BY 
 
 EDWARD E, HALE,
 
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 UCSB LIBRARY 
 
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 EVERY-DAY SERMONS. 
 
 EDWARD E. HALE, D.D., 
 
 Minister Sottth Congregational Church, Boston. 
 
 "Teaching- them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded 
 you; and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." 
 
 MATT, xxviii. 20. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 J. STILMAN SMITH & CO., 
 3 HAMILTOX PLACE. 
 
 1892.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM .... 3 
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? . . . .17 
 
 FIVE QUESTIONS . . . . . . -31 
 
 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT . . . -45 
 
 How IMMORTALS LIVE . . . . -59 
 
 IMITATORS OF GOD . . . . . .71 
 
 INSTALLATION OF REV. JOHN CUCKSON . . .83
 
 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 " I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and 
 scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and noth- 
 ing shall by any means hurt you." LUKE x. 19. 
 
 IT is a vivid statement, in prophetic symbolism, 
 of the sway of their enthusiasm over the obstacles 
 which were to come before them. The history 
 of those centuries more than makes good the 
 prophecy. These people, forgetting themselves, 
 and determined to bring in the kingdom of God, 
 went forward, conquering and to conquer ; and it 
 was as he said, the annoying serpents and scor- 
 pions, who are in the pathway of such travellers, 
 should not hinder them so but that they should 
 succeed. If you talk to-day to any low-toned per- 
 son who has been in the West Indies, he will tell 
 you of the abomination of the scorpions who per- 
 haps stray upon your pillows, and of the terror of 
 the serpents who infest the forests. But for all 
 that, when the Spanish race landed there, deter- 
 mined to find gold, they went forward to success, 
 they trod upon the serpents and the scorpions, 
 and they do not so much as appear in their 
 history.
 
 4 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 Here, then, is Christ's statement of the ag- 
 gressive power of Christian jsnthusiasm. It is a 
 statement made in advance, and we may make a 
 like statement as we look backward upon the 
 course of history. Just at this moment the Eng- 
 lish-speaking world is called upon to ask whether 
 it believes that this statement is still true, or 
 whether the more mechanical processes of the 
 nineteenth century have gained such control of 
 society that we can no longer rely upon it. The 
 square statement which General Booth makes, in 
 this remarkable book of his, " In Darkest Eng- 
 land," is that he and his are able to tread on the 
 serpents and scorpions which have deterred other 
 people in their efforts to clean up the dark places 
 of London, and to bring in the light of a decent 
 civilization in their place. To this the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury and Mr. Huxley and the people, 
 whom I may call the regulation philanthropists, 
 reply that it is quite impossible. They say that 
 there are a great many serpents in the way, and a 
 great many very annoying scorpions in the way. 
 They tell how large the scorpions are, they 
 have measured some of them. And they tell how 
 bad the bite of the serpents is, and they say that, 
 with such obstacles in the way, it is idle to under- 
 take to relieve these difficulties. They say the 
 serpents must be killed and the scorpions stifled 
 first; and yet they do not show any method of 
 killing the serpents or of stifling the scorpions. It
 
 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 5 
 
 is quite as in the Book of Proverbs it is said that 
 the sluggard says, there is a lion in the path. Not 
 that it is fair to say that the Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury or Mr. Huxley are either of them in- 
 dolent men. But it is quite fair to say that the 
 lions which they see out of their windows, or think 
 they see, are so hungry and noisy that they dare 
 not leave palace or college to go out to attack 
 them. 
 
 General Booth does. General Booth says that 
 he has an army of fanatics at his disposal, who 
 will do what he tells them to do, and that the en- 
 thusiasm of their Christian faith is so great that it 
 will enable them to overcome the inconveniences 
 which they find in their way. He does not use 
 the particular figure which the Saviour uses, of 
 serpents and scorpions. He knows that the nine- 
 teenth century prefers to have square statements 
 of the visible fact. It does not like this form of 
 Oriental imagery, and it considers it quite out of 
 the way. So he devotes himself, with more or 
 less statistical statement, such as the nineteenth 
 century does like, to show how he can take the 
 tramps who have gathered together in the worst 
 regions of London ; how he can embody them 
 under a certain military form ; how he can march 
 them into the country, and place them on farms 
 which we should think ridiculously small ; how he 
 can set them upon market-gardening; or, at the 
 least, how every man with a spade can earn his
 
 6 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 own ration. This, at bottom, is the plan for 
 darkest England which General Booth proposes. 
 And for this plan he is now engaged in collecting 
 five hundred thousand dollars as a capital stock, 
 and an annual income of one hundred fifty thou- 
 sand dollars to carry it forward, till, in its success, 
 it shall support itself. I have not observed that 
 he once speaks of it as an experiment. He speaks 
 with the definiteness with which the Saviour of 
 men himself speaks. He says that they have 
 divine power with them, that they will tread on all 
 the serpents, that they will stifle all the scorpions, 
 and that nothing shall by any means hurt them as 
 they go about this endeavor. 
 
 It will be my duty in another place to speak of 
 the detail of General Booth's plans, as far as it 
 seems useful for us to consider them. Our busi- 
 ness this morning is with the emphatic reliance 
 which the Saviour places upon men's enthusiasm 
 for mankind, in his promises of that coming king- 
 dom to which we look forward. In the contrast 
 between the races of men, it is generally supposed 
 that the people of that race who were called the 
 descendants of Shem, of that race by whom he 
 was himself surrounded, have more of that work- 
 ing enthusiasm than has fallen to the share of the 
 great Aryan race of which we are, or to the Eastern 
 races of which the Chinese and Japanese are, the 
 best representatives, or to that race which has 
 always been at the bottom, which makes up the
 
 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 7 
 
 nations of Africa. Thus it is observed that all 
 the religions of the world have come from Western 
 or Southern Asia, and a great deal more than is 
 worth while has been made of this coincidence. 
 For myself, I suppose that religion is the natural 
 tie between the child and the father. I suppose 
 that it expresses the natural relation of man with 
 God. And I do not believe, therefore, that there 
 was any more religion in Abraham than there was 
 in Massasoit, or in Cetewayo, or in Abraham 
 Lincoln. The mere accidental expression must 
 not be overstated. But with such speculation we 
 have here little to do. Let us rather notice that 
 there has been enthusiasm enough in our race to 
 do everything that the Scripture gives in the list 
 of the triumphs of the children of Abraham. 
 The men of our race, when they were set to do it, 
 " have subdued kingdoms, have wrought right- 
 eousness, have obtained promises, have stopped 
 the mouths of lions, have quenched the violence 
 of fire, out of weakness have been made strong, 
 have waxed valiant in the fight, and have put to 
 flight the armies of the aliens." I would not ask 
 for better examples of enthusiasm and daring than 
 were given us by Columbus and his men, or by 
 Cortez and his. I would not ask for enthusiasm 
 more pronounced than that which sent our fore- 
 fathers to Plymouth, or that which set Ann Lee's 
 disciples to make gardens out of deserts. There 
 is no lack of enthusiasm if there is anybody to
 
 8 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 start enthusiasm, and you have only to go this 
 afternoon to hear the words spoken in the Salva- 
 tion Army, or you have only to go to-morrow to 
 see what those people are doing in the slums of 
 Boston, to see that whatever else they lack, they 
 do not lack enthusiasm, because they speak the 
 English language or are born in the Anglo-Saxon 
 race. It is possibly true, however, that a certain 
 timidity or shyness belongs to people of English 
 descent. It is the cause of their inability to ex- 
 press all they feel, so that, when John Foster's son 
 dies, he tells his father that it is only within that 
 half-hour that he has had any conception of how 
 much his father loved him. 
 
 We are constantly hearing of such instances. 
 The false shame, as the French call it, of the 
 Englishman, and, to a certain extent, of his 
 successors in New England, keeps his lips closed, 
 so that he does not tell his friend how much he 
 loves him, he does not tell how large are his plans, 
 he is afraid to be called a fanatic, and conceals 
 from the world his very noblest aspirations. All 
 the same, however, it is to be observed that this 
 race goes into crusades under the lead of Peter 
 the Hermit, that it compasses sea and land when 
 it is led by Columbus or by Magellan, or in our 
 times by Hayes or by Greeley. The pent-up 
 enthusiasm which did not find language, exists in 
 some magnificent outburst of concentrated effort. 
 In the instance to which I have alluded, General
 
 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 9 
 
 Booth is relying upon this concentrated enthu- 
 siasm, working under such regulation and disci- 
 pline as he has established for his arm/. I do not 
 myself believe that we need here a great deal of 
 that especial form of the Salvation Army. Fortu- 
 nately for us, we have solved a good many of 
 the problems which England has still to solve, 
 and there has thus resulted a sort of prosperity 
 for each and every class here which in England 
 seems to belong only on the higher circles of their 
 social order. While I recognize, therefore, with 
 gratitude, what these humble and despised people 
 are doing, here in Boston, in New York, and in 
 our other cities, I do not believe we need to call 
 upon them to work any such miracles as General 
 Booth is calling for there. But you and I ought 
 to remember that, for the great problems which 
 are before us now, we have in reserve just such a 
 reservoir, shall I say, of human power, which can 
 do literally what it will in the reformation of the 
 world and the improvement of society, when once 
 it sees what the needs of the social order are, and 
 when once it knows that the good God calls for 
 such miracles. 
 
 A venerable friend of ours listened uneasily to 
 some of the poor materialism which tries to ac- 
 count for manhood and its victories by talk about 
 phosphorus and electricity. He waited impatiently 
 till he had a right to speak, and then said, " John, 
 you do not believe that the uprising of America in
 
 IO THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 1 86 1, when this people as one man swept away all 
 obstacles, one man, indeed, for union and free- 
 dom, you do not believe that this was nothing 
 but the consentaneous ticking of ten million pen- 
 dulums ! It was the enthusiastic determination of 
 ten million children of God." Now such enthu- 
 siasm is a power as distinctly to be relied upon as 
 is the rising of the tide or the flow of a river. And 
 any statesman or reformer does not know the alpha- 
 bet of his business who does not rely upon it, as the 
 Law to which the God of History has intrusted 
 the advance and enlightenment of his world. 
 
 It is desirable to remember this, and to illustrate 
 it, that we may always look forward to large suc- 
 cesses. Only those who have scanty resources, 
 finite and fallible, will be satisfied with small plans. 
 " We will abolish slavery," said the Abolitionist. 
 And they did so. " We will make the desert 
 blossom like the rose," said Daniel Boone and Ma- 
 nasseh Cutler. And they did so. " We will cover 
 this land with a net-work of railways," said another 
 forward-looking army of inventors. And they did 
 so. They trod on serpents and scorpions, if you 
 please ; but they had that enthusiasm which per- 
 mits men to do so, "so that .nothing shall by 
 any means hurt you." For the future, we have 
 the same rights to do large things rather than 
 small. " It is often easier to do a great thing than 
 a little one." Thus, when John Adams says that 
 in America every man and woman should have a
 
 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. H 
 
 liberal education, he proposes a condition wholly 
 unknown in his time, wholly unknown in ours, but 
 definite and possible to the power of genuine en- 
 thusiasm. When some man tells you that you 
 ought to abolish pauperism, that it is a disease to be 
 trampled out like leprosy or like small-pox, you are 
 not to send him to an insane hospital, but you are 
 to rely on this infinite power, as you address your- 
 selves to the work which so great a purpose de- 
 mands. Stupendous difficulty? Yes; but, as God 
 orders, I have stupendous power. This power, pent 
 up and available, was given me for use. It is not 
 meant for nothing. We will turn it on this ob- 
 stacle. The obstacle shall give way. If we are 
 sons and daughters of the Living God, going and 
 coming with his Infinite Commission, we will do 
 something which is worth doing. 
 
 We will do something worth doing, that is 
 the resolution for you and me. We do not call 
 ourselves reformers. We do not, I suppose, re- 
 gard ourselves as professed philanthropists. There 
 are things which we should be glad to have done, 
 which we leave for other people to do. Thus, we 
 should be very glad to have Jerusalem taken out 
 of the hands of the Turk. But we do not go about 
 preaching to people to ask them to go to Jerusalem 
 and drive the Turk out. When we ask people to 
 take the cross and bear it, we have other objects 
 nearer home. It is much more my business and 
 yours to see that Boston is decently governed than
 
 12 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 that Jerusalem is. And very likely the place that 
 you and I have in that business may be in teaching 
 a child to sew in the Parmenter Street Chapel, or 
 taking a newsboy on a sleigh-ride around the 
 Reservoir. But sewing or sleigh-ride, ward-meet- 
 ing or public speech, you and I are not going to 
 see any of the large successes, unless we ally 
 ourselves with large plans, and unless we rely on 
 this reserved enthusiasm which works the mira- 
 cles. We shall not make people temperate by 
 taking slates to them, and calculating that whiskey 
 costs more than clothing. We shall make them 
 temperate by quickening the divine fire till it 
 blazes, by giving it new fuel that it may burn 
 higher, by piling into it this thing or that which 
 tempts to wrong, so that the temptations may be 
 destroyed. This sacrifice, by the way, is what 
 " enthusiasm " originally meant. It is what the 
 sceptics and machine people cannot understand. 
 But it is involved in the great principle which 
 wins all the victories. 
 
 Thank God, and thank the enthusiasm of our 
 fanatic fathers, we have not the problem which 
 General Booth is facing so gallantly. Not one man, 
 woman, or child in Boston slept last night in quar- 
 ters as noisome and wretched as fifty thousand 
 people in London were trying to sleep in at the 
 same time. But there were bad enough places 
 here. I can show you any leader in the minis- 
 try at large or in the Salvation Army can show
 
 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 13 
 
 you places where people did sleep which it shall 
 make you weep to see. And we have our other 
 failures, for which no fathers have provided. Dis- 
 eases running rampant, which might be trampled 
 out. Ignorance, almost proud that it is ignorant. 
 Labor, crowded just where it is not wanted, and 
 wanted just where it does not come. Wealth un- 
 told, in the hands of those who are so stupid that 
 they do not know that wealth, as wealth, is merely 
 vulgar. Learning untold, in the brains of people 
 who do not know that learning is only a morbid 
 disease, unless it is shared to the last fraction with 
 all sorts and conditions of men. Life in the midst 
 of plenty, which does not know how to live. A 
 country drunk with its own prosperity, which hardly 
 knows how to use its riches, and yet, like other 
 drunkards, staggers on and asks for more. Now, 
 it is over such mountains, and in spite of them, 
 that you and I, and others like us, are to carry the 
 car of the Living God. He means that his treas- 
 ures shall be scattered right and left. He means 
 that health shall be as sure in every home as it is 
 now in the palaces of favored princes. He means 
 that ripe learning, and the joy of understanding his 
 work, shall be everywhere, as certain as it is now in 
 colleges or in libraries. He means that no man 
 shall sulk in a miser's wretchedness, counting his 
 gold and weighing his silver, but that that miser, 
 most wretched of all, shall be exalted to the luxury 
 of leading, teaching, spending, relieving, and re-
 
 14 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 ceiving the blessings of his fellow-men. You and 
 I, among others, are set to this business of hewing 
 down such mountains and building up such valleys. 
 We shall succeed if we aim high enough. We 
 shall fail if we accept things as they are. We 
 shall succeed if we trust the wave of enthusiasm 
 of those who are born from God, and try to live 
 and move and have their being in him. We 
 shall fail if we only find fault with other people's 
 plans, if we do nothing but say the work is 
 hard to do. Certainly we shall fail if we suppose 
 that wrong will right itself; that falsehood will 
 teach people to tell the truth; that bribery will 
 make man pure ; or, in general, if we think it 
 wise to let things alone. And, for ourselves, we 
 shall be strong and confident if we seek God 
 to help us ; for then we shall find him. We 
 shall be faint and weak if we do not seek him, 
 for then even his Omnipotence will find it hard to 
 set our pulses beating. What you and I need is 
 with each breath of life to come " Nearer, Great 
 God, to thee," not simply, as the hymn says so 
 well, in any flight through space, but in these rela- 
 tions of life, just as intimate, of Monday morn- 
 ing and Tuesday afternoon. I am talking to a 
 stranger in the street-car. Yes and the God of 
 Heaven is the third person in the interview. I 
 am standing at an open grave. Yes and the 
 Father of perfect love holds me, so that I may not 
 die in my wretchedness. I am before an audience
 
 THE WORTH OF ENTHUSIASM. 1 5 
 
 which distrusts and doubts me. Speak by my 
 lips, Father, and compel them to understand. Or 
 I have this child to amuse, who is fretful and over- 
 bearing. Father of my life, show me how to 
 attend to her as wisely as you have cared for me. 
 The man who has fairly sought for this Infinite 
 Companionship has found it. That man has 
 found that the lions in the way receded before him. 
 He has not found that the gnats from the foliage, 
 or the little ants from their burrows, or the beetles 
 who flew across his path, really hindered him. 
 He trod on serpents and scorpions, and they did 
 not hurt him. He did not succeed by this method, 
 or that method. It was not that one plan was so 
 much wiser than another, for this was no affair of 
 plan. It was not one or another contrivance of 
 machinery. It was a question how Infinite Power 
 should be brought to compel the machinery. 
 And this man, in his unselfish enthusiasm, was the 
 living partner of the Living God !
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 " What think ye of the Christ? whose son is he? " 
 
 MATTHEW xxii. 42. 
 
