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MAR 3 VHS 
 
 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 A SERIES OF ADDRESSES 
 
 J. RENDEL'HARRIS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 A. 1). F. RANDOLPH & CO. 
 
 182 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
 1895 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ^ I ^HE short papers contained in this volume 
 will be recognised by many into whose 
 hands they will come as memorials of occasions 
 when we have with our friends been partakers 
 of the same spiritual meat. Their analogue 
 in the Gospel is the fragments of blessed 
 bread left over from satisfied lips, only with 
 this contrast, that, instead of twelve baskets 
 marvellously full, we have one tiny basket 
 with twelve little pieces of bread in it. I 
 hope, however, that it will be found that these 
 fragments, like the consecrated wafers in the 
 Eastern ritual, are marked with the sign of 
 the Cross and with the legend that '' Jesus 
 Christ conquers." We speak of suffering made 
 holy, of sorrow made sweet, and of victory 
 
vi PREFA CE 
 
 made real ; but have no other Gospel for our 
 own needs or for the needs of the world than 
 the grace of God in Jesus Christ. But this 
 Gospel, however enigmatic it may seem to 
 the carnal mind, is sufficient to make saints 
 and to enable them to take their kingdom. 
 
 J. RENDEL HARRIS. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE GLORY OF THE BRIDEGROOM .... 3 
 
 II 
 
 THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE . . . . I9 
 
 III 
 UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR . . . . 4I 
 
 IV 
 UNION WITH THE WILL OF GOD 67 
 
 V 
 CREED AND CHARACTER 8;^ 
 
 VI 
 
 THE .SABBATISM OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD ... 99 
 
 vii 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 VII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE CONTAGION OF ALTRUISM 1 13 
 
 VIII 
 " HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD IS ONE SPIRIT " 127 
 
 IX 
 
 GRACE AND HEREDITY 151 
 
 X 
 A CORN OF WHEAT 171 
 
 XI 
 
 THE HOLY PATIENCE 1 83 
 
 XII 
 THE DEATH-SONG I99 
 
THE GLORY OF THE BRIDEGROOM 
 
" This beginning of 7niracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and mani- 
 fested His glory ; and His disciples believed on Him." — ^JOHN ii. II. 
 
THE GLORY OF THE BRIDEGROOM 
 
 IT would scarcely be divined by a person who 
 should have presented to him the mass of 
 evangelic traditions which constitute the sources 
 of the Gospels as we know them, that the 
 miracle which St. John relates in his second 
 chapter occupied the front rank in time or in 
 intensity, so that it should be called the initial 
 sign or beginning of miracles. It is likely that 
 if we were left to imagine to which of Christ's 
 works of power such pre-eminence belonged, we 
 might select an occasion like that of the raising 
 of Lazarus, and say of it, " This must be the 
 beginning, the prince of miracles, which Jesus 
 did in Bethany of Judea, and manifested forth 
 His glory, and His disciples believed on Him." 
 But there is no word in connection with the 
 marriage at Cana that, on the surface, presents 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 such dogmatic truth and affords such inspira- 
 tion of faith as the great sentence, " I am the 
 Resurrection and the Life." Compared with 
 this august saying, believing which an emanci- 
 pated spirit may step out with confidence into 
 an unseen world, the conversation at Cana 
 seems at first sight to rise scarcely above the 
 level of triviality. How does it come to pass 
 that this occasion, as truly as the scene at 
 Bethany, was one when men should see glory 
 manifested, and believe ? 
 
 The answer to such inquiries can only be in 
 the conclusion that the banquet, and the miracle, 
 and the sayings of our Lord and of those who 
 were gathered with Him, were instinct with 
 mystical significance. We need not be surprised 
 that such was apprehended to be the case by 
 St. John, to whom the whole world and all that 
 went on in it was replete with meanings not 
 discernible on the surface, so that he saw every- 
 where the allegory of a Divine teaching, and 
 the evidence of a Divine life, and read all the 
 ordinary writing of God's finger in the laws of 
 life and its daily motions as a kind of sacred 
 cipher, the key to which had been confided to 
 
THE GLORY OF THE BRIDEGROOM 5 
 
 him by the Spirit of truth. The man had not 
 been long with Christ before he left off eating 
 the common bread of life, and betook himself 
 to that hidden manna of which the outer 
 nourishment is only the symbol. He became a 
 child again, but in a larger house. By-and-by, 
 after having played with the flowered hem of 
 God's vesture in this world, he pricked the per- 
 fections of Jesus into paper with a pin, and we 
 have the Fourth Gospel — the Gospel which is 
 not Synoptic but DIoptic, which tells so many 
 things which he saw alone, below the surface, 
 in distinction from the things which the other 
 Evangelists saw together, and upon the surface. 
 The Fourth Gospel is the mystics' own Gospel. 
 So we must not be surprised that St. John 
 attaches especial importance to the ordinary 
 event and the not very striking conversation 
 that accompanied it. 
 
 We observe, in the first place, that the occa- 
 sion was one on which the Church added audibly 
 the second term to the Trisagion, and began 
 to say, what becomes from that time an ever- 
 increasing volume of sound, spreading from one 
 believing soul to another, the words, " Glory be 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 to the Son." The whole Hfe of Christ is a 
 kind of evolution of the Trisagion : I mean 
 that His days on earth furnish an illustration of 
 the " Glory to the Father," of the " Glory to 
 the Son," and of the " Glory to the Holy 
 Ghost." The angels at His birth proclaim the 
 " Glory to the Father" ; the marriage at Cana 
 marks the beginning of the " Glory to the 
 Son " ; and the day of Pentecost, with the 
 teaching about it, and the promises that 
 ensured it, mark the point when the "Glory to 
 the Holy Spirit " was sounded by human lips 
 and in human hearts. So that, if we follow the 
 analogy suggested by the birthday of our Lord 
 and by the day of Pentecost, we should interpret 
 St. John as saying that the marriage day at 
 Cana was a great and notable day of the Lord. 
 But we must admit that we have not been in 
 the habit of regarding it as such. Perhaps that 
 is on account of our habit of estimating the 
 situations in the Gospel by reference to the 
 relative grandeur of the miracles which took 
 place, instead of looking at the life of Christ 
 from the standpoint of St. John, who sums up 
 his observations of Christ's life in general, and 
 
THE GLORY OF THE BRIDEGROOM 7 
 
 of all the incidents of it, not in the words, " We 
 beheld His miracles," but in the infinitely 
 deeper terms, "We beheld His glory." As a 
 matter of fact, all Christ's miracles are of the 
 same compass, and the occasion which we are 
 studying does not derive its importance very 
 much from the quality or quantity of the wine 
 which was made by our Lord. Its significance 
 lies in the revelation of His person rather than 
 in the record of His work. He manifested 
 His glory. 
 
 So we begin to see that the marriage at Cana 
 was an important day ; we begin to felicitate the 
 bridegroom and the bride, anonymous but 
 greatly graced, and to wish that we had been 
 invited to the celebration. But if we have this 
 feeling, we may be sure that, if there is a 
 mystical interpretation of the scene, we are 
 invited. When it comes to such a large matter 
 as the teaching of Christ to the Church and His 
 ministry to the world and to His own who are 
 in the world, we are not dealing with any tran- 
 sitory festival, but with the kingdom of God 
 itself ; and we are, therefore, entitled to say of 
 ourselves with reference to the deeper truths 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 which underlie the story, what St. John says of 
 the immediate circle, " Both Jesus was called 
 and His disciples to the marriage." Here, as 
 elsewhere, "they were called" means "we are 
 called." The truths which they came together 
 to learn, which made Cana of Galilee a 
 Divinity School of the inward life, are truths 
 which we learn with them. Their communica- 
 tions of grace are ours also ; and the mystical 
 body of Christ is so truly one, not only at any 
 given time, but at all time, that one who is 
 a disciple indeed is, if one may say so, all 
 disciples in one. He has left nets with the 
 Zebedees, and custom-houses with St. Matthew ; 
 his tears have flowed into the channel of the 
 Magdalene's, and so have reached the sacred 
 feet of our Lord ; and his head is with St. 
 John's on the bosom of everlasting Love ; he is 
 in all crosses and pains of saints that suffer, and 
 partakes of all glories, and wears all crowns ; 
 for the life of Christ makes him one with all 
 manifestations of Christ's life, both suffering 
 and triumphant, that ever have been or ever 
 will be. There is something communicated 
 to the true believer which makes him under- 
 
THE GLORY OF THE BRIDEGROOM 
 
 Stand the words, " Yesterday, to-day, and for 
 ever." Those early Fathers were not so 
 unreasonable who spoke of the Church as 
 existing before the sun and moon. The body 
 of Christ is something more than a fortuitous 
 concourse of redeemed atoms. He that hath 
 the life hath the Son ; there is nothing for- 
 tuitous, or atomic, or transitory about that. 
 
 What then is the calling wherewith the 
 disciples are called to the feast, the universal 
 calling of which we have been speculating ? 
 It must be an invitation to a knowledge of the 
 life of God in the Son : and such a knowledge 
 is, first, produced by a word addressed to faith, 
 " There standeth One amongst you whom ye 
 know not " ; secondly, expressed by a word 
 from an enlightened experience, " There stand- 
 eth One amongst us whom we know." " And 
 this is life eternal, to know Thee and the 
 Christ whom Thou hast sent." 
 
 Our Lord Christ- began His service in the 
 little world of the Galilean and Judean ministra- 
 tions, by being on that small stage what God is 
 in the universe — an anonymous, or unknown, 
 or hardly known being. He came to Cana, 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 perhaps as a stranger, possibly as a poor 
 relation, for it was an occasion when poor 
 relations are in order ; it does not appear that 
 He was asked to repeat even a holy word over 
 the feast, for another was appointed master of 
 the feast. The bridegroom and the bride wore 
 their festal crowns ; as for Him, while He was 
 in this world. He discarded His aureole, or 
 only wore it on rare days and in retreat, as at 
 the Transfiguration. You might have come to 
 the feast, and marked all the notables, from 
 near and far ; He would not be of them : this 
 one is the bridegroom of the day, and this 
 the bride ; this the bride's father or mother, 
 and this the ruler of the feast : and this an 
 anonymous Stranger, one of the Nazareth 
 party ; we have not seen Him in these parts 
 before. 
 
 The action of the drama consists in making 
 this anonymous Person central ; in changing 
 the head of the table ; or, as St. John puts it, 
 in "manifesting the glory of the Son." 
 
 A little space of time, a few brief and oracular 
 speeches, with action to match, and then there 
 is a new Feast-master at the board. " For 
 
THE GLORY OF THE BRIDEGROOM n 
 
 who," says Philo, " can pour over the blessed 
 and happy soul the libations of true joy, except 
 it be the Cup-bearer, the Master of the Feast, 
 the Word ? " And now it is the old feast- 
 master who has become anonymous ; and who 
 would, indeed, be altogether forgotten if it had 
 not been that the Stranger had taken over his 
 office and borrowed his title. 
 
 One that entered the house and saw the 
 rejoicing might say to his neighbour, " Behold 
 the bridegroom ! " Attention is naturally drawn 
 that way ; felicitation finds its obvious centre 
 in the joy that was before them, in the persons 
 of those for whose sake they had come together. 
 But these who came to the feast like substance 
 depart like shadows, when there has begun to 
 stir in the heart of the disciples the whisper of 
 a new Bridegroom that was amongst them, or 
 of a new Bride. Their places became vacant, 
 their crowns were fading, and their cups were 
 empty. They owed it to Christ that they ever 
 passed into history ; and when they do pass, 
 they are become anonymous, while their stray 
 Guest has acquired a name that is above every 
 name. Behold the Bridegroom ! 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 This, then, is the action of that day's drama, 
 and this is also the action of the drama of the 
 spiritual life generally, to make the Anonymous 
 appear amongst us, and to make us become 
 anonymous except in Him and for Him. One 
 of the surprises that God treats us to in the 
 course of our life, which will no doubt be also 
 the overwhelming surprise of our first review 
 of this life from the vantage-ground of a larger 
 and better, consists in the disclosure of the 
 way in which our anonymous Lover has been 
 besetting us behind and before, and laying His 
 hand upon us. How many constraints that 
 make for salvation have never been registered 
 in the consciousness or printed off on the 
 memory ! how many times there are when 
 qualification for duty is given concerning which 
 we shall by-and-by hear the voice saying, 
 " I girded thee, though thou didst not know 
 Me"! 
 
 "There is nothing," says M, Sabatier, in his 
 recent Life of St. Francis, " that corresponds 
 to piety like love " ; and the service of love, 
 especially the earlier service, is often anony- 
 mous. 
 
THE GLORY OF THE BRIDEGROOM 13 
 
 Readers of Cowper's Memoirs will remember 
 the way in which Theodora, his cousin, pur- 
 sued him through life with gift and remembrance 
 and token that came he knew not from whence. 
 At one time it was a snuff-box of tortoiseshell 
 with a familiar landscape on the lid, and the 
 portrait of his three hares ; at another it was a 
 seasonable gift of money ; and tradition tells 
 that upon one occasion, when these nameless 
 tokens reached him, he remarked, " Dear 
 Anonymous is come again ; God bless JmnT 
 It is difficult to understand how a poet could 
 have been so blind as not to know that such 
 nameless and appropriate gifts never come 
 except from God, and from good women. But 
 even when we lay the charge of want of insight 
 at the poet's door, we are checked by One 
 who says, " Have I been so long time with 
 you, and hast thou not known Me ? Have I 
 never looked in at thy window, or left gift at 
 thy door ? " Yet oftentimes the expression of 
 the conscious heart has never been raised so 
 high as even to the "Dear Anonymous" of 
 the poet. It is a part of God's loving way 
 with us that His criticism of our blindness 
 
14 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 towards Him is a gradual revelation ; He can 
 always make us ashamed when He wants to. 
 
 We pass to another consideration : the reve- 
 lation of the glory of the Son is not limited to 
 the knowledge of the fact of His being, and of 
 His presence in the midst ; it is a knowledge 
 of the way in which He works, and an imitation 
 of the same. At Cana of Galilee He was 
 pleased to add to the world's joy ; He took 
 compassion upon people whose cups were 
 empty or half empty, and the more compassion, 
 perhaps, because they were acting as if the 
 cups were not empty. He made up that which 
 lacked, and looked into the faces of the guests 
 and said, " Lacked ye anything ? " and every 
 one could have answered, " Nothing, Lord, 
 nothing ! " 
 
 Hard by, on a neighbouring hillside, is a 
 second town, otherwise, but for His presence, 
 little known, where He occupied Himself in 
 subtracting from the world's pain ; from Nain 
 to Cana is a very short journey geographically : 
 how far is it in every-day life ? When there 
 is a wedding in one street, there is always 
 a funeral in the next. Christ attends both, 
 
THE GLORY OF THE BRIDEGROOM 15 
 
 because to add to the world's joy and to sub- 
 tract from its pain are the alternating currents 
 of the Eternal Love ; and it is in these ministries, 
 which belong to one sacred Person, who is 
 equally at home in either, because eternally 
 occupied in both, that we see the glory of the 
 Son, who would not tell us by precept to 
 rejoice with them that do rejoice and to weep 
 with them that weep, unless He had furnished 
 the perfect example that corresponds to the 
 perfect precept. Nevertheless, we do not 
 chiefly, and certainly not only, call Him the 
 Man of Sorrows, for His highest title is the 
 Master of the Feast, the Bridegroom. 
 
II 
 
 THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE 
 
" And I saw a new heaven and a new earth : for the first heaveji and 
 the first earth ivere passed away ; and there was no more sea. And I 
 John saw the holy city, nezv Jerusalem, coming down from God out of 
 heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a 
 great voice out of heaven saying. Behold, the tabernacle of God is with 
 men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and 
 God Himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall 
 wipe away all tears fro?n their eyes ; and there shall he no 7)iore death, 
 neither sorrotu, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain : for 
 the former things are passed away." — Rev. xxi. 1-4. 
 
II 
 
 THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE 
 
 I SUPPOSE, beloved, there is not anybody 
 who has a message that is worth Hstening 
 to in the world whose message is not concerned 
 in some way or other with the passing away of 
 the former things. Whether we are dealing with 
 social reforms and political reforms, or whether 
 we are dealing with those deeper reforms which 
 concern the inmost of human life and thought, 
 the same kind of problem is presented to us : 
 the problem of getting rid of the dead past. 
 When we are speaking to people who are in 
 sin, and trying to persuade them of what their 
 duty is in the matter of repentance and faith, 
 we do it remembering that they have got a 
 long history behind them which has been a 
 displeasing history to God and a displeasing 
 life to man, and that such a record is under 
 
 »9 
 
20 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 condemnation, and that God does not mean it 
 to stay ; and that the sooner they apprehend 
 that fact solidly, and set themselves according 
 to it, and become properly adjusted with regard 
 to the promises of God and to the power of 
 God, so much the better is it for them. 
 
 But all the great movements of the soul turn 
 upon the same conviction, that our state by 
 nature is not the final state. Neither is the 
 natural joy the final joy ; but God has laid up 
 for us better things — things of which he speaks 
 as passing the understanding of man to con- 
 ceive how good they are ; and one of the 
 wonders of the kingdom of heaven is that you 
 can have a large proportion of those things in 
 this life. Let us have done with "postponed 
 heavens." We want to understand how much 
 of God is to be known in this life, and how 
 much of the joy of God is to be known in this 
 world. Such an understanding and such an 
 experience is the only reasonable preparation 
 for the life and blessedness of the world to 
 come. 
 
 1 would be a Secularist on the non-Christian 
 plan, if it were not that, happily, I am a Secu- 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE 2\ 
 
 larist already on the Christian plan. I under- 
 stand that a great many of those people who say 
 that this life is the right stage on which to see 
 recovered good and banished evil are preaching 
 the true Gospel, and that it is the Gospel of 
 the New Testament. Now, of course, we apply 
 this first of all to the individual, and we begin 
 with the individual because we understand that 
 that is God's way of dealing with the world. 
 There is no gospel which does not proclaim the 
 regeneration of the individual. But he tells us 
 also that there is going to be a restored social 
 order. It is called " New Jerusalem." There 
 is going to be a restored Church life, when the 
 redeemed society and the purified Church will 
 become one. We need that restoration very 
 badly indeed, for there is a sorrowful spectacle 
 in this world of half-converted Churches as well 
 as of unconverted people. The Church of God 
 is not made up, as so many suppose, out of 
 organisations and endowments ; it is not made 
 up out of buildings, services, and prayers, and 
 the regular duties which people connect with 
 those things. The Church of God is made up 
 out of people who have Christ dwelling in their 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 hearts ; and John calls this Church " the bride 
 of the Lamb " ; he calls it the " New Jerusalem." 
 He says that he had a vision, and saw that it 
 was prepared like a bride adorned for her 
 husband. 
 
 Let us consider, then, this doctrine of the 
 bride, which is one of the wonderful doctrines 
 in the New Testament, one of the most con- 
 soling doctrines to believers, one of the things 
 which make us most hopeful and keep us from 
 discouragement and from sinking down — the 
 doctrine that God has the reconstruction of the 
 individual, and of the Church, and of the world 
 in His own hands ; and that He is attending to 
 this business of making the former things pass 
 away. First of all, then, it is not a new doctrine. 
 That is very clear in the New Testament. Let 
 us look at a passage or two. You have it in 
 Rev. xxi., which I have read, and also a little 
 further back in Rev. xix. 9 : " And he saith 
 unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are 
 called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb." 
 
 When you have read that passage about the 
 marriage supper of the Lamb, you must go 
 back into the Gospels, and read the parable 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE 23 
 
 which it is based upon, where it says that a 
 certain man made a wedding for his son ; and 
 you will see that the whole of the Gospel 
 invitation is connected with the same figure. 
 It was not St. John who invented it ; it was 
 there before him. 
 
 St. Paul has the same doctrine, too. He 
 tells us that, with regard to particular Churches, 
 he had a desire to present one company of 
 believers to Christ as a chaste virgin. He also 
 tells us, with regard to individual believers, that 
 the man who is joined to the Lord is one spirit 
 with Him. Now you will see that by these 
 different figures, these figures which St. John, 
 and St. Paul, and the Evangelists applied to 
 the calling of the Christian Church, whether 
 they are speaking of the Church as a whole 
 or whether they are speaking of individual 
 Churches or of individual men and women, 
 they are all aiming at one thing ; and that 
 thing is a oneness with God. That is their 
 gospel, and that is their aim ; and the reunion 
 of man with God and the will of God is what 
 constitutes heaven in this life and heaven in 
 the next. Now we are following after that 
 
24 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 oneness. We believe firmly that religion is 
 the marriage of the soul with God : I hope it 
 is not very unorthodox to say that. Perhaps 
 people may say, " Why don't you say that 
 religion means being baptised, taking the 
 Lord's Supper, saying the Ten Commandments, 
 and reading your Bible ? " Well, because that 
 is not the way in which it is presented in the 
 New Testament. The doctrine of the New 
 Testament is that man may be reunited to his 
 Lord and Maker, and that every provision is 
 made in grace, as well as every adjustment in 
 providence, to lead him to that blessed and 
 gracious end ; and if you are not one with God, 
 beloved, it is because in some sense in your 
 experience the former things are not passed 
 away which God means to pass away, because 
 there is something which you are holding to, 
 some sins in which you are immersed, and 
 which you are connected with, which God has 
 condemned, and which you have not disowned. 
 But God is calling us out of these things, and 
 calls us into pure life and union with Himself, 
 union with God and unity with the neighbour, 
 a union in which ill shall disappear, and in 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE 25 
 
 which the pains and trials of life shall by-and-by 
 be altogether removed, a union which is based 
 upon God and truth, for He says, " Into that 
 holy city there shall nothing come in which is 
 unholy or unclean " ; and you may be sure of 
 this : that if there is any measure of experience 
 in this life to be realised which is comparable 
 to the fulness of the blessing in the next world, 
 it consists in the excluding of the impure, and 
 unholy, and untrue from the heart and life, just 
 in the same way that God means to banish 
 them from the whole of the world. We furnish 
 a little picture of the next world as soon as we 
 begin believing for a full salvation. I mean, 
 there is something about the experience of a 
 truly consecrated child of God which preaches 
 heaven, which tells of it, and which, in a certain 
 sense, justifies God for having made the world. 
 For we realise that God is justified in having 
 made us when we are perfectly subordinate to 
 His will and quite happy in it ; and if He can 
 make us so in this life, well, that is a little 
 picture of what the joy in the next world is 
 like. 
 
 Not only do the Apostles preach this doctrine 
 
26 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 in the New Testament, but it leads to some- 
 thing further back in the history of the Church. 
 I am very fond of tracing out the history — 
 what we call the evolution — of a doctrine, 
 because doctrines do not always just drop 
 down into the world ready-made. It means 
 that God has been unfolding His thought to 
 men, and they, with their lesser thoughts, have 
 been trying to apprehend it, perhaps first from 
 one side and then from another side, until at 
 last they arrive at some definite and approxi- 
 mately final statement, and call it " a Christian 
 doctrine." And this doctrine of the oneness 
 which we speak about, and which is represented 
 under the figure of the Bridegroom and bride, 
 is the doctrine which Jesus Himself taught, 
 and which was taught before Jesus came. 
 When Jesus spoke of the wonderful relation 
 in which He stood to man — His affection for 
 the race of man, and His love for those who 
 were in the inner circle of His union in this 
 world — He spoke about His relation to them 
 under the same figure of the Bridegroom. He 
 called Himself the Bridegroom. If you will 
 turn back to where they asked John the Baptist 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE 27 
 
 whether he were the Christ, you will see that 
 he said, " No, I am not the Christ, but I am 
 the friend of the Bridegroom " ; " The friend 
 of the Bridegroom stands and hears the Bride- 
 groom's voice, and he rejoices greatly because of 
 the Bridegroom's voice ; and this my joy " (that 
 is, the joy of the friend of the Bridegroom) " is 
 therefore a fulfilled joy." 
 
