp

time to be doing this veiy thing ? Our days
are swifter than a weaver's shuttle ; why then do
we delay ?

The child who ravelled his hasp, says Dr.
Whyte, was sent suppcrlcss to bed, the weaver was
dismissed or fined in half his wages. Penalties
do not always follow with that automatic precision
in the spiritual world. Yet is it not a fact that
this year God has called to some of us, sometimes
with sharp blows and solemn warnings ? Shall
we not give heed ere the year be wholly gone ?

There is only one other thing 1 want to say.
Again and again as I sat in my study preparing
the notes for this address, Mr. Barrie's beautiful
story, A Windoiv in Thrums, came back to my
mind. Perhaps there was a natural association
between my subject and the little weaving town
of which he writes ; but however it was, I could
not put it out of my thoughts. I thought of
Hendry at his loom, and Jess at her window that
watched the brae, and Jamie the son in London
and his sorely ravelled hasp. And then I thought
of the many like him, whom I had come to knov/
in our own city, who had left behind them some-
where hearts as loving and faithful as Jess's, and
who had lived to hurt and to wound, and perhaps
to break them, even as Jamie did hers. And then
I prayed that if one such there should be listening
to me to-night, the voice of the old and dying
year might call him home again to love and God !

THE MISSIOxNARY MOTIVE

XIII

THE MISSIONARY MOTIVE ^

A/O'-^ ^^''1^. ^ liope, acquit mc oi any straining
J- after eccentricity, or any affectation of singu-
larity, if I confess at the outset, that, thou-h I
nitend to preach a missionary sermon, I have no
verse to announce by way of text.

In many ways, but especially, periiaps, throu-h
changes in our theology, the missionary motive
has of recent years, in many minds, suffered heavy
loss. My aim to-night is tiie reinforcement of
that motive; and though I do not begin, as is
usual, with a text of Scripture, my appeal all
through need I say it?— will be to Christ and
to the Word of God.

Of the changes in our theology, and particu-
larly in our eschatology— for it is with these last
that we are most concerned just now— there can
be no doubt. All Christian Churches have ceased

We^'' '?r^ T ^''^''^ "^ '^'' ^^'"^^'^^>'''" Missionary Society, in
Wesley s Chapel, City Road, London, on Wednesday, 29th April

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1 86

The Missionary Motive

to hold, at least as a living, operative faith, the
gloomy creed once so common as to the future of
the heathen who died without the knowledge of
Christ. Equally impossible is it, I think, to doubt
that the gradual relaxation in our theology is, in
many cases at least, the explanation of that un-
happy waning of missionary enthusiasm we all so
much deplore. We still believe in missions, but we
no longer feel their imperative urgency, because
no longer do we fear the dread, imminent peril of
those to whom our missionaries go.

We have long admitted this, I believe, to our-
selves, and to one another — in private. But as
yet little has been said about it in public. The
subject is a thorny and difficult one, and, except
on the rarest occasions, missionary preachers and
speakers have been wont to let it severely alone.
But difficult as the task may be, it will, I think,
be well for us to-night — and especially for the
young men to whom I am more directly to
address myself — if, beginning with a frank recogni-
tion of the facts, we attempt some re-statement of

'Tissions in the

reign

modern truth.

ight

First, then, as to the facts: (i) It will not, I
think, be disputed that one of the strongest incen-
tives to missionary enterprise in the past has been
the belief that the heathen who died in their sins

TJie Missionary Motive

187

ignorant of Christ were for ever lost. Mr. Edward
White, in his Life in Christ, says, " In the opinion
of Dr. Carey, and those wlio first went with him
to India, ... all 'he unregencrate of all ages
were unsaved, and the unsaved of India, as of all
lands, were destined to be delivered over, as Dr.
Carey says in ore of his letters, to ' endless
misery.' To endless misery had departed all the
unregencrate inhabitants of Asia during the ages
of darkness preceding the advent of Dr. Carey to
India. To endless misery were going all the
millions who rejected his message, or refused to
abandon their ancestral creeds. This is still the
foundation of our missionary theology. This is still
what may be called the State creed of the missionary
societies, Roman and Protestant. No one is con-
sidered at liberty to deny it in a missionary
speech or sermon. It is the basis of the Propa-
ganda. It is the platform creed of Exeter Hall.
The students at the missionary colleges are
supposed to believe it. The missionaries abroad
are supposed to believe it. No one who openly
assailed it would be permitted to plead the cause
of missions before the British or American people."
It is only fair to Mr. White to remember that
these words were written twenty years ago ; and
probably, if he were to re-write his book to-day, he
would think it necessary to make some consider-
able revisions in the chapter from which I have
quoted. Even as an estimate of the missionary
theology of a generation ago we might have to

.■_3S":

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i88

The Missionary Motive

insist on a little preliminary docking of rhetorical
flourishes before we could accept it as a correct
and final judgment. But if we take it as generally
descriptive of the state of belief on this subject up
to within comparatively recent years, it is prob-
ably not far wide of the mark. It would be a
very easy matter to give definite illustrations — our
own experience, doubtless, will supply us with
several — but perhaps it will be sufficient to quote
the words of the late Dr. Dale : " There was a
time," he said in a speech delivered in Exeter
Hall, in May 1881, " when the great stress of the
argument on behalf of Christian missions was
rested on the dark and appalling destiny which
was supposed to menace, without discrimination,
the whole of the heathen world ; it was believed
by many of our fathers that these millions were
drifting, generation after generation, without a
solitary exception, to ' adamantine chains and
penal fires.' " Speaking as a Methodist, I doubt
very much if John Wesley would have subscribed
to a creed so gloomy ; certainly Cowper, one of
the earliest poets of the Evangelical faith, rejected
it with indignation ; but that it was the creed of
the average follower of John Wesley fifty years,
ago I have little doubt. Our people sang, and
felt it as they sang —

" The heathen perish day by day,
Thousands on thousands pass away !
O Christians to their rescue fly ;
Preach Jesus to them ere they die."

The Missionary Motive

189

One of my earliest attempts at public speaking
was from the platform of a missionary meeting in a
Cornish village. I was a budding local preacher,
not then out of my teens. On the platform with
me was my venerable superintendent and Chap-
man of the District. Of course I had to speak
first, and I made out as good a case as I could for
Foreign Missions, saying, among other things,
something to the effect that, even though we could
not believe what men once believed concerning
the future of the heathen, motives, many and
sufficient, still remained to us. When I sat down
my old friend and counsellor rose. He referred
to what I had said, and then, in his most solemn
and impressive tones, he declared that he, for one,
did hold that ancient faith, and moreover, that if
it were not so — if the heathen were not perishing
day by day — for his part, he did not see that it
was " worth while " sending our missionaries to tell
them of Christ. The words struck a chill of
horror into my young heart, but \\\Q.y were spoken
in all sincerity, and they expressed, I do not
doubt, what multitudes once felt to be the all-
compelling motive to missionary activity.

(2) To-day — and this is the second fact I ask
you to recognize — that belief is dead. We may
still sing Montgomery's hymn in Exeter Hall and
at our missionary meetings ; but the moment we
begin to think about what we are singing, our
hearts are in silent rebellion. Nor is this simply
a change in the message of the pulpit ; it is

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190

T/ic Missionary Motive

perhaps even more a change in the mood of the
pew. You might find a preacher to preach the
old doctrine ; you would have difficulty in finding
an audience to respond to it. As the Methodist
Recorder stated in a leading article only a few
days ago : " We cannot shut our e3^es to the fact
that neither in the pulpit nor in the pew is there
the same belief in hell which was one of the most
awful and tremcndou.s incentives to earnestness
that Methodism had in the days long gone by.
If a minister who does know the ' terrors of the
Lord ' stands up in the street and cries aloud,
* Flee from the wrath to come,' whatever may be
the precise colour of his own eschatology, the
crowd in front of him does not believe in the
damnation of hell as did the crowd looking up
into John Wesley's face at Kingswood or Moor-
fields. The old belief in hell — or, to put it more
accurately, the hell of the old belief — has gone.
It may be that we have a truer and, all things
considered, a mere awful creed concerning sin and
its future punishment, but it is not a belief which
at present appeals to the people — to their imagina-
tion, to their conscience — as did the belief of the
olden times." It is worthy of note, too, that the
change has not come about through controversy.
The old belief has not so much been argued down
as it has been killed off by the spirit and temper
of the age in which we live. It has been " rele-
gated," to quote the words of Mr. Lecky, " to the
dim twilight land that surrounds every living

The Missionary Motive

191

faith ; the land not of death, but of the shadow
of death ; the land of the unrealized and the
inoperative."

rt\

IgS

ring

These, then, are some of the facts which, it
appears to me, call for frank recognition on the
part of the Christian Church. In stating them —
not, I trust, without some rough approximation
to accuracy — I have endeavoured to avoid any
expression of merely individual opinion ; but,
before I turn from the past to the present, there
is one further observation I wish to make. It is
usually assumed, and rightly assumed, that for
those who held the old faith concerning the future
of the heathen, no more tremendous motive to
missionary activity was possible. I venture to
think, though it may seem to be raising a nice
point in psychology, that if those who held that
old belief had fully realized it — if when they said,
as they did sometimes say, " that at every ticking
of the clock in every four-and-twenty hours, from
month to month and year to year, God sends a
heathen straight to never-ending misery " — if, I
say, when they said these things they had ever
taken what Kinglake somewhere calls the great
step from knowing to imagining, it would have
been to them not so much a quickening, energizing
motive, as rather a crushing, paralyzing responsi-
bility. If (I borrow an illustration of Dr. New-

^^!T^^^f^^fl^ ^^^^ ^^^^

192

T/ie Missionary Motive

man Smyth's) I were conducting an evangelistic
service here to-night, and it were given me to
declare, " All who do not come to Jesus before
the clock shall finish striking nine shall have no
further day of grace," some might think that I
had the mightiest motive conceivable to plead and
to pray. For my part, I think such a responsi-
bility would leave me dumbly impotent, for when
the strength of a motive passes a certain point it
ceases to be a stimulus and becomes instead a
paralyzing drag. Never, in my least kindly hours,
have I questioned the sincerity of those who
believed that the heathen have gone in their
countless millions to endless misery ; but, surely,
the very abundance of their works itself bears
witness that they knew not what they said. The
day that Christians began to " imagine," the
dogma was doomed ; and now, as we have
already seen, as a motive to missionary zeal it
has practically ceased to exist.

The old motive is gone, and gone beyond all
hope of recall. Has not the time come when we
should openly admit it, and when we should boldly
declare, that though the fashion of our theological
thought has changed, and may change again, the
missionary obligation abides, and can never pass
till Christ shall have put all enemies under His
feet ? Nor need we fear the result ; I do not
believe that our kindlier faith will be less quick to
kindle the fires of missionary ardour, or that we
who hold it will not be as hot ai.d eager to pro-

The Missionary Motive

193

claim the Gospel of Christ to the multitudes of
India and China as our fathers were.

Turn with me for a moment to the Acts of
the Apostles ; and I ask you to mark this fact
— a fact surely not without siLjiiificance in this
connection — that from the first chapter of that
book to the last, there is not one word concerning
the future of the unsaved. Remember what is
the character of this book. It is our one record
of the first and greatest outburst of missionary
activity in the history of the Christian Church.
Its few and narrow pages are crowded with the
triumphs of the first preachers of the Gospel.
Tl 2 narrative pants in its eager haste to keep up
with the busy feet of the great missionary of the
Gentiles. Scarce thirty years had passed from
the giving of the Great Commission before, in
Jerusalem, in Jud.xa, in Samaria, and unto the
uttermost parts of the earth, the word of this
salvation had been preached. But, if you take
the book which tells all this, and from it alone
try to reconstruct the Christian creed, you will
need to leave out the doctrine of future retribution,
for on that solemn theme the book from end to
end is silent. A very distinguished New Testa-
ment scholar, to whom all the Churches of Christ,
and our own in particular, are under a lasting
debt of gratitude, recently made, in the pages of
one of our theological magazines, a detailed ex-
amination of the teaching of the whole of the New
Testament on this subject. The Gospels, the

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7"/^^ Missionary Motive

Epistles, the Book of Revelation, were all in turn
submitted to a searching analysis, and the results
carefully set forth ; but when the writer came to
the Acts of the Apostles he dismissed it with a
couple of lines, for it had nothing to tell. Mark,
I am not saying this in order to cast any doubt
upon the doctrine of eternal punishment itself.
That I may not be misunderstood, let me say at
once that I do not know how any man, honestly
reading his New Testament, can evade Dean
Church's conclusion when he says : " We may put
aside the New Testament altogether ; but if we
profess to be guided by it, is there anything but a
' certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery
indignation ' for obstinate, impenitent, unforgiven
sin, ^in without excuse and without change?"
All this I do most firmly believe ; but what I
beg you to observe is this, that so unnecessary is
it to associate any theory of the future of the
unsaved with missionary enthusiasm of the loftiest
and purest character, that in this book, glowing as
it is throughout with missionary ardour, there is
yet not one word of which the dogmatic theologian,
arguing the question of future punishment, can lay
hold. Again I say, I am not throwing, even by
implication, any discredit upon that doctrine
itself: what I do desire to make plain is that
there are motives outside and beyond this dark
and difficult subject which, if we will yield our-
selves to them, are mighty enough to carry us to
the highest levels of service and of sacrifice, and

T/ie Missionary Motive

195

to make us not unworthy followers of Him who
came to seek and to save that which was lost.
Let us glance at one or two of the ^e for a moment
now.

