MUD] Liii&ai- ri ^ ' >' ? Z ' 6Af»li ^U^^^t/M.. SitV. THE HEAVENLY VISION A SECOND SELECTION OF SERMONS PREACHED BY GEORGE HOWARD WILKINSON, D.D. Somewhile Vicar of S. Peter s^ Eaton Square^ S.IV. ; also^ Lord Bishop of Truro ; and^ at his death^ O^ost Rev. the Bishop of S. Andrews, Primus of the Scottish Church " / fvas not disobedient to the Heavenly Vision " A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. Ltd. London : 28 Margaret Street, Oxford Circus, VV. Oxford : 9 High Street First impression, 1909 ex INTRODUCTORY NOTES A FIRST selection of sermons preached by Bishop Wilkinson was published in May, 1908, under the title of The Invisible Glory. It has been received with intense gratitude by those who knew the preacher,, and it awakened interest in a larger public. This, a second selection, has nothing of the " less good " about it. It is only another volume ; complete in itself, as useful to adults at Confirmation, or for any other pur- pose of private reading ; yet it is carefully arranged so as to carry on the previous teaching and to break fresh ground as far as possible. The Heavenly Vision is a series of instructions upon the ever-present features of the Christian warfare. Its motto is derived from S. Paul's statement as to his own conduct after Baptism. For its main thread it takes four prayers from the Baptismal Service : like all those aspirations which have come down to us through the ages, succinct and devotional as they deal with the more prominent engagements of The Good Fight. By God the Father's mercy, and the Son's atoning love, the soul accepts " one Baptism for the Remission of Sins," and it emerges from darkness, original and (in the case of adults) actual sin. The Bishop strongly preached, and here still preaches, the absolute necessity with many of conversion after regeneration. iv INT1{0DUCT0RT .T^OTES At this stage, as is next shown, the " carnal affec- tions " are still strong. Nothing but the expulsive force of spiritual life — the work of God the Holy Ghost — keeps it true to grace. This is explained in Book II. In the third place, when some progress has been made, the soul begins to realize the nature of the enemy, in the threefold division of " the devil, the world, and the flesh." Here all strife is conscious, definite, and against an aroused enemy. It is probably in this section that the most excep- tional features of the present book will be noted. Sermons, and least of all these sermons, rarely can be read as preached. But the fact that these uncom- promising words were thoughts brought out, in their full personal earnestness, before the highest and pro- bably the most busy men and women in the land — persons who had to meet at least the world at its strongest — is in itself a lesson for those whose arena is smaller. The Bishop notes that a very small object to some is as proportionately great a temptation as the sphere of highest ambitions is to others. In such cases, and where there is a lesson of " treat- ment " to be learnt, the local allusions and temporal dates have not been wholly expunged. According to the Bishop's own methods, this has been the case in other sermons : a few were corrected by himself, although not published in his lifetime. In some, it should be further understood, that the preacher began by local allusion which, as he said of such utterances, " had done its work." It may also be noted, in case of any unacquainted with the life of the Bishop taking up this volume, that there are many papers and volumes of teaching by the Bishop which supplement what is INTTipDUCTORT .7(pTES v here said. This collection is not essentially for Churchworkers and Rctreatants, as such : the former have been provided lately with Spiritual Counsels to District Visitors and Others^ and possibly a selection of the Bishop's Retreat Notes may eventually see the light — in addition to a small volume entitled One by One, published in 1909, for bishops and clergy only. Lists of other publications may be obtained from any bookseller. Although individual dealing with and by the workers of the Church is not directly included in the fourth section, which assumes its hearers to be consciously within the Communion of Saints, there is strong insistence upon the corporate life of the Church. In this place a sermon has been inserted as preached at the consecration of Dr. Maclagan and others (p. 271), and, here too (p. 285) will be found the "first sermon " mentioned in the Memoir (A. J. Mason, D.D., 2 vols., Longmans, 1909), which, preached immediately after ordination, yet contains the germ of the thoughts of the future shepherd of souls. Scottish readers will turn with deep interest to the first public utterance in Scotland (p. 320). They may know now — in words of one dear to their Bishop — ■ *'That everything seemed dark and strange, and it was only his faith that enabled him not to refuse the bishopric. He went into the cathedral, knelt down and sought ' inspiration ' for his enthronement sermon, saw the Alpha and Omega in the east window, the text came to him, and this sermon was the result." It may be of interest, as showing the Bishop's attitude to his own work, to quote his words as to the vi INTT^ODUCTORl^ ,'^(pTES " Gospel of the Kingdom," which has been printed as a pamphlet, many years ago : — The defects of the following Sermon are so great that, in the first instance, I declined to allow it to be published. I believe that the thoughts which it contains are from God, however imperfect the language in which they are expressed. May He bless them to His Church, in this glorious but critical period of her history. By means of this volume, may we too in this our day be enabled to recognize the value of the " glorious and critical " period in which we live. Some of these sermons might have been preached at this time, instead of having done their first work — to those best acquainted with religious circles, a great and historical work — chiefly in the 'seventies of the nineteenth century. But, as was said by Canon Body in reviewing the Memoir by Dr. Mason, in the Church Quarterly Review for October, 1909 : — " The greatest force in that influence was the personality of the man himself. Other things contributed to it, but were subordinate to this. He was a special spiritual influence because he lived in the spiritual himself, and was at home in it. He had a vision of Him Who is invisible, and was continually in communion with Him. ... If in each of God's saints some special feature of the Christian character is to be recognized, in Wilkinson what arrests is the power and beauty of devotion." And yet, in very consequence of the light of the Invisible Glory, and as impulsive force derived from the Heavenly Vision, came the practical side. The Bishop set forth at the outset of his work in Truro that he desired to say at death : " My Father, I have tried to finish the work which Thou gavest me to do." CONTENTS PART I a JBeatf) unto 5>tn SERMON PAGE I. The Prophets' Message - - - 3 " I sent unto you all My servants the prophets, rising early and sending them, saying. Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate." — Jer. xliv. 4. II. The Great Refusal - - - ~ "•^Z " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not ! " — 5. (Matt, xxiii, 37. III. Sin against the Lord - - - 25 " David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord." — 2 ^am. xii. 13. IV. The Need of Light - - - _ " Lord, that our eyes may be opened." 5. UAatt. XX. 33. V. The Larger Vision - - _ _ " Lord, that our eyes may be opened." 5. Matt. XX. 33. " It had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them." — 2 S. Pet. \\. 21. vii 34 44 vill C0.7VT£:7VT5 VI. The Call of Suffering - - - 52 " Also the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke : yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down." — Szek.. xxiv. 15, 16. \'II. The Power of the Lord - - "65 "I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save." ha. Ixiii. i. PART II a Xfh) I3irtt) unto ilvigijtrousnfss IRMON I'AGE I. Carnal Affections - - - "77 " If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost : in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, Who is the image of God, should shine unto them." — 2 Cor. iv. 3, 4. II. One Thing Lacking - - - - 85 " Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest." — S. Mark x. 21. III. The Loans of God - - - - 91 "Then ]esus beholding him loved him, and said unto him. One thing thou lackest : go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven : and come, take up the cross, and follow Me." — S. (Mark^ x. 21. I\'. They that have Riches - - - 100 "Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest : go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven : and come, take up the cross, and follow Me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved : for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto His disciples. How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God ! " — 5. 3^ark x. 21-23. COCNJE.VXJS ix V. Thk Dispensation of the Spirit - - i lo " With Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." — S. James i. 17 \^I. The Voice of the Spirit - - - 127 " That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural ; and afterward that which is spiritual. "^ — I Cor. XV. 46. VII. The Work of the Spirit - - -139 " Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural ; and afterward that which is spiritual." — I Qor. xv. 46. VIII. Gifts from Above - - - " ^53 " Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above." — S. James i. 17. IX. Living and Growing - - - 165 "Every good gift . . . cometh down from tlie Father of lights." — S. James i. 17. PART III ^otoer anil Strfngtt SERMON PAGE I. The Heavenly Vision - - - 179 " Hear, O Israel : The Lord our God is one Lord." — Deut. vi. 4. II. Resistance to the Devil - - - 187 " Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." S. James iv. 7. III. The Good Fight - - _ " Be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is." — Bph. iv. 17. IV. Ahab the Worldling - - _ " Now the rest of the acts of Ahab, and all that he did, and the ivory house which he made, and all the cities that he built, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?" — i Kings xxii. 39. 197 207 X CO,?(TEC\CTS V. A Reprobate Mind - . - - 217 " Because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful ; even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind." — Rom. i. 21, 28. VI. God or Mammon _ _ . . 229 " There was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the Lord, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up." — i K^ngs xxi. 25. VII. The Ways of the World _ _ . 239 " Thus saith the Lord of Hosts : Consider your ways." — Hag^ai i. 7. VIII. Temperance _ _ _ _ 248 " Hath not the Lord God of Israel commanded, saying, Go?" — Judges iv. 6. IX. Sowing and Reaping - - - - 257 " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Gal. vi. 7. PART IV SERMON PAGE I. The Gospel of the Kingdom - - - 271 " Thus saith the Lord God : I will even deal with thee as thou hast done, which hast despised the oath in breaking the covenant. Nevertheless I will remember My covenant with thee in the days of thy youth, and I will establish unto thee an everlasting covenant." — Szck. xvi. 59, 60. II. Filial Love and Fear (First Sermon, 1852) - 285 " When ye pray, say, Our Father." 5. Lu/^e xi. 2. III. A New Thing _ _ _ - 296 " Remember ye not the former things, neither con- sider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing ; now it shall spring forth ; shall yc not know it ?" — Isa. xliii. 1 8, 19. CO^HJE^NJS xi IV. The Blessed Saints - - - . 908 " Lo, a great multitude." — T^z/. vii. 9. V. A Vision of Christ - - - _ -^20 " I saw seven golden candlesticks ; and in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son ot' Man." — %ev. i. 12, 13. VI. The Return of our Lord . _ _ -529 "This same Jesus, Which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven." — ^cts i. 1 1. VII. What Christ Foretold " This same Jesus, Which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven." — Jets i. i i. VIII. The King of Glory 339 349 " This same Jesus, Which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven." — Jets i. i i. IX. Hope and Holy Fear _ _ . ^58 " This same Jesus, Which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as yc have seen Him go into heaven." — Jets i. i i. PART I A DEATH UNTO SIN " merciful Qod^ grant that the old Adam in these persons may be so buried^ that the new man may be raised up in them^ I THE PROPHETS' MESSAGE " / sent unto you all My servants the prophets^ rising early and sending them^ ^^^y'^^g-, Oh^ do not this abominable thing that I hate'' — Jer. xliv. 4. THE origin of evil, my brethren, has not been explained unto us. It is shrouded in a deeper darkness than that mysterious gloom which fell over the city of Jerusalem as the Lord was hanging on His Cross. Christianity is not responsible for the difficulty. Philosophers were perplexed, and sought in vain to penetrate the gloom and to answer the question for ages before God became Incarnate. The Bible is written for our practical guidance. From the beginning, early and late, by prophecy and by miracle, by word and by deed, the Eternal God — loving each one of His children, longing as the mother longs to snatch the babe from the burning flame — the Eternal Father has addressed to the children whom He has created the solemn warning of my text, Oh, do not, yield not to, touch not, this abominable sin which I hate. Yes, in the past, and in the present, and in the future, all whose eyes have not been blinded by self- indulgence and worldliness, all whose hearts have not been hardened by the deceitfulness of that indwelling 3 4 ^ DEATH UDiJO SIN corruption, all who have eyes to see or ears to hear, whether they look to the past or to the present or to the future, can hear the voice of the Lord God speaking unto them, saying, "Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate." I. God speaks to us by the records of the past. The Holy Spirit takes us, as it were, by the hand and leads us to the fair garden of Paradise, and bids us watch that withering blight, those withered flowers, and those withering downcast forms of our first parents, driven forth by the flaming sword, because they have done the abominable thing that God hated. Or — rising above the noise of the rushing waters, from the heights of the mountains where the refuse of the human family are striving in vain to escape from the all-encircling deluge — we hear the voice of the Living God amid the desolation of the flood, saying to His children. Be warned ; touch not that abominable thing which I hate. So is it through all the inspired volume. In its pages, God warns us by the sword, by the famine, by the pestilence, by the hissing flame, by the overwhelmed cities. He warns us by the prophet of God mounting in lonely misery those heights of Pisgah, looking out in vain upon the Canaan for which he yearned ; shut out from that glorious inheritance, because once, and once only, he had done the abominable thing which God hated. In Moses' voice we seem to hear the echo. Take heed ; be warned ; by sin I have been overcome ; by sin I have lost the promised inheritance. In all the wanderings of the wilderness ; in the ruin of Jerusalem, in the desola- tion of the city, in the cries of the thousand exiles driven hither and thither, the banished outcasts of Israel ; by all and by every means, from the beginning even unto the end of the Bible, God sends unto us His prophets, THE PROPHETS' MESS^QE 5 saying, Oh, do not, touch not, this abominable thing that I hate. 2. And the same message is sent to us as we look round on the ordinary circumstances of life. We are taken by the hand of some wise physician, and he leads us into the wards of some of the great hospitals of this mighty city. He leads us through one court after another, and he points to diseased children, and the vacant stare of idiots. And we ask him how the dreadful seed was sown that has come up in that deadly harvest of a blighted childhood and a ruined life. And he tells you that in those particular cases it was the " wild oats " that were sown by the father — it may be — fifty years previously ; these are results of men's sins, com- mitted in youth, although perhaps forgiven in penitence, and blotted out of God's Book so far as future punishment was concerned ! These cripples and these idiots are the children of drunkards and of men who were " fast " (as the world calls it) in earlier life. Or there is a case of the mother who wilfully and carelessly left her little child to the neglect of a nurse, that she might dance and drink in of this world's pleasure, and you see the fruit in the blighted, wasted life. The abominable thing has been touched, and although with weeping and with mourning she has confessed her sin, it finds her out in the broken heart, the miserable, feeble womanhood, of the girl whom now she loves dearer than her own life. Thus God's warning to-day is heard in the voice of every wise physician in this our London, "Touch not this abominable thing that 1 hate." 3. Then God the Holy Spirit leads us on to gaze at the heavenly vision ot the future. He shows us the glory of heaven ; He entrances us with the echo of the angels' songs ; He tells us of the 6 ^ DEATH UO^O SIN home where pain and sin and suffering shall be no more where they shall hunger no more nor thirst any more where every longing of the heart shall be satisfied where every difficulty of the mind shall be solved where every aspiration of the immortal spirit shall be realized. And then, as the veil is lifted up and we gaze upon " the ten thousand times ten thousand," and watch those waiting in Paradise, and know them in their long- ing to welcome those for whom they pray into the glory of that invisible kingdom ; even thence a voice Cometh forth from the eternal glory. Watch ; pray ; touch not this abominable thing that I hate, unless thou wouldst lose for ever the heavenly vision — the rest of Paradise and the glory of heaven. So is it in the past and in the present, and so we gaze on to the future. Early and late, our all-loving God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, pleads with us, saying. Touch not, do not, that abominable thing which I hate. And yet, my brethren, all the teaching of the past and the present and the future seems gathered up to-day ^ into the three quiet hours in which we are assembled together in this house of prayer. Amid the mysterious gloom of Calvary we seem to some extent at any rate to realize what sin must appear before the blessed ones in Paradise, and the angel-band, and in the sight of the ever-blessed Trinity. We draw near to Calvary, and we listen to the bitter mocking, we mark the cruel scourging, we see men changed into fiends as they walk up and down triumphing over their defenceless Prisoner, wag- ging their heads at Him with fiendish malice. We soon enter into the little company of the blessed ones, and we hear S. Peter denying Him with cursing and swearing. We watch one who had kissed His sacred cheek, one for ' Good Friday, 1877. THE PROPHETS' MESS^QE 7 whom the glorious throne was prepared, on which he was to have sat in the regeneration judging the twelve tribes of Israel. We watch the power of evil in the careless crowd, in the defiant mob, in the inner circle of the Lord's own disciples. And even yet we have not learned the fullness of the teaching that Calvary would give unto us. Even yet the voice of the Lord God has not been heard in all its distinctness saying to us, Loathe, hate, repudiate for ever, the abominable thing that nailed the Son of God to the accursed tree. Yes, my brethren, mysterious though it is to see men changed to-day into fiends, fearful though it is to listen to men like S. Peter uttering those foul oaths, the mere sight of that lonely Figure on that deadly Cross seems to speak to us with a power more eloquent than any human words. When every prophet's voice had fallen in vain upon the self-satisfied world, then God sent unto us His Son, preaching with the outstretched arms on Calvary, and saying, — Oh, by that Agony, by that bloody Sweat, by that Cross and Passion, I beseech you. My children, saith God your Father, do not that abominable thing which I hate. For the mystery is not explained. It would be an impertinence to dwell on such a thought. All that is certain is this, that the Son of God died. He Who was very God ; He Whom angels adore ; He Who, surrounded by Cherubim and Seraphim, shall judge each child of Adam : He was hanging upon that Cross, He Who is very God. And it was this hidden principle of evil, this strange force which we cannot explain, but of which we are so awfully con- scious every hour of our lives : it was this that caused the Son of God to die. O Father, forgive — He would say — " forgive them, for they know not what they do." Forgive the poor blinded eyes that see no glory in 8 ^ DEATH U.7^0 SIN the Cross. Forgive the poor hearts, deadened with this world, who can listen to no message, even though a crucified God is, sending it unto their souls. God help you if you can listen unmoved to that wondrous story of the Cross. No thoughtful man or woman, who allows himself one quiet hour to contemplate the fact that (in our human language) God had to die for sin, will ever require a human voice, 1 think, to send home the mes- sage of my text, " Do not this abominable thing that I hate." So, as the practical conclusion of the whole subject, if God speaks to us in the past and in the present and in the future, we will answer likewise for the past and for the present and for the future, " Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth." I. We will answer God with humble, lowly, penitent, and obedient hearts to-day. O my God, we will say, open my blinded eyes ; show me what that past sin really appeared in Thy sight. O men and brethren, to whom I speak with no power at all, because it is only God Who can break up a heart that has been hardened by a life of self-pleasing ! — O ye women of England, who have drugged your consciences with the sweet opiates of an easy, self-indulgent, harmless (as the world would say) life ! — kneel down and pray your God to unfold the past to-day. Pray God to show you what that one day of neglected prayer really looked like to the holy angels and the invisible kingdom. Pray God to show you what was the true nature of those " mere wild oats." Drag out each sin into the light : cover it not over. Brethren beloved in Christ, I plead with you by the love of Him Who died for you, beware of a half-repentance. Beware of that miserable delusion that saith, I am doing differently now, and the past is gone. God saw the past. He knew it from the day when you were baptized THE PROPHETS' MESS^QE 9 to this very moment in which the prophet's voice rings home into your heart. Open the door of your heart to-day, and recall the neglected prayer, or the un- opened Bible, the forgotten poor, God saw the self- indulgent heaping up of wealth, the covetousness, and all the sins which in the Bible He has condemned ; He is aware of all the pride and the vanity, the grasping of things that man loves — things that may make us prosper in the world, but which are all part of the abominable thing which the God hates before Whom you and I have to stand. Be warned when a man sends you a message, as one has done from his death-bed this morning, saying, " Oh, let my sin be told to every man — I care not what he has done — if from my death-bed I can save a soul ; ask them to pray for me, not that I may recover, but that God may forgive me ; that God may have mercy on my soul, that God may make my sin the means of bringing others to repent- ance." Such is the message which came from the far-away shores of the Mediterranean, wafted here to S. Peter's this morning : the man was what hundreds in the church are. God open your eyes to the past. Rest not till your sins have been acknowledged, till you know that they are forgiven, and your peace is made with Him before Whose judgement-seat you may soon be standing. 2. And, then, for the present : let us implore Almighty God to give us courage to read over the history of the Passion of Jesus Christ. God careth not where you are — in church, or in your own room, but on your knees, with your Bible and your Prayer Book, read about Jesus Christ. Read of the Passion, till that unutterable Love take possession of you. The fear of hell may frighten us, the joy of heaven may draw up our hearts to God ; but nothing will keep us in real, c lo c/f DEATH U:}{TO SJN earnest contrition, nothing will make the softened tears flow and the heart rise up determined to live to God, nothing will help us to get rid of the covetousness and the fear of the world and the idolatry of things that are passing away : nothing, save only the knowledge of the love of Jesus Christ. You have heard of that marble statue in the lonely garden, of which the fable tells us that all the night it was cold and dead and lifeless ; and (so runs the old legend) the moment the rays of the bright gladdening sunbeam fell on it, at once it was vocal with heavenly harmony. Oh ! believe me, when once we realize (if it be but on a lonely Good Friday) how He does love us, how He must have loved us to give those Hands to be pierced with those cruel nails, to let those thorns pierce that sacred Brow ; when we look up simply on that Lord, and say. Whatever be the explanation of the Atonement, I know that that is a fact, and that He died, and if He died He must love me ; oh, brethren, it is then that there comes, not the feverish excitement, the wild uncontrolled emotion, which is succeeded by the black ashes of despair ; but the calm, solemn, concen- trated contrition that melts and yet gladdens the heart. This is what S. Paul felt, when he said, "The love of Christ constraineth me" : binds me, that is, as with iron bands of love ; carries me away (for that is what the Greek word means) as the deep-rolling stream with its calm, solemn current bears us on, carrying every obstacle before it. The love of Christ binds, constrains, impels me ; not to live for myself, but for Him Who loved me and gave Himself for me. It is then, when we realize for a moment even, the love of Christ, that, looking upon Him Whom we pierced, we mourn. It is then that we give up ourselves, body, soul and spirit, to His service. THE PROPHETS' MESS^QE ii 3. And as with the present and with the past, so for a single moment as regards the future. Never, after the love of Christ has been realized, can we again join the crowd of fools who make a mock at sin ! We have learned what was the cost of sin to Christ. We have learned that it is the abominable thing that sent Him to Calvary. For instance, when we are tempted (as we are all tempted at times) to laugh when we watch some person who has had a trifle more than he ought to have had, observing his face flushed, or his excite- ment and jubilant feelings, we should rather shudder and say, " That is the abominable thing God hates; that is the beginning of that drunken habit that will drag that boy or man, that girl or woman, into hell." It is an abominable thing — a child of God laughing at that sin. Or, proud feelings come, and self-complacent feelings, and all the great rush of earthly desires. Then, as men who have knelt at the foot of the Redeemer Who died on the Cross, as men who remember that pride was the abominable thinp; that brought the devils out of heaven and cast them into hell, that pride was the abominable thing that lost Paradise to our first parents, that pride was the accursed evil that caused the Son of God to have to die on the Cross, we say : Lord, by Thy Cross and Passion, from all pride and self-seeking, from all want of love to God or man, from every lust of the flesh, from every tempting assault of the world — however popular it may make me — from every subtle snare of the devil, when he would drive me to unbelief and despair : oh, by Thine Agony and bloody Sweat, good Lord, deliver me ! My brethren, learn the prophetic teaching of the past and the present and the future. Listen to (if you have never yet heard) the voice of the Lord God, rising up early, sending to you — however imperfect the human 12 ^ DEATH UJ{TO SIN ministry may be — still sending to you to-day His prophets. It says in the Name of God to every one, Touch not the abominable thing ; repent of thy sin, confess it to thy God to-day. Rest not till it is forgiven ; mourn over it ; and never, never, make a mock, or speak lightly, of that abominable thing which thy God hateth. THE QREAT T^EUFSJL 13 II THE GREAT REFUSAL " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often vpould I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye yvould not V — S. Matt. xxlii. 37. IN the branch of the great Catholic Church to which we belong, every saint's day, as quickly as possible, leads our thoughts away from S. Paul, or S. Peter, or whoever it may be whose festival is kept : away from man to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God, by Whom the words of my text were spoken : the Eternal Son of God ! More than once I have been asked to say publicly, before God and man, that I did believe that Jesus Christ was God. At first I put the request aside, until once the letter was full of piteous entreaty. The writer said, " I believe you are an honest man, and you would not say out in your church that you did believe that Jesus Christ was God, if you did not ; and every- body that is near me says that this is an idea that men are abandoning. Will you say it .