 John the Baptist teaches just in the same 
 way as St. Paul, St. John, and the Master 
 Himself did. He teaches the doctrine of the 
 Bridegroom and the bride ; and he taught that 
 right at the beginning of his preaching in the 
 New Testament. If the forerunner taught it, 
 it leads back to something earlier still. It is 
 an Old Testament doctrine ; for over and over 
 again you will find the prophets teaching in 
 their message to Israel that the Lord God was 
 wonderfully in love with His elect people, that 
 He was wonderfully full of compassion and 
 desire to speak to their hearts. Sometimes it 
 is personified in one way, and sometimes in 
 another : " I will allure her, and bring her into 
 the wilderness, and talk to. her " ; " As the 
 bridegroom rejoiceth 'over the bride, so shall 
 
28 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 thy God rejoice over thee." And I suppose 
 that every Jew who has studied or thought over 
 the Old Testament, knows the doctrine very 
 well that Israel was the bride of Jehovah, and 
 that He had united Himself unto her in a 
 covenant of love, out of which have come all 
 the promises and all the hopes of the race. 
 Well, if that is so, what a wonderful change 
 Jesus has made in the doctrine! It is not any 
 longer Israel the bride of Jehovah, but He has 
 put us in the place of Israel, and Himself in 
 the place of the Most High God. You see, 
 there is no longer any room for the doctrine of 
 Bridegroom and bride on a Unitarian basis. 
 You need the Christian doctrine in its fulness 
 to understand the relation in which we stand to 
 Jesus Christ, our Lord and our Head. 
 
 Well, that is the history of the doctrine. It 
 has come down out of the past, out of the 
 partial revelation into the full revelation of the 
 Gospel ; it has come down out of a message 
 to a particular people, living in a particular 
 country at that time ; and it has come now to 
 be a message to all people, all kindreds, and 
 all tongues. It is a message of oneness. Jesus 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE 29 
 
 Speaks this message to the Church at large. 
 To every one who bears His name, to all those 
 who are gathered under all signs and condi- 
 tions of membership, He sends the message of 
 holiness and the offer of reunion with Him- 
 self. He sends it also to particular Churches. 
 Blessed is that Church on which such a visita- 
 tion comes ; blessed is that Church to which 
 God sends by His servants a message of a 
 closer walk with God ; and nothing is worse 
 for any Church in any community than the 
 rejection of such a message as is involved in 
 the larger evangelical promises of the Gospel. 
 But He also comes down to the individual ; 
 and He brings this sacred message of white 
 robes, and holy life, and individual communion 
 to us at our own doors, and tells us in a cer- 
 tain sacred and limited way that we also are 
 united to Him in the tender affection which is 
 described in the words, " As the bridegroom 
 rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God 
 rejoice over thee." If we get to that, then 
 some of the former things are passed away. I 
 am certain that that old notion that God loved 
 people while they were positively sinning 
 
30 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 against Him is a notion which needs interpret- 
 ing. We do not mean to say that God does 
 not love people ; but we do have to show that 
 there is nothing that they can know about it 
 practically, and that they have no experimental 
 realisation of what God's care over them means 
 in its depth and fulness, while they are resist- 
 ing the work of God within. You do not know 
 anything about the hidden love of God unless 
 you submit to God. If you go on every day 
 denying God, you must not expect God to be 
 confessing you. He says, " I confess them 
 that confess Me." I suppose we may say 
 (without hurting the Gospel or diminishing 
 the truth of the message) that He loves them 
 that love Him. We have to confess and 
 harmonise with Him, and submit ; and many 
 things have to be put away before we can be 
 addressed in language like the prophets repre- 
 sented God as using to those who are nearest 
 to Him. If you are going to live in the inner 
 circle — and I do not understand a man not 
 wanting to live as near to God as he can — you 
 are not going to do that and live in the inner 
 circle of the world's affections at the same time. 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE 31 
 
 This is no " Sunday " Jesus that we are offering 
 you, no " CHURCH-TIME " Jesus ; this is the 
 "working-day" Christ — One who lives with 
 us, who tabernacles under our roof, we may- 
 say, much in the same way as He tabernacled 
 in our flesh and blood so many years ago — One 
 who says, " I will dwell in them, and I will 
 walk in them ; they shall be My people, and I 
 will be their God." 
 
 Now this is a great message, beloved ! The 
 people who talk to us about reform do not 
 strike down as deep into the nature of things 
 as this. I hope I am a good reformer, in the 
 right sense of the word. I want to see every- 
 thing wrong put right — "strikes," and all the 
 rest of it. But the worst strike in the world is 
 the strike against the will of God ; the most 
 terrible lock-out is when we resist blessedness 
 and find presently that the Master of the house 
 hath shut to the door. Our defect lies in our 
 want of submission to God's law within. It is 
 the non-recognition of the promise which He 
 has made to us to restore harmony in the 
 creature. You and I may have that harmony. 
 If we don't have it ourselves, we shall have 
 
32 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 very little heart for preaching any other gospel. 
 You won't convert sinners to any remarkable 
 extent unless you have the doctrine of union 
 with God to fall back upon. You may start 
 any number of " Pleasant Sunday Afternoons " 
 (God bless them !) ; but unless you have got 
 something in the shape of a union with God, 
 which is a blessing from Sunday to Saturday, 
 you have not got the right thing. We build 
 on union. Our Gospel flows out from it, to 
 preach things which we know, things which we 
 taste and handle, of the Word of life. That is 
 the real blessing of the Gospel message ; and 
 if we have got a message for the people, and 
 are able to bring sinners in, you know quite as 
 well as I do (and perhaps a great deal better, 
 if you are in the work all the time) that there 
 is nothing saves people so quickly as the 
 preaching of a high Gospel. Let people know 
 that we have got something, and that God has 
 given it. I know that is orthodox, because I 
 have got a sentence that bears on it out of 
 Wesley. Wesley says, " When Christian per- 
 fection is not strongly and explicitly preached, 
 there is very seldom any remarkable blessing 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE ii 
 
 from God." And he also says, " Until you 
 press believers to accept full salvation 7tozv, you 
 must not look for any revival." I am afraid 
 many people have been making a mistake. 
 They have thought the proper thing to do was 
 to try and get sinners clean first, and saints 
 afterwards. But I very much question whether 
 it is not exactly the opposite, and believe that 
 the place to begin is the twenty-first chapter of 
 the Apocalypse, where John says, " I saw a 
 new Jerusalem " first, and afterwards goes on 
 to say, " Behold, .the tabernacle of God is with 
 men." A clean Church always means a clean 
 world in proportion as it is a clean Church ; 
 and if you are in harmony with God, people 
 know it. They know the white robes you 
 wear ; they know where they came from ; they 
 know they are the gift of God's grace to your 
 faith ; they know that the smile you carry is 
 not a manufactured smile, made up for an 
 occasion, but that it belongs to you as a part 
 of your renewed nature ; they know that your 
 compassion is not the compassion of the 
 " charity-box," but that it is brotherly love 
 which makes you help people, and that what 
 
 3 
 
/ 
 
 / 
 
 34 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 makes the brotherly love is Christ within. 
 Now, if you have got Him within, you will be 
 able to show Him forth. This Saviour offers 
 us full redemption, but He only does it on His 
 own terms. You may have everything for 
 everything — the exchange rules all. You may 
 have His presence continually ; you may have 
 peace flowing through you like a river ; you 
 may have sin under your foot ; but you must 
 have Him in your heart to do it. And there 
 is no other holiness that is worth preaching 
 except that which means that God reigns within 
 and has accomplished the reunion and made 
 former things pass away. How many things, 
 maybe, you want to get rid of! How much 
 has come down out of the past, the inheritance 
 of the race ! I think no people are so much to 
 be pitied as those who have strongly marked 
 sins brought into life with them, and which, 
 you may say, in one sense, they are not 
 responsible for. Well, their case would be 
 most miserable, as our case would too, if those 
 evils which we see in our flesh were not the 
 very arena in which the power of God is mani- 
 fested. I mean, if we have not a gospel against 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE 35 
 
 heredity, I shall begin to doubt whether we 
 have a gospel at all. God deals with heredity. 
 If your mother or father or grandmother or 
 grandfather had a bad temper, and you have 
 been saddled with that bad temper all your life, 
 if you will come to God in lowly penitence and 
 faith, there is grace enough to cure it and power 
 enough to give you such a redemption that 
 generations of previous sin shall not prevent 
 nor undo the work which the Blessed One is 
 able to do in your soul. I say that would be a 
 very impossible gospel to preach if it were not 
 that we had the doctrine in the New Testament, 
 and a great many witnesses rising up to say it 
 is true. There are hardly any of us that have 
 a vital message to the world that have not 
 been saved from something or other that we 
 brought into the world with us. Probably we 
 have traced it back, and have found where it 
 came from ; and we have gone to God to get 
 the deliverance, and He has given it to us, 
 given us the power and ability to make the 
 former things pass away ; and when He makes 
 the former things pass away in our lives, I say 
 that is a kind of bridal experience : it is ability 
 
36 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 to work for Him, to suffer for Him (because 
 the bride that does not suffer for her lord is not 
 worth much) ; it is the power to bear the cross 
 and the burden and heat of the day. God 
 gives it to us ; it is something which has come 
 down to us out of heaven from God. Praise 
 His name that there is such a salvation ! And 
 you and I, beloved, may have it. It does not 
 matter if they call us bad names so long as we 
 get it. You may be called a " Perfectionist " 
 for preaching Christ to the full ; but if He 
 dwells within, it won't hurt you, and you won't 
 bear any ill-will against the people that give 
 you the name. "If they have persecuted Me," 
 He says to His bride, "they will also persecute 
 you." The way they persecuted Him was, 
 amongst other things, by crucifying Him. 
 Does He mean, if they crucified Him, they 
 will also crucify her ? Well, they will try their 
 hands at it ; but when they try, they will find 
 that every blow which is aimed at an indwelling 
 "Christ will fall short of its mark just as certainly 
 as blows did which were aimed at Christ in 
 the flesh. None conquered Him ; He rose 
 victorious over all. The very cross itself was 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE BRIDE t.-j 
 
 a ladder up into paradise ; and God will make 
 our trials ladders up to heaven if we will only 
 bear them with Jesus ; but apart from Him we 
 can do and bear nothing ; without Him there 
 is no hope, no comfort, no New Jerusalem, no 
 restored social order, happiness, or joy within ; 
 we enjoy these things on the condition of that 
 sacred companionship, even as our Lord said, 
 " I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be 
 made perfect in one, and that the world may 
 believe that Thou, Father, hast sent Me." 
 
Ill 
 
 UNION WITH A PR A YING SA VIOUR 
 
" / pray for them : I pray not for the world, hit for them which 
 Thou hast given Me ; for they are Thine. And all Mine are Thine, 
 and Thine are Mine ; and I am glorified in them. And nnv I atii no 
 more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to Thee. 
 Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast 
 given Me, that they may be one, as we are. While I was with them 
 in the ivorld, I kept them in Thy name : those that Thou gavest 'Me I 
 have kept, aitd none of them is lost, but the son of perdition ; that the 
 Scripture ?>iight be fulfilled. And now come I to Thee ; and these 
 things I speak in the world, that they viight have My Joy fulfilled in 
 themselves. I have given them Thy word ; and the world hath hated 
 them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 
 I pray not that Thou shouldesf take them out of the world, but that Thou 
 shonldest keep the?n from evil. They are not of the world, even as I 
 am not of the world. Sanctify them through Thy truth : Thy word is 
 truth. As Thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent 
 them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they 
 also might be sanctified through the truth. Neither pray I for these 
 alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me throtigh their word ; 
 that they all may be one ; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, 
 that they also may be one in us : that the world 7nay believe that Thou 
 hast sent Me. And the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given 
 them ; that they may be one, even as we are one : I in them, and Thou 
 in Me, that they may be made perfect in one ; and that the world may 
 know that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them, as Thou hast loved 
 Me. Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with 
 Me where I atn ; that they may behold My glory, which Thou hast 
 given Me : for Tho2i lovedst Me before the foundation of the world. 
 O righteo7is Father, the world hath not known Thee : but I have known 
 Thee, and these have knozun that Thou hast sent Ale. And I have 
 declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it: that the love 
 wherewith Thou hast loved Ale may be in thetn, and I in them." — ^JOHN 
 xvii. 9-26. 
 
Ill 
 
 UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 
 
 MY subject is in general the intercession 
 of our Lord Jesus, and in particular 
 the relation of the intercession of our Lord 
 Jesus to our personal sanctification. 
 
 Now we may be sure of this : that, whatever 
 else the Lord Christ was, He was a praying 
 Man. Whatever were the relations of the 
 Sacred Humanity to the Father, we are quite 
 sure that when He was on earth those sacred 
 lips moved in prayer, and those sacred knees 
 bent in prayer, and those holy hands were 
 lifted up for the men and the women that were 
 in the world ; and we know that there is no 
 criticism whatever that will touch that question. 
 Criticism may sometimes be able to say that 
 a verse here or a sentence there has been 
 added to the text and does not form the 
 
42 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 original course of a Gospel or of an Epistle ; 
 but criticism will never criticise away Jesus 
 Christ's prayerfulness, and those prayers of His 
 will never be reduced to " nothingness," as if 
 they were the passing words of one generation, 
 and not meant for all generations. 
 
 Well, we have this praying Christ. And 
 when we come to read what He said and to 
 understand a little of it, we find, to our great 
 satisfaction and delight, that He is very closely 
 related to our spiritual advance in the prayers 
 that He prayed, and that we can be sanctified 
 by Jesus Christ's prayers, just in the same way 
 as we are sanctified by a right belief in and an 
 absolute devotion to His cross. 
 
 I have been very interested from time to 
 time lately in studying the way in which the 
 whole life of Christ is the teacher of holiness. 
 All the situations of His life and all the teaching 
 of His lips express one purpose — namely, the 
 restoration of the image of God in man. That 
 is what He came for, beloved. Whatever else 
 other people preach, Jesus Christ never preached 
 any half-gospel ; He neither gave us a deficient 
 calling, nor offered to us a measure of grace 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 43 
 
 that was insufficient for the calling. He never 
 preached a series of impossibilities and offered 
 them to you so that you might take hold of 
 them as though they were possibilities, and 
 then be deceived and disappointed by having 
 taken hold of something which would not bear 
 your weight. It is quite possible to have 
 holiness teaching of a sentimental sort that 
 will not stand a day of trial or a time of cross, 
 but Jesus Christ's preaching of holiness is not 
 sentimental holiness ; it is not the holiness 
 which is meant to make people happy in 
 meetings and unhappy out of meetings. It 
 is the holiness which is meant to swim the 
 dark river with, and to carry us over every 
 big stream of trial and difficulty that we may 
 have to pass ; it is the holiness which is meant 
 to be an experience for the cloudy and dark 
 day, which will keep our testimony bright, and 
 which will keep us true, loyal, and happy, and 
 full of the gracious Spirit. Such was the 
 holiness of Christ, and of this holiness those 
 that believe are made partakers. Christ's life 
 is the restored image of God in man, and all 
 the situations of that life are of the nature of 
 
44 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 gospel ; but His prayers in particular are full 
 of the message which is involved in His life. 
 Let us then praise God for a praying Saviour. 
 
 Now these great prayers of our Lord are 
 largely sanctification prayers, because, of course, 
 our Lord could not stop with blessing us half- 
 way. What you call the "Lord's Prayer" is a 
 sanctification prayer. A man can be sanctified 
 on " Thy kingdom come," and he can be 
 sanctified on " Thy will be done." Some 
 people will never be sanctified until they pray, 
 " Forgive, because I have forgiven " ; and we 
 can be brought into the experience of the 
 highest knowledge of God and harmony with 
 God if we learn rightly how to pray, " Deliver 
 us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom " : only, 
 whichever petition we adopt, we must mean it 
 when we pray, like Jesus meant it when He 
 prayed ; and we must not put in a little caution 
 and say, " But I know that there are some 
 kinds of evils so deeply ingrained in human 
 nature that Christ's prayers do not apply to 
 them, nor Christ's power." 
 
 Some people call the seventeenth chapter of 
 St. John the Lord's Prayer, because it is in 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 45 
 
 some ways wider and deeper than the prayer 
 which we commonly use in our churches and 
 meetings ; and yet, beloved, it is not a very 
 different prayer. It is the same kind of 
 praying. It is a prayer that desires to com- 
 pass this full salvation and bring the believer 
 up to the mark which Christ has set as the 
 high-water mark of his salvation. And that 
 high-water mark of Christ's prayers and of 
 Christ's belief for us in salvation is a long way 
 up above the creeds and confessions which 
 men have made up, largely out of their own 
 experience. You cannot, for instance, read 
 this chapter, where the Lord prays that they 
 may be truly sanctified, and that they may be 
 one with Him, and that they may be kept 
 from the evil, and so on, and then turn round 
 and recite to yourself the confession that no 
 man since the Fall is able to perfectly please 
 God, but must daily displease Him in word, 
 and in thought, and in deed. I am quite sure 
 that the Westminster Confession, however 
 useful a document it is in other senses, goes 
 to shreds before the burning zeal of our Lord's 
 desire for us ; and so does all teaching that 
 
46 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 is of the same kind. The teaching and preach- 
 ing which looks at the sinner from the side 
 of the Fall instead of from the side of the 
 Redemption withers away when the glory of 
 God appears in man, and when the promises of 
 God shine out from the heaven of His love, 
 and when He tells us the length, and breadth, 
 and height of His salvation, and what He has 
 offered to do for those that believe in Him. 
 
 We have, then, these prayers of Jesus. Let 
 us see where they will take us. They are 
 connected, as I said, very closely with the 
 subject of our sanctification. There is an 
 intercessory Spirit abroad in the world, and 
 there was an intercessory Spirit in the person 
 of the Well-beloved. Perhaps we may say that 
 the first suggestion which we have in the 
 history of creation of the Spirit of God brooding 
 over the face of the waters is a kind of inter- 
 cession ; God brooding over chaos and disorder. 
 It is His nature to do it, and we are all of us 
 more or less in the chaos until the kingdom of 
 God shall come. What puts us right is the 
 spreading out of the holy wings of Divine 
 intercession over us, the love of God for the 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 47 
 
 creature, the Spirit of God descending, and 
 moving, and working, and pitying those of us 
 who are out of the heavenly way ; and so when 
 our Lord came on earth He came with the 
 wings of the creating Spirit, He came with 
 wings of heaUng. The prophecy says of Him, 
 " But unto you that fear My name shall the 
 Sun of righteousness arise with healing in His 
 wings." An old Quaker two hundred years ago, 
 describing his experience of the kingdom of 
 God, said he had felt the healing drop from His 
 wings. ^ Certainly something like that happens 
 to us. The sense of God's presence and of His 
 power ; the beautiful knowledge of the life of 
 God in the soul of man ; the predictions which 
 God has uttered over His new creation, — these 
 things are our health and our strength when 
 we take them in, while life more abundant 
 is given to us from day to day, that we may 
 know we live by God and that there is no other 
 way in which a man is ever going to live rightly. 
 
 ' Isaac Penington: "I have felt the healings drop upon 
 my soul from under His wings ; I have met with the true 
 knowledge, the knowledge of life, , . . and this hath had the 
 true virtue in it." 
 
48 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 When our dear Lord reproved the Jews for 
 having refused His message, He said, " O Jeru- 
 salem, Jerusalem, . . . how often would I have 
 gathered thy children together as a hen doth 
 gather her brood under her wings ! " That is 
 what we call intercession, that spirit of pitying 
 love, that spirit of gathering love and controlling 
 care and power. With this spirit our Lord was 
 filled. 
 
 Now just as Christ shows this spirit in its 
 fulness, so every believing child has a measure 
 of it. If you are His, you know what I mean. 
 When you were brought to the Lord, one of 
 your instincts was to go and spread your wings 
 over the needs of somebody else (it may be 
 some of you have got pretty large wings by this 
 time, and you are able to pray for a good many 
 people and bring a great many under the sense 
 of God's presence and power) ; and by that 
 fact, that you were made an interceding being, 
 a praying being, you proved your unity with 
 God in Christ more than by any other con- 
 fession ; yes, a great deal more than by merely 
 standing up in a meeting to speak, which may 
 be a very little thing. Our conversion to God 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 49 
 
 made us members of the body of an interceding 
 Christ. We not only confess that " Christ 
 Hveth in me," but are also aware that "Christ 
 prayeth in me." 
 
 An old Christian father says that a Christian 
 brother should sometimes say to another brother, 
 " Come and lay thy hands upon my head, and 
 bless me " ; and I am sure we do that. We 
 know what St. Paul meant when he said, 
 " Brethren, pray for us," and we are constantly 
 helped and blessed by the visitation which 
 comes to us through the intercessions of other 
 people. Every child of God has a measure 
 of this spirit of intercession ; and I speak for 
 myself when I say I do not know anything that 
 I have ever enjoyed in the kingdom of God but 
 that I have received it in measure through the 
 spirit of intercession which God has manifested 
 in some of His dear children. Surely that 
 prayer-life is the life of the child of God, as it 
 was the life of our Lord Himself. 
 
 Now when Jesus prays for His disciples, 
 you will not be surprised that His prayer 
 exhibits the marks of universality. It is not 
 unreasonable for us to suppose that what we 
 
 4 
 
50 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 hear from Him should have in it something 
 of the nature and substance of eternity ; and 
 we may say that this particular prayer in the 
 seventeenth chapter of St. John is an instance. 
 But all the prayers of our Lord are singularly 
 timeless. Each particular prayer is also a 
 universal prayer. Everybody is under the 
 prayers of Jesus, whether he knows it or not. 
 
 Every sinner has been prayed for, right to 
 the end of time. Do you suppose that the 
 praying brethren who may come and kneel 
 with you in public, or who may intercede for 
 you in secret, would do you very much good 
 unless there were some larger praying going on 
 somewhere ? We are hardly able to express 
 our own desires to God, and find it still more 
 difficult to express other people's. The help- 
 fulness of these prayers is that they lean on 
 the prayers which Jesus prayed. Every sinner 
 is under them. " Father," said He, " forgive 
 them ; they do not know what they are doing." 
 Is that a time prayer or an eternity prayer? 
 Shall we limit that prayer, and say it applies 
 only to the band of Roman soldiers, or to that 
 handful of scribes and Pharisees, or even to the 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 51 
 
 Jerusalem crowd ? Was it not designed for 
 the people in our midst and around us who may 
 be denying Him to-day, far larger and more 
 needy crowds than those that gathered around 
 Him in the days of His flesh ? 
 
