m: m^ THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA GIFT OF Bettie W. Thomson fJ^Ju^ ]^^ /^r^ •^im t^'<^-- ^.^c-j^'' ■< i ADDRESSES m IJenry LL^aV ' Drummond Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/addressesOOdrumrich ^K^_ , 1; MENRY ORUMMONO ADDRESSES HCNPY DRUMMOND PHILADELPHIA HENRY ALTEHUS Copyrighted, 1891, by HENRY A L T E M U S . ALTEMUS BOOKBINDEKY, PHILADELPHIA. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF PRO- FESSOR DRUMMOND. The author of these remarkable addresses was born in Scotland in 185 1, and studied for the University of Edinborough in private schools, in his native city of Stirling. After gradua- tion here he continued his studies in Tubin- gen, Germany. He early gave signs of special promise, and it was decided that he should enter on the career of the ministry ; and after his ordination he was appointed to a mis- sion station at Malta. It was in the leisure of this rather solitary work that he was ena- bled to find time to turn his thoughts more entirely to the subject he has since treated in lecture and book, although it v^^as not until long afterward that these efforts were made public. • iii [ 262 IV BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH On his return to Scotland he was appointed a lecturer in science at the Glasgow Free Church College ; and it was at this period that his first book, " Natural Law in the Spiritual World," made its tremendous sensation, running through endless editions at home and abroad and in every language. The first edition of this book bears the imprint of 1883, and led to his promotion to a professorship in the same college. The success of the opening address in the present volume, when reprinted, was as instan- taneous, and even wider, than that of his first book. Professor Drummond never seemed to have been troubled with any absorbing ambition to publish his work, and the list of volumes which bear his name is small ; at least one of them being the result of finding a stenographer's in- complete notes printed and for sale in a book- store. Doubtless part of the secret of his success is his simplicity and clearness of style, and the fortunate choice of subjects which, at the moment of publication, were absorbing the OF PROFESSOR DRUMMOND. V thinking world. He has something to say, and knows how to say it, and does so without any reference to the number of pages it will make, should it ever be put in type. In this way he can take up even a commonplace sub- ject and discuss it with an original style and infuse freshness into it. There is no better example of this than the first two addresses in this book, the text of which is the oft-quoted eulogy of St. PauPs for the love that never faileth and the promise of Christ of rest for the heavy-laden. Many a preacher would hesitate to select these well-known sentences for his sermon, but Pro- fessor Drummond has found the happy art of making them seem like new truths ; and origi- nality, after all, is only the art of saying better what has been said before. Professor Drummond is an ordained minis- ter in the Free Church of Scotland, and is engaged Sundays, during the University ses- sions at Edinborough, in religious work among the students, where his meetings have been attended often by as many as five or six hun- VI BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH dred; and while at home or abroad, his work has done much to help the cause of Christian living among young men, the University Set- tlement School being the outgrowth of his words and example. During the week he is teaching science from his professor's chair at Glasgow, which is a peculiar attachment for a divinity school, and one not found in America ; but scientific study is earnestly pursued in such schools in Scotland. In the former work he has had as great suc- cess as in the latter, and has been the right- hand man of the evangelist, Mr. Moody, in many of his mass meetings, which shows the deep interest he takes in spreading evangelical truth. Professor Drummond's appearance and man- ner are well known in this country ; and, indeed, it was at Northfield that the first address in the present volume was delivered. A great scholar and divine has given the following analysis of the elements of his success : — "He has a certain magnetic quality, both as a writer and a speaker, but it can be analyzed. OF PROFESSOR DRUMMOND. Vll He has a style, — not a style to move * the lonely rapture of lonely minds,' but one which arrests the busy crowd, — clear, pleasant, flowing with faint hues of poetry. He is never allusive, supe- rior, strained ; he does not condescend ; he is always himself, — a courteous, unaffected gentle- man, with a sincere respect for his audience. He is an adept in the art of translating scientific ideas into common English, and can impart the touch that redeems the familiar from platitude. Then he has a message, a secret. No one can hope long to touch men by mere cleverness or rhetorical skill. Can he guide me? comes to be the question at last. Those who find the right road from the blows they receive on the right hand and the left when deviating into wrong roads are grateful for a wisdom which comes more easily ; and Mr. Drummond is nothing, if not practical. He has a system as well as a message. The man of one idea is not so pow- erful as he used to be. The age dreads nothing so much as the Bore, but it does not always dis- criminate. But a man with a system, provided he is not continually rattling the skeleton, is the Vlll BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. man of influence. A brilliant preacher of the day humorously compares his sermons to little heaps of earth flung up by a mole : they made a track. In the same way, Mr. Drummond's ideas have a continuity. That one-half of his scheme of thought is studiously kept out of sight does not lessen the interest taken in it; and, like all men whose ideas are coherent, he gives the impression of being at peace in thought." "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and under- stand all mysteries, and all knowledge ; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not Love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not Love, it profiteth me nothing. 5 Love suffereth long, and is kind ; Love envieth not ; Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, Seeketh not her own, Is not easily provoked, Thinketh no evil ; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth ; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth ; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child : but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly ; but then face to face : now I know in part ; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, Love, these three ; but the greatest of these is Love." — i Cor. xiii. THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD. pVERY one has asked himself the great question of antiquity as of the modern world : What is the sum- mum bommi — the supreme good ? You have life before you. Once only you can live it. What is the noblest object of desire, the supreme gift to covet } We have been accustomed to be told that the greatest thing in the religious world is Faith. That great word has been the key-note for centuries of the 12 THE GREATEST THING popular religion; and we have easily learned to look upon it as the greatest thing in the world. Well, we are wrong. If we have been told that, we may miss the mark. I have taken you, in the chapter which I have just read, to Christianity at his source; and there we have seen, "The greatest of these is love." It is not an oversight. Paul was speaking of faith just a moment before. He says, ** If I have all faith, so that I can remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing." So far from forgetting he deliberately con- trasts them, " Now abideth. Faith, Hope, Love," and without a moment's hesitation the decision falls, " The greatest of these is Love." IN THE WORLD. 1 3 And it is not prejudice. A man is apt to recommend to others his own strong point. Love was not Paul's strong point. The observing student can detect a beautiful tenderness grow- ing and ripening all through his char- acter as Paul gets old; but the hand that wrote, " The greatest of these is love," when we meet it first, is stained with blood. Nor is this letter to the Corinthians peculiar in singling out love as the summunt boniim. The masterpieces of Christianity are agreed about it. Peter says, " Above all things have fervent love among yourselves." Above all thijigs. And John goes farther, **God is love." And you remember 14 THE GREATEST THING the profound remark which Paul makes elsewhere, ** Love is the fulfilling of the law." Did you ever think what he meant by that ? In those days men were working the passage to Heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments, and the hundred and ten other com- mandments which they had manufac- tured out of them. Christ said, I will show you a more simple way. If you do one thing, you will do these hun- dred and ten things, without ever thinking about them. If you love, you will unconsciously fulfill the whole law. And you can readily see for yourselves how that must be so. Take any of the commandments. **Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." IN THE WORLD. IS If a man love God, you will not re- quire to tell him that. Love is the fulfilling of that law. "Take not His name in vain.*' Would he ever dream of taking His name in vain if he loved him ? " Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Would he not be too glad to have one day in seven to dedi- cate more exclusively to the object of his affection ? Love would fulfill all these laws regarding God. And so, if he loved Man, you would never think of telling him to honor his father and mother. He could not do any- thing else. It would be preposterous ^ J tell him not to kill. You could only insult him if you suggested that he should not steal — how could he steal 1 6 THE GREATEST THING from those he loved ? It would be superfluous to beg him not to bear false witness against his neighbor. If he loved him it would be the last thing he would do. And you would never dream of urging him not to covet what his neighbors had. He would rather they possessed it than himself. In this way " Love is the fulfilling of the law." It is the rule for fulfilling all rules, the new commandment for keep- ing all the old commandments, Christ's one secret of the Christian life. Now Paul has learned that; and in this noble eulogy he has given us the most wonderful and original account extant of the summutn bonuin. We may divide it into three parts. In the IN THE WORLD. 1 7 beginning of the short chapter, we have Love contrasted ; in the heart of it, we have Love analyzed ; toward the end, we have Love defended as the supreme gift. 1 8 THE GREATEST THING THE CONTRAST. JPAUL begins by contrasting Love with other things that men in those days thought much of. I shall not attempt to go over these things in detail. Their inferiority is already obvious. He contrasts it with eloquence. And what a noble gift it is, the power of playing upon the souls and wills of men, and rousing them to lofty pur- poses and holy deeds. Paul says, '* If I speak with the tongues of men and -of angels, and have not love, I am IN THE WORLD. 1 9 become as sounding brass, or a tink- ling cymbal." And we all know why. We have all felt the brazenness of words without emotion, the hollow- ness, the unaccountable unpersuasive- ness, of eloquence behind which lies no Love. He contrasts it with prophecy. He contrasts it with mysteries. He con- trasts it with faith. He contrasts it with charity. Why is Love greater than faith ? Because the end is greater than the means. And why is it greater than charity ? Because the whole is greater than the part. Love is greater than faith, because the end is greater than the means. What is the use of having faith ? It is to connect the soul 20 THE GREATEST THING with God. And what is the object of connecting man with God ? That he may become like God. But God is Love. Hence Faith, the means, is in order to Love, the end. Love, therefore, obviously is greater than faith. It is greater than charity, again, because the whole is greater than a part. Charity is only a little bit of Love, one of the innumerable avenues of Love, and there may even be, and there is, a great deal of charity without Love. It is a very easy thing to toss a copper to a beggar on the street ; it is generally an easier thing than not to do it. Yet Love is just as often in the withholding. We purchase relief from the sympathetic IN THE WORLD. 21 feelings roused by the spectacle of misery, at the copper's cost. It is too cheap — too cheap for us, and often too dear for the beggar. If we really loved him we would either do more for him, or less. Then Paul contrasts it with sacrifice and martyrdom. And I beg the little band of would-be missionaries — and I have the honor to call some of you by this name for the first time — to remem- ber that though you give your bodies to be burned, and have not Love, it profits nothing — nothing! You can take nothing greater to the heathen world than the impress and reflection of the Love of God upon your own character. That is the universal Ian- 22 THE GREATEST THING guage. It will take you years to speak in Chinese., or in the dialects of India. From the day you land, that language of Love, understood by all, will be pouring forth its unconscious eloquence. It is the man who is the missionary, it is not his words. His character is his message. In the heart of Africa, among the great Lakes, I have come across black men and women who remembered the only white man they ever saw before — David Livingstone; and as you cross his footsteps in that dark continent, men's faces light up as they speak of the kind doctor who passed there years ago. They could not under- stand him; but they felt the love that IN THE WORLD. 23 beat in his heart. Take into your new sphere of labor, where you also mean to lay down your life, that sim- ple charm, and your lifework must succeed. You can take nothing greater, you need take nothing less. It is not worth while going if you take anything less. You may take every accomplishment ; you may be braced for every sacrifice ; but if you give your body to be burned, and have not Love, it will profit you and the cause of Christ nothing. 24 THE GREATEST THING THE ANALYSIS. A FTER contrasting Love with these things, Paul, in three verses, very short, gives us an amazing an- alysis of what this supreme thing is. I ask you to look at it. It is a com- pound thing, he tells us. It is like light. As you have seen a man of science take a beam of light and pass it through a crystal prism, as you have seen it come out on .the other side of the prism broken up into its component colors — red, and blue, and yellow, and violet, and orange, and all the IN THE WORLD. 2$ colors of the rainbow — so Paul passes this thing, Love, through the magnifi- cent prism of his inspired intellect, and it comes out on the other side broken up into its elements. And in these few words we have what one might call the Spectrum of Love, the analysis of Love. Will you observe what its elements are ? Will you notice that they have common names; that they are virtues which we hear about every day; that they are things which can be -practiced by every man in every place in life ; and how, by a multitude of small things and ordinary virtues, the supreme thing, the siimmum bonum^ is made up ? 26 THE GREATEST THING The Spectrum of Love has nine in- gredients : Patience . . Kindness . Generosity Humility . , Courtesy . . Unselfishness Good Temper Guilelessness . Sincerity . . . "Love suffereth long." . "And is kind." . " Love envieth not." . " Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." . " Doth not behave itself unseemly." . " Seeketh not her own." . " Is not easily provoked." . "Thinketh no evil." . " Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth." Patience ; kindness ; generosity ; humility ; courtesy ; unselfishness ; good temper; guilelessness; sincerity — these make up the supreme gift, the IN THE WORLD. 2/ Stature of the perfect man. You will observe that all are in relation to men, in relation to life, in relation to the known to-day and the near to-morrow, and not to the unknown eternity. We hear much of love to God; Christ spoke much of love to man. We make a great deal of peace with heaven ; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme thing, in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day. 28 THE GREATEST THING There is [ no time to do more than niake a passing note upon each of these ingredients. Love is Patience. This is the normal attitude of Love ; Love passive, Love waiting to begin; not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its work when the summons comes, but meantime wearing the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. Love suffers long; beareth all things; believeth all things; hopeth all things. For Love understands, and therefore waits. Kindness, Love active. Have you ever noticed how much of Christ's life was spent in doing kind things — in merely doing kind things } Run over it with that in view, and you will find that He spent a great proportion of His IN THE WORLD. 29 time simply in making people happy, in doing good turns to people. There is only one thing greater than happi- ness in the world, and that is holiness ; and it is not in our keeping ; but what God Jias put in our power is the hap- piness of those about us, and that is largely to be secured by our being kind to them. **The greatest thing," says some one, ''a man can do for his Heavenly Father is to be kind to some of His other children." I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are } How much the world needs it. How easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts. How infallibly it is remem- bered. How superabundantly it pays 30 THE GREATEST THING itself back — for there is no debtor in the world so honorable, so superbly honorable, as Love. " Love never faileth." Love is success. Love is happiness, Love is life. ** Love I say," with Browning, **is energy of Life." " For life, with all it yields of joy or woe And hope and fear, Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love, — How love might be, hath been indeed, and is." Where Love is, God is. He that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God. God is Love. Therefore love. Without distinction, without calculation, without procrastination, love. Lavish it upon the poor, where it is very easy ; espe- IN THE WORLD. 3I daily upon the rich, who often need it most; most of all upon our equals, where it is very difficult, and for whom perhaps we each do least of all. There is a difference between trying to please and giving pleasure. Give pleasure. Lose no chance of giving pleasure. For that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly loving spirit. " I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kind- ness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again." Generosity, " Love envieth not." This is love in competition with others. 32 THE GREATEST THING Whenever you attempt a good work you will find other men doing the same kind of work, and probably doing it better. Envy them not. Envy is a feeling of ill-will to those who are in the same line as ourselves, a spirit of covetousness and detraction. How lit- tle Christian work even is a protection against un-Christian feeling. That most despicable of all the unworthy moods which cloud a Christian's soul assuredly waits for us on the threshold of every work, unless we are fortified with this grace of magnanimity. Only one thing truly need the Christian envy, the large, rich, generous soul which " envieth not." And then, after having learned all IN THE WORLD. * 33 that, you have to learn this further thing, Humility — to put a seal upon your lips and forget what you have done. After you have been kind, after Love has stolen forth into the world and done its beautiful work, go back into the shade again and say nothing about it. Love hides even from itself. Love waives even self-satisfaction. " Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." The fifth ingredient is a somewhat strange one to find in this summum bomim : Courtesy. This is Love in society, Love in relation to etiquette. ** Love does not behave itself unseem- ly.'* Politeness has been defined as love in trifles. Courtesy is said to be 34 THE GREATEST THING love in little things. And the one secret of politeness is to love. Love can7tot behave itself unseemly. You can put the most untutored persons into the highest society, and if they have a reservoir of Love in their heart they will not behave themselves un- seemly. They simply cannot do it. Carlisle said of Robert Burns that there was no truer gentleman in Europe than the ploughman-poet. It was because he loved everything — the mouse, and the daisy, and all the things, great and small, that God had made. So with this simple passport he could mingle with any society, and enter courts and palaces from his little cottage on the banks of the Ayr. You IN THE WORLD. 35 know the meaning of the word "gen- tleman." It means a gentle man — a man who does things gently with love. And that is the whole art and mystery of it. The gentle man cannot in the nature of things do an ungentle, an ungentlemanly thing. The ungentle soul, the inconsiderate, unsympathetic nature, cannot do anything else. " Love doth not behave itself un- seemly." Uftselfishness. "Love seeketh not her own." Observe : Seeketh not even that which is her own. In Brit- ain the Englishman is devoted, and rightly, to his rights. But there come times when a man may exercise even the higher right of giving up his rights. 36 THE GREATEST THING Yet Paul does not summon us to give up our rights. Love strikes much deeper. It would have us not seek them at all, ignore them, eliminate the personal element altogether from our calculations. It is not hard to give up our rights. They are often eternal. The difficult thing is to give up our- selves. The more difficult thing still is not to seek things for ourselves at all. After we have sought them, bought them, won them, deserved them, we have taken the cream off them for ourselves already. Little cross then to give them up. But not to seek them, to look every man not on his own things, but on the things of others — id opus est, " Seekest thou IN THE WORLD. 37 great things for thyself," said the prophet ; ** seek them not.'' Why ? Because there is no greatness in things. Things cannot be great. The only greatness is unselfish love. Even self- denial in itself is nothing, is almost a mistake. Only a great purpose or a mightier love can justify the waste. It is more difficult, I have said, not to seek our own at all, than, having sought it, to give it up. I must take that back. It is only true of a partly selfish heart. Nothing is a hardship to Love, and nothing is hard. I be- lieve that Christ's " yoke " is easy. Christ's yoke is just his way of taking life. And I believe it is an easier way than any other. I believe it is a 38 THE GREATEST THING happier way than any other. The most obvious lesson in Christ's teach- ing is that there is no happiness in having and getting anything, but only in giving. I repeat, there is no happi- ness in having or in getting, but only in giving. And half the world is on the wrong scent in pursuit of happiness. They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. It consists in giving, and in serving others. He that would be great among you, said Christ, let him serve. He that would be happy, let him remem- ber that there is but one way — it is more blessed, it is more happy, to gWQ than to receive. The next ingredient is a very re- IN THE WORLD. 39 markablc one : Good tc7nper. " Love is not easily provoked." Nothing could be more striking than to find this here. We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weak- ness. We speak of it as a mere in- firmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take into very serious account in esti- mating a man's character. And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a place ; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive elements in human nature. The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise 40 THE GREATEST THING noble character. You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or ** touchy" disposition. This compati- bility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is there are two great classes of shis — sins of the Body, and sins of the Dis- position. The Prodigal Son may be taken as a type of the first, the Elder Brother of the second. Now, society has no doubt whatever as to which of these is the worse. Its brand falls, without a challenge, upon the Prodigal. But are we right .'^ We have no bal- ance to weigh one another's sins, and IN THE WORLD. 41 coarser and finer are but human words ; but faults in the higher nature may be less venial than those in the lower, and to the eye of Him who is Love, a sin against Love may seem a hundred times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un- Christianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom of child- hood, in short, for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence stands alone. Look at the Elder Brother, moral, hard-working, patient, 42 THE GREATEST THING dutiful — let him get all credit for his virtues — look at this man, this baby, sulking outside his own father's door. " He was angry," we read, " and would not go in." Look at the effect upon the father, upon the servants, upon the happiness of the guests. Judge of the effect upon the Prodigal — and how many prodigals are kept out of the Kingdom of God by the un- lovely character of those who profess to be inside.? Analyze, as a study in Temper, the thunder-cloud itself as it gathers upon the Elder Brother's brow. What is it made of ? Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-right- eousness, touchiness, doggedness, sul- lenness — these are the ingredients of IN THE WORLD. 43 this dark and loveless soul. In vary- ing proportions, also, these are the in- gredients of all ill temper. Judge if such sins of the disposition are not worse to live in, and for others to live with, than sins of the body. Did Christ indeed not answer the question Himself when He said, " I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of Heaven before you." There is really no place in Heaven for a disposition like this. A man with such a mood could only make Heaven miserable for all the people in it. Except, therefore, such a man be born again, he cannot, he simply cannoty enter the Kingdom of Heaven. For it is perfectly certain — 44 THE GREATEST THING and you will not misunderstand me — that to enter Heaven a man must take it with him. You will see then why Temper is significant. It is not in what it is alone, but in what it reveals. This is why I take the liberty now of speak- ing of it with such unusual plainness. It is^a test for love, a symptom, a reve- lation of an unloving nature at bottom. It is the intermittent fever which be- speaks unintermittent disease within ; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath ; a sample of the most hid- den products of the soul dropped in- voluntarily when off one's guard ; in a word, the lightning form of a hundred IN THE WORLD. 45 hideous and lan-Christian sins. For a want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity, a want of cour- tesy, a want of unselfishness, are all instantaneously symbolized in one flash of Temper. Hence it is not enough to deal with the Temper. We must go to the source, and change the inmost nature, and the angry humors will die away of themselves. Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but by putting something in — a great Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours, sweetens, puri- fies, transforms all. This only can eradicate what is wrong, work a chem- 46 THE GREATEST THING ical change, renovate and regenerate, and rehabilitate the inner man. Will- power does not change men. Time does not change men. Christ does. Therefore " Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." Some of us have not much time to lose. Remember, once more, that this is a matter of life or death. I cannot help speaking urgently, for myself, for yourselves. "Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that h» were drowned in the depth of the sea." That is to say, it is the deliberate verdict of the Lord Jesus that it is better not to live than Drummond's Addresses x IN THE WORLD. 47 not to love. // is better not to live than not to love, Guilelessness and Sincerity may be dismissed almost without a word. Guilelessness is the grace for suspi- cious people. And the possession of it is the great secret of personal influ- ence. You will find, if you think for a moment, that the people who influence you are people who believe in you. In an atmosphere of suspicion men shrivel up ; but in that atmosphere they expand, and find encouragement and educative fellowship. It is a won- derful thing that here and there in this hard, uncharitable world there should still be left a few rare souls who think no evil. This is the great unworldli- 48 THE GREATEST THING ness. Love "thinketh no evil/' im- putes no motive, sees the bright side, puts the best construction on every action. What a delightful state of mind to live in ! What a stimulus and benediction even to meet with it for a day ! To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to influence or elevate others, we shall soon see that success is in proportion to their belief of our belief in them. For the respect of another is the first restoration of the self-respect a man has lost; our ideal of what he is becomes to him the hope and pattern of what he may become. *^ Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth." I have called this Sincerity from the words rendered IN THE WORLD. 49 in the Authorized Version by " re- joiceth in the truth." And, certainly, were this the real translation, nothing could be more just. For he who loves will love Truth not less than men. He will rejoice in the Truth — rejoice not in what he has been taught to believe; not in this Church's doc- trine or in that ; not in this ism or in that ism; but "in the Tnitky He will accept only what is real ; he will strive to get at facts; he will search for Truth with a humble and unbiassed mind, and cherish whatever he finds at any sacrifice. But the more literal translation of the Revised Version calls for just such a sacrifice for truth's sake here. For what Paul 50 THE GREATEST THING really meant is, as we there read, *' Rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth," a quality which probably no one English word — and certainly not Sincerity — ade- quately defines. It includes, perhaps more strictly, the self-restraint which refuses to make capital out of others* faults; the charity which delights not in exposing the weakness of others, but '' covereth all things ; " the sin- cerity of purpose which endeavors to see things as they are, and rejoices to find them better than suspicion feared or calumny denounced. So much for the analysis of Love. Now the business of our lives is to have these thinofs fitted into our char- IN THE WORLD. 