Sfian,

lay
n by

rine
that
dark

our-
Lis to

and

III

I speak to Christians ; for, he who does not
acknowledge the claims of Christ is not likely to
acknowledge the claims of Christian missions. I
speak to Christians ; and, therefore, I have nothing
to do with secondary motives. You will hear
nothing to-night about the markets which mis-
sionaries have opened up for your cotton stuffs
and the like, nothing about the straight paths
which they have made for the feet of the diplo-
matist or the empire-builder. For my part I shall
not be sorry when we have dropped that method
of appeal altogether. Salvation cometh not either
by merchants or by politicians, but by men that
believe in Christ. It may be perfectly true that
missions have proved a good business investment for
our country, and that a vigorous missionary policy
is the very best foreign policy ; but that is a matter
wc had better leave to the merchants and politicians
themselves ; the Church only weakens her appeal
when she mingles the clay with the gold after that
fashion. Brethren, if we would march victoriously,
we must march to the music of the highest motives.
What are they?

(i) Turn again for a moment to the Acts of
the Apostles. When Jesus and His disciples

■^^

196

The Missionary Motive

were come together, so we read in the first chapter,
they asked of Ilim, "Lord, dost thou at this time
restore the kingdom unto Israel ? " Mark well
the diswcr: " // is tiot for you to ktioiv — it is not
for you to know times or seasons, which the Father
hath set within His own authority." Ikit when
He has shut to that door, and double-locked and
bolted it, " This way ! " He says : " Ye shall
receive power . . . and ye shall be My witnesses
both in Jerusalem and in all Juda:a and Samaria,
and unto the uttermost parts of the earth." " And
when He had said these things, He was taken up ;
and a cloud received Him out of their sight," and
prying inquisitiveness never got its answer.

I think there be some amongst us to-day who
have never done asking questions. They have
drawn up a little Shorter Catechism of their own,
and the answer to its first question runs thus :
" The chief end of man is to speculate concerning
the Unknown and to argue about it for ever."
" Lord, what wilt Thou do at the last great day
with them that died having never heard Thy name?

— wilt Thou " " // is not for you to knoiu.

But ye shall be My witnesses unto the uttermost
parts of the earth." Then again the cloud receives
Him out of our sight. On the one hand is a
problem bewildering, vast, mysterious, tiny pin-
points of light dotting here and there the great
darkness ; on the other hand is an obligation,
perpetual, sacred, clear as obligation can ever be,
lying there in the light, wholly beyond even the

The Missionary Motive

197

edge of the shadow of that dark ni)\stcry. Take
heed, my brother, lest, in thy feverish eagerness
to know the thing that is hidden, thou forget to
do the thing that is revealed.

(2) And who is He thnt lays this obligation
upon men ? Let us turn to another Scripture.
It was the Sabbath day, and a man whom Jesus
had healed was carrying his bed in the streets of
Jerusalem. " It is the Sabbath," said the Jews,
" and it is not lawful for thee to take up thy bed."
Mark the healed man's answer. " He that made
me whole," replied he, " the same said unto me,
Take up thy bed and walk." I like that man's
logic passing well. " He that cured me, shall He
not command me ? He that gave me power,
shall He not also direct the power He gave ? He
that made me whole, He said unto me — what
more do you want ? "

" He that made me whole " — is that your name
for Christ ? Is that what He is to you — is it ?
Then He has rights in you, the strongest of all
rights — the rights of love. Herein is His claim
upon you. And here, too, is your answer to them
that ask, " Why do ye this thing ? " — the mis-
sionary's answer to a world that smiles at what it
deems his foolish knight-errantry : " He that made
me whole, the same said unto me. Go — go ye into
the uttermost parts of the earth, and preach the
Gospel to every creature." Refuse to come down
from that high ground. Do not stoop to answer
every idle interrogation ; refer the questioner to

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y/zt' Missionary Motive

Christ : " lie that made me whole, lie said unto
mc." A Christian man must not expect always
to be able to justify himself to everybody ; he
must expect to be misunderstood. But if he hold
Christ's warrant in his hand, what matters it ?
" He that made me whole, He said unto me " — ye
whom He never healed, how should ye know ?
Behold, ye speak an idle thing ; He bids me ;
that is enough.

(3) And, further, let us remember that it is
only through them who do so recognize the claims
of Christ that His supreme purposes of grace
towards men can be fulfilled. Once more I turn
to the Acts of the Apostles. " The former treatise
I made, O Theophilus," so runs its opening verse,
" concerning all that Jesus began both to do and
to teach, until the day in which He was received
up." The writer, of course, is Luke ; the " former
treatise " to which he refers is the Gospel which
bears his name ; and the contents of that Gospel
he summarizes by saying that it is a record of " all
that Jesus began to do and to teach." " Of all
that Jesus began to do and to teach " — mark that
word " began." I am no pedlar in the small
wares of exegetical ingenuity, and I know it is
quite possible to explain the Evangelist's use of
the word as a mere verbal peculiarity, empty of
any special significance. But it is possible — and
if necessary I might shelter myself behind more
than one great name — to see in it a deeper mean-
ing. Luke's Gospel is a record of " what Jesus

The Missionary Motive

199

^X'•r^// to do and to teach " ; what is the itifercncc?
That this book, which i.s a kind of sequel to the
Gospel, is a record of what Jesus continued to do
and to teach, and that instead of callinj^ it "The
Acts of the Apostles," we oUL;ht rather to speak
of it as " The Acts of Jesus " throut^h the Apostles.
But if that is so, more follows. If Jesus con-
tinued to do and to teach through the Apostles,
His doing and teaching did not cease when the
historian Luke laid down his pen. Christ's work
is still incomplete, and He is still completing it
through the work of His servants; it is ours to
finish His unfinished tasks ; we are to be the
agents of His continued activity amongst men.

That is what I want us to grasp. Christ is
still active ; He is still " doing and teaching " ;
but His activity is conditioned by the agents
through whom He works. He works, not by
prodigies that dazzle and stun, but by men and
women. " The worst of it is God never seems to
do anything, Froude," Carlyle said to his friend
and biographer one day. Yes, but what kind of
" doing " are we looking for ? God docs not save
men by some marvellous forth-flashing of His
divine glory in the heavens ; He saves men by
saved men. When He feeds the hungry it is not
by manna rained from heaven, but by human
hands made " quicker unto good " through love for
Him. By men, men whom He has redeemed,
does He sweeten the bitter waters of life ; and it
is by men that at last He will draw the world

200

The Missionary Motive

unto Himself. "Whosoever shall call upon the
name of the Lord shall be saved." But now
listen : "How then shall they call on Him in Whom
they have not believed ; and how shall they believe
in Him Whom they have not heard ; and how
shall \.\\Qy \\ca.x zi>itho2it a prcac/ier ?" Everything
hangs at last on the human agent. But neither
does Paul stop there — " and how shall they preach,
except they be sent ? " And after that there is not
one of us who can slip his neck out of the collar
of responsibility. "If God wants to save Africa,
cannot He do it without you throwing your life
away ? " said a lady to Alexander Mackay, when
he was setting out for Ug.'.nda. No ! He cannot ;
at least, He does not, and that is all we have to
do with. " Prayer moves the hand that moves
the world " ; yes, but as Mackay himself once said,
the fingers of that hand are earnest men and
women. We are " God's fellow-workers ; " and if
He says to us, "Apart from Me ye can do nothing,"
may we not also humbly say to Him, for it is He
Himself who has taught us to say it, " Yea, Led,
and, apart from us. Thou also canst do nothing"?
(4) And if we fail Him — what? One last
passage of His Word shall be my answer :
" Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we
persuade men." When you read that, how do
you interpret it ? " Knowing, therefore, the
terror of the Lord that shall fall upon them that
continue in impenitence, and that harden their
hearts against His word, we persuade men." So

f I !■

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The Missionary Motive

20I

I thought ; and 1 will not say you are wrong.
But when I say that verse over to myself I put
another interpretation on it : " Knowing the terror
of the Lord that shall fall upon mc if, having the
light, I hide it, and, knowing the truth, I do not
speak it ; therefore. Lord Jesus, teach me that,
with Thy words, spoken in Thy tones, I may
persuade men."

When Paul thinks about the judgment-seat of
Christ it is not to remind himself that all men
will one day stand there, and to wonder what
shall befall them, but to remember that he himself
will be there, and to pray that at the last he may
be found faithful. And if we ask him, " What
will God do with the heathen that die in the
darkness ? '' I think he will bid us rather ask each
man himself this question, " What will God do
with mc if, when my lamp is lit, I leave my
brother man to wander friendless in the night ? "

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

(

XIV

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

A BIBLE READING

" And in the //" <!c the disciples asked Him again of this matter.
And He saith unto them . . ." — Mark x, lo, ii.

BUT as it is not of " this matter " that I want
at this moment to speak to you, we may
break off the sentence there. I want you to
mark the method of the Teacher with His
disciples. " They asked Him again of this matter.
And He saith unto them . . ." Question and
answer — have you noticed how full the Gospels
are of these? It was in this way — they asking,
He answering — that He taught them. Let us
listen to some of these questions and answers.
True, we can catch but little snatches of the longf
dialogue that for three years went on between
the Master and the disciples ; nevertheless, if God
grant us the hearing ear and the understanding
heart, we may learn many things that Jesus said
to the twelve for their instruction, and that He
still says to us for ours.

2o6

Questions and Answers

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An address on lines such as these must of
necessity be somewhat fragmentary, and will take
the form of a Bible reading rather than a sermon ;
yet if from the tiny basket full of fragments no
man get a full meal, at least each man may get a
little. When first I began to preach, one who
knew how told me that in every sermon there
should be a unity — a unity that should reveal
itself in every word from first to last. I believe
the advice was good, and usually I have tried to
follow it. But the best rule is a bad one if you
never break it ; and for once this rule shall be
honoured in the breach rather than the observ-
ance. May one plead the authority of the great
Preacher himself?^ "When great multitudes
came to Him, He spake " — what ? " many
things." " Many things " — not a set discourse,
one, perfect, complete, proceeding point by point
along a carefully defined track, but " many
things." He was there to feed the hungry, and
there must be something for everybody ; and
since many came unto Him, He set many things
before them. For the deep, wise thinker there
was a deep, wise saying that will keep him busy
for many a day to come ; for the little child —
ay, and for the grown-up child too — who loves to
think in pictures, the homely parable and the
lovely story ; for the tired and. worn, words soft
and low, gentle as a mother's crooning to her

' In what immediately follows I am indebted, I believe, to a
sermon of Dr. Parker's,

Questio7is and Ansivers

207

babe ; for the bad man, exulting in his badness,
words harp and terrible, piercing as a javelin
thrust. " He spake many things." God grant
that out of the " many things " of His Word, each
may find something for himself this day !

Now let us turn to some of the disciples'
questions.

I note, in the first place, that to some of their
questions Christ gave no answer. " Lord," they
said unto Him, when He had gathered them
together for the last time at the close of the
great forty days, " dost thou at thi.s time
restore the kingdom unto Israel ? " " It is not
for you to know times or seasons, which the
Father hath set within His own authority."
Again, in the upper room at Jerusalem, when
Jesus had spoken of His mysterious going away,
Peter asked Him, " Lord, whither goest Thou ? "
" Whither I go," answered Jesus, " thou canst not
follow Me now : but thou shalt follow Me after-
wards." Peter saith unto Him, " Lord, why can-
not I follow Thee even now ? I will lay down
my life for Thee." " Wilt thou lay down thy
life for Me ? " said Jesus, taking the words from
off his lips : " Verily, verily, I say unto thee, the
cock shall not crow till thou hast denied Me
thrice." And Peter's question remained without
its answer.

