LIBRA.RY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 GIRT OR 
 
 Received 
 Accession No. tf $ ^ . Class No. 
 
S E R N S 
 
 
 ERTSON 
 
 

 
SERMONS 
 
 PREACHED AT BRIGHTON 
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 REV. FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON 
 
 THE INCUMBENT OF TRINITY CHAPEL. 
 
 NEW EDITION. 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON: 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 
 1899. 
 
TO 
 THE CONGREGATION 
 
 WORSHIPPING IN 
 
 TRINITY CHAPEL, BRIGHTON, 
 
 FROM AUGUST 15, 1847, TO AUGUST 15, 1853, 
 
 THESE 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF SERMONS 
 
 PREACHED BY THEIR LATE PASTOR 
 
 ARE DEDICATED. 
 
PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. 
 
 IN publishing these Sermons, a few words of explana- 
 tion are necessary. 
 
 They are not notes previously prepared, nor are they 
 Sermons written before delivery. They are simply "Rec- 
 ollections:" sometimes dictated by the Preacher himself 
 to the younger members of a family in which he was inter- 
 ested, at their urgent entreaty; sometimes written out by 
 himself for them when they were at a distance and unable 
 to attend his ministry.* 
 
 They have been carefully preserved, and are now pub- 
 lished without corrections or additions, just as they were 
 found. Mr. Robertson attached no value whatever to 
 them, and never gave any directions concerning them. 
 The only Sermon which saw the light in his lifetime is 
 now republished in this volume, with his own preface, ex- 
 plaining how it was preserved, and that it was printed by 
 desire of his congregation. 
 
 Unfortunately, in some instances this series is incom- 
 plete. The fourth of the Advent Lectures f was never 
 written out, owing to his uncertain and suffering state of 
 health; and this cause, combined with his remarkable dis- 
 like to recalling his discourses a peculiarity known to all 
 who were intimately acquainted with him has made these 
 
 * A reference to a paragraph in his own preface to "The Israelite's Grave" 
 (page 235) explains this. 
 
 t The fourth and last Advent Lecture was "The Jewish;" on the text, 
 " He came unto his own, and his own received him not." John i. 11. 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 recollections more broken and imperfect than they would 
 otherwise have been. 
 
 It is not necessary to say one word in this place of the 
 character of Mr. Robertson's teaching; it is best illustrated 
 in the published volumes of his Sermons ; and yet it seema 
 needful to say, that even these suggest but a very faint idea 
 of the influence that teaching exercised on all who came 
 within its sphere. 
 
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH SERIES. 
 
 IT is proposed shortly to issue a volume entitled " Pulpit 
 Notes," which will consist of the skeleton or outline which 
 Mr. Kobertson prepared before delivering his Sermons. In 
 some cases only a line or a single word is given to indicate 
 a division of his subject; in others he has written out a 
 whole thought, to be further amplified and completed in 
 course of preaching. 
 
 The Editor believes that such a volume will be of serv- 
 ice in two ways first, as offering suggestions to preachers 
 in the preparation or consideration of their addresses; and, 
 secondly, as being sufficiently complete for purposes of 
 home-reading where it is the custom at family prayers, or 
 on Sundays, to read a short discourse, occupying but a few 
 minutes. 
 
 With reference to the first of these, it seems to be felt 
 very generally that the pulpit is not what it was originally 
 intended to be. There is a wide-spread opinion that it 
 was designed for the edification of the mind as well as the 
 heart; and it may be that one great cause of the indiffer- 
 ence with which men are said to listen to preachers, arises 
 from the fact, that for the most part their addresses are far 
 below the intelligence of their audience, who are wearied 
 with the trite repetitions of platitudes that neither instruct 
 nor inform. These Sermons and " Pulpit Notes" evidence 
 the character of a teaching, not only earnestly listened to, 
 but also most influential. Perhaps the contrast between 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 these and the sermons usually preached, may suggest a 
 means of re-awakening an interest now almost dormant in 
 the minds of listeners. In this view, a volume will shortly 
 be issued, and if it be found successful another will be put 
 to press. 
 
 The Editor appends a portion of a letter from a friend 
 on the subject of preaching, because it serves to show that 
 the indifference he has adverted to springs from other 
 causes than mere irreligiousness. 
 
 MY DEAR , I think one great need in our pulpit ministrations is nat- 
 uralness ; by which I mean an exact recognition of the facts of our daily life. 
 The phrase, "the dignity of the pulpit," has given a fatally artificial charac- 
 ter to the mass of sermons. Mr. Spurgeon and his vulgar slang is a violent 
 reaction from the cold unfelt conventionalities with which men have grown 
 so familiar ; and his success is due to the fact that he recognizes the men 
 and women before him as flesh and blood sinning, suffering, tempted, fail- 
 ing, struggling, rising. Like all extreme reactions, it shocks a great many 
 by its levity, its irreverence, and its vulgarity. 
 
 But it is in this direction must come our pulpit reform. We come day after 
 day to God's house, and the most careless one of us there, is still one who, if 
 he could really hear a word from God to his own soul, would listen to it 
 ay, and be thankful for it. No heart can tell out to another what waves of 
 temptation have been straggled through during the week past with what 
 doubtful success. How, after the soul has been beaten down and defiled, 
 with what bitter anguish of spirit it has awoke to a knowledge of its back- 
 slidings and its bondage to sin : not to this or that sin merely, but to a gen- 
 eral sense of sinfulness pervading the whole man, so that Redemption would 
 be indeed a joyful sound. 
 
 Many are miserable in their inmost hearts, who are light-hearted and gay 
 before the world. They feel that no heart understands theirs, or can help 
 them. Now, suppose the preacher goes down into the depths of his own 
 being, and has the courage and fidelity to carry all he finds there, first to God 
 in confession and prayer, and then to his flock as some part of the general 
 experience of Humanity, do you not feel that he must be touching close upon 
 some brothei'-man's sorrows and wants? "Be ye as I am, for I am as ye 
 are." Many a weaiy and heavy-laden soul has taken his burden to the Sav- 
 iour, because he has found some man of "like passions with himself." who 
 has suffered as he has, and found relief. I think a bold faithful experimental 
 preaching rarely fails to hit some mark, and oftentimes God's Spirit witnesses 
 to the truth of what is said, by rousing this and that man to the feeling, 
 
Preface. ^ 
 
 "Why I, too, have been agonizing, and falling, and crying for just such help 
 as this. Ah, this man has indeed something to say to me." 
 
 I may be wrong in my opinion, but it is one of deep conviction, gained 
 long ago, that no amount of external evidence in the way of proof of the 
 truth of Christianity is worth any thing in the way of saving a human 
 soul. 
 
 There is always as much to be said on one side as the other, because, just 
 as Archimedes could not move the earth without a fulcrum, so there must be 
 something taken for granted in all external evidence, which a rigid logician 
 might fairly demur to granting. But when, as with the Spirit of God, the 
 voice of a man reaches his fellow-man, telling him of his inner aspirations 
 and failures, his temptations, his sins, his weakness not in generals, but in 
 details of light that has come and has been extinguished ; of hopes bora, 
 yet not nourished ; of fears which have grown stronger and stronger, and 
 which refuse altogether to be silent, even in the midst of the engagements or 
 pleasures of life does not the man feel that here is a revelation of God's 
 truth as real and fresh as if he had stood in the streets of Jerusalem, and 
 heard the Saviour's very voice ? The man feels that, in this word, which has, 
 so to speak, "told him all that ever he did," there must be a divine life. 
 "One touch of nature makes the whole word kin." 
 
 I think that a ministry which should work mightily amongst a people 
 would be one in which very rarely is heard any development of the modus 
 operandi or ''plan of salvation ;" in which proof of the divine mission of 
 Christ, or of God's revelation, was never attempted, but in which the great 
 facts themselves were set forth as the alone solution of the wants, sorrows, 
 and sins of the hearers ; in which the fact of Adam's fall, and any conse- 
 quences it had on the human race, were only touched upon incidentally ; 
 but in which the individual man's fall was pressed home upon him from his 
 own certain convictions. Not because Adam fell, and the race fell in him, 
 but because you have fallen therefore you need a Saviour, and divine life 
 and light are indispensable. 
 
 The man who quietly slumbers under Adam's sin and its tremendous con- 
 sequences his relation to which consequences how is it possible for a poor 
 uneducated person to comprehend ? may be aroused to a sense of his con- 
 nection with the fact of a fall in himself, and a need of such a restorer as 
 Christ. I am sure I don't know whether this is orthodox or not; but I 
 doubt whether orthodox creeds and confessions of doctrine have ever turned 
 one soul from the error of his ways, or brought him in real earnest to Christ 
 
Preface. 
 
 Let look at ttts boldlT. Sefotteen thousand pahvte echo m oar land 
 erar Smday, to idirt di pracfaer consider* the soundest fcan of draft 
 GoqieL Is hGo^sworfdiaxfe preached? His He dunged His purpose? 
 
 d does He BO longer intend that "His 
 Yet where is the 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 CALIFOJ* 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Setfes. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 Preached April 29, 1849. 
 
 GOD'S REVELATION OF HEAVEN. 
 
 1 COR. ii. 9, 10." Eye hath not seen, nor 
 ear heard, neither have entered into the 
 heart of man, the things which God hath 
 prepared for them that love him. But 
 God hath revealed them unto us by his 
 Spirit " Page '23 
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 Preached June 6, 1849. 
 
 PARABLE OP THE SOWER. 
 
 CONFIRMATION LECTURE. 
 
 MATT. xiii. 1-9. "The same day went Je- 
 sus out of the house, and sat by the sea- 
 side. And great multitudes were gath- 
 ered together unto him, so that he went 
 into a ship, and sat ; and the whole mul- 
 titude stood on the shore. And he spake 
 many things unto them in parables, say- 
 ing, Behold, a sower went forth to sow ; 
 and when he sowed, some seeds fell by 
 the wayside, and the fowls came and de- 
 voured them up: Some fell upon stony 
 places, where they had not much earth : 
 and forthwith they sprung up, because 
 they had no deepness of earth: And 
 when the sun was up, they were scorch- 
 ed ; and because they had no root, they 
 withered away. And some fell among 
 thorns ; and the thorns sprung up, and 
 choked them : But others fell into good 
 ground, and brought forth fruit, some a 
 hundred-fold, some sixty-fold, some thir- 
 ty-fold. Who hath ears fco hear, let Mm 
 Oear" . 33 
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 Preached June 10, 1849. 
 
 JACOB'S WRESTLING. 
 
 CONFIRMATION LECTURE. 
 
 GEN. xxxii. 28, 29. "And he said, Thy 
 name shall be called no more Jacob, but 
 Israel : for as a prince hast thou power 
 with God and with men, and hast pre- 1 
 vailed. And Jacob asked him, and s;iid 
 
 Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. 4,nfl 
 he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost 
 ask after my name? And he blessed 
 him there" Page 46 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 Preached August 12, 1849. 
 
 CHRISTIAN PROGRESS BY OBLIVION 
 OF THE PAST. 
 
 PHIL. iii. 13, 14. "Brethren, I count not 
 myself to have apprehended : but this 
 one thing I do, forgetting those things 
 which are behind, and reaching forth 
 unto those things which are before, I 
 press toward the mark for the prize of 
 the high calling of God in Christ Je- 
 sus " 51 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 Preached October 21, 1849. 
 
 TRIUMPH OVER HINDRANCES 
 ZACCHEUS. 
 
 LUKE xix. 8. "And Zaccheus stood, and 
 said unto the Lord; Behold, Lord, the 
 half of my goods I give to the poor ; and 
 if I have taken any thing from any man 
 by false accusation, I restore him four- 
 fold" 68 
 
 SERMON VI. 
 
 Preached October S8, 1849. 
 
 THE SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE OF 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 COL. ii. 16, 17. " Let no man therefore 
 judge you in meat, or in drink, or in re- 
 spect of a holyday, or of the new moon, 
 or of the sabbath -days: Which are a 
 shadow of things to come ; but the body 
 is of Christ " T8 
 
 SERMON VII. 
 
 Preached November 4, 1849. 
 
 THE SYMPATHY OF CHRIST. 
 
 HEB. iv. 15, 16." For we have not a high- 
 priest which can not be touched with 
 the feeling of our infirmities ; but wafl 
 
Xll 
 
 Contents. 
 
 in all points tempted like as we are, yet 
 without sin. Let us therefore come 
 boldly \uito the throne of grace, that we 
 may obtain mercy, and find grace to help 
 in time of need" Page SS 
 
 SERMON VIII. 
 
 Preached November 11, 1849. 
 
 'HARISEES AND SADDUCEES AT 
 JOHN'S BAPTISM. 
 
 TT. iii. 7. "But when he saw many of 
 he Pharisees and Sadducees come to his 
 )aptism, he said unto them, O genera- 
 tion of vipers, who hath warned yon to 
 flee from the wrath to come?" 99 
 
 SERMON IX. 
 
 Preached November 5, 1849. 
 
 CAIAPHAS'S VIEW OF VICARIOUS 
 SACRIFICE. 
 
 JOHN xi. 49-53. "And one of them, named 
 Caiaphasjbeing thehigh-priestthat same 
 year, said unto them, Ye know nothing 
 at all, nor consider that it is expedient 
 for us, that one man should die for the 
 people, and that the whole nation perish 
 not. And this spake he not of himself: 
 but being high-priest that year, heproph- 
 esied that Jesus should die for that na- 
 tion ; and not -for that nation only, bnt 
 that also he should gather together in 
 one the children of God that were scat- 
 tered abroad. Then from that day forth 
 they took counsel together for to put him 
 to death" 110 
 
 SERMON X. 
 
 Preached December 2, 1849. 
 
 REALIZING THE SECOND ADVENT. 
 
 JOB xix. 25-27." For I know that my Re- 
 deemer liveth, and that he shall stand 
 at the latter day npon the earth : And 
 though after my skin worms destroy this 
 body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: 
 Whom I shall see for myself, and mine 
 eyes shall behold, and* not another ; 
 though my reins be consumed within 
 me" 120 
 
 SERMON XI. 
 
 Preached December 6, 1849. 
 
 FIRST ADVENT LECTURE. 
 
 TJ1E GREEK. 
 
 unto salvation to every one that believ. 
 eth : to the Jew first, and also to the 
 Greek. For therein is the righteous- 
 ness of God revealed from faith to faith : 
 as it is written, The just shall live by 
 faith " Page 130 
 
 SERMON XII. 
 
 Preached December 13, 1849. 
 
 SECOND ADVENT LECTURE. 
 
 THE ROMAN. 
 
 ROM. i. 14-16. "I am debtor both to the 
 Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to 
 the wise, and to the unwise. So, as much 
 as in me is, I am ready to preach the gos- 
 pel to you that are at Rome also. For I 
 am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: 
 for it is the power of God unto salvation 
 to every one that believeth ; to the Jew 
 fir^t, and also to the Greek " 1ST 
 
 SERMON XIII. 
 
 Preached December 20, 1849. 
 
 THIRD ADVENT LECTURE. 
 
 THE BARBARIAN. 
 
 ACTS xxviii. i-7. "And when they were 
 escaped, then they knew that the" island 
 was called Melita. And the barbarous 
 people showed us no little kindness : for 
 they kindled a fire, and received us every 
 one, because of the present rain, and be'- 
 cause of the cold. And when Paul had 
 gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them 
 on the fire, there came a viper out of the 
 heat, and fastened on his hand. And 
 when the barbarians saw the venomous 
 beast hang on his hand, they said among 
 themselves, No doubt this man is a mur- 
 derer, whom, though he hath escaped the 
 sea, yet vengeance snfferetb. not to live* 
 And he shook off the beast into the fire, 
 and felt no harm. Howbeit they looked 
 when he should have swollen, or fallen 
 down dead suddenly : but after they had 
 looked a great while, and saw no harm 
 come to him, they changed their minds, 
 aud said that he was a god. In the same 
 quarters were possessions of the chief 
 man of the island, whose name was Pub- 
 lius; who received us, and lodged us 
 three days courteously " - . . 148 
 
 SERMON XIV. 
 
 Preached December 15, 1849. 
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SPIRITUAL 
 HARVEST. 
 
 ROM. i. 14-17. "I am debtor both to the! GAT- vi. 7, S.~ "Be not deceived; God is 
 
 Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to; 
 the wise, and to the unwise. So, as much i 
 as in me is, I am ready to preach the 
 eospel to you that are" at Rome also. 
 For I am not ashamed of the gospel ' 
 of Christ: for it is the power of God I 
 
 not mocked : for whatsoever a man sow- 
 eth, that shall he also reap. For he that 
 soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap 
 corruption; but he that soweth to the 
 Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life ever- 
 lasting" 158 
 
Contents. 
 
 Xlll 
 
 SERMON XV, 
 
 Preached December 31, 1849. 
 
 THE LONELINESS OP CHRIST. 
 
 JOHN xvi. 31, 32. "Jesus answered them, 
 Do ye now believe ? Behold, the hour 
 cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall 
 be scattered, every man to his own, and 
 shall leave me alone: aud yet I am 
 pot alone, because the Father is with 
 me" Page 168 
 
 SERMON XVI. 
 
 Prsached October 20,1850. 
 
 THE NEW COMMANDMENT OF LOVE 
 TO ONE ANOTHER. 
 
 JOIJN xiii. 34. "A new commandment I 
 give unto you, That ye love one another ; 
 as I have loved you, that ye also love one 
 another " 177 
 
 SERMON XVII. 
 
 Preached June 15, 1851. 
 
 THE MESSAGE OF THE CHURCH TO 
 MEN OF WEALTH. 
 
 1 SAM. xxv. 10, 11. "And Nabal answered 
 David's servants, and said, Who is Da- 
 vid? and who is the son of Jesse ? there 
 be many servants nowadays that break 
 away every man from his master. Shall 
 I then take my bread, and my water, and 
 my flesh that I have killed for my shear- 
 ers, and give it unto men, whom I know 
 not whence they be ?" 185 
 
 SERMON XVIII. 
 
 Preached June 22, 1851. 
 
 CHRIST'S JUDGMENT RESPECTING 
 INHERITANCE. 
 
 LUKE xii. 13-15. "And one of the com- 
 pany said unto him, Master, sneak to 
 my brother, that he divide the inherit- 
 ance with me. And he said unto him, 
 Man, who made me a judge or a divider 
 over you ? And he said unto them, Take 
 heed, and beware of covetonsness ; for a 
 man's life consisteth not in the abun- 
 dance of the things which he possess- 
 ed" 198 
 
 SERMON XIX. 
 
 Preached July 13,1851. 
 
 FREEDOM BY THE TRUTH. 
 
 JOHN viii. 32. "And ye shall know the 
 truth, and the truth shall make yon 
 free" '209 
 
 SERMON XX. 
 
 Preached at the Autumn Assizes, held at Lewes, 1853 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF THE TRUTH. 
 
 JOHN xviii. 37 " Pilate therefore said 
 unto him, Art thou a king then ? Jesui 
 answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. 
 To this end was I born, and for this 
 cause came I into the world, that I 
 should bear witness unto the truth. 
 Every one that is of the truth heareth 
 my voice " Page 2T& 
 
 SERMON XXI. 
 
 Preached November 7, 1852. 
 
 THE SKEPTICISM OF PILATE. 
 
 JOHN xviii. 38. "Pilate saith unto him, 
 What is truth ?" 226 
 
 SERMON XXII. 
 
 Preached on the first day of Public Mourning for the 
 Queen Dowager, Dec. 1849. 
 
 THE ISRAELITE'S GRAVE IN A 
 FOREIGN LAND. 
 
 GEN. 1. 24-26. "And Joseph said unto his 
 brethren, I die ; and God will surely visit 
 you, and bring you out of this land unto 
 the land which he sware to Abraham, to 
 to Isaac, and to Jacob. And Joseph 
 took an oath of the children of Israel, 
 saying, God will surely visit you, and ye 
 shall carry up my bones from hence. So 
 Joseph died, being a hundred and ten 
 years old : and they embalmed him, and 
 lie was put in a coffin in Egypt "... . 236 
 
 Seconti Serfes. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 Preached January 6,1850. 
 
 THE STAR IN THE EAST. 
 
 MATT. ii. 1, 2. "Now when Jesus was born 
 in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of 
 Herod the king, behold, there came wise 
 men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, 
 Where is he that is born King of the 
 Jews? for we have seen his star in the 
 east, and are come to worship him". 249 
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 Preached February 10, 1850. 
 
 THE HEALING OF JAIRUS'S DAUGH- 
 TER. 
 
 MATT. ix. 23-25. "And when Jesus camo 
 into the ruler's house, and saw the min- 
 strels and the people making; a noise, 
 
XIV 
 
 Contents. 
 
 he said unto them, Give place : for the 
 maid is not dead, but sleepeth. And 
 they laughed him to scorn. But when 
 the people were put forth, he went in, 
 and took her by the hand, and the maid 
 rose " Page 25' 
 
 SERMON III. 
 Preached March 10, 1850. 
 
 BAPTISM. 
 
 i. 26-29. "For ye are all the chil- 
 dren of God by faith in Christ Jesus. 
 For as many of you as have been bap- 
 tized into Christ have pnt on Christ. 
 Thert; is neither Jew nor Greek, there 
 is neither bond nor free, there is neither 
 male nor female : for ye are all one in 
 Christ Jesus, And if ye be Christ's, 
 then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs 
 according to the promise ". . ....... 207 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 Preached March 17,1850. 
 
 BAPTISM. 
 
 I PETEB iii. 21. " The like figure where- 
 unto even baptism doth also now save 
 us" 277 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 Preached October 13, 1S50. 
 
 ELIJAH. 
 
 1 KINGS xix. 4. "Bat he himself went a 
 day's journey into the wilderness, and 
 came and sat down under a juniper-tree : 
 and he requested for himself that he 
 uiight die ; and said, It is enough ; now, 
 O Lord, take away my life ; for I am not 
 better than my fathers " 286 
 
 SERMON VI. 
 
 F.-eached January 12, 1851. 
 
 NOTES ON PSALM LL 
 
 Written by David, after a double crime : 
 Uriah put in the fore-front of the battle 
 the wife of the murdered man taken, 
 etc. 293 
 
 SERMON VII. 
 Preached March 2, 1851. 
 
 OBEDIENCE THE ORGAN OF SPIR- 
 ITUAL KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 JOHN vii. 17. "If any man will do his 
 will, he shall know of the doctrine, 
 whether it be of God, or whether I speak 
 of myself"... ,. 300 
 
 SERMON Vin. 
 
 Preached March 30, 1851. 
 
 RELIGIOUS DEPRESSION. 
 
 PSALM xlii. 1-3. "As the hart panteth 
 after the water brooks, so pauteth my 
 soul after thee, O God. My soul thirst- 
 eth for God, for the living God : when 
 shall I come and appear before God? 
 My tears have been my meat day and 
 night, while they continually say unto 
 me, Where is thy God ?" Page 308 
 
 SERMON IX. 
 
 Preached April 6, 1851. 
 
 FAITH OF THE CENTURION. 
 
 MATT. viii. 10." When Jesus heard it, he 
 marvelled, and said to them that follow- 
 ed, Verily I say unto you, I have not 
 found so great faith, no, not in Is- 
 rael " 313 
 
 SERMON X. 
 
 Preached July 27, 1851. 
 
 f 
 
 THE RESTORATION OF THE 
 ERRING. 
 
 GAL. vi. 1, 2." Brethren, if a man be over- 
 taken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, 
 restore such a one in the spirit of meek- 
 ness ; considering thyself, lest thou also 
 be tempted. Bear ye one another's 
 burdens, and so fulfill the law of 
 Christ " 318 
 
 SERMON XI. 
 
 Preached Christmas Day, 1851. 
 
 CHRIST THE SON. 
 
 HEB. L 1, 2. " God, who at sundry times 
 and in divers manners spake in time 
 
 East unto the fathers by the prophets, 
 ath in these last days spoken unto us 
 by his Son" S21 
 
 SERMON XII. 
 
 Preached April 25, 185J. 
 
 WORLDLINESS 
 
 1 JOHN ii. 15-17. "If any man love the 
 world, the love of the Father is not in 
 him. For all that is in the world, the 
 lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, 
 and the pride of life, is not of the Fa- 
 ther, but is of the world. And the world 
 passeth away, and the lust thereof: but 
 he that doeth the will of God abideth 
 forever " 33? 
 
Contents. 
 
 xv 
 
 SERMON XIII. 
 
 Preached November 14, 1852 
 
 THE SYDENHAM PALACE, AND THE 
 RELIGIOUS NON-OBSERVANCE OF 
 THE SABBATH. 
 
 ROM. xiv. 5, 6. "One man esteemeth one 
 day above another : another esteemeth 
 every day alike. Lei every man be fully 
 persuaded in his own mind. He that 
 regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the 
 Lord; and he that regardeth not the 
 day, to the Lord he doth not regard it. 
 He that eateth, eateth to the Lord for he 
 giveth God thanks ; and he that eateth 
 not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth 
 God thanks " Page 343 
 
 SERMON XIV. 
 
 Preached Januarys, 1853. 
 
 THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF 
 
 JESUS. 
 
 LUKE ii. 40. "And the child grew, and 
 waxed strong in spirit, filled with wis- 
 dom ; and the grace of God was upon 
 him".., .. 353 
 
 SERMON XV. 
 
 Preached January 9, 1853. 
 
 CHRIST'S ESTIMATE OF SIN. 
 
 LUKE xix. 10. "The Son of man is come 
 to seek and to save that which was 
 lost" 363 
 
 SERMON XVI. 
 
 Preached January 16, 1853 
 
 THE SANCTIFICATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 JOHN xvii. 19. "And for their sakes 1'j 
 sanctify myself, that they also might be 
 sanctified through the truth " 372 1 
 
 SERMOX XVII. 
 
 Preached January 23, 1853. 
 
 THE FIRST MIRACLE. 
 
 I. THE GLORY OF THE VIRGIN MOTHER. 
 
 ifested forth his glory ; and his disciples 
 believed on him " Page 393 
 
 SERMON XIX. 
 
 Preached March 20, 1853. 
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 
 JOHN x. 14, 15. " I am the good shepherd, 
 and know my sheep, and am known of 
 mine. As the Father knoweth me, even 
 so know I the Father : and I lay down 
 my life for the sheep" 404 
 
 SERMON XX. 
 
 Preached Easter Day, March 27, 1853. 
 
 THE DOUBT OF THOMAS. 
 
 JOHN xx. 29. "Jesus saith unto him, 
 Thomas, because thou hast seen me, 
 thou hast believed: blessed are they 
 that have not seen, and yet have be- 
 lieved" 415 
 
 SERMON XXI. 
 
 Preached May 8, 1853. 
 THE IRREPARABLE PAST. 
 
 MARK xiv. 41, 42. "And he cometh the 
 third time, and saith unto them, Sleep 
 on now, and take your rest : it is enough, 
 the hour is come ; behold the Son of man 
 is betrayed into the hands of sinners. 
 Rise up, let us go ; lo, he that betrayeth 
 me is at hand" 420 
 
 3Tf)frt Series. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 Preached April 28, 1850. 
 
 THE TONGUE. 
 
 ST. JAMES iii. 5, 6. " Even so the tongue 
 is a little member, and boasteth great 
 things. Behold, how great a matter a 
 little fire kindleth ! And the tongue is 
 a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the 
 tongue among our members, that it de- 
 fileth the whole body, and setteth on 
 
 JOHN ii. 11.-" This beginning of miracles flre . the course of nature ; and it is set 
 f\\A T^oiif* i f~ rt ~r/^~iii 3 i on nrfi nrnfili .. <4i>7 
 
 did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and man- 
 ifested forth his glory ; and his disciples 
 believed on him" 383 
 
 SERMON XVIII. 
 
 Proached January 30, 1853. 
 
 THE FIRST MIRACLE. 
 
 II. .THE GLORY OF THE DIVINE SON. 
 
 JOHN 11. 11. "This beginning of miracles 
 did Jsus in Cana of Galilee, and man- 
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 Preached May 5, 1850. 
 
 THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 
 
 1 JOHN v. 4, 5. " For whatsoever is born 
 of God overcometh the world: and thifl 
 is the victory that overcometh the world, 
 even our faith. Who is he that over- 
 cometh the world, but he that believeth 
 that Jsus is the Son of God ?" 440 
 
XVI 
 
 Contents, 
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 Preached Whitsunday, May 19, 18oO. 
 
 THE DISPENSATION OF THE 
 SPIRIT. 
 
 1 COB. xii. 4. "Now there are diversities 
 of gifts, bat the same Spirit "..Page 455 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 Preached May 26, J850. 
 
 THE TRINITY. 
 
 2 THESS. v. 23. "And the very God of 
 peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray 
 God yocr whole spirit and soul and body 
 be preserved blameless unto the coming 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ " 464 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 Preached June 2, 1850. 
 ABSOLUTION. 
 
 LUKE v. 21. "And the scribes and the 
 Pharisees began to reason, saying, 
 Who is this which speaketh blasphe- 
 mies? Who can forgive sins, but God 
 alone ?" 476 
 
 SERMON VI. 
 
 Preached June 9, 1850. 
 
 THE fLLUSIVENESS OF LIFE. 
 
 HEE. xi. &-10. " By faith Abraham, when 
 he was called to go out into a place 
 Which he should after receive for an in- 
 heritance, obeyed ; and he went out, 
 not knowing whither he went. By faith 
 he sojourned in the land of promise, as 
 in a strange country, dwelling in taber- 
 nacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs 
 with him of the same promise : for he 
 looked for a city which hath founda- 
 tions, whose builder and maker is 
 God"... .. 4ST 
 
 SERMON VII. 
 
 Preached June 23, 1830. 
 
 THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 
 
 8 COR. v. 14, 15. "For the love of Christ 
 constraineth us ; because we thus judge, 
 that if one died for all, then were all 
 dead: and that he died for all, that 
 they which live should not henceforth 
 live unto themselves, but unto him which 
 died for them, and rose again " 495 
 
 SERMON VIII. 
 
 Preached June 30, 1850. 
 
 THE POWER OF SORROW. 
 
 2 COR. vii. 9, 10. " Now I rejoice, not that 
 ye were made sorry but that ye sorrow- 
 
 ed to repentance: for ye were made 
 sorry after a godly manner, that ye 
 might receive damage by us in nothing. 
 For godly sorrow worketh repentance 
 to salvation not to be repented of: but 
 the sorrow of the world worketh 
 death" Page 504 
 
 SERMON IX. 
 
 Preached August 4, 1830. 
 
 SENSUAL AND SPIRITUAL EXCITE- 
 MENT. 
 
 Em. v. 17,18. "Wherefore be ye not un- 
 wise, but understanding what the will 
 of the Lord is. And be not drunk with 
 wine, wherein is excess; but be filled 
 with the Spirit" 510 
 
 SERMON X. 
 
 Preached August 11, 1850. 
 PURITY. 
 
 TITCS i. 15. "Unto the pure all things 
 are pure: but unto them that are de- 
 filed and unbelieving is nothing pure; 
 but even their mind and conscience is 
 defiled " 516 
 
 SERMON XI. 
 
 Preached February 9, 1851. 
 
 UNITY AND PEACE. 
 
 ] COL. iii. 15. "And let the peace of God 
 
 I rule in your hearts, to the which also ye 
 
 are called in one body ; and be ye thank- 
 
 1 ful" ..522 
 
 SERMON XII. 
 
 Preached January 4, 1858. 
 
 ! THE CHRISTIAN AIM AND MOTIVE. 
 
 MATT. v. 48. " Be ye therefore perfect, 
 even as your Father which is in heaven 
 is perfect" 530 
 
 SERMON XIII. 
 
 Preached January 4, 1852. 
 
 CHRISTIAN CASUISTRY. 
 
 1 COR. vii. 18-24. "Is any man called 
 being circumcised? let him not become 
 uncircumcised. Is any called in nncir- 
 cumcision ? let him not be circumcised. 
 Circumcision is nothing, and uncimim- 
 cisiou is nothing, but the keeping of the 
 commandments of God. Let every man 
 abide in the same calling wherein he 
 was called. Art thou called being a 
 servant? care not for it: but if thon 
 niayest be made free, use it rather. 
 For he that is called in the Lord, being 
 a servant, is the Lord's freeman : like- 
 wise also he that is called, being free, 
 
Contents. 
 
 xvn 
 
 IS Christ's servant. Ye are bought with 
 a price ; be not ye the servants of men. 
 Brethren, let every man, wherein he is 
 called, therein abide with God". Page 539 
 
 SERMON XIV. 
 
 Preached January 11, 1852. 
 
 MARRIAGE AND CELIBACY. 
 
 1 COB. vii. 29-31. "But this I say, breth- 
 ren, the time is short : it remaineth, that 
 both they that have wives be as though 
 they had none ; and they that weep, as 
 though they wept not ; and they that re- 
 joice, as though they rejoiced not ; and 
 they that buy, as though they possessed 
 not; and they that use this world, as 
 not abusiug it: for the fashion of this 
 world passeth away " 547 
 
 SERMON XV. 
 
 Preached January 11, 1850. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH A FAM- 
 ILY. 
 
 EPII. iii. 14, 15." Our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 of whom the whole family in heaven 
 and earth is named " 555 
 
 SERMON XVI. 
 
 Preached January 25, 1852. 
 
 THE LAW OF CHRISTIAN CON- 
 SCIENCE. 
 
 1 COB. viii. 7-13. "Howbeit there is not 
 in every man that knowledge : for some 
 with conscience of the idol unto this 
 hour eat it as a thing offered unto an 
 idol; and their conscience being weak 
 is defiled. But meat commendeth us 
 not to God: for neither, if we eat, are 
 we the better ; neither, if we eat not, 
 are we the worse. But take heed lest 
 by any means this liberty of yours be- 
 come a stumbling-block to them that 
 are weak. For if any man see thee 
 which hast knowledge sit at meat in 
 the idol's temple, shall not the con- 
 science of him which is weak be em- 
 boldened to eat those things which are 
 offered to idols ; and through thy knowl- 
 edge shall the weak brother perish, for 
 whom Christ died ? ' But when ye sin so 
 against the brethren, and wound their 
 weak conscience, ye sin against Christ. 
 Wherefore, if meat make my brother to 
 offend, I will eat no flesh while the 
 world standeth, lest I make my brother 
 to offend " 565 
 
 SERMON XVII. 
 
 I / Preached May 16, 1852. 
 
 VICTORY OVER DEATH. 
 
 I COB. xv. 5S, 5T. "The sting of death is? 
 sin ; and the strength of sin is the law. 
 
 But thanks be to God, which giveth us 
 the victory through our Lord Jesus 
 Christ" :... Page 57(1 
 
 SERMON XVIII. 
 
 Preached June 20, 1852. 
 
 MAN'S GREATNESS AND GOD'S 
 GREATNESS. 
 
 ISA. Ivii. 15." For thus saith the high and 
 lofty One that inhablteth eternity, whose 
 name is Holy; I dwell in the high and 
 holy place, with him also that is of a 
 couta-ite and humble spirit " 588 
 
 SERMON XIX. 
 
 Preached June 27, 1852. 
 
 THE LAWFUL AND UNLAWFUL USE 
 OF LAW. 
 
 A FEAGMKNT. 
 
 1 TIM. i. 8. "But we know that the law 
 is good, if a man use it lawfully "... 598 
 
 SERMON XX. 
 
 Preached February 21, 1858. 
 
 THE PRODIGAL AND HIS BROTHER. 
 
 LUKE xv. 31, 32. "And he said unto him, 
 Son, thou art ever with me, and all that 
 I have is thine. It was meet that we 
 should make merry, and be glad: for 
 this thy brother was dead, and is alive 
 again ; and was lost, and is found". 603 
 
 SERMON XXI. 
 
 Preached May 15,1853. 
 
 JOHN'S REBUKE OF HEROD. 
 
 LUKE iii. 19, 20." But Herod the tetrarch, 
 being reproved by him for Herodiae, 
 his brother Philip's wife, and for all the 
 evils which Herod had done, added yet 
 this above all, that he shut up John in 
 prison " 614 
 
 Jfourt!) .Series. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 Preafehed January, 1848. 
 
 THE CHARACTER OF ELL 
 
 1 SAM. iii. 1. "And the child Samuel min* 
 istered unto the Lord before Eli. And 
 the word of the Lord was precious in 
 those days; there was no open vis- 
 ion I? . . 623 
 
XV111 
 
 Contents. 
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 Preached March, 1848. 
 
 THE APPOINTMENT OF THE FIRST 
 KING IN ISRAEL. 
 
 1 SAM. xii. 1. "Aud Samuel said unto all 
 Israel, Behold, I have hearkened unto 
 your voice in all that ye said unto me, and 
 have made a king over you ". . . Page CSS 
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 PRAYER. 
 
 MATT. xxvi. 39. "And he went a little 
 further, and fell on his face, and prayed, 
 saying, O my Father, if it be possible, 
 let this cup pass from me ; nevertheless, 
 not as I will, but as thou wilt " 644 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 Preached January 25, 1852. 
 
 PERVERSION, AS SHOWN IN BA- 
 LAAM'S CHARACTER 
 
 NUMB. xxii. 34, 35. "And Balaam said 
 nuto the angel of the Lord, I have 
 sinned ; for I knew not that thou stood- 
 est in the way against me : now there- 
 fore, if it displease thee, I will get me 
 back again. And the angel of the Lord 
 said unto Balaam, Go with the men : 
 but only the word that I shall speak 
 nnto thee, that thou shalt speak. So 
 Balaam went with the princes of Ba- 
 lak" 651 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 Preached February 1,1852. 
 
 SELFISHNESS, AS SHOWN IN BA- 
 LAAM'S CHARACTER. 
 
 NUMB, xxiii. 10. "Who can count the 
 dust of Jacob, and the number of the 
 fourth part of Israel ? Let me die the 
 death of the righteous, and let my last 
 end be like his !" 657 
 
 SERMON VI. 
 
 Preached December 28, 1851. 
 
 THE TRANSITORINESS OF LIFE. 
 
 PBALM xc. 12. "So teach us to number 
 onr days, that we may apply our hearts 
 unto wisdom " 663 
 
 SERMON VII. 
 
 Prenched July 7, 1850. 
 
 VIEWS OF DEATH. 
 
 ECCT.KS. ii. 15, 16. "Then said I in my 
 heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it 
 
 happeneth even to me ; and why was 1 
 then more wise? Then I said in my 
 heart, that this also is vanity. For there 
 is no remembrance of the wise more 
 than of the fool forever; seeing that 
 which now is in the days to come shall 
 all be forgotten. Aud how dieth the 
 wise man ? as the fool " Page 670 
 
 SERMON VIII. 
 Preached December 12, 1859. 
 
 WAITING FOR THE SECOND AD~ 
 VENT. 
 
 2 THESS. iii. 5. "And the Lord direct your 
 hearts into the love of God, and into the 
 patient waiting for Christ " 674 
 
 SERMON IX. 
 
 Preached November IS, 1849. 
 THE SINLESSNESS OF CHRIST. 
 
 1 JOHN iii. 4, 5. " Whosoever committeth 
 sin transgresseth also the law: for sin 
 is the transgression of the law. And ye 
 know that he was manifested to take 
 away our sins; and in him is no 
 sin" 680 
 
 SER3ION X. 
 
 Preached November 9, 1851. 
 
 CHRIST'S WAY OF DEALING WITH 
 SIN. 
 
 MARK ii. 8-11. "And immediately, when 
 Jesus perceived in his spirit that they 
 so reasoned within themselves, he said 
 unto them, Why reason ye these things 
 in your hearts'? Whether is it easier 
 to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins 
 be forgiven thee ; or to say/Arise, and 
 take up thy bed, and walk? But that 
 ye may knoAV that the Son of man hath 
 power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith 
 to the sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee, 
 Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy 
 way into thine house" " 690 
 
 SERMON XI. 
 
 Preached June 6, 1852. 
 
 REGENERATION. 
 
 JOHN iii. 5-7. "Jesus answered, Verily, 
 verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be 
 born of water and of the Spirit, he can 
 not enter into the kingdom of God. 
 That which is born of the flesh is flesh; 
 and that, which is born of the Spirit is 
 spirit. Marvel not that I said nnto thee, 
 Ye must be born again " . . 69' 
 
Contents. 
 
 XIX 
 
 SERMON XII. 
 
 Preached July 4, 1858. 
 
 AN ELECTION SERMON. 
 
 ACTS i. 23-26. "And they appointed two, 
 Joseph called Barsabas, who was sur- 
 named Justus, and Matthias. And they 
 prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, which 
 knowest the hearts of all men, shew 
 whether of these two thou hast chosen, 
 that he may take part of this ministry 
 and apostleship, from which Judas by 
 transgression fell, that he might go to 
 his own place. And they gave forth 
 their lots; and the lot fell upon Mat- 
 thias; and be was numbered with the 
 eleven apostles " Page 704 
 
 SERMON XIII. 
 
 Preached November 24, 1850. 
 
 ISAAC BLESSING HIS SONS. 
 
 GEN. xxvii. 1-4. "And it came to pass, 
 that when Isaac was old, and his eyes 
 were dim, so that he could not see, he 
 called Esau his eldest son, and said 
 unto him, My son: and he said unto 
 him, Behold, here am I. And he said, 
 Behold now, I am old, I know not the 
 day of my death : Now therefore take, 
 I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver 
 and thy bow, and go out to the field, 
 and take me some venison ; and make 
 me savory meat, such as I love, and bring 
 it to me, that I may eat ; that my soul 
 may bless thee before I die " 710 
 
 SERMON XIV. 
 
 Preached April, 1849. 
 
 SALVATION OUT OF THE VISIBLE 
 CHURCH. 
 
 ACTS ix. 36. "Now there was at Joppa a 
 certain disciple named Tabitha, which 
 by interpretation is called Dorcas: this 
 woman was full of good works and 
 almsdeeds which she did," etc. 
 
 ACTS x. 1. "There was a certain man in 
 Caesarea called Cornelius, a centurion of 
 the band called the Italian band," 
 etc. 716 
 
 SERMON XV. 
 
 Preached 1849. 
 
 THE WORD AND THE WORLD. 
 
 AOTB xix. 1, 2. "And it came to pass, that 
 while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul hav- 
 ing passed through the upper coasts 
 came to Ephesus; and finding certain 
 disciples, he said unto them, Have ye 
 received the Holy Ghost since ye be- 
 lieved? And they said unto him, We 
 have not so much as heard whether 
 there be any Holy Ghost," etc 724 
 
 SERMON XVI. 
 
 Preached June 24, 184ft 
 
 SOLOMON'S RESTORATION. 
 
 NEH. xiii. 26. " Did not Solomon king of 
 Israel sin by these things? yet among 
 many nations was there no king like him, 
 who was beloved of his God ". .Page 735 
 
 SERMON XVII. 
 
 Preached June 1,1851. 
 
 JOSEPH'S FORGIVENESS OF HIS 
 BRETHREN. 
 
 GEN. 1. 15-21. "And when Joseph's breth- 
 ren saw that their father was dead, they 
 said, Joseph will peradventure hate us, 
 and will certainly requite us all the evil 
 which we did unto him. And they sent 
 a messenger unto Joseph, saying, Thy 
 father did command before he died, say- 
 ing, So shall ye say unto Joseph, For- 
 !, I pray thee now, the trespass of 
 brethren, and their sin ; for they 
 
 give, I pray thee now, the trespass of 
 thy brethren, and their sin ; for they 
 did unto thee evil : and now, we pray 
 thee, forgive the trespass of the serv- 
 ants of the God of thy father. And Jo- 
 seph wept when they spake unto him. 
 And his brethren also went and fell 
 clown before his face; and they said, 
 Behold, we be thy servants. And Jo- 
 seph said unto them, Fear not: for am 
 I in the place of God ? But as for you, 
 ye thought evil against me; but God 
 meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as 
 it is this day, to save much people alive. 
 Now therefore fear ye not: I will nour- 
 ish you, and your little ones. And he 
 comforted them, and spake kindly unto 
 them" 745 
 
 SERMON XVIII. 
 
 Pleached November 16, 1849. 
 
 A THANKSGIVING DAY AFTER 
 CHOLERA. 
 
 JOHN v. 14, 15. "Afterward Jesus findeth 
 him in the temple, and said unto him, 
 Behold, thou art made whole: sin no 
 more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. 
 The man departed, and told the Jews 
 that it was Jesus, which had made him 
 whole" 752 
 
 SERMON XIX. 
 
 Preached August 8, 185!. 
 
 CHRISTIAN FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 MAL. iii. 16. "Then they that feared the 
 Lord spake often one to another: and 
 the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and 
 a boi-k of remembrance was written be- 
 fore him for them that feared the Lord, 
 and that thought upon his name " , 76J 
 
XX 
 
 Contents. 
 
 SERMON XX. 
 
 Preached February 2, 1851. 
 
 RECONCILIATION BY CHRIST. 
 
 COI.OSB. i. 21. "And yon, that were some- 
 time alienated and enemies in your mind 
 by wicked works, yet now hath he rec- 
 onciled " Page 766 
 
 SERMON XXI. 
 
 Preaehed March 13, 1853. 
 
 THE PRE-EMINENCE OF CHARITY. 
 
 1 PETER iv. 8. "And above all things 
 have fervent charity among yourselves: 
 for charity shall cover the multitude of 
 sins" 776 
 
 SERMON XXII. 
 Preaehed January 8, 1849. 
 
 THE UNJUST STEWARD. 
 
 LUKE xvi. 8, 9. "And the lord commend- 
 ed the unjust steward because he had 
 done wisely: for the children of this 
 world are iii their generation wiser than 
 the children of light. And I say unto 
 you, Make to yourselves friends of the 
 mammon of unrighteousness ; that, 
 when ye fail, they may receive you into 
 everlasting habitations " 787 
 
 SERMON XXIII. 
 
 Preached February 16, 1851. 
 
 THE ORPHANAGE OF MOSES. 
 
 A SERMON PREACHED ON BEHALF OF THE | 
 ORPHAN SOCIETY. 
 
 Exoi>. ii. 6-9. "And when she had opened | 
 it, she saw the child : and, behold, the ! 
 babe wept. And she had compassion 
 on him, and said, This is one of the 
 Hebrews' children. Then said his sis- 
 ter to Pharaoh's daughter, Shall I go 
 and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew | 
 women, that she may nurse the child 
 for thee ? And Pharaoh's daughter said I 
 to her, Go. And the maid went and | 
 called the child's mother. And Pha- 
 raoh's daughter said unto her, Take 
 this -child away, and nurse it for me, 
 and I will give thee thy wages. And i 
 the woman took the child, and nursed 
 t >: 794 
 
 SERMON XXIV. 
 Preached December, 1347. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HINDOOISM. 
 
 AN ADVENT LEOfCRE. 
 
 DEUT. vi. 4, 5." Hear, O Israel : The Lord 
 our God is one Lord : And thou shalt 
 
 love the Lord thy God with all thine 
 heart, and with all thy soul, and with 
 all thy might" Page SOI 
 
 SERMON XXV. 
 
 Preached January 13,1850. 
 REST. 
 
 MATT. xi. 28, 29. " Come unto me, nil y 
 that labor and are heavy laden, and I 
 will give you rest. Take my yoke upon 
 you, and' learn of me; for I am meek 
 and lowly in heart: and ye shall find 
 rest unto your souls " 806 
 
 SERMON XXVI. 
 THE HUMANE SOCIETY. 
 
 A SERMON PREACHED ON ITS 1JEHALF. 
 
 MARK v. 35-43. " While he yet epake, 
 there came from the ruler of the syna- 
 gogue's house certain which said, Thy 
 daughter is dead; why troublest thou 
 the "Master any further ? As soon as 
 Jesus heard the word that was spoken, 
 he saith unto the ruler of the syna- 
 gogue, Be not afraid, only believe. And 
 he suffered no man to follow him, save 
 Peter, and James, and John the brother 
 of James. And he cometh to the house 
 of the ruler of the synagogue, and seeth 
 the tumult, and them that wept and 
 wailed greatly. And when he was come 
 in, he saith unto them, Why make ye 
 this ado, and weep? the damsel is not 
 dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed 
 him to scorn. But when he had put 
 them all out, he taketh the father and 
 mother of the damsel, and them that 
 were with him, and entereth in where 
 the damsel was lying. And he took the 
 damsel by the baud, and said unto her, 
 Talitha cumi ; which is, being inter- 
 preted, Damsel, (I say unto thee,) arise. 
 And straightway the damsel arose, and 
 walked ; for she was of the age of twelve 
 years. And they were astonished with 
 a great astonishment. And he charged 
 them straitly that no man should know 
 it; and commanded that something 
 should be jriveu her to eat " 813 
 
 SERMON XXVII. 
 
 Preached December 1, 1850. 
 
 THREE TIMES IN A NATION'S HIS- 
 TORY. 
 
 LUKE xix. 41^4. "And when he was coma 
 near, he beheld the city, and wept over 
 it, saying, If thon hadst known, even 
 thou, at least in this thy day, the things 
 which belong unto thy peace! but now 
 they are hid from thine eyes. For the 
 days shall come upon thee, that thine 
 enemies shall cast a trench about thee. 
 and compass thee round, and keep thee 
 in on every side, and shall lay thee even 
 
Contents. 
 
 xxi 
 
 with the ground, and thy children within 
 thce; and they shall not leave in thee 
 one stone upon another; because thon 
 tmetreet not the time of thy visita- 
 tion" Page 81S 
 
 SERMON XXVIII. 
 
 Preached December 8, 1850. 
 
 INSPIRATION. 
 
 ROM. xv. 1-4." We then that are strong 
 ought to bear the infirmities of the 
 weak, and not to please ourselves. Let 
 every one of us please his neighbor for 
 his good to edification. For even Christ 
 pleased not himself; but, as it is writ- 
 
 ten, The reproaches of them that re 
 proached thee fell on me. For whatso- 
 ever things were written aforetime were 
 written for our learning, that we through 
 patience and comfort of the Scriptures 
 might have hope " Page 825 
 
 SERMON XXIX. 
 
 Preached Good Friday. 1851 
 
 THE LAST UTTERANCES OF CHRIST 
 
 JOHN xix. 30. "When Jesus therefore 
 had .received the vinegar, he said, It is 
 finished : and he bowed his head, and 
 gave up the ghost" 32 
 
SERMONS 
 
 Jir0t Series. 
 
 GOD'S REVELATION OF HEAVEN. 
 
 * Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart oi 
 man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God 
 hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit." 1 Cor. ii. 9, 10. 
 
 THE preaching of the Apostle Paul was rejected by num- 
 bers in the cultivated town of Corinth. It was not wise 
 enough, nor eloquent enough : nor was it sustained by mir- 
 acles. The man of taste found it barbarous : the Jew miss- 
 ed the signs and wonders which he looked for in a new dis- 
 pensation : and the rhetorician missed the convincing argu- 
 ments of the schools. To all which the Apostle was content 
 to reply, that his judges were incompetent to try the ques- 
 tion. The princes of this world might judge in a matter of 
 politics : the leaders in the world of literature were qualified 
 to pronounce on a point of taste : the counsellors of this 
 world to weigh an amount of evidence. But in matterp 
 spiritual, they were as unfit to judge, as a man without ea 
 is to decide respecting harmony ; or a man judging alone bj 
 sensation, to supersede the higher truth of science by an ap- 
 peal to his own estimate of appearances. The world, to 
 sense, seems stationary. To the eye of reason it moves 
 with lightning speed, and the cultivation of reason alone can 
 qualify for an opinion on the matter. The judgment of the 
 senses is worth nothing in such matters. For every kind ot 
 truth a special capacity or preparation is indispensable. 
 
 For a revelation of spiritual facts two things are needed : 
 First, a Divine Truth ; next, a spirit which can receive it. 
 
 Therefore the Apostle's whole defense resolved itself into 
 this : The natural man receiveth not the things which are of 
 
24 God^s Revelation of Heaven. 
 
 the Spirit of God. The world by wisdom knew not God, 
 And his vindication of his teaching was : These Revealed 
 Truths can not be seen by the eye, heard by the ear, nor 
 guessed by the heart ; they are visible, audible, imaginable, 
 only to the spirit. By the spiritually prepared, they are 
 recognized as beautiful, though they be folly to all the world 
 besides, as his Master had said before him, " Wisdom is justi- 
 fied by her children." In whatever type of life fche might be 
 exhibited, whether in the austere Man of the Desert, or in 
 the higher type of the social life of Christ, the Children of 
 Wisdom recognized her lineaments, justified and loved her 
 She was felt by them. 
 
 Two things are contained in this verse : 
 
 I. The inability ot the lower parts of human nature the 
 natural man to apprehend the higher truths. 
 
 II. The nature and laws of Revelation. 
 
 I. By the natural man is meant the lower faculties ot man ; 
 and it is said of these that they can not discover spiritual 
 truth. 
 
 1. Eternal truth is not perceived through sensation. " Eye 
 hath not seen the things which God hath prepared for them 
 that love Him." 
 
 There is a life of mere sensation. The degree of its enjoy- 
 ment depends upon fineness of organization. The pleasures 
 of sense arise from the vibration of a nerve, or the thrilling 
 of a muscle nothing higher. 
 
 The highest pleasure of sensation comes through the eye. 
 She ranks above all the rest of the senses in dignity. He 
 whose eye is so refined by discipline that he can repose with 
 pleasure upon the serene outline of beautiful form, has reach- 
 ed the purest of the sensational raptures. 
 
 Xow, the Corinthians could appreciate this. Theirs was 
 the land of beauty. They read the Apostle's letter, sur- 
 rounded by the purest conceptions of Art. In the orders of 
 architecture, the most richly graceful of all columnar forms 
 receives its name from Corinth. And yet it was to these 
 men, living in the very midst of the chastely beautiful, upon 
 whom the Apostle emphatically urged "Eye hath not seen 
 the things which God hath prepared for them that love 
 Him." 
 
 Let us not depreciate what God has given. There is s 
 rapture in gazing on this wondrous world. There is a joy 
 in contemplating the manifold forms in which the All Beau- 
 ful has concealed His essence the Living Garment in which 
 the Invisible has robed His mysterious loveliness. In every 
 
God^s Revelation of Heaven. .25 
 
 aspect of Nature there is joy ; whether it be the purity of 
 virgin morning, or the sombre gray of a day of clouds, or the 
 solemn pomp and majesty of night ; whether it be the chaste 
 lines of the crystal, or the waving outline of distant hills, 
 tremulously visible through dim vapors ; the minute petals 
 of the fringed daisy, or the overhanging form of mysterious 
 forests. It is a pure delight to see. 
 
 But all this is bounded. The eye can only reach the finite 
 Beautiful. It does not scan " the King in his beauty, nor 
 the land that is very far off." The Kingdom, but not the 
 King something measured by inches, yards, and miles not 
 the land which is very far off in the Infinite. 
 
 Again, it is perishable beauty a sight to sadden rather 
 than delight. Even while you gaze, and feel how fair it is, 
 joy mingles with melancholy, from a consciousness that it 
 all is fading : it is the transient not the Eternal Loveliness 
 for which our spirits pant. 
 
 Therefore, when He came into this world, who was the 
 Truth and the Life, in the body which God had prepared for 
 Him, He came not in the glory of form : He was " a root out 
 of a dry ground : He had no form nor comeliness ;" when 
 they saw Him, " there was no beauty that they should desire 
 Him." The eye did not behold, even in Christ, the things 
 which God had prepared. 
 
 Now observe, this is an Eternal Truth ; true at all times 
 true now and forever. In the quotation of this verse, a false 
 impression is often evident. It is quoted as if the Apostle 
 by " the things prepared " meant heaven, and the glories of 
 a world which is to be visible hereafter, but is at present un- 
 seen. This is manifestly alien from his purpose. The world 
 of which he speaks is not a future, but a present revelation. 
 God hath revealed it. He speaks not of something to be 
 manifested hereafter, but of something already shown, only 
 not to eye nor ear. The distinction lies between a kingdom 
 which is appreciable by the senses, and another whose facts 
 and truths are seen and heard only by the spirit. Never yet 
 hath the eye seen the Truths of God but then never shall 
 it see them. In heaven this shall be as true as now. Shape 
 and color give them not. God will never be visible nor 
 will His blessedness. He has no form. The pure in heart 
 will see Him, but never with the eye; only in the same way, 
 but in a different degree, that they see Him now. In the an- 
 ticipated vision of the Eternal, what do you expect to see ? 
 A shape ? Hues ? You will never behold God. Eye hath 
 not seen, and never shall see in finite form, the Infinite One, 
 nor the Infinite of feeling or of Truth. 
 
 2 
 
26 God's Revelation of Heaven. 
 
 Again no scientific analysis can discover the truths of 
 God. Science can not give a Revelation. Science proceeds 
 upon observation. It submits every thing to the experience 
 of the senses. Its law, expounded by its great lawgiver, is, 
 that if you would ascertain its truth you must see, feel, taste. 
 Experiment is the test of truth. Now, you can not, by 
 searching, find out the Almighty to perfection, nor a single 
 one of the blessed Truths He has to communicate. 
 
 Men have tried to demonstrate Eternal Life from an ex 
 ainination of the structure of the body. One fancies he has 
 discovered the seat of life in the pineal gland another Jn 
 the convolution of a nerve and thence each infers the con 
 tinuance of the mystic principle supposed to be discovered 
 there. But a third comes, and sees in it all nothing really 
 immaterial: organization, cerebration, but not Thought or 
 Mind separable from these ; nothing that must necessarily 
 subsist after the organism has been destroyed. 
 
 Men have supposed they discovered the law of Deity writ- 
 ten on the anatomical phenomena of disease. They have ex- 
 hibited the brain inflamed by intoxication, and the structure 
 obliterated by excess. They have shown in the disordered 
 frame the inevitable penalty of transgression. But if a man, 
 startled by all this, gives up this sin, has he from this selfish 
 prudence learned the law of Duty ? The penalties of 
 wrong-doing, doubtless : but not the sanction of Right and 
 Wrong written on the conscience, of which penalties are only 
 the enforcements. He has indisputable evidence that it is 
 expedient not to commit excesses ; but you can not manu- 
 facture a conscience out of expediency : the voice of con- 
 science says not, It is better not do so, but " Thou shall 
 not." 
 
 No : it is in vain that we ransack the world for probable 
 evidences of God and hypotheses of his existence. It is idle 
 to look into the materialism of man for the Revelation of his 
 immortality ; or to examine the morbid anatomy of the body 
 to find the rule of Right. If a man go to the eternal worlcl 
 with convictions of Eternity, the Resurrection, God, already 
 in his spirit, he will find abundant corroborations of that 
 which he already believes. But if God's existence be not- 
 thrilling every fibre of his heart, if the Immortal be not al- 
 ready in him as the proof of the Resurrection, if the law of 
 Duty be not stamped upon his soul as an Eternal Truth, un- 
 questionable, a Jhing that must be obeyed, quite separately 
 from all considerations of punishment or impunity, science 
 will never reveal these observation pries in vain the phy- 
 sician comes away from the laboratory an infidel. Eye hath 
 
God" s Revelation of Heaven. 27 
 
 not seen the truths which are clear enough to Love and to 
 the Spirit. 
 
 2. Eternal truth is not reached by hearsay "Ear hath 
 not heard the things which God hath prepared for them that 
 love Him." 
 
 No revelation can be adequately given by the address of 
 man to man, whether by writing or orally, even if he be put 
 in possession of the Truth" itself. For all such revelation 
 must be made through words : and words are but counters 
 the coins of intellectual exchange. There is as little re- 
 semblance between the silver coin and the bread it pur- 
 chases, as between the word and the thing it stands for. 
 Looking at the coin, the form of the loaf does not suggest 
 itself. Listening to the word, you do not perceive the idea 
 for which it stands, unless you are already in possession of 
 it. Speak of ice to an inhabitant of the torrid zone, the 
 word does not give him an idea, or if it does, it must be a 
 false one. Talk of blueness to one who can not distinguish 
 colors, what can your most eloquent description present to 
 him resembling the truth of your sensation ? Similarly in 
 matters spiritual, no verbal revelation can give a single sim- 
 ple idea. For instance, what means justice to the unjust 
 or purity to the man whose heart is steeped in licentious- 
 ness ? What does infinitude mean to a being who has never 
 stirred from infancy beyond a cell, never seen the sky, or the 
 sea, or any of those occasions of thought which, leaving 
 vagueness on the mind, suggest the idea of the illimitable ? 
 It means, explain it as you will, nothing to him but a room : 
 vastly larger than his own, but still a room, terminated by a 
 wall. Talk of God to a thousand ears, each has his own dif- 
 ferent conception. Each man in this congregation has a 
 God before him at this moment, who is, according to his 
 own attainment in goodness, more or less limited and im- 
 perfect. The sensual man hears of God, and understands 
 one thing. The pure man hears, and conceives another 
 thing. Whether you speak in metaphysical or metaphorical 
 language, in the purest words of inspiration, or the grossest 
 images of materialism, the conceptions conveyed by the same 
 word are essentially different, according to the soul which 
 receives them. 
 
 So that apostles themselves, and prophets, speaking to the 
 ear, can not reveal truth to the soul no, not if God Himself 
 were to touch their lips with fire. A verbal revelation 19 
 only a revelation to the ear. 
 
 Now see what a hearsay religion is. There are men who 
 believe on authority. Their minister believes all this Chris- 
 
2 8 God V Revelation of Heaven. 
 
 tianity true : therefore so do they. He calls this doctrine es- 
 sential : they echo it. Some thousands of years ago, men 
 communed with God : they have heard this and are content 
 it should be so. They have heard with the hearing of the 
 ear, that God is love that the ways of holiness are ways 
 of pleasantness, and all her paths peace. But a hearsay be- 
 lief saves not. The Corinthian philosophers heard Paul, the 
 Pharisees heard Christ. How much did the ear convey ? 
 To thousands exactly nothing. He alone believes truth who 
 feels it. He alone has a religion whose soul knows by expe- 
 rience that to serve God and know Him is the richest treas- 
 ure. And unless Truth come to you, not in word only, but 
 in power besides authoritative because true, not true because 
 authoritative there has been no real revelation made to you 
 from God. 
 
 3. Truth is not discoverable by the heart " neither have 
 entered into the heart of man the things which God hath 
 prepared for them that love Him." 
 
 The heart two things we refer to this source : the power 
 of imagining, and the power of loving. 
 
 Imagination is distinct from the mere dry faculty of rea- 
 soning. Imagination is creative it is an immediate intui- 
 tion ; not a logical analysis we call it popularly a kind of 
 inspiration. Now imagination is a power of the heart. 
 Great thoughts originate from a large heart : a man must 
 have a heart, or he never could create. 
 
 It is a grand thing, when in the stillness of the soul, 
 thought bursts into flame, and the intuitive vision comes like 
 an inspiration ; when breathing thoughts clothe themselves 
 in burning words, winged as it were with lightning ; or when 
 a great law of the universe reveals itself to the mind of 
 Genius, and where all was darkness, his single word bids 
 Light be, and all is order where chaos and confusion were be- 
 fore. Or when the truths of human nature shape themselves 
 forth in the creative fancies of one like the myriad-minded 
 poet, and you recognize the rare power of heart which sym- 
 pathizes with, and can reproduce all that is found in man. 
 
 But all this is nothing more than what the material man 
 can achieve. The most ethereal creations of fantastic fancy 
 were shaped by a mind that could read the life of Christ, 
 and then blaspheme the Adorable. The truest utterances, 
 and some of the deepest ever spoken, revealing the unrest 
 and the agony that lie hid in the heart of man, came from 
 one whose life was from first to last selfish. The highest 
 astronomer of this age, before whose clear eye Creation lay 
 revealed in all its perfect order, was one whose spirit refused 
 
God's Revelation of Heaven. 29 
 
 to recognize the Cause of causes. The mighty heart of 
 Genius had failed to reach the things which God imparts to 
 a humble spirit. 
 
 There is more in the heart of man it has the power of 
 affection. The highest moment known on earth by the 
 merely natural, is that in which tha mysterious union of 
 heart with heart is felt. Call it friendship love what you 
 will, that mystic blending of two souls in one. when self is 
 lost and found again in the being of another, when, as it 
 were, moving about in the darkness and loneliness of exist- 
 ence, we suddenly come in contact with something, and we 
 find that spirit has touched spirit. This is the purest, 
 serenest ecstasy of the merely human more blessed than 
 any sight that can be presented to the eye, or any sound 
 that can be given to the ear: more sublime than the sub- 
 limest dream ever conceived by genius in its most gifted 
 hour, when the freest way was given to the shaping spirit of 
 imagination. 
 
 This has entered into the heart of man, yet this is of the 
 lower still. It attains not to the things prepared by God, 
 it dimly shadows them. Human love is but the faint type 
 of that surpassing blessedness which belongs to those who 
 love God. 
 
 II. We pass, therefore, to the nature and laws of Revela- 
 tion. 
 
 First, Revelation is made by a Spirit to a spirit " God 
 hath revealed them to us by His Spirit." Christ is the voice 
 of God without the man the Spirit is the voice of God with- 
 in the man. The highest revelation is not made by Christ, 
 but comes directly from the universal Mind to our minds. 
 Therefore, Christ said Himself, " He, the Spirit, shall take of 
 mine and shall show it unto you." And therefore it is writ 
 ten here "The Spirit searches all things, yea, the deep 
 things of God." 
 
 Now the Spirit of God lies touching, as it were, the soul 
 of man ever around and n'ear. On the outside of earth 
 man stands with the boundless heaven above him : nothing 
 'between him and space space around him and above him 
 the confines of the sky touching him. So is the spirit of 
 man to the Spirit of the Ever Near. They mingle. In every 
 man this is true. The spiritual in him, by which he might 
 become a recipient of God, may be dulled, deadened by 2 
 life of sense, but in this world never lost. All men are not 
 spiritual men, but all have spiritual sensibilities which might 
 awake. All that is wanted is to become conscious of the 
 
30 God^s Revelation of Heaven. 
 
 nearness of God. God has placed men here to feel aftei 
 Him if haply they may find Him, albeit He be not far from 
 any one of them. Our souls float in the immeasurable ocean v/ 
 of Spirit. God lies around us : at any moment we might be 
 conscious of the contact. 
 
 The condition upon which this self-revelation of the Spirit 
 is made to man is love. These things are "prepared for 
 them that love Him," or, which is the same thing, revealed 
 to those who have the mind of Christ. 
 
 Let us look into this word love. Love to man may mean 
 several things. It may mean love to his person, which is 
 very different from himself, or it may mean simply pity. 
 Love to God can only mean one thing: God is a Character. 
 To love God is to love His character. For instance God 
 is Purity. And to be pure, in thought and look ; to turn 
 away from unhallowed books and conversation, to abhor the 
 moment in which we have not been pure, is to love God. 
 
 God is love and to love men till private attachments 
 have expanded into a philanthropy which embraces all at 
 last even the evil and enemies, with compassion that is to 
 love God. God is truth. To be true, to hate every form 
 of falsehood, to live a brave, true, real life, that is to love 
 God. God is Infinite ; and to love the boundless, reaching 
 on from grace to grace, adding charity to faith, and rising 
 upward ever to see the Ideal still above us, and to die with 
 it unattaiued, aiming insatiably to be perfect even as the 
 Father is perfect, that is love to God. 
 
 This love is manifested in obedience; love is the life of 
 which obedience is the form. " He that hath my command- 
 ments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me He 
 
 that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings." Now here 
 can be no mistake. Nothing can be love to God which does 
 not shape itself into obedience. We remember the anecdote 
 of the Roman commander who forbade an engagement with 
 the enemy, and the first transgressor against whose prohibi- 
 tion was *his own son. He accepted the challenge of the 
 leader of the other host, met, slew, spoiled him, and then in tri- 
 umphant feeling carried the spoils to his father's tent. But 
 the Roman father refused to recognize the instinct which 
 prompted this as deserving of the name of love ; disobedience 
 contradicted it, and deserved death : weak sentiment, what 
 was it worth ? 
 
 So with God : strong feelings, warm expressions, varied in- 
 ternal experience co-existing with disobedience, God counts 
 not as love. Mere weak feeling may not usurp that sacred 
 name. 
 
God 's Revelation of 'Heaven. 31 
 
 To this love, adoring and obedient, God -reveals His truth 
 for such as love it is prepared : or rather, by the well- 
 known Hebrew inversion, such are prepared for it. Love is 
 the condition without which revelation does not take place. 
 As in the natural, so in the spiritual world : By compliance 
 with the laws of the universe, we put ourselves in possession 
 of its blessings. Obey the laws of health, and you obtain 
 health : temperance, sufficiency of light and air, and exercise, 
 these are the conditions of health. .Arm yourselves with the 
 laws of nature, and you may call down the lightning from the 
 sky: surround yourself with glass, and the lightning may 
 play innocuously a few inches from you ; it can not touch 
 you ; you may defy it ; you have obeyed the conditions of 
 nature, and nature is on your side against it. 
 
 In the same way, there are conditions in the world of 
 Spirit, by compliance with which God's Spirit comes into 
 the soul with all its revelations, as surely as lightning from 
 the sky, and as invariably : such conditions as these : " The 
 secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him." " No man 
 hath seen God at any time." " If we love one another, God 
 dwelleth in us." " With this man will I dwell, even with him 
 that is of a meek and contrite spirit." " If any man will do 
 His will, he shall know of the doctrine " reverence, love, 
 meekness, contrition, obedience these conditions having 
 taken place, God enters into the soul, whispers His secret, be- 
 comes visible, imparts knowledge and conviction. 
 
 Now these laws are universal and invariable . they are 
 subject to no caprice. There is no favorite child of nature 
 who may hold the fire-ball in the hollow of his hand and 
 trifle with it without being burnt ; there is no selected 
 child of grace who can live an irregular life without unrest ; 
 or be proud, and at the same time have peace ; or indolent, 
 and receive fresh inspiration ; or remain unloving and cold, 
 and yet see and hear and feel the things which God hath 
 prepared for them that love Him. 
 
 Therefore the apostle preached the Cross to men who felt, 
 and to men who felt not, the Revelation contained in it. 
 The Cross is humbleness, love, self-surrender these the 
 apostle preached. To conquer the world by loving it to 
 be blest by ceasing the pursuit of happiness, and sacrificing 
 life instead of finding it to make a hard lot easy by submit- ^ 
 ting to it : this was his divine philosophy of life. And the 
 princes of this world, amidst scoffs and laughter, replied, Is 
 that all ? Nothing to dazzle nothing to captivate. But 
 the disciples of the inward life recognized the Divine Truth 
 which this doctrine of the Cross contained The humble of 
 
32 God's Revelation oj Heaven. 
 
 heart and the loving felt that in this lay the mystery of life, 
 of themselves, and of God, all revealed and plain. It wau 
 God's own wisdom, felt by those who had the mind of 
 Christ. 
 
 The application of all this is very easy : Love God, and 
 He will dwell with you. Obey God, and He will reveal the 
 truths of His deepest teaching to your soul. Not perhaps : 
 as surely as the laws of the spiritual world are irreversi- 
 ble, are these things prepared for obedient love. An inspira- 
 tion as true, as real, and as certain as that which ever prophet 
 or apostle reached, is yours, if you will have it so. 
 
 And if obedience were entire and love were perfect, then 
 would the revelation of the Spirit to the soul of man be per- 
 fect too. There would be trust expelling care, and enabling 
 a man to repose ; there would be a love which would cast 
 out fear; there would be a sympathy with the mighty All 
 of God. Selfishness would pass, isolation would be felt no 
 longer; the tide of the universal and eternal Life would 
 come with mighty pulsations throbbing through the soul. 
 To such a man it would not matter where he was, nor what : 
 to live or die would be alike. If he lived, he would live 
 unto the Lord ; if he died, he would die to the Lord. The 
 bed of down surrounded by friends, or the martyr's stake 
 girt round with curses what matter which ? Stephen, 
 dragged, hurried, driven to death, felt the glory qf_God 
 streaming on his face : when the shades of faintness were 
 gathering round his eyes, and the world was fading away 
 into indistinctness, " the things prepared " were given him. 
 His spirit saw what " eye had never seen." The later martyr 
 bathes his fingers in the flames, and while the flesh shrivels 
 and the bones are cindered, says, in unfeigned sincerity, that 
 he is lying on a bed of roses. It would matter little what 
 he was the ruler of a kingdom, or a tailor grimed with the 
 smoke and dust of a workshop. To a soul filled with God, 
 the difference between these two is inappreciable as if, from 
 a distant star, you were to look down upon a palace and a 
 hovel, both dwindled into distance, and were to smile at the 
 thought of calling one large and the other small. 
 
 Xo matter to such a man what he saw or what he heard ; 
 for every sight would be resplendent with beauty, and every 
 sound would echo harmony; things common would become 
 transfigured, as when the ecstatic state of the inward soul 
 reflected a radiant cloud from the form of Christ. The 
 human would become divine, Life even the meanest 
 noble. In the hue of every violet there would be a glimpse 
 of Divine affection, and a dream of Heaven. The forest 
 
Parable of the Sower. 33 
 
 would blaze with Deity, as it did to the eye of Moses. The 
 creations of genius would breathe less of earth and more of 
 Heaven. Human love itself would burn with a clearer and 
 intenser flame, rising from the altar of self-sacrifice. 
 
 These are " the things which God hath prepared for them 
 that love Him." Compared with these, what are loveliness 
 the eloquent utterances of man the conceptions of the 
 heart of Genius ? What are they all to the serene stillness 
 of a spirit lost in love : the full deep rapture of a soul int< 
 which the Spirit of God is pouring itself in a mighty tide of 
 Revelation ? 
 
 II. 
 PARABLE OF THE SOWER. 
 
 "The same day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by the sea-side. 
 And great multitudes were gathered together unto him, so that he went into 
 a ship, and sat ; and the whole multitude stood on the shore. And he spake 
 many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow ; 
 and when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way-side, and the fowls came and 
 devoured them up : Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much 
 earth : and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth : 
 And when the sun was up, they were scorched ; and because they had no 
 root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns ; and the thorns 
 sprung up, and choked them : But others fell into good ground, and brought 
 forth fruit, some a hundred-fold, some sixty-fold, some thirty-fold. Whe 
 hath ears to hear, let him hear." Matt. xiii. 1-9. 
 
 BEFORE the reception of the Lord's Supper on Sunday 
 next, I have been anxious to address you once more, my 
 young friends, in order to carry on the thoughts, and, if pos- 
 sible, deepen the impressions of Tuesday last. During the 
 last few weeks you have been subjected to much that is 
 exciting; and in proportion to the advantage is the danger 
 of that excitement. A great part of the value of the rite of 
 Confirmation consists in its being a season of excitement or 
 impression. The value of excitement is, that it breaks up 
 the old mechanical life which has become routine. It stirs 
 the stagnancy of our existence, and causes the stream of life 
 to flow more fresh and clear. The danger of excitement is 
 the probability of reaction. The heart, like the body and 
 the mind, can not be long exposed to extreme tension with- 
 out giving way afterwards. Strong impressions are suc- 
 ceeded by corresponding listlessness. Your work, to which 
 you have so long looked forward, is done. The profession 
 has been made, and now left suddenly, as it were, with noth- 
 
 2* 
 
34 Parabie of the Sower. 
 
 ing before you, and apparently no answer to the question, 
 What are we to do now ? Insensibly you will feel that all is 
 over, and the void within your hearts will be inevitably 
 filled, unless there be great vigilance, by a very different 
 class of excitements. This danger will be incurred most by 
 precisely those who felt most deeply the services of the past 
 week. 
 
 The parable I have selected dwells upon such a class of 
 dangers. 
 
 No one who felt, or even thought, could view the scene ol 
 Tuesday last without emotion. Six or seven hundred young 
 persons solemnly pledged themselves to renounce evil in 
 themselves and in the world, and to becpme disciples of the 
 Cross. The very color of their garments, typical of purity, 
 seemed to suggest the hope and the expectation that the 
 day might come when* they shall be found clothed with that 
 inward righteousness of which their dress was but a symbol, 
 when "they shall walk with Him in white, for they are wor- 
 thy." As yet fresh in feeling, as yet untainted by open sin, 
 who could see them without hoping that? 
 
 Aly young friends, experience forces us to correct that 
 sanguine anticipation. Of the seven hundred who were 
 earnest then, it were an appalling question to ask how many 
 will have retained their earnestness six months hence, and 
 how much of all that which seemed so real will be recognized 
 as pure, true gold at the last Great Day. Soon some will 
 have lost their innocence, and some will have become frivolous 
 and artificial, and the world will have got its cold, deaden- 
 ing hand on some. Who shall dare to guess in how many 
 the best raised hopes will be utterly disappointed ? 
 
 Now the question which presents iuelf is, How comes so 
 much promise to end in failure? And to th..s the parable of 
 the sower returns a reply. 
 
 Three causes are conceivable : It m'ght be the will, or, if 
 you venture so to call it, the fault 01 Him who gave the 
 truth ; or it might be some inherent impotency in the truth 
 itself; or, lastly, the fault mighi lie solely in the soil of the 
 heart. 
 
 This parable assures us that fie r ault does not lie in God, 
 the sower. God does not predesni ate men to fail. That is 
 strikingly told in the history of Judas "From a ministry 
 and apostleship Judas fell, that he might go to his own 
 place." The ministry and apostleship were that to which 
 God had destined him. To work out that was the destiny 
 appointed to him, as truly as to any of the other apostles. 
 He was called, elected to that. But when he refused to ex- 
 
Parable of the Sower. 35 
 
 ecute that mission, the very circumstances which, by God's 
 decree, were leading him to blessedness, hurried him to ruin. 
 Circumstances prepared by Eternal Love, became the desti 
 ny which conducted him to everlasting doom. He was a 
 predestined man crushed by his fate. But he went to hia 
 " own place." He had shaped his own destiny. So the ship 
 is wrecked by the winds and waves hurried to its fate. 
 But the winds and waves were in truth its best friends 
 Rightly guided, it would have made use of them to reach 
 the port ; wrongly steered, they became the destiny which 
 drove it on the rocks. Failure the wreck of life is not to 
 be impiously traced to the will of God. " God will have all 
 men to be saved, and come to a knowledge of the truth." 
 God willeth not the death of a sinner. 
 
 Nor, again, can we find the cause in any impotency of 
 truth : an impotency, doubtless, there is somewhere. The 
 old thinkers accounted for it by the depravity of Matter. 
 God can do any thing, they said. Being good, God would 
 do all good. If he do not, it is because of the materials He 
 has to deal with. Matter thwarts Him : Spirit is pure, but 
 Matter is essentially evil and unspiritual : the body is cor- 
 rupt. Against this doctrine St. Paul argues in the text, 
 u For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being bur- 
 dened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed 
 upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life." 
 2 Cor. v. 4. 
 
 The true account is this : God has created in man a will 
 which has become a cause. " God can do any thing ?" I 
 know not that. God can not deny himself; God can not do 
 wrong ; God can not create a number less than one ; God 
 can not make a contradiction true. It is a contradiction to 
 let man be free, and force him to do right. God has per- 
 formed this marvel, of creating a being with free-will, inde- 
 pendent, so to speak, of Himself a real cause in His uni- 
 verse. To say that He has created such a one, is to say that 
 He has given him the power to fail. Without free-will there 
 could be no human goodness. It is wise, therefore, and good 
 in God, to give birth to free-will. But once acknowledge 
 free-will in man, and the origin of evil does not lie in God. 
 
 And this leads us to the remaining cause of failure which 
 is conoeivable. In our own free-will in the grand and fear- 
 ful power we have to ruin ourselves lies the real and only 
 religious solution of the mystery.. In the soil of the heart is 
 found all the nutriment of spiritual life, and all the nutriment 
 of the weeds and poisons which destroy spiritual life. And 
 it is this which makes Christian character, when complete, a 
 
36 Parable of the Sower. 
 
 thing so inestimably precious. There are things precious, 
 not from the materials of which they are made, but from the 
 risk and difficulty of bringing them to perfection. The 
 speculum of the largest telescope foils the optician's skill in 
 casting. Too much or too little heat the interposition of a 
 grain of sand, a slight alteration in the temperature of the 
 weather, and all goes to pieces it must be recast. Therefore, 
 when successfully finished, it is a matter for almost the con- 
 gratulation of a country. Rarer, and more difficult still 
 than the costliest part of the most delicate of instruments, 
 is the completion of Christian character. Only let there 
 come the heat of persecution, or the cold of human deser- 
 tion, a little of the world's dust, and the rare and costly 
 thing is cracked, and becomes a failure. 
 
 In this parable are given to us the causes of failure, and 
 the requirements which are necessary in order to enable im- 
 pressions to become permanent. 
 
 I. The causes of failure. 
 
 1. The first of these is want of spiritual perception. Some 
 of the seed fell by the way-side. There are persons whose 
 religion is all outside ; it never penetrates beyond the intel- 
 lect. Duty is recognized in word, not felt. They are reg- 
 ular at church, understand the Catechism and Articles, con- 
 sider the Church a most venerable institution, have a respect 
 for religion, but it never stirs the deeps of their being. 
 They feel nothing in it beyond a safeguard for the decencies 
 and respectabilities of social life ; valuable, as parliaments 
 and magistrates are valuable, but by no means the one aw- 
 ful question which fills the soul with fearful grandeur. 
 
 Truth of life is subject to failure in such hearts in two 
 ways : By being trodden down : wheat dropped by a harvest- 
 cart upon a road lies outside. There comes a passenger's 
 foot, and crushes some of it ; then wheels come by the 
 w r heel of traffic and the wheel of pleasure crushing it grain 
 by grain. It is "trodden down." 
 
 The fate of religion is easily understood from the parallel 
 fate of a single sermon. Scarcely has its last tone vibrated 
 on the ear, when a fresh impression is given by the music 
 which dismisses the congregation. That is succeeded by an- 
 other impression, as your friend puts his arm in yours and 
 talks of some other matter, irrelevant, obliterating any slight 
 seriousness which the sermon produced. Another, and an- 
 other, and another and the word is trodden down. Ob 
 serve, there is nothing wrong in these impressions. The 
 farmer's cart which crushes the grain by the way-side is roil- 
 
Parable of the Sower. 37 
 
 ing bv on rightful business, and the stage and the pedestrian 
 are in their place ; simply the seed is not. It is not the 
 wrong-ness of the impressions which treads religion down, 
 but only this, that outside religion yields in turn to other 
 sutside impressions which are stronger. 
 
 Again conceptions of religious life, which are only concep- 
 tions outward, having no lodgment in the heart, disappear. 
 Fowls of the air came and devoured the seed. Have you 
 ever seen grain scattered on the road? The sparrow from 
 the housetop, and the chickens from the barn rush in, and 
 within a minute after it has been scattered not the shadow 
 of a grain is left. This is the picture, not of thought crushed 
 by degrees, but of thought dissipated, and no man can tell 
 when or how it went. Swiftly do these winged thoughts 
 come, when we pray, or read, or listen ; in our inattentive, 
 sauntering, way-side hours : and before we can be upon our 
 guard, the very trace of holier purposes has disappeared. In 
 our purest moods, when we kneel to pray, or gather round 
 the -altar, down into the very Holy of holies sweep these 
 foul birds of the air, villain fancies, demon thoughts. The 
 germ of life, the small seed of impression, is gone where, 
 you know r.ot. But it is gone. Inattentiveness of spirit, 
 produced by want of spiritual interest, is the first cause of 
 disappointment. 
 
 2. A second cause of failure is want of depth in character. 
 Some fell on stony ground. Stony gronnd means often the 
 soil with which many loose stones are intermixed ; but that 
 is not the stony ground meant here : this stony ground is the 
 thin layer of earth upon a bed of rock. Shallow soil is like 
 superficial character. You meet with such persons in life. 
 There is nothing deep about them ; all they do and all they 
 have is on the surface. The superficial servant's work is 
 done, but lazily, partially not thoroughly. The superficial 
 workman's labor will not bear looking into but it bears a 
 showy outside. The very dress of such persons betrays the 
 slatternly, incomplete character of their minds. When re- 
 ligion comes in contact with persons of this stamp, it shares 
 the fate of every thing else. It is taken up in a superficial 
 way. 
 
 There is deep knowledge of human nature and exquisite 
 fidelity to truth in the single touch by which the impression 
 of religion on them is described. The seed sprang up quick- 
 ly, and then withered away as quickly, because it had no 
 depth of root. There is a quick, easily-moved susceptibility 
 that rapidly exhibits the slightest breath of those emotions 
 which play upon the s irface of the soul, and then as rapidly 
 
38 Parable of the Sower. 
 
 passes off. In such persons words are ever at command^ 
 voluble and impassioned words. Tears flow readily. The 
 expressive features exhibit every passing shade of thought 
 Every thought and every feeling plays upon the surface ; ev- 
 ery thing that is sown springs up at once with vehement veg- 
 etation. But slightness and inconstancy go together with 
 violence. " Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth 
 speaketh." True ; but also out of the emptiness of the heart 
 the mouth can speak even more volubly. He who can always 
 find the word which is appropriate and adequate to his emo- 
 tions is not the man whose emotions are deepest: warmth 
 of feeling is one thing, permanence is another. On Tuesday 
 last, they who went to the table most moved and touched 
 were not necessarily those who raised in a wise observer's 
 breast the strongest hope of persistence in the life of Christ. 
 Rather those who were calm and subdued : that which 
 springs up quickly often does so merely from this, that it has 
 no depth of earth to give it room to strike its roots down and 
 deep. 
 
 A young man of this stamp came to Christ, running, kneel- 
 ing, full of warm expressions, engaging gestures, and profess- 
 ed admiration, worshipping and saying, " Good Master !" 
 Lovable and interesting as such always are, Jesus loved him. 
 But his religion lay all upon the surface, withered away when 
 the depth of its meaning was explored. The test of self-sac- 
 rifice was applied to his apparent love. He was ready for 
 any thing. Well, " Go, sell that thou hast," " and he went 
 away sorrowful, for he had great possessions." It had 
 sprung up quickly ; but it withered because it had no root. 
 
 And that is another stroke of truth in the delineation of 
 this character. Xot wealth nor comfort is the bane of its 
 religion ; but " when tribulation or persecution ariseth be- 
 cause of the word, by-and-by they are offended." A pleas- 
 ant, sunny religion would be the life to suit them. "They 
 receive the word with joy." So long as they have happiness 
 they can love God, feel very grateful, and expand with gen- 
 erous emo'tions. But when God speaks as he spoke to Job 
 out of the whirlwind, and the sun is swept from the face of 
 their heaven, and the sharp Cross is the only object left in 
 the dreary landscape, and the world blames, and friends 
 wound the wounded with cold speech and hollow common- 
 places, what is there in superficial religion to keep the heart 
 in its place, and vigorous still ? 
 
 Another point. Xot without significance is it represented 
 that the superficial character is connected with the hard 
 heart. Beneath the light thin surface of easily-stirred dust 
 
Parable of the Sower. 39 
 
 fie** the bed of rock. The shallow ground was stony ground. 
 And it is among the children of light enjoyment and unset- 
 tled life that we must look for stony heartlessness : not in the 
 world of business not among the poor, crushed to the earth 
 by privation -and suffering. These harden the character, but 
 often leave the heart soft. If you wish to know what hol- 
 lo wness and 'heartlessness atv, you must seek for them in the 
 world of light, elegant, superficial fashion where frivolity 
 has turned the heart into a rook >ed of selfishness. Say w r hat 
 men will of the heartlessuess of t/uJe, it. is nothing compared 
 with the heartlessness of fashion. Say what they will of the 
 atheism of science, it is nothing to the atheism of that round 
 of pleasure in which many a heart lives: dead while it lives. 
 
 3. Once more, impressions come to nothing when the mind 
 is subjected to dissipating influences, and yields to them. 
 " Some fell among thorns." 
 
 There is nutriment enough in the ground for thorns, and 
 enough for wheat ; but not enough, in any ground, for both 
 wheat and thorns. The agriculturist thins his nursery- 
 ground, and the farmer weeds his field, and the gardener re- 
 moves the superfluous grapes for that very reason, in order 
 that the dissipated sap may be concentrated in a few plants 
 vigorously. 
 
 So in the same way the heart has a certain power of lov- 
 ing. But love, dissipated on many objects, concentrates it- 
 self on none. God or the world not both. " No man can 
 serve two masters." " If any man love the world, the love 
 of the Father is not in him." He that has learned many ac- 
 complishments or sciences, generally knows none thoroughly. 
 Multifariousness of knowledge is commonly opposed to 
 depth, variety of affections is generally not found with in- 
 tensity. 
 
 Two classes of dissipating influences distract such minds. 
 " The cares of this world, and the deceit-fulness of riches, 
 choke the word." The cares of this world its petty trifling 
 distractions not wrong in themselves simply dissipating 
 filling the heart with paltry solicitudes and mean anxieties 
 wearing. Martha was u cumbered with much serving." 
 Her household and her domestic duties, real duties, divided 
 her heart with Christ. The time of danger, therefore, is 
 when life expands into new situations and larger spheres, 
 bringing with them new cares. It is not in the earlier stages 
 of existence that these distractions are felt. Thorns sprang 
 up and choked the wheat as they grew together. You see 
 a religious man taking up a new pursuit with eagerness. 
 At first no danger is suspected. But it is a distractioji 
 
4O Parable of the Sower. 
 
 something that distracts or divides ; he has become dissipat> 
 ed, and by-and-bjr you remark that his zest is gone ; he is no 
 longer the man he was. He talks as before, but the life is 
 gone from what he says : his energies are frittered. The 
 word is " choked." 
 
 Again, the deceitfulness of riches dissipate. . True as al- 
 ways to nature, never exaggerating, never one-sided : Christ 
 does not say that such religion brings forth no fruit, but 
 only that it brings none to perfection. A fanatic bans all 
 wealth and ail worldly care as the department of the devil : 
 Christ says, " How hardly shall they that trust in riches en- 
 ter into the kingdom of heaven." He does not say the di- 
 vided heart has no religion, but that it is a dwarfed, stunted, 
 feeble religion. Many such a Christian do you find among 
 the rich and the titled, who, as a less encumbered man, 
 might have been a resolute soldier of the Cross ; but he is 
 only now a realization of the old Pagan fable a spiritual 
 giant buried under a mountain of goTd. Oh ! many, many 
 such we meet in our higher classes, pining with a nameless 
 want, pressed by a heavy sense of the weariness of exist- 
 ence, strengthless in the midst of affluence, and incapable 
 even of tasting the profusion of comfort which is heaped 
 around them. 
 
 There is a way God their Father has of dealing with such 
 which is no pleasant thing to bear. In agriculture it is call- 
 ed weeding. In gardening it is done by pruning. It is the 
 cutting off the over-luxuriant shoots, in order to call back 
 the wandering juices into the healthier and more living 
 parts. * In religion it is described thus : " Every branch that 
 beareth fruit he purgeth." .... Lot had such a danger, 
 and was subjected to such a treatment. A quarrel had aris- 
 en between Abraham's herdsmen and his. It was necessary 
 to part. Abraham, in that noble way of his, gave him the 
 choice of the country when they separated. Either hand 
 for Abraham either the right hand or the left : what 
 cared the Pilgrim of the Invisible for fertile lands or rugged 
 sands? Lot chose wisely, as they of the world speak. 
 Well, if this world be all he got a rich soil became a 
 prince, had kings for his society and neighbors. It was 
 nothing to Lot that " the men of the land were sinners be- 
 fore the Lord exceedingly" enough that it was well-water- 
 ed everywhere. But his wife became enervated by volup- 
 tuousness, and his children tainted with ineradicable corrup- 
 tion the moral miasma of the society wherein he had made 
 his home. Two warnings God gave him : first, his home 
 property were spoiled by the enemy ; then came the fire 
 
Parable of the Sower. 41 
 
 from heaven ; and lie lied from the cities of the plain a riun- 
 ed man. His wife looked back with lingering regret upon 
 the splendid home of her luxury and voluptuousness, and 
 was overwhelmed in the encrusting salt : his children car- 
 ried with them into a new world the plague-spot of that 
 profligacy which had been the child of affluence and idle- 
 ness ; and the spirit of that rain of fire of the buried Cities 
 af the Plain rose again in the darkest of the crimes which 
 the Old Testament records, to poison the new society at its 
 very fountain. And so the old man stood at last upon the 
 brink of the grave, a blackened ruin scathed by lightning, 
 over the grave of his wife,, and the shame of his family 
 saved, but only " so as by fire." 
 
 It is a painful thing, that weeding work. - " Every branch 
 in me that beareth fruit, He purgeth it, that it may bring 
 forth more fruit." The keen edge of God's pruning-knife 
 cuts sheer through. No weak tenderness stops Him whose 
 love seeks goodness, not comfort, for His servants. A man's 
 distractions are in his wealth and perhaps fire or failure 
 make him bankrupt : what he feels is God's sharp knife. 
 Pleasure has dissipated his heart, and a stricken frame for- 
 bids his enjoying pleasure shattered nerves and broken 
 health wear out the Life of life. Or perhaps it comes in a 
 sharper, sadder form ; the shaft of death goes home ; there 
 is heard the wail of danger in his household. And then, 
 when sickness has passed on to hopelessness, and hopeless- 
 ness has passed on to death, the crushed man goes into the 
 chamber N of the dead; and there, when he shuts down the 
 lid upon the coffin of his wife, or the coffin of his child, his 
 heart begins to tell him the meaning of all this. Thorns 
 had been growing in his heart, and the sharp knife has been 
 at work making room but by an awful desolation tearing 
 up and cutting down, that the life of God in the soul may 
 not be choked. 
 
 II. For the permanence of religious impressions this para- 
 ble suggests three requirements :"" They on the good ground 
 are they which, in an honest and good heart, having heard 
 the word keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience." 
 ^ 1. *J An honest and good heart." Earnestness : that is, 
 sincerity of purpose. Now, sincerity is reckoned by an ex- 
 aggeration, sometimes, the only virtue. So that a man be 
 sincere, they say, it matters little what he thinks or what he 
 is ; but in truth is the basis of all goodness ; without which 
 goodness of any kind is impossible. There are faults more 
 heinous, but none more ruinous, than insincerity. Subtle 
 
42 Parable of the Sower. 
 
 ininds, which have no broad, firm footing in reality, lose 
 every thing by degrees, and may be transformed into any 
 .shape of evil ; may become guilty of any thing, and excuse 
 it to themselves. To this sincerity is given, in the parable, 
 success : a harvest thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred-fold. 
 
 This earnestness is the first requisite for real success in 
 svery thing. Do you wish to become rich ? You may be- 
 come rich : that is, if you desire it in no half-way, but thor- 
 oughly. A miser sacrifices all to this single passion ; hoards 
 farthings, and dies possessed of wealth. Do you wish to 
 master any science or accomplishment ? Give yourself to it, 
 and it lies beneath your feet. Time and pains will do any 
 thing. This world is given as the prize for the men in ear- 
 nest ; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the 
 world to come. " The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, 
 and the violent take it by force." Only there is this differ- 
 ence : In the pursuit of wealth, knowledge, or reputation, 
 circumstances have power to mar the wisest schemes. The 
 hoard of years may be lost in a single night. The wisdom 
 hived up by a whole life may perish when some fever impairs 
 memory. But in the kingdom of Christ, where inward char- 
 acter is the prize, no chance can rob earnestness of its exactly 
 proport ioned due of success. " Whatsoever a man soweth, 
 that shall he also reap." There is no blight, nor mildew, nor 
 scorching sun, nor rain-deluge, which can turn that harvest 
 into a failure. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on 
 earth." .... Sow for time, and probably you will succeed 
 in time. Sow the seeds of life humbleness, pure-hearted- 
 ness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the 
 soul, every minutest grain will come up again with an in- 
 crease of thirty, sixty, or a hundred-fold. 
 
 2. Meditation is a second requisite for permanence. They 
 keep the word which they have heard. 
 
 Now, meditation is often confounded with something which 
 only partially resembles it. Sometimes we sit in a kind of day- 
 dream, the mind expatiating far away into vacancy, whilst 
 minutes and hours slip by, almost unmarked, in mere vacuity. 
 This is not meditation, but reverie a state to which the soul 
 resigns itself in pure passivity. When the soul is absent 
 and dreaming, let no man think that that is spiritual medita- 
 tion, or any thing that is spiritual. 
 
 Meditation is partly a passive, partly an active state. 
 Whoever has pondered long over a plan which he is anxious 
 to accomplish, without distinctly seeing at first the way, 
 knows what meditation is. The subject itself presents itself 
 in leisure moments spontaneously : but then all this sets the 
 
Parable of the Sower. 43 
 
 mind at work contriving, imagining, rejecting, modifying 
 It is in this way that one of the greatest of English engineers, 
 a man uncouth and unaccustomed to regular discipline of 
 mind, is said to have accomplished his most marvellous tri- 
 umphs, He threw bridges over almost impracticable tor 
 rents, and pierced the eternal mountains for his viaducts. 
 Sometimes a difficulty brought all the work to a pause : then 
 he would shut himself up in his room, eat nothing, speak to 
 no one, abandon himself intensely to the contemplation of 
 that on which his heart was set ; and at the end of two or 
 three days, would come forth serene and calm, walk to the 
 spot, and quietly give orders which seemed the result of su- 
 perhuman intuition. This was meditation. 
 
 Again, he knows what it is, who has ever earnestly and 
 sincerely loved one living human being. The image of his 
 friend rises unbidden by day and night, stands before his soul 
 in the street and in the field, comes athwart his every 
 thought, and mixes its presence with his every plan. So far 
 all is passive. But besides this he plans and contrives for 
 that other's happiness, tries to devise what would give pleas- 
 ure, examines his own conduct and conversation, to avoid 
 that which can by any possibility give pain. This is medi- 
 tation. 
 
 So, too, is meditation on religious truths carried on. If it 
 first be loved, it will recur spontaneously to the heart. 
 
 But then it is dwelt on till it receives innumerable applica- 
 tions is again and again brought up to the sun and tried in 
 various lights, and so incorporates itself with the realities of 
 practical existence. 
 
 Meditation is done in silence. By it we renounce our nar- 
 row individuality, and expatiate into that which is infinite. 
 Only in the sacredness of inward silence does the soul truly 
 meet the secret, hiding God. The strength of resolve, which 
 afterwards shapes life and mixes itself with action, is the fruit 
 of those sacred, solitary moments. There is a divine depth in 
 silence. We meet God alone. 
 
 For this reason, I urged it upon so many of you to spend 
 the hour previous to your Confirmation separate from friends, 
 from books, from every thing human, and to force yourselves 
 into the Awful Presence. 
 
 Have we never felt how human presence, if frivolous, in 
 such moments frivolizes the soul, and how impossible it is to 
 come in contact with any thoughts which are sublime, or 
 drink in one inspiration which is from Heaven, without de- 
 grading it, even though surrounded by all that would natu- 
 rally suggest tender and awful feeling, when such are by ? 
 
44 Parable of the Sower. 
 
 It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of 
 sermons which you hear, nor the amount of religious conver- 
 sation in which you mix ; but it is the frequency and the 
 earnestness with which you meditate on these tilings, till the 
 truth which may be in them becomes your own, and part of 
 your own being, that insures your spiritual growth. 
 
 3. The third requisite is endurance. " They bring forth 
 fruit with patience." Patience is of two kinds. There is an 
 active, and there is a passive endurance. The former is a 
 masculine, the latter for the most part a feminine virtue. 
 Female patience is exhibited chiefly in fortitude in bearing 
 pain and sorrow meekly without complaining. In the old 
 Hebrew life, female endurance shines almost as brightly as in 
 any life which Christianity itself can mould. Hannah, under 
 the provocations and taunts of her rival, answering not again 
 her husband's rebuke, humbly replying to Eli's unjust blame, 
 is true to the type of womanly endurance. For the type of 
 man's endurance you may look to the patience of the early 
 Christians under persecution. They came away from the San- 
 hedrim to endure and bear; but it was to bear as conquerors 
 rushing on to victory, preaching the truth with all boldness, 
 and defying the power of the united world to silence them. 
 These two diverse qualities are joined in One, and only One of 
 woman born, in perfection. One there was in whom human na- 
 ture was exhibited in all its elements symmetrically complete. 
 One in whom, as I lately said, there met all that was manliest 
 and all that was most womanly. His endurance of pain and 
 grief was that of the woman rather than the man. A tender 
 spirit dissolving into tears, meeting the dark hour not with 
 the stern defiance of the man and the stoic, but with gentle- 
 ness, and trust, and love, and shrinking, like a woman. But 
 when it came to the question in Pilate's judgment-hall, or the 
 mockeries of Herod's men of war, or the discussion with the 
 Pharisees, or the exposure of the hollow falsehoods by which 
 social, domestic, and religious life w r ere sapped, the woman 
 has disappeared, and the hardy resolution of the man, with 
 more than manly daring, is found in her stead. This is the 
 "patience" for us to cultivate: To bear and to persevere. 
 However dark and profitless, however painful and weary ex- 
 istence may have become, however any man like Elijah may 
 be tempted to cast himself beneath the juniper-tree and say,. 
 " It is enough : now, O Lord !" life is not done, and our Chris- 
 tian character is not \von, so long as God has any thing left 
 for us to suifer, or any thing left for us to do. 
 
 Patience, however, has another meaning. It is the oppo 
 site of that impatience which can not wait. This is one of 
 
Parable of the Sower. 45 
 
 the difficulties of spiritual life. We are disappointed if the 
 harvest do not come at once. 
 
 Last Tuesday, doubtless, you thought that all was done, 
 and that there would be no more falling back. 
 
 Alas ! a little experience will correct that. If the hus- 
 bandman, disappointed at the delay which ensues before the 
 blade breaks the soil, were to rake away the earth to exam- 
 ine if germination were going on, he would have a poor har 
 vest "He must have " long patience, till he receive the early 
 and the latter rain." The winter frost must mellow the seed 
 lying in the genial bosom of the earth : the rains of spring 
 must swell it, and the suns of summer mature it. So with 
 you. It is the work of a long life to become a Christian. 
 Many, oh, many a time are we tempted to say, v ' I make no 
 progress at all. It is only failure after failure. Nothing 
 grows." Now look at the sea when the flood is coming in. 
 Go and stand by the sea-beach, and you will think that the 
 ceaseless flux and reflux is but retrogression equal to the ad- 
 vance. But look again in an hour's time, and the whole 
 ocean has advanced. Every advance has been beyond the 
 last, and every retrograde movement has been an impercep- 
 tible trifle less than the last. This is progress : to be esti- 
 mated at the end of hours, not minutes. And this is Chris- 
 tian progress. Many a fluctuation many a backward mo- 
 tion with a rush at times so vehement that all seems lost ; 
 but if the eternal work be real, every failure has been a real 
 gain, and the next does not carry us so far back as we were 
 before. Every advance is a real gain, and part of it is never 
 lost. Both when we advance and when we fail, we gain. 
 We are nearer to God than we were. The flood of spirit- 
 life has carried us up higher on the everlasting shores, where 
 the waves of life beat no more, and its fluctuations end, and 
 all is safe at last. "This is the faith and patience of the 
 saints." 
 
 It is because of the second of these requirements, medita- 
 tion, that I am anxious we should meet on Sunday next for 
 an early Communion at eight o'clock. I desire that the can* 
 didates may have a more solemn and definite Communion 
 of their own, with few others present except their own rela^ 
 tions and friends. In silence and quietness, we will meet 
 together then. Before the world has put on its full robe of 
 light, and before the busy gay crowd have begun to throng 
 our streets before the distractions of the day begin, we will 
 consecrate the early freshness of our souls untrodden, un- 
 hardened, undissipated to God. We will meet in the sim- 
 plicity of brotherhood and sisterhood. We will have Com 
 
46 Jacob's Wrestling. 
 
 munion in a sacred meal, which shall exhibit as nearly as 
 may be the idea of family affection. Ye that are beginning 
 life, and we who know something of it ye that offer your- 
 selves for the first time at that table, and we who, after sad 
 experience and repeated failure, stil.l desire again to renew 
 our aspirations and our vows to Him we will come and 
 breathe together that prayer which I commended to you at 
 your Confirmation " Our Father, which art in heaven, lead 
 us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." 
 
 III. 
 JACOB'S WRESTLING. 
 
 " And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel : for as 
 a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. And 
 Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, 
 Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name ? And he blessed him 
 there.' Gen. xxxii. 28, 29. 
 
 THE complexion of this story is peculiarly Jewish. It 
 contains three points which are specially interesting to every 
 Jew in a national point of view. It explained to him why 
 he was called Israelite. It traces the origin of his own 
 name, Israelite, to a distant ancestor, who had signally ex- 
 hibited religious strength, and been, in the language of those 
 times, a wrestler with God, from whence he had obtained 
 the name Israel. It casts much deep and curious interest 
 round an otherwise insignificant village, Peniel, where this 
 transaction had taken place, and which derived its name 
 from it, Peniel, the face of God. And, besides, it explained 
 the origin of a singular custom, which might seem a super- 
 stitious one, of not suffering a particular muscle to be eaten, 
 and regarding it with a kind of religious awe, as the part in 
 which Jacob was said by tradition to have been injured, by 
 the earnest tension of his frame during this struggle. So far 
 all is Jewish, narrow, merely of local interest. Besides this, 
 much of the story is evidently mythical. 
 
 It is clear at once that it belongs to that earlier period 
 of literature when traditions were preserved in a poetical 
 shape, adapted to the rude conceptions of the day, but en- 
 shrining an inner and a deeper truth. To disengage this 
 truth from the form in which it is encased is the duty of 
 the expositor. 
 
 Now, putting aside the form of this narrative, and looking 
 
Jacob's Wrestling. 47 
 
 into the heart and meaning of it, it will become apparent 
 that we have no longer any thing infantine, or Jewish, or of 
 limited interest, but a wide truth, wide as human nature ; and 
 that there is before us the record of an inward spiritual 
 struggle, as real now in the nineteenth century as then : aa 
 real in every earnest man as it was in the history of Jacob. 
 We take these points : 
 
 I. The nameless secret of existence. 
 II. The revelation of that secret to the soul. 
 
 The circumstances which preceded this event were these : 
 more than twenty years before, Jacob had been guilty of a 
 deliberate sin. He had deceived his father; he had over- 
 reached his free-spirited, impetuous, open-hearted brother 
 Esau. Never, during all those twenty years, had he seen 
 the man whom he had injured. But now, on the point of 
 returning to his native country, news was brought to him of 
 his brother's approach, which made a meeting inevitable. 
 Jacob made all his dispositions and arrangements to pre- 
 pare for the worst. He sent over the brook Jabbok first 
 the part of his femily whom he valued least, and who would 
 be the first to meet Esau ; then those whom he loved most, 
 that, in the event of danger, they might have the greatest 
 facility in escaping ; then Jacob was left alone, in the still 
 dark night. It was one of those moments in existence when 
 a crisis is before us, to which great and pregnant issues are 
 linked when all has been done that foresight can devise, 
 and the hour of action being past, the instant of reaction has 
 come. Then the soul is left passive and helpless, gazing face 
 to face upon the anticipated and dreadful moment which is 
 slowly moving on. It is in these hours that, having gone 
 through in imagination the whole circle of resources and 
 found them nothing, and ourselves powerless, as m the hands 
 of a Destiny, there comes a strange and nameless dread, a 
 horrible feeling of insecurity, which give's the consciousness 
 of a want, and forces us to feel out into the abyss for some- 
 thing that is mightier than flesh and blood to lean upon. 
 
 Then, therefore, it was that there came the moment of a 
 conflict within the soul of Jacob, so terrible and so violent 
 that it seemed an actual struggle with a living man. In the 
 darkness he had heard a voice, and came in contact with a 
 Form, and felt a Presence, the reality of which there was no 
 mistaking. Now, to the unscientific mind, that which is 
 real seems to be necessarily material too. What wonder 
 if, to the unscientific mind of Jacob, this conflict, so real, 
 and attended in his person with such tangible result^ 
 
4 8 Jacob's Wrestling. 
 
 seemed all human and material a conflict with a tangi 
 bie antagonist? What wonder if tradition preserved it in 
 such a form ? Suppose we admit that the Being whose 
 awful presence Jacob felt had no form which could be grap- 
 pled by a human hand, is it less real for that ? Are there no 
 realities but those which the hand can touch and the eye see V 
 
 Jacob in that hour felt the dark secret and mystery of ex- 
 istence. 
 
 Upon this I shall make three remarks. 
 
 1. The first has reference to the contrast observable be 
 tween this and a former revelation made to Jacob's soul. 
 This was not the first time it had found itself face to face 
 with God. Twenty years before, he had seen in vision a 
 ladder reared against the sky, and angels ascending and de- 
 scending on it. Exceedingly remarkable. Immediately 
 after his transgression, when leaving his father's home, a ban- 
 ished man, to be a wanderer for many years, this first meet- 
 ing took place. Fresh from his sin, God met him in tender- 
 ness and forgiveness. He saw the token which told him that 
 all communication between heaven and earth was not sever- 
 ed. The way was clear and unimpeded still^ Messages of 
 reciprocated love might pass between the Father and His 
 sinful child, as the angels in the dream ascended and de- 
 scended on the visionary ladder. The possibility of saintliness 
 was not forfeited. All that the vision taught him. Then 
 took place that touching covenant, in which Jacob bound 
 himself to serve gratefully his father's God, and vowed the 
 vow of a consecrated heart to Him. All that was now past. 
 After twenty years God met him again ; but this second in- 
 tercourse was of a very different character. It was no lon- 
 ger God the Forgiver, God the Protector, God the covenant- 
 ing Love, that met Jacob ; but God the Awful, the Unnam- 
 able, whose -breath blasts, at whose touch the flesh, of the 
 mortal shrinks and shrivels up. This is exactly the reverse 
 of what might have been anticipated. You would have ex- 
 pected the darker vision of experience to come first. First 
 the storm-struggle of the soul; then the vision of peace. It 
 was exactly the reverse. 
 
 Yet all this, tried by experience, is a most true and living 
 account. The awful feelings about Life and God are not 
 those which characterize our earlier years. It is quite natu- 
 ral that in the first espousals of the soul in its freshness to 
 God, bright and hopeful feelings should be the predominant 
 or the only ones. Joy marks, and ought to mark, early re- 
 ligion. Nay, by God's merciful arrangement, even sin is not 
 that crushing thing in early life which it sometimes becomes 
 
Jacob's Wrestling. 49 
 
 in later years, when we mourn not so much a calculable 
 number of sinful acts, as a deep pervading sinfulness. He- 
 morse does not corrode with its evil power then. Forgiveness 
 is not only granted, but consciously and joyfully felt. It is 
 as life matures, that the weight of life, the burden of this un- 
 intelligible world, and the mystery of the hidden God, are 
 felt. 
 
 A vast amount of insincerity is produced by mistaking 
 this. We expect in the religion of the child the experience 
 which can only be true in the religion of the man. We 
 force into their lips the language which describes the wrest- 
 ling of the soul with God. It is twenty years too soon. God, 
 in His awfulness, the thought of mystery which scathes the 
 soul, how can they know that yet before they have got the 
 thews and sinews of the man's heart to master such a 
 thought ? They know nothing yet they ought to know 
 nothing yet of God but as the Father who is around their 
 beds they ought to see nothing yet but Heaven, and angels 
 ascending and descending. 
 
 This morning, my young brethren, you presented your- 
 selves at the communion-table for the first time. Some of 
 you, we trust, were conscious of meeting God. Only let us 
 not confound the dates of Christian experience. If you did, 
 it was not as Jacob met God on this occasion, but rather as 
 he met Him on the earlier one. It were only a miserable 
 forcing of insincerity upon you to require that this solemn, 
 fearful sensation of his should be yours. Rather, we trust, 
 you felt God present as the Lord of Love. A ladder was 
 raised for you to heaven. Oh, we trust that the feeling in- 
 some cases at least was this as of angels ascending and de- 
 scending upon a child of God. 
 
 2. Again I remark, that the end and aim of Jacob's strug- 
 gle was to know the name of God. " Tell me, I pray thee, 
 thy name." A very unimportant desire at first sight. For 
 what signifies a name ? In these days, when names are only 
 epithets, it signifies nothing. " Jehovah, Jove, or Lord," as 
 the " Universal Prayer " insinuates, are all the same. Now, 
 to assert that it matters not whether God be called Jehovah, 
 Jove, or Lord, is true, if it mean this, that a devout and ear- 
 nest heart is accepted by God, let the name be what it will 
 by which He is addressed. But if it mean that Jove and Je- 
 hovah express the same Being that the character of Him 
 whom the Pagan worshipped was the same as the character 
 of Him whom Israel adored under the name of Jehovah - 
 that they refer to the same group of ideas, or that always 
 names are but names, then we must look much deeper. 
 
50 Jacob's Wrestling. 
 
 In the Hebrew history are discernible three periods dis- 
 tinctly marked, in which names and words bore very differ- 
 ent characters. These three, it has been observed by acute 
 philologists, correspond to the periods in which the nation 
 bore the three different appellations of Hebrews, Israelites^ 
 Jews, 
 
 In the first of these periods names meant truths, and words 
 were the symbols of realities. The characteristics of the 
 names given then were simplicity and sincerity. They were 
 drawn from a few simple sources: either from some charac- 
 teristic of the individual, as Jacob, The Supplanter, or Moses, 
 Drawn from the Water ; or from the idea of family, as Ben- 
 jamin, The Son of my Right Hand; or from the conception 
 of the tribe or nation, then gradually consolidating itself; or, 
 lastly, from the religious idea of God, But in this- ease not 
 the highest notion of God not Jah or Jehovah, but simply 
 the earlier and simpler idea of Deity : El Israel, Tlie Prince 
 of El ; Peniel, The Face of EL 
 
 Ii. these days names were real, but the conceptions they 
 contained were not the loftiest, 
 
 The second period begins about the time of the departure 
 from Egypt, and it is characterized by unabated simplicity, 
 with the addition of sublime r thought and feeling more in- 
 tensely religious. The heart of the nation was big with 
 mighty and new religious truth and the feelings with which 
 the national heart was swelling found vent in the names 
 which were given abundantly. God, under His name Jah, 
 the noblest assemblage of spiritual truths yet conceived, be- 
 came the adjunct to names of places and persons. Oshea's 
 name is changed into Je-hoshua. 
 
 Observe, moreover, that in this period there was no fas- 
 tidious, over-refined chariness in the use of that name. Men 
 conscious of deep and real reverence are not fearful of the 
 appearance of irreverence. The word became a common 
 word, as it always may, so long as it is felt, and awe is real. 
 A mighty cedar was called a cedar of Jehovah, a lofty mount- 
 ain, a mountain of Jehovah, Hirman beauty even was praised 
 by such an epithet, Moses was divinely fair, beautiful to 
 God. The Eternal name became an adjunct. No beauty- 
 no greatness no goodness, was conceivable, except as ema- 
 nating from Him : therefore His name was freely but most 
 devoutly used. 
 
 Like the earlier period, in this too, words mean realities ; 
 but, unlike the earlier period, they are impregnated with 
 deeper religions thought. 
 
 The third period was at its zenith in the time of Christ' 
 
Jacob's Wrestling. 51 
 
 words had lost their meaning, and shared the hollow, unreal 
 state of all things. A man's name might be Judas, and still 
 he might be a traitor. A man might be called Pharisee ex- 
 clusively religious and yet the name might only cover the 
 hollowness of hypocrisy ; or he might be called most noble 
 Festus, and be the meanest tyrant that ever sat upon a pro- 
 consular chair. This is the period in which every keen and 
 wise observer knows that the decay of national religions feel- 
 ing has begun. That decay in the meaning of words, that 
 lowering of the standard of the ideas for which they stand, 
 is a certain mark of this. The debasement of a language is 
 a sure mark of the debasement of a nation. The insincerity 
 of a language is a proof of the insincerity of a nation : for a 
 time comes in the history of a nation when words no longer 
 stand for things ; when names are given for the sake of an 
 euphonious sound ; and when titles are but the epithets of 
 unmeaning courtesy : a time when Majesty- Defender of 
 the Faith Most Noble Worshipful, and Honorable not 
 only mean nothing, but do not flush the cheek with the 
 shame of convicted falsehood when they are worn as empty 
 ornaments. 
 
 The name of God shares this fate. A nation may reach 
 the state in which the Eternal Name can be used to point 
 a sentence, or adorn a familiar conversation, and no longer 
 shock the ear with the sound of blasphemy, because in good 
 truth the name .no longer stands for the highest, but for a 
 meaner conception, an idol of the debased mind. For exam- 
 ple, in a foreign language, the language of a light and irre- 
 ligious people, the Eternal Name can be used as a light ex- 
 pletive and conversational ejaculation, and not shock any 
 religious sensibility. You could not do that in English. It 
 would sound like a blasphemy to say, in light talk, My God J 
 or Good God ! Your flesh would creep at hearing it. But 
 in that language the word has lost its sacredness, because il 
 has lost its meaning. It means no more than Jove or Baal, 
 It means a being whose existence has become a nursery fable. 
 No marvel that we are taught to pray, "Hallowed be Thy 
 name." We can not pray a deeper prayer for our country 
 than to say, Never may that name in English stand for a 
 lower idea than it stands for now. There is a solemn powet 
 in words, because words are the expression of character. 
 "By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words 
 thou shalt be condemned." 
 
 Yet in this period, exactly in proportion as the solemnity 
 of the idea was gone, reverence was scrupulously paid to the 
 corpse-like word which remained and had once inclosed it 
 
52 Jacob's Wrestling. 
 
 In that hollow, artificial age, the Jew would wipe his- pen 
 before he ventured to write the name he would leave out 
 the vowels of the sacred Jehovah, and substitute those of the 
 less sacred Elohim. In that kind of age, too, men bow to 
 the liame of Jesus often just in that proportion in which they 
 have ceased to recognize His true grandeur and majesty of 
 character. 
 
 In such an age it would be indeed preposterous to spend 
 the strength upon an inquiry such as this: "Tell me Thy 
 Name ?" Jehovah, Jove, or Lord what matter ? But Jacob 
 did not live in this third period, when names meant nothing, 
 nor did he live in the second, when words contained the deep- 
 est truth the nation is ever destined to receive. But he lived 
 in the first age, when men are sincere, and truthful, and ear- 
 nest, and names exhibit character. To tell Jacob the name 
 of God was to reveal to him what God is and who. 
 
 3. I observe a third thing. This desire of Jacob was not 
 the one we should naturally have expected on such an occa- 
 sion. He is alone his past fault is coming retributively on 
 a guilty conscience he dreads the meeting with his brother. 
 His soul is agonized with that, and that we naturally expect 
 will be the subject and the burden of his prayer. No such 
 thing ! Not a word about Esau not a word about person- 
 al danger at all. All that is banished completely for the 
 time, and deeper thoughts are grappling with his soul. 
 To get safe through to-morrow ? No, no, no ! To be 
 blessed by God to know Him, and what He is that is the 
 battle of Jacob's soul from sunset till the dawn of day. 
 
 And this is our struggle the struggle. Let any true 
 man go down into the deeps of his own being, and answer 
 us what is the cry that comes from the most real part of 
 his nature ? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for 
 that in his first communing with God preservation, safety. 
 Is it even this to be forgiven our sins ? Jacob had a sin to 
 be forgiven, and in that most solemn moment of his exist- 
 ence he did not say a syllable about it. Or is it this 
 "Hallowed be thy name?" No, my brethren. Out of our 
 frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the 
 earthlier hours of our religion may be this Save my soul ; 
 but in the most unearthly moments it is this " Tell me thy 
 Name." We move through a world of mystery ; and the 
 deepest question is, What is the being that is ever near, 
 sometimes felt, never seen That which has haunted us 
 from childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, 
 which has never yet been realized That which sweeps 
 through the soul at times as a desolation, like the blast 
 
Jacob's Wrestling. 53 
 
 from the wings of the Angel of Death, leaving us stricken 
 and silent in our loneliness That which has touched us in 
 our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with agony, 
 and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain 
 That which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness, and con- 
 ceptions of superhuman excellence ? Shall we say It or He ? 
 What is It? Who is He? Those anticipations of Immor- 
 tality and God what are they ? Are they the mere throb- 
 bings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living 
 something beside me? Are they the sound of my own 
 wishes, echoing through the vast void of nothingness ? or 
 shall I call them God, Father, Spirit, Love ? A living Be- 
 ing within me or outside me ? Tell me Thy Name, thou 
 awful "mystery of Loveliness ! This is the struggle of all 
 earnest life. 
 
 We come now to 
 
 II. The revelation of the mystery. 
 
 1. It was revealed by awe. Very significantly are we 
 told, that the Divine antagonist seemed, as it were, anxious 
 to depart as the day was about to dawn, and that Jacob 
 held Him more convulsively fast, as if aware that the day- 
 light was likely to rob him of his anticipated blessing, in 
 which there seems concealed a very deep truth. God is ap- 
 proached more nearly in that which is indefinite than in 
 that which is definite and distinct. He is felt in awe, and 
 wonder, and worship, rather than ia clear conceptions. 
 There is a sense in which darkness has more of God than 
 light has. He dwells in the thick darkness. Moments of 
 tender, vague mystery often bring distinctly the feeling of 
 His presence. When day breaks and distinctness comes, 
 the Divine has evaporated from the soul like morning dew. 
 In sorrow, haunted by uncertain presentiments, we feel the 
 Infinite around us. The gloom disperses, the world's joy 
 comes again, and it seems as if God were gone the Being 
 who had touched us with a withering hand, and wrestled 
 with us, yet whose presence, even when most terrible, was 
 more blessed than His absence. It is true, even literally, 
 that the darkness reveals God. Every morning God draws 
 the curtain of the garish light across His eternity, and wo 
 lose the Infinite. We look down on earth instead of up to 
 heaven, on a narrower and more contracted spectacle that 
 which is examined by the microscope when the telescope is 
 laid aside smallness, instead of vastness. "Man goeth 
 forth unto his work and to his labor till the evening ;" and 
 in the dust and pettiness of life we seem to cease to behold 
 
54 Jacob's Wrestling. 
 
 Him : then at night He undraws the curtain again, and we 
 see how much of God and eternity the bright distinct day 
 has hidden from us. Yes, in solitary, silent, vague darkness, 
 the Awful One is near. 
 
 This morning, young brethren, we endeavored to act on 
 this belief; we met in stillness, before the full broad glare of 
 day had rested on our world. Your first Communion im- 
 plored His blessing in the earlier hour which seems so pecu- 
 liarly His. Before the dull, and deadening, and earthward 
 influences of the worJd had dried up the dew of fresh morn- 
 ing feeling, you tried to fortify your souls with a sense of 
 His presence. This night, before to-morrow's light shall 
 dawn, pray that He will not depart until He has left upon 
 your hearts the blessing of a strength which shall be' yours 
 through the garish day, and through dry, scorching life, even 
 to the close of you)* days. 
 
 2. Again, this revelation was made in an unsyllabled 
 blessing. Jacob requested two things. He asked for a 
 blessing and he prayed to know the name of God. God 
 gave him the blessing. " He blessed him there," but refused 
 to tell His name. " Wherefore dost thou ask after ray 
 name ?" ' 
 
 In this, too, seems to lie a most important truth. Names 
 have a power, a strange power, of hiding God. Speech has 
 been bitterly defined as the art of hiding thought. Well, 
 that sarcastic definition has in it a truth. The Eternal 
 Word is the Reveal&r of God's thought, and every true word 
 of man is originally the expression of a thought; but by de- 
 
 frees the word hides the thought. Language is valuable 
 >r the things of this life ; but for the things of the other 
 world, it is an encumbrance almost as much as an assistance. 
 Words often hide from us our ignorance of even earthly 
 truth. The child asks for information, and we satiate his 
 curiosity with words. Who does not know how we satisfy 
 ourselves with the name of some strange bird or plant, or the 
 name of some new law in nature? It is a mystery perplex- 
 ing us before. We get the name, and fancy we understand 
 something more than we did before, but, in truth, we are 
 more hopelessly ignorant; for before we felt there was a 
 something we had not attained, and so we inquired and 
 searched : now, we fancy we possess it, because we have got 
 the name by which it is known, and the word covers over the 
 abyss of our ignorance. If Jacob had got a worc7,that word 
 might have satisfied him. He would have said, Now I un- 
 derstand God, and know all about Him. 
 
 Besides, names and words soon lose their meaning. In 
 
JacoBs Wrestling. 55 
 
 trie process of years and centuries the meaning dies oil tnern 
 like the sunlight from the hills. The hills are there the 
 color and life are gone. The words of that creed, for exam- 
 ple, which we read last Sunday (the Athanasian), were living 
 words a few centuries ago. They have changed their mean- 
 ing, and are, to ninety-nine out of every hundred, only dead 
 words. Yet men tenaciously hold to the expressions of 
 which they do not understand the meaning, and which have 
 a very different meaning now from what they had once 
 Person, Procession, Substance : and they are almost worse 
 with them than without them for they conceal their igno- 
 rance, and place a barrier against the earnestness of inquiry, 
 We repeat the creed by rote, but the profound truths of -Be- 
 ing which the creed contains, how many of us understand ? 
 
 All this affords an instructive lesson to parents and to 
 teachers. In the education of a pupil or a child, the wise 
 way is to deal with him as God dealt with his pupil, the 
 child-man Jacob : for before the teaching of God, the wisest 
 man, what is he but a child ? God's plan was not to give 
 names and words, but truths of feeling. That night, in that 
 strange scene, He impressed on Jacob's soul a religious awe 
 which was hereafter to develop, not a set of formal expres- 
 sions, which would have satisfied with husks the cravings of 
 the intellect and shut up the soul. Jacob felt the Infinite, 
 who was more truly felt when least named. Words would 
 have reduced that to the Finite : for, oh, to know all about 
 God is one thing to know the living God is another. Our 
 rule seems to be this : Let a child's religion be expansive 
 capable of expansion as little systematic as possible : let it 
 lie upon the heart like the light loose soil, which can be 
 broken through as the heart bursts into fuller life. If it be 
 trodden down hard and stiff in formularies, it is more than 
 probable that the whole must be burst through, and broken 
 violently, and thrown off altogether, when the soul requires 
 roorh to germinate. 
 
 And in this way, my young brethren, I have tried to deal 
 with you. Not in creeds, nor even in the stiffness of the 
 catechism, has truth been put before you. Rather has it 
 been trusted to the impulses of the heart on which, we 
 believe, God works more efficaciously than we can do. A 
 few simple truths : and then these have been left to work, 
 and germinate, and swell. Baptism reveals to you this truth 
 for the heart, that God is your Father, and that Christ has 
 encouraged you to live as your Father's children. It has re- 
 vealed that name which Jacob knew not Love. Confirma- 
 tion has told you another truth, that of self-dedication to 
 
56 Jacob's Wrestling. 
 
 Him. Heaven is the service of God. The highest blessed- 
 ness of life is powers and self consecrated to His will. These 
 are the germs of truth ; but it would have been miserable 
 self-delusion, and most pernicious teaching, to have aimed at 
 exhausting truth, or systematizing it. We are jealous of over- 
 systematic teaching. God's love to you the sacrifice of 
 your lives to God but the meaning of that? Oh, a long, 
 long life will not exhaust the meaning the Name of God. 
 Feel him more and more all else is but empty words. 
 
 Lastly, the effect of this revelation was to change Jacob's 
 character. His name was changed from Jacob to Israel, 
 because himself was an altered man. Hitherto there had 
 been something subtle in his character a certain cunning 
 and craft a want of breadth, as if he had no firm footing 
 upon reality. The forgiveness of God twenty years before 
 had not altered this. He remained Jacob, the subtle sup- 
 planter still. For, indeed, a man whose religion is chiefly 
 the sense of forgiveness, does not thereby rise into integrity 
 or firmness of character a certain tenderness of character 
 may very easily go along w r ith a great deal of subtlety. 
 Jacob was tender and devout, and grateful for God's pardon, 
 and only half honest still. But this half-insincere man is 
 brought" into contact with the awful God, and his subtlety 
 falls from him. He becomes real at once. Every insincere 
 habit of mind shrivels in the face of God. One clear, true 
 glance into the depths of Being, and the whole man is altered. 
 The name changes because the character is changed. No 
 longer Jacob, The Supplanter, but Israel, The Prince of God 
 the champion of the Lord, who had fought with God and 
 conquered ; and who, henceforth, will fight for God, and be 
 His true, loyal soldier : a larger, more unselfish name a 
 larger and more unselfish man honest and true at last. 
 No man becomes honest till he has got face to face with 
 God. There is a certain insincerity about us all a some- 
 thing dramatic. One of those dreadful moments which 
 throw us upon ourselves,'and strip off the hollowness ot our 
 outside show, must come before the insincere is true. 
 
 And again, young brethren, such a moment, at least of 
 truthfulness, ought to have been this morning. Let the old 
 pass. Let the name of the world pass into the Christian 
 name. Baptism and Confirmation, the one gives, and the 
 other reminds us of the giving of a better name and a truer. 
 Henceforth be men. Lose the natural frailty, whatever it is. 
 See God, and you will lose it. 
 
 To conclude, here is a question for each man separately- 
 What is the name of vour God ? Not in the sense of this 
 
Christian Progress by Oblivion oj the Past. 5 7 
 
 age, but in the sense of Jacob's age. What is the Name of 
 the Deity you worship? In the present modern sense of 
 Name, by which nothing more than epithet is meant, of 
 course the reply is easy. The Name of yours is the God of 
 Christian worship the Threefold One the Author of Exist- 
 ence, manifested in Divine Humanity, commingling with us 
 as pure Spirit the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. That, of 
 course, you say is the name of your God. Now, put away 
 names give words to the winds. What do you adore in 
 your heart of hearts ? What is the name oftenest on your 
 lips in your unfettered, spontaneous moments ? If we over- 
 heard your secret thoughts, who and what is it which is to 
 you the greatest and the best that you would desire to real-* 
 ize ? The character of the rich man, or the successful, or the 
 admired ? Would the worst misery which could happen to 
 you be the wreck of property the worst shame, not to have 
 done wrong, but to have sunk in the estimation of society ? 
 Then in the classifications of earth, which separate men into 
 Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, you may rank as a worship* 
 per N of the Christian's God. But in the nomenclature ot 
 Heaven, where names can not stand for things, God sees you 
 as an idolator your highest is not His highest. The Name 
 that is above every name is not the description of your God. 
 For life and death we have made our choice. The life of 
 Christ the life of Truth and Love; and if it must be, as the 
 result of that, the Cross of Christ, with the obloquy and 
 shame that wait on truth that is the name before which we 
 bow. In this world "there are gods many, and lords 
 many : but to us there is but one Lord, the Father of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
 IV. 
 
 CHRISTIAN PROGRESS BY OBLIVION OF 
 THE PAST. 
 
 "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing \ 
 ao ; forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those 
 things which are before, I press towards the mark for the prize of the high 
 calling of God in Christ Jesus. "Phil. iii. 13, 14. 
 
 THE first thing which strikes us on reading these verses 
 is, that the Apostle Paul places himself on a level with the 
 persons whom he addresses. He speaks to them as frail, 
 weak men, and he gives them in himself a specimen of what 
 
 3* 
 
58 Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 
 
 frailty and weakness can achieve in the strength of Christ, 
 And it is for this reason that the passage before us is one of 
 the most encouraging in all the writings of St. Paul. For 
 there is one aspect in which the apostle is presented to us, 
 which is perhaps a depressing one. When we look at his al- 
 most superhuman career, reverence and admiration we must 
 feel ; but so far does he seem removed from ordinary life that 
 imitation appears out of the question. Let us select but two 
 instances of this discouraging aspect of the apostle's life. 
 Most of us know the feeling of unaccountable depression 
 which rests upon us when we find ourselves alone in a foreign 
 town, with its tide of population ebbing and flowing past us, 
 a mass of human life, in which we ourselves are nothing. 
 But that was St. Paul's daily existence. He had consecrated 
 himself to an almost perpetual exile. He had given up the 
 endearments of domestic life forever. Home, in this world, 
 St. Paul had none. With a capacity for the tenderest feel- 
 ings of our nature, he had chosen for his lot the task of living 
 among strangers, and as soon as they ceased to be strangers, 
 quitting them again. He went on month by month, attach- 
 ing congregations to himself, and month by month dooming 
 himself to severance. And yet I know not that we read of 
 ono single trace of depression or discouragement suffered to 
 rest on the apostle's mind. He seems to have been ever fresh 
 and sanguine, the salient energy of his soul rising above the 
 need of all human sympathy. It is the magnificent spectacle 
 of missionary life, with more than missionary loneliness. 
 There is something almost awful in the thought of a man 
 who was so thoroughly in the next world that he needed not 
 the consolations of this world. And yet, observe, there is 
 nothing encouraging for us in this. It is very grand to look 
 upon, very commanding, very full of awe ; but it is so much 
 above us, so little like any thing human that we know of, 
 that we content ourselves with gazing on him as on the glid- 
 ing swallow's flight, which we wonder at, but never think of 
 imitating. 
 
 Now let us look at one other feature in St. Paul's character 
 his superiority to those temptations which are potent with 
 ordinary men. We say nothing of his being above the love 
 of money, of his indifference to a life of comfort and personal 
 indulgence. Those temptations only assail the lower part of 
 our nature, and it is not saintliness to be above these : com- 
 mon excellence is impossible otherwise. But when we come 
 to look for those temptations which master the higher and 
 the nobler man ambition, jealousy, pride it is not that we 
 see them conquered by the apostle ; they scarcely seem to 
 
Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 59 
 
 have even lodged in his bosom at all. It was open to the 
 apostle, if he had felt the ambition, to make for himself a 
 name, to become the leader of a party in Corinth and in the 
 world. And yet remember we not how sternly he put down 
 the thought, and how he labored to merge his individuality in 
 the cause, and make himself an equal of inferior men? 
 " Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers, serv- 
 ants, by whom ye believed ?" 
 
 Again, in respect of jealousy. Jealousy seems almost in- 
 separable from human love. It is but the other side of love, 
 the shadow cast by the light when the darker body inter- 
 venes. There came to him in prison that most cutting of all 
 news to a minister's heart, that others were trying to sup- 
 plant him in the affections of his converts. But his was that 
 lofty love which cares less for reciprocation than for the well- 
 being of the objects loved. The rival teachers were teach- 
 ing from emulation ; still they could not but bless by preach- 
 ing Christ to his disciples. " What then ? Notwithstanding 
 every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is preach- 
 ed ; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice." There 
 is not a trace of jealousy in these words. 
 
 Once more : Degrading things were laid to his charge. 
 The most liberal-minded of mankind was charged with big 
 otry. The most generous of men was suspected of avarice. 
 If ever pride were venial, it had been then. Yet read through 
 the whole of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, and say 
 if one spark of pride be visible. He might have shut himself 
 up in high and dignified silence. He might have refused to 
 condescend to solicit a renewal of the love which had once 
 grown cold; and yet we look in vain for the symptoms of 
 offended pride. Take this one passage as a specimen : " Be- 
 hold, this third time I am willing to come unto you ; . . . . 
 and I will very gladly spend and be spent for you, though 
 the more abundantly I love you, the less I am beloved." 
 
 In this there is very little encouragement. A man so 
 thoroughly above human resentment, human passions, human 
 weakness, does not seem to us an example. The nearer Hu- 
 manity approaches a perfe'ct standard, the less does it com 
 mand our sympathy. A man must be weak before we can 
 feel encouraged to attempt what he has done. It is not the 
 Redeemer's sinlessness, nor His unconquerable fidelity to 
 duty, nor His superhuman nobleness, that win our desire to 
 imitate. Rather His tears at the grave of friendship, His 
 shrinking from the sharpness of death, and the feeling of hu- 
 man doubt which swept across His soul like a desolation, 
 These make Him one of us, and therefore our example. 
 
60 Christian Progress by Oblivion of the 1'asi. 
 
 And it is on this account that this passage seems to us so 
 full of encouragement. It is the precious picture of a frail 
 and struggling apostle precious both to the man and to the 
 minister. To the man, because it tells him that what he feels 
 St. Paul felt, imperfect, feeble, far from what he would wish 
 to be; yet with sanguine hope, expecting progress in the 
 saintly life. Precious to the minister, because it tells him 
 that his very weakness may be subservient to a people's 
 strength. Not in his transcendent gifts not in his saintly 
 endowments not even in his apostolic devotedness, is St. 
 Paul so close to our hearts, as when he makes himself one 
 with us, and says, " Brethren, I count not myself to have ap- 
 prehended." 
 
 And we know not how otherwise any minister could hope 
 to do good when he addresses men who are infinitely his su- 
 periors in almost every thing. We know not how else he 
 could urge on to a sanctity which he has not himself attained: 
 we know not how he could dare to speak severely of weak- 
 nesses by which he himself is overpowered, and passions of 
 which he feels in himself all the terrible tyranny, if it were 
 not that he expects to have tacitly understood that in his 
 own case which the apostle urged in every form of expres- 
 sion : Brethren, be as I am, forl am as ye are struggling, 
 baffled, but panting for emancipation. 
 
 We confine ourselves to two subjects : 
 
 I. The apostle's object in this life. 
 II. The means which he used for attaining it. 
 
 I. The apostle's object or aim in this life was " perfection." 
 In the verse before " Not as though I had already attained, 
 either were already perfect." Perfection was his unreached 
 mark. 
 
 And less than this no Christian can aim at. There are 
 given to us "exceeding great and precious promises," that by 
 means of these we might be partakers of the Divine Nature. 
 Not merely to be equal to the standard of our day, nor even 
 to surpass it. Not to be superior to the men amongst whom 
 ,ve live. Not to forgive those who have little to be forgiven. 
 Not to love our friends, but to be the children of our Father 
 to be pure even as Christ is pure to be " perfect even as 
 tur Father which is in heaven is perfect." 
 
 It is easily perceivable why this perfection is unattainable 
 in this life. Faultlessness is conceivable, being merely the 
 negation of evil. But perfection is positive, the attainment 
 of all conceivable excellence. It is long as eternity expan- 
 sive as God. Perfection is our mark: yet never will the 
 
Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 6 r 
 
 aim be so true and steady as to strike the golden centre. 
 Perfection of character, yet, even to the dying hour, it will 
 be but this, "I count not myself to have apprehended." 
 Christian life is like those questions in mathematics which 
 never can be exactly answered. All you can attain is an ap- 
 proximation to the truth. You may labor on for years and 
 never reach it ; yet your labor is not in vain. Every figure 
 you add makes the fraction nearer than the last to the million- 
 millionth ; and so it is with holiness. Christ is our mark 
 the perfect standard of God in Christ. But be as holy as 
 you will, there is a step nearer, and another, and another, and 
 so infinitely on. 
 
 To this object the apostle gave himself with singleness of 
 aim. " This one thing I do" The life of man is a va- 
 grant, changeful desultoriness ; like that of children sporting 
 on an enamelled meadow, chasing now a painted butterfly, 
 which loses its charm by being caught now a wreath of 
 mist, which falls damp upon the hand with disappointment 
 now a feather of thistle-down, which is crushed in the grasp. 
 In the midst of all this fickleness, St. Paul had found a pur- 
 pose to which he gave the undivided energy of his soul. 
 " This one thing I do I press towards the mark." 
 
 This is intelligible enough in the case of a minister; for 
 whether he be in the pulpit or beside a sick man's bed or 
 furnishing his mind in the study, evidently and unmistakably 
 it is his profession to be doing only one thing. But in the 
 manifold life of the man of the world and business, it is not 
 so easy to understand how this can be carried out. To an- 
 swer this, we observe there is a difference between doing and 
 being. Perfection is being, not doing ; it is not to effect an 
 'act, but to achieve a character. If the aim of life were to do 
 something, then, as in an earthly business, except in doing 
 this one thing the business would be at a stand-still. The 
 student is not doing the one thing of student life when he 
 has ceased to think or read. The laborer leaves his work 
 undone when the spade is not in his hand, and he sits beneath 
 the hedge to rest. But in Christian life, every moment and 
 every act is an opportunity for doing the one thing, of be- 
 coming Christ-like. Every day is full of a most impressive 
 experience. Every temptation to evil temper which can ac- 
 sail us to-day will be an opportunity to decide the question 
 whether we shall gain the calmness and the rest of Christ, or 
 whether we shall be tossed by the restlessness and agitation 
 of the world. Nay, the very vicissitudes of the seasons, day 
 and night, heat and cold, affecting us variably, and producing 
 exhilaration or depression, are so contrived as to conduce to 
 
62 Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 
 
 wards the being which we become, and decide whether we 
 shall be masters of ourselves, or whether we shall be swept at 
 the mercy of accident and circumstance, miserably suscepti* 
 ble of merely outward influences. Infinite as are the vari- 
 eties of life, so manifold are the paths to saintly character ; 
 and he who has not found out how directly or indirectly to 
 make every thing converge towards his soul's sanctification, 
 has as yet missed the meaning of this life. 
 
 In pressing towards this u mark," the apostle attained a 
 prize ; and here I offer an observation, which is not one of 
 mere subtlety of refinement, but deeply practical. The mark 
 was perfection of character, the prize was blessedness. But 
 the apostle did not aim at the prize of blessedness, he aimed 
 at the mark of perfectness. In becoming perfect he attained 
 happiness, but his primary aim was not happiness. 
 
 We may understand this by an illustration. In student - 
 life there are those who seek knowledge for its own sake, and 
 there are those who seek it for the sake of the prize, and the 
 honor, and the subsequent success in life that knowledge 
 brings. To those who seek knowledge for its own sake the 
 labor is itself reward. Attainment is the highest reward. 
 Doubtless the prize stimulates exertion ; encourages and 
 forms a part of the motive, but only a subordinate one : and 
 knowledge would still have " a price above rubies," if there 
 were no prize at all. They who seek knowledge for the sake 
 of a prize are not genuine lovers of knowledge they only 
 love the rewards' of knowledge : had it no honor or substan- 
 tial advantage connected with it, they would be indolent. 
 
 Applying this to our subject, I say this is a spurious good- 
 ness which is good for the sake of reward. The child that 
 speaks truth for the sake of the praise of truth, is not truth 
 lul. The man who is honest because honesty is the best pol 
 icy, has not integrity in his heart. He who endeavors to be 
 hum ble, and holy, and perfect, in order to win heaven, has 
 only a counterfeit religion. God for His own sake Good- 
 ness because it is good Truth because it is lovely this 
 is the Christian's aim. The prize is only an incentive; insep- 
 arable from success, but not the aim itself. 
 
 \Vith this limitation, however, w r e remark that it is a Chris 
 tinn duty to dwell much more on the thought of future bless- 
 edness than most men do. If ever the apostle's step began 
 to flag, the radiant diadem before him gave new vi'^or to his 
 heart, and we know how at the close of his career the vision 
 becanfe more vivid and more entrancing. "Henceforth there 
 is laid up for me a crown of glory !" It is our privilege, if 
 we are on our way to God, to keep steadily before us the 
 
Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 63 
 
 thought of homo. Make it a matter of habit Force your- 
 self at night, alone, in the midst of the world's bright sights, 
 to pause "to think of the heaven which is yours. Let it calm 
 you and ennoble you, and give you cheerfulness to endure 
 It was so that Moses was enabled to live amongst all the fas- 
 cinations 0f his courtly life, with a heart unseduced from his 
 laborious destiny. By faith ..." esteeming the reproach of 
 Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt." Why? 
 " For he had respect unto the recompense of the reward." It 
 was so that our Master strengthened his human soul for its 
 sharp earthly endurance. " For the joy that was set before 
 him, He endured the cross, despising the shame." If we 
 would become heavenly-minded, we must let the imagination 
 realize the blessedness to which we are moving on. Let us 
 think much of rest the rest which is not of indolence, but of 
 powers in perfect equilibrium. The rest which is deep as 
 summer midnight, yet full of life and force as summer sun- 
 shine, the sabbath of eternity. Let us think of the love of 
 God, which we shall feel in its full tide upon our souls. Let 
 us think of that marvellous career of sublime occupation 
 which shall belong to the spirits of just men made perfect ; 
 when we shall fill a higher place in God's universe, and more 
 consciously, and with more distinct insight, co-operate with 
 God in the rule over His Creation. "I press towards the 
 mark for the prize." 
 
 II. We pass to our second topic. The means which St. 
 Paul found available for the attainment of Divine and per- 
 fect character. His great principle was to " forget the things 
 which were behind, and to reach forward to the things which 
 were before." The wisdom of a divine life lies hid in this 
 principle. I shall endeavor to expand the sentiment to make 
 it intelligible. 
 
 W T hat are the things behind, which are to be forgotten ? 
 
 1. If we would progress in Christian life, we must forget 
 the days of innocence that lie behind us. Let not this be 
 misunderstood. Innocent, literally, no man ever is. We 
 come into the world with tendencies to evil; but there was 
 a time in our lives when those were only tendencies. A 
 proneness to sin we had ; but we had not yet sinned. The 
 moment had not yet arrived when that cloud settles down 
 upon the heart, which in all of after-life is never entirely re- 
 moved : the sense of guilt, the anguish of lost innocence, the 
 restless feeling of a heart no longer pure. Popularly, we call 
 that innocence ; and when men become bitterly aware that 
 early innocence of heart is gone, they feel as if all were lost* 
 
64 Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past 
 
 and so look back to what they reckon holier days with A p<^ 
 culiar fondness of regret. I believe there is much that is 
 merely feeble and sentimental in this regret. Our early in- 
 nocence is nothing more than ignorance of evil. Christian 
 life is not a retaining of that ignorance of evil, nor even a re 
 turning of it again. We lose our mere negative sinlessness. 
 We put on a firm manly holiness. Human innocence is not 
 io know evil ; Christian saintliness is to know evil and good, 
 and prefer good. It is possible for a parent, with over-fas- 
 tidious refinement, to prolong the duration of this innocence 
 unnaturally. He may lock up his library, and prevent the 
 entrance to forbidden books ; he may exercise a jealous cen- 
 sorship over every book and every companion that comes into 
 the house ; he may remove the public journal from the table, 
 lest an eye may chance to rest upon the contaminating por- 
 tion of its pages ; but he has only put off the evil hour. He 
 has sent into the world a young man of eighteen or twenty, 
 ignorant of evil as a child, but not innocent as an angel who 
 abhors the evil. No ; we can not get back our past igno- 
 rance, neither is it desirable we should. No sane mrnd wish- 
 es for that which is impossible. And it is no more to be re- 
 gretted than the blossom is to be regretted w r hen fruit is 
 hardening in its place; no more to be regretted than the 
 slender gracefulness of the sapling, when you have got in- 
 stead the woody fibre of the heart of oak of which the ship 
 is made ; no more to be regretted than the green blade when 
 the ear has come instead, bending down in yellow ripeness. 
 Our innocence is gone, withered with the business-like con- 
 tact with the great world. It is one of the things behind. 
 Forget it. It was worth very little. And now for some- 
 thing of a texture more firm, more enduring. We will not 
 mourn over the loss of simplicity, if we have got instead 
 souls indurated by experience, disciplined, even by fall, to 
 refuse the evil and to choose the good. 
 
 2. In the next place, it is wise to forget our days of youth, 
 Up to a certain period of life it is the tendency of man to 
 look forward. There is a marvellous prodigality with which 
 we throw away our present happiness when we are young, 
 svhich belongs to those w r ho feel that they are rich in happi- 
 ness, and never expect to be bankrupts. It almost seems 
 one of the signatures of our immortality that we squande? 
 time as if there were a dim consciousness that we are in pos- 
 session of an eternity of it ; but as we arrive at middle age, 
 it is the tendency of man to look back. 
 
 To a man of middle life, existence is no longer a dream, 
 but a reality. He has not much more new to look forward 
 
Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 65 
 
 to, for the character of his life is generally fixed by that 
 time. His profession, his home, his occupations, will be for 
 the most part what they are now. He will make few new 
 acquaintances no new friends. It is the solemn thought 
 connected with middle age that life's last business is begun 
 in earnest; and it is then, midway Jbetween the cradle and 
 the grave, that a man begins to look back and marvel with a 
 kind of remorseful feeling that he let the days of youth go by 
 so half enjoyed. It is the pensive autumn feeling it is the 
 sensation of half sadness that we experience when the long- 
 est day of the year is past, and every day that follows is 
 shorter, and the lights fainter, and the feebler shadows tell 
 that nature is hastening with gigantic footsteps to her win- 
 ter grave. So does man look back upon his youth. When 
 the first gray hairs become visible when the unwelcome 
 truth fastens itself upon the mind that a man is no longer 
 going up the hill, but down, and that the sun is already west- 
 ering, he looks back on things behind. Now this is a nat- 
 ural feeling, but is it the high Christian tone of feeling ? In 
 the spirit of this verse, we may assuredly answer, No. We 
 who have an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and 
 that fadeth not away, what have we to do with things past? 
 When we were children, we thought as children. But now 
 there lies before us manhood, with its earnest work ; and 
 then old age, and then the grave, and then home. 
 
 And so manhood in the Christian life is a better thing 
 than boyhood, because it is a riper thing ; and old age ought 
 to be a brighter, and a calmer, and a more serene thing than 
 manhood. There is a second youth for man, better and holi- 
 er than his first, if he will look on and not back. There is a 
 peculiar simplicity of heart and a touching singleness of pur- 
 pose in Christian old age, which has ripened gradually and 
 not fitfully. It is then that to the wisdom of the serpent is 
 added the harmlessness of the dove ; it is then that to the 
 firmness of manhood is joined almost the gentleness of wom- 
 anhood ; it is then that the somewhat austere and sour char- 
 acter of growing strength, moral and intellectual, mellows 
 into the rich ripeness of an old age made sweet and tolerant 
 by experience ; it is then that man returns to first principles. 
 There comes a love more pure and deep than the boy could 
 ever feel ; there comes a conviction, with a strength beyond 
 that which the boy could never know, that the earliest lesson 
 of life is infinite, Christ is all. 
 
 3. Again, it is wise to forget past errors. There is a kind 
 of temperament which, when^indulged, greatly hinders growth 
 in real godliness. It is that rueful, repentant, self-accusing 
 
66 Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 
 
 temper which is always looking back, and microscopically ob- 
 serving how that which is done might have been better done. 
 Something of this we ought to have. A Christian ought to 
 feel always that he has partially failed, but that ought not 
 to be the only feeling. Faith ought ever to be a sanguine, 
 cheerful thing ; and perhaps in practical life we could not 
 give a better account of faith than by saying that it is, 
 amidst much failure, having the heart to try again. Our 
 best deeds are marked by imperfection ; but if they really 
 were our best, " forget the things that are behind " we shall 
 do better next time. 
 
 Under this head we include all those mistakes which be- 
 long to our circumstances. We can all look back to past life 
 and see mistakes that have been made, to a certain extent 
 perhaps, irreparable ones. We can see where our education 
 was fatally misdirected. The profession chosen for you per- 
 haps was not the fittest, or you are out of place, and many 
 things might have been better ordered. Now on this apos- 
 tolic principle it is wiss to forget all that. It is not by re- 
 gretting what is irreparable that true work is to be done, 
 but by making the best of what we are. It is not by com- 
 plaining that we have not the right tools, but by using well 
 the tools w e have. What we are, and where we are, is God's 
 providential arrangement God's doing, though it may be 
 man's misdoing ; and the manly and the wise way is to look 
 your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made out 
 of them. Life, like war, is a series of mistakes, and he is not 
 the best Christian nor the best general who makes the few- 
 est false steps. Poor mediocrity may secure that ; but he 
 is the best w r ho wins the most splendid victories by the re- 
 trieval of mistakes. Forget mistakes : organize victory out 
 of mistakes. 
 
 Finally, past guilt lies behind us, and is well forgotten. 
 There is a way in which even sin may be banished from the 
 memory. If a man looks forward to the evil he is going to 
 commit, and satisfies himself that it is inevitable, and so 
 treats it lightly, he is acting as a fatalist. But if a man pa 
 tially does this, looking backward, feeling that sin when it 
 is past has become part of the history of God's universe, and 
 is not to be wept over forever, he only does that which the 
 Giver of the Gospel permits him to do. Bad as the results 
 have been in the world of making light of sin, those of brood- 
 ing over it too much have been worse. Remorse has done 
 more harm than even hardihood. It was remorse which 
 fixed Judas in an unalterable destiny ; it was remorse which 
 filled the monasteries for ages with men and women whose 
 
Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past. 67 
 
 fives became useless to their fellow-creatures ; it is remorse 
 which so remembers by-gone faults as to paralyze the ener- 
 gies for doing Christ's work ; for when you break a Chris- 
 tian's spirit, it is all over with progress. Oh, we want every 
 thing that is hopeful and encouraging for our work, for God 
 knows it is not an easy one. And therefore it is that the 
 Gospel comes to the guiltiest of us all at the very outset with 
 the inspiring news of pardon. You remember how Christ 
 treated sin. Sin of oppression and hypocrisy indignantly, 
 but sin of frailty " 'Hath no man condemned thee ?' ' No 
 man, Lord.' ' Neither do I condemn thee ; go, and sin no 
 more.' " As if he would bid us think more of what we may 
 be than of what we have been. 
 
 There was the wisdom of life in the proverb with which 
 the widow of Tekoah pleaded for the restoration of Absalom 
 from banishment before David. Absalom had slain his 
 brother Amnon. Well, Amnon was dead before his time ; 
 but" the severity of revenge could never bring him back 
 again. " We must all die," said the wise woman, " and are 
 as water spilt upon the ground, which can not be gathered 
 up again." Christian brethren, do not stop too long to weep 
 over spilt water. Forget your guilt, and wait to see what 
 eternity has to say to it. You have other work to do now. 
 
 So let us work out the spirit of the apostle's plan. Inno- 
 cence, youth, success, error, guilt let us forget them all. 
 
 Not backward are our glances bent, 
 But onward to our Father's home. 
 
 In conclusion, remember Christian progress is only possi- 
 ble in Christ. It is a very lofty thing to be a Christian ; for 
 a Christian is a man who is restoring God's likeness to his 
 character ; and therefore the apostle calls it here a high call~ 
 ing. High as heaven is the calling wherewith we are called. 
 But this very height makes it seem impracticable. It is nat- 
 ural to say, All that was well enough for one so transcend- 
 ently gifted as Paul to hope for : but I am no gifted man ; 
 I have no iron strength of mind ; I have no sanguine hope- 
 fulness of character; I am disposed to look on the dark side 
 of things ; I am undetermined, weak, vacillating ; and then 
 I have a whole army of passions and follies to contend with. 
 We have to remind such men of one thing they have forgot- 
 ten. It is the high calling of God, if you will ; but it is the 
 high calling of God in Christ Jesus. What the world calls 
 virtue is a name and a dream without Christ. The founda- 
 tion of all human excellence must be laid deep in the blood 
 of the Redeemer's cross, and in the power of His Resurrec- 
 
68 Triumph over Hindrances. 
 
 tion. First let a man know that all his past is wrong and 
 sinful ; then let him fix his eye on the love of God in Christ 
 loving him even him, the guilty one. Is there no strength 
 in that no power in the knowledge that all that is gone by 
 is gone, and that a fresh, clear future is open ? It is not the 
 progress of virtue that God asks for, but progress in saintli- 
 ness, empowered by hope and love. 
 
 Lastly, let each man put this question to himself, " Dare 
 I look on ?" With an earnest Christian, it is " reaching 
 forth to those things which are before." Progress ever. 
 And then just as we go to rest in this world tired, and wake 
 up fresh and vigorous in the morning, so does the Christian 
 go to sleep in the world's night, weary with the work of 
 life, and then on the resurrection-day he wakes in his second 
 and his brighter morning. It is well for a believer to look 
 on. Dare you ? Remember, out of Christ, it is not wisdom, 
 but madness to look on. You must look back, for the long- 
 est and the best day is either past or passing. It will be 
 winter soon desolate, uncheered, hopeless, winter old age, 
 with its dreariness and its disappointments, and its queru- 
 lous broken-heartedness ; and there is no second spring for 
 you no resurrection-morning of blessedness to dawn on the 
 darkness of your grave. God has only one method of salva- 
 tion, the Cross of Christ. God can have only one ; for the 
 Cross of Christ means death to evil, life to good. There is 
 no other way to salvation but that ; for that in itself is, and 
 alone is, salvation. Out of Christ, therefore, it is woe to the 
 man who reaches forth to the things which are before. To 
 such I say ; My unhappy brethren, Omnipotence itself can 
 not change the darkness of your destiny. 
 
 V. 
 TRIUMPH OVER HINDRANCES ZACCHEUS. 
 
 " And Zaccheus stood, and said unto the Lord ; Behold. Lord, the half of 
 my goods I give to the poor : and if I have taken any thing from any man 
 by false accusation, I restore him fourfold." Luke xix. 8. 
 
 THERE are persons to whom a religious life seems smooth 
 and easy. Gifted by God constitutionally with a freedom 
 from those inclinations which in other men are tyrannous 
 and irresistible, endued with those aspirations which other 
 men seem to lack, it appears as if they were born saints. 
 
Triumph over Hindrances. 69 
 
 There are others to whom it is all a trial a whole world 
 of passions keep up strife within. The name of the spirit 
 which possesses them is Legion. It is a hard tight from 
 the cradle to the grave up-hill work toil all the way; 
 and at the last it seems as if they had only just kept their 
 ground. 
 
 There are circumstances which seem as if intended as a 
 very hot-bed for the culture of religious principle, in which 
 the'difficulty appears to be to escape being religious. 
 
 There are others in which religious life seems impossible. 
 For the soul, tested by temptation, is like iron tried by 
 weights. No iron bar is absolutely infrangible. Its 
 strength is tested by the weight which it will bear without 
 breaking. No soul is absolutely impeccable. It seems as if 
 all we can dare to ask even of the holiest is how much temp-' 
 tation he can bear without giving way. There are societies 
 amidst which some are forced to dwell daily, in which the 
 very idea of Christian rest is negatived. There are occupa- 
 tions in which purity of heart can scarcely be conceived. 
 There are temptations to which some are subjected in a long 
 series, in which to have stood upright would have demand- 
 ed not a man's but an angel's strength. 
 
 Here are two cases : one in which temperament and cir- 
 cumstances are favorable to religion ; another in which both 
 are adverse. If life were always the brighter side of these 
 pictures, the need of Christian instruction and Christian 
 casuistry i. &, the direction for conduct under various sup- 
 posabie cases, would be superseded. The end of the institu- 
 tion of a Church would be gone ; for the Church exists for 
 the purposes of mutual sympathy and mutual support. But 
 the fact is, life is for the most part a path of varied trial. 
 How to lead the life divine, surrounded by temptations 
 from within and from without how to breathe freely the 
 atmosphere of heaven, while the feet yet touch earth 
 how to lead the life of Christ, who shrunk from no scene 
 of trying duty, and took the temptations of man's life as 
 they came or how even to lead the ordinary saintly life, 
 winning experience from fall, and permanent strength out 
 of momentary weakness, and victory out of defeat, this is 
 the problem. 
 
 The possibility of such a life is guaranteed by the history 
 of Zaccheus. Zaccheus was tempted much, and yet Zacche- 
 us contrived to be a servant of Christ. If we wanted a mot- 
 to to prefix to this story, we should append this : The suc- 
 cessful pursuit of religion under difficulties. 
 
 These, +hen, are the two branches of our thoughts to-day: 
 
70 Triumph over Hindrances, 
 
 I. The hindrances to a religious life. 
 IL The Christian triumph over difficulties. 
 
 I. The hindrances of Zaccheus were twofold : partly cir- 
 cumstantial partly personal. Partly circumstantial, arising 
 from his riches and his profession of a publican. 
 
 Now the publican's profession exposed him to temptations 
 in these three ways. First of all, in the way of opportunity. 
 A publican was a gatherer of the Roman public imposts. 
 Not, however, as now, when all is fixed, and the Government 
 pays the gatherer of the taxes. The Roman publican paid 
 so much to the Government for the privilege of collecting 
 them, and then indemnified himself, and appropriated what 
 overplus he could, from the taxes which he gathered. There 
 was, therefore, evidently a temptation to overcharge, and a 
 temptation to oppress. To overcharge, because the only re- 
 dress the payer of the taxes had was an appeal to law, in 
 which his chance was small before a tribunal where the 
 judge was a Roman, and the accuser an official of the Ro- 
 man Government. A temptation to oppress, because the 
 threat of law was nearly certain to extort a bribe. Be- 
 sides this, most of us must have remarked that a certain 
 harshness of manner is contracted by those who have the 
 rule over the poor. They come in contact with human souls 
 only in the way of business. They have to do with their ig- 
 norance, their stupicfity, their attempts to deceive ; and hence 
 the tenderest-hearted men become impatient and apparently 
 unfeeling. Hard men, knowing that redress is difficult, be- 
 come harder still, and exercise their authority with the inso- 
 lence of office ; so that, w T hen to the insolence of office and 
 the likelihood of impunity there was superadded the pecu- 
 niary advantage annexed to a tyrannical extortion, any one 
 may understand how great the publican's temptation was. 
 