5 1 acters. That is the supreme work to which we need to address ourselves in this world, to learn Love. Is life not full of opportunities for learning Love ? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground ; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an educa- tion. And the one eternal lesson for us all is /ioz(j better we can love. What makes a man a good cricketer } Prac- tice. What makes a man a good artist, a good sculptor, a good musi- cian } Practice. What makes a man a good linguist, a good stenographer.'* Practice. What makes a man a good man } Practice. Nothing else. There is nothing capricious about religion. 52 THE GREATEST THING We do not get the soul in different ways, under different laws, from those in which we get the body and the mind. If a man does not exercise his arm he develops no biceps muscle; and if a man does not exercise his soul, he requires no muscle in his soul, no strength of character, no vigor of moral fibre, nor beauty of spiritual growth. Love is not a thing of enthu- siastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of the whole round Christian character — the Christlike nature in its fullest develop- ment. And the constituents of this great character are only to be built up by ceaseless practice. What was Christ doing in the car- IN THE WORLD. 53 penter's shop ? Practicing. Though perfect, we read that He learned obe- dience, and grew in wisdom and in favor with God. Do not quarrel there- fore with your lot in life. Do not com- plain of its neverceasing cares, its petty environment, the vexations you have to stand, the small and sordid souls you have to live and work with. Above all, do not resent temptation ; do not be perplexed because it seems to thicken round you more and more, and ceases neither for effort nor for agony nor prayer. That is your prac- tice. That is the practice which God appoints you ; and it is having its work in making you patient, and humble, and generous, and unselfish, and kind, 54 THE GREATEST THING and courteous. Do not grudge the hand that is moulding the still too shapeless image within you. It is growing more beautiful, though you see it not, and every touch of tempta- tion may add to its perfection. There- fore keep in the midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among men, and among things, and among troubles, and difficulties, and obstacles. You remember Goethe's words : Es bildet ein Talent sick in der Stille^ Dock ein Charakter m dern Strom der Welt. " Talent develops itself in solitude ; character in the stream of life." Tal- ent develops itself in solitude — the talent of prayer, of faith, of meditation, of seeing the unseen ; character grows IN THE WORLD. 55 in the stream of the world's life. THat chiefly is where men are to learn love. How ? Now, how ? To make it easier, I have named a few of the ele- ments of love. But these are only elements. Love itself can never be defined. Light is a something more than the sum of its ingredients — a glowing, dazzling, tremulous ether. And love is something more than all its elements — a palpitating, quivering, sensitive, living thing. By synthesis of all the colors, men can make white- ness, they cannot make light. By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they cannot make love. How then are we to have this tran- scendent living whole conveyed into 56 THE GREATEST THING our souls ? We brace our wills to secure it. We try to copy those who have it. We lay down rules about it. We watch. We pray. But these things alone will not bring love into our nature. Love is an effect. And only as we fulfill the right condition can we have the effect produced. Shall I tell you what the cause is .? If you turn to the Revised Version of the First Epistle of John you will find these words : " We love because He first loved us." *'We love," not "We love Him'' That is the way the old version has it, and it is quite wrong. " We love — because He first loved us." Look at that word "be- cause." It is the catise of which I have IN THE WORLD. 57 spoken. " Becaiise He first loved us/* the effect follows that we love, we love Him, we love all men. We cannot help it. Because He loved us, we love, we love everybody. Our heart is slowly changed. Contemplate the love of Christ, and you will love. Stand before that mirror, reflect Christ's character, and you will be changed into the same image from tenderness to tenderness. There is no other way. You cannot love to order. You can only look at the lovely object, and fall in love with it, and grow into likeness to it. And so look at this Perfect Character, this Perfect Life. Look at the great Sacrifice as He laid down Himself, all through life, and 58 THE GREATEST THING upon the Cross of Calvary ; and you must love Him. And loving Him, you must become like Him. Love begets love. It is a process of induc- tion. Put a piece of iron in the presence of an electrified body, and that piece of iron for a time becomes electrified. It is changed into a tem- porary magnet in the mere presence of a permanent magnet, and as long as you leave the two side by side, they are both magnets alike. Remain side by side with Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us, and you too will become a permanent magnet, a per- manently attractive force ; and like Him you will draw all men unto you, like Him you will be drawn unto all IN THE WORLD. 59 men. That is the inevitable effect of Love. Any man who fulfills that cause must have that effect produced in him. Try to give up the idea that religion comes to us by chance, or by mystery, or by caprice. It comes to us by natural law, or by supernatural law, for all law is Divine. Edward Irving went to see a dying boy once, and when he entered the room he just put his hand on the sufferer's head, and said, " My boy, God loves you," and went away. And the boy started from his bed, and called out to the people in the house, " God loves me ! God loves me ! " It changed that boy. The sense that God loved him overpowered him, melted him down, and began the 60 THE GREATEST THING creating of a new heart in him. And that is how the love of God melts down the unlovely heart in man, and begets in him the new creature, who is patient and humble and gentle and unselfish. And there is no other way to get it. There is no mystery about it. We love others, we love everybody, we love our enemies, because He first loved us. IN THE WORLD. 6l THE DEFENCt. KTOW I have a closing sentence or '*• ^ two to add about Paul's reason for singling out love as the supreme possession. It is a very remarkable reason. In a single word it is this : it lasts, " Love," urges Paul, " never faileth." Then he begins again one of his marvelous lists of the great things of the day, and exposes them one by one. He runs over the things that men thought were going to last, and shows that they are all fleeting, temporary, passing away. 62 THE GREATEST THING " Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail." It was the mother's am- bition for her boy in those days that he should become a prophet. For hun- dreds of years God had never spoken by means of any prophet, and at that time the prophet was greater than the King. Men waited wistfully for another messenger to come, and hung upon his lips when he appeared as upon the very voice of God. Paul says, " Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail." This book is full of prophecies. One by one they have '* failed ; " that is, having been fulfilled theii work is finished; they have nothing more to do now in the world except to feed a devout man's faith. IN THE WORLD. 6j Then Paul talks about tongues^ That v/as another thing that was grcatlj coveted. "Whether there be tongues^ they shall cease." As wc all know, many, many centuries have passed since tongues have been known in this world. They have ceased. Take it in any sense you like. Take it, for illustration merely, as languages in general — a sense which was not in Paul's mind at all, and which though it cannot give us the specific lesson will point the general truth. Consider the words in which these chapters were written — Greek. It has gone. Take the Latin — the other great tongue of those days. It ceased long agoi Look at the Indian language. It is 64 THE GREATEST THING ceasing. The language of Wales, of Ireland, of the Scottish Highlands is dying before our eyes. The most popular book in the English tongue at the present time, except the Bible, is one of Dickens's works, his Pickwick Papers, It is largely written in the language of London street-life ; and experts assure us that in fifty years it will be unintelligible to the average English reader. Then Paul goes farther, and with even greater boldness adds, "Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away." The wisdom of the ancients, where is it } It is wholly gone. A schoolboy to-day knows more than Sir Isaac Newton knew. His knowledo^e IN THE WORLD. 6$ has vanished away. You put yester- day's newspaper in the fire. Its knowledge has vanished away. You buy the old editions of the great ency- clopaedias for a few pence. Their knowledge has vanished away. Look how the coach has been superseded by the use of steam. Look how elec- tricity has superseded that, and swept a hundred almost new inventions into oblivion. One of the greatest living authorities, Sir William Thompson, said the other day, ''The steam-engine is passing away." "Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away." At every workshop you will see, in the back yard, a heap of old iron, a few wheels, a few levers, a few cranks, 66 THE GREATEST THING broken and eaten with rust. Twenty years ago that was the pride of the city. Men flocked in from the country to see the great invention; now it is superseded, its day is done. And all the boasted science and philosophy of this day will soon be old. But yester- day, in the University of Edinburgh, the greatest figure in the faculty was Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of chloroform. The other day his suc- cessor and nephew, Professor Simp- son, was asked by the librarian of the University to go to the library and pick out the books on his subject that were no longer needed. And his re- ply to the librarian was this : *' Take- every text-book that is more than ten IN THE WORLD. 67 years old, and put it down in the cel- lar." Sir James Simpson was a great authority only a few years ago : men came from all parts of the earth to consult him ; and almost the whole teaching of that time is consigned by the science of to-day to oblivion. And in every branch of science it is the same. " Now we know in part. We see through a glass darkly." Can you tell me anything that is going to last ? Many things Paul did not condescend to name. He did not mention money, fortune, fame ; but he picked out the great things of his time, the things the best men thought had something in them, and brushed them peremptorily aside. Paul had no 68 THE GREATEST THING charge against these things in them- selves. All he said about them was that they would not last. They were great things, but not supreme things. There were things beyond them. What we are stretches past what we do, beyond what we possess. Many things that men denounce as sins are not sins ; but they are temporary. And that is a favorite argument of the New Testament. John says of the world, not that it is wrong, but simply that it " passeth away." There is a great deal in the world that is delight- ful and beautiful ; there is a great deal in it that is great and engrossing; but it will not last. All that is in the world, the lust of the eye, the lust of IN THE WORLD. 69 the flesh, and the pride of life, are but for a little while. Love not the world therefore. Nothing that it contains is worth the life and consecration of an immortal soul. The immortal soul must give itself to something that is immortal. And the only immortal things are these : *' Now abideth faith, hope, love, but the greatest of these is love." Some think the time may come when two of these three things will also pass away — faith into sight, hope into fru- ition. Paul does not say so. We know but little now about the condi- tions of the life that is to come. But what is certain is that Love must last. God, the Eternal God, is Love. Covet 70 THE GREATEST THING therefore that everlasting gift, that one thing which it is certain is going to stand, that one coinage which w411 be current in the Universe when all the other coinages of all the nations of the world shall be useless and unhonored. You will give yourselves to many things, give yourself first to Love. Hold things in their proportion. Hold ihings in tJieir proportion. Let at least the first great object of our lives be to achieve the character defended in these words, the character — and it is the character of Christ — which is built round Love. I have said this thing is eternal. Did you ever notice how continually John associates love and faith with IN THE WORLD. /I eternal life ? I was not told when I was a boy that '' God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten . Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should have everlasting life." What I was told, I remember, was, that God so loved the world that, if I trusted in Him, I was to have a thing called peace, or I was to have rest, or I was to have joy, or I was to have safety. But I had to find out for myself that whosoever trusteth in Him — that is, v/hosoever loveth Him, for trust is only the avenue to Love — hath everlasting life. The Gospel offers a man life. Never offer men a thimbleful of Gos- pel. Do not offer them merely joy, or merely peace, or merely rest, or T2 THE GREATEST THING merely safety; tell them how Christ came to give men a more abundant life than they have, a life abundant in love, and therefore abundant in salva- tion for themselves, and large in enter- prise for the alleviation and redemption of the world. Then only can the Gospel take hold of the whole of a man, body, soul, and spirit, and give to each part of his nature its exercise and reward. Many of the current Gospels are addressed only to a part of man's nature. They offer peace, not life ; faith, not Love ; justification, not regeneration. And men slip back again from such religion because it has never really held them. Their nature was not all in it, It offered no IN THE WORLD. 73 deeper and gladder life-current than the life that was lived before. Surely it stands to reason that only a fuller love can compete with the love of the world. To love abundantly is to live abun- dantly, and to love forever is to live forever. Hence, eternal life is inex- tricably bound up with love. We want to live forever for the same rea- son that we want to live to-morrow. Why do you want to live to-morrow ? It is because there is some one who loves you, and whom you want to see to-morrow, and be with, and love back. There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved. It is when a man 74 THE GREATEST THING has no one to love him that he com- mits suicide. So long as he has friends, those who love him and whom he loves, he will live, because to live is to love. Be it but the love of a dog, it will keep him in life; but let that go and he has no contact with life, no reason to live. He dies by his own hand. Eternal life also is to know God, and God is love. This is Christ's own definition. Ponder it. **This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent." Love must be eternal. It is what God is. On the last analysis, then, love is life. Love never faileth, and life never faileth, so long as there is love. That is the IN THE WORLD. 75 philosophy of what Paul is showing us ; the reason why in the nature of things Love should be the supreme thing — because it is going to last ; because in the nature of things it is an Eternal Life. It is a thing that we are liv- ing now, not that we get when we die ; that we shall have a poor chance of getting when we die unless we are living now. No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live and grow old alone, unloving, and unloved. To be lost is to live in an unregenerate condition, loveless and unloved ; and to be saved is to love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth already in God. For God is Love. Now I have all but finished. How ^6 THE GREATEST THING many of you will join me in reading this chapter once a week for the next three months? A man did that once and it changed his whole life. Will you do it ? It is for the greatest thing in the world. You might begin by reading it every day, especially the verses which describe the perfect char- acter. ** Love suffereth long, and is kind ; love envieth not ; love vaunteth not itself.'* Get these ingredients into your life. Then everything that you do is eternal. It is worth doing. It is worth giving time to. No man can become a saint in his sleep ; and to fulfill the condition required demands a certain amount of prayer and medi- tation and time, just as improvement IN THE WORLD. ^J in any direction, bodily or mental, re- quires preparation and care. Address yourselves to that one thing; at any cost have this transcendent character exchanged for yours. You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments that stand out, the mo- ments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. I have seen y8 THE GREATEST THING almost all the beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed almost every pleasure that he has planned for man ; and yet as I look back I see standing out above all the life that has gone four or five short experiences when the love of God reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the things which alone of all one's life abide. Everything else in all our lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts of love which no man knows about, or can ever know about — they never fail. In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgment Day is depicted for us in the imagery of One seated upon a IN THE WORLD. 79 throne and dividing the sheep from the goats, the test of a man then is not^ ** How have I beUeved ? " but ''How have I loved?" The test of religion, the final test of religion, is not relig- iousness, but Love. I say the final test of religion at that great Day is not religiousness, but Love ; not what I have done, not what I have believed,, not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done, by sins of omission^ we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the with- holding of love is the negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof that we 80 THE GREATEST THING never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means that He suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing in all our lives, that we were not once near enough to Him to be seized with the spell of His com- passion for the world. It means that — " I lived for myself, I thought for myself, For myself, and none beside — Just as if Jesus had never lived, As if He had never died." It is the Son of 3fan before whom the nations of the world shall be gathered. It is in the presence of Hiifnanity that we shall be charged. And the spectacle itself, the mere sight of it, will silently judge each one. Those will be there whom we IN THE WORLD. 8 1 have met and helped ; or there, the unpitied multitude whom we neglected or despised. No other witness need be summoned. No other charge than lovelessness shall be preferred. Be not deceived. The words which all of us shall one Day hear sound not of theology but of life, not of churches and saints but of the hungry and the poor, not of creeds and doctrines but of shelter and clothing, not of Bibles and prayer-books but of cups of cold water in the name of Christ. Thank God the Christianity of to-day is com- ing nearer the world's need. Live to help that on. Thank God men know better, by a hairsbreadth, what religion is, what God is, who Christ is, where 82 GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD. Christ is. Who is Christ? He who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick. And where is Christ ? Where? — whoso shall receive a little child in My name receiveth Me. And who are Christ*s? Every one that loveth is born of God. PAX VOBISCUM. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me : for I am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light " 8s PAX VOBISCUM. I HEARD the other morning a ser- * mon by a distinguished preacher upon " Rest." It was full of beauti- ful thoughts ; but when I came to ask myself, " How does he say I can get Rest ? '* there was no answer. The sermon was sincerely meant to be practical, yet it contained no experi- ence that seemed to me to be tangi- ble, nor any advice which could help me to find the thing itself as I went about the world that afternoon. Yet this omission of the only important 87 88 PAX VOBISCUM. problem v/as not the fault of the preacher. The whole popular religion is in the twilight here. And when pressed for really working specifics for the experiences with which it deals, it falters, and seems to lose itself in mist. The want of connection betw^een the great words of religion and every-day life has bewildered and discouraged all of us. Christianity possesses the noblest words in the language ; its literature overflows with terms expres- sive of the greatest and happiest moods which can fill the soul of man. Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, Light — these words occur with such per- sistency in hymns and prayers that an PEACE BE WITH YOU. 89 observer might think they formed the staple of Christian experience. But on coming to close quarters with the actual life of most of us, how surely would he be disenchanted ! I do not think we ourselves are aware how much our religious life is made up of phrases; how much of what we call Christian experience is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere religious phraseology with almost nothing be- hind it in what we really feel and know. To some of us, indeed, the Chris- tian experiences seem further away than when we took the first steps in the Christian life. That life has not opened out as we had hoped ; we do 90 PAX VOBISCUM. not regret our religion, but we are dis- appointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when wandering notes from a diviner music stray into our spirits ; but these experiences come at few and fitful moments. We have no sense of possession in them. When they visit us, it is a surprise. When they leave us, it is without explanation. When we wish their return, we do not know how to secure it. All which points to a religion with- out solid base, and a poor and flicker- ing life. It means a great bankruptcy in those experiences which give Chris- tianity its personal solace and make it attractive to the world, and a great uncertainty as to any remedy. It is PEACE BE WITH YOU. 9 1 as if we knew everything about health — except the way to get it. I am quite sure that the difficulty does not lie in the fact that men are not in earnest. This is simply not the fact. All around us Christians are wearing themselves out in trying to be better. The amount of spiritual long- ing in the world — in the hearts of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we should never sus- pect it; among the wise and thought- ful ; among the young and gay, who seldom assuage and never betray their thirst — this is one of the most wonder- ful and touching facts of life. It is not more heat that is needed, but more light; not more force, but a wiser di- 92 PAX VOBISCUM. rection to be given to very real energies already there. The Address which follows is offered as an humble contribution to this prob- lem, and in the hope that it may help some who are ** seeking Rest and find- ing none " to a firmer footing on one great, solid, simple principle which underlies not the Christian experiences alone, but all experiences, and all life. What Christian experience wants is thread, a vertebral column, method. It is impossible to believe that there is no remedy for its unevenness and di- shevelment, or that the remedy is a secret. The idea, also, that some few men, by happy chance or happier temperament, have been given the PFACK BE WITH YOU. 93 secret — as if there were some sort of knack or trick of it — is wholly incredi- ble. Religion must ripen its fruit for every temperament ; and the way even into its highest heights must be by a gateway through which the peoples of the world may pass. I shall try to lead up to this gateway by a very familiar path. But as that path is strangely unfrequented, and even unknown, where it passes into the religious sphere, I must dwell for a moment on the coramonest of com- monplaces. 94 PAX VOBISCUM. EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. NTOTHING that happens in the world happens by chance. God is a God of order. Everything is arranged upon definite principles, and never at random. The world, even the religious world, is governed by law. Character is governed by law. Happiness is governed by law. The Christian experiences are governed by law. Men, forgetting this, expect Rest, Jo}^ Peace, Faith to drop into their souls from the air like snow or rain. But in point of fact they do not EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. CJ do SO ; and if they did they would no less have their origin in previous ac- tivities and be controlled by natural laws. Rain and snow do drop from the air, but not without a long pre- vious history. They are the mature effects of former causes. Equally so are Rest, and Peace, and Joy. They^ too, have each a previous history. Storms and winds and calms are not accidents, but are brought about by antecedent circumstances. Rest and Peace are but calms in man's inward nature, and arise through causes as definite and as inevitable. Realize it thoroughly : it is a me- thodical not an accidental world. If a housewife turns out a good cake, it is 96 PAX VOBISCUM. the result of a sound receipt, carefully applied. She cannot mix the assigned ingredients and fire them for the ap- propriate time without producing the result. It is not she who has made the cake ; it is nature. She brings related things together; sets causes at work; these causes bring about the result. She is not a creator, but an interme- diary. She does not expect random causes to produce specific effects — random ingredients would only pro- duce random cakes. So it is in the making of Christian experiences. Certain lines are followed; certain effects are the result. These effects cannot but be the result. But the result can never take place without EFFECTS REQUFRE CAUSES. 9/ the previous cause. To expect results without antecedents is to expect cakes without ingredients. That impossi- bility is precisely the almost universal expectation. Now what I mainly wish to do is to help you firmly to grasp this simple principle of Cause and Effect in the spiritual world. And instead of ap- plying the principle generally to each of the Christian experiences in turn, I shall examine its application to one in some little detail. The one I shall select is Rest. And I think any one who follows the application in this single instance will be able to apply it for himself to all the others. Take such a sentence as this: Afri- 98 PAX VOBISCUM. can explorers are subject to fevers which cause restlessness and delirium. Note the expression, ** cause restless- ness." Restlessfiess has a cause. Clearly then, any one who wished to get rid of restlessness would proceed at once to deal with the cause. If that were not removed, a doctor might pre- scribe a hundred things, and all might be taken in turn, without producing the least effect. Things are so ar- ranged in the original planning of the world that certain effects must follow certain causes, and certain causes must be abolished before certain effects can be removed. Certain parts of Africa are inseparably linked with the physical experience called fever; this EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 99 fever is in turn infallibly linked with a mental experience called restlessness and delirium. To abolish the mental experience the radical method would be to abolish the physical experience, and the way of abolishing the physical experience would be to abolish Africa, or to cease to go there. Now this holds good for all other forms of Rest- lessness. Every other form and kind of Restlessness in the world has a definite cause, and the particular kind of Restlessness can only be removed by removing the allotted cause. All this is also true of Rest. Rest- lessness has a cause : must not Rest have a cause ? Necessarily. If it were a chance world we would not lOO PAX VOBISCUM. expect this; but, being a methodical world, it cannot be otherwise. Rest, physical rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every kind of rest, has a cause as cer- tainly as restlessness. Now causes are discriminating. There is one kind of cause for every particular effect, and no other; and if one particular effect is desired, the corresponding cause must be set in motion. It is no use proposing finely devised schemes, or going through general pious exer- cises in the hope that somehow Rest will come. The Christian life is not casual, but causal. All nature is a standing protest against the absurdity of expecting to secure spiritual effects, or any effects, without the employment EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. TOT of appropriate causes. The Great Teacher dealt what ought to have been the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by a single question, **Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles ? " Why, then, did the Great Teacher not educate His followers fully ? Why did He not tell us, for example, how such a thing as Rest might be obtained ? The answer is, that He did. But plainly, explicitly, in so many words .'^ Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many words. He assigned Rest to its cause, in words with which each of us has been familiar from his earliest child- hood. He begins, you remember — for you at once know the passage I refer to — - I02 PAX VOBISCUM. almost as if Rest could be had without any cause : '' Come unto Me," He says, '' and I will £-ive you Rest." Rest, apparently, was a favor to be bestowed ; men had but to come to Him ; He would give it to every appli- cant. But the next sentence takes that all back. The qualification, in- deed, is added instantaneously. For what the first sentence seemed to give was next thing to an impossibility. For how, in a literal sense, can Rest be give7i? One could no more give away Rest than he could give away Laughter. We speak of *' causing" laughter, which we can do ; but we cannot give it away. When we speak of giving pain, we know perfectly well EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. IO3 we cannot give pain away. And when we aim at giving pleasure, all that we do is to arrange a set of cir- cumstances in such a way as that these shall cause pleasure. Of course there is a sense, and a very wonderful sense, in which a Great Personality breathes upon all who come within its influence an abiding peace and trust. Men can be to other men as the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. Much more Christ ; much more Christ as Perfect Man ; much more still as Savior of the world. But it is not this of which I speak. When Christ said He would give men rest. He meant simply that He would put them in the way of it. By no act of conveyano'^ 104 PAX VOBISCUM. would, or could, He make over His own Rest to them. He could give them His receipt for it. That was alL But He would not make it for them ; for one thing, it was not in His plan to make it for them ; for another thing, men were not so planned that it could be made for them ; and for yet another thing, it was a thousand times better that they should make it for them- selves. That this is the meaning becomes obvious from the wording of the second sentence : '^ Learn of Me and ye shall find Rest." Rest, that is to say, is not a thing that can be given, but a thing to be acquired. It comes not by an act, but by a process. It is not to EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 10$ be found in a happy hour, as one finds a treasure ; but slowly, as one finds knowledge. It could indeed be no more found in a moment than could knowledge. A soil has to be prepared for it. Like a fine fruit, it will grow in one climate and not in another; at one altitude and not at another. Like all growths it will have an orderly de- velopment and mature by slow degrees. The nature of this slow process Christ clearly defines when He says we are to achieve Rest by learning. *' Learn of Me," He says, " and ye shall find Rest to your souls." Now consider the extraordinary originality of this utterance. How novel the con- nection between these two words. I06 PAX VOBISCUM. " Learn '' and " Rest " ! How few of us have ever associated them — ever thought that Rest was a thing to be learned; ever laid ourselves out for it as we would to learn a language ; ever practiced it as we would practice the violin ? Does it not show how entirely- new Christ's teaching still is to the world, that so old and threadbare an aphorism should still be so little ap- plied? The last thing most of us would have thought of would have been to associate Rest with Work. What must one work at? What is that which if duly learned will find the soul of man in Rest? Christ answers without the least hesitation. He speci- fies two things — Meekness and Low- EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 10/ liness. *' Learn of Me," He says, •'for I am meek and lowly in heart." Now, these two things are not chosen at random. To these accompHsh- ments, in a special way, Rest is at- tached. Learn these, in short, and you have already found Rest. These as they stand are direct causes of Rest ; will produce it at once ; cannot but produce it at once. And if you think for a single moment, you will see how this is necessarily so, for causes are never arbitrary, and the connection between antecedent and consequent here and everywhere lies deep in the nature of things. What is the connection, then } I answer by a further question. What I08 PAX VOBISCUM. are the chief causes of Unrest? If you know yourself, you will answer Pride, Selfishness, Ambition. As you look back upon the past years of your life, is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from the succession of personal mortifications, and almost trivial disappointments which the in- tercourse of life has brought you ? Great trials come at lengthened inter- vals, and we rise to breast them ; but it is the petty friction of our every day life with one another, the jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse of our ambition, the crossing of our will or the taking down of our conceit, which make inward peace impossible. EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. lOQ Wounded vanity, then, disappointed hopes, unsatisfied selfishness — these are the old, vulgar, universal sources of man's unrest. Now it is obvious why Christ pointed out as the two chief objects for attain- ment the exact opposites of these. To Meekness and Lowliness these things simply do not exist. They cure unrest by making it impossible. These reme- dies do not trifle with surface symp- toms ; they strike at once at removing causes. The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centered life can be removed at once by learning Meekness and Low- liness of heart. He who learns them is for ever proof against it. He lives henceforth a charmed life. Chris- no PAX VOBISCUM. tianity is a fine inoculation, a transfu- sion of healthy blood into an anaemic or poisoned soul. No fever can attack a perfectly sound body ; no fever of unrest can disturb a soul which has breathed the air or learned the ways of Christ. Men sigh for the wings of a dove that they may fly away and be at rest. But flying away will not help us. ''The Kingdom of God is within you.'' We aspire to the top to look I for Rest ; it lies at the bottom. Water rests only when it gets to the lowest place. So do men. Hence, be lowly. The man who has no opinion of him- self at all can never be hurt if others do not acknowledge him. Hence, be meek. He who is without expecta- EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. Ill tion cannot fret if nothing comes to him. It is self-evident that these things are so. The lowly man and the meek man are really above all other men, above all other things. They dominate the world because they do not care for it. The miser does not possess gold, gold possesses him. But the meek possess it. "The meek," said Christ, " inherit the earth." They do not buy it ; they do not conquer it ; but they inherit it. There are people who go about the world looking out for slights, and they are necessarily miserable, for they find them at every turn — especially the im- aginary ones. One has the same pity for such men as for the very poor. 112 PAX VOBISCUM. They are the morally illiterate. They have had no real education, for they have never learned how to live. Few men know how to live. We grow up at random, carrying into mature life the merely animal methods and mo- tives which we had as little children. And it does not occur to us that all this must be changed ; that much of it must be revised ; that life is the finest of the Fine Arts ; that it has to be learned with lifelong patience, and that the years of our pilgrimage are all too short to master it triumphantly. Yet this is what Christianity is for — to teach men the Art of Life. And its whole curriculum lies in one word — '* Learn, of Me." Unlike most educa- EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. II J tion, this is almost purely personal ; it is not to be had from books or lectures or creeds or doctrines. It is a study from the life. Christ never said much in mere words about the Christian Graces. He lived them, He was them. Yet we do not merely copy Him. We learn His art by living with Him, like the old apprentices with their masters. Now we understand it all? Christ's invitation to the weary and heavy- laden is a call to begin life over again upon a new principle — upon His own principle. ** Watch My way of doing things," He says. '' Follow Me. Take life as I take it. Be meek and lowly and you will find Rest." 114 PAX VOBISCUM. I do not say, remember, that the Christian life to every man, or to any man, can be a bed of roses. No edu- cational process can be this. And perhaps if some men knew how much was involved in the simple "learn" of Christ, they would not enter His school with so irresponsible a heart. For there is not only much to learn, but much to unlearn. Many men never go to this school at all till their dis- position is already half ruined and character has taken on its fatal set. To learn arithmetic is difficult at fifty — much more to learn Christianity. To learn simply what it is to be meek and lowly, in the case of one who has had no lessons in that in childhood, may EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. II5 cost him half of what he values most on earth. Do we realize, for instance, that the way of teaching humility is generally by Junniliation. There is probably no other school for it. When a man enters himself as a pupil in such a school it means a very great thing. There is such Rest there, but there is also much Work. I should be wrong, even though my theme is the brighter side, to ignore: the cross and minimize the cost. Only it gives to the cross a more definite meaning, and a rarer value, to con- nect it thus directly and causally with the growth of the inner life. Our platitudes on the "benefits of afflic- tion " are usually about as vague as- Il6 PAX VOBISCUM. our theories of Christian Experience. ^'Somehow," we believe affliction does us good. But it is not a question of ^* Somehow." The result is definite, calculable, necessary. It is under the strictest law of cause and effect. The first effect of losing one's fortune, for instance, is humiliation ; and the effect of humiliation, as we have just seen, is to make one humble ; and the effect of being humble is to produce Rest. It is a roundabout way, apparently, of producing Rest; but Nature generally works by circular processes ; and it is not certain that there is any other way of becoming humble, or of finding Rest. If a man could make himself humble to order, it might simplify EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 11/ matters, but we do not find that this happens. Hence we must all go through the mill. Hence death, death to the lower self, is the nearest gate and the quickest road to life. Yet this is only half the truth. Christ's life outwardly was one of the most troubled lives that was ever lived : Tempest and tumult, tumult and tem- pest, the waves breaking over it all the time till the worn body was laid in the grave. But the inner life was a sea of glass. The great calm was always there. At any moment you might have gone to Him and found Rest. And even when the blood-hounds were dogging Him in the streets of Jeru- salem, He turned to His disciples and Il8 PAX VOBISCUM. offered them as a last legacy, "My peace." Nothing ever for a moment broke the serenity of Christ's life on earth. Misfortune could not reach Him ; He had no fortune. Food, rai- ment, money — fountain-heads of half the world's weariness — He simply did not care for; they played no part in His life; He "took no thought" for them. It was impossible to affect Him by lowering His reputation. He had already made himself of no reputation. He was dumb before insult. When He was reviled He reviled not again. In fact, there was nothing that the world could do to Him that could ruffle the surface of His spirit. Such living, as merely living, is al- EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. I IQ together unique. It is only when we see what it was in Him that we can know w^hat the word Rest means. It lies not in emotions, nor in the absence of emotions. It is not a hallowed feel- ing that comes over us in church. It is not something that the preacher has in his voice. It is not in nature, or in poetry, or in music — though in all these there is soothing. It is the mind at leisure from itself. It is the perfect poise of the soul; the absolute adjust- ment of the inward man to the stress of all outward things; the prepared- ness against every emergency ; the stability of assured convictions ; the eternal calm of an invulnerable faith ; the repose of a heart set deep in God. I20 PAX VOBISCUM. It is the mood of the man who says, with Browning^ " God's in His Heaven^ all's well with the world." Two painters each painted a picture to illustrate his conception of rest. The first chose for his scene a still, lone lake among the far-off moun- tains. The second threw on his can- vas a thundering water-fall, with a fragile birch tree bending over the foam ; at the fork of a branch, almost wet with the cataract's spray, a robin sat on its nest. The first was only Stagnation ; the last was Rest. For in Rest there are always two elements — tranquility and energy ; silence and turbulence ; creation and destruction ; fearlessness and fearfulness. This it was in Christ. EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 121 It is quite plain from all this that whatever else He claimed to be or to do, He at least knew how to live. All this is the perfection of living, of liv- ing in the mere sense of passing through the world in the best way. Hence His anxiety to communicate His idea of life to others. He came. He said, to give men life, true life, a more abundant life than they were living; "the life," as the fine phrase in the Revised Version has it, " that is life indeed." This is what He him- self possessed, and it was this which He offers to all mankind. And hence His direct appeal for all to come to Him who had not made much of life, who were weary and heavy laden. 122 PAX VOBISCUM. These He would teach His secret They, also, should know "the life that is life indeed/* WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 1 23 WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. nPHERE is still one doubt to clear ^ up. After the statement, '* Learn of Me," Christ throws in the discon- certing qualification, " Take My Yoke upon you and learn of Me.'* Why, if all this be true, does He call it a yoke? Why, while professing to give Rest, does He with the next breath whisper *^ burden'' f Is the Christian life, after all, what its enemies take it for — an additional weight to the already great woe of life, some extra punctiliousness about duty, some painful devotion to ob^ 124 PAX VOBISCUM. servances, some heavy restriction and trammelling of all that is joyous and free in the world ? Is life not hard and sorrowful enough without being fet- tered with yet another yoke ? It is astounding how so glaring a misunderstanding of this plain sentence should ever have passed into currency. Did you ever stop to ask what a yoke is really for ? Is it to be a burden to the animal which wears it ? It is just the opposite. It is to make its burden light. Attached to the oxen in any other way than by a yoke, the plough would be intolerable. Worked by means of a yoke, it is light. A yoke is not an instrument of torture; it is an instrument of mercy. It is not a WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 125 malicious contrivance for making work hard ; it is a gentle device to make hard labor light. It is not meant to give pain, but to save pain. And yet men speak of the yoke of Christ as if it were a slavery, and look upon those who wear it as objects of compassion. For generations we have had homi- lies on "The Yoke of Christ," some delighting in portraying its narrow exactions; some seeking in these exac- tions the marks of its divinity ; others apologizing for it, and toning it down ; still others assuring us that, although it be very bad, it is not to be compared with the positive blessings of Chris- tianity. How many, especially among the young, has this one mistaken 126 PAX VOBISCUM. phrase driven forever away from the kingdom of God ? Instead of making Christ attractive, it makes Him out a taskmaster, narrowing life by petty restrictions, calling for self-denial where none is necessary, making mis- ery a virtue under the plea that it is the yoke of Christ, and happiness criminal because it now and then evades it. According to this concep- tion. Christians are at best the victims of a depressing fate ; their life is a penance ; and their hope for the next world purchased by a slow martyrdom in this. The mistake has arisen from taking the word **yoke" here in the same sense, as in the expressions " under WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 12/ the yoke," or "wear the yoke in his youth.'* But in Christ's illustration it is not the jugiivi of the Roman soldier, but the simple ** harness " or " ox-collar " of the Eastern peasant. It is the literal wooden yoke which He, with His own hands in the carpenter shop, had probably often made. He knew the difference between a smooth yoke and a rough one, a bad fit and a good fit ; the difference also it made to the patient animal which had to wear it. The rough yoke galled, and the burden was heavy ; the smooth yoke caused no pain, and the burden was lightly drawn. The badly-fitted har- ness was a misery; the well-fitted col- lar was *' easy." 128 PAX VOBISCUM. And what was the '' burden " ? It was not some special burden laid upon the Christian, some unique infliction that they alone must bear. It was what all men bear. It was simply life, human life itself, the general bur- den of life which all must carry with them from the cradle to the grave. Christ saw that men took life painfully. To some it was a weariness, to others a failure, to many a tragedy, to all a struggle and a pain. How to carry this burden of life had been the whole world's problem. It is still the whole world's problem. And here is Christ's solution : " Carry it as I do. Take life as I take it. Look at it from My point of view. Interpret it upon My WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 129 principles. Take My yoke and learn of Me, and you will find it easy. For My yoke is easy, works easily, sits right upon the shoulders, and therefore My burden is light." There is no suggestion here that religion will absolve any man from bearing burdens. That would be to absolve him from living, since it is life itself that is the burden. What Christianity does propose is to make it tolerable. Christ's yoke is simply His secret for the alleviation of human life, His prescription for the best and hap- piest method of living. Men harness themselves to the work and stress of the world in clumsy and unnatural ways. The harness they put on is I30 PAX VOBISCUM. antiquated. A rough, ill-fitted collar at the best, they make its strain and friction past endurin'g, by placing it where the neck is most sensitive ; and by mere continuous irritation this sen- sitiveness increases until the whole nature is quick and sore. This is the origin, among other things, of a disease called " touchi- ness " — a disease which, in spite of its innocent name, is one of the gravest sources of restlessness in the world. Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a morbid condition of the inward disposition. It is self-love inflamed to the acute point; conceit, with a hair- trigger. The cure is to shift the yoke to some other place ; to let men and WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. I3I things touch us through some new and perhaps as yet unused part of our nature ; to become meek and lowly in heart while the old nature is becoming numb from want of use. It is the beau- tiful work of Christianity everywhere to adjust the burden of life to those who bear it, and them to it. It has a per- fectly miraculous gift of healing. With- out doing any violence to human nature it sets it right with life, harmonizing it with all surrounding things, and restor- ing those who are jaded with the fatigue and dust of the world to a new grace of living. In the mere matter of alter- ing the perspective of life and changing the proportion of things, its functions in lightening the care of man is altogether 132 PAX VOBISCUM. its own. The weight of a load depends upon the attraction of the earth. But suppose the attraction of the earth were removed? A ton on some other planet, where the attraction of gravity is less, does not weigh half a ton. Now Chris- tianity removes the attraction of the earth, and this is one way in which it diminishes men's burden. It makes them citizens of another world. What was a ton yesterday is not half a ton to-day. So without changing one's cir- cumstances, merely by offering a wider horizon and a different standard, it alters the whole aspect of the world. Christianity as Christ taught is the truest philosophy of life ever spoken. But let us be quite sure when we speak WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 1 33 of Christianity that we mean Christ's Christianity. Other versions are either caricatures, or exaggerations, or mis- understandings, or shortsighted and surface readings. For the most part their attainment is hopeless and the results wretched. But I care not who the person is, or through what vale of tears he has passed, or is about to pass, there is a new life for him along this path. 134 P^X VOBISCUM. HOW FRUITS GROW. "I 1[ yTERE Rest my subject, there are * ^ other things I should wish to say about it, and other kinds of Rest of which I should like to speak. But that is not my subject. My theme is that the Christian experiences are not the work of magic, but come under the law of Cause and Effect. And I have chosen Rest only as a single illustration of the working of that principle. If there were time I might next run over all the Christian experi- ences in turn, and show how the same HOW FRUITS GROW. I 35 wide law applies to each. But I think it may serve the better purpose if I leave this further exercise to your- selves. I know no Bible study that you will find more full of fruit, or which will take you nearer to the ways of God, or make the Christian life itself more solid or more sure. I shall add only a single other illustration of what I mean, before I close. Where does Joy come from ? I knew a Sunday scholar whose con- ception of Joy was that it was a thing made in lumps and kept somewhere in Heaven, and that when people prayed for it, pieces were somehow let down and fitted into their souls. I am not sure that views as gross and material 136 PAX VOBISCUM. are not often held by people who ought to be wiser. In reality, Joy is as much a matter of Cause and Effect as pain. No one can get Joy by merely asking for it. It is one of the ripest fruits of the Christian life, and, like all fruits, must be grown. There is a very clever trick in India called the mango-trick. A seed is put in the ground and covered up, and after divers incantations a full-blown mango bush appears within five minutes. I never met any one who knew how the thing was done, but I never met any one who believed it to be any- thing else than a conjuring-trick. The world is pretty unanimous now in its belief in the orderliness of Nature. HOW FRUITS GROW. 1 3/ Men may not know how fruits grow, but they do know that they cannot grow in five minutes. Some lives have not even a stalk on which fruits could hang, even if they did grow in five minutes. Some have never planted one sound seed of Joy in all their lives : and others who may have planted a germ or two have lived so little in sunshine that they never could come to maturity. Whence, then, is joy.^ Christ put His teaching upon this subject into one of the most exquisite of His parables. I should in any instance have appealed to His teaching here, as in the case of Rest for I do not wish you to think I am speaking words of my own. But 138 PAX VOBISCUM. it SO happens that He has dealt with it in words of unusual fulness. I need not recall the whole illustra- tion. It is the parable of the Vine. Did you ever think why Christ spoke that parable ? He did not merely throw it into space as a fine illustration of general truths. It was not simply a statement of the mystical union, and the doctrine of an indwelling Christ. It was that; but it was more. After He had said it, He did what was not an unusual thing when He was teaching His greatest lessons. He turned to the disciples and said He would tell them why He had spoken it. It was to tell them how to get joy. "These things have I spoken unto you," He HOW FRUITS GROW. 1 39 said, "that My joy might remain in you and that your Joy might be full." It was a purposed and deliberate com- munication of His secret of Happiness. Go back over these verses, then, and you will find the Causes of this Effect, the spring, and the only spring, out of which true Happiness comes. I am not going to analyze them in detail. I ask you to enter into the words for your- selves. Remember, in the first place, that the Vine was the Eastern symbol of Joy. It was its fruit that made glad the heart of man. Yet, however inno- cent that gladness — for the expressed juice of the grape was the common drink at every peasant's board — the gladness was only a gross and passing I40 PAX VOBISCUM. thing. This was not true happiness, and the vine of the Palestine vineyards was not the true vine. Christ was " the true Vine." Here, then, is the ulti- mate source of Joy. Through whatever media it reaches us, all true joy and Gladness find their source in Christ. By this, of course, is not meant that the actual Joy experienced is transferred from Christ's nature, or is something passed on from Him to us. What is passed on is His method of getting it. There is, indeed, a sense in which we can share another's joy or an- other's sorrow. But that is another matter. Christ is the source of Joy to men in the sense in which He is the source of Rest. His people share HOW FRUITS GROW. I4I His life, and therefore share its con- sequences, and one of these is Joy. His method of living is one that in the nature of things produces Joy. When He spoke of His Joy remaining with us, He meant in part that the causes which produced it should continue to act. His followers, that is to say, by repeating His life would experi- ence its accompaniments. His Joy, His kind of Joy, would remain with them. The medium through which this Joy comes is next explained : " He that abideth in Me, the same bringeth forth much fruit." Fruit first, Joy next; the one the cause or medium of the other. Fruit-bearing is the necessary antece- 142 PAX VOBISCUM. dent ; Joy both the necessary conse- quent and the necessary accompani- ment. It lay partly in the bearing fruit, partly in the fellowship which made that possible. Partly, that is to say, Joy lay in mere constant living in Christ's presence, with all that that implied of peace, of shelter and of love; partly in the influence of that Life upon mind and character and will ; and partly in the inspiration to live and work for others, with all that that brings of self-riddance and Joy in others' gain. All these, in different ways and at different times, are sources of pure Happiness. Even the sim- plest of them — to do good to other people — is an instant and infalli- HOW FRUITS GROW. 1 43 ble specific. There is no mystery about Happiness whatever. Put in the right ingredients and it must come out. He that abideth in Him will bring forth much fruit; and bringing forth much fruit is Happiness. The infalli- ble receipt for Happiness, then, is to do good ; and the infallible receipt for doing good is to abide in Christ. The surest proof that all this is a plain matter of Cause and Effect is that men may try every other conceivable way of finding Happiness, and they will fail. Only the right cause in each case can produce the right effect. Then the Christian experiences are our own making ? In the same sense in which grapes are our own making, 144 PAX VOBISCUM. and no more. All fruits grow — whether they grow in the soil or in the soul ; whether they are the fruits of th^ wild grape or of the True Vine. No man can make things grow. He can get them to gr'oiv by arranging all the circumstances and fulfilling all the conditions. But the growing is done by God. Causes and effects are eternal arrangements, set in the constitution of the world ; fixed beyond man's order- ing. What man can do is to place himself in the midst of a chain of sequences. Thus he can get things to grow : thus he himself can grow. But the grower is the Spirit of God. What more need I add but this — test the method by experiment. Do HOW FKUnS liKOW. I45 not imagine that you have got these things because you know how to get them. As well try to feed upon a cookery book. But I think I can promise that if you try in this simple and natural way, you will not fail. Spend the time you have spent in sighing for fruits in fulfilling the con- ditions of their growth. The fruits will come, must come. We have hith- erto paid immense attention to effects, to the mere experiences themselves ; we have described them, extolled them, advised them, prayed for them — done everything but find out what caused them. Henceforth let us deal with causes. " To be,'' says Lotze, *' is to be in relations." About every other 146 PAX VOBISCUM. method of living the Christian life there is an uncertainty. About every other method of acquiring the Chris- tian experiences there is a " perhaps." But in so far as this method is the way of nature, it cannot fail. Its guarantee is the laws of the universe, and these are " the Hands of the Liv- ing God." THE TRUE VINE. 1 4/ THE TRUE VINE. ** I AM the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away : and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine ; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches : he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much 148 PAX VOBISCUM. fruit: for without me ye can do noth- ing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered ; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in me, and my word abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye may bear much fruit ; so ye shall be my disciples. As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you : continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love ; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." THE CHANGED LIFE. PREFACE. T AST autumn, in a book-shop in ^^ California, the author found a little book with his name upon the title- page — a book which he did not know existed ; which he never wrote ; nor baptized with the title which it bore. This stray publication — taken from shorthand notes of a spoken Address — he does not grudge. Already, it seens, it has done its small measure of good. But owing to the imperfections which it contains it has been thought right to issue a more complete edition. 151 152 PREFACE. The theme, like its predecessors in this series, represents but a single aspect of its great subject — the man- ward side. The light and shade is apportioned with this in view. And the reader's kind attention is asked to this limitation, lest he wonder at points being left in shadow which theology has always, and rightly, taught us to emphasize. It was the hearing of a simple talk by a friend to some plain people in a Highland deer-forest which first called the author's attention to the practical- ness of this solution of the cardinal problem of Christian experience. What follows owes a large debt to that Sunday morning. We all With unveiled face Reflecting As a Mirror The Glory of the Lord Are transformed Into the same image From Glory to Glory Even as from the Lord The Spirit. 