11 f

1
i. ■

liiB'.

208

Questions and Answers

The disciples are still questioning the Master,
and to many of their questions He is still saying,
" It is not for you to know." How this habit of
intellectual inquisitiveness has laid hold of us
to-day I This is the Bypath Meadow wherein we
love to wander. We write books that start as
many questions as a catechism ; and the story of
the lives of some amongst us can be told by a
sufficiently big note of interrogation.

It is useless to murmur because things are so.
In part we cannot help ourselves ; we are so
made that we must ask questions, even though as
we ask them we know no answer can be given.
Nor should we forget that it is from this very
restlessness that the largest and richest results
have sometimes sprung. But religion has, and
always has had, its questions to which no search-
ing can find out the answer. There is a very
interesting letter in Principal Shairp's Li/ey in
which, writing to a correspondent, he says : —
" There are many difficulties, critical, historical,
metaphysical, connected with religion which you
cannot answer now — which you probably will
never be able to answer. Make up your mind to
this at oncer Ikit it is exactly that that some of
us find it so difficult to do. I remember when I
was a student at college, beginning for the first
time to think about these things, there were one
or two subjects, and one in particular, about
which I felt that unless my doubts in regard to
them could somehow be cleared up, I had better

Questions and Answers

209

give up all idea of preaching and go back to my
teaching. My doubts are not all gone yet ; but
I have come to see that there are some things,
as Jesus told His disciples, that are not for me
to know ; so perhaps I had better go on with my
preaching after all.

And is it any wonder if Christ has not yet told
us all things ? " To comprehend God," said Sir
Wm. Hamilton, our great Scottish metaphysician,
" is to be God." Shall I murmur because my little
hand cannot span the great mountain ? because the
tiny cup I call my intellect cannot hold the ocean ?

But if much is hidden, much, thank God —
enough — is revealed. You cannot make a perfect
chart of God's truth. Try, if you will ; and you
will get something like one of the old maps of
Africa that we used to see — a wavering coast-
line, here and there an uncertain river course, the
tail end of a mountain range, and so on ; and all
through the interior great blanks unexplored and
unknown. But though that be so, the great
highways of human duty run plain and clear.
Not yet on the distant mountain-tops have the
mists lifted ; perhaps to these eyes they never
will lift. But here, in the valley where God calls
me to walk, there is light enough, and i need
never miss my way. " There are many diffi-
culties," says Principal Shairp in the letter I have
just quoted ; but he goes on, " There can be no
doubt at all about goodness — about the Christian
standard of life and temper, which rises before us

I-.

i }

i>10

Oitcsiions and Ansivcrs

in the New Testiiment. There is no speculative
difficulty at all here — none but the great
practical one of realizing it." " Follow Me," says
Jesu — ^there runs the great highway ; take heed
that \ ou do not wander from it, and when night
fallb \jc lost in the dark.

"Then came Peter and said to Him, Lord,
how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I
forgive him ? until seven times?" You maybe
quite sure Jesus will not let that question pass
unanswered. Listen to it : " IIoiv oft shall I
forgive?" How the word grates on one's ear?
What has love to do with arithmetic ? " Until
seven times?" — as if love stopped to count its
past injuries before it forgave again ! There is
another question of Peter's pitched in the same
false key : " Lo, we have left all and followed
Thee ; what then shall we have ? " — like a man on
the other side of your shop-counter, who has put
down his money, and stands waiting till you give
him its exact equivalent. Peter is back at his
arithmetic again.

And there are multitudes to whom in the same
way religion seems to resolve itself into a little
problem in mathematics. " Master," said one,
" what shall I do to inherit eternal life ? " — " having
done what, shall I inherit eternal life ? " Religion
to this man is simply a question of doing — so

f.-L

Questions and ^Insivers

21 I

culativc
great
c," says
ke heed
:n night

1, Lord,
% and I
may be
on pass
shall 1
e's car ?
" Until
oiint its
.'here is
le same
bllowed
man on
las put
^ou give
at his

le same
a little
id one,
having
s^cligion
ng — so

many alms /^lus so many prayers plus so many
ceremonies, etc. — " eternal life " is the reward that
by and by he is to get for his doing ; and the
only question that troubles him is an arithmetici'l
one — he is not quite sure how much ought to be
done ; and so he will ask this new Teacher :
" Master, what saycst Thou ? having done what
shall I inherit eternal life?" A certain man
went up into the temple to pray. His prayer is a
little sum in addition ; its several items his own
excellences ; its total the price at which he will
purchase the favour of God. And arc there not
many of us still whose religion, if we get to the
bottom of it, is really a bit of conscious or un-
conscious bargaining with God ? We read our
Bible, we say our prayers, we give our tithes — do
we ? — we pay our weekly toll of worship in God's
house : that is our side of the bargain. And God
sees to it, in some way or other, that it shall be
well with us, both in the life that now is and in
that which is to come.

What does Christ say of this pitiable, arith-
metical religion ? He will have none of it : "I
say not unto thee, Until seven times, but until
seventy times seven." Give, work, love all thou

canst —

" High Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely-calculated less or more."

He who thinks that forgiveness must go back
over all the bad past, before it will bow its head
and be itself, does not know what forgiveness

•

»':)

?■ .

212

Questions and j-lnswcrs

means. Love never asks " Mow oft ? " Love
never stops to bargain. Love never says, " Come
half the way, and I will come the other half."
No ; " when he was yet a great way off, his father
saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on
his ncclv, and kissed him " • — that is the mighty
speech of love. And as God has dealt with us,
so He bids us deal the one with the other. " lie
laid down His life for us ; and wc ought to lay
down our lives for the brethren." When our
hearts are hardening into the spirit of unforgiving-
ness, and when like Peter, wc are tempted to ask,
"How oft shall I forgive?" then, as Samuel
Rutherford wrote to Marion M'Naught, " Let us
remember what has been forgiven us."

Ill

"Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and
said, Why could not we cast it out ? " That,
also, is a question that is certain of its answer.
Jesus will never greet an honest confession of
failure with silence. You remember the circum-
stances. Jesus with three of His disciples was on
the Mount of Transfiguration. In His absence
the father of a poor demoniac boy brought his
suflfering child to the other disciples that they
should heal him ; but they could not. Now they
are anxious to know the cause of their failure :
" Why could not we cast it out ? " There are
some who never succeed, because they will never

I ,'

Questions and Ausivcrs

213

admit that they hnve failed. Yet the confession
of failure to-day wwy be the first step towards
success to-morrow.

" Why could not we cast it out ? " — if only the
Christian Church would more often take that
humble and humbling inquiry into her lips !
Why is missionary enthusiasm on the wane ?
Why arc the converts from heathenism so few ?
Why arc so many of our home churches more
than half empty ? Why — as the question is often
nowadays put why do not workinij men go
to church ? But we had rather not face the ques-
tions. We prefer to listen to amiable speeches
and flattering reports, to be patted on the back,
and to be told what a great people we are,
and, generally, to live in a fool's paradise. "See!"
cries some one, " sec ! " and he walks round and
round the little molehill of things done. Now,
who will show us the great mountain of things
undone, unattcmpted even ? Two or three years
ago I ventured to raise in our city the question of
non-churchgoing among working men. " Work-
ing men not go to church ? " said one ; " why, my
congregation are all working people — look at
them." *' Working men not go to church ? " said
another ; " but look at my officials ; count them —
one, two, three — they are all working men."
Professional dunderheads ! It is easy enough —
all too easy, alas ! — to count the working men
who are inside the Church ; now begin to count
them that are outside, and we shall not hear of

I ;■

214

Questions and Answers

\ s

, >

these again for a while. But we will do anything,
some of us, rather than admit that we have
failed.

I come a step nearer home. Is not the same
true of our own personal failures ? We do not
conquer because we will not confess. I draw a
bow at a venture. Yesterday you lied, you
cheated a brother - man, you let some angry
passion leap up within you and master you.
And now to-day you will not admit it ; you
will not admit it to yourself, you will not admit
it to the man you wronged, and therefore, of
course, you cannot admit it to God. You joined
with the preacher a moment ago, when he prayed
" Forgive us our trespasses ; " but, I think, God
never hears that prajer. So long as we are con-
tent to slur over our " trespass " in a vague prayer
for the forgiveness of our " trespasses," we are but
wasting words. We must put our finger upon the
foul, black thing in our life, and name it before
God : " 77!/> trespass, ////i- trespass,© Lord, do Thou
forgive and put far from me ; " then He will bow
the heavens and come down. But until, like the
disciples, we confess our failures, until we stand
over them and name them by their right names,
neither peace nor victory can be ours.

" Simon Peter saith unto Him, Lord, dost
Thou wash my feet ? " The disciple's question

\ ■

mmmm

nvp

Oucstions and Answers

215

has in it an echo of the same wondc! that filled
the heart of John when, in after years, he looked
back upon that memorable scene in the upper
room. What John saw was this : " Jesus, know-
ing that the Father had given all things into His
hands, and that He came forth from God, and
goeth unto God," — He, conscious of all this, —
" riseth from supper and laycth aside His gar-
ments ; and took a to^ A and girded Himself,
and began to wash the disciples' feet." This
was what Peter could not understand. That
Jesus should be called and should call Himself a
King, that He should work great and mighty
miracles, that wherever He went the multitudes
should throng Him — that were no wonder. But
that One so great should humble Himself to
stoop so low — how could that be ! " Lord, dost
Thou wash my feet ? "

Do we understand it even yet ? " Yc know,"
said Jesus, " that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it
over them, and their great ones exercise authority
over them " ; and so is it still. But that is not
the true greatness : " Whosoever would become
great among you shall be your minister, and who-
soever would be first among you shall be your
servant." There is no other path to greatness
but the path of lowly service. You know the
motto round the Prince of Wales' feathers, IJi
dicn — I serve ; and I tell you that on all God's
earth there is no true princedom that is not built
on service. " The Son of Man " Himself " came

! -Ii

2l6

Questions and Answers

not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and
to give His life a ransom for many." " I am
among you," He said, " as he that serveth."

What was that I heard you say ? You knew
some one who lived in his great country-house,
who could drive twenty miles in a straight line
over his own land, and he — what was it? — kept
so many servants. Well, I say nothing against
that. But do you know, my friend, your place
in God's aristocracy depends not on the number
who serve you, but on the number whom you
serve ? Now, where do we stand ? Ah ! if we
saw men with God's eyes, I think, we should
often stand hat in hand before many a man who
never yet filled up an income-tax paper. In His
sight there are no crowned ones save those who
are among us as they that serve.

One moment longer let us linger with the
Master and His disciples in that upper room.
" One of you," He said unto them as they sat
with Him at the passover meal, " one of you shall
betray Me " ; and we can almost hear the silence
that falls upon the little company. Then one by
one they begin to say unto Him, " Lord, is it I ?
is it I ? " A btrange question, surely, we think.
We do not wonder that Judas should ask it — we
do not wonder at anything he may do — but why
should Peter, and John, and James thus doubt

[ :1l!«|

Questions and Answers

217

themselves? What right has self-distrust like
this on lips like theirs ?

But if we think a moment longer perhaps we
shall begin to understand it Do we not know
the awful possibilities of evil that lie coiled up
and sleeping within the hearts of even the best of
us ? Do we not know what it is to come near
to utter shipwreck ? to be walking as on some
razor edge of peril, death yawning on either side
of us ? Ah, )'cs ! I think I know what Peter
and John and the rest of them meant. I have
had glimpses of my own heart which have some-
times made me tremble ; and when I hear of this
man or that who has fallen from righteousness,
who am I that I should condemn him ? — there is
but a little space betwixt him and me ; and I will
rather take heed to myself lest I also be tempted.
" Lord, is it I ? is it I ? " Oh ! men and women,
have we not had experiences enough to knock all
the pride and all the self-confidence out of us for
ever? 'As for me," said the psalmist, "my feet
were almost gone; my steps had well-nigh
slipped." Have you never been there ? Do you
not know that awful sense of being all but gone ?
One moment more and the tide had swept us off
our feet ; one step farther and we had been over
the precipice; but somehow — we do not know
how, it is all a great mystery of divine grace — we
were saved ; and henceforth we carry with us,
plucked from the heart of that great experience,
a new sense of our own peril ; we understand

2l8

Questions and A^isivers

now what the disciples meant when they asked,
" Lord, is it I ? is it I ? "

Fix your eye upon yourself. Again and again
the enemy takes us by surprise and overwhelms
us with disaster because we do not know our-
selves. Here and now let us take the candle of
the Lord in our hand, and ourselves go down
into the cavernous depths of our hearts, and search
out all their dark places, that we may see and know
ourselves as God sees and knows us. And yet
I would not have my last word to be of self.
You cannot think too often or too humbly of
yourself, but you may think too exclusively.
Therefore when you enter into that secret con-
ference between your own heart and yourself,
take Christ with you ; and sure as you are of
your own weakness and sin, be even more sure of
His power to save you. " Howbeit I am a wretched
captive of sin," cries Rutherford, " yet my Lord
can hew heaven out of worse timber than I am."
Yes, " He is able to save unto the uttermost " ;
and there is no life however bad that does not lie
inside the boundless rim of God's great uttermost.

