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THE
GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
THE GREAT TEXTS
OF THE BIBLE
EDITED BY THE REV.
JAMES HASTINGS, D.D.
EDITOR OF "THE EXPOSITORY TIMES" "THE DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE'
"THE DICTIONARY OF CHRIST AND THE GOSPELS" AND
"THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION AND ETHICS "
I CORINTHIANS
Published by Messrs. T. & T. CLARK
THE WAVERLEY BOOK COMPANY LTD,
7 and 8 OLD BAILEY, LONDON, E.G.
1912
Printed by Moawgoii & GIBB LIMITED, Edinburgh
.IS
CONTENTS
TOPICS.
PAGK
THE POWER AND THE WISDOM OF Gui> . . . .1
THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE . . . . .25
THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE . . . . . .45
GOD'S FELLOW- WORKERS .... . f 67
THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT . . . . . .89
YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS . . . . . .111
OUR THREE JUDGES . . . . . . .141
JUDGING PREMATURELY ....... 159
FOR THE FEAST . . . . . . . .173
THE BODY FOR GOD . . . . . . .191
SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT ....... 207
ADAPTABILITY ........ 235
FOR THE CROWN ........ 263
TRUST IN GOD AND Do THE EIGHT . . . . .281
MAN'S CHIEF END ....... 303
PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH ..... 319
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL ...... 345
THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT ..... 365
THESE THREE . . . . . . . .391
THE EESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD ..... 453
THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT . , 483
vi CONTENTS
TEXTS.
1 CORINTHIANS.
PAGE
I. 22-24 . . . . . . . ... .3
II. 2 27
II. 9 47
III. 9 . . .69
III. 11-13 91
III. 21-23 . .113
IV. 3, 4 143
IV. 5 161
V. 7,8 . . . 175
VI. 19, 20 193
VII. 29, 31 209
IX. 22 237
IX. 25 265
X. 13 283
X. 31 305
XI. 26 . . . . . . . . . 321
XIII. 1 347
XIII. 12 367
XIII. 13 393
XV. 20 . . . . . . . . .455
XVI. 13, 14 ... .... 485
THE POWER AND THE WISDOM OF GOD.
I COR. I
LITERATURE.
Alford (H.), Sermons on Christian Doctrine, 210.
Burrell (D. J.), Christ and Progress, 111.
Bushnell (H.), The New Life, 239.
Candlish (J.), The Gospel of Forgiveness, 301.
Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, iii. 101.
Conn (J.), The Fulness of Time, 71.
Cunningham (W.), Sermons, 120, 134.
Denney (J.), The Way Everlasting, 13.
Dykes*(J. 0.), Sermons, 34.
Edger (S.), Sermons preached at Auckland, N.Z., ii. 40.
Fairbairn (A. M.), Christ in the Centuries, 23.
Foster (J. E.), Pain, 102.
Holland (H. S.), Creed and Character, 191.
Hopkins (E. H.), The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, 141.
Ingram (A. F. W.), The Gospel in Action, 54.
Jowett (J. H.), Apostolic Optimism, 68.
Macleod (A.) 5 A Man's Gift, 23.
(D.), Tlie Sunday Home Service, 262.
Magee (W.), The Gospel and the Age, 3.
Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, ii. 174.
Mills (B. R. V.), Tlie Marks of the Church, 94.
Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 117.
Sclater (J. R. P.), The Enterprise of Life, 244.
Stubbs (W.), in The Anglican Pulpit of To-day, 49.
Taylor (W. M.), Contrary Winds, 116.
Thomas (J.), Sermons : Myrtle Street Pulpit, iii. 99.
Watt (L. M.), The Communion Table, 322.
Winterbotham (R.), Sermons, 156.
British Weekly, Feb. 22, 1912 (Berry).
Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 92 (Beecher) ; xviii. 246 (Stevenson) ; xxxiv.
219 (Spurgeon); xxxix. 369 (Fairbairn); xlii. 146 (Snell) ; Ivii.
273 (Jowett); Ixii. 151 (Pickett); Ixxix. 312 (Fox); Ixxx. 296
(Brown).
Church of England Pulpit, xxx. 13 (Panter) ; Ixii. 381 (Payne), 662
(Straton) ; xliii. 230 (Maturin).
Contemporary Pulpit, ii. 144 (Scott).
THE POWER AND THE WISDOM OF GOD.
Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek after wisdom : but we preach Christ
crucified, unto Jews a stumblingblock, and unto Gentiles foolishness; but
unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God,
and the wisdom of God. I Cor. i. 22-24.
THIS chapter is full of the tragic pathos of the Apostle's life.
We can read, as it were between the lines, the emotions, the
hopes, the despairs, the fears, the loves, amid which he preached
in Corinth, confronted by the hate of the Jew and the scorn
of the Greek, and beset by the jealousies, the divisions, the
misunderstandings, of his heathen and Hebrew converts.
St. Paul when he arrived in Corinth was not new to the work
and the troubles of the missionary. Behind him were years of
labour and sorrow. The man of Macedonia who appeared in a
vision had cried, " Come over and help us " ; and to St. Paul to
hear was to obey. He landed at Philippi, bringing westward and
into Europe the gospel of Christ. But love did not leap to
answer his love, or faith rise to salute his coming. Instead, he
was beaten, smitten with stripes, set in the stocks, made fast in
the inner prison, till the virtue of his Koman citizenship opened
the door of his prison, and he passed on to Thessalonica. There
" lewd fellows of the baser sort " set the city in an uproar, and
he was forced to depart for Beroea. In Beroea he found men
nobler than those of Thessalonica ; for they searched the Scrip-
tures to discover whether his words were true. But enmity
followed and drove him to Athens, where he felt the wondrous
charm of the city and the wondrous indifference of the men.
Images of gods were everywhere, but nowhere was the living
God or godly peace of soul. The men wanted news, not of the
kind he preached, but of the sort that was curious rather than
true. So they set him on Mars' hill, and as, he unrolled his
4 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
burden told of their blind quest after God, and God's ceaseless
quest after them they listened till he came to speak of resur-
rection and judgment. And then, offended rather than amused,
they broke in and said, " We will hear thee again of this matter."
And so he had to forsake cultured Athens, and make for busy
Corinth.
And now, as he writes, the antagonisms and the victories of
those early days in Corinth come back to him. His mingled
feelings are represented by a series of contrasts. First, he
contrasts the hearers who were hostile to his preaching (the
Jews and the Greeks) with those who accepted it (the " called ").
Next, he contrasts the message he had to deliver (a crucified
Christ) with the expectations of those hearers who asked for
signs and sought after wisdom. Then he contrasts the estimates
formed of that same message a " stumblingblock " and " foolish-
ness " to those who were asking for signs of power and wisdom ;
the "power and wisdom of God" to those who believed. The
subject accordingly is St. Paul's preaching, and we have three
natural divisions.
I. The Hearers.
II. The Message.
III. The Eeception of the Message.
I.
THE HEARERS.
What the city of Corinth was we know ; it was rich, luxuri-
ous, commercial, lascivious. East and West met in it, and
mingled their vices and their faiths. Thither had come the Jew,
and built his synagogue, opened his bazaar, made a place for
himself on the exchange, and used his knowledge of the Eastern
men and markets to bring their wares and their ways to the men
of the West. There, too, was found the Greek, subtle, full of
the pride of race and intellect and achievement, speculative,
argumentative in his very commerce, and beating out in the
manner of the Schools the questions connected with the prin-
ciples and profits of trade. There, too, was the Koman, with the
spirit of the soldier who had become sovereign, scornful of the
poor civilian and the mean merchant, thinking the world had
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 5
been made to be conquered, and he to be its conqueror. And in
the face of this mixed and divided community St. Paul preached.
You can imagine him, after a day's hard toil at his handicraft, in
the evening stealing along the quay, watched by few, cared for
by fewer, a man who could not be conquered, and who had in
him vaster ambitions for the good of men than could find room
in the mind of imperial Caesar. And if you had followed him
you might have seen him climb by a mean stair to a meaner
upper room, where the slave, set free for an hour by his master,
or the wharfinger escaping from loading or unloading his ship,
or the porter seeking release from the burden he had carried
throughout the day, met to hear this preacher, mean in appear-
ance, but great in dignity and in power.
T[ The education of the human race has been an affair of
unconscious co-operation. One department of it has been put
out to one race, another to another. For illustration look at
Athens and then at Jerusalem. In Greece we find the first-
class minds of the ancient world. Thales, Pythagoras, Derno-
critus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pheidias, Praxiteles, Archimedes,
Thucydides are, in their several ways, prophets of the intellect.
They stand for philosophy, physics, mathematics, art, music,
politics, the whole sphere of things with which the mind can
busy itself. They are the pioneers of research, openers of the
ways in which truth-seekers have been travelling ever since.
When you pass from Greece to Palestine you find yourself in
another world. Open on Isaiah or Micah, read the New Testa-
ment from cover to cover, and you will find scarce a word about
mentality. There is nothing about philosophy, or geometry, or
music, or painting, or the science of history, or the science of
politics. If you kept to the Bible, you would learn nothing
worth knowing about the physical universe; no hint of the
methods by which its secrets are to be disclosed. Summing the
two up, you may say : Greece is all for knowledge ; Palestine is
all for character. We are learning to-day the immeasurable
debt we owe to both. When you ask, "Which is the mightier;
which the more important ? " Huxley's statement (" clever men
are as common as blackberries ; the rare thing is to find a good
one "), remembering what he stood for, may well set us thinking. 1
The Apostle divides the ancient world into two classes
of men : those whom God has taken under His direction and
1 J. Brierlcy, Life and the Ideal, 57.
6 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
enlightened by a special revelation, the Jews\ the others whom
He " has left to walk in their own ways," the Gentiles, designated
here by the name of their most distinguished representatives,
the Greeks. Each of these groups has its demands, and the
demands are different.
i. Jews.
"Jews ask for signs."
As proof that God was in their midst and as a revelation
of God's nature, the Jews required a sign, a demonstration of
physical power. It was one of Christ's temptations to leap from
a pinnacle of the Temple, for thus He would have won accept-
ance as the Christ. The people never ceased to clamour for a
sign. They wished Him to bid a mountain be removed and cast
into the sea ; they wished Him to bid the sun stand still or the
Jordan retire to its source. They wished Him to make some
demonstration of superhuman power, and so put it beyond a
doubt that God was present.
1. Signs were suggested to the Jewish mind whenever that
people thought of the past history of their nation. Almost
every page of their sacred books spoke of signs either past or to
come. Their faith had signs for its surest proof. Their greatest
men had exhibited most startling signs. Those epochs to which
they looked back with most pride were marked by a greater
display of signs. And so it was no wonder that with the advent
of the Messiah they expected signs in greater number and of
more surpassing brilliancy than ever before.
2. Indeed they had signs in exceeding plenty, and of a
character such as, from the past history of their nation, they
might have expected. Jesus Christ of Nazareth confined His
miracles to no one district, to no one section of the Jewish race
above another. Everywhere, before all the people, He did
wonders, which in number, power, and beneficence surpassed
anything of the kind that had ever occurred in their history.
These miracles, indeed, were so many signs from heaven to them,
but they were not signs to their mind. They really did not
know what they would be at. They wanted signs, and yet more
signs ! For it is of the nature of this desire to rise higher and
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 7
higher in proportion as it is satisfied. On the morrow after the
multiplication of the loaves the multitudes ask : What signs doest
thou then ? Every stroke of power must be surpassed by a
following one yet more marvellous.
Tf There is in the farther course of some Christians that which
is the counterpart of the Slough of Despond at the commencement
of it. There were cartloads of Gospel encouragements cast into
the Slough of Despond, and yet it was the Slough of Despond
still; and so into this there are carted distinctions and marks
of saving grace, yet it remains the counterpart of the Slough of
Despond still. There is no dealing with such persons ; for if you
give them signs of grace, they will ask for signs of the signs. 1
3. The Gospel, now as then, has to encounter the demand of
those who ask for signs. Do we not see the craving for the sign
for the display, that is, of supernatural power to crush and silence
all doubt resulting in the superstitious corruptions of Christianity ?
For what is superstition but an appeal from wisdom to power,
an effort to silence the reason by the terrors of the senses ? The
demand for a religion which shall dispense with the exercise of
reason and the discipline of thought is ever punished by belief
in a religion which outrages all reason and, at last, silences all
thought. Superstition is still the Nemesis, not of faith, but of
unbelief. And every such superstition necessarily grows always
grosser and darker as it grows older. For the desire of the
teacher for power, combining with the desire of the taught for
certainty, must tend always to efforts at making the sign, which
is to secure both, still more awful and convincing, by still greater
and more awful attestations. A fresh miracle must be provided to
silence each fresh heresy, a new prodigy to confirm each new dogma.
K When Carlyle said of God, the God in whom Christians
believe, " He does nothing," he gave expression to precisely this
mental temper. It is the temper of all to whom it is a religious
difficulty that there is a constitution and course of nature and of
human life in which things go on according to general laws, and
in which there is much that is bafiiing, mysterious, and unjust.
If we are to believe in God, they say, let Him do something. 2
^[ The Jews asked for signs, a request which is not necessarily
indicative of a thirst ; it may be an asking behind which there is
J " Rabbi" Duncan, in Brown's Memoir of John Duncan, 426.
2 J. Denney, The Way Everlasting, 14.
8 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
110 parched and aching spirit. That is the bane and peril of all
externalism. It may gratify a feverish curiosity without awaken-
ing the energies of a holy life. The Jews asked for signs. " Now
when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad," for he hoped to
see a sign. It was a restless curiosity, itching for the sensation
of some novel entertainment ; it is not the pang of a faint and
weary heart hungering for bread. " He answered him nothing."
The Jews asked for signs, a request which is frequently indicative
of a life of moral alienation. Externalism abounds in moral gifts,
and in externalisms men often discover drugs by which they can
benumb the painful sense of their own excesses. " An evil and
adulterous generation seeketh after a sign." They try to resolve
into merely physical sensations and sensationalisms what can be
apprehended only by the delicate, tender tendrils of a penitent
and aspiring heart. 1
If F. W. Eobertson in his diary makes the following resolution :
To endeavour to get over the adulterous-generation-habit of
seeking a sign. I want a loud voice from Heaven to tell me
a thing is wrong, whereas a little experience of its results is
enough to prove that God is against it. It does not cohere with
the everlasting laws of the universe. 2
And not for signs in heaven above
Or earth below they look,
Who know with John His smile of love,
With Peter His rebuke.
In joy of inward peace, or sense
Of sorrow over sin,
He is His own best evidence,
His witness is within. 3
ii. Greeks.
" Greeks seek after wisdom."
The wisdom of which St. Paul speaks appears to have been of
two kinds speculative philosophy and wisdom of words, i.e.
eloquence. The Greeks had deified wisdom. They wanted the
Divine intellectualized in a system eloquently giving account of
the nature of the gods, the origin, course, and end of the universe.
This people, with their inquisitive and subtle mind, would get at
1 J. H. Jowett.
- Stopfortl Brooke's Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 73.
8 Wliittier.
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 9
the essence of things. The man who will satisfy Greek expecta-
tion will be, not a miracle-worker, but a Pythagoras or a Socrates
of double power.
1. Next to the Jews there was no people in the world that St.
Paul knew better than the Greeks. He had in his lifetime come
much in contact with them. He had, like all other men,
wondered at their genius. There was no feature more distinctive
of the whole people than their intellectual aptitudes, which they
never lost. Everywhere they kept strong hold of their national
traditions. Their language remained through ages uncorrupt and
unmutilated. Much of their theology and culture was gathered
from the Homeric poems, which were the heirloom of the whole
race. They excelled in all the fine arts. They were masters in
every branch of literature. "The Greeks," above every other
people, " sought after wisdom." There could be nothing equal to
that description in perspicuity and appreciation of national
character. For the Greeks from hoar antiquity had been seekers
after wisdom.
2. The Greek asked for no sign; he cared nothing for the
supernatural, he had ceased to believe in it. He believed only in
nature ; he sought only for wisdom to understand himself and the
world in which he lived ; he asked from Christ only light on those
problems in external nature, or in himself, on which his subtle
mind was ever working. He wanted a perfect philosophy, or, at
least, a perfect morality, which could justify itself to his intellect
by solving all those difficulties which beset all other philosophies
and all other systems of morals. Could Christianity do this ?
Could it tell him what was mind, and how it differed from
matter ? Could it tell him whether he was governed by fate or
by free-will ? Could it tell him whence came evil ? If it could,
he was willing to listen to it and to believe all that it could prove.
But then for such teaching there was no need of miracles any
more than there was for the teaching of geometry. All that was
true in it he would receive on its own evidence, and he would
receive nothing that did not so prove itself to be true.
3. From the earliest days of Christianity to our own, there
have been those who, like the Greeks, demand a demonstration
of religious truths not to the senses, but to the intellect, who ever
io POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
seek to divest Christianity of all that is mysterious or super-
natural and to reduce it, as much as possible, to a purely natural
religion, to something that can be weighed and measured by
the understanding, or that approves itself to the feelings; to
something, in short, that is self-evident to the natural man.
If There is, in our day, a marvellous idolatry of talent ; it is a
strange and a grievous thing to see how men bow down before
genius and success. Draw the distinction sharp and firm between
these two things goodness is one thing, talent is another. It is
an instructive fact that the Son of Man came not as a scribe, but
as a poor working man. He was a teacher, but not a Eabbi.
When once the idolatry of talent enters the Church, then fare-
well to spirituality ; when men ask their teachers, not for that
which will make them more humble and God-like, but for the
excitement of an intellectual banquet, then farewell to Christian
progress. 1
If Artists have united with authors to strengthen this idolatry
of intellect. One of the great pictures in the French Academy of
Design assembles the immortals of all ages. Having erected a
tribunal in the centre of the scene, Delaroche places Intellect
upon the throne. And when the sons of genius are assembled
about that glowing centre, all are seen to be great thinkers.
There stand Democritus, a thinker about invisible atoms ; Euclid,
a thinker about invisible lines and angles; Newton, a thinker
about an invisible force named gravity ; La Place, a thinker about
the invisible law that sweeps suns and stars forward towards an
unseen goal. The artist also remembers the inventors whose
useful thoughts blossom into engines and ships ; statesmen whose
wise thoughts blossom into codes and constitutions; speakers
whose true thoughts blossom into orations; and artists whose
beautiful thoughts appear as pictures. At this assembly of the
immortals great thinkers touch and jostle. But if the great
minds are remembered, no chair is made ready for the great
hearts. He who lingers long before this painting will believe
that brain is king of the world ; that great thinkers are the sole
architects of civilization ; that science is the only providence for
the future; that God Himself is simply an infinite brain, an
eternal logic engine, cold as steel, weaving endless ideas about
life and art, about nature and man. But the throne of the
universe is mercy and not marble ; the name of the world-ruler is
Great Heart, rather than Crystalline Mind, and God is the
Eternal Friend who pulsates out through His world those forms
1 F. W. Robertson.
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 n
of love called reforms, philanthropies, social bounties and bene-
factions, even as the ocean pulsates its life-giving tides into every
bay and creek and river. The springs of civilization are not in
the mind. For the individual and the State " out of the heart
are the issues of life." l
U A dour old Scot upon his deathbed was informed by his
wife that the minister was coming to pray with him. " I dinna
want onybody tae pray wi' me," said he. " Well, then, he'll speak
words of comfort tae ye." "I don't want to hear words o*
comfort," said the intractable Northcountryman. "What do
ye want, then ? " asked his wife. " I want," was the characteristic
reply, " I want tae argue." 2
iii. Them that are Called.
St. Paul places this class of hearers in sharp contrast to all
others. He forcibly separates the "called" Jews and Gentiles
from the mass of their fellow-countrymen ; to the called themselves,
he says, as opposed to all others. The term "called" here
includes the notion of believers. Sometimes " calling " is put in
contrast to the acceptance of faith, as in Matt. xxii. 14, " Many
called, few chosen." But often also the description "called"
implies that of acceptor, as it certainly does here.
1. The Apostle exalts the Divine act in salvation; he sees
God's arm laying hold of certain individuals, drawing them from
the midst of those nationalities, Jewish and Gentile, by the call of
preaching. St. Paul thinks of the constituent elements of which
the church of Corinth was actually composed. These Corinthian
Christians were of no account, poor, insignificant, outcasts, and
slaves, friendless while alive and when dead not missed in any
household ; but God called them and gave them a new and
hopeful life in Christ Jesus. It is plain that it is not by human
wisdom, nor by power, nor by anything generally esteemed among
men that we hold our place in the Church. The fact is that
" not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many
noble, are called." If human wisdom or power held the gates of
the Kingdom, we ourselves would not be in it. To be esteemed,
and influential, and wise is no passport to this new kingdom. It
is not men who by their wisdom find out God and by their nobility
1 N. D. Hillis, The Investment of Influence, 133.
2 Arch. Alexander.
i2 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
of character commend themselves to Him ; it is God who chooses
and calls men, and the very absence of wisdom and possessions
makes men readier to listen to His call.
2. The people that are called are those who have heard the
voice of God and responded to it. The old theologians distin-
guished between a general and an effectual calling. So far they
were correct enough, but they erred in laying the cause of the
distinction on God. There is no difference in the call. The
difference lies in this, that in one case the heart responds to it,
and in the other it does not. God never fails in anything He
does, so far as His part of the work is concerned. God's call
comes forth clear and strong, a great shout of power to the wide
world, but only some respond and are raised to the power of
God, and to the enjoyment of His life.
3. In St. Paul's day this argument from the general poverty
and insignificance of the members of the Christian Church was
readily drawn. Things are changed now; and the Church is
filled with the wise, the powerful, the noble. But St. Paul's
main proposition remains : whoever is in Christ Jesus is so, not
through any wisdom or power of his own, but because God has
chosen and called him. The sweetness and humble friendliness
of St. Paul sprang from his constant sense that whatever he was
he was by God's grace. He was drawn with compassion towards
the most unbelieving because he was ever saying within himself,
There, but for the grace of God, goes Paul.
I owned a little boat a while ago,
And sailed a morning sea without a fear,
And whither any breeze might fairly blow
I'd steer the little craft afar or near.
Mine was the boat,
And mine the air,
And mine the sea,
Not mine a care.
My boat became my place of nightly toil ;
I sailed at sunset to the fishing ground ;
At morn the boat was freighted with the spoil
That my all-conquering work and skill had found.
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 13
Mine was the boat,
And mine the net,
And mine the skill,
And power to get.
One day there passed along the silent shore,
While I my net was casting in the sea,
A Man, who spoke as never man before ;
I followed Him new life began in me.
Mine was the boat,
But His the voice,
And His the call,
Yet mine the choice.
Ah! 'twas a fearful night out on the lake,
And all my skill availed not at the helm,
Till Him asleep I wakened, crying, " Take,
Take Thou command, lest waters overwhelm ! "
His was the boat,
And His the sea,
And His the peace,
O'er all and me.
Once from His boat He taught the curious throng,
Then bade me let down nets into the sea;
I murmured, but obeyed, nor was it long,
Before the catch amazed and humbled me.
His was the boat,
And His the skill,
And His the catch,
And His my will. 1
II.
THE MESSAGE.
1. Preaching. The clear, creative imagination of St. Paul
could penetrate into the brain of the Eoman and look through
his eyes ; into the intellect of the Greek and judge with his
cynicism ; into the spirit of the Hebrew and feel with his heart,
or dream with his fancy. And as he looked at the men he could
read their thoughts without the help of words, translating the
scowl on the Hebrew's face into bitter speech, the scorn on the
1 Joseph Richards.
14 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
Greek's lip into eloquent reproach. But though he knew the
thoughts of the men he did not dare be silent in their presence.
For God sent him to preach the Gospel, and he preached it
possessed with the passion for souls that is the image in man of
grace in God.
(1) "But we preach." St. Paul refused to make any com-
promise. He was very clearly conscious of the two great streams
of expectation and wish which he deliberately thwarted and set
at naught. "The Jews ask for signs" "but we preach Christ
crucified. "The Greeks seek after wisdom" but again, we
preach Christ crucified. To all their subtleties, whether of out-
ward sign or of inward wisdom he opposed the simple fact of his
preaching.
(2) " We preach" The word " preach " is emphatic ; it means
in its full signification " to proclaim as a herald does." St. Paul
proclaimed his Gospel simply as a fact. The Jew required a
sign; he wanted a man who would do something. The Greek
sought after wisdom ; he wanted a man who would perorate and
argue and dissertate. St. Paul says, " No ! " " We have nothing
to do. We do not come to philosophize and to argue. We come
with a message of fact that has occurred, of a Person that has lived."
^[ Preaching is an institute peculiar to the Gospel. Nothing
can be preached but the Gospel, so nothing can be done with the
Gospel but preach it. It is not a mere law to be enjoined, or
a philosophy to be developed by human thought, or a series of
articles to be taught. In its naked essence, it is a fact of God's
doing, a Divine datum, a salvation provided, stored, and offered
in the person of a Saviour. As such, it is to be asserted, declared,
published, heralded. 1
2. Preaching Christ. St. Paul proclaimed a Person, not a
system of philosophy. We can adore a person, but we cannot
adore principles. It is not merely Purity, but the Pure One ; not
merely Goodness, but the Good One, that we worship. Some of
the Greek teachers were also teaching Purity, Goodness, Truth ;
they were striving to lead men's minds to the First Good, the
First Fair. The Jewish Rabbis were endeavouring to do the same ;
but it is only in Christ that it is possible to do this effectually,
it is only in Christ that we find our ideal realized.
1 J. 0. Dykes.
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 15
U Preaching Christ is not preaching about Christ. There is
a well-known passage in the tenth chapter of Eomans which gives
a balanced account of the reason for the failure of so much
preaching to produce any adequate or satisfactory results. The
first part of the passage points to causes of failure in the
preachers; the second half to causes of failure in the hearers.
The great cause of failure in preachers is indicated in one of
these opening interrogations as it is translated in the Eevised
Version. The old version, smoothing over a difficulty of trans-
lation, and giving not the actual sense of the words but what it
was imagined St. Paul ought to have said and meant to say, reads
thus, " How shall they believe in him of whom they have not
heard ? " Now the Eevisers give us what St. Paul actually did
write. "How shall they believe in him whom they have not
heard ? " You see there is a whole world of difference in the two
phrases. According to the first one the difficulty of belief is that
they have not heard about Christ ; but according to the second
it is that they have not heard Christ. According to the first the
function of the preacher is to talk about Christ; but according
to the second his function is to be a mouthpiece through whom
Christ can speak about Himself. " They are not likely to believe,"
St. Paul says, " unless they hear Christ." If it was true when
he wrote, it is abundantly true to-day. There are few indeed
to-day who have not heard about Christ ; but there are multitudes
who have never heard Christ. 1
3. Preaching Christ crucified. St. Paul's subject was " Christ
crucified." He would not preach Christ the Conqueror, or Christ
the Philosopher (by preaching which he might have won both
Jews and Greeks), but Christ the crucified, Christ the humble.
There is a distinction between preaching Christ crucified and
preaching the Crucifixion of Christ. It is said by some that
the Gospel is not preached unless the Crucifixion be named.
But the Apostle did not preach that ; he preached Christ
Christ the Example Christ the Life Christ the Son of Man
Christ the Son of God Christ risen Christ the King of Glory.
And ever and unfailingly he preached that Christ as a humble
Christ crucified through weakness, yet living by the power of
God.
U " Reason cries, ' if God were good, He could not look upon
the sin and misery of man and live; His heart would break.'
The Church points to the Crucifixion and says, ' God's heart did
1 0. Silvester Home, Relationships of Life, 139.
16 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
break.' Reason cries, ' Born and reared in sin and pain as we
are, how can we keep from sin ? It is the Creator who is
responsible ; it is God who deserves to be punished.' The Church
kneels by the cross and whispers, ' God accepts the responsibility
and bears the punishment.' Keason cries, ' Who is God ? What
is God ? The name stands for the unknown. It is blasphemy
to say we know Him.' The Church kisses the feet of the dying
Christ and says, ' We must worship the majesty we see.' "
that Thy Name may be sounded
Afar over earth and sea,
Till the dead awaken and praise Thee,
And the dumb lips sing to Thee !
Sound forth as a song of triumph
Wherever man's foot has trod,
The despised, the derided message,
The foolishness of God.
Jesus, dishonoured and dying,
A felon on either side
Jesus, the song of the drunkards,
Jesus the Crucified !
Name of God's tender comfort,
Name of His glorious power,
Name that is song and sweetness,
The strong everlasting tower,
Jesus the Lamb accepted,
Jesus the Priest on His throne
Jesus the King who is coming
Jesus Thy Name alone!
III.
THE RECEPTION OF THE MESSAGE.
No two races, no two types of the human mind, could have
been more widely different, more directly the opposite of each
other, than the Jew and the Greek. The very fact that the
Gospel was displeasing to the one might therefore have led us to
expect that it would be sure to please the other. And yet Jews
and Greeks, who agreed in nothing else, agreed in rejecting
Christ.
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 17
TJ Widely different as the demands of the Jew and the Greek
seemed at first, they were really asking one and the same thing ;
they were asking for an unspiritual religion', a revelation that
should not deal with the* heart at all in the way of trial or
discipline, that would spare them the great trial of being called
on to trust and to love, in spite of doubt and difficulty. What
they sought for, in one word, was knowledge without belief.
The Jew demanded a demonstration of God to his senses; the
Greek demanded a demonstration of God to his intellect. The
Jew required a revelation that should compel assent ; the Greek
required one that should give no occasion for doubt. Both
demanded a religion without faith, both asked to see, both
refused to believe in an invisible God, and, therefore, both
rejected a crucified Christ. 1
1. To the Jews, the death upon the Cross was a stumbling-
block, i.e. it was something which they could not get over,
because it was so utterly contrary and so entirely repugnant to
their religious ideas. It was a " stumblingblock " ; literally a
trap, something that arrests the foot suddenly in walking and
causes a fall. Here, in the very forefront of the Gospel, was the
stumbling-block, which they could not get over, and which pre-
vented them from making any effort to weigh the evidences and
the claims of Christianity.
(1) To the Jew, the Cross meant failure of the most evident
and pitiful kind ; it meant impotence and weakness ; it meant a
life of great apparent promise, a career of great and wide-felt
influence, ending in the most disastrous, the most humiliating
acknowledgment of helplessness.
^f It was not only incredible, it was disgusting and abominable,
this "word of the Cross." That men should dare to speak of
One crucified, of One hung upon a tree, of One who had suffered
the death of the accursed as the Messiah of Israel, the Saviour
of the world,, the chosen Servant of Jehovah their faces reddened
with shame or gathered blackness with rage when they heard of
it. In the Jewish writings of those ages our Lord is never
directly spoken of. His name was to them a thing of nameless
horror ; He was a thing of darkness so fearful, so shocking, that
to speak or write of Him was by tacit consent forbidden. Only
in far-fetched figures and suggestions was that object of loathing
dimly alluded to as the arch enemy of Israel. 2
1 W. C. Magce. 8 R. Winterbotham.
I COR. 2
i8 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
(2) There are multitudes of Christians who worship success ;
and these would reject and repudiate Christ as emphatically as
the Jews if it were open to them, if they were really free to
be consistent. Christ represents failure, weakness, humiliation ;
and they admire only what is successful in this world, what is
strong in mere physical might, what is glorified by itself.
^f They tell us that there are men of science who stumble at
the Cross. There are young men and middle-aged men, and old
men, so we are told, who follow us sympathetically until we
come to the proclamation of the sacrifice of Christ as the atone-
ment for sin, and there they stumble. Shall we remove the cross
that these people may not stumble? If we do we remove the
world's redemption at the same time. Even though it be a
stumbling-block to some, we must preach Christ crucified. 1
2. To the Greek-speaking heathens the doctrine was foolish-
noss. The Greeks had been trained to speculation. Everything
iii their esteem ought to assume the shape of a theory, or a
system, or a well-arranged argument, and ought to invite them
with subtlety of discussion. The Apostle reduced them to what
was in their eyes foolishness ; he reduced them to a fact Christ
crucified.
(1) Men who sought for wisdom had to find it in other quarters
than these. Wisdom is of two kinds : theoretical and practical.
Theoretical wisdom gives an account and an explanation of all
things that are : of the state of the world, of the puzzles and
trials of human life, of the nature and character of God and of
man. Practical wisdom, again, teaches men how to live so as
to make the best of life, to avoid most evil, and to attain most
good. Now the doctrine of the Cross failed in every way (as they
thought, and not unreasonably) to commend itself to wisdom. To
see a man, who is said to be the best, and the prime favourite of
heaven, dying a horrible death amidst general detestation does
not explain anything ; it only makes things very much more dark,
and perplexed, and confused than before. Moreover, to point to
a man who ended his days in such a wretched way can be no
help in the way of practical guidance. No one but an absolute
lunatic could desire such a fate, or regard it with anything but
horror. Have we not a human nature ? Are we not made of
1 J. Thomas.
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 19
ilesh and blood ? Do we not rightly shrink from suffering, cold,
hunger, pain, and all their kindred ills ? Do we not instinctively
desire to be warm, to be full, to be at ease, to be wrapped in
comfort and in peace ? The doctrine of the Cross, which is of its
very nature opposed to all this, is not wisdom but foolishness ; it
does not deserve a hearing from sensible people.
(2) The opposition which the Gospel met with in St. Paul's
day was not of that day alone. The Jew and the Greek, the
seeker after the sign and the seeker after wisdom, exist always.
Still, wherever the Gospel is preached, must the preacher expect
to hear from each of these the same demand that St. Paul heard ;
still must be found, with St. Paul, Christ crucified a stumbling-block
to the one and foolishness to the other. For these two the seeker
after the sign and the seeker after wisdom ; the man who would
rest all religion, all philosophy, all social polity, upon authority
alone, and the man who would rest them all upon reason alone
this Jew, with his reverence for power, his love of custom and
tradition which are the power of the past his tendency to rest
always in outward law and form the power of the present his
distaste for all philosophical speculation, his impatience of novelty,
his dread of change leaning always to the side of despotism in
religion and, on the other hand this Greek, with his subtle and
restless intellect, his taste for speculation, his want of reverence
for the past, his desire of change, his love of novelty, his leaning
towards licence in society and scepticism in religion; what are
they these two but the representatives of those two opposite
types of mind which divide, and always have divided, all mankind ?
3. Those who listened to the call of God found in this
preaching of the Apostle exactly what both Jew and Gentile
were looking for. It was both a sign and a philosophy. The
sign, the proof, which comes closest to us all is a change of heart,
an emancipated will, a risen self, a new life. The mind humbled
and exalted at once before the Cross of Christ, accepting the
message of peace and love, found itself acted on by a new power.
All things became new ; old habits and corruptions fell off from
the believers ; they began to walk in newness of life. The great
proof of moral regeneration was being exhibited in every Christian
Church, and was to every one that felt it a philosophy. The
20 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
nature of the soul, the character of God, the destiny and hopes
of man, were now realized truths. They did not depend on the
capacity to follow a well-reasoned system of philosophy, but on
the power to lead a new and a holier life.
Tf In the life of David Hill, the Chinese missionary, it is
recorded that as time went on Mr. Hill was increasingly
impressed by the conviction that something further should be
done to reach the literati of the province, the proud Confucian
scholars, in their strong antipathy to Christian truth. Frequently
meeting these men he could not but be struck by their contemp-
tuous attitude towards the Gospel, their hatred of foreigners, and
their prejudice against missionary work. His whole heart went
out to them in genuine sympathy.
By offering prizes for essays on subjects taken from the
Christian classics the Scriptures he got into touch with Hsi,
a Confucian scholar, who carried off three out of four of the prizes.
A little later he invited Hsi to be his teacher in studying the
Chinese classics. Thus Hsi came to live with Mr. Hill, and
became acquainted with the New Testament. Gradually, as
he read, the life of Jesus seemed to grow more real and full of
interest and wonder, and he began to understand that this
mighty Saviour was no mere man, as he once imagined, but God,
the very God, taking upon Him mortal flesh. Doubts and
difficulties were lost sight of. The old, unquenchable desire for
better things, for deliverance from sin, self, and the fear of death,
for light upon the dim, mysterious future, came back upon him
as in earlier years. And yet the burden of his guilt, the torment
of an accusing conscience and bondage to the opium-habit he
loathed but could not conquer, grew more and more intolerable.
At last, the consciousness of his unworthiness became so over-
whelming that he could bear it no longer, and placing the book
reverently before him, he fell upon his knees on the ground, and
so with many tears followed the sacred story. It was beginning
then to dawn upon his soul that this wonderful, Divine, yet
human sufferer, in all the anguish of His bitter cross and shame,
had something personally to do with him, with his sin and sorrow
and need. And so, upon his knees, the once proud, self-satisfied
Confucianist read on, until he came to " the place called Geth-
semane," and the God-man, alone, in that hour of His supreme agony
at midnight in the garden. Then the fountains of his long-sealed
heart were broken up. The very presence of God overshadowed
him. In the silence he seemed to hear the Saviour's cry, " My soul
is exceeding sorrrowf ul, even unto death " ; and into his heart there
came the wonderful realisation, " He loved me, and gave himself
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 *t
for me." Then, suddenly, as he himself records, the Holy Spirit
influenced his soul, and " with tears that flowed and would not
cease," he bowed and yielded himself unreservedly to the world's
Eedeemer, as his Saviour and his God. 1
4. Christ the Power of God. The power of God is the force
from above, manifested in those spiritual wonders which transform
the heart of the believer ; expiation which restores God to him,
the renewal of will which restores him to God. We know now
by experience of many ages how much more powerful that
defeat, humiliation, overthrow, of Christ upon the Cross is than
any victory which God could have given Him. It would have
been a very small and commonplace exercise of power if God had
interfered to set Christ free from the Cross. Had He come in
darkness and flame ; had He fallen upon the murderers of our
Lord with sudden destruction; had He slain them as one man
with the breath of His mouth, it had been a very poor display
of the Divine power. Anybody could have done that (we may
say with reverence) if only he possessed the necessary physical
power. But to let Christ die, without a sign, without a struggle ;
to let Him suffer all things ; to let Him taste of defeat, disgrace,
and death; that was an exercise of power which was, indeed,
worthy of God.
(1) Christ crucified is the power of God in self-sacrifice.
There is no power among men so great as that which conquers
evil by enduring evil. It takes the rage of its enemy and lets
him break his malignity across the enduring meekness of its
violated love. Just here it is that evil becomes insupportable
to itself. It can argue against everything but suffering patience ;
this disarms it. Looking in the face of suffering patience it
sinks exhausted. All its fire is spent. In this view it is that
Christ crucified is the power of God. It is because He shows
God in self-sacrifice, because He brings out and makes his-
torical in the world God's passive virtue, which is, in fact, the
culminating head of power in His character.
(2) Christ is, in His sacrifice, the mighty power of God for
the salvation of men. This is the power that has new-created
and sent home, as trophies, in all the past ages, its uncounted
myriads of believing, new-created, glorified souls. It can do for
1 Life of David Hill, 118, 132,
22 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
us all that we want done. It can regenerate our habits, settle
our disorders, glorify our baseness, and assimilate us perfectly to
God. There never yet was a human being delivered from the
power of sin, except by the power of God ; and the Divine power
never was exerted upon any human being with that view, except
through the Cross of Christ, that is, in consequence of what
Christ has done and suffered in our room and stead.
If Christ can take the man at his worst and the woman at her
basest, and out of them make saints that can love God and that
God has loved; make saints that can cause the very breath of
the world to grow fragrant and the very heart of the world to
grow tender. 1
(3) The power of Christ crucified is permanent and universal.
Christ addresses Himself to the world; and His influence
transcends all external accidents that serve very well for pomps
and shows, because He addresses the hearts of men. The power
of " Christ crucified " is this, He works personally in every
believer, and is present to strengthen every faithful heart. The
power which would have gratified the Jews would have been the
demonstration of a moment a sign, a wonder, a triumph; but
the power which is to save a world must know no decay ; it must
exist at this moment in the same fulness in men's hearts as it did
of old on the day of Pentecost. The Jew would have degraded
and confined the power of the Messiah ; the Jew and not St. Paul
would have put the stumbling-block in the way of man's salva-
tion ; the truth, the simple truth, which was so obnoxious was
after all the most complete manifestation of the power of God.
5. The Wisdom of God. While the Cross of Christ, viewed in
its bearing upon the condition and character of men, is a most
striking manifestation of Divine power, it is no less striking a
manifestation of Divine wisdom. Wisdom is shown in the
adaptation of means to an end, so as most effectually to
accomplish the object intended. The wisdom of God is the light
which breaks on the believer's inward eye, when in the Person of
Christ he beholds the Divine plan which unites as in a single
work of love, creation, incarnation, redemption, the gathering
together of all things under one head, the final glorification of the
universe.
1 A, M. Fairbairn.
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 23
(1) The Cross of Christ affords us a knowledge of the Divine
character, which is complete in all its aspects, which shows us at
once the just God and the Justifier of the ungodly a knowledge
which, as it stands revealed in His own word, and when it is not
perverted by the ungodliness of the human heart, brings before
our minds the Divine character, in the manner best fitted to
mould or transform us into the full resemblance of the moral
perfection of God.
(2) Christ crucified is to the Christian the wisdom of God
because the Cross explains (so far as they can be explained in
this world) the dark mysteries of life and death, and because it
is the practical guide to truth and happiness. All the wisdom
man needs to take him safely through the perils and perplexities
of life is to be learned from the Cross.
TI St. Buonaventura (wise and strong himself) used to say
that all the learning in the world had never taught him so much
as the sight of Christ upon the cross.
(3) The Divine wisdom is such that it comes within the reach of
all. The wisdom of man would be offered to the select few. Not
everybody can read Plato and understand him. Very few can
read Hegel and understand him. There are great thinkers
concerning whom we take it for granted that they are great
thinkers, but can only say that the little we understand is good,
and that we assume that the rest is quite as good. But God's
wisdom comes to all. What if the world were to be saved
by the wisdom of man ? How many could thus be saved ? What
if we had to depend for redemption on the utterances of some wise
philosopher ? Thousands of the poor sons and daughters of men
possessing little intellect and less learning would not be able to lay
hold of it. But this is a wisdom coming into the hearts of all,
and first of all by preference into the hearts of the simple and
untutored and childlike.
Away, haunt thou not me
Thou vain Philosophy !
Little hast thou bestead,
Save to perplex the head,
And leave the spirit dead.
Unto thy broken cisterns wherefore go,
While from the secret treasure-depths below,
24 POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
Fed by the skiey shower,
And clouds that sink and rest on hill-tops high,
Wisdom at once, and Power,
Are welling, bubbling forth, unseen, incessantly?
Why labour at the dull mechanic oar,
When the fresh breeze is blowing,
And the strong current flowing,
Eight onward to the Eternal Shore? 1
1 Clough, Poems, 24.
THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE.
LITERATURE.
Alexander (S. A.), The Christianity of St. Paul, 13.
Benson (E. W.), Living Theology, 191.
Bigg (C.), The Spirit of Christ in Common Life, 267.
Brooks (P.), Seeking Life, 259.
Clayton (C.), Stanhope Sermons, 366.
Cooper (T. J.), Love's Unveiling, 93.
Davidson (A. D.), Lectures and Sermons, 1.
Ellis (P. H.), Old Beliefs and Modern Believers, 69.
Goulburn (E. M.), Occasional Sermons, ii. 235.
Horton (R. F.), The Triumph of the Cross, 31.
Horwill (H. W.), The Old Gospel in the New Era, 1.
Hunter (J.), De Profundis Clamavi, 74.
Little (W. J. Knox), The Hopes of the Passion, 106.
Lucas (A.), At the Parting of the Ways, 1.
Mabie (H. C.), The Meaning and Message of the Cross, 47.
Mac Arthur (R. S.), The Calvary Pulpit, 1.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : 1 and 2 Corinthians, 19 ; A Rosary of
Christian Graces, 273.
Melvill (H.), Lothbury Lectures, 224.
Moore (A. L.), The Message of the Gospel, 16.
Neale (J. M.), Sermons in Sackville College Chapel, ii. 187.
Park (E. A.), Discourses, 45.
Parker (J.), Studies in Texts, i. 76.
Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 201.
Shelford (L. E.), By Way of Remembrance, 13.
Vaughan (D. J.), The Days of the Son of Man, 337.
Wardell (R. J.), Studies in Homiletics, 32.
Wheeler (W. C.), Sermons and Addresses, 44.
Young (D. T.), The Crimson Book, 71.
Christian World Pulpit, ii. 385 (Saphir) ; xvii. 289 (Brown) ; xxv. 219
(Shalders) ; xxvii. 38 (Rogers) ; xxxviii. 420 (Whittaker) ; Hi. 264
(Campbell) ; liii. 67 (Parker) ; Ivii. 67 (Rogers) ; Ixi. 193 (Boyd
Carpenter) ; Ixiv. 182 (Smith) ; Ixx. 58 (Lee).
Church of England Pulpit, liii. 230 (Boyd Carpenter).
Church Family Newspaper, Aug. 26, 1910, p. 676 (Tetley).
THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE.
For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ,
and him crucified. i Cor. ii. 2.
THERE is another way of translating the text. Some have
translated it thus: "For I did not determine to know any-
thing among you. . . ." According to Godet, "the Apostle
does not say ' I determined (judged good) not to know . . .' but
'I did not judge good to know . . .' He intentionally set
aside the different elements of human knowledge by which he
might have been tempted to prop up the preaching of salvation.
He deemed that he ought not to go in quest of such means."
I.
THE APOSTLE'S DETERMINATION.
1. / determined. There is no doubt or hesitation in this
statement. These are the words of one who had weighed the
matter well, and knew whereof he spoke. Here is one who blows
the trumpet of truth with no uncertain sound, who speaks with
no tremor in his voice ; who has a decided conviction of what he
knows and believes, and who thinks, and speaks, and acts in
accordance with that knowledge and belief. St. Paul has decided
for himself what is true ; and is determined to declare it and to
stand by it.
K St. Paul was no hired teacher not an official expounder
of a system. He preached what he believed. He felt that his
words were Eternal Truth ; and hence came their power. He
preached ever as if God Almighty were at his side ; hence arises
the possibility of discarding elegance of diction and rules of
oratory. For it is half-way towards making us believe, when a
man believes himself. Faith produces faith. If you want to
convince men, and ask how you shall do it, we reply, Believe
2 8 THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE
with all your heart and soul, and some souls will be surely
kindled by your flame. 1
2. Not improbably this determination of St. Paul's represents
a temptation conquered, a soul-conflict won. To such a one as
he, it would be a trial of spirit to contemplate service in such a
city as Corinth. Corinth was a centre of fashion. Shall he
essay to appeal to the fashionable crowd with " Christ crucified "
as the central theme ? Will he not repel them thus ? May he
not emphasize other aspects of Christ which will be attractive
and not repellent ? Thus the evil one would ply him. But the
God of peace crushed Satan under his feet, and his splendid
" I determined " rings out. Corinth was an aesthetic city. Its
architecture is a proverb still, and its brasses are still famous.
Corinth was an intellectual city. Its typical Greek love of
philosophy all men know. It was an opulent commercial city
too. Shall he not soften the truth and smooth his message?
Will not taste, and culture, and materialism, and wealth resent
the preaching of " Christ crucified " ? It may be, but, " I
determined," cries this hero of the Cross. He will cry out and
shout in the delicate ears of Corinth nothing but the crucified
Lord.
3. What is the ground of this intense and all-absorbing faith ?
St. Paul believes that he has in his hand something that will
explain man to himself, a man's life to himself. He is so firmly
convinced of this that, although his mind is large and capacious
and he can view with a sympathetic admiration many of the mag-
nificent manifestations of world-power, still, in his own estimate,
the sacred message which he has to give to the world is worth
all else besides. He is quite alive, as his letter shows, to the
variety of powers, the nimbleness of intellect, the ambitious skill
which the Corinthians possess ; he knows that they are a people
eager to express themselves in many ways, that they rejoice in
the powers of rhetoric, in the gifts of tongue, in skilful elucida-
tion of philosophical mysteries. But still he comes to these, and
he says : " I determined to know nothing among you, save Jesus
Christ, and him crucified." He has made up his mind that this
particular formula, "Jesus Christ, and him crucified," expresses
1 F. W. Robertson,
i CORINTHIANS n. 2 29
for the world a great, a central, an extensive truth. This is the
knowledge for which St. Paul counts all else but loss " to know
Jesus Christ, and him crucified." This is the simple gospel : its
simplicity is its offence in the eyes of many. Nevertheless there
are infinite depths in it. It is as when we look into the clear
depths of some swift-flowing river. Its very clearness had
deceived us. We thought it but a shallow stream, and are
astonished at its undreamed-of depths. So with this message of
St. Paul, we notice its simplicity first, its apparent narrowness,
its exclusiveness ; and then we see something of its depth, its
boundlessness, its comprehensiveness.
J Berry told some of his Bolton friends, at the time, how
ed and disappointed he had been at finding himself power-
less for a while to give help and comfort to a woman who was
dying, amid tragic and squalid surroundings, in one of the lowest
parts of the town. He had been called upon to minister to her,
but as he unfolded the Christian message, as he was wont to
preach it then the doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood and the
Eternal Love as he told the story of the Prodigal and the
Magdalene, her heart gave no response, and she looked up with
eyes which seemed to him to ask if that was all he had to say
to a lost and dying woman. Under a new afflatus, that came he
knew not whence, he began with trembling voice to speak on
evangelical simplicities, to tell of Christ's death for a world's sin,
and to point her to the Cross for pardon. To his joy arid wonder
he found that in response to words as simple as those he heard
at his mother's knee, the sinful one found rest and peace. 1
Who speaketh now of peace ?
Who seeketh for release ?
The Cross is strength, the solemn Cross is gain.
The Cross is Jesus' breast,
Here giveth He the rest
That to His best belov'd doth still remain.
How sweet an ended strife !
How sweet a dawning life!
Here will I lie as one who draws his breath
With ease, and hearken what my Saviour saith
Concerning me ; the solemn Cross is gain ;
Who willeth now to choose?
Who strives to bind or loose ?
Sweet life, sweet death, sweet triumph and sweet pain, 2
1 J. S. Drummond, Charles A. Berry, 35. 2 Dora Greemvell.
30 THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE
II.
THE CONCENTRATION OF HIS MESSAGE.
Every act of self-determination involves a corresponding self-
repression. Every selection includes at least one alternative.
No man commits himself to a really practical resolution without
first putting away and rejecting. Many pursuits invited St. Paul.
They were attractive, pleasant, honourable, useful to the world.
He had all the instincts of a student. He was a scholar with
splendid capacity. He might have been, we feel persuaded, a
greater than Philo, than Seneca a greater than Plato himself.
" To know Jesus Christ, and him crucified " is the end for which
everything else is sacrificed. By "Jesus Christ," the Apostle
understands His manifestation in general His life, death, and
Messianic dignity. Yet, while confining himselr to this elemen-
tary theme of preaching, he might still have found means to
commend Jesus to the attention and admiration of the wise. But
he determined "not to know anything, save Jesus Christ, and
him crucified." He will not know even Jesus Christ except in
one aspect. That is the idea. One of our best exegetes thus
renders the words : " And even Him as having been crucified."
It is the crucified Christ alone that he will know. Observe the
far-reaching word " know." Not merely does he refuse to speak
on any other theme, but he will " know " none other. The
crucified Saviour shall fill the whole horizon of his mind and
heart. He will, so to say, severely limit his Christology to this
phase : " Even Him as having been crucified."
1. St. Paul disdained systems of philosophy or the teaching of
morality merely. The Gospel has been presented as a philosophy.
The development of the Church, the innumerable attacks of
scepticism, the rise of problems within Christianity itself have
rendered imperative the presentation of the Christian system
as a well-ordered scheme of philosophical thought. Profound
thinkers have arisen from time to time in the Christian Church
who have demonstrated the reasonableness of Christianity as a
philosophical system, and the work of these thinkers is of great
value. But where one man is converted by reading books of
apologetics or theology, a thousand are drawn and held captive
i CORINTHIANS n. 2 31
by the pathos of Calvary the moving, subduing story of the
Cross. Men of all orders and degrees, of all climes and tongues,
have owned the wondrous contagion of the Cross, and have
yielded to its strange compulsion.
^[ We are philosophers who have found the truth, chemists
who have discovered (or rather been told of) the elixir of life ; as
we read again our Plato and Aristotle, and even the modern
searchers after truth, we are the children
On whom those truths do rest
That they are toiling all their lives to find.
To be at the centre of all things ; to have disclosed in our unde-
serving ears the secret of the ages ; to know for certain how the
world came into being; to have in the Cross the long sought
after key to the suffering of the world ; to be told what all this
curious world is tending towards that is our real position in the
realm of thought. 1
2. Theology cannot take the place of the Cross. Nothing has
been more fatal in the history of Christianity than that marvel-
lous intellectual curiosity which has been earnest to invent
doctrine after doctrine, experience upon experience, till there
appears a complete scheme of dogmatic ideas which is called
systematic theology. But theological ideas, however systematic,
lead only to barrenness and dryness if theologians ignore the
fundamental principle which the Apostle has laid down that
the key is not to be found in a theology apart from a person,
nor in a person apart from a theology. Whatever the Apostles
teach, they always teach Christ. They never turn their
teaching into dry intellectual formulae ; they abhor the exagger-
ated rationalism for it is nothing more of the extreme dog-
matist, just as they have no sympathy with the incoherent gush
which satisfies indolent devotion.
^J A man may be a great theologian and at the same time a
great sinner. If theology could save anybody the devil himself
would have^been converted long ago. He is one of the most
expert theologians alive ; he can quote Scripture for his purpose
with marvellous propriety ; but he is the devil yet for all that.
On the other hand, there are many whose theological knowledge
1 A. F. "Wilmington Ingram, Messengers, Watchmen, and Stewards, 16.
3 2 THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE
is hardly worth the name, but whose devout and godly lives are
a pattern and an inspiration to all who see them. 1
3. Science cannot take the place of the Cross. Some are
constantly asserting the claim of science to supersede Christianity.
Many well-meaning Christians are spending the time which
might be devoted to evangelistic work in endeavouring to recon-
cile the book of Genesis with the latest scientific theory, or in
attempting, from a very superficial knowledge of the subject, to
reply to men who not only possess an enormously larger stock of
facts on scientific matters, but who also and this is far more
important have had the advantage of a scientific training. Let
us leave to experts investigation into the condition of the early
inhabitants of the world. The most serious question in the
world is not, What think ye of Darwin ? or even, What think ye
of Moses ? It is, What think ye of Christ ?
world invisible, we view thee,
world intangible, we touch thee,
world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee.
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there !
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars !
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry; and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacop's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
1 H. W. Horwill.
i CORINTHIANS 11. 2 33
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry, clinging Heaven by the hems,
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Genesareth, but Thames ! l
4. St. Paul disdained human eloquence. It is certain that
St. Paul was not unversed in the wisdom, or unskilled in the
rhetoric, which was all the vogue in his day. The Apostle could
have presented his message in a beautiful dress, and might have
recommended himself to his hearers by polished periods; but
he knew very well that the power of the Gospel did not consist
in these things.
5. St. Paul was careful to efface self. He did not mar his
message by any reference to himself. His eye was fixed on
Christ. His desire was to exalt Christ. His zeal expended itself
in proclaiming Christ the Saviour of sinners. There were no
side glances at his own prospects, his own reputation, his own
success. He was content to hide behind the person of Christ, so
that He might be seen and loved, and honoured and exalted.
Like John the Baptist, whose business it was to cry " Behold the
Lamb," and to point his hearers away from himself, saying, " He
must increase, but I must decrease," so it was St. Paul's business
to declare Christ crucified and to keep himself in the background.
If In any work which is to live, or be really beautiful, there
must be the spirit of the Cross. That which is to be a temple of
God must never have the marble polluted with the name of the
architect or builder. There can be no real success, except when
a man has ceased to think of his own success. 2
Tf As Michael Angelo wore a lamp on his cap to prevent his
own shadow from being thrown upon the picture which he was
painting, so the Christian minister and servant needs to have
the candle of the Spirit always burning in his heart, lest the
reflection of self and self-glorying may fall upon his work to
darken and defile it. 3
III.
THE COMPREHENSIVENESS OF HIS MESSAGE.
When the Apostle tells us that he is determined to know
nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified, he impresses upon
1 Francis Thompson. 2 F. W. Robertson. 3 A. J. Gordon.
I COR. 3
34 THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE
our minds that this is "the hidden wisdom which God hath
ordained before the world." He means that to know Christ
crucified is the maximum of knowledge, not the minimum. He
means that in Jesus Christ and Him crucified all doctrines cul-
minate, and from Jesus Christ and Him crucified all duties
emanate and evolve. We live in a world which may well be
illustrated as a labyrinth, and as we pursue our way, there are
many deviating paths down which we may be tempted to wander.
But for us who desire practical wisdom for the conduct of life,
we do not want a map of the whole labyrinth ; what we do want
is a silver thread which may pass through our hands and guide
us to the secret part of all things. That guiding thread St. Paul
claims to give us in the knowledge of Jesus Christ and Him
crucified.
^ " You are going down to the assize, my lord ? " " Yes."
" What do you think you will do with that remarkable series of
frauds committed some time ago ? " "I do not know." " What
do you think you will do with that case of forgery, the most
elaborate and intricate piece of business I ever heard of in all
our criminal jurisprudence what do you think you will do with
it ? " "I do not know." " Why, are you going down to the city
in a loose mind?" "No." "What have you resolved to do?"
" One thing. I have determined nothing except one thing."
" What is that, my lord ? " " That the law shall be administered
and justice shall be done." That is what St. Paul said. 1
^J Mr. Guyse did not condemn, but both approved and
practised, the preaching of Christian morals, while he denied that
such preaching is all that is meant by the phrase and commission,
"to preach Christ." His statements on this department were
the following :
Preaching Christ (in a latitude of the expression) takes in
the whole compass of Christian religion considered in its refer-
ence to Christ. It extends to all its noble improvements of
natural light and principles, and to all its glorious peculiarities
of the supernatural and incomprehensible kind, as each of these
may, one way or other, be referred to Him. In this sense there
is no doctrine, institution, precept, or promise no grace, privilege,
or duty toward God and man no instance of faith, love, repent-
ance, worship, or obedience, suited to the Gospel state and to the
design and obligations of the Christian religion that don't belong
to preaching Christ. But to bring all these with any propriety
1 J. Parker.
i CORINTHIANS n. 2 35
under this denomination, they must be considered, according to
their respective natures or kinds, in their reference to Christ,
that He may be interwoven with them and appear to be concerned
in them. They must be preached, not with the air of a heathen
moralist or Platonic philosopher, but with the spirit of a minister
of Christ, referring them up to Him, as revealed, or enjoined, or
purchased by Him as shining in their brightest lustres and
triumphing in all their glories through Him as built upon Him
and animated by Him as lodged in His hands who is head over
all things to the church as standing in the connections, uses, and
designs in which He hath placed them as known, enjoyed, or
practised by light and grace derived from Him as to be
accounted for to Him as acceptable to God, and advantageous
to our salvation, alone through Him, by faith in Him as enforced
upon us by motives and obligations taken from Him and as
tending to His glory and the glory of God in Him. 1
3 A company of young men were once met at supper in the
ays of Athens, and Socrates, the great teacher of morality,
was present. The conversation turned on their guest.
" Socrates," said Alcibiades, " is like the figure of the Wood-god
which you see in the workshops of sculptors : if you open it, you
shall find it filled with images of all the gods." That was the
highest praise which in those days of heathen worship it was
possible to give to a human being. It was as much as to say
that all the forms of Divine life imagined and worshipped at that
time were to be found in the one life of Socrates. And, far off, it
may be taken as an outshadowing of the reality presented to us in
this word of St. Paul concerning Christ. 2
If In Tennyson's " Palace of Art " we have the story of how a
soul tried to satisfy herself with an environment completely
beautiful. Art and Literature were drawn upon lavishly to make
her a meet dwelling-place. But into this paradise of all beauty
despair crept, and made havoc. Fear fell like a blight, and the
question of questions came to be
What is it that will take away niy sin,
And save me lest I die ?
At last, come to her true self, and awake to her need of God,
" Make me a cottage in a vale," she said,
"Where I may mourn and pray,"
Yet Tennyson had too wide a vision of the truth to make an end
1 John Guyse. 2 A. Macleod.
36 THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE
there. He honours the " first needs " in his poem, but he is
careful to leave room for all that enriches life. And so he makes
his penitent soul ask as a last request,
Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built:
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt. 1
i. To know Jesus Christ.
It is perfectly possible to know the things that are said about
Christ, and not to know Him about whom these things are said.
Theological cobwebs have been wrapped round the gracious figure
of Christ with disastrous results. He must be known by
personal, persistent, private communion; by long, intense
contemplation known as He was known to Loyola, on whose
upturned face and uplifted hands the very stigmata of the Cross
started out.
1. To know Jesus Christ is to know man in ideal development.
In Him we behold our human nature fully inspired and possessed
by God. He is at once a revelation of God and a manifestation
of human perfection. As much of God as could be held in a
human mind and heart, and shown in human virtues, was found
in Christ Jesus. He is the Son of Man, the only perfect specimen
of humanity that has lived upon the earth, the ideal of what we
ought to be, and the type of the new creation.
"U The Cross had become the unchanging centre of my
thoughts, but these, as they revolved around it, had gradually,
yet surely, formed for themselves an orbit widely diverging from
the circle in which Christian consciousness is wont to move. The
Cross, as I looked at it more and more intently, became to me the
revelation of a loving and a suffering God. I learnt to look upon
the sacrifice of the death of Christ, not only as being the all-
sufficient satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, but also as
the everlasting witness to God's sympathy with man. The mystery
of the Cross did not, it is true, explain any one of the enigmas
connected with our mortal existence and destiny, but it linked
itself in my spirit with them all. It was itself an enigma fiung
down by God alongside the sorrowful problem of human life, the
confession of Omnipotence itself to some stern reality of misery
and wrong. 2
1 Arch. Alexander, 3 Dora Greeuwell.
i CORINTHIANS n. 2 37
2. To know Christ is to know God. Christ reveals God to us.
The life of Christ shows us the holiness of God ; the patience of
Christ shows us the longsuffering of God ; the compassion of
Christ shows us the mercy of God ; the tenderness of Christ
shows us the gentleness of God; the sympathy of Christ opens
to us the very heart of God : while the death of Christ reveals
to us the justice of God.
Here hast thou found me, oh mine enemy !
And yet rejoice not thou, by strength shall none prevail.
By noon thine arrows fly,
None faileth of its mark ; thou dost not tire ;
And yet rejoice not thou! Each shaft of fire
That finds me here becomes a living nail.
What strength of thine, what skill can now avail
To tear me from the Cross? My soul and heart
Are fastened here! I feel the cloven dart
Pierce keenly through. What hands have power to wring -
Me hence ? What voice can now so sweetly sing
To lure my spirit from its rest ? Oh now
Eejoice my soul, for thou
Hast trodden down thy foeman's strength through pain, 1
ii. To know Jesus Christ crucified.
Education, Plato tells us, is the turning away of the soul
from the images, shadows, simulacra of things, to the facts and
verities of real existence. Education is not increase of knowledge,
nor is it the quickening and strengthening of one faculty, such
as the intellect. Education is the awakening and unfolding of
the whole nature, due regard being had to those capacities which
belong to the higher range. Nothing contributes more to man's
education than the discovery of a great fact, the recognition and
contemplation of a great thought. It uplifts, expands, and
augments the entire being. Now "Christ crucified" is the
greatest, the most transcendent fact in the whole universe. It is
the master-thought of the Eternal. To know Christ crucified
is to know the meaning of life. The death of Christ is the solving
power of the mystery of the universe. It is also to know how to
live and how to die. The Cross is the moral lever for the world.
It lifts men above the power of sin.
1 Dora Greenwell.
38 THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE
TJ In a letter to a friend, Elmslie describes his experience
among the children in an Edinburgh east-end Sabbath School :
" When T was ending I spoke of how Jesus deserved to be loved,
and that they should ask to be made to love Him. One little
girlie whispered, ' I will ask Him, for, oh, I do want to love Him ! '
and when I said it was time to go away they cried, ' Oh, dinna
send's away yet, tell's mair about Jesus'; and then they came
round me, and made me promise to tell them ' bonnie stories about
Jesus ' next Sabbath. I have found that nothing interests them
more than what is directly about Jesus. I could not help telling
you all these little things, but I never had the same sort of feeling
in teaching a class before, and I would like you to remember
sometimes my poor little children down in the Canongate. I wish
I could take them all into a better atmosphere, for it is sad to
think of their chances of ever becoming good in such an evil,
wretched place. Harper and I have been having many nice talks.
I mean to preach often in the summer I want to." 1
1. To know Christ crucified is to know the meaning of life.
(1) In the Cross of Christ we come to understand the mystery
of human suffering. Sorrow and pain pass no man by ; and no
reasoning can argue them out of existence, or reduce our fight
with disease and suffering to a phantom battle. Living in a
world where the blows of misfortune are constantly falling ; where
the ravages of suffering are nowhere long absent; where every
joy is every moment exposed to blight; where development
yields new pain; where increasing knowledge, increasing refine-
ment, increasing goodness and sympathy mean increasing sorrow,
and men and women suffer, not for being worse, but for being
better than their fellows, it is no wonder that the Cross appeals
to human hearts everywhere as a symbol of human life, and holds
us under the spell of a solemn fascination. Eejoice as we may,
and we ought to rejoice in all that brightens and sweetens
life, yet the fellowship of suffering is wider and deeper than the
fellowship of happiness. A German poet has said that the image
of humanity, broken in all its limbs, transfixed in hands and feet
and sorrowful unto death, has become distasteful to men ; but that
can be true of men only in their light, careless, self-indulgent
hours. In all our deeper experiences our feet tread the path
that leads to Calvary, and we seek the Man of Sorrows acquainted
1 W, Robertson Nicoll, W. O. Elmslie, 41.
i CORINTHIANS n. 2 39
with grief. Christ has not diminished the suffering of the world,
but He has given it a new and nobler meaning, made it appear
to be no longer God's wrath and curse, but God's love and
blessing.
^j The Cross is the supreme instance of the law that no moral
or spiritual victory is won, no glorious thing can be done, without
suffering, and here suffering was borne to its farthest verge in
death. 1
(2) In the Cross of Christ we learn the meaning and power
of self-sacrifice. The Cross, as the revelation and symbol of
redemption through sacrifice, needs to be brought back to our
common life. So far as the principle is concerned, it is right to
apply, and we do instinctively apply, all the New Testament
phraseology of redemption to parents sacrificing themselves for
the good of their children, to patriots suffering and dying for the
sacred causes of justice and freedom, to the vast army of labourers
who procure for us our necessities and luxuries at the cost of
their nobler growth and comfort. Without shedding of blood
blood of body, blood of brain, blood of heart there has been no
remission of sins, no redemption from evil conditions, no progress
from a lower to a higher state of society. Figuratively, if not
literally, men have been crucified, their hands torn, their hearts
pierced through with many sorrows, in the interest of every
onward step and movement of mankind. The work which really
helps the world work of statesman and philanthropist, work
of poet and painter and doctor, work of teacher and preacher
is work into which men put their life, their heart's blood. It
is this power to give without counting the cost to one's self,
this power of suffering and sacrifice, that is the secret of all
redeeming work.
If There are elements of suffering for sin which are not only
possible to the guiltless, but which only they are capable of.
Not only can a good man suffer for another's sin, but it is just
in proportion to his goodness that he will suffer. The sin of a
dearly loved child will give pain to a saintly mother far more keen
than the child himself will feel. The child's sin blunts his
sensitiveness to holiness and to the evil of sin. The mother's
holiness and love will be the measure of her suffering. No suffer-
1 P. A. Ellis.
40 THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE
ing for sin can be so deep as that which is endured for the bad
by the good who love them and do not partake of their guilt. 1
(3) In the Cross of Christ we realize the meaning of sin.
Before that, the world treated sin lightly ; after that it could not.
The world will always treat sin lightly until it understands the
meaning of God condemning sin in the flesh where Christ died.
Belief in Christ means, and must mean, a sense of the guilt of
sin, a hatred of sin, a personal sense of sin and penitence for it.
Apart from this there could be no coming to the Saviour, or
trust in Him, since there would be no felt necessity for
salvation.
Tf The true cross of the Kedeemer was the sin and sorrow of
this world that was what lay heavy on His heart and that is
the cross we shall share with Him, that is the cup we must drink
of with Him, if we would have any part in that Divine Love
which is one with His sorrow. 2
(4) In the Cross we come to know the victory of failure.
The Cross is the revelation and symbol of victory, but of victory
iu failure and because of failure. There never was such an
apparent failure as the Crucifixion. But the Cross was not the
end but the beginning the beginning of victory an endless
victory to the cause of goodness in the world. There are successes
that are sadder than any failures, arid failures that are more
glorious than any successes. And the history of all that is best
on this earth is one continuous illustration of this law of the
Cross. The lives of not a few of the great religious leaders of
the last century seemed more or less a failure Kobertson's,
Maurice's, Colenso's; but they are having now a second and a
better life the victory which comes of the apparent defeat, and
because of it.
He passed in the light of the sun,
In the path that the many tread,
And his work, like theirs, was done
For the sake of his daily bread ;
But he carried a sword, and, one by one,
Out there in the common light of the sun,
The sins of his life fell dead.
1 P. A. Ellis. 2 Dinah Morris in Adam Bede.
i CORINTHIANS n. 2 41
His feet never found the way
That leads to the porch of fame,
But he strove to live each day
With a conscience void of blame;
And he carried a cross whose shadow lay
Over every step of his lowly way,
And he treasured its splendid shame.
So life was a long, hard fight
For the wrong was ever there,
And the cross ne'er out of sight,
The cross of a grey world's care;
But right through the day to the failing light
He carried the cross and fought the fight,
Great-hearted to do and bear.
Night fell and the sword was sheathed,
And the cross of life laid down,
And into his ear was breathed
A whisper of fair renown;
And the nameless victor was glory-wreathed,
For the Voice that said, "Let thy sword be sheathed,"
Said also, " And take thy crown.' 1 1
(5) To know Christ crucified is to know God as a loving Father.
In St. Paul's day this was an idea so new and so wonderful and
so wonderfully helpful that it excluded in the Apostle's mind
all other knowledge. God was no longer a wrathful potentate,
He was no longer the patron of the Jewish nation only, He was
the Father of all men, who willed not that any should perish.
In the knowledge of Jesus Christ there had burst upon the
Apostle's mind the all-transforming thought that God was not
law, but love. The death of Christ this is the great truth of
truths in the gospel, the great wonder of wonders, the finishing
and perfect proof of that love of God to us, beyond which we
can conceive nothing higher. All in the gospel rests upon it;
without it the gospel could not be understood. From the Cross
of Christ streams all the light which makes the gospel the
message of peace and comfort to sinful and dying men.
f In one of the ancient churches of Central Italy there is a
unique representation of the Crucifixion. Behind the Christ on
1 Percy C. Ainsworth Poems and Sonnets, 17.
42 THE SUM OF SAVING KNOWLEDGE
the Cross we catch a dim vision of the Eternal Father ; the hands
of the Father behind the hands of the Son, and the nails which
pierce the Son piercing the Father also. We shrink from it at
first as coarse and rude, but as we think about it we feel that it
is the old painter saying, in the only language which he could
command, what has been so long and strangely forgotten, if not
in form yet in reality, that God is in Christ, that the Father is
in the Son, that His love had not to be won by sacrifice, that it
is His love which is embodied in the sacrifice, that the Cross and
Passion are the revelation in time and space, in visible and
historical form, of the grief and pain of a God who suffers for
and with His creation and His children. 1
2. To know Christ crucified is to know how to live and how
to die.
(1) St. Paul wanted to find a power that should be adequate to
cope with men's dispositions and reach down to the very centre
of feeling, and that should take hold of men's wills. And he
found that power in Christ. They who long after better things
find their ideal in Him ; He lives on by the cords of love, He
bids them live righteously and holily in this present world ; and
with the command comes the power. There is power in Christ
to transform the nature and to renew the life ; and because the
Apostle knew this, he made Him the theme of his preaching, and
uplifted Him before the longing eyes of Jew and Gentile.
Tf Does God have no heroes but those who lead on a great
battlefield ? Has He no saints but those in pictures, with a
halo about their head? Heroism in the common life, that is
what the world needs ; men and women who in common places
will do everyday duties without noise or glitter, just because the
heart and conscience say, " This is the way, walk ye in it."
(2) There is one study, the deepest, hardest of all, which is
equally and supremely necessary for every one to make some
progress in before the application of it comes. It is the study
of how to die. We cannot think how ever it will be possible for
us to go through that. One thing we hope. We hope that we
may not die reluctant, as if under doom, but with life's onward
action and life's hopefulness still present in us ; looking tenderly
back, but looking calmly, earnestly, before us. If that is our
hope, on what can it rest ? It is assured to us as soon as Christ
1 J. Hunter.
i CORINTHIANS n. 2 43
crucified is assured to us. The saints of all time, in proportion
to the measure of their faith and of their self-sacrifice, have found
death robbed of its terrors.
Pausing a moment ere the day was done,
While yet the earth was scintillant with light,
I backward glanced. From valley, plain, and height,
At intervals, where my life-path had run,
Eose cross on cross ; and nailed upon each one
Was my dead self. And yet that gruesome sight
Lent sudden splendour to the falling night,
Showing the conquests that my soul had won.
Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,
" There is no death ! for year on year, re-born
I wake to larger life : to joy more great,
So many times have I been crucified,
So often seen the resurrection morn,
I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait." 1
1 Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Poems of Experience, 31.
THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE.
LITERATURE.
Blake (K. E.), Good News from Heaven, 18.
Brown (A. G.), God's Full-orbed Gospel, 110.
Davies (J. LI.), The Purpose of God, 55.
Dewhurst (E. M.), The King and His Servants, 173.
Drummond (J.), Spiritual Religion, 78.
Gibson (J. M.), A Strong City, 181.
Greenhough (J. G.), The Mind of Christ in St. Paul, 77.
Hodge (C.), Princeton Sermons, 358.
Hopkins (E. H.), Hidden yet Possessed, 1.
Horton (R. F.), The Trinity, 21.
Houchin (J. W.), The Vision of God, 132.
Inge (W. R), All Saints 1 Sermons, 92.
Lockyer (T. F.), Inspirations of the Christian Life, 44.
Matheson (G.), Thoughts for Life's Journey, 34.
Voices of the Spirit, 158.
Moore (E. W.), Life Transfigured, 87.
Morris (W.), in The Welsh Pulpit of To-Day, 396.
Moule (H. C. G.), Christ is All, 107.
Murray (A.), The Spirit of Christ, 214.
Paget (E. C.), Silence, 130.
Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, iv. 249.
Kobertson (F. W.), Sermons, i. 1 ; iii. 26.
Shedd (W. G. T.), Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 315.
Shelf ord (L. E.), By Way of Remembrance, 184.
Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, ii. (1856), No. 56.
Temple (F.), Rugby Sermons, iii. 236.
Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 142.
Cambridge Review, iii., Supplement No. 56 (Moule).
Christian World Pulpit, xii. 273 (Chown) ; xxix. 360 (Wickhain) ; xxxii.
193 (Westcott) ; xxxviii. 424 (Ferrier) ; Ixii. 12 (Hall) ; Ixxx. 150
(Hanson).
Churchman's Pulpit, Sixth Sunday after Trinity ; x. 430 (Shelford).
Homiletic Review, xlvii. 189 (Hillis).
THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE.
But as it is written,
Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not,
And which entered not into the heart of man,
Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him.
i Cor. ii. 9.
NOWHERE in the Old Testament are these words literally
found. But the source of the quotation is undoubtedly the
passage, Isa. Ixiv. 4 combined with Ixv. 17: "Men have not
heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen a
God beside thee, which worketh for him that waiteth for
him . . ."; and, "The former things shall not be remembered,
nor come into mind." Similar combinations of several prophetic
quotations are not rare in St. Paul's writings.
The context of the verse is the assertion of the Apostle that
there is about the Gospel a hidden wisdom, an inner truth ; and
that this truth was invisible to the minds of those who rejected
and crucified the Saviour ; for, had they seen it, they would not
have crucified Him. And then comes in the text, to prove that
such blindness of the soul was recognized long before in the Old
Testament Scriptures as a mystery and a fact. The blindness of
those who slew the Lord did but answer to what " was written "
that solemn formula of final appeal with the Apostles and their
Master. Isaiah had spoken of the acts of God in redeeming
mercy as things beyond the reach of a, priori discovery by human
senses, and reason, and imagination. Man could receive them
when revealed ; there was that in man which could respond to
them when revealed ; but for that revelation there was needed
the action of the Divine Spirit on the spirit of man. No record
of facts, no witness of phenomena, without the special action of
the Holy Spirit, could bring them home to the heart. But to
47
4 S THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE
Christian believers, to St. Paul and his disciples, they were
brought home. And it was so, not because their eyes or ears
were keener than those of the Lord's executioners, or because
their hearts were more imaginative or more sympathetic, but
because the Holy Ghost had unveiled to them this wisdom, this
esoteric wisdom and glory of the ways of God.
The Apostle's quotation of the Prophet plainly refers to the
whole gift of salvation, not only to the bright eternal future of
the saved. The words cannot indeed exclude the thought of the
glories of heaven, which assuredly senses have not seen, nor
imagination conceived, but which God has prepared for them that
love Him. But neither can they exclude the wonders of grace on
earth ; which equally are things of eternal plan and preparation.
I.
THE THINGS OF GOD ARE NOT EEVEALED TO THE
NATURAL MAN.
"Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which
entered not into the heart of man."
1. " The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit
of God." The preaching of the Apostle Paul was rejected by
numbers in the cultivated town of Corinth. It was not wise
enough or eloquent enough, nor was it sustained by miracles.
The man of taste found it barbarous ; the Jew missed the signs
and wonders which he looked for in a new dispensation ; and the
rhetorician missed the convincing arguments of the Schools. To
all this the Apostle was content to reply that his judges were
incompetent to try the question. The princes of this world might
judge in a matter of politics ; the leaders in the world of literature
were qualified to pronounce on a point of taste ; the counsellors
of this world to weigh an amount of evidence. But in matters
spiritual they were as unfit to judge as a man without ear is to
decide respecting harmony ; or a man, judging alone by sensation,
is fit to supersede the higher truth of science by an appeal to
his own estimate of appearances. The world, to sense, seems
stationary. To the eye of reason it moves with lightning speed,
and the cultivation of reason alone can qualify for an opinion
on the matter. The judgment of the senses is worth nothing in
i CORINTHIANS n. 9 49
such matters. For every kind of truth a special capacity or
preparation is indispensable.
2. By the natural man is meant the ordinary faculties of
man ; and it is said of these that they cannot discover spiritual
truth. By combining the three terms seeing, hearing, and enter-
ing into the heart, the Apostle wishes to designate the three
names of natural knowledge : sight, or immediate experience ;
hearing, or knowledge by way of tradition; finally, the inspira-
tions of the heart, the discoveries of the understanding proper.
By none of these means can man reach the conception of the
blessings which God has destined for him.
i. The Eye.
"Eye saw not."
1. Eternal truth is not perceived through the eye ; it is not
demonstrable to the senses.
(1) God's works in nature give us wonderful pleasure. Let us
not depreciate what God has given. There is a rapture in gazing
on this wonderful world. There is a joy in contemplating the
manifold forms in which the All Beautiful has concealed His
essence the Living Garment in which the Invisible has robed
His mysterious loveliness. In every aspect of Nature there is
joy; whether it be the purity of virgin morning, or the sombre
grey of a day of clouds, or the solemn pomp and majesty of night ;
whether it be the chaste lines of the crystal, or the waving out-
line of distant hills, tremulously visible through dim vapours;
the minute petals of the fringed daisy, or the overhanging form
of mysterious forests. It is a pure delight to see. But all this
is bounded. The eye can reach only the finite Beautiful. And
the fairest beauty is perishable.
(2) Art has many devotees. The highest pleasure of sensa-
tion comes through the eye. He whose eye is so refined by dis-
cipline that he can repose with pleasure upon the serene outline
of beautiful form has reached the purest of the sensational
raptures. The Corinthians could appreciate this. Theirs was
the land of beauty. They read the Apostle's letter, surrounded
by the purest conceptions of Art. In the orders of architecture,
the most richly graceful of all columnar forms receives its name
j COR, 4
So THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE
from Corinth. And yet it was to these men, living in the very
midst of the chastely beautiful, upon whom the Apostle emphati-
cally urged "Eye hath not seen the things which God hath
prepared for them that love him."
(3) Science cannot give a revelation. Science proceeds upon
observation. It submits everything to the experience of the
senses. Its law, expounded by its great lawgiver, is that if we
would ascertain its truth we must see, feel, taste. Experiment
is the test of truth. Men have supposed they discovered the
law of Duty written on the anatomical phenomena of disease.
They have exhibited the brain inflamed by intoxication, and the
structure obliterated by excess. They have shown in the dis-
ordered frame the inevitable penalty of transgression. But if
a man, startled by all this, gives up his sin, has he from this
selfish prudence learned the law of Duty ? The penalties of
wrong-doing, doubtless; but not the sanction of Eight and
Wrong written on the conscience, of which penalties are only
the enforcements. He has indisputable evidence that it is
expedient not to commit excesses : but you cannot manufacture
a conscience out of expediency: the voice of conscience says
not, " It is better not to do so," but " Thou shalt not."
2. " Eye saw not." When He came into this world, who was
the Truth and the Life, in the body which God had prepared for
Him, He came not in the glory of form : He was a root out of a
dry ground: He had no form nor comeliness; when they saw
Him, there was no beauty that they should desire Him. The
eye did not behold, even in Christ, the things which God had
prepared. This is an eternal truth. There is a kingdom which
is appreciable by the senses, and another whose facts and truths
are seen and heard only by the spirit.
TI It was rumoured that underneath a certain piece of ground
there was iron to be found, and two men were appointed to go
and inspect the land and see whether there was really iron there.
One man, a scientist and mineralogist, was very conscious of his
own limitations; and, knowing his own weakness, he took with
him some scientific instruments. The other man, who was
bueyant and self-confident, said, " I believe what I can see, and
what I can't see I won't believe " ; and so he walked over the field,
and got over it in no time. He said, " Iron ? nonsense ! I see no
i CORINTHIANS n. 9 51
iron ; there is no iron here." This man went to the syndicate and
said, " There is no iron there : I walked all over the field and I
could not see a trace of it."' The other man did not trust to his
eye at all. He carried in his hand a little crystal box, and in
that little crystal box there was a needle, and he kept watching
that needle. He paused, for the needle in that crystal box had
pointed down like the very finger of God, and he said, " There is
iron there." He passed on, until again that needle pointed down,
and he said, " There is iron there," and when he handed in his
report he said, " From one end of the field to the other there is
iron/' " Oh ! " said one of the adherents of the first man, " how
do you know, when you did not see it ? " " Because," he said,
" that which cannot be seen with the eye can be magnetically
discerned." 1
ii. The Ear.
"Ear heard not."
Eternal truth is not reached by the sense of hearing ; nor does
traditional knowledge reveal it.
1. The many beautiful and varied sounds of nature speak to
us of God, if God's existence be already thrilling our hearts, but
of themselves they do not reveal the things of God. How many
sounds there are that gladden us ! Think of the cooling sound
of a rippling stream, or a waterfall, or a playing fountain on a hot
summer evening. Think of the many pleasing notes and songs
of birds. Think of the human voice. There is no sound that
we would miss more than that. Then think of music, with all
its varied modes of appealing to our feelings. Think of the music
of the great masters, how it attracts and fascinates and subdues
us, how it inspires and strengthens us, how it makes us glad ! But
" things which ear heard not," and which ear can never hear, are
prepared by God for those that love Him.
2. No revelation can be adequately given by man to man,
whether in writing or orally, even if he be put in possession of
the Truth itself. For all such revelation must be made through
words: and^ words are but counters the coins of intellectual
exchange. There is as little resemblance between the silver coin
and the bread it purchases as between the word and the thing it
'A, G. Brown.
52 THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE
stands for. Looking at the coin, the form of the loaf does not
suggest itself. Listening to the word, you do not perceive the
idea for which it stands, unless you are already in possession of it.
Speak of ice to an inhabitant of the torrid zone, the word does
not give him an idea, or if it does, it must be a false one. Talk
of blueness to one who cannot distinguish colours, what can your
most eloquent description present to him resembling the truth
of your sensation ? Similarly in matters spiritual, no verbal
revelation can give a single simple idea. Talk of God to a
thousand ears, each has its own conception. The sensual man
hears of God, and understands one thing; the pure man hears,
and conceives another thing. So that apostles themselves, and
prophets, speaking to the ear, cannot reveal truth to the soul no,
not if God Himself were to touch their lips with fire. A verbal
revelation is only a revelation to the ear.
3. Traditional knowledge will not reveal eternal truth. There
are men who believe on authority. They have heard with the
hearing of the ear that God is Love, they have heard that the
ways of holiness are the ways of pleasantness and all her paths
peace. But a hearsay belief saves not. The Corinthian
philosophers heard St. Paul; the Pharisees heard Christ. How
much did the ear convey ? To thousands exactly nothing. He
alone believes truth who feels it. He alone has a religion whose
soul knows by experience that to serve God and know Him is the
richest treasure.
I have a little kinsman
Whose earthly summers are but three,
And yet a voyager is he
Greater than Drake or Frobisher,
Than all their peers together !
He is a brave discoverer,
And, far beyond the tether
Of them who seek the frozen pole,
Has sailed where the noiseless surges roll.
Ay, he has travelled whither
A winged pilot steered his bark
Through the portals of the dark,
Past hoary Mimir's well and tree,
Across the unknown sea.
i CORINTHIANS n. 9 53
Suddenly, in his fair young hour,
Came one who bore a flower,
And laid it in his dimpled hand
With this command:
"Henceforth thou art a rover!
Thou must make a voyage far,
Sail beneath the evening star,
And a wondrous land discover."
With his sweet smile innocent
Our little kinsman went.
Since that time no word
From the absent has been heard.
Who can tell
How he fares, or answer well
What the little one has found
Since he left us, outward bound ?
Would that he might return !
Then should we learn
From the pricking of his chart
How the skyey roadways part.
Hush! does not the baby this way bring,
To lay beside this severed curl,
Some starry offering
Of chrysolite or pearl?
Ah, no ! not so !
We may follow on his track,
But he comes not back.
And yet I dare aver
He is a brave discoverer
Of climes his elders do not know.
He has more learning than appears
On the scroll of twice three thousand years,
More than in the groves is taught,
Or from furthest Indies brought;
He knows, perchance, how spirits fare-
What shapes the angels wear,
What is their guise and speech
In - those lands beyond our reach
And his eyes behold
Things that shall never, never be to mortal hearers
told. 1
1 Edmund Clarence Stedman.
54 THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE
iii. The Heart.
" Which entered not into the heart of man."
Eternal truth is not discoverable by the heart of man, with all
its powers of imagination and all its powers of affection.
1. Great thoughts originate from a large heart. It is a grand
thing when, in the stillness of the soul, thought bursts into flame,
and the intuitive vision comes like an inspiration ; when breathing
thoughts clothe themselves in burning words, winged as it were
with lightning ; or when a great law of the universe reveals itself
to the mind of Genius, and where all was darkness, his single word
bids Light be, and all is Order where chaos and confusion were
before; or when the truths of human nature shape themselves
forth in the creative fancies of one like the myriad-minded Poet,
and you recognize the rare power of heart which sympathizes with
and can reproduce all that is found in man. But all this is
nothing more than what the material man can achieve. The
most ethereal creations of fantastic fancy were shaped by a mind
that could read the life of Christ, and then blaspheme the
Adorable. The highest astronomer of this age, before whose clear
eye Creation lay revealed in all its perfect order, was one whose
spirit refused to recognize the Cause of Causes. The mighty
heart of Genius had failed to reach the things which God imparts
to a humble spirit.
2. The heart has the power of affection. To love is the purest,
the serenest ecstasy of the merely human more blessed than any
sight that can be presented to the eye, or any sound that can be
given to the ear ; more sublime than the sublimest dream ever
conceived by genius in its most gifted hour, when the freest way
was given to tne shaping spirit of imagination. This has entered
into the heart of man, yet this is of tne lower still. It attains
not to the things prepared by God ; it dimly shadows them.
Human love is but the faint type of that surpassing blessedness
which belongs to those who love God.
^[ There are unexhausted possibilities in our lives, and our
human hearts are conscious of unrest. Have you never stood in
the presence of a commanding and lovely landscape and had the
thought come to you that you could conceive a landscape of
infinitely greater loveliness than that which unrolled before your
eyes ? Have you never, if you are a lover of music, been in the
i CORINTHIANS n. 9 55
midst of great music and had the thought visit you that you
could conceive of harmonies greater and more majestic than the
ear of man ever heard ? Have you not, although surrounded by
many of the joys of life, had thrilling moments visit you, when it
seemed to you that you could realize a happiness that was infinite
and perfect in its fulness ? And so, on the other hand, have not
the possibilities of suffering sometimes shot across your conscious-
ness with almost awful force ? As the traveller climbing the
mountain sometimes comes upon the deep and dark crevice
opening at his very foot, so has there not sometimes come to you
in the mysterious journey of life a realization of the potential
ability of your nature to suffer miserably ? It is the sense of
unexhausted possibility, the yearning of the heart towards
something beyond itself, towards the things which " eye saw not,
and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man." l
I know 'tis but a loom of land,
Yet is it land, and so I will rejoice,
I know I cannot hear His voice
Upon the shore, nor see Him stand;
Yet is it land, ho ! land.
The land ! the land ! the lovely land !
"Far off" dost say? Far of Ah, blessed home!
Farewell ! Farewell ! thou salt sea-foain !
Ah, keel upon the silver sand
Land ho ! land.
You cannot see the land, my land,
You cannot see, and yet the land is there
My land, my land, through murky air
I did not say 'twas close at hand
But land ho ! land.
Dost hear the bells of my sweet land,
Dost hear the kine, dost hear the merry birds ?
No voice, 'tis true, no spoken words,
No tongue that thou may'st understand
Yet is it land, ho ! land.
It's clad in purple mists, my land,
In regal robe it is apparelled,
A crown is set upon its head,
And on its breast a golden band
Land ho ! land.
1 C. Cuthbert Hall.
56 THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE
Dost wonder that I long for land?
My land is not a land as others are
Upon its crest there beams a star,
And lilies grow upon the strand
Land ho! land.
Give me the helm! there is the land!
Ha! lusty mariners, she takes the breeze!
And what my spirit sees it sees
Leap, bark, as leaps the thunder-brand,
Land ho! land. 1
II.
THE THINGS OF GOD ARE EEVEALED BY His SPIRIT.
" Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him."
1. Only the spiritual man can apprehend spiritual truth ; and
only the spiritual man can comprehend spiritual experience.
(1) Only the spiritual man can apprehend spiritual truth.
Just as a blind man cannot possibly form any conception of
colour, or a deaf man of music ; so the artist, merely as an artist,
has no sort of title or qualification to pronounce on questions of
scientific research, and in like manner the scientist, as such, is no
more competent to discuss matters of religion than the humblest
clodman of the land. The man of science, therefore, who loudly
vaunts that in all his scientific researches he can find no trace of
God, is merely proclaiming to the world his own unreasonable-
ness ; for not as a man of science, restricting himself to one set of
faculties, but only as a man, giving play and scope to all his
faculties, can he learn the things which are hidden from the wise
and understanding, and revealed unto babes (Matt. xi. 25). Still
more unreasonable are the thoughtless and careless, who find no
God in all their gaiety of life, and then say there is none ; for
from all such God hides Himself, and His glory is absolutely
indiscernible by the wanton eye of worldly pleasure. What, then,
is the great law of knowledge of Divine things ? " If any man
willeth to do his will, he shall know." Obedience to spiritual
laws, conformity to spiritual conditions, is essential to real
1 T. E. Brown.
i CORINTHIANS n. 9 57
knowledge of God, and to true insight into the Divine meaning
of the facts and forecasts of human life. Spiritual blessings
cannot be attained, cannot even be apprehended, save by the
humility of faith.
^[ I remember once being present at the Geological Society,
when a bottle was produced which was said to contain certain
Zoophytes (delicate water-animals, having the form of plants).
It was handed round in the first instance among the initiated on
the foremost benches, who commented freely with one another on
the forms of the animals in the fluid ; but when it came to our
hands, we could discover nothing in the bottle but the most
limpid fluid, without any trace, so far as our eyes could make out,
of animals dead or alive, the whole appearing absolutely trans-
parent. The surprise of the ignorant, at seeing nothing, was only
equal to that of the learned, who saw so much to admire. Nor
was it till we were specifically instructed what it was we were to
look for, and the shape, size, and general aspect of the Zoophytes
pointed out, that our understanding began to co-operate with our
sight in peopling the fluid which, up to that moment, had seemed
perfectly uninhabited. The wonder then was how we could
possibly have omitted seeing objects now so palpable. 1
(2) Only the spiritual man can comprehend spiritual experience.
People say to us : " Your joys are imaginary, your perceptions of
God are self-delusions, your assurances, and hopes, and peace of
mind, and consciousness of forgiveness, are your own creations:
they are things which we do not feel, and do not understand, and
do not believe." It would be a wonderful thing if they did
understand what they have never felt. There are simple things
in everyday life that are closely akin to this. There are natures
to whom sunsets and flowers and the infinitely varied landscapes
of nature are utterly unattractive and meaningless.
Once in a dream I saw the flowers
That bud and bloom in Paradise;
More fair they are than waking eyes
Have seen in all this world of ours.
And faint the perfume-bearing rose,
And faint the lily on its stem.
And faint the perfect violet,
Compared with them.
1 Captain Basil Hall.
58 THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE
I heard the songs of Paradise:
Each bird sat singing in his place;
A tender song so full of grace
It soared like incense to the skies.
Each bird sat singing to his mate
Soft cooing notes among the trees:
The nightingale herself were cold
To such as these.
I saw the fourfold Elver flow,
And deep it was, with golden sand;
It flowed between a mossy land
With murmured music grave and low.
It hath refreshment for all thirst,
For fainting spirits strength and rest;
Earth holds not such a draught as this
From east to west.
The Tree of Life stood budding there,
Abundant with its twelvefold fruits;
Eternal sap sustains its roots,
Its shadowing branches fill the air.
Its leaves are healing for the world,
Its fruit the hungry world can feed,
Sweeter than honey to the taste
And balm indeed.
I saw the Gate called Beautiful;
And looked, but scarce could look within;
I saw the golden streets begin,
And outskirts of the glassy pool.
Oh harps, oh crowns of plenteous stars,
Oh green palm branches many-leaved
Eye hath not seen, nor ear hath heard,
Nor heart conceived.
I hope to see these things again,
But not as once in dreams by night;
To see them with my very sight,
And touch and handle and attain:
To have all heaven beneath my feet
For narrow way that once they trod;
To have my part with all the saints,
And with my God. 1
1 Christina G. Rossetti, Paradise.
i CORINTHIANS n. 9 59
2. What are the things which God has revealed ?
" Things " is a short way of saying " thinkings." Everything
was first a thought. This world before it became a thing was a
thought in the Creator's mind. Every cathedral that has ever
been built was a thought in the mind of the architect before it
became a thing in the hands of the builder. Every book of
poems was first of all a thought in the poet's mind. The things
here spoken of are God's thinkings, God's thoughts; but God's
thoughts are realities ; they are no mere myths, they are things.
What are these "deep things of Gcd" to which the Apostle
refers ? There can be no doubt that St. Paul was thinking
of the glorious total of redeeming mercy and the wonders of
redeeming grace.
(1) The knowledge of Christ as God was to St. Paul one of
the most wonderful revelations of the Spirit. He had known
Christ after the flesh ; he was aware that He had said and done
certain things, and had been crucified; and the crucifixion he
had regarded as a triumphant refutation of His claims, and as
covering Him with well-merited contempt. But as soon as he
was changed, the veil was taken from his eyes; and what eye,
and ear, and intellect had sought in vain, God revealed by His
Spirit.
If Christ, as thou affirmest, be of men
Mere man, the first and best but nothing more,
Account Him, for reward of what He was,
Now and forever, wretchedest of all.
For see; Himself conceived of life as love,
Conceived of love as what must enter in,
Fill up, make one with His each soul He loved :
Thus much for man's joy, all men's joy for Him.
Well, He is gone, thou sayest, to fit reward.
But by this time are many souls set free,
And very many still retained alive;
Nay, should His coming be delayed awhile,
Say, ten years longer (twelve years, some compute),
See if, for every finger of thy hands,
There be not found, that day the world shall end,
Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ's word
That He will grow incorporate with all,
With me as Pamphylax, with him as John,
Groom for each bride! Can a mere man do this?
6o THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE
Yet Christ saith, this He lived and died to do.
Call Christ, then, the illimitable God,
Or lost ! *
(2) The revelation of God as Love comes also by the Spirit.
It is in vain that you reiterate that " God is love," if my terrified
conscience and cruel temper shut out the very notion of love,
and empty the word of all true meaning. The spirit of love
must dawn upon our consciousness; no mere description will
enable us to understand it ; but as soon as its light arises within,
a revelation is made, and the spiritual mind apprehends what
was hidden from intellect and sense.
Thou as represented here to me
In such conception as my soul allows,
Under Thy measureless, my atom width !
Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points
Picked out of the immensity of sky,
To re-unite there, be our heaven for earth,
Our known unknown, our God revealed to man ?
Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole;
Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense,
There, (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus!)
In the absolute immensity, the whole
Appreciable solely by Thyself,
Here, by the little mind of man, reduced
To littleness that suits his faculty,
In the degree appreciable too;
Between Thee and ourselves nay even, again,
Below us, to the extreme of the minute,
Appreciable by how many and what diverse
Modes of the life Thou madest be ! (why live
Except for love, how love unless they know T
Each of them, only filling to the edge,
Insect or angel, his just length and breadth,
Due facet of reflection, full, no less,
Angel or insect, as Thou framest things. 2
(3) With the revelation of God as Love comes an under-
standing of the Divine plan of Salvation, a comprehension of the
meaning of the Cross of Christ. And with the sense of sin that
1 Browning, A Death in the Desert.
8 Browning, The Ring and the Book.
i CORINTHIANS n. 9 61
this inevitably brings come also the promise of the forgiveness
of sin, and the still more blessed promise of the conquest of sin.
This boon the suppression and extinction of sin is one of the
great gifts which God has prepared for them that love Him.
Sin ! wilt thou vanquish me !
And shall I yield the victory ?
Shall all my joys be spoiled,
And pleasures soiled,
By thee!
Shall I remain
As one that's slain
And never more lift up the head?
Is not my Saviour dead !
His Blood, thy bane; my balsam, bliss, joy, wine,
Shall thee destroy; heal, feed, make me Divine. 1
(4) Union with Christ is one of the deep things of God, and in
that union are endless spiritual blessings. To conquer the world
by loving it, to be blest by ceasing from the pursuit of happiness,
and sacrificing life instead of finding it, to make a hard lot easy by
submitting to it this was St. Paul's Divine philosophy of life. And
the princes of this world, amidst scoffs and laughter, replied, Is
that all? Nothing to dazzle nothing to captivate? But the
disciples of the inward life, the humble of heart, and the loving,
felt that in this lay the mystery of life, of themselves, and of God,
all revealed and plain.
" Eye hath not seen " : yet man hath known and weighed
A hundred thousand marvels that have been :
What is it which (the Word of Truth hath said)
Eye hath not seen ?
"Ear hath not heard": yet harpings of delight,
Trumpets of triumph, songs and spoken word,
Man knows them all: what lovelier, loftier might
Hath ear not heard?
" Nor heart conceived " : yet man hath now desired
Beyond all reach, beyond his hope believed,
Loved beyond death: what fire shall yet be fired
No heart conceived ?
1 Traherne,
62 THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE
"Deep calls to deep": man's depth would be despair,
But for God's deeper depth: we sow to reap,
Have patience, wait, betake ourselves to prayer:
Deep answereth deep. 1
3. These things God has prepared. The term used recalls the
words of Christ: "The kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world " (Matt. xxv. 34).
God prepared the things that He knew man's heart would
long for. A thing prepared is a thing ready at the moment it
is needed and expected. So, when we feel the yoke of sin heavy,
then is the moment to accept the prepared deliverance. It was
prepared on the Cross, it is found at the Cross. As deliverance
from sin is found at the Cross, so also was union with Christ and
likeness to Christ prepared at the open grave of Christ, and
found by faith in a risen, living Saviour. The hope of our calling,
the riches of the glory of our inheritance, the exceeding greatness
of His power, these are not future blessings, they are prepared
here and now for those who believe and love. And what of the
things on before ? Truly the glory of them is past man's under-
standing the city prepared, the place prepared, the rest, the
work, the joy, the crown that God is making ready.
There is a Stream, which issues forth
From God's eternal Throne,
And from the Lamb, a living stream
Clear as the crystal stone.
The stream doth water Paradise;
It makes the Angels sing ;
One cordial drop revives my heart;
Hence all my joys do spring.
Eye hath not seen, nor ear hath heard,
From fancy 'tis conceal'd,
What Thou, Lord, hast laid up for Thine,
And hast to me reveal'd. 2
4. The things are prepared by God for them that love Him.
Everything is seen by its own glass ; everything looks foolish
when seen through any other glass. Music is meaningless when
addressed only to the eye ; painting has no message to the ear.
1 Christina G. Rossetti. 2 John Mason.
i CORINTHIANS n. 9 63
The deep things of man can be seen only by their own faculty. So
is it with the deep things of God. There are things in religion
which are mysteries to every organ but one the spirit of love.
There are depths which love alone can fathom.
The good things are for those who love. Eepentant sinners
they may be, like David, yet because they are forgiven much they
will love much. Love is the condition without which revelation
does not take place. No selected child of grace can remain
unloving and cold, and yet see and hear and feel the things
which God hath prepared for them that love Him.
For the heart only dwells, truly dwells, with its treasure,
And the languor of love captive hearts can unfetter;
And they who love God cannot love Him by measure,
For their love is but hunger to love Him still better.
For the lack of desire is the ill of all ills,
Many thousands through it the dark pathway have trod;
The balsam, the wine of predestinate wills,
Is a jubilant pining and longing for God.
Oh, then, wish more for God, burn more with desire,
Covet more the dear sight of His marvellous face !
(1) To love God is to love His character. God is Love : and to
love men till private attachments have expanded into a philan-
thropy which embraces all, at last even the evil and enemies,
with compassion that is to love God. God is Purity : and to be
pure in thought and look ; to turn away from unhallowed books
and conversation, to abhor the moments in which we have not
been pure, is to love God. God is Truth : to be true, to hate
every form of falsehood, to live a brave, true, real life that
is to love God. God is Infinite : and to love the boundless,
reaching on from grace to grace, adding charity to faith, and
rising upwards ever to see the Ideal still above us, and to die
with it unattained, aiming insatiably to be perfect even as the
Father is perfect that is love to God.
(2) Love is manifested in obedience. Love is the life of which
obedience is the form. " He that hath my commandments, and
keepeth them, he it is that loveth me." Nothing can be love to
God which does not shape itself into obedience. We remember
the anecdote of the Eoman commander who forbade an engage-
64 THINGS PREPARED FOR LOVE
ment with the enemy. The first transgressor against his pro-
hibition was his own son, who accepted the challenge of the
leader of the other host, met, slew, spoiled him, and then in
triumphant feeling carried the spoils to his father's tent. But
the Eoman father refused to recognize the instinct which prompted
this as deserving of the name of love. Disobedience contradicted
it, and deserved death. So with God: strong feelings, warm
expressions, varied internal experience co-existing with disobedi-
ence, God counts not as Love. Mere weak feeling may not usurp
that sacred name.
TI About this time I had constantly in my mind that wonder-
ful reconciliation of half the theological enigmas which ever have
arisen, which Maurice points out in one of his sermons on the
Temptation, and expounds more fully (tho', I think, not so
forcibly) in one of his latter Prayer-book series on the Consecra-
tion Prayer. He reminds us how " worldly men in their carnal
and proud hearts cannot conceive how the Father commands
because the Son obeys, and the Son obeys because the Father
commands." This had for some time given to me a most blessed
and practical solution of the question of Free Will. I dared not
apply the term " servile " to this loving and willing yet eternal
obedience of the Son " begotten before all worlds " ; yet surely it
was the fullest, completest obedience, the perfect type of all
imperfect obedience on earth, and likewise was the authority of
the Father the fullest, completest authority, the perfect type of
all imperfect authority on earth. This fundamental doctrine of
the filial subordination of the Son from all eternity (in no wise
interfering with His co-eternity and co-equality with the Father)
is hard to receive, and will always be rejected when the under-
standing seeks to exert an universal empire ; yet I fully believe
that it is the keystone of theology and humanity. 1
Tf While abhorring war, M. Coillard always had the strongest
sympathy with the military profession. His mind seemed to
move in its imagery. Christianity, as he conceived it, was the
march of an ever- victorious army ; to him it meant a loyalty, not
a philosophy, still less a ceremonial system. He had no other
ambition than to be " a good soldier of Jesus Christ." " A French
general," he once wrote, " told his aide-de-camp that the polite-
ness of a soldier was obedience; and I myself hold that in all
circumstances our duty to our Master is fidelity." 2
1 The Life and Letters of Fent&n J. A. Hort, i. 135.
8 C. W. Mackintosh, Coillard of the Zambezi 106.
i CORINTHIANS n. 9 65
Lord of the host of deep desires
That spare no sting, yet are to me
Sole echo of the silver choirs
Whose dwelling is eternity
With all save thee my soul is pressed
In high dispute from day to day,
But, Love, at thy most high behest
I make no answer, and obey. 1
1 John Drinkwater, Poems of Men and Hours, 21.
I COR. 5
GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS.
LITERATURE.
Darlow (J. H.), The Upward Calling, 178.
Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, iii. 405.
Herford (B.), Anchors of the Soul, 77.
Hodgkin (T.), Human Progress and the Inward Light, 42.
Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 225, 230.
James (J. A.), Sermons, iii. 158.
Jones (W. B.), The Peace of God, 243.
Keenleyside (C. B.), God's Fellow-workers, 79.
Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 214.
Macgilvray (W.), The Ministry of the Word, 83.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : 1 and 2 Corinthians, 30.
Menzies (G.), Pictorial Sermons in Industries, 48, 110.
Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 140.
Percival (J.), Sermons at Rugby, 189.
Some Helps for School Life, 216.
Selby (T. G.), The Lesson of a Dilemma, 365.
Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 341.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxvii. (1881), No. 1602.
Stalker (J.), The New Song, 38.
Vaughan (C. J.), Memorials of Harrow Sundays, 437.
Wells (J.), Bible Images, 239.
Wilson (S. L.), Helpful Words for Daily Life, 362.
British Congreyationalist, Sept. 15, 1910, p. 208 (Cadraan).
Christian Age, xxxiv. 258 (Diggle).
Christian World Pulpit, vi. 255 (Marling) ; viii. 329 (Beecher) ; xix. 104
(Woodford); xxix. 132 (Beecher); li. 364 (Armitage); liv. 70
(Snell) ; Ix. 257 (Hunter).
Church of England Magazine, x. 417 (Holland).
Church of England Pulpit, xxxii. 28 (Reed).
Church Family Newspaper, Dec. 31, 1909, p. 1071 (James).
Examiner, Dec. 22, 1904, p. 600 (Jovvett).
GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS.
We are God's fellow- workers. i Cor. iii. 9.