^ " And I say it. I believe in Jesus Christ, very God ; God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God. There is one reason why many do not believe. Before I give the rule I own that there are exceptions to it. There are great scientific men who, of necessity, in the work that God has entrusted to them, of learning His revelation in nature, have so concentrated their 14 =^ DEATH UD^O SIN thoughts upon the things of nature, as not to leave themselves leisure for developing fully the spiritual side of their being, or bringing their mind to bear upon what I may call, for want of a better word, spiritual facts. And there are many who may have had religion put before them in such a miserable — I was goins^ to use stronger language — in such a miserable form. They have had God painted as a Being delighting in the torture of His children, instead of as a God Who, though obliged to let some suffer, does it ever with the breaking Heart of the Father mourning over the children whom He loves. Or else, they have seen people making a great profession of religion, always at services or at meetings, full of talk. They have become sickened of the whole subject, and they have said. Well, I shall leave faith and religion alone, and I shall try to be an honest man, and to do my duty in this life, if that is not religion. But, my dear brethren, I have never myself known, with these rare exceptions, any man who had not got some secret sin that made him afraid of committing him- self to Christ, made him afraid of believing that there was a God and a judgement to come, afraid of acknow- ledging Christ to be God, because he would be obliged to pluck out the right eye or cut off the right hand ; I have never known an honest man give up one year — and a year is surely not much to decide a matter upon which eternity depends — give up a year to the patient study of evidences, without coming back joyfully to acknowledge with all other Christians that Jesus Christ is God. Out of the hundreds of arguments, I will just touch upon one for a moment in passing. Our Lord Jesus Christ distinctly claimed to be God. About that there is no doubt. Either, therefore. He was deliberately deceiv- ing people, doing evil that good might come ; or else THE QREAT "REFUSAL 15 He was Himself deceived, an enthusiast carried away by His emotions. Now, He could not have deliberately deceived, because any infidel of common intelligence who has written upon the life of Christ, acknowledges Him to be beautiful, pure, and holy. One of the most interesting signs of the present day, I think, is the way in which men of all shades of opinion are longing to rally round Christ. They say, We do not understand the dogma, but we want to follow that example ; come with us. There is a great fallacy under the words, but that is not my business this morning. I only mention it as a fact, that all who have studied the subject bear witness that Christ was a good and a holy man, and therefore not a liar, and a deliberate deceiver. But was He carried away by His emotions .'' Here, again, there are two types of character. There is the emotional man, easily impressed ; and there is the self- disciplined, self-controlled man, keeping his emotions under, and only allowing them now and then to appear. Which of these was Jesus Christ } A few texts will answer the question. When His followers were excited, He said, " Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven." A number of people gathered round Him and said. Blessed is the mother that bare Thee ! Yes, He said, but more blessed are they who hear the Word of God, and keep it. But the most striking text is yet to be given. Our Lord was gathering round Him a little company who were to go out and transform the whole aspect of the world. He was kindling their enthusiasm ; and yet, in the middle ot all that kindling of their enthusiasm. He kept so calm and still that He told them they must expect persecution, that they must expect to be misunderstood. O dear Christian workers, what joy there is in this ; that they 1 6 ^ DEATH UU^O SIN must expect, the more good they did, the less the world would thank them for it ; that they must be prepared often for apparent failuce, and no results ; that the more they were winning people for God, the more Satan would attack them, and dry up the joy of their own inner life ; so that they would often hardly be able to pray, so terribly would they be bound in that hour of darkness ! But more than that. He said. Remember this. When people take you, and bring you before rulers, and bare your back, and you feel the scourge falling upon you, and then are dragged to some cruel tree to be cruci- fied, never judge them. I, your God, tell you before- hand that those who treat you in that way will think that they are doing God service : they being in their way as earnest as you are. Therefore you must be calm and strong, and not carried away by your natural feelings to think that they are a lot of wicked sinners who are behaving in that way. Now I ask, was that the emotional man, carried away, borne on the tide of popular favour } I leave it to you. Therefore Jesus Christ, as we saw, could not deceive and be a liar ; and by the very laws of nature and of psychology it is plain that His was not the class of mind that was likely to be found amongst a self-deceived band of enthusiasts. But, as the Apostle says — when he looked back upon that marvellous life, when he looked at the hiding of the Omnipotence, when he thought of the manger in Beth- lehem and the village home at Nazareth, of the Face that man had looked on, when Christ was tired, with- out a place where to lay Himself : when he thought of the Son of Mary wandering about among the poor, without bread to eat, or water with which to quench His thirst — marvelling at that strong self-abnegation, he says that the Lord Jesus did not think His Godhead a THE QREAT T{EFUSAL 17 matter to be snatched at, and grasped. It was not to be taken hold of and kept, every bit of it, just as we — all of us — keep every bit of our good character, every bit of our position, every bit of any credit we may have for religious or for intellectual force ; snatching at it, and keeping it, and being hurt if anybody does not ascribe honour to us exactly in the measure in which we deserve it. The Lord Jesus, S. Paul says, did not snatch at His Godhead, but emptied Himself of it, and became Man. Yes ! He is very Man as well as very God. And that was the side of His Being that He put forward. He knew how in this age, and in every other age, the very humiliation of His life would be thrown in His face. He knew for what reasons He would be despised and rejected by the world, as He is being rejected now in this great London of ours. But He loved us so dearly, He knew that a man of sorrows, a suffering Christ, would win more souls than a king triumphing in His Godhead. He knew that there is a peculiar power — O dear people, if some of you are in sorrow just now, remember this and cherish it — He knew that there is a peculiar power which can only be won by suffering. He knew that this power is only won after perhaps a year of spiritual darkness, in which God has seemed hidden from us ; or only after years (known only to Himself) in which One Face has seemed never away from us in each pause from the busy outer life. He knows that it is by suffer- ing that man wins a power of gentleness and love for others, a power of helping, a glorious priesthood ! Deliberately, no man taking His life from Him, He determined to be a suffering Man ; suffering in child- hood, suffering all through His life, to the last great agony of Calvary. He went about as Man amongst men. Come, He said, to Me. Come to Me. I am a Man of sorrows ; I am acquainted with grief. Come, if you D 1 8 ^ DEATH U:NJ0 SIN find the work hard ; come, if the business presses upon you ; come, when the head aches with the overstrain. Come, you poor heavy laden ones, come to Me, and I will give you rest. And when the people were going away, that great Heart of love fastened its eyes upon them. Will you also. He said, go away } Will you go away .'' Him that cometh to Me, whatever the past has been, I will never send away. And then, when some did go away — when they could not really take the bother of carrying His yoke every day, it seemed so tiresome, they thought ; when they could not quite make up their mind to be different from other people ; when they could not make up their mind really to do that which in their hearts they knew would be the best — He just was silent. And when they got angry with His silence. He let them do with Him what they liked. He let them drag Him as a lamb to the slaughter, and, as a sheep before her shearers, He was dumb. He did not resist their will. He knew that the best thing that He could do for the world now was to die for it ; and so, at any rate, He would do that. He hung upon the Cross there, with the nails and the thorns. And before He died. He did them all the good He could ; just as His Father goes on sending down the rain upon the just and the unjust, and making His sun to shine upon the evil and the good. He went on doing what good He could. He opened the blind eyes, and made the deaf hear, and fed the hungry ; and almost His last act was to touch the ear of the soldier who had come to take Him to prison. But His Heart was just breaking ; for He knew that it was as impossible for fire not to burn, as for those people to reach heaven who were loving the world, and caring what the men in Jerusalem said more than they cared for what His Father said — unless they were THE QREAT T^EFUSAL 19 changed. He saw that they would not be changed. He saw that every day they were just fixing a great gulf between themselves and heaven, which very soon they would not be able to pass for ever. He saw that their character every day was hardening : that they were coming to think it was wrong not to do what everybody did, however God might have spoken : that they were coming to think it was actually necessary to put self first, and the world second, and God last. He saw this going on under His very eyes ; and He knew that unless He crushed their free-will, that unless He broke down their freedom, that unless He made them into dumb animals. He could do nothing more. And so, I say. He did all that was left Him : He died for them. And before He died His Heart just broke, and the tears flowed down His cheeks, and He said, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I have loved you ! How My Soul has yearned over you ! How often from that hill of Olivet have I looked down upon your streets and seen that false religion, that religion without power, that worldliness, that love of self ! Oh, how often would I have gathered you, as the hen gathers the poor little helpless chickens under her wings, and ye would not ! Oh ! the unutterable sadness of my Christ, that caused Him to utter those words of sorrow ! What can I, dear brethren, say more .'' Only perhaps this, that the Lord Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. He is alive, alive ! Thank God for it ! What could we do without Him ? And He is the same, with the same mind and the same Heart. His last message, as He went up into heaven, and the clouds received Him out of their sight — the last message to the disciples was this, This same Jesus, this same Jesus ! The Jesus that you read of in 20 c^ DEATH U:XTO SIN the Gospels, the Jesus Who cannot break a man's free- will, the Jesus Who can only break His own Heart when the world will not come to Him, the Jesus Who said, Come unto Me, the same ! And He is looking down on us to-day. He has been gathering us. Oh ! how wonderfully various are the ways in which He has gathered us ! Before I came across to the church I ran over a book of mine, where I have a few of the names of those who have entered into their rest ; who, so far as man dare judge, have had an abundant entrance, and gone with joy into the other world. And I could not help thinking how marvellous was the manifold wisdom of God ; how wonderful were the different ways in which they had been brought ! There was the man who had never thought of religion till God gave him one to love him with all her heart ; and I remember the day when he came over to the old vicarage and said, " God is good ; God has been good to me, I wish I had been a better man ! Oh, would to God that 1 had been able to say what I can never say again on earth — but, Mr. Wilkinson, I am going to start afresh, God helping me, He has been so kind to me." And oh, the joy of being able to tell him in those weeks before his marriage of the power of the Blood of Christ, of the magnificence of the new creation, of the kingdom of the new Jerusalem : that every man who will come to Christ with an honest heart shall be welcomed as the poor prodigal in the parable was welcomed, when the father came to meet him down that dusty road, and fell on his neck and kissed him ; and when the better people were saying that he destroyed morality by treating a bad man in that way, he only silenced them with. My son ! it is my son that was dead and is alive again ; it is my son that was lost and is found ! Oh, what joy it was ! and then on that bright mar- THE QREAT "REFUSAL 21 riage morning, to feel that it was a new start, that the love of God had broken down his heart ! And then, think of other trials : bankruptcy, sorrow, long-lingering illness; pain in little children, that seemed at first so hard to look at, but which became at last an angel from heaven ; times when some were almost ruined ; when they were standing on the very brink of a precipice, with things that would have disgraced them for life, and God never let anybody know ; and so that tremendous love broke down their hearts, and they are living to Him. I dare not, I must not go on. You can under- stand, my people, how my heart seems to go back to it all ; how, as I see you around me, 1 recall all those conversations and prayers, and the wonderful ways in which the Lord has gathered us. And if any one has gone astray, what is to bring him back on this bright S. Peter's morning ? Just this, Christ loves me. Christ says, Will you go away again } Will you break My Heart again } That is all. And oh, I dare not, I cannot end as 1 intended. I did intend to have worked out, with you, that solemn thought that all science is now teaching us, the tremen- dous force of law in the kingdom of God. We are coming to see that if a stupid, pig-headed man will not learn what science can teach him about the laws of health, and will not look properly to the sanitary arrangements of his home, though God loves the wife and loves the little children, the typhoid comes, and the blood is poisoned, and misery comes into the home. God is showing that there are great principles that cannot be broken even on earth. And He says, Have you not understanding .'' Do you not see that it is an equally true principle, that what a man sows in spiritual things he reaps } Do you not see that, by the law of your 22 c/f DEATH UD^O SIN freedom, you are every day and every night that you live either softening or hardening your character ? " Every time you do an act of self-denial, every time you sacrifice yourself for others, every time you lose a friend rather than laugh at something that ought never to be men- tioned, every time you lose what the world has got to give you for the sake of the Christ Who died for you, you are fixing a great gulf between yourself and the torments of the lost. And on the other hand, every day and every hour in which you are just yielding up your will — never mind whether it is wicked, or if it seem as innocent as you like — every time you yield up your- self to the power of this present world that crucified Christ, and surrender yourself to the mastery of the principles which brought Christ to His death in Jewry, you are as surely fixing a great gulf between yourself and heaven as ever that poor man did in the parable : who did nothing wrong, but only got blinded by the glitter and deafened by the noise of this world, and so never saw him whom God had sent to be his angel of deliverance, lying at his very door. Do you not see it ^ I wanted to have worked it all out with you, but it is too awful ! One cannot bear sometimes to dwell upon that hour, that may have come to some, of the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It is so terrible. When Christ has done all that He can, when the being has made up its mind, then one of two things happens. Sometimes it becomes perfectly happy, with no more prickings of conscience ; gives enough money, and does enough work to satisfy itself. Christ has done all He can. He can only leave it quietly, and hope ; and, of course. He does not give any trouble that can possibly be avoided ; just as the Father lets the rain come down and the sun shine on the evil and the good. The dear little children grow up THE QREAT 'J^EFUSAL 23 better than other people's children, and the home is happier, and the wife is good. All goes well. But Christ is saying, Oh, if you had known, in that your day, the things that belong to your peace, but now they are hid from your eyes ! And sometimes it seems the kindest thing to take the man out of the world altogether. I had an awful thing happen last week, I can hardly speak of it. A few months ago some poor people in a country parish wrote to me, and besought me to get them the means of grace ; besought me to get a little mission-house built, where they could just have the Gospel preached to them, and say a few prayers. And I earnestly entreated a man who had the property, and could do it, to help to do it. And he would not do it. And he persuaded himself that he could not do it. And I never judged him. He wrote me a beautiful letter, in which he said he could not ; but he could have done this : he could have come over to me, and he could have said, " 1 cannot aiford to do this, but will you pray with me, and we will see how it can be managed for the poor people." If he had loved God, if he had loved souls — for the great gulf had not then been fixed ; God grant it was never entirely fixed ; I am not judging — he could never have read those poor people's prayer for help, and not have come over at any rate to see what could be done. And I was very unhappy, and I saw years before me in that parish, with no provision for the outlying hamlet. And one morning the rural dean wrote to me that an awful thing had happened ; he said, " So-and-so went to bed, and he died in the night ! " And another man came into the property, and 1 pleaded with him ; and at first he was touched, and he said he would. But, then, his wife found the house very uncomfortable, and there was a great deal to do to it. 24 ^ DEATH U^NJO SIN I am not judging the man. There was a great deal to do ; it was really very necessary to spend a great deal of money. And the last letter I had from him was that it was no use trying ; nobody would do it, and he did not see how it was to be done. And again I could only think, " Oh, would that the man had known the joy, even when you cannot give, of praying that others who can may give." And on Friday morning, when my letters came up, one letter was, " So-and-so was walking along, and he has fallen down dead I " My dear brethren, I cannot tell you what I feel about it. It is one instance, out of hundreds of instances that I have seen, where, when a man appears to have made up his mind that the world shall be all he cares tor, and that Christ shall not have all his being, and God sees that perhaps he would do harm if he were allowed to remain on earth any longer, he dies. Die, die, die ! I seem to hear the cry of those dying men in my ears 1 Dear people, let Christ gather you. Let Him never have to say of you, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often — oh, even to that S. Peter's Day — would 1 have gathered you, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not ! SIN AGAIUiST THE LORT> 25 III SIN AGAINST THE LORD " David said unto Nathan^ I have sinned against the Lord.'' 2 Sam. xii. 13. HOW startling, brethren, at first sight, is the life of David-; how strangely do the contrasts of those forty years pass before our minds ! Reared from his childhood in the Faith of God, he appears at the commencement of his history in all the varied characters which are calculated to awaken our sympathy and to command our admira- tion. As the champion of Israel against the blas- phemers of Jehovah, as the conqueror of Goliath (the proud warrior of Philistia), as the loyal soldier, the brave adventurer, the firm unflinching friend, he has been from our earliest years our favourite Bible char- acter. Then suddenly, and almost without a word of warning, the whole scene is changed. The lion-hearted son of Jesse remains at home in listless cowardice. The strong man, who had borne with unflinching hardihood the trials of exile, is transformed into the effeminate idler. The warm-hearted trusting friend betrays, with well- weighed subtilty, the simple-minded captain of his army. The sweet Psalmist of Israel, whose holy spirit had borne him, as on angels' wings, to the very gates of heaven, is hustled by one dread fall into the depths of deceit and adultery and murder. Strange, brethren, is all this, and yet the Word of God dares to lay before us the failings £ 2 6 ^ DEATH UOiJO SIN as well as the excellences, the sins as well as the virtues, of its heroes. Freely it speaks to us of the patriarchs and prophets. Freely it tells us of the impatience of Moses and the falsehood of Abraham and the despon- dency of Elijah and the cowardice of the Apostle Peter. Freely it paints for us the whole life in all its varied colouring. And is it not, brethren, this holy freedom which renders the examples of these Scripture saints of such real value to us in our busy working life ? Is it not this mingling of good and evil which makes us realize that they were men like ourselves, struggling as we are struggling, tried as we are tried, and tempted as we are tempted ? Yes, this history of David is, in broad out- line, the heart experience of every Christian. True that we may not have risen to the same heights of spiritual love, and may, by God's grace, have been preserved from so fearful a fall ; yet however much our life may differ from that of the sovereign of Israel in degrees both of good and evil, its main features are substantially the same. All real Christians can say with David that their souls thirst for God — for the living God. All, alas ! can tell of days of falling away — cold, lifeless times when sin is strong and faith is weak and love is wellnigh quenched. All, thank Goo, can speak of hours of repentance, blessed hours in which the Holy Spirit has entered into the heart and wrung out from their half-reluctant lips the confession of the text, "I have sinned against the Lord." It is with this last stage of David's history that I am especially concerned to-night. We know that his repent- ance was a true repentance and was accepted by God. We know also that there is in this world an immense amount of false repentance, a sort of spurious sorrow for sin which deadens the conscience and ruins the spiritual SIN y^GA].'^ST THE LORT) 27 life. I would suggest, therefore, to those who are using this Lent in self-examination and special prayer, that they should take Psalm li, verse by verse, and compare their feelings with the feelings of the Psalmist, their repentance with his repentance. Observe, for instance, the deep sorrow, " the broken and contrite heart " of which he speaks. The longing for cleansing and pardon, " Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean." The thorough surrender of his whole heart to God, "Wash me throughly from my wickedness, and cleanse me from my sin." The longing to work for God and help others forward in the divine life, " Then shall I teach Thy ways unto the wicked : and sinners shall be converted unto Thee." We can trace the fullness of the pardon received, the joy of forgiveness which breathes out in every utterance of Psalm xxxii, " Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, and whose sin is covered." In order to help you in this work which I have suggested, I wish to dwell at length on two features in this repentance, praying that the Holy Ghost may bless to us all, for Christ's sake, the word spoken. First, then, let us observe David's humility. He confesses his sin to the Lord. He confesses it to Nathan the prophet. He confesses it to the whole congregation. He makes no excuse, he does not attempt to cast the blame upon others. He does not say with Adam, " The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the fruit, and I did eat." It is not with him as with Saul, "The people spared the best of the flocks, and compelled me to break the commandment of the Lord." Without any reserve, humbly and honestly David takes upon himself the entire burden of his sin, " / have sinned. I acknowledge my transgressions : and my sin is ever before me," Now, brethren, this humility is by no means so 2 8 c/f DEATH UCNJO SIN common as might at first sight appear. Many who fancy that they have repented have never truly humbled themselves. It is marvellous to observe the different ways in which our pride will try to spare us the pain of real self-abasement. Sometimes it will endeavour to save us from lowering ourselves before man. It is true, this great enemy seems to whisper, it is true that you have sinned against man as well as against God, but why acknowledge your shortcoming to your neighbour .'' Why give him an opportunity of lording it over you ? Tell it, if you will, to your Maker, but do not humble yourself before man ! At other times this subtle pride will tempt us to be content with only a half-humiliation in the presence of God Himself. " You are no worse," it says, " than others, not so bad as many. True that you have sinned, but your trial was so great, the circum- stances in which you were placed were so difficult, your nature is so feeble that you may surely be excused," and so forth. It would be easy enough to expose these fallacies. It would be easy to show how sins which have been com- mitted against our neighbours, as a general rule, should, at any rate, be confessed to those whom we have injured. It would not be difficult also to prove that the excuses to which I have referred are nothing less than mere tamper- ings with conscience. Friends may have tempted us and our position may have been very trying, our nature may be encompassed with human weakness, but what pallia- tion is there in all this for a Christian's transgression ? What excuse do they offer, for one who has a power within greater than all the powers of evil which are ranged against him, for one whose body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, who had only to ask and to receive all the help which he required from that Saviour Whose strength is perfected in human weakness .'' Time would SIN JGJI.XST THE LORT> 29 fail me to answer all the arguments which this great spirit of pride is ever suggesting to our hearts. I can only press upon you this truth, gathered alike from the Bible and from all experience. All who really repent are ready to pass with David through the valley of humilia- tion. The man who truly repents is ready, if need be, to humble himself before his fellow-man, to say with the prodigal of old, I will arise and go to the father, the wife, the friend, the stranger, the minister whom I have wronged, and however painful the effort, I will say to him, I have sinned not merely against heaven, but in thy sight. And still more ready is he to lower himself before his Maker ; without any reserve or any excuse, without dissembling or cloaking his transgressions, he unfolds the whole of their dark catalogue to his Father in heaven. With a lowly, penitent, and obedient heart he pours out his soul in sorrowful confession. On bended knee and with a broken, contrite spirit he echoes the cry of the royal mourner of Israel : Mine iniquity will I not hide. " I acknowledge my transgres- sions : and my sin is ever before me." I have left undone the things which I ought to have done. I have done the things which I ought not to have done. There is no health in me. " I have sinned against the Lord. I have sinned against the Lord'' The last clause of the text suggests a second sign of true repentance as distinguished from its many counter- feits. The sin is chiefly bewailed because it has grieved God. "I have sinned against the Lord." These words, brethren, are very remarkable, if we consider the circum- stances under which they were spoken. A very heavy penalty had just been denounced against David by Nathan, the prophet of Jehovah. "I will raise up evil against thee, saith the Lord, because thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and 30 ^ DEATH UJ\(JO SIN hast taken his wife to be thy wife . . . the sword shall never depart from thine house." Here, to a man of David's temperament, were gathered into one dark heap the greatest earthly troubles. He felt even for the death of a disobedient child, he used such touching words in mourning over the reprobate who had insulted his grey hairs and brought misery to his home, saying of the rebellious, godless Absalom, " O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! " Surely, a man who was so wrapped up in his family was not likely to be unaffected by that stern punishment which the Almighty had inflicted. Surely he, above a// others, would not weigh lightly that heavy sentence which was to change his happy home into a scene of continual discord, which was to raise up against him enemies from the midst of his own house- hold, which was to send him forth from the hill of Zion which he loved, into a lonely homeless exile. No, brethren, David felt all these calamities. His heart no doubt was pierced by them as with a sharp two-edged sword ; and yet alike in the words of the text and in the whole Psalm they appear to be entirely forgotten. They are, as it were, overshadowed by a still darker cloud. " I have sinned against the LordT " Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight." " I have sinned against the Lord " — against my kind, loving Father. "Cast me not away from Thy Presence : and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. O give me the comfort of Thy help again : and stablish me with Thy free Spirit." Here, brethren, we have a touchstone to which we may bring our penitence, if we desire to understand whether or no it is the work of the Holy Spirit. There may be abundance of sorrow after sin, and yet SIN AGJir^(ST THE LORD 31 no true repentance for sin. When the drunkard has wasted his strength and squandered his fortune, unless he is mad he will be sorry for his folly. When the thief is dragged from his home to pay the penalty of his crime in the lonely prison, he will naturally be filled with sorrow and self-reproaches. When the parent who has neglected his children is reaping the harvest of his care- lessness in their extravagance and profligacy, he will, of course, regret the feeble way in which he discharged the responsibilities of a father. The youth who is disgraced in the sight of his fellows, the girl whose character is blighted, may, and doubtless will, shed abundance of bitter tears. The poor sinner, when he feels the lash of the Almighty Judge already descending upon him, when he thinks of the agony of that dreary abode wherein no ray of hope can enter, when the punishment of sin has thus become a reality to his heart, he may curse the madness with which his life has been wasted : he may cry, like Esau, with an exceeding bitter cry, "Hast Thou not a blessing for me, even for me also, O my Father.''" and yet in all these wails of despair there may be no true repentance. In all the cases which I have sketched there may be no sorrow for having grieved the Lord, no tears because His law has been broken, no heartfelt confession, " Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight," But go, brethren, to any real Christian in the time of his humiliation, and ask him what is the cause of his greatest sorrow, when the devil has broken down his defences, and through that opened breach has poured the long train of evils into his heart. He will tell us that it is not the worldly loss, though that is hard to bear, not the contempt of his fellow-men, though of that he is not forgetful, no, not the fear of hell itself which is the 32 c/f DEATH U:NJ0 SIN bitterest drop in his cup of agony, but the thought that he has offended a loving Father, that he has crucified his Saviour afresh, that he has grieved the Holy Spirit of God. It is this which oppresses his soul in his hour of penitence, it is this which causes him to abhor himself as in dust and ashes when the graves of past sins are opened, and one after another of their dread inhabitants are appearing before him. In plain words, brethren, though God in His mercy often employs the reproach of man, or worldly shame, or tear of hell as instruments by which to lead us to repentance, He never leaves the soul which has been given up unto His gracious discipline until by the power of the Holy Ghost He has taught it to echo the cry of the royal mourner of Israel, " Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned " ; yea, I have sinned against the Lord. Thus, brethren, have I set before you marks of real repentance. Have you ever repented } Have you so repented as to humble yourself before God and without any excuse acknowledge yourself a helpless, guilty sinner } Have you so repented as to humble yourself before man, to acknowledge to those against whom you have sinned the evil word or evil deed by which they have been injured } Have you so repented as to feel sorry for your sin because it has grieved your Saviour } It is quite possible to give up some of our evil deeds without ever having repented of those sins. When you were young, perhaps, you broke that fifth command- ment. To that sin you are now no longer tempted. The parents whose hearts you saddened, whose last years you embittered by your disobedience, are now at rest. No longer can your angry passions disturb their peace. But your sin was against God. Have you ever telt it as against God } Have you ever repented as in His sight ? Or again, you are now settled in life. Those SIN AGAID^ST THS LORD 33 early lusts of the flesh no longer tempt you — you are now thoroughly respectable ; but that impure act, which the world calls " sowing your wild oats," that sin was against God. It is recorded in God's Book of remem- brance. Have you ever repented of it as in His sight .'' Has it cost a single tear ? O men and brethren, our whole life is crowded with evil ; our sins compass us about. They are more in number than the hairs of our head. Let us awake from our dreams of self-satisfaction and false peace. Let us allow ourselves time to drag out our sins from their long closed hiding-places : the sins of childhood ; sins of youth ; sins of riper years ; sins against God ; sins against man. Men and brethren, let us be honest. Down on our knees let us tell them all to that Saviour Whom David longed to see but never saw on earth. Let us beseech Him to make us really sorry, to blot out, as a thick cloud, our transgressions : sins of thought, sins of word, sins of deed, sins that we can remember, sins that we have forgotten. Let us beseech Him to wash all away in His own most precious Blood. There, before His Cross, let us kneel, day by day, till we can see His love and realize His pardon, till His own blessed peace streams into our souls, and we have learnt, in our own experience, the happiness which follows on a hearty repentance and humble trust in the Redeemer — till we can say with the Psalmist of old, " Blessed is he whose unrighteousness is forgiven, and whose sin is covered." " I said, I will confess my sins unto the Lord, and so Thou forgavest the wickedness of my sin." 34 ^ DEATH UDiJO SIN IV THE NEED OF LIGHT " Lor^j that our eyes may he opened^ S. Matt. xx. 33. THIS prayer is suited for all sorts and conditions of men. It is needed by the sinner as he stands, all unconscious, on the brink of everlasting ruin ; and it is a petition for the holiest and most saintly of God's children, as they wait on the brink of Jordan's stream, racked, it may be, with pain, and shrinking from the severance of the ties which bind them to those whom they love dearer than life itself. It is a cry to the Everlasting Father, when heart and flesh are failing, that the chariots of fire may be revealed, and the band of ministering angels, by whom the spirit is to be borne into everlasting bliss, may be manifested ; and, above all, that He may be seen Whom to know is life eternal. By how many, I wonder, has the prayer been uttered, either in the letter or in the spirit 1 How many in that great congregation who have worshipped here have said in the letter, I repeat it, or in the spirit, " Lord, that I may receive my sight " — Lord, open my eyes .'' God knows. Last Sunday they were asked to do this, but the idea that hearing a sermon involves a responsibility is an idea which numbers even of professing Christians have never grasped. No word of God, however feebly it may have been uttered, can ever return unto Him void. For every sermon the account shall be rendered in that day when THE NEET> OF LIQHT 35 the books are opened, and the Judge is seated on His throne. The question then will be, not " Who preached to you?" but, "What was the message of God, and what was the text, and what was the answer of thy soul to the loving God Who spake to thee ? " There is nothing, I think, more awful, in the right sense of the word " awe-ful," than to hear a clergyman thanked for " a beautiful sermon," when, if any word of that sermon were according to the mind of God, the person to whom it was preached, and who enjoyed it, is in reality himself under its condemnation. It is awful how men and women with a certain amount of Christianity are trifling with eternal verities. But some, I doubt not — God grant that it may have been many — some have been saying from their heart, " Lord, that my eyes may be opened." Now, dear brethren, there is great need of caution here, for we live surrounded, as we are told, by prin- cipalities and powers of evil. Satan, the great adversary, is going about ever seeking whom he can devour ; and, just as the blind man in the story of old was hindered when he would have run after Jesus Christ in order that his vision might be restored, so we may rest assured that we shall not be allowed to draw near to the Fountain of light and life and blessing without many weighty hin- drances being thrown in our way. And I purpose, by the help of the Holy Spirit, to direct your attention this morning to one or two at least of these hindrances. May God the Holy Ghost, Who knows each secret of your hearts, each longing after a higher life, and each desire to please that Lord Who was crucified for you on Calvary — may that Blessed Spirit so guide my words and so open your hearts that the devices of Satan may be defeated, and many a soul be brought into the glorious light of God's revealed truth ! 