 THE first half of this text was selected by Father 
 Ignatius for his discourse, when he preached in 
 this pulpit three weeks since. With that curious 
 indifference to historical accuracy which seems 
 to stamp enthusiasts, he omitted the last half of 
 the text, and made no illusion to the incident 
 described. This was a pity. For, as he wanted 
 to interest us in the real history of Jesus, it would 
 have seemed natural to tell us why Jesus asked 
 the question of the text on this occasion, when he 
 never asked it of the same people on any other 
 occasion. For the subject Father Ignatius was dis- 
 cussing, it is a very curious observation that the 
 Saviour himself was so indifferent as to men's 
 questions or thoughts about him. He once asked 
 his apostles what the multitude thought about him. 
 On this occasion he does not even speak of himself. 
 He asks a general question as to the Messiah whom 
 all expected. Whose son shall the Messiah be? 
 Must he be David's son? "Whose son is he, 
 the son of David or the son of God?" For the 
 rest he said squarely, " It is my Father who does
 
 1 8 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 the works. It is the Holy Spirit who speaks the 
 word. If any man blasphemes me, he may be 
 forgiven." He even chides his disciples because 
 they can do nothing without him. He sinks his 
 own personality. As Paul says so well, " He 
 makes himself of no reputation. He takes upon 
 himself the form of a servant." You might 
 say he is quite indifferent how men define his 
 nature- or his position if only they will follow him. 
 
 You might say he is absolutely indifferent to 
 this question, "What think ye of Christ?" which 
 we are now told is the most important question of all. 
 If you read the four Gospels for the first time, and 
 merely addressed yourself to the question of what 
 he did think important, you would say at once 
 that his whole heart and soul were put on bring- 
 ing in the kingdom of God. 
 
 There is, as I said, one and only one central 
 passage where he gave to us his own statement. 
 Curiously enough, again, this passage is now 
 coolly rejected by those who are most eager to 
 extol his authority. When they were all driven 
 out of Galilee, when they had taken refuge in a 
 foreign dominion, he asked the twelve who they 
 thought he was. Simon Peter promptly an- 
 swered, " Thou art the Christ, the son of the 
 living God." Jesus praised him for the answer; 
 he said he would build his Church on that 
 answer, that that answer should be sufficient 
 for the foundation of the Church, and that on a
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 19 
 
 church so built hell would have no power. " Thou 
 art the Christ, the son of the living God." 
 
 How extraordinary it is, if Peter made the 
 wrong reply, as we are now told he did, if 
 Peter should have said, " Thou art the living 
 God," as the creeds of the fifth century would 
 have him say ! How extraordinary that this cen- 
 tral occasion should have been lost, nay, should 
 have been worse than lost ! How extraordinary 
 that Peter should say Jesus was the son of God, 
 if he were God himself! This failure can only be 
 accounted for on the ground which our friend 
 Dr. Huntington takes, the Bishop of Syracuse, 
 when he says that Peter did not himself then know 
 who the Saviour was, and only found out after the 
 Saviour had died. 
 
 As to our text itself, it is only interesting in what 
 I may almost call the dramatic sequence of events ; 
 because it illustrates the Saviour's steady determi- 
 nation to put down, even by ridicule, that Jewish 
 prejudice which made out the children of Abraham 
 to be the only people in the world worth thinking 
 of. I have read the whole passage, as Father Igna- 
 tius did not, that you might see this determina- 
 tion of his, and how important it is that the two 
 parts of this text shall be kept together. Here 
 was this Jewish superstition, that when God chose 
 to send his messenger, when the Christ should 
 come, he must be of the line of David. The same 
 superstition shows itself in those long genealogies
 
 20 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 with which the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke 
 begin, in which, by different lines, Christ's birth is 
 traced back to David, to show that he fulfilled the 
 Jewish condition. But the Saviour himself shows 
 indifference to this tradition. When they say at 
 once that the Christ must be the son of David, he 
 says in reply, " Why, David calls him ' Lord.' 
 David admits that he himself is inferior to any one 
 who comes direct from God. And do you mean 
 that David requires a genealogical descent from 
 himself of one who is to be the King of kings, and 
 Lord of lords? " The incident is only one of many 
 on which he presses hard upon that provincialism 
 of the Jews. " God is able of these stones to raise 
 up children unto Abraham." " The publicans and 
 the harlots shall go into the kingdom of heaven 
 before you." Yes, the Gentiles, who are like beggars 
 out in the highway, they shall be received at the 
 feast when the children of Abraham are left out. 
 Such are the parables and such the epigrams by 
 which this local provincialism is rebuked. And what 
 is offered on the other side? The grandeur of a 
 true-born son of God. The light and life and glory 
 and victory which will certainly come when a child 
 of God partakes of the divine nature, as we all may, 
 enters into the life of God, is inspired by the Holy 
 Spirit, and works the miracles, therefore, which 
 the Holy Spirit may command. There is one and 
 another curious phrase, to show how broadly Jesus 
 interprets this title of " son," and how much he
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 2 I 
 
 means by the central word " father." In another 
 interview in this same temple, he quotes from the 
 82d Psalm the words in which those are called 
 gods to whom the word of God came, " Is it not 
 written in your law, I said, ye are gods?" And 
 then he puts squarely the question, which neither 
 Father Ignatius nor any of his school ever con- 
 descends to answer, " If he called them gods unto 
 whom the word of God came (and the Scripture 
 cannot be broken), say ye of him whom the Father 
 sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest, 
 because I said I am the son of God? " If God is 
 our father, we are all God's sons or God's daugh- 
 ters. And then, as the centre of expostulation 
 and entreaty, he begs us to recognize the greatness 
 of this calling, to be true to the spirit which inspires 
 us, and as princes of the blood royal to live in the 
 Father's house, and to go about the Father's busi- 
 ness. Not unwilling to take the fond phrases, in 
 which, with more or less distinctness, old prophets 
 have spoken of the Messiah, he is willing to accept 
 such terms as " First-born," " First-begotten," 
 " Best beloved ;" but always there is the determina- 
 tion that we shall understand that where there is a 
 first-born son, there are other children, and that he 
 opens for us the inheritance which he begs us all 
 to claim. 
 
 What think ye of the Christ, then ? The gospel 
 answer to this question is, that the Christ is the 
 Son of God.
 
 22 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRTST? 
 
 Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, 
 is indeed the motto for the corner-stone of the 
 church, as he said it was. 
 
 And any effort to make it out that more was 
 concealed behind this phrase than it expresses, is 
 an effort which re-acts against him who makes it. 
 The Church herself stopped dead in her amazing 
 advance of the early centuries. She failed in her 
 real duty, and sunk back into an " establishment " 
 just so soon as she began to worship him. Then 
 it was that she turned away from the work which 
 he assigned to her, which was to bring in the King- 
 dom of God. 
 
 " I am your master," he said. Yes. " You are 
 to follow me, and I am your leader." Yes. " But 
 you are to seek the Spirit of God to enliven you 
 and give you strength. And, in fact, I go away 
 that that Spirit may more surely possess you." 
 Nay, his word is so strong as this, " If I do not go 
 away, the Comforter will not come to you." 
 
 So careful is he to efface himself from the wor- 
 ship of the church. He brings the wandering 
 child to the Father's feet, and then goes away, that 
 he may leave him there. 
 
 I. There are thirty different texts in which the 
 Saviour more or less distinctly defines Christian 
 discipleship. Such is the statement to Nico- 
 demus, the earliest of them : " Except a man be 
 born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God." 
 I need not read them. It will be a better exercise
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 23 
 
 for you to copy them from yotir own Bibles 
 yourselves. In those thirty texts he speaks three 
 times of their believing on him. In all of them 
 he speaks as to those who love him enough to be- 
 lieve him and to follow him. But in not one of 
 them does he lay the least stress on any intellec- 
 tual process. In not one of them does he open 
 the question as to what they think of him, or what 
 honor they shall pay to him. He offered himself 
 as our Master, and left us his unfinished work. 
 He says to us, " If you obey me, you will follow 
 me." He proved his affection in his death. And 
 he says, " If you believe in me, you will love 
 me." He means that we shall unite in such love, 
 and he says : " If you love me, you will love each 
 other." In all these statements he speaks as one 
 who would bring in the Kingdom of the Living 
 God. Of himself he says almost nothing. But 
 when he does speak, it is to say that he represents 
 that Living God as his anointed and well-beloved 
 Son. 
 
 II. When you come, in the Testament, to the 
 apostles' definition of Christianity you find the 
 same statement. They are building on the foun- 
 dation. The foundation is : " Thou art the 
 Christ, the Son of the living God." They are 
 never tempted, right hand or left hand, to make 
 any other statement. They baptize into the name 
 of Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Saviour. They 
 make no pretence that this Jesus is very God of
 
 24 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 very God. Their one central thought is the build- 
 ing up a church of God's children ; of the sons of 
 God and of his daughters. 
 
 To these sons and daughters they say, " Here is 
 God, God is near: enter his Kingdom." To bind 
 them together, they baptize them in the name of 
 Jesus Christ, the first begotten of their company, 
 the best beloved Son of God, who has called them 
 from darkness into light. And they call upon 
 each and all to receive, as he received, the present 
 Spirit of God, to live in that Spirit, to walk in that 
 Spirit, to go and to come as themselves, God's 
 children. " Walk worthy of the calling with 
 which ye are called," as that Son of God walked, 
 who died that you might come into your Father's 
 home, and he into yours. 
 
 III. What the church thought of Christ, in the 
 first centuries after the apostles, has appeared very 
 distinctly in late years, in the discovery of the 
 early Catechism, to which the name of the twelve 
 apostles was given. It was the Catechism taught 
 to new converts before they received the supper. 
 Its language at the supper, for instance, shows 
 that that was then a simple service of thanks- 
 giving: 
 
 " Concerning the Eucharist, thus give thanks ; 
 first concerning the cup : We thank thee, our 
 Father, for the holy wine of David thy servant, 
 which thou hast made known to us through Jesus 
 thy servant ; to thee be the glory forever. And
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 25 
 
 concerning the broken bread : We thank thee, our 
 Father, for the life and knowledge which thou hast 
 made known to us through Jesus thy servant ; to 
 thee be the glory forever." All worship, all prayers, 
 are addressed to the Father. Jesus is his servant, 
 whom he has sent as a teacher. He is as he was 
 in Peter's word, " The son of the living God." It 
 is on this rock that the church of that day knew 
 that it was standing. 
 
 And so long as they sought what he sought, 
 to bring in the Kingdom of God, the church 
 triumphed, with a sway which no philosophy 
 understood, and which no martyrdom set back- 
 ward. But then, alas ! that came which he foresaw. 
 Ah ! it is so much easier to worship him than to 
 follow him. " Many will say ' Lord, Lord,' who 
 do not the things that I say." While the church 
 was willing to do the things he said, though it was 
 the communion of the poor and the ignorant, of 
 the weak and foolish, it triumphed. In those 
 days it had no name for him other than his own, 
 none but the anointed of God, brother of our 
 brotherhood, first heir of inheritance, Son of God, 
 well beloved, first-born, Master, and Lord. But it 
 was not so easy to do as one would be done by ; it 
 was not so easy to feed the poor and to welcome 
 the leper ; it was not so easy to live in the brother- 
 hood of humanity. It was a great deal easier to 
 fall down and worship him, as he had never asked 
 them to do ; vastly easier to call him very God of
 
 26 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 very God, as he never said he was ; easier to say 
 he made the worlds, as he did not. Weary of that 
 harder service, weary of the way of thorns, the 
 church made its compact with the world. And 
 from that day to this day, its formal creeds have 
 thrown upon him the burden of the sins of man- 
 kind, and have given to him the homage which he 
 gave to his Father. 
 
 IV. Yet he was never left without a witness. 
 Central in all testimonies were the four Gospels, 
 which would not change. Steadily they say that 
 he is the Anointed the Son of the living God. 
 There was the confessed refusal of all Palestine, 
 where he lived and died, to give him any other 
 name, whether men were his followers or no. 
 There were such simple Christians as those in 
 the valleys of the Alps, who would never say that 
 the Son was the Father, and did not know what 
 was meant when men said it. 
 
 More and more, as Galileo's tube opened the 
 sky, as this world took its proper little place in 
 the universe, as it showed itself, a little speck of 
 dust floating in space, by the same law which 
 ruled planets, suns, and constellations ; more and 
 more did men ask themselves what the creed of 
 the church meant when it said that Jesus of 
 Nazareth made all the worlds ; or what it meant 
 when it said that the very God of the universe 
 even, left the universe to stand on the deck of a 
 fishing-boat at Capernaum. More and more the
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 2 7 
 
 devout thought of the world went back to the 
 simple statement of the four Gospels, and recog- 
 nized and found its Saviour, as never before, 
 when it accepted him again as the well-beloved 
 Son of the Living God, commissioned and anointed 
 to bring in the Kingdom of God. 
 
 This is the statement of his work and his posi- 
 tion which will stand, because it is his own state- 
 ment. For us, our place is gratitude and loyalty. 
 " What is that to thee ? " he said to Peter once, 
 when Peter stepped too far in a question, " what 
 is that to thee ? Follow thou me." 
 