1. THE characteristic Greek tendency to factions was threaten-
ing to rend the Corinthian Church, and each faction was swearing
by a favourite teacher. St. Paul uses the words of the text to
emphasize the truth that in the process of teaching and saving
men God's work links itself with man's, and God's work is so
much mightier and more wonderful than man's that it is idle to
weigh the work of one human labourer against that of another,
after the fashion of these Corinthian sectaries. We might just
as well pick out tiny shells in the cement binding the stones
of a minster and divide ourselves into factions to champion the
architectural honour due to the several tenants of each particular
primeval shell, or select striking portions of oak carving and
divide ourselves into factions to champion the artistic possibilities
of the several acorns that evolved such magnificent material. A
rational being has not time to think of these infinitesimal
questions. He wishes to save up his tribute of honour for the
genius who planned arch and spire, and dreamt out flowered
screen and stall, and guided the whole to its many-sided per-
fection. God's true labourers will be rewarded, not by the
reckless praise and short-sighted judgments of men, but by Him
who counts them allies, and in the strength of whose gift all
right work must be done.
2. Startled by the boldness of the expression of the text, as
if it verged on profanity, interpreters have been found, to give it
a different meaning " fellow-labourers under God," "fellow-
workers in God's field." But this is not justified by the language
used. The meaning of St. Paul's words is " We are at work with
70 GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS
God Himself." And to the bold idea of joint labour with God
there is added the idea of dependence. "We are God's day-
labourers, working with Him." It is His to pay the workmen,
and to value their labour. For is it not His Church, His
field, His house ? It is to a Divine possession that the workers
put their hand. What gravity attaches to such labour ! To
cultivate a field the harvest of which is God's I To build the
house which God Himself is to inhabit ! God alone can estimate
such labour, and He will not fail to do so. These are the ideas
in the Apostle's mind when he says : " We are God's fellow-
workers."
3. The principle embodied is a very wide one, and it applies
in all regions of life and activity, intellectual, scholastic, philan-
thropic, social. Wherever men are thinking God's thoughts and
trying to carry into effect any phase or side of God's manifold
purposes of good and blessing to the world, there it is true.
Every man who is trying to make men understand God's
thought, whether it is expressed in creation, or whether it is
written in history, or whether it is graven in half -obliterated
letters on the constitution of human nature, every man who, in
any region of society or life, is seeking to effect the great designs
of the universal loving Father can take to himself, in the
measure and according to the manner of his special activity,
the great encouragement of the text, and feel that he, too, is a
fellow-helper to the truth and a fellow-worker with God.
If The apse of Amiens is the first virgin perfect work
Parthenon also in that sense of Gothic Architecture. Who
built it, shall we ask? God, and Man is the first and most
true answer. The stars in their courses built it, and the nations.
Greek Athena labours here and Eoman Father Jove, and
Guardian Mars. The Gaul labours here, and the Frank : knightly
Norman mighty Ostrogoth and wasted anchorite of Idumea.
The actual Man who built it scarcely cared to tell you he did so ;
nor do the historians brag of him. Any quantity of heraldries
of knaves and faineants you may find in what they call their
" history " : but this is probably the first time you ever read the
name of Kobert of Luzarches. I say he "scarcely cared" we
are not sure that he cared at all. He signed his name nowhere
that I can hear of. You may perhaps find some recent initials
cut by English remarkable visitors, desirous of immortality, here
i CORINTHIANS m. 9 71
and there about the edifice, but Kobert the builder or at least
the Master of building, cut his on no stone of it. 1
I.
WE ARE FELLOW-WORKERS WITH ONE ANOTHER.
The men who had ministered at Corinth, and around whose
names factions were forming, differed in their gifts. St. Paul was
the wisest master-builder who dealt with massive fundamentals.
The elaboration of his artistic successors would not have counted
for much without Pauline teaching for corner and foundation-
stone. Some people would have liked to see more paint, gilding,
embellishment on his granite. The task of Apollos was chiefly
one of garniture, useful and fitted to attract, but vain without the
bulwark of well-tested logic behind and beneath it. Gifts are
diverse no less than the crowns which shall recompense the
faithful use of gifts, but the work is one.
If Convenience, that admirable branch system from the main
line of self-interest, makes us all fellow-helpers in spite of adverse
resolutions. It is probable that no speculative or theological
hatred would be ultimately strong enough to resist the persuasive
power of convenience: that a latitudinarian baker, whose bread
was honourably free from alum, would command the custom of
any dyspeptic Puseyite; that an Arminian with the toothache
would prefer a skilful Calvinistic dentist to a bungler stanch
against the doctrines of Election and Final Perseverance, who
would be likely to break the tooth in his head; and that a
Plymouth Brother, who had a well-furnished grocery shop in
a favourable vicinage, would occasionally have the pleasure
of furnishing sugar or vinegar to orthodox families that
found themselves unexpectedly "out of" these indispensable
commodities. 2
If There was a story that when the Anglo-Catholic Library
was being discussed, Mr. Keble said to Dr. Moberly, " Well, you
shall undertake the Anglo part and / the Catholic, and we will
fight over the hyphen." 3
(1) In the building of Solomon's Temple there were counted
out by the king seventy thousand men for the sole purpose of
1 Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens (Works, xxxiii. 131).
2 George Eliot, Janet's Repentance.
8 C. A. E. Moberly, Dulce Domum, 82.
72 GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS
bearing burdens. No doubt this grew irksome to these men,
and they would many a time wish for some other work on the
structure, and perhaps envy the men who were skilful to work
in gold, and in silver, in brass, in iron, in purple, in blue, and in
crimson. But without them the Temple could never have been
built. Their work was absolutely essential. And so it seems
that in the building of the spiritual temple, many have been
counted out by the king just to bear burdens. Tedious and
wearisome as their lots are, yet nothing they do that makes for
spiritual growth, purity of life, or cleanness of soul, can fail to
subserve God's great purpose of erecting a world-wide spiritual
temple upon this sin-stained world.
T[ There was a sharp discussion the other clay in a gentleman's
kitchen. One speaker said to another, " I am ashamed of you ;
we ought not to be in the same house together ; you are common
and vulgar-looking, besides being scratched and chipped all over.
Look at me ; there is not a flaw upon all my surface ; my beauty
is admired ; my place in the house is a place of honour." The
other speaker was not boisterous, there was no resentment in
the tone of the reply : " It is true that you are beautiful, and
that I am very common, but that is not the only difference
between us. See how you are cared for ; you are protected by a
glass shade ; you are dusted with a brush made of the softest
feathers; everybody in approaching you is warned of your
delicacy. It is very different with me\ whenever water is
wanted I am taken to the well; when servants are done with
me they almost fling me down ; I am used for all kinds of work ;
and there never was a scullery -maid in the house who did not
think herself good enough to speak of me with contempt/' It is
so with men. Some of us live under glass shades ; others of us
are as vessels in common wear ; but we could not change places ;
each must do his proper work, and each will have his appropriate
reward. 1
Is it the work ttiat makes life great and true?
Or the true soul that, working as it can,
Does faithfully the task it has to do,
And keepeth faith alike with God and man ?
Ah ! well ; the work is something ; the same gold
Or brass is fashioned now into a coin,
Now into fairest chalice that shall hold
To panting lips the sacramental wine:
1 J. Parker.
i CORINTHIANS HI. 9 73
Here the same marble forms a cattle-trough
For brutes by the wayside to quench their thirst,
And there a god emerges from the rough
Unshapely block yet they were twins at first.
One pool of metal in the melting pot
A sordid, or a sacred thought inspires;
And of twin marbles from the quarry brought
One serves the earth, one glows with altar-fires.
There's something in high purpose of the soul
To do the highest service to its kind ;
There's something in the art that can unroll
Secrets of beauty shaping in the mind.
Yet he who takes the lower room, and tries
To make his cattle-trough with honest heart,
And could not frame the god with gleaming eyes,
As nobly plays the more ignoble part.
And maybe, as the higher light breaks in
And shows the meaner task he has to do,
He is the greater that he strives to win
Only the praise of being just and true.
For who can do no thing of sovran worth
Which men shall praise, a higher task may find,
Plodding his dull round on the common earth,
But conquering envies rising in the mind.
And God works in the little as the great
A perfect work, and glorious over all
Or in the stars that choir with joy elate,
Or in the lichen spreading on the wall. 1
(2) Besides seventy thousand men to bear burdens for the
Temple, there were told off eighty thousand men to hew stone
and wood in the mountains. These men had a task both
laborious and uninviting. Although the Temple' could never
have been built without them, yet the pleasure was denied them
of seeing, while they worked, the great and glorious edifice arise
on Mount Moriah. And so, to-day, the Lord has His hewers of
wood and stone in the mountains. To them is given hard and
unresponsive tasks. They labour all the day, and catch no
1 Walter C. Smith, " Work and Spirit."
74 GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS
glimpse of the House that is being built for Jehovah, helped by
their labour. But still, without them, the House could never
have been built.
U The close sympathy between the Scotch people and the
Scotch gentry in most of the national struggles has been one
great cause of that admirable firmness of national character
which learnt at last to dispense with leadership. In Ireland, in
spite of adverse circumstances, this attachment between land-
lord and tenant in many particular instances was undoubtedly
formed, but in general there could be no real confidence between
the classes. When the people awoke to political life, they found
their natural leaders their antagonists ; they were compelled to
look for other chiefs, and they often found them in men who
were inferior in culture, in position, and in character, who sought
their suffrages for private ends, and who won them by fulsome
flattery, false rhetoric, and exaggerated opinions. 1
TJ From Bellinzona (after a day or two's excursion to Locarno)
Ruskin drove to the head of the lake, and took the steamer for
Baveno and the Isola Bella. Writing thence to his father (July
8), Ruskin mentions a political observation which made a great
impression on him, for he used it more than once as an illustration
in his economic writings :
" No pity nor respect can be felt for these people, who have
sunk and remain sunk, merely by idleness and wantonness in
the midst of all blessings and advantages : who cannot so much
as bank out or in a mountain stream, because, as one of their
priests told me the other day, every man always acts for himself :
they will never act together and do anything at common expense
for the common good; but every man tries to embank his own
land and throw the stream upon his neighbours; and so the
stream masters them all and sweeps its way down all the valley
in victory. This I heard from the curate of a mountain chapel
at Bellinzona, when I went every evening to draw his garden." 2
(3) There were men skilful to work in gold and silver, brass,
iron, stone, linen, purple, and crimson, and to grave all manner
of gravings and devise all manner of devices. These were the
outstanding men of genius, of whom only a few were needed.
Tf To Sir Christopher Wren belongs the undying honour of
having designed the great cathedral of St. Paul, with its world-
famous dome, in London. But Sir Christopher Wren could never
1 W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland, i. 280.
8 E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 517,
i CORINTHIANS m. 9 75
in a million years have built the dome alone. He was dependent
upon the humblest labourers who toiled upon the hidden base, or
reared the turrets of the mighty structure, as they were dependent
upon him. In so far as they used to the uttermost their talents
and opportunities, to them is due a full share of the glory. 1
^ One day at Perth Bishop Wilkinson (late of Truro) noticed
a thin-faced boy looking as if he wanted to speak to him, and he
went up to him, asking if the boy wished to speak to him. " No,
sir," said the boy, " only I sing in the same choir as you are in."
The Bishop's friends laughed at the boy's idea of his association
with the Bishop in the Church, but the boy was not laughed at
by the Bishop. 2
Tf The world itself might be redeemed by hopefulness and
organized co-operation. Kuskin may have lacked the practical
gift ; but he was possessed by the vision :
(To his Mother) "Verona, June 18. Yesterday, it being
quite cool, I went for a walk, and as I came down from a rather
quiet hillside a mile or two out of town, I passed a house where
the women were at work spinning the silk off the cocoons.
There was a sort of whirring sound as in an English mill ; but at
intervals they sang a long sweet chant, all together, lasting about
two minutes, then pausing a minute, and then beginning again.
It was good and tender music, and the multitude of voices
prevented any sense of failure, so that it was all very lovely and
sweet, and like the things that I mean to try to bring to pass." 8
II.
WE ARE FELLOW- WORKERS FOR GOD.
1. Every Christian man and woman is invested with the
power, and is therefore burdened with the honourable obligation
to work for God. Man's communion with his Maker is not only
a fellowship of worship but also a fellowship of service.
If What were Ruskin's methods in his other and more general
manners, when he had the single view of making himself under-
stood and said what he desired in the best words he could find
for it ? What was his secret ? He would have told us, I think,
what he reported Turner as saying, " I know of no genius but
the genius of hard work." There is no writer who gives a
stronger impression of ease than Cardinal Newman a great
1 C. B. Keenleyside. 2 Life of Bishop Wilkinson, ii. 288.
8 E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, ii. 164,
;6 GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS
master of simple and lucid English, greater in these particular
respects, if we take the whole body of their writings, than
Kuskin. Yet even Newman said : " I have been obliged to take
great pains with everything I have written, and I often write
chapters over and over again, besides innumerable corrections
and interlined additions." Buskin's method was the same. The
search for the right word, for the fitting sentence, was often
long; and paragraphs and chapters were written over and over
again before they satisfied him. And this applies equally to his
most simple writing, such as is to be found, for instance, in The
Elements of Drawing ; and to his most elaborate passages, such as
the exordiums and perorations in Modern Painters, The Seven
Lamps, and The Stones of Venice. He carried on the process to
the stage of proofs, revises, and re-revises. Facsimiles of pages
re-written on the printed proof are included in the Library
Edition, and in this connection Dr. Furnivall gave me an
anecdote. To Euskin's father the publisher came one day
exhibiting a thickly scored final revise and explaining that
continuance in such practices would absorb all the author's
profits. " Don't let my son know," said the old gentleman ;
" John must have his things as he likes them ; pay him whatever
would become due, apart from corrections, and send in a separate
bill for them to me." Few authors, it may be feared, are blessed
with so indulgent a parent. 1
Be strong !
We are not here to play, to dream, to drift.
We have hard work to do, and loads to lift.
Shun not the struggle ; face it. 'Tis God's gift. 2
2. There is a sense in which every man is a worker for God.
We cannot help fulfilling His purposes. All things serve Him,
and He maketh even the wickedness of men work out His will.
(1) Through human agency the ancient miracle of creation is
repeated. One great teaching of modern knowledge says nothing
above a certain low level of excellence comes by natural law
unaided by man ; all best things in the world of nature are the
result of his thought and toil. It is true that man can do absolutely
nothing without God. He can create no new forces. All the
material with which he works Nature has furnished. But what
can he not do with it, and what has he done ? He has modified
1 E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 358.
2 Maltbie D. Babcock.
i CORINTHIANS in. 9 77
climate, made the rivers change their course and even the ocean its
shore, made forests grow and made new ground for them to grow in,
made the parched ground a pool and the thirsty land springs of
water. Eight hundred years ago there was no such country as
the Holland of to-day; God had not made it. He made it
possible, but man had to give it actual frame and form. The map
of Holland is not even now what it was at the beginning of the
last century; it has 120,000 more acres of land than it had then.
T[ I was deeply impressed by what a gardener once said to
me concerning his work. " I feel, sir," he said, " when I am
growing the flowers, or rearing the vegetables, that I am having
a share in creation ! " I thought it a very noble way of regarding
his work. 1
(2) In the realm of outward nature man works for God. It
is man's part in evolution that has developed the moss-rose out
of the wild-briar, the fine wheat out of the wild grasses. And
in the animal kingdom the same thing is seen still more strik-
ingly. The famous breeds of horses and cattle are man's creation
by development. Compare your sheep-dog or your setter
with the wild canine stock. Association with man has evolved
in them something almost of human intelligence and feeling.
God gives man all things in the rough, as it were, and leaves him
to develop them further; and without man's part faithfully
performed, there could not be a loaf of bread evolved out of a
wheat field, or a woollen coat out of a sheep's fleece.
^[ Nature knew enough to make textile fibres, but never knew
enough to weave a piece of cotton. It never brought out a yard
of broadcloth. Nature knew how to make a worm, and the worm
knew how to make a garment of death for itself, but nature never
made silk. Nature made iron, but never made a tool not one ;
and yet, what are the hands of man without tools ? Men could
not have risen above barbarism but for them. 2
(3) In his own training and saving, in the work of developing
personal faculty and character, man is a worker with God. Man's
own will and effort constitute one of the factors in his progress.
You remember the little child's quaint answer to the question,
" Who made you ? " Said she, " God made me so long, and I
growed the rest myself." "Out of the mouth of babes and
1 J. H. Jowett. 3 H. W. Beecher,
78 GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS
sucklings hast thou ordained strength ! " The little girl's answer
touched the very heart of the matter. We are made, intel-
lectually and morally, just about so long ; that is not our doing
" it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves " but, after
all, there is a good deal that we have to " grow ourselves " and
that we can grow ourselves.
If Theodore Parker used to say that man's life was only about
three parts out of the hundred freedom, the rest, necessity.
That is not much to claim for free-will the veriest necessarian
might concede that much ! But then, even three per cent, of moral
freedom, if made the most of, and constantly turned over, may
mount up gradually to a considerable increase of that stock-in-
trade with which man started. That little three per cent, of free
effort has brought man from skins to broadcloth ; from the wig-
wam to the modern house ; from the rough tradition chanted by
the camp fire to the printed book ; from the rude torch to the
electric light. In religion, it has brought man from the instinct
of fetish- worship to the communion of spiritual prayer ; and in
morality, from the measureless revenge of the savage to the
measured law "for a tooth only a tooth," and on to the
unmeasured law of forgiveness " unto seventy times seven " !
In a word it is that little free part of man's own, even if it
be only three per cent., which, not buried in the napkin of
indolence or fatalism, but put out to interest in busy striving
life, has brought man from savagism up to civilization, and in
which lie the possibilities of further progress still the potenti-
alities of the hero, sage and saint in this world, to say nothing
of the angel in the life to come. 1
(4) It is through men that God helps and saves men and
creates His new heavens and His new earth. Out of humanity
come the Divine helpers of humanity. God in the world reconcil-
ing it to Himself means in human life God in Christ and God
in men whom Christ inspires, God choosing and using men to be
the instruments of His purpose, the messengers of His mercy and
grace, the doers of His word. There was no want of faith, or
reverence, or humility in Martin Luther, and yet he could say in
his own bold, earnest way, " God needs strong men ; He cannot
get along without them."
T[ The highest of all privileges is to share with God the work
of re-creation. There are no flowers so winsome as those you
1 B. Herford.
i CORINTHIANS in. 9
79
have grown in your own garden, and there is no life that gives
you such joy and such delicacy of spiritual food as the life you
have helped to make beautiful by your own heart's blood. When
you have worked with the Lord in the creation of another man's
joy, a most delicately flavoured joy visits your own heart. Let
us regard every man as a possible sphere of service, and set to
work to turn the untilled field into a garden. 1
Wherefore hast Thou withdrawn Thee from my sight,
Shepherd? Yesterday in glad delight
1 walked serene, rejoicing in the light.
Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep !
But yesterday my soul was all aflame
If but the faintest whisper of Thy name
Ineffable to my rapt spirit came.
Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!
The waters that refreshed me yesterday,
The sweet green fields that cheered me on my way
Afford no comfort to my soul to-day.
Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!
Around me the fair world is bathed in light,
All nature breathes to God her calm delight;
And I, alone, stumble in blackest night.
Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!
Why dost Thou leave me on the mountain side
When all my soul cries out for Thee to guide,
Desiring nought in earth or heaven beside?
Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!
Why dost Thou leave me thus? If Thou art near,
Succour me speedily. Each step I fear.
Oh let Thy voice fall on my straining ear.
Shepherd, Shepherd, Shepherd, seek Thy sheep!
Thy voice ? Nay, but across the lonely track
A faint xry from a soul in bitter lack.
Is it Thy voice ? Shepherd, I turn me back
And hasten, joyful, to seek out Thy sheep. 2
*
1 J. H. Jowett.
2 Margaret Blaikie, Songs ly the Way, 39.
8o GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS
III.
WE ABE FELLOW- WORKERS WITH GOD.
We are fellow-workers, and we are fellow-workers for God.
But, more than that, we are fellow- workers with God. It is God's
field we are tilling, it is God's house we are building together, and
God is with us in the work. He and we till the field and build
the house together. We are God's fellow-workers.
" God's fellow- workers ! " What a title ! How august the
dignity ! What distinction it confers upon us ! The conjunction
is almost incredible. God the eternal, infinite. The omniscient
and omnipotent! Man, crushed before the moth, chilled and
smitten by the November fog! And yet these two terms,
significant of frailty and almightiness, are brought into this
marvellous association, and we are described as " fellow-workers " !
We do not wonder that John Calvin, in seeking an exposition
of these words, describes one side of the partnership as " composed
of mere worms of the dust." But a worm in conjunction with
the Almighty becomes a powerful fellow-worker.
^| Is there anything more fragile than the incandescent
mantle ? You blow upon it and it falls into dust. It will not
bear the rough touch even of the gentlest finger. And yet this
flimsy substance can co-operate with a tremendous energy and
contribute in the production of dazzling light. And here we are,
mere children of the dust, frail and flimsy as this mantle. And
yet, when we are in league with the Almighty, we become
exceedingly serviceable, and fruitful in great things. We can be
fellow-workers with God ; such a dignity ought to make us walk
with sanctified erectness. 1
^ When a mother says to her little child who is carrying some
little burden from one room to another, " You are helping me,"
what stature it gives to the little soul, and what a sense of dignity
and place in life's affairs.
Tf Suppose a great painter, a Eaphael or a Turner, taking a
little boy that cleaned his brushes, and saying to him, "Come
into my studio, and I will let you do a bit of work upon my
picture." Suppose an aspirant, an apprentice in any walk of life,
honoured by being permitted to work along with some one who
was recognized all over the world as being at the very top of that
1 J, H. Jowett
i CORINTHIANS m. 9 81
special profession. Would it not be a feather in the boy's cap
all his life ? And would he not think it the greatest honour that
ever had been done him that he was allowed to co-operate, in
however inferior a fashion, with such an one ? Jesus Christ says
to us, " (Some and work here side by side with Me." l
1. As we are joint-labourers with God, we must learn the
lesson of mutual dependence.
(1) We are dependent on God. We cannot do the smallest
part of our work without His co-operation. Here is the secret of
humility. Alike in the development of our own inner lives and
in our ministry for others, we must be destitute of prosperity
and progress, if it were not that God is working in us to will and
to do of His good pleasure. So let us bid farewell to every shred
and vestige of pride. If it were not for our Divine ally, we
should be shamed and driven in dishonour from the field.
TJ When first the greatness of the scientific thought of evolu-
tion burst upon the wondering mind of our time, there was an
idea that it would almost cut away the ground from under
religion. Perhaps this feeling was never expressed and at the
same time its shallowness exposed better than in the saying
of Frances Power Cobbe. " It is a curious thing," said Miss Cobbe,
" that as soon as men find out how anything is done, they should
immediately rush to the conclusion that God did not do it." But
that idea is pretty well past. God's part in Evolution becomes
only more evident the more the subject is examined. We cannot
get that idea of evolution to work, we cannot keep it working,
without recognizing, behind all things and in all things, some
mighty, mysterious power and energy, which, the more we look
at it, the more we have to think of it as life and will, and to call
it by some name of God. 2
(2) God is dependent on us. In his controversy with the late
John Stuart Mill, the French philosopher Comte said, " My Deity,
that is, Humanity, has this advantage over yours : He needs
help." The English philosopher met the charge by saying, " The
theist's God is not omnipotent ; He can be helped, great worker
though He be." What Mill described as " the feeling of helping
God " has always been cherished by the most sincere and earnest
believers in the power of God over all.
1 A. Maclaren. 3 B. Herford.
I COR.- 6
82 GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS
Lord, when we pray, "Thy kingdom come!"
Then fold our hands without a care
For souls whom Thou hast died to save,
We do but mock Thee with our prayer. n
Thou couldst have sent an angel band
To call Thine erring children home;
And thus through heavenly ministries
On earth Thy kingdom might have come.
But since to human hands like ours
Thou hast committed work divine,
Shall not our eager hearts make haste
To join their feeble powers with Thine?
To word and work shall not our hands
Obedient move, nor lips be dumb,
Lest through our sinful love of ease,
Thy kingdom should delay to come ?
2. As we are fellow- workers with God let us work in harmony
with God and by God's method,
(1) It behoves us to work in harmony with Him. Co-opera-
tion with God is a question of knowing, of being conscious of it.
It is impossible to divorce ourselves from God. In spite of us
He will realize His will in us. He cannot overcome our will,
but even through our opposing will He will accomplish His
purpose. But we may be willing fellow-workers. It is the
difference between opposition to God's will, together with the
shamefaced confession that we cannot help doing His work,
and willing co-operation with His will, together with the
consciousness of being recognized by Him as fellow- workers.
^f Says Euskin, " You will find it needful to live, if it be with
success, according to God's Law ; and the first uttered article in
it is, ' In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread.' " 1
K The conduct of life becomes like the experience of the brave
Nansen in his attempt to reach the Pole. Men had struggled
northward through weary days from the Greenland side, only to
find at the end of each day's march that they had been swept
farther south by a current which moved the whole pack of ice
1 E. T. Cook, The Life of Rusk in, ii. 329.
i CORINTHIANS m. 9 83
beneath their feet. Then the Norwegian explorer made himself
a labourer together with God, through the Siberian approach, and
gave himself to the mighty sweep of the polar current, so that the
law which he had discovered bore him towards the realization of
his dream. It is the same with every honest desire to do right.
The current of God's laws is under you ; the movement of things
is with you ; you are a labourer together with God.
(2) If we are working in willing co-operation with God, we
will be content to work by God's method. And if we wish to
know what God's method is, we have but to look at Jesus Christ.
Now we know that the method of God for Jesus Christ involved
self-sacrifice, pain, weariness, utter self-oblivious devotion, as well
as gentleness, tenderness, infinite pity, and love running over. If
we felt that side by side with us, like two sailors hauling on one
rope, " the Servant of the Lord " was toiling, would it not burn up
all our selfishness, and light up all our indifference, and make us
spend ourselves in His service ?
U Men's lives bear the aspects of deserts and wildernesses,
and God wants them to be as beautiful as the Garden of Eden
aye, more beautiful. The "paradise of God" in the book of
Kevelation is a far more lovely garden than the Garden of Eden ;
the first was the garden of innocence, the latter is the garden of
holiness. Man fell from innocence; he may attain unto the
garden of holiness ; but the attainment is made possible by the
awful happenings in the Garden of Gethsemane. Now if we are
to be fellow-workers in creating the garden of holiness we too
must know something of the agonies of Gethsemane. We must
know " the fellowship of his sufferings." We can do nothing of
this high gardening except through the ministry of sacrificial
blood. When we are willing to bleed, in order that other lives
may be beautiful, we shall be sharing the travail of the whole
creation. It is no use playing at spiritual gardening ; it is a thing
of agony and bloody sweat. 1
Whose is the speech
That moves the voices of this lonely beech?
Out of the long West did this wild wind come
Oh strong and silent! And the tree was dumb,
Keady and dumb until
The dumb gale struck it on the darkened hill.
1 J. H, Jowett.
84 GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS
Two memories,
Two powers, two promises, two silences
Closed in this cry, closed in these thousand leaves
Articulate. This sudden hour retrieves
The purpose of the past,
Separate, apart embraced, embraced at last.
"Whose is the word?
Is it I that spake ? Is it thou ? Is it I that heard ? "
"Thine earth was solitary; yet I found thee!"
"Thy sky was pathless, but I caught, I bound thee,
Thou visitant divine."
"0 thou my Voice, the word was thine." "Was thine." 1
3. The fact that our work is conjoined with the Divine is the
root of motive. It ought ever to be an adequate inspiration to us
that the work is God's, and that He has called us into His fellow-
ship. Is not the motive that stirs in His heart and moves His
stupendous activities without ceasing sufficient for us ? What is
good enough to engage the majestic energies of God is surely good
enough for us. Does the work that beseems His matchless
sovereignty need commendation from us, or the high seal of our
rank and prestige ? Into the work He touches with His sceptred
hand on the one side, and which we are permitted to touch with
our feeble hands of flesh on the other, He reflects all the glory of
His attributes.
K It is said that when Phidias was preparing the figures for
the Acropolis, the work was perfect even in the smallest details,
although these figures were to stand upon a background so high
that nobody could see them. A sculptor was working at the hair
of one of them with minute fidelity, when some one said to him,
" What is the use of that expenditure of time and labour ?
Nobody will ever see your work." The workman replied, " Yes,
the gods will see it ! "
Christ, by Thine own darkened hour
Live within my heart and brain!
Let my hands not slip the rein.
Ah, how long ago it is
Since a comrade rode with me !
Now a moment let me see
1 Alice Moynell.
i CORINTHIANS m. 9 85
Thyself, lonely in the dark,
Perfect, without wound or mark. 1
4. The fact that the work is God's is our strong encourage-
ment. He who works for the redemption of men from the
deepest evil of their life will not long want the sign that God
works. The sign is so universal that we have perhaps ceased to
call it a sign.
K A short time ago I saw a well-kept flower-garden blooming
in the little angle of ground formed at the junction of two railway
lines. The helpless flowers were thriving there in spite of the
terrible forces that came so near them on every side. If you
were to put an untaught savage inside the garden hedge and let
him hear the screaming engines and see the files of carriages or
the trucks laden with coal, timber, and iron converging towards
this fairy oasis, he would be ready to say, " These beautiful things
will be torn to shreds in a moment." But behind the garden
fences there are the lines of strong, faithful steel keeping each
engine and carriage and truck in its appointed place, and though
the air vibrates with destructive force, and pansy, primrose, and
geranium live in a world of tremors, not a silken filament is
snapped, and not a petal falls untimely to the earth. In the very
angle of these forces the frailest life is unharmed. So with the
fine spiritual husbandries that foster faith in the souls around us.
The air hurtles with fierce hostilities. The mechanisms of
diabolic temptation encroach on every side upon our work.
Public- house, gaming-club, and ill-ordered home, threaten disasters
of which we do not like to think. The air quivers with anger of
demons. Yet the work is God's, and the gates of hell shall not
prevail against it. In the very angle of these demoniac forces
the work shall thrive, for the hidden lines of His protecting
power are round about it. 2
Just where you stand in the conflict,
There is your place !
Just where you think you are useless,
Hide not your face!
God placed you there for a purpose,
Whate'er it be;
Think you He has chosen you for it:
Work loyally.
1 Padraic Colum. 2 T. G. Selby.
86 GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS
Gird on your armour! be faithful
At toil or rest,
Whiche'er it be, never doubting
God's way is best.
Out in the fight, or on picket,
Stand firm and true;
This is the work which your Master
Gives you to do.
5. The fact that we are linked with God in His service is our
pledge of victory. If God works with us, success is sure. If God
is doing this work, then God's strength, God's skill, God's know-
ledge are employed upon it. We are no longer discouraged and
enfeebled by the sense of our own incapacity, our own ignorance
and inexperience, our own faint hearts and feeble hands. There
is beside us an inexhaustible fountain of ability, from which we
can draw. It is God's work. Therefore it must be triumphant.
There is no place for misgiving or despondency. No sense of
personal frailty, no calculation of opposing odds, no menaces of
approaching evil, no symptoms of immediate failure none of
these can appal us. God's work is eternal. Nothing can prevail
against it. There may be temporary defeats, partial fallings back.
Men may come and men may go. But what then ? " All flesh
is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The
grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away ; but the
word of the Lord endureth for ever."
^J A noble cause cannot of itself make a man noble. We
must despair of growing great, unless we can feel that we are
given to the cause to work for it, and not it to work for us. In
the old torch races of Pan, the rule was that each runner should
hold his torch as long as it kept its light, but when he flagged
he must hand it to another who stood ready girded to follow up
the race. And so it must be with us. We must recognize the
great end of all this panting, and running, and toiling, not that
you or I should reach the goal, and be rich or honoured in men's
mouths, but that the torch of truth that was put into our hands
when we started should reach the people at the end all alight
with truth as when we took it. Let it be our hands, if we can,
that bring it there, and then the honour shall be ours ; but that
must not be our end, and when we see it sinking and going out,
let no petty conceit or unfledged pride keep us from giving it to
a fresher and stronger man, with a hearty Godspeed to run the
i CORINTHIANS in. 9 87
next stage of the same great journey. Thus we win a broadness,
and deepness, and fulness of character that sinks all little human
ventures like the sea. 1
^ It is said that the engineer who planned the Brooklyn
bridge one of the most colossal triumphs of scientific skill in
the world was a bed-ridden invalid ; and that with the help of a
telescope he watched the bridge grow into shape day by day from
his couch of paralysis and pain. He triumphed because the
great thought in a fragile frame was conjoined with all but
exhaustless capital and the illimitable labour that capital could
bring into the field. 2
I cannot do it alone,
The waves run fast and high,
And the fogs close chill around,
And the light goes out in the sky;
But I know that we two
Shall win in the end
Jesus and I.
I cannot row it myself,
My boat on the raging sea;
But beside me sits Another
Who pulls or steers with me,
And I know that we two
Shall come safe into port
His child and He.
Coward and wayward and weak,
I change with the changing sky ;
To-day so eager and brave,
To-morrow not caring to try;
But He never gives in,
So we two shall win
Jesus and I.
Strong and tender and true,
Crucified once for me !
He will not change, I know,
Whatever I may be !
But all He says I must do,
Ever from sin to keep free.
We shall finish our course
And reach home at last
His child and He.
1 Phillips Brooks, Life, 53. 2 T. G. Sell.y.
THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT.
LITERATURE.
Abbott (L.), Signs of Promise, 111.
Alexander (S. A.), The Christianity of St. Paul, 123.
Bell (C. D.), The Name above Every Name, 165.
Burrell (D. J.), The Morning Cometh, 67.
Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, iii. 9.
Clark (H. W.), Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 121.
Dawsoc (W. J.), The Comrade Christ, 261.
Dudden (F. H.), Christ and Christ's Religion, 17.
Fraser (J.), Parochial Sermons, 259.
Gibbon (J. M.), The Image of God, 42.
Jenkinson (A.), A Modern Disciple, 49.
Jones (W. B.), The Peace of God, 243.
Lee (R.), Sermons, 464.
Liddon (H. P.), Sermons on Some Words of St. Paul, 51.
Sermons on Special Occasions, 220.
Mabie (H. C.), The Meaning and Message of tlie Cross, 197.
Maclaren (A.), Christ in the Heart, 157.
Expositions : 1 and 2 Corinthians, 39.
Maurice (F. D.), Lincoln's Inn Sermons, v. 206.
Moore (E. W.), The Christ- Controlled Life, 207.
Palmer (J. R.), Bur den- Bearing, 50.
Pusey (E. B.), Parochial and Cathedral Sermons, 103.
Raleigh (A.), Quiet Resting Places, 272.
Robertson (S.), The Rope of Hair, 71.
Scott (C. A.), CJiristian Character Building, 25.
Trench (R. C.), Shipwrecks of Faith, 62.
Van Dyke (H.), Manhood, Faith and Courage, 237.
Vaughan (C. J.), University Sermons, 170.
Westcott (B. F.), The Bible in the Church, 141.
Social Aspects of Christianity, 1.
Christian Age, xxviii. 146(Beecher) ; xxxii. 114 (Fisher).
Christian World Pulpit, xv. 56 (Snell) ; xxv. 373 (M'Cree) ; xxxvi. 385
(Liddon) ; xlviii. 68 (Varley) ; Ixii. 86 (Banks).
Kesivick Week, 1905, p. 164 (Moore).
THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT.
For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is
Jesus Christ. But if any man buiideth on the foundation gold, silver, costly
stones, wood, hay, stubble ; each man's work shall be made manifest ; for
the day shall declare it, because it is revealed in fire ; and the fire itself shall
prove each man's work of what sort it is. i Cor. iii. 11-13.
1. THE vivid imagination of St. Paul puts before us here
an important truth in a picturesque form. Two workmen are
building side by side. One builds a palace, the other a hovel.
The materials which one uses are gold and silver, for decoration ;
and for solidity costly stones, by which is not meant diamonds
and emeralds and the like, but valuable building material, such as
marbles and granites and alabaster. The other employs timber,
dry reeds, straw. No doubt in Corinth, as in all ancient cities,
side by side with the temples shining in marble and Corinthian
brass were the huts of the poor and of slaves built of such flimsy
materials as these. Suddenly there plays around both buildings
a great fire, the fire of the Lord coming to Judgment. The
marbles gleam the whiter, and the gold and the silver flash the
more resplendently, whilst the tongues of light leap about them ;
but the straw hovel goes up in a flare ! The one man gets wages
for work that lasts, the other man gets no pay for what perishes.
He is dragged through the smoke, saved by a hair's breadth,
but sees all his toil lying there in white ashes at his feet.
Tf The building, if it be really of gold, silver, and precious
stones, is not destroyed. It becomes rather, in due course, the
foundation on which the new superstructure is reared. Is not
that the meaning of the somewhat difficult lines in Browning's
" Aristophanes' Apology " ?
And what's my teaching but accept the old,
Contest the strange ! acknowledge work that's done,
Misdoubt men who have still their work to do !
Eeligions, laws and customs, poetries,
92 THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
Are old? So much achieved victorious truth!
Each work was product of a lifetime, wrung
From each man by an adverse world: for why?
He worked, destroying other older work
Which the world loved and so was loth to lose.
Whom the world beat in battle dust and ash!
Who beat the world, left work in evidence,
And wears its crown till new men live new lives,
And fight new fights, and triumph in their turn. 1
2. The original application of these words is distinctly to
Christian teachers. The whole section starts from a rebuke
of the party spirit in the Corinthian Church which led them to
swear by Paul or Peter or Apollos, and to despise all teachers
but their own favourite. The Apostle reminds these jangling
partisans that all teachers are but instruments in God's hands,
who is the true Worker, the true Husbandman, the true
Builder. That word opens up a whole region of thought to his
ardent mind. He goes on to speak of the foundation which
God has laid, namely, the mission of Jesus Christ. That founda-
tion laid once for all in actual reality, in the historical facts of
our Lord's life, death, and resurrection, had been laid in preaching
by St. Paul when he founded the Corinthian Church. There
cannot be two foundations. So all other teachers at Corinth
have only to build on that foundation, that is, to carry on a
course of Christian teaching which rests upon that fundamental
truth. Let all such teachers take heed what sort of materials
they build on that foundation, that is to say, what sort of
teaching they offer; for there may be gold, and silver, and
precious stones solid and valuable instruction ; or there may be
timber, and hay, and straw worthless and unsubstantial teach-
ing. The materials with which the teachers build are evidently
the instruction which they give, or the doctrines which they teach.
This, then, is the teacher's Great Text. The teacher's work
is spoken of as building, with the certainty that one day the
building will be tested by fire. Let us consider
I. The Foundation.
II. The Building.
III. The Fire.
1 J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 200.
i CORINTHIANS in. 11-13 93
I.
THE FOUNDATION.
1. The Foundation is already laid. " Other foundation can
no man lay than that which is laid." It was laid in the person
and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was laid before St. Paul
himself or any of the Apostles began to teach.
A paradox which found favour with some of the earlier moods
of German nationalism went to the effect that St. Paul and not
Jesus Christ was the real founder of Christendom. How the
writer of the indignant appeal to the Corinthians, "Was Paul
crucified for you ? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul ? "
could ever have been seated, by the convictions of any intelligent
readers of his Epistles, in his Master's place, might well raise
our wonder, if experience did not prove that of all credulity the
easiest is that which is enjoined by unbelief, and of all theories,
the wildest are those which are put forward in order to discredit
the creed of Christendom. If the Church is built upon the
labour of Apostles, as her foundation, the Apostles themselves
rested on the Chief Corner-stone. And, indeed, since Schleier-
macher, the paradox in question has been discredited well-nigh
everywhere. It is one of that great man's many claims to honour,
that he did more than any other writer in his day and country
to reassert Christ's true historical relation to the Christian Church.
U In a lecture, given in St. George's, Edinburgh, Principal
Eainy made this comparison between Jesus and Paul : " We can
easily mark the tie between the two; we also easily feel the
difference. In both, there is goodwill to men below; in both,
a constant reference to One above. But in the true manhood of
our Lord, we own something serener, more self-contained and
sovereign. The love to His Father moves in great tides of even
perpetual flow. The love to men is a pure compassion, whose
perfect goodness delights in bringing its sympathy and its help
to the neediest and the worst, does so with a perfect under-
standing and an unreserved self-communication. When He
speaks, He speaks in the language of His time and land and
circumstances, but He speaks like one who addresses human
nature itself, finding the way to the common mind and common
heart of every land and every age and every condition. When
He reasons, it is not like one who is clearing his own thoughts,
but like one who turns away from the perversity of the caviller,
94 THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
or who, for the perplexed inquirer, brings into view the elements
of the spiritual world he was overlooking or forgetting. And
with what resource none the less His that He rejoiced to think
of it as His Father's does He confront whatever comes to Him
in life ! As we watch Him, there grows upon us the strongest
sense of a perfect inner harmony with Himself and with His
Father that lives through all changes. Finally, standing in this
world, He declares the order of another and a higher world. He
does it as one who knew it, who speaks what He had seen.
" We turn to Paul, and we perceive him also to be great ; great
thoughts, great affections, great efforts, great fruits are his. But
he is not great in the manner of his Master. He goes through
the world full of a noble self-censure that bows him willingly to
the earth, and of a passionate gratitude that cannot speak its
thanks but offers up its life. Like his Master, while he rever-
ences the order of this world and of society as God has framed it,
he is at the same time full of the relations of a world unseen.
To that world unseen he already belongs ; it determines for him,
and for all who will listen to him, the whole manner of thought
and life and feeling in this world ; it holds him, it inspires him.
But it is in the manner of faith rather than of knowledge, of
earnest rather than of possession. Especially, the influence that
has mastered him and is the secret of his power and nobleness,
has not brought him to the final harmony of all his powers. It
has, on the contrary, committed him to an inward conflict, a
fight of faith, which he will never cease to wage till the final
victory crowns him. This man knows the inward weakness and
the inward disgrace of Sin. He knows forgiveness and repentance,
and good hope through grace. The Lord received sinners and
sat and ate with them ; but this man was himself a sinner who
was forgiven much and loved much. That was the Saviour : this,
a pattern of them that should believe on Him to life ever-
lasting." 1
2. The Foundation is Jesus Christ. " Other foundation can no
man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." What
does the Apostle mean by " Jesus Christ " ? The one thing
fundamental, according to the teaching of St. Paul, and according
to the teaching of Jesus Himself, is faith in Jesus as the Divine
Eedeemer of the world. In opposition to this faith there is a
Religion of the Human Christ. If we look at the points in which
the Religion of a Human Christ differs from the Christian faith
1 The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 426.
i CORINTHIANS in. 11-13 95
we shall see what the Apostle means when he says that the
foundation is Jesus Christ.
Tf Two rival views are claiming the allegiance of the present
generation. The one finds the basis of Christianity in the teaching
of a man, inspired as Moses was inspired and more inspired,
Divine as Shakespeare was Divine and more Divine, but now dead
in the sense in which Moses is dead and Shakespeare is dead.
The other finds the basis of Christianity in the ever-living Person
of God for men made Man. Such are the views which, in some
form or other, confront each one of us, and between which, sooner
or later, we must make our solemn choice. 1
(1) In the first place, the religion of a Human Christ as it is
represented, for example, in Kenan's Life of Jesus or in Robert
Elsmere, gives us as our leader, as the centre of our faith, as the
object of our reverence, a human hero.
If The last movement of Ruskin's mind had been away from
evangelical faith; it had coincided with his growing admiration of
the great worldly, irreligious painters; his religion had become
"the religion of humanity," though "full of sacred colour and
melancholy shade " ; his teaching had been in such exhortations
as may be based on intellectual scepticism. But while engaged
on drawing Giotto's frescoes, " I discovered," he says, " the fallacy
under which I had been tormented for sixteen years the fallacy
that Religious artists were weaker than Irreligious. I found that
all Giotto's 'weaknesses' (so called) were merely absences of
material science. He did not know, and could not, in his day,
so much of perspective as Titian so much of the laws of light
and shade, or so much of technical composition. But I found he
was in the make of him, and contents, a very much stronger and
greater man than Titian ; that the things I had fancied easy in his
work, because they were so unpretending and simple, were never-
theless entirely inimitable ; that the Religion in him, instead of
weakening, had solemnized and developed every faculty of his
heart and hand ; and finally, that his work, in all the innocence
of it, was yet a human achievement and possession, quite above
everything that Titian had ever done." This " discovery " affected,
first, Ruskin's estimate of painters ; and at Florence, presently, he
set himself to write of Giotto and his works in Florence, as twenty
years before, with a more reserved admiration for the master, he
had written of Giotto and his Works in Padua. 2
(2) In the second place, this Religion of a Human Christ blots
1 F. Homes Dudden. 2 E. T. Cook, The Life of Buskin, ii, 253.
96 THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
the resurrection out of the Gospel and gives us but a cross and a
tomb. Let us read Kobert Elsmere's speech to the working men
of East London : " * He laid him in a tomb which had been hewn
out of a rock ; and he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.'
The ashes of Jesus of Nazareth mingled with the earth of
Palestine
Far hence he lies
In the lone Syrian town,
And on his grave, with shining eyes,
The Syrian stars look down.
" He stopped. The melancholy cadence of the verse died away.
Then a gleam broke over the pale, exhausted face a gleam of
extraordinary sweetness. 'And in the days and weeks that
followed, the devout and passionate fancy of a few mourning
Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the Kesurrection. How
natural, and amid all its falseness how true, is that naive and
contradictory story! The rapidity with which it spread is a
measure of many things. It is, above all, a measure of the
greatness of Jesus, of the force with which he had drawn to
himself the hearts and imaginations of men.' "
T[ It may be true, as Mr. Nettleship has said, that "A Death
in the Desert goes no single step in the direction of proving
Christ's divinity as a dogma " ; but the poem itself is void of all
meaning, unless, in spite of its dramatic form, it can be regarded
as setting forth the deepest conviction of the poet's own soul.
Hence the verdict of the man who adds the final note is this :
If Christ, as thou affirmest, be of men
Mere man, the first and best but nothing more
Account Him, for reward of what He was,
Now and for ever, wretchedest of all. 1
(3) Thirdly, the Keligion of a Human Christ offers to us a law
and an example nothing more; the religion of Christian faith
offers us a Divine power.
TI Mr. Gladstone has eloquently sketched in a few words the
power of the Christian church : " Christianity both produced a
type of character wholly new to the Roman world and it funda-
mentally altered the laws and institutions, the tone, temper, and
tradition of that world. For example, it changed profoundly the
1 J, Flow, Studies in Brmvning, 45.
i CORINTHIANS in. 11-13 97
relation of the poor to the rich, and the almost forgotten
obligation of the rich to the poor. It abolished slavery,
abolished human sacrifice, abolished gladiatorial shows, and a
multitude of other horrors. It restored the position of woman
in society. It prosecuted polygamy; and put down divorce,
absolutely in the West, though not absolutely in the East. It
made peace, instead of war, the normal and presumed relation
between human societies. It exhibited life as a discipline, every-
where and in all its parts, and changed essentially the place and
function of suffering in human experience. Accepting the ancient
morality as far as it went, it not only enlarged but transfigured
its teaching by the laws of humility and of forgiveness, and by
a law of purity even more new and strange than these."
(4) In the fourth place, this Eeligion of a Human Christ offers
a temporal and local religion in place of one that is as eternal
and as universal as its Divine Author. Let Kobert Elsmere
again explain his position : " If you wish, Catherine, I will wait
I will wait till you bid me speak ; but I warn you there is
something dead in me, something gone and broken. It can
never live again except in forms which now it would only pain
you more to think of. It is not that I think differently of this
point or that point, but of life and religion altogether. I see
God's purposes in quite other proportions, as it were. Christi-
anity seems to me something small and local. Behind it, around
it, including it, I see the great drama of the world, sweeping on,
led by God, from change to change, from act to act. It is not that
Christianity is false, but that it is only an imperfect human
reflection of a part of truth."
1J It is a perfectly unique and very striking fact, that the
views of Christ do not proceed from the concretely defined
horizon of any age or any historical sphere, not even from His
own. Mark the distinction in this respect between Christ and
Socrates. 1
3. The Foundation is the Person of Christ Christ Himself.
This has been the teaching of the Church from the earliest
day till now. In every age and in every land the Church has
taught invariably that the one determining factor of the
Christian religion is the Person of Jesus. That is the absolute,
essential thing. The Christian religion is not a mere system of
1 R. Rothe, Still Hours, 213.
I COR. 7
98 THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
doctrine. It is not a mere ethical code. It is not merely a
redemptive social force. It is above all dependence on a Person.
And therein lies its peculiarity and its novelty. A Church
Father of the second century, being pressed with the question,
" What new thing did the Lord bring by His coining ? " replied,
"Know that He brought all newness in bringing us Himself."
The distinctive feature of the new religion is the Person of Jesus.
(1) It is Jesus Christ, and not doctrines about Jesus Christ.
To say this is not to disparage the precious guidance of Scripture
or Creeds or Councils. These Apostolic words, these later
definitions, which furnish in our day the favourite topic for so
much shallow declamation, are the voice of that Eternal Spirit
by whom the whole Body is governed as well as sanctified.
They guard and sustain in Christian thought the Divine Saviour's
peerless honour ; they forbid, in tones of merciful severity, false
and degrading beliefs about Him. Yet He, our living Lord, is
the foundation ; and no one can altogether rest upon the formulae
which uphold and regulate our estimate of His Glory. We
prize both Scripture and the Creeds for His sake, not Him for
theirs ; and to rest upon them, as distinct from Him whom they
keep before us, would be like building a wall upon a measuring
rule, instead of upon the block of granite, of which it has given
us the noble dimensions.
If I do not agree with the saying imputed to some one, that
God gave man religion, but the devil invented theology as a
counterfeit. For theology is not the natural or proper antithesis
to religion; still less its opposite or antagonist. It occupies a
different sphere ; and though dealing with the same subjects in
great measure, yet its aim is, or should be, different ; and it works
by means of different faculties. Eeligion aims at the production
of faith, hope and charity, and all the proper fruits of those
graces. It would teach us to trust in God, and love Him, and to
obey that second commandment, which is like unto the first both
in its scope and in its importance and comprehensiveness " Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." It is that which brings the
human soul consciously into relation with God, with an unseen
world and a spiritual kingdom, and with a future state of
retribution. Religion, therefore, is an appeal to faith and also to
conscience, both of which it seeks to quicken and exercise; so
that we may be godly towards God, and righteous towards our
neighbour, performing all our duties from a principle of obliga-
i CORINTHIANS HI. 11-13 99
tion aud reverence to the great Father who made and loves us
all, and requires us to love, pity, and help one another, because
of this our common origin and family relation. Religion also
requires us to be sober or temperate regulating the appetites of
our bodies and the emotions and affections of our minds, so that
we be not carried away by them beside or beyond the purposes
for which they were implanted, but that they may further us in
attaining perfection in this world, and at last eternal felicity.
Now, though theology deals in great part with the same
subjects with which religion is concerned, it differs from it in
several respects. Religion deals with those subjects in a practical
way, chiefly with reference to conduct or life ; and it appeals to
all parts of our nature, to the affections and emotions as well as
to the understanding. It works through hope and fear, and
seeks to influence, to restrain, to stimulate, and to regulate in
short, to make us wise, holy, good, in all manner of conversation,
that we may be " perfect in all the will of God." On the other
hand, theology is wholly theoretical or speculative. Its object
is to reconcile certain apparent contradictions or inconsistencies,
not only between different parts, or passages, or expressions of
Scripture, but between Scriptural statements or doctrines, and
the phenomena of the physical and moral world. For it must
deal not only with the Bible but with facts ; regarding the facts
of nature and providence, and of general history and experience,
as being, no less than the histories, doctrines and teachings
of Scripture, revelations or manifestations of the Maker and
Governor of the world. These all, proceeding from the same
Divine source, are and must be really consistent, however at first
sight they may sometimes appear to conflict one with another.
It is therefore the province of theology to point out the harmony
which underlies seeming opposition and discordance in the Word
or ways of God, so that we may discern a real and profound
order where at first sight confusion or contradiction presents
itself to our minds. Thus, in the natural world, the law of
gravitation being demonstrated to be a law operating throughout
the universe, it is available to explain and reconcile a multitude
of facts or appearances which seemed, to minds not instructed in
this law of gravitation, to be unrelated, or even opposed and
contradictory, one to another. 1
(2) Still more true is it that it is Jesus Christ, and not
feelings about Him. Feelings are great aids to devotion; they
are often special gifts of God, the play of His Blessed Spirit
1 Robert Lee,
too THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
upon our life of affection, raising it towards high and heavenly
things. Yet what is so fugitive, so protean, so unreliable as a
feeling ? It conies and it is gone ; it is intense, and forthwith it
wanes; it promises much, and presently it yields nothing but
a sense of moral languor and exhaustion that succeeds it. Feel-
ing shouts " Hosanna " to-day, and to-morrow " Crucify " ; it
would pluck out its right eye for the apostle of its choice, and
then suddenly he is become its enemy because he tells it the
truth.
*f[ I will tell you of a want I am beginning to experience very
distinctly. I perceive more than ever the necessity of devotional
reading. I mean the works of eminent holy persons, whose tone
was not merely uprightness of character and highmindedness,
but communion a strong sense of personal and ever-living
communion with God besides. I recollect how far more peace-
ful my mind used to be when I was in the regular habit of
reading daily, with scrupulous adherence to a plan, works of this
description. A strong shock threw me off the habit partly the
external circumstances of my life, partly the perception of a
most important fact, that devotional feelings are very distinct
from uprightness and purity of life that they are often
singularly allied to the animal nature, the result of a warm
temperament guides to hell under the form of angels of light,
conducting the unconscious victim of feelings that appear Divine
and seraphic, into a state of heart and life at which the very
world stands aghast. Cases of this kind came under my im-
mediate cognizance, disgusted me, made me suspect feelings
which I had hitherto cherished as the holiest, and produced a
reaction. Nevertheless, the only true use of such a discovery
is this, that our basest feelings lie very near to our highest, and
that they pass into one another by insensible transitions. It is
not true to take the tone so fearfully sounded in Tennyson's
"Vision of Sin," or that of Mephistopheles when he sneeringly
predicts to Faust the mode of termination for his "sublime in-
tuition," after the soliloquy in the forest, when Gretchen's image
has elevated his soul. The true lesson is to watch, suspect, and
guard aspirations after good, not to drown them as spurious.
Wordsworth says
True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect, and still revere himself,
In lowliness of heart.
i CORINTHIANS m. 11-13 101
I feel the need of works of this kind, and I shall begin them
again. 1
(3) It is Jesus Christ Himself, and not His teaching or His
work apart from His Person. His work, indeed, can be appreci-
ated only in the light of His Person ; His death is at best heroic
self-devotion (if it be so much as that) unless His Person is
superhuman. If Jesus is only man, or if His Person is left out
of view, there is no more reason for reliance on His death than
on the death of Socrates. His Sacraments are only picturesque
unrealities, unless He who warranted their power lives and is
mighty; apart from His Person, they have no more spiritual
validity than an armorial bearing or a rosette. And His teaching
cannot be represented as a " foundation " of Christian life, which
may be substituted for His Person, and enable us to dispense
with it, for the simple reason that the persistent drift of that
teaching is directly and indirectly to centre thought, love, adora-
tion upon Himself ; as though in Him, as distinct from what He
said and did, mankind was to find its true and lasting strength
and peace.
^f This is the secret of Christ's power over men. He does not
come to discuss with them some empty conundrum, some wretched
enigma, that challenges only the intellect ; He sets Himself down
in the heart, and trains that, brings that into the liberty of His
blessed captivity, and out of the heart there comes His kingdom,
which can never be moved. 2
4. A comprehensive idea of Jesus Christ as the foundation
may be found in the very old representation of Him as Prophet,
Priest, and King.
(1) Prophet. A Prophet is not merely one who foretells
future events. That is but a small and, in some respects, an
inferior part of the prophet's work. The generic idea of a
prophet is one who speaks of God, who reveals the thoughts and
proclaims the truth of God. And in this regard Jesus Christ is
the Prophet of God, who infinitely transcends all others.
(2) Priest. In former times the priest stood between the
sinner and God, and offered sacrifice on account of his sins. The
Lord Jesus, as the Son of God and the Son of Man, was fitted
1 Robertson, in Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson,, 263.
' J.Parker.
ro2 THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
to be the medium to stand between our sinful souls and the
righteous God ; and for sacrifice, He offered Himself without spot
unto God. And " If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the
Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for
our sins, and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole
world."
(3) King. Christ is also our King. As such He claims our
love, our loyal obedience, our grateful homage, and our reverent
worship. Instead of obeying the maxims and customs of the
world, instead of following our own inclinations, and the uncertain
and fitful impulses of our own hearts, let us obey Him. Let
His will be supreme.
If It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints
us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing to our own souls,
as if we could choose for ourselves where we shall find the fulness
of the Divine Presence, instead of seeking it where alone it is to
be found, in loving obedience. 1
Close gently, weary eyes,
And let the closing day sing sweetly unto thee
A song of rest, that so the coming day may be
A glad surprise;
Close, weary eyes.
Eest now, oh wayward heart!
Eest in submission comes; then let the swaying trees,
Bending, obedient, at each breath of God's light breeze
Show thee thy part ;
Kest, wayward heart.
Peace, sweet peace, struggling soul!
Waves, hills and stars will say, "Seek not to walk by sight.
By faith take all thy stumbling steps, through day and night,
In God's control."
Peace, struggling soul.
II.
THE BUILDING.
1. Our attention is drawn to the materials used in the build-
ing rather than to the building itself. The materials are of two
kinds (1) "gold, silver, costly stones," that is, those that will
1 Dinah Morris, in Adam Btde.
i CORINTHIANS HI. 11-13 103
pass through fire unscathed; and (2) "wood, hay, stubble,"
materials which fire will consume. There is, therefore, good teach-
ing and bad teaching. Good teaching is the showing forth of
Christ Jesus in word and life .
U We are, perhaps, beginning to recognize the need of special
training, but hundreds of clergymen can be found who would
acknowledge that they never had any kind of education in the
two branches of their work teaching and preaching. A young
clergyman recently, in conversation with me, deplored this. " I
did not know how to teach, and I have been obliged to try and
gain some knowledge of the art by listening to the teachers in
the elementary schools." This is the example of a man wise
enough to be aware of his deficiencies, and courageous enough
to try and repair them. But here is a strange fact. Educated
skill is demanded in some callings, and these not the most im-
portant; yet in some of the higher or more difficult callings
educated skill is not demanded, and is not even deemed to be
important. We do not allow our teeth to be pulled out except
by a qualified practitioner, but we entrust grave moral responsi-
bilities to untrained men. We require some evidence of practical
skill from our cab-drivers, but we hand over the direction of vast
national interests to men who have never learned even the rudi-
ments of political and economic science. It is all very puzzling.
It belongs to the noble faith of being able somehow to " muddle
through." The wonder is, not that things are done so well con-
sidering how much is given into untrained hands, but that things
are done at all. 1
2. What is bad teaching ?
(1) A man may interpret Scripture, and yet not bring Christ
out of it. He may delight himself in the study; he may be
skilful in comparing Scripture with Scripture ; he may perceive
with a marvellous insight the doctrinal contrasts and harmonies
which fill the Bible ; he may be wise in combining and reconciling
where careless readers see only contradiction and confusion ; he
may attract listeners by the clearness of his exposition and the
variety of his illustration ; and yet in all this there may be no
savour of Christ and no unction of the Spirit. Men may come
and go, depart and return, week by week, where he ministers ;
they may find information, find instruction, but not find edification,
because they find not Christ.
1 AY. Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of my Life, 324.
to4 THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
(2) Again, a man may be a sincere Christian, and even in a
sense preach Christ, and yet his work may be but as the wood
or the stubble because in the Divine he has lost the human;
because, in other words, though he knows theology, he knows
not man, and, though he understands something of the glory of
the Saviour, he is ignorant of the application of that Gospel to
the hearts and lives of men. His doctrinal statements are correct
and ample ; he can discourse with feeling and beauty upon the
great revelations of grace; but there is no connecting link, in
his preaching, between heaven and earth, between truth and life,
between the Saviour of sinners and the sinner whom He came
to save. Therefore the Gospel which he enforces floats above
his hearers in a region cloudy and inaccessible; they hear the
sound thereof, but the voice they hear not; the revelation of
Christ is become again in his hands as the letter which kills,
rather than as the spirit which gives life.
(3) It may be that all the energies of a ministry have been
turned upon controversy ; that a congregation which came
together to be fed with " the sincere milk of the word " that it
" might grow thereby," has been occupied week by week and year
after year with vehement declamation or laborious argument
against some form of error, supposed to be the peril of the times,
upon which the preacher would concentrate all the anxieties and
all the efforts of souls given him to guide and lives entrusted to
him to regulate.
T[ We naturally look to our symbolical documents the
Creeds, Catechisms, and other standards of our several Churches,
for guidance as to what constitutes the main matter or substance
of the Christian religion. But we find upon inspection that the
subjects which those books treat of are neither those which are
in themselves most necessary and important, nor those which our
Lord and His Apostles chiefly insisted on ; but they are for the
most part the points disputed between different Churches
between Eomanists and Protestants, between Calvinists and
Arminians, and between Trinitarians and Unitarians. So that
the books in question set forth the differences which exist among
Christians, not their agreements. Now, as a general rule, their
agreement is both far greater and far more momentous than their
disagreement. I say the things they agree about are far more
numerous, and far more essential, than the things they disagree
about. These last have often swelled out into magnitude simply
i CORINTHIANS m. 11-13 105
by reason of the quarrels respecting them, as a barren island or
a sandy waste has sometimes grown into a mighty matter by
reason of the struggles of great nations respecting it. In itself
it is worth little or nothing; it is great only because of the
contest which is carried on. 1
(4) There is a fourth case in which a fatal deadness has fallen
upon a ministry in the very attempt to communicate to it a
vigorous life. The preacher gives himself to the one aim of
making his sermons lively. He counts nothing below the level
of pulpit gravity; nothing too secular or too mundane to be
made the starting-point of Sunday exhortation. He speaks of
giving " a healthy tone to common life," and this, not by raising
earth to heaven, but by bringing down the heavenly to the level
of the earthly. He forgets that the Christian politician and the
Christian student and the Christian man of business do not
come together in the Lord's house to hear their own subjects
discussed by one far less fitted to do so than themselves, but
rather to be reminded of a subject higher and nobler than their
own, a subject in which they may rest altogether from week-day
toils and cares, and realize a loftier aim and a deeper unity in
things unseen, things heavenly, things Divine.
TJ It is no part of my business to condemn this, that, and
the other kind of teaching, but I will tell you what is evidently
wood and hay and stubble. Misplaced learning; misplaced
speculation ; misplaced eloquence ; sham philosophy ; preaching
one's self ; talking about temporary, trivial things ; dealing with
the externals of Christianity, its ceremonial and its ritual;
dealing with the morals of Christianity apart from that one
motive of love to a dying Saviour which makes morality a
reality in human life. All that kind of Christian teaching,
remote from daily life and from men's deepest needs, however
it may be admired, and thought to be " eloquent," " original,"
and " on a level with the growing culture of the age," and so on,
is flimsy stuff to build upon the foundation of a crucified Saviour.
There is no solidity in such work. It will not stand the stress
of a gale of .wind while it is being built, or keep out the weather
for those who house in it ; and it will blaze at last like a thatched
roof when " that day " puts a match to it. 2
1 Robert Lee. a A. Maclaren.
io6 THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
III.
THE FIRE.
1. The flame plays round both the buildings. What fire is
it ? The text answers the question for us " the day shall
declare it." The Apostle does not think that he needs to say
what day. His readers know well enough what day he means. To
him and to them there is one day so conspicuous and so often in
their thoughts, that there is no need to name it more particularly.
The day is the day when Christ shall come. And the fire is but
the symbol that always attends the Divine appearance in the
Old and in the New Testament.
K Many of us who live in London have at some time watched
that awful but fascinating sight, the progress of a great fire ; we
have marked how the devouring element masters first one and
then another department of the building which is its victim ; but
especially we have noted what it consumes and what it is forced
to spare, the resistless force with which it sweeps through and
shrivels up all slighter materials, and pauses only before the
solid barriers of stone or iron, thus trying, before our eyes, the
builder's work of what sort it is. 1
I felt begin
The Judgment-Day: to retrocede
Was too late now. " In very deed,"
(I uttered to myself) "that Day!"
The intuition burned away
All darkness from my spirit too :
There stood I, found and fixed, I knew,
Choosing the world. The choice was made;
And naked and disguiseless stayed,
And unevadable, the fact. 2
2. But He who at the end will judge us once for all, is now and
always judging us ; and His perpetual presence as the Judge who
is constantly probing and sifting us is revealed by events and
circumstances which have on our souls the effect of fire they
burn up what is frivolous and worthless, and they leave what is
solid unscathed. There are many events and situations which
act upon us as fire ; it will be enough to consider one or two of
them.
1 H. P. LitMon. * Browning, Easter-Day.
i CORINTHIANS m. 11-13 107
(1) There is the searching, testing power of a responsible and
new position, of a situation forcing its occupant to make a critical
choice, or to withstand a strong pressure. Such a new position
discovers and burns up all that is weak in a man's faith or character.
In quiet times there is nothing to extort the discovery ; but when
a great effort of action or of resistance becomes necessary, it is
soon seen what will and what will not stand the test. All that
looks like a hold on solid principle, and is in reality only fancy,
or sentiment, or speculation, is then seen to be unserviceable;
and if a man's religious mind is composed mainly of such material,
a catastrophe is inevitable.
If Take the Pope in Browning's The Ring and the Book. The
aged man, on the verge of the grave, has the responsibility laid
upon him of deciding the fate of Count Guido. He holds the
balance between life and death.
In God's name ! Once more on this earth of God's,
While twilight lasts and time wherein to work,
I take His staff with my uncertain hand,
And stay my six and fourscore years, my due
Labour and sorrow, on His judgment-seat,
And forthwith think, speak, act, in place of Him
The Pope for Christ. Once more appeal is made
From man's assize to mine: I sit and see
Another poor weak trembling human wretch
Pushed by his fellows, who pretend the right,
Up to the gulf which, where I gaze, begins
From this world to the next gives way and way,
Just on the edge over the awful dark:
With nothing to arrest him but my feet.
i
And I am bound, the solitary judge,
To weigh the worth, decide upon the plea,
And either hold a hand out, or withdraw
A foot and let the wretch drift to the fall.
Ay, and while thus I dally, dare perchance
Put fancies for a comfort 'twixt this calm
And yonder passion that I have to bear,
As if reprieve were possible for both
Prisoner and Pope how easy were reprieve!
He weighs all the evidence, the reasons which might be urged
in the name of mercy for flinching from the solemn decision.
io8 THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
Quis pro Domino ?
" Who is upon the Lord's side ? " asked the Count.
I, who write
And lie signs the death-warrant.
For I may die this very night
And how should I dare die, this man let live?
(2) Sometimes men surprise us, when placed in a difficult
position, by the sudden exhibition of qualities for which no one
before had given them credit; the apparently thoughtless show
foresight, and the timid courage, and the selfish disinterestedness ;
and the irresolute perseverance, of which there had been no
evidence whatever. The quiet school-boy in an Italian village,
whom his playmates name the "dumb ox/' becomes, almost in
spite of himself, the first of the scholars, one of. the few greatest
thinkers in the world. The officer who has been distinguished
for nothing but a punctual regard to duty is suddenly placed in
a position to show that he has almost the genius and courage
sufficient to roll back the course of history, and to save a falling
empire from ruin. The youth whose life has been passed amidst
scenes of frivolity, or perhaps of licentiousness, hears one day an
appeal to his conscience, his sense of duty, his sense of failure,
and wakes from a dream of sensual lethargy to show the world
that he has in him the making of a man, aye, the making of a
saint.
^f The sense of power which comes from self-development can
only be fruitful for good if it be directed by the profound sense
of responsibility, which the perpetual consciousness of life as lived
in God's sight alone can give. 1
(3) But the Greeks had a stern proverb to the effect that a
position of leadership shows what a man is. The real drift of the
saying was that in practice it too often shows what he is not. It
implies that too generally the discovery would be unfavourable ;
that the test of high office would, in a majority of cases, bring to
light something weak or rotten in the character, which in private
life might have escaped detection. History is strewn with
illustrations of this truth; the virtuous though weak Emperor,
1 Life and Letters of Mandell Crcighton, i. 185.
i CORINTHIANS m. 11-13 109
who was floated to power on the surf of a revolution, is by no
means the only man of whom it might be written that all men
would have judged him capable of ruling others, had he only
never been a ruler. How often does manhood open with so much
that seems promising intelligence, courage, attention to duty,
good feeling, unselfishness, all that looks like high principle and
then a man is put into a position of authority. It is the fire
which tests the work he has done in his character. Suddenly he
betrays some one defect which ruins everything. It may be
vanity; it may be envy; it may be untruthf ulness ; it may be
some lower passion which emerges suddenly, and as if unbidden,
from the depths of the soul, and gains over him a fatal mastery.
All his good is turned to ill, all is distorted, discoloured; he
might have died as a young man, amid general lamentations that
so promising a life had been cut short. He does die, as did Nero or
Henry vm., amidst the loudly expressed or muttered thanksgiving
of his generation that he has left the world. The fact was, that
the position in which he found himself exposed him to a pressure
which his character could not bear.
U After the Council the King [George iv.] called me and
talked to me about racehorses, which he cares more about than
the welfare of Ireland or the peace of Europe. 1
^[ You remember how the old Tay bridge, before that fatal
winter night, was believed to be equal to its purpose ; no one of
us who had travelled by it high in the air, over what was practi-
cally an arm of the sea, thought that it could but do its work for
many long years to come, in all winds and weathers. It needed,
no doubt, a mighty impact, a terrific rush of wind from a
particular quarter, to show that the genius and audacity of man
had presumed too largely on the forbearance of the elements ; but
the moment came. We, many of us, remember something of
the sense of horror which that tragic catastrophe left on the
public mind the gradual disappearance of the last train, as it
moved along its wonted way into the darkness, the suddenly
observed dislocation and flickering of the distant lights, the faint
sound as of a crash, rising for a moment above the din of the
storm, and^ then the utter darkness, as all train and bridge
together sank into the gulf of waters beneath, and one moment of
supreme agony was followed by the silence of death. 2
1 The Grtville Memoirs, i. 144.
8 H. P. Liddon, 59.
no THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
Not alone in pain and gloom
Does the abhorred tempter come;
Not in light alone and pleasure
Proffers he the poisoned measure.
When the soul doth rise
Nearest to its native skies,
There the exalted spirit finds,
Borne upon the heavenly winds,
Satan, in an angel's guise,
With voice divine and innocent eyes. 1
1 Richard Watson Gilder.
YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS.
LITERATURE.
Alexander (W. L.), Sermons, 122.
Arnold (T.), Sermons, iv. 39.
Caird (J.), Aspects of Life, 205.
Carr (A.), Horas Biblical, 193.
Clark (H. W.), Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 200.
Cox (S.), The Genesis of Evil, 91, 106.
Duncan (J.), In the Pulpit and at the Communion Table, 221.
Evans (B. W.), Parochial Sermons, 301.
Greer (D. H.), From Things to God, 1.
Herford (B.), Courage and Cheer, 235.
Hodge (C.), Princeton Sermons, 197.
Horder (W. G.), The Other- World, 3, 111.
Jeffrey (G.), The Believer's Privilege, 57.
Kennedy (J. D.), Sermons, 83.
King (D.), Memoir and Sermons, 403.
Lewis (F. W.), The Work of Christ, 33.
Lightfoot (J. B.), Sermons on Special Occasions, 1.
Lockyer (T. F.), Inspirations of the Christian Life, 189.
Maclaren (A.), Creed and Conduct, 56.
Meyer (F. B.), Present Tenses, 123.
Moule (H. C. G.), The Secret of the Presence, 33, 48.
Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 229.
Pope (W. B.), Discourses on the Lordship of the Incarnate Redeemer, 325.
Talmage (T. de W.), Sermons, vi. 404.
Vaughan (C. J.), Temple Sermtms, 485.
Walker (J.), Memoir and Sermons, 311.
Watkinson (W. L.), Noonday Addresses, 1 ff.
British Congregationalist, Nov. 11, 1909, p. 418 (Shepherd).
Cambridge Review, ii. Supplement No. 45 (Ince).
Christian Age, xlii. 68 (Talmage).
Christian World Pulpit, xi. 408 (Beecher) ; xiii. 65 (Duckworth) ;
xv. 312 (Pulsford) ; xviii. 145 (Duckworth) ; xxi. 337 (Edwards) ;
xxxvii. 90 (Smith), 104 (Clarke); xxxviii. 179 (Duckworth);
xl. 58 (Hobbs) ; xli. 154 (Garrett Horder) ; xlvi. 307 (Phillips) ;
xlviii. 121 (Goodspeed).
YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS.
All things are yours ; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world,
or life, or death, or things present, or things to come ; all are yours ; and ye
are Christ's ; and Christ is God's. I Cor. iii. 21-23.
1. THE Corinthian Christians seem to have carried into the Church
some of the worst vices of Greek political life. They were split
up into wrangling factions, each swearing by the name of some
person. Paul was the battle-cry of one set ; Apollos of another.
Paul and Apollos were very good friends, their admirers bitter
foes according to a very common experience. The springs lie
close together up in the hills, the rivers may be parted by half a
continent.
These feuds were all the more detestable to the Apostle
because his name was dragged into them ; and so, in the first part
of this letter, he sets himself, with all his might, to shame and to
argue the Corinthian Christians out of their wrangling. This
great text is one of the considerations which he adduces with that
purpose. In effect he says, " To pin your faith to any one teacher
is a wilful narrowing of the sources of your blessing and your
wisdom. You say you are Paul's men. Has Apollos got nothing
that he could teach you ? and may you not get any good out of
brave brother Cephas ? Take them all ; they were all meant for
your good. Let no man glory in individuals."
That is all that his argument required him to say. But in his
impetuous way he goes on into regions far beyond. His thought,
like some swiftly revolving wheel, catches fire of its own rapid
motion ; and he blazes up into this triumphant enumeration of all
the things that serve the soul which serves Jesus Christ. " You
are lords of men, of the world, of time, of death, of eternity ; but
you are not lords of yourselves. You belong to Jesus, and in the
measure in which you belong to Him do all things belong to you."
x COR. 8
ii4 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
2. There is a fine wholesome exultation about the words,
considering from whom they come and to whom they were
addressed. We do not like to hear a rich man boasting of his
wealth ; but when a poor man tells us how rich he feels, that
seems wholesome, and it gives us a glimpse into the deeper fact
of what being " well off " really is. And that is what we have in
this word of St. Paul's to his Corinthian converts. Poor men
they were, every one of them, with little enough of this world's
gear. What different ways of looking at things there are ! If
we could have gone to any one of the great merchants at Corinth,
and asked him about the standing of the score or two of men
who were beginning to be known as the followers of the new
religion there, his answer would probably have been something
like this : " Standing, my dear sir ? They have not any ! Why,
there is hardly a man among them worth his fifty ounces of
silver. You might buy up the whole lot of them for five talents
of gold. The only man among them who has anything is that
sailmaker, Agrippa, and he was almost ruined by having to break
up and leave Eome on that edict of the emperor, expelling the
Jews." That was one way of looking at them. St. Paul looks
at them differently. "You have everything," he says. "I am
yours, and Apollos is yours, and so is Cephas. And this world
is yours, and the next world is yours, things present and things
to come 'all things are yours."' It was a right royal setting
forth of their position, if they could only feel it so. And they
did feel it so in the main. Take that early Christian life as a
whole ; there is very little whining in it, very little about their
poverty, or difficulties, or hardships. They rise up before us
St. Paul and his fellows, and those humble, nameless folk who
gathered round them they rise up before us out of the shadows
of the past, not as weary and sorrow-laden men, treading pain-
fully along, but as soldiers marching with firm ringing steps, and
singing songs of triumph as they go. 1
3. " All things are yours," says St. Paul, and he goes on with
an enumeration which has been called, not without reason, " the
inventory of the possessions of the child of God," and in which
death itself figures. He sums up his enumeration by reproducing
1 B. Herford, Courage and Cheer, 236.
i CORINTHIANS in. 21-23 "5
the bold paradox with which he had begun, " Yea, I tell you, all
are yours" Then he adds the ground or basis of this possession.
" Ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." " All things are yours,"
he says, " but ye are not your own, ye are Christ's, and it is
because ye belong to Christ and depend on Him that all things
belong to you."
I.
ALL THINGS ARE YOURS.
There are days in the year when merchants take account of
their stock. It is well sometimes for a Christian disciple likewise
to stop and take an inventory of his possessions'. The Apostle
Paul here gives us such an inventory. " All things are yours."
There cannot be anything left when you have said " All things."
That is an expression which sweeps round the whole universe
and takes in everything. " All things are yours." And now the
thought strikes the Apostle's mind, " They will hardly understand
how much that includes, unless I begin to specify," and so he
adds: "Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas," representing all
that ministered in word and doctrine; but that is only one
department of this great possession. " Or the world." " The
world " is one of the most universal terms of which we have any
knowledge. It includes the whole human family ; it includes the
whole of human history ; it includes the whole of the habitable
earth. Yet even that will not do. "Or life." That covers
the term of our existence both in this world and in the hereafter ;
it is all yours with all its experiences. " Or death." If there is
anything that seems to have both " all seasons " and all men for
its own, it is death. " Things present " ; these include whatsoever
is and whatsoever has been, because whatsoever has been belongs
to the present as the property of memory, just as whatsoever is
belongs to the present as the property of actual daily experience.
But all this will not suffice. " And things to come." That reaches
into the illimitable ages of eternity. St. Paul has been trying
to make specifications, to give the items in this stocktaking.
But, as though discouraged with the attempt to enumerate, he
has only succeeded in giving a very few of the things possessed
by the disciple, but those are the most comprehensive terms
possible. And like a man who has begun taking stock in a
u6 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
great manufactory, and has noted five or six great articles that
one shelf contains, but, as he sees the vast accumulation of goods
before him, gives up in despair in the effort to complete his work
St. Paul returns to the original sentence with which he began :
" All things are yours."
What does this statement of the Apostle mean ?
1. It is worth our while first to recall something of what it
does not mean. It does not mean licence, the parody and libel
of liberty. It does not mean selfishness, the mind which grasps
or which withholds at the dictate of self-will; this is not
possession, but theft ; this in its effect is nothing but the hard
bondage and poverty of the being. It does not mean the faintest
shadow of a slur over moral distinctions the bad dream that
you can be so spiritual as to be, even for one fraction of a moment,
emancipated from conscience ; the lying whisper that you shall
not surely die of permitted sin, because Christ died for you.
2. It does not mean a relaxation of the Divine rule of self-
sacrifice. It is not spoken in order to throw the halo of the
Gospel over a life which, professing godliness, is yet secretly,
perhaps almost unconsciously, making itself as comfortable as
possible for its own sake. It is not spoken to help us to minimize
the call to bear the cross, and to serve the Lord in others, while
we multiply and magnify excuses for indulgences and enjoyments
which, however cultivated and refined, terminate in ourselves.
The words are not given us to insinuate that, if we will but say
" Lord, Lord," with a certain fervour, we may live as those who
think that a man's " life " does " consist in the abundance of the
things which he possesseth."
3. But then, most certainly, the words have a meaning, positive
and beautiful " All things are yours." They are spoken indeed
to those, and to those only, who are not their own but their
Lord's possession; but they do not merely restate that side of
truth. They give its contrast and its complement; they turn
the shield quite round, to show its other face and it is another.
" You are not your own " ; be sure of that, it is an immovable
fact. " All things are yours " ; be sure of that also ; it is meant
to carry to you a magnificent message, affirmative, distinctive,
i CORINTHIANS m. 21-23 117
altogether its own. Now as then, now and for ever, the man who
belongs to Christ in truth is " a child of God." And his Father
will do anything for him. Nothing of his Father's resources shall
be grudged to him. Wisdom and love may, and will, sort and
sift, and in that sense limit, the things which shall be put actually
into the child's hands. But the whole wealth of the great home
is his, in the sense that he is the child for whom anything shall
be done, on whom no resources are too great to spend. His
utmost good is watched for, always and everywhere. His Father
delights exceedingly to meet his wishes, and limits the meeting
of them only by the interests of the child ; and He has made
those interests identical with His own.
If Adolphe Monod, great saint, great teacher, great sufferer,
lying on a premature couch of anguish and death at Paris,
collected in his bedchamber, Sunday by Sunday, a little con-
gregation of friends ; Guizot was sometimes of the number. There
he addressed them, like Standfast in the Pilgrim's Progress, as
from the very waters of the last river, speaking always on his
life-long theme, Jesus Christ. The pathetic series of these Adieux
ct ses Amis et ct VEglise was gathered after his death into a volume.
Late in its pages comes a discourse with the title ' All in Jesus
Christ.' From this let me quote a few sentences: "Be it
wisdom, be it light, be it power, be it victory over sin, be it a
matter of this world, or of the world to come, all is in Christ.
Having Christ, we have all things; bereft of Christ, we have
absolutely nothing. All things are yours, and you are Christ's,
and Christ is God's. Well, then, what is the result for me ? I
am poor, it may be. Yet all the fortunes of this world are mine ;
for they are Christ's, who Himself is God's, and who could easily
give them all to me, with Himself, if they would serve my
interests. The whole world, with all its glories, with all its power,
belongs to me ; for it belongs to my Father, who will give it me
to-morrow, and could give it me to-day, if that were good for me.
I am very ill, it may be. Yet health is mine, strength is mine,
comfort is mine, a perfect enjoyment of all the blessings of life
is mine ; for all this belongs to Christ, who belongs to God, and
who disposes of it as He will. If He withholds these things from
me to-day, for a fleeting moment, swift as the shuttle in the loom,
it is for ^reasons wholly of His own; it is because these pains
and this bitterness conceal a benediction worth more to me than
the health so precious, than the comfort so delightful. ... I
challenge you to find a thing of which I cannot say : This is my
Father's ; therefore it is mine ; if He withholds it to-day, He will
n8 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
give it me to-morrow. I trust myself to His love. All is mine,
if I am His." l
Tf A distinguished American politician in a heated campaign
is said to have telegraphed to his friends : " Claim everything."
That, in a much profounder sense, is precisely the summons which
Christianity makes on life. . . . All things are yours. The whole
of life is holy. Eeligion is not a province but an empire. It
comprehends both the church and the world, both life and death,
both the present and the future. The world is one, and all of it
is sacred, and it is all yours, if ye are Christ's, as Christ is God's. 2
T[ Amidst all my hurry, however, I had five minutes alone
by my little Lena's grave. The beautiful white coral was
blackened, but the grass and shrubs had grown, and the lemon
branches with their bright fruit were bending over and shading
it beautifully. How naturally one looks up to the blue sky above,
and wonders where the spirit is, or if she can see the mourning
hearts below. She would have been running on her own little
feet now, had she been on Earth ; but though my heart aches
for her still, I would not have it otherwise, for she was not sent
in vain, and oh, what a little teacher she has been ! When John
took Dr. Steele to see the grave, he said : " You have thus taken
possession " ; and I felt we had taken possession of more through
her than that little spot of ground on Aniwa. 3
wealth of life beyond all bound!
Eternity each moment given!
What plummet may the Present sound ?
Who promises a future heaven ?
Or glad, or grieved,
Oppressed, relieved,
In blackest night, or brightest day
Still pours the flood
Of golden good.
And more than heartfull fills me aye.
My wealth is common; I possess
No petty province, but the whole
What's mine alone is mine far less
Than treasure shared by every soul.
Talk not of store,
Millions or more
1 H. C. G. Moule, The Secret of the Presence, 56
2 Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 231.
8 John G. Paton, ii. 296.
i CORINTHIANS m. 21-23 119
Of values which the purse may hold
But this divine !
I own the mine
Whose grains outweigh a planet's gold.
I have a stake in every star,
In every beam that fills the day;
All hearts of men my coffers are,
My ores arterial tides convey;
The fields, the skies,
The sweet replies
Of thought to thought are my gold-dust ;
The oaks ; the brooks,
And speaking looks
Of lovers, faith and friendship's trust.
Life's youngest tides joy-brimming flow
For him who lives above all years,
Who all-immortal makes the Kow,
And is not ta'en in Time's arrears:
His life's a hymn
The seraphim
Might hark to hear or help to sing,
And to his soul
The boundless whole
Its bounty all doth daily bring.
"All Mine is thine," the Sky-Soul saith;
"The wealth I Am must thou become;
Richer and richer, breath by breath
Immortal gain, immortal room ! "
And since all His
Mine also is,
Life's gift outruns my fancies far,
And drowns the dream
In larger stream,
As morning drinks the morning-star. 1
i. Paul, Apollos, Cephas.
1. Each of these names stands for a distinct species of teaching
the argumentative, the eloquent, the hortatory. Let us not
pass any of them by ; from those with whom we have least
sympathy, we may glean something. Each disciple brings some
1 David Atwood Wasson.
120 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
bits of bread and fish. Each stone flashes some colour needed by
the prism to effect the beam of perfect light. Each flower may
furnish some ingredient for the common store of honey.
2. Not in vain have martyrs suffered, and fathers taught, and
saints prayed, and philanthropists laboured, and reformers preached.
All these too are ours. It is ours to note the martyr Ignatius
weighed down with years but undaunted in heart, with a spirit
soaring higher than the courage of a hero and bowing lower than
the humility of a child, not daring yet to count himself a disciple,
but setting his face stedfastly towards the Eoman amphitheatre,
thirsting to become food for the wild beasts, that haply while
finding them he might also find Christ. It is ours to observe the
kingly spirit of Athanasius, who through nearly half a century,
resolute and unswerving, defied obloquy and persecution, maintain-
ing with no less clearness of vision than stedfastness of purpose
the faith of Christ alone against the world. It is ours also to take
to heart the example of Francis of Assisi, the most gentle and
loving of saints, who delighted to claim kindred with all the works
of creation and all the dispensations of providence, as the sons
and daughters of the one beneficent Father, greeting even fire
as a brother and death as a sister ; who preached to a literal age
in the only language which that age could understand, by a
literal obedience to the precept of Christ, and went out into the
world taking with him absolutely nothing, casting in his lot with
the poor whom men despised, and the leper whom they abhorred !
So we may go on through all the ages, feeding the fires that are
within us with the fuel of these bright examples of Christian
faith and heroism and love. And we shall do this without fear.
We shall use these examples without abusing them. We shall
not say, I am of Martin Luther, or I am of Francis Xavier, or I am
of John Wesley ; for Luther and Xavier and Wesley are all ours.
Brilliant though their lives may have been, they are after all only
broken lights of Him who is the full and perfect light.
3. Not only are all Christian teachers ours to serve us after
their own kind, but the whole world of men is ours to do the same.
If there is a man anywhere with a thought in his mind worth
having, whether he be a historian, or a poet, or a romancer ; if
there is a man anywhere who has a practical idea to communicate,
i CORINTHIANS m. 21-23 121
whether he be a statesman, or a political economist, or a
sanitarian ; if there is a man anywhere who knows something
valuable about the earth or the heavens, we should listen to that
man with all gratitude. For the whole world of such men is ours
men of thought, men of imagination, men of inventive genius
men of character; all are ours, and we should not despise any
one of them. They have all their place in the economy of human
nature. We should not favour the historian and neglect the
poet, or welcome the scientist and spurn the romancer ; we should
look upon each as a valuable servant ready to render us a service
peculiar to himself.
T[ Literature may almost be called the last stronghold of
paganism for the cultivated classes all over the Empire. It is
hard for us to sympathize with the feelings of Christians in the
fifth century for whom cultivated paganism was a living reality
possessed of a seductive power ; who could not separate classical
literature from the religious atmosphere in which it had been
produced; and who regarded the masterpieces of the Augustan
age as beautiful horrors from which they might hardly escape.
Jerome had fears for his soul's salvation because he could not
conquer his admiration for Cicero's Latin prose, and Augustine
shrank within himself when he thought on his love for the
poems of Vergil. Had not his classical tastes driven him in
youth from the uncouth latinity of the copies of the Holy
Scriptures when he tried to read them ? Christianity had
mastered their heart, mind and conscience, but it could not
stifle fond recollection nor tame the imagination. 1
ii. The World.
By "the world" St. Paul here means the existing order of
material things, the world we live in, the physical universe.
" The world," he says, " is yours." The world, the cosmos, the
Divine order of the created universe, with all its intricate
harmonies and all its manifold glories, is ours. Our Lord is not
only the Head of the Church, the spiritual creation ; He is also
the Centre of the Universe, the material creation. This He is,
as the Eternal Word of God by whom all things came into being,
in whom they are sustained, through whom they are governed.
In our modern theology we almost wholly lose sight of this aspect
of Christ's Person ; and the loss to ourselves is inestimable.
1 Cambridge Medieval History, i. 115.
122 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
Science and religion, in the Apostle's teaching, have their meeting-
point in Christ. There is no antagonism between them ; they are
the twofold expression of the same Divine energy. And therefore
science, not less than theology, is the inheritance of the Christian.
It is ours to roam through the boundless realms of space with
the astronomer, and to plunge into the countless ages of the past
with the geologist: ours to enter into the vast laboratory of
nature, and to analyse her subtle processes and record her
manifold results. It will be no intrusion into an alien sphere.
It is a right which we can claim as Christians. It is ours because
we are Christ's.
U This is our school, hung with maps and diagrams and simple
lessons. There is not a single flower, not a distant star, not a
murmuring brooklet, not a sound sweet or shrill ; there is not
a living creature, or a natural process, that may not serve us ;
not only by meeting some appetite of sense, but by teaching us
such deep lessons as those which Jesus drew from the scenes
around Him, saying, " the kingdom of heaven is like." 1
1. That man owns the world who remains its master. There
are rich men who say they possess so many thousand pounds.
Turn the sentence about and it would be a great deal truer the
thousands of pounds possess them. They are the slaves of their
own possessions, and every man who counts any material thing
as indispensable to his well-being, and regards it as the chiefest
good, is the slave-servant of that thing.
K My friends, do you remember that old Scythian custom,
when the head of a house died ? How he was dressed in his
finest dress, and set in his chariot, and carried about to his
friends' houses ; and each of them placed him at his table's head,
and all feasted in his presence ? Suppose it were offered to you
in plain words, as it is offered to you in dire facts, that you should
gain this Scythian honour, gradually, while you yet thought
yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this : You shall die
slowly; your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify,
your heart beat at last only as a rusted group of iron valves.
Your life shall fade from you, and sink through the earth into the
ice of Caina ; but, day by day, your body shall be dressed more
gaily, and set in higher chariots, and have more orders on its
breast crowns on its head, if you will. Men shall bow before
1 F. B. Meyer.
i CORINTHIANS in. 21-23 123
it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up and down the streets ;
build palaces for it, feast with it at their tables' heads all the
night long; your soul shall stay enough within it to know what
they do, and feel the weight of the golden dress on its shoulders,
and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull ; no more. Would
you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel ? Would
the meanest among us take it, think you ? Yet practically and
verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure ; many of
us grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it,
who desires to advance in life without knowing what life is;
who means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen.
and more fortune, and more public honour, and not more
personal soul. He only is advancing in life, whose heart is
getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose
spirit is entering into living peace. And the men who have
this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth they,
and they only. 1
^| We shall never learn from our Lord to look with an un-
loving and cynical eye upon the common sights and ordinary
ways of nature and of men. Who, if not He, has enabled us to
read Divine philosophy in the birds of the air and the- ilowers of
the field, in the transactions of the market, in the work of the
farm, in the casting of a net, and the sweeping of a room ? Where,
if not in His school, have we been taught that it was a good God
who made the world, and sent us into it, not to withdraw ourselves
from it, not to feel scorn for it, but to study it, toil in it, and help
one another to profit by our stay in it ? Are they not His
lessons which have redeemed the life of the peasant from dulness,
as they have deepened the insight of the artist, and strengthened
the heart of the philanthropist ? It is inconceivable, wholly
inconceivable, that He who lived and taught thus, could have
meant us to understand that His truest followers were to be
those who should pass through this earthly life unoccupied,
uninterested, unstirred spectators, unfriendly critics, or active foes
of its development and progress. 2
2. He owns the world who turns it to the highest use of
spiritual nourishment. All material things are given, and were
created, for the growth of men ; or at all events their highest
purpose is that men should, by them, grow. And therefore, as
the scaffolding is swept away when the building is finished, so
1 Buskin, Sesame and Lilies ( Works, xviii. 99).
2 A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 109.
124 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
God will sweep away this material universe, with all its wonders
of beauty and of contrivance, when men have grown by means
of it. The material is less than the soul, and he is master of the
world, and owns it, who has got thoughts out of it, truth out of
it, impulses out of it, visions of God out of it, who has by it been
led nearer to his Divine Master. If I look out upon a fair land-
scape, and: the man who draws the rents of it is standing by my
side, and I draw more sweetness, and deeper impulses, and larger
and loftier thoughts out of it than he does, it belongs to me far
more than it does to him.
Tf Hazlitt, relating in one of his essays how he went on foot
from one great man's house to another's in search of works of art,
begins suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners,
because he was more capable of enjoying their costly possessions
than they were; because they had paid the money and he had
received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for self-
complacency. While the one man was working to be able to
buy the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the
picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently im-
proved in either case ; only the one man has made for himself a
fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit. It is
a fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event
shows a man to have chosen the better part, and laid out his
life more wisely, in the long-run, than those who have credit
for most wisdom. 1
*[ Kead that touching book, The Story of a Scotch Naturalist ;
or the life of Hugh Miller only a workman in the Cromarty
stone quarries, yet to whom that " Old Eed Sandstone " belonged
more than ever it did to the men for whom he worked. Or think
of Thoreau, one of that little group, with Emerson at their head,
who made Concord famous Thoreau, in his little shanty in the
Walden woods, cultivating just enough f or - life's barest needs,
and meanwhile making the wisdom and beauty of Nature and of
books and men his own ; loving everything around him and loved
by all the birds perching upon him as he hoed his garden, the
squirrels nestling up to him as he sat reading in his woodland
nooks ; taking all that country-side into his mind and heart, and
making it curiously his own. So that to-day, as people drive by
it, they say " that is Thoreau's wood " ! 2
3. He owns the world who uses it as the arena, or wrestling
1 R. L. Stevenson, Ordered South. a B. Herford.
i CORINTHIANS m. 21-23 125
ground, on which, by labour, he may gain strength, and in which
he may do service. Antagonism helps to develop muscle, and
the best use of the outward frame of things is that we shall take
it as the field upon which we can serve God.
First, then, behold the world as thine, and well
Note that where thou dost dwell :
See all the beauty of the spacious case ;
Lift up thy pleased and ravisht eyes;
Admire the glory of this Heavenly place,
And all its blessings prize.
That sight well seen thy spirit shall prepare
To make all other things more rare.
Men's woes shall be but foils unto thy bliss:
Thou once enjoying this :
Trades shall adorn and beautify the earth ;
Their ignorance shall make thee bright :
Were not their griefs Democritus's mirth?
Their slips shall keep thee right;
All shall be thine advantage ; all conspire
To make thy bliss and virtue higher. 1
iii. Life, Death.
Of the powers acting in the world there are two, of formid-
able and mysterious greatness, which seem to decide the course
of the universe life and death. The first comprehends all
phenomena which are characterized by force, health, productive-
ness; the second, all those which betray weakness, sickness,
decay. From the one or the other of these two forces proceed all
the hostile influences of which the believer feels himself the
object. But he knows also that he is not their puppet ; for it is
Christ his Lord who guides and tempers their action.
1. " Life is yours." Life is a very inclusive term. Think of
the vastness of its meaning. It means here, as always, more
than existence. Life has its dimensions: length and breadth,
and depth and height. It is not enough to count the years that
you live if " you would measure your life. "The days of our
years are threescore years and ten." That is simply a line from
the cradle to the grave, reaching over seventy years of length.
1 Thomas Traherne.
126 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
A man may broaden out his life by broadening out his sympathy,
his love, by taking into the embrace of his thought and his
affection things that are outside the narrow line of self-interest.
As he thinks of his neighbour ; of a dying world ; of the destitute
and the widowed and the orphan and the oppressed; as he
thinks of the Kingdom of God in all its vast out-reachings, the
little narrow line of self-interest is crossed, and the territory of
life broadens out to cover a vast continent of affection and of
thought. When a man begins to cultivate his own nature, when
he goes down into the depths of his own soul to find out what is
there of sin, and by the grace of God expel it ; what is there of
weakness, and by the grace of God strengthen it; and what is
there of selfishness, and by the grace of God displace it ; when
he learns, like a man who occupies uncultivated land on a farm, to
plough it up, and subsoil it, and enrich the ground, so that he
may yet get out of his own being the utmost possible yield for
himself and his family and humanity that man is discovering
the depth that is possible to life. And when he looks beyond
the present and the transient and the temporal, when he casts
his eyes upward to God, when he reaches up after God, His
likeness, His honour, His glory, then he is learning the height
that is possible to life.
How is this abundant life ours ?
(1) The world of human life is most his who knows it best,
and loves it best. How shall we appropriate this world of man
to ourselves and make it ours ? The common idea has been to
get some kind of lordship or kingship or mastership over it, or
over as much of it as we can. In the old feudal times, the vassal
used to kneel at the feet of the lord of the manor and swear to be
" his man." But that is a poor notion. Let us go forth into the
busy world and love it ; interest ourselves in its life ; mingle
kindly with its joys and sorrows ; try what we can do for men
rather than what we can make them do for us, and we shall know
what it is to have men ours, better than if we were their king or
master. If we look through history, whose, most of all, is the
world ? Not Alexander's or Napoleon's, but Christ's, who made
men His because He knew them and loved them. He whom we
bind to ourselves by love becomes, as far as it is possible, ours.
i CORINTHIANS HI. 21-23 127
A friendship is more truly a possession than a slave. Shake-
speare's plays become ours not by our owning a handsome copy
of them, but by our knowing them and loving them. Beethoven
and Mendelssohn are theirs who love and understand them. So
true is this, that Buskin has pleaded that in works of art it is
wrong to claim any private property or ownership. Such things
belong to humanity. Would we allow that any money purchase
could give a man any real right to make a bonfire of Raphael's
pictures or to break up the Laocoon into paperweights ? So of
character and the deep qualities of life itself. We cannot buy
these things ; we cannot pay a master even to teach us goodness,
or uprightness, or purity. This does not mean that the teacher
can do nothing 'knowing here too goes for something, but it is
loving that does infinitely the most. The quality we love becomes
a part of us. Our friend's nobleness, if that is what we really
love in him, gives us also some touch of nobleness. We may never
have much opportunity for heroism ; but if, as we read of some-
brave, heroic deed, our heart throbs with deep loving admiration,
that love by subtle chemistry transmutes the deed into our
character; not the whole of it, but some touch of it, becomes
a part of what we are.
(2) Life in its pleasures is ours ; there is no bright or helpful
pleasure that is not ours. There is no place on earth which a
Christian man cannot transform and transfigure to be the very
gateway of heaven. All mirth is ours, all laughter is ours, all
amusements are ours. Amusement in our hands will turn to
spiritual help, and to the making of manhood and womanhood. All
music is ours, all poetry is ours, the drama is ours. Pleasure in
its noblest, best, sweetest, truest sense belongs only to the
Christian. It is only when we are really armed in Christ for the
shocks and storms of life that we are safe to remember that we
are made fit in Christ for a double enjoyment of its joys.
T[ Life is really so wondrous ; this fibrine, iron, sinew, bone,
flesh, and colouring substance is so miraculous when alive, walking
about and thinking, and the eye is so expressive, the tone so
eloquent, the brain so active, and the heart so full of love and
feeling, that the mere gift of life is a largess so grand and utterly
magnificent that the dry bones breathed on should indeed rejoice.
Man is king of the world, monarch of the air, which is his circum-
ambient servant and puts colour in his cheeks and brightness in
128 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
his eye ; of the earth, which on her brown bosom bears him corn
and wine and oil of gladness ; of the sea, which scatters its treasures
at his feet and conveys him from land to land ; of the sky, which
is peopled with winged servants of his ; of the caverns and hollows
under the earth, which yield iron and copper and lead and gold to
serve him, and give him precious stones to glitter in his sight, and
the treasures of antediluvian woods, laid up as coal to warm him
in the winter. Of the other inferior life that shares the earth he
too is master. Yoked to his chariot the swift steed bears him ;
and all animals, from the lion to the lamb, minister to his
recreations, sports, desires, or wants. 1
(3) Life in its disciplines is ours. To say that life is pleasurable
is also to say that life is sad. To say that life is full of beauty is
also to say that life is full of sorrow. There are minor as well
as major chords in our life. There are none of us without our
struggles, none of us without our failures, none of us without
disappointments, none of us without bereavements, none without
our sorrows. The old theologians and prophets used to look upon
life as a probation. Life is not a probation; life is something
nobler than that, it is an education. If we struggle, if we fight,
if we are foiled, if we are down, let us not call it our sad destiny
let us call it God's educating force to make us perfect men or
women in Christ Jesus.
Blaspheme not thou thy sacred Life, nor turn,
O'er joys that God hath for a season lent
(Perchance to try thy spirit and its bent,
Effeminate soul and base !) weakly to mourn !
There lies no desert in the land of Life;
For e'en that tract that barrenest doth seem,
Laboured of thee in faith and hope, shall teem
With heavenly harvests and rich gatherings rife. 2
(4) Life in its possibilities is ours. John Stuart Mill once
said that no man could think of the heights of feeling that were
possible to him. Do we not believe that ; do we not believe with
all the future before us, and with all the love of God on our side,
there are scarcely any stages which we cannot reach ? There are
heights of purity to climb, valleys of humility to go through,
all the magnificent possibilities of service, of self-sacrifice, and of
life for others, a new start, and prospects which the grace of God
1 J. H. Friswell, This Wicked World, 269. 2 Frances Kemble.
i CORINTHIANS in. 21-23 129
alone can give. When we look back upon our life, the saddest
thing is not that we have been dishonest, not that we have been
impure, perhaps ; but the saddest thing is that our life has been
so meagre when it might have been so grand, that it has been so
petty when it might have been so sublime, so poor when it might
have been so rich.
"If From the first Christianity had proclaimed that the whole
life of man belonged to it. This meant everything that made
man's life wider, deeper, fuller; whatever made it more joyous
or contented; whatever sharpened the brain, strengthened and
taught the muscles, gave full play to man's energies, could be
taken up into and become part of the Christian life. Sin and
foulness were sternly excluded; but, that done, there was no
element of the Graeco-Boman civilization which could not be
appropriated by Christianity. So it assimilated Hellenism or
the fine flower and fruit of Greek thought and feeling; it
appropriated Koman law and institutions ; it made its own the
simple festivals of the common people. All were theirs; and
they were Christ's ; and Christ was God's. 1
Thank God for life: life is not sweet always,
Hands may be heavy-laden, hearts care full,
Unwelcome nights follow unwelcome days,
And dreams divine end in awakenings dull.
Still it is life, and life is cause for praise,
This ache, this restlessness, this quickening sting,
Prove me no torpid and inanimate thing,
Prove me of Him who is of life the Spring,
I am alive ! and that is beautiful. 2
2. " Death is yours." We had forgotten that ; or we had not
realized it. We had thought that we belonged to death, not
death to us. We knew that we had some feeble hold upon life,
but death was not thought to be a possession, desirable or
undesirable. We had not added that to the catalogue of our
wealth. We had never reckoned it among our treasures among
our resources. We had not realized that death is one of our
opportunities.
^[ The Writers of the Epistles make little or nothing of
physical death. They bear two great points in mind, (1) our
present standing, and (2) our ultimate standing in the day of the
1 Cambridge Medieval History, i. 96. a usan Coolidge,
I COR. 9
130 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
Lord. We persist in walking by sight and esteeming this
existence Life, and the end of this existence Death; whereas,
rightly viewed, this existence is but a stage in mortality, and
so-called Death a step onwards to the fulness of immortality.
Each one of us is, as it were, a limb of God, with the potentiality
of perfection, and gradually, through the experience of multiform
error, to be developed into the full exercise of spontaneous and
joyous activity. 1
TJ There are two very striking engravings by a great, though
somewhat unknown, artist, representing Death as the Destroyer,
and Death as the Friend. In the one case he comes into a
scene of wild revelry, and there at his feet lie stark and stiff
corpses in their gay clothing and with garlands on their brows,
and feasters and musicians are flying in terror from the cowled
Skeleton. In the other he comes into a quiet church belfry,
where an aged saint sits with folded arms and closed eyes, and an
open Bible by his side, and endless peace upon the wearied face.
The window is flung wide to the sunrise, and on its sill perches
a bird that gives forth its morning song. The cowled figure has
brought rest to the weary, and the glad dawning of a new life to
the aged, and is a friend. 2
Lo ! all thy glory gone !
God's masterpiece undone!
The last created and the first to fall;
The noblest, frailest, godliest of all.
Death seems the conqueror now,
And yet his victor thou:
The fatal shaft, its venom quench'd in thee,
A mortal raised to immortality.
Child of the humble sod,
Wed with the breath of God,
Descend! for with the lowest thou must lie
Arise ! thou hast inherited the sky. 3
(1) To the believer death is not a step into the dim unknown,
but a step into a region lighted by Jesus. Death is not the end
of something ; it is not an enemy that crushes us ; it is not a
loss, a defeat, a calamity ; it is a possession, a weapon in our
1 R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 20.
8 A. Maclareu. 3 John Banister Tabb.
i CORINTHIANS in. 21-23 131
armoury, an opportunity, a resource. It is not a putting off, but
a putting on.
At end of Love, at end of Life,
At end of Hope, at end of Strife,
At end of all we cling to so
The sun is setting must we go ?
At dawn of Love, at dawn of Life,
At dawn of Peace that follows Strife,
At dawn of all we long for so
The sun is rising let us go. 1
(2) Death is not the cessation of activity, but the introduction
to nobler opportunities, and the endowment with nobler capacities
of service. To become dead is an experience which is part of life.
It is an experience in life's upgrowth and development. There
are many whom we know, who always seem to have been
thwarted; who seem to be disinherited; who do not seem to
have come into their rightful place or possession. If we look
at their lives, from the cradle to the certain grave, we cannot
understand them. There seems no accomplishment ; there seems
no real purpose ; there seems no achievement worth the travail.
But we are not to look at any one, viewing him merely from the
cradle to the grave. Death is our interpreter. It alone gives the
true perspective; and when death comes to such as we have
spoken of, it is seen to be the endowment of the disinherited.
Life, its meaning, its purpose, its wealth, is for them beyond the
grave. It is beyond the grave for all of us ; but it is clearly seen
to be so for them. Death is the endowment of the disinherited.
TI The shutters are drawn and the people talk in whispers and
walk softly, an immortal soul is passing out of time into eternity.
His has been a commonplace life, but he has been faithful, and
now he has reached the end of the journey. The sunset has come
and the shadows of evening are thickening. Between two worlds
hangs the veil which separates time from eternity. On this side
the veil it is a house of sorrow. Loved ones are in tears and
speak to each other in broken sobs and cry out to God for
comfort.
But on the other side of that thin veil the scene is far
different. It is the hour of coronation. There are no tears, no
1 Louise Chandler Moulton.
132 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
sobbing grief and heart-broken prayers, but the chant of victory,
for a faithful soul is coming to its own. All the pomp and circum-
stance of heaven centre there. The face of the pilgrim has lost
its death pallor and the eyes shine with the light of expectant
immortality. God is once more placing the crown of life on the
brow of death. 1
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
He hath awakened from the dream of life
Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. 2
(3) Death does not separate and isolate us, but unites us to
Jesus and all His lovers. Those we have lost we have not lost
them. Death is the guardian of our treasures. Here they would
have faded, faded, faded. Do we ever think, that if friendship
were to last for ever on this earth of frailty, the last horror
would come the hearts even of friends would get worn out?