 Every timid soul is also under the prayers 
 of Jesus. He said to Peter, " I pray for thee, 
 that thy faith fail not." Then when Peter fell, 
 you know, he fell softly, because he fell on that 
 prayer. It was a good thing he had that prayer 
 to fall upon ; and if he had been held up, as 
 he might have been, it would have been by 
 holding on to that prayer. And if you are 
 tempted and tried, and your will is being con- 
 strained to something outside the will of God, 
 and you are drifting from the Divine harmony 
 instead of being swept into it, as you ought to 
 be — if you are in that state of trial, and difficulty, 
 and tribulation, and danger, shall we shrink up 
 that little prayer to Peter, or shall we not say 
 that in Peter our eternal Lord prayed for all 
 who might have Peter's thoughts and Peter's 
 temptations, and that if it should happen that 
 any of you are to-day likely to be ashamed of 
 Christ, the same petition and the same burning 
 
52 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 care and love goes out for you, and that He 
 can keep you, and that His prayers hold you, 
 and that God has gone out in Christ towards 
 all poor timid souls to the very end of time ? 
 
 And not only the timid people and the sinful 
 people, but the believing people, are under 
 Christ's prayers. The man that hungers and 
 thirsts after righteousness comes under Christ's 
 prayer. What prayer is that ? This prayer, 
 beloved : " I will pray the Father, and He 
 shall give you another Comforter, that He may 
 abide with you for ever, even the Spirit of 
 truth, whom the world does not receive, because 
 it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him ; but 
 ye know Him, for He dwelleth with you, and 
 shall be in you." Note the two stages of the 
 indwelling of the Holy Ghost : " He dwelleth 
 with you, and shall be in you." When you 
 are hungering and thirsting, therefore, and are 
 wanting a deeper life in God, and when your 
 mind has been touched on the subject of 
 holiness, either because you have seen it in the 
 Scriptures, or because you have seen it shine 
 out in the lives and from the lips of some dear 
 brethren and sisters in God, or even if you 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 53 
 
 have never seen it anywhere, only you have 
 been inwardly convinced that it must be some- 
 where — when you get that sweet conviction 
 coming upon you, the conviction of the possi- 
 bility of sanctification, then you have the prayer 
 of Jesus like a sacred dove spread over you. 
 This prayer is balancing itself, as it were, over 
 your spirit. You are receiving the revelation 
 of an unclaimed promise of God, which rests 
 upon you just as certainly as it rested upon the 
 saints in the olden time who went apart to 
 plead and claim the fulfilment of it for them- 
 selves and for the world in which they lived. 
 Shall we let that promise shrink up and say it 
 only applies to the hundred and twenty chosen 
 people — Mary the mother of Jesus, Peter, and 
 James, and John, and the rest, down to 
 Matthias, and a little balance to make up the 
 number and total of the first Church ? Shall 
 we let that promise be limited to a few? or is it 
 not a prayer which claims all His own people, 
 and all people that are longing after holiness, 
 and all those who are tired of themselves and 
 anxious to find rest in God ? That prayer must 
 be our prayer ; and it is a prayer which is over 
 
54 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 US and for us to-day. You see what a blessing 
 it is to have a praying Saviour. We are very 
 glad when the spirit of prayer is poured out on 
 a community or in a meeting, as we know it 
 always means good ; but we may remember 
 that there is one Person who never is wanting 
 in the spirit of prayer : it was always poured 
 out upon Him ; it was always as incense rising 
 to the Father from His life ; and it has always 
 been a blessing descending on mankind since 
 He ascended to the glory. 
 
 We have then such a High-priest and some 
 knowledge of His intercession. This prayer is 
 called the High-priestly prayer of Jesus. It is 
 not altogether wrong. There is a great deal 
 in the New Testament which shows that our 
 Lord did take what we call a high-priestly 
 position towards His Church. It was very 
 natural that He should do so, because in the 
 Jewish Church there were days in the year on 
 which all the hopes of the people centred around 
 the motions and actions of one elect person. 
 That sacred person was set aside perhaps by 
 election, or in other ways, according to the 
 different times in the history of the people. 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 55 
 
 That sacred person on the day of atonement 
 drew to himself, as it were, the whole sins and 
 errors of the people, and presented them before 
 God in the holy place. That was the solemn 
 day, the most solemn day, of the whole Jewish 
 year. The Passover day is not anything like 
 it in respect of solemnity. For on that day, 
 when the high-priest comes into the holy place 
 to perform his ritual and to present his petition 
 before the mercy-seat, when he comes forth 
 from his interview with God, he comes out, 
 and he speaks over the people these words of 
 blessing — " Now ye are clean " ; and those are 
 the words which you find in the beginning of 
 the fifteenth chapter of St. John, where Jesus 
 says to His disciples, ''Now ye are clean 
 through the word which / have spoken unto 
 you." It is evident from the fact that our Lord 
 used such words as these that He wished them 
 to recognise Him as occupying a high-priestly 
 relation to themselves — a relation of One who 
 could intercede for them with the Father, and 
 who could bring them back promises of God from 
 the presence into which He entered. Now that 
 thought is, of course, all through the New Testa- 
 
56 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 ment. The disciples were not slow to catch 
 the idea ; they took it, and they worked it out. 
 When St. John saw his great vision in 
 Patmos, he tells us that he saw our Lord 
 " clothed " (as it says in our Bible) " in a vesture 
 down to the foot." If you look into the original, 
 you will see that the word that was used for 
 this vesture that went down to the foot is the 
 same word which is used for the high-priestly 
 dress ; we may represent the idea of what he 
 saw by translating his words, " I saw Him in 
 His priestly raiment." That is, he saw Him 
 carrying on His concern for humanity in the 
 risen life ; and we believe that, and we know 
 that it must be true. In the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews we have the same thought : " For we 
 have not a High-priest which cannot be touched 
 with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in 
 all points tempted like as we are, yet without 
 sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the 
 throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and 
 find grace to help in time of need." And so 
 in many other passages. Now turn to your 
 chapter in St. John, and say to yourselves, " I 
 want all the precious things that Jesus the 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 57 
 
 High-priest prayed for to be fulfilled in me." 
 That is not a presumptuous position to take. 
 We don't want to disappoint Him. Of course 
 it may cause you some disappointment your- 
 selves. You cannot please everybody ; you 
 cannot please God and please yourselves ; you 
 cannot please God and please your neighbour, 
 not altogether ; but you can please God, and 
 you can please God in allowing the prayers of 
 Jesus to be fulfilled in your experience. That 
 is part of your privilege in Him. Now, first 
 of all, be quite sure that He really did pray for 
 you individually, and in order to sanctify you. 
 He says, " Neither pray I for these alone, but 
 for them also which shall believe on Me through 
 their word." You see the prolongation of 
 Christ's prayer. You were in it, beloved. 
 There is no doubt about that. That is one of 
 the wonderful things that make us believe so 
 in Jesus Christ. I can pray for my people ; I 
 can pray for their friends and for their children ; 
 but my power of prayer does not embrace the 
 great inheritance of God right away on to the 
 end of time. I could not pray for your grand- 
 children and great-grandchildren right on to 
 
58 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 doomsday ! I have not power enough nor 
 scope enough to carry so many people before 
 God. Yet He carried them all, every one. 
 He carried you, and He carried me, and 
 petitioned the Father, and prayed for us, and 
 presented us before the throne of glory. He 
 prayed, " Sanctify them through Thy truth : 
 Thy word is truth." 
 
 " I pray not that Thou shouldest take them 
 out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep 
 them from the evil." Is that possible to-day ? 
 Is it possible for us to-day to be in the world, 
 and to be perfectly preserved from the spirit of 
 it, so that the troubles and disturbances of out- 
 side life do not affect our sweet communion 
 with God } Is that possible ? Is it possible 
 for you to be truly sanctified, so that you are 
 saved from prejudice, from pride, and delivered 
 from passion and continual enmity with God 
 and man? Is that possible? Jesus prays for 
 that very thing. That is the kind of prayer 
 which He gave utterance to ; and we are sure 
 that it was for us. When we believe great 
 things of our calling, Christ is with us. If 
 the prayer, " Sanctify them through Thy truth," 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 59 
 
 is Uttered to-day, it comes a great deal more 
 from Christ's lips than it does from any- 
 body else's ; and if you are hungering and 
 thirsting after holiness, it does not require much 
 explanation to see that your hunger and thirst 
 is secondary, and that in reality the hungry 
 and thirsty Person after holiness is of necessity 
 our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, because 
 He has everybody's hunger in His heart, while 
 we are only able to call upon God for our- 
 selves and for one or two others whom He has 
 given us. 
 
 We have then these great prayers of Jesus 
 and are under His intercession to-day. Now, 
 of course, the person of our Lord is every- 
 thing to us — I do not mean in theology so much 
 as in practical life ; and just in the same 
 way as His life is the great life, and all our 
 little lives are involved in it, Christ being the 
 macrocosm, and ourselves the microcosm, so our 
 prayers are involved in His. And when we 
 see that, we shall see also that the great stream 
 of prayer which comes flowing upon the Church 
 and is the life and union of the Church, that 
 which binds us together in one and brings 
 
6o UNION WITH GOD 
 
 blessings down upon the Church, flowed from 
 our Lord's person. And when we see the great 
 prayers in the Bible and the wonderful prayers 
 in the New Testament, they came from Jesus, 
 The macrocosm made the microcosm. If He 
 had not prayed, other people would not have 
 done so. If you will turn to the Epistle to the 
 Colossians (iv. 12), you will see there the prayer 
 of Epaphras. We do not know very much 
 about brother Epaphras, except that he was a 
 companion and friend of St. Paul ; but we 
 know this about him — that he was a man 
 thoroughly baptised with the spirit of prayer. 
 He prays for the Colossian Church that they 
 may stand " perfect and complete in all the 
 will of God." What business had he to pray 
 such a prayer as that ? Why did not the 
 religious organs of the day take him down for 
 it, and say he ought not to pray such big 
 prayers unless he put in the condition before- 
 hand that he knew they would not be answered ? 
 But we may reply, " A man does not pray great 
 prayers like that for other people until he has 
 experimentally proved that such prayers can be 
 answered for himself." His agony of soul for 
 
UNION WITH A PR A YING SA VI OUR 6i 
 
 Other people is not aroused until he has had 
 something of the agony for himself first. Was 
 the man likely to pray that other people should 
 stand perfect and complete in all the will of 
 God unless he had the witness in his own soul 
 that he stood there ? I suppose a good man, 
 however much he might be liable to mistake, 
 would not be tempted to such a piece of hypo- 
 crisy as to pray a much bigger experience for 
 other people than he had any idea of enjoying 
 or experiencing himself. 
 
 Very well, then, you see that prayer leans on 
 something. It leans, first, on Epaphras's own 
 experience — he had, as we say, " the blessing " ; 
 and, secondly, he prayed, as it says in the 
 Greek, " with agony " — with intentness, with 
 striving. He prayed for the Christians who 
 belonged to him that they might have that 
 blessing too. That is not all. His experience, 
 his strong crying and tears for them, is con- 
 nected centrally with Gethsemane and with 
 the upper room in Jerusalem. All the praying 
 that God's will may be done on earth has its 
 connection with the garden where the Man 
 of Sorrows is kneeling upon the ground and 
 
62 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 saying, *' O My Father, if it be possible, let this 
 cup pass from Me ; nevertheless, not as I will, 
 but as Thou wilt." Do you suppose we could 
 pray that way if Jesus had not prayed so ? 
 When you have come into the deep place in life, 
 when every one has been against you, and when 
 familiar friends have denied you, and when 
 your circumstances in life have become difficult 
 and you have not known which way to turn, 
 and you have been cast on God with strong 
 crying and tears, how sweet it was that your 
 tears ran into the flowing stream of Christ's 
 tears of compassion, and you got strength from 
 His victory to claim yours, and God made you 
 to stand because Jesus stood ! 
 
 Turn next to the prayer in the third chapter 
 of Ephesians. That prayer is a kind of Magna 
 Charta of the holiness movement : " For this 
 cause I bow my knees unto the Father of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all fatherhood 
 in heaven and earth is named " (you know 
 the prayer), "that He would grant you, 
 according to the riches of His glory, to be 
 strengthened with might by His Spirit in the 
 inner man ; that Christ may dwell in your 
 
UNION WITH A PRAYING SAVIOUR 63 
 
 hearts by faith ; that ye, being rooted and 
 grounded in love, may be able to grasp with 
 all saints what is the breadth, and length, and 
 depth, and height ; and to know the love of 
 Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might 
 be filled with all the fulness of God." Where 
 did St. Paul learn to pray such wonderful 
 prayers as that ? He learned, as he says, from 
 the Fatherhood. He bowed his knees to the 
 Father, I tell you that takes us back to certain 
 words in the Gospel where Jesus kneeled down 
 and said, "Abba, Father." "All things are 
 possible unto Thee." These words are the 
 first draft of Paul's great petitions ; they are 
 involved in them, and underlie them. 
 
 You see, beloved, it is not sentimental holi- 
 ness. Jesus Christ's preaching of holiness was 
 never a sentimental holiness. It was a holiness 
 which showed itself to man in sacrificial deeds 
 from first to last, and in a continual acceptance 
 of the Cross on our account ; and I do not 
 believe there is any way of getting into the 
 blessing of pure life and communion with God 
 unless we find it by the way of the Holy Cross, 
 and keep it by the way that we find it. There 
 
64 UNION WI2H GOD 
 
 is, of course, such a thing as singing ourselves 
 into ecstatic conditions ; but when the trial- 
 time came, as Jesus went down into the " deeps " 
 for us, it is true that they sang a hymn, but it is 
 also true that they went out to the Mount of 
 Olives and to the Garden of Gethsemane. That 
 was Christ's holiness. Don't you see how 
 different that is from the idea that you are 
 simply going to be given an experience which 
 is to keep you happy to the end of the journey ? 
 Of course you will be kept happy if you are 
 kept faithful ; but to be kept happy does not 
 mean that you are going to be severed from 
 Christ's cross or from the conditions of sacri- 
 fice which make the redemption of the world. 
 Christ's prayers are all cruciform, both His 
 prayers for Himself and His intercessions for 
 His people ; and if we are going the right way 
 in this matter, if God has really offered to us 
 purity and offered to us power, we may be 
 quite sure that He has offered it to us by the 
 royal way of the Holy Cross. 
 
IV 
 
 UNION WITH THE WILL OF GOD 
 
 65 
 
IV 
 
 UNION WITH THE WILL OF GOD 
 
 THE Gospel tells us that upon a certain 
 occasion, when our Lord was sitting and 
 teaching in the midst of a group of charmed 
 and attentive hearers, the circle was broken in 
 upon by some one (some brawler in God's 
 open-air church), and the discourse interrupted 
 (in the midst of who knows what Divine 
 allegory or oracle ?) by the information that 
 His mother and His brethren were standing 
 without (they should have been sitting within) 
 and desiring to speak with Him (they should 
 have been hearing from Him). And our Lord 
 looked round upon the circle of the learners, 
 and drawing the attention of His disturber to 
 
 their 
 
 ..." beautiful and holy faces, 
 Lit with their loving and aflame with God," 
 
 He said, "Who is My mother.-* and who are 
 
 67 
 
68 UNION TVITH GOD 
 
 My brethren ? . . . Whosoever shall do the 
 will of My Father in heaven, the same is My 
 brother, and sister, and mother." 
 
 You will find the passage in the Gospels at 
 the following places : Matt. xii. 46-50 ; Mark 
 iii. 31-35 ; Luke viii. 19-21. Of the three 
 accounts, that in Mark is the best to study, 
 because it is probably the most primitive form 
 of the story, and because it presents the incident 
 in a connection which is probably the historical 
 one, and certainly must have been intended by 
 the writer, according to which sequence the 
 interruption of our Lord's discourse takes place 
 shortly after a somewhat similar occasion when 
 His kinsmen had endeavoured to stop Jesus or 
 imprison or detain Him on the ground that 
 His reason was affected, and when the scribes 
 and Pharisees had taken up the same mis- 
 understanding in a grosser form by attributing 
 His power to the indwelling of an evil spirit. 
 
 It is well to bear this sequence in mind when 
 we try to interpret the account ; for if it is a 
 historical sequence or suggested as such by the 
 writer, it furnishes us with the interpretation 
 of the disturbance of our Lord's teaching by 
 
UNION WITH THE WILL OF GOD 69 
 
 placing it in line with other movements of a 
 distinctly hostile character. The message sent 
 to our Lord by His mother and His brethren 
 was no casual remark of bystanders, but it 
 was a distinct interference, a hostile movement 
 directed against His mission. There were 
 points in Christ's life when He shared in His 
 own person the experience which He predicted 
 for His followers, that a man's foes should be 
 they of his own household. Even in Nazareth 
 and in Capernaum the Sword came as well as 
 the Peace, and inward questionings sometimes 
 took the form of outward hinderings of the 
 Son of Man. When we have read the incident 
 recorded by the Evangelists, the first thing we 
 have to do is to replace the headline in our 
 Bibles, whatever may be there at present, by 
 the words — 
 
 The Holy Family. 
 
 I had at first almost said A Holy Family ; 
 but this would have been a mistake, and would 
 have been clean contrary to Christ's teaching, 
 which was that there could be only one Holy 
 Family, and not that there was one and might 
 
70 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 be another. " Whosoever shall do the will," 
 said He, " the same is the brother, the sister, 
 the mother." Let us then take the words just 
 suggested as a headline to the story, and we 
 will spend a few moments in thinking over the 
 conventional meaning which we attach to the 
 words " Holy Family." 
 
 The words express to us to-day, when we 
 hear them superficially, much the same thought 
 as would have been suggested to the circle of 
 listeners by the words " His mother" and 
 " His brethren." They are the terms which 
 we employ, for example, when we refer to the 
 efforts made by the great painters of past days 
 to represent in visible form the links between 
 our Lord and the humanity which He had 
 embraced. When we say " The Holy Family," 
 we call up before our minds one great picture 
 after another which bears the name : perhaps 
 it is a picture of our Lord and His mother, 
 with St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist, 
 or it is St. Joseph and the Virgin, with our 
 Lord standing between them, or it is the cave 
 at Bethlehem, lighted with unearthly splendour, 
 where the human forms are flanked by the ox 
 
UNION WITH THE WILL OF GOD 71 
 
 that knew his owner and the ass that recognised 
 his master's crib ; or it is some one of those 
 many forms in which the painters represent the 
 Adoration and Love which must have marked 
 the earliest days of the Son of Man. And 
 often along with the loved and loving human 
 faces the painters represent to us the adoration 
 and love of an invisible world in cherubic faces 
 and galaxies of wings and eyes. We shall 
 never cease to love the great masters for the 
 way in which they spent themselves on this 
 subject, and there are some of their treatments 
 of it which the world will never weary of, 
 because child-life and mother-love have been 
 so glorified in them. They are the true ex- 
 pression of that sentiment of which we have 
 the falsity and counterfeit in the language of 
 Herod the Great : " When ye have found the 
 Child, bring me word, that I may come and 
 worship Him also." No one brings us word so 
 clearly as the great masters do. When they are 
 at their best, their work is distinctly theology 
 of the inspired and inspiring kind. A friend 
 of mine said, after seeing the great Dresden 
 Madonna, " I don't see how any one can look 
 
72 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 at that picture and be a Unitarian." The 
 picture had provoked the thought on the artistic 
 side of Hfe which the whole story of Christ was 
 meant to suggest on the historical side. 
 
 But now let us turn from the old masters to 
 the Master Himself, and let us allow Him to 
 paint the Holy Family for us, and compare 
 the representation which He offers with that 
 to which we are accustomed. We find from 
 the Gospel that His idea of the Holy Family 
 is quite different from the conventional one. 
 He takes the brush and paints out all the 
 familiar faces that we know so well. The out- 
 ward relationships vanish away ; mother and 
 brethren and sisters disappear, and other faces 
 appear instead of theirs, listeners and learners, 
 imitators of and sufferers with Himself, doers 
 with Him of the Divine will, heirs with Him 
 of the Divine glory. The truth " Blessed is 
 she that bare Thee" is overwritten by the 
 larger language " Blessed are they that hear 
 the word of God and do it." So we are 
 brought to consider what Christ paints out, 
 and why, and who are they that are painted in, 
 and whence came they. 
 
UNION WITH THE WILL OF GOD 73 
 
 In the first place, we may say that the 
 boundary of the Holy Family (for the Family 
 may equally be described as a Land, and has 
 its boundaries as a Holy Land has) is the 
 Divine will — nothing less and nothing more. 
 We may, if we please, speak of this boundary 
 as the frame that holds the canvas upon which 
 Jesus is painting His picture for us. Inside 
 its limits will be found the saints on earth and 
 the saints in heaven. " Holy living" is another 
 term for living in the will of God : those who 
 are in the will of God are holy ; those who 
 are out of the will of God are unholy. The 
 definition is sharp, as Christ's definitions usually 
 are, and there does not seem to be a middle 
 or third term. It is this will of God by which 
 we are sanctified. Sanctity, or its equivalent 
 Beatitude, is that condition in which the lives 
 of believers have become, in their own proper 
 measure and degree, the incarnation of the 
 will of God on earth. The prepared body of 
 Christ was explained by the writer of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews as being the equivalent 
 outwardly for what was inwardly denoted by 
 the words " I come to do Thy will, O God " ; 
 
74 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 and we should err gravely, and be numbered 
 amongst those who do not know the Scriptures 
 nor the power of God, if we were to suppose 
 that the perfect conformity between Christ's 
 inward law and His outward life was meant to 
 be an argument to discourage us from our 
 calling to conformity with God's thought for 
 us, or that His prepared body was to be 
 reckoned a reason against our presenting such 
 bodies and spirits as we have to be living 
 sacrifices in a reasonable service. On the 
 contrary, we may derive great encouragement 
 from the fact that His obedience was accom- 
 plished in a body that claims fraternity with 
 ours, and we must believe that the doing of 
 the will of God is possible for those who follow 
 the blameless Lamb of God, even though they 
 are not themselves blameless lambs to begin 
 with. 
 
 In the next place, we can see that the reason 
 for the appearance of any given figure, at any 
 given time, amongst the saints in either world 
 is that the person in question has got into 
 touch with God and with the will of God ; and 
 the reason for the disappearance of any given 
 
UNION WITH THE WILL OF GOD 75 
 
 figure from the charmed circle of illuminated 
 lives is that he has ceased to be in harmony 
 with God. It is a changing picture, where the 
 grouping of the mothers and sisters and brothers 
 is constantly altering, where some press nearer 
 to the central radiance and some elongate from 
 it and disappear, where some are lost in God, 
 absorbed into the central abyss of love, and 
 some are lost out of God, withdrawing them- 
 selves from the light into the darkness. No 
 doubt this may sound strange, and it may be 
 said that what we are describing is not a 
 picture, but a kaleidoscope, and that the blessed 
 words " mother," "sister," and " brother" ought 
 not to be regarded as thus ephemeral in cha- 
 racter. Let us, then, examine the picture which 
 Christ presents to us, and study some of the 
 individual cases In it, in order that we may see 
 whether our interpretation is a correct one. 
 
 Of the central figure, at all events, there is 
 no doubt : the Christ is " the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and for ever," Necessarily in any 
 picture He must be the central object, whether 
 it be a grouping of two or of three, as in the 
 leading situations in the Gospels, or whether it 
 
76 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 be the multitude that no man can number in 
 the summing up of the saints. If two appear 
 with Him in transfiguration glory, He, naturally- 
 enough, must be delineated between them ; and 
 if three are crucified on crosses of shame, we 
 take it for granted that Jesus is in the midst — 
 even the crucifiers had that much sense of sym- 
 metry ; if He walk on the day of His rising 
 with two that are in deep distress and dis- 
 appointment, could we paint the scene of the 
 Divine converse without making the disciples 
 group themselves instinctively one on each 
 side of the mysterious Stranger ? And so with 
 every situation in His life : the triumphal entry 
 into Jerusalem divides its procession into " those 
 that went before " and " those that followed 
 after" Jesus; and the triumphal entry into 
 paradise knows no other central figure nor 
 any other focus for the motions of the blessed 
 than the throne of the Lamb. 
 