 And that is what he would say to us if we 
 could put to him some of our speculative ques- 
 tions, these conundrums which the theologians 
 hand about so glibly, "What is that to thee? 
 Follow thou me." Whoever will take the Saviour 
 of men, in his work of saving them from their 
 sins, whoever will try the great experiment of 
 prayer, and the other experiment of sacrifice, as 
 this Leader of men bids him try one and the 
 other, comes to the certainty that here is a Leader 
 who knows how to lead, who knows what he is 
 talking about, and who shows the way. Whoever 
 follows, though with trembling foot and fickle 
 faith, follows each day more hopefully and 
 strongly, and knows that this is no finite guess that 
 he is working on ; he knows that he has God's law 
 for the affairs of men ; this time he is sure of his 
 Leader. This Leader is from God, commissioned
 
 28 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 
 
 by him, inspired by him, and sustained by him. 
 He who follows that Leader, comes to believe that 
 Leader, and to live in his Life. As the Saviour 
 prays, he prays. As the Saviour trusts, he trusts. 
 As the Saviour listens, he listens. He comes to 
 know that the living God, the living Power of the 
 Universe, loves and strengthens every child of 
 earth. They are his children, partakers of his 
 nature, and alive with his life. Such a child of 
 God, who has followed to such purpose the Son 
 of God well-beloved, dares the great experiment 
 of the Holy Spirit. He lives in God, he moves in 
 God, in God he has his being. He plunges into 
 life, knowing that the living God will sustain him 
 and carry him through. He believes the Master's 
 words, " Lo, I am not alone, for my Father is 
 with me." 
 
 " God does not hate me. He loves me." This 
 is the cry of such a disciple. " God does not 
 punish me. He forgives me. God does not forget 
 me as he goes about in his universe. He is here 
 to-day this minute. And I I am not in the 
 darkness. I am in his Light. I am not alone. 
 I am with him. I am next weak. I am in his 
 arms. For I am his child born of him as I 
 shall return to him. My life is not of to-day, not 
 of to-morrow, but is forever; it is as the life of 
 God." This is the joy of life to come to this 
 certainty. And the disciple who is so glad, the 
 disciple who is so certain, cannot find hymn or
 
 WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? 29 
 
 psalm joyous enough to express his exultation ; 
 he cannot frame the word which expresses his 
 gratitude. What can he do but follow loyally, 
 lovingly, heartily, the Leader who has led him, 
 the Teacher who has taught him, the Saviour who 
 has saved him, the Brother who has blessed him. 
 He finds the way of life. He looks, and lo ! an 
 Open Door. Thou art indeed the Christ, the Son 
 of the living God.
 
 FIVE QUESTIONS. 
 
 "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." 
 
 MATT. vi. 9. 
 
 I HAVE received a courteous letter from the 
 editor of the " Boston Investigator." This is a 
 newspaper which has existed in Boston, dedicated 
 to what used to be called infidelity, since 1831, 
 and is read, as it says itself, by thousands of men 
 and women who are in the dark about God, and 
 are willing to be enlightened. The letter which I 
 have received is an " open letter to the clergymen 
 of Boston." I will not read it at length now, but 
 I will read the five questions which it puts to all 
 of us. 
 
 1. What do you mean by the word "God"? 
 
 2. How do you know that there is a God? 
 
 3. Where is the dwelling-place of God, or 
 where is heaven? 
 
 4. What makes the Bible the word of God ? 
 
 5. Did God write the Bible, or dictate it, or 
 make it divine after it was written? 
 
 Nothing can be more interesting than the fact 
 that such a letter, intelligently drawn and courte- 
 ously written, is addressed, in good faith, to the
 
 32 FIVE QUESTIONS. 
 
 preachers of the Christian religion in Boston. It 
 is simply my duty, as it is a pleasure, to reply to 
 it; and there are many reasons why I read the 
 reply here before sending it, as I shall do, to Mr. 
 Washburn. 
 
 It would be rather painful to think that one had 
 preached what he thought true in Boston for 
 thirty-five years, and that any person who cared 
 about him was ignorant of his views on these five 
 subjects. But I can well understand that, as there 
 are many different answers possible to each of 
 these five questions, that vague person whom we 
 call " the average reader " might fail to see how 
 those answers connect with each other. That is to 
 say, it may well be that the whole system of relig- 
 ious belief often confuses the inquirer who knows 
 what is one or another detail, 
 
 It is interesting to observe that a person who 
 calls himself an infidel puts his questions in about 
 the same way in which they would be put in a 
 theological school by the most conservative of 
 professors. This seems to show that both are 
 making the same inquiry, in much the same 
 spirit and with much the same purpose. 
 
 I. The first question, then, is, " What do you 
 mean by ' God ' ? " My answer is that that word is 
 the word which has, on the whole, been agreed 
 upon by the persons who speak the English lan- 
 guage, to denote the infinite Power which appears 
 in all nature. As to the existence of this Power
 
 FIVE QUESTIONS. 33 
 
 there is no question. Some Power makes what we 
 call storms sweep across the continent, so that 
 snow is falling from the atmosphere while I write 
 these words. Some Power has set the world and 
 sun in such order that on this world it is daylight 
 for a part of the time and darkness for another 
 part of the time. To this Power, the people 
 who use the English language have, on the whole, 
 assigned the name " God ; " and I use that word be- 
 cause it is the English word for this Power. Jesus 
 Christ, whom I call the Saviour of men, preferred 
 to use the word " Father " when he spoke of this 
 Power. This was because he definitely and dis- 
 tinctly believed that men and women are of the 
 same nature with this Power. He definitely and 
 distinctly believed, as I believe, that this Power is 
 aware of what men and women do, and assists 
 them in doing it. Just as any man of science 
 would say that gravitation or electricity results 
 from this Power, Jesus Christ said that love, 
 memory, imagination, and any other human 
 attribute come from the Power who rules the 
 universe. 
 
 II. The second question is, " How do you know 
 that there is a God? " After my first answer, Mr. 
 Washburn would put this question thus : " How 
 do you know that this Power is conscious of your 
 existence? " For Mr. Washburn and I would agree 
 that there is such a Power in the universe. The 
 general answer which will be made to Mr. Wash-
 
 34 FIVE QUESTIONS. 
 
 burn is that all men and women are conscious of 
 the existence of God, unless they have been early 
 prejudiced. It will be said to him that all nations 
 in all times have believed in the existence of 
 a conscious Power above them, and that this 
 general accord of the common sense of men is a 
 strong reason for belief that such a Power exists. 
 At all events, it will be said, a feeling naturally 
 impressed in all human hearts must be taken as 
 fundamental in any human discussions. It seems 
 to me that this statement is worth a great deal, 
 and I should find it very hard to parry it if it 
 were made against me in argument. But I know 
 perfectly well that Mr. Washburn will say in reply 
 what he has a right to say, that he has no such 
 sentiment. He will say that he never had any 
 such sentiment, and that therefore when I appeal 
 to the consciousness of the human race, I make 
 an appeal which he is not bound to respect. I 
 think, as a matter of logic, he has a right to make 
 this reply. 
 
 For myself, however, it is a matter of the greatest 
 interest to observe that here live, upon this world, 
 millions and millions and millions of men, beasts, 
 birds, fishes, and insects who are conscious of 
 their own existence and aware of the existence of 
 others. Even a fly knows that he is alive, and 
 knows that other flies are alive around him. 
 Observing this, there is to me something prepos- 
 terous beyond language in the assumption that
 
 FIVE QUESTIONS. 35 
 
 every other world goes about its own business 
 without such life such conscious life; that 
 this element which we call life, this element of 
 consciousness, is unknown outside this world 
 in all that universe. To suppose that on this 
 little speck there are some millions of beings, 
 loving, hating, fearing, resolving, worshipping, 
 acting, and creating from conscious impulse, and 
 then to suppose that everywhere outside of this 
 speck there is no loving, no hating, no fearing, 
 no hoping, no worshipping, and no creating, is to 
 me so sublimely absurd that I find it difficult to 
 conceive that other people hold that impression. 
 To go a little farther, I find that I, with five senses, 
 and five senses only, by which to communicate 
 with outside nature, am able to form a definite 
 and well-conceived opinion regarding many things 
 which are passing in stars whose distance from me 
 is almost beyond statement. I find myself able to 
 go back into the past through ages indefinite, 
 even though you say I may not go forward into 
 the future ; I find that a little five-sensed man like 
 me is capable of this almost infinite range in his 
 life. As this is so, I find it absolutely impossible 
 to think that the Power who moves worlds, makes 
 suns shine or not shine, and creates me and cre- 
 ates everything around me, is doing this without 
 thought, without hope, without life that that 
 Power is not He, but is It that that Power is 
 an unconscious power.
 
 36 FIVE QUESTIONS. 
 
 If this Power knows what he is about, if he is 
 conscious of his work, he knows more or less 
 about me, about what I am about, and about what 
 my work is. 
 
 I do not suppose that the average savage of 
 early days would have made this statement in 
 exactly this form; but I do suppose that, from 
 the beginning, a certain sympathy between the 
 processes of nature, as we call them, and the pro- 
 cesses of a man's life has led the average savage 
 or the average sage to the feeling that there is 
 possible conversation or communion between the 
 Infinite Being and the finite being. That is, 
 prayer or communion between the two comes 
 from the certainty that nature, or God, is inter- 
 ested in man. If God knows about me and cares 
 for me, if I am of his nature, I know some- 
 thing about him and certainly I care for him. 
 
 Such mutual consciousness may of course be ex- 
 pressed in a thousand ways. But there are, how- 
 ever, simple experiments which the world has been 
 trying for tens of thousands of years, probably 
 for hundreds of thousands of years, which have 
 brought men to the conviction of to-day. If God 
 is conscious of my existence, if I have, to say the 
 least, a suspicion that he exists, I can try the ex- 
 periment. Even if I were as badly off as a fishing- 
 vess-el in a fog, and knew not where I was, I could 
 blow the steam-whistle or sound the horn hour 
 after hour of the tedious night. And if, of a sud-
 
 FIVE QUESTIONS. 37 
 
 den, I heard whistle or horn in reply, I should 
 know that I was not alone, but that there was 
 some other intelligence at hand. It is thus in the 
 power of any child of God to try the great ex- 
 periment. He can come to God in prayer. Day in 
 and out, month in and out, year in and out, he can 
 tell him everything one's hopes and fears, one's 
 joys and sorrows. The men who have tried this 
 great experiment in hundreds of thousands of 
 years are, on the whole, agreed that these prayers 
 have been answered. They are, on the whole, 
 sure that from the infinite Power which rules all 
 life new power has come to them in proportion as 
 they have entered into his life, his purpose, and his 
 affair. If they have lived as sons of God, partak- 
 ers of his nature, they have more and more be- 
 lieved that he is their Father, and they have had 
 more and more of the infinite strength which con- 
 trols the world. On the whole, taking a long 
 sweep of the circle for the calculation, those chil- 
 dren of God who have tried to walk with God, to 
 carry out such laws as they have found him give, 
 and to give themselves to such purposes as they 
 believe to be his purposes, have been the men and 
 women who have succeeded in this world. And 
 they are the very men and women who have begged 
 other persons to enter into the same communion 
 with him. 
 
 Of such prayer the simplest form and the best 
 for a doubtful beginner, if you please, is that old
 
 38 FIVE QUESTIONS. 
 
 form, often repeated, " O God, if there be a God, 
 help my soul, if I have a soul ! " This is quoted 
 sometimes as if it were matter for ridicule. It 
 seems to me a yearning appeal of a heart which has 
 been chilled, of a soul whose senses have been 
 stunned, of a child of God who, by some fatal or 
 hellish ingenuity, has been shut up in a prison where 
 he could not see the heavens nor enjoy the life of 
 the earth. Beginning with a prayer as simple, 
 " Lord, I believe ; help thou mine unbelief," an 
 unprejudiced child of God, with every sense open 
 for an answer, eager to live life larger and larger, 
 comes out perhaps to-day, perhaps to-morrow, 
 perhaps next year, perhaps after some shock or 
 crisis of being into infinite life, is no longer 
 hemmed in in the petty work of five human senses, 
 but partakes of the divine nature and goes about 
 his God's infinite concerns. 
 
 If, as he lives, he is born as a little child every 
 day, the prayer becomes absolute intimacy. He 
 nestles in this Father's arms as a glad child in her 
 mother's. " Father dear, now they have all gone, 
 now we are alone, tell me something. What is 
 there to-day? What are you doing, Father dear? 
 What can I do can I not help somewhere? Oh, 
 do let me tell you, dear Father, what a time I have 
 had. I was all broken to pieces, I was so angry. 
 And then just in time I remembered. I remem- 
 bered how good you are, and I would not give 
 way. But please show me how I am to pull
 
 FIVE QUESTIONS. 39 
 
 through." Men come into the real presence, and 
 they are sure that the central Love of the universe 
 sustains them. Here, then, is my answer to the 
 second question. 
 
 III. And in these statements is the answer to the 
 next question of our series: "Where is heaven?" 
 Heaven is the universe of space. Heaven is here, 
 as it is in the planet Jupiter, or in the worlds which 
 surround the stars of the Pleiades. Wherever is the 
 universal God who rules all nature, wherever is the 
 Power who works for righteousness, there is heaven. 
 When I accept that glad suggestion or impression 
 that I am of that life, that I share that power, that 
 I partake of that divine nature, I am in heaven as 
 God is in heaven. I have not to take the wings of 
 the eagle, I have not to go to the uttermost parts 
 of any unfathomed ocean. God is with me, I am 
 with him. I live and move and have my being 
 in my God ; and so I am in heaven. Some poet, 
 not known to me, speaks of 
 
 "That perfect presence of his face 
 Which we, for lack of words, call heaven." 
 
 It is easy to see that, in the earlier language 
 of barbarous tribes, it was supposed that certain 
 spots in space were more sacred than other spots. 
 But it belongs to the life more abundant, of man 
 who is infinite in his aspirations and infinite in his 
 powers, to discover that there is no such limita- 
 tion. I shall not put it better than it is put by
 
 40 FIVE QUESTIONS. 
 
 one of these old Hebrew prophets : " If I ascend 
 to the skies thou art there ; if I descend into the 
 depths thou art there ; if I take the wings of 
 the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of 
 the universe, even there shall thy hand lead me, 
 and thy right hand shall hold me." 
 
 In a word, every difficulty which has been sug- 
 gested in these questions, thus far, seems to be a 
 difficulty belonging to the use of crippled lan- 
 guage, to the mechanical use of certain words made 
 from things. So soon as man, the child of God, 
 takes into his heart the reality that he is also in- 
 finite, and is of the nature of the Power which 
 makes for righteousness, all these separate ques- 
 tions go back to the etymologists and to the 
 dictionaries. 
 
 IV., V. The next questions " What is the Bible ? " 
 and "Did God write the Bible?" are simpler ques- 
 tions, merely of human history. It happened or it 
 was ordered, under this present law of God, that 
 the Jewish nation, at its best periods, made the wor- 
 ship of an unseen God a central matter, as other 
 nations of their time did not. So when they wrote 
 history or poetry it was history or poetry devout 
 in its statement and expression. It looked toward 
 God. It has so happened, or has been so ordered, 
 that a few of the histories and poems thus written 
 struggled through, as the naturalists say, by the 
 survival of the fittest, where other literature has 
 gone to ruin. It became, therefore, the centre
 
 FIVE QUESTIONS. 41 
 
 around which formed itself the religious literature 
 of the Western World. This is just as other books 
 of high antiquity have become the centre of the 
 religious expression of the Eastern World. 
 
 The early Christians, who had received from 
 Jesus Christ new life and new lessons of life, took 
 and read in their assemblies these religious books 
 of the Hebrew nation to which he belonged. But 
 they wanted much more to know what he said, 
 and what they said who knew him best. They 
 therefore collected all the written remains which 
 they could find, of those men who had proclaimed 
 his glad tidings. Again, the law of selection pre- 
 served some, while others, of course, have disap- 
 peared. A council of Christian teachers, held in 
 the beginning of the fourth century, made the 
 selection which we now call the New Testa- 
 ment, in the attempt to say what manuscripts then 
 existing were the words of Christ's companions. 
 
