LIBRARY University of California. GIF^T OK Mrs. SARAH P. WALSWORTH Received October, 1894, Accessions No. ,^2^^- Class No. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/discoursesOOIiverich DISCOURSES, BT ABIEL ABBOT LIYEBMORE, CINCINNATI, OHIO. ^A OF THJ^'^C;^ Hihiteesitt; BOSTON: CROSBY, NICHOLS, AND COMPANY. NEW YORK: CHARLES S. FRANCIS AND COMPANY. 1854. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1854, by A. A. LiVERMORE, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. CAMBRIDGE: METCALP AND COMPANY, PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. CONTENTS DISCOURSE I. PAGE THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY OF THE CHRIS- TIAN RELIGION 1 DISCOURSE n. THE MANNER OF BBYELATION 34 DISCOURSE III. REVELATION AND REASON . . . ' 53 DISCOURSE IV. THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS ... 75 DISCOURSE V. THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT 96 VI CONTENTS. . DISCOURSE VI. THE CONQUEST OF EVIL 110 DISCOURSE VII. THE FROMISB 130 DISCOURSE VIII. THE soul's want OF GOD 150 ♦ DISCOURSE IX. BE STILL AND KNOW GOD . 164 DISCOURSE X. UNION with god and MAN 176 DISCOURSE XL THE birth of JESUS 192 DISCOURSE xn. THE THREEFOLD CHRIST 208 DISCOURSE XIII. THE FULNESS OF CHRIST 230 CONTENTS. VU DISCOUESE XIV. JESUS THE BE-CBEATOR 245 DISCOTTRSE XV. GROUP OF THE CRUCIFIXION . . . . . . . 259 DISCOURSE XVI. SELF-CREATION 277 DISCOURSE XVII. UNION OF RELIGION AND LIFE 291 DISCOURSE xvni. THE BLESSINGS OF A DAT 312 DISCOURSE XIX. CHRISTIANITY A WANT OF CIVILIZATION .... 329 DISCOURSE XX. RELIGION A NECESSITY 340 DISCOURSE XXI. RELIGION IN ITS FOURFOLD EXPRESSION .... 355 Vlll CONTENTS. DISCOURSE xxn. CHRISTIANITY PROGRESSIVE 375 DISCOURSE XXIIL WISDOM, LAW, AND FAITH 396 DISCOURSE XXIV. I WOULD NOT LIVE ALWAT 412 Iuhitbksitt; DISCOURSE I THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETriTY OF THE CHRISTI.^ RELIGION. JESUS ANSWERED AND SAID UNTO HER, WHOSOEVER DRINKETH OF THIS WATER SHALL THIRST AGAIN : BUT WHOSOEVER DRINK- ETH OP THE WATER THAT I SHALL GIVE HIM SHALL NEVER thirst; BUT THE WATER THAT I SHALL GIVE HIM SHALL BE IN HIM A WELL OP WATER SPRINGING UP INTO EVERLASTING LIFE. — John iv. 13, 14. When art, science, literature, or government is revolutionized, religion always feels the shock. For, entering as a component part into the structure of society, when other members suffer, it suffers with them ; and when other members are honored, it re- joices with them. Thus the conversion of Constantino, the Roman Emperor, in the fourth century, which led to the adoption of Christianity as the national religion instead of Polytheism, entirely changed the existing form and operation of the Gospel. What Rome gained, Christianity seemed to lose. Jesus became but a species of Jove of the Capitol. The sacred ordinances were drowned in heathenish rites. The 1 2 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY living were tied to the dead. The New Testament became the hand-book to a corrupt court and world- ly policy. And the effect survives in the Roman Catholic Church to this day. The next mighty movement, the Crusades, in the eleventh century, committed the religion of the Prince of Peace to a warlike and persecuting career. This turned the cross into the crescent for the time being, and made Christ, the suffering Son of God, the conquering Mahomet, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other. This discord, too, is still heard in the music of the Church. The fatal virus has circulated far in the veins of belligerent Christendom. The Reformation of Martin Luther, in the six- teenth century, again broke the slumber of ages with a new day. The Gospel was then committed to a higher form than worldly policy or a warlike propagandism. It was embodied in intellectual dog- mas, creeds, confessions of faith. Reason, individu- alism, dissent, asserted their claims. The Church began to return to the Bible, from whose living stream it had been cut off by the rubbish of tradition. The Scriptures were read, though it was through a glass, darkly. In Calvinism, the night-side of human nature found expression. Reason raised terrible questions, which reason could not answer. This dogmatic era has also woven its stiff fibre into the web, and we can trace it to this day. But the motto of all human affairs is, " Overturn, OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 6 overturn " ; and there came another general breaking up at the period of the American and French revo- lutions, in the eighteenth century. It was but a step, to pass from questioning prescription in the State to questioning it in the Church. The transition from no king to no bishop, was short and logical. Man even took his stand outside of the Bible itself, weighed the volume in his hand, said it was not a very great book after all, — was but little heavier than Aristotle's Ethics, or Cicero's Colloquies. The reason of Luther's time had ripened into the philoso- phy — falsely so called — of the French and English Deists. When thrones fell, the altar, close by, reeled at the shock. In this instant and living present of the nineteenth century, however, we are lifted up and borne on the ground-swell of another stupendous revolution. Chris- tianity feels the immense force, because it has grown into art, science, literature, and government, as a uni- versal principle. It is not worldly power, as under Constantine, or war, as in the time of the Crusades, or human reason, as in Luther's day, or specula- tive philosophy, as in the period of the French En- cyclopedists, but science, and science applied to art, that now makes a new point of departure for human society, and of course for Christianity. The other influences still endure, and are upon us, but this is the star of the ascendant. There are wonders in heaven and in earth. As- tronomy reveals them there, chemistry finds them 4 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY here. We recover from the surprising discoveries of the telescope, only to fall into new wonder at those of the microscope. The old interjections are not strong enough for these days of astonishment. But man is getting so nicely accommodated in his house on earth, and has such power over matter and its forces, can ride the sea, the land, the air, so victori- ously, that he is becoming a little heady and self- willed, and forgetting the rock out of which he was hewn, and the pit whence he was digged. The sen- timent of reverence is drained off in other directions. Revelation is taken down from the everlasting heights, where it was kindled and set by the hands of God, and is found, on examination, to be a candle lighted by man, and raised from the earth. But as you have seen the moon, when the sky was overcast by ragged clouds, " walking in brightness," and sailing by them with an unshorn beauty and an unshaken serenity, so does Christianity pass through all revolutions, observations, and eclipses, only to beam with the same eternal light, and yield the same beautiful guidance to the benighted traveller. Religious institutions, phraseology, and books are effected by these changes ; but the Bible stands, the Church survives, the Father finds worshippers, the Saviour disciples, heaven receives emigrant saints ; and though the very heavens and earth pass away, yet a new heaven and a new earth appear, wherein more and more dwelleth righteousness. The diffu- sion of the Gospel in extent, and the depth of its OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. O power in life and character, were never greater than after nineteen centuries of action and reaction. But again, as the great world has its periods, so does the little world of each man's heart. We live in the microcosm, what the wprld lives in the ma- crocosm. The infinite law is in a dew-drop, as much as in the Atlantic. In childhood we receive religion implicitly, and say our prayers at our mother's knee without a seri- ous doubt. Tender and holy indeed is that sense of home piety. Cowper writes immortal lines on it, that bring the tears now. John Randolph says it was all that kept him from the infidelity of Rous- seau and Voltaire. Daniel Webster writes under the maternal portrait, " My excellent mother." But in youth we begin to question. The world has a stern discipline. Faith for a time suffers eclipse. A love of independence, and a curiosity after the new and untried, make us dissenters from the good old ways of the past. The placid lake of the morning, smooth mirror of heaven, is ruffled by rising gales, and for a time the Divine image is lost. But manhood is strong. It grasps the realities of things with a firm hold, and recovers the lost faith of childhood. The lake that was smooth in the morn- ing grows smooth again towards night. John Quin- cy Adams, white with the snows of years, and bent by the tempests of state, repeats still, as he did of old at his mother's knee, before his nightly rest, — 1* 6 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY ^' Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep ; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." In the world, then, and in the individual experi- ence, we are to expect to meet questioning, doubt, even stern denial. This always has been, and always will be. And we are not to be alarmed, panic-struck, indignant, at these states of mind, but calm, gener- ous, appreciative, and charitable. Let doubt have a frank expression, and it will be sooner cured. But we are to use truth to convert error ; not anger, not sorrow, not custom. Truth is mighty, and it will prevail. Thought, free inquiry, discussion, action, are what we should covet, if we believe we have the truth. The most lamentable state of the Christian Church is stagnation, death. Truth becomes too ob- vious, — is taken for granted. Men sleep over it, make the sanctuary a dormitory, nod over the Bible. They assert and assert, and go away to live just as they did before. But a reformer, a radical, a denier, comes, and at his daring tread the mind is startled from its drowsiness. None can sleep now. Every- body is wide awake. Men think somewhat, and talk more. Some scold, some pray, and read their Bibles, and wish for more light ; and day does break. It is so of Millerism, Rationalism, Transcendentalism, Spiritualism. A storm on Lake Erie drives a steam- boat ashore, and wrecks a few schooners ; but it pu- rifies a hundred thousand square miles of prairie ex- OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. * halation, and oxygenates the air for two millions of men to breathe. The intellectual and moral tem- pests may be uncomfortable, but they drive at a similar end. Let the winds blow. Having glanced at the law of religious revolutions, and seen where we stand, I have thought the present would be a good opportunity to state to an awa- kened public attention what is our faith in Christiani- ty, as Unitarians generally hold it, and the why and the wherefore. My remarks will be grouped under the three titles of the Divinity, the Sufficiency, and the Perpetuity of the Christian Religion. 1. By the Divinity of Christianity, I do not mean the Deity of the person, Jesus Christ, who brought it into the world, but the divine, superhuman char- acter of the message and the messenger. Another being than God can reveal God. God is God, arid Christ is Christ ; but God is not Christ, and Christ is not God. The personality of God is as distinct from the personality of Christ, as that of James is from John. Such is " the doctrine of pronouns." When we enter the spiritual sphere, there is God, but there also is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, at the right hand of the Father. But you are familiar with these opinions. In holding, then, to the divine character, and special miraculous agency of Christ, but not to his Deity, we agree with Universalists, Hicksite Quakers, and the Christian Connection ; and we differ from Presbyterians, Baptists, Metho- dists, Episcopalians, the New Jerusalem Church, and Catholics. 8 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY "The divinity of the Christian religion is in its substance and its form ; in its substance the most intimate and tender disclosure of the will of God, profounder than any lessons of the outward creation, providence, conscience, or the soul's intuitions, — and in form, special, miraculous, sudden. Revelation is not contrary to creation, providence, but addition- al. It is not against reason, but above it, — a secret opened, a mystery made into a discovery. It is not unnatural^ for all we know of nature and the soul would lead us to expect some clearer exposition of God's will, and man's duty and destiny, but super- natural. It is clearer, more authentic, more au- thoritative and conclusive, and it works, as we ex- pect it would if it were divine, new spiritual and moral results upon mankind. In one sense, all nature, all providence, is divine. God made them. God is in them, their life, strength, beauty, and joy. But revelation is more divine, a fuller unfolding of the Godhead, a nearer approach of the finite to the Infinite. It is intentional and articulate. It is the Word made flesh. It is saying to man what he did not feel and believe of the Mighty Maker of all, I love you, I care for you, and I will save you. This message is special ; it opens to us the bosom of God, it shows us the heart of the Father, it brings us nigh to him, when before we felt that we were far off. In his natural condition, to man's apprehension the world, life, and soul are emp- tied of God. But in man's Christian condition, God OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 9 flows back, fills and overflows the soul, inundates all things with his presence and love, making the sun and moon shine brighter, and filling home, earth, heaven, with a cheerful radiance. This divine sense of life we owe to Christianity. The Greeks and Romans had it not, — not Plato, not Cicero. "We have drawn it in with our earliest breath, and it has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength. God is in New Holland as much as he is in the United States, but he is not felt to be there by its degraded savages, as he is felt to be here by us. Here the Deity is re-enthroned over his works and over the soul. Here man, not one or two extra ge- niuses or philosophers, but masses, millions of men, look at the universe out of a different mind and heart, and through the windows of different eyes. This is due, not to the natural development of the race, but to a special revelation ; due, not to the nineteenth century, or any number of centuries, but to Christ and his Gospel. But the Christian religion has other and impor- tant offices, constituting it divine. By flooding the world anew with thoughts and feelings of God, it would change, convert the heart, and thus effect a salvation from sin. For man is haunted, dogged with a feeling of moral unworthiness. Call it fear, superstition, folly, or what not ; there it is, sin, and a sense of sin. You can see it in his eye. It blush- es over his face. He cannot rid himself of it. Do you say it is education ? But that is only putting 10 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY the question further back. How did education get it ? You say it is a nursery idea. But how did the nursery create in successive generations from the first this sentiment of moral ill-desert ? That would be a greater miracle than raising Lazarus, or healing the blind man. This sense of sin is embodied in all law, all art and literature ; and it is in every faith and form of religion, from the lowest stages of idolatry up to the last work on Christian morals and piety. Now it is the sublime and crowning office of Jesus to be the Saviour of men from sin, and from sinning. And the parental love and mercy of God, and his own life and death, and its mighty instrument, the Cross, are the means he employs to accomplish this end. Out of Christianity how feeble are the senti- ments of forgiveness, reconciliation to God, sub- mission, patience, repentance, reformation ? They glimmer here and there, in a few eminent and pure- minded heathen, like a glowworm in the dark. But the power of the Gospel is such that it has made these holy and heavenly feelings and resolves,^ by which man is delivered from moral evil and its tor- menting remorse in his soul, burning and shining lights to multitudes of men. This faith speaks to the criminals, to the sot, to the leprous-spotted proffi- gate, " Go, wash and be clean," and mighty revolu- tions follow it. The cannibals of the South Sea Isl- ands are now found sitting, clothed and in their right mind, worshipping God, and loving one another. OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 11 Father Mathew speaks this word of redemption, and millions arise, and fling from them a polluting habit. Elizabeth Fry utters it in Newgate prison, and poor wretches, whose souls seemed dead and buried even before their bodies, come to life at the glad sound, and whisper, " Is there hope even for us ? " Miss Dix reads it to the insane, talks of it in dungeon walls, and the very walls — how much more human hearts which are not stone ! — seem to grow gentle and soft at the melodious words, " Son, thy sins are forgiv- en thee " ; " Daughter, be of good cheer." Mr. Pease talks of this truth in the dens of the Five Points in New York, and our Ministers at Large proclaim it in the wretched alleys and hovels of Boston and Liver- pool ; and the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the sick are healed, and the morally dead are raised. Magical is this spiritual power and divinity of thp religion of Jesus in redeeming man from sin, and reconciling him to God. Christianity is divine, for it spreads over the world a sense of the presence of God, and it drives sin from the heart, and bleaches it out of the character and life. But we advance a step. Many concede all this, and yet say, we see no proofs of any thing more than a natural agency, reason developed, man progressing, the world growing up to this point through six thou- sand years. Then we adduce, besides this internal and moral evidence of the power and divinity of the Gospel, its special character as a sudden moral phe- 12 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY nomenon in history, springing out of inadequate causes if we call it natural, but easily explained if we admit the record; in a word, its miraculous character. Now, properly understood, miracles, what we call such, seem possible, probable, and I will say even inevitable. Certainly no one would limit the power of God, and say he could not work them. For when we have looked at the whole scale of the universe, does it not seem likely that they would occur ? For what is a miracle ? It is a wonder, as its derivation signifies, — a wonder more than commonly wonder- ful. Is it any violation of the laws of God ? Not of the highest and most enduring of his laws, — cer- tainly not; for God does not contradict himself, — but only of our acquaintance with his laws here, our human experience. Let me illustrate this by the creation of man. No one yet has been bold enough to say that he believed our race is eternal on the earth. No human bones are found mingling in the mighty cemetery of departed generations of sentient creatures on our hills; no skull or vertebrae of man by the side of mammoth and mastodon. At a certain point of time, then, man was created. To a watcher in the heavens, — to those sons of God who shouted for joy when the new earth wheeled into the march of worlds and constellations, if any were looking on, — that cre- ation of the first pair was to all intents and pur- poses a miracle worked on earth. Something was OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 13 done that was never done before. Something took place that did not violate, indeed, the greater law of the whole universe, — for creating intelligent beings, we may suppose, is such a law, — but it was an ex- ception to the ordinary course of things on this globe. They, therefore, who object to the moral miracle of Christ, a new and higher type of spiritual being, have got to account for the physical miracle of the creation at first, unless they believe man to have been an eternal inhabitant of this globe. For the great miracle, and inclusive of all other miracles, is Christ himself, so pure and perfect a being, springing at once to light out of the darkness of Jewish life, with all its bigotry and corruption ; so humble, born in a manger ; having never learned letters, only thirty years old, and yet distancing all teachers before or since in wisdom, all lives in spotless excellence and benevolence, and leaving an influence behind, — a Gospel, a Church, a kingdom, which, despite the ignpminy of his death, and the successive attempts of Jewish, Pagan, and Mahometan powers to crush it, has gone on conquering and to conquer, until it has wellnigh filled the world. That such a being, himself a miracle, should work miracles, seems nat- ural. Hence his words were miraculous, his deeds miraculous, his effect on the world miraculous ; thus being an exception to the ordinary range of human experience, but not a violation, we may suppose, of the laws of all time and all being. For the love 14 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY which originally introduced one new system by the creation of man, now opened another by the creation of the Saviour of man. As it required ages upon ages for the earth to become prepared for the habita- tion of man, so, after he was introduced, society for many thousands of years was undergoing a prepara- tion for the advent of the new moral type of being in Jesus. It is in accordance with this view that Paul says : " The first man Adam was made a liv- ing soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit." One word as to the use which this miraculous in- terpretation has upon man. The miracles of the New Testament are not so much proofs of the spe- cial, divine origin of the religion of Jesus, as helps to awaken mankind to see and feel those proofs, and the truths which lie behind them. Here are souls sunk in stupor and lethargy, but the miracle-worker comes along, and cures the sick, or raises the dead. According to the record, — and it has every external and internal mark of veracity, -^ crowds did follow Him of Nazareth, when they saw the mighty works he did, and even the half-converted Nicodemus got so far as to say, " Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God ; for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him." The office of the miracle is, as its name implies, to appeal to wonder, to arrest attention, to startle the dull and indifferent, to flow visibly before them as a stream of divine power, to show them, as by a lightning-flash, OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 15 the latent God in what is around them, and reveal him to their wondering and adoring hearts. What are miracles, then, at man's point of view, may be laws at the Divine point of view. Because God loves man more than father and mother their child, these special interpositions seem entirely possible, probable, rational, and necessary. They are the direct look, the felt touch, the pressure of the hand of the Mighty Parent of all. As the mother, engaged about her household tasks, plays and talks with her child, but once in a while she fixes her loving eyes full upon the eyes of her be- loved, presses him more fondly to her bosom, and speaks a kinder word, so miracles break the silence of nature with articulate speech, articulate love. They are emphatically the Word of God. They are what the creation has been groaning and travailing to utter from the first by all its mute signs and gifts, but which at last burst into angelic anthems, " Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men." Let it be further remarked, that Jesus claimed to be a special divine messenger, different from all who had gone before him. He calls himself the light of the world, the bread of life, the Son of God, the sanctified and sent, the way, the truth, and the life, the Saviour. Voices from above claimed this supe- riority for him at his birth, his baptism, in his teach- ing, and in his miracles. He died a wonderful death, was buried, rose again, and ascended on high. He 16 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY left behind a miraculous effect. For some reason, he has had a more wide-spread and a deeper influ- ence on the history of the world than any other be- ing. Since he lived, the world has taken its date from him. His resurrection is the certificate to all men that they also shall rise, and be immortal. What cause is sufficient to account for these phenom- ena of Christianity, and for its increasing vitality in the most advanced and cultivated nations, except we admit the divine, special, and miraculous character of its Founder? "We fall necessarily upon one of three supposi- tions. He was true, or he was himself deceived, or he deceived others. One of these three we must adopt, in whole or in part. If we believe he was what he claimed to be, all is reasonable and probable. We then have a great cause, sufficient for the great effect to be accounted for and explained. This is philosophical, as well as evangelical. But if we reject the idea of his perfect truth, and suppose that he presumed in aught upon our credu- lity and ignorance, then we find it wholly incredible that so much goodness, such transparent truth, such crystalline purity, so much love to God and man, should belong to the same character with so much craft and conceit. The immediate neighborhood and contact of two such characters, so utterly unlike and opposite, would be harder to believe than all the mir- acles, twice told, of the -New Testament. OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 17 But if Jesus was neither true nor a deceiver, then we fall upon the sole remaining supposition, that he was an enthusiast, a fanatic. But what a miracle is here ? To believe that such a life, such labors and instructions, such a death, such lasting effects on mankind, such faith and persuasion of his truth in many of the ripest and richest spirits that ever inhab- ited mortal clay, could grow out of one heated brain, without entire reason, truth, and reality to back the claim, is to reverse all the laws of probability, and call this a chance world, where effects take place without causes, and error and folly have all the power of truth. A corrupt tree does not thus bear good fruit. Mahomet succeeds for a time, because he used the sword. The Mormon chief succeeds a lit- tle, because he appeals to worldly comfort and sen- sual pleasure. The Christian empire had no sword, no sceptre, but a cross, tolerated none of the passions and appetites in self-indulgence, and was aided by no worldly power, but resisted by all ; yet it is what we see it to-day in all the earth. If this counsel or this work had been of men, it would come to naught. Every reason to account for the spread, success, hopes, and prospects of Christianity centres finally in its character as a special, divine revelation from God to man by Jesus Christ. And if the Au- thor and Finisher of our faith were seriously in error in a single point, bearing upon moral and spiritual subjects, respecting which he particularlycam e to make the revelation, would it not shake the entire 2* 18 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY fabric of the Gospel, and bring a dark cloud of doubt over the whole ? 2. The Sufficiency of the Christian Religion is but a corollary from its Divinity ; for, if divine, it must be adequate to its purpose. So extensive and costly an apparatus cannot have been provided only to prove abortive. Fire, and light, and sun, and moon do not fail ; why should truth, and love, and right ? Divine in its origin, in the love and mercy of God, divine in the spirit, mission, character, works, and resurrection of its Founder, divine in its works and ways among men, it follows as an inevitable re- sult that it is all-sufficient. Some have objected, that they could not receive the Gospel as a sufficient guaranty to their salvation, unless its Author and Finisher were God himself. But it is virtually God himself. For the rule holds equally good in theology as in law, that what one does by another he does himself. If Jesus is com- missioned by God, it is the same as if the Infinite One appeared in person. Do we rashly say we can- not trust in any being short of God for our safety in such an infinite matter as eternal life ? We*do trust in God when we trust in Christ. When the Chinese merchant at Canton has transactions with the United States, he must negotiate with our commissioner there. For the commissioner is the United States, carried abroad, all that can be carried, to China. So Jesus is God revealed into this world, so much of the In- finite First Fair and First Good as can dawn on these dim eyes of dust. OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 19 But it is further objected to the sufficiency of the Christian Revelation, that it does not show the full glory of God. The Hebrew Revelation did not, we concede, because men were not able to bear the full blaze of light at once. Moses yielded a point here and there in his legislation, we are told, on account of the hardness of men's hearts. Even Jesus taught his disciples with adaptation, — gave them the truth as they were able to bear it. All believe in the progress of the material creation ; why is it any more irrational to believe that there are progress, de- grees in Revelation, if both are from God ? Nature culminates in man ; why should not Revelation cul- minate in Christ? In both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, hu- man words, figures, relations, and affections are used, and must be used, to set forth the infinite perfection of God. And no man, be he saint or philosopher, can use any other, though it be six thousand years after the creation, and two thousand after Jesus. For the moment you say father, mother, or employ the terms justice, love, mercy, you begin to limit the Illimitable, and to take terms from home, the court, the congress, and carry them up and attach them to the Absolute and Inconceivable and Inexpressible God. If you object to the imperfect and limiting terms of the prophet, he can equally object to yours. For you cannot jump the abyss any more than he, and pluck the spoils of absolute Infinity and Eter- nity. In truth, it may be doubted whether the most 20 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY eminent philosophers of the nineteenth century can surpass, or even equal, the sublime descriptions of God in David and Isaiah, to say nothing of Paul and John. The intellect is indeed an inferior faculty, in the knowing of God, to the heart. For he is not known, but felt. " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." " The world by wisdom knew not God." Wisdom became even an obstruction instead of a help. " Spiritual things are spiritually dis- cerned." " The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him." Jesus said, " If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." The grand generalization, God is love, was not made by the eagle intellect of Paul, but by the tender- hearted John. An eagle was in fact John's emblem in the early Church symbolism, as if to indicate that he soared by that very love into the heaven of heav- ens, into the heart of the Unknown and Eternal, and brought back the glad message, God is Love. The only idea of the Infinite Perfection is a senti- ment. It cannot be grasped and weighed by the thought, but it can be felt by the heart. Words break down under the burden. Though they are piled up in great masses, and intensified and illumi- nated with rhetorical fire, they can only suggest that Uncreated Glory. One rapt emotion of a mother's heart, bending over her babe, one kindling spark of love in John, reclining in the bosom of his Master, OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 21 is a deeper glance into the fathomless mystery of the Godhead, than all that divines and philosophers could achieve by the mere intellectual study of a lifetime. Jesus reveals the infinite perfection of the Deity, not by displays of power or wisdom alone, though in these there was no defect, but in love, in doing good, in healing, blessing, forgiving his ene- mies, dying on the cross. No wonder the world has called this being God ; for there shone the brightness of the Everlasting Glory. It has been objected to Jesus having the true idea of the infinite perfection of God, that he admitted the existence of three things conflicting with that perfection, — a Devil, absolute evil, and an eternal hell. I do not believe he did. I am one of those who are said to " explain the Devil out of the Bible," and I prefer it to explaining the Bible oft' the basis of its divine and miraculous character. For if I found any thing in the teachings of Jesus which I could not accept, I should be more inclined to think that I erred in the interpretation of his words, than that he erred in understanding God and his universe. But Jesus admits there is evil ; so do we ; so do all men; — evil, that black mote swimming in the golden sunlight of all this glorious universe. We live nineteen centuries after Christ, yet evil, that sad, fearful, ominous, inscrutable thing, still exists. I feel it, see it ; so do you ; so do all. By no ingenuity can we make it a synonym e for good ; evil it will still remain, in gloomy, awful form, as if a bright angel 22 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY had fallen from the sky, and lay prostrate and broken on the earth. Some still put a d before it, and call evil devil, as they did in olden time of vivid figures of speech, and sometimes almost violent personifica- tions. So Wisdom was a person in Proverbs, and Charity, Sin, Death, the Law, in Paul. If we inter- pret language, we must do it according to the rules of language. The art of criticism may be despised, but it is as essential in its place as the kindred art of computation in numbers, for we cannot make the mental, any more than the numerical figures, yield the right result, without the right rules. Evil, both natural and moral, seems to arise from the very necessity of a finite and created being. Jesus barely stated the fact. He did not explain it, and he did not speculate about it. Perhaps its explanation is not* a subject of human knowledge. There may be some thoughts the human mind can- not think in the present state. We cannot tell whence evil is, how it is, or what it is. But it is, — stern, inexorable fact. Evil, suffering, sin, dungeons in Austria, gibbets in Rome, slavery in the South, bloody stripes on the flesh, darker spots on the soul ! O the untold suffering, agony, despair, suicide, of mortals I If it is their fault, why is it their fault ? is the significant inquiry. Why should such a fatal margin have been granted to their liberty ? If it still exists, this Sphinx-riddle of the universe, at the end of six thousand years, why may it not at the end of sixty thousand or of sixty million years ? If it ex- OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 23 ists nowat the end of an eternity past, so to speak, who shall presume to say but that it may exist somewhere, in some world, in some being, at the end, so to say, of an eternity future ? Once having con- ceded evil, who shall prescribe limits, and say, " Thus far, and no farther ? " For if it is consistent with the perfections of a Being, infinitely powerful, and able to prevent it, infinitely wuse, and knowing how to prevent it, and infinitely good, and disposed to pre- vent it, to allow evil in this world for a limited time, in order to accomplish wise and benevolent purposes, as we believe with the strength of adamant, who shall undertake to say it may not also be consistent in other worlds and other states of being? The truth is, we know nothing about it, and cannot even speculate far. Jesus came to forewarn us, and fore- arm us for the eternal life, not to relieve our curiosity about a multitude of questions and problems, for which we are not yet probably far enough advanced. Little children must begin with their a h c, not La Place's Mecanique Celeste, or Kant's Pure Reason^ The teacher of heaven knows the law of adaptation as well as the teacher of the village school. Jesus said the practical word, and let the speculative word go. He said, offences must needs come, — such is the constitution of things. He did not attempt to explain what we could not understand, either origi- nal or total, natural or acquired depravity, but he pealed into the startled ear of conscience the eternal law, and love as well as law, Woe to that man by 24 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY whom the offence cometh! When Peter would suggest a temptation, he exclaimed, Get thee behind me, Satan ; showing who and what he knew Satan to be, — evil, sin. But he had no time to correct a host of superstitions, any more than of astronomical mistakes. He taught the mighty and luminous truths, that would at last extirpate all material errors. But though he did not solve intellectually the question of evil, either here or hereafter, — as who but the Infinite Mind can ? — he did solve it spiritually. He gave the clew to the heart out of this labyrinth. To the believing, praying, loving, and working soul this dark shade grows paler and paler, lighter and lighter, until it is swallowed up in the blaze of glory. Evil is thus found to be, as has been said, good in the making. How bravely did the Conqueror of Sin and Death, yet how tenderly, pass onward and upward to the everlasting day, through the hall of Pilate, up to the cross of Cal- vary, through the tomb, to Olivet, until a cloud received him out of their sight ! Can Philosophy give us any explanation of evil, equal to this faith and deliverance of the Son of God? The great heart of humanity for twenty centuries answers. No. Again, we place man no more in the darl^ on one side, and God in the light on the other, on the theory of revelation, than others do on the theory of nature and natural development. For on the natural and philosophical theory, man began low, has crept up OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 25 very slowly, and has not risen very high at last, being on the dark side, and being visited by a little light glimmering through the semi-opaque wall. This deprivation of light, and its slow progressive shining through, is as much to be objected to, be- cause it would seem to conflict with the perfect be- nevolence of the Deity, as to assume the theory that, at certain definite periods, distinct rays of Revela- tion were allowed to perforate the wall of partition, and fall on the pathway of man. Butler long ago settled this class of difficulties by his Analogy, and the argument cannot be shaken. If there are diffi- culties under the system of Revelation, they are not removed, but aggravated, by returning to philosophy and nature. He who leaves the sun, to get heat and light from his own lamp, will find not less, but more, darkness than before. If we consider, then, either the scale, or the filling up of the scale, the quantity or the quality of this wisdom from above, we find it sufficient and fitting. That the man-made creeds of the churches, or the rit- uals of the sects, into which Christendom is splintered up, are able to meet the progressive spirit of society, I doubt ; but the fountain is purer than the streams, and he who drinks there will never thirst more. The great names of history on the side of Revela- tion, who found it sufficient in the toils of state, the researches of science, the flights of poetry and fiction, and the depths of philosophy, are the names of tran- scendent power, whose very mention sends a thrill 26 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY through one as at the presence of superior intelli- gences. Their testimony is no more, to be sure, than that of Cowper's Poor Cottager, or the Shepherd of Salisbury Plain ; for the soul is soul, and man is man, all over the world ; but the monumental names of Leibnitz, Newton, Milton, Bacon, Burke, Cuvier, Washington, bear testimony to faith in the Son of God, as a sufficient Saviour. For the sublime process is ever going on from age to age. The Bible is an unexhausted book. The spiritual aid from heaven is ever flowing. Jesus is personally gone, but spiritually he has diffused him- self everywhere. His words remain, the seeds of truth. The Holy Spirit rains sweet and purifying showers on men's souls. The channels are open, and the ways direct. The battery is ever full charged, the jar is ready, the conductors are in their places. The electric element is in constant transmission. In the Bible God speaks to man, and in prayer man speaks to God. The wants of earth go up to plead before God, and the fulness of the Divine All in All is ever coming down to satisfy these wants. The ladder is erected, and angels are seen ascending and descending. 