THE DIFFICULTIES OF UNBELIEF

THERE was published some few years ago
a series of little books entitled Helps to
Belief. They deal with such subjects as Prayer,
the Atonement, the Divinity of our Lord, and so
on, and they arc describcu by the publishers as
a series of " Helpful manuals on the religious
difficulties of the day." They are for the most
part well written by competent hands, and to
those who feel the difficulties of which they treat,
likely to be of considerable service.

Did it ever occur to any one, I wonder, to
publish a series of Helps to Unbelief? A distin-
guished American divine (Dr. Newman Smyth)
has printed a sermon with this title. The Difficulty
of not Believing. That is worth thinking about.
Men talk sometimes as if the only persons troubled
with intellectual difficulties to-day are those who
still continue to believe in Jesus Christ. I grant
that the believer has his difficulties, though I

2 22 The Difficulties of Unbelief

think they arc often absurdly exaggerated ; I
would rather say with Robert Browning,

"Tlie acknowledgment of God in Christ,
Accepted by thy reason, sohes for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it."

But what is so constantly overlooked is that if
belief has its difficulties so also has unbelief.
The choice does not lie between a thorny, tangled
thicket on the one hand and a level greensward
on the other. You may give up your religious
faith and flatter yourself that henceforth you will
carry no more burdens heavy and grievous to be
borne ; but unless, at the same time, you are to
renounce your intellect as well, you will find that
instead of having got rid of your load you have
only exchanged it for another and heavier. That
is what I want in this address to make plain.
My subject is the " Difficulties of Unbelief."

Obviously the subject is a very wide one, and
I shall not attempt to touch it at more than one
point. What arc we to believe about Jesus
Christ ? The alternatives have been stated with
such admirable precision and force by Dr. Dods,
that I venture to read his words to you, " What
is Christ ? " he asks ; " what is the truth about
Him ; how is He to be accounted for ; and what
lies at the root of His influence ? Is He a super-
natural interpolation in the history of our race, or
is He the natural product of antecedent persons
and conditions ? Did He begin to be when born

The Dilficullies of Unbelief

223

in Judaea, or did He come from a previous exist-
ence ? Is He human, precisely as other men are
human, or has He a unique relationship to the
Father and to the Unseen ? Is Christ merely
the best of men, or is He the same Who was with
God, and was God, and by Whom God made the
world ? "

The answer of the Christian Church to these
questions is known to all : it is, it always has been,
unhesitating and unmistakable. I do not affirm
that answer to be free from difficulties, though to
discuss those difficulties is not within our pre-
sent province, but I ask you to mark some of
the problems that unbelief is compelled to
take in hand when it rejects that answer. The
modern unbeliever declares, to adopt the lan-
guage of Dr. Dods, that Christ is the natural
product of antecedent persons and conditions,
that He began to be when born in Judiea, and
that though beyond doubt the best of men, He is
nevertheless human, precisely as other men are
human. Singularly enough, this declaration has
substantially just been made by a minister of the
Church of Scotland in a book, the main con-
clusions of which appear wholly indistinguishable
from Unitarianism.^ I cannot enter into a dis-

^ I refer, of course, to tlie Rev. Alexander Robinson, li.D., of
Kilmun, whose volume, The Saviour in the N'e-wer Light, \ as excit-
ing considerable attention in Scotland at the time when this address
was delivered. It is only flxir to add that Mr. Robinson's teaching
has been utterly repudiated by the Church of which he is a minister,
and that his book has since been withdrawn from circulation. IJut

2 24 The Difficulties of Unbelief

cussion of that book now, though I shall refer to
it again before I have done ; but let me say, no
man who makes a declaration of that sort can
stop short with it. As he makes it other ques-
tions start up which demand to be answered.
He has got rid of the difficulties of belief only to
be confronted with the far graver difficulties of
unbelief. Let me point out some of these now.

I begin with the Resurrection of Christ from
the dead. " I delivered unto you first of all that
which also I received, how that Christ died for
our sins according to the Scriptures ; and that
He was buried ; and that He hath been raised
on the third day according to the Scriptures": so
Paul taught, and so in all ages the Church has
believed. I allow readily that the belief is not
free from difficulties ; but if we reject it, the
difficulties do not vanish ; they rather increase.
For, consider : if Christ did not rise from the dead
what did happen ?

Let us try to grasp the true position of
affairs. Look at Christ's followers when He was
laid in the tomb ; is it possible to conceive a
body of men more utterly broken, hopeless, and
dispirited ? Of the twelve disciples, one had

the wide publicity given to his views, both by the large sale of the
book, and especially by the public discussions concerning it, fully
warrant me, I think, in printing the address in its original form.

lEan^p^

The Dijficullics of UnbclicJ 22;

committed suicide, another with oaths and curses
had denied that he knew his Lord, and the rest had
forsaken Him and fled. Ahkc to them and to the
Jewish authorities it must have seemed that the
cause of Christ was buried with Ilim in His tomb.
Turn now to the first chapters of the Acts of the
Apostles, and what do we find? W'h)-, that
within a few months, in the same city where
Christ had died, these fri^■htcned disciples, with
Peter at their head, were fearlessly declarini^ to
the chief priests and the rulers, " God hath
made both Lord and Christ this Jesus Whom ye
crucified " ; and not only so, but were winning
converts to their faith by thousands. Go a few
years further down the histor)', and we find that
the new faith has established itself throuL:h all
Palestine, in Asia Minor, and in Europe as far
even as distant Rome.

What brought about the change ? What
transformed a handful of weak, despondent men
and women into the conquering missionaries of a
world ? Their own testimony is unequivocal ; let
two speak for all. " This Jesus," said Peter, " did
God raise up, whereof we all are witnesses." " He
appeared " \i.c. after the resurrection], says Paul,
"to Cephas; then to the twelve; then He
appeared to above five hundred brethren at once,
of whom the greater part remain until now, but
some are fallen asleep ; then Lie appeared to
James ; then to all the apostles ; and last of all,
as unto one born out of due time, Lie appeared to

I I

226 T/ic Difficulties of Unbelief

I i

mc also." If this twofold testimony be received
as true vvc have an adequate explanation of what
follows ; if we reject it the facts still remain, and
some other explanation must be forthcoming.

Some of you will remember the Lectures
delivered in this city a year or two ago by an
eminent German thinker, Professor Pfleiderer. In
these Lectures, which have since been issued in
book form, the Professor denies the Resurrec-
tion, and endeavours to explain what in his
judgment actually did take place. " The stricken
disciples," he says, in substance — I quote Professor
Orr's summing up — " after the first blow, pluck
up courage and begin to think their Master is
with them again. Then Peter has a vision — sees
a bright light, or something of the sort, and
fancies it is Jesus ; and, by a mysterious tele-
pathy, his faith affects the twelve, and they have
visions ; and the women have visions ; and the
five hundred brethren at once have visions ; and
last of all Paul has a vision. Out of these visions
grew faith in the Resurrection, the Ascension, the
Godhead, the Incarnation, the Atonement of
Christ — the whole scheme of Christian theology."
Now, Professor Pfleiderer is a man of great learn-
ing and ability. For any position that he takes
up we may be quite sure he will say the best that
can be said. But I confess that when I read his
answer to the question, " If Christ did not rise from
the dead, what did happen ? " I felt as I had
never felt before the unassailable strength of our

l^hc Difficulties of Unhcliif 22^

position. The miserable little racjjgcd re<^imcnt,
which was all that he could brin^ into the field,
could not stand for five minutes aL,^'linst the onset
of the serried ranks of the Christian argument.

The author of T/ic Sa^'iour in tlic Ncivcr Lii^/it
is apparently of Professor Pflcidcrer's way of
thinking ; he also has no ICaster Day in his
calendar. How, then, does he account for what
followed the alleged Resurrection ? He makes
no attempt to account for it at all. Mr. Robinson
has done a very bold thing : he has written a life
of Christ which not only ends with His burial, but
which quietly ignores all that our onl' records of
that life tell us of what happened after His return
from the grave. " He went into the l^eyond," says
Mr. Robinson, " into which we all have to go " ;
but of any return from that " Beyond " theie is
not a word. " He went into the Beyond ; and
He left behind Him a number of ' apostles,' who
f6r a short time became scattered in dismay, but
soon rallied themselves." But the significance of
this speedy *' rallying " Mr. Robinson wholly misses.
It meant nothing less than the beginning of the
Christian Church, the opening of a new era.
Surely there must have been something behind
so momentous a spiritual fact. To say that the
disciples, " scattered in dismay " by the death of
Christ, " rallied themselves " is to trifle with us ;
reason demands some adequate explanation of a
change so sudden and so mighty. Between these
two things — the scattering and the rallying —

2 28 The Dijficultics of Unbelief

something there must have been ; wliat was it ?
" The Resurrection of Christ from the dead," says
the believer ; " nothing," says the unbeliever,
" nothing save the baseless delusion of a few weak
men and women." So then the choice lies
between the supernatural and the ridiculous ; for
my part, I prefer the supernatural.

A second difficulty which unbelief has to face
is the belief of the first Christians concerning
Christ.

And, fortunately, we are in a position to know
with practical certainty what that belief, at least
in broad outline, was. In the four greater Epistles
of St. Paul — those, i.e. addressed to the Corin-
thians, the Romans, and the Galatians — we have
four documents, written within thirty years of the
death of Christ, whose genuineness Renan himself
admitted to be " undisputed and indisputable."
If, now, we examine these documents, what may
we learn from them as to the thoughts of the
first Christians concerning Christ ? A New Testa-
ment scholar of equal candour and scholarship —
Professor Sanday— summarizes the main points
thus : —

1. Jesus was a divine Being — the Messiah
of the Jews ; and, at the same time. Son of
God.

2. He came forth from God and became man,

The Difficulties of Unbelief 229

for

man.

haviniT shared with God an existence prior to His
Incarnation.

3. His career on earth was terminated by a
violent death ; but after being crucified, He rose
again from the dead.

4 His Crucifixion, ignominious as it seemed,
had nevertheless a far-reaching effect : in some
mysterious way it operated to remove the guilt of
human sin.

5. Though He had departed to the sphere
from which He came, He would return once more
as Judge of quick and dead.

But, it may be asked, granted that these were
the beliefs of the man who wrote tiie letters, can
we be sure that they were held in common by all
the early Christians ? We can ; and for several
reasons. We know that Paul, shortly after his
conversion, joined himself to the other disciples in
Jerusalem ; and that, at a later time, he was by
them of Antioch sent forth on his first missionary
journey. Is it conceivable that cither of these
things should have hc'])pened had there been any
serious divergence of opinion concerning the great
facts which were the staple of the apostle's preach-
ing? Furthermore, wc have Paul's own definite
statement that that which he preached was that
which also he had received (i Cor. xv, 3) — that
is to say, which had been handed on to him as
the common Christian tradition — and that it was
identical with the faith that before he had per-
secuted (Gal. i. 23). So then, within thirty years

I
I

I
• I

''.(

' I

230 T/ie Difficulties of Unbelief

of the death of Christ, throughout all Palestine,
in Galatia, in Corinth, and in Rome, Christian
believers with one consent worshipped Christ as
God. Controversies, bitter and strong, in the
early Church we know there were, and they have
left their marks in these Epistles. But of any
controversy concerning the Divinity of our Lord
Jesus Christ there is no trace, even the faintest.