153 THE CHANGED LIFE. " I PROTEST that if some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning, I should instantly close with the offer." nPHESE are the words of Mr. Hux- ^ ley. The infinite desirability, the infinite difficulty of being good — the theme is as old as humanity. The man does not live from whose deeper being the same confession has not risen, or who would not give his all I5S IS6 THE CHANGED LIFE. to-morrow, if he could " close with the offer," of becoming a better man. I propose to make that offer now. In all seriousness, without being "turned into a sort of clock," the end can be attained. Under the right con- ditions it is as natural for character to become beautiful as for a flower ; and if on God's earth there is not some machinery for effecting it, the supreme gift to the world has been forgotten. This is simply what man was made for. With Browning : " I say that Man was made to grow, not stop." Or in the deeper words of an older Book : ** Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate ... to be con- formed to the Image of His Son." THE CHANGED LIFE. I $7 Let me begin by naming, and in part discarding, some processes in vogue already, for producing better lives. These processes are far from wrong ; in their place they may even be essential. One ventures to dispar- age them only because they do not turn out the most perfect possible work. The first imperfect method is to rely on Resolution. In will-power, in mere spasms of earnestness there is no sal- vation. Struggle, effort, even agony, have their place in Christianity, as we shall see ; but this is not where they come in. In mid- Atlantic the other day, the Etruria, in which I was sail- ing, suddenly stopped. Something 158 THE CHANGED LIFE. had gone wrong with the engines. There were five hundred able-bodied men on board the ship. Do you think that if we had gathered together and pushed against the mast we could have pushed it on ? When one attempts to sanctify himself by effort, he is trying to make his boat go by pushing against the mast. He is like a drowning man trying to lift himself out of the water by pulling at the hair of his own head. Christ held up this method almost to ridicule when he said, " Which of you by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature ? " The one redeeming fea- ture of the self-sufficient method is this — that those who try it find out almost at once that it will not gain the goal. THE CHANGED LIFE. l$g Another experimenter says : *' But that is not my method. I have seen the folly of a mere wild struggle in the dark. I work on a principle. My plan is not to waste power on random effort, but to concentrate on a single sin. By taking one at a time, and crucifying it steadily, I hope in the end to extirpate all." To this, unfor- tunately, there are four objections : For one thing, life is too short ; the name of sin is Legion. For another thing, to deal with individual sins is to leave the rest of the nature for the time untouched. In the third place a single combat with a special sin does not affect the root and spring of the disease. If only one of the channels of sin be ob- l60 THE CHANGED LIFE. structed, experience points to an almost certain overflow through some other part of the nature. Partial conversion is almost always accompanied by such moral leakage, for the pent-up energies accumulate to the bursting point, and the last state of that soul may be worse than the first. In the last place, reli- gion does not consist in negatives, in stopping this sin and stopping that. The perfect character can never be produced with a pruning knife. But a third protests : " So be it. I make no attempt to stop sins one by one. My method is just the opposite. I copy the virtues one by one." The difficulty about the copying method is that it is apt to be mechanical. One THE CHANGED TJFE. l6l can always tell an engraving from a picture, an artificial flower from a real flower. To copy virtues one by one has somewhat the same effect as erad- icating the vices one by one ; the temporary result is an overbalanced and incongruous character. Some one defines a p7ng as *' a creature that is over-fed for its size.'' One sometimes finds Christians of this species — over- fed on one side of their nature, but dismally thin and starved-looking on the other. The result for instance, of copying Humility, and adding it on to an otherwise worldly life, is simply gro- tesque. A rabid teniperance advocate, for the same reason, is often the poor- est of creatures, flourishing on a single 1 62 THE CHANGED LIFE. virtue, and quite oblivious that his Tem- perance is making a worse man of him and not a better. These are examples of fine virtues spoiled by association with mean companions. Character is a unity, and all the virtues must advance together to make the perfect man. This method of sanctifi- cation, nevertheless, is in the true direction. It is only in the details of execution that it fails. A fourth method I need scarcely mention, for it is a variation on those already named. It is the very young man's method ; and the pure earnest- ness of it makes it almost desecration to touch it. It is to keep a private note-book with columns for the days THE CHANGED LIFE. 163 of the week, and a list of virtues with spaces against each for marks. This, with many stern rules for preface, is stored away in a secret place, and from time to time, at nightfall, the soul is arraigned before it as before a private judgment bar. This living by code was Franklin's method ; and I suppose thousands more could tell how they had hung up in their bed- rooms, or hid in lock-fast drawers, the rules which one solemn day they drew up to shape their lives. This method is not erroneous, only somehow its success is poor. You bear me wit- ness that it fails. And it fails gener- ally for very matter-of-fact reasons — most likely because one day we forget the rules. 164 THE CHANGED LIFE. All these methods that have been named — the self-sufficient method, the self-crucifixion method, the mimetic method, and the diary method — are perfectly human, perfectly natural, per- fectly ignorant, and, as they stand, per- fectly inadequate. It is not argued, I repeat, that they must be abandoned. Their harm is rather that they distract attention from the true working method, and secure a fair result at the expense of the perfect one. What that perfect method is we shall now go on to ask. FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1 65 THE FORMULA OF SANCTI- FICATION. A FORMULA, a receipt, for Sanc- tification — can one seriously speak of this mighty change as if the process were as definite as for the pro- duction of so many volts of electricity ? It is impossible to doubt it. Shall a mechanical experiment succeed infalli- bly, and the one vital experiment of humanity remain a chance ? Is corn to grow by method, and character by caprice ? If we cannot calculate to a certainty that the forces of religion l66 THE CHANGED LIFE. will do their work, then is religion vain. And if we cannot express the law of these forces in simple words, then is Christianity not the world's religion, but the world's conundrum. Where, then, shall one look for such a formula ? Where one would look for any formula — among the text-books. And if we turn to the text-books of Christianity we shall find a formula for this problem as clear and precise as any in the mechanical sciences. If this simple rule, moreover, be but fol- lowed fearlessly, it will yield the result of a perfect character as surely as any result that is guaranteed by the laws of nature. The finest expression of this rule in Scripture, or indeed in any lit- FORMULA OF SANXTIFICATION. 1 67 erature, is probably one drawn up and condensed into a single verse by Paul. You will find it in a letter — the second to the Corinthians — written by him to some Christian people who, in a city which was a byword for depravity and licentiousness, were seeking the higher life. To see the point of the words we must take them from the immensely improved rendering of the Revised translation, for the older Version in this case greatly obscures the sense. They are these : " We all, with un- veiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit." l68 ^ THE CHANGED LIFE. Now observe at the outset the (entire contradiction of all our previous efforts, in the simple passive *Sve are trans- formed/' We are changed, as the Old Version has it — we do not change ourselves. No man can change him- self. Throughout the New Testament you will find that wherever these moral and spiritual transformations are described the verbs are in the passive. Presently it will be pointed out that there is a rationale in this; but mean time do not toss these words aside as if this passivity denied all human effort or ignored intelligible law. What is implied for the soul here is no more than is everywhere claimed for the body. In physiology the verbs de- FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1 69 scribing the processes of growth are in the passive. Growth is not volun- tary ; it takes place, it happens, it is wrought upon matter. So here. "Ye must be born again " — we cannot born ourselves. " Be not conformed to this world, but be ye trans for77icd'' — we are subjects to transforming influence, we do not transform ourselves. Not more certain is it that it is something outside the thermometer that produces a change in the thermometer, than it is some- thing outside the soul of man that produces a moral change upon him. That he must be susceptible to that change, that he must be a party to it, goes without saying; but that neither his aptitude nor his will can produce it, is equally certain. 170 THE CHANGED LIFE. Obvious as it ought to seem, this may be to some an almost startling revelation. The change we have been striving after is not to be produced by any more striving after. It is to be wrought upon us by the moulding of hands beyond our own. As the branch ascends, and the bud bursts, and the fruit reddens under the co-operation of influences from the outside air, so man rises to the higher stature under invisi- ble pressures from without. The radi- cal defect of all our former methods of sanctification was the attempt to generate from within that which can only be wrought upon us from without. According to the first Law of Motion : Every body continues in its state of FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. I7I rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it may be com- pelled by impressed forces to change that state. This is also a first law of Christianity. Every man's character remains as it is, or continues in the di- rection in which it is going, until it is compelled by ijnpi'essed forces to change that state. Our failure has been the failure to put ourselves in the way of the impressed forces. There is a clay, and there is a Potter ; we have tried to get the clay to mould the clay. Whence, then, these pressures, and where this Potter } The answer of the formula is " By reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord we are changed." But this is not very clear. What is 17^2 THE CHANGED LIFE. the "glory" of the Lord, and how can mortal man reflect it, and how can that act as an "impressed force" in mould- ing him to a nobler form ? The word "glory" — the word which has to bear the weight of holding those " impressed forces " — is a stranger in current speech, and our first duty is to seek out its equivalent in working English. It suggests at first a radiance of some kind, something dazzling or glittering, some halo such as the old masters loved to paint round the heads of their Ecce Homos. But that is paint, mere matter, the visible symbol of some unseen thing. What is that unseen thing ? It is that of all unseen things the most radiant, the most beautiful. FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1/3 the most Divine, and that is Character. On earth, in Heaven, there is nothing so great, so glorious as this. The word has many meanings ; in ethics it can have but one. Glory is character, and nothing less, and it can be nothing more. The earth is '^ full of the glory of the Lord," because it is full of His character. The " Beauty of the Lord " is character. "The effulgence of His Glory " is character. " The Glory of the Only Begotten " is character, the character vv^hich is *' fulness of grace and truth." And when God told His people His name He simply gave them His character. His character which was Himself : '' And the Lord pro- claimed the name of the Lord . . . 174 THE CHANGED LIFE. the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth." Glory then is not something intangible, or ghostly, or transcendental. If it were this how could Paul ask men to reflect it ? Stripped of its physical enswathement it is Beauty, moral and spiritual Beauty, Beauty infinitely real, infinitely exalted, yet infinitely near and infinitely com- municable. With this explanation read over the sentence once more in paraphrase : We all reflecting as a mirror the char- acter of Christ are transformed into the same Image from character to charac- ter — from a poor character to a better one, from a belter one to one a little FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1/5 better still, from that to one still more complete, until by slow degrees the Perfect Image is attained. Here the solution of the problem of sanctification is compressed into a sentence : Reflect the character of Christ, and you will become like Christ. All men are mirrors — that is the first law on which this formula is based. One of the aptest descriptions of a human being is that he is a mirron As we sat at table to-night the world in which each of us lived and moved throughout this day was focussed in the room. What we saw as we looked at one another was not one another, but one another's world. We were an arrangement of mirrors. The 176 THE CHANGED LIFE. scenes we saw were all reproduced ; the people we met walked to and fro ; they spoke, they bowed, they passed us by, did everything over again as if it had been real. When we talked, we were but looking at our own mir- ror and describing what flitted across it ; our listening was not hearing, but seeing — we but looked on our neigh- bor's mirror. All human intercourse is a seeing of reflections. I meet a stranger in a railway carnage. The cadence of his first word tells me he is English, and comes from Yorkshire. Without knowing it he has reflected his birthplace, his parents, and the long history of their race. Even phys- iologically he is a mirror. His second FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1 7/ sentence records that he is a politician, and a faint inflection in the way he pronounces The Times reveals his party. In his next remarks I see re- flected a whole world of experiences. The books he has read, the people he has met, the influences that have played upon him and made him the man he is — these are all registered there by a pen which lets nothing pass, and whose writing can never be blotted out. What I am reading in him meantime he also is reading in me ; and before the journey is over we could half write each other's lives^ Whether we like it or not, we live in glass houses. The mind, the memory, the soul, is simply a vast chamber lyS THE CHANGED LIFE. panelled with looking-glass. And upon this miraculous arrangement and en- dowment depends the capacity of mor- tal souls to " reflect the character of the Lord." But this is not all. If all these varied reflections from our so-called secret life are patent to the world, how close the writing, how complete the record, within the soul itself ! For the influences we meet are not simply held for a moment on the polished surface and thrown off again into space. Each is retained where first it fell, and stored up in the soul forever. This law of Assimilation is the sec- ond, and by far the most impressive truth which underlies the formula of FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 1/9 sanctification — the truth that men are not only mirrors, but that these mirrors, so far from being mere reflectors of the fleeting things they see, transfer into their own inmost substance, and hold in permanent preservation, the things that they reflect. No one knows how the soul can hold these things. No one knows how the miracle is done. No phenomenon in nature, no process in chemistry, no chapter in necro- mancy can ever help us to begin to understand this amazing operation. For, think of it, the past is not only focussed there, in a man's soul, it is there. How could it be reflected from there if it were not there ? All things that he has ever seen, known, felt, l80 THE CHANGED LIFE. believed of the surrounding world are now within him, have become part of him, in part are him — he has been changed into their image. He may deny it, he may resent it, but they are there. They do not adhere to him, they are transfused through him. He cannot alter or rub them out. They are not in his memory, they are in him. His soul is as they have filled it, made it, left it. These things, these books, these events, these influences are his makers. In their hands are life and death, beauty and deformity. When once the image or likeness of any of these is fairly presented to the soul, no power on earth can hinder two things happening — it must be FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. l8l absorbed into the soul, and forever reflected back again from character. Upon these astounding yet perfectly obvious psychological facts, Paul bases his doctrine of sanctification. He sees that character is a thing built up by slow degrees, that it is hourly changing for better or for worse according to the images which flit across it. One step further and the whole length and breadth of the appli- cation of these ideas to the central problem of religion will stand before us. l82 THE CHANGED LIFE. THE ALCHEMY OF INFLU- ENCE. IF events change men, much more ^ persons. No man can meet an- other on the street without making some mark upon him. We say we exchange words when we meet; what we exchange is souls. And when inter- course is very close and very frequent, so complete is this exchange that rec- ognizable bits of the one soul begin to show in the other's nature, and the second is conscious of a similar and growing debt to the first. THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 1 83 This mysterious approximating of two souls who has not witnessed ? Who has not watched some old couple come down life's pilgrimage hand in hand, with such gentle trust and joy in one another that their very faces wore the self -same look ? These were not two souls ; it was a composite soul. It did not matter to which of the two you spoke you would have said the same words to either. It was quite indifferent which replied, each would have said the same. Half a century's rejlectmg had told upon them ; they were changed into the same image. It is the Law of In- fluence that zve become like those whom we habitually admWe : these had be- 1 84 THE CHANGED LIFE. come like because they habitually admired. Through all the range of literature, of history, and biography this law presides. Men are all mosaics of other men. There was a savor of David about Jonathan and a savor of Jonathan about David. Jean Valjean, in the masterpiece of Victor Hugo, is Bishop Bienvenu risen from the dead. Metempsychosis is a fact. George Eliot's message to the world was that men and women make men and wo- men. The Family, the cradle of mankind, has no meaning apart from this. Society itself is nothing but a rallying point for these omnipotent forces to do their work. On the doc- trine of Influence, in short, the whole vast pyramid of humanity is built. THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 185 But it was resented for Paul to make the supreme application of the Law of Influence. It was a tremendous infer- ence to make, but he never hesitated. He himself was a changed man ; he knew exactly what had done it ; it was Christ. On the Damascus road they met, and from that hour his life was absorbed in His. The effect could not but follow — on words, on deeds, on career, on creed. The "impressed forces" did their vital work. He be- came like Him Whom he habitually loved. "So we all," he writes, "re- flecting as a mirror the glory of Christ, are changed into the same image." Nothing could be more simple, more intelligible, more natural, more super- 1 86 THE CHANGED LIFE. natural. It is an analogy from an every-day fact. Since we are what we are by the impacts of those who surround us, those who surround themselves with the highest will be those who change into the highest. There are some men and some women in whose company we are always at our best. While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or speak ungen- erous words. Their mere presence is elevation, purification, sanctity. All the best stops in our nature are drawn out by their intercourse, and we find a music in our souls that was never there before. Suppose even that influence pro- longed through a month, a year, a life- time, and what could not life become ? THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 1 8/ Here, even on the common plane of life, talking our language, walking our streets, working side by side, are sanctifiers of souls; here, breathing through common clay, is Heaven ; here, energies charged even through a temporal medium with the virtue of regeneration. H to live with men, diluted to the millionth degree with the virtue of the Highest, can exalt and purify the nature, what bounds can be set to the influence of Christ ? To live with Socrates — with unveiled face — must have made one wise ; with Aristides, just. Francis of Assisi must have made one gentle; Savonarola, strong. But to have lived with Christ must have made one like Christ; that is to say, A Chnstian, 1 88 THE CHANGED LIFE. As a matter of fact, to live with Christ did produce this effect. It pro- duced it in the case of Paul. And during Christ's lifetime the experiment was tried in an even more startling form. A few raw, unspiritual, unin- spiring men, were admitted to the inner circle of His friendship. The change began at once. Day by day we can almost see the first disciple grow. First there steals over them the faintest possible adumbration of His character, and occasionally, very occasionally, they do a thing or say a thing that they could not have done or said had they not been living there. Slowly the spell of His Life deepens. Reach after reach of their nature is overtaken, THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 1 89 thawed, subjugated, sanctified. Their manner softens, their words become more gentle, their conduct more un- selfish. As swallows who have found a summer, as frozen buds the spring, their starved humanity bursts into a fuller life. ' They do not know how it is, but they are different men. One day they find themselves like their Master, going about and doing good. To themselves it is unaccountable, but they cannot do otherwise. They were not told to do it, it came to them to do it. But the people who watch them know well how to account for it — "They have been," they whisper, **with Jesus." Already even, the mark and seal of His character is upon IQO THE CHANGED LIFE. them — "They have been with Jesus.'* Unparalleled phenomenon, that these poor fishermen should remind other men of Christ! Stupendous victory and mystery of regeneration that mor- tal men should suggest to the world, God! There is something almost melting in the way His contemporaries, and John especially, speak of the influence of Christ. John lived himself in daily wonder at Him ; he was over- powered, over-awed, entranced, trans- figured. To his mind it was impossi- ble for any one to come under this influence and ever be the same again. "Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not," he said. It was inconceivable THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. IQI that he should sin, as inconceivable as that ice should live in a burning sun, or darkness coexist with noon. If any one did sin, it was to John the sim- ple proof that he could never have met Christ. "Whosoever sinneth," he ex- claims, ** hath not seen Hhn, neither known Him,'' Sin was abashed in this Presence. Its roots withered. Its sway and victory w^ere forever at an end. But these were His contemporaries. It was easy for them to be influenced by Him, for they were every day and all the day together. But how can we mirror that which we have never seen } How can all this stupendous result be produced by a Memory, by 192 THE CHANGED LIFE. the scantiest of all Biographies, by One who lived and left this earth eighteen hundred years ago ? How can modern men to-day make Christ, the absent Christ, their most constant companion still ? The answer is that Friendship is a spiritual thing. It is independent of Matter, or Space, or Time. That which I love in my friend is not that which I see. What influences me in my friend is not his body but his spirit. It would have been an ineffable experience truly to have lived at that time — "I think when I read the sweet story of old How when Jesus was here among men, He took little children like lambs to his fold, I should like to have been with Him then. THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUEN'CE. I93 "I wish that His hand had been laid on my head, That His arms had been thrown around me, And that I had seen His kind look when he said, * Let the little ones come unto me/" And yet, if Christ were to come into the world again few of us probably would ever have a chance of seeing Him. Millions of her subjects, in this little country, have never seen their own Queen. And there would be millions of the subjects of Christ who could never get within speaking dis- tance of Him if He were here. Our companionship with Him, like all true companionship, is a spiritual com- munion. All friendship, all love, human and Divine, is purely spiritual. 194 THE CHANGED LIFE. It was after He was risen that He influenced even the disciples most. Hence in reflecting the character of Christ, it is no real obstacle that we may never have been in visible con- tact with Himself. There lived once a young girl whose perfect grace of character was the wonder of those who knew her. She wore on her neck a gold locket which no one was ever allowed to open. One day, in a moment of unusual confi- dence, one of her companions was allowed to touch its spring and learn its secret. She saw written these words — " Whom having not seen, I love.'' That was the secret of her beautiful life. She had been changed into the Same Image. THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. I95 Now this is not imitation, but a much deeper thing. Mark this dis- tinction. For the difference in the process, as well as in the result, may be as great as that between a photo- graph secured by the infallible pencil of the sun, and the rude outline from a school-boy's chalk. Imitation is mechanical, reflection organic. The one is occasional, the other habitual. In the one case, man comes to God and imitates Him ; in the other, God comes to man and imprints Himself upon him. It is quite true that there is an imitation of Christ which amounts to reflection. But Paul's term includes all that the other holds, and is open to no mistake. 196 THE CHANGED LIFE. ** Make Christ your most constant companion " — this is what it practically means for us. Be more under His in- fluence than under any other influence. Ten minutes spent in His society every day, ay, two minutes if it be face to face, and heart to heart, will make the whole day different. Every character has an inward spring, let Christ be it. Every action has a key-note, let Christ set it. Yesterday you got a certain letter. You sat down and wrote a re- ply which almost scorched the paper. You picked the cruellest adjectives you knew and sent it forth, without a pang, to do its ruthless work. You did that because your life was set in the wrong key. You began the day THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. IQ/ with the mirror placed at the wrong angle. To-morrow, at day-break, turn it towards Him, and even to your enemy the fashion of your counte- nance will be changed. Whatever you then do, one thing you will find you could not do — you could not write that letter. Your first impulse may be the same, your judgment may be un- changed, but if you try it the ink will dry on your pen, and you will rise from your desk an unavenged, but a greater and more Christian, man. Throughout the whole day your ac- tions, down to the last detail, will do homage to that early vision. Yester- day you thought mostly about your- self. To-day the poor will meet you, 198 THE CHANGED LIFE. and you will feed them. The help- less, the tempted, the sad, will throng about you, and each you will befriend. Where were all these people yester- day ? Where they are to-day, but you did not see them. It is in reflected light that the poor are seen. But your soul to-day is not at the ordinary angle. '* Things which are not seen " are visible. For a few short hours you live the Eternal Life. The eternal life, the life of faith, is simply the life of the higher vision. Faith is an atti- tude — a mirror set at the right angle. When to-morrow is over, and in the evening you review it, you will won- der how you did it. You will not be conscious that you strove for anything, THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. IQQ or imitated anything, or crucified any- thing. You will be conscious of Christ; that he was with you, that without compulsion you were yet com- pelled, that without force, or noise, or proclamation, the revolution was ac- complished. You do not congratulate yourself as one who has done a mighty deed, or achieved a personal success, or stored up a fund of "Christian experience " to ensure the same result again. What you are conscious of is **the glory of the Lord." And what the world is conscious of, if the result be a true one, is also " the glory of the Lord." In looking at a mirror one does not see the mirror, or think of it, but only of what it reflects. For a 200 THE CHANGED LIFE. mirror never calls attention to itself — except when there are flaws in it. That this is a real experience and not a vision, that this life is possible to men, is being lived by men to-day, is simple biographical fact. From a thousand witnesses I cannot forbear to summon one. The following are the words of one of the highest intellects this age has known, a man who shared the burdens of his country as few have done, and who, not in the shadow^s of old age, but in the high noon of his success, gave this confession — I quote it with only a few abridgments — to the world : '* I want to speak to-night only a little, but that little I desire to speak of THE ALCHEMV OF INFLUENCE. 