8. From either proposition, then, of the Divinity or of the Sufficiency of the Religion of Jesus, we might infer its Perpetuity. For God is economical. The nature of Revelation is progressive, as it respects its reception and application by man, but it is com- pleted in its perfect life, its all-comprehending love OP THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 27 and mercy, and its sufficient truth. Can the human eye bear a brighter light than the Sun of Righteous- ness? Can truth be truer, pity tenderer, or love deeper and warmer ? The Hebrew dispensation looks forward to the fulfilment of the Christian, and the Christian looks back to its own germs and beginnings in the Hebrew. But the Christian predicts only its own expansion, not any second Messiah. Illus- trious sons, whom it has nourished, have developed and applied it, — Augustine, Luther, Howard, Cal- vin, Wesley, Channing ; but what single new truth, new spiritual principle, new sentiment, now vivifies society, or looms up in the future, but what is coiled up as a spring, or lies as an element, in the New Testament itself, ready for use ? The Millerites, who look for a second advent of the former Christ, and his reign on earth, and the Rationalists, who anticipate more perfect revela- tions, belong to the same class in their dissatisfaction with Christianity as it is. But what office could the new messenger fill, that is not already occupied by our Lord ? Is there any unoccupied field of spiritual truth, social sentiment, or philanthropic reform ? Je- sus seems to have laid down laws that cover all cases, given a life that has no flaw, and charged a magazine of spiritual forces sufficient to convert the world. Paul could add nothing, John could add nothing. Has any one since, can any one, add any- thing, after the Son of God has spoken ? Men are inveigled into the notion, that, because there are new 28 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY machines and telegraphs, there must be a new Gos- pel. But what can be added to the Perfect ? I can conceive of no brighter representative of the God- head than Jesus. He shines with all the glory we can bear. We mayreverently say, he lived on earth as God would live if God were man, in love, pa- tience, fortitude, goodness, holy joy, and hope. Jesus promised, indeed, that his disciples should do greater works than his. In one sense they have, and will. In their lifetime they may exceed in quantity what he said and did in his lifetime. Paul, for ex- ample, travelled farther, wrote books, as Jesus did not, left behind more words, and probably while living made more individual converts. But what a distance between the Master and his disciple ! The diamond is carbon, and coal is carbon, but what a remove is the jewel from the stone ! When the sun is up, the stars are not seen. Jesus was not exclu- sive, exacting in spirit, monopolized no virtue, car- ried none to excess, has associated his name not with one, but all graces; bade his disciples aim not at him, but at the Infinite Perfection, — Be ye perfect, as God is perfect ; yet who in all the millions of the spirits of the earth has ever approached the wisdom, the love, the holiness, the benevolence, the self-sacri- fice, of the Lord ? His lessons are as living to-day as when spoken on the hills of Galilee and Judea. There is no smell of age on them. None has grown obsolete ; none reads hard ; none jars, when science is spoken of, when music is played, when senates OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 29 deliberate, when the world holds its conventions, or builds its crystal palaces, or when art ransacks heav- en and earth to seek new elements, and apply them to its machines, and change the habits and occupa- tions of mankind. This sweet and holy wisdom glides in like light, wherever we will let it go, and it gilds and beautifies all it touches. The unwhole- some birds of night fly into the dark places at its shining. All our wrong desires shrink away from the clear and loving eye of the Son of God. What is natural we cannot now precisely say. For Christianity has slidden into nature, has entered the stars, and trees, and streams, and invested them with its spirit. The human consciousness is now a Christian consciousness. All in the range of civil- ized nations have had their being more or less soaked and saturated with the sentiments of Jesus. They drank them in early, and they drink them still. We owe more to Christianity than we are aware of, for this thing has not been done in a corner, nor hidden under a bushel. We cannot denude our souls, and say, this is nature, and this is Christ. For he is now an element with the rest, as the air, or the water. His star shines with all the heavenly host. We are born into him, as we are born into day and night. Christianity was supernatural in its origin, like the physical creation, and man himself; but like them, it is natural in its continuance and operation. Whither do even reformers, radicals, and deniers resort for their golden rules, their higher laws, their rebukes of 3" 30 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY wickedness and hypocrisy, their hopes of brother- hood, and their beatitudes, but to the New Testa- ment ? Has it ever been tried and found wanting in the utmost spiritual emergency ? Christianity has two great works always on hand; to save man, and to save mankind; to re-create the bruised and stained soul after a divine type, and to organize society on a new basis. It would take this cold and heavy lump of humanity, and breathe into it a living spirit. It would take this battle-field of the earth, and wash out its bloody spots with the rains of mercy and love. It would take this black and threatening cloud of slavery, and draw out the thunder-bolts from its bosom, and write a rainbow of promise over its portentous folds. It would advance association, the first faint crystallization of the Christian kingdom, into the brotherhood of nations. We take a low view of the progress of mankind, when we dwell chiefly on ^tools and telegraphs. The great human growth is in thought, literature, morals, codes, philosophies. The conquest of new ideas from his spiritual sphere is the sign of the moral coming of the Head and Leader of the human race in his more complete reign on earth. Missions, Ministries at Large, Hospi- tals, Schools, Libraries, Lectures, Freedom, Tem- perance, Purity, Peace, are the heralds of his coro- nation. When Jesus, after some of his disciples had left him, said to those who remained, " Will ye also go OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 31 away ? " he who was ever forward, and whose first impressions were always better than his sober second-thought, ejaculated the glorious confession for himself and all the world, " Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life." Far, far be it from me to condemn any man who differs from me in opinion or faith. To his own Mas- ter he standeth or falleth. Twenty violations of faith are not so bad as one breach of charity. Charity is not only the kindest rule for the heart, but the truest rule for the intellect. Some who deny the super- natural character of Christ are better men morally than some who believe in it. There is such a thing as holding error, rank error, in the spirit of truth, and of holding truth in unrighteousness. But when I look at the Author of the Christian religion, at his deeds and words, his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, when I see how broad and unmistakable are the proofs of his divine mission, when I wit- ness the energy which his religion put into the breasts of a handful of Galilean fishermen, and how it has ever gained and gained against power, cus- tom, fashion, worship, interest, sense, until it has won all contemporaneous civilized empires, I can assign no adequate philosophical cause for so essen- tial and enduring a change, but the authority of a divine messenger. I know good men have lived and died without this regenerating power. But when I consider how easily we are tempted, and how far we go astray, how short is life, and how 32 THE DIVINITY, SUFFICIENCY, AND PERPETUITY certain is its end, I feel the want of this faith in God, in Christ, and in immortality, as the one thing needful, the light of life, the pearl of great price. I find the New Testament emphasizing, with every variety of phrase, the want of this faith, and its in- expressible value. And when I bow my mind, my heart, my will, my life, my whole being, before this commanding authority of Jesus, I feel not humil- iated, but elevated, glorified by the act. In conclusion, to use the words of Dr. Dewey, " I know it is often said. What great harm is there about this system of Naturalism ? There are many beautiful things in it ; what great harm is there in rejecting the miracles ? The substance of Gospel truth and love is left. What need is there of look- ing so very seriously upon a man, though he does assail your faith in a divine interposition? I judge no man's heart ; but I will tell you the state of my own. Very seriously I must look at this question, at any rate. For I feel deep in my heart and whole being the need of such a faith. I must confess that the teaching of Nature is too general to satisfy the wants of my mind ; and that the revealings of my mind, again, are too doubtful and defective for the needed reliance. I am ignorant, I am weak, I am sinful, I am struggling with many difficulties; the conflict is hard, — it seems too hard for me at times ; and nature around me moves on, mean- while, in calm uniformity, as if it did not mind me, and as if its Author did not regard the dread warfare OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 33 that is going on within me. The universe lies around me, like a bright sea of boundless fluctua- tions, — studded with starry isles indeed, but swept by clouds of obscurity; and whither it is tending, and where it is bearing me, I know not. I feel at times as if I were wrapt with an infinite envelop- ment of mystery; and I ask, with almost heart- breaking desire, for some voice to come forth from the great realm of silence, and speak to me. I say, * O that the great Being who made the universe would for once touch, as no hand but his can touch, the springs of this all-encompassing order, and say to me in the sublime pause, — in the cleft of these dread mountain-heights of the universe, — say to me, I love thee; I will care for thee; I will save thee ; I will bear thee beyond the world-barrier, the rent vail of death, and the sealed tomb, away, away, to blessed regions on high, there to live for ever! ' " It has COME ! To my faith, that very word has come, in the mission of Christ. I will not mock conviction with arguments to prove the value of such an interposition. I will only say, * Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again to a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead ; to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away ! ' " DISCOURSE II.- THE MANNEK OF EEVELATION. GOD, WHO AT SUNDRY TIMES AND IN DIVERS MANNERS SPAKE IN TIME PAST UNTO THE FATHERS BY THE PROPHETS, HATH IN THESE LAST DAYS SPOKEN UNTO US BY HIS SON. — Heb. i. 1, 2. In discussing the Manner of Uevelation, the fol- lowing points claim our notice : the Time, Agents and Examples, Languages and Books, Miracles and History, and Institutions and Ordinances, by which the gift of a pure and regenerating faith has been imparted to mankind. 1. Time. — The text refers to this feature of Reve- lation. Communications were made to the fathers by the prophets, and in later times to us by the Son of God. Centuries and ages were required to com- plete the scheme. Man was to be taken at a low and infantile point, and raised up to the fulness of the stature of a perfect manhood ; from " a living soul" to "a quickening spirit." The divine com- passes were to trace one arc after another of the vast circle, and generations were to come and go, before it was finished. By no one sudden blow could the THE MAl^NER OF REVELATION. 35 benevolent design of giving man the true knowledge of God, and his own duty and destiny, be executed. The laws of progress, gradation, and periodicity must be observed in regard to our 4iigher nature. Man was not to stride by one enormous step from the depth of idolatry to the height of a filial and in- telligent worship, but he must go up step by step, and round by round, on the ladder on which angels ascend and descend. One age was to witness one attainment, and another, another. It was much to establish the unity of the Deity ; it was more to de- velop the idea of the Father. We see, therefore, in this characteristic of Revelation, an analogy with other portions of the Divine workings : the growth of the plant, " first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear " ; the age-long preparation of the earth for the abode of man, the progress of the arts and sciences, and the slow advancement of government and civilization from their rudimental to their glorified condition. The necessary element of time is allotted to the germination, expansion, and ripening of the religious ideas. Revelation in this view is an education, begun with one man, prosecuted with his descendants, from one nation to all nations, from a narrow province of Asia over the whole globe. There is a grandeur and beauty in this succession of periods in Revelation, wholly inconsistent with the notion of human invention and fraud. If one man had begun such a system, would other men 36 THE MANNER OF REVELATION. have been found to carry it out through long periods of centuries and thousands of years? The decep- tion is on too gigantic a scale for puny man either to conceive or. execute. He may falsify a date, an act, a single reign, and corrupt a nation by his misgovernment or his writings, but he cannot take the sceptre of the ages in his hand, and plan a fraud, which shall be commenced under Moses, pros- ecuted by kings and prophets, and consummated by Christ and his Apostles, and looking through a range of interminable ages for its entire fulfilment. For link is joined to link in one 'lependent and connected chain, and he must have been an arch-magician, scarcely less than omniscient, who could plan the whole, if it were based on error and fraud. Any. seeming exception to these views arising from the long continuance and wide spread of Buddhism, Mahometanism, and other great systems of error or fanaticism, is obviated, when we recall to mind, that they arose at once in a single man, or generation, and have none of that prospective character belong- ing to Judaism, nor of that retrospective character belonging to Christianity. The length and breadth of Revelation, therefore, are securities of its truth, for the unfolding of each successive stage reveals the finger of Him who sees the end from the beginning, and with whom a thousand years are as one day. A very practical inference from this view of the progress of Revelation is trust in its essential re- sults. If it have been ages in a course of prepara- THE MANNER OF REVELATION. 37 tion and development, it is natural and to be ex- pected that it should also be ages in its application and fruits in the lives, communities, and nations of men. A tree that has been growing so long will long bear fruit. Instead of being near the end of the world, we are near the beginning. This is the morning, not the evening, twilight of the great day of the Lord. But many who are most profoundly convinced of the truth of Revelation falter in their confidence of its results. They believe the Creator has constructed a wonderful moral machinery, so to speak, but they doubt its power and success. They despair of the improvement of mankind, scorn the zeal of reformers, and stand upon it as an incontro- vertible position, that if the world always has been rude and barbarous, it always must be ; there is nothing new under the sun ; the universe can only go on repeating itself. The introduction of the time element into our survey of Revelation corrects this narrow scepticism. As it lifts our eyes to the venerable past, it turns them also to the splendid future. It assures us that Hope is greater than Memory, and that Prophecy surpasses History. All the triumphs which Christianity has thus far achieved are but beginnings. It has not yet entered the heart of the world and carried captive every thought to Christ. But it will go on for ages, to which the lives of individuals are but as drops to the bucket, winning new victories over evil and sin, transform- ing institutions, moulding and coloring more per- 38 THE MANNER OF REVELATION. fectly the heart of humanity after a Divine type and hue, and domesticating the kingdom of God among the sons of men. II. Agents and Examples. — Again, the manner of Revelation is not abstract, but concrete. The ordinary as well as supernatural agencies are em- ployed. If angels are sent, so are men ; if the special messenger raised up, sanctified, and commissioned be the Son of God by excellence, yet a long line of the good and the great bear up the ark of God ; and patriarch, king, and priest, and prophet, and apostle, are seen at different intervals along the majestic procession. In selecting men to act so dis- tinguished a part in the designs of God towards his children, we perceive a part of the same system which we witness in business, art, science, govern- ment, and literature. For if " History be philoso- phy teaching by example," then is Revelation re- ligion teaching by example. In this feature of the mode of communication we see the wise adaptation of means to ends, the use of causes to produce effects, such as we should anticipate from so great a Designer. To every abstruse principle, to every divine sentiment, is assigned some magnified and brilliant example, exhibiting it in a more impressive and really true light, that the world might look on and admire, and catch the contagion of truth and goodness. Hence Abraham stands for faith, Job for patience, Joseph for purity, David for piety, Solomon for wisdom, Daniel for faithfulness, Paul for zeal, and THE MANNER OF REVELATION. 39 John for love. In the changing moods of the human mind, and the different experiences of life, how much good is often done by the presentation of some clear and unquestionable example of a failing virtue re- stored, or an imperfect excellence brightened! We see and admire. We touch but the hem of the gar- ment of some one of this " sacramental host of God," and their virtue passes into us, and we be- come whole and strong. Are we told that errors and imperfections attend the development of divine truth by so many differ- ent characters, and that Moses loses his faith, David his integrity, and that Peter dissimulates ? But in- spiration of ideas does not imply perfection of con- duct any more than it does universality of knowledge, and though the treasure of God be in an earthen vessel, the vessel still remains earthen, coarse, liable to fracture and flaw. Then it is plain that all that is lost by the sins and faults of prophets and apostles is compensated by the boundless variety and combi- nation of intellectual and moral qualities, in all their stages and manifestations. The wants of mankind could only be adequately met by a book of such sur- passing richness and complexity as the Bible. A plain legal statement would not have done it. A simple, colorless, passionless exhibition of the truth, a constitutional abstract and codification of the laws of God in unfigurative, unimpassioned words, would scarcely have converted a soul. But the Scriptures heave with a human life as well as with the Divine 40 THE MANNER OF REVELATION. spirit. They interest our affections, our hopes and fears, our wonder and love. Interesting faces look out upon us from this truly " pictorial" book, picto- rial though artist had never taken his tool to engrave and illustrate it ; some are scarred with passion, some are haggard with fear, but others are sweet and celestial, grave and mystic, with an expression im- bued from a world beyond this. The truth is accord- ingly not merely told, but illustrated, embodied, solidi- fied in acts. For everything good there is an example to win, for everything bad there is an example to warn. So far then as Revelation is history and biography, or changes at times its strain t6 a dramatic and poetic form, it shows a comprehension such as we look for in vain in the Veds of the Hindoos, or the Koran. The Almighty moves forth in his power and love, but he is attended by groups of his chil- dren, toiling, suffering, ecstatic, glorified, showing forth all that is highest and deepest in their nature as spiritual beings, in their attitude towards Him, towards one another, and towards their future and eternal destiny. In this light there are no charac- ters like the Bible characters, and none have seized so profoundly on the imagination of the artist as well as the faith of the saint. These advantages of an historical and charactered revelation are fulfilled not only in relation to the lower and preliminary elements of truth ; but Jesus came also to reduce the loftiest ideal to a life, to give the diamond a golden setting. ** For," says the Epistle to the Hebrews, '^ THE MANNER OF REVELATION. 41 " verily he took not on him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of Abraham. "Wherefore in all things it behooved him to be made like unto his brethren ; that he might be a merciful and faithful High-Priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered, being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted." III. I pass to Languages and Books. — In two prin- cipal languages, Hebrew and Greek, with a few pas- sages in the Chaldee, — in sixty-six books, written by at least thirty-nine authors, — the Jewish and Chris- tian Scriptures present that fertility of human genius, as well as of sacred truth, that fitly entitles it to be called the Bible, The Book. As one book, there is something beautiful in the idea, that between its lids is treasured up an amount of wisdom and truth in reference to life, such as the combined literature of the world in all ages and na- tions might, however diligently sifted and extracted, be challenged in vain to produce. The binding up of the works of the earlier with those of the later dispensation may have the ill effect to put Moses on a basis of equal authority with Christ to some minds, but there is at least the benefit of presenting the whole system, from its earliest dawn to its last development, in one sizable volume. Or, if we come to the New Testament, we find in a range less than that of an ordinary history or tale of fiction the con- densed lessons, life, deeds, death, resurrection, and 4* 42 THE MANNER OF REVELATION. ascension of the Son of God, the characters and teach- ings of his disciples, the history of the young Church? with its early persecutions and controversies, and the predictions of its final glory. Language, it is true, is a human and imperfect method of communication, but so are all mediums. The very fact that we are finite implies of course that all our circumstances, means of access from mind to mind, are likewise finite and imperfect. Revelation in this aspect sustains the closest anal- ogy with all the gifts of God. All are liable to be misunderstood and to be abused, and the truth itself may become a savor of death unto death. In fact wisdom appears in this very provision. For if Rev- elation were demonstration, if the truths of our moral nature were based upon the same ground as those of mathematics, if it were as easy to show, for in- stance, the truth of our immortality, as to prove the forty-fifth problem of Euclid, where would be man's free moral agency, his room for choice, for the work- ing of his affections and preferences, and all those delicate operations of the mind, by which the truth may become, so to speak, his truth, realized, domes- ticated, and lived by him ? The Great "Will of all wishes not to override our wills, nor His intellect to overpower ours. For while His communications have authority, they do not encroach on our freedom. So that even Revelation is not open vision. It has its veil untaken away. We read it in a human lan- guage, in an ancient language or a translation, and THE MANNER OF REVELATION. 43 more or less of error must mix with the instrument of communication. Then too we read it with our erroneous, prejudiced, though truth-seeking minds. The authors also were men of like passions as we are, however exalted by inspiration and by goodness ; and their peculiar illustrations, their feelings, their arguments, their conceptions, all appear on the page. It is in vain to say that the whole value of Revelation is destroyed by its liability to these errors, for then we should include all the blessings of life in the same sweeping conclusion. The very air and sunlight may be tortured and perverted into curses instead of benefits. But that wicked cunning of man does not prove the one to be only a deadly breath, nor the other a noxious beam. Revelation was designed to be a positive and incalculable good to man ; but, giv- en to finite creatures, it must have finite limitations and accidents. Had it been written in great letters of fire across the overarching sky, man could still have his option of reading or not the celestial hand- writing. Had not only Sinai, but every hill and mountain, thundered forth the solemn message of love and warning, the sound would at last die away on listless ears, as do indeed the thunders of the sky, the cataract, and the ocean. God has written on the heavens a sublime lesson ; he has spoken in the winds and waters holy lessons; but they were not suffi- cient. Therefore he came nigh, — to use the Biblical phrase, — he came nigh to man, he spoke in prophet and apostle ; he gave man a book, the book, the book 44 THE MANNER OF REVELATION. of truth and love; and when properly read, when search*ed with the spirit and love of the truth, when used, not as a blind charm or spell to work some mysterious and unintelligible change, but to act in harmony with the intellectual and spiritual laws, to enlighten, to move, and to purify the soul, the book of revelation does, and has, in cases without num- ber, become the book of salvation. " Thy creatures," said' the greatest English philosopher in a prayer, " have been my books, but thy Scriptures much more. I have sought thee in the courts, fields, and gardens, but I have found thee in thy temples." Here are flowers of every hue and fragrance, fruits of every taste and nutriment. The sinner cannot read far without meeting with his warning, nor the saint without hearing his beatitude, nor the sad without alighting upon his consolation, nor the weak without touching the wand of spiritual strength, nor the poor without opening the mine of heavenly treas- ures, nor the rich without being reminded that they brought nothing into this world, and that they can carry nothing out. When did we open this book, and our eyes not rest upon a sentence that seemed to have a meaning for us ? Dr. Greenwood once remarked, that he always liked to sweeten his mind with some text from the Bible before retiring to rest at night. When did we peruse it carefully and re- flectingly, and not find something that we never thought of before ? *' Every time I read the Bible," said Mr. Adams, " I understand some passages which THE MANNER OF REVELATION. 45 I never understood before." When did we bring to this volume our hearts, sick with life, pierced with its thorns, torn and wounded with its sorrows, torpid in moral sense, and not discover what rekindled as by the breath of heaven our dying resolutions, harmon- ized anew to the eternal song of gratitude the heart- strings jangled and out of tune, and sent the thrilling conviction through all the recesses of the inner world, that we belong to God, and God to us, in ties never to be broken? Here angels sing ; here Christ pleads ; here God commands ; here heaven shines ; here eter- nity speaks. Man, weak, misguided, forgetful, rash, earth-bound man, with all his sins, sorrows, and cares heavy about him, but with all the sensibilities of an immortal nature, cannot come to such a book, and not find in its generous abundance, its king's feast, some food for his appetite, some delicacy for his con- valescence, or some bread for his strength. The very things that make it an imperfect book in itself, as a work of art, make it a perfect book for his case as a sinner. Its artlessness is its adaptation ; its variety is its power ; its human aspects are its cords of sym- pathy, and its need of study and research leave man free, so that his goodness shall be his own choice, aided, but not necessitated, by higher power. IV. Miracles. This is one important feature of the manner of Revelation. Some are so constituted, that miracles seem rather to obstruct than advance their faith ; some so pure, that they listen and obey the truth for the truth's sake. But the most of us 46 THE MANNER OF REVELATION. are so earthly-minded that some extraneous means to arouse us from indifference are needed. We want a rap from the Master's desk to remind us that he has something of importance to say, to which he wishes us to hearken. We want a bell rung to call us to the temple of the Lord to receive his gracious message. Miracles are that rap and that bell. They prove nothing by their solitary selves. And one egregious error in reasoning upon them has been the severance of miracles from the great end with which they are connected. It would be hard to defend mir- acles in general, but not the Christian miracles ; for they subserve a great and good end, worthy of the interposing finger of God. We should hardly have expected that disclosures of such radiant truth and love would have been made, unless even the brute elements had broken out into articulate assent to them, the sky opened, the dove descended, and the heavens thundered. All along, too, in speaking of his signs and won- ders, Jesus very remarkably and clearly points out their office. It was that men might believe on him, and believing, have life. They added no weight to the truth as truth, but they did add weight to truth, as received by the ignorant, the degraded, and the inattentive. They spoke to their wonder and mar- vellousness and curiosity, traits that never die out of the lowest specimens of mankind. Miracles were the handwriting, the sign-manual, that the messenger spoke not in his own name, but by the authority of THE MANNER OF REVELATION. 47 his Sovereign. They arrested, seized men's attention. Everywhere Jesus had throngs to hear him, the first marked attraction being that he healed the sick, raised the dead, and did the works which no man could do unless God were with him. His wonderful deeds become as much a part, and a natural and ex- pected part, of his life, as his wonderful words. We sho.uld have thought it strange if so great and good a spirit had not touched the secret springs of the uni- verse : it was a sign and token that God was with him, and when other things agreed with it, a perfect and persuasive sign, — the highest, crowning evi- dence of a Divine mission. Thus viewed, miracles, instead of being an ex- crescence, become of the sum and substance of the revelation itself. Their presence is not strange ; their absence would have been. The burden of proof would seem to be, since such and such other things were, — perfect truth, and love, and a per- fect life, — to show not that miracles were, but that they were not. Then the additional thing to be considered is the evidence of them to us. If we can trust our senses, can we trust imperfect human evidence? Hume says we cannot. He contends, it is more likely that men would lie, or that they would be deceived, than that a miracle would be wrought. Stronger testi- mony, it is true, would seem to be demanded, but the incredibility of miracles is not so great but that it can be reasonably overcome, and we believe has 48 THE MANNER OF REVELATION. been, in the case of the Christian Revelation. A jury of twelve men decide questions of life and liberty upon weaker evidence than is afforded in the Gos- pels for the fact of miracles. Men daily act in the business world and hang their fortunes upon contin- gencies more remote and perilous than he does his faith who receives the miracles in full confidence. But time does not allow the further prosecution of this point. V. Institutions and Ordinances. — The manner of Revelation illustrates its wisdom, not only in its original bequest, but also in its means of perpetuity, diffusion, and influence. Man is addressed as a be- ing of sense as well as of soul. The embodiment of the truth in a book is one instance, and its trans- mission so little corrupted through so many ages, and its spread over the earth, its numerous versions into different languages, all attest the fitness of the means to the end, and verify literally the words that " the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endureth for ever." But Revelation also has its institutions and ordi- nances, and we behold in these likewise the same skill in suiting cause to effect. The institutions of Moses, however puerile they may seem to a Christian, were yet admirably adapt- ed to raise up a low and barbarous people, and give a race of idolaters the knowledge and worship of the One True and Living God. They were in truth an infant school, seemingly very humble and rudimen- THE MANxNER OF REVELATION. 49 tary, but in their place and time, and for their end, just as needful as the most advanced institutions to Christendom. The illustrious end dignifies the means. That end was the best we can conceive of, to bring the creature into communion with the Cre- ator, to raise the fallen child into the arms of the Heavenly Father. And the event testified that the agencies were effectual. The standard of a true faith was established. Idolatry began to retreat. By the lessons and discipline of centuries, the Jews were weaned from their proneness to fall down and wor- ship the works of their own hands, and a way was opened for the still higher truths of the Christian Revelation. Not a thread too many, then, we may say, was there in that old tapestry of the Jewish tabernacle, not a lamb or dove offered for naught in those sacrifices of thousands of years ; not a shekel was levied in vain for that gorgeous temple service, nor a splendor too dazzling encircled the high-priest and his attendants in their garb ; for they were each and all an education to the Jews. And as such, how- ever insignificant as single parts, they grow into greatness and dignity when combined together, and viewed as the polity of the Divine commonwealth ; for while all the rest of men were worshipping stocks and stones, leeks and onions, snakes and croc- odiles, and while polished Greece had her temples to the unknown God, and proud Rome deified her own sons, the Hebrew slaves from Egypt were rising up and paying homage to the Eternal King of kings. 50 THE MANNER OF REVELATION. ^ Bat if we turn to the Christian Revelation, the in- stitutions are more simple, as becomes a more per- fect faith and spirituality. What is adopted from the Jewish system — as the use of one day in seven for religious purposes, baptism, the worship of the syn- agogue, and the Passover celebration — is changed rather by example than specific command, lest too much importance should be attached to them, to cor- respond to the ideas of the new dispensation. The Sabbath becomes a day for religious and social wor- ship, the commemoration on the first day of the week of the resurrection of our Lord. The rite of baptism, by which proselytes were received from Gentilism, is adopted to signify a spiritual washing and purity from sin, and dedication to Christ and God. The synagogue service is converted into the adoration of the Universal Father of Jew and Gen- tile, and the faith of his Son, the Messiah. The Passover becomes the pathetic emblem of " the lamb slain from the foundation of the world," and " the showing of the Lord's death until he come " in the fulness of his religion. The establishment of a Church, or body of believers, in which these things should be perpetuated, was just as natural and neces- sary, as constitutional laws and institutions for the perpetuity of freedom. But no undue stress was laid on them, as all-essential. They come recom- mended by example rather than by explicit precept. But they have existed, and probably will exist in every age, in various modes, but yet expressing the THE MANNER OF REVELATION. 