The Gospel according to St. John might be
put in as evidence also. This is the Gospel which
Mr. Robinson loses no opportunity of disparaging.
Any passage in which Christ claims for Himself
more than superhuman dignity he attributes to
the idealizing tendency of the writer of the Gospel.
I cannot accept either Mr. Robinson's method or
its results ; but suppose it were so, could you
have a more triumphant and final proof of that
which I am now contending for — the universal
belief of the first Christians in the Divinity of our
Lord? Nor is this belief to be explained by any
theories concerning the growth of myths and
legendary stories. Myths do not spring up like
mushrooms ; they need time ; and in this case
the time cannot be found. For, as we have seen,
the wide-spread existence of the belief can be traced
back to within a few years of the Ascension.
Once more, I ask, is there any explanation that
does really explain the facts save this, that Christ
actually was what the early Christians believed
Him to be — the Son of God, the Saviour of the
world ?

The Difficulties of Unbelief 231

III

The difficulties of unbelief do not end with the
first century. There is the same consensus of
opinion concerning Christ among Christians of all
ages. Professor Pfleiderer — and apparently, also,
Mr. Robinson — make Christ one in a row ; right
or wrong, that has never at any time been the
faith of the Christian Church during the eighteen
centuries of its existence.

The early Church, as every one knows, had its
controversies concerning the Person of Christ ; but,
as Dr. Pope has clearly shown, these controver-
sies were due not to any denial of the doctrine,
but to one-sided and imperfect statements of it.
" A Christ only jnau," he says, " was unknown until
the third century, if indeed then." Further, as
Mr. Gladstone pointed out a few years ago in his
famous review of Robert Ehniere, since the fourth
century our conception of Christ has remained
practically unchanged. " In all ages," says a great
German sceptic, " there has been one common
mark of the Christian religion — belief in Christ."
Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Bap-
tists, Salvation Army, and Methodists — we may
agree about nothing else ; we are absolutely one
here. God knows I say it with no uncharitable-
ness ; but with all our easy toleration to-day there
is not, I believe, an Iivangelical Church in all
Christendom that w^ould not close the doors of its

232 The Difficulties of Unbelief

ministry against any man whose confession of
faith was contained in The Saviour in the Neiver
Light.

What arc we to say to these things? Is this
great testimony, stretching in an unbroken line
from the days of the apostle Paul until now, one
long repeated error ? For eighteen centuries and
more the Church has worshipped Jesus of Nazareth
as Lord ; must we now acknowledge that we have
blundered, blundered not at the circumference
merely, but at the very centre of our faith ? and
must we confess that only now, in the discovery
that Jesus was a man of like passions with our-
selves, the true light is beginning to shine? It is
impossible ; and yet it is to that very impossi-
bility that unbelief is driven when it denies the
Divinity of the Founder of the Christian faith.

One other difficulty that unbelief has to reckon
with I will name, and then I have done : the testi-
mony of Christ's own consciousness. Even if we
can conceive it possible for unbelief to explain
away the belief of others concerning Christ, its
heaviest task would still remain, viz. to explain
Christ's belief concerninj^ Himself.

Mr. Robinson essays the task with a light heart,
and whatever else may be said for his method, at
least it does not lack the merit of simplicity. He
sets out with the assumption that the keynote of

The Difficulties of Unbelief 233

Christ's character is His humility. Everything in
the four Gospels that, in his judgment, accords
with that he accepts as genuine ; everything that
does not accord with it — His claims to supernatural
origin and power, and so forth — he rejects as the
mistaken interpolation of an enthusiastic disciple.
And ir'asmuch as it is in the fotath Gospel that
these claims are most fully stated, that Gospel
receives very scant consideration at his hands.

Now, of course, if you once adopt a method of
that character, you have only to apply it skilfully
and vigorously enough, and you may prove almost
anything you wish. But if you do, please have at
least a sufficient regard for the meaning of words
not to call the process " criticism." But I am not
anxious just now to discuss any methods of read-
ing the New Testament, critical or otherwise ; I
want to point out that, however it be read, that
even though you hack and hew at it with your
" critical " penknives till Utt'e more i^e left of it
than a heap of shreds and tatters, you cannot get
rid of Christ's great and astonishing claims con-
cerning Himself: the torn fragments still bear
their testimony.

I mention but one fact only. From the
Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the
Epistles of St. Paul, it is made abundantly clear
that Christ Himself taught that He would one
day return to the world to be its Judge. So over-
whelming is the evidence on this point, that even
Professor Pflciderer does not attempt to controvert

i I

234 T/ie Difficulties of Unbelief

it. Now, I put the question to you : Is it con-^
ceivable that any good man (such at least as all
admit Jesus to have been), with a good man's con-
sciousness of and sensitiveness to his own weak-
ness and limitations, should arrogate to himself
the right to be the judge and final arbiter of the
destinies of mankind ? To ask the question is to
answer it ; and we have to make our choice be-
tween these alternatives : either Christ spoke out
of the depths of His own divine consciousness,
knowing that the Father had committed all judg-
ment unto the Son ; or He made use of words
and put forth claims which were, and which He
must have known to have been empty, false, and
blasphemous. For my part, again, I choose the
former alternative ; belief may have its difficulties,
but they are as the small dust of the balance com-
pared with the difficulties of unbelief.

The argument might be pursued to almost any
length ; but already, perhaps, I have said more
than enough. Some of you, I know — and it is
you I have had before me in preparing this ad-
dress — will receive thankfully the word I have
tried to speak. But I almost fear lest some of
you should turn my poor arguments into excuses
for delay in yielding yourselves to Christ. " There
are still questions to be answered, and problems to
be solved " ; yes, and there always will be. But
if we do not know everything, at least we know
enough. Remember we have only one life ; we

The Difficulties of Unbelief 235

may waste it in idle speculating, but there will be
no second for practice. After all we are not saved
by syllogisms. I never expect to argue a man
into faith in Christ. Argument may roll away the
stone from the mouth of the grave ; argument
cannot bring the dead man back to life again.
Now that I have spoken, let me stand aside and
be still ; and may all hear the voice of the Son of
God and live !

THE BACKWATER OF LIFE

I-

111

XVI

THE BACKWATER OF LIFE

" The time of my departure is c<?we."~2 TiM. iv. 6.

THESE are the words of a man who knows
that his course is finished, that his work
is done. This " Second Epistle to Timothy "
is the last letter which we have from the
Apostle's hand ; and as he wrote it he knew the
end was near. In the epistles that belong to
the period of St. Paul's first captivity in Rome
we find him more than once anticipating a
speedy release. Thus he writes to Philemon :
" Withal prepare me also a lodging : for I hope
that through your prayers I shall be granted unto
you." And so, as we know, it came to pass.
Again, at a still later period, in the interval be-
tween his first and second imprisonment, he is
busy with plans for the future. To Timothy,
whom he had left in charge of the Church at
Ephesus, he writes, " These things write I unto
thee, hoping to come unto thee shortly." To
Titus, who was in Crete, he sends instructions,

240

llic /uu'/c'i^'afcr of fJfc

" When I shall send Artcmas unto thcc, or
Tychicus, <;ivc diH<^cncc to come unto nie to
Nicopolis : for there I have determined to winter."
Then suddenly the blow fell, and a second time
the apostle was hurried away a captive to Rome.

It was durini,^ this second captivity that the
letter before us was written. The chan5.;e in
Paul's circumstances and outlook is manifest in
every line. He has no plans for the future now ;
there is no more word of a visit to Timothy or to
Titus ; nay, he urges Timothy to make all haste
to come to see him — " before winter," he says ;
after that it may be too kite. " Already I am
being offered, and the time of my departure is
come." At any moment the messenger may be at
the door, and the servant summoned into the pre-
sence of his Lord.

Paul knew, I say, that his work was done.
With a Nero on the throne little was to be ex-
pected from the hard clemency of Rome — at most
a brief respite ; a second release was impossible.
Hitherto the strong man had girded himself, and
walked whither he would ; and now another was
girding him and carrying him whether he willed
or no. How will he bear himself now ? Again
and again we have heard the ring of his clear,
unfaltering voice as he led the hosts of 00*^ into
battle. With what voice will he speak, now tha
for him the fight is over, and the armour must be
laid aside ?

There is a brief essriy of exquisite beauty,

The Jiackivatcr of Life

2^\

known well to many of you, entitled " Ordered
South," by Robert Louis Stevenson. I shall never
forget the first time I eame across it in a bundle of
old magazines, which once in a sudden freak I had
picked up in a saleroom. 1 was only a schoolboy
at the time, caring a good deal more for cricket
than for "style"; but somehow the subtle music
of the words stole into my heart until it held me
spellbound. The essay was written while Steven-
son was quite a young man, and when ill health
and our cruel northern winds had sent him flying
south in search of a sunnier clime. It is full of
the sad, pensive musings of one who feels his days
closing in around him, and knows not if the next
turn of the road may not bring him in sight of
the end. '' The world is disenchanted for him.
He seems to himself to touch things with muflled
hands, and to see them through a veil. His
life becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that
are silent when he has found and struck
them."

How docs this man, the servant of Jesus
Christ, bear himself in these closing days ? With
what thoughts of the friends about him, of the
years that lie behind, of the few fleeting days that
still remain, and above all, of the great Ikyond
that is now so near to him ?

I have been led to the choice of this subject
through the reading of a very remarkable article
which has recently appeared in the pages of the
Cornhill Magazine, from the pen of its editor, Mr.

o I ">

The Backioatcr of Life

Jaiiics l'a}n.^ Mr. Payn has been fcv many years
a familiar figure in literary circles, and his gay
and genial wisdom has given delight to multi-
tudes. But the keynote of this brief essay, to
which 1 refer, is its sad and utter hopelessness :
"It is a strange feeling," he writes, "to one who
has been immersed in affairs, and as it were in
the mid-stream of what we call Life, to find one-
self in its Backwater, crippled and helpless, but
still able to sec through the osiers on the island
between us what is passing along the river — the
))assenger vessels and the pleasure boats — and to
hear fain.tly the voices and the laughter, and the
strong language mellowed by distance from the
slovv-moving barges." Then he goes on to speak
of the " bitter sense of humiliation at being re-
duced to dependence upon others." They on
the Backwater do not " live," they only " exist."
There is for him no happiness m the memory of
his own happier past ; he cannot sing with Dora
Greenwell, " I turn unto the past when I have
need of comfort"; rather he holds with the poet
who tells us that " Sorrow's crown of sorrow is
remembering happier things"; none either in the
contemplation of the happiness of others : all
these things do but sharpen the contrast with his
own misery —

'• Alas ! wc lia\e nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor cahn around."

^ Mr. Payn has rcsigucd his editorship since this was written.

The Backioater of Life

!43

years
1 gay
nulti-
ly, to
jiicss :
c who
ere in
i onc-
is, but
island
r — the
and to
nd the
Dm the
) speak
;ing re-
ley on
' exist."
noiy of
h Dora
1 have
le poet
rrovv is
in the
rs: all
,vith his

"There is one — one — consolation in our miser-
able lot " says Mr. Payn : " it has brought us
face to face with the immeasurable goodness of
Humanity."

I have referred t(j this article somewhat in
detail, because it is to those in whose hearts its
sad words awaken some answering echo that I
want for a moment or two to speak. Usually
such words as I am able to speak are to the
young, to those whose life is before them, whose
work is still waiting to be done, whose great de-
cisions are yet to be formed. And I think it is
right it should be so. liut for once I turn from
these to speak, as God shall help mc, to those
who arc " in the Backwater," from whose hands
the tasks of life ha\e been taken, all unfinished as
they are, for ivhom. now nothing remains save to
sit with empty, folded hands quietly waiting the
end. It was only the other day, as I sat think-
ing on this subject, that a letter reached me from
one o'l these who are no longer in the mid-stream
of life ; and I suppose there are many such in
evcy congregation.

It is no wonder if such arc sometimes sad. It
is a testing day in a man's life when he comes to
know what he has long secretly feared, that the
prizes he has coveted and toiled for are not for
him, that already he has done the best he is
capable of, and that henceforth his influence wiu
be within less and ever-lessening circles. " I must
decrease," said the Baptist, and murmured not as

Iwnlitn.

244

The Backivater of Life

he said it ; nevertheless, it is a hard saying. To
see — as Christina Rossetti sings in her infinitely
pathetic poem —

" The dark hair clianging to grey
That hath now neither laurel nor bay,"

and to know that here, at least, we shall never be
crowned ; that wc have reached the top of the
road, and that henceforth all our steps must be
downhill ; that we can be no longer actors, but
only spectators in a world that in a little while
will go on its way without us at all — it needs
great grace to know all this and not to grow hard
and gloomy and bitter.