 In neither of these books the Old Testament or 
 the New Testament is any claim made that they 
 are written by God, or that they are directed by 
 him except as he directs all life. Nor is the claim 
 made in them that his Word cannot be found else- 
 where. They do not make any such claim, and 
 if they did it is clear enough that such a claim of 
 itself would not add to the authority. All the 
 more, however, the Bible, as it stands, is the 
 best record of many of the few greatest crises of 
 history. It contains the word of Him who has
 
 42 FIVE QUESTIONS. 
 
 proved to be the Leader of Life, the Life-giver, and 
 the Saviour. It will therefore hold the place which 
 it has won. For that thing which the world craves 
 as its needs is Life. It craves the closest intimacy 
 it can gain with the God who makes for righteous- 
 ness. So it clings to the Bible, which tells the 
 steps and records the words of those who have 
 known this absolute intimacy. 
 
 It is pathetic enough that such questions can be 
 asked, with such serious dignity, in the year 1892. 
 It is pathetic indeed it might well make one 
 wretched to see that even science, even what 
 is called theology, even the organization of 
 churches, should have cramped and hardened 
 as they have the forms of thought and the words 
 in which men speak of infinite truth; pathetic, 
 indeed, that any man or woman who might be ex- 
 ulting in the liberty of the infinite children of an 
 infinite God is thus hampered and distressed by 
 the mechanism of words, so as to be asking what 
 they mean, and hesitating before accepting any 
 answer. Nearly nineteen hundred years since, 
 Jesus Christ said, " God is spirit, and they that 
 worship him must worship him in spirit and in 
 truth." Surely he said, if nobody had said it be- 
 fore, that we are the children of God and are like 
 him ; that he is our Father and that we partake 
 his nature. He said, if nobody said it before, " Ye 
 shall be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is 
 perfect." He said, if nobody ever said it before,
 
 FIVE QUESTIONS. 43 
 
 " I must go about my Father's business." And if 
 nobody ever said it before, he said that if we are 
 willing to embark in the great purpose of the uni- 
 verse, with the great Power who makes for right- 
 eousness, the Power who makes for righteousness 
 strengthens our hearts and quickens our minds 
 and gives to us the victory. And we, summoned 
 by such a call, quickened by such a hope, turn 
 around to ask if this infinite Power of life and lore 
 is like Jupiter sitting on Olympus, or like Neptune 
 riding from wave to wave on a chariot. We ask 
 whether certain pages of paper, with certain let- 
 ters printed upon them with ink, contain his 
 whole law of life and love, and exclude the law 
 whispered in all the winds, written on all the fields, 
 spoken by every voice which the ear can hear, 
 and written over the seas and over the skies. 
 
 Do not such appeals as this which I have been 
 reading urge any of us who may have been luke- 
 warm as to the duty of a spiritual and liberal 
 church to send out its glad tidings beyond its own 
 walls ? Naturally enough, we hate the propaganda 
 which the Middle Ages set on foot. Naturally 
 enough, the mere word missions has tainted itself, 
 as that word propaganda is associated with the 
 idea of restriction. But one has only to see how 
 a false definition of the name of God makes men 
 disbelieve in him ; how a false claim made for the 
 Bible makes them throw the Bible to the winds ; 
 how a mechanical account of the domain of
 
 44 FIVE QUESTIONS. 
 
 heaven makes them refuse to enter into the infi- 
 nite heaven of perfect love ; one has only to see 
 the evidence of such torpor as follows on the wor- 
 ship of words, and he consecrates himself anew 
 to proclaim the gospel of realities. He swears he 
 will let the world know the glorious truth, as the 
 centuries have revealed it. It can be stated in 
 three words, or it can be expanded through 
 poems and histories. God is with us, and we are 
 with him. As he lives, life is real. We can live 
 in that life. His word speaks to me here and now. 
 And when I hear it and when I find him, I am in 
 his kingdom of a present heaven.
 
 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 " Go ye forth and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them 
 into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
 Spirit." MATTHEW xxviii. 19. 
 
 THIS baptismal formula is repeated every day of 
 the year in thousands of Christian churches. 
 
 But I am afraid that its use is almost absolutely 
 conventional. As one might take the stars and 
 stripes of our flag and say that the flag is the 
 symbol of the country, without asking why the 
 stars are there or why the stripes are there, so I 
 am afraid people repeat these ancient words which 
 refer to Father, Son, and Spirit. 
 
 So I am more glad to use them, with that addi- 
 tion which is made to them in one of the ancient 
 doxologies. Here the worshipper sang: 
 
 " Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. 
 As it was in the beginning." 
 
 As it was in the beginning. 
 
 If you and I could only repeat this formula, as 
 if it were not a formula; if you and I could only 
 use such words, all fresh and alive with the life 
 with which Christ spoke them ; if they were 
 
 Edward E. Hale.
 
 46 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 words which had meaning in them, which had liv- 
 ing sap in them, which had red blood in them, 
 then we could make them the war-cry of the 
 Church or its paean of victory. But they are 
 neither war-cry nor paean if they are only 
 repeated decorously, as the requisition of a 
 liturgy. 
 
 The trouble is, in all our use of the Gospels, 
 that we fail to see the amazing novelty to those 
 people of the Saviour's statement. So we do 
 not comprehend the sudden start, the flash of 
 light, the determination to live, shall I say, as 
 giants or as angels, in that infinite future which is 
 spread before us. Indeed, it is almost impossible 
 for us to feel this ; but we must try, we must use 
 our imaginations. Here is the Saviour in the 
 midst of all sorts of people Pharisees, Sadducees, 
 Samaritans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Parthians, Greeks, 
 Romans, Egyptians, people who have had all sorts 
 of gods, or who have had no God, one God, or 
 many gods. Some of these gods were what we 
 should call devils. All of them represented force 
 and arbitrary power. They were kings or judges, 
 perhaps they were executioners or magistrates. 
 Everybody was afraid of them. To be afraid of 
 them was a requisite of, what was called religion. 
 Religion, indeed, is often defined among the writers 
 of that time as the terror of the inferior in pres- 
 ence of the superior. They went so far, you re- 
 member, as to say squarely that " the fear of the
 
 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 47 
 
 Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Into the midst 
 of the chattering of such worshippers, cold with 
 fear and almost dumb from terror, comes Jesus 
 Christ. And he says, " Whom are you afraid of? 
 What are you afraid of? This Power who main- 
 tains this world, and brings you and me into being, 
 he is our Father. He loves us, and whenever 
 we know him we love him. He cannot help lov- 
 ing us, and we cannot help loving him." When 
 he has to say which commandment of the old law 
 is greatest of them all, it is Moses' instruction, 
 which they had never understood and never ful- 
 filled, that they should love the Lord their God. 
 And the central statement of all he has to say 
 to them is this statement, that God loves them 
 and does not hate them ; that God loves them and 
 does not judge them; that God commands them 
 only because he loves them ; and that because he 
 loves them God watches over them and cares for 
 them. Nature is really conscious, and is on our 
 side. Now we are used to all this. To us the 
 words " Our Father " and the word " God" have 
 become synonymous, and they mean the same 
 thing when we use them, just as the two words 
 " Lord " and " God " have become synonymous. 
 It was not so then. It was the marvel of marvels. 
 Here is this prophet, clearly he knows what he 
 is talking about, and he says nature is not cruel, 
 but she is kind. God is not our King, but our 
 Father. God watches us always, and though we
 
 48 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 do not know it, his every act and thought are 
 act and thought of love. 
 
 Of course, then, in the watchword of the new 
 Church, in its worship, in its baptism, in its proc- 
 lamation, this word comes foremost. We are 
 not to baptize in the name of Jehovah ; not 
 even, observe, in the name of God. We are to 
 show the great reality which we stand for, which 
 lifts our worship above and beyond that of all 
 partial religions. We are to show that it is our 
 Father to whom we come. 
 
 Now, who are we who worship? Who are 
 we who proclaim? Who are we who baptize? 
 Who are we who go up and down the world pro- 
 claiming these glad tidings? Are we worms of 
 the dust? 
 
 No! 
 
 Are we so many shell-fish, lying hidden in the 
 sand, over whom there sweep regularly by a fixed 
 order certain ocean tides, which then sweep back 
 again and leave us with no wills of our own, 
 only to drink in this or that from sunshine or from 
 air? 
 
 No! 
 
 Are we a set of machines, carefully constructed, 
 with so many bones, so many nerves, so many 
 muscles and sinews, so much blood, so much carti- 
 lage, worked by a stationary battery called a brain, 
 which will run fourscore years and then stop run- 
 ning?
 
 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 49 
 
 No! 
 
 In no accurate sense are we the mere creatures 
 of this Father. We are much more. We share 
 his nature. We partake his life. We are his 
 sons and his daughters. His life is our life. 
 His being is our being. His nature is our nature. 
 Let no man say hereafter that this language is too 
 bold, that no man born of woman has shown 
 such love as God shows, such tenderness as 
 God shows, such justice as he shows, which is 
 mercy. No man shall say this who remembers 
 the son of Mary. The revelation which the son 
 of Mary has made to all his brothers and sisters of 
 mankind is, first, that the God of Nature is their 
 Father; and, second, that in the most real and 
 simple use of words, they are his sons as Jesus 
 Christ is and they are his daughters. So the 
 new Church, when it states its watchword in an 
 epigram, states this reality with the other. Abso- 
 lute religion is the religion of the Father and his 
 children. It is the religion of the Father and of 
 the Son. It is the religion of the Father and of 
 all his sons and daughters. 
 
 It proved convenient afterward for a church of 
 priests to confine its reverence to that first-born 
 Son as he is called. But the Saviour made no 
 such restriction. " Ye shall do greater things 
 than I," he said to his own. He bade all his 
 brethren address " Our Father." First and last, 
 his appeal to them and to us is to those who can
 
 5O FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 claim all his privileges and hold his communion 
 with God ; as when at the end he says : 
 
 " I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my 
 God and your God." 
 
 We are not to come to him in our prayer. 
 We are to pray as he prayed, to his Father and to 
 ours. 
 
 ," But these things are too wonderful for me." 
 This is the answer which the camel-driver from 
 Parthia makes to Matthew on the Day of Pente- 
 cost. This is what the stevedore at Corinth says 
 to Silas on the pier. This is what the philoso- 
 pher, Seneca, at Rome, says to Paul. " You cannot 
 make us believe," they say, " that this Power 
 who is shaping and moving the world has any- 
 thing in common with us." Each of them says, 
 " My world is a very small world. His world is 
 infinite." It is, then, the first duty of anybody 
 who proclaims the eternal gospel to meet that 
 difficulty. The Saviour of men does meet it. 
 All his true apostles meet it, and you and I must 
 meet it. It is perfectly true that, judged by our 
 measuring tapes, some things which God does 
 seem very large, and some things which we do 
 seem very small. But to him there is nothing 
 large and nothing small. And we, as we really 
 come to live in him, to move in him, and have 
 our being in him, as we come to know what 
 it is that we are his children, to believe in the 
 Father and in the Son, we shall come to know
 
 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 5 l 
 
 that to child and Father there is one life in 
 each and in both. It is one Spirit which in- 
 spires the action which we call " large," and 
 it is the same Spirit which inspires the action 
 which we call " small." Here is this poor mother 
 holding her sick baby in her arms. Hour after 
 hour, day after day, she cares for the child with 
 unvarying and unquestioning love. The child 
 does not thank her, cannot thank her, does not 
 want to thank her. But the mother loves still, 
 loves without question, loves without reward. 
 What dictates such sacrifice? It is the same 
 Spirit of Love which sets the universe in motion. 
 It is the Spirit of Love which clothes the world in 
 exquisite beauty, so that the poets may well sing 
 that the angels delight to look on it from afar. 
 It is the same Spirit of Love which flavors the 
 fruit and colors the flower. That Spirit inspires 
 that mother through the dark watches of the 
 night and through the long hours of the day, 
 so that that love is a perfect love and her sacri- 
 fice is unfaltering. You shall not say it is any 
 lesser spirit. This display of this Holy Spirit, 
 this visible victory on that little scene, as you 
 call it, between the whitewashed walls of an attic, 
 is as grand, as noble, as infinite, as is that other 
 display when worlds are called into visible being. 
 The one is perfect, and the other is perfect. The 
 newborn Church means to assert this ; it means to 
 assert, not simply the greatness of man's origin,
 
 52 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 but the dignity of his life. He is engaged here 
 on affairs to which the Lord of lords and King 
 of kings has commissioned him. For those af- 
 fairs that King of kings and God of gods has 
 commissioned him and inspired him. It is his 
 Spirit, the Infinite and Holy Spirit which rules that 
 universe. It is the same Spirit which quickens 
 the kiss which this mother gives her child. Her 
 affair, also, is infinite, and her love is infinite 
 love. 
 
 In the beginning these early teachers meant to 
 express this in their watchword, and that watch- 
 word meant this then, when they proclaimed the 
 Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 
 
 And that is what we mean now when we give 
 glory to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy 
 Spirit, " as it was in the beginning." 
 
 A very curious study is that historical examina- 
 tion which shows how this simple rallying-cry 
 was transformed into the mechanical and dead 
 church doctrine called the Trinity, as held in the 
 Dark Ages. Egypt had its triads of gods, such as 
 Osiris, Isis, and Horus, which in a fashion were 
 one God. And when the modest Christian school 
 appeared in Alexandria, it was not hard to con- 
 fuse their simple three, Father, Child, and Spirit, 
 into the sonorous phrases which describe three 
 adorable persons as all three one God. Easier 
 still, when Constantine folded Christianity in his 
 arms and almost stifled her in the embrace, for
 
 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 5j 
 
 him to grant any honors, any statement of deity, 
 to the Jesus Christ who was crucified three centu- 
 ries before, if, by that easy bargain, he might strike 
 out from the new-born religion those fatal state- 
 ments that all men were brethren, and that every 
 man was son of God. 
 
 It is no business of ours, however, to go again 
 into that fatal story of the Dark Ages. Thanks 
 to the Christian Reformation and to reformation 
 upon reformation which has sprung from it, the 
 Dark Ages are over, and we live in the light again, 
 or at least in the early dawn. The church doctrine 
 of the Trinity died the day Galileo pointed his tele- 
 scope at Jupiter. For us to-day, then, one of the 
 necessities is to give glory to the divinity of man, 
 as they did in the beginning. When we speak of 
 the divinity of human nature, we do not confine it 
 to the divinity of Jesus Christ, who came and went 
 in Palestine for thirty-three years. We are talking 
 of the infinite power of all the sons of God, and of 
 all his daughters. We are talking of the infinite 
 and eternal life. We are talking of the range of 
 their duties, of the range of their possibilities, of 
 the range of their successes, of the range of their 
 joys. This is it to give glory to the child of God 
 as it was in the beginning. 
 
 And in saying this I am only speaking of one 
 detail of what would be for the higher and better 
 life of mankind, if the Church of Christ to-day 
 would do what it says in the decorous lip-service
 
 54 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 of a thousand different forms. It is very true that 
 each age likes to prepare its own symbols, each 
 likes to make its own statements. Nay, each man 
 does this thing. Our dear friend Freeman Clarke 
 used to say that he had reduced the whole to the 
 four words, " Love God, love man." These make 
 an admirable watchword, but of course they re- 
 quire the statement of what you mean by God, and 
 the other statement of what you mean by man. 
 They suppose, that is, that nineteen centuries have 
 brought up the world to the knowledge that God 
 is our Father, and to the knowledge that man is 
 the son of God, is the well-beloved son of God ; 
 that man partakes his nature, enters into his work, 
 and enjoys his joy. For myself, I enjoy Paul's 
 phrase, when he says that the abiding elements of 
 life are faith and hope and love. 
 