36 c/f DEATH UCh(TO SIN First, then, we read in the Gospel as our Blessed Lord appeared to His disciples in that upper room at Jerusalem, though He came with words of blessing and of peace, though He came with the pierced hands and the wounded side again to claim their confidence, that at first they were terrified and aflFrighted. And we read in the Old Testament history that, when the great type of Jesus Christ was going to overcome all the cruelty and evil of his brethren by an act of surpassing love, he began by making himself strange unto them. So oft-times is it in the dealings of the Divine Master with the soul that has said, " Lord, that my eyes may be opened." For instance, we have perhaps been longing to see clearly that God has forgiven us. We understand it with our head ; we know that the Blood that was shed upon Cal- vary cleanses from all sin. We know that God's people are safe in their Lord, and are at peace with God through Jesus Christ. But we feel none of that inward peace or joy ourselves, and we long that a communication of that blessing may be vouchsafed unto us, and so we pray to our Lord. Or it may be that we have heard of the power of Jesus Christ in delivering men from evil. We have been told that greater is He that is with us than all the powers of evil that are against us, and that whatever may be our peculiar temptations, of temper, or to indolence, or sloth, or whatever it may be, Christ has the power to crush the evil, to sanctify us entirely — body, soul, and spirit — and to present us without spot or stain of sin before the Eternal Father. We are longing either for acceptance or for sanctification, and we have said, it may be for years, this prayer. Lord, that I may receive my sight, and see clearly the power and the love of my Lord. But, instead of matters improving, everything seems to go wrong with us. We cannot pray, and our temper THE NEET> OF LIQHT 37 is worse than ever. We seem, even while we are plead- ing with God, more than usually tempted with wandering thoughts. Everything seems to us as if we were mere hypocrites, and as if we were only bringing down upon ourselves wrath instead of blessing by any language addressed to the mercy-seat of heaven. Let us try to see the meaning of this dealing of our Lord Jesus Christ with us. He knows perfectly well that if we had a certain amount of success at this crisis of our life, if we gained a little mastery over our besetting sins, we should be so buoyed up that we should soon become confident in ourselves, and never really submit and kneel down at His feet to receive the pardon that He alone can give, or to obtain the mastery over evil which can only be permanent in so far as it is vouchsafed by Himself. It is, in fact, very much in the same way that a human physician deals with his patient. A man, for example, has been long ill ; stimulants of different kinds have become almost a necessity to him ; he feels that it is impossible for him to exist without them ; and when- ever he has taken them — I am not speaking of drunken- ness now — whenever he has taken them he can do much more work, and he feels more equal to the various emer- gencies of his life, whatever it may be. But the physician says to him, " That very feeling which these stimulants give you is doing you harm " — I am not speaking now about teetotalism — " whatever acts in this way upon your constitution is radically wrong, and all that patching it up for a few minutes or an hour or two hours is simply making the mischief more permanent, and the time that will be required for your recovery more prolonged. The only hope for you is to have a thorough radical improve- ment in your constitution." You cannot fail, I think, to perceive the meaning of the illustration. Our Lord Jesus Christ knows that we cannot really 38 ^ DEATH UJ^O SIN be happy till we have found out that we are nothing, that we are utterly guilty, and helpless, and lost, and undone. And therefore the kindest thing- He can do is to teach us this lesson by the bitter experience of utter failure, that so we may be driven in spite of ourselves to that prayer which is never uttered in vain : "Just as I am, without one plea But that Thy Blood was shed for me, And that Thou bidd'st me come to Thee, O Lamb of God, I come ! " So the practical lesson is to go on with the prayer of the blind man who cast his garments behind him, and though the people tried to hinder him, determined not to rest till Jesus had stood still, till his eyes were opened, and the blessing for which he craved had been vouch- safed. Then, secondly, there is another most important lesson. There is nothing that we admire so much as a proud man. The world respects pride ; it despises vanity — petty little vanities — but pride is a grand thing. The man who does not waver when he has once spoken, the man who never humbles himself but stands up like some great mountain in the midst of his fellows, is respected, and he gains power and influence. People are afraid of him. In the kingdom of grace all this is altered. The man who wills to be proud, the Bible says, is fighting against God, and, sooner or later, we know how that struggle will end. God, it says, resists the proud. He resists him, fights against him for his own good, defeats him again and again, and if he rises up from the dust still unhumbled, again God uses His power. God does this in love, mind ! not in the mere human way of struggling for mastery, but because the Eternal One knows THE NEET> OF LIQHT 39 that it is an impossibility for grace to be given to any man except he is humble. God can only give grace, help, strength, and power to the humble. You cannot fill a vessel until it is empty. It is no use. If a vessel is full of self, self-satisfaction, self-complacency, God Almighty Himself cannot fill it with divine grace. And so it is very important, when we are praying for an Epiphany of the Lord Jesus Christ, that we should humble ourselves, and put ourselves aside to the very utmost of our power by the help of the Holy Spirit. For example, we have been praying to Goo Almighty to open our eyes, and God has some new set of truths to teach us in answer to our prayer, something to teach us that we have not really known before. Perhaps we have been Churchmen all our life, leading a watchful life of self-denial and self-restraint. We have been careful in our preparations for Communion, and careful in our thanksgivings afterwards. We have been watchful, it may be, about our confessions, and so forth. But some- thing, we have felt, has still been wanting, and we have been led by the Holy Spirit to pray the prayer of the text. Now, any one who has studied human nature knows that it is intensely difficult at that crisis of his spiritual history for a real Churchman to submit himself to the plain, simple foundation-truth of Jesus Christ crucified. Again and again persons have said to me, " Do you mean to tell me that all these years when I have been trying to obey the Lord God, when I have been watchful about my prayers and my Communions, never neglecting a means of grace — do you mean to tell me that all these years have been wasted, and that 1 am to begin again at the very beginning, just like the poor heathen that have never heard of Christ } I cannot believe it." Brethren, it is hard to believe this. It is true, too. 40 ^ DEATH UUiJO SIN that every act of real earnest work for God has been acknowledged by God. Every habit that you have \ formed of mastery over self will be found useful in ,' the future. Every bit of that self-discipline, the prepara- tions and the thanksgivings too, will come in hereafter to help in building up the temple acceptable to God. But there is a little bit of God's Gospel that you have never laid hold of; you have never done the first work, which is to believe on Him Whom God hath sent. When the people came to Christ, and asked what they should do to please God, they were told, " This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent." Trust in Him. Hide yourself in Him. Christ is made unto you wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. God gives you the Saviour, and He tells you that our dear Lord, by His death and rising again, has so opened the kingdom of heaven to you who are baptized into Him, that you may hide yourselves in Him, that you may shelter, as it were, behind Him, and so stand accepted in the Beloved. That seems so simple, and yet it takes a few days of looking up to Jesus Christ, thinking of Him, and praying to Him, and looking away from self — a few days before the eyes are opened to see it. It is often a very great stumbling-block in the way of real Churchmen to be broug^ht face to face with this truth, and unless they are changed so as to become like \ little children they cannot receive it. I remember seeing \ in a great mission one after another coming and learning that little simple bit of God's Gospel, and then going back with new life to their Communions, and with new power to every Christian duty and to every means of grace. And so, on the other side, we may take it, a soul has known the peace and the joy of believing, has known what THE NEET> OF LIQHT 41 it is to thank God that its sins are washed away in the precious Blood, and has known what it is to do this, not with excited utterance, but with calm, confident assurance based, not on feeling, but on the Word of the Living God that can never be found false. This soul has known what it is to be at peace with God, and has rejoiced in that peace, it may be, for many a year ; and then God in His love desires to lead that soul onward, to teach it the great sacramental side of the Church's instruction, to teach it something about the Body of Christ, to teach it about the feeding of the soul with the living Bread and the water that flows from beneath the Throne of God and the Lamb, and to teach it what is the right position to adopt to God's ministers, not merely to the one or two whom we personally like, but to every minister of God who has been specially ordained for doing His work. Well, all this, that we call " Church teaching," has now to be received, and the soul shrinks from it. The man to whom this truth is taught often speaks thus : " All my party will think that I have become a Ritualist, or a Puseyite, or a Romanist. I shall be dishonoured amongst those who looked up to me as a teacher in Israel. I know the everlasting Gospel ; I know that God loves me, and if I cannot always feel it, I make myself feel it ; and if I die, I will cry as I die. Thanks be to God for the precious Blood that cleanses from sin ; and you shall not rob me of it by talking to me about self-examination, and by all your teaching about your Holy Communions. It is all a delusion ; I know what God has taught me." If that soul continues proud, I will not say that it is lost — though I have seen a very bitter end come to the proud — but it never goes forward, it makes no progress, there is no growth in grace, and no influence over others. It has a name to live, but in the sight of God it is almost dead. G 42 o^ DEATH U:NJ0 SIN But when the soul comes like a little child and says, Lord, open my eyes, then God Almighty pours in these satisfying truths : that we are not merely forgiven, but that we can be made holy ; that God loves to pour new life into us, so that the old nature shall be gradually driven out, as darkness vanishes before the early morn ; that God comes to live in us by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that we may become not merely what are called " saved men," but strong men, men able to influence others as they pursue their onward course, men who by their very lives shed abroad an influence for all that is good, and pure, and holy. Oh, the growth in grace of a soul drawn into evangelical light, and then humbling itself to receive what God has taught in His holy Church ! Dear brethren, there is not time to dwell longer on the subject ; I would only warn you, whilst using this prayer, to beware of the spirit of that proud captain of the host of the King of Syria of whom you have read in the ancient story. Let one of God's humblest servants at least teach to you that lesson, and you can hear it well- nigh in every church that you may enter in this great metropolis. You remember the story. He came in all his barbaric pomp and majesty from the Syrian court to the prophet of the Lord, and that leprous captain of the host stood at the door of Elisha, and sent up to ask what he must do to be recovered of his leprosy. And his anger was stirred within him because he was not recog- nized as a great and mighty man — a man not to be treated as the ordinary poor would be treated. And Elisha sent to him the message, " Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean." And then he went away in a rage. He thought of those rivers, Abana and Pharpar, in the grand old city of Damascus, and said. What ! have I been brought all this distance, and then told to do a little THE NEET> OF LIQHT 43 thing like that ? — to wash in that little stream, when I have left behind the deep-rolling current of those Syrian streams ? No ! But his servants came to him and said, " My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it ? " My brethren, if God asked a great thing of you to-day as the price of everlasting joy with the saints and angels for ever hereafter, you would lay down your money — even the most covetous man in the church this morning — though you never really denied yourself a single fraction of your money for Christ all these many years that you have lived : you would tell out cheque after cheque, sovereign after sovereign — O God, any- thing to be sure of heaven hereafter. And God — by the voice of His prophet, to-day, for every man standing in the Name of God, properly ordained, is a witness and prophet of the Unseen God — gives you this answer, Humble thyself, trust God if He seems to be making Himself strange to you, and pray morning, noon, and night, at every pause from the whirl of the outer life, God, for Christ's sake, grant that my eyes may be opened. 44 ^ DEATH UJ\(TO SIN V THE LARGER VISION " Lor^^ that our eyes may he opened T — S. Matt. xx. 33. " // had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have kno-^n it, to turn from the holy commandment deli'))ered unto them."" — 2 S. Pet. ii. 2 i . " ^ I ^HAT our eyes may be opened." It is almost J- impossible to open the Bible without finding passages in which the responsibility of spiritual enlighten- ment is pressed upon our notice. Hear the word of the Living God, of which we have been told in the first lesson of this morning, that no utterance of His can ever return to Him empty and void. Take heed, saith God, how you hear, for whosoever uses what he has, to him shall more be given ; whosoever uses not what is given, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have. Seemeth to have ! In the sight of God a man only possesses really the knowledge that he uses. If a man hears My words and believes not, said Christ, I judge him not ; he that rejecteth Me, and receiveth not My words, does not act upon what he is taught, there is " One that judgeth him : the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him at the last day." Once more. " See," said the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, or rather the Blessed Spirit speaking through him, " see that ye refuse not Him that speaketh. For if they escaped not in olden time who refused Him THE LATiGER VISION 45 that spake on earth " — if Jerusalem was laid low, and the Temple devastated, and Israel scattered as a wander- ing race over the face of the universe — " if they escaped not . . . who refused Him that spake on earth, much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from Him that speaketh from heaven." Christ our King, the Alpha and the Omega, the Being that liveth, and Who died, but Who is alive for evermore, has heard each word that was preached, each warning that was uttered, and each encouragement that ran home into the heart of the people to whom His prophet was sent. Now, dear brethren, this truth is quite obvious, if we look at it for a moment, in earthly matters. Every one knows that the mere repetition of a feeling, unless the will is brought to bear upon that emotion, so that out of it is developed a habit of practical action — every one knows that the tendency of that reiterated emotion is to deaden the being, to paralyse the will, and to drive the man into a state of almost hopeless helplessness. Every one knows how the very man who faints at the sight of an operation may become in the course of years so accustomed to it, that he can smile and talk care- lessly though surrounded by cries of agony from suffering patients. A man may live utterly unmoved in the midst of the most heartrending scenes, hearing the cries of the agonized and watching their unceasing woe, until he may come at last to revel in the midst of it, when a stranger would be stirred with an emotion too big for utterance at the sight of these things. Any doctor in London who has any experience can illustrate this principle — the danger of enlightenment not producing practical action. He could tell you what is the secret of the malady of one after another who come to them for advice. The patients feel weak ; they require something to carry them through the day ; they crave for the stimulant, the 46 <^ DEATH UD^TO SIN subtle drug, or the brandy, whichever it may be. The physician says, " Ruin, sooner or later — stimulants at irregular times away from your food — ruin — I can do nothing." Another patient comes. The physician says, " You have only one hope of ever making full proof of your earthly ministry in that great position which you occupy. If you are obliged to dine out you must have a rule of life, a certain amount that you may drink, or those dishes that you like so much must be passed untouched, if you are to be fit for work all the year round." And the patients — so doctors tell me — the patients say, " We ought to ; you are quite right " ; but they return to the old stimulant and the accustomed self- indulgence. The great physician — I am speaking of the human physician — has to stand as it were in the midst of this mighty London to see the patients who come to him year by year becoming enfeebled, until at last they lose the very power of trusting in themselves, and sink down into a degenerate and enfeebled old age. It were better for them not to have known the right way than after it had been taught them by God's great teacher — for next to the preacher ranks the human physician — to have turned from the wise commandment delivered unto them. We pass out of the natural into the spiritual realm — the God of nature is the God of the spiritual kingdom. We have not two Gods ; God, Who sends the human physician for the body, sends likewise the spiritual phy- sician for the soul ; and when we pass into the spiritual kingdom, how fearfully is the truth of the text exempli- fied ! I will not speak this morning of that on which I have often dwelt, that aspect of the subject which comes before us when we think of the Living God speaking, and the creature using its free-will to fight against God and to say, " I know I ought^ but I catit^ and I wont'' I will THE LAT{GER VISION 47 not dwell on that side. We will carry on the thought that has occupied us so far. In the spiritual kingdom over which God Almighty rules there are eternal prin- ciples, such as can be seen in the world of nature. Just as all science reveals to us the general order, the almost invariable sequence of cause and effect, so the principles of the spiritual kingdom are established on an equally — to say the least of it, an equally — firm foundation. Now, what is the law of the spiritual kingdom "? It is this — that if prayer ascends to heaven, blessing comes down ; if a Church prays, the Holy Ghost is outpoured ; every Sunday that we pray, the power of God descends by a fixed law in answer to that petition. A father and mother cannot pray for their son without some influence entering the heart of that boy for the time, whether he yield to it or not. The Holy Spirit humbles Himself, so to speak, to be at the call of the prayer. Now for our thought. If when this holy commandment is revealed, if when the eyes are thus opened there is not an honest response (to use the words of our Lord, the " honest heart " responding to the full revelation, whatever it be), do you not see how a person may be living much above the average of other Christians, and yet relatively to his light immeasurably below them } Let me illustrate what I mean. We have been brought up, perhaps, some of us, in a Christian home. The father or the mother or the sisters have prayed for us continually. We received the answer to the prayer : we saw glimpses of a higher life ; there came wafted to us from the far-off land the breath, as it were, of the Living Spirit. We felt what we could be, what we might become, what could be done by God working in us. But instead of bringing the strong will to bear upon the feelings, and to train ourselves into habits of real response and of surrender to God, we trifled and dallied 48 o/ DEATH UDiTO SIN with it. We were not so bad as many, but we failed to answer to the call, we would not say. Speak, Lord, and then Thy servant will hear. We go on in life, we come into such a parish as this, either as the clergyman of the parish, or one of the congregation. Every week at least a hundred — I think nearer a thousand — prayers go up for every human being who comes into a church in the parish of S. Peter. People meet together for no other purpose than to pray for every one of us, clergymen and congregation. And the result is that these prayers are answered. Meltings of consciences, whether I hear of them in this world or not, must be experienced by numbers who would be angry if I suggested to them that their hearts had been touched in this way. It must be so, because God has said, " Ask, and ye shall receive." So the eyes are opened, and we respond — whether it be the clergyman or the people — we respond to a certain extent, but not to the full call of Almighty God. We do something, but not all that God would help us to do, and wishes us to do. So we rise up in the judgement of the world, and think that we are better than other people, and infinitely more holy, but in God's sight we are disobedient to the holy commandment that has been delivered to us — not responding to the call, living below our privileges, and disobedient to the heavenly vision. Now, imagine one of us, preacher or congregation, pass- ing out into that world where, as the Lord Jesus Christ says in one of those passages that I read to you, " there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested ; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad. . . . Take heed what ye hear." We have passed out into that world ; we find that every appeal was from God ; we find that every fresh answer to the prayer, " Lord, that our eyes may be opened," was a new responsibility. We find that wc have been living far above the average THE LA'RGER VISION 49 of Christians, but far below the call of the Eternal Father to our individual soul. Can you not imagine yourself in that land of light and revelation and eternal verities, crying with a bitter cry, " Would God I had never lived in that parish or entered that church ! Would God the clergyman had never knelt at the Holy Table, and pleaded there the Passion and the Death of the Eternal God Who was crucified those hundreds of years ago and died for me ! Would God that nobody had prayed for me, for then I should only have lived a good average sort of communicant. Christian kind of life, just as the rest of my neighbours, no worse, no better ! Would God no one had ever prayed for me, and then 1 should not have been disobedient to the holy commandment that was revealed in answer to that Epiphany prayer. Lord, that my eyes may be opened ! " O Blessed Spirit, give power to the words, and drive Thy message home this morning ! Now, brethren, what must be the practical conclusion of the whole matter ? Must it not be what that God is teaching us in the Gospel for the day ? First of all, saith Christ to us — what His Mother said at that feast in Cana of Galilee — "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it." Does God tell you that you are to believe in Jesus Christ ? Rest not day or night till you can say, " I know in Whom I have believed." Does He tell you to do that work } Do it. Does He tell you that you ought to go to Communion ^ Begin to prepare for it to-day. Does He tell you that you must give up the employment that is ruining your soul by robbing you of the time for prayer and the study of God's Word .'' Begin to-day to pray, and look out for the opportunity of altering your condition ; go on trying to get rid of it till God shall answer the prayer and make the way clear. Does He tell H so ^ DEATH U.?{TO SIN you that that cord must be cut which, if you should die to-night, would bind you to the devil and his angels for ever? Cut it to-night. "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it." Submit your mind to the Holy Ghost. If He has a new truth to teach you, though all your relations and friends laugh at you for becoming an evangelical, or becoming a Churchman, or whatever it may be, do it in the Name of the Living God Who has opened your eyes. The responsibility of spiritual enlightenment gives mighty power to the words of the Gospel. You may know God's will by waiting upon Him prayerfully for two or three weeks to ascertain what it is. " Whatsoever He " — Christ, not I, mind — "saith unto you, do it." The second and last lesson is given in the same Gospel. Do not, when you have obeyed Christ in one point, and done that, stop the prayer. Lord, that my eyes may be opened. Go on praying. Many people get one answer to one prayer ; perhaps they learn to believe in Christ, perhaps to give up some bad habit, or to go more regularly to the Holy Communion ; then they stop praying. Lord, that my eyes may be opened. But this must be our prayer continually to the very end of our lives, dear brethren. " Every man at the begin- ning doth set forth good wine." At the beginning the world provides her best, and then when men have well drunk, that which is worse — old age and feeble health, and friends leaving you alone to fight the battle of life — " when men have well drunk, then that which is worse." Christ keeps the good wine to the end. Every year we receive a new revelation, as we study the Bible more carefully, and pray for spiritual enlighten- ment more truly. Each bit of the Creed gradually comes out — perhaps, first, Christ the Eternal Son and the dear Elder Brother ; then God the Father ; then the Holy Ghost living in us to give light and strength and power ; THE LAT{GER VISION 51 then the Holy Catholic Church ; then the Communion of Saints ; then, onward still, " Lord, that our eyes may be opened " ; onward still, new visions of glory as we read the Holy Book upon our knees, and new insight into that spiritual kingdom. There came once the sovereign of Israel to the ancient prophet, and in the Name of the Living God, Elisha said unto Joash, Thou shalt have power and blessing from heaven ; take that bow and these arrows in thine hand, and according to thy faith in God, shoot these arrows ; open the window eastward and begin. And the man sent the arrow once out of that open window, and twice and thrice it was discharged. Then his faith failed. My brethren, open thy window eastward to the land of light and glory; eastward, where Christ thy King was born in great humiliation ; eastward, where He shall be seen coming surrounded by ten thousand times ten thousand angels. Open thy window eastward, and in the power of the Living God resolve to-day. What- soever my God tells me, shall be done, and, as I do it, I will pray even till my dying hour, Lord, that my eyes may be opened. Mine eyes shall be opened more to see the invisible kingdom, opened to see across the Jordan, to watch those there waiting, waiting for us — the blessed ones who died in Christ; perhaps little children or the dear mother who prayed for us long ago ; the faithful ones waiting to welcome us after the fight, waiting to watch our joy as the prayer of the text is at last accomplished, and our eyes are opened to see the invisible glory. 