" My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky :
So was it when my life began ;
So is it now I am a man ;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die I "

And perhaps there is nothing that some of us so
much dread as th .- coming of the days whereof
we shall say that wc have no pleasure in them.

May it not help us if we listen to the last words
of the Apostle Paul ?

(i) And in the first place, in striking contrast
with the sad hopelessness of what I read a moment
ago, mark the apostle's quiet confidence and joy.
It is not only that he does not murmur ; he is
not merely silently submissive ; his patient writ-
ing is far removed from numbed acquiescence.

The Backwater of Life

245

His soul is stilled and at rest because it is
abundantly satisfied. What royal words on a
prisoner's lips, " I have all things and abound " !

" Youth," some one has naid, " is a blunder, man-
hood a struggle, old age a regret." Paul might
have called his youth a blunder, and his manhood
a struggle, but his old age a regret — no ! a
thousand times no ! Long ago it had been his
desire that he might finish his course with joy ;
and now his prayer is being answered. The
Apostle found his l?eulah Land where Bunyan
found his after him — on the hither side of the
river as he drew near to the city : " Now, as they
walked in this land, they had more rejoicing than
in parts more remote from the kingdom to which
they were bound."

(2) The Apostle's life-convictions remain with
him still in unshaken strength. " I am not
ashamed of the Gospel of Christ " — so he had
written in the noontide of his day, and now that
night is coming on apace, he repeats the great
confession in this his last epistle : " For the which
cause \i.e. because he was appointed a preacher
and an apostle and a teacher of the Gospel] I
suffer also these things, yet I am not ashamedl^
How often as men grow old do they grow gloomy,
and cynical, and pessimistic ! They see no more
visions, and dream no more dreams ; they doubt
even the dreams and visions that once they had.
" God's not in His heaven," say they ; " all's ivrong
with the world." And in the grave of their own

246

The Backtvatcr of Life

buried hopes tliey bury their hopes for the world.
But Paul never doubted. He beheld Jesus, not
indeed as yet with aM things made subject unto
Him ; but he beheld Jesus, crowned with glory
and honour ; and the daily vision made him strong
to do and to endure.

Nor are the old interests of his life dead and
gone from him. He gives manifold directions to
Timothy : " The clothes that I left at Troas with
Carpus bring when thou comest, and the books,
especially the parchments." One of God's children
lay nigh unto death. "What shall I read you?"
said a friend with his hand on the Bible. " Read
me the newspaper," said the sick man, " let me
know how it fares with the kingdom of God."
" The books, and especially the parchments," writes
the Apostle ; he will let no creeping paralysis, born
of the thought that that which had been could be
for him no more, stay his hand from what it still
found to do.

(3) Very beautiful also is Paul's attitude
towards those who were near him in these last
days. Mr. Payn speaks, in the article I quoted,
of the " bitter sense of humiliation at being reduced
to dependence upon others." But is that the true
Christian spirit ? Ought we not rather to cultivate
a spirit of glad willingness to be ministered unto?
We often say, " It is more blessed to give than
to receive." But how are men to taste that
blessedness if you and I will never humble our-
selves to receive? There is, I suppose, in serving

The Backivatcr of Life

247

sometimes a subtle sense of superiority which
pleases us ; but to submit to be served hurts our
pride and we cannot bear it. But Paul har, cast
out utterly this unlovely temper. He who before
had stood firm and strong as a granite pillar
for others to lean upon, now puts out )iis hand
to find some on whom he may lean. Twice
he bids Timothy "do thy diligence to come
shortly unto me." Timothy, Demas, Mark, Luke
— he would have them all about him in these
last days.

There is, too, if I mistake not, a new note of
tenderness in Paul's voice. Every reader of his
life and letters knows what fierce fires slumbered
in his great soul, and how, at times, they would
shoot forth in tongues of angry flame — against the
tyranny of a Roman official or the injustice of a
Jewish high-priest, against his brutal and shameless
persecutors, and once even against a former com-
panion and friend. But ail that is past now,
" Demas hath forsaken me," he writes to Timothy,
" having loved this present world ' ; and wc know
how the treachery of desertion at a time like that
must have stung the Apostle to the quick ; but he
says nothing. " Take Mark, and bring him
with thee " ; this is the man about whom he Lad
had his quarrel with Barnabas ; nevertheless, he
bids Timothy " bring him with thee ; for he is
useful to me for ministering." " At my first
defence," he says, " no one took my part, but all
forsook me." Then his voice softens, and in

!! (

;5 h

248

The Backwater of Life

li
I

words that sound like an echo of a yet greater
prayer he prays, " May it not be laid to their
account ! " Paul may never have read the words
of his brother Apostle Peter, but he would have
made them his own unhesitatingly : " The end of
all things is at hand . . . have fervent chanty
among yourselves!'

(4) Need I say Paul did not fear to die ? He
had looked too often into death's dark face to be
afraid of it now. Yet, after all, that is but a little
thing to say. There are many to whom death is
no longer " the shadow feared of man," who have
not Paul's high hope. Some there are, indeed,
who welcome death ; it is for them the one door
of escape from the unutterable pain and weariness
of life. Paul welcomed death because he saw
beyond death. " There is the Mainstream," writes
Mr. Payn,"the Backwater and the Weir, and there
ends the River of Life." What is after that he does
not know ; with him it is from death to dark. But
with Paul it was from death to day. " Henceforth
there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness,
which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to
me at that day. . . . The Lord will deliver me
from every evil work, and will save me unto
His heavenly kingdom." What arc Nero's judg-
ment seat and the executioner's flashing brand
to the man who holds th.a faith ?

" I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren,
concerning them that arc asleep." Many a time
had he thrust that staff i .0 the trembling hands

r- y

The Backivater of Life

249

of the dying ; many a time had he bid men lean
upon it as they bowed themselves in the presence
of their dead. And now that his own turn has
come Paul does not fear to trust himself to it :
" Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will fear no evil ; for Thou art
with me : thy rod and thy staff, they comfort
me." So the martyr -apostle passed, to be, as
he himself loved to put it, " at home with the
Lord."

To Paul death was but as "the lifting of a latch ;"
to us, perhaps, who are young and strong, " the
thought of death is terrible, having such hold on
life." " Having the desire to depart and to be
with Christ ; for it is very far better " — so said the
Apostle once ; and so sometimes we persuade our-
selves to say after him, all the time knowing that
if we would be honest with ourselves, what we
really desire is not to die, but to live. Yet let us
make no mistake ; it is no necessary mark of
spirituality either to desire to die or to have no
fear of death. When Paul wrote the familiar
words I have quoted, he was no longer a
young man, but " Paul the aged," and a prisoner.
He did not speak thus twelve months after
his conversion on the way to Damascus ;
but now he is tired and sick for home.
Therefore let us not reproach ourselves need-
lessly.

But if our work is done, if we are in the back-

250

The Backzvater of Life

water and the end is near, God grant that in
deepening peace and with ever-j^aowing tenderness
we may do the things that remain, till the soft
mellow light of evening fade into that last dark-
ness that brings the swift dawn of the eternal day !

•, \.

lat in
;rncss
2 soft
dark-
day !

"NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND
IS IT?

ill

! (

■

XVII

"NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND"—
• IS IT?^

'« // is impossible to renew them again unto repentance."—
IIeh. vi. 6.

IMPOSSIBLE "—and yet wc say, it is " never
too late to mend." Let us look into this
matter for a few moments.

The subject has been down on my list to
preach about for three or four years ; but I have
shrunk from it, and week after week have passed
it by. You will not find it difficult to understand
why. The preaching of doom is no light and
easy task. But to-day necessity is laid upon me.
After all, a preacher's business is not with what
man thinks or what man likes, but with what God
says ; and if that doom is here, in the Word, we
may not be silent about it. I do not speak as the
champion of a doctrine, armed from head to foot

1 I am indebted to Mr. Joseph Cook's Boston Monday Lectures
for several suggestions and illustrations in this address.

wmmm

254 " Never too Laic to McmV — h it ?

with " proof-texts," eager for some paltry logical
victory. Least of all would I be of those, of whom
John Ruskin speaks, who, where they least know, will
condemn first, and think to commend themselves
to their Master by crawlmg up the steps of I lis
judgment-throne to divide it with Him.

" I.ct not lliis frail, iinknouinj^ haiul
I'rcsuiuc 'I'liy bolts to throw,
And hurl damnation round the land
At those I deem Thy foe."

No ; but if He who told us that God so loved the
world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever belicveth on Him should not perish, but
have eternal life, also told us that men by their
sii! may make even of repentance an impossibility,
must not the herald, whose one duty is with the
King's message, make known the whole — this as
well as that ?

There is a good deal of thinking to-day —
much of it very loose and very inexact, and some
of it thrown into the form of definite, dogmatic
propositions — which may be summed up in the
familiar saying I have already quoted, " It is never
too late to mend.' A man, it is said, may wander
far and sin grievously, he may fill up to over-
flowing the measure of his iniquity ; nevertheless,
God is good, His mercy endureth for ever, and at
last — " far off," it may be, but at last — all will be
well for all.

It is a comfortable and a comforting creed — if

" Never loo Late to MeiuV Is it ? 255

one dare hold it. Will it bear looking at? Will
it stand the test of examination? I do not
think so.

"God is good ; His mercy endurclh for ever,"
— that, hai)pily, needs no discussion ; so far we
are at one. J''or my part, I can put no limit to
the mercy of God. 1 preach the unmerited, im-
partial, universal love of God. Nay, more, I
cannot think that towards any that Une can ever
cease : " in the place we call hell eternal love as
really is as in the place vvc call heaven."

But docs universal love imi)ly universal salva-
tion ? Is the love of God the only needed factor
in the salvation of men? He " willeth that all
men should be saved, and come to the knowledge
of the truth ; " but is God's will alone sufficient
to secure that all men shall unfailingly be saved ?

It is narrated of the eminent Swiss naturalist,
Agassiz, that wishing to study the interior of an
Alpine chasm, he allowed himself on one occasion
to be lowered into a crevice in a glacier, and
remained for some hours at mid-day at a point
hundreds of feet below the surface of the ice.
Then he gave his companions the signal to draw
him up. But in their haste they had forgotten the
weight of the rope. The weight of the basket, of the
tacklings, of Agassiz himself, had all been calculated,
but the rope had been forgotten ; the three men at
the summit were not strong enough to draw him
back, and he had to remain suspended in the jaws of
the chasm until one of the party went to seek for

M n n i* »n »ww .mw i> m ii i fi .Tj iw i^ tfta****

1 1 i

256 " Never too Late lo Mend" —Is it ?

assistance. When a man lets himself down into
the depths of sin, saying to himself, " God is good,
His mercy endureth for ever," and trusting to that
to draw him up again, he is making a blunder not
less fatal than the mistake of Agassiz might have
proved : he is forgetting the consequences of sin
upon himself My sin cannot chill or change the
love of God ; but what if it so change nie that all
that love never stirs me, never touches me, never
wakens within me one answering throb? I know
of nothing in the nature or the will of God that
can ever make impossible the salvation of any
man ; but what if that impossibility be created in
the nature of man himself by that permanent and
final dissimilarity of feeling with God which is
sin's last and most terrible issue?

" Never too late to mend " ? — look where I
will, I can find confirmation of it nowhere : contra-
diction, refutation of it everywhere.