51 same leading purpose. They serve to keep that ethereal spirit of faith and Christian devotion from evaporating, which would otherwise, like some ex- quisite perfume, exhale to the general air and be lost. They seem to be needful to creatures of flesh and blood, of days and mortal life, as remembrances of the great things of the spirit, the monumental facts of a world's salvation and a divine interposition. Forms are not absolute, but relative ; not essential, but important ; they have a place, but it is not the first place. They are a species of gigantic language, whose letters are facts and whose sentences are cus- toms. They are to be observed, not for their own sake, but for the spiritual purport they imply and convey. Thus kept, they are vital and efficacious, and they are never livingly observed without leaving behind them most precious results in refinement and spirituality of character. The manner of Revelation is thus indicative of a Supreme Designer, in relation, — 1st. To the extent of time through which it extended ; 2d. The agencies and examples by which it was effected ; 3d. The medium of languages and books through which it is diffused, after its oral communication ceased ; 4th. The mira- cles by which it was impressively attested to an un- believing world ; and 5th. The institutions and ordinances by which it is perpetuated. In the nat- ural world it is a great awakener of devotion to the Most High Creator, to see in how many ways there is a fitness of means to ends, and kindness shown in 52 THE MANNER OF REVELATION. every least thing. But the economy of Nature is paired by the economy of Grace. To the Christian, the contemplation of the fitness and harmonies and adaptations of Revelation, the spiritual creation, superinduced on the other and natural creation, and constituting its crown of glory, ought even more to inspire a very jubilee of praise and honor to the In- finite Father of Christ and men. DISCOURSE III. REVELATION AND REASON. UNDER8TANDE8T THOU WUAT THOU READEST ? — ActS viii. 30. Surely it was a beautiful exemplification of the worth of conscientiousness in the pursuit of truth, that the honest-minded Ethiopian should receive a special visit from the inspired messenger, to scatter his ignorance with the beams of heavenly light, whilst the walls of Jerusalem held many a disdainful doctor of the law, who was allowed to hug his con- ceited wisdom unvisited by the dayspring from on high. But the eunuch carried in his swarthy bosom, not only a truth-loving and truth-seeking heart, but also the power of judging between truth and error, — a portion of the universal reason, a spark of the divine intelligence, which constituted him rational, and capacitated him to receive the Gospel. To that faculty Philip appealed, and asked him, " Under- standest thou what thou readest ? " With a con- sciousness of its possession, with a straightforward frankness, and withal humility, he replied, " * How can I, except some man should guide me ? ' And he 54 REVELATION AND REASON. desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him." It was not enough that his heart was sincere and his piety acceptable ; his understanding also needed to be instructed in new views of the prophet he was reading, and of the Saviour therein predicted. Philip explained, and the Ethiopian believed. The need of the ^eunuch was not a solitary one then, nor is it so now. The question of the text might be stereotyped for the majority of the human family, Understandest thou what thou readest, — what thou hearest, — what thou seest ? A mournful ignorance, as well as a mournful sinfulness, overshad- ows the world. Ignorance, sometimes necessary be- cause of poverty and labor ; ignorance, sometimes, and oftenest in our day, sinful, being the consequence of mental sloth, or moral indifference ; but sometimes — the worst case of all — ignorance upon principle, conscientious, welcome, intentional ignorance. In testimony of which it requires only to be stated, that, at different periods of the Christian era, the follow- ing doctrines have been openly avowed and re- ceived : — that the truths of the Gospel were not to be spread before the mass, as they lie on the glorious page of Evangelist and Apostle, but were first to be filtered through the heads of popes and priests, and administered to the vulgar as they were able, for- sooth, to bear them, — that learning was a dangerous foe to piety, — •- that an illiterate clergy were the best heralds of the cross, — that reason was not to be em- ployed in matters of faith. Thus, sad to say, igno- REVELATION AND REASON. 55 ranee has been perpetuated and recommended upon principle. Having eyes, men have conscientiously not seen ; having minds, they have, with a sense of duty, not understood. Spotted as the page of his- tory is with drops of blood, wet as it is with tears, foul as it is with vice, it has hardly any darker fea- ture than this, — man divesting himself of his noblest faculty in the pursuit of his noblest end, dethroning his understanding that he might the better learn his duty, putting out his eyes that he might the more clearly see the Sun of Righteousness. It is sad, be- cause it seems like his voluntarily laying aside what makes him human, and confounding himself with the brute race. It is sad, because the principle has hatched a brood of monstrous errors, has killed the vitality of Christian faith at home, and thrown stumbling-blocks in its progress abroad, so that we know not which to call the greatest bane of true re- ligion, conscientious ignorance or wilful perversity. In accordance with these introductory remarks, the present discourse will be devote>d to the vindication and enforcement of the great truth, often overlooked and often misunderstood, that reason is to be used in religion as in other departments of life, and that man's ultimate reliance, for faith and practice, is upon his own mind, aided by God's word. Man is gifted with a faculty or capacity, variously called, in common parlance, reason, mind, common sense, understanding, that searches, apprehends, and judges concerning all that falls within its cognizance. 56 REVELATION AND REASON. By this power, in proportion as it is swayed by hopes and fears, passion and conscience, as it is developed by education or cramped by ignorance, he is able to dis- criminate between truth and error upon all subjects whatsoever. By this he generalizes principles from facts, and predicts facts from principles. Into this cru- cible he throws arts, sciences, philosophies, religions, and the dross and the gold are divided. Upon this foundation he relies for opinions, belief, and practice. It is his sun and centre, his point of departure and his point of arrival. For by it he determines the meaning even of Scripture itself, decides, therefore, what to be- lieve, what do, whom worship, and which of the nu- merous and increasing theories of Christianity he shall adopt as his own. This capacity is a divine principle in the human soul, as well as Revelation a divine communication. Both are the offspring of the Deity. This faculty is divine, as it is the direct handiwork of the Creator, not an inheritance from Adam, for " there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding." From moment to moment, he im- pregnates it with his celestial fire, gives it its con- stant supply, and speaks through it with his venerable authority, which none shall gainsay with impunity. It is divine, as it lifts man above all other creatures of the earth, gives him a citizenship and a fellowship with the spiritual intelligences of higher worlds, and distantly assimilates the finite child to the Infinite Father, enabling us to " be followers of God, as dear children." REVELATION AND REASON. 67 Still man may pervert it. What does he not per- vert? It is not infallible, like Revelation; but it is the instrument which God has given us to ascertain the import of even Revelation. He who renounces it abandons one of the highest prerogatives of his being. He who brings against it " a railing accusa- tion," does nothing less than slander the most illus- trious specimen of the Divine workmanship in the world. He who leaves it undeveloped, or allows it to languish and decay, commits a deadlier suicide than taking the bodily life. He who loses it and becomes insane, is justly deemed the most unfortunate of his kind, as absolved even from moral accountability, dead to the power of improvement, and, for the time being, sunken into a condition as much worse than that of the dumb animal, as there remain to him greater powers for his own and others' injury. Yet, even^^in its wildest aberrations, it retains the glim- merings of its original heavenly light. Its ruins, like those of the fallen archangel, betoken its primi- tive splendor and might. The craziest fanatic some- times speaks astonishing truths, and the walls of the lunatic's abode have been scribbled over with verses of uncommon beauty and power. This faculty, in conjunction with conscience and the moral affections, composes man's religious na- ture, and enables him to receive a revelation. Thus he has a foundation to stand upon. He can under- stand and apply to his wants the gracious communi- cations of his Maker, and thereby " lay hold on eter- nal life." 58 REVELATION AND REASON. Since, then, man was endowed with reason, it was to be expected that, if God made a revelation of his will, it would address itself to, and harmonize with, that capacity in the recipient. Since we were created with religious natures and wants, it would have been a signal and perplexing departure from the custom- ary modes of our Heavenly Father's administration, if the religion he had commissioned to exercise our na- tures and satisfy our wants had warred against them. What was to be expected has been fulfilled. The truths of the Gospel possess the same congeniality witk the human soul, as bread with the stomach, and light with the eye. There is no discrepancy between the workmanship of God in the soul and the ways of God in the Bible, but the nicest concord, at once beautiful and convincing. The Almighty does not^ contradict himself. Keason and Revelation are twin agents, co-workers in the cause of the soul. The mind and truth, the soul and its Saviour, have a re- ciprocal fitness each for each. Revelation is the teacher, Reason the pupil. Revelation assists, per- fects, does not supplant or dethrone Reason. With- out Revelation, Reason were in a cold, pale twilight ; with it, man is surrounded with the pure light and warm flush of day. Without Reason, Revelation were of no more significance to man than to the ox or the dove ; with it, the saving truth is received, loved, and followed. How many works have been powerfully and successfully written to elucidate the internal evidence of Revelation, a large part of REVELATION AND REASON. 59 which consists in the facts of this exquisite harmony between the soul's capacities and needs, and the truths and promises of the Gospel ! But in dwelling thus upon the alliance between Revelation and Reason, it is not in the least implied that man does not receive, through the Scriptures, original, vital communications from his Maker. They teach many things above Reason, but not one syllable against it. What the wisest sages had spec- ulated about with painful uncertainty, Jesus taught with the assurance of consciousness. The human heart, the Divine counsels, and the secrets of eternity were unveiled in his discourse, and stood forth as breathing realities. Old truths sprang into new life and power. What Reason in her best champions had only felt after, never fully found, still less proved and efficiently spread amongst men, was now clothed with gigantic might and celestial beauty, and went forth " conquering and to conquer." He gave us a Heavenly Father, and opened a heavenly hereafter before us, — thus giving the soul, in its dark and dis- couraging struggle with evil, all needed and possible guidance, strength, warning, and consolation. All is plain and simple, yet how glorious ! " I hope," said the distinguished philosopher and Christian, John Locke, " it is no derogation to the Christian religion to say, that the fundamentals of it, that is, all that is necessary to be believed in by all men, are easy to be understood by all men. This I thought myself authorized to say, by the easy and 60 REVELATION AND REASON. very intelligible articles insisted on by our Saviour and his Apostles, which contain nothing but what could be understood by the bulk of mankind." Men like Locke, Milton, and Newton, the mightiest spirits God ever kindled on earth, have testified to the rea- sonableness of Christianity. Locke wrote a book to show it. Revelation has come from their searching investigations, like thrice-refined gold from the fur- nace, bright and undiminished. Its evidences, its doctrines, its promises, its services, are all seen to be founded in nature and common sense, as well as guaranteed by the explicit will of the Most High. They have consequently remained fixed and firm against the assaults of acute infidels, as the steady earth beneath the gusty winds that sweep over its surface. They commend themselves to the good un- derstandings of all, and testify that religion is emi- nently " a reasonable service." But here a distinction is needed that is often neg- lected. Because Revelation does not conflict with Reason, though it soars above Reason, it is far from being asserted that it does not contend against hu- man nature and character, under some of their as- pects. It harmonizes with the higher, but clashes with the lower nature. This is our battle, spirit against flesh, and flesh against spirit ; in taking sides with the spirit. Revelation therefore, fights against the dominion of the flesh. Indeed, in that identical conflict consists its virtue, its use ; just as medicine makes an enemy of disease, but not of the human REVELATION AND REASON. 61 constitution. Religion struggles, as for life, against the passions and appetites in their excesses. Yet this contest is often mistaken for a discordance be- tween Reason and Revelation, whereas it is a nota- ble instance of their agreement. For when Reason was too weak of her single strength to cope with the lusts of the flesh, Revelation descended as a kind friend to restore the reins to the rightful possessor. The strict Scripture doctrines may strive against worldliness and selfishness; they may prick men's hearts with pungent expositions of truth, earnest en- forcements of duty ; — Heaven be thanked that they do I — but they are all justified by Reason. They are never wanting in the most perfect rationality. For example, the truths that God is One, is a Spirit, is to be worshipped in spirit and truth, are hard truths for a sensual world to feel and obey, but they stand good to Reason. The command to love our enemies is probably the hardest in the Bible to comply with, honestly and heartily, but not because it is irrational ; it is seen, when all the circumstances of the case are considered, to be reasonable, sensible ; but because it puts the curb on some of the strongest feelings of the human heart. It is at the antipodes of folly or absurdity, but it enjoins self-restraint, forbearance, forgiveness ; therefore the natural, that is, the sen- sual, selfish man, receives it not, loves it not. So, universally. In one word, Revelation may conflict with man's evil dispositions, and check his wrong tendencies ; it is a noble proof of its divinity and its 62 REVELATION AND REASON. efficacy, that it does, — that it makes alliance with Reason and Conscience against their formidable as- sailants, but with Reason and Conscience it no more wars than with the Supreme Intelligence from which it sprung. Its language is ever that of " truth and soberness," its spirit a " spirit of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." Since, therefore. Reason capacitates man for Reve- lation, and harmonizes with it, we are not surprised, but prepared, to find that Revelation itself enjoins with deep emphasis the exercise of Reason. Per- petually it appeals to the rational principles in man. It invites and urges him to test the disclosures it makes by the light of his God-given spirit, " the elder Scripture." Unlike some of its friends, so far from denying Reason and frowning upon free in- vestigation, it commands the vigorous action of the mind upon its truths as a duty. Its precepts are, to " search the Scriptures ; not to believe every spirit, but to try the spirits whether they be of God ; to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good ; to understand the Scriptures ; to judge what is right ; to be men and not children in understanding ; to be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear." Indeed, what is the aim and sum of Revelation, but God reasoning with and in- structing his erring children, making known to them truths above and beyond what their unaided minds could have reached, setting before them motives REVELATION AND REASON. 63 loftier than this world could furnish, and leading their hopes and aspirations upward to a life of eter- nal bliss and glory ? In the next place, it may be remarked, that facts substantiate what has now been said of the connec- tion between Reason and Revelation, so far as the practice of all denominations of Christians extends. Not one exception can be found. All use reason, all appeal to it, all abide by it, or by what to them is Reason. Where is the sect that does not exer- cise the understanding upon the doctrines of Chris- tianity and the duties of life? Is it said that the Roman Catholic rests his faith on tradition and the infallibility of his Church? Then tradition and the infallibility of his Church are his sufficient reasons for his faith. He keeps on good terms with his un- derstanding. Is it asserted that the mystic believes in emotions, feelings, divine promptings, which he can neither analyze nor understand? Then certain operations of his own mind are his ultimate grounds of faith, and to him entirely rational grounds. He has no quarrel with Reason in his own soul, how- ever mad he may seem to other men. Is it stated that some believe in doctrines which present a down- right contradiction to Reason, — as that there are three persons in the Godhead, and yet only one God ? Still their faith is just as rational to them as mine is to me, who believe that there is only one person in the Godhead. Their faith is placed on that which has to them the greatest evidence of its being true, 64 REVELATION AND REASON. and is accordingly the most reasonable to them. Is it said that they place their faith, not on Reason, but on the Bible ? In that case, the Bible is their Rea- son ; at least, they have reasons for making the Bible their Reason. Thus all sects do, in fact, whatever may be said to the contrary, appeal to Reason, first or last, in one way or another. What are religious controversies, in which all sects have participated, but reasonings on this side and that, to develop the relative strength of each? What are the volumes of Evidences of Christianity, of which every de- nomination has contributed its useful portion, but a solemn appeal at the bar of Reason in vindication of the truths of the Bible ? What are Commen- taries, but helps to make the Scriptures better under- stood, to take faith off of the ground of implicit trust, and plant it more on that of personal knowledge and conviction ? What are Sunday schools, sermons, lectures, tracts, periodicals, but means to make more intelligent, as well as more pious Christians ? Is it not most evident, from this review of the beliefs and operations of all Christian denominations, that they use Reason in religion as in other departments of life ? These interrogations are so plain, that none but affirmative answers can be given them. It will therefore be seen to be a mistake, or to be mere affec- tation, to say that Reason is not to be employed in matters of faith and practice, when in truth all use it habitually, and must use it more or less, or sink themselves to the level of the irrational brute. No REVELATION AND REASON. 65 man can, no man does, proceed one step in belief, in interpretation, in conduct, without the guidance of Reason. Wherein, then, it may occur to some minds, are Unitarians, or Rational Christians, different in respect to this point from other sects, which would perhaps deem the epithet Rational to be a stigma ? They are said to be different ; it is rumored all over the country that they are a denomination by themselves ; Christendom looks upon them with suspicion. What is their dark offence? They reason, but so does the Roman Catholic. They use their under- standings in religion, but so does the Trinitarian. They throw the lights of Biblical criticism upon the Holy Scriptures, that they may the more nearly arrive at the true sense of the inspired volume, but so equally does the Episcopalian. What then is their crime ? Wherein is the point of difference ? Simply, so far as yet appears, the distinction consists in their arriving at different results by the exercise of Reason ; not in their using Reason, and other sects not using it. They lay stress upon the tenet which all actually employ. They avow earnestly the principle which all adopt, if we may judge of their rules by their practice. But here a new element appears. It is charged upon them that they make Reason their goddess, that they exalt her above Revelation. If this were so, then they would indeed be a unique sect. But is it so ? Let us see whether, in matters of faith G* 66 REVELATION AND REASON. and in the interpretation of the Scriptures, they do not take the same course which all take. First, in regard to Faith. It niay be laid down as an axiom, that belief always rests on evidence of some sort, and that where there is no evidence, it is quite impossible that there should be any be- lief; the nature of faith precludes it. The evidence may be small, — may be unsatisfactory to the ma- jority of men; but evidence of some kind, of some degree, is indispensable. If a doctrine is positively irrational, it may be a call with here and there a mind to put forth more faith to embrace it, but with most it would prevent all faith whatever. But even in this extreme case, the Reason that is wanting in one direction is supplied in another, else faith were still an impossibility. Thus some Christians believe in doctrines which they acknowledge are irrational, because the creed, or Church, or Bible, as they sup- pose, upholds them ; and then the creed, or Church, or Bible, is their reason and evidence, though all other reason and evidence be against them. The Unitarian exercises his reason in settling the founda- tions of his faith ; thus doing as all others do, and must do. But the question arises. Does he not set Reason above Revelation ? So it has been reported everywhere. No, never. He finds no occasion for such a competition between the dictates of his mind and the doctrines of the Scriptures. What Revela- tion teaches, he believes in, because it is perfectly rational, as well as because Revelation teaches it. REVELATION AND REASON. 67 Is it inquired, whether he would believe in a doc- trine that was entirely irrational, provided the Scrip- tures contained it ? His reply is, that he is not re- duced to this alternative of crucifying Reason or renouncing Revelation. The supposition is impossi- ble. Christianity never does teach any thing but what is reasonable, and therefore nothing but what he can and does believe. It were a daring propo- sition to advance, that God has contradicted, in one mode of his communication of truth, what he teaches us by another. It is just as absurd to ask, whether we would believe an irrational doctrine because Revelation taught it, as whether we would do a vicious act because Revelation enjoined it. The cases are parallel, but neither is for a moment sup- posable. The Bible violates neither Reason ncr Conscience : it offers no irrational doctrine for us to believe, — it commands no vicious deed for us to do. To the view now presented of the necessity of in- telligibleness in what we believe, and of evidence as a basis for faith, it is objected, that we are surround- ed by mysteries, understand little in reality, and believe in many things which we cannot explain. Two things are confounded in such an objection, which ought to be carefully distinguished. I may believe in that which is above Reason, but that is quite different from believing in that which is against Reason. I may believe in mysteries, or, in the popu- lar sense of that word, in many incomprehensible things, — things above men's experience and knowl- 68 REVELATION AND REASON. edge. I believe, for example, in the existence of God, which I can neither comprehend nor explain. But observe, I believe in the fact that he exists, which fact is supported by most abundant proof; I do not believe in the mode of his existence ; I am not assured how he fills all with his august presence, and I can only believe as far as I have evidence for my belief. So far as his existence is a fact, I believe in it; so far as it is a mystery, I cannot believe in it, because I have no grounds for belief. I believe in the revolutions of worlds around worlds, through all the boundless heavens above and below, but I cannot understand nor elucidate the nature and essence of those centripetal and centrifugal forces that bind those stupendous masses in the exactest harmony as they fly on their swift courses. I be- lieve in the fact for which there is good evidence, not in the mystery, the how, for which there is none. The secrets of attraction and gravitation cannot be classed amongst matters of faith, because there is no proof what those secrets are. The facts are all that can come within the bounds of credence. Nobody else, any more than the Unitarian, believes in irra- tional doctrines, that is, doctrines irrational to the believer. It cannot be done. The doctrines must move over from the ground of No-Reason to the ground of Reason, before they can be believed. Evi- dence of many kinds there is, but evidence of some kind there must be, or belief is dead. The most absurd things in the world have been believed, not REVE1.ATION AND REASON. 69 as they were absurd, but as they had some basis of Reason, however narrow or shallow. To speak of Faith without Reason would be to say that there were rivers without fountains, and effects without causes. In exercising his Reason in matters of Faith, the Unitarian does no more than, nor differ- ently from, all other Christian believers. Next, turn to th^ interpretation of the Scriptures. Unitarians are accused of setting their reason up as a standard above the Bible. But they do no such thing. They but do what all do. If they err, then all err, in using their minds to understand the word of God. The Bible is our standard. What it teaches respecting truth and duty, we receive, we believe in, with implicit love and trust But the grand, dividing question is. What does it teach ? It is not the same thing, the same sense, to all. The Bible is nothing more nor less than the meaning of the Bible, and that meaning varies with every mind. It teaches one set of doctrines to the Baptist, an- other to the Quaker, another to the Methodist. " Men labor," as Cecil acutely remarked, " to make the Bible their Bible." In fact, every sect has its own Bible, inasmuch as each has its own sense of the book. The Scriptures, then, are the standard, but it is a different standard to different men. Re- ligious controversy is the struggle which each de- nomination makes to render the Bible their Bible. Reformation in the Christian Church is but the con- stant bringing of man's sense of Sacred Writ nearer 70 REVELATION AND REASON. to its absolute sense, the one God gave it ; the ad- vancement of the imperfect human idea up to the glorious clear significance of the Divine Mind. Nor is this difficulty of arriving at the absolute truth of the sacred volume escaped by the instru- mentality of creeds. For if not at first, which is generally the case, yet afterwards, the creed, like the Bible, conveys different senses to different minds, and so what was designed for an explanation soon needs itself to be explained. Hence arise ambigui- ties and discussions ; the sectarian banner becomes itself the signal of war ; and old churches and assem- blies fall to pieces to be reorganized into new ones. Since, then, the Bible, though the directory of faith and practice, is one thing to one man arid another to another, according to what each under- stands it to teach ; since there is variance of belief even touching fundamental points, — what is done by all, but to fall back on their own minds, enlight- ened by Revelation, as the last criterion ? Each one claims and allows the supremacy of the Scriptures, but he must rely on his own mind to tell him what they teach. Probably no two persons, who have read the Bible understandingly, and reflected ear- nestly on religious subjects, think exactly alike. The more men reflect, the more they differ, and the smaller their differences become, because they ap- proximate continually nearer to absolute truth. Modern civilization and free thought multiply sects in profusion, but their influence is to make " the REVELATION AND REASON. 71 crooked straight, and the rough ways smooth," and to unite all upon the essentials of Christianity. From these remarks, it will be clear to every can- did mind, that in regard to the interpretation of the Scriptures, as well as in matters of faith, Unitarians proceed upon no novel and dangerous principle of using their Reason, none which is not equally adopted by others as their rule. Precisely like other denom- inations, they refer to the Bible as their standard, and to their minds to inform them what that stand- ard requires. They would not only read, but under- stand, the word with the faculties God has bestowed for that purpose. They hold that he intended his Revelation should be understood, as indeed with what propriety could it be called a Revelation, if it were not intelligible ? Where were the value of faith if it were placed at random ? — where the merit of conduct, if action were indiscriminate ? In pursuance, then, of what has been intimated, it is proper to repeat, that Unitarians differ from other Christians, not in their using Reason, or ex- alting it above Revelation, but in their coming to different conclusions by the exercise of that faculty. This is " the very head and front of their offending." Reason teaches them to believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures; the miracles of Christ; his un- questionable authority as the Son of God and Saviour of men ; in the reconciliation, or atonement, of men to God through him ; in the influences of the Holy Spirit, the immortality of the soul, and 72 REVELATION AND REASON. future retribution. These they receive and cherish, as their guide in life, their hope in death. These, and other subsidiary doctrines, kindred to them, seem to be as clearly taught in the Scriptures as lan- guage allows. They cannot believe in the Trinity, in total depravity, in the popular doctrines of the atonement and of election, because they do not find them in the Bible to believe. Revelation, as well as Reason, disowns them. But they would rather their "right hand might forget her cunning," and their " tongue cleave to the roof of their mouth," than do any violence to the blessed charter of their privileges and their hopes. They would not for worlds be guilty of perverting one word that fell from the sin- less lips of Jesus, or the inspired tongue of the Apos- tles. They use their own minds in determining what the Book of Heaven teaches, because they deeply reverence, not because they " lightly esteem " that volume. But, with Paul, " they had rather speak five words with their understanding, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue." They feel that Reason is fallible, therefore they cannot trust an- other man's, but must hearken to their own. Rea- son is fallible ; therefore they would use it with great care and activity, that it might become more and more trustworthy. Reason is fallible; it may be dimmed by worldliness, or warped by prejudice, or stormed by passion; therefore they cannot dogma- tize, for they may be in the wrong, and others in the right. They marvel how others can dogmatize, for REVELATION AND REASON. 73 they may be in the wrong, and themselves in the right. They see no danger in the use of Reason, they see every danger from its neglect and abuse. Finally, they feel a solemn and awful responsi- bility, resting upon every individual soul, to decide for itself, according to its best light, what it shall be- lieve and do. The interest here is personal, not social. Human authority is not admissible. Calvin cannot decide, Arminius cannot decide, for me ; I must decide for myself. God has put it upon me, and I cannot, I dare not, shake off the responsibility. It will not do for the Council of Nice, nor the Synod of Dort, nor the Assembly of Westminster, to step in between me and my Master, and determine for me what he taught, and what I must receive. Solemn interests I have at stake. A mighty business is upon my hands, which cannot be done by proxy, though popes and councils should tender their aid. The soul, in such high matters, must do its own work with God's assistance, not with man's inter- ference. My own free mind is worth more to me in settling the grounds of my duty and my destiny, than the wisdom of the whole world besides, backed by all its great names, and its vast authority. My conscience, my judgment, my reason, — these living principles in my soul, set there by God, kindled by his inspiration, fanned by his spirit, — these hold me accountable to him with an adamantine strength. If through them I have approved myself to him, my Almighty Father, what are the reproofs of friends, 74 REVELATION AND REASON. and the slanders of enemies, and the thunders of councils and assemblies ? — The mere blast of an ad- verse wind, the peltings of the outward storm, — they cannot touch the quiet peace of the heart. But — fearful contrast ! — if I have from the motives of temporal expediency, from the fear or the favor of man, wrested my conscience, done despite to the good spirit, and embraced a creed, or led a life, which is condemned by that mind God gave me as a gov- ernor, woe is me ! I am undone, the sweet approval of the heart is gone. " If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God." DISCOURSE IV THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS/ FOR THEKE 18 ONE GOD, AND ONE MEDIATOR BETWEEN GOD AND MEN, THE MAN CHRI8T JESUS. — 1 Tim. ii. 5. My Christian Friends and Brethren: — The work of erecting a house of public worship has been completed, and you have now assembled to dedicate it as a holy offering to Almighty God. To you this must be a joyful occasion, for your laudable wishes have been accomplished under a gracious Providence, and your sacrifice is ready to be offered. You have now come to hallow these walls for the first time — may the last be far distant! — with de- vout meditation, prayer, and thanksgiving to the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. You would, in accordance with the ancient example, " keep the dedication of this house of God with joy." " You enter into his gates with thanks- giving, and into his courts with praise." And here let us consider for a few moments, why * A Discourse delivered at the Dedication of the Unitarian Church in Windsor, Vermont, December 9, 1846. 76 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. a joyful and a grateful spirit should fill the heart on this day. Why have you laid these foundations, and reared these walls, and garnished them with beauty ? We answer, for the most glorious object in the uni- verse ; for the solemn worship of the Infinite Creator, for the preaching of the Gospel of Christ, the conver- sion of sinners, the culture of the spiritual life, the salvation of immortal souls. The world knows nothing so great as these ends. There are splendid edifices upon the earth, — the mighty pyramid, the colossal amphitheatre, the magnificent pagoda, the golden palaces of kingdoms, the massive fortresses of war, the brilliant galleries of art, the proud gates of cities, the storied columns of victory, the marble monuments of the dead, which the daily sun looks down upon, as he turns his glory upon the succes- sive countries of the rolling globe ; but we hesitate not to say, that he beholds no structure, built with human hands, devoted to so high a purpose as the humblest Christian sanctuary. There may be no pillars of porphyry or gilded tapestry for the outward adorning, but there is the purer glory of a heavenly consecration and a godlike use overshadowing its lowly walls. The cloud of the Divine Presence hovers over it. It is irradiated with light from the heaven of heavens. It is as the ladder, seen in the vision of old, whose top reached to heaven, whereon angels were ascending and descending, and an alliance was kept up with the skies. It is as the antechamber to the spiritual world, where man comes to humble him- THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 77 self under the mighty hand of God, and plead the promises of his everlasting covenant. " How dread- ful is this place ! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." But after speaking thus in general of the high and holy object to which this house of Christian worship is devoted, it is natural and proper, on an occasion which brings together so many friends and strangers, who take a deep interest in your welfare, and inquire after your ways, that you should desire some more particular statement of the faith as held by Unita- rian Christians. To some it may be unknown and new, and to others odious, and odious because un- known. To those to whom it is dear, its discussion will be welcome. To those 'who are anxiously in- quiring for the way of truth, to speak of it may be timely and profitable, and, we would hope, to all not without interest. For if we feel ourselves to be grounded in the truth, we shall not fear lest the weak- ness of others' errors will overcome the strength of our truth. God grant both to speaker and hearer the spirit of truth, candor, and charity ! To begin with the foundation doctrine of a Great First Cause of all things : as Unitarian Christians, we believe, in the language of the text, in " one God," and in only one. " The first of all the com- mandments," said Christ, "is. Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord." We contend that by one God is as strictly meant one being, as, when a man is spoken of, one being, and only one, is under- 7» 78 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. stood, and not two persons, or three in one. The use of the personal pronouns in the Scriptures de- monstrates this position. The Jews walked in the light of revelation, and never worshipped, and do not to this day, more than one God. Only one God, supreme and indivisible, is revealed in the Old Tes- tament, and, as we believe, only one in the New. Nature knows but one Creator, Providence but one Guide, and the soul but one object of the highest adoration. It is the bane of idolatry, that it leads men to worship gods many, and lords many ; and it is a fearful injury to the pure religion of Jesus to present to the worshipper more than one God to be adored, and from whom we supplicate spiritual fa- vors. For if we address two or three persons or natures or distinctions in the Godhead, we must have two or three separate beings in our mind at the same time, and thus be distracted in our attention, while our thoughts are flitting from one to another ; for it is an impossibility to regard three as literally one, or one as three. Happily, however, these diffi- culties do not often occur, so much stronger is the word of God than human traditions and theories, for we seldom hear even from Trinitarians themselves any prayers except those directed to the Father Su- preme, and we would only ask that what is disused in practice might also be stricken from the creed. But not to dwell longer on this tenet of the abso- lute oneness of God, which- gives the name of Unita- rian to our body, we pass to another point in our THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 79 belief, which we would fain bring out into clearer view than has been done in past ages of the Church. What adds an immeasurable interest to our faith in one God is not so much the revelation of what are called by theologians his natural attributes, as his unity, omnipresence, and omniscience, — though that is much, — as of his moral character, most impres- sively condensed in those words which our Saviour so often used, " Our Father." The one God is our Parent. What a word, if we will think of it, is here I In our familiarity with it, we do not perceive its strange beauty, its infinite tenderness. God, our Father! the humble word of time and earthly re- lationship, the household title, the ejideared name of home, lifted up on high and applied to Him who is the Infinite King of the Universe, the Mighty Maker and Head of worlds and systems and beings without number or bound ! What kindness is here, and what knowledge of human wants ! Could there have been a more comforting, enlightening, strength- ening, cheering revelation out of the depths of in- finity and eternity, than this of the Fatherhood of God ? Was it not the very last blessing which Heav- en even in its inexhaustible riches could bestow, to whisper in the ear of the tempted, stricken child of mortality, " Thy Father in heaven " ? In heaven, and yet thy Father ! So high, so pure over all, and yet setting his love upon the feeble creature of the earth, caring for him with an infinite wisdom, and pitying and pardoning him with an everlasting mer- 80 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. '' cy ! There is nothing like it in the world. It is the crown of the Gospel of Christ. It is the essence of Christianity. When men come around us with their dark doctrines, that seem almost to forbid the sun rising on the evil and on the good, and the rain de- scending on the just and on the unjust, we ask no stronger refutation than this, — " Our Father, who art in heaven." When our friends are few, and our days evil, and our hearts fail us, we will open the blessed volume of inspiration, and seeing there these all-illuminating, all-cheering words. Our Father, all shall be well again. This shall be our light, our cordial, our anchor of eternal hope. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In connection with this doctrine of the fatherly character of God, and as a consequence from it, we believe in, and with all earnestness would proclaim, the Brotherhood of man with man, without excep- tion of color, condition, or country. God is our Father ; therefore man, his creature and the child of his love, is our brother. These terms father and brother are figurative, taken from our earthly rela- tionship, and therefore imperfect in a degree. For God is more than father, man is more than brother. In both cases, the tie is spiritual and immortal. It relates not to the circumstances in which we are born, as do these bonds of kindred, but to the very essence of our being as moral and spiritual creatures. This great doctrine of human brotherhood is the key- stone to Christian morality, as the doctrine of God THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 81 our Father is to Christian piety. In obedience to it, all wars should for ever cease, all slavery be over- thrown, all empty distinctions exploded, all dissen- sions in the Church be pacified, and everywhere man love, sympathize with, and labor for man as a broth- er. Haste, O, haste the happy time, when such shall be the state of the world ! In the next place, we would emphasize our faith in Jesus Christ, our Saviour. Though often accused of denying the Lord that bought us, and making the cross of none effect, we nevertheless cherish this faith of salvation from our sins in the name and through the mediation of Christ as the chief thing of life, the highest manifestation of the paternal interest of God in mankind. " God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." We believe in Jesus Christ, not as God the Son, for we find no such words between the lids of the Bible, though they often may be found in human works, but as the Son of God, the Saviour of sinners, the Mediator between God and man, the Intercessor with the Father. His life was without spot or blemish of sin ; his example of all he taught, perfect ; his teach- ings, the truth; his labors, love; and his death, in- stinct with a mighty efficacy to reconcile, not God to man, but man to God, and to draw earth within the circle of heaven. We cannot admit that Christ was literally God, or equal with the Almighty ; for he said, " My Father is greater than I " ; and at 82 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVEREIi TO THE SAINTS. another time, " But of that day and that hour know- eth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." And when he said at another time, " I and my Father are one," he else- where explains what he meant by that oneness, for he prayed that his disciples " might be one, even as we are one." It was not therefore identity of nature, but union of affection, will, and effort. We cannot add a second and third being to the Divine Unity, nor can we divide Christ into two beings or natures, one finite and the other infinite, one human and the other divine, because we cannot find any authority for it in the Scriptures. The same text that says God is one, also declares that the Mediator is one. " For there is one God, and one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus." We cannot discern a single intimation of the twofold nature of Jesus, either in his own teachings, or those of his Apostles, or in the Christian faith of the first two centuries of our era ; and we are constrained there- fore to regard it as a mere unauthorized inference from certain texts, a pure theological fiction, to ex- plain the difficulties of the Trinity. Christ may have applied to him both terms, God and man, in a figurative sense, but literally he was neither one nor the other, neither " very God " nor " mere man," but an exalted being midway between the two, or, as the record says, a Mediator. He is like no other, and has neither predecessor nor successor. As there is but one God, so there is, there will be, there needs THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 83 to be, but one Christ. He is his own, and not an- other's, the first-born of a new moral creation, the second Adam to lead on the generations of a new spiritual race. Human classifications are at fault. A new being has appeared upon the earth. We be- lieve, indeed, most firmly in the divinily of Christ, namely, that the spirit was given him not by meas- ure, and that he was created, authorized, and sent on a divine mission to save the world ; but we reject his deily^ that is, that he is the second person in the Godhead, " equal in power and glory " with the Supreme Father ; not because it is a mystery, for there are many mysteries connected with religion, as there are many in nature and providence; but because it is an absurdity, and a palpable contradic- tion in terms. As it regards our views of Salvation, we hold that Jesus Christ saves mankind from sin by working a moral change in their hearts, and making them bet- ter, holier, spiritually-minded ; not that he can save a single soul in its sins, by presenting himself as a substitute to avert the doom of the transgressor, and by suffering in his own person in the garden and on the cross all the mountains of miseries and agonies which would otherwise have fallen upon the millions of millions of guilty beings for having broken the laws of their Maker. His mission was not a piece of diplomacy, contrived in the cabinet of Heaven, to clear the wicked by punishing the innocent, but a breathing forth of the love of God, an expression of 84 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. his interest and mercy, an instrumentality to work a change, not above, but below, — not in the Divine purposes, but in human life, — to effect the regener- ation and sanctification of souls lost in sin. He preached repentance, and, by a necessary conse- quence, remission of sins ; for God is both ^^ faithful and just^ as well as merciful, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." He represented the difficulty as not on the part of God, who is, and ever was, ready to have mercy on the returning prodigal, but on the part of man, who is slow to feel his sins as sins, to be sorry for them, and to forsake them. Jesus came not, therefore, to soften God's law, which is ever the same, but man's heart, which may be changed. He taught, entreated, lived, died, that men might listen as never before to truth and duty, — that their whole nature might be sancti- fied to God, and every thought be brought into obe- dience, — that the will might bow to the supreme will, — that reason and conscience might become to man as the veritable voices of his Maker, — that the two great moral affections, connecting man to man in benevolence, and man to God in piety, might be quickened into living exercise, — and that the pure spiritual aspirations, faith and hope, might take hold of the immortality opened before them, — and that thus, altogether, m,an, instead of bowing himself down and burying himself in the narrow, selfish, sen- sual interests bounded by the flesh and time, might take into view the glorious range of a never-ending THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 85 state of being beyond the grave, and live to virtue, heaven, God. Hence his lessons come to us, when we are ourselves, as a ray of light to the bewildered traveller, as a draught from the cold spring to a thirsty soul, as the tear of sympathy to the friendless sufferer. Nothing has ever been so beautiful as the Sermon on the Mount, nor so pathetic as the parable of the prodigal son, nor so solemn as the judgment scene, nor so searching as the condemnation of the Scribes and Pharisees. Let them that have ears hear, and let them that have eyes read, and let them that have hearts feel, these divine discourses of the Gospel, until they shall penetrate through the com- mon crust of moral insensibility and worldliness, and reach with a healing power the last recesses of the soul. Again : we believe in the Holy Spirit, so frequent- ly mentioned in the New Testament, not as a dis- tinct person, being, or even distinction of the God- head, but as that Godhead itself, God himself, the Father, the Great and Good Spirit, in action, giving Christ his power and wisdom, enabling the Apostles to work miracles, ever guiding, blessing, and saving all, spreading light and love in boundless tides over the moral creation, and at all times and in all places, would we but be sensible to it, gently but powerfully striving, though with perfect consistency with human freedom, to win the sinner from the error of his way. We think there are some who speak of the spirit of God too much, as the ancient prophet did, when ridi- 86 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. culing the heathen deity before the priests of Baal, — " He is pursuing, or he is on a journey, or perad- venture he sleepeth, and must be awaked." They speak of times and places, unmindful that the spirit of God is in all places at all times, filling and em- bosoming all, and if unperceived, it is by the dull mind, and if unfelt, it is by the insensible heart. It is the common faith that God is wisely and benevo- lently working throughout the realms of Nature, the material universe ; shall we atheistically exclude him from the moral world, from the kingdom of mind, thought, conscience, affection, aspiration ? No. We rejoice to believe that he is with the soul, helping its infirmities, and providing for its wants. We would not give up this faith for worlds. It is the encour- agement of prayer. It is the motive to moral effort. It is the blessed assurance that we are not engaged single-handed against the principalities and powers of evil, — the omnipotence of habit, the torrent of example, the fury of the passions, the acquired depravity of the heart, and the cares and follies of the world ; but that we have " a strong-siding cham- pion," a divine helper, who will suffer no faithful heart to fail in the moral battle, but will bring us off conquerors and more than conquerors. Yes, one of the highest ends of Christ's mission was to direct man to the Comforter and Sanctifier, and to inspire confidence in his heart of the alliance of spiritual powers in his behalf, working around him and with- in for his redemption. THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 87 In regard to those questions which have so long agitated the world under the head of the Calvinistic and Arminian controversies, we believe there is, as in the topics already touched upon, a medium point, nearer the truth than either side. The law of human opinions is in all matters too much a law of extremes, but nowhere more so than in theology. Man is depraved, — we cannot open our eyes, and not see it, — but not totally depraved. He is born weak, not evil. He has depraved himself. God " made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions." His mind is not naturally in a state of sin, for sin is the act of a moral agent, any more than his body is naturally in a state of disease. Sickness is contrary to nature ; so is sin the moral disorder contrary to nature. And as we should not take one to the lazaretto or pest-house to exhibit the natural powers of the physical, so we should not seize on crimes and vices as a description of the spiritual constitution. All the propensities are good, all the appetites and passions were inserted for a benevo- lent purpose, and only when they usurp the throne of reason and conscience, and renounce their allegiance to God, do they change from convenient servants into terrible tyrants. Who would wish or dare to cross out one God-given faculty, were it even one that allied him most to the earth ? It were a horror to think of it. Man would then lose his wonderful and fearful adaptation to two worlds, and would be cast forth a poor, mutilated creature. Let us not 88 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. think to improve upon the creative skill of the Framer of his body, any more than upon that of the Father of his spirit, nor libel His work, nor make Him the author of shi. We contend earnestly for the moral freedom of man, and that he is responsible only so far as he' is free ; that God has richly provided the means and motives of spiritual life, and it depends on him whether he will accept the terms. We cannot in- deed do anything, lift a finger, move a step, with- out God ; but we have as much assurance that he will help us, if we help ourselves, in things spirit- ual, as in things material ; in cultivating the soul, as in cultivating our fields. If we will not sow, we shall not reap, is not more true in the earthly than in the Divine husbandry. In a single word, the ob- stacle is wdth man. God has provided everything, has made man in his own image, little lower than the angels, crowned him with honor and glory, given him will, reason, conscience, affection, aspiration, set before him the choice of good and evil, life and death ; and, to crown all, he speaks audibly from heaven, and says, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased ; hear ye him." Man can- not change his heart from sin to holiness without God; so he cannot without his cooperation think or stir. But if he will go to work in good earnest, he will soon find there is a mighty power working within and around him, through ten thousand benefi- cent agencies and influences, to will and to do of its THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 89 good pleasure. To the seeking, praying heart, all nature, all providence, all grace, all heaven and earth, time and eternity, bring their holiest contributions of light and love. ** All things work together for good to them that love God." " How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation ? " The remaining points of belief are the immortal- ity of the spirit, and a future state of righteous retri- bution, of suffering to the bad and of happiness to the good, as in the present life, only with greater cer- tainty and more exact correspondence. Some assert that a portion of the human family will be saved hereafter, but that the greater part will be sentenced to unchangeable and eternal woe. Others assert that all will be saved, without respect of persons, or distinction of moral character. These doctrines of Calvinism and Universalism are both plain and in- telligible, though, we contend, erroneous extremes. We would proclaim a doctrine, if possible, equally plain and intelligible, — that it is rendered to every man in the future world precisely according to his deserts, or, as the Scriptures say, " according to that he hath done in the flesh, whether good or bad." All the good will not enjoy alike, — Lazarus as much as Abraham, — because all are not equally good, and so are not equally prepared to enjoy God and his works. Each vessel may, however, be full ; the ab- solute happiness may be the same, though not the relative, for every vessel may not have the same ca- pacity. On the other hand, all the wicked may not 90 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. suffer equally, because there are different depths of guilt ; and surely the imperfect justice of human tri- bunals, that punishes crimes according to their tur- pitude, must more than be equalled by the equity of the Divine. We believe in a retribution of degrees, of equity, of benevolence, not of " vindictive jus- tice " ; and that suffering in all worlds and all states of being, judging by the character of God and the analogy of this life, and the end of man's creation, and by the spirit if not the letter of Scripture, must tend towards a final restoration to virtue and happi- ness. Still, we presume not to pry into futurity. It becomes us to fear rather than speculate concerning the future state of the wicked ; for solemn are the warnings of the sacred word, and fearful the glimpses it gives us into the condition of the impenitent sin- ner. Of the continuance of future punishment we are not absolutely informed, and we must leave it in the hands of Him who will employ suffering as long as it is needed, and no longer. For to predicate ab- solute eternity of future woe from the terms in the Bible, everlasting and eternal, and other words of like import, is to overlook the analogy of faith, and comparison of Scripture with Scripture ; for these terms are elsewhere applied to things of indefinitely long period, things not in their nature unending, and therefore limited by the connection in which they stand, — as the Jewish ritual and priesthood, the pos- session of the land of Canaan by the chosen people, and other things of a similar nature. THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 91 I have thus made a statement in plain and general language, not an argument, of the faith of Unitarian Christians. Many will perhaps differ from it in part ; a few may agree with it entirely. Agreeing or disagreeing, may we look at the subject fairly and candidly, and make up our minds as in the sight and fear of God. We are not responsible for others, but for ourselves. " To his own master every man standeth or falleth." We believe, yet further, that our faith has most powerful auxiliaries to spread it, and eternal founda- tions to support it, and therefore that it cannot be overthrown, though all the powers and priesthoods on earth should war against it, but that in the end it will leaven Christendom. For we appeal to the Bible, both the Old and New Testament, against creeds, confessions, traditions, customs, however ancient or authorized by man. We say, " To the law and to the testimony," not in the mere " letter which killeth, but in the spirit which giveth life." We appeal to conscience, the moral sense in man of right and wrong, the echo of the Divinity ; and we are certain that it is the ally of a just theology, of equitable views of God's character and attributes, of accountableness, sin, and punishment. We appeal to reason, twin-sister of conscience, not as in rivalry of the Scriptures, but in beautiful harmony therewith ; and we feel and know, by good experience, that, in the unprejudiced, unsophisticated 92 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. common-sense of mankind, our doctrines will gain an immovable hold. "We do not hold to reason above revelation, but to revelation interpreted, the only way it can be, by reason. We appeal to the affections and aspirations of the heart, and we find these to be our allies ; in poetic words, — " And exultations and agonies And love, and man's unconquerable mind," which yearn after a higher state of the soul, a purer condition of society, and the perfect reign on earth, as in heaven, of " liberty, holiness, love." We appeal to the grand principles of Protestant- ism, to which half the Protestant world have proved false, the Bible as the standard of faith and practice, and the' right and duty of private judgment in these high matters, independently of popes and presbyter- ies, assemblies and alliances. We appeal to the spirit of our own free institu- tions and republican government, which proclaim the equality of man with man in his rights and du- ties, and which is opposed to church governments founded on the monarchical and aristocratic princi- ples of the old countries, — the bishoprics, the coun- cils, the synods, the power of one or a few over the many, — but which gives toleration to every sect and denomination. The great ideas of American free- dom are identical with the principles of New Eng- land Congregationalism, fairly carried out, and in fact they thence caught that electric spark which has THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 93 vivified the world, and made liberty a watchword among the nations. We appeal, in fine, to the spirit of the age, which is in league, we believe, with a more earnest practi- cal faith, with a more resolute religious spirit, a more sober, real, living, every-day piety and morality, cleared from the mists and speculations and tra- ditions of dark and distant ages, and in harmony with the progress of society, the advance of science, the triumphs of the arts, the spread of popular insti- tutions, the diffusion of useful knowledge, the uni- versal education of the people, and the glorious movements of modern reformation against the hoary vices of the past, — idolatry, ignorance, cruelty, slav- ery, war, licentiousness, and intemperance. To all these, and to more and mightier allies, to the Father of spirits and to the Saviour of sinners, who ever liveth to make intercession for us, we appeal for the truth of our views, and for their saving power and spread in the world. If they are not the truths of revelation, they will and they ought to go down. But if, as we must solemnly believe, they are in ac- cordance with the teachings of Jesus and his Apos- tles, they will live, and not die. They will win their way over all obstacles, and gain the heart of the world. The truth is mighty, and it will prevail. Take courage, therefore, brethren, in your under- taking. Be of good cheer. Be active in these infi- nite concerns. Be wide awake to your spiritual and eternal interests. Labor, pray, confer together. Kin- 94 THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. die up a pure flame of brotherly love and heartfelt devotion in your own hearts, and in the hearts of your fellow-men around. Believe, hope, persevere unto the end, and you cannot fail of great and good results. In due season you shall reap, if you faint not. To this faith, then, " once delivered to the saints," this faith of the Scriptures, of reason, of conscience, of fervent affections and high aspirations ; to this faith of Protestantism, of freedom, and of progress ; to one God, the Father, and to his Son, Jesus Christ, our Saviour, and to the fellowship of the Holy Spirit of God ; to the reading of the sacred volume ; to the preaching of Christ, and him crucified ; to the songs of praise, and devout meditations, and penitence and prayer ; to the observance of the Christian ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and the joys of Christian communion and conference, — we would dedicate these now hallowed courts. We would con- secrate the pulpit for the faithful and heart-searching and soul-moving administration of the Divine Word, — the pews for the attentive hearing and devout re- flections and resolutions of the worshippers, — the choir for the solemn strains of sacred melody, — the doors for the entrance of successive genera- tions of the young and old, pressing to the altar of God and the feet of Jesus, — the walls to resound with the songs and exhortations of the holy day. Here may the children be welcomed to the Sabbath school, and taught by faithful and affectionate teach- THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 95 ers the beautiful precepts and promises of their Sav- iour. Here may the mourner come and find com- fort, the sinner be warned and rescued, and all guided and cheered on in the way everlasting. Here may many souls be born out of the low earthly mind into the high spiritual life, and be prepared to enter into the inheritance of heaven. Here may you become better husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters ; better citizens in your town, better patriots to your country, and better philanthro- pists to your race. And may the outward institu- tions of religion, generously and faithfully supported by your people, result in inward sanctification and heavenly-mindedness, so that when these walls shall fall into ruins, it may be found that you not only dedicated this temple, built with hands, to the Most High, but that you also dedicated yourselves as the living temples for the residence of his indwelling spirit ; so that you shall all at last — not one fam- ily broken, not one wanderer lost — enter into that higher sanctuary, eternal in the heavens, and perform that nobler worship, ascribing " blessing and honor and glory and power unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever." Amen. DISCOURSE V THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. NOT OP THE LETTER, BUT OF THE SPIRIT ; FOR THE LETTER KiLLETH, BUT THE SPIRIT GiVETH LIFE. — 2 Corinthians iii. 6. There are two methods of interpreting the word of God; — one of the letter, the other of the spirit; one literal and verbal, the other liberal. One makes much of the words or forms in which an idea is conveyed, and insists upon a rigid construction of the language. The other passes within the out- works which surround, or the illustrations which beautify, to grasp the central thought itself, account- ing expressions as of little consequence in them- selves, and as only valuable for the sense they con- vey ; since it is the gem gives value to the casket, not the casket to the gem. One is chiefly concerned with the grammar and lexicon, and is anxious about the cases of nouns, and the modes and tenses of verbs, while the other aims at the mind of the au- thor, and from that stand-point would read his lan- guage and interpret his sentiments. One admits only what is expressly written, the other allows THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. 97 much room for what is implied or understood, but is not directly expressed. One is fearful of going too far, the other of falling short. One inclines more to the explicit precepts and positive rules ; the other seeks to penetrate the profound depth of truth, and catch its rare, ethereal essence. The method of lit- eral interpretation leads in its extremes, strange as it may appear, to the divergent errors of Catholicism and Calvinism ; while the free construction, allowed too much scope, leaves us only the thin abstractions of Neology and Pantheism, or with its correspon- dencies and celestial senses mystifies us with the flights of Spiritualism. If however we must range ourselves on the one or the other side, if we must be either Literalists or Liberals and Spiritualists, we should not hesitate long between the two. For the errors of one class arise from the very principles with which they set out ; the errors of the other arise, not from their prin- ciples, but from the perversion and misapplication of their principles. If we must be either of the letter or of the spirit, we should rank ourselves on the side of the spirit, for the reason given in the text ; in other words, because by a rigid, liberal, verbal under- standing of the Scriptures their genuine life is de- stroyed, while by a free, liberal, popular construction, you seize their life-giving spirit, and arrive at the mind of the author. The importance of the alternative now proposed has never received sufficient attention, either from 98 THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. learned or unlearned readers of the Bible. It scarce- ly seems to have been observed, that the undue weight given to the one or the other side of this question has been the grand, prolific source of the errors and absurdities in Christian theology. Hard- ly any step could be taken more conducive to the cause of both truth and union, than the establishment of just principles of Biblical interpretation, and their steady and consistent application by every class of Christian believers. The merits of this subject will however be better understood by immediately turning to some well- known cases, where the two methods indicated are brought into use. In the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, our Lord says to the Jews, " Verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." He repeats the same language several times in the course of the chapter, as if it were of the greatest consequence. Proceeding on the verbal method, a large propor- tion of the Christian Church in all ages has held lit- erally to these words and phrases, and believed that no man could have spiritual life in himself, unless he eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of man, or, what is deemed equivalent, partake of the elements of bread and wine, which, after their conse- cration by the priest, are regarded as the literal flesh and blood of the Saviour ! And to carry out in practice this idea to its utmost limits, the cup was THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. 99 not distributed among the lay communicants of the Church, as we should have naturally inferred from the strict and literal System ; but to exhibit a still higher refinement of the theory adopted, it was de- nied on the ground that, as the flesh contains the blood, so the bread when consecrated imbibed the efficacy of both the flesh and blood of Christ, and it was therefore superfluous to partake of the cup ! This and kindred errors in relation to the Lord's Supper infect, not only the Church of Rome, but large portions of the Protestant world, and appear at this moment to be gaining ground. On the other hand, the liberal interpreters deny that any of the above inferences are to be drawn from our Lord's words in question. No reference is probably made in that chapter to the ordinance after- wards instituted. Jesus had just before fed the five thousand with a miraculous increase of loaves and fishes. This leads to the vivid imagery quoted. He charges the multitude with selfish motives in follow- ing him, and exhorts them to labor for " the meat which endureth unto everlasting life." He then calls himself by a strong figure the bread of life, and says they must eat this spiritual bread. Some said it was a hard saying, and many have felt the same since, because they understand the language liter- ally. But our Lord explaineth himself soon after. " It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth nothing : the words that I speak unto you, they arc spirit, and they are life." As much as to say. The 100 THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. saving, life-giving power of which I speak resides not in my flesh literally, but in my words and spirit. They are instinct with vital energy. How much stronger and nobler an idea is yielded by the free and figurative, than by the literal method! How much more agreeable to " the analogy of faith," to the harmony of truth, to the whole circle of Christ's teaching of which this is one arc, to understand, that he gives us his doctrine, his moral and spiritual life, to feed our life, than that he imparts his flesh and blood in any literal or material sense whatsoever I Many are ready to say, that, if you do not adopt the most literal signification of a passage of Scrip- ture, you explain it away. But the charge is wholly misplaced, the fact is directly the reverse. You ex- plain away the sense of any book, when you rest on its apparent, verbal import, instead of descending into its interior idea. Because we assert that this or that text of Scripture is figurative, we by no means say that it means little, or means nothing, but, on the contrary, that it is all the more full of thought and life on that very account. For the very fact, that there is something more than a bare statement of truth in a commonplace way, attests to the warm and aroused mind of the speaker or writer, which could not be satisfied with tame and prosaic words, but indulged in the most natural way in signs, pic- tures, figures, as embodiments of thought, and struck off from the glowing anvil of meditation a thousand brilliant sparks in every direction. THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. 101 The Jews took Jesus literally when he said, " De- stroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up " ; and they said, " Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days ? " But he spoke of the temple of his body. They explained away the sublime idea of the resur- rection from the dead, and substituted in its place the literal, limited conception of prostrating the mar- ble and the mortar of the edifice, and raising it up again to its former estate. So it is uniformly. The verbal sense is always the least sense, the feeblest, most frigid thought; the spiritual sense, the most living and profound. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. Incalculable injury has been done to the Bible by wresting its free and popular language, its graceful, figurative phrases, to suit a rigid, stiff literalness. Such treatment would have been the ruin of any other work, less potent than the oracles of divine truth. They have survived the perversion only be- cause the light that is in them cannot be wholly put out, though all the clouds and mists of human tradi- tion and false philosophy gather about them, for they shine with an independent and inextinguishable radiance of their own. In short, the same disposition which the ancient Jews so often manifested in torturing the words of Christ to express a different sense from what he de- signed, has largely infected the Christian world in all periods. When he spoke of his kingdom, the king- 9* 102 THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. dom of God, the kingdom of heaven, he simply meant the order and reign of his religion ; but their minds caught fire at the prospect of an actual earthly sovereignty. So, at the present time, nothing will satisfy some persons but the personal advent of our Lord bodily, to sway his sceptre over his dependent subjects. It is not enough for them that his religion is enthroning itself above principalities and powers, ascending a loftier 4:hrone than that of the Caesars, and subjecting kingdom after kingdom and conti- nent after continent to his laws. They are not con- tent that he is beginning to reign as the Prince of Peace, the Deliverer of the captive, and the univer- sal Saviour of the world. They slight the tokens of his coming in tb"^- selfish and w^arlike passions being softened, and in the growth of a true self-respect, so- cial order, civil and religious liberty, general educa- tion. Christian morals, and the reformations of this age. But they are haunted with the pageantry of a throne, a sceptre, attendants, ministers, and all the coarse accompaniments of royalty. Like some of old, they would take Jesus and make him king. But by giving a spiritual construction to the words of our Saviour, we yield them the highest sense, the truest dignity. For the outward reign of the best sovereign is but little ; while the inward subjection of the whole man to Jesus, the bringing of all the forces of the intellectual and moral world into his obedience and consequent freedom, is the only real glory, either to the spiritual ruler or to his spiritual followers. THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. 103 Another instance, among the many which might be mentioned, in which the teachings of Christ were obscured by an adherence to the letter, was when he spoke of his connection with his F'ather. Because he said he was the Son of God, they accused him of making himself equal with God ; a position which he never claimed. But by their literal understanding of his words, they narrowed and degraded his idea. In the same sense he said, " I .and my Father are one." It is not explaining away this remarkable phrase to say, that not oneness of person, identity of consciousness, is meant, but unison of affection, pur- pose, and interest. This is to give it the true and spiritual sense. The oneness of Jesus with God in a moral sense, as filled with his love, reflecting his attributes, obedient to his will, and engaged in his highest service, is a far greater and more inspiring idea than bare identity of being. The one is poor and cold, because it is of the letter ; the other is pro- found and sanctifying, because it is of the spirit, and therefore giveth life. One of the greatest mischiefs which creeds and textual, verbal controversy have inflicted is, that they have attracted attention to the letter of Scripture, and so far have thrown its spirit into obscurity. They have exercised the skill of the grammarian more than the temper of the saint. They have sent the Christian student to his lexicon oftener than to his prayers. They have turned the simplicity of Scripture into the jargon of metaphysics. Are we 104 THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. to believe, and believe only what is in a creed, com- posed by fallible men in imperfect language ? Shall we go whither it goes, and stop where it stops? What, Christianity shut up in a creed, imprisoned in the Assembly's Catechism, the Presbyterian Confes- sion, or the Thirty-Nine Articles ! — then might the sea be poured into a nutshell. Christianity is shut up in no form of words, for it is greater than all words. It is a spirii, and like its embodiment Christ, like its author God, no expressions can perfectly de- scribe, as no thought can fully comprehend it. The language of the New Testament is the sign, symbol, manifestation of this spirit, — a true, beautiful, forci- ble manifestation ; but the spirit itself still soars far above and beyond, pure as heaven, blest as Jesus, in- finite as God. After this spirit we ought to aspire, and not yield adherence to the dead letter, and cling to literal words. An analogous case will illustrate this view more fully. I go forth to witness the fair creation at this refulgent season of the year, when heaven seems to have descended to sojourn for a time upon the earth. I walk amidst endless signs of beauty and order and wisdom and power and goodness. The pure blue sky, as it softly meets my eye, the fresh breeze, as it fans my brow, and the harmony of every grove, convey to the soul an indescribable sense of the reality and pres- ence of God. I care not to dwell on any single leaf, or cloud, or sunbeam, to learn that God is great and good. All nature declares it with one voice. All is THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. 