 And certainly the centre of the Holy Family 
 is and must be the Lord Christ. It is worth 
 noticing that in His representation of the 
 blessed company that do the will of the Father 
 He always placed Himself. " I do always 
 
UNION WITH THE WILL OF GOD ■j'j 
 
 what pleases Him " ; " The Father hears Me 
 always " ; "I am the Son that does nothing 
 of Himself" ; "God worketh, and I work too." 
 Such sayings as these are a summary of the 
 perfect obedience and communion in which He 
 lived. 
 
 But when we turn to the other members of 
 the Holy Family we find a great difference. 
 Begin with the blessed mother, of whom we 
 think as highest in privilege above all her race. 
 Set her as high as we may, consistently with 
 being a little lower than the angels, we cannot 
 help seeing that her will was not always the 
 will of her Son, and therefore not one with the 
 will of God. 
 
 Sometimes He went too slow for her judg- 
 ment, as when at Cana of Galilee He was 
 urged to hasten His miracle, and compelled to 
 say words out of which no criticism can remove 
 the rebuke which they obviously contain : "What 
 have I to do with thee ? " or " What have we 
 in common }'' It is the language of alienation, 
 the same which the demons use with regard to 
 Himself. " Mine hour is not yet come." It 
 is a formula of independence as regards the 
 
78 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 creature, used by One who lived in God towards 
 those who acted apart from God. He used it 
 again when His brethren urged Him to prema- 
 ture assertion of His dignity and claims. 
 
 Sometimes, again, the Lord went too fast 
 for the approval of His mother and brethren, 
 as in the case which we are studying. Sug- 
 gestions were made of His insanity, and plans 
 were laid to reclaim Him to that slower conduct 
 which never attracts the extremer forms of re- 
 proach. But if the mother of Jesus was thus 
 disposed to alternately spur and restrain her 
 Son, what is this but saying that there were 
 times when she was not a member of the Holy 
 Family at all, and therefore needed the same 
 teaching and training as the rest of the com- 
 pany, if the words of eternal blessing were 
 to be spoken over her, " The same is My 
 mother " ? 
 
 Or take the case of the most privileged of 
 the disciples, beginning with those who were 
 relations as well as followers. We have already 
 seen that His brethren did not believe in Him. 
 The earliest versions of the Gospel add a qualify- 
 ing word to that severe indictment ; they tell us 
 
UNION WITH THE WILL OF GOD 79 
 
 that " His brethren did not at that time believe 
 in Him." But even if the qualification be a 
 just one, as we can readily allow, the necessity 
 for such a qualification is a sufficient reason for 
 Christ's language with regard to His brethren 
 after the flesh ; it means that " the Lord did 
 not at that time regard His brethren as members 
 of the Holy Family." 
 
 And if we pass to the study of the experience 
 of those who were closely connected with the 
 most solemn occasions of our Lord's life, we 
 must say similar things. John the Beloved 
 was sometimes in the Holy Family and some- 
 times not : he was in it when he leaned on 
 Jesus' breast, and as St. Bernard says, " im- 
 bibed from the Only Begotten what He had 
 imbibed from the Father " ; he was not in the 
 sacred oneness when he stretched out his hands 
 to heaven to borrow a thunderbolt and destroy 
 a village of inhospitable Samaritans. 
 
 Peter, too, is a strangely fluctuating face in 
 the first days of the Gospel-preaching. Great 
 confessions and great denials follow one another 
 so closely as hardly to leave space between 
 them for Christ to praise the confession or to 
 
8o UNION WITH GOD. 
 
 war against the deviation. " Thou art Christ. 
 . . . But Thou shalt not suffer." " I will go 
 with Thee to prison and to death. . . . But 
 ... I do not know the man." 
 
 Now we may be sure that these fluctuations 
 could not be meant for the settled experience 
 of the dear mother and brethren and disciples. 
 The Lord could not have intended that a tidal 
 wave of joy or illumination should toss His 
 disciples to His breast, to be followed more or 
 less rapidly by an undertow which should carry 
 them back again into conditions which they had 
 coveted to leave. There must be some way of 
 being kept in the love of God, if there is any 
 way of finding the love of God for ourselves. 
 But the art of keeping what we find is an art 
 which is only learned in an upper chamber on 
 the day of Pentecost. Nor is there anything 
 short of a direct occupation of our souls by the 
 promised Spirit of God that will enable us to 
 be " always what we sometimes are, and never 
 what we sometimes have been." 
 
V 
 
 CREED AND CHARACTER 
 
 8i 
 
V 
 
 CREED AND CHARACTER 
 
 THERE is an extant piece of early Christian 
 literature commonly cited as the Second 
 Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, but which 
 would be more accurately described as a homily 
 read by some unknown person in the Church at 
 Corinth, from which I wish to quote the opening 
 sentences, after which I will construct a lesser 
 homily upon the one from which the excerpt is 
 made. The document is an interesting one, 
 not merely from an antiquarian point of view, 
 as being perhaps the earliest known sermon in 
 the history of Christendom outside of the pages 
 of the New Testament, and because it has the 
 advantage of being complete in itself, whereas 
 the records of apostolic discourses are for the 
 most part mere fragmentary notes ; but also 
 because there are suggestions in it of the 
 
 elevation of thought and of morals which we 
 
 83 
 
84 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 associate with the apostolic age. Whoever the 
 writer may have been, he was a manly soul to 
 whom the Isthmian games, which were close 
 at hand when he was preaching, suggested 
 the same wrestlings and runnings for spiritual 
 crowns as had been spoken of by an apostolic 
 athlete who had preceded him. 
 
 The opening words of this interesting docu- 
 ment are as follows : " Brethren, we ought to 
 think of Jesus Christ as God, as the judge of 
 quick and dead. And we ought not to think 
 meanly of our salvation : for when we think 
 meanly of Him, meanly do we also expect to 
 receive." It is clear that for the man who 
 uttered these words there was a necessary con- 
 nection between creed and character, between 
 what we confess and what we experience, 
 between low views of Christ and meagre 
 receptions of the grace of Christ ; and, on the 
 other hand, that lofty views of the person and 
 work of Christ are closely related to the fulness 
 of the blessing of the everlasting Gospel. It 
 was not of the creed as a bul-wark against heresy 
 that he was speaking, but of the creed as a 
 stepping-stone to experimental holiness. 
 
CREED AND CHARACTER 85 
 
 You will find the same conjunction of ideas 
 in another very helpful little book of the Spirit, 
 the Dream of Gerontius, by John Henry 
 Newman — the little book which Gordon took 
 with him to Khartoum to die on. When 
 Gerontius is on his death-bed, he makes his 
 confession as follows : — 
 
 " Firmly I believe and truly 
 
 God is three and God is one : 
 Next I do acknowledge duly 
 
 Manhood taken by the Son : 
 And I firmly trust and fully 
 
 In that manhood crucified : 
 Every deed and thought unruly 
 
 Do to death ; for He has died. 
 Sanctus fortis, sanctus Deus, 
 
 De profundis oro te," etc. 
 
 And you will notice the very same flight of the 
 soul from its creed about God to its conformity 
 with God as we detected in the early Christian 
 homillst. Now it is quite possible that it may 
 be a new thought to some that orthodoxy and 
 sanctity have the ultimate connection which we 
 have suggested ; certainly the common opinion 
 would seem to be that, so far from there being 
 any link between them, anybody can be orthodox 
 
86 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 and no one can be holy. But that opinion 
 simply arises from wrong views with regard to 
 the faith of the believer and the Divine nature 
 of which he becomes partaker. We are not 
 speaking of mere lip confessions, nor of Utopian 
 attainments : we are talking of God and the 
 children of God. 
 
 It is not easy to have right views of God and 
 clear vision of Christ. Even on the intellectual 
 plane it does not become easier as time goes 
 by to say that we believe in the Son of God : 
 on the contrary, there are abundant signs that 
 the cyclical movement which Church history so 
 often suggests is bringing us back again not 
 only to the primitive life of the Church, but also 
 to the primitive questions of the Church, and 
 we may very likely end with a last heresy 
 similar to the first as regards the person of the 
 Lord Himself. But if it is not easy to have 
 satisfactory intellectual apprehensions of Christ, 
 neither is it easy to possess that spiritual appre- 
 hension which handles and tastes and feels the 
 Word of Life. Apart from the help and illu- 
 mination of God Himself, the Christian creed 
 is an alpine range of impossible beliefs. 
 
CREED AND CHARACTER Zl 
 
 But if belief is alpine, what are we to say of 
 conduct and of character — I mean of conduct 
 as explained by Christ and character as required 
 by Christ ? Is it easy to be blameless and 
 harmless, the sons of God without rebuke, in 
 the midst of a crooked and perverse generation ? 
 It is Christ of whom we are told that He was 
 holy, harmless, and separate from sinners ; and 
 His level must at least be as high as our 
 mountain. And even those who venture to 
 disbelieve in the elevation of Christ's character 
 do not make it easier for us to be what 
 we ought to be by the unbelief which they 
 suggest. They cannot make us more by making 
 Him less. The Christian aspires to be holy 
 because his Lord and God is holy ; he is 
 hardly likely to aspire more if he should believe 
 less. 
 
 And what is true of virtue and of sanctity in 
 general, as we regard them mirrored in Christ 
 and hear them enforced by Him, is true of all 
 the separate headings under which the Christian 
 character can be subdivided ; so that whether 
 we consider the command to truth, justice, and 
 love, to patience under the hand of God or at 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 the hands of men, to the forgiveness of injuries, 
 and the benediction of those that curse us, we 
 are obliged to regard the Christian life as an 
 elevated range of inaccessible conduct. 
 
 And the strange and wonderful thing is that 
 all the spiritual men seem to discover that these 
 beliefs which make the Creed, and these 
 practices which make the Life, however im- 
 possible and inaccessible they may be separately, 
 are possible and accessible when taken together, 
 and that thus taken they blend into a shining 
 tableland of faith and life, — 
 
 " To which our God Himself is moon and sun." 
 
 And it need hardly be said that the truth of 
 this is not deduced from a quotation from 
 an anonymous father of the second century, 
 or the imaginary dying Christian depicted by 
 a father of the nineteenth century, for it is 
 merely a roundabout way of saying what St. 
 John says in a sentence : " Who is he that 
 overcometh the world, but he that believeth 
 that Jesus is the Son of God ? " or what St. 
 Paul proclaims equally forcibly from his own 
 experience : " I have been crucified with Christ, 
 
CREED AND CHARACTER 89 
 
 and I live no longer : the world is crucified to 
 me, and I to the world." 
 
 So it comes to this, that we must say " God" 
 and " Holiness" as nearly as possible in succes- 
 sive breaths ; so that God may make holiness 
 possible, and holiness make God real. We 
 must say "A Divine Saviour," and then "A 
 Divine salvation," thinking meanly neither of 
 the one nor of the other. And we must 
 sedulously exclude from our hearts and lives 
 everything that would involve unworthy 
 thoughts of Him. We must covet that the 
 thoughts of our hearts may be cleansed by the 
 inspiration of His holy word, in order that we 
 may worthily magnify His holy name. The 
 prospect of a life continued without the heart 
 being cleansed is unworthy of the Name. " I 
 should die, O my God," said St. Catharine of 
 Genoa, in one of her moments of religious 
 ecstasy, " if I thought that I should fail of loving 
 Thee with all my heart." 
 
 We may be sure that nothing will be so 
 likely to make us miss the mark of the Divine 
 glory as the habitual exercise of unworthy 
 thoughts with regard to the Christian calling in 
 
90 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 general, or our personal vocation in particular. 
 Faber says that it is as easy for the devil to 
 contend against God with low views as with 
 mortal sins. I think this is probably true, and 
 that if it is true low views must be classed with 
 the temptations that make for mortal sins. In 
 the armoury of the devil they are ranged along- 
 side of the most biting and burning of his fiery 
 darts. At the same time it must be admitted 
 that the analysis and detection of low views, 
 either in the individual or in the Church, is not 
 so easy as the crusade against deadly sins. 
 Minimum Christianity has a kind of orthodoxy 
 of its own : it is considered respectful to Christ 
 and His Apostles that the Church should have 
 receded from what they proclaimed and lived ; 
 and, on the other hand, along with the com- 
 placence over a Church which has ethically and 
 spiritually gone down, there is a disapprobation 
 shown towards individuals who may be con- 
 sidered too keen in their purpose to reascend : 
 so that it comes to pass that a crusade against 
 mean views of Christ and of His great salvation 
 would hardly be recognised as a crusade at all. 
 We may, however, be sure that if the enemy 
 
CREED AND CHARACTER 91 
 
 fights against God successfully with low views, 
 the most successful way to resist him is to 
 disarm him. Now those views of God and of 
 His work in man are low views which in any 
 degree suggest that we have a smaller God to 
 deal with than the early Church had. It is a 
 necessary part of our idea of God that He is 
 not capable of being, according to human ideas, 
 more and less. " Thou art the same, and Thy 
 years have no end " is philosophy as well as 
 religion ; it is the same thought that underlies 
 the words, " Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and for ever." But if it were not an 
 intellectual necessity for us to think of God as 
 changeless and timeless, we should not hesitate 
 to say that for the true Christian, if the question 
 were asked as to whether God could be less or 
 more, the answer gathered up from every day 
 of communion and confirmed by every moment 
 of illumination would be that God was more 
 and more continually. So that it is easy to 
 understand how St. Paul sometimes falls into 
 expressions which suggest growth in God, and 
 talks of " increasing with the increase of God," 
 because the revelation of God and the com- 
 
92 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 munion with God and the fellow-working with 
 God were developing at such a rate, both in 
 his own experience and in the experience of 
 those whom he taught to imitate him and 
 Christ in him. 
 
 One of my early book memories is an illus- 
 trated copy of ^sops Fables, and amongst 
 them one fable in particular suggests itself to 
 me in this connection : a story of an old woman 
 leaning over a huge wine jar which once con- 
 tained excellent Falernian, and inhaling the 
 fragrance of the vintage with which the vessel 
 was once filled. I quite forget the moral of 
 the story, and the illustration cannot be re- 
 produced in the present pages, however much 
 one might wish to set before the reader the 
 aged form and the empty amphora. For us of 
 course the moral is that no such figure and no 
 such vessel can represent the Christian Church. 
 Of course we would admit cheerfully and gladly 
 that the maxim about the permanence of sweet 
 odour in a vessel that has once been filled 
 (" Quo semel imbuta est," etc.) is true of the 
 Christian Church : we do not think it easy for 
 any Church to be so dead that a devout or 
 
CREED AND CHARACTER 93 
 
 hungry soul cannot find in it some savour of 
 God in Christ. But we think the scent-bottle 
 theory of the Church is not a good one. One 
 needs to paint another figure by the side, with 
 the flush of heavenly youth, and a cup that 
 runs over. Underneath the pair of pictures we 
 may write the old-fashioned words, " Ecclesia 
 stans aut cadens " : on the one side we illustrate 
 the day of Pentecost fully come, and on the 
 other the day of Pentecost fully — gone ! 
 
 Further, we must remember that those are 
 low views of Christian life which assume that 
 a less complete surrender to the Lord will be 
 adequate to our full salvation in the present 
 day than was necessary in the days when loyal 
 and loving people left all that they might 
 follow Christ. Confessors are made out of 
 people who have something to tell, and martyrs 
 out of people who have some one to love. We 
 cannot charge the early Christian teachers with 
 concealing the secret of their success, and 
 letting the knowledge of their elixir die with 
 them. " For whom I have suffered the loss 
 of all things"; "Where Thou goest I will 
 go " ; " These are they which follow the Lamb 
 
94 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 whithersoever He goeth." But no tradition, 
 not even from the best and loftiest lives, is 
 sufficient to secure for us the point of contact 
 with the Eternal Life. Low views must be 
 chased out of the personal life, as well as 
 banished from our thoughts of the Church. 
 When this is done we shall make progress. 
 It will be a birthday of new spiritual science. 
 
 How often in the matter of our earthly- 
 knowledge everything leads up to some definite 
 grasp of a new truth, upon the single appre- 
 hension of which all future thinking turns ! 
 Sir William Rowan Hamilton tells us that the 
 birthday of the science of quaternions was on 
 a certain occasion when, as he was walking 
 with Lady Hamilton towards Dublin, " the 
 galvanic circle of thought began to close, and 
 the sparks which dropped from the circuit were 
 the fundamental /,/, and k'' of the new science. 
 Does any one ask what would happen if the 
 galvanic circle of obedience were to close in 
 any life? We cannot tell in particular what 
 sparks would fall from the completed circle of 
 communion ; but we have it summed up for us 
 in general in the formula of Acts v. 32 : " He 
 
CREED AND CHARACTER 95 
 
 hath given the Holy Ghost to them that obey 
 Him." 
 
 And, last of all, those are low views of the 
 Gospel which assume it to be less catholic in 
 regard to the individual than in the world at 
 large. We all of us believe in foreign missions 
 nowadays ; but to believe in claiming the world 
 for Jesus has been a progressive education in 
 the Church from the beginning. It has been 
 carried out by contention often, and by entreaty 
 ever. Peter only grasped it slowly, James 
 perhaps never ; Antioch divided over it, and 
 Paul that went to the work went under what 
 was often very like anathema. But it is easy 
 to-day to say that the earth is the Lord's; 
 and we hardly consider any one a good Christian 
 who has not some share in missionary enterprise, 
 some touch of missionary fervour. 
 
 Is it less important to proclaim the empire 
 of Christ over the passions than over the 
 savages of far-away islands, a less necessary 
 Gospel to set Him over all thoughts that rise 
 up against obedience to Him within the secret 
 mind than to carry His truth and set it above 
 idolatrous worships and imperfect apprehensions 
 
96 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 of God ? Must it not be, as Newman said, 
 that the visitation of God's Spirit is ** as catholic 
 in the individual as it is in the Church at large, 
 and that it claims the whole man for God " ; 
 and that any spirit which makes reserves from 
 this great obedience, the circuit of which God 
 is closing in the thought, will, and affections of 
 every true believer, is not of God ? 
 
VI 
 
 THE SABBATISM OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD 
 
 97 
 
" There 7'smaincth therefore a rest to the people of GodT — IIeb. iv. 9. 
 
 98 
 
VI 
 
 THE SABBATISM OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD 
 
 WHEN the proposal was made for carry- 
 ing a railway through some of the 
 most beautiful scenery of the Derbyshire dales, 
 an indignant letter was written by Mr. Ruskin 
 to the public papers to stay, if it were possible, 
 the devastation that seemed to be impending 
 over a country which he loved not merely for 
 its own sake, or for his own sake, but for 
 the sake of the people themselves, to whom 
 its exquisite configuration was of the very 
 nature of an evangel, and therefore entitled 
 to the tradition of an unblemished text from 
 generation to generation. Amongst other argu- 
 ments which he urged against what, I suppose, 
 may be called the secularisation of the Dale 
 scenery, he said that Derbyshire is "a lovely 
 child's alphabet, an alluring first lesson in all 
 that's admirable." And without discussing the 
 
 99 
 
loo UNION WITH GOD 
 
 question of the justification of railroads in 
 beautiful localities, or the value of Mr. Ruskin 's 
 defence of such localities against the spoiler, 
 we may recognise, in the sentence quoted on 
 the educational value of small strips of country, 
 a truth which has been closely wrought into 
 the religious history of the race. For it has 
 pleased God to make one small land of such 
 importance in the spiritual progress of the 
 people, that not only have the ordinary pro- 
 cesses of His providence been seen in its story,- 
 not only has it been the stage for the fulfilment 
 of promised mercies, and for the working out 
 of threatened judgments, but the highest 
 aspirations of the soul in quest of union with 
 God have been expressed in the language of this 
 country, of its rivers and plains, of its corn and 
 wine and oil, of its wars and rests ; so that we 
 may fairly say, in Ruskin's terms, that Palestine 
 is a lovely child's alphabet, an alluring first lesson 
 in all that's admirable ; and when we say this we 
 mean chiefly to draw attention to the thought 
 expressed by the writer to the Hebrews, that 
 out of this alphabet was spelt the truth that 
 "there remaineth a rest to the people of God." 
 
THE SABBATISM 01' THE PEOPLE OF GOD loi 
 
 And I suppose there is no historical student, 
 and certainly no student of Scripture, who 
 would dispute or deny the educational value 
 of the land of which we speak. Nine-tenths 
 of the good words we repeat are in Eastern 
 language, if we only knew it : they can never 
 be more than half translated, however pro- 
 gressive we may be. We shall always talk of 
 Promised Lands, whenever God breathes into 
 our souls the hope of good things to come ; of 
 Beulah or wedlock lands when we describe the 
 life of abiding communion with God ; of New 
 Jerusalem, rather than of Atlantis or Utopia, 
 when we see visions and dream dreams of 
 renewed and revised social order : it is signifi- 
 cant that the most enthusiastic persons who 
 took part in the Chicago Parliament of 
 Religions have described the scene as being 
 the Mount Tabor of their personal experience. 
 There was no American mountain adequate to 
 express the emotion ! From the historical 
 standpoint at all events this little land vindicates 
 its right to be called a religious alphabet, and 
 the smaller the land the more wonderful is it 
 that so many lessons have been taught in terms 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 of it. Compared with Egypt or Assyria, this 
 land is only a strip for which they both con- 
 tended ; yet it is from its natural features, and 
 not from theirs, that God taught His children 
 their elementary lessons, and is teaching them 
 to-day some of their more advanced lessons. 
 Compared with its neighbour Phoenicia, from 
 which Western peoples received their secular 
 alphabet, we may say of this land and its 
 message to the rest of the world that it has 
 for its Cadmus Him that was from the be- 
 ginning. For the Spirit of Truth not only 
 made a message out of Christ's life, but also 
 out of His environment, and made the land a 
 talking and a teaching land for all those who 
 have ears to hear. And so 
 
 " Faith hath yet its Ohvet, 
 And love its Gahlee." 
 
 It was natural enough that this should have 
 been so when Christ was on earth ; for in 
 those days all creatures found a speech, and 
 the very birds and beasts and trees and flowers 
 were full of oracles : the birds might say, We 
 are created to be preached about ; and the 
 
THE SABBATISM OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD 103 
 
 lilies, We are here to be considered ; and the 
 lambs, When in fold we are the figure of His 
 Church, and when lost, we are the favourite 
 text for His compassions to discourse on ; and 
 as for the trees, the fig tree when barren 
 proclaimed His judgments, when slow of fruit, 
 His forbearance, and in the richness of summer 
 promise. His advent. For everything that 
 was about Christ was vocal of Christ. But 
 it would be a mistake to suppose that the 
 message of the land was over when Christ 
 ascended. For as time went by a new lesson 
 was framed out of the very desolations that 
 were impending over it, and an illuminated 
 mind made an argument, recapitulating the 
 story of its first conquest, and saying, almost as 
 if he were working out a string of syllogisms, — 
 
 " If they shall enter into my rest : 
 They to whom it was first preached, entered not ; 
 It remains that some must enter in ; 
 If Joshua had given them rest, he would not afterwards 
 
 have spoken of another day. 
 There remaineth, therefore, a rest for the people of God." 
 