I. It is not the doctrine of tJic ]Scio Tcstaimnt,
And when I say the New Testament, I mean the
whole of the New Testament. The author of a
recent work on th.e life of Christ will not allow that
Jesus said anything implying a future separation of
mankind into two classes, and he manipulates the
Gospel records accordingly. Everything that con-
tradicts his preconceived thejiy he gets rid off by
the convenient method of putting his pen through
it. When a writer proceeds on that principle, it
is trifling with us to talk of discovering tiie New
Testament doctrine on the subject ; what he dis-

" Never too Late to JVh ur~~fs it P 257

covers is simply a dream of his own creation, with
as much and as little autliority as such dreams
usually possess. But if we take all the words of
the New Testament, and if we rct^ard them as
authoritative, then (if words have any meaning at
all) there will be some of whom even at the last
it will be true that it had been better for them
if they had never been born. " IMesscd is he who
3." not ashamed of Christ's sternest words." The
New Testament is a much sterner book than some
of us like to think. There are shadows here that
will not flee. Christ spoke of " an eternal sin," of
which, if a man be guilty, he " hath never forgive-
ness."^ The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews
declcTired of some that it was "impossible to renew
them again unto repentance." St. Peter writes of
men " having eyes full of an adulteress, that nrnnct
cease from sin." St. John says, " There is a sin
unto death," and then, though he had only just
written, '' this is the boldness which we have
towards Him, that, if we ask an}'thing according
to His will, He heareth us," he goes on to say,
"not concerning this do I say that a man should
make request." And when we clo.se the I^ook of
Revelation, it is with these solemn words in our
ears, " He that is unrighteous, let him do un-
righteousness still ; and he that is filthy, let him
be made filihy ;-/Lill." "You .seem, sir," said some
one to Dr. Johnson, in one of his despondent hours,
when the fear of »leath and judgmenL lay heavy

^ Mark iii. 2<), K. V.
S

fl^

e(f^

258 " Never too Late to Mend'' — h it ?

on him, " to forget the merits of our Redeemer."
*' Madam," said the honest old man, " I do not
forget the merits of my Redeemer ; but my Re-
deemer has said that He will set some on His
right hand, and some on His left." ^

Note not merely the " proof- texts," but the
" proof-trend " (as some one has named it), not
merely the "Biblical ripple," but "the Biblical
gulf-stream ; " and if you do that, you will neither
yourself believe, nor teach others to believe, that
it is " never too late to mend."

2. Nature does not cjtcourage 11s to betieve that
it is " never too late to mend.'' A boat may careen
to the right or to the left, and right itself again ;
but let it go beyond a certain line and it will
capsize, and right itself no more. Gash a tree up
to a certain point and kindly Nature will heal
the wound ; but go beyond that point, and the
tree will wither end die. If it is a hundred steps
from me to the edge of a precipice, I may take
ninccy-nine, and yet retrace them all ; but if I
take the hundredth step, there is no retracing that.

3. W/iat say the great students of human nature ?
I take up Victor Hugo's great masterpiece, Les
Miserables, and this is what I read when Bishop
Myriel's goodness has opened to Jean Valjean a
door of salvation : " He felt instinctively that this
priest's forgiveness was the greatest and most
formidable assault by which he had yet been
shaken ; that his Hardening would become perma-

' QuDtcd in Denney's Studies in Theolog)\

" Never too Late to Mend'' —Is it ? 259

nent, if he resisted this clemency ; that this time he
must either conquer or be conquered, and that the
struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had begun
between his wickedness and that man's goodness."
Milton pictured Satan a free agent, and yet
saying,

" All good to me is lost ;
Evil, be thou my good."

Hear
useless :

the guilty king in Hamlet; prayer is

" What then .> What rests .?
Try what repentance can ; what can it not 'i
Yet what can it ivlicn one can not repent .'
O wretched state ! () bosmi black as death !
() limed soul, that, strug. img to be free.
Art more engaged I "

And now beside your open Shakespeare lay
these words from Sanuiel Taylor Coleridge. He
is replying to those who say, " True, we are all
sinners ; but even in the Old Testament God has
promised forgiveness on repentance." " True," he
says, " God has promised pardon on penitence,
but has He promised penitence on sin ? He that
repentcth shall be forgiven ; but where is it said,
He that sinneth shall repent?"

" It is impossible to renew them again unto
repentance," says the writer of the Epistle to
the Hebrews. " Amen ! " sa>'s Sanuiel Taylor
Coleridge. "Amen!" says your gicat Shake-
speare.

4. And now, if from these we turn to some of

26o " Never too Late to Mend'' — Is it ?

the awful facts in the h'fe of men about us, will
they bid us to hope that it is " never too late to
mend " ? I have read of an habitual drunkard
who said, "If a glass of spirits were put before
me, and 1 knew that the abyss was yawning
between me and it, I must still take it," Dean
Farrar says that a great living physician once
told him how he was attending the deathbed of a
rich man who seemed as if he could not die : with
aimless and nervous restlessness his hands kept
moving and opening and shutting over the
counterpane. " What is the matter ? " asked the
physician. " I know," answered the son for his
speechless father ; " every night, before he went
to sleep, my father liked to feel and handle some
of his bank-notes." Then he slipped a ;^io
note into the o'd man's hand, and feeling, hcindling,
and clutching it he died. Some years ago I cut
out from the pages of the British Weekly this
story concerning an eminent London clergyman,
the Rev. Henry White of the Savoy Chapel.
One night, many years ago, when Mr. White was
a curate living at the East End of London, he
was rung up in the dead of night, and urgently
implored by a woman to come and see her hus-
band, who, she said, was dying. Mr. White
dressed and followed the woman to a squalid
house in a court, where he found a man of about
forty years of age, already within touch of the
hand of death. He bent over the bed, talking to
him, and offered to pray with him. As he spoke

" Never too Late to Mend" —Is it ? 261

he noted a sudden t^leam in the man's eyes ; still
he went on talking- of things past and things to
come, and then, as the woman stood sobbing her
heart out, he knelt and prayed. When he rose
from his knees the man was dead, his fast stiffen-
ing fingers clasping the chain of the curate's
watch. The man was a noted burglar and a life-
long thief, and even as he was dying, the sight of
a gold watch-chain in the possession of a pre-
occupied man was too much for him, and as Mr.
White prayed to God to forgive him his sin, the
dying thief tried to pick his pocket. Professor
Drummond — to mention but one fact more —
addressing a meeting of students in Edinburgh,
related this incident : A young man whose eye-
sight was suffering went to consult a London
doctor. The doctor examined him, and saw in a
moment that it was a case for plain speaking :
" Young man," he said, '* you are leading an im-
moral life ; if you do not stop, in three months
you will be blind." For a moment there was
silence ; then tiie young man moved slowly
towards the window, and said in a low, hoarse
whisper, " Good-bye, sweet world of light ; I
cannot give up my sin."

I do not want to make too much of stories of
this kind ; but when I take into account the
whole facts, and above all when I remember that
great moral law according to which character is
always tending to become permanent, I dure not
say, '■ It is never too late to mend." Sin may

262 " Never too Late to Mend'' — Is it ?

become so ingrained into the very fibre of a
man's being tiiat, like a poisoned Nessus shirt,
it can no more pass from him ^han existence. I
have among my books one that bears upon its
title-page the words " stereotyped edition." There
had been several editions of the work before this
one, in which the author had made various cor-
rections and additions, but now the book had
taken its final shape, and the edition was stereo-
t}pcd. And up to a certain point a man may
go on publishing a sort of revised edition of his
life, expunging, correcting, adding — up to a cer-
tain point ; but after that the " stereotyped edi-
tion " comes out, and then there arc no more
changes. " He that is unrighteous, let him do
unrighteousness still ; and he that is filthy, let
him be made filthy still." " Sow an act and you
reap a habit ; sow a habit and you reap a char-
acter ; sow a character and you reap a destiny."

Are you building on what men call " future
probation," on a " second chance ' in the life to
come ? But suppose you get your " chance " ?
God can only win men by His love ; and if it
fail here, what reason have we to think it will
succeed there? If now every outgoing of divine
grace avails nothing to shape our life according
to the divine will, why should we expect that it
will become suddenly effectual then ? You will
get another and a clearer revelation, you think ;
I do not know where it is to come from ; but
if you do, will you see it ? will you love it ?

" Never loo Late to MeuiV'—ls it ? 263

will you be obedient unto it ? Did you ever
ponder this deep .sayin<,^ : "If they hear not
Moses and the prophets" — if they follow not the
light they have — " neither will they be persuaded
though one rise from the dead " — though a greater
light should shine upon them ?

He ivho ivill not at last cannot. Ah, my
brother ! you may scoff at the doctrine of eternal
punishment, you may put it aside as the dis-
credited figment of an obsolete theology ; but
here is a great and solemn moral law, whose
daily workings every man may behold for him-
self. Will you ignore it, and shut your c}cs to
it, and go on in the dark as if it were not ?

Thank God ! to-night we r^?/;- — will you? will
you? "Turn ye, for why will ye die?" Our
destiny is in our own hands. God damns no
man. If we are lost we are suicides.

"WILT THOU?"

XVIII

"WILT THOU?

" IViltthon?" ]on>;y. 6.

l\/r Y text is a very little one— two words, four
iVi letters each. But the lon^rer I live, tiic
more I am comin^^ to see that it is these little
words that carry the large meanings. Your
sesquipedalian terminology, great showy words of
many syllables — the dictionary is enough for
them; They are only big, they are not great ;
there is no haunting mystery about them ; the
wise man can take them to i)ieces and put them
together again, and tell you all about them in
rive minutes. But these great little words— life,
light, love, home, God — your little child of two
can say them, and your wise man of forty cannot
tell you half that is in them.

Moreover, these words are Christ's words ; and
on His lips the word of large meaning has a
larger meaning still. Let us dwell upon it for a
time, and we shall find, I think, in this brief

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268

Will Thou?''

question of my text one of those large and
thought-provoking questions that Christ still puts
to men.

" Wilt thou ? " — read the question again as we
find it in the Revised Version : " Wouldest thou?"
That starts us thinking at once. This is the
not of futurity simply, but of volition

" dost thou will ? is it th}'^ purpose ? " Already
we are sighting larger meanings. This is no
mere surface question ; it goes to the roots of
things. It is a question, not of the outer, but of
the innermost life. " What," it asks, " is the bent
of the spirit ? what is the purpose of the heart ?
which way does the inward man look ? what
wouldest thou ? "

That is the kind of question Christ always
asks. He never dwells long among the things
that are seen of men. He always takes deep
views of life ; " that which is within " — that is His
concern. Hear how we judge, and then listen to
Him. " How much is he worth ? " we ask of
some one. And then, for answer, we add up his
rent-roll, we count his sovereigns at the bank.
Now hear Christ. He tells us of a certain rich
man who had barns great and many, and they
were all full ; but he had nothing eh-e, and when
at last the end comes, God writes his epitaph in
big round letters — " Thou fool." " So," says
Jesus, " so is every one that layeth up treasure
for himself, and is not rich toward God." We
pass our little shallow judgments on men and

mtm

" Wz'/^ TJiou?''

269

things; we call this man good, and that man
bad ; this Hfe we pronounce a failure, that a
splendid success — but what is it we are judging ?
" The vulgar mass called work " —

" Things done, that took the eye and had the price,
O'er which from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
P'ound straightway to its mind, could value in a trice."

But Christ — how does He judge? Our words,
does He heed them ? He does. Our deeds, does
He mark them ? He does ; but He does more
than that. He asks not only " What dost thou
say .? what hast thou done ? " but also, " What
ivouldest thou ? " His word is living and active,
sharper than any two-edged sword; it pierces
even to th^ dividing asunder of soul and spirit, of
joints and marrow ; it is quick to discern the
thoughts and intents of the heart, and so—

" All the world's coarse thumb,
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account ;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure.
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's
amount.

" Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act.
Fancies that broke through language and escaped ;

All I could never be,

All men ignored in me
This ..."

270

" mu Thou?''

I am worth to Christ. For He sees me not only
as I am, but as I am seeking to be. His question
is not, " What art thou ? " but " What wilt thou ?"
He cares not for the endless babble of lips that
say now this, now that — what does the heart
say?

And is not Christ right? Is not this the
really great question ? Understand, I am not
apologizing for those people who have a habit of
doing all kind of nasty, ill-mannered things, and
for whom their friends are always ready with the
excuse, " Ah, well ; but they are good at heart,
you know, good at heart." People of that kind
are something else. " at heart " as well as good.
No, I make no apology for such as these ; never-
theless, I repeat, the great question is. What do
we ivill? For that which we really zvill, sooner
or later, we shall be. Did you ever ponder that
deep saying of the Master : " Be it done unto
thee even as thou wilt " ? In the long run it is
always so.

Let us turn for a moment, then, to some of
the words of Christ, especially as we find them in
the Revised Version, and let us see how much
He makes — we may almost say, how He makes
everything — to depend on that which ive will.

( I ) " What ivill j/e," He said once, " that I
should do unto you ? " Did you ever think of it ?
His "doing" waits upon our "willing." Thanks
be unto God, He has done many things that
depended nothing at all upon our willing, else

mam^mtm

mmm

" ^F/// T/iou?''

271

had they never been done. It was not because
we willed it that He left His Father's home of
light; It was not because we willed it that He
lived and suffered amongst men, and died at last
at their cruel hands. His love sought not, for it
needed not, any cause beyond itself; it waited no
promptmg from without ; within itself it found its
own cause and motive: He loved because He
was love.