105 grand, all is fair, all is wise. The same master-idea is expressed by each individual star and tree and flower. But I will not scan too curiously these sin- gle letters of the mighty alphabet, the infinite lan- guage of the Almighty ; let me rise to the spirit of the whole, to Him who is greater than his works. Thus only shall I receive the truest and most inspir- ing idea of the Infinite and Ever-Blessed One. When I see a fine landscape, when I behold the worlds of fire and glory that roll and shine above us, I feel myself in the presence of One who could make a yet fairer world, yet more glorious and stu- pendous exhibitions of his unbounded perfections; of One who has not exhausted himself, but rejoices in making ever new revelations of himself in the boundless fields of the universe. In a similar spirit ought we to commune with the word of God and with the Gospel of Christ ; not cling to the words with a schoolboy literalness, but seek to enter into the life-giving spirit. This or that text, or all texts, cannot fully describe the sum total of Christianity. Here are signs, symbols, pointing to it, and partially representing it, as the sun, moon, flowers, mountains, partially exhibit God; but we must not stick in these, and lose the living energy of the whole. The Gospel is taught us by a life, a death, a resurrection, an ascension. These facts convey what no mere description could embody, a weight and world of meaning, which no progress can exhaust, no discoveries supersede. And if we 106 THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. would devote more time to imbibing the large, gen- erous, deep-toned spirit of our religion, to receiving and freshening in our hearts its glorious principles and ideas, and less attention were given to the letter and external doctrines, our progress would be far more satisfactory. For men become disciples of the Saviour, not by following set rules, but by drinking in his spirit, the spirit of all holiness and goodness. Not that the distinctive precepts and positive com- mands of the Master are not to be most faithfully followed ; but they are to be obeyed in the spirit, their sense to be perceived, their relations and effects to be understood, and their tone of feeling to be cherished ; and then obedience will not be of con- straint, but willingly, virtue will not be a mechani- cal propriety, but the inmost perfection of the char- acter. And nothing can ever help society to outgrow the narrowness and exclusiveness of the systems of theology generally received, but the reception of the great central principles of the Gospel ; love to God, love to man, the worth of the soul, the accountable- ness of the individual, the sublimity of human des- tiny, and the certainty of retribution. In the pres- ence and under the action of these eternal truths, these magnificent sentiments, all littleness and big- otry stand abashed, and hasten to hide themselves in that night to which they belong. While, then, we would say wrfh the prophet, " To the law and to the testimony," we would also add, " To its life-giving spirit, not to its dead letter." THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. 107 The Gospel of Christ is a new moral creation. It is a universe of truth. Its great ideas never can be exhausted, nor its perfect laws displaced. But so far as we insist on single words, texts, — the tokens and emblems of these laws and ideas, — to the exclusion of the general import, we shut ourselves out of this glorious creation, we blind our eyes to this beautiful universe, and creep into a dark corner. But the pure resolve, the earnest prayer, the breathing of the heart after light and rest and God, will take us out into its invigorating air and sunshine and divine beauty. If we choose to be contracted and illiberal, it is easy to be so, though all the while we date from the Church of God, and register our names among the followers of the Lamb. But if we would be growing Chris- tians, either personally or as a Church ; if we would enjoy religion, and find its yoke easy and its burden light, we must pierce through the shell to the kernel, and enter more into the spirit of our faith, and rise to ever new and holier views of life and duty. Though prisoners in the flesh, we are prisoners of hope, and may bathe our souls in the heaven of light and love. In saying this, no recommendation is given to vagueness or mysticism. An habitual state of sentimental reverie enfeebles every virtue, and prostrates all manliness of character. A spurious spiritualism is one of the follies of the day, though far from being native to the New England mind. But what is most earnestly advised is the spiritual study of religion and its records in preference to its 108 THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. doctrinal, or textual, or verbal study. Not that one may not be good, but the other is far better. For while one may give us an accurate creed, though it can hardly do that, the other inspires a divine life. The one may save us from absurdity, though it has not always accomplished even that end, but the other rescues us from sin. The one may make us good theologians, though it has made many poor ones, but the other constitutes us heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ to an inheritance incorruptible and unde- filed, and that fadeth not away. Religion is a' history, an institution, and a doc- trine, but eminently and always it is a spirit. The law of the spirit of life, or, to drop the Hebrew idiom, the law of the living spirit in Christ Jesus, hath made me free, said Paul, from the law of sin and death. Would that all men might forthwith enter into that living spirit ! Shall we be ever learn- ing, and never come to the experimental knowledge of the truth ? Shall we always remain among the first rudiments, among the beggarly elements ? Let us be satisfied with no dead-letter profession, or un- derstanding, or practice of religion. If it is any- thing, it is a thing of spirit, life, reality, progress. If it is anything, it is everything, the very breath of our being. If the Christian teacher can have one desire higher and purer than any other, as the heavens are higher than the earth, it is that his flock may be spiritually- minded Christians ; not that they bear this name or THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. 109 * that, — how poor will sectarian titles look in the light of the eternal throne ! how discordant will the watch- words of party sound in the seraphic choir ! — but that they may be living men in Christ Jesus. To start one soul in the endless progress and bliss of a divine and spiritual life were doing more than to cast a thousand minds in the mould of a human creed, or make them feeble imitators of some great leader. Brethren, our hearts' desire and prayer is, that you may be Christians in all the vast and un- fathomed meaning of that word ; that you may have the spirit of Christ, without which you are none of his. And what is " the fruit of that spirit, but love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance? Against such there is no law." 10 DISCOUESE VI. THE CONQUEST OE EVIL.=^ BE NOT OVERCOME OF EVIL, BUT OVERCOME EVIL WITH GOOD. — Romans xii. 21. The nature and office of Philosophy are quite dis- tinct from the nature and office of the Gospel. Phi- losophy cannot take the place of Religion, nor Relig- ion that of Philosophy ; for one is the highest wisdom of man, but the other is the perfect wisdom of God. The philosopher speculates, suggests ; the prophet declares, commands. The philosopher speaks from the largest human reason, and his words are great «and good; the prophet speaks from the larger reason and higher inspiration of the Divinity, — not at war with the purest conclusions of reason, but beyond and above them, as heaven is above the earth. Great in history are the names of Plato and Confu- cius, but those of Moses and Christ are not only greater, but of a different order of greatness, so that * A Discourse preached at the Installation of Rev. John Jay Put- nam as Pastor of the First 'Congregrational Church and Society in Bolton, Massachusetts, September 26, 1849. THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. Ill it is not reverential to place them in juxtaposition, except by \vS,y of contrast. And Philosophy has showed at once her true character and merit, when, after achieving her noblest triumphs by her Bacons, her Lockes, and her Newtons, she has come and seated herself humbly and modestly at the feet of Him, the Teacher come from God, who " taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes." But Philosophy, though utterly incapable, as ex- perience and history demonstrate, of standing in the holy sanctuary and teaching sinful man the way to God, performs a most valuable service as a hand- maiden to Christianity. Philosophy has a necessary work in applying religion to human nature, life, and society. Like the dense atmosphere of the earth, it can well reflect and refract the pure light of heaven, and make it useful to man. Or, to change the illus- tration, though, like the sun-glass, it has no intrinsic light and heat of its own, sufficient to enlighten and warm the world, yet, like that humble instrument^ it can cause the diffused beams of the sun to converge to a focus, and light a fire which its scattered rays never could have kindled. In other words, human wisdom is needed in converting to the best ends the Divine wisdom. A philosophical knowledge of his- tory, and especially of the history of the Church, of human nature in its strong and its weak points, of society as now existing and working, is an important part of the mental furniture of the Christian teacher. He can neither add to nor take from the pure truths 112 THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. of the Gospel, as they shine on the pages of the Apostles and Evangelists, but a true philosophy will make him far more expert and efficient in reducing them to practice, in bringing them within the circle of man's appreciation, and in urging them home as living realities on the conscience and the heart. In a word, the Christian minister should be a philoso- pher ; not that he may teach philosophy, but that he may truly and effectually teach Christianity. For " we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us." The Apostle in the text has stated an important law of spiritual progress, the philosophical method of individual and social regeneration. He has here generalized and announced the Christian mode of spiritually dealing with ourselves and with mankind. It is, in few words, the process of changing the heart, and through the heart changing the life by what has been called " the expulsive power of a new affec- tion." By this law of our moral constitution, that " which is in part can be done away only when that which is perfect comes." Positive good, accordingly, is the match for evil, light the agency to disperse darkness, truth the power to overcome error, the per- fect Gospel the divine instrument to redeem imper- fect and erring man. " Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." If this philosophy of mental and moral influence had been better understood and carried into effect, THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. 113 the truth would have been spared many defeats, and the disciples of Christ many discouragements. For they have in past times often sought to promote Christianity in unphilosophical and unnatural ways, and, of course, have been disappointed. They have not paid that attention to the elements and powers with which they have had to do, that the chemist, the mechanic, the naturalist, have been obliged to give, if they would^win success in their several spheres of action. But the operation of the moral laws, if not as prompt, is as stringent and inevitable as that of the material, and no zeal, no energy, no devotion, can make amends for a defective process. " Nature," as the poet said, " cannot be driven out with a pitchfork," and the illustration applies to the world of mind as much as to the world of matter. It is, therefore, of prime consequence that we not only have, what we believe we have, the perfect and heaven-appointed instrument in the Gospel of Christ for the salvation of the world, but that we use, ap- ply, adapt that instrument to human nature and society, according to its own spirit and intent, and according to a sound philosophy of human nature and the human condition. Thus, for example, one of the unphilosophical methods of past ages has been persecution. Pains and penalties have been made the remedy for error. Torture has been used for conviction and persuasion. Christianity, as well as Mahometanism, has been promulgated by the sword at certain periods. Car- lo • 114 THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. nal weapons have been employed to do a spiritual work. Another unphilosophical mode of operating on men for a religious end has been by terror. All the fears which man has been capable of feeling, have been appealed to, and made the grand instrument of conversion. Fear is doubtless a proper motive in its place, but its place is a low one. To bring it into prominent or exclusive use is as absurd as to use but one kind of food, clothing, or medicine. Fear-made Christians will always betray the error of their spirit- ual birth, in a certain dwarfed and warped character. Terror has been the potent spirit of the revival sys- tem, and certain tracts of the country over which it has passed have been designated by a fearful, but descriptive term, as " the burnt disirict^sJ^ The ver- dure of nature has perished, and even the fire itself cannot be kindled there again. Denunciation is still another mode, which, if exclu- sively adopted, ruins the cause it would promote. To call certain sects of Christians by hard names, to array against them the prejudices of the commu- nity, to torture all they do and say, by a perverse ingenuity, into something sinful or criminal, to spend and be spent, not in seeing how good we can make ourselves, but how bad we can prove our neighbors to be, is surely very wide of the aim proposed by the Apostle Paul in the text. One of the chief privileges, perhaps, of our country and our age is, that in some measure they have lifted off this immense power of THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. 115 persecution by denunciation, and given men hardi- hood and room to think their own free thoughts and speak their own free words on religious subjects. There is some practical freedom here and now, while in most countries and ages it has had but a specula- tive existence. Again, artifice and deception have been but too often, and still are, the modes applied to spread the holy Gospel. "Pious frauds" have been commit- ted; "Do evil, that good may come," has been a maxim but too faithfully followed in some quarters. Political intrigues, and, where they failed, force of arms, have recently been the instrument of upholding the Papal throne ; — darkest, saddest, most wicked of all the deeds of a wicked generation ! I might proceed in this enumeration of the unphil- osophical and unchristian methods, current in Chris- tendom, of promoting the Gospel, but enough has been said to give a general idea of them. Against such agencies and means the text and the spirit of the whole New Testament, I scarcely need say, enter their remonstrance. For the rule laid down by the Apostle virtually excludes all other rules, or makes them entirely subordinate. It proposes, as the best and highest method of overcoming evil, to do it by the counter victorious influence of good. It is evident that the means used ought to be in harmony with the end proposed. To promote a bad cause by bad methods is what we might reasonably expect ; but to seek the promotion of truth by means 116 THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. of error, of good by means of evil, is utterly incon- sistent. But more than this, it is in the long run utterly impracticable. However apparently success- ful for a season worldly agencies may be in advan- cing the cause of God, yet in the end they are signally defeated. The laws of Providence cannot be cheated. "False weights and measures will not long avail any- where. Truth, love, righteousness, holiness, must be the leading characteristics of all the modes of influence by which we propose to spread truth, love, righteousness, and holiness. In all things like begets like. I. We may apply this rationale of procedure to Theology, In the language of one of our wise men, lately expressed, " it is only by religious truth that religious errors, with all their attendant evils, can be done away." The main difficulty in most contro- versies in the Christian Church has been, that they are mere clashings together of two systems of error, not the grapplings of truth with error. If Luther attempted to root out transubstantiation, it was by the equal absurdity of consubstantiation. If the Protestants in general strove zealously against the Papacy, they contended at the same time as ardently for infallible creeds of their own, and persecuted all doubters as heretics. If the Church of England dis- owned the validity of the first ordinance of the Gos- pel as consisting in the amount of water employed in its administration, yet she ran into the error still worse, if possible, of baptismal regeneration. If the THE COx\QUEST OF EVIL. 117 extreme of the eternity of hell-torments, in the Cal- vinistic sense, has called forth an answer, it has too often been that of immediate, unconditional, and universal salvation. So on the battle-field of Theol- ogy has error fought with error, and dogma warred against dogma. Here the philosophical mode of the Apostle Paul proffers itself. It is not to knock down errors, so much as to set up truths. It is not to disprove the negative, but to present the affirmative. It is to preach positively, rather than controversially ; not to contend against the darkness, but to "light a candle, and put it on a candlestick, that it may give light unto all that are in the house." I am far from say- ing that noxious errors are not to be vigorously attacked occasionally, and their true character re- vealed, but it is to be done in perfect charity. In the mean time, the prevailing and all-absorbing work of the Christian theologian is to proclaim and press home the truth, — plain, positive. Gospel truth. The warfare of the sects cannot be pacified, as long as they pursue their present methods of operation. For if existing difficulties were all settled, with their bel- ligerent spirit and dispositipn to fight down error, rather than to show up the truth, a new class of questions would soon arise, a new set of dragon's teeth, according to the fable, be sown, and a new crop of armed men spring up. The vast systems of error embraced in the theol- ogy of Rome, of Oxford, and of Geneva, consolidated 118 THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. through many generations, intertwined with civil institutions and social customs, half sanctified by the memory of the many good men who have been so because they were more Christians than Catho- lics, Episcopalians, or Calvinists, widely diffused in literature, deeply tincturing education, and wrought into every portion of modern society, cannot fall at once, nor in our wise moments shall we ask it or wish it. Better an erroneous and superstitious faith, than an inundation of scepticism. But the safe and eventual remedy for these imperfect religions, as for the imperfect scientific or political systems of past times, which try to outlive their day, is in the truth. That is mighty, and it will prevail. Thus alchemy, astrology, are done away, beyond recall, when chem- istry, when astronomy, come. Thus feudal institu- tions depart before the power of new ideas, or undergo important modifications. In this view, our chief anxiety should not be success, but that we may have the pure truth, that we may drink in the spirit of a boundless charity ; for against the truth, spoken in love, nothing of error, however petrified in forms and customs, however hallowed by antiquity, or but- tressed up by authority, can finally maintain its ground. We feel assured that, as Liberal Christians, we have a Christian theology, an interpretation of the Gos- pel which escapes most of the errors, and embodies most of the truths, which are to be found in the superannuated bodies of divinity. The doctrines of THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. 119 God, the Father ; Christ, the Saviour ; and Man, the brother; of life, as a school to learn in, and not a prison, to suffer in ; sin, as a fearful, but not an infi- nite, and not necessarily an eternal, evil;^of forgive- ness, as consequent on repentance and amendment, not on the sacrifice of the innocent for the guilty ; of the sufficiency of Him to save whom God has ap- pointed to save, though he be less than God, and more than man ; of faith as rational, not less than Scriptural; of character as determining our condition hereafter; of a righteous award, and justice admin- istered with mercy, and the spirit shining more and more unto the perfect and eternal day, — these doc- trines, and others kindred to them, we are con- vinced, are true, and will win their way. We claim not infallibility, but appeal to revelation interpreted by reason in the light of faith. And. for a true re- vival of religion, not a transient emotion, but a deep life-sentiment, we feel bound on all proper occasions to preach, teach, and enforce these doctrines. They are full of light and love, and wherever spread, the theological night will flee before them, as the dark- ness before the morning aurora. As we welcome another laborer to the Master's service, we trust that he will be the diligent student of this nobler Chris- tian theology, that he may be a powerful and per- suasive preacher of righteousness. If you would satisfy man's thirst, or purge away the errors and evils that infest the human soul, draw, my brother, draw from the deep fountain of the Gospel the waters of everlasj;ing life. 120 THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. II. This scientific mode is also applicable to Spir- itual Culture^ whether in the young or the old. In education, the true way to prevent evil is to fill the mind with good ; to overcome bad passions, is to call into exercise good ones. Even in the worst, there still remain certain indestructible moral ele- ments, like the beautiful figures in the glass paper- weights, buried deep in the very substance, which can only be destroyed by annihilating the whole handiwork in which they are inserted. And where better principles have fallen into disuse, the duty is plain to revive their activity, and to restore the lost balance of the moral constitution. We have done little or no good to a child when we have brought one set of selfish motives to overbear another set of the same kind, and by the mere fear of punishment, hope of reward, or desire to excel others, have sought to conquer sloth, reluctance to study or work, and sensual dispositiofis. The human mind has many strings, and these are but a few of the lowest and coarsest, necessary and harmonious in their place, but not to be exclusively or chiefly struck. Let the teacher fearlessly touch the higher chords of duty, love, gratitude, sympathy, aspiration, and a response will be given, faint it may be at first, but rising and swelling at last into strains sweet and pure as the songs of angels. In the work of personal, experimental religion, also, we often meet with difficulties and discourage- ments because we adopt a false and unphilosophical THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. 121 mode of self-discipline. The end is plain before us. It is moral power, spiritual refinement, increasing heavenly-mindedness. But how to raise these fal- tering, backsliding characters of ours to such heights of Christian excellence, and maintain our position in the pure ether, when earth and its powerful attrac- tions are drawing us down to its gross interests, and its dead level of conformity, is the difficult problem. The Apostle has given us precept and philosophy in few words. " Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." This is the solution of the prob- lem. We can do away the evils of our characters, and the sins of our conduct, by the presence and influence of better motives and feelings, by the regen- erating energy of a higher class of motives. We cannot cast out Satan by Satan, or command the devils to depart in any other name than that of the great exorcist, Jesus of Nazareth. The Holy Spirit is the only adequate sanctifier. It is in this connection we see the mistake, so graphically portrayed by the Saviour, of the man in the Gospel. When the unclean spirit left him, he simply swept and garnished its habitation, and made ready for the accommodation of seven other spirits worse than the first, instead of filling his apartments so full of good spirits that the bad ones would find no welcome, and no room to abide in. The human mind cannot remain unoccupied. A vacuum cannot be created in the moral, any more than in the mate- rial world. Every mental space, so to say, will be 11 122 THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. full of something ; the only question is, whether that something shall be good or bad. Objection is some- times made to giving children a religious faith, be- cause we shall sow their young natures with preju- dices and biases. But they cannot be kept neutral and passive, and we must decide whether it is better that they should contract the haphazard biases and prejudices of society, or the faith and opinions of their parents and teachers. Every mind will have its leading thought, and every heart its determining affection. If the true God be not worshipped and loved, then some idol will desecrate the inner sanc- tuary of the soul. The question of salvation is not whether the soul shall act, or remain inert, for act it will by the force of a natural, instinctive law ; but it is whether it shall act downward or upward, wheth- er it shall assimilate itself to the earthly or to the heavenly, whether it shall pour all its energies into the channel of worldly interests, or raise them to spiritual duties, objects, and realities. God or Mam- mon is the alternative. The only way not to serve the false divinity is earnestly to serve the true one. The proper method, accordingly, either to begin or to prosecute the Christian course, is to put forth pos- itive and earnest efforts to rise, rather than endeavors not to fall. Religion is most effective when it passes from a law of restraint into an impulse to good, a predomi- nant motive, an informing and quickening life of the soul. Then it is not the negation of evil, but the THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. 123 presence and possession of good ; not the mere irk- some conformity to a precept, but the happy growth of the spiritual constitution towards perfection. It will be your duty, and I know, my brother, it will be your happiness, to preach, not only a Chris- tian theology, but a practical, working, improving faith, as its chief worthy conclusion. The exhorta- tion will be ever sounding forth from this pulpit, "* Friend, go up higher'; forget the things behind ; press onward to those before ; let no day pass with- out its step forward, without some grace or excellence of character brightened, some error or sin weakened, some victory won over envy, or ill-temper, or negli- gence, or pride, or selfishness, or hate, or lust, or some of the other evil spirits that beset us." For to live is not to eat, sleep, work, move, breathe, but to think, feel, choose, love, and act according to the everlasting laws of the spiritual world. Hence that must be regarded as a lost day, when we have not done something to change the dull, leaden image of the earthy into the beauty and glory of the heavenly. III. The remaining field of duty in which the law of influence laid down by the Apostle is to be employed, is that of Philanthropy. Prohibition is good in its place. " Thou shalt not steal," " Thou shalt not kill," form a part of that system, which Jesus came not to destroy, but to fulfil. But the law, fearfully enforced and sanctioned, was weak through the flesh. Temporal motives, the penalties of this world, were insufl[icient. To reform men of 124 THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. their vices, and keep them reformed, requires the most persuasive and controlling influences of which the human heart is susceptible. The faith of Christ, opening the wonders, glories, and terrors of the spir- itual world, pointing up to a Supreme Judge and forward to a day of retribution, disclosing the infinite love of God for his children on the earth, has sup- plied these motives. It is therefore less by fierce attacks on existing evils, though for that work too there is sometimes an imperative call, than by a comprehensive develop- ment of the truth as it is in Jesus, and its strenuous application to the whole broad field of moral reforma- tion, that we may hope to do lasting good to man- kind. We need a fresh expansion of Christian truth and love, more than philippics against any sins or any sinners. Jesus and his Apostles denounced the vices of men, but they devoted the greater part of their time and teaching to effecting those radical changes in the motives and principles of human action by which an entire reformation would in due time be accomplished in the institutions and cus- toms of men. Ideas govern the world. The dis- covery of a few new principles of an elemental na^ ture has created chemistry, astronomy, optics, geolo- gy. A fresh application of truth changes the modes of travelling, mechanism, business. Take now the Christian ideas, let them become real ideas to men, not the ghosts and forms of ideas, and they would transform the earth, they would beautify humanity. THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. 125 SO that there would be as great a distance between the men of the genuine Christian era of piety and human brotherhood and the men of our own time, as there is between a refined New England village and the barbarian hamlets of our British ancestors in the days of the Druids. There is power enough, latent power, in the Gospel, to change the whole as- pect of society, and to bring out those lovelier, gen- tler, purer, godlike traits, which should reflect in some degree the image, faint though fair, of the Divine loveliness, beauty, purity, and beneficence. But the world is now demonized, possessed by seven or more evil spirits. 'They rend and tear it. They create poverty and suffering and death beyond computation. They make Ishmaelites of the human fraternity, and set every man's hand against his brother. But we cannot attack these evils, as Her- cules is fabled to have done the Lernean Hydra, crushing his heads, and burning the prolific wounds with a red-hot iron. A strong moral indignation has its proper periods and places, but abuse is not a moral instrument of any great efficacy. We cannot bury evils in the dust, nor rend them away suddenly and violently from the social fabric. Diligently and constantly we must multiply the good, and that and that alone of all the weapons in the universe can at last overcome the evil. We want in our Christian philanthropists a living specimen of what they would make all men ; — we look in them for firmness, but not obstinacy ; zeal, but not fanaticism ; courage, 11 * 126 THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. but not recklessness ; honest dealing, but not outrage ; prompt decision, but not angry impatience. Let us learn a more generous and kindly tone of Christian manners, speaking peaceably for the cause of Peace, temperately for the cause of Temperance, freely for the cause of Freedom, purely for the cause of Pu- rity, justly for the cause of Justice, and humanely for the cause of Humanity. God's work should be done in God's spirit. Only when deeply imbued with the temper of Christ, shall we be qualified to act wisely and permanently in the cause of man's refor- mation. If we hope to do away with that which is in part, the partial, fragmentary, and imperfect in manners, customs, and institutions, it must be by hastening the coming of that which is perfect. By increasing what is good, the evil is overborne and excluded. Sins cannot be amputated ; they must be outgrown. Vicious institutions can only be reformed, that is, formed again, not wholly supersed- ed. They must be worn away, rather than cut off. Time and patience are needed even in the ripen- ing of the annual fruits of the earth, — how much more in the great harvest of the world and of ages, and the maturing of the spirit ! — " first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." In this work much has been done, the world has grown better, and will continue to grow better, if men will adopt the true and Christian philosophy on the subject. Nor need we fear any general and fatal relapse. As in science we can never return to the beggarly ele- THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. 127 ments of the dawn of knowledge, so in religion we have seen a progress from age to age, and one prac- tical error and evil after another has been outgrown. Let us not suppose that there is any other or possi- ble course than that onward and upward. Every evil practice or institution is based on some evil opin- ion or notion, and when we proclaim the new idea, applicable to that case, we overthrow the antagonist evil for ever. As yet we have too little faith in God, and Christ, and man. To move us powerfully for the promotion of good ends, we must have deep and living springs of truth and love and zeal in our own hearts. We are not enough aware that, if great are our hinderances, great also are our helps, and that, if we are true to ourselves and to God in the work of moral reforma- tion, all things else will be true to us, and will, as by a species of omnipotence, work together with us for good. But common sense, practical wisdom, a Christian philosophy, are needed to direct and make useful the efforts of the most devoted and spiritually- minded laborers in this sphere. Man is essentially an active being. He will be occupied, interested, about something. And if we call him home from the camp, we must set him at some work that will at once occupy and ennoble him, and enlist his affec- tions, and make him feel that his laurels, won by a fierce animal courage, are but worthless weeds, com- pared with the greater glories and honors of peace. If, too, we win the inebriate from his cups, we must 128 THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. provide innocent recreations, and healthful occupa- tions and excitements, and cheerful happiness, that shall in time make him loathe the coarse revelries of excess. If, in short, we take men out of any lower and earthly condition by our reforms, we cannot leave them in a vacuum ; we must furnish them with new objects of activity, and happiness far exceeding the old, and summon them with a trumpet voice to the blessed life and love of the children of God. When we have said, therefore, " Overcome evil with good," we have proposed a rational and philo- sophical mode of Theology, Education, Religious Culture, and Philanthropy of the most valuable kind : one of those general laws laid down by the Apostle, which, like the principle of gravitation or the discov- ery of electricity in the natural world, simplifies a thousand particulars and details. And, my brother beloved, this law of action is wor- thy to be considered by you in your entrance again upon the settled ministry. I am happy to believe that it has been already in other fields of labor a principle of conduct and influence in your labors for the cause of Christ and salvation of men. And with yourself and your people here, may it be a sacred aim, not to be overcome of evil, but to overcome evil with good. It is a rule of general use and worthy of all acceptation. We, both as ministers and people, are to aim for the positive truth, do the good deed, do the best, bring in the perfect, and then the negative, the evil, THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. 129 the imperfect, will — how could it be otherwise ? — be done away beyond all power of reaction or recall. Rise to noble and comprehensive views of Christian truth, let the light of heaven shine into the soul, and the darkness of error and sin will flee away. The Gospel saves the world, not mainly because it pro- nounces condemnation on its iniquities, but chiefly because it fills it with new life and love, and thus extinguishes at once the power and inclination to sin. We cannot fight down the darkness either in our- selves or other men. We cannot light any torches of our own, that will scatter the dominion of moral night and illumine the world. But we can open our eyes to the light of heaven, we can welcome the rev- elation from God through Christ, we can fill our souls, and help to fill the souls of others, with the godlike sentiments of Faith, Hope, and Love ; and then shall we become children of the day, — a short and not unhappy day on earth, — a calm, and joyous, and everlasting day in heaven. DISCOURSE VII. THE PROMISE.* TRAIN UP A CHILD IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO ', AND WHEN HE IS OLD, HE WILL NOT DEPART FROM IT. — PrOVCrbs Xxii. 6. All great truths commonly lie dormant some ages after they are discovered or revealed. Tardily, though surely, the unstable mind of man is brought to take its true direction, as the shaken needle slowly comes to rest on its great magnet. Hundreds of years pass by, and the truth is still unapplied and rusted. Men walk careless over it, as over an un- discovered mine of diamonds. Straightway a re- former is born, not always a genius, and frequently from some by-corner of the earth ; but the veil is taken from both his eye and his heart, and he is able to see and to feel. Little by little the solemn mel- ody of Truth breaks upon his ear and transports his soul. Alive himself with the life of truth, he makes others live. He touches a chord which vibrates * A Discourse delivered before the Cheshire Sunday School Asso- ciation. THE PROMISE. 131 throughout the universal bosom. Seizing upon a great principle of nature, he electrifies, he galvanizes, he magnetizes his race. The truth once recovered no more dies, nor is buried. The reformer bequeathes his work and his inspiriting example to countless heirs, and they to theirs, till " Millions of souls shall feel their power, And bear them down to millions more." Thus the rays from one majestic luminary shoot from peak to peak of the mountain-tops, until they finally descend into all the humble vales and most secluded dwellings, and it is day. As illustrations of this delay in the application of great laws to the uses of man, remember the distance between Coper- nicus and Newton, between the Marquis of Water- ford and Fulton. And in things spiritual, how long, how tediously long, were it not the dread and glorious march of Providence, between the declara- tion of the text and the announcements of Jesus, on one hand, and the Borromeos, and Hannah Mores, and Robert Raikeses on the other I For ages the re- ligious teacher has been wasting his good seed on the beaten highway, — the flinty hearts of grown-up sin- ners ; to-day he sows m rich and mellow furrows, — in the genial natures of children. The mind of the world understands at last, the heart of the world feels, the hands of the world carry into execution, this castaway and neglected truth of the royal sage, — "Train up a child in the way he should go ; and when he is old, he will not depart from it." 132 THE PROMISE. Our generation has been called unspiritual. We have been warned that we were running into mech- anism and materialism. Nor has there been want- ing some color of reason to the charge. There has been such a din respecting the mere shell of life, — what shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed, and how shall we faster travel ? — that it has caused a shudder lest the divine life of the soul was going to be lost sight of, or extinguished. But it would be a craven spirit that would despond, or despair. If there is not health, there are its symptoms ; and we have the attendance of the Great Physician. If there has been an unexampled devotion to man's present and perishable interests, the fruits of the spirit have not been altogether wanting. There have been Ark- wrights and Fultons, but also Oberlins and Tucker- mans. Not the least of the good auspices of the coming age is the Sunday school. It took its origin from the recognition of long-buried truth, — the capacity and the need of man to be religiously educated from the cradle upwards. Its bare existence is a fact pro- phetic of a glorious spiritual prosperity, for it marks the acknowledgment and partial carrying out of the fundamental rudiments of religion, that man has a religious nature from the beginning, that it demands culture, and that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the divinely appointed instrument. Now commences a reformation worthy the name, deep down in man's THE PROMISE. 