This mortal must put on immortality before life can stand its own
strain and the glory of its meaning ; the life we learn on earth
is too high for earth ; death alone can release it to its fit dominion.
And death is the guardian of your hidden treasures and the
keeper of your secret wealth, of all the unknown that lies
beyond the veil for us not only those whom we have let go,
but those we have never known, whom God has made and is
keeping for us. Our treasures, some of them, are here ; but we
will not know how rich we are till we have passed beyond.
I cannot think of them as dead
Who walk with me no more;
Along the path of life I tread
They have but gone before.
The father's house is mansioned fair
Beyond my vision dim;
All souls are His, and, here or there,
Are living unto Him.
And still their silent ministry
Within my heart hath place,
As when on earth they walked with me,
And met me face to face.
1 J. I. Vance, Tendency, 229, 233. 2 Shelley, Adonais, xxxix.
i CORINTHIANS in. 21-23 133
Their lives are made forever mine;
What they to me have been
Hath left henceforth its seal and sign
Engraven deep within.
Mine are they by an ownership
Nor time nor death can free;
For God hath given to Love to keep
Its own eternally. 1
U I have no fear lest my Saints should be far from me in
their upper heaven; God's hierarchy is the hierarchy of con-
joining love, and His great ones have their place in power to
draw near even to the very least. The heights of heaven must
be close to every lower place, as close as heart and heart may be. 2
iv. Things Present, Things to Come.
All things are yours, says the Apostle, in the spiritual order
(whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas) and in the terrestrial order
(the world); the great powers of the world are yours (life and
death); now he adds a third pair in relation to time (things
present, and things to come). " Things present " comprehends
all that can happen to us in the present state of things, and as
long as we form part of it ; while " things to come " denotes the
great expected transformation, with its eternal consequences.
"Or things present, or things to come." How quickly the
incidents of daily life are gliding over us ! and as they pass, to
our weak gaze they steal from us so much that we hold dear
the elastic step, the clear vision, the strong nerve, the beloved
friend, the hard-earned gold. Sometimes they manifestly enrich
us. For the young there is a constant sense of acquisition.
One good and perfect gift follows swiftly on the heels of another.
But when we have crossed the summit of life's hill there is an
incessant consciousness of loss. Yet in God's sight, and in the
spiritual realm, these distinctions vanish and pass away as mists
under the touch of the sun : and we find that all incidents come
to bless usj all winds waft us to our haven; all tribes bring
their tribute into the throne-roorn of our inner being. We are
not the creatures of circumstances, but their masters, their
kings, their lords. All these things are the servants and tutors
1 Frederick Lucian Hosmer. 2 A Modern Mystic's Way.
1 134 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
appointed by our Father, to wait on and minister to us, His
heirs.
1. " Things present" Our present lot is one of the " all things "
which belong to us. We may not like it ; we may greatly desire
to be quit of it; we may be looking forward with intensest eager-
ness to a happier day, when our griefs or our difficulties shall no
longer be with us. But these, remember, are from God to us,
and God's love is in them. Let us not be anxious merely to
rid ourselves of them. Let us dig in them, and we shall find
treasure.
Tf We read some time ago, in an Australian paper, of a nugget
worth a thousand pounds. In its picture a very ungainly block
it looked. Most of us might have fallen in with it and heed-
lessly passed it by, or cast it aside as something in the way. The
"digger" knew better, and he and his "mate" made a little
fortune in a day. 1
K We can be only in the present, but not in the present
without a past, nor in the present without a future. We need a
. present stretching from an eternal past to an eternal future. In
Jehovah alone is such a past, present, and future found (Ps.
xc. 1, 2). Jehovah hath created the heavens and the earth. We
are here, and here as an integral part of them. " Bless the Lord,
all his works, in all places of his dominion : bless the Lord, my
soul." We are connected in that verse with all places of His
dominion everything, everywhere, my soul. Yet the foundations
of our being, of our eternity, are in God our possibility in His
omnipotence our futurition in the purpose of His will, as our
actuality in our generic creation, and our individuality from Him
who calls the generations from the beginning. So of men so
of our salvation, omnipotence, purpose, creation in Christ.
There's something there that I'll no' spin out ; it could be spun
out into a long thread. 2
2. " Things to come." The dim, vague future shall be for each
of us like some sunlit ocean stretching shoreless to the horizon ;
every little ripple flashing with its own bright sunshine, and all
bearing us onwards to the great Throne that stands on the sea of
glass mingled with fire.
(1) All the future that hope anticipates or fear apprehends
1 J. Walker of Carnwath, Essays, Sermons, and Memoir, 318.
8 "Rabbi " Duncan, in Memoir of John Duncan, 4Q8.
i CORINTHIANS in. 21-23 135
is ours, and we can safely leave it with Him. We are like a
cathedral that has been building through ages ; the scaffolding is
round about it, obscuring its beauty and symmetry, but essential
to the erection of the towering spires. But, when the whole
thing is completed, the scaffolding will be torn down and burnt
up, and the grand building will appear in perfection.
(2) The Hebrew youth who, eager and buoyant, full of joyous
young life and aspiration, left his father's home to seek his
brethren in the distant pasture-lands, had no dream of " things to
come " for him no dream of his sale as a bondsman, of his exile,
of Potiphar's house, of the false accusation, of the fetters and the
dungeon, of the hope deferred and the sudden release, of the
unexpected exaltation, of the reunion to his family in circum-
stances baffling all human calculation, and fraught with a history
so grand, with an influence stretching down through all time and
abroad over all lands. Not in his wildest imaginings did that
future of wonders ever open up before him. But as you see the
roll of his destiny unwind, as event follows event in the
marvellous career, you recognize how truly all that came to him
was his, and for his sake chastening, sifting, humbling, purifying,
preparing him alike for an earthly or a heavenly future. So is it
for us all, if we are truly of the seed of Jacob.
^J To-morrow is the Gorgon ; a man must only see it mirrored
in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is
turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have
really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The
Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination, were
turned to stone; the modern sociological scientists (with their
excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The only difference
is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists somewhat
amusing, statues. 1
^J The man who believes in God and in His loving providence
need not darken his days by fretful cares and dread of evil to
come. Believing in God's purpose of love with him, he knows
that the future cannot bring anything contrary to that. If there
are any trials and sorrows in that time to come, he knows that
the Father's grace is sufficient for him through them all. If
there are temptations, he knows he will not be tempted above
what he can bear. His times are in God's hands. If his days
are to be long, the more time to worship and to witness. If they
1 Chesterton, What's Wrong ivith the World.
136 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
are to be few, the greater need to redeem the time now. If they
are to be lived through much tribulation with darkness and storm,
with a long stretch through the valley of the shadow, the
Shepherd of his soul is ever with him. He will ask to see the
heart of good in every evil that touches his life, the joy that
slumbers in every pain, and in the hour of the final passion will
commit his soul to God. 1
T[ " Why wilt thou be concerned beyond to-day," asks Luther,
<l and take upon thyself the misfortunes of two days ? " Put thus,
with Luther's sanctified common sense, it is foolish from any
point of view, but it is more than foolish from the point of view
of faith. 2
II.
YE ARE CHRIST'S, AND CHRIST is GOD'S.
All things are yours, says St. Paul with one exception. That
exception is a very startling one. All things are ours but
ourselves ! That is really what the Apostle means when he says,
" All are yours, and ye are Christ's." And in this matter we are
in precisely the same position as the Lord Jesus Christ. While
all things are His, He is not His own any more than we are.
" All things are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's."
There is no one in this universe his own but God the Father. He
is the only absolute Being ; all the rest of us belong to some one
else. Christ is God's and we are Christ's. Christ belongs to God
by right of generation. "Thou art my Son, this day have I
begotten thee." We belong to Christ by right of purchase. " Ye
are not your own ; for ye were bought with a price."
1. It is because we are not our own, but Christ's, that all
things are ours. How should we, poor creatures of yesterday,
have all things if it were not for our connection with Christ ?
Has not God given all things to Christ ? As the Word has it,
" The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his
hand." And how should we have all things, if they were not
given us by Christ, whose we are ?
2. We are truly our own only when we are Christ's. The
highest truth ever lies in the completest paradox. There are
many things that we never truly possess till' we give them up.
1 Hugh Black, Comfort, 179. 2 Ibid. 191.
i CORINTHIANS HI. 21-23 137
It is only when we relinquish the world that we possess it. It is
only when we let pleasure go that we obtain it. It is only when
we give money away that we enjoy it. It is only when we lose
our life that we find it. And it is only when we become Christ's
that we become our own.
Lord, Thou art mine, and I am Thine,
If mine I am; and Thine much more
Than I or ought or can be mine.
Yet to be Thine doth me restore,
So that again I now am mine,
And with advantage mine the more,
Since this being mine brings with it Thine,
And Thou with me dost Thee restore:
If I without Thee would be mine,
I neither should be mine nor Thine.
Lord, I am Thine, and Thou art mine;
So mine Thou art, that something more
I may presume Thee mine than Thine,
For Thou didst suffer to restore
Not Thee, but me, and to be mine:
And with advantage mine the more,
Since Thou in death wast none of Thine,
Yet then as mine didst me restore:
0, be mine still; still make me Thine;
Or rather make no Thine and mine. 1
3. All things are ours to serve us, and we are Christ's to serve
Him. Service is the golden thread that runs through all creation,
making it one. The ancient fable told that all things were bound
by golden chains about the feet of God : and surely the real deep
connection of which the fable spoke is to be found in the service
which each lower order of creation renders to the one above, the
service becoming rarer and more refined as the pyramid of
existence tapers to a point.
Our Lord was also the servant of God, and we are His
servants. We are, of course, His, in the sense of being owned
by Him : IJe made us ; He bought us ; He claims us. But how
many of us resemble Onesimus, the runaway slave of Philemon !
who probably bore the brand of his master, and had certainly
been purchased by his gold, but who withheld from him his
1 George Herbert.
138 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
service, following the bent of his own wayward will, and herding
with the most abandoned of the populace that rotted in the
criminal quarters of ancient Eome. We too have been bought
by the Lord, at priceless cost ; but we are far from serving Him
with the same sort of loyal and whole-hearted ministry as that
with which He, in His unwearied solicitude for us, serves the Father.
4. Whenever we get into this right attitude towards our
Lord Jesus, we shall find that all things begin to minister to us
in a constant round of holy service. Each event or circumstance
in life becomes an angel, laden with blessed helpfulness, bringing
to us the gifts of our beloved Master. That title, " Eabboni,
Master," the sweetest name by which the prostrate soul can
address its Saviour, does not degrade or demean it ; but enables
it, like the babe Christ, to be the recipient of costly presents
sent from afar gold, frankincense, and myrrh. If we have been
chafing at our lot, thinking that time and things are robbing
us, we may be sure that we are not as we should be towards
Christ ; and the true cure will be to get as a slave to His feet.
Then all things will be ours in this deep sense.
5. " And Christ is God's." If Christ is at the right hand of
God, then the world is ours. The world is transformed from a
prison into a home, and life from a dream into a reality. All that
we know and love and strive for is given permanence and worth.
To see the glorious fountain and the end,
To see all creatures tend
To thy advancement, and so sweetly close
In thy repose : to see them shine
In serviceable worth; and even foes,
Among the rest, made thine :
To see all these at once unite in thee
Is to behold felicity.
To see the fountain is a blessed thing,
It is to see the King
Of Glory face to face : but yet the end,
The deep and wondrous end, is more;
In that the Fount we also comprehend,
The spring we there adore:
For in the end the fountain is best shewn,
As by effects the cause is known.
i CORINTHIANS m. 21-23
From one, to one, in one, to see all things,
Perceive the King of Kings
My God and portion; to see His treasures
Made all mine own, myself the end
Of His great labours! 'Tis the life of pleasures
To see myself His friend !
Who all things finds convey'd to Him alone,
Must needs adore the Holy One. 1
1 Thomas Traherne.
OUR THREE JUDGES.
LITERATURE
Arnold (T.), Sermons, i. 155.
Bramston (J. T.), Fratribus, 156.
Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, iv. 489.
Greenhough (J. G.), The Mind of Christ in St. Paul, 284.
Hoyle (A.), The Depth and Power of the Christian Faith, 89.
Jackson (G.), Judgment Human and Divine, 1.
Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. PauVs, 195, 295.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : 1 and 2 Corinthians, 74.
Triumphant Certainties, 152.
Neale (J. M.), Sermons Preached in a Religious House, 2nd Ser., i. 190.
Parker (J.), City Temple Pulpit, iv, 155.
Pusey (E. B.), Parochial and Cathedral Sermons, 1.
Stalker (J.), The Four Men, 2.
Tholuck (A.), Hours of Christian Devotion, 34.
Vaughan (C. J.) Family Prayer and Sermon Book, ii. 576.
Christian World Pulpit, xxxvii. 225 (Stalker).
Church of England Pulpit, Ixii. 71 (Barnes).
Churchman's Pulpit : Third Sunday in Advent : i. 469 (Hobhouse), 472
(Battershall), 474 (Arnold), 477 (Gurney), 479 (Temple).
Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., ix. 161 (Liddon).
14=
OUR THREE JUDGES.
But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of
man's judgment : yea, I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing
against myself ; yet am I not hereby justified : but he that judgeth me is the
Lord. i Cor. iv. 3, 4.
1. To understand this passage we must remember what the cir-
cumstances were which led St. Paul to write this first letter to
the Corinthians. He had been absent from them for three years,
during which time trouble and disorder of several kinds had been
arising and spreading in the body of the Corinthian Christians.
And the first of these troubles, to which he alludes in this letter,
was the numberless divisions and parties into which they seemed
to have broken. Full of intellectual restlessness, craving after
new varieties of doctrine, they had formed at least three eager
and violent parties : the party of Paul, the party of Apollos, the
party of Cephas. We may gather that while St. Paul's own
partisans had raised him to a height of authority which he would
not for one moment claim, his opponents had brought the charge
of unfaithfulness against him.
And in this letter he tells them what he would have them
think of his office and his relations to them. Not a leader, not
a favourite of a party, but a servant doing work for God, a steward
dispensing to them the riches of the revelation of Christ. And
if a servant and a steward, then the one merit that he would
claim, the one thing that makes his service and his stewardship
real is faithfulness. But who is to judge whether he has been
faithful or not ? Men may judge, but he does not care for their
verdict : " If is a very small thing that I should be judged of you
or of man's judgment." His own conscience may judge, but he
will not stand on its acquittal alone : " though I know nothing
against myself, yet am I not hereby justified." There is only one
143
144 OUR THREE JUDGES
judgment to which he will submit, only one utterly true and
infallible approbation or condemnation, which will be awarded to
those who will wait for it : " He that judgeth me is the Lord."
2. So here we have three tribunals, that of men, that of our own
conscience, and that of Jesus Christ. An appeal lies from the
first to the second, and from the second to the third. It is base
to depend on men's judgments ; it is well to attend to the decisions
of conscience, but it is not well to take for granted that, if
conscience approve, we are absolved. The court of final appeal
is Jesus Christ, and what He thinks about each of us.
I.
MEN'S JUDGMENT OF Us.
Dr. Stalker says that in every man there are four men the
man the world sees, the man seen by the person who knows him
best, the man seen by himself, and the man whom God sees. We
can reduce the four to three by taking the first two together.
Under "men's" judgment we have (i) the judgment of the world,
and (ii) the judgment of our friends.
i. The World.
The world looks at each of us and sees a certain image of us.
It observes single actions of ours and watches our courses of
action, and gradually makes up its mind about our character and
conduct as a whole. It takes in a general impression of what we
are, and gives it expression in a brief judgment on us.
From morning till night we are all of us passing judgment : we
are passing judgment on the dead and the living, on those the
most remote and the most unknown to us, and on those who are
close to us, on the things we know best, and on the things of
which we know nothing. Men, and classes, and nations throw
back their judgments one at another, as if they were the most
real and unquestionable certainties, about which no one could
doubt. West judges east, and east judges west each with equal
confidence, each on grounds which are held to be clear and strong.
Kich judge poor, and poor judge rich, family judges family, and
neighbourhood judges neighbourhood, and party judges party.
The learned judge the practical and the busy, the busy and
i CORINTHIANS iv. 3, 4 145
practical the learned. Nothing escapes, nothing daunts criticism,
that is, the passing of judgment about which the judges do not
doubt. Judgment means the pronouncing on what a thing really
is, and the application to it of a rule, and standard, and law, which
we assume to be beyond dispute. To this rule and standard we
are for ever bringing not only actions and opinions, but whole
courses of conduct, with all their intricate train of accompanying
events, and what we call dispositions and characters, with their
endless lights and shades, their perplexing contradictions, their
terrible or pathetic mysteries. All comes naturally within our
range of judgment : on all, we seriously or lightly, conscientiously
or carelessly, wisely or stupidly, fairly or unfairly, exercise our
judgment. We cannot help it. It is a part of our lives.
These judgments swell into what is called public opinion
the great force which has to do with the changes of society and
institutions, which settles what shall stand and what shall fall.
They accumulate into the traditions, the moral standards of a
society or a generation, its governing beliefs, its tyrannical usages.
And in private life and affairs this unceasing and universal habit
of judging appears in all the manifold incidents of our relations
and intercourse, as members of a family or a body, as friends, or
acquaintances, as working with or working against others, as
indifferent lookers-on, as in accidental contact with them. From
morning to night we are judging what they do, and what they are ;
and they are judging us. Out of it grow our preferences, our
admirations, our likings and dislikings, our lifelong friendships;
it expresses itself in our strong words of approval and condemna-
tion, it hardens into our bitter animosities, our unconquerable
antipathies. A case of conduct comes before us, and whether
it is our duty to judge it, or only our amusement and our pastime,
we judge it. A person with all those things which make one man
different from another his special qualities, his habits and purposes
and ways comes before us and we judge him. And this is not
here and there, or now and then, but all day long and everywhere,
as a matter of course, with every one. It is part of the necessary
system of the world : we see clearly that without this exercise of
human judgment, in its many forms, the world could not go on.
And a great deal of it is righteous, wise, salutary judgment ;
judgment which supports what is good, which directs what is
i COR. 10
146 OUR THREE JUDGES
just and right, which brands and confounds evil. The quality of
human judgment is as various as the objects on which it is
exercised. There is responsible judgment and irresponsible, there
is deliberate and well-informed judgment, and there is off-hand
and cruelly ignorant judgment. But besides what is reasonable
and deliberate in judgment, there is a vast mass of judging with
no purpose, with no control, of which nothing is meant to come
or can come, except perhaps mischief. And what judging!
What amazing and easy generalizations from the slenderest facts !
What recklessness of evidence ! What ingenious constructions
put on the simplest and the most imaginary appearances ! What
defiant confidence and certainty, coupled with the grossest
indifference to the actual truth, and the grossest negligence to
ascertain it ! What superb facility in penetrating and divining
hidden corruption of motives for unavowed ends !
^f Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to
say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular
shade of brown, blue, or green to which it really belongs. It is
so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is
good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that
would oblige you to modify that opinion. 1
If Part of the fascination of Principal Eainy for those who
knew him was that this man, compelled to assume leadership, had
no ambition to do " eminent service " but only to be " eminently
spiritual " ; that, forced into the forefront of battle after battle,
he had set his hopes on the refinement and quiet of the life of
a scholar ; that, often appearing to be, or at least charged with
being, a wily ecclesiastic, he was really one with a child's heart
of trust and love and obedience towards God. It was this subtle
paradox of character and career that, in part, made him so
interesting alike to friend and opponent. 2
To your judgments give ye not the reins
With too much eagerness, like him who ere
The corn be ripe, is fain to count the grains:
For I have seen the briar through winter snows
Look sharp and stiff yet on a future day
High on its summit bear the tender rose:
And ship I've seen, that through the storm hath past,
Securely bounding o'er the watery way,
At entrance of the harbour wrecked at last. 8
1 George Eliot, Amos Barton. " Life of Principal JRainy, i. 147.
3 Dante, Paradiso, xiii. 130-38, tr. by Wright.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 3, 4 147
1. Now, for one to say, "With me it, is a very small thing
that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgement," is not a
conclusive proof of apostolic mission or apostolic life. Defiance
of man's judgment, indifference to public opinion, cannot ordin-
arily be considered a symptom of moral health, and it may be
the finishing stroke in the education of a scoundrel. Indeed, a
man can hardly be said to have thoroughly accomplished the
curriculum of the school of vice, and to have fairly earned his
diploma in crime, till he has beaten out of his nature all respect
for the moral judgments of his fellows, and bred in himself a
scorn for the verdict of public opinion. Even the pretence of
goodness, with an eye to the demands of public opinion, is a
moral crutch to a man. When he flings it away he loses the
last support of decency. A regard for the favourable judgment
of our fellows is usually the surviving grace which attends the
death-bed of the virtues ; and when she, the nurse, is discharged,
the man surrenders himself to a moral collapse.
In a high sense, and to most men, it is a great and momentous
thing to be "judged of man's judgement." Very few of us are
aware of the reinforcements which our virtue receives from the
pressure of our neighbour's opinion, and the persistent impact of
the moral sense that is diffused in the social atmosphere in which
we move. A man generally lives up to what is expected of him.
The organized life of which he is a part presses him into place,
and keeps his feet in the routine of duty. The habit of the
community finds him, holds him, becomes to him law, breeds in
him a personal habit which he no more thinks of breaking than
a planet thinks of leaping from the clutch of the law of gravita-
tion. Hence the peril, when a boy goes out from the shelter of
his home, and the familiar faces of his native town, and plunges
a lone swimmer, unnoted and unrecognized, in the turbid torrent
of life that surges in some vast metropolis. The faiths, the
principles, the moral habits with which his nature is stocked,
these he takes with him ; and if they be of the right sort, they
will bear him up, and he will breast the tide with a strong,
manful stroke. But all the more he will need them, because he
leaves behind him the safeguards of loving, watchful eyes.
The more closely we study the ways of men, the more clearly
we recognize that the heavier weights we can pile on the cage
148 OUR THREE JUDGES
in which we pen our hungry passions, the less danger there is
that those passions will upset the cage, and break loose in our
life. The judgments of our fellow-men the men whom we
meet in the streets, in business, in social contact serve as
weights for this purpose. If we defy those judgments, not only
do we suffer smart and loss in our outward life, but generally
which is far worse we suffer impairment of moral power in our
inward life. For a man to live under the perpetual challenge
of the violated conscience of his fellows hardens him, embitters
him, gives a morbid and distorted action to his own conscience.
He is apt to yield to the restless push of whim and passion.
Even if he honestly engages in the fight with sin, he is like a
soldier who has been driven from behind the breastworks, and is
compelled to face his foe alone in the open field with his naked
sword.
Tf The public opinion fostered by a Tiberius or a Nero was of
little worth to a man like St. Paul. But the public opinion of
to-day bears the imprint of the Divine Christ. Something from
that peerless, spotless Soul who brought God to this earth has
flowed into the great thought of the world. Men have caught,
in fragments at least, His interpretation of life, His ideal of life,
His law of life. Very imperfectly do the actual lives of men
reflect all these ; but His image lies in broken lines on the turbid
pool of our modern life, and the strange Divine light in His soul
has shot through the conscience of Christendom. The civilization
in which we live is a civilization that bears the finger-marks of
Christ. What we call public opinion is the invisible breath, the
subtle aroma, of a Christian civilization.
^[ Habitually to ignore and set at naught what other people
think may be as foolish and as fatal as habitually to consult and
wait upon it. Athanasius contra mundum it is a magnificent
phrase, and it stands for a great truth; but I fear it has to
answer for a good deal of stupid and obstinate wrong-headedness
which is not always called by its proper name. 1
^[ Christian public opinion, the expression of the Spirit of
Christ in the united will, emotion, and intellect of human
societies, has wrought, and is working miracles. It has raised
the standard of purity, of honesty, of loving-kindness ; and above
all, and including all, it has established the sense of brotherhood,
of mutual obligation and responsibility. But it has not had its
1 G. Jackson.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 3, 4 149
perfect work. It has been paralysed by timidity, the fear of
persecution and ridicule, the fear of plain speaking ; it has been
seduced by temptation, the personal desire for ease and pleasure,
the corporate desire for power and wealth. But more than all,
it has been weakened by division, and obscured by controversy and
by an exaggerated sense of the paramount duty of withstanding
erring brethren to the face because they are to be blamed. 1
2. But for most of us the peril does not lie that way, but
rather in a tame subservience, a too ready compliance with the
ways and thoughts of the world about us. Is there anything
that we need more in every department of life to-day than the
spirit of sturdy, uncompromising independence which breathes
through these words of the Apostle : " With me it is a very
small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judge-
ment ; he that judgeth me is the Lord " ? We want men, like
him, who fear God and have no other fear.
U The mischief which arises from habitual anxiety about the
good opinion of men is more than can be told. It is speaking
strongly, but truly, to say that it makes the whole of our life
unchristian; that it dethrones our Maker from His lawful
authority, and sets up an idol in His place; that it makes us
heathens as completely, for all purposes of our souls' danger, as
if we were to bow down and offer sacrifice to a graven image. 2
If Take the case of the famous Francis Bacon. Bacon's
greatness on its intellectual side it is almost impossible to
exaggerate. It was his proud, and by no means empty, boast
that he had taken all knowledge to be his province. Such a
vision of truth, such power to comprehend and to speak it, have
rarely been granted to any man. In sheer intellectual might he
stands, in our nation at least, with the one exception of
Shakespeare, without a peer. And yet, notwithstanding all
his magnificent gifts, we see him stooping to almost incredible
meanness and perfidy, suffering himself to become the abject tool
of a wretch like Buckingham, a mere " chessman," as he himself
put it, in the hand of a monarch so weak and contemptibles a
James i. What is the explanation ? Why this strange mingling
of mud and marble, of meanness and magnificence? Let Dean
Church, who of all Bacon's critics has, perhaps, understood him
best, answer : " There was," he says, " in Bacon's ' self ' a deep
and fatal flaw. He was a pleaser of men. There was in him that
subtle fault, noted and named, both by religion and philosophy,
1 J. H. F. Peile, The Reproach of the Gospel, 194. 8 T. Arnold.
150 OUR THREE JUDGES
ill the apecrfcos of Aristotle, the dvQpcoTrdpeoncos of St. Paul, which is
more common than it is pleasant to think even in good people,
but which, if it becomes dominant in a character, is ruinous to
truth and power." In all history is there any warning so tragic
of the shipwreck that men suffer when they trim their sails to
catch the favour of the many or the great ? 1
U It is clear from Bishop Wilkinson's recorded words that no
man was ever more intensely sensitive to the least breath of
opposition or hostility; he instinctively desired and valued the
good opinion of the world. But he valued his conscience and his
message more, and never modified the truths he had to tell;
while his very sensitiveness kept him from ever presuming or
dictating, and gave him an instinct for conciliation which was
never blunted. 2
^ Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men, for
whether they judge well of thee or ill, thou art not on that account
other than thyself. 3
ii. Our Friends.
1. The man seen by the persons who know him best may be
quite a different man from the man the world sees : for every man
has two sides one to face the world with, and one to show to
the friend of his heart.
TJ I once had a friend. The popular opinion about him was
that he was very quiet and rather dull, without ideas, or
experience, or character of his own. Such was the man the
world saw. But the man I saw was quite a different being a
man of the most genial humour, who could break into conversation
the most lively and discursive or the most serious and profound,
with a mind richly stored with unusual knowledge, a fertile
imagination, and a moral nature which had passed through all
the great experiences of the human soul and all the peculiar
experience of our new time. 4
Ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder,
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you.
There, in turn, I stand with them and praise you,
But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,
Come out on the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.
1 G. Jackson. 2 A. C. Benson, The Leaves of the Tree, 119.
3 Thomas a Kempis. * J. Stalker.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 3, 4 151
2. But if the too severe judgments of others are hard for us
to bear, their too favourable judgments are far more perilous to
us. We are so apt to assume that all the pleasant things said
about us are true, to be satisfied with approbation which we know
to be nothing but superficial. We each, no doubt, if we choose,
know our own weaknesses and our own sins; perhaps they are
unknown to every one else, perhaps they are known only to some
few of our friends. Yet if we seem to be accepted by those who
do not know them, with favourable judgment and trusting affec-
tion perhaps respected and loved for our external pleasantness,
treated as we know we should not be treated if they knew our
real inner selves is it not a dangerous temptation to us to accept
the affection and the approbation as our true merit, and to forget
the weakness or the sin that is not known ?
Greatly his foes he dreads, but more his friends;
He hurts me most who lavishly commends. 1
II.
OUR JUDGMENT OF OUESELVES.
We pass from the judgment of others to our own. " I judge
not mine own self."
1. The Apostle is not to be taken here as contradicting what
he says in other places. In one of these same letters to the
Corinthians he says, " If we would judge ourselves, we should not
be judged." So he does not mean here that he is entirely without
any estimate of his own character or actions. That he did in
some sense judge himself is evident from the next clause, because
he goes on to say, "I know nothing against myself." If he
acquitted himself, he must previously have been judging himself.
His acquittal of himself, however, is not to be understood as if it
covered the whole ground of his life and character ; it is to be
confined to the subject in hand his faithfulness as a steward of
the mysteries of God. But though there is nothing in that region
of his life which he can charge against himself as unfaithfulness,
he goes otf to say, " Yet am I not hereby justified."
All of us who have read the life of St. Paul will admit not
only that he was sincere after his conversion to Christ, but that
1 Churchill, The Apology.
152 OUR THREE JUDGES
also as a Pharisee of the Pharisees he was a man of integrity even
when he persecuted the Church of Christ, because he did it
ignorantly in unbelief. St. Paul was a Pharisee, but never a
hypocrite ; he never desired to live under false pretences, but was
always faithful to his convictions, even when they were mistaken.
He therefore could say especially now as an Apostle, " I know
nothing against myself " ; in other words, " As far as I know, I
am not guilty of any unfaithfulness in my office ; I desire to be
faithful, but I do not put up my judgment against yours, or
against the judgment of the world. I was sadly mistaken when
I was a Pharisee ; and therefore I have learned not to fall back
upon my own opinion as a court of final appeal " I judge not
mine own self." The strength of my life is not in my personal
opinion, though I am not conscious of having been guilty of any
insincerity. My conscious integrity doubtless adds individuality
to my convictions, and strength to my life ; but that is not the
sustaining force of my life, it is not that from which I draw my
strength. Though I know nothing against myself ; yet am I not
hereby justified.
H Grant that you acquit yourself at the bar of conscience, that
the acquittal is impartial, is sincere. Are you competent as a
judge ? Have you before you all the data on which the verdict
must be founded ? How much do you know of yourself ? At
this very moment your friends, your neighbours, even casual
strangers, discern faults in you which you do not actually and
perhaps may not ever suspect. They see one side of you ; you your-
self another. Yours is the larger fraction, but it is only a fraction
still. There are intricate complications in the heart of every
man, which far transcend his powers to unravel. At times we
may almost realize, not indeed the knowledge of ourselves, but
the knowledge of our ignorance of self. A shock is given to the
moral system by some unwonted occurrence a disappointment,
a loss, a sickness, a bereavement, a desertion, a surprise of tempta-
tion, a victory of sin. A momentary light is flashed in upon the
man's heart, and reveals to him his inability, his meanness, his
inconsistency, his degradation. Then he begins to suspect how
little he has known of his true self. But the flash is gone, and
the old darkness gathers about him. What do you remember
now of the eventful history of some one sin which has long
become a habit the warnings, the compunctions, the counter-
acting influences, the growing attractions, the faint resistance,
becoming feebler and feebler, as the allurement became stronger
i CORINTHIANS iv. 3, 4 153
and stronger ? How little do you scrutinize, record, realize the
motives which urge you to the conduct of to-day or to-morrow,
too absorbed in the energy of the processes, and too eager about
the success of the results ! Yet just here, in this past history,
here, in these directing motives, are the main elements in which
your responsibility consists, the chief data on which your final
sentence must be based. 1
T[ It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be a
judge in his own cause. 2
The seas that shake and thunder will close our mouths one day,
The storms that shriek and whistle will blow our breaths away.
The dust that flies and whitens will mark not where we trod.
What matters then our judging? we are face to face with
God. 3
2. The man as seen by himself is a very different one from the
man seen by the world or even by his closest friend. Is he better
or worse ? He is both.
(1) In some respects we all, perhaps, know ourselves to be
better than we are supposed to be. There are bright visitations
in the mind which we could not communicate to another if we
tried. Then there are some of the best things which we dare
not speak of; humility, for example, spoken of is humility no
more. What religious man can fully describe the tragic moments
when his soul lies prostrate and penitent before God, or the
golden moments when he is closest to the Saviour? Such
things are soiled by fingering. Besides, in all highly toned
minds there is a modesty about explanations; and even in the
frankest friendship there is many a word, many an act, which
we know is misinterpreted to our disadvantage, but which we
cannot explain.
"Where have you been, my brother?
For I missed you from the street ? "
"I have been away for a night and a day
At the great God's judgment-seat."
"And what did you find, my brother,
When your judging there was done ? "
" Weeds in my garden, dust in my doors,
And my roses dead in the sun :
1 J. B. Lightfoot. 2 Pascal, Thoughts. Dora Sigerson Shorter.
154 OUR THREE JUDGES
"And the lesson I brought back with me,
Like silence, from above
On the Judgment-Throne there is room alone
For the Lord whose name is Love." 1
(2) All men know themselves to be, in some respects, better
than they are supposed to be. But do we not also know ourselves
to be worse ? What do we say not with the tongue with which
we would speak to another, but with that voice with which the
soul speaks to itself ? Have we never said to ourselves, " If people
only knew me as I know myself, they would scorn me; if my
friend knew me as I really am, he would be my friend no more " ?
Away back in our life, are there not hours about which we neither
could, would, nor should speak ? Is there ever a day that there
do not pass through our mind thoughts of pettiness and vanity,
movements of covetousness, envy and pride, perhaps dark
doubts and blasphemies ? Have we no secret habits and sinful
inclinations and desires which dare not see the light ?
If Great were the wrath and consternation of the pirates
when they saw their dilemma; for, having no provisions, they
must either starve or seek succour at the fort. They chose the
latter course, and bore away for the St. John's. A few casks of
Spanish wine yet remained, and nobles and soldiers, fraternizing
in the common peril of a halter, joined in a last carouse. As the
wine mounted to their heads, in the mirth of drink and desperation,
they enacted their own trial. One personated the judge, another
the commandant; witnesses were called, with arguments and
speeches on either side. " Say what you like," said one of them,
after hearing the counsel for the defence ; " but if Laudonniere
does not hang us all, I will never call him an honest man." 2
Tf You constantly hear a great many people saying I am very
bad, and perhaps you have been yourself disposed lately to think
me very good. I am neither the one nor the other. I am very
self-indulgent, very proud, very obstinate, and very resentful ; on
the other side, I am very upright nearly as just as I suppose
it is possible for man to be in this world exceedingly fond of
making people happy, and devotedly reverent to all true mental
or moral power. 1 never betrayed a trust never wilfully did an
unkind thing and never, in little or large matters, depreciated
another that I might raise myself. I believe I once had affections
1 L. Maclean Watt.
3 Park man, Pioneers of France in the New World, i. 76.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 3, 4 155
as warm as most people ; but partly from evil chance, and partly
from foolish misplacing of them, they have got tumbled down and
broken to pieces. It is a very great, in the long-run the greatest,
misfortune of my life that, on the whole, my relations, cousins
and so forth, are persons with whom I can have no sympathy, and
that circumstances have always somehow or another kept me out
of the way of the people of whom I could have made friends.
So that I have no friendships, and no loves.
Now you know the best and worst of me; and you may
rely upon it it is the truth. If you hear people say I am utterly
hard and cold, depend upon it it is untrue. Though I have no
friendships and no loves, I cannot read the epitaph of the Spartans
at Thermopylae with a steady voice to the end ; and there is an
old glove in one of my drawers that has lain there these eighteen
years, which is worth something to me yet. If, on the other hand,
you ever feel disposed to think me particularly good, you will be
just as wrong as most people are on the other side. My pleasures
are in seeing, thinking, reading, and making people happy (if I
can, consistently with my own comfort). And I take these
pleasures. And I suppose, if my pleasures were in smoking,
betting, dicing, and giving pain, I should take those pleasures.
It seems to me that one man is made one way, and one another
the measure of effort and self-denial can never be known, except
by each conscience to itself. Mine is small enough. 1
More than your schoolmen teach, within
Myself, alas ! I know ;
Too dark ye cannot paint the sin,
Too small the merit show.
I bow my forehead to the dust,
I veil my eyes for shame,
And urge, in trembling self-distrust,
A prayer without a claim. 2
III.
CHRIST'S JUDGMENT OF Us.
The final judgment to which St. Paul appealed was his
Master's. " He that judgeth me is the Lord " ; in other words, I
am His steward, and to Him am I ultimately responsible. I do
not come to you for your approval to sustain me in my work ;
1 Ruskin, in E. T. Cook's Life of Ruskin, i. 490.
2 Whittier, "The Eternal Goodness."
156 OUR THREE JUDGES
I do not go to men in general for their approval as the one
confidence upon which I shall lean ; I do not come to my own
soul, to my own sense of integrity and fidelity, as the one thing
that is to support me; I must go back to my Master: the one
who has sent me forth to the world in His service, and I must
stand or fall by what He shall say.
U He who judges us is God. From this judgment there is no
escape, and no hiding-place. The testimony of our fellows will
as little avail us in the day of judgment, as the help of our fellows
will avail us in the hour of death. We may as well think of
seeking a refuge in the applause of men from the condemnation
of God, as we may think of seeking a refuge in the power or the
skill of men from the mandate of God, that our breath shall
depart from us. 1
Lord and Master of us all!
Whate'er our name or sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine.
Thou judgest us; Thy purity
Doth all our lusts condemn;
The love that draws us nearer Thee
Is hot with wrath to them.
Our thoughts lie open to Thy sight;
And, naked to thy glance,
Our secret sins are in the light
Of Thy pure countenance.
Thy healing pains, a keen distress
Thy tender light shines in;
Thy sweetness is the bitterness,
Thy grace the pang of sin.
Yet, weak and blinded though we be,
Thou dost our service own ;
We bring our varying gifts to thee,
And thou rejectest none. 2
1. The great truth of the judgment of God, the perfect
all-knowing judgment to which all other judgments are as
nothing, sweeps away all the sham and self-deception of double
1 Chalmers. 3 Whittier, " Our Master."
i CORINTHIANS iv. 3, 4 157
lives. " He that judgeth rne is the Lord." Can we, on our knees
before our heavenly Father, for one moment be satisfied with the
undeserved approbation of those who do not know us as we are ?
When we understand and remember that all things are naked
and open to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do, we
can no longer rest satisfied with any successful concealment of
part of our character from human eyes. It is as though a
searching flood of pure light were thrown upon our inmost lives,
forcing us to purge them of all that is unworthy, bracing us to
attain to a life lived in the realization of the pure presence of
God. For the power of the truth of the judgment of God is
found in this that it is the supreme declaration that there lies
before us all a goal to be attained, an ideal to be realized, a high
standard by which to live. We need it all our lives, in youth
and in older life. It is so natural to acquiesce in all sorts of
conventional standards of goodness and duty, standards which we
know to be unworthy of our Christian calling, yet which satisfy
the demands of the conscience of our society. But to each single
soul face to face with the eternal Father, these lower standards
must fade into their true worthlessness. The Divine ideal of
goodness purity and truth and love does not change with the
shifting ideals of society, does not make exceptions to suit the
weaknesses of human nature. That is the ideal which we have
vowed to keep before us; that is the ideal by which God will
judge us.
U The one principle which governs the entire vision of Jesus
is that Love judges, and that it is by Love that men are tested.
The men and women of loving disposition, who have wrought
many little acts of kindness which were to them so natural and
simple that they do not so much as recollect them, find themselves
mysteriously selected for infinite rewards. The men and women
of opposite disposition, in spite of all their outward rectitude of
behaviour, find themselves numbered with the goats. A cup of
cold water given to a child, a meal bestowed upon a beggar,
a garment shared with the naked these things purchase heaven.
One who Himself had been thirsty, hungry, and naked, judges
their worth) and He judges by His own remembered need. It is
love alone that is Divine, love alone that prepares the soul for
Divine felicity. 1
1 W. J. Dawson, The Empire of Love, 76.
158 OUR THREE JUDGES
2. " He that judgeth me is the Lord." Mark the tense of
the verb present, not future; "judgeth," not "shall judge."
Side by side, concurrently with the imperfect and fallible
judgment of man, there goes on unerring and unresting the perfect
judgment of God. There is in the Acts of the Apostles a very
striking picture of a little scene in a court of justice in Palestine.
The prisoner is St. Paul; standing round him like wild beasts
hungry for their prey are his accusers, "bringing against him
many and grievous charges." With one word he silences them
all "Caesarem appello!" "I appeal unto Caesar." After that
they have no more that they can do. And for us too our Csesar
sits upon the throne, and to Him may the daily appeal for
judgment be made : " He that judgeth us is the Lord."
^[ I have read somewhere of a young musician listening to the
first rendering of his first great composition. He stood up above
the orchestra, and as he watched how the music which was the
child of his own soul stirred and swayed the hearts of the
listening multitude, a strange new emotion swept over his own
heart : and yet through all he kept his eye fixed on one who sat
there amidst the throng, the face of one who was a past master
in the art in which he himself was but a beginner; and every
change in the master's face meant more to him than the thunders
and plaudits of the crowd. 1
T| The governor of a Crown Colony may attach some importance
to colonial opinion, but he reports home; and it is what the
people in Downing Street will say that he thinks about. We
have to report home; and it is the King whom we serve to
whom we have to give an account. 2
1 G. Jackson, * A. Maclaren.
JUDGING PREMATURELY.
159
LITERATURE.
Adams (J. C.), The Leisure of God, 143.
Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, i. 8.
Colenso (J. W.), Natal Sermons, i. 72.
Dale (R. W.), Weekday Sermons, 38.
Gray (W. A.), Laws and Landmarks of the Spiritual Life, 41.
Home (W.), Religious Life and Thought, 86.
Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons in Outline, 217.
Howatt (J. R.), The Children's Angel, 67.
Johnson (H.), From Love to Praise, 165.
Knight (J. J.), Sermons in Brief, 46.
Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., ii. 19.
Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul's, 551.
Lightfoot (J. B.), Sermons in St. PauPs Cathedral, 193. ,
Lilley (A. L.), The Soul of St. Paul, 179.
Neale (J. M.), Sermons in Sackville College Chapel, ii. 177.
Parker (J.), Studies in Texts, i. 173.
Sauter (B.), The Sunday Epistles, 30.
Skrine (J. H.), The Heart's Counsel, 8.
Stevenson (J. F.), God and a Future Life, 55.
Whitworth (W. A.), Christian Thought on Present Day Questions, 200.
Christian World Pulpit, xliv. 257 (Harries) ; Ixxiv. 410 (Henson).
Church of England Pulpit, Ii. 93 (Udny); lix. 112 (Jackson).
Cliurchrnan's Pulpit : Third Sunday in Advent : i. 482 (Crosse), 483
(Mulchahey), 485 (Farquhar), 488 (Shipman), 490 (Johnson).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., ii. 193 (Church).
160
JUDGING PREMATURELY.
Judge nothing before the time. i Cor. iv. 5.
1. THE time of which the Apostle speaks is, of course, the Advent
of the Lord. " Judge nothing," he says, " before the time, until
the Lord come." He is thinking of his own character and work,
which certain Corinthian teachers have been endeavouring to
asperse. And what he declares is that in questions pertaining
to his personal sincerity he admitted the authority of no earthly
tribunal, he did not even rely on the verdict of conscience, he
made his appeal to Christ. It was for Christ's approval that he
worked here ; it was Christ's vindication that he expected here-
after. When the end came, so he implies, the Corinthians would
know what manner of man he had been pure in motive, upright
in conduct, faithful in witness. Meanwhile, if anything in his
conduct and methods seemed perplexing, they were to avoid all
harsh and uncharitable opinions, possess their souls in patience,
and wait for the full and final explanation " when the Lord
comes."
2. Now, what is the exact force and import of the precept ?
Is it meant that we are to form and express no judgment what-
ever upon human conduct, upon anything that we see and hear
of in the world around us ? This cannot possibly be meant, and
for more reasons than one.
(1) The first reason is that, if we think at all, many judgments,
of the mind if not of the lips, are inevitable. What is the process
that is going on with every human being, every day from morning
to night? Is it not something of this kind? Obser\^,tion is
perpetually collecting facts and bringing them under the notice
of reason. Eeason sits at home, at the centre of the soul holding
in her hands a twofold rule of law the law of truth and the law
i COR. ii
1 62 JUDGING PREMATURELY
of right. As observation conies in from its excursions, laden
with its stock of news, and penetrates thus laden into the
chamber of reason, reason judges each particular : by the law of
right, if it be a question of conduct ; by the law of truth, if it be
a question of faith or opinion. In a very great number of cases
the laws of truth and right, as held by the individual reason, are
very imperfect laws indeed ; still reason does the best she can
with them, and goes on sitting in her own court, judging and
revising judgments from morning until night. Probably two-
thirds of the sentences we utter, when closely examined, turn out
to be judgments of some kind ; and if our mental or moral natures
are healthy, judgments of some kind issue from us as naturally as
flour does from a working corn-mill.
How can it be otherwise ? God has given to every man a
law or sense of right. As a consequence, every action done by
others produces upon us a certain impression, which, when we
put it into words, is a judgment. When we hear of a monstrous
fraud, of a great act of profligacy, or of a great act of cruelty, we
are affected in one way ; when we hear of some self-sacrificing
or generous deed, of some conspicuous instance of devotion to
duty, we are affected in another t we condemn or we approve as
the case may be. Woe to us, if we do not thus condemn or
approve ; for this would mean that our moral nature was drugged
or dead.
Tf In our day men sometimes think it good-natured to
treat truth and falsehood as at bottom much the same thing;
but this cannot be done for long with impunity. In the first
age of Christianity it was not so. " Ye have an unction from
the Holy One," wrote St. John to the first Christians, " and ye
know all things. I have not written unto you because ye know
not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the
truth. Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the
Christ ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son."
This direct language of St. John would jar upon the ear of a
generation which thinks that something is to be said for every
falsehood, and something to be urged against every truth ; but
it is the natural language of those to whom religious truth is a
real thing, and not a passing sentiment or fancy. The law of
truth within us necessarily leads to our forming judgments no
less than does the law of right. 1
1 H. P. Liddon.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 5 163
^[ One great evil of sin is that it takes away our right to be
indignant when other people sin, and so in time our standard of
thought is lowered to their scale. 1
(2) In the second place, Scripture stimulates and trains the
judicial faculty within us, making its activity keener and wider
than would have been possible without it. The servants of God
in the Bible are intended to rouse us to admire and imitate them ;
and what is this but a judgment of one kind ? The sinners in
the Bible, from Cain to Judas Iscariot, are intended to create in
us moral repulsion, not for their persons, but for their crimes ;
and what is this but an inward and emphatic judgment of another
kind ?
TI Then came the maxim that the indignation expressed by
Him against hypocrisy was no precedent for us, inasmuch as He
spoke as a Divine person. I contended that it was human, and
that if a man did not feel something of the same spirit under
similar circumstances, if his blood could not boil with indignation,
nor the syllable of withering justice rise to his lips, he could not
even conceive His spirit. Mr. E agreed to this, to my surprise,
and told an anecdote. " Could you not have felt indignation for
that, Robertson ? " My blood was at the moment running fire
not at his story, however, and I remembered that I had once in
my life stood before my fellow-creature with words that scathed
and blasted; once in my life I felt a terrible might: I knew,
and rejoiced to know, that I was inflicting the sentence of a
coward's and a liar's hell. 2
3. The words of St. Paul, then, do not forbid us to form
judgments and act on them, they simply convey a warning
against premature judgments, an admonition in regard to those
hasty and ill-considered verdicts we are apt to pronounce both
on people and on facts, while in reality the elements for a sound
and safe verdict are not in our hands. There are many facts,
enterprises, events, and problems in regard to which it is of the
very greatest importance to remember the rule of the text,
"Judge nothing before the time." They are all those matters
into whicli there enters the element of ignorance, uncertainty,
and change. They are those matters in which the fact must be
reckoned with that you may be changed, or that they may be
1 Phillips Brooks, Life, 79.
2 Robertson, in Life and Letters of the Heu. F. W. Hoberlsmi, 212.
164 JUDGING PREMATURELY
changed, or that surroundings may be changed, or that the amount
of light may be changed, so that data that are hidden now may
be known hereafter, to the altering of human estimates, the
overturning of human views.
Let this be lead unto thy feet, that slow
Thy steps may be (as of one tired) to give,
When not convinced by sight, a yes or no.
For sunk is he 'mid fools in lowest place,
Who no distinction makes, and to the same
Conclusion doth arrive in either case.
Since popular opinion is inclined
Erroneous judgments oftentimes to frame,
Self-love comes in, the intellect to blind. 1
(1) Judge nothing before the time, in view of possible changes
in yourself. We all change. We change steadily, we change
necessarily, in the process of the years. We change in structure,
change in intellect, change in spirit. Our perceptions, our tastes,
our needs, all of them alter. And therefore what seems worthless
at one stage of our history becomes valuable at another, not
because the thing is different in itself, but because we are
different who have come to prize it.
Here is a lesson for youth. There are few things to which
the youthful are so prone as the practice of judging judging
men, judging methods, judging facts, judging books; and they
are continually judging before the time. Youth is often very
dogmatic, even when Christianized. It is apt to be contemptuous
towards what does not come up to its youthful standard, de-
preciatory towards what does not square with its youthful
tastes. Take the views of youth in regard to qualities of
character. Certain of these qualities get scant justice from the
young patience, for instance. How little do the young think
of patience in comparison with self-reliance, fortitude, boldness
of initiative, brilliance of attack. They are all for action, all for
aggressiveness, all, too, for the men in whom action, and aggres-
siveness are the predominant features. But in setting slight
store by patience, assigning it a lesser function, relegating it to a
lower place, they are judging before the time.
' Or pass from qualities of character to modes of presenting
1 Dante, Paradiso, xiii., tr. by Wright.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 5 165
truth, and the attitude towards these. The young are often
enamoured of the showy the showy in religious testimony, the
showy in religious teaching. What draws them and holds them
is often the element of novelty, the ingenious in thought, the
rhetorical in language, the exciting in appeal. And yet, in look-
ing down on the quiet and homely plain, sober truth, plainly
and soberly preached they are judging before the time.
If When Dr. Wayland was president of Brown University,
and professor of moral science, his eldest son, who was a senior,
in reciting to him one day, drew from his father, by a question,
the expression of a certain opinion. " The esteemed author of this
book," said the young man, holding up his father's text-book on
moral science which the class was using, "holds a different
opinion." " The author of that book, my son," said Dr. Wayland
quietly, "knows more now than he did ten years ago." The
teacher of any science who does not know more now than he
did ten years ago, who never finds occasion to modify and
qualify and reshape his utterances, is probably a cheap and poor
sort of teacher. 1
(2) But again, judge nothing before the time, in view of
possible changes in the matters to be judged. These changes may
be real and great. There are, for instance, the changes that are
incident to a natural progress, from the partial to the perfect,
from the provisional to the final, from the rudimentary stage to
the developed, from the dust and confusion of the beginning to
the faultlessness of the ending. Hence the commonplace, so
often quoted and so often exemplified, that the public should
not see half-done work.
Tf I know a place of worship, the interior of which exhibits
an amount of comfort, completeness, and beauty beyond the
aspect of most, and certainly in advance of its own original con-
dition. Yet in the first confusion, when old arrangements were
disturbed, levels altered, and pews removed, one visitor after
another entered the church, and the verdict of each was unfavour-
able: "The work should never have been begun. The building
should never have been touched. The result will be failure and
disfigurement." So the grumblers went on, till, to avoid a
general panic, as well as to secure peace for the actual work,
those in charge had to lock the door. The fault-finding was all
premature, as the fault-finders themselves acknowledged. Things
1 Washington Gladden, Where does the Sky Begin, 66.
1 66 JUDGING PREMATURELY
fell into place and order and harmony; panel matched with
panel, colour blended with colour, and the satiefactoriness of
the final result justified the disorder and inconvenience of the
temporary means. 1
Tf When an artist has projected a great picture, when he has
completed all his studies, conceived his plan, and decided upon
his methods, he proceeds to make his preliminary sketches. He
roughly draws his various figures, in such postures and with such
general expression as he means them to have in the canvas where
he will finally place them. They are roughly done at first, and,
taken by themselves, suggest no adequate notion of what the
general composition will be. Perhaps he even paints each sketch
with some elaboration. But even then it would be impossible
to make a fair estimate of any of these carefully studied figures,
or pronounce upon their colouring ; because in the mind of the
artist every one of these details has a definite relation to every
other, and neither face nor figure, outline nor colouring, can be
understood, except as it is thought of in connection with all the
rest. So the real value of all these separate particulars cannot
be estimated alone. But when the artist begins to draw them
in together, when he groups these sketches on one surface, when
he blends the colours, and combines them in relation to the lights
and shadows of the picture, then one may begin to see, and not
till then, all that the studies contained. They can be interpreted
only by their final combination, their place in the finished
picture. 2
(3) Judge nothing before the time, in view of possible changes
in surrounding circumstances. Changes may yet reveal the use
of the object in question evince the need of it, prove the value
of it, and mal^e you thankful it was ever provided. Till then,
however puzzling the thing may be, be patient, be watchful, and
do not judge unfavourably before the time.
If There are certain religious definitions, certain theological
formulas, the meaning and value of which are by no means very
clear at first. They are so dry, so abstract, so rigid, so formal in
character, so antiquated in phrase, that they seem at times a
simple clog on the memory, mere dead-weight on the mind.
" How useless such lore ! " you say. " Surely the time might be
better occupied, the faculties might be better exercised, than in
memorizing and storing such arid material as this ! " But in
speaking thus, you may be judging before the time. Truth
1 W. A. Gray. a J. C. Adams.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 5 167
summed up and expressed in fixed and formal dogma may lie in
the mind and the memory, unappealed to and unused, so long as
there is nothing to disturb. But let circumstances change. Let
the sky be dark with the clouds of religious doubt, let the air
be agitated with the winds of religious controversy, let the path-
way be blocked with the drifts of religious error, and then comes
the use of such statements as these, making the road plain,
keeping the road open, for those who can put them to use, while
those who have no such provision are left to wander amidst the
mists and the quagmires of fanaticism, fickleness, and doctrinal
mistake. 1
TJ To summer travellers in Norway, ignorant of the imple-
ments of the country, there is a frequent cause of curiosity in
certain cumbrous constructions of wood, disposed at intervals by
the side of the public roads. There they lie, baking and peeling
in the hot summer sunshine, never used, yet never removed.
What is the meaning of them ? They are lumber on the road.
They are eyesores to the tourists. They scare the horses. Surely
the best thing to do with them is to break them up into posts
for the fences, or faggots for the fire. That is perhaps your
impression, as you look at them on a bright July day. But if
you visited Norway amidst the snows of the winter or spring,
you would be thankful that these homely contrivances are in
readiness. They are simply wooden snow-ploughs of unusual
shape and size, kept on the spot for the use of the peasants who
maintain the road. To say on a summer day that they are useless
is plainly to judge before the time. 2
(4) Judge nothing before the time, in view of possible changes
in the amount of light, with the consequent unveiling of facts at
present concealed, data and evidence at present hid.
If The supreme Court of the United States, just after the
inauguration of President Buchanan, decided (over the case of Dred
Scott) that slaves were property and not persons. This decision
Lincoln, after succeeding Buchanan, challenged. At New York
on 27th February 1860, he said: "Perhaps you will say, the
Supreme Court has decided the disputed constitutional question
in your favour. Not quite so. But waiving the lawyer's dis-
tinction between dictum and decision, the court has decided the
question for you in a sort of way. The court has substantially
said, it is your constitutional right to take slaves into the Federal
Territories, and to hold them there as property. When I say
the decision was made in a sort of way, I mean that it was made
W. A. Gray. Ibid.
168 JUDGING PREMATURELY
in a divided court, by a bare majority of the judges, and they
not quite agreeing with one another in the reasons for making
it ; that it is so made that its avowed supporters disagree with
one another about its meaning, and that it was mainly based
upon a mistaken statement of fact the statement in the opinion
that ' the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly
affirmed in the Constitution.' " 1
4. Hitherto we have spoken of matters that may often be
settled in time ; we revert under this head to the standpoint
of St. Paul, and speak of matters that for the most part must
be left to eternity. Here a wide field opens up, suggesting at
least four different cautions.
(1) Judge no one's character before the time. As a rule, you
have not the evidence. The outer life which man sees may be
different from the inner life which God sees, and may lie
beyond your analysis, because beyond your ken. You see your
neighbour's failures, but not his aspirations; his stumbles into
what is wrong, but not his struggles after what is right; his
occasional sins, but not his fierce and lifelong temptations. God
and God alone strikes the balance; let God and God alone be
the arbiter. Judge not till the last great day, when He admits
you to participation in His knowledge, and asks you to assent
to His award.
^f Sometimes, under the most unpromising appearances, there
is a fund of hidden good. We all of us have known people with
a manner so rude as to be almost brutal, whom we have after-
wards discovered to have very tender hearts. And persons are
to be found who have a reputation for stinginess, but who really
save up their money that they may give it to the poor with-
out letting the world know what they do. In the same way we
have met people whose conversation strikes us as uniformly
frivolous, or at least as wanting in seriousness, and yet it may
be that this is the effect of a profoundly serious, but shy, reserved
nature, bent on concealing from any human eye the severe self-
scrutinizing, self-repressing life within. 2
^[ While we are coldly discussing a man's career, sneering at
his mistakes, blaming his rashness, and labelling his opinions
" Evangelical and narrow," or " Latitudinarian and Pantheistic,"
or "Anglican and supercilious" that man, in his solitude, is
perhaps shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is a hard one,
1 The History of North America, xv. 106. 2 H. P. Liddon.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 5 169
because strength and patience are failing him to speak the
difficult word, and do the difficult deed. 1
(2) Judge no one's work before the time least of all, if that
work be spiritual. Much of the truest and finest spiritual work
that goes on is of a kind that defies tabulation. It refuses to be
set down in statistics, or grouped in anecdotes, or presented in
any tangible or calculable form whatsoever. The balance of the
sanctuary is a rarer and more delicate instrument than the balance
of the shop, though the balance of the shop too often takes its place.
You cannot weigh the fruits of the Tree of Life as a shopman
weighs apples and oranges over his counter, nor can you count
the number of conversions as a shopman counts the coins in his
till. The mistake of many, both without the Church and within
it, lies in forgetting this, and importing the commercial principle
of so much visible return for so much visible outlay a principle
which is degrading to the work, discouraging to the worker, and
presumptuous and dictatorial towards God.
U The publication of the papers (afterwards published
under the title of Unto this Last) in the Cornhill Magazine
raised a storm of indignant protest; even a theological heresy-
hunt could not have been more fast and furious. The essays
were declared to be "one of the most melancholy spectacles,
intellectually speaking, that we have ever witnessed." "The
series of papers in the Cornhill Magazine" wrote another critic,
" throughout which Mr. Euskin laboured hard to destroy his
reputation, were to our mind almost painful. It is no pleasure
to see genius mistaking its power, and rendering itself ridiculous."
The papers were described by the Saturday Review as " eruptions
of windy hysterics," "absolute nonsense," "utter imbecility,"
"intolerable twaddle"; the author was "a perfect paragon of
blubbering"; his "whines and snivels" were contemptible; the
world was not going to be " preached to death by a mad gover-
ness." The last passage of the book in particular filled the
Saturday reviewer with indignant disgust. Let us hear the
passage, for the author considered it one of the best he ever wrote,
and it has reached many a mind and touched many a heart. He
had been pleading for wiser consumption, for fairer distribution,
for a more thoughtful direction of labour, for a simpler mode of
life, and then continued thus :
"And if, on due and honest thought over these things, it
1 George Eliot, Janet's Repentance.
170 JUDGING PREMATURELY
seems that the kind of existence to which men are now summoned
by every plea of pity and claim of right, may, for some time at
least, not be a luxurious one ; consider whether, even supposing
it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw
clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the
world. Luxury is indeed possible in the future innocent and
exquisite ; luxury for all, and by the help of all ; but luxury at
present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man
living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold. Kaise
the veil boldly ; face the light ; and if, as yet, the light of the
eye can only be seen through tears, and the light of the body
through sackcloth, go thou forth weeping, bearing precious seed,
until the time come, and the kingdom, when Christ's gift of
bread, and bequest of peace, shall be " Unto this last as unto
thee"; and when, for earth's severed multitudes of the wicked
and the weary, there shall be holier reconciliation than that of
the narrow home, and calm economy, where the Wicked cease
not from trouble, but from troubling and the Weary are at rest." l
(3) Judge no one's discipline before the time. Do not judge
your own. Perhaps you think that discipline harsh. Perhaps
you think it singularly unsuitable. You are tempted to imagine
that your spiritual character would have been better nurtured and
your spiritual interests better served had God taken another
method with you assigning you a different burden, leading you
a different way. Not so. You may be sure that the burden fits
your shoulders, that the path fits your feet, as they fit those of no
one else. Wherefore be obedient, be patient, be hopeful. What
you know not now you shall know hereafter, if not in this life,
certainly in the day that makes all things clear.
^J We judge others according to results ; how else ? not
knowing the process by which results are arrived at. 2
(4) Judge no one's destiny before the time ; you know not the
determining elements. They are often hidden from you in life,
and some who have passed as opponents of religion have,
Nicodemus-like, been its secret friends. And in death the data
may be hidden too. I speak with caution, even with trembling,
remembering the danger of abuse; but I say that while the
possibility of a late repentance permits no one to presume in his
own case, it permits no one to despair in the case of others.
1 E. T. Cook, The Life of Kmkin, ii. G.
- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 5 171
U I have not much sympathy with those who have great
suspiciousuess about false religion. I have not much sympathy
with strong, positive [condemnatory] affirmations about people's
religion, where there is nothing decidedly bad. I have not much
sympathy with those who are not disposed to admit and to hope
that there may be reality where there is the appearance of some
little good thing toward the Lord God of Israel. 1
Tf The tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from
within. " Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable
aphorisms "character is destiny." But not the whole of our
destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and
irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if
his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an
early death, we can conceive Hamlet's having married Ophelia,
and got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding
many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the fail-
daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to
his father-in-law. 2
T[ A sailor, who had long been the object of a mother's
prayers, but had nevertheless lived a godless and a thoughtless
life, was swept overboard in a storm. While he struggled
in the waves a vision of his past rose before him, vivid, concen-
trated, intense, together with what seemed a last opportunity of
making his peace with God. That vision he improved. That
opportunity he embraced. Then and there he repented. Then
and there he gave himself to Christ. "When my soul fainted
within me, I remembered the Lord : and my prayer came in unto
him, into his holy temple." And his first thought after the
transaction was this: "I shall die a Christian, and my mother
will never know of the change." But she did know ; for he lived
to tell her, and to testify to others besides, by the consistency of
his Christian walk and faithfulness of his Christian service. 8
1 "Rabbi" Duncan, in Memoir of John Duncan, 425.
2 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.
8 W. A. Gray.
FOR THE FEAST.
73
LITERATURE.
Aitkcn (W. H. M. H.), The Highway of Holiness, 220.
Beecliing (H. C.), The Bible Doctrine of the Sacraments, 86.
Burrell (D. J.), The Gospel of Gladness, 255.
Davies (J. LI.), The Work of Christ, 85.
Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 97, 100.
Green (T. H.), The Witness of God, and Faith, 1.
Grubb (G. C.), The Light of His Countenance, 9.
Gurney (T. A.), The Living Lord and the Opened Grave, 57.
Heplier (C.), The Revelation of Love, 157.
Jerdan (C.), For the Lord's Table, 62.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year : Easter Ascension, 1.
Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., ii. 256.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : 1 and 2 Corinthians, 83.
Maurice (F. D.), Lincoln's Inn Sermons, iii. 245.
Morgan (E. C.), The Cross in the Old Testament, 81.
Moule (H. C. G.), The Pledges of His Love, 97.
Pope (R. M.), The Poetry of the Upward Way, 29.
Smith (D.), The Pilgrim's Hospice, 37.
Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, ii. (1856) No. 54.
Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xvi. (1870) No. 965.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xxiii. (1883) No. 1244.
Waterston (R.), Thoughts on the Lord's Supper, 153.
Watt (L. M.), The Communion Table, 223.
Wiseman (N.), Children's Sermons, 72.
Christian World Pulpit, xiv. 121 (Aveling).
Church of England Pulpit, Ixiii. 237 (Sandham).
Churchman's Pulpit : Easter Day and Season : vii. 195 (Keble).
Clergyman's Magazine, 3rd Ser., xv. 300 (Gurney).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., ix. 161 (Barry).
Homiletic Review, xliii. 333 (Dieterich).
174
FOR THE FEAST.
Purge out the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, even as ye
are unleavened. For our passover also hath been sacrificed, even Christ :
wherefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven
of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and
truth. x. Cor. v. 7, 8.
THERE had been hideous immorality in the Corinthian Church.
St. Paul had struck at it with heat and force, sternly commanding
the exclusion of the sinner. He did so on the ground of the
diabolical power of infection possessed by evil, and illustrated
that by the very obvious metaphor of leaven, a morsel of which,
as he says, " leaveneth the whole lump," or, as we say, " batch."
But the word " leaven " drew up from the depths of his memory
a host of sacred associations connected with the Jewish Passover.
He remembered the sedulous hunting in every Jewish house .for
every scrap of leavened matter ; the slaying of the paschal lamb,
and the following feast. Carried away by these associations, he
forgot the sin in the Corinthian Church for a moment, and turned
to set forth, in the words of the text, a very deep and penetrating
view of what the Christian life is, how it is sustained, and what
it demands. "Wherefore let us keep the feast . . . with the
unleavened bread of sincerity and truth."
In the text three events are commemorated, (1) the search
which the Israelites made for leaven immediately before the
Passover; (2) the slaying of the Passover lamb; and (3) the
Passover feast. That is also the order in which the thoughts
occur to the Apostle. So we have
I. The Old Leaven.
"Purge out the old leaven."
175
176 FOR THE FEAST
II. Our Passover.
" Our passover also hath been sacrificed,
even Christ."
III. The Feast.
"Wherefore let us keep the feast."
I.
THE OLD LEAVEN.
"Purge out the old leaven."
1. The appointed preparation for the Jews, on the point of
keeping their Passover, was putting away leaven out of their
houses. For seven whole days they were to eat only unleavened
bread. In the first instance this was meant to remind them of
the haste with which God brought them out of Egypt, when they
took their dough before it was leavened. But it had also this
other meaning, that men should labour and strive and pray to
cleanse themselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit. For
that is the old leaven of which the Apostle here makes mention ;
the corrupt nature and bad habits of men, filling them full of
malice and wickedness.
In consequence of the command that they should purge out
the leaven at the Passover, the head of the household among the
Jews, especially when they grew more strict in their ritual, would
go through the whole of the house on a certain day to search for
every particle of leavened bread. It was generally done in the
evening with a candle, and the servants and others would
accompany the goodman of the house to search for every crumb.
Clothes were shaken, cupboards were emptied, drawers were
opened, and if a mouse ran across the room and might be supposed
to carry a crumb of bread into its hole, they trembled lest a curse
should rest on the home. So strict did they become that our
Saviour might have rebuked them as straining at a gnat while
swallowing a camel. We, however, have no need to fear excessive
strictness in getting rid of sin. With as scrupulous a care as the
Israelite purged out the leaven from his house we are to purge
out all sin from ourselves, our conduct, and our conversation.
i CORINTHIANS v. 7, 8 177
U I remember hearing a friend of mine describe what he him-
self once saw in Palestine, and, of all places in Palestine, in
Nazareth, and, of all places in Nazareth, in a carpenter's shop
there. The carpenter would not allow him to witness the search
in the house lest his presence should defile the home; but he
allowed him to enter the shop and witness the search there. The
man went about the work with a will; he was evidently
thoroughly in earnest ; he girded up his loins as if he had a day's
work before him, and then proceeded to search with the utmost
zeal. Carefully and conscientiously he turned over every board,
he moved all his tools, he swept out the whole place, he opened
every drawer, looked into every cupboard; there was not a
crevice or a cranny in the wall that was not inspected lest there
might be a tiny crumb of leaven anywhere in the shop. As he
drew towards the close of his search my friend suddenly heard
him utter an exclamation of horror, and looking round he saw
him standing as though he had seen something most alarming.
If he had found a viper or a cockatrice he could not have been
more horrified than he seemed to be. What was it? In the
last corner that he had visited, under some shavings, he had
come across a little canvas bag, and in this little bag there were
a few crumbs of leavened bread ; one of the workmen had left it
on some former occasion. It was enough; it defiled the whole
place. With the utmost possible gravity and solemnity, and with
a most anxious expression of countenance as though it were a
most critical and important business, the man took hold of two
pieces of wood, and using them as a pair of tongs he raised up the
bag, and holding it off at arm's length, marched out of the shop
and dropped the leavened crumbs, bag and all, into the centre of
a fire that he had burning outside ready for such a contingency,
and so he purged out the old leaven. 1
Tf Self-scrutiny is often the most unpleasant, and always the
most difficult, of moral actions. But it is also the most important
and salutary; for, as the wisest of the Greeks said, "an un-
examined life is not worth living." 2
2. " Leaven " had a figurative use in Jewish speech, signifying
the working of evil affections in the soul. " Lord of Eternity,"
prayed one of the Kabbis, " it is open and known in Thy sight
that we desire to do Thy will. Subdue that which hindereth, to
wit, the leaven which is in the lump." " If," it is written in the
paschal rubric, " a man be on the way to offer his paschal lamb,
1 Canon Hay Aitken. 2 J, Strachan, ffebreto Ideah, i. 93,
I COR, I?
i;8 FOR THE FEAST
and it come into Ins mind that he has leaven in his house, if he
can return and remove it, and then return to his office, let him
return and remove it ; but, if he cannot, let him destroy it in his
heart." Our Lord came not to abrogate the ancient Law but to
fulfil it ; and, ever exalting the spirit above the letter, He took
this Jewish prescription and gave it a loftier interpretation.
" If," He said with evident reference to that article of the paschal
rubric, "thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there re-
memberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there
thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to
thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift." And St. Paul
taught the same lesson when he wrote to the Corinthians : " Know
ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump ? Purge out
the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, even as ye are
unleavened."
The working of leaven did not seem, at first sight, to belong
to the more regular process of nature. Man's imagination had
been struck here by the likeness to something dark, ominous,
evil. This strange disturbance into which the natural substances
were thrown by the arrival of this alien matter what did it
portend ? This secret insertion of so little within so much by
which there was set moving an inner ferment, a yeasty working,
a spreading excitement what was it? What did it express?
Was it healthy ? Was it not typical, rather, of disease, corrup-
tion ? It looked so uncanny, so uncomfortable. How insidiously
it crept ! How unaccountably it penetrated ! It seemed to eat
its way along; it insinuated its hidden force within the mass;
until what was before quiet and at peace began to stir with un-
accountable agitation, began to shake and heave and swell. And
what a portentous inflation ! What a mysterious tumult ! Surely
here (men said) is the very picture of what we know of the
nature of sin ! This is the very way of its attack. A seed, a
germ, hardly suspected for its smallness, plants itself deep down
within some secret recess of the soul, and from that moment the
old peace has begun to break up. At first, it is a mere spot of
uncomfortable disturbance ; but it is ever moving forward ; the
stir spreads wider ; there is gradual agitation ; there is growing
upheaval. We never quite- know how or when, but somehow,
point by point, our steadiness dissolves; our orderly restraint
i CORINTHIANS v. 7, 8 179
weakens; always the ferment is touching a fresh layer; always
the festering eruption breaks out in a new place. And, wherever
it goes, there is this same effervescence, this inflation, this over-
stepping of old bounds, this swelling exuberance, this irresistible
turmoil. Stronger and more violent grows the heat of the motion ;
it rushes forward over the whole material ; nothing can, at last,
hold out against its devouring extravagance. It eats into the
whole body as doth a canker. Like a poison in the blood, it
permeates every nook and corner. And all from so tiny a
beginning! Yes; like a little leaven "it leaveneth the whole
lump." So men thought of leaven. They might use it, indeed,
for the homeliest affairs ; but still it became for them a type of
the movement of evil. Its working seemed to embody the
dreadful character of the mystery of iniquity. It had, therefore,
proverbially a sinister significance. And in the Bible itself it is
generally used, as a symbol, under this comparison.
3. The leaven is called "the old leaven of malice and
wickedness."
(1) Malice, that is, ill-nature, envy, grudging, is a subtle thing,
mingling itself with many parts of men's conduct, where they
little suspect it themselves. For example : you hear a neighbour
praised for something on which you are apt to value yourself.
Ask your own conscience fairly : do you feel no sort of pang, no
jealousy or envy, at this ? Is it not too plain, that we are most
of us inclined to repine at our neighbour's getting things which
we think we might as well have had ourselves ? Now, whatever you
may judge of it, this is the leaven of malice, and must be purged out.
^f It is said of the famous English clergyman, Venn, that in
his declining years he was removed to the obscurity of a country
parish, and a stirring young curate was employed to help him in
his work. Nobody wanted to hear the old man preach, while the
curate attracted surprising congregations. Naturally the rector's
family grew jealous. They could not bear the advancement of a
junior above their honoured father. But the arrows were
quenched in a boundless ocean of charity, for with true Christ-
likeness the old man said, " Carry me to hear him preach. God
honours him, and I will honour him. No man can receive
anything except it be given him from heaven." l
(2) So in respect of that ivickcdness of which the great Apostle
1 G. C. Peck, Old Sins in Few Cloth, 284,
i8o FOR THE FEAST
warns us fraud, falsehood, cunning, insincerity. It is what
people generally can least endure to be charged with : to call a
man a liar is the bitterest of all affronts ; and those who would
confess many faults will search far and wide, and invent all sorts
of excuses, rather than plead guilty to this. And many seem to
think that if they affirm no direct falsehood, they are sufficiently
purged from this sin. But surely they judge too hastily. There
is a leaven of cunning as well as of malice, which is apt to mingle
with all our conduct, and poison and infect it and make it un-
worthy of God, to a degree far beyond what we can imagine, till
we have really watched and tried ourselves. We get into mean,
pitiful habits, of setting traps for our own praise ; of contriving
to take the best of everything for ourselves ; of getting off in all
business with less than our share of expense, or trouble, or ill-
will. This is the leaven of selfish cunning, so worked into the
daily behaviour of most men that they are not themselves at all
aware of it : they never, of course, dream of repenting of it.
K It is important to bear in mind that, in speaking of sin and
sinners, we are apt to take as our type of sin one particular class
of sin, the sins of the " publican and the harlot." It is natural
that, revolting, ruinous, flagrant as they are, they should represent
sin to our mind. Yet there are sins more malignant, and more
difficult to conceive cured. I can conceive many of these poor
creatures, whom the world speaks of as "lost," blindly "seeking after
God." It is difficult to me to conceive this of those who, with full
knowledge and all advantages, prey on human happiness in one way
or another the selfish seekers of their own interest and pleasure. 1
As are those apples, pleasant to the eye,
But full of smoke within, which use to grow
Near that strange lake, where God pour'd from the sky
Huge showers of flames, worse flames to overthrow;
Such are their works that with a glaring show
Of humble holiness, in virtue's dye
Would colour mischief, while within they glow
With coals of sin, though none the smoke descry.
Ill is that angel which erst fell from heaven,
But not more ill than he, nor in worse case,
Who hides a traitorous mind with smiling face,
And with a dove's white feather masks a raven,
1 Dean Church, Life and Letters, 265,
i CORINTHIANS v. 7, 8 181
Each sin some colour hath it to adorn;
Hypocrisy, almighty God doth scorn. 1
4. For power to purge out the old leaven, we must have
some participation in Christ, by which there is given to us that
new life which conquers evil. In the words immediately preceding
the text, the Apostle bases his injunction to purge out the old
leaven on the fact that " ye are unleavened." Ideally, in so far
as the power possessed by them was concerned, these Corinthians
were unleavened, even whilst they were bid to purge out the
leaven. That is to say, be what you are; realize your ideal,
utilize the power you possess, and since by your faith there has
been given to you a new life that can conquer all corruption and
sin, see that you use the life that is given. Purge out the old
leaven because ye are unleavened.
Tf Power, that is the great practical matter for us men, once
our faces are set towards the light ; and in the life in Christ the
way of power is marked out. Everywhere, all over the world, in
its darkest places, as a man follows the light he sees, the power
comes, and more light comes, and power grows anew, Divine
power flowing in upon him and through him, whether he knows
it or not. But in the Christian faith we are given an open vision
of the way of power, as well as of the light and truth of men ;
open-eyed we may yield to Christ being made Man in us the
Christ who ever comes to enlarge the realm of His Incarnation ;
and we may possess and wield His power as our own, reason
giving consent, heart warmed by the vision, and the presence of
Him who reigns. In this, too, Christianity stands at the centre
of things, and fulfils and completes them all. 2
If When God was about to call Abraham to a higher level
of service and a higher range of truth to require of him a
perfection which might seem unattainable, and to unfold to him
a grace which might seem incredible, He prefaced the call with
the revelation, "I am El Shaddai God Almighty, the Wielder
of power, the All-sufficient." After that nothing is impossible,
nothing incredible. The august title reveals the infinite resources
from which man can draw, the Divine energy which ensures his
success. Absolute reliance on God's almightiness is the condition
of power. _ For every duty there is an appointed dynamic : " Thy
God hath commanded thy strength." The Almighty will not let
His servants fail or be put to shame, else that is not His name.
1 William Drammond. 2 William Scott Palmer.
i8 2 FOR THE FEAST
He links His power to His imperatives. What we can do in our
own strength is one thing ; what we are empowered to achieve by
omnipotent grace is far different. The possibilities of life are to
be measured, not by the ability of man, but by the power and will
of God. Instead of desiring a lower ideal, we should pray for a
higher energy. "Lord," said Augustine, "give what thou com-
mandest, and command what thou wilt." " Attempt great things
for God, expect great things from God," said Carey. "Who is
sufficient for these things ? " asked St. Paul, and presently
answered, " Our sufficiency is of God." 1
^J It does not matter how intricately sin may have been woven
into all the tissues of life and coloured word and deed and thought ;
Christ by the Spirit can take it all away. He can " purely purge
away thy dross, and take away all thy tin." A lump of ore, when
mixed with clay and mire, may be washed clean, as the soul by
the washing of regeneration ; but fire acts upon it in a different
way. It liberates the metal from the stoney or clayey surround-
ings, and sets one free from the other. Often more than one
mineral is contained in the same rock. Take, for example, a
piece of Cornish arsenical mundic. Here is stone speckled all
through with minute but thoroughly distributed portions of the
poison known as arsenic. Here also in close neighbourhood is a
vein of pure copper ore. Mixed with both is the quartz and
earthy matter in which they are imbedded, which is the earliest
deposit. We will call the stony portion the simple creature life ;
the arsenic the evil nature, injected as a foreign substance by
some external power ; and the copper representing the new life,
also foreign to nature, and also external in its introduction into
the heart. Here they are together in close association, though
not in fellowship. Can nothing separate them ? Yes, fire can,
and every particle of the arsenic can, by its power, be separated
from its companions.
II.
OUR PASSOVER.
" Our passover also hath been sacrificed, even Christ."
It is very remarkable that this is the only place in St. Paul's
writings where he articulately pronounces that the paschal lamb
is a type of Jesus Christ. There is only one other instance in
the New Testament where that is stated with equal clearness and
emphasis, and that is in St. John's account of the Crucifixion,
1 J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 97.
i CORINTHIANS v. 7, 8 183
where he recognizes the fact that Christ died with limbs
unbroken, as being a fulfilment, in the New Testament sense of
that word, of what was enjoined in regard to the antitype, "a
bone of him shall not be broken."
1. The words carry us back in imagination to the last night
of Israel's bondage in the land of Egypt. That was a season of
horror and anguish to the Egyptians, for at midnight the first-
born of every household was killed by the Angel of the Lord.
It was a memorable night to Israel also, though they passed it
in perfect safety. The Hebrews had been informed by Moses
and Aaron of God's purpose to slay the first-born of the
Egyptians, and had been instructed as to the mystic ceremony
by the observance of which they would protect themselves from
being overtaken in the same terrible doom. On the night of
the Exodus the head of each household was to kill in sacrifice a
lamb, or a kid of the goats. He was to put the blood in a basin,
and afterwards sprinkle it with a sprig of hyssop on the upper
door-post and the two side-posts of his house. The lamb was
then to be roasted whole, and eaten with unleavened bread and
a salad of bitter herbs. The family were to eat it in the attitude
of pilgrims about to set out on a long journey with their loins
girded, their sandals strapped on their feet, and their staves
ready in their hands. All this was done in the evening; and
a few hours later, at midnight, the first-born of every Egyptian
family was smitten by the Angel of Death. But no one died
that night in any Israelitish house the door of which was marked
with the blood of the paschal lamb. In giving the command
about the sprinkling of the blood, the Lord had added this
gracious promise : " When I see the blood, I will pass over you,
and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I
smite the land of Egypt." And God announced that the Passover
was to be to the Jews an ordinance for ever ; it was to be an
annual festival commemorative of the deliverance of their fore-
fathers from Egypt ; the people were to observe it with solemnity
and gladness; and parents were to teach their children its
significance.
2. There are three thoughts contained in the statement that
Christ our passover has been sacrificed for us.
1 84 FOR THE FEAST
(1) It emphasizes, with each great approach of the redeemed
people to God as their covenant Lord, that a "Passover" is
necessary. It becomes a memorial to be kept at Sinai, at Gilgal,
and again with special solemnity after periods of backsliding from
God, as in the great Passovers under Hezekiah and Josiah, and
at the return from the captivity under Ezra, after their separation
from the filthiness of the heathen. Besides this, it is the annual
covenant feast to be kept unto the Lord throughout all their
generations. Thus it bears witness through all the Old Dispensa-
tion to man's need of redemption and God's pledge to meet that
need, till that day when the disciples asked the great Antitype
Himself, " Where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the
passover ? "
TJ Think of these two chains which have always fettered the
spirit of humanity, and say whether Christ accomplished nothing
for man's redemption in breaking them the sense of guilt on the
conscience and the fear of death. I do not mean to say that
men have actually been delivered from these. We are too
ignorant of our own franchise, like the poor Israelites who
despised their freedom, and perished through their unbelief in
the wilderness. But the chains are broken for those who will
enjoy their freedom ; and countless multitudes have tested to the
full their emancipation, and all Christendom feels some common
benefit from the deliverance. 1
(2) It offers, next, the Divine provision for that need. If we
ask, " Where is the lamb for a burnt offering ? " we receive the
answer : Not in that ancient service with its filaments stretching
back into the remote past, not even in its great Christian counter-
part, which unites in one link of loving rite the Lord's Supper
with the Jewish Passover, but in that of which both alike speak
so clearly, " the death of the Cross." Christ by His own blood
has " entered in once for all into the holy place, having obtained
eternal redemption for us."
If Christ hath died His brethren well may die,
Sing in the gate of death, lay by
This life without a sigh :
For Christ hath died and good it is to die;
To sleep when so He lays us by,
Then wake without a sigh.
1 J. LI. Davies.
i CORINTHIANS t. 7, 8 185
Yea, Christ hath died, yea, Christ is risen again :
Wherefore both life and death grow plain
To us who wax and wane;
For Christ who rose shall die no more again:
Amen: till He makes all things plain
Let us wax on and wane. 1
(3) It also expresses the simple appropriation of faith, whereby
alone the blessings of Christ's Passion can become ours. The
paschal lamb was offered, not as in any way worthy of God's accept-
ance ; but, being looked on as a substitute for the family, it saved
the first-born from death. God did not wish to smite Israel, but
to save them. But He did not simply omit the Israelite houses
and pick out the Egyptian ones through the land. He left it to
the choice of the people whether they would accept His deliver-
ance and belong to Him or not. The angel of judgment was to
recognize no distinction between Israelite and Egyptian save
this of the sprinkled, stained doorposts. Death was to enter
every house where the blood was not visible ; mercy was to rest
on every family that dwelt under this sign. God meant that all
should be rescued, but He would not force any we may say He
could not force any to yield themselves to Him.
And now Christ our Passover is slain and we are asked to
determine whether we will use His sacrifice or not. We are not
asked to add anything to the efficacy of that sacrifice, but only
to avail ourselves of it. Wherever there was faith there was a
man in the twilight sprinkling his lintel, and resolved that no
solicitation should tempt him from behind the blood till the
angel had passed by. He took God at His word; he believed
that God meant to deliver him, and he did what he was told was
his part. To us God opens a way out from all bondage and from
all that gives us the spirit of slaves.
3 Stephen Grellet was the child of French parents of the
ity, and was born in the city of Limoges, in the beautiful
district of Limousin, a few years before the great Eevolution
broke out in France. He was brought up as a Koman Catholic,
and shared in the sufferings of the Eoyalist party like other
members ot the nobility. In the fortunes of war he was
captured and ordered to be shot. But at that moment a
commotion arose and he escaped to America, and began soon
1 Christina G. Rosaetti, Poems, 168.
i86 FOR THE FEAST
after that life of wonderful usefulness which carried him several
times across Europe on errands of mercy, brought him before
kings and popes, exposed him to perils of war and imprisonment,
and made him one of the first workers in the United States for
the abolition of slavery. Upon what did that career turn ?
First, upon a sense of conviction of sin so keen that an awful
voice seemed to call from Heaven to him as he walked in the fields
" Eternity ! eternity ! eternity ! " and he felt himself sinking as
in the lowest hell. Then, when he was like one " crushed under
the millstones " with the sense of his sin, there came " the fulness
of heavenly joy" through trust in a living Saviour. He
realized that "there was One, even He whom I had pierced
Jesus Christ the Kedeemer that was able to save me. I saw
Him to be the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the
world. ... On my earnest petition being put up to Him, the
language was proclaimed, ' Thy sins are forgiven, thine iniquities
are pardoned/ " x
^[ Safdar Ali was the son of a Moslem judge in a native state
of India, and attended Agra College, studying among other things
very closely the Moslem faith. After leaving college he obtained
the post of Deputy-Inspector of Schools in the Punjab, and there
he came across Sufi philosophers and fakirs. From them he
learned to practise austerities of life in order to obtain purity of
heart. But he failed to find it, and when he told them of his
failure they answered that he must find an infallible director.
Among sheikhs and fakirs he sought for such a one in vain, till
at length he decided on the pilgrimage to Mecca. As he was
preparing for it he met with a copy of Pfander's Mizan-al-Haqq,
or " Balance of Truth," a defence of Christianity against Moslems.
This led him to decide to study the Christian faith, and for three
years, instead of going to Mecca, he pondered over the Bible and
Koran side by side, deserted by his wife, but helped by a
Christian convert Nehemiah. The result was that he found
Christ as a personal Saviour, and could say:
My Friend was near me, and I roamed far in search of Him ;
My well was full of water, while I was parched and thirsty,
Praise upon praise, to-day my journey is ended.
Now the last stage is reached my pilgrimage is o'er. 2
3. But the particular reason why the Apostle here states that
our Passover has been sacrificed is to offer a reason why the old
leaven should be purged out. His thought, accordingly, is that
1 W. Guest, Life of Stephen Grellet, 24. 2 History of the C.M.&. ii. 555.
i CORINTHIANS v. 7, 8 187
Christ is our representative ; in offering Himself He offers us to
God ; and we are no longer our own.
Christ is our passover, because through Him there is made
the acknowledgment that we belong to God. He is in very truth
the prime and flower, the best representative of our race, the
first-born of every creature. He is the One who can make for all
others this acknowledgment that we are God's people. And He
does so by perfectly giving Himself up to God. This fact that
we belong to God, that we men are His creatures and subjects, has
never been perfectly acknowledged save by Christ.
Tf Only those of us who can see that we ought to live for God
can claim Christ as our representative. Only those who wished
to go free from Egypt to serve God sacrificed the paschal lamb ;
the service of God, the living as His people, was the object they
had in view. What object have we ? If we mean to be of His
spirit, if we mean to count it our meat and drink to do God's
will, if we are really disposed to seek the advancement of God's
purposes, and not to seek great things for ourselves, we may speak
of Him as our Substitute and Sacrifice. If He is our Passover,
the meaning of this is that He gives us liberty to serve God, that
He comes to redeem us from all that hinders our serving Him.
The one question is, Do we at heart wish to give ourselves up to
God ? Do we find in His life and death, in His submission to God
and meek acceptance of all God appointed, the truest representation
of what we would fain be and do, but cannot ? l
9
III.
THE FEAST.
"Wherefore let us keep the feast."
1. "Wherefore," exclaims the Apostle (and remember that
" Wherefore " loses its force unless we have appropriated to our-
selves the benefit of the Paschal sacrifice), " let us keep the feast."
When we know that for us the Paschal blood has been shed, that
word "wherefore" indicates a logical conclusion which must
follow from Gospel premises ; and this inference is so patent and
powerful, that there is no escape from it. " Christ our passover
is sacrificed for us : wherefore let us keep the feast."
2. The "feast" alluded to in these words is neither the
1 Marcus Dods.
i88 FOR THE FEAST
Passover of the Law nor a Communion season of the Christian
Church. It is the whole life of the followers of Jesus, as that
life is led in Him, and as, in it all, they are partakers of His joy.
Their Paschal Lamb is for them always slain. For them the
incense of Christ's offering continually ascends before the throne
of God. They have put the leaven of sin out of their hearts and
lives, not for an hour only, or a day or a week, but for ever.
Therefore they keep constant festival. Their whole life, with its
memories of deliverance from bondage, and with the first-fruits
of a spiritual harvest ripening around them in their free and
independent home, has a festival light thrown over it. They
always eat the flesh and drink the blood of One who never fails
either to support or quicken them. The Christian Passover
never ends. 1
3. Two things are suggested by keeping the feast.
(1) Taking food. For the point to be observed is this, that
just as in that ancient ritual the lamb slain became the food of
the Israelites, so with us the Christ who has died is to be the
sustenance of our souls, and of our Christian life. "Wherefore
let us keep the feast."
Feed upon Him; that is the essential central requirement
for all Christian life. And what does feeding on Him mean?
" How can this man give us his flesh to eat ? " said the Jews, and
the answer is plain now, though so obscure then. The flesh
which He gave for the life of the world in His death, must by us
be taken for the very nourishment of our souls, by the simple
act of faith in Him. That is the feeding which brings not only
sustenance but life. Christ's death for us is the basis, but it is
only the basis, of Christ's living in us, and His death for us is of
no use at all to us unless He that died for us lives in us. We
feed on Him by faith, which not only trusts to the Sacrifice as
atoning for sin, but feeds on it as communicating and sustaining
eternal life " Christ our passover is sacrificed for us, wherefore
let us keep the feast."
Again, we keep the feast when our minds feed upon Christ
by contemplation of what He is, what He has done, what He is
doing, what He will do ; when we take Him as " the Master-light
1 W. Milligan, in The Expositor, 3rd Ser., viii. 164,
i CORINTHIANS v. 7, 8 189
of all our seeing/' and in Him, His words and works, His Passion,
Kesurrection, Ascension, Session as Sovereign at the right hand
of God, find the perfect revelation of what God is, the perfect
discovery of what man is, the perfect disclosure of what sin is,
the perfect prophecy of what man may become, the Light of light,
the answer to every question that our spirits can put about the
loftiest verities of God and man, the universe and the future.
We feed on Christ when, with lowly submission, we habitually
subject thoughts, purposes, desires, to His authority, and when
we let His will flow into, and make plastic and supple, our wills.
We nourish our wills by submitting them to Jesus, and we feed
on Him not only when we say " Lord ! Lord ! " but when we do
the things that He says. We feed on Christ, when we let His
great, sacred, all-wise, all-giving, all-satisfying love flow into
our restless hearts and make them still, enter into our vagrant
affections and fix them on Himself.
TI To feed on Christ is to get His strength into us to be our
strength. You feed on the cornfield and the strength of the
cornfield comes into you and is your strength. You feed on the
cornfield and then go and build your house, and it is the corn-
field in your strong arm that builds the house, that cuts down
the trees and piles the stones and lifts the roof into its place.
You feed on Christ and then go and live your life, and it is
Christ in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, that tells
the truth, that fights the battle, and that wins the crown. 1
(2) Enjoyment. In the second place, the word suggests the
thought of enjoyment. Our life is to be a feast ; that is to say,
a season of continuous happy festivity. Not only when we reach
that better land, and sit down at the marriage supper of the
Lamb ; not only then are we to be privileged to feast with Him.
The feast of heaven begins on earth, and only those who know
from their own experience what it is to feast with Jesus now
will ever feast with Him yonder.
The Christian is not only to take the doctrines which concern
Christ, to build up his soul with them as the body is built up
with food, but he may draw from them the wine of joy and the
new wine of delight. It is meet that we rejoice in Christ Jesus.
He is the bliss of the saints. Is it not a joy unspeakable and
1 Phillips Brooks.
190 FOR THE FEAST
full of glory, that my sin will never be laid to my charge if I
believe in Him ; that my sin has been laid at His door, and He
has put it all away, so that if it be searched for it shall not be
found ? Is it not an intense delight to believe that Christ has so
effectually put away sin that no destroying angel can touch one
of His saints? There being no condemnation, there can be no
punishment for us either in this world or in that which is to come.
We are safe as were the Israelites when the door was sprinkled
with the blood. And then, being justified, we rise to a higher
position, we are adopted into the family of God, and if children,
then heirs. What a vista of glory opens before our eyes at the
mention of that word, heirs of God ! All things are ours, because
Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us.
As if to one who in a dungeon lay,
Laden with chains, and hidden from the sun,
For some dark evil deed that he had done,
For which he must his life a forfeit pay,
Should come a messenger of glad reprieve,
And lead him out into the sunlight gay,
Pardoned and free,- on some high holiday,
To joy his trembling heart can scarce conceive;
So in his veins the wine of life should run,
So should he still rejoicing keep the feast,
Who is from guilt and fear of death released,
By the sure promise of the Mighty One,
That, as in Egypt passing Death was fain
To spare the house where blood he might perceive,
Sprinkled by those who did the Lord believe,
So, for us too, our Passover is slain.
THE BODY FOR GOD.
LITERATURE.
Alexander (S. A.), The Christianity of St. Paul, 132,
Arnold (T.), Sermons, v. 147.
Baillie (D.), The Love of God, 80.
Black (H.), Work, 193.
Calthrop (G.), The Lost Sheep Found, 25.
Clarke (J. E.), Common-Life Sermons, 82.
Cornaby (W. A.), In Touch with Reality, 97.
Dale (E. W.), Weekday Sermons, 154.
Davidson (T.), The City Youth, 37.
Dearmer (P.), in Practical Questions, 244.
Duncan (J.), In the Pulpit and at the Communion Table, 221.
Elmslie (W. G.), Expository Lectures and Sermons, 257.
Gregg (J.), Sermons and Lectures ; The Light of Faith, 81.
Herford (B.), Courage and Cheer, 191.
Hoyle (A.), The Depth and Power of the Christian Faith, 107.
Ingram (A. F. W.), The Call of the Father, 163.
A Mission of the Spirit, 123.
Mackennal (A.), The Life of Christian Consecration, 100.
Mackintosh (H. R.), Life on God's Plan, 129.
Moule (H. C. G.), The Secret of the Presence, 33, 48.
Mursell (W. A.), The Waggon and the Star, 66.
New (C.), Sermons Preached in Hastings, 246.
Paget (F.), The Spirit of Discipline, 80.
Robarts (F. L.), Sunday Morning Talks, 116.
Russell (A.), The Light that Lighteth every Man, 309.
Shore (J. T.), Saint George for England, 42.
Simpson (J. G.), The Spirit and the Bride, 59.
Temple (F.), Rugby Chapel Sermons, ii. 297.
Van Dyke (H.), Manhood, Faith, and Courage, 99
Walker (W. L.), The True Christ, 222.
Wilberforce (B.), The Hope that is in Me, 222.
Church Times, May 19, 1911 (Simpson).
Preacher's Magazine, v. (1894) 130 (Hill).
THE BODY FOR GOD.
Know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost . . . glorify
God therefore in your body. I Cor. vi. 19, 20.
ST. PAUL'S words declare the basis on which all the fabric of
specifically Christian civilization stands the doctrine of the
intrinsic sanctity of the body, bought by Christ on the cross,
indwelt by the Spirit of God, commissioned to be the instrument
of God's glory.
The Apostle is denouncing sins of the flesh. In his eyes these
sins are something more than sins. They are flagrant anomalies ;
they are monstrous wrongs. There is a direct contradiction in
terms, a flat denial of the first principles of justice, in the com-
mission of them. God has set His stamp upon us. He impressed
us with His image in our first creation. He re-stamped the same
image upon us when He formed us anew in Christ. Thus we are
doubly His. Here is God enthroned in the sanctuary of your
bodies. But you you ignore the august Presence, you profane
the Eternal Majesty ; you pollute, you dishonour, you defy, with
shameless sacrilege, the ineffable glory, the Lord seated on His
throne, high and lifted up, His train filling the whole temple
of your being, as if He were some vile and worthless thing.
T[ There is a deep and luminous suggestiveness about St. Paul's
characteristic formula, " know ye not ? " Some have thought
that the Apostle is thus recalling to the memory of his converts
specific teachings of his own ; but this seems unlikely. Eather he
is addressing himself to their elementary Christian instincts, and
bringing these into the field against the shallow and demoralizing
sophistries,^ which had for them an attractiveness so strange and
so perilous. He would thus cut his way through the thickets of
futile argumentation, and bring the whole question at issue into
the open, where it could be clearly seen and justly appraised,
i COR. i^
194 THE BODY FOR GOD
The Christian conscience would settle with prompt and per-
emptory decision matters which would long perplex and mislead
the Christian intellect. Know ye not, he says, " that your body
is a temple of the Holy Ghost? . . . glorify God, therefore, in
your body." l
I.
THE BODY.
Of all the visible and tangible wonders of the universe, the
human body ranks the first. It is the centre and home of all
the sciences. All things, by ministering to it, unanimously
consent that it is " head over all." It is the throne of all laws ;
and comprehends every form. Only let it be added that, for the
exquisiteness of its lines, it excels all forms, and surpasses
everything that exists, whether in the vegetable or in the animal
world. Hence one may pass for a good artist in the representa-
tion of mountains, clouds, streams, trees, and cattle; and yet
have very little capacity to represent the subtle and delicate lines
of the human face. The human face is the triumph of beauty.
It is visible, but it expresses the wisdom, love, and grace of the
invisible world. It is on the sky-line between the two worlds,
where matter and spirit exquisitely blend.
1. Consider the honour of the human body.
(1) It is a bit of the handiwork of God. Men of science,
whose study is in the forms of life, tell us that in these there is
visible a struggle upwards through innumerable forms, but the
goal of the struggle is man, the human form Divine. Contrivances
which are only experiments lower down in the scale are complete
in the human body, and its hundreds of different parts are com-
pacted together into a machine so perfect that it may go some-
times for a hundred years without going wrong. But just as the
flowers and plants of Eden were made originally all very good,
but required the cultivating hand of Adam, and as plants and
many other works of God require human culture in order to bring
them to the most complete perfection, so does the body. The
body requires cultivation; but is it not a splendid reason for
giving it this, to remember that we are fellow-workers with God
1 H. Hensley Henson.
i CORINTHIANS vi. 19, 20 195
in so doing, that we are carrying out His ideals and bringing His
handiwork to perfection ?
Tf In the interests of his intelligence man's mind has been
sheathed in a sensitive body. Through the things that he has
felt and suffered in his body he has come into the mastery of the
things that made him feel and suffer, so that now they do him
service. So it is with character. In the interests of his spirit
man's soul has been sheathed in his body. It is given him for
moral discovery, for the shaping of character. All moral great-
ness and moral power come first in the form of control of the
body. To eat, to drink, to rest, are all of them good, but
because each of them may be abused into selfishness and sin,
there is moral danger in each of them. We are shaping our
moral character, and are determining our moral possibilities, by
our use of the body. It is the earliest arena and instrument of
the spirit's training. Through the body also men learn to suffer
and to be strong, and through suffering to find a farther and a
finer moral and spiritual beauty. It is our business to be at our
physical best for God's sake our religious business, for the
functions of life are only perfectly performed in health. But it
is very easy for us to overrate the physical; and, lest we be
betrayed into folly, we may remember that some of the greatest
and the noblest men and women have been physical weaklings. To
read their story is to understand that through their sufferings
and bodily disability, they came into their nobleness, learned to
consecrate suffering, and compel it to the holy ministries of
spiritual culture. Through the pain and the patience of disabled
years they worked out their own salvation. 1
(2) The body is the indispensable instrument of the mind.
The body is not a part of the mind, nor a function of the mind, as
some teach in our day. The mind is not inevitably bound up
with the body, as we can see by the fact that the most splendid
minds have often lodged in the plainest and even the most
deformed bodies. The mind is not going to go down in the
dissolution of the body, but to survive " the wreck of matter and
the crash of worlds," and yet in many respects the mind is
dependent on the body. It is through the body that it receives
all its knowledge, and it is only through the members of the
body that it can act on the outer world. The mind is dependent
on the body for its share in all that is done beneath the circuit
1 T. Yates, Sculptors of Life, 106,
i 9 6 THE BODY FOR GOD
of the sun. Neglect of the body or ill-treatment of it may
shorten life, or it may debilitate life and make it a burden to its
K We have probably yet to learn how much we owe to those
humble, obscure, and too often slighted friends, the senses,
whether they be five or seven. Are they indeed only doors and
windows, gateways of knowledge, messengers conveying intelli-
gence to some inner, directing power, or are they in themselves
as noble, as important, as any other part of man, as necessary
to the soul as it is to them ? Of one thing I am intimately con-
vinced, that it is to the agency of the senses that man owes
many of his sweetest feelings of affection, his loftiest aspirations
after excellence. It cannot be doubted that the purest affections
of the heart are closely linked with our physical nature, and fed
by what ministers to its delight. Those whom we really love are
as dear to us in their bodies as they are in their souls ; it is to
sight, hearing, contact, we greatly owe that irresistible charm
which makes the presence of a person we love to be desired by
the heart, above all else that life can give it. The sovereign
attraction lies in what an old writer calls " the continual comfort
of a face," in the sound of a voice, the touch of a hand, so that we
may truly say that it is presence, not absence, which is the real
test of love, and that affection is better gauged by our feelings
about people when we are with them, than by our thoughts about
them when we are separated. 1
(3) The body is the medium of expression of the soul. There
are many faces about this world in which prayer and patience
and humility have, by God's grace, wrought a beauty which may
be the nearest approach that can be seen in this life to the glory
of the Kesurrection the glory that is to be revealed in those
who shall then be wholly penetrated and transfigured by the
Spirit of the Lord. So intimate is the bond between soul and
body that it has naturally come to be employed as the very type
of immediate union or alliance ; and the poet has illustrated that,
in a well-known line, when he writes that God is very near to
us: "Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and
feet." Indeed every day we see new instances in which, owing
to this indissociable connection, the soul has written its own
character on the body. We are usually right in judging a man
by his facial expression. His nature peeps out in the glance of
1 Dora Greenwell, Liber Humanitatis, 8.
i CORINTHIANS vi. 19, 20 197
his eye, the touch of his hand, the tone and inflection of his voice,
his unstudied and unconscious gestures and attitudes, even the
peculiarities of his gait.
K " Olalla," I said, " the soul and the body are one, and mostly
so in love. What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the
body clings, the soul cleaves; body for body, soul to soul, they
come together at God's signal ; and the lower part (if we can call
aught low) is only the footstool and foundation of the highest." l
If There are times when, all unconsciously to itself, the soul
declares what it really is, what is its true nature its love or
hate, esteem or scorn. Perhaps it is some articulate utterance
that is the medium of revelation, as when Browning says :
He replied
The first word I heard ever from his lips,
All himself in it an eternity
Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth
0' the soul that then broke silence " I am yours."
Or, perhaps, the silence remains unbroken, but the disclosure
is made, nevertheless, with
Each soul a-strain
Some one way through the flesh the face, an evidence
0' the soul at work inside.
When a man has " base ends and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy,
and sometimes a-squint." But when his soul is true and pure,
"his eye is as clear as the heavens," and his face grows "one
luminosity " ; though, in the former case, he may never suspect
that the question will be put to him, " Why is thy countenance
fallen ? " And in the latter also it might truthfully be said, He
" wist not that the skin of his face shone." *
New burnisht Joys !
Which finest Gold and Pearl excell !
Such sacred Treasures are the Limbs of Boys
In which a Soul doth dwell:
Their organized Joints and azure Veins
More Wealth include than the dead World contains. 8
(4) The body is a medium of Divine service. A large part of
our usefulness and influence is due to passing bodily changes, of
which we may be unconscious, but which others feel. Our eyes
1 R. L. Stevenson, Olalla. a J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 94.
3 Traherne, Poems of Felicity, 2.
198 THE BODY FOR GOD
brighten with the good news we have to tell; our face beams
with a smile ; " there's music in our very foot " when we are on
an errand of love. When one "lifts" on us "the light of his
countenance" we learn the sacred service of the body. Love
and joy, hope and fear, pleading earnestness, remonstrant indigna-
tion all the deep emotions of spiritual life lay the body under
tribute. Think of the power of the orator in glance and gesture
as well as in word; think of the dear faces and the musical
voices of a happy household; think of beauty of expression,
lovely when it animates fair features, but infinitely more touching
when it glorifies a plain face. These are but casual illustrations
of the various ways in which the body lends itself to the divinest
ministries of life.
1f Charles Kingsley once said, " There has always seemed to
me something impious in the neglect of personal health. I could
not do half the good I do, if it were not for the strength and
activity some consider coarse and degrading."
Tf One personal characteristic of Bishop Wilkinson stands out
very strongly all through his life the exquisite sensitiveness
and delicacy of his bodily frame. He was not a man who could
rough it ; he was singularly dependent upon rest, upon the refined
appointments of life; his house, his dress, his apparatus were
always those of a wealthy and almost aristocratic fine gentleman.
I think he showed his greatness and his simplicity by not
troubling about this, and accepting these as the conditions under
which he could do his work best ; he did not plan for them or
set any affected value upon them he was simply unconscious of
them, while they somehow enhanced his mysterious grace, and
showed how the arts of courtly living and the pomps and
vanities of the world may be consecrated to the service of God. 1
(5) Kemember also the prospects of the body. The body has
its own real share in the hopes and promises that cluster round
the name of Jesus. The heathen said our modern heathen say
still the body will perish like the animals ; what matters it how
we treat it ? Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Nay,
replies Christian faith, there is a second and nobler chapter in
the story even of this frail tenement we here inhabit, which sheds
back its light upon the chapter we are living in now. God, who
raised up Jesus, shall in due time also quicken your mortal bodies.
1 A. C. Benson, The Leaves of the Tree, 129.
i CORINTHIANS vi. 19, 20 199
2. Consider the dishonour of the body.
(1) It has an inevitable tendency to usurp the place of the
sou l t The body is always trying to slip this domination of the
powers that are above it, and become uppermost, and if this is
allowed to take place the whole life is turned upside down, and
man is degraded.
(2) The body has propensities which, if unduly indulged, waste
and ruin life. Where lies the gravity and guilt of sins like
gluttony, intemperance, or lust in any form? In this, for one
thing, that they give the body the upper hand. The only right
and safe thing is that the body shall always serve. Any attempt
to reverse the Divine law of our nature, that that part of us
which is akin to God must rule, means a loss of true manhood
and inevitable suffering. The drunkard reeling down the street
is, in too many cases, a man whose body has already become the
grave of a lost spirit.
If The sovereignty of the conscience, and the control of
reason, and the force of will exist in us to control appetite.