 The French Socialists have taken the phrase 
 " Liberty, -equality, fraternity." The English 
 Chartists, the Odd Fellows, the Sons of Temper- 
 ance, every leading organization, has in like 
 wise taken modern words to state its requisition 
 of the times, and to try to turn a fresh corner of 
 the diamond, which has not been rubbed, to do 
 the cutting of the living hour. In every such 
 effort to freshen men's thought and quicken their 
 intelligence, something, certainly, is gained. But 
 all of them involve certain eternal principles. 
 And I say again, if the Church, when it mumbles 
 over these principles in ancient language, could
 
 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 55 
 
 be electrified by some flash from heaven, or 
 quickened by some explosion of earthly dyna- 
 mite, or roused by some voice of living prophet, 
 to do the thing which she says that she believes, 
 in that day the Kingdom of Heaven would come. 
 Imagine, if you can, a world in which men should 
 go and come with this sense, that nature is on 
 their side and is not against them ; a world in 
 which a man shall rejoice in the snow-storm, in 
 the tempest, in the rush of the tide upon the 
 beach, as a child rejoices in the opening of a 
 snowdrop or the perfume of a rose. Imagine 
 a world in which a man who goes forth to his 
 daily duty shall know that God is with him, is 
 present life, strength, comfort, and joy. It is a 
 world in which he does not suppose that a cruel 
 God is pursuing him to punish him. It is a world 
 in which he does not suppose that a critical or 
 cynical God is weighing him on the scales, to 
 snap him off the balance when he is done with 
 him, because he is mean or imperfect. It is a 
 world in which he knows that if he will only use 
 that which is given him, if he will only resolutely 
 eat the manna which falls to-day, it shall be to 
 him for tonic if not for food, it shall give him 
 strength if it do not give him joy. It is a world 
 in which he studies the forces of God, which he 
 has not understood till now, and lo ! he finds that 
 lightning is not the engine of God's wrath, but 
 that it is the humble servant of his own con-
 
 56 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 venience and pleasure ! He finds that the tem- 
 pest is not the punishment of man's sins, but that 
 it is to work the wonders of God's present love. 
 The new life, the heart and courage for daily duty, 
 which shall make men do their work why, as 
 God does his work, gladly, heartily, and of 
 course successfully, is the life which belongs to 
 the world of our Father. It will come the 
 moment when the world really believes in " Our 
 Father." I suppose that that sense of God's love 
 must come first. But it is not impossible for 
 those to see what will come next, who have read 
 the four Gospels. Those who have some touch 
 or sense of the Saviour's life can imagine at least 
 what is to come to the world when men under- 
 stand as well what it is to believe in the sonship 
 of all God's children. To go about your daily 
 business, as we say here so often, as a prince of 
 the blood royal. This is to share the joy of God ; 
 it is to use the strength of God. To forget that 
 any cynic or any fool or any creed ever said that 
 we were born in sin and conceived in iniquity; to 
 forget that any priest or any knave ever pro- 
 claimed the folly that we were worms of the dust, 
 and were to cry, "Vile, vile!" or, better than 
 this, to grow up, as I have known children in this 
 church to grow up, utterly ignorant that there 
 ever was such folly or cynicism, which put into 
 words such infinite depreciations of the sons of 
 God, and of his daughters. All this is to give
 
 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. $? 
 
 energy of life and hope to the work of this world ; 
 yes, and, let me say, to its pleasures ; to make 
 of the work a divine offering, new every morning 
 and fresh every evening ; and make the pleasures, 
 as well, to be so many steps in the advance of 
 these princes and princesses, as they go forward, 
 indeed, from life to life, from joy to joy, and from 
 glory to glory. This vision seems somewhat dim, 
 and men take it as less possible than that other 
 vision. God reveals himself as our Father with 
 every morning. And the glory and dignity of 
 the sons of God scattered this world over has 
 no such visible or tangible representation. But 
 the Saviour was such a visible representation. 
 Apostles, prophets, and martyrs have all lived 
 and died in the certainty that this vision is to 
 become more real and more to every generation. 
 Every noble life makes the vision more certain. 
 Every unselfish death makes us apprehend better 
 what is its range and infinitude. So that we may 
 well believe that, as the Church casts off its 
 hypocrisies, treads under foot its shams, and 
 makes its liturgies real, the Church herself shall 
 succeed in proclaiming to all children of sorrow, as 
 she has called them, the infinite reality that they 
 are really sons and daughters of the living God. 
 
 Then, and perhaps not till then, will Church and 
 world know what men have been saying when, in 
 a half-stupid, half-mechanical way, they have pre- 
 tended that they have believed in the Holy Spirit.
 
 58 FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 One spirit with God who loves the world and the 
 same spirit in the hearts of men and women whom 
 he loves and who loves him ; to go and come 
 in my daily affair as God goes and comes in his ; 
 in the same Holy Spirit, as joyous, as pure, as un- 
 selfish, as infinite, this is what I say is possible 
 when I baptize a little child in the name of the 
 Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 
 This is what I say is possible when, with my head 
 bent, I repeat the Apostles' Creed, and say that 
 I believe in the Holy Spirit. There is a much 
 greater reality than saying I believe it, and that 
 reality conies to me when I live in that Spirit, when 
 it inspires me, when it gives me the strength of an 
 infinite child of an infinite God, when it gives to 
 my daily duty the breadth and range of some 
 infinite affair. Then it shows me that the conse- 
 quences of that duty shall sweep through all time 
 and to them there shall be no distance. It shows 
 to me that the success of to-day's endeavor is not 
 simply the cheer in my own household of the 
 comfort of my own friend, though that is no trifle. 
 It is success ranging through all the world and 
 touching all time ; for here is the success, here is 
 the victory, of the Holy Spirit of God himself. 
 This is the spirit in which he moves the worlds 
 and sets them in order. It is in this spirit that 
 his sons and daughters live. They are one in 
 him, he is one with them. This is it to live and 
 move and have my being in my God.
 
 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 
 
 "Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which en- 
 tered not into the heart of man, whatsoever things God prepared 
 for them that love him. Unto us God revealed them through the 
 Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things 
 of God." 
 
 I Cor. ii. 9, 10. 
 
 " IT is one thing to say one believes in immor- 
 tality. It is quite another to live as an immortal." 
 
 I heard Mr. John Weiss say this in a sermon 
 nearly fifty years ago. I can use no better words 
 now to state the difference between two habits of 
 life and expression. The truth involved is shown 
 in the lives of all the men of infinite experience. 
 
 Think how little there is in the four Gospels 
 which can be cited in words, to a person uneasy 
 about infinite life, as one cites an argument. 
 There is no demonstration of immortality sug- 
 gested or even attempted. There is that difficult 
 and hardly intelligible rejoinder to the Saddu- 
 cees, where it would seem as if some ready epi- 
 gram had been mistaken and lifted into the place 
 of an argument. And this is the only approach 
 to what we call demonstration. On the other 
 hand, every important conversation takes immor- 
 tality absolutely for granted. It is a reality where 
 no argument is needed. It has been settled once
 
 6O HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 
 
 and forever. You do not argue about it, you do 
 not prove it, any more than you prove the exist- 
 ence of air or the pressure of gravitation. What 
 one does see and it is the central pulse of the 
 intense vitality of the Gospels is this, that Jesus 
 lives as an immortal lives. He is always looking 
 out into infinite life. Food, raiment, shelter, 
 always take a secondary and inferior place. Love, 
 society, faith, prayer, hope, heaven, these are 
 the primary matters. These are what one talks 
 about, thinks about, and lives for. He does not 
 so much as say that he believes in immortality, 
 or that they must. But he lives as you know an 
 immortal would live, and he takes it for granted 
 that you will. 
 
 I do not regard this as merely an illustration of 
 his evident dislike of talk where it is contrasted 
 with work. That is clear all along, that he detests 
 the people of eager expression, who say, Lord, 
 Lord, but do not the things which he says. There 
 is much more than this. You will find, I think, 
 that just in proportion to the largeness of any 
 one's life, that person refrains from talking about 
 life in heaven, as if he could describe it, or make 
 it evident to the senses. 
 
 To compare it with a very small thing, it is only 
 the poor critics, people who are very ignorant of 
 music or of other fine art, who undertake to ex- 
 plain to you in words the power which a noble 
 symphony has over one, or a perfect statue. Lord
 
 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 6 1 
 
 Byron ridicules them as those who " describe the 
 indescribable. " 
 
 It is on a scale vastly larger than this that those 
 people show their own absurdity who undertake 
 to make heaven visible to us, or its language 
 audible. The precise truth for which we want 
 expression is this : that whereas here life is fet- 
 tered and imprisoned within the somewhat hard 
 control of five senses, the infinite life is not so fet- 
 tered or controlled. Infinite means unbounded. 
 When Dean Mansell wrote his book on "The Lim- 
 itations of Religious Enquiry," Dr. Hedge said to 
 me, "Why does the man want to talk about the 
 limitations of that which is unlimited?" And one 
 feels the same surprise, not to say disgust, when one 
 reads in the Koran of Mahomet about the roses 
 and the rubies, the pearls and the feasts, the houries 
 and the djins, which and who make up the heaven 
 to which the true Musselman is invited. Or take 
 the Book of Revelation, with which the Bible 
 ends. The poetry of that book is simply magnifi- 
 cent, when it tells you of thousands and thousands 
 which no man can number; when it tells you of 
 voices which no one can pretend to interpret or 
 understand. But when the language turns to num- 
 bering and interpreting, it fails. We come to 
 visions of four square cities measured by measur- 
 ing-rods, and built upon stones whose mineralogy 
 is explained to us, and we turn the page uneasily 
 and seek for more of the other kind. All this is
 
 62 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 
 
 to say that audible language is, from its very 
 nature, earthly and finite. So far as it goes, it goes 
 very well, but woe to him who tries to make it go 
 farther. My horse or my ass may bear me well to 
 the shore of the infinite ocean, but woe to me if I 
 try to make him carry me over. Human language 
 is necessarily confined to the affairs of the five 
 senses. When it tries to describe the realities 
 which are noted by a thousand senses outside their 
 range, human language of necessity breaks down. 
 
 But human life is not limited within five senses. 
 I lie in my bed at midnight: I hear nothing, I 
 see nothing, I taste nothing, I smell nothing, 
 indeed, I feel nothing but the even temperature of 
 98 Fahr., maintained in my body between the 
 blankets and the mattress ; so little do my five 
 senses help me there. But my life, all the same, 
 is taking an unbounded range, if I choose, in 
 memory or in hope, in prayer or in faith, or in the 
 absolutely unlimited sweep of love. I am living, 
 if I choose, in a range of being which does not 
 want to express itself in English words, or German 
 words, or Latin words. It is perfectly indifferent 
 to such earthy, wooden, carnal, clumsy, finite ex- 
 pressions. I would as soon get out of bed and 
 light the lamp and find canvas and an easel and 
 try to paint a picture there, of my love or my 
 aspiration, with colors called Antwerp blue or rose 
 madder and flake white, as undertake to express
 
 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 63 
 
 the same aspiration or the same love in two 
 hundred and fifty words, of which the philologists 
 tell me that fifty-seven per cent, are derived from the 
 Saxon, twenty-two from the Latin, and the rest from 
 the Keltic or the Icelandic or from somewhere else. 
 All that is of the earth, earthy. The word is as 
 earthy as the pigment. And here is the essential 
 reason why any master of life will not fool with 
 these clumsy expressions. 
 
 " Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of 
 God?" This is the groan of the Saviour, indig- 
 nant because people want to have infinite realities 
 clamped and cramped in human language. It 
 is the reason why all poets tell you that there 
 are more realities in heaven and earth than your 
 written philosophy pretends to. I may say in 
 passing, as of an illustration not very important, 
 that in this truth we find the reason for the utter 
 futility and ghastly dulness of the people who call 
 themselves the spiritualists of to-day. 
 
 To live as an immortal lives is a very different 
 matter. How often in history a great man or 
 woman, true child of God, has done God's work 
 as God himself might do it, who had no power of 
 describing the deed when it was done. Years after 
 him, centuries after, this poet or that, this 
 artist or that, strives, unequal, to describe or to 
 represent the deed itself, which has long before 
 been approved by all the sons of God as being
 
 64 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 
 
 indeed divine. Arnold of Winkelried rushes 
 forward on the Austrian lances with the cry, 
 "Make way for Liberty!" 
 
 In another language, five hundred years after, 
 an English poet tells the story. But the divine 
 deed, of course, is the Swiss peasant's who gave 
 his life a ransom for many. 
 
 Perhaps the best things in poetry are its suc- 
 cesses, when it does show how what we call the 
 most insignificant of God's children is indeed 
 significant when he becomes himself a creative 
 force, enters into God's work, and goes about his 
 Father's business. What are the conquests of 
 religion? Invariably you find that they are not 
 the results of logic or demonstration ; they have 
 not come from crusades or other organizations : 
 they are wrought by the flash which we like to call 
 electric, from one devout, and loving, and hopeful 
 life to another. As we felt a few days ago at an 
 open grave, when we remembered how one 
 woman's life had quickened and inspired other 
 lives around her, while, perhaps, she had never 
 taught a word of dogmatic, or never argued out 
 a conclusion in language. 
 
 To live as an immortal means that one uses 
 thus the things of earth and time for infinite 
 results. The New Testament text on this matter 
 is seldom understood, but covers the whole. The 
 Saviour directs his disciples to use the things of
 
 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 65 
 
 this world in such wise that when they fail, as they 
 must fail, the angels of light may receive them 
 into everlasting habitations. It is as a boy of 
 five years, on the carpet, may use his wooden 
 blocks so as to take into the range of his knowl- 
 edge those laws of gravitation on which the 
 movements of planets and comets depend. It is 
 to make my bargains at the grocer's shop with 
 that courtesy, that integrity, that justice and 
 steadiness with which I should talk with Raphael 
 or Uriel if I happened to be in the business of 
 Paradise Lost, and should show them that I was 
 quite their equal in all matters of conscience and 
 inspiration. Or, in a word, it is to bear in mind 
 all along that, though the sun is to set to-night at 
 five o'clock, there are regions of space where it 
 never sets ; and though the sun is burning itself 
 out and will be done with when some myriads of 
 aeons of ages have gone by, that I, who walk in 
 the shadow or in the sunlight, am never to be done 
 with, and that I may use the shadow or the sun- 
 light for my affair without any slavish subser- 
 viency to their accidental changes. 
 