 So we conclude that it was God's will to 
 make us learn the lessons of our personal 
 
I04 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 sanctification out of the migration of His 
 ancient people, and to say of the relation 
 between their fortunes and ours, " The Holy 
 Ghost thus signifying . . . that there remaineth 
 a rest to the people of God." 
 
 And now let us go a step further, and with 
 the map of Palestine before our eyes, and the 
 story of the entrance of the children of Israel 
 before our minds, let us say that it appears 
 that the good land and large into which God 
 led His people was designed (i) to be surveyed 
 from a mountain of vision ; (2) to be entered 
 upon by a passage of faith. We begin with 
 vision : because eyes take possession of their 
 inheritance before hands and feet ; and as a 
 matter of fact hands take hold and feet enter 
 in because eyes have seen. Nothing is more 
 important than a good perspective in the king- 
 dom of God ; until we have a measure of 
 vision, there is no place for footsteps of advancing 
 and appropriating faith. Vague and general 
 notions as to the kingdom of God are almost 
 worthless ; they never constitute the terms 
 of a covenant between God and the soul. 
 Splendour, glory, and immensity, some one 
 
THE SABBATISM OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD 105 
 
 has said, are great thoughts, high ideas ; but 
 a little definite happiness would be more to 
 the purpose. We need to get some informa- 
 tion from God Himself as to what it is that 
 He is wanting to do with us and for us ; and 
 if He opens the eyes of our heart to the 
 knowledge of His will, and makes us strong 
 to grasp with all saints the length and breadth 
 and height of Redeeming Love, we may be 
 encouraged to exchange the panorama for the 
 reality, and to turn contemplation into obedi- 
 ence. It is for this reason that our Lord in 
 His teaching on earth proclaimed a series 
 of beatitudes in what we call the Sermon on 
 the Mount. These beatitudes are a series of 
 instantaneous photographs of the Holy Life, 
 in which the initiated soul is seen under so 
 many successive aspects, as mourning and as 
 merciful, as pure in heart and aspiring with 
 divinely quickened desire ; but all these de- 
 tached views are only so many glimpses of 
 what is comprehensively defined under the 
 head of Blessedness ; and just as in Edison's 
 newly invented kinetograph a succession of 
 rapidly taken photographs may be recombined 
 
io6 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 into the story of the motion of an object, so 
 the phases of beatitude are to be combined 
 together as beatitude, and then, seen in one 
 combination, are to be the object of the spiritual 
 covetousness of the soul that is ascending to 
 the Divine likeness. When, therefore, we 
 have an intelligent conception of what blessed- 
 ness is, we are on the mountain of vision ; and 
 when we stand on the mount of vision it is 
 natural to say, " I pray Thee, let me go over." 
 As we ascend the mountain of vision it is 
 a counsel of the first importance that we take 
 our stand with our faces toward the good land 
 and our backs to the wilderness. It is a 
 panorama that lies in one direction only, and 
 the vision depends on the attitude, as well as 
 on the altitude. For this reason the Scriptures 
 exhort us (i) negatively, to let the dead past 
 bury its dead, for "the time past suffices to 
 have wrought the will of the Gentiles " ; to 
 " forget the things that are behind," and even 
 to " leave the word of the beginning of Christ," 
 in order that (2) positively, we may " prove 
 the good and acceptable and perfect will of 
 God," may " reach out towards those things 
 
THE SABBATISM OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD 107 
 
 that are before," and be " carried forwards to 
 perfection." And this attitude implies, amongst 
 other things, that we have done with legal 
 years, and have silenced vain regrets. We 
 must exchange the obedience of the letter for 
 the law of the spirit of life which is in Christ 
 Jesus. The thought either of our own loneli- 
 ness in a wide world, or of our own disappoint- 
 ment in a contentious world, must be eclipsed 
 by the assurance that we shall neither be lonely 
 nor disappointed when the kingdom of God 
 shall be fully come. 
 
 Of the wilderness life, then, it is said, "The 
 time past suffices " ; the covenant, moreover, 
 of God with the soul is indicated in the words 
 with which the Apostle continues, "that we 
 should live . . . the rest of our time ... to 
 the will of God " ; it is a covenant with the 
 residue of our days. And this covenant is 
 accepted by the soul on the mountain of vision 
 in an act of consecrating faith : — 
 
 " Lord, in the strength of grace. 
 With a glad heart and free, 
 Myself, my residue of days, 
 I consecrate to Thee." 
 
io8 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 We must not, however, forget that even on 
 the mountain of vision, and when the soul is 
 looking in the right direction, there are such 
 mists as oftentimes obscure the landscape even 
 to people who wish to see. These mists are 
 the results, in many cases, of a false theology, 
 which has for generation after generation in- 
 sisted that God shall not do for His people, 
 and Christ shall not be to His people, just 
 what the Scriptures propound. It is impossible, 
 or almost impossible, to argue with persons 
 who are set at strife with their own blessedness 
 by their teachers, but there is one consideration 
 which is encouraging, and that is this : it often 
 happens that to sincere people who are seeking 
 the closer walk with God there comes an ex- 
 perience similar to that which Wordsworth de- 
 scribes in the third book of his Excursion, when 
 
 " a step, 
 A single step, that freed me from the skirts 
 Of the blind vapour, opened to my view 
 Glory beyond all glory, ever seen 
 By waking sense or by the dreaming soul. 
 
 That which I saw was the revealed abode 
 Of spirits in beatitude ! " 
 
THE SABBATISM OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD 109 
 
 It is a waste of time to try and fight with 
 the blind vapour of traditional misconceptions 
 of God and traditional misinterpretations of the 
 Scriptures, when a single step of obedience 
 will often set us saying and singing that ** there 
 remaineth a rest to the people of God," 
 
 We pass on to the next thought, which is 
 that our Lord who planned the mountain of 
 vision planned also the passage of faith, the 
 river which must be crossed before the good 
 land is ours. He set Jordan on the map, and 
 it is not for us to erase it. Here we are 
 brought face to face with the fact that we are 
 to come down out of the vision that we may 
 go over into the reality. The vision is with- 
 drawn as we descend to take possession of 
 what God shows us to be most truly ours : the 
 mystics call this deprivation which comes at a 
 certain point in the advance of the soul the 
 dark night of faith, when every step has to be 
 taken in absolute dependence upon God, and 
 assurance that the vision was truth and no lie. 
 We drop into a lowly vale, as low as the hill 
 was high : it is the valley of our individual 
 nothingness, the nothingness of the creature. 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 Jacob is left alone, and a strange angel wrestles 
 with him all night long, until the day of a new 
 covenant-making (that shall also be covenant- 
 keeping) dawns upon him ; until the word of 
 blessing shall be spoken, that " as a prince 
 thou hast power with God and with man, and 
 hast prevailed." The children ol the Patriarch 
 are brought to the edge of the overflowing 
 stream with which faith has to reckon ; they act 
 as though the waves were rocks, or as though 
 the waters were dry land. And the *' lovely 
 child's alphabet " has nothing more lovely than 
 the thought of the unreserved obedience and un- 
 limited submission which are the characteristics 
 of the great surrender by which such things 
 are claimed for our own as " God has laid up 
 for them that love Him." 
 
 If this be the alphabet by which God teaches, 
 may we be the children that learn, the " obedient 
 children" (i Peter i. 14), the ** dear children" 
 (Eph. V. i), the "little children" (i John ii. i), 
 the "children of God " (i John iii. i). 
 
VII 
 
 THE CONTAGION OF ALTRUISM 
 
" / am the light of the world." — ^JoHN vii. I2. 
 " Ye are the light of the world."— Mk-vt. v. 14. 
 
VII 
 
 THE CONTAGION OF ALTRUISM 
 
 T^TE put these two verses side by side, 
 * ' because they are so identical in ex- 
 pression that they must refer to some marvellous 
 possible oneness of character ; and since there 
 is nothing so altruistic or other-loving in the 
 world as the sunshine, which, as far as we 
 know, is all giving and no taking (a radiant 
 energy of which we predict no return to its 
 focus), we are entitled to conclude that an 
 altruistic Saviour must be accompanied by a 
 people who are saved in this sense, that they 
 become themselves altruistic. And for this 
 reason we do not to-day print the word "light " 
 in the passage from John with a capital letter, 
 and in the passage from Matthew with a small 
 letter, because the change of the type is not an 
 indication of great faith or of great humility, 
 but is too often a mark of unbelief and her 
 
 »3 g 
 
114 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 elder sister pride (who affects humility) ; or, if 
 not exactly so bad as that, it is a mark of the 
 unreality with which we regard the sacred 
 humanity. (Both these last words also we 
 print to-day with small letters, for the same 
 reason as above.) It is quite true that capital 
 letters have become a part of the popular 
 religion, but the conviction grows upon us that 
 they have been used to excess, and to the 
 detriment of the spiritual life. Take up, for 
 instance, such a book 'ssY-axx'd.xs Life of Christ, 
 and notice how the early life of Jesus is large- 
 typed, so that even the simple word " boy " 
 cannot be printed without being made to suggest 
 that He was never like other children. For 
 example, " the Boy was with some other group 
 of friends or relatives in that long caravan " ; 
 *'the Boy was in the temple to inquire and 
 learn." We are quite sure that such printing 
 throws an air of undue mystery about what is 
 perfectly natural, and prevents us from entering 
 into fellowship with Christ's early years, and 
 with His mother's joy over the unfolding pur- 
 pose of God in those early years. He who 
 grew in wisdom and in stature from day to 
 
THE CONTAGION OF ALTRUISM 115 
 
 day must often have had the added cubits of 
 His height tested by human hands with a 
 human rule ; for the Gospel teaches us to 
 reverence the anthropometry of Jesus, as well 
 as to believe all that prophets have said, or 
 saints have sung, about His redeeming work 
 and His changeless love. And it is significant 
 that the records of His life have come down to 
 us in manuscripts, which the scholar knows to 
 have been in the first instance entirely destitute 
 of the distinction of capital letters ; and those 
 who are mystically inclined, and desire to realise 
 in their own experience everything that is com- 
 municable in the life of Christ, will take the 
 hint, and say to themselves over this doctrine 
 of altruism, as over everything else that unites 
 us to the Lord, " that we are in Him, in that 
 which was from the beginning " ; and " as He 
 is, so are we in this world." They will aspire 
 to live with His very life ; they will kindle 
 " flame from flame." So much being premised 
 as to the union between the other-loving Lord 
 and the other-loving people, we turn back to 
 the fifth chapter of Matthew, from which the 
 second of the announcements of Christ quoted 
 
n6 tlNION WITH GOD 
 
 above is taken. The first thing to be observed 
 with regard to the verse is its setting ; it is a 
 pearl set with pearls ; it comes as a pendant to 
 the beatitudes, and therefore is itself a sum-total 
 of beatitude, even though the word " Blessed" 
 be not immediately prefixed. The fifth chapter 
 of Matthew, in its opening verses, is a kind of 
 spiritual maelstrom, which draws us down by- 
 successive rings and whirls into untold depths 
 of self-abnegation and abandonment to God. 
 Against each one of them might be written, as 
 a marginal comment, the words, " The kingdom 
 of heaven is at hand " ; and against the totality 
 of them the words, " The kingdom of God is 
 come." And the soul that is in any one of the 
 experiences indicated by the successive beati- 
 tudes finds that the experience over which the 
 blessing is spoken is in close correspondence 
 with a similar experience in the life and mani- 
 festation of Jesus Christ. 
 
 We can sit down with these verses, and mark 
 a marginal reference to each one of them out of 
 the Scriptures of Christ's life ; we can note His 
 poverty over against ours, and let the same 
 mind be in us which was in Him who made 
 
THE CONTAGION OF ALTRUISM 117 
 
 Himself poor for our sakes. We can put our 
 mourners' tears into Christ's bottle, and find 
 that it is not an empty bottle, but the receptacle 
 of the sympathy which dropped at Bethany 
 and the strong waters of Gethsemane. The 
 meek, whom He felicitates, are blessed by 
 Him who was both meek and lowly, and their 
 promised inheritance is a portion of His own 
 boundless right and His own fathomless rest. 
 They are hungry and thirsty for the same 
 Divine will, which was the meat and drink for 
 which He discarded or postponed the lesser 
 nourishments ; they are merciful because their 
 Lord is compassionate, and as He was good 
 to the thankless and evil, so are they to the 
 extent of being '^foolishly, incredibly merciful." 
 Their heart-purity is the circulation of His 
 life-blood and the anointing of His Spirit ; 
 their peace-making proves them to belong to 
 the Prince of Peace, who is also called the Son 
 of Peace, and more briefly the Peace ; and the 
 great beatitude which closes the announcement, 
 the persecution which ends the tale of good as 
 the Cross ended the work of His earthly life, 
 cannot be read apart from the preface, " As 
 
ii8 UNION WIIH GOD 
 
 they have persecuted Me, they will also perse- 
 cute you." The beatitudes are, therefore, as 
 we said in a previous chapter, so many instan- 
 taneous views of the manifold grace of God in 
 Christ. 
 
 And it follows from this that any one who is 
 a sincere believer will recognise the unity which 
 underlies the various manifestations of God in 
 character, and will sedulously avoid the thought 
 that he is in the world to illustrate special 
 virtues ; much less will he think to apologise to 
 God for special failings by special excellencies. 
 The covetousness of the enlightened soul is 
 not limited to one beatitude, but takes hold 
 on all ; nor do we truly aspire, unless we wish 
 to ascend every time that God lets down the 
 ladder, and whenever we see any one else 
 ascending. The thought of being meek but 
 not pure, forbearing but not compassionate, is 
 foolish with the radical absurdity of a divided 
 Christ. If the soldiers who crucified Him 
 respected His body that it might not be broken, 
 and spared His coat because it was made in 
 one piece, let us reverence the unity of His 
 spirit, and covet the seamlessness of His virtue 
 
THE CONTAGION OF ALTRUISM 119 
 
 and of His obedience, for even in the believer 
 it may be said that " the good is one." 
 
 But having seen Christ in the words of Christ, 
 we want in the next place to read the beatitudes 
 in the light of the history of man, and especially 
 the question must be asked in the Scriptures 
 which men are asking in the world at large. 
 The discussion is going on amongst scientific 
 men and philosophers as to whether the order 
 of human society is becoming more altruistic ; 
 and in order to solve this question they are 
 asking, " What is the origin of altruism ? " with 
 the same earnestness that they ask the question, 
 "What is the origin of life.'*" We want to 
 know when man, in his own history and in the 
 history of his ancestors, became other-loving, 
 as against self-loving. Did the beginning show 
 the love for others as well as the love of and care 
 for self-life? And when other-love appeared, 
 did it appear in the disguise of children, or in 
 the form or fashion of friends, or how did it 
 come ; and being come, what are the laws of its 
 growth, development, and perfection ? Nothing 
 is more hopeful than that science and philosophy 
 should be pursuing these questions. They must 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 run up against the Cross on this path ; and if 
 they run up against the Cross, it will go hard if 
 they do not run into the glory that accompanies 
 the Cross. 
 
 Now we are not philosophers, and cannot 
 answer the hard questions which they put ; but 
 we can search the Scriptures and scrutinise the 
 calling of the saints for altruism, and not go 
 far before we find it. Suppose we ask the 
 question with regard to the Sermon on the 
 Mount, with its magnificent prologue and pro- 
 mise of good, Is it individualist or altruist in 
 its teaching ? The answer is that it is, in the 
 first place, profoundly individualist; the blessings 
 are on personal experiences, upon individual 
 longings. Hunger and thirst, even when right- 
 eousness is the aliment, is individual. To be 
 meek and inherit the earth almost looks like 
 the much-reviled capitalist disguised. Of the 
 nine blessings enumerated, seven relate to our 
 own experience, without any apparently direct 
 good to the 'neighbour or to the social organism ; 
 only two relate to the good of others. The one 
 speaks of the exercise of mercy, the other of 
 the making of peace. But even these are not 
 
THE CONTAGION OF AL7RUISM 
 
 dissociated from personal revenue and income. 
 "Ye shall obtain mercy" ; "ye shall be called 
 God's bairns." Perhaps there may be some 
 who would take offence at this, and say that 
 the mystic is not so very different to the more 
 grossly selfishly living people, who want to get 
 all the good that there is for themselves alone, 
 and to leave other people behind, in the very 
 same way as is done in the more common form 
 of the strife for existence. But this misunder- 
 standing would arise from not observing that 
 every one of these personal blessings is so 
 placed as to lead up to the two great announce- 
 ments which Christ makes over the people that 
 have passed under His blessing hands. These 
 two statements are : (i) ye are the salt of the 
 earth ; (ii) ye are the light of the world. And 
 this is not individualism, much less is it self-life 
 and self-love ; it is pure undiluted altruism. 
 We are in the world to be sweet and make 
 it sweet ; to be enlightened and to give light. 
 Christ's salt and Christ's sunbeams have nothing 
 of self-love about them ; it is other-love pure 
 and simple. It is Christ in me that it may be 
 Christ through me. Some people who look at 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 Raphael's Transfiguration are a little offended 
 that the picture has been crowded with two 
 different scenes. It is a very large canvas, and 
 would have made two pictures very well — one, 
 of the saints in the light with Jesus, and one, 
 of the crowd and the suffering child and suffer- 
 ing father around Jesus ; one picture for the 
 top of the mountain, and another for the next 
 day at the mountain's foot. But Raphael was 
 right ; the two pictures must be made into one ; 
 and every rapture is only the preface to an action 
 or a passion. One frame must hold them both. 
 And it may be taken for granted that if there 
 is any ground for the belief that in the world 
 at large God is making people altruistic, even 
 against their will, and by all kinds of irregular 
 pressure, much more is it true that the whole of 
 the economy of grace in the creature is accom- 
 plishing the same loving purpose with untold 
 directness of aim in the children of God. We 
 learned the Lord's Prayer in the plural, and 
 our daily spiritual progress only makes the 
 plural into a larger majority. And happily for 
 our faith it is precisely at this point of our 
 advance that our religion becomes so delight- 
 
THE CONTAGION OF ALTRUISM 123 
 
 fully intelligible to everybody. " Ye are the 
 light of the world," said Jesus. " Neither do 
 men light a candle," He continued. 
 
 " Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, 
 Not Hght them for themselves," 
 
 said Shakespeare. Was he stealing from the 
 Gospel ? If so, then the Gospel was easy to 
 appropriate : but it does not cease to be Gospel. 
 
 " How far that little candle sheds its beams ! " 
 
 You can write that sentence as a marginal 
 comment to the words, "Ye shall be witnesses 
 unto Me in Jerusalem . , . and to the utter- 
 most parts of the earth," and not defile the 
 sacred page by the quotation. And it may be 
 written over the limitations and incapacity of 
 any consecrated life. 
 
 As we began our meditation by choosing 
 ourselves texts out of the sunbeams, and have 
 been led to see ourselves united to Christ not 
 only in His life, but also in the altruism of 
 His life, it will not be amiss to conclude with 
 the prayer that we may be as other-loving as 
 the sunshine, and as the compassions of God in 
 Christ. 
 
VIII 
 
 HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD IS 
 ONE SPIRIT" 
 
He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit^ — i CuR. vi. x"]. 
 
 126 
 
VIII 
 
 ''HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD IS 
 ONE SPIRIT" 
 
 WE have in our New Testament the 
 Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians 
 — Epistles which concern themselves with the 
 religious needs and difficulties of the time, but 
 which are constantly in their language passing 
 beyond the needs and difficulties of any 
 particular time, and taking us over to those 
 needs which are the eternal needs of the 
 Church, and those blessed satisfactions of the 
 soul which are the eternal vindications of God 
 to His creatures that trust in Him. If we 
 picked up these two Epistles and found them 
 anywhere, without any headlines or titles or 
 names upon them, with no address of the 
 people for whom they were intended, and no 
 introduction expressing the person from whom 
 they came, we could very easily, by a little 
 
128 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 Study, determine a great deal both with regard 
 to the person who wrote the Epistles and also 
 with regard to the people for whom they were 
 intended ; it would not be, for instance, very 
 difficult to show you that they were addressed 
 to a trading community, to a people that were 
 largely occupied in commercial life, for the 
 language takes a business tone, and the ex- 
 pressions which are used even with regard 
 to spiritual things are very often expressions 
 which are taken up from the market-place and 
 from the shop. For example, in 2 Cor. ii. 17, 
 the writer of these Epistles says : " We are 
 not of those people who huckster, or adulterate 
 the Word of God ; but we speak out of 
 sincerity, and we speak as from God, as stand- 
 ing face to face with God in Christ." And if 
 you look a verse or two further back than that, 
 the eleventh verse, you will find the same 
 writer saying that he hopes we shall not be 
 over-reached by Satan, because we are not 
 ignorant of his sharp practices. Now a writer 
 who expresses himself in that way is writing 
 to a trading community, and you would easily 
 be able, if you were studying these Epistles 
 
"HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD'' 129 
 
 for the first time, and trying to find out some- 
 thing about them, to see that they were written 
 to people Hving on one of the great trade 
 routes of the East. Not only so, but we find 
 something about the character of the people 
 to whom these letters were addressed. They 
 were living in the midst of a bad world, but 
 they were also themselves a part of the bad- 
 ness of that world. It is not a pleasant record 
 to read ; it is a fatal Epistle for those who 
 wish to prove that the ancient Churches were 
 all good and the modern are all bad. We 
 do not mean to attack primitive Christianity. 
 The inspiration of the Church is a magnificent 
 truth. Pentecost is rightly called Whit Sunday, 
 i.e. White Sunday, and that means white faith, 
 white heart, white garments : the primitive 
 Church had that. In that sense we desire to 
 be more and more baptised into the spirit of 
 the primitive Church, more to speak as they 
 did, to be consecrated as they were, to follow 
 the Lamb as they did, to be glorified along with 
 them even in this present life. There is such 
 a thing as primitive Christianity ; but you will 
 have to be careful where you look for it. You 
 
 9 
 
130 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 will not find it in the theory of the necessary 
 infallibility of the teachers or the immaculate- 
 ness of the people who were taught. I have 
 often made the mistake of trying to find in 
 the first century things which one hoped were 
 specially characteristic of the first century, but 
 which in reality were not so. But I found 
 God in history, and Christ in the power ot 
 His people, and just as great a Christ as I 
 am able to find without any history at all when 
 I place myself on believing ground, or mingle 
 with other persons who are in the same spirit 
 of faith — the nineteenth-century Jesus Christ, 
 this same Jesus. Church history is good, but 
 it won't represent to us a spotless Church. 
 On the contrary, it represents to us Churches 
 such as some of us would not have liked to 
 belong to, which we should perhaps have 
 wanted to escape from into purer surroundings, 
 even if we had to go out into the desert to 
 find them. And that definitely is the kind of 
 community that these Epistles are written to — 
 a community, if we can judge by their vices, 
 their failures and lapses, exactly similar to 
 what history tells us to have been characteristic 
 
''HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD'' 131 
 
 of all the cities of the Levant and most of the 
 cities of the great ancient world ; and, as I 
 have said, it would not be difficult to reconstruct 
 from these letters what was the personality of 
 the person who wrote them, and what were 
 also the character and life of the people to 
 whom they were written. These writings are 
 water-marked heavily, and as we hold them 
 up to the light we see that if they had no titles, 
 and if the name of Paul was blotted out every 
 time it occurred in the writings, we could still 
 decipher and unravel enough to tell us the 
 character of the writer as well as the time and 
 the place. We could tell the people to whom 
 they were written, and approximately the date 
 at which they were composed. That is, of 
 course, a result of criticism. Criticism is 
 busied to determine truth and to recognise 
 historical fact in literature. And do not be 
 afraid of criticism. You may be afraid of all 
 the dishonest criticism, and there is a good 
 deal of it ; but you will dishonour Christ if 
 you are afraid of criticism, because no man is 
 going to gain anything in his work for God by 
 discounting and undervaluing the services of 
 
132 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 persons who may be finding out the truth of 
 God more carefully than we are able to do, 
 even though it be only the truth of God as it 
 appears in outward history. But behind this 
 historical water-mark I see another water-mark 
 of a different description, the water-mark of 
 inspiration, that is to say, that the statements 
 made are not merely results deduced from 
 observed outward facts, but they are arrived at 
 by the inward observations of God's ways with 
 men, and expressed in words which criticism 
 can never do anything with, except on the 
 natural side, where it sometimes ventures to 
 suggest that the experiences affirmed are mere 
 extravagances ; words which, when spoken in 
 the midst of a community of people who want 
 God, or of people who know God, arouse at 
 any time in the history of the world or the 
 Church the same kind of emotion and provoke 
 the same kind of acceptation that they did at 
 the beginning ; words like this strangely time- 
 less expression of the Apostle : " He that is 
 joined unto the Lord is one spirit." You do 
 not need to go back to Corinth at all ; you 
 do not go hunting around asking what was the 
 
''HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD" 133 
 
 State of the Church ; then but you sink down 
 into the midst of your own experience and the 
 experience of the people among whom God 
 has placed you, and into the sense and know- 
 ledge of your own standing to-day, and the 
 standing of the people of God to-day ; and you 
 recognise it to be a great, eternal word of 
 God that is spoken when we say that " He 
 that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit." 
 And when we have got that in sight, we have 
 got away from the difficulties and from the 
 divisions — there is no more Calvinist or 
 Arminian ; because these words take you right 
 up into the very presence of Christ ; and if you 
 are under the will of the Lord, they fill you 
 with the outpoured and communicated life of 
 Jesus in the soul. This is our charter, which 
 is not in dogma, except where dogma in an 
 introduction and part of experience, but it is 
 in the great supercarnal, supersensual fact that 
 is above observation of history and above mere 
 record of emotions, the great fact of the revela- 
 tion of God and the communication of God to 
 the creature. " He that is joined unto the 
 Lord is one spirit." 
 