The horse, when it is held in with a firm hand in a tight rein, is
a noble sight, but if the rider or driver lets the rein slip from his
fingers, the very mettle and force of the brute are what lead to
destruction. And so the very frailty of the body becomes the
means of greater destruction unless it is held in by the superior
faculties of our nature. 1
IL
THE TEMPLE OF THE BODY.
Under the Old Dispensation of Law, God had a temple for
His people, but under the New Dispensation of Grace, He has
His people for a temple.
1. The Temple was the one place in all the land of Israel
which was entirely dedicated to God's use. It existed solely for
His service, and from all secular purposes and work it was com-
pletely separated. God's ownership was recognized in every
detail of its construction and service it was truly the House
of God. So is it with all those who are called now to be His
temples.
If I remember once learning, as I was standing in the rnagnifi-
1 J. Stalker.
200 THE BODY FOR GOD
cent Cathedral at Cologne, that Napoleon had stabled his cavalry
horses in its chapel, and the very thought seemed to darken and
profane the whole place. Your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost, and if any man defile the temple of God, him will God
destroy. 1
2. The Temple thus dedicated to God was handed over to His
possession in that wonderful prayer of Solomon. The body of a
Christian believer holds another tenant than his human spirit;
a Divine presence is within him, at once his glory and his power.
And that Divine presence confers an unutterable sacredness upon
his body. Just as he who commits sacrilege not only desecrates
the material fabric, but also dishonours the God whose shrine it
is; as he who performs unseemly acts in a temple not only
defiles the stones and buildings, and wounds the spirits of the
worshippers, but also profanes the worship of the Deity : so he
who injures his body offends the Holy Ghost ; he who sins against
his body, not only degrades himself, but is a transgressor against
the indwelling God.
T[ They who sin against the body defile their temple, and dis-
honour Him who dwells in them. Some do so from an excessive
devotion to the cares of this life, which, however necessary they
may be to give practical directness and homely reality to spiritual
character, are sure to exhaust him who lives wholly or even
mainly in and for them. Some do it by an undue addiction to
social excitements, which are to the intellect and imagination
what stimulants are to the appetites. How many strong men,
men of practical genius and large common sense ; how many genial-
spirited men, with rare gifts of sympathy and social qualities, are
lost to the labours of our churches from these causes ! 2
3. The Temple offered to God became His indeed by His
acceptance of the offering. This was sealed by fire from heaven
and by the glory of the Lord filling the house (2 Chron. vii. 1).
Henceforth, in a peculiar sense, that place became God's dwelling-
place, and a type for all time of the spiritual temples which He
purposes that all His people should be. No mere emotion, no
strength of resolution, no strenuous striving to live aright, can
ever take the place of God Himself in His people. This is the
secret which alone transforms, "We will come unto him, and
make our abode with him " (John xiv. 23).
1 J. Stalker. ~ A. Mackeniial.
i CORINTHIANS vi. 19, 20 201
4. The Temple thus possessed and indwelt by God became
the sphere of His manifestation to man, and from thence they
learned His law and received His blessing through ordinance and
sacrifice. And thus it is with " the Temples of the Spirit " even
now. They are the media through whom He chooses to manifest
Himself to the world, and their lives in the power of His in-
dwelling are set for the life and light of men. Holiness is in
itself not an end, but a means to an end, the end being the
blessing of others through our lives and labour. Any conception
less than this degrades holiness to the level of refined selfishness,
and dishonours Him whose name we bear. The "Temples of
God " are not self-contained but Christ-communicating, and each
by virtue of its existence as such is a centre of unmeasured
blessing to the world.
Not in the world of light alone,
Where God has built His blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker's glory seen:
Look in upon thy wondrous frame
Eternd. wisdom still the same !
The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves,
Whose streams of brightening purple rush,
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay
The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature's flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart.
No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
For ever quivering o'er his task,
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then, kindling each decaying part,
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.
But warmed with that unchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
202 THE BODY FOR GOD
Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason's guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master's own.
See how yon beam of seeming white
Is braided out of seven-hued light,
Yet in those lucid globes no ray
By any chance shall break astray.
Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
Arches and spirals circling round,
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
With music it is heaven to hear.
Then mark the cloven sphere that holds
All thought in its mysterious folds,
That feels sensation's faintest thrill,
And flashes forth the sovereign will;
Think on the stormy world that dwells
Locked in its dim and clustering cells !
The lightning gleams of power it sheds
Along its hollow glassy threads !
O Father ! grant Thy love divine
To make these mystic temples Thine!
When wasting age and wearying strife
Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
When darkness gathers over all,
And the last tottering pillars fall,
Take the poor dust Thy mercy warms,
And mould it into heavenly forms! 1
III.
THE GLORY OF GOD IN THE BODY.
1. " Glorify God, therefore, in your body." Do not let us mar
the directness of this appeal by imitating the timidity of those
later interpreters who read, " Glorify God in your body and in
your spirit." There is but one problem in human life, and that is
the problem of the body, the organ through which alone life
manifests itself, the home of our activities, the seat of our desires.
1 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Living Temple.
i CORINTHIANS vi. 19, 20 203
" Glorify God in your body " was the straight appeal of one who
knew what it was to stand fast in the liberty with which Christ
had made him free.
^[ " Ye are not your own," that is the premise ; " therefore
glorify God in your body," that is the conclusion. Between
premise and conclusion is builded Calvary. Before God's " there-
fore " stands a blood-stained cross and on it hangs the Son of God.
If we are God's, all that we own is His. If He owns us, He owns
our property. He allows us to own it, that He may control it.
If one owns a piece of ground, he owns the grass that grows on it.
If God owns us, we are to glorify Him with all that we own.
What we are to give Him is to depend, not on our whims and
moods, not on what we think we can spare, but on what it takes
to glorify Him. He is to have not what we like, but what He
likes. This is the kind of ownership of property society needs to
have recognized; not the public, collective ownership of land
and capital for which socialism is shrieking; but the Divine
ownership of property whose right rests on the claims of creation
and redemption. 1
^[ We do not want to have our life divided up into body and
spirit, secular and sacred, week-day and Sunday. The devil likes
to keep us talking about what we ought not to do on Sunday
morning, because none knows better than he that our destinies
are really determined by what we do on Saturday night. A few
reserves which are labelled " sacred " are the best guarantee that
Beelzebub can have for undisturbed possession of the character.
" Give me the body " is the cry of every claimant for the citadel
of Mansoul, " and let who will have the spirit." 2
2. " To glorify " God is to do Him honour, to exalt, to magnify,
to praise Him. How can we glorify God in our bodies ?
(1) We glorify God in our bodies by a clear, direct recognition
that the body is His shrine, His temple. " Now the body," says
St. Paul, " is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord
for the body." This implies a strenuous mental rally back to
elemental principles whenever the body presumes to make its
imperious demands. It implies certain times of soul-quietude
when we affirm, with strong conviction, " I am a manifestation of
God. My body is His shrine, His temple, the theatre of His
operation. If my body beguiles me into lust, anger, selfishness,
unkindness to others, I am not merely making myself an objec-
1 J. I. Vance, Tendency, 88. 2 Canon J. G. Simpson.
204 THE BODY FOR GOD
tionable nuisance, but I am guilty of sacrilege, of something akin
to blasphemy against the God who dwells within me."
(2) We glorify God in our bodies by disciplining the body so
that we gain the victory of self-possession. By far the best, the
surest, the happiest, verification of St. Paul's great claim must be
made by each man for himself in the effort of obedience ; in the
hidden discipline of life ; through pain and toil and fear, it may
be, yet, by the grace of God, not without some earnest of a victory
whose faintest, briefest forecast is better than all the pleasures of
compromise the victory of self-possession for the glory of God.
It is pitiful to imagine how much of strength and liberty and joy
is being missed or marred day after day by the mistakes men
make in dealing with their bodies. Quite apart from the misery
and havoc wrought by sheer misuse by gluttony and drunkenness
and lust there are misunderstandings of the body's meaning,
and one-sided ways of treating it, which, with little or no blame
perhaps, still hinder grievously the worth and happiness that life
might have, and that the love of God intended for it.
(a) The body is not to le neglected or despised. In former times
it was the belief of men that they honoured God by punishing
the flesh. If one man were more saintly than another he would
wear a hair shirt next his skin, or put round his body a belt with
spikes in it. Long and rigorous fasts, great and serious privations,
were thought to be special marks of religious sanctity. Are we
quite free from this error ? Have not we cared more for souls
than bodies ? We have sometimes been so busy " saving souls "
that we have cared next to nothing for bodies.
Tf It seems to me that the spurious and unspiritual feeling of
the day is directed to spiritual even more frequently than to
material objects ; and above all, that to divorce from each other
a care for men's bodies and for their spirits, or under any pretence
whatever to cast a slight upon the former, or even upon those
who exclusively (at least as they fancy) devote themselves to the
former, is to set at naught the first and last lessons of the Gospels.
It would be utterly shocking to me to doubt that the plainest
and most literal meaning of such passages as Matt. xv. 32,
Mark viii. 2, 3 is also the most important, whatever other
meanings may likewise be contained within them. 1
Tf The great German tenor, Herr Heinrich Knote, once showed
1 Hort, Life and Letters, i. 405.
i CORINTHIANS vi. 19, 20 205
me his mirrors for examining the vocal chords. The first thing
he does after waking is to see whether the vocal chords have the
fine pink hue that indicates perfect health. And a red and
inflamed vein means that something is wrong. His whole art
is so to carry on the functions of digestion, exercise, sleep, work
and play as to keep his body at the point of absolute perfection.
The time was when men talked about despising the body. People
wanted the moral teacher to have the student's pallor and to
show those signs of exhaustion that betoken the midnight oil.
We have finally discovered that sickliness is not saintliness.
Holiness is wholeness, or healthiness to use the Hebrew ex-
pression. God made the body to be a fearful and wonderful
instrument, and a man who injures his body and by carelessness
and sin appears on the street with a bad cold or indigestion, or
shows signs of gluttony, ought to be as humiliated as if he had
been caught stealing chickens, forging a note, or telling lies.
Sickness that comes from disobedience to the laws of God
represents a form of personal degradation. 1
If Behold: eating, drinking, clothing, and other necessaries
pertaining to the support of the body are burdensome to a fervent
spirit.
Grant me to use such comforts with moderation, and not to be
entangled with an excessive longing for them. It is not allowed
us to cast them all away, for nature must be supported ; but Thy
holy law forbids to require superfluities and such things as are
for mere delight; for otherwise the flesh would grow insolent
against the spirit.
Between these, I beseech Thee, let Thy hand govern and direct
me, that nothing be done in excess. 2
(6) The body is not to le indulged. Modern civilization
addresses an ever more powerful and persuasive appeal to the
lower appetites of man. The cravings of the senses are stimulated
in many ways, and a wonderful organization of sensual service
has been developed to satisfy them. The body is an instrument
for making money, and the patient servitor of sensual pleasure,
and for many nothing more.
(3) We glorify God in our bodies by trusting the love and
power and resources of the Father-Soul who dwells within us.
Our want of faith limits God. They who are able to concentrate
upon the central fountain of life, and affirm that all that is God's
1 N. D. Hillia, Contagion of In/luenct, 206. a A Kempis.
206 THE BODY FOR GOD
is theirs, do find the lower conditions controlled ; the moral
conditions of the psychical nature, and the physical conditions
of the animal nature, are practically dead because they are " hid
with Christ in God."
If One of the finest organs in Europe is in the Cathedral of
Fribourg, a town in Switzerland. A good many years ago a
young man came to that Cathedral and asked to be allowed to
examine the organ. The attendant, not knowing who he was, at
first refused to permit him to do so. After considerable per-
suasion he suffered him to look through it, and then in response
to further persistent entreaty he allowed him to sit down and
attempt to play. Forthwith there burst from the great in-
strument such strains of heavenly music that the attendant stood
spellbound. " Who are you ? " at last he ventured to ask. " My
name is Mendelssohn," was the reply. " Mendelssohn ! " cried
the attendant, lifting up his hands in amazement, " and to think
that I refused to let you play on the organ ! " There is One who
wishes to bring music to the glory of God out of our lives, if we
will only allow Him. Let Christ touch us, and we will be able
to glorify God. 1
(4) To glorify God in the body is manifestly self-identification
with the brethren of humanity. " If you would glorify God in
your body, know that the humility that loves to serve, the self-
subordination that induces you to leave your heaven of personal
comfort to be identified with your brethren's sorrows, will pro-
pitiate the only element in the nature of the Absolute that
requires propitiating, which is His yearning, hungering love."
God's human children need us all, bitterly need us.
King's children are these all; though want and sin
Have marred their beauty glorious within,
We may not pass them but with reverent eye :
As when we see some goodly temple graced
To be Thy dwelling, ruined and defaced,
The haunt of sad and doleful creatures, lie
Bare to the sky, and open to the gust,
It grieveth us to see this House laid waste,
It pitieth us to see it in the dust ! 2
1 J. Aitchison. 8 Dora Greenwell.
SPIRIT DAL DETACHMENT.
07
LITERATURE.
Banks (L. A.), The Sinner and His Friends, 1.
Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, i. 305.
Cox (S.), Expositions, ii. 404.
Dykes (J. 0.), Plain Words on Great Themes, 43.
Finlayson (T. C.), The Divine Gentleness, 170.
Henson (H. H.), Light and Leaven, 209.
Hodgson (A. P.), Thoughts for the King's Children, 151.
Horder (W. G.), The Other-World, 159.
Hoyle (A.), The Depth and Power of the Christian Faith, 153.
Jerdan (C.), Messages to the Children, 56.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year : Easter to Ascension, 251.
Leffingwell (C. W.), in Living Voices of Living Men, 153.
Little (W. J. Knox), Manchester Sermons, 81.
Manning (H. E.), Sermons, i. 349.
Martineau (J.), Endeavours after the Christian Life, 439.
Matheson (G.), The Spiritual Development of St. Paul, 288.
Times of Retirement, 152.
Parker (J.), City Temple Pulpit, v. 88.
Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 244.
Ridgeway (C. J.), Social Life, 52.
Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, iii. 169.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, viii. (1862) No. 481.
Vaughan (C. J.), Lessons of Life and Godliness, 311.
(J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), 1869, No. 680 ; xxv. (1884-85)
No. 1292.
Vincent (M. R.), God and Bread, 363.
Webb-Peploe (H. W.), He Cometh, 33.
Wilson (J. M.), Sermons in Clifton College Chapel, i. 79.
Wood (W. S.), Problems in the New Testament, 80.
Cambridge Review, ii. Supplement, No. 40 (Bradby).
Christian Age, xxxiii. 21 (Talmage).
Christian World Pulpit, xiv. 65 (Rogers), 344 (Short) ; xliv. 44 (Smith) j
Ixx. 273 (Home) ; Ixxii. 9 (Taylor).
Churchman's Pulpit : Lenten Season, v. 92 (Cooke).
Homiktic Review, xx. 537 (Hoyt) ; xxxi. 44 (Storrs).
SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT.
But this I say, brethren, the time is shortened, that henceforth both those
that have wives may he as though they had none ; and those that weep, as
though they wept not ; and those that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not ;
and those that buy, as though they possessed not ; and those that use the
world as not abusing it : for the fashion of this world passeth away. I Cor.
vii. 29-31.
THE subject of this chapter is marriage. But marriage is part
of a larger subject. The great question agitating the Corinthians
is whether a man should, on becoming a Christian, maintain the
occupations and relationships which he entered into previously.
The Apostle's answer is, Yes : " Let each man abide in that
calling wherein he was called." Let the slave remain a slave,
though he may take advantage of an honourable opportunity of
becoming free. Let those who are married remain married, and
those who are unmarried remain unmarried. " But this I say "
there is a change of word (from Xeyo) to <f)rjfj,t), in order probably
to give special emphasis to the assertion " But this I do declare :
though I counsel none to change their state, I counsel all to
change their attitude towards these and all other earthly things."
And what are the earthly interests towards which Christian
men are to change their attitude ? He names marriage, weeping,
rejoicing, buying, and the use of the world generally. But how
is this possible ? Because the time is short literally " is
shortened, abridged " there is no very long time now for any
one to feel the duty of detachment irksome. And finally there
is wisdom in it, for this world is neither essential nor enduring
" the fashion of this world passeth away."
Thus the subject is detachment from the world. There is
mentioned
i COR. 14
210 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
I. An Encouragement to Detachment.
II. Three Relationships of life towards which the Detachment
may be practised :
1. Marriage.
2. Sorrowing and Eejoicing.
3. Business.
III. A general Direction regarding the proper Attitude to
the World.
IV. A good Reason for this Attitude.
H Christianity is a spirit, not a law : it is a set of principles,
not a set of rules ; it is not a saying to us, You shall do this, you
shall not do that you shall use this particular dress, you shall
not use that you shall lead, you shall not lead, a married life.
Christianity consists of principles, but the application of those
principles is left to every man's individual conscience. With
respect not only to this particular case, but to all the questions
which had been brought before him, the Apostle applies the same
principle; the cases upon which he decided were many and
various, but the large, broad principle of his decision remains
the same in all. You may marry, and you have not sinned:
you may remain unmarried, and you do not sin; if you are
invited to a heathen feast, you may go, or you may abstain from
going ; you may remain a slave, or you may become free ; not in
these things does Christianity consist. But what it does demand
is this : whether married or unmarried, whether a slave or free,
in sorrow or in joy, you are to live in a spirit higher and loftier
than that of the world. 1
I
AN ENCOURAGEMENT TO DETACHMENT.
" The time is shortened."
1. There is no tremor of dismay or sadness in the voice. St.
Paul was in the midst of work, full of the interest and joy of
living, holding the reins of many complicated labours in his hands,
and he quietly said, " This is not going to last long. Very soon
it will be over." It is what men often say to themselves with
terror, clutching all the more closely the things which they hold,
as if they would hold on to them for ever. There is nothing of
1 F. W. Robertson.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 211
that about St. Paul. And on the other hand, there is nothing of
morbidness or discontent, no rejoicing that the time is short, and
wishing that it were still shorter. There is no hatred of life which
makes him want to be away. There is no mad impatience for
the things which lie beyond. There is simply a calm and satisfied
recognition of a fact. There is a reasonable sense of what is
good and dear in life, and yet, at the same time, of what must
lie beyond life, of what life cannot give us. It is as when the
same pen wrote those sublime and simple words, " This corruptible
must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on im-
mortality " ; the quiet statement of a great, eternal necessity, at
which the wise man must feel the same kind of serious joy as
that with which he follows the movements of the stars, and looks
to see day and night inevitably give place to one another.
2. It does not matter what St. Paul was thinking of when he
said the time was short. He may have had his mind upon the
death which they were all approaching. He may have thought
of the coming of Christ, which he seems to have expected to take
place while he was yet alive. We cannot be quite certain which
it was. And perhaps the very vagueness about this helps us to
his meaning. For he is not, evidently, dwelling upon the nature
of the event which is to limit the " time," only upon the simple
fact that there is a limit; that the period of earthly life and
work lies like an island in the midst of a greater sea of being,
the island of time in the ocean of a timeless eternity ; and that
it is pressed upon and crowded into littleness by the infinite.
Not the shore where the sea sets the island its limits, but only
the island in the sea, hearing the sea always on its shores ; not
the experience by which this life should pass into another, but
only the compression and intensifying of this life by the certainty
that there is another ; not death, but the shortness of life that
is what his thoughts are fixed upon, and it is of this that the
best men always think the most.
3. Time is short in reference to two things.
(1) First,4t is short in reference to the person who regards it t
That mysterious thing Time is a matter of sensation, and not
a reality; a modification merely of our own consciousness, and
not actual existence ; depending upon the flight of ideas long
212 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
to one, short to another. The span granted to the butterfly, the
child of a single summer, may be long ; that which is given to the
cedar of Lebanon may be short. The shortness of time, therefore,
is entirely relative, belonging to us, not to God.
*[f In poetry and ordinary talk, we are obliged to look at time
as an agent in itself; but in reality time does nothing and is
nothing; we use it as an easy familiar expression for all those
causes which are working slowly, and which we cannot see.
Unless some positive cause is in action, no change takes place
even in a thousand years. There are probably empty regions in
the universe where no light comes, and nothing occurs ; in such
places there can be no time. It is simply that we are here, and
that things are happening around us. The earth has gone a
certain course round the sun, and brought us again to the same
point where we were twelve months ago. We have for 365 days
been careering through different parts of space. That is the
meaning of a year. We are only allowed to join in the career,
and to come back to the same point a certain number of repeti-
tions in our lives the same point, I mean, in reference to the
solar system ; but the solar system itself is moving onward through
space. During each period, certain causes are leading either to
the completion, the maintenance, or the decay of our bodies ; and
after we have spun round with our little globe for some 40, 50,
60, 70, 80, 90, or at the most 100 circuits, then comes the end.
We can see no further. Others take our place, and we are what
is called dead. 1
If There is a little insect that crawls upon the trees, and
creeps, in one short day of ours, through all the experiences of
life from birth to death. In a short twenty-four hours his life
begins, matures and ends birth, youth, activity, age, decrepitude,
all crowded and compressed into these moments that slip away
uncounted in one day of our human life. Is his life long or
short ? Is our life long or short to him ? If he could realize it
by any struggle of his insect brain, what an eternity our three-
score years and ten must seem to him ! And then lift up your
eyes, lift up your thoughts, and think of God. How does the
life that has any limits appear to Him ? Nothing short of eternity
can seem long to Him. He sees the infant's life flash like a ripple
into the sunlight of existence and vanish almost before the eye has
caught it. And He sees Methuselah's slow existence creep
through its nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and find, at last,
the grave which had stood waiting so long. Is there a real
1 W. M. Sinclair, A Young Man's Life, 126.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 213
difference in the length of these two lives to Him ? A little
longer ripple is the life of the patriarch than was the life of the
baby, that is all. What do we mean, then, by the shortness of
our human life ? To the ephemera it looks like an eternity ; to
God it looks like an instant. Evidently these attributes of length
and shortness must be relative ; they are not absolute. 1
^[ An illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a
decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says,
" God works in moments " " En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We
ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or grand moments that signify.
Let the measure of Time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is
unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation,
a smile, a glance what ample borrowers of eternity they are ! 2
(2) Again, time is short with reference to its opportunities. For
this is the emphatic meaning in the original literally, " the
opportunity is compressed, or shut in." Time may be long, and
yet the opportunity may be very short. The sun in autumn may
be bright and clear, but the seed which has not been sown until
then will not vegetate. A man may have vigour and energy in
manhood and maturity, but the work which ought to have been
done in childhood and youth cannot be done in old age. A chance
once gone in this world can never be recovered.
TJ An Italian superstition of the Middle Ages engaged with
wonderful success the pencil of Watts while he was sojourning
in Florence, and in it he who had been the pupil of Phidias in
the study of the Elgin marbles at home, became the worshipper
of Tintoretto in Italy. The Fata Morgana which Boiardo in his
Orlando Innamorato imagined as a siren, fleeing from the pur-
suit of a knight, he embodies with a singular deftness. She is
depicted as having reached a thicket of dense foliage, and the
knight has almost grasped the hem of her crimson robe when
she flees still further from him with a mischievous glance which
mocks all his eager efforts. It was a superstitious notion among
the Italian peasants that this mystic being could only be effectu-
ally caught by having the lock of her forehead seized with a firm
grasp. What is this but virtually saying in finer form, what
time, and every opportunity which it brings, is preaching to us
in loud tones to seize it by the forelock and hold it fast, other-
wise it will escape and we shall lose it for ever ? 3
If Iron passes into the furnace cold and unyielding; coming
1 Phillips Brooks. 2 Emerson.
8 H. Macmillan, The Life- Work of George Frederick Watts, 171.
214 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
out it quickly cools and refuses the mould; but midway is a
moment when fire so lends itself to iron, and iron so yields its
force to flame that the metal flows like water. This brief plastic
moment is the inventor's opportunity, when the metal will take
on any shape for use or beauty. Similarly the fields offer a
strategic time to the husbandman. In February the soil refuses
the plough, the sun refuses heat, the sky refuses rain, the seed
refuses growth. In May comes an opportune time when all
forces conspire towards harvests ; then the sun lends warmth,
the clouds lend rain, the air lends ardour, the soil lends juices.
Then must the sower go forth and sow, for nature whispers that
if he neglects June he will starve in January. The planets also
lend interpretation to this principle. Years ago astronomers
were sent to Africa to witness the transit of Venus. Preparations
began months beforehand. A ship was fitted up, instruments
were packed, the ocean was crossed, a site selected, and the
telescopes were mounted. Scientists made all things ready for that
opportune time when the sun, Venus, and the earth should all
be in line. That critical moment was very brief. Instinctively
each astronomer knew that his eye must be at the small end of
the glass when the planet went scudding past the large end.
Once the period of conjunction had passed no machinery would
offer itself for turning the planet back upon her axis. Not for
astronomers only are the opportune times brief. 1
When I have time, so many things I'll do,
To make life happier and more fair
For those whose lives are crowded now with care,
I'll help to lift them from their low despair
When I have time.
When I have time, the friend I love so well
Shall know no more the weary, toiling days;
I'll lead his feet in pleasant paths always,
And cheer his heart with words of sweetest praise,
When I have time.
When you have time ! The friend you hold so dear
May be beyond the reach of all your sweet intent,
May never know that you so kindly meant
To fill his life with bright content,
When you had time.
1 N. D. Hillis, TJie Investment of Influence, 220.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 215
Now is the time! Speed, friend, no longer wait
To scatter loving smiles and words of cheer
To those around, whose lives are now so drear;
They may not need you in that far-off year:
Now is the time.
4. What effect ought the shortness of the time to have on a
man ?
(1) It should make him discriminate. Out of the mass of
things which we have touched, we must choose those which are
ours the books which we shall read, the men whom we shall
know, the power that we shall wield, the pleasure which we shall
enjoy, the special point where we shall drop our bit of usefulness
into the world's life before we go. We come to be like a party
of travellers left at a great city railway station for a couple of
hours. All cannot see everything in town. Each has to choose
according to his tastes what he will see. They separate into their
individualities instead of going wandering about promiscuously,
as they would if there were no limit to their time. So conscien-
tiousness, self-knowledge, independence, and the toleration of
other men's freedom which always goes with the most serious
and deep assertion of our own freedom, are closely connected
with the sense that life is very short.
If When Dr. Chalmers was a young man, he was for a time
more devoted to the study of mathematics than to the subjects
which more properly should have concerned him as a parish
minister. In a pamphlet which he wrote at the time in support
of his application to be appointed to a mathematical chair in the
University of Edinburgh, he affirmed that a minister could do
all he needed to do in his parish, and do it well, and yet have
five clear days every week for literary or other pursuits. Twenty
years afterwards some one, who had found a copy of the old
forgotten pamphlet, publicly taunted him with what he had
said. Yes, he said, it was too true. " I was at that time unduly
devoted to the study of mathematics. What, sir, is the object of
mathematical science ? Magnitude and the proportions of magni-
tude. But then, strangely blinded that I was, I had forgotten
two magnitudes. I thought nothing of the littleness of time and
the greatness of eternity." 1
If In a letter to his old schoolmaster Euskin wrote as follows :
"Nero's choice of time and opportunity for the pursuit of his
1 The Morning Watch, Dec. 1902, p. 134.
216 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
musical studies has been much execrated, but is guiltless in
comparison to the conduct of the man who occupies himself for
a single hour with any earthly pursuit of whatever importance,
believing, as he must, if he believe the Bible, that souls, which
human exertion might save, are meanwhile dropping minute by
minute into hell. This being fully granted, the questions come,
' What means are there by which the salvation of souls can be
attained ? ' and ' How are we to choose among them ? ' For
instance, does the pursuit of any art or science, for the mere
sake of the resultant beauty or knowledge, tend to forward this
end? That such pursuits are beneficial and ennobling to our
nature is self-evident, but have we leisure for them in our
perilous circumstances? Is it a time to be spelling of letters,
or touching of strings, counting stars or crystallizing dewdrops,
while the earth is failing under our feet, and our fellows are
departing every instant into eternal pain ? Or, on the other
hand, is not the character and kind of intellect which is likely
to be drawn into these occupations employed in the fullest
measure and to the best advantage in them ? Would not great
part of it be useless and inactive if otherwise directed? Do
not the results of its labour remain, exercising an influence, if
not directly spiritual, yet ennobling and purifying, on all
humanity, to all time ? Was not the energy of Galileo, Newton,
Davy, Michael Angelo, Eaphael, Handel, employed more effect-
ively to the glory of God in the results and lessons it has left
than if it had been occupied all their lifetime in direct priestly
exertion, for which, in all probability, it was less adapted, and
in which it would have been comparatively less effectual? Is
an individual, then, who has the power of choice, in any degree
to yield to his predilections in so important a matter ? I myself
have little pleasure in the idea of entering the Church, and have
been attached to the pursuits of art and science, not by a flying
fancy, but as long as I can remember, with settled and steady
desire. How far am I justified in following them up ? " What
answer was sent by Canon Dale to assist his pupil in resolving
the doubt between these conflicting calls, I do not know; but
Buskin's own answer to it is written large in his life and work.
He made the critic's chair a pulpit. 1
(2) It should make him concentrate. He who knows he is in
the world for a very little while, who knows it and feels it, is
not like a man who is to live here for ever. He strikes for the
centre of living. He cares for the principles and not for the
1 E. T. Cook, The Life, of Rusk in, i. 122.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 217
forms of life. He does the little daily things of life, but he does
them for their purposes, not for themselves. He is like a climber
on a rocky pathway, who sets his foot upon each projecting point
of stone, but who treads on each, not for its own sake, but for
the sake of the ones above it. The man who knows he is to die
to-morrow does all the acts of to-day, but does them as if he did
not do them, does them freely, cannot be a slave to their details,
has entered already into something of the large liberty of death.
That is the way in which the sense that life is short liberates a
man from the slavery of details. You say, perhaps, "That is
not good. No man can do his work well unless his heart is in
it." But is it not also true that a man's heart can really be only
in the heart of his work, and that the most conscientious faithful-
ness in details will always belong, not to the man who serves the
details, but to the man who serves the idea of the work which
he has to do ?
^J Michael Faraday, when a pcor apprentice, utilized every
moment, and in a letter to a boy friend he wrote : " Time is all I
require. Oh, that I could purchase at a cheap rate some of our
modern gents' spare hours nay, days ! I think it would be a
good bargain both for them and for me." 1
gentlemen! the time of life is short;
To spend that shortness basely were too long,
If life did ride upon a dial's point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour. 2
(3) It sJiould make him realize. Every emotion has its higher
and its lower forms. It means but little to me if I know only
that a man is happy or unhappy, if I do not know of what sort
his joy or sorrow is. But all the emotions are certainly tempted
to larger action if it is realized that the world in which they
take their birth is but for a little time, that its fashion passes
away, that the circumstances of an experience are very transitory.
That must drive me down into the very essence of every experi-
ence and make me realize it in the profoundest and largest way.
Take, for instance, one experience. Think of deep sorrow coming
to a man, something which breaks his home and heart by taking
suddenly, or slowly, out of them that which is the centre of
1 G. C. Lorimer, Messages of To-day, 355.
8 Shakespeare, Henry IV., pt. i.'v. ii. 82.
2i8 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
them both, some life around which all his life has lived. There
are two forms in which the sorrow of that death cornes to a man.
One is in the change of circumstances, the breaking up of sweet
companionships and pleasant habits, the loneliness and weariness
of living ; the other is in the solemn brooding of mystery over
the soul and the tumult of love within the soul, the mystery of
death, the distress of love. Now if the man who is bereaved
sees nothing in the distance, as he looks forward, but one stretch
of living, if he realizes most how long life is, it is the first of
these aspects of his sorrow that is the most real to him. He
multiplies the circumstances of his bereavement into all these
coming years. Year after year, year after year, he is to live
alone. But if, as it so often happens when death comes very
near to us, life seems a very little thing; if, as we stand and
watch when the spirit has gone away from earth to heaven,
the years of earth which we have yet to live seem very few and
short ; if it seems but a very little time before we shall go too,
then our grief is exalted to its largest form. It grows unselfish.
It is perfectly consistent with a triumphant thankfulness for
the dear soul that has entered into rest and glory. It dwells
not on the circumstances of bereavement, but upon that mysteri-
ous strain in which love has been stretched from this world to
the other, and, amid all the pain that the tension brings, is still
aware of joy at the new knowledge of its own capacities which
has been given it.
1J A truth is not true until it is realized. I know that a
battle was fought and won ; the mother whose only son appears
in the list of the dead realizes it. A man is saved not by what
he holds, but by what holds him. I believe in God. So did
Antipas. So do you. Who would contradict this? "We are
all theists. We all believe in God. And yet any man who
realized the awfully solemn and truly blessed meaning of this
would live as in a temple. This world is the temple of God.
And though somewhere and somehow we are in the thrice holy
place we are never beyond its outer courts. 1
(4) It should solemnize him. It is not so much that the
shortness of life makes us prepare for death as that it spreads
the feeling of criticalness all through life, and makes each moment
1 J. H. Goodman, The Lordship of Christ, 236.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 219
prepare for the next, makes life prepare for life. This is its
power. Blessed is he who feels it. Blessed is he in whose
experience each day and each hour has all the happiness and
all the solemnity of a parent towards the day and the hour to
which it gives birth, stands sponsor for it, holds it for baptism
at the font of God. Such days are sacred in each other's eyes.
The life in which such days succeed each other is as a holy family,
with its moments " bound each to each by natural piety."
The bell strikes one. We take no note of Time
But from its loss. To give it then a tongue
Is wise in man ; as if an angel spoke
I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright
It is the knell of my departed hours:
Where are they ? With the years beyond the flood.
It is the signal that demands despatch :
How much is to be done ! My hopes and fears
Stand up alarmed, and o'er life's narrow verge
Look down on what? a fathomless abyss;
A dread eternity ! how surely mine ! l
(5) It should make him sympathize. Two men have lived
side by side for years, with business and social life between them,
with a multitude of suspicions and concealments; but let them
know that they have only an hour more to live together, and,
as they look into each other's eyes, do not the suspicions and
concealments clear away ? They know each other. They trust
each other. They think the best of each other. They are ready
to do all that they can do for each other in those few moments
that remain.
TI A traveller was crossing a mountain path alone. The
snow was falling fast and thick, and an overpowering sense of
sleep stole over him. Desperately he fought against it, for
he knew that sleep was certain death. As he struggled on,
dragging his tottering steps with increasing difficulty, his foot
struck against an obstruction which lay across his path, and
looking down to see what it was he found it was a man half
buried in the snow. In a moment he forgot his drowsiness and
was wide awake. He took the unconscious man in his arms
and chafed his frozen body, and in so doing the effort to help
another brought life and energy to himself.
1 Young.
220 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
^[ A missionary describes a scene which he saw in South
Africa. From the top of a hill he looked down upon a piece of
land where a few men were busy sowing peas, and he recognized
them to be lepers at work together. Two particularly caught
his attention. One had no hands, the other no feet, for their
limbs were wasted away by that terrible and loathsome scourge.
By themselves they would both alike have been unable to work,
but they had overcome their helplessness by mutual help and
association. The man who was without hands was bearing on
his back the other who had no feet, and he in turn carried the
bag of seeds, which he dropped into the ground as they moved
along, while his companion pressed each seed into the ground
with his feet. 1
The time is short;
Therefore with all thy might,
Labour for God and Eight.
Pause not for heats and shadows of the day,
Fail not for difficulties of the way:
Be true, be pure, be strong !
Eternity is long.
The time is short;
Sin, misery, and despair
Darken the earth and air;
Therefore do thou with Heaven intercede,
And for thy brethren, ere they perish, plead:
Pray for the prayerless throng!
Eternity is long.
The time is short;
Therefore, my brother, love!
Love always ! God above
Is one with thee in this; O take
His crown of thorns, and thine own self forsake !
Love, spite of pain and wrong!
Eternity .is long. 2
II.
IN THREE
There are many who have the impression that the tendency
of religion, if a man is sincere and deep in it, is to make him less
competent and practical in the affairs of the present. But this
1 C. J. Ridgeway, Social Life, 63. 2 Shirley Wynne.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 221
cannot be the Apostle's meaning. He was too sane, too wise a
man to claim no more for him to teach such a way of regarding
the business and necessities of the present life. And indeed this
was not St. Paul's idea of religion at all. St. Paul's doctrine is
the doctrine which is taught all through the Bible, that the
family, society, the state, business are of God's ordaining, and
that it is of supreme importance that man should fulfil his duties
and play his part aright in all these. "Be not slothful in
business." "Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord."
" If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his
own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an un-
believer." St. Paul does not tell us to withdraw from common
relationships or from business. He does not blot out the words
" home," " politics," " business." The Christian life always means
for him a life of more varied and nobler interests.
What, then, does he mean by saying that they who have
wives should be as though they had none ; and they that weep,
as though they wept not ; and they that rejoice, as though they
rejoiced not? What St. Paul is enjoining here is the relative
value of the present order of things. Home, joy, sorrow, business
these are the most real things of the present ; but he says even
these, which are the most real, are not ends in themselves. They
have uses to serve beyond the present. Do not take them as
if they were final ; learn to look through them and beyond them.
Let us consider them one by one.
1. Marriage. " Those that have wives as though they
had none." St. Paul means by this expression domestic life
generally. He does not mean that marriage is not a good thing.
He is not doing what some Christian people have done speaking
slightingly of marriage, in the interests of godliness. Nor does
he mean that marriage is to be looked upon lightly, that men
and women should enter into that relationship and then take it
as a little thing. That on the face of it would be contrary to the
whole strain of the Scriptures. It would be contrary to the
Apostle's own teaching, " Husbands, love your wives." St. Paul
means by marriage domestic life, and his meaning is that a true
family life looks on to something beyond itself, and is meant to
prepare for something beyond itself. A good husband, a good
222 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
wife, children growing up in the home united in family affection,
a happy home life, are among the best things we can have here.
They are present blessings, but they are prophetic of something
beyond the present, and they are meant to train the affections for
another home than the present. Home, and home relationships
are not simply for our ease and comfort and happiness. They
contribute much, where they are what they should be, to these.
But they have a purpose beyond them. And we find most
in them, and they do most for us, when we use them with a
recognition of this greater purpose. To let home become
everything to us is to make it less than if it were only a part
of our life.
Tf Kachel, the daughter of Lord Southampton, married in 1670
William Kussell, the younger son of the Earl of Bedford. It was
a very happy marriage. In one of her letters to him she writes,
"My best life, make my felicity entire by believing my heart
possessed with all the gratitude, honour, and passionate affection
to your person any creature is capable of ; and this granted, what
have I to ask but a continuance (if God see fit) of these present
enjoyments? if not, a submission without murmur to His most
wise dispensations and unerring providence. He knows best
when we have had enough here ; what I most earnestly beg
from His mercy is, that we both live so that, whichever goes first,
the other may not sorrow as for one of whom they have no hope.
Then let us cheerfully expect to be together to a good old age ;
if not, let us not doubt but He will support us under what trial
He will inflict upon us. ... Excuse me, if I dwell too long upon
this ; it is from my opinion that if we can be prepared for all
conditions, we can with the greater tranquillity enjoy the present,
which I hope will be long ; though when we change, it will be for
the better, I trust, through the merits of Christ." l
Tf You cannot love a man, a woman, a child, without enter-
ing that centre of things where love alone reaches its true
meaning. It is only when we have touched the timeless in
those we love that we enter on the true glory of loving. It is
only then that love becomes the ingredient and f urtherer of the
highest in us. It is this that gives love its permanency, when
all else has fallen away ; when youth has passed, when beauty
has faded, when trials and difficulties come. When love inhabits
this sphere it takes on a Divine patience, a forgiveness to the
uttermost, a hopefulness that no disappointments can quench
1 The Morning Watch, September, 1906, p. 100.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 223
Here the eternity in us touches the eternity in our friend, and
makes our love immortal. 1
2. Sorrow and Joy. " Those that weep, as though they wept
not ; and those that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not." Again
we must bear in mind that St. Paul is speaking in a terse,
epigrammatic way. There is nothing more real to us than our
joys and sorrows, and we cannot make believe about them. And
there are sorrows that come, that possess us wholly for the time ;
we can do nothing with them, we cannot moderate them or put
them aside. But we are not to let ourselves be carried off our
feet by either the troubles of life or its joys. It is the part of
those who believe in another life to have balance and moderation
and self-control in these things. St. Paul would say, " Joy is joy
and sorrow is sorrow ; you will weep and you will laugh. Sorrow
will be bitter and joy sweet. But do not make too much of
either. Both will pass, and they will be only memories to you
some day, but they ought to leave you different yourself. Let
both have a place in a larger conception of life. Look beyond
them to some purpose which God means them to serve."
Fair vessel hast thou seen with honey filled,
Which is no sooner opened, than descend
Upon the clammy sweets by bees distilled
A troop of flies, quick swarming without end ?
Yet these when one doth fan away and beat,
Such as had lighted with a fearful care
On the jar's edge, nor cumbered wings and feet,
Lightly they mount into the upper air.
But all that headlong plunged those sweets among,
They cannot fly, in cloying sweetness bound;
The heavy toils have all around them clung,
In woful surfeiting their lives are drowned.
Such vessel is this world fanned evermore
By ^death's dark Angel with his mighty wing ;
Then all that had in pleasure's honied store
Their spirits sunk, they upward cannot spring.
1 J. Brierley, The Secret of Living, 35.
224 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
Only they mount, who on this vessel's side
With heed alighting, had with extreme lip
Just ventured, there while suffered to abide,
Its sweets in measure and with fear to sip. 1
1J In a palace, at Florence, there are two pictures which hang
side by side. One represents a stormy sea with its wild waves,
and black clouds and iierce lightnings flashing across the sky. In
the waters a human face is seen, wearing an expression of the
utmost agony and despair. The other picture also represents the
sea tossed by as fierce a storm, with as dark clouds ; but out of
the midst of the waves a rock rises, against which the waters
dash in vain. In a cleft of the rock are some tufts of grass and
green herbage, with sweet flowers, and amid these a dove is seen
sitting on her nest quiet and undisturbed by the wild fury of the
storm. The first picture represents the sorrow of the world
helpless and despairing ; the second the sorrow of the Christian
nestling in the bosom of God's unchanging love. When striving
to bear on and bear up we may remember a fine passage of
Jeremy Taylor's: "Well, let the world have its course, I am
content to bear it ; God's will be done ; let the sea be troubled ;
let the waves thereof roar ; let the winds of affliction blow ; let
the waves of sorrow rush upon me ; let the darkness of grief and
heaviness compass me about; yet will I not be afraid. These
storms will blow over ; these winds will be laid ; these waves
will fall ; this tempest cannot last long ; and these clouds shall
be dispelled ; whatsoever I suffer here shall shortly have an end.
I shall not suffer eternally ; come the worst that can come death
will put an end to all my sorrow and miseries. Lord grant
me patience here and ease hereafter ! I will suffer patiently
whatever can happen, and shall endeavour to do nothing against
my conscience and displeasing unto Thee ; for all is safe and sure
with him who is certain and sure of a blessed Eternity." z
3. Business. " Those that buy, as though they possessed not."
St. Paul recognizes, as every man must, the important place
which business holds in life. Business or trade belongs just as
much to life as the home and family do, or as the State does. It
is part of the order of things, and may have just as great a
religious value as the home has. Do not think of St. Paul as
speaking slightingly of business, or as having any such idea in his
mind. He has not. Nor does he mean that men are to be half
in earnest in their work. " Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily."
1 Trench, Poems, 328. 2 J. II. Goodman, The Lordship of Christ, 6.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 225
What he means is that business is not an end in itself. It is
ordained in the providence of God to serve for things greater
than itself. Buy, but do not let business be your life. As we
are not to lose ourselves in joy or sorrow, so we are not to lose
ourselves in business.
^[ When outward business diverted him a little from the
thought of God, a fresh remembrance coming from God invested
his soul, and so inflamed and transported him, that it was
difficult for him to restrain himself.
That he was more united to God in his ordinary occupations
than when he left them for devotion in retirement, from which
he knew himself to issue with much dryness of spirit.
That the most excellent method which he had found of going
to God, was that of doing our common business, without any view
of pleasing men, and (as far as we are capable) purely for the love
of God.
That it was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer
ought to differ from other times ; that we were as strictly
obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by
prayer in its season. 1
III.
A GENERAL DIRECTION.
" Use the world, as not abusing it."
1. These English words " use " and rt abuse " stand to each
other in much the same relation as the corresponding words of
the Apostle. To "use" anything is to turn it to account in
the direction of those ends for which it is really needed. To
" a&use " is simply to turn a thing away from its true and proper
use. Often, in doing this, you spoil the thing itself ; so that the
idea of injury comes to be generally involved in that of abuse.
But, originally and literally, to " abuse " is just to employ any-
thing in a manner that is aside from those purposes for which it
is needed and designed.
2. The word " world " is an expression which is used in the
New Testament Scriptures with several meanings, and therefore
needs to be interpreted with the utmost care and discrimination.
Sometimes it denotes the whole material universe as created by
1 Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 18, 2J,
I COR. 15
226 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
God, " the maker of heaven and earth." Sometimes it is this world
in which God has placed man for a time, the temporary scene of
human existence, man's abode, in which he sojourns for a limited
period. Sometimes it conveys the idea, not of a material creation
of God's fashioning, but of a spirit of worldliness in God's reasoning
creatures which is antagonistic to the will of God. Sometimes
it is the aggregate of those possessed by this spirit who, having
been made by God, rebel against His authority and refuse to heed
His commands. Sometimes it is the equivalent of what is known
to us by the name of Society, i.e. the environment of persons and
things, in the midst of which each one lives his life here, and
which, while not evil in itself, must be used, as St. Paul writes
in his letter to the Christians at Corinth, with caution, "not
overusing it," or " using it to the full," as his words really mean.
3. The text implies that this world has its uses. It stands
in direct relation to human needs. According to the original
purpose of God, it is our friend and not our enemy a servant to
minister to our wants, not a tyrant to oppress or degrade us.
Why has God placed us here at all, if our surroundings have not
their divinely appointed uses ? It is true that the world may
become a dangerous foe to our spiritual welfare ; but this is only
when we stand in false relations to it. Even God Himself cannot
be to the wicked all that He can be to the " pure in heart." And
the world, which is God's minister to us, cannot subserve the
purposes which it is meant to fulfil, unless we use it aright.
* c Worldliness " is simply living as if the visible were all, as if we
were merely visible creatures amongst visible things, forgetful
that we are spiritual beings, whose abiding home is the eternal.
" To use as not abusing " : this is the grand principle of the
unworldly life. And if we would see how we may and do abuse
the world, we have only to consider what are those uses which it
is intended to subserve.
(1) This world is designed to aid in revealing God to us. God
is the Eternal Spirit ; we are finite spirits. How is the Infinite to
manifest Himself to the finite ? Each human spirit is mysteri-
ously associated with a material frame ; and by this frame it is
connected with that great world of matter and of circumstance
on which God stamps the tokens of His presence, power, and
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 227
character. Whatever other or more direct methods God may
have of speaking to our souls, this is at least one medium of
communication. The material world and the human body, linked
together by affinity, form a bridge over which the thoughts of
God pass into the mind of man. And we may be sure that our
relations to the world outside of us have their own distinctive
part to play in the revelation of God within us. Humanity is
doubtless a better interpreter of God than nature ; but then
nature may help to interpret humanity. The highest manifesta-
tion which has been given us of God is in Jesus Christ, His
incarnate Son : but this Jesus becomes intelligible to us in virtue
of His relations to the world outside of Himself. Christ is " the
image of the invisible God " ; when we see Christ, we " see the
Father." But how do we see Christ, except through the medium
of His surroundings? The character of Jesus becomes visible
to us as we behold His attitude and conduct in circumstances
which are more or less familiar to ourselves, and the significance
of which we can therefore in some measure appreciate. It is
because He lived and moved in our " world " that what He did
and suffered becomes, through the interpreting power of our own
human experience, a revelation of the heart of God.
U What an " a&use " of the world it is when men employ it
to conceal God ! The attributes of the Most High are mirrored
in the world ; but men look at the mirror from such an angle of
vision as to see only its glittering surface, and not the reflection of
the Divine glory. You have heard of the astronomer who said
that what he found in the study of the starry sky was the glory of
Newton and his fellow- thinkers, and not the "glory of God." 1
^[ That was a fine reply of the astronomer, who, when inter-
rogated about the science he had been idolizing, said, " I am now
bound for the kingdom of Heaven, and I take the stars on my
way." 2
(2) This world is designed to aid in the formation and develop-
ment of spiritual character. The material exists for the sake of
the spiritual. This earth has been furnished as a school for the
education and discipline of man. Labour is the counteractive
of lust; affliction, of pride. Our relationships tend to destroy
selfishness ; our temptations reveal to us our own weakness. The
1 T. C. Finlayson. 2 S. L. Wilson, Helpful Words for Daily Life, 240,
228 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
whole world is an arena of education by probation, at once a
weigh-house in which character is tested, and a gymnasium in
which character is trained. It furnishes us with a plastic
material, the moulding and shaping of which reveals the native
royalty and develops the native capacity of our spiritual being.
^| Man learns to swim by being tossed into life's maelstrom
and left to make his way ashore. No youth can learn to sail his
life-craft in a lake sequestered and sheltered from all storms,
where other vessels never come. Skill comes through sailing
one's craft amidst rocks and bars and opposing fleets, amidst
storms and whirls and counter currents. 1
I
Life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom
To shape and use. 2
(3) This world is designed to be a sphere for the service of God.
God is a Spirit ; and we are spirits ; hence all true service of
God is, in its root and essence, spiritual. Yet possibly it may be
a necessity for the finite spirit that it shall be able to embody its
devotion towards God in forms external to itself. At any rate,
in giving to the human spirit a tabernacle of flesh, and thus
connecting it with the material world, God has made that world
an instrument for the expression of our spiritual obedience. If
one human soul loves another, it longs for some opportunity of
embodying its affection. If a servant is really devoted to his
master, he rejoices when his master so takes him into confidence
as to enable him to give some practical manifestation of his
loyalty. And so, God has placed us in a world which may
become a sphere of manifest service. He brings us into relations
which are constantly trying our obedience, and therefore furnish-
ing us with the means of expressing it.
Methought that in a solemn church I stood.
Its marble acres, worn with knees and feet,
Lay spread from door to door, from street to street.
Midway the form hung high upon the rood
1 N. D. Hillis, A Man's Value to Society, 46. 2 Tennyson, In Memoriam.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 229
Of Him who gave His life to be our good;
Beyond, priests flitted, bowed, and murmured meet,
Among the candles shining still and sweet.
Men came and went, and worshipped as they could
And still their dust a woman with her broom,
Bowed to her work, kept sweeping to the door.
Then saw I, slow through all the pillared gloom,
Across the church a silent figure come:
"Daughter," it said, "thou sweepest well my floor!"
It is the Lord! I cried, and saw no more. 1
IV.
A GOOD KEASON.
" For the fashion of this world passeth away."
1. The word " fashion " here is a translation of the Greek
word schema, from which we get our English word " scheme." The
text means that the present order of things, the earthly plan or
scheme in which we live, must come to an end. It is true,
indeed, of the earth itself. " This goodly frame, the earth, seems
to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air,
look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me
than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." The fashion
of this world passeth away ; even the solid earth is moving on to
sure destruction.
K Above the valley of the Neckar rises the magnificent ruin
of Heidelberg. To the world without it still presents a front of
majesty and beauty. The mountain crags seem not more massive
and enduring than its battlements of stone, its towers and walls
of solid masonry. But within, what a picture of desolation meets
the eye ! Broken columns and shattered carvings are scattered
in confusion about the deserted court. Fragments of costly
monuments are mingled with the debris of crumbling walls, and
trees are growing upon ramparts where once the cannon
thundered to the echoes of the surrounding hills. The rent
tower discloses the ingenuity of man to build, and his yet greater
power to destroy.
TJ The word translated " fashion " literally means " stage
scenery." St. Paul does not mean that everything on earth
1 George MacDonald.
2 3 o SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
is perishable, but that every unreal thing is perishable. Stage
scenery is unreal scenery. It does not represent the actual facts
of the greenroom. Many an actor is bringing down the house
with laughter when his own heart is breaking. St. Paul saw that
a great deal of life is simply stage acting concealment of the
greenroom. How many kind things are spoken, not in order to
reveal, but in order to cover ! How many gifts are sent, not for
your sake, but for the sake of the donor ! How many blandish-
ments are lavished for a vote ! How many visits are paid for a
subscription! St. Paul says all this unreality will pass away.
When will it pass away ? At death, you say. No ; death does
not reveal the reality of life. Death does not tear away the mask
from the face of my brother. Death is itself a mask, itself an un-
reality. So far from causing the stage scenery to vanish, it is
itself the climax of illusion. It is not to death I look ; it is to
love. Love is the great dispeller of unreality. Love is the great
emancipator from stage scenery. Love is the true rending of the
veil between this world and the world to come. 1
2. No doubt the world itself will pass away. For that we
have the warrant of Scripture, and Science has countersigned the
warrant. But this warrant is not to be found here. St. Paul is
not predicting a future catastrophe ; he is announcing a present
fact. He does not affirm that " the cloud-capp'd towers, the
gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" of this familiar world,
yea, the solid globe itself, with all who inherit it, shall dissolve,
and like the baseless fabric of a vision, like an insubstantial
pageant faded, "leave not a rack behind." He affirms a fact
with which we are more immediately concerned, namely, that
the fashion, the form, the whole outward aspect, of the world in
which we live fades, changes, passes, while we look upon it ; that
it is now, and always, passing away : and from this fact he
infers the immense importance of fixing our affections and
placing our aims, not on the outward show, the frail and shifting
forms of things, but on the sacred and enduring realities which
lie beneath and behind them. There are two ways in which it is
true that the fashion of this world is passing away.
(1) First it is true with respect to all the things by which we
are surrounded. It is only in poetry the poetry of the Psalma
for example that the hills are called " everlasting." Go to the
1 G. Matheson.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 231
side of the ocean which bounds our country, and watch the tide
going out, bearing with it the sand which it has worn from the
cliffs; the very boundaries of our land are changing; they are
not the same as they were when these words were written.
Every day new relationships are forming around us; new cir-
cumstances are calling upon us to act, to act manfully, firmly,
decisively, and up to the occasion, remembering that an oppor-
tunity once gone is gone for ever. Indulge not in vain regrets
for the past, in vainer resolves for the future; act, act in the
present.
U The difference between the ancient and the modern world
is this: in the one the great reality of being was now, in the
other it is yet to come. If you would witness a scene character-
istic of the popular life of old, you must go to the amphitheatre
of Eome, mingle with its 80,000 spectators, and watch the eager
faces of Senators and people; observe how the masters of the
world spend the wealth of conquest, and indulge the pride of
power; see every wild creature that God has made, from the
jungles of India to the mountains of Wales, from the forests of
Germany to the deserts of Nubia, brought hither to be hunted
down in artificial groves by thousands in an hour; behold the
captives of war, noble perhaps and wise in their own land, turned
loose, amid yells of insult more terrible for their foreign tongue,
to contend with brutal gladiators trained to make death the
favourite amusement, and present the most solemn of individual
realities as a wholesale public sport; mark the light look with
which the multitude, by uplifted finger, demands that the
wounded combatant be slain before their eyes ; notice the troop
of Christian martyrs awaiting hand in hand the leap from the
tiger's den ; and, when the day's spectacle is over and the blood
of two thousand victims stains the ring, follow the giddy crowd
as it streams from the vomitories into the street, trace its lazy
course into the forum, and hear it there scrambling for the bread
of private indolence doled out by the purse of public corruption ;
and see how it suns itself to sleep in the open ways, or crawls into
foul dens till morning brings the hope of games and merry blood
again; then you have an idea of that Imperial people, with
their passionate living for the moment, which the Gospel found
in occupation of the world.
And if, ^on the other hand, you would fix in your thought
an image of the popular mind of Christendom, I know not
that you could do better than go at sunrise with the throng
of toiling men to the hillside where Whitefield or Wesley is
232 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
about to preach. Hear what a great heart of reality is in that
hymn which swells upon the morning air a prophet's strain upon
a people's lips ! See the rugged hands of labour, clasped and
trembling, wrestling with the Unseen in prayer! Observe the
uplifted faces, deep-lined with hardship and with guilt, streaming
now with honest tears, and flushed with earnest shame, as the
man of God awakes the life within, and tells of Him that bare
for us the stripes and cross, and offers the holiest spirit to the
humblest lot, and tears away the veil of sense from the glad and
awful gates of heaven and hell. Go to these people's homes, and
observe the decent tastes, the sense of domestic obligations, the
care for childhood, the desire for instruction, the neighbourly
kindness, the conscientious self-respect, and say whether the
sacred image of duty does not live within those minds ; whether
holiness has not taken the place of pleasure in their idea of life :
whether for them too the toils of nature are not lightened by
some external hope, and their burden carried by some angel of
love, and the strife of necessity turned into the service of God.
The present tyrannizes over their character no more, subdued by
a future infinitely great; and hardly though they lie upon the
rock of this world, they can live the life of faith ; and while the
hand plies the tools of earth, keep a spirit open to the skies. 1
(2) Again, this is true with respect to ourselves. " The fashion
of this world passeth away " in us. The feelings we have now
are not those which we had in childhood. There has passed
away a glory from the earth the stars, the sun, the moon, the
green fields have lost their beauty and significance nothing
remains as it was, except their repeated impressions on the
mind, the impressions of time, space, eternity, colour, form;
these cannot alter, but all besides has changed. Our very minds
alter. There is no bereavement so painful, no shock so terrible,
but time will remove or alleviate it. The keenest feeling in this
world time wears out at last, and our minds become like old
monumental tablets which have lost the inscription once graven
deeply upon them.
If Jesus (on whom be peace !) said, " The world is a bridge ;
pass over it, but do not build upon it." Inscription on a bridge
at Fatehpur SikrL 2
^f Perhaps no one has pictured with truer hand the changing
fashion of the world in the passing of human life than Long-
1 James Martineau. 2 Field, A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom, 97.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 233
fellow in his poem, "The Old Clock on the Stairs," in which he tells
us that
Through days of sorrow and of mirth,
Through days of death and days of birth,
Through every swift vicissitude
Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood,
And as if, like God, it all things saw,
It calmly repeats those words of awe,
"For ever never!
Never for ever!"
In that mansion used to be
Free-hearted Hospitality ;
His great fires up the chimney roared;
The stranger feasted at his board;
But, like the skeleton at the feast,
That warning timepiece never ceased,
"For ever never!
Never for ever ! "
There groups of merry children played,
There youths and maidens dreaming strayed ;
O precious hours! golden prime,
And affluence of love and time!
Even as a miser counts his gold,
Those hours the ancient timepiece told,
"For ever never!
Never for ever!"
From that chamber, clothed in white,
The bride came forth on her wedding night;
There, in that silent room below,
The dead lay in his shroud of snow;
And in the hush that followed the prayer,
Was heard the old clock on the stair,
"For ever never!
Never for ever!"
All are scattered now and fled,
Some are married, some are dead;
And when I ask, with throbs of pain,
" Ah ! when shall they all meet again ? "
As. in the days long since gone by,
The ancient timepiece makes reply,
"For ever never!
Never for ever!"
234 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
Never here, for ever there,
Where all parting, pain, and care,
And death, and time shall disappear,
For ever there, but never here!
The horologe of Eternity
Sayeth this incessantly,
"For ever never!
Never for ever!"
ADAPTABILITY.
LITERATURE.
Banks (L. A.), Hidden Wells of Comfort, 79.
Bramston (J. T.), Fratribus, 34.
Capen (E. H.), The College and the Higher Life, 195.
Clarke (J. E.), Common-Life Sermons, 159.
Darlow (T. H.) 5 The Upward Calling, 13.
Doney (C. G.) 5 The Throne-Room of the Soul, 89.
Goulburn (E. M.), Occasional Sermons, ii. 139.
Greenhough (J. G.), The Mind of Christ in St. Paul, 156.
Horwill (H. W.), The Old Gospel in the New Era, 15.
Irons (J. C.), Memorial of a Faithful Ministry, 208.
Jenkins (E. E.), Life and Christ, 167.
Keble (J.), Sermons for Saints' Days, 100.
Liddon (H. P.), Clerical Life and Work, 311.
Sermons on Special Occasions, 26.
Lightfoot (J. B.), Sermons on Special Occasions, 55.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : 1 and 2 Corinthians, 142.
Metcalf (R), The Abiding Memory, 29.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xx. (1874) No. 1170;
xxv. (1879) No. 1507.
Young (D. T.), The Enthusiasm of God, 13.
Christian World Pulpit, xvii. 138 (Beecher) ; xviii. 60 (Charlton) ; li. 65
(Holland), 280 (Stalker), 308 (Thomas) ; Ixxv. 353 (Carpenter).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., i. 165 (Goulburn).
Homiletic Review, xlv. 323 (Gregg).
36
ADAPTABILITY.
I am become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some. -
i Cor. ix. 22.
No one, perhaps, of St. Paul's sayings describes the general
effect of his life and character with such terseness, or so vividly,
as this. Not that the Apostle can be thought of as deliberately
framing an epigram which might afterwards do duty in a
biography. He is on his defence, as against the charge, widely
circulated by his Corinthian opponents, that he was really a
selfish person who was making a good thing out of the Gospel ;
he is showing that, if he chose to stand upon the letter of his
rights, he might have claimed more, and done less, than he did.
Had silence been possible, we may be sure that he would gladly
have said nothing about himself ; but since there is this hostile
criticism in the way of his usefulness, and he is forced to speak,
he boldly asserts the rights which he had waived, and the lofti-
ness of the motives which governed him. In so varied and
complex a life as his, there was of course much that could not
be compressed into any single saying ; but nowhere else does he
so nearly bring himself before us as a whole, or trace with so
delicate yet powerful a hand the leading feature of his great
career, as in the words, " I am become all things to all men, that
I may by all means save some."
TJ " All things to all men." St. Paul is always in the face of
a listening crowd. Every word, therefore, hits ! He uses speech
like a rapier, ready and rapid, which is quivering with personal
characterization and the heat of the moment. He is aware of
every objection that friend or foe can be framing, and he fore-
stalls them, and he retorts. It turns this way and that. It has
sharp recoils, and rushes to seize an advantage, and hastens to
press a point that tells, and daring, venturous strokes that beat
238 ADAPTABILITY
back a possible counter-stroke, and then brimming bursts of
sympathy that overmaster by their very suddenness. And then,
again, not only debate is in his power, but also the townsman's
delicate skill, what is called by the townsman's own name his
urbanity. We have only to recall the exquisite letter to Philemon
on his runaway slave. Here is the gentleman, in the finest sense
of the word, felt speaking ; here are the polished tone, the veiled
irony, the irresistible reserve, the quiet humour, the social grace,
that all tell of one who, without risking his self-respect or his
sincerity, yet by sheer force of trained social sympathy can
throw himself into another's mind, can understand and allow for
his prejudices, and see with his eyes, and so win him to do what
he desires. 1
I.
THE ADAPTABILITY OF ST. PAUL.
"I am become all things to all men."
1. The great gift which St. Paul had received of God next
in order of importance after that of God's grace and truth was
the power of making himself at home with all classes, races, and
degrees of men. A practical capacity like this cannot be learned
like an art or a trick ; it must be rooted in and spring from those
affections and sympathies which are at the base of human
character. Nor, although this gift was undoubtedly developed
and shaped by grace, can we suppose it to have had no place in
the character of St. Paul until he became a servant of Christ.
Nature must have contributed to it at least somewhat of the
raw material. As a Jew, we may be sure, Saul of Tarsus apart
from the limits which Eabbinical narrowness would have assigned
to his sympathies could already have said, with the heathen
poet, that, being a man, he deemed nothing human strange. His
broad and genial humanity must have belonged to the original
outfit of his nature : for in him, the sympathies of our race lived
with extraordinary freshness and power.
2. The Apostle himself has traced this versatile sympathy in
three of its fields of operation.
(1) "To the Jews I became as a Jew." In the Apostle's eyes
the Jews were the race which had come nearest to God, and
1 H. Scott Holland.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 239
had most decisively rejected Him. And yet how tender and
affectionate he is in his dealings with his poor countrymen, or
with Christians who shared, less excusably, their hereditary
prejudices ! It might almost seem at times as if he had turned
his back upon the Cross, so careful is he not to wound the
sensitiveness of the adherents of the old religion. Eecognizing
circumcision as a national mark of distinction, while utterly
denying its necessity to salvation, he circumcised Timothy, who
had a right to it by his mother's side. Owing allegiance as
a Jew to the Mosaic Eitual, so long as God suffered it to exist,
he took legal vows, and was scrupulous in paying them. In
arguing against Judaizers he allegorized the story of Hagar and
Sarai, dealing with the Old Testament precisely after the manner
of the Jewish Kabbis. And even when he is compelled, by virtue
of his Apostolic commission, and by the imperious truth which
fills and rules him, to utter the stern and awful sentence,
that by their infatuated rejection of the true Messiah, who was
the crown and promise of their history, they had rejected their
God, how does he soften his message by all the resources of
sympathy and affection !
(2) "To them that are without law, as without law." St.
Paul, the Apostle of revealed truth, the preacher of that One
God who is known to and approached by man only through our
Lord Jesus Christ, how does he make himself at home with the
men and thoughts of the heathen world ! Eead his Epistles, and
see how he can sympathize with the happy conqueror in the
Greek games " who receiveth the prize," or with the old Latin
idea of the city or state, imagined as a political transcript of the
human body. How does he study each detail of the dress and
accoutrements of the soldier who watches him as he writes to the
Ephesians ! How interested he is in the details of the admini-
stration of the empire when addressing the Eomans ! How
tenderly does he survey the heathen world at Athens, as " feeling
after God " as though on its way to " find him " !
(3) "To the weak I became weak." There were "weak"
Christians, as^ the Apostle gently calls them, who clung to
observances, or who entertained scruples which were at variance
with the import, freedom, generosity of the Gospel. And of
that Gospel, in its unstinted liberty and grace, St. Paul was the
240 ADAPTABILITY
jealous and passionate champion. He, if any man, might have been
expected to pour contempt upon a worthless scruple to brand,
with the sternest note of disapprobation, the forms, whether of
life or of thought, which, however unintentionally, did dishonour
to the work of the Kedeemer. We know how he could express
himself upon occasions when great principles were at stake, as
when he told the Galatians sharply that if they were circumcised
Christ would profit them nothing. But, as a rule, how tender
he is, how full of consideration and charity, how tolerant, how
hopeful ! The prejudice against the meat exposed for sale in the
Corinthian market was a weakly superstition; but for himself
he would rather eat no flesh whatever while the world lasted than
offend the conscience of a weak brother. The private observance
of days, Jewish or other, at Eome, was no part of the Church's
rule, and might easily engender Jewish errors ; but the Apostle
insists that those who kept these days did so to the Lord, and
should be respected in the observance. The strong, he says,
with a touch of quiet irony, ought to bear the infirmities of the
weak, and not to please themselves. And to the scandal of
some, no doubt, at the time, but for the instruction of the Church
of all ages what he preached he practised.
Tf There was another aspect of the anxiety of this matter
regarding the Bible to which Dr. Eainy was peculiarly sensitive.
He had the keenest sense of the shock which the new view
occasioned in many simple believing minds to whom the plenary
inspiration of every word of Scripture had been an unquestioned
assumption. And he had further an even stern feeling that those
were blameworthy who by any regardlessness of utterance
unnecessarily wounded the faith of such. It may be admitted
that both Professor Dods and Professor Bruce were men who
made what the ecclesiastical mind calls " unguarded statements."
Dr. Dods one of the most absolutely truthful men who ever
breathed, and a man incapable of choosing a word for any other
reason than that it seemed the true one spoke about the " errors "
and "immoralities" in the Scripture narrative. Dr. Bruce, who
had a Carlylean strain in his rugged nature, showed at times a
Irusqmrie in dealing even with the most sacred themes which
was not, but which was easily taken to be, irreverence and
which jarred even on those who did not misunderstand it.
Principal Kainy, along with all his tolerance on the general
question, was extraordinarily sensitive to the hurting of tender
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 241
consciences. I remember his once saying to me of some utterances
of one of the professors just named. " He does not realize the
sheer pain words like these cause to many of our most believing
people " ; and, as he said it, there crossed his own face a look of
" sheer pain " such as assuredly he would never have shown for
any suffering inflicted on himself. Here surely is real breadth.
So many men who pride themselves on their theological liberality
are but one-sided in their sympathy. Here was a man who, on
the one hand, resolutely supported the scholar's liberty to criticize
with the frankest freedom the structure of the sacred narrative,
but who, on the other, really saw and shared the pain such
criticism caused in the mind of some simple and perhaps ignorant
pious woman who, like Cowper's lace- worker, "just knows, and
knows no more, her Bible true." l
3. St. Paul's life has ever been an enigma to those who have
failed to appreciate this ruling principle of his conduct. To his
contemporaries he seemed altogether inconsistent and unintelligible.
The Jewish converts were at a loss to understand how one who
had conceded so much to Judaism in the case of Timothy should
refuse everything to Judaism in the case of the Galatians. The
Gentile converts could not reconcile the utterances of a teacher
who in the same breath declared that an idol was nothing in the
world, and denounced the feasters in an idol's temple as having
fellowship with devils. The party of tradition reviled him,
because he broke loose from the time-honoured usages of his
race and country. The friends of liberty suspected him, because
he denounced in no sparing terms the practical licence which
they grafted on his doctrine. And to modern critics also his
conduct has appeared not less perplexing. The Paul of the Acts,
they say, is a different person from the Paul of St. Paul's Epistles.
They cannot identify the facile pupil of James, who to win over
those many thousands of his fellow-countrymen lent himself to
a complicity in Nazirite vows, with the stern master of Peter,
who declared that those seeking justification through the Law had
fallen from grace. The one character is to them irreconcilable
with the other. Irreconcilable, yes, to those who do not
appreciate the. infinite power of love in concession, in adaptation,
in expedient, in varying sympathy with the wants and the
weaknesses and the prejudices and the ignorances of men, while
1 P. C. Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 117.
I COR. 16
242 ADAPTABILITY
holding firmly and maintaining boldly the great central truths
of God. There is a concession which springs from cowardice, and
there is a facility which is born of indifference. There is an
adaptation which is the slave of self-interest, and there is a
versatility which is leagued with fraud. Not such was the
Apostle's principle of action. His was the elasticity of a keen,
absorbing, dominating love, which concentrates its entire energies
for the time on the one object before it, which watches every
moment, seizes every opportunity, fastens on every rising
emotion, and ingratiates itself with every transient thought, that
it may force an entrance for the truth which shall save a soul
from self and sin, and gain it for God.
^f The root of all that was peculiar in Mr. Kobertson's
character and correspondence lay in the intense sensitiveness
which pervaded his whole nature. His senses, his passions, his
imagination, his conscience, his spirit, were so delicately wrought,
that they thrilled and vibrated to the slightest touch. His great
power of sympathy arose out of this sensitiveness. My mis-
fortune or happiness (he says) is power of sympathy. I can feel
with the Brahmin, the Pantheist, the Stoic, the Platonist, the
Transcendentalist, perhaps the Epicurean. At least, I feel the
side of Utilitarianism which seems like truth, though I have
more antipathy to it than anything else. I can suffer with the
Tractarian, tenderly shrinking from the gulf blackening before
him, as a frightened child runs back to its mother from the dark,
afraid to be alone in the fearful loneliness ; and I can also agonize
with the infidels, recoiling from the cowardice and false rest of
superstition. Many men can feel each of these separately, and
they are happy. They go on straight forward, like a one-eyed
horse, seeing all clear on one side. But I feel them all at once,
and so far I am allseitig, ein ganzer Mann. But I am not such
in this sense, that I can harmonize them all; I can only feel
them. For this greatness there must be an all-feeling heart,
together with an all-seeing eye. 1
II.
THE USES OF ADAPTABILITY.
The attitude of St. Paul in the first age is the precedent for
Christian workers in all ages. We too, like the Apostle, must
1 Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 154.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 243
in a certain sense strive to be all things to all men. Effectual
Christian service is a difficult and delicate art. No amount of
zeal will save us from blundering and failure, unless along with
our zeal we possess some of the insight which comes from sym-
pathy with the people we try to help. There are few gifts more
necessary, and less common, among Christian workers than
this gift of imaginative sympathy, which can enter by intuition
into other men's feelings and appreciate their condition and
understand instinctively how to deal with their case. Such a
gift is too precious to be common. It depends partly on moral
endowment and inheritance. But a sensitive nature may be
coarsened and blunted by selfishness, as it may be cultivated by
faithful obedience. Thoughtful love grows wise by constant
watching, and strong by patient self-denial. Only the heart
at leisure from itself has skill to sympathize. How few of us
attain to the height of George Fox's wonderful petition : " I have
prayed to be baptized into a sense of all conditions, that I might
be able to know the needs and feel the sorrows of all."
TJ There are seven octaves on an ordinary piano. And most
of us can hear every musical note which a piano sounds. But
there are both higher and lower octaves which certain instru-
ments reach, and which many human ears cannot take in.
Some can hear the higher notes, but not the lower, and with
others it is the reverse. We all differ in the same way with
regard to the things which impress us, catch hold of our imagina-
tion, appeal to the best and worst in us, and bring out our evil
and our good. There are sermons preached in every sanctuary
which move some to tears, stir them to impassioned devotion,
and lift them up to the very gates of heaven. Yet when those
very sermons have been preached others will declare that the
preacher has been quite out of form, and that his words were
wearying and unprofitable. And it by no means follows that
they are not good and earnest Christian men. It only means
that the preacher has been touching chords which are not found
in them. 1
1. Behind all efficient personal Christian service, there must
lie this principle of adaptation. St. Paul became Jew, Greek,
Roman, and accursed in order to save men. He put himself into
the place of the one he sought to help, and from that new stand-
1 J. G. Greenhough, The Mind of Christ in St. Paul, 157.
244 ADAPTABILITY
point learned the secret path of access to his soul. No one can
understand another who is unable to leave himself behind and
look upon the world as the other person does ; and this requires
the sympathetic nature. It is the method of the loving heart.
To him who really loves, the inner chambers of the other life
are opened that he may dwell therein a welcome guest. The
magic of a fellow-feeling has not been equalled as a means where-
by the full life of a Christian is admitted to the starving life of
him who knows only the flesh.
If Sanctified ingenuity is a gift to be prized highly, both for
its value and for its rarity. 1
^f Mrs. Stelling was not a loving, tender-hearted woman : she
was a woman whose skirt sat well, who adjusted her waist and
patted her curls with a pre-occupied air when she inquired after
your welfare. These things, doubtless, represent a great social
power, but it is not the power of love. 2
Tf You mistook me in thinking I did not sympathize. A few
years ago, when I felt less, you would have been more satisfied,
when the eyes showed moisture, the voice emotion, and when I
had a gentler manner and a more ready show of responding to
what was expected. Now, a certain amount of iron has gone
into my blood ; and a sardonic sentence often conceals the fact that
I wince to the very quick from something that has gone home.
Oh, many a shaft at random sent
Finds mark the archer little meant !
I no longer wear my heart upon my sleeve, "for daws to
peck at." But there is not a conversation, there is not a book I
read, there is not a visit I pay, that does not cut deep traces in
the " Calais" of my heart. 3
(1) At the very outset, it is essential that there should be
respect for other people's views. Men do not think alike in this
world. They cannot. Many may be inclined to regard the
results which we have reached through patience and toil and
tribulation, not only with opposition, but resentment ; while we
in turn may look upon them with contempt because they have
not yet caught up with our vision. How poor and mean and
petty must they be whose horizon is bounded and circumscribed !
1 H. W. Horwill. 2 George Eliot, TJie Mill on the Floss.
8 Life and Letters of the Hev. F. W. Robertson, 455,
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 245
Of course the truth is one and clear, easily discerned and we
have it. Nothing but stupidity or obstinacy could prevent any-
body from beholding it as well as we. Thus does some heartless
and incompetent teacher belabour a backward boy (whose back-
wardness is due perhaps to defective vision or imperfect hearing
or defect in some of the other faculties of perception) because he
cannot keep pace with those to whom God has given every need-
ful endowment. When we give way to our natural impulses we
are impatient and intolerant. It is this spirit that has poured
the gall of bitterness without measure into social and domestic
life, filled neighbourhoods with discord, sown the seeds of strife
among the nations of mankind and not infrequently deluged the
earth with blood.
Tf Without sympathy in the high sense of intellectual
penetration, kindness may be only folly, and intended aid,
oppression. 1
(2) There must be respect for other men's convictions. These
are things to which men come, often by painful effort, and always
with solemnity. Few men are willing to abandon them without
a struggle. They may be false, but they are precious. Not
infrequently they are interwoven with the holiest traditions.
For the sake of them, their holders are frequently willing and
eager to wear the martyr's crown. The fact that we may know
or think we know other men's convictions to be false, does not
alter the obligation to treat them with respect. For when we
reflect we must perceive that there is some real reason for every
deep-seated conviction. And not until there is a mutual ap-
proach, not until there is a disposition manifest to acknowledge
that there is some sanity in an opponent's view, do the conditions
exist for a real advance. One lesson which the experience of
human conflict has clearly taught is that before there can be
liberty for new thought there must be deference and courtesy
paid to the older belief.
^[ There is an incident in point in the life of the Rev. John
Murker of Banff. A new church had been built, but not without
strong opposition from some of the older members. Murker
himself tells what occurred :
At last the day arrived when we had to bid farewell to
1 Ruskin, A KnigM's Faith (Works, xxxi. 386).
246 ADAPTABILITY
the old time-honoured building. The services were of a char-
acter suitable to the occasion. In the morning my text was
" If thy presence go not with us, carry us not up hence " ; in
the evening "Speak unto the children of Israel that they go
forward," trying to blend in my discourses tender reverence for
the past with a consciousness of duty for the present. At the
close of the evening service, I felt in no mood to stand in the
vestry with the deacons, as was my custom, but hurried home
seeking retirement and privacy for my thoughts. I had not been
more than an hour seated in my study when an uncontrollable
desire seized me to go back and look at the old place once more,
before it was turned to secular use, as was to be the case on
Monday morning. It was a clear, frosty night, and I slipped
down to the chapel as quietly as possible, so as not to attract
observation. My difficulty was how to get in. I did not like
to go to the beadle for the key ; but, to my astonishment, as I
was passing, I found the key in the lock, and, without stopping
to inquire how this was, or thinking any more about it, stepped
in. I was soon disturbed in my musings by the suppressed
sounds of a voice familiar to my ear ; I listened attentively, and
turning round to one of the square seats near the pulpit, I dimly
saw the figure of one of my senior members whom I deeply
respected, but who had grieved me somewhat by his lukewarm-
ness with respect to the building of the new chapel. There he
was kneeling beside the seat on which he had sat when a laddie,
and he was so much absorbed in his prayer as not to hear my
footsteps. Afraid to move lest I should disturb him, I stood still
and could not but listen to the broken sentences that reached my
ear as his voice rose above a whisper and swelled into audible
tones. The following bits of his fervent supplication ejaculated
forth as the tears came streaming down his cheeks. I distinctly
heard : " For forty years this place has been a Bethel to me ;
here I was born again. . . . But if we maun leave this house
may Thy presence gang wi' us ... forgive my obstinateness,
mak' the cause even mair prosperous in the new chapel. . . .
Come doon, Lord, come doon in Thy power. . . . Bless oor
young pastor. . . . Lift upon him and us a' the licht o' Thy
coontenance, and mak' the little ane a thousand."
I could stand no longer the spectator of such a scene ; my
presence was, I felt, an almost sacrilegious intrusion ; as quietly
as possible I went away. But that prayer, or the fragments of it I
got, had lifted a load from my mind. Next day I met the worthy
old man and gave him a warmer shake of the hand than he had
got from me for a long time, he not knowing the secret of it, nor
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 247
ever will in this world. All coldness and alienation of feeling
had been melted in the fervour of that prayer which reached my
ear and touched my heart. His position I now understood, and
I did not think any the less of him for his lingering regard for
the old, with which he had now to part. 1
(3) Nor is this true only of beliefs. It applies in like manner
to prejudice. Nothing in this world is quite BO stubborn as
prejudice. Nothing is so hard to overcome. Nothing so persists
after every reason for its existence has passed away. Some
prejudices are the peculiarities of the race, as if they were
ingrained in the very nature of their possessors ; some are
characteristic of nations; some are local in their boundary,
confined to community or time ; and some are purely individual,
growing out of environment, or tradition, or training. But how-
ever encountered they are relentless. Woe to the man who
ruthlessly runs up against them. Prejudice is a universal trait
of mankind, and it behoves us, when we encounter it in others,
not to try to neutralize or overcome it by a counter prejudice,
but rather to stand in awe before it and pay obeisance to one of
the common weaknesses of our poor humanity. This is the one
and only solvent. Pride of opinion, the force of individual will,
the virulence of hatred are all alike powerless before it. When
we come to recognize that prejudice has some ground for existence
in the order of the world and in the nature of man we begin the
process by which it is ultimately to be undermined and uprooted.
Eespect a prejudice and you destroy its power for harm. It is
like extracting the fangs of a venomous serpent. No matter how
vindictive his feeling or his actions, his power for evil is gone.
So though the animosity which prejudice has aroused may long
remain, its poison has vanished as soon as those who might other-
wise be its victims meet it with serenity and patience.
^f To minds strongly marked by the positive and negative
qualities that create severity strength of will, conscious recti-
tude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great
power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over
others prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which
can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-
provoking knowledge which we call truth. Let a prejudice be
bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in
1 J. Stark, John Murker, 192,
248 ADAPTABILITY
through the eye however it may come, these minds will give it
a habitation: it is something to assert strongly and bravely,
something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to
impose on others with the authority of conscious right : it is at
once a staff and a baton. Every prejudice that will answer these
purposes is self-evident. 1
(4) Even human conventions may be deferred to. These, to
be sure, lie on the surface of human life and seem not to be related
in any vital way either to the established social order or to the
progressive movements of the world. Yet they do have great
power. There are no inherent reasons why there should be such
a marked difference in the styles of dress between men and
women. Yet the most persistent efforts, covering years and even
generations, by those who bring forth the powerful argument
of convenience and health have made but slight difference in
changing the time-honoured practice. So with many of our habits
and customs; they are superficial but they are commanding.
The custom of uncovering the head in a church or other place of
public assembly, the habit of saying "good morning," or "good
evening," of wishing good health and prosperity to even the
most casual acquaintance, are the invariable marks of good
breeding, and good breeding is a fundamental requisite of
the gentleman or the gentlewoman. No one can make any
headway in an influential career who neglects this quality.
St. Paul was a gentleman when he said, " I think myself
happy, king Agrippa, because I shall answer for myself this
day before thee," and that gentlemanliness secured for him a
respectful hearing.
Tf Darwin's way of looking at himself as an ignoramus in
matters of art, was strengthened by the absence of pretence, which
was part of his character. With regard to questions of taste, as
well as to more serious things, he always had the courage of his
opinions. I remember, however, an instance that sounds like
a contradiction to this : when he was looking at the Turners in
Mr. Ruskin's bedroom, he did not confess, as he did afterwards,
that he could make out absolutely nothing of what Mr. Kuskin
saw in them. But this little pretence was not for his own sake,
but for the sake of courtesy to his host. He was pleased and
amused when subsequently Mr. Kuskin brought him some
1 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 249
photographs of pictures (I think Vandyke portraits), and
courteously seemed to value my father's opinion about them. 1
2. At the root of all efficient evangelization there must lie this
same principle of adaptation. We are fishers of men, and the
fisherman uses the bait that is most likely to catch the fish, not
the bait that best suits his own palate.
TJ An illustration of this truth is afforded by the different
characters of Gregory the Great and the missionary St. Augustine.
Both were earnest, both enthusiastic, both ready to spend and
to be spent, if only they might preach Christ crucified to the rude
barbarians of Anglo-Saxon England. But St. Augustine from
first to last was hampered by a want of elasticity, a narrowness,
intellectual rather than moral, which led him to identify
Christianity with that form of it with which, in his convent life
at Eome, he had been familiar. St. Gregory, with that wisdom
which a knowledge of many men and many minds had given,
a delicate sense of the difference between essential and accidental,
above all with a conviction of the necessity of " adaptation " in
the preaching of Christianity, stands out as a model of wide and
liberal-minded earnestness. When the collision with the old
British Church came, St. Augustine with the same want of
flexibility, not unmixed perhaps with a sense of his own importance
as Metropolitan of England, was ready to contend to the last
about the wording of a Liturgy, or the form of a tonsure, or the
style of chronology. In vain St. Gregory's wise warning that he
should adapt himself to national customs as far as possible, and
" not value things because of places, but places for the good things
they contained." With all his earnestness and missionary zeal,
St. Augustine's want of versatility in the delivery of his message
narrowed down his success to a small portion of the east of
England, leaving the rest to be evangelized by the remnants of
that very British Church with which he would not work. 2
If Surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is
that which enables us to feel with him, which gives us a fine
ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes
of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools
and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the
love that sees in all forms of human thought and work the life-
and-death struggles of separate human beings. 8
1 The Life atid Letters of Charles Darwin, i. 125.
* A. L. Moore, The Message of the Gospel, 34.
* George Eliot, Janet's Repentance,
250 ADAPTABILITY
(1) We hear much of intellectual difficulties. How many of
us attempt to qualify ourselves even to understand them far less
to answer them ? Again and again grievous harm is done to
those for whom, as for us, Christ died, by the way in which
those who have never themselves experienced difficulties of
belief put such things aside as the work of the devil, or as
a wilful carping at revealed truth. To fail to throw ourselves
into the different mental and moral states of our people will be
to fail to deliver our message aright.
I, too, have passed through that self-same place
Where you and the Dragon are face to face.
I neither vanquished nor slew him quite,
But he fled away with the morning light
Alas! so deadly the mortal fray,
You cannot hearken the words I say.
And I, who remember the combat sore,
Weep. I have passed that way before. 1
(2) We hear much of scientific progress. The true Christian
worker will meet the latest acquisitions of science, not with
opposition, not with coldness, not with misgiving, but with a
hearty welcome the more hearty in proportion as his faith
is the stronger confident that in the end Divine truth can only
gain by enlarging the bounds of human knowledge.
K Of all that elder race, he [Dean Church] was the one who
most intimately followed on with the new movements and the
fresh temper. He was absolutely in touch with the younger men.
No brick walls blocked them out, or brought them into abrupt
arrest. He did not encounter them with a challenge of suspicion,
or hold them off at arm's length. He felt what was going forward ;
he believed in its worth ; he took it seriously. Eight to his very
last years, he caught the spirit that was abroad, and was sensitive
to its necessary differences from earlier types. Thus the younger
men could come to him with their vague and crude aspirations,
unafraid and unchilled. They were sure of sympathetic considera-
tion of a judgment that viewed their case from inside. They
felt that he saw with their eyes ; and, with that assurance, they
1 Margaret Blaikie, Songs ly the Way, 48.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 251
could freely yield to his authority, which it was a delight to
recognize. 1
(3) Do we live at a time when sesthetic culture is making
rapid strides ? We will not let it drift into a position of antagon-
ism to Christian worship, but will rather enlist it in the service
of God, careful only not to make a mistress of a handmaid, and
watchful always lest artistic feeling should step into the place of
devotion, or music usurp the throne of prayer.
^[ If we are to become all things to all men that we may by
all means save some, we are to become cultured to the cultured,
refined to the refined. But we often work on a principle diametric-
ally opposite to that of the Apostle. As a rule, much more pains
is taken to adapt the Gospel to the uneducated than to the
educated, and a severe unchristian shibboleth is set up as a test
which serves only as a barrier. It is difficult to see why it should
be right to respect the tastes of one class and wrong to respect
the tastes of another. 2
(4) There is urgent need for adaptation in the methods of
our work among children. How many people who give Sunday-
school addresses ever try to become children while they are
speaking ? How many make the least effort to drop all their
philosophy and look at things with the simple directness of a
child ? How many remember that children become bored by a
long and dull speech ? How many think of saying a word about
the peculiar difficulties of school life, the moral problems that
arise even in the earliest years out of every day's work and play ?
K The angel of the Lord i.e. God in self-manifestation said
to Abraham, " Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast
not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me " (Gen. xxii. 12).
This is one of the many instances in which God is represented
as speaking in a human fashion, as if He were not omniscient.
When the cry of Sodom came up to heaven, the Lord said, " I
will go down and see ... and / will know." To Abraham He
said, " If I find in Sodom fifty righteous men, I will spare it."
The Infinite voluntarily approximates the ways and thoughts of
finite beings. He is above all limitations, and to Him nothing
is ever unknown. " I am God," He said, " and there is none like
me, declaring the end from the beginning." But if He were to
speak to men in terms of His foreknowledge absolute, they
1 Life and Letters of Dean Church^ 227. * H. W. Horwill.
252 ADAPTABILITY
would " find no end, in wandering mazes lost." The All-wise in
His intercourse with men is represented as like a human father
conversing with his children. He speaks very simply, that He
may be understood. Every teacher knows that he must sym-
pathize with his pupils' ignorance, else they will never under-
stand his knowledge. He must condescend to their condition,
place himself alongside of them, study their limitations, take
into account their inexperience. He has to bridge over the gulf
that separates his mind from theirs. Unless he can express his
ideas, not in his own language, but in theirs, their ears might as
well be closed, and all his wisdom will be lost upon them. That
is the principle on which the Divine Teacher of the human race
acted in His revelation. He made His meaning intelligible by
translating His great thoughts into simple forms of speech. He
spake to men in the language of earth, that they might learn
the laws of Heaven. 1
(5) This principle must guide us in our attempts to reach those
among the working classes who at present are never seen inside
a place of worship. If elaborate sermons repel them, elaborate
sermons must go. If pew-rents keep them away, pew-rents must
go. We must learn their habits of thought, their opinions, even
their prejudices, and use this knowledge for the extension of
Christ's Kingdom.
TJ A certain shoemaker, radical and infidel, was among the
number of those under Irving's special care ; a home- workman of
course, always present, silent, with his back turned upon the
visitors, and refusing any communication except a sullen humph
of implied criticism, while his trembling wife made her depre-
cating curtsy in the foreground. The way in which this intract-
able individual was finally won over is attributed by some tellers
of the story to a sudden happy inspiration on Irving's part ; but,
by others, to plot and intention. Approaching the bench one
day, the visitor took up a piece of patent leather, then a recent
invention, and remarked upon it in somewhat skilled terms. The
shoemaker went on with redoubled industry at his work ; but at
last, roused and exasperated by the speech and pretence of know-
ledge, demanded, in great contempt, but without raising his eyes,
" What do ye ken about leather ? " This was just the opportunity
his assailant wanted ; for Irving, though a minister and a scholar,
was a tanner's son, and could discourse learnedly upon that
material. Gradually interested and mollified, the cobbler
1 J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 171.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 253
slackened work, and listened while his visitor described some
process of making shoes by machinery, which he had carefully
got up for the purpose. At last the shoemaker so far forgot his
caution as to suspend his work altogether, and lift his eyes to the
great figure stooping over his bench. The conversation went on
with increased vigour after this, till finally the recusant threw
down his arms : " Od, you're a decent kind o' fellow ! do you
preach ? " said the vanquished, curious to know more of his victor.
The advantage was discreetly, but not too hotly pursued ; and on
the following Sunday the rebel made a defiant, shy appearance
at church. Next day Irving encountered him in the savoury
Gallowgate, and hailed him as a friend. Walking beside him in
natural talk, the tall probationer laid his hand upon the shirt-
sleeve of the shrunken sedentary workman, and marched by his
side along the well-frequented street. By the time they had
reached the end of their mutual way not a spark of resistance
was left in the shoemaker. His children henceforward went to
school; his deprecating wife went to the kirk in peace. He
himself acquired that suit of Sunday "blacks" so dear to the
heart of the poor Scotchman, and became a churchgoer and
respectable member of society ; while his acknowledgment of
his conqueror was conveyed with characteristic reticence, and
concealment of all deeper feeling, in the self-excusing pretence
" He's a sensible man, yon ; he kens about leather ! " l
3. This principle of adaptation is the basis of all effective
missionary work. It is not so long ago that the idea which
people attached to missionary work was that Christian people
went out to speak to heathen people ; and they grouped under
the phrase " heathen " all sorts of races, nationalities and religions.
In point of fact we coloured the world, or the map of the world,
in various colours, and the great bulk of it was coloured black.
But the black covered various races, various nationalities, various
creeds and differences, and it is one of the mistakes of those
indefatigable and earnest men, that they did not learn to dis-
criminate between the religious differences and the racial
differences, between one nationality, race and creed, and
another.
(1) It is at this point that we shall find the clue to the slow
progress which the Christian religion has too often made among
alien races in spite of the sturdiest missionary effort. The
1 Mrs. Oliphant, The Life of Edward Irving, i. 110.
254 ADAPTABILITY
advocates of Christianity have not always possessed the tolerance
of their great Master. They have said, " This is the only way.
Walk in this way or go to destruction." They have declared,
" Here is the supreme and absolute truth. Believe it or perish
in the darkness and misery of unbelief." The pagan peoples to
whom they have gone with their patent panacea for the ills of
life have made reply, " Our own sages have shown us another
way, and we have found that a safer way to walk in. They have
given us a different doctrine. They were good men and true, and
we have not found their teachings repugnant to reason."
^| Do not think you will ever get harm by striving to enter
into the faith of others, and to sympathize, in imagination, with
the guiding principles of their lives. So only can you justly love
them, or pity them, or praise. 1
If On the Day of Pentecost part of the charm was that every
man heard the Gospel in his own language, and that is why our
missionaries have to learn foreign languages, that they may
preach the Gospel to men in the tongue to which they were born.
But if they are to be of much use they must learn far more than
the language of the people ; they must learn their manners and
customs, their history, their beliefs, their ideals, even their
prejudices. Let no young missionary going forth doubt that
there are elements of Divine truth in the faith and the practice
of the heathen. And these are not to be despised or neglected,
but are to be used as stepping-stones by which to lead them to
something higher and better. I have always been profoundly
moved by what an Indian woman said when she first heard the
Gospel of Grace proclaimed " That is what I have been expect-
ing to hear all my life." 2
^f I once heard a distinguished missionary, who had spent his
whole life among Indians upon the frontier, tell the story of a
chieftain, who, just as he was about to go upon the war-path
against the whites, lost a little child to whom he was devotedly
attached. He sat down in his tepee a day and a night beside
the body of the babe, gloomy and terrible. Then the white man
came with a little coffin and placed it on the ground before him.
The Indian sat an hour or more in silence. Then he rose and,
after placing the babe in the coffin, washed away the paint and
laid aside the feathers, which were the symbols of war, and dis-
missed his followers in peace. 3
1 Ruskin, The Ethics of the Dust ( Works, xviii. 356).
a Professor J. Stalker. 8 E. H. Capen.
I CORINTHIANS ix. 22 255
^[ Those who heard Dollinger speak from the pulpit or in the
lecture-room, from his seat in the chamber or in the Council, of
course carried away with them the impression of a man of letters
and distinction ; but to see him out of doors, in the freedom of
God's beautiful creations, was to learn his disposition and feel
his geniality. There he was gladdened by tree and meadow, air
and water, sunshine and the songs of birds. The air might be
both raw and damp, but he always found something to praise in
it, so that I was involuntarily reminded of a legend told me by
Dollinger himself. " In one of the streets of Galilee there lay
rotting the body of a dead dog. All who saw it exclaimed, ' How
unsightly ! How horrible ! What a stench ! ' But Christ, who
passed that way, said gently, ' Yet he has beautiful teeth.' " 1
(2) It is said that those who try to plant Western corn in
India have found that it was absolutely necessary before that
Western corn could yield an adequate harvest that it should be
naturalized by some years of sowing in Indian soil. Is not that
a parable that the want of the East is the rising up of the Eastern
to speak Christianity to the Eastern people, and that it is needful
that our religious teaching should, as it were, be naturalized in
the soil as it was naturalized in every soil in the history of the
past, in order that it might gain power of full expression to the
hearts of those who need it ?
^ Mozoomdar and his fellow-disciples of the Brahmo-Samaj
claim that they can understand and interpret the teachings of
Jesus far more accurately than is possible with the occidental
mind. Jesus was an Oriental and they are Orientals. They,
therefore, can see the truth which He taught as it stood in His
own mind. They have comprehended as we do not the problems
which confronted Him. To them the doctrines which He
proclaimed in gorgeous imagery and poetic parables are not dis-
torted by our western literalism. To them the work of our
Lord and Master is revealed. Surely there is some force in this
claim. But whether it is just or not, it must be clear that the
point of view is of the utmost importance. If we are going to
China, or Japan, or India, or the islands of the sea for the
purpose of inducing them to take on our civilization and adopt
our cult, we must first of all be able to see our own message as
they see it, and we must moreover have a sympathetic knowledge
of the doctrines and beliefs which we are seeking to overthrow
and supplant. 2
1 L. von Kobell, Conversations of Dr. Dollinger, 18.
* E. H. Capen, The College and The Higher Life, 206.
256 ADAPTABILITY
(3) Nor should we stop here. We should enter into the new life
ourselves. If we are among Orientals, we must become Orientals.
If we are with people who speak a different language, we must
learn their language. If their dress is different from ours, we
must conform to their style. This is the way to reach the heart
of things.
If I know that some will condemn me as holding a doctrine
of expediency ; but I have no fear of condemnation from men of
liberal minds and large hearts, whose condemnation I should be
sorry to have, while the others would, more than likely, condemn
me for any possible view that ventured to differ a hair's-breadth
from their own. You know the old saw, " My doxy is orthodoxy,
any other doxy is heterodoxy." Many a life has been lost in
this country for learning no more than our alphabet: should
more lives go merely for declining to learn the Arabic alphabet ?
Few, very few, will go further ; few went further before, when
it was strongly in vogue, and no Christianity to counteract it.
Do we not ever see that, in the case of the real Mussulmans who
come here, the most unpromising feature about them is their
obstinacy and bigotry, which will not allow them even to look
at our Gospel! I believe we shall gain a great point when
Christianity ceases to be called the white man's religion. The
foolish phrase, "Kusoma Kizungu," creates needless suspicion.
I am ever battling with it among our own people, and trying to
get them to use "Soma Luganda" instead. When will they
learn that Christianity is cosmopolitan and not Anglican ? But
there is so much in our ways and methods that strengthens the
idea of foreign rule English men, English church, English
formularies, English Bishop \ Nor can the evil be readily
rectified, until we are become more prepared to look on Africa
as our home, or, if you like, till we become more truly identified
with Africa than heretofore. Here, too, I fear, I shall be con-
strued wrongly. But I allude only to mental affinity. 1
Ill
THE LIMITS OF ADAPTABILITY.
In our times these words, " Becoming all things to all men,"
have acquired an unmusical sound. Those who have professedly
acted on this principle have sometimes been viewed askance,
partly with suspicion, and not always without reason. There
1 Mackay of Uganda, 361.
r CORINTHIANS ix. 22 257
has been the absence, apparently, of fixed principles; an in-
difference not only to dogmas, but also to truth; a liberality
running to seed in mere licence; and a charity so broad as to
border on defection and impurity. They have protested too
much. Under the pretence of putting on the mantle of the
Apostle, they have but used his robe as a convenient cloak to
hide a self-seeking which he would have been the first in fiery
words to condemn. For there is a cant of philosophy as well as
of orthodoxy, and a kind of freedom which is spurious as well
as one which is heaven-born and Divine.
1. Let us be sure that we have the right aim. St. Paul had
only one aim "that I may by all means save some." Some
become all things to all men that they may by all means destroy
some. Satan himself can become an angel of light if it suits
his purpose. There are others who become all things to all
men to avoid trouble and persecution. They can be very religious
in a prayer-meeting where none but Christians are present, but
when they get out into worldly society they so adapt themselves
to the fancies of their associates that there is no mark by which
they can be recognized as Christians. That is as far removed as
possible from the spirit of St. Paul. Dare we, without hypocrisy,
quote this declaration of his as the watchword of our own lives ?
Are we jealous about tradition and usage rather than about
saving men? Are we tenacious of our comforts and luxuries
when by sacrificing them we might rescue our brother for whom
Christ died? Are we standing upon our dignity, unwilling to
adopt some method that we think to be beneath us, while we
are surrounded by multitudes who perish ? Do we think indeed
that it is possible for us to save our own souls while we are
indifferent to the salvation of others ?
^ While St. Paul's heart is on fire his reason is cool ; after all
this expenditure of feeling and effort he looks for very partial
results. " That I may save some" Not " all " that were too
much to hope. But whether in the Jewish synagogue or on
Mars' Hill in Athens ; whether among scholars or the unlettered ;
whether amidst friends or foes ; whether he stands face to face
with multitudes or is pleading with a single soul ; he keeps one
purpose steadily before him ; he is what he is, he does what he
does, that some at least may know the power of that faithful
i COR. 17
258 ADAPTABILITY
saying which is ever worthy of all acceptation, that "Christ
Jesus came into the world to save sinners." 1
U Some people are quite intolerable to one by the way in
which they insist that sympathy means looking at things as
they do, without any feeling of real conviction. Now, to me,
sympathy means understanding other people, and acting in
accordance with one's perception, though neither one's feelings
nor one's reason may approve of their condition. An abandon-
ment of one's personality to another makes sympathy a quite
useless gift. Yet that is the sort of sympathy which people most
demand. They come in a defiant way and say, " You shall feel
with me: you shall tell me that my feelings are the best, the
noblest, the richest." I am afraid that I never look for more
than a modified approval of my own doings. In proportion as
a man is really worth consulting, he will show his appreciation
of my difficulties, but will suggest, without expressing, a more
excellent way in the future. 2
2. Let us be sure that we have the right motive. Mere
human sympathy, however strong, wears itself out; it is at
least half physical in its nature, and its energy shares the
vicissitudes and decay of our bodily frame. One motive only-
the love of God really lasts ; and of the love of God, the love
of man, whom God has loved so well as to create and to redeem
him, is in reality the consequence and the attestation.
TJ What we have to be on our guard against is not the versa-
tility itself, but a wrong motive, or the absence of a good one to
direct it. This is well illustrated by the different forms which
versatility took in the history of the Greeks. In the age of Pericles
it was the great Hellenic virtue, on the excellence of which the
Greek prided himself. " It was a happy and graceful flexibility."
Freedom from prejudice, freedom from stiffness, openness of mind,
amiability of manners, clearness and propriety of language all
these seem to have had their part in that which enabled the
Athenian, without loss of earnestness or "relaxation of moral
force," to become all things to all men. In the age of Aristotle
this versatility is still a grace, but a subordinate grace, of
character. It is now little more than an elegant accomplish-
ment, which the Athenian gentleman, enveloped in a sense of
dignity and self-importance, cultivates only that he may avoid
the unpleasant extremes of buffoonery and boorishness. Four
1 H. P. Liddon, Clerical Life and Work, 318.
8 Life and Letters of Mandell Creight&n, i. 271.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 259
hundred years later the same word appears in the Epistle of St.
Paul to the Ephesians, and lo, it is coupled with filthiness and
foolish talking; it is the "jesting" which is not convenient.
Wherein then does the flexibility of St. Paul differ from the
frivolity and fickleness of the lonians of Asia Minor ? Simply
and solely in the motive which actuated him. It was when
Greece lost its reality, its earnestness, when its moral fibre
became relaxed, that this grace of character became hateful and
contemptible. 1
3. The principle of adaptation when applied to Christian work
gives no sanction to the satanic doctrine that the end justifies the
means. St. Paul wore different characters only so long as he
could wear them consistently with his Christianity. There must
be no infidelity to conscience, no compromise with wrong, no
overcoming evil with evil, though we might think that we could
save souls thereby. The motives of the Jesuits and Inquisitors
were often of the purest, but they defiled themselves by the use
of means that were nothing short of diabolical. The conversion
of a sinner from the error of his ways will not hide any sins that
may be committed in the process. Nothing is justifiable in
Christian work which is not justifiable elsewhere. There must be
no sharp practice. Christ drives the traffickers out of the Temple,
though the Temple may make a profit from their gains.
T| Some days before, the missionary had used the same device
(Industrie) for baptizing a little boy six or seven years old. His
father, who was very sick, had several times refused to receive
baptism ; and when asked if he would not be glad to have his son
baptized, he had answered, No. " At least," said Father Pijart,
" you will not object to my giving him a little sugar." " No ; but
you must not baptize him." The missionary gave it to him once ;
then again; and at the third spoonful, before he had put the
sugar into the water, he let a drop of it fall on the child, at the
same time pronouncing the sacramental words. A little girl, who
was looking at him, cried out, " Father, he is baptizing him ! "
The child's father was much disturbed ; but the missionary said
to him, " Did you not see that I was giving him sugar ? " The
child died soon after ; but God showed His grace to the father,
who is now kf perfect health. 2
1 A. L. Moore, The Message of the Gospel, 31.
2 Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons (quoted in Parkman, The Jesuits in North
America, i. 186),
260 ADAPTABILITY
4. In work among the lowest classes, while we may conform to
their wishes, we must be sure that we ourselves fall into no sin,
such as the sin of irreverence, which is sometimes committed by
those who try to attract them. In work among people of higher
social position, while we may be anxious that our mode of worship
and our style of preaching shall in no way shock a refined taste,
we must beware lest we gloss over or tone down any truths that
are likely to be unwelcome. It may sometimes be our duty to
declare truths that are utterly opposed to the most inveterate
convictions of those to whom we speak. We must not be un-
faithful to our own consciences for fear of offending the sensi-
bilities of anybody. Even St. Paul, the model of tact and
adaptation, did not hesitate to reason before the licentious
governor Felix of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to
come.
K On one occasion (writes a gentleman who knew Robertson
well at Cheltenham) he had been asked to preach at a church
where the congregation was chiefly composed of those whom Pope
describes as passing from " a youth of frolics " to " an old age of
cards." I accompanied him, and listened curiously for his text.
It was this, " Love not the world, nor the things of the world. If
any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him."
The sermon was most impressive and eloquent, and bold in its
denunciation. Returning home, he asked me if I thought he was
right in preaching it. I answered that it was very truthful;
but, considering the character of the clergyman whose pulpit he
occupied by courtesy, and the character of the congregation, not
a discreet sermon. It might have been as truthful without ap-
parently setting both minister and people at defiance. "You
are quite right, quite right," he answered ; " but the truth was
this : I took two sermons with me into the pulpit, uncertain which
to preach; but, just as I had fixed upon the other, something
seemed to say to me, ' Robertson, you are a craven, you dare not
speak here what you believe ' ; and I immediately pulled out the
sermon that you heard, and preached it as you heard it." l
5. We must never sacrifice convictions to expediency. St.
Paul's sympathy even with his opponents, and his great tender-
ness for the bigoted, the scrupulous, the superstitious, are the
more remarkable in a man of such deep, strong, definite convic-
tions. Assuredly he never accepted the hateful maxim that to
1 S. A. Brooke, Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 71.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 261
understand everything is to condone everything. No one held
more tenaciously to the sacredness of principle and the certainty
of truth. Yet he would go almost any length, short of com-
promising principle, if by any means he might win over his
antagonists. In particular he was ready to waive his own
personal rights and to sacrifice his individual liberties in all
matters that did not involve evil, on the chance that by so doing
he might influence some soul for good. General Gordon wrote :
"Daily I am more convinced that the non-assertion of one's
rights is a great gain, though only to be acquired by a closer
union with Christ."
Tf Of Bishop Moberly, Keble says, " There is nobody, I feel
sure, nobody on earth, who can exactly take the part which he
did, with his sweet and noble and, as I always thought, royal
ways : not giving up an inch of principle, yet known to be the
friend of every one and making all friends to one another." x
TJ Ideal tolerance necessarily is of extreme rarity because it
virtually implies an amicable meeting of apparent contradictories
Belief, and sympathy with Unbelief. Superstition and infalli-
bility may tolerate "just endure" Jews, Turks, and Infidels.