52 A DEATH UCHJO SIN VI THE CALL OF SUFFERING " Also the voord of the Lord came unto me, ^^yi^^t Son of man, behold, I ta^e away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke : yet neither shah thou mourn nor '?oeep, neither shall thy tears run down." — Ezek. xxiv. 15, 16. THOSE of us, my brethren, who gathered round the Holy Table at our earliest Celebration this morning must have been touched by that appeal which was then made for our Christian intercession. He for whom the appeal was made was probably known to none of us here ; or at most, to only one or two. Many hundred miles he was away from us. But there was something so intensely touching in those simple words, " Your prayers are asked for one who has been suddenly bereaved ; for a husband who has lost his wife." Two days ago, he was happy, and thanking God for the joy of his home. To-night, he is there in his lonely desolation ! Comfort on earth there was none. The only sense of comfort was in Him to Whom as a Chris- tian people we appealed this morning for one who, though a stranger to ourselves, was linked with us by the ties of Christian brotherhood, a member of the great Church of Christ, joined with us in the fellowship of the saints. The first lesson for this evening seems, as it were, the key-note of all such sudden desolations. The voice of the Lord God came to the prophet Ezekiel saying. THE 04LL OF SUFFETilNG 53 " Son of man " — as if God had said : 1 know thee ; I know that human heart ; 1 know the trial with which 1 am about to visit thee — " Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke." There is something so intensely Fatherly in those words of the Almighty : obliged, for reasons that we shall see afterwards, to lay desolate the home of the prophet, and yet, so intensely feeling for him, as God ever feels for those who are in sorrow, " Son of man, I take from thee the desire of thine eyes." To the world, Ezekiel's wife was as nothing ; it was not the custom of the prophets to talk of themselves or their family life. But God knew the strength and the joy that His prophet had drawn from that loving sympathy. " I take from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke." Then follows that stranore command : " Yet neither o shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down. Forbear to cry, make no mourning for the dead, bind the tire of thine head upon thee, and put on thy shoes upon thy feet " (i.e., omit the customary signs of mourning among the Jews), " and cover not thy lips, and eat not the bread of men" ; partake not of the tuneral feast (meats) that will be offered to thee in loving sympathy. Thou art not to mourn ; thou art the prophet of God. Thou must m.ourn, but let the mourning be hidden in thine own inmost heart. Let no weeping of a broken spirit mar the grand majestic chorus of the prophet's voice. Be still ; speak only the word that shall be given thee to speak. Ezekiel was a true prophet. It was in the morning that the sudden message came from the Most High. That morning, he went out with an aching heart ; all 54 A DEATH UDiJO SIN that long day, he testified for the Unseen Jehovah ; and then at night he came home to that desolate dwelling on the shores of Chebar, and then gave back the spirit of her whom he loved more than his own life, to her Father and his Father. That night his wife died. And then, in the morning, he was seen standing there, silent, refusing the outward garb of woe, as the people gathered round him, startled for a time from their thoughtless levity ; obliged, for a moment at any rate, to draw near to the prophet to whose message they had so long been deaf; asking, with a silly curiosity. Tell us, tell us, what does it mean ? Why are you doing this ? We are all of us curious — interested. Wilt thou not tell us — this and this and this ^ Why not eat the funeral meats .'' Why no sign of mourning ? Tell us ! Oh, what a picture of a world that can find in man's deepest woe only a subject for its idle gossip ! Tell us what these things are to us, that thou doest so. And then came the message. Just as, in after years, the true Son of Man turned round to those daughters of Jerusalem, saying, " Weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children" ; just as God sent not His Son in festal garb to proclaim the sad message of a coming woe ; as Christ Himselt first became the Man of Sorrows, and then stood in the midst of them, sadly proclaiming the coming doom : so it was that Ezekiel, pale as some statue, with a broken heart, and yet not one tear flowing down the cheek, spake to the people in the Name of God. "Thus saith the Lord God : Behold, I will profane My sanctuary, the excellency of your strength, the desire of your eyes, . . . and ye shall do as I have done." The day is coming, when you shall be visited by the Almighty with a calamity so terrible that it shall dry up the fountain of your tears. You shall see the Holy THE C^LL OF SUFFS'IilNG SS City devastated ; your sons and daughters carried into captivity ; and yet, you shall find it impossible to weep. You shall gaze with a sad and silent sorrow on those devastated walls of the Holy City. As I am silent in my sorrow, so also, I tell you in the Name of my God, the sorrow that is coming on you shall be a sorrow that shall find no relief in tears. And then God, with His loving. Fatherly Heart, knowing what Ezekiel was suffering, seems to have allowed him, for three years, to be comparatively silent. A few prophecies to the Amorites and Moabities, and so forth — nations in whom Ezekiel was not so intensely interested as he was in his own fatherland — prophecies that did not tear his very heart to pieces, as the woes which he was pronouncing against Jerusalem had deso- lated his spirit — these are all that we find recorded. God knew what the strain was, to that bereaved husband, in that sad preaching ; and so God gave him time to rest. He ever gives His people time to rest, in the midst of their trials and sorrows. For three years he was silent ; and then, again, the people came, and a new message was revealed. My brethren, the superficial student of the Bible may speak of our God in this history as a hard Master. He makes this grand mistake ; he limits his ideas to the three-score years and ten of this lower life : whereas God has eternity for which to provide ! God knew that, bitter as was the stroke which had fallen upon Ezekiel, he would a thousand times rather be used as God's prophet, than have all earthly joy continued for the full term of mortal life. And God knew that that dear wife would willingly die, if she could help on her husband's work. So God gathered her to the rest of Paradise, and gave to Ezekiel the time to rest, to gather in new power, while in silent meditation he communed S6 A DEATH UC^(TO SIN with the spirit that had passed away into the quiet land beyond the grave. The story which we have been reading, my brethren, is the teaching of the whole volume of Inspiration. It is the teaching that was given by the Life of Sacrifice, by the Death on Calvary, of the Incarnate God. Ezekiel was a prophet. What mean we by the word " prophet " ^ Not merely a man who foretells things to come ; that is but a part of his office. The prophet, as the Greek word shows, is one who speaks for another. In the Book of Exodus, Aaron is called the " prophet " of Moses ; he spoke for him. Moses thought, and Aaron clothed his thoughts in human words, and uttered them to Israel. The prophets received from above some strange inspiration which it is impossible accurately to define ; they received an inspiration from the world of spirits, and clothed it in the imperfect medium of human language ; they gave out the true thought, however feebly expressed. God could provide the word as well as the thought, to those whom He had made His mouth- piece. The prophets spoke for God. And why were you and I baptized ^ Why did Christ die for us on that Cross ? Why were we made members of the chosen generation, the royal priesthood, the peculiar people ? Open your Bibles, and you shall find the reason, in S. Peter's first Epistle, "That ye may shew forth the praises of Him Who hath called you out of darkness into His marvellous light " ; that we might be mouth-pieces for God ; that our life, our words, our deeds, our suffer- ing, might be ever speaking for the Unseen and Eternal Jehovah. You and I are " prophets," called by God to speak for Him to a fallen humanity. There are millions who THE C^LL OF SUFFETilNG si have never been baptized ; millions who have never been grafted into the Body of Christ. We are, at best — even if we include all who are baptized — but a small army in the midst of heathendom. And of those who have been baptized and made God's children, how few comparatively have realized their adoption 1 How few there are who have given their hearts to their Lord ! How few have been taught by the Holy Spirit to see the meaning of that Blood- shedding on Calvary ! Look round on the baptized ; look into your own hearts. What have you realized of the meaning of your Baptism } You are a member of Christ, the child of God, an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. Have you realized it .'' Have you felt the meaning of "the forgiveness of sins".'' Do you know what is meant by those words : " I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and as a cloud, thy sins" .'' Are you at peace with God, through Jesus Christ ^ If, next Sunday morning, those who love you are asking us to pray for them because their home has been bereaved — if one of you should be in another world before next Sunday, and we have to pray that God may comfort those who love you — where will your soul be .'' Oh, how few, how very few, have learnt even the first principles of the doctrine of Christ! How few are even at peace with God through Jesus Christ ! And yet, that is only the beginning. But whether we have realized it or not — whatever our standpoint may be ; whether we are merely baptized, and content, like selfish creatures, with knowing that we have been forgiven once, without trying to advance in the Christian life, to grasp new principles and to grow up into the fullness of Christ, or whether we are struggling on (painfully and wearily, perhaps, amid many faults and I 58 A DEATH UDiTO SIN disappointments, yet still struggling on) for the prize of our high calling — whatever be our position, one thing is true, and will be felt by us to be true for all eternity. It is this : God has separated you — whatever your past history, by the mere fact of your Baptism you were separated — to witness for your God. You are as truly a " prophet" of the Unseen and Holy Trinity, as Ezekiel was when he was sent forth in the Name of the Lord God to bear witness to His people. We are, all of us, God's prophets, whether we believe it or not. The truth which God would teach us, and which the Church has brought before us in our First Lesson to-night, is very parallel to the, at first, perplexing verse (S. Luke xiv. 26). Our Lord saw crowds coming about Him, and He looked round and said, " If any man come after Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple." Here again, the superficial student may raise a difficulty ; but any one who compares one passage with another — any one who even understands the original language — will find no difficulty in seeing what our Lord meant. He wished to teach the very same truth which, in older times, Ezekiel had taught by a parable. The dearest of all love is the love which a man feels for his wife, and that love, however real and however holy in itself, must be subordinated by the prophets of God to the voice of the Unseen and the Eternal. When God had need of Ezekiel, he must give him- self up to be used by God, however close might be the ties by which he was bound to this lower earth. However absorbing might be the interests of those Galilean peasants ; however interesting might be the work of the merchandise and the farm, and so forth, yet. THE CALL OF SUFFET{ING 59 when the voice of God spake, " Come, for all things are now ready," each prophet of God must gird up his loins, and leave behind him the yoke of oxen, and the new piece of ground, and yield himself up to the God by Whom he has been redeemed. This is no hard teaching. The whole of this lower life is but like a dream. When you and I shall wake up on the other side of that " narrow stream," the Bible tells us that this life will appear like a dream of the night when a man wakes up in the morning ! And, then, what will matter the difficulty, or the discipline, or the trial, provided we have been true to the Lord God, Who lives and reigns, not merely in this lower earth, but in all the kingdoms of the eternal world .'' We can make allowance for a poor boy just going out into the world, fancying that every idle pleasure will satisfy the deepest longings of his soul ; we almost smile as we watch him going on, still fancying that what the world calls "pleasure" will make him really happy 1 We have not one hard thought for him ; we are only sorry that he has wasted so many precious years ; we know how he will regret it in after-life : but there is no hard thought for him. But it is a little pitiable, when grown men and women such as you and I are, who are called by the Mighty God to love and suffer and work and speak for Him, can degrade ourselves by putting into the first place the pleasure and the money and the interests of a life that is passing away — that may be terminated at any moment ! Of course, the work is to be done ; the recreation is to be enjoyed : and God can make the recreation a real re-creation, and give to the poor tired merchant more prosperity, if only he work in submission to God, than if " without God " he shall go to bed late, and rise early, and eat the bread of carefulness. God 6o ^ DEATH UC^iTO SIN wishes us to have all the happiness which does not interfere with eternal happiness. But, grown men and women ! when God has given His Son to redeem us ; when God has told us that, whatever our past life may be. He will wash away every stain, and give us strength to walk in newness of life ; when God has separated us from millions of heathen, that we may go up and down the world and testify for Him, by our daily walk, wherever we are : there is, I say, something degrading in seeing the " prophets " of God with no ideas — except whether her dress is becoming, whether she is better dressed than others, or whether he has " made enough money to retire," when he may only be going to " retire " to the grave ! God wishes to elevate us above all these things ; and God gives us trials and disappointments and all the manifold discipline of our earthly existence on purpose that we may be weaned from this lower life, that our home may be sought above, in the only real home, where alone the God Who made us knows that our heart can be satisfied. And for fear that this should seem hard to us — for fear we should think God a hard Master — He sent His own Son first : He let Jesus be born in that manger and live for thirty years in that carpenter's shop, and oft-times have no place where to lay His head. He made the Prophet of God, His own well-beloved Son, live a life of trial, in order that when — for our own good and for the good of others — God should call us to suffer, as His prophets, we might bear the trial unflinchingly. That is the idea in to-day's second lesson, and in the lesson from Ezekiel : that you and I, as prophets of God, must ^^ seek Jirst the kingdom of God" ; and if trial comes, in thus seeking the glory of God, then, in God's Name, we must bear the trial. THE C^LL OF SUFFSTi/NG 6i There are two thoughts in conclusion which suggest themselves to us. Very often God gives to His people, His true prophets, whether young or old, some great trial ; one of the infinite vicissitudes of life ; some earthly loss, bereavement, or bodily weakness, and Satan, who is always ready to accuse both God and man, comes to the child of God, and says, " You are a wretched sinner, and you deserve to be punished ; and so, God is punishing you." That side of human suffering: which is for our own good 1 shall not touch upon to-night. The point that I wish to bring out is this : that very often the trials which come upon us and the sorrows which we have to bear have nothing to do with our own sins, nor, except indirectly, with our own spiritual discipline. As every prophet of God, from the beginning to the end of the Bible, only became a perfect prophet by suffering — by drinking of the cup which Jesus drained to the dregs, so, again and again, you will find, when you look back upon your past history (no one can see clearly while he is passing through the furnace, but when you look back, you shall see) that you, too, were born to be a prophet ; that as Ezekiel suffered for the sake of others, so God has allowed you to suffer, for the sake of some linked to you, it may be by very close ties. We pray for our children ; we pray for those whom we love ; and the answer comes through a bankruptcy, a broken heart, an open grave, a desolated home ! We know not what it means ; but we " forbear to cry " ; and then, in the three years of silent meditation by the still waters of God's sanctuary, God teaches His prophet that the prayer is answered ; that the sorrow came in order that the child, the husband, the friend, might be saved by the suffering of the prophet. The subject is too wide for the limits of a sermon : I only leave 62 ^ DEATH UU^TO SIN it with you. If you are living to God, and trying to love Him, you will often find that your heaviest sorrows will be God's answer to your prayers. Very often your heaviest trials will fall upon you not for your own sin but in virtue of that glorious office into which you have been baptized — the office of God's prophet. The second thought also is practical. How are these trials to be met .'' How is the lesson of to-night to be learned ? Are you to be always anticipating coming woe ? If Ezekiel's sorrow falls on me, how can I bear it r If such and such a trial is given, how shall I endure it.? No, that is Satan's teaching, not God's teaching. The teaching of the Bible is this : " Give us day by day our daily bread." The manna was provided for the Israel of God, and one day at a time. He who tried to gather sufficient for the second day found that the labour had been spent in vain. Day by day ; for the day ! We are God's prophets ; make sure of that first. Then, make sure that you grasp the Christian's privileges. And then, let there be a full and earnest yielding up of the spirit every morning to God. My God, I give myself, body, soul, and spirit, " to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto Thee." Do Thou, my God, give me strength to do what is right. Do Thou give me grace to battle against temptation. Do Thou enable me to bear any trial that Thou mayest see fit to lay upon me. And then, as the varied trials of life come on, as one trial after another is sent by Him with Whom we have to do, take it quietly. Do not be disheartened if, for days, this heart and flesh seem to sink under it ; when earthly circumstances seem to be all going wrong ; when the home is becoming more and more dreary to you, as your children have gone away from you, one after another, and you cannot feel sure that they are true THE CALL OF SUFFSI^/NG 63 prophets of God. Do not be surprised — mark this — if, for days, you feel unable to feel or to realize God's love. Kneel down and say the prayers, even though your thoughts are wandering from the beginning to the end. And so, in the Name of God, bring that sacrifice as the prophet of God and the priest of God, and bind it to the horns of the altar, saying, " My God, if my strength is failing, 1 will bear it ; if my children dis- appoint me, I will bear it ; if those for whom I have sacrificed almost my very life treat me with ingratitude, I will bear it. It will break my heart, O God, to be known as a bankrupt or a pauper, but 1 will bear it, my God, in Thy strength." Never mind, even if you fail ; go back to the precious Blood ; ask the Lord Jesus to wash out the stain on the white robe in that Fountain which flowed from Calvary. Come back, and say, " My God, give me strength to bear it. My God, give me strength to go out amongst these young men, and to bear being laughed at. Help me to take my part with the chosen generation, the royal priesthood. Help me to tell all who are in the shop or office with me. My God, even if I fail ninety-nine times, I will rise up again." And so, as in the Name of God you try each day to be a true prophet, God will teach you new truths. Your mind will be enlarged ; your capacity for knowing Christ will increase. Your power to love other people and to bear unkindness, to give back good for evil and to suffer for Christ, will increase year by year. Instead of being the poor silly child, carried everywhere according as the wind may blow, led wherever man's opinion may guide, doing only what others do, and living as others live, only kind to those who are kind to you, only loving those who love you, only blessing those 64 ^ DEATH UNTO SIN who bless you — you will drink of the Spirit of the Crucified. You will learn that you are sent out by God, blessed by Him, in order that you may bless others. You will learn that the highest dignity of the creature is to carry out the purpose of the Creator, to be in harmony with the universe of God. You will feel that pleasure may be very well, when we are children ; and money may be very well, before we have learnt to know the true and incorruptible riches ; but that God has called us to something higher : that He calls us to suffer with Christ, to work for Christ, to take our part in the great onward march of the baptized ; to take our part in the battle of the great army that is going up in the Name of God to save the world which Satan has enthralled. Yes, Christian men and women, boys and girls, young and old ! make up your mind, in the Name of God, that you will be strong and of a good courage, to do and to bear whatever God may call you to do or to suffer, as the " prophets " of the Unseen and Eternal Jehovah ! THE TOWER OF THE LORT> 6$ VII THE POWER OF THE LORD " / i/iat speak in righteousness^ mighty to soDeT IsA. Ixiii. I. IT is not my intention to consider the context of this passage. 1 regard it to-day rather as the answer which, sooner or later, God has promised to vouchsafe to every man and woman and child who shall honestly persevere in uttering that prayer, " Lord, that our eyes may be opened." Sooner or later, to every waiting soul, the vision of the Lord Jesus Christ shall assuredly be granted, because God, Who cannot lie, has so promised. Let me here be clearly understood. I am not speaking now of any strange and mystic revelation of the world unseen ; I am not speaking of any personal vision of Jesus Christ, the result, it may be, of a highly-wrought imagination, or coming simply from the delusions of Satan transforming himself into an angel of light. I am referring now to that most calm and intelligent knowledge of Jesus Christ, no longer as a mere abstraction, but as a Living Person. I am referring to that turning-point — and there are many such in the experience of every real Christian — to that turning-point in the life wherein the soul lays hold, by the power of the Holy Ghost, of this great fact, that it belongs to a living Christ ; that the loving Lord has a direct and personal relation to it ; and that K 66 ^ DEATH UfJ^TO SIN there are direct communications between its individual self — between the individual spirit I ought to say — and that living Jesus Christ. I refer to that crisis — if the word be not too strong to express my meaning — that crisis of the soul's history wherein by the eye of faith, the inner eye of the soul, it passes out of the range of mere doctrines and imagina- tions and human teachings and human systems, and comes on earth into the immediate Presence of Him Who was born in Bethlehem and manifested. Who died and rose again and ascended into heaven, and Who Himself has declared unto us that, wherever two or three are gathered together in His Name, He is present in their midst, Who has promised to every trusting heart that He will come and reveal Himself unto it. This knowledge of Jesus Christ comes to men at sundry times and in divers manners. It has come in the quiet solitude of our chamber, as alone, with no eye resting upon us, we were studying the Holy Book and praying for the guidance of the Blessed Spirit. It has come, as it came in olden days, through the breaking of bread at the Holy Communion, when the Lord Jesus said to the disciples, after they had received that spiritual Food, " Peace be unto you ! " It comes at some times through the feelings, at others through the understanding. It may come gradually, a little more light each week and month and year perhaps, till at last the King is seen in His living personality. Or it may come suddenly, through a sermon, or through the word of a friend. It may be burnt into our very being in the midst of one of those great crashes of the human life when we are confronted by Him W^ho holds in His hands the keys of the grave and of death — those times when, with the most calm and intelligent conviction, we know that it depends upon that living Being Whom we THE TOWER OF THE LORT> 67 met in that most narrow place whether the near future shall find us in the midst of that invisible world of which men talk so much but know so little. We know not on which side of the narrow door the morrow's dawn will find us : with the spirits that have passed away, or living, conscious, thanking God for our deliverance. In whatever way it comes — God lives, and the Holy Ghost works, in the Church, to take of the things of Jesus and show them unto us, to reveal that loving Person to every soul that would seek for light. Yes ! just as in the olden days the eyes of the blind were opened : it might be suddenly, so that all things were clearly manifested ; it might be with a strange withholding of the full enlighten- ment, like the poor man who saw at first only men like trees walking ; it matters not. Who is this, do you ask, that is coming to me at that turning-point of my soul's history } Who is this that is coming in His glorious apparel, travelling in the greatness of His strength } Who is it : Thy God, thy Saviour, " 1 that speak unto thee in righteousness, mighty to save." Now, dear brethren, there is every reason why we should have confidence in this Living Person thus revealed to us. If it be true, and we know it is true, that the Lord Jesus Christ is not merely human in His sympathies, but almighty in His power, speaking to us in this righteousness of the Eternal Godhead, mighty to save us — I say there is every reason why we should repose implicit confidence in Him ; and yet the great struggle of the Christian life is to know Him ; and when we know, to trust, this Living Lord. The difficulty arises from many sources. First, it is owing to our own natural infirmity, it is the tendency of all ot us to stop short ; to rest in secondary causes ; not to press on till we have laid hold of the entire revelation, 68 ^ DEATH UNTO SIN and till we have obtained the fullness of the blessing that our God has for us. Let me explain what I mean. I believe it is quite impossible for any one to under- value one single iota of God's revealed truth without grevious injury to his soul. If we are too proud to receive what is called evangelical truth — if because when we were young it was presented to us in those repulsive forms which alienated our understanding and crushed all power of belief in such a caricature of religion — I do not say we shall never go to heaven, but if we refuse to receive God's evangelical teaching, we shall never know what is meant by rejoicing in the Lord, and never enjoy the full privileges of those who are standing firm in the liberty with which Christ has made them free. And on the other hand there is danger. If from fear of being unpopular, and despised as Papists or Puseyites and the like, we will not submit our will to the entire round of God's truth which the Lord Jesus has revealed to His bride, the Church — not speaking of the Church in the narrower sense of the clergy but of the entire body — if we have nothing to do with the truth, because the world does not love it ; if we will take certain portions that are popular, and toss aside the humbling teaching of self-examination and the acknowledgement of our sin to Almighty God with a penitent, lowly, humble, and obedient heart ; if we toss aside the sacramental system with all its wondrous mystery and lite-giving power ; if we will have nothing to do with the grace of the Ministry and the privileges God gives to the whole body of the faithful through those who are set apart for that office ; if, in fact, we toss Churchmanship to the wind and sing for ever "Jesus only," as if Christ were something different from His Church, the bride, and as if the Word of the Lord in one part of the Bible was not as important as THE TOWER OF THE LORT> 69 the Word of the same God in another part ; then we shall never — I do not say we shall not be " saved," for any one who believes in Jesus Christ really and truly will be saved — but we shall never grow up into the fullness of the stature of the manhood of Christ : we shall be weak, wavering, powerless beings to the very end of our lives. But, though this is true — and I cannot express it too emphatically — yet if we stop in our systems and our dogmas and our half-truths, and do not use them as the ladders by which to rise up into the Presence of the King ; if we are satisfied with having known " the Gospel," or being " Churchmen," or with whatever we like ; and if we do not struggle on in the prayer, " Lord, open mine eyes to see Thyself coming to me, travelling in the greatness of Thy strength, glorious in Thine apparel, mighty to save me " we shall never know even the bemnnin^ of the higher life, the life hid with Christ in God. There is a second hindrance to knowledge of, and confidence in, the Lord Jesus Christ. The devil is a living person, however much he may have been eliminated from our thought. God, Who had seen Satan from the beginning — whenever that was — the beginning of his being, God Almighty for our guid- ance has revealed to us in the Bible certain truths about Satan, and foremost amongst them is the fact of his personality. God, in His love, has shielded us from the full knowledge of Satan's power, perhaps because if we knew what he was, we should all be powerless to fight against him, and our hands would hang down in utterly hopeless apathy and helplessness. But He reveals to us that Satan does live, and that he hates Christ, and that he hates and persecutes every soul that is trying to find Christ, or is savingly united with Him. 70 c/f DEATH UNTO SIN On earth the way to break a husband's heart is for the wife to doubt his love ; a father might sooner see his boy commit some open sin than that he should lock up his secret thoughts in cold reserve ; every human being longs for trust and confidence from those it loves. So the devil knows that the loving desire of the great Heart of Jesus Christ is the confidence of His people — He wills that every one for whom He died on the Cross and redeemed with that priceless Agony should trust Him implicitly, trust Him as the guide of his life, trust Him as against the whole universe, trust Him as against the whole body of the devil's army ranged against him. And so the devil, to hurt us and to grieve and annoy Jesus Christ, does all that in him lies to make us not trust Him. And yet, once more, the very discipline which in His eternal wisdom Christ sees to be necessary for us, helps our fallen nature, and helps in a certain sense this malice of Satan. When the ancient patriarch in the old history was to receive the greatest blessing that had ever been vouchsafed to man on earth, when Abraham was to be called