134 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 Now I suppose we might go on and say, 
 in the next place, that this truth, at any rate, 
 comes in a very unlikely setting. I am not 
 going to draw your attention to the whole of 
 this chapter ; I would do it if it were necessary. 
 It is a bad enough world to make almost any 
 record of bad things appropriate in a certain 
 sense at any time ; but the study of evil is not 
 what we are aiming at ; because we notice 
 this, that the Apostle, who was engaged in a 
 very troublesome and difficult work, the work 
 of discipline in the Corinthian Church, engaged 
 in a heartbreaking work which often brought 
 tears to his eyes, and brought him to his 
 knees in the great intercession before God — 
 the Apostle, I say, dropped the subject he had 
 in hand, and took up the subject which he had 
 in heart. The subject which he had in hand 
 was the sin that had crept into the Church, 
 the breaking out of apostasy, the presence of 
 immorality and impurity in the Church, and he 
 dealt with them faithfully as a good apostle of 
 Jesus Christ ; but as a good apostle of Jesus 
 Christ he did not limit himself to dealing with 
 sin. If we only deal with sin, we shall not 
 
'^ HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD'' 135 
 
 preach God in the sense that God ought to be 
 preached. We have got to preach the king- 
 dom of righteousness, of peace and joy in the 
 Holy Ghost ; and so he breaks away from the 
 subject which he has in hand to the subject 
 which he has in heart, and that is the subject 
 which asserts itself, as it were, spontaneously 
 in the current of the Epistle, as much as to 
 say, " That is what I would like to talk to 
 you about if I could." And you can see that 
 again in the third chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Philippians, where he has again to deplore the 
 declension of a great many who had forsaken 
 the love of God and the glory of Christ : 
 " Many walk, of whom I have told you often, 
 and now tell you even weeping, that they are 
 the enemies of the cross of Christ ; whose end 
 is destruction, whose God is their belly, and 
 whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly 
 things." But in the midst of his tears and in 
 the midst of his mourning, with the Church, as 
 it were, going to pieces over his head and 
 about his ears, he says, " Our life is in heaven, 
 and it is from thence we look for the Saviour, 
 the Lord Jesus, who shall change our vile body, 
 
136 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 that it may be fashioned according to the body 
 of His glory." You see it is a spontaneous 
 thought that broke into the midst of the death 
 that was breaking into the Church ; the thought 
 that broke it was this : Our Hfe is in heaven, 
 we are joined to the Lord, and we are one 
 spirit with Him, That is a great truth ; it is 
 a beautiful pearl of the kingdom of God, I 
 do not care about the disagreeable Corinthian 
 oyster-shell ; we are going to preach the pearl. 
 If any man or woman got a fair sight of what 
 it was to be one with God and live in the one- 
 ness and testify to it and suffer for it, which is 
 the Christian's real inheritance, his true testi- 
 mony, his proper characteristic, and compre- 
 hended even faintly and afar the utmost and 
 furthermost that God can make us experi- 
 mentally to realise, he would say, I shall sell 
 all I have in order to find this beautiful pearl, 
 which has shone out for me from the pages of 
 the First Epistle to the Corinthians, and which 
 also shines out for me from almost every hymn 
 that I sing and from almost every sermon that 
 I hear preached, even when the minister did 
 not intend to preach quite so far. Praise God, 
 
"HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD'' 137 
 
 we always hear a good measure of the Gospel 
 even from backward preachers of it. I have 
 heard ministers who did not believe in the 
 baptism of the Holy Ghost pray for it in their 
 prayers. I sometimes think that God will 
 hear unbelieving prayers for believing people. 
 At any rate, whether we believe or not, the 
 word and the promise of God is not made 
 of none effect to-day ; and, wherever there is 
 a real word of God uttered, the utterance is a 
 blessing in some degree, though not of course 
 to the same extent as when it falls from faithful 
 lips, and is addressed direct to believing hearts. 
 May God make us believe in what we say, and 
 if any one prays for the baptism, do at least 
 pray, " God grant that I may be able to receive 
 and to witness it." 
 
 Our life, then, is this glorious life of which 
 we are told, " He that is joined unto the Lord 
 is one spirit." We may be sure of this, that 
 there 2s no necessity whatever for any one zvho 
 has such a life as this to be disturbed from it. 
 I suppose, if anybody had a right to be, it was 
 a person who had apparently been spending 
 his strength in vain and labouring, according 
 
138 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 to the outward judgment, for nought. There 
 is no more trying or difficult circumstance than 
 to bring people to God — at any rate, in appear- 
 ance — and then to see them go back from that 
 which they profess to have found. There is 
 not anything more likely to break the heart of 
 any one who has to preach the Word of God 
 than to find that his ministry has the Corinthian 
 or Philippian accompaniment in any degree 
 among those to whom he is sent — the accom- 
 paniment of apostasy. To preach Christ, and 
 then find people deny Him ; to proclaim the 
 goodness of God and the Reconciliation, and 
 then see them in any degree trample under 
 foot the blood of the Everlasting Covenant, — 
 I tell you, if it crucifies Christ afresh, it also 
 crucifies the ministers of Jesus afresh ; because 
 they share the failure, as it seems outwardly, 
 of Christ ; and if Christ can be heartbroken or 
 heart-crucified, they must be heartbroken and 
 heart-crucified too. And yet it is not so with 
 the Apostle. In the midst of all this disappoint- 
 ment, when you see very little of God in the 
 primitive Church, very little to encourage him, 
 everything to provoke tears, he breaks out into 
 
''HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD'' 139 
 
 what is nothing less than a psalm in a sentence, 
 " He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit," 
 and goes up into heaven itself, as it were, in 
 order that he may escape from the depression 
 and the difficulty that he finds down here. If 
 any one had a right to be discouraged, Paul 
 had ; but he was not discouraged, because he 
 could not be discouraged without losing his 
 union, and he could not sacrifice that without 
 losing everything that he held dear ; and if 
 we are one with God we won't be discouraged. 
 There are a great many centrifugal influences 
 which would take us away from our centre all 
 the time ; there are a thousand forces which 
 remove us from blessedness, and sometimes 
 seem to keep us at war with blessedness ; but 
 even amid all this, the strong constraint of a 
 Redeemer's love which we have felt and known, 
 and that fellowship with Him which we have 
 in service and in everything else, the great 
 magnetism is stronger than that which con- 
 tradicts it, the positive more than the negative. 
 " What shall separate us from the love of 
 Christ ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or perse- 
 cution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or 
 
HO UNION WITH GOD 
 
 sword" — the being slain all day long for the 
 kingdom's sake ? " Nay ; in all these things 
 we are more than conquerors " ; for the centri- 
 petal influence is more than the centrifugal. 
 Now, beloved, we may realise that for ourselves 
 in every possible environment. I sometimes 
 say that those closing verses of the eighth 
 chapter of Romans, of which I quoted one or 
 two just now, are about the greatest words that a 
 human soul has ever said of what God can do 
 to those who believe in Him and rest in Him. 
 These verses constitute in the Apostle's mind 
 the creation of an ideal adverse environment 
 with which he proposes that the life which is 
 within him can deal. How much can you 
 stand ? How much will it take to disunite you 
 from God } A cross word, a misunderstanding, 
 a commercial loss, a little difference in the 
 amount you carry about with you, and which 
 you are perfectly sure you are not going to 
 carry away with you— a very little difference of 
 this kind will separate some people from God. 
 A bankruptcy court will do it, and with some 
 people something very much short of a bank- 
 ruptcy court will do it. To have an account 
 
"HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD'' 141 
 
 presented twice will put some people out of the 
 kingdom of God. Now make your adverse en- 
 vironment ideal ; it is a lawful question, because 
 you will get better saved when you know what 
 can separate you. The testimony of the power 
 of Christ to the Apostle to keep him saved and 
 to keep him sweet was never intended, and those 
 who love God will say it never could have 
 been intended, to imply an apostolic monopoly 
 of holiness. We, too, can say, "Jesus, I trust 
 Thee to keep me through all surroundings," 
 " Life or death or any other creature " ; put 
 these amongst the centrifugal influences, and 
 when you have put them there put in this 
 great centripetal sentence, which takes us up 
 to the source from whence we come and from 
 which we live, " He that is joined unto the 
 Lord is one spirit." It is pantheistic, beloved, 
 strongly pantheistic ; but we do not propose to 
 let the theosophists have all the pantheism to 
 themselves. We have got some of it too. If 
 you do not like the term pantheistic, say pan- 
 christic. I am not ashamed to say that I 
 believe there is an experience of union with 
 the Lord which is rightly characterised as 
 
142 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 pantheistic, in which God has met all the needs 
 of the soul, and has become the indwelling 
 power of the human spirit ; that the man who 
 is thus united to God moves as God moves, 
 and acts as the Lord wills him to act in the 
 body and in the circumstances in which he is 
 placed. Of course it is somewhat pantheistic ; 
 but Christ can be all in all in the nineteenth 
 century as well as in the first, and we do not 
 need to think Him less than He wishes to be 
 to those who trust in Him. 
 
 Of all things that separate us, and they are 
 many, the one great cause of separation, 
 perhaps, is the fact that the love which is in 
 the world seems to be of a non-permanent 
 character. The greatest thing in the world is 
 love. I never ask God, or hardly ever, for 
 outward things ; I do not know that I ever 
 asked Him for glory or honour, and I hope 
 I never shall ; and I very seldom ask Him 
 for material things apart from the kingdom ; 
 but I sometimes say things like this, that if 
 God will give me three or four good friends, I 
 think I can manage to continue to the end, 
 because love is the machinery of life and the 
 
"HE THAI IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD'' 143 
 
 motive power. Love is the centre of the 
 kingdom of God. If there is any heaven on 
 earth, I know what it is going to be made 
 out of — the red-hot charity of believers to 
 one another, and the affection of those who are 
 drawn nearest to us in Christ. And yet, strange 
 to say, that wonderful thing is just what seems 
 to be one of the separable things in life. You 
 have not only your own grave open before you, 
 but a great many other people's graves ; and 
 as we are getting further on in life and passing 
 along, our waymarks cease to be milestones, 
 and become gravestones. I have not got on 
 any funeral raiment, because I never wear it ; 
 the days of my mourning are ended, thank God ; 
 but you must not suppose I have never had 
 anything to do with this apparent separability 
 of love, in which we seem to see so much that 
 contradicts God. There is a picture, is there 
 not } of John Wesley preaching on a gravestone 
 in Ep worth Churchyard. It was very well for 
 him to do so ; but the funeral was, I think, not 
 a recent one. God can help you to do some- 
 thing like what Wesley did on a recent grave- 
 stone — He can help you to say, " He that is 
 
144 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 joined unto the Lord is one spirit," in the midst 
 of trials and bereavements as you face them, 
 and, what is harder still, when you turn after 
 the first experience of desolation to look back 
 at them. I have to a very great extent got rid 
 of the idea of a frontier between the two worlds. 
 I suppose there is a frontier, but it is like the 
 frontier that you see between the countries on 
 the Continent, where there is an area of delimi- 
 tation on either side. That area, on this side, 
 is called the Beulah Land ; and note, not only 
 does the Saviour come and walk with men, but 
 the spirits of the just made perfect come and 
 walk with us, come to attend our spiritual 
 meetings, and are deeply interested in the 
 progress of human souls in holiness, and in 
 the way they take their thrones and claim 
 their crowns. They come and walk with us in 
 order that we may be able to say and to sing 
 that we are one family, one Church above and 
 beneath, though now divided by the narrow 
 stream of death. There is no separation for 
 those who are joined to the Lord, and are one 
 spirit in Him. 
 
 Next to death I do not know anything much 
 
''HE THAI IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD'' 145 
 
 worse than loneliness. Misunderstanding is 
 bad, but loneliness in some ways is harder to 
 bear, especially for social beings, and we are all 
 social when we are at our best. Nothing is so 
 bad as being disjoined from those whom we 
 love by those isolations which come necessarily 
 in life, apart from death. Take a specimen — 
 St. John in the island, the loving St. John, the 
 well-beloved St. John, who could find enough 
 material in his experience and in his hope to 
 preach on the text, " Little children, love one 
 another," all the year round, and never find 
 the subject grow cold or stale, but could always 
 preach on love, because love was everything to 
 him ; the man who leaned on the heart of 
 Jesus, and gathered up the residual secrets of 
 the great Gospel, and told them out to man ; 
 who lived in Ephesus, and there helped to 
 build up a Church which had some of the 
 brightest traditions of all that was best in the 
 beginning, and then was taken right away from 
 the midst of his work, not taken to heaven, not 
 at all — he could have gone there perhaps more 
 easily — but taken right away out into the sea 
 and put down out of sight, only a little way out 
 
 10 
 
146 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 of sight, of all those whom he had loved and 
 laboured for, and set there, apparently, to end 
 his days in nothingness ; he who had had the 
 greatest fulness of Christian hope and Christian 
 service — he says, ** I was in the island." You 
 know what that meant, you people who have 
 an insular experience of loneliness here to-day, 
 whom nobody loves and nobody sympathises 
 with, who seem to have to go to heaven on a 
 single line, no one before, none to follow, none 
 at the right hand or the left. That is all he 
 says about his loneliness ; and a verse or two 
 after he says, " I was in the Spirit." That will 
 do ; for he that is in the Spirit is joined to 
 God. He is not lonely any more ; he is not 
 separated any more ; and his pains are over 
 and his isolation is done, and what he begins 
 with when he says in the first chapter of the 
 Apocalypse, " I was in the Spirit," is only the 
 first sentence of what turns out to be a great 
 ladder which runs right up into heaven itself, 
 and where you see not only God at the top, like 
 Jacob did, but the Bridegroom and the Bride, 
 the Bridegroom with His Bride, the everlasting 
 Sabbath and the unchanging glory, where we. 
 
"HE THAT IS JOINED UNTO THE LORD'' 147 
 
 are restored to all that we may have lost, and 
 where we find all that we have never on earth 
 attained, and where the oneness is preached 
 from the throne that faith learned by the Cross ; 
 and when we ask whether there is anything 
 that can separate us from Him whom we love, 
 the dear Apostle, looking back at us from the 
 great reunion which he accomplished with the 
 Lord whom we love, and leaning again upon 
 the sacred Heart with a more interior embrace 
 than any words of his first fellowship can 
 express, — from that great embrace of love that 
 has gathered back the soul that was its object 
 to itself, he looking down upon us who are 
 hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and 
 after love, which is the essence of righteousness 
 — looking down upon us to-day, the hungry and 
 thirsty people of God, tells us that " He that 
 is joined unto the Lord is one Spirit." " Come 
 hither," He says, "and I will show thee the 
 Bride, the Lamb's Wife." 
 
IX 
 
 GRACE AND HEREDITY 
 
 149 
 
" The fathers have eajen sour grapes, and the children s teeth are set on 
 edge. As I live, saith the Lord, ye shall not have occasion any more to 
 use this proverb in Israel!^ — Ezek. xviii. 2, 3. 
 
IX 
 
 GRACE AND HEREDITY 
 
 T DO not know whether any one has ever 
 -*- taken the pains to collect from the 
 Scriptures the various statements which they 
 contain of the doctrine of human heredity, and 
 to point out the teaching of holy men of old 
 upon the question of transmitted characteristics, 
 which has come so astonishingly to the front 
 in recent years. Certainly there are abundant 
 materials for such a study, and they are the 
 more valuable because of the limitation of the 
 outlook of the Scriptures of the Old Testament 
 to the fortunes of a particular people, so that 
 although they do not furnish us with a very 
 wide view laterally, being bounded by the 
 frontier of a single province, and the changes 
 and chances of a single tribe, yet in the vertical 
 direction, the up and down of time, the direction 
 of historical record and of prophetical hope, 
 
152 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 they have a very extended outlook ; and it is 
 precisely in this direction that the problems of 
 heredity will assert themselves. In fact, the 
 passage which we have placed at the head of 
 this chapter is one out of many evidences that 
 the questions of heredity became very serious 
 even to the Jews themselves, both in regard 
 to their own national well-being, and as bearing 
 upon the Divine Justice which was supposed 
 to be involved in that well-being. 
 
 Nor are we to suppose that their perplexities 
 are very different to our own ; the same 
 questions about the sour grapes which the 
 fathers had eaten are in all our minds to-day, 
 even though we are entirely out of the line 
 of the national well-being or ill-fortune of the 
 Jews. Our study of the question is perhaps 
 a little more scientific and perhaps a little less 
 religious, but that is all the difference : the 
 actual problems involved will always be both 
 scientific and religious ; and, as time goes on, 
 it may very well be the case that the two terms 
 become more and more coincident. We see 
 this happening in many directions, as in the 
 analogies between the Selection of Nature and 
 
GRACE AND HEREDITY 153 
 
 the Election of Grace, and suspect that the 
 story of human life needs to be told from both 
 sides of its web. So with regard to the question 
 of inherited and transmitted ill, we shall probably 
 find that we have justified God about the same 
 time that we have understood man, and in 
 proportion as we understand him. 
 
 However, as we have said, the Old Testa- 
 ment, being occupied with the fortunes of a 
 particular people, affords excellent material for 
 a study of the moral issues connected with the 
 laws of heredity. Many of its most striking 
 statements acquire quite a new force when read 
 in the light of these laws, such as the promise 
 " in thee and thy seed shall all kindreds of 
 the earth be blessed," or the doctrine that 
 Divine anger extends to the third and the 
 fourth generation of them that hate Him, and 
 Divine favour to thousands of them that love 
 Him and keep His commandments. Especially 
 is this the case in connection with those matters 
 in which heredity affected social life, for we 
 must remember that to the Hebrew mind the 
 problems of heredity have more to do with 
 caste than they have to do with morals ; even 
 
154 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 the "third and fourth generation" to which 
 we just alluded is not an arbitrary expression 
 meant to convey a rough idea of how long God 
 can be considered to be angry with any given 
 family ; the terms used are the ordinary and 
 recognised terms of guest friendship and tribal 
 communion, they are the limits at which tribal 
 rights are acquired or until which they are 
 forfeited or withheld. 
 
 It is certain that no one who read the 
 Scriptures with the view of finding out what 
 they say on the subject of heredity would fail 
 to examine the passage which we have tran- 
 scribed from Ezekiel ; for here we have the 
 dark side of the question stated, the observed 
 scientific fact of inherited misery, the decided 
 though Oriental protest of man against an 
 apparently inevitable past history which is 
 continually rewriting itself after the proverbial 
 manner of history, and along with this human 
 protest there is coupled an equally strong 
 counter-protest on the part of the Lord through 
 His prophet against the irreligious feelings to 
 which the observation of the law of heredity 
 had given occasion. The people to whom the 
 
GRACE AND HEREDITY 155 
 
 prophet ministered had scented out this law 
 for themselves ; they expressed it hieroglyphic- 
 ally, if we may so say, under the term " sour 
 grapes," and having begun to make wry faces 
 at their fathers, they went on to turn distrustful 
 faces on their God. Sin, having conceived, 
 had brought forth Suffering, and Suffering was 
 preparing to become the mother of Atheism. 
 It was time for a Divine intervention. 
 
 It is worthy of notice that the term " sour 
 grapes," as it appears in the prophet, is some- 
 thing very different from the proverbial usage 
 which is current amongst us from a Greek 
 source. In ordinary speech " sour grapes " 
 stand for the cynical depreciation of good 
 things which we are unable to grasp ; but in 
 the Scriptures they stand for bad things which 
 we are incompetent to elude. The difference 
 between the proverb in yEsop and the proverb 
 in Ezekiel is as wide as the gulf which separates 
 the thought of a human disappointment from 
 the thought of the failure of the Creator Him- 
 self, and the variation in the size of the problem 
 treated makes a corresponding variation in the 
 treatment ; the sage on the one hand stops 
 
156 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 short with being witty, the prophet is nothing 
 unless he is theological. He is dealing with 
 atheism, not with mere discontent ; his burden 
 is not to soothe wounded pride, but to "justify 
 the ways of God to men" ; and who ever had 
 this service like the old Hebrew seers ? 
 
 Now, without stopping to inquire what were 
 the special political and social troubles which 
 provoked the Hebrew complaint of God's deal- 
 ings (whether it be the results of wars which 
 the people had not made, the hardships of 
 captivity which they had not brought upon 
 themselves, or whatever it may be), let us take 
 the complaint with the reply, and say of the 
 general truths that here appear in particular 
 instances : — 
 
 (i) The Doctrine of Heredity is the greatest 
 of Scientific Discoveries. 
 
 (2) The Doctrine of Grace is the greatest 
 of Catholic Doctrines. 
 