20I the sacred name of Christ, who is my life, my inspiration, my hope, and my surety. I cannot help stopping and looking back upon the past. And I wish, as if I had never done it before, to bear witness, not only that it is by the grace of God, but that it is by the grace of God, as manifested in Christ Jesus, that I am what I am. I recog- nize the sublimity and grandeur of the revelation of God in His eternal father- hood as one that made the heavens, that founded the earth, and that regards all the tribes of the earth, compre- hending them in one universal mercy ; but it is the God that is manifested in Jesus Christ, revealed by His life, made known by the inflections of His 202 THE CHANGED LIFE. feelings, by His discourse, and by His deeds — it is that God that I desire to confess to-night, and of whom I desire to say, 'By the love of God in Christ Jesus I am what I am.' " If you ask me precisely what I mean by that, I say, frankly, that more than any recognized influence of my father or my mother upon me ; more than the social influence of all the members of my father's household, more, so far as I can trace it, or so far as I am made aware of it, than all the social influences of every kind, Christ has had the formation of my mind and my disposition. My hidden ideals of what is beautiful I have drawn from Christ. My thoughts of what is THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 203 manly, and noble, and pure, have almost all of them arisen from the Lord Jesus Christ. Many men have educated themselves by reading Plu- tarch's Lives of the Ancient Worthies, and setting before themselves one and another of these that in different ages have achieved celebrity ; and they have recognized the great power of these men on themselves. Now I do not perceive that poet, or philosopher, or reformer, or general, or any other great man, ever has dwelt in my imagi- nation and in my thought as the simple Jesus has. For more than twenty-five years I instinctively have gone to Christ to draw a measure and a rule for every- thing. Whenever there has been a 204 THE CHANGED LIFE. necessity for it, I have sought — and at last almost spontaneously — to throw myself into the companionship of Christ; and early, by my imagination, I could see Him standing and looking quietly and lovingly upon me. There seemed almost to drop from His face an influence upon me that suggested what was the right thing in the con- trolling of passion, in the subduing of pride, in the overcoming of selfishness ; and it is from Christ, manifested to my inward eye, that I have consciously derived more ideals, more models, more influences, than any other human character whatever. **That is not all. I feel conscious that I have derived from the Lord THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 205 Jesus Christ every thought that makes heaven a reality to me, and every thought that paves the road that lies between me and heaven. All my conceptions of the progress of grace in the soul ; all the steps by which divine life is evolved ; all the ideals that overhang the blessed sphere which awaits us beyond this world — these are derived from the Saviour. The life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God. ** That is not all. Much as my future includes all these elements which go to make the blessed fabric of earthly life, yet, after all, what the summer is compared with all its earthly products — flowers, and leaves, 206 THE CHANGED LIFE. and grass — that is Christ compared with all the products of Christ in my mind and in my soul. All the flowers and leaves of sympa- thy ; all the twining joys that come from my heart as a Christian — these I take and hold in the future, but they are to me what the flowers and leaves of summer are compared with the sun that makes the summer. Christ is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of my better life. '' When T read the Bible, I gather a great deal from the Old Testament, and from the Pauline portions of the New Testament; but after all, I am conscious that the fruit of the Bible THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 20/ is Christ. That is what I read it for, and that is what I find that is worth reading. I have had a hunger to be loved of Christ. You all know, in some relations, what it is to be hungry for love. Your heart seems unsatisfied till you can draw something more toward you from those that are dearest to you. There have been times when I have had an unspeakable heart- hunger for Christ's love. My sense of sin is never strong when I think of the law ; my sense of sin is strong when I think of love — if there is any difference between law and love. It is when drawing near the Lord Jesus Christ, and longing to be loved, that I have the most vivid sense of unsym- 208 THE CHANGED LIFE. metry, of imperfection, of absolute unworthiness, and of my sinfulness. Character and conduct are never so vividly set before me as when in silence I bend in the presence of Christ, revealed not in wrath, but in love to me. I never so much long to be lovely, that I may be loved, as when I have this revelation of Christ before my mind. " In looking back upon my experi- ence, that part of my life which stands out, and which I remember most vividly, is just that part that has had some conscious association with Christ. All the rest is pale, and thin, and lies like clouds on the horizon. Doctrines, systems, measures, methods — what THl<: ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCK. 209 may bo called the necessary mechani- cal and external part of worship ; the part which the senses would recog- nize — this seems to have withered and fallen off like leaves of last summer; but that part which has taken hold of Christ abides." Can any one hear this life-music, with its throbbing refrain of Christ, and remain unmoved by envy or desire? Yet, till we have lived like this we have never lived at all. 2IO THE CHANGED LIFE. THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. nPHEN you reduce religion to a common Friendship ? A com- mon Friendship — who talks of a com- mon Friendship ? There is no such thing in the world. On earth no word is more sublime. Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is. God is love. And to make reli- gion akin to Friendship is simply to give it the highest expression con- ceivable by man. But if by demur- ring to " a common friendship *' is meant a protest against the greatest THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 211 and the holiest in religion being spoken of in intelligible terms, then I am afraid the objection is all too real. Men always look for a mystery when one talks of sanctification ; some mys- tery apart from that which must ever be mysterious wherever Spirit works. It is thought some peculiar secret lies behind it, some occult experience which only the initiated know. Thou- sands of persons go to church every Sunday hoping to solve this mystery. At meetings, at conferences, many a time they have reached what they thought w^as the very brink of it, but somehow no further revelation came. Poring over religious books, how often were they not within a paragraph of 212 THE CHANGED LIFE. it; the next page, the next sentence, would discover all, and they would be borne on a flowing tide forever. But nothing happened. The next sentence and the next page were read, and still it eluded them ; and though the promise of its coming kept faithfully up to the end, the last chapter found them still pursuing. Why did nothing happen ? Because there was nothing to happen — nothing of the kind they were looking for. Why did it elude them .'^ Because there was no ^*it.'* When shall we learn that the pursuit of holiness is simply the pursuit of Christ ? When shall we substitute for the *' it " of a fictitious aspiration, the approach to a Living Friend ? Sane- THK FIRST EXPERIMENT. 213 tity is in character and not in moods ; Divinity in our own plain calm human- ity, and in no mystic rapture of the soul. And yet there are others who, for exactly a contrary reason, will find scant satisfaction here. Their com- plaint is not that a religion expressed in terms of Friendship is too homely, but that it is still too mystical. To "abide" in Christ, to "make Christ our most constant companion," is to them the purest mysticism. They want something absolutely tangible and absolutely direct. * These are not the poetical souls w^ho seek a sign, a mysticism in excess ; but the prosaic natures whose want is mathematical 214 THE CHANGED LIFE. definition in details. Yet it is perhaps not possible to reduce this problem to much more rigid elements. The beauty of Friendship is its infinity. One can never evacuate life of mysti- cism. Home is full of it, love is full of it, religion is full of it. Why stumble at that in the relation of man to Christ which is natural in the rela- tion of man to man ? If any one cannot conceive or real- ize a mystical relation with Christ, per- haps all that can be done is to help him to step on to it by still plainer analogies from tommon life. How do I know Shakespeare or Dante.? By communing with their words and thoughts. Many men know Dante THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 21$ better than their own fathers. He influences them more. As a spiritual presence he is more near to them, as a spiritual force more real. Is there any reason why a greater than Shake- speare or Dante, who also walked this earth, who left great words behind Him, who has greater works every- where in the world now, should not also instruct, inspire, and mould the characters of men ? I do not limit Christ's influence to this. It is this, and it is more. But Christ, so far from resenting or discouraging this relation of Friendship, Himself pro- posed it. " Abide in me " was almost His last w^ord to the world. And He partly met the difficulty of those who 2l6 THE CHANGED LIFE. feel its intangibleness by adding the practical clause, " If ye abide in Me and My words abide in you ^ Begin with His words. Words can scarcely ever be long impersonal. Christ Himself was a Word, a word made Flesh. Make His words flesh ; do them, live them, and you must live Christ. ''He that keepeth My com- mandments, he it is that loveth Me.'* Obey Him and you must love Him. Abide in Him and you must obey Him. Cultivate His Friendship. Live after Christ, in His Spirit, as in His Pres- ence, and it is difficult to think what more you can do. Take this at least as a first lesson, as introduction. If you cannot at once and always feel THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 21/ the play of His life upon yours, watch for it also indirectly. "The whole earth is full of the character of the Lord." Christ is the Light of the world, and much of His Light is reflected from things in the world — even from clouds. Sunlight is stored in every leaf, from leaf through coal, and it comforts us thence when days are dark and we cannot see the sun. Christ shines through men, through books, through history, through nature, music, art. Look for Him there. " Every day one should either look at a beautiful picture, or hear beautiful music, or read a beautiful poem." The real danger of mysticism is not making it broad enough. 2lS THE CHANGED LIFE. Do not think that nothing is happen- ing because you do not see yourself grow, or hear the whir of the ma- chinery. All great things grow noise- ^ I lessly. You can see a mushroom grow, but never a child. Mr. Darwin tells us that Evolution proceeds by "numerous, successive, and slight modifications." Paul knew that, and put it, only in more beautiful words, into the heart of his formula. He said for the comforting of all slowly perfecting souls that they grew '*from character to character." "The in- ward man," he says elsewhere, "is renewed from day to day." All thorough work is slow; all true devel- opment by minute, slight, and insen- THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 219 sible metamorphoses. The higher the structure, moreover, the slower the progress. As the biologist runs his eye over the long Ascent of Life he sees the lowest forms of animals de- velop in an hour ; the next above these reach maturity in a day ; those higher still take weeks or months to perfect; but the few at the top demand the long experiment of years. If a child and an ape are born on the same day, the last will be m full possession of its fac- ulties and doing the active work of life before the child has left its cradle. Life is the cradle of eternity. As the man is to the animal in the slowness of his evolution, so is the spiritual man to the natural man. Foundations which 220 THE CHANGED LIFE. have to bear the weight of an eternal life must be surely laid. Character is to wear forever; who will wonder or grudge that it cannot be developed in a day ? To await the growing of a soul, nevertheless, is an almost Divine act of faith. How pardonable, surely, the impatience of deformity with itself, of a consciously despicable character standing before Christ, wondering, yearning, hungering to be like that! Yet must one trust the process fear- lessly, and without misgiving. "The Lord the Spirit " will do His part. The tempting expedient is, in haste for abrupt or visible progress, to try some method less spiritual, or to defeat THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 221 the end by watching for effects instead of keeping the eye on the Cause. A photograph prints from the negative only while exposed to the sun. While the artist is looking to see how it is getting on he simply stops the getting on. Whatever of wise supervision the soul may need, it is certain it can never be over-exposed, or that, being exposed, anything else in the world can improve the result or quicken it. The creation of a new heart, the renewing of a right spirit, is an om- nipotent work of God. Leave it to the Creator. " He which hath begun a good work in you will perfect it unto that day." No man, nevertheless, who feels the 222 THE CHANGED LIFE. worth and solemnity of what is at stake will be careless as to his prog- ress. To become like Christ is the only thing in the world worth caring for, the thing before which every am- bition of man is folly, and all lower achievement vain. Those only who make this quest the supreme desire and passion of their lives can ever begin to hope to reach it. If, therefore, it has seemed up to this point as if all de- pended on passivity, let me now assert, with conviction more intense, that all depends on activity. A religion of effortless adoration may be a religion for an angel, but never for a man. Not in the contemplative, but in the active, lies true hope ; not in rapture, THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 223 but in reality, lies true life ; not in the realm of ideals, but among tangible things, is man's sanctification wrought. Resolution, effort, pain, self-crucifixion, agony — all the things already dis- missed as futile in themselves must now be restored to office, and a tenfold responsibility laid upon them. For what is their office ? Nothing less than to move the vast inertia of the soul^ and place it, and keep it where the spiritual forces will act upon it. It is to rally the forces of the will, and keep the surface of the mirror bright and ever in position. It is to uncover the face which is to look at Christ, and draw down the veil when unhallowed sights are near. You have, perhaps. 224 THE CHANGED LIFE. gone with an astronomer to watch him photograph the spectrum of a star. As you entered the dark vault of the observatory you saw him begin by lighting a candle. To see the star with ? No ; but to see to adjust the instrument to see the star with. It was the star that was going to take the pho- tograph ; it was, also, the astronomer. For a long time he w^orked in the dimness, screwing tubes and polishing lenses and adjusting reflectors, and only after much labor the finely focussed instrument was brought to bear. Then he blew out the light, and left the star to do its work upon the plate alone. The day's task for the Christian is to brino^ his instrument THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 22$ to bear. Having done that he may blow out his candle. All the evidences of Christianity which have brought him there, all aids to Faith, all acts of worship, all the leverages of the Church, all Prayer and Meditation, all girding of the Will — these lesser proc- esses, these candle-light activities for that supreme hour, may be set aside. But, remember, it is but for an hour. The wise man will be he who quickest lights his candle ; the wisest he who never lets it out. To-morrow, the next moment, he, a poor, darkened, blurred soul, may need it again to focus the Image better, to take a mote off the lens, to clear the mirror from a breath with which the world has dulled it. 226 THE CHANGED LIFE. No readjustment is ever required on behalf of the Star. That is one great fixed point in this shifting universe. But the world moves. And each day, each hour, demands a further motion and readjustment for the soul. A tel- escope in an observatory follows a star by clockwork, but the clockwork of the soul is called the WilL Hence, while the soul in passivity reflects the Image of the Lord, the Will in intense activity holds the mirror in position lest the drifting motion of the world bear it beyond the line of vision. To ''follow Christ" is largely to keep the soul in such position as will allow for the motion of the earth. And this calculated counteracting of the move- THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 22/ ments of the world, this holding of the mirror exactly opposite to the Mirrored, this steadying of the faculties unerr- ingly through cloud and earthquake, fire and sword, is the stupendous co- operating labor of the Will. It is all man's work. It is all Christ's work. In practice it is both ; in theory it is both. But the wise man will say in practice, " It depends upon myself." In the Galerie des Beaux Arts in Paris there stands a famous statue. It was the last work of a great genius, who, like many a genius, was very poor and lived in a garret, which served as a studio and sleeping-room alike. When the statue was all but finished, one midnight a sudden frost 228 THE CHANGED LIFE. fell upon Paris. The sculptor lay- awake in the fireless room and thought of the still moist clay, thought how the water would freeze in the pores and destroy in an hour the dream of his life. So the old man rose from his couch and heaped the bed-clothes reverently round his work. In the morning when the neighbors entered the room the sculptor was dead. But the statue lived. The Image of Christ that is forming within us — that is life's one charge. Let every project stand aside for that. "'Till Christ be formed," no man's work is finished, no religion crowned, no life has fulfilled its end. Is the in- finite task begun ? When, how, are THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 229 "we to be different ? Time cannot change men. Death cannot change men. Christ can. Wherefore put on Christ. "FIRST!" A TALK WITH BOYS. c. FIRSTI'^ T HAVE three heads to give you. The first is " Geography," the sec- ond is ** Arithmetic," and the third is '* Grammar." Geography. First. Geography tells us where to find places. Where is the kingdom of God ? It is said that when a Prus> sian officer was killed in the Franco- Prussian war, a map of France was very often found in his pocket. When 233 234 "first ! we wish to occupy a country, we ought to know its geography. Now, where is the kingdom of God ? A boy over there says, ** It is in heaven." No, it is not in heaven. Another bqy says, "It is in the Bible." No; it is not in the Bible. Another boy says, "It must be in the Church." No; it is not in the Church. Heaven is only the capital of the kingdom of God ; the Bible is the Guide-book to it ; the Church is the weekly Parade of those who belong to it. If you would turn to the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke you will find out where the kingdom of God really is. " The kingdom of God is within you " — within j^^//. The king- dom of God is inside people. GEOGRAPHY. 235 I remember once taking a walk by the river near where the Falls of Niagara are, and I noticed a remark- able figure walking along the river bank. I • had been some time in America. I had seen black men, and red men, and yellow men, and white men; black men, the Negroes; red men, the Indians;, yellow men, the Chinese; white men, the Americans. But this man looked different in his dress from anything I had ever seen. When he came a little closer, I saw he was wearing a kilt ; when he came a little nearer still, I saw that he was dressed exactly like a Highland sol- dier. When he came quite near, I said to him, "What are you doing 236 " FIRST r' here ? " " Why should I not be here ? " he said. '* Don't you know this is British soil ? When you cross the river you come into Canada." This soldier was thousands of , miles from England, and yet he was in the king- dom of England. Wherever there is an English heart beating loyal to the Queen of Britain, there is England. Wherever there is a boy whose heart is loyal to the King of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God is within him. What is the kingdom of God ? Every kingdom has its exports, its products. Go down to the river here, and you will find ships coming in with cotton; you know they come from GEOGRAPHY. 2n America. You will find ships with tea; you know they are from China. Ships with wool ; you know they come from Australia. Ships with sugar; you know they come from Java. What comes from the kingdom of God } Again we must refer to our Guide- book. Turn to Romans, and we shall find what the kingdom of God is. I will read it : " The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, joy " — three things. '' The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, joy." Right- eousness, of course, is just doing what is right. Any boy who does what is right has the kingdom of God within him. Any boy who, instead of being quarrelsome, lives at peace with other 238 *' FIRST ! " boys, has the kingdom of God within him. Any boy whose heart is filled with joy because he does what is right, has the kingdom of God within him. The kingdom of God is not going to religious meetings, and hearing strange religious experiences: the kingdom of God is doing what is right — living at peace with all men, being filled with joy in the Holy Ghost. Boys, if you are going to be Chris- tians, be Christians as boys, and not as your grandmothers. A grand- mother has to be a Christian as a grandmother, and that is the right and the beautiful thing for her ; but if you cannot read your Bible by the hour as your grandmother can, or delight \i mrf flSfe ^ft- "■■**••«(. fl Mi Mki -K GEOGRAPHY. 239 in meetings as she can, don't think you are necessarily a bad boy. When you are your grandmother's age you will have your grandmother's kind of religion. Meantime, be a Christian as a boy. Live a boy's life. Do the straight thing ; seek the kingdom of righteousness and honor and truth. Keep the peace with the boys about you, and be filled with the joy of being a loyal, and simple, and natural, and boy-like servant of Christ. You can very easily tell l house, or workshop, or an office where the king- dom of God is 7iot, The first thing you see in that place is that the *' straight thing " is not always done. Customers do not get fair play. You 240 '' FIRST ! " are in danger of learning to cheat and to lie. Better, a thousand times, to starve than to stay in a place where you cannot do what is right. Or, when you go into your workshop, you find everybody sulky, touchy, and ill-tempered ; everybody at dagger's drawn with everybody else ; some of the men not on speaking terms with some of the others, and the whole fee/ of the place miserable and unhappy. The kingdom of God is not there, for it is peace. It is the kingdom of the Devil that is anger and wrath and malice. If you want to get the kingdom of God into your workshop, or into your home, let the quarrelling be stopped. GEOGRAPHY. 24 1 Live in peace and harmony and broth- erliness with every one. For the kingdom of God is the kingdom of brothers. It is a great society, founded by Jesus Christ, of all the people who try to be like Him, and live to make the world better and sweeter and hap- pier. Wherever a boy is trying to do that, in the house or in the street, in the workshop or on the baseball field, there is the kingdom of God. And every boy, however small or ob- scure or poor, who is seeking that, is a member of it. You see now, I hope, what the kingdom is. Arithmetic. I pass, therefore, to the second head : What was it ? ** Arithmetic." 242 " FIRST ! " Are there any arithmetic words in this text? "Added," says one boy. Quite right, added. What other arithmetic word ? " First." Yes, first — " first," '* added." Now, don't you think you could not have anything better to seek " first " than the things I have named — to do what is right, to live at peace, and be always making those about you happy } You see at once why Christ tells us to seek these things first — because they are the best worth seeking. Do you know anything better than these three things, any- thing happier, purer, nobler } If you do, seek them first. But if you do not, seek first the kingdom of God. I am not here this afternoon to tell ARITHMETIC. 243 you to be religious. You know that. I am not here to tell you to seek the kingdom of God. I have come to tell you to seek the kingdom of God first. First. Not many peo- ple do that. They put a little religion into their life — once a week, perhaps. They might just as well let it alone. It is not worth seeking the kingdom of God unless we seek it first. Suppose you take the helm out of a ship and hang it over the bow, and send that ship to sea, will it ever reach the other side } Certainly not. It will drift about anyhow. Keep religion in its place, and it will take you straight through life, and straight to your Father in heaven when life is over. 244 '* first!" But if you do not put it in its place, you may just as well have nothing to do with it. Religion out of its place in a human life is the most miserable thing in the world. There is nothing that requires so much to be kept in its place as religion, and its place is what ? second.^ third .^ '* First." Boys, carry that home with you to-day — first the kingdom of God. Make it so that it will be natural to you to think about that the very first thing. There was a boy in Glasgow ap- prenticed to a gentleman who made telegraphs. The gentleman told me this himself. One day this boy was up on the top of a four-story house with a number of men fixing up a ARITHMETIC. 245 telegraph wire. The work was all but done. It was getting late, and the men said they were going away home, and the boy was to nip off the ends of the wire himself. Before going down they told him to be sure to go back to the workshop, when he was finished, with his master's tools. '' Do not leave any of them lying about, what- ever you do," said the foreman. The boy climbed up the pole and began to nip off the ends of the wire. It was a very cold winter night, and the dusk was gathering. He lost his hold and fell upon the slates, slid down, and then over and over to the ground below. A clothes-rope, stretched across the ** green " on to which he was just about 246 " FIRST ! " to fall, caught him on the chest and broke his fall ; but the shock was ter- rible, and he lay unconscious among some clothes upon the green. An old woman came out; seeing her rope broken and the clothes all soiled, thought the boy was drunk, shook him, scolded him, and went for the police- man. And the boy with the shaking came back to consciousness, rubbed his eyes, and got upon his feet. What do you think he did.** He staggered, half blind, away up the stairs. He climbed the ladder. He got on to the roof of the house. He -gathered up his tools, put them into his basket, took them down, and when he got to the ground again, fainted dead away. ARITHMETIC. 24/ Just then the policeman came, saw there was something seriously wrong, and carried him away to the hospital, where he lay for some time. I am glad to say he got better. What was his first thought at that terrible moment.^ His duty. He was not thinking of himself; he was thinking about his master. First, the kingdom of God. But there is another arithmetic word. What is it.? ''Added." There is not one boy here who does not know the difference between addition and sub- traction. Now, that is a very impor- tant difference in religion, because — and it is a very strange thing — very few people know the difference when they begin to talk about religion. 248 " FIRST ! " They often tell boys that if they seek the kingdom of God, everything else is going to be subtracted from them. They tell them that they are going to become gloomy, miserable, and will lose everything that makes a boy's life worth living — that they will have to stop baseball and story-books, and become little old men, and spend all their time in going to meetings and in singing hymns. Now, that is not true, Christ never said anything like that. Christ says we are to " seek first the kingdom of God," and everything else worth having is to be added imto us. If there is anything I would like you to take away with you this after- noon, it is these two arithmetic words — ARITHMETIC. 249 "first" and "added." I do not mean by added that if you become religious you are all going to become rich. Here is a boy, who, in sweeping out the shop to-morrow morning, finds sixpence lying among the orange- boxes. Well, nobody has missed it. He puts it in his pocket, and it begins to burn a hole there. By breakfast- time he wishes that sixpence were in his master's pocket And by and by he goes to his master. He says (to himself, and not to his master,) " I was at the Boys' Brigade yesterday, and I was to seekyfr^-/ that which was right." Then he says to his master, " Please, sir, here is sixpence that I found upon the floor." The master 250 " FIRST ! puts it in the "till." What has the boy got in his pocket? Nothing; but he has got the kingdom of God in his heart. He has laid up treasure in heaven, which is of infinitely more worth than sixpence. Now, that boy does not find a shilling on his way home. I have known that happen, but that is not what is meant by '* add- ing." It does not mean that God is going to pay him in his own coin, for He pays in better coin. Yet I remember once hearing of a boy who was paid in both ways. He was very, very poor. He lived in a foreign country, and his mother said to him one day that he must go into the great city and start in business, and she ARITHMETIC. 2$! took his coat and cut it open and sewed between the lining and the coat forty golden dinars, which she had saved up for many years to start him in life. She told him to take care of robbers as he went across the desert; and as he was going out of the door she said : " My boy, I have only two words for you — * Fear God, and never tell a lie.' " The boy started off, and toward evening he saw glittering in the distance the minarets of the great city, but between the city and himself he saw a cloud of dust, it came nearer ; presently he saw that it was a band of robbers. One of the robbers left the rest and rode toward him, and said: " Boy, what have you got ? *' And the 252 ''first!" boy looked him in the face and said : " I have forty golden dinars sewed up in my coat." And the robber laughed and wheeled round his horse and rode away back. He would not believe the boy. Presently another robber came, and he said : " Boy, what have you got ?'' '' Forty golden dinars sewed up in my coat." The robber said: *' The boy is a fool," and wheeled his horse and rode away back. By and by the robber captain came, and he said : ** Boy, what have you got.