Indifferentism suffers with good-humoured contemptuousness a
babel of Creeds. The genuinely tolerant, whatever the origin of
his faith, has made it his personal possession, has converted
himself to it. 2
6. But we may sacrifice almost everything else. Yield in a
thousand little things that the great things may be urged.
Nothing on earth is so winning, so subduing, as the spectacle of a
man who forgets all his self-importance for the sake of doing good
to others. The real triumphs of the Gospel involve the humility
and self-suppression and self-effacement of its preachers. And
the Gospel of Love can prevail only as it is preached lovingly,
with endless tenderness and tolerance and patience and long-
suffering. In one of Cowper's letters to John Newton we read :
"No man was ever scolded out of his sins," or, let us add,
persecuted out of his prejudices and errors and superstitions.
lj A sermon was preached before the Irish House of Commons
in 1725 by Edward Synge on the anniversary of the rebellion.
The preacher was prebendary of St. Patrick and son of that
Archbishop Synge who for many years exercised a great influence
1 C. A. E. Moberly, Duke Domum, 165. 2 W. Stebbing, Three Essays, 10.
262 ADAPTABILITY
over all Irish policy, and it was published by order of the House.
Taking for his text the words " Compel them to enter in," which
had been so often employed in justification of persecution, and
adopting substantially the reasoning of Locke and of Hoadly,
Synge proceeded to examine with considerable ability the duty
of a Protestant Legislature in dealing with a Roman Catholic
population. Coercion, he maintained, which is directed simply
against religious teaching as such, is always illegitimate and
useless. Its only good end could be to release men from error,
but this involves a change of judgment, which cannot be effected
by external force. "All persons, therefore, in a society, whose
principles in religion have no tendency to hurt the public, have a
right to toleration." l
1 W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland, i. 304,
FOR THE CROWN.
LITERATURE.
Alford (H.), Quebec Cliapel Sermons, v. 199.
Beaumont (J. A.), Walking Circumspectly r , 144.
Edwards (F.), These Twelve, 338.
Fraser (J.), University Sermons, 204.
Hall (C. R.), Advent to Whitsun-Day, 83.
Hickey (F. P.), Short Sermons, ii. 50.
Hort (F. J. A.), Cambridge Sermons, 109.
Hutchings ("W. H.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., ii. 170.
Little (H. W.), Arrows for the King's Archers, No. 14.
Maclaren (A.), Christ in the Heart, 205.
Christ's Musts, 75.
Expositions : 1 and 2 Corinthians, 153.
Paget (E. C.), Silence, 53.
Westcott (B. F.), Lessons from Work, 269.
Williams (T. M.), Sermons of the Age, 173.
Winterbotliain (R.), Sermons, 93.
Cambridge Review, i. Supplements Nos. 12, 13 (Mayor).
Christian Age, xl. 66 (Wolf).
Christian World Pulpit, viii. 395 (Landels); xvii. 232 (McCree) ; Ixi.
231 (Stalker) ; Ixxv. 97 (Henson).
Church of England Magazine, xiv. 96 (Home).
Church of England Pulpit, Ixi. 78, 142 (Mackarness).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., vii. 85 (Agar Beet), 114 (Alford).
Examiner, Aug. 6, 1903, p. 132 (Jowett).
FOR THE CROWN.
And every man that striveth in the games is temperate in all things. Now
they do it to receive a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I Cor.
ix. 25.
So, says St. Paul, praising the effort and contemning the prize,
" they do it to receive a corruptible erown." And yet there was
a soul of goodness in this evil thing. Though these festivals
were indissolubly intertwined with idolatry, and besmirched with
much sensuous evil, yet he deals with them as he does with war
and with slavery he points to the disguised nobility that lay
beneath the hideousness, and holds up even these low things as a
pattern for Christian men.
1. One of the most famous of the Greek athletic festivals
was held close by Corinth. Its prize was a pine-wreath from the
neighbouring sacred grove. The painful abstinence and training
of ten months, and the fierce struggle of ten minutes, had for
their result a twist of green leaves that withered in a week, and
a little fading fame that was worth scarcely more, and lasted
scarcely longer. The struggle and the discipline were noble ;
the end was contemptible. And so it is with all lives whose aims
are lower than the highest. They are greater in the powers they
put forth than in the objects they compass, and the question,
" What is it for ? " is like a douche of cold water from the cart
that lays the clouds of dust in the ways.
2. There is both comparison and contrast here. Comparison,
because there is between the athlete and the Christian a likeness
upon which the Apostle is very fond of dwelling. Both have
entered the lists ; both have engaged in a contest wherein a vast
amount of resolution and endurance is needed; both have set
their hearts upon a certain prize. Contrast, because there is
263
266 FOR THE CROWN
between the athlete and the Christian this great difference, among
others, that the prize is of little worth in the one case, of unspeak-
able value in the other. " They do it to receive a corruptible
crown, but we an incorruptible."
I.
THE DISCIPLINE.
1. Strenuous effort. If people would work half as hard to gain
the highest object that a man can set before him as hundreds of
people are ready to do in order to gain trivial and paltry objects,
there would be fewer stunted and half-dead Christians among us.
" That is the way to run," says St. Paul, " if you want to obtain."
Look at the contrast that he hints at, between the prize that
stirs these racers' energies into such tremendous operation and
the prize which Christians profess to be pursuing. " They do it
to receive a corruptible crown " a twist of pine branch out of
the neighbouring grove, worth half-a-farthing, and a little
passing glory not worth much more. They do it to obtain a cor-
ruptible crown ; we do not do it, though we professedly have an
incorruptible one as our aim and object. If we contrast the
relative values of the objects that men pursue so eagerly with
the objects of the Christian course, surely we ought to be smitten
down with penitent consciousness of our own unworthiness, if not
of our own hypocrisy.
TJ Everybody knows about the athlete, and knows that what-
ever he goes in for, there is no mistake about it. You cannot
play cricket, or football, or anything else to any purpose with
half your strength, or with half your heart. To do anything, to
distinguish yourself in the least, you have to give yourself up to
it. Everything else must give way ; and everything that hinders,
or enfeebles, or injuriously affects the play, must be given up.
Everybody knows that. "They do it," says the Apostle; they
really do it ; there is no humbug or pretence* about it. If they
play, they do not play at playing ; they do it, and no mistake.
It is possible to say that a man is a fool to make such efforts,
and incur such sacrifices, in order to wear a cap of a certain
colour, or be known as the champion in a certain game. But, at
any rate, he has achieved something with much toil, and effort,
and loss of rest, and after tremendous exertions ; " they do it." 1
1 E, Winterbotham.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 25 267
^[ Here is a little kingdom, which we shall characterize as the
kingdom of merely muscular competition. Men are going to try
muscular force with their fellow-men, they are going to have a
boat race. You and I cannot walk along the river-side and
instantly take into our heads the notion that we will have a spin
with these men and beat them all. That can't be done. Strait
is the gate and narrow is the way that leads even to athletic
supremacy. The men are going into training ; they are going to
put themselves under tutors and governors ; they are going to
submit to a bill of fare and a course of discipline which you and I
would take to very unkindly. But why are they going to do so ?
Because they have determined to take a higher seat in the
kingdom of mere athletic exercise and enjoyment. Now it is a
very strange thing that you, a man fourteen stones weight, cannot
just get into the very first boat that comes in your way and
outstrip the men who have been in drill and training and exercise
for the last three months. But you cannot do so. As a mere
matter of fact, a man who has been drilled, disciplined, exercised,
will beat you, except a miracle be wrought for your advantage. 1
2. Rigid self-control. Every man that is striving for the
mastery is " temperate in all things." The discipline for runners
and athletes was rigid. They had ten months of spare diet no
wine hard gymnastic exercises every day, until not an ounce of
superfluous flesh was upon their muscles, before they were
allowed to run in the arena. And, says St. Paul, that is the
example for us. They practised this rigid discipline and abstin-
ence by way of preparation for the race, and after it was run
they might dispense with the training. You and I have to
practise rigid abstinence as part of the race, as a continuous
necessity. They did not only abstain from bad things, they did
not only avoid criminal acts of sensuous indulgence ; they
abstained from many perfectly legitimate things. So for us it is
not enough to say, " I draw the line there, at this or that vice,
and I will have nothing to do with these." You will never make
a growing Christian if abstinence from palpable sins only is your
standard. You must lay aside every sin, of course, but also
every weight. Many things are weights that are not sins ; and if
we are to run- fast we must run light ; and if we are to do any
good in this world we have to live by rigid control and abstain
from much that is perfectly legitimate, because, if we do not, we
1 Joseph Parker.
268 FOR THE CROWN
shall fail in accomplishing the highest purposes for which we are
here.
U Only on one occasion have I seen him angry, and I mention
the circumstance now because I feel convinced that his lack of
disciplinary power, which has been noted in the matter of his
Harrow work, was due to excess rather than to defect of moral
force. Conscious of his power, he was, I believe, afraid to let
himself go, and so habitually exercised a severe self-restraint. It
was in the early Peterborough days, as he and I were starting out
for a walk, that, in passing through the passage, which was then
being tiled, he remarked to the man at work that he was not
laying the tiles straight. The man contradicted him, and then
my father said something which seemed to annihilate the culprit.
I was astonished at my father losing his temper, but more
astonished still at the effect of his wrath : the man trembled and
turned pale, and I thought he would be falling down dead. 1
The perfect poise that comes of self-control,
The poetry of action, rhythmic, sweet,
That unvexed music of the body and soul
That the Greeks dreamed of, made at last complete.
Our stumbling lives attain not such a bliss ;
Too often, while the air we vainly beat,
Love's perfect law of liberty we miss. 2
3. Concentration of aim. There are few things more lacking
in the average Christian life of to-day than resolute, conscious
concentration upon an aim which is clearly and always before us.
Do you know what you are aiming at ? This is the first question.
Have you a distinct theory of life's purpose that you can put
into half a dozen words, or have you not ? In the one case, there
is some chance of attaining your object ; in the other, none.
Alas ! we find many Christian people who do not set before
themselves, with emphasis and constancy, as their aim the doing
of God's will, and so sometimes they do it, when it happens to
be easy, and sometimes, when temptations are strong, they do
not. It needs a strong hand on the tiller to keep it steady when
the wind is blowing in puffs and gusts, and sometimes the sail
bellies full and sometimes it is almost empty. The various
strengths of the temptations that blow us out of our course are
1 Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, i. 351. 8 Annie Matheson.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 25 269
such that we shall never keep a straight line of direction which
is the shortest line, and the only one on which we shall " obtain "
unless we know very distinctly where we want to go, and have
a good strong will that has learned to say "No!" when the
temptations come.
If It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the
earning itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or some-
thing else must follow. To live is sometimes very difficult, but
it is never meritorious in itself ; and we must have a reason to
allege to our own conscience why we should continue to exist
upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his
house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the open
air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self- improver,
he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who
can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private
means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the
necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the
more liberty, have only the higher moral obligation to be up and
doing in the interest of man. 1
Doth life resemble clouds that come and go ?
Or fitful sparks that but a moment glow?
Not so !
Man's life is vast and deeper than the sea,
His purpose giveth birth to destiny,
He moulds and carves his own futurity.
Is life a senseless weary wail of woe ?
A glittering bubble such as babes might blow?
Not so !
Life's meaning is as lofty as the sky,
It stirs the heart to action pure and high,
It thrills the human breast with ecstasy.
Is life a noxious weed which whirlwinds sow ?
A useless flint o'er which the waters flow?
Not so !
A life well spent has not its weight in gold,
It is jthe clearest crystal earth doth hold,
A gem beside which suns seem dull and cold. 2
1 R. L. Stevenson, Familiar Stttdies of Men and Books.
8 Gustav Spiller.
270 FOR THE CROWN
II.
THE KEWARD.
Christianity is sometimes charged with being a long-sighted
worldliness. We are told that the enjoyment many Christians
expect is just as worldly as the enjoyments which they now reject.
The only difference between such Christians and worldly folk is
not in the character of the crowns they seek but in the season
when they wear them. The crowns are the same ; but the
worldly man wears his now, the Christian hopes to wear it here-
after. Now is that accusation entirely ill-founded? Are our
conceptions of the future weighted and coloured by the worldli-
ness which we have professed to reject ? How are our thoughts
of the future shaped? How do we talk about it? We some-
times speak of the unfairness with which things are distributed
in this life. Wealth seems to be showered upon the undeserving.
The deserving seem often to be kept in straits. From this we
argue that there must be a future life to make this fair. If there
be no future life, then the constitution of the world is mon-
strously unjust. Let us look at that. Let us assume that in
this world the good always became the rich, and the wicked
always became the poor; would the arrangement be perfectly
fitting and just? If goodness were always paid for by money
would you consider the traffic conducive to moral and spiritual
health? This worldly and materialistic conception of crowns
and rewards eats away the very strength and sweetness of our
religion. We are wanting material crowns as a reward for
saintliness, and they will not be given in this world or in the
world to come. God has other crowns more precious and incor-
ruptible, and He is lavish in the bestowal of them.
^f The prize system has frequently been denounced as unworthy
and degrading, and there is a grain of truth in the charge. The
danger is that the child may work solely for the prize, and not
for the sake of knowledge. We have the same danger in the
religious sphere when rewards of any kind are promised. Certain
it is that rewards for well-doing are wrong and hurtful when
they are of such a nature as to evoke a greedy or mercenary
spirit, and it is equally certain that no man or woman should do
right simply for the sake of reward. The higher we go in the
sphere of rewards, the more spiritual they become, until they
i CORINTHIANS ix. 25 271
cease altogether to be mercenary. The soldier values the Victoria
Cross far more than any pecuniary reward. The artist values
your, admiration more than the price you give for his pictures.
No amount of money, however great, can ever be an equivalent
of a brave deed or a great work of art. 1
^[ If a religion were revealed to us to-morrow, proving,
scientifically and with absolute certainty, that every act of
goodness, of self-sacrifice, of heroism, of inward nobility would
bring us, immediately after our death, an indubitable and unim-
aginable reward, I doubt whether the proportion of good and evil,
of virtues and vices amid which we live would undergo an
appreciable change. Would you have a convincing example ?
In the middle ages there were moments when faith was absolute
and obtruded itself with a certainty that corresponds exactly
with our scientific certainties. The rewards promised for well-
doing, the punishments threatening evil were, in the thoughts of
the men of that time, as tangible, so to speak, as would be those
of the revelation of which I spoke above. Nevertheless, we do
not see that the average of goodness was raised. A few saints
sacrificed themselves for their brothers, carried certain virtues,
selected from among the more contestable, to the pitch of
heroism ; but the bulk of men continued to deceive one another,
to lie, to fornicate, to steal, to be guilty of envy, to commit
murder. The mean of the vices was no lower than that of to-day.
On the contrary, life was incomparably harsher, more cruel and
more unjust, because the low- water mark of the general intelligence
was less high. 2
TJ The feeble soul that may be lured to love and service by
the promise of reward is unworthy to be enrolled in the regiment
of Heaven. We needs must follow with assent the words in
which the Saint disclaims with poignant ardour all thought
of personal advantage, the desire of Heaven and the fear of Hell
being alike blotted out in the burning radiance of devotion:
" Thou drawest me, my God. . . . Thy death agony draws me ;
Thy love draws me, so that, should there be no Heaven, I would
love Thee. Were there no Hell, I would fear thee." 3
U The symbol of the Gospel is a cross ; but not a cross by
itself ; not a lone, bare, gaunt, naked cross. The symbol of the
Gospel is a crown ; but not a crown by itself ; not a proud, cold,
despotic, selfish, pitiless crown. The symbol of the Gospel is
1 David "Watson, In Life's School, 160.
2 Maurice Maeterlinck, Life and Flowers, 100.
8 Lady Dilke, The Book of the Spiritual Life, 167,
2 7 2 FOR THE CROWN
a cross and a crown ; a cross lying in a crown ; a crown growing
around a cross; a cross haloed by a crown; a crown won by
a cross. 1
I sorrowed that the golden day was dead,
Its light no more the countryside adorning;
But whilst I grieved, behold! the East grew red
With morning.
I sighed that merry Spring was forced to go,
And doff the wreaths that did so well become her;
But whilst I murmured at her absence, lo !
'Twas Summer.
I mourned because the daffodils were killed
By burning skies that scorched my early posies;
But whilst for these I pined, my hands were filled
With roses.
Half broken-hearted I bewailed the end
Of friendships than which none had once seemed nearer;
But whilst I wept I found a newer friend,
And dearer.
And thus I learned old pleasures are estranged
Only that something better may be given;
Until at last we find this earth exchanged
For Heaven. 2
1. The corruptible crown. Think of the corruptible crowns
which are to so many the objects of a fond ambition. How
many are seeking the tinselled crowns of gaiety, their daily
luxury being found in the thin enjoyment of the world ! How
corruptible is the crown! The first cold shower that falls
occasions its destruction. One of the most pitiful sights to be
seen is that of a gay and shallow woman plunged into some
sudden sorrow. She is like a butterfly in the rain. How many
others are seeking the crown of fame ! How many are possessed
with the burning desire to be recognized, to be esteemed, to be
influential, to be remembered. Yet how corruptible is the crown !
Of how very few can it be said that their fame lasts as long as
their gravestones. When the clock strikes the last stroke of the
1 James I. Vance, Tendency, 207. 2 Ellen Thorney croft Fowler,
i CORINTHIANS ix. 25 273
hour, there is a lingering and decreasing reverberation before
the sound quite dies out. That reverberation represents a man's
posthumous fame, the short lingering remembrance that follows
the final stroke of his life. If a man wins fame, he wins a
corruptible crown. Others seek the crown of wealth. All they
want is money. They measure their success by money. It is their
standard and their crown. Yet how corruptible ! " The wind
passeth over it, and it is gone." It is the prey of many foes.
The moth can destroy it. The rust can corrupt it. The thief
can steal it. These are types of the crowns admired by the
world, coveted by the world, sought by the world, and they are
all corruptible. If a man gains one he is regarded as having had
a successful career.
TJ The King [William IV.] ought not properly to have worn
the crown, never having been crowned ; but when he was in the
robing-room he said to Lord Hastings, "Lord Hastings, I wear
the crown; where is it?" It was brought to him, and when
Lord Hastings was going to put it on his head he said, " Nobody
shall put the crown on my head but myself." He put it on, and
then turned to Lord Grey and said, " Now, my Lord, the coronation
is over." George Villiers said that in his life he never saw such
a scene, and as he looked at the King upon the throne with the
crown loose upon his head, and the tall, grim figure of Lord Grey
close beside him, with the sword of state in his hand, it was as
if the King had got his executioner by his side, and the whole
picture looked strikingly typical of his and our future
destinies. 1
I saw a truant schoolboy chalk his name
Upon the Temple door; then with a shout
Eun off; that night a weary beggar came,
Leant there his ragged back and rubbed it out. 2
2. The incorruptible crown. The Christian's crown is else-
where spoken of as a crown of life, a crown of glory, and a crown
of righteousness.
(1) The incorruptible crown is a crown of life. If you want
a summary of Biblical teaching respecting virtue and its
crowns, you may find it in the Book of Kevelation "Be thou
faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." A
1 The Greville Memoirs, ii. 140. 2 Charles Murray, Hameivitli, 54.
I COR. 18
274 FOR THE CROWN
crown of life ! Your physician examines your body, the healthy
workings of which have somehow or other become clogged with
disease. He finds out the obstruction, ascertains its character,
discovers its root. Then practically he says to the patient,
" Attend to my instructions, loyally follow my prescriptions, be
faithful to my word, and I will drive the disease out of your body
and give your body a crown of life." The reward of obedience
is health, fresh, vigorous health, a crown of life ! That is precisely
what the Lord says to us about our souls. He says to me, Be
thou faithful. Be loyal in My service. Be scrupulously obedient
to My will, and I will heal thee of all thy diseases. I will remove
all thy moral sicknesses and spiritual infirmities. I will give thee
moral and spiritual health, make thee every whit alive thou
shalt have a crown of life ! That is the reward of obedience and
faithfulness the incorruptible crown of life. The reward for
doing a good deed is that you have more life to do another.
That is the meaning of Christ's benediction upon the faithful
servant "Thou hast been faithful over a few things." His
faithfulness had crowned him with life. He had greater life for
doing greater service. At first he had only life enough for " few
things," but faithfulness had given him life enough for more.
"Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee
ruler over many things."
Have you ever noticed closely that gracious list of beatitudes
which Jesus tells us are the special possession and reward of
the Christian life ? How august are the payments ! How incor-
ruptible the crowns ! Look at one or two. " Blessed are the
merciful." Why are they blessed ? What is their reward, their
crown? "They shall obtain mercy." Beautifully suited is the
crown to the virtue. God will give their hearts the same sweet
feast as they have given to the heart of their fellows. " Blessed
are the pure in heart." In what consists their blessedness?
What is their reward ? " They shall see God." How incor-
ruptible the crown! And how appropriate that purity should
be rewarded by visions, that they who have washed their eyes
clean and clear should be able to feast them upon the beauty and
glory of God! "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness." Whence comes their blessedness ? What is
their reward? "They shall be filled." Their spiritual hunger
i CORINTHIANS ix. 25 275
shall meet with spiritual satisfaction. The hunger for life shall
receive the bread of life. The thirst for life shall receive the
water of life.
If I think I know many people who are already wearing the
crowns in their hearts. It seems to me that there are many people
from whom God has only to strip away their robes of flesh, and
they will stand before Him crowned ! I think you must know
such men and women, who have reached the west, and the
brightness of whose crowns shines through their attenuated flesh.
They wear the crown of humility, the crown of patience, the
crown of brotherly kindness, the crown of hope, the crown of
love. Do you think any one will be able to wear brighter crowns
than these in the Kingdom of God ? Do you think that in all
heaven there is a brighter crown than the crown of love ? It
is the crown worn by the great God Himself ! These are the
crowns we must seek, the incorruptible crowns. Let us seek
for such character as will be to us a worthy crown. Let us
become more spiritual. Let us inspect our purposes and
ambitions, and make it our one aim to be found at last in
Christ, in possession of the righteousness which is of God by
faith. Let us consecrate ourselves to one holy and supreme
ambition, to wake at last in the likeness of our God. 1
How many a Grecian }-outh of old,
Preparing for the Isthmian plain,
And driven by thirst of fame, was bold
For discipline that he might gain
An athlete's vigour well-controlled,
And win the olive crown through pain !
But, when in time of wrinkled age
His earlier force had ebbed away,
And, closing now his pilgrimage,
He viewed the wreath's forlorn decay,
Then he at last grew wise to gauge
The fleeting worth of glory's day.
Therefore shall we give precious years
And sacred energies of soul
To win the world's resounding cheers
j\.nd triumph at its vaunted goal ?
Nay, such a guerdon calms no fears
When Doomsday's awful thunders roll !
1 J. H. Jowett.
276 FOR THE CROWN
But rather may the second sight
Of Faith disclose the prize unseen,
And urge us, led by its delight
To tame the sins, that intervene,
And fight with joy a nobler fight
For crowns of never-fading green ! l
(2) A crown of glory. It is a crown of glory, and that means
a lustrousness of character imparted by radiation and reflection
from the central light of the glory of God. "Then shall the
righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father."
Our eyes are dim, but we can at least divine the far-off flashing
of that great light, and may ponder upon what hidden depths
and miracles of transformed perfectness and unimagined lustre
wait for us, dark and limited as we are here, in the assurance
that we all shall be changed into the " likeness of the body of
his glory."
The promise of an incorruptible crown is not only for this
life but also for the life to come. Here we have the promise of
life, that fuller life which men want, " the life of which our veins
are scant," even in the fullest tide and heyday of earthly existence.
But the promise sets that future over against the present, as if
then first should men know what it means to live : so buoyant,
elastic, unwearied shall be their energies, so manifold the new
outlets for activity, and the new inlets for the surrounding glory
and beauty ; so incorruptible and glorious shall be their new being.
Here we live a living death ; there we shall live indeed ; and that
will be the crown, not only in regard to physical, but also in regard
to spiritual, powers and consciousness.
But remember that all this full tide of life is Christ's gift.
There is no such thing as natural immortality ; there is no such
thing as independent life. All Being, from the lowest creature
up to the loftiest created spirit, exists by one law, the continual
impartation to it of life from the fountain of life, according to
its capacities. And unless Jesus Christ, all through the eternal
ages of the future, imparted to the happy souls that sit garlanded
at His board the life by which they live, the wreaths would
wither on their brows, and the brows would melt away, and dis-
solve from beneath the wreaths. " I will give him a crown of life."
1 G. T. S. Farquhar.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 25 277
If There is a pathetic and beautiful story related of Jenny
Lind Madame Goldschmidt. Her innate religious feeling caused
her to leave the stage at the height of her extraordinary triumph.
Some time after, an English friend found her at a seaside retreat.
The famous artiste was "sitting on the steps of a bathing-
machine, on the sands, with a Lutheran Bible open on her knee,
and looking out into the glory of a sunset that was shining over
the waters." The friends talked " and the talk drew near to the
inevitable question, { Oh, Madame Goldschmidt, how was it that
you ever came to abandon the stage at the very height of $our
success ? ' ' When, every day,' was the quiet answer, ' it made
me think less of this (laying a finger on the Bible), and nothing
at all of that (pointing out to the sunset), what could I do ? ' " l
(3) A crown of righteousness. It is a crown of righteousness.
Though that phrase may mean the wreath that rewards righteous-
ness, it seems more in accordance with the other similar expres-
sions to regard it, too, as the material of which the crown is
composed. It is not enough that there should be festal gladness,
not enough that there should be calm repose, not enough that
there should be flashing glory, not enough that there should be
fulness of life. To accord with the intense moral earnestness of
the Christian system there must be, emphatically, in the Christian
hope, cessation of all sin and investiture with all purity. The
word means the same thing as the ancient promise, " Thy people
shall be all righteous." It means the same thing as the latest
promise of the ascended Christ, "They shall walk with me in
white." And it sets the very climax and culmination on the
other hopes, declaring that absolute, stainless, infallible righteous-
ness which one day shall belong to our weak and sinful spirits.
^[ I love Dinah next to my own children. An' she makes
one feel safer when she's i' the house ; for she's like the driven
snow : anybody might sin for two as had her at their elbow. 2
^[ Since the beginning of history thoughtful men have been
asking what is man's summum bonum, his highest good, his
heart's true ideal. " Power," " wealth," " pleasure," " wisdom,"
" culture," are some of the answers. The true answer is " God."
"I have no good beyond Thee," said one who had learned the
secret. " Lord, give me Thyself," was Augustine's constant
prayer ; and he adds the exquisite reason, " Habet omnia qui kabet
hdbentem omnia" "he has all who has Him that has all."
1 W. J. Lacey, Masters of To-morrow, 210. 2 Mrs. Poyser, in Adam Bede.
278 FOR THE CROWN
Slowly or suddenly we rise from delight in God's gifts to delight
in Himself. " Unless," says Hooker, " the last good, which is
desired for itself, be infinite, we do evil making it our end. No
good is infinite but God ; therefore He is our felicity and bliss."
Every soul has capacities greater than the infinite sea, and only
He who filleth heaven and earth, whom the heaven of heavens
cannot contain, can satisfy one little human heart. 1
^Mysterious Death ! who in a single hour
Life's gold can so refine;
And by thy art divine
Change mortal weakness to immortal power !
Bending beneath the weight of eighty years,
Spent with the noble strife
Of a victorious life,
We watched her fading heavenward, through our tears.
But, ere the sense of loss our hearts had wrung,
A miracle was wrought,
And swift as happy thought
She lived again, brave, beautiful, and young.
Age, Pain, and Sorrow dropped the veils they wore,
And showed the tender eyes
Of angels in disguise,
Whose discipline so patiently she bore.
The past years brought their harvest rich and fair,
While Memory and Love
Together fondly wove
A golden garland for the silver hair.
How could we mourn like those who are bereft,
When every pang of grief
Found balm for its relief
In counting up the treasure she had left ?
Faith that withstood the shocks of toil and time,
Hope that defied despair,
Patience that conquered care,
And loyalty whose courage was sublime;
1 J. Strachan. Hebrew Ideals, i. 75.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 25 279
The great deep heart that was a home for all,
Just, eloquent and strong,
In protest against wrong;
Wide charity that knew no sin, no fall;
The Spartan spirit that made life so grand,
Mating poor daily needs
With high, heroic deeds,
That wrested happiness from Fate's hard hand.
We thought to weep, but sing for joy instead,
Full of the grateful peace
That followed her release;
For nothing but the weary dust lies dead.
Oh, noble woman ! never more a queen
Than in the laying down
Of sceptre and of crown,
To win a greater kingdom yet unseen,
Teaching us how to seek the highest goal,
To earn the true success;
To live, to love, to bless,
And make death proud to take a royal soul. 1
1 Louisa May Alcott.
TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT.
LITERATURE.
Aitken (W. H. M. H.), Temptation and Toil, 91.
Banks (L. A.), The Great Promises of the Bible, 112.
Boyd (A. K. H.), Counsel and Comfort from, a City Pulpit, 251.
Brooke (S. A.), Short Sermons, 269.
Gaulfield (S. F. A.), The Prisoners of Hope, i. 76.
Guckson (J.), Faith and Fellowship, 283.
Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, v. 41.
Faithful (R. C.), My Place in the World, 157.
Farrar (F. W.), Tlie Silence and the Voices of God, 101.
Fraser (J.), Parochial Sermons, 167.
Button (J. A.), The Fear of Things, 81.
Jones (J. D.) } Eliim of Life, 92.
Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., iii. 93, v. 234.
Lushington (F. de W.), Sermons to Young Boys, 22.
Mantle (J. G.), God's To-morrow, 67.
Moinet (C.) 5 The Great Alternative, 105.
Mursell (W. A.), The Waggon and the Star, 49.
Robinson (W. V.), Sunbeams for Sundays, 49.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 1. (1904) No. 2912.
Stalker (J.), in The World's Great Sermons, ix. 167.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit) ix. (1872) No. 749.
Christian World Pulpit, xlviii. 142 (Wickham) ; Ixix. 298 (Dale) ;
li. 217 (Gore).
Churchman's Pulpit : Ninth Sunday after Trinity : xi. 129 (Field), 134
(Boyd), 137 (Rice), 140 (Cotton).
Clergyman's Magazine, vii. 25 (Griffith); XT. 18 (Rogers); New Ser.,
vi. 95 (Proctor).
Methodist Times, June 2, 1910, p. 6 (Hutton).
282
TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT,
God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are
able ; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye
may be able to endure it. I Cor. x. 13.
1. THE reason for our confidence that every temptation can be
overcome is that God is faithful. " God is faithful," says the
Apostle, " who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye
are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of
escape, that ye may be able to endure it." Notice, the Apostle
does not give as his reason for confidence that man is strong, but
that God is faithful. Men who have faced temptation confiding
only in their own strength have come to grief. It is the men
who, distrustful of self, have leaned upon God who have come
off more than conquerors.
2. Should we be disposed at any time to doubt this, we may
reassure ourselves by remembering how God's faithfulness is
guaranteed.
(1) God cannot be true to His purpose of grace and yet
allow us to be overcome by the sheer weight and pressure of evil
without a possibility of escape. For what is the purpose which
we see revealed in the gift of Christ? It is that we may be
saved from sin ; and salvation from sin implies that we shall be
strengthened against the temptations by which it seeks to pre-
vail. God is faithful to His purpose, and His purpose is to save
and keep all those who put their trust in Him. He never
departs from this. He has it always before Him. It is the end
to which He makes everything subordinate. He is never off
His guard, never asleep, never too busily engaged to attend to
the wants of the very least of His children. Sin can lurk no-
where without being detected by His all-seeing eye. It can
283
284 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
devise no stratagem without being clearly visible to Him. Still
less can it strike down or fatally wound any who look to Him
for help.
(2) But not only would it be inconsistent with His purpose
of grace were God to suffer overwhelming evil to assail us,
it would also place Him in contradiction to Himself. His
nature is to love goodness supremely, and He has pledged Him-
self by the gift of His Son to leave nothing undone to give it the
victory. But if He were to stand aside, and see us beaten down
by sin without interposing ; if He were to allow temptations to
muster in irresistible force; this would not only defeat His
manifested purpose, but destroy His character for holiness. The
very fact that God is good, that He loves and cherishes with a
compassionate eye every movement of a human soul to purity
and truth, involves His doing everything that wisdom, and
power, and pity can do to make us triumphant over sin.
^ When man thus considers the wealth and the marvellous
sublimity of the Divine nature, and all the manifold gifts which
He grants and offers to His creatures, amazement is stirred up
in his spirit at the sight of so manifold a wealth and majesty ;
at the sight of the immense faithfulness of God to all His creatures.
This causes a strange joy of spirit, and a boundless trust in God,
and this inward joy surrounds and penetrates all the forces of the
souls in the secret places of the spirit. 1
^[ A beautiful instance is recorded in the life of Catherine of
Siena. The plague was abroad, and Father Matthew, the Director
of the Hospital, caught the infection while ministering to a dying
person. The next day he was carried like a corpse, livid and
strengthless, from the chapel to his room. The physician said
that every symptom announced the approach of death. But
Catherine loved him sincerely, and when she heard of his illness
she went to his room and cried with a cheerful voice, " Get up,
Father Matthew ! Get up ! " As she left the house, another friend
Eaymond of Capua was entering, and said to her, " Will you
allow a person so dear to us, and so useful to others, to die ? I
know your secrets, and I know that you obtain from God whatsoever
you ask in faith" She bowed her head, and, after a few moments,
looked him in the face with her countenance radiant with joy,
and said, " Well, let us take courage ; he will not die this time."
The good Father immediately recovered, and sat down to a light
meal with his friends, chatting and laughing gaily with them.
1 M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, HO.
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 285
Catherine believed in the promise, " The prayer of faith shall save
the sick." She was bold in appealing to the truthfulness of the
Divine Healer, and she was not disappointed. " Know therefore
that the Lord thy God, he is God ; the faithful God, which keepeth
covenant and mercy with them that love him" (Deut. vii. 9).
We very seldom put the veracity of God to the test. But the
more we venture on Him and on His gracious words, the stronger
and clearer is our faith bound to become. 1
If 1 sometimes think that in the case of those who are not
tried by sharp outward temptations to break God's commandments,
the trial may come in inward temptations to distrust His grace.
It would be a bad business for us if we were not tried in some
way. 2
Tf There are two possible ways of looking upon trial. The
first is that God is angry with the sufferer and is taking His
revenge. It is a view old as the fears and the morbidness of man.
The friends of Job are its champions in every generation. It
seems so obvious to those who hold it that few of them give any
pains to think it out to its issues, or realize how small a God
this of theirs must be. Those who seriously believe in God at
all will have little difficulty in passing to the second way of
looking upon trial, and if their faith is worthy of the name, it
will be quite as obvious as the former. Once seen it can never
again be doubted, though it may sometimes require a strong
effort to realize and hold by it. When we hear that certain troops
have been sent into the most dangerous and trying post on the
battlefield, how do we judge of them ? Is it that their general
has wished to punish them, or is it not rather that he believed
in them best of all? And is not such confidence an honour
greater than all other praise ? To look at life under that light
is to be done with fears and doubts. And along with that we
take the further assurance that God sends no man into any battle
that he may fall. None of all His troops are ever sacrificed to
the exigencies of the field. 3
And this shalt thou know most surely, God breaketh His faith
with none.
Teach thy thoughts ne'er from Him to wander, since Himself
and His ways are One."
3. " God. is faithful," says St. Paul, and proceeds to point
1 J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 52.
8 The Life of E. W. Dale of Birmingham, 544.
* J. Kelman, Honour towards God, 52.
286 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
out to the Corinthians the ways in which God's faithfulness is
shown towards them in the matter of their temptations. He tells
them (1) that God permits the temptation, suffers them to be
tempted ; (2) that He proportions the temptation to their strength
of resistance, not suffering them to be tempted above that they
are able; (3) that He provides the way of escape from every
temptation. So we have
I. The Control of Temptation.
II. The Adjustment of Temptation.
III. The Escape from Temptation.
I.
THE CONTROL OF TEMPTATION.
The term " proof," " temptation," comprehends all that puts
moral fidelity to the proof, whether this proof has for its end to
manifest and strengthen the fidelity it is in this sense that God
can tempt, or whether it seeks to make man fall into sin it
is in this sense that God cannot tempt, and that the devil always
tempts. It may also happen that the same fact falls at once into
these two categories, as, for example, the temptation of Job, which
on the part of Satan had for its end to make him fall, and which
God, on the contrary, permitted with the view of bringing out
into clear manifestation the fidelity of His servant, and of raising
him to a higher degree of holiness and of knowledge. There are
even cases in which God permits Satan to tempt, not without
consenting to his attaining his end of bringing into sin. So in
the case of David. This is when the pride of man has reached
a point such that it is a greater obstacle to salvation than the
commission of a sin ; God then makes use of a fall to break this
proud heart by the humbling experience of its weakness. 1
TJ When Jehovah asked the question : " Hast thou considered
my servant Job, that there is none like him in all the earth ? "
Satan said, " Hast thou not put a hedge about him, and about his
house, and about all that he hath on every side ? " I am very
thankful for Satan's own confession of the security of this servant
of God. " The hedge was so high," says one of the old Puritans,
" that the big demons could not get over it, and so thick that the
little demons could not get through it." 2
1 F. Godet, Commentary on Corinthians, ii. 70. 2 J. G. Mantle.
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 287
1. Since God controls the temptation, and is testing us by it,
we ought to bear it faithfully, believing in His faithfulness. We
know God's faithfulness to us only when we are honestly faithful
to ourselves. He is no paternal despot who will make us good
by force ; and no more shameful cry than that petulant demand
exists. He preserves our independence ; it is dear to Him ; He
will compel us to work out our own salvation with resolute
labour, and in this more than in all else His faithfulness to us is
shown. That fidelity is often stern enough, it inflicts our due
penalties, it proves to us the weaknesses of our nature by the
trials in which they break down, it reveals what is strong in us
by testing it sometimes to the last strand of the rope, and we
quiver under the severity of the test ; but what is the worth of
our manliness, and what the use of a long experience, unless we
are sufficiently strong of heart to realize that faithfulness is often
sternness, and love sometimes apparently cruel ?
^f We shall all be tempted, but the effects of the temptation
depend upon ourselves. Fling into the same flame a lump of
clay and a piece of gold, the clay will be hardened, the gold will
melt; the heart of Pharaoh hardened into perfidious insolence,
the soul of David melted into pathetic song. Bear temptation
faithfully, and it will leave you not only unscathed, but nobler. 1
Beauteous things of earth !
1 cannot feel your worth
To-day.
kind and constant friend !
Our spirits cannot blend
To-day.
Lord of truth and grace 1
1 cannot see Thy face
To-day.
A shadow on my heart
Keeps me from all apart
To-day.
Yet something in me knows
How fair creation glows
To-day.
1 F. W. Farrar, The Silence and the Voices of God, 112.
288 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
And something makes me sure
That love is not less pure
To-day.
And that th' Eternal Good
Minds nothing of my mood
To-day.
For when the sun grows dark
A sacred, secret spark
Shoots rays.
Fed from a hidden bowl
A Lamp burns in my soul
All days. 1
2. We must trust Him in the darkness of our temptation.
He is faithful ; but to us in our blindness, ignorance, waywardness,
He does not always seem so. To the strong man when he sits,
despairing and stricken, amid the ruins of his life, to the father
whose erring son causes him agony and shame to these the sun
shines not, and the stars give no light, the heavens above their
heads are iron, and the earth beneath their feet is brass. Yet,
how gently He heals even for these the wounds which His own
loving hand has made ; how do the clouds break over them and
the pale silver gleam of resignation brighten into the burning
ray of faith and love. For our path in life is like that of the
traveller who lands at the famous port of the Holy Land. He
rides at first under the shade of palms, under the golden orange-
groves, beside the crowded fountains with almonds and pome-
granates breaking around him into blossom. Soon he leaves
behind him these lovely groves ; he enters on the bare and open
plain; the sun burns over him, the dust-clouds whirl around
him ; but even there the path is broidered by the quiet wayside
flowers, and when at last the bleak bare hills succeed, his heart
bounds within him, for he knows that he shall catch his first
glimpse of the Holy City, as he stands weary on their brow.
There came a cloud; it fell in shining showers.
Lo ! from the earth sprang troops of radiant flowers.
1 Charles G. Ames.
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 289
Grief o'er a joyous heart its shadow threw.
Lo I in the darkness love's sweet graces grew.
The golden sun dropped sudden out of sight.
Lo ! silver stars made glorious the night.
Death came. The soul, affrighted at its guise,
Was led protesting into Paradise.
3. Because God is faithful, He sends temptation to drive us to
Himself. There is no escape from His love ; no escape from the
restlessness He will excite in our hearts till we find rest in Him.
A thought will rise in our minds, we know not whence, a dim
emotion kindle there which will seem to have no cause ; they are
the inspirations of God. In early times we have heard, as
Samuel heard, His voice, and, unlike Samuel, we have forgotten.
In after years, in issuing into life, we have met Him, in our first
loneliness, as the infinite Inspirer. He has kindled in our hearts
a fire of duty and hope and aspiration ; but we have lost the
music of that vision in the din of business and the clangour of
the world. But He will not lose us ; we forget, but not He.
Again He comes to make our life shake in the tempest. If
tenderness will not touch us, perhaps this stern education will.
Therefore, there comes keen testing "thrilling anguish," the
death of earthly hopes, the hours in which life seems a dreadful
dream out of which we cannot wake. For only so can some be
awakened to feel that they are not their own, but God's ; that the
invisible is the real, and the visible unreal ; that this world is, to
us, children of immortality, no more than one flash of the shuttle
through the loom, in comparison with the eternal world in which
we are at one with Him.
^[ Many men are distressing themselves, when they think of
their trials, by imagining that they must have done something
wrong, or God never could have sent such afflictions to them
personally or to their household. That is a mistake. There are
trials that are simply tests, not punishments ; trials of faith and
patience, not rods sent to scourge men because they have been
doing some particular evil thing. God's people are tried. " Whom
the Lord loveth he chasteneth." The honour is not in the trial,
it is in the spirit in which the trial is borne. 1
1 J, Parker,
I COR. 19
2 9 o TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
4. It is an awful thought, this unremitting faithfulness of
God, for it means, if we resist Him, stern, unrelenting work upon
us. It is in vain that we say to Him, " Let us alone, torment us
not." He never takes offence; He has none of the jealousy of
vanity ; He is never unkind, though His strokes are hard ; never
wanting in swift reciprocation of the faintest utterance of love,
the faintest cry for forgiveness; always ready to listen with
tenderness, though wise enough not always to grant our prayer ;
always reasonable, always just, so that He can make excuse, can
weigh the force of trial on our character, can understand the
force of the circumstances which betrayed us into guilt. He
knows all, and there is infinite comfort in that.
Tf You may assure your soul, when you are marching forward
into the darkness of some valley of the shadow of death, that
God would never have sent you to face that trial unless He had
known that you could master it. Life is often difficult: it is
never impossible for the man that has to live it. If the trial be
very sore, if it shake your strength and strain your patience
almost to the breaking-point, if the agony of conflict surprise you,
then that only shows that you are stronger than you took your-
self to be. Had you been unfit for it, this post of danger would
never have been assigned to you. Your God has gauged your
powers of resistance with exact knowledge, and the duty He
shall set you will always be well within the limits of these
powers. 1
5. In the face of such faithfulness, we dare not do less than our
best. It is a shame to sink wilfully below that which we know we
ought to be. There are those who talk of their weakness, their
yielding nature, as if it were something beautiful to be feeble ; as
if there were some poetical quality in giving way to that which
they choose to call Fate ; as if ideals were given them in order
that they might sigh sentimentally over their unattainability, and
not in order that they may pursue them with a resolute will.
This is the infidelity of life far worse than all else, when it is
worst turned into the ghost of an artistic dream and made the
ground of vanity. Feebleness is never beautiful, and to choose
feebleness as the rule of life is disgraceful in man or woman,
however we may deck it with fine fancies. The real beauty of
life is in health of mind, strength of will, vigour of purpose.
1 J. Kelraan, Honour tmvards God, 53.
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 291
The real poetry of life is in the noble effort which does not rest
till it has accomplished its end ; in the undying pursuit of that
which we know to be best; in the battle for right; in the
resolution and the power to live above the standard of the world ;
in the ravishment which is born of seeing truth, love, justice,
purity, as they are seen by God ; and in unresting, yet unhasting
endeavour to become at one with them.
^f Led by God's Spirit to the battle-ground, there is no assault
in which any man is doomed to be defeated, and there is no
temptation which it is impossible for a man to overcome. The
conditions of life that tempt us are but the challenges that incite
a man to assert his mastery. The lusts of the body, the pride of
life, the meaner parts of human nature that offer a morbid
pleasantness, all that they can do at their worst is to give him
the choice whether he shall respect himself or bow his neck.
Let him remember that God has trusted him for this conflict
also, trusted him to assert his best manhood, and to show its
mastery. Let him remember that he is upon his honour, and that
God counts on him to keep his honour bright as his sword. 1
Was the trial sore ?
Temptation sharp ? Thank God a second time !
Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestaled in triumph ? Pray
"Lead us into no such temptations, Lord!"
Yea, but, Thou whose servants are the bold,
Lead such temptations by the head and hair,
Eeluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,
That so he may do battle and have praise. 2
II.
THE ADJUSTMENT OF TEMPTATION.
We are to believe that whatever our trial or temptation may
be, however heavy, however formidable, it will, at least, never
come in a light, random way to us. It is all measured before,
and it is in strict order and proportion to something. He who
made our body and our mind, and who knows exactly our
every sensitive fibre, and the capacity of each what each can
and cannot endure has fitted everything accurately to our
1 J. Kelman, Honour tmvards God, 57. * Browning,
292 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
constitution, to our circumstances, to our body, to our mind ; and
this sense of adaptation or proportion will of itself be an immense
strength to us. It gives such dignity to affliction, and establishes
at once a limit beyond which it can no more go than the sea can
pass high - water mark. The mere knowing that there is a
boundary line perfectly defined, though we do not see it, will give
us courage to bear all that falls within that line. It will come to
pass thus. It will sometimes happen to us to feel in our suffering
" If this trial were to go one inch further, I could not bear it ;
it would crush me." But it will never go that inch. We shall
not be crushed.
U The words "beyond what ye are able come as a surprise. Has
man then some power ? And, if the matter in question is what
man can do with the Divine help, is not the power of this help
without limit ? But it must not be forgotten that, if the power of
God is infinite, the receptivity of the believer is limited : limited
by the measure of spiritual development which he has reached, by
the degree of his love for holiness and of his zeal in prayer, etc.
God knows this measure, St. Paul means to say, and He proportions
the intensity of the temptation to the degree of power which the
believer is capable of receiving from Him, as the mechanician, if
we may be allowed such a comparison, proportions the heat of the
furnace to the resisting power of the boiler. 1
1. There are two factors in every temptation, the sinful heart
within, the evil world without, and they stand to one another
much in the relation of the powder-magazine and the lighted
match. Temptation originates in the heart, says St. James, and
that is absolutely true. The heart is the powder-magazine. But
for the lusts raging there, the allurements of the world would be
absolutely powerless for harm. Temptation comes from the sin-
ful world, says St. Paul; that is also true. The world is the
lighted match; but for the allurements and incitements of the
world, the sinful desires of the heart would never be called into
play. It is when the match is applied to the powder-magazine
that danger arises. So the power of the temptation may vary
and the power of resistance may vary.
2. There is no greater mystery of providence than the
unequal proportions in which temptation is distributed. Some
1 F. Godet,
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 293
are tempted comparatively little; others are thrown into a
fiery furnace of it seven times heated. There are in the world
sheltered situations in which a man may be compared to a ship in
the harbour, where the waves may sometimes heave a little, but
a real storm never com.es ; there are other men like the vessel
which has to sail the high seas and face the full force of the
tempest.
(1) That whicli is a temptation at one period of life may be
no temptation at all at another. To a child there may be an
irresistible temptation in a sweetmeat which a man would never
think of touching; and some of the temptations which are now
the most painful to us will in time be as completely outlived.
(2) One of the chief powers of temptation is the power of
surprise. It comes when we are not looking for it ; it comes from
the person and from the quarter we least suspect. The day dawns
which is to be the decisive one in our life ; but it looks like any
other day. No bell rings in the sky to give warning that the
hour of destiny has come. But the good angel that watches over
us is waiting and trembling. The fiery moment arrives ; do we
stand ; do we fall ?
(3) Every man has his own trials ; and every condition and
circumstance of life its own peculiar temptations. Solitude has
its temptations as well as society. St. Anthony, before his
conversion, was a gay and fast young man of Alexandria ; and,
when he was converted, he found the temptations of the city so
intolerable that he fled into the Egyptian desert and became a
hermit; but he afterwards confessed that the temptations of a
cell in the wilderness were worse than those of the city. It
would not be safe to exchange our temptations for those of
another man ; every one has his own.
If In speaking of Knox's Rambles, and the effects of association
with men in sharpening the intellect, you remark that this seems
inconsistent with the fact that great spirits have been nursed in
solitude. Yes, but not the ploughman's solitude. Moses was
forty years in Midian, but he had the education of Egypt before,
and habits of thought and observation begun, as shown in his
spirit of inquiry with regard to the burning forest. Usually, I
suppose, the spark has been struck by some superior mind, either
in conversation or through reading. Ferguson was, perhaps, an
exception. Then, again, stirring times set such master-rninds to
294 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
work even in this solitude, as in Cromwell's case. I remember,
too, a line of Goethe's, in which he says :
Talent forms itself in solitude,
Character in the storms of life.
Bat I believe both your positions are true. The soul collects
its mightiest forces by being thrown in upon itself, and coerced
solitude often matures the mental and moral character marvel-
lously, as in Luther's confinement in the Wartburg. Or, to take a
loftier example, Paul during his three years in Arabia ; or, grander
still, His solitude in the desert : the Baptist's too. But, on the
other hand, solitude unbroken from earliest infancy, or with
nothing to sharpen the mind, either by collison with other minds,
or the expectation of some new sphere of action shortly, would, I
suppose, rust the mental energies. Still there is the spirit to be
disciplined, humbled, and strengthened, and it may gain in pro-
portion as the mind is losing its sharpening education. 1
TJ Trench, in his poem " The Monk and Bird," shows that the
very blessedness of the consecrated life may become a temptation.
Even thus he lived, with little joy or pain
Drawn through the channels by which men receive
Most men receive the things which for the main
Make them rejoice or grieve.
But for delight, on spiritual gladness fed,
And obvious to temptations of like kind;
One such, from out his very gladness bred,
It was his lot to find.
When first it came, he lightly put it by,
But it returned again to him ere long,
And ever having got some new ally,
And every time more strong
A little worm that gnawed the life away
Of a tall plant, the canker of its root,
Or like as when from some small speck decay
Spreads o'er a beauteous fruit.
For still the doubt came back, Can God provide
For the large heart of man what shall not pall,
Nor through eternal ages' endless tide
On tired spirits fall ?
1 F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 222.
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 295
Here but one look tow'rd heaven will oft repress
The crushing weight of undelightful care;
But what were there beyond, if weariness
Should ever enter there?
Yet do not sweetest things here soonest cloy?
Satiety the life of joy would kill,
If sweet with bitter, pleasure with annoy
Were not attempered still.
This mood endured, till every act of love,
Vigils of praise and prayer, and midnight choir,
All shadows of the service done above,
And which, while his desire,
And while his hope was heavenward, he had loved,
As helps to disengage him from the chain
That fastens unto earth all these now proved
Most burdensome and vain. 1
3. The severity and the variety of man's temptations, together
with the persistently lofty and urgent appeals addressed to him,
are a supreme tribute to the grandeur of his moral nature. In
a race the severity of the handicap is an indication of the capacity
of the runner. A great deal is expected from a man who can
give another a hundred yards' start. The runners are not all of
equal calibre, and they are not handicapped above that they are
able. Can we not see here what God is doing ? Can we not see
how He is dealing with us, according to this Pauline statement ?
So far from making things too difficult, He is trying to make
them easier ; He is tempering the strife to each man's strength ;
He does not want us to lose, but to win ; not to fail, but to over-
come. That is not harshness, it is kindness ; that is not undue
severity, it is magnanimity, it is compassion, it is fair-play. Let
us not allow ourselves to curse our circumstances, or to arraign
God and His plans and His world, as if they were all in special
conspiracy against us. The fact is that most of us are in con-
spiracy against ourselves perhaps without knowing it. We
have groaned about our difficulties, instead of accepting them
and using them as stepping-stones to success. We have kicked
against our limitations, instead of allowing them to develop our
resources. We have resented our hardships and our handicaps,
1 Trench, Poems, 13.
296 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
instead of making them contribute to our manhood. We have
sat and gloomed at our temptations and roundly cursed our fate,
but we have never considered the ways of escape. Thus we
have been at once unfair to God and have courted failure for
ourselves.
If You all know the story about the Black Prince at the battle
of Crecy, how his father refused to send help to him when he
was hard pressed. It would have been easy for the king to keep
the prince out of reach of danger; but no, the father said to
those who came appealing for help, " Let the boy win his spurs,
and let the day be his." 1
III.
THE ESCAPE FROM TEMPTATION.
1. God will "with the temptation make also the way of
escape." Sometimes we want to see the way of escape before
the temptation, but the way of escape comes with the temptation,
not before it.
It may have happened to us, in some of our visits to the
grandest scenes of nature, to be wending our way along a lake
or river where mountains are before us, so close and so encom-
passing that they appear not only to bar our own progress, but
to leave not the smallest outlet for our little boat. But, as
we neared these vast barriers which edged us in, we gradually
descried an opening between the hills which, as we went on,
grew clearer and clearer, and wider and wider, till, safely and
smoothly, our little bark floated on by a channel just made for
us from within apparently impenetrable masses, to other regions
which now range before us in their loveliness. So when the
hindrances are the thickest, and the difficulties the most insur-
mountable, we feel that our faithful God, who made these fast-
nesses for this very end, will Himself provide the issue, and
with the temptation make also the way of escape, that we may
be able to endure it.
2. God is said here to make the temptation as well as the
way of escape. Nor is this without a purpose. He knows
precisely the strength we need, because He has prepared the
1 F. de W. Lusliington, Sermons to Young Boys, 24.
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 297
occasion on which we shall be called to use it. It will never
fail through any miscalculation or ignorance on His part. It
will never be too feeble or too long upon the way. We may
always be sure His succour will be at hand, a very present help
in every time of trouble. Even in those moments in which our
temptation comes upon us most suddenly, so that it may seem
to have taken even God Himself by surprise, His way of escape
will be close beside us. For the swiftest and most unforeseen
of temptations are all equally under His control.
^[ I leave you to call this deceiving spirit what you like or
to theorize about it as you like. All that I desire you to recog-
nize is the fact of its being here, and the need of its being
fought with. If you take the Bible's account of it, or Dante's,
or Milton's, you will receive the image of it as a mighty spiritual
creature, commanding others, and resisted by others : if you take
^Eschylus's or Hesiod's account of it, you will hold it for a
partly elementary and unconscious adversity of fate, and partly
for a gijpup of monstrous spiritual agencies connected with
death, and begotten out of the dust; if you take a modern
rationalist's, you will accept it for a mere treachery and want
of vitality in our own moral nature exposing it to loathsomeness
or moral disease, as the body is capable of mortification or leprosy.
I do not care what you call it, whose history you believe of it,
nor what you yourself can imagine about it; the origin, or
nature, or name may be as you will, but the deadly reality of the
thing is with us, and warring against us ; and on our true war
with it depends whatever life we can win. Deadly reality, I
say. The puff-adder or horned asp is not more real. Unbeliev-
able, those, unless you had seen them; no fable could have
been coined out of any human brain so dreadful, within its own
poor material sphere, as that blue-lipped serpent working its
way sidelong in the sand. As real, but with sting of eternal
death this worm that dies not, and fire that is not quenched,
within our souls or around them. Eternal death, I say sure,
that, whatever creed you hold ; if the old Scriptural one, Death
of perpetual banishment from before God's face ; if the modern
rationalist one, Death Eternal for us, instant and unredeemable
ending of lives wasted in misery.
This is what this unquestionably present this, according to
his power, oram-present fiend, brings us towards, daily. He is
the person to be " voted " against, my working friend ; it is worth
something, having a vote against him, if you can get it ! Which
you can, indeed; but not by gift from Cabinet Ministers; you
298 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
must work warily with your own hands, and drop sweat of heart's
blood, before you can record that vote effectually. 1
3. The way of escape must be sought for, or it may not be
found. It is not always forcibly obtruded. It reveals itself to
the humble and watchful eye the eye that has become single,
and waits only upon God. And if we are tempted, and can see
no mode of relief, then we must search for it. Gradually it will
open and widen before us.
4. How is it that God makes the way of escape ? Notice that
it is not a way, but the way of escape ; the one separate escape
for each separate temptation.
(1) Sometimes the only victory over a temptation is not to
argue with it, not even to wrestle with it, but simply to get away
from it. " Brethren, let us not be righteous over-much ! " St.
Paul, indeed, uses no grandiloquent speech as to what a man
should do when he finds himself beset by temptations. # He does
not in this place recommend a man to draw his sword, and plant
his right foot forward, and clench his teeth, and do many another
strenuous and showy thing which looks so well in a picture and
sounds so well when addressed to a great audience, but which is
all, as a matter of fact, futile in those hot, and terrible, and lonely
hours when we are sorely tempted to do wrong. No ; St. Paul
tells us here that when we are tempted, the first and only thing
to do is to get away from the spot, to run in fact for our life.
This is one of those simple and obvious things which never occur
to any of us until a genius arises to say them when you are hard
pressed by evil, move on, get away, escape. That may sound
tame. It may sound less than the highest; but it is the very
highest. Nay, it is the only truth and fact of the matter. There
are situations in life, dark turnings in the moral world, sheer
precipices where we must not trust ourselves, where the only
sensible and religious course is to get away.
If In passing through the " Inferno," Dante's spiritual guide
would not allow him to stand still for a moment.
J" What ! " a wayward youth might perhaps answer, incredu-
y ; "no one ever gets wiser by doing wrong ? Shall I not
know the world best by trying the wrong of it, and repenting ?
1 Ruskin, Time and Tide ( Works, xvii. 365).
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 299
Have I not, even as it is, learned much by many of my errors ? "
Indeed, the effort by which partially you recovered yourself was
precious ; that part of your thought by which you discerned the
error was precious. What wisdom and strength you kept, and
rightly used, are rewarded ; and in the pain and the repentance,
and in the acquaintance with the aspects of folly and sin, you
have learned something] how much less than you would have
learned in right paths can never be told, but that it is less is
certain. Your liberty of choice has simply destroyed for you so
much life and strength, never regainable. It is true you now
know the habits of swine, and the taste of husks : do you think
your father could not have taught you to know better habits and
pleasanter tastes, if you had stayed in his house ; and that the
knowledge you have lost would not have been more, as well as
sweeter, than that you have gained ? l
(2) The way of escape may be very near the entrance gate.
It often is. And the victory may be won by watchfulness over the
thoughts. As is the fountain, so will be the stream. Quench the
spark, and you are safe from the conflagration. Crush the
serpent's egg, and you need not dread the cockatrice. Conquer
evil thoughts, and you will have little danger of evil words and
evil ways. The victory over every temptation is easiest, is safest,
is most blessed there.
If Wasps' nests are destroyed when the wasps are only grubs
like caterpillars, and before they have learned to fly. You get
a squib, like those they fire off on the fifth of November, and light
the end and put it into the hole in the ground where the nest is,
and cover it over with a turf. And then all the grubs in the
nest are suffocated by the smoke. If you wait till the grubs have
wings and have learned to fly, then a ton of dynamite will be of
little use; for the wasps will be buzzing all round your ears,
and stinging you, and then flying away. 2
(3) Sometimes prayer is the only way of escape. Sometimes
the doors are all shut upon human sympathy and understanding,
but there is always a way of escape towards God. " I have been
driven many times to my knees," said Abraham Lincoln, " by the
overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go."
Tf Thera is a picture by one of our great artists of a young
knight on the verge of a dark wood through which he has to pass.
That wood contains all manner of lurking perils and stealthy
1 Ruskin, Queen of the Air ( Wvrks, xix. 409). a W. V. Robinson.
300 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
enemies, and before entering it the young knight has taken off
his helmet, and is pouring out his soul in prayer. And the
legend at the foot of the picture is this: "Into thy hands, O.
Lord." We too stand, like that young knight, face to face with
all manner of dangers and perils ; fierce and deadly temptations
of many a kind will assail us as we make our way through the
mystic wood. What better can we do than commit ourselves
into the keeping of the same gracious and mighty God ? " Into
thy hands we commit ourselves." l
^| I was in the Puzzle Garden one day at Hampton Court
(there they call it a maze), and after getting to the centre, I had
the greatest difficulty in getting out. But in the centre of that
garden there is, not a summer house, but a raised platform.
And a man stands on it, and he can see every one in the maze.
Soon I heard him calling to me : " Turn to the left, sir," " To
the left again," " Now to the right," until I got out. Life is like
a puzzle garden sometimes. We do not know which way to
turn, whether to go forward, or to turn to this side or to that ;
but if we look up to God in prayer, He will show us the way,
and bring our souls out of trouble. We shall hear a voice behind
us saying, " This is the way, walk ye in it." 2
Tf A young lieutenant who had seen one campaign alone, and
without any of the means and appliances of such war as I had
been apprenticed to I was about to take command, in the midst
of a battle, not only of one force whose courage I had never tried,
but of another which I had never seen ; and to engage a third,
of which the numbers were uncertain, with the knowledge that
defeat would immeasurably extend the rebellion which I had
undertaken to suppress, and embarrass the Government which I
had volunteered to serve. Yet, in that great extreme, I doubted
only for a moment one of those long moments to which some
angel seems to hold a microscope and show millions of things
within it. It came and went between the stirrup and the saddle.
It brought with it difficulties, dangers, responsibilities, and
possible consequences terrible to face; but it left none behind.
I knew that I was fighting for the right. I asked God to help
me to do my duty, and I rode on, certain that He would do it. 3
(4) There is the way of submission and resistance. It is all
summed up in that word of St. James : " Submit yourselves
therefore unto God, but resist the devil." That is the way of
submission and resistance, and it is the secret of victory in the
1 J. D. Jones. 2 W. V. Robinson.
* Edwardes, A Year on the Punjab Frontier, ii. 318 (Ruskin's Works, xxxi. 495).
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 301
hour of fierce temptation. "Submit yourselves to God." Let
us yield our nature absolutely and unreservedly to Him. Make
an unconditional surrender. Then trust Him to come in the
Person of His Spirit, and garrison every part of that yielded
being, and undertake the battle for us. Then, when the enemy
comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a
standard against him. As the flood rushes onwards carrying
everything before it, so the tempter comes upon men, if per-
chance he may find them unprepared and sweep them off their
feet. What happens to the man who is submitted to God?
The Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against the enemy.
An ungrieved Spirit will always mean victory in the hour of
temptation. First submit, and then resist. Trust Him to under-
take the conflict and then resist.
Tf In an old Continental town they will show you a prison
in a tower, and on all the stones of that prison within reach,
one word is carved it is "Resist." Your guide will tell you
that years ago a godly woman was for forty years immured in
that dungeon, and she spent her time in cutting with a piece of
iron on every stone that one word, for the strengthening of her
own heart and for the benefit of all who might come after her,
" Eesist ! " " Resist ! " " Resist ! " l
I hoped that with the brave and strong,
My portioned task might lie;
To toil amid the busy throng,
With purpose pure and high;
But God has fixed another part,
And He has fixed it well ;
I said so with my bleeding heart,
When first the anguish fell.
Thou, God, hast taken our delight,
Our treasured hope away;
Thou bidst us now weep through the night
And sorrow through the day.
These weary hours will not be lost,
These days of misery,
These nights of darkness, anguish-tossed,-
Can I but turn to Thee:
i J. G. Mantle,
302 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
With secret labour to sustain
In humble patience every blow,
To gather fortitude from pain,
And hope and holiness from woe.
Thus let me serve Thee from my heart,
Whate'er may be my written fate:
Whether thus early to depart,
Or yet a while to wait.
If Thou shouldst bring me back to life,
More humbled I should be,
More wise, more strengthened for the strife,
More apt to lean on Thee:
Should death be standing at the gate,
Thus should I keep my vow:
But, Lord! whatever be my fate,
let me serve Thee now
1 Anne Bronte.
MAN'S CHIEF END.
303
LITERATURE.
Austin (G. B.), The Beauty of Goodness, 38.
Barry (A.), Westminster Abbey Sermons, 91.
Brooks (P.), The More Abundant Life, 68.
Byles (J.), The Boy and the Angel, 123.
Clayton (C.), Stanhope Sermons, 382.
Dale (R. W.), Weekday Sermons, 218, 260.
Ewing (J. F.), The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, 359.
Girdlestone (A. G.), The Way, the Truth, the Life, No. 10.
Goulburn (E. M.), Personal Religion, 116, 254.
Greenhough (J. G.), in Eden and Gethsemane, 115.
Hall (C. C.), The Gospel of Divine Sacrifice, 293.
Hocking (W. J.), in Religion in Common Life, 150.
Jowett (B.), College Sermons, 225.
Kingsley (C.), Village, Town and Country Sermons, 155.
Little (W. J. Knox), Characteristics and Motives, 197.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : 1 and 2 Corinthians, 164.
Macniillan (H.), The Gate Beautiful, 246.
Meyer (F. B.), The Soul's Pure Intention, 155.
Miller (J. E,.), A Help for the Common Days, 50.
Morgan (G. H.), Modern Knights-Errant, 114.
Murray (W. H. H.), in American Pulpit of the Day, ii. 613.
Newman (J. H.), Parochial and Plain Sermons, viii. 154.
Reid (H. M. B.), Books that Help the Religious Life, 41.
Sandford (C. W.), Counsel to English Churchmen Abroad, 260.
Souper (W.), Concerning Character and Conduct, 9.
Vaughan (C. J.), Family Prayer and Sermon Book, ii. 277.
Watkinson (W. L.), Studies in Christian Character^ i. 99.
Webb-Peploe (H. W.), Calls to Holiness, 115.
Westcott (B. F.), Christian Aspects of Life, 224.
The Incarnation and Common Life, 125.
Whittuck (C.), Learning and Working, 88.
Wilson (J. M.), Truths New and Old, 306, 316, 325.
Cambridge Review, viii. Supplement No. 196 (Worlledge).
Christian World Pulpit, ii. 218 (Abercrombie) ; xii. 161 (Jones); xx. 11
(Beecher), 257 (Barry) ; xli. 185 (Pearson) ; xliv. 124 (Morgan) ;
1. 353 (Horton) ; Ixxiii. 171 (Burton) ; Ixxix. 236 (Farr).
304
MAN'S CHIEF END.
Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the
glory of God. i Cor. x. 31.
THIS verse, with the passage immediately preceding, illustrates
St. Paul's constant habit of solving questions as to conduct by
the largest principles. He did not keep his theology and his
ethics in separate watertight compartments, having no com-
munication with each other. The greatest truths were used to
regulate the smallest duties. Like the star that guided the Magi,
they burned high in the heavens, but yet directed to the house
in Bethlehem.
The Corinthians were in a practical difficulty. Social life
had been upheaved by the action of Christianity. Like the
shuddering of the sunny, peaceful plains of Campania from the
fierce shock of the insurgent fires of Vesuvius, the whole social
fabric, wherever Christ's hand had touched it, was in a state of
convulsive trembling ; and the convulsion was felt in the agonies
of its rebound alike in the deepest and in the most trivial things
of life. The ordinary gentleman of the day, in Corinth, was no
longer able to associate himself with his everyday acquaintances
in the pleasures or the business of social life, without the rebuk-
ing face of the new religion gazing at him in serious warning.
He could not, as we should say, " dine out " with his friend with-
out being at once confronted by a practical difficulty. The old
idol-worship had interpenetrated the social life of Corinth ; and
when Christians came to accept the invitation of their friends
to an ordinary social entertainment, they were placed in a serious
dilemma, as they would either appear to sanction by their presence
a service of idols and an insult to God, or else would be forced
to cut themselves off from the commonest demands of the society
of the time. Now, certainly St. Paul in his usual manner touches
I COR. 2O
306 MAN'S CHIEF END
specific dangers with specific remedies ; but at the same time he
never limits himself to such a method. Invariably, whatever be
the difficulty he has to deal with, he goes beyond the exact line
of the particular question and its corresponding remedy, and
sketches out a serviceable and yet a comprehensive canon of
conduct. Thus, feeling that what is a desirable principle for
all converts, when they have seceded from heathenism to the
Christian Church, is some guidance for those at Corinth how to
comport themselves properly in their social entertainments,
instead of going into all the wearisome intricacies of the difficulty
although he does touch them also when necessary he lays
down the comprehensive rule of the text.
The principle of this text is "Do all to the glory of God."
Following out (i) this great principle of conduct, we get (ii) a
test of action ; (iii) a Christian ideal in everyday life ; (iv) a
transfiguration of drudgery and common toil.
I.
THE PRINCIPLE.
" Do all to the glory of God."
1. St. Paul's words are an expression of a fundamental truth
of religion, the truth, namely, that while the living God is the
source and efficient cause of all things, so also He is their final
end. It follows that God (though He gives lavishly to man gifts
of help, and comfort, and blessing) is Himself, and not anything
He gives, man's final and only satisfaction; and therefore, that
the end He had in view in His creation, and has in view in His
government, of the world, is not at all that He Himself may
receive from any external being or thing a support which is never
needed by that majestic self-sufficing life, but that He may have
about Him numberless sons, like Himself in goodness and beauty,
and finally fitted to be partakers of His own glory. Now if this
truth, as to the final object of life, and therefore the final cause
o God's action in Christ Jesus, and government of the world,
underlay the Apostle's thought, what must be the result?
Surely nothing else but the statement of the text.
i CORINTHIANS x. 31 307
^[ " Do all to the glory of God," that is, in a higher manner,
in a nobler spirit. Instead of the busy, ever-recurring image of
self, which is always like " a forward child " chattering within us,
let the thought of God be present with us, like the sea, silent and
unfathomable, like the light and air, living and infinite, yet also
communicated by Him to us. Let us do all to the glory of
God not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but, as the servants
of God, from the heart. When we bring ourselves into that
Presence, the temptations of sense flee away ; when we lay our
doubts and difficulties before Him, in the brightness of that light
they are dispersed. It is by communion with Him, who is the
essence of Righteousness and Truth and Love, that we are
enabled to rise above ourselves. This is what the Scripture calls
"living to His glory." The vision of God in His glory (not
merely as in a picture, surrounded by angels, but in the higher
form of mind or thought) is sometimes seen at a distance from
the heights of philosophy, and sometimes has a dwelling-place
in the humble soul. If we attempted to describe it, we should fall
into unreality, for we see " through a glass " only. Let us
think sometimes of the best moments of our lives, when we have
been most resigned to the will of God, when we have risen most
above the opinions of men, when we have been most free from
the temptations of sense, when we have desired to look into the
truth, and seen it so far as our earthly state allowed. In this
way we may form an idea of what the Apostle meant by living
to God's glory, of what Christ meant when He said, The kingdom
of God is within you. 1
2. Now Christianity is not a sum of isolated observances. It
is the hallowing of all human interests and occupations alike.
Worship is a very small fragment of devotion. The Christian
does not offer to God part of his life or of his endowments in
order that he may be at liberty to use the rest according to his
own caprice. All life, all endowments, are equally owed to our
Lord, and equally claimed by Him. Every human office in every
part is holy. Our conduct our whole conduct is a continuous
revelation of what we are. At each moment we are springs of
influence. Virtue goes out of us also or weakness. Our silence
speaks. We who profess to be Christians must from day to day
either confirm or disparage our Creed. Our faith our want of
faith must "show itself. It is finally the soul that acts. The
body is but its instrument.
1 B. Jowett.
3 o8 MAN'S CHIEF END
If The sense of being God's minister gives to any life that
noble pride which is our birthright, and which we ought carefully
to cherish. Do we not see on a lower level how fond people are
of linking their name and calling with royalty ? " Purveyor to
His Majesty." We sometimes wonder how these petty hucksters
came to possess this sounding title. No doubt the distinction
often rests on a slender charter; a mere gossamer thread binds
the obscure counter to the throne ; yet the privilege is sedulously
guarded, and throws a coveted lustre upon the village shop. But
how truly grand to relate all life to God, even in its lowliest
phases ! Nothing is then common or unclean. Everything is
on the altar ; all is sacramental. Every service is as royal as
the golden crowns cast on the jasper pavement. This gives to the
ordinary life infinite honour and content. 1
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see;
And what I do in any thing,
To do it as for Thee.
Not rudely, as a beast,
To runne into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection.
A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav'n espie.
All may of Thee partake;
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture "for Thy sake"
Will not grow bright and clean.
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps the room as for Thy laws
Makes that and th' action fine.
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold,
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for lesse be told. 2
1 W. L. Watkinson. 2 George Herbert.
i CORINTHIANS x. 31 309
II.
A TEST OF ACTION.
It is surprising how difficult the duties of men sometimes
become, when opposite rules are set against one another, or
when they have to be reconciled with differences of character.
It is surprising how simple they grow when they are considered
by the light of great principles ; when, dismissing tradition and
custom and the opinions of men, we are able simply to ask:
" What is the will of God ? " If you can say that there is no
will of God about this trifling ceremony, about this small dispute
(for God does not interfere in such matters, but only in the
greater things of righteousness and temperance and truth), the
question is already answered : " An highway shall be there,
and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness; the
unclean shall not pass over it ; the wayfaring man shall not err
therein."
If People are perpetually squabbling about what will be best
to do, or easiest to do, or advisablest to do, or profitablest to
do ; but they never, so far as I hear them talk, ever ask what it
is just to do. And it is the law of heaven that you shall not be
able to judge what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved
to judge what is just, and to do it. That is the one thing con-
stantly reiterated by our Master the order of all others that is
given oftenest " Do justice and judgment." That's your Bible
order ; that's the Service of God, not praying nor psalm-
singing. You are told, indeed, to sing psalms when you are
merry, and to pray when you need anything; and, by the per-
verseness of the evil Spirit in us, we get to think that praying
and psalm-singing are " service." If a child finds itself in want
of anything, it runs in and asks its father for it does it call
that doing its father a service ? If it begs for a toy or a piece
of cake does it call that serving its father? That, with God,
is prayer, and He likes to hear it ; He likes you to ask Him for
cake when you want it ; but He doesn't call that " serving Him."
Begging is not serving : God likes mere beggars as little as you
do He likes honest servants, not beggars. So when a child
loves its father very much, and is very happy, it may sing little
songs about him; but it doesn't call that serving its father;
neither is singing songs about God, serving God. It is enjoying
ourselves, if it's anything, most probably it is nothing; 'but if
310 MAN'S CHIEF END
it's anything it is serving ourselves, not God. And yet we are
impudent enough to call our beggings and chauntings "Divine
service " : we say, " Divine service will be ' performed ' " (that's
our word the form of it gone through) "at so-and-so o'clock."
Alas ! unless we perform Divine service in every willing act oi
life, we never perform it at all. The one Divine work the one
ordered sacrifice is to do justice ; and it is the last we are ever
inclined to do. Anything rather than that! As much charity
as you choose, but no justice. " Nay," you will say, " charity is
greater than justice." Yes, it is greater; it is the summit of
justice it is the temple of which justice is the foundation. But
you can't have the top without the bottom; you cannot build
upon charity. You must build upon justice, for this main reason,
that you have not, at first, charity to build with. It is the last
reward of good work. Do justice to your brother (you can do
that whether you love him or not), and you will come to love
him. But do injustice to him, because you don't love him ; and
you will come to hate him. 1
^[ There is a little organism called volvox, which, in its con-
struction, habits of life, and mode of reproduction, stands on
the border-line between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. I
suppose ever since it has been known, this little creature so
small that it can scarcely be seen with the unaided eye has
been bandied about between the two kingdoms. Why ? Because
scientists have applied different tests. One has noted its posses-
sion of green colouring matter, and has therefore claimed it for
the vegetable kingdom, while another, noting its mode of repro-
duction to be similar to that of some lower forms of animal life,
has therefore claimed it for the animal kingdom. Like the
volvox, many actions have been bandied about. Some claim
that they belong to the kingdom of darkness, others that they
belong to the Kingdom of God. Ought I to smoke, ought I to
go to the theatre, ought I to drink intoxicating liquors, ought I
to read my newspaper on Sunday? Ought I to cycle, tram or
train on Sunday? Ought I to make my man or maid servant
work on Sunday? Ought I to enter the public ballroom, or
ought I to dance at all ? Ought I to accept bribes in business ?
Bring the action to this test. Let this bright light shine upon
it. Can I do this to the glory of God ? In other words, I am
a follower of Christ, who summed up His lifework in the sentence,
" I have glorified thee on the earth." 2
Tf Charles Marriott's unfailing good nature but in fact it
1 Ruskin, The Grown of Wild Olive ( Works, xviii. 419).
2 G. Hay Morgan.
i CORINTHIANS x. 31 311
was his inveterate Christian consideration really knew no
bounds. Overwhelmed (as he always was) with alt manner of
work, he never denied himself to any one who saw fit to call on
him, or wanted anything of him. "I see you are too busy. I
will not disturb you," once exclaimed Edward King, (afterwards
Bishop of Lincoln, who was at that time an undergraduate of
Oriel "a royal fellow," as C. M. used to call him) and was
proceeding to leave the room. " That depends " (quietly rejoined
Marriott) " on the relative importance of what I am doing and
what you have come to me about." The reply aptly expresses what
the speaker seems always to have felt namely, that the twelve
hours of every day had to be spent in God's service, and that he
was not a competent judge beforehand of how God might be most
acceptably served. He therefore always held himself in readi-
ness to meet any demand which might by any one be made upon
him for a measure of his time, or for a share of his attention. 1
III.
A CHRISTIAN IDEAL IN EVERYDAY LIFE.
Eeligion recognizes no bisecting into sacred and secular.
" Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all
to the glory of God." It is just as much a part of Christian duty
to do one's weekday work well as it is to pray well. " I must be
about my Father's business," said Jesus in the dawn of youth;
and what do we find Him doing after this recognition of His duty ?
Not preaching or teaching, but taking up the common duties of
common life and putting all His soul into them. He found the
Father's business in His earthly home, in being a dutiful child,
subject to His parents, in being a diligent pupil in the village
school, and later in being a conscientious carpenter. He did not
find religion too spiritual, too transcendental, for weekdays. His
devotion to God did not take Him out of His natural human
relationships into any realm of mere sentiment : it only made
Him all the more loyal to the duties of His place in life. We
ought to learn the lesson. Keligion is intensely practical. Only
so far as it dominates one's life is it real. We must get the
commandments down from the Sinaitic glory amid which they
were first graven on stone by the finger of God and give them a
1 J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, i. 339.
3 i2 MAN'S CHIEF END
place in the hard, dusty paths of earthly toil and struggle. We
must get them off the tables of stone and have them written on
the walls of our own hearts. We must bring the Golden Rule
down from its bright setting in the teaching of our Lord and get
it wrought into our daily, actual life.
If The Law of God concerning man is, that if he acts as God's
servant he shall be rewarded with such pleasure as no heart can
conceive nor tongue tell. 1
If Jenny Lind once said to John Addington Symonds, " I sing
to God." Coming as it did from the heart, it was a fine
expression. The famous cantatrice was deeply devout, and these
words expressed the secret of her soul. She had a vivid sense of
God, a boundless joy in Him, and her music was the spontaneous
acknowledgment of His presence and beauty. Why should we
not do all the work of life in the same spirit ? " I sing for God " ;
" I plough for God " ; "I write for God " ; " I build for God " ; " I
weave for God " ; "I buy and sell for God." All that Jenny Lind
sang was not strictly sacred, it was often, no doubt, secular and
trivial; but she had ever a commanding sense of the heavenly
presence, and sang to the God whose gladness filled her heart.
So whatever our task may be we may serve Him day and night
in His presence. 2
Dismiss me not Thy service, Lord,
But train me for Thy will;
For even I in fields so broad
Some duties may fulfil;
And I will ask for no reward,
Except to serve Thee still.
How many serve, how many more
May to the service come ;
To tend the vines, the grapes to store,
Thou dost appoint for some:
Thou hast Thy young men at the war,
Thy little ones at home.
All works are good, and each is best
As most it pleases Thee;
Each worker pleases when the rest
He serves in charity:
And neither man nor work unblest
Wilt Thou permit to be.
1 Ruskin, in Cook's Life of Ruskin, ii. 329. 2 W. L. Watldnson.
i CORINTHIANS x. 31 313
ye who serve, remember One
The worker's way who trod;
He served as man, but now His throne,
It is the throne of God ;
The sceptre He hath to us shown
Is like a blossoming rod.
Firm fibres of the tree of life
Hath each command of His,
And each with clustering blossoms rife
At every season is;
Bare only, like a sword of strife,
Against love's enemies.
Our Master all the work hath done
He asks of us to-day;
Sharing His service, every one
Share too His sonship may.
Lord, I would serve and be a son;
Dismiss me not, I pray. 1
IV.
A TRANSFIGUKATION OF DRUDGERY AND COMMON TOIL.
1. The life of nearly every man has great spaces that are
flat and uninteresting. The predominant colour is grey. Incident
is rare, monotony is continuous. The same things have been
done day by day, and a child's entry in a diary would report the
life of many of our days, " Nothing special to-day." But, really,
life is not monotonous. It is we who are monotonous. Life is
full of a hidden beauty, a hidden glory indeed, of a hidden
God. We may look through its tiniest part, if it is well done
and done in sincerity, and see the vision of the golden heavens,
and catch suggestions of the face of Jesus. Even the most limited
sphere will give us room for the discipline of our character into
the beauty of heaven. And the least conspicuous life may
perform ministries which are near relatives to the service of the
very angels. It is the dropping of God out of life that makes
life uninteresting ; it is the neglect of His presence that shadows
our days. Let Him be there, let His face shine upon us, and
1 T. T. Lynch, The Rivulet.
314 MAN'S CHIEF END
the most trivial act is invested with an awful glory, and every
bit of life is enhanced and transfigured with its power. The way
to find blessedness is to find God ; and He is to be found in every
ordinary thing in our daily round. We always find Him when
we try to do everything for His glory. " For Thy sake ! " This
is life's deepest inspiration, and this its highest power. This
touches us when all other motives are weak. This changes
drudgery into Divinity. But to be fruitful it must be always held
before the mind, and always kept in the heart. Day by day our
lowliest duty must be lifted to this great height; so will the
great God stoop to our lowliness, and our dustiest and most
commonplace way be radiant with His infinite glory.
Tf It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's
endeavour springs in some degree from dulness. We require
higher tasks because we do not recognise the height of those we
have. Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple
and too inconsequential for gentlemen of our heroic mould; we
had rather set ourselves something bold, arduous, and conclusive ;
we had rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut off a
hand or mortify an appetite. But the task before us, which is to
co-endure with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness,
and the heroism required is that of patience. There is no cutting
of the Gordian knots of life ; each must be smilingly unravelled. 1
Tf Brownlow North has told us that it was about eleven months
after his awakening at Dallas, when he strongly felt it to be his
duty to do some service for the Lord. For two months before
this he had shut himself up in his own room, reading the Bible
and praying. He then said to himself that he must do something
for God, but felt that he could not. The thought suggested itself
to his mind that he might at least distribute tracts, but he felt
that to do so would make himself ridiculous, and that people
would laugh at him and call him mad. At last he resolved to
try, and putting a number of tracts into his pocket, he went into
the most secluded part of Elgin, in which he was living. The
first person he met with was an old woman, who amazed him by
accepting his tract without laughing at him. To another old
woman whom he saw coming down the road he presented another
tract, and she received it with thanks. The third he gave to a
policeman, who said, " Thank you, Mr. North." He recorded
it as his experience after fourteen years' trial, that only on one
occasion was a tract refused, and that was by a professed infidel,
1 B. L. Stevenson, A Christmas Sermon,
i CORINTHIANS x. 31 315
and yet he had systematically given away tracts to persons of
all ranks, in all sorts of places. Very few Christians can be
preachers like Brownlow North, but there are none who cannot
be tract distributors. 1
TJ This is what Brother Lawrence once told me, writes his
friend and biographer : " For me, the time of action does not
differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of
my kitchen, while several persons are together calling for as
many different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as
when upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament.
" Nor is it needful," says Brother Lawrence himself in his
Conversations, " that we should have great things to do." I am
giving you the picture of a lay-brother serving in a kitchen ; let
me then use his own words : " We can do little things for God ;
I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of Him, and
that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself
in worship before Him, who has given me grace to work ; after-
wards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick
up but a straw from the ground for the love of God.
" We search for stated ways and methods of learning how to
love God, and, to come at that love, we disquiet our minds by
I know not how many devices ; we give ourselves a world of
trouble and pursue a multitude of practices to attain to a sense of
the Presence of God. And yet it is so simple. How very much
shorter it is, and easier to do our common business purely for the
love of God, to set His consecrating mark on all we lay our hands
to, and thereby to foster the sense of His abiding Presence by
communion of our heart with His ! There is no need either of
art or science; just as we are, we can go to Him, simply and
with single heart."
Only a little shrivelled seed,
It might be flower, or grass, or weed;
Only a box of earth on the edge
Of a narrow, dusty, window-ledge;
Only a few scant summer showers;
Only a few clear shining hours;
That was all. Yet God could make
Out of these, for a sick child's sake,
A blossom-wonder, as fair and sweet
As ever broke at an angel's feet.
Only a life of barren pain,
Wet with sorrowful tears for rain,
1 K. Moody-Stuart, Brownlow North, 50.
316 MAN'S CHIEF END
Warmed sometimes by a wandering gleam
Of joy, that seemed but a happy dream;
A life as common and brown and bare
As the box of earth in the window there ;
Yet it bore, at last, the precious bloom
Of a perfect soul in that narrow room;
Pure as the snowy leaves that fold
Over the flower's heart of gold. 1
2. All that God wants of any one is faithfulness. Not
brilliance, not success, not notoriety which attracts newspaper
notice, but the quiet, regular, and careful performance of trivial
and common duties, as beneath " the great Taskmaster's eye."
To be faithful in that which is least will win as rich a reward
as faithfulness in the greatest. Indeed, it is harder to be faithful
over a very little than over much. The opportunity, therefore,
of winning the highest reward in the future world is given not
only to those who are called to occupy the high places of the
field, where every brilliant act is chronicled by admiring pens,
but to those who dig out the foundations, who do duty in the
trenches, and who are buried in common graves, without magni-
ficent obsequies or glowing epitaphs. Of many it will be said
at last : "They had their reward" in the blowing of the trumpet of
earthly fame and the murmured applause of many voices ; the turn
of those to whom no one said "Thank you" will then have arrived.
TJ Have you not seen the way in which men construct arches ?
A number of beams, wooden uprights, and cross-pieces are con-
structed into the form of the arch which is to be. The structure
looks very confused and flimsy, it is difficult to trace the design,
and one spark of flame would consume the whole ; but upon its
span the bricks and stones are deposited which will last for genera-
tions. So upon the mean structure of daily drudgery, which excites
no enthusiasm, which strains the muscles and wearies the nerves, is
being built up a character which will be " a thing of beauty and a
joy for ever " when the heavens have passed away " as a scroll." 2
We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the heart resides;
The spirit bloweth and is still
In mystery our soul abides.
But tasks in hours of insight will'd
Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.
1 Henry van Dyke. a F. B. Meyer.
i CORINTHIANS x. 31 317
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish 'twere done.
. Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern. 1
If Do not ask for great opportunities of service, or be dis-
appointed if you feel no glow of devotion to other people or even
to God. We are all too anxious to be conscious of beautiful
feelings ; they comfort us and lead us to think that we are in
the right way; but the real test is obedience doing the right
things as far as we know them. Feelings are very misleading :
let them come when they come ; do not be disheartened if they
do not come, or if when they come they soon vanish. This I
think is the path to higher perfection ; at any rate no other path
is certain. Hold fast to the assurance that God wants you to
have the mind of Christ; pray for it; but meanwhile, whether
your heart goes with it or not, try in humble, unostentatious ways
to serve Christ by serving others. 2
If Only one letter received by this momentous mail brought the
least encouragement to Coillard it was one addressed by the
Kev. W. G. Lawes, of the L.M.S., New Guinea, to Mme. Coillard,
who had gone out with him and his wife in the John Williams
(1860).
" PORT MORESBY, September 18, 1877.
" I remember you perfectly as you were then, and have
sometimes been helped and strengthened by the remembrance
of your strong faith. . . . Our work on Savage Island was very
delightful. 'All work for Christ is that/ you will say, and so
indeed it is, but it had in it that which human nature rejoices in
a large measure of success and prosperity. It was my happiness
to baptize upwards of one thousand converts, to train a band of
young men who are now at work as pastors on their own island,
and as pioneers on this and other heathen [islands], and, above
all, to translate into their language the whole of the New
Testament and part of the Old. . . . I felt sorry to leave the
work on Savage Island, but the call to harder work, more self-denying
work, is an honour from the Master's hands. Does He not in this
way deal with His servants? Is not the reward of service in
His Kingdom more service, harder service, and (measured ly human
standards) less successful service ? We deal just so with our children,
1 Matthew Arnold.
3 The Life <tf R. W. Dale of Birmingham, 664.
3i8 MAN'S CHIEF END
and we ought not to repine when our Father calls us from some
loved, congenial work to something more arduous and difficult."
These words at such a time came to them to M. Coillard
especially as a message straight from God. It was not the
only time that a letter, apparently quite accidental, opportunely
shed light upon his path, and showed him, as he himself would
say, how real is the Communion of Saints, and what a myth is
the supposed rivalry of sects and societies, when each other's
experiences, successes, and even apparent failures teach such
lessons of faith and obedience in God's service. 1
Love and pity are pleading with me this hour.
What is this voice that stays me forbidding to yield,
Offering beauty, love, and immortal power,
Mons away in some far-off heavenly field ?
Though I obey thee, Immortal, my heart is sore.
Though love be withdrawn for love it bitterly grieves:
Pity withheld in the breast makes sorrow more.
Oh, that the heart could feel what the mind believes!
Cease, love, thy fiery and gentle pleading.
Soft is thy grief, but in tempest through me it rolls.
Dreamst thou not whither the path is leading
Where the Dark Immortal would shepherd our weeping
souls ? 2
1 C. W. Mackintosh, Coillard of the Zambesi, 288.
8 A. E., The Divine Vision, 78.
PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH.
LITERATURE.
Arnold (T.), Sermons, iv. 228.
Bonner (H.), Sermons and Lectures, 193.
Book (W. H.), Columbus Tabernacle Sermons, 183.
Brown (J. B.), The Sunday Afternoon, 219.
Calthrop (G.), Pulpit Recollections, 207.
Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, iii. 101.
Clementson (C.), These Holy Mysteries, 107.
Cunningham (W.), Sermons, 335.
Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, ii. 52.
(T.), Philippians, 350.
Jerdan (C.), For the Lord's Table, 306, 379.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Advent to Christmas, 469.
Lawlor (H. J.), Thoughts on Belief and Life, 71.
Lewis (F. W.), The Work of Christ, 181.
Maclaren (A.), Christ's Musts, 87.
Matheson (G.), The Spiritual Development of St. Paul, 269.
Maurice (F. D.), Lincoln's Inn Sermons, iv. 97.
Moule (H. C. G.), The Pledges of His Love, 14.
Thoughts for the Sundays of the Year, 170.
Pope (W. B.), Discourses on the Lordship of the Incarnate Redeemer, 311.
Punshon (W. M.), Lectures and Sermons, 345.
Randolph (B. W.), The Threshold of the Sanctuary, 129.
Smith (D.), CJiristian Counsel, 37.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 1. (1904) No. 2872 ;
li. (1905) No. 2942 ; Iv. (1909) No. 3151.
Walpole (G. H. S.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., iii. 222.
Watson (F.), The Christian Life : Here and Hereafter, 90.
Watt (L. M.), The Communion Table, 23.
Webster (F. S.), In Remembrance of Me, 69.
Whiton (J. M.), Reconsiderations and Reinforcements, 113.
Christian World Pulpit, ii. 42 (Minton) ; xlii. 333 (Body).
Church of England Pulpit, xxxv. 25 (Hobson), 76 (Reid).
Churchman's Pulpit : General Advent Season : i. 179 (Keble), 183
(Wood ford).
Holy Week : vi. 497 (Furse), 500 (West), 503
(Owen).
Clergyman's Magazine, i. 283 (Richardson) ; New Ser., viii. 367 (Vouard).
PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH.
For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink the cup, ye proclaim the
Lord's death till he come. i Cor. xi. 26.
1. THE Apostle Paul sustained to the Corinthian Church the
relation of a father to his child. By him the Gospel had been
first preached in the rich and sensual city ; by his instrumentality
the first converts had been won to Christ ; and with all a father's
yearning did he watch over their welfare, counsel them in their
ever-recurring perplexities, and guide the heedless footsteps which
were too prone to go astray. To his fatherly care for their
interests we owe the circumstantial account which he has given
us in this chapter of the institution of the Lord's Supper, in the
celebration of which, among the Corinthians, certain abuses had
crept in. His account of it, here recorded, is a valuable and
welcome revelation. He was not present in the Upper Boom.
He was not among the awe-stricken company who were thrilled
with horror by the announcement that amongst them was a foul
betrayer, and who, scarce recovered from the shock of such sad
tidings, were invited to join in the tender and prophetic feast ;
and yet he had not been left to the hazard of a traditional
knowledge, nor had he received his impression of the scene from
the glowing descriptions of another. He distinctly repudiates the
thought that he had either received it or been taught it of
man, and expressly states that " he had received it directly of
the Lord." So distinguishing was the honour put upon the
Apostle of the Gentiles, and so important the institution itself,
that there was given to him a new revelation that its Divine
paternity might be placed beyond all cavil, and that it might be
authenticated by yet weightier evidence, and more firmly homed
in the hearts of believers, in the perpetuity of its obligation to
the end of time,
i COR. 21
322 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
2. The words of the text are, " As often as ye eat this bread,
and drink the cup, ye proclaim the Lord's death till he come."
The eating and drinking are a proclamation. It is surprising
that, notwithstanding these words, this aspect of the Sacrament
of the Lord's Supper receives so little emphasis. We give the
Sacrament names. We call it " the Eucharist," drawing attention
to the element of thanksgiving ; or " the Communion," in order to
recognize in it that fellowship which it offers with Christ Himself
and with one another ; or simply " the Lord's Supper." But here,
after repeating the words of the institution, St. Paul does not
speak of the giving of thanks or the fellowship as the great
purpose of the institution, but says that that purpose is fulfilled
when we proclaim the Lord's death till He come.
^J " As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do
shew" I cannot tell why our translators preferred this verb to
" proclaim " or " announce," which would have seemed the more
obvious one. But should we have expected either word ? Are
we not speaking of a Communion, of a participation in something ?
Can an ordinance which possesses that character be described as
showing, announcing, declaring? It is safer to let the Apostle
explain himself than to insist that he shall follow a course which
we have prescribed for him. I believe he will tell us hereafter
more about communion and participation than we should ever
find out for ourselves ; but I doubt whether we shall profit by his
teaching, if we stumble at this phrase and wish to get rid of it.
Do you think that any ordinance of Christ can have reference
merely to the advantage or enjoyment of those who submit to it ?
Did He come from heaven to enjoy or to suffer ; to be ministered
unto or to minister ? If the eating of the bread and the drinking
of the wine imports any communion with Him, any sympathy with
Him, can this point of communion and sympathy be wanting?
Did He not come to show forth or declare a truth to men into
which only some would enter ? If we are not willing in all our
acts and services to make this a primary object; if we are
thinking of some selfish end as above this ; can we be like Him ?
Let us grasp this thought steadfastly. If this feast does not show
forth or declare something to the world ; if we seek in it only for
some benefit to ourselves ; it cannot be a communion in the body
or in the mind of Jesus Christ. 1
Let us see, then, what this proclamation consists of, and (in
1 F. D. Maurice, Lincoln's Inn Sermons, iv. 99.
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 323
conclusion) how it may be made. It will be found on considera-
tion to consist of three things :
I. A Remembrance of the Past.
II. A Eecognition of the Present.
III. A Eegard to the Future.
I.
A KEMEMBEANCE OF THE PAST.
11 Ye proclaim the Lord's death."
1. St. Paul's words give prominence to the truth that the
Sacrament was intended primarily as a memorial or remembrance
of the Saviour. Nothing could be simpler or more human than
our Lord's appointment of this Sacrament. Lifting the material
of the Supper before Him, He bids His disciples make the simple
act of eating and drinking the occasion of remembering Him. As
the friend who is setting out on a long absence or is passing for
ever from earth puts into our hands his portrait or something he
has used or worn or prized, and is pleased to think that we shall
treasure it for his sake, so did Christ on the eve of His death
secure this one thing, that His disciples should have a memento
by which to remember Him. And as the dying gift of a friend
becomes sacred to us as his own person, and we cannot bear to
see it handed about by unsympathetic hands and remarked upon
by those who have not the same loving reverence as ourselves,
and as when we gaze at his portrait, or when we use the very pen
or pencil worn smooth by his fingers, we recall the many happy
times we spent together and the bright and inspiring words that
fell from his lips, so does this Sacrament seem sacred to us as
Christ's own Person, and by means of it grateful memories of all
He was and did throng into the mind.
^J It is no uncommon thing in the history of nations
to commemorate events of national importance by expressive
symbolism. Medals are struck to celebrate a victory or to
perpetuate the prowess of a hero. The statues of the wise and
of the valiant^are niched in their country's temples columns rear
their tall heads on the mounds of world-famed battlefields, or on
some holy place of liberty processions and pageants of high and
solemn festivity transmit from generation to generation the
3 2 4 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
memory of notable days and deeds. And it is right that it
should be so. These things are expressions of something great
and true, and by how much they are invested with imposing
grandeur, by so much is the likelihood that they will be fastened
upon the memory and the heart. There is hope of a nation when
its gratitude lives, though the exhibitions of that gratitude may
be extravagant and unseemly.
If we come from the national to the individual, how memory
clings round some relic of sanctity bestowed on us by some far-
off friend, some dear gage of affection; the gift, perhaps in the
latest hour, of the precious and sainted dead. As we gaze upon
them mute but eloquent reminders of a past that has fled for
ever how closely they seem linked with our every conception of
the giver, and in what an uncounted value we hold them for the
giver's sake. 1
Tf In the Highlands of Scotland, in a wild region, there is a
spring at which Prince Albert once stopped to quench his thirst.
The owner of the spring fenced it in and built a tasteful
monument, making the waters flow into a basin of hewn stone,
on which he placed an inscription. Every passing stranger
stopping to drink at this fountain reads the inscription and
recalls the memory of the noble prince whom it honours. Thus
the spring is both a memorial .and a blessing ; it keeps in mind
the great man, and it gives drink to the weary and the thirsty.
The Lord's Supper is a memorial to Christ, but it is food and
drink to every one who rightly receives it. 2
If Jesus Christ could not bear the thought of being forgotten
by His people. God and man long to be remembered. This is
one point of fellow-feeling at which the Divine heart touches the
human. One of the greatest calamities in the sight of God
which can befall the wicked is that " his memory shall be cut
off." I know of nothing within the covers of this Book more
touching than the way in which the prophets represent God and
His people the One truthfully, and the other untruthfully as
bringing the charge of forgetf illness against each other. "Zion
said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten
me" (Isa. xlix. 14). In these words we find the awful charge
of unfaithfulness and forgetfulness brought against God Himself
by the people of His choice. This suspicion must vanish, or the
relationship must cease. On the other hand, there comes from
the fatherly and infinitely tender heart of God a broken sigh
which has the undertone of desolation in it, "My people have
forgotten me days without number " (Jer. ii. 32) ; and the answer
1 W. II. Punshon. 2 S. Marriott, On Playing the Game, 190.
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 325
which He gives to their accusation is, " Can a woman forget her
sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of
her womb ? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee."
Thus, in God's relationship with His people, all is made to hinge
upon this one word " forget." " Blot me not out of the book of
thy remembrance," exclaims man to God ; " Blot me not out of
the book of thy remembrance " is the mysterious and pathetic
appeal of God to man ! Now this longing to be remembered, so
Divine and so human, is found with cumulative force and intensity
in " the man Christ Jesus," and is inseparably associated with the
institution of the Lord's Supper. He instituted it so as to make
it supremely difficult for His followers to forget Him. 1
2. What is it that we are to remember ? It is " the Lord's
death " His death, not His life, though that was lustrous with a
holiness without the shadow of a stain; His death, not His
teaching, though that embodied the fulness of a wisdom that was
Divine; His death, not His miracles, though His course was a
march of mercy, and in His track of blessing the world rejoiced
and was glad. His death ! His body, not glorious but broken ;
His blood, not coursing through the veins of a conqueror, but
shed, poured out for man. On the summit of the Mount of
Transfiguration, when the hidden Divinity broke for a while
through its disguise of flesh, and Moses and Elias, those federal
elders of the former time, came down in conference, and the awe-
stricken disciples feared the baptism of the cloud, they " spake
of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem." His
death ! Still His death ! Grandest and most consecrating memory
for both earth and Heaven.
See Him set forth before your eyes,
That precious bleeding Sacrifice!
His offer'd benefits embrace,
And freely now be saved by grace.
Tf " Ye do proclaim the Lord's death." That is the central
message. The mortal is the vital here. It is not, He was born,
was made Man, lived, wrought, taught, blessed the poor sinful
world by the touch of His feet, and the look of His fair
countenance, and the words such as man never spoke before.
It is that Pie died. It is that Gethsemane and Golgotha were
that for which, above all things, He came. " He gave his life
1 D. Davies.
326 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
a ransom for many." "He poured out his soul unto death."
He was "lifted up from the earth." He "endured the cross."
" That he might sanctify his people with his own blood, he
suffered, without the gate." " Without shedding of blood was no
remission " ; " He loosed us from our sins in his own blood." He
came "again from the dead, in the blood of the everlasting
covenant." " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain ! " 1
3. " To proclaim the Lord's death " is not merely to announce
our belief that Jesus Christ died upon the Cross some eighteen
hundred years ago. That, an infidel might do; or, at least, a
man who denies the inspiration and authority of Holy Scripture,
and puts the sacred narrative on a level with other books, might
do. That, certainly, a sinful man might do ; or a mere worldling,
a man totally careless about living a life of faith in the Son of
God. All these persons might accept and credit the fact of the
Saviour's dying, and might be willing to proclaim their accept-
ance ; and some of them would probably avow their persuasion
that the Being who hung upon the Cross was no ordinary person,
but the Prince of glory, the Lord of life, the incarnate Son of
God Himself. And yet such confession as this would not be
Christian confession. It would not be what the Apostle here
means by showing the Lord's death. No ! The Apostle means
by this expression the proclaiming of that death as an event, as a
fact, upon which all our hopes of access to God and all our hopes of
life, of salvation, and of blessedness depend ; and the proclaiming of
it, too, as a thing that was done for ourselves. Then do we fully
show the Lord's death, when by word, and by significant action,
and by the whole course and tenor of our life, we announce our
confident persuasion, that that dying upon the Cross was a dying
for us.
4. We are not to understand the Apostle as limiting the
remembrance rigidly to the actual Passion. The form of the
memorial is fitted to recall the life of our Lord as well as His
death. It is His body and blood we are invited by the symbols
to remember. By them we are brought into the presence
of an actual living Person. Our religion is not a theory;
it is not a speculation, a system of philosophy putting us in
possession of a true scheme of the universe and guiding us
1 H. C. G. Moule, Thoughts for the Sundays of the Year, 172.
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 327
to a sound code of morals; it is, above all, a personal matter.
We are saved by being brought into right personal relations.
And in this Sacrament we are reminded of this and are helped
to recognize Christ as an actual living Person, who by His body
and blood, by His actual humanity, saved us. The body and
blood of Christ remind us that His humanity was as substantial
as our own, and His life as real. He redeemed us by the actual
human life He led and by the death He died, by His use of the
body and soul we make other uses of. And we are saved by
remembering Him and by assimilating the spirit of His life and
death.
U St. Paul says, " the Lord's death." If he had not said so,
if this expression, "the Lord," did not stand written in his
Epistle, there are many who would have called it hard and cold.
" The Saviour," they would have said ; " the Divine Bridegroom,
the ineffable Sacrifice that is offered to us in this feast. How
can you speak of ' the Lord ' like some writer of the Old Testa-
ment ? " I fancy that the Hebrew of the Hebrews used that
Hebrew phrase because he deemed it not to be obsolete for any,
because he knew that it was not obsolete for him. He
wanted sympathy and fellowship. He wanted also to be
guided and governed. The Incarnation had not lessened but
deepened his reverence for the unseen Guide of his heart and
reins. His belief in a brother of Man did not make him
remember less or rejoice less that He is the Lord of men.
There were times when he delighted to call Him our Lord.
There were occasions when the Lord expressed more fully the
universality of His dominion. This was one of them. He is
speaking of the bread and wine as testifying, not to him or to
his brethren, but to all men, of One whose Kingdom was in the
midst of them, of One who had proved Himself to be the King
and Shepherd, by dying for them. 1
5. When Christ said, " Do this in remembrance of me," He
meant that His people to all time should remember that He had
given Himself wholly to them and for them. The symbols of
His body and blood were intended to keep us in mind that all
that gave Him a place among men He devoted to us. By giving
His flesh andj)lood He means that He gives us His all, Himself
wholly ; and by inviting us to partake of His flesh and blood He
means that we must receive Him into the most real connection
* y. D. Maurice,
328 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
possible, must admit His self-sacrificing love into our heart as
our most cherished possession. He bade His disciples remember
Him, knowing that the death He was about to die would " draw
all men unto Him," would fill the despairing with hopes of
purity and happiness, would cause countless sinners to say to
themselves with soul-subduing rapture, " He loved me, and gave
himself for me." He knew that the love shown in His death
and the hopes it creates would be prized as the world's redemp-
tion, and that to all time men would be found turning to Him
and saying, "If I forget thee, let my right hand forget her
cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to
the roof of my mouth ; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief
joy." And therefore He presents Himself to us as He died : as
One whose love for us actually brought Him to the deepest
abasement and sorest suffering, and whose death opens for us a
way to the Father.
TJ For the first time the Dorcas Street Sabbath School
Teachers' gift from South Melbourne Presbyterian Church was
put to use a new Communion Service of silver. They gave it
in faith that we should require it, and in such we received it.
And now the day had come and gone ! For three years we had
toiled and prayed and taught for this. At the moment when I
put the bread and wine into those dark hands, once stained with
the blood of cannibalism, now stretched out to receive and partake
the emblems and seals of the Eedeemer's love, I had a foretaste
of the joy of Glory that well-nigh broke my heart to pieces. I
shall never taste a deeper bliss, till I gaze on the glorified face
of Jesus Himself. 1
If In 1861 a brave volunteer turned his back upon loved ones
in his little home, nestling among the hills of the Blue Eidge
and the spurs of the Alleghanies, in Craig County, Va., and
went to the battlefield to fight for what he believed to be right.
On the 3rd of July 1863, in that fatal charge made by Picket t,
he was shot down, and there gave his life for his country. On
the following day (4th July) a son was born. As this son grew
in stature and in knowledge, his mother would point to a photo-
graph, and tell him that that was his father. He grew to be a
man, and at last had the privilege of walking over the ground
that had been made sacred with the blood of a father. He can-
not express to you his feelings as he stood upon that holy
ground ; the acute conception of fancy with the vivid flights of
1 John Q. Paton, ii. 222.
i CORINTHIANS XL 26 329
imagination would be inadequate to the task. When he returned
to his home, and looked again upon the picture as it hung upon
the wall, he remembered that his mother had told him that it
was his father. He has never seen him; but some time he
hopes to see him face to face, and then he will no longer need
the picture, for he shall see him as he is. 1
II.