 Another temptation was presented : to live satisfied with 
 a low morality. The standard of right and wrong is eternal 
 in the heavens unchangeably one and the same. But here 
 on earth it is perpetually variable it is one in one age or 
 nation, another in another. Every profession has its conven- 
 tional morality, current nowhere else. That which is per- 
 mitted by the peculiar standard of truth acknowledged at 
 the bar is falsehood among plain men ; that which would be 
 reckoned in the army purity and tenderness would be else- 
 where licentiousness and cruelty. There is a parliamentary 
 honor quite distinct from honor between man and man. 
 Trade has its honesty, which rightly named is fraud. And 
 in all these cases the temptation is to live content with the 
 
Triumph over Hindrances. 7 1 
 
 Btandard of a man's own profession or society ; and this is 
 the real difference between the worldly man and the relig- 
 ious man. He is the worldling who lives below that stand' 
 ard, or no higher ; he is the servant of God who lives above 
 his age. But you will perceive that amongst publicans a 
 very little would count much that which would be laxity 
 to a Jew and shame to a Pharisee, might be reckoned very 
 strict morality among the Publicans. 
 
 Again, Zaccheus was tempted to that hardness in evil 
 which comes from having no character to support. But the 
 extent to which sin hardens depends partly on the estimate 
 taken of it by society. The falsehood of Abraham, the guilt 
 and violence of David, were very different in their effect on 
 character in an age when truth and purity and gentleness 
 were scarcely recognized, from what they would be now. 
 Then Abraham and David had not so sinned against their 
 consciences as a man would sin now in doing the same acts, 
 because their consciences were less enlightened. A man might 
 be a slave-trader in the Western hemisphere, and in other re- 
 spects a humane, upright, honorable man. In the last cen- 
 tury, the holy Newton of Olney trafficked in slaves after be- 
 coming religious. A man who had dealings in this way in 
 this country could not remain upright and honorable, even if 
 it were conceivable that he began as such ; because he would 
 either conceal from the world his share in the traffic, and so, 
 doing it secretly, would become a hypocrite, or else he must 
 cover his wickedness by effrontery, doing it in defiance of 
 public shame, and so getting seared in conscience. Because 
 in the one case, the sin remaining sin, yet countenanced bj 
 society, does not degrade the man nor injure his conscience 
 even to the same extent to which it would ruin the other, 
 whose conscience must become seared by defiance of public 
 shame. It is scarcely possible to unite together the idea of 
 an executioner of public justice and a humble, holy man. 
 And yet assuredly, not from any thing that there is unlaw- 
 ful in the office ; ah executioner's trade is as lawful as a sol- 
 dier's. A soldier is placed there by his country to slay his 
 country's enemies, and a doomster is placed there to slay 
 the transgressors of his country's laws. Wherein lies the dif 
 ierence which leaves the one a man of honor, and almost ne- 
 cessitates the other to be taken from the rank of reprobates, 
 or else gradually to become such ? Simply the difference of 
 public opinion public scorn. Once there was no shame in 
 the office of the execittioner, and the judge of Israel, with his 
 own hands, hewed Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal. 
 Phineas executed summary and sanguinary vengeance, and 
 
72 Triumph over Hindrances. 
 
 his name has been preserved in a hymn by his country's 
 gratitude. The whole congregation became executioners in 
 the case of blasphemy, and no abandonment was the result. 
 But the voice of public opinion pronouncing an office or a 
 man scandalous, either finds jr else makes them what it has 
 pronounced them. The executioner i or becomes an out- 
 cast, because reckoned such. 
 
 More vile and more degraded than even the executioner's 
 office with us was the office of publican among the Jews. A 
 penitent publican could not go to the house of God without 
 the risk of hearing muttered near him the sanctimonious 
 thanksgiving of Pharisaism : " God, I thank Thee that I am 
 not as this publican." A publican, even though high in of- 
 fice, and rich besides, could not receive into his house a teach- 
 er of religion without being saluted by the murmurs of the 
 crowd, as in this case: "He is gone to eat with a man that 
 is a sinner." A sinner ! The proof of that ? The only proof 
 was that he was a publican. There are men and women in 
 this congregation who have committed sins that never have 
 been published to the world ; and therefore, though they be 
 still untouched by the love of God, they have never sunk 
 down to degradation ; whereas the very same sins, branded 
 with public shame, have sunk others not worse than them 
 down to the lowest infamy. There is no principle in educa- 
 tion and in life more sure than this to stigmatize is to ruin ; 
 to take away character is to take away all. There is no 
 power committed to man, capable of use and abuse, more cer- 
 tain and more awful than this : " Whose soever sins ye remit, 
 they are remitted unto them." 
 
 This, then, was a temptation arising out of Zaccheus's cir- 
 cumstances to become quite hardened by having no char- 
 acter to support. 
 
 The personal hindrance to a religious life lay in the rec- 
 ollection of past guilt. Zaccheus had done wrong, and 
 no four-fold restitution will undo that where only remorse 
 exists. 
 
 There is a difference between remorse and penitence. Re- 
 morse is the consciousness of wron^-doing with no sense of 
 love. Penitence is that same consciousness, w r ith the feeling 
 of tenderness and gratefulness added. 
 
 And pernicious as have been the consequences of self-right- 
 eousness, more destructive still have been the consequences 
 of remorse. If self-righteousness has slain its thousands, re- 
 morse has slain its tens of thousands ; #>r, indisputably, self- 
 righteousness secures a man from degradation. Have yon 
 never wondered at the sure walk of those persons who, to trust 
 
Triumph over Hindrances. 73 
 
 to their own estimate of themselves, are always right ? They 
 never sin, their children are better brought up than any other 
 children, their conduct is irreproachable. Pride saves them 
 from a fall. That element of self-respect, healthful always, is 
 their safeguard. Yes, the Pharisee was right. He is not an 
 extortioner, nor unjust, and he is regular in his payments and 
 his duties. That was self-righteousness: it kept him from 
 samtliness, but it saved him from degradation too. Remorse, 
 on the contrary, crushes. If a man lose the world's respect, 
 he can retreat back upon the consciousness of the God with- 
 in. But if a man lose his own respect, he sinks down and 
 down, and deeper yet, until he can get it back again by feel- 
 ing that he is sublimely loved, and he dares at last to respect 
 that which God vouchsafes to care for. Remorse is like the 
 clog of an insoluble debt. The debtor is proverbially ex- 
 travagant one more, and one more expense. What can it 
 matter when the great bankruptcy is near ? And so, in the 
 same way one sin, and one more. Why not? why should 
 he pause when all is hopeless? what is one added to that 
 which is already infinite ? 
 
 Past guilt becomes a hindrance too in another way it 
 makes fresh sin easier. Let any one, out of a series of trans- 
 gressions, compare the character of the first and the last. 
 The first time there was the shudder and the horror, and the 
 violent struggle, and the feeling of impossibility. I can not 
 can not do that. The second time there was faint reluc- 
 tance, made more faint by the recollection of the facility and 
 the pleasantness of the first transgression, and the last time 
 there is neither shudder nor reluctance, but the eager plunge 
 down the precipice on the brink of which he trembled once. 
 All this was against Zaccheus. A publican had lost self-re- 
 spect, and sin was therefore easy. 
 
 II. Pass we on to the triumph over difficulties. In this 
 there is man's part, and God's part. 
 
 Man's part in Zaccheus's case was exhibited in the discov- 
 ery of expedients. The Redeemer came to Jericho, and Zac- 
 cheus desired to see that blessed countenance, whose very 
 looks, he was told, shed peace upon restless spirits and fever- 
 ed hearts. But Zaccheus was small of stature, and a crowd 
 surrounded him. Therefore he ran before, and climbed up 
 into a sycamore-tree. You must not look on this as a mere 
 act of curiosity. They who thronged the steps of Jesus were 
 a crowd formed of different materials from the crowd which 
 would have been found in the amphitheatre. He was there 
 as a religious teacher or prophet ; and they who took pains to 
 
74 Triumph over Hindrances. 
 
 see Him, at least were the men who looked for sa/vation ?t, 
 Israel. This, therefore, was a religious act. 
 
 We have heard of the " pursuit of knowledge under diffi- 
 culties," The shepherd, with no apparatus besides his thread 
 and beads, has Iain on his back, on the starry night, mapped 
 the heavens, and unconsciously become a distinguished as- 
 tronomer. The peasant-boy, w T ith no tools- but his rude knife, 
 and a visit now and then to the neighboring town, has begun 
 his scientific education by producing a watch that would 
 mark the time. The blind man, trampling upon impossibili- 
 ties, has explored the economy of the bee-hive, and, more 
 wondrous still, lectured on the laws of light. The timid 
 stammerer, with pebbles in his mouth, and the roar of the sea- 
 surge in his ear, has attained correctest elocution, and sway- 
 ed as one man the changeful tides of the mighty masses of 
 the Athenian democracy. All these were expedients. It is 
 thus in the life religious. No man ever trod exactly the 
 path that others trod before him. There is no exact chart 
 laid down for the voyage. The rocks and quicksands are 
 shifting. He who enters upon the ocean of existence arches 
 his sails to an untried breeze. He is "the first that evei 
 burst into that lonely sea." Every life is a neio life. Ev- 
 ery day is a new day like nothing that ever went before, 
 or can ever follow after. No books no systems no fore- 
 cast set of rules, can provide for all cases ; every case is a 
 new case. And just as in any earthly enterprize, the conduct 
 of a campaign, or the building of a bridge, unforeseen diffi- 
 culties and unexpected disasters must be met by that inex- 
 haustible fertility of invention which belongs to those who do 
 not live to God second-hand. We must live to God first- 
 hand. If we are in earnest, as Zaccheus was, we must invent 
 peculiar means of getting over peculiar difficulties. 
 
 There are times when the truest courage is shown in re- 
 treating from a temptation. There are times when, not be- 
 ing on a level with other men in qualifications of temper, 
 mind, character, we must compensate by inventions and 
 Christian expedients. You must climb over the crowd of 
 difficulties which stand between your soul and Christ you 
 must " run before " and forecast trials, and get into the syca- 
 more solitude. Without a living life like this, you will never 
 get a glimpse of the King in his beauty ; you will never see 
 Him. You will be just on the point of seeing Him, and yet 
 be shut out by some unexpected hindrance. 
 
 Observe again, an illustration of this : Zacchens's habit of 
 restoration. " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to 
 the poor ; and if I have taken any thing from any man bif 
 
Triumph over Hindrances. 75 
 
 false accusation, I restore him fourfold." There are two ways 
 of interpreting this ; it may have reference to the future. It 
 commonly is so interpreted. It is supposed that, touched by 
 the love of Christ, Zaccheus proclaimed this as his resolve I 
 hereby promise to give the hall of my goods to the poor. 
 But it is likely that this interpretation has been put upon it 
 in order to make it square with the evangelical order of emo- 
 tions grace first, liberality after. The interpretation seems 
 rather put on the passage than found there. The word is 
 not future, but singular : Behold, Lord, I give. And it seema 
 more natural to take it as a statement of the habit of Zac- 
 cheus's previous life. If so, then all is plain. This man, so 
 maligned, had been leading a righteous life after all, accord- 
 ing to the Mosaic standard. On the day of defense he stands 
 forward and vindicates himself from the aspersion. " These 
 are my habits." And the Son of Man vindicates him before 
 all. Yes, publican as he is, he too is a " son of Abraham." 
 
 Here, then, were expedients by which he overcame the hin- 
 drances of his position. The tendency to the hardness and 
 selfishness of riches he checked by a rule of giving half away. 
 The tendency to extortion he met by fastening on himself 
 the recollection, that when the hot moment of temptation 
 had passed away, he would be severely dealt with before the 
 tribunal of his own conscience, and unrelentingly sentenced 
 to restore fourfold. 
 
 God's part in this triumph over difficulties is exhibited in 
 the address of ,Jesus : " Zaccheus, make haste and come 
 down ; for to-day I must abide at thy house." 
 
 Two things we note here : Invitation and Sympathy. In- 
 vitation " come down." Say what we will of Zaccheus 
 seeking Jesus, the truth is, Jesus was seeking Zaccheus. 
 For what other reason but the will of God had Jesus come 
 to Jericho but to seek Zaccheus and such as he? Long 
 years Zaccheus had been living in only a dim consciousness 
 of being a servant of God and goodness. At last the Saviour 
 is born into the world appears in Judea comes to Jericho, 
 Zaccheus's town passes down Zaccheus's street, and by 
 Zaccheus's house, and up to Zaccheus's .person. What is all 
 this but seeking what the Bible calls election ? Now there 
 is a specimen in this of the ways of God with men in this 
 world. We do not seek God God seeks us. There is a 
 Spirit pervading time and space who seeks the souls of men. 
 At last the seeking becomes reciprocal the Divine Presence 
 is felt afar, and the soul begins to turn towards it. Then 
 when we begin to seek God, we become conscious that God 
 is seeking us. It is at that period that we distinguish the 
 
76 Triumph over Hindrances. 
 
 voice of personal invitation "Zaccheus!" It is then that 
 the Eternal Presence makes its abode with us, and the hour 
 of unutterable joy begins, when the banquet of Divine Love 
 is spread within the soul, and the Son of God abides there as 
 at a feast. " Behold, I stand at the door and knock : If any 
 man hear my voice, I will come in and sup with him, and he 
 with me." 
 
 This is Divine Grace. We are saved by grace, not will. 
 " It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but 
 of God that showeth mercy." In the matter of man's salva- 
 tion God is first. He comes to us self-invited He names us 
 by name He isolates us from the crowd, and sheds upon us 
 the sense of personal recognition He pronounces the bene- 
 diction, till we feel that there is a mysterious blessing on our 
 house, and on our meal, and on our heart. " This day is sal- 
 vation come to this house, forasmuch as he also is a son of 
 Abraham." 
 
 Lastly, the Divine part was done in Sympathy. By sym- 
 pathy we commonly mean little more than condolence. If 
 the tear start readily at the voice of grief, and the purse- 
 strings open at the accents of distress, we talk of a man's 
 having great sympathy. To weep with those who weep : 
 common sympathy does not mean much more. 
 
 The sympathy of Christ was something different from this. 
 Sympathy to this extent, no doubt, Zaccheus could already 
 command. If Zaccheus were sick, even a Pharisee would 
 have given him medicine. If Zaccheus had been in need, a 
 Jew would not have scrupled to bestow an alms. If Zac- 
 cheus had been bereaved, many even of that crowd that mur- 
 mured when they saw him treated by Christ like a son of 
 Abraham would have given to^ his sorrow the tribute of a 
 sigh. 
 
 The sympathy of Jesus was fellow-feeling for all that is hu- 
 man. He did not condole with Zaccheus upon his trials 
 He did not talk to him "about his soul" He did not preach 
 to him about his sins He did not force his way into his house 
 to lecture him He simply said, " I will abide at thy house:" 
 thereby identifying himself with a publican: thereby ac- 
 knowledging a publican for a brother. Zaccheus a publican? 
 Zaccheus a sinner? Yes; but Zaccheus is a man. His heart 
 throbs at cutting words. He has a sense of human honor. 
 He feels the burning shame of the world's disgrace. Lost? 
 Yes: but the Son of Man, with the blood of the human race 
 in His veins, is a Brother to the lost. 
 
 It is in this entire and perfect sympathy with all Humani- 
 ty that the heart of Jesus differs from every other heart that 
 
Triumph over Hindrances. 77 
 
 is found among the sons of men. And it is this oh, it ia 
 this, which is the chief blessedness of having such a Saviour. 
 If you are poor you can only get a miserable, sympathy from 
 the rich ; with the best intentions they can not understand 
 you. Their sympathy is awkward. If you are in pain, it i& 
 only a factitious and constrained sympathy you get from 
 those in health feelings forced, adopted kindly, but imper 
 feet still. They sit beside you, when the regular condolence 
 is done, conversing on topics with each other that jar upon 
 the ear. They sympathize ? Miserable comforters are they 
 all. If you are miserable, and tell out your grief, you have 
 the shame of feeling that you were not understood ; and that 
 you have bared your inner self to a rude gaze. If you are ir. 
 doubt, you can not tell your doubts to religious people ; no, 
 not even to the ministers of Christ for they have no place 
 for doubts in their largest system. They ask, What right 
 have you to doubt? They suspect your character. They 
 shake the head ; and whisper it about gravely, that you read 
 strange books that you are verging on infidelity. If you 
 are depressed with guilt, to whom shall you tell out your 
 tale of shame ? The confessional, with its "innumerable evils, 
 and yet indisputably soothing power, is passed, away ; and 
 there is nothing to supply its place. You can not speak to 
 your brother man, for you injure him by doing so, or else 
 weaken yourself. You can not tell it to society, for society 
 judges in the gross, by general rules, and can not take into 
 account the delicate differences of transgression. It banishes 
 the frail penitent, and does homage to the daring hard trans- 
 gressor. 
 
 Then it is that, repulsed on all sides ^nd lonely, we turn 
 to Him whose mighty Heart understands and feels all. 
 " Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of 
 eternal life." And then it is that, exactly like Zaccheus, 
 misunderstood, suspected by the world, suspected by our 
 own hearts the very voice of God apparently against us 
 isolated and apart, we speak to Him from the loneliness of 
 the sycamore-tree, heart to heart, and pulse to pulse. 
 " Lord, Thou knovvest all things :" Thou knowest my se- 
 cret charities, and my untold self-denials. " Tliou knowest 
 that I love thee." 
 
 Remark, in conclusion, the power of this sympathy on 
 Zaccheus's character. Salvation that day came to Zaccheus's 
 house. What brought it ? What touched him ? Of course, 
 " the gospel." Yes ; but what is the gospel ? What was 
 his gospel? Speculations or revelations concerning the Di 
 vine Nature ? the scheme of the atonement ? or of the in- 
 
78 The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. 
 
 carnation ? or baptismal regeneration ? Nay, but the Di 
 vine sympathy of the Divinest Man. The personal love of 
 God, manifested in the face of Jesus Christ. The floodgates 
 of his soul were opened, and the whole force that was in the 
 man flowed forth. Whichever way you take that expres- 
 sion, " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the 
 poor :" If it referred to the future, then, touched by unex- 
 pected sympathy, finding himself no longer an outcast, he 
 made thai resolve in gratefulness. If to the past, then, still 
 touched by sympathy, he who had never tried to vindicate 
 himself before the world, was softened to tell out the tale of 
 his secret munificence. This is what I have been doing all 
 the time they slandered me, and none but God knew it. 
 
 It required something to make a man like that talk of 
 things which he had not suffered his own left hand to know, 
 before a scorning world. But, anyhow, it was the manifest- 
 ed Fellowship of the Son of Man which brought salvation to 
 that house. 
 
 Learn this : When we live the gospel so, and preach the 
 gospel so, sinners will be brought to God. We know not 
 yet the gospel power ; for who trusts, as Jesus did, all to 
 that ? Who ventures, as He did, upon the power of Love, 
 in sanguine hopefulness of the most irreclaimable? who 
 makes that, the divine humility of Christ, " the gospel ?" 
 More than by eloquence, more than by accurate doctrine, 
 more than by ecclesiastical order, more than by any doc- 
 trine trusted to by the most earnest and holy men, shall we 
 and others, sinful rebels, outcasts, be won to Christ by that 
 central truth of all the Gospel the entireness of the Redeem- 
 er's sympathy. In other words, the Love of Jesus, 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE OF THE 
 SABBATH. 
 
 " Let no man, therefore, judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a 
 olyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath-days : which are a shadow of 
 things to come; but the body is of Christ." Col. ii. 16, 17. 
 
 No sophistry of criticism can explain away the obvious 
 meaning of these words. The apostle speaks of certain in- 
 stitutions as Jewish : shadowy : typical : and among these 
 we are surprised to find the sabbath-days. It has been con- 
 tended that there is here no allusion to the seventh day of 
 
The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. 79 
 
 rest, but only to certain Jewish holydays, not of Divine in- 
 stitution. But, in the first place, the " holydays " have been 
 already named in the same verse; in the next we are con- 
 vinced that no plain man, reading this verse for the first 
 time, without a doctrine to support, would have put such an 
 interpretation upon the word : and we may be sure that St. 
 Paul would never have risked so certain a misconstruction 
 of his words by the use of an ambiguous phrase. This, 
 then, is the first thing we lay down a very simple postu- 
 late, one would think when the apostle says the sabbath- 
 days, he means the sabbath-days. 
 
 Peculiar difficulties attend the discussien of the subject of 
 the sabbath. If we take the strict and ultra ground of sab- 
 bath observance, basing it on the rigorous requirements of 
 the fourth commandment, we take ground which is not true ; 
 and all untruth, whether it be an over-statement or a half- 
 truth, recoils upon itself. If we impose on men a burden 
 which can not be borne, and demand a strictness which, pos- 
 sible in theory, is impossible in practice, men recoil ; we have 
 asked too much, and they give us nothing the result is an 
 open, wanton, and sarcastic desecration of the Day of Rest. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we state the truth, that the sabbath 
 is obsolete a shadow which has passed without modifica- 
 tion or explanations, evidently there is a danger no less per- 
 ilous. It is true to spiritual, false to unspiritual men ; and a 
 wide door is opened for abuse. And to recklessly loosen the 
 hold of a nation on the sanctity of the Lord's day would be 
 most mischievous to do so willfully would be an act almost 
 diabolical. For if we must choose between Puritan over- 
 precision on the one hand, and on the other that laxity 
 which, in many parts of the Continent, has marked the day 
 from other days only by more riotous worldliness, and a more 
 entire abandonment of the whole community to amusement, 
 no Christian would hesitate : no English Christian, at least ; 
 to whom that day is hallowed by all that is endearing in 
 early associations, and who feels how much it is the very 
 bulwark of his country's moral purity. 
 
 Here, however, as in other cases, it is the half-truth which 
 is dangerous the other half is the corrective ; the whole 
 truth alone is safe. If we say the sabbath is shadow, this is 
 only half the truth. The apostle adds, " the body is ot 
 Christ." 
 
 There is, then, in the sabbath that which is shadowy and 
 that which is substantial ; that which is transient and that 
 which is permanent ; that which is temporal and typical, 
 and that which is eternal. The shadow and the body. 
 
8o The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. 
 
 Hence, a very natural and simple division of our subject 
 suggests itself. 
 
 I. The transient shadow of the sabbath which has passed 
 away. 
 
 II. The permanent substance which can not pass. 
 
 L The transient shadow which has passed away. 
 
 The history of the sabbath-day is this. It was given by 
 iMoses to the Israelites, partly as a sign between God and 
 them, marking them oif from all other nations by its observ- 
 ance ; partly as commemorative of their deliverance from 
 Egypt. And the reason why the seventh day was fixed on, 
 rather than the sixth or eighth was, that on that day God 
 rested from His labor. The soul of man was to form itself 
 on the model of the Spirit of God. It is not said, that God 
 at the creation gave the sabbath to man, but that God rest- 
 ed at the close of the six days of creation : whereupon he 
 had blessed and sanctified the seventh day to the Israelites. 
 This is stated in the fourth commandment, and also in Gen. i., 
 which was written for the Israelites ; and the history of crea- 
 tion naturally and appropriately introduces the reason and 
 the sanction of their day of rest. 
 
 Nor is there in the Old Testament a single trace of the 
 observance of the sabbath before the time of Moses. After 
 the Deluge, it is not mentioned in the covenant made with 
 Noah. The first account of it occurs after the Israelites had 
 left Egypt; and the fourth commandment consolidates it 
 into a law, and explains the principle and sanctions of the 
 institution. The observance of one day in seven, therefore, 
 is purely Jewish. The Jewish obligation to observe it rest- 
 ed on the enactment given by Moses. 
 
 The spirit of its observance, too, is Jewish, and not Chris- 
 tian. There is a difference between the spirit of Judaism 
 and that of Christianity. The spirit of Judaism is separa- 
 tion that of Christianity is permeation. To separate the 
 evil from the good was the aim and work of Judaism : to 
 sever one nation from all other nations; certain meats from 
 other meat ; certain days from other days. Sanctify means 
 to set apart. The very essence of the idea of Hebrew holi- 
 ness lay in sanctification in the sense of separation. On the 
 contrary, Christianity is permeation it permeates all evil 
 with good it aims at overcoming evil by good it desires 
 to transfuse the spirit of the day of rest into all other days, 
 and to spread the holiness of one nation over all the tvofkt 
 To saturate life with God, and the world with Heaven s that 
 is the genius of Christianity. 
 
The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. 8 1 
 
 Accordingly, the observance of the sabbath was entirely 
 in the Jewish spirit. No fire was permitted to be made on 
 pain of death : Exod. xxxv. 3. No food was to be prepared : 
 xvi. 5, 23. No buying nor selling : Neheni. x. 31. So rigor- 
 ously was all this carried out, that a man gathering sticks 
 was arraigned before the congregation, and sentenced to 
 death by Moses. 
 
 This is Jewish, typical, shadowy ; it is all to pass away. 
 Much already has passed : even those who believe our 
 Lord's day to be the descendant of the sabbath admit this. 
 The day is changed. The first day of the week has taken 
 the place of the seventh. The computation of hours is al- 
 tered. The Jews reckoned from sunset to sunset modern 
 Christians reckon from midnight to midnight. The spirit 
 of its observance, too, is altered. No one contends now for 
 Jewish strictness in its details. 
 
 Now observe, all this implies the abrogation of a great 
 deal more nay, of the whole Jewish sabbath itself. We 
 have altered the day the computation of the hours the 
 mode of observance : What remains to keep ? Absolutely 
 nothing of the literal portion except one day in seven : and 
 that is abrogated, if the rest be abrogated. For by what 
 right do we say that the order of the day, whether it be the 
 first or the seventh, is a matter of indifference, because only 
 formal, but that the proportion of days, one in seven, instead 
 oi one in eight or nine, is moral and unalterable ? On what 
 intelligible principle do we produce the fourth command' 
 ment as binding upon Christians, and abrogate so important 
 a clause of it as, "In it thou shalt do no manner of work ?" 
 On what self-evident ground is it shown that the Jew might 
 not light a fire, but the Christian may ; yet that if the postal 
 arrangements of a country permit the delivery of a letter, it 
 is an infraction of the sabbath ? 
 
 Unquestionably on no scriptural authority. Let those 
 who demand a strict observance of the letter of scripture re- 
 member that the Jewish sabbath is distinctly enforced in 
 the Bible, and nowhere in the Bible repealed. You have 
 changed the seventh day to the first on no clear scriptural 
 permission. Two or three passages tell .us that, after the 
 nesurrection, the apostles were found together on the first 
 day of the week (which, by-the-way, may have been Satur- 
 day evening after sunset) But it is concluded that there- 
 fore probably the change was apostolic. You have only a 
 probability to go on and that probability, except with the 
 aid of tradition, infinitesimally small for the abrogation of 
 a single iota of the Jewish fourth commandment. 
 
 4* 
 
H2 The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. 
 
 It will be said, however, that works of necessity and works 
 of mercy are excepted by Christ's example. 
 
 Tell us, then, ye who are servants of the letter, and yet do 
 not scruple to use a carriage to convey you to some church 
 where a favorite minister is heard, is that a spiritual necessi- 
 ty or a spiritual luxury ? Part of the Sunday meal of all of 
 you is the result of a servant's work. Tell us, then, ye ac- 
 curate logicians, who say that nothing escapes the rigor of 
 the prohibition which is not necessary or merciful, is a hot 
 repast a work of necessity or a work of mercy ? Oh ! it 
 rouses in every true soul a deep and earnest indignation to 
 hear men who drive their cattle to church on Sundays, be- 
 cause they are too emasculated to trudge through cold and 
 rain on foot, invoke the severity of an insulted Law of the 
 Decalogue on those who provide facilities of movement for 
 such as can not afford the luxury of a carriage. What 
 think you, would He who blighted the Pharisees with such 
 burning words, have said, had He been present by, while 
 men, whose servants clean their houses, and prepare their 
 meals, and harness their horses, stand up to denounce the 
 service on some railway by which the poor are helped to 
 health and enjoyment ? Hired service for the rich is a ne- 
 cessity hired service for the poor is a desecration of the 
 sabbath ! It is right that a thousand should toil for the few 
 in private ! It is past bearing in a Christian country that a 
 few should toil for thousands on the sabbath-day ! 
 
 There is only this alternative : if the fourth command- 
 ment be binding still, that clause is unrepealed " no man- 
 ner of work ;" and so, too, is that other important part, the 
 sanetification of the seventh day and not the first. If the 
 fourth commandment be not binding in these points, then 
 there is nothing left but the broad, comprehensive ground 
 taken by the apostle. The whole sabbath is a shadow of 
 things to come. In consistency, either hold that none of the 
 formal part is abrogated, or else all. The whole of the let- 
 ter of the commandment is moral, or else none. 
 
 II There is, however, in the sabbath a substance, a per- 
 manent something " a body " which can not pass away. 
 
 "The body is of Christ;" the spirit of Christ is the fulfill- 
 ment of the law. To have the spirit of Christ is to have ful- 
 filled the law. Let us hear the mind of Christ in this mat- 
 ter. " The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sab- 
 bath." In that principle, rightly understood, lies the clue 
 for the unravelling of the whole matter. The religionists 
 of that day maintained that the necessities of man's nature 
 
The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. 83 
 
 must give way to the rigor of the enactment: He taught 
 that the enactment must yield to man's necessities. They 
 said that the sabbath was written in the book of the Law ; 
 He said that it was written on man's nature, and that the 
 law was merely meant to be in accordance with that nature. 
 They based the obligation to observe the sabbath on the sa- 
 credness of an enactment ; He on the sacredness of the na- 
 ture of man. 
 
 An illustration will help us to perceive the difference be- 
 tween these two views. A wise physician prescribes a regi- 
 men of diet, to a palate which has become diseased : lie fixes 
 what shall be eaten, the quantity, the hours, and number of 
 times. On what does the obligation to obey rest ? On the 
 arbitrary authority of the physician ? or on the nature with 
 which that prescription is in accordance ? When soundness 
 and health are restored, the prescription falls into disuse : 
 but the nature remains unalterable, which has made some 
 things nutritious, others unwholesome, and excess forever 
 pernicious. Thus the spirit of the prescription may be still 
 in force when the prescriptive authority is repealed. 
 
 So Moses prescribed the sabbath to a nation spiritually 
 diseased. He gave the regimen of rest to men who did not 
 feel the need of spiritual rest. He fenced round his rule 
 with precise regulations of details one day in seven, no 
 work, no fire, no traffic. On what does the obligation to 
 obey it rest ? On the authority of the rule ? or on the ne- 
 cessities t of that nature for which the rule was divinely 
 adapted ? Was man made for the sabbath, to obey it as a 
 slave? or, Was the sabbath made for man? And when 
 spiritual health has been restored, the Law regulating the 
 details of rest may become obsolete ; but the nature which 
 demands rest never can be reversed. 
 
 Observe, now, that this is a far grander, safer, and more 
 permanent basis on which to rest the sabbath than the mere 
 enactment. For if you allege the fourth commandment as 
 your authority, straightway you are met by the objection 
 " no manner of work." Who gave you leave to alter that ? 
 And if you reply, works of necessity and works of mercy I 
 may do, for Christ excepted these from the stringency of the 
 rule, again the rejoinder comes, is there one in ten of the 
 things that all Christians permit as lawful really a matter 
 of necessity ? 
 
 Whereas, if the sabbath rest on the needs of human na- 
 ture, and we accept His decision that the sabbath was made 
 for man, then you have an eternal ground to rest on from 
 which you can not be shaken. A son of man mav be lord 
 
84 The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. 
 
 of the sabbath-day, but he is not lord of his own nature, 
 He can not make one hair white or black. You may abn> 
 gate the formal rule, but you can not abrogate the needs of 
 your own soul Eternal as the constitution of the soul of 
 man is the necessity for the existence of a day of rest. 
 Further still, on this ground alone can you find an impreg- 
 nable defense of the proportion, one day in seven : on the 
 other ground it is unsafe. Having altered the seventh to 
 the first, I know not why one in seven might not be altered 
 to one in ten. The thing, however, has been tried ; and by 
 the necessities of human nature the change has been found 
 pernicious. One day in ten, prescribed by revolutionary 
 France, was actually pronounced by physiologists insuffi- 
 cient. So that we begin to find that, in a deeper sense 
 than we at first suspected, " the sabbath was made for man." 
 Even in the contrivance of one day in seven, it was arranged 
 by unerring wisdom. Just because the sabbath was made for 
 man, and not because man was ordained to keep the sabbath- 
 day, you can not tamper even with the iota, one day in seven. 
 
 That necessity on which the observance leans is the need 
 of rest. It is the deepest want in the soul of man. If you 
 take off covering after covering of the nature which wraps 
 him round, till you come to the central heart of hearts, deep 
 lodged there you find the requirement of repose. All men 
 do not hanker after pleasure all men do not crave intel- 
 lectual food. But all men long for rest ; the most restless 
 that ever pursued a turbulent career on earth did by that 
 career only testify to the need of the soul within. They 
 craved for something which was not given : there was a 
 thirst which was not slaked : that very restlessness be- 
 tokened that restless because not at rest. It is this need 
 which sometimes makes the quiet of the grave an object of 
 such deep desire. " There the wicked cease from troubling, 
 and there the weary are at rest." It is this which creates 
 the chief desirableness of heaven : " There remaineth a rest 
 for the people of God." And it is this which, consciously or 
 unconsciously, is the real wish that lies at the bottom of all 
 others. Oh ! for tranquillity of heart heaven's profound 
 silence in the soul, " a meek and quiet spirit, which in the 
 sight of God is of great price !" 
 
 The rest needed by man is twofold. Physical repose of 
 the body a need which he shares with the animals through 
 the lower nature which he has in common with them. 
 " Thou shall do no work, nor thy cattle," so far man's 
 sabbath-need places him only on a level with the ox and 
 with the ass. 
 
The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. 85 
 
 But, besides this, the rest demanded is a repose of spirit. 
 Between these two kinds of rest there is a very important 
 difference. Bodily repose is simply inaction : the rest of the 
 soul is exercise, not torpor. To do nothing is physical rest 
 to be engaged in full activity is the rest of the soul. 
 
 In that hour, which of all the twenty-four is most emblem- 
 atical of heaven, and suggestive of repose, the eventide, in 
 vvhich instinctively Isaac went into the fields to meditate 
 when the work of the day is done, when the mind has ceased 
 its tension, when the passions are lulled to rest in spite of 
 themselves, by the spell of the quiet star-lit sky it is then, 
 amidst the silence of the lull of all the lower parts of our 
 nature, that the soul comes forth to do its work. Then the 
 peculiar; strange work of the soul, which the intellect can 
 not do meditation, begins. Awe, and worship, and wonder 
 are in full exercise ; and Love begins then in its purest form 
 of mystic adoration and pervasive and undefined tenderness 
 separate from all that is coarse and earthly swelling as 
 if it would embrace the All in its desire to bless, and lose it- 
 self in the sea of the love of God. This is the rest of the 
 soul the exercise and play of all the nobler powers. 
 
 Two things are suggested by this thought. 
 
 First, the mode of the observance of the day of rest. It 
 has become lately a subject of very considerable attention. 
 Physiologists have demonstrated the necessity of cessation 
 from toil : they have urged the impossibility of perpetual oc- 
 cupation without end. Pictures, with much pathos in them, 
 have been placed before us, describing the hard fate of those 
 on whom no. sabbath dawns. It has been demanded as a 
 right, entreated as a mercy, on behalf of the laboring man, 
 that he should have one day in seven for recreation of his 
 bodily energies. All well and true. But there is a great 
 deal more than this. He who confines his conception of the 
 need of rest to that, has left man on a level with the brutes. 
 Let a man take merely lax and liberal notions of the fourth 
 commandment let him give his household and dependents 
 immunity from toil, and wish for himself and them no more 
 he will find that there is a something wanting still. Experi- 
 ence tells us, after a trial, that those Sundays are the hap- 
 piest, the purest, the most rich in blessing, in which the 
 spiritual part has been most attended to those in which the 
 business letter was put aside till evening, and the profane 
 literature not opened, and the ordinary occupations entirely 
 suspended those in which, as in the temple of Solomon, 
 the sound of the earthly hammer has not been heard in the 
 temple of the soul : for this is, in fact, the very distinction be- 
 
86 The Shadow and Substance of ttie Sabbath. 
 
 tween the spirit of the Jewish sabbath and the spirit of the 
 Christian Lord's day. The one is chiefly for the body 
 " Thou shalt do no manner of work." The other is princi- 
 pally for the soul "I was in the spirit on the Lord's day.'' 
 
 The other truth suggested by that fact, that the repose of 
 the soul is exercise, not rest, is, that it conveys an intimation 
 of man's immortality. It is only when all the rest of our hu- 
 man nature is calmed that the spirit comes forth in full ener 
 gy: all the rest tires, the spirit never tires. Humbleness, 
 awe, adoration, love, these have in them no weariness : so 
 that when this frame shall l)e dissolved into the dust of the 
 earth, and the mind, which is merely fitted for this time- 
 world, learning by experience, shall have been superseded, 
 then, in the opening out of an endless career of love, the 
 spirit will enter upon that sabbath of which all earthly sab- 
 baths are but the shadow the sabbath of eternity, the im- 
 mortal rest of its Father's home. 
 
 Two observations, in concluding. 
 
 1. When is a son of man lord of the sabbath-day? To 
 whom may the sabbath safely become a shadow ? I reply, 
 he that has the mind of Christ may exercise discretionary 
 lordship over the sabbath-day. He who is in possession of 
 the substance may let the shadow go. A man in health has 
 done with the prescriptions of the physician. But for an un- 
 spiritual man to regulate his hours and amount of rest by his 
 desires, is just as preposterous as for an unhealthy man to 
 rule his appetites by his sensations. Win the mind of Christ ; 
 be like Him ; and then, in the reality of rest in God, the sab- 
 bath form of rest will be superseded. Remain apart from 
 Christ, and then you are under the law again ; the fourth 
 commandment is as necessary for you as it was for the Is- 
 raelite the prescriptive regimen which may discipline your 
 soul to a sounder state. It is at his peril that the worldly 
 man departs from the rule of the day of rest. Nothing can 
 make us free from the law but the Spirit. 
 - 2. The rule pronounced by the apostle is a rule of liberty, 
 and at the same time a rule of charity : " Let no man judge 
 you in respect of the sabbath-days." It is very difficult to 
 discuss this question of the sabbath. Heat, vehemence, acri- 
 mony, are substituted for argument. When you calmly ask 
 to investigate the subject, men apply epithets, and call them 
 reasons : they stigmatize you as a breaker of the sabbath, 
 pronounce you " dangerous," with sundry warnings against 
 you in private, and pregnant hints in public. 
 
 The apostle urges charity: "One man esteemeth one day 
 above another : another man esteemeth every day alike." . . . 
 
The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath. 87 
 
 - He that regardeth the day, regardeth it to the Lord ; and 
 he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he regardeth 
 it not." Carry out that spirit. In the detail of this question 
 there is abundant difficulty. It is a question of degree. 
 Some work must be done on the sabbath-day : some must 
 sacrifice their rest to the rest of others; for all human life is 
 sacrifice, voluntary or involuntary. 
 
 Again, that which is rest to one man is not rest to another,, 
 To require the illiterate man to read his Bible for some hours 
 would impose a toil upon him, though it might be a relaxa* 
 tion to you. To the laboring man a larger proportion of the 
 day must be given to the recreation of his physical nature 
 than is necessary for the man of leisure, to whom the spirit- 
 ual observance of the day is easy, and seems all. Let us 
 learn large, charitable considerateness. Let not the poor 
 man sneer at his richer neighbor, if, in the exercise of his 
 Christian liberty, he uses his horses to convey him to church 
 and not to the mere drive of pleasure ; but then, in fairness, 
 let not the rich man be shocked and scandalized if the over- 
 wearied shopkeeper and artisan breathe the fresh air of heav- 
 en with their families in the country. "The sabbath was 
 made for man." Be generous, consistent, large-minded. A 
 man may hold stiif, precise Jewish notions on this subject, 
 but do not stigmatize that man as a formalist. Another may 
 hold large, Paul-like views of the abrogation of the fourth 
 commandment, and yet he may be sincerely and zealously 
 anxious for the hallowing of the day in his household and 
 through his country. Do not call that man a sabbath-break- 
 er. Remember, the Pharisees called the Son of God a sab- 
 bath-breaker. They kept the law of the sabbath, they broke 
 the law of love. Which was the worst to break ? which was 
 the higher law to keep? Take care lest, in the zeal which 
 seems to you to be for Christ, ye be found indulging their 
 spirit, Ana 11 ot His. 
 
88 The Sympathy of Christ. 
 
 VTL 
 THE SYMPATHY OF CHRIST. 
 
 " For we hare not a high-priest which can not be touched with the feeling 
 of our infirmities : bat was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without 
 sin. "Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may ob- 
 tain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need." Heb. iv. 15, 16. 
 
 ACCORDING to these verses, the priesthood of Jesus Christ 
 is based upon the perfection of His humanity. Because 
 tempted in all points like as we are, therefore He can show 
 mercy, and grant help. Whatever destroys the conception 
 of His humanity does in that same degree overthrow the no- 
 tion of His priesthood. 
 
 Our subject is the Priestly Sympathies of Christ. But we 
 make three preliminary observations. 
 
 The perfection of Christ's humanity implies that He was 
 possessed of a human soul as well as a human body. There 
 was a view held in early times, and condemned by the 
 Church as a heresy, according to which the body of Christ 
 was an external framework animated by Deity, as our bodies 
 are animated by our souls. What the soul is to us, Deity 
 was to Christ. His body was flesh, blood, bones moved, 
 guided, ruled by indwelling Divinity. 
 
 But you perceive at once that this destroys the notion of 
 complete humanity. It is not this tabernacle of material ele- 
 ments which constitutes our humanity: you can not take 
 that pale corpse from which life has fled, and call that man. 
 And if Deity were to take up that form and make it its 
 abode, that would not be a union of the Divine and Human. 
 It would only be the union of Deity with certain materials 
 that might have passed into man, or into an animal or an 
 herb. Humanity implies a body and a soul. 
 
 Accordingly, in the life of Christ we find two distinct 
 Classes of feeling. When He hungered in the wilderness 
 wherf He thirsted on the cross when He was weary by the 
 well at Sychar He experienced sensations which belong to 
 the bodily department of human nature. But when out of 
 twelve He selected one to be His bosom friend when He 
 looked round upon the crowd in anger when the tears 
 streamed down His cheeks at Bethany and when He recoil 
 ed from the thought of approaching dissolution : these 
 
The Sympathy if Christ. 89 
 
 grief, friendship, fear were not the sensations of the body, 
 much less were they the attributes of Godhead. They were 
 the affections of an acutely sensitive human soul, alive to all 
 the tenderness, and hopes, and anguish with which human 
 life is filled, qualifying Him to be tempted in all points like as 
 we are. 
 
 The second thought which presents itself is, that the Re- 
 deemer not only was, but is man. He was tempted in all 
 points like us. He is a high-priest which can be touched. 
 Our conceptions on this subject, from being vague, are often 
 very erroneous. It is fancied that in the history of Jesus's 
 existence, once, for a limited period and for definite purposes, 
 He took part in frail humanity; but that when that purpose 
 was accomplished, the Man forever perished, and the Spirit 
 reascended, to unite again with pure unmixed Deity. But 
 Scripture has taken peculiar pains to give assurance of the 
 continuance of His humanity. It has carefully recorded His 
 resurrection. After that He passed through space from spot 
 to spot : when He was in one place He was not in another. 
 His body was sustained by the ordinary aliments broiled 
 fish and honeycomb. The prints of suffering were on Him. 
 His recognitions were human still. Thomas and Peter were 
 especially reminded of incidents before His death, and con- 
 nected with His living interests. To Thomas He says 
 " Reach hither thy hand." To Peter" Lovest thou me ?" 
 
 And this typifies to us a very grand and important truth. > 
 It is this, if I may venture so to express myself the truth of 
 the human heart of God. We think of God as a Spirit, in- 
 finitely removed from and unlike the creatures He has made. 
 But the truth is, man resembles God : all spirits, all minds, 
 are of the same family. The Father bears a likeness to the 
 Son whom He has created. The mind of God is similar to 
 the mind of man. Love does not mean one thing in man, and 
 another thing in God. Holiness, justice, pity, tenderness 
 these are in the Eternal the same in kind which they are in 
 the finite being. The present manhood of Christ conveys 
 tliis deeply important truth, that the Divine heart is human 
 in its sympathies. 
 
 The third observation upon these verses is, that there is a 
 connection between what Jesus was and what Jesus is. He 
 run be touched now, because He was tempted then. The in- 
 cidents and the feelings of that part of the existence which 
 is gone have not passed away without results which are drep 
 ly entwined with His present being. His past experience haa 
 left certain effects durable in His nature as it is now. It has 
 endued Him with certain qualifications and certain suscepti- 
 
9<D The Sympathy of Christ. 
 
 bilities, which He would not have had but for that experi* 
 ence. Just as the results remained upon His body, the prints 
 of the nails in His palms, and the spear-gash in His side, so 
 do the results remain upon His soul, enduing Him with a cer- 
 tain susceptibility, for " He can be touched with the feeling of 
 our infirmities ;" with certain qualifications, for " He is able 
 to show mercy, and to impart grace to help in time of need." 
 To turn now to the subject itself. It has two branches. 
 
 I. The Redeemer's preparation for His priesthood. 
 II. The Redeemer's priestly qualifications. 
 
 I. His preparation. The preparation consisted in being 
 tempted. But here a difficulty arises. Temptation, as ap- 
 plied to a Being perfectly free from tendencies to evil, is not 
 easy to understand. See what the difficulty is. Temptation 
 has two senses: It means test or probation; it means also 
 trial, involving the idea of pain or danger. A common acid 
 applied to gold tests it, but there is no risk or danger to the 
 most delicate golden ornament. There is one acid, and only 
 one, which tries it, as well as tests it. The same acid applied 
 to a shell endangers the delicacy of its surface. A weight 
 hung from a bar of iron only tests its strength ; the same, 
 depending from a human arm, is a trial, involving, it may be, 
 the risk of pain or fracture. Now trial placed before a sin- 
 less being is intelligible enough in the sense of probation it 
 is a test of excellence : but it is not easy to see how it can be 
 temptation in the sense of pain, if there be no inclination to 
 do wrong. 
 
 However, Scripture plainly asserts this as the character of 
 Christ's temptation. Not merely test, but trial. 
 
 First, you have passages declaring the immaculate nature 
 of His mind as here, " without sin." Again, He was " holy, 
 harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners." And again, " The 
 prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in fie." Thp 
 spirit of evil found nothing which it could claim as its own in 
 Christ. It was the meeting of two elements which will no* 
 amalgamate. Oil and water could as easily blend, as tl 
 mind of Christ with evil. Temptation glanced from His 
 heart as the steel point does from the surface of the diamond. 
 It was not that evil propensities were kept under by the pow' 
 er of the Spirit in Him : He had no evil propensities at all. 
 Obedience was natural to Him. 
 
 But then we find another class of passages such as this : 
 " He suffered, being tempted." There was not merely test in 
 the temptation, but there was also painfulness in the victory, 
 How could this be without any tendency to evil ? 
 
The Sympathy of Christ. 91 
 
 To answer this, let us analyze sin. In every act of sin 
 there are two distinct steps: There is .the rising of a desire 
 which is natural, and, being natural, is not wrong : there is 
 the indulgence of that desire in forbidden circumstances ; and 
 that is sin. Let injury, for example, be inflicted, and resent- 
 ment will arise. It must arise spontaneously. It is as im 
 possible for injustice to be done, and resentment not to fo! 
 low, as it is for the flesh not to quiver on the application 01 
 intense torture. Resentment is but the sense of injustice, 
 made more vivid by its being brought home to ourselves; 
 resentment is beyond our control, so far. There is no sin in 
 this: but let resentment rest there; let it pass into, not jus- 
 tice, but revenge ; let it smoulder in vindictive feeling till it 
 becomes retaliation, and then a natural feeling has grown 
 into a transgression. You have the distinction between these 
 two things clearly marked in Scripture. "Be ye angry" 
 here is the allowance for the human, " and sin not " here is 
 the point where resentment passes into retaliation. 
 
 Again, take the natural sensation of hunger. Let a man 
 have been without food : let the gratification present itself, 
 and the natural desire will arise involuntarily. It will arise 
 just as certainly in a forbidden as in a permitted circum- 
 stance. It will arise whether what he looks on be the bread 
 of another or his own. And it is not here, in the sensation 
 of hunger, that the guilt lies. But it lies in the willful grat- 
 ification of it after it is known to be forbidden. 
 
 This was literally one of the cases in which Christ was 
 tried. The wish for food was in His nature in the wilderness. 
 The very mode of gratifying it was presented to His imagina- 
 tion, by using Divine power in an unlawful way. And had He 
 so been constituted that the lower wish was superior to the 
 higher will, there would have been an act of sin ; had the 
 two been nearly balanced, so that the conflict hung in doubt, 
 there would have been a tendency to sin: what we call a sin- 
 ful nature. But it was in the entire and perfect subjugation 
 of desire to the will of right that a sinless nature was ex- 
 hibited. 
 
 Here then is the nature of sin. Sin is not the possession of 
 desires, but the having them in uncontrolled ascendency over 
 the higher nature. Sinfulness does not consist in having 
 strong desires or passions : in the strongest and highest na- 
 tures, all, including the desires, is strong. Sin is not a real, 
 thing. It is rather the absence of a something, the will to do 
 right. It is not a disease or taint, an actual substance pro- 
 jected into the constitution. It is the absence of the spirit 
 which orders and harmonizes the whole \ so that what we 
 
92 The Sympathy of Christ. 
 
 mean when we say the natural man must sin inevitably, h 
 this, that he has strong natural appetites, and that he has no 
 bias from above to counteract those appetites : exactly as if 
 a ship were deserted by the crew, and left on the bosom of 
 the Atlantic with every sail set and the wind blowing. No 
 one forces her to destruction, yet on the rocks she will surely 
 go, just because there is no pilot at the helm. Such is the 
 state of ordinary men. Temptation leads to fall. The gusts 
 of instincts, which rightly guided would have carried safely 
 into port, dash them on the rocks. No one forces them to 
 sin ; but the spirit-pilot has left the helm. [Fallen Nature.] 
 
 Sin, therefore, is not in the appetites, but in the absence of 
 a controlling will. 
 
 Now contrast this state with the state of Christ. There 
 were in Him all the natural appetites of mind and body. 
 Relaxation and friendship were dear to Him so were sun- 
 light and life. Hunger, pain, death He could feel all, and 
 shrunk from them. Conceive, then, a case in which the grat- 
 ification of any one of these inclinations was inconsistent 
 with His Father's will. At one moment it was unlawful to 
 eat, though hungry : and without one tendency to disobey, 
 did fasting cease to be severe ? It was demanded that he 
 should endure anguish ; and willingly as He subdued Him- 
 self, did pain cease to be pain? Could the spirit of obedi- 
 ence reverse every feeling in human nature ? When the 
 brave man gives his shattered arm to the surgeon's knife, 
 will may prevent even the quiver of an eyelid, but no will 
 and no courage can reverse his sensations, or prevent the op- 
 eration from inflicting pain. When the heart is raw, and 
 smarting from recent bereavement, let there be the deepest 
 and most reverential submission to the highest Will, is it 
 possible not to wince? Can any cant demand for submission 
 extort the profession that pain is pleasure ? 
 
 It seems to have been in this way that the temptation of 
 Christ caused suffering. He suffered from the force of de- 
 sire. Though there was no hesitation whether to obey or 
 not, no strife in the will, in the act of mastery there , was 
 pain. There was self-denial there was obedience at the 
 expense of tortured natural feeling. 'He shrunk from St. 
 Peter's suggestion of escape from ignominy as from a thing 
 which did not shake His determination, but made Him feel, 
 in the idea of bright life, vividly the cost of His resolve. 
 " Get thee behind me, tempter, foV thou art an offense." In 
 the garden, unswervingly, " Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." 
 There was no reluctance in the will. But was there no 
 struggling no shudder in the inward sensations no ^e 
 
The Sympathy of Christ. 93 
 
 membrance that the Cross was sharp no recollection of the 
 family at Bethany, and the pleasant walk, and the dear com- 
 panionship which He was about to leave ? " My soul is ex- 
 ceeding sorrowful to die." .... 
 
 So that in every one of these cases not by the reluctancy 
 of a sinful sensation, but by the quivering and the anguish 
 of natural feeling when it is trampled upon by lofty will 
 Jesus suffered, being tempted. He was " tempted like as we 
 aie." Remember this. For the way in which some speak 
 of the sinlessness of Jesus reduces all His suffering to phys- 
 ical pain, destroys the reality of temptation, reduces that 
 glorious heart to a pretense, and converts the whole of His 
 history into a mere fictitious drama, in which scenes of trial 
 were only represented, not really felt. Remember that, " in 
 all points," the Redeemer's soul was tempted. 
 
 II. The second point we take is the Redeemer's priesthood. 
 
 Priesthood is that office by which He is the medium of 
 union between man and God. The capacity for this has 
 been indelibly engraven on His nature by His experience 
 here. All this capacity is based on His sympathy : He can 
 be " touched with the feeling of our infirmities." 
 
 Till we have reflected on it, we are scarcely aware how 
 much the sum of human happiness in the world is indebted 
 to this one feeling sympathy. We get cheerfulness and 
 vigor, we scarcely know how or when, from mere associa- 
 tion with our fellow-men ; and from the looks reflected on 
 us of gladness and employment, we catch inspiration and 
 power to go on, from human presence and from cheerful 
 looks. 'The workman works with added energy from having 
 others by. The full family circle has a strength and a life 
 peculiarly its own. The substantial good and the effectual 
 relief which men extend to one another is trifling. It is not 
 by these, but by something far less costly, that the work is 
 done. God has insured it by a much more simple machinery. 
 He has given to the weakest and the poorest, power to con 
 tribute largely to the common stock of gladness. The 
 child's smile and laugh are mighty powers in this world. 
 VVTien bereavement has left you desolate, what substantial 
 benefit is there which makes condolence acceptable? It 
 can not replace the loved ones you have lost. It can bestow 
 upon you nothing permanent. But a warm hand has 
 touched yours, and its thrill told you that there was a liv- 
 ing response there to your emotion. One look, one human 
 sigh has done more for vou than the costliest present could 
 convey. 
 
94 The Sympathy of Christ. 
 
 And it is for want of remarking this that the effect of 
 public chanty falls often so far short of the expectations of 
 those who give. The springs of men's generosity are dried 
 up by hearing of the repining, and the envy, and the discon- 
 tent which have been sown by the general collection and the 
 provision establishment, among cottages where all was har 
 mony before. The famine and the pestilence are met by 
 abundant liberality; and the apparent return for this is riot 
 and sedition. But the secret lies all in this. It is not in 
 channels such as these that the heart's gratitude can flow. 
 Love is not bought by money, but by love. There has been 
 all the machinery of a public distribution : but there has 
 been no exhibition of individual, personal interest. The 
 rich man who goes to his poor brother's cottage, and without 
 affectation of humility, naturally, and with the respect which 
 man owes to man, enters into his circumstances, inquiring 
 about his distresses, and hears his homely tale, has done 
 more to establish an interchange of kindly feeling than he 
 could have secured by the costliest present by itself. Pub- 
 lic donations hav<? their value and their uses. Poor-laws 
 keep human beings from starvation : but in the point of 
 eliciting gratitude, all these fail. Man has not been brought 
 into contact close enough with man for this. They do not 
 work by sympathy. 
 
 Again, when the electric touch of sympathetic feeling has 
 gone among a mass of men, it communicates itself, and is 
 reflected back from every individual in the crowd, with a 
 force exactly proportioned to their numbers. The speech or 
 sermon read before the limited circle of a family, and the 
 same discourse uttered befoi'e closely crowded hundreds, are 
 two different things. There is strange power even in the 
 mere presence of a common crowd, exciting almost uncon- 
 trollable emotion. 
 
 It is on record that the hard heart of an Oriental conquer- 
 or was unmanned by the sight of a dense mass of living mil- 
 lions engaged in one enterprise. He accounted for it by say- 
 ing that it suggested to him that within a sigle century 
 not one of those millions would be alive. But the hard- 
 jhearted bosom of the tyrant mistook its own emotions ; his 
 tears came from no such far-fetched inference of reflection : 
 they rose spontaneously, as they will rise in a dense crowd, 
 you can not tell why. It is the thrilling thought of numbers 
 engaged in the same object. It is the idea of our own feel- 
 ings reciprocated back to us, and reflected from many hearts, 
 It is the mighty presence- of life. 
 
 And again, it seems partly to avail itself of this tendency 
 
Tke Sympathy of Christ. 95 
 
 within us that such stress is laid on the injunction of united 
 prayer. Private devotion is essential to the spiritual life 
 without it there is no life. But it can not replace united 
 prayer, for the two things have different aims. Solitary 
 prayer is feeble in comparison with that which rises before 
 the throne echoed by the hearts of hundreds, and strength- 
 ened by the feeling that other aspirations are mingling with 
 our own. And whether it be the chanted litany, or the 
 more simply read service, or the anthem producing one emo- 
 tion at the same moment in many bosoms, the value and the 
 power of public prayer seem chiefly to depend on this mys- 
 terious affection of our nature sympathy. 
 
 And now, having endeavored to illustrate this power of 
 sympathy, it is for us to remember that of this in its fullness 
 He is susceptible. There is a vague way of speaking of the 
 Atonement which does not realize the tender, affectionate, 
 personal love by which that daily, hourly reconciliation is 
 effected. The sympathy of Christ was not merely love of 
 men in masses:* He loved the masses, but he loved them 
 because made up of individuals. He "had compassion on 
 the multitude ;" but He had also discriminating, special ten- 
 derness for erring Peter and erring Thomas. He felt for the v" 
 despised lonely Zaccheus in his sycamore-tree. He compas- 
 sionated the discomfort of His 'disciples. He mixed His 
 tears with the stifled sobs by the grave of Lazarus. He 
 called the abashed children to His side. Amongst the num- 
 bers, as He walked, He detected the individual touch of 
 faith. "Master, the multitude throng thee, and sayest thou, 
 ~Who touched me ?" u Somebody hath touched me." 
 
 Observe how he is touched by our infirmities with a sep- 
 arate, special, discriminating love. There is not a single 
 throb, in a single human bosom, that does not thrill at once 
 with more than electric speed up to the mighty heart of God. 
 You have not shed a tear or sighed a sigh that did not 
 come back to you exalted and purified by having passed 
 through the Eternal bosom. 
 
 The priestly powers conveyed by this faculty of sympa- 
 thizing, according to the text are two : the power of mercy, 
 and the power of having grace to help. "Therefore" be- 
 cause He can be touched u let us come boldly," expecting 
 mercy and grace. 
 
 1. We may boldly expect mercy from Him who has learned 
 to -sympathize. He learned sympathy by being tempted : 
 but it is by being tempted, yet without sin, that He is spe 
 cially able to show mercy. 
 
 There are two who aie a&fit for showing mercy: He who 
 
g6 The Sympathy of Christ, 
 
 has never been tried; and he who, having been tempted, ha* 
 i'allen under temptation. The young, untempted, and up 
 right, are often severe judges. They are for sanguinary pun 
 ishment : they are for expelling offenders from the bosom 
 of society. The old, on the contrary, who have fallen much, 
 are lenient ; but it is a leniency which often talks thus : Men 
 must be men a young man must sow his wild oats and re- 
 form. 
 
 So young ardent Saul, untried by doubt, persecuted the 
 Christians with severity; and Saul the king, on the contrary, 
 having fallen himself, weakly permitted Agag to escape pun- 
 ishment. David, again, when his own sin was narrated to 
 him under another name, was unrelenting in his indignation : 
 "The man that hath done this thing shall surely die." 
 
 None of these were qualified for showing mercy aright. 
 Kow this qualification " without sin " is very remarkable : 
 for it is the one we often least should think of. Unthinking- 
 ly we should say that to have erred would make a man leni- 
 ent : it is not so. 
 
 That truth is taught with deep significance in one of the 
 incidents of the Redeemer's life. There stood in His pres- 
 ^ence a tempted woman, covered with the confusion of recent 
 conviction. And there stood beside her the sanctimonious 
 religionists of that day, waiting like hell-hounds to be let 
 loose upon their prey. Calm words came from the lips of 
 Him "who spake as man never spake," and whose heart 
 felt as man never felt. " He that is without sin among you 
 let him first cast a stone." A memorable lesson of eternal 
 truth. Sinners are not fit to judge of sin : their justice is re- 
 venge their mercy is feebleness. He alone can judge of 
 sin he alone can attemper the sense of what is due to the 
 offended law with the remembrance of that which is due to 
 human frailty he alone is fit for showing manly mercy, who 
 has, like his Master, felt the power of temptation in its 
 might, and come scathless through the trial. " In all points 
 tempted yet without sin /" therefore, to Him you may 
 "boldly go to find mercy." 
 
 2. The other priestly power is the grace of showing " help 
 in time of need." 
 
 We must not make too much of sympathy, as mere feeling. 
 We do in things spiritual as we do with hot-house plants 
 The feeble exotic, beautiful to look at, but useless, has costly 
 sums spent on it. The hardy oak, a nation's strength, is per- 
 mitted to grow, scarcely observed, in the fence and copses. 
 We prize feeling and praise its possessor. But feeling is 
 only a sickly exotic in itself a passive quality, having in it 
 
The Sympathy of Christ. 97 
 
 nothing moral, no temptation and no victory. A man is no 
 more a good man for having feeling, than he is for having a 
 delicate ear for music, or a far-seeing optic nerve. The Son 
 of man had feeling He could be " touched." The tear 
 would start from His eyes at the sight of human sorrow. 
 But that sympathy was no exot : .c in His soul, beautiful to 
 look at, too delicate for use. Feeling with Him led to this, 
 " He went about doing good." Sympathy with Him was this, 
 '' Grace to help in time of need." 
 
 And this is the blessing of the thought of Divine sympa- 
 thy. By the sympathy of man, after all, the wound is not 
 healed ; it is only stanched for a time. It can make the tear 
 flow less bitterly : it can not dry it up. So far as permanent 
 good goes, who has not felt the deep truth which Job taught 
 his friends " Miserable comforters are ye all ?" 
 
 The sympathy of the Divine Human ! He knows what 
 strength is needed. He gives grace to help ; and when the 
 world, with its thousand forms of temptation, seems to whis- 
 per to us as to Esau, Sell me thy birthright, the other voice 
 speaks, Shall I barter blessedness for happiness the inward 
 peace for the outward thrill the benediction of my Father 
 for a mess of pottage ? There are moments when we seem, 
 to tread above this earth, superior to its allurements, able to 
 do without its kindness, firmly bracing ourselves to do our 
 work as He did His. Those moments are not the sunshine 
 *if life. They did not come when the world would have said 
 diat all round you was glad: but it was when outward 
 trials had shaken the soul to its very centre, then there came 
 Tom Him " grace to help in time of need." 
 
 1. He who would sympathize must be content to be tried 
 and tempted. There is a hard and boisterous rudeness in 
 DUF hearts by nature which requires to be softened down. 
 We pass by suffering gayly, carelessly, not in cruelty, but 
 unfeelingly, just because we do not know what suffering is. 
 We wound men by our looks and our abrupt expressions 
 without intending it, because we have not been taught the 
 delicacy, and the tact, and the gentleness which can only be 
 learnt by the wounding of our own sensibilities. There is a 
 haughty feeling in uprightness which has never been on the 
 yerge of fall that requires humbling. There is an inability 
 to enter into difficulties of thought which marks the mind to 
 which all things have been presented superficially, and 
 which has never experienced the horror of feeling the ice of 
 doubt crashing beneath the feet. 
 
 Therefore, if you aspire to be a son of consolation if you 
 would partake of the priestly gift of sympathy if you 
 
98 The Sympathy of Christ. 
 
 would pour something beyond commonplace consolatioi 
 into a tempted heart if you would pass through the inter- 
 course of daily life with the delicate tact which never in^ 
 flicts pain if to that most acute of human ailments, mental 
 doubt, you are ever to give effectual succor, you must be 
 content to pay the price of the costly education. Like Him, 
 you must suffer being tempted. 
 
 But remember, it is being tempted in all points, yet with- 
 out sin, that makes sympathy real, manly, perfect, instead of 
 a mere sentimental tenderness. Sin will teach you to feel 
 for trials. It will not enable you to judge them, to be mer- 
 ciful to them, nor to help them in time of need with any cer- 
 tainty. 
 
 Lastly, it is this same human sympathy which qualifies 
 Christ for judgment. It is written that the Father hath 
 committed all judgment to Him, because He is the Son of 
 Man. The sympathy of Christ extends to the frailties of 
 human nature, not to its hardened guilt : He is " touched 
 with the feeling of our infirmities" There is nothing in His 
 bosom which can harmonize with malice ; He can not feel 
 for envy; He has no fellow-feeling for cruelty oppression 
 hypocrisy ; bitter censorious judgments. Remember, He 
 could look round about Him with anger. The sympathy of 
 Christ is a comforting subject. It is, besides, a tremendous 
 subject ; for on sympathy the awards of heaven and hell are 
 built. " Except a man be born again " not he shall not, 
 but " he can not enter into heaven." There is nothing in 
 him which has affinity to any thing in the Judge's bosom. 
 A sympathy for that which is pure implies a repulsion of 
 that which is impure. Hatred of evil is in proportion to the 
 strength of love for good. To love good intensely is to hate 
 evil intensely. It was in strict accordance with the laws of 
 sympathy that He blighted Pharisaism in such ungentle 
 words as these : " Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers ! how 
 can ye escape the damnation of hell?" Win the mind of 
 Christ now or else His sympathy for human nature will 
 not save you from, but only insure, the recoil of abhorrence 
 t the last " Depart from me ! I never knew you." 
 
Pharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism. 99 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE PHARISEES AND SADDUCEES AT JOHN'S 
 BAPTISM. 
 
 " But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his bap- 
 tism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee 
 from the wrath to come ?" Matt. iii. 7. 
 
 IT seems that the Baptist's ministry had been attended 
 with almost incredible success, as if the population of the 
 country had been roused in mass by the tidings of his doc- 
 trine. " Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judea, 
 and all the region round about Jordan, and were baptized 
 by him in Jordan, confessing their sins." 
 
 The success of his ministry was tested by the numbers 
 that he baptized. Not so a modern ministry. Ministerial 
 success is not shown now by the numbers who listen. Not 
 mere impression, but altered character, marks success. Not 
 by startling nor by electrifying congregations, but by turn- 
 ing men from darkness unto light, from the power of Satan 
 unto God, is the work done. With John, however, it was 
 different. He was on earth to do a special work the work 
 of the axe, not the trowel ; to throw down, not to build ; to 
 startle, not to instruct ; and therefore his baptism was sim- 
 ply symbolized by water, the washing away of the past : 
 whereas that of Christ was symbolized by fire, the touching 
 of the life and heart with the living flame of a heavenlier 
 life. Whoever, therefore, came to John for baptism, possess- 
 ed conviction of the truth of that which John taught, and. 
 thereby so far tested the fidelity and success of his ministry. 
 
 Bearing, then, in mind that coming to John's baptism was 
 the seal of his success, and that his baptism contained, in 
 symbolical form, the whole substance of his teaching, these 
 are the two topics of the text : 
 
 I. The meaning wrapped up in John's message. 
 II. The Baptist's astonishment at his own success. 
 
 I. The meaning of John's message. His baptism implied 
 to those who came to put themselves under its protection 
 that they were in danger, for it was connected with th 
 warning, " Flee from the wrath to come !" 
 
ioo Pharisees and Sadducees at Jo/ins Baptism. 
 
 Future retribution has become to us a kind of figment. 
 Hell is in the world of shadows. The tone in which educa- 
 ted men speak of it still, is often only that good-humored 
 condescension which makes allowance for childish supersti 
 tion. 
 
 Part of this incredulity arises from the confessedly sym- 
 bolical intimations of Scripture on the subject. We read 
 of the fire and the worm of spirits being salted with fire 
 of a lake of fire and brimstone. All this tells solely of phys- 
 ical suffering. And accordingly, for centuries this was the 
 predominant conception of Christendom on the subject. 
 Scarcely any other element was admitted. Whoever has 
 seen those paintings on which the master-spirits in Art have 
 thrown down the conceptions of their age, will remember 
 that hideous demons, distorted countenances, and waves of 
 flame represent the whole idea. And in that immortal work 
 in which he who sang of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven has 
 embodied the belief of his day, still the same fact prevails. 
 You read of the victims of unchaste life hurried on the dark 
 whirlwind forever ; of the heretics in their coffins of intense 
 fire, and of the guilty spirits who are plunged deep down in 
 " thick-ribbed ice. n But in those harrowing pictures which 
 his genius has painted with such vividness, there is not one 
 idea of mental suffering embodied. It is all bodily awful, in- 
 tolerable torture. Now all this we believe no longer. The 
 circles of hell and the mountain of purgatory are as fabulous 
 to us as the Tartarus of the heathens. Singular that in an 
 age in which the chief aim of science appears to be to get rid 
 of physical pain and discomfort, as if these were the worst 
 evils conceivable, the idea of a bodily hell should be just the 
 one at which we have learnt to smile. But with the form, 
 we have also dispossessed ourselves of belief in the reality 
 of retribution at all. 
 
 Now Scripture language is symbolical. There is no salt, 
 no worm, no fire to torture. I say not that a diseased soul 
 may not form for itself a tenement hereafter, as here, pecu- 
 liarly fitted to be the avenue of suffering ; but unquestiona- 
 bly we can not build upon these expressions a material helL 
 
 Hell is the infinite terror of the soul, whatever that may 
 be. To one man it is pain. Rid him of that, he can bear all 
 degradation. To another it is public shame. Save him from 
 that, and he will creep and crawl before you to submit to any 
 reptile meanness. " Honor me now, I pray thee, before the 
 people," cries Saul, till Samuel turns from the abject thinir in 
 scorn. To others, the infinite terror is that compared with 
 which all these would be a bed of roses. It is the hell of 
 

 Pharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism. 1 01 
 
 having done wrong the hell of having had a spirit from 
 God, pure, with high aspirations, and to be conscious of hav- 
 ing dulled its delicacy and degraded its desires the hell of 
 having quenched a light brighter than the sun's of having 
 done to another an injury that through time and through 
 eternity never can be undone infinite, maddening remorse 
 the hell of knowing that every chance of excellence, and 
 every opportunity of good, has been lost forever. This is the 
 infinite terror ; this is wrath to come. 
 
 You doubt that? Have you ever marked that striking 
 fact, the connection of the successive stages of the soul? 
 How sin can change the countenance, undermine the health, 
 produce restlessness ? Think you the grave will end all that 
 that by some magic change the moral being shall be bui 
 led there, and the soul rise again so changed in every feeling 
 that the very identity of being would be lost, and it would 
 amount to the creation of a new soul ? Say you that God is 
 love? Oh, but look round this world. The aspect of things 
 is stern very stern. If they be ruled by love, it is a love 
 which does not shrink from human agony. There is a law 
 of infinite mercy here, but there is a law of boundless rigor 
 too. Sin, and you will suffer that law is not reversed. The 
 young, and the gentle, and the tender, are inexorably sub- 
 jected to it. We would shield them if we could, but there is 
 that which says they shall not be shielded. They shall weep, 
 and fade, and taste of mortal anguish, even as others. Carry 
 that out into the next world, and you have " wrath to come." 
 
 John's baptism, besides, implied the importance of confes- 
 sion. "They were baptized, .... confessing their sins." 
 On the eve of a promised new life, they were required to ac- 
 knowledge the iniquity of their past life. In the cure of our 
 spiritual maladies there is a wondrous efficacy, to use a home- 
 ly phrase, in making a " clean breast." There is something 
 strengthening, something soothing, and at the same time 
 something humbling, in acknowledging that we have done 
 wrong. There is a pride in us which can not bear pity. 
 There is a diseased sensitiveness which shrinks from the 
 smart of acknowledgment ; and yet that smart must be borne 
 before we can be truly soothed. When was it that the 
 younger son in the parable received the ring, and the robe, 
 and the banquet, which represent the rapture of the sense 
 of being forgiven ? When he had fortitude enough to go 
 back, mile by mile, step by step, every inch of the way he 
 had gone wrong, had borne unflinchingly the sneer of his fa- 
 ther's domestics, and, worse than all, the sarcasms of his im- 
 maculate brother, and manfully said out, "Father, I have 
 
IO2 Pharisees and Sadducees at Johds Baptism. 
 
 sinned against heaven and before thee." When was it that 
 the publican went down justified to his house when he said, 
 even before a supercilious Pharisee, " God be merciful to me 
 a sinner?" When did the royal delinquent hear the words, 
 "The Lord hath also put away thy sin?" When he gave 
 the sacrifice of his lips " I have sinned before the Lord." 
 And when did the Church of Ephesus rise into the bright- 
 est model of a perfect church that has yet been exhibited on 
 earth ? After her converts had publicly come forward, burnt 
 those manuscripts which were called " Ephesian letters " to 
 the value of 50,000 pieces of silver, " confessed and showed 
 their deeds." 
 
 There is a profound truth in the popular anxiety that a 
 murderer should confess before he dies. It is an instinctive 
 feeling that a true death is better than a false life that to 
 die with unacknowledged guilt is a kind of lie. To acknowl- 
 edge bis sin is to put it from him to abjure it to refuse to 
 acknowledge it as part of himself to separate it from him 
 to say, I will keep it as mine no more : then it is gone. Who 
 here has a secret of guilt lying like lead upon his heart ? As 
 he values serenity of soul, let that secret be made "known. 
 And if there be one to-day who is impressed or touched by 
 all this, let him beware how he procrastinates that which 
 was done when John baptized. The iron that once was cool- 
 ed may never be warmed again the heart that once had its 
 flood-gates open, and has delayed to pour out the stagnation 
 of its wretchedness, may be closed forever. 
 
 Once more, John's baptism implied the necessity of a re- 
 newal of heart. We lose part of the significance of that cer- 
 emony from its transplantation away from a climate in which 
 it was natural and appropriate. 
 
 Ablution in the East is almost a religious duty : the dust 
 and heat weigh upon the spirits and heart like a load ; the 
 removal is refreshment and happiness. And it was impossi- 
 ble to see that significant act in which the convert went 
 down into the water, travel-worn and soiled with dust, disap- 
 peared for one moment, and then emerged pure and fresh 
 without feeling that the symbol answered to, and interpreted 
 a strong craving of the human heart. It is the desire to wash 
 away that which is past and evil. We would fain go to an- 
 other country and begin life afresh. We look upon the grave 
 almost with complacency, from the fancy that there we shall 
 lie down to sleep and wake fresh and new. It was this same 
 longing that expressed itself in heathenism by the fabled 
 river of forgetfulness, of which the dead must drink before 
 they can enter into rest. 
 
Pharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism. 1 03 
 
 Now to that craving John gave reality and meaning when 
 he said, " Behold the Lamb of God !" For else that craving 
 is but a sick fond wish. Had John merely said, " Flee from 
 the wrath to come !" he would have filled man's life with the 
 terrors of anticipated hell. Had he only said, " My baptism 
 implies that ye must be pure," he would have crushed men's 
 hearts with the feeling of impossibility ; for excellence without 
 Christ is but a dream. He gave meaning and promise to all 
 when he said, " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away 
 the sins of the world." 
 
 Sin-laden and guilty men the end of all the Christian min- 
 istry is *to say that out with power, " Behold the Lamb of 
 God !" Divine life and death ! to have had one glimpse of 
 which, with its ennobling impulses, it were worth while to 
 have endured a life of suffering. When we believe that the 
 sacrifice of that Lamb meant love to us, our hearts are light' 
 ened of their load : the past becomes as nothing, and life be- 
 gins afresh. Christ is the river of forgetfulness in which by- 
 gone guilt is overwhelmed. 
 
 II. The Baptist's astonishment at his own success. It was 
 a singular scene which was exhibited in those days on the 
 banks of Jordan. There was a crowd of human beings, each 
 having a history of his own men who have long mouldered 
 in earth's dust, but who were living then in fresh and vigor- 
 ous existence. Think of it. Busy life was moving there 
 beings who had their hopes and fears about time and eter- 
 nity, to whom life was dear as it is to us at this day. They 
 had come to be cured of that worst of human maladies, the 
 aching of a hollow heart ; and a single mortified man was 
 bending over them, whose countenance bore all that peculiar 
 aspect of saintliness which comes from spare diet and austere 
 habits, and all that unruffled composure which comes from 
 lonely communings with God : a solitary man, who had led 
 a hermit's life, but was possessed of rare sagacity in worldly 
 matters ; for, hermit as he was, John took no half-views of 
 men and things : there was nothing morbid in his view of 
 life; there was sound common sense in the advice he gave 
 the different classes which came to him. "Repent," with 
 him, did not mean, Come with me into the wilderness to live 
 away from the world, but it meant this : Go back to the 
 world, and live above it, each doing his work in an unworld- 
 ly spirit. It was a strange spectacle, men of the world com- 
 ing with implicit reverence to learn the duties of active life 
 from a man whose world was the desert, and who knew noth 
 ing of active life except by hearsay. 
 
104 Pharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism. 
 
 Now what was the secret of this power by which he chained 
 the hearts of men as by a spell ? 
 
 One point in the secret of this success was a thing which 
 we see every day. Men of thought and quiet contemplation 
 exercise a wonderful influence over men of action. We ad- 
 mire that which we are not ourselves. The man of business 
 owns the control of the man of religious thoughtfulness. 
 Like coalesces in this world wuth unlike. The strong and 
 the weak, the contemplative and the active, bind themselves 
 together. They are necessary for each other. The active 
 soldiers and the scheming publicans came to the lonely, as- 
 cetic John to hear something of that still, inner life, of which 
 their own career could tell them nothing. 
 
 A second cause of this success appears to have been that 
 it was a ministry of terror. Fear has a peculiar fascination. 
 As children love the tale of the supernatural which yet makes 
 them shudder, so do men, as it would seem, find a delight in 
 the pictures of eternal woe which terrify them partly from 
 the pleasure which there is in vivid emotions, and partly, per- 
 haps, from a kind of feeling of expiation in the horror which 
 is experienced. You could not go among the dullest set of 
 rustics and preach graphically and terribly of hell-fire with- 
 out insuring a large audience. The preaching of John in 
 this respect differed from the tone of Christ's. Christ taught 
 much that God is love. He spoke a great deal of the Fa- 
 ther which is in heaven. He instructed in those parables 
 which required thoughtful attention, exercise of mind, and a 
 gently sensitive conscience. He spoke didactic, calm dis- 
 courses, very engaging, but with little excitement in them : 
 such discourses as the Sermon on the Mount, respecting 
 goodness, purity, duties ; which assuredly, if any one were 
 to venture so to speak before a modern congregation, would 
 be stigmatized as a moral essay. Accordingly His success 
 was much less marked than that of John's. No crowds were 
 baptized as His followers : one hundred and twenty, in an 
 upper chamber, appear to have been the fruits of his life- 
 work. To teach so, is assuredly not the way to make strong 
 impressions ; but it is the way to work deeply, gloriously 
 for eternity. How many of John's terrified Pharisees and 
 Sadducees, suppose we, retained the impression six months ? 
 
 What is your religion ? Excitability, romance, impression, 
 fear ? Remember, excitement has its uses, impression has its 
 value. John, in all circumstances of his appearance and style 
 of teaching, impressed by excitement. Excitement, warmed 
 feelings, make the first actings of religious life and the break* 
 ing of inveterate habits easier. But excitement and impres* 
 
Pharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism. 105 
 
 sion are not religion. Neither can you trust to the alarm 
 produced by the thought of eternal retribution. Ye that 
 hav e been impressed, beware how you let those impressions 
 d'e away. Die they will, and must : we can not live in ex- 
 citement forever; but beware of their leaving behind them 
 nothing except a languid, jaded heart. If God ever gave you 
 the excitements of religion, breaking in upon your monotony, 
 as John's teaching broke in upon that of Jerusalem, take care. 
 There is no restoring of elasticity to the spring that has been 
 overbent. Let impression pass on at once to acting. 
 
 We have another cause to assign for John's success. Men 
 felt that he was real. Reality is the secret of all success. 
 Religion in Jerusalem had long become a thing of forms. 
 Men had settled into a routine of externals, as if all religion 
 centred in these. Decencies and proprieties formed the sub- 
 stance of human life. And here was a man in God's world 
 once more who felt that religion is an everlasting reality. 
 Here was a man once more to tell the world that life is 
 sliding into the abyss that all we see is but a shadow that 
 the invisible Life within is the only real life. Here was a 
 man who could feel the splendors of God shining into his 
 soul in the desert without the aid of forms. His locust-food, 
 his hair-garment, his indifference to earthly comforts, spoke 
 out once more that one at least could make it a conviction 
 to live and die upon, that man does not live on bread alone, 
 but on the Living Word which proceedeth out of the mouth 
 of God. And when that crowd dispersed at sunset, and John 
 was left alone in the twilight, with the infinite of darkness 
 deepening round him, and the roll of Jordan by his side, re- 
 flecting the chaste, clear stars, there was something there 
 higher than Pharisaic forms to speak to him : there was 
 heaven and eternity to force him to be real. This life waa 
 swiftly passing. What is it to a man living like John but a 
 -show and a dream? He was homeless upon earth. Well, 
 but beyond beyond in the blue eternities above, there was 
 the prophet's home. He had cut himself off from the solaces 
 of life. He was to make an enemy of the man of honor, Her- 
 od. He had made an enemy of the man of religion, the Phar- 
 isee. But he was passing into that country where it matters 
 little whether a man has been clothed in finest linen or in 
 coarsest camel's hair : that still country, where the struggle- 
 storm of life is over, and such as John find their rest at last 
 in the home of God, which is reserved for the true and brave. 
 If perpetual familiarity with such thoughts as these can not 
 make a man real, there is nothing in this world that can. 
 
 And now look at this man, so disciplined. Life to John 
 
 5* 
 
106 Pharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism. 
 
 was a reality. The citizens of Jerusalem could not go to 
 him, as they might have gone .to the schools of their rabbis, 
 for learned subtleties, or to the groves of Athenian literature 
 for melting imagery. Speech falls from him sharp rugged 
 cutting : a word, and no more. " Repent !" " wrath to 
 come." "The axe is laid at the root of the trees." "Fruit- 
 less trees will be cast into the fire." He spoke as men speak 
 . vhen they are in earnest, simply and abruptly, as if the 
 ^graces of oratory were out of place. And then, that life of 
 his ! The world could understand it. There was written on 
 it, in letters that needed no magnifying-glass to read, " Not 
 of this world." 
 
 It is, after all, this which tells the reality of unworldli- 
 ness. The world is looking on to see what religious people 
 mean. It has a most profound contempt for unreality. Such a 
 man as John comes before them. Well, we understand that : 
 we do not like him: get him out -of the way, and kill him 
 if he interferes with us but it is genuine. They then turn 
 and see other men drawing ingenious distinctions between 
 one kind of amusement and another indulging themselves 
 on the sabbath-day and condemning others who do similar 
 things, and calling that imworldliness. They see that a 
 religious man has a shrewd .eye to his interests is quick at 
 making a bargain captivated by show and ostentation 
 affects titled society. The world is very keen-sighted: it 
 looks through the excitement of your religious meetings, 
 quietly watches the rest of your scandal, scans your con- 
 sciousness, and the question which the world keeps putting 
 pertinaciously is, Are these men in earnest ? Is it any mar- 
 vel if Christian unreality is the subject of scoffs and bitter 
 irony ? 
 
 Let men see that you are real inconsistent, it may be, 
 sinful : oh, full of sin, impetuous, hasty, perhaps stern John 
 was. But compel them to feel that you are in earnest. 
 This is the secret of influence. 
 
 So much, then, for the causes of success. Now let us an- 
 alyze that success a little more closely, by considering the 
 classes of men on whom that influence told. 
 
 First of all, we read of soldiers, publicans, and the poor 
 people, coming to John for advice, and with the acknowl- 
 edgment of guilt, and we do not read that their arrival 
 excited the smallest emotion of astonishment in John's 
 bos<rvm. The wonder was not there. No wonder that the 
 poor, whose lot in this world is hard, should look wistfully 
 for another. No wonder that soldiers, with their prompt 
 habits of obedience and their perpetual opportunities of self 
 
Pharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism. 107 
 
 devotion, should recognize with reverence the type of heroic 
 life which John presented. No wonder that the guilty pub- 
 licans should come for purification of heart. For is it not 
 true that the world's outcasts may be led by their very sin 
 to Christ ? It is no wonder to see a saddened sinner seeking 
 in the disappointment and weariness of solitary age that 
 which he rejected in the heat of youth. Why, even the 
 world is not astonished when it sees the sinner become the 
 saint. Of course, the world has its own sarcastic account to 
 give. Dissipation leads to weariness, and weariness to sati- 
 ety, and satiety to devotion, and so your great sinner be- 
 comes a great saint, and serves God when all his emotions 
 are exhausted. Be it so. He who knew our nature well, 
 knew that marvellous revolutions go on in the soul of a man 
 whom the world counts lost. In our wildest wanderings 
 there is sometimes a love, strong as a father's, tender as a 
 mother's, watching over us, and bringing back the erring 
 child again. Know you not the law of Nature ? Have you 
 never seen how out of chaos and ferment Nature brings 
 order again life out of death, beauty out of corruption ? 
 Such, gainsay it who will, often is the history of the rise of 
 saintliness and purity out of a disappointed, bruised, and 
 penitent spirit. When the life-hopes have become a wreck 
 when the cravings of the heart for keen excitement have 
 been ministered to so abundantly as to leave nothing but 
 loathing and self-reproach behind when innocence of heart 
 is gone yes, even then scoff who will the voice of Him 
 is heard, who so dearly purchased the right to say it : " Come 
 unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
 give you rest." 
 
 John was not surprised that such came to him, owning 
 the power of life-giving truth. 
 
 But among those who came, there were two classes who 
 did move him to marvel. The first was the moral, self-satis- 
 fied formalist. The second was the calm, metaphysical, 
 reasoning infidel. When he saw the Pharisees and Saddu- 
 cees coming, he said : " Who hath warned you ?" Now who 
 were these men ? 
 
 The Pharisees were men who rested satisfied with the 
 outward. The form of religion, which varies in all ages, that 
 they wanted to stereotype. The inner heart of religion 
 the unchangeable justice, mercy, truth that they could not 
 feel. They had got their two schools of orthodoxy the 
 school of Shammai and the school of Hillel ; and, under the 
 orthodoxy of these popular idols of the day, they were con- 
 tent to lose their OAvn power of independent thought ; souls 
 
io8 Pharisees and Sadducees at Johns Baptism. 
 
 that had shrunk away from all goodness and nobleness, and 
 withered into the mummy of a soul. They could jangle 
 about the breadth of a phylactery ; they could discuss, as if 
 it were a matter of life and death, ecclesiastical questions 
 about tithe ; they could decide to a furlong the length of 
 journey allowable on the sabbath-day ; but they could not 
 look with mercy upon a broken heart pouring itself out to 
 God in His temple, nor suifer a hungry man to rub an ear 
 of corn on the Sabbath, nor cover the shame of a tempted 
 sister or an erring brother. Men without souls, from whose 
 narrow hearts the grandeur of everlasting truth was shut out. 
 
 There was another class in Israel as different from the 
 Pharisees as man can be from man. The Sadducees could 
 not be satisfied with the creed of Pharisaism, and had begun 
 to cross-examine its pretensions. They felt that the thing 
 which stood before them there, challenging the exclusive 
 name of religion, wkh its washing of cups, its fastings, its 
 parchment texts, this had nothing in it of the Eternal and 
 the Infinite. This comes not from the Almighty God, and so 
 from doubt they passed on to denial. The usual order had 
 taken place. The reaction from superstition is infidelity. 
 The reaction from ultra-strictness is laxity. The reaction 
 from Pharisaism was the Sadducee. And the Sadducee, with 
 a dreadful daring, had had the firmness to say : " Well then, 
 there is no life to come. That is settled. I have looked 
 into the abyss without trembling. There is no phantom 
 there. There is neither angel, spirit, nor life to come. And 
 this glorious thing, man, with his deep thoughts, and his 
 great, unsatisfied heart, his sorrows and his loves, godlike 
 and immortal as he seems, is but dust animated for a time, 
 passing into the nothingness out of which he came." That 
 cold and hopeless creed was the creed of Sadduceeism. Hu- 
 man souls were trying to live on that, and find it enough. 
 
 And the strange thing was that these men, so positive in 
 their creed, so distinct in their denial, so intolerant of the 
 very name of future existence, crowded to John to make 
 those confessions, and promise that new life, which were 
 meet for men who desired to flee from the wrath to corne. 
 Wrath to come ! What had the infidel to do with that r 
 Repentance unto life ! Why should the denier of life listen 
 to that ? - Fruits meet for repentance ! What had the form- 
 alist to do with that rebuke, whose life was already all that 
 could be needed ? " O generation of vipers," said the proph- 
 et, in astonishment, "who hath warned you to flee from the 
 wrath to come ?" 
 
 I deduce, from those facts which astonished John, two 
 
Pharisees and Sadducees at yohris Baptism. 1 09 
 
 truths. Formalism, even morality, will not satisfy the con- 
 science of man. Infidelity will not give rest to his troubled 
 spirit. It is a pregnant lesson, if we will only read it thought- 
 fully, to consider those two classes going up for baptism. 
 That heart of man which the moralist tells us is so pure and 
 excellent, the light of day has shone into it, and behold, in 
 the moralist's self, it is not pure, but polluted and miserable : 
 else, what has that Pharisee to do with the symbol of new 
 life which he has gone to John to use ? That clear, unbiased 
 intellect with which the skeptic reached his conclusions, be- 
 hold it is not clear nor unbiased ! It has been warped by 
 an evil life. His heart is restless, and dark, and desolate ; 
 else, why is that Sadducee trembling on Jordan's brink? 
 There is a something which they want, both Pharisee and 
 Sadducee, and they come to see if baptism will give it them. 
 Strangely moved indeed must those men have been ay, 
 shaken to the inmost soul before they could so contradict 
 their own profession as to acknowledge that there was a 
 hollowness in their hearts. We almost fancy we can stand 
 at the water's edge and hear the confession which was wrung 
 from their lips, hot-burning and choked with sobs, during the 
 single hour in which reality had forced itself upon their 
 soiils: "It is a lie ! we are not happy we are miserable 
 Prophet of the Invisible ! what hast thou got to tell us of 
 that awful other world ?" 
 
 For when man comes to front the everlasting God, and 
 look the splendor of His judgments in the face, personal in- 
 tegrity, the dream of spotlessness and innocence, vanish into 
 thin air: your decencies, and your church-goings, and your 
 regularities, and your attachment to a correct school and 
 party, your gospel formulas of sound doctrine what is all 
 that, in front of the blaze of the wrath to come ? 
 
 And skepticism too, how philosophical and manly soever 
 it may appear, will it rock the conscience with an everlast- 
 ing lullaby ? Will it make, with all its reasonings, the tooth 
 of the worm less sharp, and the fire less fierce that smoulders 
 inwardly? Let but the plain, true man speak. We ask 
 from him no rhetoric. We require no eloquence. Let him 
 but say, in his earnestness, Repent or Wrath to come, and 
 then what has infidelity to fall back upon ? 
 
 There is rest in this world nowhere except in Christ the 
 manifested love of God. Trust in excellence, and the better 
 you become, the keener is the feeling of deficiency. Wrap 
 up all in doubt, and there is a stern voice that will thunde' 1 
 at last out of the wilderness upon your dream. 
 
 A heart renewed- -a loving heart a penitent and humble 
 
T 10 Laiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 
 
 heart a heart broken and contrite, purified by love that 
 and only that is the rest of man. Spotlessness may do for 
 angels, repentance unto life is the highest that belongs to 
 man. 
 
 IX. 
 CAIAPHAS'S VIEW OF VICARIOUS SACRIFICE. 
 
 "And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high-priest that same 
 fear, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expe- 
 dient for us, ^hat one man should die for the people, and that the whole na- 
 tion perish not. And this spake he not of himself: but being high-priest 
 that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation ; and not for 
 that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children 
 of God that were scattered abroad. Then from that day forth they took 
 counsel together to put him to death." John xi. 49-53. 
 
 Ox this occasion, the first resolution passed the Jewish 
 Sanhedrim to compass the death of Jesus. The immediate 
 occasion of their meeting was the fame of the resurrection of 
 Lazarus. There were many causes which made the Saviour 
 obnoxious to the priests and Pharisees. If that teaching 
 wer-e once received, their reign was over : a teaching which 
 abolished the pretensions of a priesthood, by making every 
 man his own priest, to offer spiritual sacrifices to God 
 which identified religion with Goodness making spiritual 
 excellence, not ritual regularity, the righteousness which 
 God accepts which brought God within the reach of the 
 sinner and the fallen which simplified the whole matter by 
 making religion a thing of the heart, and not of rabbinical 
 learning or theology : such teaching swept away all the ex- 
 clusive pretensions of Pharisaism, made the life which they 
 had been building up with so much toil for years time 
 wasted, and reduced their whole existence to a lie. 
 
 This was the ground of their hatred to the Son of Man. 
 But this was not the ground which they put forward. He 
 was tried chiefly on the charge of treason against the Em- 
 peror; and the argument by which the mind of the judge 
 was principally swayed was, " If thou let this man go, thou 
 art not Cesar's friend." The present passage contains the 
 Hrst trace of the adoption of that ground. "If we let him 
 alone, the Romans will come and take away both our place 
 and nation." 
 
 Be it observed, then, the real ground of opposition was 
 natred of the light. The ostensible ground was patriotism, 
 
Caiaphas s View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 1 1 1 
 
 public zeal, loyalty, far-sighted policy ; and such is life. The 
 motive on which a deed of sin is done is not the motive 
 which a man allows to others, or whispers to himself. Listen 
 to the criminal receiving sentence, and the cause of condem- 
 nation is not the enormity of the crime, but the injustice of 
 the country's law. Hear the man of disorderly life, whom 
 society has expelled from her bosom, and the cause of the 
 expulsion is not his profligacy, but the false slander which 
 has misrepresented him. Take his own account of the 
 matter, and he is innocent injured pure. For there are 
 names so tender, and so full of fond endearment, with which 
 this world sugars over its dark guilt towards God, with a 
 crust of superficial whiteness, that the sin on which eighteen 
 centuries have looked back appalled was, to the doers of 
 that sin, nothing atrocious, but respectable, defensible, nay 
 even, under the circumstances, necessary. 
 
 The judgment of one of these righteous murderers was 
 given in remarkable terms. Apparently there were some in 
 the council, such mc^n as Nicodernus, who could not acquiesce 
 in the view given of the matter. Doubtless they alleged the 
 unfairness of the proceeding, and the innocence of the ac- 
 cused ; upon which Caiaphas replied, " Ye know nothing at 
 all, nor consider that it is expedient that one man die for the 
 people, and that the whole nation perish not." The remark- 
 able point in this judgment is, that it contained the very cen- 
 tral doctrine of Christianity : unconsciously, Caiaphas had 
 uttered the profoundest of all truths, the necessity, of the 
 innocent suffering for the guilty. He had stated it in the 
 very words which St. John could have himself adopted. But 
 they meant one thing in the lips of holy Love, and quite an- 
 otTier thing in the lips of tyrannical Policy. Yet St. John, 
 contemplating that sentence years after, could not but feel 
 that there was something in the words deeper than met the 
 ear a truth almost inspired, which he did not hesitate to 
 call prophetic. " Being high-priest that year, he prophesied." 
 
 We must not, therefore, call this merely a singular coinci- 
 dence. It was the same truth viewed from different sides: 
 the side of Caiaphas, and the side of John ; the side of the 
 world, and the side of God. That truth was the vicarious 
 sacrifice of "Christ. 
 
 And there are two ways in which you may contemplate 
 that sacrifice. Seen from the world's point of view, it is 
 unjust, gross, cruel. Seen as John saw it, and as God looks 
 at it, it was the sublimest of all truths ; one which so entwines 
 itself with our religious consciousness, that you might as soon 
 tear from us our very being, as our convictions of the reality 
 
112 Caiaphas s View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 
 
 of Christ's atonement. Our subject, then, is the vicarious 
 sacrifice of Christ. The words of Caiaphas contain a formal 
 falsehood and a material truth : the outward statement, and 
 an inspired or prophetic inward verity so that the subject 
 branches into two topics : 
 
 I. The human form, in which the words are false. 
 II. The divine principle or spirit, in which they are true. 
 
 I. The human form, in which the words are false. 
 
 Vicarious means in the stead of. When the Pope calls 
 himself the vicar of Christ, he means that he is empowered 
 in the stead of Christ to absolve, decree, etc. When we 
 speak of vicarious suffering, we mean that suffering which is 
 endured in another's stead, and not as the sufferer's own 
 desert. 
 
 1. The first falsity in the human statement of that truth of 
 vicarious sacrifice is its injustice. Some one said the accused 
 is innocent. The reply was, Better that one should die than 
 many. " It is expedient for us, that one man should die for 
 the people, and that the whole nation perish not" It was 
 simply with Caiaphas a question of numbers : the unjust ex- 
 pediency of wresting the law a little to do much apparent 
 good. The reply to that was plain. Expediency can not 
 obliterate right and wrong. Expediency may choose the 
 best possible when the conceivable best is not attainable ; 
 but in right and wrong there is no better and best. Thou 
 shall not do wrong. Thou must not : you may not tell a lie 
 to save life. Better that the whole Jewish nation should per- 
 ish, than that a Jewish legislature should steep its hand in 
 the blood of one innocent. It is not expedient to do injustice. 
 
 There are cases in which it is expedient to choose the sac- 
 rifice of one instead of that of many. When a whole army 
 or regiment has mutinied, the commander, instead of general 
 butchery, may select a few to perish as examples to the rest. 
 There is nothing here unjust. The many escape, but the few 
 who die deserve to die. But no principle could justify a 
 commander in selecting an innocent man, condemning him 
 by unjust sentence, and affecting to believe that he was 
 guilty, while the transgressors escaped, and learned the 
 enormity of their transgressions by seeing execution done 
 upon the guiltless. No principle can justify nothing can 
 do more than palliate the conduct of the ship's crew upon 
 the raft who slay one of their number to support their exist- 
 ence on his flesh. No man would justify the parent, pursued 
 in his chariot by wolves over Siberian snows, who throws out 
 one of his children to the pack, that the rest may escape 
 
Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 1 1 3 
 
 while their fangs are buried in their victim. You feel at 
 once expediency has no place here. Life is a trifle compared 
 with law. Better that all should perish by a visitation ol 
 God, than that they should be saved by one murder. 
 
 I do not deny that this aspect has been given to the sacri- 
 fice of Christ. It has been represented as if the majesty of 
 law demanded a victim : and, so as it glutted its insatiate 
 thirst, one victim would do as well as another the purer 
 and the more innocent the better. It has been exhibited as 
 if Eternal Love resolved in fury to strike, and so as He had 
 His blow, it mattered not whether it fell on the whole world, 
 or on the precious head of His own chosen Son. 
 
 Unitarianism has represented the Scriptural view in this 
 way, or, rather perhaps, we should say, it has been so repre- 
 sented to Unitarians and, from a view so horrible, no won- 
 der if Unitarianism has recoiled. But it is not our fault if 
 some blind defenders of the truth have converted the self-de- 
 votion of love into a Brahminical sacrifice. If the work of 
 redemption be defended by parallels drawn from the most 
 atrocious records and principles of heathenism, let not the 
 fault be laid upon the Bible. We disclaim that as well as 
 they. It makes God a Caiaphas. It makes Him adopt the 
 words of Caiaphas in the sense of Caiaphas.' It represents 
 Him in terms which better describe the ungoverned rage of 
 Saul, missing his stroke at David, who has offended, and in 
 disappointed fury dashing his javelin at his own son Jon- 
 athan. 
 
 You must not represent the Atonement as dependent on 
 the justice of unrighteous expediency. 
 
 2. This side of viewing the truth was the side of selfish- 
 ness. It was not even the calm resolve of men balancing 
 whether it be better for one to die or many, but whether it 
 is better that He or we should perish. It is conceivable in 
 the ca$e supposed above, that a parent in the horrible di- 
 lemma should be enough bewildered to resolve to sacrifice 
 one rather than lose all ; but it is not conceivable that the 
 doubt in his mind should be this Shall I and the rest per- 
 ish or this one ? yet this was the spirit in which the party 
 of Caiaphas spoke. "The Romans will come and take away 
 our place and our nation." 
 
 And this spirit, too, is in human nature. The records of 
 antiquity are full of it. If a fleet could not sail, it was as- 
 sumed that the deities were offended. The purest and ten- 
 derest maiden of the royal household was selected to bleed 
 upon the altar : and when the sharp knife passed to her in- 
 nocent heart, this was the feeling in the bosoms of those 
 
H4 Caiaphas s View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 
 
 stern and unrelenting warriors of the blood and of the 
 stock of Caiaphas Better she should suffer than we. 
 
 This may be the way in which the sacrifice of Christ is re- 
 garded by us. There is a kind of acquiescence in the Atone- 
 ment which is purely selfish. The more bloody the repre- 
 sentation of the character of God, the greater, of tonrse, the 
 satisfaction in feeling sheltered from it. The more wrath in- 
 stead of love is believed to be the Divine name, the more 
 may a man find joy in believing that he is safe. It is the 
 feeling of the Siberian story : the innocent has glutted the 
 wolves, and we may pursue our journey in safety. Christ 
 has suffered, and I am safe. He bore the agony I take the 
 reward : I may now live with impunity : and, of course, it is 
 very easy to call acquiescence in that arrangement humility, 
 and to take credit for the abnegation of self-righteousness : 
 but whoever can acquiesce in that thought chiefly in refer- 
 ence to personal safety, and, without desiring to share the 
 Redeemer's cross, aspire to enjoy the comforts and the bene- 
 fits of the Redeemer's sacrifice, has but something of the 
 spirit of Caiaphas after all, the spirit which contentedly sac- 
 rifices another for self selfishness assuming the form of wis- 
 dom. 
 
 II. We pass to the prophetic or hidden spirit in which 
 these words are true. 
 
 I observe, first, that vicarious sacrifice is the Law of Be- 
 ing. It is a mysterious and fearful thing to observe how all 
 God's universe is built upon this law, how it penetrates and 
 pervades all Nature, so that if it were to cease, Nature would 
 cease to exist. Hearken to the Saviour himself expounding 
 this principle : "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground 
 and die, it abideth alone : but if it die, it bringeth forth much 
 fruit." We are justified, therefore, in assuming the Law of 
 Nature to be the Law of His own Sacrifice, for He^ himself 
 represents it as the parallel. 
 
 Now observe this world of God's. The mountain-rock 
 must have its surface rusted into putrescence and become 
 dead soil before the herb can grow r . The destruction of the 
 mineral is the life of the vegetable. Again the same process 
 begins. The " corn of wheat dies," and out of death more 
 abundant life is born. Out of the soil in which deciduous 
 leaves are buried, the young tree shoots vigorously, and 
 strikes its roots deep down into the realm of decay and 
 death, Upon the life of the vegetable world, the myriad 
 forms of higher life sustain themselves still the same law : 
 the sacrifice of life to give life. Farther still: have we 
 
Caiaphas s View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 1 1 5 
 
 never pondered over that mystery of nature the dove 
 struck down by the hawk the deer trembling beneath the 
 stroke of the lion the winged fish falling into the jaws of 
 the dolphin ? It is the solemn law of vicarious sacrifice 
 again. And as often as man sees his table covered with the 
 flesh of animals slain, does he behold, whether he think of it 
 or not, the deep mystery and law of being. They have sur- 
 rendered their innocent lives that he may live. 
 
 Nay, farther still : it is as impossible for man to live as it 
 is for man to be redeemed, except through vicarious suffer- 
 in o\ The anguish of the mother is the condition of the 
 child's life. His very being has its roots in the law of sacri- 
 fice ; and from his birth onward, instinctively this becomes 
 the law which rules his existence. There is no blessing 
 which was ever enjoyed by man which did not corne 
 through this. There was never a country cleared for civili- 
 zation, and purified of its swamps and forests, but the first 
 settlers paid the^ penalty of that which their successors en- 
 joy. There never was a victory won, but the conquerors 
 who took possession of the conquest passed over the bodies 
 of the noblest slain, who died that they might win. 
 
 Now observe, all this is the law obeyed, either uncon- 
 sciously or else instinctively. But in the redemption of our 
 humanity, a moment comes, when that law is recognized as 
 the will of God adopted consciously, and voluntarily obeyed 
 as the law of man's existence. Then it is that man's true 
 nobleness, his only possible blessedness, and his redemption 
 from blind instincts and mere selfishness, begin. You may 
 evade that law you may succeed in living as Caiaphas did, 
 sacrificing others instead of yourself and men will call you 
 wise, and prudent, and respectable. But you are only a 
 Caiaphas : redeemed you are not. Your proper humanity 
 has not begun. 
 
 The highest Man recognized that law, and joyfully em- 
 braced it as the law of His existence. It was the conscious- 
 ness of His surrender to that as God's will, and the voluntari- 
 ness of the act, which made it sacrifice. Hear Him : " No 
 man taketh my life from me. I have power to lay it down, 
 and I have power to take it up again." " This command- 
 ment have I received from my Father." Had he been by 
 the wiles of Caiaphas simply surprised and dragged strug- 
 gling and reluctant to doom, He would have been a victim, 
 but not a sacrifice; He would have been an object of our 
 compassion, but by no means of our admiring wonder. It 
 was the foresight of all the result of His opposition to the 
 world's sin, and His steady uncompromising battle against 
 
1 1 6 Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 
 
 it notwithstanding, in every one of its forms, knowing that 
 He must be its victim at the last, which prevented His death 
 from being merely the death of a lamb slain unconsciously on 
 Jewish altars, and elevated it to the dignity of a true and 
 proper sacrifice. 
 
 We go beyond this, however. It was not merely a sacri- 
 fice, it was a sacrifice for sin. " His soul was made an offer- 
 ing for sin." Neither was it only a sacrifice for sin it was 
 a sacrifice for the world's sin. In the text, " that Jesus 
 should die for that nation ; and not for that nation only, but 
 that also He should gather together in one the children of 
 God that were scattered abroad." 
 
 Two ideas are necessaiy to be distinctly apprehended by 
 us in order to understand that : the first is the notion of 
 punishment, the second is the idea of the world's sin. 
 
 By punishment is simply meant the penalty annexed to 
 transgression of a law. Punishment is of two kinds : the 
 penalty which follows ignorant transgression, and the chas- 
 tisement which ensues upon willful disobedience. The first 
 of these is called imputed guilt, the second is actual guilt. 
 By imputed guilt is meant, in theological language, that a 
 person is treated as if he were guilty : if, for example, you ap- 
 proach too near the whirling w T heel of steam machinery, the 
 mutilation which follows is the punishment of temerity. If 
 the traveller ignorantly lays his hand on the cockatrice's 
 den, the throb of the envenomed fang is the punishment of 
 his ignorance. He has broken a law of nature, and the guilt 
 of the infection is imputed to him ; there is penalty, but there 
 is none of the chastisement which follows sin. His conscience 
 is not made miserable. He only suffers. 
 
 Farther, according to the constitution of this world, it is 
 not only our own transgressions of ignorance, but besides, 
 the faults of others, which bring pain and sorrow on us. The 
 man of irritable and miserably nervous temperament owes 
 that often to a father's intemperance. Many a man has to 
 straggle all his life with the penury which he reaps as th 
 harvest of a distant ancestor's extravagance. In the stride* 
 sense of the word, these are punishments the consequences 
 annexed to transgression : and, in the language of theology, 
 they are called imputed guilt. But there~is an all-important 
 distinction between them and the chastisements of personal 
 iniquity. If a man suffer ill health or poverty as the results 
 of his own misconduct, his conscience forces him to refer thia 
 to the wrath of God. He is reaping as he had sown, and 
 the miseries of conscious fault are added to his penalty. 
 But if such things come as the penalty of the wrong of oth- 
 
Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice. \ 1 7 
 
 ers, then, philosophically though you may call them punish' 
 ment, in the popular sense of the word they are no punish- 
 ments at all, but rather corrective discipline, nay, even rich- 
 est blessings, if they are received from a Father's hand, and 
 transmuted by humbleness into the means of spiritual 
 growth. 
 
 Apply all this to the sacrifice of Christ. Let ho man say 
 that Christ bore the wrath of God. Let no man say that 
 God was angry with His Son. We are sometimes told of a 
 mysterious anguish which Christ endured, the consequence 
 of Divine wrath, the sufferings of a heart laden with the 
 conscience of the world's transgressions which He was bear- 
 ing as if they were His own sins. Do not add to the Bible 
 what is not in the Bible. The Redeemer's conscience was 
 not bewildered to feel that as His own which was not His 
 own. He suffered no wrath of God. Twice came the voice 
 from heaven, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well 
 pleased.' 1 '' There was seen an angel strengthening Him. 
 Nay, even to the last, never did the consciousness of purity 
 and the Father's love forsake Him. "Father, into Thy 
 hands I commend my spirit." 
 
 Christ came into collision with the world's evil, and He 
 bore the penalty of that daring. He approached the whirl- 
 ing wheel, and was torn in pieces. He laid His hand upon 
 the cockatrice's den, and its fangs pierced Him. It is the 
 law which governs the conflict with evil. It can be only 
 
 crushed by suffering from it The Son of man who 
 
 puts His naked foot on the serpent's head, crushes it: but 
 the fang goes into His heel. 
 
 The Redeemer bore imputed sin. He bore the penalty of 
 others' sin. He was punished. Did He bear the anger of 
 the Most High ? Was His the hell of an accusing con- 
 science ? In the name of Him who is God, not Caiaphas, 
 never. Something more, however, is necessary to complete 
 our notion of punishment. It is a right estimate of law. 
 We are apt to think of punishment as something quite arbi- 
 trary, which can be remitted or changed at will. Hence we 
 almost always connect it with the idea of wrath ; hence, the 
 heathen tried to bribe and coax their deities to spare ; and 
 hence the sacrifice of Christ comes to be looked upon in the 
 light of a sagacious or ingenious contrivance, a mere 
 " scheme " of redemption. 
 
 Now remember what law is. The moral laws of this uni- 
 verse are as immutable as God Himself. Law is the Being 
 of God. God can not alter those laws : He can not make 
 wrong right. He can not make truth falsehood s nor 
 
\ 
 
 1 1 8 Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice- 
 
 hood truth. He can not make sin blessed, nor annex hell to 
 innocence. Law moves on its majestic course irresistible. 
 If His chosen Son violates law, and throws Himself from the 
 pinnacle, He dies. If you resist a law of the universe in its 
 eternal march, the universe crushes you, that is all. Consid- 
 er what law is, and then the idea of bloody vengeance passes 
 away altogether from the sacrifice. It is not " an eye for an 
 eye," and " a tooth for a tooth," in the sanguinary spirit of 
 the old retaliatory legislation. It is the eternal impossibility 
 of violating that law of the universe whereby penalty is an- 
 nexed to transgression, and must fall, either laden with curse 
 or rich in blessing. 
 
 The second idea which it behooves us to master is that of 
 the world's sin. The Apostle John always viewed sin as a 
 great connected principle One; a single world-spirit ex- 
 actly as the electricity with which the universe is charged is 
 indivisible, imponderable, one, so that you can not sepa- 
 rate it from the great ocean of fluid. The electric spark 
 that slumbers in the dew-drop is part of the flood which 
 struck the oak. Had that spark not been there, it could be 
 demonstrated that the whole previous constitution of the 
 universe might have been different, and the oak not have 
 been struck. 
 
 Let us possess ourselves of this view of sin, for it is the 
 true one. Separate acts of sin are but manifestations of one 
 * great principle. It was thus that the Saviour looked on the 
 sins of His day. The Jews of that age had had no hand in 
 the murder of Abel or Zacharias, but they were of kindred 
 spirit with the men who slew them. Condemning their 
 murderers, they imitated their act. In that imitation they 
 " allowed the deeds of their fathers ;" they shared in the 
 guilt of the act which had been consummated, because they 
 had the spirit which led to it. " The blood of them all shall 
 come on this generation." It was so, too, that Stephen look- 
 ed on the act of his assassins. When God's glory streamed 
 upon his face, he felt that the transaction going on then was 
 not simply the violence of a mob in an obscure corner of the 
 world, it was an outbreak of the great principle of evil. He 
 saw in their act the resurrection of the spirit of those who 
 tad " resisted the Holy Ghost " in their day, slain the proph- 
 ets, opposed Moses, crucified " the just one," and felt that 
 their genuine descendants were now opposing themselves to 
 the form in which Truth and Goodness were appearing in 
 his day. 
 
 It is in this way only that you will be able, with any reali 
 ty of feeling, to enter into the truth that " your sins nailed 
 
Caiaphass View of Vicarious Sacrifice. 1 1 q 
 
 Him to the cross ;" that " the Lord hath laid on "Him the in- 
 iquity of us all ;" that He died " not for that nation only, 
 but that also He should gather together in one the children 
 of God that were scattered abroad." If, for instance, indis- 
 putable evidence be given of the saintliness of a man wiiose 
 creed and views are not yours, and rather than admit that 
 good in him is good, you invent all manner of possible mo- 
 tives to discredit his excellence, then let the thought arise, 
 This is the resurrection of the spirit which was rampant in 
 the days of Jesus ; the spirit of those who saw the purest 
 goodness, and rather than acknowledge it to be good, prefer- 
 red to account for it as a diabolical power. Say to yourself, 
 I am verging on the spirit of the sin that was unpardonable, 
 I am crucifying the Son of God afresh. 
 
 If in society you hear the homage unrebuked Honor to 
 the rich man's splendid offering, instead of glory to the wid- 
 ow's humble mite if you see the weak- and defenseless pun- 
 ished severely for the sins which the great and strong do un- 
 blushingly, and even with the connivance and, admiration of 
 society if you find sins of frailty placed on the same level 
 with sins of pride and presumption or it you find guilt of 
 any kind palliated instead of mourned, then let the dreadful 
 thought arise in the fullness of its meaning I allow the deeds ./ 
 of those days His blood shall come upon this generation.^' 
 My sin and your sin, the sin of all, bears the guilt of the Re- >. 
 deemer's sacrifice. It was vicarious He suffered for what 
 He never did. " Not for that nation only, but that also He 
 should gather together in one the children of God that were 
 scattered abroad." 
 
 To conclude : estimate rightly the death of Christ. It was 
 not simply the world's example it was the world's Sacrifice. 
 He died not merely as a martyr to the truth. His death is 
 the world's life. Ask ye what life is ? Life is not exemption 
 from penalty. Salvation is not escape from suffering and 
 punishment. The Redeemer suffered punishment, but the Re- 
 deemer's soul had blessedness in the very midst of punish- 
 ment. Life*is elevation of soul nobleness Divine charac- 
 ter. The spirit of Caiaphas was death : to receive all, and 
 give nothing to sacrifice others to himself. The spirit of 
 Christ was life: to give and not receive to be sacrificed, 
 and not to sacrifice. Hear Him again : " He that loseth his 
 life, the same shall find it." That is life : the spirit of losing 
 all for love's sake. That is the soul's life which alone ia 
 blessedness and heaven. By realizing that ideal of humani- 
 ty, Christ furnished the life which we appropriate to oui> 
 selves only when we enter into His spirit. 
 
I2O Realizing the Second Advent. 
 
 Listen : Only by renouncing sin is His death to sin yours 
 only by quitting it are you free from the guilt of His blood 
 only by voluntary acceptance of the law of the Cross, self- 
 surrender to the will of God, and self-devotion to the good 
 of others as the law of your being, do you enter into that 
 present and future heaven which is the purchase of His vica- 
 rious sacrifice. 
 
 REALIZING THE SECOND ADVENT. 
 
 "For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand gt the lat- 
 ter day upon the earth : And though after my skin worms destroy this body, 
 yet in'my flesh shall I see God : Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes 
 shall behold, and not another ; though my reins be consumed within me. " 
 Job xix. 25-27. 
 
 THE hardest, the severest, the last lesson which man has 
 to learn upon this earth, is submission to the will of God. It 
 is the hardest lesson, because to our blinded eye-sight it often 
 seems a cruel will. It is a severe lesson, because it can be 
 only taught by the blighting of much that had been most 
 dear. It is the last lesson, because when a man has learned 
 that, he is fit to be transplanted from a world of willfulness 
 to a world in which one will alone is loved, and only one is 
 done. All that saintly experience ever had to teach resolves 
 itself into this, the lesson how to say affectionately, "Not as 
 I will, but as Thou wilt." Slowly and stubbornly our hearts 
 acquiesce in that. The holiest in this congregation, so far as 
 he has mastered the lesson, will acknowledge that many a 
 sore and angry feeling against his God had to be subdued, 
 many a dream of earthly brightness broken, and many a 
 burning throb stilled in a proud, resentful heart, before he 
 was willing to suffer God to be sovereign in His own world, 
 and do with him and his as seemed to Him best. 
 
 The earliest record that we have of this struggle in the. 
 human bosom is found in the Book of Job. It is the most 
 ancient statement we have of the perplexities and miseries 
 of life, so graphic, so time to nature, that it proclaims at once 
 that what we are reading is drawn not from romance but 
 life. It has been said that religious experience is but the fic- 
 titious creation of a polished age, when fanciful feelings are 
 called into existence by hearts bent ua,ck in reflex and mor- 
 bid action on themselves. We have an answer to that in 
 this book. Religion is no morbid fancy. In the rough, rude 
 
Realizing the Second Advent. 121 
 
 ages when Job lived, when men did not dwell on their feel- 
 ings as in later centuries, the heart-work of religion was 
 manifestly the same earnest, passionate thing that it is now. 
 The heart's misgivings were the same beneath the tent of an 
 Arabian Emir which they are beneath the roof of a modern 
 Christian. Blow after blow fell on the Oriental chieftain. 
 One day he was a father a prince the lord of many vas- 
 sals and many flocks, and buoyant in one of the best of bless- 
 ings, health ; the next, he was a childless, blighted, ruined 
 man. And then it was that there came from Job's lips those 
 yearnings for the quiet of the grave which are so touching, 
 so real; and, considering that some of the strongest of the 
 elect of God have yielded to them for a moment, we might 
 almost say, so pardonable : " I should have been at rest 
 where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at 
 rest. There the prisoners rest together : they hear nbt the 
 voice of the oppressor. Wherefore is light given unto him 
 that is in misery, and life unto the bitter of soul which 
 long for death, but it cometh not, and dig for it more than 
 for hid treasures which rejoice exceedingly and are glad 
 when they can find the grave ?" 
 
 What is the Book of Job but the record of an earnest soul's 
 perplexities ? The double difficulty of life solved there, the 
 existence of moral evil the question whether suffering is a 
 mark of wrath or not. What falls from Job's lips is the 
 musing of a man half-stunned, half-surprised, looking out 
 upon the darkness of life, and asking sorrowfully why are 
 these things so ? And all that falls from his friends' lips is 
 the common-place remarks of men upon what is inscrutable 
 maxims learned second-hand by rote and not by heart, frag-, 
 ments of deep truths, but truths misapplied, distorted, torn 
 out of all connection of time and place, so as to become ac- 
 tual falsehoods : only blistering a raw wound. 
 
 It was from these awkward admonitions that Job appealed 
 in the text. He appealed from the tribunal of man's opinion 
 to a tribunal where sincerity shall be cleared and vindicated. 
 He appealed from a world of confusion, where all the foun- 
 dations of the earth are out of course, to a world where all 
 shall be set right. He appealed from the dark dealings of a 
 God whose way it is to hide Himself, to a God who shall 
 stand upon this earth in the clear radiance of a love on 
 which suspicion's self can not rest a doubt. It was faith 
 straining through the mist, and discerning the firm land that 
 is beyond. " I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He 
 shall stand at the latter day upon the earth." We take two 
 points ; 
 
 6 
 
122 Realizing the Second Advent. 
 
 I. The certainty of God's interference in the affairs of this 
 world. 
 
 II. The means of realizing that interference. 
 
 God's interference, again, is contemplated in this passage 
 in a twofold aspect : A present superintendence " I know 
 that my Redeemer liveth." A future, personal, visible inter 
 ference "He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth, 1 * 
 
 I. His present superintendence, 
 
 1. The first truth contained in that is God's personal ex- 
 istence. It is not chance, nor fate, which sits at the wheel 
 of this world's revolutions. It was no fortuitous concourse of 
 atoms which massed themselves into a world of beauty. It 
 was no accidental train of circumstances which has brought 
 the human race to their present state. It was a living God, 
 And it is just so far as this is the conviction of every day, 
 and every hour, and every minute " My Kedeemer liveth " 
 that one man deserves to be called more religious than anoth- 
 er. To be religious is to feel that God is the Ever Near. It 
 is to go through life with this thought coming instinctively 
 and unbidden, "Thou, God, seest me." A life of religion is 
 a life of faith : and faith is that strange faculty by which man 
 feels the presence of the invisible ; exactly as some animals 
 have the power of seeing in the dark. That is the difference 
 between the Christian and the world. 
 
 . Most men know nothing beyond what they see. Tin's love- 
 ly world is all in all to them : its outer beauty, not its hidden 
 loveliness. Prosperity struggle sadness it is all the same. 
 They struggle through it al! alone, and when old age comes, 
 nd the companions of early days are gone, they feel that they 
 are solitary. In all this strange, deep world they never meet, 
 or but for a moment, the Spirit of it all, who stands at their 
 very side. And it is exactly the opposite of this that makes 
 a Christian. Move where he will, there is a Thought and 
 Presence which he can not put aside. He is haunted forever 
 by the Eternal Mind. God looks out upon him from the clear 
 sky, and through the thick darkness is present in the rain- 
 drop that trickles down the branches, and in the tempest that 
 crashes down the forest. A living Redeemer stands beside 
 him goes with him talks with him, as a man with his friend. 
 The emphatic description of a life of spirituality is: "Enoch 
 walked with God :" and it seems to be one reason why a 
 manifestation of God was given us in the flesh, that this liv- 
 ingness of God might be more distinctly felt by us, 
 
 We must not throw into these words of Job a meaning 
 which Job had not. Reading these verses, some have 
 
Realizing the Second Advent. 123 
 
 covered in them all the Christian doctrine of the Second Ad' 
 i cut of a Resurrection of the Humanity of Christ. This 
 is simply an anachronism. Job was an Arabian Emir, not a 
 Christian. All that Job meant by these words was, that he 
 knew he had a vindicator in God above: that though his 
 friends had the best of it then, and though worms were prey- 
 ing on his flesh, yet at last God Himself would interfere to 
 prove his innocence. But God has given to us, for our faith 
 to rest on, something more distinct and tangible than He 
 gave to Job. There has been One on earth through whose 
 lips God's voice spoke, and from whose character was reflect- 
 ed the character of God. A living Person manifesting Deity. 
 It is all this added meaning gained from Christ with which 
 we use thes'e words: "I know that my Redeemer liveth." 
 But we must remember that all that was not revealed to Job. 
 
 2. The second truth implied in the personal existence of a 
 Redeemer is sympathy. It was the keenest part of Job's 
 trial that no heart beat pulse to pulse with his. His friends 
 misunderstood him ; and his wife, in a moment of atheistic 
 bitterness, in the spirit of our own infidel poet, " Let no man 
 say that God in mercy gave that stroke," addressed him thus : 
 "Curse God and die." In the midst of this, it seems to have 
 risen upon his heart with a strange power to soothe, that he 
 was not alone : gall and bitterness were distilling from the 
 lips of man, and molten lead was dropping from the hand of 
 God. But there was a great difference between the two in- 
 flictions. Men were doiii^ their work, unknowing of the pain 
 they gave : God was meting out His in the scales of a most 
 exquisite compassion, not one drop too much, and every drop 
 that fell had a meaning of love in it. " Affliction," said the 
 tried man, "cometh not out of the dust, neither doth trouble 
 spring out of the ground " superintending all this, " I know 
 that my Redeemer liveth." 
 
 And here there is one word full of meaning, from which we 
 collect the truth of sympathy. It is that little word of ap- 
 propriation, " my " Redeemer. Power is shown by God's at- 
 tention to the vast ; sympathy by His condescension to the 
 small. It is not the thought of heaven's sympathy by which 
 we are impressed, when we gaze through the telescope on the 
 mighty world of space, and gain an idea of what is meant by 
 infinite. Majesty and power are there, but the very vastness 
 excludes the thought of sympathy. It is when we look into 
 the world of insignificance which the microscope reveals, and 
 find that God has gorgeously painted the atoms of creation, 
 and exquisitely furnished forth all that belongs to minutest 
 life, that we feel that God sympathizes and individualizes. 
 
124 Realizing the Second Advent* 
 
 When we are told that God is the Redeemer of the 
 we know that lovfc dwells in the bosom of the Most High ; 
 but if we want to know that God feels for us individually 
 and separately, we must learn by heart this syllable of en- 
 dearment, "My Redeemer." Child of God, if you would 
 have your thought of God something beyond a cold feeling 
 of His presence, let faith appropriate Christ. You are as much 
 the object of God's solicitude as if none lived but yourself. 
 He has counted the hairs of your head. In Old Testament 
 language, " He has put your tears into His bottle." He has 
 numbered your sighs and your smiles. He has interpreted 
 the desires for which you have not found a name nor an ut- 
 terance yourself. If you have not learned to say, "My Re- 
 deemer," then just so far as there is any thing tender or affec- 
 tionate in your disposition, you will tread the path of your 
 pilgrimage with a darkened and a lonely heart; and when 
 the day of trouble comes, there will be none of that triumph- 
 ant elasticity which enabled Job to look down, as from a 
 rock, upon the surges- which were curling their crests of fury 
 at his feet, but could only reach his bosom with their spent 
 spray. 
 
 3. The third thing implied in the present superintendence 
 is God's vindication of wrongs. The word translated here 
 Redeemer is one of quite peculiar signification. In all the 
 early stages of society the redress of wrongs is not a public, 
 but a private act. It was then as now blood for blood. 
 But the executioner of the law was invested with something 
 of a sacred character. Now he is the mere creature of a 
 country's law, then he was the delegated hand of God ; for 
 the next of kin to the murdered man stood forward solemnly 
 in God's name as the champion of the defenseless, the goel, or 
 Avenger of Blood. Goel is the word here : so that, trans- 
 lated into the language of those far-back days, Job was pro- 
 fessing his conviction that there was a champion or an 
 Avenger, who would one day do battle for his wrongs. 
 
 It is a fearful amount of this kind of work which is in ar- 
 rear for the Avenger to execute, accumulating century by 
 century, and year by year. From the days of Cain and Abel 
 there have been ever two classes : the oppressor and the op- 
 pressed; the gentle humble ones who refuse to right them- 
 selves, and the unscrupulous who force them aside. The 
 Church has ever had the world against it. The world struck 
 its first deadly blow by the hand of Cain, and it has been 
 striking ever since: from the battle-field, and the martyr's 
 stake, and the dungeons of the Inquisition, and the prisons 
 of the lordly tyrant, the blood of the innocent has cried fo! 
 
Realizing the Second Advent. 125 
 
 vengeance. By taunt and sneer, the world has had her tri- 
 umph. And the servants of the Meekest have only had this 
 to cheer them, " I know that my Redeemer liveth." 
 
 There is a persecution sharper than that of the axe. There 
 is an iron that goes into the heart deeper than the knife. 
 Cruel sneers, and sarcasms, and pitiless judgments, and cold- 
 hearted calumnies these are persecution. There is the ty- 
 rant of the nursery, and the play-ground, and the domestic 
 circle, as well as of the judgment-hall. "Better were it," 
 said the Redeemer, " for that man ii a millstone had been 
 hanged about his neck." Did you ever do that ? Did you 
 ever pour bitterness into a heart that God was bruising, by a 
 cold laugh, or a sneer, or a galling suspicion into a sister's 
 heart, or a friend's, or even a stranger's ? Remember when 
 you sent them, as Job's friends sent him, to pour out their 
 griefs alone before their Father, your name went up to the 
 Avenger's ears, mingled with the cries of His own elect. 
 
 There is a second mode in which God interferes in this 
 world's affairs. There is a present superintendence perceived 
 by faith ? but there is a future redress which will be made 
 manifest to sight. "He shall stand at the latter day upon 
 the earth." I shall see Him. 
 
 First of all, there will be a visible, personal interference. 
 All that Job meant was in the case of his own wrongs. But 
 if we use those words, we must apply them in a higher sense. 
 The Second Advent of Christ is supposed by some to mean 
 an appearance of Jesus in the flesh to reign and triumph vis- 
 ibly. Others who feel that the visual perception of His form 
 would be a small blessing, and that the highest and truest 
 presence is always spiritual and realized by the Spirit, believe 
 that His advent will be a coming in power. We will not 
 dispute : controversy whets the intellect, and only starves, or 
 worse, poisons the heart. We will take what is certain. 
 Every signal manifestation of the right, and vindication of 
 the truth in judgment, is called in Scripture a coming of the 
 Son of Man. A personal advent of the Redeemer is one 
 which can be perceived by foes as well as recognized by 
 friends. The destruction of Jerusalem, recognized by the 
 heathen themselves as judgment, is called in the Bible a com- 
 ing of Christ. In the Deluge, in the destruction of the cities 
 of the plain, in the confusion of tongues, God is said to have 
 come down to visit the earth. There are two classes, then, 
 who shall see that sight. Men like Job, who feel that their 
 Redeemer liveth ; and men like Balaam, from whose lips 
 words of truth, terrible to him, came : " I shall see Him, but 
 not now ; I shall behold Him, but not nigh." " Every eye 
 
126 Realizing the Second Advent. 
 
 shall see Him." You will see the triumph of the right the 
 destruction of the wrong. The awful question is, As Balaam 
 or as Job ? 
 
 Besides this, it will be unexpected : every judgment com- 
 ing of Christ is as the springing of a mine. There is a mo- 
 ment of deep suspense after the match has been applied to 
 the fuse which is to fire the train. Men stand at a distance, 
 and hold their breath. There is nothing seen but a thin, 
 small column of white smoke, rising fainter and fainter, till it 
 seems to die away. Then men breathe again ; and the inex- 
 perienced soldier would approach the place thinking that the 
 thing has been a failure. It is only faith in the experience of 
 the commander, or the veterans, which keeps men from hur- 
 rying to the spot again till just when expectation has be- 
 gun to die away, the low, deep thunder sends up the column 
 of earth majestically to heaven, and all that was on it comes 
 crushing down again in its far circle, shattered and blacken- 
 ed with the blast. 
 
 It is so with the world. By God's word the world is doom 
 ed. The moment of suspense is past : the first centuries, in 
 which men expected the convulsion to take place at once; 
 for even apostles were looking for it in their lifetime. We 
 have fallen upon days of skepticism. There are no signs of 
 ruin yet. We tread upon it like a solid thing fortified by its 
 adamantine hills forever. There is nothing against that but 
 a few words in a printed book. But the world is mined : and 
 the spark has fallen ; and just at the moment when serenity 
 is at its height, " the heaven shall pass away with a great 
 noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat," and the 
 feet of the Avenger shall stand on the earth. 
 
 II. The means of realizing this interference. 
 
 There is a difference between knowing a thing and realiz- 
 ing it. When a poor man becomes suddenly the possessor of 
 a fortune or of dignity, it is some time before the thing be- 
 comes so natural to him that he can act in his new sphere 
 like his proper self: it is all strangeness at first. When the 
 criminal hears the death-sentence in the dock, his cheeks are 
 tearless. He hears the words, but scarcely understands that 
 they have any thing to do with him. He has not realized 
 that it is he himself that has to die. When bereavement 
 comes, it is not at the moment when the breath leaves the 
 body that we feel what has been lost : we know, but yet we 
 must have it in detail: see the empty chair, and the clothes 
 that will never be worn again, and perceive day after day 
 pass, and he comes not : then we realize. 
 
Realizing the Second Advent* ' 127 
 
 ,fot> finew that God was the vindicator of wrongs that he 
 But why did he go on repeating in every possible form 
 the same thing : u I shall see God see him for myself mine 
 eyes shall behold Him yes, mine and not another's?" It 
 would seem as if he were doing what a man does when he 
 repeats over and over to himself a thing which he can not 
 picture out in its reality. It was true: but it was strange, 
 and shadowy, and unfamiliar. 
 
 It is no matter of uncertainty to any one of us whether he 
 himself shall die. He knows it. Every time the funeral bell 
 tolls, the thought in some shape suggests itself, I am a mor- 
 tal, dying man. That is knowing it. Which of us has real- 
 ized it ? Who can shut his eyes, and bring it before him as a 
 reality, that the day will come when the hearse will stand at 
 the door for him, and that all this bright world will be going 
 on without him; and that the very "flesh which now walks 
 about so complacently, will have the coffin-lid shut down 
 upon it, and be left to darkness, and loneliness, and silence, 
 and the worm ? Or take a case still more closely suggested 
 by the text out of the grave we must arise again long after 
 all that is young, and strong, and beautiful before me shall 
 have mouldered into forgetfulness. Earth shall hear her 
 Master's voice breaking the long silence of the centuries, and 
 our dust shall hear it, and stand up among the myriads that 
 are moving on to judgment. Each man in his own proper 
 identity, his very self, must see God, and be seen by Him 
 looking out on the strange new scene, and doomed to be an 
 actor in it for all eternity. We all know that on which of 
 our hearts is it stamped, not as a doctrine to be proved 
 texts, but as one of those things which must be hereafter, 
 in sight of which we are to live now ? 
 
 There are two ways suggested to us by this passage for 
 realizing these things. The first of these is meditation. No 
 man forgets what the mind has dwelt long on. It is not by 
 a passing glance that things become riveted in the memory. 
 It is by forcing the memory to call them up again and again 
 in leisure hours. It is in the power of meditation to bring 
 danger in its reality so vividly before the imagination that 
 the whole frame can start instinctively as if the blow were 
 falling, or as if the precipice were near. It is in the power 
 of meditation so to engrave scenes of loveliness on a painter's 
 eye that he transfers to the canvas a vivid picture that was 
 real to him before it was real to others. It is in the power 
 of meditation so to abstract the soul from all that is passing 
 before the bodily eye, that the tongue shall absently speak 
 out the words with which the heart was full, not knowing 
 
128 * Realizing the Second Advent. 
 
 that others are standing b'y. It seems to have been this that 
 Job was doing he was realizing by meditation. You can 
 scarcely read over these words without fancying them the 
 syllables of a man who was thinking aloud. 
 
 It is like a soliloquy rather than a conversation. " I shal] 
 see him." Myself. Not another. My own eyes. 
 
 This is what we want. It is good for a man to get alone, 
 and then in silence think upon his own death, and feel how 
 time is hurrying him along : that a little while ago, and he 
 was not a little while still, and he will be no more. It is 
 good to take the Bible in his hands, and read those passages 
 at this season of the year which speak of the Coining and the 
 End of all, till from the printed syllables there seems to come 
 out something that has life, and form, and substance in it, 
 and all things that are passing in the world group themselves 
 in preparation for that, and melt into its outline. Let us try 
 to live with these things in view. God our Friend Christ 
 our living Redeemer ; our sympathizing Brother ; our con- 
 quering Champion : the triumph of truth, the end of wrong. 
 We shall live upon realities then : and this world will fade 
 away into that which we know it is, but yet can not .realize 
 an appearance, and a shadow. 
 
 Lastly, God insures that His children shall realize all this 
 by affliction. Job had admitted these things before, but this 
 time he spoke from the ashes on which he was writhing. 
 And if ever a man is sincere, it is when he is in pain. If 
 ever that superficial covering of conventionalities falls from 
 the soul, which gathers round it as the cuticle does upon the 
 &ody, and the rust upon the metal, it is when men are suffer- 
 ing. There are many things which nothing but sorrow can 
 teach us. Sorrow is the great teacher. Sorrow is the real- 
 izer. It is a strange and touching thing to hear the young 
 speak truths which are not yet within the limits of their ex- 
 perience : to listen while they say that life is sorrowful, that 
 friends are treacherous, that there is quiet in the grave. 
 When we are boys we adopt the phrases that we hear. In a 
 kind of prodigal excess of happiness, we say that the world is 
 a dream, and life a nothing that eternity lasts forever, and 
 that all here is disappointment. But there comes a day of 
 sharpness, when we find >to our surprise that what we said 
 had a meaning in it, and we are startled. That is the senti- 
 mentalism of youth passing into reality. In the lips of the 
 young such phrases are only sentimentalities. What we 
 mean by sentimentalism is that state in which a man speaks 
 things deep and true, not because he feels them strongly, but 
 because he perceives that they are beautifu! 3 and that U is 
 
Realizing the Second Advent. 129 
 
 touching and fine to say them things which he fain would 
 feel, and fancies that he does feel. Therefore, when all is 
 well, when friends abound, and health is strong, and the com- 
 forts of life are around us, religion becomes faint and shad- 
 owy. Religious phraseology passes into cant the gay, and 
 light, and trilling use the same words as the holiest ; till the 
 earnest man, who feels what the world is sentimentalizing 
 about, shuts up his heart, and either coins other phrases or 
 else keeps silence. 
 
 And then it is that if God would rescue a man from that 
 unreal world of names and mere knowledge, He does what he 
 did with Job He strips him of his flocks, and his herds, and 
 his wealth ; or else, what is the equivalent, of the power of 
 enjoying them the desire of his eyes falls from him at a 
 stroke. Things become real then. Trial brings man face to 
 face with God God and he touch; and the flimsy veil of 
 bright cloud that hung between him and the sky is blown 
 away : he feels that he is standing outside the earth with 
 nothing between him and the Eternal Infinite. Oh, there is 
 something in the sick-bed, and the aching heart, and the rest- 
 lessness and the languor of shattered health, and the sorrow 
 of affections withered, and the stream of life poisoned at its 
 fountain, and the cold, lonely feeling of utter rawness of heart 
 which is felt when God strikes home in earnest, that forces a 
 man to feel what is real and what is not. 
 
 This is the blessing of affliction to those who will lie still 
 and not struggle in a cowardly or a resentful way. It is 
 God speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, and saying, In 
 the sunshine and the warmth you can not meet Me : but in 
 the hurricane and the darkness, when wave after wave, has 
 swept down and across the soul, you shall see My form, and 
 hear My voice, and know that your Redeemer liveth. 
 
 6* 
 
1 30 First Advent Lecture. 
 
 XI. 
 FIRST ADVENT LECTURE. 
 
 THE GRECIAN. 
 
 " I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians ; both to the wise, 
 ind to the unwise. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gos. 
 pel to you that are at Rome also. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of 
 Christ : for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believe; li ; 
 to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the lighteouHi .-> ( 
 God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall In l.y 
 faith." Rom. i. 14-17. 
 
 THE season of Advent commemorates three facts. 1. 
 That the Lord has come. 2. That He is perpetually coming. 
 8. That He will yet come in greater glory than has yet ap- 
 peared. And these are the three Advents: The first in the 
 flesh, which is past ; the second in the spirit ; the third, His 
 judgment advent. 
 
 The first occupies our attention in these lectures. 
 
 We live surrounded by Christian institutions ; breathe an 
 atmosphere saturated by Christianity. It is exceedingly 
 difficult even to imagine another state of things. In the en- 
 joyment of domestic purity, it is difficult to conceive the de- 
 basing effects of polygamy; in the midst of political liber- 
 ty, to conceive of the blighting power of slavery ; in scien- 
 tific progress, to imagine mental stagnation ; in religious lib- 
 erty and free goodness, to fancy the reign of superstition. 
 
 Yet to realize the blessings of health we must sit by the 
 sick-bed ; to feel what light is we must descend into the 
 mine and see the emaciated forms which dwindle away in 
 darkness ; to know what the blessing of sunshine is, go down 
 into the valleys where stunted vegetation and dim vapors 
 tell of a scene on which the sun scarcely shines two hours in 
 the day. And to know what we have from Christianity, it 
 is well to cast the eyes sometimes over the darkness from 
 which the Advent of Christ redeemed us. 
 
 There are four departments of human nature spoken of in 
 these verses on which the light shined. The apostle felt that 
 the Gospel was the power of God unto salvation to the 
 Greeks, the Romans, the Barbarians, and the Jews. In the 
 present lecture we consider Christianity presented to the 
 Grecian character, and superseding the Grecian religion. 
 
The Grecian. 131 
 
 Four characteristics marked Grecian life and Grecian 
 religion : Restlessness, worldliness, the worship of the beau- 
 tiful, the worship of the human. 
 
 I. Restlessness. Polytheism divided the contemplation 
 over many objects : and as the outward objects were mani- 
 fold, so was there a want of unity in the inward life. The 
 Grecian mind was distracted by variety. He was to obtain 
 wisdom from one Deity : eloquence from that Mercurius for 
 whom Paul was taken ; purity from Diana for whom Ephe- 
 sus was zealous ; protection for his family or country from 
 the respective tutelary deities ; success by a prayer to For- 
 tune. 
 
 Hence dissipation of mind that fickleness for which the 
 Greeks were famous and the restless love of novelty which 
 made Athens a place of literary and social gossip " some 
 new thing." All stability of character rests on the contem- 
 plation of changeless unity. 
 
 So in modern science, which is eminently Christian, having 
 exchanged the bold theorizing of ancient times for the pa- 
 tient humble willingness to be taught by the facts of nature, 
 and performing its wonders by exact imitation of them on 
 the Christian principle the Son of man can do nothing of 
 Himself but what He seeth the Father do. 
 
 And all the results of science have been to simplify and 
 trace back the manifold to unity. Ancient science was only 
 a number of insulated facts and discordant laws ;- modern 
 science has gradually ranged these under fewer and ever 
 fewer laws. It is ever tending towards unity of law. 
 
 For example, gravitation. "The planet's motion, and the 
 motion of the atom of water that dashes tumultuously, and 
 as it seems lawlessly, down the foam of the cataract ; the 
 floating of the cork, the sinking of the stone, the rise of the 
 balloon, and the curved flight of the arrow, are all brought 
 under one single law, diverse and opposite as they seem. 
 
 Hence science is calm and dignified, reposing upon uniform 
 fact. The philosopher's very look tells of repose, resting, as 
 he does, on a few changeless principles. 
 
 So also in religion. Christianity proclaimed " One God 
 and one Mediator between God and Man, the man Christ 
 Jesus." Observe the effect in the case of two apostles. St. 
 Paul's view of the Gospel contemplated it as an eternal 
 divine purpose. His Gospel, the salvation of the Gentiles, 
 was the eternal purpose which had been hidden from ages 
 and generations. His own personal election was part of an 
 eternal counsel. All the children of God Jiad been predesti- 
 
132 First Advent Lecture. 
 
 nated before the creation " unto the adoption of children by 
 Jesus Christ to Himself." Now see the effect on character. 
 First, on veracity 2 Cor. i. 18, etc. He contemplated the 
 changeless " yea " of God ; His own yea became fixed as 
 God's changeless, and calmly unalterable. 
 
 Again in orthodoxy "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, 
 
 \to-day, and forever." " Be not carried about by divers and 
 
 strange doctrines." Truth is one, error manifold many 
 
 'opinions, yet there can be but one faith. See how calm and 
 
 full of rest all this spirit is. 
 
 Now consider St. John. His view of the Gospel recog- 
 nized it rather as tbe manifestation of love than the carry- 
 ing out of the unity of an everlasting purpose. If you view 
 the world as the Greek did, all is so various that you must 
 cither refer it to various deities, or to different modes of the 
 same Deity. To-day you are happy God is pleased : to- 
 morrow miserable God is angry. But St. John referred- 
 these all to unity of character "God is Love." Pain and 
 pleasure, the sigh and smile, the sunshine and the storm, nay, 
 hell itself, to him were but the results of eternal love. 
 
 Hence came deep calm the repose which we are toiling 
 all our lives to find, and which the Greek never found. 
 
 II. Worldliness. There are men and nations to whom 
 this world seems given as their province, as if they had no 
 aspiration above it. If ever there was a nation who under- 
 stood the science of living, it was the Grecian. They had 
 organized social and domestic life; filled existence with 
 comforts ; knew how to extract from every thing its great- 
 est measure of enjoyment. This world was their home ; this 
 visible world was the object of their worship. Not like the 
 Orientals, who called all materialism bad, ami whose highest 
 object was to escape from it, " to be unclothed, not clothed 
 upon," as St. Paul phrases it. The Greeks looked upon this 
 world in its fallen state, and pronounced it all " very good." 
 
 The results were threefold. 
 
 1. Disappointment. Lying on the infinite bosom of Na- 
 ture, the Greek was yet unsatisfied. And there is an insa- 
 tiable desire above all external forms and objects in man- 
 all men which they can never satisfy. Hence his craving 
 too, like others, was from time to time, " Who will show us 
 any good?" This dissatisfaction is exhibited in the parable 
 of the prodigal, who is but the symbol of erring humanity. 
 Away from his father's home, the famine came, and he fed 
 on husks. Famine 'and husks are the world's unsatisfactory 
 ness. A husk is a thing that seems full is really hollow 
 
The Grecian. 133 
 
 which stays the appetite for a time, but will not support the 
 life. And such is this world leaving a hollowness at heart, 
 staying our craving but for a time. " He that drinketh of 
 this water shall thirst again." And the worldly man is try- 
 ing to satiate his immortal hunger upon husks. 
 
 3. Degradation. Religion aims at an ideal life above this 
 actual one to found a divine polity a kingdom of God a 
 church of the best. And the life of worldliness pronounces 
 this world to be all. This is to be adorned and beautified. 
 Life as it is. Had you asked the Greek his highest wish, he 
 would have replied, " This world, if it could only last I ask 
 no more." Immortal youth and this bright existence. 
 This is to feed on husks, but husks which the swine did eat. 
 No degradation to the swine, for it is their nature ; . but 
 degradation to man to rest in the outward, visible, and pres- 
 ent, for the bosom of God is his home. The Greek, therefore, 
 might be, in his own language, " a reasoning animal," but 
 not one of the children of heaven. 
 
 3. Disbelief in immortality. The more the Greek attached 
 himself to this world, the more the world unseen became a 
 dim world of shades. The earlier traditions of the deep- 
 thinking Orientals, which his forefathers- brought from Asia, 
 died slowly away, and any one who. reminded him of them 
 was received as one would now be who were to speak of pur- 
 gatory. The cultivated Athenians were for the most part skep- 
 tics in the time of Christ. Accordingly, when Paul preach- 
 ed at Athens the resurrection of the dead, they " mocked." 
 
 This bright world was all. Its revels, its dances, its the- 
 atrical exhibitions, its races, its baths, and academic groves, 
 where literary leisure luxuriated, these were blessedness, 
 and the Greek's hell was death. Their poets speak pathet- 
 ically of the misery of the wrench from all that is dear and 
 bright. The dreadfulness of death is one of the most re- 
 markable things that meet us in those ancient writings. 
 
 And these men were startled by seeing a new sect rise uf 
 to whom death was nothing who almost courted it. They 
 heard an apostle say at Miletus, u None of these things move 
 me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might 
 finish my course with joy." For the cross of Christ had 
 crucified in their hearts the Grecian's world. To them life 
 was honor, integrity, truth ; that is the soul : to this all 
 !>ther was to be sacrificed. This was the proper self, which 
 could only die by sin, by denying its own existence. The 
 rise of the higher life had made this life nothing, " and de- 
 livered those who, through fear of death, were all their life- 
 time subject unto bondage." 
 
1 34 First Advent Lecture. 
 
 Appeal to the worldly-minded. Melancholy spectacle! 
 Men and women shutting out the idea of death, the courte* 
 sies of society concealing from them the mention of their 
 age, by all false appliances of dress, etc., etc., and staying the 
 appearance of the hand of time. You must die. The day 
 will come, and the coffin. Life in God alone robs that 
 thought of dreadfulness : when the resurrection being begun 
 within, you can look upon the decay of the outward man, 
 and feel, I am not dying. 
 
 III. The worship of the beautiful. The Greek saw this 
 world almost only on its side of beauty. His name for it was 
 Cosmos, divine order or regularity. He looked at actions in 
 the same way. One and the same adjective expressed the 
 noble and the beautiful. If he wanted to express a perfect 
 man, he called him a musical or harmonious man. 
 
 What was the consequence ? Religion degenerated into 
 the arts. All the immortal powers of man were thrown upon 
 the production of a work of the imagination. The artist who 
 had achieved a beautiful statue was almost worshipped ; the 
 poet who had produced a noble poem was the prophet of the 
 nation ; the man who gave the richest strains of melody was 
 half divine. This was their inspiration. The arts became 
 religion, and religion ended in the arts. 
 
 Hence, necessarily, sensuality became religious, because all 
 feelings produced by these arts, chiefly the voluptuous ones, 
 were authorized by religion. There is a peculiar danger in 
 refinement of sensuous enjoyments. Coarse pleasures dis- 
 gust, and pass for what they are ; but who does not know 
 that the real danger and triumph of voluptuousness are 
 when it approaches the soul veiled under the drapery of ele- 
 gance ? They fancied themselves above the gross multi- 
 tude : but their sensuality, disguised even from themselves, 
 was sensuality still ay, and at times even, in certain festi- 
 vals, broke out into gross and unmistakable licentiousness. 
 
 And hence the greatest of the Greeks, in his imaginary re- 
 public, banished from that perfect state all the strains which 
 were soft and enfeebling all the poems that represented any 
 deeds of deities unworthy of the Divine all the statues 
 which could suggest one single feeling of impurity. Him- 
 self a worshipper of the purest beautiful, it was yet given to 
 his all but inspired heart to detect the lurking danger before 
 which Greece was destined to fall the approach of sensuali- 
 ty through the worship of the graceful and the refined. 
 
 There is this danger now. Men are awakened from coarse 
 rude life to the desire of something deeper ; and the god of 
 
The Grecian. 135 
 
 spirit of this world can subtly turn that aside into channels 
 which shall effectually enfeeble and ruin the soul. Refine- 
 ment melting imagery dim religious light ; all the witch- 
 ery of form and color music architecture ; all these, even 
 colored with the hues of religion, producing feelings either 
 religious or quasi-religious, may yet do the world's work. 
 For all attempt to impress the heart through the senses, " to 
 make perfect through the flesh," is fraught with that danger 
 beneath which Greece sunk. There is a self-deception in 
 those feelings the thrill, and the sense of mystery, and the 
 luxury of contemplation, and the impressions on the senses : 
 all these lie very close to voluptuousness enfeeblement of 
 heart yea, even impurity. 
 
 This, 'too, is the ruinous effect of an education of accom- 
 plishments. The education of the taste, and the cultivation 
 of the feelings in undue proportion, destroy the masculine 
 tone of mind. An education chiefly romantic or poetical, not 
 balanced by hard practical life, is simply the ruin of the 
 soul. 
 
 If any one ever felt the beauty of this world, it was He. 
 The beauty of the lily nestling in the grass He felt it all ; 
 but the beauty which He exhibited in life was the stern love- 
 liness of moral action. The King in His Beauty "had no 
 form or comeliness ;" it was the beauty of obedience, of noble 
 deeds, of unconquerable fidelity, of unswerving truth, of Di- 
 vine self-devotion. The Cross ! the Cross ! We must have 
 something of iron and hardness in our characters. The Cross 
 tells us that is the true Beautiful which is Divine : an in- 
 ward, not an outward beauty, which rejects and turns stern- 
 ly away from the meretricious forms of the outward world, 
 which have a corrupting or debilitating tendency. 
 
 IV. The worship of humanity. The Greek had strong hu- 
 man feelings and sympathies. He projected his own self on 
 nature ; humanized it ; gave a human feeling to clouds, for- 
 ests, rivers, seas. 
 
 In this he was a step above other idolatries. The Hindoo, 
 for instance, worshipped monstrous emblems of physical pow- 
 er. Might gigantic masses hundred-handed deities, scarce- 
 ly human, you find in Hindostan. In Egypt, again, life was the 
 thing sacred. Hence all that had life was in a way divine 
 the sacred ibis, crocodile, bull, cat, snake. All that produced 
 and all that ended life. Hence death too was sacred. The 
 Egyptian lived in the contemplation of death. His coffin 
 was made in his lifetime ; his ancestors embalmed ; the sa- 
 cred animals preserved in myriad heaps through generations 
 
1 36 First Advent Lecture. 
 
 in mummy pits. The sovereign's tomb was built to last for, 
 not centuries, but thousands of years. 
 
 The Greek was above this. It was not merely power, but 
 human power ; not merely beauty, but human beauty ; not 
 merely life, but human life, which was .the object of his pro- 
 foundest veneration. His effort therefore was, in his concep- 
 tion of his god, to realize a beautiful human being. And not 
 the animal beauty of the human only, but the intelligence 
 which informs and shines through beauty. All his life he 
 was moulding into shape visions of earth a glorious human 
 being. Light under the conditions of humanity ; the " sun 
 in human limbs arrayed" was the central object of Grecian 
 worship. 
 
 Much in this had a germ of truth more was false. This 
 principle, which is true, was evidently stated : The Divine, 
 under the limitations of humanity, is the only worship of 
 which man is capable. Demonstrably, for man can not con- 
 ceive that which is not in his own mind. He may worship 
 what is below himself, or that which is in himself resembling 
 God ; but attributes of which from his own nature he has no 
 conception, he clearly can not adore. 
 
 The only question therefore is, What he shall reckon di- 
 vine, and in alliance with God ? If power, then he worships 
 as the Hindoo ; if life, then as the Egyptian ; if physical and 
 intellectual beauty, then as the Greek. 
 
 Observe, they wanted some living image of God contain- 
 ing something more truly divine to supplant their own. For 
 still, in spite of their versatile and multifarious conceptions, 
 the illimitable Unknown remained, to which an altar stood in 
 Athens. They wanted humanity in its glory they asked 
 for a Son of Man. 
 
 Christ is Deity under the limitations of humanity. But 
 there is presented in Christ for worship, not power, nor beau- 
 ty, nor physical life, but the moral image of God's perfec- 
 tions. Through the heart, and mind, and character of Jesus 
 it was that the Divinest streamed. Divine character, that 
 was given in Christ to worship. 
 
 Another error. The Greek worshipped all that was in 
 man. Every feeling had its beauty and its divine origin. 
 Hence thieving had its patron deity, and treachery, and cun- 
 ning ; and lust had its temple erected for abominable wor- 
 ship. All that was human had its sanction in the example 
 of some god. 
 
 Christ corrects this. Not all that is human is divine. 
 There is a part of our nature kindred with God : the strength- 
 ening of that, by mixture with God's spirit, is our true and 
 
Second Advent Lecture. 1 37 
 
 proper humanity regeneration of soul. There is another 
 part whereby we are related to the brutes : our animal pro- 
 pensities, our lower inclinations, our corrupted will. And 
 whoever lives in that, and strengthens that, sinks not to the 
 level of the brutes, but below them, to the level of the de- 
 mons : for he uses an immortal spirit to degrade himself: 
 and the immortal joined with evil, as the life to the body, is 
 demoniacal. 
 
 In conclusion, remark, In all this system one thing was 
 wanting the sense of sin. The Greek worshipped the beau- 
 tiful, adored the human, deified the world : of course this wor- 
 ship found no place for sin. The Greek would not have spok- 
 en to you of sin: he would have told you of departure from 
 a right line ; want of moral harmony ; discord within : he 
 would have said that the music of your soul was out of tune. 
 Christ came to convince the world of sin. And after Him 
 began to brood upon the hearts of Christendom that deep 
 cloud that rests upon the conscience which has been called 
 into vitality of action and susceptibility. 
 
 For this Greece had no remedy. The universe has no rem- 
 edy but one. There is no prescription for the sickness of the 
 heart, but that which is written in the Redeemer's blood. 
 
 XII. 
 SECOND ADVENT LECTURE. 
 
 THE ROMAN. 
 
 " I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians ; both to the wise, 
 and to the unwise. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gos- 
 pel to you that are at Rome also. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of 
 Christ : for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth ; 
 to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." Rom. i. 14-16. 
 
 THE Advent of Christ is the gulf which separates ancient 
 from modern history. The dates B.C. and A.D. are not arbi- 
 trary but real division. His coming is the crisis of the world's 
 history. It' was the moment from^whence light streamed into 
 the realms of darkness, and life descended into the regions of 
 the grave. It was the new birth of worn-out Humanity. 
 
 Last Thursday we considered the effects of this Advent on 
 Greece. We found the central principle of Grecian life to be 
 worldliness. The Greek saw, sought, and worshipped, noth- 
 ing higher than this life, but only this life itself. Hence 
 
138 Second Advent Lecture. 
 
 Greek religion degenerated into mere taste, which is peroep 
 tion of the beautiful. The result on character was three-fold : 
 Restlessness, which sent the Greek through this world w r ith 
 his great human heart unsatisfied, fickle in disposition, and 
 ever inquiring, with insatiable curiosity, after some new 
 thing. Licentiousness ; for whosoever attaches his heart to 
 the outward beauty, without worshipping chiefly in it that 
 moral beauty of which all else is but the type and suggestion, 
 necessarily, slowly, it may be, but inevitably, sinks down and 
 down into the deepest abyss of sensual existence. Lastly, 
 unbelief. The Greek, seeing principally this "world, lost his 
 hold upon the next. For the law of faith is, that a man can 
 only believe what is already in his spirit. Pie believes as he 
 is. The Apostle Paul writes in astonishment to these Greeks 
 (of Corinth), " How say some among you there is no resurrec- 
 tion of the dead ?" But the thing was explicable. Paul was 
 " dying daily." The outward lite decayed ; the inner grew 
 and lived with more vitality every day. He/*^ the life to 
 come in which he believed. But the Corinthians, leading an 
 easy, luxurious life, how could it be a reality to them? How 
 could they believe in immortality, in whom the immortal 
 scarcely stirred, or only feebly ? To these the apostle felt 
 bound to preach the living Gospel. " I am debtor to the 
 Greeks." 
 
 To-day, we turn to the Roman nation, its religion, and its 
 life. At the time of which the New Testament speaks, Greece 
 had been nearly a century and a half a province of Rome. 
 In the language of Daniel, the kingdom of brass had given 
 way to the kingdom of iron. The physical might of Rome 
 had subdued Greece, but the mind of Greece had mastered 
 Rome. The Greeks became the teachers of their conquerors. 
 The deities of Greece were incorporated into the national 
 faith of Rome. Greek literature became the education of the 
 Roman youth. Greek philosophy was almost the only phi- 
 losophy the Roman kne\v. Rome adopted Grecian arts, and 
 was insensibly moulded by contact with Grecian life. ?" 
 that the world in name and government was Roman, but i 
 feeling and civilization Greek. 
 
 If, therefore, we would understand Roman life, we must 
 contemplate it at an earlier period, when it was free from 
 Greek influence, and purely exhibited its own idiosyncracies. 
 
 The nation which we contemplate to-day was a noble one 
 humanly, one of the noblest that the world has seen. 
 Next to the Jewish, the very highest. We may judge from 
 the fact of St. Paul's twice claiming his Roman citizenship, 
 and feeling the indignation of a Roman citizen at the indig 
 
The Roman. 139 
 
 nity of chastisement. And this too in an age when the name 
 had lost its brightness when a luxurious, wealthy Greek could 
 
 Eurchase his freedom. Claudius Lysias bought it " with a 
 irge sum of money." And yet we may conceive what it 
 had been once, when even the faint lustre of its earlier dignity 
 could inspire a foreigner, and that foreigner a Jew, and that 
 Jew a Christian, with such respect. 
 