*^" *' I have forty golden dinars sewed up in my coat." And the robber dismounted and put his hand over the boy's breast, felt something round, counted one, two, three, four, five, till he counted ARITHMETIC. 253 out the forty golden coin. He looked the boy in the face, and said : " Why did you tell me that ? " The boy said : *' Because of God and my mother." And the robber leaned on his spear and thought, and said : " Wait a moment." He mounted his horse, rode back to the rest of the robbers, and came back in about five minutes with his dress changed. This time he looked not like a robber, but like a merchant. He took the boy up on his horse and said : ** My boy, I have long wanted to do something for my God and for my mother, and I have this moment renounced my robber's life. I am also a merchant. I have a large business house in the city. 254 "first!" I want you to come and live with me, to teach me about your God ; and you will be rich, and your mother some day will come and live with us.'' And it all happened. By seeking first the kingdom of God, all these things were added unto him. Boys, banish for ever from your minds the idea that religion is siibtrac- tio7i. It does not tell us to give things up, but rather gives us something so much better that they give themselves up. When you see a boy on the street whipping a top, you know, per- haps, that you could not make that boy happier than by giving him a top, a whip, and half an hour to whip it. But next birthday, when he looks back, ARITHMETIC. 255 he says, "What a goose I was last year to be delighted with a top ; what I want now is a baseball bat." Then when he becomes an old man he does not care in the least for a baseball bat ; he wants rest, and a snug fireside, and a newspaper every day. He wonders how he could ever have taken up his thoughts with baseball bats and whip- ping tops. Now, when a boy becomes a Christian, he grows out of the evil things one by one — that is to say, if they are really evil — which he used to set his heart upon (of course I do not mean baseball bats, for they are not evils); and so instead of telling people to give up things, we are safer to tell them to ''seek first the kingdom of 256 " FIRST ! " God," and then they will get new. things and better things, and the old things will drop off of themselves. This is what is meant by the "new heart." It means that God puts into us new thoughts and new wishes, and we become quite different boys. Grammar. Lastly, and very shortly. What was the third head.'* "Grammar." Right : Grammar. Now, I require a clever boy to answer the next question. What is the verb.? "Seek." Very g^ood: "Seek." What mood is it in.? "Imperative mood." What does that mean.? "Command." You boys of the Boys' Brigade know what com- GRAMMAR. 2$/ mands are. What is the soldier's first lesson ? '' Obedience.'* Have you obeyed this command ? Remember the imperative mood of these words, " See^ first the kingdom of God." This is the command of your King. It must be done. I have been trying to show you what a splendid thing it is ; what a reasonable thing it is ; what a happy thing it is; but beyond all these reasons it is a thing that m?ist be done, because we are com- manded to do it by our Captain. It is one of the finest things about the Boys* Brigade that it always appeals to Christ as its highest officer, and takes its commands from Him. Now, there is His command to seek first the king- 258 "first : dom of God. Have you done it ? "Well," I know some boys will say, " we are going to have a good time, enjoy life, and then we are going to seek — last — the kingdom of God." Now that is mean ; it is nothing else than mean for a boy to take all the good gifts that God has given him, and then give Him nothing back in return but his wasted life. God wants boys' lives^ not only their souls. It is for active service soldiers are drilled and trained and fed and armed. That is why you and I are in the world at all — not to prepare to go out of it some day ; but to serve God actively in it 7tow, It is mon* strous and shameful and cowardly to GRAMMAR. 259 talk of seeking the kingdom last. It is shirking duty, abandoning one's rightful post, playing into the enemy's hand by doing nothing to turn his flank. Every hour a kingdom is com- ing in your heart, in your home, in the world near you, be it a kingdom of darkness or a kingdom of light. You are placed where you are, in a partic- ular business, in a particular street, to help on there the kingdom of God. You cannot do that when you are old and ready to die. By that time your companions will have fought their fight, and lost or won. If they lose, will you not be sorry that you did not help them t Will you not regret that only at the last you helped the king- 260 " FIRST ! " dom of God ? Perhaps you will not be able to do it then. And then your life has been lost indeed. Very few people have the opportu- nity to seek the kingdom of God at the end. Christ, knowing all that, knowing that religion was a thing for our life, not merely for our death-bed, has laid this command upon us now: "S&ek Jirst the kingdom of God." I am going to leave you with this text itself. Every Brigade boy in the world should obey it. Boys, before you go to work to- morrow, before you go to sleep to-night, before you go to the Sunday-school this afternoon, before you go out of the door of the City Hall, resolve that, GRAMMAR. 261 God helping you, you are going to seek first the kingdom of God. Per- haps some boys here are deserters; they began once before to serve Christ, and they deserted. Come back again, come back again to-day. Others have never enlisted at all. Will you not do it now t You are old enough to de- cide. And the grandest moment of a boy's life is that moment when he decides to Seefe first tl)e feinsliom of ffioli^ HOW TO LEARN HOW. I. DEALING WITH DOUBT. 11. PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. DEALING WITH DOUBT. 'T'HERE is a subject which I think ^ we as workers amongst young men cannot afford to keep out of sight — I mean the subject of " Doubt." We are forced to face that subject. We have no choice. I would rather let it alone; but every day of my life I meet men who doubt, and I am quite sure that most of you have innumerable interviews every year with men who raise skeptical difficulties about religion. Now, it becomes a matter of great practical importance 265 266 DEALING WITH DOUBT. that we should know how to deal wisely with these men. Upon the whole, I think these are the best men in the country. I speak of my own country. I speak of the universities with which I am familiar, and I say that the men who are perplexed — the men who come to you with serious and honest difficulties — are the best men. They are men of intellectual honesty, and cannot allow themselves to be put to rest by words, or phrases, or traditions, or theologies, but who must get to the bottom of things for themselves. And if I am not mis- taken, Christ was very fond of these men. The outsiders always interested Him, and touched Him. The ortho- DEALING WITH DOUBT. 26/ dox people — the Pharisees — He was much less interested in. He went with publicans and sinners — with people who were in revolt against the respect- ability, intellectual and religious, of the day. And following Him, we are entitled to give sympathetic considera- tion to those whom He loved and took trouble with. First, let me speak for a moment or two about the origin of doubt. In the first place, we are born questioners. Look at the wonderment of a little child in its eyes before it can speak. The child's great word when it begins to speak is, " Why } '' Every child is full of every kind of questions, about every kind of thing that moves, and 268 DEALING WITH DOUBT. shines, and changes, in the little world in which it lives. That is the in- cipient doubt in the nature of man. Respect doubt for its origin. It is an inevitable thing. It is not a thing to be crushed. It is a part of man as God made him. Heresy is truth in the making, and doubt is the prelude of knowledge. Secondly : The world is a Sphinx. It is a vast riddle — an unfathomable mystery ; and on every side there is temptation to questioning. In every leaf, in every cell of every leaf, there are a hundred problems. There are ten good years of a man's life in investigating what is in the leaf, and there are five good years more in DEALING WITH DOUBT. 269 investigating the things that are in the things that are in the leaf. God has planned the world to incite men to intellectual activity. Thirdly : The instrument with which we attempt to investigate truth is im- paired. Some say it fell, and the glass is broken. Some say prejudice, heredity or sin, have spoiled its sight, and have blinded our eyes and dead- ened our ears. In any case the In- struments with which we work upon truth, even in the strongest men, are feeble and inadequate to their tremen- dous task. And in the fourth place, all reli- gious truths are doubtable. There is no absolute proof for any one of them. 270 DEALING WITH DOUBT, Even that fundamental truth — the existence of a God — no man can prove by reason. The ordinary proof for the existence of God involves either an assumption, argument in a circle, or a contradiction. The impression of God is kept up by experience ; not by logic. And hence, when the ex- perimental religion of a man, of a community, or of a nation, wanes, religion wanes — their idea of God grows indistinct, and that man, com- munity or nation becomes infidel. Bear in mind, then, that all religious truths are doubtable — even those which we hold most strongly. What does this brief account of the origin of doubt teach us ? It teaches us DEALING WITH DOUBT. 2/1 great intellectual humility. It teaches us sympathy and toleration with all men who venture upon the ocean of truth to find out a path through it for them- selves. Do you sometimes feel your- self thinking unkind things about your fellow-students who have intellectual difficulty ? I know how hard it is always to feel sympathy and toleration for them ; but we must address our- selves to that most carefully and most religiously. If my brother is short- sighted, I must not abuse him or speak against him ; I must pity him, and if possible try to improve his sight or to make things that he is to look at so bright that he cannot help seeing. Btt never let us think evil of men who 2/2 DEALING WITH DOUBT. do not see as we do. From the bot- tom of our hearts let us pity them, and let us take them by the hand and spend time and thought over them, and try to lead them to the true light. What has been the Church's treat- ment of doubt in the past? It has been very simple. " There is a heretic. Burn him ! " That is all. " There is a man who has gone off the road. Bring him back and torture him ! " We have got past that physically; have we got past it morally ? What does the modern Church say to a man who is skeptical ? Not " Burn him ! '' but " Brand him ! " '' Brand him ! — call him a bad name." And in many xtountries at the present time a man DEALING WITH DOUBT. 2/3 who is branded as a heretic is despised, tabooed, and put out of religious so- ciety, much more than if he had gone wrong in morals. I think I am speak- ing within the facts when I say that a man who is unsound is looked upon in many communities with more suspicion and with more pious horror than a man who now and then gets drunk. " Burn him!" "Brand him!'* " Excommu- nicate him ! " That has been the Church's treatment of doubt, and that is perhaps to some extent the treatment which we ourselves are inclined to give to the men who cannot see the truths of Christianity as we see them. Con- trast Christ's treatment of doubt. I have spoken already of His strange 2/4 DEALING WITH DOUBT. partiality for the outsiders — for the scattered heretics up and down the country ; of the care with which He , loved to deal with them, and of the respect in which He held their intellec- tual difficulties. Christ never failed to distinguish between doubt and unbe- lief. Doubt is ca7i't believe ; unbelief is won't believe. Doubt is honesty ; unbelief is obstinacy. Doubt is look- ing for light; unbelief is content with darkness. Loving darkness rather than light — that is what Christ at- tacked, and attacked unsparingly. But for the intellectual questioning of Thomas, and Philip, and Nicodemus, and the many others who came to Him to have their great problems solved. DEALING WITH DOUBT. 275 He was respectful and generous and tolerant. And how did He meet their doubts ? The Church, as I have said, says, "Brand him!" Christ said, ** Teach him/' He destroyed by fulfilling. When Thomas came to Him and de- nied His very resurrection, and stood before Him waiting for the scathing words and lashing for his unbelief, they never came. They never came. Christ gave him facts — facts. No man can go around facts. Christ said, " Behold My hands and My feet." The great god of science at the present time is a fact. It works with facts. Its cry is, " Give me facts." Found anything you like upon facts and we will believe 2y6 DEALING WITH DOUBT. it. The spirit of Christ was the scien- tific spirit. He founded His religion upon facts ; and He asked all men to found their religion upon facts. Now, gentlemen, get up the facts of Chris- tianity, and take men to the facts. Theologies — and I am not speaking disrespectfully of theology; theology is as scientific a thing as any other science of facts — but theologies are human versions of Divine truths, and hence the varieties of the versions, and the inconsistencies of them. I would allow a man to select whichever version of this truth he liked after- wards ; but I would ask him to begin with no version, but go back to the facts and base his Christian life upon DEALING WITH DOUBT. 2// that. That is the great lesson of the New Testament way of looking at doubt — of Christ's treatment of doubt. It is not " Brand him ! " — but lovingly, wisely, and tenderly to teach him. Faith is never opposed to reason in the New Testament ; it is opposed to sight. You will find that a principle worth thinking over. Faith is never opposed to reason in the New Testamenty but to sight. Well, now ; with these principles in mind as to the origin of doubt, and as to Christ's treatment of it, how are we ourselves to deal with our fellow- students who are in intellectual diffi- culty } In the first place, I think we must make all the concessions to 2/8 DEALING WITH DOUBT. them that we conscientiously can. When a doubter first encounters you he pours out a deluge of abuse of churches, and ministers, and creeds, and Christians. Nine-tenths of what he says is probably true. Make con- cessions. Agree with him. It does him good to unburden himself of these things. He has been cherishing them for years — laying them up against Christians, against the Church, and against Christianity ; and now he is startled to find the first Christian with whom he has talked over the thing almost entirely agrees with him. We are, of course, not responsible for everything that is said in the name of Christianity ; but a man does not give DEALING WITH DOUBT. 2/9 up medicine because there are quack doctors, and no man has a right to give up his Christianity because there are spurious or inconsistent Christians. Then, as I have already said, creeds are human versions of Divine truths ; and we do not ask a man to accept all the creeds, any more than we ask him to accept all the Christians. We ask him to accept Christ, and the facts about Christ, and the words of Christ. But you will find the battle is half won when you have endorsed the man's objections, and possibly added a great many more to the charges which he has against ourselves. These men are in revolt against the kind of religion which we exhibit to the world — 280 DEALING WITH DOUBT. against the cant that is taught in the name of Christianity. And if the men that have never seen the real thing — if you could show them that, they would receive it as eagerly as you do. They are merely in revolt against the imperfections and inconsistencies of those who represent Christ to the world. Second : Beg them to set aside, by an act of will, all unsolved problems : such as the problem of the origin of evil, the problem of the Trinity, the problem of the relation of human will and predestination, and so on — prob- lems which have been investigated for thousands of years without result — ask them to set those problems aside as DEALING WITH DOUBT. 28 1 insoluble in the meantime, just as a man who is studying mathematics may- be asked to set aside the problem of squaring the circle. Let him go on with what can be done, and what has been done, and leave out of sight the impossible. You will find that will relieve the skeptic's mind of a great deal' of unnecessary cargo that has been in his way. Thirdly : Talking about difficulties, as a rule, only aggravates them. En- tire satisfaction to the intellect is un- attainable about any of the greater problems, and if you try to get to the bottom of them by argument, there is no bottom there ; and, therefore, you make the matter worse. But I would 282 DEALING WITH DOUBT. say what is known, and what can be honestly and philosophically and scien- tifically said about one or two of the difficulties that the doubter raises, just to show him that you can do it — to show him that you are not a fool — that you are not merely groping in the dark yourself, but you have found whatever basis is possible. But I would not go around all the doctrines. I would simply do that with one or two ; be- cause the moment you cut off one, a hundred other heads will grow in its place. It would be a pity if all these problems could be solved. The joy of the intellectual life would be largely gone. I would not rob a man of his problems, nor would I have another DEALING WITH DOUBT. 283 man rob me of my problems. They are the delight of life, and the whole intellectual world would be stale and unprofitable if we knew everything. Fourthly — and this is the great point : Turn away from the reason, and go into the man's moral life. I don't mean, go into his moral life and see if the man is living in conscious sin, which is the great blinder of the eyes — I am speaking now of honest doubt ; but open a new door into the practical side of man's nature. Entreat him not to postpone life and his life's Use- fulness until he has settled the prob- lems of the universe. Tell him those problems will never all be settled ; that his life will be done before he has 284 DEALING WITH DOUBT. begun to settle them ; and ask him what he is doing with his Hfe mean- time. Charge him with wasting his Hfe and his usefulness ; and invite him to deal with the moral and practical difficulties of the world, and leave the intellectual difficulties as he goes along. To spend time upon these is proving the less important before the more important ; and, as the French say, ** The good is the enemy of the best." It is a good thing to think ; it is a bet- ter thing to work — it is a better thing to do good. And you have him there, you see. He can't get beyond that. You have to tell him, in fact, that there are two organs of knowledge : the one reason, the other obedience. And DEALING WITH DOUBT. 285 now tell him, as he has tried the first and found the little in it, just for a moment or two to join you in trying the second. And when he asks whom he is to obey, you tell him there is but One, and lead him to the great histori- cal figure, who calls all men to Him : the one perfect life — the one Saviour of mankind — the one Light of the world. Ask him to begin to obey Christ ; and, doing His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God. That, I think, is about the only thing you can do with a man : to get him into practical contact with the needs of the world, and to let him lose his intellectual difficulties meantime. 286 DEALING WITH DOUBT. Don't ask him to give them up alto- gether. Tell him to solve them after- ward one by one if he can, but mean- time to give his life to Christ and his time to the kingdom of God. And, you see, you fetch him completely around when you do that. You have taken him away from the false side of his nature, and to the practical and moral side of his nature ; and for the first time in his life, perhaps, he puts things in their true place. He puts his nature in the relations in which it ought to be, and he then only begins to live. And by obedience — by obedience — he will soon become a learner and pupil for himself, and Christ will teach him things, and he will find whatever MATTHEW ARNOLD DEALING WITH DOUBT. 28/ problems are solvable gradually solved as he goes along the path of prac- tical duty. Now, let me, in closing, give a cou- ple of instances of how to deal with specific points. The commonest thing that we hear said nowadays by young men is, *' What about evolution.^ How am I to reconcile my religion, or any religion, with the doctrine of evolu- tion.?" That upsets more men than perhaps anything else at the present hour. How would you deal with it i^ I would say to a man that Christianity is the further evolution. I don't know any better definition than that. It is the further evolution — the higher evolution. I don't start with him to attack evolu- 288 DEALING WITH DOUBT. tion. I don't start with him to defend it. I destroy by fulfilling it. I take him at his own terms. He says evolu- tion is that which pushes the man on from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher. Very well ; that is what Christianity does. It pushes the man farther on. It takes him where nature has left him, and carries him on to heights which on the plain of nature he could never reach. That is evolution. "Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I." That is evolution. It is the development of the whole man in the higher direc- tions — the drawing out of his spiritual being. Show an evolutionist that, and you take the wind out of his sails. " I DEALING WITH DOUBT. 289 came not to destroy." Don't destroy his doctrine — perhaps you can't — but fulfil it. Put a larger meaning into it. The other instance — the next com- monest perhaps — is the question of miracles. It is impossible, of course, to discuss that now — miracles ; but that question is thrown at my head every second day: **What do you say to a man when he says to you, 'Why do you believe in miracles.^'" I say, " Because I have seen them.'' He says, ''When.?" I say, ''Yesterday." He says, "Where.?" "Down such- and-such a street I saw a man who was a drunkard redeemed by the power of an unseen Christ and saved from sin. That is a miracle." The 290 DEALING WITH DOUBT. best apologetic for Christianity is a Christian. That is a fact which the man cannot get over. There are fifty- other arguments for miracles, but none so good as that you have seen them. Perhaps you are one yourself. But take you a man and show him a mira- cle with his own eyes. Then he will believe. PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 29I PREPARATION FOR LEARN- ING. T3EFORE an artist can do anything ^-^ the instrument must be tuned. Our astronomers at this moment are preparing for an event which happens only once or twice in a Ufetime : the total eclipse of the sun in the month of August. They have begun already. They are making preparations. At chosen stations in different parts of the world they are spending all the skill that science can suggest upon the con- struction of their instruments ; and up 292 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. to the last moment they will be busy adjusting them ; and the last day will be the busiest of all, because then they must have the glasses and the mirrors polished to the last degree. They have to have the lenses in place and focussed upon this spot before the event itself takes place. Every thing will depend upon the instruments which you bring to this experiment. Every thing will depend upon it ; and, therefore, fifteen min- utes will not be lost if we each put our instrument into the best working order we can. I have spoken of lenses, and that reminds me that the instru- ment which we bring to bear upon truth is a compound thing. It con- PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 293 sists of many parts. Truth is not a product of the intellect alone ; it is a product of the whole nature. The body is engaged in it, and the mind, and the soul. The body is engaged in it. Of course, a man who has his body run down, or who is dyspeptic, or melancholy, sees everything black, and disordered, and untrue. But I am not going to dwell upon that. Most of you seem in pretty fair working order so far as your bodies are concerned ; only it is well to remember that we are to give our bodies a living sacrifice — not a half- dead sacrifice, as some people seem to imagine. There is no virtue in emacia- tion. I don't know if you have any 294 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. tendency in that direction in America, but certainly we are in danger of dropping into it now and then in Eng- land, and it is just as well to bear in mind our part of the lens — a very com- pound and delicate lens — with which we have to take in truth. Then comes a very important part : the intellect — which is one of the most useful servants of truth ; and I need not tell you as students, that the intel- lect will have a great deal to do with your reception of truth. I was told that it was said at these conferences last year, that a man must crucify his intellect. I venture to contradict the gentleman who made that statement. I am quite sure no such statement PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 295 oiild ever have been made in your hearing — that we were to crucify our intellects. We can make no progress without the full use of all the intellec- tual powers that God has endowed us with. But more important than either of these is the moral nature — the moral and spiritual nature. Some of you remember a sermon of Robertson of Brighton, entitled " Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge." A very startling title! — ''Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge." The Pharisees asked about Christ : '' How knoweth this man letters, never having learned } " How knoweth this man, never having learned? The organ of 296 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. knowledge is not nearly so much mind, as the organ that Christ used, namely, obedience ; and that was the organ which He Himself insisted upon when He said: ^' He that willeth to do His will shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God." You have all noticed, of course, that the words in the origi- nal are : '' If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine.'* It doesn't read, " If any do His will," which no man can do perfectly ; but if any man be simply willing to do His will — if he has an absolutely un- divided mind about it — that man will know what truth is and know what falsehood is ; a stranger will he not follow. And that is by far the best PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 29/ source of spiritual knowledge on every account — obedience to God — absolute sincerity and loyalty in following Christ. " If any man do His will he shall know'* — a very remarkable asso- ciation of knowledge, a thing which is usually considered quite intellectual, with obedience, which is moral and spiritual. But even although we use all these three different parts of the instrument, we have not at all got at the complete method of learning. There is a little preliminary that the astronomer has to do before he can make his observation. He has to take the cap off his telescope. Many a man thinks he is looking at truth when he is only looking at the 298 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. cap. Many a time I have looked down my microscope, and thought I was looking at the diatom for which I had long been searching, and found I had simply been looking at a speck of dust upon the lens itself. Many a man thinks he is looking at truth when he is only looking at the spectacles he has put on to see it with. He is look- ing at his own spectacles. Now, the common spectacles that a man puts on — I suppose the creed in which he has been brought up — if a man looks at that, let him remember that he is not looking at truth : he is looking at his own spectacles. There is no more important lesson that we have to carry with us than that truth is not to be PREPAFATTON FOR LEARNING. 299 found in what I have been taught. That is not truth. Truth is not what I have been taught. If it were so, that would apply to the Mormon, it would apply to the Brahman, it would apply to the Buddhist. Truth would be to everybody just what he had been taught. Therefore let us dismiss from our minds the predisposi- tion to regard that which we have been brought up in as being necessarily the truth. I must say it is very hard to shake one's self free altogether from that. I suppose it is impossible. But you see the reasonableness of giving up that as your view of truth when you come to apply it all around. If that were the definition of truth, 300 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. truth would be just what one's parents were — it would be a thing of heredi- tary transmission, and not a thing absolute in itself. Now, let me ven- ture to ask you to take that cap off. Take that cap off now, and make up your minds you are going to look at truth naked — in its reality as it is, not as it is reflected through other minds, or through any theology, however venerable. Then there is one thing I think we must be careful about, and that is besides having the cap off, and having all the lenses clean and in position — to have the instrument rightly focussed. Everything may be right, and yet when you go and look at the object, you see PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 3OI things altogether falsely. You see things not only blurred, but you see things out of proportion. And there is nothing more important we have to bear in mind in running our eye over successive theological truths, or reli- gious truths, than that there is a pro- portion in those truths, and that we must see them in their proportion, or we see them falsely. A man may take a dollar or a half-dollar and hold it to his eye so closely that he will hide the sun from him. Or he may so focus his telescope that a fly or a boulder may be as large as a moun- tain. A man may hold a certain doc- trine, very intensely — a doctrine which has been looming upon his horizon for 302 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. the last six months, let us say, and which has thrown everything else out of proportion, it has become so big itself. Now let us beware of distor- tion in the arrangement of the reli- gious truths which we hold. It is almost impossible to get things in their true proportion and symmetry, but this is the thing we must be con- stantly aiming at. We are told in the Bible to ''add to your faith virtue, and to virtue, knowledge, and to knowl- edge balance," as the word literally means — balance. It is a word taken from the orchestra, where all the parts — the sopranos, the basses, the altos, and the tenors, and all the rest of them — must be regulated. If you have too PRKPARATTON FOR LEARNING. 