by God " blessed for ever," " the father of the faithful," his trust had first to be tested. For three long days he must journey on side by side with the boy he loved, seeing no hope of human deliverance. To the very end he must be tested. The wood must be laid in order, the hand must be stretched out to bind Isaac, before the vision of joy is vouchsafed and the deliverer is revealed, and Jehovah-jireh has provided the ransom and vouchsafed the deliverance. Even so at every stage of our life, whether we are beginning, or have attained to a fuller Christianity, at every crisis of life, if God has a great blessing for us. He first tests us. All comfort is taken away, we walk in darkness and see no light ; our sins take such hold on us that we cannot look up ; we THE TOWER OF THE LORT> 71 feel more helpless, weak, guilty, and fallen than ever we did previously. Christ says, Wilt thou trust Me, in the dark, alone, without human sympathy, without any consciousness of power in thyself, without anything on which to stay thy heart, wilt thou trust Me and love Me, the Living God Who died for thee ? It is very hard : and those who have gone through it best know how hard it is. Look at that sea shore for a moment. Standing on the top of that grassy sward you see the rugged cliffs around, and you look down and see the great hard rocks beneath, and watch the waves dash- ing their whitening foam on the shore. Do you see that man there down by the sea shore with his arms stretched out, gazing upwards ? What is it } Look a little further. Do you see that child a little below the grassy sward on which you are standing } Do you see him hanging there by that branch of the tree .'' The child thinks that the branch will hold him. You from above see the soil all loosening, and you know it is a question perhaps not of an hour before the child must be dashed to pieces on those rocks. And the man below knows it, and he looks round and he sees the waves dashing and the tide rising, and he cries in an agony, " Leave that branch ; fall into my arms ; trust me ; I can't wait longer ; I cannot see you perish." Oh ! it is hard for the little child to lose what seems safety, and to trust, to let go that last hold of life, simply in confidence, because the voice has spoken, " Let thyself go ; trust in me." Thus, my brethren, there is this threefold difficulty ; from Satan, from our own hearts, and from the very dealing of God with man. You will see in a moment that Christ is powerless, unless we will trust Him, and have confidence in Him. Take another earthly illus- tration. If you have not confidence in your earthly physician, he can do nothing, nothing. The difference 72 ^ DEATH UNTO SIN between a wise man and a fool is simply this — a fool goes to one doctor, and after trying his prescriptions for a while, goes to another, and then to a third, and wonders he does not recover. The wise man pauses, considers, and at last chooses the physician in whom he has con- fidence. Then, though the cure may be delayed for weeks or months, he says, " I know whom I have trusted, and I am persuaded that what he has promised he is able also to perform." He goes on waiting, not happily at all, very unhappily perhaps, but patiently, because he has confidence. And if he refuse that trust, the wisest doctor that ever lived — I repeat the word — is utterly powerless. So it is with Christ. If you read your Bible in the light of these thoughts, you will see what power our Lord attaches to confidence, to trust, to faith, how no wickedness is too great for Him to forgive, how by a word he healed the leper in the Gospel, and by another word in an instant He cured the palsied man. Consider, the only thing that hindered Him from doing mighty works was want of confidence in Him ; He could not do many mighty works because of their want of confidence. Then do you ask, "How can I gain this confidence }'' How } How do you strengthen your confidence in an earthly friend } If some one tells you he has wronged you, or he has dealt cruelly with you, what do you do .'' You think of his character ; you take out the old letters and read them over and over again, and you say, " I am sure that he is true, though appearances are against him." If you have the opportunity you talk to him, and let him speak to you ; you spend time in his society till you know him, in order that you may be able to trust him with all confidence and knowledge. Even so, my brethren, if you wish to gain confidence in Christ, be alone with our Lord ; read His letters in THE TOWER OF THE LORD 73 this Holy Book ; read about His life. Think how He dealt with every one that came to Him on earth ; talk to Him in simple words, like the simple words that people spake who came to Him when He went up and down those hills of Galilee. Take some promise of His, and thank Him for the promise. Tell Him you cannot realize it, or feel it, or believe it ; but, all the same, thank Him that He has said it. Then turn the promise into a prayer, and as you thank Him, and as you read His blessed Word, and as you let Him speak to you by the quiet voice of the indwelling Spirit, turn your prayer now into a prayer to God the Holy Ghost. The Blessed Spirit lives to reveal Jesus Christ to us. Pray, then, to Him, " O God the Holy Ghost, witness for my Lord ; what- ever the standpoint at which I have arrived, reveal Him more to me. O Blessed Spirit, open my eyes to see Christ as my Saviour, to see Him as my Example, to see Him as the Mighty One Whose omnipotent love can dash all obstacles away, and cast my guilt into the depths of the sea. Show Him to me as having power to say to my leprous soul, ' I will, be thou clean.' Show Him to me, Blessed Spirit, as having the power to fulfil in me His own command, * Be not overcome of evil ' — Christ was never overcome of evil. He overcame evil with good. O Blessed Spirit, show to me " — let that be your prayer — " that my Lord lives, with all His power and love, to overcome the evil that is in me by His own omnipotent goodness." PART II A NEW BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS " merciful God^ grant that all carnal affections may die in them^ and that all things belonging to the Spirit may live and grow in them.'' 75 CARNAL AFFECTIONS " If our gospel be hid^ it is hid to them that are lost : in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not^ lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christy Who is the image of God^ should shine unto ihemT — 2 Cor. iv. 3j 4- THERE is a God, a living God. He is about our path and about our bed. In the dark hours of the night, in the weary tossings to and fro of the fever- stricken patient, there is an invisible Being always nigh. He is " not far from every one of us." And " God," as the word expresses, is " good." Therefore it is His nature to give ; to give all that we need day by day, the daily bread, and the forgiveness of sins, and the deliverance from evil. God loves to give : to give over and over again. Judgement is " His strange work." It was with tears pouring down His cheek that our Incarnate Lord said to Jerusalem, " If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace ! but now they are hid from thine eyes." Dear brethren, has that thought no power to touch your heart ? For forty years, perhaps, we have never given anything to Him Who all the time has been loving us ! We listen to the story of His love unmoved, many of us ; most of us, at some period of our life. God have mercy on us ! Our next point is this : God has appointed certain 77 78 A NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS means, certain instrumentalities, by which He conveys His blessings to us. He does not give them merely in some directly spiritual and supernatural way, such as could only be discovered by the learned and enlightened, who have leisure to ponder on the deep mysteries of His working. He has appointed certain outward channels, through which the inward grace and life are com- municated. Such, for example, are the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion ; the Holy Scriptures ; and the ordinary events of His providence in daily life. Such also are holy men and women. Such, in a special degree, are those whom He sets apart to be His ministers. All these are described in Holy Scripture as appointed by a God Who loves to give, for a definite object, namely, as channels of life, of grace, of blessing. When our Lord led captivity captive and ascended into heaven He received as Man from His Father certain gifts ; and these gifts He distributed among men as in olden days a conqueror scattered largesses amongst the crowds that had thronged his triumphal chariot. He gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, to spread life and grace everywhere around them. The next thought that we have been considering is this : all these instruments, appointed by God as His own means of communicating His gifts to us, are, to a large extent, allowed by God to remain in their natural con- dition, that is, with much in them that is unattractive, or even repulsive. The outside is left as it was. The wrinkles in the face are not smoothed down by the painter's art. The old mistakes, the old weak points, in the good men and women remain — the want of breadth and judgement, the want of tenderness, perhaps, in God's ministers ; the one-sided exaggerations, the provincial accent ; the bad reading. All the outward defects remain. In Bible history we find the same thing. Those CARNAL AFFECTIONS 79 whom we now know as saints, those who are now looked upon as apostles, martyrs, and confessors, were all left in this condition, " What will these babblers say ? — unlearned and ignorant men ! They have never been trained in our schools of learning. The common people listen to them ; but, as for ourselves — the ' Pharisees,' the learned, and the intellectual — we consider such preaching simply * twaddle.' " Such were the ideas of the ordinary superficial observer, such the kind of epithets used, with regard to those of whom we read in the New Testament, whom we now look upon with such reverence. And God has been pleased to allow this to continue. " God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise." " Through the foolishness of preaching," God is pleased to save them that believe. Woe be to the country that is doing what England is doing now ! Woe be to the land that gives her best to the Army, to the Navy, to the Civil Service, and considers that anything is good enough to " send into the Church," as it is called (as if the poor boy had never been baptized !). Woe be to the land that gives her worst to the sanctuary ; offering to God, as Malachi says, " the blind, the lame, and the sick " ; reserving her best for that which brings abundant earthly honour and abundant earthly wealth ! And yet, God takes the refuse, takes what the Apostle calls " the offscouring of the world " : the poor, the weak, the foolish, the contemptible : and He allows the world to laugh at them as it laughed at the Apostles ; and, through the outside, He shows to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, something — something more than that ! There is the " earthen vessel." Any child can see what common pottery it is. But within that earthen vessel, as S. Paul says, there is the heavenly treasure : 8o A NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God." (2 Cor. iv. 6, 7.) There is One standing in the midst, Whom we see not — not the poor miserable clergyman, with all his defects ; not the poor man or woman, tailing in the home, failing in business, failing perhaps in everything, crying bitter tears every night for having dishonoured God so much during the day — but One "Whom we see not : Jesus Christ. The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost desired to use that external weakness as a channel through which life and blessing might flow into the home, into the parish, into the Church, into the world. And Jesus Christ is repeating the old piteous appeal : If thou knewest the gift of God, and Who it is that is speaking to you through all these miserable inconsistencies — if only you had looked beyond the instrument, beyond the clergyman, beyond the Bread and Wine at Holy Communion, beyond the water in the sacred font — you would have asked of Him, of Him Who was standing in the midst of you, and He would have given you the living water. The thought that now forces itself upon us is this : the Bible history tells us that men and women like ourselves did make this great mistake, and were perfectly satisfied with themselves while they were making it. The Bible tells us that when the Son of God Himself was upon earth, those who corresponded in earthly position, in intellectual ability, in spiritual knowledge, to the ordinary congregation in this church, were so blind that they saw in Jesus Christ no beauty that they should desire Him ; that they despised Him, rejected Him, treated Him as an impostor, and thought that they did God service by nailing Him to the Cross and putting Him to death. If this be so, then I would ask you calmly and simply. Is there no danger lest we — clergy and laity — CARNAL ^AFFECTIONS 8i may be at least as blind as those amongst whom Christ went all unnoticed, despised, and rejected ? Is it not possible that there may be something in the Bible, something in the Sacraments, something in every godly man and woman among us, that we have never yet seen, because we are blind ? Is it not possible that there may be in every sermon, in every chapter that is read in our hearing from that lectern, something beneath the surface, that we are allowing to pass by all unnoticed, so as to lose the gift of a good loving God ? Is there no danger ? My brethren, you must see that there is danger. You must feel, as I feel, what awful words those are in which our Lord replies to those who came to Him, saying, " Are we blind also ? ... If ye were blind, ye should have no sin " — natural blindness would be only an infirmity — " but now ye say. We see ; therefore your sin remaineth." (aS. John ix. 40, 41.) Have you never gone on your knees and said, " My God, do deliver me from blindness of heart " '^ Imagine what it will be when we see Christ in His glory, and all the angels and archangels with Him, and all the saints ; and we review our life, and find that everywhere, in the house, in the street, in the church, was a God surrounding us with blessings, channels of mercy, channels of life — perhaps Holy Communion every day, if we wanted it, and daily prayers — Christ ready to meet us over and over again ; channels of blessing even in the " trivial round " of daily life : what will it be when we realize that Jesus was standing in our midst, loving us, and we never saw Him ^ What, then, is the cause of this blindness } Crowds of angels round us, the glory of the cherubin and seraphin, all the blessed ones, all the little children that passed away fresh from their Baptism into the other M 82 A NEW mRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS world near to us ; and yet some of us see — nothing ! Why is it ? The Bible tells us plainly. It is because the devil, the god of this world, has blinded the eyes of those who believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, Who is the Image of God the Father, should shine upon them. A being blinds their eyes, and that being uses the things of this world to hide the glories of the invisible world by which we are surrounded. This is the simple explanation which is given to us in His tender love by God Himself. Now, there are three classes of sins by which any one who has studied human nature will tell you that the god of this world blinds our eyes. It does not follow, remember, that, because we have yielded to the sins of which I am to speak, we are " lost." Thank God, there has been made a complete Atonement ! " Now is the day of salvation." There is free pardon, thank God, and grace to begin afresh ! Though we may now be on the road to ruin, we need not continue on that broad road a single hour. But there are three different ways, drawn out for us in Holy Scripture, by which this veil is drawn over our eyes. There is, first of all, the direct attack of the devil, in pride. When we are proud of ourselves, satisfied with our spiritual, intellectual, or earthly position ; when we are satisfied that our party alone is right ; that our section of the Church has the monopoly of truth ; when we say, " I, at any rate, am not as other men are "; then we are falling into that sin which lost the devil his heaven. The first way in which the devil blinds our eyes is — I repeat — by any form of vanity or pride. There is, secondly, the burning fever of impurity. " Blessed are the pure in heart ; for they shall see God." CARNAL AFFECTIONS 83 But this sin of impurity blinds the eye ; it takes away the nerve power ; it leads to softness, effeminacy, and to a yielding to the conventional standard. Impurity in thought, impurity in excess of food, impurity in any of those ways that cannot be particularized in the great congregation — impurity withers the soul as the burning fever withers the physical being. Then there is the slow withering consumption of the love of this present world, " minding earthly things." Look on the ground and you see mud. Look up and you see the stars, and the beautiful clouds and the heavenly sunset. You do not see both at once. The more we concentrate our thoughts on the world — our o own world, whatever it be, the two or three people or the thousand, it is no matter which ; the more we accustom ourselves to judge, as Jesus did not judge, according to the appearance ; the more we carelessly let ourselves think as others think, look as others look, see as others of the world see — the more do we join ourselves to those who, in the days of Christ, crucified Him. The whole world then was satisfied that it had done right, because the god of this world had so blinded the eyes of those who believed not, that they could see no beauty, no glory in the Son of God. Dear brethren, what is it that is blinding your eyes } — love of this present world } political worldliness } religious worldliness ? impurity ^ pride } — what is it ,'' Ask yourselves. Many despised Christ, and saw no beauty in Him. Am I like them ? Many were blinded. Am I blinded ^ Is the veil over my eyes ? — through pride, through impurity, religious or secular worldliness } Come with me, far away, in thought, to that great American continent. Let us stand in mid-winter near one of those gigantic lakes, all covered with its icy shroud. Watch far up in that clear sky the proud 84 A NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS sovereign of the air, that great eagle, peering up in its grandeur into the very face of the sun itself, the un- approachable glory. See the bird there, claiming kindred with the clouds, companioning, as it were, with God's eternal firmament. Watch its magnificence, as it poises its wings in that glorious atmosphere of purity and light and beauty. Watch it as the sunlight falls upon its plumes, in all its majestic beauty. Then below, on that frozen lake lies a dark shadow. Watch ! It is but a little shadow on that cold, ice- bound lake. The great sovereign of the air fastens its eye on it. It minds that earthly thing. It ceases to look upwards. It ceases to revel in the bright sunshine. It ceases to look through the open door into the great firmament of heaven. Its eye has fastened on that little shadow : something that it can grasp, something that it can eat, something that will satisfy its animal nature. With one great swoop it descends ; it fastens on its prey ! O what hundreds, in my twenty years of ministry, have I seen — heroes, GoD-sent souls, boys trained in apostolic homes, girls reared amid the tears of saintly parents now in Paradise — fasten on some such dark shadow ! Watch that bird. It has got what it wanted. But the talons are frozen : bound down to that ice ! And there it remains — bones, talons, flesh — perishing, dying by inches, a monument to angels and to men of the power of the lower nature to destroy the higher : of the power of the god of this world to blind the eyes of men, lest they should see the beauty and the magnifi- cence and the abounding love of Thee, my God and my King, Who art coming to judge the quick and the dead ! ONE THINQ LJCKJNG 85 II ONE THING LACKING " Jesus beholding him loved him^ and said unto hiniy One thing thou lackest." — S. Mark x. 21. A STRIKING picture, my brethren, is drawn for us in this chapter. In the background is the scenery beyond the Jordan ; and we watch two figures on the road leading down to the Jordan stream and across to Jericho and up to Jerusalem. There is, first, the Lord Jesus Christ ; that eternal Saviour, born into the world iox us men and fi^r our salvation. There is that Lord Who is in the midst of us this morning, according to His own most sure promise, " Wheresoever two or three are gathered in My Name, there am I in the midst of them." There is that Saviour Who, through His wondrous death upon the Cross, has made it right for God to send far and wide by the voice of His messengers to every human being, whatever his past may have been, an unconditional oflfer of a complete forgiveness. There is that Lord Who shed His Blood upon the Cross in order that — nothing asked from us but the simple rudimentary re- pentance of turning towards God, of giving up anything that we know is wicked at the time, and of believing in the Blood of Jesus Christ — we should have acceptance in the Beloved. Look at the Face of Him to Whom all is owinof that makes life bearable and that sheds brightness on the prospect of the everlasting ages which 86 A NEIV 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS have yet to run their course ; Jesus Christ is there, the Lord Who is in our midst to-day. Next, the portrait is drawn for us of a man, in good position in society, a " ruler " (probably " a ruler of the synagogue ") but young, and one who has lived hitherto in the eye of man an irreproachable life. He can look his fellow-men in the face, and he can say, " I have honoured my father and mother ; I have committed no murder ; I have never broken the seventh nor the eighth commandment ; I have not borne false witness ; nor coveted my neighbour's goods ; I have defrauded no one. I need not point out to you many details, such as that the man had never really dug beneath the surface. He had never grasped the spiritual meaning of those old commandments, as brought out for us by the Lord Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. Although we read between the lines not a little self-complacency and vanity in this young man, taking him as a whole he would have been described, and rightly described, as " a good sort." He was a thorough, honest, up- right, straightforward man ; one of a race that, I am afraid, in England was more common in olden days than at present — yet one which may God increase in our midst and multiply a thousandfold ! — and one which is, perhaps, more often to be found in Eng- land than in any other nation, unless, indeed, I am blinded by national vanity. The man was able to convince everybody, except sometimes himself, that all was right with him. He could prove that he had kept the commandments. He could challenge anybody, as he did the Lord Jesus Christ, "What lack I yet?" He could satisfy every- body except himself. There were times, the knowledge of which he would never have divulged to a single ONE THINQ LACKJNG 87 human being, when he was not perfectly certain that the heaven for which every Jew was striving would really be his eternal possession. And so, when he observed that Christ Jesus, the great Teacher, had gone out of the little house, and had started on the road, evidently intending a long journey, the feeling came into his mind, " Perhaps I have missed an oppor- tunity ; perhaps He could tell me something I could do to make myself, as well as every one else, certain that I am on the road to eternal life." And so, with the impulse of a nature longing for all that was good, he forgot his position, and the appearance that he would present to the crowd of poor people gathered round Jesus of Nazareth ; he ran, and fell at His feet, saying. Good Master, what shall I do to make sure of heaven ? Our Lord asked him about the commandments, " All these," he said, half disappointed, " I have kept from my youth up. What lack I yet .^ " And "Jesus beholding him loved him " ; and He said. You are right ; more right when you are nervous at home than when by loud talking you have convinced yourself as well as the crowd that you are perfect. You are wanting in one point ; one thing thou lackest. Now, let us try if we can (very briefly) see the characteristics of those in our own day who would be represented by this ruler. There are many, probably, here — at least there are in most congregations — poor as well as rich, servants as well as masters. The outward circumstances of the life vary, of course, according to ancestral inheritance, according to the traditions persons have received from their fathers. For we are moulded in our outward habits by the habits of our fathers. That is a solemn thought tor fathers and mothers. I know many a man who never would miss family prayer, almost as a matter of super- 88 A NEW 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS stition, because his father, and his father before him, always had the servants in for family prayer. There is a wonderful power in example, and parents should remember this power. But, I say, the outward cir- cumstances vary very much. We form our standard, and are influenced in it by so many very varying cir- cumstances. So it is impossible for me to draw an accurate sketch, but it is something, you know, of this kind. The type is a person who may be man or woman, rich or poor, old or young. Upon rising in the morning, he would say his prayers, read a verse or two of the Bible, have family prayer, go out, be quite upright and straightforward all the day, come home, say his prayers, go to bed sooner or later. If he is accustomed to it, he will go, perhaps, to weekday service, or only go on Sunday. He may go to Communion in the weekday, or he may only go on the Sunday, or he will go, perhaps, once a week, or once a month, or once a quarter, or only at Christmas and Easter, according to his custom. He may go on a long time with the old outward habits of a good bringing-up : habits cling to us in a wonderful manner ! He is perfectly ready, if anybody is speaking to him about his religion, to turn round almost angrily and say, "What more do you want.'' What can I do more ?" Yet, though such a person can satisfy everybody that he has kept the commandments, he is not at ease. We can look up and thank God that there are these men who keep the commandments, for they are the salt of the country : good, honest, upright men. Thank God for it ! What would the Church be without the money they give, the example they set, the barriers they present against the inroads of immorality on every side ? Thank God that they are numbered by hundreds 1 ONE THINQ LACKJNG 89 of men and women in S. Peter's parish ! May God multiply them a thousandfold ! But, to continue. This kind of person can prove to perfection to every- body except himself that all is right. But, when alone, he is not satisfied ; she is not quite sure — as they read over the obituary in the Times and see one after another just reaching the very height of their ambition, and thence passing out into the Presence of an invisible God — they are not quite sure that the eternal gates will be lifted up, and that they will be for ever and ever with God and with the blessed angels. Then there is an impulse to come out, to fall down at Jesus' feet, to smite on the breast and say, " God be merciful ! Lord, what lack I yet ? Tell me." And the answer to each one from that same Jesus of Nazareth, Who is in our midst to-day, is this : "One thing thou lackest." Christ, Who has created the sense of need ; Christ, Who has awaked your conscience, has stamped with His approval those solitary moments when you are doubtful, whether the past has been a life of progress, and whether the future (if it be a future in eternity) will be a future of joy. That misgiving is from God, and God endorses it. One thing, O noble character, O glorious type of all that has made England what she is — one thing thou lackest ; one thing, differing in every case — for it is not the letter of what our Lord said to that particular man with which we are concerned — one thing, differing in each case : father, mother, brother, sister, in the same family, differing in each case ; one thing. O mother, pattern of mothers ; child, perfectly obedient ; son, whom thy father speaks of with such pride and love : one thing thou lackest ! A poor drunken man once reeled up to old Bishop Wilberforce in S. James's Square, and said, " Bishop, N 90 A NEW 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS how am I to be sure of getting to heaven ? " The bishop looked at him, and said, " Don't you know that ? My mother taught me that as I knelt at her knee in my childhood. My poor friend " — the poor wretched creature under the power of strong drink was reeling at his side — " my poor friend," said the bishop with that calm, quiet face that we remember so well, " turn to the right and go straight on." My brother, take one step to-day. Christ has not altered. When He was upon earth people came to Him and said. What am I to do } He said, This is the first work of God, have confidence in Him Whom God has sent. Believe that Christ is near to you, and speak to Him. Take for granted that He means what He says ; that He is with you this day and to-morrow and the day following. Go on till we meet again in God's house, if we are spared to meet, to carry on the subject, and say, " O my Lord, Thou hast died for me. Show me, so far as I can bear the knowledge, what I lack. What lack I yet .'' " And, secondly, have confidence enough to take for granted that, as Jesus beholding him loved him, so Jesus loves you when He beholds you on your knees, saying, " Lord, I am blind ; open my eyes. Lord, I have not the courage to tell any one. They know I have kept the commandments. But what lack I yet .'' O Lord, if I am dying to-day and about to meet Thee, what lack I yet .'' Lord, show me. Lord, that I may receive my sight ! " "Jesus beholding him loved him." And He loves you, my brother, and He will answer thy prayer ; though 1 may never know it on earth. He will teach you — and He will teach me — " One thing thou lackest." God knows what the one thing is — "One thing!" What is it ^ THE LOANS OF QOD 91 III THE LOANS OF GOD " Then Jesus beholding him loved him^ and said unto him^ One thing thou lackest : go thy ivay^ sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven : and come, take up the cross, and follow Me'' — S. Mark X. 21. YOU remember the picture as it has been drawn for us by the three Evangelists compared together. A young man, earnest, impulsive, in good position in society, with great possessions, utterly regardless of appearance, comes forward and in the middle of the open street or highway falls down at Jesus Christ's feet : saying, Good Master, what shall I do that I may go to heaven ? Our Lord Jesus Christ referred him to that which God had already taught him. You know the com- mandments. He said. He mentioned them. The man spoke back quite honestly. I believe that there was not an atom of hypocrisy in him at that time. I believe he was in the position in which (thank God !) numbers of you are to-day ; who have been living according to your light, who have been trying, so far as you knew how, with many imperfections, of course, to do God's holy will, to carry oat the old Catechism, to serve God truly as far as you had light, to honour your father and mother, and to live an honest life ; not stealing, or lying, or back- biting, or committing what is called open sin. All 92 A NEJV mRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS these, he said, I have kept from my youth. What do I want now, what more ? And then comes one, I think, of the most touching words in the Bible. "Jesus beholding him loved him." And He took the man at his word. He said, There is one thing you want. The Lord knew the idiosyncrasy. He knew, that is, the particular character of the man. He knew his thoughts, as He knows your thoughts and mine. And He knew what was keeping the man back. He knew the step which, once taken, would let in the whole light of heaven upon his past life, so that he would, like the publican, say, " God be merciful to me a sinner." He knew that one step which, taken that day, would let the whole light of the glory of God illumine his being ; so that the man would have gone further forward in a day than, without taking that step, years of Judaical observance would ever have led him. One thing. He said, I ask, or you have asked Me, rather. One thing. I know you, true heart, 1 love you. Now, one thing ; go thy way now, sell whatsoever thou hast ; all of it, no seeking for what may be reserved, but all ! I, your God : I, Whom, at any rate, you look on as a Teacher ; I tell you, go ; whatsoever thou hast, dis- tribute it to the poor. I will not leave you there. I love you. I want you to come with Me. Come, you shall have the very thing you have asked for. But I will not keep you waiting. You are young. You are impulsive. You have not yet the maturity of after life. You have not the patience — I do not ask it of you — to wait. Come now with Me. Take up the cross that I am carrying. Come bravely with Me ; and remember there is no man who has left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My sake, but he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and THE LOANS OF QOD 93 lands, with persecution, as I shall be persecuted. But we shall go up together, as Abraham and Isaac went up to the mount of sacrifice, you and I. I love you, and God, My Father, has drawn you to Me. There is sympathy between us. We will be friends. Come, take it up now. Follow Me. I should spoil the beauty, my brethren, of the narra- tive if I added a human word. Those who have ears to hear will perceive the glory and the beauty of those words of the Incarnate. Never man spoke as He spoke. No man could have spoken such words. The countenance fell. The man was sad at that saying. He went away " very sorrowful," S. Mark says " grieved " ; they mention sadness as if it had made a great impression upon them. He went away sad. He had been fascinated by that Face. Oh, would to God that we could see It, if only our seeing It would make us love Him more ! He went away grieved, but he went. Why was it } Now let us look for a moment at the subject. Let us remind ourselves, first of all, that the Lord Jesus is alive, and that He is with us now. "Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them." May the Blessed Spirit help him who has to preach to grasp this for the few moments in which he is to speak ! The Lord is alive, and the Lord God is the same yesterday and to-day and for ever. The only difference between Christ on earth and Christ now is this : that whereas then He spoke with the human voice, and the disciples knew Him after the flesh, now He speaks to our conscience by the still small voice of His Spirit ; speaks more quietly, requires of us the use of our facul- ties, to make sure that we have not mistaken the voice either for some whisper of Satan or some cry of a heated 94 A NEtV 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS imagination. But He speaks as simply and as clearly now as ever He did when He was upon earth. I see the like continually, my brethren. The voice speaks to people in a church like this ; and for weeks and months they have to consider, and then decide, whether to go away sorrowful, or to obey the voice. 