 At the outset, then, we have a rare and high-minded peo 
 pie and their life, to think of. They who have imbibed the 
 spirit of its writers from their youth can neither speak nor 
 think of it without enthusiasm. Scarcely can we forbear it 
 even in the pulpit. Nor is this an unchristian feeling, earth- 
 ly, to be checked ; for in order to elevate Christianity, it is 
 not necessary to vilify heathenism. To exalt revelation, we 
 need not try to show that natural religion has no Jtruths. 
 To exhibit the blessings of the Advent, it is not needful to 
 demonstrate that man was brutalized without it. It is a 
 poor, cowardly system which can only rise by the degrada- 
 tion of all others. Whatever is true belongs to the kingdom 
 of the truth. The purer the creed, the higher the character, 
 the nobler the men who, without revelation, signally failed at 
 last, the more absolute is the necessity of a Redeemer, and 
 the more are we constrained to refer gratefully all blessings 
 to His Advent. 
 
 We take three points : the public and private life of Rome, 
 and its moral and inevitable decay at last. 
 
 I. The public life of Rome. 
 
 First, I notice the spirit of its religion. The very word 
 shows what that was. Religion, a Roman word, means ob- 
 ligation, a binding power. Very different from the corre- 
 sponding Greek expression, which implies worship by a sen- 
 suous ceremonial (threskeia). 
 
 The Roman began, like the Jew, from law. He started 
 from the idea of duty. But there was an important differ- 
 ence. The Jew was taught duty or obedience to the law of 
 a personal, holy God. The Roman obeyed, as his Etruscan 
 ancestors taught him, a fate or will, and with very different 
 results. But at present we only observe the lofty character 
 of the early religion which resulted from such a starting-point. 
 
 The early history of Rome is wrapped in fable ; but the 
 fable itself is worth much, as preserving the spirit of the old 
 life when it does not preserve the facts. Accordingly, the 
 tradition taught that the building of Rome was done in obe- 
 dience to the intimations of the will of Heaven. It was re- 
 built in a site selected not by human prudence, but by a voice 
 
140 Second Advent Lecture. 
 
 divinely guided. Its first great legislator (Numa) is repre 
 sented as giving laws, not from a human heart, but after se- 
 cret communion with the superhuman. It was the belief of 
 Roman writers that the early faith taught access to God only 
 through the mind ; that therefore no images, but only tem- 
 ples, were found in Rome during the first two centuries of 
 hep existence. No bloody sacrifices defiled the city. War 
 itself was a religious act ; solemnly declared by a minister of 
 religion casting a spear into the enemy's territory. Nay, we 
 even find something in spirit resembling the Jewish sabbath ; 
 the command that during the rites of religion no traffic 
 should go on, nor workman's hammer break the consecrated 
 silence, but that men should devoutly contemplate God. 
 
 Here was a high, earnest, severe religion. 
 
 Now this resulted in government, as its highest earthly ex- 
 pression. Duty and therefore law on earth as a copy of 
 the will of Heaven. Different nations seem, consciously or 
 unconsciously, destined by God to achieve different missions. 
 The Jew had the highest : to reveal to the world holiness. 
 The Oriental stands as a witness to the reality of the Invisi- 
 ble above the Visible. The Greek reminded the world of 
 eternal beauty ; and the destiny of the Roman seems to have 
 been to stamp upon the minds of mankind the ideas of law, 
 government, order. 
 
 Beauty was not the object of the Roman contemplation, 
 nor worship ; nor was harmony. The taste for them might 
 be taught, superinduced, but it was not natural. It was not 
 indigenous to the soil of his nature. Hence, when Greece was 
 reduced to a Roman province, in 146 B.C., the Roman soldiers 
 took the noblest specimens of Grecian painting and converted 
 them into gambling-tables. 
 
 You may distinguish the difference of the two characters 
 from the relics w r hich they have left behind them. The Greek 
 produced a statue or a temple, the expression of a sentiment. 
 The Roman, standing upon visible fact, dealing with the prac- 
 tical, and living in the actual life of men, has left behind him 
 works of public usefulness : noble roads which intersect em- 
 pires, mighty aqueducts, bridges, enormous excavations for 
 draining cities at which we stand astonished ; and, above all, 
 that system of law, the slow result of ages of experience, 
 which has so largely entered into the modern jurisprudence 
 of most European nations. 
 
 One of their own Avriters has distinctly recognized this 
 destiny. "It is for others to work brass into breathing 
 shape others may be more eloquent or describe the 
 circling movements of the heavens, and tell the rising of 
 
The Roman. 141 
 
 the stars. Thy work, O Roman ! is to rule the nations : 
 these be thine acts : to impose the conditions of the world's 
 peace, to show mercy to the fallen, and to crush the proud." 
 
 In accordance with this, it is a characteristic fact that 
 we find the institutions of Rome referred to inspiration. Not 
 a decalogue of private duties, but a code of municipal laws. 
 And, turning to the page of Scripture, whenever the Roman 
 comes prominently forward, we always find him the organ 
 of law, the instrument of public rule and order. Pilate has 
 no idea of condemning unjustly: "Why, what evil hath He 
 done ?" But he yields at the mention of the source of law, 
 the emperor. The Apostle Paul appeals to Caesar, and 
 even a corrupt Festus respects the appeal: "Unto Ca?sar 
 shalt thou go." Nor could even the prisoner's innocence 
 reverse his own appeal : " This man might have been set at 
 liberty if he had not appealed unto Caesar." The tumult at 
 Ephesus is stilled by a hint of Roman interference : " We 
 are in danger of being called in question for this day's 
 uproar." When the angry crowd at Athens, and the equally 
 angry mob of the Sanhedrim, was about to destroy Paul, 
 again the Roman, Claudius Lysias, comes " with an army, 
 and rescues him." 
 
 It was always the same thing. The Roman seems almost 
 to have existed to exhibit on earth a copy of the Divine 
 order of the universe, the law of the heavenly hierarchies. 
 
 II. Private life. 
 
 We observe the sanctity of the domestic ties. Very 
 touching are all the well-known anecdotes: that, for in- 
 stance, of the noble Roman matron, who felt, all spotless as 
 she was, life-dishonored, and died by her own, hand. The 
 sacredness of home was expressed strongly by the idea of 
 two guardian deities (Lares and Penates) who watched over 
 it. A Roman's own fireside and hearth-stone were almost the 
 most sacred spots on earth. There was no battle-cry that 
 came so to his heart as that, " For the altar and the hearth." 
 How firmly this was rooted in the nation's heart is plain 
 from the tradition, that for 170 years no separation took 
 place by law between those who had once been united in 
 wedlock. 
 
 There is deep importance in this remark, for it was to this 
 that Rome owed her greatness. The whole fabric of the 
 Commonwealth rose out of the Family. The family was 
 the nucleus round which all the rest agglomerated. First, 
 the family ; then the clan, made up of the family and its 
 dependents or clients ; then the tribe ; lastly, the 
 
142 Second Advent Lecture. 
 
 And so the noble structure of the Roman Commonwealth 
 arose, compacted and mortised together, but resting on the 
 foundation of the hearth-stone. 
 
 Very different is it in the East. A nation there is a col- 
 lection of units, held together by a government. There is 
 a principle of cohesion in them, but only such cohesion as 
 belongs to the column of sand, supported'by the whirlwind : 
 when the blast ceases, the atoms fall asunder. When the 
 chief is slain or murdered, the nation is in anarchy the 
 family does not exist. Polygamy and infanticide, the bane 
 of domestic life, are the destruction, too, of national existence. 
 
 There is a solemn lesson in this. Moral decay in the 
 family is the invariable prelude to public corruption. It is 
 a false distinction which we make between public integrity 
 and private honor. The man whom you can not admit into 
 your family, whose morals are corrupt, can not be a pure 
 statesman. Whoever studies history will be profoundly 
 convinced that a nation stands or falls with the sanctity of 
 its domestic ties. Rome mixed with Greece, and learned 
 her morals. The Goth was at her gates; but she fell not 
 till she was corrupted and tainted at the heart. The domes- 
 tic corruption preceded the political. When there was no 
 longer purity on her hearth-stones, nor integrity in her Sen- 
 ate, then, and not till then, her death-knell was rung. 
 
 We will bless God for our English homes. Partly the 
 result of our religion ; partly the result of the climate which 
 God has given us, according to the law of compensation by 
 which physical evil is repaid by moral blessing ; so that, its 
 gloom and darkness making life more necessarily spent 
 within doors than it is among Continental nations, our life is 
 domestic, and theirs is social. When England shall learn 
 domestic maxims from strangers, as Rome from Greece, her 
 ruin is accomplished. And this blessing, too, comes from 
 Christ who presided at the marriage-feast at Cana, who 
 found a home in the family of Nazareth, and consecrated the 
 hearth-stone with everlasting inviolability. 
 
 Let us break up this private life into particulars. 
 
 1. We find manly courage. This too is preserved in a 
 .word. Virtue is a Roman word manhood, courage; for 
 courage, manhood, virtue were one word. Words are fossil 
 thoughts : you trace the ancient feeling in that word you 
 trace it, too, in the corruption of the word. Among the 
 degenerate descendants of the Romans, virtue no longer 
 means manhood ; it is simply dilettantism. The decay of 
 life exhibits itself in the debasement even of words. 
 
 We dwell on this courage, because it was not merely 
 
The Roman. 143 
 
 animal daring. Like every thing Roman, it was connected 
 with religion. It was duty, obedience to will, self-surrender 
 to the public good. The Roman legions subdued the world ; 
 but it was not their discipline alone, nor their strength, nor 
 their brute daring. It was rather, far, their moral force 
 a nation whose legendary and historical heroes could thrust 
 their hand into the flame, and see it consumed without a 
 nerve shrinking; or come from captivity on parole, advise 
 their countrymen against peace, and then go back to torture 
 and certain death : or devote themselves by solemn self- 
 sacrifice (like the Decii), who could bid sublime defiance 
 to pain and count dishonor the only evil. The w^orld must 
 bow before such men ; for unconsciously, here was a form 
 of the spirit of the Cross self-surrender, unconquerable 
 fidelity to duty, sacrifice for others. And so far as Rome 
 had in her that spirit, and so long as she had it, her career 
 was the career of all those who in any form, even the low- 
 est, take up the Cross: she went forth conquering and to 
 conquer. 
 
 2. Deep as Roman greatness was rooted in the courage 
 of her men, it was rooted deeper still in the honor of her 
 women. I take one significant fact, which exhibits national 
 feeling. There was a fire in Rome called eternal, forever 
 replenished. It was the type and symbol of the duration 
 of the Republic. This fire was tended by the Vestals a 
 beautifully significant institution. It implied that the dura- 
 tion of Rome was co-extensive with the preservation of her 
 purity of morals. So long as the dignity of her matrons 
 and her virgins remained unsullied, so long she would last. 
 No longer. Female chastity guarded the Eternal City. 
 
 Here we observe something anticipative of Christianity. 
 In the earlier ages after the Advent there were divine honors 
 paid to the Queen of Heaven, and the land was covered over 
 with houses set apart for celibacy. Of course, rude and 
 gross minds can find plenty to sneer at in that institution, 
 and doubtless the form of the truth was mistaken enough, as 
 all mere forms of doctrine are. But the heart of truth which 
 lay beneath all that superstition was a precious one. It was 
 this. So long as purity of heart, delicacy of feeling, chastity 
 of life, are found in a nation, so long that nation is great no 
 longer. Personal purity is the divinest thing in man and 
 woman. It is the most sacred truth which the Church of 
 Christ is commissioned to exhibit and proclaim. 
 
 Upon these virtues I observe : The Roman was conspicu- 
 ous for the virtues of this earth honor, fidelity, courage, 
 chastity, all manliness ; yet the apostle felt that he had a 
 
1 44 Second Advent Lecture. 
 
 Gospel to preach to them that were in Rome also. Moral 
 virtues are not religious graces. There are two classes of 
 excellence. There are men whose lives are full of moral 
 principle, and there are others whose feelings are strongly 
 devotional. And, strange to say, each of these is found at 
 times disjoined from the other. Men of almost spotless 
 earthly honor, who scarcely seem to know what reverence 
 for things heavenly and devout aspirations towards God 
 mean ; men who have the religious instinct, pray with fer- 
 vor, kindle with spiritual raptures, and yet are impure in 
 their feelings, and fail in matters of common truth and 
 honesty. Each of these is but a half man, dwarfed and 
 stunted in his spiritual growth. The " perfect man in Christ 
 Jesus," who has grown to the " measure of the stature of the 
 fullness of Christ," is he who has united these two things : 
 who, to the high Roman virtues which adorn this earth, 
 has added the sublimer feelings which are the investiture of 
 Heaven: in whom "justice, mercy, truth " are but the body 
 of which the soul is faith and love. 
 
 Yet observe, these are moral virtues, and morality is not 
 religion. Still, beware of depreciating them. Beware of 
 talking contemptuously of " mere morality." If we must 
 choose between two things which ought never to be divided, 
 moral principle and religious sentiment, there is no question 
 which most constitutes the character " which is not far from 
 the kingdom of heaven." Devout feelings are common 
 enough in childhood, religious emotions, religious warmth, 
 instances of which are retailed by the happy parent ; com- 
 mon enough, too, in grown men and women but listen 
 those devout feelings, separate from high principle, do not 
 save from immorality : nay, I do believe, are the very step- 
 ping-stone towards it. When the sensual is confounded 
 with and mistaken for the spiritual ; and merely devout 
 warmth is the rich, rank soil of heart in which moral evil 
 most surely and most rankly grows you will not easily 
 build Roman virtues upon that. But high principle, which 
 is, in other words, the baptism of John, is the very basis on 
 which is most naturally raised the superstructure of religious 
 faith. Happy, thrice happy he who begins with the law and 
 ends with the gospel. 
 
 HI. The decline of Roman life. 
 
 1. First "came corruption of the moral character. The 
 Roman worldliness was of a kind far higher than the Gre- 
 cian. In his way the Roman really had the world's good at 
 heart. There was a something invisible at which he aimed : 
 
The Roman. 145 
 
 invisible justice, invisible order, invisible right. Still it was 
 only the law on earth the well-being of this existence. And 
 whatever is only of this earth is destined to decay. The 
 soul of the Roman, bent on this world's affairs, became secu- 
 larized, then animalized, and so at last, when there was little 
 left to do, pleasure became his aim, as it had been the Gre- 
 cian's. Then came ruin swiftly. When the emperors lived 
 for their elaborately contrived life of luxury, when the Roman 
 soldier left his country's battles to be fought by mercenaries, 
 the doom of Rome was sealed. Yet, because it was a nobler 
 woiidliness, less sensual and less selfish, the struggle with de- 
 cay was more protracted than in Greece. Lofty spirits rose 
 to stem the tide of corruption, and the death-throes of Rome 
 were^long and terrible. She ran a mighty career of a thou- 
 sand years. 
 
 2. Skepticism and superstition went hand in hand. An 
 example of the former we have in Pilate's question, " What 
 is truth ?" An example of the latter in the superstitious 
 belief of the inhabitants of Lystra that Paul and Barnabas 
 were "gods come to them in the likeness of men." And this 
 probably was a tolerably accurate picture of the state of 
 Roman feeling. The lower classes sunk in a debased super' 
 stition the educated classes, too intellectual to believe in it, 
 and yet having nothing better to put in its stead. Or per- 
 haps there was also a superstition which is only another 
 name for skepticism : infidelity trembling at itself, shrinking 
 from its own shadow. There is a fearful question for which 
 the soul must find an answer the mystery of its own being 
 and destinies. Men looked into their own souls, and, listen- 
 ing, heard only an awful silence there. No response came 
 from the world without. Philosophy had none to give. 
 And then men, terrified at the progress of infidelity, more 
 than half distrusting their own tendencies, took refuge in 
 adding superstition to superstition. They brought in the 
 gods of Greece, and Egypt, and the East : as if multiplying 
 the objects of reverence strengthened the spirit of reverence 
 in the soul ; as if every new sacredness was a barrier be- 
 tween them and the dreadful abyss of uncertainty into which 
 they did not dare to look. 
 
 This is as true now as then. Superstition is the refuge of 
 a skeptical spirit, which has a heart too devout to dare to be 
 skeptical. Men tremble at new theories, new views, the 
 spread of infidelity, and they think to fortify themselves 
 against these by multiplying the sanctities which they rever- 
 ence. But all this will not do. Superstition can not do the 
 work of faith, and give repose or peace. It is not by multi 
 
146 Second Advent Lecture. 
 
 plying ceremonies it is not by speaking of holy things with 
 low, bated breath it is not by entrenching the soul behind 
 the infallibility of a church, or the infallibility of the words 
 and sentences of a book it is not by shutting out inquiry, 
 and resenting every investigation as profane, that you can 
 arrest the progress of infidelity. Faith, not superstition, is 
 the remedy. 
 
 There is a grand fearlessness in faith. He who in his 
 heart of hearts reverences the good, the true, the holy that 
 is, reverences God does not tremble at the apparent success 
 of attacks upon the outworks of his faith. They may shake 
 those who rested on those outworks they do not move him 
 whose soul reposes on the truth itself. He needs no props 
 or crutches to support his faith. He does not need to multi- 
 ply the objects of his awe in order to keep dreadful doubt 
 away. Founded on a Rock, Faith can afford to gaze undis 
 mayed at the approaches of Infidelity. 
 
 3. In Rome religion degenerated into allegiance to the 
 State. In Greece, as it has been truly said, it ended in taste. 
 In Rome it closed with the worship of the emperor. Noth- 
 ing shows the contrast between Greek and Roman feeling 
 more strongly than this. In Greece the poet became the 
 prophet, and the artist was the man divinely inspired. In 
 Rome the deification of the emperor, as the symbol of gov- 
 ernment, was the point towards which, unsuspected, but by 
 a sure and inevitable consecutiveuess, the national feeling foi 
 ages had been tending. 
 
 . And the distinction between the Christian and the Roman 
 tone of feeling is no less strikingly contrasted in the very 
 same allegiance. Sacrament, perhaps, is the highest word of 
 symbolical life in both. It is a Roman word. In Rome it 
 meant an oath of allegiance to the Senate and Roman people. 
 Nothing higher the Roman knew. In the Christian Church 
 it is also the oath of highest fidelity ; but its import there is 
 this : " Here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our- 
 selves, our souls and bodies, to be a living sacrifice." 
 
 In this contrast of the sacramental vows, as I have re- 
 marked before, were perceptible the different tendencies of 
 the two starting-points of revealed religion and Roman. 
 Judaism began from law or obligation to a holy person. 
 Roman religion began from obedience to a mere will. Ju 
 daism ended in Christianity, whose central principle is joy- 
 ful surrender to One whose name is Love. The religion of 
 Rome ended, among the nobler, as Cato and the Antonines, 
 in the fatalism of a sublime but loveless stoicism, whose es< 
 sential spirit is submission to a destiny : among <he ordinary 
 
The Roman. 147 
 
 men, in mere zeal for the state, more or less earthly. It stiff 
 ened into stoicism, or degenerated in public spirit. 
 
 4. The last step we notice is the decline of religion into ex- 
 pediency. It is a startling thing to see men protecting popu- 
 lar superstitions which they despise ; taking part with solemn 
 gravity in mummeries which in their heart they laugh at. 
 Yet such, we are told, was the state of things in Rome. It 
 is a trite and often quoted observation of a great Roman, 
 that one minister of religion could scarcely meet another 
 without a smile upon his countenance, indicating conscious- 
 ness of a solemn mockery. And an instance of this, I believe, 
 we have in the Acts of the Apostles. The town-clerk or mag- 
 istrate of Ephesus stilled the populace by a kind of accom- 
 modation to their prejudices much in the same way in which 
 a nurse would soothe a passionate child. Apparently, as we 
 are told, he belonged to the friends of Paul ; and we can 
 scarcely forbear a smile at the solemn gravity with which he 
 assures the people that there could be no doubt that the im- 
 age fell down from Jupiter : no question throughout all Asia 
 and the world about the greatness of the " great goddess 
 Diana." 
 
 For there were cultivated minds which had apprehended 
 some of the truths of Christianity philosophers who were 
 enlightened far beyond their age. But a line of martyred 
 philosophers had made them cautious. They made a com- 
 promise. They enjoyed their own light, kept silence, and 
 left the rest in darkness. The result was destruction of their 
 own moral being ; for the law of truth is that it can not be 
 shut up without becoming a dead thing, and mortifying the 
 whole nature. Not the truth which a man knows, but that 
 which he says and lives, becomes the soul's life. Truth can not 
 bless except when it is lived for, proclaimed and suffered for. 
 
 This was the plan of the enlightened when the Saviour 
 came. And this is the lowest step of a nation's fall, when 
 the few who know the truth refuse to publish it ; when gov- 
 ernments patronize superstition as a mere engine for govern- 
 ing; when the ministers of religion only half believe the 
 dogmas which they teach, dare not even say to one another 
 what they feel and what they doubt ; when they dare not be 
 true to their convictions for fear of an Ephesian mob. 
 
 Therefore it was necessary that One should come into the 
 world who should be true the truest of all that are woman- 
 born ; whose life was truth ; who from everlasting had been 
 the truth. It was necessary that He should come to preach 
 the Gospel to the poor, to dare- to say to the people some 
 truths which the philosophers dared not say, and other truths 
 
1 48 Third Advent Lecture. 
 
 of which no philosopher had ever dreamed. The penalty of 
 that true life was the sacrifice which is the world's Atone 
 ment. Men saw the Mortal die. But others saw the Im- 
 mortal rise to take His place at the right hand of Power : 
 and the Spirit which has been streaming out ever since from 
 that life and death is the world's present Light, and shall be 
 its everlasting Life. 
 
 XIIL 
 THIRD ADVENT LECTURE. 
 
 THE BARBARIAN. 
 
 "And when they were escaped, then they knew that the island was called 
 Melita. And the barbarous people showed us no little kindness : for they 
 kindled a fire, and received us every one, because of the present rain, and 
 because of the cold. And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and 
 laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his 
 hand. And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, 
 they said among themselves, No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though 
 he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suifereth not to live. And he shook 
 off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm. Howbeit the}* looked when he 
 should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly: but after they had 
 looked a great while, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their 
 minds, and said that he was a god. In the same quarters were possessions 
 of the chief man of the island, whose name was Publius ; who received us, 
 md lodged us three days courteously." Acts xxviii. 1-7. 
 
 OF the four divisions of the world at the time of the Ad- 
 vent, two have already been reviewed. The Greek, seeing 
 the right only on its side of beauty, ended in mere intellect- 
 ual refinement. The artist took the place of God, and genius 
 stood for inspiration. The Roman's destiny was different. 
 His was not the kingdom of burnished brass, but the king- 
 dom of iron. He set out with the great idea of duty and 
 law : exhibited in consequence the austere simplicity of pure 
 domestic life, in public affairs government and order: stamp- 
 ing upon the world the great idea of obedience to law. In 
 the decline of Rome the results of this were manifest. After 
 a mighty career of a thousand years Rome had run out her 
 course. Among the loftier minds who stood out protesting 
 against her corruption, and daring in a corrupted age to be- 
 lieve in the superiority of right to enjoyment, grand con- 
 tempt for pleasure, sublime defiances of pain told out the 
 dying agonies of the iron kingdom, worthy of the heart of 
 steel which beat beneath the Roman's robe. This was stoi- 
 
The Barbarian. 149 
 
 cism : the Grecian philosophy which took deepest root, as 
 might have been expected, in the soil of Roman thought. 
 Stoicism was submission to a destiny : hard, rigid, loveless 
 submission. Its language was Must. It must be, and man's 
 highest manliness is to submit to the inevitable. It is right 
 because it must be so. Besides these higher ones, there were 
 others who carried out the idea of duty in quite another di- 
 rection. With the mass of the nation, reverence for law 
 passed into homage to the symbol of law loyalty to the 
 Government ; its highest expression being the sacramental 
 homage to the nation's authority. So that, as I have alread) 
 said, the Roman spirit stiffened into stoicism, and degener- 
 ated into worship of the emperor. This was not accidental, 
 it was the inevitable result of the idea. It might have taken 
 half the time, or ten times as long ; but at last the germ 
 must have ripened into that fruit and no other. The Roman 
 began with obedience to will. 
 
 Law, meaning obedience to a holy God, passes by a nat- 
 ural transition into the Gospel : that .is, reverential duty to a 
 person becomes the obedience of love at last, which obeys 
 because the beautifulness of obedience is perceived. The 
 Jew began in severity, ended in beauty. The Roman began 
 in severity, ended in rigidity, or else relaxation. To him the 
 Advent came proclaiming the Lord of love instead of the co 
 ercive necessity of a lifeless fate. 
 
 To the Greek worshipper of beauty, the Advent came with 
 an announcement of an inner beauty. He who was to them, 
 and all such, " a Root out of a dry ground, with no form or 
 comeliness," with nothing to captivate & refined taste, or 
 gratify an elegant sensibility, lived a life which was divine 
 and beautiful. His religion, as contrasted with the Grecian, 
 supplementing it, and confirming in it what was true, " was 
 the worship of the Lord in the beauty of holiness." 
 
 The third department is the necessity of the Advent for 
 the Barbarian world. 
 
 By Barbarian was meant any religion but the Roman or 
 the Greek a contemptuous term, the spirit of which is com- 
 mou enough in all ages. Just as now every narrow sect 
 monopolizes God, claims for itself an exclusive heaven, con- 
 temptuously looks on all the rest of mankind as sitting in 
 outer darkness, and complacently consigns myriads whom 
 God has made to His uncovenanted mercies, that is, to prob- 
 able destruction, so, in ancient times, the Jew scornfully des- 
 ignated all nations but his own as Gentiles ; and the Roman 
 and Greek, each retaliating in his way, treated all nations 
 but his own under the common epithet of Barbarians. 
 
1 50 Third Advent Lecture. 
 
 We shall confine ourselves to-day to a single case of bar* 
 barian life. We shall not enter into the religion of our own 
 ancestors, the Celts and Teutonic nations, who were barbari< 
 ans then, nor that of the Scythians or the Africans. One in- 
 stance will be sufficient. 
 
 Twice in his recorded history St. Paul came in contact 
 with barbarians twice he was counted as a god. Once 
 among the semi-barbarians of Lycaonia, at Lystra once her*? 
 at Melita. 
 
 There is a little uncertainty about the identification of this 
 Melita. It was a name shared by two islands Malta, and 
 Melida in the Adriatic. But it seems to be established be- 
 yond all reasonable doubt that it was on Malta, not on Me- 
 lida, that St. Paul was wrecked. The chief objection to this 
 view is, that immediately before the wreck we are told 
 chap, xxvii. 27 that they were "driven up and down in 
 Adria." But this is satisfactorily answered by the fact that 
 the name Adriatic was applied often loosely to all the sea 
 round Sicily. Two great arguments in favor of Malta then 
 remain : After leaving the island, the apostle touched at Sy- 
 racuse, and so went on to Rhegium and Puteoli. This is the 
 natural direction from Malta to Rome, but not from Melida. 
 Then besides, " barbarians " will not apply to the inhabitants 
 of Melida. They were Greeks : whereas the natives of Mal- 
 ta, living under Roman government, were originally Cartha- 
 ginians, who had been themselves a Phoenician colony. The 
 epithet is perfectly correct as applied to them. 
 
 It is the Carthaginian or Phoenician religion, then, which 
 moulded the barbarian life, that we examine to-day. We 
 take three points. 
 
 I. Barbarian virtues. 
 II. Barbarian idea of retribution. 
 III. Barbarian conception of Deity. 
 
 I. Barbarian virtues. Two errors have been held on the 
 subject of natural goodness. The first, that of those who 
 deny to fallen man any goodness at all, and refuse to admit 
 even kindliness of feeling. In the language of a celebrated 
 and popular expounder of this view, "man in his natural 
 state is one-half beast and one-half devil." This is the effect 
 of a system. No man in his heart believes that. No moth- 
 er ever gazed upon her child, baptized or unbaptized, and 
 thought so. Men are better than their creed. Their hearts 
 are more than a match for their false theological system. 
 Beneath the black skin of the African there runs a blood as 
 warm as that which is in the blue veins of the Christian. 
 
The Barbarian. 151 
 
 Among the civilized heathen, the instinctive feelings are aa 
 kindly and as exquisitely delicate as they were ever found 
 in thes bosom of the baptized. Accordingly, we find here 
 these natural barbarian virtues of hospitality and sympathy. 
 The shipwrecked mariners, wet and cold, were received in 
 Melita with a warm, compassionate welcome. The people of 
 the island did not say, " Depart in peace, be ye warmed and 
 filled." They gave them those things which were necessary 
 for the body. And a Christian contemplating this, gave this 
 distinct testimony, " The barbarous people showed us no lit- 
 tle kindness." 
 
 The second error is the opposite one of placing too high a 
 value on these natural virtues. There is a class of writers 
 who talk much of early unsophisticated times. They tell of 
 the days " when wild in woods the noble savage ran." They 
 speak of pastoral simplicity, and the reverence and piety of 
 mountain life. According to them, civilization is the great 
 corrupter. But the truth is, the natural good feelings of hu- 
 man nature are only instincts: no more moral than a long 
 sight or a delicate sense of hearing. The keen feelings of 
 the child are no guaranty of future principle perhaps rath- 
 er the reverse. The profuse hospitality of the mountaineer, 
 who rarely sees strangers, and to whom gold is little worth, 
 becomes shrewd and selfish calculation so soon as temptation 
 from passing traffic is placed in his way. You may travel 
 among savages who treat you, as a stranger, with courtesy, 
 but yet feed on the flesh of their enemies. And these Meli- 
 tans, who " showed no little kindness " to the wrecked crew, 
 belonged to a stock who, in the most civilized days of Car- 
 thage, offered human sacrifice, and after every successful battle 
 with the Romans burnt the chief prisoners alive as a thank- 
 offering to Heaven. If we trace them still farther back, we 
 find their Pho3nician ancestors in the Old Testament tainted 
 with the same practice, and the Hebrews themselves imbib- 
 ing it from them, so as to be perpetually arraigned by their 
 prophets on the charge of making their sons and daughters 
 "pass through the fire to Baal." They could be kind to 
 strangers, and cruel to enemies. 
 
 The Advent of Christ brought a new spirit into the world. 
 "A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one an- 
 other." That wasYiot the new part. The Melitans would not 
 have disagreed with that. ... " As I have loved you, that 
 ye love one another." " As I have loved you," .... that 
 makes all new. So also 1 John ii. 7, 8. The " old command- 
 ment " was old enough. Barbarians felt in their hearts. But 
 the same commandment with " true light " shining on il 
 different indeed. 
 
152 Third A dvent L ecture. 
 
 " Love your neighbor, hate your enemy." Carthaginians 
 obeyed that. Hear the law of love expounded by Himself. 
 " But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that 
 curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them 
 which despitefully use you and persecute you. For if ye 
 love them which love you, what do ye more than others? 
 Do not even . . . (the barbarians) . . . the same ?" This is 
 Christianity that is, the mind of Christ. 
 ; Remark, too, the principle on which this is taught. " That 
 ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven : 
 for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, 
 and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." Not upon 
 merely personal authority; not by a law graven on stone, 
 nor even printed in a book, to be referred to, chapter and 
 verse ; but on the principle of the imitation of God. His 
 heart interpreted the universe He read its " open secret,'* 
 which is open to all who have the heart to feel it, secret to 
 all others. A secret, according to Him, to be gathered from 
 the rain as it fell on the just and the unjust, from the dejv 
 of heaven, from the lily, and from the fowls of the air, from 
 the wheat, from every law and every atom. This was His 
 revelation. He revealed God. He spelled for us the mean- 
 ing of all this perplexing, unintelligible world. He pro- 
 claimed its hidden meaning to be Love. So He converted 
 rude barbarian instincts into Christianj graces by expand- 
 ing their sphere and purifying them of selfishness causing 
 them to be regulated by principle, and elevating them into 
 a conscious imitation of God in His revealed character. 
 
 II. The Barbarian idea of retribution. 
 
 The Apostle Paul was one of those who are formed to be 
 the leaders of the world. Foremost in persecution, foremost 
 in Christianity (" nothing behind the chiefest apostles ") fore- 
 most in the shipwreck, his voice the calmest, his heart the 
 stoutest, his advice the wisest in the tumult ; foremost, too, 
 when all was over, not as a prisoner, but actively engaged 
 for the general good, it is Paul who is gathering the Sticks 
 to make the fire. From those sticks a viper sprung and fas- 
 tened on his hand, and the first impression of the barbarians 
 was, " No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he 
 hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live." 
 
 This is the very basis of all natural religion the idea of 
 the connection between guilt and retribution. In some 
 form or other it underlies all mythologies. The sleepless, 
 never-dying avengers of wrong the Nemesis who presides 
 over retribution the vengeance which suffereth not the 
 
The Barbarian. 153 
 
 murderer to live the whips and scorpions of the Furies 
 it seems the first instinct of religion. 
 
 In the Barbarian conception of it, however, there was 
 something gross, corporeal, and dangerous ; because they 
 misinterpreted natural laws into vengeance. Yet there is a 
 proneness in man to judge so. We expect that nature will 
 execute the chastisements of the spiritual world. Hence all 
 nature becomes to the imagination leagued against the 
 transgressor. The stars in their courses fight against Sisera ; 
 the wall of Siloam falls on guilty men ; the sea will not carry 
 the criminal, nor the plank bear him the viper stings 
 every thing is a minister of wrath. On this conviction na- 
 tions constructed their trial by. ordeal. The guilty man's 
 sword would fail in the duel, and the foot would strike and 
 be burnt by the hot ploughshare. Some idea of this sort 
 lurks in all our minds. We picture to ourselves the spectres 
 of the past haunting the nightly bed of the tyrant. We take 
 for granted that there is an avenger making life miserable. 
 
 But experience corrects all this. The tyrant's sleep is 
 often as sweet and sound as the infant's. The sea will 
 wreck an apostle, and bear a murderer triumphantly. The 
 viper stings the innocent turf -cutter. The fang of evil 
 pierces the heel of the noblest as he treads it down. It is 
 the poetry of man's heart, not the reality of the universe, 
 which speaks of the vengeance which pursues guilt with un- 
 relenting steps to slay ; only in poetry is this form of jus- 
 tice found ; only in poetry does the fire refuse to burn the 
 innocent ; only in poetry can Purity lay her hand on the 
 fawning lion's mane. If we ask where these Melitans got 
 their idea of retribution, the reply is, out of their own 
 hearts. They felt the eternal connection between wrong- 
 doing and penalty. The penalty they would have executed 
 on murder w~as death. They naturally threw this idea of 
 theirs into the character of God, and blended together what 
 was theirs and what is His. This is valuable as a proof of 
 the instinctive testimony of man's heart to the realities of 
 retribution. It is utterly worthless as a testimony to the 
 form in which retributive justice works, because it is not 
 borne out by the facts of life. 
 
 Ao;ain, that notion was false, in that it expected vengeance 
 for flagrant crime only. " This man is a murderer." "There 
 is a common and superstitious feeling now to that effect, 
 " Murder will out :" as if God had set a black mark on mur- 
 der as if, because it is unlikely to escape detection in a 
 country where every man's hand is against the murderer, 
 impunity was not common enough in countries where hu 
 
 ST* 
 
1 54 Third Advent Lecture. 
 
 man life is held cheap. The truth is, we think much of 
 crime, little of sin. There is many a murderer executed 
 whose heart is pure and whose life is white, compared with 
 those of many a man who lives a respectable and even hon- 
 ored life. David was a murderer. The Pharisees had com- 
 mitted no crime, but their heart was rotten at the core. 
 There was in it the sin which has no forgiveness. It is not 
 a Christian but a Barbarian estimate, which ranks crime 
 above sin, and takes murder for the chief of sins marked out 
 for Heaven's vengeance. 
 
 As information increased, this idea of retribution disap- 
 pears. Natural laws are understood, and retribution van- 
 ishes; Then often comes Epicureanism or Atheism. "All 
 things come alike to all : there is one end to the righteous 
 and to the sinner ; to the clean and to the unclean : to him 
 that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not." This is the 
 feeling of the voluptuary of Ecclesiastes. If so, then the in- 
 ference suggests itself to Epicurean indolence " Let us eat 
 and drink"" it is all the same. Or the skeptical feeling 
 comes thus : " Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and 
 washed my hands in innocency." For assuredly there is no 
 vengeance such as this which suffers not the murderer to 
 live, but arms the powers of nature against him. Therefore 
 why do right instead of wrong ? 
 
 Thus the idea of retribution is gone for those who see no 
 deeper than the outward chance of penalty. 
 
 The Advent of Christ brought deeper and truer views. 
 It taught what sin is, and what suffering is. It showed the 
 Innocent on the Cross bearing the penalty of the world's sin, 
 but Himself still the Son of God, with whom the Father was 
 not angry, but "well pleased." 
 
 The penal agonies of sin are chiefly those which are exe- 
 cuted within. "Vengeance," said the Melitans, " suffereth 
 not the murderer to live." " Whosoever slayeth Cain," said 
 God, "vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold." Cain, 
 the murderer, lives Christ, the holy, dies. Cain is to us 
 the dread type of hell. To live ! that is hell, to live when 
 you fain would die. There is such a thing as being salted 
 with fire, a never annihilating but still consuming torture. 
 You may escape the viper and the wreck. You may by 
 prudence make this world painless, more or less. You can 
 not escape yourself. Go where you will, you carry with 
 you a soul degraded, its power lost, its finer sensibilities de- 
 stroyed. Worse than the viper's tooth is the punishment 
 of no longer striving after goodness, or aspiring after the life 
 of God. Just as the man can not see through the glass on 
 
The Barbarian. 155 
 
 which he breathes, sin darkens the windows of the soul. 
 You can not look out even to know the glories of the fair 
 world from which your soul excludes itself. There is no 
 punishment equal to the punishment of being base. To sink 
 from sin to sin, from infamy to infamy, that is the fearful 
 retribution which is executed in the spiritual world. You 
 are safe, go where you will, from the viper : as safe as if 
 you were the holiest of God's children. The fang is in your 
 soul. 
 
 HI. The Barbarian conception of Deity. 
 
 When the viper fell off, and Paul was left uninjured, they 
 changed their mind and said that he was a god. 
 
 Observe first, this implied a certain advance in religious 
 notions. There is a stage of worship prior to that of man- 
 worship. Man finds himself helpless among the powers of 
 nature, and worships the forces themselves which he finds 
 around him. This takes different forms. The highest is the 
 worship of that host of heaven from which Job professed 
 himself to be free. With some it is the adoration of lifeless 
 things : the oak which has been made sacred by the light- 
 ning-stroke ; the " meteoric stone " which fell down from 
 Jupiter. So the Israelites adored the brazen serpent, with 
 which power had once been in connection. Evidently there 
 can be no holy influence in this. Men worship them by fear, 
 fortify themselves by charms and incantations : do not try 
 to please God by being holy, but defend themselves from 
 danger by jugglery. The Christians of the early ages car- 
 ried about bits of consecrated bread to protect themselves 
 from shipwreck. 
 
 Besides this, men have worshipped brute life some ani- 
 mal, exhibiting a limited quality, which is yet reckoned a 
 type of the Divine. The hawk-eyed deities of Egypt, for in- 
 stance, implied omniscience. Beast-worship was that of 
 Egypt. Israel learned it there, and in an early stage of their 
 history imitated the highest form which they knew, that of 
 Apis, in their golden calf. 
 
 It is quite clear that the Melitans were in a stage beyond 
 this. It is a step when men rise from the worship of lifeless 
 things to that of animals another when they rise to worship 
 human qualities; for they are nearest the Divine. Perhaps 
 a step higher still, when, like the early Romans, they wor- 
 ship a principle like Destiny, separate from all shape. They 
 were in the stage of worshipping what is human. 
 
 2. But in this worship of the human we have to distinguish 
 that it was the adoration of the marvellous, not the rever* 
 
156 Third Advent Lecture. 
 
 ence for the good. It was not Paul's character to which 
 they yielded homage. It was only to the wonderful mys- 
 tery of, as they supposed, miraculous escape. So, too, at 
 Lystra. It was the miracle which they chiefly saw. 
 
 All that would pass away when they knew that he was a 
 man of like passions with themselves, or when they were in- 
 formed that it was a providential escape which might have 
 happened to any ordinary man. When the savage sees the 
 flash of European fire-arms he kneels as to a god ; but when 
 he has learned its use, his new religion is gone. When the 
 Americans first saw the winged ships of Spain, they thought 
 that the deities spoke in thunder; but when they discovered 
 the secret of their humanity, the worship ceased. And thus 
 science is every day converting the religion of mere wonder 
 into Atheism. The mere worship of the mysterious has but 
 a limited existence. As you teach laws, you undermine that 
 religion. Men cease to tremble. The Laplander would no 
 longer be awed by the eclipse if he knew how to calculate it 
 with unerring accuracy. The savage's dread of lightning as 
 the bolt of God, is over when he sees the philosopher draw 
 it from the clouds, and experimentalize on it in his laboratory. 
 The awe created by a pestilence is passed, when it is found 
 to be strictly under the guidance of natural laws. And the 
 Romanist, or the semi-Romanist, whose religion is chiefly a 
 sense of the mysterious, the solemn, and the awful, and 
 whose flesh creeps when he sees a miracle in the consecration 
 of the sacraments, ends, as is well known, in infidelity, when 
 enlightenment and reason have struck the ground of false 
 reverence from beneath his feet. 
 
 It is upon this indisputable basis that the mightiest sys 
 tern of modern Atheism has been built. The great founder 
 of that system divides all human history into three periods. 
 The first, in which the Supernatural is believed in ; and a 
 personal agent is believed in as the cause of all phenomena. 
 The second, in which metaphysical abstractions are assumed 
 as Causes. The third, the Positive stage, in which nothing 
 is expected but the knowledge of sequences by experience ; 
 the Absolute, that lies beneath all phenomena, being forever 
 unknowable, and a God, if there be a God, undiscoverable by 
 the intellect of man. 
 
 This conclusion is irrefragable. Granted that the only ba- 
 sis of religion is awe, a worship of the marvellous, then ver- 
 ily, there "remains nothing for the human race to end in but 
 blank and ghastly Atheism. 
 
 Therefore has the Redeemer's Advent taught a deeper truth 
 to man. The Apostle Paul spoke almost slightingly of the 
 
The Barbarian. 157 
 
 marvellous. " Covet earnestly the best gifts : yet show 1 
 unto you a more excellent way. Though I speak with the 
 tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become 
 as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." Love is diviner 
 than all wondrous powers. 
 
 So, too, the Son of God came into this world, depreciating 
 the merely mysterious. ''An evil and adulterous genera- 
 tion seeketh after a sign. No sign shall be given to it." 
 "Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe." 
 Nay, His own miracles themselves, so far as the merely won- 
 drous in them was concerned, He was willing, on one occa- 
 sion at least, to place on the same level with the real or sup- 
 posed ones of exorcists among themselves. " If I by Beel- 
 zebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out ?" 
 It was not the power, nor the supernatural in them, which 
 proved them divine. It was their peculiar character their 
 benevolence, their goodness, their love which manifested 
 Deity. 
 
 Herein lies the vast fallacy ot the French skeptic. The 
 worship of the merely Supernatural must, as science pro- 
 gresses, legitimately end in Atheism. Yes, all science re- 
 moves the Cause of causes farther and farther back from hu- 
 man ken, so that the baffled intellect is compelled to confess 
 at last we can not find it. But "the world by wisdom knew 
 not God." There is a power in the soul, quite separate from 
 the intellect, which sweeps away or recognizes the marvel- 
 lous, by which God is felt. Faith stands serenely far above 
 the reach of the atheism of science. It does not rest on the 
 wonderful, but on the eternal wisdom and goodness of God. 
 The revelation of the Son was to proclaim a Father, not a 
 mystery. No science can sweep away the everlasting love 
 which the heart feels, and which the intellect does not even 
 pretend to judge or recognize. And he is safe from the in- 
 evitable decay which attends the mere Barbarian worship, 
 who has felt that as faith is the strongest power in the mind 
 of man, so is love the divinest principle in the bosom of God 
 in other words, he who adores God as known in Christ, rath- 
 er than trembles before the Unknown whose homage \s 
 yielded to Divine Character rather than to Divine Power. 
 
158 The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 
 
 XIV. 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SPIRITUAL HARVEST. 
 
 "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth. 
 that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap 
 corruption ; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life ever- 
 lasting." Gal. vi. 7, 8. 
 
 THERE is a close analogy between the world of nature 
 and the world of spirit. They bear the impress of the same 
 hand ; and hence the principles of nature and its laws are 
 the types ad shadows of the Invisible. Just as two books, 
 though on different subjects, proceeding from the same pen, 
 manifest indications of the thought of one mind, so the 
 worlds, visible and invisible, are two books written by the 
 same finger, and governed by the same idea. Or rather, 
 they are but one book, separated into two only by the nar- 
 row range of our ken. For it is impossible to study the uni- 
 verse at all without perceiving that it is one system. Be~ 
 gin with what science you will, as soon as you get beyond 
 the rudiments, you are constrained to associate it with an- 
 other. 
 
 You can not study agriculture long without finding that 
 it absorbs into itself meteorology and chemistry : sciences 
 run into one another till you get the " connection of the sci- 
 ences ;" and you begin to learn that one Divine idea con- 
 nects the whole in one system of perfect order. 
 
 It was upon this principle that Christ taught. Truths 
 come forth from His lips, not stated simply on authority, but 
 based on the analogy of the universe. ^ His human mind, in 
 perfect harmony with the Divine mind with which it is mix- 
 ed, discerned the connection of things, and read the Eternal 
 Will in the simplest laws of nature. For instance, if it were 
 a question whether God would give His Spirit to them that 
 asked, it was not replied to by a truth revealed on His au- 
 thority ; the answer was derived from facts lying open to all 
 men's observation. " Behold the fowls of the air"" behold 
 the lilies of the field " learn from them the answer to your 
 question. A principle was tnere. God supplies the wants 
 which He has created. He feeds the ravens He clothes the 
 lilies He will feed with His Spirit the craving spirits of His 
 children. 
 
The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 1 59 
 
 It was on this principle of analogy that St. Paul taught in 
 this text. He tells us that there is a law in nature accord- 
 ing to which success is proportioned to the labor spent upon 
 the work. In kind and in degree, success is attained in 
 kind; Tor example, he who has sown his field with beech- 
 mast does not receive a plantation of oaks ; a literary educa- 
 tion is not the road to distinction in arms, but to success in 
 letters ; years spent on agriculture do not qualify a man to 
 be an orator, but they make him a skillful farmer. Success, 
 again, is proportioned to labor in degree, because, ordinarily, 
 as is the amount of seed sown, so is the harvest : he who 
 studies much will know more than he who studies little. In 
 almost all departments it is " the. diligent hand which mak- 
 eth rich." 
 
 The keen eye of Paul discerned this principle reaching far 
 beyond what is seen, into the spiritual realm which is un- 
 seen. As tare-seed comes up tares, and wheat-seed wheat ; 
 and as the crop in both cases is in proportion to two condi- 
 tions, the labor and the quantity committed to the ground 
 so in things spiritual, too, whatsoever a man soweth, that 
 shall he also reap. Not something _else, but " that." The 
 proportion holds in kind ft holds, too, in degree, in spiritual 
 things as in natural. " He which soweth sparingly shall 
 reap also sparingly ; and he which soweth bountifully shall 
 reap also bountifully." If we could understand and rightly 
 expound that principle, we should be saved from much of the 
 disappointment and surprise which come from extravagant 
 and unreasonable expectations. I shall try first to elucidate 
 the principle w'hich these verses contain, and then examine 
 the two branches of the principle. 
 
 I. The principle is this, " God is not mocked : for whatso 
 ever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 
 
 There are two kinds of good possible to men : one enjoyed 
 by our animal being, the other felt and appreciated by our 
 spirits. Every man understands more or less the difference 
 between these two : between prosperity and well-doing be- 
 tween indulgence and nobleness between comfort and in- 
 ward peace between pleasure and striving after perfection 
 between happiness and blessedness. These are two kinds 
 of harvest, and the labor necessary for them respectively is 
 of very different kinds. The labor which procures the har- 
 vest of the one has no tendency to secure the other. 
 
 We will not deprec are the advantages of this world. It 
 is foolish and unreal to do so. Comfort, affluence, success, 
 freedom from care, rank, station these are in their real way 
 
1 60 The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 
 
 goods ; only the labor bestowed upon them does not proem a 
 one single blessing that is spiritual. 
 
 On the other hand, the seed which is sown for a spiritual 
 harvest has no tendency whatever to procure temporal well- 
 being. Let us see what are the laws of the sowing and reap 
 ing in this department. Christ has declared them : " Bless- 
 ed are the pure in heart : for they shall see God." " Bless- 
 ed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness : for 
 they shall be filled " (with righteousness). " Blessed are they 
 that mourn : for they shall be comforted." You observe, 
 the beatific vision of the Almighty fullness of righteous- 
 ness divine comfort. There is nothing earthly here it is, 
 spiritual results for spiritual labor. It is not said that the 
 pure in heart shall be made rich ; nor that they who hunger 
 after goodness shall be filled with bread ; nor that they who 
 mourn shall rise in life and obtain distinction. Each depart- 
 ment has its own appropriate harvest reserved exclusively 
 to its own method of sowing. 
 
 Every thing in this world has its price, and the price buys 
 that, not something else. Every harvest demands its own 
 preparation, and that preparation will not produce another 
 sort of harvest. Thus, for example, you can not have at 
 once the soldier's renown and the quiet of a recluse's life. 
 The soldier pays his price for his glory sows and reaps. 
 His price is risk of life and limb, nights spent on the hard 
 ground, a weather-beaten constitution. If you will not pay 
 that price, you can not have w r hat he has military reputa- 
 tion. You can not enjoy the statesman's influence together 
 with freedom from public notoriety. If you sensitively 
 shrink from that, you must give up influence ; or else pay 
 his price the price of a thorny pillow, unrest, the chance of 
 being to-day a nation's idol, to-morrow the people's execra- 
 tion. You can not have the store of information possessed 
 by the student, and enjoy robust health : pay his price, and 
 you have his reward. His price is an emaciated frame, a de- 
 bilitated constitution, a transparent hand, and the rose taken 
 out of the sunken cheek. To expect these opposite things : 
 i soldier's glory and quiet, a statesman's renown and peace, 
 the student's prize and rude health, would be to mock God, 
 to reap what has not been sowed. 
 
 Now the mistakes men make, and the extravagant expec- 
 tations in which they indulge, are these : they sow-for earth, 
 and expect to win spiritual blessings, or they sow to the 
 Spirit, and then wonder that they have not a harvest of the 
 good things of earth. In each case they complain. What 
 have I done to be treated so ? 
 
The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 1 6 1 
 
 The unreasonableness of all this appears the moment we 
 have understood the conditions contained in this principle, 
 " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 
 
 It is a common thing to hear sentimental wonderings 
 about the unfairness of the distribution of things here. The 
 unprincipled get on in life, the saints are kept back. The 
 riches and rewards of life fall to the lot of the undeserving. 
 The rich man has his good things, and Lazarus his evil things. 
 Whereupon it is taken for granted that there must be a fu- 
 ture life to make this fair : that if there were none, the con- 
 stitution of this world would be unjust. That is, that be- 
 cause a man who has sown to the Spirit does not reap to the 
 flesh here, he will hereafter ; that the meed of well-doing 
 must be somewhere in the universe the same kind of recom- 
 pense which the rewards of the unprincipled were here 
 comfort, abundance, physical enjoyment or else all is wrong. 
 
 But if you look into it, the balance is perfectly adjusted 
 even here. God has made his world much better than you 
 and I could make it. Every thing reaps its own harvest, ev- 
 ery act has its own reward. And before you covet the en- 
 joyment which another possesses, you must first calculate the 
 cost at which it was procured. 
 
 For instance, the religious tradesman complains that his 
 honesty is a hindrance to his success : that the tide of cus- 
 tom pours into the doors of his less scrupulous neighbors in 
 the same street, while he himself waits for hours idle. My 
 brother, do you think that God is going to reward honor, in- 
 tegrity, high-mindedness, with this world's coin? Do you 
 fancy that He will pay spiritual excellence with plenty of 
 custom? Now, consider the price that man has paid for his 
 success. Perhaps mental degradation and inward dishonor. 
 His advertisements are all deceptive; his treatment of his 
 workmen tyrannical ; his cheap prices made possible by in- 
 ferior articles. Sow that man's seed, and you will reap that 
 man's harvest. Cheat, lie, advertise, be unscrupulous in your 
 assertions, custom will come to you. But if the price is too 
 dear, let him have his harvest, and take yours; yours is 
 a clear conscience, a pure mind, rectitude within and with- 
 out. Will you part with that for his ? Then why do you 
 complain ? He has paid his price, you do not choose to 
 pay it. 
 
 Again, it is not an uncommon thing to see a man rise from 
 insignificance to sudden wealth by speculation. Within the 
 last ten or twenty years England has gazed on many such a 
 phenomenon. In this case, as in spiritual things, the law seems 
 to hold : He that hath, to him shall be given. Tens of thou* 
 
1 62 The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 
 
 sands soon increase and multiply to hundreds of thousands, 
 His doors are besieged by the rich and great. Royalty ban- 
 quets at his tableland nobles court his alliance. Whereupon 
 some simple Christian is inclined to complain : " How strange 
 that so much prosperity should be the lot of mere clever- 
 
 ness 
 
 Well, are these really God's chief blessings ? Is it for such 
 as these you serve Him ? And would these indeed satisfy 
 your soul? Would you have God reward his saintliest with 
 these gauds and gewgaws all this trash rank, and wealth, 
 and equipages, and plate, and courtship from the needy 
 great ? Call you that the heaven of the holy ? Compute 
 now what was paid for that? The price that merchant- 
 prince paid, perhaps with the blood of his own soul, was 
 shame and guilt. The price he is paying now is perpetual 
 dread of detection ; or worse still, the hardness which can 
 laugh at detection ; or one deep lower yet, the low and grov- 
 elling soul which can be satisfied with these things as a 
 paradise, and ask no higher. He has reaped enjoyment 
 yes, and he has sown, too, the seed of infamy. 
 
 It is all fair. Count the cost. "He that saveth his life 
 shall lose it." Save your life if you like, but do not complain 
 if you lose your nobler life yourself: win the whole world, 
 but remember you do it by losing your own soul. Every sin 
 must be paid for ; every sensual indulgence is a harvest, the 
 price for which is so much ruin for the soul. " God is not 
 mocked" 
 
 Once more, religious men in every profession are surprised 
 to find that many of its avenues are closed to them. The 
 conscientious churchman complains that his delicate scruples 
 or his bold truthfulness stand in the way of his preferment ; 
 while another man, who conquers his scruples or softens the 
 eye of truth, rises, and sits down a mitred peer in Parliament. 
 The honorable lawyer feels that his practice is limited, while 
 the unprincipled practitioner receives all he loses ; and the 
 Christian physician feels sore and sad at perceiving that char- 
 latanism succeeds in winning employment ; or, if not char- 
 latanism, at least that affability and courtly manners take the 
 place that is due to superior knowledge. 
 
 Let such men take comfort, and judge fairly. Porjularity 
 is one of the things of an earthly harvest for which quite 
 earthly qualifications are required. I say not always dishon- 
 orable qualifications, but a certain flexibility of disposition ; 
 a certain courtly willingness to sink obnoxious truths, and 
 adapt ourselves to the prejudices of the minds of others ; a 
 certain adroitness at catching the tone of those with whom 
 
The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 1 63 
 
 we are. Without some of these things no man can be popu 
 lar in any profession. 
 
 But you havenresolved to be a liver a doer a champion 
 of the truth. Your ambition is to be pure in the last re- 
 cesses of the mind. You have your reward : a soul upright 
 and manly a fearless bearing, that dreads to look no man in 
 the face-^-a willingness to let men search you through and 
 through, and defy them to see any difference between what 
 you seem and what you are. Now, your price : your price is 
 dislike. The price of being true is the Cross. The warrior 
 of the truth must not expect success. What have you to do 
 with popularity ? Sow for it, and you will have it. But if 
 you wish for it, or wish for peace, you have mistaken your 
 calling ; you must not be a teacher of the truth ; you must 
 not cut prejudice against the grain : you must leave medical, 
 legal, theological truth, to harder and nobler men, who are 
 willing to take the martyr's cross, and win the martyr's 
 crown. 
 
 This is the "mistake men make. They expect both har- 
 vests, paying only one price. They would be blessed with 
 goodness and prosperity at once. They would have that on 
 which they bestowed no labor. They take sinful pleasure, 
 and think it very hard that they must pay for it in agony, 
 and worse than agony, souls deteriorated. They would 
 monopolize heaven in their souls, and the world's prizes at 
 the same time. This is to expect to come back, like Joseph's 
 brethren from the land of plenty, with the corn in their sacks, 
 and the money returned, too, in their sacks' mouths. No, no ; 
 it will not clo. "Be not deceived; God is not mocked." 
 Reap what you have sown. If you sow the wind, do not 
 complain if your harvest is the whirlwind. If you sow to the 
 Spirit, be content with a spiritual reward : invisible within : 
 " more life and higher life." 
 
 II. Next, the two branches of the application of this 
 principle. 
 
 First : He that soweth to the flesh, shall of the flesh reap 
 corruption. There are two kinds of life : one of the flesh, 
 another of the spirit. Amidst the animal and selfish desires 
 of our nature there is a voice which clearly speaks of duty, 
 right, perfection. This is the Spirit of Deity in man ; it is 
 the life of God in the soul. This is the evidence of our 
 divine parentage. 
 
 But there is a double temptation to live the other life 
 instead of this. First, the desires of our animal nature are 
 keener than those of our spiritual. The cry of Passion is 
 
1 64 The Principk of the Spiritual Harvest. 
 
 louder than the calm voice of Duty. Next, the reward in 
 the case of our sensitive nature is given sooner. It takes 
 less time to amass a fortune than to become heavenly- 
 minded. It costs less to indulge an appetite than it does 
 to gain the peace of lulled passion. And hence, when men 
 feel that for the spiritual blessing, the bread must be cast 
 upon the waters which shall not be found until after many 
 days (skepticism whispers " never !"), it is quite intelligible 
 why they choose the visible and palpable, instead of the 
 invisible advantage, and plan for an immediate harvest 
 rather than a distant one. 
 
 The other life is that of the flesh. The " flesh " includes 
 all the desires of our unrenewed nature the harmless aa 
 well as sinful. Any labor, therefore, which is bounded by 
 present well-being is sowing to the flesh whether it be the 
 gratification of an immediate impulse, or the loner-contrived 
 plan reaching forward over many years. Sowing to the 
 flesh includes, therefore, 
 
 1. Those who live in open riot. He sows to the flesh 
 who pampers its unruly animal appetites. Do not think 
 that I speak contemptuously of our animal nature, as if it 
 were not human and sacred. The lowest feelings of our 
 nature become sublime by being made the instruments of 
 our nobler emotions. Love, self-command, will elevate them 
 all ; and to ennoble and purify, not to crush them, is the 
 long, slow work of Christian life. Christ, says St. Paul, is 
 the Saviour of the body* But if, instead of subduing these 
 to the life of the Spirit, a man gives to them the rein and 
 even the spur, the result is not difficult to foresee. There 
 are men who do this. They " make provision for the flesh, 
 to fulfill the lusts thereof." They whet the appetites by 
 indulgence. They whip the jaded senses to their work. 
 Whatever the constitutional bias may be, anger, intemper- 
 ance, epicurism, indolence, desires, there are societies, con- 
 versations, scenes, which supply fuel for the flame, as well 
 as opposite ones which cut off the nutriment. To indulge 
 in these, knowing the result, is to foster the desire which 
 brings forth the sin which ends in death. This is "sowing 
 to the flesh." 
 
 If there be one to whom these words which I have used, 
 veiled in the proprieties due to delicate reserve, are not 
 without meaning, from this sentence of God's word let him 
 learn his doom. He is looking forward to a harvest wherein 
 he may reap the fruit of his present anticipations. And he 
 shall reap it. He shall have his indulgence, he shall enjoy 
 his guilty rapture, he shall have his unhallowed triumph,- 
 
The Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 1 65 
 
 and the boon companions of his pleasures shall award him 
 the meed of their applause. He has sown the seed, and i 
 fair requital he shall have his harvest. It is all fair. He 
 shall enjoy. But tarry a while : the law hath yet another 
 hold upon him. This deep law of the whole universe goes 
 farther. He has sown to the flesh, and of the flesh he has 
 reaped pleasure; he has sown to the flesh, and of the flesh 
 he shall reap corruption. That is, in his case, the ruin of 
 the soul. It is an awful thing to see a soul in ruins : like a 
 temple which once was fair and noble, but now lies over- 
 thrown, matted with ivy, weeds, and tangled briers, among 
 which things noisome crawl and live. He shall reap the 
 harvest of disappointment the harvest of bitter, useless 
 remorse. The crime of sense is avenged by sense, which 
 wears by time. He shall have the worm that gnaws, and 
 the fire that is not quenched. He shall reap the fruit of 
 long-indulged desires, which have become tyrannous at last, 
 and constitute him his own tormentor. His harvest is a 
 soul in flames, and the tongue that no drop can cool. Pas- 
 sions that burn, and appetites that crave, when the power 
 of enjoyment is gone. He has sowed to the flesh. " God is 
 not mocked." The man reaps. 
 
 2. There is a less gross way of sowing to the flesh. There 
 are" men of sagacity and judgment in the affairs of this life 
 whose penetration is almost intuitive in all things where the 
 step in question involves success or failure here. They are 
 those who are called in the parable the children of this 
 world, wise in their generation. They moralize and specu- 
 late about eternity, but do not plan for it. There is no seed 
 sown for an invisible harvest. If they think they have 
 sown for such a harvest, they might test themselves by the 
 question, What would they lose if there were to be no eter- 
 nity ? - For the children of God, so far as earth is concerned, 
 " If in this life only they have hope in Christ, then are they 
 of all men most miserable." But they these sagacious, 
 prudent men of this world they have their reward. What 
 have they ventured, given up, sacrificed, which is all lost 
 forever, if this world be all ? What have they buried like 
 seed in the ground, lost forever, if there be no eternity? 
 
 Now we do not say these men are absolutely wicked. 
 We distinguish between their sowing to the flesh, and the 
 sowing of those profligates last spoken of. All we say is, 
 there is " corruption " written on their harvest. It was for 
 earth, and with earth it perishes. It may be the labor of 
 the statesman, planning, like the Roman of old, the govern- 
 ment and order of the kingdoms of the earth ; or that of the 
 
1 66 Tke Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 
 
 astronomer, weighing suns, prescribing rules of return to 
 comets, and dealing with things above earth in space, but 
 unspiritual still ; or that of the son of a humbler laborious- 
 ness, whose wprk is merely to provide for a family: or, 
 lastly, the narrower range of the man of pleasure, whose 
 chief care is where he shall spend the next season, in what 
 metropolis, or which watering-place, or how best enjoy the 
 next entertainment. 
 
 All these are objects more or less harmless. But they 
 end. The pyramid crumbles into dust at last. The mighty 
 empire of the eternal city breaks into fragments which dis- 
 appear. The sowers for earth have their harvest here : Suc- 
 cess in their schemes quiet intellectual enjoyment exemp- 
 tion from pain arid loss the fruits of worldly-wise sagacity. 
 And that is all. " When the breath goeth forth, they return 
 to their dust, and all their thoughts perish." The grave is 
 not to them the gate of paradise, but simply the impressive 
 mockery which the hand of death writes upon that body for 
 which they lived, and with which all is gone. They reap 
 corruption, for all they have toiled for decays ! 
 
 Ye that lead the life of respectable worldliness, let these 
 considerations arrest your indifference to the Gospel. You 
 have sown for earth. Well. And then what? Hear the 
 Gospel, which tells of a Saviour whose sacrifice is the world's 
 life w r hose death is the law of life; from whose resurrection 
 streams a Spirit which can change carnal into spiritual men 
 whose whole existence, reflecting God, was the utterance of 
 the Divine truth and rule of heavenly life, the blessedness of 
 giving. To live so, and to believe so, is to sow to the Spirit. 
 
 Lastly, sowing to the Spirit. " He that soweth to the 
 Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." 
 
 What is meant by sowing to the Spirit here is plain. " Let 
 us not be weary in well-doing," says the apostle directly after: 
 " for in due season we sfiall reap if we faint not." Well-do- 
 ing : not faith, but works of goodness, were the sowing that 
 he spoke of. 
 
 There is proclaimed here the rewardableness of works. So 
 in many other passages : " Abounding in the work of the Lord, 
 forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the 
 Lord." " Laying up a good foundation for the time to come,' 
 was the reason alleged for charging rich men to be willing to 
 give ; and so all through. There is an irreversible principle. 
 The amount of harvest is proportioned to the seed sown ex- 
 actly. There are degrees of glory. The man who gives out 
 of his abundance has one blessing. She who gives the mite, 
 all she had. even all her living, has another, quite different 
 
Tfe Principle of the Spiritual Harvest. 167 
 
 The rectitude of this principle, and what it is, will be plainer 
 from the following considerations : 
 
 1. The harvest is life eternal. But eternal life here does 
 not simply mean a life that lasts forever. That is the destiny 
 of the soul all souls, bad as well as good. But the bad do 
 not enter into this "eternal life." It is not simply the dura- 
 tion, but the quality of the life which constitutes its charac- 
 ter of eternal. A spirit may live forever, yet not enter into 
 this. And a man may live but for five minutes the life of 
 Divine benevolence, or desire for perfectness : in those five 
 minutes he has entered into the life which is eternal never 
 fluctuates, but is the same unalterably, forever in the life of 
 God. This is the reward. 
 
 2. The reward is not arbitrary, but natural. God's re- 
 wards and God's punishments are all natural. Distinguish 
 between arbitrary and natural. Death is an arbitrary pun- 
 ishment for forgery : it might be changed for transportation. 
 It is not naturally connected. It depends upon the will of 
 the law-maker. But trembling nerves are the direct and nat- 
 ural results of intemperance. They are, in the order of na- 
 ture, the results of wrong-doiri*g. The man reaps what he has 
 sown. Similarly in rewards. If God gave riches in return 
 for humbleness, that would be an arbitrary connection. He 
 did give such a reward to Solomon. But when He gives life 
 eternal, meaning by life eternal not duration of existence but 
 heavenly quality of existence, as explained already, it is all 
 natural. The seed sown in the ground contains in itself the 
 future harvest. The harvest is but the development of the 
 germ of life in the seed. A holy act strengthens the inward 
 holiness. It is a seed of life growing into more life. " What- 
 soever a man soweth, that shall he reap." He that sows 
 much, thereby becomes more conformed to God than he w^as 
 before in heart and spirit. That is his reward and harvest. 
 And just as among the apostles there was one whose spirit, 
 attuned to love, made him emphatically the disciple whom 
 Jesus loved, so shall there be some who, by previous disci- 
 pline of the Holy Ghost, shall have more of His mind, anfl 
 understand more of His love, and drink deeper of His joy 
 than others they that have sowed bountifully. 
 
 Every act done in Christ receives its exact and appropriate 
 reward. They that are meek shall inherit the earth. They 
 that are pure shall see God. They that suffer shall reign 
 with Him. They that turn many to righteousness shall shine 
 as the stars forever. They that receive a righteous man in 
 the name of a righteous man that is, because he is a right- 
 eous man shall receive a righteous man's reward. Even the 
 
1 68 The Loneliness of Christ. 
 
 cup of cold water, given in the name of Christ, shall not lose 
 its icward. 
 
 It will be therefore seen at once, reward is not the result 
 of merit. It is, in the order of grace, the natural consequence 
 of well-doing. It is life becoming more life. It is the soul 
 developing itself. It is the Holy Spirit of God in man making 
 itself more felt, and mingling more and more with his soul, 
 felt more consciously with an ever-increasing heaven. You 
 reap what you sow not something else, but that. An act 
 of love makes the soul more loving. A deed of humbleness 
 deepens humbleness. The thing reaped is the very thing 
 sown, multiplied a hundred-fold. You have sown a seed of 
 life, you reap life everlasting. 
 
 XV. 
 THE LONELINESS OF CHRIST. 
 
 "Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe? Behold, the hour cometh, 
 yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall 
 leave me alone : and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me." 
 John xvi. 31, 32. 
 
 THERE are two kinds of solitude : the first consisting of 
 insulation in space, the other of isolation of the spirit. The 
 first is simply separation by distance. When we are seen, 
 touched, heard by none, we are said to be alone. And all 
 hearts respond to the truth of that saying, This is not soli- 
 tude ; for sympathy can people our solitude with a crowd. 
 The fisherman on the ocean alone at night is not alone when 
 he remembers the earnest longings which are arising up to 
 heaven at home for his safety ; the traveller is not alone when 
 the faces which will greet him on his arrival seem to beam 
 upon him as he trudges on ; the solitary student is not alone 
 when he feels that human hearts will respond to the truths 
 which he is preparing to address to them. 
 
 The other is loneliness of soul. There are times when 
 hands touch ours, but only send an icy chill of unsympa 
 thizing indifference to the heart : when eyes gaze into ours, 
 but with a glazed look which can not read into the bottom 
 of our souls when words pass from our lips, but only come 
 back as an echo reverberated without replying through a 
 dreary solitude when the multitude throng and press us, and 
 we can not say, as Christ said, " Somebody hath touched me :" 
 
The Loneliness of Christ. 169 
 
 for the contact has been not between soul and soul, but only 
 between form and form. 
 
 And there are two kinds of men who feel this last solitude 
 in different ways. The first are the men of self-reliance : 
 self-dependent who ask no counsel, and crave no sympathy 
 who act and resolve alone who can go sternly through 
 duty, and scarcely shrink, let what will be crushed in them.' 
 Such men command respect ; for whoever respects himself 
 constrains the reverence of others. They are invaluable in 
 all those professions of life in which sensitive feeling would 
 be a superfluity ; they make iron commanders ; surgeons 
 who do not shrink ; and statesmen who do not flinch from 
 their purpose for the dread of unpopularity. But mere self- 
 dependence is weakness, and the conflict is terrible when a 
 human sense of weakness is felt by such men. 
 
 Jacob was alone when he slept in his way to Padan-aram, 
 the first night that he was away from his father's roof, with 
 the world before him, and all the old associations broken up, 
 and Elijah was alone in the wilderness when the court had 
 deserted him, and he sajd, " They have digged down Thine 
 altars, and slain Thy prophets with the sword: and I, even 
 I, only am left, and they seek my life to take it away." 
 But the loneliness of the tender Jacob was very different 
 from that of the stern Elijah. To Jacob the sympathy he 
 yearned for w r as realized in the form of a simple dream. A 
 ladder raised from earth to heaven figured the possibility of 
 communion between the spirit of man and the Spirit of God. 
 In Elijah's case, the storm, and the earthquake, and the fire 
 did their convulsing work in the soul, before a still, small 
 voice told him that he was not alone. In such a spirit the 
 sense of weakness comes with a burst of agony, and the 
 dreadful conviction of being alone manifests itself with a 
 rending of the heart of rock. It is only so that such souls 
 can be taught that the Father is with them, and that they 
 are not alone. 
 
 There is another class of men who live in sympathy. 
 These are affectionate minds which tremble at the thought 
 of being alone : not from want of courage, nor from weak- 
 ness of intellect conies their dependence upon others, but 
 from the intensity of their affections. It is the trembling 
 spirit of humanity in them. They want not aid, nor even 
 countenance, but only sympathy. And the trial comes to 
 them not in the shape of fierce struggle, but of chill and ut- 
 ter loneliness, when they are called upon to perform a duty 
 on which the world looks coldly, or to embrace a truth whicn 
 has not found lodgment yet in the breasts of others. 
 
1 70 The Loneliness of Christ. 
 
 It is to this latter and not to the former class that we 
 must look if we would understand the spirit in which the 
 words of the text were pronounced. The deep humanity of 
 the soul of Christ was gifted with those finer sensibilities of 
 affectionate nature which stand in need of sympathy. He 
 not only gave sympathy, but wanted it too, from others. 
 He who selected the gentle John to be his friend who found 
 solace in female sympathy, attended by the women who 
 ministered to him out of their substance who in the triai- 
 iiour could not bear even to pray without the human pres- 
 ence which is the pledge and reminder of God's presence 
 had nothing in Him of the hard, merely self-dependent 
 character. Even this verse testifies to the same fact, A 
 stem spirit never could have said, " I am not alone ; the Fa- 
 ther is with Me ;" never would have felt the loneliness which 
 needed the balancing truth. These words tell of a struggle 
 an inward reasoning a difficulty and a reply a sense of 
 solitude " I shall be alone ;" and an immediate correction 
 of that, "not alone the Father is with Me." 
 
 There is no thought connected witb the life of Christ more 
 touching, none that seems so peculiarly to characterize His 
 spirit, than the solitariness in which He lived. Those who 
 understood Him best only half understood Him. Those 
 who knew Him best scarcely could be said to know Him, 
 On this occasion the disciples thought Now we do under- 
 stand now we believe. The lonely spirit answered, " Do 
 ye now believe ? Behold, the hour cometh that ye shall be 
 scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone." 
 
 Very impressive is that trait in His history. He was in 
 this world alone. 
 
 I. First, then, we meditate on the loneliness of Christ. 
 II. On the temper of His solitude, 
 
 1. The loneliness of Christ was caused by the Divine ele 
 vation of His character. His infinite superiority severed 
 Him from sympathy; His exquisite affectionateness made 
 that want of sympathy a keen trial. 
 
 There is a second-rate greatness which the world can com- 
 prehend. If we take two who are brought into direct con- 
 trast by Christ Himself, the one the type of human, the oth- 
 er that of Divine excellence, the Son of Man and John the 
 Baptist, this becomes clearly manifest. John's life had a 
 certain rude, rugged goodness, on which was written, in 
 characters which required no magnifying-glass to read, spir- 
 itual excellence. The world, on the whole, accepted him. 
 Pharisees and Sadducees went to his baptism. The people 
 
The Loneliness of Christ. \ 7 1 
 
 idolized him as a prophet ; and if he had not chanced to 
 cross the path of a weak prince and a revengeful woman, we 
 can see no reason why John might not have finished his 
 course with joy, recognized as irreproachable. If we in- 
 quire why it was that the world accepted John and rejected 
 Christ, one reply appears to be that the life of the one was 
 finitely simple and one-sided, that of the other divinely com- 
 plex. 
 
 In physical nature, the naturalist finds no difficulty in com- 
 prehending the simple structure of the lowest organizations 
 of animal life, where one uniform texture and one organ per- 
 forming the office of brain and heart and lungs, at once leave 
 little to perplex. But when he comes to study the complex 
 anatomy of man, he has the labor of a lifetime before him. 
 It is not difficult to master the constitution of a single coun- 
 try ; but when you try to understand the universe, you find 
 infinite appearances of contradiction : law opposed by law 
 motion balanced by motion happiness blended with misery : 
 and the power to elicit a divine order and unity out of this 
 complex variety is given to only a few of the gifted of the 
 race. That which the structure of man is to the structure 
 of the limpet that which the universe is to a single coun- 
 try the complex and boundless soul of Christ was to the 
 souls of other men. 
 
 Therefore, to the superficial observer, His life was a mass 
 of inconsistencies and contradictions. All thought them- 
 selves qualified to point out the discrepancies. The Phari- 
 sees could not comprehend how a holy teacher could eat with 
 publicans and sinners. His own brethren could not recon- 
 cile His assumption of a public office with the privacy which 
 He aimed at keeping. " If thou doest these things, show 
 thyself to the world." Some thought He was " a good 
 man," others said, " Nay, but He deceiveth the people." 
 And hence it was that lie lived to see all that acceptance 
 which had marked the earlier stage of His career, as for in- 
 stance at Capernaum, melt away. First the Pharisees took 
 the alarm ; then the Sadducees ; then the political party of 
 the Herodians ; then the people. That was the most terrible 
 of all : for the enmity of the upper classes is impotent ; but 
 when that cry of brute force is stirred from the deeps of so- 
 ciety, as deaf to the voice of reason as the ocean in its 
 strength churned into raving foam by the winds, the heart 
 of mere earthly oak quails before that. The apostles, at all 
 events, did quail. One denied, another betrayed, all desert- 
 ed. They " were scattered, each to his own :" and the Truth 
 Himself was left alone in Pilate's judgment-hall. 
 
172 The Loneliness of Christ. 
 
 Now learn from this a very important distinction. To 
 feel solitary is no uncommon thing. To complain of being 
 alone, without sympathy and misunderstood, is general 
 enough. In every place, in many a family, these victims of 
 diseased sensibility are to be found, and they might find a 
 weakening satisfaction in observing a parallel between their 
 own feelings and those of Jesus. But before that parallel is 
 assumed, be very surQ that it is, as in His case, the elevation 
 of your character which severs you from your species. The 
 world has small sympathy for Divine goodness; but it also 
 has little for a great many other qualities which are disagree- 
 able to it. You meet with no response you are passed by 
 find yourself unpopular meet with little communion. 
 Well ; is that because you are above the world, nobler, de- 
 vising and executing grand plans which they can not com- 
 prehend vindicating the wronged, proclaiming and living 
 on great principles offending it by the saintliness of your 
 purity, and the unworldliness of your aspirations ? Then 
 yours is the loneliness of Christ. Or is it that you are 
 wrapped up in self cold, disobliging, sentimental, indifferent 
 about the welfare of others, and very much astonished that 
 they are not deeply interested in you ? You must not use 
 these words of Christ. They have nothing to do with you. 
 
 Let us look at one or two of the occasions on which this 
 loneliness was felt. 
 
 The first time was when He was but twelve years old, 
 when His parents found Him in the temple, hearing the 
 doctors and asking them questions. High thoughts were in 
 the child's soul : expanding views of life ; larger views of 
 duty and His own destiny. 
 
 There is a moment in every true life to some it comes 
 very early when the old routine of duty is not large enough 
 when the parental roof seems too low, because the Infinite 
 above is arching over the soul when the old formulas in 
 creeds, catechisms, and articles seem to be narrow, and they 
 must either be thrown aside, or else transformed into living 
 and breathing realities when the earthly father's authority 
 is being superseded by the claims of a Father in heaven. 
 
 That is a lonely, lonely moment, when the young soul first 
 feels God ; when this earth is recognized as an " awful place, 
 yea, the very gate of heaven ;" when the dream-ladder is 
 seen planted against the skies, and we wake, and the dream 
 haunts us as a sublime reality. 
 
 You may detect the approach of that moment in the 
 young man or the young woman by the awakened spirit of 
 inquiry : by a certain restlessness of look, and an eager ear* 
 
The Loneliness of Christ. 173 
 
 nestness of tone by the devouring study of all kinds of books 
 by the waning of your own influence, while the inquirer 
 is asking the truth of the doctors and teachers in the vast 
 temple of the world by a certain opinionativeness, which is 
 austere and disagreeable enough ; but the austerest moment 
 of the fruit's taste is that in which it is passing from green- 
 ness into ripeness. If you wait in patience, the sour will 
 become sweet. Rightly looked at, that opinionativeness is 
 more truly anguish : the fearful solitude of feeling the inse- 
 curity of all that is human ; the discovery that life is real, 
 and many forms of social and religious existence hollow. 
 The old moorings are torn away, and the soul is drifting, 
 drifting, drifting, very often without compass, except the 
 guidance of an unseen hand, into the vast infinite of God. 
 Then come the lonely words, and no wonder, " How is it 
 that ye sought me ? Wist ye not that I must be about my 
 Father's business ?" 
 
 2. That solitude was felt by Christ in trial. In the des- 
 ert, in Pilate's judgment-hall, in the garden, He was alone 
 and alone * must every son of man meet his trial-hour. The 
 individuality of the soul necessitates that. Each man is a 
 new soul in this world ; untried, with a boundless possible 
 before him. No one can predict what he may become, pre- 
 scribe his duties, or mark out his obligations. Each man's 
 own nature has its own peculiar rules ; and he must take up 
 his life-plan alone, and persevere in it in a perfect privacy 
 with which no stranger int^rmeddleth. Each man's tempta- 
 tions are made up of a host of peculiarities, internal and ex- 
 ternal, which no other mind can measure. You are tried 
 alone alone you pass into the desert alone you must bear 
 and conquer in the agony alone you must be sifted by the 
 world. There are moments known only to a man's own self, 
 when he sits by the poisoned springs of existence " yearning 
 for a morrow which shall free him from the strife." And 
 there are trials more terrible than that. Not when vicious 
 inclinations are opposed to holy, but when virtue conflicts 
 with virtue, is the real rending of the soul in twain. A 
 temptation in which the lower nature struggles for mastery 
 can be met by the whole united force of the spirit. But it 
 is when obedience to a heavenly Father can be only paid by 
 disobedience to an earthly one ; or fidelity to duty can be 
 only kept by infidelity to some entangling engagement ; or 
 the straight path must be taken over the misery of others ; 
 or the counsel of the affectionate friend must be met with a 
 " Get thee behind me, Satan," oh, i is then, when human ad- 
 vice is unavailable, that the soul feels what it is to be alone. 
 
1 74 The Loneliness of Christ. 
 
 Once more the Redeemer's soul was alone in dying 
 The hour had come they were all gone, and He was, as He 
 predicted, left alone. All that is human drops from us in 
 that hour. Human faces flit and fade, and the sounds of 
 the world become confused. " I shall die alone " yes, and 
 alone you live. The philosopher tells us that no atom in 
 creation touches another atom they only approach within a 
 certain distance ; then the attraction ceases, and an invisible 
 something repels they only seem to touch. No soul touches 
 another soul except at one or two points ; and those chiefly 
 external a fearful and a lonely thought, but one of the 
 truest of life. Death only realizes that which has been the fact 
 all along. In the central deeps of our being w r e are alone. 
 
 II. The spirit or temper of that solitude. 
 
 1. Observe its grandeur. I am alone, yet not alone. 
 There is a feeble and sentimental way in which we speak of 
 the Man of Sorrows. We turn to the cross, and the agony, 
 and the loneliness, to touch the softer feelings, to arouse 
 compassion. You degrade that loneliness by your compas- 
 sion. Compassion ! compassion for Him ! Adore if you 
 will respect and reverence that sublime solitariness with 
 which none but the Father was but no pity ; let it draw 
 out the firmer and manlier graces of the soul. Even tender 
 sympathy seems out of place. 
 
 For even in human things, the strength that is in a man 
 can be only learnt when he is thrown upon his own resources 
 and left alone. What a man can do in conjunction with oth- 
 ers does not test the man. Tell us w r hat he can do alone. 
 It is one thing to defend the truth when you know that your 
 audience are already prepossessed, and that every argument 
 will meet a willing response ; and it is another thing to hold 
 the truth when truth must be supported, if at all, alone met 
 by cold looks and unsympathizing suspicion. It is one thing 
 to rush on to danger with the shouts and the sympathy of 
 numbers ; it is another thing when the lonely chieftain of 
 the sinking ship sees the last boatful disengage itself, and 
 folds his arms to go down into the majesty of darkness, 
 crushed, but not subdued. 
 
 Such and greater far was the strength and majesty of the 
 Saviour's solitariness. It was not the trial of the lonely her- 
 mit. There is a certain gentle and pleasing melancholy in 
 the life which is lived alone. But there are the forms of na- 
 ture to speak to him, and he has not the positive opposition 
 of mankind if he has the absence of actual sympathy. It is 
 a solemn thing, doubtless, to be apart from men, and to feel 
 
The Loneliness of Christ. 1 75 
 
 eternity rushing by like an arrowy river. But the solitude 
 of Christ was the solitude of a crowd. In that single human 
 bosom dwelt the thought which was to be the germ of the 
 world's life : a thought unshared, misunderstood, or rejected. 
 Can you not feel the grandeur of those words, when the Man 
 reposing on His solitary strength, felt the last shadow of per- 
 fect isolation pass across His soul : " My God, my God, why 
 hast Thou forsaken me ?" 
 
 Next, learn from these words self-reliance, " Ye shall 
 leave me alone." Alone, then, the Son of man was content 
 to be. He threw Himself on His own solitary thought ; did 
 not go down to meet the world, but waited, though it might 
 be for ages, till the world should come round to Him. He 
 appealed to the future ; did not aim at seeming consistent ; 
 left His contradictions unexplained ; " I came from the Fa- 
 ther, I leave the world, and go to the Father." " Now," 
 said they, " thou speakest no proverb " that is, enigma. 
 But many a hard and enigmatical saying before He had 
 spoken, and He left them all. A thread runs through all 
 true acts, stringing them together into one harmonious 
 chain ; but it is not for the Son of God to be anxious to 
 prove their consistency with each other. 
 
 This is self-reliance to repose calmly on the thought 
 which is deepest in our bosoms, and be unmoved if the 
 world will not accept it yet. To live on your own convic- 
 tions against the world is to overcome the world ; to believe 
 that what is truest in you is true for all ; to abide by that, 
 and not be over-anxious to be heard or understood, or sym- 
 pathized with, certain that at last all must acknowledge the 
 same, and that while you stand firm, the world will come 
 round to you, that is independence. It is not difficult to get 
 away into retirement, and there live upon your own convic- 
 tions ; nor is it difficult to mix with men, and follow their 
 convictions ; but to enter into the world, and there live out 
 firmly and fearlessly according to your own conscience, that 
 is Christian greatness. 
 
 There is a cowardice in this age which is not Christian. 
 We shrink from the consequences of truth. We look round 
 and cling dependently. We ask what men will think what 
 others will say whether they will not stare in astonishment. 
 Perhaps they will ; but he who is calculating that, will ac- 
 complish nothing in this life. The Father the Father who 
 is with us and in us what does He think ? God's work can 
 not be done without a spirit of independence. A man is got 
 pome way in the Christian life when he has learned to say 
 liumbly and yet majestically, " I dare to be alone." 
 
176 The Loneliness of Christ. 
 
 Lastly, remark the humility of this loneliness. Had the 
 Son of man simply said, I can be alone, He would have said 
 no more than any proud, self-relying man can say. But 
 when he added, " because the Father is with me," that inde- 
 pendence assumed another character, and self-reliance be- 
 came only another form of reliance upon God. Distinguish 
 between genuine and spurious humility. There is a false 
 humility which says, " It is my own poor thought, and I 
 ,must not trust it. I must distrust my own reason and judg- 
 ment, because they are my own. I must not accept the dic- 
 tates of my own conscience, for it is not my own, and is not 
 trust in self the great fault of our fallen nature ?" 
 
 Very well. Now remember something else. There is a 
 Spirit which beareth witness with our spirits ; there is a God 
 who " is not far from any one of us ;" there is a " Light 
 which lighteth every man which cometh into the world." Do 
 not be unnaturally humble. The thought of your mind, per- 
 chance, is the thought of God. To refuse to follow that may 
 be to disown God. To take the judgment and conscience of 
 other men to live by, where is the humility of that ? From 
 whence did their conscience and judgment come? Was the 
 fountain from which they drew exhausted for you ? If they 
 refuse like you to rely on their own conscience, and you rely 
 upon it, how are you sure that it is more the mind of God 
 than your own which you have refused to hear ? 
 
 Look at it in another way. The charm of the words of 
 great men those grand sayings which are recognized as true 
 as soon as heard is this, that you recognize them as wisdom 
 which has passed across your own mind. You feel that they 
 are your own thoughts come back to you, else you would 
 not at once admit them : " All that floated across me before, 
 only I could not say it, and did not feel confident enough to 
 assert it, or had not conviction enough to put it into words." 
 Yes, God spoke to you what He did to them : only they be- 
 lieved it, said it, trusted the Word within them, and you did 
 not. Be sure that often when you say, " It is only my own 
 poor thought, and I am alone," the real correcting thought is 
 this, " Alone, but the Father is with me ;" therefore I can 
 live that lonely conviction. 
 
 There is no danger in this, whatever timid minds may 
 think no danger of mistake, if the character be a true one. 
 For we are not left in uncertainty in this matter. It is given 
 us to know our base from our noble hours to distinguish 
 between the voice which is from above, and that which 
 speaks from below, out of the abyss of our animal and selfish 
 nature. Samuel could distinguish between the impulse, 
 
The New Commandment, Etc. 177 
 
 quite a human one, which would have made him select Eliab 
 out of Jesse's sons, and the deeper judgment by which "the 
 Lord said, Look not on his countenance, nor on the height 
 of his stature, for I have refused him." Doubtless deep 
 truth of character is required for this ; for the whispering 
 voices get mixed together, and we dare not abide by our 
 own thoughts, because we think them our own, and not 
 God's ; and this because we only now and then endeavor to 
 know in earnest. It is only given to the habitually true to 
 know the difference. He knew it, because all His blessed 
 life long He could say, "My judgment is just, because I seek 
 not my own will, but the will of Him which sent me." 
 
 The practical result and inference of all this is a very sim- 
 ple, but a very deep one the deepest of existence. Let life 
 be a life of faith. Do not go timorously about, inquiring 
 what others think, what others believe, and what others say. 
 It seems the easiest, it is the most difficult thing in life, to do 
 this believe in God. God is near you. Throw yourself 
 fearlessly upon Him. Trembling mortal, there is an unknown 
 might within your soul which will wake when you command 
 it. The day may come when all that is human, man and 
 woman, will fall off from yon, as they did from Him. Let 
 His strength be yours. Be independent of them all now. 
 The Father is with you. Look to Him, and He will save you. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 THE NEW COMMANDMENT OF LOVE TO ONE 
 ANOTHER. 
 
 "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I 
 have loved you, that ye also love one another." John xiii. 34. 
 
 THESE words derive impressiveness from having been spok- 
 en immediately before the last Supper, and on the eve of 
 the great Sacrifice : the commandment of love issued appro- 
 priately at the time of the Feast of Love, and not long before 
 the great Act of Love. For the love of Christ was no fine 
 sat/ing: it cost Him His life to say these words with mean- 
 ing, " As I have loved you." 
 
 There is a difficulty in the attempt to grasp the meaning 
 of this command, arising from the fact that words change 
 their meaning. Our Lord affixed a new significance to the 
 word love : it had been in use, of course, before, but the new 
 sense in which He used it made it a new word. 
 
 8* 
 
178 The New Commandment of 
 
 His law is not adequately represented by the word love c . 
 because love is, by conventional usage, appropriated to one 
 species of human affection, which, in the commoner men, is 
 the most selfish of all our feelings ; and in the best is too ex- 
 clusive and individual to represent that charity which is uni- 
 versal. 
 
 Nor is charity a perfect symbol of His meaning ; for chari- 
 ty, by use, is identified with another form of love which is but 
 a portion of it, almsgiving ; and too saturated with that 
 meaning to be entirely disengaged from it, even when we 
 use it most accurately. 
 
 Benevolence or philanthropy, in derivation, come nearer to 
 the idea ; but yet you feel at once that these words fall 
 short ; they are too tame and cold ; too merely passive, as 
 states of feeling rather than forms of life. 
 
 We have' no sufficient word. There is therefore no help 
 for it, but patiently to strive to master the meaning of this 
 mighty word love, in the only light that is left us the light 
 of the Saviour's life : "As I have loved you :" that alone ex- 
 pounds it. We will dispossess our minds of all preconceived 
 notions ; remove all low associations, all partial and conven- 
 tional ones. If we would understand this law, it must be 
 ever a "new" commandment, ever receiving fresh light and 
 meaning from His life. 
 
 Take, I. The novelty of the law " That ye love one an- 
 other."* 
 
 IL The spirit or measure of it "As I have loved you." 
 
 I. Its novelty. A "new commandment," yet that law 
 was old. See 1 John ii. 7, 8. It was new as an historical fact. 
 We talk of the apostolic mission as a matter of course ; we 
 say that the apostles were ordered to go and plant churches, 
 and so we dismiss the great fact. But we forget that the 
 command was rather the result of a spirit working from with- 
 in, than of an injunction working from without. That spirit 
 was love. 
 
 And when that new spirit was in the world, see how 
 straightway it created a new thing. Men before that had 
 travelled into foreign countries : the naturalist to collect 
 specimens; the historian to accumulate facts; the philoso- 
 pher to hive up wisdom, or else he had staid in his cell or 
 grove to paint beautiful pictures of love. But the spectacle 
 of an Apostle Paul crossing oceans not to conquer kingdoms 
 not to hive up knowledge, but to impart life not to accu- 
 mulate stores for self, but to give, and to spend himself- 
 was new in the history of the world. The celestial fire had 
 
Love to one Another. 1 79 
 
 the hearts of men, and their hearts flamed ; and it 
 caught, and spread, and would not stop. On they went, that 
 glorious band of brothers, in their strange enterprise, over 
 oceans, and through forests, penetrating into the dungeon, 
 and to the throne to the hut of the savage feeding on hu- 
 man flesh, and to the shore lined with the skin-clad inhabit- 
 ants of these far isles of Britain. Read the account given 
 by Tertullian of the marvellous rapidity with which the 
 Christians increased, and you are reminded of one of those 
 vast armies of ants which moves across a country in irresisti- 
 ble myriads, drowned by thousands in rivers, cut off by fire, 
 consumed by man and beast, and yev fresh hordes succeeding 
 interminably to supply their place. 
 
 A new voice was heard : a new yearning upon earth ; mau 
 pining at being severed from his brother, and longing to 
 burst the false distinctions which had kept the best hearts 
 from each other so long an infant cry of life the cry of the 
 young Church of God. And all this from Judea the nar- 
 rowest, most bigoted, most intolerant nation on the face of 
 the earth. 
 
 Now I say that this was historically a new r thing. 
 
 2. It was new in extent. It was, in literal words, an old 
 commandment given before both to Jew and Gentile. To 
 the Jew, as, for instance, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
 thyself: I am the Lord." To the Gentile, in the recognition 
 which was so often made of the beauty of the law in its par- 
 tial application, as in the case of friendship, patriotism, domes- 
 tic attachment, and so on. 
 
 But the difference lay in the extent in which these words 
 "one another" were understood. By them, or rather by 
 " neighbor," the Jew meant his countrymen ; and narrowed 
 that down again to his friends among his countrymen so 
 that the well-known Rabbinical gloss upon these words, cur- 
 rent in the days of Christ, was, " Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
 bor and hate thine enemy." And what the Gentile under- 
 stood by the extent of the law of love, we may learn from 
 the well-known words of their best and wisest, who thanked 
 heaven that he was born a man, and not a brute a Greek, 
 and not a barbarian : as if to be a barbarian were identical 
 with being a brute. 
 
 Now listen to Christ's exposition of the word neighbor. 
 " Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
 bor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your 
 enemies." And he went farther : as a specimen of a neigh- 
 bor, he specially selected one of that nation whom, as a theo- 
 logian and a patriot, every Jew had. been taught to hata 
 
1 80 The New Commandment of 
 
 And just as the application of electricity to the innumerable 
 wants of human life and to new ends is reckoned a new dis- 
 covery and invention of modern times (though the fact has 
 been familiar for ages to the Indian child in the forest of 
 the Far West, and applied by him for ages to his childish 
 sports), so the extension of this grand principle of Love to 
 all the possible cases of life, and to all possible persons 
 even though the principle was known and applied long be 
 fore, in love to friends, country, and relations is truly and 
 properly " a new commandment," a discovery, a gospel, a 
 revelation. 
 
 3. It was new in being made the central principle of a 
 system. Never had obedience before been trusted to a prin- 
 ciple : it had always been hedged round by a law. The 
 religion of Christ is not a law 7 , but a spirit ; not a creed, but 
 a life. To the one motive of love, God has intrusted the 
 whole work of winning the souls of His redeemed. The heart 
 of man was made for love pants and pines for it : only in the 
 love of Christ, and not in restrictions, can his soul expand. 
 Now it was reserved for One to pierce, w T ith the glance of in- 
 tuition, down into the springs of human action, and to pro* 
 claim the simplicity of its machinery. " Love," said the 
 apostle after Him, "Love is the fulfilling of the law." 
 
 We are told that in the new commandment the old per- 
 ishes : that under the law of love, man is free from the law 
 of works. ^Let us see how. 
 
 Take any commandment for example, the sixth, the sev- 
 enth, the eighth. I may abstain from murder and theft, de- 
 terred by law ; because law has annexed to them certain 
 penalties. But I may also rise into the spirit of charity 
 then I am free from the law ; the law was not made for a 
 righteous man : the law no more binds or restrains me, now 
 that I love my neighbor, than the dike built to keep in the 
 sea at high tide restrains it when that sea has sunk to low- 
 water mark. 
 
 Or the seventh. You may keep that law from dread of 
 discovery, or you may learn a higher love : and then you can 
 not injure a human soul ; you can not degrade a human 
 spirit. Charity has made the old commandment superfluous. 
 In the strong language of St. John, you can not sin, because 
 you are born of God. 
 
 It was the proclamation of this, the great living principle 
 of human obedience, not with the pedantry of a philosopher, 
 nor the exaggeration of an orator, but in the simple reality 
 of life, which made this commandment of Christ a new com- 
 mand men t. 
 
Love to one Another. 1 8 1 
 
 II. The spirit or measure of the law "as I have loved 
 you." 
 
 Broadly, the lova of Christ was -the spirit of giving all He 
 had to give. " Greater love hath no man than this, that a 
 man lay down his life for his friend." Christ's love was not 
 a sentiment ; it was a self-giving. To that His adversaries 
 bore testimony: "He saved others; himself He can not 
 save." Often as \Ve have read these words, did it ever strike 
 us, and if not, does it not bring a flash of surprise when we 
 perceive it, that these words, meant as taunt, were really the 
 noblest panegyric, a testimony higher and more adequate far 
 than even that of the centurion ? " He saved others ; him- 
 self He can not save." The first clause contained the answer 
 to the second " Himself He can not save !" How could He, 
 having saved others ? How can any keep what he gives ? 
 How can any live for self, when He is living for others ? 
 Unconsciously, those enemies were enunciating the very 
 principle of Christianity, the grand law of all existence, that 
 only by losing ,self you can save others; that only by giving 
 life you can bless. Love gives itself! The mother spends 
 herself in giving life to her child ; the soldier dies for his 
 country; nay, even the artist produces nothing destined for 
 immortality, nothing that will live, except so far as he has 
 forgotten himself, and merged his very being in his work. 
 
 " He saved, others ; himself He can not save." That was 
 the love of Christ. Now to descend to particulars. 
 
 That spirit of self-giving manifests itself in the shape of 
 considerate kindliness. Take three cases: First, that in 
 which he fed the people with bread. " I have compassion 
 on the multitude, because they continue with me now three 
 days, and have nothing to eat." There was a tenderness 
 which, not absorbed in his own great designs, considered a 
 number of small particulars of their state, imagined, provided, 
 and this for the satisfaction of the lowest wants. Again, to 
 the disciples : " Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, 
 and rest awhile." He would not overwork them in the sub- 
 limest service. He did not grudge from duty their interval 
 of relaxation ; He even tenderly enforced it. Lastly, His 
 dying words : " Behold thy mother ! Woman, behold thy 
 son !" Short sentences. He was too exhausted to say 
 more. But in that hour of death-torture, He could think of 
 her desolate state when he was gone, and with delicate, 
 thoughtful attention provide for her well-being. 
 
 There are people who would do great acts ; but because 
 they wait for great opportunities, life passes, and the acts of 
 love are not done at all. Observe, this considerateness of 
 
1 8 2 The New Commandment of 
 
 Christ was shown in little things. And such are the parts 
 of human life. Opportunities for doing greatly seldom occur ; 
 life is made up of infinitesimals. If you compute the sum of 
 happiness in any given day, you will find that it was com- 
 posed of small attentions, kind looks, which made the heart 
 swell, and stirred into health that sour, rancid film of misan- 
 thropy w r hich is apt to coagulate on the stream of our inward 
 life, as surely as we live in heart apart from our fellow-crea- 
 tures. 
 
 Doubtless the memory of each one of us will furnish him 
 with the picture of some member of a family whose very 
 presence seemed to shed happiness: a daughter, perhaps, 
 whose light step, even in the distance, irradiated every one's 
 countenance. What was the secret of such a one's power ? 
 what had she done? Absolutely nothing; but radiant 
 smiles, beaming good-humor, the tact of divining what every 
 one felt and every one wanted, told that she had got out of 
 self and learned to think for others ; so that at one time it 
 showed itself in deprecating the quarrel which lowering 
 brows and raised tones already showed to be impending, by 
 sweet words; at another, by smoothing an invalid's pillow; 
 at another, by soothing a sobbing child ; at another, by hu- 
 moring and softening a father who had returned weary and 
 ill-tempered from the irritating cares of business. None but 
 she saw those things. None but a loving heart could see 
 them. That was the secret of her heavenly power. 
 
 Call you those things homely trifles, too homely for a ser- 
 mon ? By reference to the character of Christ, they rise into 
 something quite sublime. For that is loving as He loved. 
 And remark, too, these trifles prepared for larger deeds. The 
 one who will be found in trial capable of great acts of love, 
 is ever the one who is always doing considerate small ones. 
 The soul which poured itself out to'death upon the cross for 
 the human race, was the Spirit of Him who thought of the 
 wants of the people, contrived for the rest of the disciples, 
 and was thoughtful for a mother. 
 
 Once again it was a love never foiled by the unworthiness 
 of those on whom it had been once bestowed. It was a love 
 w r hich faults, desertion, denial, unfaithfulness could not chill, 
 even though they wrung His heart. He had chosen and He 
 trusted. Even in ordinary manhood, that is a finely-temper- 
 ed heart, one of no ordinary mould, which can say, "It ever 
 was my way, and shall be still, when I do trust a man, to 
 trust him wholly." 
 
 And yet there was every thing to shake His trust in hu- 
 manity. The Pharisees called him Good Master, and were 
 
Love to one Another. 183 
 
 circumventing Him all the while. The people shouted ho- 
 sannas, and three days afterwards were shrieking for His 
 blood. One disciple who had dipped in the same dish, and 
 been trusted with His inmost counsels, deceived and betrayed 
 Him; another wa.s ashamed of Him; three fell asleep while 
 He was preparing for death ; all forsook Him. Yet nothing 
 is more surprising than that unshaken, I had well-nigh said 
 obstinate, trust with which He clung to His hopes of our 
 nature, and believed in the face of demonstration. 
 
 As we mix in life, there comes, especially to sensitive na- 
 tures, a temptation to distrust. In young life we throw our- 
 selves with unbounded and glorious confidence on such as 
 we think well of an error soon corrected : for we soon find 
 out too soon that men and women are not what they 
 seem. Then comes disappointment ; and the danger is a re- 
 action of desolating and universal mistrust. For if we look 
 on the doings of man with a merely worldly eye, and pierce 
 below the surface of character, we are apt to feel bitter scorn 
 and disgust for our fellow-creatures. We have lived to see 
 human hollowness ; the ashes of the Dead Sea shore ; the 
 falseness of what seemed so fair; the mouldering beneath 
 the whited sepulchre : and no wonder if we are tempted to 
 think " friendship all a cheat smiles hypocrisy words de- 
 ceit ;" and they who are what is called knowing in life con- 
 tract by degrees, as the result of their experience, a hollow 
 distrust of men, and learn to sneer at apparently good mo- 
 tives that demoniacal sneer which we have seen, ay, per- 
 haps felt, curling the lip at times, " Doth Job serve God for 
 naught ?" 
 
 The only preservation from this withering of the heart is 
 love. Love is its own perennial fount of strength. The 
 strength of affection is a proof not of the worthiness of the 
 object, but of the largeness of the soul which loves. Love 
 descends, not ascends. The might of a river depends not on 
 the quality of the soil through which it passes, but on the in- 
 exhaustibleness and depth of the spring from which it pro- 
 ceeds. The greater mind cleaves to the smaller with more 
 force than the other to it. A parent loves the child more 
 than the child the parent ; and partly because the parent's 
 heart is larger, not because the child is worthier. The Sav- 
 iour loved His disciples infinitely more than His disciples 
 loved Him, because His heart was infinitely larger. Love 
 trusts on ever hopes and expects better things ; and this, a 
 trust springing from itself and out of its own deeps alone. 
 
 And more than this. It is this trusting love that makes 
 men what they are trusted to be so realizing itself. Would 
 
1 84 The New Commandment, Etc. 
 
 you make men trustworthy? Trust them. Would you 
 make them true ? Believe them. This was the real force 
 of that sublime battle-cry which no Englishman hears with- 
 out emotion. When the crews of the fleet of Britain knew 
 that they were expected to do their duty, they did their duty. 
 They felt, in that spirit-stirring sentence* that they were 
 trusted; and the simultaneous cheer that rose from every 
 ship was a forerunner of victory the battle was half-won al- 
 ready. , They went to serve a country which expected from 
 them great things, and they did great things. Those preg- 
 nant words raised an enthusiasm for the chieftain who had 
 thrown himself upon his men in trust, which a double line of 
 hostile ships could not appall, nor decks drenched in blood 
 extinguish. 
 
 And it is on this principle that Christ wins the hearts of 
 His redeemed. He trusted the doubting Thomas, and Thom- 
 as arose with a faith worthy " of his Lord and his God." He 
 would not suffer even the lie of Peter to shake His convic- 
 tion that Peter might love him yet, and Peter answered no- 
 bly to that sublime forgiveness. His last prayer was in ex- 
 tenuation and hope for the race who had rejected Him, and 
 the kingdoms of the world are become His own. He has 
 loved us, God knows why I do not and we, all unworthy 
 though we be, respond faintly to that love, and try to be 
 what He would have us. 
 
 Therefore come what may, hold fast to love. Though men 
 should rend your heart, let them not embitter or harden it. 
 We win by tenderness, we conquer by forgiveness. Oh, 
 strive to enter into something of that large celestial charity 
 which is meek, enduring, unretaliating, and which even the 
 overbearing world can not withstand forever. Learn the 
 new commandment of the Son of God. Not to love merely, 
 but to love as He loved. Go forth" in this spirit to your life- 
 duties: go forth, children of the Cross, to carry every thing 
 before you, and win victories for God by the conquering 
 power of a love like His. 
 
The Message of the Church to Men of Wealth. 1 85 
 
 XVII. 
 
 THE MESSAGE OF THE CHURCH TO MEN OF 
 WEALTH. 
 
 "And Nabal answered David's servants, and said, Who is David? and 
 who is the son of Jesse? There be many servants nowadays that break 
 away every man from his master. Shall'l then take my bread, and my 
 water, and my flesh that I have killed for my shearers, and give it unto men, 
 whom I know not whence they be?" 1 Sam. xxv. 10, 11. 
 
 I HAVE selected this passage for our subject this evening, 
 because it is one of the earliest cases recorded in the Bible 
 in which the interests of the employer and the employed, 
 the man of wealth and the man of work, stood, or seemed to 
 stand, in antagonism to each other. 
 
 It was a period in which an old system of things was 
 breaking up, and the new one was not yet established. The 
 patriarchal relationship of tutelage and dependence was 
 gone, and monarchy was not yet in firm existence. Saul 
 was on the throne but his rule was irregular and disputed. 
 Many things were slowly growing up into custom which had 
 not yet the force of law ; and the first steps by which cus- 
 tom passes into law from precedent to precedent are often 
 steps at every one of which struggle and resistance must 
 take place. 
 
 The history of the chapter is briefly this : Nabal, the 
 wealthy sheep-master, fed his flocks in the pastures of Car- 
 rael. David was leader of a band of men who got their liv- 
 ing by the sword on the same hills : outlaws, whose excesses 
 he in some degree restrained, and over whom he retained a 
 leader's influence. A rude irregular honor was not unknown 
 among those fierce men. They honorably abstained from 
 injuring Nabal's flocks. They did more: they .protected 
 jhem from all harm against the marauders of the neighbor- 
 hood. By the confession of Nabal's own herdsmen, "they 
 were a wall unto them both by night and day, all the time 
 they were with them keeping their flocks." 
 
 And thus a kind of right grew up : irregular enough, but 
 sufficient to establish a claim on Nabal for remuneration of 
 these services ; a new claim, not admitted by him : reckoned 
 by him an exaction, which could be enforced by no lawj 
 
1 86 The Message of the Church 
 
 only by that law which is above all statute-law, deciding ac- 
 cording to emergencies an indefinable instinctive sense of 
 fairness and justice. But as there was no law, and each man 
 was to himself a law, and the sole arbiter of his own rights, 
 what help was there but that disputes should rise between 
 the wealthy proprietors and their selfconstituted champions, 
 with exaction and tyranny on the one side, churlishness and 
 parsimony on the other ? Hence a fruitful and ever-fresh 
 source of struggle : the one class struggling to take as much, 
 and the other to give as little as possible. In modern lan- 
 guage, the Rights of Labor were in conflict with the Rights 
 of Property. 
 
 The story proceeds thus : David presented a demand, mod- 
 erate and courteous enough (vs. 6, 7, 8). It was refused by 
 Nabal, and added to the refusal were those insulting taunts 
 of low birth and outcast condition which are worse than 
 injury, and sting, making men's blood run fire. One court 
 of appeal was left. There remained nothing but the trial by 
 force. " Gird ye on," said David, " every man his sword." 
 
 Now observe the fearful, hopeless character of this strug- 
 gle. The question had come to this : whether David, with 
 his ferocious and needy six hundred mountaineers, united by 
 the sense of wrong, or Nabal, with his well-fed and trained 
 hirelings, bound by interest and not by love to his cause, 
 were stronger? Which was the more powerful want whet- 
 ted by insult, or selfishness pampered by abundance ; they 
 who wished to keep by force, or they who wished to take ? 
 An awful and uncertain spectacle, but the spectacle which is 
 exhibited in every country where rights are keenly felt, and 
 duties lightly regarded where insolent demand is met by in- 
 sulting defiance. Wherever classes are held apart by rivalry 
 and selfishness, instead of drawn together by the law of love 
 wherever there has not been established a kingdom of 
 heaven, but only a kingdom of the world there exist the 
 forces of inevitable collision. 
 
 I. The causes of this false social state. 
 II. The message of the Church to the man of wealth. 
 
 I. False basis on which social superiority was held to rest. 
 Throughout Nabal's conduct was built upon the assump- 
 tion of his own superiority. He was a man of wealth. Da- 
 vid was dependent on his own daily efforts. Was not that 
 enough to settle the question of superiority and inferiority ? 
 It was enough on both sides for a long time, till the falsehood 
 of the assumption became palpable and intolerable. But pal- 
 pable and intolerable it did become at last. 
 
To Men of Wealth. 187 
 
 A social falsehood will be borne long, even with consider- 
 able inconvenience, until it forces itself obtrusively on men's 
 attention, and can be endured no longer. The exact point 
 at which this social falsehood, that wealth constitutes supe- 
 riority, and has a right to the subordination of inferiors, be- 
 comes intolerable, varies according to several circumstances. 
 
 The evils of poverty are comparative they depend on cli- 
 mate. In warm climates, where little food, no fuel, and scan- 
 ty shelter are required, the sting is scarcely felt till poverty 
 becomes starvation. They depend on contrast. Far above 
 the point where poverty becomes actual famine, it may be- 
 come unbearable if contrasted strongly with the unnecessary 
 luxury and abundance enjoyed by the classes above. Where 
 all sutler equally, as men and officers suffer in an Arctic voy- 
 age, men bear hardship with cheerfulness: but where the suf- 
 fering weighs heavily on some, and the luxury of enjoyment 
 is out of all proportion monopolized by a few, the point of 
 reaction is reached long before penury has become actual 
 want : or again, when wealth or rank -assumes an insulting, 
 domineering character when contemptuous names for the 
 poor are invented, and become current among the more un- 
 feeling of a wealthy class then the falsehood of superiority 
 can be tolerated no longer : for we do not envy honors which 
 are meekly borne, nor wealth which is unostentatious. 
 
 Now it was this which brought matters to a crisis. David 
 had borne poverty long nay, he and his men had long en- 
 dured the contrast between their own cavern-homes and beds 
 upon the rock, and Nabal's comforts. But when Nabal add- 
 ed to this those pungent biting sneers which sink into poor 
 men's hearts and rankle which are not forgotten, but come 
 out fresh in the day of retribution " Who is David ? and 
 who is the son of Jesse? There be many servants nowadays 
 that break away every man from his master," then David 
 began to measure himself with Nabal; not a wiser man- nor 
 a better nor even a stronger. Who is this Nabal ? Intel- 
 lectually, a fool ; morally, a profligate, drowning reason in 
 excess of wine at the annual sheep-shearing; a tyrant over 
 his slaves overbearing to men who only ask of him their 
 rights. Then rose the question which Nabal had better not 
 have forced men to answer for themselves. By what right 
 does this possessor of wealth lord it over men who are infe- 
 rior in no one particular? 
 
 Now observe two things. 
 
 1. An apparent inconsistency in David's conduct. David 
 had received injury after injury from Saul, and had only for- 
 given. One injury from Nabal, and David is striding over 
 
1 88 The Message of the Church 
 
 the hills to revenge his wrong with naked steel. How came 
 this reverence and irreverence to mix together? 
 
 We reply. Saul had a claim of authority on David's al- 
 legiance ; Nabal only one of rank. Between these the Bible 
 makes a vast difference. It says, The powers which be are 
 ordained of God. But upper and lower, as belonging to dif- 
 ference in property, are fictitious terms: true, if character 
 corresponds with titular superiority; false, if it does not. 
 And such was the difference manifested in the life of the Son 
 of God. To lawful authority, whether Roman, Jewish, or 
 even priestly, He paid deference ; but to the titled mark of 
 conventional distinction, none. Rabbi, Rabbi, was no Divine 
 authority. It was not power, a delegated attribute of God 
 it was only a name. In Saul, therefore, David reverenced 
 one his superior in authority ; but in Nabal he only had be- 
 fore him one surpassing him'in wealth. And David refused, 
 somewhat too rudely, to acknowledge the bad, great man as 
 his superior: would pay him no reverence, respect, or alle- 
 giance whatever. Let us mark that distinction well, so often 
 confused kings, masters, parents : here is a power ordained 
 of God. Honor it. But wealth, name, title, distinctions, 
 always fictitious, often false and vicious, if you can claim 
 homage for these separate from worth, you confound two 
 things essentially different. Try that by the test of His life. 
 Name the text where Christ claimed reverence for wealth 
 or rank. On the Mount did the Son of Man bow the knee 
 to the majesty of wealth and wrong, or was His Sonship 
 shown in this, that He would not bow down to that as if of 
 God? 
 
 2. This great falsehood respecting superior and inferior 
 rested on a truth. There had been a superiority in the 
 wealthy class once. In the patriarchal system wealth and 
 rule had gone together. The father of the family and tribe 
 was the one in whom proprietorship was centred; but the 
 patriarchal system had passed away. Men like Nabal suc- 
 ceeded to the patriarch's wealth, and expected the subordi- 
 nation which had been yielded to patriarchal character and 
 .position ; and this when every particular of relationship was 
 altered. Once the patriarch was the protector of his depend- 
 ents. Now David's class was independent, and the protect- 
 ors, rather than the protected : at all events, able to defend 
 themselves. Once the rich man was ruler in virtue of pa- 
 ternal relationship. Now wealth was severed from rule and 
 relationship : a man might be rich, yet neither a ruler, nor a 
 protector, nor a kinsman. And the fallacy of Nabal's expec- 
 tation consisted in this, that he demanded for wealth that 
 
To Men of Wealth. 1 89 
 
 reverence which had once been due to men who happened to 
 be wealthy. 
 
 It is a fallacy in which we are perpetually entangled. 
 We expect reverence for that which was once a symbol of 
 what was reverenced, but is reverenced no longer. Here in 
 England it is common to complain that there is no longer any 
 respect of inferiors towards superiors that servants were 
 once devoted and grateful, tenants submissive, subjects en- 
 thusiastically loyal. But we forget that servants were once 
 protected by their masters, and tenants safe from wrong 
 only through the guardianship of their powerful lords ; that 
 thence a personal gratitude grew up ; that now they are pro- 
 tected by the law from wrong by a different social system 
 altogether ; and that the individual bond of gratitude sub- 
 sists no longer. We expect that to masters and employers 
 the same reverence and devotedness shall be rendered which 
 were due to them under other circumstances, and for differ- 
 ent reasons ; as if wealth and rank had ever been the claim to 
 reverence, and not merely the accidents and accompaniments 
 of the claim as if any thing less sacred than holy ties could 
 purchase sacred feelings as if the homage of free manhood 
 could be due to gold and name as if to the mere Nabal-fool 
 who is labelled as worth so much, and whose signature car- 
 ries with it so much coin, the holiest and most ennobling 
 sensations of the soul, reverence and loyalty, were due by 
 God's appointment. 
 
 No. That patriarchal system has passed forever. No 
 sentimental waitings for the past, no fond regrets for the 
 virtues of a by-gone age, no melancholy, poetical, retrospect- 
 ive antiquarian ism can restore it. In Church and State the 
 past is past : and you can no more bring^ back the blind 
 reverence, than the rude virtues of those days. The day has 
 come in which, if feudal loyalty or patriarchal reverence are 
 to be commanded, they must be won by patriarchal virtues 
 or feudal real superiorities. 
 
 II. Cause of this unhealthy social state : A false concep- 
 tion respecting rights. 
 
 It would be unjust to Nabal to represent this as an act of 
 willful oppression and conscious injustice. He did what ap- 
 peared to him fair between man and man. He paid his 
 laborers. Why should he pay any thing beyond stipulated 
 wages ? 
 
 David^s demand appeared an extravagant and insolent 
 one, provoking unfeigned astonishment and indignation. It 
 was an invasion of his rights. It was a dictation with re- 
 
1 90 The Message of the Church 
 
 spect to the employment of that which was his own. "Shall 
 I then take my bread, and my water, and my flesh that I 
 have killed for my shearers, and give it unto men whom I 
 know not whence they be ?" 
 
 Recollect, too, there was something to be said for Nabal. 
 This view of the irresponsible right of property was not his 
 invention. It was the view probably entertained by all his 
 class. It had descended to him from his parents. They 
 were prescriptive and admitted rights on which he stood. 
 And however false or unjust a prescriptive right may be, 
 however baseless when examined, there is much excuse for 
 those who have inherited and not invented it ; for it is hard 
 to see through the falsehood of any system by which we 
 profit, and which is upheld by general consent, especially 
 when good men too uphold it. Rare indeed is that pure- 
 heartedness which sees with eagle glance through conven- 
 tionalisms. This is a wrong, and I and my own class are 
 the doers of it. 
 
 On the other hand, David and his needy followers were 
 not slow to perceive that they had their rights over that 
 property of Nabal's, 
 
 Men on whom wrongs press are the first to feel them, and 
 their cries of pain and indignation are the appointed means 
 of God to direct to their wrongs the attention of society. 
 Very often the fierce and maddened shriek of suffering is 
 the first intimation that a wrong exists at all. 
 
 There was no law in Israel to establish David's claims. 
 This guardianship of Nabal's flocks was partly a self-consti- 
 tuted thing. No bargain had been made, no sum of reward 
 expressly stipulated. But there is a law besides and above 
 all written law, which gives to written laws their authority, 
 and from which so often as they diverge, it is woe to the 
 framers of the law : for their law must perish, and the 
 Eternal Law unseen will get itself acknowledged as a truth 
 from heaven or a "truth from hell a truth begirt with fire 
 and sword, if they will not read it except so. 
 
 In point of fact, David had a right to a share of Nabal's 
 profits. The harvest was in part David's harvest, for with- 
 fout David it never could have been reaped. The sheep were 
 in part David's sheep, for without David not a sheep would 
 have been spared by the marauders of the hills. Not a 
 sheaf of corn was carried to Nabal's barn, nor a night passed 
 in repose by Nabal's shepherds, but what told of the share 
 of David in the saving of that sheaf, and the procurement of 
 that repose (not the less real because it was past and mi- 
 Been). The right which the soldier has by law to his pay, 
 
To Men of Wealth. 191 
 
 vas the right which David had by unwritten law a right 
 resting on the fact that his services were indispensable for 
 the harvest. 
 
 Here, then, is one of the earliest instances of the Rights 
 of Labor coming into collision with the Rights of Property : 
 rights shadowy, undefined, perpetually shifting their bound- 
 aries, varying with every case, altering with every age, in- 
 capable of being adjusted except rudely by law, and leaving 
 always something which the most subtle and elaborate law 
 can not define, and which in any moment may grow up into 
 a wrong. 
 
 Now when it comes to this, Rights against Rights, there 
 is no determination of the question but by overwhelming 
 numbers or blood. David's remedy was a short, sharp, de- 
 cisive one. " Gird ye on every man his sword." And it is 
 difficult, for the sake of humanity, to say to which side in 
 such a quarrel we should wish well. If the rich man succeed 
 in civil war, he will bind the chain of degradation more se- 
 verely and more surely for years, or ages, on the crushed serf. 
 If the champions of popular rights succeed by the sword, 
 you may then await in awe the reign of tyranny, licentious- 
 ness, and lawlessness. For the victory of the lawless, with 
 the memory of past wrongs to avenge, is almost more san- 
 guinary than the victory of those who have had power long, 
 and whose power had been defied. 
 
 We find another cause in circumstances. Want and un- 
 just exclusion precipitated David and his men into this re- 
 bellion. It is common enough to lay too much weight on 
 circumstances. Nothing can be more false than the popular 
 theory that ameliorated outward condition is the panacea for 
 the evils of society. The Gospel principle begins from with 
 in, and works outward. 
 
 The world's principle begins with the outward condition, 
 and expects to influence inwardly. To expect that by chang- 
 ing the world without, in order to suit the world within, by 
 taking away all difficulties and removing all temptations, in- 
 stead of hardening the man within against the force of out- 
 ward temptation to adapt the lot to the man, instead of 
 moulding the spirit to the lot, is to reverse the Gospel method 
 of procedure. Nevertheless, even that favorite speculation 
 of theorists, that perfect circumstances will produce perfect 
 character, contains a truth. Circumstances of outward con- 
 dition are not the sole efficients in the production of charac- 
 ter, but they are efficients which must not be ignored. Fa- 
 vorable condition will not produce excellence, but the want 
 of it often hinders excellence, It is true that vice leads to 
 
192 The Message of the Church 
 
 poverty : all the moralizers tell us that, but it is also true 
 that poverty leads to vice. 
 
 There are some in this world to whom, speaking humanly 
 social injustice and social inequalities have made goodness 
 impossible. Take, for instance, the case of these bandits or 
 Mount Carmel. Some of them were outlawed by their own 
 crimes, but others doubtless by debts not willfully contracted 
 one at least, David, by a most unjust and unrighteous per- 
 secution. And these men, excluded, needy, exasperated by a 
 sense of wrong, untaught outcasts, could you gravely expect 
 from them obedience, patience, meekness, religious resigna- 
 tion ? Yes, my brethren, that is exactly the marvellous im- 
 possibility people do most inconsistently expect; and there 
 are no bounds to their astonishment if they do not get what 
 they expect : Superhuman honesty from starving men, to 
 whom life by hopelessness has become a gambler's desperate 
 chance ! chivalrous loyalty and high forbearance from crea- 
 tures to whom the order of society has presented itself only 
 as an unjust system of partiality ! We forget that forbearance 
 and obedience are the very last and highest lessons learned by 
 the spirit in its most careful training. By those unhallowed 
 conventionalisms through which we, like heathens, and not 
 like Christians, crush the small offender and court the great 
 one that damnable cowardice by which we banish the se- 
 duced and half admire the seducer by which, in defiance of 
 all manliness and all generosity, we 'punish the weak and 
 tempted, and let the tempter go free : by all these we make 
 men and women outcasts, and then expect from them the 
 sublimest graces of reverence and resignation ! 
 
 II. The message of the Church to the man of wealth. 
 
 The message of the Church contains those principles of 
 life which, carried out, would, and hereafter will, realize the 
 Divine Order of Society. The revealed Message does not 
 create the facts of our humanity it simply makes them 
 known. The Gospel did not make God our Father, it au- 
 thoritatively reveals that He is so. It did not create a new 
 duty of loving one another, it revealed the old duty which 
 existed from eternity, and must exist as long as humanity is 
 humanity. It was no " new commandment," but an old com- 
 mandment which had been heard from the beginning. 
 
 The Church of God is that living body of men who are 
 called by Him out of the world, not to be the inventors of a 
 new social system, but to exhibit in the world by word and 
 life, chiefly by life, what Humanity is, was, and will be, in 
 Ihe Idea of God. Now so far as the social economy is con- 
 
To Men of Wealth. 193 
 
 eerned, the revelations of the Church will coincide with the 
 discoveries of a Scientific Political Economy. Political 
 Economy discovers slowly the facts of the immutable laws 
 of social well-being. But the living principles of those laws, 
 which cause them to be obeyed, Christianity has revealed to 
 living hearts long before. The Spirit discovers them to the 
 spirit. For instance, Political Economy, gazing on such a 
 fact, as this of civil war,, would arrive at the same principles 
 which the Church arrives at. She too would say, Not self- 
 ishness, but love. Only that she arrives at these principles 
 by experience, not intuition by terrible lessons, not revela- 
 tion by revolutions, wars, and famines, not by spiritual im- 
 pulses of charity. 
 
 And so because these principles were eternally true in hu- 
 manity, we find in the conduct of Abigail towards David in 
 this early age, not explicitly, but implicity, the very princi- 
 ples which the Church of Christ has given to the world ; and* 
 more the very principles which a sound political economy 
 would sanction. In her reply to David we have the antici- 
 pation by a loving heart of those duties which selfish pru- 
 dence must have taught at last. 
 
 1. The spiritual dignity of man as man. Recollect David 
 "was the poor man, but Abigail, the high-born lady, admits 
 his worth : " The Lord will certainly make my lord a sure 
 house ; because my lord fighteth the battles of the Lord, and 
 evil hath not been found in thee all thy days." Here is a 
 truth revealed to that age. Nabal's day, and the day of such 
 as Nabal, is past ; another power is rising above the horizon. 
 David's cause is God's cause. Worth does not mean what a 
 man is worth you must find some better definition than 
 that. 
 
 Now this is the very truth revealed in the Incarnation. 
 David, Israel's model king, the king by the grace of God, not 
 by the conventional rules of human choice is a shepherd's 
 son. Christ, the King who is to reign over our regenerated 
 humanity, is humbly born the poor woman's Son. That is 
 the Church's message to the man of wealth, and a message 
 which it seems has to be learned afresh in every age. It was 
 new to Nabal. It was new to the men of the age of Christ. 
 In His day they were oifended in Him, because He was hum- 
 bly born. "Is not this the carpenter's son?" It is the of- 
 fense now. They who retain those superstitious ideas of the 
 eternal superiority of rank and wealth have the first princi- 
 ples of the Gospel yet to team. How can they believe in the 
 Son of Mary ? They may honor Him with the lip, they deny 
 him in Hia brethren. Whoever helps to keep alive that an- 
 
 9 
 
1 94 The Message of the Church 
 
 cient lie of upper and lower, resting the distinction not on 
 official authority or personal worth, but on wealth and title, 
 is doing his part to hinder the establishment of the Redeem- 
 er's kingdom. 
 
 Now the Church of Christ proclaims that truth in baptism. 
 She speaks of a kingdom here in which all are, as spirits, 
 equal. She reveals a fact. She does not affect to create the 
 fact. She says not hypothetically r u This child may be the 
 child of God if prevenient grace has taken place, or if here- 
 after he shall have certain feelings and experiences ;" nor, 
 " Hereby I create this child magically by supernatural power 
 in one moment what it was not a moment before :" but she 
 says, authoritatively, " I pronounce this child the child of 
 God : the brother of Christ the First-born the Son of Him 
 who has taught us by His Son to call Him our Father, not 
 my Father. Whatever that child may become hereafter in 
 'fact, he is now, by right of creation and redemption, the child 
 *f God. Rich or poor, titled or untitled, he shares the spirit- 
 ual nature of the second Adam the Lord from heaven." 
 
 2. The second truth expressed by Abigail was the law of 
 Sacrifice. She did not heal the grievance with smooth words. 
 Starving men are not to be paciiied by professions of good- 
 will. She brought her two hundred loaves, and her two 
 skins of wine, her five sheep ready dressed, etc. A princely 
 provision ! 
 
 You might have said this was waste half would have 
 been enough. But the truth is, liberality is a most real econ- 
 omy. She could not stand there calculating the smallest pos- 
 sible expense at which the affront might be wiped out. True 
 economy is to pay liberally and fairly for faithful service. 
 The largest charity is the bet economy. Nabal had had a 
 faithful servant. He should have counted no expense too 
 great to retain his services, instead of cheapening and de- 
 preciating them. But we wrong Abigail if we call this econ- 
 omy or calculation. In fact, had it been done on economical 
 principles, it would have failed. Ten times this sum from 
 Nabal would not have arrested revenge. For Nabal it was 
 too late. Concessions extracted by fear only provoke ex- 
 action further. The poor know well what is given because 
 it must be given, and what is conceded froih a sense of jus- 
 tice. They feel only what is real. David's men and David 
 felt that these were not the gifts of a sordid calculation, but 
 the offerings of a generous heart. And it won them their 
 gratitude their enthusiasm their unfeigned homage. 
 
 This is the attractive power of that great law, whose high- 
 est expression was the Cross. " I, if I be lifted up, will draw 
 
To Men of Wealth. 195 
 
 all men unto Me." Say what you will, it is not interest, but 
 the sight of noble qualities and true sacrifice, which com- 
 mands the devotion of the world. Yea,.even the bandit and 
 the outcast will bend before that as before a Divine thing. In 
 one form or another, it draws all men, it commands all men. 
 
 Now this the Church proclaims as part of its special mes- 
 sage to the rich. It says that the Divine Death was a Sac- 
 rifice. It declares that death to be the law of every life 
 which is to be like His. It says that the law, which alone 
 can interpret the mystery of life, is the self-sacrifice of Christ. 
 It proclaims the law of His life to have been this : "For their 
 sakes I devote (sanctify) Myself, that they also may be de- 
 voted through the truth." 
 
 In other words, the self-sacrifice of the Redeemer -was to 
 be the living principle and law of the self-devotion of His 
 people. It asserts that to be the principle which alone can 
 make any human life a true life. " I fill up that which is be- 
 hind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh, for His body's 
 sake, which is the Church." We have petrified that sacrifice 
 into a dead theological dogma, about the exact efficacy of 
 which we dispute metaphysically, and charge each other with 
 heresy. That Atonement will become a living fact only 
 when we humbly recognize in it the eternal fact that sacri- 
 fice is the law of life. The very mockers at the crucifixion 
 unwittingly declared the principle: "He saved others: him- 
 self He can not save." Of course how could He save him- 
 self who had to save others? You can only save others 
 when you have ceased to think of saving your own soul ; 
 you can only truly bless when you have done with the pur- 
 suit of personal happiness. Did you ever hear of a soldier 
 who saved his country by making it his chief work to secure 
 himself? And was the Captain of our salvation to become 
 the Saviour by contravening that universal law of sacrifice, 
 or by obeying it ? 
 
 Brother, men, the early Church gave expression to that 
 principle of sacrifice in a very touching way. They had all 
 things in common. "Neither said any of them that aught 
 of the things which he possessed was his own." They failed, 
 not because they declared that, but because men began to 
 think that the duty of sharing was compulsory. They pro- 
 claimed principles which were unnatural, inasmuch as they 
 set aside all personal feelings, which are part of our nature 
 too. They virtually compelled private property to cease, 
 because he who retained private property when all were 
 giving up was degraded, and hence became a hypocrite and 
 liar,, like Ananias. 
 
1 96 The Message of the Church 
 
 But let us not lose the truth which they expressed in an 
 exaggerated way : " Neither said any of them that aught of 
 the things which he possessed was his own." Property is 
 sacred. It is private property ; if it were not, it could not 
 be sacrificed. If it were to be shared equally by the idle 
 and the industrious, there could be no love in giving. Prop- 
 erty is the rich man's own. Nabal is right in saying, My 
 bread my water my flesh. But there is a higher riuht 
 which says, It is not yours. And that voice speaks to every 
 rich man in one way or another, according as he is selfish or 
 unselfish : coming as a voice of terror or a voice of blessing. 
 It came to Nabal with a double curse, turning his heart into 
 stone with the vision of the danger and the armed ranks of 
 David's avengers, and laying on David's soul the sin of in- 
 tended murder. It came to the heart of Abigail with a 
 double blessing : blessing her who gave and him who took. 
 
 To the spirit of the Cross alone we look as the remedy for 
 social evils. When the people of this great country, espe- 
 cially the rich, shall have been touched with the spirit of 
 the Cross to a largeness of sacrifice of which they have not 
 dreamed as yet, there will be an atonement between the 
 Rights of Labor and the Rights of Property. 
 
 3. The last part of the Church's message to the man of 
 wealth touches the matter of rightful influence. 
 
 Very remarkable is the demeanor of David towards Nabal, 
 as contrasted with his demeanor towards. Abigail. In the 
 one case, defiance, and a haughty self-assertion of equality ; in 
 the other, deference, respect, and the most eloquent bene- 
 diction. It was not therefore against the wealthy class, but 
 against individuals of the class, that the wrath of these men 
 burned. 
 
 See, then, the folly and the falsehood of the sentimental 
 regret that there is no longer any reverence felt towards 
 superiors. There is reverence to superiors, if only it can be 
 shown that they are superiors. Reverence is deeply rooted 
 in the heart of humanity you can not tear it out. Civiliza- 
 tion science progress only change its direction : they do 
 not weaken its force. If it no longer bows before crucifixes 
 and candles, priests and relics, it is not extinguished towards 
 what is truly sacred and what is priestly in man. The 
 fiercest revolt against false authority is only a step towards 
 submission to rightful authority. Emancipation from false 
 lords only sets the heart free to honor true ones. The free- 
 born David will not do homage to Nabal. Well, now go 
 and mourn over the degenerate age which no longer feels 
 respect -for that which is above it. But behold David has 
 
To Men of Wealth. 197 
 
 found a something nobler than himself. Feminine charity 
 sacrifice and justice and in gratitude and profoundest 
 respect he bows to that. The state of society which is 
 coming is not one of protection and dependence, nor one 
 of mysterious authority, and blind obedience to it, nor one 
 in which any class shall be privileged by Divine right, and 
 another remain in perpetual tutelage ; but it is one in which 
 unselfish services and personal qualities will command, by 
 Diyine right, gratitude and admiration, and secure a true 
 and spiritual leadership. 
 
 Oh, let not the rich misread the signs of the times, or mis- 
 take their brethren : they have less and less respect for ti- 
 tles and riches, for vestments and ecclesiastical pretensions, 
 but they have a real respect lor superior knowledge and su- 
 perior goodness: they listen like children to those whom 
 they believe to know a subject better than themselves. Let 
 those who know it say whether there is not something inex- 
 pressibly touching and even humbling in the large, hearty, 
 manly, English reverence and love which the working-men 
 show towards those who love and serve them truly, and 
 save them from themselves and from doing wrong. See how 
 David's feelings gush forth : " Blessed be the Lord God of 
 Israel which sent thee this day to meet me : and blessed be 
 thy advice, and blessed be thou which hast kept me this day 
 from coming to shed blood, and from avenging myself with 
 mine own hand." 
 
 The rich and the great may have that love if they will. 
 
 To conclude. Doubtless David was wrong : he had no 
 right even to redress wrongs thus ; patience was his divinely 
 appointed duty; and doubtless in such circumstances we 
 should be very ready to preach submission and to blame 
 David. Alas ! we, the clergy of the Church of England, 
 have been only too ready to do this : for three long centu- 
 ries we have taught submission to the powers that be, as if 
 that were the only text in Scripture bearing on the relations 
 between the ruler and the ruled. Rarely have we dared to 
 demand of the powers that be, justice ; of the wealthy man 
 and the titled, duties. We have produced folios of slavish 
 flattery upon the Divine Right of Power. Shame on us ! 
 we have not denounced the wrongs done to weakness : and 
 yet for one text in the Bible which requires submission and 
 patience from the poor, you will find a hundred which de- 
 nounce the vices of the rich in the writings of the noble 
 old Jewish prophets, that, and almost that only that, in the 
 Old Testament, with a deep roll of words that sound like Si- 
 nai thunders : and that in the New Testament in words less 
 
ig8 Christ's Judgment Respecting Inheritance. 
 
 impassioned and more calmly terrible from the apostles anq 
 their Master : and woe to us in the great day of God, if we 
 have been the sycophants of the rich instead of the redressera 
 of the poor man's wrongs woe to us if we. have been tutor- 
 ing David into respect to his superior, Nabal, and forgotten 
 that David's cause, not Nabal's, is the cause of God. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 CHRIST'S JUDGMENT RESPECTING INHERIT- 
 ANCE.* 
 
 ' And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother, 
 that he divide the inheritance with me. And he said unto him, Man, who 
 made me a judge or a divider over you? And he said unto them, Take 
 heed, and beware of covetousness : for a man's life consisted! not in the 
 abundance of the things which he possesseth." Luke xii. 13-15. 
 
 THE Son of God was misunderstood and misinterpreted in 
 His day. With this fact we are familiar ; but we are not at 
 all familiar with the consideration that it was very natural 
 Uiat He should be so mistaken. 
 
 He went about Galilee and Judea proclaiming the down- 
 fall of every injustice, the exposure and confutation of every 
 lie. He denounced the lawyers who refused education to 
 the people, in order that they might retain the key of knowl- 
 edge in their own hands. He reiterated Woe ! woe ! woe ! 
 to the Scribes and Pharisees, who revered the past, while 
 systematically persecuting every new prophet and every 
 brave man who rose up to vindicate the spirit of the past 
 against the institutions of the past. He spoke parables 
 which bore hard on the men of wealth : that, for instance, 
 of the rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen, 
 and fared sumptuously every day, who died, and in hell lift 
 up his eyes, being in torments that of the wealthy proprie- 
 tor who prospered in the world ; who pulled down his barns 
 to build greater ; who all the while was in the sight of God 
 a fool ; who in front of judgment and eternity was found un- 
 ready. He stripped the so-called religious party of that day 
 of their respectability, convicted them, to their own astonish- 
 ment, of hypocrisy, and called them " whited sepulchres." 
 
 * This Sermon was preached the Sunday after that on which "The Mes- 
 sage of the Church to Men of Wealth " was preached, and it was intended af 
 a further illustration of that subject. 
 
Chrises Judgment Respecting Inheritance. 199 
 
 He said God was against them ; that Jerusalem's day was 
 come, and that she must fall. 
 
 And now consider candidly : suppose that all this had 
 taken place in this country ; that an unknown stranger, 
 with no ordination, with no visible authority, basing his au- 
 thority upon his truth, and his agreement with the mind of 
 God the Father, had appeared in this England, uttering halt 
 the severe things He spoke against the selfishness of wealth, 
 against ecclesiastical authorities, against the clergy, against 
 the popular religious party suppose that such an one should 
 say that our whole social life is corrupt and false suppose 
 that instead of " thou blind Pharisee," the word had been 
 " thou blind Churchman !" 
 
 Should we have fallen at the feet of such an one and said, 
 Lo ! this is a message from Almighty God, and He who 
 brings it is a Son of God ; perhaps what He says Himself, 
 His only Son God of God ? Or should we not have rath' 
 er said, This is dangerous teaching, and revolutionary in its 
 tendencies, and He who teaches it is an incendiary a mad, 
 democratical, dangerous fanatic ? 
 
 That was exactly what they did say of your Redeemer in 
 His day ; nor does it seem at all wonderful that they did. 
 
 The sober, respectable inhabitants of Jerusalem, very 
 comfortable themselves, and utterly unable to conceive 
 why things should not go on as they had been going on 
 for a hundred years not smarting from the misery and the 
 moral degradation of the lazars with whom He associated, 
 and under whose burdens his loving spirit groaned thought 
 it excessively dangerous to risk the subversion, of their quiet 
 enjoyment by such outcries. They said, prudent men ! " If 
 He is permitted to go on this way, the Romans will come 
 and take away our place and nation." The priests and Phar- 
 isees, against whom He had specially spoken, were fiercer 
 still, they felt there was no time to be lost. 
 
 But still more, His own friends and followers misunder- 
 stood Him. 
 
 They heard him speak of a kingdom of justice and right- 
 eousness in which every man should receive the due reward 
 of his deeds. They heard Him say that this kingdom was 
 not far off, but actually among them, hindered only by their 
 sins and dullness from immediate appearance. Men's souls 
 were stirred and agitated. They were ripe for any thing, 
 and any spark would have produced explosion. They 
 thought the next call would be to take the matter into their 
 own hands. 
 
 Accordingly, on one occasion, St. John and St. James asked 
 
2OO Christ's Judgment Respecting Inheritance. 
 
 permission to call down fire from heaven upon a village of 
 the Samaritans which would not receive their message. 
 On another occasion, on a single figurative mention of a 
 sword, they began to gird themselves for the struggle : 
 " Lord," said one, " behold here are two swords." Again, as 
 soon as He entered Jerusalem for the last time, the populace 
 heralded His way with shouts, thinking that the long-delay- 
 ed hour of retribution was come at last. They saw the Con* 
 queror before them who w r as to vindicate their wrongs. In 
 imagination they already felt their feet upon the necks of 
 their enemies. 
 
 And because their hopes were disappointed, and He w r aa 
 not the demagogue they wanted, therefore they turned 
 against Him. Not the Pharisees only, but the people whom 
 He had come to save the outcast, and the publican, and the 
 slave, and the maid-servant; they whose cause Pie had so 
 often pleaded, and whose emancipation He had prepared. 
 It was I[\Q people who cried, " Crucify Him, crucJfy Him !" 
 
 This will become intelligible to us if we can get at the 
 spirit of this passage. 
 
 Among those who heard Him lay down the laws of the 
 kingdom of God justice, fairness, charity there was one 
 who had been defrauded, as it seems, by his brother of his 
 just share of the patrimony. He thought that the One who 
 stood before him was exactly w y hat he wanted : a redresser 
 of wrongs a champion of the oppressed a divider and ar- 
 biter between factions a referee of lawsuits one who 
 would spend His life in the unerring decision of all misun- 
 derstandings. 
 
 To his astonishment, the Son of Man refused to interfere in 
 his quarrel, or take part in it at all. " Man, who made me a 
 judge or a divider between you ?" 
 
 We ask attention to two things. 
 
 I. The Saviour's refusal to interfere. 
 
 H. The source to which He traced the appeal for interfer- 
 ence. 
 
 I. The Saviour's refusal to interfere. 
 
 1. He implied that it was not TH\$ jxirt to interfere. "Who 
 made me a judge or a divider?" 
 
 It is a common saying that religion has nothing to do with 
 politics, and particularly there is a strong feeling current 
 against all interference with politics by the ministers of re- 
 ligion. This notion rests on a basis which is partly wrong, 
 partly right. 
 
 To say that religion has nothing to do with politics is to 
 
Christ's Judgment Respecting Inheritance. 201 
 
 assert that which is" simply false. It were as wise to say 
 that the atmosphere has nothing to do with the principles of 
 architecture. Directly, nothing indirectly, much. Some 
 kinds of stone are so friable, that though they will last for 
 centuries in a dry climate, they will crumble away in a few 
 years in a damp one. There are some temperatures in which 
 a form of building is indispensable which in another would 
 be unbearable. The shape of doors, windows, apartments, 
 all depend upon the air that is to be admitted or excluded. 
 Nay, it is for the very sake of procuring a habitable atmos- 
 phere within certain limits that architecture exists at all. 
 The atmospheric laws are distinct from the laws of architect- 
 ure; but there is not an architectural question into which 
 atmospheric considerations do not enter as conditions of the 
 question. 
 
 That which the air is to architecture, religion is to politics, 
 It is the vital air of every question. Directly, it determines 
 nothing indirectly, it conditions every problem that can 
 arise. The kingdoms of this world must become the king- 
 doms of our Lord and of His Christ. How, if His Spirit i& 
 not to mingle with political and social truths ? 
 
 Nevertheless, in the popular idea that ivligion as such 
 must not be mixed with politics, there is a profound truth. 
 Here, for instance, the Saviour will not meddle with the 
 question. He stands aloof, sublime and dignified. It was 
 no part of His to take from the oppressor and give to the 
 oppressed, much less to encourage the oppressed to take 
 from the oppressor himself. It was His part to forbid op- 
 pression. It was a judge's part to decide what oppression was. 
 It was not His office to determine the boundaries of civil 
 right, nor to lay down the rules of the descent of property. 
 Of course there was a spiritual and moral principle involved 
 in this question. But He would not suffer His sublime mis- 
 sion to degenerate into the mere task of deciding casuistry. 
 
 He asserted principles of love, unselfishness, order, which 
 would decide all questions ; but the questions themselves 
 He would not decide. He would lay down the great politic- 
 al principle, " Render unto Caesar the things that be Caesar's, 
 and unto God the things which are God's;" but He would 
 not determine whether this particular tax was due to Caesar 
 or not. 
 
 So, too, He would say, justice, like mercy and truth, is one 
 of the weightier matters of the law ; but he would not decide 
 whether in this definite case this or that brother had justice 
 on his side. It was for themselves to determine that, and in 
 that determination lay their responsibility. 
 
 9* 
 
2 o 2 Christ '' s Judg men t Respecting Inherita nee. 
 
 And thus religion deals with men, not cases : with human 
 hearts, not casuistry. 
 
 Christianity determines general principles, out of which, 
 no doubt, the best government would surely spring : but 
 what the best government is it does not determine whether 
 monarchy or a republic, an aristocracy or a democracy. 
 
 It lays down a great social law : " Masters, give unto your 
 servants that which is just and equal." But it" is not its part 
 to declare how much is just and equal. It has no fixed 
 scale of wages according to which masters must give. That 
 it leaves to each master and each age of society. 
 
 It binds up men in a holy brotherhood. But what are the 
 best institutions and surest means for arriving at this broth- 
 erhood it has not said. In particular, it has not pronounced 
 whether competition or co-operation will secure it. 
 
 And hence it comes to pass that Christianity is the eternal 
 religion, which can never become obsolete. If it sets itself 
 to determine the temporary and the local, the justice of this 
 tax, or the exact wrongs of that conventional maxim, it 
 would soon become obsolete : it would be the religion of one 
 century, not of ail. As it is, it commits itself to nothing ex- 
 cept eternal principles. 
 
 It is not sent into this world to establish monarchy, or se- 
 cure the franchise to establish socialism, or to frown it into 
 annihilation but to establish a charity, and a moderation, 
 and a sense of duty, and a love of right, which will modify 
 human life according to any circumstances that can possibly 
 arise. 
 
 2. In this refusal, again, it was implied that His kingdom 
 was one founded on spiritual disposition, not one of outward 
 law and jurisprudence. 
 
 That this lawsuit should have been decided by the broth- 
 ers themselves, in love, with mutual fairness, would have 
 been much that it should be determined by authoritative 
 arbitration, was, spiritually speaking, nothing. The right 
 disposition of their hearts, and the right division of their 
 property thence resulting, was Christ's kingdom. The ap- 
 portionment of their property by another's division had 
 nothing to do with His kingdom. 
 
 Suppose that both were wrong : one oppressive, the other 
 covetous. Then, that the oppressor should become gener- 
 ous, and the covetous liberal, were a great gain. But to 
 take from one selfish brother in order to give to another self- 
 ish brother, what spiritual gain would there have been in 
 this ? 
 
 Suppose, again, that the retainer of the inheritance was in 
 
Christ's Judgment Respecting Inheritance. 203 
 
 the wrong, and that the petitioner had justice on his side 
 that he was a humble, meek man, and his petitio.n only one 
 of right. Well, to take the property from the unjust and 
 give it to Christ's servant, might be, and was, the duty of a 
 judge; but it was not Christ's part, nor any gain to the 
 cause of Christ. He does not reward His servants with in- 
 heritances, with lands, houses, gold. The kingdom of God is 
 not meat and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in 
 the Holy Ghost. Christ triumphs by wrongs meekly borne, 
 even more than by wrongs legally righted. What we call 
 poetical justice is not His kingdom. 
 
 To apply this to the question of the day. The great prob- 
 lem which lies before Europe for solution is, or will be, this : 
 Whether the present possessors of the soil have an exclusive 
 right to do what they will with their own, or whether a 
 larger claim may be put in by the workman for a share of 
 the profits ? Whether Capital has hitherto given to Labor 
 its just part, or not ? Labor is at present making an appeal, 
 like that of this petitioner, to the Church, to the Bible, to 
 God. "Master, speak unto my brother, that he divide the 
 inheritance with me." 
 
 Now in the mere setting of that question to rest, Chris- 
 tianity is not interested. That landlords should become 
 more liberal, and employers more merciful : that tenants 
 should be more honorable, and workmen more -unselfish ; 
 that would be indeed a glorious thing a triumph of Christ's 
 cause ; and any arrangement of the inheritance thence result- 
 ing would be a real coming of the kingdom of God. But 
 whether the soil of the country and its capital shall remain 
 the property of the rich, or become more available for the 
 poor, the rich and the poor remaining as selfish as before 
 whether the selfish rich shall be able to keep, or the selfish 
 poor to take, is a matter, religiously speaking, of profound 
 indifference. Which of the brothers shall have the inherit- 
 ance, the monopolist or the covetous ? Either neither 
 who cares ? Fifty years hence what will it matter ? But 
 a hundred thousand years hence it will matter whether 
 they settled the question by mutual generosity and forbear- 
 ance. 
 
 3. I remark a third thing. He refused to be the friend of 
 one, because He was the friend of both. He never was the 
 champion of a class^ because He was the champion of hu- 
 manity. We may take for granted that the petitioner was 
 an injured man one, at all events, who thought himself in- 
 jured ; and Christ had often taught the spirit which would 
 have made his brother right him, but He refused to take his 
 
2O4 Christ's Jiidg ment Respecting Inheritance. 
 
 part against his brother, just because he was his brother -* 
 Christ's servant, and one of God's family, as well as he. 
 
 And this was His spirit always. The Pharisees thought 
 to commit Him to a side when they asked whether it was 
 lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not. But He would take 
 no side as the Christ : neither the part of the Government 
 against the tax-payers, nor the part of the tax-payers against 
 >the Government. 
 
 Now it is a common thing to hear of the rights of man 
 a glorious and a true saying, but, as commonly used, the ex- 
 pression only means the rights of a section or class of men. 
 And it is very worthy of remark, that in these social quar- 
 rels both sides appeal to Christ and to the Bible as the 
 champions of their rights, precisely in the same way in 
 which this man appealed to Him. One class appeal to the 
 Bible, as if it were the great Arbiter which decrees that the 
 poor shall be humble and the subject submissive ; and the 
 other class appeal to the same book triumphantly, as if it 
 were exclusively on their side, its peculiar blessedness con- 
 sisting in this, that it commands the rich to divide the inher- 
 itance, and the ruler to impose nothing that is unjust. 
 
 In either of these cases Christianity is degraded, and the 
 Bible misused. They are not, as they have'been made, oh, 
 shame ! for centuries, the servile defenders of rank and 
 wealth, nor are they the pliant advocates of discontent and 
 rebellion. The Bible takes neither the part of the poor 
 against the rich exclusively, Dor that of the rich against the 
 poor ; and this because it proclaims a real, deep, true, and 
 not a revolutionary brotherhood. 
 
 The brotherhood of which we hear so much is often only a 
 one-sided brotherhood. It demands that the rich shall treat 
 the poor as brothers. It has a right to do so. It is a brave 
 and a just demand ; but it forgets that the obligation is mu- 
 tual ; that in spite of his many faults, the rich man is the 
 poor man's brother, and that the poor man is bound to rec- 
 ognize him and feel for him as a brother. 
 
 It requires that every candid allowance shall be made for 
 the vices of the poorer classes, in virtue of the circumstances 
 which, so to speak, seem to make such vices inevitable : for 
 their harlotry, their drunkenness, their uncleanness, their in- 
 subordination. Let it enforce that demand; it may and 
 must do it in the name of Christ. He was mercifully and 
 mournfully gentle to those who through terrible temptation 
 and social injustice had sunk, and sunk into misery at least 
 as much as into sin. But then, let it not be forgotten that 
 Borne sympathy must be also due on the saive score of cu 
 
Christ's Judgment Respecting Inheritance. 205 
 
 curastances to the rich man. Wealth has its temptations, so 
 has power. The vices of the rich are his forgetfulness of re- 
 sponsibility, his indolence, his extravagance, his ignorance of 
 wretchedness. These must be looked upon, no certainly 
 with weak excuses, but with a brother's eye by the poor 
 man, if he will assert a brotherhood. It is not just to attrib- 
 ute all to circumstances in the one case, and nothing in the 
 other. It is not brotherhood to say that the laborer does 
 wrong because he is tempted, and the man of wealth because 
 he is intrinsically bad. 
 
 II. The source to which he traced this appeal for a dt 
 vision. 
 
 Now it is almost certain that the reflection which aros 
 to the lips of Christ is not the one which would have pre- 
 sented itself to us under similar circumstances. We should 
 probably have sneered at the state of the law in which a 
 lawsuit could obtain no prompt decision, and injury get no 
 redress : or we should have remarked upon the evils of the 
 system of primogeniture, and asked whether it were just 
 that one brother should have all, and the others none : or 
 we might, perhaps, have denounced the injustice of permit- 
 ting privileged classes at all. 
 
 He did nothing of this kind. He did not sneer at the law, 
 nor inveigh against the system, nor denounce the privileged 
 classes. He went deeper : to the very root of the matter. 
 "Take heed and beware of covetousness." It was covet- 
 ousness which caused the unjust brother to withhold: it 
 was covetousness which made the defrauded brother indig- 
 nantly complain to a stranger. It is covetousness which is 
 at the bottom of all law r suits, all social grievances, all polit- 
 ical factions. So St. James traces the genealogy. "From 
 whence come wars and fightings among you ? Come they 
 not hence, even from your lusts which reign in your flesh ?" 
 
 Covetousness the covetousness of all : of the oppressed 
 as well as of the oppressor ; for the cry " Divide " has its 
 root in covetousness just as truly as "I will not." There 
 are no innocent classes: no devils who oppress, and angels 
 who are oppressed. The guilt of a false social state must 
 be equally divided. 
 
 We will consider somewhat more deeply this covetousness. 
 In the original the word is a very expressive one. It means 
 the desire of having more not of having more because 
 there is not enough, but simply a craving after more. More, 
 when a man has not enough. More when he has. More, 
 more, ever more. Give, give. Divide, divide. 
 
206 Christ 's Judgment Respecting Inheritance. 
 
 This craving is not universal. Individuals and whole 
 nations are without it. There are some nations, the con- 
 dition of whose further civilization is, that the desire of 
 accumulation be increased. They are too indolent or too 
 unambitious to be covetous. Energy is awakened when 
 wants are immediate, pressing, present ; but ceases with the 
 gratification. 
 
 There are other nations in which the craving is excessive, 
 even to disease. Pre-eminent among these is England. This 
 desire of accumulation is the source of all our greatness, and 
 all our baseness. It is at once our glory and our shame. It 
 is the cause of our commerce, of our navy, of our military 
 triumphs, of our enormous wealth, and our marvellous inven- 
 tions. And it is the cause of our factions and animosities, 
 of our squalid pauperism, and the worse than heathen deg- 
 radation of the masses of our population. 
 
 That which makes this the more marvellous is, that of all 
 the nations on the earth, none are so incapable of enjoyment 
 as we. God has not given to us that delicate development 
 which He has given to other races. Our sense of harmony 
 is dull and rare, our perception of beauty is not keen. An 
 English holiday is rude and boisterous : if protracted, it 
 ends in ennui and self-dissatisfaction. We can not enjoy. 
 Work, the law of human nature, is the very need of an Eng- 
 lish nature. That cold shade of Puritanism which passed 
 over us, sullenly eclipsing all grace and enjoyment, was but 
 the shadow of our own melancholy, unenjoying, national 
 character. 
 
 And yet we go on accumulating as if we could enjoy more 
 by having more. To quit the class in which they are and 
 rise into that above, is the yearly, daily, hourly effort of 
 millions in this land. And this were well if this word 
 "above" implied a reality: if it meant higher intellectually, 
 morally, or even physically. But the truth is, it is only 
 higher fictitiously. The middle classes already have every 
 real enjoyment which the wealthiest can have. The only 
 thing they have not is the ostentation of the means of enjoy- 
 ment. More .would enable them to multiply equipages, 
 houses, books. It could not enable them to enjoy them more. 
 
 Thus, then, we have reached the root of the matter. Our 
 national craving is, in the proper meaning of the term, cov- 
 etousness. Not the desire of enjoying more, but the desire 
 of having more. And if there be a country, a society, a 
 people to whom this warning is specially applicable, that 
 country is England, that society our own, that people are 
 we. " Take heed and beware of covetousness." 
 
Christ's Judgment Respecting Inheritance. 207 
 
 The true remedy for this covetousness He then proceeds 
 to give. " A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of 
 the things which he possesseth." 
 
 Now observe the distinction between His view and the 
 world's view of humanity. To the question, What is a man 
 worth ? the world replies by enumerating what he has. In 
 reply to the same question, the Son of Man replies by esti- 
 mating what he is. Not what he has, but what he is, that, 
 through time and through eternity, is his real and proper 
 life. He declared the presence of the soul : He announced 
 the dignity of the spiritual man ; He revealed the being that 
 we are. Not that which is supported by meat and drink, 
 but that whose very life is in truth, integrity, honor, purity. 
 "Skin for skin" was the satanic version of this matter; "All 
 that a man hath will he give for his life." " What shall it 
 profit a man," was the Saviour's announcement, "if he shall 
 gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" 
 
 For the oppressed and the defrauded this was the true 
 consolation and compensation the true consolation. This 
 man had lost so much loss. Well, how is he consoled ? By 
 the thought of retaliation by the promise of revenge by 
 the assurance that he shall have what he ought by right to 
 have? Nay, but thus as it were: Thou hast lost so much, 
 but thyself remains. "A man's life consisteth not in the 
 abundance of the things which he possesseth." 
 
 Most assuredly Christianity proclaims laws which will 
 eventually give to each man his rights. I do not deny this. 
 But I say that the hope of these rights is not the message, 
 nor the pVomise, nor the consolation of Christianity. Rather 
 they consist in the assertion of the true life, instead of all 
 other hopes : of the substitution of blessedness which is in- 
 ward character, for happiness which is outward satisfaction 
 of desire ; for the broken-hearted, the peace which the world 
 can not give ; for the poor, the life which destitution can not 
 take away ; for the persecuted, the thought that they are the 
 children of their Father which is in heaven. 
 
 A very striking instance of this is found in the consolation 
 offered by St. Paul to slaves. How did he reconcile them to 
 their lot? By promising that Christianity would produce 
 the abolition of the slave-trade ? No ; though this was to be 
 effected by Christianity: but by assuring them that, though 
 slaves, they might be inly free Christ's freedmen. "Art 
 thou called, being a slave ? Care not for it." 
 
 T^is, too, was the real compensation offered by Christiani- 
 ty for injuries. 
 
 The other brother had the inheritance ; and to win the in- 
 
208 Christ's Judgment Respecting Inheritance. 
 
 heritance lie had laid upon his soul the guilt of injustice 
 His advantage was the property : the price he paid for that 
 advantage was a hard heart. The injured brother had no 
 inheritance, but instead he had, or might have had, innocence, 
 and the conscious joy of knowing that he was not the injurer. 
 Herein lay the balance. 
 
 Now there is great inconsistency between the complaints 
 and claims that are commonly made on these subjects. 
 There are outcries against the insolence of power and the 
 hard-hearted selfishness of wealth. Only too often these cries 
 have a foundation of justice. But be it remembered that 
 these are precisely the cost at which the advantages, such as 
 they are, are purchased. The price which the man in au- 
 thority has paid for power is the temptation to be insolent. 
 He has yielded to the temptation, and bought his advantage 
 dear. The price which the rich man pays for his wealth is 
 the temptation to be* selfish. They have paid in spirituals for 
 what they have gained in temporals. 
 
 Now, if you are crying for a share in that wealth", and a 
 participation in that power, you mjust be content to run the 
 risk of becoming as hard and selfish and overbearing as the 
 man whom you denounce. Blame their sins if you will, or 
 despise their advantages ; but do not think that you can 
 covet their advantages, and keep clear of their temptations. 
 God is on the side of the poor, and the persecuted, and the 
 mourners a light in darkness, and a life in death ; but the 
 poverty, and the persecution, and the darkness are the con- 
 dition on which they feel God's presence. They must not 
 expect to have the enjoyment of wealth and the spiritual 
 blessings annexed to poverty at the same time. 
 