3OJ much of the bass, or too much of the soprano, there is want of harmony. That is what I mean by the want of proper focus — by the want of proper balance — in the truths which we all hold. It will never do to exaggerate one truth at the expense of another,, and a truth may be turned into a false- hood very, very easily, by simply being' either too much enlarged or too much, diminished. I once heard of some blind men who were taken to see a menagerie. They had gone around the animals, and four of them were allowed to touch an elephant as they went past. They were discussing afterwards what kind of a creature the elephant was. One man, \yho had; 304 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. touched its tail, said the elephant was like a rope. Another of the blind men, who had touched his hind limb, said, *' No such thing ! the elephant is like the trunk of a tree." Another, who had felt its sides, said, ''That is all rubbish. An elephant is a thing like a wall." And the fourth, who had felt its ear, said that an elephant was like none of those things ; it was like a leather bag. Now, men look at truth at different bits of it, and they see different things, of course, and they are very apt to imagine that the thing which they have seen is the whole affair — the whole thing. In reality, we can only see a very little bit at a time ; and we must, I think, PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 305 learn to believe that other men can see bits of truth as well as ourselves. Your views are just what you see with your own eyes ; and my views are just what I see ; and what I see depends on just where I stand, and what you see depends on just where you stand ; and truth is very much bigger than an elephant, and we are very much blinder than any of those blind men as we come to look at it. Christ has made us aware that it is quite possible for a man to have ears and hear nothing, and to have eyes and see not. One of the disci- ples saw a great deal of Christ, and he never knew Him. " Have I been so long time with you, 306 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. Philip, and yet hast thou not known Me?'' ''He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father also." Philip had never seen Him. He had been look- ing at his own spectacles, perhaps, or at something else, and had never seen Him. If the instrument had been in order, he would have seen Christ. And I would just add this one thing more : the test of value of the differ- ent verities of truth depends upon one thing : whether they have or have not a sanctifying power. That is another remarkable association in the mind of Christ — of sanctification with truth — thinking and holiness — not to be found in any of the sciences or in any of the philosophies. It is peculiar to the PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 30/ Bible. Christ said '* Sanctify them through Thy truth. Thy word is truth." Now, the value of any ques- tion — the value of any theological question — depends upon whether it has a sanctifying influence. If it has not, don't bother about it. Don't let it dis- turb your minds until you have ex- hausted all truths that have sanctifica- tion within them. If a truth makes a man a better man, then let him focus his instrument upon it and get all the acquaintance with it he can. If it is the profane babbling of science,, falsely so called, or anything that has injurious effect upon the moral and spiritual nature of man, it is better let alone. And above all, let us remem- 308 PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. ber to hold the truth in love. That is the most sanctifying influence of all. And if we can carry away the mere lessons of toleration, and leave behind us our censoriousness, and criticalness, and harsh judgments upon one another, and excommunicating of everybody except those who think exactly as we do, the time we shall spend here will not be the least useful parts of our lives. WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? \/OUNG men are learning to respect * more, perhaps, than ever young men have done, the word *' Christian." I have seen the time when it was sy- nonymous with cant and unreality and strained feeling and sanctimoniousness. But although that day is not quite passed yet, it is passing. I heard this definition the other day of a Christian man by a cynic — *'A Christian man is a man whose great aim in life is a selfish desire to save his own soul, who, in order to do that, goes regularly to 311 312 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? church, and whose supreme hope is to get to Heaven when he dies." This reminds one of Professor Huxley's ex- amination paper in which the question was put — "What is a lobster?'* One student replied that a lobster was a red fish, which moves backwards. The ex- aminer noted that this was a very good answer, but for three things. In the first place a lobster was not a fish ; sec- ond it was not red ; and third it did not move backwards. If there is anything that a Christian is not, it is one who has a selfish desire to save his own soul. The one thing which Christianity tries to extirpate from a man's nature is selfishness, even though it be the losing of his own soul. WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 313 Christianity, as we understand it from Christ, appeals to the generous side of a young man's nature, and not to the selfish side. In the new version of the New Testament the word "soul" is always translated in this connection by the word *'life/' That marks a revo- lution in the popular theology, and it will make a revolution in every Young Man's Christian Association in the country where it comes to be seen that a man's Christianity does not consist in merely saving his own soul, but in sanctifying and purifying the lives of his fellow-men. We are told in the New Testament that Christianity is leaven, and "leaven" comes from the same root-word as lever, meaning that 314 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? which raises up, which elevates; and a Christian young man is a man who raises up or elevates the lives of those round about him. We are also told that Christianity is salt, and salt is that which saves from corruption. What is it that saves the life of the world from being utterly rotten, but the Christian elements that are in it? Matthew Arnold has said, " Show me ten square miles in any part of the world outside Christianity where the life of man and the purity of woman are safe, and I will give Christianity up." In no part cf the world is there any such ten square miles outside Christianity. Christian men are the salt of the earth in the most literal WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 315 sense. They, and they alone, keep the world from utter destruction. I want to say a word here about the Young Men's Christian Associations. Many have criticised them. They have been the target for a great deal of abuse. Many of the best young men have sneered at them, and turned up their noses at them, and denounced them. I am speaking with absolute sympathy and respect, and even enthu- siasm, for Young Men's Christian Associations. But I will turn for one instant upon those men who turn against them, and tell them that it is not breadth that leads them to do that, but what one might call the narrow- ness of breadth — that breadth which 3l6 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN/ denounces intolerance, and which is itself too intolerant to tolerate intoler- ance. And, as some one says, it is easier to criticise the best thing su- perbly than to do the smallest thing indifferently. It is very easy to criticise the meth- ods and aims and men of the Young Men's Christian Associations. If, in- stead of looking on and criticising those who know a thing or two, those who think they are wiser, and that they have the whole truth, would throw themselves in among others and back them and try to work alongside of them, they would get perhaps their breadth tempered by earnestness and by zeal, because the narrow man has much to contribute to WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? ^JJ the Christian cause, perhaps more than the broad man. But it needs all kinds of people to make a world ; it needs all kinds of people to make a church, and every type of young men a Christian Association; and the greatest mistake of all i^ to have every man stamped in the same stamp, so that if you met him in a railway train one hundred miles off, you would know him as a Y. M. C. A. man. I would like to find many who would not wear the badge so pro- nouncedly, that every one should know them at a glance. There is only one great character in the world that can really draw out all that is best in man. He is so far above all others in influencing men for good 3l8 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? that He stands alone. That man was the founder of Christianity. To be a Christian man is to have that character for our ideal in life, to live under its influence, to do what He would wish us to do, to live the kind of life He would have lived in our house, and had He our day's routine to go through. It would not, perhaps, alter the forms of our life, but it would alter the spirit and aims and motives of our life, and the Christian man is he who in that sense lives under the influence of Jesus Christ. Now, there is nothing that a young^ man wants for his ideal that is not ■found in Christ. You would be sur- prised when you come to know who WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 319 Christ is, if you have not thought much about it, to find how He will fit in with all human needs, and call out all that is best in man. The highest and man- liest character that ever lived was Christ. One incident I often think of and wonder. You remember, when He hung upon the cross, there was handed up to Him a vessel containing a stupefying drug, supplied by a kind society of ladies in Jerusalem, who always sent it to criminals when being executed. And that stupefying drug was handed up to Christ's lips. And we read, '*When he tasted thereof He would not drink." I have always thought that one of the most heroic actions I have ever read of. But that 320 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? was only one very small side of Christ's nature. He can be everything that a man wants. Paul tells us that if we live in Christ we are changed into His image. All that a man has to do, then, to be like Christ, is simply to live in friendship with Christ, and the character follows. But it is only one of the aims of Christianity to make the best men. The next thing Christ wants to do is to make the best world. And He tries to make the best world by setting the best men loose upon the world to influence it and reflect Him upon it. In 1874 a religious movement began in Edinburgh University among the students themselves, that has since WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 32 1 spread to some of the best academic institutions in America. The students have a hall, and there they meet on Sundays, or occasionally on week-days, to hear addresses from their profes- sors, or from outside eminent men, on Christian topics. There is no com- mittee ; there are no rules ; there are no reports. Every meeting is held strictly in private, and any attempt to pose before the world is sternly dis- couraged. No paragraphs are put into the journals ; no addresses are reported. The meetings are private, quiet, ear- nest, and whatsoever student likes may attend them. That is all. It is not an organization in the ordinary sense, it is a "leaven." In all the schools '322 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? it is the best men who take most part in the movement, and among the schools it is the medical side which furnishes the greatest number of stu- dents to the meetings. Some of the most zealous have taken high honors in their examinations, and some have been in the first class of university athletes.. It is not a movement that has laid hold of weak or worthless students whom nobody respects, but one that is maintained by the best men in every department. The first benefit is to the students themselves. Take Edinburgh, with about 4000 students drawn from all parts of the world, and living in rooms with no one caring for them. Taken away from the moral WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 323 support of their previous surroundings, they went to the bad in hundreds. It is now found that through this movement they work better, and that a greater percentage pass laonorably through the university portals into life. The reli- gious meetings, it is to be observed, are never allowed to interfere with the work of the students. The second result is to be seen in what are called university settlements. A few men will band themselves together and rent a house in the lower parts of the city and live there. They do no preaching, no formal evangelization work ; but they help the sick and they arrange smoking concerts, and contribute to the amusement of their neighbors. They 324 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? simply live with the people, and trust that their example will produce a good effect. Three years ago they printed and distributed among themselves the following ** Programme of Christian- ity : " — '* To bind up the broken- hearted, to give liberty to the captives, to comfort all that mourn, to give beauty for ashes, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.'* I suppose there are few of us with broken hearts, but there are other people in the world besides ourselves, and underneath all the gayety of the city there is not a street in which there are not men and women with broken hearts. Who is to help these people.^ No one can lift them up in any way except those who WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 325 are living the life of Christ, and it is their privilege and business to bind up the broken-hearted. I want to urge the claims of the Christian ministry on the strength and talent of our youth. I find a singular want of men in the Christian ministry, and I think it would be at least worth while for some of you to look around, to look at the men who are not filling the churches, to look at the needs of the crowds who throng the streets, and see if you could do better with your life than throw yourself into that work. The advantage of the ministry is that a man's whole life can be thrown into the carrying out of that programme without any deduction. Another ad- 326 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? vantage of the ministry is that it is so poorly paid that a man is not tempted to cut a dash and shine in the world, but can be meek and lowly in heart, like his Master. It is enough for a servant to be like his master, and there is a great attraction in seeking obscu- rity, even isolation, if one can be following the highest ideal. With regard to the question, how you shall begin the Christian life, let me remind you that theology is the most abstruse thing in the world, but that practical religion is the simplest thing. If any of you want to know how to begin to be a Christian, all I can say is that you should begin to do the next thing you find to be done as WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 327 Christ would have done it. If you follow Christ the "old man" will die of atrophy, and the "new man" will grow day by day under His abiding friendship. THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. I WILL give a note or two, pretty much by way of refreshing the memory about the Bible and how to look at it. First : The Bible came out of religion, not religion ont of the Bible. The Bible is a product of religion, not a cause of it. The war literature of America, which culminated, I suppose, in the publication of President Grant's life, came out of the war ; the war did not 33« 332 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. come out of the literature. And so in the distant past, there flowed among the nations of heathendom a small warm stream, like the Gulf Stream in the cold Atlantic — a small stream of religion; and now and then at inter- vals, men, carried along by this stream, uttered themselves in words. The his- torical books came out of facts ; the devotional books came out of experi- ences; the letters came out of circum- stances ; and the Gospels came out of all three. That is where the Bible came from. It came out of religion ; religion did not come out of the Bible. You see the difference. The religion is not, then, in the writing alone ; but in those facts, experiences, circum- THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 333 Stances, in the history and develop- ment of a people led and taught by God. And it is not the words that are inspired so much as the men. Secondly : These men were authors ; they were not pefis. Their individuality comes out on every page they wrote. They were different in mental and literary style ; in insight ; and even the same writer differs at different times. II. Thessalonians, for example, is con- siderably beneath the level of Romans, and III. John is beneath the level of I. John. A man is not always at his best. These writers did not know they were writing a Bible. Third : The Bible is not a book ; it is a library. It consists of sixty-six 334 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. books. It is a great convenience, but in some respects a great misfortune, that these books have always been bound up together and given out as one book to the world, when they are not ; because that has led to endless mistakes in theology and in practical life. Fourth : These books, which make up this library, written at intervals of hundreds of years, were collected after the last of the writers was dead — long after — by human hands. Where were the books ? Take the New Testament. There were four lives of Christ. One was in Rome; one was in Southern Italy ; one was in Palestine ; one in Asia Minor. There were twenty-one THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 335 letters. Five were in Greece and Macedonia ; five in Asia ; one in Rome. The rest were in the pockets of private individuals. Theophilus had acts. They were collected undesign- edly. For example, the letter to the Galatians was written to the Church in Galatia. Somebody would make a copy or two, and put it into the hands of the members of the different churches, and they would find their way not only to the churches in Gala- tia, but after an interval to nearly all the churches. In those days the Christians scattered up and down through the world, exchanged copies of those letters, very much as geolo- gists up and down the world exchange ^;^6 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. specimens of minerals at the present time, or entomologists exchange speci- mens of butterflies. And after a long time a number of the books began to be pretty well known. In the third century the New Testament consisted of the following books: the four Gos- pels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, I. John, I. Peter ; and in addition, the Epistles of Barnabas and Hermas. This was not called the New Testa- ment, but the Christian Library. Then these last books were discarded. They ceased to be regarded as upon the same level as the others. In the fourth century the canon was closed — that is to say, a list was made up of the books which were to be regarded THE STUDY OF THE BIBLL. 337 as canonical. And then long after that they were stitched together and made up into one book — hundreds of years after that. Who made up the complete list ? It was never formally made up. The bishops of the differ- ent churches would draw up a list each of the books that they thought ought to be put into this Testament. The churches also would give their opinion. Sometimes councils would meet and talk it over — discuss it. Scholars like Jerome would investi- gate the authenticity of the different documents, and there came to be a general consensus of the churches on the matter. But no formal closing of the canon was ever attempted. 338 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. And lastly : All religions have their sacred books, just as the Christians have theirs. Why is it necessary to remind ourselves of that ? If you ask a man why he believes such and such a thing, he will tell you, Because it is in the Bible. If you ask him, ** How do you know the Bible is true ? '* he will probably reply, " Because it says so.'* Now, let that man remember that the sacred books of all the other religions make the same claim ; and while it is quite enough among our- selves to talk about a thing being true because it is in the Bible, we come in contact with outsiders, and we have to meet the skepticism of the day. We must go far deeper than that. The THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 339 religious books of the other religions claim to be far more divine in their origin than do ours. For example, the Mohammedans claim for the Koran — a large section of them, at least — that it was uncreated, and that it lay before the throne of God from the beginning of time. They claim it was put in the hands of the angel Gabriel, who brought it down to Mahomet, and dic- tated it to him, and allowed him at long intervals to have a look at the original book itself — bound with silk and studded with precious stones. That is a claim of much higher Divinity than we claim for our book ; and if we sim- ply have to rely upon the Bible's tes- timony to its own verity, it is for the 340 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. same reason the Mohammedan would have you believe his book, and the Hindu would have you put your trust in the Vedas. That is why thorough Bible study is of such importance. We can get to the bottom of truth in itself, and be able to give a reason for the faith that is in us. Now may I give you, before I stop, just a couple of examples of how the Bible came out of religion, and not religion out of the Bible ? Take one of the letters. Just see how it came out of the circumstances of the time. The first of the letters that was written will do very well as an example. It is the 1st Epistle to the Thessalonians. In the year 52 Paul went to Europe, THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 34I He spent three Sundays in Thessa- lonica, created a great disturbance by his preaching, and a riot sprang up, and his Hfe was in danger. He was smuggled out of the city at night — not, however, before having founded a small church. He wcis unable to go back to Thessalonica, although he tried it two or three times ; but he wrote a letter. That is the first letter to the Thessalonians. You see how it sprang out of the circumstances of the time. Take a second example. Let us take one of the lives of Christ. Suppose you take the life recorded by Mark. Now, from internal evidences you can make out quite clearly how it was written, by whom it was written, 342 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. and to whom it was written. You understand at once it was written to a Roman public. If I were writing a letter to a red Indian I would make it very different from a letter I would write to a European. Now, Mark puts in a number of points which he would not if he had been writing to Greeks. For example, Mark almost never quotes prophecy. The Romans did not know anything about prophecy. Then, he gives little explanation of Jewish cus- toms. When I was writing home I had to give some little explanations of American customs — for example, Commencement Day. When Mark writes to Rome about things hap- pening farther East, he gives elab- THE STUDV OF THE BIBLE. 343 orate explanations. Again, Mark is fond of Latin words — writing to the Latins, who could understand them. He talks about ** centurion," " pra^to- rium," and others. Then, he always turns Jewish money into Roman money, just as I should say a book, if I were writing to Europe about it, cost two shillings, instead of fifty cents. Mark, for example, says, " two mites, which make a codrantes." He refers to the coins which the Romans knew. In these ways we find out that the Bible came out of the circumstances and the places and the times in which it was written. Then if we will we can learn where Mark got his information, to a large extent. It is an extremely 344 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. interesting study. I should like to refer to Gocet's '' New Testament Studies,'* where you will get this worked out. Let me just indicate to you how these sources of information are arrived at — the principal sources of information. There are a number of graphic touches in the book which indicate an eye-witness. Mark him- self could not have been the eye- witness ; and yet there are a number of graphic touches which show that he got his account from an eye-witness. You will find them, for example, in Mark iv. 38; x. 50; vi. 31; vii. 34. You will find also graphic touches indicating an ear-witness — as if the voice lingered in the mind of the THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 345 writer. For example, the retention of Aramaic in v. 41 ; and in vii. 34 — *' Talitha cumi ; Damsel, I say unto thee, arise." He retained the Aramaic words Christ said, as I would say in Scotland, *'My wee lassie, rise up." The very words lingered in his ear, and he put them in the original. Then there are occasional phrases indicating the moral impression produced — v. 15 ; X. 24; X. 32. Now, Mark himself was not either the eye-witness or ear- witness. There is internal evidence that he got his information from Peter. We know very well that Mark was an intimate friend of Peter's. When Peter came to Mark's house in Jerusa- lem, after he got out of prison, the 346 THE STUDV OF THE BIBLE. very servant knew his voice, so that he must have been well known in the house. Therefore he was a friend of Mark's. The coloring and notes seem to be derived from Peter. There is a sense of wonder and admiration which you find all through the book, very like Peter's way of looking at things — i. 27; i. 33; i. 45 ; ii. 12; v. 42; and a great many others. But, still more interesting, Mark quotes the words, **Get thee behind Me, Satan," which were said to Peter's shame, but he omits the preceding words said to his honor — "Thou art Peter. On this rock," and so on. Peter had learned to be humble when he was telling Mark about it. Compare Mark viii. THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 347 27-33, with Matthew's account — xvi. 13-33- Mark also omits the fine achievement of Peter — walking on the lake. When Peter was talking to Mark, he never said anything about it. Compare vi. 50 with Matthew's account — xiv. 28. And Mark alone records the two warnings given to Peter by the two cock-crowings, mak- ing his fall the more inexcusable. See Mark xiv. 30 ; also the 68th verse and the 72d. Peter did not write the book ; we know that, because Peter's style is entirely different. None of the four Gospels have the names of the writers attached to them. We have had to find all these things out ; but Mark's Gospel is obviously made 343 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. up of notes from Peter's evangelistic addresses. So we see from these simple exam- ples how human a book the Bible is, and how the Divinity in it has worked through human means. The Bible, in fact, has come out of religion; not religion out of the Bible. A TALK ON BOOKS. No book is worth anything which is not worth much nor is it serviceable until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapons he needs in any armory, or a housewife bring the piece she needs from her store. — John Ruskin. Except a living man, there ie nothing more wonderful than a book ! — A message to us from the dead — from human souls whom we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away, and yet these, or those little sheets of paper, speak to us, amuse us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. — Chas. Kingsley. Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen ; the more select the more enjoyable. — A. Bronson Alcott. A TALK ON BOOKS. ly /lY object at this time is to give encouragement and help to the *' duffers," the class of *' hopeful duffers." Brilliant students have every 'help, but second-class students are sometimes neg- lected and disheartened. I have great sympathy "with the duffers," because I was only a second-rate student myself. The subject of my talk with you is Books. A gentleman in Scotland who has an excellent library has placed on one side 352 A TALK ON BOOKS. of the room his heavy sombre tomes, and over those shelves the form of an owl. On the other side of the room are arranged the lighter books, and over these is the figure of a bird known in Scotland as ''the dipper." This is a most sensible division. The ''owl books" are to be mastered, — the great books, such as Gibbon's "Rome," Butlers "Analogy," Dorner's "Person of Christ," and text-books of philosophy and science. Every student should master one or two, at least, of such "owl books," to exercise his faculties, and give him concentrativeness. I do not intend to linger at this side of the library, but will cross over to the "dip- per books," which are for occasional A TALK ON BOOKS. 353 reading — for stimulus, for guidance, recreation. I will be Autobiographical. When I was a student in lodgings I began to form a library, which I ar- ranged along the mantelshelf of my room. It did not contain many books ; but it held as many as some students could afford to purchase, and if wisely chosen, as many as one could well use. My first purchase was a volume of ex- tracts from Ruskin's works, which then in their complete form were very costly. Ruskin taught me to use my eyes. Men are born blind as bats or kittens, and it is long before men's eyes are opened ; some men never learn to see as long as they live. I often wondered, if there was 354 A TALK ON BOOKS. a Creator, why He had not made the world more beautiful. Would not crim- son and scarlet colors have been far richer than green and browns ? But Ruskin taught me to see the world as it is, and it soon became a new world to me, full of charm and loveliness. Now I can linger beside a ploughed field and revel in the affluence of color and shade which are to be seen in the newly turned furrows, and I gaze in wonder at the liquid amber of the two feet of air above the brown earth. Now the colors and shades of the woods are a delight, and at every turn my eyes are surprised at fresh charms. The rock which I had supposed to be naked I saw clothed with lichens — patches of color — marvellous A TALK ON BOOKS. 