 For training in this consciousness and certainty 
 of infinite life I am, as you know, always urging 
 young people to be familiar with the processes of 
 nature, as one sees them where they are not con- 
 trolled, not harnessed for immediate and tem- 
 porary purposes. Such a sleigh-ride as that of
 
 66 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 
 
 last week, in an hour of the glory of nature, lifts 
 a man above mere earthy entanglements, as no 
 logical demonstration of his being can do, and as 
 very little formal poetry does. Whenever Script- 
 ure achieves such a miracle, wherever we find 
 that Scripture, it is then that we call it inspired. 
 For inspiration is the presence of the Infinite or 
 Holy Spirit in words, in inventions, in heroism, 
 or in any other human affair. Whether, then, 
 one study nature through the revelations of the 
 microscope, whether he study nature in the stars 
 at night, whether he study nature as he opens a 
 bud to see how life is enlarging itself and pre- 
 paring to enlarge itself, or whether he study the 
 old records of the folding of the strata into 
 mountains, or travel afar, afoot or on the seas, 
 that he may know more, whether of the curve 
 of waves or the heaving up of sands, he trains 
 himself to infinite life all the time. One does not 
 say to " larger" life, because that word is too small, 
 but to a life which is infinite, unbounded, and does 
 not know our measure of great or little. Every 
 step that the schools make in this direction is a 
 gain in real education, whether it be or be not an 
 advance in instruction. The use of the Natural 
 History Society, of the museums, of such clubs 
 as the Appalachian Club, and everything which 
 calls men out from their handicrafts, whether of 
 the brain or of the fingers, into this sympathy 
 with the life of the world and of the universe, is
 
 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 67 
 
 so much help to him who is thus emancipated. 
 Indeed, I suppose that here is the real reason why, 
 at bottom and at heart, imprisonment, or being 
 shut up away from the courses of nature, has 
 come to be rightly esteemed as the most terrible 
 punishment which man can inflict upon his 
 brother. The man who eagerly and continuously 
 tries in such fashion to cultivate the infinite secret 
 of nature lives as an immortal. 
 
 It is virtually to say the same thing, simply 
 with a change of the illustration, when one 
 speaks of that enlargement of life as infinite which 
 comes from frankly throwing ourselves into the 
 great brotherhood of mankind. Of course I may 
 go about my daily business merely with the wish 
 to make a profit for myself, to receive more 
 than I give out, to be richer to-night than I was 
 this morning. But I may go into it with the en- 
 thusiasm with which a great general makes an 
 army move because he loves his country. Every 
 thread in my shuttle as I throw it across the loom, 
 every word that I write upon the paper, or every 
 type which I set in my composing-stick, may be 
 my contribution to the welfare of mankind. I 
 heard a man say once that he had rather live in a 
 work-shop than in a trade-shop. What he meant 
 was that he wanted to be a contributor to the real 
 comfort of the whole human race. He liked to 
 feel, when he made a screw, that that screw was of 
 use in South Africa or in Alaska. He liked to
 
 68 IIOVV IMMORTALS LIVE. 
 
 feel that he was doing his part as a creative force, 
 and that God had not miscalculated when He sent 
 him into the world. I see no reason why a man 
 in a trade- shop should not have the same feeling; 
 but perhaps it does not suggest itself quite so 
 readily. Trade-shop or work-shop, wherever a 
 man is, if he be at work in the brotherhood, and 
 bears in mind the service he is rendering for the 
 brotherhood, he will be lifted wholly above the 
 plane of the brute, eating that his own hunger 
 may be appeased, and seeking forage that he may 
 eat, and going and coming only that he may seek 
 forage. In such service, as George Herbert says, 
 there is nothing mean ; in such service for man- 
 kind one comes, as in the study of nature, into 
 the infinite relations. And as a thousand poets 
 have sung and a thousand philosophers have said, 
 this service also extends itself beyond the range of 
 1892 or of this century. I touch the button to- 
 day, but the thrill which results from my deter- 
 mination is a thrill which spreads not only through 
 all space, but through all time. So far I am one 
 with God and nature in the affair of His eternity. 
 
 " Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain 
 mercy." This was the beatitude as the Saviour 
 announced it on the mountain. To his own mind 
 it involved the enlargement of merciful life of him 
 who rendered this service or that service. He 
 saw the disciple who had accepted the promise 
 more and more godlike, more and more divine,
 
 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 69 
 
 a partner indeed of the universe, in precise pro- 
 portion as he passed outside his own physical 
 effort or enjoyment into the service which God, 
 without leaving it Himself, had intrusted to His 
 children of mankind. 
 
 To make one's life as large as this in its relations 
 is to live as an immortal. 
 
 It is his business to enter into the life of the 
 universe, his business to enter into the common 
 life of his race, yes, and to make it better. 
 And whatever he does in such matters he does it 
 under infinite law. He does not need to inquire 
 what are the customs or statutes of people round 
 him. His tenure is not a temporary tenure, and 
 his laws are the eternal laws. Among the most 
 interesting of the fairy tales of our time, or of 
 classical times, are stories to illustrate such life. 
 The gods descend to live with men, as Apollo 
 with Admetus, as Jupiter with Deucalion and 
 Pyrrha. The god so housed in a cabin by the 
 hour must be indifferent to its discomforts. He 
 must eat his bran bread as if it were ambrosia, 
 and drink his black broth as if it were nectar. 
 He must correct the errors of the housekeeping 
 or of the farm as if he were setting right the 
 movement of a planet. But he must not be crit- 
 ical about the bed in which he sleeps, or the 
 grammar of those to whom he is talking. He is 
 above such trifles, because he is divine ; he is 
 Jove, or the son of Jove ; he is infinite, immortal.
 
 7 HOW IMMORTALS LIVE. 
 
 Such stories owe their interest to our reminis- 
 cences of our own immortality and the sense of 
 our infinity which they quicken in us. We are in 
 these cabins of ours, or houses, or palaces this 
 house of our earthly tabernacle for a few score 
 years, what matter whether twoscore, three- 
 score, or four. No matter, if while I live them 
 through I am speaking the old language of 
 heaven, and do not lose my accent; doing the old 
 work of heaven, though it be in the ploughing of a ' 
 furrow or the amusement of a child, if, indeed, 
 I be not warped aside to the gluttony of a beast 
 or the laziness of an oyster, but if I go about my 
 Father's business. 
 
 Eye hath not seen, no, nor ear heard, no, nor 
 hath it entered into the heart of man to imagine 
 what are the infinite things open to those who love 
 God. But God has revealed them by His Spirit. 
 Whoso really liveth, says the Saviour, making 
 the same statement, whoso liveth in the infinite 
 life, whoso believeth that God is Father and that 
 we are children, he does not die. He shall 
 never die. It is not to the argument of a logi- 
 cian that He intrusts this truth. He intrusts it to 
 the infinite experience of a living man a man 
 who really lives ; who lives and moves and has 
 his being; in his God.
 
 IMITATORS OF GOD. 
 
 " Be ye imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in 
 
 love, as Christ also loved you." 
 
 EPHESIANS v. i. 
 
 IT is a bold demand. But absolute religion is 
 satisfied with nothing less. As we open a new 
 year, it is the demand we are to keep in sight. 
 These plans of ours are not the plans of beasts or 
 of fishes or insects. They are the plans of chil- 
 dren of God. We propose to enter that infinite 
 life in 1892. We propose to discover that land of 
 our bounded range which, perhaps, we have never 
 seen before. We are of God's nature. We propose 
 to do His will. We will be imitators of God. 
 
 A boy changes into a man when he takes his 
 instructions from headquarters, when he asks 
 God what is his duty to-day, and from Him takes 
 his answer. 
 
 It is thus, also, that a girl changes into a 
 woman. The change in women comes more sud- 
 denly than with men. You leave your little girl 
 playmate for three months, and when you meet 
 her after that time you find she is another person. 
 A greater change comes over her in that time than 
 
 o o 
 
 comes over a boy in many years.
 
 7- IMITATORS OF GOD. 
 
 Boys, on the other hand, are much more apt 
 than girls to be separated from home early in life. 
 They have to form the habit then of going to 
 headquarters, and many a man will tell you that 
 his seriousness of life, his consecration to life, be- 
 gan when he made the change from his early 
 home. 
 
 Our business to-day is to ask carefully what 
 help, if any, can be given to boy or girl in this 
 business. How shall a man so order his life that 
 he may have every day the personal intimacy with 
 God which \vi\\, first, tell him what he has to do, 
 and, second, give him the strength and judgment 
 with which to do it, in his imitation of God. 
 
 I make it a rule of my own life to see every 
 day some one whom I know to be my superior. 
 But it is very difficult to enforce this rule. Often 
 and often I fail, I am always sorry when I fail, 
 but one cannot command events. The man or 
 woman you want to see may not be at home ; or, 
 in the fifteen minutes you have for the interview, 
 you may be waiting for a street-car at the corner. 
 You and I must not complain when our plans 
 break down if we have done our part. That 
 probably means that the plans of One who knows 
 more than we do have succeeded. But if you 
 and I find this difficulty in intimacies with per- 
 sonal friends here, it is our business to care even 
 more assiduously about our daily conversation and 
 intimacy with the nearest of our friends, the
 
 IMITATORS OF GOD. 73 
 
 most powerful and the most loving, and to be sure 
 that there, at least, no circumstance or accident of 
 time or of place shall prevent the interview. 
 
 Young men or women will be really in earnest 
 about this if they have fairly tried the great ex- 
 periment themselves, or if they have rightly and 
 carefully ordered life, in the recognition of Our 
 Father as a personal friend, seeking His advice, 
 and acting by it. 
 
 Take the Life of lives, the life of the Leader of 
 leaders, the Lord of lords, the Saviour of men. 
 We begin to see as mere matter of fact and out- 
 side history how he is becoming King of kings 
 for this world. Of that life, the centre is daily 
 communion with God. He sets on foot the great 
 practical movement which changed the world. 
 He sends out two and two, his twelve apostles, 
 yes, and he does this after spending the night 
 in prayer. He had gone away to the mountain 
 solitude that he might tell his Father what he 
 needed, and from his Father receive directions. 
 
 Read Paul with any attention, and you find the 
 same thing. All that is said there about the 
 Spirit explaining this, and the Spirit explaining 
 that, about the apostles receiving this from the 
 Spirit and that from the Spirit, means simply 
 that he did not trust only to any logic of his own, 
 or any observation of his own, but that he sought 
 the Holy Spirit, whose other name is Our Father.
 
 74 IMITATORS OF GOD. 
 
 Bear in mind all along that any distinction be- 
 tween Our Father and the present Holy Spirit is 
 merely artificial and technical, and the folly of the 
 schools. I must not take time about this, but the 
 same truth holds all through history. The mo- 
 ment you come upon any one of the world's real 
 leaders there are not many of them you 
 come upon a man who was in distinct personal com- 
 munion with God. The two instances which are 
 perhaps most cited are very good ones. They 
 are in the lives of Luther and Columbus, two 
 men who habitually retired from personal conver- 
 sation with princes, and captains, and other men, 
 that they might ask God what their duty was, and 
 from Him might receive, first, an answer to that 
 question, and, second, the power by which they 
 were to discharge that duty. Mr. Fiske has just 
 now made the statement which for myself I think 
 will be received very seriously that the first of liv- 
 ing men, in the catalogue of men so far known, is 
 Oliver Cromwell, the great founder of the English 
 Commonwealth, the person to whose tenderness 
 and wisdom we owe it that New England is New 
 England. Determine this as you please, there is 
 another instance where the power of the man 
 comes from this daily communion with the infinite 
 power which rules all worlds. 
 
 Simply stated, here is the law. The voice of 
 that infinite power whom the Saviour called Our 
 Father is what we call right, and the man who
 
 IMITATORS OF GOD. 75 
 
 seeks his instructions at headquarters if I may 
 use the same figure I used before is the person 
 who succeeds in doing right; and the person who 
 does right has the alliance of angels and arch- 
 angels, and of all good men and women. 
 
 This I say as a simple outside fact of history, 
 which must attract the attention of any intelligent 
 young man or young woman. Now, our business 
 to-day is to ask whether there are any methods or 
 forms which can assist the young man or young 
 woman who has highly resolved in every day to 
 hold this personal communion with the All- 
 Father, Our Father, the Infinite Spirit, whose 
 voice is right? To help in this personal intimacy, 
 these churches are formed. Let the leaders of 
 them, and the members of them, hold well in mind 
 that this is their central business. It will be a 
 very good thing if our New Year's resolutions 
 help to sustain the " Church of the Holy Spirit," 
 or the " Sixth Congregational Church" of the 
 town, or if.it engage in active charities, or if the 
 members become better acquainted with each 
 other. All these are very good things, but our 
 central business is to encourage young people to 
 hold daily communion with God. That is what 
 the church is, in the first place, for. They can 
 try their wings in different ways, but the first busi- 
 ness is to encourage them in learning to fly. And 
 there is a certain danger, which we have all of us 
 observed, that the interest of studying out the
 
 76 IMITATORS OF GOD. 
 
 duties which will belong to him who has learned 
 to fly, shall be so great that the other study of 
 flight itself, of flying strongly and well, of mount- 
 ing up on wings as eagles, shall slip out of sight 
 and attention. 
 
 I have found no wiser rule, in the advice which 
 I have given to young people, than that which I 
 myself received from John Weiss. He said it in a 
 sermon which he preached to the Unitarian con- 
 vention at Portland, I suppose thirty years ago. 
 To those doctors of divinity, men of learning, men 
 of practice, manufacturers, merchants, inventors, to 
 the mothers of families, to young men starting in 
 life, to young women starting in life, he said, " Go 
 away every day from other people, without their 
 knowing it, and for five minutes or for ten minutes 
 sit in a room by yourself to see if God has any- 
 thing to say to you." I believe that to be an ex- 
 cellent, practical, four-square rule in the direction 
 of life. 
 
 Side by side with this advice I tell young people 
 who ask me for advice, to have in that room two 
 or three of the books which they have found most 
 helpful in this affair, or which their friends have 
 found so. Here, in the first place, is the use of the 
 Bible. It is not simply as a book of ethics that 
 the Bible is valuable, certainly not as a book of 
 history, least of all as a book of doctrine. Its 
 value comes from its recording so much of the in- 
 timacy of men and women who have known how
 
 IMITATORS OF GOD. -jj 
 
 to live with Him who is the Author of life. And 
 you do get expressions in the Psalms, the prophets, 
 the Gospels, in the epistles, and in the Book 
 of Revelation, which make real to you the ab- 
 solute possible intimacy of the child with the 
 Father, as hardly anything else in literature does. 
 The Bible is therefore the prayer-book of Chris- 
 tians. When people talk to me of this or that 
 liturgy with enthusiasm, I always try to listen civ- 
 illy ; but I always say, " There is no such book of 
 prayers as the Bible." On this Bible you will put 
 one or two of the books, from a small list, I should 
 not say more than ten or twelve, which are easily 
 accessible in the English language. A first-rate 
 hymn book is one of these; and occasionally some 
 one edits a collection of sacred poetry which is 
 worth having there. Besides these, take your 
 choice from Thomas a Kempis, which, if you can, 
 you had better read in Latin ; Fenelon, Will- 
 iam Law, and Scougal. " Owen Feltham's Re- 
 solves " is a good book. So is The Roman 
 Breviary, if you can read it in Latin ; and for 
 many reasons, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. 
 I mention these because they are my favorites. 
 Any good adviser will add three or four more of 
 his favorites to the list. Observe, I do not mean 
 that you shall have them all there at one time. But 
 I would have some one or two of them beside the 
 Bible. I would then cultivate the habit of going 
 away, as Mr. Weiss says, to listen if God has any-
 
 78 IMITATORS OF GOD. 
 
 thing to say to me. I would not hesitate to open 
 at random into one, two, or three of these books, 
 and take the particular suggestion which came to 
 me and read a few lines. I would turn it over in 
 my mind. But I would remember all along that 
 this is not a mere intellectual process that I am en- 
 gaged in. I am engaged in communion with the 
 Infinite Spirit from which I am born, to which I 
 return, whose work I share, whose light I can re- 
 ceive, and into whose joy I mean to enter. 
 