 If you will be rich, you must be content to pay the price 
 of falling into temptation, and a snare, and many foolish and 
 hurtful lusts, which drown men in perdition ; and if that 
 price be too high to pay, then you must be content with the 
 quiet valleys of existence, where alone it is well with us : 
 kept out of the inheritance, but having instead God for your 
 portion your all-sufficient and everlasting portion peace, 
 and quietness, and rest with Christ. 
 
Freedom by the Truth* 209 
 
 XIX. 
 FREEDOM BY THE TRUTH. 
 
 "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you frea**--' 
 John viii. 32. 
 
 IF these words were the only record we possessed of the 
 Saviour's teaching, it may be that they would be insufficient 
 to prove His personal Deity, but they would be enough to 
 demonstrate the Divine character of His mission. 
 
 Observe the greatness of the aim, and the wisdom of the 
 means. 
 
 The aim was to make all men free. He saw around Him 
 servitude in every form man in slavery to man, and race to 
 race: His own countrymen in bondage to the Romans 
 slaves both of Jewish and Roman masters, frightfully op- 
 pressed : men trembling before priestcraft : arid those who 
 were politically and ecclesiastically free, in worse bondage 
 still the rich and rulers slaves to their own passions. 
 
 Conscious of His inward Deity and of His Father's inten- 
 tions, He, without hurry," without the excitement which 
 would mark the mere earthly liberator, calmly said, " Ye 
 shall be free." 
 
 See, next, the peculiar wisdom of the means. 
 
 The craving for liberty was not new it lies deep in human 
 nature. Nor was the promise of satisfying it new. Em- 
 pirics, charlatans, demagogues, 'and men who were not char- 
 latans nor demagogues, had promised in vain. 
 
 1. First, they had tried by force. Wherever force has 
 been used on the side of freedom, we honor it ; the names 
 which we pronounce in boyhood with enthusiasm are those 
 of the liberators of nations and the vindicators of liberty. 
 Israel had had such : Joshua the Judges Judas Macca- 
 baeus. Had the Son of God willed so to come, even on hu- 
 man data the success was certain. I wafve the truth of His 
 inward Deity, of His miraculous power, of His power to sum- 
 mon to His will more than twelve legions of angels. I only 
 notice now that men's hearts were full of Him : ripe for re- 
 volt : and that at a single word of His, thrice three hundred 
 thousand swords would have started from their scabbards. 
 But had He so come, one nation might have gained liberty 
 
2 1 o Freedom by tJie Truth. 
 
 not the race of man : moreover, the liberty would only have 
 been independence of a foreign conqueror. Therefore as a 
 conquering king He did not come. 
 
 2. Again, it might have been attempted by legislative en- 
 actment. Perhaps only once has this been done successfully, 
 and by a single effort. When the names of conquerors shall 
 have been forgotten, and modern civilization shall have be- 
 come obsolete when England's shall be ancient history, one 
 act of hers will be remembered as a record of her greatness, 
 that Act by which in costly sacrifice she emancipated her 
 slaves. 
 
 But one thing England could not do. She could give free- 
 dom she could not fit for freedom she could not make it 
 lasting. The stroke of a monarch's pen will do the one, the 
 discipline of ages is needed for the other. Give to-morrow a 
 constitution to some feeble Eastern nation, or a horde of sav- 
 ages, and in half a century they will be subjected again. 
 Therefore the Son of Man did not come to free the world by 
 legislation. 
 
 3. It might be done by civilization. Civilization does free 
 intellect equalizes. Every step of civilization is a victory 
 over some lower instinct. But civilization contains within 
 itself the elements of a fresh servitude. Man conquers the 
 powers of nature, and becomes in turn their slave. The 
 workman is in bondage to the machinery which does his 
 will : his hours, his wages, his personal habits determined by 
 k. The rich man fills his house with luxuries, and can not do 
 without them. A highly civilized community is a very 
 spectacle of servitude. Man is there a slave to dress, to 
 hours, to manners, to conventions, to etiquette. Things con- 
 trived to make his life more easy become his masters. 
 
 Therefore Jesus did not talk of the progress of the species 
 nor the growth of civilization, He did not trust the world's 
 hope of liberty to a right division of property. But he freed 
 the inner man, that so the outer might become free too. 
 " Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make yon 
 free." 
 
 I. The truth that liberates. 
 II. The liberty which truth gives. 
 
 The truth which Christ taught was chiefly on these three 
 points : God man immortality. 
 
 First, God. Blot out the thought of God, a living person, 
 and life becomes mean, existence unmeaning, the universe 
 dark, and resolve is left without a stay, aspiration and duty 
 without a support. 
 
Freedom by the Truth. 211 
 
 The Son exhibited God as love : and so that fearful .bond, 
 age of the mind to the necessity of fate was broken. A liv- 
 ing Lord had made the world, and its dark and unintelligible 
 mystery meant good, not evil. He manifested Him as a 
 Spirit ; and if so, the only worship that could please Him 
 must be a spirit's worship. Not by sacrifices is God pleased, 
 nor by droned litanies and liturgies, nor by fawning and flat- 
 tery, nor is his wrath bought off by blood. Thus was the 
 chain of superstition rent asunder ; for superstition is wrong 
 views of God, exaggerated or inadequate, and wrong concep- 
 tions of the way to please Him. 
 
 And so when the woman of Samaria brought the conver- 
 sation to that old ecclesiastical question about consecrated 
 buildings, whether on Mount Gerizim or on Mount Moriah 
 God was the more acceptably adored, He cut the whole 
 conversation short by the enunciation of a single truth: 
 " God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship 
 Him in spirit and in truth." 
 
 2. Truth respecting man. 
 
 We are a mystery to ourselves. Go to any place where 
 nations have brought together their wealth and their inven- 
 tions, and before the victories of mind you stand in rever- 
 ence. Then stop to look at the passing crowds who have 
 attained that civilization. Think of their low aims, their 
 mean lives, their conformation only a little higher than that 
 of brute creatures, and a painful sense of degradation steals 
 upon you. So great, and yet so mean ! And so of individu- 
 als. There is not one here whose feelings have not been 
 deeper than we can fathom, nor one who "would venture to 
 tell out to his brother man the me-an, base thoughts that have 
 crossed his heart during the last hour. Now this riddle He 
 solved He looked on man as fallen, but magnificent in his 
 ruin. We, catching that thought from Him, speak as He 
 spoke. But none that were born of woman ever felt this or 
 lived this like Him. Beneath the vilest outside He saw this : 
 a human soul, capable of endless growth ; and thence He 
 treated with what for want of a better term we may call 
 respect, all who approached Him ; not because they were 
 titled Rabbis or rich Pharisees, but because they were men. 
 
 Here was a germ for freedom. It is not the shackle on 
 the wrist that constitutes the slave, but the /oss of self-re- 
 spect to be treated as degraded till he feels degraded to 
 be subjected to the lash till he believes that he deserves the 
 lash : and liberty is to suspect and yet reverence self to 
 suspect the tendency which leaves us ever on the brink of 
 fall to reverence that within ur which is allied to God, re* 
 
212 Freedom by the Truth. 
 
 deemed by God the Son, and made a temple of the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 Perhaps we have jseen an insect or reptile imprisoned in 
 wood or stone. How it got there is unknown how the 
 particles of wood in years, or of stone in ages, grew round 
 it, is a mystery, but not a greater mystery than the question 
 of how man became incarcerated in evil. At last the day of 
 emancipation came. The axe-stroke was given: and the 
 light came in, and the warmth ; and the gauze wings ex- 
 panded, and the eye looked bright ; and the living thing 
 stepped forth, and you saw that there was not its home. Its 
 home was the free air of heaven. 
 
 Christ taught that truth of the human soul. It is not in 
 its right place. It never is in its right place in the dark 
 prison-house of sin. Its home is freedom and the breath of 
 God's life. 
 
 3. Truth respecting immortality. 
 
 He taught that this life is not all : that it is only a miser- 
 able state of human infancy. He taught that in words : by 
 His life, and by His resurrection. 
 
 This, again, was freedom. If there be a faith that cramps 
 and enslaves the soul, it is the idea that this life is all. If 
 there be one that expands and elevates, it is the thought of 
 immortality : and this, observe, is something quite distinct 
 from the selfish desire of happiness. It is not to enjoy, but 
 to be, that we long for. To enter into more and higher life : 
 a craving which we can only part with when we sink below 
 humanity, and forfeit it. 
 
 This was the martyrs' strength. They were tortured, not 
 accepting deliverance, that they might attain a better resur- 
 rection. In that hope, and the knowledge of that truth, they 
 were free from the fear of pain and death. 
 
 II. The nature of the liberty which truth gives. 
 
 1. Political freedom. 
 
 It was our work last Sunday to show that Christianity 
 does not directly interfere with political questions. But we 
 should have only half done our work if we had not also 
 learned that, mediately and indirectly, it must influence 
 them. Christ's Gospel did not promise political freedom,, yet 
 it gave it : more surely than conqueror, reformer, or patriot, 
 that Gospel will bring about a true liberty at last. 
 
 And this, not by theories nor by schemes of constitutions, 
 but by the revelation of truths. God a Spirit : man His 
 child, redeemed and sanctified. Before that spiritual equali- 
 ty, all distinctions between peer and peasant, monarch and 
 
Freedom by the Truth. 2 \ 3 
 
 laborer, privileged and unprivileged, vanish. A better man, 
 or a wiser man than I, is in my presence, and I feel it a mock- 
 ery to be reminded that I am his superior in rank. 
 
 Let us hold that truth ; let us never weary of proclaiming 
 it ; and the truth shall make us free at last. 
 
 2. Mental independence. 
 
 Slavery is that which cramps powers. The worst slavery 
 is that which cramps the noblest powers. Worse, therefore, 
 than he who manacles the hands and feet, is he who puts 
 fetters on the mind, and pretends to demand that men shall 
 think, and believe, and feel thus arid thus, because others so 
 believed, and thought, and felt before. 
 
 In Judea life was become a set of forms, and religion a 
 congeries of traditions. One living word from the lips of 
 Christ, and the mind of the world was free. 
 
 Later, a mountain mass of superstition had gathered 
 round the Church, atom by atom, and grain by grain. Men 
 said that the soul was saved only by doing and believing 
 what the priesthood taught. Then the heroes of the Refor- 
 mation spoke. They said the soul of man is saved by the 
 grace of God : a much more credible hypothesis. Once 
 more' the mind of the world was made free, and made free 
 by truth. 
 
 There is a tendency in the masses always to think not 
 what is true, but what is respectable, correct, orthodox : 
 we ask, is that authorized ? It comes partly from cowardice, 
 partly from indolence, from habit, from imitation, from the 
 uncertainty and darkness of all moral truths, and the dread 
 of timid minds to plunge into the investigation of them. 
 Now, truth known and believed respecting God and man 
 frees from this, by warning of individual responsibility. 
 But responsibility is personal. It can not be delegated to 
 another, and thrown off upon a church. Before God, face 
 to face, each soul must stand to give account. 
 
 Do not, however, confound mental independence with men- 
 tal pride. It may, it ought to coexist with the deepest hu- 
 mility. For that mind "alone is free which, conscious ever 
 of its own feebleness, feeling hourly its own liability to err, 
 turning thankfully to light from whatever side it may come, 
 does yet refuse to give up that right with which God has in- 
 vested it of judging, or to abrogate its own responsibility, 
 and so humbly, and even awfully, resolves to have an opin- 
 ion, a judgment, a decision of its own. 
 
 3. Superiority to temptation. 
 
 It is not enough to define the liberty which Christ prom- 
 ises as freedom from sin. Many circumstances will exempt 
 
214 Freedom by the Truth. 
 
 from sin which do not yet confer that liberty "where the 
 Spirit of the Lord is." Childhood, paralysis, ill health, the 
 impotence of old age may remove the capacity and even the 
 desire of transgression ; but the child, the paralytic, the old 
 man, are not free through the truth. 
 
 Therefore, to this definition we must add, that one whom 
 Christ liberates is free by his own will. It is not that he 
 would and can not ; but that he can, and will not. Christian 
 liberty is right will, sustained by love, and made firm by 
 faith in Christ. 
 
 This may be seen by considering the opposite of liberty 
 moral bondage. Go to the intemperate man in the morn- 
 ing, when his head aches, his hand trembles, his throat burns, 
 and his whole frame is relaxed and unstrung : he is ashamed, 
 he hates his sin, and would not do it. Go to him at night, 
 when the power of habit is on him like a spell, and he obeys 
 the mastery of his craving. He can use the language of 
 Romans vii. : " That which he would, he does not " but the 
 evil thatvhe hates, that does he." Observe, he is not in pos- 
 session of a true self. It is not he, but sin which dwelleth in 
 him, that does it. A power which is not himself, which is not 
 he, commands him against himself. And that is slavery. 
 
 This is a gross case, but in every more refined instance the 
 slavery is just as real. Wherever a man would and can not, 
 there is servitude. He may be unable to control his expend- 
 iture, to rouse his indolence, to check his imagination. 
 Well, he is not free. He may boast, as the Jews did, that 
 he is Abraham's son, or any other great man's son that he 
 belongs to a free country that he never was in bondage to 
 any man, but free in the freedom of the Son he is not. 
 
 4. Superiority to fear. 
 
 Fear enslaves, courage liberates and that always. What- 
 ever a man intensely dreads, that brings him into bondage, 
 if it be above the fear of God and the reverence of duty. 
 The apprehension of pain, the fear of death, the dread of the 
 world's laugh, of poverty, or the loss of reputation, enslave 
 alike. 
 
 From such fear Christ frees, and through the power of 
 the truths I have spoken of. He who lives in the habitual 
 contemplation of immortality can not be in boodage to time, 
 or enslaved by transitory temptations. I do not. say he will 
 not ; " he can not sin," saith the Scripture, while that faitb is 
 living. He who feels his soul's dignity, knowing what he is 
 and who, redeemed by God the Son, and freed by God the 
 Spirit, can not cringe, nor pollute himself, nor be mean. He 
 who aspires to gaze undazzled on the intolerable brightness 
 
f UNIVERSITY j 
 Freedom by the 7>^& '2 1 5 
 
 of that One before whom Israel veiled their faces, will 
 scarcely quail before any earthly fear. 
 
 This is not picture-painting. This is not declamation. 
 These are things that have been. There have been men on 
 this earth of God's, of whom it was simply true that it was 
 easier to turn the sun from its course than them from the 
 paths of honor. There have been men like John the Baptist, 
 who could speak the truth which had made their own spirits 
 free, with the axe above their neck. There have been men, 
 redeemed in their inmost being by Christ, on whom tyrants 
 and mobs have done their worst, and when, like Stephen, the 
 stones crashed in upon their brain, or when their flesh hissed 
 and crackled in the flames, were calmly superior "to it all. 
 The power of evil had laid its shackles on the flesh, but the 
 mind, and the soul, and the heart were free. 
 
 We conclude with two inferences : 
 
 1. To cultivate the love of truth. I do not mean veracity : 
 that is another thing. Veracity is the correspondence be- 
 tween a proposition and a man's belief. Truth is the corre- 
 spondence of the proposition with fact. The love of truth is 
 the love of realities the determination to rest upon facts, 
 and not upon semblances. Take an illustration of the way 
 in which the habit of cultivating truth is got. Two boys see 
 a misshapen, hideous object in the dark. One goes up to the 
 cause of his terror, examines it, learns what it is ; he knows 
 the truth, and the truth has made him free. The other leaves 
 it in mystery and unexplained vagueness, and is a slave for 
 life to superstitions and indefinite terrors. Romance, pretti- 
 ness, " dim religious light," awe and mystery these are not 
 the atmosphere of Christ's gospel of liberty. Base the heart 
 on facts. The truth alone can make you free. 
 
 2. See what a Christian is. Our society is divided into 
 two classes those who are daring, inquisitive, but restrain- 
 ed by no reverence, and kept back by little religion ; those 
 who may be called religious : but, with all their excellences, 
 we can not help feeling that the elements of their character 
 are feminine rather than masculine, and that they have no 
 grasp or manly breadth, that their hold is on feeling rather 
 than on truth. 
 
 Now see what a Christian is, drawn by the hand of Christ. 
 He is a man on whose clear and open brow God has set the 
 stamp of truth : one whose very eye beams bright with hon- 
 or; in whose very look and bearing you may see freedom, 
 manliness, veracity ; a brave man a noble man frank, gen- 
 erous, true, with, it may be, many faults; whose freedom 
 may take the form of impetuosity or rashness, but the form 
 
2 1 6 The Kingdom of the Truth. 
 
 of meanness never. Young men, if you have been deterred 
 from religion by its apparent feebleness and narrowness, re- 
 member, it is a manly thing to be a Christian. 
 
 XX. 
 THE KINGDOM OF THE TRUTH. 
 
 " Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then ? Jesus answered, 
 Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause 
 came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one 
 that is of the tuith heareth my voice." John xviii. 37. 
 
 THE Church is the kingdom of God on earth, and the whole 
 fabric of the Christian religion rests on the monarchy of 
 Christ. The Hebrew prisoner who stood before the Roman 
 judge claimed to be the King of men, and eighteen centuries 
 have only verified His claim. There is not a man bearing 
 the Christian name who does not, in one form or another, ac- 
 knowledge Him to be the Sovereign of his soul. The ques- 
 tion therefore at once suggests itself On what title does this 
 claim rest ? 
 
 Besides the title on which the Messiah grounded His pre- 
 tensions to be the Ruler of a kingdom, three are conceivable : 
 the title of force, the title of prescriptive authority, or the ti- 
 tle of incontrovertible reasoning. 
 
 Had the Messiah founded His kingdom upon the basis of 
 force, he would simply have been a rival of the Caesars. The 
 imperial power of Rome rested on that principle. This was all 
 that Pilate meant at first by the question, "Art thou a king ?" 
 As a Roman, he had no other conception of rule. Right 
 well had Rome fulfilled her mission as the iron kingdom 
 which was to command by strength, and give to the world 
 the principles of law. But that kingdom was wasting when 
 these words were spoken. For seven hundred years had the 
 empire been building itself up. It gave way at last, and was 
 crumbled into fragments by its own ponderous massiveness. 
 To use the language of the prophet Daniel, miry clay had mix- 
 ed with the kingdom of iron, and the softer nations which had 
 been absorbed into it broke down its once invincible strength 
 by corrupting and enervating its citizens ; the conquerors of 
 the world dropped the sword from a grasp grown nerveless. 
 The empire of strength was passing away ; for no kingdom 
 founded on force is destined to permanence. "They that 
 take the sword shall perish with the sword." 
 
The Kingdom of the Truth. 2 1 7 
 
 Before Pontius Pilate Christ distinctly disclaimed this right 
 of force as* the foundation of his sovereignty. "If my king- 
 dom were of this world, then would my servants fight : but 
 now is .my kingdom not from hence." 
 
 The next conceivable basis of a universal kingdom is pre- 
 scriptive authority. The scribes and priests who waited out- 
 side for their victim conceived of such a kingdom. They 
 had indeed already an ecclesiastical' kingdom which dated 
 back far beyond the origin of Rome. They claimed to rule 
 on a title such as this : " It is written." But neither on this 
 title did the Saviour found His claim. He spoke lightly of 
 institutions which were venerable from age. He contravened 
 opinions which were gray with the hoar of ages. It may be 
 that at times He defended Himself on the authority of Moses, 
 by showing that what He taught was not in opposition to 
 Moses; but it is observable that He never rested His claims 
 as a teacher, or as the Messiah, on that foundation. The 
 scribes fell back on this : " It has been said ;" or, " It is writ- 
 ten." Christ taught, as the men of His day remarked, on an 
 authority very diiferent from that of the scribes. Not even 
 on His own authority : He did not claim that His words 
 should be recognized because He said them, but because they 
 were true. " If I say the truth, why do ye not believe me ?" 
 Prescription personal authority these were not the basis 
 of His kingdom. 
 
 One more possible title remains. He might have claimed 
 to rule over men on the ground of incontrovertible demon- 
 stration of His principles. This was the ground taken by ev- 
 ery philosopher who was the founder of a sect. Apparently, 
 after the failure of his first guess, Pilate thought in the sec- 
 ond surmise that this was what Jesus meant by calling Him- 
 self a king. When fie heard of a kingdom, he thought he 
 had before him a rival of Caasap ; but when truth was named, 
 he seems to have fancied that he was called to try a rival of 
 the philosophers some new candidate for a system some 
 new pretender of a truth which was to dethrone its rival sys-_ 
 tern. 
 
 This seems to be implied in the bitter question, " What is 
 truth ?" For the history of opinion in those days was like 
 the history of opinion in our own religions against religions, 
 philosophies against philosophies religion and philosophy 
 opposed to one another the opinion of to-day dethroned by 
 the opinion of to-morrow the heterodoxy of this age reckon- 
 ed the orthodoxy of the succeeding one. And Pilate, feeling 
 the vainness and the presumption of these pretensions, having 
 lived to see failure after failure of systems which pretended tft 
 
 10 
 
2 1 8 The Kingdom of the Truth. 
 
 teach that which is, smiled bitterly at the enthusiast who 
 again asserted confidently His claims to have discovered the 
 undiscoverable. There broke from his lips a bitter, half-sar- 
 castic, half-sad exclamation of hopeless skepticism, "What is 
 truth?" 
 
 And indeed had the Redeemer claimed this to overthrow 
 the doctrine of the Porch and of the Academy, and to en- 
 throne Christianity as a philosophy of life upon their ruins, 
 by mere argument, that skeptical cry would have been not 
 ill-timeql. 
 
 In these three ways have men attempted the propagation 
 of the Gospel. By force, when the Church ruled by persecu- 
 tion by prescriptive authority, when she claimed infallibili- 
 ty, or any modification of infallibility in the Popery of Rome 
 or the Popery of the pulpit by reasoning, in the age of 
 " evidences," when she only asked to have her proofs brought 
 forward and calmly heard, pledged herself to rule the world 
 by the conviction of the understanding, and laid deep and 
 broad the foundations of rationalism. Let us hear the claim 
 of the King Himself. He rested His royal rights on His tes- 
 timony to the truth. " Thou sayest, for I am a King (a more 
 correct translation) ; to this end was I born, to bear witness 
 to the truth." The mode in which the subjects of the king- 
 dom were brought beneath His sway was by assimilation. 
 " Every one that is of the truth, heareth My voice." These, 
 then, are our points: 
 
 I. The basis of the kingly rule of Christ. 
 II. The qualifications of the subjects of the kingdom. 
 
 I. The basis of the kingly rule of Christ. 
 
 Christ is a king in virtue of His being a witness to the 
 truth. "Thou sayest right, To this end was I born, and for 
 this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness 
 unto the truth." 
 
 Truth is used here in a sense equivalent to reality: for 
 - l truth " substitute reality, and it will become more intelligi- 
 ble. For " the truth " is an ambiguous expression, limited in 
 its application, meaning often nothing more than a theologi- 
 cal creed, or a few dogmas of a creed which this or that par- 
 ty have agreed to call "the truth." It would indeed fritter 
 down the majesty of the Redeemer's life to say that He was 
 a witness for the truth of any number of theological dogmas. 
 Himself His life were a witness to truth in the sense of re- 
 ality. The realities of life the realities of the universe to 
 these His every act and word bore testimony. He was as 
 much a witness to the truth of tlie purity of domestic life aa 
 
The Kingdom of the Truth. 2 1 9 
 
 to the truth of the doctrine of the Incarnation : to the truth 
 of goodness being identical with greatness as much as to the 
 doctrine of the Trinity and more : His mind corresponded 
 with reality as the dial with the sun. 
 
 Again, in being a witness to reality, we are to understand 
 something very much deeper than the statement that He 
 spoke truly. There is a wide difference between truthfulness 
 and mere veracity. Veracity implies a correspondence be- 
 tween words and thoughts : truthfulness, a correspondence 
 between thoughts and realities. To be veracious, it is only 
 necessary that a man give utterance to his convictions; to be 
 true, it is needful that his convictions have affinity with fact. 
 
 Let us take some illustrations of this distinction. The 
 prophet tells of men who put sweet for bitter, and bitter for 
 sweet : who call good evil, and evil good. Yet these were 
 veracious men ; for to them evil was good, and bitter was 
 sweet. There was a correspondence between their opinions 
 and their words : this was veracity. But there was no cor- 
 respondence between their opinions and eternal fact : this 
 was untruthfulness. They spoke their opinions truly, but 
 their opinions were not true. The Pharisees in the time of 
 Christ were men of veracity. What they thought they said. 
 They thought that Christ was an impostor. They believed 
 that to tithe mint, anise, and cummin was as acceptable to 
 God as to be just, and merciful, and true. It was their con 
 viction that they were immeasurably better than publicans 
 and profligates : yet veracious as they were, the title perpet- 
 ually affixed to them is, " Ye hypocrites." The life they led 
 being a false life, is called, in the phraseology of the Apostle 
 John, a lie. 
 
 If a man speak a careless slander against another, believ- 
 ing it, he has not sinned against veracity ; but the careless- 
 ness which has led him into so grave an error effectually 
 bars his claim to clear truthfulness. He is a veracious wit- 
 ness, but not a true one. Or a man may have taken up sec- 
 ond-hand, indolently, religious views : may believe them, de- 
 fend them vehemently, is he a man of truth ? Has he bowed 
 before the majesty of truth with that patient, reverential 
 humbleness which is the mark of those who love her? 
 
 Imagination has pictured to itself a domain in which every 
 one who enters should be compelled to speak only what he 
 thought, and pleased itself by calling such domain the pal- 
 ace of truth. A palace of veracity, if you will, but no tem- 
 ple of the truth : a place where every one would be at liberty 
 to utter his own crude unrealities to bring forth his delu- 
 sions, mistakes, half-formed hasty judgments : where the de 
 
22O The Kingdom of the Truth. 
 
 praved ear would reckon discord harmony, and the depraved 
 eye mistake color the depraved moral taste take Herod or 
 Tiberius for a king, and shout beneath the Redeemer's Cross, 
 "Himself He can not save." A temple of the truth ? Nay, 
 only a palace echoing with veracious falsehoods : a Babel 
 of confused sounds, in which egotism would rival egotism, 
 and truth would be each man's own lie. Far, far more is 
 implied here than that the Son of Man spoke veraciously, in 
 saying that He was a witness to the truth. 
 
 Again, when it is said that He was a witness to the truth, 
 it is implied that His very being, here, manifested to the 
 world Divine realities. Human nature is but meant to be a 
 witness to the Divine ; the true humanity is a manifestation 
 or reflection of God. And that is Divine humanity in 
 which the humanity is a perfect representation of the Divine. 
 "We behold," says the Apostle Paul, in Christ, "as in a 
 glass, the glory of the Lord." And, to borrow and carry on 
 the metaphor, the difference between Christ and other men 
 is this ; they are imperfect reflections, He a perfect one, of 
 God. 
 
 There are mirrors which are concave, which magnify the 
 thing that they reflect : there are mirrors convex, which di- 
 minish it. And we in like manner represent the Divine in a 
 false, distorted way. Fragments of truth torn out of connec- 
 tion, snatches of harmony joined without unity. We exag- 
 gerate and diminish till all becomes untrue. We bring forth 
 our own fancies, our own idiosyncrasies, our own imagina- 
 tions, and the image of God can be no longer recognized. 
 
 In One alone has the Divine been so blended with the 
 human, that, as the ocean mirrors every star and every tint 
 of blue upon the sky, so was the earthly life of Christ the 
 life of God on earth. 
 
 Now, observe, that the perfection of humanity consists in 
 faithful imitation of, or witness borne to, the mind and life of 
 God. Whoever has studied and understood the life of Christ 
 will have remarked, not without surprise, that the whole 
 principle of His existence was the habit of unceasing imita- 
 tion. Listen to a few instances of this. 
 
 " The Son can do nothing of Himself, but that which He 
 geeth the Father do." " The words which I speak I speak 
 not of myself, but the Father which is with me, He doeth 
 the works." Do we remember the strange and startling 
 principle on which He defends His infraction of the literal, 
 legal Sabbath ? " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." 
 God the Father works all the sabbath-day. So may man, 
 His son. Do we recollect the ground on which He enforces 
 
The Kingdom of the Truth. , 221 
 
 forgiveness of injuries ? A strange ground, surely, which 
 would never have occurred except to One whose life was 
 habitual imitation. " Love your enemies ; do good to them 
 that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you 
 and persecute you : that ye may be the children of (that is, 
 resemble) your Father ; . . . for He sendeth His rain upon the 
 just and upon the unjust." 
 
 This, then, is man's this was the Son of Man's relation to 
 the truth. Man is but a learner a devout recipient of a 
 revelation here to listen with open ear devoutly for that* 
 which he shall hear ; to gaze and watch for that which He 
 shall see. Man can do no more. He can not create truth, 
 he can only bear witness to it ; he has no proud right of 
 private judgment, he can only listen and report that which 
 is in the universe. If he does not repeat and witness to 
 that, he speaketh of his own, and forthwith ceaseth to be 
 true. He is a liar, and the father of it, because he creates it. 
 Each man in his 'vocation is in the world to do this: as 
 truly as it was said by Christ rnay it be said by each of us, 
 even by those from whose trades and professions it seems 
 most alien, " To this end was I born, and for this cause 
 came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth." 
 
 The architect is here to be a witness. He succeeds only 
 so far as he is a witness, and a true one. The lines and 
 curves, the acanthus on his column, the proportions, all are 
 successful and beautiful only so far as they are true the 
 report of an eye which has lain open to God's world. If he 
 build his light-house to resist the storm, the law of imitation 
 bids him build it after the shape of the spreading oak which 
 has defied the tempest. If man construct the ship which is 
 to cleave the waters, calculation or imitation builds it on the 
 model upon which the Eternal Wisdom has already con- 
 structed the fish's form. 
 
 The artist is a witness to the truth, or he will never attain 
 the beautiful. So is the agriculturist, or he will never reap 
 a harvest. So is the statesman, building up a nation's polity 
 ou the principles which time has proved true, or else all his 
 work crumbles down in revolution : for national revolution 
 is only the Divine rejection stamped on the social falsehood 
 which can not stand. In every department of life, man 
 must work truly as a witness. He is born for that, noth- 
 ing else : and nothing else can he do. Man the Son can do 
 nothing of Himself, but that which He seeth God the Father 
 do. 
 
 This was the Saviour's title to be a king, and His king- 
 dom formed itself upon this law : " Every one that is of the 
 
222 The Kingdom of the Truth. 
 
 truth heareth iny voice :" that eternal law which makes 
 truth assimilate all that is congenial to itself. Truth is like 
 life : whatever lives absorbs into itself all that is congenial. 
 The leaf that trembles in the wind assimilates the light of 
 heaven to make its color, and the sap of the parent stem, 
 innumerable influences from heaven, and earth, and air, to 
 make up its beautiful being. 
 
 So grew the Church of Christ round Him, as a centre, 
 attracted by the truth : all that had in it harmony with His 
 Divine life and words grew to Him (by gradual accretions) ; 
 clung to Him as the iron to the magnet. All that were of 
 His Spirit believed : all that had in them the Spirit of Sacri- 
 fice were attracted to His Cross. " I, if I be lifted up, will 
 draw all men unto me." 
 
 He taught not by elaborate trains of argument, like a 
 scribe or a philosopher : He uttered His truths rather as 
 detached intuitions, recognized by intuition, to be judged 
 only by being felt. For instance, " Blessed are the pure in 
 heart : for they shall see God." " It is more blessed to give 
 than to receive." " Blessed are ye when men shall revile 
 you, and persecute you." Prove that by force by au- 
 thority by argument you can not. It suffices that a man 
 reply, " It is not so to me : it is more blessed to receive than 
 it is to give." You have no reply : if he be not of the 
 truth, you can not make him hear Christ's voice. The truth 
 of Christ is true to the unselfish ; a falsehood to the selfish. 
 They that are of the truth, like Him, hear His voice : and if 
 you ask the Christian's proof of the truth of such things, he 
 has no other than this : It is true to me, as any other intui- 
 tive truth is true ; equals are equal, because my mind is so 
 constituted that they seem so perforce. Purity is good, be- 
 cause my heart is so made that it feels it to be good. 
 
 Brother men, the truer you are, the humbler, the nobler, 
 the more will you feel Christ to be your king. You may be 
 very little able to prove the king's Divine genealogy, or to 
 appreciate those claims to your allegiance which arise out 
 of His eternal generation : but He will be your Sovereign 
 and your Lord by that affinity of character which compels 
 you to acknowledge His words and life to be Divine. " He 
 that receiveth His testimony hath set to his seal that God is 
 true." 
 
 II. We pass to the consideration of the qualification of the 
 subjects .of the empire of the truth. Who are they that are 
 of the truth. 
 
 1. The first qualification is to be true : " He that is of the 
 
The Kingdom of Ike Truth. 223 
 
 truth heareth My voice." Truth lies in character. Christ 
 did not simply speak truth : He was truth : true through 
 and through ; for truth is a thing, not of words, but of life 
 and being. None but a Spirit can be true. 
 
 For example. The friends of Job spoke words of truth. 
 Scarcely a maxim which they uttered could be impugned : 
 cold, hai'4, theological verities : but verities out of place, in 
 that place cruel and untrue. Job spoke many words not 
 strictly accurate hasty, impetuous, blundering, wrong; but 
 the whirlwind came, and, before the voice of God, the vera- 
 cious falsehoods were swept into endless nothingness: the 
 true man, wrong, perplexed in verbal error, stood firm : he 
 was true though his sentences were not : turned to the truth 
 as the sunflower to the sun : as the darkened plant impris- 
 oned in the vault turns towards the light, struggling to 
 solve the fearful enigma of his existence. Job was a servant 
 of the truth, being true in character. 
 
 2. The next qualification is integrity. But by integrity I 
 do not mean simply sincerity or honesty; integrity rather 
 according- to the meaning of the word as its derivation inter- 
 prets it entireness wholeness soundness: that which 
 Christ means when He says, " If thine eye be single [or 
 sound], thy whole body shall be full of light." 
 
 This integrity extends through the entireness or whole- 
 ness of the character. It is found in small matters as well 
 as great ; for the allegiance of the soul to truth is tested by 
 small things rather than by those which are more important. 
 There is many a man who would lose his life rather than 
 perjure himself in a court of justice, whose life is ye*t a tis- 
 sue of small insincerities. We think that we hate falsehood 
 when we are only hating the consequences of falsehood. 
 We resent hypocrisy and treachery and calumny, not be- 
 cause they are untrue, but because they harm us. We hate 
 the false calumny, but we are half pleased with the false 
 praise. It is evidently not the element of untruth here that 
 is displeasing, but the element of harmfulness. Now he is a 
 man of integrity who hates untruth as untruth : who resents 
 the smooth and polished falsehood of society which does no 
 harm : who turns in indignation from the glittering whiten 
 ed lie of sepulchral Pharisaism which injures no one. Integ- 
 rity recoils from deceptions which men would almost smile 
 to hear called deception. To a moral, pure mind, the arti- 
 fices in every department of life are painful : the stained 
 wood which passes for a more firm and costly material in a 
 building, and deceives the eye by seeming what it is not, 
 marble : the painting which is intended to be taken for a re 
 
224 The Kingdom of the Truth. 
 
 ality : the gilding which is meant to pass for gold : and the 
 glass which is worn to look like jewels ; for there is a moral 
 feeling and a truthfulness in architecture, in painting, and in 
 dress, as well as in the market-place, and in the senate, and 
 in the judgment-hall. 
 
 " These are trifles." Yes, these are trifles but it is just 
 these trifles which go to the formation of character. He 
 that is habituated to deceptions and artificialities in trifles, 
 Hvill try in vain to be true in matters of importance : foi 
 truth is a thing of habit rather than of will. You can not in 
 any given case, by any sudden and single effort, will to be 
 true, if the habit of your life has been insincerity. And it is 
 a fearful question and a difficult one, how all these things, 
 the atmosphere which we breathe of our daily life, may sap 
 the very foundations of the power of becoming a servant of 
 the truth. Life becomes fictitious : and it passes into religion, 
 till our very religion bases itself upon a figment too. We 
 are not righteous, but we expect God to make believe that 
 we are righteous, in virtue of some peculiar doctrines which 
 we hold ; and so our very righteousness becomes the ficti* 
 tious righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, instead of 
 the righteousness which is by faith, the righteousness of 
 those who are the children of the kingdom of the truth. 
 
 3. Once more. He alone is qualified to be the subject of 
 the King who does the truth. Christianity joins two things 
 inseparably together: acting truly, and perceiving truly. 
 Every day the eternal nature of that principle becomes 
 more certain. If any man will do His will, he shall know of 
 the doctrine whether it be of God. 
 
 It is a perilous thing to separate feeling from acting ; to 
 have learnt to feel rightly without acting rightly. It is a 
 danger to which in a refined and polished age, we are pecul- 
 iarly exposed. The romance, the poem, and the sermon, 
 teach us how to feel. Our feelings are delicately correct. 
 But the danger is this : feeling is given to lead to action ; 
 if feeling be suffered to awake without passing into duty, 
 the character becomes untrue. When the emergency for 
 real action comes, the feeling is as usual produced : but ac- 
 customed as it is to rise in fictitious circumstances" without 
 action, neither will it lead on to action in the real ones. 
 " We pity wretchedness and shun the wretched." We utter 
 sentiments, just, honorable, refined, lofty but somehow, 
 when a truth presents itself in the shape of a duty, we are 
 unable to perform it. And so such characters become by 
 degrees like the artificial pleasure-grounds of bad taste, in 
 which the waterfall does not fall, and the grotto offers only 
 
The Kingdom of the Truth. 225 
 
 the refreshment of an imaginary shade, and the green hill 
 does not strike the skies, and the tree does not grow. Their 
 lives are a sugared crust of sweetness trembling over black 
 depths of hollowness : more truly still, " whited sepulchres" 
 fair without to look upon, " within full of all uncleanness." 
 
 It is perilous, again, to separate thinking rightly from act- 
 ,ing rightly. He is already half false who speculates on truth 
 and does not do it. Truth is given, not to be contemplated, 
 but to be done. Life is an action not a thought. And the 
 penalty paid by him who speculates on truth, is that by de- 
 grees the very truth he holds becomes to him a falsehood. 
 
 There is no truthfulness, therefore, except in the witness 
 borne to God by doing His will to live the truths we hold, 
 or else they will be no truths at all It was thus that He 
 witnessed to the truth. He lived it. He spoke no touching 
 truths for sentiment to dwell on, or thought to speculate upon. 
 Truth with Him was a matter of life and death. He periled 
 His life upon the words He said. If He were true, the life 
 of men was a painted life, and the woes He denounced un- 
 flinchingly would fall upon the Pharisees. But \fthey were 
 true, or even strong, His portion in this life was the Cross. 
 
 Who is a true man ? He who does the truth ; and never 
 holds a principle on which he is not prepared in any hour to 
 act, and in any hour to risk the consequences of holding it. 
 
 I make in conclusion one remark. The kingly character 
 of truth is exhibited strikingly in the calmness of the bearing 
 of the Son of Man before His judge. Veracity is not neces- 
 sarily dignified. There is a vulgar effrontery a spirit of 
 defiance which .taunts, and braves, and challenges coriderrfna- 
 tion. It marks the man who is conscious of sincerity, but of 
 nothing higher whose confidence is in himself and his own 
 honesty, and who is absorbed in the feeling, " I speak the 
 truth and am a martyr." Again, the man of mere veracity 
 is often violent, for what he says rests upon his own asser- 
 tion : and vehemence of assertion is the only addition he can 
 make to it. Such was the violence of Paul before Ananias. 
 He was indignant at the injustice of being smitten contrary 
 to the law ; and the powerlessness of his position, the hope- 
 lessness of redress, joined to a conviction of the truth of what 
 he said, produced that vehemence. 
 
 It has been often remarked that there is a great difference 
 between theological and scientific controversy. Theologians 
 are proverbially vituperative : because it is a question of ve- 
 racity : the truth of their views, their moral perceptions, 
 their intellectual acumen. There exists no test but argu- 
 ment on which they can fall back. If argument fails, all fails, 
 
 10* 
 
226 *Tke Skepticism of Pilate. 
 
 But the man of science stands calmly on the facts of the uni 
 verse. He is based upon reality. All the opposition and 
 controversy in the world can not alter facts, nor prevent the 
 facts being manifest at last. He can be calm, because he is 
 a witness for the Truth. 
 
 In the same way, but in a sense far deeper and more sa- 
 cred, the Son of Man stood calm, rooted in the Truth. There 
 was none of the egotism of self-conscious veracity in those 
 placid, confident, dignified replies. This was not the feeling 
 "I hold the truth," but "I am witness to the truth." 
 They might spit upon Him kill Him crucify Him give 
 His ashes to the winds they could not alter the Truth by 
 which He stood. Was not that His own feeling ? " Heaven 
 and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass 
 away." 
 
 There was the kingly dignity of One who, in life and 
 death, stood firm on truth as on a rock. 
 
 In the name of Christ, I respectfully commend these 
 thoughts for the special consideration of the present week, 
 to those who will be pledged by oath to witness to the 
 whole truth they know, and nothing but the truth : to those 
 who permitted by the merciful spirit of English jurispru- 
 dence, to watch that their client, if condemned, shall be con- 
 demned only according to the law are yet not justified by 
 the spirit of the life of Christ in falsifying or obscuring facts; 
 and who, owing a high duty to a client, owe one higher to 
 the Truth : and lastly, to those whom the severe intellectual, 
 and, much more, moral training of the English bar has quali- 
 fied for the high office of disentangling truth from the mazes 
 of conflicting testimony. 
 
 From the trial-hour of Christ from the Cross of the Son 
 of God there arises the principle to which all His life bore 
 witness, that the first lesson of Christian life is this, Be true 
 and the second this, Be true and the third this, Be true. 
 
 XXI. 
 THE SKEPTICISM OF PILATE. 
 
 "Pilate saith unto him, What is truth ?" John xviii. 38. 
 
 THE lesson which we are to draw from this verse must 
 depend upon the view we take of the spirit in which the 
 words were spoken. Some of the best commentators con- 
 
The Skepticism of Pilate. 227 
 
 ceive them to have been words of mockery : and such is the 
 great Lord Bacon's view. " ' What is truth ?' said jesting 
 Pilate, and would not wait for a reply." 
 
 In all deference to such authority, we can not believe that 
 this sentence was spoken in jest. In Pilate's whole conduct 
 there is no trace of such a tone. It betrays throughout 
 much of uncertainty, nothing of lightness. He was cruelly 
 tormented with the perplexity of efforts to save his prisoner. 
 He risked his own reputation. He pronounced Him, almost 
 with vehemence, to be innocent. He even felt awe, and was 
 afraid of Him. In such a frame of mind, mockery was im- 
 possible. 
 
 Let us try to comprehend the character of the man who 
 asked this question. His character will help us to judge the 
 tone in which he asked. And his character, the character of 
 his mind and life, are clear enough from the few things re- 
 corded of him. He first hears what the people have to say; 
 then asks the opinion of the priests then comes back to Je- 
 sus goes again to the priests and people lends his ear 
 listens to the ferocity on the one hand, and feels the beau- 
 ty on the other, balancing between them ; and then he be- 
 comes bewildered, as a man of the world is apt to do who 
 has had no groundwork of religious education, and hears su- 
 perficial discussions on religious matters, and superficial 
 charges, and superficial slanders, till he knows not what to 
 think. What co?/&/come out of such procedure? Nothing 
 but that cheerlessness of soul to which certainty respecting 
 any thing and every thing here on earth seems unattainable. 
 This is the exact mental state which we call skepticism. 
 
 Out of that mood, when he heard the enthusiast before him 
 speak of a kingdom of the truth, there broke a sad, bitter, 
 sarcastic sigh, " What is truth?" Who knows any thing 
 about it ? Another discoverer of the undiscoverable ! Jest- 
 ing Pilate ! with Pilate the matter was beyond a jest. It 
 was not a question put for the sake of information : for he 
 went immediately out, and did not stay for information. It 
 was not put for the sake of ridicule, for he went out to say, 
 "I find no fault in Him." Sarcasm there was perhaps: but 
 it was that mournful, bitter sarcasm which hides inward un- 
 rest in sneering words: that sad irony whose very laugh 
 rings of inward wretchedness. We shall pursue, from this 
 question of Pilate, two lines of thought. 
 
 I. The causes of Pilate's skepticism. 
 II. The way appointed for discovering what is truth. 
 
 I. The causes and among these I name first, indecision of 
 
228 The Skepticism of Pilate. 
 
 character. Pilate's whole behavior was a melancholy exhi 
 bition. He was a thing set up for the world's pity. See how 
 lie acts : he first throws the blame on the priests and then 
 acknowledges that all responsibility is his own : washes his 
 hands before the multitude, saying, " I am innocent of the 
 blood of this just person. See ye to it." And then " Know- 
 est thou not that /have power to crucify thee, and power to 
 release thee?" He pronounces Jesus innocent; and then, with 
 wondrous inconsistency, delivers Him to be scourged: yields 
 Him up to be crucified, and then tries every underhand ex- 
 pedient to save Him. 
 
 What is there in all this but vacillation of character lying 
 at the root of unsettledness of opinion ? Here is a man 
 knowing the right and doing the wrong not willing to do 
 an act of manifest injustice if he can avoid it, but hesitating 
 to prevent it, for fear of a charge against himself pitiably 
 vacillating because his hands were tied by the consciousness 
 of past guilt and personal danger. How could such a man 
 be certain about any thing ? What could a mind, wavering, 
 unstable, like a feather on the wind, know or believe of solid, 
 stable truth, which altereth not, but remaineth like a rock 
 amidst the vicissitudes of the ages and the changeful fash- 
 ions of the minds of men ? "A double-minded man is un- 
 stable in all his ways." " He that is of the truth, heareth 
 the voice of truth." To the untrue man all things are untrue. 
 To the vacillating man, who can not know his own mind, all 
 things seem alterable, changeful, unfixed ; just as to the man 
 tossed at sea, all things motionless in themselves seem to 
 move round, upward, downward, or around, according to his 
 own movements. 
 
 2d. Falseness to his own convictions. 
 
 Pilate had'a conviction that Jesus was innocent. Instead 
 of acting at once on that, he went and parleyed. He argued 
 and debated till the practical force of the conviction was un- 
 settled. 
 
 Now let us distinguish : I do not say that a man is never 
 to re-examine a question once settled. A great Christian 
 writer, whose works are very popular, has advised that when 
 a view has once been arrived at as true, it should be, as it 
 were, laid on the shelf, and never again looked on as an open 
 question : but surely this is false. A young man of twenty- 
 three, with such light as he has, forms his views : is he never 
 to have more light? Is he never to open again the questions 
 which his immature mind has decided on once ? Is he never 
 in manhood, with manhood's data and manhood's experience, 
 to modify, or even reverse, what once seemed the very truth 
 
The Skepticism of Pilate. 229 
 
 itself? Nay, my brethren the weak pride of consistency, 
 the cowardice which dares not say I have been wrong all my 
 life, the false anxiety which is fostered to be true to our prin- 
 ciples rather than to make sure that our principles aie true, 
 all this would leave in Romanism the man who is born a Ro- 
 manist. It is not so : the best and bravest have struggled 
 from error into truth : they listened to their honest doubts, 
 and tore up their old beliefs by the very roots. 
 
 Distinguish, however. A man may unsettle the verdict of 
 his intellect : it is at his peril that he tampers with the con- 
 victions of his conscience. Every opinion and view must re* 
 main an open question, freely to be tried with fresh light. 
 But there are eternal truths of right and wrong, such as the 
 plain moralities and instinctive decencies of social life, upon 
 which it is perilous to argue. There are plain cases of im- 
 mediate duty where it is only safe to act at once. 
 
 Now Pilate was false to his conscience. His conviction was 
 that Jesus was innocent. It was not a matter of speculation 
 or probability at all, nor a matter in which fresh evidence 
 was even expected, but a case sifted and examined thorough- 
 ly. The Pharisees are persecuting a guiltless man. His 
 claims to royalty are not the civil crime which they would 
 make out. Every charge has fallen to the ground. The 
 clear mind of the Roman procurator saw that, as in sunlight, 
 and he did not try to invalidate that judicial conviction. He 
 tried to get rid of the clear duty which resulted from it. 
 Now it is a habit such as this which creates the temper of 
 skepticism. 
 
 I address men of a speculative turn of mind. There is 
 boundless danger in all inquiry which is merely curious. 
 When a man brings a clear and practised intellect to try 
 questions, by the answer to which he does not mean to rule 
 his conduct, let him not marvel if he feels, as life goes on, a 
 sense of desolation ; existence a burden, and all uncertain. 
 It is the law of his human nature which binds him ; for truth 
 is for the heart rather than the intellect. If it is not done it 
 becomes unreal as gloomily unreal and as dreamily impal- 
 pable as it was to Pilate. 
 
 3d. The third cause of Pilate's skepticism was the taint of 
 the worldly temper of his day. Pilate had been a public 
 man. He knew life : had mixed much with the world's busi- 
 ness,*and the world's politics: had come across a multiplicity 
 of opinions, and gained a smattering of them all. He knew 
 how many philosophies and religions pretended to an exclu- 
 sive possession of truth, and how the pretensions of each were 
 overthrown by another. And his incredulity was but a spec- 
 
230 The Skepticism of Pilate. 
 
 imen of the skepticism fashionable in his day. The polished 
 skepticism of a polished, educated Roman, a sagacious man 
 of the world, too much behind the scenes of public life to 
 trust professions of goodness or disinterestedness, or to be- 
 lieve in enthusiasm and a sublime life. And his merciful lan- 
 guage, and his desire to save Jesus, was precisely the liberal- 
 ism current in our days as in his an utter disbelief in the 
 truths of a world unseen, but at the same time an easy, care- 
 less toleration, a half-benevolent, half-indolent unwillingness 
 to molest the poor dreamers who chose to believe in such su- 
 perstitions. 
 
 This is the superficial liberalism which is contracted, in 
 public life. Public men contract a rapid way of discussing 
 and dismissing the deepest questions never going deep 
 satisfied with the brilliant flippancy which treats religious 
 beliefs as phases of human delusion, seeing the hollowness of 
 the characters around them, and believing that all is hollow ; 
 and yet not without their moments of superstition, as when 
 Pilate was afraid, hearing of a Son of God, and connecting ijb 
 doubtless with the heathen tales of gods who had walked 
 this earth in visible flesh and blood which he had laughed at, 
 and w r hich he now for one moment suspected might be true ; 
 not without their moments of horrible insecurity, when the 
 question, " What is truth ?" is not a brilliant sarcasm, but a 
 sarcasm on themselves, on human life, on human nature, 
 wrung out of the loneliest and darkest bewilderment that can 
 agonize a human soul. 
 
 To such a character Jesus would not explain His truth. 
 He gave no reply : He held His peace. God's truth is too 
 sacred to be expounded to superficial worldliness in its tran- 
 sient fit of earnestness. 
 
 4th. Lastly, I assign, as a cause of skepticism, that priestly 
 bigotry which forbids inquiry and makes doubt a crime. 
 
 ^The priests of that day had much to answer for. Consider 
 for a moment the state of things. One of whom they only 
 knew that He was a man of unblemished life came forward 
 to proclaim the truth. But it was new; they had never 
 heard such views before; they were quite sure they had never 
 taught such, nor sanctioned such; and so they settled that 
 the thing was heresy. He had no accredited ordination. 
 "We know that God spake to Moses: as for this fellow we * 
 know not whence He is." Then they proceeded to bind that 
 decision upon others. A man was heard to say, " Why, what 
 evil hath he done?" Small offense enough, but it savored 
 of a dangerous candor towards a suspected man ; and in tha 
 priestly estimate, candor is the next step to heresy. "Thou 
 
The Skepticism of Pilate. 2 3 1 
 
 wast altogether born in sin, and dost Thou teach us ? and 
 they cast him out of the synagogue." And so again with 
 Pilate: they stifled his soul's rising convictions with threats 
 and penalties " If thou let this man go, thou art not Cesar's 
 friend." 
 
 This was what they were always doing : they forbade all 
 inquiry, and made doubt of their decision a crime. 
 
 Now the results of this priestcraft were twofold. The first 
 result was seen in the fanaticism of the people who cried for 
 blood : the second, in the skepticism of Pilate. And these 
 are the two results which come from all claims to infallibility, 
 and all prohibition of inquiry. They make bigots of the fee- 
 ble-minded who can not think : cowardly bigots, who at the 
 bidding of their priests or ministers swell the ferocious cry 
 which forces a government, or a judge, or a bishop, to perse- 
 cute some opinion which they fear and hate ; turning private 
 opinion into civil crime : and they make skeptics of the acute 
 intellects which, like Pilate, see through their fallacies, and 
 like Pilate too, dare not publish their misgivings. 
 
 And it matters not in what form that claim to infallibility 
 is made : whether in the clear, consistent way in which Rome 
 asserts it, or whether in the inconsistent way in which church- 
 men make it for their church, or religious bodies for their 
 favorite opinions: wherever penalties attach to a conscien- 
 tious conviction, be they the penalties of the rack and flame, 
 or the penalties of being suspected, and avoided, and slan- 
 dered, and the slur of heresy affixed to the name, till all men 
 count him dangerous lest they too should be put out of the 
 synagogue ; and let every man who is engaged in persecuting 
 any opinion ponder it these two things must follow you 
 make fanatics, and you make skeptics ; believers you can not 
 make. 
 
 Therefore do we stand by the central protest and truth of 
 Protestantism. There is infallibility nowhere on this earth : 
 not in Rome ; not in councils or convocations ; not in the 
 Church of England ; not in priests ; not in ourselves. The 
 soul is thrown in the grandeur of a sublime solitariness on 
 God. Woe to the spirit that stifles its convictions when 
 priests threaten, and the mob which they have maddened 
 cries heresy, and insinuates disloyalty " Thou art not Ce- 
 sar's friend." 
 
 II. The mode appointed for discovering the reply to the 
 question, " What is truth ?" 
 
 Observe I do not make our second division that which 
 might seem the natural one what truth is. I am not about 
 
232 The Skepticism of Pilate. 
 
 to be guilty of the presumption of answering the question 
 which Jesus did not answer. Some persons hearing the text 
 might think it the duty of any man who took it as a text 
 to preach upon, to lay down what truth is : and if a minister 
 were so to treat it, he might give you the fragment of truth 
 which his own poor mind could grasp : and he might call it, 
 as the phrase is, The Truth, or The Gospel : and he might re- 
 quire his hearers to receive it on peril of salvation. And 
 then he would have done as the priests did ; and they who 
 lean on other minds would have gone away bigoted ; and 
 they who think would have smiled sadly, bitterly, or sarcas- 
 tically, and gone home to doubt still more, " What is truth, 
 and is it to be found ?" 
 
 No, my brethren! The truth can not be compressed into 
 a sermon. The reply to Pilate's question can not be con- 
 tained in any verbal form. Think you that if Christ Himself 
 could have answered that question in a certain number of 
 sentences, He would have spent thirty years of life in wit- 
 nessing to it ? Some men would compress into the limits of 
 one reply or one discourse the truth which it took Christ 
 thirty years to teach, and which He left unfinished for the 
 Spirit to complete. 
 
 One word more. The truth is infinite as the firmament 
 above you. In childhood, both seem near and measurable ; 
 but with years they grow and grow, and seem farther off, 
 and farther and grander, and deeper and vaster, as God Him- 
 self; till you smile to remember how you thought you could 
 touch the sky, and blush to recollect the proud and self-suf- 
 ficient way in which you used to talk of knowing or preach- 
 ing " the truth." 
 
 And once again : the truth is made up of principles : an in- 
 ward life, not any mere formula of word?. God's character 
 spiritual worship the Divine life in the soul. How shall 
 I put that into sentences ten or ten thousand ? " The words 
 which I speak unto you, they are truth, and they are life" 
 How could Pilate's question be answered except by a Life ? 
 The truth, then, which Pilate wanted which you want, and 
 I want is not the boundless verities, but truth of inward 
 life. Truth for me : Truth enough to guide me in this dark- 
 ling world : enough to teach me how to live and how to die. 
 
 Now the appointed ways to teach this Truth. They are 
 three : independence humbleness action. 
 
 First, Independence. Let no man start as if independence 
 savored of presumption. Protestant independence, they tell 
 us, is pride and self-reliance, but in truth it is nothing more 
 than a deep sense of personal responsibility ; a determination 
 
The Skepticism of Pilate. 233 
 
 to trust in God rather than in man to teach : in God and 
 God's light in the soul. You choose a guide among preci- 
 pices and glaciers, but you walk for yourself; you judge his 
 opinion, though more experienced than your own ; you over 
 rule it if needs be; you use your own strength, you rely on 
 your own nerves. That is independence. 
 
 You select your own physician, deciding upon the respect- 
 ive claims of men, the most ignorant of whom knows more 
 of the matter than you. You prudently hesitate at times to 
 follow the advice of the one you trust most, yet that is only 
 independence without a particle of presumption. 
 
 And so precisely in matters of religious truth. No man 
 cares for your health as you do ; therefore you rely blindly 
 upon none. No man has the keeping of your own soul, or 
 cares for it as you do. For yourself, therefore, you inquire 
 and think, and you refuse to delegate that work to bishop, 
 priest, or church. Call they that presumption? Oh, the 
 man who knows the awful feeling of being alone, and strug- 
 gling for truth as for life and death, he knows the difference 
 between independence and presumption. 
 
 Second, Humbleness. There is no infallibility in man ; if 
 so, none in us. We may err : that one thought is enough to 
 keep a man humble. There are two kinds of temper contrary 
 to this spirit. The first is a disputing, captious temper. 
 Disagreement is refreshing when two men lovingly desire to 
 compare their views to find out the truth. Controversy is 
 wretched when it is an attempt to prove one another wrong. 
 Therefore Christ would not argue with Pilate. Religious 
 controversy does only harm. It destroys the humble inquiry 
 after truth: it throws all the energies into an attempt to 
 prove ourselves right. The next temper contrary is a hope- 
 less spirit. Pilate's question breathed of hopelessness. He 
 felt that Jesus was unjustly condemned, but he thought Him 
 in views as hopelessly wrong as the rest: all were wrong. 
 What was truth? Who knew any thing about it? He 
 spoke too bitterly, too hopelessly, too disappointedly to get 
 an answer. In that despairing spirit no man gets at truth : 
 "The meek will He guide in judgment. . . ." 
 
 Lastly, Action. This was Christ's rule " If any man will 
 do His will. ..." A blessed rule : a plain and simple rule. 
 Here we are in a world of mystery, where all is difficult, and 
 very much dark where a hundred jarring creeds declare 
 themselves to be the truth, and all are plausible. How shall 
 a man decide ? Let him do the right that lies before him : 
 much is uncertain some things at least are clear. What- 
 ever else may be wrong, it must be right to be pure- -to be 
 
234 7^ Skepticism of Pilate. 
 
 just and tender, and merciful and honest. It must be right 
 to love, and to deny one's self. Let him do the will of God, 
 and he shall know. Observe men begin the other way. 
 They say, If I could but believe, then I would make my life 
 true : if I could but be sure what is truth, then I would set 
 to work to live in earnest. No : God says, Act ; make the 
 life true, and then you will be able to believe. Live in ear- 
 nest, and you will know the answer to " What is truth ?" 
 
 Infer the blessedness of belief. Young men are prone to 
 consider skepticism a proof of strong-mindedness a some- 
 thing to be proud of. Let Pilate be a specimen and a 
 wretched one he is. He had clear-mindedness enough to be 
 dissatisfied with all the views he knew : enough to see 
 through and scorn the squabbles and superstitions of priests 
 and bigots. All well, if from doubt of falsehood he had gone 
 on to a belief in a higher truth. But doubt, when it left him 
 doubting why, he missed the noblest opportunity man ever 
 had that of saving the Saviour : he became a thing for the 
 people to despise, and after ages to pity. And that is skep- 
 ticism. Call you that a manly thing ? 
 
 To believe is to be happy; to doubt is to be wretched. 
 But I will not urge that. Seventy years and the most fe- 
 vered brain will be still enough. We will not say much of 
 the wretchedness of doubt. To believe is to- be strong. 
 Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a 
 man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do 
 any thing that is worth the doing. 
 
 I speak to those who have learned to hold cheap the 
 threats wherewith priests and people would terrify into ac- 
 quiescence to those who are beyond the appeal of fear, and 
 can only yield, if at all, to higher motives. Young men, the 
 only manly thing, the only strong thing, is faith. It is riot 
 so far as a man doubts, but so far as he believes, that he can 
 achieve or perfect any thing. "All things are possible to 
 him that believeth." 
 
The Israelites Grave. 235 
 
 "XXII. 
 THE ISRAELITE'S GRAVE IN A FOREIGN LAND.* 
 
 " And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die ; and God will surely visit* you^ 
 and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to 
 Isaac, and to Jacob. And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, 
 saying, God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence. 
 So Joseph died, being a hundred and ten years old : and they embalmed 
 him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt." Gen. 1. 24-26. 
 
 THERE is a moment when a man's life is re-lived on earth. 
 It is in that hour in which the coffin-lid is shut down, just 
 before the funeral, when earth has seen the last of him for- 
 ever. Then the whole life is, as it were, lived over again in 
 the conversation which turns upon the memory of the de- 
 parted. The history of threescore years and ten is soon re- 
 capitulated : not, of course, the innumerable incidents and 
 acts which they contained, but the central governing princi- 
 ple of the whole. Feverish curiosity sometimes spends itself 
 upon the last hours : and a few correct sentences, implying 
 faith after the orthodox phraseology, would convey to some 
 greater hope than a whole life breathing the Spirit of Christ 
 
 * \This sermon was formerly published by the Author in a separate form, 
 and the following Preface to that publication explains so well the circumstances 
 under which all the other sermons have been preserved, that it has been thought 
 best to reprint the Preface herej\ 
 
 "For the publication of the commonplace observations contained in the 
 following pages, the commonplace excuse may, perhaps, suffice, that printing 
 was the simplest way of multiplying copies for a few friends who desired 
 them. Perhaps, too, the uncommonness of the occasion may justify the 
 writer in giving to an ephemeral discourse an existence somewhat less tran- 
 sient than the minutes spent in listening to it. 
 
 "The sermon is published as nearly as possible as it was spoken. It was 
 written out concisely for a friend on the day of its delivery, with no intention 
 of publication. Afterwards, it seemed better to leave it in that state, with 
 only a few corrections, and the addition of a few sentences, than to attempt 
 to re-write it after an interval too great to recall what had been said. This 
 will account for the abruptness and want of finish which pervades the com- 
 position. 
 
 "The writer takes this opportunity of disowning certain sermons which 
 have been published in his name. They would not have been worth notice, 
 had not the innumerable blunders of thought and expression which they 
 contain been read and accepted by several as his. For this reason he feele 
 it due to himself to state that they are published without his sanction, and 
 against his request, and that he is'not responsible for either the language or 
 the ideas." 
 
236 The Israelite's Grave. 
 
 separate from such sentences. But it is not thus the Bible 
 speaks. It tells us very little of the closing scene, but a 
 great deal of the general tenor of a life. In truth, the clos- 
 ing scene is worth very little. The felon, who, up to the last 
 fortnight, has shown his impenitence by the plea of not 
 guilty, in the short compass of that fortnight makes a con- 
 fession, as a matter of course exhibits the externals of peni 
 tence, and receives the Last Supper. But it would be ere 
 dulity, indeed, to be easily persuaded that the eternal state 
 of such an one is affected by it. A life of .holiness sometimes 
 mysteriously terminates in darkness ; but it is not the bitter- 
 est cries of forsakenness so often the result of physical ex- 
 haustion nor even blank despair, that shall shake our deep 
 conviction that he whose faith shone brightly through life is 
 now safe in the everlasting arms. The dying scene is worth 
 little little, at least, to us except so far as it is in harmo- 
 ny with the rest of life. 
 
 It is for this reason that the public estimate pronounced 
 upon the departed is generally a fair criterion of worth. 
 There are, of course, exceptional cases cases in which the 
 sphere of action has been too limited for the fair development 
 of the character, and nothing but the light of the judgment- 
 day can reveal it in its true aspect cases in which party 
 spirit has defaced a name, and years are wanted to wash 
 away the mask of false color which has concealed the genu- 
 ine features cases in which the champion of truth expires 
 amidst the execrations of his contemporaries, and after ages 
 build his sepulchre. These, however, are exceptions. For 
 the most part, when all is over, general opinion is not far 
 from truth. Misrepresentation and envy have no provoca- 
 tives left them. What the departed was is tolerably well- 
 known in the circle in which he moved. The epitaph may 
 be falsified by the partiality of relations ; but the broad judg- 
 ment of society reverses that, rectifies it, and pronounces with 
 perhaps a rude, but, on the whole, fair approximation to the 
 truth. 
 
 These remarks apply to the history of the man whose final 
 scene is recorded in the text. The verdict of the Egyptian 
 world was worth much. Joseph had gone to Egypt, some 
 years before, a foreigner ; had lived there in obscurity ; had 
 been exposed to calumny ; by his quiet, consistent goodness, 
 had risen, step by step, "first to respect, then to trust, com- 
 mand, and veneration : was embalmed after death in the af- 
 fections, as well as with the burial rights, of the Egyptians ; 
 and his honored form reposed at last amidst the burial-place 
 of the Pharaohs. 
 
The Israelite's Grave. 237 
 
 In this respect the text branches into a twofold division. 
 The life of Joseph, and the death which was in accordance 
 with that life. 
 
 1. The history of Joseph, as of every man, has two sides 
 its outward circumstances and its inner life. 
 
 The outward circumstances were checkered with misfor- 
 tune. Severed from his home in very early years, sold into 
 slavery, cast into prison at first grief seemed to have 
 marked him for her own. And this is human life. Part of 
 its lot is misery. There are two inadequate ways of ac- 
 counting for this mystery of sorrow. One, originating in a 
 zeal for God's justice, represents it as invariably the chastise 
 ment of sin, or, at the least, as correction for fault. But, 
 plainly, it is not always such. Joseph's griefs were the con- 
 sequences, not of fault, but of rectitude. The integrity 
 which, on some unknown occasion, made it his duty to carry 
 his brethren's " evil report " to their father, was the occasion 
 of his slavery. The purity of his life was the cause of his 
 imprisonment. Fault is only a part of the history of this 
 great matter of sorrow. Another theory, created by zeal for 
 God's love, represents sorrow as the exception, and happiness 
 as the rule of life. We are made for enjoyment, it is said, 
 and on the whole there is more enjoyment than wretched- 
 ness. The common idea of love being that which identifies 
 it with a simple wish to confer happiness, no wonder that a 
 feeble attempt is made to vindicate God by a reduction of 
 the apparent amount of pain. Unquestionably, however, 
 love is very different from a desire to shield from pain. 
 Eternal love gives to painlessness a very subordinate place 
 in comparison of excellence of character. It does not hesi- 
 tate to secure man's spiritual dignity at the expense of the 
 sacrifice of his well-being. 
 
 The solution will not do. Let us look the truth in the face. 
 You can not hide it from yourself. " Man is born to sorrow 
 as the sparks fly upward." Sorrow is not an accident, oc- 
 curring now and then, it is the very woof which is woven 
 into the warp of life. " God has created the nerves to agonize, 
 and the heart to bleed ; and before a man dies, almost every 
 nerve has thrilled with pain, and every affection has been 
 wounded. The account of life which represents it as proba- 
 tion is inadequate : so is that which regards it chiefly as a 
 system of rewards and punishments. The truest account of 
 this mysterious existence seems to be that it is intended for 
 the development of the soul's life, for which sorrow is indis- 
 pensable. Every son of man who would attain the true end 
 of his being must be baptized with fire. It is the law of out 
 
238 The Israelite's Grave. 
 
 humanity, as that of Christ, that we must be perfected 
 through suffering. And he who has not discerned the divine 
 sacredness of sorrow, and the profound meaning which is con- 
 cealed in pain, has yet to learn what life is. The Cross, man- 
 ifested as the necessity of the highest life, alone interprets it. 
 
 2. Besides this, obloquy was part of Joseph's portion. 
 His brethren, even his father, counted him a vain dreamer, 
 full of proud imaginings. He languished long in a dungeon 
 with a stain upon his character. He was subjected to almost 
 all the bitterness which changes the milk of kindly feelings 
 into gall : to Potiphar's fickleness, to slander, to fraternal 
 envy, to the ingratitude of friendship in the neglect of the 
 chief butler, who left his prison and straightway forgot his 
 benefactor. Out of all which a simple lesson arises, " Cease 
 ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils." Yet that may 
 be overstated. Nothing chills the heart like universal dis- 
 trust. Nothing freezes the genial current of the soul so 
 much as doubts of human nature. Human goodness is no 
 dream. Surely we have met unselfishness, and love, and 
 honor among men. Surely we have seen, and not in dreams, 
 pure benevolence beaming from human countenances. Sure- 
 ly we have met with integrity that the world's wealth could 
 not bribe ; and attachment which might bear the test of any 
 sacrifice. It is not so much the depravity as the frailty of 
 men, that makes it impossible to count on them. Was it not 
 excusable in Jacob, and even natural, if he attributed to van- 
 ity his son's relation of the dream in which the sun, and the 
 moon, and the eleven stars bowed down before him ? Was 
 it not excusable if Potiphar distrusted his tried servant's 
 word, when his guilt appeared so indisputably substantiated? 
 Was not even the chief butler's forgetfulness intelligible, 
 when you remember his absorbing interest in his own dan- 
 ger, and the multiplied duties of his office ? The world is 
 not to be too severely blamed if it misrepresents us. It is 
 hard to reach the truth very hard to sift a slander. 
 
 Men who believe Sucn rumors., especially in courtly life, 
 may be ignorant, hasty, imperfect, but are not necessarily 
 treacherous. Yet even while you keep this in mind, that the 
 heart may not be soured, remember your dearest friend 
 may fail you in the crisis: a truth of experience was 
 wrapped up ir* the old fable, and the thing you have fostered 
 in your bohor^ may wound you to the quick ; the one you 
 have trusted may become your accuser, and throw his own 
 blame, with dastard meanness, upon you. That was the ex- 
 perience of Joseph. Was not that* His fate who trusted Ju- 
 das ? There is One. and but One, whose love is as a rock, 
 
The Israelites Grave. 239 
 
 which will not fail you when you cling. It is a fearful, sol- 
 itary feeling, that lonely truth of life ; yet not without a 
 certain strength and grandeur in it. The life that is the 
 deepest and tlie truest will feel most vividly both its desola- 
 tion and its majesty. We live and die alone. God and our 
 own souls we fall back upon them at last. " Behold, the 
 hour cometh, yea, is' now come, that ye shall be scattered, 
 every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone ; and yet I 
 am not alone, because the Father is with Me." 
 
 3. Success, besides, marked the career of Joseph. Let us 
 not take half views of men and things. The woof of life is 
 dark ; that we granted : but it is shot through a web of 
 brightness. Accordingly, in Joseph's case, even in his worst 
 days, you find a kind of balance to be weighed against his 
 sorrows. The doctrine of compensation is found through 
 all. Amidst the schemings of his brothers' envy he had his 
 father's love. In his slavery he had some recompense in 
 feeling that he was gradually winning his master's confi- 
 dence. In his dungeon he possessed the consciousness of in- 
 nocence, and the grateful respect of his fellow-prisoners. 
 
 In that beautiful hymn which some of you read last Sun- 
 day,* you may remember that a parallel is drawn between 
 human life and the aspects of the weather. The morning 
 rainbow, glittering among the dangerous vapors of the west, 
 predicts that the day will not unclouded pass away. The 
 evening rainbow declares that the storms are past, and that 
 serene weather is setting in. Such is the life of all whom 
 God disciplines. The morning or the evening brightness is 
 the portion of a life, the rest of which is storm. Rarely are 
 the manful struggles of principle in the first years of life suf- 
 fered to be in vain. Joseph saw the early clouds which dark- 
 ened the morning of his existence pass away, and the rain- 
 bow of heavenly peace arched over the calmness of his later 
 years. " The Lord was with Joseph, and he was a prosper- 
 ous man." And it is for this special purpose it is written, 
 "And Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third genera- 
 tion ; the children also of Machir, the son of Manasseh, were 
 brought up on Joseph's knees." Long life, and honored old 
 age, a quiet grave ; these were the blessings reckoned desir- 
 able in Jewish modes of thought : and they are mentioned 
 as evidences of Joseph's happiness. 
 
 And this, too, is life. The sorrows of the past stand out 
 most vividly in our recollections, because they are the keen- 
 est of our sensations. At the end of a long existence we 
 
 * Keble's Christian Year. Twenty-fifth Sv.irciay after Trinity. 
 
240 7 he Israelite s Grave. 
 
 should probably describe it thus : " Few and evil have the 
 days of the years of thy servant been." But the innumer- 
 able infinitesimals of happiness that from moment to moment 
 made life sweet and pleasant are forgotten ; and very richly 
 has our Father mixed the materials of these with the home- 
 liest actions and domesticities of existence. See two men 
 meeting together in the streets mere acquaintances. They 
 will not be five minutes together before a smile will over- 
 spread their countenances, or a merry laugh ring of, at the 
 lowest, amusement. This has God done. God created the 
 smile and the laugh, as well as the sigh and the tear. The 
 aspect of this life is stern very stern. It is a very super- 
 ficial account of it which slurs over its grave mystery, and 
 refuses to hear its low, deep under-tone of anguish. But 
 there is enough, from hour to hour, of bright, sunny happi- 
 ness, to remind us that its Creator's highest name is love. 
 
 Now turn to the spirit of Joseph's inner life. First of all, 
 that life was forgiveness. You can not but have remarked 
 that, conversant as his experience was with human treachery, 
 no expressions of bitterness escape from him. No senti- 
 mental wailing over the cruelty of relations, the falseness of 
 friendship, or the ingratitude of the world ; no rancorous 
 outburst of misanthropy ; no sarcastic skepticism of man's 
 integrity or woman's honor. He meets all bravely, with 
 calm, meek, and dignified forbearance. If ever man had 
 cause for such doubts, he had ; yet his heart was never 
 soured. At last, after his father's death, his brothers, appre- 
 hending his resentful recollections of their early cruelty, 
 come to deprecate his revenge. Very touching is his reply. 
 " Fear not : for am I in the place of God ? But as for you, 
 ye thought evil against me : but God meant it unto good, to 
 bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. 
 Now therefore, fear ye not : I will nourish you and your 
 little ones." 
 
 This is the Christian spirit before the Christian times. 
 Christ was in Joseph's heart, though not definitely in Jo- 
 seph's creed. The Eternal Word whispered in the souls of 
 men before it spoke articulately aloud in the Incarnation. 
 It was the Divine Thought before it became the Divine Ex- 
 pression.* It was the Light that lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world, before it blazed into the Day-spring 
 from on high which visited us. - The mind of Christ, the 
 spirit of the years yet future, blended itself with life before 
 He came ; for His words were the eternal verities of our hu- 
 
The Israelite s Grave. 241 
 
 manity. In all ages love is the truth of life Men can not 
 injure us except so far as they exasperate us to forget our- 
 selves. No man is really dishonored except by his own act. 
 Calumny, injustice, ingratitude the only harm these can do 
 us is by making us bitter, or rancorous, or gloomy : by shut- 
 ting our hearts or souring our aifections. We rob them of 
 their power if they only leave us more sweet and forgiving 
 than before. And this is the only true victory. We win by 
 love. Love transmutes all curses, and forces them to rain 
 down in blessings. Out of the jealousy of his brothers Joseph 
 extracted the spirit of forgiveness. Out of Potiphar's weak 
 injustice, and out of the machinations of disappointed pas- 
 sion, he created an opportunity of learning meekness. Our 
 enemies become unconsciously our best friends when their 
 slanders deepen in us heavenlier graces. Let them do their 
 worst ; they only give us the Godlike victory of forgiving 
 them. 
 
 2. Distinguished from the outward circumstances, we find 
 simplicity of character : partly in the willingness to acknowl- 
 edge his shepherd-father in Egypt, where the pastoral life 
 was an abomination ; partly in that incidental notice which 
 we have of the feast at which he entertained his brethren, 
 where the Egyptians sat at a table by themselves, and Joseph 
 by himself. So that, elevated as he was, his heart remained 
 Hebrew still. He had contracted a splendid alliance by 
 marrying into one of the nooiest families in Egypt, that of 
 Potipherah, the priest of On. And yet he had not forgotten 
 his country, nor sought to be naturalized there. His heart 
 was in that far land where he had fed his father's flocks in 
 his simple, genial boyhood ; the divining-cup of Egyptian 
 silver was on his table ; but he remembered the days wheji 
 the only splendor he knew was that coat of many colors 
 which was made for him by his father. He bore a simple, 
 unsophisticated heart amidst the pomp of an Egyptian court. 
 
 There is a great mistake made on the subject of simplicity. 
 There is one simplicity of circumstances, another simplicity 
 of heart. These two must not be confounded. It is com- 
 mon to talk of the humble poor man, and the proud rich 
 man. Let not these ideas be inseparably blended together. 
 There is many a man who sits down to a meal of bread and 
 milk on a wooden table, whose heart is as proud as the proud- 
 est whose birth is ro} 7 al. There is many a one whose voice 
 is heard in the public meeting, loudly descanting on legal 
 tyranny and aristocratic insolence, who in his own narrow 
 circle is as much a tyrant as any oppressor who ever dis- 
 graced the throne. And there is many a man who sits down 
 
 11 
 
242 The Israelite s Grave. 
 
 to daily pomp, to whom gold and silver are but as brass and 
 tin, and who bears in the midst of it all a meek, simple spirit, 
 and a " heart refrained as a weaned child :" many a man 
 who lives surrounded with homage, and hearing the ap- 
 plause and flattery of men perpetually, on whose heart these 
 things fall flat and dead, without raising one single emotion 
 of fluttered vanity. 
 
 The world can not understand this. They can not believe 
 that Joseph can be humble while he is conscious of such ele- 
 vation above the crowd of men not even dreaming of it. 
 They can not understand how carelessly these outsides of 
 life can be worn, and how they fall off like the unregarded 
 and habitual dress of daily life. They can not know how the 
 spirit of the Cross can crucify the world, make grandeur 
 painful, and calm the soul with a vision of the Eternal 
 Beauty. They can not dream how His life and death, once 
 felt as the grandest, write mockery on all else, and fill the 
 soul with an ambition which is above the world. It is not 
 the unjewelled finger, nor the affectation of an almost Qua- 
 kerish simplicity of attire, nor the pedestrian mode of travel- 
 ling, nor the scanty meal that constitute humility. It is that 
 simple, inner life of real greatness, which is indifferent to 
 magnificence, and surrounded by it all, lives far away in the 
 distant country of a father's home, with the Cross borne si- 
 lently and self-sacrificingly in the heart of hearts. 
 
 3. One characteristic of Joseph's inner life remains 
 benevolence. It was manifested in the generosity with 
 which he entertained his brethren, and in the discriminating 
 tenderness with which he provided his best beloved brother's 
 feast with extraordinary delicacies. These^were traits of 
 thoughtfulness. But further still. The prophetic insight 
 of Joseph enabled him to foresee the approach of famine. 
 He took measures accordingly ; and when the famine came, 
 the royal storehouses were opened, and every man in Egypt 
 owed his life to the benevolent providence of the Hebrew 
 stranger. It was productive of a great social revolution. 
 It brought, by degrees, all the land of Egypt into the power 
 of the Crown, so that a kind of feudal system was establish- 
 ed, every man holding in direct tenancy from the Crown. 
 Hence the nation became compacted into a new unity, and 
 power was concentrated in the hands of government, partly 
 by the pecuniary revenue thus added, and partly by the 
 lustre of goodness which Joseph had thrown round the royal 
 acts. For acts like these are the real bulwarks of a throne. 
 One such man as Joseph does more to strengthen the Crown 
 than all the speculations, solemn or trifling, which were ever 
 
The Israelite s Grave. 243 
 
 trritten on the " Divine right of kings." There is a right 
 divine which requires no elaborate theory to make it felt. 
 
 II. The death of Joseph was in accordance with his life. 
 
 1. The funeral was a homage paid to goodness. Little is 
 said in the text of Joseph's funeral. To know what it was, 
 we must turn to the earlier part of the chapter, where that 
 of Jacob is mentioned. A mourning of seventy days a 
 funeral whose imposing greatness astonished the Canaanites. 
 They said, " This is a grievous mourning to the Egyptians." 
 Seventy days were the time, or nearly so, fixed by custom 
 for a royal funeral ; and Jacob was so honored, not for his 
 own sake, but because he was Joseph's father. We can not 
 suppose that Joseph's own obsequies were on a scale less 
 grand. 
 
 Now weigh what is implied in this. This was not the 
 homage paid to talent, nor to wealth, nor to birth. Joseph 
 was a foreign slave, raised to eminence by the simple power 
 of goodness. Every man in Egypt felt, at his death, that he 
 had lost a friend. There were thousands whose tears would 
 fall when they recounted the preservation of lives dear to 
 them in, the years of famine, and felt that they owed those 
 lives to Joseph. Grateful Egypt mourned the good Foreign- 
 er ; and, for once, the honors of this world were given to the 
 graces of another. 
 
 2. We collect from this, besides, a hint of the resurrection 
 of the body. The Egyptian mode of sepulture was embalm- 
 ing ; and the Hebrews, too, attached much importance to the 
 body after death. Joseph commanded his countrymen to 
 preserve his bones to take away with them. In this we de- 
 tect that unmistakable human craving, not only for immor- 
 tality, but immortality associated with a form. No doubt 
 the Egyptian feeling was carried out absurdly. They tried 
 to redeem from the worm the very aspect that had been 
 worn, the very features they had loved ; and there was a 
 kind of feeling, that. while that mummy lasted, the man had 
 not yet perished from earth. They expected that, in process 
 of years, it would again be animated by its spirit. 
 
 Now Christianity does not disappoint, but rather meets 
 that feeling. It grants all that the materialist, and all that 
 the spiritualist, have a right to ask. It grants to the mate- 
 rialist, by the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that 
 future life shall be associated with a material form. Leaving 
 untouched all the questions which may be raised about the 
 identity of the atoms that have been buried, it simply pro- 
 nounces that the spirit shall have a body. It grants to the 
 
244 The Israelite's Grave. 
 
 spiritualist all he ought to wish that the spirit shall be free 
 from evil. For it is a mistake of ultra-spiritualism, to con- 
 nect degradation with the thought of a risen body ; or to 
 suppose that a mind, unbound by the limitations of space, is 
 a more spiritual idea of resurrection than the other. 
 
 The opposite to spirituality is not materialism, but sin. 
 The form of matter does not degrade. For what is this 
 world itself but the form of Deity, whereby the manifoldness 
 of His mind and beauty manifests, and wherein it clothes 
 itself? It is idle to say that spirit can exist apart from form. 
 We do not know that it can. Perhaps even the Eternal Him- 
 self is more closely bound to His works than our philosophi- 
 cal systems have conceived. Perhaps matter is only a mode 
 of thought. At all events, all that we know or can'know of 
 mind, exists in union with form. The resurrection of the 
 body is the Christian verity, which meets and satisfies those 
 cravings of the ancient Egyptian mind that expressed them- 
 selves in the process of embalming, and the religious rev- 
 erence felt for the very bones of the departed by the He- 
 brews. 
 
 Finally, in the last will and testament of Joseph we find 
 faith. He commanded his brethren, and through them, his 
 nation, to carry his bones with them when they migrated to 
 Canaan. In the Epistle to the Hebrews that is reckoned an 
 evidence of faith. "By faith Joseph gave commandment 
 concerning his bones." How did he know that his people 
 would ever quit Egypt ? We reply, by faith. Not faith in 
 a written word, for^Joseph had no Bible ; rather, faith in that 
 conviction of his own heart which is itself the substantial evi- 
 dence of faith. For religious faith ever dreams of something 
 higher, more beautiful, more perfect, than the state of things 
 with which it feels itself surrounded. Ever, a day future 
 lies before it : the evidence for which is its own hope. 
 Abraham, by that creative faith, saw the day of Christ, and 
 was glad. Joseph saw his family in prosperity, even in af- 
 fluence ; but he felt that this was not their rest. A higher 
 life than that of affluence a nobler destiny than that of 
 stagnant rest, there must be for them in the future ; else all 
 the anticipations of a purer earth, and a holier world, which 
 imagination bodied forth within his soul, were empty dreams, 
 not the intuitions of God's Spirit. It was this idea of 
 perfection, which was " the substance of things hoped for," 
 that carried him far beyond the period of his own death, 
 and made him feel himself a partaker of his nation's blessed 
 future. 
 
 And that is the evidence of immortality. When the 
 
The Israelite s Grave. 245 
 
 coffin is lowered into the grave, and the duL, heavy sound of 
 earth falling on it is heard, there are some to whom that 
 sound seems but an echo of their worst anticipations ; seems 
 but to reverberate the idea of decay forever, in the words, 
 " Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." There are 
 others to whom it sounds pregnant with the expectations o 
 immortality, the " sure and certain hope of a resurrection to 
 eternal life." The difference between these two feelings is 
 measured by the difference of lives. They whose life is low 
 and earthly, how can they believe in aught beyond the grave, 
 when nothing of that life which is eternal has yet stirred 
 within them? They who have lived as Joseph lived, just in 
 proportion to their purity and their unselfishness, must 
 believe it. They can not but believe it. The eternal exist- 
 ence is already pulsing in their veins ; the life of trust and 
 high hope, and sublime longings after perfection, with which 
 the decay of the frame has nothing at all to do. That is 
 gone yes but it was not that life in which they lived, and 
 when it finished, what had that ruin to do with the destruc- 
 tion of the immortal ? 
 
 For what is our proof of immortality ? "Not the analogies 
 of nature the resurrection of nature from a winter grave 
 or the emancipation of the butterfly. Not even the testi- 
 mony to the fact of risen dead ; for who does not know how 
 shadowy and unsubstantial these intellectual proofs become 
 in unspiritual frames of mind ? No; the life of the spirit is 
 the evidence. Heaven begun is the living proof that makes 
 the heaven to come credible. " Christ in you is the hope of 
 glory." It is the eagle eye of faith which penetrates the 
 grave, and sees far into the tranquil things of death. He 
 alone can believe in immortality who feels the resurrection in 
 him already. 
 
 There is a special application to be made of this subject to 
 our hearts. It is not often that the pulpit can be used for a 
 funeral eulogium. Where Christ is to be exalted in solitary 
 pre-eminence, it is but rarely that the praise of men may be 
 heard. Rank, royalty itself, could not command from the 
 lips of a minister of the King of kings one syllable of adula- 
 tory, undeserved, or unfelt homage. But there are cases in 
 which to loftiness of birth is added dignity of character; 
 and then we gladly relax the rule, to pay a willing tribute 
 to the majesty of goodness. 
 
 There is one to whom your thoughts must have reverted 
 often during the history which we have been going through, 
 suggesting a parallel, all the more delicately felt from the 
 absence of direct allusion. That royal la dy, for whose loss 
 
246 The Israelite s Grave. 
 
 the marvellous uniformity of the unbroken funeral hue which 
 pervades this congregation tells eloquently of general mourn' 
 ing, came to this land a few years ago, like Joseph, a foreign- 
 er like Joseph, the earlier years of her sojourn were spent 
 in comparative obscurity like Joseph, she had her share of 
 calumny, though in a diiferent form. There are many here 
 who can remember that in that year when our political feuds 
 had attained the acme of rancor, the irreverent lip of party 
 slander dared to breathe its rank venom upon the name of 
 one of the gentlest that ever .adorned a throne. There are 
 some who know how that unpopularity was met: with 
 meekness with Christian forgiveness with quiet dignity 
 with that composure which is the highest result and evi- 
 dence of strength. Like Joseph, she passed through the 
 temptations of a court with unsullied spotlessness like Jo- 
 seph, the domestic and social relationships were sustained 
 w^ith beautiful fidelity like Joseph, she lived down opposi- 
 tion, outlived calumny like Joseph, she used the noble in- 
 come intrusted to her in acts of almost unexampled munifi- 
 cence like Joseph, her life was checkered with sorrow ; and 
 when the clouds of earlier difficulties had cleared away, the 
 rainbow sign of peace, even in the midst of broken health, 
 spanned the calmness of her evening years like Joseph, she 
 will have a regal burial, and her ashes will repose with the 
 dust of England's princes amidst the mourning of the nation 
 in which she found a home. 
 
 The homage which is given to her is not the homage 
 yielded to rank or wealth or genius. There will be silver 
 on her coffin, and magnificence in the pageantry which at- 
 tends her to the grave ;* but it is not in these that the glory 
 of her funeral lies. These were the privileges of the most 
 profligate of her ancestors as well as her. These are the 
 world's rewards for those whom she delights to honor. There 
 will be something in her funeral besides which these things 
 are mean. There is a grandeur in a nation's tears ; and they 
 will be shed in unfeigned reverence over the remains of all 
 that was most queenly, and all that was most womanly. 
 No political fervor mixes with her obsequies. She stood 
 identified with no party politics. No peculiar religious par- 
 ty mourns its patroness. Of all our jarring religious sects, 
 in the Church and out of it, not one dares to claim her as its 
 own. Her spirit soared above these things. It is known 
 
 * This anticipation has not been realized. In one of the most touching 
 and unaffected documents that ever went right home to English hearts, the 
 queen of a British sovereign requested to be borne to the grave as the wife 
 of a sailor. 
 
The Israelite s Grave. 247 
 
 that she scarcely recognized them. All was lost in the sub- 
 limer name of Christian. It is a Christian who has passed 
 from this earth away, to take her place in the general As- 
 sembly and Church of the first-born : to stand before God, 
 the Judge of all, among the spirits of the just made per- 
 fect. 
 
 One word more. Honoring the Queen, profoundly rever- 
 encing the Woman, let not contemplation stop there. Do 
 not bury thought in the human and finite. Mildly as her 
 lustre shone on earth, remember it was but one feeble ray of 
 the Light that is Uncreated. All that she had she received. 
 If we honor her, it is to adore Him who made her what she 
 was. Of His fullness she had received, and grace for grace. 
 What she was, she became through adoring faith in Christ. 
 It is an elevating thing to gaze on human excellence, be- 
 cause through it the Highest becomes conceivable. It is a 
 spirit-stirring thing to see saintly goodness asserting its ce- 
 lestial origin by turning pale the lustre of the highest earth- 
 ly rank; for in this universal mourning our noble country 
 has not bowed the knee in reverence to the majesty which is 
 of time. Every heart in England has felt that the sovereign 
 was merged in the servant of Christ. " The King's daugh- 
 ter was all glorious within." "Hers was Christian goodness. 
 Her eyes had beheld the King in His beauty, and therefore 
 Tier life was beautiful, and feminine, and meek, and simple. 
 It was all derived beauty. She had robed herself in Christ. 
 " Reflecting back, as from a burnished mirror, the glory of 
 the Lord, she was changed into the same image, from glory 
 to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."* 
 
 * 2 Cor. iii. 18. This appears to be the true force and rendering of the 
 metaphor. 
 
 Subjoined are the directions given by her late Majesty for her own funeral. 
 The reader will be glad to have them preserved in a form less inconvenient 
 than the columns of a newspaper. Should he be one who feels it a relief to 
 miss, for once, the worn-out conventionalisms of religious expression, and 
 come in contact with something fres,h and living, he will find more in these 
 quiet lines than in ten sermons ; more to make a very happy tear start ; 
 more of the simplicity and the beauty of the life in God ; more to cool the 
 feverishness of his heart, and still its worldliness into silence ; more of that 
 deep rest into which the meek and humble enter ; more that will make him 
 long to be simple, and inartificial, and real, as Christ was, desiring only, in 
 life, and death, and judgment, to be found in HIM. 
 
248 The Israelites Grave. 
 
 [COPY.] 
 
 " I die in all humility, knowing well that we are all alike before the Throne 
 of God, and request, therefore, that my mortal remains be conveyed to the 
 grave without any pomp or state. They are to be moved to St. George's 
 Chapel, Windsor, where I request to have as private and quiet a funeral as 
 possible. 
 
 "I particularly desire not to be laid out in state, and the funeral to take 
 place by daylight, no procession, the coffin to be carried by sailors to the 
 chapel. 
 
 " All those of my friends and relations, to a limited number, who wish to 
 attend, may do so. My nephew, Prince Edward of Saxe Weimar, Lords 
 Howe and Denbigh, the Hon. William Ashley, Mr. Wood, Sir Andrew 
 Barnard, and Sir D. Davis, with my dressers, and those of my ladies who 
 may wish to attend. 
 
 "I die in peace, and wish to be carried to the tomb in peace, and free 
 from the vanities and the pomp of this world. 
 
 " I request not to be dissected, nor embalmed ; and desire to give as little 
 trouble as possible. 
 
 (Signed) " ADELAIDE R 
 
 "November, 184ft- 
 
SERMONS 
 
 Series. 
 
 i. 
 THE STAR IN THE EAST. 
 
 "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod 
 the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, 
 Where is he that is born King of the Jews ? for we have seen his star in the 
 east, and are come to worship him." Matt. ii. 1, 2. 
 
 OUR subject is the Manifestation of -Christ to the Gentiles. 
 The King of the Jews has become the Sovereign of the 
 world : a fact, one would think, which must cause a secret 
 complacency in the heart of all Jews. For that which is 
 most deeply working in modern life and thought is the mind 
 of Christ. His name has passed over our institutions, and 
 much more has His spirit penetrated into our social and do- 
 mestic existence. In other words, a Hebrew mind is now, 
 and has been for centuries, ruling Europe. 
 
 But the Gospel which He proclaimed was not limited to 
 the Hebrews : it was a Gospel for the nations. By the death 
 of Christ, God has struck His death-blow at the root of the 
 hereditary principle. " We be the seed of Abraham " was 
 the proud pretension of the Israelite ; and he was told by 
 Christ's Gospel that spiritual dignity rests not upon spiritual 
 descent, but upon spiritual character. New tribes were 
 adopted into the Christian union, and it became clear that 
 there was no distinction of race in the spiritual family. The 
 Jewish rite of circumcision a symbol of exclusiveness, cut- 
 ting off one nation from all others was exchanged for Bap- 
 tism, the symbol of universality, proclaiming the nearness of 
 all to God, His paternity over the human race, and the Son* 
 ship of all who chose to claim their privileges. 
 
 This was a Gospel for the world, and nation after nation 
 
250 The Star in the East. 
 
 accepted it. Churches were formed ; the kingdom which is 
 the domain of love grew; the Roman Empire crumbled into 
 fragments ; but every fragment was found pregnant with 
 life. It brake not as some ancient temple might break, its 
 broken pieces lying in lifeless ruin,. overgrown with weeds: 
 ratLer as one of those mysterious animals break, of w/iich, if 
 vou rend them asunder, every separate portion forms itself 
 into a new anc 1 . .complete existence. Rome gave way; but 
 every portion became a Christian kingdom, alive with the 
 mind of Christ, and developing the Christian idea after its 
 own peculiar nature. 
 
 The portion of Scripture selected for the text and for the 
 gospel of the day has an important bearing on this great 
 Epiphany. The ' ; wise men " belonged to a creed of very 
 hoary and venerable antiquity ; a system, too, which had in 
 it the elements of strong vitality. For seven centuries after, 
 the Mohammedan sword scarcely availed to extirpate it 
 indeed could not. They whom the Mohammedan called fire- 
 worshippers clung to their creed with vigor and indestructi- 
 ble tenacity, in spite of ail his efforts. 
 
 Here then, in this act of homage to the Messiah, were the 
 representatives of the highest then existing influences of the 
 world, doing homage to the Lord of a mightier influence, and 
 reverently bending before the dawn of the Star of a new and 
 brighter Day. It was the first distinct turning of the Gen- 
 tile mind to Christ ; the first instinctive craving after a 
 something higher than Gentilism could ever satisfy. 
 . In this light our thoughts arrange themselves thus : 
 
 I. The expectation of the Gentiles. 
 IL The Manifestation or Epiphany. 
 
 I. The expectation : " Where is He that is born King of 
 the Jews ? for we have seen His star in the east, and are 
 ^ome to worship Him." 
 
 Observe 1. The craving for eternal life. The " wise men " 
 were " Magians," that is, Persian priests. The name, howev- 
 er, was extended to all the Eastern philosophers who profess- 
 ed that religion, or even that philosophy. The Magians were 
 chiefly distinguished by being worshippers of the stars, or 
 students of astronomy. 
 
 Xo\v astronomy is a science which arises from man's need 
 of religion ; other sciences spring out of wants bounded by 
 th is life. For instance, anatomy presupposes disease. There 
 would be no prying into our animal frame, no anatomy, were 
 there not a malady to stimulate the inquiry. Navigation 
 arises from the necessity of traversing the seas to appropri- 
 
The Star in the East. 251 
 
 ate t ; ne produce of other countries. Charts, and maps, and 
 soundings are made, because of a felt earthly want. But 
 in astronomy the first impulse of mankind came not from 
 the craving of the intellect, but from the necessities of the 
 soul. 
 
 If you search down into the constitution of your being till 
 you come to the lowest deep of all, underlying all other 
 wants you will find a craving for what is infinite a some- 
 thing that desires perfection a wish that nothing but the 
 thought of that which is eternal can satisfy. To the untu- 
 tored mind nowhere was that want so called into conscious- 
 ness, perhaps, as beneath the mighty skies of the East. Se- 
 rene and beautiful are the nights in Persia, and many a wise 
 man in earlier days, full of deep thoughts, went out into the 
 fields like Isaac to meditate at eventide: God has so made 
 us that the very act of looking up produces in us percep- 
 tions of the sublime. And then those skies in their calm 
 depths mirroring that which is boundless in space and illim- 
 itable in time, with a silence profound as death and a motion 
 gliding on forever, as if symbolizing eternity of life, no won- 
 der if men associated with them their highest thoughts, and 
 conceived them to be the home of Deity no wonder if an 
 Eternal Destiny seemed to sit enthroned there no wonder 
 if they seemed to have in their mystic motion an invisible 
 sympathy with human life and its mysterious destinies no 
 wonder if he who could read best their laws was reckoned 
 best able to interpret the duties of this life, and all that con- 
 nects man with that which is invisible no wonder if, in 
 those devout days of young thought, science was only an- 
 other name for religion, and the Priest of the great temple 
 of the universe was also the Priest in the temple made with 
 hands. Astronomy was the religion of the world's youth. 
 
 The Magians were led by the star to Christ ; their as- 
 tronomy was the very pathway to their Saviour. 
 
 Upon this I make one or two remarks. 
 
 1. The folly of depreciating human wisdom. Of all vani- 
 ties, the worst is the vanity of ignorance. It is common 
 enough to hear learning decried, as" if it were an opposite of 
 religion. If that means that science is not religion, and that 
 the man who can calculate the motions of the stars may nev- 
 er have bowed his soul t Christ, it contains a truth. But 
 if it means, as it often does, that learning is a positive incum- 
 brance arid hindrance to religion, then it is as much as to say 
 that the God of nature is not the God of grace; that the 
 more you study the Creator's works, the farther you remove 
 from Himself: nay, we must go farther to be consistent, and 
 
252 The Star in the East* 
 
 hold, as most uncultivated and rude nations do, that the 
 state of idiocy is nearest to that of inspiration. 
 
 There are expressions of St. Paul often quoted as sanction- 
 ing this idea. He tells his converts to beware " lest any man 
 spoil you through philosophy." Whereupon we take for 
 granted that modern philosophy is a kind of antagonist to 
 Christianity. This is one instance out of many of the way 
 in which an ambiguous word misunderstood becomes the 
 source of infinite error. Let us hear St. Paul. He bids Tim- 
 othy "beware of profane and old wives' fables." He speaks 
 of "endless genealogies" "worshipping of angels" "in- 
 truding into those things which men have riot seen." This 
 was the philosophy of those days : a system of wild fancies 
 spun out of the brain somewhat like what we might now 
 call demonolatry: but as different from philosophy as any 
 two things can differ. 
 
 They forget, too, another thing. Philosophy has become 
 Christian ; science has knelt to Christ. There is a deep sig- 
 nificance in that homage of the Magians. For it in fact was 
 but a specimen and type of that which science has been doing 
 ever since. The mind of Christ has not only entered into the 
 Temple, and made it the house of prayer, it has entered into 
 the temple of science, and purified the spirit of philosopb;. 
 This is its spirit now, as, expounded by its chief interpreter, 
 " Man, the interpreter of Nature, knows nothing, and can do 
 nothing, except that which Nature teaches him." What is 
 this but science bending before the Child, becoming childlike, 
 and, instead of projecting its own fancies upon God's world, 
 listening reverently to hear what It has to teach him? In a 
 similar spirit, too, spoke the greatest of philosophers, in words 
 quoted in every child's book : " I am but a child, picking up 
 pebbles on the shore of the great sea of truth." 
 
 Oh, be sure all the universe tells of Christ and leads to 
 Christ. Rightly those ancient Magians deemed, in believing 
 that God was worshipped truly in that august temple. The 
 stars preach the mind of Christ. Not as of old, w^hen a mys- 
 tic star guided their feet to Bethlehem, but now, to the mind 
 of the astronomer, they tell of eternal order and harmony ; 
 they speak of changeless law, where no caprice reigns. You 
 may calculate the star's return : and to the day, and hour, 
 and minute it will be there. This is the fidelity of God. 
 These mute masses obey the law impressed upon them by 
 their Creator's hand, unconsciously : and that law is the law 
 of their own nature. To understand the laws of our nature, 
 and consciously and reverently to obey them, that is the mind 
 of Christ, the subliinest spirit of the Gospel. 
 
The Star in the East. 253 
 
 I remark again This universe may be studied in an irrev- 
 erent spirit. In Dan. ii. 48, we find the reverence which was 
 paid to science. Daniel among the Chaldees was made chief 
 of the wise men ; that is, the first of the Magians : and King 
 Nebuchadnezzar bowed before him, with incense and obla- 
 tions. In later days we find that spirit changed. Another 
 king, Herod, commands the wise men to use their science for 
 the purpose of letting him know where the Child was. In 
 earlier times they honored the priest of N&ture : in later times 
 they made use of him. 
 
 Only by a few is science studied now in the sublime and 
 reverent spirit of old days. A vulgar demand for utility has 
 taken the place of that lowly prostration with which the 
 world listened to the discoveries of truth. The discovery of 
 some new and mighty agent, by which the east and west are 
 brought together in a moment, awakens chiefly the emotion 
 of delight in us that correspondence and travelling will be 
 quickened. The merchant congratulates himself upon the 
 speedier arrival of the news which will give him the start of 
 his rivals, and enable him to outrace his competitors in the 
 competition of wealth. Yet what is this but the utilitarian 
 spirit of Herod, seeing nothing more solemn in a mysterious 
 star than the means whereby he might crush his supposed 
 rival ? 
 
 There is a spirit which believes that " godliness is gain," 
 and aims at being godly for the sake of advantage which is 
 honest, because honesty is the best policy which says, Do 
 right, and you will be the better, that is, the richer for it. 
 There is a spirit which seeks for wisdom simply as a means 
 to an earthly end and that often a mean one. This is a 
 spirit rebuked by the nobler reverence of the earlier days of 
 Magianism. Knowledge for its own pure sake. God for His 
 own sake. Truth for the sake of truth. This was the reason 
 for which, in earlier days, men read the aspect of the heavens. 
 
 2. Next, in this craving of the Gentiles we meet with traces 
 of the yearning of the human soul for light. The Magian sys- 
 tem was called the system of light about seven centuries be- 
 fore Christ. A great reformer (Zoroaster) had appeared, who 
 either restored the system to its purity, or created out of it 
 a new system. He said that light is eternal that the Lord 
 of the universe is light ; but because there was an eternal 
 light, there was also an eternal possibility of the absence of 
 light. Light and darkness, therefore, were the eternal prin- 
 ciples of the universe not equal principles, but one the nega- 
 tion of the other. He taught that the soul of man needs 
 light a light external to itself as well as in itself. As the 
 
254 The Star in the East. 
 
 eye can not see in darkness, and is useless, so is there a ca* 
 pacity in the soul for light ; but it is not itself light ; it 
 needs the Everlasting light from outside itself. 
 
 Hence the stars became worshipped as the symbols of this 
 light. But by degrees these stars began to stand in the place 
 of the light Himself. This was the state of things in the days 
 of these Magians. 
 
 Magianism was now midway between its glory and its de- 
 cline. For its glorj- we must go back to the days of Daniel, 
 when a monarch felt it his privilege to do honor to the priest 
 of Light when that priest was the sole medium of commu- 
 nication between Deity and man, and through him alone 
 "Oromasdes" made his revelations known when the law 
 given by the Magian, revealed by the eternal stars, was " the 
 law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not." For its 
 lowest degradation we must pass over about half a century 
 from the time we are now considering till W T C find ourselves 
 in Samaria, in the presence of Simon the Magian. He gave 
 himself out for the great power of God. He prostituted such 
 powers and knowledge as he possessed to the object of mak- 
 ing gain. Half dupe, half impostor, in him the noble system 
 of Light had sunk to petty charlatanism : Magianism had de- 
 generated into Magic. 
 
 Midway between these two periods, or rather nearer to the 
 latter, stood the Magian of the text. There is a time in the 
 history of every superstition when it is respectable, even de- 
 serving reverence, when men believed it when it is in fact 
 associated with the highest feelings that are in man, and the 
 channel even for God's manifestation to the soul. And there 
 is a time when it becomes less and less credible, when clearer 
 science is superseding its pretensions : and then is the p'eriod 
 in which one class of men like Simon keep up the imposture 
 the priests who will not let the old superstition die, but 
 go on, half impostors, half deceived by the strong delusion 
 wherewith they believe their own lie another class, like 
 Herod, the wise men of the world, who patronize it for their 
 own purposes, and make use of it as an engine of state 
 another still, who turn from side to side, feeling with horror 
 the old, and all that they held dear, crumbling away beneath 
 them : the ancient lights going out, more than half suspecting 
 the falsehood of all the rest, and with an earnestness amount- 
 ing almost to agony, leaving their own homes and inquiring 
 for fresh light. 
 
 Such was the posture of these Magians. You can not en- 
 ter into their questions or sympathize with their wants un- 
 less you realize all this. For that desire for light is one of 
 
The Star in the East. 255 
 
 the most impassioned of our nobler natures. That noble 
 prayer of the ancient world (iv $e tyaei rat dXeovrov), " Give 
 light, and let us die:" can we not feel it? Light light 
 Oh, if the result were the immediate realization of the old fa* 
 ble, and the blasting of the daring spirit in the moment of 
 revelation of its God, yet give us light. The wish for light, 
 the expectation of the manifestation of God, is the mystery 
 which lies beneath the history of the whole ancient world. 
 
 n. The Epiphany itself. 
 
 First, they found a king. There is something very signifi- 
 cant in the fact of that king being discovered as a child. 
 The royal child was the answer to their desires. There are 
 two kinds of monarchy, rule or command. One is that of 
 hereditary title ; the other is that of Divine Right. There 
 are kings of men's making, and kings of God's making. The 
 se'cret of that command which men obey involuntarily is sub- 
 mission of the ruler himself to law. And this is the secret 
 at* the royalty of the humanity of Christ. No principle 
 through all His life is more striking, none characterizes it so 
 peculiarly, as His submission to another will. " I came not 
 to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me." 
 "The words which I speak, I speak not of myself." His 
 commands are not arbitrary. They are not laws given on 
 authority only, they are the eternal laws of our humanity, to 
 which He himself submitted: obedience to which alone can 
 makte our being attain its end. This is the secret of His king- 
 ship "He became obedient . . . wherefore God also hath 
 highly exalted Him." And this is the secret of all influence 
 and all command. Obedience to a law above you subjugates 
 minds to you who never would have yielded to mere will. 
 "Rule thyself, thou rulest all." 
 
 2. Next, observe the adoration of the Magians very 
 touching, and full of deep truth. The wisest of the world 
 bending before the Child. Remember the history of Ma- 
 gianism. It began with awe, entering into this world be* 
 neath the serene skies of the East ; in wonder and worship. 
 It passed into priestcraft and skepticism. It ended in won- 
 der and adoration as it had begun : only with a truer and 
 nobler meaning. 
 
 This is but a Tepresentation of human life. "Heaven lies 
 around us in our infancy." The child looks on this world of 
 God's as one, not many all beautiful wonderful God's 
 the creation of a Father's hand. The man dissects, breaks 
 it into fragments loses love and worship in speculation and 
 reasoning - becomes more manly, more independent, and less 
 
256 The Star in the East. 
 
 irradiated with a sense of the presence of the Lord of all ; till 
 at last, after many a devious wandering, if he be one whom 
 the Star of God is leading blind by a way he knows not, he 
 begins to see all as one again, and God in all. Back comes 
 the child-like spirit once more in the Christianity of old age. 
 We kneel before the Child we feel that to adore is greater 
 than to reason that to love, and worship, and believe, bring 
 the soul nearer heaven than scientific analysis. The Child is 
 nearer God than we. 
 
 And this, too, is one of the deep sayings of Christ "Ex- 
 cept ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall 
 in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
 
 3. Lastly In that Epiphany we have to remark the Ma- 
 gians' joy. They had seen the star in the east. They fol- 
 lowed it it seemed to go out in dim obscurity. They went 
 about inquiring : asked Herod, who could tell them nothing: 
 asked the scribes, who only gave them a vague direction. 
 At last the star shone out once more, clear before them in 
 their path. " When they saw the star, they rejoiced with 
 exceeding great joy." 
 
 Perhaps the hearts of some of us can interpret that. There 
 are some who have seen the star that shone in earlier days 
 go out ; quench itself in black vapors or sour smoke. There 
 are some who have followed many a star that turned out to 
 be but an ignis fatuus one of those bright exhalations which 
 hover over marshes and church-yards, and only lead to the 
 chambers of the dead, or the cold damp pits of disappoint- 
 ment: and oh, the blessing of "exceeding joy," after follow- 
 ing in vain after inquiring of the great men and learning 
 nothing of the religious men and finding little to see the 
 star at last resting over " the place where the young Child 
 lies " after groping the way alone, to see the star stand still 
 to find thaiT Religion is a thing far simpler than we thought 
 that God is near us that to kneel and adore is the noblest 
 posture of the soul. For, whoever will follow with fidelity 
 his own star, God will guide him aright. He spoke to the 
 Magians by the star; to the shepherds by the melody of the 
 heavenly host ; to Joseph by a dream; to Simeon by an in- 
 ward revelation. " Gold, and frankincense, and myrrh " 
 these, and ten times these, were poor and cheap to give for 
 that blessed certainty that the star of God is on before us. 
 
 Two practical hints in conclusion. 
 
 1. A hint of immortality. That star is now looking down 
 on the wise men's graves; and if there be no life to come, 
 then this is the confusion : that mass of inert matter is pur- 
 suing its way through space, and the minds that watched it, 
 
The Healing of Jairus's Daughter 257 
 
 calculated its movements, were led by it through aspiring 
 wishes to holy adorations ; those minds, more precious than 
 a thousand stars, have dropped out of God's universe. And 
 then God cares for mere material masses more than for spirits, 
 which are the emanation and copy of Himself. Impossible ! 
 " God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." God is 
 the Father of our spirits. Eternity and immeasurableness 
 belong to Thought alone. You may measure the cycles of 
 that star by years and miles : can you bring any measure- 
 ment which belongs to time or space, by which you can com- 
 pute the length or breadth or the duration of one pure 
 thought, one aspiration, one moment of love ? This is eter- 
 nity. Nothing but thought can be immortal. 
 
 2. Learn, finally, the truth of the Epiphany by heart. To 
 the Jew it chiefly meant that the Gentile too could become 
 the child of God. But to us ; is that doctrine obsolete ? 
 Nay, it requires to be reiterated in this age as much as in 
 any other. There is a spirit in all our hearts whereby we 
 would monopolize God, conceiving of Him as an unapproach- 
 able Being ; whereby we may terrify other men outside our 
 own pale, instead of as the Father that is near to all, whom 
 we may approach, and whom to adore is blessedness. 
 
 This is our Judaism : we do not believe in the Epiphany. 
 We do not believe that God is the Father of the world we do 
 not actually credit that He has a star for the Persian priest, 
 and celestial melody for the Hebrew shepherd, and an unsyl- 
 labled voice for all the humble and inquiring spirits in His 
 world. Therefore remember Christ has broken down the 
 middle wall of partition ; He has revealed God as Our Fa- 
 ther; proclaimed that there is no distinction in the spiritual 
 tamily, and established a real Brotherhood on earth. 
 
 II. 
 THE HEALING OF JAIRTJS'S DAUGHTER. 
 
 "And when Jesus came into the ruler's house, and saw the minstrels and 
 the people making a noise, he said unto them, Give place : for the maid is 
 not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. But when the 
 people were put forth, he went in, and took' her by the hand, and the maid 
 arose."" Matt. ix. 23-25. 
 
 THIS is one of a pair of miracles, the full instruction from 
 neither of which can be gained, unless taken in connection 
 with the other. 
 
258 The Healing of Jairu^ s Daughter. 
 
 On His way to heal the daughter of Jairus, the Son of Man 
 was accosted by another sufferer, afflicted twelve years with 
 an issue of blood. Humanly speaking, there were many causes 
 which might have led to the rejection of her request. The 
 case of Jairus's daughter was urgent ; a matter of life and 
 death ; delay might be fatal ; a few minutes might make all the 
 difference between living and dying. Yet Jesus not only per- 
 formed the miracle, but refused to perform it in a hurried 
 way ; paused to converse to inquire who had touched Him 
 to perfect the lesson of the whole. On his way to perform one 
 act of love, He turned aside to give His attention to another. 
 
 The practical lesson is this: There are many who are so 
 occupied by one set of duties as to have no time for others : 
 some whose life-business is the suppression of the slave-trad^ 
 the amelioration of the state of prisons the reformation 
 o^ public abuses. Right, except so far as they are monopo- 
 lized by these, and feel themselves discharged from other ob- 
 ligations. The minister's work is spiritual; the physician's 
 temporal. But if the former neglect physical needs, or the 
 latter shrink from spiritual opportunities on the plea that the 
 cure of bodies, not of souls, is his work, so far they refuse to 
 imitate their Master. 
 
 He had an ear open for every tone of wail, a heart ready 
 to respond to every species of need. Specially the Redeem- 
 er of the soul, He was yet as emphatically the " Saviour of 
 the body." He " taught the people," but he did not neglect 
 to multiply the loaves and fishes. The peculiar need of the 
 woman, the father's cry of anguish, the infant's cry of help- 
 lessness, the wail of oppression, and the shriek of pain, all 
 were heard by Him, and none were heard in vain. 
 
 Therein lies the difference between Christian love and the 
 impulse of mere inclination. We hear of men being " inter- 
 ested " in a cause. It has some peculiar charm for them in- 
 dividually : the wants of the heathen, or the destitution of 
 the soldier and sailor, or the conversion of the Jews accord- 
 ing to men's associations, or fancies, or peculiar bias may 
 engage their attention and monopolize their sympathy. I 
 am far from saying these are wrong : I only say that so far 
 as they only interest^ and monopolize interest, the scurce 
 from which, they spring is only human, and not the highest. 
 The difference between such beneficence and that which is 
 the result of Christian love, is marked by partiality in one 
 case, universality in the other. Love is universal. It is in- 
 tevested in all that is human : not merely in the concerns of 
 its own family, nation, sect, or circle of associations. Hu- 
 manity is the sphere of its activity. 
 
The Healing of Jairus' s Daughter. 259 
 
 Here, too, we find the Son of Man the pattern of our hu- 
 manity. His bosom was to mankind what the ocean is to 
 the world. The ocean has its own mighty tide ; but it re- 
 ceives and responds to, in exact proportion, the tidal influ- 
 ences of every estuary, and river, and small creek which 
 pours into its bosom. So it was in Christ; His bosom 
 heaved with the tides of our humanity ; but every separate 
 Borrow, pain, and joy gave its pulsation, and received back 
 influence from the sea of His being. 
 
 Looking at this matter somewhat more closely, it will be 
 plain that the delay was only apparent seemingly there 
 was delay, and fatal delay : while He yet spake there came 
 news of the child's death. But just so far as the resurrec- 
 tion of the dead is a mightier miracle than the healing of the 
 sick, just so far did the delay enhance and illustrate, instead 
 of dimming the glory of His mission. 
 
 But more definitely still. The miracles of Jesus were not 
 merely arbitrary acts : they were subject to the laws of the 
 spiritual world. It was, we may humbly say, impossible to 
 convey a spiritual blessing to one who was not spiritually 
 susceptible. A certain inward character, a certain relation 
 (rapport) to the Redeemer, was required to make the mercy 
 eificacious. Hence in one place we read, " He could not do 
 many miracles there because of their unbelief." And His 
 perpetual question was, " Believest thou that I am able to 
 do this?" 
 
 Now Jairus beheld this miracle. He saw the woman's 
 modest touch approaching the hem of the Saviour's garment. 
 He saw the abashed look with which she shrunk from public 
 gaze and exposure. He heard the language of Omniscience, 
 " Somebody hath touched Me." He heard the great princi- 
 ple enunciated, that the only touch which reaches God is 
 that of faith. The multitude may throng and press ; but 
 heart to heart, soul to soul, mind to mind, only so do we 
 come in actual contact with God. And remembering this, it 
 is a matter not of probability but of certainty, that the soul 
 of Jairus was actually made more capable of a blessing than 
 b?fore that he must have walked with a more .hopeful step 
 that he must have heard the announcement, "Thy daugh- 
 ter is dead," with less dismay that the words, "Fear not, 
 only believe," must have come to him with deeper meaning, 
 and been received with more implicit trust than if Jesus had 
 not paused to heal the woman, but hurried on. 
 
 And this is the principle of the spiritual kingdom. Tn 
 matters worldly, the more occupations, duties, a man has. t i e 
 more certain is he of doing all imperfectly. In the thills 
 
260 The Healing of J alms's Daughter. 
 
 of God this is reversed. The more duties you perform, the 
 more you are fitted for doing others : what you lose in time, 
 you gain in strength. You do not love God the less, but the 
 more, for loving man. You do not weaken your .affection 
 for your family by cultivating attachments beyond its pale, 
 but deepen and intensify it. Respect for the alien, tender- 
 ness for the heretic, do not interfere with, but rather 
 strengthen, attachment to your own country and your own 
 church. He who is most liberal in the case of a foreign 
 famine or a distant mission, will be found to have only learn- 
 ed more liberal love towards the poor and the uuspiritual- 
 ized of his own land : so false is the querulous complaint that 
 money is drained away by such calls, to the disadvantage of 
 more near and juster claims. 
 
 You do not injure one cause of mercy by turning aside to 
 listen to the call of another. 
 
 I. The uses of adversity. 
 II. The principles of a miracle. 
 
 I. The simplest and most obvious use of sorrow is to re- 
 mind of God. Jairus and the woman, like many others, 
 came to Christ from a sense of want. It would seem that a 
 certain shock is needed to bring us in contact with reality. 
 We are not conscious of our breathing till obstruction makes 
 it felt. We are not aware of the possession of a heart till 
 some disease, some sudden joy or sorrow, rouses it into extra- 
 ordinary action. And we are not conscious of the mighty 
 cravings of our half Divine humanity ; we are not aware of 
 the God within us, till some chasm yawns which must be 
 filled, or till the rending asunder of our affections forces us to 
 become fearfully conscious of a need. 
 
 And this, too* is the reply to a rebellious question which our 
 hearts are putting perpetually : Why am I treated so ? 
 Why is my health or my child taken from me ? What have 
 I done to deserve this ? So Job passionately complained 
 that God had set him up as a mark to empty His quiver on. 
 
 The reply is, that gifts are granted to elicit our affections ; 
 they are resumed to elicit them still more; for we never 
 know the value of a blessing till it is gone. Health, children 
 we must lose them before we know the love which they 
 contain. 
 
 However, we are not prepared to say that a charge might 
 Dot with some plausibility be brought against the love of 
 God, were no intimation ever given that God means to re- 
 sume His blessings. That man may fairly complain of his 
 adopted father who has been educated as his own son, and 
 
The Healing of J aims' s Daughter. 261 
 
 after contracting habits of extravagance, loosing forward to 
 a certain line of life, cultivating certain tastes, is informed 
 that he is only adopted : that he must part with these tem- 
 porary advantages, and sink into a lower sphere. It would 
 be a poor excuse to say that all he had before was so much 
 gain, and unmerited. It is enough to reply that false hopes 
 were raised, and knowingly. 
 
 Nay, the laws of countries sanction this. After a certain 
 period, a title to property can not be interfered with : if a 
 right of way or road has existed, in the venerable language 
 of the law, after a custom " whereof the memory of man 
 runneth not to the contrary," no private right, however dig- 
 nified, can overthrow the public claim. I do not say that a 
 bitter feeling might not have some show of justice if such 
 were the case with God's blessings. 
 
 But the truth is this : God confers His gifts with distinct 
 reminders that they are His. He gives us, for a season, 
 spirits taken out of His universe; brings them into temporary 
 contact with us ; and we call them father, mother, sister, 
 child, friend. But just as in some places, on one day in the 
 year the way or path is closed in order to remind the public 
 that they pass by sufferance and not by right, in order that 
 no lapse of time may establish "adverse possession," so does 
 God give warning to us. Every ache and pain every 
 wrinkle you see stamping itself on a parent's brow every 
 accident which reveals the uncertain tenure of life and pos- 
 sessions every funeral-bell that tolls, are only Gcd's re- 
 minders that we are tenants at will and not by right : pen- 
 sioners on the bounty of an hour. He is closing up the right 
 of way, warning fairly that what we have is lent, not given: 
 His, not ours. His mercies are so much gain. The resump- 
 tion of them is no injustice. Job learned that, too, by heart, 
 "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away : blessed be 
 the name of the Lord." 
 
 Again observe the misuse of sorrow. When Jesus came 
 to the house, He found the minstrels and people making a 
 noise. In the East, not content with natural grief, they use 
 artificial means to deepen and prolong it. Men and women 
 make it a separate profession to act as mourners, to exhibit 
 for hire the customary symbols and wail of grief, partly to 
 soothe and partly to rivet sorrow deeply, by the expression 
 of it. 
 
 The South and North differ greatly from each other in 
 this respect. The nations of the North restrain their grief- 
 affect the tearless eyes and the stern look. The expressive 
 South, and all the nations whose origin is from thence, are 
 
262 The Healing of Jairus^s Daiighter. 
 
 demonstrative in grief. They beat their breasts, tear theii 
 hair, throw dust upon their heads. It would be unwise 
 were either to blame or ridicule the other so long as each is 
 true to Nature. Unwise for the nations of the South tc 
 deny the reality of the grief which is repressed and silent ; 
 unjust in the denizen of the North were he to scorn the 
 violence of Southern grief, or call its uncontrollable demon- 
 strations unmanly. Much must be allowed for tempera- 
 ment. 
 
 These two opposite tendencies, however, indicate the two 
 extremes into which men may fall in this matter of sorrow. 
 There are two ways in which we may defeat the purposes of 
 God in grief by forgetting it, or by over-indulging it. 
 
 The world's way is to forget. It prescribes gayety as the 
 remedy for woe ; banishes all objects which recall the past ; 
 makes it the etiquette of feeling, even amongst near relations, 
 to abstain from the mention of the names of the lost ; gets 
 rid of the mourning weeds as soon as possible the worst of 
 all remedies for grief. Sorrow, the discipline of the Cross, is 
 the school for all that is highest in us. Self-knowledge, true 
 power, all that dignifies humanity, are precluded the moment 
 you try to merely banish grief. It is a touching truth that 
 the Saviour refused the anodyne on the cross that would 
 have deadened pain. He would not steep his senses in ob- 
 livion. He would not suffer one drop to trickle down the 
 side of His Father's cup of anguish untasted. 
 
 The other way is to nurse sorrow : nay, even our best af- 
 fections may tempt us to this. It seems treason to those we 
 have loved to be happy now. We sit beneath the cypress ; 
 we school ourselves to gloom. Romance magnifies the fidel- 
 ity of the broken heart : we refuse to be comforted. 
 
 Now, generally speaking, all this must be done by effort. 
 For God has so constituted both our hearts and the world, 
 that it is hard to prolong grief beyond a time. Say w r hat 
 we will, the heart has in it a surprising, nay, a startling 
 elasticity. It can not sustain unalterable melancholy ; and 
 beside our very pathway plants grow r , healing and full of 
 balm. It is a sullen heart that can withstand the slow but 
 sure influences of the morning sun, the summer sky, the trees 
 and flowers, and the soothing power of human sympathy. 
 
 We are meant to sorrow, "but not as those without 
 hope." The rule seems to consist in being simply natural. 
 The great thing which Christ did was to call men back to 
 simplicity and nature not to perverted, but original nature. 
 He counted it no derogation of His manhood to be seen to 
 weep ; he thought it no shame to mingle with merry crowds ; 
 
The Healing of Jairus's Daughter. 263 
 
 He opened His heart wide to all the genial and all the mourn- 
 ful impressions of this manifold life of ours. And this is 
 what we have to do ; be natural. Let God, that is, let the 
 influences of God, freely play unthwarted upon the soul. 
 Let there be no unnatural repression, no control of feeling 
 by mere effort. Let there be no artificial and prolonged 
 grief, no "minstrels making a noise." Let great Nature 
 have her way ; or, rather, feel that you are in a Father's 
 world, and live in it with Him, frankly, in a free, fearless, 
 childlike, and natural spirit. Then grief will do its work 
 healthily. The heart will bleed, and stanch when it has bled 
 enough. Do not stop the bleeding ; but, also, do not open 
 the wound afresh. 
 
 II. We come to the principles on which a miracle rests. 
 1. I observe that the perception of it was confined to a 
 few. Peter, James, John, and the parents of the child were 
 the only persons present. The rest were excluded. To 
 behold wonders, certain inward qualifications, a certain state 
 of heart, a certain susceptibility are required. Those who 
 were shut out were rendered incapable by disqualifications. 
 Absence of spiritual susceptibility in the case of those who 
 " laughed Him to scorn " unbelief, in those who came with 
 courteous skepticism, saying, " Trouble not the Master ;" in 
 other words, He is not master of impossibilities unreality 
 in the professional mourners the -most helpless of all dis- 
 qualifications. Their whole life was acting : they had caught 
 the tone of condolence and sympathy as a trick. Before 
 minds such as these the wonders of creation may be spread 
 in vain. Grief and joy alike are powerless to break through 
 the crust of artificial semblance which envelops them. Such 
 beings see no miracles. They gaze on all with dead, dim 
 eyes wrapped in conventionalisms, their life a drama in 
 which they are but actors, modulating their tones and simu- 
 lating feelings according to a received standard. How can 
 such be ever witnesses of the supernatural, or enter into the 
 presence of the wonderful ? 
 
 Two classes' alone were admitted. They who, like Peter, 
 James, and John, lived the life of courage, moral purity, and 
 love, and they who, like the parents, had had the film re- 
 moved from their eyes by grief. For there is a way which 
 God has of forcing the spiritual upon men's attention. 
 When you shut down the lid upon the coffin of a child, or 
 one as dearly loved, there is an awful want, a horrible sense 
 of insecurity, which sw r eeps away the glittering mist of time 
 from the edge of the abyss, and you gaze on the phantom 
 
264 The Healing of Jairus's Daughter. 
 
 wonders of the unseen. Yes, real anguish qualifies fo'r an 
 entrance into the solemn chamber where all is miracle. 
 
 In another way, and for another reason, the numbers of 
 those who witness a miracle must be limited. Jairus had 
 his daughter restored to life : the woman was miraculously 
 healed. But if every anxious parent and every sick sufferer 
 could have the wonder repeated in his or her case, the won- 
 der itself would cease. This is the preposterousness of the 
 skeptic's demand Let me see a miracle, on an appointed day 
 and hour, and I will believe. Let us examine this. 
 
 A miracle is commonly defined to be a contravention of 
 the laws of nature. More properly speaking, it is only a 
 higher operation of those same laws in a form hitherto un^ 
 seen. A miracle is perhaps no more a suspension or contra- 
 diction of the laws of nature than a hurricane or a thunder- 
 storm. They who first travelled to tropical latitudes came 
 back with anecdotes of supernatural convulsions of the ele- 
 ments. In truth, it was only that they had never personally 
 witnessed such effects ; but the hurricane which swept the 
 waves flat, and the lightning which illuminated all the heav- 
 en, or played upon the bayonets or masts in lambent flames, 
 were but effects of the very same laws of electricity and me- 
 teorology which were in operation at home. 
 
 A miracle is perhaps no more in contravention of the laws 
 of the universe, than the direct interposition of a whole na- 
 tion in cases of emergency to uphold what is right in oppo- 
 sition to what is established, is an opposition to "the laws of 
 the realm. For instance, the whole people of Israel reversed 
 the unjust decree of Saul which had sentenced Jonathan to 
 death. But law is the expression only of a people's will. 
 Ordinarily we see that expression mediately made through 
 judges, office-bearers, kings : and so long as we see it in this 
 mediate form, we are by habit satisfied that all is legal. 
 There are cases, however, in which, not an indirect, but a 
 direct expression of a nation's will is demanded. Extraordi- 
 nary cases : and because extraordinary, they who can only 
 see what is legal in what is customary, conventional, and in 
 the routine of written precedents, get bewildeVed, and reck- 
 on the anomalous act illegal or rebellious. In reality, it is 
 only the source of earthly law, the nation, pronouncing the 
 law without the intervention of the subordinate agents. 
 
 This will help us to understand the nature of a miracle. 
 What we call laws are simply the subordinate expressions of 
 a will. There must be a will before there can be a law. 
 Certain antecedents are followed by certain consequents. 
 When we see this succession, we are satisfied, and call it nat- 
 
The Healing of Jairus's Daughter. 265 
 
 ural. But there are emergencies in which it may be neces- 
 sary for the will to assert itself, and become not the mediate, 
 but the immediate antecedent to the consequent. No sub- 
 ordinate agent interposes ; simply the first cause comes in 
 contact with a result. The audible expression of will is fol- 
 lowed immediately by something which is generally pre- 
 ceded by some lower antecedent which we call a cause. In 
 this case, you will observe, there has been no contravention 
 of the laws of nature, there has only been an immediate 
 connection between the first cause and the last result. A 
 miracle is the manifestation to man of the voluntariness of 
 power. 
 
 Now, bearing this in mind, let it be supposed that every 
 one had a right to demand a miracle that the occurrence 
 of miracles was unlimited that as often as you had an ache, 
 or trembled for the loss of a relation, you had but to pray, 
 and receive your wish. 
 
 Clearly in this case, first of all, the constitution of the uni- 
 verse would be reversed. The will of man would be substi- 
 tuted for the will of God. Caprice and chance would regu- 
 late all : God would be dethroned ; God would be degraded 
 to the rank of one of those beings of supernatural power with 
 whom Eastern romance abounds, who are subordinated by a 
 spell to the will of a mortal, who is armed with their powers 
 and uses them as vassals ; God would be merely the genius 
 who would be chained by the spell of prayer to obey the be- 
 hests of man. Man would arm himself with the powers of 
 Deity, and God would be his slave. 
 
 Further still : This unlimited extension of miracles would 
 annihilate miracles themselves. For suppose that miracles 
 were universal that prayer was directly followed by a re- 
 ply that we could all heal the sick and raise the dead this 
 then would become the common order of things. It would 
 be what we now call nature. It would cease to be extraor- 
 dinary, and the infidel would be as unsatisfied as ever. He 
 would see only the antecedent, prayer, and the invariable 
 consequent, a reply to prayer ; exactly what he sees now in 
 the process of causation. And then, just as now, he would 
 say, What more do you want ? These are the laws of the 
 universe: Why interpose the complex and cumbrous ma- 
 chinery of a God, the awkward hypothesis of a will, to ac- 
 count for laws ? 
 
 Miracles, then, are necessarily limited. The non-limita- 
 tion of miracles would annihilate the miraculous. 
 
 Lastly ; it is the intention of a miracle to manifest the Di- 
 vine in the common and ordinary. 
 
 12 
 
266 The Healing of Jairus^s Daughter. 
 
 For instance, in a boat on the Sea of Tiberias the Redeem- 
 er rose and rebuked the storm. Was that miracle merely a 
 proof of His divine mission ? Are we merely to gather from 
 it that then and there on a certain day, in a certain obscure 
 corner of the world, Divine power was at work ? It is con- 
 ceivable that a man might credit that miracle that he 
 might be exceedingly indignant with the rationalist who re- 
 solves it into a natural phenomenon and it is conceivable 
 that that very man might tremble in a storm. To what 
 purpose is that miracle announced to him ? He believes in 
 God existing in the past, but not in the present ; he believes 
 in a Divine presence in the supernatural, but discredits it in 
 the natural ; he recognizes God in the marvellous, but does 
 not feel Him in the wonderful of every day : but unless it 
 has taught him that the waves and winds now are in the 
 hollow of the hand of God, the miracle has lost its mean- 
 ing. 
 
 Here again, as in many other cases, Christ healed sickness 
 and raised the dead to life. Are we merely to insert this 
 among the " Evidences of Christianity," and then, with law- 
 yer-like sagacity, having laid down the rules of evidence, 
 say to the infidel, " Behold our credentials ; we call upon 
 you to believe our Christianity ?" This were a poor reason 
 to account for the putting forth of Almighty Power. More 
 truly and more deeply, these miracles were vivid manifesta- 
 tions to the senses that Christ is the Saviour of the body 
 that now, as then, the issues of life and death are in His 
 hands that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The 
 extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God's power in 
 the ordinary. Nay, the ordinary marvels are greater than 
 the extraordinary, for these are subordinate to them ; mere- 
 ly indications and handmaids guiding us to perceive and 
 recognize a constant Presence, and reminding us that in 
 everyday existence the miraculous and the Godlike rule us. 
 
Baptism. 267 
 
 in. 
 BAPTISM. 
 
 "For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as 
 many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There 
 is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male 
 nor female : for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then 
 are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. " Gal. iii. 26-29. 
 
 WHEREVER opposite views are held with warmth by re- 
 ligious-nrinded men, we may take for granted that there is 
 some higher truth which embraces both. All high .truth is 
 the union of two contradictories. Thus predestination and 
 free-will are opposites : and the truth does not lie between 
 these two, but in a higher reconciling truth which leaves 
 both true. So with the opposing views of baptism. Men of 
 equal spirituality are ready to sacrifice all to assert, or to 
 deny, the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. And the truth, 
 I believe, will be found, not in some middle, moderate, timid 
 doctrine which skillfully avoids extremes, but in a truth 
 larger than either of these opposite views, which is the basis 
 of both, and which really is that for which each party tena- 
 ciously clings to its own view as to a matter of life and 
 death. 
 
 The present occasion* only requires us to examine three 
 views. 
 
 I. That of Rome. 
 II. That of modern Calvinism. 
 
 III. That of (as I believe) Scripture and the Church of Eng- 
 land. 
 
 I. The doctrine of Rome respecting baptism. We will 
 take her own authorities. 
 
 1. "If any one say that the sin of Adam .... is taken 
 away, either by the powers of human nature or by any other 
 remedy than the merit of the One Mediator, our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, .... or denies that the merit of Jesus Christ, duly 
 conferred by the sacrament of baptism in the church form, is 
 applied to adults as well as to children let him be accursed." 
 Sess. v. 4. 
 
 " If any one deny that the imputation of original sin is re- 
 
 * The recent decision on the Gorham case of the Privy Council. 
 
268 Baptism. 
 
 raitted by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is con- 
 ferred in baptism, or even asserts that the whole of that 
 which has the true and proper character of sin, is not taken 
 away, but only not imputed let him be accursed." Sess. 
 v. 5. 
 
 "If any one say that grace is not given by sacraments of 
 this kind always and to all, so far as God's part is concerned, 
 but only at times, and to some, although they be duly re- 
 ceived let him be accursed." 
 
 " If any one say that by the sacraments of the New Cove- 
 nant themselves, grace is not conferred by the efficacy of the 
 rite (opus operatum), but that faith alone is sufficient for ob- 
 taining grace let him be accursed." 
 
 " If any one say that in three sacraments, i. e., baptism, con- 
 firmation, and orders, a character is not impressed upon the 
 soul, i. e., a certain spiritual and indelible mark (for which 
 reason they can not be repeated) let him be accursed." 
 Sess. vii. cap. 7-9. 
 
 " By baptism, putting on Christ, we are made a new crea- 
 tion in Him, obtaining plenary and entire 'remission of all 
 sins." 
 
 It is scarcely possible to misrepresent the doctrine so plain- 
 ly propounded. Christ's merits are instrumentally applied 
 by baptism ; original sin is removed by a change of nature ; 
 a new character is imparted to the soul ; a germinal principle 
 or seed of life is miraculously given ; and all this in virtue not 
 of any condition in the recipient, nor of any condition at all 
 except that of the due performance of the rite. 
 
 This view is held, with varieties and modifications of many 
 kinds, by an increasingly large number of the members of 
 the Church of England ; but we do not concern ourselves 
 with these timid modifications, which painfully attempt to 
 draw some subtle hair's-breadth distinction between them- 
 selves and the above doctrine. The true, honest, and only 
 honest representation of this view is that put forward undis- 
 guisedly by Rome. 
 
 When it is objected to the Romanist that there is no evi- 
 dence in the life of the baptized child different from that- 
 given by the unbaptized sufficient to make credible a change 
 so enormous, he replies, as in the case of the other sacrament, 
 The miracle is invisible. You can not see the bread and wine 
 become flesh and blood ; but the flesh and blood are there, 
 whether you see them or not. You can not see the effects 
 of regeneration, but they are there, hidden, whether visible 
 to you or not. In other words, Christ has declared that it is 
 with every one born of the Spirit as with the wind, "77wu 
 
Baptism. 269 
 
 nearest the sound thereof" But the Romanist distinctly 
 holds that you can not hear the sound that the wind hath 
 blown, but there is no sound that the Spirit hath descended, 
 and there are no fruits whereby the tree is known. 
 
 In examining this view, at the outset we deprecate those 
 vituperative and ferocious expressions which are used so 
 commonly against the Church of Rome unbecoming in pri- 
 vate conversation, disgraceful on the platform, they are still 
 more unpardonable in the pulpit. I am not advocating that 
 feeble softness of mind which can not speak strongly because 
 it can not feel strongly. I know the value, and in their 
 place, the need of strong words. I know that the Redeemer 
 used them : stronger and keener never fell from the lips of 
 man. I am aware that our Reformers used coarse and ve- 
 hement language ; but we do not imbibe the Reformers' 
 spirit by the mere adoption of the Reformers' language; 
 nay, paradoxical as it may seem, the use of their language 
 even proves a degeneracy from their spirit. You will find 
 harsh and gross expressions enough in the Homilies, but re- 
 member that when they spoke thus, Rome was in the as- 
 cendency. She had the power of fire and sword ; and the 
 men who spoke so were candidates for martyrdom, by the 
 expressions that they used. livery one might be called 
 upon by fire and steel to prove the quality of what was in 
 him, and account for the high pretension of his words. I 
 grant the grossness. But when they spoke of the harlotries 
 of Rome, and spoke ofMier adulteries, and fornications, and 
 lies which she had put in full cup to the lip of nations, it was 
 the sublime defiance of free-hearted men against oppression 
 in high places, and falsehood dominant. But now, when 
 Rome is no longer dominant, and the only persecutions that 
 we hear -of are the petty persecutions of Protestants among 
 themselves, to use language such as this is not the spirit of a 
 daring Reformer, but only the pusillanimous shriek of a cru- 
 el cowardice which keeps down the enemy whose rising it is 
 afraid of! 
 
 We will do justice to this doctrine of Rome. It has this 
 merit at least, that it recognizes the character of a church : 
 it admits it to be a society, and not an association. An as- 
 sociation is an arbitrary union. Men form associations for 
 temporary reasons ; and, arbitrarily made, they can be arbi- 
 trarily dissolved. Society, on the contrary, is made, not by 
 will, but facts. Brotherhood, sonship, families, nations are 
 nature's work : real facts. Rome acknowledges this. It per- 
 mits no arbitrary drawing of the lines of that which calls it- 
 self the Church. A large, broad, mighty field : the Christian 
 
270 Baptism. 
 
 world : all baptized : nay, expressly, even those who are 
 baptized by heretics. It shares the spirit, instead of mo- 
 nopolizing it. 
 
 Practically, therefore, in the matter of education, we should 
 teach children on the basis on which Rome works. We say 
 as Rome says, You are the child of God : baptism declares 
 you such. Rome says as Paul says, " As many of you as are 
 baptized into Christ have put on Christ." 
 
 Consequently, we distinguish between this doctrine as 
 held by spiritual and as held by unspiritual men. Spiritu- 
 ality often neutralizes error in views. Men are often better 
 than their creeds. The Calvinist ought to be an Antinomi- 
 an he is not. So, in holy-minded men, this doctrine of bap- 
 tismal regeneration loses its perniciousness nay, even be- 
 comes, in erroneous form, a precious, blessed truth. 
 
 It is quite another thing, however, held by unspiritual 
 men. Our objections to this doctrine are, 
 
 1. Because it assumes baptism to be not the testimony to 
 a fact, but the fact itself. Baptism proclaims the child of 
 God. The Romanist says it creates him. Then and there a 
 mysterious change takes place, inward, spiritual, effected by 
 an external rite. This makes baptism not a sacrament, but 
 an event. 9 
 
 2. Because it is materialism of the grossest kind. The or- 
 der of Christian life is from within to that which is without 
 from the spiritual truth to the material expression of it. 
 The Roman order is from the outwar'd to the creation of the 
 inward. This is magic. The Jewish Cabalists believed that 
 the pronunciation of certain magical words engraved on the 
 seal of Solomon would perform marvels. The whole Eastern 
 world fancied that such spells could transform one being 
 into another a brute into a man, or a man into 'a brute. 
 Books containing such trash were burnt at Ephesus in the 
 dawn of Christianity. But here, in the midday of Chris- 
 tianity, we have belief in such spells, given, it is true that it 
 is said, by God, whereby the demoniacal nature can be exor- 
 cised, the Divine implanted in its stead, and the evil heart 
 transformed unconsciously into a pure spirit. 
 
 Xow this is degrading God. Observe the results: A child 
 is to be baptized on a given day ; but when that day ar- 
 rives the child is unwell, and the ceremony must be post- 
 poned another week or month. Again a delay takes place 
 the day is damp or cold. At last the time arrives ; the 
 service is read ; it may require, if read slowly, five minutes 
 more than ordinarily. Then and there, when that reading is 
 slowly accomplished, the mystery is achieved. And all this 
 
Baptism. 271 
 
 time, while the child is ill, while the weather is bad, while 
 the reader procrastinates I say it solemnly the Eternal 
 Spirit who rules this universe must wait patiently, and come 
 down, obedient to a mortal's spell, at the very second that rt 
 suits his convenience. God must wait attendance on the ca- 
 price of a careless parent, ten thousand accidents, nay, the 
 leisure of an indolent or an immoral priest. Will you dare 
 insult the Majesty on high by such a mockery as this result ? 
 
 3. We object, because this view makes Christian life a 
 struggle for something that is lost, instead of a progress to 
 something that lies before. Let no one fancy that Rome's 
 doctrine on this matter makes salvation an easy thing. The 
 Spirit of God is given the germ is implanted ; but it may 
 be crushed, injured, destroyed. And her doctrine is, that 
 venial sins after baptism are removed by absolutions and at- 
 tendance on the ordinances : whereas for mortal sins there is 
 not no hope but no certainty ever after until the judg- 
 ment-day. Vicious men may make light of such teaching, 
 and get periodic peace, from absolution, to go and sin again ; 
 but to a spiritual Romanist this doctrine is no encourage- 
 ment for laxity. Now observe, after sin life becomes the ef- 
 fort to get back to where you were years ago. It is the sad 
 longing glance at the Eden from which you have been ex- 
 pelled, which is guarded now by a fiery sword in this world 
 forever. And, therefore, whoever is familiar with the writ- 
 ings of some of the earliest leaders of the present movement 
 Romeward, writings that rank among the most touching and 
 beautiful of English compositions, will remember the marked 
 tone of sadness which pervades them their high, sad long- 
 ings after the baptismal purity that is gone their mournful 
 contemplations of a soul that once glistened with baptismal 
 dew, now " seamed and scarred " with the indelible marks of 
 sin. 
 
 The true Christian life is ever onward, full of trust and 
 hope : a life wherein even past sin is no bar to saintliness, 
 but the step by which you ascend to higher vantage-ground 
 of holiness. The " indelible grace of baptism," how can it 
 teach that? 
 
 II. The second view is that held by what we, for the sake 
 of avoiding personalities, call modern Calvinism. It draws 
 a distinction between the visible and the invisible Church. 
 It holds that baptism admits all into the former, but into the 
 latter only a special few. Baptismal regeneration as applied 
 to the first, is merely a change of state though what is 
 meant by a change of state it were hard to say, or to deter- 
 
272 Baptism, 
 
 mine wherein an unbaptized person admitted to all the 
 ordinances would differ in state from a person baptized. 
 The real benefit of baptism, however, only belongs to the 
 elect. With respect to others, to predicate of them regen- 
 eration in the highest sense, is at best an ecclesiastical fie* 
 tion, said " in the judgment of charity." 
 
 This view maintains that you are not God's child until 
 you become such consciously. Not until evidence of a re- 
 generate life is given not until signs of a converted soul 
 are shown, is it right to speak of being God's child, except 
 in this judgment of charity. Now we remark, 
 
 1. This judgment of charity ends at the baptismal font. 
 It is never heard of in after-life. It is like the charitable 
 judgment of the English law, which presumes, or is said to 
 presume, a man innocent till proved guilty : valuable enough 
 as a legal fiction ; nevertheless, it does not prevent a man 
 barring his windows, guarding his purse, keenly watching 
 against the dealings of those around him who are presumed 
 innocent. Similarly, the so-called "judgment of charity" 
 terminates with infancy. They who speak of the Church's 
 language, in which children are called children of God, as 
 being quite right, but only in "the judgment of charity," 
 are exactly the persons who do not in after-life charitably 
 presume that all their neighbors are Christians. " He is not 
 a Christian." " She is one of the world," or " one of the 
 unregenerate." Such is the language applied to those who 
 are in baptism reckoned children of God. They could not 
 consistently apply to all adults the language applied in this 
 text: "As many of you as have been baptized into Christ, 
 have put on Christ. Ye are all the children of God by faith 
 ir Christ Jesus." 
 
 2. Next, I observe that this view is identical with the 
 Roman one in this respect, that it creates the fact instead of 
 testifying to it. Only, instead of baptism, it substitutes 
 certain views, feelings, and impressions, and asserts that 
 these make the man into a child of God. The Romanist says 
 baptism, the Calvinist says faith, makes that true which was 
 not true before. It is not a fact that God is that person's 
 Father till in the one case baptism, in the other faith, have 
 made him such. 
 
 3. Observe the pernicious results of this teaching in the 
 matter of education. Here, again, I draw the distinction 
 between the practical consequences which legitimately ought 
 to be, and those which actually are deduced from it. Hap- 
 pily men are better than their views. Hear the man speak 
 ing out of his theological system* and then hear him speak- 
 
Baptism. 273 
 
 ing out of the abundance of his heart. Hear the religious 
 mother when the system is in view, and all are indiscrimi- 
 nately, except a certain few, corrupt, vile, with nothing good 
 in them, heirs of ruin. But hear her talk unguardedly of 
 her own children. They have the frailties, weaknesses, 
 common faults of childhood ; but they have no vice in them : 
 there is nothing base or degraded in her children ! When 
 the embraces of her child are round her neck, it will require 
 more eloquence than you possess to convince her that she is 
 nursing a little demon in her lap. The heart of the mother- 
 is more than a match for the creed of the Calvinist. 
 
 There are some, however, who do not shrink from con- 
 sistency, and develop their doctrine in all its consequences. 
 The children follow out their instructions with fearful fidelity. 
 Taught that they are not the children of God till certain 
 feelings have been developed in them, they become by de- 
 grees bewildered, or else lose their footing on reality. They 
 hear of certain mystic joys and. sorrows; and unless they 
 fictitiously adopt the language they hear, they are painfully 
 conscious that they know nothing of them as yet. They 
 hear of a depression for sin which they certainly have never 
 experienced a joy in God, making His service and His 
 house the gate of heaven ; and they know that it is excess- 
 ively irksome to them a confidence, trust, and assurance 
 of which they know nothing till they take for granted 
 what has been told them, that they are not God's children. 
 Tauiiht that they are as yet of the world, they live as the 
 world ; they carry out their education, which has dealt with 
 them as children of the devil, to be converted; and children 
 of the devil they become. 
 
 Of these two views, the last is by far the most certain to 
 undermine Christianity in every Protestant country. The 
 first at least assumes God's badge to be an universal one, 
 and in education is so far right, practically: only wrong in 
 the decision of the question how the child was created a 
 child of God. But the second assumes a false, partial, party 
 badge election, views, feelings. No wonder that the chil- 
 dren of such religionists proverbially turn out ill. 
 
 III. We pass to the doctrine of the Bible and (I believe) 
 of the Church of England. 
 
 Christ came to reveal a name the Father. He abolished 
 the exclusive " my," and He taught us to pray, " our Father.'' 
 He proclaimed God the Father man the Son : revealecl that 
 vhe Son of Man is also the Son of God. Man, as man, God's 
 child. He came to redeem the world from that ignorance 
 
 12* 
 
274 Baptism. 
 
 of the relationship which had left them in heart aliens and 
 unregenerate. Human nature, therefore, became, viewed in 
 Christ, a holy thing and divine. The revelation is a com- 
 mon humanity, sanctified in God. The appearance of the 
 Son of God is the sanctification of the human race. 
 
 The development of this startled men. Sons of God ! 
 Yes; ye Jews have monopolized it too long. Is that Samar- 
 itan, heretic and alien, a child of God ? Yes. The Samar- 
 itan, but not these outcasts of society ? Yes, these outcasts 
 ef society. He went into the publican's house and proclaim- 
 ed that " he too was a son of Abraham." He suffered the 
 sinful penitent to flood His feet with tears. He saw there 
 the Eternal Light unquenched the eye, long dimmed and 
 darkened, which yet still could read the Eternal Mind. She, 
 too, is God's erring, but forgiven, beloved, and " much-loving " 
 child. One step farther. He will not dare to say the Gen- 
 tiles? the Gentiles who bow down to stocks and stones? 
 Yes, the Gentiles too. He spake to them a parable. He 
 told of a younger son who had lived long away from his 
 father's home. But his forgetfulness of his father could not 
 abrogate the fact of his being his son, and as soon as he rec- 
 ognized the relationship, all the blessings of it were his own. 
 
 Now this is the revelation. Man is God's child, and the 
 sin of the man consists in perpetually living as if it were 
 false. It is the sin of the heathen, and what is your mission 
 to him but to tell him that he is God'S child, and not living 
 up to his privilege ? It is the sin of the baptized Christian 
 waiting for feelings for a claim on God. It was the false life 
 which the Jews had led: precisely this, that they were liv- 
 ing coerced by law. Christ had come to redeem them from 
 the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons. But 
 they were sons already, if they only knew it. "Because ye 
 are'sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your 
 hearts, whereby ye cry Abba, Father." To be a son of God 
 is one thing ; to know that you are, and call Him Father, is 
 another and that is regeneration. 
 
 Now there was wanted a permanent and authoritative 
 pledge, revealing and confirming this : for, to mankind in 
 the mass, invisible truths become real only when they have 
 been made visible. All spiritual facts must have an existence 
 in form for the human mind to rest on. This pledge is bap- 
 tism. Baptism is a visible witness to the world of that 
 which the world is forever forgetting. A common humanity 
 united in God. Baptism authoritatively reveals and pledges 
 to the individual that which is true 6*f the race. Baptisni 
 takes the child and addresses it by name : Paul no longer 
 
Baptism. 275 
 
 Saul you are a child of God. Remember it henceforth. 
 It is now revealed to you, and recognized by you ; and to 
 recognize God as the Father is -to be regenerate. You, Paul, 
 are now regenerate ; you will have foes to fight the world, 
 the flesh, and the devil : but remember, they only keep you 
 out of an inheritance which is your own not an inheritance 
 which you have to win by some new feeling or merit in 
 yourself. It is yours ; you are the child of God you are 
 a member of Christ you are an inheritor of the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 Observe then baptism does not create a child of God. It 
 authoritatively declares him so. It does not make the fact, 
 it only reveals it. If baptism made it a fact then and there 
 for the first time, baptism would be magic. Nay, faith does 
 not create a child of God any more than baptism, nor does 
 it make a fact. It only appropriates that which is a fact al- 
 ready. For otherwise see what inextricable confusion you 
 fall into. You ask a man to believe, and thereby be created 
 a child of God. Believe what that God is his Father? 
 But God is not his Father. He is not a child of God, you 
 say, till he believes. Then you ask him to believe a lie. 
 
 Herein lies the error, in basis identical, of the Romanist 
 and the Calvinist. Faith is to one what baptism is to the 
 other, the creator of a fact ; whereas they both rest upon a 
 fact, which is a fact whether they exist or not before they 
 exist ; nay, without whose previous existence both of them 
 are unmeaning and false. 
 
 The Catechism, however, says : In baptism .... I was 
 made a child of God. Yes, coronation makes a sovereign ; 
 but, paradoxical as it may seem, it can only make one a 
 sovereign who is a sovereign already. Crown a pretender, 
 that coronation will not create the king. Coronation is the 
 authoritative act of the nation declaring a fact which was 
 fact before. And ever after coronation is the event to which 
 all dates back, and the crown is the expression used for all 
 royal acts : the crown pardons, the prerogatives of the 
 crown, etc. 
 
 Similarly with baptism. Baptism makes a child of God in 
 the sense in which coronation makes a king. And baptism 
 naturally stands in Scripture for the title of regeneration and 
 the moment of it. Only what coronation is in an earthly way, 
 an authoritative manifestation of an invisible earthly truth, 
 baptism is in a heavenly way : God's authoritative declara- 
 tion in material form of a spiritual reality. In other words, 
 no bare sign, but a Divine sacrament. 
 
 Now for the blessings of this view. 
 
276 Baptism. 
 
 1. It prevents exclusiveness and spiritual pride, and all 
 condemnation and contempt of others ; for it admits those 
 who have no spiritual capacity or consciousness to be God's 
 children. It proclaims a kingdom, not for a few favorites, 
 but for mankind. It protests against the idea that sonship 
 depends on feelings. It asserts it as a broad, grand, uni- 
 versal, blessed fact. It bids you pray with a meaning of 
 added majesty in the words, Our Father. 
 
 Take care. Do not say of others that they are unregener- 
 ate, of the world. Do not make a distinction within the 
 Church of Christians and not-Christians. If you do, what do 
 you more than the Pharisees of old ? That wretched beggar 
 that holds his hat at the crossing of the street is God's child 
 as well as you, if he only knew it. You know it he does 
 not : that is the difference. But the immortal is in him too, 
 and the Eternal Word speaks in him. That daughter of dis- 
 sipation whom you despise, spending night after night in 
 frivolity, she too has a Father in heaven. " My Father and 
 your Father, my God and your God." She has forgotten 
 Him, and, like the prodigal, is trying to live on the husks of 
 the world the empty husks which will not satisfy the de- 
 grading husks which the swine did eat. But whether she 
 will or not, her baptism is valid, and proclaims a fact which 
 may be, alas ! the worse for her, if she will not have it the 
 better. 
 
 2. This doctrine protests against the notion of our being 
 separate units in the Divine fife. The Church of Calvinism 
 is merely a collection of atoms, a sand-heap piled together, 
 with no cohesion among themselves, or a mass of steel filings 
 cleaving separately to a magnet, but not to each- other. 
 Baptism proclaims a church.- Humanity joined in Christ to 
 God. Do not say that the separating work of baptism, 
 drawing a distinction between the Church and the world, 
 negatives this. Do not say, that because the Church is sep- 
 arated from the world, therefore the world are not God's 
 children. Rather that very separation proves it. You bap- 
 tize a separate body, in order to realize that which is true of 
 the collective race, as in this text, "There is neither Jew nor 
 Greek." In all things it is the same. If you would sanctify 
 all time, you set apart a sabbath not to show that other 
 days are not intended to be sacred, but for the very purpose 
 of making them sacred. If you would have a "nation of 
 priests," you set apart a priesthood ; not as if the priestly 
 functions of instruction and assisting to approach God were 
 exclusively in that body, but in order, by concentration, to 
 bring out to greater perfection the priestly character which 
 
Baptism. 277 
 
 is shared by the whole, and then thereby make the whole 
 more truly " priests to God to offer spiritual sacrifices." In 
 the same "way, if God would baptize humanity, He baptizes 
 a separate Church, in order that that Church may baptize 
 the race. The Church is God's ideal of humanity realized. 
 
 Lastly, This doctrine of baptism sanctifies materialism. 
 The Romanist was feeling his way to a great fact when he 
 said that there are other things of sacramental efficacy be- 
 sides these two Baptism and the Supper of the Lord. The 
 things of earth are pledges and sacraments of things in heav- 
 en. It is not for nothing that God has selected for His sac- 
 raments the commonest of all acts a meal, and the most 
 abundant of all materials water. Think you that He 
 means to say that only through two channels His Spirit 
 streams into the soul ? Or is it not much more in unison 
 with His dealings to say that these two are set apart to sig- 
 nify to us the sacramental character of all nature ? Just as 
 a miracle was intended not to reveal God working there, at 
 that death-bed and in that storm, but to call attention to His 
 presence in every death and every storm. Go out at this 
 spring season of the year ;. see the mighty preparations for 
 life that Nature is making ; feel the swelling sense of grate- 
 fulness, and the pervasive expanding consciousness of love 
 for all Being ; and then say, whether this whole form which 
 we call nature is not the great Sacrament of God, the rev- 
 elation of His existence, and the channel of His communica- 
 tions to the spirit ? 
 
 IV. 
 BAPTISM. 
 
 "The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us." 1 
 Peter iii. 21. 
 
 LAST Sunday we considered the subject of baptism in ref- 
 erence to the Romish and modern Calvinistic views. The 
 truth seemed to lie not in a middle course between the two 
 extremes, but in a truth deeper than either of them. For 
 there are various modifications of the Romish view which 
 soften down its repulsive features. There are some who hold 
 that the guilt of original sin is pardoned, but the tendencies 
 of an evil nature remain ; others who attribute a milder 
 meaning to*" regeneration," understanding by it a change of 
 state instead of a change of nature ; others who acknowledge 
 
278 Baptism. 
 
 a certain mysterious benefit imparted by baptism, but decline 
 determining how much grace is given, or what the exact na- 
 ture of the blessing is; others who acknowledge that it is in 
 certain cases the moment when regeneration takes place, but 
 hold that it is conditional, occurring sometimes, not always, 
 and following upon the condition of what they call " preven- 
 ient grace." We do not touch upon these views. They are 
 simply modifications of the Romish view, and as such, more 
 offensive than the view itself; for they contain that which is 
 most objectionable in it, and special evils of their own besides. 
 
 We admitted the merits of the two views. We are grate- 
 ful to the Romanist for the testimony which he bears to the 
 truth of the extent of Christ's salvation for the privilege 
 which he gives of calling all the baptized, children of God 
 for the protest which his doctrine makes against all party 
 monopoly of God for the protest against ultra-spiritualism, 
 in acknowledging that material things are the types and 
 channels of the Almighty Presence. 
 
 We are grateful to the Calvinist for his strong protest 
 against formalism for his assertion of the necessity of an in- 
 ward change for the distinction which he has drawir be- 
 tween being in the state of sons, a,nd having the nature of 
 sons of God. 
 
 The error in these two systems, contrary as they are, ap- 
 peared to us to be identically one and the same that of pre- 
 tending to create a fact instead of witnessing to it. The Cal- 
 vinist maintains that on a certain day and hour, under the 
 ministry of the Word, under the preaching of some one who 
 "proclaims the Gospel," he was born again, and God became 
 his Father; and the Romanist declares that on a certain day, 
 at a certain moment by an earthly clock, by the hands of a 
 priest apostolically ordained, the evil nature was expelled 
 from him, and a new fact in the world was created he at- 
 tained the right of calling God his Father. 
 