1. We " go away " when we deliberately refuse to hear what we know to be the voice of God. Nobody else may think it is a voice. Nobody may ever know we had the call. If we ask anybody they would simply say, " Non- sense ! " But we know that when we meet God, if there is a God, we shall have to say, "That was a real voice. I watched ; I waited ; I prayed ; and then, after weeks of thought, and the use of the common sense Goo has given me, it was clear that it was His voice." And having that conviction, we go away if we refuse to obey the voice. It may be the merest trifle, or it may be what the world calls a great matter. Very often the turning-point of a life is a trifle, in spiritual things as in earthly things. 2. And also, we go away when we deliberately refuse to face the question ; when we will not look it in the face and say, " Is that voice from God ? " whatever it may be. It may not be the same as what was said to this man. The Lord knows each man's peculiar need, and the voices are difl^erent. But do we put it aside because (nobody knowing, observe, except God) we are afraid that if we follow it out it will lead us to something that we did not intend to do or wish to do ? We may busy ourselves in anything — business, pleasure, or religious work, and philanthropic occupations — so as to get rid of that still, small voice ; and the heart gets hardened, as the Bible says, and the conscience ceases to speak. We think no more of it perhaps till our death-bed, or perhaps not even then ; generally, not then. Yet unless the whole teaching of the Bible is simply a human delusion, that THE LOANS OF QOD 95 thought will meet us, that voice will again sound in our ears, like the echo, of which the sound, it is said, never dies. I do not know anything about that. But one thing is certain : the echo of the voice of the Eternal must be eternal. On and on, through all those long ages, the voice will ever be heard by that young man who went away very sorrowful, because — for the reason we shall see. Now, my brethren, for a moment, having grasped this, look with me at the reasonableness of these words. Let us take a very simple illustration. Suppose one of you lent me a sum of money, a thousand pounds, a hundred pounds, and you say to me, " I gladly lend it to you, but I may be obliged to ask it back from you without any notice. I may have time to give you a little notice, or I may have to ask it back in a moment. I may want it for my own purposes, or I may desire to lend it to some one else." Sup- pose that I thankfully take what you had lent me, and that when you asked it back of me, I refused to give it ; I would not part with it. Your judgement upon me, of course, would be so simple that a child could follow it. You would say, first, that I was ungrateful, for not beino; thankful for having had the loan for so long ; secondly, that clearly I was acting dishonourably to you, for that was the condition on which it was given to me ; thirdly, 1 was not doing my duty to my neighbour, for every hour in which I kept those persons without the money that you intended to lend to them, by barricading my house and not allowing you to come and get it, I was defrauding those people of that which you had a right to lend them. And that was exactly the position of that man ; and it is the position of every one of us who holds back from God. God does not ask us to be always looking at every- 96 A NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS thing and saying, " Perhaps God will take that away to-day." God does not want the wife to be always thinking, " Perhaps He will ask my husband before the night is gone ; perhaps I shall wake up and find him dead by my side, as other wives have done." All that is utterly alien to the freedom and the glorious confidence of the new dispensation. God does not want us to be looking at our children and saying, " And they may die to-day" ; and so rob ourselves of all the joy of their innocent companionship. God does not ask us to be always thinking, " I wonder what is coming," All that is breaking the law of the kingdom which tells us not to look forward ; day by day, sufficient for the day. Nor does God expect us not to feel it when He asks back His loan from us. God does not expect us not to feel ; our Lord Jesus Christ felt all the agony ; the tears rolling down His cheek, weary, heavy laden. " My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me." He expects us to feel. But it is so commonplace that if I did not know in my own life how hard it is to act upon it, I should be ashamed of taking your time in saying it, God has lent life to us. " In a moment," He says, " I may have to ask it back." He gives us health ; in a day He may ask it back, for reasons known to Himself. He gives us money ; He gives us husbands, wives, children, every- thing, in His own abundant goodness. " He openeth His hand and filleth all things living with plenteousness." But, for our education, for His own glory, for number- less reasons that there is no time even to touch upon, every single thing is given on one condition. It is lent by God with the understanding, the honourable under- standing between the creature and the Creator, that it may be asked back at any time ; with or without notice, suddenly or with preparation, as He sees best. THE LOANS OF QOD 97 Well, then, my dear brethren, is it not perfectly obvious, whether it is the young man in the story, or you or I ? We can set our face against Him, and either run away that we may not hear what God says, and say then we do not understand, as the Jews did when they crucified Christ ; or, having heard, we may deliberately put it aside. Is it not obvious that then we are simply acting as the debtor should have acted, if instead of thanking the creditor for generosity in trusting him with all that money for such a long period, he had refused to give it back, and robbed the persons for whom it was intended ? My brethren, 1 know how difficult it is ; as I look back over my own ministerial life ; as I think of those who have come to talk with me, when the voice has spoken ; as I think of those servants, feeling that they could not go to Communion and could not get to church in that situation, and therefore must go out from a home of perfect comfort, not knowing whither they were going ; when I think of that poor woman who came to me in Windmill Street, with her little shop that brought in nothing all the week, and on Sunday brought in enough to keep her in comfort, and, without a word from myself on the subject, said, "I feel I ought to go to church and shut up my shop" ; when I remember that man in the prime of life, one of the most popular men that ever came to this church, whom everybody liked, his business was prospering, bringing in three or four thousand a year, and increasing every year, and the voice came to him, and he said, " I feel there is nothing else to be done but to part with all this at once ; leave me three or four hundred a year, and I must go out and work for God where others will not go ; I am free, I must do it, and sell all that I have." Oh, my brethren, when they came to me, I remember how my heart shrank and sank o 98 A NEW 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS within me ! I thought what it would be, what it would cost, what a trial — the poor woman without bread, or almost worse, kept by charity — the poor thing ! Yet it was not I who told her, but God. She felt sure the voice was from God, and she said, " I must do it, or I shall go back, back, back, in my spiritual life." And all that man's friends saw the influence that he would lose in London ; how, instead of being looked up to as a man whose opinion would be taken in a moment by all the young fellows in London, they would say, " Lost his head ; that S. Peter's ruined him ! " Oh, coward that I was ! Cowards that we all are ! As if my God would ever say to a man, " Give up," without saying, " Thou shalt have treasure " ; as if it were not true that no man leaves house, or friends, or wife, or children for God's sake, but he receives even here a hundredfold ; as if it were not true that, though the tears stream down at first, and it is a dark hour when the child is brought home dead to the mother's arms, God can repay a thousandfold ! Come, take up this cross, my dear brothers and sisters. Which way, from north, or south, or east, or west, is the voice coming ? What is it thou hast to do .'' What is it that thy Lord is asking of thee.'' "Jesus beholding him loved him." You are living according to your light to-day ; but are you ready, ready to face the truth, ready to hear the voice ? Are we living, you and I, with our life, strength, wife, children, everything, as if we did not possess them — though loving them, doing everything we can to make them happy ? Thanking God we are well and strong, thanking God for our intellect, thanking God for our reputation, and an honest name among men — but knowing that, if God will, to-morrow the character may be blasted by slander, that to-morrow the money may be gone, that THE LOANS OF QOD 99 before to-morrow the soul may be asked, the life taken away ? Are we living so that, though heart and flesh may fail, though we may cry with a broken spirit, yet we shall say, " The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the Name of the Lord" ? "Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven." loo A NEJV 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS IV THEY THAT HAVE RICHES " Then Jesus beholding him loved him^ and said unto him^ One thing thou lac\est : go thy way^ sell "whatsoever thou hast^ and give to the poor^ and thou shah have treasure in heaven : and come, tal^ up the cross, and follow Me. And he "Vpas sad at that saying, and went away grieved : for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto His disciples. How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God T' — S. Mark x. 21-23. THE more life-like does every detail of the faces of those two men appear — Jesus of Nazareth and the young ruler — the more solemn does the dark back- ground of the picture come out, as we try to enter further into the meaning of the words which the Blessed Spirit has recorded for our instruction. We are no longer surprised that, looking at the human side of the story, the disciples were so fascinated by it, that every detail, every look of Jesus Christ and of this young ruler, was photographed, as it were, upon their minds. We wonder no longer that God has inspired three out of the four Evangelists to record the history, for we are brought here face to face with almost every problem which has perplexed the wisest and the deepest thinkers ages before the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. That mys- terious problem (which is just as mysterious when the idea of the personal God has been eliminated), why evil, how evil, can exist in the presence of goodness ; why THE2'' THAT HAVE TiJCHES loi evil is permitted at all ; that not less mysterious fact, which no logic can prove, but of which every human being is satisfied, the mystery of man's freedom — all come out here with a distinctness from which it is impossible for us to escape. Here is one whom Jesus Christ loved ; loved in some clear, definite, personal, individualizing manner ; so that the words are emphatically recorded, Jesus, as His eye rested upon him, loved him. Here is one who is fascinated by the perfect love, the unspeakable majesty, of the Incarnate God. Here is one drawn (as we should say) within the circle of His influence, who desires to remain with Him ; who, when the command is given which he cannot or will not obey, is still miserable. The words are so striking when we compare the three Gospels. " His countenance fell," we are told. He became very unhappy. It was written on his face, " Oh, would to God I might stay with you. Master, Teacher, Who lovest me. 1 long for your presence." He was very unhappy. He was sorry to go. He longed to remain in that bright circle of Jesus Christ's disciples. He longed for the courage to leave behind, as James and John and Peter had done, the home and the nets, and the father, the lands, everything. He longed to stay. He was sorry to go. And yet he went away. He was grieved, but he went. Now, first of all, let us be on our guard. Whatever else we lose to-day, let us not lose the teaching of the chapter by listening to any of the subtle whispers of Satan. Let us not escape from it, as if Christ Who lived then is not the same Christ Who is alive to-day, and present wherever two or three are gathered in His Name. Let us not escape from it by imagining that we have not got great possessions, and therefore that the teaching does not wholly apply to us. The more I02 A NEW 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS thoughtful among you, as you reflect afterwards on the passage, will see that while, for the sake of distinctness and brevity, I have to confine myself to the actual words of the narrative, to the " possessions " or money ; although all that is said would apply equally well if, instead of riches, we put bodily vigour, mental force, a great reputation, or an untarnished name. Whatever we possess, whatever God has given us, whatever blessing we enjoy, is held just on the same terms as our money. Everything that Jesus said to this man here about his riches would equally apply to us, with reference to any possession ; husband, wife, children, home, anything. Whatever we possess, whatever we have, the condition of having is losing ; the condition of living is dying. If in this new kingdom to which you and I belong — God has said it, and the words are eternal — if a man chooses to keep he loses, if a man will save his life it is lost. The illustration Jesus Christ has given is so simple. He said that every single thing we possess we must deal with just on one condition. You take a corn of wheat and put it into the ground : and the condition of that corn of wheat being any real use to you is, that you will part with it, put it out of sight, bury it, trust God with it while it becomes black and discoloured and to all outward seeming is gone. So with character, reputation, home, wife, children, everything. Unless we are regard- ing them day by day in the spirit of the Communion Office, " Here we off^er . . . ourselves, our souls, and bodies," they are practically no use to us so far as eternity goes. We are keeping with our will outside of the first elementary principle of the new dispen- sation. That is perfectly clear. Then, secondly, let us bear in mind that everything in this world is relative. If there be in the church to-day any of those poor old women for whom your alms r//£r THAT HAVE RICHES 103 provide a fixed income, so that (having been respectable all their life) by the organization of our Parochial Council of Charity we give them so much every week, that they may have no anxiety for the future : those persons are relatively rich. There is not a servant who comes to this church who, compared to hundreds with whom I have had to deal myself as pastor of poor parishes, is not rich. They have bread to eat, clothes to wear, a home in which to live. They have no anxiety about to-morrow morning. There will be bread for them, and a home. Therefore, my brethren, keep those two cautions clearly before you. The Lord Who spoke is alive now. To every human being, preacher and people, old and young, masters and servants, rich and poor He speaks (for He is unchangeable), as He spoke on that way up to Jerusalem to this young man kneeling at His feet. " One thing ; sell all." He went away grieved, for he had great possessions. The greater our possessions, the greater our difficulty in parting with them and obeying the law of the kingdom. But Christ, Who is the same, speaks to each one this morning. To every human soul there is the same great difficulty. We long to stay. Yet, O God, Thou knowest how hard it is to say, " I offer myself ; I sell this morning all that I have. Nothing in my hand I bring. Just as I am, I come to Thee." Having thus cleared the way, a very few words will be sufficient. I observe then, first, that this is a hard saying. And I observe, secondly, that it is so simple as to be almost a commonplace. In the light of the rest of the Bible, it is a hard saying. It would not be true to speak as if great riches were not a blessing given by God. The Bible tells us they are ; not merely for the comfort that they bring I04 A NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS to us, but for the glorious opportunities that they bestow upon us of doing good to others. It is not necessary to enter into detail. Our common instincts, the instincts God Almighty has given us, tell us that it is a blessing to be well oiF, to have sufficient means to enable us and our children to have every advantage in this life. I am only just reminding you, without dwelling on details, that riches are a blessing from Almighty God. And it seems so difficult to be told here by God Himself that those very possessions, that very comfort, that very store of health and vigour and intellect, and all that we covet, and naturally covet, are, as a matter of fact, made every day by Satan hindrances in entering the kingdom. We look back upon this man, and we see as a matter of history that he did not enter into the kingdom. He had the opportunity of following Jesus. He had the opportunity of becoming a disciple, of being baptized, of being put into a state of salvation, of joining the army who, in the Acts of the Apostles, went forth and shook the earth to its very foundation ; and, as a matter of history, the man did not enter into that kingdom. We have nothing to do with his state in the other world. God takes him and does what is right with him, as He does with the heathen. We have nothing to do with anything more than what God has told us in these few verses ; that the man lost that opportunity which we now covet every time we say the Te Deum : he would not be rewarded with the saints ; did not join the noble army of martyrs ; nor was one of the glorious company of the Apostles. He went back from Christ, and lost the position which, as a matter of history, S. Peter and S. James and S. John gained. He rejected the offer that was made to him. God offered him Christianity in place of Judaism. Then was offered to him salvation, then was offered to him companionship THET THAT HAVE RICHES 105 with Jesus Christ ; and he put it all aside. It seems so difficult for us to realize that the very man of all others who seemed to have been most blessed by God should be the one whose history is here recorded for our warning. It seems so hard. We are not surprised to read (as we do in the subsequent verses) that the disciples were astonished. It is repeated that " they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved." If a man with money, a man who can get a good seat and pay for it in a church, a man who can do what he likes, who can build a private chapel, and have a chaplain all to himself, a man who has the power of getting every single thing in heaven and earth that money will buy — if that man cannot get salvation, who in the name of heaven can be saved ? Is the astonishment not natural .? Is there not a stamp of truth upon the whole story ? " Who then can be saved ? " And our Lord looked round, and said to His disciples — and then comes that wonderful word, " Verily," which has such a deep meaning — He looked round and said. It is hard, but that which is impossible with men is possible with God. And He looked at the man very much as He might have looked at a poor paralytic if the question had been asked, " Can that man walk ? " And Jesus said, That which is impossible with men is possible with God. That was the only answer He gave. It is the greatest difficulty on earth. " How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God ! " And yet, secondly, I observe, my brethren, that the answer is so simple that it is a mere commonplace, if I may use the word with reverence. Just consider with me for a moment the facts of life. Is it or is it not true, that when we are perfectly comfortable in this p io6 A ISIEW 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS life, with a wife loving us, children who delight us, no need to desire anything on earth that we cannot obtain, good health, able to enjoy our amusements, getting on well in business, with an unblemished name, a fair reputation, good ability, rejoicing in all the beautiful brightness and sunshine of life — is it not a mere commonplace that this state tends to make us satisfied with the life that we now possess ? Does not the Bible tell us, that just as when Jesus came on earth those Israelites followed Him who were not satisfied with this life, who were hungering and thirsting for something more, so, on the other hand, those who had got every- thing to make them contented here, who had received, as He expresses it, their consolation, who were comfort- able, who were happy, and did not want anything else, went away instead of coming after Jesus of Nazareth ? Is it not, my dear brethren, a matter of simple common sense, that the Bible tells us that now the same Lord God is gathering out of this great world a little company who long for something more than earth, whom nothing here can satisfy, who feel that they are only strangers and pilgrims here, who are always longing for something higher and better in the glorious kingdom above — is it not a simple matter of common sense that those who are bankrupt of fortune, bankrupt of reputation, bankrupt of health, those who are miser- able, poor, not having a place where to lay their head (as the result of a mere natural law), are more likely to be longing for Jesus to help them ? They have failed in their own strength, and are longing for a wise God to guide them ; they have made such miserable mistakes in their own past life, they desire some place, instead of the cold shivering nakedness of the wayside hedge, instead of the degradation of the common lodging-house, where they shall sit down with THET THAT HAVE RICHES 107 Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of God. Is not the mere force of circumstances in which they live — provided the two are perfectly equal — certain to make the man who is miserable more ready to look for something beyond this life than the one who is happy, and who, therefore, by the mere force of circumstances, will gravitate to earth ? Is it not so ? Must it not be so, that the more we possess, the less we want to part with it ; the more we have got to make us contented here, the less likely we are to be crying, " O God, come back in Thy glory ; O Father, make me ready for the kingdom of heaven " ? " Eyes that the preacher's art in vain hath schooled, By wayside graves are raised ; And lips cry, * God be merciful,' That ne'er said, ' God be praised.' " When we have lost our all, whatever it be, we are driven to God. How difficult for those who have great possessions to enter into the kingdom of God ! My dear brethren, I wish not to say one word more than the Master, Whose words at least I try to teach, has spoken. The mystery of the passage before us oppresses the soul. The love of the Lord Jesus Christ seems shining out this morning as I speak — beholding you, loving you, knowing that you are put in a position which He recognizes as full of difficulty ; I see some of you with such perfect characters, such unblemished reputations — thank God for it ! — all of you with many comforts, com- paratively few unable to write down your names in that census without any great heart agony. You are contented, long may you be so ; in one sense happy, long may you continue so ! In one sense ! and yet He Who loves you, He Who died for you. He on Whose Passion we are io8 A NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS about to gaze, says to you, my own dear people, beloved in God, that you are in the greatest danger. I am ; I have confessed it. You are. All of us are. How difficult for those who have possessions to become as little children, to sell all, to make sacrifices, instead of waiting till God has taken them from us ! How hardly ! And yet, surely, surely, that which is impossible with man is possible with God. If only this young man had had the strength to remain a little longer with Jesus Christ, if only he had had the courage to stay a little — this event happened about a Tuesday or Wednesday — probably if he had only stayed till a Friday, he would have seen Jesus open the blind man's eyes as He went up to Jerusalem ; if he had stayed a little longer he would have heard at Bethany, when they spoke with Martha and Mary and Lazarus, of the wonderful resurrection that had been wrought by the Incarnate Lord ; if he had only waited over the next Sunday, then he would have gone on to watch all the Agony and bloody Sweat, the Cross and Passion, and to see the glorious Easter ; and in the forty days he would have cast in his lot with Jesus, And now for us there is light, and now there is joy, and now there are the prayers of Christendom rising, if only we will be strong. Make up your minds on your knees, my dear brethren, this day. You have wandered often, I doubt not, on some quiet night, by the shores of a sleeping sea. You know those nights with which we are so familiar in this our England ; a night halt dark, half light, with bright moonbeams and passing clouds. Look on the surface of that quiet sea. Do you see it ? Do you see that path of light : the moon's bright beams reflected on its glassy surface, calm, still ? Look at it quietly. The one side, the dark shadow and the lowering cloud ; the other, darkness : dark, light. THET THAT HAVE RICHES 109 dark. Out from that darkness comes that little vessel. For a moment you watch it, all irradiated in the light ; every sail, every rope, every tiny bit of that vessel, all bright in the moonlight. You watch it. It is a picture, my brother, of thyself. Thou hast come out of darkness into light. Thou art now in the presence of Him Who is the Light : Christ, the Light of the world. Watch that vessel. Will it remain ? Will it drop anchor and abide for ever in the light, till the moonbeams pass away and the glorious sun shineth everywhere ? Or will it pass out of the light ? Which shall it be ? This young ruler was in the light, and he passed out into the deep, deep darkness. Will you, shall I, in the light to-day, be known for eternity as the man, the woman, the child, that once was in light ; and Jesus beholding us loved us, and Jesus said, " One thing, one thing thou lackest " ? O God, will it be said of any of us on that day. He was in the light, and he went out into the darkness ; very sorry to go, very grieved ; but he went away ? God grant it may not be so, for him who preaches, for you who hear, for Jesus Christ's sake ! no A NEW mRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS V THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT " fVith fVhom is no variableness^ neither shadow of turning^ — S. James i. 17. TO the subject of the Person and work of God the Holy Ghost, the third Person of the Blessed Trinity, our thoughts are led by all the Gospels of the later Sundays after Easter ; and to consider it is the natural preparation for the great Whitsuntide festival. Yet a little while, and the first manifestation of the Holy Spirit will be commemorated amongst us ; yet a little while, and we shall hear, as it were, the echo of that rushing, mighty wind, and see again in our midst the tongues of fire, and hear the promise of the Eternal God as to the new grace and strength that is for ever, until the return of Jesus Christ, pledged to His Church. By way of preparation, let us endeavour, depending upon the help of that Blessed Spirit, to realize to some extent what a tremendous difference was made in the position ot the world by that revelation of the third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. Few, comparatively, study their Bibles with sufficient intelligence to observe the different revelations which God has vouchsafed to mankind. It is a word with which we are familiar, taken from one of the Epistles, that this is the " last dispensation." Let us dwell for a moment THE DISTENSATION OF THE SPIRIT 1 1 1 upon the meaning of that word dispensation, or dispensing. The word, in the Greek, brings before us the idea of the ruler of the household, the man to whom is entrusted the ordering and arranging — whether the arrangement be made directly or indirectly ; by his own direct interven- tion or through the instrumentality of others — the agent to whom is entrusted the ordering and guiding and ruling of the household. Or, to take a parallel word in the old