But now that love has thus shown itself to be
love, it waits for our response. It cannot force
Its gifts, itself, upon us ; that is never love's way.
It will plead, and beseech, and entreat; but if
still we sit, silent and sullen, love has no more
that it can do. Christ bends over every one of
us: "Wilt thou? my child. All good is mine,
and mine to give to thee. Dost thou need it ?
Wilt thou seek it ? V/ilt thou take it ? " And if
to Him pleading, we answer " Yea, Lord," then,
just as the pressing 9f an electric button sets all
the machinery in motion ; just as the pulling up
of the dam sends the glad waters bounding and
sparkling along the dried-up river bed, so our
response sets free all His love to work its own
great work within our hearts. But while we are
silent, He is powerless; He can but stand and
wait and plead, " What will ye that I should do
unto you ? " And until we w///, He cannot c/o.

(2) "//• anjy man zuill do His will, he shall
knoiv of the doctrine tvhether it be of God." Once
more the Revised Version is truer to the words of

2']2

" Wilt Thou?''

Christ: "If any man zvilletJi to do His will."
What a gracious breadth of promise is here !
The blessing is his, not only who does, but who
only wills to do.

" If you desire faith, then you'\e faith enough ;
What else seeks God ? Nay, what else seek ourselves ? "

Remember, attainment is not everything. Read
over again the Beatitudes. Where do I come
in ? Which beatitude can I claim as my own ?
" Blessed are the meek " ? — But I am proud and
haughty. " Blessed are the merciful " .?— But I
am hard and unjust. " Blessed are they that
have been persecuted for righteousness' sake " ? —
But I have denied my Lord, and would not suffer
for His sake. " Blessed are the pure in heart " ?
— But my heart, I dare not think of all that is
hidden there ! Then is there no word for me
here ? Hast thou not one blessing for me, O
my Father ? Let us read the great sayings again.
" Blessed are they " — how runs it ? — " that hunger
and thirst after rigJiteousness." Ah 1 now I can
put in my claim. If Thou, Lord, hadst said,
" Blessed are the righteous," then had I no hope ;
but now dost Thou call him blessed who only
desires with a great desire to be righl ous. Yes,
there are many things in Christ's reckoning
besides " things done." He does, indeed, ask,
" What hast thou done ? " but this also is His
question, " What wouldest thou ? " There is more
for the eye to see in the little shrub a foot above

" IF/// r/iou ?

^11

the soil than in the tiny acorn-cup that will lie
in the hollow of your hand. But Christ does not
count the full-grown shrub higher than the grow-
ing seed ; He has His eye on to-morrow and the
da}' after.

And herein is there great hope for him who
knows himself wrong, who knows to how little he
has as yet attained, but whose whole being leaps
forth in response to Christ's " Wilt thou ? " There
are, if I read my New Testament aright, at least
two classes of sinners in Gods sight. Here is
one : to those Jews who went about seeking to kill
Him, Jesus said, " Ye are of your father the devil,
and the lusts of your father ye will do — the lusts of
your father it is your iviii to do " (for that is the true
significance of the words) ; and where that is so,
and as lo:-:g as it is so, Christ Himself can do
nothing. But there are many who, conscious as
they are of the power of evil in their hearts, are
not less conscious of a better self within them
rising up in daily rebellion against the foe that
enslaves them : most emphatically, the lusts of
the devil is it not their will to do. Those words
of the Apostle read like a page torn from the
book of their own life : " The good which I would
I do not ; but the evil which I would not, that I
practise. ... I find then the law that to me who
would do good evil is present. For I delight in
the law of God after the inward man : but I see
a different law in my members warring against
the law of my mind, and bringing me into

274

JViU Thou?''

captivity." Is that you, my brother? Is that
fearful death-struggle yours? Then, in God's
name, I bid you, do not despair. It is when
knowingly we choose evil for our portion, when
we say, " Evil, be thou my good," when our souls
are wedded to it, it is then our case is desperate ;
for of that horrible incestuous union there can
come forth naught but horrible death. But if,
beaten and driven back as we are, our will yet
sides with good, if we defy evil even while it
enslaves us, if, when to the sin-stormed garrison
of the soul, Christ calls, " Wouldest thou ? " there
is still one voice left to cry, " Lord, I would, I
would ; help Thou my weakness, and deliver me,"
then is our deliverance nigh at hand, and even
from our poor lips Paul's shout of triumph shall
burst forth : " I thank God through Jesus Christ
our Lord ! "

(3) But if in this teaching of Christ there is
a tender graciousness, is there not also a lofty
severity ? Do not His words judge us, even as
they bid us hope ? Can we not feel the strands
of the rope tightening in our hands? Let us
take one more of His sayings — the question put
to His disciples at that critical moment in their
life when so many " went back and walked no
more with Him:" " Will ye also go away? "or,
as the Revised Version once again, with a finer
perception of the true significance of the question,
puts it, " Would ye also go away ? "

It is, I think, as if the Mastc/, turning de-

" PVill Thou?''

275

spondently from the faithless crowd, had said to
the Twelve : " IVe, at least, 7ve surely arc not
going to part ? And yet, if your hearts be witii
them that are gone back, it were better so ; for if
the heart be recreant, it matters little that with
your feet ye follow Me ; so if ye ivoiu'd—go." It
was not enough for Christ that they should stay
by His side— where were their hearts? What
ivould they ?

Is not that a word that tests some of us ?
You are members of Christ's Church, but
your hearts are not in His service. Religion
is to you only a fetter that irks and frets
you. If it were simply a question of what
you "would," you would have gone back long
ago, but something has kept you. Let me speak
to you frankly : you had better go. The Church
is not helping you, and you are hurting it. Be
honest ; go to your minister and tell him to strike
your name off the church roll. "Where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also " ; and if
your " treasure " is not here, but otherwhere, do
not offer to your Lord the worthless husk of a
heartless service. "Would ye also go away?"
It is to you He speaks this time — "would ye?"
He is loth to let you go, and when you are gone
He will weep great hot tears over you, but if you
ivould, it were better so. Nay, I even think there
will be more hope of you then than if you stay.
One there v/as among the Twelve who heard His
Master's word who should have gone ; if he had,

276

Wilt Thou ? "

some day, mayhap, he might have come back
another man ; but he stayed, and staying, betrayed
his Lord.

These are examples sufficient, I think, to show
how much, in Christ's thought, depends on what
we will. One word more let me add. This
question, "Wilt thou?" is His question to us; it
need never be onrs to Him. It is our willingness,
never His, that is in doubt. " Lord," said one,
" if Thou wilt Thou canst make me clean/' "If
Thou canst do anything," said another, " have
compassion oh us and help us." Oh, these
trembling " ifs " of the seeking soul! Christ
says to us " Wilt tJiou P" and here are we doubt-
ing, wondering if He will, if He is able. He can ;
He will ; wilt t/iou ? Listen to the wretched
prodigal in the far country : " I will arise and go
to my father, and will say unto him. Father, I
have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight : I
am no more worthy to be called thy son : make
me as one of thy hired servants." Has not that
often been our thought of God ? We must do
something to persuade Him to have mercy upon
us, something to overcome His reluctance to
receive us ; " let me be thy hired servant — any-
thing — so that I be not utterly shut out from
Thy great pitying love." Now hear the Father
Himself speak : " Bring forth quickly the best
robe, and put it on him ; and put a ring on his
hand, and shoes on his feet, and bring the fatted
calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry :

" IViit T/ioH?''

277

for this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he
was lost and is found." My brother, have you
found how hard is the way of the transgressor ?
One such, a young man, sat with me in my stud)-
but the other day ; and in the bitterness of his
soul it seemed to him that God had forgotten to
be gracious. Is it so with you, too ? Then will
you read again the old, old words 1 have just
quoted, and remember, as you read them, this is

ivhat God says of Himself? Bad as we arc

bad with years of sinning, it may be — yet if we
go to Him He will say even unto us, " My son ! "
Still Christ stands over us as He stood over the
doomed city of Jerusalem, and still He says, " I
would, I would ; " and if He does not, why is it ?
There is ever but one answer : " Ye would not ;
ye would not." Then, wilt thou ?

And if I will not, what? Then, as I have
said, Christ can do nothing. " Wilt thou ? " — all
hinges upon that. Passions that rend and tear
the soul, vices that grip it as with teeth of iron,
habits ingrained into its very fibre — not one of
these, nor all combined, can keep Him back from
us. But if upon the heart's threshold the Will
meet Him with its defiant " Nay," He cannot
enter. Christ never passes over an " I will not "
into our life.

" Our wills are ours, we know not how ;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine."

But if, instead, we stiffen our necks and harden
our hearts, we bring to helplessness the very

2/8

IVili Thou ? "

Christ of God. And remember — ! say it with
trembling h'p.s ; I would leave it unsaid if I dare
— this fixing of the will against Christ may
become final, until the power to will with Christ
itself is gone. All Scripture and all experience
bear witness to this tremendous truth : he who
will not, at last cannot.

" To-day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not
your hearts." To morrow, though He speak, you
may not hear. Now ! now ! at this moment,
yield to Him. Thirty years or so ago a lad of
fifteen sat one Sunday night in a little Welsh
chapel. As the preacher closed his sermon, he
called upon all his hearers there and then to
" submit to Christ." Then God opened that
young lad's eyes ; for weeks he had been seeking
the way of peace, and now all at once he saw it
all clear as the noonday ; and sitting there among
his school-fellows he bowed in submission to the
will of Christ. And now to-day that lad's name
is known tl. rough all our land, and multitudes
thank God because thus in him He was pleased
to reveal His Son. Will you submit to Christ?
" While Peter yet spake these words " — so runs
the ancient record — " the Holy Spirit fell." Pray
that as I speak that same Holy Spirit may fall
on us and lead us to the Saviour of the world.

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

BY thl: same author

Seventh Thousand, Cro7cn St'^, c/olh, 3.V. GJ.

FIRST THINGS FIBST
Addresses to Young Men.

" I'-vcry surmoii iii Mr. Jackson's volume burns with a yrcat
earnestness. lie is emphatically a man with the best of all messages.
. . . There are happy phrases and thoughts scattered over the
volume. " — Methodist Times.

"These addresses are short, full of force, and eli iiaal in the
lessons they convey. . . . He is no waster of words : he points n
truth in a few brief, incisive jihrases, and prearlics a sermon in a
paragraph. Above all, they are manly in tone, and have the Stirling
rnijj of sincerity." — Dundee Advertise)',

" May be cordially commended to all young men foi the \\\g\\ yet
true ideal of life inculcated, and the clear and manly ai.tl arrestive
manner in which it is unfolded and enforced." — Scotsman.

•' The volume ought to be widely circulated among young men.
Mr. Jackson is a guide that they will delight to follow, full of generous
enthusiasm and high purposes, and well at home in all the books that
they themselves like to read." — London Quarterly Review.

"These vigorous, practical discourses are an index to the
thoroughly live ministry which Mr. Jackson exercises in ihe
Edinburgh community. While sound in the faith, he is quite
abreast of the many problems that demand solution in these days of
universal questioning and testing. Christ and Christianity have in
him an able, courteous, and fearless advocate. To young men who
crave for certainty of belief and for backbone in act we heartily
commend these weighty and convincing counsels."— 67/m//rtw.

London: HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27 Paternoster Row.

LITTLE BOOKS ON RELIGION

Edited by the Rev. W. ROBERTSON N/COLL, M.A., l.L.D.
Elegantly bound in cloth, is. 6d. each.

I. CHRIST AND THE FUTURE LIFE.

By the Rev. R. W. DALE, LL.D.

2. THE SEVEN WORDS FROM THE CROSS.

By the Rev. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.

3. THE VISIONS OF A PROPHET.

Studies in Zechariah.
By the Rev. Professor MARCUS DODS, D.D. ^

4. THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS.
By the Rev. ALEX. WHYTE, D.D.

S. THE UPPER ROOM.

By the Rev. JOHN WATSON, M.A., D.D.

6. WHY BE A CHRISTIAN ?

And other Addresses to Young Men.

By the Rev. Professor MARCUS DODS, D.D.

7. FOUR PSALMS.
By the Rev. Professor GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D.

8. THE UNITY AND SYMMETRY OF
THE BIBLE.

By the Rev. J. MONRO GIBSON, D.D.

9- GOSPEL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.
By the Rev. JAMES DENNEY, D.D.

3K.;.-^

London : HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27 Paternoster Row.

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L.D.

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