355 organisms, frail as the ash of a cigar, thin as brown paper, yet growing and fructifying in spite of wind and rain, of scorching sun and biting frost. I owe much to Ruskin for teaching me to see. Next on my mantelshelf was Emer- son. I discovered Emerson for myself. When I asked what Emerson was, one authority pronounced him a great man ; another as confidently wrote him down a humbug. So I silently stuck to Emerson. Carlyle I could not read. After wading through a page of Carlyle I felt as if I had been whipped. Carlyle scolded too much for my taste and he seemed to me a great man gone delirious. But in Emerson I found what I would fain have sought in Carlyle ; and, more- 356 A TALK ON BOOKS. over, I was soothed and helped. Emer- son taught me to see with the mind. Next on my shelf came two or three volumes of George Eliot's works, from which I gained some knowledge and a furthur insight into many philosophical and social questions. But my chief debt to George Eliot at that time was that she introduced me to pleasant char- acters — nice people — and especially to one imaginary young lady whom I was in love with one whole winter, and it diverted my mind in solitude. A good novel is a valuable acquisition, and it supplies companionship of a pleasant kind. Amongst my small residue of books I must name Channing's works. Before I A TALK ON liOOKS. 2>S7 read Channing I doubted whether there was a God ; at least I would rather have believed that there were no God. After becoming acquainted with Channing I could believe there was a God, and I was glad to believe in Him, for I felt drawn to the good and gracious Sovereign of all things. Still, I needed further what I found in F. W. Robertson, the British officer in the pulpit — bravest, truest of men — who dared to speak what he be- lieved at all hazards. From Robertson I learned that God is human ; that we may have fellowship with Him, because He sympathizes with us. One day as I was looking over my mantelshelf library, it suddenly struck me that all these authors of mine were 3S8 A TALK ON BOOKS. heretics — these were dangerous books. Undesignedly I had found stimulus and help from teachers who were not cred- ited by orthodoxy. And I have since found that much of the good to be got from books is to be gained from authors often classed as dangerous, for these provoke inquiry, and exercise one's powers. Towards the end of my shelf I had one or two humorous works ; chief amongst them all being Mark Twain. His humor is peculiar; broad exaggera- tion, a sly simplicity, comical situations, and surprising turns of expressions ; but to me it has been a genuine fund of humor. The humorous side of a stu- dent's nature needs to be considered, and where it is undeveloped, it should A TALK ON BOOKS. 359 be cultivated. I have known many in- stances of good students who seemed to have no sense of humor. I will not recommend any of my fav- orite books to another; they have done me good, but they might not suit another man. Every man must discover his own books ; but when he has found what fits in with his tastes, what stimulates him to thought, what supplies a want in his nature, and exalts him in conception and feelings, that is the book for the student, be what it may. This brings me to speak of The Friendship of Books. To fall in love with a good book is one of the greatest events that can 360 A TALK ON BOOKS. befall us. It is to have a new influence pouring itself into our life, a new teach- er to inspire and refine us, a new friend to be by our side always, who, when life grows narrow and weary, will take us into his wider and calmer and higher world. Whether it be biography intro- ducing us to some humble life made great by duty done ; or history, opening vistas into the movements and destinies of nations that have passed away; or poetry making music of all the common things around us, and filling the fields, and the skies, and the work of the city and the cottage with eternal meanings — whether it be these, or story books, or religious books, or science, no one can become the friend even of one good A TALK ON BOOKS. 361 book without being made wiser and better. Do not think I am going to recommend any such book to you. The beauty of a friend is that we discover him. And we must each taste the books that are accessible to us for our- selves. Do not be disheartened at first if you like none of them. That is pos- sibly their fault, not yours. But search and search till you find what you like. In amazingly cheap form — for a few pence indeed — almost all the best books are now to be had ; and I think everyone owes it as a sacred duty to his viind to start a little library of his own. How much do we not do for our bodies.^ How much thought and money do they not cost us.^ And shall we not think a little, and pay 362 A TALK ON BOOKS. a little, for the clothing and adorning of the imperishable mind? This private library may begin, perhaps, with a single volume, and grow at the rate of one or two a year; but these well-chosen and well-mastered, will become such a foun- tain of strength and wisdom that each shall be eager to add to his store. A dozen books accumulated in this way may be better than a whole library. Do not be distressed if you do not like time-honored books, or classical works, or recommended books. Choose for yourself; trust yourself; plant yourself on your own instincts ; that which is natural for us, that which nourishes us, and gives us appetite, is that which is right for us. We have all different A TALK ON BOOKS. 363 minds, and we are all at different stages of growth. Some other day we may find food in the recommended book, though we should possibly starve on it to-day. The mind develops and changes, and the favorites of this year, also, may one day cease to interest us. Nothing better indeed can happen to us than to lose interest in a book we have often read; for it means that it has done its work upon us, and brought us up to its level, and taught us all it had to teach. HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. PHILADELPHIA. PA. STEPHEN. A SOLDIER OF THE CROSS, by Florence Morse Kingsley, author of " Titus, a Comrade of the Cross." " bince Ben-Hur no story has so vividly por- trayed the times of Christ."— 77tt' BookselUr. Cloth, i2mo., 369 pages. ^1.25. PAUL. A HERALD OF THE CROSS, by Florence Morse Kingsley. "A vivid and picturesque narrative of the life and times of the great Apostle.' Cloth, orna- mental, i2mo., 450 pages, ;Ji.5o VIC. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FOX TER- RIER, by Marie More Marsh. *'A fitting companion to that other wonderful book, ' Black. Beauty.' " Cloth, i2mo., 50 cents. WOMAN'S WORK IN THE HOME, by Archdeacon Farrar. Cloth, small i8mo., 50 cents. THE APOCRYPHAL BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTA- MENT, being the gospels and epistles used by the fol- lowers of Christ in the first three centuries after his death, and rejected by the Council of Nice, A. D. 325. Cloth, 8vo., illustrated, ;i^2.oo. THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, as John Bunvan ivrote it. A fac-simile reproduction of the first edition, pub- lished in 1678. Antique cloth, i2mo., $1.^5. THE FAIREST OF THE FAIR, by Hildegarde Haw- thorne. " The grand-daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne possesses a full share of his wonderful genius." Cloth, i6mo., ^1.25 A LOVER IN HOMESPUN, by F. Clifford Smith. Interesting tales of adventure and home life in Canada. Cloth. i2mo., 75 cents. ANNIE BESANT: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Cloth, i2mo., 368 pages, illustrated. ;^2.oo THE GRAMMAR OF PALMISTRY, by Katharine St. Hill. Cloth, i2mo., illustrated, 75 cents. AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY MINUTES. Contains over 100 photographs of the most famous places and edifices with descriptive text. Cloth, 50 cents. WHAT WOMEN SHOULD KNOW. A woman's book about women. By Mrs. E. B. Duffy. Cloth, 320 pages, 75 cents. HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. THE CARE OF CHILDREN, by Elisabeth R. Scovil. " An excellent book of the most vital interest." Cloth, i2mo., ^i.oo. PREPARATION FOR MOTHERHOOD, by Elisabeth R. Scovil. Cloth, i2mo., 320 pages, ;^i.oo. ALTEMUS' CONVERSATION DICTIONARIES. En?- lish-German, English-French, " Combined dictionaries and phrase books." Pocket size, each ^i.oo. TAINE'S ENGLISH LITERATURE, translated from the French by Henry Van Laun, illustrated with 20 fine photogravure portraits. Best English library edition, four volumes, cloth, full gilt, octavo, per set, $10.00. Half calf, per set, $12.50. Cheaper edition, with frontispiece illustrations only, cloih, paper titles, per set $7.50. SHAKESPEARE'S COMPLETE WORKS, with a bio- graphical sketch by Mary Cowden Clark, embellished with 64 Boydell,and numerous other illustrations, four volumes, over 2000 pages. Half Morocco, izmo., boxed, per set, $3.00. DORE'S MASTERPIECES THE DORE BIBLE GALLERY. A complete panorama of Bible History, containing 100 full-page engravings by Gustave Dore. MILTON'S PARADISE LOST, with 50 full page engrav- ings by Custave Dore. DANTE'S INFERNO, with 75 hill page engravings by Gus- tave Dore. DANTE'S PURGATORY AND PARADISE, with 60 full page engravings by Gustave Dore. Cloth, ornamental, large quarto (9 x 12 inches), each $2.00. TENNYSON'S IDYLLS OF THE KING, with 37full page engravings by Gustave Dore. Cloth, full gilt, large imperial quarto (11 x 14^ inches), $4.50. HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS, :i-. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER, by Sam- uel Taylor Coleridge, with 46 full paj^e engravings by Gustave Dore, Cloth, full gilt, large imperial quarto (11 X 14 J4 inches), ^^3.00. BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, with 100 engrav- infes by Frederick IJarn.ird and oth«.rs. Cloth, small quarto (9 x 10 inches j, ^i.oo. DICKENS' CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND, with 75 tine engravings by famous artists. Cloth, small quarto, boxed (9 x 10 inches), ;^i.oo. BIBLE PICTURES AND STORIES, loc full page engrav- ings. Cloth, small quarto (7x9 inches), ;^i.oo. MY ODD LITTLE FOLK, some rhymes and verses about them, by Malcolm Douglass. Numerous original engravings. Cloth, small quarto (7x9), j^i.oo. PAUL AND VIRGINIA, by Bemardin St. Pierre, with 125 engravings by Maurice Leloir, Cloth, small quarto (gx io),;^i.oo. LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRU- SOE, with 120 original engravings by Wa.ter Paget. Cloth, octavo {7% x.gyi), $1.50. ALTEMUS' ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY OF STANDARD AUTHORS. Cloth, Twelve Mo. Size, 5]/^ x ■]% Inches. Each ^1,00. TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE, by Charles and Mary Lamb, with 155 illustrations by famows artists. PAUL AND VIRGINIA, by Bemardin de St. Pierre, with 125 engravings by Alaurice Leloir. ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, AND THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE, by Lewis Carroll. Complete in one volume with 92 engravings by John Tenniel. LUCILE, by Owen Meredith, with numerous illustrations by George J >u Maurier. BLACK BEAUTY, by Anna Sewell, with nearly 50 original engravings. SCARLET LETTER, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with numer- ous original fuil-page and le.xt illustrations. THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with numerous original lul.-page and text illustrations. BATTLES OF THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE, by Prescott Holmes, with 7 . illustration.s BATTLES OF THE W^AR FOR THE UNION, by Prescott Holmes, with 80 illustrations. / HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. ALTEMUS V'OUNG PEOPLES' LIBRARY PRICE FIFTY CENTS EACH. ROBINSON CRUSOE : (Chiefly in words of one syllable). His life and strange, surprising adventures, with 70 beautiful illustrations by Walter Paget. ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, with 42 illustrations by John Tenniel. " The most delightful of children's stories. Elegant and delicious nonsense." — Saturday Review. THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE; a companion to " Alice in Wonderland," with 50 illustrations by John Tenniel. BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, with 50 full page and text illustrations. A CHILD'S STORY OF THE BIBLE, with 72 full page illustrations, A CHILD'S LIFE OF CHRIST, with 49 illustrations. God has implanted in the infant heart a desire to hear of Jesus, and children are early attracted and sweetly riveted by the wonderful Story of the Master from the Manger to the Throne. SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, with 50 illustrations. The father of the family tells the tale of the vicissitudes through which he and his wife and children pass, the wonderful discoveries made and dangers encountered. The book is full of interest and instruction, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE DISCOV- ERY OF AMERICA, with 70 illustrations. Every American boy and girl should be acquainted v/ith the story of the life of the great discoverer, with its strug- gles, adventures, and trials. THE STORY OF EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY IN AFRICA, with 80 illustrations. Records the ex- periences of adventures and discoveries in developing the " Dark Continent," from the early days of Bruce and Mungo Park down to Livingstone and Stanley, and the h'.roes of cur own time-;. No preseni can be more acceptable than such a volume as thi-, where courage, intrepidity, re.source, and devotion ure so admirauiy mingled. HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. Altemus' Young Peoples' Library— continued. THE FABLES OF /ESOP. Compiled from th* best accepted sources. With 62 illustrations. I'he fables of i^j^sop are among the very earliest compositions of this kind, and probably have never been surpassed fur point and brevity. GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. Adapted for young readers. With 50 illustrations. MOTHER GOOSE'S RHYMES, JINGLES AND FAIRY TALES, with 234 illustrations. LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES, by Prescott Holmes. With portraits of the Presidents and also of the unsuccessful candidates for the office ; as well as the ablest of the Cabinet offi- cers. It is just the book for intelligent boys, and it will help to make them intelligent and patriotic citizens. THE STORY OF ADVENTURE IN THE FROZEN SEAS, with 70 illustrations. By Prescott Holmes. We have here brought together the records of the attempts to reach the North Pole. The book shows how much can be accomplished by steady perseverance and indomitable pluck. ILLUSTRATED NATURAL HISTORY, by the Rev J. G. Wood, with 8j illustrations. This author has done more to popularize the study of natural history than anv other writer. The illustrations are striking and life-like. A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND, by Charles Dickens, with 50 illustrations. 'I'ired of listening to his children memorize the twaddle of old fashioned English history the author covere 1 the ground in his own peculiar and happy style for his own children's use. When the work was published its success was instantaneous. BLACK BEAUTY, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A HORSE, by Anna Sewell, with 50 illustrations. A work sure to educate boys and girls to treat with kind- ness all members of the animal kingdom. Recognized as the greatest story of animal life extant. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENTS, with 130 illustrations. Contains the most favorably known of the stories. HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. ALTEMUS' DEVOTIONAL SERIES. Standard Religious lyiterature Appropriately Bound in Handy Volume Size. iEach Volume contains Illuminated Title, Portrait of Author and Appropriate Illustrations. WHITE VELLUM, SILVER AND MONOTINT, BOXED, EACH FIFTY CENTS. 1 KEPT FOR THE MASTER'S USE, by Frances Ridley Havergal. " Will perpetuate her name." 2 MY KING AND HIS SERVICE, OR DAILY THOUGHTS FOR THE KING'S CHILDREN, by F>ances Ridley Havergal. " Simple, tender, gentle, and full of Christian love." 3 MY POINT OF VIEW. Selections from the works of Professor Henry Drummond. 4 OF THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, by Thomas AKempis. " With the exception of the Bible it is probably the book most read in Christian literature." • 5 ADDRESSES, by Professor Henry Drummond. " Intel- ligent sympathy with the Christian's need." 6 NATURAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD, by Professor Henry Drummond. " A most notable book which has earned for the author a world-wide reputation." 7 ADDRESSES, by the Rev. PhilHps Brooks. "Has exerted a marked influence over the rising generation." 8 ABIDE IN CHRIST. Thoughts on the Blessed Life of Fellowship with the Son of God. By the Rev. Andrew Murray. It cannot fail to stimulate and cheer. — 9 LIKE CHRIST. Thoughts on the Blessed Life of Con- formity to the Son of God. By the Rev. Andrew Murray. A sequel to " Abide in Christ." "May be read with comfort and edification by all." ID WITH CHRIST IN THE SCHOOL OF PRAYER» by the Rev Andrew Murray. *' The best work on prayer in the language." HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. XX HOLY IN CHRIST. ThouKhts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy. I^y the Rev. Andrew Murray. " This sacred theme istieated Scrip- turally and robustly without spurious sentimentalism." 12 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST, by Thomas Hughes, author of "Tom Brown's School Days," etc. "Evi- dences of the sublimest courage and manliness in the boyhood, ministry, and in the last acts of Christ's life." X3 ADDRESSES TO YOUNG MEN, by the Rev. Henry Ward Heecher. Seven Addresses on common vices and their results. 14 THE PATHWAY OF SAFETY, by the Rt. Rev. Ash- ton O.xenden, D.D. Sound words of advice and encour- agement on the text ** What must I do to be saved?" 15 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, by the Rt. Rev. Ashton Oxenden, D. D. A beautiful delineation of an ideal life from the conversion to the final reward. 16 THE THRONE OF GRACE. Before which the bur- dened soul may cast itself on the bosom of infinite love and enjoy in prayer" a peace which passeth all under- standing." 17 THE PATHWAY OF PROMISE, by the author of "The Throne of Grace." Thoughts consolatory and encouraging to the Christian pilgrim as he journeys onward to his heavenly home. 18 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK OF HOLY SCRIP- TURE, by the Rt. Hon. William Ewart Gladstone, M, P. The most masterly defence of the truths of the Bible extant. The author says : The Christian Faith and the Holy Scriptures arm us with the means of neu- tralizing and repelling the assaults of evil in and from ourselves. 19 STEPS INTO THE BLESSED LIFE, by the Rev. F. B. Meyer, B. A. A powerful help towards sanctifica- tion. ao THE MESSAGE OF PEACE, by the Rev. Richard W. Church, D. D. Eight excellent sermons on the advent of the Babe of Bethlehem and his influence and effect on the world. 21 JOHN PLOUGHMAN'S TALK, by the Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon. 22 JOHN PLOUGHMAN'S PICTURES, by the Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon. 23 THE CHANGED CROSS; AND OTHER RE- LIGIOUS POEMS. ALTEMUS' ETERNAL LIFE SERIES. Selections from the writings of well-known religious authors, beautifully printed and daintily bound with original designs in silver and ink. PRICE, 25 CENTS PER VOLUME. 1 ETERNAL LIFE, by Professor Henry Drummond. 2 LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY, by Rev. Andrew Murray. 3 GOD'S WORD AND GOD'S WORK, by Martin Luther. 4 FAITH, by Thomas Arnold. 5 THE CREATION STORY, by Honorable William E. Gladstone. 6 THE MESSAGE OF COMFORT, by Rt. Rev. Ashton Oxenden. 7 THE MESSAGE OF PEACE, by Rev R. W. Church. 8 THE LORD'S PRAYER AND THE TEN COM- MANDMENTS, by LVan Stanley. 9 THE MEMOIRS OF JESUS, by Rev. Robert F. Horton. 10 HYMNS OF PRAISE AND GLADNESS, by Elisabeth R. Scovil. 11 DIFFICULTIES, by Hannah Whitall Smith. 12 GAMBLERS AND GAMBLING, by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 13 HAVE FAITH IN GOD, by Rev. Andrew Murray. 14 TWELVE CAUSES OF DISHONESTY, by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 15 THE CHRIST IN WHOM CHRISTIANS BELIEVE, by Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks. i6 IN MY NAME, > y Rev. Andrew Murray. 17 SIX WARNINGS, by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. i8 THE DUTY OF THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESSMAN, by Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks. ig POPULAR AMUSEMENTS, by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 20 TRUE LIBERTY, by Rt. Rev Phillips Brooks. 21 INDUSTRY AND IDLENESS, by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 22 THE BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE, by Rt. Rev. Phillip'; Brooks. 23 THE SECOND COMING OF OUR LORD, by Rev. A. T. Pierson, D D. 24 THOUGHT AND ACTION, by Rt. Rev. Phillips. Brooks. 25 THE HEAVENLY VISION, by Rev. F. B. Meyer. 26 MORNING STRENGTH, by Elisabeth R. Scovil. 27 FOR THE QUIET HOUR, by Edith V. Bradt. 28 EVENING COMFORT, by Elisabeth R. Scovil 29 WORDS OF HELP FOR CHRISTIAN GIRLS, by Rev. F B. Meyer. 30 HO'W TO STUDY THE BIBLE, by Rev. Dwight L. Moody 31 EXPECTATION CORNER, by E. S. Elliot. 32 JESSICA'S FIRST PRAYER, by Hesba Stratton. ALTEMUS' BELLES-LETTRES SERIES. A collection of Essays and Addresses by eminent English and American Authors, beautifully primed and daintily bo\md, with original designs in silver. PRICE, 25 CENTS PER VOLUME. 1 INDEPENDENCE DAY, by Rev. Edward E. Hale, 3 THE SCHOLAR IN POLITICS, by Hon. Richard Olney. 3 THE YOUNG MAN IN BUSINESS, by Edward W. Bok. 4 THE YOUNG MAN AND THE CHURCH, by Edward W. Bok. 5 THE SPOILS SYSTEM, by Hon. Carl Schurz. 6 CONVERSATION, by Thomas DeQuincey. 7 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, by Matthew Arnold. 8 WORK, by John Ruskin. 9 NATURE AND ART, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 10 THE USE AND MISUSE OF BOOKS, by Frederic Harrison. 11 THE MONROE DOCTRINE: ITS ORIGIN, MEAN- ING AND APPLICATION, by Prof. John Bach McMaster (University of Pennsylvania). 12 THE DESTINY OF MAN, by Sir John Lubbock. 13 LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 14 RIP VAN WINKLE, by Washington Irving. 15 ART, POETRY AND MUSIC, by Sir John Lubbock. 16 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS, by Sir John Lubbock. J 7 MANNERS, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 18 CHARACTER, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 19 THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW, by Wash- ington Irving. 20 THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE, by Sir John Lubbock. 21 SELF RELIANCE, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 22 THE DUTY OF HAPPINESS, by Sir John Lubbock. -.3 SPIRITUAL LAWS, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 24 OLD CHRISTMAS, by Washington Irving 25 HEALTH, WEALTH AND THE BLESSING OF FRIENDS, by Sir John Lubbock. 25 INTELLECT, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. i7 WHY AMERICANS DISLIKE ENGLAND, by Prof. Geo B Adams (Yale). c8 THE HIGHER EDUCATION AS A TRAINING FOR BUSINESS, by Prof Harry Pratt Judson (University of Chicago). 29 MISS TOOSEY'S MISSION. 30 LADDIE. 31 J. COLE, by Emma Gellibrand. HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. ALTEMUS' NEW ILLUSTRATED VADEMECUM SERIES. Masterpieces of English and American I^iterature, Handy Volume Size, Large Type Editions. Each Volume Contains Illuminated Title Pages, and Portrait of Author and Numerous Engravings Full Cloth, ivory finish, oraamental inlaid sides and back, boxed 40 Full White Vellum, full silver and monotint, boxed .... 50 1 CRANFORD, by Mrs. Gaskell. 2 A WINDOW IN THRUMS, by J. M. Barrie. 3 RAB AND HIS FRIENDS, MARJORIE FLEM- ING, ETC., by John Brown, M. D. 4 THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD, by Oliver Goldsmith. 5 THE IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW, by Jerome K. Jerome. " A book for an idle holiday." 6 TALES FROM SHAKSPEARE, by Charles and Mary Lamb, with an introduction by the Rev, Alfred Aineer. M. D. ^ ' 7 SESAME AND LILIES, by John Ruskin. Three Lectures — I. Of the King's Treasures. II. Of Queen's Garden. III. Of the Mystery of Life. 8 THE ETHICS OF THE DUST,by John Ruskin. Ten lectures to little housewives on the elements ot crystali- zation. 9 THE PLEASURES OF LIFE, by Sir John Lubbock. Complete in one volume. ID THE SCARLET LETTER, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. 11 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. 12 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. "^ Altemus' New Illustrated Vadcmecum Series- continued. 13 TWICE TOLD TALES, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. 14 THE ESSAYS OF P'RANCIS (LORD) BACON WITH MEMOIRS AND NOTES. 15 ESSAYS, First Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. x6 ESSAYS, Second Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 17 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, by R.ilph Waldo Emerson. Mental portraits each representing a class. i. The Philosopher. 2. The Mystic.. 3. The Skeptic. 4. The Poet. 5. The Man of the World. 6. The Writer. 18 THOUGHTS OF THE EMPEROR MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS, translated by George Long. 19 THE DISCOURSES OF EPICTETUS WITH THE ENCHIRIDION, translated by George Long. 20 OF THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, by Thomas A^Kempis. Four books complete in one volume. ai ADDRESSES, by Professor Henry Drummond. The Greatest Thing in the World ; Pax Vobiscum ; The Changed Life; How to Learn How; Dealing With Doubt ; Preparation for Learning ; What is a Chris- tian ; The Study of the Bible ; A Talk on Books. M LETTERS, SENTENCES AND MAXIMS, by Lord Chesterfield. Masterpieces of good taste, good writing and good sense. 23 REVERIES OF A BACHELOR. A book of the heart. By Ik Marvel. 24 DREAM LIFE, by Ik Marvel. A companion to " Reve- ries of a Bachelor." 25 SARTOR RESARTUS, by Thomas Carlyle. 26 HEROES AND HERO WORSHIP, by Thomas Car- lyle. 27 UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. 28 ESSAYS OF ELIA, by Charles I^mb. HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. Altemus' New Illustrated Vademecum Series- continued. 39 MY POINT OF VIEW. Representative selections from the works of Professor Henry Drunimond by William Shepard. 30 THE SKETCH BOOK, by Washington Irving. Com- plete. 31 KEPT FOR THE MASTER'S USE, by Frances Ridley Havergal. 32 LUCILE, by Owen Meredith. 33 LALLA ROOKH, by Thomas Moore. 34 THE LADY OF THE LAKE, by Sir Walter Scott. 35 MARMION, by Sir Walter Scott. 36 THE PRINCESS ; AND MAUD, by Alfred (Lord) Tennyson. 37 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE, by Lord Byron. 38 IDYLLS OF THE KING, by Alfred (Lord) Tennyson. 39 EVANGELINE, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 40 VOICES OF THE NIGHT AND OTHER POEMS, by Henr>' V/adsworth Longfellow. 41 THE QUEEN OF THE AIR, by John Ruskin. A study of the Greek myths of cloud and storm. 42 THE BELFRY OF BRUGES AND OTHER POEMS, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 43 POEMS, Volume I, by John Greenleaf Whittier. 44 POEMS, Volume II, by John Greenleaf Whittier. HENRY ALTEMUS* PUBLICATIONS. ^ Altemus' New Illustrated Vademecum Series- continued. 45 THE RAVEN; AND OTHER POEMS, by Edgar Allan Poe. 46 THANATOPSIS;AND OTHER POEMS, by William Culleu Bryant. 47 THE LAST LEAF;AND OTHER POEMS, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. 48 THE HERpES OR GREEK FAIRY TALES, by Charles Kingsley. 49 A WONDER BOOK, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. 50 UNDINE, by de La Motte Fouque, 51 ADDRESSES, by the Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks. 52 BALZAC'S SHORTER STORIES, by Honore de Balzac. 53 TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST, by Richard H. Dana, Jr. 54 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. An Autobiography. 55 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA, by Charles Lamb. 56 TOM BRO'WN'S SCHOOL DAYS, by Thomas Hughes. 57 WEIRD TALES, by Edgar Allan Poe. 58 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, by John Ruskin. Three lectures on Work, Traffic and War. 59 NATURAL LAW^ IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD, by Professor Henry Drummond. 60 ABBE CONSTANTIN, by Ludovic Halevy. 61 MANON LESCAUT, by Abbe Prevost. 7 / HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. Altemus' New Illustrated Vademecum Series — continued. 62 THE ROMANCE OF A POOR YOUNG MAN, by Octave Feuillet. 63 BLACK BEAUTY, by Anna Sewell. 64 CAMILLE, by Alexander Dumas, Jr. 65 THE LIGHT OF ASIA, by Sir Edwin Arnold. 56 THE LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME, by Thomas Babington Macaulay. 67 THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM- EATER, by Thomas De Quincey. 68 TREASURE ISLAND, by Robert L. Stevenson. 6g CARMEN, by Prosper Merimee. 70 A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY, by Laurence Sterne. 71 THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. 72 BAB BALLADS, AND SAVOY SONGS, by W. H. Gilbert. 73 FANCHON, THE CRICKET, by George Sand. 74 POEMS, by James Russell Lowell. 75 JOHN PLOUGHMAN'S TALK, by the Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon, 76 JOHN PLOUGHMAN'S PICTURES, by the Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon. 77 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST, by Thomas Hughes. 78 ADDRESSES TO YOUNG MEN, by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 79 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE, by OUver Wendell Holmes. HENRY ALTEMUS' PUBLICATIONS. Altemus' New Illustrated Vademecum Series — continued. 80 MULVANEY STORIES, by Rudyard Kipling. 81 BALLADS, by Rudyard Kipling. 8a MORNING THOUGHTS, by Frances Ridley Havergal. 83 TEN NIGHTS IN A BAR ROOM, by T. S. Arthur. 84 EVENING THOUGHTS, by Frances Ridley Qavergal. 85 IN MEMORIAM, by Alfred (Lord) Tennyson. 86 COMING TO CHRIST, by Frances Ridley Haverga'!. 87 HOUSE OF THE WOLF, by Stanley Weyman. AMERICAN POLITICS (non-Partisan), by Hon. Thomas V. Cooper, A history- of all the Political Parties with their views and records on all important questions. All political platforms from the beginning to date. Great Speeches or> Great issues. Parliamentary Practice and tabulated history of chronological events. A library without this work is de- ficient. 8vo., 750 pages. Cloth, $3.00. Full Sheep Library style, $4 00. NAMES FOR CHILDREN, by Elisabeth Robinson Scovil, author of " The Care of Children," " Preparation for Motherhood." In family life there is no question of greater weight or importance than naming the baby. The author gives much good advice and many suggestions on the sub- ject. Cloth, i2mo., $ .40. TRIE AND TRIXY,byJohn Habberton, author of "Helen's Babies." The story is replete with vivid and spirited scenes; and is incomparably the happiest and most de- lightful work Mr. Habberton has yet written. Cloth, i2mo., $ .35. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or i on the date to which renewed. "^ I Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. ;*- LIBRARY USE NOV 71960 REC'D LD WOV 14 160 LIBRARY USB NOV 81960 _«|fHj — JUL ?.?.VBi |t!>fc'<5«v3 ij^ 8 i9ou LIBRARY USE SiTERLIBRARY LOAN NOV 10 1960 UBRARY USE tH JN 1 " 1985 a ^'V. OF CALIF- BERK. — NQViii9bU YA 02859 '^m