Anglo-Saxon, bringing out with still more beauty the position of our Divine Dispenser, he is the " loaf-giver " — the giver-out of the portion of bread, the necessary food that is required for each member of the household ; or, to use the Bible language, the one who gives to each " his portion of meat in due season." We know that with the Ever-blessed and Glorious Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, there " is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." God is " the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever." " From everlasting to everlasting Thou art God." " Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made " : there, with- out the shadow of a change, was that Ever-blessed Trinity. When this world, with all its changing caprices, its ever-varying fashions, its miserable, impotent pride, attempting to scale the very mountains, and to stand on an equality of thought with the great Creator of the universe — when all this world shall have shrivelled into nothingness, and the new heavens and the new earth shall have been called into being by the word of the Omnipotent God, He, that Creator and Destroyer of the universe, will still remain the same, unchanged and unchanorinor. But just as a wise parent, watching the growing capacity of his children, gives out to them, as they are able to receive it — line upon line, precept upon precept 112 A NEW 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS — the knowledge which he himself has acquired, it may be, through a long lifetime ; so the Eternal Father — not indeed having had need to acquire knowledge, but possessing in Himself the fullness of wisdom and know- ledge — has been pleased to look upon the world in its completeness as an individual, and to give out to this child of His creation its portion of meat in due season. He has been pleased to reveal to humanity, as they seemed able to receive it, one portion after another of the eternal truth. So we find — without entering now into subtle divisions of Old Testament history — at least three divisions of God's dealings with men. There is the revelation of God the Father. There is the manifestation of the Incarnate One, the Lord Jesus Christ. And there is the dispensation of the Spirit, of God the Holy Ghost. Looking back for a moment into the old story of Genesis and Exodus and the succeeding books, you see God revealing to the Church in the earlier ages of the patriarchal times, the intense personal love with which the great Heart of the Creator is filled towards His weak and tempted children. You find Him condescending to call a man " His friend." You see Him taking a tender personal interest in a wretched, deceiving, shuffling man like Jacob, watching him year after year, giving to him sufficient trial to burn out the dross, that the fine gold might be manifested in all its clearness ; and yet amid all the chastisements, amid all those dreary years of banish- ment from his father's house, amid all the upbraidings of his conscience, for ever bringing back to him the sins of earlier life, there is manifested the intense love of God the Father towards him. We see that love on the first night, when the poor boy (as he must have appeared to the angels, whatever might be his age computed by the THE DISTENSATION OF THE SPIRIT 113 earthly standard, went out from home, friendless, guilty — remorse behind and the dark, blank future before him — even then not waiting till the man had proved the reality of his repentance, not waiting till by some great act of superhuman devotion he had called down the Almighty compassion ; but taking him as he was, in his weakness, in his wretchedness and defilement, God vouchsafed unto him one of the most glorious visions with which the Old Testament pages are filled. He saw the ladder, and the Eternal God, and the angels ascending with his poor prayers, as he was struggling to plead out of a wandering mind and a weak and tempted spirit. There was the ladder, and the angels going up with the prayers of the wanderer, bringing down the answer of mercy from the High and Lofty One Who inhabiteth eternity. And so on, all through his life, blessing mingled with chastisement. The love of the Eternal Father was revealed at every turn of his changing life. And then, when the love of God had been taught to mankind, taught to the Church that she might reveal it to humanity, then came another and a yet sterner discipline. Amid the thunders of Sinai, and the mountain that burned with fire, and the crowd kept back and for- bidden to touch the base of that hill whereon the Presence of God was revealed, men were taught for the first time the utter unreality of the fashionable theology of modern days. They were taught by anticipation the utter nothingness of that " emasculated form of religion " — that degradation of the Godhead — which lowers it even beneath the level of a good and a holy man. On that mountain the Church of God, and through the Church humanity, was taught that God is ho/y. " Holy, holy, holy. Lord God Almighty, Which was, and is, and is to come." The fullness of the revelation Q 114 A NEW mRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS that those words convey was not yet vouchsafed. But the keynote was given : Your God is not merely a God of love ; He is a holy God, and will in no wise clear the guilty. And so, through the long history of the teaching of the law, through that hard discipline by which the offender was stoned, and the adulterer not allowed to live, God taught men that the /aw must be respected, that God would bring every secret thought into judge- ment, that, sooner or later, that sentence which is the epitome of the law, must have its fulfilment : — " Be sure " — be sure, whatever your own deceitful heart may tell you, whatever the world may whisper — " be sure your sin," that sin which is hidden from all the world, " will find you out." Then, after a while, through long preparation of seers and prophets, the way was made ready for the revelation of the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ. He came on earth, very Man, of the substance of the Virgin Mary, His Mother, full of all the tenderest sympathy, knowing what it was to hunger and to thirst, knowing what it was to be so tired that when they took Him into the little boat on the Sea of Galilee, He fell asleep from pure human weariness : very Man, entering into all the sorrows of a suffering humanity, agonizing in Gethsemane, crying on Calvary with a loud voice, " My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me .''" The Lord Jesus Christ, in the verity of His human nature, came on earth to be for ever mani- fested as the Example of a purer morality than the world had ever known, to be the Guide of men in the ascent of the everlasting hills, to make men know something at any rate of the character of the God with Whom they had to live for all eternity. And He came — thank God, that foundation truth has been preached over and over again THE DISTENSATION OF THE SPIRIT 115 in this church — He came to be wounded for our trans- gressions, to be bruised for our iniquities, to take the whole guilt of the world upon Himself, that His Blood shed on Calvary might cleanse us from all sin. And then, after that death on the Cross, He rose again, and ascended into heaven, there to be for ever at the right hand of the Father, making intercession for us. Such was the revelation — for I can only remind you of the old familiar truths — such was the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Now comes a point which is often forgotten. Many, even of those who are to a certain extent students of their Bibles, have lost altogether the deep significance of those portions of Scripture which our Church has chosen for these later Sundays after Easter. If you look through our Lord's last conversation with His disciples — nay, even if you take such a passage as that about the well of water springing up into everlasting life — you will see how continually the Lord Jesus Christ told His dis- ciples that all the wonderful miracles which they had beheld, all the marvellous exhibitions of supernatural power, the healing of the sick, and the cleansing ot the lepers, and the raising of the dead, were as nothing com- pared to the Divine manifestations which were reserved for the coming dispensation. The Divine Householder had given out the revelation of a holy and loving Father in the Old Testament, the revelation of the GoD-Man in the Gospels had yet a greater wonder to reveal to the expectant Church, after those ten days of quiet preparation. Oh, would to God that the Church now could realize the secret of her power ! not by might, nor by power, but by the preparation for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the preparation by which Pentecost was heralded. Those ten days in which the few poor ii6 A NEM^ "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS people met together in the upper room at Jerusalem, those days of prayer prepared the way for the revelation of the third and last manifestation, the manifestation of God the Holy Ghost. In that dispensation we live, separated off from the disciples who were the companions of Jesus Christ ; separated off by a great gulf from S. John the Baptist, and all who were baptized into his community ; separated still further from the patriarchs and prophets and kings of the older dispensation, any one of whom, we are told, would gladly have torn off his purple robe, and cast his royal crown to the ground, if he had been allowed to know one sentence of the Cate- chism that is taught to the children in our schools. " I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life." Let us for a few moments try to grasp something of the position that we now occupy in these latter days. What are our privileges ? Let us calmly count them one by one. May God the Blessed Spirit give such power and wisdom to the words spoken, that to many a heart in this church these privileges, from this day, may be part of their conscious possession. First of all, we are perfectly certain that if we are trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, on account of that complete Sacrifice which He has offered — that life of perfect obedience, and that atoning death — the whole of our sin, so far as guilt is concerned, is buried. The promise has been fulfilled for us, the promise of the Old Testament prophets, " I will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea." This, says the Apostle, is the new covenant, this is the distin- guishing characteristic of the latter dispensation— "their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more" — a complete absolution through Jesus Christ the Lord. THE DISTENSATION OF THE SPIRIT 117 Then we have the certain knowledge that the Son of God, very God, is living to make intercession for us ; that, however our thoughts may wander, how- ever poor and imperfect may be our supplications, if we cast them upon the Lord Jesus Christ, He assuredly presents them, making them perfect by His all-prevailing intercession. Just as some poor blun- dering simpleton will go to a learned lawyer, and will explain to him in stammering provincial accents, the difficulties in which he is involved, hardly able even to explain what he means with sufficient distinctness for the acute mind of his advocate, and then, having committed his cause to that trained intellect, returns home with calm confidence. He believes that all the subtleties of his neighbours who are perpetually annoy- ing and irritating him shall be henceforth powerless with him, because his cause is committed to one in whom he has confidence. So are we confident : confident, 1 say, because the central truths of Christianity are abso- lutely certain. The fringe, the outside truths, I grant you, may be argued about for ever ; but the central truths, of which I am speaking to-day, are as certain as anything on earth can be certain ; more so, for they are based upon the Word of the Living God. Again, when we are tortured by anxieties for our- selves, for those whom we love, for the great Church of God, Satan hinders us, it may be, with a thousand wandering thoughts, preventing us from praying any prayer that gives us the slightest comfort or the least portion of satisfaction ; yet we come and we tell it to the Lord Jesus Christ. Just as, in the olden days, the High Priest within the veil was hidden from the sight of the congregation, and they lay all silent without, waiting till the work of intercession was com- pleted, so is it with our great High Priest. Our ii8 A NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS words — feeble, poorer than the words of the veriest clown when listened to in the presence-chamber of heaven — our poor stammering words are not despised by that Divine Elder Brother. He bears them on His Heart, the great Advocate Who ever lives to make intercession for us. And so we have that cer- tainty, that whatever we need we can commit to Him with the unbounded confidence of men who are reposing upon the Everlasting God. Further, we are partakers of a privilege which was only enjoyed in a very limited sense by the Jew, in the fact of being joined together with all our fellow- Christians in one communion and fellowship of God's Holy Catholic Church. There is something depressing in fighting a battle always alone. There is something that crushes the spirit in seeing the great world, with all its time-honoured customs and with all its prestige, arrayed against you ; to feel, " Who am I, that I can stand against that mighty army ?" But we know — -as the weakest child in this church has the right to know — that we are part of a Body, that we are linked, by God's eternal counsels, with all the saints and martyrs and confessors gathered out of every age and every land ; with that lion-hearted bishop who has gone forth to Africa, with those who are doing the Lord's work in India, with the spirits and souls of the righteous whom God has gathered into Paradise. When we remember that these are all one with us, there comes into the heart of a man — if only he has the grace given him to look above this lower earth — an over- powering sense of the grandeur of his position and the dignity of belonging to the Church of Christ. The knowledge of that exalted position raises us above many a petty care, and above many a degrading temptation. The cares are felt, the iron eats into THE DISTENSATION OF THE SPIRIT 119 the soul ; but the spirit, the higher part of the man, has communion with the great and the good of every age and every land. When the battle seems to be going against the Church in Britain, we read of the victories that she is winning in wellnigh every quarter of the globe, and we thank God and take courage. And all this is the gift of this last dispensation. For the Jew, though he had a Church, was at best but a member of an isolated nation shut up in that little land of Palestine, almost separated off from every onward movement of the great world in which he lived. Whereas we, in these latter days, by the very large- ness, the catholicity of the Church, have sympathy with every movement that is good and true and holy, and according to the mind of God, and worthy of the dignity of humanity. It matters not whether good come from the Conservative or the Liberal side of the House, the Church's arms are open to receive it, the Church's heart beats true, with quick sympathy for everything that is good, for everything that will elevate mankind. And that is not all. Not merely are we linked one with another, not merely have we a God to pray for us, not merely have we the certainty that if we believe in Christ we are washed from our sins in His Blood ; but by God's own regenerating act, by the Word of God, according to His own Divine will, we have been baptized into the Trinity, into the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, made members of Christ, and children of God, and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. Have you ever thought what these words mean : baptized into, covered, as it were, with the ever-glorious Trinity, baptized into the Father, into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost ? O mystery of mysteries ! would that the grand I20 A NEIV "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS intellects that God has given to England in this age were more brought to bear on these great verities of the Faith ! How much is involved of supernatural power, of untiring energy, of all-conquering might, in that one formula which is pronounced over the little child, baptized into the Father, into the Son, into the Holy Ghost ! Again, that is not all. Not merely are we baptized into God, but we are fed with God's own Divine life. We are made partakers, we are told — and you cannot rob these words of their meaning — we are made partakers of the Divine nature. God is pleased to communicate to the weakest and most trembling believer who kneels at that Table — simply trusting in the word of the Lord Jesus Christ Who brake the bread, and poured out the wine, and said, " Take, eat : this is My Body ; drink this, for this is My Blood." God has covenanted to give to that poor, weak child, kneeling there at his first Communion — What ? Words fail, my brethren, words fail to define that stupendous Gift which is contained in those words, " The Body — the Blood — of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life." The gift of the new dispensation, the Pentecostal blessing, is the indwelhng of God, the indwelling of God the Holy Ghost. He lives in you, dwells in you. Your body, saith God, is the temple of the Holy Ghost, Who dwelleth in you. Oh, it is that which makes a certain class of sin so awful ! The body — the temple of the Holy Ghost, Who dwelleth in us ! You are not your own ; you are bought with a price ; therefore glorify God in your body, and come out from the unclean crowd and be separate. Let me be to you, saith God, what I will to be, a Father Almighty. THE DISTENSATION OF THE SPIRIT 121 In the natural world of God's creation, when electricity was discovered, it was a wondrous gift and revelation, that men could communicate their thoughts to those far distant, in a moment, as it were, of time. Something like that wondrous transformation was the change that was effected when the great Dispenser of all grace, when the Eternal God was pleased to reveal the third Person of the Blessed Trinity, when God came to live in us, to take possession of us. Men had seen a possessed soul ; they had seen devils taking for a time possession of men, and dragging them down to perdition. They had seen the awful power of that invisible kingdom of darkness. But what is it, that you and I are possessed by God .'' It is that when you have to speak, it is not ye, saith Christ, who speak, but the Spirit that speaketh in you and through you. It is that when you have to say with stammering lips, " I do not think it is right," and you are laughed at, and you feel that you have blundered over it, and done more harm than good, God will take that word and, if He sees fit, all unknown to you, make it an arrow piercing through and through into the heart of the man who has laughed at you. Any clergyman can tell you of instance after instance where a silly, weak person, just saying, " It is right," or " It is wrong," or " I think I ought not so to do it ; I am afraid I cannot do it," has been made such a power, because he was possessed by God, that though the enemy had come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord God had raised up a banner against it, and it was powerless. Now, the position of Britain at present — it is a commonplace to say it — is a most critical one ; and I think that many of the books that we read, and the sermons to which we listen have oft-times a tendency to be one-sided. Either the glorious results that have been 122 A NEW 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS accomplished are exaggerated, or the dangers are so magnified, as almost by the perpetual dwelling upon them, to hasten their accomplishment and realization. It appears to me that at present there is, on the one hand, an amount of spiritual activity, a deepening of the spiritual life, a real honest desire on the part of a number of lay people, to do their best, according to their light, to fulfil the will of God in the land. Of course, if through the carelessness and sluggishness of the Church, men grow up not knowing what is meant by a Church, or by Holy Baptism, or the Holy Eucharist, it is not natural to expect that they should at once embrace all that God has revealed in His love to those who are every year being confirmed amongst us. But, according to the light that God has given them, no one looking impartially at the world around him can fail to acknow- ledge that there are numbers trying to do their best as good, honest Englishmen. And more than that, unknown to the world, unknown even to the congre- gations that muster in our churches, there are little bands meeting together day after day — there are hun- dreds of souls in the quiet of their own chamber — praying to God : "Remember not, O Lord, the in- iquities of our forefathers ; spare our country ; raise up Thy power and come among us." I speak that which I know, and I am bearing witness to that which I have seen. And yet, on the other hand, it is simply ridiculous to ignore the signs of danger with which we are every- where surrounded. Of course, numbers have not time to read history. Numbers are occupied in different ways, so that it is impossible for them to gather that teaching which God gives us in the experience of the past. But any man, who is familiar even with the alphabet of history, is aware that there are around us THE DISTENSATION OF THE SPIRIT 123 now just the outward signs by which the downfall of some of the mightiest empires in the world has been heralded. The Roman poet will tell you that when the home life was losing its purity, that country was tottering to its fall. Every wise philosopher of the olden time would have taught you that all the luxury and increase of money by which we are encompassed are just (unless they are jealously watched) the harbingers of a nation's ruin. Here are these two forces. The country — thank God, we have seen it on several marked occasions — the country is still loyal and true, true to God and true to its sovereign. And on the other hand, impurity, and dishonesty, and adulteration in trade, and a wretched servile imitation of the class immediately above, and a reckless extravagance, and a miserable habit of living upon money that belongs to the tradesmen whose debts have never been paid — all these most wretched signs of a degraded empire are around us. Now, what is the practical lesson to be learned ? It is this : the tremendous importance of each individual man and woman who has been baptized into the Body of Christ. If it be true that we live in this latter dispen- sation, if all the glorious privileges of which I have spoken are ours (and if we believe in the Bible we know that they are ours) ; if we are aided by the Holy Spirit in us so that any petition that we offer is sure to be accomplished in God's own time and in God's own way, should it be really for our good and the welfare of His Church ; if it be true that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost, and that we are thus possessed by the Living Spirit, then, I say, what a tremendous influence each Christian man and woman and child can exercise on the future of the country ! 1 am not speaking of those whom God has set like a city on a hill, whose light 124 A NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS cannot be hidden ; I am only speaking of the poorest and the weakest who are brave enough not to give up themselves to evil, who will not yield to the spirit of extravagance, who will not be dragged by the world wherever it wills, and who will in God's strength dare to stand alone. I am speaking simply of those who will really try to be true to the leading of God the Holy Ghost. Now see the tremendous power they have. How little those last ten men in Sodom thought that the whole city depended on them ! — that one man, perhaps, if he had been true (ten instead of nine), would have saved his country. There was one man there, perhaps, whoever it was, who might have saved his country if he had been true. How little that poor slave thought that she would be the means of the salvation of Naaman, and the carrying of the teaching of God into that Syrian land ! How little those fisher- men thought, that by simply obeying the call, " Follow Me," they were to shake the world to its foundation ! How little S. Peter thought that by just saying his prayers in the middle of the day, when other people went to sleep in those hot countries, he would receive the vision which would enable him to open the door of the Gospel to the Gentiles, so that in the ever-widening circles its sound has gone forth throughout all the earth ! How little conception has any one of the mighty import that attaches to his truth, his trust, his GoD-fearing Christian living, his progress, his life of dependence on the Holy Spirit ! No one knows these things, brethren, but God. If you love this old fatherland, if you believe that it is a critical time, then let the practical effect be, that you reconsider your life. Now, at the beginning of this season, ask yourselves, " Am I really obliged to spend that money which so-and-so spends ? Am I really THE DISTENSATION OF THE SPIRIT 125 obliged to read that book because others read it ? Can I not, even if I am obliged to go to that place of amusement where everything that is immoral abounds, if I am obliged by my duty to those whom God has set over me to go, can I not at least bear witness for my Christ by saying, " I do not wish to go " ? (That is a witness.) Can you not ? Is there one who has not the power to do that ? Oh, men and brethren, for the sake of England, for the sake of the children that shall come after us, for the sake of the God Who became incarnate and died on Calvary, I beseech you, believe that you are indeed possessed with the Holy Ghost, that there is a power in your prayers, that there is a power in the stammering words at which the world will sneer, that there is a power in your refusing to do what others do, and to live as others live around you ! Believe that you may live the very highest life which God has revealed to you. I am not preaching any narrow isolation. I am speaking with the fullest sympathy with all that is joyous, and pure, and beautiful in life ; I am not grudging the man his sports, or the young girl her harmless amuse- ments. Thank God that they have them ! Long may they live to enjoy them ! But 1 am bearing witness for the glorious might of every individual man and woman who is baptized into the Holy Trinity, who has been made a partaker of the Divine nature, who has God within him, to be not a cypher, but a power for good in the great progress of humanity. Sons and daughters of Great Britain, arise ! Look round your homes — I am not sent to judge, but to speak and to help you to know Him Who came to save you — look round on your homes, look round on the money that has been spent in the past, look round on the money you intend to spend in these coming months, look round 126 A NEW 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS upon the great Church of God ! Hear the voice of the Incarnate One, as He stood on that hill-side of Olivet, and pray Him to give you courage ; that He may never have to say of Great Britain through your fault. If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in that thy day ! THE VOICE OF THE SPIRIT 127 VI THE VOICE OF THE SPIRIT " That "tpas not first which is spiritual^ but that vohich is natural ; and afterward that which is spiritual^ — i Cor. XV. 46. WE know, I trust, that God the Holy Ghost is a Person, separate from the Father and the Son, conscious of separate Being, though of the same substance with the Father and the Son ; a living Person, as truly as the Father lives and the Son lives. And we have traced the progressive revelation of the three Persons. The Blessed Trinity, of course, was ever the same, three in One, and one in Three, " most ancient of all mysteries." But the revelation to man of this threefold personality has been gradual ; first the Father, then the Son, then the Holy Ghost. And our position in the last dis- pensation has been, I trust, clearly defined. Not merely have we entered into the possession of all that the people of God enjoyed under the old Covenant, not merely have we inherited all the high privileges of those who touched the hands and listened to the very voice of the Incarnate God ; you and I have advanced a step higher on the way up to the everlasting hills, for no virtue of our own. It is not our doing, any more than it is any credit to have been born in an age when the electric telegraph and all the mighty machineries of science have been manifested in the natural world. God, Who loved our fathers just as much as He loves us, has been pleased to ordain that, 128 A NEJV 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS while they were born under the old Covenant or in the days of Christ's personal ministry, we of this latter dis- pensation shall have been made partakers of something far more glorious and Divine than the mind of man in the olden days had ever been able to conceive. " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man to conceive, the things that God hath pre- pared for them that love Him," but observe, the text is often misquoted — but God has revealed them to us by the Holy Ghost. We have been made partakers of the Divine nature ; we have been baptized into the Trinity, into it; our life hidden with Christ in the God- head ; the black, hard stone of our fallen nature covered with the rising tide of the Divine influence of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, so that in God we live and move and have our being. In us God the Holy Ghost dwells as a living Person, the most tender, sympathizing Friend, able to make allowance for all our weakness, able to supply our manifold defects, able and most willing to correct our manifold faults. Yes ! God the Holy Ghost is living in you and in me, to suggest, to hasten, to restrain, to purify, to strengthen, to lift up into the society of the very angels our inner man, our immortal spirit, the highest part of our being. Dwelling in that centre, from the spirit of the man He influences the soul and the body in like manner ; dwelling in that inmost citadel. He sends forth illumination into the mind, purity and fervour into the affections ; and He will not stay His glorious work till the last promise has been fulfilled, and the very mortal bodies have been quickened by the power of the same Holy Spirit that raised up Christ from the dead in that new body of His resurrection life. And so it comes to pass as a simple commonplace in THS voice OF THE SPIRIT 129 the Christian covenant, that every command of our God can be fulfilled ; because it is God, Who gave the com- mand, that is working in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure. Everything that the Bible describes as the normal life of the regenerate soul is within our reach, partially on earth, to a greater extent probably in Paradise, perfectly in the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth, as its natural habitation, the Divine righteousness. Peace and joy, love to God and man, holy affection, Christian liberty, wisdom to know God, understanding to recognize and apply the principles of the eternal king- dom ; in the idlest child that has wasted its life up to this year, in the weakest member of this congregation, each and all of these can be developed in God's own time and in God's own way, because God hath so willed, because God hath so promised. We have seen, further, that the only requisites on our part are : — First, not to be satisfied with the dictum of any preacher, but that from God's own Word, with the help of our concordance, going down from time to time on to our knees for Divine enlightenment, and then rising again to study the pages and compare the texts, we search out for ourselves from God's own written Word whether that