A RECOGNITION OF THE PRESENT.
"As often as."
1. It is manifest from the solemnity of its inauguration, and
from the singular reverence with which it was regarded by the
early Christians, that the Lord's Supper was not intended to be
a thing of one generation, but to be a precious and hallowed
memorial to the end of time. So broad and deep was the im-
pression of its perpetual obligation that in every age of the
Church, alike when it was crushed by persecution, and when it
had degenerated into worldly alliance and conformity, the con-
tinuity of this great festival sustained no interruption ; it remained
in general acknowledgment through all external changes. This
perpetuity of the Sacrament seems to stamp it as a confirming
ordinance confirming man's faith in God, confirming God's
fidelity to man.
2. These symbols were appointed to be for a remembrance
of Christ in order that, remembering Him, we might renew our
fellowship with Him. In the Holy Sacrament there is not a
mere representation of Christ or a bare commemoration of
events in which we are interested; there is also an actual,
present communion between Christ and the soul.
We may not climb the heavenly steeps
To bring the Lord Christ down :
In vain we search the lowest deeps,
For Him no depths can drown.
Nor holy bread, nor blood of grape,
-The lineaments restore
Of Him we know in outward shape
And in the flesh no more.
1 W. H. Book.
330 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
He conieth not a king to reign;
The world's long hope is dim;
The weary centuries watch in vain
The clouds of heaven for Him.
Death comes, life goes; the asking eye
And ear are answerless;
The grave is dumb, the hollow sky
Is sad with silentness.
The letter fails, and systems fall,
And every symbol wanes ;
The Spirit over-brooding all
Eternal Love remains.
And not for signs in heaven above
Or earth below they look,
Who know with John His smile of love,
With Peter His rebuke.
In joy of inward peace, or sense
Of sorrow over sin,
He is His own best evidence,
His witness is within.
No fable old, nor mythic lore,
Nor dream of bards and seers,
No dead fact stranded on the shore
Of the oblivious years;
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet
A present help is He;
And faith has still its Olivet,
And love its Galilee. 1
3. There are three distinct things that stare us in the face
here : first, the advent of our Lord in the days of His humiliation ;
secondly, the coming advent of our Lord in His glory; and
between the two, a distinctive sacramental rite " As often as ye
eat this bread, and drink the cup " (that is, in this present), " ye
proclaim the Lord's death " (that is, in that past) " till he come "
(that is, in the anticipation of that future). Now, we may be certain
of this, that this is not a mere artificial arrangement ; there must
1 Whittier.
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 331
be something in the Sacrament which makes it fit to stand
between the advent consummated in Christ's redemptive death
and the advent of His coming glory. What is that connecting
thing? The one thing that marks out the Sacrament as being
what it is amidst Christian rites, is that, in a special sense, it is
the sphere of our Lord's presence. Our Lord's presence and His
humanity are revealed to us under three distinct conditions.
First, He has been present in the days of His historical life
under conditions of bodily humiliation. Secondly, He will be
present after His second coming under conditions of glorification.
But between these two conditions He is present with His people
in a spiritual manner.
If How deep is our obligation to our own Liturgy for bringing
out so distinctly, through the means of Holy Communion, the
reality of Christ's spiritual presence, and the verity of our
communion with Him in this Holy Sacrament. It has preserved
for us the true doctrine in this particular as perfectly as it has
done justice to the truth first considered, namely, the memorial
of the death of Christ. For instance, " He hath given His Son
our Saviour Jesus Christ not only to die for us, but also to be our
spiritual food and sustenance in that Holy Sacrament"; "For as
the benefit is great, if with a true penitent heart and lively faith
we receive that Holy Sacrament (for then we spiritually eat the
flesh of Christ, and drink His blood ; then we dwell in Christ,
and Christ in us ; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us),
so is the danger great, if we receive the same unworthily. Grant
us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of Thy dear Son
Jesus Christ, and to drink His blood, that our sinful bodies may
be made clean by His body, and our souls washed through His
most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in Him,
and He in us " " Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily
thank Thee, for that Thou dost vouchsafe to feed us, who have
duly received these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the
most precious Body and Blood of Thy Son our Saviour Jesus
Christ ; and dost assure us thereby of Thy favour and goodness
towards us ; and that we are very members incorporate in the
mystical body of Thy Son, which is the blessed company of all
faithful people." 1
4. The past, however sweet and precious, is not enough for
any soul to live upon. And so this memorial rite, just because
1 Canon Furse.
332 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
it is memorial, is a symbol for the present. That is taught us in
that great chapter the sixth of St. John's Gospel which was
spoken long before the institution of the Lord's Supper, but
expresses in words the same ideas as it expresses by material
forms. The Christ who died is the Christ who lives, and must
be lived upon by the Christian. If our relation to Jesus Christ
were only that " Once in the end of the world hath he appeared
to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself " ; and if we had to
look back through lengthening vistas of distance and thickening
folds of oblivion, simply to a historical past, in which He was
once offered, the retrospect would not have the sweetness in it
which it now has. But when we come to this thought, that the
Christ who was for us is also the Christ in us, and that He is
not the Christ for us unless He is the Christ in us ; and His
death will never wash away our sins unless we feed upon Him,
here and now, by faith and meditation, then the retrospect
becomes blessedness. The Christian life is not merely the
remembrance of a historical Christ in the past, it is also the
present participation in a living Christ with us now.
He is near each of us that we may make Him the very food
of our spirits. We are to live upon Him. He is to be incor-
porated within us by our own act. This is no mysticism, it is a
piece of simple reality. There is no Christian life without it.
The true life of the believer is just the feeding of our souls upon
Him our minds accepting, meditating upon, digesting the
truths which are incarnated in Jesus; our hearts feeding upon
the love which is so tender, warm, stooping, and close ; our wills
feeding upon and nourished by the utterance of His will in
commandments which to know is joy and to keep is liberty ; our
hopes feeding upon Him who is our Hope, and in whom they
find no chaff and husks of peradventures, but the pure wheat of
" Verily ! verily I say unto you " ; the whole nature thus finding
its nourishment in Jesus Christ.
^| " We proclaim the Lord's death." By the very fact of so
doing we proclaim also His glorious present life, His victory
over the grave, His spiritual presence with His people, His gift
of Himself to be their life indeed. Never, let us be quite sure
of this, would the first believers have kept festival over their
Master's death, had not that death been followed by a triumph
over the grave which at once and for ever showed His dying
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 333
work to be the supreme achievement which it was. Only the
risen Christ can explain the joy of the Lord's Supper. Without
Him it would have been a funeral meal, kept for a while by
love in its despair, and then dropped for ever. From the very
first till now it has been a feast of life and of thanksgiving. It
is a contemporary and immortal witness to the risen One. And
the risen One is alive for ever more. And in His eternal life
He is our life, here and now. Feed on Him as such, feed every-
where and always upon Him. Eat Him and drink Him, that
you may live because of Him. Such is the message of the festal
Meal of the Church, spoken straight from her Lord to the heart
of every member of His Body. 1
TJ What would be the value of the Holy Supper if it were
simply a memorial of a Divine visitation long ago, and not a
pledge and a discovery of the Lord's abiding presence ? John
Knox called it " a singular medicine for all poor sick creatures, a
comfortable help to weak souls"; and he "utterly condemned
the vanity of those that affirmed sacraments to be nothing else
but bare and naked signs." I fear there are few among us in
these days who thus esteem them. The truth is that the
Sacraments are the very heart of Christian worship, and their
neglect, their perfunctory and slovenly administration, is a sore
impoverishment of the Church, and proves how very low the
tide of our spiritual life has ebbed. True worship is essentially
sacramental, and I warmly sympathize with old Gilbert of
Sempringham, the friend of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, when he
says : " All doctrine is suspect with me, and surely despised,
which introduces no mention of Christ, which neither renews me
with His Sacraments, nor informs me with His precepts, nor
inflames me with His promises." 2
U A communion was held at Pesth, in Hungary, on the 1st
of January 1843, being the Lord's Day. We met in an upper
room, at night and in secret " for fear of the Jews," and to
escape the eye of an intolerant Government. From the moment
that the service began, the place where we were assembled seemed
to be filled with a mysterious presence. Indeed, the risen Lord
had entered by the closed door, and stood, as at Jerusalem, in
the midst of His disciples. Deep silence fell on the little
company as they realized His nearness, a silence interrupted
only at intervals by the deep-drawn sigh of some bursting heart.
The dividing wall which separated heaven and earth seemed for
the time removed, and that fellowship between both was ex-
1 H. C. G. Moule, Thoughts fen- the Sundays of the Year, 173.
8 D. Smith, Christian Counsel, 39.
334 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
perienced which is the fullest blessedness of earth, and anticipates
the glory of heaven. 1
III.
A KEGARD TO THE FUTURE.
"Till he come."
1. The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper not only proclaims
to us the Gospel of the Passion, it also proclaims to us that great
Gospel which is the centre and basis of all Christian hope : the
Gospel of the second coming of Jesus Christ our Lord. And
since this holy rite is in creed and in action, they who preach
it look back upon the first Advent and recognize and confess its
redemptive aspect, and they look forward to the second Advent
and recognize it and confess it as being the one great act in
which that redemptive work on Calvary will reach to its full
and to its glorious climax. And in this present, the gaze of our
faith is fixed upon the redemption consecrated in Christ's first
coming ; the eyes of our hope are fixed on the glorious consum-
mation of His work in His second coming, and in the meantime
we wait with the repose of love, giving ourselves up to His
sweet ministries, in the conviction that as often as we eat this
bread, and drink the cup, we " proclaim the Lord's death till
he come."
In the original words of the institution our Lord Himself
makes reference to the future ; till I " drink it new in the
kingdom of God." And in the text here, the Apostle provides
for the perpetual continuance, and emphasizes the prophetic
aspect, of the rite, by that word, "till he come." His death
necessarily implies His coming again. The Cross and the Throne
are linked together by an indissoluble bond. Being what it is,
the death cannot be the end. Being what He is, if He has once
been offered to bear the sins of many, so He must come the
second time without sin unto salvation. The rite, just because
it is a rite, is the prophecy of a time when the need for it,
arising from weak flesh and an intrusive world, shall cease.
"They shall say no more, The ark of the covenant of the
Lord ; at that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the
1 Memoir of John Duncan, 334.
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 335
Lord." There shall be no temple in that great city, because the
Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the Temple thereof. So
all external worship is a prophecy of the coming of the perfect
time when, that which is perfect being come, the external helps
and ladders to climb to the loftiest shall be done away.
TJ Of all earthly signs and tokens, there is none which seems
so wonderfully ordained to prepare us for the last Day, and
keep us in mind of it, as the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper,
the holy Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ. Holy
Scripture expressly connects the one with the other ; the Com-
munion with the Day of Judgment. For after St. Paul had put
the Corinthians in mind of what he had always taught them
concerning that Sacrament, how that our Lord ordained it, the
same night in which He was betrayed, to be done, or sacrificed,
in remembrance of Him after He was gone, lest they should
imagine that it was only the Apostles who had to perform this
service, seeing that they alone were present with our Lord when
He commanded it, the Apostle goes on and declares, "For as
often as ye eat this bread, and drink the cup, ye proclaim the
Lord's death till he come " as much as to say that this mode
of remembering our Lord's Death, and setting it forth before
God and man, should never cease, while the world should stand.
One generation after another will perish from the face of the
earth; cities and empires will fade away; the wisdom of the
wise, and the understanding of the prudent will be forgotten ;
customs, manners, languages may change, and the outward face
of things be ever so different : but still this holy memorial of
God made Man and crucified for us will go on being offered, and
the holy Feast will go on to be received, from time to time, in
all Churches of all lands, until that last morning break upon
the earth, and the very meaning and substance of that Sacra-
ment, the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, shall appear openly
in the eyes of men. 1
TI When you go to put flowers upon a grave, what is the motive
that prompts you ? to keep memory green ? Doubtless ; but
is that all ? "Why do you wish to keep memory green ? It is
because you are looking forward as well as backward. You are
convinced the old days will come again. If it were not for that
hope, you could not plant your flower; you would rather let
memory wither. Some have written of the pleasures of memory,
and some of the pleasures of hope. But has it occurred to either
that the pleasures of memory are the pleasures of hope ? Has
1 J. Keble.
336 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
it occurred to either that these are twin sisters, who cannot live
apart? When hope dies, memory cries out to be killed; she
cannot abide alone. When memory goes with her flowers to
the grave, hope calls from the shadowy land, " Occupy till I
come." If she did not hear that call, she could not plant her
flower. My Lord tells me that when I build to His past I am
prompted by His future. It is the light of Easter morn that
leads me to the sepulchre ; it is the gleam of resurrection that
conducts me to the broken body, " As often as ye eat this bread,
ye proclaim the Lord's death till he come." 1
(1) The sacrament confirms our faith in the certainty of His
coming. He shall come ; the Church is not for ever orphaned of
His presence ; the disciples need not mourn over a dead Christ ;
the weeping Virgin may dry her tears, for her Son liveth, glorified,
exalted, King of kings and Lord of lords.
The first thing that we need in the anticipation of our Lord's
second coming is to have the knowledge within us that were He
to come to us now we should be found of Him in peace. " Be
diligent," says St. Peter, " that ye may be found of him in peace."
And the only peace in which we can be found, we who have our
sins in the past, and our failures and imperfections in the present,
is in the peace of the Divine reconciliation. And in this Sacra-
ment, first of all, the consummated passion is preached to us
through powerful sacramental action. Christ is evidently set
forth as crucified among us. Through the union of the earthly
action with our Lord's continued intercession in heaven, we learn
that that death thus died is at the present moment being pleaded
for us in all its reconciling efficacy before the Father, and then,
when we draw nigh to Him in this Sacrament, He comes and
gives Himself to us. Doing what ? Assuring us, thereby, of
God's goodness towards us, and that we are all members of the
mystical Body of His Son, which is the blessed company of all
faithful people. The Holy Eucharist is the sacrament of Christian
assurance, and they who are hushed into the peace of God by the
sacramental kiss of Christ of the Eucharist can anticipate without
fear His coming, for they will " be found of him in peace." 2
^[ The Feast has gone on ; for it has been God's, and not man's.
It has had a power over Christendom which we cannot measure,
but which we shall know one day. For it contains a promise
1 G. Matlieson, Searching in the Silence, 223. " Canon Body.
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 337
which may sustain us when its influence appears to be weakest,
when the Church appears to be most rent by the factions against
which it is bearing its silent, awful protest. It is written, that
as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we show
forth the Lord's death till He come. The Incarnation and Death
and Kesurrection of the Son of God were the fulfilments of all
that men in the Old Dispensation were able to. long for. The
manifestation of Christ in the glory of His Father and of the
Holy Angels is the highest object which we in this Dispensation
are able to long for. It includes every craving for righteous
government, for a perfect Society, for the adoption of our spirits,
for the perfection of the faculties of our souls, for the full
redemption of our bodies. It includes the fulfilment of every
relationship, of all loving intercourse, which has been most
imperfectly realized here, but which has been raised and sancti-
fied by a diviner Communion. It includes the accomplishment
of all earthly discipline and sorrow, fellowship with those whose
faces we miss, but whose love must be far warmer than ever it
was, because it is in more immediate contact with the perfect
Love. It includes the apprehension of the order and beauty of
God's creatures, when the veil of death which covers them has
been taken away. It includes the ever-deepening sense of the
meaning and force of that death which revealed the whole mind
of God, which was the perfect Atonement for Man. 1
(2) The second thing that is needed is this. If we are to be
ready for Christ's coming, we must be numbered with those who,
in the language of the Book of Kevelation, are "sealed." And
what is this sealing ? A seal is that whereby an impress is made
upon molten wax. And so it is here. There is a seal in which
there is the image of Christ, and this image of Christ is to be
imprinted on hearts that are melted in the furnace of contrition
until they are all molten wax. There is a seal that bears the
image of the King, and by the impress of that seal that image is
stamped on those who are sealed. What is that seal if it be
not that sacred rite in Christendom in which Christ Himself is
present, in which Christ Himself impresses His own image upon
the image of His elect? "As often as ye eat this bread, and
drink the cup, ye proclaim the Lord's death till he come " ; for
the Sacramento is not only the sacrament of assurance ; it is the
sacrament of increasing conformity.
1 F. D. Maurice,
I COR. 22
338 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
The definition of a Sacrament seems to lack completeness,
unless it be regarded not only as a sign but as a seal a solemn
federal act which involves mutual pledges, of fidelity on the one
hand and of blessing on the other. The expression of the inner
dispositions by appropriate symbol is by no means of uncommon
occurrence in the sacred writings. When the Psalmist speaks of
his own deliverances, and, in astonishment at their extent and
magnitude, asks, " What shall I render ? " he replies, as the most
public and graceful utterance of his gratitude, " I will take the
cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord," and the
next verse may be regarded as the translation of the symbol into
language, "I will pay my vows unto the Lord now in the
presence of all his people." And our participation of the Holy
Communion must be thus regarded as the fresh act of our
espousals, as the solemn renewal of our covenant; as our
surrender, entire and unhesitating, to the service of the Lord.
It is thus that we confess Christ and witness of Him to the
world. If we eat and drink without discerning this great pur-
pose, we eat and drink unworthily ; if we repudiate such purpose,
either in thought or in act, we crucify in our measure " the Son of
God afresh, and put him to an open shame."
(3) And last of all, what do we need as we are living now
between this first and second Advent looking for the coming
of the Lord ? Is it not the grace of perseverance, the power to
hold on our way, and day by day to act more and more firmly ?
And does not He who came to save us, and is coming to raise us
up to be partakers in His glory does not He Himself come to
us in this Sacrament to give to us this grace of perseverance?
Is it not true of us what is said of Elijah in the mystical language
of old? God said to him, Arise and eat; and he arose and
did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty
days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God. And so
it is still. God says to us: "Wearied in life's journeying,
burdened with life's burdens and anxieties and woes, eat,
friends; drink; yea, drink abundantly, beloved"; and we
draw nigh and eat of Him whose flesh is meat indeed, and drink
of Him whose blood is drink indeed ; and through His love we
find strength in weakness and refreshment in weariness. And
through the sacrament of perseverance, receiving into ourselves
i CORINTHIANS xi, 26 339
the blessing of the first Advent, we wait in confident hope for
the second coming of the Lord.
TI I will give a brief parable to those who live in continual
ebullitions of love, in order that they may endure this disposition
nobly and becomingly, and may attain to a higher virtue.
There is a little insect which is called an ant; it is strong
and wise, and very tenacious of life, and it lives with its fellows
in warm and dry soils. The ant works during summer and
collects food and grain for the winter, and it splits the grain so
that it may not become rotten or spoiled, and may be eaten
when there is nothing more to be found. And it does not make
strange paths, but all follow the same path, and after waiting
till the proper time they become able to fly.
So should these men do ; they will be strong by waiting for
the coming of Christ, wise against the appearance and the in-
spiration of the enemy. They will not choose death, but they
will prefer God's glory alone and the winning of fresh virtues.
They will dwell in the community of their heart and of their
powers, and will follow the invitation and the constraint of
Divine unity. They will live in rich and warm soils, or, in other
words, in the passionate heat of love, and in great impatience.
And they will work during the summer of this life, and will
gather in for eternity the fruits of virtue. These they will
divide in two one part means that they will always desire the
supreme joy of eternity; the other, that by their reason they
will always restrain themselves as much as possible, and wait the
time that God has appointed for them, and so the fruit of virtue
shall be preserved into eternity. They will not follow strange
paths or curious methods, but through all storms they will follow
the path of love, towards the place whither love shall guide them.
And when the set time has come, and they have persevered in
all the virtues, they shall be fit to behold God, and their wings
shall bear them towards His mystery. 1
Not so in haste, rny heart!
Have faith in God and wait;
Although He linger long,
He never comes too late.
He never comes too late,
He knoweth what is best;
Vex not thyself in vain:
Until He cometh, rest.
*M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, 132*
340 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
Until He cometh, rest,
Nor grudge the hours that roll;
The feet that wait for God
Are soonest at the goal;
Are soonest at the goal
That is not gained by speed;
Then hold thee still, my heart,
For I shall wait His lead. 1
^[ And the coming of the Bridegroom is so swift that He is
always coming, and that He dwells within us with His unfathom-
able riches, and that He returns ever anew in person, with such
new brightness that it seems as if He had never come before.
For His coming is comprised beyond all limit of time, in an
eternal Now; and He is ever received with new desires and a
new delight. Behold, the joys and the pleasures which this
Bridegroom brings with Him at His coming are boundless and
without limit, for they are Himself. And this is why the eyes
of the spirit, by which the loving soul beholds its Bridegroom,
are opened so wide that they will never shut again. For the
contemplation and the fixed gaze of the spirit are eternal in the
secret manifestation of God. And the comprehension of the
spirit is so widely opened, as it waits for the appearance of the
Bridegroom, that the spirit itself becomes vast as that which it
comprehends. And so is God beheld and understood by God, in
whom all our blessedness is found. 2
CONCLUSION.
In conclusion, let us see to whom the proclamation is to be
made.
1. It is to be made to ourselves. The Lord's Supper is a pre-
sentation to our own minds of the great work of redemption. If
it was said to the Galatians that before their eyes Christ, whom
they had not seen in the flesh, had been evidently set forth cruci-
fied among them (Gal. iii. 1), so may it be said to us that, not
only by the preaching of His Word, but by visible signs before
our eyes, and spiritual realities to our hearts, Christ is set forth
in the Holy Communion, in all His love and grace and mercy.
^J The Lord's Supper may be celebrated without any spec-
tators. It should be in public where it can be ; but if there are
1 Bayard Taylor. 2 M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeclc and the Mystics, 152.
i CORINTHIANS XL 26 341
i
none to look on, it may be otherwise. In Venice, in Milan, in
Paris, and in other cities where Eomanism prevails, five or six
of us have met together in our room at our hotel, and we have
had the true Lord's supper there, though there were none to look
on ; and probably if there had been, in some cities where we have
partaken of it, we might have been amenable to the law. 'Tis
a showing forth of Christ's death to ourselves. We see the bread
broken, and see the wine poured out, and we ourselves see here,
in symbol, Christ crucified ; and we see as before our eyes, when
we eat and drink, our interest in the sacrifice offered upon
Calvary. 1
2. It is to be made to one another, as members of the Body of
Christ. As instituted, the holy Service is nothing if not social,
mutual. Scripture knows nothing of a solitary Eucharist. There-
fore the rite has a mutual significance ; it has some sacred
thing to say, all round the circle, Christian to Christian. By his
presence, by his partaking, " each is then a herald to the rest,"
telling it out that Jesus did indeed die, to rise again.
When at the Table of our Lord
In silence all we kneel
With broken bread and wine outpour'd
To share the heavenly Meal;
Few though we be, and though the few
Are feeble at the best,
Yet each is here, if God is true,
A prophet to the rest.
We to each other show the Death
Of that slain Lamb we love,
Until He come (the Scripture saith)
In glory from above.
Yes, gathering here, each other all
With solemn cheer we warn
Of the Archangel's thunder-call
And resurrection-morn.
Blest Sign of Christ's own victory won,
Thy prophecies we prize ;
Oh, with what joy the eternal Sun,
Thus heralded, shall rise. 2
1 C. H. Spurgcon. * H. C. G. Moule, In the House of the Pilgrimage, 56.
342 PROCLAIMING THE LORD'S DEATH
3. It is to be made to the world. The Lord's Supper is a
confession before men of our faith ; a testimony as to whose we
are and whom we serve. So long as this ordinance exists in the
Church of God, the world will not be left without a testimony
for Christ. It is a sermon always in course of being preached.
Its text is Christ, its argument is love; its appeal is, "Come
unto me, all ye," etc. It preaches not only to those who draw
near to it, "Eat, friends, yea, drink/' etc. (Cant. v. 1), but
also to those who turn their back upon it, "Will ye also go
away ? "
TJ All the provinces of China in the month of May are astir
with pilgrim crowds, moving up and down the rivers, and along
the intersecting ways. It is the red-letter day of the ancestral
cult, and is called " the Feast of Manifestation." Hundreds and
thousands of miles are traversed to show filial regard for the last
resting-place of the departed forefathers. After the viands have
been presented, all weeds hoed up from the grave, and the ground
trimmed, three or four sheets of white paper, kept in position by
a stone, are placed on the apex of the mound, to show that the
grave has a living guardian, and no one must dare to turn the
soil to common uses. The symbolic act is recognized in all the
courts of law. In the absence of that simple but effectual sign
the peasant might drive his plough across the grave-plot and
enlarge the border of his rice field, and no one would resist him.
The little sign asserts an inviolable heritage. 1
We gather to the sacred board
Perchance a scanty band;
But with us in sublime accord
What mighty armies stand !
\
In creed and rite howe'er apart,
One Saviour still we own,
And pour the worship of the heart
Before the Father's throne.
A thousand spires o'er hill and vale
Point to the same blue heaven;
A thousand voices tell the tale
Of grace through Jesus given.
1 T. G. Selby.
i CORINTHIANS xi. 26 343
High choirs, in Europe's ancient fanes,
Praise Him for man who died;
And o'er our boundless Western plains
His name is glorified.
Around His tomb, on Salem 's height, ?
Greek and Armenian bend ;
And through all Lapland's months of night
The peasants' hymns ascend.
Are we not brethren? Saviour dear!
Then may we walk in love,
Joint subjects of Thy kingdom here,
Joint heirs of bliss above ! l
1 Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch.
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL.
3*5
LITERATURE.
Ainger (A.), The Gospel and Human Life, 30.
in Anglican Pulpit of To-day, 344.
Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, vii. 104, 120, 133.
Bonar (H.), God's Way of Holiness, 153.
Bradby (E. H.), Sermons at Haileybury, 324.
Brooke (S. A.), The Fight of Faith, 51.
Brookfield (W. H.), Sermons, 96.
Cross (J.), Pauline Charity, 22, 36, 50.
Daplyn (E.), One with the Eternal, 9.
Duncan (J.), In the Pulpit and at the Communion Table, 183.
Grant (C.), A School's Life, 80.
Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 47.
Jones (H.), in A Lent in London, 134.
Kingsley (G.), Sermons for the Times, 256.
Kuegele (R), Country Sermons, New Ser., ii. 167.
Matheson (G.), Times of Retirement, 222.
Moberly (R. C.), Christ our Life, 45.
Moody (D. L.), Faithful Sayings, 41.
Newman (J. H.), Parochial and Plain Sermons, iv. 307, v. 327.
Nicoll (W. R.), Ten-Minute Sermons, 173.
Robarts (F. L.), Sunday Morning Talks, 125.
Salmon (G.), Sermons in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin, 55.
Sauter (B.), The Sunday Epistles, 134.
Scott (M.), Harmony of Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, 66.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xiii. (1876) No. 992.
Wilson (J. M.), Sermons in Clifton College Chapel, i. 205.
Cambridge Review, ii. Supplement No. 39 (Bradby); vi. Supplement
No. 142 (Ainger).
Christian World Pulpit, iii. 296 (Gasquoine), 406 (Bull); xvi. 20
(Statham); xxvii. 376 (Rogers); xxxv. 168 (Halsey) ; Ixv. 97
(Henson) ; Ixxix. 342 (Gordon).
Church of England Magazine, xiii. 281 (Hodgson) ; xix. 273 (Horsford) ;
xxxix. 200 (Hoare).
Clergyman's Magazine, 3rd Ser., vii. 92 (Proctor).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., i. 155 (Newman) ; ii. 142 (Drumrnond) ;
v. 115 (Newman) ; vii. 120 (Alford).
Preacher's Magazine, ix. (1898) 251 (Slater).
346
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL.
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love,
I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. i Cor, xiii. i.
1. THIS chapter, although a digression, is yet a step in the
treatment of the subject of spiritual gifts (xii. 1, xiv. 40), and
forms in itself a complete and beautiful whole. After the
promise that he will point out a still more surpassing way, there
is, as it were, a moment of suspense ; and then jam ardet Paulus
ct fertur in amorem (Bengel). Stanley imagines "how the
Apostle's amanuensis must have paused to look up in his master's
face at the sudden change in the style of his dictation, and seen
his countenance lit up as it had been the face of an angel, as this
vision of Divine perfection passed before him." Writer after
writer has expatiated upon its literary and rhythmical beauty,
which places it among the finest passages in the sacred, or, indeed,
in any writings. We may compare ch. xv., Kom. viii. 31-39, and
on a much lower plane the torrent of invective in 2 Cor. xi.
19-29. This chapter is a Divine "prophecy," which might have
for its title that which distinguishes Ps. xlv. " A Song of Love "
or " of Loves." And it is noteworthy that these praises of love
come, not from the Apostle of love, but from the Apostle of
faith. It is not a fact that the Apostles are one-sided and
prejudiced, each seeing only the gift which he specially esteems.
Just as it is St. John who says, " This is the victory which over-
cometh the world, even our faith," so it is St. Paul who declares
that greater than all gifts is love. 1
Tf " The greatest, strongest, deepest thing Paul ever wrote." 2
U I never read 1 Cor. xiii. without thinking of the description
of the virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. St. Paul's ethical
teaching has quite an Hellenic ring. It is philosophical, as resting
1 Robertson and Plummer, 1st Corinthians, 285. 2 Harnack.
347
348 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
on a definite principle, namely, our new life in Christ ; and it
is logical, as classifying virtues and duties according to some
intelligible principle. 1
U For moral elevation, there is nothing in literature equal to
this chapter. No Plato or Seneca ever uttered a sentiment of
such transcendent beauty. Even in the Word of God I know of
no parallel to the passage, even in the Epistles of St. John,
who wrote so much upon the subject, and learned his lesson on
the Saviour's heart. It is the highest encomium of the Queen
of Graces that genius ever indited ; and what more could man,
however inspired of God, say in her praise ? Yet here is no
exaggeration, no distortion of the virtue commended, no deprecia-
tion of any other Christian quality or duty. All is just, exact,
proportionate, because all is Divine. Love, in whatever aspect
regarded whether in its abstract principle, or in its relative
importance, or in its enumerated attributes, or in its immeasurable
duration, or in its asserted superiority to faith and hope is
manifestly worthy of its apostolic designation "the more
excellent way." 2
2. Let us examine the important word by which he designates
this more excellent way. There is hardly a more difficult one to
render exactly, in the whole compass of the New Testament.
Our language has not a term which will exactly convey to an
English reader the full idea. It is the word, indeed, by which at
the same time God's love to man, and that feeble return of ours
which is called love to Him, are both expressed. Still, our word
" love " would not by any means do its full work in this chapter.
We have that word in so many restricted senses the love of
friendship, the love of wedded life, even the love of lower and
less worthy objects that there would perhaps be danger of our
escaping from the largeness of regard here insisted on into some
of those smaller channels and abiding places, and satisfying our-
selves that we had attained that which is required of us. For
instance, when it is said, " Love suffereth long, and is kind,"
instead of forming in our minds the idea of some unusual indwell-
ing grace which always and to all men suffereth long and is kind,
we should be saying in our hearts, " yes we know that there
is nothing one will not endure from an object deeply loved " ; and
1 E. L. Hicks, Studio, Biblica, iv. 9.
3 J. Cross, Pauline Charity, 6.
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 349
so of similar expressions, thereby missing the whole force and
blessedness of the description.
The A.V. has unfortunately departed here from the earlier
rendering " love " of Tindale and Cranmer (which the Eevised
Version has restored) and has followed the Vulgate caritas. Thus
the force of this eloquent panegyric on love is impaired, and the
agreement between the various writers of the New Testament
much obscured. The aim, no doubt, of the Vulgate translators
was to avoid the sensuous associations which the Latin word amor
suggested. But the English word charity has never risen to the
height of the Apostle's argument. At best it signifies only a
kindly interest in and forbearance towards others. It is far
from suggesting the ardent, active, energetic principle which the
Apostle had in view. And though the English word "love"
includes the affection which springs up between persons of
different sexes, it is generally understood to denote only the
higher and nobler forms of that affection, the lower being stig-
matized under the name of "passion." Thus it is a suitable
equivalent for the Greek word here used.
The word " charity " is open to grave objections. For, in the
mind of the common English reader, it absolutely identifies the
quality here spoken of with that very practice of almsgiving with
which it is in one verse of the chapter so forcibly contrasted.
And it is partly owing to the fact of the word " charity " having
been used here by our translators that the chapter itself falls so
dead on the ear of the English public. The word, as already said,
was adopted from the writers of the Latin Vulgate. Of our own
English versions, it is found in Wyclif, and in the Rheims Eomau
Catholic translation, both of which were made from the Latin.
All the versions of the Eeformation Tindale, Cranmer, and the
Geneva Bible had "love" throughout; but King James's trans-
lators, to whom we owe our Authorized Version, unhappily
returned to " charity," so much more easily mistaken, and so
characteristically doing the work of Rome, in being capable of
representing a mere external act, instead of the largeness of
Christian spirit here described. "This," says Dean Alford, "is
one out of not a few instances in which we owe our translators
no thanks for having taken from us the life and spirit of our
350 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
genuine Eeformation Bibles, and having gone back to the
ambiguous and less expressive language of the version by which
Home supports so many of her errors."
The difference between the two terms is well exhibited in
1 John iv. 8, where the Vulgate reads : " God is charity." Even
the A.V. would not accept this. In Luke xi. 42, the Latin has :
" Ye pass over judgement and the charity of God," but in John v.
42 : " Ye have not the love of God in yourselves." These passages
suggest that it was the intention of the Latin editors to dis-
tinguish between love as a principle and its manifestation. Yet
in Kom. v. 5, we have " the charity of God is diffused in our
hearts." Again, Eom. viii. 35, " What shall separate us from
the charity of Christ ? " It has also to be observed that the
Latin caritas had not precisely the same meaning as has attached
itself to our " charity." With us it means beneficence, practical
kindness, but in Latin it represents more the inward feeling.
Hence Cicero speaks of "the charity which exists between
children and parents." The whole case shows how wisely the
Eevisers have applied their principle not always observed
which required the same English word to represent one in the
original.
U Watts about the same time completed the group of the
graces by adding his picture of " Charity." This picture is in
the manner of the old Italian masters, and might well have been
painted by Correggio or Andrea del Sarto. Charity is a calm,
modern Madonna, the homely, motherly love which is a constant
revelation of His heart who comforts us as one whom his mother
comforteth, robed in richly coloured vesture, and tenderly en-
circling three bright, chubby-faced children with her arms an
attempt to picture the " motherliness of God." It is evident that
the painter has a different and higher idea of charity than merely
that of one who ministers to the poor, for in that case he would
have represented the mother with a look of profound pity on her
face, and the children with attenuated frames and gaunt, hungry
countenances. The conception which he has of this virtue is
that of St. Paul. Charity is more than the love that exists
between man and woman. It has none of its excitement and
passion. There is no selfishness or exclusiveness such as tinges
even the most disinterested love between the sexes. It is more
than benevolence, for it makes the rich as well as the poor the
objects of its regard. It is not pity and a desire to help that it
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 351
feels, but a longing for their true happiness, for their attainment
of that which is highest and best and most lasting, for those who
are well-off as well as for those who are unfortunate, irrespective
of condition. It is this realized identity of interests resting on
the invisible union of souls. You see on the countenance which
the artist places before you the patience of love, never in a hurry,
but always waiting to begin. A meek and quiet spirit of love
looks out of those thoughtful, kindly eyes, suffering long, bearing
all things, believing all things, hoping all things. She who seems
so serene has learnt much of her wisdom by self-sacrifice, and
much of her happy thoughts for the future from the trials and
disappointments of the past. Humility reigns upon the brow,
sealing her lips, so that she speaks not of, and tries to forget, the
good she has done, and goes back from the world from her lovely
act to the shade again, hiding even her love from itself. 1
Tf " I do not know when I first heard the thirteenth chapter
of 1st Corinthians ; but it was no abstract idea of charity, it was
the living image of my mother that informed every verse of it.
Even the clause * charity never faileth ' (though I knew what the
Apostle meant by it) suggested to me rather that, in the worst
extremity, she would never fail to afford comfort and help." 2
3. What is love ? St. Paul answers, by giving a great
number of properties of it, all distinct and special. It is patient,
it is kind, it has no envy, no self-importance, no ostentation, no
indecorum, no selfishness, no irritability, no malevolence. Which
of all these is it ? For if it is all at once, surely it is a name for
all virtues at once. And what makes this conclusion still more
plausible is that St. Paul elsewhere actually calls love "the
fulfilling of the law " : and our Saviour, in like manner, makes
our whole duty consist in loving God and loving our neighbour.
And St. James calls it " the royal law " : and St. John says, " We
know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love
the brethren." Thus the chapter from which the text is taken
seems but an exemplification in detail of what is declared in
general terms by the inspired writers.
In one sense it is all virtues at once, and therefore St. Paul
cannot describe it more definitely, more restrictedly than he does.
In other words, it is the root of all holy dispositions, and grows
and blossomslnto them : they are its parts ; and when it is de-
1 H. Macmillan, G. F. Watts, 207.
2 Rainy'a daughter in The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 24.
352 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
scribed, they of necessity are mentioned. Love is the material
(so to speak) out of which all graces are made, the quality of mind
which is the fruit of regeneration, and in which the Spirit dwells ;
according to St. John's words, " Every one that loveth is born of
God; ... he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God
in him."
Tf The chief point to remember is that here love is not
regarded as a " gift " to be compared with other gifts, it is rather
a spirit, or temper, in which all gifts are to be used or exercised.
St. Paul constantly speaks of the Christian as a man or woman
"in Christ," or as one in whom Christ dwells. If love is a
synonym for the spirit and motive of Christ, when we say that
all these gifts have to be exercised and used with, or in, love, we
mean that they have to be exercised " in Christ." Just as to be
"in Christ" infinitely moralizes the whole life, so to exercise a
gift " in love " infinitely moralizes its use and exercise. 1
4. No distinction is drawn between love to God and love to
man. Throughout the chapter it is the root-principle that is
meant; love in its most perfect and complete sense. But it is
specially in reference to its manifestations to men that it is
praised, and most of the features selected as characteristic of it
are just those in which the Corinthians had proved defective.
And this deficiency is fatal. Christian love is that something
without which everything else is nothing, and which would be
all-sufficient, even were it alone. It is not merely an attribute
of God, it is His very nature, and no other moral term is thus
used of Him.
TI What is meant by love is not a preference for a certain
number of special people, but a generic disposition. If you are
going to test yourself by the words of Christ and His Apostles,
you must ask yourself, not whether you love some person or
persons who love you in return, but whether you so live amongst
your fellowmen that those around you can see in you something
of the comprehensive and inclusive love of God. " No man can
love God except he evidence it in love to man." 2
T[ One of the last, slowly murmured sayings of Whittier, the
poet, as he lay dying, was this: "Give my love to the
world." And this is the world's supreme need to-day; more
than our eloquence, or our knowledge, or our wealth, or all
: W. E. Chadwick, The Pastoral Teaching of St. Paul, 247.
2 Quintin Hogg, 303.
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 353
else besides, it needs our love. True, even love may sometimes
err; but the cure for love's mistakes is just more love. We
never blunder because we love ; we often blunder because we do
not love enough. God help us all, that like Whittier, we may
live and die, giving our love to the world ! l
5. St. Paul's first application of his great principle refers to
the use of "tongues" a gift of ecstatic, and probably highly
emotional utterance, and evidently very highly prized by the
Corinthians. St. Paul at once refuses to consider the gift apart
from the personality through which it is exercised. If that
personality is not motived by love the speaker has become a
mere instrument of sound without moral (or spiritual) character.
^[ Two applications at once suggest themselves : first, to what
is termed popular preaching, however eloquent and clever, which
does not proceed from a Christianized heart, which is not inspired
by the love of souls, and whose object is not the salvation or
edification of men; secondly, to the emotional singing of hymns
whose words, if studied carefully apart from the music, are seen
to be either heresy or nonsense, if they do not come perilously
near to blasphemy. 2
I.
INTELLECT OR CHARACTER?
1. St. Paul has been alluding in the preceding chapter to
sundry and various endowments, abilities, and qualifications by
which certain individuals in the early Christian community were
gifted and distinguished by Divine providence, for the purpose of
the more speedy propagation of the Gospel, and of attracting,
retaining, and edifying new candidates for that community. And
one purpose of the Apostle in referring to these extraordinary
gifts and faculties is to put the favoured possessors of them upon
their guard, lest they should become puffed up and self-complacent
in the consciousness of their distinctions, and employ them for
their own exaltation, instead of for the furtherance of God's honour
in the welfare and progress of humanity.
Of the precise nature of these mysterious gifts, we know little
more than that, having answered their temporary purpose, they
1 G. Jackson, Memoranda Paulina, 51.
2 W. E. Ohadwick, The Pastoral Teaching of St. Paul, 248.
I COR. 23
354 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
exist no longer. But whatever they were, it is obvious that the
best way of applying for our own edification the Apostle's
admonitions with respect to them will be to translate, as it were,
those extraordinary gifts into their modern equivalents, which are
variously distributed amongst us under the common name of
" talents." We have no miraculous gift of Tongues ; but we have
scholars whose laborious industry has mastered languages to such
a degree as almost to repair the inconvenience of Babel and to
reduce its confusion to order. We have no miraculous gift of
Prophecy but we have men of far-sighted sagacity to discern the
signs of the times, of profound wisdom to prepare for the recep-
tion and interpretation of those phenomena, and possessed of an
eloquence little short of miraculous in propounding their projects
and recommending them for acceptance by a free people. And
whatever might be the precise nature of what St. Paul terms
" gifts of healing, gifts of help, gifts of government," we can have
no doubt that they each have their corresponding though ordinary
and unmiraculous endowments in the present day, exhibited in
the various evolutions of art, science, philosophy, political and
religious administration ; each of them, like the Pentecostal gifts,
and like "every good and perfect gift," proceeding from the
Father of Lights ; each of them liable to misuse by the vanity
of man ; each of them therefore necessitating a word of caution
in the spirit of the Apostle. Such gifts there are corresponding
to those of tongues, of knowledge, of prophecy, of discovery, of
contrivance or administration; gifts working through all the
range of commerce, politics, the camp, the court, the Church, or
in the fields of literature and science. These are the gifts which,
under the names of talent, force, and genius, men (and no wonder)
are ready to bow down before and worship ; these are the gifts
before which we are least reluctant and ashamed to offer homage,
sometimes approaching to extravagance gifts that are dazzling
to the beholder, and cannot therefore but be more or less danger-
ous to the possessor ; gifts that must be used with watchfulness
lest they should bear that possessor up into the region of super-
ciliousness ; lest they should set him above the plain tasks, the
common duties, the homely sympathies, the social kindnesses,
the meekness, the modesty, the concession, the considerateness,
and the fair construction which we owe to one another.
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 355
Tf In earlier days his standard had been almost purely
intellectual, but in later life simplicity and charm and genuine
goodness seemed to appeal to him most. He said, " The power
of simple goodness is the greatest in the world." l
^ The idea was early and unmistakably impressed on our
minds, that to be good was the main thing in life ; that there was
nothing else that could come into any comparison or competition
with this ; that in fact nothing else mattered greatly. We knew
that this was what our parents desired for us above all else,
though I do not think there was much direct speaking about it,
beyond a little explanation of our Sunday lessons, or an occasional
word when we were saying our prayers. 2
If Occasionally I preached a sermon at home over the red
sofa cushions ; this performance being always called for by my
mother's dearest friends, as the great accomplishment of my
childhood. The sermon was, I believe, some eleven words long ;
very exemplary, it seems to me, in that respect and I still think
must have been the purest gospel, for I know it began with,
"People, be good." 8
2. Since it is plainly because of its fruits that St. Paul
magnifies the grace of love, we shall hardly be doing injustice to
his argument by saying that, after all, the distinction he draws
is between intellect and character, as things to be sought after
for ourselves and reverenced in others. The text condenses it
into an epigram, " Though I speak with the tongues of men and
of angels, and have not love, I am become as the blare of the
trumpet or the clang of the cymbal."
U St. Paul knew nothing of the modern orchestra. He meant
by his simile, presumably, only showy noise and display, loud
enough to attract any attention however little cultivated. We
may read into it yet other lessons, not less important; for the
trumpet and the cymbal have their right and due place in the
orchestra, and contribute their necessary share to the "concord
of sweet sounds," and to the intention of the great Master whose
meaning they help to interpret. But by themselves what are
they but " sound and fury, signifying nothing " ? They are
useless, and without beauty, unless they take a subordinate place,
and unless they co-operate for something greater than themselves. 4
1 Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 484.
2 Early Letters of Marcus Dods, 18.
3 Ruskin, Prceterita, i. 25.
4 A. Awger, The Gospel and Human Life t 33,
356 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
3. It was within a comparatively small ring-fence of a
struggling church, separated by hard and fast lines from the
heathen and corrupt populace outside, that the problem had
risen for solution, which St. Paul sets himself to solve. It was
on purely religious questions the diffusion of the knowledge
of Christ by the ability and fervour of those already possessing
it that this question of Intellect versus Character had arisen.
But as it is a question going down to the deeps of human
personality, it never disappears, but is ever present, and ever
pressing for our decision. It is a perennial danger, because
a perennial temptation that steady, never-changing temptation
to value ability, talent, learning, accomplishment, even "clever-
ness," the cheapest and most worthless of them all to value
these above goodness, and to ignore the certain truth that, where
these things are not given by nature (as must be the case with
the majority), they are not to be acquired by aping those who
have them, by the mere mimicry of "gifts," which everywhere
abounds, the tinsel which obtains acceptance as the glorious gem
of the mountain or the sea, the surface cleverness which we daily
meet, the borrowed tricks of style and manner and talk, the
assimilative skill, wherein is no reality, no root, because no heart.
^f An over-'cute woman's no better nor a long-tailed sheep
she'll fetch none the bigger price for that. 1
If One to whom he often spoke of the deepest things of life
and of death will never forget his saying one day just after the
attack of illness in December : " I have come to see that cleverness,
success, attainment, count for little; that goodness, or, as F.
(naming a dear friend) would say, ' character' is the important
factor in life." 2
4. St. Paul did not malign or disparage gifts. Himself a man
of rarest genius, is it likely he would stultify his own mission
and function by disparaging the great gifts which, inspired and
guided by love, were helping to mould the whole future of the
world ? " Covet earnestly the best gifts," he said ; every talent
and faculty that God has bestowed on your mysterious individ-
uality welcome and turn to the Master's use.
True it is, and within the range both of illustrious historical
1 Mr. Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss.
8 Life and Letters of George John Romanes t 323.
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 357
precedent and of frequent personal observation and experience,
that the best and most brilliant and distinguished gifts may be
directed, harmonized, moderated, and controlled by the most
frank and unaffected humility, and by the most tender and
generous sentiments of humanity. But it will hardly be denied
that while the highly gifted in literature and science are very
frequently, and perhaps even in exact proportion to their
eminence, men of modest stillness and humility, there is a very
great temptation to the contrary. There is an instinct of self-
glorification through these gifts which requires close looking
after. There is a temptation to forget that the only legitimate
dedication of such faculties, and the implied condition on which
they are bestowed, must be such as shall promote the ulterior
advantage of the whole community (as St. Paul shows in the
preceding chapter representing us as all members of one body).
If I remember one thing he said which made a great im-
pression. Something led us to talk about genius and character.
I was praising genius, and taking no notice of character as its
great buttress. He turned and said quietly, and with some
sadness, " I have seen more young men fail in early life from the
absence of character than from the absence of genius." *
Tf In 1876 Leslie Stephen and his sister-in-law, Lady Eitchie
(Miss Thackeray), were staying at a neighbouring farmhouse, and
Kuskin saw a good deal of them. He liked Stephen, in spite of
differences of opinion and temperament, and mentions talk with
him as one of the agreeable things at Brant wood ; but Stephen on
his side "could not be at ease with Kuskin." Between Lady
Kitchie and Kuskin there was fuller sympathy, as is seen in her
description of their meeting :
" Mrs. Severn sat in her place behind a silver urn, while the
master of the house, with his back to the window, was dispensing
such cheer, spiritual and temporal, as those who have been his
guests will best realize, fine wheaten bread and Scotch cakes in
many a crisp circlet and crescent, and trout from the lake, and
strawberries such as grow only on the Brantwood slopes. Were
these cups of tea only, or cups of fancy, feeling, inspiration?
And as we crunched and quaffed we listened to a certain strain
not easily to be described, changing from its graver first notes to
the sweetest and most charming of vibrations. . . . The text was
that strawberries should be ripe and sweet, and we munched and
1 Life and Letters of Brooke toss Wcstcolt, ii. 33.
358 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
marked it then and there; that there should be a standard of
fitness applied to every detail of life, and this standard, with a
certain gracious malice, wit, hospitality, and remorselessness, he
began to apply to one thing and another, to one person and
another, to dress, to food, to books. . . . Listening back to the
echoes of a lifetime we can most of us still hear some strains very
clear, very real and distinct, out of all the confusion of past noise
and chatter ; and the writer (nor is she alone in this) must ever
count the music of Brantwood oratory among such strains.
Music, oratory I know not what to call that wondrous gift
which subjugates all who come within its reach."
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. 1
5. That there may be gifts without love to use them aright
this is St. Paul's warning, and this warning must be declared
afresh in every age. If love is the one source of all that is best
in human character, we need not wonder any more why St. Paul
should be careful to compare or contrast it with faith and hope,
and declare that it is the greatest. For indeed love is the
atmosphere in which alone the light of faith and hope can burn.
Love creates character, and character, in return, makes lovely and
makes lovable. There is a witchery and a glamour which attend
intellectual gifts in life, winning admiration and popularity, and
even the semblance of affection. But when Death has come in to
place the object of these at a distance from earth and time, it is
to something far other than "cleverness" that Memory turns
instinctively to brood over and cherish. Not the gifts, but the
graces, then; not the cleverness, not the accomplishments or
learning, not the wit and humour, but the touches of human
sympathy and tenderness: the self-denial, the patience and
forbearance, the nobility of aim, the steadfastness of purpose, the
fact that the atmosphere of life and society was higher, nobler,
purer, where such an one moved and spoke just all those things
which St. Paul found to have their source and spring in love.
If My opinion of Lord Althorp is extremely high. In fact,
his character is the only stay of the Ministry. I doubt whether
any person has ever lived in England who, with no eloquence, no
brilliant talents, no profound information, with nothing in short
but plain good sense and an excellent heart, possessed so much
1 E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, ii. 291.
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 359
influence both in and out of Parliament. His temper is an
absolute miracle. He has been worse used than any Minister
ever was in debate ; and he has never said one thing inconsistent,
I do not say with gentlemanlike courtesy, but with real
benevolence. Lord North, perhaps, was his equal in suavity
and good-nature; but Lord North was not a man of strict
principles. His administration was not only an administration
hostile to liberty, but it was supported by vile and corrupt means,
by direct bribery, I fear, in many cases. Lord Althorp has the
temper of Lord North with the principles of Eomilly. If he had
the oratorical powers of either of those men, he might do any-
thing. But his understanding, though just, is slow, and his
elocution painfully defective. It is, however, only justice to him
to say that he has done more service to the Eeform Bill even as a
debater than all the other Ministers together, Stanley excepted. 1
II.
THE DISCOVERY OF LOVE.
1. What is the origin of love ? Turn to the Ke vised Version
of the Epistles of John and you will find there these words : " We
love because he first loved us." "We love" not, "We love
him." This is the way the old version has it, and it is wrong.
"We love because he first loved us." Look at that word
" because." There is the cause. " Because he first loved us/'
The effect follows that we love Him we love all men. Our
heart is slowly changed. Because He loved us, we love. Con-
template the love of Christ, and you will love Him. Stand before
that, and you will be changed into the same image, from tender-
ness to tenderness. There is no other way. You cannot love to
order. You can only look at the lovely object, and fall in love
with it ; you cannot command yourself to do it. And so look at
the great sacrifice of Christ, as He laid down His life all through
life, and at His death upon the Cross of Calvary ; and you must
love Him. Love begets love. It is a process of induction. You
put a piece of iron in the mere presence of an electrified body,
and that piece of iron for a time becomes electrified. It becomes
a temporary- magnet in the presence of a permanent magnet, and
as long as you leave the two side by side, they are both magnets.
1 Macaulay, Life, and Letters, 175.
360 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
Remain side by side with Him who loved us, and gave Himself
for us, and you too will become a permanent magnet, a permanent
attractive force ; and like Him you will draw all men be they
white men or black men unto you. That is the inevitable effect
of love.
With all thy heart, with all thy soul and mind,
Thou must Him love and His behests embrace;
All other loves, with which the world doth blind
Weak fancies, and stir up affections base,
Thou must renounce and utterly displace,
And give thyself unto Him full and free,
That full and freely gave Himself to thee.
Then shalt thou feel thy spirit so possest,
And ravisht with devouring great desire
Of His dear Self, that shall thy feeble breast
Inflame with love, and set thee all on fire
With burning zeal, through every part entire,
That in no earthly thing thou shalt delight,
But in His sweet and amiable sight.
Thenceforth all world's desire will in thee die,
And all earth's glory, on which men do gaze,
Seem dirt and dross in thy pure-sighted eye,
Compar'd to that Celestial Beauty's blaze,
Whose glorious beams all fleshly sense doth daze
With admiration of their passing light,
Blinding the eyes, and lumining the spright.
Then shall thy ravisht soul inspired be
With heavenly thoughts far above human skill,
And thy bright radiant eyes shall plainly see
Th' Idea of His pure glory present still
Before thy face, that all thy spirits shall fill
With sweet enragement of celestial love,
Kindled through sight of those fair things above. 1
U With Professor Blackie the course of true love did not at
first run smooth. But the Professor refused to believe that Mr.
Wyld (her father) would persist in his displeasure. " You shall
soon (he wrote to her) see your father, dearest, sitting as
comfortably at my lireside as he does at his own. I believe
1 Spenser.
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 361
that the only invincible power in the world is love ; I shall ply
your father with that and that only, and if I do not conquer
Christianity never conquered." l
^f Edward Irving went to see a dying boy once, and when he
entered the room, he just put his hand on the sufferer's head,
and said, " My boy, God loves you," and went away. And the
boy started from his bed, and he called out to the people in the
house, " God loves me ! God loves me ! " One word ; one word !
It changed that boy. The sense that God loved him had over-
powered him, melted him down, and had begun the making of a
new heart.
^[ " Please, ' ma,' " began Atim, " please no whip Mees Kittee.
She say true word. Me black, me nigger. Me no white, me no
prettee, but Jesus He no think about black face, and He lofe me
all the same. He lofe me, me too glad. Mees Kittee speak true
word, but me not sorree any more."
The girl's black eyes glistened with feeling, but she looked
very happy, and she showed her ivory teeth.
" Atim, my dear Atim ! " said Mrs. Temple. " I'm glad along
with you ! What do other things matter after all if one is sure
of that?"
"Jesus, He make me white as snow me never see in me
country. Me lofe Him ! Me lofe Him ! " She laughed aloud
in her perfect pleasure. Truly she could afford to forgive and
forget.
Kitty, stony-faced, had been a study during Atim's plea for
her. She had refused utterly to beg pardon, and stood as perverse
a little mortal as one could see anywhere. Gradually, as Atim
spoke, her expression became softer. Her warm heart was
touched. The moment Atim stopped, she flung herself into the
black girl's arms.
" I love you, Atim ! " she cried. " I love your black face.
I'm the wickedest sinner alive! If I loved Jesus the least
little bit, I wouldn't behave so." She kissed the girl many
times, and fondled her. Then Kitty turned to her mother.
" Mother, mother, punish rne ! Make me do something I don't
like at all. I'll do it just to show how sorry I am. I don't
want to be naughty, but it's my nature ! I feel awful bad,
awful!" 2
2. As if on purpose to obviate all mysticism, St. Paul is
careful to describe love by its practical results. A tree is known
by its fruit ; and as you might describe an oak tree to a child
1 John Stuart Blaclcie, i. 207. 2 J. F. Hogg, The Angel Opportunity, 131.
362 THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
as the tree that is covered with acorns ; or a vine as the tree
from which the purple clusters are hanging, so St. Paul delineates
love by the fruit it bears. By love, he seems to say, I mean that
quality which " suffereth long and is kind," puts up with a great
deal, and, trying to find excuses for the misdemeanour of an
adversary, is kind and gentle and forbearing. Love envieth not
the good fortune, the reputation, the precedence of another,
vaunteth not herself, is not puffed up; gives herself no airs of
consequence, nor plumes herself upon even real superiorities,
inasmuch as it is contrary to the very essence of love to be
making those comparisons which alone could supply materials
for self-conceit; doth not behave herself unseemly, nor in any
manner incongruous with the correlative circumstances in which
she is placed; or inconsistent with the rights, the feelings, or
even, if it can be helped, the honest prejudices of those with
whom she is placed. And she is the less likely to fall into this
unseemliness because she seeketh not her own ; is not incessantly
on the watch to assert her own presence and to claim attention
to her own prerogative ; is not easily (or perhaps it may here
mean " vehemently ") provoked ; imputeth no evil where it can
be avoided ; rejoiceth not in iniquity as so many do, who cannot
hear a piece of discreditable news but they sit on thorns until
they can find an opportunity to repeat it but rejoiceth in every-
thing that is consistent with truth, justice, and integrity. Beareth
all things, or more probably here, concealdh all things concerning
another person which, without injury to the claims of social laws,
it would be kind and considerate to conceal ; believeth all things
favourable to such a person which there is any colourable reason
to believe; even hopeth those which she finds it difficult to
believe ; and endureth all things which it may be an advantage
to others that she should endure.
TJ Henry Drunimoud has told us how in the heart of Africa,
among the great lakes, he came across black men and women who
remembered the only white man they ever saw before David
Livingstone ; " and as you cross his footsteps in that dark con-
tinent, men's faces light up as they speak of the kind doctor who
passed there years ago. They could not understand him ; but
they felt the love that beat in his heart."
U In London, in 1872, one Sunday morning a minister said
i CORINTHIANS xm. i 363
to me, " I want you to notice that family there in one of the
front seats ; and when we go home I want to tell you their story."
When we arrived home I asked him for the story, and he said,
" All that family were won by a smile." " Why," said I, " how
was that ? " " Well," said he, " as I was walking down a street
one day I saw a child at a window ; it smiled, and I smiled, and
we nodded. So it was the second time ; I nodded, she nodded.
It was not long before there was another child, and I had got
into a habit of looking and nodding ; and pretty soon the group
grew, and at last, as I went by, a lady was with them. I did
not know what to do. I did not want to nod to her, but I knew
the children expected it, and so I nodded to them all. And the
mother saw I was a minister, because I carried a Bible every
Sunday morning. So the children followed me the next Sunday
and found I was a minister. And they thought I was the
greatest preacher they knew, and their parents must hear me." l
Tf How is it that the poets have said so many fine things
about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their
first poems their best? or are not those the best which come
from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-
rooted affections ? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring
charm ; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music. 2
Youth immortal undying love !
With these by winter fireside we'll sit down,
Wearing our snows of honour like a crown;
And sing as in a grove,
Where the full nests ring out with happy cheer,
"Summer is here."
Koll round, strange years; swift seasons, come and go;
Ye leave upon us only an outward sign;
Ye cannot touch the inward and divine,
While God alone does know ;
There seal'd till summers, winters, all shall cease
In His deep peace.
Therefore uprouse ye winds and howl your will;
Beat, beat, ye sobbing rains on pane and door;
Enter, slow-footed age, and thou, obscure
Grand Angel not of ill:
Healer of every wound, whene'er thou come,
Glad, we'll go home. 3
1 D. L. Moody, The Faithful Saying, 44.
2 George Eliot, Adam Bede. 3 Dinah M. Mulock.
THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT.
1*5
LITERATURE.
Aked (C. F.), The Courage of the Coward, 225.
Albertson (C. C.), The Gospel according to Christ, 259.
Brooke (S. A.), The Govpel of Joy, 297.
Brooks (P.), Twenty Sermons, 280.
Clow (W. M.), The Secret of the Lord, 337.
Cooper (T. J.), Love's Unveiling, 111.
Cross (J.), Pauline Charity, 207, 223.
Daplyn (E.), One with the Eternal, 51.
Davies (J. LI.), The Purpose of God, 80.
Dix (M.), Sermons Doctrinal and Practical, 190.
Edger (S.), Sermons at Auckland, N.Z., ii. 105.
Gibbon (J. M.), Evangelical Heterodoxy, 182.
Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 62.
Henson (H. H.), Christ and the Nation, 296.
Hicks (E.), The Life Hereafter, 1.
Howatt (J. R.), The Children's Pew, 81.
Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 164.
(W. W.), in Oxford University Sermons, 144.
Jones (J. S.), Seeing Darldy, 3.
Leach (C.), Shall We know our Friends in Heaven? 81.
Lewis (E. W.), Some Views of Modern Theology, 50.
(H. E.), in The Old Faith and the New Theology, 241.
Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul's, 367.
Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, i. 110.
Morrison (G. H.), Sunrise: Addresses from a City Pulpit, 12.
Paget (F.), The Spirit of Discipline, 111.
Pope (R. M.), The Poetry of tlie Upward Way, 137.
Randall (R. W.), Life in the Catholic Church, 155.
Roberts (R.), The Meaning of Christ, 39.
Sampson (E. F.), Christ Church Sermons, 11.
Sanday (W.), Oracles, 34.
Smith (D.), Man's Need of God, 199.
Vaughan (C. J.), Epiphany, Lent and Easter, 87.
(J.), Sermons in Christ Church, Brighton, i. 204.
Watson (F.), The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, 233.
Cambridge Review, viii. Supplement No. 204 (Randall) ; xv. Supplement
No. 366 (Kirkpatrick).
Christian World Pulpit, xv. 221 (Craig) ; xvii. 238 (Wonnacott) ; xxii.
184 (Johnson) ; xxxv. 232 (Westcott) ; xxxvii. 369 (Rogers) ; liv.
10 (Stalker) ; Ixv. 104 (Winnington Ingram) ; Ixvii. 69 (Watt) ;
Ixx. 8 (Watson).
THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT.
For now we see in a mirror, darkly ; but then face to face ; now I know
in part ; but then shall I know even as also I have been known. i Cor.
xiii. 12.
1. ST. PAUL has been speaking of gifts or endowments on
which members of the Corinthian Church were priding them-
selves. There was a great deal of emotion in the new Christian
societies of that day. Emotional impulses broke out in irregular
exhortations, in utterances of praise, in expressions of conviction,
in acts of healing ; and these impulses, which sometimes led to
disorderly competition, needed to be controlled. The first
principle that St. Paul lays down with regard to them is that
their proper object is to be of some use to the Christian society.
They were given not for the profit or distinction of the individual,
but for the benefit of the Church. Then he bids his readers see
that all gifts, even those from which the Church might derive
most advantage, were essentially inferior to love.
He goes on to describe, in words worthy of what he praises,
the beauty and blessedness of love. The ultimate distinction
that he ascribes to it is that it lasts ; it does not fail, or undergo
changes, it abides. Herein especially was it contrasted with
prophesying and tongues and knowledge. Prophecies will be
done away, tongues will cease, knowledge will be done away.
St. Paul was no doubt referring here to the emotional gifts which
were used and valued in the Churches of that age. But he lets
us see that he regards these as representing all intellectual
conceptions and utterances concerning spiritual things. " For we
know in part, and we prophesy (or preach) in part: but when
that which is-perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done
away." St. Paul would hardly have spoken thus if he had not
himself been perplexed by the incompleteness and unsatisfying
3*7
3 68 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
character of the accounts which we can give to ourselves and
others of the ways of God. He was accustomed to take refuge
in the thought that our conceptions and language are the
expressions of partial knowledge, such as will be superseded in
time by maturer and completer knowledge. And he had
evidently found support in the two analogies which he proceeds
to give.
(1) " When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child,
I thought as a child : now that I am become a man, I have put
away childish things." Every grown-up person is familiar with
this experience. We can remember fanciful conceptions of our
childhood which now make us smile; things appeared to us in
very different proportions from those in which we see them now.
Our knowledge has grown, and the growth of it inevitably alters
our apprehensions and judgments. It is not unreasonable to
expect that what has already happened to us will happen to us
again. May we not hope that in the future world, which we
cannot now understand, but which will seem so different to us
from the present, the contradictions and perplexities which baffle
us now will in some way be made to disappear ? There is a pre-
sumption that, even on this side of the grave, as the generations
of Christians grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord
Jesus Christ, they may outgrow doctrines and rules which were
natural to earlier stages.
(2) The other analogy is that which forms our text. We
are reminded of the difference between a person seen as reflected
by an imperfect and confusing mirror and the same person seen
face to face. Let us hold the Apostle taught that God is now
seeing and knowing us ; but let it not be assumed that we as yet
see and know God except most imperfectly.
2. The expression which St. Paul here uses is a very suggestive
one. He has been speaking of the contrast in value between
knowledge and love, showing that all our knowledge, of whatever
sort it may be, is of little worth compared with love. Love is
that which alone is truly precious in human life, and love
endures; while all our ideas are destined to dissolve and pass
away, like the changing shapes of the clouds from the heaven's
azure. Love is that constant blue above, and love above is
i CORINTHIANS xm. \i 369
eternal. Knowledge is partial, and therefore the utterance of
the truth in prophecy or preaching must be partial. And just
as the man puts off the thoughts of the child, so the man is ever
putting off and changing even his manhood's thoughts that have
been as those of a spiritual childhood, for those that are to him
new and better, even as he changes his raiment. This process
must go on to the last hour of mental life and activity; and
what we think the best thought must in time give place to a
better; and the best that can be dreamed is still a dream and
a shadow compared with the substance and the reality itself.
"For," says the Apostle (to render his words quite literally),
" we are looking now through a mirror in (or upon) an enigma."
3. Human knowledge is imperfect, fragmentary, partial. We
can scarcely be said to " know " ; we are only " learning to know "
by slow and painful effort; our best attainment is one-sided,
relative, incomplete. Our expression even of what we think we
know is partial and imperfect. Not only do we " know in part,"
but we " prophesy in part." Even those whom God has called
to be His spokesmen can but communicate their message in
language which is inadequate to express the truth fully. And
why ? Because here and now, in this present life and with our
limited faculties, we can only see " by means of a mirror." All
that we can discern is as it were but a reflection of the absolute
archetypal realities, a blurred, confused, imperfect image of
glory upon which as yet we cannot gaze. And even that reflec-
tion which we seem to see can only be described in language
which is like a riddle, challenging us to guess its meaning and
unravel its secret, but hinting, not defining, hard to interpret,
liable to be misunderstood. In the face of eternal truths we
are but children; thinking, feeling, speaking, with the limited
capacities, the baffled eagerness, the constant and inevitable
misunderstandings of children: yes, but like children too, with
the hope and promise of growth, development, attainment here-
after.
For St. Paul's now is balanced by a then. " When that which
is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away."
Beyond this life of mediate and imperfect knowledge expressed
in the language of riddles lies the promise of a life where know-
i COR. 24
370 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
ledge will be immediate, distinct, consummated in the vision of
God " face to face " ; when partial knowledge will be exchanged
for knowledge so full, so complete, so personal, that St. Paul
dares to compare it with God's present perfect insight into each
human soul ; " then shall I know fully even as also I have been
fully known."
Meanwhile, in this our present state of limited and imperfect
knowledge, amid all the uncertainties and perplexities of life,
there is one sure clue, one indispensable guide to direct us
" love never faileth."
The idea is one, but the Apostle gives it in two parallel
statements, after the manner of Hebrew poetry. And each
statement has its two sides " now " and " then." Thus
I. SEEING.
1. Now we see in a mirror, darkly.
2. Then face to face.
II. KNOWING.
1. Now 1 know in part.
2. Then shall I know even as also I have been known.
I.
SEEING.
It is often hard to get people to see. Their gaze is on the
outward the shows of sense and of time on the seen; and
therefore to the New Testament writers it is but blindness. To
them he who does not see the unseen does not see at all. But,
given the vision of faith, it will develop from faltering dim
beginnings, and its horizon will become richer and more heavenly.
It will rejoice in the mirror. It will not even resent the riddle.
And why ? Because it is conscious of moving onwards to the
Face.
^ One summer evening sitting by my window I watched for
the first star to appear, knowing the position of the brightest in
the southern sky. The dusk came on, grew deeper, but the star
did not shine. By-and-by, other stars less bright appeared, so
that it could not be the sunset which obscured the expected one.
Finally, I considered that I must have mistaken its position,
when suddenly a puff of air blew through the branch of a pear-
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 371
tree which overhung the window, a leaf moved, and there was
the star behind the leaf.
At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing
at the sky up through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful
star shines clearly : here a constellation is hidden by a branch :
a universe by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organism is
required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may
be removed, and a real void : when to cease to look in one direc-
tion, and to work in another. Many men of broad brow and
great intellect lived in the days of ancient Greece, but for lack
of the accident of a lens, and of knowing the way to use a prism,
they could but conjecture imperfectly. I am in exactly the
position they were when I look beyond light. Outside my
present knowledge I am exactly in their condition, I feel that
there are infinities to be known, but they are hidden by a
leaf. 1
If The late Professor T. C. Edwards says that St. Paul got his
metaphor of the mirror from Philo, who got it from Plato, and
he mentions the striking passage in Plato's Republic, where
Socrates is illustrating the slow development of our faculties
by the case of men who have been immured in a cavern and
are suddenly dragged into the sunlight. Not a man at first
can make out, in the unaccustomed glare, a single object as it
is. " Hence, I suppose, habit will be necessary to enable him to
perceive objects in that upper world. At first he will be most
successful in distinguishing shadows; then he will discern the
reflections of men and other things in water, and afterwards the
realities ; and after this he will raise his eyes to encounter the
light of the moon and the stars, finding it less difficult to study
the heavenly bodies and the heaven itself by night than the sun
and the sun's light by day." Finally, he will see the sun as it
is, not as it appears in water or on alien ground, and then he
will conclude that the sun is the author of the seasons, the
guardian of the visible world, and the cause of all he and his
friends used to see. On some such lines the idealism of St. Paul
runs respecting the soul and its spiritual vision as it ascends
from the partial to the perfect, from the fleeting to the real.
One may note, in passing, the joy of discovering a kinship
between such minds as Plato, St. Paul, and Wordsworth, children
of ages far distant, but each illumined by the immanent Reason,
by the " Light which lighteth every man." 2
1 Richard Jeiferies, The Story of My Heart, 188.
2 K. M. Pope, The Poetry oftfw Upward Way, 152.
372 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
i. Now.
" Now we see in (by means of) a mirror, darkly."
St. Paul's meaning is explained in an illustration. "When
I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I
thought as a child ; but when I became a man I put away childish
things." With the humility of true wisdom and the sweetness
of a large understanding, he reckons the attainments of this life
as no more than childish acquisitions, when compared with that
which we shall reach when we are home. Our powers are
undeveloped, immature, juvenile, in this life; our spiritual in-
sight is therefore defective, and our knowledge only preparatory
or initial.
1. In (or ly) a mirror. When St. Paul lived and wrote,
mirrors were not made of glass, as the Authorized Version of
this passage erroneously suggests, but of some metal. The best,
being made of silver, were costly, and it took a good deal of
skill and labour to make the surface of the metal quite even.
And however well made a mirror might be, it was always in
danger of losing its clearness by exposure. St. Paul and his
readers were not of the class that could indulge themselves in
costly articles of luxury. A cheap and inferior mirror was
better than nothing ; but we can picture to ourselves what the
mirrors used by the humbler classes were like, if we recall the
reflections of ourselves which we have casually seen in tarnished
and uneven surfaces of metal.
Let any one imagine himself to be before such a mirror, with
a friend standing by him. He can see the friend's face reflected
as if he were looking through the mirror. But the face, so seen,
will be distorted and dim, and if he desires to examine any
feature accurately he will be baffled, so that the face will be in
some respects an enigma or puzzle to him. What a contrast he
will perceive, if he turns his head, and looks at the actual face
of the friend at his side ! Then he will see and know his friend,
as his friend who was not using the mirror was seeing and
knowing him.
Thus St. Paul's similitude is to be explained. His words,
literally rendered, are " For we see now through a mirror in
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 373
an enigma (or puzzle), but then face to face; now I know in
part, but then I shall know as fully as I was known." He is
comparing the blurred and confusing reflection of an object with
the object as seen directly. And he uses this image to illustrate
what he assumes to be puzzling in the ways of God as we can
now apprehend them.
What we see at present is a sort of reflection of truth, not
the very truth itself. A mirror may be very useful ; but it can
never give the accurate idea of the very figure, the very person,
presented in it. If its copy of the person be ever so accurate, still
it is not defective only, it is also misleading : the right side has
become the left, and the left hand in the picture is awkwardly
performing the functions of the right hand in the original : thus
the effect produced is different, however carefully represented
the details and the particulars. A mirror, too, can hold but one
image at a time : if it be preoccupied by one figure, it is unavail-
able for another. And if, in addition to these essential defects
of accuracy and limitations of capacity, there be also the slightest
flaw in the glass or cloud upon the surface, there is an end at
once of all beauty and of all truth in the representation, and
what was before only defective becomes now a distortion and a
caricature. And how much more expressive would be the figure
in the Apostle's days, when not glass but stone or metal was
commonly used for the purpose spoken of; when the colouring
therefore of every object must have been lost in the reflection,
and nothing would remain but a meagre and blurred outline to
carry to the eye the impression of face or figure or landscape !
2. Darkly. That is, as the margin tells us, "in a riddle."
The original is identical with our English word " enigma." What
a mirror is to the eye a riddle is to the ear, only that the latter
expresses more clearly the incompleteness of our knowledge, and
the necessity that it should be thus partial. But just as a re-
flection implies a reality, so a riddle involves an answer. What
we know of God comes to us wrapped in mystery ; it comes as
an answer to our needs, but in giving this answer it raises new
questions for our solution questions which St. Paul tells us by
this very phrase we cannot hope now altogether to solve. We
see God and Divine things amid the perplexities and contra-
374 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
dictions of this imperfect . state, part, surely, of the clouds and
darkness which are round about Him ; we behold Him through
life's great riddle, and though the dimness which it brings rises
ever before us from this lower earth like a mist, those who look
for Him see the far-off shining of His face, and know the maze
is not without its clue, that His Hand, strong and tender, holds
the thread of the Divine love, from which, while we hold it fast,
neither life nor death, neither things present nor things to come,
shall be able to separate us.
It is in relation to the highest truths that it is most important
constantly to recognize the limitation of our knowledge and the
imperfection of our expression of it. It is these truths of which
it is most necessary to remember that we apprehend them only
as " through a mirror," express them only as " in a riddle " ; learn
only by slow degrees to recognize a little better what the image
means, to understand a little more fully the depths of mystery
wrapped in the words of the riddle. How many an error has sprung
from the assumption that human language could be a full and
adequate expression of Divine realities, in forgetfulness of St.
Augustine's warning, Verius cogitatur Deus quam dicitur, et
verius est quam cogitatur; for "when we have said all that we
can say concerning Him, we have said nothing worthily." How
many an assault upon the Christian faith has been based upon
the assumption that infinite truths could be compressed into the
moulds of human words ! Yes, and how often the defenders of
the Faith have exposed themselves to attack by letting it be
thought that this was their belief, this the position which they
were bound to maintain at all hazards.
U Take for an example the nature of God. The very attributes
of God are an enigma to us. What is infinity ? What is omni-
science? What is omnipresence? What is eternity? Each is
a riddle. Take the character of God. Is it not all shadowed
forth to us in the Scriptures, in the Old Testament at all events,
in dark sayings ? " It repented the Lord that he had made man
on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart " (Gen. vi. 6). Take
the mode of our redemption. We firmly believe in the truth of
an atonement made for sin by the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus
Christ. But is not every word in that statement an enigma?
Who can explain, unless he would "darken counsel by words
without knowledge" (Job xxxviii. 2), the precise mode and
i CORINTHIANS xni. 12 375
principle of that work of Christ, which is yet a sinner's one hope ?
Take the operation of the Holy Spirit. Who can tell us how the
Holy Spirit works in the hearts of men ? " Thou hearest the sound
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it
goeth : so is every one that is born of the Spirit " (John iii. 8).
Take the process of the future judgment. Who will say that a
thousand objections which he cannot answer might not be urged
by human ingenuity against each part of that doctrine? We
know it ; but it is " in a riddle " ; it is as a dark saying. Or take,
once more, for an example, the whole conception of heaven, of the
future life of the saved; and 0, ten thousand times more, of
the future life of the lost. The revelation is made to us, made
on the authority of God, but made to us also in human words, arid
therefore also made " in an enigma." 1
U Evermore it remains true that we see darkly. It is
necessary ; it is part of our education ; we do not require to know
much just yet a little here goes a long way. I do not need to
know the metaphysical nature of God, or the state and occupa-
tions of the dead, or the destiny of the heathen, or how many
shall be saved, or how long the world is to last under present
arrangements, and when the great historic drama of our planet
will enter upon another act, or what rising hierarchies of angels
there are, and what they look like, and what they do, and how
they subsist: all this is irrelevant to my condition. We see
darkly, but we see enough. We feel that there must be reality
behind these appearances, that behind the universe must be a
Mind that made it; behind time must be eternity; behind the
carnal kingdoms of this world, the kingdom of eternal love that
shall one day replace them ; behind man's soul, with its hankerings
and hungers and thirsts and clamours, a God who can satisfy
them ; behind all the sin of the world, a salvation from it.*
ii. Then.
"Then face to face."
No doubt there is a verbal reference here to the words spoken
of Moses : " If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will
make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto
him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in
all mine house. With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even
apparently, and not in dark speeches ; and the similitude of the
Lord shall he behold " (Num. xii. 6-8). We have the same contrast
1 C. J. Vaughan. 2 J. S. Jones, Seeing Darkly, 22.
376 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
here : " Now we see through a glass, in a dark speech . . . but
then face to face." We shall all have that sort of communication
with God Himself, which, alone of all men, the mediator of the
first dispensation was privileged to enjoy in his day.
Higher, higher,
Purified by suffering's fire,
Eise, my soul, until thy flight
Pierce its way to heaven's light.
Clearer, clearer,
Until, ever drawing nearer,
There shall burst upon thy sight,
Through the darkness of earth's night,
All the eye of faith may see,
Set in God's eternity. 1
II.
KNOWING.
In the language of St. Paul " knowledge " denotes the advanced
or perfect knowledge, which is the ideal state of the true Christian.
It appears only in his Latin Epistles (from Komans onwards),
where the more contemplative aspects of the Gospel are brought
into view, and its comprehensive and eternal relations more
fully set forth. But the power of the preposition appears in
the verb, no less than in the substantive. In this passage it is
forced upon our notice. The partial knowledge is contrasted
with the full knowledge which shall be attained hereafter. This
distinction is missed in the Authorized Version here, though it is
observed in 2 Cor. vi. 9, " as unknown, and. yet well known" 2
i. Now.
"Now I know in part."
How much in the history of knowledge, as we read it with
the comment of that most stern of critics, Time, seems to be but
a record of misapplied ingenuity and dreary waste of energy.
We mark one generation contemptuously discarding the studies
and the methods of its predecessors and substituting its own,
doomed in their turn to become antiquated and obsolete. Pro-
1 William H. Birckhead. a Lightfoot, A Fresh Revision, 69.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 377
cesses of thought which claimed to be capable of solving every
contradiction are found wanting, and are abandoned for ever.
Enthusiasms which boasted of their power to regenerate a dead
age prove their insufficiency, and even turn themselves to worse
corruption. Controversies which were treated as questions of
life and death are pronounced to be barren logomachies or, at
the best, of comparative insignificance, when, viewed from a
distance, they assume their proper proportions.
Tf In each successive age we see the tyranny of some dominant
form of thought, or subject of study, or scheme of learning, claiming
to be supreme and final, to have the right to suppress its rivals,
and destined to last for ever. Wherein lay the error ? Was it
not that one age after another failed to take to itself St. Paul's
warning that all human knowledge is partial, relative, progressive ?
Each form of thought, each branch of study, served some useful
end, but the mistake lay in the tendency to regard passing forms
of thought as final, partial methods of study as universal ; and its
consequence was a timid and anxious clinging to the past when
the inevitable hour of change arrived. The dialectic of the
Schoolmen served to sharpen the reasoning faculties, but long
ere it was displaced it had degenerated into the merest quibbling,
and stunted rather than developed the growth of the intellectual
powers. Yet its adherents were slow to confess that the " science
of sciences" was no infallible instrument for the attainment of
knowledge, and that the exercises of the schools were perilously
liable to beget a habit of mind which valued victory in argument
more highly than the elucidation of truth. 1
K Most of the hot debates which burn in the history of
theology have been about things which were looked at in a
mirror; and the fact that no one could see these things just as
they were, was precisely what made them such excellent matter
for debate. 2
1. There are secrets hidden in every tiny flower and grain
of sand, in every throbbing nerve and aching heart, which our
keenest wisdom cannot discover. Every tear is a profound
mystery, every sigh is a world of unimaginable things. No one
can tell us why we laugh or why we cry. No one can read his
brother's mind or understand his own. He who has studied
human nature most closely has but touched the surface of it.
1 A. F. Kirk pa trick, Cambridge Review, xv. 85.
- F. Gr. Peabody, Afternoons in the College Chapel, 9.
378 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
Those who can tell us most about man can only prove that he
is fearfully and wonderfully made. Men who have been investi-
gating for a lifetime the sins, sorrows, and diseases of the world
find that these are still the everlasting riddle; and he whose
faith has given him the clearest vision of God, knows that these
are but " a portion of His ways, and the thunders of His power
none can understand." The highest philosophy still prattles and
stammers and guesses like a child, and we all have to kneel
down humbly declaring that our wisdom is but dim-eyed folly,
and repeating these words of St. Paul : " Now we see in a mirror,
darkly ; but then face to face : now I know in part ; but then
shall I know even as also I have been known."
If The science of all sciences is the knowledge of God. To
know Him, what He has done for man, what He is to man, what
man is to Him, nay, what He is in Himself, to know at once
the tenderness of His love and the mystery of His Being this
is the highest exercise of man's mind ; this is the purest joy of
man's heart ; this is the only one true aim of life ; this alone can
be called life ; this is the life the pulses of which begin to beat
within us in this world ; this is the life which swells out into its
full perfection in the world to come ; for " this is life eternal,
that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ,
whom thou hast sent." 1
TJ Speaking of God as being infinite in His nature and attributes,
he said: "I cannot grasp this infinity: I am not able to com-
prehend God ; I know but in part. If I knew Him I would cease
to worship Him." 2
If If I knew that I had fathomed all the love or all the
wisdom of God, how faith and reverence and trust would fall
away from a being that such powers as mine could grasp. 3
2. If we can know in part what the holiest Mind has thought,
how the purest Heart has loved, what the most gracious Wisdom
has provided, "let us follow on to know." If we must confess
ourselves, at best, agnostics, let it be progressive agnosticism
" If we do not know to-day, we shall hope to know to-morrow."
Tf Is not all positiveness of necessity partiality ? To say,
" This is true, I know it," and to leave no room for the limitations
and qualifications that we cannot know, for all those outside
1 R. W. Randall, Life in the Catholic Church, 159.
2 D. Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 248. 3 Phillips P.rooks, Life, 80.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 379
influences of unseen truth which we must be working on and
drawing from this fact that we have found, is there riot some
folly here ? Is not the true wisdom something like this ? I
know so far as it goes this truth is sacredly and wholly true, but
that very truth forbids me to believe that it has not developments
and ramifications reaching far out into the universe of associated
truth with which it is connected. Now I know, and I prize my
knowledge as the gift of God and hold it sacred ; but " I know
in part," I wait till that which is in part shall be done away. 1
(1) Let it be recognized that the highest knowledge we may
here attain will not be clear of an agnostic haze. To comprehend
infinitude and eternity our mind would have to be infinite and
eternal; but we may apprehend where we cannot comprehend.
We may voyage on a sea which we cannot compass. Whenever
we follow on to know perfect Love, eternal Eighteousness,
absolute Will, we are compelled to take up Wesley's strain
God only knows the love of God.
But this is relatively true of all knowledge. Even the flower
in the crannied wall has a last citadel of mystery which no effort
of the human mind can capture.
^[ We see " in part," but we do see Him, though it be only
in part ; the more lovely the prospect, the nearer it must be to
the truth. Again, we cannot fancy truth ; we may fancy about
truth when we are in the carnal mind, being led by the outward
word, whether it be of a teacher whom we call the Church, or of
an individual whom we call a theologian. In either case, what
we see is what we fancy they see. We only see Truth when we
are taught immediately by the Spirit of Truth. Let us take
our revelation simply, as it is given us, and let us believe that the
Lord spoke truly and is come to be the Guide and Teacher of the
hearts of His children. His desire is that we should look up into
His face and know Him as " Our Father." 2
(2) That we only know now in part persuades us, constrains
us to give all diligence towards fuller knowledge. In natural
scenery, mountains appeal to us most and touch the strangest
deeps of our nature, not when they stand out clear in sharp
outline, but when their strength and curve are softened by a
tender, almost- transparent, haze. It is then that the call of the
1 Phillips Brooks, Life, 111.
2 R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 40.
380 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
mountains is most eloquent, most effective. And to the earnest
soul in quest of God, the richest moments are those when some
increased knowledge has been gained, some fresh experience of
truth has been treasured, with a feeling that more, far more,
remains yet to be won. " We all, with unveiled face reflecting
as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same
image from glory to glory."
TJ It is inscribed on the grave of T. H. Green, "He died learning."
Tf Isaac Newton had one theory of the universe, and John
Hutchinson had another, but they both accepted the fact of the
universe, about the detailed constructions and processes of which
they differed so vigorously. One may believe that the earth
stands still, another may believe that it performs certain
revolutions ; but they both believe in the earth itself, they both
have confidence in its foundations, and they both draw their
sustenance from the same generous bosom. So it must be to
a very great extent with the first idea of God. We must receive
the idea without discussion, without critical or metaphysical inquiry.
We must begin with the idea that God is, and day by day grow in
our knowledge concerning Him, and in our love towards Him. 1
(3) Our knowledge here as elsewhere must begin as a " venture
of faith." Faith is the pioneer of all knowledge. The first harvest
of the field, the first voyage on the sea, was due to heroism of
faith. Belief had to precede experience. Why then should
any one demand faith's dismissal when we come to the choicest
knowledge of all ? The great word of the Gospel " Whosoever
believeth " is not a casual or official demand : it is rooted in the
eternal order revealed to us. Columbus was not more learned than
all his contemporaries: they stopped where experience stopped;
he made the venture of faith. The whole story of human piety,
of man's apprehension of God, is a story of faith's heroism. When
we read that Enoch walked with God, it means that he ventured
on a road that had to be travelled in order to be known. The
rnoan of the agnostic in earnest was wrung from the heart of Job,
when he cried
"Oh that I knew where I might find him,
That I might come even to his seat!
Behold, I go forward, but he is not there;
i J. Parker.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 381
And backward, but I cannot perceive him;
On the left hand, when he doth work, but I cannot behold
him:
He hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him."
What then ? Experience refuses to go further, turns back,
and would have him give up the quest. But faith stands beside
him in the cloud and driving tempest, faces the blast with lighted
face, cheers him to make the grand venture
"When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold."
I think if thou couldst know,
soul that will complain,
What lies concealed below
Our burden and our pain ;
How just our anguish brings
Nearer those longed-for things
We seek for now in vain,
I think thou wouldst rejoice, and not complain.
I think if thou couldst see,
With thy dim mortal sight,
How meanings, dark to thee,
Are shadows hiding light;
Truth's efforts crossed and vexed
Life's purpose all perplexed,
If thou couldst see them right,
I think that they would seem all clear, and wise, and bright.
And yet thou canst not know,
And yet thou canst not see;
Wisdom and sight are slow
In poor humanity.
If thou couldst trust, poor soul,
In Him who rules the whole,
Thou wouldst find peace and rest:
Wisdom and right are well, but Trust is best. 1
ii. Then.
"Even as also I have been known."
If the Bible speaks of a disadvantageous " Now " it is always
able to put over against it a bright and glorious " Then." And
these two must always be taken together. Look only at the
1 Adelaide Arine Procter.
382 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
"Now," with its limitations and imperfections, forgetful of the
" Then," and your philosophy will be a chain of despair ; but
view earth revolving, as it surely does, in the light of a not far-
distant heaven, and your thoughts will be gathered up into a
song of hope. It was this that enabled St. Paul to write these
words expressive of our present disadvantage without dissatisfac-
tion or regret. "We see through a glass darkly, we know in
part!" Those words tell all the intellectual struggle and pain
through which a great mind passes before it accepts its defeat.
They are the words of intellectual resignation in presence of
those inscrutable problems before which lesser minds beat them-
selves in fruitless pain ; grand words of one who has assayed the
heights and depths of knowledge to prove them past finding out,
and yet is calm. Not the words of an impatient thinker, or the
petulance of a little mind not strong enough to wait, but the
language of a great faith resting hopefully in God.
^1 Porphyry, in his Principles of the Theory of Intelligibles,
seems to me to have written a warning which might fitly stand
at the beginning of this book " By our intelligence we say many
things of the principle which is higher than the intelligence.
But these things are divined much better by an absence of
thought than by thought. It is the same with this idea as with
that of sleep, of which we speak up to a certain point in our
waking state, but the knowledge and perception of which we can
gain only by sleeping. Like is known only by like, and the
condition of all knowledge is that the subject should become like
to the object." l
I know the night is heavy with her stars,
So much I know,
I know the sun will lead the night away,
And lay his golden bars
Over the fields and mountains and great seas,
I know that he will usher in the day
With litanies
Of birds and young dawn-winds. So much I know,
So little though.
I know that I am lost in a great waste,
A trackless world
Of stars and golden days, where shadows go
In mute and secret haste,
1 M. Maeterlinck, JKuyxbroeck and the Mystict, 6.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 383
Paying no -heed to supplicating cries
Of spirits lost and troubled, this I know.
The regal skies
Utter no word, nor wind, nor changing sea,
It frightens me.
Yet I believe that somewhere, soon or late,
A peace will fall
Upon the angry reaches of my mind;
A peace initiate
In some heroic hour when I behold
A friend's long-quested triumph, or unbind
The tressed gold
From a child's laughing face. I still believe,
So much believe.
Or, when the reapers leave the swathed grain,
I'll look beyond
The yellowing hazels in the twilight-tide,
Beyond the flowing plain,
And see blue mountains piled against a sky
Flung out in coloured ceremonial pride ;
Then haply I
Shall be no longer troubled, but shall know,
It may be so. 1
1. Then shall we see face to face ; then shall I know even as
I am known. Even as I am known. That is a good thing to
rest upon, even in this stage that, however little I know about
you and about myself and about God, I am known to Him, every
bit of me, and the way that I take, and the thoughts I think,
and the fears which disturb me, and the doubts which worry and
the sins which oppress. All is spread before Him in the search-
ting light which scans and tries the uttermost secrets, and from
which nothing can be hid. He knows me as well as He knows
Himself. He knows every heart-beat, and every struggle, and
every penitential sigh, and every passing shame and regret, and
every striving after better things. He knows all the possibilities
that are in me, the worst and the best, and all the helps, in-
centives, and pardons that they call for. And He never mis-
reads, misunderstands, or misjudges. He is always fair, just,
true, and pitiful. " And I shall know even as I am known."
1 J. Drinkwater, Poems of Men and Hours, 5.
384 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
A myriad worlds encompass ours;
A myriad souls our souls enclose;
And each, its sins and woes and powers,
The Lord He sees, the Lord He knows,
And from the Infinite Knowledge flowers
The Infinite Pity's fadeless rose.
Lighten our darkness, Lord, most wise;
All-seeing One, give us to see;
Our judgments are profanities,
Our ignorance is cruelty;
While Thou, knowing all, dost not despise
To pardon even such things as we. 1
2. There are two things that may be said about this
knowledge.
(1) It will be thorough. It will be a knowledge through and
through (for that is the meaning of the word). God is a heart-
searching God. There is no secret so deeply buried in us but
God sees it as in the light of day. Even such is the insight into
His truth and character, into His word and works, into His ways
and will, which is promised to those of us who shall be faithful
unto death, in a world beyond the grave. It will be indeed a
thorough knowledge.
(2) It will be comprehensive. God has not only a minute
insight ; He has also a large insight. He not only sees particulars ;
He sees each one of us as a whole. You know how impossible
that is for any one of us with regard to another. We see
particular faults and particular virtues, but we are not able, in
very many instances, nor ought we, to speak decisively of the
character as a whole, whether for good or evil. But God sees
this also. God could judge each one of us at this moment. He
could say, Notwithstanding this fault, that man is my servant ;
notwithstanding that good quality, this man I never knew. And
it shall be thus with our knowledge hereafter. Not only shall
we believe and understand this item and that item, separately,
of God's truth, but we shall see it all in its connection, in its
combination, in its reconciling harmony, in its perfect unity.
There will no longer be any spaces and gaps in our knowledge.
There will be no longer crevasses and chasms, to be vaulted over
1 Susan
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 385
on a staff of faith. " The crooked " will then have been " made
straight," and " the rough places plain " (Isa. xl. 4) ; and " all flesh
will see," as in one view, " the salvation of God " (Luke iii. 6).
Then will not only wisdom be, as she ever has been, "justified of
her children" (Matt. xi. 19), but also the ways of God will be
universally and finally justified to men.
Knowledge who hath it? Nay, not thou,
Pale student, pondering thy futile lore !
A little space it shall be thine, as now
'Tis his whose funeral passes at thy door:
Last night a clown that scarcely knew to spell
Now he knows all. wondrous miracle ! x
III,
WHAT SHALL WE SEE AND KNOW?
1. God. Human knowledge, then, imperfect as it must
necessarily be, is consecrated by the thought that it has for its
goal the vision of God, of whose Being and Doing all that we
can see and learn here is the reflection, " broken lights " piercing
earth's mists from the central sun upon which no mortal man
could gaze unveiled and live.
(1) The entrance on the next world must bring with it a
knowledge of God such as is impossible in this life. In this life
many men talk of God, and some men think much and deeply
about Him. But here men do not attain to that sort of direct
knowledge of God which the Bible calls "sight." We do not
see a human soul. The soul makes itself felt in conduct, in con-
versation, in the lines of the countenance ; although these often
enough mislead us. The soul speaks through the eye, which
misleads us less often. That is to say, we know that the soul
is there, and we detect something of its character and power and
drift. We do not see it. In the same way we feel God present
in nature, whether in its awe or in its beauty; and in human
history, whether in its justice or in its weird mysteriousness ; and
in the life of a good man, or the circumstances of a generous or
noble act. Most of all we feel Him near when conscience, His
inward messenger, speaks plainly and decisively to us. Con-
1 Thomas B. Aldrich,
I COR. 25
386 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
science, that invisible prophet, surely appeals to and implies a
law, and a law implies a legislator. But we do not see Him.
" No man hath seen God at any time " ; even " the only begotten
Son, which is in the bosom of the Father," is only said to have
" declared him," since in Him the Godhead was veiled from earthly
sight by that mantle of Flesh and Blood which, together with a
human soul, He assumed in time.
But after death there will be a change. It is said of our
Lord's glorified Manhood, united as it is for ever to the Person
of the Eternal Son, that " every eye shall see him, and they also
which pierced him." Even the lost will then understand much
more of what God is to the universe and to themselves, although
they are excluded from the direct vision of God.
(2) What will that first apprehension of God, under the new
conditions of the other life, be ? There are trustworthy accounts
of men who have been utterly overcome at the first sight of a
fellow-creature with whose name and work they had for long
years associated great wisdom, or goodness, or ability; the first
sight of the earthly Jerusalem has endowed more than one
traveller with a perfectly new experience in the life of thought
and feeling. What must not the first direct sight of God be,
the Source of all beauty, of all wisdom, of all power, when the
eye opens upon Him after death ! " Thine eyes shall see the
King in his beauty " were words of warning as well as words of
promise. What will it not be to see Him in those first few
moments God, the Eternal Love, God, the consuming Fire as
we shall see Him in the first five minutes after death !
^[ An Indian officer, who in his time had seen a great deal of
service, and had taken part in more than one of those decisive
struggles by which the British authority was finally established
in the East Indies, had returned to end his days in this country,
and was talking with his friends about the most striking experi-
ences of his professional career. They led him, by their sympathy
and their questions, to travel in memory through a long series of
years; and as he described skirmishes, battles, sieges, personal
encounters, hair-breadth escapes, the outbreak of the mutiny and
its suppression, reverses, victories all the swift alternations of
anxiety and hope which a man must know who is entrusted with
command, and is before the enemy their interest in his story,
as was natural, became keener and more exacting. At last he
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 387
paused with the observation, " I expect to see something much
more remarkable than anything I have been describing." As he
was some seventy years of age, and was understood to have
retired from active service, his listeners failed to catch his mean-
ing. There was a pause ; and then he said in an undertone, " I
mean in the first five minutes after death." x
(3) Distinguish between those who say, " We know nothing,"
and those who say with the Apostle, " We know in part." When
we are only speculating, God will seem to us very incomprehensible,
very unknowable; His nature and mode of working do always
baffle our understandings : " how unsearchable are his judgements,
and his ways past tracing out!" But then we turn to the
revelation of God which has been given us in our Lord Jesus
Christ. As we study that, we shall hardly be inclined to
complain of necessary ignorance; rather shall we be moved to
exclaim with St. Paul that in Christ " are hid all the treasures
of wisdom and knowledge." The impressions concerning God
and the Father which we received from the Lord Jesus grow
into secure knowledge as they are verified by life and experience,
and as we learn what the conditions of human progress and well-
being are. How, we ask, can men live without faith and hope
and love, and how can faith and hope and love be awakened
and preserved without Divine righteousness and encouragement
and goodness to which they may respond ?
2. Our fellows. This chapter is the glorious hymn of love.
The religious fervour, the intellectual conquests, the accumulated
philosophy of succeeding centuries, have produced nothing nobler
than this. You cannot "praise" this perfect utterance. You
might as well " approve " the perpetual rainbow over the Fluela
Fall or the after-glow in an Alpine sky. The Apostle exhausts
the resources of inspired eloquence in exposition of love. And
he looks for the maturing, the completion, the perfection of this
Christian grace. When such full-blossomed love has come, we
shall see with perfect clearness. In proportion as it comes, we
shall see better. When love has her perfect work, we shall see
so distinctly that the vision may be said to be " face to face."
Yes ; that we have always understood. But what is it that we
shall see? What but the object of our love our fellow-man?
1 H. P. Liddon,
388 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
Towards whom have you exercised love ? Your brother-man,
your neighbour, your friend, your rival, your foe. Then, as your
love deepens, your vision of him will clear. As you think more
charitably of him you will understand him better. When love
towards him is perfected, you will see him face to face.
^f Doubtless the words " face to face " apply primarily to the
vision of God in the perfected manhood. But, as the greater
includes the lesser, this recognition of God involves the recogni-
tion of loved ones.
U Pilgrims no longer, nor longer disguised from one another
by the suspicions and concealments of this life, nor hidden from
each other, as here the most closely linked hearts must be, by
the necessary solitude and loneliness of every individual life, in
which we must live so largely and, in all our tenderest sensi-
bilities, so entirely alone. There hearts shall open to hearts
spontaneously as the flowers to the sun, and there soul shall
communicate itself to the soul it loves as naturally as the dews
nourish the white lilies of the wood. The armour of light, so
often blood-stained and torn, is unlaced; the shield and sword
laid down at the King's feet, and the soft clothing of peace put on.
Tf " It is not easy, at the best, for two persons talking
together to make the most of each other's thoughts, there are
so many of them."
This was a remark made by the Autocrat of the Breakfast-
Table to the assembled guests. And the company looked as if
they wanted an explanation. So the Autocrat went on.
" When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together,
it is natural that among the six there should be more or less
confusion and misapprehension."
The people thought that the Autocrat had suddenly gone
mad. The landlady turned pale. The old gentleman opposite
thought the Autocrat might seize the carving-knife. But he
proceeded to explain that at the fewest six personalities are
distinctly to be recognized as taking part in the dialogue between
John and Thomas. There is (1) the real John, known only to
his Maker ; (2) John's ideal John, never the real one, and often
very unlike him ; (3) Thomas's ideal John, never the real John,
nor John's John ; but often very unlike either. In precisely
the same way there are three Thomases. There is Thomas as he
really is, as God sees him ; Thomas as he thinks he is ; and
Thomas as John thinks he is. In all, there are six people. No
wonder two disputants often get angry when there are six of
them talking and listening at the same time !
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 389
TJ There is a truth in the word that marriages are made in
heaven. You may remember that Charles Kingsley had put on
his grave, which was to be his wife's, " We have loved, we love,
we shall love." Death does not, as most of us know, put an end
to love. We love the dead because they are the living. Death
separates, it is all that it can do ; it cannot annihilate. Surely
then, when death is destroyed the law of separation will be
disannulled, and those who loved and love will meet again and
enjoy one another's love again. I say then, because we shall
have full knowledge of our past life, because we preserve our
individuality in the resurrection change, because in the other
world we know and are known, because we are perfectly mani-
fested by our spiritual bodies, and because by means of their
powers we shall perfectly discern, because of the mutual attraction
of love love which was stronger than death, we shall, I feel
confident, recognize one another in the life of the world to come.
And it will be a full recognition ; our hearts in perfect sympathy
will beat one with another, answering love for love. 1
3. Ourselves. At our entrance on another world we shall
know our old selves as never before. The past will lie spread out
before us, and we shall take a comprehensive survey of it. Each
man's life will be displayed to him as a river, which he traces
from its source in a distant mountain till it mingles with the
distant ocean. The course of that river lies sometimes through
dark forests which hide it from view, sometimes through sands or
marshes in which it seems to lose itself. Here it forces a passage
-t O
angrily between precipitous rocks, there it glides gently through
meadows which it makes green and fertile. At one time it might
seem to be turning backwards out of pure caprice ; at another to
be parting, like a gay spendthrift, with half its volume of waters ;
while later on it receives contributory streams that restore its
strength ; and so it passes on, till the ebb and flow of the tides
upon its bank tells that the end is near. What will not the
retrospect be when, after death, we survey, for the first time, as
with a bird's-eye view the whole long range the strange vicissi-
tudes, the loss and the gain, as we deem it, the failures and the
triumphs of our earthly existence ; when we measure it, as never
before, in its completeness, now that it is at last over !
This, indeed, is the characteristic of the survey after death,
that it will be complete.
1 F. Watson, The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, 240.
390 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
There no shade can last,
In that deep dawn behind the tomb,
But clear from marge to marge shall bloom
The eternal landscape of the past.
In entering another world we shall know as never before what
we have been in the past ; but we shall know also what we are.
Our present thoughts, feelings, mental habits, good and bad, are
the effects of what we have done or left undone, of cherished
impressions, of passions indulged or repressed, of pursuits
vigorously embraced or willingly abandoned. And as our past
mental and spiritual history has made us what we are, so we are
at this very moment making ourselves what we shall be.
^[ Eichard le Gallienne delighted us some years ago by a
brilliant essay on " Life in Inverted Commas." He represented
himself as watching from the top of an omnibus in Fleet Street
the capture of a notorious plagiarist by detectives in the employ of
the Incorporated Society of Authors, who led him away secured
between strong inverted commas. This set him thinking. And
he looked round at his companions in the 'bus. " There was the
young dandy just let loose from his band-box, wearing exactly
the same face, the same smile, the same neck-tie, holding his
stick in exactly the same fashion, talking exactly the same words,
with precisely the same accent, as his neighbour, another dandy,
and as all the other dandies between the Bank and Hyde Park
Corner. Looking at these examples of Nature's love of repeating
herself," he goes on, " I said to myself : Somewhere in heaven
stands a great stencil, and at each sweep of the cosmic brush a
million dandies are born, each one alike as a box of collars.
Indeed, I felt that this stencil process had been employed in the
manufacture of every single person in the omnibus : two middle-
aged matrons, each of whom seemed to think that having given
birth to six children was an indisputable claim to originality;
two elderly business men to correspond ; a young miss, carrying
music and wearing eyeglasses ; and a clergyman discussing stocks
with one of the business men; I alone in my corner being, of
course, the one occupant for whom Nature had been at the
expense of casting a special mould, and at the extravagance of
breaking it ! " To be sure " /, myself" am the original one. And
each one of us is an " /, myself ! " x
1 C. F. Aked.
THESE THREE.
391
LITERATURE.
Abbott (E. A.), Oxford Sermons, 86.
Alexander (S. A.), The Christianity of St. Paul, 50.
Bevan (LI. D.), in Welshmen in English Pulpits, 266.
Bigg (C.), The Spirit of Christ in Common Life, 260.
Bryant (S.), The Teaching of Christ, 98.
Campbell (L.), The Christian Ideal, 175.
Church (R. W.), Advent Sermons, 89 ; Village Sermons, iii. 74.
Clifford (J.), Typical Christian Leaders, 153.
Collyer (R.), Nature and Life, 62, 72.
Cross (J.), Pauline Charity, 239, 254.
Daplyn (E.), One with the Eternal, 62.
Davies (J.), The Kingdom without Observation, 103.
(J. LI.), Spiritual Apprehension, 26.
Drumrnond (H.), The Greatest Thing in the World, 1.
(R. J.), Faith's Certainties, 235.
Gairdner (W. T.), The Three Things that Abide, 72.
Gibson (J. M.), A Strong City, 53.
Grimley (H. N.), Tremadoc Sermons, 261.
Gwatkin (H. M.), The Eye for Spiritual Things, 81.
Henson (H. H.), Christ and the Nation, 296.
Hughes (H. P.), The Philanthropy of God, 29.
Inge (W. R.), All Saints' Sermons, 20.
Ingram (A. F. W.), Banners of the Christian Faith, 32.
Jerdan (C.), For the Lambs of the Flock, 221.
Lockyer (T. F.), Inspirations of the Christian Life, 35.
Lorimer (G. C.), The Modern Crisis in Religion, 230.
Maclaren (A.), Creed and Conduct, 26.
Matheson (G.), Thoughts for Life's Journey, 19.
Parkhurst (C. H.), A Little Lower than the Angels, 146.
The Sunny Side of Christianity, 1.
Pearse (M. G.), Parables and Pictures, 243.
Reynolds (H. R.), Light and Peace, 116.
Robinson (J. A.), Unity in Christ, 181.
Rowland (A.), The Exchanged Crowns, 29.
Salmon (G.), Gnosticism and Agnosticism, 205.
Sanderson (T.), Unfulfilled Designs, 100.
Simpson (A. R.), These Three, 39, 53.
Skrine (J. H.), The Heart's Counsel, 115.
Smith (D.), Man's Need of God, 13.
Thorn (J. H.) 5 A Spiritual Faith, 124.
Wilson (J. M.), Clifton College Sermons, ii. 111.
THESE THREE.
But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three ; and the greatest of these
is love. i Cor. xiii. 13.
1. IF St. Paul had left us nothing but this exquisite hymn in
praise of heavenly love, he would have established his claim to be
a great religious genius. Happily it loses nothing in the English
Version. The scholars who translated the Bible for James i.'s
government seldom failed to rise to a great occasion; and this
chapter in the Authorized Version is one of the finest bits of
prose poetry that have been written in our language. But the
lyric rapture is St. Paul's own. He was not, perhaps, a poet by
nature; and a Eabbinical education was enough to dry up any
but a very copious spring of poetic talent. But every now and
then he is carried quite out of himself, and his words glow with
a white heat of fervour and emotion. To read the thirteenth
chapter after the twelfth, in which he discusses the relative
merits of speaking with tongues and prophesying, is almost
startling. " The more excellent way " once mentioned, the tide of
pure inspiration flows swift and strong.