 Now if baptism makes God our Father, baptism is incan- 
 tation ; if faith makes him so, faith rests upon a falsehood. 
 
 For the Romanist does no more than the red Indian and 
 the black negro pretend to do exorcise the devil, and infuse 
 God. The only question then becomes, Which is the true 
 enchanter, and which is the impostor? for the juggler does, 
 by the power of imagination, often cure the sick man ; but 
 the mysterious effects of baptism never are visible, and never 
 can be tested in this world. 
 
 On the other hand, faith would rest upon a falsehood : for 
 if faith is to give the right of calling God a Fatfter, how can 
 you believe that which is not true the very moment before 
 
Baptism. 279 
 
 belief? God is not your Father. If you believe He is, your 
 belief is false. 
 
 The truth which underlies these two views, on which all 
 that is true in them rests, and in which all that is false is ab- 
 sorbed, is the paternity of God. This is the revelation of the 
 Redeemer. This is authoritatively declared by baptism, ap- 
 propriated personally by faith, but a truth independent both 
 of baptism and faith which would still be true if there were 
 neither a baptism nor a faith in the world. They are the 
 witnesses of the fact not the creators of it. 
 
 Here, however, two difficulties arise. If this be so, do we 
 not make light of Original Sin? And do we not reduce bap- 
 tism into a superfluous ceremony ? 
 
 Before we enter upon these questions, I must vindicate my- 
 self from the appearance of presumption. Where the wisest 
 and holiest have held opposite views, it seems immodest to 
 speak with unfaltering certainty and decisive tone. Hesita- 
 tion, guarded statements, caution, it would seem, would be 
 far more in place. Now, to speak decidedly, is not, necessa- 
 rily, to speak presumptuously. There are questions involv- 
 ing great research, and questions relating to truths beyond 
 our ken, where guarded and uncertain tones are only a duty. 
 There are others where the decision has become conviction, 
 a 'kind of intuition, the result of years of thought, which has 
 been the day to a man's darkness, " the fountain-light of all 
 his seeing," which has interpreted him to himself, made all 
 clear where all was perplexed before, been the key to the rid- 
 dle of truths that seemed contradictory, become part of his 
 very being, and for which more than once he has held him- 
 self cheerfully prepared to sacrifice all that is commonly held 
 dear. With respect to convictions such as these, of course, 
 the arguments by which they are enforced may be faulty, the 
 illustrations inadequate, the power of making them intelligi- 
 ble very feeble ; nay, the views themselves may be wrong ; 
 but to pretend to speak with hesitation and uncertainty re- 
 specting such convictions would be not modesty, but affec- 
 tation. 
 
 For let us remember in what spirit we are to enter on this 
 inquiry. Not in the spirit of mere cautious orthodoxy, en- 
 deavoring to find a safe mean between two extremes in- 
 quiring what is the view held by the sound, and judicious, 
 and respectable men, who were never found guilty of any en- 
 thusiasm, and under the shelter of whose opinion we may be 
 secure from the charge of any thing unsound ; nor in the 
 spirit of the lawyer, patiently examining documents, weigh- 
 ing evidence, and deciding whether upon sufficient testimony 
 
280 Baptism. 
 
 there is such a thing as " prevenient grace " or not ; nor, 
 once more, in the spirit of superstition. The superstitious 
 mother of the lower classes baptizes her child in all haste be- 
 cause she believes it has a mystic influence on its health, or 
 because she fancies that it confers the name without which it 
 would not be summoned at the day of judgment. And the 
 superstitious mother of the upper classes baptizes her child 
 too in all haste, because, though she does not precisely know 
 what the mystic effect of baptism is, she thinks it best to be 
 on the safer side, lest her child should die, and its eternity 
 should be decided by the omission. And we go to preach to 
 the heathen while there are men and women in our Christian 
 England so bewildered with systems and sermons, so pro- 
 foundly in the dark respecting the Father of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, so utterly unable to repose in eternal love and justice, 
 that they must guard their child from Him by a ceremony, 
 and have the shadow of a shade of doubt whether or not, for 
 omission of theirs, that child's Creator and Father may curse 
 its soul for all eternity ! 
 
 We are to enter upon this question as a real one of life 
 and death as men who feel in their bosoms sin and death, 
 and who want to determine no theological nicety, but this: 
 Whether we have a right to claim to be sons of God or not ? 
 And if so, on what grounds? In virtue of a ceremony, or in 
 virtue of a certain set of feelings ? Or in virtue of an eternal 
 fact the fact of God's paternity ? 
 
 I reply to two objections. 
 
 I. The apparent denial of original sin. 
 H. The apparent result that baptism is nothing. 
 
 I. The text selected is a strong and distinct one. It pro- 
 claims the value of baptism. " Baptism saves us." But it 
 declares that it can only be said figuratively: "The like fig- 
 ure whereunto even baptism cloth also now save us." 
 
 Now the first reply I make is, that in truth the Romish 
 view seems to make lighter of original sin than this. Me- 
 thinks original sin must be a trifling thing if a little water 
 and a few human words can do away with it. A trifling 
 thing if, after it is done away, there is rib distinguishable dif- 
 ference between the baptized and unbaptized ; if the unbap- 
 tized Quaker is just as likely to exhibit the fruits of goodness 
 as the baptized son of the Church of England. We have got 
 out of the land of reality into the domain of figments and 
 speculations. A fictitious guilt is done away with by a fic- 
 titious pardon, neither the appearance nor the disappearance 
 being visible. 
 
Baptism. 281 
 
 Original sin is an awful fact. It is not the guilt of an an- 
 cestor imputed to an innocent descendant, but if is the ten 
 dencies of that ancestor living in his offspring and incurring 
 guilt. Original sin can be forgiven only so far as original 
 sin is removed. It is not Adam's, it is yours; and it must 
 .cease to be yours, or else what is " taking away original sin ?" 
 
 Now he who would deny original sin must contradict all 
 experience in the transmission of qualities. The very hound 
 transmits his peculiarities learnt by education, and the Span- 
 ish horse his paces, taught by art, to his offspring, as a part 
 of their nature. If it were not so in man, there could be no 
 history of man as a species no tracing out the tendencies 
 of a race or nation nothing but the unconnected repetitions 
 of isolated individuals and their lives. It is plain that the 
 first man must have exerted on his race an influence quite 
 peculiar that his acts must have biased their acts. And 
 this bias or tendency is what we call original sin. 
 
 Now original sin is just this denial of God's paternity, re- 
 fusing to live as His children, and saying we are not His chil- 
 dren. To live as His child is the true life to live as not His 
 child is the false life. What was the Jews' crime? Was it 
 not this : " He came unto His own, and His own received 
 him not :" that they were His own, and in act denied it, pre- 
 ferring to the claim of spiritual relationship, the claim of 
 union by circumcision or hereditary descent ? What was the 
 crime of the Gentiles ? Was it not this : that " when they 
 knew God, they glorified Him not ' as God, neither were 
 thankful?" For what were they to be thankful? For being 
 His enemies? -Were they not His children, His sheep of 
 another fold ? Was not the whole falsehood of their life the 
 worship of demons and nothings instead of Him ? Did not 
 the parable represent them as the younger son a wanderer 
 from home, but still a son f 
 
 From this state Christ redeemed. He revealed God not 
 as the mechanic of the universe, not the judge, but as the 
 Father, and as the Spirit who is in man, " lighting every man," 
 moving in man his infinite desires and infinite affections. 
 This was the revelation. The reception of that revelation is 
 regeneration. " He came unto His own, and His own received 
 Him not ; but to as many as received Him to them gave He 
 power to become the sons of God, even to as many as be- 
 lieved on His name." They were His own, yet they wanted 
 power to become His own. 
 
 Draw a distinction, therefore, between being the child of 
 God and realizing it. The fact is one thing ; the feeling of 
 the fact, and the life which results from that feeling, is anoth* 
 
282 Baptism. 
 
 er. Redemption is the taking of us out of the life of false- 
 hood into tne life 01 truth and fact. "Of His own will begat 
 He us by the word of truth." But, remember, it is a truth ; 
 true whether you believe it. or not ; true whether you are 
 baptized or not. 
 
 There are two ways in which that revelation may be a'>. 
 cepted. 1. By a public recognition called baptism. 2. By 
 faith. In two ways, therefore, may it be said that man is 
 saved. " We are saved by faith." But it is also true, figu- 
 ratively, "Baptism saves us." 
 
 IT. If baptism is only the public recognition and symbol 
 of a fact, is not baptism degraded and made superfluous? 
 
 1. Baptism is given as a something to rest upon; nay, as a 
 something without which redemption would soon become 
 unreal which converts a doctrine into a reality which re- 
 alizes visibly what is invisible. 
 
 For our nature is such, that immaterial truths are unreal 
 to us until they are embodied in material form. Form al- 
 most gives them reality and being. For instance, time is an 
 eternal fact. But time only exists to our conceptions as an 
 actuality by measurements of materialism. When God cre- 
 ated the sun, and moon, and stars, to serve for " signs and for 
 seasons, and for days and years," He was actually, so far as 
 man was concerned, creating time. Our minds would be 
 only floating in an eternal Now, if it were not for symbolical 
 successions which represent the processes of thought. The 
 clock in the house is almost- a fresh creation. It realizes. 
 The gliding heavens, and the seasons, and the' ticking clock 
 what is time to us without them ? Nothing. 
 
 God's character, again, nay, God Himself, to us would be 
 nothing if it were not for the creation, which is the great 
 symbol and sacrament of His presence. 'If there were no 
 light, no sunshine, no sea, no national and domestic life, no 
 material witness of His being, God would be to us as good 
 as lost. The Creation gives us God : forever real in Himself, 
 by Creation He becomes a fact to us. 
 
 It is in virtue, again, of this necessity in man for an out- 
 ward symbol to realize an invisible idea, that a bit of torn 
 and blackened rag hanging from a fortress or the taflrail of 
 a ship, is a kind of life to iron-hearted men. Why is it that 
 in the heat of battle there is one spot where the sabres flash 
 most rapidly, and the pistols' ring is quicker, and men and 
 officers close in most densely, and all are gathered round one 
 man, round whose body that tattered silk is wound, and held 
 with the tenacity of a death-struggle ? Are they only chib 
 
Baptism. 283 
 
 dren fighting for a bit of rag ? That flag is every thing to 
 them : their regiment, their country, their honor, their life ; 
 yet it is only a symbol ! Are symbols nothing ? 
 
 In the same way, baptism is a fact for man to rest upon, 
 a doctrine realized to flesh and blood. A something in eter- 
 nity which has no place in time brought down to such time 
 expressions as " then and there." 
 
 2. Again, baptism is the token of a church : the token of 
 an universal church. Observe the importance of its being 
 the .sacrament of an universal church instead of the symbol 
 of a sect. Not episcopacy, not justification by faith, nor any 
 party badge, but " one baptism." How blessed, on the 
 strength of this, to be able to say to the baptized dissenter, 
 You are my brother : you anathematize my church link 
 Popery and Prelacy together malign me ; but the same 
 sign is on our brow, and the same Father was named over 
 our baptism. Or to say to a baptized Romanist, You are my 
 brother too in doctrinal error perhaps in error of life it 
 may be too : but my brother our enemies the same our 
 struggle the same our hopes and warfare the very same. 
 Or to the very outcast, And you, my poor degraded friend, 
 are my brother still sunk, oblivious of your high calling ; 
 but still, whatever keeps you away from heaven keeps you 
 from your own. You may live the false life till it is too 
 late : but still, you only exclude yourself from your home. 
 Of course this is very offensive. What ! the Romanist my 
 brother ! the synagogue of Satan the house of God ! the 
 Spirit of God dwelling with the Church of Rome ! the be- 
 liever in transubstantiation my brother, and God's child ! 
 Yes, even so ; and it is just your forgetfulness of what bap- 
 tism is and means, that accounts for that indignation of 
 yours. Do you remember what the elder brother in the par- 
 able was doing ? He went away sulky and gloomy, because 
 one not half so good as himself was recognized as his father's 
 child. 
 
 3. Baptism is seen to be no mere superfluity when you re- 
 member that it is an authoritative symbol. Draw the dis- 
 tinction between an arbitrary symbol and an authoritative 
 :ne for this difference is every thing. 
 
 I take once again the illustration of the coronation act. 
 Coronation places the crown on the brow of one who is sov- 
 ereign. It does not make the fact, it witnesses it. Is cor- 
 onation therefore nothing ? An arbitrary symbolical act 
 agreed on by a few friends of the sovereign would be noth- 
 ing; but an act which is the solemn ratification of a country 
 is every thing. It realizes a fact scarcely till then felt to be 
 
284 Baptism. 
 
 real. Yet the fact was fact before otherwise the coronation 
 would be invalid. Even when the third William was crown- 
 ed, there was the symbol of a previous fact the nation's de- 
 cree that he should be king : and accordingly, ever after, all 
 is dated back to that. You talk of crown-prerogatives. You 
 say in your loyalty you " would bow to the crown, though it 
 hung upon a bush." Yet it is only a symbol! You only 
 say it " in a figure." But that figure contains within it the 
 royalty of England. 
 
 In a figure, the Bible speaks of baptism as you speak of 
 coronation, as identical with that which it proclaims* It 
 calls it regeneration. It says baptism saves. A grand fig- 
 ure, because it rests upon eternal fact. Call you that noth- 
 ing ? 
 
 We look to the Bible to corroborate this. In the Acts of 
 the Apostles Cornelius is baptized. On what grounds ? To 
 manufacture him into a child of God, or because he was tV 
 child of God ? Did his baptism create the fact, or was . 
 fact prior to his baptism, and the ground on which his bap- 
 tism was valid ? The history is this : St. Peter could not be- 
 lieve that a Gentile could be a child of God. But miracu- 
 lous phenomena manifested to his astonishment that this Gen- 
 tile actually was God's child whereupon the argument of 
 Peter was very natural. He has the Spirit, therefore baptism 
 is superfluous. Nay, he has the Spirit, therefore give him the 
 symbol of the Spirit. Let it be revealed to others what he is. 
 He is heir to the inheritance, therefore give him the title- 
 deeds. He is of royal lineage put the crown upon his head. 
 He is a child of God baptize him. "Who shall forbid wa- 
 ter, seeing these have received the Holy Ghost as well as 
 we?" 
 
 One illustration more from the marriage ceremony ; and I 
 select this for two reasons : because it is the type in Scrip- 
 ture of the union between Christ and his Church, and because 
 the Church oi Rome has called it a sacrament. 
 
 A deep truth is in that error. Rome calls it a sacramenx, 
 because it is the authoritative symbol of an invisible fact. 
 That invisible fact is the agreement of two human beings to 
 be one. We deny it to be a sacrament, because, though it is 
 the symbol of an invisible fact, it is not the symbol of a spir- 
 itual fact, nor an eternal fact : no spiritual truth, but only a 
 changeful human covenant. 
 
 Now observe the difference between an arbitrary or con- 
 ventional, and an authoritative ceremony of marriage-union. 
 There are conventional acknowledgments of that agreement, 
 ceremonies peculiar to certain districts, private pledges, be- 
 
Baptism. 285 
 
 trothals. In the sight of God those are valid ; they can not 
 be lightly broken without sin. You can not in the courts of 
 heaven distinguish between an oath to God and a word 
 pledged to man. He said, "Let your yea be yea, and your 
 nay, nay." Such an engagement can not be infringed with- 
 out penalty the penalty of frivolized hearts, and that habit 
 of changefulness of attachment which is the worst of penal- 
 ties. But now, additional to that, will any one say that the 
 marriage ceremony is superfluous that the ring he gives his 
 wife is nothing ? It is every thing. It is the authoritative 
 ratification by a country and before God of that which be- 
 fore was for all purposes of earth unreal. Authoritative 
 therein lies the difference. Just in that authoritativeness 
 lies the question whether the ceremony is nothing or every 
 thing. 
 
 And yet remember, the ceremony itself does not pretend 
 to create the fact. It only claims to realize the fact. It ad* 
 mits the fact as existing previously. It bases itself upon a 
 fact. Forasmuch as two persons have consented together, 
 and forasmuch as a token and pledge of that in the shape 
 of a ring has been given, therefore, only therefore, the ap- 
 pointed minister pronounces that they are what betrothax 
 had made them already in the sight of God. 
 
 Exactly so, the authoritativeness is the all in all which 
 converts baptism from a mere ceremony into a sacrament. 
 Baptism is not merely a conventional arrangement, exceed- 
 ingly convenient, agreed on by men to remind themselves 
 and one another that they are God's children, but valid as a 
 legal, eternal truth, a condensed, embodied fact. 
 
 Is this making baptism nothing ? I should rather say 
 baptism is every thing. Baptism saves us. 
 
 One word now practically. I address myself to any one 
 who is conscious of fault, sin-laden, struggling with the ter- 
 rible question whether he has a right to claim^God as his Fa- 
 ther or not, bewildered on the one side by Romanism, on the 
 other by Calvinism. My brother, let not either of these rob 
 you of your privileges. Let not Rome send you to the fear- 
 ful questioning as to whether the mystic seed infused at a 
 certain moment by an act of man remains in you still, of 
 whether it has been so impaired by sin that henceforth there 
 is nothing but penance, tears, and uncertainty until the grave. 
 Let not Calvinism send you with terrible self-inspection to 
 the more dreadful task of searching your own soul for the 
 warrant of your redemption, and deciding whether you have 
 or have not the feelings and the faith which give you a 
 right to be one of God's elect. Better make up your minft 
 
286 Elijah. 
 
 at once you have not ; you have no feelings that entitle you 
 to that. Take your stand upon the broader, sublimer basis 
 of God's paternity. God created the world God redeemed 
 the world. Baptism proclaims separately, personally, by 
 name, to you God created you, God redeemed you. "Bap- 
 tism is your warrant, you are His child. And now, because 
 you are His child, live as a child of God ; be redeemed from 
 the life of evil, which is false to your nature, into the life of 
 light and goodness, which is the truth of your being. Scorn 
 all that is mean ; hate all that is false ; struggle with all that 
 is impure. Love whatsoever " things are true, whatsoever 
 things are just, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever 
 things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report," 
 certain that God is on your side, and tfiat whatever keeps 
 you from Him, keeps you from your own Father. Live the 
 simple, lofty life which befits an heir of immortality. 
 
 V. 
 ELIJAH. 
 
 " But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and 
 sat down under a juniper-tree: and he requested for himself that he might 
 die ; and said, It is enough ; now, O Lord, take away my life ; for I am not 
 better than my fathers." 1 Kings xix. 4. 
 
 IT has been observed of the holy men of Scripture that 
 their most signal failures took place in those points of char- 
 acter for which they were remarkable in excellence. Moses 
 was the meekest of men, but it was Moses who " spake un- 
 advisedly with his lips." St. John was the apostle of chari- 
 ty ; yet he is the very type to us of religious intolerance, in 
 his desire to call down fire from heaven. St. Peter is pro- 
 verbially the apostle of impetuous intrepidity, yet twice he 
 proved a craven. If there were any thing for which Elijah is 
 remarkable, we should say it was superiority to human weak- 
 ness. Like the Baptist, he dared to arraign and rebuke his 
 sovereign : like the commander who cuts down the bridge 
 behind him, leaving himself no alternative but death or vic- 
 tory, he taunted his adversaries the priests of Baal, on Mount 
 Carmel, making them gnash their teeth and cut themselves 
 with knives, but at the same time insuring for himself a ter- 
 rible end, in case of failure, from his exasperated foes. And 
 again, in his last hour, when he was on his way to a strange 
 and unprecedented departure from this world when th 
 
Elijah. 287 
 
 and flame-chariot were ready, he asked for no hu- 
 man companionship. The bravest men are pardoned if one 
 lingering feeling of human weakness clings to them at the 
 last, and they desire a human eye resting on them a human 
 hand in theirs a human presence with them. But Elijah 
 would have rejected all. In harmony with the rest of his 
 lonely severe character, he desired to meet his Creator 
 alone. Now it was this man so stern, so iron, so independ- 
 ent, so above all human weakness of whom it was record* 
 ed that in his trial-hour he gave way to a fit of petulance and 
 querulous despondency to which there is scarcely found a 
 parallel. Religious despondency, therefore, is our subject. 
 
 I. The causes of Elijah's despondency. 
 II. God's treatment of it. 
 
 The causes of Elijah's despondency. 
 
 1. Relaxation of physical strength. 
 
 On the reception of Jezebel's message, Elijah flies for his 
 life toils on the whole day sits down under a juniper-tree, 
 faint, hungry, and travel-worn ; the gale of an Oriental even- 
 ing, damp and heavy with languid sweetness, breathing on 
 his face. The prophet and the man give way. He longs to 
 die : you can not mistake the presence of causes in part 
 purely physical. 
 
 We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Of that consti* 
 tution which in our ignorance we call union of soul and body, 
 we know little respecting what is cause and what is effect. 
 We would fain believe that the mind has power over the 
 body, but it is just as true that the body rules the mind. 
 Causes apparently the most trivial : a heated room want of 
 exercise a sunless day a northern aspect will make all 
 the difference between happiness and unhappiness, between 
 faith and doubt, between courage and indecision. To our 
 fancy there is something humiliating in being thus at the 
 mercy of our animal organism. We would fain find nobler 
 causes for our emotions. We talk of the hiding of God's 
 countenance, and the fiery darts of Satan. But the picture 
 given here is true. The body is the channel of our noblest 
 emotions as well as our sublimest sorrows. 
 
 Two practical results follow. First, instead of vilifying 
 the body, complaining that our nobler part is chained down 
 to a base partner, it is worth recollecting that the body too 
 is the gift of Go4, in its way Divine " the temple of the 
 Holy Ghost ;" and that to keep the body in temperance, so- 
 berness, and chastity, to guard it from pernicious influence, 
 and to obey the laws of health, are just as much religious as 
 
288 Rlijah. 
 
 they are moral duties ; just as much obligatory on the Chris* 
 dan as they are on a member of a Sanitary Committee. 
 Next, there are persons melancholy by constitution, in whom 
 the tendency is incurable ; you can not exorcise the phantom 
 of despondency. But it is something to know that it is a 
 phantom, and not to treat it as a reality something taught 
 by Elijah's history, if we only learn from it to be patient, and 
 wait humbly the time and good pleasure of God. 
 
 2. Want of sympathy. . 
 
 " I, even I only, am left." Lay the stress on only. The 
 loneliness of his position- was shocking to Elijah. Surprising 
 this : for Elijah wanted no sympathy in a far harder trial on 
 Mount Carmel. It was in a tone of triumph that he pro- 
 claimed that he was the single, solitary prophet of the Lord, 
 while Baal's prophets were four hundred and fifty men. 
 
 Observe, however, the difference. There was in that case 
 an opposition which could be grappled with : here there was 
 nothing against which mere manhood was availing. The 
 excitement was passed, the chivalrous look of the thing 
 gone. To die as a martyr, yes, that were easy, in grand fail- 
 ure ; but to die as a felon to be hunted, caught, taken back 
 to an ignominious death flesh and blood recoiled from that. 
 
 And Elijah began to feel that popularity is not love. The 
 world will support you when you have constrained its votes 
 by a manifestation of power, and shrink from you when pow- 
 er and greatness are no longer on your side. " I, even J 
 only, am left." 
 
 This trial is most distinctly realized by men of Elijah's 
 stamp and placed under Elijah's circumstances. It is the 
 penalty paid by superior mental and moral qualities, that 
 such men must make up their minds to live without sympa- 
 thy. Their feelings will be misunderstood, and their proj- 
 ects uncomprehended. They must be content to live alone. 
 It is sad to hear such appeal from the present to the judg- 
 ment of the future. Poor consolation ! Elijah has been 
 judged at that bar. *We are his posterity: our reverence 
 this day is the judgment of posterity on him. But to Elijah 
 what is that now? Elijah is in that quiet country where 
 the voice of praise and the voice of blame are alike unheard, 
 Elijah lived and died alone ; once only the bitterness of it 
 found expression. But what is posthumous justice to the 
 heart that ached then f 
 
 What greater minds like Elijah's have felt intensely, all 
 we have felt in our own degree. Not one of us but what 
 has felt his heart aching for want of sympathy. We have 
 had our lonely hours, our days of disappointment, and >jf 
 
Elijah 289 
 
 moments of hopelessness times when our highest feelings 
 have been misunderstood, and our purest met with ridicule. 
 Days when our heavy secret was lying unshared, like ice 
 upon the heart. And then the spirit gives way : we have 
 wished that all were over that we could lie down tired, 
 and rest like the children, from life that the hour was come 
 when we could put down the extinguisher on the lamp, and 
 feel the last grand rush of darkness on the spirit. 
 
 Now, the final cause of this capacity for depression, the 
 reason for which it is granted us, is that it may make God 
 necessary. In such moments it is felt that sympathy be- 
 yond human is needful. Alone, the world against him, Eli- 
 jah turns to God. " It is enough : now, Lord" 
 
 3. Want of occupation. 
 
 As long as Elijah had a prophet's work to do, severe as 
 that work was, all went on healthily; but his occupation 
 was gone. To-morrow, and the day after, what has he left 
 on earth to do ? The misery of having nothing to do pro- 
 ceeds from causes voluntary or involuntary in their nature. 
 Multitudes of our race, by circumstances over which they 
 have no control in single life or widowhood in straitened 
 circumstances are compelled to endure lonely days, and 
 still more lonely nights and evenings. They who have felt 
 the hours hang so heavy can comprehend part of Elijah's 
 sadness. 
 
 This misery, however, is sometimes voluntarily incurred. 
 In artificial civilization certain persons exempt themselves 
 from the necessity of work. They eat the bread which has" 
 been procured by the sweat of the brow of others they 
 skim the surface of the thought which has been ploughed by 
 the sweat of the brain of others. They are reckoned the fa- 
 vored ones of fortune, and envied. Are they blessed ? The 
 law of life is, in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread. 
 No man can evade that law with impunity. Like all God's 
 laws, it is its own executioner. It has strange penalties an- 
 nexed to it : would you know them ? Go to the park, or the 
 esplanade, or the solitude after the night of dissipation, and 
 read the penalties of being useless, in the sad, jaded, listless 
 countenances nay, in the very trifles which must be con- 
 trived to create excitement artificially. Yet these very eyes 
 could, dull as they are, beam with intelligence : on many of 
 those brows is stamped the mark of possible nobility. The 
 fact is, that the capacity of ennui is one of the signatures of 
 man's immortality. It is his very greatness which makes in- 
 action misery. If God had made us only to be insects, with 
 no nobler care incumbent on us than the preservation of our 
 
 13 
 
290 Elijah. 
 
 lives, or the pursuit of happiness, we might be content to 
 flutter from sweetness to sweetness, and from bud to flower. 
 But if men with souls live only to eat and drink and be 
 amused, is it any wonder if life be darkened with despond- 
 ency? 
 
 4. Disappointment in the expectation of success. 
 
 On Carmel the great object for which Elijah L ji-7 lived 
 seemed on the point of being realized. Baal's prophets were 
 slain Jehovah acknowledged with one voice-^false worship 
 put down. Elijah's life-aim, the transformation of Israel into 
 a kingdom of God, was all but accomplished. In a single 
 day all this bright picture was annihilated. 
 
 Man is to desire success, but success rarely cornea. The 
 wisest has written upon life its sad epitaph " All is vanity," 
 i. <?., nothingness. 
 
 The tradesman sees the noble fortune for which he lived, 
 every coin of which is the representative of so much time 
 and labor spent, squandered by a spendthrift son. The 
 purest statesmen find themselves at last neglected, and re- 
 warded by defeat. Almost never can a man look back on 
 life and say that its anticipations have been realized. For 
 the most part life is disappointment, and the moments in 
 which this is keenly realized are moments like this of 
 Elijah's. 
 
 II. God's treatment of it. 
 
 1. First He recruited His servant's exhausted strength. 
 Read the history. Miraculous meals are given then Elijah 
 sleeps, wakes, and eats : on the strength of that goes forty 
 days' journey. In other words, like a wise physician, God 
 administers food, rest, and exercise, and then, and not till 
 then, proceeds to expostulate ; for before, Elijah's mind was 
 unfit for reasoning. 
 
 Persons come to the ministers of God in seasons of de- 
 spondency ; they pervert with marvellous ingenuity all the 
 consolation which is given them, turning wholesome food 
 into poison. Then we begin to perceive the wisdom of 
 God's simple homely treatment of Elijah, and discover that 
 there are spiritual cases which are cases for the physician 
 rather than the divine. 
 
 2. Next Jehovah calmed his stormy mind by the healing 
 influences of Nature. He commanded the hurricane to 
 sweep the sky, and the earthquake to shake the ground. 
 He lighted up the heavens till they were one mass of fire. 
 All this expressed and reflected Elijah's feelings. The mode 
 in which Nature soothes us is by finding meeter and no- 
 
Elijah. 291 
 
 blei utterance for our feelings than we can find in words 
 by expressing and exalting them. In expression there is re- 
 lief. Elijah's spirit rose with the spirit of the storm. Stern, 
 wild defiance strange joy all by turns were imaged there. 
 Observe, " God was not in the wind," nor in the fire, nor in 
 the earthquake. It was Elijah's stormy self reflected in the 
 moods of the tempest, and giving them their character. 
 
 Then came a calmer hour. Elijah rose in reverence felt 
 tenderer sensations in his bosom. He opened his heart to 
 gentler influences, till at last out of the manifold voices of 
 Nature there seemed to speak, not the stormy passions of 
 the man, but the "still small voice" of the harmony and the 
 peace of God. 
 
 There are some spirits which must go through a discipline 
 analogous to that sustained by Elijah. The storm-struggle 
 must precede the still small voice. There are minds which 
 must be convulsed with doubt before they can repose in 
 faith. There are hearts which must be broken with disap- 
 pointment before they can rise into hope. There are dispo- 
 sitions which, like Job, must have all things taken from them 
 before they can find all things again in God. Blessed is the 
 man who, when the tempest has spent its fury, recognizes his 
 Father's voice in its under-tone, and bares his head and bows 
 his knee, as Elijah did. To such spirits, generally those of a 
 stern rugged cast, it seems as if God had said, " In the still 
 sunshine and ordinary ways of life you can not meet Me, but 
 like Job, in the desolation of the tempest, you shall see My 
 form, and hear My voice, and know that your Redeemer 
 liveth." 
 
 3. Besides, God made him feel the earnestness of life. 
 What doest thou here, Elijah ? Life is for doing. A proph- 
 et's life for nobler doing and the prophet was not doing, 
 but moaning. 
 
 Such a voice repeats itself to all of us, rousing us from our 
 lethargy, or our despondency, or our protracted leisure, 
 " What doest thou here ?" here in this short life. There is 
 work to be done evil put down God's Church purified 
 good men encouraged doubting men directed a country 
 to be saved time going life a dream eternity long one 
 chance, and but one forever. What doest thou here ? 
 
 Then he went on farther : "Arise, go on thy way." That 
 speaks to us : on thy way. Be.up and doing ; fill up every 
 hour, leaving no crevice or craving for a remorse, or a re- 
 pentance to creep through afterwards. Let not the mind 
 brood on self; save it from speculation, from those stagnant 
 moments in which the awful teachings of the spirit grope 
 
292 Elijah. 
 
 into the unfathomable unknown, and the heart torments it- 
 self with questions which are insoluble except to an active 
 life. For the awful Future becomes intelligible only in the 
 light of a felt and active Present. Go, return on thy way if 
 thou art desponding on thy way ; health of spirit will re- 
 turn. 
 
 4. He completed the cure by the assurance of victory. 1 
 " Yet have I left me seven thousand in Israel who have not 
 bowed the knee to Baal." So, then, Elijah's life had been no 
 failure after all. Seven thousand at least in Israel had been 
 braced and encouraged by his example, and silently blessed 
 him, perhaps, for the courage which they felt. In God's 
 world for those that are in earnest there is no failure. No 
 work truly done no word earnestly spoken no sacrifice 
 freely made, was ever made in vain. Never did the cup of 
 cold water given for Christ's sake lose its reward. 
 
 We turn naturally from this scene to a still darker hour 
 and more august agony. If ever failure seemed to rest on a 
 noble life, it was when the Son of Man, deserted by His 
 friends, heard the cry which proclaimed that the Pharisees 
 had successfully drawn the net round their Divine victim. 
 Yet from that very hour of defeat and death there went 
 forth the world's life from that very moment of apparent 
 failure there proceeded forth into the ages the spirit of the 
 conquering Cross. Surely if the Cross says any thing, it 
 says that apparent defeat is real victory, and that there is a 
 heaven for those who have nobly and truly failed on earth. 
 
 Distinguish, therefore, between the real and the apparent. 
 Elijah's apparent success was in the shouts of Mount Carmel. 
 His real success was in the unostentatious, unsurmised obe- 
 dienoe of the seven thousand who had taken his God for 
 their God. 
 
 This is a lesson for all : for teachers who lay their heads 
 down at night sickening over their thankless task. Remem- 
 ber the power of indirect influences: those which distill from 
 a life, not from a sudden, brilliant effort. The former never 
 fail, the latter often. There is good done of which we can 
 never predicate the when or where. Not in the flushing of 
 a pupil's cheek, or the glistening of an attentive eye ; not in 
 the shining results of an examination does your real success 
 lie. It lies in that invisible influence on character which He 
 alone can read who counte^ the seven thousand nameless 
 ones in Israel. 
 
 For ministers, again what is ministerial success ? Crowd- 
 ed churches full aisles attentive congregations the ap- 
 proval of the religious world much impression produced ? 
 
Notes on Psalm LI. 293 
 
 Elijah thought so ; and when he found out his mistake, and 
 discovered that the applause on Carmel subsided into hide- 
 ous stillness, his heart well-nigh broke with disappointment. 
 Ministerial success lies in altered lives and obedient humble 
 hearts : unseen work recognized in the judgment-day. 
 
 What is a public man's success? That which can be 
 measured by feast-days and the number of journals which 
 espouse his cause? Deeper, deeper far must he work who 
 works for eternity. In the eye of that, nothing stands but 
 gold real work : all else perishes. 
 
 Get below appearances, below glitter and show. Plant 
 your foot upon reality. Not in the jubilee of the myriads 
 on Carmel, but in the humble silence of the hearts of the 
 seven thousand, lay the proof that Elijah had not lived in 
 vain. 
 
 VI. 
 NOTES ON PSALM LI. 
 
 Written by David after a double crime: Uriah put in the forefront of the 
 battle the wife of the murdered man taken, etc. 
 
 A DARKER guilt you will scarcely find kingly power 
 abused worst passions yielded to. Yet this psalm breathes 
 from a spirit touched with the finest sensibilities of spiritual 
 feeling. 
 
 Two sides of our mysterious twofold being here, Some- 
 thing in us near to hell : something strangely near to God. 
 " Half beast half devil ?" No : rather half diabolical half 
 divine : half demon half God. This man mixing with the 
 world's sins in such sort that we shudder. But he draws 
 near the Majesty of God, and becomes softened, purified, 
 melted. 
 
 It is good to observe this, that we rightly estimate : gen- 
 erously of fallen humanity, moderately of highest saintship. 
 
 In our best estate and in our purest moments there is a 
 something of the devil in us which, if it could be known, 
 would make men shrink from us. The germs of the worst 
 crimes are in us all. In our deepest degradation there re- 
 mains something sacred, undefjled, the pledge and gift of our 
 better nature : a germ of indestructible life, like the grains of 
 wheat among the cerements of a mummy surviving through 
 three thousand years, which may be planted, and live, an] 
 grow again. 
 
294 Notes on Psalm LI. 
 
 It is this truth of human feeling which makes the Psalms, 
 more than any other portion of the Old Testament, the link 
 of union between distant ages. The historical books need a 
 rich store of knowledge before they can be a modern book 
 of life, but the Psalms are the records of individual experi- 
 ence. Personal religion is the same in all ages. The deeps 
 of our humanity remain unruffled by the storms of ages which 
 change the surface. This psalm, written three thousand years 
 ago, might have been written yesterday : describes the vicis- 
 situdes of spiritual life in an Englishman as truly as of a Jew. 
 " Not of an age, but for all time." 
 
 I. Scripture estimate of sin. 
 n. Spiritual restoration. 
 
 I. Scripture estimate of sin. 
 
 1. Personal accountability. " My sin " strange, but true. 
 It is hard to believe the sin we do our own. One lays the 
 blame on circumstances ; another on those who tempted ; a 
 third on Adam, Satan, or his own nature, as if it were not 
 himself. " The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the chil- 
 dren's teeth are set on edge." 
 
 In this psalm there is no such self-exculpation. Personal 
 accountability is recognized throughout. No source of evil 
 suggested or conceived but his own guilty will no shifting 
 of responsibility no pleading of a passionate nature, or of 
 royal exposure as peculiar. " I have sinned." " I acknowl- 
 edge my transgression : my sin is ever before me." 
 
 One passage only seems at first to breathe a different tone : 
 " In sin did my mother conceive me." By some interpreted 
 as referring to hereditary sin : alleged as a proof of the doc- 
 trine of transmitted guilt, as if David traced the cause of his 
 act to his maternal character. 
 
 True as the doctrine is that physical and moral qualities 
 are transmissible, you do not find that doctrine here. It is not 
 in excuse, but in exaggeration of his fault that David speaks. 
 He lays on himself the blame of a tainted nature, instead of 
 that of a single fault : not a murder only, but of a murderous 
 nature. " Conceived in sin." From his first moments up till 
 then, he saw sin sin sin : nothing but sin. 
 
 Learn the individual character of sin its personal origin, 
 and personal identity. There can be no transference of it. 
 It is individual and incommunicable. My sin can not be 
 your sin, nor yours mine. 
 
 Conscience, when it is healthy, ever speaks thus: "my 
 transgression." It was not the guilt of them that tempted 
 you they have theirs ; but each as a separate agent, hia 
 
Notes on Psalm LL 295 
 
 own degree of guilt. Yours is your own ; the violation of 
 your own and not another's sense of duty ; solitary, awful, 
 unshared, adhering to you alone of all the spirits of the 
 universe. 
 
 Perilous to refer the evil in us to any source out of and be- 
 yond ourselves. In this way penitence becomes impossible : 
 fictitious. 
 
 2. Estimated as hateful to God. " Against thee, thee only, 
 .have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight ; that thou 
 mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when 
 thou judgest." The simple judgment of the conscience. But 
 another estimate, born of the intellect, comes in collision with 
 this religion and bewilders it. Look over life, and you will 
 find it hard to believe that sin is against God ; that it is not 
 rather/or Him. 
 
 Undeniable, that out of evil comes good that evil is the 
 resistance in battle, with which good is created and becomes 
 possible. Physical evil, for example, hunger, an evil, is the 
 parent of industry, human works, all that man has done : it 
 beautifies life. The storm-fire burns up the forest, and slays 
 man and beast, but purifies the air of contagion. Lately, 
 the tragic death of eleven fishermen elicited the sympathy 
 and charities of thousands. 
 
 Even moral evil is also generative of good. Peter's cow- 
 ardice enabled him to be a comforter: "when he was con- 
 verted, to strengthen his brethren." David's crime was a 
 vantage-ground, from which he rose through penitence near- 
 er to God. Through it this psalm has blessed ages. But if 
 the sin had not been done ! 
 
 Now, contemplating this, we begin to perceive that evil is 
 God's instrument. " If evil be in the city, the Lord hath 
 done it." Then the contemplative intellectualist looks over 
 this scene of things, and complacently approves of evil as 
 God's contrivance as much as good is a temporary necessi- 
 ty, worthy of His wisdom to create. And then, can He truly 
 hate that which He has made ? Can His agent be his enemy ? 
 Is it not short-sightedness to be angry with it? Not the an- 
 tagonist of God surely, but His creature and faithful servant 
 this evil. Sin can not be " against God." 
 
 Thus arises a horrible contradiction between the instincts 
 of the conscience and the judgment of the understanding. 
 Judas must have been, says the intellect, God's a^ent as 
 much as Paul. "Why doth He yet find fault? for who had 
 resisted His will ? Do not evil men perform His will ? Why 
 should I blame sin in another or myself, seeing it is neces- 
 sary ? Why not say at once, crime and virtue are the same ?" 
 
296 Notes on Psalm LI. 
 
 Thoughts such as these, at some time or another, I doubt 
 not haunt and perplex us all. Conscience is overborne by 
 the intellect. Some time during every life the impossibility 
 of reconciling these two verdicts is felt, and the perplexity 
 confuses action. Men sin with a secret peradventure behind. 
 "Perhaps evil is not so bad, after all perhaps good who 
 knows ?" 
 
 Remember, therefore, in matters practical, conscience, not 
 intellect, is our guide. Unsophisticated conscience ever 
 speaks this language of the Bible. 
 
 We can not help believing that our sentiments towards 
 right and wrong are a reflection of God's. That we fall just 
 and true, we can not but think is just and true in His sight. 
 That which seems base and vile to us, we are compelled to 
 think is so to Him and this in proportion as we act up to 
 duty. In that proportion we feel that His sentiments coin- 
 cide with ours. 
 
 In such moments when the God within us speaks most per- 
 emptorily and distinctly, we feel that the language of this 
 psalm is true, and that no other language expresses the truth. 
 Sin is not for God can not be, but " against God." An op- 
 position to His will, a contradiction to His nature, not a co- 
 incidence with it. He abhors it will banish it, and annihi- 
 late it. 
 
 In these days, when French sentimentalism, theological 
 dreams, and political speculations are unsettling the old 
 landmarks with fearful rapidity, if we do not hold fast, and 
 that simply, and firmly, that first principle, that right is right, 
 and wrong wrong, all our moral judgments will become con- 
 fused, and the penitence of the noblest hearts an absurdity. 
 For what can be more absurd than knowingly to reproach 
 ourselves for that which God intended ? 
 
 3. Sin estimated as separation from God. Two views of 
 sin : The first reckoning it evil, because consequences of pain 
 are annexed; the second evil, because a, contradiction of our 
 own nature and God's will. 
 
 In this psalm the first is ignored ; the second, implied 
 throughout. "Take not thy Holy Spirit from me;" "Have 
 mercy upon me," does not mean, Save me from torture. 
 You can not read the psalm and think so. It is not the 
 trembling of a craven spirit in anticipation of torture, but 
 the agonies of a noble one in the horror of being evil. 
 
 If the first view were true, then if God were by an act of 
 will to reverse the consequences, and annex pain to goodness 
 and joy to crime to lie and injure would become duty as 
 much as before they were sins. But penalties do not change 
 
Notes on Psalm LL 297 
 
 good into evil. Good is forever good ; evil forever evil. 
 God Himself could not alter that by a command. Eternal 
 hell could not make truth wrong, nor everlasting pleasure en* 
 noble sensuality. 
 
 Do you fancy that men like David, shuddering iu sight of 
 evil, dreaded a material hell ? I venture to say, into true 
 penitence the idea of punishment never enters. If it did, it 
 would be almost a relief; but oh ! those moments in which 
 a selfish act has appeared more hideous than any pain which 
 the fancy of a Dante could devise ! when the idea of the 
 strife of self-will in battle with the loving will of God pro- 
 longed forever has painted itself to the imagination as the 
 real infinite hell ! when self-concentration and the extinC' 
 tion of love in the soul has been felt as the real damnation of 
 the devil-nature ! 
 
 And recollect how sparingly Christianity appeals to the 
 prudential motives. Use them it does, because they are mo' 
 tives, but rarely. Retribution is a truth ; and Christianity, 
 true to nature, warns of retribution. But, except to rouse 
 men sunk in forgetfulness, or faltering with truth, it almost 
 never appeals to it : and never, with the hope of eliciting 
 from such motives as the hope of heaven or the fear of hell, 
 high goodness. 
 
 To do good for reward, the Son of Man declares to be the 
 sinner's religion. " If ye lend to them who lend to you, what 
 thank have ye ?" and He distinctly proclaims that alone to 
 be spiritually good, " the righteousness of God," which " does 
 good, hoping for nothing in return;" adding, as 'the only 
 motive, " that ye may be the children of (i. e., resemble) your 
 Father which is in heaven : for He maketh His sun to shine 
 on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on 
 the unjust." 
 
 IT. Restoration. 
 
 First step, sacrifice of a broken spirit. 
 
 Observe the accurate and even Christian perception of the 
 real meaning of sacrifice by the ancient spiritually-minded 
 Jews. 
 
 Sacrifice has its origin in two feelings : one human, one di- 
 viiie or inspired. 
 
 Tnie feeling : something to be given to God : surrendered : 
 that God must be worshipped with our best. 
 
 Human : added to this, mixed up with it, is the fancy that 
 this sacrifice pleases God because of the loss or pain which it 
 inflicts. Then men attribute to God their own revengeful 
 feelings ; think that the philosophy of sacrifice consists in the 
 
 13* 
 
298 Notes on Psalm LI. 
 
 necessity of punishing : call it justice to let the blow fall 
 somewhere no matter where: blood must 'flow. Hence 
 heathen sacrifices were offered to appease the Deity, to buy 
 off His wrath the purer the offering the better: to sjlut 
 His fury.. Instances illustrating the feeling: Iphigenia; Zaleu- 
 cus ; two eyes given to the law : barbarian rude notions of 
 justness mixed up with a father's instincts. Polycrates and 
 Amasis ; seal sacrificed to avert the anger of heaven sup- 
 posed to be jealous of mortal prosperity. These notions 
 were mixed with Judaism: nay, "are mixed up now with 
 Christian conceptions of Christ's sacrifice. 
 
 Jewish sacrifices therefore presented two thoughts to the 
 spiritual, true notions ; to the unspiritual, false ; and express- 
 ed these feelings for each. But men like David felt that 
 what lay beneath all sacrifice as its ground and meaning was 
 surrender to God's will that- a man's best is himself and 
 to sacrifice this is the true sacrifice. By degrees they came 
 to see that the sacrifice was but a form typical ; and that it 
 might be superseded. 
 
 Compare this psalm with Psalm L. 
 
 They were taught this chiefly through sin and suffering. 
 Conscience, truly wounded, could not be appeased by these 
 sacrifices which were offered year by year continually. The 
 selfish coward, who saw in sin nothing terrible but the pen- 
 alty, could be satisfied of course. Believing that the animal 
 bore his punishment, he had nothing more to dread. But 
 they who felt sin to be estrangement from God, who were 
 not thinking of punishment, what relief could be given to 
 them by being told that the penalty of their sins was borne 
 by another being ? They felt that only by surrender to God 
 could conscience be at rest. 
 
 Learn then God does not wish pain, but goodness ; not 
 suffering, but you yourself your heart. 
 
 Even in the sacrifice of Christ, God wished only this. It 
 was precious not because it was pain, but because the pain, 
 the blood, the death were the last and highest evidence of 
 entire surrender. Satisfaction? Yes, the blood of Christ 
 satisfied. Why ? Because God can glut His vengeance in 
 innocent blood more sweetly than in guilty? Because, like 
 the barbarian Zaleucus, so long as the whole penalty is paid, 
 He cares not by whom ? Or was it because for the first time 
 He saw human nature a copy of the Divine nature the will 
 of Man the Son perfectly coincident with the will of God the 
 Father the love of duty for the first time exhibited by man 
 obedience entire, " unto death, even the death of the cross?" 
 Was not that the sacrifice which He saw in His beloved Son 
 
Notes on Psalm LI. 299 
 
 wherewith He was well pleased ? Was not that the sacrifice 
 of Him who, through the Eternal Spirit, ottered Himself with- 
 out spot to God : the sacrifice once offered which hath per- 
 fected forever them that are sanctified ? 
 
 2. Last step, spirit of liberty. " Thy free spirit " literal- 
 ly, princely. But the translation is right. A princely is a 
 free spirit unconstrained. Hence St. James calls it " the 
 royal law of liberty." 
 
 Two classes of motives- may guide to acts of seeming 
 goodness: 1. Prudential ; 2. Generous. 
 
 The agent of the temperance society appeals to prudential 
 motives when he demonstrates the evils of intoxication ; en- 
 lists the aid of anatomy ; contrasts the domestic happiness 
 and circumstantial comfort of the temperate home with that 
 of the intemperate. An appeal to the desire of happiness and 
 fear of misery. A motive, doubtless, and of unquestionable 
 potency. All I say is, that from this class of motives comes 
 nothing of the highest stamp. 
 
 Prudential motives will move me : but compare the rush 
 of population from east to west for gold with a similar rush 
 in the time of the Crusades. A dream a fancy ; but an 
 appeal to generous and unselfish emotions to enthusiasm 
 which has in it no reflex consideration of personal greed : 
 in the one case, siriiply a transfer of population, with vices 
 and habits unchanged ; in the other, a sacrifice of home, 
 country, all. 
 
 Tell men that salvation is personal happiness, and damna- 
 tion personal misery, and that goodness consists in seeking 
 the one and avoiding the other, and you will get religionists : 
 but poor, stunted, dwarfish asking, with painful' self-con- 
 sciousness, Am I saved ? Am I lost ? Prudential considera- 
 tions about a distant happiness, conflicting with passionate 
 impulses to secure a neaf and present one : men moving in 
 shackles " letting I dare not wait upon I would." 
 
 Tell men that God is love : that right is right, and wrong 
 wrong : let them cease to admire philanthropy, and begin 
 to love men : cease to pant for heaven, and begin to love 
 God : then the spirit of liberty begins. 
 
 When fear has done its work whose office is not to create 
 holiness but to arrest conscience and self-abasement has 
 set in in earnest, then the free Spirit of God begins to 
 breathe upon the soul like o gale from a healthier climate, 
 refreshing it with a more generous and a purer love. Pru- 
 dence is no longer left in painful and hopeless struggle with 
 desire : love bursts the shackles of the soul, and we are free. 
 
300 Obedience the Organ of Spiritual KnowLdge* 
 
 VII. 
 
 OBEDIENCE THE ORGAN OF SPIRITUAL 
 KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 ASSIZE SERMON. 
 
 : * it any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be 
 of God, or whether I speak of myself. " John vii. 1 7. 
 
 THE first thing we have to do is to put ourselves in pos- 
 session of the history of these words. 
 
 Jesus taught in the Temple during the Feast of Taber- 
 nacles. The Jews marvelled at His spiritual wisdom. The 
 cause. of wonder was the want of scholastic education: 
 "How knoweth this man letters, never having learned?" 
 They had no conception of any source of wisdom beyond 
 learning. 
 
 He Himself gave a different account of the matter. " My 
 doctrine is not mine, but His that sent me." And how He 
 came possessed of it, speaking humanly, 'He taught (chap. v. 
 30): "My judgment is just, because I seek not mine own 
 will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me." 
 
 That principle whereby He attained spiritual judgment 
 or wisdom, He extends to all. "If any man will do His 
 will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, 
 or whether I speak of myself." Here, then, manifestly, there 
 are two opinions respecting the origin of spiritual knowledge : 
 
 1. The popular one of the Jews, relying on a cultivated 
 understanding. 
 
 2. The principle of Christ, which relied on trained affec- 
 tions, and habits of obedience. 
 
 What is truth? Study, said the Jews. Act, said Christ, 
 jmd you shall know. A very precious principle to hold by 
 ; n these days, and a very pregnant one of thought to us, 
 who during the next few days must be engaged in the con- 
 templation of crime, and to whom the question will suggest 
 Uself, how can men's lives be made true ? 
 
 Religious controversy is fast settling into a conflict be- 
 tween two great extreme parties those who believe every 
 thing, and those who believe nothing : the disciples of credu- 
 lity, and the disciples of skepticism. 
 
 the first rely on authority. Foremost among these, and 
 
Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge. 301 
 
 the only self-consistent ones, are the adherents of the Church 
 of Rome ; and into this body, by logical consistency, ought 
 to merge all Dissenters, Churchmen, Bible Christians ; all 
 who receive their opinions because their sect, their church, 
 or their documents assert them, not because they are true 
 eternally in themselves. 
 
 The second class rely solely on a cultivated understand- 
 ing. This is the root principle of Rationalism. Enlighten, 
 they say, and sin will disappear. Enlighten, and we shall 
 know all that can be known of God. Sin is an error of the 
 understanding, not a crime of the will. Illuminate the un- 
 derstanding, show man that sin is folly, and sin will disap- 
 pear. Political economy will teach public virtue; knowl- 
 edge of anatomy will arrest the indulgence of the passions. 
 Show the drunkard the inflamed tissues of the brain, and he 
 will be sobered by fear and reason. 
 
 Only enlighten fully, and spiritual truths will be tested. 
 When the anatomist shall have hit on a right method of dis- 
 section, and appropriated sensation to this filament of the 
 brain, and the religious sentiment to that fibre, we shall 
 know whether there be a soul or not, and whether conscious- 
 ness will survive physical dissolution. When the chemist 
 shall have discovered the principle of life, and found cause 
 behind cause, we shall know whether the last cause of all is 
 a personal will or a lifeless force. 
 
 Concerning whom I only remark now, that these disciples 
 of skepticism easily become disciples of credulity. It is in- 
 structive to see how they who sneer at Christian mysteries 
 as old wives' fables, bow in abject reverence before Egyp- 
 tian mysteries of three thousand years' antiquity ; and how 
 they who have cast off a God believe in the veriest im- 
 posture, and have blind faith in the most vulgar juggling. 
 Skepticism and credulity meet. Nor is it difficult to ex- 
 plain. Distrusting every thing, they doubt their own con- 
 clusions and their own mental powers ; and that for which 
 they can not account presents itself to them as supernatural 
 and mysterious. Wonder makes them more credulous than 
 those they sneer at. 
 
 In opposition to both these systems stands the Christian- 
 ity of Christ. 
 
 1. Christ never taught on personal authority. "My doc- 
 trine is not mine." He taught " not as the scribes." They 
 dogmatized : " because it was written " stickled for max- 
 ims, and lost principles. His authority was the authority of 
 
 truth, not of personality : He commanded men to believe, 
 not because He said it, bi 
 
 but He said it because it was true. 
 
302 Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge. 
 
 Hence John xii. 47, 48, " If any man hear my words, and be- 
 lieve not, I judge him not: the word that I have spoken, 
 the same shall judge him in the last day." 
 
 2. He never taught that cultivation of the understanding 
 would do all, but exactly the reverse. And so taught His 
 apostles. St. Paul taught, "The world by wisdom knew 
 not God." His Master said not that clear intellect will give 
 you a right heart, but that a right heart and a pure life will 
 clarify the intellect. Not, become a man of letters and learn- 
 ing, and you will attain spiritual freedom : but, Do rightly, 
 and you will judge justly : obey, and you will know. "My 
 judgment is just, because I seek not mine own will but the 
 will of the Father which sent me." " If any man will do His 
 will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or 
 whether I speak of myself." 
 
 I. The knowledge of the truth, or Christian knowledge. 
 H. The condition on which it is attainable. 
 
 I. Christian knowledge "he shall know." Its object 
 " the doctrine." Its degree certainty " shall know" 
 
 Doctrine is now, in our modern times, a word of limited 
 meaning ; being simply opposed to practical. For instance, 
 the Sermon on the Mount would be called practical : St. 
 Paul's Epistles doctrinal. But in Scripture, doctrine means 
 broadly, teaching : any thing that is taught is doctrine. 
 Christ's doctrine embraces the whole range of His teaching 
 every principle and every precept. Let us select three 
 departments of "doctrine" in which the principle of the text 
 will be found true " If any man will do His will, he shall 
 know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I 
 speak of myself." 
 
 1. It holds good in speculative truth. If any man will do 
 God's will, he shall know what is truth and what is error. 
 Let us see how willfulness and selfishness hinder impartial- 
 ity. How comes it that men are almost always sure to ar- 
 rive at the conclusions reached by their own party ? Surely 
 because fear, interest, vanity, or the desire of being reckoned 
 sound and judicious, or party spirit, bias them. Personal 
 prospects, personal antipathies, these determine most men's 
 creed. How will you remove this hindrance ? By increased 
 cultivation of mind ? Why, the Romanist is as accomplished 
 as the Protestant, and learning is found in the Church and 
 out of it. You are not sure that high mental cultivation will 
 lead a man either to Protestantism or to the Church of Eng- 
 land. Surely, then, by removing self-will, and so only, can 
 the hindrance to right opinions be removed. Take away the 
 
Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge. 303 
 
 last trace of interested feeling, and the way is cleared for 
 men to come to an approximation towards unity, even in 
 judgment on points speculative; and so he that will do 
 God's will shall know of the doctrine. 
 
 2. In practical truths the principle is true. It is more 
 true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and 
 habits, than to say that our lives depend upon our opinions, 
 which is only now and then true. The fact is, men think in 
 a certain mode on these matters because their life is of a 
 certain character, and their opinions are only invented after- 
 wards as a defense for their life. 
 
 For instance, St. Paul speaks of a maxim among the Co- 
 rinthians, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." 
 They excused their voluptuousness on the ground of its con- 
 sistency with their skeptical creed. Life was short. Death 
 came to-morrow. There was no hereafter. Therefore it was 
 quite consistent to live for pleasure. But who does not see 
 that the creed was the result, and not the cause of the life ? 
 Who does not see that t /w- they ate and drank, and then be- 
 lieved to-morrow we die ? " Getting and spending, we lay 
 waste our powers." Eating and drinking, we lose sight of 
 the life to come. When the immortal is overborne and 
 smothered in the life of the flesh, how can men believe in 
 life to come ? Then disbelieving, they mistook the cause for 
 the effect. Their moral habits and creed were in perfect con- 
 sistency : yet it was the life that formed the creed, not the 
 creed that formed the life. Because they were sensualists, 
 immortality had become incredible. 
 
 Again, slavery is defended philosophically by some. The 
 negro, on his skull and skeleton, they say, has God's intention 
 of his servitude written : he is the inferior animal, therefore 
 it is right to enslave him. Did this doctrine precede the 
 slave-trade ? Did man arrive at it, and then in consequence, 
 conscientiously proceed with human traffic ? Or was it in- 
 vented to defend a practice existing already the offspring 
 of self-interest ? Did not men first make slaves, and then 
 search about for reasons to make their conduct plausible to 
 themselves ? 
 
 So, too, a belief in predestination is sometimes alleged in 
 excuse of crime. But a man who suffers his will to be over- 
 powered, naturally comes to believe that he is the sport of 
 fate : feeling powerless, he believes that God's decree has 
 made him so. But let him but put forth one act of loving 
 will, and then, as the nightmare of a dream is annihilated by 
 an effort, so the incubus of a belief in tyrannous destiny is 
 dissipated the moment a man wills to "do the will of God, 
 
304 Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge. 
 
 Observe, how he knows the doctrine, directly he does tho 
 will. 
 
 There is another thing said respecting this knowledge ot 
 truth. . It respects the degree of certainty " he shall know" 
 not he shall have an opinion. There is a wide distinction 
 between supposing and knowing betw r een fancy and con- 
 viction between opinion and belief. Whatever rests on au- 
 thority remains only supposition. You have an opinion 
 when you know what others think. You know when you 
 feel. In matters practical you know only so far as you can 
 do. Read a work on the " Evidences of Christianity," and 
 it may become highly probable that Christianity, etc., are 
 true. That is an opinion. Feel God, do His will, till the 
 Absolute Imperative within you speaks as with a living 
 voice, Thou shalt, and thou shalt not ; and then you do not 
 think, you know that there is a God. That is a conviction 
 and a belief. 
 
 Have we never seen how a child, simple and near to God, 
 cuts asunder a web of sophistry with a single direct ques- 
 tion how, before its steady look and simple argument, some 
 fashionable utterer of a conventional falsehood has been 
 abashed? how a believing Christian scatters the forces of 
 skepticism, as a morning ray, touching the mist on the 
 mountain side, makes it vanish into thin air? And there 
 are few more glorious moments of our humanity than those 
 in w r hich faith does battle against intellectual proof: when, 
 for example, after reading a skeptical book, or hearing a 
 cold-blooded materialist's demonstration in which God, the 
 soul, and life to come, are proved impossible, up rises the 
 heart in all the giant might of its immortality to do battle 
 with the understanding, and with the simple argument, " I 
 feel them in my best and highest moments to be true," anni- 
 hilates the sophistries of logic. 
 
 These moments of profound faith do not come once for 
 all : they vary with the degree and habit of obedience. 
 There is a plant which blossoms once in a hundred years. 
 Like it, the soul blossoms only now and then in a space of 
 years; but these moments are the glory and the heavenly 
 glimpses of our purest humanity. 
 
 H. The condition on which knowledge of truth is attain- 
 able. "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the 
 doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself." 
 
 This universe is governed by laws. At the bottom of ev- 
 ery thing here there is a law. Things are in this way and 
 not that : we call that a law or condition. All departments 
 
Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge. 305 
 
 have their own laws. By submission to them, you make 
 them your own. Obey the laws of the body such laws as 
 say, Be temperate and chaste : or of the mind such laws as 
 say, Fix the attention, strengthen by exercise ; and then their 
 prizes are yours health, strength, pliability of muscle, tena- 
 ciousness of memory, nimbleness of imagination, etc. Obey 
 the laws of your spiritual being, and it has its prizes too. 
 For instance, the condition or law of a peaceful life is sub- 
 mission to the law of meekness: "Blessed are the meek, for 
 they shall inherit the earth." . The condition of the Beatific 
 vision is a pure heart and life: "Blessed are the pure in 
 heart, for they shall see God." To the impure, God i sim- 
 ply invisible. The condition annexed to a sense of God's 
 presence in other words, that without which a sense of 
 God's presence can not be is obedience to the laws of love: 
 " If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is 
 perfected in us." The condition of spiritual wisdom and cer- 
 tainty in truth is obedience to the will of God, surrender of 
 private will : "If any man will do His will, he shall know of 
 -the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of 
 myself." 
 
 In every department of knowledge, therefore, there is an 
 appointed "organ," or instrument for discovery of its specific 
 truth, and for appropriating its specific blessings. In the 
 world of sense, the empirical intellect : in that world the 
 Baconian philosopher is supreme. His Novum Organon is 
 experience : he knows by experiment of touch, sight, sound, 
 etc. The religious man may not contravene his assertions : 
 he is lord in his own province. But in the spiritual world, 
 the " organ " of the scientific man sensible experience is 
 powerless. If the chemist, geologist, physiologist come back 
 from their spheres and say, we find in the laws of affinity, in 
 the deposits of past ages, in the structure of the human 
 fratne, no trace nor token of a God, I simply reply, I never 
 expected you would. Obedience and self-surrender is the 
 sole organ by which we gain a knowledge of that which can 
 not be seen nor felt. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
 neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which 
 God hath prepared for them that love him." And just as by 
 copying perpetually a master-painter's works we get at last 
 an instinctive and infallible power of recognizing his touch, 
 so by copying and doing God's will we recognize what is 
 His : we know of the teaching whether it be of God, or 
 whether it be an arbitrary invention of a human self. 
 
 2. Observe the universality of the law. "If any man will 
 do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of 
 
306 Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge. 
 
 God, or whether I speak of myself." The law was true of 
 the man Christ Jesus Himself! He tells us it is true of all 
 other men. 
 
 In God's universe there are no favorites of heaven who 
 may transgress the laws of the universe with impunity 
 none who can take fire in the hand and not be burnt no 
 enemies of heaven who, if they sow corn, will reap nothing 
 but tares. The law is just and true to all : " Whatsoever a 
 man soweth, that shall he also reap." 
 
 In God's spiritual universe there are no favorites of heaven 
 who can attain knowledge and spiritual wisdom apart from 
 obedjence. There are none reprobate by an eternal decree, 
 who can surrender self, and in all things submit to God, and 
 yet fail of spiritual convictions. It is not therefore a rare, 
 partial condescension of God, arbitrary and causeless, which 
 gives knowledge of the truth to some, and shuts it out from 
 others, but p, vast, universal, glorious law. The light light- 
 eth every man that cometh into the world. " If 'any man 
 will do His will, he shall know." 
 
 See the beauty of this Divine arrangement. If the cer- 
 tainty of truth depended upon the proof of miracles, prophe- 
 cy, or the discoveries of science, then truth would be in the 
 reach chiefly of those who can weigh evidence, investigate 
 history, and languages, study by experiment ; whereas as it 
 is, "The meek will He guide in judgment, and the meek will 
 He teach His way." "Thus saith the high and lofty One 
 what inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy ; I dwell in the 
 high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and 
 humble spirit." The humblest and the weakest may know 
 more of God, of moral evil and of good, by a single act of 
 charity, or a prayer of self-surrender, than all the sages can 
 teach : ay, or all the theologians can dogmatize upon. 
 
 They know nothing, perhaps, these humble ones, of the evi- 
 dences, but they are sure that Christ is their Redeemer, 
 They can not tell what " matter " is, but they know that they 
 are spirits. They know nothing of the " argument from de- 
 sign," but they feel God. The truths of God are spiritually 
 discerned by them. They have never learned letters, but 
 they have reached the Truth of Life. 
 
 3. Annexed to this condition, or a part of it, is earnestness. 
 "If any man will do His will." Now that word "will" is 
 not the will of the future tense, but will meaning volition : 
 if any man wills, resolves, has the mind to do the will of 
 God. So then it is not a chance fitful obedience that leads 
 us to the truth, nor an obedience paid while happiness lasts 
 and no longer, but an obedience rendered in entireness and 
 
Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge. 307 
 
 in earnest. It is not written, " If any man does His will," 
 but if any man has the spirit and desire. If we are in ear- 
 nest, we shall persevere like the Syrophenician woman, even 
 though the ear of the universe seem deaf, and Christ Himself 
 appear to bid us back. If we are not in earnest, difficulties 
 will discourage us. Because Avill is wanting, we shall be 
 asking still in ignorance and doubt, What is truth ? 
 
 All this will seem to mat y people time misspent. They go 
 to church because it is the custom, and all Christians believe 
 it is the established religion. But there are hours, and they 
 come to us all at some period of life or other, when the hand 
 of Mystery seems to lie heavy on the soul when some life- 
 shock scatters existence, leaves it a blank and dreary waste 
 henceforth forever, and there appears nothing of hope in all 
 the expanse which stretches out, except that merciful gate of 
 death which opens at the end hours when the sense of mis- 
 placed or ill-requited affection, the feeling of personal worth- 
 lessness, the uncertainty and meanness of all human aims, and 
 the doubt of all human goodness, unfix the soul from all its 
 old moorings, and leave it drifting, drifting over the vast in- 
 finitude, with an awful sense of solitariness. Then the man 
 whose faith rested on outward authority and not on inward 
 life, will find it give way: the authority of the priest, the au- 
 thority of the Church, or merely the authority of a document 
 proved by miracles and backed by prophecy, the soul con- 
 scious life hereafter God will be an awful desolate Perhaps. 
 Well in such moments you doubt all whether Christianity 
 be true : whether Christ was man, or God, or a beautiful fable. 
 You- ask bitterly, like Pontius Pilate, What is truth ? In 
 such an hour what remains? I reply, obedience. Leave 
 those thoughts for the present. Act be merciful and gentle 
 honest ; force yourself to abound in little services ; try to 
 do good to others ; be true to the duty that you know. 
 That must be right, whatever else is uncertain. And by all 
 the laws-of the human heart, by the word of God, you shall 
 not be left to doubt. Do that much of the will of God which 
 is plain to you, and " You shall know of the doctrine, wheth-_ 
 3r it be of God." 
 
308 Religious Depression. 
 
 VIII. 
 RELIGIOUS DEPRESSION. 
 
 "As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after 
 thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God : when shall I 
 come and appear before God ? My tears have been my meat day and night, 
 while they continually say unto me,' Where is thy God ?" Psalm xlii. 1-3. 
 
 THE value of the public reading of the Psalms in our serv- 
 ice is, that they express for us indirectly those deeper feel- 
 ings which there would be a sense of indelicacy in express- 
 ing directly. 
 
 Example of Joseph : asking after his father, and blessing 
 his brothers, as it were, under the personality of another. 
 
 There are feelings of which we do not speak to each oth- 
 er ; they are too sacred and too delicate. Such are most of 
 our feelings to God. If we do speak of them, they lose their 
 fragrance : become coarse : nay, there is even a sense of in- 
 delicacy and exposure. 
 
 Now the Psalms afford precisely the right relief for this 
 feeling : wrapped up in the forms of poetry, metaphor, etc., 
 that which might seem exaggerated is excused by those who 
 do not feel it ; while they who do can read them, applying 
 them, without the suspicion of uttering their own feelings. 
 Hence their soothing power, and hence, while other portions 
 of Scripture may become obsolete, they remain the most pre- 
 cious parts of the Old Testament. For the heart of man is 
 the same in all ages. 
 
 This forty-second Psalm contains the utterance of a sor- 
 row of which men rarely speak. There is a grief worse than 
 lack of bread or loss of friends. Men in former times called 
 it spiritual desertion. But at times the utterances of this 
 solitary grief are, as it were, overheard, as in this Psalm. 
 Read verses 6, 7. And in a more august agony, " My God. 
 my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" 
 
 I. Causes of David's despondency. 
 IL The consolation. 
 
 I. Causes of David's despondency. 
 
 1. The thirst for God. " My soul thirsteth for God, for 
 
 the living God : when shall I come and appear before God?" 
 
 There is a desire in the human heart best described as the 
 
Religious Depression. 309 
 
 cravings of infinitude. We are so made that nothing which 
 has limits satisfies. Hence the sense of freedom and relief 
 which comes from all that suggests the idea of boundless- 
 ness : the deep sky, the dark night, the endless circle, the il- 
 limitable ocean. 
 
 Hence, too, our dissatisfaction with all that is or can be 
 done. There never was the beauty yet than which we could 
 not conceive something more beautiful. None so good as to 
 be faultless in our eyes. No deed done by us, but we feel 
 we have it in us to do a better. The heavens are not clean 
 in our sight, and the angels are charged with folly. 
 
 Therefore to never rest is the price paid for our greatness. 
 Could we rest, we must become smaller in soul. Whoever 
 is satisfied with what he does has reached his culminating 
 point : he will progress no more. Man's destiny is to be not 
 dissatisfied, but forever unsatisfied. 
 
 Infinite goodness a beauty beyond what eye hath seen 
 or heart imagined, a justice which shall have no flaw, and a 
 righteousness which shall have no blemish to crave for 
 that, is to be " athirst for God." 
 
 2. The temporary loss of the sense of God's personality. 
 " My soul is athirst for the living God." 
 
 Let us search our own experience. What we want is, we 
 shall find not infinitude, but a boundless One; not to feel 
 that love is the law of this universe, but to feel One whose 
 name is love. 
 
 For else, if in this world of order there be no One in whose 
 bosom that order is centred, and of whose Being it is the ex- 
 pression ; in this world of manifold contrivance, no personal 
 affection which gave to the skies their trembling tenderness, 
 and to the snow its purity, then order, affection, contrivance, 
 wisdom, are only horrible abstractions, and we are in the 
 dreary universe alone. 
 
 Foremost in the declaration of this truth was the Jewish 
 religion. .It proclaimed not "Let us meditate on the 
 Adorable Light, it shall guide our intellects" which is the 
 most sacred verse of the Hindoo sacred books but " Thus 
 saith the Lord, I am, that I am." In that word "I am" is 
 declared personality ; and it contains, too, in the expression, 
 i4 Thus saith" the real idea of a revelation, viz., the volunta- 
 ry approach of the Creator to the creature. 
 
 Accordingly, these Jewish Psalms are remarkable for that 
 personal tenderness towards God those outbursts of pas- 
 sionate individual attachment which are in every page. A 
 person, asking and giving heart for heart inspiring love, be- 
 cause feeling it that was the Israelite's Jehovah. 
 
3io Religious Depression. 
 
 Now distinguish this from the God of the philosopher and 
 the God of the mere theologian. 
 
 The God of the mere theologian is scarcely a living God 
 He did live ; but for some eighteen hundred years we are 
 credibly informed that no trace of His life has been seen. 
 The canon is closed The proofs that He was are in the 
 things that He has made, and the books of men to whom He 
 spake ; but He inspires and works wonders no more. Ac- 
 cording to the theologians, He gives us proofs of design in- 
 stead of God doctrines instead of the life indeed. 
 
 Different, too, from the God of the philosopher. The 
 tendency of philosophy has been to throw back the personal 
 Being farther and still farther from the time when every 
 branch and stream was believed a living power, to the pe- 
 riod when "principles" were substituted for this belief; 
 then " laws ;" and the philosopher's God is a law into which 
 all other laws are resolvable. 
 
 Quite differently to this speaks the Bible of God. Not as a 
 law, but as the life of all that is the Being who feels, and is 
 felt is loved, and loves again feels my heart throb into His 
 counts the hairs of my head : feeds the ravens and clothes 
 the lilies : hears my prayers, and interprets them through a 
 Spirit which has affinity with my spirit. 
 
 It is a dark moment when the sense of that personality is 
 lost : more terrible than the doubt of immortality. For of 
 the two eternity without a personal God, or God for seven- 
 ty years without immortality no one after David's heart 
 would hesitate, " Give me God for life, to know and be 
 known by Him." No thought is more hideous than that of 
 an eternity without Him. " My soul is athirst for God." 
 The desire for immortality is second to the desire for God. 
 
 3. The taunts of scoffers. "As the hart panteth after the 
 water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God." Now 
 the hart here spoken of is the hart hunted, at bay, the big 
 tears rolling from his eyes, and the moisture standing black 
 upon his side. Let us see what the persecution was. "Where 
 is now thy God ?" (ver. 3). This is ever the way in religious 
 perplexity: the unsympathizing world taunts or misunder- 
 stands. In spiritual grief they ask, Why is he not like oth- 
 ers ? In bereavement they call your deep sorrow unbelief. 
 In misfortune they comfort you, like Job's friends, by calling 
 it a visitation. Or like the barbarians at Melita when the 
 viper fastened on Paul's hand, no doubt they call you an in- 
 fidel, though your soul be crying after God. Specially in 
 that dark and awful hour, when He called on God, " Eloi, 
 Eloi," they said, " Let be : let us see whether Elias will come 
 to save Him." 
 
Religious Depression. 311 
 
 Now this is sharp to bear. It is easy to say Christian for- 
 titude should be superior to it; but in darkness to have no 
 sympathy ; when the soul gropes for God, to have the hand 
 of man relax its grasp ! Forest-flies, small as they are, drive 
 the noble war-horse mad : therefore David says, "As a sword 
 in my bones, mine enemies reproach me : while they say 
 daily unto me, Where is thy God?" (ver. 10). Now, ob- 
 serve, this feeling of forsakenness is no proof of being forsak- 
 en. Mourning after an absent God is an evidence of love as 
 strong as rejoicing in a present one. Nay, further, a man 
 may be more decisively the servant of God and goodness 
 while doubting His existence, and in the anguish of his soul 
 crying for light, than while resting in a common creed, and 
 coldly serving Him. There has been One at least whose ap- 
 parent forsakenness and whose seeming doubt bears the 
 stamp of the majesty of faith. " My God, my God, why 
 hast thou forsaken me ?" 
 
 II. David's consolation. 
 
 1. And first, in hope (see verse 5) : distinguish between the 
 feelings of faith that God is present, and the hope of faith 
 that He will be so. 
 
 There are times when a dense cloud veils the sunlight: 
 you can not see the sun, nor feel him. Sensitive tempera- 
 ments feel depression, and that unaccountably and irresisti- 
 bly. No effort can make you feel. Then you hope. Be- 
 hind the cloud the sun is; from thence he will come; the 
 day drags through, the darkest and longest night ends at 
 last. Thus we bear the darkness and the otherwise intolera- 
 ble cold, and many a sleepless night. It does not shine now, 
 but it will. 
 
 So too, spiritually. There are hours in which physical de- 
 rangement darkens the windows of the soul ; days in which 
 shattered nerves make life simply endurance; months and 
 years in which intellectual difficulties, pressing for solution, 
 shut out God. Then faith must be replaced by hope. 
 " What I do thou knowest not now ; but thou shalt know 
 hereafter." " Clouds and darkness are round about Him : but 
 righteousness and truth are the habitation of His throne." 
 "My soul, hope thou in God : for I shall yet praise Him, who 
 is the health of my countenance and my God." 
 
 2, This hope was in God. 
 
 The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in 
 ourselves : self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. 
 In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort 
 never can be. 
 
3 1 2 Religious Depression. 
 
 For first, it is impossible to derive consolation from our 
 own feelings, because of their mutability: to-day we are 
 well, and our spiritual experience, partaking of these circum- 
 stances, is bright; but to-morrow some outward circum- 
 stances change the sun does not shine, or the wind is chill, 
 and we are low, gloomy, and sad. Then if our hopes were 
 unreasonably elevated, they will now be unreasonably de- 
 pressed ; and so our experience becomes flux and reflux, ebb 
 and flow; like the sea, that emblem of instability. 
 
 Next, it is impossible to get comfort from our own acts ; 
 for though acts are the test of character, yet in a low state 
 no man can judge justly of his own acts. They assume a 
 darkness of hue which is reflected on them by the eye that 
 contemplates them. It would be well for all men to remem- 
 ber that sinners can not judge of sin least of all, can we es- 
 timate our own sin. 
 
 Besides, we lose time in remorse. I have sinned ; well, by 
 the grace of God I must endeavor to do better for the future. 
 But if I mourn for it overmuch all to-day, refusing to be com- 
 forted, to-morrow I shall have to mourn the wasted to-day; 
 and that again will be the subject of another fit of remorse. 
 
 In the wilderness, had the children of Israel, instead of 
 gazing on the serpent, looked down on their own wounds to 
 watch the process of the granulation of the flesh, and see how 
 deep the wound was, and whether it was healing slowly or 
 fast, cure would have been impossible : their only chance, was 
 to look off the wounds. Just so, when giving up this hope- 
 less and sickening work of self-inspection, and turning from 
 ourselves in Christian self-oblivion, we gaze en God, then first 
 the chance of consolation dawns. 
 
 He is not affected by our mutability ; our changes do not 
 alter Him. When we are restless, He remains serene and 
 calm; when we are low, selfish, mean, or dispirited, He is 
 still the unalterable I AM. The same yesterday, to-day, and 
 forever, in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turn- 
 ing. What God is in Himself, not what we may chance te 
 feel Him in this or that moment to be, that is our hope, 
 "My soul, hope thou in God." 
 
Faith of the Centurion. 313 
 
 IX. 
 FAITH OF THE CENTURION. 
 
 "When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, 
 Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel." 
 Matt. viii. 10. 
 
 THAT upon which the Son of God fastened as worthy of 
 admiration was not the centurion's benevolence, nor his per- 
 severance, but his faith. And so speaks the whole New Tes- 
 tament, giving a special dignity to faith. By faith we are 
 justified. By faith man removes mountains of difficulty. 
 The Divinest attribute in the heart of God is love, and the 
 mightiest, because the most human, principle in the breast 
 of man is faith. Love is heaven, faith is that which appro- 
 priates heaven. 
 
 Faith is a theological term rarely used in other matters. 
 Hence its meaning is obscured. But faith is no strange, new, 
 peculiar power, supernaturally infused by Christianity, but 
 the same principle by which we live from day to day one 
 of the'commonest in our daily life. 
 
 We trust our senses, and that though they often deceive 
 is. We trust men ; a battle must often be risked on the in- 
 telligence of a spy. A merchant commits his ships, with all 
 his fortunes on board, to a hired captain, whose temptations 
 are enormous. Without this principle society could not hold 
 together for a day. It would be a mere sand-heap. 
 
 Such, too, .is religious faith ; we trust on probabilities ; and 
 this though probabilities often are against us. We can not 
 prove God's existence. The balance of probabilities, scien- 
 tifically speaking, are nearly equal for a living person or a 
 lifeless cause : immortality, etc., in the same way. But faith 
 throws its own convictions into the scale and decides the pre- 
 ponderance. 
 
 Faith, then, is that which, when probabilities are equal, 
 ventures on God's side, and on the side of right, on the guar- 
 anty of a something within which makes the thing seem to 
 be true because it is loved. 
 
 It is so defined by St. Paul : " Faith is the substance of 
 things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." The hope 
 is the ground for faith to rest on We consider, 
 
 14 
 
3 1 4 Faith of the Centurion. 
 
 I. The faith which was commended. 
 II. The causes of the commendation. 
 
 I. The faith which was commended. 
 
 First evidence of its existence, his tenderness to his serv< 
 ant. 
 
 Of course this good act might have existed separate from 
 religion. Romans were benevolent to their domestics ages be- 
 fore the law had been enacted regulating the relationship be- 
 tween patron and client. 
 
 But we are forbidden to view it so, when we remember 
 that he was a proselyte. Morality is not religion, but it is 
 ennobled and made more delicate by religion. 
 
 How ? By instinct you may be kind to dependents. But 
 if it be only by instinct, it is but the same kind of tenderness 
 you show to your hound or horse. Disbelief in God, and 
 right, and immortality, degrades the man you are kind to, to 
 the level of the beast you feel for Both are mortal, and for 
 both your kindness is finite and poor. 
 
 But the moment faith comes, dealing as it does with things 
 infinite, it throws something of its own infinitude on the per- 
 sons loved by the man of faith, upon his affections and his 
 acts: it raises them. 
 
 Consequently you find the centurion " building syna- 
 gogues," " caring for our (i. e., the Jewish) nation," as the 
 repository of the truth tending his servants. And this 
 last, observe, approximated his moral goodness to the Chris- 
 tian standard ! for therein does Christianity differ from mere 
 religiousness, that it is not a worship of the high, but a 
 lifting up of the low not hero-worship, but Divine conde-_ 
 scension. 
 
 Thus, then, was his kindness an evidence of his faith. 
 
 Second proof. His humility : " Lord, I am not worthy that 
 thou shouldest come under my roof." 
 
 Now Christ does not call this humility, though it was hu* 
 mility. He says, I have not found so great faith. Let us 
 see why. How is humbleness the result of, or rather identi- 
 cal with, faith ? 
 
 Faith is trust. Trust is dependence on another ; the spirit 
 which is opposite to independence or trust in self. Hence 
 where the spirit of proud independence is, faith is not. 
 
 Now observe how this differs from our ordinary and mod- 
 ern modes of thinking. The first thing taught a young man 
 is that he must be independent. Quite right, in the Christian 
 sense of the word, to owe no man any thing : to resolve to 
 get his own living, and not be beholden to charity, which fos- 
 
Faith of the Centurion. 3 1 5 
 
 ters idleness : to depend on his own exertions, and not on 
 patronage or connection. But what is commonly meant by 
 independence is to rejoice at being bound by no ties to other 
 human beings to owe no allegiance to any will except our 
 own to be isolated and unconnected by any feeling of inter- 
 communion or dependence ; a spirit whose very life is jeal- 
 ousy and suspicion : which in politics is revolutionary, and in 
 religion atheism. This is the opposite of Christianity, and 
 the opposite of the Christian freedom whose name it usurps. 
 For true freedom is to be emancipated from all false lords, in 
 order to owe allegiance to all true lords to be free from the 
 slavery of all lusts, so as voluntarily to serve God and right. 
 Faith alone frees. 
 
 And this was the freedom of the centurion : that he chose 
 his master. He was not fawning on the emperor at Rome, 
 nor courting the immoral ruler at Caesarea who had titles 
 and places to give away, but he bent in lowliest homage of 
 heart before the Holy One. His freedom was the freedom 
 of uncoerced and voluntary dependence the freedom and 
 humility of faith. 
 
 3. His belief in an invisible, living Will. " Speak the 
 word only." Remark how different this is from a reliance 
 on the influence of the senses. He asked not the presence 
 of Christ, but simply an exertion of His will. He looked 
 not like a physician to the operation of unerring laws, or the 
 result of the contact of matter with matter. He believed in 
 Him who is the life indeed. He felt that the Cause of causes 
 is a person. Hence he could trust the Living Will out of 
 sight. This is the highest form of faith. 
 
 Here, however, I observe the centurion learned this 
 through his own profession. " I am a man under authority, 
 having soldiers under me." The argument ran thus. I by 
 the command of will obtain the obedience of my dependents. 
 Thou by will the obedience of Thine : sickness and health 
 are Thy servants. Evidently he looked upon this universe 
 with a soldier's eye : he could not look otherwise. To him 
 this world was a mighty camp of living forces in which au- 
 thority was paramount. Trained in obedience to military 
 law, accustomed to render prompt submission to those above 
 him, and to extract it from those below him, he read law 
 everywhere ; and law to him meant nothing, unless it meant 
 the expression of a personal will. It was this training 
 through which faith took its form. 
 
 The Apostle Paul tells us that the invisible things of God 
 from the creation of the world are clearly seen ; and, we may 
 add, from every part of the creation of the world, "The heav- 
 
316 Faith of the Centurion. 
 
 ens declare the glory of God ;" but so also does the butter- 
 cup and the raindrop. 
 
 The invisible things of God from life are clearly seen 
 and, we may add, from every department of life. There is 
 no profession, no trade, no human occupation which does not 
 in its own way educate for God. 
 
 The soldier, through law, reads a personal will; and he 
 might from the same profession, in the unity of an army, 
 made a living and organized unity by the variety of its parts, 
 have read the principle of God's and the Church's unity, 
 through the opportunities that profession affords for self- 
 control, fo generous deeds. When the Gospel was first an- 
 nounced on earth, it was proclaimed to the shepherds and 
 Magians in a manner appropriate to their modes of life. 
 
 Shepherds, like sailors, are accustomed to. hear a supernat- 
 ural power in the sounds of the air, in the moaning of the 
 night-winds, in the sighing of the storm; to see a more than 
 mortal life in the clouds that wreathe around the headland. 
 Such men, brought up among the sights and sounds of na- 
 ture, are proverbially superstitious. No wonder, therefore, 
 that the intimation came to them, as it were, on the winds in 
 the melodies of the air : " a multitude of the heavenly host 
 praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and 
 on earth peace, good-will toward men." 
 
 But the Magians being astrologers, accustomed to read 
 the secrets of life and death in the clear star-lit skies of 
 Persia, are conducted by a meteoric star. 
 
 Each in his own way ; each in his own profession ; each 
 through that little spot of the universe given to him. For 
 not only is God everywhere, but all of God is in every point. 
 Not His wisdom here, and His goodness there : the whole 
 truth may be read, if we had eyes, and heart, and time 
 enough, in the laws of a daisy's growth. God's beauty, His 
 love, His unity: nay, if you observe how each atom exists 
 not for itselt alone, but for the sake of every other atom in 
 the universe, in that atom or daisy you may read the law of 
 the Cross itself. The crawling of a spider before now has 
 taught perseverance, and led to a crown. The little moss, 
 brought close to a traveller's eye in an African desert, who 
 had lain down to die, roused him to faith in that love which 
 had so curiously arranged the minute fibres of a thing so 
 small, to be seen once and but once by a human eye, and 
 carried him in the strength of that heavenly repast, like Eli- 
 jah of old, a journey of forty days and forty nights, to the 
 sources of the Nile ; yet who" could have suspected divinity 
 in a spider, or theology in a moss ? 
 
Faith of the Centurion. 317 
 
 II. The causes of Christ's astonishment. 
 The reasons why he marvelled may .be reduced under two 
 heads. 
 
 1. The centurion was a Gentile; therefore unlikely to 
 know revealed truth. 
 
 2. A soldier, and therefore exposed to a recklessness, and 
 idleness, and sensuality which are the temptations of that 
 profession. But he turned his loss to glorious gain. 
 
 The Saviour's comment, therefore, contained the advan- 
 tage of disadvantages, and the disadvantage of advantages. 
 The former, " Many shall come from the east and the west, 
 and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in 
 the kingdom of heaven ;" the latter, " The children of the 
 kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness ; there shall 
 be weeping and gnashing of teeth." 
 
 There are spirits which are crushed by difficulties, while 
 others would gain strength from them. The greatest men 
 have been those who have cut their way to success through 
 difficulties. And such have been the greatest triumphs of 
 art and science : such, too, of religion. Moses, Elijah, Abra- 
 ham, the Baptist, the giants of both Testaments, were not 
 men nurtured in the hot-house of religious advantages. 
 Many a man would have done good if he had not a super- 
 abundance of the means of doing it. Many a spiritual giant 
 is buried under mountains of gold. 
 
 Understand, therefore, the real amount of advantage 
 which there is in religious privileges. Necessary especially 
 for the feeble, as crutches are necessary ; but, like crutches, 
 they often enfeeble the strong. For every advantage which 
 facilitates performance and supersedes toil, a corresponding 
 price is paid in loss. Civilization gives us telescopes and 
 microscopes ; but it takes away the unerring acuteness with 
 which the savage reads the track of man and beast upon the 
 ground at his feet : it gives us scientific surgery, and impairs 
 the health which made surgery superfluous. 
 
 So, ask you where the place of religious might is ? Not 
 the place of religious privileges not where prayers are 
 daily, and sacraments monthly not where sermons are so 
 abundant as to pall upon the pampered taste, but on the hill- 
 side with the Covenanter ; in the wilderness with John the 
 Baptist ; in our own dependencies where the liturgy is rarely 
 heard, and Christian friends meet at the end of months : 
 there amidst manifold disadvantages, when the soul is thrown 
 upon itself, a few kindred spirits, and God, grow up those 
 heroes of faith, like the centurion, whose firm conviction wins 
 admiration even from the Son of God Himself. 
 
3 1 8 The Restoration of the Erring. 
 
 Lastly, see how this incident testifies to the perfect hu- 
 manity of Christ. The Saviour " marvelled :" that wonder 
 was no fictitious semblance of admiration. It was a real gen- 
 uine wonder. He had not expected to find such faith. The 
 Son of God increased in wisdom as well as stature. He knew 
 more at thirty than at twenty. There were tilings He knew 
 at twenty which He had not known before. In the last year 
 of His life He went to the fig-tree expecting to find fruit, and 
 was disappointed. In all matters of eternal truth, principles 
 which are not measured by more or less true, His knowledge 
 was absolute ; but it would seem that in matters of earthly 
 fact which are modified by time and space, His knowledge 
 was, like ours, more or less dependent upon experience. 
 
 Now we forget this; we are shocked at the thought of the 
 partial ignorance of Christ, as if it were irreverence to think 
 it ; we shrink from believing that He really felt the force of 
 temptation, or that the forsakenness on the Cross and the 
 momentary doubt have parallels in our human life. In other 
 words, we make that Divine Life a mere mimic representa- 
 tion of griefs that were not real, and surprises that were 
 feigned, and sorrows that were theatrical. 
 
 But thus we lose the Saviour. For it is well to know that 
 He was divine ; but if we lose that truth, we should still 
 have a God in heaven. But if there has been on this earth 
 no real, perfect human life, no love that never cooled, no faith 
 that never failed, which may shine as a loadstar across the 
 darkness of our experience, a light to light amidst all convic- 
 tions of our own meanness and all suspicions of others' little- 
 ness, why, we may have a religion, but we have not a Christi- 
 anity. For if we lose Him as a Brother, we can not feel Him 
 as a Saviour. 
 
 THE RESTORATION OF THE ERRING. 
 
 " Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore 
 srch a one in the spirit of meekness ; considering thyself, lest thou also be 
 tempted. Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. " 
 Gal. vi. 1,2. 
 
 IT would be a blessed thing for our Christian society if we 
 could contemplate sin from the same point of view from 
 which Christ and His apostles saw it. ' But in this matter 
 society is ever oscillating between two extremes undue lax- 
 ity and undue severity. 
 
The Restoration of the Erring. 3 1 9 
 
 In one age of the Church the days of Donatism, for in- 
 stance men refuse the grace of repentance to those who have 
 erred : holding that baptismal privileges once forfeited can 
 not be got back; that for a single distinct lapse there is no 
 restoration. , 
 
 In another age, the Church, having found out its error, and 
 discovered the danger of setting up an impossible standard, 
 begins to confer periodical absolutions and plenary indul- 
 gences, until sin, easily forgiven, is as easily committed. 
 
 And so too with societies and legislatures. In one period 
 Puritanism is dominant and morals severe. There are no 
 small faults. The statute-book is defiled with the red mark 
 of blood, set opposite innumerable misdemeanors. In an 
 age still earlier the destruction of a wild animal is punished 
 like the murder of a man. Then in another period we have 
 such a medley of sentiments and sickliness that we have lost 
 all our bearings, and can not tell what is vice and what is 
 goodness. Charity and toleration degenerate into that feeble 
 dreaminess which refuses to be roused by stern views of li{J3. 
 
 This contrast, too, may exist in the same age, nay, in the 
 same individual. One man gifted with talent, or privileged 
 by rank, outrages all decency: the world smiles, calls it 
 eccentricity, forgives, and is very merciful and tolerant. 
 Then some one unshielded by these advantages, endorsed 
 neither by wealth nor birth, sins not to one-tenth, nor one- 
 ten-thousandth part ,of the same extent : society is seized 
 with a virtuous indignation, rises up in wrath, asks what is 
 to become of the morals of the community if these things 
 are committed, and protects its proprieties by a rigorous 
 exclusion of the offender, cutting oif the bridge behind him 
 against his return forever. 
 
 Now the Divine character of the New Testament is shown 
 in nothing more signally than in the stable ground from 
 which it views this matter, in comparison with the shifting 
 and uncertain standing-point from whence the world sees it. 
 It says, never retracting nor bating, " The wages of sin is 
 death." It speaks sternly, with no weak sentiment, " Go, sin 
 no more, lest a worse thing happen unto thee." But then 
 it accepts every excuse, admits every palliation : looks upon 
 this world of temptation and these frail human hearts of ours, 
 not from the cell of a monk or the study of a recluse, but in 
 a large, real way ; accepts the existence of sin as a fact, with- 
 out affecting to be shocked or startled ; assumes that it must 
 needs be that offenses come, and deals with them in a large 
 noble way, as the results of a disease which must be met 
 which should be, and which can be, cured. 
 
320 The Restoration of the Erring. 
 
 I. The Christian view of other men's sin. 
 II. The Christian power of restoration. 
 
 I. The first thing noticeable in the apostle's view of sin 
 is, that he looks upon it as if it might be sometimes the 
 result of a surprise. " If a man be overtaken in a fault." 
 In the original it is anticipated^ taken suddenly in front. As 
 if circumstances had been beforehand with the man : as if 
 sin, supposed to be left far behind, had on a sudden got in 
 front, tripped him up, or led him into ambush. 
 
 All sins are not of this character. 'There are some which 
 are in accordance with the general bent of our disposition, 
 and the opportunity of committing them was only the first 
 occasion for manifesting what was in the heart : so that if 
 they had not been committed then, they probably would or 
 must have been at some other time; and looking back to 
 them we have no right to lay the blame on circumstances 1 
 we are to accept the penalty as a severe warning meant to 
 show what was in our hearts. 
 
 There are other sins of a different character. It seems 
 as if it were not in us to commit them. They were, so to 
 speak, unnatural to us: you were going quietly on your 
 way, thinking no evil, suddenly temptation, for which you 
 were not prepared, presented itself, and before you knew 
 where you were, you were in the dust, fallen. 
 
 As, for instance, when a question is suddenly put to a 
 man which never ought to have been put, touching a secret 
 of his own or another's. Had he the presence of mind or 
 adroitness, he might turn it aside, or refuse to reply. But 
 being unprepared and accosted suddenly, he says hastily 
 that which is irreconcilable with strict truth ; then, to sub- 
 stantiate and make it look probable, misrepresents or invents 
 something else ; and so he has woven round himself a mesh 
 which will entangle" his conscience through many a weary 
 day and many a sleepless night. 
 
 It is shocking, doubtless, to allow ourselves even to admit 
 that this is possible; yet no one knowing human nature 
 from men, and not from books, will deny that this might 
 befall even a brave and true man. St. Peter was both ; yet 
 this was his history. In a crowd, suddenly, the question was 
 put directly, "This man also was with Jesus of Nazareth." 
 Then came a prevarication a lie; and yet another. This 
 was a sin of surprise. He was overtaken in a fault. 
 
 Every one. of us admits the truth of this in his own case. 
 Looking back to past life, he feels that the errors which 
 have most terribly determined his destiny were the result 
 
The Restoration of the Erring. 321 
 
 of mistake. Inexperience, a hasty promise, excess of trust, 
 incaution, nay, even a generous devotion, have been fear- 
 fully, and, as it seems to us, inadequately chastised. There 
 may be some undue tenderness to ourselves when we thus 
 palliate the past : still, a great part of such extenuation is 
 only justice. 
 
 Now the Bible simply requires that we should judge 
 others by the same rule by which we judge ourselves. The 
 law of Christ demands that what we plead in our own case, 
 we should admit in the case of others. Believe that in this 
 or that case which you judge so harshly, the heart, in its 
 deeps, did not consent to sin, nor by preference love what is 
 hateful; simply admit that such an one may have been 
 overtaken in a fault. This is the large law of charity. 
 
 1. Again, the apostle considers fault as that which has 
 left a burden on the erring spirit. "Bear ye one another's X 
 burdens." 
 
 For we can not say to the laws of God, I was overtaken. 
 We live under stern and unrelenting laws, which permit no 
 excuse, and never heard of a. surprise. They never send a 
 man who has failed once back to try a second chance. 
 i I There is no room for a mistake; you play against them for 
 your life; and they exact the penalty .inexorably, " Every . 
 man must bear his own burden." Every law has its own / 
 appropriate penalty ; and the wonder of it is, that often the 
 severest penalty seems set ngainst the smallest transgression. 
 We suffer more for our vices than our crimes ; we pay dearer 
 for our imprudences than even for our deliberate wickedness. 
 
 Let us examine this a little more closely. One burden 
 laid on fault is that chain of entanglement which seems to 
 drag down to fresh sins. One step necessitates many others. 
 One fault leads to another, and crime to crime. The soul 
 gravitates downward beneath its burden. It was profound 
 knowledge indeed which prophetically refused to limit Peter's 
 sin to once. " Verily I say unto thee .... thou shalt deny 
 Me thrice." 
 
 We will try to describe that sense of burden. A fault 
 has the power sometimes of distorting life till all seems 
 hideous and unnatural. A man who has left his proper 
 nature, and seems compelled to say and do things unnatural 
 and in false show, who has thus become untrue to himself, 
 to him life and the whole universe becomes untrue. He can 
 grasp nothing ; he does not stand on fact ; he is living as in 
 a dream himself a dream. All is ghastly, unreal, spectral. 
 A burden is on him as of a nightmare. He moves about in 
 nothingness and shadows, as if he were not. His own exist- 
 
 14* 
 
322 The Restoration of the Erring. 
 
 ence swiftly passing might seem a phantom life, were it not 
 for the corroding pang of anguish in his soul, for that at 
 least is real ! 
 
 2. Add to this, the burden of the 1 heart weighing on 
 itself. 
 
 It has been truly said that the human heart is like the 
 millstone, which, if there be wheat beneath it, will grind to 
 purposes of health ; if not, will grind still, at the will of the 
 wild wind, but on itself. So does the heart wear out itself 
 against its own thought. One fixed idea one remembrance, 
 and no other one stationary, wearing anguish. This is 
 remorse, passing into despair ; itself the goad to fresh and 
 wilder crimes. 
 
 The worst of such a burden is that it keeps down the soul 
 from good. Many an ethereal spirit, which might have 
 climbed the heights of holiness, and breathed the rare and 
 difficult air gf the mountain-top, where the heavenliest spir- 
 ituality alone can live, is weighed down by such a burden 
 to the level of the lowest. If you know such an one, mark 
 his history ; without restoration, his career is done. That 
 soul will not grow henceforth. 
 
 3. The burden of a secret. 
 
 Some here know the weight of an uncommunicated sin. 
 They know how it lies like ice upon the heart. They know 
 how dreadful a thing the sense of hypocrisy is ; the knowl- 
 edge of inward depravity, while all without looks pure as 
 snow to men. 
 
 How heavy this weight may be, we gather from these 
 indications. First, from this strange, psychological fact. A 
 man with a guilty secret will tell out the tale of his crimes 
 as under the personality of another; a mysterious necessity 
 seems to force him to give it utterance as in the old fable 
 of him who breathed out his weighty secret to the reeds. A 
 remarkable instance of this is afforded in the case of that 
 murderer, who, from the richness of his gifts and the enor- 
 mity of his crime, is almost a historical personage, who, 
 having become a teacher of youth, was in the habit of nar- 
 rating to his pupils the anecdote of his crime w r ith all the 
 circumstantial particularity of fact, but all the w r hile under 
 the guise of a pretended "dream. Such men tread forever 
 on the very verge of a confession : they seem to- take a fear- 
 ful pleasure in talking of their guilt, as if the heart could 
 not bear its own burden, but must give it outness. 
 
 Again, is it evidenced by the attempt to get relief in pro- 
 fuse and general acknowledgments of guilt. They adopt 
 the language of religion ; they call themselves " vile dust 
 
The Restoration of the Erring. 323 
 
 and miserable sinners." The world takes generally what 
 they mean particularly. But they get no relief, they only 
 deceive themselves ; for they have turned the truth itself 
 into a falsehood, using true words which they know convey 
 a false impression, and getting praise for humility instead of 
 punishment for guilt. They have used all the effort, and 
 suffered all the pang which it would have cost them to get 
 real relief, and they have not got it ; and the burden unac- 
 knowledged remains a burden still. 
 
 The third indication we have of the heaviness of this bur- 
 den is the commonness of the longing for confession^- None 
 but a minister of the Gospel can estimate this : heonly who, 
 looking round his congregation, can point to person after 
 person whose wild tale of guilt or sorrow he is cognizant of 
 who can remember how often similar griefs were trem- 
 bling upon lips which did not unburden themselves whose 
 heart being the receptacle of the anguish of many, can judge 
 what is in human hearts : he alone can estimate how much 
 there is of sin and crime lying with the weight and agony 
 of concealment on the spirits of our brethren. 
 
 The fourth burden is an intuitive consciousness of the hid- 
 den sins of others 7 hearts. 
 
 To two states of soul it is given to detect the presence of 
 evil : states the opposite of each other innocence and guilt. 
 
 It was predicted of the Saviour while yet a child, that by 
 Him the thoughts of many hearts should be revealed ; the 
 fulfillment of this was the history of His life. He went 
 through the world, by His innate purity detecting the pres- 
 ence of evil, as He detected the touch of her who touched 
 His garment in the crowd. 
 
 Men, supposed spotless before, fell down before Him, 
 crying, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord !" 
 This, in a lower degree, is true of all innocence : you would 
 think that oue who can deeply read the human heart and 
 track its windings must be himself deeply experienced in 
 evil. But it is not so at least not always. Purity can 
 detect the presence of the evil which it does not understand : 
 just as the dove which has never seen a hawk trembles at 
 its presence ; and just as a horse rears uneasily when the 
 wild beast unknown and new to it is near, so innocence 
 understands, yet understands not the meaning of the unholy 
 look, the guilty tone, the sinful manner. It shudders and 
 shrinks from it by a power given to it, like that which God 
 has conferred on the unreasoning mimosa. Sin gives the 
 same power, but differently. Innocence apprehends the ap- 
 proach of evil by the instinctive tact of contrast ; guilt, bj 
 
324 The Restoration of the Erring. 
 
 the instinctive consciousness of similarity. It is the pro. 
 found truth contained in the history of the Fall. The eyea 
 are opened ; the knowledge of good and evil has come. 
 The soul knows its own nakedness, but it knows also the 
 nakedness of all other souls which have sinned after the si- 
 militude of its own sin. 
 
 / Very marvellous is that test-power of guilt : it is vain to 
 |think 01 eluding its fine capacity of penetration. Intimations 
 of evil are perceived and noted, when to other eyes all seems 
 pure. The dropping of an eye, the shunning of a subject, 
 the tremulousness of a tone,, the peculiarity of a subterfuge, 
 will tell the tale. "These are tendencies like mine, and here 
 is a spirit conscious as my own is conscious." 
 
 This dreadful burden the Scriptures call the knowledge 
 of good and evil : can we not all remember the salient sense 
 of happiness which we had when all was innocent when 
 crime was the tale of some far distant hemisphere, and the 
 guilt we heard of was not suspected in the hearts of the beings 
 around us ? and can we not recollect, too, how by our own 
 sin, or the cognizance of others' sin, there came a something 
 which hung the heavens with shame and guilt, and all 
 around seemed laden with evil ? This is the worst burden 
 that comes from transgression : loss of faith in human good- 
 ness ; the being sentenced to go through life haunted with a 
 presence from which we can not escape ; the presence of 
 evil in the hearts of all that we approach. 
 
 II. The Christian power of restoration : " Ye which are 
 spiritual, restore such an one." 
 
 First, then, restoration is possible. That is a Christian 
 fact. Moralists have taught us what sin is ; they have ex- 
 plained how it twines itself into habit ; they have shown us 
 its ineffaceable character. It was reserved for Christianity 
 to speak of restoration. Christ, and Christ only, has revealed 
 that he who has erred may be restored, and made pure and 
 clean and whole again. 
 
 Next, however, observe that this restoration is accomplished 
 by men. Causatively, of course, and immediately, restoration 
 is the work of Christ and of God the Spirit. Mediately and 
 inBtrumentally, it is the work of men. "Brethren, .... re- 
 store such an one." ftod has given to man the power of 
 elevating his brother man. He has conferred on His Church 
 the power of the keys to bind and loose, " Whosesoever sins 
 ye remit, they are remitted ; and whosesoever sins ye retain, 
 they are retained." It is therefore in the power of man, by 
 his conduct, to restore his brother, or to hinder his restora 
 
The Restoration of the Erring. 325 
 
 tion, He may loose him from his sins, or retain their power 
 upon his soul. 
 
 Now the words of the text confine us to two modes in 
 which this is done : by sympathy and by forgiveness. " Bear 
 ye one another's burdens." 
 
 By sympathy. We Protestants have one unvarying sneer 
 ready for the system of the Romish confessional. They con- 
 fess, we say, for the sake of absolution, that absolved they 
 may sin again. A shallow, superficial sneer, as all sneers 
 are. In that craving of the heart which gives the system of 
 the confessional its dangerous power, there is something far 
 more profound than any sneer can fathom. It is not the 
 desire to sin again that makes men long to unburden their 
 conscience, but it is the yearning to be true, which lies at 
 the bottom, even of the most depraved hearts, to appear 
 what they are, and to lead a false life no longer ; and besides 
 this, it is the desire of sympathy. For this comes out of that 
 dreadful sense of loneliness which is the result of sinning ; 
 the heart severed from God, feels severed from all other 
 hearts : goes alone as if it had neither part nor lot with other 
 men ; itself a shadow among shadows. And its craving is 
 for sympathy : it wants some human heart to know what it 
 feels. Thousands upon thousands of laden hearts around us 
 are crying, Come and bear my burden with me ; and observe 
 here, the apostle says, " Bear ye one another's burdens." 
 Nor let the priest bear the burdens of all: that were most 
 unjust. Why should the priest's heart be the common re- 
 ceptacle of all the crimes and wickedness of a congregation ? 
 " Bear ye one another's burdens." 
 
 Again, by forgiveness. There is a truth in the doctrine 
 of absolution. God has given to man the .power to absolve 
 his brother, and so restore him to himself. The forgiveness 
 of man is an echo and an earnest of God's forgiveness. He 
 whom society has restored realizes the possibility of restora- 
 tion to God's favor. Even the mercifulness of one good 
 man sounds like a voice of pardon from heaven : just as the 
 power and the exclusion of men sound like a knell of hope- 
 lessness, and do actually bind the sin upon the soul. The 
 man whom society will not forgive nor restore is driven into 
 recklessness. This is the true Christian doctrine of absolu- 
 tion, as expounded by the Apostle Paul, 2 Cor. ii. 7-10 : the 
 degrading power of severity, the restoring power of pardon, 
 vested in the Christian community, the voice of the minister 
 being but their voice. 
 
 Now, then, let us inquire into the Christianity of our so-. 
 ciety. Restoration is the essential work of Christianity 
 
326 The Restoration of the Erring. 
 
 The Gospel is the declaration of God's sympathy and God's 
 pardon. In these two particulars, then, what is our right to 
 be called a Christian community ? 
 
 Suppose that a man is overtaken in a fault. What does 
 he, or what shall he do ? Shall he retain it unacknowledged, 
 or go through life a false man ? God forbid. Shall he then 
 acknowledge it to his brethren, that they by sympathy and 
 merciful caution may restore him ? Well, but is it not cer- 
 tain that it is exactly from those to whom the name of 
 " brethren " most peculiarly belongs that he will not receive 
 assistance ? Can a man in mental doubt go to the members 
 of the same religious communion ? Does he not know that 
 they precisely are the ones who will frown upon his doubts, 
 and proclaim his sins? Will a clergyman unburden his 
 mind to his brethren in the ministry ? Are they not in their 
 official rigor the least capable of largely understanding him ? 
 If a woman be overtaken in a fault, will she tell it to a sis- 
 ter-woman ? Or does she not feel instinctively that her sis- 
 ter-woman is ever the most harsh, the most severe, and the 
 most ferocious judge ? 
 
 Well, you sneer at the confessional ; you complain that 
 mistaken ministers of the Church of England are restoring it 
 amongst us. But who are they that are forcing on the con- 
 fessional? who drive laden and broken hearts to pour out 
 their long pent-up sorrows into any ear that will receive 
 them? I say it is we: we by our uncharitableness ; we by 
 our want of sympathy and unmerciful behavior; we by the 
 unchristian way in which we break down the bridge behind 
 the penitent, and say, " On, on in sin there is no returning." 
 
 Finally, the apostle tells us the spirit in which this is to 
 be done, and assigns a motive for the doing it. The mode 
 is, " in the spirit of meekness." For Satan can not cast out 
 Satan. Sin can not drive out sin. For instance, my anger 
 can not drive out another man's covetousness ; my petulance 
 or sneer can not expel another's extravagance. The meek- 
 ness of Christ alone has power. The charity which desires 
 another's goodness above his well-being, that alone succeeds 
 iu the work of restoration. 
 
 The motive is, " considering thyself, lest thou also be 
 tempted." For sin is the result of inclination or weakness, 
 combined with opportunity. It is therefore in a degree the 
 offspring of circumstances. Go to the hulks, the jail, the 
 penitentiary, the penal colony, statistics will almost mark 
 out for you beforehand the classes which have furnished the 
 jnmates, and the exact proportion of the delinquency of each 
 class. You will not find the wealthy there, nor the noble. 
 
Christ the Son. 327 
 
 nor those guarded by the fences of social life, but the poor, 
 and the uneducated, and the frail, and the defenseless. Can 
 you gravely surmise that this regular tabulation depends 
 upon the superior virtue of one class compared with others : 
 Or must you admit that the majority at least of those who 
 have not fallen are safe because they were not tempted ? 
 Well, then, when St. Paul says, " considering thyself, lest 
 thou also be tempted," it is as if he had written, Proud Phar- 
 isee of a man, complacent in thine integrity, who thankest 
 God that thou art "not as other men are, extortioners, 
 unjust, or as this publican," hast thou gone through the ter- / 
 rible ordeal and come off with unscathed virtue? Or art 
 thou in all these points simply untried ? Proud Pharisee of 
 a woman, who passest by an erring sister with a haughty 
 look of conscious euperiority, dost thou know what tempta- 
 tion is, with strong feeling and mastering opportunity ? 
 Shall the rich-cut crystal which stands on the table of the 
 wealthy man, protected from dust and injury, boast that it 
 has escaped the flaws, and the cracks, and the fractures 
 which the earthen jar has sustained, exposed and subjected 
 to rough and general uses ? Oh man or woman ! thou who 
 wouldst be a Pharisee, consider, oh consider thyself, lest ; 
 thou also be tempted. 
 
 XL 
 CHRIST THE SON. 
 
 "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. 
 
 Two critical remarks. 
 
 1. "Sundry times" more literally, sundry portions sec- 
 tions, not of time, but of the matter of the revelation. God 
 gave His revelation in parts, piecemeal, as you teach a child 
 to spell a word letter by letter, syllable by syllable ad- 
 ding all at last together. God had a Word to spell His own 
 name. By degrees He did it. At last it came entire. The 
 Word was made flesh. 
 
 2. " His Son," more correctly, " a Son "for this is the 
 very argument. Not that God now spoke by Christ, but 
 that whereas once He spoke by prophets, now He spoke bv 
 a Son. The filial dispensation was the last. 
 
 This epistle was addressed to Christians ou the verge of 
 
328 Christ the Son. 
 
 apostasy. See those passages : " It is impossible for those 
 who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly 
 gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have 
 tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world 
 to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto re- 
 pentance ; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God 
 afresh, and put Him to an open shame." " Cast not away 
 your confidence." " We are made partakers of Christ, if we 
 hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end." 
 
 Observe what the danger was. Christianity had disap- 
 pointed them they had not found in it the rest they antici- 
 pated. They looked back to the Judaism they had left, and 
 saw a splendid temple-service, a line of priests, a visible tem- 
 ple witnessing of God's presence, a religion which was un- 
 questionably fertile in prophets and martyrs. They saw 
 these pretensions and wavered. 
 
 But this was all on the eve of dissolution. The Jewish 
 earth and heavens, i. e., the Jewish Commonwealth and 
 Church, were doomed and about to pass away. The writer 
 of this epistle felt that their hour was come ;* and if their re- 
 ligion rested on nothing better than this, he knew that in 
 the crash religion itself would go. To return to Judaism 
 was to go down to atheism and despair. , 
 
 Reason alleged they had contented themselves with a 
 superficial view of Christianity ; they had not seen how it 
 was interwoven with all their own history, and how it alone 
 explained that history. 
 
 Therefore in this epistle the writer labors to show that 
 Christianity was the fulfillment of the idea latent in Judaism : 
 that from the earliest times, and in every institution, it was 
 implied. In the monarchy, in prophets, in sabbath-days, in 
 psalms, in the priesthood, and in temple-services, Christianity 
 lay concealed ; and the dispensation of a Son was the realiza- 
 tion of what else was shadow. He therefore alone who ad- 
 hered to Christ was the true Jew, and to apostatize from 
 Christianity was really to apostatize from true Judaism. 
 
 I am to show, then, that the manifestation of God through 
 a Son was implied, not realized, in the earlier dispensation. 
 
 "Sundry portions" of this truth are instanced in the epis- 
 tle. The mediatorial dispensation of Moses the gift of 
 Canaan the Sabbath, etc. At present I select these : 
 
 I. The preparatory Dispensation. 
 II. The filial and final Dispensation. 
 
 L It was implied, not fulfilled in the kingly office. Three 
 * See chap. xii. 2C, 27. 
 
Christ the Son. 329 
 
 
 
 Psalms are quoted, all referring to kingship. In the 2d 
 Psalm it was plain that a true idea of a king was only fulfill- 
 ed in one who was a son of God. The Jewish king was king 
 only so far as he held from God : as His image, the repre- 
 sentative of the Fountain of law and majesty. To Him God 
 hath said, " Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee." 
 The 45th Psalm is a bridal hymn, composed on the marriage 
 of a Jewish king. Startling language is addressed to him. 
 He is called God Lord. " Thy throne, O God, is for ever 
 and ever." The bride is invited to worship him as it were a 
 God : " He is thy Lord, and worship thou Him." No one is 
 surprised at this who remembers that Moses was said to be 
 made a God to Aaron. Yet it is startling, almost blasphem- 
 ous, unless there be a deeper meaning implied the divine 
 character of the real king. 
 
 In the 110th Psalm a new idea is added. The true king 
 must be a priest. " Thou art a priest forever, after the or- 
 der of Melchizedek. This was addressed to the Jewish king ; 
 but it implied that the ideal king, of which he was for the 
 time the representative, more or less truly, is one who at the 
 same time sustains the highest religious character, and the 
 highest executive authority. 
 
 Again, David was emphatically the type of the Jewish re- 
 gal idea. David is scarcely a personage, so entirely does he 
 pass in Jewish forms of thought into an ideal sovereign 
 "the sure mercies of David." David is the name, therefore, 
 for the David which was to be. Now David was a wander- 
 er, kingly still, ruling men and gaining adherents by force of 
 inward royalty. Thus in the Jewish mind the kingly office 
 disengaged itself from outward pomp and hereditary right 
 as mere accidents, and became a personal reality. The king 
 was an idea. 
 
 Further still. The epistle extends this idea to man. The 
 psalm had ascribed (Ps. viii. 6) kingly qualities and rule to 
 manhood rule over the creation. Thus the idea of a king 
 belonged properly to humanity ; to the Jewish king as the 
 representative of humanity. 
 
 Yet even in collective humanity the royal character is not 
 realized. " We see not," says the epistle, " all things as yet 
 put under him " man. 
 
 Collect, then, these notions. The true king of men is a 
 Son of God : one who is to his fellow-men, God and Lord, as 
 the Jewish bride was to feel her royal husband to be to her 
 one who is a priest one who may be poor and exiled, yet 
 not less royal. 
 
 Say, then, whence is this idea fulfilled by Judaism V To 
 
330 Christ the Son. 
 
 which of the Jewish kings can it be applied, except with in? 
 finite exaggeration ? To David ? Why, the Redeemer 
 shows the insuperable difficulty of this. " How then doth 
 David in Spirit call him," i. e., the king of whom he was 
 writing, " Lord, saying, the Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou 
 on my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool ?" 
 David writing of himself, yet speaks there in the third per- 
 son, projecting himself outward as an object of contempla- 
 tion, an idea. 
 
 Is it fulfilled in the human race ? " We see not yet all 
 things put under him." Then the writer goes on : " But we 
 see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for 
 the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor ; that 
 He by the grace of God should taste death for every man." 
 In Jesus of Nazareth alone all these fragments, these sundry 
 portions of the revealed idea of royalty met. 
 
 II. Christianity was implied in the race of prophets. 
 
 The second class of quotations refer to the prophets' life 
 and history (Heb. ii. 11-14; Psalm xxii. 22; Psalm xviii. 2 ; 
 Isaiah xii. 2 ; Isaiah viii. IS). Remember what the prophets 
 were. They were not merely predictors of the future. 
 Nothing destroys the true conception of the prophets' office 
 more than those popular books in which their mission is cer- 
 tified by curious coincidences. For example, if it is predict- 
 ed that Babylon shall be a desolation, the haunt of wild 
 beasts, etc., then some traveller has seen a lion standing on 
 Birs Nimroud ; or if the fisherman is to dry his nets on Tyre, 
 simply expressing its destruction thereby, the commentator 
 is not easy till he finds that a net has been actually seen dry- 
 ing on a rock. But this is to degrade the prophetic office to 
 a level with Egyptian palmistry : to make the prophet like 
 an astrologer, or a gypsy fortune-teller one who can pre- 
 dict destinies and draw horoscopes. But, in truth, the first 
 office of the prophet was with the present. He read eternal 
 principles beneath the present and the transitory, and in 
 doing this, of course, he prophesied the future; for a princi- 
 ple true to-day is true forever. But this was, so to speak, 
 an accident of his office, not its essential feature. If, for 
 instance, he read in the voluptuousness of Babylon the se- 
 cret of Babylon's decay, he also read by anticipation the 
 doom of Corinth, of London, of all cities in Babylon's 
 state ; or if Jerusalem's fall was predicted, in it all such 
 judgment comings were foreseen ; and the language is true 
 of the fall of the world : as truly, or more so, than that of , 
 Jerusalem. A philosopher saying in the present tense the 
 
Christ the Son. 331 
 
 law by which comets move, predicts all possible jcometary 
 movements. 
 
 Now the prophet's life, almost more than his words, was 
 predictive. The writer of this epistle lays down a great prin- 
 ciple respecting the prophet : " Both he that sanctifieth and 
 they who are sanctified are all of one." It was the very 
 condition of his inspiration that he should be one with the 
 people. So far from making him superhuman, it made him 
 more man. He felt with more exquisite sensitiveness all that 
 belongs to man, else he could not have been a prophet. His 
 insight into things was the result of that very weakness, sen- 
 sitiveness, and susceptibility so tremblingly alive. He burned 
 with their thoughts, and expressed them. He was obliged 
 by the very sensitiveness of his humanity to have a more 
 entire dependence and a more perfect sympathy than other 
 men. The sanctifying prophet wr.s one with those whom he 
 sanctified. Hence he uses those expressions quoted from 
 Isaiah and the Psalms above. 
 
 He was more man, just because more divine more a son 
 of man, because more a son of God. He was peculiarly the 
 suffering Israelite : His countenance marred more than the 
 sons of men. Hence we are told the prophets searched 
 " what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which 
 was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the 
 sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow." 
 Observe, it was a spirit in them, their own lives witnessing 
 mysteriously of what the perfect Humanity must be suf- 
 fering. 
 
 Thus, especially, the 53d chapter of Isaiah was spoken orig- 
 inally of the Jewish nation of the prophet as peculiarly the 
 Israelite ; and it is no wonder the eunuch asked Philip in per- 
 plexity, " Of whom doth the prophet say this of himself or 
 some other man ?" The truth is, he said it of himself, but 
 prophetically of Humanity ; true of him, most true of the 
 highest Humanity. Here, then, was a new " portion" of the 
 revelation. The prophet rebuked the king, often opposed 
 the priest, but was one with the people. " He that sancti- 
 fieth and they who are sanctified are all of one." 
 
 If, then, One had come claiming to be the Prophet of the 
 race, and was a sufferer, claiming to be the Son of God, and 
 yet peculiarly man ; the son of man : the son of man just be- 
 cause the Son of God : more Divine, because more human : 
 then this was only what the whole race of Jewish prophets 
 should have prepared them for. God had spoken by the 
 prophets. That God had now spoken by a Son in whom the 
 idea of the true prophet was realized in its entireriess. 
 
332 Christ the Son. 
 
 ILL The priesthood continued this idea latent. The writer 
 of this epistle saw three elements in the priestly idea : 1. That 
 he should he ordained for men in things pertaining to God; 
 2. That he should offer gifts and sacrifices ; 3. That lie should 
 he called by God, not be a mere sel<-asserter. 
 
 1. Ordained for men. Remark here the true idea con- 
 tained in Judaism, and its difference from the heathen no- 
 tions. In Heathenism the priest was of a different race sep- 
 arate from his fellows. In Judaism he was ordained for men ; 
 their representative ; constituted in their behalf The Jew- 
 ish priest represented the holiness of the nation ; he went into 
 the Holy of Holies, showing it. But this great idea was only 
 implied." not fulfilled in the Jewish priest. He was only by a 
 fiction the representative of holiness. Holy he was not. He 
 only entered into a fictitious Holy of Holies. If the idea 
 were to be ever real, it must be in One who should be act* 
 ually what the Jewish priest was by a figment, and who 
 should carry our humanity into the real Holy of Holies the 
 presence of God ; thus becoming our Invisible and Eternal 
 Priest 
 
 : it was implied that his call must be Divine. But in 
 the 110th Psalm a higher call is intimated than that Divine 
 call which was madelo the Aaronic priesthood by a regular 
 succession, or, as it is called in the epistle, " the law of a car- 
 nal commandment" Melehizedek's call is spoken o The 
 king is called a priest after his order. Xot a derived or he- 
 reditary priesthood; not one transmissible, beginning and 
 ending* in himself (Heb. vii 1-3), but a priesthood, in other 
 words, of character, of inward right : a call internal, hence 
 more Divine ; or, as the writer calls it, a priest " after the 
 power of an endless life," This was the idea for which the 
 Jewish psalms themselves ought to have prepared the Jew. 
 
 Again, the priests offered gifts and sacrifices. Distinguish : 
 
 Gifts were thank-offerings T first-fruits of 
 
 etc., a man's best ; testimonies of infinite gratefulness, and 
 expressions of it. But sacrifices were different : they implied 
 a sense of un worthiness: that sense which conflicts with the 
 idea of any right to offer gifts. 
 
 Now the Jewish Scriptures themselves had explained this 
 subject, and this instinctive feeling of nnworthiness for which 
 sacrifice found an expression. Prophets and psalmists had 
 felt that no sacrifice was perfect which did not reach the con- 
 science (Ps. 11 16, 17), for instance; also Heb. x. 8-12. Xo 
 language could more clearly show that the spiritual Jew dis- 
 cerned that entire surrender to the Divine WiH is the only 
 perfect sacrifice, the ground of all sacrifices, and that whic* 
 
Worldliness. 333 
 
 alone imparts to it a significance. Not the mere sacrifice of 
 victims. . . . "Then said I, Lo, I come to do Thy will, O 
 God." Tliat is the sacrifice which God wills. 
 
 I say it firmly all other notions of sacrifice are false. 
 Whatsoever introduces the conception of vindictiveness or 
 retaliation whatever speaks of appeasing fury whatever 
 estimates the value of the Saviour's sacrifice by the "penalty 
 paid" whatever differs from these notions of sacrifice con- 
 tained in psalms and prophets is borrowed from the bloody 
 shambles of Heathenism, and not from Jewish altars. 
 
 This- alone makes the worshipper perfect as pertaining to 
 the conscience. He who can offer it in its entireness, He 
 alone is the world's Atonement ; He in whose heart the Law 
 was, and who alone of all mankind was content to do it, His 
 sacrifice alone^can be the sacrifice all-sufficient in the Father's 
 sight as the proper sacrifice of humanity : He who through 
 the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, He 
 alone can give the Spirit which enables us to present our 
 bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. He is 
 the only High-priest of the universe. 
 
 XII. 
 WORLDLINESS. 
 
 "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in, him. For 
 all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the 
 pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth 
 away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for- 
 ever.'' 1 John ii. 15-17. 
 
 RELIGION differs from morality in the value which it 
 places on the affections. Morality requires that an act be 
 done on principle. Religion goes deeper, and inquires into 
 the state of the heart. The Church of Ephesus was unsus- 
 pected in her orthodoxy, and unblemished in her zeal : but to 
 the ear of him who saw the apocalyptic vision, a voice spake, 
 "I have somewhat against thee in that thou hast left thy 
 first love." 
 
 In the eye of Christianity he is a Christian who loves the 
 Father. He who loves the world may be in his way a good 
 man, respecting whose eternal destiny we pronounce no 
 opinion : but one of the children of the kingdom he is not. 
 
 Now the boundary-lines of this love of the world, or 
 worldliness, are exceedingly difficult to define. Bigotry pro- 
 
334 Worldliness. 
 
 nounces many things wrong which are harmless : laxity per- 
 mits many which are by no means innocent : and it is a 
 question perpetually put, a question miserably perplexing to 
 those whose religion consists more in avoiding that which is 
 wrong than in seeking that which is right, What is world- 
 Ihess ? 
 
 To that question we desire to find to-day an answer in the 
 text ; premising this, that our object is to put ourselves in 
 possession of principles. For otherwise we shall only deal 
 with this matter as empirics ; condemning this and approving 
 that by opinion, but on no certain and intelligible ground: 
 we shall but float on the unstable sea of opinion. 
 
 We confine ourselves to two points. 
 
 I. The nature of the forbidden world. 
 n. The reason for which it is forbidden. 
 
 I. The nature of the forbidden world. The first idea sug- 
 gested by " the world " is this green earth, with its days and 
 nights, its seasons, its hills and its valleys, its clouds and 
 brightness. This is not the world the love of which is pre- 
 hibited ; for to forbid the love of this would be to forbid the 
 love of God. 
 
 There are three ways in which we learn to know Him. 
 First, by the working of our minds : love, justice, tender- 
 ness. If we would know what they mean in God, we must 
 gain the conception from their existence in ourselves. But 
 inasmuch as humanity is imperfect in us, if we were to learn 
 of God only from His image in ourselves, we should run the 
 risk of calling the evil good, and the imperfect divine. 
 Therefore He has given us, besides this, the representation of 
 Himself in Christ, where is found the meeting-point of the 
 Divine and the human, and in whose life the character of 
 Deity is reflected as completely as the sun is seen in the 
 depth of the still, untroubled lake. 
 
 But there is a third way in which we attain the idea of 
 God. This world is but manifested Deity God shown to 
 eye, and ear, and sense. This strange phenomenon of a 
 world, what is it? All we know of it all we know of mat- 
 ter is, that it is an assemblage of powers which produce in 
 us certain sensations ; but what those powers are in them- 
 selves we know not. The sensation of color, form, weight, 
 we have ; but what it is which gives those sensations in 
 the language of the schools, what is the substratum which 
 supports the accidents or qualities of Being we can not tell. 
 Speculative Philosophy replies, It is but our own selves be- 
 coming conscious of themselves. We, in our own being, are 
 
Worldliness. 335 
 
 the cause 01 all phenomena. Positive Philosophy replies, 
 What the Being of the world is we can not tell, we only 
 know what it seems to us. Phenomena appearance be 
 yond this we can not reach. Being itself is and forever 
 must be, unknowable. Religion replies, That something is 
 God. The world is but manifested Deity. That which lies 
 beneath the surface of all appearance, the cause of all mani- 
 festation, is God. So that to forbid the love of all this 
 world is to forbid the love of that by which God is known 
 to us. The sounds and sights of this lovely world are but 
 the drapery of the robe in which the Invisible has clothed 
 Himself. Does a man ask what this world is, and why man 
 is placed in it ? It was that the invisible things of Him from 
 the creation of the world jnight be clearly seen. Have we 
 ever stood beneath the solemn vault of heaven when the 
 stars were looking down in their silent splendor, and not felt 
 an overpowering sense of His eternity ? When the white 
 lightning has quivered in the sky, has that told us nothing 
 of power, or only something of electricity ? Rocks and 
 mountains, are they here to give us the idea of material mass- 
 iveness, or to reveal the conception of the Strength of Israel ? 
 When we take up the page of past history, and read that 
 wrong never prospered long, but that nations have drunk 
 one after another the cup of terrible retribution, can we dis- 
 miss all that as the philosophy of history, or shall we say 
 that through blood, and war, and desolation we trace the 
 footsteps of a presiding God, and find evidence that there 
 sits at the helm of this world's affairs a strict, and rigorous, 
 and most terrible justice? To the eye that can see, to the 
 heart that is not paralyzed, God is here. The warnings 
 which the Bible utters against the things of this world bring 
 no charge against the glorious world itself. The world is 
 the glass through which we see the Maker. But what men 
 do is this : They put the dull quicksilver of their own selfish- 
 ness behind the glass, and so it becomes not the transparent 
 medium through which God shines, but the dead opaque 
 which reflects back themselves. Instead of lying with open 
 eye and heart to receive, we project ourselves upon the world 
 and give. So it gives us back our own false feelings and na- 
 ture. Therefore it brings forth thorns and thistles; there- 
 fore it grows weeds weeds to us; therefore the lightning 
 burns with wrath, and the thunder mutters vengeance. By 
 all which it comes to pass that the very manifestation of God 
 has transformed itself: the lust of the flesh, and the lust of 
 the eye, and the pride of life ; and all that is in the world is 
 no longer of the Father, but is of the world. 
 
336 Worldliness. 
 
 By the world again is sometimes meant the men that ere 
 in the world. And thus the command would run, Love not 
 men, but love God. It has been so read. The Pharisees 
 read it so of old. The property which natural affection de- 
 manded for the support of parents, upon that they wrote 
 " Corban," a gift for God, and robbed men that they might 
 give to God. Yet no less than this is done whenever human 
 aifection is called idolatry. As if God were jealous of our 
 love in the human sense of jealousy ; as if we could love God 
 the more by loving man the less ; as if it were not by loving 
 our brother whom we have seen, that w r e approximate to- 
 wards the love of God whom we have not seen. This is but 
 the cloak for narrowness of heart. Men of withered affec- 
 tions excuse their lovelessness by talking largely of the affec- 
 tion due to God. Yet, like the Pharisees, the love on which 
 Corban is written is never given to God, but really retained 
 
 f* t r* 
 
 for self. 
 
 No, let a man love his neighbor as himself. Let him love 
 his brother, sister, wife, with all the intensity of his heart's 
 affection. This is not St. John's forbidden world. 
 
 By the world is often understood the worldly occupation, 
 trade or profession which a man exercises. And according- 
 ly, it is no uncommon thing to hear this spoken of as some- 
 thing which, if not actually anti-religious, is, so far as it goes, 
 time taken away from the religious life. But when the man 
 from whom the legion had been expelled asked Jesus for the 
 precepts of a religious existence, the reply sent him back to 
 home. His former worldliness had consisted in doing his world- 
 ly duties ill his future religiousness was to consist in doing 
 those same duties better. A man's profession or trade is not 
 only not incompatible with religion (provided it be a lawful 
 one), it is his religion. And this is true even of those call- 
 ings which at first sight appear to have in them something 
 hard to reconcile with religiousness. For instance, the pro- 
 fession of a lawyer. He is a worldling in it if he use it for 
 some personal greed, or degrade it by chicanery. But in it- 
 self it is an occupation which sifts right from wrong ; which, 
 in the entangled web of human life, unwinds the meshes of 
 error. He is by profession enlisted on the side of the right 
 directly connected with God, the central point of justice 
 and truth. A nobler occupation need no man desire than to 
 be a fellow-worker with God. Or take the soldier's trade 
 in this world generally a trade of blood, and revenge, and 
 idle licentiousness. Rightly understood, what is it ? A sol- 
 dier's whole life, whether he will or not, is an enunciation of 
 the greatest of religious truths, the voluntary sacrifice of 
 
Worldliness. 337 
 
 one for the sake of many. In the detail of his existence, how 
 abundant are the opportunities for the voluntary recognition 
 of this. Opportunities such as that when the three strong 
 men brake through the lines of the enemy to obtain the wa* 
 ter for their sovereign's thirst opportunities as when that 
 same heroic sovereign poured the untasted water on the 
 ground, and refused to drink because it was his soldiers' lives 
 he could not drink at such a price. Earnestness in a law- 
 ful calling is not worldliness. A profession is the sphere of 
 our activity. There is something sacred in work. To work 
 in the appointed sphere is to be religious as religious as to 
 pray. This is not the forbidden world. 
 
 Now to define what worldliness is. Remark, first, that it 
 is determined by the spirit of a life, not the objects with which 
 the life is conversant. It is not the "flesh," nor the "eye," 
 nor " life," which are forbidden, but it is the " litst of the 
 flesh," and the " lust of the eye," and the "pride of life." It 
 is not this earth, nor the men who inhabit it, nor the sphere 
 of our legitimate activity, that we may not love, but the way 
 in which the love is given which constitutes worldliness. 
 Look into this a little closer. The lust of the flesh. Here is 
 affection for the outward : pleasure, that which affects the 
 senses only : the flesh, that enjoyment which comes from the 
 emotions of an hour, be it coarse or be it refined. The pleas- 
 ure of wine or the pleasure of music, so far as it is only a 
 movement of the flesh. Again, the lust of the eye. Here is 
 affection for the transient, for the eye can only gaze on form 
 and color and these are things that do not last. Once 
 more the pride of life. Here is affection for the unreal. 
 Men's opinion the estimate which depends upon wealth, 
 rank, circumstances. 
 
 Worldliness then consists in these three things : Attach- 
 ment to the outward attachment to the transitory attach- 
 ment to the unreal : in opposition to love for the inward, the 
 eternal, the true : and the one of these affections is necessari- 
 ly expelled by the other. If a. man love the world, the love 
 of the Father is not in him. But let a man once feel the 
 power of the kingdom that is within, and then the love fades 
 of that emotion whose life consists only in the thrill of a 
 nerve, or the vivid sensation of a feeling : he loses his happi- 
 ness, and wins his blessedness. Let a man get but one glimpse 
 of the King in His beauty, and then the forms and shapes of 
 things here are to him but the types of an invisible loveli- 
 ness : types which he is content should break and fade. Let 
 but a man feel truth that goodness is greatness that there 
 is no other greatness and then the degrading reverence 
 
 15 
 
338 Worldliness. 
 
 with which the titled of this world bow before wealth, and 
 the ostentation with which the rich of this world profess 
 their familiarity with title : all the pride of life, what is it to 
 him ? The love of the inward everlasting, real the love, 
 that is, of the Father, annihilates the love of the world. 
 
 II. We pass to the reasons for which the love of the world 
 is forbidden. 
 
 The first reason assigned is, that the love of the world is 
 incompatible with the love of God. If any man love the 
 world, the love of the Father is not in him. Now what we 
 observe in this is, that St. John takes it for granted that we 
 must love something. If not the love of the Father, then of 
 necessity the love of the world. Love misplaced, or love 
 rightly placed you have your choice between these two : 
 you have not your choice between loving God or nothing. 
 No man is sufficient for himself. Every man must go out of 
 himself for enjoyment. Something in this universe besides 
 himself there must be to bind the affections of every man. 
 There is that within us which compels us to attach ourselves 
 to something outward. The choice is not this : love, or be 
 without love. You can not give the pent-up steam its choice 
 of moving or not moving. It must move one way or the 
 other : the right way or the wrong way. Direct it rightly, 
 and its energy rolls the engine-wheels smoothly on their 
 track : block up its passage, and it bounds away, a thing of 
 madness and ruin. Stop it you can not ; it will rather burst. 
 So it is with our hearts. There is a pent-up energy of love, 
 gigantic for good or evil. Its right way is in the direction 
 of our Eternal Father ; and then^let it boil and pant as it 
 will, the course of the man is smooth. Expel the love of 
 God from the bosom what then ? Will the passion that is 
 within cease to burn ? Nay. Tie the man down let there 
 be no outlet for his affections let him attach himself to noth- 
 ing, and become a loveless spirit in this universe, and then 
 there is what we call a broken heart : the steam bursts the 
 machinery that contains it. Or else let him take his course, 
 unfettered and free, and then we have the riot of worldliness 
 a man with strong affections thrown off the line, tearing 
 himself to pieces, and carrying desolation along with him. 
 Let us comprehend our own nature, ourselves, and our des- 
 tinies. God is our rest, the only one that can quench the 
 fever of our desire. God in Christ is what we want. When 
 men quit that, so that " the love of the Father is not in them," 
 then they must perforce turn aside : the nobler heart to break 
 with disappointment the meaner heart to love the world 
 
Wov Id lines s. 339 
 
 instead, and sate and satisfy itself, as best it may, on things 
 that perish in the using. Herein lies the secret of our being, 
 in this world of the affections. This explains why our no- 
 blest feelings lie so close to our basest why the noblest so 
 easily metamorphose themselves into the basest. The hejirt 
 which was made large enough for God wastes itself upon the 
 world. 
 
 The second reason which the apostle gives for not squan- 
 dering affection on the world is its transitoriness. Now this 
 transitoriness exists in two shapes. It is transitory in itself 
 the world passeth away. It is transitory in its power of 
 exciting desire the lust thereof passeth away. 
 
 It is a twice-told tale that the world is passing away from 
 us, and there is very little new to be said on the subject. 
 God has written it on every page of His creation that there 
 is nothing here which lasts. Our affections change. The 
 friendships of the man are not the friendships of the boy. 
 Our very selves are altering. The basis of our being may 
 remain, but our views, tastes, feelings are no more our former 
 self than the oak is the acorn. The very face of the visible 
 world is altering around us : we have the gray mouldering 
 ruins to tell of what was once. Our laborers strike their 
 ploughshares against the foundations of buildings which 
 once echoed to human mirth skeletons of men, to whom 
 life once was dear urns and coins that remind the antiqua- 
 rian of a magnificent empire. To-day the shot of the enemy 
 defaces and blackens monuments and venerable temples 
 which remind the Christian that into the deep silence of 
 eternity the Roman world, which was in its vigor in tho 
 days of John, has passed away. And so things are going. 
 It is a work of weaving and unweaving. All passes. Names 
 that the world heard once in thunder are scarcely heard at 
 the end of centuries : good or bad, they pass. A few years 
 ago, and we were not. A few centuries farther, and we 
 reach the age of beings of almost another race. Nimrod 
 was the conqueror and scourge of his far-back age. Tubal 
 Cain gave to the world the iron which was the foundation 
 of every triumph of men over nature. We have their 
 names now. But the philologist is uncertain whether the 
 name of the first is real or mythical, and the traveller exca- 
 vates the sand-mounds of Nineveh to wonder over the rec- 
 ords which he can not decipher. Tyrant and benefactor, 
 both are gone. And so all things are moving on to the last 
 fire which shall wrap the world in conflagration, and make 
 all that has been the recollection of a dream. This is the 
 history of the world, and all that is in it. It passes while we 
 
34 Worldline^s. 
 
 look at it. Like as when you watch the melting tints of the 
 evening sky purple-crimson, gorgeous gold, a few pulsa- 
 tions of quivering light, and it is" all gone: "We are such 
 stuff as dreams are made of." 
 
 Jhe other aspect of this transitoriness is, that the lust of 
 the world passeth away. By which the apostle seems to re- 
 mind us of that solemn truth that, fast as the world is fleet 
 ing from us, faster still does the taste for its enjoyments fleet ; 
 fast as the brilliancy fades from earthly things, faster still 
 does the eye become wearied of straining itself upon them. 
 
 Now there is one way in which this takes place by a man 
 becoming satiated with the world. There is something in 
 earthly rapture which cloys. And when we drink deep of 
 pleasure, there is left behind something of that loathing 
 which follows a repast on sweets. When a boy sets out in 
 life, it is all fresh freshness in feeling zest in his enjoy- 
 ment purity in his heart. Cherish that, my young breth- 
 ren, while you can ; lose it, and it never comes again. It is 
 not an easy thing to cherish it, for it demands restraint in 
 pleasure, and no young heart loves that. Religion has only 
 calm, sober, perhaps monotonous pleasures to offer at first. 
 The deep rapture of enjoyment comes in after-life. And 
 that will not satisfy the young heart. Men will know what 
 pleasure is, and they drink deep. Keen delight feverish 
 enjoyment that is what you long for: and these emotions 
 lose their delicacy and their relish, and will only come at the 
 bidding of gross excitements. The ecstasy which once rose 
 to the sight of the rainbow in the sky, or the bright brook, 
 or the fresh morning, comes languidly at last only in the 
 crowded midnight room, or the excitement of commercial 
 speculation, or beside the gaming-table, or amidst the fever 
 of politics. It is a spectacle for men and angels, when a 
 man has become old in feeling and worn-out before his time. 
 Know we none such among our own acquaintance? Have 
 the young never seen those aged ones who stand amongst 
 them in their pleasures, almost as if to warn them of what 
 they themselves must come to at last? Have they never 
 marked the dull and sated look that they cast upon the 
 whole scene, as upon a thing which they would fain enjoy 
 and can not ? Know you what you have been looking on ? 
 A sated worldling one to whom pleasure was rapture once, 
 as it is to you now. Thirty years more, that look and that 
 place will be yours : and that is the way the world rewards 
 its veterans; it chains them to it after the "lust of the 
 world " has passed away. 
 
 Or this may be done by a discovery of the unsatisfactory 
 
Worldliness. 341 
 
 ness of the world. That is a discovery not made by every 
 man. But there are some at least who have learned it bit- 
 terly, and that without the aid of Christ. Some there are 
 who would not live over this past life again even if it were 
 possible. Some there are who would gladly have done with 
 the whole thing at once, and exchange oh ! how joyfully- 
 the garment for the shroud. And some there are who cling 
 to life, not because life is dear, but because the future is 
 dark, and they tremble somewhat at the thought of entering 
 it. Clinging to life is no proof that a man is still longing 
 for the world. We often cling to life the more tenaciously 
 as years go on. The deeper the tree has struck its roots into 
 the ground, the less willing is it to be rooted up. But there 
 is many a one who so hangs on just because he has not the 
 desperate hardihood to quit it, nor faith enough to be " will- 
 ing to depart." The world and he have understood each 
 other ; he has seen through it ; he has ceased to hope any 
 thing from it. The love' of the Father is not in him, but 
 " the lust of the world " has passed away. 
 
 Lastly, a reason for unlearning the love of the world is the 
 solitary permanence of Christian action. In contrast with 
 the fleetingness of this world, the apostle tells us of the sta- 
 bility of labor. "He that doeth the will of God abideth for- 
 ever." And let us mark this. Christian life is action : not 
 a speculating, not a debating, but a doing. One thing, and 
 only one, in this world has eternity stamped upon it. Feel- 
 ings pass ; resolves and thoughts pass ; opinions change. 
 What you have done lasts lasts in you. Through ages, 
 through eternity, what you have done for Christ, that, and 
 only that, you are. " They rest from their labors," saith the 
 Spirit, " and their works do follow them." If the love of the 
 Father be in us, where is the thing done which we have to 
 show ? You think justly feel rightly yes but your 
 work ? produce it. Men of wealth, men of talent, men of 
 leisure, what are you doing in God's world for God ? 
 
 Observe, however, to distinguish between the act and the 
 actor : It is not the thing done, but the doer who lasts. 
 The thing done often is a failure. The cup given in the 
 name of Christ may be given to one unworthy of it ; but 
 think ye that the love with which it was given has passed 
 away ? Has it not printed itself indelibly in the character 
 by the very act of giving ? Bless, and if the Son of peace 
 be there, your act succeeds ; but if not, your blessing shall 
 return unto you again. In other words, the act may fail, but 
 the doer of it abideth forever. 
 
 We close this subject with two practical truths. Let us 
 
342 Worldliness. 
 
 learn from earthly changefulness a lesson of cheerful active 
 ty. The world has its way of looking at all this, but it is 
 not the Christian's way/ There has been nothing said to- 
 day that a worldly moralist has not already said a thousand 
 times far better. The fact is a world-fact. The application 
 is a Christian one. Every man can be eloquent about the 
 nothingness of time. But the application ! " Let us eat 
 and drink, for to-morrow we die?" That is one application. 
 Let us sentimentalize and be sad in this fleeting world, and 
 talk of the instability of human greatness, and the transi- 
 toriness of human affection ? Those are the only two appli- 
 cations the world knows. They shut out the recollection 
 and are merry, or they dwell on it and are sad. Christian 
 brethren, dwell on it and be happy. This world is not 
 yours ; thank God it is not. It is dropping away from you 
 like worn-out autumn leaves ; but beneath it, hidden in it, 
 there is another world lying as the flower lies in the bud. 
 That is your world, which must burst forth at last into eter- 
 nal luxuriance. All you stand on, see, and love, is but the 
 husk of something better. Things are passing ; our friends 
 are dropping off from us ; strength is giving way ; our relish 
 for earth is going, and the world no longer wears to our 
 hearts the radiance that once it wore. We have the same 
 sky above us, and the same scenes around us ; but the fresh- 
 ness that our hearts extracted from every thing in boyhood, 
 and the glory that seemed to rest once on earth and life have 
 faded aAvay forever. Sad and gloomy truths to the man who 
 is going down to the grave with his work undone. Not sad 
 to the Christian, but rousing, exciting, invigorating. If it be 
 the eleventh hour, we have no time for folding of the hands : 
 we will work the faster. Through the changefulness of life 
 through the solemn tolling of the bell of Time, which tells 
 us that another, and another, and another, are gone before 
 us through the noiseless rush of a world which is going down 
 with gigantic footsteps into nothingness. Let not the Chris- 
 tian slack his hand from work, for he that doeth the will of 
 God may defy hell itself to quench his immortality. 
 
 Finally, The love of this world is only unlearned by the 
 love of the Father. It were a desolate thing, indeed, to for- 
 bid the love of earth, if there were nothing to fill the vacant 
 space in the heart. But it is just for this purpose, that a 
 sublimer affection may find room, that the lower is to be ex- 
 pelled. And there is only one way in which that higher love 
 is learned. The cross of Christ is the measure of the love of 
 God to us, and the measure of the meaning of man's existence. 
 
 The measure is the love of God. Through the death-kneU 
 
The Sydenham Palace, Etc. 343 
 
 of a passing universe God seems at least to speak to us in 
 wrath. There is no doubt of what God means in the Cross. 
 He means love. The measure of the meaning of man's exist 
 'ence. Measure all by the Cross. Do you want success? 
 The Cross is failure. Do you want a name? The Cross is 
 infamy. Is it to be gay and happy that you live ? The Cross 
 is pain and sharpness. Do you live that the will of God may 
 be done in you and by you, in life and death ? Then, and 
 only then, the Spirit of the Cross is in you. When once a 
 man has learned that, the power of the world is gone ; and 
 no man need bid him, in denunciation or in invitation, not to 
 love the world. He can not love the world, for he has got 
 an ambition above the world. He has planted his foot upon 
 the Rock, and when all else is gone, he at least abides forever. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE SYDENHAM PALACE, AND THE RELIGIOUS 
 NON-OBSERVANCE OF THE SABBATH. 
 
 "One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every 
 day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that 
 regardeth the day, regardeth fy unto the Lord ; and he that regardeth not the 
 day, to the Lord lie doth not regard it. He that eateth, eateth to the Lord, 
 for he giveth God thanks ; and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, 
 and giveth God thanks. " Rom. xiv. 5, 6. 
 
 THE selection of this text is suggested by one of the cur- 
 rent topics of the day. Lately projects have been devised, 
 one of which in importance surpasses all the rest, for provid 
 ing places of public recreation for the people : and it has 
 been announced, with the sanction of government, that such 
 a place will be held open during a part at least of the day of 
 rest. By a large section of sincerely religious persons this 
 announcement has been received with considerable alarm 
 and strenuous opposition. It has seemed to them that such 
 a desecration would be a national crime : for, holding the sab- 
 bath to be God's sign between Himself and His people, they 
 can not but view the desecration ot the sign as a forfeiture 
 of His covenant, and an act which will assuredly call down 
 national judgments. By the secular press, on the contrary, 
 this proposal has been defended with considerable power. It 
 has been maintained that the sabbath is a Jewish institu 
 tion; in its strictness, at all events, not binding on a Chris- 
 tian community. It has been urged with much force thaj 
 
344 The Sydenham Palace, and the 
 
 we can not consistently refuse to concede to the pool man 
 publicly, that right of recreation which privately the rich 
 man has long taken without rebuke, and with no protest on 
 the part of the ministers of Christ. And it has been said 
 that such places of recreation will tend to humanize, which 
 if not identical with Christianizing the population, is at least 
 a step towards it. 
 
 Upon such a subject, where truth unquestionably does not 
 lie upon the surface, it can not be out of place if a minister 
 of Christ endeavors to direct the minds of his congregation 
 towards the formation of an opinion ; not dogmatically, but 
 humbly, remembering always that his own temptation is, 
 from his very position as a clergyman, to view such matters, 
 not so much in the broad light of the possibilities of actual 
 life, as with the eyes of a recluse ; from a clerical and eccle- 
 siastical, rather than from a large and human point of view. 
 For no minister of Christ has a right to speak oracularly. 
 All that he can pretend to do is to give his judgment, as one 
 that has obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful. And on 
 large national subjects there is perhaps no class so ill quali- 
 fied to form a judgment with breadth as we, the clergy of 
 the Church of England, accustomed as we are to move in the 
 narrow circle of those who listen to us with forbearance and 
 deference, and mixing but little in real life, till in our clois- 
 tered and inviolable sanctuaries we are apt to forget that it 
 is one thing to lay down rules for a religious clique, and an- 
 other to legislate for a great nation. 
 
 In the Church of Rome a controversy had arisen in the 
 time of St. Paul, respecting the exact relation in which Chris- 
 tianity stood to Judaism; and, consequently, the obligation 
 of various Jewish institutions came to be discussed : among 
 the rest the sabbath-day. One party maintained its abroga- 
 tion, another its continued obligation. " One man esteemeth 
 one day above another ; another esteemeth every day alike." 
 Now it is remarkable that, in his reply, the Apostle Paul, al- 
 though his own views upon the question were decided and 
 strong, passes no judgment of censure upon the practice of 
 either of these parties, but only blames the uncharitable 
 spirit in which the one "judged their brethren" as irrelig- 
 ious, and the other " set at naught " their stricter brethren as 
 superstitious. He lays down, however, two principles for the 
 decision of the matter : the first being the rights of Christian 
 conviction, or the sacredness of the individual conscience 
 "Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind;'* the 
 second, a principle unsatisfactory enough, and surprising, no 
 doubt, to both, that there is such a thing as religious observ- 
 
Religious Non-Observance of the Sabbath. 345 
 
 ance, and also such a thing as a religious non-observance of 
 the day " He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the 
 Lord: and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he 
 doth not regard it." I shall consider, 
 
 I. St. Paul's own view upon the question. 
 II. His modifications of that view, in reference to separate 
 
 cases. 
 
 I. St. Paul's own view. No one, I believe, who would 
 read St. Paul's own writings with unprejudiced mind could 
 fail to come to the conclusion that he considered the sabbath 
 abrogated by Christianity : not merely as modified in itd 
 stringency, but as totally repealed. 
 
 For example, see Colossians ii. 16, 17: observe, he counts 
 the sabbath-day among those institutions of Judaism which 
 were shadows, and of which Christ was the realization, the 
 substance or " body ;" and he bids the Colossians remain in- 
 diiferent to the judgment which would be pronounced upon 
 their non-observance of such days. "Let no man judge you 
 with respect to .... the sabbath-days." 
 
 He is more decisive still in the text. For it has been con- 
 tended that in the former passage, " sabbath-days " refers 
 simply to the Jewish sabbaths, which were superseded by 
 the Lord's day, and that the apostle does not allude at all to 
 the new institution, which it is supposed had superseded it. 
 Here, however, there can be no such ambiguity. " One man 
 esteemeth every day alike;" and he only says, "let him be 
 fully persuaded in his own mind." "Every" day must in- 
 clude first days as well as last days of the week: Sundays as 
 well as Saturdays. And again, he even speaks of scrupulous 
 adherence to particular days, as if it were giving up the very 
 principle of Christianity: "Ye observe days, and months, 
 and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestow 
 ed upon you labor in vain." So that his objection was not 
 to Jewish days, but to the very principle of attaching intrin- 
 sic sacredness to any days. All forms and modes of particu- 
 larizing the Christian life he reckoned as bondage under the 
 elements or alphabet of the law. And this is plain from the 
 nature of the case. He struck not at a day, but at a princi- 
 ple. Else, if w r ith all this vehemence and earnestness, he only 
 meant to establish a new set of days in the place of the old, 
 there is no intelligible principle for which he is contending, 
 and that earnest apostle is only a champion for one day in- 
 stead of another an asserter of the eternal sanctities of Sun- 
 day, instead of the eternal sanctities of Saturday. Incredi- 
 ble indeed. 
 
 15* 
 
346 The Sydenham Palace, and the 
 
 Let us then understand the principle on which he declared 
 the repeal of the sabbath. He taught that the blood of 
 Christ cleansed all things; therefore there was nothing spe* 
 dally clean. Christ had vindicated all for God ; therefore 
 there was no one thing more God's than another. For to a&- 
 sert one thing as God's more than another, is by implication 
 to admit that other to be less God's. 
 
 The blood of Christ had vindicated God's parental right to 
 all humanity; therefore there could be no peculiar people, 
 " There is neither Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircum- 
 cision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond, nor free : but Christ is all, 
 and in all." It had proclaimed God's property in all places; 
 therefore there could be no one place intrinsically holier than 
 another. No human dedication, no human consecration" 
 could localize God in space. Hence the first martyr quoted 
 from the prophet : " Howbeit the Most High dwelleth not in 
 temples made with hands ; as saith the prophet, heaven is 
 my throne, and earth is my footstool ; what house will ye 
 build for me ? saith the Lord." 
 
 Lastly, the Gospel of Christ had sanctified all time : hence 
 no time could be specially God's. For to assert that Sunday 
 is more God's day than Monday, is to maintain by implica- 
 tion Monday is His less rightfully. 
 
 Here, however, let it be observed, it is perfectly possible, 
 and not at all inconsistent with this, that for human conveni- 
 ence, and even human necessities, just as it became desirable 
 to set -apart certain places in which the noise of earthly busi- 
 ness should not be heard for spiritual worship, so it should 
 become desirable to set apart certain days for special wor- 
 ship. But then all such were defensible on the ground of 
 wise and Christian expediency alone. They could not be 
 placed on the ground of a Divine statute or command. They 
 rested on the authority of the Church of Christ ; and the 
 power which had made could unmake them again. 
 
 Accordingly in early, we can not say exactly how early 
 times, the Church of Christ felt the necessity of substituting 
 something in place of the ordinances which had been repeal- 
 ed. And the Lord's day arose : not a day of compulsory 
 rest ; not such a day at nil as modern Sabbatarians suppose ; 
 not a Jewish sabbath ; rather a day in many respects abso- 
 lutely contrasted with the Jewish sabbath. 
 
 For the Lord's day sprung, not out of a transference of the 
 Jewish sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, but rather out of 
 the idea of making the week an imitation of the life of Christ. 
 With the early Christians, the great conception was that of 
 following their crucified and risen Lord: they set, as it were, 
 
Religious N on-Observance of the Sabbath. 347 
 
 the clock of Time to the epochs of his history. Friday repre- 
 sented the Death in which all Christians daily die, and Sun- 
 day the Resurrection in which all Christians daily rise to 
 higher life. What Friday and Sunday were to the week, 
 that Good Friday and Easter Sunday were to the year. 
 And .thus, in larger or smaller cycles, all time represented to 
 the early Christians the mysteries of the Cross and the Risen 
 Life hidden in humanity. And as the sunflower turns from 
 morning till evening to the sun, so did the early Church turn 
 forever to her Lord, transforming week and year into a sym- 
 bolical representation of His spiritual life. 
 
 Carefully distinguish this, the true historical view of the 
 origin of the Lord's day, from a mere transference of a Jew- 
 ish sabbath from one day to another. For St. Paul's teach- 
 ing is distinct and clear, that the sabbath is annulled, and to 
 urge the observance of the day as indispensable to salvation 
 was, according to him, to Judaize : " to turn again to the 
 weak and beggarly -elements, whereunto they desired to be 
 in bondage." 
 
 II. The modifications of this view. 
 
 1. The first modification has reference to those who con- 
 scientiously observed the day. He that observeth the day, 
 observeth it to the Lord. Let him act, then, on that convic- 
 tion : " Let him be fully persuaded in his own mind." There 
 is therefore a religious observance of the sabbath-day possi- 
 ble. 
 
 We are bound by the spirit of the fourth commandment, 
 so far as we are in the same spiritual state as they to whom 
 it was given. The spiritual intent of Christianity is to wor- 
 ship God every day in the spirit. But had this law been 
 given in all its purity to the Jews, instead of turning every 
 week-day into a sabbath, they would have transformed every 
 sabbath into a week-day : with no special day fixed for wor- 
 ship, they would have spent every day without worship. 
 Their hearts were too dull for a devotion so spiritual and 
 pure. Therefore a law was given, specializing a day, in or- 
 der to lead them to the broader truth that every day is 
 God's. 
 
 Now, so far as we are in the Jewish state, the fourth com- 
 mandment, even in its rigor and strictness, is wisely used by 
 us ; nay, we might say, indispensable. For who is he who 
 needs not the day ? He is the man so rich in love, so con- 
 formed to the mind of Christ, so elevated into the gublime 
 repose of heaven, that he needs no carnal ordinances at all, 
 nor the assistance of one day in seven to kindle spiritual 
 
348 The Sydenham Palace, and the 
 
 feelings, seeing he is, as it were, all his life in heaven al< 
 ready. 
 
 And doubtless, such the Apostle Paul expected the 
 Church of Christ to be. Anticipating the Second Advent 
 at once ; not knowing the long centuries of slow progress 
 that were to come, his heart would have sunk within him 
 could he have been told that at the end of eighteen centu- 
 ries the Christian Church would be still observing days, 
 and months, and times, and years, and still more, needing 
 them. 
 
 Needing them, I say. For the sabbath was made for 
 man. Gcd made it for men in a certain spiritual state, be- 
 cause they needed it. The need therefore is deeply hidden 
 in human nature. He who can dispense with it must be 
 holy and spiritual indeed. And he who, still unholy and 
 unspiritual, would yet dispense with it, is a man who would 
 fain be wiser than his Maker. We, Christians as we are, 
 still need the law : both in its restraints, and in its aids to 
 our weakness. 
 
 No man, therefore, who knows himself, but will gladly and 
 joyfully use the institution. No man who knows the^need 
 of his brethren will wantonly desecrate it, or recklessly hurt 
 even their scruples respecting its observance. And no such 
 man can look with aught but grave and serious apprehen- 
 sions on such an innovation upon English customs of life and 
 thought, as the proposal to give public and official counte- 
 nance to a scheme which will invite millions, I do not say to 
 an irreligious, but certainly an unreligious use of the day of 
 rest. 
 