133 soul ; not a doffing of one set of creeds or ceremonies to put on another, — Pope Calvin fot Pope Peter, — but a regeneration of the human spirit, a flinging away of the last shred of tyranny, the emancipation of ecclesiastical slaves, and their introduction into that " liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free." The truth has long had a free course, now it runs, and anon it will be glorified. After a great invention or discovery, we think it strange that nobody ever alighted upon it before, so simple afterwards it seems. The ancient Roman almost invented the art of printing, — why did he ifot take the last important step ? Thousands had seen apples fall before Newton ; how wonderful, that they never made his inference from the fact ! So in re- gard to the Sunday school. Wonderful it is, that so simple a project, so plain a duty, as that of edu- cating the young systematically in the Gospel, should have been the last thing thought of in the world ! Robert Raikes himself, in a letter to a friend, describ- ing the origin of his illustrious plan, modestly re- marks: "The same sentiments would have arisen in your mind, had they happened to have been called forth as they were suggested to me." Truly the need of the institution was urgent ; we wonder that necessity was not sooner the mother of invention. Here were millions of parents, sleeping over their solemn trust. Here was the great stream of spiritual being, direct from God's throne, allowed to flow into filthy sewers and wasting channels. 134 THE PROMISE. Here was stainless childhood, its fresh-gushing love uncongealed by the wintry world, its hopes blooming like Eden before the fall ; here was generous, elastic, credulous youth, — exposed without any shield to snares without and treachery within. Practised wickedness was industriously distilling poison into their believing ears and tender hearts. Here were young immortals — their souls made for religion, the abiding interests of their whole being, from the first gasp of infancy for ever, religious interests — who grew up without God, who never approached the Great Friend of children at his sweet and gentle in- vitation. Their beautiful affections, ever rising up and imploring sympathy, are coldly repulsed and driven back into the timid bosom, to pine alone. The ten thousand doubts and questions, and fears and hopes, which swell the sighing heart nigh to bursting, and many a time fill the young eye with tears, — these thronging, pressing inquiries, which threaten to bend down and break the tender, over- burdened stalk of youth with the dark enigmas of its existence, must go unanswered, and prey upon the solitary breast. It was (alas ! it is) a sorrowful sight, yet how common, to behold a beautiful young crea- ture, fresh from a Father of love, straying on at its own wild will, chasing the butterflies of its own fancy, now visited with thrills of ecstasy and now with awful fears, but still wandering on amidst the pitfalls and precipices of life, unguided and un- guarded. Soon the storm and the night may come THE PROMISE. 135 on, and its home be lost for ever. It is a melting story, that of the babes left in the woods by him who should have been their protector. But ought it to be less affecting to see many children spiritually deserted in the devious moral wilderness of life, with no hand to lead them out of its dark mazes, with no arm to defend them from the wild beasts prowling therein ? Out of this need arose the Sunday school : out of this need, more clearly seen and felt, is to arise its improvement and growing efficiency. We were liv- ing not long ago in the skirts of the Dark Ages ; we have not yet fully emerged. But we are coming to the light ; our watchword is, " Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, we press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." Much has been done, much is doing, more remains to be done. " The harvest is passed, the summer is ended," and we are assembled, my friends, to give account to one another of our stewardship, to digest our experience into principles, our knowledge into wisdom, and to animate each of our hearts by the aggregate sym- pathy of all. If the Sunday-school system is ever to be improved, it must be by the patient induction of facts ; by the comparison of opinion with opinion, of experience with experience ; by the action of mind upon mind, in meetings, reports, addresses. True philosophy in relation to all subjects is of slow 136 THE PROMISE. growth, and still slower application. The capabili- ties of this institution have not yet been wholly fath- omed and evolved. And if we are to be carried for- ward in this evangelical enterprise to higher knowl- edge and livelier interest, it must be in a considerable degree by bringing ourselves more into sympathy with each other on the subject. My faith, said Cole- ridge, is infinitely increased the moment another joins his assent. We are confederates and fellow- workers in a great and good cause, and it cannot but be highly serviceable for us to meet and mingle our thoughts, affections, and prayers, and to pledge ourselves to new fidelity to the cause of God and his Son. The spirit of the text is adapted to cheer us in our exertions to educate the young in the Gospel. It pronounces our duty, and promises to fulfil our hopes. It teaches us to look forward to future years for the fruits of our labors, and announces that law of habit which secures to age the acquisitions of youth. " Train up a child in the way he should go ; and when he is old, he will not depart from it." I look around and ponder our situation, the con- dition of our Sunday schools, the greatness of the cause, the interests depending, the attention of parents and teachers and pupils and clergymen, and I have asked myself, What do we most want ? Wherein are we most deficient ? From the study of my own heart, and the confessions and conduct of others, I have no hesitation in saying, that what is most im- THE PROMISE. 137 periously needed is enlarged and enkindled Faith. Here is ever our greatest want, our saddest deficiency, that we lack that very thing on which the whole system of religious education, hinges, and around which it revolves. Soon would other evils be reme- died, and other obstacles surmounted, were only this principle enthroned in living energy in our hearts. We totter, we fall, because we do not with childlike confidence take hold of that Mighty Hand, stretched forth to lead us to success. We distrust ourselves, we distrust others, and in both we are guilty of the worst of all, distrusting God. We selfishly fear we shall not succeed, as if a Wiser and a Mightier than we were not presiding at the great helm. Hemmed in by the mists and shadows of earth, enfeebled in our capacities of belief and action by our moral delin- quencies and timid indolence, we are prone to be- come cold and faithless respecting the stupendous realities of the spiritual world. In this state of mind are involved most of the difficulties we lament in ourselves, or others. We complain of a want of interest in parents in the spir- itual good of their children. But why are parents uninterested? Because they do not believe in the nature, wants, and sublime destiny of their little ones. We are grieved at the insensibility of teach- ers. But why are they insensible? Because they have not yet been kindled with a living sense of spiritual things, they do not believe in the mighty interests of the soul, soaring infinitely beyond the 12 • 138 THE PROMISE. interests of the body. Why is the pastor — mourn- ful apathy I — sometimes found indifferent to the religious training of the children of his flock ? He too is tainted with the prevalent unbelief. Why are even the children so often heedless of the use of their priceless opportunities to " get wisdom " ? They disbelieve the frozen lessons of their elders. All lack faith, all need it, as the one thing needful. Only infuse one particle of genuine, living faith, and we live. The valley of dry bones swarms with uprisen men. The mustard-seed expands into the tree. No more we falter, no more drivel, no more sleep. We have faith. Faith links us with the Almighty. We are invincible through Him. No longer we handle the unspeakable interests of the soul with listless- ness. Our minds kindle and dilate with the solemn grandeur of the work. The great deep is broken up, and with the line of faith we fathom its abysses. Not more keenly does imagination fix on the glisten- ing star, and pursue it through the awful depths of heaven, until it has expanded into a mighty globe, than does faith, looking profoundly into the soul, and afar into eternity, catch a glimpse of the arch- angelic destiny of the little child. Faith alters to- tally the complexion of religious education ; from a task converts it into a delightful privilege, from a non-essential into the all-essential, and sinks all mis- givings and obstacles in the sublimity of the cause, the promises of God, and the immortality of the soul. % THE PROMISK. 139 This faith must have two branches, — a confidence in human nature as capable of receiving religion, and a confidence in the Gospel as the divine instru- ment of its culture. 1. We have too little faith in the child. Children are common ; are often perversely educated ; and sometimes far gone in vice. Our trust in their ca- pacities is shaken. We almost unconsciously attrib- ute the fault more to them than to their parents, more to their nature than to their education. But it is a mistake. Our notions on this point savor more of impiety towards the Creator, than we may be aware. By distrusting the child, what do we but cast discredit on the word and promises of God, and blaspheme his handiwork ? I read among the golden treasures of his revealed truth, " God created man in his own image " ; " God hath made man upright." I see the Saviour smiling on little children, and say- ing, " Of such is the kingdom of heaven " ; " Verily, I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." On these and other descriptions of the sonship of man to God, and the capacity of human nature in childhood for religion, we plant ourselves immovably. We defer to no scruples, we hold parley with no doubts. Though the worldly wise may ridicule our fond credulity, though a dark creed may stigmatize us as heretics ; we must never, never let go this sheet-anchor of the Sunday school, that children are by their very nature members of the 140 THE PROMISE. kingdom of heaven, and never would be driven out of paradise, the " heaven " that " lies about them in their infancy," provided they were rightly and re- ligiously educated. Children are common. If we do not find here one source of our feeble faith, we do find one cause of our indifference. We become habituated to them. They are no novelty. We see others slighting them, and we soon learn the dangerous habit ourselves. Wrapped up in our supposed wisdom, and hot in the chase of our selfish interests, we overlook these new messengers from the spiritual world. We for- get who they are, and why they have come, and who has sent them. We heed not the power with which each deed and word of ours tells upon their forming characters, as the hard seal upon the flowing wax. They tabernacle in houses of clay, and we forget their immortality as we do our own. We are not alive to the sublime reality in respect simply to the duration of their existence, that it is henceforth co- eval with the Eternal Father. And furthermore, we too little realize that that stupendous and awful range and immensity of being is to be virtuous and happy, or wicked and miserable, very much as the right or wrong direction is given to the unfolding energies here. If we should once place our eye at the telescope of faith, and see the ages upon ages, the worlds after worlds, the heavens above heavens, through which the child may soar towards God, we should be startled out of our stone-blind indifference THE PROMISE. 141 to its spiritual education into some just feeling of our responsibility, and our glorious privilege, as its guardians and teachers. 2. But, again, it is requisite to usefulness and success in this cause, that we heartily believe in the instrument as well as the material and the subject, in the Gospel as well as in the child. We must see the wondrous affinity between the truth of God and the spirits he has created. We must see how wisely and beautifully the Gospel is fitted to man's consti- tution and wants; that not more exquisite is the formation of the eye to receive the light, than is the moral nature of man, before it is warped by actual transgressions, to receive, love, and practise the Christian religion. With the undoubting mind of the husbandman, we are to sow good seed in a good soil. We need to enter into the deep meaning of those figures which liken the Gospel to bread, satis- fying hunger; to water, quenching thirst; to light, illuminating the dark world ; to life, hidden from the sensual. Some Indians of John Eliot's time, and who had been under his instruction, being asked how they knew the Scripture to be the word of God, re- plied, " Because they did find that it did change their hearts, and wrought in them wisdom and hu- mility." This striking answer indicated that these untutored children of the wilderness had arrived at a sense of the fitness of the Gospel to human nature and wants, which it would be happy if the Christian of civilized life always enjoyed. 142 THE PROMISE. We must believe that the truths of Christianity, as they are taught in the words and deeds of Jesus, are in nice harmony with the love, trust, imagination, spirituality, innocence, of children. The parables, the miracles, the dialogues, of the Gospels, could not have been more happily adapted to the young, if they had been expressly composed for their instruc- tion. We must realize and act upon this view. We must teach without one shadow of apprehen- sion lest the bread that came down from heaven will not feed the hungering soul. We must see that the Gospe] is the express instrument, appointed by God, to educate the young; that it is meat and drink, light and life, to their expanding natures. Again, we want a stronger confidence in the suc- cess of all well-meant and faithful efforts to bring the Gospel into living contact with the undefiled soul. It is true we should shun the extreme of presump- tion ; but we ought never to doubt, that whatever we rightly do in this cause sooner or later has its due effect. It may be objected to what has now been said of the duty of faith in the child, and faith in the Gospel as the God-given instrument to save and bless it, that those who in their youth were placed under the best religious influences, the children of the most exemplary Christians, have often sunk into vice and crime, whilst those who were born and nur- tured in the haunts of wickedness have grown up lights in the Church and benefactors to their species. In this objection is couched much of that weakness THE PROMISK. 143 of faith of which complaint has now been made. Parents and teachers are most unhappily and falsely led to imagine, that it is a matter pretty much of chance, after all, what characters the young form. They see wheat sown, and tares reaped ; and tares sown, and wheat reaped. They know not what to trust, what to abide by. They float hither and thither, at the capricious mercy of every ** wind of doctrine." O that they might see the truth in this matter ! O that they would believe with uncon- querable trust, what man's nature and God's word conspire to teach, that no word, no effort, no teach- ing, no prayer, can by any possibility be lost in this glorious work I Let them remember, that we anchor ourselves on the promises of God, that we stand on the Rock of Ages, in our confidence that our labors to train up the young in " the nurture and admoni- tion of the Lord " will not be frustrated. Still, it will be said, we may not succeed. We may not, and why ? Because of some faial leakage ; because we undo in one way all we do in another ; because our example mocks our precepts ; because the bad company abroad, into which our children fall, neutralizes the good influences of home and the Sunday school, and we are convicted of the folly of pouring water into a sieve with the idle hope of filling it. We may not succeed for the present, — who is sower and reaper the same day ? — but we should sow, assured that in due time we shall reap, if we faint not Encouragements from our nature. 144 THE PROMISE. from human experience, from the Holy Word, 'bid US go on fearlessly, zealously, perseveringly, and however forlorn our hope may for the present appear, we are never to despair in our exertions to educate, save, and bless -those who have God for their Fa- ther and immortality for their lifetime. " If good seed," said Robert Raikes, " be sown in the mind at an early period of human life, though it show it- self not again for many years, it may please God at some future period to cause it to spring up and bring forth a plentiful harvest." John Bunyan, John Newton, Richard Cecil, and many others, are striking illustrations of the remark. Out of unsightly shrubs, they grew up beautiful and fruitful trees in the gar- den of God. But it is only in comparatively few cases that we must hope, because we dare not yield to despair. In the majority of instances, just in the proportion that our labors are abundant, abundant will be our rewards. A systematic, evangelical, and universal training of the young in the way they should go, would produce the most excellent and happy results in literature, society, and religion. In literature, when genius shall be baptized into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In socie- ty, w^hen brother's heart shall be knit to brother's heart, and there shall be one pulse of love ; when we shall carry forth to all nations the balance of justice in one hand, and the olive-branch of peace in the other. Voices from the great Western Ca- THE PROMISE. 145 naan, voices from the far isles of the sea, voices from a thousand centuries to come, thunder in our pars with mighty tones the solemn obligation of the pres- ent generation to educate their children in the Gos- pel. With accents thrilling as the trump of the archangel, they command us to prepare for a state of human welfare, more glorious than ever charmed the poet's imagination, or kindled the prophet's eye. Most blessed too must be the effects on religion of this religious education of all children. No more the dead letter, but the living spirit ; no more a ster- eotyped faith and a traditional piety, but Christian inquiry and growth without pause or limit. The jangling of the sects also will be melted into an ex- pansive charity as the coronation of Jesus, King of mankind, draws near. Then shall man's state of probation bear some remote resemblance to his state of fruition. Is it too much to say, that the universal and increasing interest in the religious education of children is a bright augury, predicting this advance- ment as probable, as certain ? Ill would it become us to despond, when prophets desired to see these things, and desired in vain, yet suffered not their faith to waver. It would show but a weak trust in God to despair of the cause of Christ now, when he despaired not of it on the Cross. No interest ought to have a deeper hold upon the hearts of parents, than the religious culture of their children. They are the natural instructors, but they may call in the assistance of coadjutors in the moral 13 146 THE PROMISE. and religious, as well as the intellectual, education of their offspring. Permit me to inquire of those who sustain the parental relation, whether they are sensi- ble of the uncalculated responsibility that rests upon them, to provide for their interesting young charge all, and the best, means and appliances to a thorough Christian education. Do they see, that, whilst they are laying up money, their children are treasuring up characters for eternity ? Alas for that father or mother who is more set on riches than education, who is laboring more anxiously to amass great wealth to bequeathe to a bereaved family, than to impart to them the priceless jewel of a Christian spirit! Alas for that parent who thinks himself absolved from his duty of instructing his sons and daughters through the instrumentality of the Sunday school! O, let him see how all is needed, and is blessed to the child's good, — precept at school, example at home, and prayer and love everywhere ! Let him bear it ever in remembrance, how much good he can do, and how much evil avert, by faithfully training up his children to fear and love God, and keep his com- mandments. Soon those now at the breast will be in the marts of trade and the workshops of labor ; those now at school will become the fathers and mothers of families, holding various offices of trust, responsibility, and distinction in tlie various educa- tional, political, and religious institutions of the land ; the glory or the disgrace of their friends, shaping to freedom and virtue, or corruption and ruin, the THE PROMISE. 147 changeful destinies of their country, putting back- ward or forward the mighty interests of the human race. How all-important that they should now im- bibe that life-giving truth, which saves from error and sin ! Let teachers too be reminded of the importance, the delicacy, the grandeur, of their work. Cherish faith in the child, faith in the Gospel, and faith in your own usefulness under the good favor of God. " Be not faithless, but believing." Live as you teach, that you may not overthrow your instructions by your ill example. Vivify your zeal by prayer, and cultivate the tenderness of a mother's self-sacrificing love for your pupils. Remember that they are the hope of their country, the hope of the Church, the hope of the world. Esteem it not as a task, but rejoice in it as a precious privilege, that you can confer the greatest good upon others, whilst you are augmenting that good in yourselves. Be devoutly thankful, my friends, that it falls to your lot to join alliance with the Saviour and the Father of tnen, in the sublime employment of conducting human beings to honor, glory, and immortality ; that you have it in your power to give not merely a cup of cold water, but the waters of life everlasting, to these little ones. Labor evermore with an elevating and strengthening consciousness of the dignity and the excellence of your calling. What work, this side of heaven, can be so acceptable to God, as that of lending a brotherly, a sisterly hand, to aid the young and inexperienced 148 THE PROMISE. in preparing for life here and forever ; as that of ele- vating them to their heritage of love, liberty, and eternal life; as that of starting into a living and har- monious growth the folded germs of a deathless spirit? They have not yet crossed the Rubicon of lawless ambition, nor drank the Lethe waters of sensual indulgence, nor wished, like Midas, that everything they touched might be turned into gold. They are pure ; it is your happy privilege to aid them in becoming positively virtuous and holy. To provide these young immortals, but lately launched into this tempestuous world, wdth the compass of religion, and the anchor of a heavenly hope, is the most exalted labor in which men or angels can share. Yours also is a "reward beyond this world and time." Heaven and earth shall pass away sooner than the good you do be effaced from the tablets of the human soul, or the records of heaven. The blazing sapphires of the sky shall be extinguished in utter darkness, before the fruits of your Sunday- school instruction shall perish, or cease to afford you the refined satisfaction of doing the will of God. My younger hearers and friends will recollect those words of our Saviour, — "unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required." As your parents and teachers have done much for you, you will feel that your obligations are great. You will remember to use your precious opportunities faithfully ; you will seek to make those returns to your friends and benefactors which they most love, THE PROMISE. 149 the returns of good characters, upright lives, Chris- tian spirits. Be entreated now, in this fair and glo- rious prime of your days, to give your hearts to those things which never decay, to those beings who will never deceive you. Remember your Saviour and Father now, before your love has been lost upon things that are worthless and treacherous. Bear it in mind, that there is no sight on earth so sweet and beautiful as an obedient and virtuous child. There is no flower that opens in spring, there is no bird that sings in summer, there is no star that shines in heaven, there is no diamond, sparkling from the mines, so delightful to look upon, as an affectionate and religious child. " Of such is the kingdom of heaven." Nothing gladdens a teacher so much as docile and virtuous pupils. They are his " crown of rejoicing." Noth- ing makes a parent's heart sing for joy, like a good son or daughter. The father thinks his labors well repaid. The mother forgets all her cares and watch- ings, and points to her dutiful children, as the Ro- man lady is related to have done in ancient times, and exclaims, " Behold my jewels ! " God from heaven looks with complacency upon the youth who love him and keep his commandments, and will in his good time take them to his celestial man- sions. 13 DISCOURSE VIII THE SOUL'S WANT OF GOD. MY HBABT AND MT FLESH CRIET^ OUT FOR THE LIVING GOD. — Psalm Ixxxiv. 2. The chief want of man is God. He has various faculties and senses, each of which craves its specific and proper good, the eye light, the stomach food, the ear sounds, the brain thought, the conscience right, the heart love. But the cry of the whole human being, the need of the whole united powers, is the Supreme Good. Both heart and flesh cry out for the living God ; the one in its frailty claiming a support to lean upon, and the other in its far-reach- ing affections and aspirations a never-ending and infinite excellence. The soul is for God, and God for the soul. What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. Many are unhappy and do not know the cause of their unhappiness, but the deep and constant cause, below all others, is the absence from the true light of life. They may eat, drink, and amass wealth, and satisfy the intellect with knowledge, but these desires are not the deep- 151 est. They are on the surface. The heart cries out for something more, and better. The Apostle speaks of living " without God and without hope in the world." To live without God is to live without hope. We can have no true hope but in him. The soul trembles till it points to its eternal pole-star in the heavens. It is restless until it finds rest in the All-sufficient Being. Without God all is dark without, and all is in disorder with- in. Desert him, and we exile ourselves to a Sahara without verdure* and to a Siberia without heat. Disobey him, and we cut ourselves off from the protection of those laws which are the only safe- guard of our being. We may have every other blessing, and may say, with the Laodiceans of old, " We are rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing " ; but we are really " wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked." " Give us this bread of life," cries the soul. The orphan child is always in search for his Father. With restless desires, with dumb and piteous cries, with wanderings into far countries, with eager chase after pleasures and vanities, man journeys through life, but he spends his strength for naught, when he has not secured this main interest. " God," cry the na- tions, — "give us the knowledge of him " ; and they agonize, build temples, worship idols, torment their own bodies, make painful pilgrimages, until the true light shines upon them, and they learn to love, wor- ship, and serve him, the one living and true God. 152 The superficial desires of the body may be satis- fied and put to rest ; but the yearning of the soul after its proper good is enduring. All through life, in vivid joy, in blank indifference, in sharp grief, in danger, sickness, sudden changes, in all emergencies, our whole nature — heart and flesh — feels after God, if happily it may find him. The old English poet truly said, — " Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how mean a thing is man ! " Says Leighton, " God hath suited every creature he hath made with a convenient good to which it tends, and in the obtainment of which it rests and is satisfied. Now in this is the excellency of man, that he is made capable of a communion with his Master, and because capable of it, unsatisfied without it; the soul (so to speak), being cut out to that large- ness, cannot be filled with less. It is made for Him, and is therefore still restless till it meet with Him." 1. The first step in this answer to the deepest want of human nature is the conviction that God is, — that God lives. Heart and flesh cry ; where is the response? Joyful is the moment in the soul's experience when the reality of God's being comes over us with its full power. Revelation does not undertake to prove to us the being of God, but it implies it throughout, and that is the most persua- sive way of teaching it. It does not argue it, and therefore it does not arouse opposition. Faith is the first condition of all religious good, not cold intellect- 153 ual assent, but believing with the whole heart unto righteousness. We see him not by sense, but we know him by the soul. Knowledge is larger and truer than sight. We see not a pain, but we feel it. We see not the virtues and characters of our friends, but they are among the most real things to us. We see not foreign countries, but they lie clear and well defined in the domain of our knowledge. Mathemat- ics demonstrate their truths to our intellectual con- victions. We cannot but receive them. But the truths of morals and faith rest on a broader basis of our whole spiritual, as well as intellectual nature. They take the deeper form, not of convictions, but of persuasions, not so definite and decided, but more comprehensive and satisfying to the whole man. When children wish to describe anything as par- ticularly good and excellent, they say that it is real. The first need of the soul is to feel that God is real, — the great reality and essence of all things. And if sin had not shut up and darkened the windows of our being, this gracious light would flow in on every side. Every moment God would arrive at the soul in his blessings, — sun, rain, and food, and home with its group of loving ones, and all nature and society, would reflect him in upon the inmost heart in bright and glorious colors, and in awful distinct- ness and power. 2. Then we are to feel that He is Present and Living. The belief of not a few seems to be in a past God, a deceased, departed Deity, and the world as a 154 huge skeleton out of which all the soul has gone, not an abode for the indwelling Power, but the ruins of his former stately palace. But he has not made the world, and then retired from it. He is not an absentee proprietor. He is the present Creator, the living' God, as on the world's first morning. He dyes the flower, and ripens the corn. Laws are but his uniform modes of working. Forces are but the heavings of the indwelling Almightiness. He is, and he is present. Here, to-day, in these sweet heavens filled with holy light, and in this , earth garbed in beautiful plants and colored with rich hues, and in this air on which the Sabbath hymn is borne, a solemn presence broods, — an inconceivable, and sublime, and mysterious Being is round about us. How it is, we cannot know or explain. We cannot explain any more how it is loe are here, in these bodies. We only know it is so. God is a greater mystery. The finite can only catch a dis- tant glimpse of the Infinite. The fact is the impor- tant thing to feel, not to know the how. The Great Eye, looking on the evil and the good, is in every place, as our childish books taught us. But we should be in error to imagine that presence one of scrutiny and watching alone, to detect our sins, and spy out our weaknesses. That Eye of Heaven is bright with unutterable interest and love, and we can only fear its look, as Peter did that of Christ, when we have done wrong. I lately saw a Catholic representation of the Deity 155 in the form of the Trinity, — the Father, a venerable old man, seated on one side, with the earth as a globe on his lap ; on the other side a younger man, as the Son ; and midway between the two an illuminated Dove, hovering, as the Holy Ghost. I have also seen, in a recent number of Godey's Lady's Book, a series of pictures on the Creation, in which God was represented as a man, at work on the Creation in its various parts. All such images blur and mar for many minds the sense of the universal, spiritual, glori- ous, and benignant presence of the Father of all. For when we make God man, we make him finite. But he is in heaven, boundless, pure, bright, majestic, ever over us, as the infinite sky, except that no cloud ever obscures, no storms disturb, the serenity of his Being. All great truths are necessarily indefinite, — the existence and presence of God, inspiration, the im- mortality of the human soul. They must all stand in our minds in large and flowing outlines. Our compasses are not made to draw their exact circum- ference. We are not of a calibre and bore to carry that ball. We are not to cut truth to the quick, for then it bleeds to death. God is not a form, any form, — even the most beautiful or majestic, man. He is a Presence, universal, living, all-powerful, and all-lov- ing. Too often he is addressed in tevival meet- ings as if he were specially near, or as the piriests of Baal cried unto their God ; as if he were a great way off, when he is near ; or as requiring endless repeti- tions in our requests, when he knows all even before 156 we speak ; or as waiting to be entreated with ago- nizing supplications, when he is more placable and benign than any earthly parent to give all necessary good to his children. He overflows creation. He is all in all. While we walk forth over these rich scenes of earth, and under the stupendous sky, we should cherish that " sense sublinrie " the poet speaks of, — " Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the breathing air. And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, — A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking beings, all objects of thought, And rolls through all things." 