 We couple the scientific discovery with the 
 religious discovery ; there is no necessary 
 opposition between them, for Scientific truth 
 and Catholic doctrine are near neighbours ; all 
 that is Scientific will one day be Catholic, and 
 
GRACE AND HEREDITY 
 
 157 
 
 conversely. The observation of laws of heredity 
 is not inconsistent with the Doctrine of Divine 
 Grace. Concerning this latter doctrine, indeed, 
 the statement we have made is not our own, 
 but that of the late M. Renan. It often 
 happens that we learn from our enemies ; and 
 especially in the estimating of relative magni- 
 tudes the outsider will be found the best judge 
 of proportion. Consequently we accept M. 
 Renan's statement that the Doctrine of Grace 
 is the greatest of Catholic doctrines, and set 
 it side by side with the greatest thing that 
 Science can say as to our birth and destiny. 
 Every kind of analysis and every test of ex- 
 perience will verify the accuracy of M. Renan's 
 dictum. So that on the one hand we have a 
 statement to the effect that by the perpetuation 
 of my parents I am what I am, and on the 
 other the doctrine that by the grace of God 
 I am what I am. And these two statements 
 are not contradictory nor mutually exclusive. 
 
 How wonderfully the facts and laws of 
 heredity are coming to light in all current 
 discussions with regard to the body and the 
 mind ' We are all of us meeting with our past 
 
158 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 in a thousand new and unexpected ways : it 
 looks out upon us everywhere ; where it used 
 to be a mere matter of hair or eyes or speech, 
 it is now in every curve of the body and in 
 every mood of the mind. Not merely in times 
 of special perplexity or intricate inquiry do we 
 say to our friends — 
 
 " Your face, my thane, is like a book where men 
 May read strange matters " ; 
 
 but under all circumstances we are learning to 
 find in their faces (and in our face also when 
 seen from the reflecting surface of the world we 
 live in) an open book, and that not a single 
 volume, but a whole encyclopaedia — a long row 
 of volumes of historical information. 
 
 Family likeness is everywhere ; we began 
 perhaps by searching for it in the newly living 
 or recently dead, after the manner described in 
 the lines — 
 
 " As sometimes in a dead man's face. 
 To those who watch it, more and more 
 A Ukeness unobserved before 
 Comes out to some one of his race." 
 
 And we are learning now to record what we 
 
GRACE AND HEREDITY 159 
 
 see, not sometimes in a dead man's face, but 
 every day in the faces of living men. Nor is 
 it a single portrait that we recover, or the two 
 or three immediate ancestors ; but the resem- 
 blances make up a gallery of historical figures. 
 They are not limited to the good or the great, 
 for there are faces amongst them which we 
 would gladly and for ever turn to the wall if we 
 could. To put it in plain English, we all of 
 us have not merely a long ancestry, but in part 
 a criminal ancestry. The verification of that 
 statement lies to some extent in the thoughts 
 and intents of our own hearts. Science has 
 joined hands with Christianity on the question 
 of original sin, and the once popular doctrine 
 of the soul as a clean white paper is gone for 
 ever. It is doubtful whether we can any longer 
 even take consolation in the thought that at 
 any time in the world's history the soul's paper 
 was white. If it ever were so, it was so far 
 back that it could scarcely be identified as 
 a soul ; individuality would have disappeared 
 before purity was discovered. 
 
 It is no doubt a great gain to have definitely 
 rid ourselves of the absurd and impossible idea 
 
i6o UNION WITH GOD 
 
 that children are born good, and to have 
 abandoned the idea that there is such a thing 
 as starting fair in the race of life. It is one of 
 the proofs that may be given of a statement 
 made a little further back that the terms 
 Scientific and Catholic tend to coincidence. 
 But it does not diminish the seriousness of the 
 problem ; for the more clearly the conditions 
 and laws of heredity are brought to light, the 
 more hopeless are we likely to become both 
 as regards our own moral welfare and as 
 regards the character of God, which is involved 
 in that moral welfare. It is natural, and not 
 altogether unreasonable, to be discouraged 
 when we find ourselves under the influence 
 of a multitude of temptations of which the 
 greater part belong to our ancestors, and per- 
 petuating in innumerable habits the manners 
 of life which they ought to have unlearned 
 for us. 
 
 And small is the consolation which the man 
 whose teeth are set on edge will take from 
 being told that the grapes are not so sour as 
 they used to be. We may optimistically en- 
 courage him to " move upward, working out the 
 
GRACE AND HEREDITY i6i 
 
 beast, and let the ape and tiger die," and in 
 some respects this is not unlike the Scripture 
 advice to mortify our members which are on the 
 earth ; but if the man find not merely the ape 
 and the tiger, but a whole menagerie of wild 
 animals gathered under his own roof, he will 
 suspect that, though they sometimes sleep, they 
 show no signs of dying. While he lives, they 
 live ; for they are a part of himself. Of these 
 inherited ills he will say what Faber says of 
 self-life generally — 
 
 "But I can scarcely hope, I fear, to kill thee, 
 Save in the act of dying." 
 
 Nor even here, to a man who believes in a 
 future life, is the consolation effectual ; for even 
 a life to come is not exempt from the influence 
 of acquired characteristics. We may learn to 
 hate on one continent, and carry our hatred 
 with us when we emigrate to another. We 
 are under a load of acquired characteristics in 
 this life ; and who shall say we may not groan 
 under the burden of them in another ? For 
 although the corruptible body presseth down 
 the soul, it is even more true that the corrupted 
 
 II 
 
1 62 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 and corruptible soul is a burden to herself. Such 
 a burden may subsist even in a disembodied 
 condition. 
 
 It is precisely the painfulness of this question 
 of inherited ill that makes the acceptableness of 
 the doctrine of Divine Grace. There must be 
 some way of condemning heredity in the flesh, 
 in order that we may walk at large in the spirit. 
 It is the sense of the prevalence of hereditary 
 evil that makes us apprehend the greatness of 
 the Catholic doctrine of Grace and the glory 
 of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For Grace is 
 the antidote of Heredity, and can deal with a 
 thousand years as easily as with a single day — 
 can say of sin that the wind shall pass over it 
 and it shall be gone, and the place thereof shall 
 know it no more. It can take the proverb of 
 " sour grapes " out of our lips, because we shall 
 have no more occasion to use it in Israel. It 
 can provide that the man who stole shall steal 
 no more, not merely by reiterating the com- 
 mands of the Decalogue against theft, but by 
 making him partaker of the life that does not 
 steal. It can deal with inherited tendency as 
 easily as with actual sin — can make hatred 
 
GRACE AND HEREDITY 163 
 
 cease by excess of love, and falsity shrivel before 
 excess of truth. 
 
 The proverb about the sour grapes will always 
 be used in Israel until we understand the Grace 
 of God in Jesus Christ well enough to embrace 
 it absolutely in its fulness as the sufficient 
 medicine against heredity ; and I have long 
 thought that if we have not a gospel against 
 heredity, it is very doubtful zvhether we have 
 any gospel at all. 
 
 Now in studying the sweet grapes, which 
 antidote the sour, we begin by the contempla- 
 tion of the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, as 
 it existed in Himself personally. It is a fact 
 which is often lost sight of, that our Lord was 
 like ourselves in the matter of having a human 
 heredity ; and we cannot limit this heredity to 
 the fact that His eyes were, according to the 
 old legend, of the same colour as His mother's ; 
 there must have been other things which were 
 also of the same colour. The Scriptures them- 
 selves teach us to study the genealogy of Jesus, 
 by declaring Him to be of David's race, and 
 affirming Him to be sprung out of Judah. 
 And although we are not able to distinguish 
 
1 64 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 clearly at what point the actual genealogy 
 diverges from the two Joseph-genealogies given 
 in Matthew and in Luke, we have every reason 
 to believe that the line of the blessed Virgin's 
 past history runs back upon a course not very 
 different to those which are supposed in the 
 Gospels. In other words, our Lord had a 
 human line of descent which was, in all 
 probability, similar in its features to the Book 
 of Generations of the first chapter of Matthew. 
 The Scripture expresses this fact in the words, 
 " Forasmuch as the children are partakers of 
 flesh and blood. He also Himself took part of 
 the same." But while every one accepts this 
 statement, it is but seldom that we appreciate 
 what it means to be partaker of the flesh and 
 blood of the children. Two tremendous facts 
 start up before our mind : the first is that our 
 Lord was like ourselves in the possession of 
 criminal ancestry ; the second is that, though 
 His ancestors had eaten sour grapes. His teeth 
 were not set on edge with them. For both of 
 these statements — the first of which startles 
 from the Catholic side our sense of reverence 
 and arouses a feeling of something impious 
 
GRACE AND HEREDITY 165 
 
 having been spoken, and the second which from 
 the Scientific side astonishes us by affirming 
 that an unparalleled miracle has been wrought 
 — there is abundant Scriptural evidence. 
 
 We are definitely taught to regard our Lord 
 as sprung from a sinful ancestry : apart from 
 the genealogies it would be sufficient to repeat 
 only the names David and Judah ; and with the 
 genealogies a little examination seems to show 
 that there is an emphasis on deadly sin in the 
 record. But even if no mortal sins had been 
 alluded to, every step in the genealogies (what- 
 ever the step was) is the record of a life 
 of a sinful man who tended to transmit his 
 own acquired characteristics and to perpetuate 
 his own inherited tendencies. With supreme 
 reverence, and with the overflowing of grateful 
 love, we are entitled to say that the statement 
 that our Lord partook of the flesh and blood 
 of the children reduces His heredity and ours 
 in some sense to a common classification. But 
 we are further definitely taught that He was 
 without sin, that He knew no sin, that guile 
 was not found in His mouth, that He was 
 without blemish and without spot. So that. 
 
1 66 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 without entering into any perplexing questions 
 as to the nature of Christ's sinlessness, we can 
 see that He is in His own person the leading 
 proof of the fulfilment of the prophecy that the 
 influence of the sour grapes should not be 
 eternal in Israel. I will not attempt to analyse 
 how far this miracle is to be referred to the 
 Incarnation and how far to the Obedience of 
 Christ ; it is suf^cient for us to believe that 
 by the Incarnation and the Obedience (and the 
 Obedience according to the Scripture culminates 
 in the Cross) the succession of sin in a direct 
 line was made to cease : in His own person 
 Grace reigned through righteousness unto glory. 
 But by this time we are getting away from the 
 sour grapes ourselves and beginning to gather 
 sweet grapes. For this doctrine of Grace, this 
 greatest of Catholic doctrines, teaches us not to 
 regard our Lord as a childless man, but as One 
 who stands in relation with ourselves so that 
 we may repeat His life. Behold, He says, I and 
 the children whom God has given Me. 
 
 If He took heredity, it is also true that He 
 gives us His. We find out what vine the 
 sweet grapes grow on, and are branches of it. 
 
GRACE AND HEREDITY 167 
 
 A communication of the Divine nature remedies 
 our long line of ills, and the grace which was 
 in Him appears as saving grace and sanctifying 
 grace in ourselves. We begin to act as if our 
 own genealogy commenced with the words 
 " which was the Son of God " ; and when we 
 thus act the genealogy turns out to be true, for 
 we are all the children of God by faith in Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
X 
 
 A CORN OF WHEAT 
 
 169 
 
X 
 
 A CORN OF WHEAT 
 
 THE teaching of the Bible is largely coloured 
 by figures borrowed from a civilisation so 
 much more elementary than our own that we 
 are obliged sometimes to stop and ask our- 
 selves the question whether, if Christ and His 
 Apostles were to reappear in the twentieth 
 century, they would talk in the same way as 
 they did in the first. Would their thought be 
 as exquisitely simple, and their language so 
 charmingly agricultural and piscatorial, as we 
 find in the Galilean story ? or should we find, 
 instead of the language of the farm and the 
 vineyard, allusions to railway-trains and to 
 machine-shops, to telephones and torpedoes ? 
 For we find that to-day, even in making the 
 simplest religious and moral statements, the 
 modern teacher is affected by the increasing 
 complexity of the life around him, and his 
 
172 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 speech is coloured by the enterprise, the in- 
 dustrial developments, and the speculations of 
 the nineteenth century. To take the simplest 
 possible case : the late Prof. Jowett told us that 
 the value of a religious system consists in the 
 ethical dividend that it pays — an elementary 
 truth, and in a very modern habiliment ; the 
 people of old time would have said with Paul, 
 " What fruit had ye ?" or with the Lord would 
 have announced that " every tree which bringeth 
 not forth good fruit would be hewn down and 
 burned up." But there is a change in the 
 form of expression, if we correct the evangelical 
 language and say that every company which 
 does not pay a dividend will be wound up or 
 pass into the hands of a receiver ! 
 
 We admit freely that our Lord, if He preached 
 in our day, might use language borrowed largely 
 from our time ; but it does not follow that the 
 terms used would be any more forcible than 
 the expressions which came out of the very 
 heart of nature as well as out of the inmost 
 thought of God. Should we believe Him any 
 more if He said, " Behold, an investor went 
 forth to invest," instead of " Behold, a sower 
 
A CORN OF WHEAT 173 
 
 went forth to sow " ? Would the illustration 
 probably be longer-lived because it belonged 
 to later days ? To assume that would be to 
 predict for our industrial and commercial life 
 a permanence which is generally supposed not 
 to be its leading characteristic. And I think 
 we may be glad that the Bible is agriculturally 
 rather than financially or mechanically illustrated, 
 for there is a permanence about the processes 
 of nature which makes illustrations, such as our 
 Lord used, very suitable to accompany truths 
 which do not pass away. 
 
 Has it ever occurred to any one to notice 
 what a wide range Christ's teaching could take 
 with the aid of a single illustration ? How 
 much could He tell of the mysteries of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven over a fishing-net, or a 
 farm-yard, or one solitary ear of corn or de- 
 tached grain of wheat ! We venture to say 
 that the whole of Christ's most salient teaching 
 could be done with a text plucked at random 
 in a corn-field. Let us try and see some of the 
 ways in which the statement just made can be 
 verified. 
 
 We will begin with the lowest of the lessons 
 
174 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 in the Christian scale — viz., the right to acquire 
 and the duty to defend our personal and re- 
 ligious liberty. We trace all our good to Jesus 
 Christ, whenever we see a rightly ordered state 
 or look upon a well-saved soul. If Christ had 
 not promulgated our liberties in His new charter, 
 if priestcraft had not come under His lash, and 
 the slave had not found the sealed orders of 
 his emancipation amongst Christ's papers, we 
 should have to answer John's question, "Are 
 we to look for another ? " in the affirmative. 
 Christ cannot be all and in all until there is 
 neither bond nor free. Nor have we the right 
 to glory over the best steps of national pro- 
 gress, and remain Christians when we thus exult, 
 unless we count Christ as the seed-corn of our 
 harvest. It is perfectly in accordance with 
 New Testament teaching to define liberty as 
 the right to act without the intervention of a 
 ruler and to think without the intervention of 
 a priest. These ideas are the current coin of 
 the kingdom, as well as the base metal of the 
 agitator. 
 
 Now when our Lord would teach us these 
 things. He went through the corn-fields on the 
 
A CORN' OF WHEA2 175 
 
 Sabbath, and His disciples plucked and ate. 
 They did not know that they were plucking 
 and eating emancipation, that the rubbing of 
 their hands was the type of the whole friction 
 of progress ; but Christ knew it. And when 
 the Pharisees would stop the impromptu break- 
 fast, and put precedent and piety to the front, 
 and proved to demonstration, no doubt, that it 
 was a lesser kind of threshing forbidden on 
 the holy day. He shook the ears of corn in 
 their faces, and said that He was the Lord of 
 the Sabbath. I wonder whether once in the 
 thousand times when we decorate our churches 
 with wheat-ears for harvest festivals we have 
 any thought in our minds of the kind of sermon 
 Christ preached off the simple texts which make 
 our show ? or whether we are so limited in our 
 range of religious vision as not to know that 
 the harvest is not exclusively the end of the 
 world, nor those that reap it merely the angels ? 
 So much then may be said with regard to the 
 priceless privileges of an advancing Christian 
 civilisation from the text, "He went through 
 the corn-fields on the Sabbath." 
 
 Turn now to the spiritual life, and let us fly 
 
176 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 higher. Our consecration to God was taught 
 us by Jesus Christ over a single grain of seed- 
 corn ; the law of death to the self-life and of life 
 in the spirit is written across the law of natural 
 disintegration and reintegration of the corn of 
 wheat that falls into the ground. To make a 
 more exact statement, we ought to say, not the 
 law of our consecration to God, but the law of 
 His consecration. For the corn of wheat from 
 which He preached was in the first instance 
 His own life, and not ours. " Except a corn 
 of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth 
 alone : if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." 
 And the context shows that, in the first instance, 
 He was speaking of His own actual death, and 
 not merely of the mystical surrender of His 
 will or of ours, but of the whole story of which 
 the Incarnation is the prologue and the Resur- 
 rection the conclusion. Now it is true that our 
 spiritual history is involved in that story, for to 
 be a Christian is to have died with Christ and 
 to be raised with Him ; but the lesson loses 
 much of its force if we leave out the words 
 " with Christ " and " with Him." For what 
 special wonder is it if we acknowledge our own 
 
A CORN OF WHEAT 177 
 
 limitations and confess our own nothingness ? 
 The propulsion to duty lies in the appreciation 
 of Christ, not in the depreciation of ourselves ; 
 in the knowledge of heavenly love, not in the 
 attainment of hatred of personal selfishness. 
 And one of the things that move our affection 
 Christwards is His unspeakable humility, and 
 we shall not easily find a better illustration of 
 the truth that He was meek and lowly in heart 
 than In the fact of His comparing His life to 
 a single corn of wheat, which any one might 
 despise and nobody would miss. Such language 
 is like a renewal of the Incarnation. 
 
 If we appreciate Christ when He thus dis- 
 courses over His own body, and when He thus 
 epitomises His own life, we ought not to find 
 it so difificult to take the place of consecration 
 ourselves, and to be planted with Him in the 
 likeness of His death. 
 
 From the very same text He taught us the 
 doctrine of our sanctification, by means of wheat 
 that was thoroughly threshed and corn that was 
 gathered in from a floor that was thoroughly 
 purged. We observe that here He does not 
 call Himself the corn, but the thresher ; the 
 
 12 
 
178 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 inference is that, while it was appropriate to 
 see in Him the seed-corn of God, it was 
 not appropriate to think of Him as a grain of 
 wheat still in the chaff, when the lesson clearly 
 is that the chaff stands for what is worthless 
 and actually evil. For this reason He appears 
 as the thresher, and not as the corn ; and we 
 are entitled to interpret all the imagery of the 
 threshing-floor of ourselves and of the Church. 
 God did not say concerning Christ, " I will 
 thoroughly purge," but it was said of His 
 people ; the cleansing of the Vine is in the 
 branches. But this really simplifies matters for 
 us very much, because we are in no danger 
 of wrongly transferring to ourselves a work of 
 grace which might refer to Him, or to ourselves 
 only in an ideal manner in Him. Whatever 
 Pentecostal grace may be, or Pentecostal purity, 
 it is all ours ; nor need we have the slightest 
 fear or suspicion that we shall detract anything 
 from the glory of Christ by being as pure as 
 He intends to make us. And personally it is 
 a matter of great comfort to me that this 
 thought of a God-wrought purity is put in the 
 very forefront ot the Gospel ; so that if we 
 
A CORN OF WHEAT 179 
 
 had nothing more than a leaf or two at the 
 beginning of Matthew, or if we had only so 
 much of John the Baptist's sermons as would 
 make mere headlines for newspapers, we should 
 know what it was that God was designing for 
 us, and why Christ was come ; and we should 
 not err, we cannot err, in pushing to the front 
 of our own religious thinking those very thoughts 
 which belong to the beginning of the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 Much more might be said on the same sub- 
 ject, and in connection with it. It is probable 
 that all the deepest teaching of the Bible, both 
 of the Old and of the New Testaments, is 
 characterised by the same leaning on the 
 elementary facts and processes of nature. The 
 graces of the redeemed life can all be ex- 
 pressed in the same alphabet; "every virtue 
 we possess, and every conflict won," can be re- 
 corded in these simple forms of speech. What 
 a magnificent praise of God behind the cloud 
 and within the veil is contained, for instance, in 
 that last chapter of Habakkuk ! One wonders 
 why it was never pushed back from the 
 Prophets into a leading place in the Psalms. 
 
i8o UNION WITH GOD 
 
 Indeed it was so pushed back in the Greek 
 Church, for they made it one of the nine can- 
 ticles which they commonly write at the end of 
 the Psalter. When we come to examine the 
 terms of this beautiful song in the night, the 
 most perfect expression of resignation to God 
 and of deliverance from disappointment, we 
 find the writer teaching us from fig trees that 
 have not blossomed, and from olive trees whose 
 labour has failed. We should not learn it any 
 quicker if it had been expressed in the language 
 of Consols or of Argentine Securities. These 
 simple teachings of farm and field knock con- 
 tinually at the doors of our own blessedness, 
 with intent that we may enter therein and find 
 our home in the will of God, and our permanent 
 lodging under the shadow of the Almighty. 
 
XI 
 
 THE HOLY PA2IENCE 
 
" My sou I, wait thou only upon God ; 
 For my expectation is fro7n IIi?n." 
 
 Psalm Ixii. 5. 
 
 182 
 
XI 
 
 THE HOLY PATIENCE 
 
 AMONGST the virtues and graces which 
 go to make up the saintly character, it 
 is certain that Patience occupies a leading 
 position, being, in its highest form (for we 
 are not speaking of elementary attainments), a 
 virtue so God-honouring and God-justifying, 
 that it is set amongst the other ethical cha- 
 racteristics of the redeemed man as a chief 
 corner-stone, being in the builded temple of 
 the Christian life what Christ is in the temple 
 of redeemed humanity. 
 
 If we were to be told that a book was 
 shortly to appear, in which, from the standpoint 
 of freshly acquired facts or more accurately 
 combined doctrines, a perfect vindication of 
 God's ways to men would be for the first time 
 presented, and we were left to speculate about 
 
 the character of the book in the interval between 
 
 183 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 the announcement of the book and its publica- 
 tion, how many things would immediately be 
 suggested to our mind ! One of the first would 
 be that this was the book which all the best 
 men had been wishing to write : for who is 
 there that knows God at all that is unconcerned 
 with the problem that Milton had in hand 
 when he desired — 
 
 " That to the height of this great argument 
 I may assert eternal Providence 
 And justify tlie ways of God to men " ? 
 
 If this is the end and aim of poetry, every 
 poet is a Christian, and every Christian, more 
 or less, a poet. We hold, on this question, the 
 faith and morals of Milton. And we have all 
 of us the inward conviction that, forming, as 
 we do, fragments of a world in which, from 
 the microcosm to the macrocosm, the denial of 
 God appears along with the affirmation of His 
 being and of His love, and in which unbelief is 
 always dogging the pioneer footsteps of Faith, 
 there is none of us that is exempt from the 
 study of the Divine Vindication. For God 
 cannot be in the highest degree glorified until 
 He is justified ; and we should therefore feel 
 
THE HOLY PATIENCE 185 
 
 that, when the book of the Divine Justification 
 is open to readers, the readers will be all that 
 worthily bear the name of Believers. We 
 should all read this book, at all events, the 
 moment that it appears. 
 
 Another thought that would rise to our 
 minds would be that it could hardly be a short 
 book that was promised. It will be more 
 interesting than the best novel ever written, 
 yet we hardly expect it to come within the 
 scope of three volumes. Our own perplexities 
 require at least a page ; and then there are 
 our neighbours' troubles too, which have reacted 
 upon the affirmation of God in the world, and 
 made it more like a changing Yea-nay than the 
 everlasting Yea. And even if we have never 
 sinned nor charged God with folly, there must 
 be a vindication of our Faith, as well as a 
 condemnation of any possible or actual Unfaith, 
 in the new book. Certainly it will be a large 
 book, when the index shows our names and 
 the names of those we know and love, along 
 with the other factors that make up the travail 
 of the world. 
 