 This then is the first modification of the broad view of a 
 repealed sabbath. Repealed though it be, there is such a 
 thing as a religious observance of it. And provided that 
 those who are stricter than we in their views of its obliga- 
 tion, observe it not from superstition, nor in abridgment 
 of Christian liberty, nor from moroseness, we are bound in 
 Christian charity to yield them all respect and honor. Let 
 them act out their conscientious convictions. Let not him 
 that observeth not despise him that observeth. 
 
 The second modification of the broad view is, that there is 
 such a thing as a religious non-observance of the sabbath. 1 
 lay a stress on the word religious. For St. Paul does not say 
 that every non-observance of the sabbath is religious, but 
 that he who not observing it, observeth it not to the Lord, 
 is, because acting on conscientious conviction, as acceptable 
 as the others, who, in obedience to what they believe to be 
 His will, observe it. 
 
Religious Non-Observance of the Sabbath. 349 
 
 He pays his non-observance to the Lord, who feeling that 
 Christ has made him free, striving to live all his days in the 
 spirit, and knowing that that which is displeasing to God is 
 not work nor recreation, but selfishness and worldliness, re- 
 fuses to be bound by a Jewish ordinance which forbade la- 
 bor and recreation, only with a typical intent. 
 
 But he who, not trying to serve God on any day, gives 
 Sunday to toil or pleasure, certainly observes not the day : 
 but his non-observance is not rendered to the Lord. He may 
 be free from superstition : but it is not Christ who has made 
 him free. Nor is he one of whom St. Paul would have said 
 that his liberty on the sabbath is as acceptable as his broth- 
 er's conscientious scrupulosity. 
 
 Here, then, we are at issue with the popular defense of 
 public recreations on the sabbath-day : not so much with re- 
 spect to the practice, as with respect to the grounds on-which 
 the practice is approved. They claim liberty : but it is not 
 Christian liberty. Like St. Paul, they demand a license for 
 non-observance ; only, it is not " non-observance to the Lord." 
 For distinguish well. The abolition of Judaism is not neces- 
 sarily the establishment of Christianity : to do away with the 
 sabbath-day in order to substitute a nobler, truer, more con- 
 tinuous sabbath, even the sabbath of all time given up to 
 God, is well ; but to do away with the special rights of God 
 to the sabbath, in order merely to substitute the rights of 
 pleasure, or the rights of mammon, or even the license of 
 profligacy and drunkenness, that, methinks, is not St. Paul's 
 " Christian liberty !" 
 
 The second point on which we join issue is the assump- 
 tion that public places of recreation, which humanize, will 
 therefore Christianize the people. It is taken for granted 
 that architecture, sculpture, and the wonders of nature and 
 art which such buildings will contain, have a direct or indi- 
 rect tendency to lead to true devotion. 
 
 Only in a very limited degree is there truth in this at all. 
 Christianity will humanize : we are not so sure that human- 
 izing will Christianize. Let us be clear upon this matter. 
 Esthetics are not religion. It is one thing to civilize and 
 polish : it is another thing to Christianize. The worship of 
 the beautiful is not the worship of holiness ; nay, I know not 
 whether the one may not have a tendency to disincline from 
 the other. 
 
 At least, such was the history of ancient Greece. Greece 
 was the home of the arts, the sacred ground on which the 
 worship of the beautiful was carried to its perfection. Let 
 those who have read the history of her decline and fall, who 
 
350 The Sydenham Palace^ and the 
 
 have peraeed the debasing works of her later years, tell ua 
 how "music, painting, poetry, the arts, softened and debilita- 
 ted and sensualized the nation's heart. Let them tell us 
 how, when Greece's last and greatest man was warning in 
 vain against the foe at her gates, and demanding a manlier 
 and a more heroic disposition to sacrifice, that most polished 
 and humanized people, sunk in trade and sunk in pleasure, 
 were squandering enormous sums upon their buildings and 
 their esthetics, their processions and their people's palaces, 
 till the flood came, and the liberties of Greece were trampled 
 down forever beneath the feet of the Macedonian conqueror. 
 
 No ! the change of a nation's heart is not to be effected 
 by the infusion of a taste for artistic grace. " Other founda- 
 tion can no man lay than that is laid, which is Christ Jesus." 
 Not art, but the cross of Christ. Simpler manners, purer 
 lives:. more self-denial; more earnest sympathy with the 
 classes that lie below us ; nothing short of that can lay the 
 foundations of the Christianity which is to be hereafter, deep 
 and broad. 
 
 On the other hand, we dissent from the views of those 
 who would arrest such a project by petitions to the legis- 
 lature on these grounds : 
 
 1. It is a return backward to Judaism and law. It may 
 be quite true that, as we suspect, such non-observance of the 
 day is not to the Lord ; but only a scheme of mere pecuni- 
 ary speculation. Nevertheless there is such a thing as a re- 
 ligious non-observance of the day : and we dare not "judge 
 another man's servant : to his own master he standeth or 
 falleth." We dare not assert the perpetual obligation of 
 the sabbath, when an inspired apostle has declared it abro- 
 gated. We dare not refuse a public concession of that kind 
 of recreation to the poor man which the rich have long not 
 hesitated to take in their sumptuous mansions and pleasure- 
 grounds, unrebuked by the ministers of Christ, who seem 
 touched to the quick only when the desecration of the sab- 
 bath is loud and vulgar. \Ve can not substitute a statute law 
 for a repealed law of God. We may think, and we do, that 
 there is much which may lead to dangerous consequences in 
 this innovation : but we dare not treat it as a crime. 
 
 2. The second ground on which we are opposed to the ul- 
 tra-rigor of sabbath observance, especially when it becomes 
 coercive, is the danger of injuring the conscience. It is 
 wisely taught by St. Paul that he who does any thing with 
 offense, i. e., with a feeling that it is wrong, does wrong. 
 To him it is wrong, even though it be not wrong abstractly. 
 Therefore it is always dangerous to multiply restrictions and 
 
Religious Non-Observance of the Sabbath. 351 
 
 requirements beyond what is essential, because men feeling 
 themselves hemmed in break the artificial barrier, but break- 
 ing it with a sense of guilt, do thereby become hardened in 
 conscience and prepared for transgression against command- 
 ments which are divine and of eternal obligation. Hence it 
 is that the criminal has so often in his confessions traced his 
 deterioration in crime to the first step of breaking the 
 sabbath-day, and no doubt with accurate truth. But what 
 shall we infer from this ? Shall we infer, as is so often done 
 upon the platform and in religious books, that it proves the 
 everlasting obligation of the sabbath ? Or shall we, with a 
 far truer philosophy of the human soul, infer, in the language 
 of St. Peter, that we have been laying on him " a ^oke which 
 neither we nor our fathers were able to bear ?" in the lan- 
 guage of St. Paul, that " the motions of sin were by the law," 
 that the rigorous rule was itself the stimulating, moving 
 cause of the sin : and that when the young man, worn out 
 with his week's toil, first stole out into the fields to taste 
 the fresh breath of a spring day, he did it with a vague, 
 secret sense of transgression, and that having, as it were, 
 drawn his sword in defiance against the established code of 
 the religious world, he felt that from thenceforward there 
 was for him no return, and so he became an outcast, his sword 
 against every man, and every man's sword against him ? I 
 believe tins to be the true account of the matter ; and be- 
 lieving it, I can not but believe that the false Jewish notions 
 of the sabbath-day which are prevalent have been exceeding- 
 ly pernicious to the morals of the country. 
 
 Lastly, I remind you ol the danger of mistaking a " posi- 
 tive " law for a moral one. The danger is that proportion- 
 ably to the vehemence with which the law positive is en- 
 forced, the sacredness of moral laws is neglected. A positive 
 law, in theological language, is a law laid down for special 
 purposes, and corresponds with statute laws in things civil. 
 Thus laws of quarantine and laws of excise depend for their 
 force upon the will of th*e legislature, and when repealed are 
 binding no more. But a moral law is one binding forever, 
 which a statute law may declare, but can neither make nor 
 unmake. 
 
 Now when men are rigorous in the enforcement and rev- 
 erence paid to laws positive, the tendency is to a correspond- 
 ing indifference to the laws of eternal right. The written 
 supersedes in their hearts the moral. The mental history of 
 the ancient Pharisees who observed the sabbath, and tithed 
 mint, anise, and cummin, neglecting justice, mercy, and truth, 
 is the history oi a most dangerous but universal tendency of 
 
352 The Sydenham Palace, Etc. 
 
 the human heart. And so, many a man whose heart swells 
 with what he thinks pious horror when he sees the letter de- 
 livered or the train run upon the sabbath-day, can pass 
 through the streets at night, undepressed and unshocked by 
 the evidences of the wide-spreading profligacy which has 
 eaten deep into his country's heart. And many a man who 
 would gaze upon the domes of a Crystal Palace, rising above 
 the trees, with somewhat of the same feeling with which he 
 would look on a temple dedicated to Juggernaut, and who 
 would fancy that something of the spirit of an ancient proph- 
 et was burning in his bosom, when his lips pronounced the 
 woe ! woe ! of a coming doom, would sit calmly in a social 
 circle of English life, and scarcely feel uneasy in listening to 
 its uncharitableness and its slanders : would hear without 
 one throb of indignation the common dastardly condemna- 
 tion of the weak for sins which are venial in the strong ; 
 would survey the relations of the rich and poor in this coun- 
 try, and remain calmly satisfied that there is nothing false in 
 them, unbrotherly and wrong. No, my brethren ! let us 
 think clearly and strongly on this matter. It may be that 
 God has a controversy with this people. It may be, as they 
 say, that our Father will chasten us by the sword of the 
 foreigner. But if He does, and if judgments are in store for 
 our country, they will fall not because the correspondence 
 of the land is carried on upon the sabbath-day : nor because 
 Sunday trains are not arrested iSy the legislature : nor be 
 cause a public permission is given to the working classes for 
 a few hours' recreation on the day of rest but because we 
 are selfish men : and because we prefer pleasure to duty, and 
 traffic to honor ; and because we love our party more than 
 our Church, and our Church more than our Christianity ; 
 and our Christianity more than truth, and ourselves more 
 than all. These are the things that defile a nation : but the 
 labor and the recreation of its poor, these are not the things 
 that defile a nation 
 
The Early Development of Jesus. 353 
 
 XIV. 
 THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS. 
 
 f< And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; *?>/ 
 ;fae grace of God was upon him." Luke ii. 40. 
 
 THE ecclesiastical year begins with Advent, then comes 
 Christmas-day. The first day of the natural year begins 
 with the infancy of the Son of Man. To-day the Gospel 
 proceeds with the brief account of the early years of Jesus. 
 
 The infinite significance of the life of Christ is not exhaust- 
 ed by saying that He was a perfect man. The notion of the 
 earlier Socinians that He was a pattern man (\fsi\oe av0pa>7roe), 
 commissioned from Heaven with a message to teach men 
 how to live, and supernaturally empowered to live in that 
 perfect way Himself, is immeasurably short of truth. For 
 perfection merely human does not attract ; rather it repels. 
 It may be copied in form : it can not be Imitated in spirit 
 for men only imitate that from which enthusiasm and life 
 are caught for it does not inspire nor fire with love. 
 
 Faultless men and pattern children you may admire 
 them, but you admire coldly. Praise them as you will, no 
 one is better *for their example. No one blames them, and 
 no one loves them : they kindle no enthusiasm ; they create 
 no likeness of themselves : they never reproduce themselves 
 in other lives the true prerogative of all original life. 
 
 If Christ had been only a faultless being, He would never 
 have set up in the world a new type of character which at 
 the end of two thousand years is fresh and life-giving and 
 inspiring still. He never would have regenerated the world. 
 He never would have " drawn all men unto Him," by being 
 lifted up a self-sacrifice, making self-devotion beautiful. In 
 Christ the divine and human blended : immutability joined 
 itself to mutability. There was in Him the divine which re- 
 mained fixed; the human which was constantly developing. 
 One uniform idea and purpose characterized His whole lile, 
 with a divine immutable unity throughout, but it was sub- 
 ject to the laws of human growth. For the soul of Christ 
 was not cast down upon this world a perfect thing at once. 
 Spotless ? yes. Faultless? yes. Tempted, yet in all points 
 without sin ? yes. But perfection is more than faultlessnoss. 
 All Scripture coincides in telling us that the ripe perfection 
 
354 The Early Development of Jesus. 
 
 of His manhood was reached step by step. There was a 
 power and a life within Him which were to be developed, 
 which could only be developed, like all human strength and 
 goodness, by toil of brain and heart. Life up-hill all the 
 way : and every foot-print by which He climbed left behind 
 for us, petrified on the hard rock, and indurated into history 
 forever, to show us when, and where, and how He toiled and 
 won. 
 
 Take a few passages to prove that His perfection was 
 gained by degrees. "It became Him for whom are all 
 things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons 
 to glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect 
 through suffering." Again, " Behold, I cast out devils, and 
 do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be 
 perfected" " Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedi- 
 ence." And in the context, " Jesus increased. . . . ." 
 
 Now see the result of this aspect of His perfectibility. In 
 that changeless element of His being which beneath all the 
 varying phases of growth remained divinely faultless, we see 
 that which we can adore. In the ever-changing, ever-grow- 
 ing, subject therefore to feebleness and endearing mutabili- 
 ty, we see that which brings Him near to us : makes Him 
 lovable, at the same time that it interprets us to ourselves. 
 
 Our subject is the early development of Jesus. In this 
 text we read of a threefold growth. 
 
 I. In strength. 
 II. In wisdom. 
 III. In grace. 
 
 First, it speaks to us simply of his early development, 
 " The child grew." 
 
 In the case of all rare excellence that is merely human, it 
 is the first object of the biographer of a marvellous man to 
 seek for surprising stories of his early life. The appetite for 
 the marvellous in this matter is almost instinctive and inva- 
 riable. Almost all men love to discover the early wonders 
 which were prophetic of after-greatness. Apparently the 
 reason is that we are unwilling to believe that wondrous ex- 
 cellence was attained by slow, patient labor. We get an ox- 
 cuse for our own slowness and stunted growth, by settling it 
 once for all, that the original differences between such men 
 and us were immeasurable. Therefore it is, I conceive, that 
 we seek so eagerly for anecdotes of early precocity. 
 
 In this spirit the fathers of the primitive Church collected 
 legends of the early life of Christ, stories of superhuman in- 
 fancy : what the infant and the child said and did. Many 
 
The Early Development of Jesus. 355 
 
 of these legends are absurd : all, as resting on no authority, 
 are rejected. 
 
 Very different from this is the spirit of the Bible narra- 
 tive. It records no marvellous stories of infantine sagacity 
 or miraculous power, to feed a prurient curiosity. Both in 
 what it tells and in what it does not tell, one thing is plain, 
 that the human life of the Son of God was natural. There 
 was first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn. In what 
 it does not say : because, had there been any thing preter- 
 natural to record, no doubt it would have been recorded. 
 In what it does say : because that little is all unaffectedly 
 simple. One anecdote, and two verses of general descrip- 
 tion, that is all which is told us of the Redeemer's childhood. 
 
 The Child, it is written, grew. Two pregnant facts. He 
 was a child, and a child that grew in heart, in intellect, in 
 size, in grace, in favor with God. Not a man in child's 
 years. No hotbed precocity marked the holiest of infancies. 
 The Son of Man grew up in the quiet valley of existence 
 in shadow, not in sunshine, not forced. No unnatural, stimu- 
 lating culture had developed the mind or feelings : no pub- 
 lic flattery : no sunning of His infantine perfections in the 
 glare of the world's show, had brought the temptation of 
 the wilderness, with which His manhood grappled, too early 
 on His soul. We know that He was childlike as other chil- 
 dren : for in after years His brethren thought His fame 
 strange, and His townsmen rejected Him. They could not 
 believe that one who had gone in and out, ate and drank and 
 worked among them, was He whose name is Wonderful. 
 The proverb, true of others, was true of Him : "A prophet is 
 not without honor, but in his own country, and among his 
 own kin, and in his own house." You know Him in a, picture 
 at once, by the halo round His brow. There was no glory 
 in His real life to mark Him. He was in the world, and the 
 world knew Him not. Gradually and gently He woke to 
 consciousness of life and its manifold meaning ; found Him- 
 self in possession of a self; by degrees opened His eyes upon 
 this outer world, and drank in its beauty. Early He felt 
 the lily of the field discourse to Him of the Invisible Loveli- 
 ness, and the ravens tell of God His Father. Gradually and 
 not at once, He embraced the sphere of human duties, and 
 He woke to His earthly relationships one by one the son 
 the brother the citizen the master. 
 
 It is a very deep and beautiful and precious truth that the 
 Eternal Son had a human and progressive childhood. Hap- 
 py the child who is suffered to be and content to be what 
 God meant it to be a child while childhood lasts. Happy 
 
356 The Early Development of Jesus. 
 
 the parent who does not force artificial manners, precocious 
 feeling, premature religion. Our age is one of stimulus and 
 high pressure. We live, as it were, our lives out fast. Ef- 
 fect is every thing. We require results produced at once : 
 something to show and something that may tell. The folio 
 of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet that stirs men's 
 curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten. " Plain living 
 and high thinking are no more." The town, with its fever 
 and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind, has 
 spread over the country : and there is no country, scarcely 
 home. To men who traverse England in a few hours and 
 spend only a portion of the year in one place, home is becom- 
 ing a vocable of past ages. 
 
 The result is, that heart and brain, which were given to 
 last for seventy years, wear out before their time. We have 
 our exhausted men of twenty-five, and our old men of forty. 
 Heart and brain give way : the heart hardens and the brain 
 grows soft. 
 
 Brethren ! the Son of God lived till thirty in an obscure 
 village of Judea, unknown : then came forth a matured and 
 perfect man with mind, and heart, and frame in perfect 
 balance of humanity. It is a Divine lesson ! I would I could 
 say as strongly as I feel deeply. Our stimulating artificial 
 culture destroys depth. Our competition, our nights turned 
 into days by pleasure, leave no time for earnestness. We 
 are superficial men. Character in the world wants root. 
 England has gained much : she has lost also much. The 
 world wants what has passed away, and which until we se- 
 cure, we shall remain the clever shallow men we are : a child- 
 hood and a youth spent in the shade a home. 
 
 Now this growth of Jesus took place in three particulars. 
 
 I. In spiritual strength. " The child waxed strong in spirit." 
 Spiritual strength consists of two things power of will, and 
 power of self-restraint. It requires two^things, therefore, for its 
 existence strong feelings and strong command over them. 
 
 Now it is here we make a great mistake : we mistake 
 strong feelings for strong character. A man who -bears all 
 before him before whose frown domestics tremble, and 
 whose bursts of fury make the children of the house quake 
 because he has his will obeyed and his own way in all things 
 we call him a strong man. The truth is, that is the weak 
 man ; it is his passions, that are strong : he, mastered by 
 them, is weak. You must measure the strength of a man by 
 the power of the feelings which he subdues, not by the power 
 of those which subdue him. 
 
The Early Development of Jesus, 357 
 
 And hence composure is very often the highest result of 
 strength. Did we never see a man receive a flagrant insult, 
 and only grow a little pale, and then reply quietly ? That 
 was a man spiritually strong. Or did we never see a man in 
 anguish stand as if carved out of solid rock, mastering him- 
 self? or one bearing a hopeless daily trial remain silent, and 
 never tell the world what it was that cankered his home- 
 peace ? That is strength. He who with strong passions re- 
 mains chaste : he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of 
 indignation in him, can be provoked and yet refrain himself, 
 and forgive these are strong men, spiritual heroes. 
 
 The Child waxed strong. Spiritual strength is reached by 
 successive steps ; fresh strength is got by every mastery of 
 self. It is the belief of the savage that the spirit of every 
 enemy he slays enters into him and becomes added to his 
 own, accumulating a warrior's strength for the day of battle : 
 therefore he slays all he can. It is true in the spiritual war- 
 fare. Every sin you slay the spirit of that sin passes into 
 you transformed into strength : every passion, not merely 
 kept in abeyance by asceticism, but subdued by a higher im- 
 pulse, is so much character strengthened. The strength of 
 the passion not expended is yours still. Understand then, 
 you are not a man of spiritual power because your impulses 
 are irresistible. They s\veep over your soul like a tornado 
 lay all flat before them ; whereupon you feel a secret pride 
 of strength. Last week men saw a vessel on this coast borne 
 headlong on the breakers, and dashing itself with terrific force 
 against the shore. It embedded itself, a miserable wreck, 
 deep in sand and shingle. Was that brig in her convulsive 
 throes strong? or was" it powerless and helpless? 
 
 No, my brethren : God's spirit in the soul an inward powei 
 of doing the thing we will and ought that is strength, noth- 
 ing else. All other force in us is only our weakness, the vio- 
 lence of driving passion. " I can do all things through Christ 
 who strengtheneth me :" this is Christian strength. " I can 
 not do the things I would :" that is the weakness of an unre- 
 deemed slave. 
 
 I instance one single evidence of strength in the early years 
 of Jesus : I find it in that calm, long waiting of thirty years 
 before He began his work. And yet all the evils he was to re- 
 dress were there, provoldng indignation, crying for interfer- 
 ence the hollowness of social life the misinterpretations of 
 Scripture the forms of worship and phraseology which had 
 hidden moral truth the injustice the priestcraft the cow- 
 ardice the hypocrisies : He had long seen them all. 
 
 All those years His soul burned within Him with a Divine 
 
358 The Early Development of Jesus. 
 
 zeal and heavenly indignation. A mere man a weak, emo 
 tional man of spasmodic feeling a hot enthusiast, would 
 have spoken out at once, and at once been crushed. The 
 Everlasting Word incarnate bided his own time : " Mine hour 
 is not yet come " matured His energies, condensed them by 
 repression and then went forth to speak and do and suffer 
 His hour was come. This is strength : the power of a divine 
 silence : the strong will to keep force till it is wanted : the 
 power to wait God's time. "He that believeth," said the 
 wise prophet, " shall not make haste." 
 
 IL Growth in wisdom " Filled with wisdom." 
 
 Let us distinguish wisdom from two things. From informa- 
 tion, first. It is one thing to be well-in formed, it is another 
 thing to be wise. Many books read, innumerable facts hived 
 up in a capacious memory, this does not constitute wisdom. 
 Books give it not : sometimes the bitterest experience gives 
 it not. Many a heart-break may have come as the result of 
 life-errors and life-mistakes ; and yet men^may be no wiser 
 than before. Before the same temptations they fall again in 
 the self-same way they fell before. Where they erred in youth 
 they err still in age. A mournful truth ! " Ever learning," 
 said St. Paul, "and never able to come to a knowledge of the 
 truth." 
 
 Distinguish wisdom, again, from talent. Brilliancy of pow- 
 ers is not the wisdom for which Solomon prayed. Wisdom 
 is of the heart rather than the intellect : the harvest of moral 
 thotightfulness, patiently reaped in through years. Two 
 things are required earnestness and love. First that rare 
 thing earnestness the earnestness which looks on life prac- 
 tically. Some of the wisest of the race have been men Avho 
 have scarcely stirred beyond home, read little, felt and 
 thought much. " Give me," said Solomon, " a wise and un- 
 derstanding heart." A heart which ponders upon life, trying 
 to understand its mystery, not in order to talk about it like 
 an orator, nor in order to theorize about it like a philosopher; 
 but in order to know how to live and how to die. 
 
 And, besides this, love is required for wisdom the love 
 which opens the heart and makes it generous, and reveals se 
 crets deeper than prudence or political economy teaches; 
 for example, " It is more blessed to give than to receive." 
 Prudence did not calculate that, love revealed it. Ko man 
 can be wise without love. Prudent : cunning : yes ; but not 
 wise. Whoever has closed his heart to love has got wisdom 
 at one entrance quite shut out. A large, genial, loving heart 
 with that we have known a ploughman wise ; without it 
 
The Early Development of Jesus. 359 
 
 we know a hundred men of statesmanlike sagacity fools- 
 profound, but not wise. There was a man who pulled down 
 his barns and built greater, a most sagacious man, getting on 
 in life, acquiring, amassing, and all for self. The men of that 
 generation called him, no doubt, wise God said, " Thou fool.' 3 
 Speaking humanly, the steps by which the wisdom of Jesus 
 was acquired were two. 
 
 1. The habit of inquiry. 
 
 2. The collision of mind with other minds. 
 
 Both these we find in this anecdote : His parents found 
 Him with the doctors in the temple, both hearing and asking 
 them questions. For the mind of man left to itself is unpro- 
 ductive: alone in the wild woods he becomes a savage. 
 Taken away from school early, and sent to the plough, the 
 country boy loses by degrees that which distinguishes him 
 from the cattle that he drives, and over his very features and 
 looks the low animal expressions creep. Mind is necessary 
 for mind. The mediatorial system extends through all God's 
 dealings with us. The higher man is the mediator between 
 God and the lower man : only through man can man receive 
 development. For these reasons, we call this event aft Jeru- 
 salem a crisis or turning-point in the history of Him who was 
 truly man. 
 
 He had come from Nazareth's quiet valley and green slopes 
 on the hillsides, where hill and valley, and cloud and wind, 
 and day and night, had nourished His child's heart from 
 communion with minds proverbially low, for the adage was, 
 "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" to the cap- 
 ital of His country, to converse with the highest and most 
 cultivated intellects. He had many a question to ask, and 
 many a difficulty to solve. As for instance, such as this: 
 How could the religion accredited in Jerusalem a religion 
 of long prayers and church services, and phylacteries, and 
 rigorous sabbaths be reconciled with the stern, manly right- 
 eousness of which He had read in the old prophets : a right- 
 eousness not of litany-makers, but of men with swords in their 
 hands and zeal in their hearts, setting up God's kingdom upon 
 earth ? a kingdom of truth, and justice, and realities were 
 they bringing in that kingdom? And if not, who should? 
 Such questions had to be felt, and asked, and pondered on. 
 Thenceforth we say therefore, in all reverence, dated the in- 
 tellectual life of Jesus. From that time " Jesus increased 
 in wisdom" 
 
 Not that they, the doctors of the temple, contributed much. 
 Those ecclesiastical pedants had not much to tell Him that 
 was worth the telling. They were thinking about theology. 
 
360 The Early Development of Jesus. 
 
 He about religion. They about rubrics and church services, 
 He about God His Father, and His will. And yet He gained 
 more from them than they from Him. Have we never ob- 
 served that the deepest revelations of ourselves are often 
 made to us by trifling remarks met with here and there in 
 conversation and books, sparks which set a whole train of 
 thoughts on fire ? Nay, that a false view given by an inferior 
 mind has led us to a true one, and that conversations from 
 which we had expected much light, turning out unsatisfac- 
 torily, have thrown us upon ourselves and God, and so be- 
 come almost the birth-times of the soul? The truth is, it is 
 not the amount which is poured in that gives wisdom : but 
 the amount of creative mind and heart working on and stirred 
 by what is so poured in. That conversation with miserable 
 priests and formalists called into activity the One Creative 
 Mind which was to fertilize the whole spiritual life of man to 
 the end of time : and Jesus grew in wisdom by a conversation 
 with pedants of the law. 
 
 What Jerusalem was to Him a town life is to us. Knowl- 
 edge develops itself in the heated atmosphere of town life. 
 Where men meet, and thought clashes with thought where 
 workmen sit round a board at work, intellectual irritability 
 must be stirred more than where men live and work alone. 
 The march of mind, as they call it, must go on. Whatever 
 evils there may be in our excited, feverish, modern life, it is 
 quite certain that we know through it more than our fore 
 fathers knew. The workman knows more of foreign politics 
 than most statesmen knew two centuries ago. The child is 
 versed in theological questions which only occupied master- 
 minds once. But the question is, whether, like the Divine 
 Child in the Temple, we are turning knowledge into wisdom, 
 and whether, understanding more of the mysteries of life, we 
 are feeling more of its sacred law ; and w r hether, having left 
 behind the priests, and the scribes, and the doctors, and the 
 fathers, we are about our Father's business, and becoming 
 wise to God. 
 
 HI. Growth in grace " the grace of God was upon Him. 75 
 And this in three points : 
 
 1. The exchange of an earthly for a heavenly home. 
 
 2. Of an earthly for a heavenly parent. 
 
 3. The reconciliation of domestic duties. 
 
 First step : Exchange of an earthly for a heavenly home. 
 Jesus was in the temple for the first time. That which was 
 dull routine to others through dead habit, was full of vivid 
 impression, fresh life, and God to Him. " My Father's busi- 
 
The Early Development of Jesus. 36 1 
 
 ness" "My Father's house." How different the meaning 
 of these expressions now from what it had been before ! Be- 
 fore all was limited to the cottage of the carpenter : now it 
 extended to the temple. He had felt the sanctities of a new 
 home. In after-life the phrase which He. had learned by 
 earthly experience obtained a divine significance. "In my 
 Father's house are many mansions." 
 
 Our first life is spontaneous and instinctive. Our second 
 life is reflective. There is a moment when the life sponta- 
 neous passes into the life reflective. We live at first by 
 instinct; then we look in, feel ourselves, ask what we are 
 and whence we came, and whither we are bound. In an 
 awful new world of mystery, and destinies, and duties, we 
 feel God, and know that our true home is our Father's house 
 which has many mansions. 
 
 Those are fearful, solitary moments; in which the heart 
 knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth 
 not with its joys. Father mother can not share these; 
 and to share is to intrude. The soul first meets God alone. 
 So with Jacob when he saw the dream-ladder: so with 
 Samuel when the voice called him: so with Christ. So 
 with every son of man, God visits the soul in secrecy, in 
 silence, and in solitariness. And the danger and duty of a 
 teacher is twofold. 1st. To avoid hastening that feeling, 
 hurrying that crisis-moment which some call conversion. 
 2d. To avoid crushing it. I have said that first religion is 
 a kind of instinct ; and if a child does not exhibit strong 
 religious sensibilities, if he seem " heedless, untouched by awe 
 or serious thought," still it is wiser not to interfere. He 
 may be still at home with God : he may be worshipping at 
 home ; as has been said with not less truth than beauty, he 
 may be 
 
 "Lying in Abraham's bosom all the year, 
 And worship at the temple's inner shrine," 
 
 God being with him when he knew it not. Very mysterious, 
 and beautiful, and wonderful, is God's communing with the 
 unconscious soul before reflection comes. The second cau- 
 tion is not to quench the feeling. Joseph and the Virgin 
 chid the Child for His absence : *"" Why hast thou dealt so 
 with us ?" They could not understand His altered ways : 
 His neglect of apparent duties : His indifference to usual 
 pursuits. They mourned over the change. And this reminds 
 us of the way in which affection's voice itself ministers to 
 ruin. When God comes to the heart, and His presence is 
 shown by thoughtfulness, and seriousness, and distaste to 
 common business, and loneliness, and solitary musings, anrj 
 
 IB 
 
362 The Early Development of Jesus. 
 
 a certain tone of melancholy, straightway we set ourselves 
 to expostulate, to rebuke, to cheer, to prescribe amusement 
 and gayeties, as the cure for seriousness which seems out of 
 place. Some of us have seen that tried ; and more fearful 
 still, seen it succeed. And we have seen the spirit of fri- 
 volity and thoughtlessness, which had been banished for a 
 time, come back again with seven spirits of evil more mighty 
 than himself, and the last state of that person worse than 
 the first. And we have watched the still small voice of 
 God in the soul silenced. And we have seen the, spirit of 
 the world get its victim back again ; and incipient goodness 
 dried up like morning dew upon the heart. And they that 
 loved him did it his parents his teachers. They quenched 
 the smoking flax, and turned out the lamp of God lighted 
 in the soul ! 
 
 The last step was reconciliation to domestic duties. He 
 went down to Nazareth, and was subject unto them. The 
 first step in spirituality is to get a distaste for common du- 
 ties. There is a time when creeds, ceremonies, services, are 
 distasteful ; when the conventional arrangements of society 
 are intolerable burdens; and when, aspiring with a sense 
 of vague longing after a goodness which shall be immeasur- 
 'able, a duty which shall transcend mere law, a something 
 which we can not put in words all restraints of rule and 
 habit gall the spirit. But the last and highest step in spir- 
 ituality is made in feeling these common duties again to be 
 divine and holy. This is the true liberty of Christ, when a 
 free man binds himself in love to duty. Not in shrinking 
 from our distasteful occupations, but in fulfilling them, do 
 we realize our high origin. And this is the blessed, second 
 childhood of Christian life. All the several stages towards 
 it seem to be shadowed forth -with accurate truthfulness in 
 the narrative of the Messiah's infancy. First the quiet, un- 
 pretending, unconscious obedience and innocence of home. 
 Then the crisis of inquiry : new strange thoughts, entrance 
 upon a new world, hopeless seeking of truth from those who 
 can not teach it, hearing many teachers and questioning all : 
 thence bewilderment and bitterness, loss of relish for former 
 duties : 'and small consolation to a man in knowing that he 
 is farther oif from heaven than when he was a boy. And 
 then, lastly, the true reconciliation and atonement of our 
 souls to God a second springtide of life a second faith 
 deeper than that of childhood not instinctive but conscious 
 trust childlike love come back again childlike wonder 
 childlike implicitness of obedience only deeper than child- 
 hood ever knew; when life has got a new meaning, when 
 
Christ's Estimate of Sin. 363 
 
 u old things are passed away, and all things are become 
 new;" when earth has become irradiate with the feeling of 
 our Father's business and our Father's home. 
 
 CHRIST'S ESTIMATE OF SIN. 
 
 "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."" 
 Luke xix. 10. 
 
 THESE words occur in the history which tells of the re- 
 covery of Zaccheus from a life of worldliness to the life of 
 God. Zaccheus was a publican ; and the publicans were 
 outcasts among the Jews, because, having accepted the 
 office under the Roman government of collecting the taxes 
 imposed by Rome upon their brethren, they were regarded 
 as traitors to the cause of Israel. Reckoned a degraded 
 class, they became degraded. It is hard for any man to live 
 above the moral standard acknowledged by his own class; 
 and the moral standard of the publican was as low as possible. 
 The first step downward is to sink in the estimation of others 
 the next and fatal step is to sink in a man's own estima- 
 tion. The value of character is that it pledges men to be 
 what they are taken for. It is a fearful thing to have no 
 character to support nothing to fall back upon nothing 
 to keep a man up to himself. Now the publicans had no 
 character. 
 
 Into the house of one of these outcasts the Son of Man 
 had entered. It was quite certain that such an act would be 
 commented upon severely by people who called themselves 
 religious : it would seem to them scandalous, an outrage 
 upon decency, a defiance to every rule of respectability and 
 decorum. No pious Israelite would be seen holding equal 
 intercourse with a publican. In anticipation of such remarks, 
 before there was time perhaps to make them, Jesus spoke 
 these words : " The Son of Man is come to seek and to save 
 that which was lost." They exhibit the peculiar aspect in 
 which the Redeemer contemplated sin. 
 
 There are two ways of looking at sin. One is the severe 
 view : it makes no allowance for frailty it will not hear of 
 temptation, nor distinguish between circumstances. Men 
 who judge in this way shut their eyes to all but two objects 
 a plain law, and a transgression of that law. There is no 
 
364 Christ's Estimate of Sin. 
 
 more to be said : let the law take its course. Now if thig 
 be the right view of sin, there 4s abundance of room left for 
 admiring what is good, and honorable, and upright : there is 
 positively no room provided for restoration. Happy if you 
 have done well ; but if ill, then nothing is before you but 
 judgment and fiery indignation. 
 
 The other view is one of laxity and false liberalism. When 
 such men speak, prepare yourself to hear liberal judgments 
 and lenient ones: a great" deal about human weakness, error 
 in judgment, mistakes, an unfortunate constitution, on which 
 the chief blame of sin is to rest a good heart. All well if 
 we wanted, in this mysterious struggle of a life, only conso- 
 lation. But we want far beyond comfort goodness ; and to 
 be merely made easy when we have done wrong will not help 
 us to that ! 
 
 Distinct from both of these was Christ's view of guilt. 
 His standard of right was high higher than ever man had 
 placed it before. Not moral excellence, but heavenly, He de- 
 manded. " Except your righteousness shall exceed the right- 
 eousness of the Scribes and" Pharisees, ye shall in no case en- 
 ter into the kingdom of heaven." Read the Sermon on the 
 Mount. It tells of a purity as of snow resting on an Alpine 
 pinnacle, white in the blue holiness of heaven ; and yet also, 
 He the All-pure had tenderness for what was not pure. He 
 who stood in divine uprightness that never faltered, felt com- 
 passion for the ruined, and infinite gentleness for human fall. 
 Broken, disappointed, doubting hearts, in dismay and bewil- 
 derment, never looked in vain to Him. Very strange, if we 
 stop to think of it, instead of repeating it as a matter of 
 course. For generally human goodness repels from it evil 
 men: they shun the society and presence of men reputed 
 good, as owls fly from light. But here was purity attracting 
 evil ; that was the wonder. Harlots and wretches steeped in 
 infamy gathered round Him. No wonder the purblind Phar- 
 isees thought there must be something in Him like such sin- 
 ners which drew them so. Like draws to like. If He chose 
 their society before that of the Pharisee, was it not because 
 of some congeniality in evil ? But they did crowd His steps, 
 and that because they saw a hope opened out in a hopeless 
 world for fallen spirits and broken hearts, ay, and seared 
 hearts. The Son of Man was forever standing among the 
 lost, and His ever predominant feelings were sadness for the 
 evil in human nature, hope for the divine good in it, and the 
 divine image never worn out wholly. 
 
 I perceive in this description three peculiarities, distin 
 guishing Christ from ordinary men. 
 
Christ's Estimate of Sin 365 
 
 I. A peculiarity in the constitution of the Redeemer's 
 moral nature. 
 
 II. A peculiarity in the objects of His solicitude. 
 III. A peculiarity in His way of treating guilt. 
 
 I. In His moral constitution. Manifested in that peculiar 
 title which he assumed The Son of Man. Let us see what 
 that implies. 
 
 1. It implies fairly His divine origin : for it is an emphatic 
 expression, and, as we may so say, an unnatural one. Im- 
 agine an apostle, St. Paul or St. John, insisting upon it per- 
 petually that he himself was human. It would almost pro- 
 voke a smile to hear either of them averring and affirming, 
 I am a son of man : it would be unnatural, the affectation of 
 condescension would be intolerable. Therefore, when we 
 hear these words from Christ, we are compelled to think of 
 them as contrasted with a higher nature. None could with- 
 out presumption remind men that He was their brother and 
 a Son of Man, except One who was also something higher, 
 even the Son of God. 
 
 2. It implies the catholicity of His brotherhood. 
 
 Nothing in the judgment of historians stands out so sharp- 
 ly distinct as race national character: nothing is more in- 
 effaceable. The Hebrew was marked from all mankind. The 
 Roman was perfectly distinct from the Grecian character; 
 as markedly different as the rough English truthfulness is 
 from Celtic brilliancy of talent. Now these peculiar nation- 
 alities are seldom combined. You rarely find the stern, old 
 Jewish sense of holiness going together with the Athenian 
 sensitiveness of what is beautiful. Not often do you find 
 together severe truth and refined tenderness. Brilliancy 
 seems opposed to perseverance. Exquisiteness of taste com- 
 monly goes along with a certain amount of untruthfulness. 
 By humanity, as a whole, we mean the aggregate of all these 
 separate excellences. Only in two places are they all found 
 together in the universal human race ; and in Jesus Christ. 
 He having, as it were, a whole humanity in Himself, com- 
 bines them all. 
 
 Now this is the universality of the nature of Jesus Christ. 
 There was in Him no national peculiarity or individual idio- 
 syncrasy. He was not the Son of the Jew, nor the Son of 
 the carpenter ; nor the offspring of the modes of living and 
 thinking of that particular century. He was the Son of Man. 
 Once in the world's history was born a MAN. Once in the 
 roll of ages, out of innumerable failures, from the stock of 
 human nature, one bud developed itself into a faultless flow- 
 
366 Chrisfs Estimate of Sin. 
 
 er. One perfect specimen of humanity has God exhibited on 
 earth. 
 
 The best and most catholic of Englishmen has his preju- 
 dices. All the world over, our greatest writer would be rec- 
 ognized as having the English cast of thought. The pattern 
 Jew would seem Jewish everywhere but in Judea. Take 
 Abraham, St. John, St. Paul, place them where you will, in 
 China or in Peru, they are Hebrews : they could not com- 
 in and all sympathies: their life could not be imitable except 
 in part. They are foreigners in every land, and out of place 
 in every country but their own. But Christ is the King of 
 men, and " draws all men," because all character is in Him, 
 separate from nationalities and limitations. As if the life- 
 blood of every nation were in His veins, and that which is 
 best and truest in every man, and that which is tenderest, 
 and gentlest, and purest in every woman, were in His char- 
 acter. He is emphatically the Son of Man. 
 
 Out of this arose two powers of His sacred humanity the 
 universality of His sympathies, and their intense particular 
 personality. 
 
 The universality of His sympathies : for, compare Him 
 with any one of the sacred characters of Scripture. You 
 know how intensely national they were in their sympathies, 
 .priests, prophets, and apostles: for example, the apostles 
 "marvelled that He spake with a woman of Samaria:" just 
 before His resurrection, their largest charity had not reached 
 beyond this, " Lord, wilt thou at this time restore the king- 
 dom unto Israel?" Or, to come down to modern times, 
 when His spirit has been moulding men's ways of thought 
 for many ages : now, when we talk of our philanthropy and 
 catholic liberality, here in Christian England, we have scarce- 
 ly any fellow-feeling, true and genuine, with other nations, 
 other churches, other parties, than our own : we care nothing 
 for Italian or Hungarian struggles ; we think of Romanists as 
 the Jew thought of Gentiles ; we speak of German Protest- 
 ants in the same proud, wicked, self-sufficient way in which 
 the Jew spoke of Samaritans. 
 
 Unless we bring such matters home, and away from vague 
 generalities, and consider what we and aJl men are, or rather 
 are not, we can not comprehend with due wonder the mighty 
 sympathies of the heart of Christ. Kone of the miserable 
 antipathies that fence us from all the world, bounded the out- 
 goings of that love, broad and deep and wide as the heart 
 of God. Wherever the mysterious pulse of human life waa 
 beating, wherever aught human was in struggle, there to Him 
 was a thing not common or unclean, but cleansed by God and 
 
Christ's Estimate of Sin. 367 
 
 Bacred. Compare the daily, almost indispensable language 
 of our life with His spirit. " Common people ?" Point us 
 out the passage where He called any people that God His Fa- 
 ther made, common ? " Lower orders ?" Tell us when and 
 where He, whose home was the workshop of the carpenter, 
 authorized you or me to know any man after the flesh as low 
 or high ? To Him who called Himself the Son of Man, the 
 link was manhood. And that he could discern even when it 
 was marred. Even in outcasts His eye could recognize the 
 sanctities of a nature human still. Even in the harlot " one 
 of Eve's family :" a " son of Abraham " even in Zaccheus. 
 
 Once more, out of that universal, catholic nature rose 
 another power the power of intense, particular, personal af- 
 fections. He was the Brother and Saviour of the human 
 race ; but this because He was the Brother and Saviour of 
 every separate man in it. 
 
 Now it is very easy to feel great affection for a country as 
 a whole ; to have, for instance, great sympathies for Poland, 
 or Ireland, or America, and yet not care a whit for any single 
 man in Poland, and to have strong antipathies to every sin- 
 gle individual American. Easy to be a warm lover of Eng- 
 land, and yet not love one living Englishman. Easy to set a 
 great value on a flock of sheep, and yet have no particular care 
 for any one sheep or lamb. If it were killed, another of the 
 same species might replace it. Easy to have fine, large, liberal 
 views about the working classes, or the emancipation of the 
 negroes, and yet never have done a loving act to one. Easy 
 to "be a great philanthropist, and yet have no strong friend- 
 ships, no deep personal attachments. 
 
 For the idea of an universal manlike sympathy was not new 
 when Christ was born. The reality was new. But before 
 this, in the Roman theatre, deafening applause was called 
 forth by this sentence, " I am a man nothing that can affect 
 man is indifferent to me." A fine sentiment that was all. 
 Every pretense of realizing that sentiment, except one, has been 
 a failure. One and but One has succeeded in loving man : and 
 that by loving men. No sublime high-sounding language in 
 His lips about " educating the masses," or " elevating the 
 people." The charlatanry of our modern sentiment had not 
 appeared then : it is but the parody of His love. 
 
 What was His mode of sympathy with men ? He did not 
 sit down to philosophize about the progress of the species, or 
 dream about a millennium. He gathered round Him twelve 
 men. He formed one friendship, special, concentrated, deep. 
 He did not give himself out as the leader of the publican's 
 cause, or the champion of the rights of the dangerou! 
 
368 Christ's Estimate of Sin. 
 
 classes ; but He associated with Himself Matthew, a publican 
 called from the detested receipt of custom. He went into 
 the bouse of Zaccheus, and treated him like a fellow-creature 
 a brother, and a son of Abraham. His catholicity or phi- 
 lanthropy was not an abstraction, but an aggregate of person* 
 al attachments. 
 
 IL Peculiarity in the objects of Christ's solicitude. 
 
 He had come to seek and to save the " lost." The world 
 is lost, and Christ came to save the world. But by the lost 
 in this place He does not mean the world ; He means a spe 
 cial class, lost in a more than common sense, as sheep are lost 
 which have strayed from the flock, and wandered far beyond 
 all their fellows scattered in the wilderness. 
 
 Some men are lost by the force of their own passions, as 
 Balaam was by love of gold : as Saul was by self-will, ending 
 in jealousy, and pride darkened into madness : as Hainan was 
 by envy indulged and brooded on: as the harlots were, 
 through feelings pure and high at first, inverted and pervert- 
 ed : as Judas was by secret dishonesty, undetected in its first 
 beginnings, the worst misfortune that can befall a tendency 
 to a false life. And others are lost by the entanglement of 
 outward circumstances, Avhich make escape, humanly speak- 
 ing, impossible. Such were the publicans : men forced, like 
 executioners, into degradation. An honest publican, or a 
 holy executioner, would be miracles to marvel at. And some 
 are lost by the laws of society, which while defending society 
 have no mercy for its outcasts, and forbid their return, fallen 
 once, forever. 
 
 Society has power to bind on earth ; and what it binds is 
 bound upon the soul indeed. For a man or woman who has 
 lost self-respect is lost indeed. 
 
 And oh ! the untold world of agony contained in that ex- 
 pression " a lost soul !" agony exactly in proportion to the 
 nobleness of original powers. For it is a strange and mourn- 
 ful truth, that the qualities which enable men to shine are 
 exactly those which minister to the worst ruin. God's high- 
 est gifts talent, beauty, feeling, imagination, power : they 
 carry with them the possibility of the highest heaven and the 
 lowest hell. Be sure that it is by that which is highest in 
 you that you may be lost. It is the awful warning, and net 
 the excuse of evil, that the light which leads astray is ligl.t 
 from heaven. The shallow fishing-boat glides safely over the 
 reefs where the noble bark strands : it is the very might and 
 majesty of her career that bury the sharp rock deeper in hei 
 bosom. There are thousands who are not lost (l*ke the ro 
 
Christ's Estimate of Sin. 369 
 
 gpectable Pharisees), because they had no impetuous impulses, 
 no passion, no strong enthusiasm, by the perversion of which 
 they could be lost. 
 
 Now this will explain to us what there was in these lost 
 ones which left a hope for their salvation, and which Jesus 
 saw in them to seek and save. Outwardly men saw a crust 
 of black scowling impenitence. Reprobates they called them. 
 Below that outward crust ran a hot lava-stream of anguish: 
 What was that ? The coward fear of hell ? Nay, hardened 
 men defy hell. The anguish of the lost ones of this world is 
 not fear of punishment. It was, and is, the misery of having 
 quenched a light brighter than the sun : 'the intolerable sense 
 of being sunk : the remorse of knowing that they were not 
 what they might have been. And He saw that : He knew 
 that it was the germ of life which God's spirit could develop 
 into salvation. 
 
 It was His work and His desire to save such, and in this 
 world a new and strange solicitude it was, for the world had 
 seen before nothing like it. 
 
 Not half a century ago a great man was seen stooping and 
 working in a charnel-house of bones. Uncouth, nameless 
 fragments lay around him, which the workmen had dug up 
 and thrown aside as rubbish. They belonged to some far- 
 back age, and no man knew what they were or whence. Few 
 men cared. The world was merry at the sight of a philoso- 
 pher groping among mouldy bones. But when that creative 
 mind, reverently discerning the fontal types of living being 
 in diverse shapes, brought together those strange fragments, 
 bone to bone, and rib to claw, and tooth to its own corre- 
 sponding vertebrae, recombining the wondrous forms of pjut 
 ages, and presenting each to the astonished world as it 
 moved and lived a hundred thousand ages back, then men 
 began to perceive that a new science had begun on earth. 
 
 And such was the work of Christ. They saw Him at work 
 among the fragments and mouldering wreck of our humanity, 
 and sneered. But He took the dry bones such as Ezekirl 
 saw in vision, which no man thought could live, and He 
 breathed into them the breath of life. He took the scattered 
 fragments of our ruined nature, interpreted their meaning, 
 showed the original intent of those powers, which were now 
 destructive only, drew out from publicans and sinners yearn- 
 ings which were incomprehensible, and feelings which were 
 misunderstood, vindicated the beauty of the original inten- 
 tion, showed the Divine Ordej below the chaos, exhibited to 
 the world once more a human soul in the form in which GocJ 
 had made it. saying to the dry bones " Live I" 
 
 16* 
 
370 Christ's Estimate of Sin. 
 
 Only what in the great foreigner was a taste, in Christ was 
 love. In the one the gratification of an enlightened curiosi- 
 ty : in the other the gratification of a sublime affection. In 
 the philosopher it was a longing to restore and. reproduce 
 the past. In Christ a hope for the future " to seek and to 
 save that which was lost." 
 
 Ill, A peculiarity in His mode of treatment. How were 
 these lost ones to be restored ? The human plans are reducible 
 to three. Governments have tried chastisement for the rec- 
 lamation of offenders. For ages that was the only expedi- 
 ent known either to Church or State. Time has written 
 upon it failure. I do not say that penal severity is not need- 
 ful. Perhaps it is, for protection, and for the salutary ex- 
 pression of indignation against certain forms of evil. But as 
 a system of reclamation it has failed. Did the rack ever re- 
 claim in heart one heretic ? Did the scaffold ever soften one 
 felon ? One universal fact of history replies : where the 
 penal code was most sanguinary, and when punishments 
 were most numerous, crime was most abundant. 
 
 Again, society has tried exclusion for life. I do not pre- 
 tend to say that it may not be needful. It may be necessary 
 to protect your social purity by banishing offenders of a cer- 
 tain sort forever. I only say for recovery it is a failure. 
 Whoever knew one case where the ban of exclusion was 
 hopeless, and the shame of that exclusion reformed ? Did 
 we ever hear of a fallen creature made moral by despair ? 
 Name, if you can, the publican or the harlot in any age 
 brought back to goodness by a Pharisee, or by the system 
 of a Pharisee. 
 
 And once more, some governors have tried the system of 
 indiscriminate lenity : they forgave great criminals, trusting 
 all the future to gratitude : they passed over great sins, they 
 sent away the ringleaders of rebellion with honors heaped 
 upon them: they thought this was the Gospel: they expect- 
 ed dramatic emotion to work wonders. How far this miser- 
 able system has succeeded, let those tell us w r ho have studied 
 the history of our South African colonies for the last twenty 
 years. We were tired of cruelty we tried sentiment we 
 trusted to feeling. Feeling failed : we only made hypo- 
 crites, and encouraged rebellion by impunity. Inexorable 
 severity, rigorous banishment, indiscriminate and mere for- 
 givingness all are failures. 
 
 In Christ's treatment of guilt we find three peculiarities: 
 Sympathy, holiness, firmness. 
 
 1. By human sympathy. In the treatment of Zaccheui 
 
Christ 's Estimate of Sin. 371 
 
 this was almost all We read of almost nothing else as the 
 instrument of that wonderful reclamation. One thing only, 
 Christ went to his house self-invited. But that one was ev- 
 ery thing. Consider it Zaccheus was, if he were like othei 
 publicans, a hard and hardened man. He felt people shrink 
 from him in the streets. He lay under an imputation : and 
 we know how that feeling of being universally suspected 
 and misinterpreted makes a man bitter, sarcastic, and de 
 fiant. And so the outcast would go home, look at his gold 
 rejoice in the revenge he could take by false accusations 
 felt a pride in knowing that they might hate, but could not 
 help fearing him : scorned the world, and shut up his heart 
 against it. 
 
 At last, one whom all men thronged to see, and all men 
 honored, or seemed to honor, came to him, offered to go home 
 and sup with him. For the first time for many years Zac- 
 cheus felt that he was not despised, and the floodgates of 
 that avaricious, shut heart were opened in a tide oi love and 
 generosity.' " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to 
 the poor ; and if I have taken any thing from any man by 
 false accusation, I restore him fourfold." He was reclaimed 
 to human feeling by being taught that he was a man still ; 
 recognized and treated like a man. A Son of Man had come 
 to " seek " him the lost. 
 
 2. By the exhibition of Divine holiness. 
 
 The holiness of Christ differed from all earthly, common, 
 vulgar holiness. Wherever it was, it elicited a sense of sin- 
 fulness and imperfection. Just as the purest cut crystal of 
 the rock looks dim beside the diamond, so the best men felt 
 a sense of guilt growing distinct upon their souls. When 
 the Anointed of God came near, " Depart from me," said the 
 bravest and truest of them all, "for I am a sinful man, O 
 Lord." 
 
 But at the same time the holiness of Christ did not awe 
 men away from Him, nor repel them. It inspired them with 
 hope. It was not that vulgar unapproachable sanctity which 
 makes men awkward in its presence, and stands aloof. Its 
 peculiar characteristic was that it made men enamored of 
 goodness. It " drew all men unto Him." This is the differ 
 ence between greatness that is first-rate and greatness which 
 is second-rate between heavenly and earthly goodness. 
 The second-rate and the earthly draws admiratipn on itself. 
 You say, " how great an act how good a man !" The first- 
 rate and the heavenly imparts itself inspires a spirit. You 
 feel a kindred something in you that rises up to meet it, 
 and draws you out of yourself, making you better than you 
 
372 The Sanctification of Christ. 
 
 were before, and opening out the infinite possibilities of yoal 
 life and soul. 
 
 And such pre-eminently was the holiness of Christ. Had 
 some earthly great or good one come to Zaccheus's house, a 
 prince or a nobleman, his feeling would have been, What 
 condescension is there ! But when He came whose every 
 ^word and act had in it life and power, no such barren reflec- 
 iii:>n was the result: but instead, the beauty of holiness had 
 become a power within him, and a longing for self-consecra- 
 tion. " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the 
 poor: and if I have taken any thing from any man by false 
 accusation, I restore him fourfold." 
 
 By Divine sympathy, and by the Divine Image exhibited 
 in the speaking act of Christ, the lost was sought and saved. 
 He was saved, as alone all fallen men can be saved. " Be- 
 holding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, he was changed 
 into the same image.'' And this is the very essence of the 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are redeemed by the life of God 
 without us, manifested in the person of Christ, kindling into 
 flame the life of God that is within us. Without Him we 
 can do nothing. Without Him the warmth that was in 
 Zaccheus's heart would have smouldered uselessly away. 
 Through Him it became life and light, and the lost was 
 saved. 
 
 XVI. 
 THE SANCTIFICATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 "And for their sakes'I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified 
 through the truth." John xvii. 19. 
 
 THE prayer in which these words occur is given to us by 
 the Apostle John alone. Perhaps only St. John could give 
 it, for it belongs to the peculiar province of his revelation. 
 He presents us with more of the heart of Christ than the 
 other apostles: with less of the outward manifestations. He 
 gives us more conversations, fewer miracles : more of the in 
 ner life, more of what Christ was, less of what Christ did. 
 
 St. John's mind was not argumentative, but intuitive 
 There are two ways of reaching truth : by reasoning it out 
 and by feeling it out. All the profoundest truths are felt 
 out. The deep glances into truth are got by love. Love a 
 man, that is the best way of understanding him. Feel a 
 truth, that is the only way of comprehending it. 
 
The Sane tification of Christ. 373 
 
 Not that you can put your sense of such truths into words 
 in the shape of accurate maxims or doctrines : but the truth 
 is reached, notwithstanding.* 
 
 Now St. John felt out truth. He understood his Lord by 
 loving him. You find no long trains of argument in St. 
 John's writings : an atmosphere of contemplation pervades 
 all. Brief, full sentences, glowing with imagery of which 
 the mere prose intellect makes nonsense, and which a warm 
 .heart alone interprets, that is the character of his writing . 
 very different from the other apostles'. St. Peter's knowl- 
 edge of Christ was formed by impetuous mistakes, corrected 
 slowly and severely. St. Paul's Christianity was formed by 
 principles wrought out glowing hot, as a smith hammers out 
 ductile iron, in hk unresting, earnest fire of thought, where 
 the Spirit dwelt in warmth and light forever, kindling the 
 Divine fire of inspiration. St. John and St. John's Christian- 
 ity were formed by personal view of Christ, by intercourse 
 with Him, and by silent contemplation. Slowly, month by 
 month and year by year, he gazed on Christ in silence and 
 thoughtful adoration : " reflecting as from a glass the glory 
 of the Lord," he became like Him caught His tones, His 
 modes of thought, His very expressions, and became partaker 
 of His inward life. A " Christ was formed* in him." 
 
 Hence it was that this prayer was revealed to St. John 
 alone of the apostles, and by him alone recorded for us. 
 The Saviour's mind touched his : through secret sympathy 
 he was inspired with the mystic consciousness of what had 
 passed and what was passing in the deeps of the soul of 
 Christ. Its secret longings and its deepest struggles were 
 known to John alone. 
 
 This particular sentence in the prayer which I have taken 
 for the text was peculiarly after the heart of the Apostle 
 John. For I have said that to him the true life of Christ 
 was rather the inner life than the outward acts of life. Now 
 this sentence from the lips of Jesus speaks of the atoning 
 sacrifice as an inward mental act rather than as an outward 
 deed : a self-consecration wrought out in the will of Christ. 
 For their sakes I am sanctifying myself. That is a resolve 
 a secret of the inner life. No wonder that it was recorded 
 by St. John. The text has two parts. 
 
 I. The sanctification of Jesus Christ. 
 II. The sanctification of His people. 
 
 I. Christ's sanctification of himself. " For their sakes I 
 sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through 
 * Compare 1 Cor. ii. 15, 16. 
 
374 The Sanctification of Christ. 
 
 the truth." We must explain this word " sanctify ;" upon it 
 the whole meaning turns. Clearly it has not the ordinary 
 popular sense here of making holy. Christ was holy. H 
 could not by an inward effort or struggle makt Himself 
 holy, for He was that already. Let us trace the history of 
 the word " sanctity " in the early pages of the Jewish his- 
 tory. 
 
 When the destroying angel smote the first-born of the 
 Egyptian families, the symbolic blood on the lintel of every 
 Hebrew house protected the eldest born from the plague of 
 death. In consequence, a law of Moses viewed every eldest 
 son in a peculiar light. He was reckoned as a thing devoted 
 to the Lord redeemed, and therefore set apart. The word 
 used to express this devotion is sanctify. "The Lord said 
 unto Moses, Sanctify unto me all the first-born, whatsoever 
 openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of 
 man and of beast : it is mine." By a subsequent arrange- 
 ment these first-born were exchanged for the Levites. In- 
 stead of the eldest son in each family, a whole tribe was 
 taken, and reckoned as set apart and devoted to Jehovah, 
 just as now a substitute is provided to serve in war in 
 another's stead. Therefore the tribe of Levi were said to be 
 sanctified to God: 
 
 Ask we what was meant by saying that the Levites were 
 sanctified to God ? The ceremony of their sanctification will 
 explain it to us. It was a very significant one. The priest 
 touched with the typical blood of a sacrificed animal the Le- 
 vite's right hand, right eye, right foot. This was the Le- 
 vite's sanctification. It devoted every faculty and every 
 power of seeing, doing, walking, the right-hand faculties 
 the best and choicest to God's peculiar service. He was a 
 man set apart. To sanctify, therefore, in the Hebrew phrase, 
 meant to devote or consecrate. Let us pause for a few mo- 
 ments to gather up the import of this ceremony. 
 
 The first-born are a nation's hope: they may be said to 
 represent a whole nation. The consecration, therefore, of the 
 first-born was the consecration of the entire nation by their 
 representatives, Now the Levites were substituted for the 
 first-born. The Levites consequently represented all Israel ; 
 and by their consecration the life of Israel was declared to 
 be in idea and by right a consecrated life to God. But fur- 
 ther still. As the Levites represented Israel, so Israel itself 
 was but a part taken for the whole, and represented the 
 whole human race. If any one thinks this fanciful, let him 
 remember the principle of representation on which the whole 
 Jewish system was built. For example the first-fruits of 
 
The Sanctification of Christ. 375 
 
 the harvest were consecrated to God. Why ? to declare 
 that portion and that only to be God's? No; St. Paul saya 
 as a part for the whole, to teach and remind that the whole 
 harvest was his. " If the first-fruits be holy, the lump also 
 is holy." So in the same way, God consecrated a peculiar 
 people to himself? Why? The Jews say because they 
 alone are His. We say, as a part representative of the 
 whole, to show in one nation what all are meant to be. The 
 holiness of Israel is a representative holiness. Just as the 
 consecrated Levite stood for what Israel was meant to be, 
 so the anointed and separated nation represents forever what 
 the whole race of man is in the Divine Idea a thing whose 
 proper life is perpetual consecration. 
 
 One step farther. This being the true life of humanity, 
 name it how you will, sanctification, consecration, devotion, 
 sacrifice, Christ the Representative of the Race, submits 
 Himself in the text to the universal law of this devotion. 
 The true law of every life is consecration to God : therefore 
 Christ says, I consecrate myself: else He had not been a 
 Man in God's idea of Manhood for the idea of Man which 
 God had been for ages laboring to give through a consecra- 
 ted tribe and a consecrated nation to the world, was the idea 
 of a being whose life-law is sacrifice, every act and every 
 thought being devoted to God. 
 
 Accordingly, this is the view which Christ Himself gave 
 of His own Divine humanity. He spoke of it as of a thing 
 devoted by a Divine decree. " Say ye of Him, whom the 
 Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blas- 
 phemest ; because I said I am the Son of God ?" 
 
 We have reached, therefore, the meaning of this word in 
 the text, " For their sakes I sanctify," i. e., consecrate or de- 
 vote " myself." The first meaning of sanctify is to set apart. 
 But to set apart for God is to devote or consecrate ; and to 
 consecrate a thing is to make it holy. And thus we have 
 the three meanings of the word, viz., to set apart, to devote, 
 to make holy rising all out of one simple idea. To go 
 somewhat into particulars. This sanctification is spoken of 
 here chiefly as threefold: Self-devotion by inward resolve; 
 self-devotion to the truth ; self-devotion for the sake of 
 others. 
 
 1. He devoted Himself ?/ inward resolve. " I sanctify my- 
 self." God His Father had devoted Him before. He had 
 sanctified and sent Him. It only remained that this devo- 
 tion should become by His own act se(/*-devotion : com- 
 pleted by His own will. Now in that act of will consisted 
 His sanctification of Himself. 
 
376 The Sanctification of Christ. 
 
 For observe, this was done within : in secret, solitary 
 struggle in wrestling with all temptations which deterred 
 Him from His work in resolve to do it unflinchingly : in 
 real human battle and victory. 
 
 Therefore this self-sanctification applies to the whole tone 
 and history of His mind. He was forever devoting Himself 
 to work forever bracing His human spirit to sublime re- 
 solve. But it applies peculiarly to certain special moments, 
 when some crisis came, as on this present occasion, which 
 called for an act of will. 
 
 The first of these moments which we read of came when 
 He was twelve years of age. We pondered on it a few 
 weeks ago. In the temple, that earnest conversation with 
 the doctors indicates to us that He had begun to revolve 
 His own mission in His mind ; for the answer to His moth- 
 er's expostulations shows us what had been the subject of 
 those questions He had been putting : " Wist ye not that I 
 must be about my Father's business ?" Solemn words, sig- 
 nificant of a crisis in His mental history. He had been ask- 
 ing those doctors about His Father's business : what it was, 
 and how it was to be done by Him of whom He had read in 
 the prophets, even Himself. This was the earliest self-devo- 
 tion of Messiah : the boy was sanctifying Himself for life 
 and manhood's work. 
 
 The next time was in that preparation of the wilderness 
 which we call Christ's temptation. You can not look deep- 
 ly into that strange story without perceiving that the true 
 meaning of it lies in this, that the Saviour in that conflict 
 was steeling His soul against the threefold form in which 
 temptation presented itself to Him in after-life, to mar or 
 neutralize His ministry. 
 
 1. To convert the hard, stony life of duty into the comfort 
 and enjoyment of this life : to barter, like Esau, life for pot- 
 tage : to use Divine powers in Him only to procure bread of 
 earth. 
 
 2. To distrust God, and try impatiently some wild, sud- 
 den plan, instead of His meek and slow-appointed ways to 
 cast Himself from the temple, as we dash ourselves against 
 our destiny. 
 
 3. To do homage to the majesty of wrong: to worship 
 evil for the sake of success : to make the world His own by 
 force or by crooked policy, instead of by suffering. 
 
 These were the temptations of His life, as they are of ours. 
 If you search through His history, you find that all trial was 
 reducible to one or other of these three forms. In the wil- 
 derness His soul foresaw them all; they were all in spirit 
 
The Sanctification of Christ. 377 
 
 met then, fought and conquered before they came in their 
 reality. In the wilderness He had sanctified and consecra- 
 ted Himself against all possible temptation, and life thence- 
 forward was only the meeting of that in fact which had 
 been in resolve met already a vanquished foe. 
 
 I said He had sanctifieci Himself against every trial : I 
 should have said, against every one except the last. The 
 temptation had not exhibited the terrors and the form of 
 death : He had yet to nerve and steel Himself to that. And 
 hence the lofty sadness which characterizes His later minis- 
 try, as he went down from the sunny mountain-tops of life 
 into the darkening shades of the valley where lies the grave. 
 There is a perceptible difference between the tone of His 
 earlier and that of His later ministry, which by its evidently 
 undesigned truthfulness gives us a strong feeling of the re- 
 ality of the history. 
 
 At first all is bright, full of hope, signalized by success 
 and triumph. You hear from Him joyous words of antici- 
 pated victory : " I beheld Satan as lightning fall from 
 heaven." And we recollect how His first sermon in the 
 synagogue of Capernaum was hailed; how all eyes were fix- 
 ed on Him, and His words seemed full of grace. 
 
 Slowly after this there conies a change over the spirit of 
 His life. The unremitting toil becomes more superhuman, 
 " I must work the work of Him that sent Me while it is 
 day : the night cometh when no man can work." The cold 
 presentiment of doom hangs more often on Him. He begins 
 to talk to His disciples in mysterious hints of the betrayal 
 and the cross. He is going down into the cloud-land, full 
 of shadows where nothing is distinct, and His step becomes 
 more solemn, and His language more deeply sad. Words 
 of awe, the words as of a soul struggling to pierce through 
 thick glooms of mystery, and doubt, and death, come more 
 often from His lips : for instance, " Now is My soul troub- 
 led : and what shall I say ? Father, save Me from this hour 
 but for this cause came I into the world." " My soul is ex- 
 ceeding sorrowful, even unto death." And here in the text 
 is another of those sentences of mournful grandeur : " For 
 their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sancti- 
 fied through the truth." 
 
 Observe the present tense. Not I shall devote Myself 
 but I sanctify, i. e., I am sanctifying Myself. It was a men- 
 tal struggle going on then. This prayer was, so to speak, 
 part of His Gethsemane prayer, the first utterances of i f -- 
 broken by interruption then finished in the garden. The 
 consecration and the agony had begun the long inward 
 
378 The Sanctification of Christ. 
 
 battle which was not complete till the words came, too 
 solemnly to be called triumphantly, though they were in- 
 deed the trumpet-tones of man's erand victory, " It is fin- 
 ished." 
 
 Secondly the sanctification of Christ was self-devotion to 
 the truth, I infer this, because He says, " I sanctify Myself, 
 that they also might be sanctified through the truth.' 1 
 " Also " implies that what His consecration was, theirs was. 
 Now theirs is expressly said to be sanctification by the 
 truth. That, then, was His consecration too. It was the 
 truth which devoted Him and marked Him out for death. 
 
 For it was not merely death that made Christ's sacrifice 
 the world's atonement. There is no special virtue in mere 
 death, even though it be the death of God's own Son. 
 Blood does not please God. " As I live, saith the Lord, I 
 have no pleasure in the death of the sinner." Do you think 
 God has pleasure in the blood of the righteous ? blood mere- 
 ly as blood ? death merely as a debt of nature paid ? suffer- 
 ing merely, as if suffering had in it mysterious virtue ? 
 
 No, my brethren ! God can be satisfied with that only 
 which pertains to the conscience and the will ; so says the 
 writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews : " Sacrifices could nev- 
 er make the comers thereunto perfect." The blood of Christ 
 was sanctified by the will with which He shed it : it is that 
 which gives it value. It was a sacrifice offered up to con- 
 science. He suffered as a martyr to the truth. He fell in 
 fidelity to a cause. The sacred cause in which He fell was 
 love to the human race : " Greater love hath no man than 
 this, that a man give his life for his friends." Now that 
 truth was the cause in which Christ died. We have His 
 own words as proof: " To this end was I born, and for this 
 cause came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth." 
 
 Let us see how His death was a martyrdom of witness to 
 truth. 
 
 1. He proclaimed the identity between religion and good- 
 ness. He distinguished religion from correct views, accurate 
 religious observances, and even from devout feelings. He 
 said that to be religious is to be good. " Blessed are the 
 pure in heart .... Blessed are the merciful .... Blessed 
 are the meek." Justice, mercy, truth these He proclaimed 
 as the real righteousness of God. 
 
 But because He taught the truth of Godliness, the Phari- 
 Bees became his enemies : those men of opinions and maxims . 
 those men of ecclesiastical, ritual and spiritual pretensions. 
 
 Again, He taught spiritual religion. God was not in the 
 temple : the temple was to come down. "But religion would 
 
The Sanctification of Christ. 379 
 
 survive the temple. God's temple was man's soul ; and be- 
 cause He taught spiritual worship, the priests became his en- 
 emies. Hence came those accusations that He blasphemed 
 the temple : that he had said contemptuously, " Destroy this 
 temple, and in three days I will raise it up." 
 
 Once more he struck a death-blow at Jewish exclusive- 
 ness : He proclaimed the truth of the character of God. God 
 the Father : the hereditary descent from Abraham was noth- 
 ing : the inheritance of Abraham's faith was every thing. 
 God therefore would admit the Gentiles who inherited that 
 faith. For God loved the world, not a private few : not the 
 Jew only, not the elder brother who had been all his life at 
 home, but the prodigal younger brother too, who had wan- 
 dered far arid had sinned much. 
 
 Now because He proclaimed this salvation of the Gentiles, 
 the whole Jewish nation were offended. The first time he 
 ever hinted it at Capernaum, they took Him to the brow of 
 the hill whereon their city was built that they might throw 
 Him thence. 
 
 And thus by degrees priests, Pharisees, rulers, rich and 
 poor He had roused them all against Him : and the Divine 
 Martyr of the truth stood alone at last beside the cross, when 
 the world's life was to be won, without a friend. 
 
 All this we must bear in mind, if we would understand the 
 expression, " I sanctify myself." He was sanctifying and 
 consecrating Himself for this to be a witness to the truth 
 a devoted One, consecrated in His heart's deeps to die loyal 
 to truth, even though it should have to give as the reward of 
 allegiance, not honors and kingdoms, but only a crown of 
 thorns. 
 
 3. The self-sanctification of Christ was for the sake of oth- 
 ers. " For their sakes." He obeyed the law of self-consecra- 
 tion for Himself, else He had not been man ; for that law is 
 the universal law of our human existence. But he obeyed it 
 not for Himself alone, but for others also. It was vicarious 
 :jelf-devotion, i. e., instead of others, as the Representative of 
 Miem. " For their sakes," as an example, " that they also 
 might be sanctified through the truth." 
 
 Distinguish between a model and an example. You copy 
 the outline of a model : you imitate the spirit of an example. 
 Christ is our example : Christ is not our model. You might 
 copy the life of Christ : make Him a model in every act : and 
 yet you might be not one whit more of a Christian than be- 
 fore. You might wash the feet of poor fishermen as He did, 
 live a wandering life with nowhere to lay your head. You 
 might go about teaching, and never use any worAs but His 
 
380 The Sanctification of Christ. 
 
 words, never express a religious truth except in Bible lan- 
 guage : have no home, and mix with publicans and harlots. 
 Then Christ would be your model : you would have copied 
 His life like a picture, line for line, and shadow for shadow ; 
 yet you might not be Christlike. 
 
 On the other hand, you might imitate Christ, get his Spirit, 
 breathe the atmosphere of thought which He breathed : do 
 not one single act which He did, but every act in His spirit: 
 you might be rich, whereas He was poor : never teach, where- 
 as He was teaching always ; lead a life in all outward partic- 
 ulars the very contrast and opposite of His : and yet the spirit 
 of His self-devotion might have saturated your whole being, 
 and penetrated into the life of every act and the essence of 
 every thought. Then Christ would have become your exam- 
 ple : for we can only imitate that of which we have caught 
 the spirit. 
 
 Accordingly, He sanctified Himself that He might become 
 a living, inspiring example, firing men's hearts by love to imita- 
 tion a burning and a shining light shed upon the mystery 
 of life, to guide by a spirit of warmth lighting from within. 
 In Christ there is not given to us a faultless essay on the love- 
 liness of self-consecration, to convince our reason how beau- 
 tiful it is : but there is given to us a self-consecrated One : 
 a living Truth, a living Person ; a life that was beautiful, a 
 death that we feel in our inmost hearts to have been divine : 
 and all this in order that the Spirit of that consecrated life 
 and consecrated death, through love, and wonder, and deep 
 enthusiasm, may pass into us, and sanctify us also to the 
 truth in life and death. He sacrificed Himself that we might 
 offer ourselves a living sacrifice to God. 
 
 IL Christ's sanctitication of His people : " That they also 
 might be sanctified through the truth." 
 
 To sanctify means two things. It means to devote, and it 
 means to set apart. Yet these two meanings are but differ- 
 ent sides of the same idea : for to be devoted to God is to be 
 separated from all that is opposed to God. Those whom 
 Christ sanctifies are separated from two things : from the 
 world's evil, and from the world's spirit. 
 
 1. From the world's evil So in verse 15, " I pray not that 
 thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou 
 fchouldest keep them from the evil." Not from physical evil 
 not from pain : Christ does not exempt his own from such 
 kinds of evil. Nay, we hesitate to call pain and sorrow evils, 
 when we remember what bright characters they have ma'de, 
 and when we recollect that almost all who came to Christ 
 
The Sanctification of Christ. 381 
 
 came impelled by suffering of some kind or other. For ex 
 ample, the Syrophenician woman had been driven to "fall at 
 His feet and worship Him," by the anguish of the tormented 
 daughter whom she had watched. It was a widow that cast 
 into the treasury all her living, and that widow poor. 
 
 Possibly want and woe will be seen hereafter, when this 
 world of appearance shall have passed away, to have been, 
 not evils, but God's blessed angels and ministers of His most 
 parental love. 
 
 But the evil from which Christ's sanctification separates 
 the soul is that worst of evils properly speaking the only 
 ev il s i n : revolt from God, disloyalty to conscience, tyranny 
 of the passions, strife of our self-will in conflict with the lov- 
 ing will of God. This is our foe our only foe that we have 
 a right to hate with perfect hatred, meet it where we will, and 
 under whatever form, in Church or state, in false social max- 
 ims, or in our own hearts. And it was to sanctify or separate 
 us from this that Christ sanctified or consecrated Himself. 
 By the blood of his anguish by the strength of his uncon- 
 querable resolve we are sworn against it bound to be, in a 
 world of evil, consecrated spirits, or else greatly sinning. 
 
 Lastly, the self-devotion of Christ separates us from the 
 world's spirit. 
 
 Distinguish between the world's evil and the world's spirit. 
 Many things which can not be classed amongst things evil 
 are yet dangerous as things worldly. 
 
 It is one of the most difficult of all ministerial duties to de- 
 fine what the world-spirit is. It can not be identified with 
 vice, nor can unworldliness be defined as abstinence from vice. 
 The Old Testament saints were many of them great trans 
 gressors. Abraham lied, Jacob deceived, David committed 
 adultery. Crimes dark, surely ! and black enough ! And 
 yet these men were unworldly ; the spirit of the world was 
 not in them. They erred and were severely punished ; for 
 crime is crime in whomsoever it is found, and most a crime 
 in a saint of God. But they were beyond their age : they 
 were not of the world. They were strangers and pilgrims 
 upon earth. They were, in the midst of innumerable temp- 
 tations from within and from without, seeking after a better 
 country, i. e., a heavenly. 
 
 Again, you can not say that worldliness consists in mixing 
 with many people, and unworldliness with few. Daniel was 
 unworldly in the luxurious, brilliant court of Babylon : Adam, 
 in Paradise, had but one companion ; that one was the world 
 to him. 
 
 Again, the spirit of the world can not be defined as con 
 
382 The Sanctification of Christ. 
 
 sisting in any definite plainness of dress or peculiar mode of 
 living. If we would be sanctified from the world when Christ 
 comes, we must be found, not stripping oif the ornaments from 
 our persons, but the censoriousness from our tongues and the 
 selfishness from our hearts. 
 
 Once more, that which is a sign of unworldliness in one 
 age is not a certain sign of it in another. In Daniel's age, 
 when dissoluteness marked the w T orld, frugal living was a suf- 
 ficient evidence that he was not of the world. To say that 
 he restrained his appetites w r as nearly the same as saying 
 that he was sanctified. But now when intemperance is not 
 the custom, a life as temperate as Daniel's might coexist with 
 all that is worst of the spirit of the world in the heart ; al- 
 most no man then was temperate who was not serving God 
 now hundreds of thousands are self-controlled by prudence, 
 who serve the world and self. 
 
 Therefore you can not define sanctification by any outward 
 marks or rules. But he who will thoroughly watch will un- 
 derstand what is this peculiar sanctification or separation 
 from the world which Christ desired in His servants. 
 
 He is sanctified by the self-devotion of his Master from the 
 world, who has a life in himself independent of the maxims 
 and customs 'which sweep along with them other men. In 
 his Master's words, "A well of water in him, springing up 
 into everlasting life," keeping his life on the whole pure, and 
 his heart fresh. His true life is hid with Christ in God. His 
 motives, the aims and objects of his life, however inconsist- 
 ent they may be with each other, however irregularly or fee- 
 bly carried out, are yet on the whole above, not here. His 
 citizenship is in heaven. He may be tempted, he may err, 
 he may fall, but still in his darkest aberrations there will be 
 a something that keeps before him still the dreams and aspi- 
 rations of his best days a thought of the cross of Christ and 
 'the self-consecration 'that it typifies a conviction that that 
 is the highest, and that alone the true life. And that if it 
 were only that would make him essentially different from 
 other men, even when he mixes with them and seems to catch 
 their tone, among them but not one of them. And that life 
 within him is Christ's pledge that he shall be yet what he 
 longs to be a something severing him, separating him, con- 
 secrating him. For him and for such as him the consecration 
 prayer of Christ was made. " They are not of the world, 
 even as I am not of the world : Sanctify them through thy 
 truth : thy word is truth." 
 
Tke First Miracle. 383 
 
 XVII. 
 THE FIRST MIRACLE. 
 
 i. THE GLORY OF THE VIRGIN MOTHER. 
 
 <(: This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested 
 forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him." John ii. 11. 
 
 THIS was the " beginning of miracles " which Jesus did, 
 and yet he was now thirty years of age. For thirty years he 
 had done no miracle ; and that is in itself almost worthy to 
 be called a miracle. That he abstained for thirty years from 
 the exertion of His wonder-working power is as marvellous 
 as that He possessed for three years the power to exert. He 
 was content to live long in deep obscurity. Nazareth, with 
 its quiet valley, was world enough for Him. There was no 
 disposition to rush into publicity : no haste to be known in 
 the world. The quiet consciousness of power which breathes 
 in that expression, "Mine hour is not yet come," had marked 
 His whole life. He could bide His time. He had the strength 
 to wait. 
 
 This was true greatness the greatness of man, because 
 also the greatness of God : for such is God's way in all He 
 does. In all the works of God there is a conspicuous absence 
 of haste and hurry. All that He does ripens slowly. Six 
 slow days and nights of creative force before man was made: 
 two thousand years to discipline and form a Jewish people : 
 four thousand years of darkness, and ignorance, and crime, 
 before the fullness of the time had come, when He could send 
 forth His Son : unnumbered ages of war before the thousand 
 years of solid peace can come. Whatever contradicts this 
 Divine plan must pay the price of haste brief duration. All 
 that is done before the hour is come decays fast. All preco- 
 cious things ripened before their time, wither before their 
 time : precocious fruit, precocious minds, forced feelings. "He 
 that believeth shall not make haste." 
 
 We shall distribute the various thoughts which this event 
 suggests under two heads. 
 
 I. The glory of the Virgin Mother. 
 II. The glory of the Divine Son. 
 
 I. The glory of the Virgin Mother. 
 
 In the First Epistle to the Corinthians St Paul speaks of 
 
384 The First Miracle. 
 
 the glory of the woman as of a thing distinct from the 
 of the man. They are the two opposite poles of the sphere 
 of humanity. Their provinces are not the same, but differ- 
 ent. The qualities which are beautiful as predominant in 
 one are not beautiful when predominant in the other. That 
 which is the glory of the one is not the glory of the other. 
 The glory of her who was highly favored among women, 
 and whom all Christendom has agreed in contemplating 'as 
 the type and ideal of her sex, was glory in a different order 
 from that in which her Son exhibited the glory of a perfect 
 manhood. A glory different in degree, of course: the one 
 was only human, the other more than human, the Word 
 made flesh ; but different in order too : the one manifesting 
 forth her glory the grace of womanhood ; the other mani- 
 festing forth His glory the wisdom and the majesty of 
 manhood, in which God dwelt. 
 
 Different orders or kinds of glory. Let us consider th 
 glory of the Virgin, which is, in other words, the glory of 
 what is womanly in character. 
 
 1. Remarkable, first of all, in this respect, is her considei 
 ateness. There is gentle, womanly tact in those words, " The) 
 have no wine." Unselfish thoughtfulness about others' com 
 forts, not her own : delicate anxiety to save a straitened 
 family from the exposure of their poverty : and moreover, 
 for this is very w r orthy of observation ,. carefulness about 
 gross, material things : a sensual thing, we might truly say 
 wine, the instrument of intoxication : yet see how her 
 feminine tenderness transfigured and sanctified such gross 
 and common things; how that wine which, as used by the 
 revellers of the banquet, might be coarse and sensual, was 
 in her use sanctified, as it was by unselfishness and charity t 
 a thing quite heavenly, glorified by the ministry of love. 
 
 It was so that in old times, with thoughtful hospitality, 
 Rebekah offered water at the well to Abraham's way-worn 
 servant. It was so that Martha showed her devotion to her 
 Lord even to excess, being cumbered with much serving. 
 It was so that the women ministered to Christ out of their 
 substance water, food, money. They took these low things 
 of earth, and spiritualized them into means of hospitality and 
 devotion. 
 
 And this is the glory of womanhood : surely no common 
 glory : surely one which, if she rightly comprehended her 
 place on earth, might enable her to accept its apparent hu- 
 miliation unrepiningly ; the glory of unsensualizing coarse 
 and common things, sensual things, the objects of mere 
 sense, meat and drink and household cares, elevating them, 
 
The Glory of the Virgin Mother. 385 
 
 bj the spirit in which she ministers them, into something 
 transfigured and sublime. 
 
 The humblest mother of a poor family who is cumbered 
 with much serving, or watching over a hospitality which she 
 is too poor to delegate to others, or toiling for love's sake in 
 household work, needs no emancipation in God's sight. It 
 is the prerogative and the glory of her womanhood to con- 
 secrate the meanest things by a ministry which is not for 
 self. 
 
 2. Submission/ "Whatsoever He saith unto you, -do it." 
 Here is the true spirit of obedience. Not slavishness, but 
 entire loyalty and perfect trust in a person whom we rever- 
 ence. She did not comprehend her Son's strange repulse and 
 mysterious words ; but she knew that they were not capri- 
 cious words, for there was no caprice in Him : she knew that 
 the law which ruled His will was right, and that importunity 
 was, useless. So she bade them reverently wait in silence till 
 His time should come. 
 
 Here is another distinctive glory of womanhood. In the 
 very outset of the Bible submission is revealed as her pe- 
 culiar lot and destiny. If you were merely to look at the 
 words as they stand, declaring the results of the Fall, you 
 would be inclined to call that vocation of obedience a curse ; 
 but in the spirit of Christ it is transformed, like labor, into a 
 blessing. In this passage a twofold blessing stands con- 
 nected with it. Freedom from all doubt ; and prevailing 
 power in prayer. 
 
 The first is freedom from all doubt. The Virgin seems to 
 have felt no perplexity at that rebuke and seeming refusal ; 
 and yet perplexity and misgiving would seem natural. A 
 more masculine and imperious mind would have been start' 
 led ; made sullen, or have begun at once to sound the depths 
 of metaphysics, reasoning upon the hardship of a lot which 
 can not realize all it wishes: wondering why such simple 
 blessings are refused, pondering deeply on Divine decrees, 
 ending perhaps in skepticism. Mary was saved from this. 
 She could not understand, but she could trust and wait. 
 Not for one moment did a shade of doubt rest upon her 
 heart. At once and instantly, " Whatsoever He saith unto 
 you, do it." And so, too, the Syrophenician woman was not 
 driven to speculate on the injustice of her destiny by the 
 seeming harshness of Christ's reply. She drew closer to her 
 Lord in prayer. Affection and submissiveness saved them 
 both from doubt. True women both. 
 
 Now there are whole classes of our fellow-creatures to 
 whom, as a class, the anguish of religious doubt never or 
 
 17 
 
386 The First Miracle. 
 
 rarely comes. Mental doubt rarely touches women. Sol 
 diers and sailors do not doubt. Their religion is remarkable 
 for its simplicity and childlike character. Scarcely ever are 
 religious warriors tormented with skepticism or. doubts. 
 And in all, I believe, for the same reason the habits of feel- 
 ing to which the long life of obedience trains the soul. 
 Prompt, quick, unquestioning obedience : that is the soil for 
 faith. 
 
 I call this, therefore, the glory of womanhood. It is the 
 true glory of human beings to obey. It is her special glory, 
 rising out of the very weakness of her nature God's strength 
 made perfect in weakness. England will not soon forget 
 that lesson left her as the bequest of a great life. Her bur- 
 ied Hero's glory came out of that which was manliest in his 
 character the Virgin's spirit of obedience. 
 
 The second glory resulting from it is prevailing power 
 with God. Her wish was granted. "What have I to do 
 with thee," were words that only asserted His own perfect 
 independence. They were not the language of rebuke. As 
 Messiah He gently vindicated His acts from interference, 
 showing the filial relation to be in its first strictness dis- 
 solved. But as Son He obeyed, or to speak more properly, 
 complied. Nay, probably His look had said that already, 
 promising more than His words, setting her mind at rest, 
 and granting the favor she desired. 
 
 Brethren, the subject of prayer is a deep mystery. To 
 the masculine intellect it is a demonstrable absurdity. For 
 says logic, how can man's will modify the will of God, or 
 alter the fixed decree ? And if it can not, wherein lies the 
 use .of prayer ? But there is a something mightier than in- 
 tellect and truer than logic. It is the faith which works by 
 love the conviction that in this world of mystery, that 
 which can not be put in words, nor defended by argument, 
 may yet be true. The will of Christ was fixed, what could 
 be the use of intercession ? ancKyet the Virgin's feeling was 
 true ; she felt her prayer would prevail. 
 
 Here is a grand paradox, which is the paradox of all 
 prayer. The heart hopes that which to reasoning seems im- 
 possible. And I believe we never pray aright except when 
 we pray in that feminine childlike spirit which no logic can 
 defend, feeling as ifvrs modified the will of God, though that 
 will is fixed. It is flie glory of the spirit that is affectionate 
 and submissive that it, ay and it alone, can pray, because it 
 alone can believe that its prayer will be granted ; and it ia 
 the glory of that spirit, too, that its prayer will be granted. 
 
 3. In all Christian ages the especial glory ascribed to the 
 
The Glory of the Virgin Mother. 387 
 
 
 
 Virgin Mother is purity of heart and life. Implied in the 
 term " Virgin." Gradually in the history of the Christian 
 Church the recognition of this became idolatry. The works 
 of early Christian art curiously exhibit the progress of this 
 perversion. They show how Mariolatry grew up. The first 
 pictures of the early Christian ages simply represent the 
 woman. By-and-by we find outlines of the mother and the 
 child. In an after-age the Son is seen sitting on a throne, with 
 the mother crowned, but sitting as yet below Him. In an 
 age still later, the crowned mother on a level with the Son. 
 Later still, the mother on a throne above the Son. And last- 
 ly, a Romish picture represents the eternal Son in wrath, 
 about to destroy the earth, and the Virgin Intercessor inter- 
 posing, pleading by significant attitude her maternal rights, 
 and redeeming the world from His vengeance. Such was, in 
 fact, the progress of Virgin-worship. First the woman rev 
 erenced for the Son's sake; then the woman reverenced 
 above the Son, and adored. 
 
 Now the question is, How came this to be ? for we assume 
 it as a principle that no error has ever spread widely that was 
 not the exaggeration or perversion of a truth. And be as- 
 sured that the first step towards dislodging error is to un- 
 derstand the truth at which it aims. Never can an error be 
 permanently destroyed by the roots, unless we have planted 
 by its side the truth that is to take its place. Else you will 
 find the falsehood returning forever, growing up again when 
 you thought it cut up root and branch, appearing in the very 
 places where the crushing of it seemed most complete. 
 Wherever there is a deep truth, unrecognized, misunderstood, 
 it will force its way into men's hearts. It will take perni- 
 cious forms if it can not find healthful ones. It will grow as 
 some weeds grow, in noxious forms, ineradicably, because it 
 has a root in human nature. 
 
 Else how comes it to pass, after three hundred years of 
 reformation, we find Virgin-worship restoring itself again in 
 this reformed England, where least of all countries we should 
 expect it, and where the remembrance of Romish persecu- 
 tion might have seemed to make its return impossible ? 
 How comes it that some of the deepest thinkers of our day, 
 and men of the saintliest lives, are feeling this Virgin-worship 
 a necessity for their souls ; for it is the doctrine to which the 
 converts to Romanism cling most tenaciously ? 
 
 Brethren, I reply, Because the doctrine of the worship of 
 the Virgin has a root in truth, and no mere cutting and up 
 rooting can destroy it : no thunders of Protestant oratory : 
 uo platform expositions : no Reformation societies. In out* 
 
388 The First Miracle. 
 
 Q 
 
 word, no mere negations; nothing but the full liberation of 
 the truth which lies at the root of error can eradicate error. 
 
 Surely we ought to have learnt that truth by this time. 
 Recollect how, before Christ's time, mere negations failed to 
 uproot paganism. Philosophers had disproved it by argu- 
 ment : satirists had covered it with ridicule. It was slain a 
 thousand times, and yet paganism lived on in the hearts of 
 men : and those who gave it up returned to it again in a 
 dying hour, because the disprovers of it had given nothing 
 for the heart to rest on in its place. But when Paul dared 
 to proclaim of paganism what we are proclaiming of Virgin- 
 worship, that paganism stood upon a truth, and taught that 
 truth, paganism fell forever. The Apostle Paul found in 
 Athens an altar to the unknown God. He did not announce 
 in Athens lectures against heathen priestcraft ; nor did he 
 undertake to prove it, in the Areopagus, all a mystery of in- 
 iquity, and a system of damnable idolatries that is the 
 mode in which w r e set about our controversies; b\it he dis- 
 engaged the truth from the error, proclaimed the truth, and 
 left the errors to themselves. The truth grew up, and the 
 errors silently and slowly withered. 
 
 I pray you, Christian brethren, do not join those fierce as- 
 sociations which think only of uprooting error. There is a 
 spirit in them which is more of earth than heaven, short- 
 sighted too and self-destructive. They do not make converts 
 to Christ, but only controversialists, and adherents to a par- 
 ty. They compass sea and land to make one proselyte. It 
 matters little whether fierce Romanism or fierce Protestant- 
 ism wins the day : but it does matter whether or not in the 
 conflict we lose some precious Christian truth, as well as the 
 very spirit of Christianity. 
 
 What lies at the root of this ineradicable Virgin-worship? 
 How comes it that out of so few Scripture sentences about 
 her, many of them like this rebuke, depreciatory, learned men 
 and pious men could ever have developed, as they call it, or 
 as it seems to us, tortured and twisted a doctrine of Divine 
 honors to be paid to Mary ? Let us set out with the con- 
 viction that there must have been some reason for it, some 
 truth of which it is the perversion. 
 
 I believe the truth to be this. Before Christ the qualities 
 honored as Divine were peculiarly the virtues of the man : 
 courage, wisdom, truth, strength. But Christ proclaimed the 
 Divine nature of qualities entirely opposite : meekness, obe- 
 dience, affection, purity. He said that the pure in heart 
 should see God. He pronounced the beatitudes of meekness, 
 and lowliness, and poverty of spirit. Now observe these 
 
The Glory of the Virgin Mother. 389 
 
 were all of the order of graces which are distinctively femi 
 nine. And it is the peculiar feature of Christianity that it 
 exalts not strength nor intellect, but gentleness, and loving- 
 uess, and virgin purity. 
 
 Here was a new, strange thought given to the world. It 
 was for many ages the thought : no wonder it was the one 
 i^reat novelty of the revealed religion. How were men to 
 find expression for that idea which was working in them, 
 vague and beautiful, but wanting substance ? the idea of the 
 Divineness of what is pure, above the Divineness of what is 
 strong? Would you have had them say simply, we had 
 forgotten these things ; now they are revealed now we know 
 that love and purity are as Divine as 1 power and reason ? My 
 brethren, it is not so that men worship it is only so that men 
 think. They think about qualities they worship persons. 
 Worship must have a form. Adoration finds a person, and if 
 it can not find one it will imagine one. Gentleness and purity 
 are words for a philosopher ; but a man whose heart wants 
 something to adore will find for himself a gentle one, a pure 
 one, incarnate purity and love, gentleness robed in flesh and 
 blood, before whom his knee may bend, and to whom the 
 homage of his spirit can be given. You can not adore except 
 a person. 
 
 What marvel if the early Christian found that the Virgin- 
 mother of our Lord embodied this great idea ? What marvel 
 if he filled out and expanded w r ith that idea which was in his 
 heart, the brief sketch given of her in the Gospels, till his 
 imagination had robed the woman of the Bible with the 
 majesty of the mother of God ? Can we not feel that it must 
 have been so ? Instead of a dry, formal dogma of theology, 
 the Romanist presented an actual woman, endued with every 
 inward grace and beauty, and pierced by sorrows, as a living 
 object of devotion, faith, and hope a personality instead of 
 an abstraction. Historically speaking, it seems inevitable 
 that the idea could scarcely have been expressed to the world 
 except through an idolatry. 
 
 Brethren, it is an idolatry : in modern Romanism a perni* 
 cious and most defiling one. The worship of Mary over- 
 shadows the worship of the Son. The love given to her is 
 so much taken from Him. Nevertheless, let us not hide from 
 ourselves the eternal truth of the idea that lies beneath the 
 temporary falsehood of the dogma. Overthrow the idolatry ; 
 but do it by substituting the truth. 
 
 Now the truth which alone can supplant the worship of the 
 Virgin is the perfect humanity of Jesus Christ. I say the 
 perfect humanity : for perfect manhood is a very ambiguous 
 
39 The First Miracie. 
 
 expression. By man we sometimes mean the human race, 
 made up of man and woman, and sometimes we only mean the 
 masculine sex. We have only one word to express both 
 ideas. The language in which the New Testament was 
 written has two. Hence we may make a great mistake. 
 When the Bible speaks of man the human being, we may 
 think that it means, man the male creature. When the 
 Bible tells us Jesus Christ was the Son of Man, it uses the 
 word which implies human being: it does not use the word 
 which signifies one of the male sex: it does not dwell on the 
 fact that He was a man : but it earnestly asserts that He was 
 Man. Son of a man He was not. Son of Man He was : for 
 the blood, as it were, of all the race was in His veins. 
 
 Now let us see what is implied in this expression Son of 
 Man. It contains in it the doctrine of the incarnation : it 
 means the full humanity of Christ. Lately I tried to bring 
 out one portion of its meaning. I said that He belonged to 
 no particular age, but to every age. He had not the qualities 
 of one clime or race, but that which is common to all climes 
 and all races. He was not the Son of the Jew, nor the Son 
 of the Oriental He was the Son of Man. He was not the 
 villager of Bethlehem: nor one whose character and mind 
 were the result of a certain training, peculiar to Judea, or pe- 
 culiar to that century but He was the Man. This is what 
 St. Paul insists on, when He says that in Him there is neither 
 Jew nor Gentile, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free. A hu 
 manity in which there is nothing distinctive, limited, or pe- 
 culiar, but universal your nature and mine, the humanity in 
 which we all are brothers, bond or free. Now in that same 
 passage St. Paul uses another very remarkable expression : 
 " There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor 
 free, there is neither male nor female." That is the other 
 thing implied in His title to the Son of Man. His nature 
 had in it the nature of all nations : but also His heart had in 
 it the blended qualities of both sexes. Our humanity is a 
 whole made up of two opposite poles of character the manly 
 and the feminine. In the character of Christ neither was 
 found exclusively, but both in perfect balance. He was the 
 Son of Man the Human Being perfect Man. 
 
 There was in Him the woman-heart as well as the manly 
 brain all that was most manly, and all that was most wom- 
 anly. Remember what He was in life : recollect His stern 
 iron hardness in the temptation of the desert : recollect the 
 calmness that never quailed in all the uproars of the people, 
 the truth that never faltered, the strict severe integrity which 
 characterized the Witness of the Truth : recollect the justice 
 
The Glory of the Virgin Mother. 391 
 
 that never gave way to weak feeling which let the rich 
 young ruler go his way to perish if he would which paid 
 the tribute-money which held the balance fair between the 
 persecuted woman and her accuser, but did not suffer itself 
 to be betrayed by sympathy into any feeble tenderness the. 
 justice that rebuked Peter with indignation, and pronounced 
 the doom of Jerusalem unswervingly. Here is one side or 
 pole of human character surely not the feminine side. Now 
 look at the other. Recollect the twice-recorded tears, which 
 a man would have been ashamed to show, and which are 
 never beautiful in man except when joined with strength like 
 His : and recollect the sympathy craved and yearned for as 
 well as given the shrinking from solitude in prayei? the 
 trembling of a sorrow unto death the considerate care which 
 provided bread for the multitude, and said to the tired disci- 
 ples, as with a sister's rather than a brother's thoughtfulness, 
 " Come ye apart into the desert and rest a while." This is 
 the other side or pole of human character surely not the 
 masculine. 
 
 When we have learnt and felt what is meant by Divine 
 humanity in Christ, and when we have believed it, not in a 
 one-sided way, but in all its fullness, then we are safe from 
 Mariolatry because we do not want it : we have the truth 
 which Mariolatry labors to express, and, laboring ignorantly, 
 falls into idolatry. But so long as the male was looked upon 
 as the only type of God, and the masculine virtues as the 
 only glory of His character, so long the truth was yet unre- 
 vealed. This was the state of heathenism. And so long as 
 Christ was only felt as the Divine Man, and not the Divine 
 Humanity, so long the world had only a one-sided truth. 
 
 One-half of our nature, the sternei portion of it, only was 
 felt to be of God and in God. The other half, the tenderer 
 and the purer qualities of our souls, were felt as earthly. 
 This was the state of Romanism from, which men tried to 
 escape by Mariolatry. And if men had not learned that this 
 side of our nature too was made divine in Christ, what possi- 
 ble escape was there for them, but to look to the Virgin 
 Mary as the incarnation of the purer and lovelier elements of 
 God's character, reserving to her Son the sterner and the 
 more masculine ? 
 
 Can we not understand, too, how it came to pass that the 
 mother was placed above the Son, and adored more ? Chris- 
 tianity had proclaimed meekness, purity, obedience, as more 
 Divine than strength and wisdom. What wonder if she 
 who was gazed on as the type of purity should be reckoned 
 more near to God than He who had come through miscon? 
 
392 The First Miracle. 
 
 ception to be looked on chiefly as the type of Strength and 
 Justice ? 
 
 There is a spirit abroad which is leading men to Rome 
 Do not call that the spirit of the Devil. It is the desire and 
 hope to find there in its tenderness, and its beauty, and its 
 devotion, a home for those feelings of awe, and contempla- 
 tion, and love, for which our stern Protestantism finds no 
 shelter. Let us acknowledge that what they worship is 
 indeed deserving of all adoration: only let us say -that what 
 they worship ignorantly is Christ. Whom they ignorantly 
 worship let us declare unto them: Christ their unknown 
 God, worshipped at an idol-altar. Do not let us satisfy 
 ourselves by saying as a watchword, "Christ, not Mary:" 
 say rather, " In Christ all that they find in Mary." The 
 mother in the Son, the womanly in the soul of Christ. Di- 
 vine honor to the feminine side of His character, joyful and 
 unvarying acknowledgment that in Christ there is a reve- 
 lation of the Divineness of submission, and love, and purity, 
 and long-suffering, just as there was before in the name of 
 the Lord of Hosts a revelation of the Divineness of courage^ 
 and strength, and heroism, and manliness. 
 
 Therefore it is we do not sympathize with those coarse 
 expositions which aim at doing exclusive honor to the Son 
 of God by degrading the life and character of the Virgin. 
 Just as the Romanist has loved to represent all connection 
 with her as mysterious and immaculate, so has the Prot- 
 estant been disposed to vulgarize her to the level of the 
 commonest humanity, and exaggerate into rebukes the rev- 
 erent expressions to her in which Jesus merely asserted His 
 Divine independence. 
 
 Rather reverence, not her, but that idea and type which 
 Christianity has given in her the type of Christian woman- 
 hood ; which was not realized in her, which never was and 
 never will be realized in one single woman which remains 
 ever a Divine Idea, after which each living woman is to 
 strive. 
 
 And when I say reverence that idea or type, I am but 
 pointing to the relation between the mother and the Son, 
 and asking men to reverence that which He reverenced. 
 Think we that there is no meaning hidden in the mystery 
 that the Son of God was the Virgin's Son? To Him through 
 life there remained the early recollections of a pure mother. 
 Blessed beyond all common blessedness is the man who can 
 look back to that. God has given to him a talisman which 
 will carry him triumphant through many a temptation. To 
 other men purity may be a name ; to him it has been once a 
 
The Glory of the Divine Son. 393 
 
 realty. "Faith in ail things high beats with his blood." 
 He may be tempted: he may err: but there will be a light 
 from home shining forever* on his path inextinguishably. 
 By the grace of God, degraded he can not be. 
 
 XVIII. 
 THE FIRST MIRACLE. 
 
 II. THE GLORY OF THE DIVINE SON. 
 
 "This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested 
 forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him." John ii. 11. 
 
 IN the history of this miracle two personages are brought 
 prominently before our notice. One is the Virgin Mary; 
 the other is the Son of God. And these two exhibit differ- 
 ent orders of glory, as well as different degrees. Different 
 degrees, for the Virgin was only human : her Son was God 
 manifest in the flesh. Different orders of glory, for tine one 
 exhibited the distinctive glory of womanhood : the Other 
 manifested forth His glory the glory of perfect manhood. 
 
 Taking the Virgin as the type and representative of her 
 sex, we found the glory of womanhood, as exhibited by her 
 conduct in this parable, to consist in unselfish considerate- 
 ness about others, in delicacy of tact, in the power of enno- 
 bling a ministry of coarse and household things, like the 
 wine of the marriage-feast, by the sanctity of affection : in 
 meekness, and lowly obedience, which was in the Fall her 
 curse,-in Christ become her glory, transformed into a bless- 
 ing and a power: and lastly, as the name Virgin implies, 
 the distinctive glory of womanhood we found to consist in 
 purity. 
 
 Now the Christian history first revealed these great truths. 
 The Gospels which record the life of Christ, first, in the his- 
 tory of the world, brought to light the Divine glory of those 
 qualities which had been despised. Before Christ came, the 
 heathen had counted for Divine the legislative wisdom of 
 the man, manly strength, manly truth, manly justice, manly 
 courage. The life and the cross of Christ shed a splendor 
 from heaven upon a new and till then unheard-of order of 
 heroism that which may be called the feminine order, 
 meekness, endurance, long-suffering, the passive strength of 
 martyrdom. For Christianity does not say, Honor to the 
 
394 Tk* First Miracle. 
 
 wise, but " Blessed are the meek." Not, Glory to the strong, 
 but " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
 Not, " The Lord is a man of war, Jehovah is His name," but 
 " God is Love." In Christ not intellect, but love, is conse- 
 crated. In Christ is magnified, not force of will, but the 
 glory of a Divine humility. " He was obedient unto death, 
 even the death of the cross : wherefore God also hath highly 
 exalted Him." 
 
 Therefore it was, that from that time forward womanhood 
 assumed a new place in this world. She in whom these 
 qualities, for the first time declared Divine in Christ, were 
 the distinctive characteristics, steadily and gradually rose 
 to a higher dignity in human life. It is not to a mere civiliza- 
 tion, but to the spirit of life in Christ, that woman owes all 
 she has, and all she has yet to gain. ^ 
 
 Now the outward phases in w r hich this redemption of the 
 sex appeared to the world have been as yet chiefly three. 
 There have been three ages through which these great truths 
 of the Divineness of purity, and the strength and glory of 
 obedience, the peculiar characteristics of womanhood, have 
 been rising into their right acknowledgment. 1. The ages 
 of Virgin-worship. 2. The ages of chivalry. 3. The age of 
 the three last centuries. Now during these three Protestant 
 centuries, the place and destinies of womanhood have been 
 every year rising more and more into great questions. Her 
 mission, as it is called in the cant language of the day 
 what it is that is one of the subjects of deepest interest in 
 the controversies of the day. And unless we are prepared 
 to say that the truth which has been growing clearer and 
 brighter for eighteen centuries shall stop now exactly where 
 it is, and grow no clearer: unless we are ready to affirm that 
 mankind will never learn to pay less glory to strength and 
 intellect, and more to meekness, and humbleness, and pure- 
 ness than they do now, it follows that God has yet reserved 
 for womanhood a larger and more glorious field for her 
 peculiar qualities and gifts, and that the truth contained in 
 the Virgin's motherhood is unexhausted still. 
 
 For this reason, in reference to that womanhood and its 
 destinies of which St. Mary is the type, I thought it needful, 
 last Sunday, to insist on two things as of profound impor- 
 tance. 
 
 L To declare in what her true glory consists. The only 
 glory of the Virgin was the glory of true womanhood. The 
 glory of true womanhood consists in being herself: not in 
 striving to be something else. It is the lalse paradox and 
 
The. Glory of the Divine Son. 395 
 
 heresy of this present age to claim for her as a glory the 
 right to leave her sphere. Her glory lies in her sphere, and 
 God has given her a sphere distinct ; as in the" Epistle to the 
 Church of Corinth, when in that' wise ctfapter St. Paul render- 
 ed unto womanhood the things which were woman's, and 
 unto manhood the things which were man's. 
 
 And the true correction of that monstrous rebellion against 
 what is natural lies in vindicating Mary's glory, on the one 
 side, from the Romanist, who gives to her the glory of God ; 
 and on the other from those who would confound the dis- 
 tinctive glories of the two sexes, and claim as the glory of 
 woman what is, in the deeps of nature, the glory of the 
 man. 
 
 Every thing is created in its own order. ..Every created 
 thing has its own glory. " There is one glory of the sun, 
 another glory of the moon, and another glory of the sta v a 
 for one star differeth from another star in glory." There is 
 one glory of manhood, and another glory of womanhood. 
 And the glory of each created thing consists in being true 
 to its own nature, and moving in its own sphere. 
 
 Mary's glory was not immaculate origin, nor immaculate 
 life, nor exaltation to Divine honors. She had none of these 
 things. Nor, on the other hand, was it force or demanded 
 rights, social or domestic, that constituted her glory. But it 
 was the glory of simple womanhood ; the glory of being 
 true to the nature assigned her by her Maker; the glory of 
 motherhood; the glory of "a meek and quiet spirit, which 
 in the sight of God is of great price." She was not the 
 queen of heaven, but she was something nobler still, a crea- 
 ture content to be what God had made her: in unselfishness, 
 and humbleness, and purity, " rejoicing in God her Saviour," 
 content that " He had regarded the lowliness of His hand- 
 maiden." 
 
 The second thing upon w 7 hich I insisted was, that the only 
 safeguard against the idolatrous error of Virgin-worship is a 
 full recognition of the perfect humanity of "Christ. A full 
 recognition : for it is only a partial acknowledgment of the 
 meaning of the incarnation when we think of Him as the 
 Divine Man. It was not manhood, but humanity, that was 
 made Divine in Him. Humanity has its two sides : one side 
 in the strength and intellect of manhood ; the other in the 
 tenderness, and faith, and submissiveness of womanhood: 
 Man and woman, not man alone, make up human nature. Ip 
 Christ not one alone but both were glorified. Strength anci 
 grace, wisdom and love, courage and purity, Divine manli- 
 ness : Divine womanliness. In all noble characters you find 
 
396 The First Miracle. 
 
 the two blended : in Him, the noblest, blended into one en. 
 tire and perfect humanity. 
 
 Unless you -recognize and fully utter this whole truth, you 
 will find Mariolatry forever returning, cut it down as you 
 will. It must come back. It will come back. I had well 
 nigh said it ought to come back, unless we preach and believe 
 the full truth of God incarnate in humanity. For while we 
 teach in our classical schools as the only manliness, Pa- 
 gan heroism of warrior and legislator, can we say that we 
 are teaching both sides of Christ ? Our souls were trained 
 in boyhood to honor the heroic and the masculine. Who 
 ever hinted to us that charity is the "more excellent way ?" 
 Who suggested that " he which ruleth his spirit is greater 
 than he which taketh a city ?" 
 
 Again, we find our English society divided into two sec- 
 tions : one the men of business and action, exhibiting promi- 
 nently the masculine virtues of English character, truth and 
 honor, and almost taught to reckon forbearance and feeling 
 as proofs of weakness; taught in the playground to believe 
 that a chaste life is romance ; false sentiment and strength- 
 lessness of character taught there : and in after-life that it is 
 mean to forgive a personal affront. 
 
 The other section of our society is made up of men of 
 prayer and religiousness : for some reason or other singular- 
 ly deficient in masculine breadth and strength, and even 
 truthfulness of character : with no firm footing upon reality, 
 not daring to look the real problems of social and political 
 life in the face, but wasting their strength in disputes of 
 words, or shrinking into a dim atmosphere of ecclesiastical 
 dreaminess, unreal and effeminate. Dare we say that the 
 full humanity of Christ in its double aspect is practically 
 adored amongst us? Have we not made a fatal separation 
 between the manly and the feminine sides of character ? be- 
 tween the moral and the devout ? so that we have men who 
 are masculine and moral, and also men who are effeminate 
 and devout. But w<here are our Christian men in whom the 
 whole Christ is formed all that is brave, and true, and wise, 
 and at the same time all that is tender, and devout, and 
 r,ure ? Who ever taught us to adore in Christ all that is 
 most manly, and all that is most womanly, that we might 
 strive to be such in our degree ourselves ? And if not, can 
 you wonder that men, feeling their Christianity imperfect, 
 blindly strive to patch it up through Mariolatry'? 
 
 I gather into a few sentences the substance of what was 
 said last Sunday. I said that Christianity exhibited the 
 Divine glory of the weaker elements of our human nature, 
 
The Glory of the Divine Son. 397 
 
 Heathenism, nay even Judaism, had as yet before him only 
 recognized the glory of the stronger and masculine. Now 
 the Romanist personified the masculine side of human na- 
 ture in Christ. He personified gentleness and purity, the 
 feminine side of human nature, in the Virgin Mary. No 
 wonder that with this cardinal error at the outset in his con- 
 ceptions, he adored ; and no wonder, since Christianity de- 
 clared meekness and purity more Divine than strength and 
 intellect, in process of time he came to honor the Virgin 
 more than Chris^ That I believe is the true history and 
 account of Virgin-worship. 
 
 The Bible personifies both sides of human nature, the mas- 
 culine and feminine, in Christ, of whom St. Paul declares in 
 the Epistle to the Galatians, " In Him is neither Jew nor 
 Greek, bond nor free, male nor female." Neither distinctive- 
 ly, for in him both the manly and the womanly sides of char- 
 acter divinely meet. I say therefore that the incarnation of 
 God in Christ is the true defense against Virgin-worship. 
 
 Think of Christ only as the masculine character, glorified 
 by the union of Godhead with it, and your Christianity has 
 in it an awful gap, a void, a want the inevitable supply and 
 relief to which will be Mariolatry, however secure you may 
 think yourself; however strong and fierce the language 
 you now use. Men who have used language as strong and 
 fierce have become idolaters of Mary. With a half thought 
 of Christ, safe you are not. But think of him as the Divine 
 Human Being, in whom both sides of our cjouble being are 
 divine and glorified, and then you have the truth which Ro- 
 manism has marred and perverted into an idolatry pernicious 
 in all ; in the less spiritual worshippers sensualizing and de- 
 basing. 
 
 Now there are two ways of meeting error. The one is that 
 in which, in humble imitation of Christ and His apostles, I 
 have tried to show you the error of the worship of Mary to 
 discern the truth out of which the error sprung, firmly as- 
 serting the truth, forbearing threatening ; certain that he in 
 Avhose mind the truth is lodged has in that truth the safe- 
 guard against error. 
 
 The other way of meeting error is to overwhelm it with 
 threats. To some men it seems the only way in which true 
 zeal is shown. Well, it is very easy, requiring no self-con- 
 trol, but only an indulgence of every bad passion. It is very 
 easy to call Rome the " mother of harlots and abominations " 
 very easy to use strong language about " damnable idola- 
 tries " very easy for the apostles to call down fire from 
 heaven upon the Samaritans because they would not receive 
 
The First Miracle. 
 
 Christ, and then to flatter themselves that that was godly 
 zeal. But it might be well for us to remember his somewhat 
 startling comment, "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye 
 are of." There are those who think it a surer and a safer 
 Protestantism to use those popular watchwords. Be it so. 
 But with God's blessing, that will not I. The majesty of 
 truth needs other bulwarks than vulgar and cowardly vitu- 
 peration. Coarse and violent language, excusable three hun- 
 dred years ago by the manners of that day, was bold and 
 brave in the lips of the Reformer's, with whom the struggle 
 was one of life and death, and who might be called to pay 
 the penalty of their bold defiances with their blood. But the 
 same fierceness of language now, when there is no personal 
 risk in the use of it, in the midst of hundreds of men and 
 women ready to applaud and honor violence as zeal, is simply 
 a dastardliness from which every generous mind shrinks. 
 You do not get the Reformers' spirit by putting on the ar- 
 mor they have done with, but by risking the dangers which 
 those noble warriors risked. It is not their big words, but 
 their large, brave heart that makes the Protestant. Oh, be 
 sure that he whose soul hns anchored itself to rest on the 
 deep calm sea of truth, does not spend his strength in raving 
 against those who are still tossed by the winds of error. 
 Spasmodic violence of words is one thing, strength of convic- 
 tion is another. 
 
 When, oh when, shall we learn that loyalty to Christ is 
 tested far more by the strength of our sympathy with truth 
 than by the intensity of our hatred of error ? I will tell you 
 what to hate. Hate hypocrisy hate cant hate intolerance, 
 oppression, injustice hate Pharisaism hate them as Christ 
 hated them, with a deep, living, Godlike hatred. But do not 
 hate men in intellectual error. To hate a man for his errors 
 is as unwise as to hate one who in casting up an account has 
 made an error against himself. The Rornanist has made an 
 error against himself. He has missed the full glory of his 
 Lord and Master. Well, shall we hate him, and curse, and 
 rant, and thunder at him ? Or, shall we sit down beside him, 
 and try to sympathize with him, and see things from his point 
 of view, and strive to understand the truth which his soul is 
 aiming at, and seize the truth for him and for ourselves, 
 " meekly instructing; those who oppose themselves?" 
 
 Our subject to-day is the glory of the Divine Son. In that 
 miracle " He manifested forth his glory." Concerning that 
 glory we sny : 
 
 1 . The glory of Christ did not begin with that miracle : the 
 miracle only manifested it. For thirty years the wonder- 
 
The Glory of the Divine Son. 399 
 
 working power had been in Him. It was not Diviner power 
 when it broke forth into visible manifestation than it had 
 been when it was unsuspected and unseen. It had been ex- 
 ercised up to this time in common acts of youthful life : obe- 
 dience to His mother, love to His brethren. Well, it was 
 just as Divine in those simple, daily acts, as when it showed 
 itself in a way startling- and wonderful. It was just as much 
 the life of God on earth when He did an act of ordinary hu- 
 man love or human duty, as when He did an extraordinary 
 act, such as turning water into wine. God w r as as much, nay 
 more, in the daily life and love of Christ, than he was in Christ's 
 miracles. The miracle only made the hidden glory visible. 
 The extraordinary only proved that the ordinary was Divine* 
 That was the very object of the miracle. It was done to man- 
 ifest forth his glory. And if, instead of rousing men to see 
 the real glory of Christ in His other life, the miracle merely 
 fastened men's attention on itself, and made them think that 
 the only glory which is Divine is to be found in what is won- 
 derful and uncommon, then the whole intention of the miracle 
 was lost. 
 
 Let us make this more plain by an illustration. To the 
 wise man, the lightning only manifests the electric force which 
 is everywhere, and which for one moment has become visible. 
 As often as he sees it, it reminds him that the lightning slum- 
 bers invisibly in the dew-drop, and in the mist, and in the 
 cloud, and binds together every atom of the water that he 
 uses in daily life. But to the vulgar mind, the lightning is 
 something unique, a something which has no existence but 
 when it appears. There is a fearful glory in the lightning 
 because he sees it. But there is no startling glory and noth- 
 ing fearful in the drop of dew, because he does not know, 
 what the thinker knows, that the flash is there in all its ter- 
 rors. So, in the same way, to the half believer a miracle is 
 the one solitary evidence of God. Without it he could have 
 no certainty of God's existence. 
 
 But to the true disciple a miracle only manifests the pow- 
 er and love which are silently at work everywhere as truly 
 and as really in the slow work of the cure of the insane, as in 
 the sudden expulsion of the legion from the demoniac as 
 divinely in the gift of daily bread as in the miraculous mul- 
 tiplication of the loaves. God's glory is at work in the growth 
 of the vine and the ripening of the grape, and the process by 
 which grape-juice passes into wine. It is not more glory, but 
 only glory more manifested, when water at his bidding passes 
 at once into wine. And be sure that if you do not feel as 
 David felt, God's presence in the annual miracle, that it is 
 
4OO The First Miracle. 
 
 God, which in the vintage of every year causeth wine to 
 make glad the heart of man, the sudden miracle at Caperna- 
 um would not have given you conviction of His presence. 
 " If you hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will you 
 be persuaded though one rose from the dead." Miracles have 
 only done their work when they teach us the glory and the 
 awfulness that surround our common life. In a miracle, God 
 for one moment shows Himself that we may remember it is 
 He that is at work when no miracle is seen. 
 
 Now this is the deep truth of miracles which most men 
 miss. They believe that the life of Jesus was Divine, be- 
 cause He wrought miracles. But if their faith in miracles 
 were shaken, their faith in Christ would go. If the evidence 
 for the credibility of those miracles were weakened, then to 
 them the mystic glory would have faded off His history. 
 They could not be sure that His existence was Divine. 
 That love, even unto death, would bear no certain stamp of 
 God upon it. That life of long self-sacrifice would have had 
 in it no certain unquestionable traces of the Son of God. 
 
 See what that implies. If that be true, and miracles are 
 the best proof of Christ's mission, God can be recognized 
 only in what is marvellous : God can not be recognized in 
 what is good. It is by Divine power that a human Being 
 turns water into wine. It is by power less certainly Divine 
 that the same Being witnesses to truth forgives His ene- 
 mies makes it His meat and drink to do His Father's will, 
 and finishes His. work. We are more sure that God was in 
 Christ when he said, " Rise up, and walk," than when He 
 said with absolving love, " Son, thy sins be forgiven thee :" 
 more certain when He furnished wine for wedding-guests, 
 than when He said, " Father, forgive them, for they know 
 not what they do." Oh, a strange, and low, and vulgar ap- 
 preciation this of the true glory of the Son of God ; the same 
 false conception that runs through all our life, appearing in 
 every form God in the storm, and the earthquake, and the 
 fire no God in the still small voice. Glory in the lightning- 
 flash no glory and no God in the lowliness of the dew-drop. 
 Glory to intellect and genius no glory to gentleness and 
 patience. Glory to every kind of power none to the in- 
 ward, invisible strength of the life of God in the soul of man. 
 
 "An evil and an adulterous generation seeketh after a 
 sign." Look at the feverish eagerness with which men 
 crowd to every exhibition of some newly-discovered force, 
 real or pretended. What lies at the bottom of this feverish- 
 ness but an unbelieving craving after signs ? some wonder 
 which is to show them the Divine life of which the evidence 
 
The Glory of the Divine Son. 401 
 
 is yet imperfect ? As if the bread they eat and the wine 
 they drink, chosen by God for the emblems of His sacra- 
 ments because the commonest things of daily life, were not 
 filled with the presence of His love ; as if God were not 
 around their path and beside their bed, and spying out all 
 their daily ways. 
 
 It is in this strange way that we have learned Christ. 
 The miracles which were meant to point us to the Divinity 
 of His goodness, have only dazzled us with the splendor of 
 their power. We have forgotten, what His first wonder- 
 work shows, that a miracle is only manifested glory. 
 
 2. It was the glory of Christ, again, to sanctify, i. e., declare 
 the sacredness of, all things natural all natural relation- 
 ships, all natural enjoyments. 
 
 All natural relationships. What He sanctified by His 
 presence was a marriage. Now remember what had gone 
 before this. The life of John the Baptist was the highest 
 form of religious life known in Israel. It was the life 
 ascetic. It was a life of solitariness and penitential auster- 
 ity. He drank no wine : he ate no pleasant food : he mar- 
 ried no wife : he entered into no human relationship. It was 
 the law of that stern and in its way sublime life, to cut out 
 every human feeling as a weakness, and to mortify every 
 natural instinct, in order to cultivate an intenser spirituality. 
 A life in its own order grand, but indisputably unnatural. 
 
 Now the first public act of our Redeemer's life is to go 
 with His disciples to a marriage. He consecrates marriage, 
 and the sympathies which lead to marriage. He declares 
 the sacredness of feelings which had been reckoned carnal, 
 and ( low, and human. He stamped His image on human 
 joys, human connections, human relationships. He pro- 
 nounces that they are more than human as it were sacra- 
 mental : the means whereby God's presence comes to us ; 
 the types and shadows whereby higher and deeper relation- 
 ships become possible to us. For it is through our human 
 aifections that the soul first learns to feel that its destiny is 
 divine : It is through a mortal yearning, unsatisfied, that the 
 spirit ascends, seeking a higher object : It is through the 
 gush of our human tenderness that the immortal and the in- 
 finite in us reveals itself. Never does a man know the force 
 that is in him till some mighty affection or grief has human- 
 ized the soul. It is by an earthly relationship that God haa 
 typified to us and helped us to conceive the only true espous- 
 al the marriage of the soul to her eternal Lord. 
 
 It was the glory of Christianity to pronounce all these hu- 
 man feelings sacred: therefore it is that the Church asserts 
 
4O2 The First Miracle. 
 
 their sacredness in a religious ceremony ; for example, that 
 of marriage. Do not mistake. It is not the ceremony that 
 makes a thing religious : a ceremony can only declare a thing 
 religious. The Church can not make sacred that which is 
 not sacred : she is but here on earth as the moon, the witness 
 of the light in heaven ; by her ceremonies and by her insti- 
 tutions to bear witness to eternal truths. She can not by 
 her manipulations manufacture a child of the devil, through 
 baptism, into a child of God : she can only authoritatively 
 declare the sublime truth ho is not the devil's child, but 
 God's child by right. She can not make the bond of mar- 
 riage sacred and indissoluble.: she can only witness to the 
 sacredness of that which the union of two spirits has already 
 made : and such are her own words. Her minister is com- 
 manded by her to say " Forasmuch as these two persons 
 have consented together" there is the sacred fact of nature, 
 " I pronounce that they be man and wife " here is the au- 
 thoritative witness to the fact. 
 
 Again, it was His glory to declare the sacredness of all 
 natural enjoyments. It was not a marriage only, but a mar- 
 riage-feast, to which Christ conducted His disciples. Now 
 we can not get over this plain fact by saying that it was a 
 religious ceremony : that would be mere sophistry. It was 
 an indulgence in the festivity of life ; as plainly as words 
 can describe, here was a banquet of human enjoyment. The 
 very language of the master of the feast about men who had 
 well drunk, tells us that there had been, not excess of course, 
 but happiness there and merry-making. 
 
 Neither can we explain away the lesson by saying that it 
 is no example to us, for Christ was there to do good, and 
 that what was safe for Him might be unsafe for us. For if 
 His life is no pattern for us here in this case of accepting an 
 invitation, in what can we be sure it is a pattern ? Besides, 
 He took His disciples there, and His mother was there : they 
 were not shielded, as He was, by immaculate purity. He was 
 there as a guest at first, as Messiah only afterwards : thereby 
 He declared the sacredness of natural enjoyments. 
 
 Here again, then, Christ manifested His peculiar glory 
 The temptation of the wilderness was past : the baptism of 
 John, and the life of abstinence to which it introduced, were 
 over; and now the Bridegroom comes before the world in 
 the true glory of Messiah not in the life of asceticism, but 
 in the life of Godliness not separating from life, but conse- 
 crating it ; carrying a Divine spirit into every simplest act 
 accepting an invitation to a feast giving to water the vir- 
 tue of a nobler beverage. For Christianity does not destroy 
 
The Glory of the Divine Son. 403 
 
 what is natural, but ennobles it. To turn water into wine, 
 and what is common into what is holy, is indeed the glory of 
 Christianity. 
 
 The ascetic life of abstinence, of fasting, austerity, singu- 
 larity, is the lower and earthlier form of religion. The life 
 of Godliness is the glory of Christ. It is a thing far more 
 striking to the vulgar imagination to be religious after the 
 type and pattern of John the Baptist, to fast, to mortify 
 every inclination, to be found at no feast, to wrap ourselves 
 in solitariness, and abstain from all social joys : yes, and far 
 easier so to live, and far easier so to win a character for re- 
 ligiousness. A silent man is easily reputed wise. A man 
 who suffers none to see him in the common jostle and un 
 dress of life, easily gathers round him a mysterious veil of 
 unknown sanctity, and men honor him for a saint. The un- 
 known is always wonderful. But the life of Him whom 
 men called " a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of 
 publicans and sinners," was a far harder and a far heavenlier 
 religion. 
 
 To shroud ourselves in no false mist of holiness : to dare to 
 show ourselves as we are, making no solemn affectation of 
 reserve or difference from others : to be found at the mar- 
 riage-feast : to accept the invitation of the rich Pharisee Si- 
 mon, and the scorned publican Zaccheus: to mix with the 
 crowd of men, using no affected singularity, content to be 
 " creatures not too bright or good for human nature's daily 
 food :" and yet for a man amidst it all to remain a conse- 
 crated spirit, his trials and his solitariness known only to his 
 Father a being set apart, not of this world, alone in the 
 heart's deeps with God: to put the cup of this world's glad- 
 ness to his lips, and yet be unintoxicated : to gaze steadily 
 on all its grandeur, and yet be undazzled, plain and simple 
 in personal desires : to feel its brightness, and yet defy its 
 thrall : this is the difficult, and rare, and glorious life of 
 God in the soul of man. This, this was the peculiar glory 
 of the life of Christ, which was manifested in that first mir- 
 acle which Jesus wrought at the marriage -ieast in Caua oi 
 Galilea 
 
404 The Good Shepherd. 
 
 XIX. 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 
 " I am the good shepherd, and know ray sheep, and am known of mint 
 As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father : and I lay down nu} 
 life for the sheep." John x. 14, 15. 
 
 As these words stand in the English translation, it is hard 
 to see any connection between the thoughts that are brought 
 together. 
 
 It is asserted that Christ is the good Shepherd, and knows 
 His sheep. It is also asserted that He knows the Father ; 
 but between these two truths there is no express connection. 
 And again, it is declared that He lays down His life for the 
 sheep. This follows directly after the assertion that He 
 knows the Father. Again, we are at a loss to say what one 
 of these truths has to do with the other. 
 
 But the whole difficulty vanishes with the alteration of a 
 single stop and a single word. Let the words " even so" be 
 exchanged for the word " and." Four times in these verses 
 the same word occurs. Three times out of these four it is 
 translated " and," and know my sheep, and am known, and 
 I lay down my life. All that is required then is, that in con- 
 sistency it shall be translated by the same word in the fourth 
 case : for " even so " substitute " and :" then strike away the 
 full stop after " mine," and read the whole sentence thus : 
 "I am the good Shepherd, and know my sheep, and am 
 known of mine as the Father knoweth me, and&s I know the 
 Father : and I lay down my life for the sheep." 
 
 At once our Redeemer's thought becomes clear. There is 
 a reciprocal affection between the Shepherd and the sheep. 
 There is a reciprocal affection between the Father and the 
 Son ; and the one is the parallel of the other. The affection 
 between the Divine Shepherd and His flock can be compared, 
 for the closeness of its intimacy, with nothing but the affec- 
 tion between the Eternal Father and the Son of His love. 
 As the Father knows the Son, so does the Shepherd know 
 the sheep : as the Son knows the Father, so do the sheep 
 know their heavenly Shepherd. 
 
 I. The pastoral character claimed by Christ. 
 XL The proofs which substantiate the claim. 
 
 L The Son of Man claims to Himself the name of Shep- 
 
The Good Shepherd. 405 
 
 herd. - Now we shall not learn any thing from that, unless 
 we enter humbly and affectionately into the spirit of Christ's 
 teaching. It is the heart alone which can give us a key to 
 His words. Recollect how He taught. By metaphors, by 
 images, by illustrations, boldly figurative, in rich variety 
 yes, in daring abundance. He calls Himself a gate, a king, 
 a vine, a shepherd, a thief in the night. In every one of 
 these He appeals to certain feelings and associations. What 
 He says can only be interpreted by such associations. They 
 must be understood by a living heart : a cold, clear intellect 
 will make nothing of them. If you take those glorious ex- 
 pressions, pregnant with almost boundless thought, and lay 
 them down as so many articles of rigid, stiff theology, you 
 turn life into death. It is just as if a chemist were to ana- 
 lyze a fruit or a flower, and then imagine that he had told 
 you what a fruit and a flower are. He separates them into 
 their elements, names them and numbers them : but thost 
 elements, weighed, measured, numbered in the exact propor- 
 tions that made up the beautiful living thing, are not the liv- 
 ing thing no, nor any thing like it. Your science is very 
 profound, no doubt ; but the fruit is crushed, and the -grace 
 of the flower is gone. 
 
 It is in this way often that we deal with the words of 
 Christ, when we anatomize them and analyze them. Theol- 
 ogy is very necessary, chemistry is very necessary ; but 
 chemistry destroys life to analyze, murders to dissect ; and 
 theology very often kills religion out of words before it can 
 cut them up into propositions. 
 
 Here is a living truth which our cold reasonings have often 
 torn into dead fragments "I am the good Shepherd." In 
 this northern England it is hard to get the living associa- 
 tions of the East with which such an expression is full. 
 
 The pastoral life and duty in the East is very unlike that 
 of the shepherds on our bleak hill-sides and downs. Here 
 the connection between the shepherd and the sheep is simply 
 one of pecuniary interest. Ask an English shepherd about 
 his flock, he can tell you the numbers and the value ; he 
 knows the market in which each was purchased, and the re- 
 munerating price at which it can be disposed of. There is 
 before him so much stock convertible into so much money. 
 
 Beneath the burning skies and the clear starry nights of 
 Palestine there grows up between the shepherd and his flock 
 an union of attachment and tenderness. It is the country 
 where at any moment sheep are liable to be swept away by 
 some mountain-torrent, or carried off by hill-robbers, or torn 
 by wolves. At any moment their protector may have to 
 
406 The Good Shepherd. 
 
 save the/n by personal hazard. The shepherd-king tells us 
 how, in defense of his father's flock, he slew a lion and a 
 bear : and Jacob reminds Laban how, when he watched La- 
 ban's sheep in the day, the drought consumed. Every hour 
 of the shepherd's life is risk. Sometimes for the sake of an 
 armful of grass in the parched summer days, he must climb 
 precipices almost perpendicular, and stand on a narrow ledge 
 of rock where the wild goat will scarcely venture. Pitiless 
 showers, driving snows, long hours of thirst all this he must 
 emlure, if the flock is to be kept at all. 
 
 And thus there grows up between the man and the dumb 
 creatures he protects, a kind of friendship. For this is, after 
 all, the true school in which love is taught dangers mutually 
 shared and hardships borne together; these are the things 
 which make generous friendship risk cheerfully encountered 
 for another's sake. You love those for whom you risk, and 
 they love you ; therefore it is that, not as here where the 
 flock is driven, the shepherd goes before and the sheep follow 
 him. They follow in perfect trust, even though he should be 
 leading them away from a green pasture, by a rocky road, to 
 another pasture which they can not yet see. He knows them 
 all their separate histories, their ailments, their characters. 
 
 Now let it be observed how much in all this connection 
 there is of heart of real, personal attachment, almost incon- 
 ceivable to us. It is strange how deep the sympathy may 
 become between the higher and the lower being : nay, even 
 between the being that has life and what is lifeless. Alone 
 almost in the desert, the Arab and his horse are one family. 
 Alone in those vast solitudes, with no human being near, the 
 shepherd and the sheep feel a life in common. Differences 
 disappear, the vast interval between the man and the brute : 
 the single point of union is felt strongly. One is the love of 
 the protector : the other the love of the grateful life : arid so 
 between lives so distant there is woven by night and day, by 
 summer suns and winter frosts, a living network of sympa- 
 thy. The greater and the less mingle their being together : 
 they feel each other. " The shepherd knows his sheep, and 
 is known of them." 
 
 The men to whom Christ said these words felt all this 
 and more, the moment He had said them, which it has taken 
 me many* minutes to draw out in dull sentences : for He ap- 
 pealed to the familiar associations of their daily life, and call- 
 ing Himself a Shepherd, touched strings which would vi- 
 brate with many a tender and pure recollection of their 
 childhood. And unless we try, by realizing su< h scenes, to 
 supply what they felt by association, the words of Chris* 
 
The Good Shepherd. 407 
 
 will be only hard, dry, lifeless words to us : for all Christ's 
 teaching is a Divine poetry, luxuriant in metaphor, over- 
 flowing with truth too large for accurate sentences, truth 
 which only a heart alive can appreciate. More than half the 
 heresies into which Christian sects have blundered, have 
 merely come from mistaking for dull prose what prophets 
 and apostles said in those highest moments of the soul, when 
 seraphim kindle the sentences of the pen and lip into poetry. 
 "This is my body." Chill that into prose, and it becomes 
 Transubstantiation. "I am the good Shepherd." In the 
 dry and merciless logic of a commentary, trying laboriously 
 to find out minute points of ingenious resemblance in which 
 Christ is like a Shepherd, the glory and the tenderness of this 
 sentence are dried up. 
 
 But try to feel, by imagining what the lonely Syrian shep- 
 herd must feel towards the helpless things which are the com- 
 panions of his daily life, for whose safety he stands in jeopardy 
 every hour, and whose value is measurable to him not by 
 price, but by his own jeopardy, and then we have reached 
 some notion of the love which Jesus meant to represent, that 
 eternal tenderness which bends over us infinitely lower 
 though we be in nature and knows the name of each and 
 the trials of each, and thinks for each with a separate solici- 
 tude, and gave Itself for each with a sacrifice as special and 
 a love as personal, as if in the whole world's wilderness there 
 were none other but that one. 
 
 To the name Shepherd, Christ adds an emphatic word 
 of much significance: "I am the good Shepherd." Good, 
 not in the sense of benevolent, but in the sense of genuine, 
 true born, of the real kind just as wine of nobler quality is 
 good compared with the cheaper sort, just as a soldier is 
 goo'd or noble who is a soldier in heart, and not a soldier by 
 mere profession or for pay. It is the same word used by St. 
 Paul when he speaks of a good, i. e., a noble soldier of Christ. 
 Certain peculiar qualifications make the genuine soldier 
 certain peculiar qualifications make the genuine or good 
 shepherd. 
 
 Now this expression distinguishes the shepherd from two 
 sorts of men who may also be keepers of the sheep : shep- 
 herds, but not shepherds of the true blood. 1. From rob- 
 bers. 2. From hirelings. 
 
 1. Robbers may turn shepherds : they may keep the 
 sheep, but they guard them only for their own purposes, 
 simply for the flesh and fleece ; they have not a true shep- 
 herd's heart, any more than a pirate has the true sailor's 
 heart and the true sailor's loyalty. There were many such 
 
408 The Good Shepherd. 
 
 marauders on the hills of Galilee and Judea : such, for ex 
 ample, as those from whom David and his band protected 
 Nabal's flocks on Mount Carmel. 
 
 And many such nominal shepherds had the people of 
 Israel had in by-gone years : rulers in whom the art of rul- 
 ing had been but kingcraft ; teachers whose instruction to 
 the people had been but priestcraft. Government, states- 
 manship, teachership tL <se are pastoral callings sublime, 
 even Godlike. For only consider it : wise rule, chivalrous 
 protection, loving guidance what diviner work than these 
 has the Master given to the shepherds of the people ? But 
 when the work is done, even well done, whether it be by 
 statesmen or by pastors, for the sake of party or place, or 
 honor, or personal consistency, or preferment, it is not the 
 spirit of the genuine shepherd, but of the robber. No won- 
 der He said, "All that ever came before Me were thieves 
 and robbers." 
 
 2. Hirelings are shepherds, but not good shepherds, of 
 the right pure kind : they are tested by danger. " He that 
 is a hireling, and not the good shepherd, whose own the 
 sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, 
 and fleeth ; and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth 
 the sheep." Now a man is a hireling when he does his 
 duty for pay. He may do it in his way faithfully. The 
 paid shepherd would not desert the sheep for a shower or a 
 cold night. But the lion and the bear he is not paid to 
 risk his life against them, and the sheep are not his, so he 
 leaves them to their fate. So, in the same way, a man may 
 be a hired priest, as Demetrius was at Ephesus : " By this 
 craft we get our living." Or a paid demagogue, a great 
 champion of rights, and an investigator of abuses paid by 
 applause ; and while popularity lasts he will be a reformer 
 deserting the people when danger comes. There is no 
 vital union between the champion and the defenseless the 
 teacher and the taught. The cause of the sheep is not his 
 cause. 
 
 Exactly the reverse of this Christ asserts in calling Him- 
 self the good Shepherd. He is a good, genuine, or true- 
 born sailor who feels that the ship is as it were his own ; 
 whose point of chivalrous honor is to save his -ship rather 
 than himself not to survive her. He is a good, genuine, or 
 true-born shepherd who has the spirit of his calling, is an en- 
 thusiast in it, has the true shepherd's heart, and makes the 
 cause of the sheep his cause. 
 
 Brethren, the cause of man was the cause of Christ ! He 
 did no hireling's work. The only pay He got was hatred, a 
 
The Good Shepherd. 409 
 
 crown of thorns, and the cross. He might have escaped it 
 all. He might have been the Leader of the people and their 
 King. He might have converted the idolatry of an hour 
 into the hosannas of a lifetime : if He would but have con- 
 ciliated the Pharisees, instead of bidding them defiance and 
 exasperating their bigotry against Him : if He would but 
 have explained, and, like some demagogue called to account^ 
 trimmed away His sublime sharp-edged truths about oppres- 
 sion and injustice until they became harmless, because mean- 
 ingless : if He would but have left unsaid those rough things 
 about the consecrated temple and the sabbath-days : if He 
 would but have left undisputed the hereditary title of Israel 
 to God's favor, and not stung the national vanity by telling 
 them that trust in God justifies the Gentile as entirely as the 
 Jew : if He would but have taught less prominently that 
 hateful doctrine of the salvability of the heathen Gentiles 
 and the heretic Samaritans, and the universal Fatherhood of 
 God : if he would but have stated with less angularity of 
 edge His central truth that not by mere compliance with 
 law, but by a spirit transcending law, even the spirit of the 
 cross and self-sacrifice, can the soul of man be atoned to 
 God : that would have saved Him. But that would have 
 been the desertion of the cause God's cause and man's the 
 cause of the ignorant defenseless sheep, whose very salvation 
 depended on the keeping of that Gospel intact : therefore the 
 Shepherd gave His life a witness to the truth, and a sacrifice 
 to God. It was a profound truth that the populace gave ut- 
 terance to, when they taunted Him on the cross : " He saved 
 others, Himself He can not save." No, of course not ; He 
 that will save others can not save Himself. 
 
 Of that pastoral character He gives here three proofs. I 
 know My sheep am known of Mine I lay down My life 
 for the sheep. 
 
 I know my sheep, as the Father knoweth Me. In other 
 words, as unerringly as His Father read His iicart, so unerr- 
 ingly did He read the heart of man and recognize His own. 
 
 Ask we how ? An easy reply, and a common one, would 
 be He recognized them by the Godhead in Him : His mind 
 was Divine, therefore omniscient : He knew all things, there- 
 fore He knew what was in man: and therefore He knew His 
 own. But we must not slur over His precious words in this 
 way. That Divinity of His is made the pass-key by which 
 we open all mysteries with fatal facility, and save ourselves 
 from thinking of them. We get a dogma ard cover truth 
 with it : we satisfy ourselves with saying Christ was God, 
 and lose the precious humanities of His heart and life. 
 
 18 
 
4.IO The Good Shepherd. 
 
 * 
 
 There is here a deep truth of human nature, for he does not 
 limit that recognizing power to Himself He says that the 
 sheep know Him as truly as He the sheep. He knew men on 
 the same principle on which we know men the same on 
 which we know Him. The only difference is in degree : He 
 knows with infinitely more unerringness than we, but the 
 knowledge is the same in kind. 
 
 Let us think of this. There is a certain mysterious tact 
 of sympathy and antipathy by which we discover the like 
 and unlike of ourselves in others' character. You can not 
 find out a man's opinions unless he chooses to express them; 
 but his feelings and his character you may. He can not hide 
 them : you feel them in his look and mein, and tones and 
 motion. There is, for instance, a certain something in sincer- 
 ity and reality which can not be mistaken a certain some- 
 thing in real grief which the most artistic counterfeit can not 
 imitate. It is distinguished by nature, not education. 
 There is a something in an impure heart which purity de- 
 tects afar off. Marvellous it is how innocence perceives the 
 approach of evil which it can not know by experience, just 
 as the dove w r hich has never seen a falcon trembles by in- 
 stinct at its approach ; just as a blind man detects by finer 
 sensitiveness the passing of the cloud which he can not see 
 overshadowing the sun. It is wondrous how the truer we 
 become the more unerringly we know the ring of truth, dis- 
 cern whether a man be true or not, and can fasten at once 
 upon the rising lie in word and look, and dissembling act. 
 Wondrous how the charity of Christ in the heart finely per- 
 ceives the slightest aberration from charity in others, in un- 
 gentle thought or slanderous tone. 
 
 Therefore Christ knew His sheep by that mystic power al- 
 ways finest in the best natures, most developed in the high- 
 est, by which like detects what is like and what unlike it- 
 self. He was perfect love, perfect truth, perfect purity : 
 therefore He knew what was in man, and felt, as by another 
 sense, afar off the shadows of unlovingness, and falseness, and 
 impurity. 
 
 No one can have read the Gospels without remarking that 
 they ascribe to Him unerring skill in reading man. People, 
 we read, began to show enthusiasm for Him. But Jesus did 
 not trust Himself unto them, "for He knew what was in 
 man." He knew that the flatterers of to-day would be the 
 accusers of to-morrow. Nathanael stood before Him. He 
 had scarcely spoken a word ; but at once unhesitatingly, to 
 Nathanael's own astonishment "Behold an Israelite indeed, 
 VD whom there is no guile !" There came to Him a young 
 
The Good Shepherd. . 411 
 
 man with vast possessions.: a single sentence, an exaggerated 
 epithet, an excited manner, revealed his character. Enthusi- 
 astic and amiable, Jesus loved him : capable of obedience, in 
 life's sunshine and prosperity, ay, and capable of aspiration 
 after something more than mere obedience, but not of sacri- 
 fice. Jesus tested him to the quick, and the young man fail- 
 ed. He did not try to call him back, for He knew what was 
 In him and what was not. He read through Zaccheus when 
 he climbed into the sycamore-tree, despised by the people as 
 a publican, really a son of Abraham : through Judas, with 
 his benevolent saying about the selling of the alabaster-box 
 for the poor, and his false kiss : through the curses of the 
 thief upon the cross, a faith that could be saved : through the 
 zeal of a man who in a fit of enthusiasm offered to go with 
 Him whithersoever He would. He read through the Phari- 
 sees, and His whole being shuddered with the recoil of utter 
 and irreconcilable aversion. 
 
 It was as if His bosom was some mysterious mirror on 
 which all that came near Him left a sullied or unsullied sur- 
 face, detecting themselves by every breath. 
 
 Now distinguish that Divine power from that cunning 
 sagacity which men call knowingness in the matter of char- 
 acter. The worldly-wise have maxims and rules ; but the 
 finer shades and delicacies of truth of character escape 
 them. They would prudently avoid Zaccheus a publican : 
 they 
 
 There is a very solemn aspect in which this power of Jesus 
 to know man presents itself. It is this which qualifies Him 
 for judgment this perfection of human sympathy. Perfect 
 sympathy with every most delicate line of good implies ex- 
 quisite antipathy to every shadow of a shade of evil. God 
 hath given Him authority to execute judgment also, because 
 He is the Son of Man. On sympathy the final awards of 
 heaven and hell are built : attraction and repulsion, the law 
 of the magnet. To each pole all that has affinity with itself: 
 to Christ all that is Christlike : from Christ all that is not 
 Christlike forever and forever. Eternal judgment is noth- 
 ing more than the carrying out of these words, " I know my 
 sheep :" for the obverse of them is, " I never knew you, de- 
 part from me all ye that work iniquity." 
 
 The second proof which Christ alleges of the genuineness 
 of His pastorate is that His sheep know Him. 
 
 How shall we recognize truth Divine? What is the test 
 by which we shall know whether it crimes from God or not ? 
 They tell us we know Christ to be from God because He 
 wrought miracles ; we know a doctrine to be from God be- 
 
4 1 2 The Good Shepherd. 
 
 cause we find it written: or because it is sustained by an 
 universal consent of fathers. 
 
 That is for observe what this argument implies there is 
 something more evident than truth : Truth can not prove it- 
 self: we want something else to prove it. Our souls judge 
 of truth our senses judge of miracles ; and the evidence of 
 our senses the lowest part of our nature is more certain 
 than the evidence of our souls, by which we must partake of 
 God. 
 
 Now to say so is to say that you can not be sure that it is 
 midday or morning sunshine unless you look at the sun-dial : 
 you can not be sure that the sun is shining in the heavens 
 unless you see his shadow on the dial-plate. The dial is val- 
 uable to a man who never reads the heavens the shadow is 
 good for him who has not watched the sun : but for a man 
 who lives in perpetual contemplation of the sun in heaven, 
 the sunshine needs no evidence, and every hour is known. 
 
 Now Christ says, " My sheep know Me" Wisdom is just- 
 ified by her children. Not by some lengthened investiga- 
 tion, whether the shepherd's dress be the identical dress, and 
 the staff and the crozier genuine, do the sheep recognize the 
 shepherd. They know him, they hear his voice, they know 
 him as a man knows his friend. 
 
 They know him, in short, instinctively. Just so does the 
 soul recognize what is of God and true. Truth is like light : 
 visible in itself, not distinguished by the shadows that it 
 casts. There is a something in our souls of God, which cor- 
 responds with what is of God outside us, and recognizes it 
 by direct intuition : something in the true soul which corre- 
 sponds with truth and knows it to be truth. Christ came 
 with truth, and the true recognize it as true : the sheep know 
 the shepherd, wanting no further evidence. Take a few ex- 
 amples : " God is Love." " What shall a man give in ex- 
 change for his soul ?" " He that saveth his life shall lose it : 
 and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." " All 
 things are possible to him that believeth." "The sabbath 
 was made for man, not man- for the sabbath." " God is a 
 Spirit." 
 
 Now the wise men of intellect and logical acumen wanted 
 proof of these truths. Give us, said they, your credentials. 
 " By what authority doesV thou these things ?" They want- 
 ed a sign from heaven to prove that the truth was true, and 
 the life He led, Godlike, and not devil-like. How can we be 
 sure that it is not frdrn Beelzebub, the prince of the devils, 
 that these deeds and sayings come ? We must be quite sure 
 that we are not taking a message from hell as one from 
 
The Good Shepherd. 41 3 
 
 heaven. Give us demonstration, chains of evidence chapter 
 and verse authority. 
 
 But simple men had decided the matter already. They 
 knew very little of antiquity, church authority, and shadows 
 of coming events which prophecy casts before : but their 
 eyes saw the light, and their hearts felt the present God. 
 Wise Pharisees and learned doctors said, to account for a 
 wondrous miracle, " Give God the glory." But the poor un 
 lettered man, whose blinded eye had for the first time looked 
 on a face of love, replied, " Whether this man be a sinner or 
 not, I know not : one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, 
 now I see." 
 
 The well-read Jews could not settle the literary question, 
 whether the marks of his appearance coincided with the 
 prophecies. But the Samaritans felt the life of God : " Now 
 we believe, not because of thy word, but because we have 
 heard Him ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ." 
 
 The Shepherd had come, and the sheep knew his voice. 
 Brethren, in all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before 
 the intellect: the things of God are spiritually discerned. 
 You know truth by being true : you recognize God by being 
 like Him. The Scribe comes and says, I will prove to you 
 that this is sound doctrine by chapter and verse, by what 
 the old and best writers say, by evidence such as convinces 
 the intellect of an intelligent lawyer or juryman. Think you 
 the conviction of faith is got in that way ? 
 
 Christ did not teach like the Scribes. He spoke His truth. 
 He said, " If any man believe not, I judge him not ; the 
 word which I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the 
 last day." It was true, and the guilt of disbelieving it was 
 not an error of the intellect but a sin of the heart. Let us 
 stand upright : let us be sure that the test of truth is the soul 
 within us. Not at second-hand can we have assurance of 
 what is divine and what is not: only at first-hand. The 
 sheep of Christ hear His voice. 
 
 The third proof given by Christ was pastoral fidelity : " I 
 lay down my life for the sheep." Now here is the doctrine 
 of vicarious sacrifice : the sacrifice of one instead of another : 
 life saved by the sacrifice of another life. 
 
 Most of us know the meagre explanation of these words 
 which satisfies the Unitarians : they say that Christ merely 
 died as a martyr, in attestation of the truths He taught. 
 
 But you will observe the strength of the expression which 
 we can not explain away, "I lay down my life for," i. e, in- 
 stead of "the sheep." If. the Shepherd had not sacrificed 
 Himself, the sheep must have been the sacrifice. 
 
414 The Good Shepherd. 
 
 Observe, however, the suffering of Christ was not the sam 
 suffering as that from which He saved us. The suffering of 
 Christ was death. But the suffering from which He re- 
 deemed us by death was more terrible than death. The pit 
 into which He descended was the grave. But the pit in 
 which we should have been lost forever, was the pit of self- 
 ishness and despair. 
 
 Therefore St. Paul affirms, " If Christ be not risen, ye are 
 vet in your sins" If Christ's resurrection be a dream, and 
 tie be not risen from the grave of death, you are yet in the 
 grave of guilt. He bore suffering to free us from what is 
 worse than suffering sin : temporal death to save us from 
 death everlasting : His life given as an offering for sin to 
 save the soul's eternal life. 
 
 Now in the text this sacrificing love of Christ is paralleled 
 by , the love of the Father to the Son. As He loved the 
 sheep, so the Father had loved Him. Therefore the sacrifice 
 of Christ is but a mirror of the love of God. The love of the 
 Father to the Son is self-sacrificing love. 
 
 You know that shallow men make themselves merry with 
 this doctrine. The sacrifice of God, they say, is a figment and 
 an impossibility. Nevertheless this parallel tells us that it 
 is one of the deepest truths of all the universe. It is the pro- 
 found truth which the ancient fathers endeavored to express 
 in the doctrine of the Trinity. For what is the love of the 
 Father to the Son Himself yet not Himself but the grand 
 truth of Eternal Love losing Itself and finding Itself again in 
 the being of another ? What is it but the sublime express- 
 ion of the unselfishness of God ? 
 
 It is a profound, glorious truth ; I wish I knew how to put 
 it in intelligible words. But if these words of Christ do not 
 make it intelligible to the heart, how can any words of mine? 
 The life of blessedness the life of love the life of sacrifice 
 the life of God, are identical. All love is sacrifice the 
 giving of life and self for others. God's life is sacrifice for 
 the Father loves the Son as the Son loves the sheep for 
 whom He gave His life. 
 
 Whoever will humbly ponder upon this will, I think, un- 
 derstand the Atonement better than all theology can teach 
 him. Oh, my brethren, leave men to quarrel as they will 
 about the theology of the Atonement ; here in these words is 
 the religion of it the blessed, all-satisfying religion for our 
 hearts. The self-sacrifice of Christ was the satisfaction to 
 the Father. 
 
 iiow could the Father be satisfied with the death of Christ, 
 unless He saw in the sacrifice mirrored His own love ? for 
 
The Doubt of Thomas. 4 1 5 
 
 God can be satisfied only with that which is perfect as Him- 
 self. Agony does not satisfy God agony only satisfied Mo- 
 loch. Nothing satisfies God but the voluntary sacrifice of 
 love. 
 
 The pain of Christ gave God no pleasure only the love 
 that was tested by pain the love of perfect obedience. He 
 was obedient unto death. 
 
 XX. 
 THE DOUBT OF THOMAS. 
 
 " Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast 
 believed : blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." 
 John xx. 29. 
 
 THE day on which these words were spoken was the first 
 day of the week. On that day Thomas, received demonstra- 
 tion that his Lord was risen from the dead. On that same 
 day a week before, Thomas had declared that no testimony 
 of others, no eyesight of his own, nothing short of touching 
 with his hands the crucifixion marks in his Master's body, 
 should induce him to believe a fact so unnatural as the res- 
 urrection of a human being from the grave. Those seven 
 days between must therefore have been spent in a state of 
 miserable uncertainty. How miserable and how restless 
 none can understand but those who have felt the wretched- 
 ness of earnest doubt. 
 
 Doubt moreover, observe, respecting all that is dear to a 
 Christian's hopes. For if Christ were not risen, Christianity 
 was false, and every high aspiration which it promised to 
 gratify was thrown back on the disappointed heart. 
 
 Let us try to understand the doubt of Thomas. There are 
 some men whose affections are stronger than their under- 
 standings : they feel more than they think. They are simple, 
 trustful, able to repose implicitly on what is told them lia- 
 ble sometimes to verge upon credulity and superstition, but 
 take them all in all, perhaps the happiest class of minds : for 
 it is happy to be without misgivings about the love of God 
 and our own eternal rest in Him. u Blessed," said Christ to 
 Thomas, " are they that have believed." 
 
 There is another class of men whose reflective powers are 
 stronger than their susceptive : they think out truth they 
 do not feel it out. Often highly gifted and powerful minds, 
 
4i 6 The Doubt of Thomas. 
 
 they can not rest till they have made all their grounds Cer- 
 tain : they do not feel safe as long as there is one possibility 
 of delusion left : they prove all things. Such a man was 
 Thomas. He has well been called the rationalist among the 
 apostles. Happy such men can not be. An anxious and in- 
 quiring mind dooms its possessor to unrest. But men of 
 generous spirit, manly and affectionate, they may be : Thomas, 
 was. When Christ was bent on going to Jerusalem, to cer- 
 tain death, Thomas said, "Let us go up too, that we may die 
 with him." And men of mighty faith they may become, if 
 they are true to themselves and their convictions: Thomas 
 did. When such men do believe, it is belief with all the heart 
 and soul for life. When a subject has been once thoroughly 
 and suspiciously investigated, and settled once for all, the ad- 
 herence of the whole reasoning man, if given in at all, is given 
 frankly and heartily as Thomas gave it "My Lord, and my 
 God." 
 
 Now this question of a resurrection which made Thomas 
 restless, is the most anxious that can agitate the mind of man. 
 So awful in its importance, and out of Christ so almost des- 
 perately dark in its uncertainty, who shall blame an earnest 
 man severely if he crave the most indisputable proofs ? 
 
 Very clearly Christ did not. Thomas asked of Christ a 
 sign : he must put his own hands into the prints. His Mas- 
 ter gave him that sign or proof. He said, " Reach hither thy 
 hand." He gave it, it is true, with a gentle and delicate 
 reproof but He did give it. Now from that condescension 
 we are reminded of the darkness that hangs round the ques- 
 tion of a resurrection, and how excusable it is for a man to 
 question earnestly until he has got proof to stand on. For if 
 it were not excusable to crave a proof, our Master never 
 would have granted one. Resurrection is not one of those 
 questions on w r hich you can afford to wait : it is the question 
 of life and death. There are times when it does not weigh 
 heavily. When we have some keen pursuit before us : when 
 we are young enough to be satisfied to enjoy ourselves the 
 problem does not press itself. We are too laden with the 
 pressure of the present to care to ask w r hat is coming. But 
 at last a time comes when we feel it will be all over soon 
 that much of our time is gone, and the rest swiftly going. 
 And let a man be as frivolous as he will at heart, it is a ques- 
 tion too solemn to be put aside Whether he is going down 
 into extinction and the blank of everlasting silence or not. 
 Whether in those far ages, when the very oak which is to 
 form his coffin shall have become fibres of black mould, and 
 the church-yard in which he is to lie shall have become per 
 
The Doubt of Thomas. 4 1 7 
 
 haps unconsecrated ground, and the spades of a generation 
 yet unborn shall have exposed his bones, those bones will be 
 the last relic in the world to bear record that he once trod 
 this green earth, and that life was once dear to him, Thomas, 
 or James, or Paul. Or whether that thrilling, loving, think- 
 ing something, that he calls hirnselt, has indeed within it an 
 indestructible existence which shall still be conscious, when 
 avery thing else shall have rushed into endless wreck. Oh, 
 in the awful earnestness of a question such as that, a specula- 
 tion and a peradventure will not do : we must have proof 
 The honest doubt of Thomas craves a sign as much as the 
 cold doubt of the Sadducee. And a sign shall be mercifully 
 given to the doubt of love which is refused to the doubt of 
 indifference. 
 
 This passage- presents two lines of thought. 
 
 I. The naturalness of the doubts of Thomas, which partly 
 excuses them. 
 
 II. The evidences of the Christian Resurrection. 
 
 I. The naturalness of the doubts of Thomas. 
 
 The first assertion that we make to explain those doubts 
 is, that Nature is silent respecting a future life. All that 
 reason, all that nature, all that religion, apart from Christ, 
 have to show us is something worse than darkness. It is 
 the twilight of excruciating uncertainty. There js enough 
 in the riddle of this world to show us that there may be a 
 life to come; there is nothing to make it certain that there 
 will be one. We crave, as Thomas did, a sign either in the 
 height above or in the depth beneath, and the answer seems 
 to fall back like ice upon our hearts " there shall no sign 
 be given you." 
 