3. But the heart and flesh have another note in their cry, and it is for a Good Being, or, as our Saxon has it, God, that is, the Good, whom we may love. If God is, and if he is present, what matters it, if he is a malicious Power, planning our pain and misery, and eventually decreeing our eternal ruin ? He who teaches such a view of the Supreme, educates infi- dels. Calvinism has created hosts of unbelievers. It is a religion suited to some dark and stern and ter- rible race of beings, who imagine God altogether such a being as themselves ; not to us tender-hearted men, women, and children. If we may suppose such a thing, it would be a religion for the lion and the rhinoceros ; not for hearts that may be broken, for eyes that can weep, and for sinning, suffering, dying mortals. They ask for something gentler, milder, brighter. True, there is evil ; but evil is not abso- 157 lute, but relative. " If I were God," said a divine, with more point than reverence, " I would have it all my own way." With reverence let us say, He does have it all his own way. There is no Almighty Devil to compete with Him the throne of the uni- verse, as Milton has fabled, no everlasting evil, no eternal hell. He is Absolute, Eternal, Almighty Good. Evil is the shadow which his finite and im- perfect creatures cast, not his shadow. There is indeed pain, suffering, sin. But we must not judge the work before it is done. A temple begun is de- formity itself; advanced, it begins to put on grace and majesty ; completed, we see that the imperfec- tions were necessary stages to its glorious consum- mation. This life is a beginning, a school, a disci- pline, a foundation. The finished temple soars far beyond, and its pinnacle reaches up into worlds above, not of time and sense. God, the Good, is in all sys- tems, all beings, and in all working according to his own being, that is, for good. Father is his proper name. Nature, Providence, Jesus, all teach this com- forting lesson. And when the heart in its hopes and affections, and the flesh in its griefs and pangs, cry, the response comes from every side, and is echoed and re-echoed in endless and harmonious sounds, — God is good. This is the psalm of David. This is the sermon of Jesus. Humanity, blind and dark as it is, sings this hymn, God is good ; and this is the sublime music of the spheres, God is good. Angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim, 14 158 THE soul's want of god. chant it to the listening ear of eternity, God is good, God is good. 4. But this is not enough. The want of the soul is not only for a Good, but for a Great God, whom we may adore. It admires greatness with an even earlier and intenser admiration than goodness. It worships genius. If a new poet, an Alexander Smith, appear, the whole world is anxious to read and know him. This is no factitious taste. It is inborn and necessary. We may and do often mis- take what is greatness, but we all admire it, desire, rejoice in it. Our nature has been constructed on a scale so large and generous itself, that it cannot in the end be satisfied with anything less than the great, the vast, the illimitable. We go far and study long to reach these qualities. The life of a man like Na- poleon, the presence of Niagara, the Atlantic Ocean in a storm, a battle, an earthquake, a volcano, appeal to something in us which rises up, and sometimes, to our own astonishment, clainas kindred with these forces in man and in nature. In the infinite power and greatness of God, this inborn reverence of our nature for the great finds its true and purifying ob- ject. This passion for greatness, unguided, makes us idolaters, but directed and enlightened by Christian- ity, it makes us worshippers of God in spirit and in truth. Man-worship is empty ; mere fond admira- tion of a cave or a mountain is sentimentalism ; the praise of genius is often as hollow as sounding brass ; for only when objects are put in their right places, 159 and we respect the greatest as the greatest, and all things less as emanations and manifestations of that uncreated glory, do our intellectual and spiritual fac- ulties come into their proper order, and work to their appointed ends. The heart and flesh cry out. Give us something greater than the Alps, or the sea, or man, or angel ; yea, they stretch their wings to a flight beyond all visible majesty of heavens or earth, and ask for God, for Him who is greater than all his works, and then, and not till then, are they satisfied. Our tastes change very much from youth onward. Things we once passionately admired cease to move us. The soul has got beyond them. Jt is travelling upward. It exhausts one thing after another. But there is one youthful sentiment that is never out- grown, — that rises with our intellectual stature", and spreads with our moral expansion, and soars with our spiritual aspirations, — and that is our faith in the Great God, — " And, as it hastens, every age But makes its brightness more ^^vine." 5. The nature of man has been so created as to seek after a Wise and Infinite Intelligence. We ad- mire with huge respect the men even who have been able to pocket a little science, who can read a dozen languages, who are largely conversant with affairs, and know things as they are. A skilful invention is heralded from hemisphere to hemi- sphere. He who has read one of the characters in Nature's alphabet, or spelled out a few syllables or 160 THE soul's want OF GOD. words in her mighty lore, is hailed with all the titles of glory. But no libraries, geniuses, scientific or lit- erary associations, no fragments and crumbs that fall from the table of knowledge, can meet the unextin- guishable thirst of man for the s{)iritual and the im- mortal. Let him not think to fill an infinite craving with anything less than the Infinite. Newton ex- pressed it all, when, with all his vast illumination of wisdom, entering profoundly as he did into the secret chambers of the knowledge of the universe, he said he seemed but as a child wandering on the beach, picking up here and there and admiring a prettier stone or shell than usual, while the great ocean of truth rolled dark and boundless beyond him. This yearning for a God wise, as well as mighty and good, whom we may trust as well as love and reverence, is especially felt in the difficult problems of our own life. Is the plan of the world intelligent, unerring, or is it a failure and an abortion ? Milton gave great and just offence to our reverence, when he describes the'Devil as overreaching God, and de- feating his plan in the creation of the earth and the formation pf man. Who is this Devil, we ask ? If he has done the thing once, may he not again ? may he not always ? and, finally, may he not carry down to his own black abodes the splendid trophy of a lost human soul, snatched from the hand of God, — yea, of multitudes of such ? And fearful to say, such is the theology, creed, faith, of the dominant churches of Christendom at this day. No, I will not say faith, 161 for it is too horrible to Be the distinctly conscious and well-considered faith of an intelligent age. Against such a faith, if it anywhere lurks among the dry husks and stubble of an antiquated body of divin- ity, human nature, heavenly and earthly, heart and flesh, cry out in protest. They crave a God of wis- dom, one, so to speak with awe, who understands himself; not the God of Calvin, overruled by a Law mightier than himself, the decree of Fate, — the prin- ciple of the Greek tragedy; not the God of some philosophers, — a Being slowly coming to self-con- sciousness in man ; but an original, uncreated, un- erring, infinite, conscious Wisdom, whom we can trust, and know that we are not deceived, and follow without going astray ; whose works and whose word are full of light and life, and conduct every true aspirant and humble follower and servant to never- ending rest and peace. But if I have at all rightly interpreted the signifi- cance of this cry, which is for ever ascending from the breast, and seeking after God, you may ask. How shall it be satisfied ? I would not dogmatize, and say by any one way, but rather by all ways. It is more in the waiting, receiving, and teachable state of the soul, than it is by methods, cultures, churches, and dispensations. When the final reckoning comes, and honor is paid to whom honor is due, I doubt not it will be found that Mahomet saved some as well as Moses, and that China, now seeming to awake with wondrous life, and cry through all its millions after 14* 162 something better than it has had, after the living God, — that China has not been for so many ages a mere blank and desert of souls. Still, we cannot doubt the best way is best. The purest truth is a million times better than -truth with one drop of al- loy or sediment of error. Seek, then, for the truth, and in the truth God will ever be coming, and enter- ing in and taking possession of the soul, and driving out every darkness and weakness. Rest not short of God. The mistake of the churches is, they stop before they come to the end. The end is God, the ever-present, living, good, powerful, wise ; they pause in men, they call themselves by a human appellation ; they halt at the saints, the Virgin Mary ; their timid and unbelieving worship does not climb to the eter- nal temple, and present itself filially but confidently before the great white throne of the Father. The Christian Church in general has not risen above Christ. It has been the Christian^ not the Divine era. He is indeed the God to mOst, above and beyond whom they conceive of no God, though he was weary, and sad, and tempted, and ignorant, as he himself says, of some things, and finally died, — all of which God could not be and do, and be a God in the high- est sense. The Church must learn that the end is not Christ, but God ; that Christ is the Mediator, medium, way to the Father. He does not attract our love, or regard, or worship, to himself, and detain it there. He prays and teaches us to pray to the Father. He comes into the world, not to do his own 163 will, but the will of the Father. My Father is greater than I ; and he prayed that his disciples might be one with him, as he was one with the Father, that the chain might be complete, and the soul find a way for its ascent to God and heaven, — men united to Christ, Christ and his Church united to the Father. The world is a sublime ruin, and the Church itself is a superstition, until God becomes all in all. What he fills is filled, and what he blesses is blessed. We wander in pain and sin, hopeless and helpless, until we come to Christ, and through Christ come to the Father. May we each and all hearken to this voice after God, ever rising up from the deep- est places of the spirit-world, and yearning with strong crying and tears after the Supreme Good and Love. The best things of earth will only mock and ruin us, if we obey not this first and most urgent of all wants, this hunger and thirst of an immortal na- ture. Pray, read, think, labor, study, do anything, do everything that is right, to gain this true wisdom. Spend life in this service, and it will be well spent. All its various scenes and trials, its joys and bless- ings and hopes, its schools and homes and churches and governments, will then have all done for us their inconceivable and eternal benefit. For they will have ripened within these frail, but never-dying spir- its, the faith and hope and love of the One Living and True God, Father of all, of Christ and men and angels, now and for ever. DISCOURSE IX BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. BE STILL, AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD. — Psalm xlvi. 10. Every period and every place have their peculiar obstructions to the Christian life. The mistake committed by theologians is in making the Devil but one, when his name is Legion. The great induc- tive philosopher assigned four kinds of prejudices to man, which he termed respectively, idols of the tribe, or those inherent in human nature ; idols of the den, or those peculiar to the individual ; idols of the mar- ket, or those arising from intercourse and association with mankind ; and the idols of the theatre, or the errors which come from false systems of philosophy and theology, and which give fictitious or theatrical notions of things. The devils might have a similar classification, and there is one of those which come from the market, or from intercourse and association with mankind, that might without slander be called the Devil of Haste. We live in an age of hurry. There is an evil spirit abroad in our civilization, that drives men too BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. 165 fast and too far. Life, that was formerly likened to a journey, a voyage, or a pilgrimage, has become a race, a chase, in which not bit and bridle, but spurs and whip, are deemed the rider's best equipment. Our gospel is condensed into one line : " What thou doest, do quicklyP We overdo even our good things. If we are righteous, and undertake righteous reforms, we are sometimes in the category of Solomon, "righteous overmuch." "Drive" is the word of the times. A late writer has said that " a railway train should be the emblem on our shield, with the motto. Hurrah I " In short, the Devil of Haste has entered in and possessed us, and he is not a good angel, but a veri- table devil. He hurries us so fast that we have no time to "be still and know God," no place quiet enough to read our Bibles and say our prayers. Or, if he should put his hand upon religion, he wishes, to use the vulgar phrase, to " put it through quick," and he has therefore a high estimation of camp- meetings and revivals, and the whole enginery of fear and excitement, as speedy labor-saving machines to accomplish a work, which, in the slower times of prophets, apostles, martyrs, and saints, it was thought could only be effected by a lifetime of prayer and charity and self-denial. This American system of conversion will, we fear, lose in quality all it gains in time. Its style of Christianity will be perishable, we apprehend, as it is rapid. Character is not a blow struck once, but a growth. What is life given 166 BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. for, but that, through its revolving years and circling ages, the intellectual and spiritual constitution may come, like the physical, to their gradual perfection by successive stages of advancement ? There is no short cut to heaven, no swift march we can steal upon the sure-abiding and the long-unfolding laws of this most ancient universe. A day's work in a day is all we can ever do ; and all that is done more than that, we have to settle for afterwards under high penalties for disobedience. In education, the methods of haste, the early and long-continued confinement of very young children in close and ill-ventilated roomfe, the short, twelve- lesson modes of learning, the forcing processes of prizes, parts, and embittering emulation to stuff the youthful memory with the largest amount of studies, whether understood and digested or not, belong to the same system. Hence tender plants are watered so much that they are drowned. The fuel is heaped so abundantly on the fire, that every spark goes out. The culture of an immortal mind excludes by the very terms the notion of a hot-house development. But the present results are such as to bid us pause in our headlong career, " be still and know God " and his laws, and sit humbly and quietly at the inner oracle, and gain reliable intimations how we may touch this inward spiritual organization of a human being, a thousand times more delicate and marvellous than any watch-work of wheels and springs, and not throw it into lasting and perhaps BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. 167 irretrievable disorder. Young ladies "finish their education " in their teens, and are "brought out" to flutter through a brief season of admiration, and die of consumption before the age at which their grand- mothers began to live. Young men foolishly buy their time before they are twenty-one years of age, to go to California, or some other splendid lottery, where the blanks are counted by thousands, and the prizes by units. Now if we will stop long enough to hear a word of exhortation, we shall see that, while activity, in- dustry, progress, and despatch are all good in their places and within due bounds, the reckless habit of the present generation is not good for anybody or anything. Man was not made with wings to fly, but with feet to walk. And if by sail, engine, rail, and wire he can move with the steam and with the. lightning, there is all the more reason why the leis- ure which he thus accumulates more and more, by his labor and time saving machinery, he should de- vote to repose, and calm meditation on God and duty, and earnest supplication for the holy and serene life of Jesus. There is time and there is eternity before us, and whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well. They who run may read, but running is not favorable to reading. The slow- paced are sometimes the quickest at the goal. We live but once in this world, and we are bound to extract out of life, by trial, experience, exercise of our faculties and the associated power and knowledge of 168 BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. the race, and the superior illumination from above, all the good this world can yield. But this hot and impatient mood of life leaves a host of duties not done, a multitude of truths not meditated, a world of pleasures not enjoyed, and a constellation of graces and virtues not cultivated and assimilated. Let us know that quicksilver is not the only metal, nor lightning the only element. Instead of this feverish and eager rushing across the stage of life, as of the horse plunging into the battle, we will lift up serene brows to the calm heavens, and we will repeat in a low tone that beautiful strain, which has been chanted for two thousand years, to quiet the restless bosom of humanity, never more restless than here and now, — "Be still, and know that I am God." So highly was silence esteemed by that remarka- ble reformer and philosopher of the ancient world, Pythagoras, that he enjoined upon his disciples a probation of five years without speaking, by which their minds might be cleared of trifles, and learn self- control. We can easily conceive that such a rule, absurd as it appears at first, was based upon deep principles, and we know from history that noble spirits were trained in that school of still meditation, whom men consented to call divine, and whose sys- tems of thought ruled for generations over the most polished nations of the earth. Nor has the Christian world been without its rep- resentatives of the virtues of silence and rest. To BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. 169 the unspeaking and hushed Quaker assembly the secret of divine truth and love has been unveiled. The still of mind would seem to share the blessins: with the pure in heart, of seeing God. Immortal principles have crystallized in secrecy and calmness of soul. And the purity and spirituality of doctrine, and the freedom from the grosser sins and corrupt institutions and customs of the world, which are naturally associated with Quakerism, testify that a blessing from above has descended in those rapt and heaven-opened pauses of the mind. Who indeed can doubt, that, if men would oftener stop in their hurried life, and recur to the First Great Cause, and cast a look to heaven while toiling and worrying themselves among their earthly cares, they would be far better armed against temptation, and that fountains of unfading happiness would be opened to the thirsting soul ? "Who is weak, when the thought of God is in his mind ? Who is poor, when the love of God is in his heart? Who is wretched, when he consciously rests on an Almighty arm? For our spiritual attainments depend less upon isolated efforts, or direct lessons, than on the general moods and postures of the soul, produced by the whole web of discipline in which we are enveloped. Life is truly found in a heavenly exaltation of our whole being, in the attitude of the mind and its habitual gait and carriage as immortal, in the disen- chantment from the transient trifles which crumble 15 170 BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. to pieces in our hand, in the resumption by the soul of its native and conscious dignity, as a child of the Infinite Father and an heir of eternal life. Every man must be aware at times of this shining up within him of a central light, like a candle in a trans- parent vase, the enkindling of a celestial heat, which ' he certainly never originated, and which as certainly he can never extinguish. Every one must feel, as he is perplexed with his swarm of little cares, and wea- ried with the daily drudgery of his oft-repeated work, that he is a kind of Belisarius, an emperor begging ; a species of Pegasus, born to fly through the em- pyrean, but toiling in the harness of earth. There is a sublime discontent that is proof of immortality. While, then, there must be no relaxation of fidelity in the smallest details of duty, how good it is again and again to uplift the flagging soul into a serener atmosphere, to touch spiritual things and receive their electric shock, to be still and know that God is God for ever and ever. Often and often must we thus charge home upon our dull insensibility, and vitalize our sluggish gratitude. But whatever helps us thus to retire from the bustling world of sense into the tranquil world of infinite love, beauty, and glory, - be it a book, a prayer, the call of a friend, the claim of the poor, or a Scripture, or a poem, or a flower, as surely raises us heavenward, places us in a condi- tion from which we can never wholly fall away, as if a visible arm were stretched out from the opening sky to lift us upwards. BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. 171 A little girl, who for the first time was passing through the streets of a crowded city with her mother, innocently inquired, " Mother, when do the people get time to pray here ? " It is a question, like many of those put by children, easier asked than an- swered. When verily do men, either in city or coun- try, amidst the incessant demands upon their atten- tion, get time to quiet their nerves, to call home their wandering thoughts, and really and calmly to think of duty and of eternity ? Hurried as they are, from morn to latest eve, not only with the natural haste of labor, and quick steps, and urgent calls on body and brain, but with the speed of machines, with engines " grating harsh thunder," and the lightning revolution of countless wheels, what spare moment is there when one can call his soul his own, and can direct that soul, freighted with all its wondrous affections and yearnings, to the Infinite Father and to the heavenly home'? Alas I how much of the time we call life is really the death, the deadness, of the living part ! We vacate the ample palace of the soul, to take up mean and miserable quarters in the hut of coarse and brutish world liness. How much we need to do what we were told when children to do in read- ing, mind our stops! Did a day never pass, my brother, when close and absorbing business so steeped your senses in forgetfulness, that even the thought of God, much less a calm and conscious leaning upon him, a felt uplifting and grateful opening of the heart to him, as the Fountain of light and love, 172 BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. never for one blessed instant visited you from twi- light to twilight ? Sterne fancied the poor captive pining in his cell, and visited with one straggling ray of light from the cheerful upper world, but the pris- oner of worldliness is sunk in a subterranean dun- geon, whose solid darkness is not pierced by a soli- tary ray. When the mortal rests on the mortal, it is full of toil and trouble ; but when it rests on the immortal, it finds rest and peace. Man leaning on man finds his support but a fragile reed ; but, leaning on God, he cannot be greatly moved. The noble German dying asked for a great thought to refresh him. So is it with us all living, as well as dying. Cast in these mortal straits, raised and depressed by the fluc- tuating body, wounded and bleeding in the life-bat- tle, washed and whelmed in the surges of this time- sea, to which we cannot say, " Peace, be still! " we thirst to be refreshed by a great thought, and the greatest of all thoughts is that of God. When we earnestly think of his glorious being, of his vast cre- ation, of his protecting providence, and of his fatherly grace and love, when we strive to acquaint ourselves with him, and to bow to his will, the agitation in our bosoms subsides, and peace, heavenly peace, waves over us her palm. This peace is not the stagnation of our powers, but their harmonious action. It is not the insensi- bility of a single faculty or affection, but the subor- dination of all. under the legitimate dominion of con- BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. 173 science and reason, whose right it is to reign. It is the body with every limb and sense performing its proper function without usurpation and without un- worthy compliance. It is the spirit with every ca- pacity growing, every taste in exercise, and every affec- tion aspiring, reigning over the body and under God to the fulfilling of his divine plan of a human being. So that peace is not death, dulness, torpor, which too many associate with religion, but true vigor, life which is life. The larger, therefore, by study, disci- pline, obedience, suffering, our acquaintance with God becomes, the more entirely our being is spread over his creation, and the greater the number of points at which it is brought into harmonious affinity with his laws in creation, in providence, and in reve- lation, the broader the basis of our peace, and the more immovable and eternal the soul's rest. We see the truth of both propositions resolved into one, to be still that we may know God, and to acquaint ourselves with him that we may be at peace. It is because we are so timid in our faith, so hesitating in our love, so reluctant and feeble in our service, that we are so much at the mercy of circumstances, and possess so little of the peace of God which passeth understanding. But cast off fearlessly, restless voy- ager of earth, from these shores. Let the familiar headlands disappear ; launch out into the mighty deep, and fear not its winds and waves ; for all that ocean on which you sail is an ocean of love. Its icebergs even are vast monuments of love, its tropic 15* 174 BE STILL AND KNOW GOD. suns blaze with love, and its awful hurricanes, when Omnipotence rides the gale and heaven and earth are mingled together, and its gentle calms, when not a ripple breaks the mirror, — all, all are love, and the heart that bows intelligently and affectionately to the will of the Infinite Helmsman of the voyage, will abide in peace, and abide in it for ever. The introductory passage of St. Augustine's Con- fessions gives us a volume of wisdom on this sub- ject, in few words : " O God, thou awakest us to delight in thy praise ; for thou makest us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it find rest in thee." The whole argument in behalf of the culture of a calm, meditative spirit is narrowed to one fact, and the exhortation to be drawn from thence is as effectual as any words could utter or accumulate, — Jesus PRAYED. Not for example's sake alone, not from habit, education, form, but from the present and felt needs of the spirit, and its aspirations heavenward, he prayed to his Father and our Father, to his God and our God. He passed whole nights in prayer> not as an ascetic task, but as the natural expression of his spiritual state. But in our humbler case wor- ship and meditation cannot be wholly lyrical and spontaneous. There must mingle with them some consciousness of the earthly that is resisted and over- come, as well as of the heavenly that is won and en- joyed. Our spiritual wings cannot always be spread, nor our flight be to the sun. There must be a cer- tain religious mechanitem to these bodies, turning on BE STILL AND KNOAV GOD. 175 joints, and to these souls, asleep one third of the time in the depths of unconsciousness and irresponsible- ness. The fixed hour, day, place, book, are not to be despised. But however the pause comes, come it should and must often in the eager rush of worldli ness and care. " Be still, and know that I am God." " Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still." " Acquaint now thyself with God, and be at peace." The earth makes no noise or jar in its sublime revolution, and all the silver spheres of heaven turn on harmonious axles. Impatient mor- tal, look up, and adore, and be still before Him who is greater than all his works. Think more calmly, act more serenely, pray more fervently. The Chris- tian soul, like its divine prototype, should move with a holy stillness and peace in its place. Shone upon by heavenly light and moved by divine power, it will seek and pray to enter into that oneness with God by which all its motions around its own axis, so to say, will be parts and arcs of the larger and serener revolution around the Central Sun. DISCOURSE X. UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. THAT THEY MAY BE MADE PERFECT IN ONE. — John XVU. 23. The last prayer of our Saviour for his followers was, — " That they all may be one ; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us ; — that they may be one, even as we are one ; I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." " To be made perfect in one " — one with God and one with each other — is the perfec- tion and happiness of mankind. An ultimate aim of Christianity, accordingly, is union, harmony, love. Instead of the present ceaseless war of man upon man, the selfish strife of sects and parties, the worry- ing competition of business, the hostility of castes and classes, the grinding and crushing of city against city and country against country, it proposes peace, — peace in the family, in the church, in the neigh- borhood, in the nation, and between the nations. So towards the Eternal Majesty of heaven, instead of the distance and coldness of strangers, or the stub- bornness of enemies, it would give the confidence and UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. 177 delightful ease of children in a father's house, so that we may feel God's world is man's home, and live before the Highest in a holy and affectionate spirit of friendship. And the Gospel will not accomplish its blessed mission to man until it shall have estab- lished this brotherhood of the species, this childhood of man to God, and this fatherhood of God to man, not as splendid theories, but as living, practical real- ities. '* That they may be made perfect in one," are words written all over the works of God. They con- tain a profound philosophy, as well as indicate a per- fect religion. Union is the law of universal nature, and disunion the exception ; and disunion takes place only that there may be a more perfect union. It is the composition of seven different colors that makes the absolute light. It is the mixture of three diverse gases that produces the vital air ; and of two, that gives us the vital water. It is the congeries of the discordant materials which science analyzes and classifies, that constitutes the round and revolving earth. And what is true of the so-called elements also holds good of all the various objects of matter ; not one but is a union, a composition, an agreement. And when this union is broken, it is only a tempo- rary transition to a new and better union; even matter itself for ever rising on an ascending scale of progress, until, instead of the original chaos, we now behold a beautiful and inhabited globe. This magnificent law of God is in force and man- 178 UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. ifestation beyond our little globe. It is inscribed on the stars of the firnnament, and chanted in the music of the spheres. Orbit circling within orbit and system within system, above, below, and on either hand, the mystic dance of worlds, ten thousand times ten thou- sand mighty globes in swiftest motion, but in perfect method, crossing and recrossing one another's path without collision, testify to the sublime union of the material and visible universe. Even the seemingly lawless meteors and the erratic comets are but more dazzling demonstrations of the same eternal truth. It is said by some one, that all nature is at war ; but it is a superficial remark. More truly may we say, all nature is at peace, and her seeming conflict is but the condition of a more absolute harmony, and her very variety makes the real universe. It is dif- ferent notes in music that constitute the perfect mel- ody ; and the endless changes, revolutions, and, to our dull ears, discords of the creation, are in truth a more concordant anthem of praise to the Creator. " All nature is but art, unknown to thee ; All chance, direction which thou canst not see ; All discord, harmony not understood ; All partial evil, universal good." And could we read the moral as clearly as we can the physical creation, we should no doubt see the same law, if not the same fact, in every part of its complicated web. We should know that evil and good, light and darkness, misery and happiness, were a» essential and unavoidable in a world of free. UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. 179 moral, accountable, and improvable agents, as the changes of matter and the compensations of growth and decay, combination and dissolution, from a glow- worm to a planet. At least, we cannot get away from one fact. It is the world of God. He made it, and not we ourselves. He created its beings, es- tablished its laws, and foresaw, if he did not predes- tinate, its evil and its good. But we must not judge the architect's work half done. We must " the great issue wait," and not suppose, that, because we see trouble to-day, we see the character and meaning of the whole unbounded plan of our Heavenly Father. For it is but a minute arc of the circle of eternity, crooked, indeed, and unsightly to the mole eye of man, but harmony and beauty itself to the all-com- prehending Mind. In fact, the theory of Christianity agrees perfectly with this view, and the specific teachings of our Lord corroborate it. What we know not now, we are to know hereafter. The tares cannot be pulled out from among the wheat until the harvest. The very Prince of Peace came to send forth on the earth a temporary sword, a transition-fire, to make way for a more entire union of soul with soul, and of the finite with the Infinite. The old stubble must be burnt up, to prepare the soil for a new and more abundant increase. The Church itself would prove a cause of contention for the time being, and Chris- tianity a question of dispute, but only that in the end they might fulfil the conditions of a more lasting 180 UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. peace. The probe and the knife must precede the perfect cure. The religion that was cradled amid crucifixions and martyrdoms could not grow to its complete maturity in the earth without its Inquisi- tions and Smithfields. Thus unity of faith, and even of opinions, has a meaning, if we would rever- ently heed it. Men struggle to be at one, not only in feeling but in doctrine. They break the peace for peace' sake. He must have read the history of the Christian Church to little good purpose, who does not see that its strifes have a deeper meaning than mere strife ; and that, with clangor of hammer and saw, — with the splitting, cutting, and fashioning of this celestial, as of our familiar earthly architecture, — the world has been seeking, almost unconsciously to itself, to frame and build the harmonious temple of Christ. The final issue, whatever may come between, is revealed by the Master, — " that they may be made perfect in one." This union and perfection of relig- ion, so illustrated by the works and so confirmed by the word of God, has two natural branches. The final end of the Gospel is to make man one with God. The great work of Christ was to bring about this union. He was the medium of communication between heaven and earth, the Mediator between God and man, standing midway, like the angel in the beautiful design of the sculptor, who is pointing, with upward finger, the wondering infant, released from earth, to a brighter world on high. The relig- UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. 181 ious acts our Saviour inculcated all subserved this main purpose. Did he teach repentance, faith, love, obedience, gratitude, prayer ? They were the means and instrumentalities of removing the barriers to the perfect union ; they were the filaments to weave a stronger and more incorruptible bond of harmony. This state of perfect reconciliation with the Father of our spirits and Dispenser of our lot has been the aspiration and effort of the good and wise in the past, " the sacramental host of God." Indeed, more atten- tion has been given to this side of religion, piety, than to the other side, morality. The exertion has been to be just with God, more than to be just to man. But a profound want of our nature is met by union with God. We find nothing mystical or ab- surd in the sympathy of heart with heart; why should we in the concord of the humblest mind on earth with the Great Spirit? And if new light and power flow from the interchange of thought with thought, and intercourse among men, then how much greater must be the benefit to the ignorant and err- ing child of the earth to be brought into a living union with the Supreme Mind ! The very term re- ligion^ as some derive it, signifies this binding again of the soul, that has drifted away from God, to its eternal strength. For life away from him is, in real- ity, not life, but a species of death. Not to know and love him is not to know and love truly anything he has made, not even ourselves. Our very self-love IG 182 UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. will be actual self-hatred and self-rjiin, unless the blessing of this higher relationship be recognized and sought. Observe, this must be a living union ; not a tra- ditional and legendary conversion, effected many years ago, — our Christian character justifying itself by that single transaction, — but an ever-renewed alliance and good understanding ; the most lively sorrow following every fall from the high estate of this divine intimacy. To-day, if we will, we may hear God in the rushing rain, and see him in the bountiful harvest. This present moment in which we dwell is full of him. Earth and air and ocean cover our board with royal generosity, and the mighty sun has spent the summer in ripening our desert. If the lowest things of life have tongues thus to speak to us of the All-surrounding Love, what shall we say of the highest, — of thought and fancy and feeling, — of art and science and literature, — of government, laws, and morals, — of the Holy Scrip- tures and the Gospel of Jesus Christ ? The whole creation, physical, mental, and spiritual, has in truth been constructed to bring us into contact with God at every point, to impart to the mind the light, and to pour into the heart the life, of this blessed union. • Consider its honor. This co-working with God, as dear children, is the chief privilege of man. What folly, what insanity, that we should so often and willingly forfeit it by our sins ! There is no pride nor haughtiness with the Most High. He UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. 183 condescends to an infant as to a Socrates, and abides with all his glory equally in the cottage or the palace which is opened to him. He has made man, as it were, a humble image of himself, a mini- ature of the Infinite. He calls upon his child to re- semble him by choice, as he is formed to resemble him by creation ; and to grow, as he has been made, in the divine life and similitude. He has thus im- parted to man even a portion of his own tireative power, and the satisfaction of being in part self-made. By a true and close union with our Father in heav- en, we are not lost in him, absorbed, and deprived of the consciousness and identity of our being ; but it is in this manner we truly find our life, and come to ourselves ; it is thus that the meek, the spiritually- minded, own and enjoy all things, enter into posses- sion of the whole universe, inherit earth and inherit heaven ; while he who is out of God and this filial oneness, however rich he may seem to be, has noth- ing, is disinherited of all, because he is not rich to- wards God. Everything refuses its use to him, be- cause he does not use and enjoy all in God. " His riches are corrupted, his garments moth-eaten, his gold and silver cankered." When we separate ourselves from the central Mind and Heart of the creation, we put ourselves into false relations with all things and beings ; but when we maintain an unbroken communion of worship, love, and obedience, we place ourselves in such a con- junction that all things work together for our good. 184 UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. h and none for our ill ; the least swell into generous bounties, and the hardest soften into parental bene- dictions ; — yea, pain and grief have sweet uses to the child of God. And when something worse comes, when the foul blot of sin threatens to eclipse the light of the soul for ever, how does this forgiving Parent meet us a great way off, even in our earliest compunctions and penitence, and give us no reluctant welcome home, but say, " This my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, and is found" ! O the mercy and long- suffering of God I Eternity will be too short to un- derstand the instances of his care, and to sum up the multitude of his kindnesses. Let us set about making this filial union a most practical and daily business of our lives. It is one of the greatest ends for which we have our lives given and preserved. God is a spirit ; but so are our friends spirits. That characteristic is no bar to our sympa- thy with them ; indeed, it is its very foundation. We can talk to them. But we can hold the higher conversation of prayer with the Heavenly Friend. They can answer us. True; and poor and imperfect enough their answers often are, — smiles on false cheeks, — perhaps tears from fond, but foolish eyes, — half-stammered meanings of the soul, at the best. But the answers of God are great words of providence and grace, that we never can wholly forget or mistake^ because they are always perfectly true and sincere. They are cherubim, standing in the sun ; crosses, -UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. 185 inscribed with encouraging mottoes, on the sky ; bushes, burning with a divine, but unconsuming flame ; now the birth-angel and now the death-angel crossing the threshold of our home ; new influxes of light and new visitings of love. God speaks to us with such words as these. Have we failed to study even the alphabet of that language which makes them as articulate to us as our vernacular tongue ? Union with God ! He in us and we in him, through his Son and his Spirit ! He in us by his ful- ness of temporal good and spiritual blessing ; we in him by our contented dependence and unquestioning love ! We will see him in all things, and all things in him. We will hear him in the bird of spring and the fall of the autumn leaf. He condescends from his infinite heavens to dwell in the souls of his chil- dren. We will arise from our low and worldly life, from the dark places where we shut out from us the pure light and joy of the spirit-world, and enter into union with God, even with our God. But thus far only the half has been said ; the other privilege and duty of our being is union tvith man. " Perfect in one" applies to men with men, as to all men with God. The ancient St. Simon Stylites dwelt thirty-seven years on the tops of pillars in the open air, exposed to all the rain and cold and heat, that he might cru- cify the body by this lingering martyrdom, and be perfectly joined to the Djlvine Being. He had his reward. He was called holy, saint, and many down 16* 186 UNION WITH GOD AND MAN.