 We should further consider that, inasmuch as 
 
1 86 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 it is by the Church that the manifold wisdom 
 of God is to be made known, the justification 
 of God's ways will especially be brought out 
 by throwing fresh light upon the great historical 
 facts upon which the Christian religion reposes, 
 and upon the great experiences, personal and 
 collective, which men have had of the Grace of 
 God in this life. It will not be a mere book 
 of anthems arranged for the instruments of 
 another world. Every word of it would indeed 
 serve for the libretto of an oratorio, and a good 
 part of it we shall sing, and at sight too, with 
 an accompaniment upon our own strings. But 
 it will be written in plain prose, and the 
 librarian will catalogue it as Church History. 
 
 And the author's name — what can it be other 
 than Patience ? For, unless God write the 
 book Himself, to which of the powers or 
 virtues, celestial or terrestrial, could it be 
 given, except only to this handmaid of the 
 Lord, who can say of all the story of the 
 Church of God — 
 
 " et quorum pars magna fui " ; 
 
 whose ceaseless occupation it has been to wait 
 
THE HOLY PATIENCE 187 
 
 for the consolation of Israel ; who first made 
 hope to be vocal in the soul of Isaiah, who 
 fasted and prayed with Anna in her long 
 widowhood, who was at the cross with the 
 Blessed Mother, and at the grave with the 
 Magdalene ; who hired the room for the great 
 Pentecostal Meeting, and sang " How long, O 
 Lord, how long " under the great altar of the 
 martyr sacrifices ? She it is who will write the 
 book (for it is Patience that justifies God), and 
 some of the proof-sheets are already passing 
 through the press. 
 
 But, leaving allegory and similitude, let us 
 say in plain English that a God-inspired Ex- 
 pectation, a Holy Patience, has always been 
 the mark of the true believer, at the most 
 critical periods in the history of the Church 
 and of the individual ; and we propose to point 
 out some of the ways in which this grace has 
 been demonstrated to be the corner-stone of 
 the Worship of God. We may show this, in 
 the first instance, by illustrations drawn from 
 the leading dispensations of the Grace of God 
 to men, and we may confirm it from the obser- 
 vation of individual leadings and visitations, in 
 
UNION WITH GOD 
 
 accordance with the general law that all dis- 
 pensational experience of the Church becomes 
 the individual experience of the child of God. 
 
 In the first place, then, remark that before 
 the First Advent God had a waiting people 
 whose faith was focussed upon the promises of 
 the Advent. That such a band of waiting 
 people really existed is sufficiently clear from 
 hints that are let fall in the story of Simeon 
 and Anna. The definition of Simeon as one 
 who was expectant of the Comfort of Israel, 
 and the allusion to the audiences of the 
 prophetess Anna as being composed of those 
 who were expectant of the redemption of 
 Jerusalem, are sufficient intimations of the 
 existence of an adventist movement in Jerusalem. 
 Indeed, the terms are practically equivalent in 
 the two passages quoted (Luke i. 25, 38). But 
 if we equate " expectant of the consolation of 
 Israel " with " expectant of the redemption of 
 (or in) Jerusalem," we have practically re- 
 covered the formula of the religious movement 
 to which Simeon and Anna and their friends 
 belonged. And the leading virtue which is 
 involved in this spiritual movement, without 
 
THE HOLY PATIENCE 
 
 which the movement itself could not exist, is 
 evidently the Holy Patience. 
 
 Here, then, we have the nucleus of 
 Christianity, the Church before the Christ, 
 detached from the average Judaism of the day 
 by the fact that they had larger hopes, a more 
 assiduous communion with God, and special 
 intimations of the Spirit concerning the things 
 which God had laid up for them that loved 
 Him. It would be called, nowadays, a new 
 sect, and as such meet with prompt condemna- 
 tion ; but the sectarianism involved in a closer 
 walk with God, and a better knowledge of His 
 ways, has broad shoulders, and can bear some 
 reproaches, without being bent too much out 
 of the perpendicular. And certainly when the 
 apparently sectarian movement becomes set to 
 music in such terms as the Nunc Dimittis 
 offers, and discourses of a " salvation prepared 
 before the face of all people," and of " a light 
 that was to be a revelation of the Gentiles " as 
 well as **the glory of Thy people Israel," we 
 can only say that the apparently sectarian move- 
 ment is vastly wider than the Jewish Church, 
 from which a larger hope has differentiated it. 
 
igo UNION WITH GOD 
 
 There is nothing narrow about people that can 
 sing in this way. 
 
 We shall understand the position of the 
 First Adventists better, if we remove from our 
 minds that common but unverifiable opinion 
 that all the Jews in our Lord's day were 
 indulging Messianic expectations. It is so 
 far from being so that there were whole com- 
 munities from which we get no evidence ot 
 such beliefs. Take, for example, Alexandria, 
 the greatest of all Jewish colonies, and the 
 nearest to Jerusalem. When our Lord came, 
 the leading teacher of that great community, 
 the greatest of all Jewish teachers outside the 
 Christian movement, was Philo. So far from 
 Philo indulging Messianic hopes himself or 
 arousing them in other people, we find him to 
 be definitely and positively an anti-adventist, 
 at the very opposite pole to good Simeon and 
 Anna. The utmost length that he will go in 
 the indulging of national hopes is that there 
 may be a return of the people to the Holy 
 Land ; but even with regard to this there will 
 be no leader and commander of the people ; 
 they will be brought back by a Light, and even 
 
THE HOL Y PA TIENCE 1 9 1 
 
 this is an inward Light, visible to the people 
 themselves, and invisible to others — that is, a 
 light which might be a glory of God's people 
 Israel, but in no sense was an apocalypse of 
 the nations. It is very important to study 
 these cross-currents and opposing centres in 
 the Judaism of our Lord's time, and to recon- 
 struct, as far as possible, the molecular group- 
 ings of the B.C. believers. If we could determine 
 the characteristic beliefs of the great synagogues 
 of those days, we should probably see reasons 
 why the Church made more rapid progress in 
 some centres than in others — why it was, for 
 example, so rapid in Rome and so slow in 
 Alexandria. And, at all events, we can see 
 that the Adventists were right, and Philo 
 (blessed man though he was) was wrong, and 
 that it was better to have had a part in the 
 most simple religious exercises of the waiting 
 people in Jerusalem than to have imbibed the 
 deepest wisdom of the man who wrote the 
 tract Who is the Heir of Things Divine ? 
 For Christ did come, even though Philo ex- 
 pressed so decidedly an opinion to the contrary ; 
 and the Adventists saw Him first ; while, as 
 
192 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 far as we know, Philo never had the privilege 
 of seeing the Salvation of God. 
 
 All of which is to me, at all events, peculiarly 
 instructive ; for it has a very practical bearing 
 when we turn to our second consideration, 
 which is that the Second Advent is the subject 
 of the Holy Patience, exactly as the First was. 
 Waiting and its correlative Watching are the 
 distinctive marks of the Church of the last 
 days, in so far as the Church of the last days 
 is alive. In a certain sense it has always been 
 the mark of the living Church : " Ye turned 
 unto God from idols ... to wait for His Son 
 from heaven"; "To them that look for Him 
 He shall appear, without sin, unto salvation " ; 
 " A crown of righteousness which the Lord, 
 the righteous judge, shall give unto me in that 
 day ; and not to me only, but to all them that 
 love His appearing." Is there no parallel 
 between the case of people who to-day love 
 His appearing, and of those who in earlier 
 times were described as " waiting for the 
 Comfort of Israel"? And if such a parallel 
 does exist, will it not be important to ask 
 whether our attitude on the question of the last 
 
THE HOL Y PA TIENCE 1 93 
 
 days is consonant with a just interpretation of 
 the promises of Christ, and whether we may 
 not lose, by an undue spiritualising of Scripture, 
 just where we seem to find ? — for the best 
 mystical illumination is no substitute for a lost 
 promise of Jesus Christ. Blessed are those 
 servants whom their Lord, when He cometh, 
 shall find watching. 
 
 The third point to be noticed is that the 
 Holy Patience has to do with another great 
 dispensational truth — the descent of the Holy 
 Ghost. We have spoken of the organised 
 expectancy for the Comfort of Israel : and the 
 Comfort of Israel was Christ Incarnate — our 
 first Comforter, as the Blessed Spirit is the 
 other Comforter, in order that under no stage 
 of the Christian Church's history should be- 
 lievers be orphans. 
 
 But it is just as true of the Descent of the 
 Spirit as of the Incarnation that it was looked 
 for by a nucleus of simple-minded people, to 
 whom the promises of God and the spiritual 
 intimations that they received were everything 
 in the world. Nevertheless, it is true that 
 even Pentecost has something about it which 
 
 13 
 
194 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 looks like sectarianism. When they called the 
 Church-roll on the great and notable day, there 
 were many names missing that might have 
 been expected, beside the name of Judas. 
 One hundred and twenty Spirit-baptised persons 
 is far short even of the five hundred brethren 
 who are reported to have seen the Risen Christ 
 upon one occasion ; and how vastly short of 
 the number of the names of those who had 
 experienced His healing grace or, in one form 
 or another, proved His saving power ! One 
 might almost use Christ's own words, and 
 apply them to the praising people in the upper 
 room : " Were there not ten cleansed ? and 
 where are the nine ? There are not found that 
 return and give God the glory, except this 
 handful ! " But this only shows that the Holy 
 Patience, in which these souls tarry for their 
 enduement of Divine Life and Power, is, as it 
 were, an election within the election ; and that 
 here also many are called, but few chosen. 
 
 It is possible that, at the time of this great 
 manifestation of God to the world, there may 
 have been those amongst early disciples who 
 had either ventured to disbelieve the promise 
 
THE HOLY PATIENCE 195 
 
 of the Father, or had falsely consoled them- 
 selves by a belief that the Church was already 
 enjoying all that was meant by the Promise ! 
 
 Last of all, when we turn from dispensational 
 truth to personal experience, which is its mirror 
 and reproduction, we find ourselves face to face 
 with the promise of great and notable days for 
 ourselves, as important to our lives as the 
 coming of Christ to the world or the day of 
 Pentecost to the Church — with blessings defi- 
 nite enough, if Scripture be not misleading, to 
 awaken all desire and unite us all experimentally 
 in the Holy Patience of which we have been 
 speaking. " I will dwell in them and walk in 
 them " ; " He dwelleth with you and shall be 
 in you"; "The Lord, whom ye seek, shall 
 suddenly come to His temple" : and over every 
 promised revelation of Christ to the soul, we 
 take up the language which is natural to the 
 last days, and say, " Even so, come, Lord 
 Jesus." 
 
XII 
 
 THE DEATH-SONG 
 
XII 
 
 THE DEATH-SONG 
 
 I HAVE a dear and gifted friend who, 
 when she writes to me, seals her letters 
 with the legend of the dying swan, " Moriens 
 cano," "As I die I sing"; for, as you know, 
 the last day of the wild swan's life is said to be 
 set to music. It has often happened that the 
 imagination has played sweetly false with natural 
 history, and has supported both dogma and 
 ethics on some statement which cannot be found 
 in treatises on zoology. The early Christians, 
 for example, found the doctrine of the Resurrec- 
 tion in the story of the phoenix ; and some of 
 them believed the " sole Arabian bird " to have 
 been expressly designed by God for the preach- 
 ing of a life to come. And something similar 
 to this has happened in the case of the wild 
 swan, which was supposed to become oracular 
 
200 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 before Its death, and is therefore the symbol for 
 the most exalted hopes which man is privileged 
 to indulge, as he looks over the verge of his 
 narrow world into the broad world which God 
 has laid up for them that love Him. 
 
 It is a figure which often meets us in litera- 
 ture ; for instance, there is a noble passage in 
 the Phcedo of Plato, in which the dying Socrates 
 is made to compare himself with the prophetic 
 birds that are sacred to Apollo : " For they, 
 when they perceive that they must die, having 
 sung all their life long, do then sing more than 
 ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are 
 about to go away to the god whose ministers 
 they are. For because they are sacred to 
 Apollo they have the gift of prophecy, and 
 anticipate the good things of another world ; 
 wherefore they sing and rejoice on that day 
 more than ever they did before."^ 
 
 And the student of the life of Tennyson (and 
 the study of the life includes the memory of the 
 death) will recall how favourite a figure this 
 was to him. We find it in the most exquisite 
 
 ' Plato's Phcedo^ 84 D. 
 
THE DEATH-SONG 201 
 
 of his early poems, The Dying Swan, in which 
 he describes the way in which 
 
 " The wild swan's death-note took the soul of that waste 
 place 
 With joy mingled with sorrow." 
 
 It appears again as the leading metaphor in 
 The Passing of Arthur, whose exit is compared 
 to the bird that, 
 
 " fluting a wild carol ere her death. 
 Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood 
 With swarthy webs." 
 
 And last of all, chiefest of all, it is the figure 
 by which one naturally describes the best and 
 greatest words which we associate with his 
 memory, the song that predicted his own 
 passing, as he crossed the bar, and knew his 
 Pilot face to face. The wild swan will not 
 drop out of literature, even though she may 
 have, in the sense that poets praise her, dropped 
 out of natural history. We have too deep- 
 rooted a belief in the life to come to suppose 
 that we are obliged to enter it as upon an 
 absolutely foreign country. It must surely be 
 possible, from some point of spiritual vantage, 
 
202 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 to see the land from afar. Nor are the counsels 
 of those upon whom the light of the City is 
 already falling likely to be always feeble with 
 the weakness of failing lips. And certainly it 
 is not an ordinary thing for a person who has 
 lived in Divine communion to "die, and give 
 no sign " ; for a holy life is always oracular with 
 truth and electric with love ; and why should 
 it cease to be so because it has become re- 
 newedly conscious that the night is far spent, 
 and the day is at hand ? 
 
 Let us consider our Lord Jesus Christ. What 
 a death-song was that which He sang to His 
 disciples in the last hours of their outward 
 companionship ! We recognise how the note 
 has changed in Christ's speech when we read 
 the closing chapters of St. John's Gospel, say 
 from the thirteenth to the seventeenth, and 
 compare them either with the earlier discourses 
 in the same Gospel, or with the fragments of 
 His teaching in the other Gospels. How far 
 we are now removed from the discussion of 
 merely local issues, such as Sabbath-day 
 healings, and the like ! Instead of the relative 
 superiority of Jerusalem or Samaria as places 
 
THE DEATH-SONG 203 
 
 of worship, we hear of a single flock, composed 
 of those who believe, and of others who will 
 believe through their word. We are past the 
 point where it is discussed whether this or that 
 Jewish feast is to be attended when the last 
 great Passover has been reached, concerning 
 which He said, " With desire I have desired to 
 eat this Passover with you before I suffer." All 
 doubtful situations have disappeared from the 
 life ; and with the end in full view He fulfils 
 the Scriptures written concerning Himself, and 
 notes, as the last steps of the journey are taken, 
 that these steps are fore-ordained, and that 
 thus it must be. For the last time He has said, 
 what was one of His characteristic words in the 
 early ministry, that His hour was not yet come ; 
 for He now knows assuredly that the time is 
 come when He is to be delivered into the hands 
 of sinners, and when He is to return to the 
 Father. 
 
 Accordingly when we read these chapters we 
 hear in them the "awful jubilant voice" of the 
 wild Swan ; and some of the notes of this song, 
 sung in sight of the City, will set us also singing, 
 as if we shared the vision. 
 
204 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 Let US examine some of the points at which 
 we become partakers of the Lord's hope, and 
 fulfillers of His saying, that all things which He 
 had learned from the Father He had made 
 known to His disciples. 
 
 First of all, think of the marvellous freedom 
 from heart-care of which He spoke. " Let not 
 your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. 
 Believe in God and believe in Me." And as 
 He said the words the care of the whole world 
 was gathered upon His shoulders. He was 
 already being crushed by the sin and the sorrow 
 of the world ; presently He will be forced by 
 the sheer weight of them to His knees. Nor 
 will He be able to rise again without the aid 
 of an angelic ministry to strengthen Him. Yet 
 in the midst of this burden, what boundless 
 cheer ! With the burden of the world there 
 was involved the care of the Church. Over 
 the general mass of believers He is saying, " I 
 pray for them," and over the pressing needs of 
 individuals, of whom Peter is the representative, 
 He is saying, " I have prayed for thee." It is 
 one of the astonishing characteristics of our 
 Lord's last prayers that they exhibit such 
 
THE DEATH- SONG 205 
 
 freedom of choice in the subject concerning 
 which request is made. We find by experi- 
 ment that, even when we have attained to 
 a measure of the grace of intercession, that 
 immediate and pressing personal needs have 
 a tendency to make friends forgotten at the 
 Mercy-seat. We cannot always carry a heavier 
 burden of petition than is evoked by our own 
 circumstances and proper to our own day of 
 trial. There is a want of spiritual elasticity 
 about the inner life which often prevents us, 
 under the stress of personal suffering, from 
 responding to the needs of others. Yet in 
 our Lord's last days and hours we recognise 
 a wonderful buoyancy, which is not limited to 
 the single statement, " I have overcome the 
 world ! " "■ Father, I will," is strangely alter- 
 nated with "Not My will, but Thine." "Be 
 of good cheer " falls from the same lips that 
 will presently be saying " My soul is exceeding 
 sorrowful." Granted that the waves of unutter- 
 able grief are breaking in succession against the 
 beaten promontory of His perfect faith and 
 changeless love, and that betrayal and denial 
 are followed by the fluctus dectcmana, or tenth 
 
2o6 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 wave, of a general desertion, we must also 
 recognise the incoming of a tide of exultant joy 
 (He calls it *' My joy," as though it were some 
 prize He had found in the waste places of this 
 world) ; and this joy is prospective beyond the 
 pain. It almost seems as if He were prepar- 
 ing to stand outside His own grave, and say, 
 " Jesus, come forth," as He had done at the 
 grave of Lazarus. He saw an unoccupied 
 tomb beyond the sealed one, and an occupied 
 throne in the place of the one that He had 
 vacated. Depend upon it that such spiritual 
 exultation, in which the spirit claimed its right 
 to sing its own triumph, had its Jluctus decumana 
 as truly as the ocean of sorrow, and that its 
 flood-mark was higher. Such freedom from 
 care and such spiritual confidence is one of the 
 characteristic notes of the true swan-song. 
 
 Secondly, as we have already intimated, our 
 Swan sang of the life to come. And it is clear 
 from the stray words of the song that have 
 come down to us, that Jesus Christ regarded 
 the next world with perfect naturalness. Two 
 notes recur in this part of the music : one is 
 the word " Home," and the other is the word 
 
THE DEATH-SONG 207 
 
 " A little while." Both of these words are 
 within the compass of our own voices, and the 
 scale of our own instruments. Our Lord said 
 nothing about the life to come in these chapters 
 that would provoke ideas of a spectacular 
 character. No trumpets sound, no rapturous 
 welcome is heard. For a moment we almost 
 forget that the song is the jubilation of a 
 conqueror. " The glory which I had with 
 Thee" turns into the lowly language of " My 
 Father's house " ; and He Himself, as He 
 turns and looks back upon His brethren whom 
 He is leaving, says to them, " I shall be your 
 courier in another world ; I will prepare a 
 place for you ; and when you come I will open 
 the door to receive you, as if I were the 
 servant, and you the master, and as if I were 
 still among you as the one that ministers." It 
 is certain there is more true music in these 
 simple statements than in the language of the 
 highest coloured apocalypse. We can never 
 be thankful enough to the Lord for having 
 made the thought of the next life so contiguous 
 to the fact of the life that now is, and for 
 having revealed it so clearly as the prolongation 
 
2o8 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 of the righteousness, peace, and joy in believing 
 which we enjoy here and now. With this 
 gratitude is also mingled the thankfulness for 
 the words " Yet a little while." Without Christ 
 these words are a passing bell ; with Christ 
 they are a chiming bell. He used them over 
 Himself that we might learn to use them 
 over ourselves. " A little while and ye shall 
 not see Me, and again a little while and ye 
 shall see Me." Any separation from Him 
 would have seemed like an age to those to 
 whom His presence, even in the outward, 
 meant so much ; but for the elect's sake the 
 days were shortened until theyappeared as "a 
 little while." And all separations are included 
 in the same formula. He gave us in His 
 own life an object-lesson in reunion. This we 
 could not have learned from the grass that 
 to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven ; 
 nor from the daffodils that " haste away so 
 soon," for they only proclaim "A little while 
 and ye shall not see me." But we can learn it 
 from the perfect flower of the triumphant life 
 of the Christ that prepares to die, and knows 
 that death will have only a moment's dominion 
 
THE DEATH-SONG 209 
 
 over Him. Is not this thought of the reunion 
 of the Hfe to come a part of the true swan- 
 music ? 
 
 But, in the next place, we may remember 
 that a part of this last song was an action. 
 You will find it in John xiii., where He washes 
 the disciples' feet. It could not be done in 
 words only, because it was not possible that 
 words could leave an example ; and without 
 an example the doctrine inculcated would not 
 have been believed. Compared to mere words, 
 even good and holy words, a loving action is 
 an orchestra to a shepherd's pipe. So He laid 
 aside His garments (as if it were a mystery 
 play of the Incarnation), and took on Him the 
 form and the fashion of a servant (as He had 
 done in the great humiliation), and went out 
 of the world having left nothing menial in it, 
 because He so successfully had taken the 
 lowest place from first to last, and had in 
 Himself made the humblest actions holy. Few 
 things had so emphasised the gulf between 
 Christ and His disciples as this loving action 
 had done. When it was over they looked on 
 His feet, and did not venture to wash them in 
 
 14 
 
210 UNION WIIH GOD 
 
 return. Not even the beloved John proposed 
 to take up the towel which Jesus dropped. 
 Nor did He urge such reciprocity upon them 
 towards Himself, but said, " Do to one another 
 the lowly thing which I have done to you." 
 This was swan-music indeed — sphere-music 
 apart from and beyond the incidental words 
 which the situation provoked. It would have 
 been a part of the great harmony if it had 
 been done in silence. 
 
 Last of all, this death-song was a song of 
 the victory of love over all ills. It is true 
 that in this song faith, hope, and love all 
 conspire to bear a part ; but here also the 
 rule is not broken that the greatest of these is 
 love. The closing chapters of John are full 
 of statements of the love of God to Christ, 
 and the love of God in Christ ; of love that is 
 before the foundation of the world, and of love 
 that will be unshaken when the foundations 
 and pillars of the earth do tremble ; of love 
 that was in the beginning, continues with its 
 own in the world, and is with them even to 
 the end ; of love that the Father had for the 
 Son, and of the Son for the Father. And 
 
THE DEATH-SONG 
 
 when we have sounded a little in this mystery, 
 we are told that the love of God to the believer 
 is the same as the love wherewith He loved 
 the Son ; for, says Christ, " Thou hast loved 
 them as Thou hast loved Me." We see it in 
 action, as He pours water, and in passion, as 
 He sheds His life-blood. And we understand 
 from Him that this single principle is an 
 equivalent of every rule of good conduct, and 
 fulfils all righteousness ; that everything which 
 God can be in man, or which He can do 
 through man, shapes itself into this single and 
 perfect syllable, the last great oracular word, 
 the closing note of the great music of the 
 Dying Swan. 
 
 Printed by Hasell, IVatson, <S' Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. 
 

 
 
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