2. But even more remarkable than the sublime poetry of
this chapter is the concluding verse : " Now abideth faith, hope,
love, these three ; but the greatest of these is love." In this verse
St. Paul has found an absolutely complete and satisfactory
formula for the Christian character. Faith, hope, and love, with
love in the place of honour is not this Christianity in a nutshell ?
Within a few years after the Ascension, St. Paul has not only
penetrated to the very heart of Christ's teaching, but has given
us the kernel of the whole Gospel in one of those illuminating
phrases which' are a necessity for every great movement. So at
least the Church has always felt. The three emblematic figures
393
394 THESE THREE
of the "theological virtues," as they were called, have been
favourite themes of Christian art and Christian eloquence all
over the world. What the cardinal virtues, Justice, Fortitude,
Prudence, and Temperance were to pagan antiquity ; what Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity were to the French Eevolution; what
the Eights of Man were to the founders of the American Eepublic ;
what the three stages in the spiritual ascent Purification,
Illumination, Union with God have been to mystics of all ages
and countries, that Faith, Hope, and Love have been and are to
the Christian. The imitation of Christ means the life of Faith,
the life of Hope, the life of Love.
^[ Greek philosophy had proclaimed four cardinal virtues
justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude. Christian philosophy,
following St. Paul, has taught during nineteen centuries that
there are three specifically Christian graces they are more than
virtues three primary and fundamental spiritual dispositions,
which must dominate and permeate all true Christian character
Faith and Hope and Love.
This is one of the greatest of the great texts of the Bible.
Let us take it in six parts
Faith.
Hope.
Love.
These Three.
These Three Abide.
The Greatest of these Three.
FAITH.
1. St. Paul has written as vigorously of faith, if not with as
much seraphic eloquence, as he here writes of love. He penned
the most intellectual and profound of all his Epistles that to
the Eomans to indicate the essential excellence, the justifying
and soul-saving power of faith. We who have come to receive the
truth which filled and fired the soul of the Apostle Paul have
learned that by faith the just live. It is a rational and necessary
spiritual ingredient of the truest manhood. We regard it as the
channel through which God's righteousness pours into the soul ;
as our gate of access into the kingdom of grace, standing like the
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 395
Propylaea at Athens before the Acropolis, and giving entrance
to the temple not only of love, but also of wisdom. St. Paul
went so far as to say that any moral activity into which this
quality did not enter was vitiated and unworthy. In one of his
letters he describes faith as the light by which the soul walks :
" A light that never was on sea or land," but which glows in the
mind of man. To his thinking this virtue was so needful and
important that the whole doctrine which he proclaimed he called
by this name. He speaks of "preaching the faith" which he
once persecuted, meaning by it both the Christian doctrine and
the Christian Church. Our warfare he calls " the fight of faith " ;
so that in his thirteen letters, from the First Epistle to the
Thessalonians to the letters addressed to Philemon, St. Paul
sounds forth a thousand notes from this golden string.
2. What is the antithesis of faith? Is it Eeason? Do I
believe some things because I am convinced by evidence that they
are true, and other things because the Church tells me to believe
them, or because it is a meritorious act to force myself to believe
them ? Is faith an act of submission to authority ? Is there any
truth in the answer of the child, who, according to the story, said,
"Faith means believing what you know to be untrue"? Look
out some of the places where faith is mentioned in the New
Testament, and see whether it is ever opposed to Eeason. You
will find that it never is : it is opposed to sight. Faith is not
the acceptance of certain historical propositions on insufficient
evidence. It is trust in God and goodness.
It is the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest and
highest hypothesis that we can conceive. It is the spirit of
Athanasius when he stood " against the world " ; of Luther when
he said, " God help me, I can do no otherwise " ; of Job when he
said, " Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him " ; of the three
children in the furnace when they said, " He will deliver us out
of thy hand, King. But if not, we will not serve thy gods."
It is the spirit which has given courage to all the martyrs to
face death. Faith is the confidence that somehow or other the
right must triumph, that God is stronger than Satan.
TJ I resolved that at any rate I would act as if the Bible were
true ; that if it were not, at all events I should be no worse off
396 THESE THREE
than I was before ; that I would believe in Christ, and take Him
for my Master in whatever I did; that assuredly to disbelieve
the Bible was quite as difficult as to believe it ; that there were
mysteries either way ; and that the best mystery was that which
gave me Christ for a Master. And when I had done this I fell
asleep directly. When I rose in the morning the cold and cough
were gone; and though I was still unwell, I felt a peace and
spirit in me I had never known before, at least to the same
extent; and the next day I was quite well, and everything has
seemed to go right with me ever since, all discouragement and
difficulties vanishing even in the smallest things. 1
(1) Faith is trust in the saving power of Christ. " Believe on
the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved " would seem to
be the simplest of all directions. Many, in Apostolic times,
hesitated to believe, but none hesitated as to what belief was.
A heathen or pagan never asks a missionary what is meant by
faith. The very simplicity of the act prevents its definition.
Like time and space, the more we think about faith, the less
we understand it. It must be felt, not analysed. It cannot be
analysed. Many a Christian life has been mournfully chequered
by dark and cheerless seasons, from the habit of thinking about
faith instead of the object of faith, about the acts of the mind
instead of the truths of God, the manner of believing instead of
the testimony to be believed. Faith leads the soul bo act on
what it credits. It includes not only the belief of what is true,
and the desire of what is good, but the choice of what is right.
We may believe many things which have no possible connection
with our conduct. Many of the propositions of Scripture are not
the proper objects of trust, though they are of belief. We believe
on the ground of evidence, we trust on the ground of character.
We believe a truth, we trust a person. I might believe and not
trust, but I cannot trust and not believe. So the specific act of
faith which unites to Christ terminates upon His person, an
existing, living, loving personality. It is not a doctrine concern-
ing Christ that saves me, but trust in the saving power of Christ.
It is not a specific theory of faith, but the practical grasp of faith,
that saves. Salvation is not the formation of a right creed in
my understanding ; it is the quickening of a spiritual life in my
soul.
1 Letter from Ruskin to his father in E. T. Cook's Life of Buskin, i. 271.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 397
TJ Faith is that strong buoyant confidence in God and in His
love which gives energy and spirit to do right without doubt or
despondency. Where God sees that, He sees the spring and
fountain out of which all good springs : He sees, in short, the
very life of Christ begun, and He reckons that to be righteous-
ness ; just as a small perennial fountain in Gloucestershire is the
Thames, though it is as yet scarcely large enough to float a
schoolboy's boat ; and just as you call a small seedling not bigger
than a little almond peeping above the ground, an oak ; for the
word "justify" means not to be made righteous, but to reckon or
account righteous. 1
^[ I am not sure that we are much the better for our attempted
definitions of Faith. Baxter connects it with the doctrine of the
mystical union ; Lampe defines it as a willingness to be saved by
Christ ; Halyburton and Owen as a cordial acceptance of the
offer; Sandernan as simple belief in simple testimony. Well, a
man is sometimes very little the better for a definition, and all
these perplex as well as enlighten. But " none perish that Him
trust " none perish that Him trust. 2
(2) Faith is also trust in God as a Father. If there is a word
more expressive of Christian character than any other, it is this
one: trust trust in God. It is the secret source of all peace
and serenity. It will comfort and sustain when nothing else can.
It gives the child of God the delightful assurance that all his
trials are disguised blessings, the appointment of a Father's
wisdom, and the infliction of a Father's love. And death itself
becomes the security and enlargement of life, a training for that
holy intimacy with Himself which is to constitute the blessedness
of the heavenly world. " Though he slay me, yet will I trust in
him." The bringing of good out of evil is His grand prerogative.
He permits the evil in order to produce the good. The Christian's
character is formed more from his trials than from his enjoyments.
The picture would have no beauty or effect without shade.
TI Christ's faith in His Father was as conspicuous as His
faith in the mission He had to accomplish, of which He said on
the cross, " It is finished ! " His vindication He left entirely in
His Father's hands, when He yielded up His spirit, in a complete
surrender of self, saying, "Father, into thy hands I commend
my spirit!". I am not forgetting that He was the everlasting
1 F. "W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 335.
8 "Rabbi" Duncan, in Memoir of John Duncan, 414,
398 THESE THREE
Word, the only begotten of the Father, when I speak thus, but
I wish to remind you that He really became man having limited
Himself, having " emptied " Himself, as St. Paul said, that He
might become the true Brother of humanity, the Son of Man,
sharing with us, in everything save sin, the necessity and the
blessedness of faith. 1
^[ The faith of our time has had to pass through fiery furnaces
of tribulation. It has survived the shock of losing its Infallible
Church. It has survived the shock of losing its Infallible Book.
It has surrendered, at the bidding of science, that latest voice of
God the Garden of Eden, and the world made in six days, and
the dream of man's primal innocence. It presumes no longer to
penetrate dark mysteries. It cannot reconcile Foreknowledge
and Free Will. It cannot reconcile the apparent cruelty of
nature with the lovingness of God. It understands neither
heaven nor hell. It has learnt to trust, humbly and without
reserve, in Christ. "Blessed are they that have not seen, and
yet have believed." That surely is the truest faith of all the
ages, to have lived in an atmosphere of unbelief, to have faced
and endured all the assaults of modern doubt, and still to trust
"in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, by honour and dis-
honour, by evil report and good report, as dying, and behold we
live, as chastened and not killed " still, with deeper intensity
than ever, to believe in God and Christ and Eternal Life.
I little see, I little know,
Yet can I fear no ill;
He who hath guided me till now
Will be my leader still.
No burden yet was on me laid
Of trouble or of care,
But He my trembling step hath stayed,
And given me strength to bear.
I came not hither of my will
Or wisdom of mine own :
That Higher Power upholds me still,
And still must bear me on.
I knew not of this wondrous earth,
Nor dreamed what blessings lay
Beyond the gates of human birth
To glad my future way.
1 A. Rowland, The Exchanged Croivns, 33.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 399
And what beyond this life may be
As little I divine
What love may wait to welcome me,
What fellowships be mine.
I know not what beyond may lie,
But look, in humble faith,
Into a larger life to die,
And find new birth in death.
He will not leave my soul forlorn ;
I still must find Him true,
Whose mercies have been new each morn
And every evening new.
Upon His providence I lean,
As lean in faith I must:
The lesson of my life hath been
A heart of grateful trust.
And so my onward way I fare
With happy heart and calm,
And mingle with my daily care
The music of my psalm. 1
(3) It is enough to name one further aspect of faith : Faith is
spiritual insight. This is the way in which the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews regards faith. He says it is " the sub-
stance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
These words impress upon our minds the thought that, correspond-
ing to all the longings which possess the Christian soul, to all the
desires and yearnings which spring up within the soul that is
earnestly striving to attain to the Christlike and Divine
corresponding to all these are glorious realities; that the up-
springing desires shall not be in vain; that the soul which
remains steadfast in hope, which clings with brave perseverance
to the hopeful yearnings which from time to time unfold them-
selves to consciousness within its inward recesses, begins by-and-
by to feel by anticipation the very substance of what it has
hoped for within its grasp, by-and-by attains to the power of
seeing before it in mystic vision the glorious spiritual realities,
the thoughts of which presented themselves at first only as dimly
discerned but irrepressible desires. Faith then is spiritual in-
1 Frederick Lucian Hosmer,
400 THESE THREE
sight. It has been called the eye of the soul. It is more than
this ; it is the soul seeing, the soul beholding, the things of
heaven ; the soul looking upon the things not seen by the
bodily eye looking upon the glories of the spiritual world, upon
the wonders of that invisible world which is ever around us,
ever underlying the natural world.
Tf By the aid of that mental insight, which, because it is
directed towards matters of a scientific import, has been called
scientific imagination, men have been able to have within their
minds a vivid representation of the marvellous vibratory move-
ments of the mysterious ether, and their rapid transmission in
one vast tide of light through the infinite space around us. By
the aid of the same power of imagination, that other swiftly-
acting vibratory motion which has only in recent times become
obedient to man's control, that vibratory motion which enables
us with magic speed to send tidings even to countries separated
from us by ocean abysses and by wide-spreading continents, by
the aid of the same imaginative power, the mind is able to discern
the vibrations of the all-pervading ether with which we associate
the term electricity. God who thus endows that part of our
inner being which we call the mind with marvellous powers, also
endows that which we speak of as the soul of which the mind
is indeed but a faculty with corresponding powers. Within all
souls longing after a fuller knowledge of Divine things God is
ever breathing the breath . of a diviner life ; and as this sacred
breath this Holy Spirit abides with us to animate us, our
enkindled spiritual imaginations discern more and more of the
mystic glories of heaven towards which the longings of our souls
have been directed. This spiritual imagination which enables us
to see as in a vision the substantial realities which the soul has
been possessed with longings for ; which enables the soul to have
a vivid conviction that it has entered upon the life of reconcilia-
tion with God, which enables it to discern the transcendent
glory of the future life of ever-advancing union with the Divine,
which enables it to discern the underlying import of such words
as Atonement and Sacrament, to recognize the oneness of the
life of the redeemed on earth and in heaven with the great life
of God, to behold the unity which binds things seen with things
unseen, the correspondence which exists between things natural
and things spiritual, this spiritual imagination which has such
potency within us, is the Divine gift of faith which is defined for
us in the Epistle to the Hebrews in such suggestive words. 1
1 H. N. Grimley.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 401
Canst thou discern beneath all outward seeming,
The hidden meaning, oft concealed from sight?
The secrets wherewith nature's heart is teeming,
The deep soul-vision of a clearer light ?
Say, dost thou understand the whisper'd token,
The promise breath'd from every leaf and flower?
And dost thou hear the word ere it be spoken,
And apprehend love's presence by its power ?
Canst thou discover in the lives around thee,
How small events to mighty issues lead ?
And does the storm's voice nevermore astound thee,
Since every God-sent message thou canst read ?
Then, Heaven-gifted thou, to whom is broken
Th' eternal revelation, calm and clear
As they to whom, long since the words were spoken,
"He that hath ears to hear" yea, let him hear. 1
HOPE.
1. The question occurs to us sometimes, more or less con-
sciously, why hope should be ranked so high, placed on a level
with faith and love. We can understand why faith should be so
singled out; it is the foundation of the whole structure of
religion; it is the bond between the creature and his invisible
Maker and God; it is the special title of his acceptance; it is
the ground of his self-devotion and obedience, of his highest and
noblest ventures. Still more can we understand it of love ; for
love brings us near, hi the essential qualities of character, to Him
whom we believe in and worship ; love is the faint and distant
likeness of Him who so loved the world that He gave His only-
begotten Son to save it ; love must last and live and increase,
under whatever conditions the regenerate nature exists, the same
in substance, however differing in degree, in the humblest
penitent on earth and in adoring saint or seraph in the eternal
world. But hope is thought of, at first sight, as a self-regarding
quality; something which throws forward its desires into the
future, and dwells on what it imagines of happiness for itself.
And hope, of all things, is delusive and treacherous ; it tempts to
1 Una, In Life's Garden, 93.
I COR, 26
402 THESE THREE
security and self-deceit ; it tempts us to dreams which cannot be
realized, which divert us from the necessary and wholesome
realities which do concern us : it is the mother of half the mis-
takes, half the fruitless wanderings, half the unhappiness of the
world. How comes it that such a quality is placed on a level with
faith and love ? What need of encouragement to what men are
only too ready to do of themselves ?
K So far from being always considered a virtue, Hope has
been stigmatized as a dangerous deceiver or as a luxury not to be
indulged in by the weak. " Hope," says the Athenian in Thucy-
dides, " the procuress of peril, cannot indeed destroy, though she
may harm, those of her employers who have a reserve to fall
back upon : but to those who risk their all upon the issue of her
services and a costly servant she assuredly is she unmasks
herself only in the moment of their ruin, when her victims have
no resource left to defend themselves against her recognized
treachery." Poets in the same strain cry shame upon this
delusive phantom, and protest that they are
tired of waiting for this ehymick gold,
Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.
^[ " Hope," says Owen Feltham, " is the bladder a man will
take wherewith to learn to swim ; then he goes beyond return,
and is lost." And Lee,
Hope is the fawning traitor of the mind,
Which, while it cozens with a coloured friendship,
Kobs us of our best virtue, resolution.
1J The twentieth century is as sad as Marcus Aurelius. Our
music is sad. Our poetry when we get any is sad. Our
drama, when it is serious, is half-morbid. Our greatest
writers of fiction are pessimists, and deem a good ending, not
only bad art, but false to fact. Our preachers Heaven pardon
them! seem somehow to have lost fire and hope, and preach
as though Christ were indeed in the ship, but asleep. Our
philosophy has culminated in the insane ravings against God and
man of Nietzsche, or, for the more reverent, in the pathetic
Epicureanism of Omar
One moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste,
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing oh, make haste. 1
1 W. Hudson Shaw.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 403
2. But it is not really strange that St. Paul should raise hope
to a Christian temper of the first order. St. Paul was a student
of Scripture and of the history of his people and of religion in the
world. And what is on the surface of the Bible is the way in
which from first to last it is one unbroken, persistent call to hope
to look from the past and the present to the future. Its contents,
we know, are manifold and various ; the subjects which it treats
are widely different, and it is different in different parts of it in
its way of treating them ; it is the record of enormous changes, of
a great progressive advance in God's dispensations and of man's
light and character, of the long and wonderful education of the
Law and the Prophets; its story of uninterrupted tendency is
strangely chequered in fact ; bright and dark succeed one another
with the most unexpected turns lofty faith and the meanest
disloyalty, great achievement and unexpected failure, lessons of
the purest goodness and most heartfelt devotion with the falls
and sins of saints, blessing and chastisement, the patience of God,
and the incorrigible provocations of His people. In spite of all
that is wonderful and glorious in it, it sounds like the most
disastrous and unpromising of stories; and yet that is not its
result. For amid the worst and most miserable conditions there
is one element which is never allowed to disappear the strength
of a tenacious and unconquerable hope. Hope, never destroyed,
however overthrown, never obscured even amid the storm and
dust of ruin, is the prominent characteristic of the Old Testament.
All leads back to hope, hope of the loftiest and most assured kind,
even after the most fatal defeats, of changes which seem beyond
remedy. The last word is always hope.
The whole Bible, from first to last, is one unbroken, persistent
call to hope. Some of the most wonderful and soul-stirring words
of revelation are those in which hope is spoken of. " The God of
hope" "We are saved by hope" "Jesus Christ who is our
hope" "Christ in you, the hope of glory" "Begotten again
into a living hope " these are expressions which only familiarity
could deprive of their commanding power.
K We call St. Paul the Apostle of Faith, and rightly.
Equally the^ great teacher who, in a sudden moment of unique
inspiration, recalling what Jesus was when He lived on earth,
gave us the 13th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians,
404 THESE THREE
was the Apostle of Love. But just as truly, perhaps even
more emphatically, was St. Paul, above all things else, an Apostle
of Hope. It is impossible to mistake it ; he was himself the very
embodiment of the Christian grace he taught. He never defined
it, but his whole life illustrated what he meant. Save in his
argumentative passages, it is his characteristic word always when
exhorting, trying his hardest to help. "Now the God of hope
fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound
in hope." " Sorrow not, even as the rest, which have no hope."
"Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable,
always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye
know that your labour is not vain in the Lord." That is the
note which peals like a trumpet through all the Pauline
Epistles. 1
3. Even the common sense of mankind tells us that life
would be but a poor shrunken thing without hope; and even
the poet who reviles its " chymick gold," marvels at the fascina-
tion which it still imparts to the future in spite of our
monotonous and oft-repeated experience of the flat unprofitable
past
Strange cozenage ! Who would live past days again ?
Yet all hope pleasure from what still remain.
Surely the common sense of the world is right. While recog-
nizing that hope may be an evil if it makes us careless or
indolent, trustful to chance or to luck or to interpositions of
Providence rather than to our own energies and skill, we cannot
fail to see that hopelessness is a still greater evil, paralysing
energy and neutralizing skill. No business in life, however
purely intellectual, can dispense with hope as a stimulus to
activity. That impulse which the immediate pressure of pleasure
or pain gives to irrational animals, hope gives to human beings,
who are endowed with the faculty or necessity of looking forward.
Who could toil on through threescore years or more in hopeless-
ness ? " Work without hope," says Coleridge, " draws nectar in
a sieve " ; and, indeed, what possibility is there that any human
being, however richly endowed with genius, should ever produce
the durable results that come from harmonious and continuous
effort, or give birth to anything but the perishable expressions
1 W. Hudson Shaw.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 405
of a mere spasmodic outburst, if he had no durable hope of any-
thing in heaven or earth ?
U Hope is the minister of strength. When I think of the
virtue called Hope two pictures come to my mind. One is the
work of a great living painter : it is a piece of symbolism, a
gracious, frail, pathetic figure, the eyes blinded with a veil, the
head bent and turned on one side with the intentness of a listener
to catch the music sounded on the one unbroken chord of her
lyre, on which all strings but this are gone. A touchingly beauti-
ful conception ; but this is human hope, not Divine. The other
picture is the very familiar one which may have met your eye
on many a church window a figure not pathetic, weak, forlorn,
but strong and brave as Fortitude ; and in her hand not the lyre
of broken strings, but the stout shaft and the iron grappling
hooks of her mighty anchor; the anchor which entereth into
that within the veil, the deeps of the world unseen, and from
thence, whatever storm may swing their surface, holds the soul
fast. 1
If To the quenchless hope in their souls all the strong heroes
of the past, from Leonidas to King Alfred, from Alfred to Hilde-
brand, from Hildebrand to Cromwell and Lord Chatham and
Washington and Mazzini, have owed their power. Without it,
Eeligion, facing the stubborn mass of humanity's sin, is paralysed.
To the Christian the shield of faith is no whit more essential
than the helmet of hope. Only to men of undying hope, able
contagiously to kindle courageousness in their fellows, will the
dead weight of the insensate evil of this universe ever yield.
There will be no great Day of the Lord until such leaders arise.
Then sound again the golden horn with promise ever new,
The princely doe will ne'er be caught by those that slack
pursue,
Yes! sound again the horn of Hope, the golden horn!
Answer it, flutes and pipes, from valleys still and lorn;
Warders from your high towers, with trumps of silver
scorn,
And harps in maidens' bowers, with strings from deep
hearts torn,
All answer to the horn of Hope, the golden horn !
4. Hope elevates and strengthens" and inspires. This is why it
is one of the great elements of the religious temper ; this is why
it ranks with faith and love. It is one of the great and necessary
1 J. H. Skrine, The Heart's Counsel, 118.
406 THESE THREE
springs of full religious action. There may be a faith almost
without hope; a faith which still believes, though it can see
nothing ; a faith which refuses to be comforted, which will not
let the distant picture of better things rise before it, but yet
trusts, even in the darkness, to God's truth and goodness. It is
the deep and awful faith of him who said, " Though he slay me
yet will I trust in him " ; of the cry, " My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me ? " It is the touching and childlike
confidence of the prophet "Although the fig-tree shall not
blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the
olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock
shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the
stalls ; yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my
salvation." But the human spirit can hardly stand long the
strain of a hopeless faith; one or other of the elements will
assert its supremacy. And hope is the energy and effort of
faith; the strong self-awakening from the spells of discourage-
ment and listlessness and despair.
What gives its moral value to hope, what makes it a virtue
and a duty, is that in its higher forms it is a real act and striving
of the will and the moral nature; and if any one thinks that
this is an easy process he has yet much to learn of the secrets
of his own heart. It is an act, often a difficult act, of choice and
will, like the highest forms of courage. It is a refusal to be
borne down and cowed and depressed by evil ; a refusal, because
it is not right, to indulge in the melancholy pleasure, no unreal
one, of looking on the dark side of things. It is so that hope
plays so great a part in the spiritual life ; that it fights with such
power on the side of God.
If Millions of men are digging and toiling twelve hours each
day; and God hath sent forth hope to emancipate them from
drudgery. The man digging with his pick hath a far-away look
as he toils. Hope is drawing pictures of a cottage with vines
over the doorway, with some one standing at the gate, a sweet
voice singing over the cradle. Hope makes this home his; it
rests the labourer and saves him from despair. Multitudes
working the stithy and deep mines sweeten their labour and
exalt their toil by aspiring thoughts. Thinking of his little ones
at home, the miner says: "My children shall not be as their
father was; my drudgery is not for self, but for love's sake;
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 407
the sweat of my brow is oil in the lamp of love ; I will light it
to-night on the sacred altar of home." Here is the secret of the
rise and reign of the people. This explains all man's progress
in knowledge and culture. As the fruits and flowers rise rank
upon rank in response to the advancing summer, so all that is
most refined and exalted in man's mind or heart bursts forth in
new ideals, reforms, revolutions, in response to the revelation of
that personal presence from whom all hope and aspiration incess-
antly proceed. 1
5. What is the use, it is asked, of bidding us hope without
giving us first some certain or probable reality to hope about?
The faculty of hope is like the faculty of reason so far as this,
that both must have some foundation of facts whereon to work.
Give us a permanent and reasonable object of hope and we shall
be only too glad to hope ; but without such an object we must
be content to be hopeless. We cannot allow ourselves to be
fooled, even though the fooling may lead us along a path of
happiness. Better the hopeless path of truth than the fool's
paradise of comfortable delusions.
(1) The whole universe, when illuminated by the light that
streams upon it from the Cross of Christ, furnishes us with a
durable object of hope in the Fatherhood of the Maker of the
world, who, in the course of many ages, is conforming man to
the Divine image. The hope of the ultimate perfection of all
things, based upon the sense of the Divine Fatherhood, is the
source of all healthy activity in men. In the strength of this
hope we can look all evil in the face without blenching, and
beneath the abyss of sin discern the vaster abyss of the Divine
love.
(2) But what shall we say to those who tell us that about
the future we may reason but have no right to hope ? Our reply
will be that we cannot reason about the future without taking
into account the evidence that the world was made by a good and
wise Being who has given us many faculties tending to happiness
and righteousness, which faculties He cannot have intended to
fust in us unused; and among the highest of these faculties
stands hope. Furthermore we may point out that healthy
natural hope, though it may work through illusions, does not
1 N. D. Hillis, TJie Investment of Influence, 285.
408 THESE THREE
delude. There is no deception in the Divine Providence which
leads the human soul from the cradle to the grave under the
guidance of unfulfilled hopes. Hope, like faith, may be literally,
but it is not spiritually, deceptive : the spirits of heaven are not
like the fiends
That palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear
And break it to our hope.
Of the word of God's promises we may assert the direct opposite.
That word is never " kept to our ear " and never " broken to our
hope." Just as the faith or trust of the child in the father (who
to him is as a God) is not a delusion but a truth enwrapped in
illusion, so it is with the natural hopes of childhood and of every
age ; with the aspirations of a generous youth and the ambitions
of a virtuous man. These neither "fool us when young" nor
" beggar us when old " ; but, on the contrary, each bright cloud
of hope, breaking as the traveller is allured onward by it from
one stage to another in his lifelong upward journey, reveals a
brighter cloud within, to break in its turn and to disclose a still
brighter interior splendour, till at last those heights are reached
where all clouds shall vanish away, and the mind shall be pre-
pared to receive the direct rays of the Sun of righteousness.
If The characteristic of waning life is said to be disenchantment.
Old men in general are inclined to check the zeal and damp the
ardour of their younger followers. A shrewd observer of life has
said that youth is an illusion, manhood a struggle, old age a regret.
" How many young men," says a great idealist, " have I not hailed
at the commencement of their career, glowing with enthusiasm,
and full of the poetry of great enterprises, whom I see to-day
precocious old men, with the wrinkles of cold calculation on their
brow ; calling themselves free from illusion when they are only
disheartened; and practical when they are only commonplace."
But believing men experience no disillusionment. The leaves of
hope never wither on souls that are rooted in God. Joseph when
dying looks forward with calm and perfect confidence, knowing
that glorious things, and ever more glorious, must be, because
God is. " What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual
promise of the Creator ? " God lives though a hundred Josephs
die. The two characteristics of the Hebrew mind were the up-
ward and the forward look, the one directed to God in the present,
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 409
the other to His coming in increasing power and grace in the
future. Optimism was the distinction of the Hebrews. " In the
absence of Hope and of an ideal of progress, we strike upon one
great difference between the classical Greeks and the Hebrews."
Among the ancient races the Hebrew was like a watcher standing
on a high mountain top, scanning the horizon and catching the
first beams of coming day, while others were still hidden in dark-
ness. The very heart-cry of the Hebrew race is heard in such
words as these
My soul looketh for the Lord
More than watchmen look for the morning;
Yea, more than watchmen for the morning. 1
6. Our hope is for others and for ourselves.
(1) It is for ourselves here and now. There must often be
much to distress and alarm us in the course of things which
interest us now evils which seem without remedy, defeats which
seem final, perplexities through which we cannot see our way,
dark and gloomy clouds rising in menace over our familiar
world. To hope seems to us then like deluding ourselves; we
call it optimism, and instinctive dislike to pain, a determination
not to see the cruel truth. And yet how often has it appeared
in the upshot of things that if in the darkest times any had been
bold enough to hope he would have been amply justified ?
What must have been the feelings of Christians in the fourth
and fifth centuries, when, just as Christianity seemed to have won
its way into the Koman Empire, they saw the fierce northern
barbarians break into it, and the heathen triumph over religion
and civil order ? Which would then have seemed the judgment
of sober good sense the despondency which saw only the fright-
ful mischief, or the bold hope which saw in the barbarians the
seed of a great Christendom ? Yet, who would have been right
and who wrong ?
"It has come," wrote the soberest and also the loftiest of
Christian thinkers in the last century, " I know not how, to be
taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity is not so
much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length
discovered to be fictitious." The ominous symptom has certainly
not grown less ominous ; but could even the calm and large mind
1 J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 165.
4 io THESE THREE
of Bishop Butler have embraced the thought that with this, not
diminished, perhaps aggravated, there might also come a steady
growth of energy and fervour and deepening practical purpose
in the Church and religious men, such as he had certainly not
seen, and could not look for ?
If Hope about ourselves should be encouraged. It is no proof
of devoutness to be always shedding penitential tears, or to be
so sensible of our own weaknesses as to be despondent about our
future. Victory is generally the guerdon of those who expect it,
confident in the Tightness of their cause, and the help of omnipo-
tence on the side of right. When King Kamirez, in the year 909,
vowed to deliver Castile from the shameful tribute imposed by
the Moors of one hundred virgins delivered annually, he collected
his troops and openly defied their King Abdelraman.
The king called God to witness, that come there weal or woe,
Thenceforth no maiden tribute from out Castile should go,
"At least I will do battle on God our Saviour's foe,
And die beneath my banner before I see it so."
He fought with courage but without hope of victory, and after
a furious conflict was defeated on the plain of Clavijo. But that
night (the legend says), while he was sleeping, St. Jago appeared
to him in vision, and promised him the victory. Next morning
he called his officers about him, and told them his dream ; inspired
them also with hope of heavenly aid; and that day the enemy
was overwhelmed by the Christian warriors, and ever since the
war-cry of Spain has been " Santiago." 1
^f The worst of all the woes that trouble faithful hearts is
despair of ever conquering our sins, of ever becoming what the
Lord Christ would have us be. The modern man, Sir Oliver
Lodge tells us, is not troubling much about his sins. I do not
know about that. This I am sure of, that earnest Christians
trouble about nothing so much. While we are young, while we
are yet in the glad spring-time, the hope of victory is ever present.
When we have entered upon the dull, dusty paths of middle age,
there comes a horrible weariness of the conflict. Disappointment,
disillusionment of ourselves, drag us down. Like the Celtic race,
we are always setting forth to the war, always to return vanquished.
Year by year our hearts grow harder and seem to ossify. The
old sins we loathe are with us still; new sins that we never
dreamt of assault us. Character seems not to advance, but to
retrograde, and the enthusiastic impulses of youth have fled.
1 A. Rowland.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 411
What shall save us now, in the second critical period of life, but
the grace of Christian hope, which is not temperament, is not
human quality at all, but a blessed boon from God? By that
gladdening spirit alone shall despair be quelled, demons exorcized,
the old energy of youth recovered, the battle renewed. 1
^[ Nowhere, perhaps, is Hope in relation to one's own future
more beautifully illustrated than in the noontide scene in Pippa
Passes. Phene, a Greek girl, has become the wife of Jules, a
French sculptor. The union is the result of a cruel joke practised
upon him by some students who owed him a grudge; and the
sculptor finds, when it is too late, that the refined woman by
whom he fancied himself loved is but an ignorant girl of the
lowest class, of whom also his enemies have made a tool. Her
remorse at seeing what man she had deceived disarms his anger,
and marks the dawning of a moral sense in her. And this is
what she says
You creature with the eyes !
If I could look for ever up to them,
As now you let me, I believe, all sin,
All memory of wrong done, suffering borne,
Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth
Whence all that's low comes, and there touch and stay
Never to overtake the rest of me.
All that, unspotted, reaches up to you,
Drawn by those eyes! What rises is myself,
Not me the shame and suffering; but they sink,
Are left, I rise above them. Keep me so,
Above the world!
Both he and she are saved. 2
(2) It is for ourselves in the hereafter. For it is simply the
most literal fact that God has set before us, in another state of
being, the most wonderful future, which is within the certain
reach of every single one of us : as much, as certainly, within our
reach, as anything that we know of, which we could obtain to-
morrow. This is the plain, clear, certain promise, without which
Christianity is a dream and a delusion. The life and destiny of
each individual man runs up to this ; this is what he was made
for; for this, he has been taught, and has received God's grace,
and has been tried, and has played his part in the years of time.
1 W. Hudson Shaw. a J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 119.
412 THESE THREE
It is the barest of commonplaces ; and yet to any one who has
tried to open his mind to its reality and certainty, it must have
come with a strange and overpowering force new on every fresh
occasion, like nothing else in the world. For it is one thing to
look forward to some great general event, the triumph of the
saints of God, the final glory of the great company of the
redeemed; one thing to look at all this from the outside, as a
spectator by the power of imagination and thought. It is quite
another, when it comes into your mind that you yourself in the
far-off ages, you yourself, the very person now on earth, are
intended to have your place your certain and definite place
in all that triumph, in all that blessedness, in all that glory ; and
yet surely, to any one that will, this is the prospect ; this, and
nothing less.
Just come from heaven, how bright and fair
The soft locks of the baby's hair,
As if the unshut gates still shed
The shining halo round his head!
Just entering heaven, what sacred snows
Upon the old man's brow repose!
For there the opening gates have strown
The glory from the great white throne. 1
(3) It is for others. That ye may abound in hope, says St.
Paul, hope for ourselves, hope for our neighbour, hope for the
world. Be the sin of our heart what it may, and seventy times
seven the falls of the past, in Christ we know th&t sin shall have
no more dominion over us. Be the sin of our neighbour what it
may, love hopeth all things, and without love we are nothing.
Be the sin of the world what it may, we know who came to take
it away. His arm is not shortened, that it cannot save ; neither
is His ear heavy, that it cannot hear the great and bitter cry
that cometh up from earth to heaven. We may give up hope
when the Saviour of the world confesses Himself defeated, and
all-ruling Love retires for ever baffled from the battlefield of
human wickedness : but until then Christ calls us to set our
hope on Him, and to bear witness of it to the world.
1 Harriet Prescott Spofford.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 413
^ In the England of John Wesley, numbers of men were his
peers in faith. Butler, Toplady, Bomaine, John Newton, had as
firm a grip on what faith can reach as he, and said words as noble
for it. But Wesley had more hopefulness in his little finger
than any other man of them had in his whole body. And so it
was, that, wherever Wesley went, men caught the contagion of
his great hope, and then ran tirelessly as long as they lived,
kindling over all the world. Macaulay does well to say that no
man can write a history of England in the last century, who shall
fail to take into account Wesley's vast influence in the common
English life. 1
Tf It is to be regretted that Edna Lyall's religious stories are
being neglected. They are full, not only of artistic power, but
likewise of rich Christian instruction. In one she describes one
of her characters in this significant fashion : " Carlo had the rare
and enviable gift of seeing people as they might have been under
happier circumstances, and the still rarer gift of treating them as
such." The life of Christ was full of this enviable hopefulness.
Read how He dealt with sinners, and you will rejoice to find that
His compassion dwelt upon them in their sin. 2
If Dr. Westcott has told us what those who are acquainted
with the poet's works will recognize as a statement of fact that
Browning " has dared to look on the darkest and meanest forms
of action and passion, from which we commonly and rightly turn
our eyes, and he has brought back for us, from this universal
survey, a conviction of hope." As a single specimen of this, we
may refer to the scene described in the brief poem bearing the
title, " Apparent Failure." It is a picture of the Morgue in Paris,
into which the poet entered to gaze upon the ghastly spectacles that
there presented themselves the bodies of men who hated life, or
whose ideals were shattered, or whose hearts were broken. And,
after plucking up courage to look fearlessly upon them all, trying
to conceive what such a sight represented, how each victim came
to meet with his terrible fate, he sums up his reflections thus
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst. 3
1 K. Collyer, The Life That Now Is, 68.
2 J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 117.
8 J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 121.
414 THESE THREE
LOVE.
1. Now consider the greatest of the three charity or Christiaa,
love. It is no use studying Greek or Latin to find out what
Christian love is. The dictionaries to consult here are our own
hearts in relation to our nearest and dearest, the thirteenth
chapter of Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, and St. John's
pregnant phrase, "God is love." Christian love is the feeling
begotten in our hearts towards God and towards our fellow-men
by the penetration into our hearts of the sense of the love of God
to us when He gave His Son to die for us. " Herein is love, not
that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be
the propitiation for our sins ... we love, because he first loved
us." That is at once the natural and the supernatural history of
Christian love.
T[ Nothing suggests better what Christian love is than Giotto's
drawing of "Charity" in Padua. It is a corrective to all that
misconception of love which left room for such a phrase as
"cold as charity." This is how Buskin describes the drawing:
"Usually Charity is nursing children or giving money. Giotto
thinks there is little charity in nursing children; bears and
wolves do that for their little ones ; and less still in giving money.
His Charity stands trampling upon bags of gold has no use for
them. She gives only corn and flowers (with her right hand);
and God's angel (to whom she looks) gives her, not even these
but a Heart." 1
*J The great religions of the world are distinguishable from
each other by some supreme characteristic. Thus, the genius of
Hinduism is mysticism, that of Buddhism is asceticism, that of
Parseeism is dualism, that of Mohammedanism is fanaticism, that
of Confucianism is secularism, and that of our own faith is
altruism, or love. No other inference than this is possible from
the teachings of the New Testament. There God is represented
as sending His Son to the earth because He loved, and He in this
way " commends " His love ; and then St. John, seeking to sum up
His nature in a single word, exclaims : " God is love ! " 2
2. Note three things in the very conception of love.
(1) It is a personal relation. The word may, indeed, be used
loosely of our mere liking for inanimate or impersonal objects;
1 R. J. Drummond, Faith's Certainties, 240.
9 G. C. Lorimer, Tfic Modern Crisis in Religion, 233.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 415
it may be degraded to express an animal passion. But all such
uses of the word are either abuses of its meaning or are figurative.
As the modern poet of chivalry has exquisitely expressed it:
" True love's the gift which God has given to man alone beneath
the heaven ; " it is " the tie, which heart to heart, and mind to
mind, in body and in soul can bind." The discriminating genius
of the Greek language has marked the absolute difference of this
love from the lower forms of passion by assigning special words
to each ; and there are some who have regretted that no similar
distinction has been maintained in our own language. But, we
may perhaps be permitted to think, there is another point of view
from which the absence of any such verbal distinction may
appear prompted by a true instinct in a Christian nation. It was
necessary for a Greek to recognize sensual passion as one form of
human relationship. But the Christian best expresses the lofty
ideal which is ever before his eyes, and best exemplifies that
charity which thinketh no evil and which believeth all things, by
refusing to contemplate men and women as united by any lower
tie than that of love, or by refusing to contemplate our lower
nature except in the light shed upon it by the higher.
(2) Love is the highest relation which one personal being can
assume towards another. It seems necessary to insist iipon this
characteristic in it, because its true nature is often obscured by
its association with mere abstractions. It is not with humanity
but with human beings that love is concerned; and such mere
intellectual abstractions are useful only so far as they assist us in
placing ourselves in that individual relation to individuals in
which love finds its existence and its sphere of action. That
which the Apostle has in view in his glowing description of this
virtue is not a vague emotion of the heart, but the self-sacrifice,
the devotion, the patience which are evoked in one soul by the
presence of another.
T[ The degree in which this gracious virtue of love can be
evoked in our nature must depend upon the personal relations
in which we are placed. The relation, perhaps, may be some-
times and in some measure an ideal one; but the vision of a
person must be brought before the soul, if its highest faculties
are to be aroused and its noblest emotions drawn forth. We all
know, and it is the privilege of a generous youth to feel with
peculiar vividness, what an ennobling effect is produced upon our
416 THESE THREE
nature by love, in the true sense of the word, thus aroused
towards a kindred soul; while we also know and feel how
intimately and essentially this influence is dependent on the
personal character of the relation. It was the favourite theme of
our greatest poets in the most splendid period of our literature,
and perhaps of our national life ; and in Spenser's lofty verse the
vision of love and beauty, and the vision of heavenly love and
beauty, are so closely associated that they seem to merge into one
another. But poets of less spiritual flight, and more concerned
with the ordinary passions of human nature, have similarly
depicted their heroes as rising to their noblest heights under the
inspiration of this generous passion. When St. Paul discerns
in the true relation of husband and wife a picture of the relation
of Christ to His Church, he justifies and sanctifies these tran-
scripts from nature, and welds together in essential union the
most human and the most Divine aspect of love. Where, indeed,
even in the light of the Gospel, shall be found more touching
illustrations of some of the excellencies which the Apostle ascribes
to charity, than in the personal affections of a gracious family
life ? The love which suffers long and is kind, which envies not,
which seeks not her own, which is not easily provoked, which
thinks no evil, which bears all things, believes all things, hopes
all things, and endures all things, is not this the love of mothers
and of wives, the devotion of true sons and husbands ? What
an astonishing power there is in such love and such devotion to
suppress the selfishness in a man or a woman, and to arouse all
the faculties of our nature in the service of the person to whom
we are devoted ! l
(3) It needs a perfect Person to satisfy its desires. For the
question arises, whether all these stirrings of heart towards men
like ourselves, all these quickenings of the moral and spiritual
pulse can be more than the first awakenings of the human soul
towards its true destiny that of communion and union with a
perfect Person. With respect to all these emotions, even the
truest and most beautiful, when viewed independently of higher
relations, in how lamentable a degree is illusion blended with
them! Those illusions are often the mockery, the cruel and
unworthy mockery, of maturer years ; and they are not less often
the bitter disappointments of tender and faithful hearts. But
suppose a love open to human nature which should be subject to
no such illusion ; imagine a Person revealed to men and women
1 Dean Wace.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 417
on whom they could lavish the inexhaustible stores of their
affection, their admiration, their devotion, and be sure that all,
and more than all, would fall short of what was due, and be a
feeble response to the infinite reality : and what might not then
be expected to be the influence produced upon our nature ? We
have the answer in this chapter, which was, in fact, the response
elicited from the soul of St. Paul by the vision of the Lord Jesus
Christ, by the love of the Saviour for him and his responsive .love
for the Saviour.
If Perfection, or at least blessedness, in some form or other,
has been proved by experience to be the ineradicable desire of the
soul of man. That desire may, indeed, be dulled for a time, or
chilled by despair. But such an acquiescence in imperfection
brings with it, like the [disappointed philosophy of the ancient
world, a decay of energy, an abandonment of hope, in every
sphere of life, and relaxes the spring of all noble thoughts and
emotions. " Be ye perfect " is a command which is implied in all
others, and is one of their main animating motives; and, in
offering the means for this perfection, the Gospel possesses one of
its deepest claims upon our spirits. 1
Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all,
Gather our rival faiths within Thy fold,
Eend each man's temple veil and bid it fall,
That we may know that Thou hast been of old;
Gather us in.
Gather us in : we worship only Thee ;
In varied names we stretch a common hand
In diverse forms a common soul we see;
In many ships we seek one spirit-land;
Gather us in.
Each sees one colour of Thy rainbow light;
Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven
Thou art the fulness of our partial sight,
We are not perfect till we find the seven;
Gather us in.
3. To whom, then, is our love directed ?
(1) It is love to God in Christ. The immediate and supreme
object of love-is the ever-blessed God. " Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
1 Dean Wace.
I COR. 27
4 i8 THESE THREE
thy strength, and with all thy mind." This is the first command-
ment. And with God as the centre of the heart, all the faculties
and all the powers have unbounded scope for their operation.
T[ I spoke to H about the worship of the Virgin, and he
thought one reason for its prevalence is, that it puts before men
the more affectionate side of truth ; and he deplored the want of
a more large appeal to the affections in Protestantism, saying that
we worship Christ, but none of us love Him. I was silent, but
the result of a scrutiny into my own mind was that, with an
exception, I scarcely love any one, or anything else, and that not
because of any reference to His love for me, which somehow or
other never enters into my mind, but solely in consequence of
what He is and was, according, at least, to my conception of Him
and His mind and heart. I do not know that this consciousness
pleased me, because it presented itself rather as a deficiency than
as a power a lack of human sympathy, the existence of a con-
tinually increasing number of repellent poles in my constitution,
which isolate me from my species, and make my antipathies more
marked than my sympathies. Whereas St. John's conception of
genuine love for Him was that of an affection trained in love for
beings who exhibit the same Humanity which was in Him, in
weaker images, in the various relationships of life. "If a man
love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God
whom he hath not seen ? " Through the visible as a school we
rise up to the appreciation of the invisible. Now my nature
forces me to reverse the order, or rather to skip the first steps,
for I certainly have some sympathy dreamy, perhaps useless
with the invisible invisible personality, justice, right ; but there
they end, and almost never go on, or go back, to the visible and
human. Those lines you have often quoted, of Burns
I saw thee eye the general weal
With boundless love
express a feeling which I can only imagine, not realize, except
by a sort of analogy which is dreamy. 1
Tf The very blessed in Paradise, beholding the infinite Beauty
of God, would faint and fail from longing to love Him more if
His most Holy Will did not fill them with His own sweet Kest.
But they love His sovereign Will so entirely that theirs is wholly
merged in it, and they rest content in His Content, willing to
submit to the limit Love puts to love. Were it not so, their love
would be alike delicious and poignant delicious in the possession
1 F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 841.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 419
of so great a gift, poignant in the intensity of desire for more.
Thus God in His Wisdom sends perpetual shafts into the hearts
of those who love Him, to teach them that they do not love Him
nearly so much as He deserves to be loved. And be sure that
the man who does not crave to love God more does not as yet
love Him well enough. There is no " enough " ; and he who
would stop short in what he has attained, has attained but little,
be sure. 1
(2) It is love to man. We cannot love God without loving
man. The love of God is the love of man expanded and purified.
To love man is to love God. The testimony of St. John, the
disciple of love, is decisive on this point. His love to God was
unearthly, pure, spiritual; his religion had melted into love,
and here is his account : " He that loveth not his brother whom
he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ? "
According to him, it is through the visible that we appreciate the
invisible, through the love of our brother that we grow into the
love of God. At the same time, true love for man must flow
primarily from love to God. The love of God is the root, the love
of man the fruit ; the love of God is the fountain, the love of man
is the stream in which it flows. Both are parts of one whole,
links of one chain, threads of one cord which binds us to God,
descending from Him to us, and lifting us up to His very being,
which is love. 2
T| I read the other day of a girl, a convert from heathenism
in the Sandwich Islands, where Father Damien lived. She had
a class of little children, and she wished to know which of them
continued heathen and which had accepted Christianity. In her
simplicity, uncontaminated by conventionalities and traditions
which mislead us, she said to each child in her class, " Do you
love your enemies?" If the child answered, "Yes," the un-
sophisticated teacher said, "Then you are a Christian; stand
here." If the child answered, " No," she said, with equal decision,
" Then you are a heathen ; stand on the other side." Thus did
the girl in the Sandwich Islands divide the sheep from the goats ;
and thus will her Saviour divide them on the last day. 3
^[ The Teacher earnestly desired to return to his post. I pled
with him to remain at the Mission House till we felt more assured,
but he replied; " Missi, when I see them thirsting for my blood,
1 St. Francis de Sales. 2 J. Davies.
8 H. P. Hughes, The Philanthropy of God, 40.
420 THESE THREE
I just see myself when the Missionary first came to my island.
I desired to murder him, as they now desire to kill me. Had he
stayed away for such danger, I would have remained Heathen ;
but he came, and continued coming to teach us, till, by the grace
of God, I was changed to what I am. Now the same God that
changed me to this can change these poor Tannese to love and
serve Him. I cannot stay away from them ; but I will sleep at
the Mission House, and do all I can by day to bring them to
Jesus." 1
If Have we got this love ? Have we got it as a city, as a
Church, and as individuals ? Have we got it as a city ? I
suppose that many would answer that by an eulogium upon the
charity of London. We should have flowing articles upon the
generosity with which we support our hospitals and our asylums
and our refuges. But I have during this last week come across
certain facts which I feel it my duty to place before you this
afternoon. As the Bishop of East London, it is, I think, natural
that, considering for a thousand years the head of every hospital
in Europe was Bishop of the place, the Bishop of East London
should take a great interest in East London hospitals. I took
first the London Hospital, that lifeboat, as it were, which goes up
and down the sea of suffering humanity in East London, to cure
it and to save it. I thought that the charity of London would,
at any rate, be sufficient to support a great institution like the
London Hospital. What do I find? I find that the love of
London has allowed a deficit of 30,000 in the last two years ;
that so cramped are they that they have to build, and yet have
no money to build with ; and that to carry on their work efficiently
at all they want 10,000 a year more. I pass to the Victoria
Park Consumptive Hospital, and I pass with the memory of
having seen at least fifty of my East-end friends die of consump-
tion before my eyes in the last nine years. I go to the Con-
sumptive Hospital, and what do I find ? Out of 162 beds only
60 can be used for lack of funds. One hundred and two patients
are passed as suitable, and yet of those 102 none can be taken in.
Four women, passed a few weeks ago, have all died before their
time to go in came. Those 102 beds are left vacant because the
love of London is not sufficient for the purpose. I go to the
Children's Hospital. One would have thought that the charity
of a great city would look after its children. But what do I find
at the North-Eastern Hospital for children ? I find the Hospital
crammed with children, and another wing an urgent necessity,
and yet the only 2000 which has been given was not given by
1 John G. Paton, i. 195.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 421
some one who hates creeds and who goes in for the service of
man without creeds, but was obtained from a distinctly Church
charity as the first contribution to the new wing. I say, then,
that as a city we have not risen yet to the true standard of love.
Have we as a Church ? 1
" happy souls, radiant souls, what songs are ye out-
pouring ?
What passionate, pure prayers are these from earth to
heaven soaring?
What mystic gifts of love and grace are these your words
imploring
From God, for your neighbour and your enemy?"
Our souls are all afire with love with love our hearts are
glowing,
The mystic peace that Jesus gives our joyous strains are
showing ;
For lo! our love can not be hid our brimming love out-
flowing
To God, and our neighbour and our enemy.
" But what of those who sought your harm who joyed at
your mistaking,
What place have they in this your chant in these your
prayers, partaking?
Are your pure souls your tender hearts with love and
longing breaking
For God, and your neighbour and your enemy?"
Our souls are filled with heavenly peace our hearts with love
untiring,
And Jesus with His radiant love our feeble love is firing,
Till nought we crave but love for all, in this our joyous
choiring
From God, for our neighbour and our enemy. 2
(3) It is love to the brethren. The love of the brethren is
often referred to as distinguished from love; the one having
reference to moral character, the other to the race in general.
" Be kindly affectioned one to another." " Be ye all of one mind,
. . . love as brethren."
1 Bishop Winnington Ingram, Banners of the Christian Faith, 43,
2 Margaret Blaikie, Songs by the Way, 54.
422 THESE THREE
U Gibbon has discussed the reason of the wonderful expansion
of Christianity at the outset of its career, and he has alleged
five causes: the zeal of the primitive Christians, their doctrine
of immortality, the miraculous powers of the Apostolic Church,
her pure morality, and the union and discipline of the Christian
republic. And these, no doubt, were efficient causes, but Gibbon
has overlooked the strongest of all. The reason why Christianity
spread over the world and won the nations, was that the Chris-
tians understood the blessed secret of love as the Lord had taught
it. It is said by Tertullian that in those early days the heathen
would often exclaim : " See how they love one another ! " All
this changed, and during the days of bitter controversy over
the doctrine of the Person of Christ, when the Christians were
wrangling and excommunicating and persecuting one another,
it was said by a Latin historian that their hatred of each other
exceeded the fury of savage beasts against mankind. It was
then that Christianity lost its power, and if we would recover
the ancient power, we must rediscover and practise the ancient
secret. 1
H In Samoa, Stevenson had left his small hut and removed
into a large house. There had not yet been time for Love to
line it. Stevenson felt sad and weary, and had forgotten to
bespeak his nightly coffee and cigars. Whilst he was thinking,
the door quietly opened and the native boy entered carrying the
tray with that on it for which he longed. Stevenson said in the
native tongue, " Great is your forethought." The boy corrected
him and said, " Great is the love." z
TJ The writer remembers a curious expression used by a
Mohammedan who had become a Christian and then relapsed,
" Un ki muhabbat dekhke, bhul gaya ; un ki dushmani dekhke,
yad aya," " Their (the Christians') love made me forget my re-
ligion ; their hostility made me remember it." 3
4. But God in Christ is the source as well as the object of love.
Where are we to look for the inspiration that breathed into the
idea of " love " that intense spirituality that perfect purity and
almost infinite longing and desire, which demanded almost a new
word to meet a new conception, as much in advance of all that
the heathen world knew as the Gospel of St. John transcends all
the Greek philosophies? The answer to this question is to be
found, at least in the first instance, in the words of our Lord
1 D. Smith. 2 A. R. Simpson, These Three, 47.
3 C. Field, The Charm of India, xi.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 423
Jesus Christ Himself, as reported to us in that very Gospel the
spiritual Gospel, as it has been well called of the beloved
Apostle ; to the effect that " God so loved the world, that he
gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him
should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not
his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the
world through him might be saved."
So kindly was His love to us,
(We had not heard of love before),
That all our life grew glorious
When He had halted at our door.
So meekly did He love us men,
Though blind we were with shameful sin,
He touched our eyes with tears, and then
Led God's tall angels naming in.
He dwelt with us a little space,
As mothers do in childhood's years,
And still we can discern His face
Wherever Joy or Love appears.
He made our virtues all His own,
And lent them grace we could not give,
And now our world seems His alone,
And while we live He seems to live.
He took our sorrows and our pain,
And hid their torture in His breast,
Till we received them back again,
To find on each His grief impressed.
He clasped our children in His arms,
And showed us where their beauty shone,
He took from us our grey alarms,
And put Death's icy armour on.
So gentle were His ways with us,
That crippled souls had ceased to sigh,
On them He laid His hands, and thus
They gloried at His passing by.
Without reproof or word of blame,
- As mothers do in childhood's years,
He kissed our lips in spite of shame,
And stayed the passage of our tears.
424 THESE THREE
So tender was His love to us,
(We had not learned to love before),
That we grew like to Him, and thus
Men sought His grace in us once more. 1
If When the Jubilee Singers first visited our shores in 1873,
an old believer used to repeat constantly the refrain of one of
their songs, " Free grace and dying love." The love of Christ
constrained her. " Kabbi " Duncan rose up from the Professor's
chair, and walked up and down the platform as he discoursed on
the Crucifixion with his students. " Ay, ay, d'ye know what it
was dying on the cross, forsaken by His Father d'ye know
what it was ? What ? What ? It was damnation and
damnation taken lovingly." The love of Christ constrained him. 2
It was for me that Jesus died, for me and a world of men
Just as sinful, and just as slow to give back His love again;
And He didn't wait till I came to Him, but He loved me at
my worst;
He needn't ever have died for me if I could have loved Him
first. 3
THESE THREE.
We have looked at Faith, Hope, and Love separately. Now
let us see them acting and re-acting the one on the other.
"Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three." In thus
speaking of these cardinal virtues of the Christian character,
it is evident that St. Paul means to distinguish them from one
another. He speaks of them as "these three," and thereby
represents them to us as three several virtues, each holding its
own place, and serving its own purpose, to which it is peculiarly
adapted, and in which the others are incapable of superseding it.
Each one of that blessed triad of Christian graces has its own
proper province in the spiritual life allotted to it. And each has
important functions to discharge, which none but itself is capable
of executing. Faith can be no substitute for love in the way
of fulfilling the great duties of practical religion. And as little
can love be any substitute for faith in the way of appropriating
the merits of the Saviour, and thereby securing our justification
in the sight of God. What St. Paul has elsewhere said of the
1 Coningsby William Dawson.
2 A. R. Simpson, These Three, 45. 8 Dora Greenwell.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 425
several offices in the Christian Church is equally applicable to
the leading graces of the Christian character that all of them
are useful and needful in their respective spheres, like the various
organs and members of the human body ; and that no one among
them can set aside another any more than the hand can dispense
with the services of the foot, or the eye undertake to perform the
functions of the ear.
But while in this statement faith, hope, and love are thus
represented as numerically distinct, they are notwithstanding
very intimately associated, as having the closest mutual affinity
and dependence. All three must abide together, in order to the
perfection of each other, as well as of the whole character into
which they enter. God has joined them; and man must not
attempt to sever them. Faith must animate the mind with
hope, and " work by love," in order to show its genuineness as
that living and operative faith of which alone the Scriptures
have approved. Hope, if it do not rest on the good foundation
which faith has laid for it, is altogether visionary and unwar-
ranted ; and if it do not elevate the soul unto the unfeigned love
of God and man, it is spurious or hypocritical. And love, if it
be not originated by faith and sustained by hope, is merely an
instinctive impulse of nature, accidental in its attachments, and
limited to the sphere of visible things, and thus differing most
essentially from that evangelical love of which it is written, that
"the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart,
and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned."
1. Faith and Hope. Faith and hope are twin sisters, and
hardly to be known apart ; both as beautiful as they can be, and
alike beautiful, and very often indeed mistaken each for the
other. Yet this need never be; because between them there
is this clear difference, that while hope expects, faith inspects;
while hope is like Mary, looking -wp-ward, faith is like Martha,
looking a^-ward ; while the light in the eyes of hope is high, the
light in the eyes of faith is strong; while hope trembles in
expectation, faith is quiet in possession. Hope leaps out toward
what will be: faith holds on to what is; hope idealizes, faith
realizes ; faitbT sees, hope foresees.
TJ The trouble with some men is, that, while they hold on to
426 THESE THREE
the faith, they have lost hold of the hope of their religion. And
so they inspect but they do not expect ; they believe in what has
come, but not in what is coming. So they expire after they have
ceased to inspire; they die, but they do not make many live.
You get a grand lesson on this matter, as you go from the mouth
to the springs of the Ehine. Passing through the fog and mist
of Holland, as through a stagnant, grassy sea, you stretch upward,
league after league ; and, as you go, the country gradually changes.
The air grows clearer, the prospect finer ; everything that can
stir the soul begins to reach down toward you, and touch you
with its glory. But the higher you go, the harder is your
going; only the deepening beauty never fails you. So at last
you come into Switzerland, where the blue heavens bend over you
with their infinite, tender light ; and the mountains stand about
you, in their white robes, glorious as the gates of heaven, with
green valleys nestling between, which, but for sorrow and sin,
are beautiful as Paradise. And all about you is a vaster vision,
and within you an intenser inspiration than can ever be felt on
the foggy flats below. It is the difference between faith alone,
and faith and hope together. 1
If By faith Jacob, when a-dying, leaves his children a legacy
of hope in God. He looks upward in faith and forward in
expectancy. His religion makes him sanguine and prophetic.
" Behold," he said, " I die : but God shall be with you " (Gen.
xlviii. 21). The words are suggestive of infinite possibilities. The
One remains while the many change and pass. When man dies,
God lives on, and faith in the real presence of a living God is the
spring of eternal hope. Faith is the power by which men grasp
the future, the unseen, the Divine, by which they maintain their
expectant look, by which they remain optimists in spite of all the
evil of the world. Dying saints are enabled to bequeath messages
of comfort to after ages, because they are sure that the God who
has so greatly blessed themselves has greater blessings in store
for their posterity. True religion bids them expect a brighter
day to dawn and a happier society to come into being. Jacob,
dying in Goshen, the proverbial land of plenty, sees something
still better than Goshen. His conviction of the goodness of God
kindles an ardent and unquenchable hope of the amelioration of
the state of his people. The vision of God is always accompanied
by the vision of a better and happier world. 2
T| In the career of Columbus faith and hope supported each
other. So sings the American poet, Maurice Francis Egan
1 R. Collyer, The Life that Now Is, 64.
* J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 150.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 427
Who doubts has met defeat ere blows can fall ;
Who doubts must die with no palm in his hand ;
Who doubts shall never be of that high band
Which clearly answer Present ! to Death's call :
For Faith is life, and, though a funeral pall
Veil our fair Hope, and on our promised land
A mist malignant hang, if Faith but stand
Among our ruins, we shall conquer all.
faithful soul, that knew no doubting low ;
Faith incarnate, lit by Hope's strong flame,
And led by Faith's own cross to dare all ill
And find our world ! but more than this we owe
To thy true heart; thy pure and glorious name
Is one clear trumpet call to Faith and Will.
2. Faith and Love. Faith is energetic love. Divinely implanted
love, spiritually inspired self-surrender increases every faculty of
knowledge, deepens every impression made by truth, opens the
eye which indifference or passion had blinded, purifies the gaze
which prejudice or evil bias had corrupted and obscured, and so
makes the trembling faith which can only cry, " I believe ; help
thou mine unbelief," grow, burn, gleam with holy enthusiasm, until
it cries, " I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded."
If I have been writing lately on the subject of Keble's lines
(Hymn for Sunday next before Advent). I have little doubt that
the Church of Kome has paid far more attention than we have to
that which forms the subject of this hymn the treatment of
penitence. She has more power to soothe, because she dwells
chiefly on that which is the most glorious element in the nature
of God Love. Whereas Protestantism fixes attention more on
that which is the strongest principle in the bosom of man
Faith. 1
I ask not for Thy love, Lord : the days
Can never come when anguish shall atone.
Enough for me were but Thy pity shown,
To me as to the stricken sheep that strays,
With ceaseless cry for unforgotten ways
lead me back to pastures I have known,
Or find me in the wilderness alone,
And slay me, as the hand of mercy slays.
I- ask not for Thy love ; nor e'en so much,
As for a hope on Thy dear breast to lie;
1 F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 244.
428 THESE THREE
But be Thou still my shepherd still with such
Compassion as may melt to such a cry ;
That so I hear Thy feet, and feel Thy touch,
And dimly see Thy face ere yet I die. 1
1f In 1836 James Field, of Cork, called for the third time on
an unsaved woman to whom he had been introduced. She cried
out to him, "Oh, sir, I do not love God!" He replied, "What
have you to do with loving God ? How can you love until you
apprehend His love to you ? and this you cannot do until you
believe. It is folly to think of loving God before you obtain
pardon" Tears gushed from her eyes, and she said she had
never understood it before. As the two prayed, God set her soul
at liberty, and then she found she could love God, because He
first loved her. It was the gift of pardon that filled her heart with
the love of gratitude. 2
3. Hope and Love. Who has not experienced what he and
others call Christian hope, but which on close analysis is found
to be little better than a faint and feeble desire after better things,
and a desponding cry of the soul for what is just a grade better
than blank despair ? This is not the hope that saves. Contrast
it with the full evidence of things hoped for, which is imparted by
living faith. Let desire be large, and expectation strong; let
hope embrace all Divine promises, and it becomes a vast capacity
for blessedness, and often bursts out in solitary places and on
dark nights into songs of rejoicing. Then is revealed what the
Apostles call "patience," born of quiet waiting, with a smile
upon its face, reflecting all the lustre of the Divine manifestation.
Tribulation and sorrow are but the crucible in which this precious
quality and energy of soul is refined. "This hope maketh not
ashamed," and can never be disappointed, because it is a veritable
foretaste of its own object it is the earnest and foretaste of the
purchased possession. What leads the soul from hope to hope,
from the faint uplifting of the wearied weeping eye to the " hope
full of immortality " ? St. Paul gives us the answer : " Because
the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit
given to us."
1J Do you not think that the ordinary standpoint of so-called
Christian teaching is undergoing a destruction, and that the
1 George John Romanes, Life and Letters, 267.
8 J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 68.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 429
devil's travesty is waning? Terrorism is no real factor iu
Christianity. Surely Christianity is the response which follows
the recognition of Love and its beneficent purpose of Universal
beatitude. In that atmosphere the heart beats freely and fully,
for it breathes the Hope which Love begets. We ought to
breathe the Hope before we attempt to deal with the distresses
of life; then should we be armed with the Sympathy that is
powerful, and not merely with the sympathy that is the recog-
nition of a common woe. 1
If Yesterday, after reading Romance of Rose, thought much of
the destruction of all my higher power of sentiment by late
sorrow; and considered how far it might be possible to make
love, though hopeless, still a guide and strength. 2
Is any grieved or tired? Yea, by God's will:
Surely God's Will alone is good and best:
weary man, in weariness take rest,
hungry man, by hunger feast thy fill.
Discern thy good beneath a mask of ill,
Or build of loneliness thy secret nest:
At noon take heart, being mindful of the west;
At night wake hope, for dawn advances still.
At night wake hope. Poor soul, in such sore need
Of wakening and of girding up anew,
Hast thou that hope which fainting doth pursue?
No saint but hath pursued and hath been faint;
Bid love wake hope, for both thy steps shall speed,
Still faint yet still pursuing, thou saint. 8
4. Faith, Hope, Love. When St. Paul takes three words, and
couples them with a verb in the singular, he is not making a
slip of the pen, or committing a grammatical blunder which a
child could correct. But there is a great truth in that piece of
apparent grammatical irregularity; for the faith, the hope, and
the love, for which he can afford only a singular verb, are thereby
declared to be in their depth and essence one thing, and it, the
triple star, abides, and continues to shine; the three primitive
colours are unified in the white beam of light. Do not correct
the grammar, and spoil the sense, but discern what he means
when he says, " Now abided faith, hope, love." For this is what
1 R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 150.
2 Ruskin in E. T. Cook's Life of EusJcin, ii. 267.
8 Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 164.
430 THESE THREE
he means, that the two latter come out of the former, and that
without it they are naught, and that it without them is dead.
(1) Faith is the rightful attitude of self and our neighbour
to God : Hope is the recognition and welcome of God's purpose
for self, and our neighbour: Love binds God, self, and our
neighbour in the perfect bond of the Divinely purposed harmony.
Tf You have seen that famous picture of the French artist
Millet, "The Angelus." You remember the scene which it
depicts a very homely and, at the first glance, prosaic scene : a
potato-field and two figures, a man and a woman, surrounded by
the implements of their toil. It is a dull, bleak landscape, and
away across the level tract you see a village with the church-
spire rising above the lowly roofs. It is evening, and the bell
has rung out its call to prayer. Its silvery chime has reached
the ears of the two labourers, and after the devout manner of
their country they have hearkened to its call. They have
dropped their tools, and they are standing erect, with bowed
heads and folded hands, in the attitude of prayer. I once heard
an interpretation of this picture from my old teacher, the late
Professor Henry Drummond. There, he said, are the three
elements of a complete life Work, God, and Love. The field,
the spade, the basket, and the barrow there is Work ; the bowed
heads and the folded hands there is Eeligion ; the two, a man
and a woman, whatever be their relationship there is Love.
And this is precisely the idea of the saying of St. Paul in our
text. 1
So Faith shall build the boundary wall,
And Hope shall plant the secret bower,
That both may show magnifical
With gem and flower.
While over all a dome must spread,
And Love shall be that dome above;
And deep foundations must be laid,
And these are Love.
(2) Though separated in the representation, faith, hope, and
love are really inseparable companions, closely united, not only
to every Christian, but also to each other. What, indeed, is
faith without hope and love ? A cold conviction of the intellect,
but without life-awakening power in the heart, or mature fruit
in the life. Without hope, faith would never behold heaven;
1 D. Smith, Man's Need of God, 16.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 431
but even if it could enter therein, heaven would lack its highest
bliss. What is hope without faith and love ? At most, an idle
dream from which we soon shall sadly wake ; a fragrant
blossom in the garden, fading before it has brought forth fruit.
And, lastly, what is love without hope or faith ? The welling
forth, perhaps, of natural feeling, but in no degree a spiritual
principle of life. If love believes not, it must die; and if it
hopes not in the same measure as it loves, it is then the source
of unparalleled suffering. Thus, whichever of these three sisters
we would separate from the others, in so doing we have
subscribed her death-warrant ; nay, even if two of them remain
together, the brightness of their beauty is dimmed whenever the
third has disappeared.
Tf That the whole substance of religion was faith, hope, and
love ; by the practice of which we became united to the will of
God; that all beside is indifferent, and to be used only as a
means, that we may arrive at our end, and be swallowed up
therein, by faith and love.
That all things are possible to him who believes, that they are
less difficult to him who hopes, that they are easier to him who
loves, and still more easy to him who perseveres in the practice
of these three virtues. 1
U I remember reading about an English barrister, of refined
mind but speculative tendencies, who had reached such a depth
of Pyrrhonism, alike in philosophy and religion, that he had lost
all faith in positive truth. His Christian wife grieved over him
all the more that she perceived about him symptoms of incipient
consumption. One day, however, as he lay on the sofa, she saw
him gazing upwards, as if on some object, with an expression of
soft delight and almost rapture. " What's the matter ? " she
asked. " Do you know, I have begun to conceive hope." " Hope
of what ? " "I don't know, but somehow I have hope." Ah !
the haze was dissolving, phantoms were crystallizing into concrete
realities and the transporting " hope " of finding solid footing on
the rock of positive truth. Eight speedily came that faith which
overcometh the world a childlike reception of the Gospel of
Christ terminating, and at no distant period, in a tranquil
departure to the region of unclouded light. 2
^[ John Knox, in his History of the Reformation, has preserved
a beautiful comparison of faith, hope, and charity by Patrick
1 Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 23.
2 D. Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 78.
432 THESE THREE
Hamilton, the Scottish martyr. Says Hamilton : " Faith cometh
of the Word of God, Hope cometh of Faith, and Charity springeth
of them both. Faith believes the Word, Hope trusteth after
that which is promised by the Word, and Charity doeth good
unto her neighbour, through the love which she hath to God,
and gladness that is within herself. Faith looketh to God and
His word ; Hope looketh unto His gift and reward ; Charity
looketh unto her neighbour's profit. Faith receiveth God ; Hope
receiveth His reward ; Charity looketh to her neighbour with a
glad heart, and that without any respect of reward. Faith
pertaineth to God only, Hope to His reward, and Charity to
her neighbour."
Let love weep
It cometh, that day of the Lord divine;
And the morning star will surely shine
On the long death-night of sleep.
Let faith fear,
The unending light comes on apace;
The path leads homeward from this place;
Through the twilight home must appear.
Let hope despair,
Let death and the grave shout victory,
That flush of the morning yet shall be,
Which shall wake the slumberers there !
THESE THREE ABIDE.
1. Amidst all that changes and is destined to pass away,
three things there are, St. Paul tells us, that abide. Just as in
a world of shadows and uncertainties we have learned to postulate
as fundamental certainties three incontestable realities, God, self,
and our neighbour ; so amid the variety of external and transient
manifestations of the religious life there remain unchangeably
three activities or functions of the soul, which are perpetually
concerned with these fundamental certainties. Much of the
detail of religion is an accommodation to present necessities and
will pass away when it has served its temporary purpose; but
behind and beneath lie three essential and eternal principles of
spiritual life Faith, Hope, and Love.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 433
2. The popular interpretation reads "now" as temporal
instead of logical identifying it with the "now" of verse 12,
though the Greek words differ as though the Apostle meant
that for the present faith and hope " abide " with love, but love
alone "abides" for ever. But St. Paul puts the three on the
same footing in respect of enduringness " these three " in com-
parison with the other three of verse 8 pointedly adding faith
and hope to share and support the "abiding" of love; love is
greater among these, not more lasting.
It is curious that this meaning has been so generally missed
by readers of the passage. Learned readers, as well as unlearned,
have failed to observe it. You may frequently see it assumed,
in hymns and other religious literature, that faith and hope,
instead of being associated with love in this quality of per-
manence, as St. Paul declares them to be, are contrasted with it,
in that they are transitory, whilst love is eternal. " Faith will
vanish into sight ; Hope be emptied in delight ; Love in heaven
will shine more bright." Such language is plausible enough to
be generally accepted. But it is at variance with St. Paul's view.
The passage we are considering is not one of doubtful meaning ;
no competent interpreter could question that St. Paul's purpose
is to say that faith, hope, love, all three abide; and that by
" abide " he means that they have not the changing and trans-
itory character which belongs to other things of which he has
been speaking. It is true that he is asserting the supreme glory
of love ; it is greater, he says, than faith and hope. But these
two sister graces share with it the significant distinction that
they all abide.
3. The chief point, then, to be noticed in this statement, is
the permanence it ascribes to those graces of which it speaks. It
represents " faith, hope, and love, these three," as all alike abiding.
Formerly the Apostle had said this of love in particular, declaring
in the 8th verse that " love never faileth." But now, in repeating
the statement, he extends it to the other two, ascribing to them
also the same durability that he had previously noticed as an
attribute of Jove. No doubt it was the design of the Apostle to
point out in this respect the very striking contrast between these
three essential graces, by which at all times the Christian
i COR. 28
434 THESE THREE
character must be distinguished, and those extraordinary gifts
bestowed on the early Christian Church, which, however remark-
able and useful while they endured, were only intended to
continue for a season.
If If, loving well the creatures that are like yourself, you feel
that you would love still more dearly creatures better than
yourself were they revealed to you ; if striving with all your
might to mend what is evil, near you and around, you would
fain look for a day when some Judge of all the Earth shall
wholly do right, and the little hills rejoice on every side; if,
parting with the companions that have given you all the best
joy you had on Earth, you desire ever to meet their eyes again
and clasp their hands, where eyes shall no more be dim, nor
hands fail ; if, preparing yourselves to lie down beneath the
grass in silence and loneliness, seeing no more beauty, and feeling
no more gladness you would care for the promise to you of a
time when you should see God's light again, and know the things
you have longed to know, and walk in the peace of everlasting
Love then, the Hope of these things to you is religion, the
Substance of them in your life is Faith. And in the power of
them, it is promised us, that the kingdoms of this world shall
yet become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. 1
4. When we have looked backward and seen these three graces
to be thus identical and unchanging in stages of human growth
which are in mental conditions so far separated from each other,
we shall have confidence in them as we look forward even beyond
the grave. Are we to part with faith hereafter? Only if we
give to the name Faith some narrow interpretation. Not, surely,
if it is filial trust in the Father. It cannot be part of the reward
of the future state that the children of God should cease to be
filial, or to cherish that confiding trust in the Fatherly wisdom
and goodness which was perfectly exhibited in the perfect Son
of God. No; if childlike faith has continued from yesterday
until to-day, we may know it to be of a nature to continue and
abide for ever. But must not hope, as they say, be swallowed
up in fruition? Not, it would seem, until the whole work of
the Divine creation and government be brought to a standstill.
Such an end is beyond the reach of our faculties to imagine.
But the death of a Christian will not leave him without objects
1 Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens (Works, xxxiii. 174).
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 435
of hope. After each of us dies there will be plenty of evil still
to be purged out of God's world ; there will be endless evolutions
of the Divine purpose for the revealing of the Divine glory.
Those that have gone before us, we may well believe, instead of
having ceased to hope, are now hoping more earnestly, more
continuously, more joyfully, more calmly, than we are. Of the
continuance of love in the life to come one need say nothing, as
it has not been possible to fall into the mistake of supposing
that love could be stopped by death unless all conscious exist-
ence be believed to be stopped by it also.
If We are very much accustomed to speak of faith as destined
in the future world to give place to vision, and of hope as des-
tined, in like manner, to end in full fruition. This view is taken
in the last verses of our 49th Paraphrase, of which the chapter
before us is the groundwork. And by frequently using that
beautiful Paraphrase, we have probably been led, without
much consideration, to assume that love alone shall exist in
heaven, while faith and hope shall be altogether superseded. But
is there any solid Scriptural ground for such an assumption ?
There is nothing in the text itself to warrant it. Nor am I
aware of any other passage that has ever been formally brought
forward to confirm it. No faith in heaven ! What, then, are we
to make of those texts which speak of the glorified saints as
" eating of the hidden manna," partaking of " the fruit of the tree
of life," following the Lamb of God whithersoever He may lead
them and as guided by Him to "living fountains of waters."
Surely these expressions are as significant as words can be of a
life of unceasing faith in the Kedeemer. It is quite true that
many of those things which are now objects of faith, shall here-
after be objects of sight. But it would be a very rash and
sweeping conclusion thence to infer that in a future world there
shall be no room and no occasion for faith at all. Unless, indeed,
we are to be made absolutely omniscient at the very first moment
of our entrance into the heavenly mansions, there must still
remain a field, though not indeed the same field as that which
we now have, for the exercise of faith. And then, in so far as
faith can be held to consist in confidence towards God or depend-
ence on the Saviour, we may surely venture to say that instead
of ceasing in the world to come, it will be more fully developed
and more perfectly maintained. With respect to hope, again, it
is not to be questioned that many of those things to which it is
for the present directed shall in our future state be actually
possessed, so that they cannot then be hoped for any longer. But
436 THESE THREE
does it follow that, after this life is ended, the Christian will
have absolutely nothing whatever to hope for ? Will it be
nothing for the departed spirits of the faithful to anticipate the
resurrection of their bodies, and to look forward to the triumphant
issues of the coming judgment ? And even when these glorious
events have been consummated, will there not still remain the
animating prospect of continually augmenting knowledge, un-
ceasingly advancing happiness, and progressively increasing
spiritual excellence to all eternity? We must either suppose
that all that heaven has to give is to be enjoyed at once by the
spirits of the redeemed when first they are translated thither, and
that there is no progress of any kind to be afterwards made by
them from glory to glory; or else we must allow that there is
still something in reserve for them, besides what they at first
attain, as a fit and proper object of Hope. 1
5. Faith, hope, and love, these three represent the spiritual Or
Christian life, called also the eternal life, in the soul of man. It
is this that has in its history and essential nature the witness
of permanence. St. Paul found comfort in the evident progress
from the more imperfect to the less imperfect which is to be
traced in a part of our human nature. But he also derived
comfort, and the more indispensable comfort, from contemplating
the signs and working in man of the perfect and eternal Divine
nature. And in order to realize that this which seemed to him
best in man was really unchanging, he must have looked at it as
he did at the changing forms of mental conception, in the stage
of human childhood. In the child he implies, if he does not
fully affirm he found the spiritual affections at least as admirable
as in the man. These things, faith and hope and love, he per-
ceived, manifest themselves with heavenly beauty in the young ;
they are also the signs of God's truest presence in the instructed
and experienced man, and they will stand the shock of death,
and remain with us, in virtue of their imperishable and eternal
nature, in the dimly imagined world that lies on the other side
of the grave.
TI So with our youths. We once taught them to make Latin
verses, and called them educated; now we teach them to leap
and to row, to hit a ball with a bat, and call them educated.
Can they plough, can they sow, can they plant at the right time,
1 T. J. Crawford, The Preaching of the Cross, 349.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 437
or build with a steady hand ? Is it the effort of their lives to be
chaste, knightly, faithful, holy in thought, lovely in word and
deed ? Indeed it is, with some, nay, with many, and the strength
of England is in them, and the hope ; but we have to turn their
courage from the toil of war to the toil of mercy ; and their
intellect from dispute of words to discernment of things; and
their knighthood from the errantry of adventure to the state
and fidelity of a kingly power. And then, indeed, shall abide,
for them and for us, an incorruptible felicity, and an infallible
religion; shall abide for us Faith, no more to be assailed by
temptation, no more to be defended by wrath and by fear ;
shall abide with us Hope, no more to be quenched by the years
that overwhelm, or made ashamed by the shadows that betray :
shall abide for us, and with us, the greatest of these ; the abiding
will, the abiding name of our Father. For the greatest of these
is Charity. 1
i. Faith Abides.
1. There is a common saying, which ninety out of a hundred
people think comes out of the Bible, that " faith is lost in sight."
There is no such teaching in Scripture. True, in one aspect,
faith is the antithesis of sight. St. Paul does say, " We walk by
faith, not by sight." But that antithesis refers only to part of
faith's significance. In so far as it is the opposite of sight, of
course it will cease to be in operation when we shall know even
as we are known, and see Him as He is. But the essence of
faith is not the absence of the person trusted, but the emotion
of trust which goes out to the person, present or absent. And in
its deepest meaning of absolute dependence and happy confidence,
faith abides through all the glories and the lustres of the heavens,
as it burns amidst the dimnesses and the darknesses of earth.
For ever and ever will dependence on God in Christ be the life
of the glorified, as it was the life of the militant, Church. No
millenniums of possession, and no imaginable increases in beauty
and perfectness and enrichment with the wealth of God, will
bring us one inch nearer to casting off the state of filial depend-
ence which is, and ever will be, the condition of our receiving
them all. Faith " abides."
2. But -how can faith, which is the evidence of things not
seen, remain in the very presence of the realities themselves ?
1 Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies ( Works, xviii, 186).
438 THESE THREE
There we shall see face to face. So it is clear that faith cannot
be altogether the same as here. But in every essential point, it
will be the same. For what is the ground of faith ? What leads
me to act on God's word, though I have never seen God, have
never heard His voice ? Is it not that I trust God, that I am
content to leave myself in His hands, that I have confidence in
His doing all things well ? Is not this the essence of faith in
ordinary life ? Is it not that we trust one another, and have
confidence in men doing their duty, and so we leave important
matters to be transacted for us by others, having faith in them,
as we express it ? And in this its ordinary sense, will not faith
remain in our new and higher state of being ? Will not entire
and unwavering trust in God form a component of the character
of the saints in glory a confidence compared to which the most
perfect assurance ever attained here below is but doubt, an entire
resting for the present and for the future on His wisdom and His
love, of the perfect value of which we know nothing here ?
TJ Caesar Malan's death-bed seemed to those who witnessed it
the most surprising of all his achievements. Said the doctor to
me one day on leaving him, " I have just beheld what I have
often heard of, but what I never saw before. Now I have seen
it, as I see this stick I carry in my hand." " And what have you
seen ? " I asked. " Faith, faith" he answered ; " not the faith of
a theologian, but of a Christian ! I have seen it with my eyes." l
3. It would be a most serious mistake to think that there ever
was a time in the history of our creation in the past, that there is
any part of the infinite creation now, that there ever will be a
time in the history of any conceivable creation of the future, in
regard to which it has been, is, or shall be true that the spiritual
life of creatures made in the image of God is not lived by faith in
God. For what is the life of faith but the living, not inde-
pendently and with self-reliance, but by the receiving of the life
of God ? And how can it accord with the relation between the
Creator and the creature, that there should ever be any other
spiritual life than this ?
I singularly moved
To love the lovely that are not beloved,
Of all the Seasons, most
1 The Life, Labour, and Writings of Caesar Malan, 459.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 439
Love Winter, and to trace
The sense of the Trophonian pallor on her face.
It is not death, but plenitude of peace;
And the dim cloud that does the world enfold
Hath less the characters of dark and cold
Than warmth and light asleep;
And correspondent breathing seems to keep
With the infant harvest, breathing soft below
Its eider coverlet of snow.
Nor is in field or garden anything
But, duly looked into, contains serene
The substance of things hoped for, in the Spring,
And evidence of Summer not yet seen. 1
ii. Hope Abides.
1. Hope shares the prerogative and dignity of love, to stand
on the wreck of worlds and gaze on the eternal Face which
sinners may not see and live. The works of God shall pass away.
The law of decay is not more plainly written on our mortal
bodies than on the mightiest star that walks the frozen verge of
heaven. Even spiritual gifts shall perish, unless faith and hope
and love throw over them the asbestos robe of immortality. If
prophecies there be, they shall be needed no more; if tongues
there be, they shall cease; if knowledge there be, it shall be
needed no more: but hope along with faith and love abideth
evermore. There is room and work for hope even in the world
where we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. If
heaven is not poorer than earth, there must be unmeasured room
for hope in revelations far beyond all that sinners can ask or
think revelations rising through the years of eternity, but
always revelations of our Heavenly Father's love in Christ.
2. It is no more a Scriptural idea that hope is " lost in
fruition " than it is that faith is lost in sight. Eather that future
presents itself to us as the continual communication of an in-
exhaustible God to our progressively capacious and capable
spirits. In that continual communication there is continual
progress. Wherever there is progress there must be hope. And
thus the fair form which has so often danced before us elusive,
and has led us into bogs and miry places and then faded away,
1 Coventry Patmore.
440 THESE THREE
will move before us through all the long avenues of an endless
progress, and will ever and anon come back to tell us of the
unseen glories that lie beyond the next turn, and to woo us
farther into the depths of heaven and the fulness of God. Hope
"abides."
3. What is hope ? The expectation of things to come good
things ; brighter, better, fuller life. And the surer the expecta-
tion, the truer the hope. In the first dawn of the world's history,
was not this hope an inspiration ? Indeed it is the very per-
version of hope that we see exemplified so strikingly in the desire
to be wise, to be as gods (Gen. iii. 5, 6). And in our world
to-day, is it not the glorious heritage of the sons of God, antici-
pated by hope, that makes the present not only bearable but
instinct with strength, and fraught with victory ? And can
we conceive of any other world, or of any other state of life,
where hope is not ? where the goal is already reached, and only
the dull monotony of existence is left ? Nay, hope shines on the
forehead of every happy world, as of our poor, sinful, struggling
world. And in the immortal future shall hope cease ? Nay, for
that would be our doom. But rather, " for ever and ever " or
" unto the ages of the ages," as implying the opening up of an
ever-growing history there shall be the joyous expectation of
fuller, richer, and more glorious life.
K We can imagine only one condition from which hope is for
ever shut out ; but one place over the portal of which is inscribed,
" All hope abandon, ye who enter here." But in heaven, where
the spirit shall be refined and quickened and exalted to the
utmost, shall the keenest of all its pleasures, the life of all its
delights, the spur of all its exertions, be absent ? Hope dis-
appointed indeed there shall be none, for hope shall be based on
certainty ; the eye of the soul shall rest, not on the flitting visions
of earthly bliss, but on the calm realities of perfect knowledge.
Hope deferred there shall be none ; no more sickness of heart at
long waiting ; for the state of trial will be over, the perfect work
of patience will be accomplished, and the hand which here is often
stretched out till it wearies and stiffens and cannot grasp the
object which it has reached, will there have but to open and
be filled. But hope in all its blessedness, in all its fulness of joy,
shall abide for ever. 1
1 H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, i. 130.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 441
Bury Hope out of sight,
No book for it and no bell;
It never could bear the light
Even while growing and well:
Think if now it could bear
The light on its face of care
And grey scattered hair.
No grave for Hope in the earth,
But deep in that silent soul
Which rang no bell for its birth
And rings no funeral toll.
Cover its once bright head;
Nor odours nor tears be shed:
It lived once, it is dead.
Brief was the day of its power,
The day of its grace how brief
As the fading of a flower,
As the falling of a leaf,
So brief its day and its hour;
No bud more and no bower
Or hint of a flower.
Shall many wail it? not so:
Shall one bewail it ? not one :
Thus it hath been from long ago,
Thus it shall be beneath the sun.
fleet sun, make haste to flee;
rivers, fill up the sea;
Death, set the dying free.
The sun nor loiters nor speeds,
The rivers run as they ran,
Thro' clouds or thro' windy reeds
All run as when all began.
Only Death turns at our cries:
Lo the Hope we buried with sighs
Alive in Death's eyes ! !
Hi. Love Abides.
1. Love is the eternal form of the human relation to God.
It, too, like- the mercy which it clasps, " endureth for ever." It
is greater than its linked sisters, because, whilst faith and hope
1 Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 137.
442 THESE THREE
belong only to a creature, and are dependent and expectant of
some good to come to themselves, and correspond to something
which is in God in Christ, the love which springs from faith and
hope not only corresponds to, but resembles, that from which it
comes and by which it lives. The fire kindled is cognate with
the fire that kindles ; and the love that is in man is like the love
that is in God. It is the climax of his nature ; it is the fulfilling
of all duty ; it is the crown and jewelled clasp of all perfection.
And so " abideth faith, hope, love, these three ; and the greatest
of these is love."
Bound among the quiet graves,
When the sun was low,
Love went grieving, Love who saves;
Did the sleepers know?
At his touch the flowers awoke,
At his tender call
Birds into sweet singing broke,
And it did befall
From the blooming, bursting sod
All Love's dead arose,
And went flying up to God
By a way Love knows. 1
2. The first thing about love is that it is Godlike, the second
follows from the first, and that is, it is indestructible
They sin who tell us love can die.
With life all other passions fly,
All others are but vanity.
In Heaven ambition cannot dwell,
Nor avarice in the vaults of Hell.
Of earth, these passions of the earth,
They perish where they have their birth,
But love is indestructible:
Its holy flame for ever burneth.
From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth,
Full oft on earth, a troubled guest,
At times deceived, at times oppressed,
In Heaven it finds its perfect rest.
It soweth here in toil and care,
But the harvest-time of love is there.
1 Louise Chandler Moulton.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 443
When the last day is ended,
And the nights are through
When the last sun is buried
In its grave of blue;
When the stars are snuffed like candles,
And the seas no longer fret;
When the winds unlearn their cunning,
And the storms forget;
When the last lip is palsied
And the last prayer said
Love shall reign immortal
While the worlds lie dead!
THE GREATEST OF THESE THREE.
St. Paul, when he assigns the pre-eminence to love, has no
intention of depreciating the value, still less of dispensing with
the necessity, of those other graces to which he prefers it. For
it is remarkable that he who in this passage extols love in a strain
which none of the other writers of the New Testament has ever
reached is the same who has also dwelt more largely and more
forcibly than all the others on the inestimable preciousness of
faith and hope, attaching, indeed, to these two principles, and
more particularly to faith, a measure of importance which men
have objected to as, in their judgment, altogether inordinate and
unwarranted.
Yet the first thing that strikes us is, that the whole civilized
world has come round at any rate, in theory to the teaching of
St. Paul. To an educated Eoman of the time of St. Paul it would
have seemed the most ridiculous assertion possible that the
greatest of all virtues was love. To die with a smile on his
face, to wrap himself up in the toga of his reserve, to be self-
contained and absolutely self-controlled, that was his ideal, and a
grand one, too, up to a certain point ; but the attitude of Marcus
Aurelius, for instance, towards Christianity, shows us that the
educated Kojnan of the day would have heard with something like
contempt that "the greatest of these is love." And yet to-day
take up any magazine the most anti-Church magazine that you
444 THESE THREE
can find and look to see what is its teaching about social matters.
What is it that the popular magazine puts before us as the
greatest thing of all ? Away with creeds ! Away with dogmas !
But what is important ? The service of man ; doing good to one's
fellows ! The verdict of the popular magazine of to-day is, that
cleverness may be a great thing, and learning a great thing, but
a greater than these is love. Or pick up a philosophical treatise
on ethics, and, in a more cumbrous style, you will find the same
thing said. What comes out as the ultimate basis of conduct in
such books ? Is it not Altruism ? But Altruism after all is
but a cumbrous name for love, and was taught to the world by
Jesus Christ ; and therefore the verdict of the ethical treatise is
the verdict of St. Paul, that " the greatest of these is love." Or,
again, take practical life. Who is the villain that is hissed off the
stage not only of the theatre but of real life ? Is it the dishonest
man ? Is it the drunkard ? No ! It is the hard-hearted man ;
it is the man with no sympathy ; it is the man with no kindness.
Let a man be kind-hearted and generous, and there is nothing
that he is not forgiven to-day. You will find his victims waiting
round the corner to give him another chance. He may break
every statute in the Statute Book, but if he is kind and affectionate
everything is forgiven him. The popular verdict of the day is
that sobriety is a great thing and honesty is a great thing, but
a greater than these is love.
TJ There are people who believe they could have improved this
thirteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians.
I have found one man who, if he had been acting as amanuensis,
and St. Paul had said, " And now abideth faith, hope, love, these
three, and the greatest of these is love " he would have held up
his hands and said, " No, Paul, that is a mistake ; put compact
organization of the visible church for the word love, and you will
have it right." There are multitudes of people in the churches
who believe that the outer form of the organization of the church
has more to do with religion conquering the world than love. I
have known a man who, if he had been there, would have insisted
that the word beauty should be substituted for the word love.
There are other men who would have substituted the word music,
so that it would read: "And now abideth faith, hope, music,
these three ; but the greatest of these is music." There is another
class of men who would have said, " Paul, you should substitute
conscience for the word charity, so that it shall read : And now
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 445
abideth faith, hope, conscience, these three; and the greatest of
these is conscience." I suppose there are not fewer than twenty-
five people here this morning who would have seconded the
suggestion. There are others who would have substituted for
this word love the word zeal : " And now abideth faith, hope, zeal,
these three ; but the greatest of these is zeal." There are many
who, if they had been there, would have substituted for the word
love the phrase sound doctrine : " Now abideth faith, hope, sound
doctrine, these three; but the greatest of these is sound
doctrine." l
Why is Love the greatest ? There are many reasons.
1. Love is likest God. Faith and hope, from their nature, are
recipients, while it is of the nature of love to be communicative,
and thus to be possessed of that higher blessedness which the
Lord Jesus ascribes to giving before receiving. Faith and hope,
too, are necessarily expressive, in all who exercise them, of
imperfection and dependence, and as such can be attributed
only to subordinate creatures. We cannot ascribe to God any-
thing that resembles them. He who knows all things, and
can do all things of Himself, has no room for relying on the
testimony or aid of others. And He who is infinitely blessed
in the possession of a Divine fulness cannot be said to hope,
or to lack anything that could be hoped for. But love, on the
contrary, is the attribute of superior natures. It is held by the
highest creatures in common with their Creator. It belongs to
the character of Him in whom all fulness dwells. Indeed it is
His pre-eminent and crowning attribute ; and the more we attain
of it, so much the more do we approach Him in His Divine
excellence, so much the more are we fitted to share in His
unutterable blessedness. "Beloved," saith an Apostle, "let us
love one another ; for love is of God ; and every one that loveth
is born of God, and knoweth God; God is love; and he that
dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him."
Faith and hope belong to finite beings only, while love is not
thus limited. It is an attribute of the Divine: nay, it is the
very name of God. "God is not faith," says the commentator
Bengel in his epigrammatic way, " and God is not hope, but God
is love."
1 J. R. Thompson, Burden Bearing, 152.
446 THESE THREE
(1) It follows that love interprets God. The quickest, the
truest, the fullest interpretation of God comes through love.
How do you know a man? Do you know a man when you
describe him by saying he is so many feet high, weighs so many
pounds, his hair is of such a colour, his eyes are of such a hue, he
is engaged in such a business, he lives in such a house ? Is that
a description of the man? Is that the way you interpret and
analyse a man? We begin to know a man when we find out
the master passion of his nature, and we never know anything
about him until we understand that. You may know ever so
much about a man externally, you may know ever so much about
him intellectually, but until you know what quickens it all, and
colours it all, and directs it all, until you have followed the subtle
windings of his soul, and know in what dispositions and purposes
the man has his hidden life, you will never know him.
(2) And it makes us like God. For to all the extent we
possess and cherish it, we are like God, and partakers of a Divine
nature. The possessor of it is not merely a passive recipient of
good, a shrivelled, sordid abject, turning all his thoughts and
desires inward on his own littleness ; he becomes, like his Maker,
a pattern, a source of good; a centre of diffusive benevolence;
a fountain whose streams irrigate the earth; a sun whose light
and heat dissipate the rigours of night and winter, and dispense
the blessings of day and summer.
2. Love is greatest because it is the end of redemption. Love,
we are told, is the end of the commandment. It is so, whether
by " the commandment " we understand the Law or the Gospel.
As for the Moral Law, what is its sum or substance but love to
God and love to man ? And as for the Gospel, what is its grand
design but to rescue men from a state of enmity against God
and against one another, to restore them, not only to the Divine
favour, but to the Divine image, of which Love is certainly the
characteristic and prevailing feature ; and by writing upon their
hearts that great law of Love, in which all the Divine statutes
are summarily comprehended, to bring them into cordial sub-
mission to the will of God, and to win from them a cheerful and
thorough obedience to His commandments ? This is unquestion-
ably the ultimate design of the Gospel. Finding men "without
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 447
hope " and " without God in the world," living in enmity, distrac-
tion, and alienation, it aims at raising them from their sin and
selfishness to the love of God and of the brethren. As necessary
means for the accomplishment of this purpose, faith and hope
are of inestimable importance, bringing as they do the Gospel
to bear upon us, with all its sanctifying and love-inspiring
influences. But still, as being mainly means, they are sub-
ordinate to the end or final result to which they are conducive ;
just as the scaffolding, though necessary, is less valuable than
the finished building that is erected by the use of it, or as the
sowing of the seed, however indispensable, is of less consideration
in itself than the reaping of the precious and abundant grain.
Faith is the leaf, hope is the blossom, but love is the fruit of
the tree of righteousness ; and here, too, the leaf and the blossom
are for the sake of the fruit. Only we must think of these, not
as giving place to each other in time, but as flourishing together
on the same eternal stem. Faith may rely on the mercies and
promises of God, and hope may anticipate their full and final
enjoyment ; but love is that actual consummation of blessedness,
begun on earth and to be perfected in heaven, to which these
other excellent graces are subsidiary, and from their subservience
to which they derive their chief importance.
U True religion is a radical thing, that is, it goes to the root
of matters. Paul tells us that great and needful for a complete
life as faith and hope may be, it is Love supreme, absolute Love,
which is the one essential. Love is the only religion ; there is no
true religion which is loveless. You may have everything else
orthodoxy, intelligence, faith, whatever you like, but if you have
not got love you are as a lantern without light, and as a man
without a soul. 1
(1) It is therefore most beautiful. God has revealed His
benevolence in the beautiful, and the beautiful is the image of
His benevolence. Keal affection always tries to express itself
similarly. In Divine Worship we bring the tribute of our music,
or our flowers, even one poor flower may mean much and
seek to make everything attractive in the sanctuary. So in our
human relations, love tries to make everything beautiful. It
adorns the home, adds a touch of colour here and there, the
1 Quintin Hogg, 302.
448 THESE THREE
presence of some garden trophies. When a wife professes it for
a husband, or a mother for her child, and is willing to leave every-
thing untidy, gloomy, neglected, or when a father is harsh and
glum and never thinks of helping, something is radically wrong.
In impoverished homes we see the difference in one the
pathetic endeavour to make all charming, in the other, the
disposition to leave everything unclean and hideous.
H I once read of a school where there was a very plain girl.
Somewhat cruelly her companions would remind her of her lack
of attractions. The school-teacher saw the depressing effect on
her of this treatment. One day she handed her a coarse lump
covered with black earth, and said : " This is like yourself ; only
plant it." The schoolgirl took it home and obeyed, not under-
standing. Out of it grew a Japanese lily. Then she perceived.
And in the progress of time love in her soul imparted a heavenly
charm to her character and to her face as well. 1
T| "As to other points," said John Milton, "what God may
have determined for me I know not, but this I know that if He
ever instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast of
any man, He has instilled it into mine. Ceres, in the fable,
pursued not her daughter with a greater keenness of inquiry than
I, day and night, the idea of perfection. 2
(2) It is most peaceful. There is a majesty of Divine serenity
in love. We always associate a holy calm with God. When it
is said that a thousand years with Him are as one day, we
immediately think of Him as moving reposefully. Our Saviour
in all the strain of His tempted and tempestuous life invited
the world to come to Him for rest. Wherever there is hate
there must be agitation, uncertainty, and possible anarchy. Peace
comes when we are at peace with the God of peace, and with our
fellow-beings.
U Columba renounced the warlike frenzy of his youth and
became a leader in the creative arts of peace and the preacher
of supernatural hopes. He made lona a centre of light and
loveliness. And when he came to die his end was full of holy
quietness. He sent this message to his spiritual children : " Let
peace and charity, a charity mutual and sincere, reign always
among you." St. Cuthbert also was gentle and composed.
During his wanderings when his followers were sad, he would
1 G. C. Lorimer, The Modern Crisis in Religion, 249.
2 N. D. Hillis, The Investment of Influence, 261.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 449
say : " Never did man hunger who served God faithfully ; " and
beholding the eagle above, he would add : " by it even food can
come." When a snow-storm in Fife hedged him in, one said to
him : " The snow closes the road along the shore to us ; " another
added: "The storm bars our way over the sea." St. Cuthbert
answered : " There is still the way of heaven that lies open." 1
3. Love is greatest in influence. Love is described in the
context as " seeking not her own." Equally boundless with
the others in its views, it looks constantly abroad, without any
regard to self, opens the heart and hand to all whom it can
benefit, and makes it its sole aim and never-ceasing vocation to
promote the glory of God and the welfare of all mankind. Unlike
the two kindred graces here compared with it, it leads the
Christian to regard himself not as an isolated being, whose chief
concern is to secure his own spiritual interests, but as a member
of that great family of which God is the Father and all men
are brethren, and in which the members ought ever to be linked
together by the sacred bonds of amity and peace.
Love is more than pity. Pity stands in the porch, its eyes
watching the poor wayfarer who comes wearied and footsore,
ragged and perishing. And pity bids the servant search if there
is any scrap of meat and any cast-off clothing that can be spared.
But look again, pity stands and watches more intently ; the face
is changed; the tears gather; the man is stirred; he runs. In
spite of rags and wretchedness, he falls upon the wanderer's neck.
He kisses him and presses him to his heart. The wondering
servant comes forth with a crust or two of bread, and an old
coat. No indeed, that might do for pity, but this is love. " Bring
forth the best robe and put it on him ; and put a ring on his
hand, and shoes on his feet ; and bring hither the fatted calf and
kill it ; and let us eat, and be merry : for this my son was dead,
and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." That is love.
Pity saw the wants, and would give what it could spare ; but love
saw the son, and could not give enough.
Love found upon the battle's edge
A coward fleeing from the strife;
And sent him forth his heart in pledge,
Valiant thro' life.
1 G. C. Loriiner.
I COR. 29
450 THESE THREE
Love touched dumb lips that could not pray,
And lo, they uttered prayer and song;
Love hath so subtle sweet a way,
Love is so strong.
It is because love is the first fact of all facts in the Gospel
of Christ that the Gospel is fitted to be a universal Gospel. All
men have hearts, and love is the same thing to every heart. An
idea is not the same thing to every mind, but love is the same
thing to every heart. A loving smile on the face of a Christian
woman in China does not require to be translated into Chinese
in order to be understood by a Chinaman. A child can perfectly
interpret the sweetness in its mother's face long before it can
translate into thoughts of its own the words she utters. If
thought is the soul's prose, love is its music, and we know that
music will steal easily into many a spot to which words stiffly
articulated would be coldly refused admittance.
(1) It secures obedience. " If ye love me, keep my command-
ments." In this exhortation, love to Christ is the mighty energy
that produces holy obedience. The loving eye is quick to discern
the will, the wish of the beloved. The heart which truly loves
cannot break one of the least of these commandments. Even if
the commandment seem arbitrary, it is enough that He who is
supremely loved has said, " This do in remembrance of me."
That is enough. Such motive is sufficient. It is simple, clear,
and explicit. The obedience which is the witness, the pledge, the
consequence of love, and is neither formal nor perfunctory, but
the outcome of a self-sacrificing affection, is alone well-pleasing.
(2) It is the source of knowledge. "He that loveth not,
knoweth not God." This is true of other objects of both love and
knowledge, as certainly as it is true of the love and knowledge
of the Lord God. We do not know any thing, any person, any
science, until we love it. The " dry light " needed for scientific
pursuit is the eye unbleared by prejudice, unfilled with tears
of foolish and inappropriate emotion, not an eye which does not
flash with love. It is sometimes said that " love is blind." Cupid
has been imaged with shaded eyes. No greater mistake can be
made. Love has microscopic eyes to see both the faults and
excellences of the beloved objects. What a world this would be
if mothers could see in all children the Divine attractions and
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 451
worth which they do see in their first-born ; and if lovers could see
in all persons the wonderful lovableness they easily discern in one
another ! It is only the lover of truths, of persons, of countries,
of great causes and principles, who really and veritably knows
them.
H " Love seeks not to limit its devotion but to find opportunities
of expressing it. Would you know God ? I say to you, discover
what true love means. Get your heart so full of it that it will
send you forth in God's Spirit seeking to save the lost, yearning
to redeem the erring and sinful, binding up the broken-hearted,
drying streaming eyes, and comforting them that mourn; get
such a love as that into your soul, and you need look no further
for an image of God. Moreover, not only is it true that every
one that loveth knoweth God, but it is equally true that you will
know God just to the extent that you really love and no more." l
4. Love is the greatest because it embraces and harmonizes the
res t % it is love that gives faith and hope their very life. How
can we truly trust where we love not ? In that case faith is but
a selfish grasping after one's own good. But, inspired by love,
it is the grateful acceptance of the love of God, as in itself the
best gift, and the pledge of all good gifts besides. Hope likewise,
without love, is but the selfish anticipation of one's own joy.
But, as inspired by love, it is the glad expectancy that God will
work all things according to His good pleasure.
But Love an everlasting crown receiveth;
For She is Hope, and Fortitude, and Faith,
Who all things hopeth, beareth, and believeth. 2
1 Quintin Hogg, 304. 8 Buskin.
THE RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD.
453
LITERATURE.
Aglionby (F. K.), The Better Choice, 157.
Alford (H.), Sermons on Christian Doctrine, 251.
Brown (J. B.), The Higher Life, 338.
Buckland (A. K.), Text-Studies for a Year, 115.
Butler (W. J.), Sermons for Working Men, 211.
Gurney (T. A.), The Living Lord and the Opened Grave, 57.
Horder (W. G.), The Other-World, 123.
Howatt (J. K.), The Children's Pew, 71.
Jerdan (C.), Manna for Young Pilgrims, 272.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year; Easter to Ascension, 147.
Newbolt (W. C. E.), Words of Exhortation, 147.
Pentecost (G. F.), Bible Studies : Mark and Jewish History, 193.
Pierson (A. T.), The Making of a Sermon, 96.
Russell (A.), The Light that Lighteth Every Man, 107.
Shore (T. T.), Saint George for England, 104.
Simpson (W.), in The World's Great Sermons, v. 121.
Smyth (N.), The Reality of Faith, 244.
Steel (T. H.), Sermons in Harrow Chapel, 171.
Thorne (II.), Foreshadowings of the Gospel, 205.
Varley (H.), Some Main Questions of the Christian Faith, 78.
Wheeler (W. C.), Sermons and Addresses, 162.
Whiton (J. M.), Beyond the Shadow, 68, 224.
Wilson (S.), Lenten Shadows and Easter Lights, 125.
Christian World Pulpit, v. 369 (Kennedy) ; viii. 347 (Brown) ; xvi. 197
(Craig) ; xxiii. 276 (Alexander) ; xli. 355 (Yarley) ; xlvii. 257
(Newbolt).
Churchman's Pulpit : Easter Day and Season : vii. 200 (Keble), 203
(Vaughan).
First Sunday after Easter ; vii. 463 (Cobb).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., i. 245 (Alexander) ; v. 235 (Brown).
Treasury (New York), xix. 848 (Broadbent).
Twentieth Century Pastor, xxii. 241.
454
THE RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD.
But now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of them
that are asleep. I Cor. xv. 20.
1. Do we recognize the immense debt which we owe to the great
Apostle of the Gentiles ? We base our hopes for time and
eternity on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Well,
it was St. Paul who was the first to pierce beneath their surface
and seize their hidden meaning and power. The Twelve, in their
early preaching days, were staggered by the death, and only half
understood the resurrection. They had to sit at St. Paul's feet
before their Messianic hopes broadened out into the eternal
Gospel.