^ to this day think he was a very good man, though in a great error. But his name is never mentioned in the habitations of sin and poverty as a benefactor, as a son of consolation, who clothed the naked, fed the hungry, visited the prisoner, -and comforted the sick. However faithful his struggle and his self-sacrifice to be one with God, he lost the other blessedness of being one with mankind. But it is not sufficient to have a filial piety ; our Lord also teaches us a fraternal morality. When he said, " Love thy God," he did not forget to add, " Love thy neighbor." He showed what the world did not believe, and what his own followers to this day find it a great stretch of faith to credit, that there is never any real opposition of men's interests one with another. That the good of one is the good of all, and the injury of one the injury of all. That no man liveth and no man dieth to himself. That so far as, by envy, anger, or pride, we cut ourselves off from the sympathies of the great whole of humanity, we lose a part of the substantial good of our being. We voluntarily withdraw ourselves, by so doing, from the ample range and spacious mansion assigned for our abode, and consent to take up our quarters in narrow and mean apartments. When we give to party, or sect, or clan, what was meant for all man- kind, we so far dwarf and dethrone our whole na- ture. We cannot afford to lose the good-will of a single member of the human family. We are bound to do all we can, without giving up our convictions UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. 187 of truth and duty, to preserve a kindly understand- ing with all men as men, as our brethren, as dear to the Heavenly Parent. No theory of government, no plan of social organ- ization, no mode of education, and no administration of religion, can hope to succeed in benefiting men, that is not based on the Christian view of their na- ture, and does not uphold the Christian morality. Too long has the state been esteemed as all in all, and the individual as little or nothing. Too long has the Church joined with the tyrant in pouring con- tempt on human nature. " Honor all men " stands against all these usurpations, as the bulwark of man's rights. The human soul is the greatest thing on earth. It transcends all cultures, or races, or colors. Mankind are one. They are of one origin, one na- ture, one interest, and one destiny. All slaveries, therefore, are cruelties in the family ; all wars, mur- ders under the same roof. And whatever harms one, with the certainty of gravitation harms all. The life of humanity is one. And every drop of blood un- justly shed, every wrong and oppression and cruelty, is treason against the majesty of the race, against the life and peace and virtue of unnumbered and in- numerable millions. And not one individual can live so remote or sequestered a life as not to feel for better or for worse the influence of the mighty whole. No people, however lifted up to heaven in point of power or privilege, can long flourish in hostility to the liberties and peace of the rest of the world. 188 UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. Proud Babylon may exalt herself, but Babylon must one day lie as low as the humblest village she ever laki waste with fire and sword. Imperial Rome may flaunt her glories before high Heaven; but against the queen of the earth, too, is written de- cline and downfall. Through the medium of bread and tea and poli- tics, we are interested in Ireland and China and Cir- cassia ; much more, through the all-diffusive senti- ment of human brotherhood, we are concerned for every land, however remote, for every tribe, however barbarous. In this unity of the race and of man, in this fraternity of the nations alone, can any one peo- ple attain to its highest prosperity and happiness. One air enwraps the whole globe, and one sun shines every day upon all. Nature teaches us the identity of human interests ; and the Gospel, with a sublime generalization, pronounces the multifarious races bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and sinks in one impartial love the inequalities of Jew and Gen- tile, bond and free. Peace would be but one of the fruits of the union of man with man; for peace, as generally under- stood and practised, has been but a species of armed neutrality. If men have forborne to work one another ill, they have neglected, in this false doctrine of selfishness, this short-sighted and temporary pol- icy and so-called expediency, to work one another good. Civilized and Christian society, too, has often been only a milder type of civil war ; class against UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. 189 class, church against church, and town against town. The day when men shall be made perfect in their so- cial union and cooperation has not yet arrived. But the commandments of Christ have not spent their vital force. They are the word of the day, and of all days. They contain the germs of a new civilization, as much superior to life in England or America as that exceeds the brutality of New Zealand. The heavenly laws, " Love thy neighbor as thyself," and " Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," embody the lofty ideal of a new morality ; as the command, " Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind," inculcates a perfect piety. The true disciple of Christ, therefore, or he who wishes for the true perfection and happiness of his being, will study to be at one with his Heavenly Father, and to be at one with his earthly brethren. This is the true at-one-ment and reconciliation, not in the dead letter of an antiquated theology, but in the living and life-giving spirit of divine truth. Jesus came to unite man with man, and man with God, and all real progress of his religion will exhibit this result. He lived and died for this cause. The song at his birth was peace ; and his farewell blessing was peace. And when we strive after the earnest communion of the finite with the Infinite in a humble and con- fiding piety, and after perfect love in every human relation, all other difficulties are in the way of being 190 UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. quickly solved. When these two pillars stand, the whole social and spiritual fabric is safe. No lasting grief can root itself in a nature that is daily passing into the life of these magnanimous sentiments. The solid gloom of a sceptic misanthropy, a stoical con- tempt, or an atheistic indifference whether God rule above or man sin and suffer below, fly like the morn- ing mist before the rising sun. This human and divine union is the solvent for all sins and all sor- rows. It has the promise of the life that now is, and that which is to come. What a blessing would descend upon families if this union were cherished ! What a glory would in- vest the nations, if they would regard themselves but as greater families of God ! What a sublime bless- edness would rest on the whole moral earth, if, like the material, it were bound in everlasting gravitation to its great centre, and revolved in unconflicting har- mony with its own system I There has been a Greek Church of Christ, but it has partaken largely of the old mysteries and my- thologies that went before it on the same soil. There has been a Roman Church of Christ, but it has had in it a great deal more of Caesar than of God. There has been an English Church of Christ, but its hierarchy of principalities and powers has savored strongly of the dark and feudal ages. There have been Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches of Christ, but they have embodied and preserved with fossil permanency the errors and whims of individual UNION WITH GOD AND MAN. 191 and erring men. Let there arise, then, a Universal Church of Christ, a new and holier fabric, partaking of the spirit of " Liberty, Holiness, Love" ; the cre- ation of a new world ; large and equal and practi- cal ; adequate to the age in which we live, and all ages ; combining love to God and love to man, piety and morality, faith and works, religion and philan- thropy, in bonds never to be broken. For such a Church, to come out of the present dismembered and fragmentary condition of Protestant Christendom, let us pray with faith, and labor with zeal, and God may yet grant to our prayers and labors a glorious fulfilment. DISCOURSE XI. THE BIRTH OF JESUS. BUT WHEN THE FULNESS OF THE TIME WAS COME. GOD SENT FORTH HIS SON. — Galatians iv. 4. The birth of the Saviour of mankind is an event fit to be observed with a perpetual celebration. The poets have wreathed for it their most graceful gar- lands of song, devotion has uttered her most ardent prayers of gratitude, custom and tradition have accu- mulated their venerable associations, and reform and philanthropy centre here their brightest hopes for the world. For here is the last, best gift of God. When he had poured out all his treasures of wisdom, power, and beneficence, in the ordinary methods of earth, air, seas, stars, and vegetable and animal and human life, he gave as it were himself at last to the immortals he would educate for eternal life. He crowns Nature with Providence, and Providence with Hevelation, and earth with heaven, and opens an ever better and higher good to the ceaseless ascent of the human mind. He who planted in us an eter- nal aspiration, has not failed in giving it an eternal supply. THE BIRTH OF JESUS. 193 When the angel said to the shepherds, who were sore afraid at the glory which shone round about them, " Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people," he pro- nounced the word of all time : — Joy, that a Saviour was born, that the Heavenly Father gave a new and brighter token, in the advancing race, of his exhaust- less mercy, — joy, that hope, not fear, love, not hatred, happiness, not misery, life, not death, was to be the rule and destiny of man ; — joy, that the ful- ness of time had come, that mankind were prepared for the new age, that the expectations of many gen- erations were to be fulfilled, that the year of jubilee had come, the year of years, and the age of ages. Let, then, joy be the key-note. Why, when God designs to do the greatest good to man, should he be so dismal and abject in receiving it ? Let the king's son receive the king's gift in a kingly manner. Be children happy in their way, for it is nature's lyric of exultation for the Christ child, the Kriss Kringle, in the beautiful German diminutive. Be manhood happy in its expanded strength, for there is an in- tenser joy and a serener peace in Christ the man. Be old age joyful, too, for though that was a period Jesus never lived, yet he has left for it its sufficient consolation in the decline of bodily powers by the ingrafting of a life ever fresh and youthful, the life of truth, love, hope, faith, peace ; a life that has no " sere and yellow leaf" to its mellow autumn, no ice and frost to its dying winter. The Puritans rejected 17 194 THE BIRTH OF JESUS. Christmas, because they were afraid of even a shred or rag of the scarlet woman of Rome, or what they deemed her twin-sister of England. But their great poet, Milton, sang its glories and joys in one of the finest lyrics in the language ; and as time has sped, its commemoration has been increased every year among their descendants. Humanity asleep, and lying almost at death's door, wakes up slowly, but it does awake, and arises at last, and shakes itself, and goes forth to its labor and work until the evening. In the first ages of the Church, the effect of Pagan and Jewish customs of thousands of years is observable in all the ceremo- nies and great days of the Church. The elements still cling to the body and form of existing Chris- tianity, and have some foothold in nearly every religious body. But because our fathers Judaized or Paganized, there is no occasion for us to unhuman- ize ourselves. The fruit is not the soil, but the fruit must grow in the soil to come to perfection. And the tree of Christianity, whose leaves are for the heal- ing of the nations, had its rooting and first growth in beggarly elements, and three or four centuries after his ascension, Jesus would not have known his own Church ; — he might find it difficult even now. But the tendency of Protestantism, and of Unita- rianism, the Protestantism of Protestantism, is too much to denial and neglect of the concrete, bodily form of the Gospel. It substitutes reasons for feel- ings, and convictions for faith. Many of the Protes- THE BIRTH OF JESUS. 195 tant churches leave the record of Christ's life for intellectual creeds, as the Greek and Romish Churches do for sensuous rites. But Christianity has a con- crete side as well as an abstract. Its Founder was very nigh to man, as he was very nigh to God. His principles were divine, but his agents were human. He eat, drank, slept, walked, was weary, conversed, worshipped, used the words of his day, worked events, scenes, birds, lilies, into his discourse, came not to destroy the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfil, to at- tempt not to sweep away all existing usages and opinions, but to graft in a new life on the stock, — that when that which was perfect was come, then that which was in part might be done away. Hence he attended the synagogue worship, while he led men to a higher worship. He was a Jewish Messiah, and yet a universal Saviour. All the little joys, pleasures, connections, and kindly sympathies of our race, he treated with delicacy and respect. The child he did not overlook, the beggar he called and healed. He talked as affably with the Samaritan woman at the well, as with Nicodemus, the mem- ber of the national Sanhedrim. So thoroughly im- mersed and pervaded was he with all the charities, usages, and sentiments of his day, while he rose above them all in his glorious faith of the Fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man. And we still need the concrete, historical, and traditional, for we are flesh and blood, not spirit and ether. The great days of the Church are days of 196 THE BIRTH OF JESUS. high sentiments, as are those of the State. Christ- mas, the memory of the birth, Easter, the memory of the resurrection of the Lord, are as natural to keep for piety, as the 22d of February, the day of Wash- ington's birth, and the 4th of July, the day of Inde- pendence, are for patriotism. And he would suc- ceed as little who should attempt to eliminate the essence of love of country out of all forms, and pre- serve it living and commanding in a pure abstrac- tion, as he who should discard all religious institu- tions, and resolve the hallowed days, places, and persons all back into the disembodied sentiments from which they emerged. Philosophy can talk to us of truth, but it is in the cold, dry light of reason. It is the office of religion to incarnate truth in love ; to show us truth, but truth living, warm, and vivify- ing ; to reveal, not the intellect, but the heart of God ; to lead us up from this eternal and fruitless chase after the abstract and interior essence of things, to that mighty and conscious centre of the universe, where we and all things have our being. We want philosophy, that is, truth, the reality of things, but it would be good for nothing without love, for only that can be good which has a good purpose and springs from love. Truth in love is the highest point we can attain. Then we are armed in the mind, and armed in the heart, unto every emergency. Nothing can go beyond or get round truth in one, and love in the other, — truth for extent, and love for quality, the two poles of our being, holding all things midway, continent and ocean. THE BIRTH OF JESUS. 197 It is a healthy symptom, then, when the faith of the moral and spiritual Christ, the Christ of human consciousness, is most pure and growing, that the observances and honors of the historical Christ should be green and flourishing; — that the birth of Christ, his death, his ascension, should be kept in lively and impassioned remembrance; — that the poet should give his hymn, and the speaker his ad- dress; — that joy^hould hold her festival, and pathos and gratitude sing a jubilant and triumphant strain. The birth of Jesus, — Son of Man in the flesh. Son of God in the spirit, — born not of the will of the flesh, or the will of man, — befalling in the fulness of time, when the world had exhausted its own philosophies and ex- periments, and was ready for a new advance, — a birth so heralded and preannounced, — so taking place, — a manger for a cradle, a stable for a nursery, angels for choristers, and shepherds for attendants and messen- gers, — wise men from the East with their gifts, and holy Simeon and Anna of the temple, prophet and prophetess, with their benedictions, for godfathers and godmothers, — the birth so obscure contrasted with the oflice so transcendent, — so humble a child ris- ing to be the leader at thirty years of the human race, not in lower matters, but in the highest, — in the art and conduct of life, in the relation of man to the Infinite and the Eternal ; — here is cause of won- der, and joy, and gratitude, if we were only specta- tors of the scene ; how much more when we have part and lot in the same, — when his truth is our truth, 17* 198 THE BIRTH OF JESUS. his love our love, when he conquers a rude and un- vanquished part of nature and time for us, and gives us the victory over evil and the fear of death, and imparts to his followers the freedom and citizenship of the universe and of immortality ! History has been called philosophy teaching by example; but a history is just as much religion, as philosophy, teaching by example. History, indeed, would seem more fit in its scenes and passions to teach love than truth, religion than philosophy. There are those who object to the call for faith in the historical Christ, who place their faith in the Christ within them, the Christ of consciousness, the sentiments and affections of their higher nature. But unless this faint and effaced handwriting on their souls had been brought to the fire of the living and dying Christ, what distinct moral lines, well- ordered alphabet and language of spiritual truth and love, should we have discerned in those whose na- tures are now luminous with the light and heat of spirituality. Patriotism is a great sentiment, and we cannot spare it, but neither can we spare the Washingtons and Sydneys and Hampdens who illustrate it. Plato can write of the New Atlantis, or the Fortunate Isles, and Harrington portray a Re- public of the fabled Oceana, and Sir Thomas More one of Utopia; but one incarnated Washington, one incarnated America of Free Institutions, does more to rouse the energies of mankind for practical emancipation and deliverance from the tyrannies of THE BIRTH OF JESUS. 199 the earth, than all the labors of the wise and learned, when they range the field of fiction and philosophic ideality. As a form of teaching, history never tires. We read and re-read the lives of men for the hundredth time, and always from a new position. For they are living; they go to the root of the matter ; they solve the practical difficulty, they cut the Gordian knot, they face the evil, the danger, the fear ; they con- quer. New histories, new lives, are written of the oldest times and men, and they are always interest- ing, always instructive, provided only they are told in a new and truer vein than before, with a more interior vision, a more face to face and daguerreo- typed likeness, with a deeper or more charitable construction of motives ; for example, Niebuhr and Arnold write of Rome ; Grote, of Greece ; Kenrick, of Egypt ; Layard, of Nineveh ; Carlyle, of Mahomet, Saxon England, and Frederic the Great. To this field belongs this wonderful history of Christ. And every Hew-comer takes a new point of view to survey the fulness and perfection of Jesus. Thomas h. Kempis, Scougal, Fenelon, Woolman, Ware, Furness, — some higher and some lower, but a new biography each time is given, written in word, or lived in character. In this sense, history is inexhaustible and untiring. A good history of England, of America, is ever the latest, last want, and write well as one may, Hume, SmoUet, Bancroft, Hildreth, his neighbor always Cometh and searcheth him out, gains a new vantage- 200 THE BIRTH OF JESUS. ground, makes his facts tell a better tale, rises to higher and broader principles, and settles long dis- puted questions on new grounds of evidence, or the results of society. So has the history of Christianity, and the life of its Author, and of his Apostles, to be studied long, and from new points of view, and in different modes of mind, and in varying stages of society, before we see all the riches of this volume, all the laws, mo- tives, principles, influences, and tendencies that branch forth from the Christ. Men before thought they had done much in this sphere, but when Luther comes, or Swedenborg or Neander writes, or Butler, the Christian world can never be as it was before ; even the life of all lives is seen through an altered medium and atmosphere of our own minds. This study of the history of Christ and his religion is a great desideratum ; it is too much neglected, and when attended to, is not always pursued with right views and purposes. The glory of the Gospel is not simply in itself, con- sidered abstractly from all human society, but also in its multiplied, heaven-designed adaptations. Its his- torical, traditional character is one of these. It has its lives with other lives, its heroes with other heroes, though different in character, its biographies and let- ters and discourses with other biographies, letters, and discourses. We can easily conceive of this truth having been communicated in other ways, and, if man were endowed with intellect alone, ways THE BIRTH OF JESUS. 201 equally efficient as the present. The truth might have been traced in blazing and ever-burning charac- ters along the over-arching sky, or painted on the leaves of the forest, or muttered in the rippling brook, or sounded abroad by the thunder. For in a^ these ways are not lessons continually taught us, and it needed but a step more to teach still more and bet- ter ones, a yet livelier wisdom, a warmer love, a more articulate and impressive purpose of the be- nignant Father of all? But not so have we been made, and not so does he, who knows what we are and will be, treat us. We are beings of will, power of choice, affections, motives. And we wanted, in order to be persuaded in our heart of hearts of the infinite loveliness of virtue, not a cold revelation let- tered on the sky, not a brighter sun, not a softer moon, not sweeter music of bird, waterfall, or sighing winds, or ocean's haughty roar, but we needed inex- pressibly a revelation of living warmth, spoken by living lips, gushing up from places too deep for tears, and too sacred for aught but the holy eye of God, and acted, toiled, wept, suffered, agonized, and ec- stasized out, as ours is, from day to day, through all this wondrous life of man on the earth. Such is Jesus, as he appears before us in that simple record of the Gospels. Say what men may of the credibil- ity of the books, and their genuineness and authenti- city, there is the problem, — if such a being as Jesus had not existed, they would have been eminently miraculous who fabricated such a character, and 202 THE BIRTH OF JESUS. agreed in it, as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have done in the four Gospels and the Acts, and Paul, James, Peter, and John in the Epistles and Revela- tion. While, if we admit that Jesus did live, just as we admit without a question that Csesar or Epam- inondas lived, then all is clear and satisfactory; sufficient causes are assigned for the events which followed, and the Christ of history became just as real, and in one sense we may say as natural a being, as the Socrates or the Cicero of history. This historical belief I am far from presenting to you as the all in all of Christian faith. We may believe that Homer lived, and not care particularly what he thought about Jupiter, or taught about re- venge, or slander, or hypocrisy, or any other vice. But Jesus enters into personal relations. He says, Thou. He pricks the conscience. He moves the heart. He knocks at the door. His kingdom is not of this world, — guards, palaces, power, fame, sword, or sceptre he had none ; his royal domain is within, — the field of thought, the world of spiritual being, the sphere of motives, — the decisions of conscience, the rise and fall of this sensitive, throbbing breast, the outlook of this quick, anxious, foreseeing spirit, — all this — and how much it is, pent up in the walls of this little frame ! — is the territory which this pacific Conqueror comes to take possession of, and make his own, and change the wild jungle of nature into the well-ordered and fruitful field, — what is sour sweeten, what is barren enrich, what is crooked straighten, what is weak strengthen and vivify. THE BIRTH OF JESUS. 203 And there is no length of wild fanaticism, or stu- pid and brutal ignorance, or set bigotry, or bloody- persecution, or sanguinary wars, to which not the world, but the disciples of the benign Jesus, might not revert, and persist in, were it not for the new reckon- ing we can take at any time to correct these obser- vations, by applying to the Gospels. These are the compass and needle, quadrant and practical naviga- tor. In dark ages, " when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared," — in tumultuous and agi- tated periods, when " no small tempest lay on us," and all hope that the world could be saved was taken away, — this is the pole-star to correct our voyage, an observation of the sun which by computation can steer us aright on the most boisterous sea. Men are very low, and they are to be raised very high. We must not be dainty how we help them, and use only our conceited methods. We seize what is at hand, a rope, a pole, to lift a man out of a well, or save him from the river. It is very idle in us to say that such and such institutions are not worthy of God, as if he did not use all institutions and influences to mould and dye and fashion and season and temper his human handiwork, — cold, heat, work, play, father, mother, brother, sister, lover, the loss and gain, the joy and the grief, the evil and the good, school, academy, and university of his mighty world. Why not prophet and priest, Moses and Christ, tabernacles and incense, a little bread and wine, a written book, religious rites, a few drops of water, a 204 THE BIRTH OF JESUS. few syllables in the ear, a kneeling posture, a closed eye, an uplifted heart, a murmured prayer, a har- mony of sound, hours and days, the Christmas and the Easter, the hallelujahs of the angels, and the ejac- ulations of the cross ? Life is buried in the concrete, — we are walking flesh and bones. Why not sup- pose religion would share in the same law of all our powers and affections, — would be symbolized, mate- rialized, illustrated, exemplified, commemorated, and that, however humble the details, — be it the hem or the rings of the tabernacle, or the elements of the Supper, or the posture of worship, — all would bor- row dignity and grace, however lowly they might be in human apprehension, from the infinite grand- eur of the end they are to subserve. The posts and iron wires are rather a blemish than otherwise, which follow ottr roads, and disfigure the landscape, but then they carry the lightning. And nothing is small, nothing is mean or despicable, that carries light, though it be but a single ray, to an immortal soul. The subject, the end, dignifies, greatens, glori- fies the alphabet or the multiplication-table of moral, as of mental training, — and all the loftiest souls of glory and of God could remember when they began with cradle hymns, and evening prayers, until they caught the ethereal essence of devotion, and could join cherub and seraph in their life of truth and life of love. Hail, then, to all the diversified means by which we receive our Christian nurture ! We cannot de- THE BIRTH OF JESUS. 205 spise, or spare one. The Bible would be a very dull book, if they who are evil were not put in, as well as the good. We have to use no caution lest our youth will copy Jezebel or Judas. It would be a most un- natural book, if there were not in it the flashings-up of the ill-pent fires of anger, and the blasting flames of lust, — for this is human life ; and how can the heaven-ascending sentiments begin, except on the lowly floor of man's present abode? Hail, then, to the earthen vessel which holds the diviner treasure ! The water would be spilled were it not for the pitch- er of the woman at the well. Hail to the blessed Christmas I Grant that the word is bad, — Christ- mas, the mass of Christ, — Papal terms; grant that the precise day, and even the precise year, are un- known, that folly and superstition have often ruled the usage, or that even now there is more powder than piety, more show and extravagance and merry-mak- ing than are compatible with the birth celebration of the lowly Redeemer, who had not where to lay his head, from the manger, his first resting-place, to the cross, his last. But who would give it up ? Who would not feel an appalling absence if the birthday of the Saviour were made a common day back again ? Who can calculate the refined and hallowed associ- ations that have entwined themselves around the youthful spirit, and made his Saviour real to him ? Who can see the crowd of happy faces around a Christmas-tree, in expectancy of the coming gift plucked from its branches, or the eager and happy 18 206 THE BIRTH OF JESUS. crowds, for once free, pouring through the streets, or listen to the hearty salutations of young and old, and not feel that merry, happy, joyful spirits inspired the hour, and that it is something to associate for ever with the Gospel and its opening day on the world, gladness, and gratitude, and gifts, and gener- osity to the poor, and remembrance of friends, and burial of old grudges, and the concluding year, illu- minated, and transfigured by a burst of lyrical pleas- ure, — joy at home, joy in the Church, joy in society, joy in the spirit ? For once we will give wings to our devotion, and spurn the dull clog of our labor, our prudence, and our fear; we will sing the angels' song, " Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will towards men." We will bring myrrh, frankincense, and gold, if not to him, the chief, yet to his little ones, whom he loved and blessed, and of whom he once was. All thanks that faith in him is no chill and solitary act, no cold assent and hard intellectual conviction, but emotional, lyri- cal, affectionate, — that it stands not in the midst of the utter desolation of all the finer and more child- like sentiments, memories, graces, and joys, but is to be wreathed around with all manner of kindly sym- pathies, happy memories, and happier hopes, bright and golden associations, made of earth, but colored and prismatized from heaven! Kriss Kringle the child will plant a seed in the heart that Christ the King will ripen into immortal fruits. Why despise the lowest rounds of the ladder on which we climb to our heavenly destiny ? THE BIRTH OF JESUS. 207 And while the falling sands of the year tell us once again that our life is swift and irrevocable, — " Blazing a moment, then sunk in night," — a point between the eternities, — how needful and happy it is, that, when we might sink down in de- spair of ever being or doing any good, this cheery and hope-inspiring festival comes to tell us in so many words to be of good cheer, and "hope on, hope ever," for there was once a Christ on earth, friend of ours and every human soul, and there is ever a Christ in heaven, kind, holy, and beautiful I DISCOURSE XII THE THREEFOLD CHEIST. AND WE BELIEVE AND ARE SURE THAT THOU ART THAT CHRIST, THE SON OF THE LIVING GOD. — Johll vi. 69. The glad occasion of our annual commemoration of the birth of our Lord and Saviour has again re- turned. " It was the winter wild, While the heaven-born child All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies." Many circumstances, upon which we have heretofore dwelt at this service of Christmas, gave a tender and pathetic charm to that ancient night at Bethlehem. But what lends its chief interest to all celebrations of the Author of our Faith, whether, as now, of his birth, or, as at the Supper, of his death, is that he was, as "we believe and are sure, the Christ, the Son of the living God." He came forth, in a sense different from that of any other being, from the bosom of the Infinite Father. That eminent fact alone is worth an eternal jubilee of gratitude. Could we have a proper feeling of such a gift, from such a THE THREEFOLD CHRIST. 209 Giver, the fountains of the great deep within us would be broken up, and we should require no ex- hortation to pour out our whole souls in praise and joy. That the Most High should condescend to the lowest, a Holy God to his sinful creatures, that heaven should bow to earth, dark, guilty earth, this is mercy, this is love. " For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlast- ing life." " Thanks be unto God for his unspeaka- ble gift." The illustrious messenger commissioned for our salvation may be viewed in three relations and as- pects to us, as the Christ of Prophecy, the Christ of History, and the Christ of Experience. This threefold survey will help us in grouping our meditations and aiding our memories. Each point, too, will furnish independent matter for faith and for thankfulness. I. The Christ of Prophecy, This world, as consti- tuting the initiatory state of our being, relates more directly to the body. It gives food to our hunger, clothing and shelter to our nakedness, and tasks for our muscles. Hence it is liable to tyrannize over that part of us which is not fed by any bread, clothed with any garments, or tasked by any labors, limited to t'me and sense. To bring, then, the spiritual world into action upon our spiritual nature, as this world is brought into action upon our bodily nature, seems to be the problem proposed in all religions. To reveal the Creator to his creatures ; to introduce 18* 210 THE THREEFOLD CHRIST. God into this state of existence, and make men feel nigh to Him ; to render the children of time sensible of the powers of the world to come, — has been the mission of every true prophet and teacher. Men all over the earth have yearned after God. The pil- grims have travelled far, and sank down on the desert sands, in search of their Father. The poets have borne this burden on their harmonious numbers. Hermits have dwelt in caves, that, where the noise of the world was shut out, they might hear the still, small voice. Sacrifices have been as universal as the fire that consumed them. Humanity can adopt with historical truth the words of the Psalmist, " My heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God." And Christ, as the counterpart to this wide-spread and deep-seated need, may be said to be the object of a species of blind prediction by all the sages of the heathen world, as he was of a clear prophecy by the Jewish seers. Man, though specially a creature of reason, has, nevertheless, his instincts. He is not wholly made up of cool calculation and deliberate judgment. A vast and varied nature flames within his clay. He is of " every creature's best." The animals share with him of their passions and appetites, the cherubim have contributed their knowledge, and he has caught from the seraphim a spark of their love. As the bird, the fish, the beast, under the im- pulse and unerring guidance of their respective in- stincts, seek after their appropriate and congenial THE THREEFOLD CHRIST. 211 good, SO do certain instinctive faculties in man reach upward after what the Roman orator called " some- thing immense and infinite." His trust and hope fly abroad out of this little cage of the body, and rise up singing even to heaven's gate. His love yearns and stretches itself after something lovelier and dearer than it has ever yet experienced or possessed. Pile mountains of superstition upoi^ this human na- ture, and, like the giant, it will heave the whole mass, and throw up smoke and ashes, if no clear fire, from the deep centre of the volcano. For take the lapse of ages, take the myriads of the race, and we see certain general and uniform movements towards a higher religion, as much as towards a higher civilization. Here it may be arrested, and there it may be beaten back ; but the reactions are but side-eddies in the stream, the general current is onward. There is enough to be seen even in the perverted religions of history, to convince us that Christ was, in the sacred language of the Bible, " the desire of all nations." His coming was in accordance with the plan of God from the first; not an artifice to supply an un- expected failure, not an outward patch of new cloth upon an old garment, but as a part of its intrinsic texture, of its warp and its woof, did the mission of Jesus crown and complete the Divine counsels for the welfare of man. Thus there were " prepara- tions," not only among the Jews, but in general his- tory, for the birth of Christ. It took place at such a m THE THREEFOLD CHRIST. period, in such a place, and nnder snch circum- staaees, as were best adapted, not simply for the people of J odea, bat for all kindreds, tongues, and ■mtkitis. The human species had been allowed time to run through a Tarieiy of exjjeriments in govern- ment, social life, and religion, fitted to produce hu- mility and distrust of their own unaided ability to 'watk out the life-problem. In the language of Leiaod, « The Christian Reve- lation was made to the world at a time when it was most wanted, when the darkness and connption of mankind were arrived at the height. If it had been published much sooner, and before there had been a full trial made of what was to be expected from human wisdom and philosophy, the great need men stood in of such an extraordinary Divine dis- pensation would not have been so apparent The mighty natioos of the old world had risen, de- cfiaedy and fdlen. Rome alone stood, but the film of age and decay already began to dim her eagle eye. Jast at the era when her universal dominion had inlled for the instant the turbulence of mankind, and when a comparatively safe conduct woidd be giren to the promulgators of the new faith, tmder Boman law and order, the moral King of the race b^an his reign. In Milton's noble words. — TW iOe flpor aid iUdi m« h^ 19 THE THKEEFOLD CHStST. 213 UKtained with Ikosdk blood ; The traapct ^oke Boc to the anned dtnse^ Aad kiap Mt na with awid cje, As if tihej nieij kwv Acir Sorere^B liOfd «M W. Bm peMefid WW tfce aieK WkcflCM Ae FkiMe flf 1%^* Hit na of pMce noK the esA begw." He came as ''a light to ligfaten the GentOes," no less than as « the glory of his people laad." And when shepherds of the djoaen mtkm eam^ to InH his birth, and angeb from faearen « bowed tlidr bright wings to a woiid sach as this," and rhairtrd, <« Glory to God in the highest!'' it was but a fit ac- companiment to tbe odier bonois tint wise men from the East, the Magians, the lepiesmtatives of the heathen world, shook! come to honor hiin wilk their homage, and with their rich gifts of gold, frankincense, and mirrrfa, whose need was felt in every land, and the desire and hope of whom nu^kt be said to smoolder daiUy and deeptj in eierf ho- man bosom. But the Christ who was blindly felt after by sage and seer, if haply they might find him, was the Christ of an assmed piv^ibe^ in Jodea. Abraham had seen his day, and was ^ad. Bven ^^nK^r^ to Adam and Noah the {Homise had gone finth. Th^ Mosaic institutions were all pvoepective^ not finaL Their author foresaw tbe piophet which the Ijoid God would send. I need n