 So much for my personal duty. Now, so far 
 as my influence goes in the household in which I 
 live, I would unite this personal duty with the 
 habit of the people in that house, or with those to 
 whom I am closest bound, say my brothers and 
 sisters, or my children. If, without any formality, 
 or with as little as is possible, we can meet by the 
 piano and sing a hymn every day, in the morning 
 or in the evening, as may be most convenient, or 
 if some one reads to us three or four verses of the 
 Bible, or if we join together in saying the Lord's 
 Prayer, or in reading from any other book of de- 
 votion, there is no question that we shall give our- 
 selves a chance to go to that day's business, or 
 the next day's business, more alive to the sense 
 of the common life. We shall understand better 
 that no one of us is paddling a separate boat, we 
 shall see better that we are all engaged in one 
 great enterprise, in one great voyage, and that in 
 that voyage we have the power, and, as I said, the
 
 IMITATORS OF GOD. 79 
 
 joy, if we want to take it, of Him who provides 
 the life of each and all. 
 
 But both these endeavors the endeavors for 
 personal communion with God and the endeavor 
 to quicken the whole circle of friends to a life 
 nothing less than that of God's sons and daughters 
 involve our Sunday privilege in this place. 
 When we meet each other in the street, in the 
 cars, or at a party, we who see each other here on 
 Sunday, we always have, as the central thought, 
 the place where we met last, and the dominant of 
 this church and this hour of song and prayer. 
 We, at least, need not begin with talk about the 
 weather. We have met God in each other's com- 
 pany. We are at home in His house together, and 
 so far we are at home with each other wherever we 
 go. So we have for such upward flight as I have 
 described, the great help of the sympathy of 
 " Together." 
 
 And thus what I have said leads us to speak 
 of public worship. For the endeavors for per- 
 sonal communion and any step toward quick- 
 ening the circle in which we live, all suggest a 
 wider intimacy. If, when one of us goes into 
 another house to visit, this custom of singing a 
 hymn together at the piano is a custom which has 
 been taken up in all the houses in the town, there 
 will be less of what I call formality about it. It 
 will not seem a matter of mechanism, it will seem
 
 80 IMITATORS OF GOD. 
 
 a simple matter of the regular daily life. We 
 shall accept it as we accept the fact that every 
 family takes a newspaper. It will not seem any 
 more strange. And that analogy might be 
 pushed : one family takes one newspaper and 
 another takes another. So, these different families 
 might signify their accord in worship of the life of 
 God in different ways ; but is not it clear enough, 
 that some such general organization with this ob- 
 ject as every Sunday enforces will help every 
 separate household in the wish and effort to draw 
 closer to God as every day goes by? 
 
 To repeat words which I heard last week by a 
 real leader of men, what we want in New England 
 is to encourage usages of piety. There is no reason 
 to think that there is less piety now than there 
 ever was that is, less love of God. What is de- 
 sirable is that the usages of piety shall be kept 
 even with the other usages of the time, and that 
 in the crowd and pressure of our daily life these 
 usages shall not be thrust out of sight, out of hear- 
 ing, or out of the memory. 
 
 Now it is for this very thing that the church 
 gathers us here every Sunday for this winter. It 
 is for this that the noblest genius composes for us 
 the sacred music of the Mass. For this that we 
 do our best tojnterpret it. For this that we ask 
 these children to meet in the Sunday-school. For 
 this, really, that the great machine of public 
 instruction is desired. For this that the Public
 
 IMITATORS OF GOD. 8 I 
 
 Library asks you to turn aside from chatter and 
 commune with the noblest men and the best 
 women. And this is the promise. If to-day, which 
 is happily shielded from the clatter and hurry of 
 yesterday : if you will so far set in order in an 
 hour's careful resolution, your half-formed plans 
 for the winter, so that beyond peradventure the 
 Spirit of God shall give to all life, and the dignity 
 of life ; if, I do not say in an hour's resolution, but 
 in the prayer of one minute, you gain God's con- 
 firmation of such a purpose, you shall know this 
 day twelvemonth, as none of my parables can teach 
 you, what Paul meant when he said, " Walk in the 
 Spirit," and what Christ meant when he said," Life 
 more abundantly." You shall quit the little stag- 
 nant pool of the dock in which your ship has laid 
 since she was built, and you shall sail fresh and 
 free over the unending ocean. We have all the 
 same power of eyesight. But an East Indian 
 fakir bends his head downward and uses his eye- 
 sight always to contemplate the heart- beat in his 
 own bosom. He calls that " consecration." An- 
 other trains His eyes and fortifies them to look 
 through the heavens, with this or that enginery of 
 the observatory, so that he shall walk with Orion in 
 his courses, and be a freeman of the universe, with 
 the privileges of Arcturus and his suns. The one 
 of them has the same optic nerve as the other. 
 But the range, the life, are so far different. The 
 body is earthly. Care for it ; attend to it, and
 
 82 IMITATORS OF GOD. 
 
 so far your life is earthly too. Its heavenly side is 
 the outside. It extends as far as the universe ex- 
 tends; as far as the God who rules that universe. 
 Make Him your daily companion ; talk to Him ; 
 listen to Him ; walk with Him ; work with Him ; 
 and you find what is the abundance of Life. 
 You find the meaning of that phrase, "The king- 
 dom of God." You have the certainty of the 
 present heaven. 
 
 [This sermon was preached as a New Year's sermon at 
 the South Congregational Church.]
 
 INSTALLATION OF REV. JOHN 
 CUCKSON. 
 
 ARLINGTON-STREET CHURCH, BOSTON, MAY 11, 1892. 
 
 We also, when we were children, were held in bondage, but 
 when the fulness of time came, God sent forth his Son that we 
 might receive the adoption of sons. 
 
 GALATIANS iv. 3, 4. 
 
 IT is impossible to meet here, with the happy 
 outlook of this occasion, without recalling the 
 memories of this pulpit, and of that famous 
 church in Federal street from which so much 
 went forth for the blessing of the world. 
 
 Its modern history begins when Jeremiah Bel- 
 knap, with his own wisdom and devotion, led it 
 out from the somewhat limited notions of a circle 
 of Scotch exiles, s'nging the songs of the Lord in a 
 strange land. We owe to him a great step forward 
 in the selection of our hymns. I think his hymn- 
 book is not now in use, but I have used it in public 
 service. Will you let me indulge myself, as we 
 install a new minister in this honored pulpit, by 
 saying just a word of each of his four last prede- 
 cessors? Each of them honored me with his per- 
 sonal friendship. 
 
 Edward E. Hale.
 
 84 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 
 
 The amazed critics of his own time generally 
 tried to account for Channing's power, by tracing 
 out the clearness and directness of his thought, as 
 if his were to be counted as intellectual victories. 
 But they were quite wrong. Here was a child 
 of God, who had found out that he was a 
 child of God, and delighted in the relationship. 
 Channing was a mystic, through and through, 
 using that word in its proper sense, of one who is 
 possessed by the Infinite Spirit, and trusts him- 
 self to the inspiration. The eager hopes and 
 prayers, especially of the early years of his biog- 
 raphy, are to be remembered with any of those 
 most prized among the most devout saints, as 
 A Kempis, or Molinos, or Scougal, or the Wesleys. 
 And here was the real power which moved this 
 century. Omnipotence is apt to move that with 
 which it has to do. It is interesting to see that 
 men did not make this real to themselves until, 
 after his death, his biography was published. 
 Then from his own private notes they could 
 see his eagerness to accept the life of God as his 
 life, and his only life. So resolute is the human 
 passion for ascribing power to method, or to 
 machinery, instead of looking to the Author of 
 Being and Fountain of Life, that the earlier critics 
 of Channing preferred to speak of him as an intel- 
 lectual wonder. 
 
 To be the coadjutor and helper of such a saint 
 came the young Gannett, who honored and loved
 
 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 85 
 
 him. With absolute self-renunciation, he was 
 only eager to do in this church what it was con- 
 venient for Dr. Channing not to do. That Dr. 
 Channing might be well and able to do his part, 
 and that Satan might be beaten wherever he 
 showed his head, this was the double purpose 
 to which this young man consecrated his daily 
 life. And he took care to make himself of no 
 reputation as he took that double duty. I re- 
 member so well how with his quick step and 
 firm, erect carriage, hair black as the raven, and 
 words rapid and sharp, he would enter any of our 
 pulpits, and how he controlled his hearers ! Cer- 
 tainly we boys wanted nothing better than we 
 heard from him, even in the beginning. 
 
 And his work afterwards I do not speak of 
 this church only, but for the Unitarian church 
 of New England, which he led was that of 
 enlivenment. He knew no such word as "fail" 
 in those days. He accepted for the Unitarian 
 church the moral and intellectual leadership 
 which in those days people were not unwilling 
 to give it. He had the great advantage, for that 
 position, of a fixed and definite theology, of 
 which he was as sure as an astronomer is of the 
 law of the attraction of gravitation. To see any of 
 the youngsters fall away from this was terrible to 
 him, but never did he doubt that truth is truth and 
 must prevail. 
 
 Of Mr. Ware with our fresh memories of his
 
 86 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSOX. 
 
 life, and of what seemed a death too early it is 
 harder to speak in this presence. Those who 
 only knew him in the years all too few of his 
 work in this church, know one who was carrying 
 on a daily martyr struggle against concealed dis- 
 ease, so manfully, that people would speak to 
 him as if he were in high health, when he was 
 suffering as by no chance he would say. But we, 
 who had known him from boyhood, like to think 
 of those earlier days of vigor ; of his visits to the 
 army, in the field or in the camp ; of his large 
 view of the situation there, and of the duty of the 
 church behind the army. His call to those at 
 home, to do their duty to those under canvas 
 or in the entrenchments, was a clarion cry. And 
 it would be safe and fair to say that to Henry 
 Bellows, Charles Lowe, and John Ware, more than 
 to any other of our preachers, did the Unitarian 
 church owe the new sense of its lead, of the cen- 
 tral dignity of its position in national life, which 
 culminated in the organization of our National 
 Conference. It is hardly to be spoken of as a 
 coincidence, it was rather the record of a necessary 
 connection of time, that the first authoritative con- 
 vention of the united Unitarian church of America 
 was held in New York, on the same day when 
 Richmond surrendered to the Union army. 
 
 And of our dear friend Herford, who has left 
 us now to take up harder duty in England, 
 with our fresh memories of his cordial love,
 
 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 87 
 
 there is no need to speak. Fit workman indeed 
 was he, in a field where such noble workmen had 
 gone before him. And the living force of this 
 church to-day, and its vigorous equipment of men, 
 women, and means for worship, for charity, for 
 education, and for hospitality, make a token 
 which all men understand, of the efficiency and 
 spirit which he consecrated to the work of this 
 church, and to no work beside. What this church 
 ought to do in the largest interpretation of its 
 service, what the Unitarian church of America 
 ought to do, to that he would give every throb 
 of his pulse, every thought, every act, every 
 minute. For any other duty or exigency, no! 
 Here was his place and opportunity. And we 
 know how large he made his place and how noble 
 his opportunity. 
 
 It is worth while merely to call together such 
 memories of four lives so different in their 
 method, but all so intensely alive. It is worth 
 while, because our business to-right is to look 
 back on those lessons which this church has 
 learned and taught, so that we may translate their 
 lessons into the language, yes, and the purposes, of 
 this half-century before us. Of that half-century 
 you younger men and women must highly re- 
 solve to-night that you will be among the spiritual, 
 and so the moral, leaders. If we are to take in at 
 one view seventy or eighty years, I could hardly 
 name any one church in Christendom where, Sunday
 
 88 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 
 
 after Sunday, men have taken such a view as has 
 been taken here of the present advance of the 
 Idea of the victory of the Spirit. Dr. Channing's 
 hearers \vcrj thinking of one line of advance; in 
 a way, Dr. Gannett's were thinking of another ; 
 Mr. Ware's had yet another picture before them ; 
 and Dr. Herford spoke of course he spoke 
 in an atmosphere different once more. But this 
 church, in those eighty years, has never had a 
 minister which told it that it had "entered into 
 its rest." Nobody ever stood here to tell this 
 congregation that they were to forget the things 
 that are before, while they reached back to those 
 things that are behind. That is the duty, alas ! of 
 some churches, or they are told so; but not of the 
 church in Federal street or in Arlington street. 
 And that which is incumbent, of course, in every 
 installation festival is specially agreeable here, 
 because specially hopeful. It is always pleasant 
 to prophesy when there is so good a chance that 
 prophecy will come true. 
 
 It is seventy-three years last Thursday since, at 
 Baltimore, Mr. Channing, then only thirty-nine 
 years old, preached the celebrated sermon, well 
 remembered, which distinctly announced to the 
 American church that the little company of or- 
 ganized Unitarians had a mission which it meant 
 to perform. Up till that time most people, even 
 religious people, had persuaded themselves that 
 the truth micjht be left to overcome error within
 
 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 89 
 
 the church, gradually and without conflict. Peo- 
 ple tried to think that old fables would die of 
 themselves if they were only let alone ; and that 
 all this was so certain that no one need make a 
 fuss about it. But at the Baltimore dedication 
 Mr. Channing blew the bugle of attack. Or that 
 would be a better figure which said, that this quiet 
 champion, in the presence of a curious company 
 of people, who wondered what this old-new doc- 
 trine, or new-old doctrine, was, walked quietly 
 through the ancient, dignified temple of Calvinism, 
 and there, in the presence of decorous priests 
 who hoped the thing would outlast their time, 
 struck in the face every one of the idols, on the 
 right hand and on the left hand, as he passed 
 them by. It was not contempt any longer. It 
 was not silence any longer. It was square attack 
 attack all along the line. What was worse, he 
 justified what he had done, in statement and logic 
 which no one could overthrow. 
 
 Seventy-three years have passed since then. 
 The idols still exist, perhaps. I have been told 
 that some of them can be found in museums. 
 Perhaps it is so. I do not know. I do know 
 that no one worships them. I know that there 
 are no priests who like to be reminded of them. 
 I know that the church of America, from the left 
 wing to the right, has diligently and discreetly 
 packed its Calvinism wholly out of the way. I 
 think there are some written creeds which avow
 
 go INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 
 
 it ; but in these days we are told that the creeds 
 and articles of churches are of no consequence. 
 I have even been told by the highest authority 
 that their presence in books, once regarded as 
 standards, is mere matter of the bookbinder ! 
 
 Of New England I know more. I am fond of 
 repeating the story which expresses the precise 
 truth of what Dean Stanley said, when he re- 
 turned to England from his visit here. " Of 
 course," he said, " I went to hear them preach 
 whenever I could, chiefly in the Evangelical 
 churches. Many men I heard in many pulpits 
 of different names, but the preacher was always 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson." No man can observe 
 the working theology of our time without seeing 
 that our great idealist of this century is every- 
 where the leader. And no one notes wisely the 
 movement in any church who does not see that it 
 is an aggressive movement, seeking to build up 
 the Kingdom of God. 
 