2. The Apostle has been contemplating the long train of
dismal consequences which he sees would arise if we had only
a dead Christ. He thinks that he, the Apostle, would have
nothing to preach, and we nothing to believe. He thinks that
all hope of deliverance from sin would fade away. He thinks
that, the one fact which gives assurance of immortality having
vanished, the dead who had nurtured the assurance have perished.
And he thinks that if things were so, then Christian men, who
had believed a false gospel, and nourished an empty faith, and
died clinging to a baseless hope, were far more to be pitied than
men who had had less splendid dreams and less utter illusions.
Then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he turns away from
that dreary picture, and with a change of key, which the dullest
ear can appreciate, from the wailing minors of the preceding
verses, he breaks into this burst of triumph. "Now" things
being as they are, for it is the logical " now," and not the temporal
one Christ is risen from the dead, and that as the first-fruits
of them that slept.
455
456 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
3. What a shout of joy there is in that word " now " with which
the Apostle opens out into his glorious theme of the Kesurrection.
It has been struggling to get out, through discords and obscuring
passages of controversial doubt. This great theme of the
Apostolic Gospel had been dragged down by the cries of those
who say there is no resurrection of the dead ; down deeper into
the sombre depths of a false witness to God, of a tragic mistake
in estimating evidence ; down into a gloom, where the holy dead
lie only as so many perished lives, crushed by sin, and a challenge
to despair. We hardly trace a note of the first inspiration in the
dismal discord of broken hopes and fooled expectations: "If in
this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most
miserable." But it is at this point that the resurrection theme
bursts out, rising above and upon the shifting discords, and
opening up out of the passages which ended only in woe. " Now
hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of them
that are asleep." Christian preaching was not a proclamation of
meaningless and empty platitudes, not a principle incapable of
producing any good results ; God's messengers were not false
witnesses ; the Christian dead were not perished ; Christian life
was not a hollow sham, a cunningly devised fable. All was safe
all was bright ; the brighter because the very discordance of the
doubt could only open out into this : Christ was risen, His people
should also rise.
The subject is the Eesurrection of Christ as the pledge of our
Kesurrection. Take it in three parts
I. The Possibility of the Eesurrection.
II. The Power of the Eesurrection.
III. The Promise of the Eesurrection.
I.
THE POSSIBILITY OF THE EESURRECTION.
1. The Christian doctrine of the Eesurrection is a stumbling-
block to faith because we have allowed ourselves to exalt and to
exaggerate death to a degree altogether beyond reason and
Scripture. We speak, that is to say, and mourn, as though death
were the last law of life, as though death were the ultimate fact
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 457
of our experience, and then we have to smuggle in our hope
of the resurrection as a miraculous exception to this universal
power of death. Exactly the opposite is true. Life is the law
of nature, and death a natural means to more life and better.
Death is the lower fact, and life the higher. Or more specifically,
the resurrection of Jesus is not the great exception to natural
law; it is an exemplification of the higher, universal law of
life.
The earth was dead, so they tell us, ages ago. But now how
this earth lives ! There is hardly a cliff too barren for nature not
to hang some blooming thing upon it ; and the old earth teems
with life. Furthermore, even here, where death reigns, life has
been growing higher, more complex, more capable of larger
correspondences with things. Between the lowest living thing
and the brain of man there is a difference of life wide as the
distance between the earth and the heavens. That first infini-
tesimal point of life has no world with which to establish
relations larger than the microscopic field in which we have
looked and discovered it, but we have already established
relations of thought and knowledge with the farthest stars.
Plainly then, without any doubt, life is something stronger thus
far upon this earth than death. Notwithstanding death, life
grows to be more and richer.
What is death, so far as we can see what it is ? Here is a
minute living thing in a glass of water. You turn the water out.
That living particle is now mere dust upon the glass. Dead,
that is, it is no longer moving in an element corresponding to its
capacity of vital movements. What is death then? A living
thing is no longer in harmony with its surroundings. It is
thrown out of its own proper correspondence with things ; it is
dead. So death is a relative thing. It is simply some wrong
or imperfect adjustment of life to external conditions. But death
may be partial, then, not entire. A part of the body may be dead.
A man may be dead in some relations, and still live in others.
There is a sense in which we die daily. Parts of us are thrown
out of vital relations. The body may begin to die long before it
is dead. Death is but a relative, negative thing. Life is the
principle, the force, the law ; death the limitation, the accident,
the partial negation of God's great affirmation of life in things.
458 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
If The weakest point in the historical acceptation of the Fall
certainly is its theory of death ; for if death in the case of man be
a penal punishment for breaking the Divine law, how happens it
that this penalty should lay low not only the guilty party, which
is the proper nature of all penalties, but should travel with an
indiscriminate sweep over the whole length and breadth of the
creation ? Death is not a horror but a universal phenomenon ; all
things die just as certainly as they are born. Flowers die;
quadrupeds die; birds die; fishes die fishes! there they lie
enswathed by millions in some mud-beds of the primeval slime,
thousands of thousands of years possibly before the appearance of
the unfeathered biped on this terrestrial stage, scarcely with any
presentiment of Adam's first sin. The ecclesiastical theory of
death, therefore, plainly breaks down, by the logical defect of
explaining only a small number of the facts. Had it been
otherwise, had man been the only creature that knew death,
the theory might have some plausible ground on which to stand.
But a more fundamental objection remains. Death is an evil,
but to whom ? to the creature who dies, and to all who have
special cause to lament its loss ; but is it an evil to the universe ?
to this earth ? manifestly not ; for if all the people that have
been born on the earth from Adam until now had lived and not
known death, where would the room have been for them ? Ee-
juvenescence is one of the grandest and most sublime facts in the
divine constitution of things: so that young persons may con-
stantly appear on what to them is a new and therefore a
stimulating scene, old persons must depart and make room. 1
If As to death, any one who understands Nature at all thinks
nothing of it. Her whole concern is perpetually to produce
nourishment for all her offspring. We go that others may come
and better, if we rear them in the right way. In talking of
these deep things, men too often make the error of imagining that
the world was made for themselves. 2
2. Physical death is not made the important thing in our Bibles.
Physical death does not hold the first place in the economy of
redemption. The Bible assigns a subordinate place to our King
of Terrors. The Book of Genesis, it is true, invests natural death
with certain punitive fears ; but it does not elevate death to the
rank of the supreme and final transaction between man and his
Maker. Adam was not commanded by the Lord to live every
day as though it were his last, himself a slave bound under the
1 Jolm Stuart Blackie, Notes of a Life, 270. - George Meredith.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 459
fear of death ; he was commanded to go and work in the sweat
of his brow, but with a promise of God in his heart. Man is to
work out his time here, and to pass through death, as a being
born under the higher law of the spirit, and with the possibility
of eternal life always before him.
And in the New Testament the chief use made of the fact of
death is as a metaphor. Jesus makes a metaphor of what we call
death. To Him sin is death ; the maid whom the people thought
dead, He said, was asleep. The crisis of a soul's history is not,
in the Bible, the death of the body. The fact of physical death
and resurrection is used as the symbol of the greater change of a
soul from sin to life.
If It is comparatively easy to set our teeth and face the
inevitable with " a grin " ; but the " highest bravery " is to hide
our anguish with a smile. I do think I make a decently good
Stoic, but confess that in times like this Christians have the pull.
Nevertheless, I have often thought of the words, " I am not in
the least afraid to die," and wondered if, when my time should
come, I would be able to say them. But now I know that I can,
and this even in the bitterness of feeling that one's work is
prematurely cut short. 1
If If we Christians believe the smallest fraction of what we
pretend to believe, there is but little to mourn over in death. I
know not when or how that veiled messenger may come to me,
but this I do know, that it can come only at the bidding of my
Father. I know its mission can be nothing more than the un-
clothing of this poor weak body of my humiliation to clothe me
with the body of His glory. . . . Death is not only an exodus, it
is also an entrance ; while we stand by the bedside and say, " He is
gone," they on the other side are welcoming him with unspeakable
joy. 2
3. The only thing to be feared is spiritual death. That is
non-adjustment of our hearts to God. The soul out of harmony
with love and truth may become as dead as the animalcule left
dry upon the edge of the empty glass. To attempt to live as an
immortal soul without love, and not as in God's presence, is to
dream of living in a vacuum. The true life is to know God.
Even now they are most alive who have in pure and loving
thoughts the largest relationship to all good. The wages of sin
1 George John Romanes, Life, and Letters, 317. a Quintin Hogg, 308.
460 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
is death death creeping into the heart ; death clouding the eye
of the intellect ; death, as Jesus said, destroying the soul in
Gehenna.
If Dante saw some souls in hell whose bodies were still alive
on earth, their friends in Florence and Lucca had not the
faintest idea that these men, seemingly a part of everyday life,
were, all the time, " dead souls." There is hardly a more terrible
idea in all that terrible book, and yet it is a possibility in our own
daily life this atrophy of the spiritual nature, corresponding to
the atrophy of the poetical nature which Darwin noted in himself
as due to his own neglect. Clifford, in A Likely Story, forcibly
depicts a soul awaking in the next world to find that through
this unconscious starvation, there was no longer anything in him
to correspond with God. 1
They pass me by like shadows, crowds on crowds,
Dim ghosts of men, that hover to and fro,
Hugging their bodies round them like thin shrouds
Wherein their souls were buried long ago :
They trampled on their youth, and faith, and love,
They cast their hope of human-kind away.
With Heaven's clear messages they madly strove,
And conquered, and their spirits turned to clay:
Lo ! how they wander round the world, their grave,
Whose ever-gaping maw by such is fed,
Gibbering at living men, and idly rave,
"We, only, truly live, but ye are dead."
Alas! poor fools, the anointed eye may trace
A dead soul's epitaph in every face! 2
4. The resurrection of Jesus was in accordance with the
higher, universal law of life. Death is for life, not life for death,
in the ultimate constitution of this universe. The resurrection
of Jesus is an instance of the general law that life is lord of death,
His resurrection, as our text puts it, is the first-fruits of them that
sleep. In the opinion of the Apostle the resurrection of Jesus
was no more out of the Divine order of things, no more contrary
to the ultimate law of nature, than the first-fruits of the summer
are exceptions to the general law of life which in the autumn
shall show its universal power in every harvest field.
5. This was Jesus' teaching concerning the resurrection. He
1 L. H. M. Soulsby, Stray Thoughts for Girls, 160. 2 Lowell, " The Street."
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 461
answered the Sadducees of His generation not merely by asserting
His knowledge that the dead shall be raised ; He placed the
fact of the resurrection upon the fundamental principle that life,
not death, is God's first law. " But that the dead are raised, even
Moses shewed, in the place concerning the Bush, when he calleth
the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God
of Jacob. Now he is not the God of the dead, but of the living :
for all live unto him."
6. This, then, is clearly and unmistakably the Biblical teaching
of the resurrection. It is in accordance with law. It is in the
Divine order of the creation. Why should it seem otherwise to
us? Why should we regard it as a thing incredible that God
should raise the dead ? Partly because in our pagan philosophies
we have exaggerated the place and importance of death in the
world ; partly, also, because we have fallen into gross and carnal
imaginations of the resurrection and eternal life, which would be
violations of natural law most difficult to conceive. But, planting
the standard of our faith firmly upon this high Biblical doctrine
of the resurrection as the final fulfilment of the law of life, let us
survey the field of nature and see whether we have learned
anything to make it a thing incredible that God should raise
the dead.
7. Our Lord's own resurrection is set forth as an event which
could not possibly have failed to occur. We say Jesus' resurrection
was a miracle, that is, contrary to what might have been expected
a great exception to the law of death. But that is not the way
the Scriptures put it. They say, "Jesus of Nazareth, a man
approved of God . . . whom God raised up, having loosed the
pangs of death: because it was not possible that he should be
holden of it." "Moreover my flesh also shall dwell in hope:
because thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades, neither wilt thou
give thy Holy One to see corruption." It would be impossible
for death to hold a principle of life like the Spirit of that Man
of Nazareth. It would be a violation of all law should the Holy
One be given over to corruption. There is something inherently
inconceivable and impossible in such a thought. How can Holiness
see corruption ? how can life itself be given over to death ?
Impossible ! It would have been a miracle, had Jesus not risen
462 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
from the dead. It would have been a violation of the inmost
principle of the creation, had the mere dust of this earth held
Him as its own for ever. It would have been a miracle without
reason, a miracle not against the ordinary course of nature merely,
but against God, the living God, had He not risen from the
dead, the first-fruits of this power and order of Divine life in
the creation.
T[ Dean Bradley, in his Easter Day sermon at Westminster
Abbey, put his finger on the very centre of the contrast between
ancient and modern feeling concerning Easter, when he said that
while it was the crucifixion of Christ that was to "the Jews
a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness" in the great
day when Christianity first came into the world, it is no longer
the Crucifixion but the Kesurrection which to both Jews and
Greeks, though a great marvel, was a marvel which attracted
rather than repelled them that seems to modern pride and
scepticism a stumbling-block and foolishness. We feel no diffi-
culty where the early believers felt most difficulty, in accepting
the tremendous humiliation and sorrow and shame of the cross.
On the contrary, as Dean Bradley told his hearers, the story of
the Man of Sorrows is wholly credited by the sceptical world of
to-day, and is accepted even with eager reverence and gratitude.
It is the suffering, the forgiveness, the resignation, the peace, the
calm, the fortitude, the sympathy, the " Daughters of Jerusalem,
weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children,"
the " Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do," the
" Peace I leave with you ; my peace I give unto you ; not as the
world giveth, give I unto you let not your heart be troubled,
neither let it be afraid," in which we all believe even sceptics
and those who are more than sceptics, who assert positively that
"miracles do not happen." The shame does not humiliate us;
we can see through it to the infinitely greater glory behind;
whereas the Jews found it a sore stumbling-block to their pride
of race, and the Greeks looked down upon it as radically incon-
sistent with that intellectual caste to which they ascribed the
sole possession of " the good and beautiful " in all its perfection.
To them the asserted resurrection seemed that which alone gave
a glimmer of probability to the bold assertion that God had
manifested Himself in human nature only to die upon the cross,
and submit to the jeers and scoffs of Jewish and Eoman ridicule.
To us there seems something intrinsically convincing in the
assertion that this great death was died, that that majestic calm
and that magnanimous sympathy prevailed even over the torture
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 463
of the cross ; we come to our difficulties only when we come to
the assertion that He who died that supernatural death really
lived again to be recognized by those who saw Him die and heard
Him foretell their own discomfiture and dispersion. The early
disciples found it all but impossible to believe that a Divine
nature could go through physical and moral humiliation. Our
difficulty is not in the least in believing in that which is Divine
enough to overcome any combination, however overwhelming, of
physical and moral humiliation. What we find difficulty in
believing is, that that which is morally and spiritually super-
natural involves even any power at all of controlling or over-
ruling what we suppose to be the fixed necessities of physical
law. Our minds are jaded and hag-ridden, as it were, by the
physical fatalities of modern science; and yet modern science
itself might, if we only used our eyes, warn us of the extra-
ordinary blunder we are making in thus depreciating the true
power of mind over matter. 1
Tf For the Apostles, the resurrection of Jesus meant that He
who had claimed to be the destined Son of Man had been ap-
proved, justified, and glorified by the Father, according to the
rule by which resurrection is the established and almost natural
consequence and proof of justice. What they had doubted was
His claim to be the Christ ; not the possibility of His resurrection.
When He rose, their trust in Him, in their own redemption with
and through Him, in His whole Gospel of the coming Kingdom
and His own place in it, was confirmed and verified, not by an
exceptional but by a regular occurrence. Kesurrection is the
fruit of righteousness, and a tree is known by its fruit. 2
8. What was miraculous about Jesus' resurrection was not
that God raised Him from the dead, but that He was raised
before the last great day, and that He should be seen by men,
and recognized in His transitional or intermediate state between
earth and heaven. The visibility on earth of the risen Lord,
before He ascended to His Father and ours, was exceptional, out
of the common course, or miraculous.
T| If you should see a tree break into blossom in the month
of June, and the next morning find the fruit already ripe upon
the bough, you would say, That is extraordinary ! It is not
indeed contrary to the nature of the tree that fruit should ripen
on the bough, yet contrary to all our experience of growth that
1 R. H. Hutton, Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought, 159.
2 G. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 140.
464 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
the fruit should ripen in a summer's day. That fruit would be
a miracle upon that tree ; yet not in itself contrary to the nature
of the tree, but only to its ordinary conditions of fructification.
The fruit itself would be perfectly natural, only the method of
its growth would be extraordinary. And it would not be
impossible to conceive an enhancement, or quickening, of nature's
forces which might cause a plant to break into fruitfulness
contrary to our experience of its usual times and seasons. Some-
what so, in the view we are now trying to win, is Jesus' resurrection
a first-fruit of the tree of life ; not in itself contrary to the law of
life, but in its manner and time out of the common order. In
the miracle of His resurrection we have only to think of God's
quickening, or anticipating, by His power the course of nature,
not as violating any real principle of it. 1
The yearly miracle of spring,
Of budding tree and blooming flower,
Which Nature's feathered laureates sing
In my cold ear from hour to hour,
Spreads all its wonders round my feet;
And every wakeful sense is fed
On thoughts that o'er and o'er repeat,
" The Resurrection of the Dead ! "
If these half vital things have force
To break the spell which winter weaves,
To wake, and clothe the wrinkled corse
In the full life of shining leaves;
Shall I sit down in vague despair,
And marvel if the nobler soul
We laid in earth shall ever dare
To wake to life, and backward roll
The sealing stone, and striding out,
Claim its eternity, and head
Creation once again, and shout,
"The Resurrection of the Dead'"!*
II.
THE POWER OF THE RESURRECTION.
1. Have we yet entered into the grandeur and depth of St.
Paul's teaching about the Resurrection ? What is his teaching ?
1 Newman Smyth. 8 George Henry Boker.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 465
(1) St. Paul insists that Jesus Christ did actually rise from
the dead and appeared to him, to Cephas, to the Twelve, to five
hundred brethren, to all the Apostles, to James ; and he infers that
the appearance was of one and the same character throughout. It
was no vision in the popular sense of that word still less an
hallucination that they experienced, but a direct impression
made by a living and active Person.
(2) He asserts consistently that no substantial difference
exists between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that of His
followers. His was the pattern of theirs, and they can but look
for a risen life such as His was. He was the first-fruits, the
first-born among many brethren. Where He is, there shall also
His servant be.
(3) Hence St. Paul had but a single answer to the double
question: "With what body did Christ rise? "and "With what
body do Christians come from death ? " He tells a parable, the
meaning of which cannot be evaded. We sow seed in the ground.
It contains in itself the principle of life ; it casts off its first body
and takes another. So also is the resurrection of the dead. The
earthly body is laid in the grave of life. It, too, contains an
unseen principle of life. That life, too, casts off the old and
natural body, and takes another, a glorified and spiritual body.
The body which is spiritual is that which is suited to the spirit
world, as the natural body was fitted for a material world. The
spiritual is not the natural sublimated, however, but a new creation.
Flesh and blood cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. The
natural body, with all the atoms composing it, belongs to the
present natural order. A spiritual environment demands a
spiritual body. And spirit is not atomic or at any rate, St.
Paul assumes that it is not.
(4) The power which raised Jesus Christ from the dead was
the Holy Spirit of God. One writer declares that it was through
the Eternal Spirit that Jesus offered His life while on earth
without spot to God, and, in saying this, he only follows St.
Paul in his declaration that He was marked out as the Son
of God with power by the resurrection according to a Spirit
of Holiness. The Holy Spirit given to Jesus Christ without
measure was the efficient cause of His resurrection from the
dead. Therefore it follows from the close similarity between
i COR. 30
466 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
the Head and the members that their resurrection is brought
about by the same Holy Spirit. "If the spirit of him that
raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up
Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by
his spirit that dwelleth in you."
(5) The next step in St. Paul's teaching is that in which his
religious originality and depth of thought are seen most clearly,
and, indeed, stand out before us with startling freshness. That
is perhaps the reason why this doctrine of his has fallen into
the background and been overlooked. Materially minded people
want materialistic images which they can grasp readily, and
about which they may give a logical account. But religious
truths by their very nature are too august and too evasive for
logic. They are of Heaven, and logic is of earth only. Now the
doctrine that the resurrection means the resumption of the old
body which death had corrupted is a materialistic conception.
That is why it is so popular. But it is not the doctrine of St. Paul.
He was far more concerned with religion than with metaphysic
or theories of being. That is why all he says about the resurrec-
tion moves strictly within the atmosphere of religion.
He says and let this be weighed, marked, and learned that
he has little interest in death and resurrection from the mere
standpoint of physical existence. It was not the physical death
and resurrection of Christ on which he based the Christians'
faith and hope, but His spiritual death and resurrection. But
then you cannot limit these latter to the tragedy of Mount
Calvary and that which immediately followed. Christ's death
was a death to sin, and that was in process from the first.
Christ's resurrection was a rising superior to sin, and that, too,
took place from the first. Christ died unto sin throughout His
early life, and He died finally, once and for all, when on the
Cross He rose superior to the last and most bitter temptation
of all. Every time that temptation came to Him and tempta-
tion came to Him continuously He mastered it by the power
of the Spirit of God, of that risen life which was hid in God His
Father. Calvary and the great forty days were no new elements
in His life, but its crown and its reward.
(G) From this follows the practical bearing for us of Christ's
death and resurrection. When we look on Him and are touched
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 467
by our sinfulness, and come to God, and determine to live the
life of faith, we die to sin as Christ died to it ; we rise to newness
of life as Christ rose to it ; we are buried with Him, and, like
Him, become alive unto God. The sole difference and it is
immense is that we have a past to undo, and He had none.
(7) Now we can see what St. Paul taught about our resurrec-
tion body. It is fashioned for us by holy living. It is already
in course of formation within. He that is leading the spiritual
life is having prepared for him gradually a spiritual body. Then,
when the "natural body" is finally cast aside, the glorious
"spiritual body" will leap out, as the fitting organ of a soul
which has become predominantly spiritual, and death will be
swallowed up in life.
U The unique part of the Christian revelation is the indwelling
of the Holy Spirit who forms the Spiritual body, so that when
the believer dies, or, more truly, awakes, he awakes after the
likeness of the Lord, to co-operate with Him freely in redemptive
love. I quite understand the quickening of our mortal bodies (Eom.
viii. 2) to refer to this, the getting rid of that death or mortality
which limits or imprisons us in this order of existence, by de-
veloping and perfecting the power of the incorruptible Seed of
Life which brings us into living contact and consciousness with
the Life of the Universe. Then the grub body is no longer
wanted ; like the husk in the seed, it has done its work in the
early stages of growth, and now is put off as the butterfly puts
off the chrysalis-shell, and as the materials of that body go to
the churchyard to return into that which may through various
modifications become part of another human earthly body. 1
(I Human nature, as its Creator made it, and maintains it
wherever His laws are observed, is entirely harmonious. No
physical error can be more profound, no moral error more danger-
ous, than that involved in the monkish doctrine of the opposition
of body to soul. No soul can be perfect in an imperfect body ;
no body perfect without perfect soul. Every right action and
true thought sets the seal of its beauty on person and face ; every
wrong action and foul thought its seal of distortion; and the
various aspects of humanity might be read as plainly as a printed
history, were it not that the impressions are so complex that it
must always in some cases (and, in the present state of our
knowledge, in all cases) be impossible to decipher them com-
pletely. Nevertheless, the face of a consistently just and of a
1 R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 183.
468 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
consistently unjust person, may always be rightly distinguished
at a glance ; and if the qualities are continued by descent through
a generation or two, there arises a complete distinction of race.
Both moral and physical qualities are communicated by descent,
far more than they can be developed by education (though both
may be destroyed by want of education) ; and there is as yet no
ascertained limit to the nobleness of person and mind which the
human creature may attain, by persevering observance of the
laws of God respecting its birth and training. 1
IF In 1865 Lord Francis Douglas, while climbing Mont Blanc,
slipped and fell to his death. His body could not be found, and it
was supposed that it had fallen into the bed of the glacier. Accord-
ing to computations based on careful estimates from experience,
the glacier should have discharged the body at the foot of the
mountain in the summer of 1905. All that summer, the aged
mother of Lord Francis was there watching and waiting for the
body of her boy, but the body, to her bitter disappointment, did
not appear. Broken-hearted, she had been waiting for years just
to get a glimpse of the scarred face and mangled body she loved,
and to lay its dust to rest. She would have been comforted if
only that had been allowed her. But there is an infinitely better
thing which Christ has prepared ; not the dull dust and broken
body released from the icy embrace of the cruel glacier, but the
living, glorified personality in the bosom of the Father's love;
not for one hurried, agonizing glimpse as the heart sobs over the
memory of what it has lost ; out for ever and ever in the fellow-
ship of heaven. 2
2. What are the consequences of Christ's Kesurrection ?
(1) It gives us a complete Gospel. A dead Christ annihilates
the Gospel. "If Christ be not risen," says the Apostle, "our
preaching," by which he means not the act but the substance of
his preaching, "is vain"; or, as the word might be more ac-
curately rendered, " empty." There is nothing in it ; no contents.
It is a blown bladder; nothing in it but wind. What was St.
Paul's " preaching " ? It all turned upon these points that
Jesus Christ was the Son of God ; that He was Incarnate in the
flesh of us men ; that He died on the Cross for our offences ; that
He was raised again, and had ascended into Heaven, ruling the
world and breathing His presence into believing hearts ; and that
He would come again to be our Judge. These were the elements
1 Ruskin, Munera Pulveris ( Works, xvii. 149).
2 J. I. Vance, Tendency, 245.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 469
of what St. Paul called " his gospel." He faces the supposition
of a dead Christ, and he says, " It is all gone ! It is all vanished
into thin air. I have nothing to preach if I have not a Cross to
preach which is man's deliverance from sin, because on it the
Son of God hath died, and I know that Jesus Christ's sacrifice is
accepted and sufficient, only because I have it attested to me in
His rising again from the dead."
(2) A living Christ gives faith something to lay hold of. The
Apostle here in the context twice says, according to the
Authorized Version, that a dead Christ makes our faith " vain."
But he really used two different words, the former of which is
applied to " preaching," and means literally " empty," while the
latter means " of none effect " or " powerless." So there are two
ideas suggested here. The risen Christ puts some contents, so to
speak, into our faith. Who can trust a dead Christ, or who can
trust a human Christ ? That would be as much a blasphemy as
trusting any other man. It is only when we recognize Him as
declared to be the Son of God, and that by the resurrection from
the dead, that our faith has anything round which it can twine,
and to which it can cleave. That living Saviour will stretch out
His hand to us if we look to Him, and if I put my poor, trembling
little hand up towards Him, He will bend to me and clasp it.
You cannot exercise faith unless you have a risen Saviour, and
unless you exercise faith in Him your lives ara marred and
sad.
(3) Again, a living Christ destroys the dominion of sin. The
first blessing which the believing soul receives through and from
a risen Christ is deliverance from sin. If He whom we believed
to be our sacrifice by His death and our sanctification by His
life has not risen, then all which makes His death other than a
martyr's vanishes, and with it vanish forgiveness and purifying.
Only when we recognize that in His Cross, explained by His
resurrection, we have redemption through His blood, even the
forgiveness of sins, and by the communication of the risen life
from the risen Lord possess that new nature which sets us free
from the dominion of our evil only then is faith operative in
setting us free from our sins.
(4) The resurrection was the convincing proof that Christ's
words were true, and that He was ivhat He had claimed to le. He
470 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
Himself had on more occasions than one hinted that such proof
was to be given. " Destroy this temple," He said, " and in three
days I will raise it up." The sign which was to be given, not-
withstanding His habitual refusal to yield to the Jewish craving
for miracle, was the sign of the prophet Jonah. As he had been
thrown out and lost for three days and nights, but had thereby
only been forwarded in his mission, so our Lord was to be thrown
out as endangering the ship, but was to rise again to fuller and
more perfect efficiency. In order that His claim to be the
Messiah might be understood, it was necessary that He should
die ; but in order that it might be believed, it was needful that
He should rise.
(5) The resurrection of Christ holds a fundamental place in
the Christian creed, because ly it there is disclosed a real and close
connection between this world and the unseen, eternal world. There
is no need now of argument to prove a life beyond ; here is one
who is in it. For the resurrection of Christ was not a return to
this life, to its wants, to its limitations, to its inevitable close ;
it was a resurrection to a life for ever beyond death. Neither
was it a discarding of humanity on Christ's part, a cessation of
His acceptance of human conditions, a rising to some kind of
existence to which man has no access. On the contrary, it was
because He continued truly human that in human body and with
human soul He rose to veritable human life beyond the grave.
If Jesus rose from the dead, then the world into which He is
gone is a real world, in which men can live more fully than they
live here. If He rose from the dead, then there is an unseen
Spirit mightier than the strongest material powers, a God who
is seeking to bring us out of all evil into an eternally happy
condition. Quite reasonably is death invested with a certain
majesty, if not terror, as the mightiest of physical things. There
may be greater evils ; but they do not affect all men but only
some, or they debar men from certain enjoyments and a certain
kind of life but not from all. But death shuts men out from
everything with which they have here to do, and launches them
into a condition of which they know absolutely nothing. Any
one who conquers death and scatters its mystery, who shows in
his own person that it is innocuous, and that it actually betters
our condition, brings us light that reaches us from no other
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 471
quarter. And He who shows this superiority over death in
virtue of a moral superiority, and uses it for the furtherance of
the highest spiritual ends, shows a command over the whole
affairs of men which makes it easy to believe He can guide us
into a condition like His own. As St. Peter affirms, it is by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead we are begotten again
unto a lively hope.
^| There is a beautiful sonnet of Petrarch, who sees Laura in
heaven amongst the angels ; she walks amongst them, but from
time to time turns her head and looks behind and seems to be
waiting for him :
Wherefore I raise to heaven my heart and mind
Because I hear her bid me only haste. 1
fl The history of the three anthems which are chosen in place
of the Venite for matins on Easter morning (1. Cor. v. 7, 8 ; Eom.
vi. 9-11 ; 1. Cor. xv. 20-22) well illustrates the care taken by
the compilers of the Prayer-book to make it reflect the great
doctrinal lessons of the sacred year. They do not stand to-day
in their original form, but there can be no question of the greater
fitness and beauty of the present arrangement. The first anthem
was inserted last, and did not appear till 1662, at the last revision
of the Prayer-book at the Savoy Conference. But, as an Easter
anthem, it was already very old, for part of it had appeared as
such in the Antiphonary of Gregory the Great. It had also been
read in the Epistle for the second communion on Easter Day in
1549, in the first Prayer-book of Edward VL, when provision was
made for a Collect, Epistle, and Gospel at two communions. These
were ordered to be used as the special features for Easter Tuesday
and for the first Sunday after Easter, though this arrangement
was abolished in the second Prayer-book of Edward vi. in 1552.
The second anthem is much older. It formed a part of a
short service which was prefixed in the Sarum Breviary to the
ordinary matins as a special feature for Easter Day. The exact
words used were as follows : " Christ rising again from the dead
dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him. For in
that He liveth He liveth unto God." And this had been followed
by the refrain, " Alleluia, Alleluia." In the Sarum Breviary the
versicles and response followed : " The Lord rose from the
sepulchre : yfho for us hung upon the tree. Alleluia." To these
succeeded the following beautiful collect : " God, who for us
didst suffer Thy Son to endure the yoke of the Cross, that Thou
1 Mandell Creighton, Life and Letters, ii. 168 r
472 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
mightest drive away from us the power of the enemy ; grant to
us, Thy servants, that we may always live in the joys of His
Kesurrection." In the Prayer-book of 1549 the same anthem was
placed at the head of the short introductory service therein framed
before matins for Easter Day. Next to it was added the present
third anthem, each being followed by the word " Alleluia " twice
after the first, once after the second anthem. Two versicles then
followed thus : " Show forth to all nations the glory of God . . .
and among all people His wonderful works." Then the follow-
ing exquisite collect was added, instead of the collect given above :
" God, who for our redemption didst give Thine only Begotten
Son to the death of the Cross, and by His glorious Resurrection
hast delivered us from the power of our enemy ; Grant us so to
die daily from sin that we may evermore live with Him in the
joy of His resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord."
A further change took place in 1552 in the second Prayer-book
of Edward vi. The two anthems were shifted from the head of
the service for matins to their present place before the Venite.
The Alleluias were omitted, and also the special versicles and the
collect just quoted. And thus it continued till 1662, when, as we
have seen, the first anthem was added. These changes will serve
to bring home to our minds the special importance which attaches
to these three anthems in their present position in the service.
From the date of the Sarum Breviary in 1085 down to the present
time, that is, over a period of eight hundred years, one or other
or all of them have stood at the head of the Easter service, where,
in the old days, until their change of position in 1552, they were
originally a sort of Introit, a " processional hymn," which ushered
in the worship of the Queen of Festivals. Indeed, the one
alteration which we might well wish had not been made is the
shifting of that position (so as to make them the mere alternative
of the Invitatory Psalm) to a place in the service where their
significance is almost lost in the glad festival psalms which
immediately follow. Clearly they were intended all along, and
are intended still, to strike the keynote of praise for the whole
festival, and to sound forth its doctrinal and practical
characteristics.
When we study them carefully this impression of their
importance and significance is deepened. For all the great
essential thoughts of Eastertide are in germ here, and three chief
aspects stand prominently forward. They offer us on the
morning of the Resurrection a full and complete Christ, the
perfect answer to the needs and desires of fallen man. Our souls
require above all things mercy to cover the past only too stained
with sin. We find that offered us here through the Cross in
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 473
Christ our Passover. They yearn for the secret of spiritual
power in the present, that sin already forgiven may have now
no dominion over us. It is laid bare to us in Christ our life, in
and through whom we too, reckoning ourselves "dead indeed
unto sin," are " alive unto God " with the power of an endless
life within. But our souls have also " keen desire," which finds
expression in " earnest prayer and strong " for fellowship in a life
beyond the grave, which shall restore to us the losses which the
havoc of death has made in this. It is offered us in Christ our
first-fruits, our promise, and the first-fruits of them that sleep,
the key to an everlasting destiny. Thus, as the first anthem
proclaimed the Crucified Christ as the ground of our justification,
so the second anthem extols the Eisen Christ as the secret of our
sanctification, whilst the third anthem adores the triumphant
Christ as the pledge of our glorification. What a magnificent
revelation of the Alpha and Omega of Grace, who once, as in
the first anthem, " was dead," now " lives for aye," and, better
still, " hath the keys of hell and of death " ! A risen Christ in
strong and glorious relation to the past, the present, and the future
of His redeemed ones, whom He hath " ransomed from the power
of the enemy." The Lord for me : the secret of my pardon and
my peace. The Lord in me: the secret of my holiness and
victory. The Lord with me : the sure pledge of immortality, the
" first-fruits " of them that sleep, the sheaf of early ripe corn
waved at the Passover Feast in the temple of God as the promise
of the
holy harvest-field,
Which will all its full abundance
At His second coming yield.
A Christ who is the object of adoring faith, " declared to be the
Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the
resurrection from the dead." A Christ who is the motive power
of love, who died and rose that " they which live should not hence-
forth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them,
and rose again." A Christ who is the inspiration of heavenly
hope, " who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should
live together with him." Thus, if in the first anthem we specially
dwell upon the victorious work of Jesus whereby the curse is
removed, in the second anthem we are contemplating the ever
living person^of Christ in whom the blessing is restored, and in
the third anthem we are echoing the rapturous music of Heaven,
the song of the redeemed before the throne, which tells of the
consummated Kingdom of Christ in whom Heaven itself is given
474 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
to the sons of men. Or, in other words, if in the first anthem we
realize the guilt of sin atoned for by the Paschal Lamb, in the
second we joyfully celebrate the power of sin crushed through
the overcoming life within, and in the third we foretell the result
of sin cancelled through the second Adam, who is " the Lord from
heaven." All the three groups of thought find special allusion in
the collect already quoted, which, from 1549 to 1552, followed
two of these anthems at the head of the Easter morning service. 1
III.
THE PROMISE OF THE KESURRECTION.
" The first-fruits of them that are asleep."
The word " first-fruits " has a very definite signification in
the Scriptures. There was a commandment given to the people
of Israel that when they entered into the possession of the Land
of Promise, they were not to begin harvest till they had first cut
down a sheaf and presented or waved it before the Lord, in
thanksgiving as well as in token that they and their harvests
belonged to the Lord. The circumstances connected with the
offering of the first-fruits are singularly suggestive of a higher
symbolism. The sheaf was offered on the third day after the
Passover. In this we see Christ, the sheaf of first-fruits, rising
from the dead on the third day after His Passion, the first begotten
from the dead the precursor of the harvest yet to come, the proof,
pledge, and pattern of the resurrection of the just.
1. The resurrection of Christ is the proof of the resurrection of
them that are asleep. When a farmer holds in his hand the first
ripe sheaf of corn he has in possession an unassailable proof that
he will have a harvest. More decisive and satisfactory evidence
to that effect could not be desired by any reasonable man. Long
before this time the precious seed had been cast into the dark
bosom of the earth, when no tokens were visible that nature
possessed any power of life. But in due season the sun began to
warm the sleeping world, the gentle rain from heaven fell upon
the place beneath, and the winds of the south whispered of a
1 T. A. Gurney.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 475
coming revival. Soon there was first the blade, then the ear,
after that the full corn in the ear, and then the first ripe sheaf
telling of a harvest at hand. Christ is the first-fruits of them that
sleep, the infallible proof that we shall have a resurrection from
the gloomy winter of death.
Think of one who never in his life saw a harvest or spoke with
any one to whom it was a familiar thing, who was well acquainted
with sowing, but an utter stranger to reaping. Suppose, further,
that not one harvest had ever gladdened the earth in any corner
of it, and you have some idea of the state of knowledge necessarily
possessed by men of old, concerning the rising again from the
dead. Men had been but too familiar with sowing ; from age to
age they had committed to the earth all that remained of the
fondest, the fairest, the best that they had. " Earth had been sown
thick with graves," but there had been no harvest; none had
ever been seen to return from the " dark portal, the goal of all
mortal." Earth had swallowed up an immeasurable quantity of
seed without showing any symptom of spring-time or harvest.
We need not wonder that the Old Testament gives little light on
the great rising again of the people of God. The Psalms and
the Prophets occasionally show that there was light, and they
may have had more than we can see in their records of the old
days ; but their light must have been dim and uncertain, seeing
that none had ever risen from the dead to die no more. Enoch
and Elijah were removed from the world in a mysterious way ;
they never looked upon the pale messenger, and their feet never
touched the cold waters of the border land ; but none of the sons
of mortal men had ever risen from the grave to immortality.
Before the resurrection of Christ there had been instances of
what is popularly termed " resurrection," as in the case of Lazarus
and others whom Christ raised from the dead. In the Old
Testament period, also, there had been similar cases, as in the
history of Elijah and Elisha. Had the resurrection of Christ
been like these earlier "resurrections," as we call them, simply
the return of the spirit to the waiting body, and a mere reviving
and continuance of the interrupted life, it is hard to see truth in
the terms frequently applied to Christ as " the firstborn from the
dead" (Col. i. 18), " the firstborn of the dead" (Ptev. i. 5), "the
firstfruits" (I Cor. xv. 20, 23). We recognize the appropriate-
476 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
ness of such terms to Christ only when we perceive that His
reappearance within the circle of the friends who had buried Him
was not on a level with that of Lazarus, but in a higher mode of
life than that which He had quitted. In Lazarus we behold
simply the reanimation of the natural body, and the resumption
of the fleshly life. In Christ we behold resurrection in the
spiritual body, and assumption of the life of the world to come.
This is fully demonstrated by the facts given in the Gospel
record, and this is required by the exceptional pre-eminence
which the New Testament accords to Christ's rising from the dead.
But one instance of that which is indeed the resurrection has
been vouchsafed to our knowledge, as a sure pledge of that which
is to come. This is manifest in the risen Christ, who thereby
" was declared to be the Son of God with power " (Eom. i. 4).
All the partial resemblances to this which are found on record
are cases of mere resuscitation or reanimation.
Not as a fallen stone,
Abiding where it hath been flung,
Did Christ remain the dead among,
But sprang from Hades' deep invisible zone,
As the corn springs from where it has been thrown!
Not, as at Nain of yore
The young man rose to die again,
Did He resume the haunts of men,
But closed behind Him Death's reluctant door
And triumphed on to live for evermore !
Not, as we spend our days,
Subject to sorrows, pains, and fears,
Does He persist a Man of tears;
Henceforth He feels no touch of our decays,
But inexpressive joy in all His ways !
Not for Himself alone
He fought, and won that glorious life:
For us He conquered in the strife,
That we might make His victory our own,
And rise with Him before the Father's Throne!
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 477
Thus hath the Saviour brought
Our immortality to light !
may He tarry in our sight,
That, clinging fast to Him with every thought,
We may partake the triumph He has wrought ! l
Tf In a sheltered corner of my Manse garden stands a common
red flowering-currant bush. I suppose it has no value at all for
anybody but me. But I would not exchange it for all the roses
in the Major's fine domain across the road. For year after year it
gives me the first news of Spring. Just after the New Year has
come in, I begin to watch it, long before anything else in the
garden has stirred. And some still, quiet morning it has its
message for me. There is quite a distinct new shade of green on
the buds. The wind is bitterly cold, and snow showers are about.
Everything else in the garden is cold and dead. But it has risen.
And the rest will follow in God's good time. 2
2. The resurrection of Christ is the pledge of our resurrection.
We need more than simple proof, however clear, that a resurrec-
tion of man is possible. We require a pledge of its certainty
before we can taste strong consolation. How can one man's
rising give assurance that we shall rise ? Did He not rise from
the dead purely in virtue of His power and Godhead ? What
more does that prove than that He was able to rise because He
was the strong Son of God ? How shall we, who are certainly not
strong, be able to follow His example ? Is not the proverb, that
what man has done man may do, false on the very face of it ?
Who shall say that the doings of the man Christ Jesus are the just
criterion of what may be expected from man ? If the Lord had
been related to us in the same way as we are related to our
fellows, and in no other way, His rising would have proved the
possibility of a resurrection, but nothing more. If He had been
only our Brother, He could not have been the first-fruits of them
that slept, or the pledge of their rising again. But while He was
truly our Brother, He was also the Everlasting Father, the
representative Head of the race of men.
Luther says : " Our most merciful Father, seeing us to be
overwhelmed and oppressed by the curse of the law, and so to
be holden under the same that we could never be delivered from
it by our own power, sent His holy Son into the world, and laid
1 G. T. S. Farquhar. 2 Archibald Alexander.
478 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
upon Him the sins of all men, saying, 'Be Thou Peter that
denier ; Paul that blasphemer and cruel persecutor ; David that
adulterer ; that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise ; that
thief which hanged upon the cross; and, briefly, be Thou the
person which hath committed the sins of all men. See, then, that
Thou pay and satisfy for them.' . . . Now cometh the law, and
saith, ' I find Him a sinner, and I see no sins else but on Him ;
therefore let Him die upon the cross/ and so he setteth upon
Him and killeth Him." The old order changeth, ever giving
place to the latest born, and Luther's form of sound words is now
obsolete, just as our little systems will have their day and cease
to be ; but the immortal soul of vicarious sacrifice is unchanged.
It is unalterably and eternally true that Christ, as the Head of
His people, and made one with them, was made a curse, was made
sin, took upon Himself all their responsibilities, and fully dis-
charged them in dying. When He was raised from the dead by
the glory of the Father His reappearance on earth, or reconstitu-
tion as a man, was nothing less than God's pledge that every
liability had been settled, and that a similar resurrection belonged
to them who should be found united to the Head that had
suffered in their room and stead. The solidarity of our race in
ruin is the groundwork of its solidarity in redemption ; in a true
sense, all Christ's people rose up with Him on the third day,
according to the Scriptures.
Little one, you must not fret
That I take your clothes away;
Better sleep you so will get,
And at morning wake more gay
Saith the children's mother.
You I must unclothe again,
For you need a better dress;
Too much worn are body and brain;
You need everlastingness
Saith the heavenly father.
I went down death's lonely stair;
Laid my garments in the tomb ;
Dressed again one morning fair;
Hastened up, and hied me home
Saith the elder brother.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 479
Then I will not be afraid
Any ill can come to me;
When 'tis time to go to bed,
I will rise and go with thee
Saith the little brother. 1
3. The resurrection of Christ is the pattern of our resurrection.
The first sheaf is a specimen, type, example, or pattern of the
harvest at hand. If the first fruits be poor and withered, the
after fruits will be similar ; if rich, full, and perfect, the harvest
expected will be excellent. When we read that the Lord shall
raise our vile bodies at the last, so that they may be fashioned
like His own body of glory, we have at once a type of the glorified
humanity that shall stand on the earth at the last day. He
remained with us for forty days after He had risen, in order to
give us light concerning the wonderful transformation.
(1) The condition of the spirit after death and resurrection is
clearly seen in that light. Full and perfect peace was the
atmosphere in which the spirit of the great Eedeemer lived and
moved after He had conquered death and the grave. The
memory that He had of the past was clear and distinct, but not
painful in the smallest degree ; He contemplated the whole of His
life in the past as a finished work, an arduous task accomplished,
a hard-won battle ended the whole to look back upon as a joy
for evermore. His heart was the same, as kind and thoughtful as
ever, and He resumed companionship with His friends very much
as if there had been no cross and no grave. We hope to be like
Him in all that pertained to His holy and happy humanity ; our
spirits hushed to rest, and blest in the possession of His peace ;
our minds unvexed and untortured by the element of pain that
troubles our memories here, and poisons our joy when we recall
the past. We look to have, like Him, the same sweet intercourse
with former friends of mortal years, and to retain our old familiar,
and well-known personality, set free from sin.
(2) The condition of the glorified body is unveiled in the light
of His forty days' sojourn after the resurrection. His was most
distinctly a real body, and not a phantom without substance, to
mock the gazer's sight. So real was He to the disciples that,
after the first natural start of terror, they fell easily into their
1 George MacDonald, Poetical Works, i. 348.
480 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
old ways with Him, and did not seem to feel it a strange thing
to walk and talk with One in a glorified state. He was easily
recognized by them, for His body had the well-known marks
and signs by which they were able to identify Him at once. He
showed them His hands and His feet
The arm which held the children, the pale hand
That gently touched the eyelids of the blind
And opened passive to the cruel nail.
They could not fail to remember every line of His blessed face ;
He had been away only for a little while, and it was easy to
know Him after the short grief and pain. The body of the Lord
was essentially a spiritual one withal; not any longer confined
to the conditions of time, space, and matter, but supreme in
power over the world of sense ; able to enter a fast-closed room,
and to leave it at will; to become visible or invisible as He
wished, known or unknown His was a body that obeyed every
wish of the Spirit.
T[ I sent the Queen (January 1885) a little book which con-
tained some verses due to a great sorrow of my own. In her
reply she said, " You surely do not think, as it would a little seem
from the beautiful poem, My Yew Tree, that our dear ones sleep
awhile, and that their bodies are to rise again ? I thought you
wrote to me once you thought, as I always think one feels one
must, that the spirit is at once free in death, and that you were
inclined to believe in a spiritual body within our present one ? "
To this I replied that the Queen was quite right in supposing
that I was in sympathy with the view that the " spiritual body "
(as St. Paul calls it) is set free at death. I have never been able
to feel that the supposed long sleep and time ojf unconscious-
ness is taught us in the New Testament. The phrases I had used
in my verses were used in the sense that to us our dear ones
seemed to sleep ; and that what I had tried tc sing was a kind of
triumph song, telling the cold earth that her seeming victory was
no victory at all. 1
Death and darkness, get you packing,
Nothing now to man is lacking ;
All your triumphs now are ended,
And what Adam marr'd is mended;
1 Bishop Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of My Life, 287.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 481
Graves are beds now for the weary,
Death a nap, to wake more merry;
Youth now, full of pious duty,
Seeks in thee for perfect beauty;
The weak and aged, tired with length
Of days, from Thee look for new strength;
And infants with Thy pangs contest
As pleasant as if with the breast.
Then unto Him, who thus hath thrown
Even to contempt Thy kingdom down,
And by His blood did us advance
Unto His own inheritance;
To Him be glory, power, praise,
From this unto the last of days. 1
1 Henry Vaughan.
J COR. 31
THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT.
483
LITERATURE.
Aitken (W. H. M. H.), Mission Sermons, iii. 97.
Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, v. 215.
Arinitage (W. J.), The Fruit of the Spirit, 76.
BeU (G. D.), The Name above Every Name, 111.
Brown (H. S.), Manliness and Other Sermons, 9.
Burrell (D. J.), The Religion of the Future, 154.
Butler (H. M.), Public School Sermons, 173.
Campbell (L.), The Christian Ideal, 148.
Clarke (G.), True Manhood, Womanhood, 1.
(J. E.), Common-Life Sermons, 61.
Creighton (M.), Claims of the Common Life, 64, 71, 78.
Fairbairn (A. M.), Christ in the Centuries, 139.
(K. B.), College Sermons, 60.
Farrar (F. W.), Bells and Pomegranates, 255.
Green (W. H.), in Princeton Sermons, 235.
Greenhough (J. G.), in The Ladder of Life, 123.
Hopkins (E. H.), The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, 161.
Jenkins (E. E.), Addresses and Sermons, 149.
Jerdan (C.), Messages to the Children, 131, 177.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year : Miscellaneous, 487.
Little (W. J. Knox), The Perfect Life, 48.
Lyttelton (A.), College and University Sermons, 179.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : I and 2 Corinthians, 252.
Matheson (G.), Messages of Hope, 31.
Moore (A. L.), Some Aspects of Sin, 3, 15, 28, 39.
Ryle (H. E.), On the Church of England, 92, 243.
Shore (T. T.), Some Difficulties of Belief , 271.
Thorn (J. H.), Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, i. 345.
Vaughan (C. J.), Christ and Human Instincts, 89.
(J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xi. (1875) No. 949; xvii.
(1879) No. 1091 ; xxiv. (1884) No. 1265.
Christian Age, liii. 66 (Green).
Christian World Pulpit, v. 23 (Barfield) ; xxviii. 395 (Tyler) ; xliv. 157
(Neil), 353 (Farrar) ; xlvi. 65 (Farrar), 78 (Macleod) ; Ixxiv. 79
(Hardy) ; Ixxix. 124 (Hedley).
Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., vi. 316 (Burn).
Homiletic Review, xx. 49 (Green) ; xxi. 433 (Ludlow).
4*4
THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT.
Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. Let all
that ye do be done in love. i Cor. xvi. 13, 14.
1. THIS passage occurs at the end of St. Paul's first letter to the
Corinthian Church, in which he has been reproving them for their
divisions, and for the irregularities that have grown up among
them. At the end of the Epistle, the Apostle has finished his
hortatory remarks, and is adding a few personal messages, and
giving directions about some practical points of Church administra-
tion, when, having occasion to mention the name of Apollos, he
seems to have been reminded afresh of the irregularities he has
been writing to censure. He thinks of the Corinthians and their
errors; he thinks of their unstable minds, of their wandering
imaginations; he thinks sadly how little impression his advice
will produce ; he doubts if he has spoken clearly enough, forcibly
enough, if he has said all that can be said ; then, as if to make
sure, as if to clench his other precepts, as if to sum up in a few
words all he has to say, as if to give the Corinthians some plain
advice that they may easily keep in their memory, he chooses
these few incisive words to serve as mottoes to recur to his hearers'
minds in vacant hours : " Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit
you like men, be strong. Let all that ye do be done in love."
2. The language is military. St. Paul had never seen an
engagement, but he was familiar with barrack life, and one can
imagine that there were aspects of that life that charmed him ; its
simple and absolute devotion, its discipline, its esprit de corps, the
two elements of its might, unity and obedience, and the heroic
qualities which were begotten of its dangers and its laurels. When
he borrows a figure from the guardroom or the battlefield, the
fidelity and spirit with which he uses it show that the allusion
485
486 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
is not a mere grace of style; it is a vital constituent of the
thought. To him Christian life was a contest, and he transfers
to Christian action the nomenclature of camps.
There are five precepts. And the fifth, though it is found in
a separate verse, should on no account be left out. First there
is the introductory call, Be awake! Then there are two pairs:
Be godly, and be manly ; be strong, and be tender.
I. Be awake" Watch ye."
f Be godly" Stand fast in the faith."
'\Be manly " Quit you like men."
f Be strong " Be strong."
\Be tender " Let all that ye do be done in love."
BE AWAKE.
"Watch ye."
Be awake, lie not in slumber, that is the first requisite for all
action; break the bands of sleep and indolence, or you can do
nothing.
The word means one of two things certainly, probably both
Keep awake, and keep your eyes open. Our Lord used the same
metaphor very frequently, but with a special significance. On
His lips ifc generally referred to the attitude of expectation of
His coming in judgment. St. Paul sometimes uses the figure
with the same application; but here, distinctly, it has another.
There is the military idea underlying it. What will become of
an army if the sentries go to sleep? And what chance will a
Christian man have of doing his devoir against his enemy, unless
he keeps himself awake, and keeps himself alert ? Watchfulness,
in the sense of always having eyes open for the possible rush
down upon us of temptation and evil, is no small part of the
discipline and the duty of the Christian life.
i. Wakefulness.
1. Many men have never awakened at all ; they know not
what life is ; they know not what the world in which they seem
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 487
to move may be ; they have never raised their sleepy eyes from
the dreary round of selfish enjoyment, as they call it, in which
their time is spent. To lead an aimless, useless life, with mind
enfeebled and faculties undeveloped, the whole nature enervated
through want of exercise, this is the most awful prospect any man
can be called upon to face.
2. There are two main causes at the bottom of this terrible
vice.
(1) In the first place there is the cold, deliberate selfishness
that refuses to move beyond itself, will not be troubled, has no
sympathies, with any duty outside itself, is determined to consult
always its own comfort in the way which comes most easy and
lies nearest at hand. A man who is indolent from this reason
is the most perfectly unlovely character that can be found, and
the number of such tends to increase with our national wealth
and prosperity. Such a man knows that life is likely to be
tolerably comfortable for himself, he knows that he is free from
the stern hand of daily necessity, and so he deliberately purposes
to get the utmost out of what he has, he shuts the door against
all high aims, for they might give him trouble; knowledge he
despises and takes in its place a low selfish cunning ; his fellow-
men he estimates solely as they contribute to his own enjoyment ;
he will do nothing he can help ; why should he ? He will go on
peaceably through life ; for what can come to disturb him if he is
only reasonably prudent ?
(2) But indolence comes from another cause from thought-
less feebleness rather than low selfishness. A feebly indolent
man knows dimly that life has a meaning, has duties. He
believes somehow that there is a God who judges the world,
that he himself has an immortal soul, and an account to give one
day believes it somehow, but believes it sleepily believes it so
that if he were awakened and formally asked these questions, he
would give formally proper answers, but does not believe it in
such a way that the truths to which he confesses take any real
hold upon his life. He believes that life has a purpose, but that
it need not be realized just yet. He grants that man is re-
sponsible for his own character, but then the fact that he wastes
in idleness the precious years of opening manhood need not
4 88 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
particularly influence him. He grants that bad habits are easily
acquired, but there is no fear of his own actions going so far as
to form habits. He admits that it is better to be wise than to be
ignorant, but thinks that knowledge will come to him through
society, through free intercourse with others, rather than by the
old-fashioned method of intellectual labour and honest thought.
If He wakes in the night, and hears one of his Lovedale boys
on watch, " pacing his round with his rifle on his shoulder,
singing low and sweetly, and apparently much to his heart's
content, one of Sankey's hymns, * Jesus loves me, even me.' He
did not know that I was stirring." This singing watchman was
Shadrack Ngunane, one of the Lovedale volunteers, whom Stewart,
by an act of grace, had allowed to remain in Lovedale after a
grave offence. " He has been as busy and useful," Stewart adds,
" as a white man could have been, always well, always cheerful,
always ready for everything." The picture of this once wild
Kafir, formerly rather troublesome, now cheerfully keeping his
midnight watch in this fashion and on such a venturesome
journey, is one I shall not forget. It made me hope for the day
when out of the regions we are now in there will be many who
will prove themselves as worthy of the labour bestowed on them
as this lad has done, and help to convey the Gospel still farther
on. Day or night I never found my Kafir friend sleeping
when he ought to be waking, or elsewhere than at the post of
duty. 1
ii. Watchfulness.
1. Watchfulness means more than being awake. It is con-
centrated attention in wakefulness. It springs from the conviction
of danger, it is sustained by the responsibility of duty. It is one
of those positions which are restricted to the individual himself.
Watchfulness cannot be transferred : it cannot even be distributed.
You cannot say with perfect accuracy we watch ; it must always
be, / watch. If there be many watchmen, the security of the
guard is not in the unity of the number, as it would be in repelling
an assault, but in covering every position of possible surprise by
individual and responsible vigilance. The watchman for the time
being personifies the army to which he belongs. He commands
because he protects every man and every weapon and arm of the
service. His first and main qualification is a knowledge and
persuasion of the danger which has made him a watchman.
1 J. Wells, Stewart of Lovedale, 135.
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 489
If " I recently visited the Heights of Abraham," said a friend,
" and looking down those precipitous cliffs which make that the
strongest natural citadel in America, I was amazed that Wolfe
and his English forces were able to capture it. Speaking to a
guardsman, I said, ' It would seem as if a band of schoolboys
might have held this fort against an army; how did it happen
that the French were defeated?' The guard replied, 'Oh, the
soldiers got careless, overconfident and pleasure-loving, and one
dark night while they were off guard, the citadel was taken.' " l
2. One part of that watchfulness consists in exercising a very
rigid and a very constant and comprehensive scrutiny of our
motives. For there is no way by which evil creeps upon us so
unobserved as when it slips in at the back door of a specious
motive. Many a man contents himself with the avoidance of
actual evil actions, and lets any kind of motives come in and out
of his mind unexamined. It is all right to look after our doings,
but as a man " thinketh in his heart, so is he." The good or the
evil of anything that I do is determined wholly by the motive
with which I do it. And we are a great deal too apt to palm off
deceptions on ourselves to be certain that our motives are right,
unless we give them a very careful and minute scrutiny.
Tf We should establish a rigid examination for applicants for
entrance, and make quite sure that each that presents itself is
not a wolf in sheep's clothing. Make them all bring out their
passports. Let every vessel that comes into your harbour remain
isolated from all communication with the shore until the health
officer has been on board and given a clean bill. " Watch ye " ;
for yonder, away in the dark, in the shadow of the trees, the
black masses of the enemy are gathered, and a midnight attack
is but too likely to bring a bloody awakening to a camp full of
sleepers. 2
3. We have three things to guard God's honour, God's
property, and God's truth.
(1) First, we are on guard for God's honour. How often men
fail in this. How constantly we hear God's Name, as it were,
dragged in the dust. Swearing is so common that people often use
such language without realizing that they are sinning against God.
The words come to their lips so naturally that they do not even
think about their meaning ; and the man who does not use them
1 E. J. Hardy. 8 A. Maclaren.
490 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
becomes sometimes an object of surprise, if not of ridicule, amongst
his mates. Nevertheless, the true soldier of Christ must brave
this, for he is on guard for the honour of his King. If he is
afraid to stand alone in leaving such words out of his talk, he
is failing in his duty. If it is noticed, so much the better. Others
see that he is not ashamed to show his colours. If he stands
firm, they will in time grow to respect him for it ; for deep down
in the heart of the greatest blackguard there is generally admiration
for a brave man who will stick to what is right, come what may.
U A smartly dressed railway guard was bustling about his
work on a platform, with a pretty rose in his buttonhole. A
man, more than half tipsy, came lurching past, snatched the rose
from the guard's buttonhole, and flung it under the train, and then
chuckled in his drunken fashion. The guard's face flushed red,
but without a word he turned away. As he passed, a man compli-
mented him and said, " You took that splendidly." The guard said,
" I am on duty, sir." l
(2) Secondly, we are on guard for God's property. A soldier
in the King's army is not his own. He has to go where he is
ordered and stay where he is stationed. And more than this.
Not long ago one of our great generals pointed out in an address
to the troops in India that men who do not try to keep themselves
fit for service efficient soldiers, as we call it by clean, temperate
lives, are defrauding the Service they have enlisted in. Every
conscientious soldier, he said, should look at the question in that
light. Even so the Christian soldier, who belongs to God, must try
to be, in body and soul, an efficient member of the Service of the
King of kings. In the words of the good old Church Catechism,
he must " keep his body in temperance, soberness, and chastity."
U The soldiers insensibly forgot the virtues of their profession
and contracted only the vices of civil life. They were either
degraded by the industry of mechanic trades, or enervated by the
luxury of baths and theatres. They soon became careless of their
martial exercises, and curious in their diet and apparel. They
loved downy beds and houses of marble; and their cups were
heavier than their swords. 2
(3) Lastly, we are on guard for God's truth. A man can
hardly mix among other men without hearing God's truth
1 Joseph Traill. 2 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ii. 177.
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 491
assailed. There is a certain amount of unbelief; but perhaps
less unbelief than carelessness and indifference that takes the
form of unbelieving and even blasphemous talk. Men who like
to be independent of religion themselves, who do not want to
be bound by its laws, who find their own way more convenient
than God's way, sometimes profess to be unbelievers. They are
not honest unbelievers, but it suits them to talk unbelief; and
they do their best to argue or laugh other men into the same
way of thinking. Now against this kind of thing we must be
on guard. 1
See the world
Such as it is, you made it not, nor I;
I mean to take it as it is, and you,
Not so you'll take it, though you get nought else.
I know the special kind of life I like,
What suits the most my idiosyncrasy,
Brings out the best of me and bears me fruit
In power, peace, pleasantness and length of days.
I find that positive belief does this
For me, and unbelief, no whit of this.
For you, it does, however? that, we'll try! 2
II.
BE GODLY.
" Stand fast in the faith."
" Stand fast in the faith," stand upright in it, stand firm, stand
boldly, be not tossed hither and thither, halt not between two
opinions, be not half-hearted, know which master it is you are
serving, and make up your mind clearly and definitely. " Stand
fast in the faith." Stand up like a man, and be ready to give
an account of whose you are and what you believe ; know what
it is that you believe, whatever that may be ; face it in its simple
form and say if that is what you are prepared to act up to, and
form your life by.
^[ One of the best known stories of the battle of Waterloo
is this : One regiment was hard pressed, and suffering seriously
from the enemy's fire. Presently Wellington rode up and called
out : " Stand firm, Ninety-fifth ! We must not be beaten. What
1 A. Debenham, On Guard, 9. 2 Browning, Bishop Elougram's Apology.
492 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
would they say in England ? " Stand firm ! It was an appeal
to the manliness of his soldiers, and to their patriotism. The
eye of their country was upon them. Whether charged by the
cavalry or mowed down by the cannon, there must be no flinching.
Stand firm ! We must not be beaten ! 1
1. But what is this faith that we are commanded to stand
fast in ? It means our openness of soul to that eternal God who
is our Father, yet our King ; it means daily fellowship with that
ever-living Christ who is our Brother, yet our Priest ; it means a
home within the soul to that eternal Spirit who is our Comforter,
yet our Guide. Faith is the grasp of the spirit upon those eternal
verities of God, which hold the spirit in time as if it were within
eternity.
2. Intellectual activity is a great help to steadfastness in
belief, but intellectual frivolity a grave danger. We would not
make light of the difficulties that perplex the serious mind;
what troubles it touches us all. To be forced to feel that the
beliefs witnessed to by the Christian Church and accepted by
the holy and the good cannot be believed, must ever be a heavy
trial to the sober and grave mind. For if it doubts, it is not
from inclination, but against it; not by preference, but from
sheer conviction; and he is no friend to truth who does not
respect the doubt of such a mind. But the number who belong
to this class is never large. The longer we live, and the more
we know of the intellectual tendencies that create conventional
disbelief, the more we discover that fashion, temper, want of
thought, and openness to superficial influences are more potent
than grave and serious reason. Every age has its own peculiar
tendencies to negation, and in our own day we may say that
mental meddlesomeness, want of thought and plenitude of
frivolous speech about the most awful themes are more fruitful
causes of doubt, if doubt we may call it, than the questions of
the critics, or the problems of philosophy and the schools.
The Apostle's exhortation must be interpreted by the help
of the first verse of the preceding chapter : " Moreover, brethren,
I declare unto you the gospel, . . . wherein ye stand " ; and the
Apostle proceeds to place in their order the truths which
comprise the Gospel and the cardinal fact upon which they
1 H. M. Butler, Public School Sermons, 173.
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 493
rest. The argument of the resurrection, which is the glory of
this Epistle, was addressed to the sceptical spirit of the Corinthian
Church. That spirit expressed itself in the question, " How are
the dead raised up, and with what body do they come ? " This
is the popular mode of exclaiming against dogma. Its tone does
not indicate the earnest inquiry of a child spirit, but the demand
of an impatient and carping unbelief.
^[ This was the kind of battlefield to which Arnold would so
often refer. To him the great curse of Public Schools, to be set
against their noble powers for good, the great curse seemed to
be I quote his brilliant pupil and biographer " the spirit "
sometimes "there encouraged of combination, of companionship,
of excessive deference to the public opinion prevalent in the
school." Once he spoke of it in these stern words are they
even now obsolete ? " If the spirit of Elijah were to stand in
the midst of us, and we were to ask him, 'What shall we do
then ? ' his answer would be, * Fear not, nor heed one another's
voices, but fear and heed the voice of God only/" And the
favourite image of human goodness which always stood out before
Arnold was the noble portrait of Abdiel in Milton
The Seraph Abdiel, faithful found
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single. 1
3. This counsel to " stand fast " occurs no fewer than six
times in the Epistles of St. Paul. The Apostle was evidently very
anxious about his converts, that they should maintain Christian
stability. If any one is to stand fast, two things are necessary,
namely, a foundation to stand upon, and strength to stand. It
has been well said that "a man may have his feet on a rock,
yet if he is weak as a rag, he cannot stand ; and no matter how
strong he is, if his feet are on quicksand, he cannot be stable."
(1) We have a sure foundation to stand upon : " the faith,"
that is, the truth, " as the truth is in Jesus." We are to take
our stand upon revealed truth, the truth of the Bible. Every
1 H. M. Butler,
494 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
Christian ought firmly to hold that Christ Jesus is the Son of
God ; that He died upon the cross for our sins ; that He rose
again from the dead; that He now reigns in heaven; that He
has sent His Holy Spirit into the world ; and that He will Himself
return at the last day to take all His people to be with Him in
glory. While the believer is never to stand still as to growth
and obedience, he is always to " stand fast " as to right principles.
He is to continue firm with regard to everything that is true
and just and good. He is to stand fast in the three abiding
graces " faith, hope, love."
(2) But not only has the Christian a sure ground to stand
upon; he has also strength to stand. Some men are stronger
than others in body, in mind, in affections, in will; but the
strength that is required in order to " stand fast in the faith "
is not one's own. It comes from the Lord Jesus. It is His gift
to His people. The Apostle says, "Stand fast in the Lord,"
because the Christian is already " in Christ," and the whole secret
of spiritual strength consists in union with Him. If we would
stand fast, we must " abide in him."
Tf In the Highlands of Scotland there are two bold projecting
crags or headlands, some thirty-five miles apart, both of which
are called Craigellachie. The one is at Aviemore on the south,
and the other near Aberlour on the north. The swift river Spey
flows at the foot of both ; and the two Craigellachies form the
southern and northern boundaries of Strathspey, the land of
the Grants. And what used to be long ago the war-cry of the
clan Grant, which was sent from Castle Grant at Grantown with
" the fiery cross " all through the strath ? It was these words :
" Stand fast, Craigellachie ! " A war-cry this, as John Ruskin
has said, full of " deep wells of feeling and thought," full of " the
love of the native land, and the assurance of faithfulness to it."
The repetition of these words out in India by Highland soldiers
from Strathspey has been to them in the hour of battle, when
they were fighting beside Indian palaces and temples, like a
breath of the Scottish heather or a whisper of the birches and
pines : " Stand fast, Craigellachie ! " But the Christian warrior
has a still grander and more inspiring war-cry : " Stand fast in
the faith ! " " Stand fast in the Lord ! " 1
4. How is it that so few Christian men seem to possess this
true courage, this standing fast in the faith ? Is it not because
1 C. Jerdan.
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 495
they are not rooted and grounded sufficiently in Christ Himself
as the fulness of their redemption ? Is it not because they have
not embraced the faith with all their heart and mind ; because
they stand wavering on the threshold of the fortress, and have
never really entered it? Is it not because they have not
thoroughly apprehended God's purposes regarding them; are
not yet satisfied that they are His and He is theirs? because
they have never yet felt with deep and living conviction, that
He is for them and nothing can be against them, that they were
sent here to do His work, and till that work is done, no raging
of the enemy can prevail ? Is it not because they have not as
yet acquired a distinct view of that enemy, and know not his
devices; have not learned the signals of the two armies; have
not sharply marked, in their mind's map, the frontiers of the
kingdoms of darkness and of light ? Is it not from want of the
fulness of the faith itself, that we are so wavering and hesitating,
so generally doing just what the world or the Church expects of
us, and so rarely built up on Christ Himself, looking beyond men
for our motives, for our plans, for our endurance ?
T[ One of Bunyan's famous pilgrims, in the Second Part of
The Pilgrim's Progress, is " Mr. Stand-fast." This pilgrim is the
last to be brought into the story, and the last also to cross the
river of death. A true, strong, brave pilgrim was " Mr. Stand-
fast." " Great-heart " and his company came upon him when he
was on his knees in the Enchanted Ground, praying earnestly
for help against the temptations of "Madam Bubble," that is,
the world and its enchantments. By and by, when " Christiana "
was bidding her friends farewell, she had messages to leave to
some, and adieus to present to others ; " but she gave ' Mr. Stand-
fast' a ring," evidently as a token of her peculiar respect and
affection. And when, at the very end of the allegory, the
summons to cross the river came to "Mr. Stand-fast," it bore
these touching and tender words : " For his Master is not willing
that he should be so far from Him any longer." While this
pilgrim was crossing, " there was a great calm at that time in
the river " ; so much so, that he stood for a time in mid-channel,
and talked pleasantly to the convoy of friends who were watching
him from the bank. He assured them that the river had now no
terror for him. . It had been his habit to " stand fast " amidst the
dangers of the long pilgrimage ; and therefore he could say, " Now,
methinks, I stand easy."
496 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
III.
BE MANLY.
" Quit you like men."
1. We have all read, in history remote and recent, of some
brief but spirit-stirring words of command, by which generals
leading their armies into action at moments of critical emergency
have nerved and invigorated for the conflict those who had long
learned to rely upon the skill and courage of their leader. Some
of these sayings have passed almost into proverbs ; others have
been treasured in family records, or enshrined in the pages of
military or even Christian biography. Just such in its character
is the admonition contained in the text. In the English version
it consists of four words ; in the original it is but one word.
Tf The words, " Stand fast in the faith, quit you like men,"
in their original language, stand over the gateway of Selwyn
College.
TI I remember as if it were yesterday the horrid feeling when
I knocked at his study door, the door through which I had often
been taken when something naughty had been done, too bad for
mother to punish for, but I had never felt quite so bad before.
My knock was answered by a " Come in." I entered, and father
rose and drew me towards the window. Silently we stood there,
and then strangest of all strange things, I noticed tears in his eyes.
Then, when he put his hands on my shoulders, there was a break
in his voice as he uttered the words, never to be forgotten:
" Well, my son ! You are the first to leave the home nest, and
I have been praying God to give me the right words to say to
you, and I think He has answered my prayer. God grant that
you may always try to le a man." I looked him in the face, eye
to eye, as we had been taught to do, and thought to myself, he
has begun. But he said no more. 1
2. What does St. Paul mean when he exclaims to the Corin-
thian converts, " Quit you like men " ? He means, not the conven-
tional qualities on which this or that age may look with favour,
but the highest qualities of which human nature looked at in
its highest light is capable put forth the manhood that is in you.
How strange the contrast between the thoughts which that word
1 George Clarke.,
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 49^
must have raised in the minds of St. Paul's hearers and those
which it would have called up if uttered by one of their civil
rulers. How different a thing had manhood become to the
Christian from what it was before his conversion. The thought
that their life had been lived by the Son of God, the thought that
their nature had been worn by Christ, that their bodily form had
been sanctified by God's indwelling presence, how overpowering
must this have been to the first believers. They could have no
doubt, no difficulty in life, when once they had believed. They
knew in Him the greatness of their position, the source of their
real strength. In following His life they knew wherein true
manhood lay ; they knew that it was not in the practice of the
conventional virtues of the society around them, not in striking,
brilliant exhibitions of their own great powers of mind or body,
but in the simple daily life of industry and effort, that the per-
fection of human nature was to be found. This fact, this plain
unmistakable truth, was stamped upon man's conscience by the
human life and death of God's eternal Son. They need not go
out of the world to find in solitude, in asceticism, in contempla-
tion, their own " highest perfection," as the fanatics even among
the Jews maintained. They need not strive laboriously, as the
Greeks would teach them, to ascend the lofty heights of abstract
thought, where the mind might look calmly down on human
things, and rise above them into the region of the Divine. Nay,
in order to gain their highest greatness, they need not even
struggle with the keen strong weapons of the world's ambition to
rise above their fellows, to do great exploits, to win great glory,
to conquer and to rule, as they saw their Eoman masters striving
incessantly to do. Christ had revealed to His followers the
sufficiency, the grandeur of common life; within the sphere of
daily duty can the highest individual perfection be found.
This view of life lies at the bottom of what we call manliness
of character. For it implies all those qualities which we most
commonly attach to our idea of manliness. A man acting always
from such a view is frank and straightforward, for he makes no
false pretences and so has nothing to conceal. He is simple
because he is too much in earnest to be lost in complexities and
misunderstandings. He is fearless, for he is conscious of no aim
of which he need be ashamed. He is brave, for whether he gain
I COR. 32
498 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
or lose in each separate undertaking, in the end he cannot but
win, for present failure must at least teach a broader wisdom for
the future, and a more perfect sympathy with actual surroundings.
He is sound and healthy, for he knows himself too well and deals
with himself too honestly to leave any room for what is morbid or
affected. He is strong, for he is self-controlled, at any moment
ready to act decisively up to what he knows, without thinking
that what he does is necessarily on that account the wisest and
best course possible. He is enduring, for he can afford to wait,
knowing that his aim is his own lasting development, not the
production of immediate results, not the glory of present praise
and honour.
TI All right exercise of any human gift, so descended from the
Giver of good, depends on the primary formation of the character
of true manliness in the youth that is to say, of a majestic,
grave, and deliberate strength. How strange the words sound ;
how little does it seem possible to conceive of majesty, and
gravity, and deliberation in the daily track of modern life. Yet,
gentlemen, we need not hope that our work will be majestic if
there is no majesty in ourselves. The word " manly " has come
to mean practically, among us, a schoolboy's character, not a
man's. We are, at our best, thoughtlessly impetuous, fond of
adventure and excitement ; curious in knowledge for its novelty,
not for its system and results ; faithful and affectionate to those
among whom we are by chance cast, but gently and calmly
insolent to strangers ; we are stupidly conscientious, and instinc-
tively brave, and always ready to cast away the lives we take no
pains to make valuable, in causes of which we have never
ascertained the justice. 1
U In Drummond's Life of Charles A. Berry, there is the
following reminiscence by Mr. Holderness Gale, an intimate
friend of Berry : " One day I had been spending an hour or two
with him, and we were leaving the Club together, he to go, I
think, to Woodford. Our ways parted at the Club door, and
when we reached it, he called to me to wait a minute while he
claimed his bag. In those days, a member entering the Club
might leave his bag with the hall porter, and this Berry had done.
He described his bag as a square black one, with a round handle,
and was handed one which was beautifully smooth and shone with
unsullied varnish. ' That's not mine/ said Berry ; ' mine is over
there/ and he pointed to another bag of the same shape, or rather
1 Kuskin, The Study of Architecture ( Wwka, xix. 32).
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 499
which had been of the same shape in its early days. When I
saw it, the owner's slippers, and sundry other impedimenta, had
destroyed its squareness, and the varnish had given way, here and
there, in honourable scars of roughened brown leather. 'I
suppose you thought that wasn't respectable enough for a parson,'
said Berry, as the attendant gave the bag a dusting. ' Bless you,
sir, we never thinks of you as a parson ; we always thinks of you
as a man,' was the reply. I never saw Berry more touched than
at this spontaneous tribute." l
f Away back in the Middle Ages was a very beautiful and
radiant thing named chivalry a thing partly real and partly
ideal, the ideal part of it being just as precious for us as the real
part. Now, one great purpose lying at the root of chivalry was
that of cultivating a fine and stately type of manhood ; in fact, of
breeding up the manliest race of men that had ever trod up and
down in the world. And what was their notion of manliness
theirs, in that epoch of coarseness, and of animal lusts, and of
violent lives? Listen. The finest dream of chivalry was
embodied in that superb personage, King Arthur, and in the
gorgeous knights who sat with him at the Sound Table. And by
what principles were their splendid lives controlled ? Tennyson
has told us, in the best English that has been written in our time
putting the testimony into the lips of King Arthur himself.
I was first of all the kings who drew
The knighthood-errant of this realm and all
The realms together under me, their Head,
In that fair Order of the Table Bound,
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time.
I made them lay their hands in mine and swear
To reverence the King, as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their King,
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honour his own word as if his God's,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds,
Until they won her ; for indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
1 Charles A. Berry, 274.
500 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
3. Manliness is a great word ; it is a many-sided word ; but in
general, we have this feeling about it, when we use it with emphasis
that it is an idealizing word. It is a word that will not suffer
us to stay down among the small actualities of the manly
character as known to us ; but it continually points us up and
away from the small actualities towards the grand possibilities of
the manly character which we hope may sometime be known to
us. The word manliness, perhaps, is greater and richer in noble
attributes than was any one real specimen of manliness that we
have ever looked upon with these eyes of ours. Nevertheless,
when we think of true manliness, we are not content with the
discouraging real, we lift ourselves up towards the inspiring ideal ;
and we begin to place before our eyes, one by one, all those
qualities that we can think of as going to the formation of a
noble, strong, splendid, and complete man. The manly man, we
say why, that is the ideal man ; that is the man, not as he is,
perhaps, but as he ought to be, as he may be, as he will be.
What are the attributes of this complete man, which St. Paul
may be supposed to have had in mind when he exhorted us to act
like one? There should be no difficulty in answering this
question. The very word which St. Paul used is one the exact
meaning of which is still perfectly well known. For our phrase
in four words, " Quit you like men," he used a single word, a verb
formed from the familiar noun for man. The primary meaning
of that noun was simply man as distinct from woman; its
secondary meaning was man as a person of mature years, in
contrast with a child; and then, for its third and supreme
meaning, the word broadened and blossomed into the large
conception of man as a being possessed of intelligence, wisdom,
moral light and force, and a spiritual nature, in contrast with
creatures of inferior order who are devoid of these endowments.
So when St. Paul said to the little group of Christians at Corinth,
environed by the spiritual perils of that most corrupt pagan city,
" Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men," he very
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 501
likely charged that last word with all the ennobling and stimu-
lating meanings which in the usage of poets and historians and
orators it already had. For long before St. Paul's time the word
had been often used, somewhat as he used it, as a word to spur and
inspire men to great and worthy and difficult deeds. In Homer
and Herodotus and in Xenophon the word comes up again and
again, when some great chieftain, at a moment of danger, in the
presence of some grand or tremendous duty, just turns round to
his followers and tells them to remember that they are men, and
to act accordingly. Of course, St. Paul must have charged the
word with richer meanings than they did, by as much as his
conception of the spiritual range and possibility of man's nature
was grander than theirs ; but the basis of his appeal was just the
same as theirs.
In the first place, then, if in any respect a man is expected
to have more courage and strength than a woman, let him act
as becomes a man. Here the protest is against effeminacy.
Secondly, if in any respect a grown man is expected to have
more intelligence, wisdom, force, self-control, or fortitude than a
mere child, let him act as becomes a man. Here the protest is
against puerility. But, unquestionably, the great meaning with
which the word is charged, in the Apostle's use of it, is its third
and consummate meaning. Men are to act as creatures having
reason, conscience, the power of choice, and the measureless
possibilities of the immortal life, and not like creatures of mere
instinct, impulse, and irresponsibility. Here the protest is
against brutishness or animalism, existence unregulated by
intelligent and conscientious self-direction. Therefore, taking
this as the Apostle's conception of manliness namely, character
expressing itself in a life steered by principle let us look at some
of those forms of principle by which the manly life will be steered.
(1) Magnanimity. Magnanimity is the principle of taking
the large-minded view of things rather than the small-minded
view. It is this principle woven into the texture of any human
life which gives to it, however lowly it may be, true elevation
and dignity ; which enables its possessor to meet whatever comes
with a tranquil and firm spirit ; which raises him above anything
so petty as revenge ; which prompts him to disdain injustice and
meanness, and leads him to task himself and to sacrifice himself
502 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
for noble ends. Accordingly, whatever in us is small, paltry,
narrow, low ; whatever tends to warp and contract us ; whatever
is stingy, greedy, miserly, selfish, jealous, morbid, is just so far a
diminution of our manliness. And every vocation or method of
culture which tends merely to sharpen certain less noble faculties
of our nature, such as calculation, shrewdness, cunning, acquisitive-
ness, needs to be met by the deliberate cultivation of the faculties
which will correct this tendency and broaden our grasp and
handling of things.
^j " Abraham," says Charles Kingsley, " was a prince in manners
and a prince in heart." The Hittites partly divined his secret.
His personality was grandly impressive to them. He rose in
uncrowned sovereignty above them all, the strongest, noblest,
gentlest man ; and they saw that he was a prince of God's own
making. He owed his power and charm, not so much to natural
endowments as to the transforming and ennobling influence of
Divine grace. Great aspirations and ideals created his great
character. He kept company with God till he became a partaker
of the Divine nature. Beginning as a man of God, he ended as
a prince of God. True religion develops the highest kind of
manhood. Under its influence a common man becomes princely
in soul, unconsciously regnant among his fellow-men, and does
the most common things in a noble, gentle, royal spirit. Being
to God what the wax is to the seal, he is stamped with the image
of God.
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power. 1
TJ It is news to some people that manliness is a matter of
culture rather than of fate. These are the people who confuse
manliness with manhood. Their view is that in the great drama
of humanity some of us are cast for male parts and some of us
for feminine characters ; and since none can determine his own
sex, therefore manliness is a matter over which we have no
control. They are by no means entirely wrong; and yet they
are not right. It is not ours to say whether we shall or shall
not be men. It is ours to say whether we shall be manly. For
manliness is a matter of quality. There are many kinds of men,
and it is only worth while being the best kind. To be the best
of anything a man must take himself in hand. He must culture
and discipline himself with the help of God. In other words, he
must set his will towards manliness. He must know what he
1 J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 180.
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 503
wants, he must know how to get it ; he must count as nothing
the pains of progress. The fact is that manhood is only potential
manliness. Yet where there is manhood there is always the
possibility of manliness. Temperament is bias, but not destiny.
Will and vision will always open a road from manhood to
manliness. 1
(2) Sincerity. Another principle by which the manly life is
steered is sincerity, sometimes described as ingenuousness, open-
ness of heart, frankness, fairness, straightforwardness, honesty of
nature through and through. The manly man will surely be
controlled by this principle. The manly man is not double-
tongued, or a hypocrite, or a trickster. The manly man is the
upright man, the straightforward man, or, to use a new but most
expressive phrase, he is the square man. When we hear of a
piece of brilliant and successful sharp practice in politics, in law,
in stock speculation, is it not our first tendency rather to smile
admiringly over the expert achievement than to brood seriously
over a certain ignoble something in it which taints the whole
glittering transaction and the person who executes it ? For there
is nothing manly about trick-playing. How refreshing it is to
see a man who never has an object of which he need be ashamed,
and who marches towards his object without dodging, indirection,
or stealth !
^[ No meanness, hypocrisy, or dishonesty, whether on the part
of rich or poor, could escape the rigorous censure of " that terrible
Thoreau," as his acquaintances called him ; nor would he waste
on thriftless applicants one cent of the money which he had
earned by his own conscientious labours. He maintained sincerity
to be the chief of all virtues. "The old mythology," 'he wrote,
" is incomplete without a god or a goddess of sincerity, on whose
altars we might offer up all the products of our farms, our work-
shops, and our studies. This is the only panacea." 2
Tf Trevelyan speaks of " that ingrained sincerity of character "
for the sake of which his party would have followed Lord Althorp
to the death. 3
Tf During Mr. Gladstone's last tenure of office as Prime
Minister a clergyman, whose only opportunity of knowing Mr.
Gladstone had been through the not too trustworthy descriptions
1 J. G. Stevenson, in Youth and Life, 1.
2 H. S. Salt, Henry David Thoreau, 122.
8 Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 260.
504 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
of hostile critics, happened to say in the presence of Dean
Church that he believed Mr. Gladstone was a thoroughly insincere
man. The Dean was sitting in his chair when the remark was
made, but he instantly rose, his face even paler than it usually
was, and he said, evidently with the strongest suppression of
personal feeling : " Insincere ! Sir, I tell you that to my knowledge
Mr. Gladstone goes from communion with God to the great affairs
of State." It was high testimony to be given to any man, but
highest of all when we remember who gave it. 1
This is Love's nobility,
Not to scatter bread and gold,
Goods and raiment bought and sold;
But to hold fast his simple sense,
And speak the speech of innocence,
And with hand, and body, and blood,
To make his bosom-counsel good.
For he that feeds men serveth few;
He serves all who dares be true. 2
(3) Self-control. Manliness is self-mastery. Any fool, the
weakest, dullest, paltriest that ever was, can make a drunkard or
a debauchee. There is no human clay so vile, no sludge and
scum of humanity so despicable, but out of it you may make an
effeminate corrupter or lying schemer; but it takes God's own
gold to make a man. No lacquer work, no tinsel suffices for the
cherubim of the sanctuary. They must be hammered out of pure
gold, seven times purified in the fire. From whom, it has been
asked, does the inspiration descend on us? Is it not from the
central figures of the great tragedies of humanity; from the
creators of law, from the avengers of wrong, from the martyrs
of right, from the missionaries of mercy, from the Pass of
Thermopylae, from the self-dedication of the Decii, from the
fires of Smithfield, from the waters of the Solway, yea ! from the
cross of Calvary ? And he who will not take up that cross cannot
be a true man ; he cannot be Christ's disciple.
Every man finds in himself two sets of tendencies one coarse,
the other fine ; the one gross and animal, the other spiritual and
noble; one set allying him to the beasts that perish, the other
allying him to the angels of God and to God Himself. Now,
every man's life is going to be habitually controlled by one or
1 Life and Letters of Dean Church, 304. 2 Emerson.
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 505
the other of these sets of tendencies, or he is going to vacillate
in a helpless, rudderless way between the two. But what will
the manly man do about it? This he will do. He will not
vacillate; he will not drift rudderless, water-logged, helpless.
No ; he will decide firmly between these two sets of tendencies ;
he will make his choice, and he will choose to have his life
habitually controlled by his finer instincts rather than by his
coarser ones ; he will elect as his master tendencies those which
are pure and ennobling rather than those which are low and
degrading; he will resolve that within the domain of his
personality the soul shall be king, not the body ; that conscience
and intelligence shall rule, and not the mob of his animal lusts
and passions. With him the decision simply comes to this : the
body shall obey the soul, the soul shall not be degraded to the
task of obeying the body.
T| If one is alive, there will be much in him which needs
control, and yet is not going to submit without a struggle. It
takes a practised hand to manage a pair of high-spirited horses
so that they will not run away ; and he would be a phenomenal
charioteer who could drive wild beasts tandem and keep them
under the rein together. This is the kind of task which ardent
natures have to face. As compared with some primitive peoples,
we have lost in frankness and gained in outward decorum,
because we hide objectionable eccentricities from public view.
But the human heart is still a curious menagerie. Though the
animals may be pretty well tamed in the cage of civilization, it
does not follow that their rougher instincts are destroyed. A
good many different selves often seem to be included in the self.
How shall we bind them into a real unity ?
When shall we lay
The ghost of the brute that is walking and haunting us yet
and be free?
This is the great problem of life. 1
(4) Courage. Another principle by which the manly life is
steered is courage. As to this thing called courage, people some-
times distinguish between physical courage and moral courage.
If there be such a thing as physical courage apart from moral
courage, we have not very frequent use for it in civilized life.
1 W. T. Herridge, The OrUt of Life, 65.
506 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
Against physical danger, as proceeding from the violence of
others, society protects us ; we seldom need to be at the trouble
of protecting ourselves. Physical courage is the virtue of bar-
barism ; the virtue of civilization is moral courage. The courage
most needed in civilized society, at almost every hour of our lives,
is the courage of opinion; the courage of our faiths and our
convictions.
TJ Once, in some American city, there was held a densely
crowded mass-meeting of slave-holders. Shouts of applause and
enthusiasm marked the words of these champions of bondage,
and they thundered forth the plausible sophisms of perverted
Scriptures which defended their covenants with death. And one
of the orators exclaimed, in the face of that menacing and raging
meeting: "I should like to see an Abolitionist now; I should
like to see an Abolitionist show his face here." Then a short
figure was seen thrusting its way to the front, and, standing up
before these raging defenders of wickedness alone, Theodore
Parker shouted out to the raging multitude, " I am an Abolition-
ist!" It required nobler courage to do that than to fight a
battle. 1
Tf I say it deliberately, from long observation, that I regard
cowardice as a capital defect in a young man. I have really more
hopes of a fool than of a coward. I am never sure that a coward
will tell the truth. I tremble at every temptation that he en-
counters, lest he may succumb. I fear for every opposition that
he meets, lest he may be carried away with it. 2
TI I remember a remarkable conversion that occurred many
years ago, when a work of grace was beginning in the parish over
which my dear father was pastor. It happened that at that time
there was a little band of men who were " great chums," and in
a good position in society, as things went in the village; they
were, in fact, regarded as influential men in the parish. One
evening, they were all together at an hotel in the neighbouring
town of Penzance, and, as men do on such occasions, they were
drinking, and talking all kinds of nonsense, and not infrequently
all kinds of profanity ! One happened to say, " I wonder what
the people are doing just now over at Pendeen." Another replied,
"I suppose they are all getting converted as fast as possible."
" Well," said one to a third, " I say, Captain B , I will tell you
what it is. When I see you converted, I will begin to think
there is something in it," and there was a great roar of laughter
1 Dean Farrar. 2 R. B. Fairbairn, College Sermons, 67.
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 507
from the whole of the company at the thought of Captain B 's
conversion. The man thus referred to was, I may say, a mine
agent, occupying a very influential position, and a large employer
of labour. As the laughter died away, he rose from his seat. His
companions did not notice how pale was his cheek. One thought
only had flashed across his mind, when he heard his friend's
remark, and the roar of laughter which it provoked. It was this
" Is my salvation so utterly hopeless that these worldly men can
afford to regard me as they do ? Do my companions think me
altogether lost for time and eternity ? He started up and
darted out of the room. The company thought they had offended
him. Another moment, and he was in the hotel-yard, and crying
to the ostler, " Saddle my horse ! " He rode to his home as fast
as he could ride. His wife could not understand what was wrong
with him: he seemed so agitated. He took no food; but im-
mediately set out for the place at which our meetings were being
held. He was the last man we expected to see there. He came
boldly forward and took his seat in front of the congregation, full
in view of many whom he was employing. He had overcome his
moral cowardice. My dear father gave out those lines of a well-
known hymn of Wesley's
Is here a soul that knows Thee not,
Nor feels his want of Thee ?
A stranger to the blood which bought
His pardon on the tree ?
Convince him now of unbelief,
His desperate state explain.
And, as my father uttered these last words " His desperate state
explain!" we heard a cry. This man was prostrated on his
knees, and was sending up the thrilling prayer, before the eyes
and ears of all "God be merciful to me a sinner." I need
hardly tell you that man went home rejoicing. But I may add
that his conversion moved the whole neighbourhood, and was the
commencement of the most remarkable work of God's grace that
has ever occurred in those parts. Now, I call that manly,
" quitting oneself like a man." I know he could not have done
it if the Holy Spirit had not been striving within him. But then
we often strive the other way ; God calls, and we won't answer.
God draws, and we won't yield ; and the result is our hearts
become like adamant, harder than flint. 1
K " I asked Kang Yu Wei, who has studied the Gospels
profoundly, what seemed to him the most striking quality in Jesus.
1 Canon Hay Aitken.
508 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
He answered, somewhat to my surprise, that what appealed to
him most, in the personality of Jesus, was His courage." l
And who the bravest of the brave;
The bravest hero ever born?
'Twas one who dared a felon's grave,
Who dared to breathe the scorn of scorn.
Nay, more than this: when sword was drawn,
And vengeance waited for His word,
He looked with pitying eyes upon
The scene, and said, "Put up thy sword."
God! could man be found to-day
As brave to do, as brave to say?
"Put up thy sword into its sheath,"
Put up thy sword, put up thy sword!
By Kedron's brook thus spoke beneath
The olive-trees our valiant Lord,
Spoke calm and kinglike. Sword and stave
And torch and stormy men of death
Made clamour. Yet He spake not save
With loving word and patient breath
The peaceful olive boughs beneath,
"Put up thy sword within its sheath."
IV.
BE STRONG.
It would seem, at least at first sight, as if only an
artificial distinction could be drawn between those two injunc-
tions, "Quit you like men," "Be strong." But, looking more
closely into the meaning of the words, we find that, not only
are they not synonymous, but they do not even overlap. The
Greek word translated " Quit you like men," a word which occurs
nowhere else in the New Testament, has an obvious and definite
meaning. It is an appeal to self-respect, and a call to us to show
forth our moral strength. The word translated " Be strong," on
the other hand, in the only three other passages in which it is
used, definitely refers to a different kind of strength. Twice it
is used of our Lord Himself growing strong in spirit, and once
it is used by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians, in the
1 Hibbert Journal, October 1908, p. 22.
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 509
phrase, " Strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner
man." The word thus becomes almost synonymous with another
favourite word of St. Paul's, constantly translated by the English
" strengthened," or " made strong," and always with reference to
Divine strength. " Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his
might." "Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus." It
refers definitely to that strength which made St. Paul himself
strong for his work, even as spiritual heroes in all ages out of
weakness have been made strong.
1. Let us, then, live in no doubt of what is strength and what
is weakness. It is strength to will and to do ; it is weakness to
desire and not to do ; to wish and not to will ; to wish to break
a habit and still to live in it ; to wish to fix the thoughts and
let them wander ; to wish for the command of a faculty and to
acquire no efficient use of it. And strength is not the vehement
impulse of one part of us, but the final consent of all that is in
us. It is not in the tenderness of a yielding man; nor in the
resignation of a cold one ; nor in the prudence of a selfish man ;
nor in the open-handedness of a spendthrift. The tender must
be firm ; the resigned, loving ; the prudent, generous ; the charit-
able, self-denying. It was seen in Christ when the morning of
His greatest glory dawned upon Him watching in trembling and
in prayer in His humility testing His weakness, and collecting
His strength in God. Kemember what He said to the disciples,
who all failed Him in that great crisis, not because their hearts
were evil, but simply because their wills were feeble: "What,
could ye not watch with me one hour ? Watch and pray, that
ye enter not into temptation : the spirit indeed is willing, but the
flesh is weak."
"Quit you like men, be strong." Yes, strength will come:
Who weeps at night will fight as well to-morrow;
'Tis good to stand a-wrestling with the world;
He loses much who knows not care nor sorrow;
'Tis good all day to keep the foe abreast,
'Tis good at night to fall on dreamless rest.
2. " Be strong." The original means rather " Become strong."
What is the use of telling men to " le strong " ? It is a waste of
words, in nine eases out of ten, to say to a weak man, " Pluck
5io THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
up your courage, and show strength." But is it so vain to tell
a poor, weak creature like me to become strong, when you can
point me to the source of all strength, in that spirit " of power
and of love and of a sound mind " ? We have only to take our
weakness there to have it stiffened jlnto strength ; as people put
bits of wood into what are called "petrifying wells," which
infiltrate into them mineral particles, which do not turn the wood
into stone, but make the wood as strong as stone. So my man-
hood, with all its weakness, may have filtered into it Divine
strength, which will brace me for all needful duty, and make me
more than conqueror through Him that loved me. Then, it is
not mockery and cruelty, vanity and surplusage, to preach, " Quit
you like men; be strong, and be a man"; because if we will
observe the plain and not hard conditions, strength will come
to us according to our day, in fulfilment of the great promises :
" My grace is sufficient for thee," and " my strength is made
perfect in weakness."
What is that Divine strength which is to transform our
natural and human strength ? In one word, it is " Christ in us,"
the same Divine power which secretly fought in and with the
noblest efforts of humanity outside the Jewish and the Christian
Church. Only now its nature is revealed ; more than that, there
is revealed to us the means by which that Divine strength may
be gained the channels of communication have been thrown
open to us. The end and aim of the religious life has been made
clear likeness to God, Christ formed in us, ourselves trans-
formed, our lower self subdued, our higher self taken into God.
"I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." "In all these
things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us."
^ It is sometimes said, You tell us to be manly, and yet you
bid us subject ourselves to a higher power working in us.
Keligious people are so weak. They have no self-reliance. They
are but feeble creatures, after all, with all their boasted strength.
How can you expect men to set before themselves, as an end,
what, disguise it as you will, is self-surrender, which means re-
nouncing all that we admire as manly in us ? I will answer by
some negative instances sufficient, at all events, to prove that
surrendering one's self to the will of God, resting on His strength,
is a source not of weakness but of power. Was St. Paul feeble
and nerveless because his will was surrendered to the will of
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 511
Christ ? Did he speak less powerfully, or run less certainly, or
fight as "one that beateth the air," because he had learned to
say, " Not I, but Christ in me " ? Are enthusiasts of all ages and
all creeds, fanatics, if you will, wanting in force and energy, be-
cause they believe themselves to be only passive instruments in
the hands of some mightier power ? x
3. Our strength must be of the whole man. Strength of
character is not to be obtained through the intellect or through
the feelings alone. Either of these exclusively followed can at
the best only give principles of conduct and action which satisfy
the individual, and the practical result of such a purely individual
possession can only be bigotry, prejudice, narrowness or fanati-
cism, not real strength.
That man is unmanly, for he falls far short of man's perfec-
tion, who exults only in his bodily strength, and wastes in useless,
idle, often in cruel and degrading pursuits, time and vigour that
are due to society, due to his fellow-men, due to himself. Equally,
nay, more, does he fall short, who as a narrow-minded pedant
looks out upon man's varied and ever-varying life, and measures
human nature by his own scanty measure, and, as it seethes and
tosses at his feet, applies to it his dull formula and thinks he has
thereby solved its meaning and hushed its voice for ever. Un-
manly too, deeply unmanly is he who, with a morbid sensitive-
ness that he cannot assuage, is always peering into himself and
tenderly nursing his own feelings, and greedily clamouring for
the gratification of his own emotions, who cannot face life on
equal terms with others, but is constantly brooding over his
shocked self-respect, or injured self-love, or ill-requited affection ;
who is always demanding from life as a gift that happiness which
is accorded only as the prize of effort, and is wringing his hands
in sulky despair that he is after all treated even as other men
are, though he thinks himself much more exquisitely sensitive
than they.
True strength of character is not attained by great exertions,
but by unity of life. Nothing is more common than great force
in some one direction in some one inclination, passion, or
faculty ; nothing is more rare than a strong man, if by the man
you mean the whole man, the symmetry of our entire being,
1 A. L. Moore, Some Aspects of Sin, 49.
512 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
the frame of our life complete through that which every joint
supplieth. The men whom the world takes for strong are for
the most part only one-sided just as to most minds the half of
a truth is far more telling than the whole of it, and to modify
the impression by giving the other half will seem to round it off
to comparative tameness. Vehement language coming out of
half knowledge and a blind impulse seems fraught with more
vigour than full, just, discriminating speech; and a man who
sees every side of a subject will appear more feeble than the man
who, because he sees but one side of it, can speak impetuously
and strike with unqualified force. How easy would it be to be
strong in some one direction or proclivity of our nature, or in
the vigorous prosecution of single interests ! How easy, for
instance, to be strong in the conduct of worldly business, if we
might settle down our whole powers upon it, and had never to
lift our soul from its pursuit! How difficult is it to combine
this with every other sentiment that becomes a man to infuse
into this vigour of business the fervent spirit serving God, so
that, whilst the hand of diligence maketh rich, the heart and its
treasures have no earthliness in them ! How easy might it be
to be strong in religion, in the devotion of our souls to holiness
and truth, if duty centred in the private thoughts and could be
carried on in solitude ; if it required no struggle with conflicting
things, no trained wisdom to discern our way amid a thousand
complications ; if asceticism were strength ; if the anchorite might
go to his cell, and had finished his Christian work when prayers,
aspirations, and unearthly desires had floated in ghostly array
through the uninterrupted meditations of his spirit! All that
is easy to any one who chooses to give himself to it. But how
difficult is it to be strong in a real devotedness to goodness,
purity, and truth, amid the contradiction of circumstance, and
the opposing ways of men; to shape the forms of life after
models in the soul ; to transfer unmutilated our own sentiments
into our own demeanour ; to live with men as they are and part
with no ideal; to lose no vision, disturb no fountain of peace;
to be strong in Christ's interpretation of strength ; a physician
among the sick ; whole among the unsound ; spiritual among the
worldly; living with God in the midst of crowds; full of love
and thought for the world when alone with God
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 513
(1) Strength of body. There is not, perhaps, much tendency
in the present day to return to that utter despising of our body
which was so marked a characteristic of some schools of mediaeval
asceticism. It is enough therefore to observe that the only word
in the New Testament which could seem to give countenance to
such a thought is that expression, " our vile body," which is a
painful and unfortunate mistranslation of the Greek. The word
is really, " this body of our humiliation," as contrasted with that
glorified body in which we shall exist when the Church militant
is past, and we join the completed Church triumphant in heaven.
Purity and (where God gives health) strength of body seemed
ever to St. Paul one ingredient in his estimate of true manliness.
What can exceed the fervour of that prayer that "your whole
spirit and soul and lody be preserved blameless unto the coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ " ?
(2) Strength of mind. Be strong also in soul, or intellect;
for in this sense, and not in our more modern and less accurate
sense, does St. Paul use this word " soul," distinguishing it from
our "spirit." "Be not children in understanding," says the
Apostle, "but in understanding be men." If the religion of
Christ teaches us to be brave in body, so also it teaches us to
be brave and strong in intellect.
(3) Strength of spirit. It is through the higher spiritual life
that God acts upon the other parts of man's nature ; and it is by
that spiritual power that the whole man will be purified and
exalted. The influence of the spirit of the man, acted on and
illuminated by the Holy Spirit of God, will raise him to the true
dignity of manhood in all his nature. There is nothing " manly "
quite the contrary in being irreligious or indifferent. If
there be one word of truth in all the Gospel story of what
Christ has done for us, surely it is the meanest, most unmanly
thing on earth to treat that heroic self-sacrifice with active scorn,
or with still more wounding chilling indifference.
U Like many others, I imagined a man was some one who
would shine in all athletic games, and make for himself a body
that should be so strong that people would point to him and
say : " That's .a man." Therefore when a sufficient measure of
success came to me, in a financial way, I gave myself to athletics.
I longed for the day when my name should be quoted in the
paper as a successful athlete. How I worked at it, and how hard
i COR. 33
5i4 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
I trained ! At last a measure of success came my way, and with
the glamour of the laurel wreath upon my brow, I cut the account
out of the paper and sent it home. I thought, now my father
and mother will know that their son is a man ! How hungrily
I waited for the answering letter of congratulation, and with
what eagerness I broke the seal when at last it came ! Imagine
my chagrin when I read: "Your mother and I are very glad
that you have attained to such success as an athlete. We are
very proud of you, but remember that if you were to become
the finest athlete that ever lived, you would only be a Third
of a Man."
There was nothing for it but for me at once to tackle my
brain, whilst keeping up my athletics. From that moment I
began to study, in fact almost to go to school again. I devoured
books, I studied deep subjects, I tried to become an intellectual
person. At last I read a paper before some society, which was
reported in one of the papers, with some flattering criticisms,
which were sent home. Another letter came in which my father
said : " Your mother and I are much pleased that you are letting
our prayers be answered, and that you are looking after your
mind as well as your body. Eemember, however, that supposing
you become physically perfect, and so educate yourself that you
shall have a well-stored and well-equipped brain, you will then
only be Two- Thirds of a Man" l
V.
BE TENDER.
" Let all that ye do be done in love."
1. There is a singular contrast between the first four of these
exhortations and the last. The former ring sharp and short like
pistol-shots; the last is of gentler mould. The former sound
like the word of command shouted by an officer along the
ranks; and there is a military metaphor running all through
them. The foe threatens to advance; let the guards keep their
eyes open. He comes nearer ; prepare for the charge, stand firm
in your ranks. The battle is joined ; " Quit you like men "-
strike a man's stroke " be strong." And then all the apparatus
of warfare is put away out of sight, and the captain's word of
command is softened into the Christian teacher's exhortation:
1 G. Clarke, True Manhood, Womanhood, 10.
i CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14 515
" Let all that you do be done in love." For love is better than
fighting, and is stronger than swords.
2. And yet, although there is a contrast here, there is also a
sequence and connection. No doubt these exhortations, which
are St. Paul's last word to that Corinthian Church on which he
had lavished in turn the treasures of his manifold eloquence,
indignation, argumentation, and tenderness, reflected the deficiencies
of the people to whom he was speaking. They were schismatic
and factious to the very core, and so they needed the exhortation
to be left last in their ears, as it were, that everything should be
done in love. They were ill-grounded in regard to the very
fundamental doctrines of the faith, as all St. Paul's argumentation
about the resurrection proves, and so they needed to be bidden
to "stand fast in the faith." Their slothful carelessness as to
the discipline of the Christian life, and their consequent feeble-
ness of grasp of the Christian verities, made them loose-braced
and weak in all respects, and incapacitated them for vigorous
warfare.
U An example of a splendid Christian manhood is furnished
by the career of Sir Titus Salt. It was my privilege recently to
visit Saltaire, near Bradford, the model village of which he was
the founder, and to see there in some measure how much a single
well-spent life may do in brightening the lot of others. The
great mill, which is built in the Italian style, the dwellings for
the work-people, the almshouses, the schools, the church, the
public park, and other facilities for the culture and the elevation
of the people, are proofs of a large intelligence and a loving heart.
He came to his grave in 1876 at the age of seventy-three; but
his memory lives as that of one whose motto was " Love and
Serve." l
^f A story is told of Marston Moor for which there is as good
evidence as for many things that men believe. A Lancashire
squire of ancient line was killed fighting for the king. His wife
came upon the field the next morning to search for him. They
were stripping and burying the slain. A general officer asked
her what she was about, and she told him her melancholy tale.
He listened to her with great tenderness, and earnestly besought
her to leave the horrid scene. She complied, and calling for a
trooper, he set her upon the horse. On her way she inquired
1 R. S. Duff, Pleasant Places 119.
516 THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT
the name of the officer, and learned that he was Lieutenant-
General Cromwell. 1
^f I've noticed it often among my own people around Snow-
field, that the strong, skilful men are often the gentlest to the
women and children; and it's pretty to see 'em carrying the
little babies as if they were no heavier than little birds. And
the babies always seem to like the strong arm best. 2
TJ Burne- Jones soon caught Buskin's enthusiasm for Luini,
and some years later advised a friend who was travelling in Italy
to " hunt him out everywhere. Never were any faces so perfect ;
for they are perfect like Greek ones, and have fourteen hundred
years of tenderness and pity added." 3
1 J. Morley, Oliver Cromwell, 154.
2 Dinah Morris, in Adam Bede.
8 Memorials of Edward Burne- Jones, i. 248.
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