 It is the uncertainty of twilight. You strain at some- 
 thing in the twilight, and just when you are beginning to 
 make out its form and color, the light fails you, and your 
 eyelids sink down, wet and wearied with the exertion. Just 
 so it is when we strain into nature's mysteries, to discern the 
 secrets of the great hereafter. Exactly at the moment when 
 we think we begin to distinguish something, the light goes 
 out and we are left groping in darkness the darkness of the 
 grave. 
 
 Let us forget for a moment that we ever heard of Christ : 
 what is there in life or nature to strengthen the guess that 
 there is a life to come ? There are hints there are proba- 
 bilities ther2 is nothing more. Let us examine some of 
 those probabilities. 
 
 First, there is an irrepressible longing in our hearts, W e 
 
 18* 
 
4 i 8 77/ Doubt of Thomas. 
 
 wish for immortality. The thought of annihilation is horri- 
 ble : even to conceive it is almost impossible. The wish is a 
 kind of argument : it is not likely that God would have giv- 
 en all men such a feeling, if He had not meant to gratify 5 it. 
 Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction. If we 
 thirst, God has created liquids to gratify thirst. If we are 
 susceptible of attachments, there are beings to gratify that 
 love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that 
 there are. an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that 
 craving. 
 
 Likely, I say : more we can not say. A likelihood of an 
 immortality of which our passionate yearnings are a pre- 
 sumption nothing higher than a likelihood. And in weary 
 moments, when the desire of life is not strong, and in unlov- 
 ing moments, there is not even a likelihood. 
 
 Secondly, corroborating this feeling we have the traditions 
 of universal belief. There is not a nation perhaps which 
 does not in some form or other hold that there is a country 
 beyond the grave where the weary are at rest. Now that 
 which all men everywhere and in every age have held, it is 
 impossible to treat contemptuously. How came it to be 
 held by all, if only a delusion ? Here is another probability 
 in the universality of belief. And yet when you come to es- 
 timate this, it is too -slender for a proof: it is only a pre- 
 sumption. The universal voice of mankind is not infallible. 
 It was the universal belief once on the evidence of the 
 senses that the earth was stationary : the universal voice 
 was wrong. The universal voice might be wrong in the 
 matter of a resurrection. It might be only a beautiful and 
 fond dream, indulged till hope made itself seem to be a re- 
 ality.' You can not build upon it. 
 
 Once again : in this strange world of perpetual change, 
 we are met by many resemblances to a resurrection. With- 
 out much exaggeration we call them resurrections. There 
 is tfie resurrection of the moth from the grave of the chrysa- 
 lis. For many ages the sculptured butterfly was the type 
 and emblem of immortality. Because it passes into a state 
 of torpor or deadness, and because from that it emerges by a 
 kind of resurrection the same, yet not the same in all the 
 radiance of a fresh and beautiful youth, never again to be 
 supported by the coarse substance of earth, but destined 
 henceforth to nourish its etherealized existence on the nectar 
 of the flowers the ancients saw in that transformation a 
 something added to their hopes of immortality. It was 
 their beautiful symbol of the soul's indestructibility. 
 
 Again, there is a kind of resurrection when the spring 
 
The Doubt of Thomas. 4 1 9 
 
 brings vigor and motion back to the frozen pulse of the win- 
 ter world. Let any one go into the fields at this spring sea- 
 son of the year. Let him mark the busy preparations for 
 life which are going on. Life is at work in every emerald 
 bud, in the bursting bark of every polished bough, in the 
 greening tints of every brown hillside. A month ago every 
 thing was as still and cold as the dead silence which chills 
 the heart in the highest regions of the glacier solitudes. 
 Life is coming back to a dead world. It is a resurrection 
 surely ! The return of freshness to the frozen world is not 
 less marvellous than the return of sensibility to a heart 
 which has ceased to beat. If one has taken place, the other 
 is not impossible. 
 
 And yet all this, valuable as it is in the way of suggestive- 
 ness, is worth nothing in the way of proof. It is worth ev- 
 ery thing to the heart, for it strengthens the dim guesses and 
 vague intimations which the heart has formed already. It is 
 worth nothing to the intellect : for the moment we come to 
 argue the matter we find how little there is to rest upon in 
 these analogies. They are no real resurrections, after all : 
 they only look like resurrections. The chrysalis only seemed 
 dead : the tree in winter only seemed to have lost its vitali- 
 ty. Show us a butterfly which has been dried and crushed, 
 fluttering its brilliant wings next year again show us a 
 tree plucked up by the roots and seasoned by exposure, the 
 vital force really killed out; putting forth its leaves again, 
 then we should have a real parallel to a resurrection. But 
 nature does not show us that. So that all we have got in 
 the butterfly and the spring are illustrations exquisitely in 
 point after immortality is proved, but in themselves no 
 proofs at all. 
 
 Further still. Look at it in another point of view, and it 
 is a dark prospect. Human history behind and human his- 
 tory before, both give a stern " No," in reply to the question 
 Shall we rise again ? 
 
 Six thousand years of human existence have passed away ; 
 countless armies of the dead have set sail from the shores of 
 time. No traveller has returned from the still land beyond. 
 More than one hundred and fifty generations have done 
 their work, and sunk into the dust again, and still there is 
 not a voice ; there is not a whisper from the grave to tell us 
 whether indeed those myriads are in existence still, be- 
 sides, why should they be ? Talk as you will of the grand- 
 eur of man, why should it not be honor enough for him, 
 more than enough to satisfy a thing so mean, to ha>e had 
 his twenty or his seventy years' life-rent of God's universe ? 
 
420 The Doubt of Thomas. 
 
 Why must such a thing, apart from proof, rise up and claim 
 to himself an exclusive immortality ? 
 
 Man's majesty ! man's worth ! the difference between him 
 and the elephant or ape is too degradingly small to venture 
 much on. That is not all : instead of looking backward, now 
 look forward. The wisest thinkers tell us that there are al- 
 ready on the globe traces of a demonstration that the human 
 race is drawing to its close. Each of the great human fami- 
 lies has had its o!ay its infancy its manhood its decline. 
 The two last races that have not been tried are on the stage 
 of earth doing their work now. There is no other to suc- 
 ceed them. Man is but of yesterday, and yet his race is 
 well-nigh done. Man is wearing out, as every thing before 
 him has been worn out. In a few more centuries the crust 
 of earth will be the sepulchre of the race of man, as it has 
 been the sepulchre of extinct races of palm-trees, and ferns, 
 and gigantic reptiles. The time is near when the bones of 
 the last human being will be given to the dust. It is his- 
 torically certain that man has quite lately, within a few thou- 
 sand years, been called into existence. It is certain that be- 
 fore very long the race must be extinct. 
 
 Now look at all this without Christ, and tell us whether 
 it be possible to escape such misgivings, and such reason- 
 ings as these which rise out of such an aspect of things. 
 Man, this thing of yesterday, which sprung out of the eter- 
 nal nothingness, why may he not sink, after he has played 
 his appointed part, into nothingness again ? You see the 
 leaves sinking one by one in autumn, till the heaps below 
 are rich with the spoils of a whole year's vegetation. They 
 were bright and perfect while they lasted : each leaf a mira- 
 cle of beauty and contrivance. There is no resurrection for 
 the leaves why must there be one for man ? 
 
 Go and stand some summer evening by the river side : 
 you will see the mayfly sporting out its little hour, in dense 
 masses of insect life, darkening the air a few feet above the 
 gentle swell of the water. The heat of that very afternoon 
 brought them into existence. Every gauze wing is traversed 
 by ten thousand fibres which defy the microscope to find a 
 flaw in their perfection. The omniscience and the care 
 bestowed upon that exquisite anatomy, one would think, can 
 not be destined to be wasted in a moment, Yet so it is : 
 wlfen the sun has sunk below the trees its little life is done. 
 Yesterday it was not : to-morrow it will not be. God has 
 bidden it be happy for one evening. It has no right or 
 claim to a second, and in the universe that marvellous life 
 has appeared once and will appear no more. May not the 
 
The Doiibt of Thomas. 42 1 
 
 race of man smk like the generations of the mayfly? Why 
 can not the Creator, so lavish in His resources, afford to an- 
 nihilate souls as he annihilates insects ? 
 
 Would it not almost enhance His glory to believe it ? 
 
 That, brethren, is the question ; and Nature has no reply. 
 The fearful secret of sixty centuries has not yet found a 
 voice. The whole evidence lies before us. We know what 
 the greatest and wisest have had to say in favor of an im- 
 mortality ; and we know how, after eagerly devouring all 
 their arguments, our hearts have sunk back in cold disap- 
 pointment, and to every proof as we read, our lips have re- 
 plied mournfully, that will not stand. Search through tradi 
 tion, history, the world within you and' the world without 
 except in Christ there is not the shadow of a shade of proof 
 that man survives the grave. 
 
 I do not wonder that Thomas, with that honest accurate 
 mind of his, wishing that the news were true, yet dreading 
 lest it should be false, and determined to guard against 
 every possible illusion, delusion, and deception, said so strong- 
 ly, " Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, 
 and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my 
 hand into his side, I will not believe." 
 
 II. The Christian proofs of a Resurrection. 
 
 This text tells us of two kinds of proof: The first is the 
 evidence of the senses " Thomas, because thou hast seen me, 
 thou hast believed." The other is the evidence of the Spirit 
 "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have be- 
 lieved." 
 
 Let us scrutinize the external evidence of Christ's resur- 
 rection which those verses furnish. It is a twofold evidence : 
 The witness of the Apostle Thomas, who was satisfied with 
 the proofs the witness of St. John, who records the circum- 
 stance of his satisfaction. Consider first the witness of St. 
 John : try it by ordinary rules. Hearsay evidence, which 
 c/>mes second-hand, is suspicious, but St. John's is no distant 
 hearsay story. He does not say that he had heard the story 
 from Thomas, and that years afterwards, when the circum- 
 stances had lost their exact sharp outline, he had penned it 
 rio^vn, when he was growing old and his memory might be 
 failing. St. John was present the whole time. All the 
 apostles were there : they all watched the result with eager 
 interest. The conditions made by Thomas, without which 
 he would not believe, had been made before them all. They 
 all heard him say that the demonstration was complete : 
 they all saw him touch the wounds : and St. John recorded' 
 
422 The Doubt of Thomas. 
 
 what he saw. Now a scene like that is one of those solemn 
 ones in a man's life which can not be forgotten : it graves it- 
 self on the memory. A story told us by another may be un- 
 intentionally altered or exaggerated in the repetition ; but a 
 spectacle like this, so strange and so solemn, could not be 
 forgotten or misinterpreted. St. John could have made no 
 mistake. Estimate next the worth of the witness of Thomas : 
 try it by the ordinary rules of life. Evidence is worth little 
 if it is the evidence of credulity. If you find a man believ- 
 ing every new story, and accepting every fresh discovery, so 
 called, without scrutiny, you may give him credit for sinceri- 
 ty ; you can riot re'st much upon his judgment : his testimony 
 can not go for much. For example, when St. Peter, after his 
 escape from prison, knocked at Mark's mother's door, there 
 went a maid to open it, who came back scared and startled 
 with the tidings that she had seen his angel or spirit. Had 
 she gone about afterwards among the believers with that 
 tale, that St. Peter was dead and alive again, it would have 
 been worth little. Her fears, her sex, her credulity, all rob- 
 bed her testimony of its worth. 
 
 Now the resurrection of Christ does not stand on such a 
 footing. There was one man who dreaded the possibility 
 of delusion, however credulous the others might be. He re- 
 solved beforehand that only one proof should be decisive. 
 He would not be contented with seeing Christ : that might 
 be a dream: it might be the vision of a disordered fancy. 
 He would not be satisfied with the assurance of others. 
 The evidence of testimony which he did reject was very 
 strong. Ten of his most familiar friends, and certain women, 
 gave in their separate and their united testimony ; but 
 against all that St. Thomas held out skeptically firm. They 
 might have been deceived themselves : they might have been 
 trifling with him. The possibilities of mistake were innumer- 
 able : the delusions of the best men about what they see are 
 incredible. He would trust a thing so infinitely important 
 to nothing but his own scrutinizing hand. It might be some 
 one personating his Master. He would put his hands into 
 real wounds, or else hold it unproved. The allegiance which 
 was given in so enthusiastically, " My Lord, and my God," 
 was given in after, and not before scrutiny. It was the cau- 
 tious verdict of an enlightened, suspicious, most earnest, and 
 most honest skeptic. 
 
 Try the evidence next by character. Blemished character 
 damages evidence. Now the only charge that was ever 
 heard against the Apostle John was that he loved a world 
 'which hated him. The character of the Apostle Thomas is 
 
The Doubt of Thomas. 423 
 
 that he was a man cautious in receiving evidence, and most 
 rigorous in exacting satisfactory proof, but ready to act upon 
 his convictions when once made, even to the death. Love, 
 elevated above the common love of man, in the one heroic 
 conscientiousness and a most rare integrity in the other 
 who impeaches that testimony ? 
 
 Once more : any possibility of interested motives will dis- 
 credit evidence. Ask we the motive of John or Thomas for 
 this strange tale ? John's reward a long and solitary ban- 
 ishment to the mines of Patmos. The gain and the bribe 
 which tempted Thomas a lonely pilgrimage to the far East, 
 and death at the last in India. Those were strange motives 
 to account for their persisting and glorying in the story of 
 the resurrection to the last ! Starving their gain, and martyr- 
 dom their price. 
 
 The evidence to which Thomas yielded was the evidence 
 of the senses touch, and sight, and hearing. Now the feel- 
 ing which arose from this touching, and feeling, and demon- 
 stration, Christ pronounced to be faith : " Thomas, because 
 thou hast seen, thou hast believed." There are some Chris- 
 tian writers who tell us that the conviction produced by the 
 intellect or the senses is not faith : but Christ says it is. 
 Observe, then, it matters not how faith comes whether 
 through the intellect, as in the case of St. Thomas or 
 through the heart, as in the case of St. John or as the result 
 of long education, as in the case of St. Peter. God has many 
 ways of bringing different characters to faith : but that 
 blessed thing which the Bible calls faith is a state of soul in 
 which the things of God become glorious certainties. It 
 was riot faith which assured Thomas that what stood before 
 him was the Christ he had known : that was sight. But it 
 was faith, which from the visible enabled him to pierce up to 
 the truth invisible: "My Lord, and my God." And it was 
 faith which enabled him through all life after, to venture 
 every thing on that conviction, and live for One who had 
 died for him. 
 
 Remark again this : The faith of Thomas was not merely 
 satisfaction about a fact : it was trust in a person. The 
 admission of a fact, however sublime, is not faith : we may 
 believe that Christ is risen, yet not be nearer heaven. It is 
 a Bible fact that Lazarus rose from the grave, but belief in 
 Lazarus's resurrection does not make the soul better than it 
 was. Thomas passed on from the fact of the resurrection to 
 the person of the risen : " My Lord, and my God." Trust in 
 the risen Saviour that was the belief which saved his soul. 
 
 And that is our salvation too. You may satisfy yourself 
 
424 The Doubt of Thomas. 
 
 about the evidences of the resurrection ; you may bring in 
 your verdict well, like a cautious and enlightened judge; 
 you are then in possession of a fact, a most valuable and 
 curious fact : but faith of any saving worth you have not, 
 unless from the fact you pass on, like Thomas, to cast the 
 allegiance and the homage of your soul, and the love of all 
 your being, on Him whom Thomas worshipped. It is not 
 belief about the Christ, but personal trust in the Christ of 
 God, that saves the soul. 
 
 There is another kind of evidence by which the resurrec- 
 tion becomes certain. Not the evidence of the senses, but 
 the evidence of the spirit : " Blessed are they that have not 
 seen, and yet have believed." There are thousands of Chris- 
 tians who have never examined the evidences of the resur- 
 rection piece by piece : they are incapable of estimating it if 
 they did examine : they know nothing about the laws of ev^ 
 idence: they have had no experience in balancing the value 
 of testimony : they are neither lawyers nor philosophers : and 
 yet these simple Christians have received into their very souls 
 the resurrection of their Redeemer, and look forward to 
 their own rising from the grave with a trust as firm, as 
 steady, and as saving, as if they had themselves put .their 
 hands into His wounds. They have never seen they know 
 nothing of proofs and miracles yet they believe, and are 
 blessed. How is this ? 
 
 I reply, there is an inward state of heart which makes 
 truth credible the moment it is stated. It is credible to 
 some men because of what they are. Love is credible to a 
 loving heart : purity is credible to a pure mind : life is cred- 
 ible to a spirit in which ever life beats strongly : it is incred- 
 ible to other men. Because of that such men believe. Of 
 course that inward state could not reveal a fact like the 
 resurrection ; but it can receive the fact the moment it is 
 revealed without requiring evidence. The love of St. John 
 himself never could discover a resurrection ; but it made 
 a resurrection easily believed, when the man of intellect, 
 St. Thomas, found difficulties. Therefore " with the heart 
 man believeth unto righteousness," and therefore "he that 
 believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself," 
 and therefore "faith is the substance of things hoped for." 
 Now it is of such a state, a state of love and hope, which 
 makes the Divine truth credible and natural at once, that 
 Jesus speaks : " Blessed are they that have not seen and yet 
 have believed." 
 
 There are men in whom the resurrection begun makes the 
 resurrection credible. In them the Spirit of the risen Saviour 
 
The Doubt of Thomas. 425 
 
 works already ; and they have mounted with Him from the 
 grave. They have risen out of the darkness of doubt, and are 
 expatiating in the brightness and the sunshine of a day in 
 which God is ever light. Their step is as free as if the clay 
 of the sepulchre had" been shaken off: and their hearts are 
 lighter than those of other men ; and there is in them an 
 unearthly triumph which they are unable to express. They 
 have risen above the narrowness of life, and all that is petty, 
 and ungenerous, and mean. They have risen above fear- 
 they have risen above self. In the New Testament that is 
 called the spiritual resurrection, a being, " risen with Christ :" 
 and the man in whom all that is working has got something 
 more blessed than external evidence to rest upon. He has the 
 witness in himself: he has not seen, and yet he has believed : 
 he believed in a resurrection, because he has the resurrection 
 in himself. The resurrection in all its heavenliness and un- 
 earthly elevation has begun within his soul, and he knows as 
 clearly as if he had demonstration, that it must be developed 
 in an eternal life. 
 
 Now this is the higher and nobler kind of faith a faith 
 more blessed than that of Thomas. " Because thou hast seen 
 me, thou hast believed." There are times when we envy, as 
 possessed of higher privileges, those who saw Christ in the 
 flesh : we think that if we could have heard that calm voice, 
 or seen that blessed presence, or touched those lacerated 
 wounds in His sacred flesh, all doubt would be set at rest 
 forever. Therefore these words must be our corrective. 
 God has granted us the possibility of believing in a more 
 trustful and more generous way than if we sain. To believe, 
 not because we are learned and can prove, but because there 
 is a something in us, even God's own Spirit, which makes us 
 feel Light as light, and Truth as true that is the blessed 
 faith. 
 
 Blessed, because it carries with it spiritual elevation of 
 character. Narrow the prospects of man to this time-world, 
 and it is impossible to escape the conclusions of the Epicu- 
 rean sensualist. If to-morrow we die, let us eat and drink 
 to day. If we die the sinner's death, it becomes a matter of 
 mere taste whether we shall live the sinner's life or not. 
 But if our existence is forever, then plainly, that which is to 
 be daily subdued and subordinated is the animal within us : 
 that which is to be cherished is that which is likest God 
 within us which we have from Him, and which is the sole 
 pledge of eternal being in the spirit-life. 
 
426 The Irreparable Past. 
 
 XXI. 
 THE IRREPARABLE PAST. 
 
 "And he eometh the third time, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and 
 take your rest : it is enough, the hour is come ; behold, the Son of man is 
 betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise up, let us go ; lo, he that betrayeth 
 me is at hand." Mark xiv. 41. 42. 
 
 IT is upon two sentences of this passage that our attention 
 it to be fixed to-day sentences which in themselves are ap- 
 parently contradictory, but which are pregnant with a les- 
 son of the deepest practical import. Looked at in the 
 mere meaning of the words as they stand, our Lord's first 
 command given to His disciples, " Sleep on now, and take 
 your rest," is inconsistent with the second command, which 
 follows almost in the same breath, " Rise, let us be going." 
 A permission to slumber, and a warning to arouse at once, 
 are injunctions which can scarcely standlogether in the same 
 sentence consistently. 
 
 Our first inquiry therefore is, what did our Redeemer 
 mean ? We shall arrive at the true solution of this difficulty 
 if we review the circumstances under which these words were 
 spoken. 
 
 The account with which these verses stand connected, be- 
 longs to one of the last scenes in the drama of our Master's 
 earthly pilgrimage : it is found in the history of the trial- 
 hour which was passed in the garden of Gethsemane. And 
 an hour it was indeed big with the destinies of the world, 
 for the command had gone forth to seize the Saviour's per- 
 son : but the Saviour was still at large and free. Upon the 
 success or the frustration of that plan the world's fate was 
 trembling. Three men were selected to be witnesses of the 
 sufferings of that hour: three men, the favored ones on all 
 occasions of the apostolic band, and the single injunction 
 which had been laid upon them was, " Watch with me one 
 hour." 
 
 That charge to watch or keep awake, seems to have been 
 given with two ends in view. He asked them to keep 
 awake, first that they might sympathize with him. He com- 
 manded them to keep awake that they might be on their 
 guard against surprise : that they might afford sympathy, 
 because never in all His career did Christ more stand in need 
 
The Irreparable Past. 427 
 
 of such soothing as it was in the power of man to give. It is 
 true that was not much : the struggle, and the agony, and 
 the making up of the mind to death had something in them 
 too Divine and too mysterious to be understood by the dis- 
 ciples, and therefore sympathy could but reach a portion of 
 what our Redeemer felt. Yet still it appears to have been 
 an additional pang in Christ's anguish to find that He was 
 left thoroughly alone -to endure, while even His own friends 
 did not compassionate His endurance. We know what a re- 
 lief it is to see the honest affectionate face of a menial serv- 
 ant, or some poor dependent, regretting that your suifering 
 may be infinitely above his comprehension. It may be a se- 
 cret which you can not impart to him : or it may be a men- 
 tal distress which his mind is too uneducated to appreciate : 
 yet still his sympathy in your dark hour is worth a world. 
 What you suifer he knows not, but he knows you do suffer, 
 and it pains him to think of it : there is balm to you in that. 
 This is the power of sympathy. 
 
 We can do little for one another in this world. Little, 
 very little, can be done when the worst must come ; but yet 
 to know that the pulses of a human heart are vibrating with 
 yours, there is something in that, let the. distance between 
 man and man be ever so immeasurable, exquisitely soothing. 
 
 It was this, and but this, in the way of feeling, that Christ 
 asked of Peter, James, and John : Watch be awake : let me 
 not feel that when I agonize you can be at ease and comfort- 
 able. But it would seem there was another thing which He 
 asked in the way of assistance. The plot to capture Him was 
 laid ; the chance of that plot's success lay in making the sur- 
 prise so sudden as to cut off all possibility of escape. The 
 hope of defeating that plot depended upon the fidelity of 
 apostolic vigilance. Humanly speaking, had they been vigi- 
 lant they might have saved Him. Breathless listening for 
 the sound of footsteps in the distance : eyes anxiously strain- 
 ing through the trees to distinguish the glitter of the lan- 
 terns ; unremitting apprehension catching from the word of 
 Christ an intimation that He was in danger, and so giving 
 notice on the first approach of any thing like intrusion that 
 would have been watching. 
 
 That command to watch was given twice first, when 
 Christ first retired aside leaving the disciples by themselves; 
 secondly, in a reproachful way when He returned and found 
 His request disregarded. He waked them up once and said, 
 " What, could ye not watch with me one hour ?" He came 
 again, and found their eyes closed once more. On that occa- 
 sion not a syllable fell from His lips; He did not waken 
 
428 The Irreparable Past. 
 
 them a second time. He passed away sad and disappointed, 
 and left them to their slumbers. But when He came the 
 third time, it was no longer possible for their sleep to do 
 Him harm or their watching to do Him good. The precious 
 opportunity was lost forever. Sympathy, vigilance, the hour 
 for these was past. The priests had succeeded in their sur- 
 prise, and Judas had well led them through the dark, with 
 unerring accuracy, to the very spot where his Master knelt ; 
 and there were seen quite close, the dark figures shown in re- 
 lief against the glare of the red torchlight, and every now 
 and then the gleam glittering from the bared steel and the 
 Roman armor. It was all over, they might sleep as they 
 liked, their sleeping could do no injury now; their watching 
 could do no good. And, therefore, partly in bitterness, part- 
 ly in reproach, partly in a kind of irony, partly in sad earnest, 
 our Master said to His disciples : " Sleep on now : there is no 
 use in watching now : take your rest forever if you will. 
 Sleep and rest can do me no more harm now, for all that 
 watching might have done is lost." 
 
 But, brethren, we have to observe that in the next sen- 
 tence our Redeemer addresses Himself to the consideration 
 of what could yet- be done : the best thing as circumstances 
 then stood. So far as any good to be got from watching 
 went, they might sleep on : there was no reparation for the 
 fault that had been done : but so far as duty went, there was 
 still much of endurance to which they had to rouse them- 
 selves. They could not save their Master, but they might 
 loyally and manfully share His disgrace, and, if it must be, 
 His death. They could not put off the penalty, but they 
 might steel themselves cheerfully to share it. Safety was 
 out of the question : but they might meet their fate, instead 
 of being overwhelmed by it: and so, as respected what was 
 gone by, Christ said, " Sleep, what is done can not be un- 
 done ;" but as respected the duties that were lying before 
 them still, He said, " We must make the best of it that can 
 be made : rouse yourselves to dare the worst : on to enact 
 your parts like men. Rise, let us be going we have some- 
 thing still left to do." Here then we have two subjects of 
 contemplation distinctly marked out for us. 
 
 I. The irreparable past. 
 II. The available future. 
 
 The words of Christ are not like the words of other men : 
 His sentences do not end with the occasion which called them 
 forth: every sentence of Christ's is a deep principle of hu- 
 man life, and it is so with these sentences : " Sleep on now " 
 
The Irreparable Past. - 429 
 
 that is a principle. " Rise up, and let us be going " that 
 is another principle. The principle contained in " Sleep on 
 now " is this, that the past is irreparable, and after a certain 
 moment waking will do no good. You may improve the fu- 
 ture, the past is gone beyond recovery. As to all that is 
 gone by, so far as the hope of altering it goes, you may sleep 
 on and take your rest : there is no power in earth or heaven 
 that can undo what has once been done. 
 
 Now let us proceed to give illustrations of this principle. 
 
 It is true, first of all, with respect to time that is gone by. 
 Time is the solemn inheritance to which every man is bora 
 heir, who has a life-rent of this world a little section cut out 
 of eternity and given us to do our work in : an eternity be- 
 fore, an eternity behind ; and the small stream between, 
 floating swiftly from one into the vast bosom of the other. 
 The man who has felt with all his soul the significance of 
 Time will not be long in learning any lesson that this world 
 has to teach him. Have you ever felt it, my Christian breth- 
 ren ? Have you ever realized how your own little streamlet 
 is gliding away, and bearing you along with it towards that 
 awful other world of which all things here are but the thin 
 shadows, down into that eternity towards which the confused 
 wreck of all earthly things are bound? Let us realize that, 
 beloved brethren : until that sensation of Time, and the infi- 
 nite meaning which is wrapped up in it, has taken possession 
 of our souls, there is no chance of our ever feeling other than 
 that it is worse than madness to sleep that time away. Ev- 
 ery day in this world has its work ; and every day as it rises 
 out of eternity keeps putting to each of us the question 
 afresh, What will you do before to-day has sunk into eternity 
 and nothingness again ? And now what have we to say with 
 respect to this strange solemn thing Time? That men do 
 with it through life just what the apostles did for one precious 
 and irreparable hour in the garden of Gethsemane : they go 
 to sleep. Have you ever seen those marble statues in some 
 public square or garden, which art has so fashioned into a 
 perennial fountain that through the lips or through the hands 
 the clear water flows in a perpetual stream, on and on for- 
 ever ; and the marble stands there passive, *cold making 
 no effort to arrest the gliding water ? 
 
 It is so that Time flows through the hands of men swift, 
 never pausing till it has run itself out ; and there is the man 
 petrified into a marble sleep, not feeling what it is which is 
 passing away forever. It is so, brethren, just so, that the 
 destiny of nine men out of ten accomplishes itself, slipping 
 away from them, aimless, useless, till it is too late. And 
 
430 The Irreparable Past. 
 
 this passage asks us with all the solemn thoughts which 
 crowd around an approaching eternity what has been our 
 life, and what do we intend it shall be? Yesterday, last 
 week, last year they are gone. Yesterday, for example, 
 was such a day as never was before, and never can be again. 
 Out of darkness and eternity it was born a new fresh day : 
 into darkness and eternity it sank again forever. It had a 
 voice calling to us, of its own. Its own work its own du- 
 ties. What were we doing yesterday? Idling, whiling 
 away the time in light and luxurious literature Tiot as life's 
 relaxation, but as life's business? thrilling our hearts with 
 the excitements of life contriving how to spend the day 
 most pleasantly ? Was that our day ? Sleep, brethren ! all 
 that is but the sleep of the three apostles. And now let us 
 remember this : there is a day coming when that sleep will 
 be broken rudely, "with a shock : there is a day in our future 
 Jives when our time will be counted not by years nor by 
 months, nor yet by hours, but by minutes the day when 
 unmistakable symptoms shall announce that the messengers 
 of death have come to take us. 
 
 That startling moment will come w r hich it is in vain to at- 
 tempt to realize now, when it will be felt that it is all over 
 at last that our chance and our trial are past. The moment 
 that we have tried to think of, shrunk from, put away from 
 us, here it is going too, like all other moments that have 
 gone before it : and then with eyes unsealed at last, you look 
 back on the life which is gone by. There is no mistake about 
 it : there it is, a sleep, a most palpable sleep self-indulged 
 unconsciousness of high destinies, and God and Christ : a 
 sleep when Christ was calling out to you to watch with Him 
 one hour a sleep when there was something to be done a 
 sleep broken, it may be, once or twice by restless dreams, 
 and by a voice of truth which would make itself heard at 
 times, but still a sleep which was only rocked into deeper 
 stillness by interruption. And now from the undone eterni- 
 ty the bosom of whose waves is distinctly audible upon your 
 soul, there comes the same voice again a solemn sad voice 
 but no longer the same word, " Watch " other words alto- 
 gether, " You may go to sleep." It is too late to wake; 
 there is no science in earth or heaven to recall time that 
 once has fled. 
 
 Again, this principle of the irreparable past holds good 
 with respect to preparing for temptation. That hour in the 
 garden was a precious opportunity given for laying in spir- 
 itual strength. Christ knew it well. He struggled and 
 fought then : therefore there was no struggling afterwards 
 
The Irreparable Past. 431 
 
 no trembling in the judgment-hall no shrinking on the cross, 
 but only dignified and calm victory ; for He had fought the 
 temptation on His knees beforehand, and conquered all in the 
 garden. The battle of the judgment-hall, the battle of the 
 cross, were already fought and over, in the watch and in the 
 agony. The apostles missed the meaning of that hour ; and 
 therefore when it came to the question of trial, the loudest 
 boaster of them all shrunk from acknowledging whose he 
 was, and the rest played the part of the craven and the 
 renegade. And if the reason of this be asked, it is simply 
 this : They went to trial unprepared : they had not prayed : 
 and what is a Christian without prayer but Samson with- 
 out his talisman of hair? 
 
 Brethren, in this world, when there is any foreseen or sus- 
 pected danger before us, it is our duty to forecast our trial. 
 It is our wisdom to put on our armor to consider what lies 
 before us to call up resolution in God's strength to go 
 through what we may have to do. And it is marvellous 
 how difficulties smooth away before a Christian when he 
 does this. Trials that cost him a struggle to meet even in 
 imagination like the heavy sweat of Gethsemane, when 
 Christ was looking forward and feeling exceeding sorrowful 
 even unto death come to their crisis ; and behold, to his 
 astonishment they are nothing they have been fought and 
 conquered already. But if you go to meet those tempta- 
 tions, not as Christ did, but as the apostles did, prayerless, 
 trusting to the chance impulse of the moment, you may make 
 up your mind to fail. That opportunity lost is irreparable : 
 it is your doom to yield then. Those words are true, you 
 may "sleep on now, and take your rest," for you have be- 
 trayed yourselves into the hands of danger. 
 
 And now one word about prayer. It is a preparation for 
 danger, it is the armor for battle. Go not, my Christian 
 brother, into the dangerous world without it. You kneel 
 down at night to pray, and drowsiness weighs down your 
 eyelids. A hard day's work is a kind of excuse, and you 
 shorten your prayer and resign yourself softly to repose. 
 The morning breaks, and it may be you rise late, and so 
 your early devotions are not done, or done with irregular 
 haste. No watching unto prayer wakefulness once more 
 omitted. And now we ask, is that reparable? Brethren, 
 we solemnly believe not. There has been that done which 
 can not be undone. You have given up your prayer, and 
 you will suffer for it. Temptation is before you, and you are 
 not fit to meet it. There is a guilty feeling on the soul, and 
 you linger at a distance from Christ. It is no marvel if that 
 
432 The Irreparable Past. 
 
 day, in which you suffer drowsiness to interfere with prayer, 
 be a day on which you betray Him by cowardice and soft 
 shrinking from duty. Let it be a principle through life, mo- 
 ments of prayer intruded upon by sloth can not be made up. 
 We may get experience, but we can not get back the rich 
 freshness and the strength which were wrapped up in these 
 moments. 
 
 Once again this principle is true in another respect. Op- 
 portunities of doing good do not come back. We are here, 
 brethren, for a most definite and intelligible purpose to 
 educate our own hearts by deeds of love, and to be the in- 
 strument of blessing to our brother men. There are two 
 ways in which this is to be done by guarding them from 
 danger, and by soothing them in their rough path by kindly 
 sympathies the two things which the apostles were asked 
 to do for Christ. And it is an encouraging thought, that he 
 who can not do the one has at least the other in his power. 
 If he can not protect he can sympathize. Let the weakest 
 let the humblest in this congregation remember, that in 
 his daily course he can, if he will, shed around him almost a 
 heaven. Kindly words, sympathizing attentions, watchful- 
 ness against wounding men's sensitiveness these cost very 
 little, but they #re priceless in their value. Are they not, 
 brethren, almost the staple of our daily happiness ? From 
 hour to hour, from moment to moment, we are supported, 
 blest, by small kindnesses. And then consider : Here is a 
 section of life, one-third, one-half, it may be three-fourths 
 gone by, and the question before us is, how much has been 
 done in that way ? Who has charged himself with the 
 guardianship of his brother's safety ? Who has laid on him- 
 self as a sacred duty to sit beside his brother suffering? Oh ! 
 my brethren, it is the omission of these things which is irrepa- 
 rable : irreparable, when you look to the purest enjoyment 
 which might have been your own : irreparable, when you 
 consider the compunction which belongs to deeds of love 
 not done ; irreparable, w r hen you look to this groaning w r orld 
 and feel that its agony of bloody sweat has been distilling 
 all night, and you were dreaming away in luxury ! Shame, 
 shame upon our selfishness ! There is an infinite voice in 
 the sin and sufferings of earth's millions, which makes every 
 idle moment, every moment, that is, w r hich is not relaxation, 
 guilt ; and seems to cry out, If you will not bestir yourself 
 for love's sake now, it will soon be too late. 
 
 Lastly, this principle applies to a misspent youth. There 
 is something very remarkable in the picture which is placed 
 before us. There is a picture of One struggling, tolling. 
 
The Irreparable Past. 433 
 
 standing between others and danger, and those others quiet- 
 ly content to reap the benefit of that struggle without anxie- 
 ty of their own. And there is something in this singularly 
 like the position in which all young persons are placed. 
 The young are by God's providence exempted in a great 
 measure from anxiety : they are as the apostles were in re- 
 lation to their Master: their friends stand between them 
 and the struggles of existence. They are not called upon to 
 think for themselves : the burden is borne by others. They 
 get their bread without knowing or caring how it is paid 
 for : they smile and laugh without a suspicion of the anxious 
 thoughts of day and night which a parent bears to enable 
 them to smile. So to speak they are sleeping and it is not 
 a guilty sleep while another watches. 
 
 My young brethren youth is one of the precious oppor- 
 tunities of life rich in blessing if you choose to make it so, 
 but having in it the materials of undying remorse if you suf- 
 fer it to pass unimproved. Your quiet Gethsemane is now. 
 Gethsemane's struggles you can not know yet. Take care 
 that you do not learn too well Gethsemane's sleep. Do you 
 know how you can imitate the apostles in their fatal sleep ? 
 You can suffer your young days to pass idly and uselessly 
 away; you can live as if you had nothing to do but to en- 
 joy yourselves : you can let others think for you, and not 
 try to become thoughtful yourselves : till the business and 
 the difficulties of life come upon you unprepared, and you 
 find yourselves like men waking from sleep, hurried, con- 
 fused, scarcely able to stand, with all the faculties bewilder- 
 ed, not knowing right from wrong, led headlong to evil, just 
 because you have not given yourselves in time to learn what 
 is good. All that is sleep. 
 
 And now let us mark it. You can not repair that in after- 
 life. Oh ! remember every period of human life has its own 
 lesson, and you can not learn that lesson in the next period. 
 The boy has one set of lessons to learn, and the young man 
 another, and the grown-up man another. Let us consider 
 one single instance. The boy has to learn docility, gentle- 
 ness of temper, reverence, submission. All those feelings 
 which are to be transferred afterwards in full cultivation to 
 God, like plants nursed in a hotbed and then planted out, 
 are to be cultivated first in youth. Afterwards, those habits 
 which have been merely habits of obedience to an earthly 
 parent, are to become religious submission to a heavenly par- 
 ent. Our parents stand to us in the place of God. Venera- 
 tion for our parents is intended to become afterwards adora- 
 tion for something higher. Take that single instance ; and 
 
 19 
 
434 The Irreparable Past. 
 
 now suppose that that is not learnt in boyhood. Suppose 
 that the boy sleeps to, that duty of veneration, and learns 
 only flippancy, insubordination, and the habit of deceiving 
 his father can that, my young brethren, be repaired after- 
 wards? Humanly speaking, not. Life is like the transition 
 from class to class in a school. The school-boy who has not 
 learnt arithmetic in the earlier classes can not secure it when 
 he comes to mechanics in the higher: each section has its 
 own sufficient work. He may be a good philosopher or a 
 good historian, but. a bad arithmetician he remains for life; 
 for he can not lay the foundation at the moment when he 
 must be building the superstructure. The regiment which 
 has not perfected itself in its manoeuvres on the parade- 
 ground can not learn them before the guns of the enemy. 
 And just in the same way, the young person who has slept 
 his youth away, and become idle, and selfish, and hard, can 
 not make up for that afterwards. He may do something, 
 he may be religious yes ; but he can not be what he 
 might have been. There is a part of his heart which will 
 remain uncultivated to the end. The apostles could share 
 their Master's sufferings they could not save Him. Youth 
 has its irreparable past. 
 
 And therefore, my young brethren, let it be impressed 
 upon you NOW is a time, infinite in its value for eternity, 
 which will never return again. Sleep not ; learn that there 
 is a very solemn work of heart which must be done while the 
 stillness of the garden of your Gethsemane gives you time. 
 Now or never. The treasures at your command are infinite. 
 Treasures of time, treasures of youth, treasures of opportuni- 
 ty that grown-up men would sacrifice every thing they have 
 to possess. Oh for ten years of youth back again with the 
 added experience of age ! But it can not be : they must be 
 content to sleep on now, and take their rest. 
 
 We are to pass on next to a few remarks on the other sen- 
 tence in this passage, which brings before us for considera- 
 tion the future which is still available : for we are to observe, 
 that our Master did not limit His apostles to a regretful rec- 
 ollection of their failure. Recollection of it He did demand. 
 There were the materials of a most cutting self-reproach in 
 the few words He said : for they contained all the desolation 
 of that sad word, never. Who knows not what that word 
 wraps up never it never can be undone. Sleep on. But 
 yet there was no sickly lingering over the irreparable. Our 
 Master's words are the words of One who had fully recog- 
 nized the hopelessness of His position, but yet manfully and 
 calmly had numbered His resources and scanned His duties, 
 
The Irreparable Past. 435 
 
 and then braced up His mind to meet the exigencies of His 
 situation with no passive endurance : the moment was come 
 for action " Rise, let us be going." 
 
 Now the broad general lesson which we gain from this is 
 not hard to read. It is that a Christian is to be forever rous- 
 ing himself to recognize the duties which lie before him now. 
 In Christ the motto is ever this, " Let us be going." Let me 
 speak to the conscience of some one. Perhaps yours is a 
 very remorseful past a foolish, frivolous, disgraceful, frit- 
 tered past. Well, Christ says, My servant, be sad, but no 
 languor ; there is work to be done for me yet rise up, be 
 going ! Oh my brethren, Christ takes your wretched rem- 
 nants of life the feeble pulses of a heart which has spent its 
 best hours not for Him, but for self and for enjoyment, and 
 in His strange love He condescends to accept them. 
 
 Let me speak to another kind of experience. Perhaps we 
 feel that we have faculties which never have and now never 
 will find their right field ; perhaps we are ignorant of many 
 things which can not be learnt now ; perhaps the seed-time 
 of life has gone by, and certain powers of heart and mind 
 will not grow now ; perhaps you feel that the best days of 
 life are gone, and it is too late to begin things which were in 
 your power once : still, my repentant brother, there is encour- 
 agement from your Master yet. Wake to the opportunities 
 that yet remain. Ten years of life five years one year 
 say you have only that will you sleep that away because 
 you have already slept too long ? Eternity is crying out to 
 you louder and louder as you near its brink, Rise, be going : 
 count your resources : learn what you are not fit for, and 
 give up wishing for it : learn what you can do, and do it with 
 the energy of a man. That is the great lesson of this pas^ 
 sage. But now consider it a little more closely. 
 
 Christ impressed two things on His apostles' minds : 1. 
 The duty of Christian earnestness " Rise ;" 2. The duty of 
 Christian energy " Let us be going." 
 
 Christ roused them to earnestness when He said, "Rise.'- 
 A short, sharp, rousing call. They were to start up and 
 wake to the realities of their position. The guards w.ere on 
 them : their Master was about' to be led away to doom. 
 That was an awakening which would make men spring to 
 their feet in earnest. Brethren, goodness and earnestness are 
 nearly the same thing. In the language in which this Bible 
 was written there was one word which expressed them both : 
 what we translate a good man, in Greek is literally " ear- 
 nest." The Greeks felt that to be earnest was nearly iden- 
 tical with being good. But, however, there is a day in life 
 
4.36 The Irreparable Past. 
 
 when a man must be earnest, but it does not follow that he 
 will be good. " Behold the bridegroom cometh ; go ye out 
 to meet him." That is a sound that will thunder through 
 the most fast-locked slumber, and rouse men whom sermons 
 can not rouse. But that will not make them holy. Earnest- 
 ness of life, brethren, that is goodness. Wake in death you 
 must, for it is an earnest thing to die. Shall it be this, I 
 pray you? Shall it be the voice of death which first SMVS, 
 "Arise," at the very moment when it says, "Sleep on for- 
 ever?" Shall it be the bridal train sweeping by, and the 
 shutting of the doors, and the discovery that the lamp is 
 gone out ? Shall that be the first time you know that it is 
 an earnest thing to live ? Let us feel that we have been do- 
 ing : learn what time is sliding from you, and not stopping 
 when you stop : learn what sin is : learn what " never " is : 
 " Awake, thou that sleepest." 
 
 Lastly, Christian energy " Let us be going." There were 
 two ways open to Christ in which to submit to His doom. 
 He might have waited for it : instead of which He went to 
 meet the soldiers. He took up the cross, the cup of anguish 
 was not forced between His lips, He took it with His own 
 hands, and drained it quickly to the last drop. In after- 
 years the disciples understood the lesson, and acted on it. 
 They did not wait till persecution overtook them ; they 
 braved the Sanhedrim: they fronted the world: they pro- 
 claimed aloud the unpopular and unpalatable doctrines of 
 the resurrection and the cross. Now in this there lies a prin- 
 ciple. Under no conceivable set of circumstances are we 
 justified in sitting 
 
 "By the poison 'd springs of life, 
 Waiting for the morrow which shall free us from the strife." 
 
 Under no circumstances, whether of pain, or grief, or disap- 
 pointment, or irreparable mistake, can it be true that there is 
 not something to be done, as well as something to be suffered. 
 And thus it is that the spirit of Christianity draws over our 
 life, not a leaden cloud of remorse and despondency, but a 
 sky .not perhaps of radiant, but yet of most serene and chas- 
 tened and manly hope. There is a past which is gone for- 
 ever. But there is a future which is still our own. 
 
SERMONS. 
 
 Serie0. 
 
 THE TONGUE. 
 
 " Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Be- 
 hold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth ! And the tongue is a fire, a 
 world of iniquity : so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the 
 whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature ; and it is set on fire of 
 hell. St. James iii. 5, 6. 
 
 IN the development of Christian truth a peculiar office was 
 assigned to the Apostle James. 
 
 It was given to St. Paul to proclaim Christianity as the 
 spiritual law of liberty, and to exhibit faith as the most act- 
 ive principle within the breast of man. It was St. John's to 
 say that the deepest quality in the bosom of Deity is love ; 
 and to assert that the life of God in man is love. It was the 
 office of St. James to assert the necessity of moral rectitude ; 
 his very name marked him out peculiarly for this office : he 
 was emphatically called, " the Just :" integrity was his peculiar 
 characteristic. A man singularly honest, earnest, real. Ac- 
 cordingly, if you read through his whole epistle, you will 
 find it is, from first to last, one continued vindication of the 
 first principles of morality against the semblances of religion. 
 
 He protested against the censoriousness which was found 
 connected with peculiar claims of religious feelings. "If 
 any man among you seem to be religious and bridleth not 
 his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion 
 is vain." He protested against that spirit which had crept 
 into the Christian brotherhood, truckling to the rich and de- 
 spising the poor. " If ye have respect of persons ye commit 
 sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors." He 
 protested against that sentimental fatalism which induced 
 men to throw the blame of their own passions upon God. 
 
4.38 The Tongue. 
 
 *' Let no man say, when he is tempted, I am tempted of God ; 
 for God can not tempt to evil ; neither tempteth He any 
 man." He protested against that unreal religion of excite- 
 ment which diluted the earnestness of real religion in the en- 
 joyment of listening. "Be ye doers of the word, and not 
 hearers only ; deceiving your own souls." He protested 
 against that trust in the correctness of theological doctrine 
 which neglected the cultivation of character. " What doth 
 it profit, if a man say that he hath faith, and have not works ? 
 Can faith save him ?" 
 
 Read St. James's epistle through, this is the mind breath- 
 ing through it all : all this talk about religion, and spiritual- 
 ity words, words, words nay, let us have realities. 
 
 It is well known that Luther complained of this epistle, 
 that it did not contain the Gospel ; for men who are ham- 
 pered by a system will say even of an inspired apostle 
 that he does not teach the Gospel if their own favorite doc- 
 trine be not the central subject of his discourse ; but St. 
 James's reply seems spontaneously to suggest itself to us. 
 The Gospel ! how can we speak of the Gospel, when the 
 first principles of morality are forgotten ? when Christians 
 are excusing themselves, and slandering one another ? How 
 can the superstructure of love and faith be built, when the 
 very foundations of human character justice, mercy, truth 
 have not been laid ? 
 
 L The license of the tongue. 
 II. The guilt of that license. 
 
 The first license given to the tongue is slander. I am not, 
 of course, speaking now of that species of slander against 
 which the law of libel provides a remedy, but of that of 
 which the Gospel alone takes cognizance ; for the worst in- 
 juries which man can do to man are precisely those which 
 are too delicate for law to deal with. We consider therefore 
 not the calumny which is reckoned such by the moralities of 
 an earthly court, but that which is found guilty by the spirit- 
 ualities of the courts of heaven that is, the mind of God. 
 
 Now observe, this slander is compared in the text to poi- 
 son " the tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison." 
 The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is known : 
 there are poisons so destructive that a single drop insinuated 
 into the veins produces death in three seconds, and yet no 
 chemical science can separate that virus from the contam- 
 inated blood, and show the metallic particles of poison glit- 
 tering palpably, and say, "Behold, it is there !" 
 
 In the drop of venom which distils from the sting of the 
 
The Tongue. 439 
 
 smallest insect, or the spikes of the nettle-leaf, there is con- 
 centrated the quintessence of a poison so subtle that the mi- 
 croscope can not distinguish it, and yet so virulent that it 
 can inflame the blood, irritate the whole constitution, and 
 convert day and night into restless misery. 
 
 In St. James's day, as now, it would appear that there 
 were idle men and idle women, who went about from house 
 to house, dropping slander as they went, and yet you could 
 not take up that slander and detect the falsehood there. 
 You could not evaporate the truth in the slow process of the 
 crucible, and then show the residuum of falsehood glittering 
 and visible. You could not fasten upon any word or sen- 
 tence, and say that it was calumny ; for in order to consti- 
 tute slander it is not necessary that the word spoken should 
 be false half truths are often more calumnious than whole 
 falsehoods. It is not even necessary that a word should be 
 distinctly uttered ; a dropped lip, and arched eyebrow, a 
 shrugged shoulder, a significant look, an incredulous expres- 
 sion of countenance, nay, even an emphatic silence, may do 
 the work : and when the light and trifling thing which has 
 done the mischief has fluttered off, the venom is left behind, 
 to work and rankle, to inflame hearts, to fever human exist- 
 ence, and to poison human society at the fountain - springs 
 of life. Very emphatically was it said by one whose whole 
 being had smarted under such affliction, " Adder's poison is 
 under their lips." 
 
 The second license given to the tongue is in the way of 
 persecution ; "therewith curse we men which are made after 
 the similitude of God." " We !" men who bear the name of 
 Christ curse our brethren ! Christians persecuted Chris- 
 tians. Thus even in St. James's age that spirit had begun, 
 the monstrous fact of Christian persecution ; from that day 
 it has continued, through long centuries, up to the present 
 time. The Church of Christ assumed the office of denuncia- 
 tion, and except in the first council, whose object was not to 
 strain, but to relax the bonds of brotherhood, not a council 
 has met for eighteen centuries which has not guarded each 
 profession of belief by the too customary formula, "If any 
 rnan maintain otherwise than this, let him be accursed." 
 
 Myriad, countless curses have echoed through those long 
 ages ; the Church has forgotten her Master's spirit and called 
 down fire from heaven. A fearful thought to consider this 
 as the spectacle on which the eye of God has rested. He 
 looks down upon the creatures He has made, and hears every- 
 where the language of religious imprecations : and, after all, 
 who is proved right by curses ? 
 
44-O The Tongue. 
 
 The Church of Rome hurls her thunders against Protest- 
 ants of every denomination : the Calvinist scarcely recog- 
 nizes the Arminian as a Christian : he who considers himself 
 as the true Anglican, excludes from the Church of Christ all 
 but the adherents of his own orthodoxy; every minister and 
 congregation has its small circle beyond which all are her- 
 etics : nay, even among that sect which is most lax as to the 
 dogmatic forms of truth, we find the Unitarian of the old 
 school denouncing the spiritualism of the new and rising 
 school. 
 
 This is the state of things to which we are arrived. Sis- 
 ters of Charity refuse to permit an act of charity to be done 
 t)y a Samaritan ; ministers of the Gospel fling the thunder- 
 bolts of the Lord ; ignorant hearers catch and exaggerate 
 the spirit boys, girls, and women shudder as one goes by, 
 perhaps more holy than themselves, who adores the same 
 God, believes in the same Redeemer, struggles in the same 
 life-battle, and all this because they have been taught to 
 look upon him as an enemy of God. 
 
 There is a class of religious persons against whom this ve- 
 hemence has been especially directed. No one who can read 
 the signs of the times can help perceiving that we are on the 
 eve of great changes, perhaps a disruption of the Church of 
 England. Unquestionably there has been a large secession 
 to the Church of Rome. 
 
 Now what has been the position of those who are about 
 to take this step ? They have been taunted with dishonest 
 reception of the wages of the Church ; a watch has been set 
 over them : not a word they uttered in private, or in public, 
 but was given to the world by some religious busybody ; 
 there was not a visit which they paid, not a foolish dress 
 which they adopted, but became the subject of bitter scruti- 
 ny and malevolent gossip. For years the religious press has 
 denounced them with a vehemence as virulent, but happily 
 more impotent than that of the Inquisition. There has been 
 an anguish and an inward struggle little suspected, endured 
 by men who felt themselves outcasts in their own society, 
 and naturally looked for a home elsewhere. 
 
 We congratulate ourselves that the days of persecution 
 are gone by ; but persecution is that which affixes penalties 
 upon mews held, instead of upon life led. Is persecution only 
 fire and sword ? But suppose a man of sensitive feeling 
 says, The sword is less sharp to me than the slander : fire is 
 less intolerable than the refusal of sympathy ! 
 
 Now let us bring this home ; you rejoice that the far*jot 
 and the stake are given up; you never persecuted you 
 
The Tongue. 441 
 
 leave that to the wicked Church of Rome. Yes, you never 
 burned a human being alive you never clapped your hands 
 as the death-shriek proclaimed that the lion's fang had gone 
 home into the most vital part of the victim's frame ; but did 
 you never rob him of his friends ? gravely shake your head 
 and oracularly insinuate that he was leading souls to hell? 
 chill the affections of his family ? take from him his good 
 name ? Did you never with delight see his Church placard- 
 ed as the Man of Sin, and hear the platform denunciations 
 which branded it with the spiritual abominations of the 
 Apocalypse ? Did you never find a malicious pleasure in re- 
 peating all the miserable gossip with which religious slander 
 fastened upon his daily acts, his words, and even his uncom- 
 municated thoughts ? Did you never forget that for a man 
 to " work out his own salvation with fear and trembling " is 
 a matter difficult enough to be laid upon a human spirit, 
 without intruding into the most sacred department of an-> 
 other's life that, namely, which lies between himself and 
 God ? Did you never say that " it was to be wished he 
 should go to Rome," until at last life,, became intolerable 
 until he was thrown more and more in upon himself; found 
 himself, like his Redeemer, in this world alone, but unable, like 
 his Redeemer, calmly to repose upon the thought that his 
 Father was with him ? Then a stern defiant spirit took pos- 
 session of his soul, and there burst from his lips, or heart, 
 the wish for rest rest at any cost, peace anywhere, if even 
 it is to be found only in the bosom of the Church of Rome J 
 
 II. The guilt of this license. 
 
 1. The first evil consequence is the harm that a man does 
 himself: " so is the tongue among the members, that it de- 
 files the whole body." It is not very obvious, in what way 
 a man does himself harm by calumny. I will take the sini' 
 plest form in which this injury is done; it effects a dissipa- 
 tion of spiritual energy. There are two ways in which the 
 steam of machinery may find an outlet for its force : it may 
 work, and if so it works silently ; or it may escape, and that 
 takes place loudly, in air and noise. * There are two ways in 
 which the spiritual energy of a man's soul may find its vent : 
 it may express itself in action, silently ; or in words, noisily: 
 but just so much offeree as is thrown into the one mode of 
 expression is taken from the other. 
 
 Few men suspect how much mere talk fritters away spir- 
 itual energy that which should be spent in action spends 
 itself in words. The fluent boaster is not the man who is 
 steadiest before the enemy ; it is well said to him that his 
 
 19* 
 
44 2 The Tongue. 
 
 courage is better kept till it is wanted. Loud utterance of 
 virtuous indignation against evil from the platform, or in the 
 drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual giant : so 
 much indignation as is expressed, has found vent, is wasted, 
 is taken away from the work of coping with evil ; the man 
 has so much less left. And hence he who restrains that love 
 of talk lays up a fund of spiritual strength. 
 
 With large significance, St. James declares, " If any man 
 offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, able also to 
 bridle the whole body." He is entire, powerful, because he 
 has not spent his strength. In these days of loud profession, 
 and bitter, fluent condemnation, it is well for us to learn the 
 divine force of silence. Remember Christ in the judgment- 
 hall, the very symbol and incarnation of spiritual strength ; 
 and yet when revilings were loud around Him and charges 
 multiplied, " He held His peace." 
 
 2. The next feature in the guilt of calumny is its uncon- 
 trollable character : " the tongue can no man tame." You 
 can not arrest a calumnious tongue, you can not arrest the 
 calumny itself; you jnay refute a slanderer, you may trace 
 home a slander to its source, you may expose the author of 
 it, you may by that exposure give a lesson so severe as to 
 make the repetition of the offense appear impossible ; but 
 the fatal habit is incorrigible ; to-morrow the tongue is at 
 work again. 
 
 Neither can you stop the consequences of a slander ; you 
 may publicly prove its falsehood, you may sift every atom, 
 explain and annihilate it, and yet, years after you had 
 thought that all had been disposed of forever, the mention of 
 a name wakes up associations in the mind of some one who 
 heard the calumny, but never heard or never attended to 
 the refutation, or who has only a vague and confused recol- 
 lection of the whole, and he asks the question doubtfully, 
 "But were there not some suspicious circumstances con- 
 nected with him ?" 
 
 It is like the Greek fire used in ancient warfare, which 
 burnt unquenched beneath the water, or like the weeds 
 which, when you have extirpated them in one place are 
 sprouting forth vigorously in another spot, at the distance of 
 many hundred yards ; or, to use the metaphor of St. James 
 himself, it is like the wheel which catches fire as it goes, and 
 burns with a fiercer conflagration as its own speed increases; 
 "it sets on fire the whole course of nature" (literally, the 
 wheel of nature). You may tame the wild beast, the con- 
 flagration of the American forest will cease when all the 
 timber and the dry underwood is consumed ; but you can 
 
The Tongue. 443 
 
 not arrest the progress of that cruel word which you uttered 
 carelessly yesterday or this morning which you will utter, 
 perhaps, before you have passed from this church one hun- 
 dred yards : that will go on slaying, poisoning, burning be- 
 yond your own control, now and forever. 
 
 3. The third element of guilt lies in the unnaturalness of 
 calumny. " My brethren, these things ought not so to be ;" 
 ought not that is, they are unnatural. That this is St. 
 James's meaning is evident from the second illustration 
 which follows: "Doth a fountain send forth at the same 
 place, sweet water and bitter?" "Can the fig-tree, my 
 brethren, bear olive-berries, or a vine, figs." 
 
 There is apparently in these metaphors little that affords 
 an argument against slander; the motive which they sug- 
 
 fest would appear to many far-fetched and of small cogency ; 
 ut to one who looks on this world as a vast whole, arid 
 who has recognized the moral law as only a part of the 
 great law of the universe, harmoniously blending with the 
 whole, illustrations such as these are the most powerful of 
 all arguments. The truest definition of evil is that which 
 represents it as something contrary to nature : evil is evil, 
 because it is unnatural ; a vine which should bear olive- 
 berries, an eye to which blue seems yellow, would be dis- 
 eased: an unnatural mother, an unnatural son, an unnatural 
 act, are the strongest terms of condemnation. It is this 
 view which Christianity gives of moral evil: the teaching 
 of Christ was the recall of man to nature, not an infusion 
 of something new into humanity. Christ came to call out 
 all the principles and powers of human nature, to restore 
 the natural equilibrium of all our faculties ; not to call us 
 back to our own individual selfish nature, but to human 
 nature as it is in God's ideal the perfect type which is to 
 be realized in us. Christianity is the regeneration of our 
 whole nature, not the destruction of one atom of it. 
 
 Now the nature of man is to adore God and to love what 
 is Godlike in man. The office of the tongue is to bless. 
 Slander is guilty because it contradicts this; yet even in 
 slander itself, perversion as it is, the interest of man in man 
 is still distinguishable. What is it but perverted interest 
 which makes the acts, and words, and thoughts of his breth- 
 ren, even in their evil, a matter of such strange delight ? 
 Remember, therefore, this contradicts your nature and your 
 destiny ; to speak ill of others makes you a monster in God's 
 world: get the habit of slander, and then there is not a 
 stream which bubbles fresh from the heart of nature, there 
 is not a tree that silently brings forth its genial fruit in its 
 
444 T/ie Tongue. 
 
 appointed season, which does not rebuke and proclaim you 
 to be a monstrous anomaly in God's world. 
 
 4. The fourth point of guilt is the diabolical character of 
 slander ; the tongue " is set on fire of hell." Now, this is 
 no mere strong expression no mere indignant vituperation 
 it contains deep and emphatic meaning. 
 
 The apostle means literally what he says slander is dia- 
 bolical. The first illustration we give of this is contained 
 in the very meaning of the word devil. "Devil," in the 
 original, means traducer or slanderer. The first introduc- 
 tion of a demon spirit is found connected with a slanderous 
 insinuation against the Almighty, implying that His com- 
 mand had been given in envy of His creature: "for God 
 doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes 
 shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and 
 evil." 
 
 In the magnificent imagery of the book of Job, the accuser 
 is introduced with a demoniacal and malignant sneer, attrib- 
 uting the excellence of a good man to interested motives ; 
 " Doth Job serve God for naught ?" There is another mode 
 in which the fearful accuracy of St. James's charge may be 
 demonstrated. There is one state only from which there is 
 said to be no recovery there is but one sin that is called 
 unpardonable. The Pharisees beheld the works of Jesus. 
 They could not deny that they were good works, they 
 could not deny that they were miracles of beneficence, but 
 rather than acknowledge that they were done by a good 
 man through the co-operation of a Divine spirit, they pre- 
 ferred to account for them by the wildest and most incredi- 
 ble hypothesis; they said they were done by the power of 
 Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. It was upon this occa- 
 sion that our Redeemer said with solemn meaning, "For 
 every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give ac- 
 count in the day of judgment." It was then that He said, 
 for a word spoken against the Holy Ghost there is no for- 
 giveness in this world, or in the world to come. 
 
 Our own hearts respond to the truth of this to call evil, 
 good, and good, evil to see the Divinest good, and call it 
 satanic evil below this lowest deep there is not a lower 
 still. There is no cure for mortification of the flesh there 
 is no remedy for ossification of the heart. Oh, that misera- 
 ble state, when to the jaundiced eye all good transforms 
 itself into evil, and the very instruments of health become 
 the poison of disease ! Beware of every approach of this ! 
 beware of that spirit which controversy fosters, of watching 
 only for the evil in the character of an antagonist! beware 
 
The Tongue. 445 
 
 of that habit which becomes the slanderer's life, of magni- 
 fying every speck of evil and closing the eye to goodness \ 
 till at last men arrive at the state in which generous, urii 
 versal love (which is heaven) becomes impossible, and a sus- 
 picious, universal hate takes possession of the heart, and that 
 is hell ! 
 
 There is one peculiar manifestation of this spirit to which 
 I desire specially to direct your attention. 
 
 The politics of the community are guided by the political 
 press. The religious views of a vast number are formed by 
 that portion of the press which is called religious; it be- 
 comes, therefore, a matter of deepest interest to inquire what 
 is the spirit of that " religious press." I am not asking you 
 what are the views maintained whether Evangelical, An- 
 glican, or Romish but what is the spirit of that fountain 
 from which the religious life of so many is nourished? 
 
 Let any man cast his eye over the pages of this portion of 
 the press it matters little to which party the newspaper or 
 the journal may belong he will be startled to find the char- 
 acters of those whom he has most deeply reverenced, whose 
 hearts he knows, whose integrity and life are above suspi- 
 cion, held up to scorn and hatred : the organ of one party is 
 established against the organ of another, and it is the recog- 
 nized office of each to point out with microscopic care the 
 names of those whose views are to be shunned ; and in order 
 that these may be the more shrunk from, the characters of 
 those who hold such opinions are .traduced and' vilified. 
 There is no personality too mean there is no insinuation too 
 audacious or too false for the recklessness of these daring 
 slanderers. I do not like to use the expression, lest it should 
 appear to be merely one of theatrical vehemence ; but I say 
 it in all seriousness, adopting the inspired language of the 
 Bible, and using it advisedly and with accurate meaning: 
 the spirit which guides the "religious press" of this country 
 which dictates those personalities, which prevents contro- 
 versialists from seeing what is good in their opponents, which 
 attributes low motives to account for excellent lives, and 
 teaches men whom to suspect and shun, rather than point 
 out where it is possible to admire and love is a spirit " set 
 on fire of hell." 
 
 Before we conclude, let us get at the root of the matter. 
 " Man," says the Apostle James, " was made in the image 
 of God:" to slander man is to slander God: to love what is 
 good in man is to love it in God. Love is the only remedy 
 for slander : no set of rules or restrictions can stop it ; we 
 may denounce, but we shall denounce in vain. The radical 
 
44 6 The Victory of Faith. 
 
 cure of it is charity "out of a pure heart and faith unfeign- 
 ed," to feel what is great in the human character ; to recog- 
 nize with delight all high, and generous, and beautiful ac- 
 tions ; to tind a joy even in seeing the good qualities of your 
 bitterest opponents, and to admire those qualities even in 
 those with whom you have least sympathy be it either the 
 Romanist or the Unitarian this is the only spirit which can 
 heal the love of slander and calumny. If we would bless 
 God, we must first learn to bless man, who is made in the 
 image of God. 
 
 II. 
 THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 
 
 "For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the 
 victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that over- 
 cometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" 
 1 John v. 4, 5. 
 
 THERE are two words in the system of Christianity which 
 have received a meaning so new, and so emphatic, as to be 
 in a way peculiar to it, and to distinguish it from all other 
 systems of morality and religion; these two words are the 
 world, and faith. We find it written in Scripture that to 
 have the friendship of the world is to be the enemy of God ; 
 whereupon the question arises the world ? did not God 
 make the world ? Did He not place us in the world ? Are 
 we not to love what God has made? And yet meeting this 
 distinctly we have the inspired record, " Love not the world." 
 
 The object of the statesman is, or ought to be, to produce 
 as much worldly prosperity as possible ; but Christianity, 
 that is Christ, speaks little of this world's prosperity, under- 
 rates it nay, speaks of it at times as infinitely dangerous. 
 
 The legislator prohibits crime the moralist transgression 
 the religionist sin. To these Christianity superadds a new 
 enemy the world and the things of the world. " If any 
 man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." 
 
 The other word used in a peculiar sense is faith. It is 
 impossible for any one to have read his Bible ever so negli- 
 gently, and not to be aware that the word faith, or the grace 
 of faith, forms a large element in the Christian system. It is 
 said to work miracles, remove mountains, justify the soul, 
 trample upon impossibilities. Every apostle, in his way, as- 
 signs to faith a primary importance. Jude tells us to " build 
 
The Victory of Faith. 447 
 
 up ourselves in our most holy faith." John tells us that 
 " he that believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is born of God ;" 
 and Paul tells us that, not by merit nor by works, but by 
 trust or reliance only, can be formed that state of soul by 
 which man is reckoned just before God. In these expres- 
 sions the apostles only develop their Master's meaning, when 
 He uses such words as these, "All things are possible to him 
 that believeth :" " Oh thou of little faith, wherefore didst 
 thou doubt ?" 
 
 These two words are brought into diametrical opposition 
 in the text, so that it branches into a twofold line of thought. 
 
 I. The Christian's enemy, the world. 
 II. The victory of faith. 
 
 In endeavoring to understand first what is meant by 
 the world, we shall feel that the mass of evil which is com- 
 prehended under this expression can not be told out in any 
 one sermon ; it is an expression used in various ways, some- 
 times meaning one thing, sometimes meaning another ; but 
 we will endeavor to explain its general principles and 
 these we will divide into three heads ; first, the tyranny of 
 the present ; secondly, the tyranny of the sensual ; and last- 
 ly, the spirit of society. 
 
 1. The tyranny of the present. 
 
 " Christ," says the Apostle Paul, " hath redeemed us from 
 this present evil world ;" and again, " Demas hath forsaken 
 me, having loved this present world." 
 
 Let a stress be laid on the word present. World liness is 
 the attractive power of something present, in opposition to 
 something to come. It is this rule and tyranny of the pres- 
 ent that constitutes Demas a worldly man. 
 
 In this respect worldliness is the spirit of childhood carried 
 on into manhood. The child lives in the present hour to- 
 day to him is every thing. The holiday promised at a distant 
 interval is no holiday at all it must be'either now or never. 
 Natural in the child, and therefore pardonable, this spirit, 
 when carried on into manhood, is coarse is worldliness. The 
 most distinct illustration given us of this, is the case of Esau. 
 Esau came from the hunting-field worn and hungry ; the only 
 means of procuring the tempting mess of his brother's pot- 
 tage was the sacrifice of his father's blessing, which in those 
 ages carried with it a substantial advantage ; but that birth- 
 right could be enjoyed only after years the pottage was 
 mesent, near and certain ; therefore he sacrificed a future and 
 higher blessing for a present and lower pleasure. For this 
 reason Esau is the Bible type of worldliness : he is called in 
 
44 8 The Victory of Faith. 
 
 Scripture a profane, that is, not a distinctly vicious, but a 
 secular or worldly person an overgrown child ; impetuous, 
 inconsistent, not without gleams of generosity and kindliness, 
 but ever accustomed to immediate gratification. 
 
 In this worldliness, moreover, is to be remarked the game- 
 ster's desperate play. There is a gambling spirit in hu- 
 man nature. Esau distinctly expresses this : " Behold I am 
 at the point to die, and what shall my birthright profit me ?" 
 He might never live to enjoy his birthright; but the pottage 
 was before him, present, certain, there. 
 
 Now, observe the utter powerlessness of mere preaching 
 to cope with this tyrannical power of the present. Forty 
 thousand pulpits throughout the land this 4ay will declaim 
 against the vanity of riches, the uncertainty of life, the sin of 
 worldliness against the gambling spirit of human nature ; 
 I ask what impression will be produced by those forty thou- 
 sand harangues ? In every congregation it is reducible to a 
 certainty that, before a year has passed, some will be num- 
 bered with the dead. Every man knows this, but he thinks 
 the chances are that it will not be himself; he feels it a 
 solemn thing for humanity generally but for himself there 
 is more than a chance. Upon this chance he plays away 
 life. 
 
 It is so with the child : you tell him of the consequences 
 of to-day's idleness but the sun is shining brightly, and he 
 can not sacrifice to-day's pleasure, although he knows the dis- 
 grace it will bring to-morrow. So it is with the intemperate 
 man : he says " Sufficient unto the day is the evil and the 
 good thereof; let me have my portion now." So the one 
 great secret of the world's victory lies in the mighty power 
 of saying "JVow?." 
 
 2. The tyranny of the sensual. 
 
 I call it tyranny, because the evidences of the senses are 
 all-powerful, in spite of the protestations of the reason. In 
 vain you try to persuade the child that he is moving, and not 
 the trees which seem to flit past the carnage in vain we re- 
 mind ourselves that this apparently solid earth on which we 
 stand, and which seems so immovable, is in reality flying 
 through the regions of space with an inconceivable rapidity 
 in vain philosophers would persuade us that the color which 
 the eye beholds resides not in the object itself, but in our own 
 perception ; we are victims of the apparent, and the verdict 
 of the senses is taken instead of the verdict of the reason. 
 
 Precisely so is it with the enjoyments of the world. The 
 man who died yesterday, and whom the world called a suc- 
 cessful man for what did he live ? He lived for this world 
 
The Victory of Faith. 449 
 
 he gained this world. ' Houses, lands, name, position in so- 
 cietyall that earth could give of enjoyments he had : he 
 was" the man of whom the Redeemer said that his thoughts 
 were occupied in planning how to pull down his barns and 
 build greater. We hear men complain of the sordid love of 
 gold, but gold is merely a medium of exchange for other 
 things : gold is land, titles, name, comfort all that the world 
 can give. If the world be all, it is wise to live for gold. There 
 may be some little difference in the degree of degradation 
 in different forms of worldliness ; it is possible that the am- 
 bitious man who lives for power is somewhat higher than he 
 who merely lives for applause, and he again may be a trifle 
 higher than the mere seeker after gold but, after all, look- 
 ing closely at the matter, you will find that, in respect of the 
 objects of their idolatry, they agree in this, that all belong 
 to the present. Therefore, says the apostle, all that is in the 
 world " the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the 
 pride of life, is not of the Father, but of the world," and are 
 only various forms of one great tyranny. And then, when 
 such a man is at the brink of death, the words said t5 the man 
 in our Lord's parable must be said to him, " Thou fool, the 
 houses thou hast built, the enjoyments thou hast prepared, 
 and all those things which have formed thy life for years 
 when thy soul is taken from them, what shall they profit 
 thee ?" 
 
 3. The spirit of society. 
 
 The world has various meanings in Scripture ; it does not 
 always mean the visible, as opposed to the invisible ; nor the 
 present, as opposed to the future : it sometimes stands for the 
 secular spirit of the day the voice of society. 
 
 Our Saviour says, " If ye were of the world, the world 
 would love his own." The apostle says, " Be not conformed 
 to this world ;" and to the Gentiles he writes, " In time 
 past ye walked according to the course of this world, the 
 spirit which now worketh in the children of disobedience." In 
 these verses, a tone, a temper, a spirit is spoken of. There 
 are two things the Church and the world two spirits per- 
 vading different bodies of men, brought before us in these 
 verses those called the Spirit-born, and those called the 
 world, which is to be overcome by the Spirit-born, as in the 
 text, " Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world." 
 
 Let us understand what is meant by the Church of God. 
 When we speak of the Church we generally mean a society 
 to aid men in their progress Godward ; but the Church of 
 God is by no means co-extensive in any age with that organ- 
 ized institution which we call the Church ; sometimes it is 
 
450 The Victory of Fait I i. 
 
 nearly co-extensive that is, nearly all on earth who are born 
 of God are found within its pale, nearly all who are of the 
 world are extraneous to it but sometimes the born of God 
 have been found distinct from the institution called the 
 Church, opposed to it persecuted by it. The institution of 
 the Church is a blessed ordinance of God, organized on earth 
 for the purpose of representing the eternal Church and of 
 extending its limits, but still ever subordinate to it. 
 
 The eternal Church is " the general assembly and church 
 of the firstborn which are written in heaven ;" the selected 
 spirits of the Most High, who are struggling with the evil of 
 their day ; sometimes alone, like Elijah, and like him, long- 
 ing that their work was done ; sometimes conscious of their 
 union with each other. God is forever raising up a succes- 
 sion of these His brave, His true, His good. Apostolical 
 succession, as taught sometimes, means simply this a suc- 
 cession of miraculous powers flowing in a certain line. The 
 true apostolic succession is not a succession in a hereditary 
 line, or line marked by visible signs which men can always 
 identify, *but a succession emphatically spiritual. 
 
 The Jews looked for a hereditary succession ; they thought 
 that because they were Abraham's seed, the spiritual succes- 
 sion was preserved ; the Redeemer told them that " God was 
 able of those stones to raise up children unto Abraham." 
 Therefore is this ever a spiritual succession in the hands of 
 God alone ; and they are here called the God-born, coming 
 into the world variously qualified ; sometimes baptized with 
 the spirit which makes them, like James and John, the "sons 
 of thunder," sometimes with a milder spirit, as Barnabas, 
 which makes them " sons of consolation," sometimes having 
 their souls indurated into an adamantine hardness, which 
 makes them living stones rocks like Peter, against which 
 the billows of this world dash themselves in vain, and against 
 which the gates of hell shall not prevail. But whether as 
 apostles, or visitors of the poor, or parents of a family, born 
 to do a work on earth, to speak a word, to discharge a mis- 
 sion which they themselves perhaps do not know till it is ac- 
 complished these are the Church of God the children of 
 the Most High the noble army of the Spirit-born ! Op- 
 posed to this stands the mighty confederacy called the world. 
 But beware of fixing on individual men in order to stigmatize 
 them as the world. You may not draw a line and say " We 
 are the sons of God, ye are of the world." The world is not 
 so much individual as it is a certain spirit ; the course of this 
 world is " the spirit which now worketh in the children of 
 disobedience." The world and the Church are annexed as 
 
The Victory of Faith. 451 
 
 inseparably as the elements which compose the atmosphere. 
 Take the smallest portion of this that you will, in a cubic 
 inch the same proportions are found as in a temple. In the 
 ark there was a Ham ; in the small band of the twelve apos- 
 tles there was a Judas. 
 
 The spirit of the world is forever altering impalpable ; 
 forever eluding, in fresh forms, your attempts to seize it. In 
 the days of Noah, the spirit of the world was violence. In 
 Elijah's day it was idolatry. In the day of Christ it was 
 power concentrated and condensed in the government of 
 Home. In ours, perhaps, it is the love of money. It enters 
 in different proportions into different bosoms ; it is found in 
 a different form in contiguous towns ; in the fashionable 
 watering-place, and in the commercial city : it is this thing 
 at Athens, and another in Corinth. This is the spirit of the 
 world a thing in my heart and yours: to be struggled 
 against, not so much in the case of others, as in the silent 
 battle to be done within our own souls. Pass we on now to 
 consider 
 
 II. The victory of faith. 
 
 Faith is a theological expression ; we are apt to forget 
 that it has any other than a theological import ; yet it is the 
 commonest principle of man's daily life, called in that region 
 prudence, enterprise, or some such name. It is in effect the 
 principle on which alone any human superiority can be 
 gained. Faith, in religion, is the same principle as faith in 
 worldly matters, differing only in its object : it rises through 
 successive stages. When, in reliance upon your promise, 
 your child gives up the half-hour's idleness of to-day for the 
 holiday of to-morrow, he lives by faith ; a future supersedes 
 the present pleasure. When he abstains from over-indul- 
 gence of the appetite, in reliance upon your word that the 
 result will be pain and sickness, sacrificing the present pleas- 
 ure for fear of future punishment, he acts on faith : I do not 
 say that this is a high exercise of faith it is a very low one 
 but it is faith. 
 
 Once more : the same motive of action may be carried on 
 into manhood ; in our own times two religious principles 
 have been exemplified in the subjugation of a vice. The hab- 
 it of intoxication has been broken by an appeal to the prin- 
 ciple of combination, and the principle of belief. Men were 
 taught to feel that they were not solitary strugglers against 
 the vice ; they were enrolled in a mighty army, identified in 
 principles and interests. Here was the principle of the 
 Church association for reciprocated strength j they were 
 
452 The Victory of Faith. 
 
 thus taught the inevitable result of the indulgence of the 
 vice. The missionaries of temperance went "through the 
 country contrasting the wretchedness and the degradation 
 and the filth of drunkenness, with the domestic comfort and 
 the health and the regular employment of those who were 
 masters of themselves. So far as men believed this, and gave 
 up the tyranny of the present for the hope of the future so 
 far they lived by faith. 
 
 Brethren, I do not say that this was a high triumph for 
 the principle of faith ; it was, in fact, little more than selfish- 
 ness ; it was a high future balanced against a low present ; 
 only the preference of a future and higher physical enjoy- 
 ment to a mean and lower one. Yet still, to be ruled by this 
 influence raises a man in the scale of being : it is a low vir- 
 tue, prudence, a form of selfishness ; yet prudence is a virtue. 
 The merchant who forecasts, saves, denies himself systemati- 
 cally through years, to amass a fortune, is not a very lofty 
 being, yet he is higher, as a man, than he who is sunk in 
 mere bodily gratifications. You would not say that the in- 
 temperate man who has become temperate in order merely 
 to gain by that temperance honor and happiness is a great 
 man, but you would say he was a higher and a better man 
 than he who is enslaved by his passions, or than the gambler 
 who improvidently stakes all upon a moment's throw. The 
 worldly mother who plans for the advancement of a family, 
 and sacrifices solid enjoyments for a splendid alliance, is only 
 worldly wise, yet in that manoeuvring and worldly prudence 
 there is the exercise of a self-control which raises her above 
 the mere giddy pleasure-hunter of the hour; for want of self 1 
 control is the weakness of our nature to restrain, to wait, 
 to control present feeling with a large foresight, is human 
 strength. 
 
 Once more : instead of a faith like that of the child, which 
 overleaps a few hours, or that of the worldly man, which 
 overpasses years, there may be a faith which transcends the 
 whole span of life, and, instead of looking for temporal en- 
 joyments, looks for rewards in a future beyond the grave, 
 instead of a future limited to time. 
 
 This is again a step. The child has sacrificed a day ; the 
 man has sacrificed a little more. Faith has now reached a 
 stage which deserves to be called religious ; not that this, 
 however, is very grand ; it does but prefer a happiness here- 
 after to a happiness enjoyed here an eternal well-being in- 
 stead of a temporal well-being ; it is but prudence on a grand 
 scale another form of selfishness an anticipation of infinite 
 rewards instead of finite, and not the more noble because of 
 
The Victory of Faith. 453 
 
 t 
 
 the infinitude of the gain : and yet this is what is often 
 taught as religion in books and sermons. We are told that 
 sin is wrong, because it will make us miserable hereafter. 
 Guilt is represented as the short-sightedness which barters 
 for a home on earth a home in heaven. 
 
 In the text-book of ethics studied in one of our universi- 
 ties, virtue is defined as that which is done at the command 
 of God for the sake of an eternal reward. So, then, religion 
 is nothing more than a calculation of infinite and finite quan- 
 tities ; vice is nothing more than a grand imprudence ; and 
 heaven is nothing more than selfishness rewarded with eter- 
 nal well-being ! 
 
 Yet this, you will observe, is a necessary step in the de- 
 velopment of faith. Faith is the conviction that God is a 
 rewarder of them who diligently seek Him ; and there is a 
 moment in human progress when the anticipated rewards 
 and punishments must be of a Mohammedan character the 
 happiness of the senses. It was thus that the Jews were 
 disciplined ; out of a coarse, rude, infantine state, they were 
 educated by rewards and punishments to abstain from pres- 
 ent sinful gratification: at first, the promise of the life which 
 now is, afterwards the promise of that which is to come ; 
 but even then the rewards and punishments of a future state 
 were spoken of, by inspiration itself, as of an arbitrary char- 
 acter ; and some of the best of the Israelites, in looking to 
 the recompense of reward, seemed to have anticipated, coarse- 
 ly, recompense in exchange for duties performed. 
 
 The last step is that which 'alone deserves to be called 
 Christian faith " Who is he that overcometh but he that 
 believeth Jesus is the Christ ?" The difference between the 
 faith of the Christian and that of the man of the world, or 
 the mere ordinary religionist, is not a difference in mental 
 operation, but in the object of the faith-^to believe that 
 Jesus is the Christ is the peculiarity of Christian faith. 
 
 The anticipated heaven of the Christian differs from the 
 anticipated heaven of any other man, not in the distinctness 
 with which its imagery is perceived, but in the kind of ob- 
 jects which are hoped for. The apostle has told us the char- 
 acter of heaven. " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
 hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things 
 which God hath prepared for them that love Him" which 
 glorious words are sometimes strangely misinterpreted, as if 
 the apostle merely meant rhetorically to exalt the conception 
 of the heavenly world, as of something beyond all power to 
 imagine or to paint. The apostle meant something infinitely 
 deeper : the heaven of God is not only that which u eye hath 
 
454 The Victory of Faith. 
 
 not seen," but that which eye can never see ; its glories are 
 not of that kind at all which can ever stream in forms of 
 beauty on the eye, or pour in melody upon the enraptured 
 ear not such joys as genius in its most gifted hour (here 
 called " the heart of man ") can invent or imagine : it is 
 something whicli these sensuous organs of ours never can 
 appreciate bliss of another kind altogether, revealed to the 
 spirit of man by the Spirit of God joys such as spirit alone 
 can receive. 
 
 Do you ask what these are ? " The fruits of the Spirit 
 are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 
 meekness, temperance." That is heaven, and therefore the 
 apostle tells us that he alone who " believeth that Jesus is 
 the Christ," and only he, feels that. What is it to believe 
 that Jesus is the Christ? That He is the Anointed One, 
 that His life is the anointed life, the only blessed life, the 
 blessed life Divine for thirty years ? Yes, but if so, the bless- 
 ed life still, continued throughout all eternity : unless you 
 believe that, you do not believe that Jesus is the Christ. 
 
 What is the blessedness that you expect? to have the 
 joys of earth with the addition of the element of eternity? 
 Men think that heaven is to be a compensation for earthly 
 loss : the saints are earthly-wretched here, the children of 
 this world are earthly-happy; but that, they think, shall be 
 all reversed Lazarus, beyond the grave, shall have the pur- 
 ple and the fine linen, and the splendor, and the houses, and 
 the lands which Dives had on earth : the one had them for 
 time, the other shall have them for eternity. That is the 
 heaven that men expect this earth sacrificed now, in order 
 that it may be re-granted forever. 
 
 Nor will this expectation be reversed except by a rever- 
 sal of the nature. None can anticipate such a heaven as 
 God has revealed, except they that are born of the Spirit ; 
 therefore to believe that Jesus is the Christ, a man must be 
 born of God. You will observe that no other victory over- 
 comes the world : for this is what St. John means by say- 
 ing, " Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that be- 
 lieveth that Jesus is the Christ ?" For then it comes to pass 
 that a man begins to feel that to do wrong is hell ; and that 
 to love God, to be like God, to have the mind of Christ, is 
 the only heaven. Until this victory is gained, the world re- 
 tains its stronghold in the heart. 
 
 Do you think that the temperate man has overcome the 
 world,Vho, instead of the short-lived rapture of intoxication, 
 chooses regular employment, health, and prosperity? Is it 
 not the world in another form which has his homage ? Or 
 
The Dispensation of the Spirit. 455 
 
 do you suppose that the so-called religious man is really the 
 world's conqueror by being content to give up seventy 
 years of enjoyment in order to win innumerable ages of the 
 very same species of enjoyment ? Has he not only made 
 earth a hell, in order that earthly things may be his heaven 
 forever ? 
 
 Thus the victory of faith proceeds from stage to stage : 
 the first victory is, when the present is conquered by the fu- 
 ture ; the last, when the visible and sensual is despised in 
 comparison of the invisible and eternal. Then earth has 
 lost its power forever ; for if all that it has to give be lost 
 eternally, the gain of faith is still infinite. 
 
 III. 
 THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 "Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit." 1 Cor. xii. 4. 
 
 ACCORDING to a view which contains in it a profound truth, 
 the ages of the world are divisible into three dispensations, 
 presided over by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. 
 
 In the dispensation of the Father, God was known as a 
 Creator; creation manifested His eternal power and God- 
 head, and the religion of mankind was the religion of nature. 
 
 In the dispensation of the Son, God manifested Himself to 
 humanity through man ; the Eternal Word spoke, through 
 the inspired and gifted of the human race, to those that were 
 uninspired and ungifted. This was the dispensation of the 
 prophets its climax was the advent of the Redeemer; it 
 was completed when perfect Humanity manifested God to 
 man. The characteristic of this dispensation was, that God 
 revealed Himself by an authoritative Voice, speaking from 
 without, and the highest manifestation of God whereof man 
 was capable, was a Divine humanity. 
 
 The age in which we at present live is the dispensation of 
 the Spirit, in which God has communicated Himself by the 
 highest revelation, and in the most intimate communion, of 
 which man is capable ; no longer through creation, no more 
 as an authoritative Voice from without, but as a Law within 
 as a Spirit mingling with a spirit. This is the dispensa- 
 tion of which the prophet said of old, that the time should 
 come when they should no longer teach every man his broth- 
 er and every man his neighbor, saying, " Know the Lord " 
 
45 6 The Dispensation of the Spirit. 
 
 that is, by a will revealed by external authority from other 
 human minds " for they shall all know Him, from the least 
 of them to the greatest." This is the dispensation, too, of 
 whose close the Apostle Paul speaks thus : " Then shall the 
 Son also be subject to Him that hath put all things under 
 Him, that God may be all in all." 
 
 The outward humanity is to disappear, that the inward 
 union may be complete. To the same effect, he speaks in 
 another place, " Yea, though we have known Christ after the 
 flesh, yet henceforth know we Him no more." For this rea- 
 son the ascension was necessary before Pentecost could come : 
 the Spirit was not given, we are told, because Jesus was not 
 yet glorified. It was necessary for the Son to disappear as 
 an outward authority, in order that He might re-appear as an 
 inward principle of life. Our salvation is no longer God 
 manifested in a Christ without us, but as a Christ within us, 
 the hope of glory. To-day is the selected anniversary of 
 that memorable day when the first proof was given to the 
 senses, in the gift of Pentecost, that that spiritual dispensa- 
 tion had begun. 
 
 There is a twofold way in which the operations of the 
 Spirit on mankind may be considered His influence on the 
 Church as a whole, and His influence on individuals ; both 
 of these are brought together in the text. It branches, there- 
 fore, into a twofold division. 
 
 I. Spiritual gifts conferred on individuals. 
 II. Spiritual union of the Church. 
 
 Let us distinguish between the Spirit and the gifts of the 
 Spirit: by the Spirit, the apostle meant the vital principle 
 of new life from God, common to all believers the animat- 
 ing Spirit of the Church of God ; by the gifts of the Spirit, he 
 meant the diversities of form in which He operates on indi- 
 viduals ; its influence varied according to their respective pe- 
 culiarities and characteristics. In the twenty-eighth verse 
 of this chapter a full catalogue of gifts is found ; looking at 
 them generally, we discover two classes into which they may 
 be divided the first are natural, the second are supernatu- 
 ral : the first are those capacities which are originally found 
 in human nature personal endowments of mind, a character 
 elevated and enlarged by the gift of the Spirit ; the second 
 are those which were created and called into existence by the 
 sudden approach of the same influence. 
 
 Just as if the temperature of this northern hemisphere were 
 raised suddenly, and a mighty tropical river were to pour its 
 fertilizing inundation over the country, the result would be 
 
The Dispensation of the Spirit. 457 
 
 the impartation of a vigorous and gigantic growth to the 
 vegetation already in existence, and at the same time the de- 
 velopment of life in seeds and germs which had long lain 
 latent in the soil, incapable of vegetation in the unkindly 
 climate of their birth. Exactly in the same way, the flood 
 of a Divine life, poured suddenly into the souls of men, en- 
 larged and ennobled qualities which had been used already, 
 and at the same time developed powers which never could 
 have become apparent in the cold, low temperature of natu- 
 ral life. 
 
 Among the natural gifts, we may instance these : teaching 
 healing the power of government. Teaching is a gift, 
 natural or acquired. To know, is one thing; to have the 
 capacity of imparting knowledge, is another. 
 
 The physician's art, again, is no supernatural mystery ; long 
 and careful study of physical laws capacitate him for his 
 task. To govern, again, is a natural faculty : it may be ac- 
 quired by habit, but there are some who never could acquire 
 it. Some men seem born to command : place them in what 
 sphere you will, others acknowledge their secret influence 
 and subordinate themselves to their will. The faculty of or- 
 ganization, the secret of rule, need no supernatural power. 
 They exist among the uninspired. Now the doctrine of the 
 apostle was, that all these are transformed and renovated by 
 the spirit of a new life in such a way as to become almost 
 new powers, or, as he calls them, gifts of the Spirit. A re- 
 markable illustration of this is his view of the human body. 
 If there be any thing common to us by nature, it is the mem- 
 bers of our corporeal frame ; yet the apostle taught that 
 these, guided by the Spirit as its instruments and obeying a 
 holy will, became transfigured ; so that, in his language, the 
 body becomes a temple of the Holy Ghost, and the meanest 
 faculties, the lowest appetites, the humblest organs, are en- 
 nobled by the Spirit-mind which guides them. Thus he bids 
 the Romans yield themselves " unto God as those that are 
 alive from the dead, and their members as instruments of 
 righteousness unto God." 
 
 The second class of gifts are supernatural : of these we find 
 two pre-eminent the gift of tongues, and the gift of proph- 
 ecy. 
 
 It does not appear that the gift of tongues was merely the 
 imparted faculty of speaking foreign languages it could not 
 be that the highest gift of God to His Church merely made 
 them rivals of the linguist; it would rather seem that the 
 Spirit of God, mingling with the soul of man, supernaturally 
 elevated its aspirations and glorified its conceptions, so that 
 
 20 
 
458 The Dispensation of the Spirit. 
 
 an entranced state of ecstacy was produced, and feelings 
 called into energy, for the expression of which the ordinary 
 forms of speech were found inadequate. Even in a far lower 
 department, when a man becomes possessed of ideas for 
 which his ordinary vocabulary supplies no sufficient expres- 
 sion, his language becomes broken, incoherent, struggling, 
 and almost unnaturally elevated ; much more was it to be 
 expected that when divine and new feelings rushed like a 
 flood upon the soul, the language of men would have be- 
 come strange and extraordinary ; but in that supposed case, 
 wild as the expressions might appear to one coldly looking 
 on and not participating in the feelings of the speaker, they 
 would be quite sufficient to convey intelligible meaning to 
 any one affected by the same emotions. 
 
 Where perfect sympathy exists, incoherent utterance a 
 word a syllable is quite as efficient as elaborate sentences. 
 Now this is precisely the account given of the phenomenon 
 which attended the gift of tongues. On the day of Pente- 
 cost, all who were in the same state of spiritual emotion as 
 those who spoke, understood the speakers; each was as intel- 
 ligible to all as if he spoke in their several tongues: to those 
 who were coolly and skeptically watching, the effects ap- 
 peared like those of intoxication. A similar account is given 
 by the Apostle Paul : the voice appeared to unsympathetic 
 ears as that of a barbarian ; the uninitiated and unbelieving 
 coming in, heard nothing that was articulate to them, but 
 only what seemed to them the ravings of insanity. 
 
 The next was the gift of prophecy. Prophecy has several 
 meanings in Scripture ; sometimes it means the power of pre- 
 dicting future events, sometimes an entranced state accom- 
 panied with ravings, sometimes it appears to mean only ex- 
 position ; but prophecy, as the miraculous spiritual gift grant- 
 ed to the early Church, seems to have been a state of com- 
 munion with the mind of God lower than that which was 
 called the gift of tongues, at least less ecstatic, less rapt into 
 the world to come, more under the guidance of the reason, 
 more within the control of calm consciousness as we might 
 say, less supernatural. 
 
 Upon these gifts we make two observations : 
 
 J. Even the highest were not accompanied with spiritual 
 faultlessness. Inspiration was one thing, infallibility another. 
 The gifts of the Spirit were, like the gifts of nature, subor- 
 dinated to the will capable of being used for good or evil, 
 sometimes pure, sometimes mixed with human infirmity. The 
 supernaturally gifted man was no mere machine, no automa- 
 ton ruled in spite of himself by a superior spirit. Disorder, 
 
The Dispensation of the Spirit. 459 
 
 vanity, overweening self-estimation, might accompany these 
 gifts, and the prophetic utterance itself might be degraded 
 to a mere brawling in the Church ; therefore St. Paul estab- 
 lished laws of control, declared the need of subjection and 
 rule over spiritual gifts : the spirits of the prophets were to 
 be subject to the prophets; if those in the ecstatic state were 
 tempted to break out into utterance and unable to interpret 
 what it meant, those so gifted were to hold their peace. 
 
 The prophet poured out the truths supernaturally impart- 
 ed to his highest spirit, in an inspired and impassioned elo- 
 quence which was intelligible even to the unspiritual, and 
 was one of the appointed means of convincing the unconvert- 
 ed. The lesson derivable from this is not obsolete even in 
 the present day. There is nothing perhaps precisely identi- 
 cal in our own day with those gifts of the early Church ; 
 but genius and talent are uncommon gifts, which stand in a 
 somewhat analogous relation in a closer one certainly than 
 more ordinary endowments. The flights of genius, we know, 
 appear like maniac ravings to minds not elevated to the same 
 spiritual level. Now these are perfectly compatible with 
 misuse, abuse, and moral disorder. The most gifted of our 
 countrymen has left this behind him as his epitaph, "The 
 greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind." The most glorious 
 gift of poetic insight itself in a way divine having some- 
 thing akin to Deity is too often associated with degraded 
 life and vicious character. Those gifts which elevate us above 
 the rest of our species, whereby we stand aloof and separate 
 from the-crowd, convey no moral nor even mental infalli- 
 bility : nay, they have in themselves a peculiar danger, where- 
 as, that gift which is common to us all as brethren, the ani- 
 mating spirit of a divine life, in whose soil the spiritual being 
 of all is rooted, can not make us vain ; we can not pride our- 
 selves on that, for it is common to us all. 
 
 2. Again, the gifts which were higher in one sense were 
 lower in another; as supernatural gifts they would rank thus 
 the gift of tongues before prophecy, and prophecy before 
 teaching ; but as blessings to be desired, this order is reversed : 
 rather than the gift of tongues, St. Paul bids the Corinthians 
 desire that they might prophesy. Inferior, again, to prophecy 
 was the quite simple, and as we should say, lower faculty of 
 explaining truth. Now the principle upon which that was 
 tried was that of utility not utility in the low sense of the 
 utilitarian, who measures the value of a thing by its suscep- 
 tibility of application to the purpose of this present life, but 
 a utility whose measure was love, charity. The apostle con- 
 sidered that gift most desirable by which men might most 
 
460 The Dispensation of the Spirit. 
 
 edify one another. And hence that noble declaration of one 
 of the most gifted of mankind "I had rather speak five 
 words with my understanding, that I might teach others also, 
 than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue." 
 
 Our estimate is almost the reverse of this : we value a gift 
 in proportion to its rarity, its distinctive character, separating 
 its possessor from the rest of his fellow-men ; whereas, in 
 truth, those gifts which leave us in lonely majesty apart from 
 our species, useless to them, benefiting ourselves alone, are 
 not the most Godlike, but the least so ; because they are dis- 
 severed from that beneficent charity which is the very being 
 of God. Your lofty incommunicable thoughts, your ecsta- 
 sies, and aspirations, and contemplative raptures in virtue 
 of which you have estimated yourself as the porcelain of the 
 earth, of another nature altogether than the clay of common 
 spirits tried by the test of charity, what is there grand in 
 these if they can not be applied as blessings to those that are 
 beneath you ? One of our countrymen has achieved for him- 
 self extraordinary scientific renown ; he pierced the mysteries 
 of nature, he analyzed her processes, he gave new elements 
 to the world. The same man applied his rare intellect -to the 
 construction of a simple and very common instrument that 
 well-known lamp which has been the guardian of the miner's 
 life from the explosion of fire. His discoveries are his nobil- 
 ity in this world, his trifling invention gives him rank in the 
 world to come. By the former he shines as one of the bright- 
 est luminaries in the firmament of science, by the latter, evinc- 
 ing a spirit animated and directed by Christian love, he takes 
 his place as one of the Church of God. 
 
 And such is ever the true order of rank which graces oc- 
 cupy in reference to gifts. The most trifling act w T hich is 
 marked by usefulness to others is nobler in God's sight than 
 the most brilliant accomplishment of genius. To teach a 
 few Sunday-school children, week after w r eek, commonplace, 
 simple truths persevering in spite of dullness and mean ca- 
 pacities is a more glorious occupation than the highest 
 meditations or creations of genius which edify or instruct 
 only our own solitary soul. 
 
 II. The spiritual unity of the Church "the same Spirit." 
 Men have formed to themselves two ideas of unity : the 
 first is a sameness of form of expression ; the second an 
 identity of spirit. Some of the best of mankind have fondly 
 hoped to realize an unity for the Church of Christ which 
 should be manifested by uniform expressions in every thing ; 
 their imaginations have loved to paint, as the ideal of a 
 
The Dispensation of the Spirit. 46 1 
 
 Christian Church, a state in which the same liturgy should 
 be used throughout the world, the same ecclesiastical gov- 
 ernment, even the same vestments, the same canonical hours, 
 the same form of architecture. They could conceive noth- 
 ing more entirely one than a Church so constituted that the 
 same prayers, in the very same expressions, at the very same 
 moment, should be ascending to the Eternal Ear. 
 
 There are others who have thrown aside entirely this idea 
 as chimerical ; who have not only ceased to hope it, but even 
 to wish it ; who, if it could be realized, would consider it a 
 matter of regret ; who feel that the minds of men are vari- 
 ous their modes and habits of thought, their original ca- 
 pacities and acquired associations, infinitely diverse ; and 
 who, perceiving that the law of the universal system is 
 manifoldness in unity, have ceased to expect any other one- 
 ness for the Church "of Christ than that of a sameness of 
 spirit, showing itself through diversities of gifts. Among 
 these last was the Apostle Paul : his large and glorious 
 mind rejoiced in the contemplation of the countless mani- 
 festations of spiritual nature beneath which he detected one 
 and the same pervading Mind. Now let us look at this' 
 matter somewhat more closely. 
 
 1. All real unity is manifold. Feelings in themselves 
 identical find countless forms of expression ; for instance, 
 sorrow is the same feeling throughout the human race ; but 
 the Oriental prostrates himself upon the ground, throws dust 
 upon his head, tears his garments, is not ashamed to break 
 out into the most violent lamentations. In the north, we 
 rule our grief in public ; suffer not even a quiver to be seen 
 upon the lip or brow, and consider calmness as the appropri- 
 ate expression of manly grief. Nay, two sisters of different 
 temperament will show their grief diversely ; one will love 
 to dwell upon the theme of the qualities of the departed, the 
 other feels it a sacred sorrow, on which the lips are sealed 
 forever ; yet would it not be idle to ask which of them has 
 the truest affection? Are they not both in their own way 
 true ? In the same East, men take off their sandals in de- 
 votion ; we exactly reverse the procedure, and uncover the 
 head. The Oriental prostrates himself in the dust before 
 his sovereign ; even before his (rod the Briton only kneels ; 
 yet would it not again be idle to ask which is the essential 
 and proper form of reverence ? Is not true reverence in all 
 cases modified by the individualities of temperament and 
 education ? Should we not say, in all these forms worketh 
 one and the same spirit of reverence ? 
 
 Again, in the world as God has made it, one law shows 
 
462 The Dispensation of the Spirit. 
 
 itself under diverse, even opposite manifestations ; lead sinks 
 in water, wood floats upon the surface. In former times 
 men assigned these different results to different forces, laws, 
 and gods. A knowledge of nature has demonstrated that 
 they are expressions of one and the same law ; and the great 
 difference between the educated and the uneducated man is 
 this the uneducated sees in this world nothing but an in- 
 finite collection of unconnected facts a broken, distorted, 
 and fragmentary system, which his mind can by no means 
 reduce to order. The educated man, in proportion to his 
 education, sees the number of laws diminished beholds in 
 the manifold appearances of nature the expression of a few 
 laws, by degrees fewer, till at last it becomes possible to his 
 conception that they are all reducible to one, and that that 
 which lies beneath the innumerable phenomena of nature is 
 the One Spirit God. 
 
 2. All living unity is spiritual, not formal ; not sameness, 
 but manifoldness. You may have a unity shown in identity 
 of form ; but it is a lifeless unity. There is a sameness on 
 the sea-beach that unity which the ocean waves have pro- 
 duced by curling and forcibly destroying the angularities of 
 individual form, so that every stone presents the same mo- 
 notony of aspect, and you must fracture each again in order 
 to distinguish whether you hold in your hand a mass of flint 
 or fragment of basalt. There is no life in unity such as 
 this. 
 
 But as soon as you arrive at a unity that is living, the 
 form becomes more complex, and you search in vain for uni- 
 formity. In the parts, it must be found, if found at all, in 
 the sameness of the pervading life. The illustration given 
 by the apostle is that of the human body a higher unity, 
 he says, by being composed of many members, than if every 
 member were but a repetition of a single type. It is con- 
 ceivable that God might have moulded such a form for hu- 
 man life ; it is conceivable that every cause, instead of pro- 
 ducing in different nerves a variety of sensations, should 
 have affected every one in a mode precisely similar; that 
 instead of producing a sensation of sound a sensation of 
 color a sensation of taste the outward causes of nature, 
 be they what they may, should have given but one unvaried 
 feeling to every sense, and that the whole universe should 
 have been light or sound. 
 
 That would have been unity ; if sameness be unity ; but, 
 says the apostle, "if the whole body were seeing, where 
 were the hearing?" That uniformity would have been ir- 
 reparable loss the loss of every part that was merged into 
 
Tke Dispensation of the Spirit. 463 
 
 the one. What is the body's unity ? Is it not this ? The 
 unity of a living consciousness which marvellously animates 
 every separate atom of the frame, and reduces each to the 
 performance of a function fitted to the welfare of the whole 
 its own, not another's : so that the inner spirit can say of 
 the remotest, and in form most unlike, member, " That, too, 
 is myself*" 
 
 3. None but a spiritual unity can preserve the rights both 
 of the individual and the Church. All other systems of 
 unity, except the apostolic, either sacrifice the Church to the 
 individual, or the individual to the Church. 
 
 Some have claimed the right of private judgment in such 
 a way that every individual opinion becomes truth, and 
 every utterance of private conscience right : thus the Church 
 is sacrificed to the individual ; and the universal conscience, 
 the common faith, becomes as nothing ; the spirits of the 
 prophets are not subject to the prophets. Again, there are 
 others, who, like the Church of Rome, would surrender the 
 conscience of each man to the conscience of the Church, and 
 coerce the particulars of faith into exact coincidence with a 
 formal creed. Spiritual unity saves the right of both in 
 God's system. The Church exists for the individual, just as 
 truly as the individual for the Church. The Church is then 
 most perfect when all its powers converge, and are concen- 
 trated on the formation and protection of individual charac- 
 ter ; and the individual is then most complete that is, most 
 a Christian when he has practically learned that his life is 
 not his own, but owed to others " that no man Jiveth to 
 himself, and no man dieth to himself." 
 
 Now, spiritual unity respects the sanctity of the individu- 
 al conscience. How reverently the Apostle Paul considered 
 its claims, and how tenderly ! When once it became a mat- 
 ter of conscience, this was his principle laid down in matters 
 of dispute : " Let every man be fully persuaded in his own 
 mind." The belief of the whole world can not make that 
 thing true to me which to me seems false. The conscience 
 of the whole world can not make a thing right to me, if I in 
 my heart believe it wrong. You may coerce the conscience, 
 you may control men's belief, and you may produce a unity 
 by so doing; but it is the unity of pebbles on the sea-shore 
 a lifeless identity of outward form with no cohesion be- 
 tween the parts a dead sea-beach on which nothing grows, 
 and where the very sea-weed dies. 
 
 Lastly, it respected the sanctity of individual character. 
 Out of eight hundred millions of the human race, a few feat- 
 Mres diversify themselves into so many forms of counte* 
 
464 The Trinity. 
 
 nance, that scarcely two could be mistaken for each other. 
 There are no two leaves on the same tree alike ; nor two 
 sides of the same leaf, unless you cut and kill it. There is a 
 sacredness in individuality of character ; each one born into 
 this world is a fresh new soul intended by his Maker to de- 
 velop himself in a new fresh way ; we are what we are ; we 
 can not be truly other than ourselves. We reach perfection 
 not by copying, much less by aiming at originality ; but by 
 consistently and steadily working out the life which is com- 
 mon to us all, according to the character which God has 
 given us. 
 
 And thus will the Church of God be one at last will pre- 
 sent an unity like that of heaven. There is one universe, in 
 which each separate star differs from another in glory ; one 
 Church, in which a single Spirit, the Life of God, pervades 
 each separate soul ; and just in proportion as that Life be- 
 comes exalted does it enable every one to shine forth in the 
 distinctness of his own separate individuality, like the stars 
 of heaven. 
 
 IV. 
 THE TRINttTY. 
 
 "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your 
 whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ." 1 Thess. v. 23. 
 
 THE knowledge of God is the blessedness of man. To 
 know God, arid to be known by him to love God, and to be 
 loved by Him is the most precious treasure which this life 
 has to give ; properly speaking, the only treasure ; properly 
 speaking, the only knowledge ; for all knowledge is valuable 
 only so far as it converges towards and ends in the knowl- 
 edge of God, and enables us to acquaint ourselves with God, 
 and be at peace with Him. The doctrine of the Trinity is 
 the sum of all that knowledge which has as yet been gained 
 by man. I say gained as yet. For we presume not to main- 
 tain that in the ages which are to come hereafter, our knowl- 
 edge shall not be superseded by a higher knowledge; we 
 presume not to say that in a state of existence future yea 
 even here upon this earth, at that period which is mysteri- 
 ously referred to in Scripture as "the coming of the Son of 
 Man" there shall not be given to the soul an intellectual 
 conception of the Almighty, a vision of the Eternal, in coin- 
 
The Trinity. 465 
 
 parison with whose brightness and clearness our present 
 knowledge of the Trinity shall be as rudimentary and as 
 childlike as the knowledge of the Jew was in comparison 
 with the knowledge of the Christian. 
 
 Now the passage which I have undertaken to expound to- 
 day is one in which the doctrine of the Trinity is brought 
 into connection practically with the doctrine of our humani- 
 ty. Before entering into it, brethren, let us lay down these 
 two observations and duties for ourselves. In the first 
 place, let us examine the doctrine of the Trinity ever in the 
 spirit of charity. 
 
 A clear statement of the deepest doctrine that man can 
 know, and the intellectual conception of that doctrine, are 
 by no means easy. We are puzzled and perplexed by 
 words we fight respecting words. Quarrels are nearly al- 
 ways verbal quarrels. Words lose their meaning in the 
 course of time ; nay, the very words of the Athanasian creed 
 which we read to-day mean not in this age the same thing 
 which they meant in ages past. Therefore it is possible 
 that men, externally Trinitarians, may differ from each other 
 though using the same words, as greatly as a Unitarian dif- 
 fers from a Trinitarian. There may be found, in the same 
 Church and in the same congregation, men holding all possi- 
 ble shades of opinion, though agreeing externally and in 
 words. 
 
 I speak within the limit of my own experience when I say 
 that persons have been known and heard to express the lan- 
 guage of bitter condemnation respecting Unitarianism, who 
 when examined and calmly required to draw out verbally 
 the meaning of their own conceptions, have been proved to 
 be holding all the time, unconsciously, the very doctrine of 
 Sabellianism. And this doctrine is condemned by the 
 Church as distinctly as that of Unitarianism. Therefore let 
 us learn from all this a large and catholic charity. There 
 are in almost every congregation, themselves not knowing 
 it, Trinitarians who are practically Tri-theists, worshipping 
 three Gods; and Sabellians, or worshippers of one person 
 under three different manifestations. To know God so that 
 we may be said intellectually to appreciate Him, is blessed: 
 to be unable to do so is a misfortune. Be content with your 
 own blessedness, in comparison with others' misfortunes. 
 Do not give to that misfortune the additional sting of illib- 
 eral and unchristian vituperation. 
 
 The next observation we have to lay down for ourselves 
 is, that we should examine this doctrine in the spirit of mod- 
 esty. There are those who are inclined to sneer at the Triu- 
 
 20* 
 
466 The Trinity. 
 
 itarian ; those to whom the doctrine appears merely a con- 
 tradiction a puzzle an entangled, labyrinthine enigma, in 
 which there is no meaning whatever. But let all such re- 
 member, that though the doctrine may appear to them ab- 
 surd, because they have not the proper conception of it, some 
 of the profoundest thinkers, and some of the holiest spirits 
 among mankind, have believed in this doctrine have clung 
 to it as a matter of life or death. Let them be assured of 
 this, that whether the doctrine be true or false, it is not nec- 
 essarily a doctrine self-contradictory. Let them be assured 
 of this, in all modesty, that such men never could have held 
 it unless there was latent in the doctrine a deep truth per- 
 chance the truth of God. 
 
 We pass on now to the consideration of this verse under 
 the following divisions. In the first place, we shall view it 
 as a triad in discord : " I pray God your whole spirit and 
 soul and body be preserved blameless;" in the second place, 
 as a Trinity in unity: "the God of peace sanctify you 
 wholly." We take then, first of all, for our consideration the 
 triad in discord : " I pray God your whole body and soul 
 and spirit be preserved blameless." 
 
 The apostle here divides human nature into a threefold 
 division ; and here we have to observe again the difficulty 
 often experienced in understanding words. Thus words in 
 the Athanasian creed have become obsolete, or lost their 
 meaning : so that in the present day the words " person," 
 " substance," " procession," " generation," to an ordinary 
 person, mean almost nothing. So this language of the 
 apostle, when rendered into English, shows no difference 
 whatever between " soul " and " spirit." We say, for instance, 
 that the soul of a man has departed from him. We also say 
 that the spirit of a man has departed from him. There is no 
 distinct difference between the two ; but in the original two 
 very different kinds of thoughts two very different modes 
 of conception are represented by the two English words 
 " soul " and " spirit." 
 
 It is our business, therefore, in the first place, to under- 
 stand what is meant by this threefold division. When the 
 apostle speaks of the body, what he means is the ar.imal liie 
 that which we share in common with beasts, birds, and 
 reptiles; for our life, my Christian brethren our sensational 
 existence differs but little from that of the lower animals. 
 There is the same external form, the same material in the 
 blood-vessels, in the nerves, and in the muscular system. 
 Nay, more than that, our appetites and instincts "are alike, our 
 lower pleasures like their lower pleasures, our lower pain like 
 
The Trinity. 467 
 
 their lower pain, our life is supported by the same means, and 
 our animal functions are almost indistinguishably the same. 
 
 But, once more, the" apostle speaks of what he calls the 
 "soul." What the- apostle meant by what is translated 
 " soul," is the immortal part of man the immaterial as 
 distinguished from the material : those powers, in fact, which 
 man has by nature powers natural, which are yet to survive 
 the grave. There is a distinction made in Scripture 'by our 
 Lord between these two things, " Fear not," says He, " them 
 who can kill the body ; but rather fear Him who can destroy 
 both body and soul in hell." 
 
 We have again to observe respecting this, that what the 
 apostle, called the " soul," is not simply distinguishable from 
 the body, but also from the spirit ; and on that distinction I 
 have already touched. By the soul the apostle means our 
 powers natural the powers which we have by nature. 
 Herein is the soul distinguishable from the spirit. In the 
 Epistle to the Corinthians we read " But the natural man 
 receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are 
 foolishness unto him ; neither can he know them, because they 
 are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth 
 all things." Observe, there is a distinction drawn between 
 the natural man and the spiritual. What is there translated 
 "natural" is derived from precisely the same word as that 
 which is here translated "soul." So that we may read just 
 as correctly: "The man under the dominion of the soul 
 receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are 
 foolishness unto him ; neither can l\e know them, because 
 they are spiritually discerne'd. But he that is spiritual 
 judgeth all things." And again, the apostle, in the same 
 Epistle to the Corinthians, writes : " That is not first which 
 is spiritual, but that which is natural :" that is, the endow- 
 ments of the soul precede the .endowments of the spirit. 
 You have the same truth in other places. The powers that 
 belong to the spirit were not the first developed ; but the 
 powers which belong to the soul that 'is, the powers of 
 nature. Again in the same chapter, reference is made to 
 the natural and sp iritual body. " There is a natural body 
 and there is a spiritual body." Literally, there is a body 
 governed by the soul that is, powers natural : and there is 
 a body governed by the spirit that is, higher nature. 
 
 Let then this be borne in mind, that what the apostle 
 calls " soul " is the same v as that which he calls ? in another 
 place, the " natural man." These powers are divisible into 
 two branches the intellectual powers and the moral sense. 
 The intellectual powers man has by nature. Man need not 
 
468 The Trinity. 
 
 be regenerated in order to possess the power of reasoning, 
 or in order to invent The intellectual powers belong to 
 what the apostle calls the " soul." The moral sense dis- 
 tinguishes between right and wrong. The apostle tells us, 
 in the Epistle to the Romans, that "the heathen manifestly 
 natural men had the "work of the law written in their 
 Jiearts ; their conscience also bearing witness." 
 
 The third division of which the apostle speaks, he calls 
 the " spirit ;" and by the spirit he means that life in man 
 w r hich, in his natural state, is in such an embryo condition 
 that it can scarcely be said to exist at all that which is 
 called out into power and vitality by regeneration the 
 perfection of the powers of human nature. And y^m will 
 observe, that it is not merely the instinctive life, nor the 
 intellectual life, nor the moral life, but it is principally our 
 nobler affections that existence, that state of being which 
 w r e call love. That is the department of human nature 
 which the apostle calls the spirit ; and accordingly, when the 
 Spirit of God was given on the day of Pentecost, you will 
 remember that another power of man was called out, differ- 
 ing from what he had before. That Spirit granted on the 
 day of Pentecost did subordinate to Himself, and was in- 
 tended to subordinate to Himself, the will, the understand- 
 ing, and the affection of man ; but you often find these spir- 
 itual powers were distinguished from the natural powers, and 
 existed without tnem. 
 
 So in the highest state of religious life, we are told, men 
 prayed in the spirit. % Till the spirit has subordinated the 
 understanding, the gift of God is not complete has not 
 done its work. It is abundantly evident that a new life was 
 called out. It was not merely the sharpening of the in- 
 tellectual powers ; it was calling out powers ^of aspiration 
 and love to God ; those affections which have in them some- 
 thing boundless, that are not limited to this earth, but seek 
 their completion in the mind of God Himself. 
 
 Now, what w r e have to say respecting this threefold state 
 of man is, it is a state of discord. Let us take up a very 
 simple, popular, everyday illustration. We hear it remarked 
 frequently in conversation of a man, that if only his will 
 were commensurate with his knowledge, he would be a great 
 man. His knowledge is great his powers are almost un- 
 bounded ; he has gained knowledge from nearly every de- 
 partment of science; but somehow or other you can not 
 tell why there is such an indecision, such a vacillation 
 about the man, that he scarcely knows what to do, and, per- 
 haps does nothing in this world. You find it remarked, 
 
The Trinity. 469 
 
 respecting another class of men, that their will is strong, 
 almost unbounded in its strength they have iron wills, yet 
 there is something so narrow in their conceptions, something 
 so bounded in their views, so much of stagnation in their 
 thoughts, so much of prejudice in all their opinions, that 
 their will is prevented from being directed to any thing in a 
 proper manner. Here is the discord in human nature. 
 There is a distinction between the will and the under- 
 standing. And sometimes a feeble will goes with a strong 
 understanding, or a powerful will is found in connection 
 with great feebleness or ignorance of the understanding. 
 
 Let us, however, go into this more specially. The first 
 cause of discord in this threefold state of man is the state in 
 which the body is the ruler ; and this, my Christian brethren, 
 you find most visibly developed in the uneducated and irre- 
 ligious poor. I say uneducated and irreligious, because it is 
 by no means education alone which can subordinate the flesh 
 to the higher man. The religious uneducated poor man may 
 be master of his lower passions ; but in the uneducated and 
 irreligious poor man these show themselves in full force ; this 
 discord, this want of unity, appears, as it were, in a magnified 
 form. There is a strong man health bursting, as it were, at 
 every pore, with an athletic body ; but coarse, and rude, and 
 intellectually weak almost an animal. When you are re- 
 garding the upper classes of society, you see less distinctly 
 the absence of the spirit, unless you look with a spiritual eye. 
 The coarseness has passed away, the rudeness is no longer 
 seen : there is a refinement in the pleasure. But if you take 
 the life led by the young men of our country strong, ath- 
 letic, healthy men it is still the life of the flesh: the un- 
 thinking and the unprincipled life in which there is as yet no 
 higher life developed. It is a life which, in spite of its re- 
 finement, the Bible condemns as the life of the sensualist. 
 
 We pass on now to another state of discord a state in 
 which the soul is ruined. Brethren, this is a natural result 
 this is what might have been expected. The natural man 
 gradually subordinates the flesh, the body, to the soul. It is 
 natural in the development of individuals, it is natural in the 
 development of society : in the development of individuals, 
 because that childlike, infantine life which exists at first, 
 mid is almost entirely a life of appetites, gradually subsides. 
 Higher wants, higher desires, loftier inclinations arise ; the 
 passions of the young man gradually subside, and by degrees 
 the more rational life comes : the life is changed the pleas- 
 ures of the senses are forsaken for those of the intellect. 
 
 It appears natural, again, in the development of society. 
 
470 The 'Inmty. 
 
 Civilization will subordinate the flesh to the soul. In the 
 savage state you find the, life of the animal. Civilization is 
 teaching a man, on the principle of this world, to subordinate 
 his appetites ; to rule himself; and there comes a refinement, 
 and a gentleness, and a polish, and an enjoyment of intellect- 
 ual pleasures ; so that the man is no longer what the apostle 
 calls a sensual man, but he becomes now what the apostle 
 calls a natural man. We can see this character delineated in 
 the Epistle to the Ephesians. " Then we were," says the 
 apostle, " in our Gentile state, fulfilling the desires of the flesh 
 and of the mind." Man naturally fulfills not merely the de- 
 sires of the flesh, but the desires of the mind. "And were," 
 says the apostle, " children of wrath." 
 
 One of the saddest spectacles is the decay of the natural 
 man before the work of the Spirit has been accomplished in 
 him. When the savage dies when a mere infant dies when 
 an animal dies there is nothing that is appalling or depress- 
 ing there; but when the high, the developed intellect when 
 the cultivated man conies to the last hours of life, and the 
 memory becomes less powerful, and the judgment fails, and 
 all that belongs to nature and to earth visibly perishes, and 
 the higher life has not been yet developed, though it is des- 
 tined to survive the grave forever even the life of God 
 there is here ample cause for grief; and it is no wonder that 
 the man of genius merely should shed tears at the idea of 
 decaying life. 
 
 We pass on to consider the Trinity in unity. All this is 
 contained in that simple expression, " The God of peace." 
 God is a God of unity. He makes one where before there 
 were two. He is the God of peace, and therefore can make 
 peace. Now this peace, according to the Trinitarian doctrine, 
 consists in a threefold unity. Brethren, as we remarked, re- 
 specting this first of all, the distinction in this Trinity is not 
 a physical distinction, but a metaphysical one. The illustra- 
 tions which are often given are illustrations drawn from ma- 
 terial sources : if we take only those," we get into contradic- 
 tion : for example, when we talk of personality, our idea is 
 of a being bounded by space ; and then to say in this sense 
 that three persons are one, and one is three, is simply con- 
 tradictory and absurd. Remember that the doctrine of the 
 Trinity is a metaphysical doctrine. It is a Trinity a division 
 in the mind of God. It is not three materials ; it is three per- 
 sons in a sense we shall explain by-and-by. 
 
 In the next place I will endeavor to explain the doctrine 
 not to prove it, but to show its rationality, and to explain 
 what it is. 
 
The Trinity. 471 
 
 The first illustration we endeavor to give in this is taken 
 from the world of matter. We will take any material sub- 
 stance : we find in that substance qualities-, we will say three 
 qualities color, shape and size. Color is not shape, shape is 
 not size, size is not color. They are three distinct essences, 
 three distinct qualities, and yet they all form one unity, one 
 single conception, one idea the idea, for example, of a tree. 
 
 Now we will ascend from that into the immaterial world ; 
 and here we come to something more distinct still. Kith* 
 erto we have had but three qualities ; we now come to the 
 mind of man where we find something more than qual- 
 ities. We will take three the will, the affections, and the 
 thoughts of man. Hife will is not his aifections, neither are 
 his affections his thoughts; and it would be imperfect and 
 incomplete to say that these are mere qualities in the man. 
 They are separate consciousnesses living consciousnesses 
 as distinct and as really sundered as it is possible for three 
 things to be, yet bound together by one unity of conscious- 
 ness. Now we have distincter proof than even this that 
 these things are three. The anatomist can tell you that the 
 localities of these powers are different. He can point out the 
 seat of the nerve of sensation ; he can localize the feeling of 
 affection ; he can point to a nerve and say, " There resides 
 the locality of thought." 
 
 There are three distinct localities for three distinct quali- 
 ties, personalities, consciousnesses ; yet all these three are 
 one. 
 
 Once more, we will give proof even beyond all that. The 
 act that a man does is done by one particular part of that 
 man. You may say it was a work of his genius, or of his 
 fancy ; it may have been a manifestation of his love, or an 
 exhibition of his courage ; yet that work was the work of the 
 whole man : his courage, his intellect, his habits of persever 
 ance, all helped towards the completion of that single work. 
 Just in this way certain special w>>rks are attributed to cer- 
 tain personalities of the Deity ; the work of redemption being 
 attributed to one, the work of sanctification to another. And 
 yet just as the whole man was engaged in doing that work, 
 8O does the whole Deity perform that work which is at- 
 tributed to one essential. 
 
 Once more, let us remember that principle which we ex- 
 pounded last Sunday, that it is the law of being that in pro- 
 portion as you rise from lower to higher life, the parts are 
 more distinctly developed, while yet the unity becomes more 
 entire. You find, for example, in the lowest forms of animal 
 life one organ performs several functions, one organ being at 
 
47 2 The Trinity. 
 
 the same time heart and brain and blood-vessels. But when 
 you come to man, you find all these various functions exist- 
 ing in different organs, and every organ more distinctly de 
 veloped ; and yet the unity of a man is a higher unity than 
 that of a limpet. When you come from the material world 
 to the w r orld immaterial, you find that the more society is 
 cultivated, the more man is cultivated, the more marvellous 
 is the power of developing distinct powers. In the savage 
 life it is almost all one feeling ; but in proportion as the 
 higher education advances and the higher life appears, every 
 power and faculty develops and distinguishes itself and be- 
 comes distinct and separate. And yet just in proportion as 
 in a naticm every part is distinct, the unity is greater, and 
 just in proportion as in an individual every power is most 
 complete, and stands out most distinct, just in that propor- 
 tion has the man reached the entireness of his humanity. 
 
 Now, brethren, we^apply all this to the mind of God. The 
 Trinitarian, maintains against the Unitarian and the Sabellian, 
 that the higher you ascend in the scale of being, the more dis- 
 tinct are the consciousnesses, and that the law of unity im- 
 plies and demands a manifold unity. The doctrine of Sabel- 
 lianism, for example, is this : that God is but one essence 
 but one person under different manifestations ; and that when 
 He made the world He was called the Father, w r hen He re- 
 deemed the world He was called the Son, and when he sanc- 
 tified the world He was called the Holy Ghost. The Sabel- 
 lian and the Unitarian maintain that the unity of God con- 
 sists simply in a unity of person, and in opposition to this does 
 the Trinitarian maintain that grandness, either in man or in 
 God, must be a unity of manifoldness. 
 
 But we will enter into this more deeply. The first power 
 of consciousness in which God is made known to us is as the 
 Father, the Author of our being. It is written, " In Him we 
 live, and move, and have our being." He is the Author of 
 all life. In this sense He Is not merely our Father as Chris- 
 tians, but the Father of mankind ; and not merely the Fa- 
 ther of mankind, but the Father of creation ; and in thia 
 way the sublime language of the prophets may be taken ae 
 true literally, " The morning stars sang together, and all the 
 sons of God shouted for joy ;" and the language of the can- 
 ticle which belongs to our morning service, " the deeps, the 
 fountains, the wells," all unite in one hymn of praise, one ev- 
 erlasting hallelujah to God the Father, the Author of their 
 being, "in this respect, simply as the Author of life, merely 
 as the Supreme Being, God has reference to us in relation to 
 the body. He is the Lord of life : in Him we live, and 
 
The Trinity. 473 
 
 move, and have our being. In this respect God to us is as 
 j aw as the collected laws of the universe ; and therefore to 
 offend against law, and bring down the result of transgress- 
 ing law, is said in Scripture language, because applied to a 
 person, to be provoking the wrath of God the Father. 
 
 In the next place, the second way through which the per- 
 sonality and consciousness of God has been revealed to us is 
 as the Son. Brethren, we see in all those writers who have 
 treated of the Trinity, that much stress is laid upon this 
 eternal generation of the Son, the everlasting sonship. It is 
 this which we have in the creed the creed which was read 
 to-day " God, of the substance of the Father, begotten be- 
 fore the worlds ;" and, again, in the Nicene creed, that ex- 
 pression, which is so often wrongly read, " God of God, 
 Light of Light, very God of very God," means absolutely 
 nothing. There are two statements made there. The first 
 is this, " The Son was God :" the sepond is this, " The Son 
 was of God," showing his derivation. And in that, breth- 
 ren, we have one of the deepest and most blessed truths of 
 revelation. The Unitarian maintains a divine humanity a 
 blessed, blessed truth. There is a truth more blessed still 
 the humanity of Deity. Before the world was, there was 
 that in the mind of God which we may call the humanity of 
 His Divinity. It is called in Scripture the Word : the Son : 
 the Form of God. It is in virtue of this that we have a right 
 to attribute to Him our own feelings ; it is in virtue of this 
 that Scripture speaks of His wisdom, His justice, His love. 
 Love in God is what love is in man; justice in God is what 
 justice is in man; creative power in God is what creative 
 power is in man ; indignation in God is that which indigna- 
 tion is in man, barring only this, that the one is emotional, 
 but the other is calm, and pure, and everlastingly still. It 
 is through this humanity in the mind of God, if I may dare 
 so to speak of Deity, that a revelation became possible to 
 man. It was the Word that was made flesh ; it was the 
 Word that manifested itself to man. It is in virtue of the 
 connection between God and man, that God made man in 
 Plis own image ; that through a long line of prophets the hu- 
 man truth of God could be "made known to man, till it came 
 forth developed most entirely and at large in the incarnation 
 of the Redeemer. Now in this respect, it will be observed 
 that God stands connected with us in relation to the soul as 
 " the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world." 
 
 Once more : there is a nearer, a closer, and a more enduring 
 relation in which God stands to us that is, the relation of 
 
474 The Trinity. 
 
 the Spirit. It is to the writings of St. John that we have to 
 turn especially, if we desire to know the doctrines of the 
 Spirit. You will remember the strange way in which he 
 speaks of God. It would almost seem as if the external God 
 has disappeared to him ; nay, as if an external Christ were 
 almost forgotten, because the internal Christ has been formed. 
 He speaks of God as kindred with us ; he speaks of Christ as 
 Christ in us ; and " if we love one another," he says, " God 
 dwelleth in us." If a man keep the commandments, " God 
 dwelleth in him, and he in God." So that the spiritual man- 
 ifestation of God to us is that whereby He blends Himself 
 with the soul of man. 
 
 These, then, my Christian brethren, are the three con- 
 sciousnesses by which He becomes known to us. Three, we 
 said, known to us. We do not dare to limit God ; we do not 
 presume to say that there are in God only three personali- 
 ties, only three consciousnesses : all that we dare presume to 
 say is this, that there are three in reference to us, and only 
 three ; that a fourth there is not ; that, perchance, in the 
 present state a fourth you can not add to these Creator, 
 Redeemer, Sanctifier. 
 
 Lastly, let us turn to the relation which the Trinity in 
 unity bears to the triad in discord. It is intended for the 
 entireness of our sanctification : " the very God of peace 
 sanctify you wholly." Brethren, we dwell upon that expres- 
 sion " wholly" There is this difference between Christianity 
 and every other system : Christianity proposes to ennoble 
 the whole man ; every other system subordinates parts to 
 parts. Christianity does not despise the intellect, but it 
 does not exalt the intellect in a one-sided way : it only 
 dwells with emphasis on the third and highest part of man 
 his spiritual affections ; and these it maintains are the 
 chief and real seat of everlasting life, intended to subordi- 
 nate the other to themselves. 
 
 Asceticism would crush the natural affections, destroy the 
 appetites. Asceticism feels that there is a conflict between 
 the flesh and the spirit, and it would put an end to that con- 
 flict ; it would bring back unity by the excision of all our 
 natural appetites, and all the desires and feelings which we 
 have by nature. But when the Apostle Paul comes forward 
 to proclaim the will of God, he says it is not by the crushing 
 of the body but by the sanctification of the body : " I pray 
 God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved 
 blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
 In this, my Christian brethren, there is one of the deepest 
 of all truths. Does a man feel himself the slave and the vie- 
 
The Trinity. 475 
 
 tira of his lower passions ? Let not that man hope to subdue 
 them merely by struggling against them. Let him not by 
 fasting, by austerity, by any earthly rule that he can con- 
 ceive, expect to subdue the flesh. The more he thinks of his 
 vile and lower feelings, the more will they be brought into 
 distinctness, and therefore into power; the more hopelessly 
 will he become their victim. The only way in which a man 
 can subdue the flesh is not by the extinction of those frel- 
 ings, but by the elevation of their character. Let there be 
 added to that character, sublimity of aim. purity of affection ; 
 let there be given grandeur, spiritual nobleness ; and then, 
 just as the strengthening of the whole constitution of the 
 body makes any particular and local affection disappear, so 
 by degrees, by the raising of the character, do these lower 
 affections become, not extinguished or destroyed by excision, 
 but ennobled by a new and loftier spirit breathed through 
 them. 
 
 This is the account given by the apostle. He speaks of 
 the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. And his reme- 
 dy is to give vigor to the higher, rather than to struggle 
 with the lower. " This I say, then, Walk in the spirit, and 
 ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh." 
 
 Once more : the apostle differs from the world in this, 
 that the world would restore this unity and sanctify man 
 simply from the soul. It is this which civilization pretends 
 to effect. We hear much in these modern days of " the 
 progress of humanity." We hear of man's invention, of 
 man's increase of knowledge ; and it would seem in all this, 
 as if man were necessarily becoming better. Brethren, it al- 
 ways must be the case in that state in which God is looked 
 upon as the Supreme Being merely, where the intellect of 
 man is supposed to be the chief thing that which makes 
 him most kindred to his Maker. 
 
 The doctrine of Christianity is this that unity of all this 
 discord must be made. Man is to be made one with God, 
 not by soaring intellect, but by lowly love. It is the Spirit 
 which guides him to all truth ; not merely by rendering 
 more acute the reasoning powers, but by convincing of sin, 
 by humbling the man. It is the graces of the Spirit which 
 harmonize the man, and make him one ; and that is the ei\d, 
 and aim, and object of all the Gospel : the entireness of sanc- 
 tification to produce a perfectly developed man. 
 
 Most of us in this world are monsters, with some part of 
 our being bearing the development of a "giant and others 
 showing the proportions of a dwarf: a feeble, dwarfish will 
 mighty, full-blown passions ; and therefore it is that there 
 
476 Absolution. 
 
 is to be visible through the Trinity in us, a noble manifold 
 unity ; and when ' the triune power of God shall so have 
 done its work on the entireness of our humanity, that the 
 body, soul, and spirit have been sanctified, then shall there 
 be exhibited, and only then, a perfect affection in man to his 
 Maker, and body, soul, and spirit shall exhibit a Trinity ID 
 unity. 
 
 V. 
 ABSOLUTION. 
 
 "And the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, Who is this 
 which speaketh blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?" 
 Luke v. 21. 
 
 THERE are questions which having been again and again 
 settled, still from time to time present themselves for re-so- 
 lution ; errors which having been refuted, and cut up by the 
 roots, re-appear in the next century as fresh and vigorous as 
 ever. Like the fabled monsters of old, from whose dissever- 
 ed neck the blood sprung forth and formed fresh heads, mul- 
 tiplied and indestructible; or like the weeds, which, extir- 
 pated in one place, sprout forth vigorously in another. 
 
 In every such case it may be taken for granted that the 
 root of the matter has not been reached ; the error has been 
 exposed, but the truth which lay at the bottom of the error 
 has not been disengaged. Every error is connected with a 
 truth ; the truth being perennial, springs up again as often 
 as circumstances foster it, or call for it, and the seeds of er- 
 ror which lay about the roots spring up again in the form of 
 weeds, as before. 
 
 A popular illustration of this may be found in the belief 
 in the appearance of the spirits of the departed. You may 
 examine the evidence for every such alleged apparition ; you 
 may demonstrate the improbability ; you may reduce it to 
 an impossibility ; still the popular feeling will remain ; and 
 there is a lurking superstition even among the enlightened, 
 which in the midst of professions of incredulity shows itself 
 in a readiness to believe the wildest new tale, if it possess 
 but the semblance of an authentication. Now two truths 
 lie at the root of this superstition. The first is the re- 
 ality of the spirit-world and the instinctive belief in it. The 
 second is the fact that there are certain states of -health in 
 which the eye creates the objects which it perceives. The 
 
Absolution. 477 
 
 death-blow to such superstition is only struck when we have 
 not only proved that men have been deceived, but shown be- 
 sides how they came to be deceived ; when science has ex- 
 plained the optical delusion, and shown the physiological 
 state in which such apparitions become visible. Ridicule 
 will not do it. Disproof will not do it. So long as men feel 
 that there is a spirit-world, and so long as to some the im- 
 pression is vivid that they have seen it, you spend your 
 rhetoric in vain. You must show the truth that lies below 
 the error. 
 
 The principle we gain from this is, that you can not over- 
 throw falsehood by negation, but by establishing the antag- 
 onistic truth. The refutation which is to last must be posi- 
 tive, not negative. It is an endless work to be uprooting 
 weeds : plant the ground with wholesome vegetation, and 
 then the juices which would have otherwise fed rankness 
 will pour themselves into a more vigorous growth ; the dwin- 
 dled weeds will be easily raked out then. It is an endless 
 task to be refuting error. Plant truth, and the error will 
 pine away. 
 
 The instance to which all this is preliminary, is the perti- 
 nacious hold which the belief in a human absolving power 
 retains upon mankind. There has perhaps never yet been 
 known a religion without such a belief. There is not a sav- 
 age in the islands of the South Pacific who does not believe 
 that his priest can shield him from the consequences of sin. 
 There was not a people in antiquity who had not dispensers 
 of Divine favor. That same belief passed from Paganism 
 into Romanism. It was exposed at the period of the Refor- 
 mation. A mighty reaction was felt against it throughout 
 Europe. Apparently the whole idea of human priesthood 
 was proved, once and forever, to be baseless ; human media- 
 tion, in every possible form, was vehemently controverted ; 
 men were referred back to God as the sole Absolver. 
 
 Yet now again, three centuries after, the belief is still as 
 strong as ever. That which we thought dead is alive again, 
 and not likely, it seems, to die. Recent revelations have 
 shown that confession is daily made in the country whose 
 natural manners are most against it ; private absolution ask- 
 ed by English men and given by English priests. A fact so 
 significant might lead us well to pause, and ask ourselves 
 whether we have found the true answer to the question. 
 The negation we have got, the vehement denial; we are 
 weary of its reiteration : but the positive truth which lies at 
 the bottom of this craving where is that ? 
 
 Parliaments and pulpits, senators and clergymen, have 
 
478 Absolution. 
 
 vied with each other in the vehemence with which they de 
 clare absolution uu-Christian, un-English. All that is most 
 abominable in the confessional has been with unsparing and 
 irreverent indelicacy forced before the public mind. Still, 
 men and women, whose holiness and purity are beyond slan- 
 der's reach, come and crave assurance of forgiveness. How 
 shall we reply to such men? Shall we say, "Who is this 
 that speaketh blasphemies? who can forgive sins, but God 
 only ?" Shall we say it is all blasphemy ; an impious intru- 
 sion upon the prerogatives of the One Absolver ? Well, we 
 may ; it is popular to say we ought ; but you will observe, 
 if we speak so, we do no more than the Pharisees in this 
 text : we establish a negation ; but a negation is only one 
 side of truth. 
 
 Moreover, we have been asserting that for three hundred 
 years, with small fruits. We keep asserting, Man can not 
 give assurance that sin is pardoned ; in other words, man 
 can not absolve : but still the heart craves human assurance 
 of forgiveness. What truth have we got to supply that 
 craving ? We shall therefore rather try to fathom the deeps 
 of the positive truth which is the true reply to the error; we 
 shall try to see whether there is not a real answer to the 
 craving contained in the Redeemer's words, " The Son of 
 Man hath power on earth to forgive sins." What power is 
 there in human forgiveness ? What does absolution mean 
 in the lips of a son of man ? These are our questions for to- 
 day. We shall consider two points. 
 
 I. The impotency of the negation. 
 II. The power of the positive truth. 
 
 The Pharisees denied the efficacy of human absolution : 
 they said, " None can forgive sins, but God only :" that was 
 a negation. What did they effect by their system of nega- 
 tions ? They conferred no peace ; they produced no holi- 
 ness. It would be a great error to suppose that the Phari- 
 sees were hypocrites in the ordinary sense of the term that 
 is, pretending to be anxious about religion when they knew 
 that they felt no anxiety. They were anxious, in their way. 
 They heard a startling free announcement of forgiveness by 
 a man. To them it appeared license given to sin. If this 
 new teacher, this upstart in their ow T n language, " this fel- 
 low of whom every man knew whence he w r as," were to go 
 about the length and breadth of the land, telling sinners to 
 be at peace ; telling them to forget the past, and to work on- 
 wards ; bidding men's consciences be at rest ; and command- 
 ing them not to fear the God whom they had offended, but 
 
Absolution. 479 
 
 lo trust in Him what would become of morality and relig- 
 ion ? This presumptuous Absolver would make men careless 
 about both. If the indispensable safeguards of penalty were 
 removed, what remained to restrain men from sin ? 
 
 For the Pharisees had no notion of any other goodness 
 than that which is restrained ; they could conceive no good- 
 ness free, but only that which is produced by rewards and 
 punishments law-goodness, law-righteousness: to dread 
 God, not to love and trust Him, was their conception of re- 
 ligion. And this, indeed, is the ordinary conception of re- 
 ligion the ordinary meaning implied to most minds by the 
 word religion. The word religion means, by derivation, re- 
 striction or obligation obligation to do, obligation to avoid. 
 And this is the negative system of the Pharisees scrupulous 
 avoidance of evil rather than positive and free pursuit of ex- 
 cellence. Such a system never produced any thing but bar- 
 ren denial. "This is wrong;" "that is heresy j" "that is 
 dangerous." 
 
 There was another class of men who denied human power 
 of absolution. They were called Scribes or writers ped- 
 ants, men of ponderous learning and accurate definitions ; 
 from being mere transcribers of the law, they had risen to 
 be its expounders. They could define the exact number of 
 yards that might be travelled on the sabbath-day without 
 infringement of the law ; they could decide, according to the 
 most approved theology, the respective importance of each 
 duty ; they would tell you, authoritatively, which was the 
 great commandment of the law. The Scribe is a man who 
 turns religion into etiquette : his idea of God is that of a 
 monarch, transgression against whom is an offense against 
 statute law, and he, the Scribe, is there to explain the pre- 
 scribed conditions upon which the offense may be expiated ; 
 he has no idea of admission to the sovereign's presence, ex- 
 cept by compliance with certain formalities which the Scribe 
 is commissioned to declare. 
 
 There are therefore Scribes in all ages Romish Scribes, 
 who distinguish between venial arid mortal sin, and appor- 
 tion to each its appointed penance and absolution. There 
 are Protestant Scribes, who have no idea of God but as an 
 incensed judge, and prescribe certain methods of appeasing 
 Him a certain price, in consideration of which He is willing 
 to sell forgiveness ; men who accurately draw the distinc- 
 tion between the different kinds of faith faith historical and 
 faith saving ; who bewilder and confuse all natural feeling ; 
 who treat the natural love of relations as if it were an idola- 
 try as great as bowing down to mammon ; who make intel- 
 
480 Absolution. 
 
 ligible distinction between the work that may and the worls 
 that may not be done on the sabbath-day ; who seYid you 
 into a perilous consideration of the workings of your own 
 feelings, and the examination of your spiritual experiences, 
 to ascertain whether you have the feelings which give you a 
 right to call God a Father. They hate the Romish Scribe 
 as much as the Jewish Scribe hated the Samaritan and called 
 him heretic. But in their way they are true to the spirit of 
 the Scribe. 
 
 Now the result of this is fourfold. Among the tender- 
 minded, despondency ; among the vainer, spiritual pride ; in 
 the case of the slavish, superstition ; with the hard-minded, 
 infidelity. Ponder it well, and you will find these four 
 things rife amongst us : despondency, spiritual pride, super- 
 stition, and infidelity. In this way we have been going on 
 for many years. In the midst of all this, at last we are in- 
 formed that the confessional is at work again ; whereupon 
 astonishment and indignation are loudly expressed. It is 
 not to be borne that the priests of the Church of England 
 should confess and absolve in private. Yet it is only what 
 might have been expected. 
 
 With our Evangelicalism, Tractarianism, Scribeism, Phar- 
 isaism, we have ceased to front the living fact we are as 
 zealous as Scribes and Pharisees ever were for negatives; 
 but in the mean time human nature, oppressed and over- 
 borne, gasping for breath, demands something real and living. 
 It can not live on controversies. It can not be fed on pro- 
 tests against heresy, however vehement. We are trying 
 w T ho can protest loudest. Every book, every journal, rings 
 with warnings. "Beware!" is written upon every thing. 
 Beware of Rome; beware of Geneva; beware of Germany; 
 some danger on every side ; Satan everywhere God no- 
 where; everywhere some man to be shunned or dreaded 
 nowhere one to be loved freely and without suspicion. Is it 
 any wonder if men and women, in the midst of negations, 
 cry, "Ye warn me from the error, but who will guide me 
 into truth ? I want guidance. I am sinful, full of evil ! I 
 want forgiveness. Absolve me ; tell me that I am pardon- 
 ed ; help me to believe it. Your quarrels do not help me ; 
 if you can not do that, it matters little what you can do. 
 You have restricted God's love, and narrowed the path to 
 heaven ; you have hampered religion with so many mysteri- 
 ous questions and quibbles that I can not find the w r ay to 
 God ; you have terrified me with so many snares and pitfalls 
 on every side, that I dare not tread at all. Give me peace ; 
 give me human guidance: I want a human arm to lean on." 
 
Absolution. 481 
 
 Tliis is a cry, I believe, becoming daily more passionate 
 and more common. And no wonder that all our information, 
 public and private, is to the same effect that the recent 
 converts have found peace in Rome ; for the secret of the 
 power of Rome is this that she grounds her teaching, not 
 on variable feelings and correct opinions, but on facts. God 
 is not a highly probable God, but afact. God's forgiveness 
 is not a feeling, but a fact ; and a material symbolic fact is 
 the witness of the invisible one. Rome puts forward her ab- 
 solution her false, priestly, magical absolution a visible 
 fact, as a witness of the invisible. And her perversion pre- 
 vails because founded on a truth. 
 
 II. The power of the positive truth. 
 
 Is it any wonder, if, taught on every side distrust of man, 
 the heart should by a violent reaction, and by an extrava- 
 gant confidence in a priest, proclaim that its normal, natural 
 state is not distrust, but trust ? 
 
 What is forgiveness ? It is God reconciled to us. What 
 is absolution ? It is the authoritative declaration that God 
 is reconciled. Authoritative: that is a real power of con- 
 veying a sense and feeling of forgiveness. It is the power 
 of the Son of Man on earth to forgive sins. It is man, God's 
 image, representing, by his forgiveness on earth, God's for- 
 giveness in heaven. 
 
 Now distinguish God's forgiveness of sin from an arresting 
 of the consequence of sin. When God forgives a sin it does 
 not follow that He stops its consequences: for example, 
 when He forgives the intemperate man whose health is 
 ruined, forgiveness does not restore his health. Divine par- 
 don does not interfere with the laws of the universe, for it is 
 itself one of those laws. It is a law that penalty follows 
 transgression. Forgiveness will not save from penalty ; but 
 it alters the feelings with which the penalty is accepted. 
 Pain inflicted with a surgeon's knife for a man's good is as 
 keen as that which results from the knife of the torturer ; but 
 in the one case it is calmly borne because remedial in the 
 other it exasperates because it is felt to be intended by ma- 
 levolence. So with the difference between suffering which 
 comes from a sin which we hope God has forgiven, and suf- 
 fering which seems to fall hot from the hand of an angry 
 God. It is a fearful truth, that, so far as we know at least, 
 the consequences of an act are connected with it indissolubly. 
 Forgiveness does not arrest them ; but by producing softness 
 and grateful penitence, it transforms them into blessings. 
 This is God's forgiveness ; and absolution is the conveyance 
 
 21 
 
482 Absolution. 
 
 to the conscience of the conviction of forgiveness : to absolve 
 is to free to comfort by strengthening to afford repose 
 from fear. 
 
 Now it was the way of the Redeemer to emancipate from 
 sin by the freeness of absolution. The dying thief, an hour 
 before a blasphemer, was unconditionally assured ; the mo- 
 ment the sinner's feelings changed towards God, He pro- 
 claimed that God was reconciled to him: "This day thou 
 shalt be with me in Paradise." And hence, speaking human- 
 ly, hence, from this absolving tone and spirit, came His won- 
 drous and unparalleled power with sinful, erring hearts; 
 hence the life and fresh impulse which He imparted to the 
 being and experience to those with whom He dealt. Hence 
 the maniac, freed from the legion, sat at His feet, clothed, 
 and in his right mind. Hence the outcast woman, whom 
 human scorn would have hardened into brazen effrontery, 
 hearing an unwonted voice of human sympathy, " washed 
 His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hairs of 
 her head." 
 
 And this is what we have forgotten: we have not yet 
 learned to trust the power of redeeming love ; we do not be- 
 lieve in the omnipotence of grace, and the might oif an ap- 
 peal to the better parts, and not the slavish parts of human 
 nature. Settle it in your minds, the absolving power is the 
 central secret of the Gospel. Salvation is unconditional ; not 
 an offer, but a gift; not clogged with conditions, but free as 
 the air we breathe. God welcomes back the prodigal. God 
 loves without money and without price. To this men reply 
 gravely, It is dangerous to speak thus ; it is perilous to dis- 
 pense with the safeguards of restriction. Law ! law ! there 
 is nothing like law a salutary fear for making men holy. 
 Oh blind Pharisee ! had you ever known the spring, the life 
 which comes from feeling free, the gush of gratitude with 
 which the heart springs to duty when all chains are shat- 
 tered, and it stands fearless and free in the light, and in the 
 love of God you would understand that a large trusting 
 charity, which can throw itself on the better and more gen* 
 erous impulses of a laden spirit, is the safest as well as the 
 most beautiful means of securing obedience. 
 
 So far, however, there will not be much objection to the 
 doctrine: it will be admitted that absolution is true in the 
 lips of Christ, because of His Divinity. It will be said He 
 was God, and Grod speaking on earth is the same thing as 
 God speaking in heaven. No, my brethren, it is not the 
 same thing. Christ forgiving on earth is a new truth added 
 to that of God's forgiving in heaven. It is not the sam 
 
Absolution. 483 
 
 truth. The one is forgiveness by Deity; the other is the 
 declaration of forgiveness by humanity. He bade the pal- 
 sied man walk, that they might know that " the Son of Man 
 hath power on earth to forgive sins." Therefore we proceed 
 a step farther. The same power He delegated to His Church 
 which He had exercised Himself. " Whosesoever sins ye re- 
 mit, they are remitted." Now perhaps it will be replied to 
 this, that that promise belongs to the apostles ; that they 
 were supernaturally gifted to distinguish genuine from 
 feigned repentance ; to absolve, therefore, was their natural 
 prerogative, but that we have no right to say it extends be- 
 yond the apostles. 
 
 We therefore bring the question to a point by referring to 
 an instance in which an apostle did absolve. Let us ex- 
 amine whether St. Paul confined the prerogative to himself. 
 " To whom ye forgive any thing, I forgive also : for to 
 whom I forgave any thing for your sakes, forgave I it in the 
 person of Christ." 
 
 Observe now : it is quite true here that the apostle ab- 
 solved a man whose excommunication he had formerly re- 
 quired: but he absolved him because the congregation ab- 
 solved him ; not as a plenipotentiary supernaturally gifted 
 to convey a mysterious benefit, but as himself an organ and 
 representative of the Church. The power of absolution 
 therefore belonged to the Church, and to the apostle through 
 the Church. It was a power belonging to all Christians : to 
 the apostle, because he was a Christian, not because he was 
 an apostle. A priestly power, no doubt, because Christ has 
 machB all Christians kings and priests. 
 
 Now let us turn again, with this added light, to examine 
 the meaning of that expression, " The Son of~Man hath pow- 
 er on earth to forgive sins." Mark that form of words not 
 Christ as God, but Christ as Son of Man. It was manifestly 
 said by Him, not solely as Divine, but rather as human, as 
 the Son of Man ; that is, as man. For we may take it as a 
 rule: when Christ calls himself Son of Man, He is asserting 
 His humanity. It was said by the High-Priest of humanity 
 in the name of the race. It was said on the principle that 
 human nature is the reflection of God's nature : that human 
 love is the image of God's love ; and that human forgiveness 
 is the type and assurance of Divine forgiveness. 
 
 In Christ humanity was the perfect type of Deity, and 
 therefore Christ's absolution was always the exact measure 
 and counterpart of God's forgiveness. Herein lies the deep 
 truth of the doctrine of His eternal priesthood the Eternal 
 Son the humanity of the being of God the ever-human 
 
4.84 Absolution. 
 
 inind of God. The Absolver ever lives. The Father judgeth 
 no man, but hath committed all judgment to the Son hath 
 given Him authority to execute judgment also because He 
 is the Son of Man. 
 
 But further than this. In a subordinate, because less per- 
 fect degree, the forgiveness of a man as man carries with it 
 an absolving power. Who has not felt the load taken from 
 his mind when the hidden guilt over which he had brooded 
 long has been acknowledged, and met by forgiving human 
 sympathy, especially at a time when he expected to be treat- 
 ed with coldness and reproof? Who has not felt how such 
 a moment was to him the dawn of a better hope, and how 
 the merciful judgment of some wise and good human being 
 seemed to be the type and the assurance of God's pardon, 
 making it credible* Unconsciously, it may be, but still in 
 substance really, I believe some such reasoning as this goes 
 on in the whispers of the heart "He loves me, and has com- 
 passion on me will not God forgive ? He, this man, made 
 in God's image, does not think my case hopeless. Well, 
 then, in the larger love of God it is not hopeless." Thus, 
 and only thus, can we understand the ecclesiastical act. Ab- 
 solution, the prerogative of our humanity, is represented by 
 a formal act of the Church. 
 
 Much controversy and angry bitterness has been spent on 
 the absolution put by the Church of England into the lips 
 of her ministers I can not think with justice if we try to 
 get at the root of these words of Christ. The priest pro- 
 claims forgiveness authoritatively as the organ of the con- 
 gregation as the voice of the Church, in the name of -man 
 and God. For human nature represents God. The Church 
 represents what human nature is and ought to be. The min- 
 ister represents the Church. He speaks therefore in the 
 name of our Godlike human nature. He declares a Divine 
 fact ; he does not create it. There is no magic in his absolu- 
 tion : he can no more forgive whom God has not forgiven, 
 by the formula of absolution, or reverse the pardon of him 
 whom God has absolved by a formula of excommunication, 
 than he can transfer a demon into an angel by the formula 
 of baptism. He declares what every one has a right to de- 
 clare, and ought to declare by his lips and by his conduct : 
 but being a minister, he declares it authoritatively in the 
 name of every Christian who by his Christianity is a priest 
 to God ; he specializes what is universal ; as in baptism, he 
 seals the universal Sonship on the individual by name, say- 
 ing, " The Sonship with which Christ has redeemed all men, 
 I hereby proclaim for this child ;" so by absolution he spe- 
 
Absolution. 485 
 
 cializes the universal fact of the love of God to those who 
 are listening then and there, saying, " The love pf God the 
 Absolver I authoritatively proclaim to be yours" 
 
 In the service for the visitation of the sick, the Church of 
 England puts into the lips of her ministers words quite un 
 conditional: "I absolve thee from all thy sins." You know 
 that passage is constantly objected to as Romish and super- 
 stitious, I would not give up that precious passage. I love 
 the Church of England, because she has dared to claim her 
 inheritance because she has courage to assert herself as 
 what she ought to be God's representative on earth. She 
 says to her minister, Stand there before a darkened spirit, on 
 whom the shadows of death have begun to fall : in human 
 flesh and blood representing the Invisible with words of 
 human love making credible the love eternal. Say boldly, I 
 am here to declare not a perhaps, but a fact. I forgive thee 
 in the name of humanity. And so far as humanity represents 
 Deity, that forgiveness is a type of God's. She does not put 
 into her ministers' lips words of incantation. He can not 
 bless whom God has not blessed he can not curse whom 
 God has not cursed. If the Son of Absolution be there, his 
 absolution will rest. If you have ever tried the slow and 
 apparently hopeless task of ministering to a heart diseased, 
 and binding up the wound that will bleed afresh, to which no 
 assurances can give comfort, because they are not authorita- 
 tive, it must have crossed your mind that such a power as 
 that which the Church of England claims, if it were believed, 
 is exactly the remedy you want. You must have felt that 
 even the formula of the Church of Rome would be a blessed 
 power to exercise, could it but once be accepted as a pledge 
 that all the past was obliterated, and that from that moment 
 a free untainted future lay before the soul you must have 
 felt that ; you must have wished you had dared to say it. 
 My whole spirit has absolved my erring brother. Is God 
 less merciful than I ? Can I dare I say or think it condi- 
 tionally ? Dare I say, I hope ? May I not, must I not, say, 
 I know God has forgiven you? 
 
 Every man whose heart has truly bled over another's sin, 
 and watched another's remorse with pangs as sharp as if the 
 crime had been his own, has said it. Every parent has said 
 it who ever received back a repentant daughter, and opened 
 out for her a new hope for life. Every mother has said it 
 who ever, by her hope against hope for some profligate, pro- 
 tested for a love deeper and wider than that of society. 
 Every man has said it who forgave a deep wrong. See, then, 
 why and how the Church absolves. She only exercises that 
 
486 Absolution. 
 
 power which belongs to every son of man. If society were 
 Christian -^f society, by its forgiveness and its exclusion, 
 truly represented the mind of God there would be no ne- 
 cessity for a Church to speak ; but the absolution of society 
 and the world does not represent by any means God's for 
 giveness. Society absolves those whom God has not ab- 
 solved the proud, the selfish, the strong, the seducer ; so- 
 ciety refuses return and acceptance to the seduced, the frail, 
 and the sad penitent whom God has accepted ; therefore it 
 is necessary that a selected body, through its appointed or- 
 gans, should do in the name of man what man, as such, does 
 not. The Church is the ideal of humanity. It represents 
 what God intended man to be what man is in God's sight 
 as beheld in Christ by Him ; and the minister of the Church 
 speaks as the representative of that ideal humanity. Church 
 absolution is an eternal protest, in the name of God the Ab- 
 solver, against the false judgments of society. 
 
 One thing more : beware of making this a dead formula. 
 If absolution be not a living truth it becomes a monstrous 
 falsehood ; if you take absolution as a mystical gift conveyed 
 to an individual man called a priest, and mysteriously effica- 
 cious in his lips, and his alone, you petrify a truth into death 
 and unreality. I have been striving to show that absolution 
 is not a Church figment, invented by priestcraft, but a living, 
 blessed, human power. It is a power delegated to you and 
 to me, and just so far as we exercise it lovingly and wisely, 
 in our lives, and with our lips, we help men away from sin : 
 just so far as we do not exercise it, or exercise it falsely, we 
 drive men to Rome. For if the heart can not have a truth 
 it will take a counterfeit of truth. By every magnanimous 
 act, by every free forgiveness with which a pure man for- 
 gives, or pleads for mercy, or assures the penitent, he pro- 
 claims this truth, that " the Son of Man hath power on earth 
 to forgive sins " he exhibits the priestly power of humanity 
 he does absolve ; let theology say what it will of absolu- 
 tion, he gives peace to the conscience he is a type and as- 
 eurance of what God is he breaks the chains and lets the 
 captive go free. 
 
The Illusiveness of Life. 487 
 
 VI. 
 THE ILLUSIVENESS OF LIFE. 
 
 "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which ht 
 should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed ; and he went out, not know- 
 ing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a 
 strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with 
 him of the same promise: for he looked for a city which hath foundations, 
 whose builder and maker is God." Heb. xi. 8-10. 
 
 LAST Sunday we touched upon a thought which deserves 
 further development. God promised Canaan to Abraham, 
 and yet Abraham never inherited Canaan : to the last he was 
 a wanderer there ; he had no possession of his own in its ter- 
 ritory ; if he wanted even a tomb to bury his dead, he could 
 only obtain it by purchase. This difficulty is expressly ad- 
 mitted in the text, " In the land of promise he sojourned as 
 in a strange country ;" he dwelt there in tents in changeful, 
 movable tabernacles not permanent habitations ; he had no 
 home there. 
 
 It is stated in all its startling force, in terms still more ex- 
 plicit, in the 7th chapter of the Acts, 5th verse, "And He 
 gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his 
 foot on : yet He promised that He would give it to him for a 
 possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no 
 child." 
 