 True, there are men who would tell you, as they 
 would have told you a hundred years ago, that 
 the chief business of the pulpit is in its appeal 
 to separate hearers, for the saving of their sepa- 
 rate souls. But even these men would say that 
 they want to save the soul of the separate hearer 
 so that that hearer may go to work as an apostle, 
 to bring in the Kingdom of God. They may cry, 
 " Repent ye ! " but like John the Baptist they cry, 
 " Repent ye, because the Kingdom of God is at
 
 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 91 
 
 hand!" That God is the present ruler, that God 
 is immanent in all life, this is the religious doc- 
 trine of our time. From east to west, from 
 the right wing to the left wing, from the pulpit 
 of the Church of Rome to the exhortation of a 
 Quaker conference, this is the statement and 
 appeal. In such an outlook as we are attempting 
 now; in your reconsecration of yourselves to- 
 night as a church of Christ; in the reconse- 
 cration of this man to the ministry of Christ, 
 the dominant question is : How can these eternal 
 truths best be brought into the impending move- 
 ment of the next century? How are we to lift 
 men, in the terrible wealth and prosperity which 
 belongs to their physical successes? How are we 
 to lift them away from the temptations of dust 
 and mud and smoke, into the infinite life of the 
 sons of God? 
 
 It is clear enough that it is a game of giants 
 which we look forward to. The man who had 
 only his hand to fight with, has a club to swing in 
 the future. The conspirator who had to be satis- 
 fied with words, finds now that hs can make 
 dynamite in his kitchen. The workman who was 
 glad to work twelve hours, is able to make his own 
 terms for eight. This is simply to say that man 
 has now a hundred times the power for good or 
 for evil that he had sixty years ago. If, as we 
 here all suppose, this power can be controlled 
 by laws ; if it is to be, as on the whole it always
 
 92 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSOX. 
 
 has been, swayed by moral agencies, its in- 
 crease is simply a benediction, and is one more 
 step forward and upward of the world. But all 
 the more have those who lead the world, or 
 who mean to, to find how the moral forces are 
 to be used, where they come from, and how they 
 shall be proclaimed. 
 
 This may be said, as the basis of all our 
 answers, that church and pulpit have given up 
 everywhere the attitude of defiance. No pulpit 
 threatens anybody now. Hell may be kept in the 
 creed ; but in appeal it is wisely left in the back- 
 ground. On the other hand, in all commun- 
 ions the appeal is made to man's affections, to 
 his hopes, and more and more to his judgment. 
 
 This is the more important because none of the 
 great floods of enthusiasm in history which have 
 successfully united men and compelled them to 
 move together have been swayed by men's ter- 
 rors. Peter the Hermit roused all Europe to 
 march to recover the Holy Sepulchre, by tell- 
 ing Europe how unjustly the Christians were 
 treated on the very spot where the Master died. 
 He did not alarm his hearers. John Gough, Haw- 
 kins, and the other Washingtonian leaders in 1840 
 compelled men to tread under foot the tempta- 
 tion of liquor, and combined them in a common 
 cause by showing to them that they might be 
 leaders where they were slaves, and begging them 
 to work to lift others from their ruin. The great
 
 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 93 
 
 uprising of the North, in 1861, was anything 
 but a spasm of fear. Nor was it, in the outset, a 
 determination to end slavery. It was the deter- 
 mination even higher, to assert the majesty of the 
 nation. The real rulers of the nation had, gen- 
 erally, from the time when it was formed, left the 
 rule of it to the Southern oligarchy, which was, 
 as it is, willing enough to take in hand that care. 
 But that oligarchy at last stepped too far, and the 
 giant woke. The people asserted its place, and 
 the pretender was, for twenty years, nowhere. In 
 all these cases, the appeal of the leaders was to 
 the nobler sentiments of the rank and file, and not 
 to their fears of hunger, of pain, or of other 
 penalty. 
 
 Now the question for you who have the next 
 half-century to direct is what the form of ap- 
 peal shall be by which you shall embody power 
 which is clearly matchless, if only you can win 
 it on your side. 
 
 The Saviour of men, coming into social con- 
 ditions wholly different, begged men, advised them, 
 commanded them, to turn from all other theories 
 of life and to proclaim the law of God as the 
 present law of village, city, home, synagogue, 
 court, and camp. " Go and preach the Kingdom 
 of God," he said, " and preach it all over this 
 world." That voice's echo has not died. Your 
 question in the business you have in hand, for 
 these fifty years, is to find out how that appeal
 
 94 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSOX. 
 
 can be made to most purpose now, and then to 
 make it with all your might day by day on those 
 lines. 
 
 In that business we have a good analogy, and 
 I should say a fair working example, in the 
 most remarkable single element of our national 
 strength. I mean the absolute loyalty of the sep- 
 arate citizen to the country, unless he be wholly 
 spoiled by inherited wealth, and his certainty of 
 her power and success. The earlier travellers from 
 Europe all noticed this, and it enraged them. You 
 toiled over execrable roads for a day, travelling 
 through a wilderness. At night you slept in a 
 dirty cabin, the guest of a man who could hardly 
 speak his own language. This man was using an 
 axe which was made in England ; he carried a 
 gun which was made in England; his very 
 ploughshare and hoe were made . in England ; 
 and yet, infallibly, he told his tired and annoyed 
 guest that America was yet to "whip every nation 
 in the world," that she was to go beyond them 
 all in civilization, and art, and invention. When 
 he was asked to compare his squalid cabin with 
 the home which for some reason his guest had 
 left, he said he did not care for that contrast ; that 
 America would be the greatest nation in the world, 
 that he knew it, and that his guest had only to wait 
 a little and he would know it too. 
 
 This intense arrogance, naturally enough, was 
 wholly unintelligible to people who came from
 
 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 95 
 
 feudal countries. Certainly they had never seen 
 it at home. No peasant in England, or France, 
 or Germany spoke with any such prophetic 
 intimation. And there was something mad- 
 dening to a man who had, for some reason, left 
 all the luxuries of civilization behind him, to be 
 told that all these were really of no account, 
 compared with the glories which were about to 
 dawn on the cabin in which he was half starved, 
 and on the wilderness through which he was yet 
 to travel. 
 
 But, to look on the other side, there is some- 
 thing really sublime in this arrogance, when one 
 observes its source. For the first time in the 
 world's history, such men as this braggart savage 
 had been admitted to every privilege of humanity. 
 He had been told to hew his own way, to build 
 his own house, to live his own life. Feudal cus- 
 toms, feudal religion among the rest, had always, 
 till now, bidden him do his duty in that condition 
 of life in which God had placed him. Yes ; and 
 feudal customs had bound him to that condition 
 very tightly. Now this new nation bade him " go 
 as he pleased." True, she gave him nothing to 
 go with. That was his affair. But, on the other 
 hand, if she gave no cross of honor to any Ath- 
 elstan, she had no manacle for any Wamba. Fool 
 or baron, they were all one to her. Let each man 
 live his own life, and make his own career, she 
 said. Now it was a native instinct of gratitude
 
 96 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 
 
 which compelled each such Wamba, the son of 
 Witless, each man so blessed and gifted, to praise 
 the mother who had so blessed him. And it was 
 an instinct which has proved true, by which he 
 foretold the unanimous service to her of her sons. 
 As it has proved, the material wealth of this nation 
 does not rest primarily in her mines or in her 
 crops. It is in that system of open promotion, by 
 which that man is sure to come to the front who 
 knows how to smelt the mineral, or to reap the 
 harvest, and is industrious enough to do so. 
 
 Now, one has nothing but laughter for the ar- 
 rogant boast of the half-clad frontiersman. But 
 one does see at the same time what unsubsidized 
 power the nation has won, when, by her fundamen- 
 tal system, she controls and commands, yes, to the 
 very last throb and drop, the united forces of every 
 such man within her borders. 
 
 Take that little analogy now, and carry it to 
 the range and field vastly higher and larger, with 
 which we are concerned, in our problem here : 
 How we shall lead the next half-century. We 
 have abandoned the narrow ground with which the 
 old church was satisfied. We, too, in the Liberal 
 communions, have announced, and shall announce, 
 to all men that they are nothing less than the sons 
 of God ; to all women, that they are his daughters. 
 The older church, almost with a droll grimace, 
 reserving for salvation and eternal blessing all her 
 ordained clergy, bade them tell all the rest of man-
 
 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 97 
 
 kind that they were born in sin and corfceived in 
 iniquity, and that nine-tenths of them would cer- 
 tainly be damned in eternal torment. All the 
 more, she said, must the other tenth turn and live, 
 and proclaim to the nine-tenths, and to each other, 
 the present love of a present God, and his present 
 kingdom. But can we wonder if the answer to 
 that demand was variable and fluttering? Is it 
 strange that when men heard such an invitation, 
 one turned to his farm and another to his mer- 
 chandise? Had the church, in a word, any right 
 to expect much enthusiasm in the world's reply? 
 
 No. But let the teachers of the world take up in 
 good faith, and to the outer end, the Saviour's ap- 
 peal and direction. Let them go into the highways 
 and the byways. Let them call the vinedresser, and 
 the harlot, and the publican. Let them say, " Ye 
 are all kings and all priests," believing it them- 
 selves. Let them say to the publican, " God 
 makes this demand upon you ; " and to the har- 
 lot, " God makes this demand upon you." The 
 century which dares make that demand has a right, 
 which no other century has deserved, to an enthusi- 
 astic reply. It has myriads to call en masse, where 
 the old theologians were recruiting here and there 
 a man \vho could be tempted by a ribbon or a 
 shilling. And it is likely to learn, as no century 
 has learned before, what the Master of Men meant, 
 when, to a flock where every sheep and every 
 lamb tried to do his duty, he said in such solemn
 
 98 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 
 
 prophecy : " Your Father shall give you the 
 kingdom." 
 
 That religion belongs to all sorts and conditions 
 of men, to sinner as well as saint, to blackleg 
 as well as gentleman, that is our gospel. The 
 decorous selection of a clergy with the great name 
 " the church," as if the rest must not share in 
 sacraments, must not understand theology, nay, 
 need not believe in creeds, this is to be done 
 with forever. God has work to do ; they are 
 all to be taught this. You can do it. They are 
 to be thus encouraged. .You must do it. They 
 are to be thus warned. And every mother's son of 
 us has the right to warn them, as, if the village 
 were in flames at night, every man who is awake 
 has a right to cry, " Fire ! " We are not rallying 
 for our philanthropies or our educations only 
 those who know where sin came from, or those 
 who can explain evolution. It is not the theolo- 
 gians only whom we are to enlist. It is the sons 
 and daughters of God ; it is every one who draws 
 a breath of his air or who lives in his sunshine, who 
 is to listen for his word and to bring in his kingdom. 
 And they are, each and all, to understand that the 
 coming of the kingdom depends not only upon 
 Him, but upon them as much and as well. 
 
 The work is thus to be done by the whole family 
 of God. It is not left to any selected hierarchy, 
 not left to the work of any remnant, designated 
 by some apostolic succession. To every one
 
 I 
 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 99 
 
 we may appeal, expecting from every one some 
 assistance. 
 
 This is the first characteristic of the religious 
 appeal of the next half-century; and with it, of 
 course, belongs first, second, last, and always, the 
 statement, perfectly familiar in the first century, 
 but new in the nineteenth, that God is on our side. 
 Nature is with us and not against us. The power 
 that rules the universe loves us and does not hate 
 us. We need no longer speak of the church as 
 the huddled fragment floating on the logs of a 
 drifting raft where the world has perished. We 
 speak to those who are born of God and to God 
 return, who live in his life, love with his love, 
 rest in his arms, tell him everything, and receive 
 everything from a Father's perfect tenderness. 
 Do we tell them that they are fellow-workers 
 with God ? We tell them as well that God is a 
 fellow-worker with them. Perhaps it is in this ap- 
 peal, more than in any other which we have to 
 make, by which we surprise those who have been 
 awe-struck, I might say paralyzed, under the 
 pressure of mediaeval theologies. But whether 
 men take it simply or with surprise, we are thus to 
 appeal always. As Mr. Brown said so well, " We 
 teach them the humanity of God while we teach 
 them the divinity of man." We teach them that 
 in those processes which we call the processes of 
 present Nature, as well as in work of His, long
 
 100 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSOX. 
 
 ages ago, there is the present love of a Holy 
 Spirit, which is ready to inspire the baby in his 
 play, the smith at his anvil, the speaker in the 
 forum, the nurse at the bedside, or the seaman on 
 the ocean. God is with us, and we are with him. 
 
 Our Hungarian friends, with their own fire and 
 pathos, told me the story of their first victory, 
 centuries ago, in Kolosvar. Their great prophet 
 of the North, who did not even speak their won- 
 derful Magyar language well, appealed to them as 
 the children of the living God. He gave them 
 some sense alas, no man wrote down the words ! 
 of what it is to come to God in your own 
 prayer, with no priest between ; of what it is to 
 trust in the infinite strength, and in no transfer of 
 power to machinery. Speaking with God's voice 
 himself, he spoke to God's children of God's 
 present power. And they, on the moment, with 
 a storm of passionate conviction, lifted him in their 
 arms from the stone, which they still show, where 
 he was addressing them. They carried him into 
 the cathedral of their city; and to frightened 
 priests, looking back to some old records for their 
 information, they cried out that they had here a 
 prophet of the living God, who was to speak now 
 the eternal truth. Priests of an apostolic succes- 
 sion and machinery of worship vanished at the 
 cry, from the place, and were gone for centuries. 
 It became a place which should proclaim the 
 fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
 
 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSOX. IOI 
 
 One does not wonder at such a miracle when "one 
 remembers the power by which it was effected. 
 
 We have much the same miracle to work to- 
 day, not in driving out priests from their 
 sanctuaries, but in bringing the sense of God into 
 the workshop and school and cabin ; into the 
 mining of silver, and the weaving of cotton, and 
 the carrying of corn. The immanent presence of 
 the living God, is this the gospel which we are 
 to preach ? Yes ; and it is as well the power by 
 which we are to proclaim that gospel. And we 
 need ask few questions as to method or organiza- 
 tion, when that Spirit sends us forth, conquering 
 and to conquer. 
 
 As I see the forward look with which men 
 regard the new century, it seems to me that all 
 their drift is hopeful. The fixed habit of men, of 
 all sorts and conditions, seems to me to be hope, 
 and not despair. " You will be wise," I heard a 
 great man of finance say, " if in your investments 
 you bet on the country." It seems to me that 
 I see the same disposition to " bet on the world; " 
 that men look forward cheerfully, and look back- 
 ward less. Every scheme of social reform, though 
 it seem to me absurd, and may be absurd, means 
 that men are determined that the Kingdom shall 
 come. They may not put it in those words, but that 
 is their hope and their purpose. Digging their long 
 trench in Sinaloa ; publishing their new plans of 
 social order in New York or Chicago; studying
 
 102 INSTALLATION OF MR. CUCKSON. 
 
 their Bellamy, or writing new ones which they 
 think better, everywhere the magic of hope stays 
 up the life, which would have been abject and 
 powerless were it left to despair. To direct, as to 
 encourage such hope, and to lead such enterprise, 
 is the special business of the people like you, 
 who have, with your eyes open, accepted and 
 professed a religion of hope, in the place and on the 
 ruins of a theology of darkness. It is ours to 
 see that such plans shall not be absurd, that 
 such prophecies shall not disappoint themselves. 
 This we can only do, as we live ourselves in actual 
 communion with a loving God, as for ourselves 
 we determine that we will not live, live with 
 him, for ourselves alone, and as with him and 
 for other men we make these homes and work- 
 shops of ours to be a present heaven. 
 
 We consecrate ourselves anew to-night with such 
 high determination. Gladly we intrust this church, 
 with its noble history, to such ministry for another 
 century of faith an'd hope and love. Its new 
 ministry asks no better omens than its history 
 affords. A church which definitely and distinctly 
 proclaims its determination to follow where this 
 present Holy Spirit leads, need ask for no inferior 
 ally.
 
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