which has now been said is true. Secondly, that without relying upon our progress, or upon our feelings, or upon any human ground whatever, we definitely resolve at once to accept the Word of the Living God thus discovered, and to believe that what God has promised He will most surely perform ; in other words, to put our confidence in the fullness of the promise that we have found in Holy Writ. Thirdly, that we do not hinder the work of the Holy Ghost by any wilful, deliberate resisting of His blessed s I30 ^ NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS influence. " In many points we offend all," and that continually ; but that is quite different from wilfully indulging, persisting, and continuing in that which we know to be wrong. Fourthly, that we become fellow-workers with God, by prayer, by using such means of grace as are put within our reach, by accepting — and this is very impor- tant — by accepting any discipline by which God is humbling self, by which God is robbing the world of its attractive power, by which God is crushing our own nature, in order that there may be free course — for that is the meaning of all God's chastisements — in order that there may be free course in us for the full joyous progress of God the Holy Ghost. God never wounds, except to heal ; God never gives sorrow, except that out of the sorrow and the suffering there may come the joy unspeak- able and full of glory. Fifthly, and above all, that we cherish an unbounded trust, a patient, persevering trust ; waiting God's time, resolved to believe not merely in the Word of God but in the Person of God ; resolving, if need be, if God call us, to die in faith like the Old Testament saints, even if we have not received the full realization of the promises. Let us resolve that we will die with our Creed on our lips. Make up your mind, brethren, that this shall be your cry ; resolve whenever and wherever you die, if you have ever really given yourselves up to Christ, resolve, whatever may be the assaults of the devil, to die with your Creed on your lips, saying, " What I see not now, I shall see, for God hath spoken ; and what I feel not now I shall feel, for God never lies ; I do not, I cannot doubt Him." You will try and say it when you die (will you not ?) wherever it may be, however far it may be from the old church in which we have worshipped together. Say, " I stagger not at the promise of God, though all is THE voice OF THE SPIRIT 131 dark around." Yes ! my brother, with parched lips, it may be, and with that strange quivering voice of death, say with a confidence that all the powers of hell cannot crush, speak out with a faith strong in proportion to the bodily weakness, " Thanks be to God Who gives me the victory in Jesus Christ my Lord ; thanks be to God the Holy Ghost, the Author and the Giver of life." Thus we have seen the doctrine, and we have seen the method by which man is to co-operate with this living Person. Now, praying the Holy Spirit to control, restrain, and guide my words, I desire to bring before you another thought. Let us look for a little while at the principle of the text, " That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual." S. Paul, in the chapter before us, is giving one special application of this principle. We will rather for a few moments fix our thoughts on the principle itself, and, in order to understand about what we are speaking, let us see what we mean by this word " natural." Now, of course, as you know, you and 1 have a double nature. It requires a little thought here, brethren, or you lose the after-teaching. You and I have in us, in our personality, a twofold nature. We have inherited from Adam what we call a human nature. We have been made, through God's mercy, partakers of a Divine nature. There is a divine and there is a human nature. Now of course you will understand, any of you who really think of it, that all which would be natural to that portion of us which is divine, would be supernatural to that portion of our twofold personality which is human ; just as the life of the plant is supernatural to the stone, and the life of angels supernatural to man in the ordinary 132 c/f NEJV "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS acceptation of the words. So the part of us which is merely human (speaking in common language and not guarding every word) naturally would consider things to be supernatural, which to the angels (who look at us as simply beings of God's new and divine creation) appear an ordinary, commonplace part of our normal life. By " natural," we do not mean that which is natural in the real sense of our true being, as partakers of the Divine nature ; but that which is in the ordinary accepta- tion of the word called " natural." It is the ordinary outcome of our human life, putting aside for the moment our Baptism, our regeneration, our spiritual being, com- municated from Christ, the living Vine. The truth, then, which the Apostle brings out is this : that in the general order of God's providence that which is natural comes first, and afterwards, spiritual development. For example, although some children are wonderfully born at their Baptism (like John the Baptist, " wonder- fully born "), and filled with the Holy Ghost from their earliest infancy, still, as a general rule, you see in the child in its earlier years the natural development of ordinary kindness, or gentleness, or selfishness, or what- ever it may be : the development of the nature it has inherited from its parents. And here I would say, in passing, that it is very desirable for parents to remember that the faults in their children come from themselves. Consequently, it is hard for us to blame our children, however much we may try to correct the faults, because they are reproducing the nature of their parents or grand- parents. That which is natural comes first in the ordinary life of the child. Just as God first developed on earth the natural life, and only, after ages of preparation, at Pentecost sowed the seeds in the Church of the spiritual life, so it is now. Therefore we must be very careful not to fall into THE voice OF THE SPIRIT 133 the popular mistake of despising what is natural. Chris- tian people fall into a terrible mistake when they under- value mere " natural " habits, as they are called : habits of obedience, habits of punctuality, habits of order. There is no right habit, however trifling it may appear, that is not divine, even though it be what we call " natural." And there is given to us a distinct promise that if a man or a child will begin by ordering his conversation aright, by simply carrying out what we call the natural principles of truth, and obedience, and honesty, or whatever else you like to call them — mark the words — " to him that ordereth his conversation aright will I shew the salvation of God." But while in the first place we recognize that the natural comes first, and while we jealously guard the natural from being considered as not from God, the Author of every good and perfect gift, we see, in the third place, that God has reserved some better thing for us : that we (our natural being) should not be perfected without the incoming of something higher, something of which our Lord spoke when He said, " Ye must be born from above." I only touch on some illustrations, hoping, please God, on another opportunity further to develop the thought. This higher influence comes first from above, and then through the indwelling of God in us. For example, see what a man does when he has been thoroughly led by God the Holy Ghost. (Do not here be disturbed, persons may be good, earnest Christians, and yet not be thoroughly led by God the Holy Ghost.) When we are thoroughly led by the Holy Spirit we are taught in the Bible to expect that instead of merely submitting — mark the difference — merely submitting to some law (the law of conscience, or a law of the land, or a law of the 134 ^ NEW mRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS Church, or whatever you like) there shall be in us an impulse, a love of what is good and pure and beautiful, that shall come out as naturally in obedience to God's law, as the devil's life comes out in acts of open wickedness. Or another illustration. We are taught to expect some changes in our point of view after the Holy Ghost has had a freer course in us. We have known — good in itself — mere natural sorrow. There is the mere natural sorrow that the drunkard feels for his intem- perance and its results ; the mere natural sorrow that the child feels for having pained its parents or lost a holiday ; the mere natural regret that an old man feels when the pulse is beginning to get weaker and strength is ebbing and he looks back upon not one single profitable thing done or one profitable word spoken in an entire life ; the regret for unused opportunities that a man feels when he sees opening before him on that death-bed the great company of angels, the Majesty of God, the glorious society of angels and archangels and principalities and powers, a beautiful system of law which he has never learnt, a beautiful system of order of which he has never tried even to master the first principles ; the mere natural regret that every one must feel if, having been put into this world as a school and not having learnt a single lesson, he is quite unfit, even if he were admitted into heaven, for the companionship of God and the angels. Now, we are taught to expect that, instead of all this mere natural sorrow, there shall be wrought in us by the Holy Ghost, a chastened — 1 had almost said happy — sorrow for sin. There is a bitter pain for having grieved the loving Spirit, and yet side by side with the sorrow comes a happy con- sciousness that, in spite of all our waywardness, that love has continued to save us yesterday, to-day, and for ever. THE voice OF THS SPIRIT 135 Next, there is a very practical truth for earnest Christians ; it shall be put shortly, because it will not have much meaning to those not fighting the good fight of faith. There is a time (known only to God) of transition from the natural order to the spiritual order in our life, at the time when God is intending: to bemn a real development in us of conscious spiritual life. It may come over and over again. Very often these transitions come from the natural to the spiritual order, one part of the natural order transformed to the spiritual, and so on, at different epochs of our life. Whenever any of these changes of our outer being occur, whenever God is going to develop a higher spiritual being in us, then there comes the manifestation of the great truth of which S. Paul gives an illustration in this chapter from the Corinthians. You remember he is describing there how, just before the grain of corn develops into the blade that is to come up from it, and afterwards the full ear — so that seventy times seven, even to millions of grains, may spring from it — it appears to man to die. Just as in the natural creation, when any insect is going to be manifested in a more beauteous form, there is a putting off of the old with a sort of death ; so be prepared. Christian people, for a dark time just before the higher spiritual life is poured into your souls. In this, as in other senses, we pass through the grave and gate, as it were, of death to arise into a resurrection life of higher beauty and more spiritual development. So oft-times a man says, " I am losing my nerve ; I have nothing of the old pluck left." That is the sound, the voice, of the wind that blows where it lists ; " and thou hearest the sound, but canst not tell whence it comes or whither it goes." It is the harbinger of the work of the Holy Spirit Who dwelleth in us. 136 c/f NEW 'BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS Who is going to give thee, in place of merely physical pluck, spiritual, divinely implanted courage. You may often hear Christian workers say, " My interest in the district and in the Sunday School is declining, my faith in God is weak, my hope seems to be all going." Then the devil says, " It has all been a delusion." Believe him not, my brethren, it is simply that those natural graces which have been nurtured in some quiet Christian home must die, in order that the Divine resurrection life, that will abide with you for eternity, may be manifested. Therefore, brethren, die that spiritual death bravely, as, please God, we have resolved to die the physical death when it comes, however we may shrink from it. The last thought now for all of us, whether fighting the good fight of faith or not, is this : it is one thing to live in the dispensation of the Spirit ; it is very different to be conscious of, and to know that you are living in, the dispensation of the Spirit. It is one thing to come to church, as you have all come, and heard truths that I have been afraid to utter — about which clergy pray in the vestry that God would " grant that what we teach to others may never rise up in judgement against ourselves." You have heard truths about God's kingdom that angels would tremble to publish, lest they should be adding to the responsibility of a single soul. [Oh, it is a widely different thing to have a sermon floating over our ears without it ever entering into our heart. The Lord God does not go about to condemn His children. The Lord God would rather make an excuse (to speak in human words) for His poor wayward ones, who are so sorely tried by the world and the flesh and the devil. The only thing that He cannot and will not bear with is, deliberate tampering with a conscious sense of what is right and true, accord- THE voice OF THE SPIRIT 137 ing to the mind of God, a deliberate halting between two opinions.] But I say the Lord God does not go about to condemn His children ; and therefore the last few solemn words I have to speak to you may not apply to one-tenth of those who are now sitting in this church, although, as I have said, they have listened to some of the most tremendous truths : truths of which God Himself has pronounced, that if a man deliberately sin against them, there is no forgiveness, though the Jews who nailed Christ to the Cross were afterwards forgiven in thousands. One thought I now wish to leave with the few, it may be, who have understood the teaching. My brethren, you and I now know that when a voice in us is applying the Word of God to our souls, any feeling which we possess for the higher, better life is not a natural impulse to us ; we know that it is not merely the voice of the conscience that spoke to Socrates in the olden days ; we know that it is God, God the Holy Ghost dwelling in us, alive as the man or woman sitting next to you in that seat. If the drunkard would not like the mother that prayed over him to see him tottering through the streets ; if the girl who knows that she is grieving the Lord Jesus Christ could not bear Him to stand behind her and listen to those words spoken and that evil thought indulged ; if all of us cannot bear to do our deeds of darkness in the bright light of the presence of those we love : I ask you, Christian believers in God the Holy Ghost, have you realized that the voice in you is God's voice Who lives there } To turn a deaf ear is to fight against God, and to resist nothing less than the Holy Ghost. It is to use the freedom that the great God has given us (to separate us from the T 138 c/f NEJV "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS lower animal creation) in deliberate tampering with our inwrought convictions, in a deliberate palliation of that which He has taught to be wrong, and in a deliberate procrastination that is content to say to the Living God, " Sit quiet in my heart, speak not until the season is over ; speak not till the money is gained ; speak not till the temptation is conquered ; speak not to me, O God the Holy Ghost, for I cannot and I will not listen." My dear brethren, the joy and the glory of the spiritual life is ours, but the responsibilities of it are ours also, for the Lord God, the Holy Spirit Himself, hath said, he that makes light of it, he that despises these breathings within, despiseth not man but God. From all that blindness of heart, from all that contempt of God, may the good Lord deliver us ! THE JVORK^ OF THE SPIT^IT 139 VII THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT ^^Hofobeitthaf^as not first which is spiritual^ but thafvohich is natural ; and afterwards that 'which is spiritual^ — i Cor. XV. 46. '' I ^AKING the word " natural " in its ordinary sense, J- we have seen that while Almighty God is the Author of all good gifts ; that while what are called natural graces, natural endowments, natural virtues, and the like, are by no means to be despised, but to be held in honour for the sake of Him by Whom they were created ; that while it is perfectly necessary for us, especially in dealing with children, to thank Almighty God for any sign of mere natural virtue that we see exhibited in their ripening years ; — still God has pre- pared for us, in these latter days, something better than the mere natural endowments with which a Socrates, or even an Israelite under the old Covenant, might expect to be endowed. We have seen that it is the prerogative of God the Holy Ghost to develop out of this old nature of ours — fallen, yet retaining in itself something of the image of God — a new creation, a divine being, fit for the companionship of the angels in the realms of the redeemed. We have seen that all the circum- stances of our life, all that happens to us of joy and of sorrow, all the friends or the enemies by whom I40 c/f NEJV "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS we are encompassed, when once we have believed in God the Holy Ghost — and oft-times before we have believed in Him, unconsciously, through His grace abounding, flowing ever beyond all that has been asked or thought — can be made by Him into the instruments by which this glorious, this regenerate, this immortal, this incorruptible nature, can be developed and made fit for the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ. Next, I bring before you three aspects of the working of God the Holy Ghost. It is obvious that if He be (as we have seen He is) very God, worshipped and glorified equally with the Father and the Son, of one substance with the Father and the Son, though separate from them in His Divine personality ; if God is living in us, it is obvious that all the work of the Holy Ghost must of necessity have relation to God. " He that is of God," saith Jesus Christ, "speaketh the things of God" ; much more must He Who is God bear witness to the ever-blessed Trinity, as He liveth in us in order to reveal. And if you carry this thought with you, you will have in it a mark whereby to distinguish that which is merely natural from that which is distinctly spiritual. 1. The Holy Ghost puts God in His proper posi- tion in the soul of man. 2. He puts man in his proper relation to God ; so long, I mean, as he continues on this lower earth. 3. And then, by a long, gradual work of restoration, He uplifts man out of that condition in which he now is ; He perfects the ideal of the Blessed Trinity in him ; He makes him fit for that companionship of angels here- after, for that gazing on the unveiled face of God, for which, in the long ages of a past eternity, he was predestinated. That is the threefold work of God the Holy Spirit, with which we are concerned ; of course, not limiting the THE IVORK^ OF THE SPIT^IT 141 work of the Blessed Spirit to anything that finite man can conceive. Now, first of all, the Holy Spirit repairs the altar of God. Recall that symbolic action in Israel where all the main characteristics of the Holy Spirit, the wind and the fire and the water, were brought into distinct pro- minence : in that work of restoration, preparing the way for the true Elisha, by which Elijah the prophet of God destroyed the worship of Baal in the land, and lifted up Israel into a new and regenerate life of surrender to God. The first work, as you remember, in that evening of the day — what a picture of this evening of the world's his- tory, the latter days, the latter dispensation, as it has been called ! — when men's strength was spent in fruitless efforts, when men's vain cries had gone up unheard and unanswered ; then calmly the prophet of God, or rather God the Holy Ghost Who spake through the prophet of God, comes forth, and his first symbolic action is to repair the altar of God ! All man's mistakes have proceeded from his not choosing (as S. Paul says) to retain God in his knowledge. You can work it out in the first and second chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. So the Holy Ghost, first of all, puts God into His proper position. Now try to bring your attention to bear on this ; for however imperfectly the thoughts may be brought before you, they are thoughts worthy of our consideration. Try to grasp them, for they are somewhat difficult of apprehension. I am not speaking to children in Sunday School, but to educated men and women. You must see how God the Holy Ghost, Who liveth in your hearts and mine, will act directly upon the highest part of our being, the spirit, the " inner man," as it is called in the Bible. All those who have studied the subject — whether 142 ^ NEW "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS religious people or not — all who have studied the subject impartially, have acknowledged that there must be recognized certain facts in the experience of the human soul, facts gathered by a long induction, spread over many generations and the lives of countless saints. You must recognize such an immediate revelation of God made on certain remarkable occasions (not merely in the Bible, but since the canon of Scripture was closed) which are best described in ordinary language as "miraculous" and "supernatural," although I would guard the more thoughtful amongst you against accept- ing those words without consideration. Such, for instance, was that vision of God of which S. Paul speaks, when a living Spirit took possession of his spirit, and he was borne up, he scarcely knew how, and heard in Paradise unspeakable words, that he was never allowed to clothe afterwards in human language ; when he enjoyed direct intercourse with the Everlasting Trinity in a manner that is simply inexplicable. Such are those strange utterances, those unspeakably marvel- lous visions, which every clergyman — however matter of fact he may be — cannot help recognizing occasionally (very seldom perhaps, but occasionally) in those who have lived very near to God, and are just on the threshold, passing out into the world of spirits. This is the truth of which all that wretched " spiritualism " is a mere caricature ; and it is strang^e — showino^ how God knows the need of the creatures that He has made — that numbers who have tossed aside religion, and never kneel at the Holy Table to be partakers of the Divine nature, can give themselves up, body, soul, and spirit, to delu- sions that require a thousand times more faith than to believe in Jesus of Nazareth. We descend to that which we can (so to speak) recognize with our ordinary faculties — and here, again, THE WORK^ OF THE SPII^T 143 let me remind you that although the various thoughts must be given in a certain sequence, it does not follow that God the Holy Ghost always deals with the soul in that precise order ; He speaks as He wills, just as "the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth." So we dwell for a few moments on God's work in its ordinary course : He first of all repairs the altar of God by enlightening the understanding. Of all the subtleties with which the devil has destroyed souls in the present day, few are more baseless, and, at the same time, more effective than that idea which he circulates, that religion has no scope for the under- standing, that the mind of a man can find nothing in God's revealed Word, and in the working of God upon his mind. God begins by enlightening the understanding as a general rule. He gives unto us right notions about God. Man's heart is full of wrong notions, of errors, which have been planted there by the father of lies ; and so, in breaking down the altar of Baal and lifting up God to His proper place in the temple that He has redeemed, the mind of man must be enlightened. For example, the Holy Spirit brings a man by the study of the Bible, and by calm reflection, to understand that God loves him, and that God is a God of love. He brings us to see, next, that God is an Almighty God, that His power is infinite, that He can work in us (if we will let Him) a complete restoration, that " what is impossible with man is possible with God." He says so ; and, as a mere matter of thinking, you observe that, even if we have lived a very bad life, yet if we have yielded ourselves to God honestly and truly, God, as God, can just as easily create a clean thing out of the 144 ^ NEJV "BIRTH UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS unclean, as He first brought water out of chaos, and light out of darkness. The creative power of God — the power that God has of taking a soul and bringing it out restored, doing in a week or a year what a man might not accomplish in the ordinary course of his natural working in a life-time — is one of the right notions about God with which the understanding is enlightened. Then, following close upon that, comes the right notion (following by hard logic, if you only use your minds) that if God is Almighty, that if God has the power of absolutely doing that which to a limited mind or to a limited power would be simply impossible, then, also, God can do all that in the Bible He professes to do. He can absolutely and for ever veil the past. It is not a mere boast, but the word of the Living God, " I will cast their sins into the depths of the sea." These are just some of the right notions which the Holy Spirit gives to the understanding that He has enlightened as to the nature of God — the love of God ; the absolute power of God ; and the recreative, restoring, absolving power of God. Closely following upon that there comes to the mind thinking it out, a conviction that this Living God has a right to say that there can be no part of our being taken out of His sovereign jurisdiction ; that wherever we go, into pleasure or into business, alone or in society (as a matter, again, of mere hard logic) the Living God is everywhere the absolute Lord of our being, and He claims our obedience in our daily work or pleasure as much as when we are kneeling at the Holy Table and feeding upon the living Bread. Next, He enlightens our mind. As a mere matter of understanding, just as the mind of a man appreciates a picture, or sees beauty in the glorious tiers of moun- tains rising in these distant Alps, so the Holy Ghost THE WORK^ OF THE SPIT^T 145 teaches the understanding to see that there is some- thing very noble in " God manifest in the flesh." As wc read the life of Jesus of Nazareth, although our heart may be still cold as the driven snow — our mind sees His was a noble Life. Infidels have said it, you know. It is a grand self-denying life, an utter abnegation of self, that is manifested in the course of Jesus of Nazareth from the cradle to the grave. When we see Him in all the varied aspects of life, our intelligence recognizes Him as worthy of admiration. That is the work of the understanding. Next, the Holy Spirit brings the heart into opera- tion — the heart, with all its manifold play of feeling and its infinite emotion. He brings the heart that it may fasten itself, as it were, upon these right notions, and draw near to that Person Whose Life and Being have thus been grasped with the understanding. For example. He gives faith to lay hold of the absolving power ; He gives hope to lay hold of the re-creating power ; so that the man, with a real inward feeling, hopes. He looks forward to being made absolutely perfect by the power of the Holy Spirit, if not in this life, at least in the life to come. Then comes that which we crave for when we have said — how often we have said it — " I understand it all, my intellect accepts it ; I know it is true ; but I cannot feel it." Then comes into play the emotional part of man's nature ; then God the Holy Spirit — living in us, observe, and therefore able to work upon us from within, and so to accomplish what could never be done from without — the Holy Spirit, living in us, gives us the faith, gives us the love, gives us the hope, so that we fasten with our heart's best affections upon that Being Who is " altogether lovely." And then is created a calm, deep, restful sense — O my brethren, I wish that we all realized it more ! We u 146 ^ NEW BIRTH UCNJO RIGHTEOUSNESS might know it ; the saints of God are acquiring it all around us — that calm restful sense that the past is forgiven : that quiet assurance that God, Who has begun the good work, will never leave it unfinished till the day of Christ's appearing. Afterwards will come the passionate emotion, the burning enthusiasm, that solemn longing to do anything rather than sin, to do anything rather than disappoint the God Who dwelleth in us, the God Who died for us on Calvary, the Father Who loves us and is watching every step in our onward progress. Taking here especially the Lord Jesus Christ — the tender human Saviour, the Almighty God, very God as well as very Man — witnessing for Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit creates in us those passionate longings which have been the mainspring of a life of devotion ; that faith, and hope, and love that will last on through the burning heat, as well as in the springtide ; that faith, and hope, and love that come from within, like the well of water of which Christ spake, springing up into everlasting life ; that love of God Incarnate by which the world can be subdued, and men are made strong (aye, and weak women, too) to live, and to suffer, and with joy, if need be, to die. I have almost anticipated here the next special action of the Holy Spirit. Having enlightened the under- standing, having warmed the heart. He brings into obedience the will with its definite resolves. The letter has been clearly written ; the wax has been melted by the warm emotion ; then God's seal is put upon it all : " Lo, I come, to do Thy will, O God." The reason why religion in many cases has fallen into disrepute, as being a mere thing for the feelings, is that the work of the Holy Ghost upon the understanding and upon the will has not been properly recognized. And the reason why missions, and all the more en- THE WORJ^OF THE SPIT^IT 147 thusiastic works of God's Church, have been disparaged is that men have fixed their minds exclusively on the understanding and on the will, and have ignored the action of the Blessed Spirit upon the heart with its emotions. This, then, is the first work of God the Holy Spirit. He repairs the altar of God in the heart. And if you have followed me here, the second division will be comparatively easy. The Holy Spirit, if He is to do a real work — and it were irreverent to imagine the Holy Ghost as not perfecting His work — the Holy Spirit must show us the truth. Now, what is the truth .'' What is the fact that sooner or later we all discover ? What is it ? Are we perfect ? Is it easier to do right than wrong ? Is it easy to keep our resolutions ; to crucify the flesh, to stand against the world, and so forth } Is it ? No. And why not ^ Why is it that the nature created in the image of God does not naturally apprehend God, and love God, and yield up itself to God ? Why ? Because man has fallen. Account for it as you like ; bewilder yourselves as you please with theories as to the origin of evil ; the facts unhappily cannot be ignored. Make a resolution to-day, come back next year, and tell God how it has been kept. You will not need any one to prove to you that the flesh lusteth against the spirit ; the lower nature against the higher ; that the world and the flesh and the devil have gained a mighty power over this renewed spirit that was created in the likeness of the Blessed Trinity. Therefore, the second work of the Holy Spirit is to reveal to man — observe here — his present relation to God ; in other words, to show him that he is a sinner in the presence of the Holy Trinity. Here, 148