 Now the surprising point is that Abraham, deceived, as 
 you might almost say, did not complain of it as a deception ; 
 he was even grateful for the non-fulfillment of the promise : 
 he does not seem to have expected its fulfillment ; he did not 
 look for Canaan, but for " a city which had foundations ;" his 
 faith appears to have consisted in disbelieving the letter, al- 
 most as much as in believing the spirit of the promise. 
 
 And herein lies a principle, which, rightly expounded, can 
 help us to interpret this life of ours. God's promises never 
 are fulfilled in the sense in which they seem to have been 
 given. Life is a deception ; its anticipations, which are God's 
 promises %to the imagination, are never realized; they who 
 know life best, and have trusted God most to fill it with 
 blessings, are ever the first to say that life is a series of dis- 
 appointments. And in the spirit of this text we have to say 
 that it is a wise and merciful arrangement which ordains it 
 thus. 
 
488 The Illusiveness of Life. 
 
 The wise and holy do not expect to find it otherwise- 
 would not wish it otherwise ; their wisdom consists in disbe- 
 lieving its promises. To develop this idea would be a glori- 
 ous task ; for to justify God's ways to man, to expound the 
 mysteriousness of our present being, to interpret God is not 
 this the very essence of the ministerial office ? All that I 
 can hope, however, to-day, is not to exhaust the subject but 
 to furnish hints for thought. Over-statements may be made, 
 illustrations may be inadequate, the new ground of an almost 
 untrodden subject may be torn up too rudely ; but remem- 
 ber, we are here to live and die ; in a few years it will be all 
 over ; meanwhile, what we have to do is to try to under- 
 stand, and to help one another to understand, what it all 
 means what this strange and contradictory thing, which 
 we call life, contains within it. Do not stop to ask, there- 
 fore, whether the subject was satisfactorily worked out ; let 
 each man be satisfied to have received a germ of thought 
 which he may develop better for himself. 
 
 I. The deception of life's promise. 
 II. The meaning of that deception. 
 
 Let it be clearly understood, in the first place, the promise 
 never was fulfilled. I do not say the fulfillment was delay- 
 ed. I say it never was fulfilled. Abraham had a few feet 
 of earth, obtained by purchase beyond that nothing ; he 
 died a stranger and a pilgrim in the land. Isaac had a little. 
 So small was Jacob's hold upon his country that the last 
 years of his life were spent in Egypt, and he died a foreigner 
 in a strange land. His descendants came into the land of 
 Canaan, expecting to find it a land flowing with milk and 
 honey ; they found hard work to do war and unrest, in- 
 stead of rest and peace. 
 
 During one brief period, in the history of Israel, the prom- 
 ise may seem to have been fulfilled. It was during the later 
 years of David and the earlier years of Solomon ; but we 
 have the warrant of Scripture itself for affirming, that even 
 then the promise was not fulfilled. In the Book of Psalms, 
 David speaks of a hope of entering into & future rest. The 
 writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, quoting this passage, 
 infers from "it that God's promise had not been exhausted 
 nor fulfilled by the entrance into Canaan ; for he says, " If 
 Joshua had given them rest, then would he not have spoken 
 of another day." Again, in this very chapter, after a long 
 list of Hebrew saints " These all died in faith, not having 
 received the promises." To none therefore had the promise 
 been fulfilled. Accordingly writers on prophecy, in order tc 
 
The Illusiveness of Life. 489 
 
 get over this difficulty, take for granted that there must be 
 a future fulfillment, because the first was inadequate. 
 
 They who believe that the Jews will be restored to their 
 native land, expect it on the express ground that Canaan 
 has never been actually and permanently theirs. A certain 
 tract of country three hundred miles in length, by two 
 hundred in breadth must be given, or else they think the 
 promise has been broken. To quote the expression of one 
 of the most eloquent of their writers, " If there be nothing 
 yet future for Israel, then the magnificence of the promise 
 has been lost in the poverty of its accomplishment." 
 
 I do not quote this to prove the correctness of the inter- 
 pretation of the prophecy, but as an acknowledgment which 
 may be taken so far as a proof that the promise made to 
 Abraham has never been accomplished. 
 
 And such is life's disappointment. Its promise is, you 
 shall have a Canaan ; it turns out to be a baseless airy 
 dream toil and warfare nothing that we can call our own ; 
 not the land of rest by any means. But we will examine 
 this in particulars. 
 
 1. Our senses deceive us; we begin life with delusion. 
 Our senses deceive us with respect to distance, shape, and 
 color. That which afar off seems oval turns out to be circu- 
 lar, modified by the perspective of distance; that which ap- 
 pears a speck, upon nearer approach becomes a vast body. 
 To the earlier ages the stars presented the delusion of small 
 lamps hung in space. The beautiful berry proves to be bit- 
 ter and poisonous : that which apparently moves is really at 
 rest: that which seems to be stationary is in perpetual mo- 
 tion : the earth moves : the sun is still. All experience is a 
 correction of life's delusions a modification, a reversal of the 
 judgment of the senses : and all life is a lesson on the false- 
 hood of appearances. 
 
 2. Our natural anticipations deceive us I say natural in 
 contradistinction to extravagant expectations. Every hu- 
 man life is a fresh one, bright with hopes that will never be 
 realized. There may be differences of character in these 
 hopes; finer spirits may look on life as the arena of success- 
 ful deeds, the more selfish as a place of personal enjoyment. 
 
 With man the turning-point of life may be a profession 
 with woman, marriage ; the one gilding the future with the 
 triumphs of intellect, the other with the dreams of affeciion ; 
 but in every case, life is not what any of them expects, but 
 something else. It would almost seem a satire on existence 
 to compare the youth in the outset of his career, flushed and 
 sanguine, with the aspect of the same being when it is near- 
 
 21* 
 
490 The Illusiveness of Life. 
 
 ly done worn, sobered, covered with the dust of life, and 
 confessing that its days have been few and evil. Where is 
 the land flowing with milk and honey ? 
 
 With our affections it is still worse, because they promise 
 more. Man's affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan 
 the tents of a night ; not permanent habitations even for this 
 life. Where are the charms of character, the perfection, and 
 the purity, and the truthfulness, which seemed so resplendent 
 in our friend ? They were only the shape of our own con- 
 ceptions our creative shaping intellect projected its own 
 fantasies on him : and hence we outgrow our early friend- 
 ships ; outgrow the intensity of all : we dwell in tents ; we 
 never find a home, even in the land of promise. Life is an 
 unenjoyable Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it. 
 
 3. Our expectations, resting on revelation, deceive us. 
 The world's history has turned round two points of hope ; 
 one, the first the other, the second coming of the Messiah. 
 The magnificent imagery of Hebrew prophecy had described 
 the advent of the Conqueror; He came "a root out of a 
 dry ground, with no form or comeliness: and when they saw 
 Him there was no beauty in Him that they should desire 
 Him." The victory, predicted in such glowing terms, turned 
 out to be the victory of submission the law of our hu- 
 manity, which wins by gentleness and love. The promise 
 in the letter was unfulfilled. For ages the world's hope has 
 been the second advent. The early church expected it in 
 their own day. " We, \vhich are alive, and remain until the 
 coming of our Lord." 
 
 The Saviour Himself had said, " This generation shall 
 not pass till all things be fulfilled." Yet the Son of Man has 
 never come ; or rather, He has been ever coming. Unnum- 
 bered times the judgment-eagles have gathered together 
 over corruption ripe for condemnation. Times innumerable 
 the separation has been made between good and bad. The 
 promise has not been fulfilled, or it has been fulfilled, but 
 in either case anticipation has been foiled and disappointed.- 
 
 There are two ways of considering this aspect of life. 
 One is the way of sentiment ; the other is the way of faith. 
 The sentimental way is trite enough. Saint, sage, sophist, 
 moralist, and preacher, have repeated in every possible 
 image, till there is nothing new to say, that life is a bubble, 
 a dream, a delusion, a phantasm. The other is the way of 
 faith: the ancient saints ielt as keenly as any moralist could 
 feel the brokenness of its promises ; they confessed that they 
 were strangers and pilgrims here ; they said that they had 
 here no continuing city ; but they did not mournfully moralize 
 
The Illusiveness of Life. 491 
 
 on this ; they said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so. 
 They i'elt that all was right ; they knew that the promise 
 itself had a deeper meaning : they looked undauntedly for 
 " a city which hath foundations." 
 
 II. The second inquiry, therefore, is the meaning of this 
 delusiveness. 
 
 1. It serves to allure us on. Suppose that a spiritual, 
 promise had been made at first to Israel ; imagine that they 
 had been informed at the outset that God's rest is inward ; 
 that the promised land is only found in the Jerusalem which 
 is above not material, but immaterial. That rude, gross 
 people, yearning after the fleshpots of Egypt willing to go 
 back into slavery, so as only they might have enough to eat 
 and drink would they have quitted Egypt on such terms ? 
 Would they have begun one single step of that pilgrimage 
 which was to find its meaning in the discipline of ages ? 
 
 We are led through life as we are allured upon a journey. 
 Could a man see his route before him a flat, straight road, 
 unbroken by bush, or tree, or eminence, with the sun's heat 
 burning down upon it, stretched out in dreary monotony 
 he could scarcely find energy to begin his task ; but the un- 
 certainty of what may be seen beyond the next turn keeps 
 expectation alive. The view that may be seen from yonder 
 summit the glimpse that may be caught, perhaps, as the 
 road winds round yonder knoll hopes like these, not far 
 distant, beguile the traveller on from mile to mile, and from 
 league to league. 
 
 In fact, life is an education. The object for which you 
 educate your son is to give him strength of purpose, self- 
 command, discipline of mental energies ; but you do not re- 
 veal to your son this aim of his education ; you tell him of 
 his place in his class, of the prizes at the end of the year, of 
 the honors to be given at college. 
 
 These are not the true incentives to knowledge ; such in- 
 centives are not the highest they are even mean, and par- 
 tially injurious ; yet these mean incentives stimulate and 
 lead on, from day to day and from year to year, by a process 
 the principle of which the boy himself is not aware o So 
 does God lead on, through life's unsatisfying and false re- 
 ward, ever educating : Canaan first ; then the hope of a Re- 
 deemer ; then the millennial glory. 
 
 Now what is remarkable in this is, 'that the delusion 
 continued to the last ; they all died in faith^ not having re- 
 ceived the promises ; all were hoping up to the very last, 
 and all died in faith, not in realization j for thus God has 
 
49 2 The Illusiveness of Life. 
 
 constituted the human heart. It never will be believed that 
 this world is unreal. God has mercifully so arranged it, that 
 the idea of delusion is incredible. You may tell the boy or 
 girl as you will that life is a disappointment ; yet however 
 you may persuade them to adopt your tone, and catch the 
 language of your sentiment, they are both looking forward 
 ito some bright distant hope the rapture of the next vaca- 
 tion, or the unknown joys of the next season and throwing 
 into it an energy of expectation which only a whole eternity 
 is worth. YoiMnay tell the man who has received the heart- 
 shock from which in this world he will not recover, that life 
 has nothing left ; yet the stubborn heart still hopes on, ever 
 near the prize " wealthiest when most undone :" he has 
 reaped the whirlwind, but he will go on still, till life is over, 
 sowing the wind. 
 
 Now observe the beautiful result which comes from this 
 indestructible power of believing in spite of failure. In the 
 first centuries, the early Christians believed that the millen- 
 nial advent was close; they heard the warning of the apos- 
 tle, brief and sharp, "The time is short." Now suppose 
 that, instead of this, they had seeu all the dreary page of 
 Church history unrolled ; suppose that they had known that 
 after two thousand years the world would have scarcely 
 spelled out three letters of the meaning of Christianity, 
 where would have been those gigantic efforts, that life spent 
 as on the very brink of eternity, which characterize the days 
 of the early Church, and which was, after all, only the true 
 life of man in time ? It is thus that God has led on His 
 world. He has conducted it as a father leads his child, when 
 the path homeward lies over many a dreary league. He 
 suffers him to beguile the thought of time, by turning aside 
 to pluck now and then a flower, to chase now a butterfly ; 
 the butterfly is crushed, the flower fades, but the child is 
 so much nearer home, invigorated and full of health, and 
 scarcely wearied yet. 
 
 2. This non-fulfillment of promise fulfills it in a deeper 
 way. The account we have given already, were it to end 
 there, would be insufficient to excuse the failure of life's 
 promise ; by saying that it allures us would be really to 
 charge God with deception. Now life is not deception, 
 but illusion. We distinguish between illusion and delusion. 
 We may paint wood so as to be taken for stone, iron, or 
 marble ; this is delusion : but you may paint a picture, in 
 which rocks, trees, and sky are never mistaken for what 
 they seem, yet produce all the emotion which real rocks, 
 trees, and sky would produce. This is illusion, and this 
 
The Illusiveness of Life. 493 
 
 is the painter's art : never for one moment to deceive by at- 
 tempted imitation, but to produce a mental state in which the 
 feelings are suggested which the natural objects themselves 
 would create. Let us take an instance drawn from life. 
 
 To a child a rainbow is a real thing substantial and pal- 
 pable ; its limb rests on the side of yonder hill ; he believes 
 that he can appropriate it to himself; and when, instead of 
 gems and gold hid in its radiant bow, he finds nothing but 
 damp mist, cold, dreary drops of disappointment that dis- 
 appointment tells that his belief has been delusion. 
 
 To the educated man that bow is a blessed illusion, yet it 
 never once deceives ; he does not take it for what it is not ; 
 he does not expect to make it his own ; he feels its beauty 
 as much as the child could feel it, nay infinitely more more 
 even from the fact that he knows that it will be transient ; 
 but besides and beyond this, to him it presents a deeper 
 loveliness ; he knows the laws of light, and the laws of the 
 human soul which gave it being. He has linked it with the 
 laws of the universe, and with the invisible mind of God ; 
 and it brings to him a thrill of awe, and the sense of a mys- 
 terious, nameless beauty, of which the child did not con- 
 ceive. It is illusion still ; but it has fulfilled the promise. 
 In the realm of spirit, in the temple of the soul, it is the 
 same. All is illusion ; " but we look for a city which hath 
 foundations ;" and in this the promise is fulfilled. 
 
 And such was Canaan to the Israelites. To some, doubt- 
 less, it was delusion. They expected to find their reward in 
 a land of milk and honey. They were bitterly disappointed, 
 and expressed their disappointment loudly enough in their 
 murmurs against Moses, and their rebellion against his suc- 
 cessors. But to others, as to Abraham, Canaan was the 
 bright illusion which never deceived, but forever shone be- 
 fore as the type of something more real. And even taking 
 the promise literally, though they built in tents, and could 
 not call a foot of land their own, was not its beauty theirs ? 
 Were not its trellised vines, and glorious pastures, and rich 
 olive-fields, ministers to the enjoyment of those who had all 
 in God, though its milk, and oil, and honey, could not be en- 
 joyed with exclusiveness of appropriation ? Yet over and 
 above and beyond this, there was a more blessed fulfillment 
 of the promise ; there was " a city which had foundations" 
 built and made by God towards which the anticipation 
 of this Canaan was leading them. The kingdom of God was 
 forming in their souls, forever disappointing them by the un- 
 real, and teaching them that what is spirituals and belongs 
 to mind and character, alone can be eternal. 
 
494 The Iliusiveness of Life. 
 
 We will illustrate this principle from the common walks 
 of life. The principle is, that the reward we get is not the 
 reward for which we worked, but a deeper one ; deeper and 
 more permanent. The merchant labors all his life, and the 
 hope which leads him on is perhaps wealth : well, at sixty 
 years of age he attains wealth ; is that the reward of sixty 
 years of toil ? Ten years of enjoyment, when the senses can 
 enjoy no longer a country-seat, splendid plate, a noble es- 
 tablishment ? Oh, no ! a reward deeper than he dreamed 
 of habits of perseverance : a character trained by indus- 
 try: that is his reward. He was carried on from year to 
 year by, if he were wise, illusion ; if he were unwise, delu- 
 sion ; but he reaped a more enduring substance- in himself. 
 
 Take another instance : the public man, warrior, or states- 
 man, who has served his country, and complains a,t last, in 
 bitter disappointment, that his country has not fulfilled his 
 expectations in rewarding him that is, it has not given him 
 titles, honors, wealth. But titles, honors, wealth are these 
 the rewards of well-doing? can they reward it ? would it be 
 well-doing if they could ? To be such a man, to have the 
 power of doing such deeds, what could be added to that re- 
 ward by having? This same apparent contradiction, which 
 was found in Judaism, subsists too in Christianity ; we will 
 state it in the words of an apostle : " Godliness is profitable 
 for all things ; having the promise of the life that now is, as 
 well as of that which is to come." Now for the fulfillment : 
 " If in this life only we have hope in Christ, then are we of 
 all men most miserable." 
 
 Godliness is profitable ; but its profit, it appears, consists in 
 finding that all is loss : yet in this way you teach your son. 
 You will tell him that if he will be good all men will love 
 him. You say that " Honesty is the best policy," yet in 
 your heart of hearts you know that you are leading him on 
 by a delusion. Christ was good. Was he loved by all? In 
 proportion as he, your son, is like Christ, he will be loved, 
 not by the many, but by the few. Honesty is not the best 
 policy; the commonplace honesty of the market-place may 
 be the vulgar honesty which goes no farther than paying 
 debts accurately ; but that transparent Christian honesty of 
 a life which in every act is bearing witness to the truth, that 
 is not the way to get on in life the reward of such a life is 
 the cross. Yet you were right in teaching your son this: 
 you told him what was true ; truer than he could compre- 
 hend. It is better to be honest and good; better than 
 he can know or dream : better even in this life ; better by so 
 much as being good is better than having good. But, in a 
 
The Sacrifice of Christ. 495 
 
 rade coarse way, you must express the blessedness on a level 
 with his capacity; you must state the truth in a way 
 which he will inevitably interpret falsely. The true inter- 
 pretation nothing but experience can teach. 
 
 And this is what God does. His promises are true, though 
 illusive; far truer than we at first take them to be. We 
 work for a mean, low, sensual happiness, all the while He is 
 leading us on to a spiritual blessedness, unfathomably deep. 
 This is the life of faith. We live by faith, and not by sight 
 We do not preach that all is disappointment the dreary 
 creed of sentimentalism ; but we preach that nothing here is 
 disappointment, if rightly understood. We do not comfort 
 the poor man, by saying that the riches that he has not now 
 he will have hereafter the difference between himself and 
 the man of wealth being only this, that the one has for time 
 what the other will have for eternity ; but what we say is, 
 'that that which you have failed in reaping here you never 
 will reap, if you expected the harvest of Canaan. God has 
 no Canaan for His own ; no milk and honey for the luxury 
 of the senses : for the city which hath foundations is built in 
 the soul of man. He in whom Godlike character dwells has 
 all the universe for his own "All things," saith. the apostle, 
 " are yours ; whether life or death, or things present, or 
 things to come ; if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's 
 Heed, and heirs according to the promise." 
 
 VII. 
 THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 
 
 " For the love of Christ constraineth us : because we thus judge, that if 
 one died for all, then were all dead : and that he died for all, that they which 
 live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for 
 them, and rose again." 2 Cor. v. 14, 15. 
 
 IT may be, that in reading these verses some of us have 
 understood them in a sense foreign to that of the apostle, 
 It may have seemed that the arguments ran thus Because 
 Christ died upon the cross for all, therefore all must have 
 been in a state of spiritual death before ; and if they were 
 asked what doctrines are to be elicited from this passao,\, 
 they would reply, " the doctrine of universal depravity, and 
 the constraining power of the gratitude due to Him who 
 died to redeem us from it." There is, however, in the first 
 place, this fatal objection to such an interpretation, that the 
 
496 The Sacrifice of Christ. 
 
 death here spoken of is used in two diametrically opposite 
 senses. In reference to Christ, death literal in reference to 
 all, death spiritual. Now, in the thought of St. Paul, the 
 death of Christ was always viewed as liberation from the 
 power of evil : " in that He died, He died unto sin once," and 
 again, " he that is dead is free from sin." The literal death, 
 then, in one clause, means freedom from sin ; the spiritual 
 death of the next is slavery to it. Wherein, then, lies the co- 
 gency of the apostle's reasoning ? How does it follow that 
 because Christ died to evil, all before that must have died to 
 God ? Of course that doctrine is true in itself, but it is not 
 the doctrine of the text. 
 
 In the next place, the ambiguity belongs only to the Eng- 
 lish word it is impossible to make the mistake in the orig- 
 inal : the word which stands for were, is a word which does 
 not imply a continued state, but must imply a single finish- 
 ed act. It can not by any possibility imply that before the 
 death of Christ men were in a state of death it can only 
 mean, they became dead at the moment when Christ died. 
 If you read it thus, the meaning of the English will emerge 
 " if one died for all, then all died ;" and the apostle's ar- 
 gument runs thus, that if one acts as the representative of 
 all, then his act is the act of all. If the ambassador of a na- 
 tion makes reparation in a nation's name, or does homage for 
 a nation, that reparation, or that homage, is the nation's act 
 if one did it for all, then all did it. So that instead of in- 
 ferring that because Christ died for all, therefore before that 
 all were dead to God, his natural inference is that therefore 
 all are now dead to sin. 
 
 Once more, the conclusion of the apostle is exactly the re- 
 verse of that which this interpretation attributes to him : he 
 does not say that Christ died in order that men might not 
 die, but exactly for this very purpose, that they might die ; 
 and this death he represents in the next verse by an equiva- 
 lent expression the life of unselfishness : "that they which 
 live might henceforth live not unto themselves." The 
 " dead " of the first verse are " they that live " of the sec- 
 ond. 
 
 The form of thought finds its exact parallel in Romans vi. 
 10, 11. Two points claim our attention : 
 
 I. The vicarious sacrifice of Christ. 
 IL The influence of that sacrifice on man. 
 
 I. The vicariousness of the sacrifice is implied in the word 
 "for." A vicarious act is an act done for another. When 
 the Pope calls himself the vicar of Christ, he implies that he 
 
The Sacrifice of Christ. 497 
 
 acts for Christ. The vicar or viceroy of a kingdom is one 
 who acts for the king a vicar's act, therefore, is virtually 
 the act of the principal whom he represents ; so that if the 
 Papal doctrine were true, when the vicar of Christ pardons, 
 Christ has pardoned. When the viceroy of a kingdom has 
 published a proclamation or signed a treaty, the sovereign 
 himself is bound by those acts. 
 
 The truth of the expression for all, is contained in this 
 fact, that Christ is the representative of humanity properly 
 speaking, the representative of human nature. This is the 
 truth contained in the emphatic expression, " Son of Man." 
 What Christ did for humanity was done by humanity, be- 
 cause in the name of humanity. For a truly vicarious act 
 does not supersede the principal's duty of performance, but 
 rather implies and acknowledges it. Take the case from 
 which this very word of vicar has received its origin. In 
 the old monastic times, when the revenues of a cathedral or 
 a cure fell to the lot of a monastery, it became the duty of 
 that monastery to perform the religious services of the cure. 
 But inasmuch as the monastery was a corporate body, they 
 appointed one of their number, whom they denominated their 
 vicar, to discharge those offices for them. His service did 
 not supersede theirs, but was a perpetual and standing ac- 
 knowledgment that they, as a whole and individually, were 
 under the obligation to perform it. The act of Christ is the 
 act of humanity that which all humanity is bound to do. 
 His righteousness does not supersede our righteousness, nor 
 does His sacrifice supersede our sacrifice. It is the repre- 
 sentation of human life and human sacrifice vicarious for 
 all, yet binding upon all. 
 
 That He died for all is true 
 
 1. Because He was the victim of the sin of all. In the pe- 
 culiar phraseology of St. Paul, He died unto sin. He was 
 the victim of sin He died by sin. It is the appalling mys- 
 tery of our redemption that the Redeemer took the attitude 
 of subjection to evil. There was scarcely a form of evil with 
 which Christ did not come in contact, and by which He did 
 not suffer. He was the victim of false friendship and in- 
 gratitude, the victim of bad government and injustice. He 
 fell a sacrifice to the vices of all classes to the selfishness of 
 the rich and the fickleness of the poor : intolerance, formal 
 ism, skepticism, hatred of goodness, were the foes which 
 crushed Him. 
 
 In the proper sense of the word He was a victim. He did 
 not adroitly wind through the dangerous forms of evil, meet- 
 ing it with expedient silence. Face to face, and front to 
 
498 The Sacrifice of Christ. 
 
 front, He met it, rebuked it, and defied it ; and just as truly 
 as he is a voluntary victim whose body, opposing the prog' 
 ress of the car of Juggernaut, is crushed beneath its mon- 
 strous wheels, was He a victim to the world's sin : because 
 pure,*He was crushed by impurity; because just and real 
 and true, He waked up the rage of injustice, hypocrisy and 
 falsehood. 
 
 Now this sin was the sin of all. Here arises at once a dif- 
 ficulty : it seems to be most unnatural to assert that in any 
 one sense He was the sacrifice of the sin of all. We did not 
 betray Him that was Judas's act Peter denied Him 
 Thomas doubted Pilate pronounced sentence it must be a 
 figment to say that these were our acts ; we did not watch 
 Him like the Pharisees, nor circumvent Him like the Scribes 
 and lawyers ; by what possible sophistry can we be involved 
 in the complicity of that guilt ? The savage of New Zealand 
 who never heard of Him, the learned Egyptian, and the vo- 
 luptuous Assyrian who died before He came ; how was it the 
 sin of all ? 
 
 The reply that is 'often given to this query is wonderfully 
 unreal. It is assumed that Christ was conscious, by His 
 omniscience, of the sins of all mankind ; that the duplicity 
 of the child, and the crime of the assassin, and every unholy 
 thought that has ever passed through a human bosom, were 
 present to His mind in that awful hour as if they were His 
 own. This is utterly unscriptural. Where is the single text 
 from which it can be, except by force, extracted ? Besides 
 this, it is fanciful and sentimental ; and again it is dangerous, 
 for it represents the whole Atonement as a fictitious and 
 shadowy transaction. There is a mental state in which men 
 have felt the burden of sins which they did not commit. 
 There have been cases in which men have been mysteriously 
 excruciated with the thought of having committed the un- 
 pardonable sin. But to represent the mental phenomena of 
 the Redeemer's mind as in any way resembling this to say 
 that His conscience was oppressed with the responsibility of 
 sins which He had not committed is to confound a state of 
 sanity with the delusions of a half lucid mind, and the work- 
 ings of a healthy conscience with those of one unnatural and 
 morbid. 
 
 There is a way, however, much more appalling and much 
 more true, in which this may be true, without resorting to 
 any such fanciful hypothesis. Sin has a great power in this 
 world : it gives laws like those of a sovereign, which bind us 
 all, and to which we are all submissive. There are current 
 maxims in Church and State, in society, in trade, in law, to 
 
The Sacrifice of Christ, 499 
 
 which we yield obedience. For this obedience every one is 
 responsible ; for instance, in trade, and in the profession of 
 law, every one is the servant of practices the rectitude of 
 which his heart can only half approve every one complains 
 of them, yet all are involved in them. Now, when such sins 
 reach their climax, as in the case of national bankruptcy or 
 an unjust acquittal, there may be some who are in a special 
 sense the actors in the guilt ; but evidently, for the bank- 
 ruptcy, each member of the community is responsible in that 
 degree and so far as he himself acquiesced in the duplicities 
 of public dealing ; every careless juror, every unrighteous 
 judge, every false witness, has done his part in the reduction 
 of society to that state in which the monster injustice has 
 been perpetrated. In the riot of a tumultuous assembly by 
 night, a house may be burnt, or a murder committed ; in. the 
 eye of the law, all who are aiding and abetting there are 
 each in his degree responsible for that crime ; there may be 
 difference in guilt, from the degree in which he is guilty 
 who with his own hand perpetrated the deed, to that of him 
 who merely joined the rabble from mischievous curiosity 
 degrees from that of willful murder to that of more or less 
 excusable homicide. 
 
 The Pharisees were declared by the Saviour to be guilty 
 of the blood of Zacharias, the blood of righteous Abel, and 
 of all the saints and prophets w r ho fell before He came. But 
 how were the Pharisees guilty ? They built the sepulchres 
 of the prophets, they honored and admired them ; but they 
 were guilty, in that they were the children of those that slew 
 the prophets ; children in this sense, that they inherited 
 their spirit, they opposed the good in the form in which it 
 showed itself in their day, just as their fathers opposed the 
 form displayed to theirs ; therefore He said that they belong- 
 ed to the same confederacy of evil, and that the guilt of the 
 blood of all who had been slain should rest on that genera 
 tion. Similarly we are guilty of the death of Christ. If 
 you have been a false friend, a skeptic, a. cowardly disciple, 
 a formalist, selfish, an opposer of goodness, an oppressor, 
 whatever evil you have done, in that degree and so far you 
 participate in the evil to which the Just One fell a victim 
 you are one of that mighty rabble which cry, " Crucify Him ! 
 Crucify Him !" for your sin He died ; His blood lies at your 
 threshold. 
 
 Again, He died for all, in that His sacrifice represents 
 the sacrifice of all. We have heard of the doctrine of " im- 
 puted righteousness ;" it is a theological expression to which 
 meanings foolish enough are sometimes attributed, but it 
 
500 The Sacrifice of Christ. 
 
 contains a very deep truth, which it shall be our endeavof 
 to elicit. 
 
 Christ is the realized idea of our humanity. He is God's 
 idea of man completed. There is every difference between 
 the ideal and the actual between what a man aims to be 
 and what he is ; a difference between the race as it is, and 
 the race as it existed in God's creative idea when He pro- 
 nounced it very good. 
 
 In Christ, therefore, God beholds humanity ; in Christ 
 He sees perfected every one in whom Christ's spirit exists 
 in germ. He to whom the possible is actual, to w T hom what 
 will be already is, sees all things present, gazes on the imper- 
 fect, and sees it in its perfection. Let me venture an illus- 
 tration. He who has never seen the vegetable world except 
 in Arctic regions, has but a poor idea of the majesty of 
 vegetable life a microscopic red moss tinting the surface 
 of the snow, a few stunted pines, and here and there per- 
 haps a dwindled oak ; but to the botanist who has seen the 
 luxuriance of vegetation in its tropical magnificence, all that 
 wretched scene presents another aspect ; to him those dwarfs 
 are the representatives of what might be, nay, what has been 
 in a kindlier soil and a more genial climate ; he fills up by 
 his conception the miserable actuality presented by these 
 shrubs, and attributes to them imputes, that is, to them 
 the majesty of which the undeveloped germ exists already. 
 
 Now the difference between those trees seen in them- 
 selves, and seen in the conception of their nature's perfect- 
 ness which has been previously realized, is the difference 
 between man seen in himself and seen in Christ. We are 
 feeble, dwarfish, stunted specimens of humanity. Our best 
 resolves are but withered branches, our holiest deeds unripe 
 and blighted fruit ; but to the Infinite Eye, who sees in the 
 perfect One the type and assurance of that which shall be, 
 this dwindled humanity of ours is divine and glorious. 
 Such are we in the sight of God the Father as is the very 
 Son of God Himself. This is what theologians, at least the 
 wisest of them, meant by " imputed righteousness." I do 
 not mean that all who have written or spoken on the subject 
 had this conception of it, but I believe they who thought 
 truly meant this ; they did not suppose that in imputing 
 righteousness there w T as a kind of figment, a self-deception 
 in the mind of God ; they did not mean that by an act of 
 will He chose to consider that every act which Christ did 
 was done by us ; that He imputed or reckoned to us the 
 baptism in Jordan and the victory in the wilderness, and 
 .the agony in the garden, or that He believed, or acted as if 
 
The Sacrifice of Christ. 501 
 
 He believed, that when Christ died, each one of us died: 
 but He saw Humanity submitted to the law of self-sacrifice ; 
 in the light" of that idea He beholds us as perfect, and is 
 satisfied. In this sense the apostle speaks of those that are 
 imperfect, yet " by one offering He hath perfected forever 
 them that are sanctified." It is true, again, that He died for 
 us, in that we present His sacrifice as ours. The value of 
 the death of Christ consisted in the surrender of self-will 
 In the fortieth Psalm, the value of every other kind of sacri- 
 fice being first denied, the words follow, " Then said I, Lo, I 
 come to do thy will, O God." The profound idea contained, 
 therefore, in the death of Christ is the duty of self-surrender. 
 
 But in us that surrender scarcely deserves the name ; 
 even to use the word self-sacrifice covers us with a kind of 
 shame. Then it is that there is an almost boundless joy in 
 acquiescing in the life and death of Christ, recognizing it as 
 ours, and representing it to ourselves and God as what we 
 aim at. If we can not understand how in this sense it can 
 be a sacrifice for us, we may partly realize it by remembering 
 the joy of feeling how art and nature realize for us what we 
 can "not realize for ourselves. It is recorded of one of the 
 world's gifted painters that he stood before the masterpiece 
 of the great genius of his age one which he could never 
 hope to equal, nor even rival and yet the infinite superi- 
 ority, so far from crushing him, only elevated his feeling, 
 for he saw realized those conceptions which had floated 
 before him, dim and unsubstantial; in every line and touch 
 he felt a spirit immeasurably superior yet kindred, and he is 
 reported to have exclaimed, with dignified humility, "And I 
 too am a painter !" 
 
 We must all have felt, when certain effects in nature, 
 combinations of form and color, have been presented to 
 us, our own idea speaking in intelligible and yet celestial 
 language ; when, for instance, the long bars of purple, " edged 
 with intolerable radiance," seemed to float in a sea of pale 
 pure green, when the whole sky seemed to reel with thunder, 
 when the night-wind moaned. It is wonderful how the most 
 commonplace men and women beings who, as you would 
 have thought, had no conception that rose beyond a com- 
 mercial speculation or a fashionable entertainment are ele- 
 vated by such scenes ; how the slumbering grandeur of 
 their nature wakes and acknowledges kindred with the sky 
 and storm. " I can not speak," they would say, " the feelings 
 which are in me ; I have had emotions, aspirations, thoughts ; 
 I can not put them into words. Look there ! listen now to 
 the storm ! That is what I meant, only I never could say 
 
502 The Sacrifice of Christ. 
 
 it out till now." Thus do art and nature speak for us, and 
 thus do we adopt them as our own. This is the way in which 
 His righteousuess becomes righteousness for us. * This is the 
 way in which the heart presents to God the sacrifice of Christ-, 
 gazing on that perfect Life we, as it were, say, " There, that 
 is my religion that is my righteousness what I want to be, 
 which I am not that is my offering,*ny life as I would wish 
 to give it, freely and not checked, entire and perfect." So 
 the old prophets, their hearts big with unutterable thoughts, 
 searched " what or what manner of time the spirit of Christ 
 which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand 
 of the sufferings of Christ, and of the glory which should 
 follow ;" and so with us, until it passes into prayer : " My 
 Saviour, fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my 
 clumsy hand has drawn of a divine life, with the fullness of 
 Thy perfect picture. I feel the beauty which' I can not 
 realize : robe me in Thine unutterable purity : 
 
 " Rock of ages, cleft for me, 
 Let me hide myself in Thee." 
 
 II. The influence of that sacrifice on man is the introduc- 
 tion of the principle of self-sacrifice into his nature " then 
 were all dead." Observe, again, not He died that we might 
 not die, but that in His death we might be dead, and that 
 in His sacrifice we might become each a^ sacrifice to God. 
 Moreover, this death is identical with life. They who in the 
 first sentence are called dead, are in the second Denominated 
 " they who live." So in another place, " I am crucified with 
 Christ, nevertheless I live ;" death, therefore, that is, the sac- 
 rifice of self, is equivalent to life. Now this rests upon a 
 profound truth. The death of Christ was a representation 
 of the life of God. To me this is the profoundest of all truths, 
 that the whole of the life of God is the sacrifice of self. God 
 is love ; love is sacrifice to give rather than to receive the 
 blessedness of self-giving. If the life of God were not such, it 
 would be a falsehood to say that God is love ; for even in our 
 human nature, that which seeks to enjoy all instead of giving 
 nil is known by a very different name from that of love. 
 'All the life of God is a flow of this divine self-giving charity. 
 Creation itself is sacrifice the self-impartation of the Divine 
 Being. Redemption, too, is sacrifice, else it could not be love ; 
 for which reason we will not surrender one iota of the truth 
 that the death of Christ was the sacrifice of God the man- 
 ifestation once in time of that which is the eternal law of His 
 life. 
 
 If man, therefore, is to rise into the life of God, he must be 
 
The Sacrifice of Christ. 503 
 
 absorbed into the spirit of that sacrifice he must die with 
 Christ if he would enter into his proper life. For sin is the 
 withdrawing into self and egotism, out of the vivifying life 
 of God, which alone is our true life. The moment the man 
 sins he dies. Know we not how awfully true that sentence is, 
 a Sin revived, and I died ?" The vivid'life of sin is the death 
 of the man. Have we never felt that our true existence has 
 absolutely in that moment disappeared, and that we are not ? 
 
 I say, therefore, that real human life is a perpetual comple- 
 tion and repetition of the sacrifice of Christ " all are dead;" 
 the explanation of which follows, " to live not to themselves, 
 but to Him who died for them and rose again." This is the 
 truth which lies at the bottom of the Romish doctrine of the 
 mass. Rome asserts that in the mass a true and proper sac- 
 rifice is offered up for the sins of all that the offering of 
 Christ is forever repeated. To this Protestantism has ob 
 jected vehemently, that there is but one offering once of 
 fered an objection in itself entirely true ; yet the Romist 
 doctrine contains a truth which it is of importance to disen- 
 gage from the gross and material form with which it has beer, 
 overlaid. Let us hear St. Paul : " I fill up that which is be- 
 aindhand of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh for his body's 
 sake, which is the Church." Was there then something be- 
 hindhand of Christ's sufferings remaining uncompleted, of 
 which the sufferings of Paul could be in any sense the com- 
 plement ? He says there was. Could the sufferings of Paul 
 for the Church in any form of correct expression be said to 
 eke out the sufferings that were complete ? In one sense it 
 is true to say that there is one offering once offered for all. 
 But it is equally true to say that that one offering is value- 
 less, except so far as it is completed and repeated in the life 
 and self-offering of all. This is the Christian's sacrifice. Not 
 mechanically completed in the miserable materialism of the 
 mass, but spiritually in the life of all in whom the Crucified 
 lives. The sacrifice of Christ is done over again in every life 
 which is lived, not to self but to God. 
 
 Let" one concluding observation be made self-denial, self- 
 sacrifice, self-surrender ! Hard doctrines, and impossible ! 
 Whereupon, in silent hours, we skeptically ask, Is this possi- 
 ble ? is it natural ? Let preacher and moralist say what they 
 will, I am not here to sacrifice myself for others. God sent 
 ne here for happiness, not misery. Now introduce one sen- 
 tence of this text of which we have as yet said nothing, and 
 the dark doctrine becomes illuminated " the love of Christ 
 constraineth us." Self-denial, for the sake of self-denial, does 
 no good ; self-sacrifice for its own sake is no religious act at 
 
504 The Power of Sorrow. 
 
 all. If you give up a meal for the sake of showing powei 
 over self, or lor the sake of self-discipline, it is the most mis- 
 erable of all delusions. You are not more religious in doing 
 this than before. This is mere self-culture, and self-culture 
 being occupied forever about self, leaves you only in that 
 circle of self from which religion is to free you ; but to give 
 up a meal that one you love may have it is properly a relig- 
 ious act no hard and dismal duty, because made easy by 
 affection. To bear pain for the sake of bearing it has in it no 
 moral quality at all, but to bear it rather than surrender 
 truth, or in order to save another, is positive enjoyment as 
 well as ennobling to the soul. Did you ever receive even a 
 blow meant for another, in order to shield that other? Do 
 you not know that there was actual pleasure in the keen pain 
 far beyond the most rapturous thrill of nerve which could be 
 gained from pleasure in the midst of painlessness ? Is not the 
 mystic yearning of love expressed in words most purely thus, 
 Let me suffer lor him ? 
 
 This element of love is that which makes this doctrine an 
 intelligible and blessed truth. So sacrifice alone, bare and 
 unrelieved, is ghastly, unnatural, and dead ; but self-sacrifice, 
 illuminated by love, is warmth and life ; it is the death of 
 Christ, the life of God, the blessedness and only proper life 
 of man. 
 
 VIII. 
 THE POWER OF SORROW. 
 
 " Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to 
 repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye might 
 receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance to 
 salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death." 
 2 Cor. vii. 9, 10. 
 
 THAT which is chiefly insisted on in this verse is the dis- 
 tinction between sorrow and repentance. To grieve over sin 
 is one thing, to repent of it is another. 
 
 The apostle rejoiced, not that the Corinthians sorrowed, 
 but that they sorrowed unto repentance. Sorrow has two 
 results ; it may end in spiritual life, or in spiritual death ; and 
 in themselves, one of these is as natural as the other. Sorrow 
 may produce two kinds of reformation a transient, or a per- 
 manent one an alteration in habits, which, originating in emo- 
 tion, will hist so long as that emotion continues, and then after 
 a few fruitless efforts be given up a repentance which will be 
 
The Power of Sorrow. 505 
 
 repented of; or again, a permanent change, which will be re- 
 versed by no afterthought a repentance not to be repented 
 of. Sorrow is in itself, therefore, a thing neither good nor 
 bad : its value depends on the spirit of the person on whom 
 it falls. Fire will inflame straw, soften iron, or harden clay ; 
 its effects are determined by the object with which it comes 
 in contact. Warmth develops the energies of life, or helps 
 the progress of decay. It is a great power in the hothouse, 
 a great power also in the coffin : it expands the leaf, matures 
 the fruit, adds precocious vigor to vegetable life : and warmth 
 too develops with tenfold rapidity the weltering process of 
 dissolution. So too with sorrow. There are spirits in which 
 it develops the seminal principle of life ; there are others in 
 which it prematurely hastens the consummation of irreparable 
 iecay. Our subject therefore is the twofold power of sorrow. 
 
 I. The fatal power of the sorrow of the world. 
 IL The life-giving power of the sorrow that is after God. 
 
 The simplest/ way in w T hich the sorrow of the world works 
 death, is seen in the effect of mere regret for worldly loss. 
 There .are certain advantages with which we come into the 
 world. Youth, health, friends, and sometimes property. So 
 long as these are continued we are happy ; and because hap- 
 py, fancy ourselves very grateful to God. We bask in the 
 sunshine of His gifts, and this pleasant sensation of sunning 
 ourselves in life we call religion ; that state in which we all 
 are before sorrow comes, to test the temper of the metal of 
 which our souls are made, when the spirits are unbroken and 
 the heart buoyant, when a fresh morning is to a young heart 
 what it is to the skylark. The exuberant burst of joy seems 
 a spontaneous hymn to the Father of all blessing, like the 
 matin carol of the bird ; but this is not religion : it is the in- 
 stinctive utterance of happy feeling, having as little of moral 
 character in it, in the happy human being* as in the happy 
 bird. 
 
 *N~ay more : the religion which is only sunned into being 
 by happiness is a suspicious thing having been warmed by 
 joy, it will become cold when joy is over; and then when 
 these blessings are removed we count ourselves hardly treat- 
 ed, as if we had been defrauded of a right ; rebellious hard 
 feelings come ; then it is you see people become bitter, spite 
 ful, discontented. At every step in the solemn path of life 
 something must be mourned which will come back no more ; 
 the temper that was so smooth becomes rugged and uneven ; 
 the benevolence that expanded upon all narrows into an ever- 
 dwindling selfishness we are alone ; and then that death- 
 
 22 
 
506 The Power of Sorrow. 
 
 like loneliness deepens as life goes on. The course of man la 
 downward, and he moves with slow and ever more solitary 
 steps, down to the dark silence the silence of the grave. 
 This is the death of heart; the sorrow of the world has 
 worked death. 
 
 Again, there is a sorrow of the world, when sin is grieved 
 for in a worldly spirit. There are two views of sin : in one 
 it is looked upon as wrong in the other, as producing loss - 
 loss, for example, of character. In such cases, if character 
 could be preserved before the world grief would not come ; 
 but the paroxysms of misery fall upon our proud spirit when 
 our guilt is made public. The most distinct instance we 
 have of this is in the life of Saul. In the midst of his apparent 
 
 frief, the thing still uppermost was that he had forfeited his 
 ingly character : almost the only longing was, that Samuel 
 should honor him before his people. And hence it comes to 
 pass, that often remorse and anguish only begin with expo- 
 sure. Suicide takes place, not when the act of wrong is done 
 but when the guilt is known, and hence, too, many a one be- 
 comes hardened who" would otherwise have remained tolera- 
 bly happy ; in consequence of which we blame the exposure, 
 not the guilt ; we say if it had been hushed up all would 
 have been well; that the servant who robbed his master was 
 ruined by taking away his character; and that if the sin had 
 been passed over repentance might have taken place, and he 
 might have remained a respectable member of society. Do 
 not think so. It is quite true that remorse was produced by 
 exposure, and that the remorse was fatal ; the sorrow which 
 worked death arose from that exposure, and so far exposure 
 may be called the cause : had it never taken place, respecta- 
 bility, and comparative peace, might have continued ; but 
 outward respectability is not change of heart. 
 
 It is well known that the corpse has been preserved for 
 centuries in the iceberg, or in antiseptic peat; and that 
 when atmospheric air was introduced to the exposed surface 
 it crumbled into dust. Exposure worked dissolution, but it 
 only manifested the death which was already there ; so with 
 sorrow, it is not the living heart which drops to pieces or 
 crumbles into dust, when it is revealed. Exposure did not 
 work death in the Corinthian sinner, but life. 
 
 There is another form of grief for sin, which the apostle 
 would not have rejoiced to see ; it is when the hot tears 
 come from pride. No two tones of feeling, apparently simi- 
 lar, are more unlike than that in which Saul exclaimed, " I 
 have played the fool exceedingly," and that in which the 
 publican cried out, " God be merciful to me a sinner." The 
 
The Power of Sorrow. 507 
 
 charge of folly brought against one's self only proves that we 
 feel bitterly for having lost our own self-respect. It is a hu- 
 miliation to have forfeited the idea which a man had formed 
 of his own character to find that the very excellence on 
 which he prided himself is the one in which he has failed. 
 If there were a virtue for which Saul was conspicuous it was 
 generosity ; yet it was exactly in this point of generosity in 
 which he discovered himself to have failed, when he was 
 overtaken on the mountain, and his life spared by the very 
 man whom he was hunting to the death with feelings of the 
 meanest jealousy. Yet there was no real repentance there ; 
 there was none of that in which a man is sick of state and 
 pomp. Saul could still rejoice in regal splendor, go about 
 complaining of himself to the Ziphites, as if he was the most 
 ill-treated and friendless of mankind; he was still jealous of 
 his reputation, and anxious to be well thought of. Quite dif- 
 ferent is the tone in which the publican, who felt himself a sin- 
 ner, asked for mercy. He heard the contumelious expression 
 of the Pharisee, " this publican." With no resentment, he 
 meekly bore it as a matter naturally to be taken for granted 
 " he did not so much as lift up his eyes to heaven ;" he 
 was as a worm which turns in agony, but not revenge, upon 
 the foot which treads it into the dust. 
 
 Now this sorrow of Saul's, too, works death : no merit can 
 restore self-respect ; when once a man has found himself out 
 he can not be deceived again. The heart is as a stone: a 
 speck of canker corrodes and spreads within. What on this 
 earth remains, but endless sorrow, for him who has ceased 
 to respect himself, and has no God to turn to ? 
 
 n. The divine power of sorrow. 
 
 1. It works repentance. By repentance is meant, in Scrip- 
 ture, change of life, alteration of habits, renewal of heart. 
 This is the aim and meaning of all sorrow. The conse- 
 quences of sin are meant to wean from sin. The penalty an- 
 nexed to it is in the first instance, corrective, not penal. Fire 
 burns the child, to teach it one of the truths of this universe 
 the property of fire to burn. The first time it cuts its 
 hand with a sharp knife- it has gained a lesson which it nev- 
 er will forget. Now, in the case of pain this experience is sel- 
 dom, if ever, in vain. There is little chance of a child forget- 
 ting that fire will burn, and that sharp steel will cut; but 
 the moral lessons contained in the penalties annexed to 
 wrong-doing are just as truly intended, though they are by 
 no means so unerring in enforcing their application. The 
 fever in the veins and the headache which succeed intoxica- 
 
508 The Power of Sorrow. 
 
 tion, are meant to warn against excess. On the first occasion 
 they are simply corrective ; in every succeeding one they as- 
 sume more and more a penal character in proportion as the 
 conscience carries with them the sense of ill desert. 
 
 Sorrow, then, has done its work when it deters from evil ; 
 in other words, when it works repentance. In the sorrow of 
 the world, the obliquity of the heart towards evil is not 
 cured ; it seems as if nothing cured it : heartache and trials 
 come in vain ; the history of life at last is what it was at 
 first. The man is found erring where he erred before. The 
 same course, begun with the certainty of the same desperate 
 end which has taken place so often before. 
 
 They have reaped the whirlwind, but they will again sow 
 the wind. Hence I believe that life-giving sorrow is less 
 remorse for that which is irreparable, than anxiety to save 
 that which remains. The sorrow that ends in death hangs 
 in funeral weeds over the sepulchres of the past. Yet the 
 present does not become more wise. Not one resolution is 
 made more firm, nor one habit more holy. Grief is all. 
 Whereas sorrow avails only when the past is converted into 
 experience, and from failure lessons are learned which never 
 are to be forgotten. 
 
 2. Permanence of alteration ; for after all, a steady refor- 
 mation is a more decisive test of the value of mourning than 
 depth of grief. 
 
 The susceptibility of emotion, varies with individuals. 
 Some men feel intensely, others suffer less keenly ; but this 
 is constitutional, belonging to nervous temperament rather 
 than to moral character. This is the characteristic of the 
 divine sorrow, that it is a repentance "not repented of;" no 
 transient, short-lived resolutions, but sustained resolve. 
 
 And the beautiful law is, that in proportion as the repent- 
 ance increases the grief diminishes. "I rejoice," says Paul, 
 that "I made you sorry, though it were but for a time." 
 Grief for a time, repentance forever. And few things more 
 signally prove the wisdom of this apostle than his way of 
 dealing with this grief of the Corinthian. He tried no arti- 
 ficial means of intensifying it did not urge the duty of 
 dwelling upon it, magnifying it, nor even of gauging and 
 examining it. So soon as grief had done its work the apos- 
 tle was anxious to dry useless tears he even feared lest 
 haply such an one should be swallowed up with overmuch 
 sorrow. "A true penitent," says Mr. Newman, " never for- 
 gives himself." Oh false estimate of the Gospel of Christ and 
 of the heart of man ! A proud remorse does not forgive it- 
 self the forfeiture of its own dignity ; but it is the very beauty 
 
The Power of Sorrow. 509 
 
 of the penitence which is according to God, that at last the 
 sinner, realizing God's forgiveness, does learn to forgive him- 
 self. For what other purpose did St. Paul command the 
 Church of Corinth to give ecclesiastical absolution, but in 
 order to afford a symbol and assurance of the Divine par- 
 don, in which the guilty man's grief should not be over- 
 whelming, but that he should become reconciled to himself? 
 What is meant by the publican's going down to his .house 
 justified, but that he felt at peace with himself and God ? 
 
 3. It is sorrow with God, here called godly sorrow ; in the 
 margin sorrowing according to God. 
 
 God sees sin not in its consequences but in itself; a thing 
 infinitely evil, even if the consequences were happiness to 
 the guilty instead of misery. So sorrow according to God 
 is to see sin as God sees it. The grief of Peter was as bit- 
 ter as that of Judas. He went out and wept bitterly ; how 
 bitterly none can tell but they who have learned to look on 
 sin as God does. But in Peter's grief there was an element 
 of hope ; and that sprung precisely from this that he saw 
 God in it all. Despair of self did not lead to despair of 
 God. 
 
 This is the great, peculiar feature of this sorrow : God is 
 there, accordingly self is less prominent. It is not a micro- 
 scopic self-examination, nor a mourning in which self is ever 
 uppermost : my character gone ; the greatness of my sin ; 
 the forfeiture of my salvation. The thought of God absorbs 
 all that. I believe the feeling of true penitence would ex- 
 press itself in such words as^ these : There is a righteous- 
 ness, though I have not attained it. There is a purity, and 
 a love, and a beauty, though my life exhibits little of it. In 
 that I can rejoice. Of that I can feel the surpassing loveli- 
 ness. My doings ? They are worthless, I can not endure to 
 think of them. I am not thinking of them. I have some- 
 thing else to think of. There, there ; in that life I see it. 
 And so the Christian gazing not on what he is, but on 
 what he desires to be dares in penitence to say, That right- 
 eousness is mine : dares, even when the recollection of his 
 sin is most vivid and most poignant, to say with Peter, 
 thinking less of himself than of God, and sorrowing as it 
 were with God "Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thcu 
 knowest that I love Thee." 
 
5 1 o Sensual and Spiritual Excitement* 
 
 IX. 
 SENSUAL AND SPIRITUAL EXCITEMENT. 
 
 *' Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the 
 Xord is. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess ; but be filled with 
 the Spirit." Eph. v. 17, 18. 
 
 THERE is evidently a connection between the different 
 branches of this sentence for ideas can not be properly 
 contrasted which have not some connection but what that 
 connection is, is not at first sight clear. It almost appears 
 like a profane and irreverent juxtaposition to contrast full- 
 ness of the Spirit with fullness of wine. Moreover, the 
 structure of the whole context is antithetical. Ideas are op- 
 posed to each other in pairs of contraries; for instance, 
 "fools" is the exact opposite to "wise;" "unwise," as op- 
 posed to " understanding," its proper opposite. 
 
 And here again, there must be the same true antithesis 
 between drunkenness and spiritual fullness. The propriety 
 of this opposition lies in the intensity of feeling produced in 
 both cases. There is one intensity of feeling produced by 
 stimulating the senses, another by vivifying the spiritual life 
 within. The one commences with impulses from without, 
 the other is guarded by forces from within. Here then is 
 the similarity, and here the dissimilarity, which constitutes 
 the propriety of the contrast. One is ruin, the other salva- 
 tion. One degrades, the other exalts. This contrast then is 
 our subject for to-day. 
 
 I. The effects are similar. On the day of Pentecost, when 
 the first influences of the Spirit descended on the early 
 Church, the effects resembled intoxication. They were full 
 of the Spirit, and mocking by-standers said, " These men are 
 full of new wine ;" for they found themselves elevated into 
 the ecstasy of a life higher than their own, possessed of 
 powers which they could not control ; they spoke incohe- 
 rently and irregularly ; to the most part of those assembled, 
 unintelligibly. 
 
 Now compare with this the impression produced upon sav- 
 age nations suppose those early ages in which the spectacle 
 of intoxication was presented for the first time. They saw 
 a man under the influence of a force different from and i 
 
Sensual and Spiritual Excitement, 511 
 
 some respects inferior to, their own. To them the bacchanal 
 appeared a being half inspired ; his frenzy seemed a thing for 
 reverence and awe, rather than for horror and disgust ; the 
 spirit which possessed him must be, they thought, divine ; they 
 deified it, worshipped it under different names as a god ; even 
 to a clearer insight the effects are wonderfully similar. It is 
 almost proverbial among soldiers that the daring produced 
 by wine is easily mistaken for the self-devotion of a brave 
 heart. 
 
 The play of imagination in the brain of the opium-eater is 
 as free as that of genius itself, and the creations produced in 
 that state by the pen or pencil are as wildly beautiful as 
 those owed to the nobler influences. In years gone by, the 
 oratory of the statesman in the senate has been kindled by 
 semi-intoxication, when his noble utterances were set down 
 by his auditors to the inspiration of patriotism. 
 
 It is this very resemblance which deceives the drunkard: 
 he is led on by his feelings as well as by his imagination. It 
 is not the sensual pleasure of the glutton that fascinates 
 him; it is those fine thoughts and those quickened sensi- 
 bilities which were excited in that state, which he is power- 
 less to produce out of his own being, or by his own powers, 
 and which he expects to reproduce by the same means. The 
 experience of our first parent is repeated in him : at the very 
 moment when he expects to find himself as the gods, know- 
 ing good and evil, he discovers that he is unexpectedly de 
 graded, his health . wrecked, and his heart demoralized. 
 Hence it is almost as often the finer as the baser spirits of 
 our race which are found the victims of such indulgence. 
 Many will remember, while I speak, the names of the gifted 
 of their species, the degraded men of genius who were the 
 victims of these deceptive influences ; the half- inspired 
 painter, poet, musician, who began by soothing opiates to 
 calm the over-excited nerves or stimulate the exhausted 
 brain, who mistook the sensation for somewhat half divine, 
 and became, morally and physically, wrecks of manhood, de- 
 graded even in their mental conceptions. It was therefore 
 DO mere play of words which induced the apostle to bring 
 these two things together. That which might else seem ir- 
 reverent appears to have been a deep knowledge of human 
 nature ; he contrasts, because his rule was to distinguish two 
 things which are easily mistaken for each other. 
 
 The second point of resemblance is the necessity of in- 
 tense feeling. We have fullness fullness, it may be, pro- 
 duced by outward stimulus, or else by an inpouring of the 
 Spirit. What we want is life, " more life, and fuller. " To 
 
512 . Sensual and Spiritual Excitement. 
 
 escape from monotony, to get away from the life of mere 
 routine and habits, to feel that we are alive with more of 
 surprise and wakefulness in our existence. To have less of 
 the gelid, torpid, tortoise-like existence. " To feel the years 
 before us." To be consciously existing. 
 
 Now this desire lies at the bottom of many forms of life 
 which are apparently as diverse as possible. It constitutes 
 the fascination of the gambler's life: money is not what he 
 wants were he possessed of thousands to-day he would risk 
 them all to-morrow but it is that being perpetually on the 
 brink of enormous wealth and utter ruin, he is compelled to 
 realize at every moment the possibility of the extremes of 
 life. Every moment is one of feeling. This too, constitutes 
 the charm of all those forms of life in which the gambling 
 feeling is predominant where a sense of skill is blended 
 with a mixture of chance. If you ask the statesman why it 
 is, that possessed as he is of wealth, he quits his princely 
 home for the dark metropolis, he would reply, " that he 
 loves the excitement of a political existence." It is this, too, 
 which gives to the warrior's and the traveller's existence such 
 peculiar reality ; and it is this in a far lower form which 
 stimulates the pleasure of a fashionable life which sends 
 the votaries of the world in a constant round from the capi- 
 tal to the watering-place, and from the watering-place to the 
 capital ; what they crave for is the power of feeling intensely. 
 
 Now the proper and natural outlet for this feeling is the 
 life of the Spirit. What is religion but fuller life ? To live 
 in the Spirit, what is it but to have keener feelings and 
 mightier powers to rise into a higher consciousness of life ? 
 What is religion's self but feeling? The highest form of re- 
 ligion is charity. Love is of God, and he that loveth is born 
 of God, and knoweth God. This is an intense feeling, too in- 
 tense to be excited, profound in its calmness, yet it rises at 
 times in its higher flights into that ecstatic life which glances 
 in a moment intuitively through ages. These are the pente- 
 costal hours of our existence, when the Spirit comes as 
 mighty rushing wind, in cloven tongues of fire, filling the 
 soul with God. 
 
 n. The dissimilarity or contrast in St. Paul's idea. The 
 one fullness begins from without, the other from within. 
 The one proceeds from the flesh and then influences the emo- 
 tions. The other reverses this order. Stimulants like wine 
 inflame the senses, and through them set the imaginations 
 and feelings on fire ; and the law of our spiritual being is, 
 that that which begins with the flesh sensualizes the spirit 
 
Sensual and Spiritual Excitement. 5 1 3 
 
 whereas that which commences in the region of the spirit 
 spiritualizes the senses in which it subsequently stirs emo- 
 tion. But the misfortune is that men mistake this law of 
 their emotions; and the fatal error is, when having found 
 spiritual feelings existing in connection, and associated with, 
 fleshly sensations, men expect by the mere irritation of the 
 emotions of the frame to reproduce those high and glorious 
 feelings. 
 
 You might conceive the recipients of the Spirit on the 
 day of Pentecost acting under this delusion ; it is conceiv- 
 able that having observed certain bodily phenomena for 
 instance, incoherent utterances and thrilled sensibilities co- 
 existing with those sublime spiritualities they might have 
 endeavored, by a repetition of those incoherencies, to obtain 
 a fresh descent of the Spirit. In fact, this was exactly what 
 was tried in after ages of the Church. In those events of 
 Church history which are denominated revivals in the camp 
 of the Methodist and the Ranter, a direct attempt was made 
 to arouse the emotions by exciting addresses and vehement 
 language. Convulsions, shrieks, and violent emotions were 
 produced, and the unfortunate victims of this mistaken at- 
 tempt to produce the cause by the eifect, fancied themselves, 
 and were pronounced by others, converted. Now the mis- 
 fortune is, that this delusion is the more easy from the lact 
 that the results of the two kinds of causes resemble each 
 other. You may galvanize the nerve of a corpse till the ac- 
 tion of a limb startles the spectator with the appearance of 
 life. It is not life, it is only a spasmodic hideous mimicry of 
 life. Men having seen that the spiritual is always associated 
 with forms, endeavor by reproducing the forms to recall 
 spirituality ; you do produce thereby a something that looks 
 like spirituality, but it is a resemblance only. The worst case 
 of all occurs in the department of the affections. That which 
 begins in the heart ennobles the whole animal being, but 
 that which begins in the inferior departments of our being ia 
 the most entire degradation and sensualizing of the soul. 
 
 Now it is from this point of thought that we learn to ex- 
 tend the apostle's principle. Wine is but a specimen of a 
 class of stimulants. All that begins from without belongs to 
 the same class. The stimulus may be afforded by almost any 
 enjoyment of the senses. Drunkenness may come from any 
 thing wherein is excess : from over-indulgence in society, io 
 pleasure, in music, find in the delight of listening to oratory, 
 nay, even from the excitement of sermons and religious meet- 
 ings. The prophet tells us of those who are drunken, ani pot 
 with wine. 
 
 22* 
 
5 1 4 Sensual and Spiritual Excitement. 
 
 The other point of difference is one of effect. Fullness of 
 the Spirit calms; fullness produced by excitement satiatea 
 and exhausts. They who know the world of fashion tell us 
 that the tone adopted there is, either to be, or to affect to be, 
 sated with enjoyment, to be proof against surprise, to have 
 lost all keenness of enjoyment, and to have all keenness of 
 wonder gone. That which ought to be men's shame becomes 
 their boast unsusceptibility of any fresh emotion. 
 
 Whether this be real or affected matters not ; it is, in truth, 
 the real result of the indulgence of the senses. The law is 
 this ; the " crime of sense is avenged by sense which wears 
 with time;" for it has been well remarked that the terrific 
 punishment attached to the habitual indulgence of the senses 
 is, that the incitements to enjoyment increase in proportion 
 as the power of enjoyment fades. 
 
 Experience at last forbids even the hope of enjoyment ; the 
 sin of the intoxicated soul is loathed, detested, abhorred ; yet 
 it is done. The irritated sense, like an avenging fury, goads 
 on with a restlessness of craving, and compels a reiteration 
 of the guilt though it. has ceased to charm. 
 
 To this danger our own age is peculiarly exposed. In the 
 earlier and simpler ages, the need of keen feeling finds a nat- 
 ural and safe outlet in compulsory exertions. For instance, 
 in the excitement of real warfare, and in the necessity of pro- 
 viding the sustenance of life, warlike habits and healthy la- 
 bor stimulate without exhausting life. But in proportion as 
 civilization advances, a large class of the community are ex- 
 empted from the necessity of these, and thrown upon a life 
 of leisure. Then it is that artificial life begins, and artificial 
 expedients become necessary to sharpen the feelings amongst 
 the monotony of existence ; every amusement and all litera- 
 ture become more pungent in their character; life is no long- 
 er a thing proceeding from powers within, but sustained by 
 new impulses from without. 
 
 There is one peculiar form of this danger to which I would 
 specially direct your attention. There is one nation in Eu- 
 rope which, more than any other, has been subjected to these 
 influences. In ages of revolution, nations live last ; centuries 
 of life are passed in fifty years of time. In such a state, in- 
 dividuals become subjected more or less to the influences 
 which are working around them. Scarcely an enjoyment or 
 a book can be met with which does not bear the impress of 
 this intensity. Now, the particular danger to which I allude 
 is French novels, French romances, and French plays. The 
 overflowings of that cup of excitement have reached our 
 shores. I do not say that these works contain any thing 
 
Sensual and Spiritual Excitement. 515 
 
 coarse or gross better if it were so : evil which comes in a 
 form of grossness is not nearly so dangerous as that which 
 comes veiled in gracefulness and sentiment. Subjects which 
 are better not touched upon at all are discussed, examined, 
 and exhibited in all the most seductive forms of imagery. 
 You would be shocked at seeing your son in a fit of intoxica* 
 tion ; yet, I say it solemnly, better that your son should reel 
 through the streets in a fit of drunkenness, than that the del- 
 icacy of your daughter's mind should be injured, and her im- 
 agination inflamed with false fire. Twenty-four hours will 
 terminate the evil in the one case. Twenty-four hours will 
 not exhaust the effects of the other ; you must seek the con- 
 sequences at the end of many, many years. 
 
 I speak that which I do know ; and if the earnest warning 
 of one who has seen the dangers of which he speaks realized, 
 can reach the heart of one Christian parent, he will put a ban 
 on all such works, and not suffer his children's hearts to be 
 excited by a drunkenness which is worse than that of wine. 
 For the worst of it is, that the men of our time are not yet 
 alive to this growing evil ; they are elsewhere in their stud- 
 ies, counting-houses, professions not knowing the food, or 
 rather poison, on which their wives' and daughters' intellect- 
 ual life is sustained. It is precisely those who are most un- 
 fitted to sustain the danger, whose feelings need restraint in- 
 stead of spur, and whose imaginations are most inflammable, 
 that are specially exposed to it. 
 
 On the other hand, spiritual life calms while it fills. True 
 it is that there are pentecostal moments when such life reach- 
 es the stage of ecstasy. But these were given to the Church 
 to prepare her for suffering, to give her martyrs a glimpse of 
 blessedness, which might sustain them afterwards in the ter- 
 rible struggles of death. True it is that there are pentecos- 
 tal hours when the soul is surrounded by a kind of glory, and 
 we are tempted to make tabernacles upon the mount, as if 
 life were meant for rest ; but out of that very cloud there 
 comes a voice telling of the cross, and bidding us descend 
 into the common world again, to simple duties and humble 
 life. T^his very principle seems to be contained in the text 
 The apostle's remedy for this artificial feeling is " Speaking 
 to one another in psalms and hymns, and spiritual songs." 
 
 Strange remedy ! Occupation fit for children too simple 
 far for men : as astonishing as the remedy prescribed by the 
 prophet to Naaman to wash in simple water, and be clean ; 
 yet therein lies a very important truth. In ancient medical 
 phraseology, herbs possessed of healing natures were called 
 simples ; in God's laboratory, all things that heal are simple 
 
5 1 6 Purity. 
 
 all natural enjoyments, all the deepest, are simple too. At 
 night, man fills his banquet-hall with the glare of splendor 
 which fevers as well as tires the heart ; and at the very same 
 hour, as if they intended contrast, the quiet stars of God steal 
 forth, shedding, together with the deepest feeling, the pro- 
 foundest sense of calm. One from whose knowledge of the 
 sources of natural feeling there lies almost no appeal, has said 
 that to him, 
 
 " The meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 
 This is exceedingly remarkable in the life of Christ. No 
 contrast is more striking than that presented by the thought, 
 that that deep and beautiful life was spent in the midst 
 of mad Jerusalem. Remember the Son of Man standing 
 quietly in the porches of Bethesda, when the streets all 
 around were filled with the revelry of innumerable multi- 
 tudes, who had come to be present at the annual feast. 
 Remember Him pausing to weep over his country's doomed 
 metropolis, unexcited, while the giddy crowd around Him 
 were shouting " Hosannah to the Son of David !" Remem* 
 ber Him in Pilate's judgment -hall, meek, self-possessed, 
 standing in the serenity of truth, while all around Him was 
 agitation hesitation in the breast of Pilate, hatred in the 
 bosom of the Pharisees, and consternation in the heart of 
 the disciples. 
 
 And this, in truth, is what we want : we want the vision 
 of a calmer and simpler beauty, to tranquillize us in the 
 midst of artificial tastes we want the draught of a purer 
 spring to cool the flame of our excited life ; we want, in 
 other words, the Spirit of the life of Christ, simple, natural, 
 with power to calm and soothe the feelings which it rouses : 
 the fullness of the Spirit which can never intoxicate ! 
 
 X. 
 PURITY. 
 
 * l Unto the pure all things are pure : but unto them that are defiled and 
 unbelieving is nothing pure ; but even their mind and conscience is defiled. * 
 Titus i. 15. 
 
 FOR the evils of this world there are two classes of reme- 
 dies one is the world's, the other is God's. The world 
 proposes to remedy evft by adjusting the circumstances of 
 
Purity. 517 
 
 this life to man's desires. The world says, Give us a perfect 
 set of circumstances , and then we shall have a set of perfect 
 men. This principle lies at the root of the system called 
 Socialism. Socialism proceeds on the principle that all 
 moral and even physical evil arises from unjust laws. If 
 the cause be remedied, the effect will be good. But Chris- 
 tianity throws aside all that as merely chimerical. It proves 
 that the fault is not in outward circumstances but in our- 
 selves. Like the wise physician who, instead of busying 
 himself with transcendental theories to improve the climate 
 and the outward circumstances of man, endeavors to relieve 
 and get rid of the tendencies of disease which are from 
 within, Christianity, leaving all outward circumstances to 
 ameliorate themselves, fastens its attention on the spirit 
 which has to deal with them. Christ has declared that the 
 kingdom of heaven is from within. He said to the Pharisee, 
 " Ye make clean the outside of the cup and platter, but 
 within ye are full of extortion and excess." The remedy for 
 all this is a large and liberal charity, so overflowing that 
 " unto the pure all things are pure." To internal purity all 
 external things become pure. The principle that St. Paul has 
 here laid down is, that each man is the creator of his own 
 world ; he walks in a universe of his own creation. 
 
 As the free air is to one out of health the cause of cold 
 and diseased lungs, so to the healthy man it is a source of 
 greater vigor. The rotten fruit is sweet to the worm, but 
 nauseous to the palate of man. It is the same air and the 
 vsame fruit acting differently upon different beings. To 
 different men a different world to one all pollution, to 
 another all purity. To the noble all things are noble, to the 
 mean all things are contemptible. 
 
 The subject divides itself into two parts. 
 
 I. The apostle's principle. 
 II. The application of the principle. 
 
 Here we have the same principle again ; each man creates 
 his o wn world. Take it in its simplest form. The eye creates 
 the outward world it sees. We see not things as they are, 
 but as God has made the eye to receive them. 
 
 In its strictest sense, the creation of a new man is the 
 creation of a new universe. Conceive an eye so constructed 
 as that the planets and all within them should be minutely 
 seen, and all that is near should be dim and invisible like 
 things seen through a telescope, or as we see through a 
 magnifyirig-glass the plumage of the butterfly and the bloom 
 upon the peach ; then it is manifestly clear that we have 
 
5 1 8 Purity. 
 
 called into existence actually a new creation, and not new 
 objects. The mind's eye creates a world for itself. 
 
 Again, the visible world presents a different aspect to 
 each individual man. You will say that the same things you 
 see are seen by all that the forest, the valley, the flood, 
 and the sea, are the same to all ; and yet all these things so 
 seen, to different minds are a myriad of different universes. 
 One man sees in that noble river an emblem of eternity ; he 
 sloses his lips and feels that God is there. Another sees 
 nothing in it but a very convenient road for transporting his 
 spices, silks, and merchandise. To one this world appears 
 useful, to another beautiful. Whence comes the difference? 
 From the soul within us. It can make of this world a vast 
 chaos " a mighty maze without a plan ;" or a mere ma- 
 chine a collection of lifeless forces ; or it can make it the 
 living vesture of God, the tissue through which He can 
 become visible to us. In the spirit in which we look on it 
 the world is an arena for mere self advancement, or a place 
 for noble deeds, in which self is forgotten and God is all. 
 
 Observe, this "effect is traceable even in that produced by 
 our different and changeful moods. We make and unmake 
 a world more than once in the space of a single day. In 
 trifling moods all seems trivial. In serious moods all seems 
 solemn. Is the song of the nightingale merry or plaintive ? 
 Is it the voice of joy or the harbinger of gloom ? Sometimes 
 one, and sometimes the other, according to our different 
 moods. We hear the ocean furious or exulting. The 
 thunder-claps are grand, or angry, according to the differ- 
 ent states of our mind. Nay, the very church-bells chime 
 sadly or merrily, as our associations determine. They 
 speak the language of our passing moods. The young ad- 
 venturer revolving sanguine plans upon the milestones, hears 
 them speak to him as God did to Hagar in the wilderness, 
 bidding him back to perseverance and greatness. The soul 
 spreads its own hue over every thing ; the shroud or wed- 
 ding-garment of nature is woven in the loom of our own feel- 
 ings. This universe is the express image and direct counter- 
 part of the souls that dwell in it. Be noble-minded, and all 
 nature replies I am divine, the child of God ; be thou, too 
 His child, and noble. Be mean, and all nature dwindles into 
 a contemptible smallness. 
 
 In the second place, there are two ways in which this 
 principle is true. To the pure, all things and all persons are 
 pure, because their purity makes all seem pure. 
 
 There are some who go through life complaining of this 
 world ; they say they have found nothing but treachery and 
 
Purity. 5 1 9 
 
 deceit ; the poor are ungrateful, and the rich are selfish. Yet 
 we do not find such the best men. Experience tells us that 
 each man most keenly and unerringly detects in others the 
 vice with which he is most familiar himself. * 
 
 Persons seem to each man what he is himself. One who 
 suspects hypocrisy in the world is rarely transparent ; the 
 man constantly on the watch for cheating is generally dis- 
 honest ; he who suspects impurity is prurient. This is the 
 principle to which Christ alludes when he says, *' Give alms 
 of such things as ye have ; and behold all things are clean 
 unto you." 
 
 Have a large charity ! Large " charity hopeth all things." 
 Look at that sublime apostle who saw the churches of Ephe- 
 sus and Thessalonica pure, because he saw them in his own 
 large love, and painted them, not as they were, but as his 
 heart filled up the picture ; he viewed them in the light of 
 his own nobleness, as representations of his own purity. 
 
 Once more : to the pure all things are pure, as well as all 
 persons. That which is natural lies not in things, but in the 
 minds of men. There is a difference between prudery and 
 modesty. Prudery detects wrong where no wrong is ; the 
 wrong lies in the thoughts, and not in the objects. There 
 is something of over-sensitiveness and over-delicacy which 
 shows not innocence, but an inflammable imagination. And 
 men of the world can not understand that those subjects and 
 thoughts which to them are full of torture, can be harmless, 
 suggesting nothing evil to the pure in heart. 
 
 Here, however, beware ! No sentence of Scripture is more 
 frequently in the lips of persons who permit themselves 
 much license, than the text, " To the pure all things are 
 pure." Yes, all things natural, but not artificial scenes 
 which pamper the tastes, which excite the senses. Inno- 
 cence feels healthily. To it all nature is pure. But, just as 
 the dove trembles at the approach of the hawk, and the 
 young calf shudders at the lion never seen before, so inno- 
 cence shrinks instinctively from what is wrong by the same 
 divine instinct. If that which is wrong seems pure, then the 
 heart is not pure but vitiated. To the right-minded all that 
 "is right in the course of this world seems pure. Abraham, 
 looking forward to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 
 entreated that it might be averted, and afterwards acqui- 
 esced ! To the disordered mind " all things are out of 
 course." This is the spirit which pervades the whole of the 
 Ecclesiastes. There were two things which were perpetu- 
 ally suggesting themselves to the mind of Solomon ; the in- 
 tolerable sameness of this world, and the constant desire loi 
 
5 2O Purity. 
 
 change. And yet that same world, spread before the serene 
 eye of God, was pronounced to be all " very good." 
 
 This disordered universe is the picture of your own mind. 
 We make a wilderness by encouraging artificial wants, by 
 creating sensitive and selfish feelings ; then we project every 
 thing stamped with the impress of our own feelings, and we 
 gather the whole of creation into our own pained being 
 " the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain togeth- 
 er until now." The world you complain of as impure and 
 wrong is not God's world, but your world ; the blight, the 
 dullness, the blank, are all your own. The light which is in 
 you has become darkness, and therefore the light itself is 
 dark. 
 
 Again, to the pure all things not only $eem pure, but are 
 really so because they are made such. 
 
 First, as regards persons. It is a marvellous thing to see 
 how a pure and innocent heart purifies all that it approach- 
 es. The most ferocious natures are soothed and tamed by 
 innocence. And so with human beings, there is a delicacy 
 so pure that vicious men in its presence become almost 
 pure ; all of. purity which is in them is brought out ; like at- 
 taches itself to like. The pure heart becomes a centre of at- 
 traction round which similar atoms gather, and from which 
 dissimilar ones are repelled. A corrupt heart elicits in an 
 hour all that is bad in us ; a spiritual one brings out and 
 draws to itself all that is best and purest. Such was Christ. 
 He stood in the world the Light of the world, to which all 
 sparks of light gradually gathered. He stood in the pres- 
 ence of impurity, and men became pure. Note this in the 
 history of Zaccheus. In answer to the invitation of the Son 
 of Man, he says, " Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give 
 to the poor, and if I have done wrong to any man I restore 
 him fourfold." So also the Scribe, " Well, Master, thou hast 
 well said, there is one God, and there is none other than 
 He." To the pure Saviour all was pure. " He was lifted 
 up on high, and drew all men unto Him." 
 
 Lastly, all situations are pure to the pure. According to 
 the world, some professions are reckoned honorable and some 
 dishonorable. Men judge according to a standard merely 
 conventional, and not by that of moral rectitude. Yet it 
 was in truth the men who were in these situations which 
 made them such. In the days of the Redeemer the publi- 
 can's occupation was a degraded one, merely because low 
 base men filled that place. But since He was born into the 
 world a poor, laboring man, poverty is noble and dignified, 
 and toil is honorable. To the man who feels that " the 
 
Purity. 521 
 
 king's daughter is all glorious within," no outward situation 
 can seem inglorious or impure. 
 
 There are three words which express almost the same 
 thing, but whose meaning is entirely different. These are, 
 the gibbet, the scaffold, and the cross. So far as we know, 
 none die on the gibbet but men of dishonorable and base 
 life. The scaffold suggests to our minds the noble deaths of 
 our greatest martyrs. The cross was once a gibbet, but it 
 is now the highest name we have, because He hung on it. 
 Christ has purified and ennobled the cross. This principle 
 runs through life. It is not the situation which makes the 
 man, but the man who makes the situation. The slave may 
 be a freeman. The monarch may be a slave. Situations are 
 noble or ignoble, as we make them. 
 
 From all this subject we learn to understand two things. 
 Hence we understand the Fall. When man fell, the world 
 fell with him. All creation received a shock. Thorns, 
 briers, and thistles, sprang up. They were there before, but 
 to the now restless and impatient hands of men they became 
 obstacles and weeds. Death, which must ever have existed 
 as a form of dissolution, a passing from one state to another, 
 became a curse ; the sting of death was sin unchanged in 
 itself, it changed in man. A dark heavy cloud rested on it 
 the shadow of his own guilty heart. 
 
 Hence, too, we understand the Millennium. The Bible 
 says that these things are not to be forever. There are 
 glorious things to come. Just as in my former illustration, 
 the alteration of the eye called new worlds into being, so 
 now nothing more is needed than to re-create the soul the 
 mirror on which all things are reflected. Then is realized 
 the prophecy of Isaiah, " Behold, I create all things new," 
 " new heavens and a new earth." 
 
 The conclusion of this verse proves to us why all these new 
 creations were called into being " wherein dwelleth right- 
 eousness." To be righteous makes all things new. We do 
 not want a new world, we want new hearts. Let the Spirit 
 of God purify society, and to the pure all things will be 
 pure. The earth will put off the look of weariness and 
 gloom which it has worn so long, and then the glorious lan- 
 guage of the prophets will be fulfilled "TheVorests will 
 break out with singing, and the desert will blossom as the 
 
522 Unity and Peace. 
 
 XI. 
 UNITY AND PEACE. 
 
 " And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye ar 
 called in one body ; and be ye thankful." Col. iii. 15. 
 
 THERE is something in these words that might surprise 
 ns. It might surprise us to find that peace is urged on us as 
 a duty. There can be no duty except where there is a mat- 
 ter of obedience ; and it might seem to us that peace is a 
 something over which we have no power. It is a privilege 
 to have peace, but it would appear as if there were no power 
 of control within the mind of a man able to insure that peace 
 for itself. " Yet," says the apostle, " let the peace of God 
 rule in your hearts." 
 
 It would seem to us as if peace were as far beyond our 
 own control as happiness. Unquestionably, we are not mas- 
 ters, on our own responsibility, of our own happiness. Hap 
 piness is the gratification of every innocent desire ; but it is 
 not given to us to insure the gratification of every desire ; 
 therefore, happiness is not a duty, and it is nowhere written 
 in the Scripture, " You must be happy." But we find it 
 written by the Apostle Paul, " Be ye thankful," implying, 
 therefore, that peace is a duty. The apostle says, " Let the 
 peace of God rule in your hearts ;" from which we infer that 
 peace is attainable, and within the reach of our own wills ; 
 that if there be not repose there is blame ; if there be not 
 peace but discord in the heart, there is something wrong. 
 
 This is the more surprising when we remember the cir- 
 cumstances under which these words were written. They 
 were written from Rome, where the apostle lay in prison, 
 daily and hourly expecting a violent death. They were 
 written in days of persecution, when false doctrines were 
 rife, and religious animosities fierce ; they were written in 
 an epistle abounding with the most earnest and eager con- 
 troversy, whereby it is therefore implied, that according to 
 the conception of the Apostle Paul, it is possible for a Chris- 
 tian to live at the very point of death, and in the very midst 
 of danger that it is possible for him to be breathing the at- 
 mosphere of religious controversy it is possible for him to 
 be surrounded by bitterness, and even take up the pen of 
 controversy himself and yet his soul shall not lose its own 
 
Unity and Peace* 523 
 
 deep peace, nor the power of the infinite repose and rest of 
 God. Joined with the apostle's command to be at peace, 
 we find another doctrine, the doctrine of the unity of the 
 Church of Christ. " To the which ye are called in one 
 body," in order that ye may be at peace ; in other words, 
 the unity of the Church of Christ is the basis on which, and 
 on which alone, can be built the possibility of the inward 
 peace of individuals. 
 
 And thus, my Christian brethren, our subject divides itself 
 into these two simple branches : 
 
 I. The unity of the Church of Christ. 
 II. The inward peace of the members of that Church. 
 
 I. The first subject, then, which we have to consider, is 
 the unity of the Church of Christ. 
 
 And the first thing we have to do is both clearly to define 
 and understand the meaning of that word " unity." I dis- 
 tinguish the unity of comprehensiveness from the unity of 
 mere singularity. The word one, as oneness, is an ambigu- 
 ous word. There is a oneness belonging to the army as well 
 as to every soldier in the army. The army is one, and that 
 is the oneness of unity ; the soldier is one, but that is the 
 oneness of the unit. There is a difference between the one- 
 ness of a body and the oneness of a member of that body. 
 The body is many, and a unity of manifold comprehensive- 
 ness. An arm or a member of a body is one, but that is the 
 unity of singularity. Without unity, my Christian brethren, 
 peace must be impossible. There can be no peace in the one 
 single soldier of an army. You do not speak of the harmony 
 of one member of a body. There is peace in an army, or in 
 a kingdom joined with other kingdoms ; there is harmony in 
 a member united with other members. There is no peace in 
 a unit, there is no possibility of the harmony of that which is 
 but one in itself. In order to have peace you must have a 
 higher unity, and therein consists the unity of God's own 
 Being. The unity of God is the basis of the peace of God 
 meaning by the unity of God the comprehensive manifold- 
 ness of God, and not merely the singularity in the number 
 of God's Being. When the Unitarian speaks of God as om*, 
 he means simply singularity of number. We mean that He 
 is of manifold comprehensiveness that there is unity be- 
 tween His various powers. Amongst the personalities or 
 powers of His Being there is no discord, but perfect harmo- 
 ny, entire union ; and that, brethren, is repose, the blessed- 
 ness of infinite rest, that belongs to the unity of God " I 
 and my Father are one." 
 
524 Unity and Peace. 
 
 The second thing which we observe respecting this unity 
 is, that it subsists between things not similar or alike, but 
 things dissimilar or unlike. There is no unity in the sepa- 
 rate atoms of a sand-pit ; they are things similar ; there is 
 an aggregate or collection of them. Even if they be harden- 
 ed in a mass they are not one, they do not form a unity : 
 they are simply a mass. There is no unity in a flock of 
 sheep : it is simply a repetition of a number of things simi- 
 lar to each other. If you strike off from a thousand five 
 hundred, or if you strike oif nine hundred, there is nothing 
 lost of unity, because there never was unity. A flock of one 
 thousand or a flock of five is just as much a flock as any oth- 
 er number. 
 
 On the other hand, let us turn to the unity of peace which 
 the apostle speaks of, and we find it is something different ; 
 it is made up of dissimilar members, without which dissimi- 
 larity there could be no unity. Each is imperfect in itself, 
 each supplying what it has in itself to the deficiencies and 
 wants of the other members. So, if you strike oif from this 
 body any one member, if you cut off an arm, or tear out an 
 eye, instantly the unity is destroyed ; you have no longer an 
 entire and perfect body, there is nothing but a remnant of 
 the whole, a part, a portion ; no unity whatever. 
 
 This will help us to understand the unity of the Church 
 of Christ. If the ages and the centuries of the Church of 
 Christ, if the different Churches whereof it was composed, if 
 the different members of each Church, were similar one in 
 this, that they all held the same views, all spoke the same 
 words, all viewed truth from the same side, they would have 
 no unity ; but would simply be an aggregate of atoms, the 
 sand-pit over again units, multiplied^ it may be to infinity, 
 but you would have no real unity, and therefore no peace. 
 No unity for wherein consists the unity of the Church of 
 Christ? The unity of ages, brethren, consists it in this 
 that every age is merely the repetition of another age, and 
 that which is held in one is held in another? Precisely in 
 the same way, that is not the unity of the ages of the Chris- 
 tian Church. 
 
 Every century and every age has held a different truth, 
 has put forth different fragments of the truth. In early 
 ages, for example, by martyrdom was proclaimed the eternal 
 sanctity of truth, rather than give up which a man must 
 
 lose his life In our own age it is quite plain those are 
 
 not the themes which engage us, or the truths which we put 
 in force now. This age, by its revolutions, its socialisms, 
 proclaims another truth the brotherhood of the Church of 
 
Unity and Peace. 525 
 
 Christ ; so that the unity of ages subsists on the same prin- 
 ciple as that of the unity of the human body: and just as 
 every separate ray the violet, the blue, and the orange 
 make up the white ray, so these manifold fragments of truth 
 blended together make up the one entire and perfect white 
 ray of truth. And with regard to individuals, taking the 
 case of the Reformation, it was given to one Church to pro- 
 claim that salvation is a thing received, and not local ; to 
 another to proclaim justification by faith ; to another the 
 sovereignty of God ; to another the supremacy of the Scrip- 
 tures ; to another the right of private judgment, the duty of 
 the individual, conscience. Unite these all, and then you 
 have the Reformation one one in spite of manifoldness ; 
 those very varieties by which they have approached this 
 proving them to be one. Disjoint them and then you have 
 some miserable sect Calvinism, or Unitarianism ; the unity 
 has dispersed. And so again with the unity of the Churches. 
 Whereby would we produce unity ? Would we force on 
 other Churches our Anglicanism? Would we have our 
 thirty-nine articles, our creeds, our prayers, our rules and 
 regulations, accepted by every Church throughout the 
 world ? If that were unity, then in consistency you are 
 bound to demand that in God's world there shall be but one 
 color instead of the manifold harmony and accordance of 
 which, this universe is full ; that there should be but one 
 chanted note the one which we conceive most beautiful. 
 This is not the unity of the Church of God. The various 
 Churches advance different doctrines and truths. The 
 Church of Germany something different from those of the 
 Church of England. The Church of Rome, even in its idol- 
 atry, proclaims truths which we would be glad to seize. By 
 the worship of the Virgin, the purity of women ; by the rig- 
 or of ecclesiastical ordinances, the sanctity and permanence 
 of eternal order ; by the very priesthood itself, the necessity 
 of the guidance of man by man. Nay, even the dissenting 
 bodies themselves mere atoms of aggregates as they are- 
 stand forward and proclaim at least this truth, the separate- 
 ness of the individual conscience, the right of independence. 
 Peace subsists not between things exactly alike. We do 
 not speak of peace in a single country. We say peace sub- 
 sists between different-countries where war might be. There 
 can be no peace between two men who agree in every thing ; 
 peace subsists between those who differ. There is no peace 
 between Baptist and Baptist; so far as they are Baptists, 
 there is perfect accordance and agreement. There may be 
 peace between you and the Romanist, the Jew, or the Dis* 
 
526 Unity and Peace. 
 
 senter, because Acre are angles of sharpness which might 
 come into collision if they were not subdued and softenedJby 
 the power of love. It was given to the Apostle Paul to dis- 
 cern that this was the ground of unity. In the Church of 
 Christ he saw men with different views, and he said, So far 
 from that variety destroying unity, it was the only ground 
 of unity. There are many doctrines, all of them different, 
 but let those varieties be blended together in other words, 
 let there be the peace of love, and then you will have unity. 
 
 Once more: this unity, whereof the apostle speaks, consists 
 in submission to one single influence or spirit. Wherein 
 consists the unity of the body ? Consists it not in this that 
 there is one life uniting, making all the separate members 
 one ? Take a way the life, and the members fall to pieces : 
 they are no longer one; decomposition begins, and every 
 element separates, no longer having any principle of cohe- 
 sion or union with the rest. 
 
 There is not one of us who, at some time or other, has not 
 been struck with the power there is in a single living influ- 
 ence. Have we never, for instance, felt the power where- 
 with the orator unites and holds together a thousand men as 
 if they were but one ; with flashing eyes and throbbing 
 hearts, all attentive to his words, and by the difference of 
 their attitudes, by the variety of the expressions of their 
 countenances, testifying to the unity of that single living 
 feeling with which he had inspired them? Whether it be 
 indignation, whether it be compassion, or whether it be en- 
 thusiasm, that one living influence made the thousand, for the 
 time, one. Have we not heard how, even in this century io 
 which we live, the various and conflicting feelings of the 
 people of this country were concentrated into one, when the 
 threat of foreign invasion had fused down and broken the 
 edges of conflict and variance, and from shore to shore was 
 heard one cry of terrible defiance, and the different classes 
 and orders of this manifold and mighty England were as 
 one ? Have we not heard how the mighty winds hold to- 
 gether as if one, the various atoms of the desert, so that they 
 rush like a living thing across the wilderness? And this, 
 brethren, is the unity of the Church of Christ, the subjection 
 to the one uniting Spirit of its God. 
 
 It will be said, in reply to this, " Why, this is mere enthu- 
 siasm. It may be very beautiful in theory, but it is impossi- 
 ble in practice. It is mere enthusiasm to believe, that while 
 all these varieties of conflicting opinion remain, we can have 
 unity ; it is mere enthusiasm to think that so long as men's 
 minds reckon on a thing like unity, there can be a thing liks 
 
Unity and Peace. 527 
 
 oneness." And our reply is, Give us the Spirit of God, and 
 we shall be one. You can not produce a unity by all the 
 rigor of your ecclesiastical discipline. You can not produce 
 a unity by consenting in some form of expression such as 
 this, " Let us agree to differ." You can not produce a unity 
 by Parliamentary regulations or enactments, bidding back 
 the waves of what is called aggression. Give us the living 
 Spirit of God, and we shall be one. 
 
 Once on this earth was exhibited, as it were, a specimen of 
 perfect anticipation of such a unity, when the " rushing 
 mighty wind " of Pentecost came down in the tongues of fire 
 and sat on every man ; when the Parthians, and Medes, and 
 Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, the " Cretes and 
 Arabians," the Jew and the Gentile, each speaking one lan- 
 guage, yet blended and fused into one unity by enthusiastic 
 love, heard one another speak, as it were, in one language, 
 the manifold works of God ; when the spirit of giving was 
 substituted for the spirit of mere rivalry and competition, 
 and no man said the things he had were his own, but all 
 shared in common. Let that spirit come again, as come it 
 will, and come it must ; and then, beneath the influences of a 
 mightier love, we shall have a nobler and a more real unity. 
 
 We pass on now, in the second place, to consider the indi- 
 vidual peace resulting from this unity. As we have endeav- 
 ored to explain what is meant by unity, so now let us en- 
 deavor to understand what is meant by peace. Peace, then, 
 is the opposite of passion, and of labor, toil, and effort. 
 Peace is that state in which there are no desires madly de- 
 manding an impossible gratification; that state in which 
 there is no misery, no remorse, no sting. And there are but 
 three things which can break that peace. The first is dis- 
 cord between the mind of man and the lot which he is called 
 on to inherit ; the second is discord between the affections 
 and powers of the soul ; and the third is doubt of the recti- 
 tude and justice and love wherewith this w r orld is ordered. 
 But where these things exist not, where a man is contented 
 with his lot, where the flesh is subdued to the spirit, and 
 where he believes and feels with all his heart that all is right, 
 there is peace, and to this, says the apostle, " ye are called" 
 the grand, peculiar call of Christianity the call, " Come 
 unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
 give you rest." 
 
 This was the dying bequest of Christ : " Peace I leave with 
 you, my peace I give unto you : not as the world giveth give 
 I unto you :" and therein lies one of the greatest truths of 
 the blessed and eternal character of Christianity, that it ap* 
 
528 Unity and Peace. 
 
 plies to, and satisfies the very deepest want and craving of 
 our nature. The deepest want of man is not a desire foi 
 happiness, but a craving for peace ; not a wish foi the grati- 
 fication of every desire, but a craving for the repose of ac- 
 quiescence in the will of God ; and it is this which Christiani- 
 ty promises. Christianity does not promise happiness, but it 
 does promise peace. "In the world ye shall have tribula- 
 tion," saith our Master, " but be of good cheer ; I have over- 
 come the world." Now, let us look more closely into this 
 peace. 
 
 The first thing we see respecting it is, that it is called 
 God's peace. God is rest : the infinite nature of God is in- 
 finite repose. The "I am" of God is contrasted with theT 
 am become of all other things. Every thing else is in a state 
 of becoming, God is in a state of being. The acorn has be- 
 come the plant, and the plant has become the oak. The 
 child has become the man, and the man has become good, or 
 wise, or whatever else it may be. God ever is ; and I pray 
 you once more to observe, that this peace of God, this eter- 
 nal rest in the Almighty Being, arises out of His unity. Not 
 because He is a unit, but because He is a unity. There is 
 no discord between the powers and attributes of the mind of- 
 God; there is no discord between His justice and His love; 
 there is no discord demanding some miserable expedient to 
 unite them together, such as some theologians imagined when 
 they described the sacrifice and atonement of our Redeemer 
 by saying, it is the clever expedient whereby God reconciles 
 His justice with His love. God's justice and love are one. 
 Infinite justice must be infinite love. Justice is but another 
 sign of love. The infinite rest of the "7" am " of God arises 
 out of the harmony of His attributes. 
 
 The next thing we observe respecting this divine peace 
 which has come down to man on earth is, that it is a living 
 peace. Brethren, let us distinguish. There are several things 
 called peace which are by no means Divine or Godlike peace. 
 There is peace, for example, in the man who lives for and en- 
 joys self, with no nobler aspiration goading him on to make 
 him feel the rest of God ; that is peace, but that is merely 
 the peace of toil. There is rest on the surface of the- cav- 
 erned lake, which no wind can stir ; but that is the peace of 
 stagnation. There is peace amongst the stones which have 
 fallen and rolled down the mountain's side, and lie there 
 quietly at rest ; but that is the peace of inanity. There is 
 peace in the hearts of enemies who lie together, side by side, 
 in the same trench of the battle-field, the animosities of their 
 souls silenced at length, and their hands no longer clenched 
 
Unity and Peace. 529 
 
 In deadly enmity against each other ; but that is the peace 
 of death. If our peace be but the peace of the sensualist sat- 
 isfying pleasure, if it be but the peace of mental torpor and 
 inaction, the peace of apathy, or the peace of the soul dead 
 in trespasses and sins, we may whisper to ourselves, " Peace, 
 peace," but there will be no peace ; there is not the peace of 
 unity nor the peace of God, for the peace of God is the living 
 peace of love. 
 
 The next thing we observe respecting this peace is, that it 
 is the manifestation of power it is the peace which comes 
 from an inward power : " Let the peace of God," says the 
 apostle, " rule within your hearts." For it is a power, the 
 manifestation of strength. There is no peace except there is 
 the possibility of the opposite of peace, although now restrain- 
 ed and controlled. You do not speak of the peace of a grain 
 of sand, because it can not be otherwise than merely insignifi- 
 cant, and at rest. You do not speak of the peace of a mere 
 pond ; you speak of the peace of the sea, because there is the 
 opposite of peace implied, there is power and strength. 
 And this, brethren, is the real character of the peace in the 
 mind and soul of man. Oh ! we make a great mistake when 
 we say there is strength in, passion, in the exhibition of emo- 
 tion. Passion, and emotion, and all those outward manifest- 
 ations, prove, not strength, but weakness. If the passions of 
 a man are strong, it proves the man himself is weak if he can 
 not restrain or control his passions. The real strength and 
 majesty of the soul of man is calmness, the manifestation of 
 strength ; " the peace of God " ruling ; the word of Christ 
 saying to the inward storms, " Peace !" and there is " a great 
 calm." 
 
 Lastly, the peace of which the apostle speaks is tne peace 
 that is received the peace of reception. You will observe, 
 throughout this passage the apostle speaks of a something 
 received, and not done : " Let the peace of God rule in your 
 hearts." It is throughout receptive, but by no nieans inact- 
 ive. And according to this, there are two kinds of peace ; 
 the peace of obedience " Let the peace of God rule " you ; 
 and there is the peace of gratefulness "Be ye thankful." 
 V^ery great, brethren, is the peace of obedience : when a man 
 has his lot fixed, and his mind made up, and he sees his des- 
 tiny before him, and quietly acquiesces in it, his spirit is at 
 rest. Great and deep is the peace of the soldier to whom 
 has been assigned even an untenable position, with the com- 
 mand, " Keep that, even if you die," and he obediently re 
 mains to die. 
 
 Great was the peace of Elisha very, very calm are those 
 
 23 
 
530 The Christian Aim and Motive. 
 
 words by which he expressed his acquiescence in the Divino 
 will. "Knowest thou," said the troubled, excited, and rest- 
 less men around him " Knowest thou that the Lord will 
 take away thy master from thy head to-day ?" He answered, 
 "Yea, I know it; hold ye your peace." Then there is the 
 other peace, it is the peace of gratefulness : " Be ye thank- 
 ful." It is that peace which tHe Israelites had when these 
 words were spoken to them on the shores of the Red Sea, 
 while the bodies of their enemies floated past them, de- 
 stroyed, but not by them : " Stand still and see the salvation 
 of the Lord." 
 
 And here, brethren, is another mistake of ours : we look 
 on salvation as a thing to be done, and not received. In 
 God's salvation we can do but little, but there is a great 
 deal to be received. We are here, not merely to act, but to 
 be acted upon. " Let the peace of God rule in your hearts ;" 
 there is a peace that will enter there, if you do not thwart it ; 
 there is a Spirit that will take possession of your soul, pro- 
 vided that you do not quench it. In this world we are re- 
 cipients, not creators. In obedience and in gratefulness, and 
 the infinite peace of God in the soul of man, is alone to be 
 found deep calm repose. 
 
 XII. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN AIM AND MOTIVE. 
 
 "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is per- 
 fect." Matt, v. 48. 
 
 THERE are two erroneous views held respecting the char- 
 acter of the Sermon on the Mount. The first may be called 
 an error o'f worldly-minded men, the other an error of mis- 
 taken religionists. Worldly-minded men men, that is, in 
 whom the devotional feeling is but feeble are accustomed 
 to look upon morality as the whole of religion ; and they 
 suppose that the Sermon on the Mount was designed only to 
 explain and enforce correct principles of morality. It tells 
 of human duties and human proprieties, and an attention to 
 these, they maintain, is the only religion which is required 
 by it. Strange, my Christian brethren, that men whose lives 
 are least remarkable for superhuman excellence, should be 
 the very men to refer most frequently to those sublime com* 
 ments on Christian principle, and should so confidently cor* 
 
The Christian Aim and Motive. 531 
 
 dude from thence, that themselves are right and all others 
 are wrong. Yet so it is. 
 
 The other is an error of mistaken religionists. They some- 
 times regard the Sermon on the Mount as if it were a col- 
 lection of moral precepts, and consequently, strictly speaking, 
 not Christianity 'at all. To them it seems as if the chief 
 value, the chief intention of the discourse, was to show the 
 breadth and spirituality of the requirements of the law of 
 Moses ; its chief religious significance, to show the utter im- 
 possibility of fulfilling the law, and thus to lead to the nec- 
 essary inference that justification must be by faith alone. 
 And so they would not scruple to assert that, in the highest 
 sense of that term, it is not Christianity at all, but only 
 preparatory to it a kind of spiritual Judaism ; and that the 
 higher and more developed principles of Christianity are to 
 be found in the writings of the apostles. Before we proceed 
 further, we would remark here that it seems extremely start- 
 ling to say that He who came to this world expressly to 
 preach the Gospel, should, in the most elaborate of all His 
 discourses, omit to do so : it is indeed something more than 
 startling, it is absolutely revolting, to suppose that the let- 
 ters of those who spoke of Christ, should contain a more per- 
 fectly-developed, a freer and fuller Christianity than is to be 
 found in Christ's own words. 
 
 Now you will observe that these two parties, so opposed 
 to each other in their general religious views, are agreed in 
 this that the Sermon on the Mount is nothing but morality. 
 The man of the world says " It is morality only, and that 
 is the whole of religion." The mistaken religionist says 
 "It is morality only, not the entire essence of Christian- 
 ity." In opposition to both these views, we maintain that 
 the Sermon on the Mount contains the sum and substance 
 of Christianity the very chief matter of the Gospel of our 
 Redeemer. 
 
 It is not, you will observe, a pure and spiritualized Juda- 
 ism ; it is contrasted with Judaism again and again by Him 
 who spoke it. Quoting the words of Moses, He affirmed, " So 
 was it spoken by them of old time, but I say unto you " 
 For example, " Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt 
 perform unto the Lord thine oaths." That is Judaism. " But 
 I say unto you, Swear not at all, but let your yea be yea, 
 and your nay nay." That is Christianity. And that which 
 is the essential peculiarity of this Christianity lies in these 
 two things. First of all, that the mgrality which it teaches 
 is disinterested goodness goodness not for the sake of the 
 blessing that follows it, but for its own sake, and because h 
 
532 The Christian Aim and Motive. 
 
 is right. " Love your enemies," is the Gospel precept. Why T 
 Because if you love them you shall be blessed ; and if you 
 do not, cursed ? No ; but " Love your enemies, bless them 
 that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for 
 them which despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye 
 may be the children of" that is, may be like " your Fa- 
 ther which is in heaven." The second essential peculiarity 
 of Christianity and this, too, is an essential peculiarity of 
 this sermon, is that it teaches and enforces the law of self- 
 sacrifice. " If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out ; if thy 
 right hand offend thee, cut it off." This, brethren, is the law 
 of self-sacrifice the very law and spirit of the blessed cross 
 of Christ, 
 
 How deeply and essentially Christian, then, this Sermon 
 on the Mount is, we shall understand if we are enabled in 
 any measure to reach the meaning and spirit of the single 
 passage which I have taken as my text. It tells two things 
 the Christian aim and the Christian motive. 
 
 I. The Christian aim perfection. 
 
 IL The Christian motive because it is right and Godlike 
 to be perfect. 
 
 I. The Christian aim.is this to be perfect. " Be ye there 
 fore perfect." Now distinguish this, I pray you, from mere 
 worldly morality. It is not conformity to a creed that is 
 here required, but aspiration after a state. It is not de- 
 manded of us to perform a number of duties, but to yield 
 obedience to a certain spiritual law. But let us endeavor to 
 explain this more fully. What is the meaning of this 
 expression, " Be ye perfect ?" Why is it that hi" this dis- 
 course, instead of being commanded to perform religious du- 
 ties, we are commanded to think of being like God ? Will 
 not that inflame our pride, and increase our natural vain- 
 glory ? Now the nature and possibility of human perfection, 
 what it is and how it is possible, are both contained in one 
 single expression in the text, "Even as your Father which is 
 in heaven is perfect." The relationship between father and 
 son implies consanguinity, likeness, similarity of character 
 and nature. God made the insect, the stone, the lily, but God 
 is not the Father of the caterpillar, the lily, or the stone. 
 
 When, therefore, God is said to be our Father, something 
 more is implied in this than that God created man. And so 
 when the Son of Man came proclaiming the fact that we are 
 the children of God it^was in the truest sense a revelation. 
 He told us that the nature of God resembles the nature of 
 man, that love in God is not a mere figure of speech, but 
 
The Christian Aim and Motive. 533 
 
 means the same thing as love in us, and that Divine anger is 
 the same thing as human anger divested of its emotions and 
 imperfections. When we are commanded to be like God, it 
 implies that God has that nature of which we have already 
 the germs. And this has been taught by the incarnation of 
 the Redeemer. Things absolutely dissimilar in their nature 
 can not mingle. Water can not coalesce with fire water 
 can not mix with oil. If, then, humanity and divinity were 
 united in the person of the Redeemer, it follows that there 
 must be something kindred between the two, or else the 
 incarnation had been impossible. So that the incarnation is 
 the realization of man's perfection. 
 
 But let us examine more deeply this assertion, that our 
 nature is kindred with that of God for if man has not a 
 nature kindred to God's, then a demand such as that, " Be 
 ye the children of" that is, like " God," is but a mockery 
 of man. We say, then, in the first place, that in the truest 
 sense of the word man can be a creator. The beaver makes 
 its hole, the bee makes its cell ; man alone has the power of 
 creating. The mason makes, the architect creates. In the 
 same sense that we say God created the universe, we say 
 that man is also a creator. The creation of the universe was 
 the Eternal Thought taking reality. And thought taking 
 expression is also a creation. Whenever, therefore, there is 
 a living thought shaping itself in word or in stone, there is 
 there a creation. And therefore it is that the simplest effort 
 of what we call genius is prized infinitely more than the most 
 elaborate performances which are done by mere workman^ 
 ship, and for this reason : that the one is produced by an 
 effort of power which we share with the beaver and the bee, 
 that of making, and the other by a faculty and power which 
 man alone shares with God. 
 
 Here, however, you will observe another difficulty. It 
 will be said at once, There is something in this comparison 
 of man with God which looks like blasphemy, because one 
 is finite and the other infinite man is bounded, God bound- 
 less ; and to speak of resemblance and kindred between 
 these two, is to speak of resemblance and kindred between 
 two natures essentially different. But this is precisely the 
 argument which is brought by the Socinians against the 
 doctrine of the incarnation ; and we are bound to add that 
 the Socinian argument is right, unless there be the similarity 
 of which we have been speaking. Unless there be something 
 in man's nature which truly and properly partakes of the 
 Divine nature, there could be no incarnation, and the demand 
 for perfection would be a mockery and an impossibility. 
 
534 The Christian Aim and Motive. 
 
 Let us then endeavor to find out the evidences of this in- 
 finitude in the nature of man. First of all, we find it in this 
 that the desires of man are for something boundless and 
 unattainable. Thus speaks our Lord "What shall it profit 
 a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his own 
 soul ?" Every schoolboy has heard the story of the youth- 
 ful prince who enumerated one by one the countries he 
 meant to conquer year after year ; and when the enumera- 
 tion was completed, was asked what he meant to do when 
 all those victories were achieved, and he replied, To sit down, 
 to be happy, to take his rest. But then came the ready re- 
 joinder, Why not do so now ? But it is not every school- 
 boy who has paused to consider the folly of the question. 
 He who asked his son why he did not at once take the rest 
 which it was his ultimate purpose to enjoy, knew not the im- 
 mensity and nobility of the human soul. He could not then 
 take his rest and be happy. As long as one realm remained 
 unconquered, so long rest was impossible ; he would weep 
 for fresh worlds to conquer. And thus, that which was 
 spoken by our Lord of one earthly gratification, is true of 
 all " Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again." 
 The boundless, endless, infinite void in the soul of man can 
 be satisfied with nothing but God. Satisfaction lies not in 
 having, but in being. There is no satisfaction even in doing. 
 Man can not be satisfied with his own performances. When 
 the righteous young ruler came to Christ, and declared that 
 in reference to the life gone by he had kept all the com- 
 mandments and fulfilled all the duties required by the law, 
 still came the question " What lack I yet ?" 
 
 The Scribes and Pharisees were the strictest observers of 
 the ceremonies of the Jewish religion, " touching the right- 
 eousness which is by the law " they were blameless, but yet 
 they wanted something more than that, and they were found 
 on the brink of Jordan imploring the baptism of John, seek, 
 ing after a new and higher state than they had yet attained 
 to a significant proof that man can not be satisfied with his 
 own works. And again, there is not one of us who has ever 
 been satisfied with his own performances. There is no man 
 whose doings are worth any thing, who has not felt that he 
 has not yet done that which he feels himself able to do. 
 While he was doing it, he was kept up by the spirit of hope ; 
 but when done the thing seemed to him worthless. And 
 therefore it is that the author can not read his own book 
 again, nor the sculptor look with pleasure upon his finished 
 work. With respect to one of the greatest of all modern 
 sculptors, we are told that he longed for the terminatioi? of 
 
The Christian Aim and Motive. 535 
 
 his earthly career, for this reason that he had been satisfied 
 with his own performance : satisfied for the first time in his 
 life. And this expression of his satisfaction was but equiva- 
 lent to saying that he had reached the goal beyond which 
 there could be no progress. This impossibility of being sat- 
 isfied with his own performances is one of the strongest proofs 
 of our immortality a proof of that perfection towards which 
 we shall forever tend, but which we can never attain. 
 
 A second trace of this infinitude in man's nature we find 
 in the infinite capacities of the soul. This is true intellectu- 
 ally and morally. With reference to our intellectual capa- 
 cities, it would perhaps be more strictly correct to say that 
 they are indefinite, rather than infinite ; that is, we can affix 
 to them 110 limit. For there is no man, however low his 
 intellectual powers may be, who has not at one time or 
 another felt a rush of thought, a glow of inspiration, which 
 seemed to make all things possible, as if it were merely the 
 effect of some imperfect organization which stood in the way 
 of his doing whatever he desired to do. With respect to 
 our moral and spiritual capacities, we remark that they are 
 not only indefinite, but absolutely infinite. Let that man 
 answer who has ever truly and heartily loved another. That 
 man knows what it is to partake of the infinitude of God. 
 Literally, in the emphatic language of the Apostle John, he 
 has felt his immortality " God in him, and he in God." For 
 that moment, infinitude was to him not a name, but a reality. 
 He entered into the infinite of time and space, which is not 
 measured by days, or months, or years, but is alike boundless 
 and eternal. 
 
 Again : we perceive a third trace of this infinitude in man, 
 in the power which he possesses of giving up self. In this, 
 perhaps more than in any thing else, man may claim kindred 
 with God. Nor is this power confined to the best of man- 
 kind, but is possessed, to some extent at least, by all. There 
 is no man, how low soever he may be, who has not one or 
 two causes or secrets, which no earthly consideration would 
 induce him to betray. There is no man who does not feel 
 towards one or two at least, in this world, a devotion which 
 all the bribes of the universe would not be able to shake. 
 We have heard the story of that degraded criminal who, 
 when sentence of death was passed upon him, turned to his 
 accomplice in guilt, in whose favor a verdict of acquittal was 
 brought in, and in glorious self-forgetfulness exclaimed 
 "Thank God, you are saved!" The savage and barbarous 
 Indian, whose life has been one unbroken series of cruelty 
 and crime, will submit to a slow, lingering, torturing death. 
 
536 The Christian Aim and Motive. 
 
 rather than betray his country. Now, what shall we say to 
 these things? Do they not tell of an indestructible some- 
 thing in the nature of man, of which the origin is Divine? 
 the remains of a majesty which, though it may be sullied, 
 can never be entirely lost ? 
 
 Before passing on let us observe, that were it not for this 
 conviction of the Divine origin, and consequent perfectibility 
 of our nature, the very thought of God would be painful to 
 us. God is so great, so glorious, that the mind is over- 
 whelmed by, and shrinks from, the contemplation of His ex- 
 cellence, unless there comes the tender, ennobling thought 
 that we are the children of God, who are to become like our 
 Father in heaven, whose blessed career it is to go on in an 
 advance of love and duty towards Him, until we love Him 
 as we are loved, and know Him almost as we are known. 
 
 II. We pass on, in the second place, to consider the Chris- 
 tian motive "Even as your Father which is in heaven is 
 perfect." Brethren, worldly prudence, miscalled morality, 
 says " Be honest ; you will find your gain in being so. Do 
 right ; you will be the better for it even in this world you 
 will not lose by it." The mistaken religionist only magni- 
 fies this on a large scale. " Your duty," he says, " is to save 
 your soul. Give up this world to have the next. Lose here^ 
 that you may gain hereafter" Now this is but prudence, 
 after all it is but magnified selfishness, carried on into eter- 
 nity none the more noble for being eternal selfishness. In 
 opposition to all such sentiments as these, thus speaks the 
 Gospel "Be ye perfect." Why? "Because your Father 
 which is in heaven is perfect." Do right, because it is God- 
 like and right so to do. Here, however, let us be understood. 
 We do not mean to say that the Gospel ignores altogether 
 the personal results of doing right. This would be unnat- 
 ural because God has linked together well-doing and bless- 
 edness. But we do say that this blessedness is not the mo- 
 tive which the Gospel gives us. It is true the Gospel says 
 " Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth ; 
 blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy ; blessed 
 are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for 
 they shall be filled." But when these are made our motives 
 when we become meek in order that we may inherit here 
 then the promised enjoyment will not come. If we a"re mer- 
 ciful merely that AVC may ourselves obtain mercy, we shall 
 not have that indwelling love of God which is the result 
 and token of His forgiveness. Such was the law and such 
 the example of our Lord and Master. 
 
The Christian Aim and Motive. . 537 
 
 True it is that in the prosecution of the great work of re- 
 demption He had " respect to the recompense of reward." 
 True it is He was conscious how could He but be conscious 
 that when His work was completed He should be " glori- 
 fied with that glory which He had with the Father before 
 the world began ;" but we deny that this was the motive 
 which induced Him to undertake that work ; and that man 
 has a very mistaken idea of the character of the Redeemer, 
 and understands but little of His spirit, who has so mean an 
 opinion of Him as to suppose that it was any consideration 
 of personal happiness and blessedness which led the Son of 
 God to die. " For this end was He born, and for this end 
 came He into the world to bear witness unto the truth," and 
 " to finish the work which was given Him to do." 
 
 If we were asked, Can you select one text in which more 
 than in any other this unselfish, disinterested feature comes 
 forth, it should be this, " Love ye your enemies, do good and 
 lend, hoping for nothing again." This is the true spirit of 
 Christianity doing right disinterestedly, not from the hope 
 of any personal advantage or reward, either temporal or spir- 
 itual, but entirely forgetting self, " hoping for nothing again." 
 When that glorious philanthropist, whose whole life had been 
 spent in procuring the abolition of the slave-trade, was de- 
 manded of, by some systematic theologian, whether in his ar- 
 dor in this great cause he had not been neglecting his per- 
 sonal prospects and endangering his own soul, this was his 
 magnanimous reply one of those which show the light of 
 truth breaking through like an inspiration : he said, " I did 
 not think about my own soul, I had no time to think about 
 myself, I had forgotten all about my soul." The Christian 
 is not concerned about his own happiness ; he has not time 
 to consider himself; he has not time to put that selfish ques- 
 tion which the disciples put to their Lord when they were 
 but half baptized with His spirit, " Lo, we have left all and 
 followed Thee, what shall we have therefore ?" 
 
 In conclusion we observe, there are two things which are 
 to be learned from this passage. The first is this, that hap- 
 piness is not our end and aim. It has been said, and has 
 since been repeated as frequently as if it were an indisputa- 
 ble axiom, that "happiness is our being's end and aim." 
 Brethren, happiness is not our being's end and aim. The 
 Christian's aim is perfection, not happiness, and every one of 
 the sons of God must have something of that spirit which 
 marked their Master ; that holy sadness, that peculiar unrest, 
 that high and lofty melancholy which belongs to a spirit 
 which strives after heights to which it can never attain. 
 
 23* 
 
538 . . The Christian Aim and Motive, 
 
 The second thing we have to learn is this, that on this 
 earth there can be no rest for man. By rest we mean the at- 
 tainment of a state beyond which there can be no change. 
 Politically, morally, spiritually, there can be no rest for man 
 here. In one country alone has that system been fully car- 
 ried out which, conservative of the past, excludes all desire 
 of progress and improvement for the future : but it is not to 
 China that we should look for the perfection of human socie- 
 ty. There is one ecclesiastical system which carries out the 
 same spirit, looking rather to the Church of the past than to 
 the Church of the future ; but it is not in the Romish that 
 we shall find the model of a Christian Church. In Paradise 
 it may have been right to be at rest, to desire no change ; but 
 ever since the Fall, every system that tends to check the on- 
 w"ard progress of mankind is fatally, radically, curelessly 
 wrong. The motto on every Christian banner is " Forward.'* 
 There is no resting in the present, no satisfaction in the past. 
 
 The last thing we learn from this is the impossibility of 
 obtaining that of which some men speak the satisfaction of 
 a good conscience. Some men write and- speak as if the dif- 
 ference between the Christian and the worldly man was this, 
 that in the one conscience is a self-reproaching hell, and in 
 the other a self-congratulating heaven. Oh, brethren, is this 
 the fact ? Think you that the Christian goes home at night 
 counting up the nobje deeds done during the day, saying to 
 himself, " Well done, good and faithful servant ?" Brethren, 
 that habit of looking forward to the future prevents all pride 
 and self-righteousness, and makes our best and only rest and 
 satisfaction to consist in contemplating the future which is 
 bringing us nearer and nearer home. Our motto, therefore, 
 must be that striking one of the Apostle Paul, " Forgetting 
 those things which are behind, and reaching forth to those 
 things which are before, I press towards the mark for th? 
 prize, of the high calling of God in Christ Jesua." 
 
Christian Casuistry. 539 
 
 XIII. 
 CHRISTIAN CASUISTRY. 
 
 "Is any man called being circumcised ? let him not become uncircumciaed, 
 Is any called in uncircumcision ? let him not be circumcised. Circumcision 
 is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the command- 
 ments of God. Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was 
 called. Art thou called being a servant ? care not for it : but if thou mayest 
 be made free, use it rather. For he that is called in the Lord, being a serv- 
 ant, is the Lord's freeman : likewise also he that is called, being free, is 
 Christ's servant. Ye are bought with a price ; be not ye the servants of men. 
 Brethren, let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God.' 
 1 Cor. vii. 18-24. 
 
 THE whole of these seven chapters of the First Epistle of 
 the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, is occupied with ques- 
 tions of Christian casuistry. In the application of the prin- 
 ciples of Christianity to the varying circumstances of life in- 
 numerable difficulties had arisen, and the Corinthians upon 
 these difficulties had put certain questions to the Apostle 
 Paul. This seventh chapter contains the apostle's answer to 
 many of these questions. There are, however, two great di- 
 visions into which these answers generally fall. St. Paul 
 makes a distinction between those things which he speaks 
 by commandment and those which he speaks only by per- 
 mission ; there is a distinction between wha^ he says as from 
 the Lord, and what only from himself; between that which 
 he speaks to them as being taught of God, and that which 
 he speaks only as a servant, " called of the Lord and faith- 
 ful." 
 
 It is manifestly plain that there are many questions in which 
 right and wrong are not variable, but indissoluble and fixed ; 
 while there are questions, on the other hand, where these 
 terms are not fixed, but variable, fluctuating, altering, de- 
 pendent upon circumstances. As, for instance, those in which 
 the apostle teaches in the present chapter the several duties 
 and advantages of marriage and celibacy. There may be cir- 
 cumstances in which it is the duty of a Christian man to be 
 married, there are others in which it may be his duty to re- 
 main unmarried. For instance, in the case of a missionary 
 it may be right to be married rather than unmarried ; on the 
 other hand, in the case of a pauper, not having the where- 
 withal to bring up and maintain a family, it may be propet 
 
540 Christian Casuistry. 
 
 to remain unmarried. You will observe, however, that no 
 fixed law can be laid down upon this subject. We can not 
 say marriage is a Christian duty ; nor celibacy is a Christian 
 duty ; nor that it is in every case the duty of a missionary to 
 be married, or of a pauper to be unmarried. All these things 
 must vary according to circumstances, and the duty must be 
 stated not universally, but with reference to those circum- 
 stances. 
 
 These, therefore, are questions of casuistry, which depend 
 upon the particular case : from which word the term " casu- 
 istry " is derived. On these points the apostle speaks not 
 by commandment, but by permission : not as speaking by 
 God's command, but as having the Spirit of God. A dis- 
 tinction has sometimes beer drawn with reference to this 
 chapter between that whicn tne apostle speaks by inspira- 
 tion, and what he speaks as a man uninspired. The distinc- 
 tion, however, is an altogether false one, and beside the ques- 
 tion. For the real distinction is not between the inspired 
 and uninspired, but between a decision in matters of Chris- 
 tian duty and advice in matters of Christian prudence. It is 
 abundantly evident that God can not give advice ; He can 
 only issue a command. God can not say, " It is better to do 
 this ;" His perfections demand something absolute : " Thou 
 shalt do this ; tliou shall not do this." Whensoever, there- 
 fore, we come to advice, there is introduced the human ele- 
 ment rather than the Divine. In all such cases, therefore, as 
 are dependent upon circumstances the apostle speaks not as 
 inspired, but as uninspired ; as one whose judgment we have 
 no right to find" fault with or to cavil at, who lays down 
 what is a matter of Christian prudence, and not a bounden 
 and universal duty. The matter of the present discourse 
 will take in various verses in this chapter from the tenth 
 to the twenty-fourth verse leaving part of the commence 
 ment and the conclusion for our consideration, if God permit, 
 next Sunday. 
 
 There are three main questions on which the apostle here 
 gives his inspired decision. The first decision is concerning 
 the sanctity of the marriage-bond between two Christians. 
 His verdict is given in the tenth verse : " Unto the married 
 I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart 
 from her husband." He lays down this principle, that the 
 union is an indissoluble one. 
 
 Upon such a subject, Christian brethren, before a mixed 
 congregation, it is manifestly evident that we can only speak 
 in general terms. It will be sufficient to say that marriage 
 is of all earthly unions almost the only one permitting of no 
 
Christian Casuistry. 541 
 
 change but that of death. It is that engagement in which 
 man exerts his most awful and solemn power the power of 
 responsibility which belongs to him as one that shall give 
 account the power of abnegating the right to change the 
 power of parting with his freedom the power of doing that 
 which in this world can never be reversed. And yet it is 
 perhaps that relationship which is spoken of most frivolously, 
 and entered into most carelessly and most w r antonly. It is 
 not a union merely between two creatures, it is a union 
 between two spirits ; and the intention of that bond is to 
 perfect the nature of both, by supplementing their deficien- 
 cies with the force of contrast, giving to each sex those ex- 
 cellencies in which it is naturally deficient ; to the one 
 strength of character and firmness of moral will, to the other 
 sympathy, meekness, tenderness. And just so solemn, and 
 just so glorious as these ends are for which the union was 
 contemprated and intended, just so terrible are the conse- 
 quences if it be perverted and abused. Eor there is no 
 earthly relationship w r hich has so much power to ennoble 
 and to exalt. Very strong language does the apostle use in 
 this chapter respecting it: "What knowest thou, oh wife, 
 whether thou shalt save thy husband ? or how knowest thou, 
 oh man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?" The very pow- 
 er of saving belongs to this relationship. And on the other 
 hand, there is no earthly relationship which has so much power 
 to wreck and ruin the soul. For there are two rocks in this 
 world of ours on which the soul must either anchor or be 
 wrecked. The one is God ; the other is the sex opposite 
 to itself. The one is the " Rock of Ages," on which if the 
 human soul anchors it lives the blessed life of faith; against 
 which if the soul be dashed and broken, there ensues the 
 wreck of Atheism the worst ruin of the soul. The other 
 rock is of another character. Blessed is the man, blessed is 
 the woman, whose life-experience has taught a confiding be- 
 lief in the excellencies of the sex opposite to their own a 
 blessedness second only to the blessedness of salvation. 
 And the ruin in the other case is second only to the ruin of 
 everlasting perdition the same wreck and ruin of the soul. 
 
 These, then, are the two tremendous alternatives : on the 
 one hand the possibility of securing, in all sympathy and 
 tenderness, the laying of that step on which man rises to- 
 wards his perfection ; on the other hand the blight of all 
 sympathy, to be dragged down to earth, and forced to be 
 come frivolous and commonplace ; to lose all zest and ear 
 nestness in life, to have heart and life degraded by mean and 
 perpetually-recurring sources of disagreement ; these are thu 
 
542 Christian Casuistry. 
 
 two alternatives, and it is the worst of these alternatives 
 which the young risk when they form an inconsiderate union 
 excusably indeed, because through inexperience; and it is 
 the worst of these alternatives which parents risk not ex- 
 cusably but inexcusably when they bring up their children 
 with no higher view of what that tie is, than the merely pru- 
 dential one of a rich and honorable marriage. 
 
 The second decision which the apostle makes respecting 
 another of the questions proposed to him by the Corinthians 
 is, as to the sanctity of the marriage bond between a Chris- 
 tian and one who is a heathen. When Christianity first 
 entered into our world, and was little understood, it seemed 
 to threaten the dislocation and alteration of all existing rela- 
 tionships. Many difficulties arose ; such, for instance, as the 
 one here started. When of two heathen parties only one 
 was converted to Christianity, the question arose, What in 
 this case is the duty of the Christian ? Is not the duty sepa- 
 ration ? Is not the marriage in itself null and void ? as if it 
 were a union between one dead and one living? And that 
 perpetual contact with a heathen, and therefore an enemy of 
 God, is not that, in a relation so close and intimate, perpetual 
 defilement ? The apostle decides this with his usual inspired 
 wisdom. He decides that the marriage bond is sacred still. 
 Diversities of religious opinion, even the farthest and widest 
 diversity, can not sanction separation. And so he decides in 
 the 13th verse, "The woman which hath' a husband that be- 
 lieveth not, if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not 
 leave him." And, " If any brother hath a wife that believeth 
 not, and she be pleased to dwell with him, let him not put 
 her away" (ver. 12). 
 
 Now for us in the present day the decision on this point 
 is not of so much importance as the reason which is adduced 
 in support of it. The proof which the apostle gives of the 
 sanctity of the marriage is exceedingly remarkable. Practi- 
 cally it amounts to this : If this were no marriage, but an un- 
 hallowed alliance, it would follow as a necessary consequence 
 that the offspring could not be reckoned in any sense as the 
 children of God ; but, on the other hand, it is the instinctive, 
 unwavering conviction of every Christian parent, united 
 though he or she may be to a heathen, "My child is a child 
 of God," or, in the Jewish form of expression, " My child is 
 dean" So the apostle says, " The unbelieving husband is 
 sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified 
 by the husband else were your children unclean ; but now 
 they are holy," for it follows if the children are holy in this 
 sense of dedicated to God, and are capable of Christian rela 
 
Christian Casuistry. 543 
 
 tionship, then the marriage relation was not unhallowed, but 
 sacred an,d indissoluble. 
 
 The value of this argument in the present day depends on 
 its relation to baptism. The great question we are deciding 
 in the present day may be reduced to a very few words. 
 This question the baptismal question is this : whether we 
 are baptized because we are the children of God, or, whether 
 we are the children of God because we are baptized; wheth- 
 er, in other words, when the Catechism of the Church of Eng- 
 land says that by baptism we are " made the children of 
 God," we are to understand thereby that we are made some- 
 thing which we were not before magically and mysterious- 
 ly changed ; or, whether we are to understand that we are 
 made the children of God by baptism in the same sense that 
 a sovereign is made a sovereign by coronation. Here the 
 apostle's "argument is full, decisive, and unanswerable. He 
 does not say that these children were Christian, or clean, be- 
 cause they were baptized, but they were the children of God 
 because they were the children of one Christian parent ; nay, 
 more than that, such children could scarcely ever have been 
 baptized, because, if the rite met with opposition from one 
 of the parents, it would be an entire and perfect veto to the 
 possibility of baptism. You will observe that the very fun- 
 damental idea out of which infant-baptism arises is, that the 
 impression produced upon the mind and character of the 
 child by the Christian parent makes the child one of a Chris- 
 tian community ; and therefore, as Peter argued that Cor- 
 nelius had received the Holy Ghost, and so was to be bap- 
 tized, just in the same way, as they are adopted into the 
 Christian family and receive a Christian impression, the chil- 
 dren of Christian parents are also to be baptized. 
 
 Observe, also, the important truth which comes out collater- 
 ally from this argument namely, the sacredness of the im- 
 pression which arises from the close connection between pa- 
 rent and child. Stronger far than education going on before 
 education can commence, possibly from the very first mo- 
 ments of consciousness, we begin to impress ourselves on our 
 children. Our character, voice, features, qualities modifiod, 
 no doubt, by entering into a new human being, and into a 
 different organization are impressed upon our children. 
 Not the inculcation of opinions, but much rather the forma- 
 tion of principles, and of the tone of character, the derivation 
 of qualities. Physiologists tell us of the derivation of the 
 mental qualities from the father, and of the moral from the 
 mother. But be this as it may, there is scarcely one hero 
 who can not trace back his present religious character to 
 
544 Christian Casuistry. 
 
 some impression, in early life, from one or other of his parents 
 a tone, a look, a word, a habit, or even, it may be, a bit- 
 ter, miserable exclamation of remorse. 
 
 The third decision which the apostle gives, the third prin- 
 ciple which he lays down, is but the development of the last. 
 Christianity, he says, does not interfere with existing rela- 
 tionships. First he lays down the principle, and then unfolds 
 the principle in two ways, ecclesiastically and civilly. The 
 principle he lays down in almost every variety of form. In 
 the 1 7th verse, " As God hath distributed to every man, as 
 the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk." In the 
 20th verse, " Let every man abide in the same calling where- 
 in he was called." In the 24th verse, " Brethren, let every 
 man wherein he is called therein abide with God." This is 
 the principle. Christianity was not to interfere with exist- 
 ing relationships ; Christian men were to remain in those re- 
 lationships in which they were, and in them to develop the 
 inward spirituality of the Christian life. Then he applies 
 this principle in two ways. First of all, ecclesiastically. 
 With respect to their church, or ecclesiastical affairs, he says 
 " Is any man called being circumcised ? Let him not be- 
 come uncircumcised. Is any man in uncircumcision ? Let 
 him not be circumcised." In other words, the Jews, after 
 their conversion, were to continue Jews, if they would. 
 Christianity required no change in these outward things, for 
 it was not in these that the depth and reality oi the kingdom 
 of Christ consisted. So the Apostle Paul took Timothy and 
 circumcised him ; so also he used all the Jewish customs 
 with which he was familiar, and performed a vow, as related 
 in the Acts of the Apostles, ' having shorn his head in Cen- 
 chrea ; for he had a vow." It was not his opinion that it 
 was the duty of a Christian to overthrow the Jewish system. 
 He knew that the Jewish system could not last, but what he 
 wanted was to vitalize the system to throw into it not a 
 Jewish, but a Christian feeling; and so doing, he might con- 
 tinue in it so long as it would hold together. And so it was, 
 no doubt, with all the other apostles. We have no evidence 
 that before the destruction of the Jewish polity there was 
 any attempt made by them to overthrow the Jewish external 
 religion. They kept the Jewish sabbath, and observed the 
 Jewish ritual. One of them, James, the Christian bishop of 
 Jerusalem, though a Christian, was even among the Jews re- 
 markable and honorable for the regularity with which he ob- 
 served all his Jewish duties. Now let us apply this to 
 modern duties. The great desire among men no'-v appears to 
 be to alter institutions, to have perfect institutions, as if they 
 
Christian Casuistry. 545 
 
 would make perfect men. Mark the difference between this 
 feeling and that of the apostle, " Let every man abide in the 
 same calling wherein he was called." We are called to be 
 members of the Church of England what is our duty now ? 
 What would Paul have done ? Is this our duty to put such 
 questions to ourselves as these : " Is there any single, par- 
 ticular sentence in the service of my Church with which I do 
 not entirely agree? Is there any single ceremony with 
 which my whole soul does not go along ? If so, then is it my 
 duty to leave it at once?" No, my brethren, all that we 
 have to do is to say, "All our existing institutions are those 
 under which God has placed us, under which we are to mould 
 our lives according to His will." It is our duty to vitalize 
 our forms, to throw into them a holier, deeper meaning. My 
 Christian brethren, surely no man will get true rest, true re- 
 pose for his soul, in these days of controversy, until he has 
 learned the wise significance of these wise words " Let ev- 
 ery man abide in the same calling wherein he was called." 
 He will but gain unrest, he will but disquiet himself, if he 
 says, " I am sinning by continuing in this imperfect system," 
 if he considers it his duty to change his calling if his opinions 
 do not agree in every particular and special point with the 
 system under which God has placed him. 
 
 Lastly, the apostle applies this principle civilly. And you 
 will observe he applies it to that civil relationship which of 
 all others was the most difficult to harmonize with Chris- 
 tianity slavery. " Art thou called," he says, " being a 
 servant ? Care not for it." Now, in considering this part 
 of the subject we should carry along with us these two rec- 
 ollections. First, we should recollect that Christianity had 
 made much way among this particular class, the class of 
 slaves. No wonder that men cursed with slavery embraced 
 with joy a religion which was perpetually teaching the 
 worth and dignity of the human soul, and declaring that 
 rich and poor, peer and peasant, master and slave, were equal 
 in the sight of God. And yet, great as this growth was, It 
 contained within it elements of danger. It was to be feared 
 lest men, hearing forever of brotherhood and Christian equal- 
 ity, should be tempted and excited to throw off the yoke by 
 force, and compel their masters and oppressors to do them 
 right. 
 
 The other fact we are to keep in remembrance is this 
 that all this occurred in an age in which slavery had reach 
 ed its worst and most fearful form, an age in which the em- 
 perors were accustomed, not unfrequently, to feed their fish 
 with living slaves; when captives were led to fight in the 
 
546 Christian Casuistry. 
 
 amphuheatn with wild leasts or with each other, to 
 the Koman appetite lor Mood upon a Roman holiday. And 
 yet. fearful as it was. the apostle says, "ran' not" tor it. M 
 And tearful as war was in those da*ys, \\hon tho soldiers 
 came to John to bo baptised, ho did not recommend them to 
 join some "peace association," to use the inodorn tonn ; he 
 simply exhorted them to bo oontont \\ ith thoir \< .. , - 
 
 And' hence we understand the way in v>hich Christianity 
 was to work. It interferes indirootly and not directly with 
 i \.Ming institutions. No doubt it" will at length abolish 
 war and slavery, but there is not one case \\ horo wo tind 
 Christianity interfering with institutions, as such. K\ on 
 when Onesimus ran away and came to Paul, the apostlo sont 
 him baok to his master Philemon, not dissolving the connee- 
 tion botwoon them. And thon. as a eonsolation to the serv- 
 ant^ he told him of a higher fooli.ig a feeling that would 
 make him live, with the ohain and shaoklo upon his arm. 
 And so it was possible lor the Christian thon. as it is now, to 
 bo possessed ot the highest liberty even under tyranny. It 
 many times ooonrrod that Christian men found 'themselves 
 placed under an unjust and tvrannioal government, and eom- 
 pelled to pay unjust taxes. The Son of Man showed his free- 
 dom not by "refusing, but by paying them. His glorious lib- 
 erty could do so without any feeling of degradation ; obey- 
 ing the laws, not because they wore right, but luvauso insti- 
 tut ions are to be upheld with cordiality. 
 
 One thing in conclusion we have to observe. It is possi 
 ble from all this to draw a most inaccurate conclusion. 
 Some men have spoken of Christianity as if it was entirely 
 indifferent about liberty and all public questions as if with 
 such things as those Christianity did not concern itself at 
 alL This indifference is not to be found in the Apostle 
 Paul. While he asserts that inward liberty is the only true 
 liberty, he still goes on to say, " If thou mayost be free, use it 
 rather." For he well know that although it was possible for 
 a man to be a high and lofty Christian even though he v\ 
 a slave, yet it was not probable that he would be so. Ont- 
 K*:u-d institutions are necessary partly to make a perfect 
 Christian character; and thus Christianity works from what 
 is internal to what is external. It gave to the slave the feel- 
 ing of his dignity as a man, at the same time it gave to the 
 Christian master a new view of his relation to his slave, and 
 taught him to regard him " not now as a servant, but above 
 * ^orvant, a brother beloved." And so by degrees slavery 
 passed into freed servitude, and freed servitude, under God's 
 blessing, may pass into something else. 
 
Marriage and Celibacy. 547 
 
 There a*e two mistake* which are often made upon this 
 object : one is, the error of supposing that outward institu- 
 tion* are unnecessary for the formation of character, and the 
 other, that of supposing that they are off that is required to 
 form the human soul If we understand rightly the duty of 
 a Christian man, it is this : to make his brethren free inward- 
 ly and outwardly ; first inwardly, so that they may become 
 masters of themselves, rulers of their passions, Laving the 
 power of self-rule and self-control ; and then outwardly, so 
 that there may be every power and opportunity of develop- 
 ing the inward life ; in the language of the prophet, " To 
 break the rod of the oppressor and let the oppressed go 
 free." 
 
 XIV. 
 MARRIAGE AND CELIBACY. 
 
 Bnt AM I j, brethren, the time is Aort: fe remained), that both the? 
 ha*ewmDea*tiioa**ffcerhad<e; and the? that weep, as thoagh 
 
 ^ nm **& m *** t * 
 
 fast bar, as though ther possessed not; and they that Me due world, as not 
 basingit: fr die iaslira of diu world passe* away." I Cor. THL 29-3L 
 
 THE subject of our exposition last Sunday was an essen- 
 tial portion of this chapter. It is our duty to examine now 
 the former and the latter portions of it. These portions are 
 occupied entirely with the inspired apostolic decision upon 
 this one question the comparative advantages and merits 
 of celibacy and marriage. - , One preliminary question, how- 
 ever, is to be discussed. How came it that such a question 
 should be put at all to the apostle ? 
 
 In the church at Corinth there were two different sections 
 of society ; first there were those who had been introduced 
 into the church through Judaism, and afterwards those who 
 had been converted from different forms of heathenism. 
 Now it is well known, that it was the tendency of Judaism 
 highly to venerate the marriage state, and just in the same 
 proportion to disparage that of celibacy, and to place those 
 who led a single life under a stigma and disgrace. Those 
 converts, therefore, entered into the Church of Christ carry- 
 ing with them their old Jewish prejudices. On the other 
 hand, many who had entered into the Christian Church had 
 been converted to Christianity from different forms of hea- 
 thenism. Among these prevailed a tendency to the belief 
 (which originated primarily in the Oriental schools of philo* 
 
548 Marriage and Celibacy. 
 
 ophy) that the highest virtue consisted in the denial of all 
 natural inclinations, and the suppression of all natural de- 
 sires ; and looking upon marriage on one side only, and that 
 the lowest, they were tempted to consider it as low, earthly, 
 carnal, and sensual. It was at this time that Christianity 
 entered into the world, and while it added fresh dignity and 
 significance to the marriage relationship, it at the same time 
 shed a splendor and a glory upon the other state. The vir- 
 ginity of the mother of Our Lord the solitary life of John 
 the Baptist the pure and solitary youth of Christ Himself 
 had thrown upon celibacy a meaning and dignity which it 
 did not possess before. No marvel, therefore, that to men so 
 educated, and but half prepared for Christianity, practices 
 like these should have become exaggerations ; for it rarely 
 happens that any right ideas can be given to the world 
 without suffering exaggeration. Human nature progresses, 
 the human mind goes on ; but it is rarely in a straight line, 
 almost always through the medium of reaction, rebounding 
 from extremes which produce contrary extremes. So it was 
 in the Church of Corinth. There were two opposite parties 
 holding views diametrically opposed to one another one 
 honoring the married and depreciating the unmarried life 
 the other attributing peculiar dignity and sanctity to celi- 
 bacy, and looking down with contempt upon the married 
 Christian state. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to remind ourselves that this di- 
 versity of sentiment has existed in the Church of Christ in 
 almost all ages. For example, in the early ages, in almost 
 all the writings of the Fathers we have exaggerated descrip- 
 tions of the dignity and glory of the state of celibacy. They 
 speak as if the marriage state was low, carnal, and worldly ; 
 and the other the only one in which it is possible to attain 
 to the higher spiritual life the one the natural state, fit for 
 man, the other the angelic, fit for angels. But ordinarily 
 among men in general, in every age, the state of single life 
 has been looked down upon and contemned. And then 
 there comes to the parties who are so circumstanced a cer- 
 tain sense of shame, and along with this a disposition to- 
 wards calumny and slander. Let us endeavor to understand 
 the wise, inspired decision which the Apostle Paul pro- 
 nounced upon this subject. He does not decide, as we 
 might have been led to suppose he would, from his own pe- 
 culiarity of disposition, upon one side only ; but raises into 
 relief the advantages and excellencies of both. He says that 
 neither state has in itself any intrinsic merit neither is in 
 itself superior to the other. "I suppose, then," he says, * that 
 
Marriage and Celibacy. 549 
 
 this is good for the present distress. Art thou bound unto a 
 wife ? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife ? 
 Seek not a wife. But and if thou many, thou hast not sin- 
 ned : and if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned. Neverthe- 
 less, such shall have trouble in the flesh : but I spare you." 
 That is, I will spare you this trouble, in recommending a sin- 
 gle, solitary life. You will observe that in these words he 
 attributes no intrinsic merit or dignity to either celibacy or 
 marriage. The comparative advantages of these two states 
 he decides with reference to two considerations ; first of all 
 with respect to their comparative power in raising the char- 
 acter of the individual, and afterwards with reference to the 
 opportunities which each respectively gives for the service 
 of God. 
 
 I. With respect to the single life, he tells us that he had 
 his own proper gift from God ; in other words, he was one 
 of those rare characters who have the power of living with- 
 out personal sympathy. The feelings and affections of the 
 Apostle Paul were of a strange and rare character tending 
 to expansiveness rather than concentration. Those sympa- 
 thies which ordinary men expend upon a few, he extended 
 to many. The members of the churches which he had found- 
 ed at Corinth, and Ephesus, and Colosse, and Philippi, were 
 to him as children ; and he threw upon them all that sym- 
 pathy and affection which other men throw upon their own 
 domestic circle. To a man so trained and educated, the sin- 
 gle life gave opportunities of serving God which the marriage 
 state could not give. St. Paul had risen at once to that phi- 
 lanthropy that expansive benevolence, which most other 
 men only attain by slow degrees, and this was made, by 
 God's blessing, a means of serving his cause. However we 
 may sneer at the monastic system of the Church of Rome, it 
 is unquestionable that many great works have been done by 
 the monks which could not have been performed by men 
 who had entered into the marriage relationship. Such ex- 
 amples of heroic Christian effort as are seen in the lives of 
 St. Bernard, of Francis Xavier, and many others, are scarcely 
 ever to be found except in the single state. The forlorn 
 hope in battle, as well as in the cause of Christianity, must 
 consist of men who have no domestic relationships to divide 
 their devotion, who will leave no wife nor children to mourn 
 over their loss. 
 
 Let this great truth bring its improvement to those who, 
 either of their own choice or by the force of circumstances, 
 are destined hereafter to live a single life on earth ; and, in- 
 
550 Marriage and Celibacy. 
 
 stead of yielding to that feeling so common among mankind 
 the feeling of envy at another's happiness ; instead of be- 
 coming gloomy, and- bitter, and censorious, let them remem- 
 ber what the Bible has to tell of the deep significance of the 
 Virgin Mary's life let them reflect upon the snares and dif- 
 ficulties from which they are saved let them consider how 
 much more time and money they can give to God that they 
 are called to the great work of serving causes, of entering 
 into public questions, while others spend their time and tal- 
 ents only upon themselves. The state of single life, however 
 we may be tempted to think lightly of it, is a state that has 
 peculiar opportunities of deep blessedness. 
 
 On the other hand, the Apostle Paul brings forward, into 
 strong relief, the blessedness and advantages of the marriage 
 state. He tells us that it is a type of the union between the 
 Redeemer and the Church. But as this belongs to another 
 part of the subject, we shall not enter into it now. But we 
 observe, that men in general must have their sympathies 
 drawn out step by step, little by little. We do not rise to 
 philanthropy all at once. We begin with personal, domestic, 
 particular affections. And not only is it true that rarely can 
 any man have the whole of his love drawn out except through 
 this domestic state, but, also, it is to be borne in mind that 
 those who have entered into this relationship have also their 
 own peculiar advantages. It is true that in the marriage- 
 life, interrupted as it is by daily cares and small trifles, those 
 works of Christian usefulness can .not be so continuously car- 
 ried on as in the other. But is there not a deep meaning to 
 be learned from the old expression that celibacy is an an- 
 gelic state ? that it is preternatural, and not natural ? that 
 the goodness which is induced by it is not, so to speak, the, 
 natural goodness of humanity, but such a goodness as God 
 scarcely intended ? 
 
 Who of us can not recollect a period of his history when 
 all his time was devoted to the cause of Christ ; when all 
 his money was given to the service of God ; and \vhen we 
 were tempted to look down upon those who were less ardent 
 than ourselves, as if they were not Christians? But now the 
 difficulties of life have come upon us ; we have become in- 
 volved in the trifles and the smallness of social domestic ex- 
 istence ; and these have made us less devoted perhaps, less 
 preternatural, less angelic but more human, better fitted to 
 enter into the daily cares and small difficulties of our ordi- 
 nary humanity. And this has been represented to us by two 
 freat lives one human, the other Divine one, the life of 
 ohn the Baptist, and the other, of Jesus Christ. In both 
 
Marriage and Celibacy. 551 
 
 these cases is verified the saying, that "Wisdom is justified 
 of all her children." Those who are wisdom's children the 
 truly wise will recognize an even wisdom in both these 
 lives ; they will see that there- are cases in which a solitary 
 life is to be chosen for the sake of God; while there are 
 other cases in which a social life becomes our bounden dutjr. 
 But it should be specially observed here that that life 
 which has been given to us as a specimen of life for all, was 
 a social, a human life. Christ did not refuse to mix with the 
 common joys and common sorrows of humanity. He was 
 present at the marriage-feast, and by the bier of the widow's 
 son. This, of the two lives, was the one which, because it was 
 the most human, was the most Divine ; the most rare, the 
 most difficult, the most natural therefore the most Christ- 
 like. 
 
 II. Let us notice, in the second place, the principle upon 
 which the apostle founds this decision. It is given in the 
 text " This I say, brethren, the time is short : it remaineth 
 that both they that have wives be as though they had none," 
 " for the fashion of this world passeth away." Now observe 
 here, I pray you, the deep wisdom of this apostolic decision. 
 In point of fact it comes to this : Christianity is a spirit, 
 not a law ; it is a set of principles, not a set of rules ; it is 
 not a saying to us, You shall do this, you shall not do that ; 
 you shall use this particular dress, you shall not use that ; 
 you shall lead, you shall not lead a married life. Christianity 
 consists of principles, but the application of those principles 
 is left to every man's individual conscience. With respect 
 not only to this particular case, but to all the questions 
 which had been brought before him, the apostle applies the 
 same principle ; the cases upon which he decided were many 
 and various, but the large, broad principle of his decision re- 
 mains the same in all. You may marry, and you have not 
 sinned ; you may remain unmarried, and you do not sin ; 
 if you are invited to a heathen feast, you may go, or you 
 may abstain from going ; you may remain a slave, or you 
 may become free ; in these things Christianity does not con- 
 sist. But what it does demand is this : that whether mar- 
 ried or unmarried, whether a slave or free, in sorrow or in 
 joy, you are to live in a spirit higher and loftier than that 
 of the world. 
 
 The apostle gives us in the text two motives for this 
 Christian unworldliness. The first motive which he lays 
 down is this "The time is short." You will observe how 
 frequently, in the course of his remarks upon the questions 
 
552 Marriage and Celibacy. 
 
 proposed to him, the apostle turns, as it were, entirely away 
 from the subject, as if worn out and wearied by the com- 
 paratively trivial character of the questions as if this 
 balancing of one earthly condition or advantage with an- 
 other were but a solemn trifling compared with eternal 
 things. And so here he seems to turn away from the ques- 
 tion before him, and speaks of the shortness of time " The 
 time is short !" 
 
 Time is short in reference to two things. First, it is short 
 in reference to the person who regards it. That mysterious 
 thing time, is a matter of sensation, and not a reality ; a 
 modification merely of our own consciousness, and not actual 
 existence ; depending upon the flight of ideas long to one, 
 short to another. The span granted to the butterfly, the 
 child of a single summer, may be long ; that which is given 
 to the cedar of Lebanon may be short. The shortness of 
 time, therefore, is entirely relative belonging to us not to 
 God. Time is short in reference to existence, whether you 
 look at it before or after. Time past seems nothing ; time 
 to come always seems long. We say this chiefly for the 
 sake of the young. To them fifty or sixty years seems a 
 treasure inexhaustible. But, my young brethren, ask the 
 old man, trembling on the verge of the grave, what he 
 thinks of time and life. He will tell you that the three- 
 score years and ten, or even the hundred and twenty years 
 of Jacob, are but " few and evil." And therefore if you are 
 tempted to unbelief in respect to this question, we appeal to 
 experience experience alone can judge of its truth. 
 
 Once more : time is short with reference to its opportuni- 
 ties. For this is the emphatic meaning in the original 
 literally, " The opportunity is compressed, or shut in." 
 Brethren, time may be long, and yet the opportunity may 
 be very short. The sun in autumn may be bright and clear, 
 but the seed which has not been sown until then will not 
 vegetate. A man may have vigor and energy in manhood 
 and maturity, but the work which ought to have been done 
 in childhood and youth can not be done in old age. A chance 
 once gone in this world can never be recovered. 
 
 Brother men, have you learned the meaning of yesterday? 
 Do you rightly estimate the importance of to-day ? That 
 there are duties to be done to-day which can not be done 
 to-morrow? This it is that throws so solemn a significance 
 into your work. The time for working is short, therefore 
 begin to-day ; " for the night is coming when no man can 
 work." Time is short in reference to eternity. It was es- 
 pecially with this reference that the text was written. ID 
 
Marriage and Celibacy. 553 
 
 those clays, and even by the apostles themselves, the day 
 of the Lord's appearance and second advent seemed much 
 nearer than it was. They believed that it would occur 
 during their own lives. And with this belief came the 
 feeling which comes sometimes to all. " Oh, in comparison 
 with that vast hereafter, this little life shrivels into nothing ! 
 What is to-day worth, or its duties or its cares ?" All deep 
 minds have thought that. The thought of Time is solemn 
 and awful to all minds in proportion to their depth and 
 in proportion as the mind is superficial, the thought has 
 appeared little, and has been treated with levity. Brethren, 
 let but a mart possess himself of that thought the deep 
 thought of the brevity of time ; this thought that time is 
 short, and that eternity is long and he has learned the first 
 great secret of unworldliness. 
 
 The second motive which the apostle gives us is the 
 changing character of the external world. " The fashion of 
 this world passeth away " literally, " the scenery of this 
 world," a dramatic expression, drawn from the Grecian stage. 
 One of the deepest of modern thinkers has told us in words 
 often quoted, "All the world's a stage." And a deeper 
 thinker than he, because inspired, had said long before in 
 the similar words of the text, " The scenery of this world 
 passeth away." 
 
 There are two ways in which this is true. First, it is true 
 with respect to all the things by which we are surrounded. 
 It is only in poetry the poetry of the Psalms for example 
 that the hills are called " everlasting." Go to the side of 
 the ocean which bounds our country, and watch the tide 
 going out, bearing with it the sand which it has worn from 
 the cliffs; the very boundaries of our lanci are changing; 
 they are not the same as they were when these words were 
 written. Every day new relationships are forming around 
 us; new circumstances are calling upon us to act to act 
 manfully, firmly, decisively, and up to the occasion, remem- 
 bering that an opportunity once gone is gone forever. In- 
 dulge not in vain regrets for the past, in vainer resolves for 
 the^future act, act in the present. 
 
 Again, this is true with respect to ourselves. " The 
 fashion of this world passeth away " in us. The feelings we 
 have now are not those which we had in childhood. There 
 has passed away a glory from the earth the stars, the sun, 
 the moon, the green fields have lost their beauty and signifi- 
 cance nothing remains as it was, except their repeated 
 impressions on the mind, the impressions of time, space, 
 eternity, color, form ; these can not alter, but all besides has 
 
 24 
 
554 Marriage and Celibacy. 
 
 changed. Our very minds alter. There is no bereavement 
 so painful, no shock so terrible, but time will remove or 
 alleviate. The keenest feeling in this world time wears out 
 at last, and our minds become like old monumental tablets 
 which have lost the inscription once graven deeply upon 
 them. 
 
 In conclusion, we have to examine the nature of this 
 Christian unworldliness which is taught us in the text. The 
 principle of unworldliness is stated in the latter portion of 
 the text ; in the former part the apostle makes an applica- 
 tion of the principle to four cases of life. First, to cases of 
 domestic relationship "it remaineth that they that have 
 wives be as though they had none." Secondly, to cases of 
 sorrow "and they that weep as though they wept not." 
 Thirdly, to cases of joy " and they that rejoice as though 
 they rejoiced not." And, finally, to cases of the acquisition 
 of worldly property " and they that buy as though they 
 possessed not." Time will not allow us to go into these 
 applications ; we must confine ourselves to a brief considera- 
 tion of the principle. The principle of Christian unworldli- 
 ness, then, is this, to " use this world as not abusing it." 
 Here Christianity takes its stand in opposition to two con- 
 trary principles. The spirit of the world says, " Time is 
 short, therefore use it while you have it ; take your fill of 
 pleasure while you may." A narrow religion says, " Time is 
 short, therefore temporal things should receive no attention :- 
 do not weep, do not rejoice ; it is beneath a Christian." In 
 opposition to the narrow spirit of religion, Christianity says, 
 " Use this world ;" in opposition to the spirit of the world 
 Christianity says, "Do not abuse it." A distinct duty arises 
 from this principle to use the world. While in the world 
 we are citizens of the world : it is our duty to share its joys, 
 to take our part in its sorrows, not to shrink from its diffi- 
 culties, but to mix ourselves with its infinite opportunities. 
 So that if time be short, so far from that fact lessening their 
 dignity or importance, it infinitely increases them ; since 
 upon these depend the destinies of our eternal being. Un- 
 worldliness is this to hold things from God in the per- 
 petual conviction that they will not last ; to have the world, 
 and not to let the world have us ; to be the world's masters* 
 and not the world's slaves. 
 
The Christian Church a Family. 555 
 
 xv. 
 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH A FAMILY. 
 
 "Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is 
 named." Eph. iii. 14, 15. 
 
 IN the verses immediately before the text the Apostle 
 Paul has been speaking of what he calls a mystery that 
 is, a revealed secret. And the secret was this, that the 
 Gentiles would be " fellow-heirs and of the same body, and 
 partakers of the promise in Christ by the Gospel." It had 
 been kept secret from the former ages and generations ; it 
 was a secret which the Jew had not suspected, had not even 
 dreamt of. It appeared to him to be his duty to keep as far 
 as possible from the Gentile. Circumcision, which taught 
 him the duty of separation from the Gentile spirit and Gentile 
 practices, seemed to him to teach hatred towards Gentile 
 persons, until at length, in the good pleasure and providence 
 of God, in the fullness of time, through the instrumentality 
 of men whose hearts rather than whose intellects were in- 
 spired by God, the truth came out distinct and clear, that God 
 was the Father of the Gentiles as well as of the Jews, " for 
 the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him." 
 
 In the progress of the months, my Christian brethren, we 
 have arrived again at that period of the year in which our 
 Church calls upon us to commemorate the Epiphany, or 
 manifestation of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, and we know 
 not that in the whole range of Scripture we could find a 
 passage which more distinctly and definitely than this brings 
 before us the spirit in which it is incumbent upon us to enter 
 upon this duty, In considering this passage we shall divide 
 it into these two branches : 
 
 I. The definition which the Apostle Paul here gives of 
 the Church of Christ ; and, 
 
 II. The name by which this Church is named. 
 
 I. In the first place, let us consider the definition given by 
 the Apostle Paul of the Christian Church, taken in its en- 
 tirety. It is this, " the whole family in heaven and earth." 
 But in order to understand this fully, it will be necessary for 
 us to break it up into its different terms. 
 
 1. First of all, it is taught by this definition that the 
 
556 The Christian Church a Family. 
 
 Church of Christ is a society founded upon natural affinities 
 a "family." A family is built on affinities which are nat- 
 ural, not artificial ; it is not a combination, but a society. 
 In ancient times an association of interest combined men in 
 one guild or corporation for protecting the common persons in 
 that corporation from oppression. In modern times identity 
 of political creed or opinion has bound men together in one 
 league, in order to establish those political principles which 
 appeared to them of importance. Similarity of taste has 
 united men together in what is called an association, or a 
 society, in order by this means to attain more completely 
 the ends of that science to which they had devoted them- 
 selves. But as these have been raised artificially, so their 
 end is, inevitably, dissolution. Society passes on, and guilds 
 and corporations die ; principles are established, and leagues 
 become dissolved ; tastes change, and then the association or 
 society breaks up and comes to nothing. 
 
 It is upon another principle altogether that that which we 
 call a family, or true society, is formed. It is not built upon 
 similarity of taste, ner identity of opinion, but upon affini- 
 ties of nature. You do not choose who shall be your broth- 
 er; you can not exclude your mother or your sister ; it does 
 not depend upon choice or arbitrary opinion at all, but is 
 founded upon the eternal nature of things. And precisely 
 in the same way is the Christian Church formed upon nat- 
 ural affinity, and not upon artificial combination. " The 
 family, the whole family m heaven and earth ;" not made up 
 of those who call 'them selves brethren, but of those who are 
 brethren ; not founded merely upon the principles of com- 
 bination, but upon the principles of affinity. That is not a 
 church, or a family, or a society which is made up by men's 
 choice, as when, in the upper classes of life, men of fashion 
 unite together, selecting their associates from their own class, 
 and form what is technically called a society ; it is a com- 
 bination, if you will, but a society it is not a family it is 
 not a Church of Christ it can not be. 
 
 And, again, when the Baptists or the Independents, or any 
 other sectarians, unite themselves with men holding the same 
 faith aud entertaining the same opinions, there may be a sect, 
 a combination, a persuasion, but a Church there can not be. 
 And so, again, when the Jew in time past linked himself with 
 the Jew, with those of the same nation, th^re you have what 
 in ancient times was called Judaism, and in modern times 
 is called Hebraicism a system, a combination, but not a 
 Church. The Church rises ever out of the family. First of 
 all, in the good providence of God, there is the family, then 
 
The Christian Church a Family. 557 
 
 the tribe, *then the nation ; and then the nation merges itself 
 into humanity. And the nation which refuses to merge its 
 nationality in humanity, to lose itself in the general interests 
 of mankind, is left behind, and loses almost its religious na- 
 tionality like the Jewish people. 
 
 Such is the first principle. A man is born of the same 
 family, and is not made such by an appointment or by arbi- 
 trary choice. 
 
 2. Another thing which is taught by this definition is this, 
 that the Church of Christ is a whole made up of manifold di- 
 versities. We are told here it is " the ichole family," taking 
 into it the great and good of ages past, now in heaven ; and 
 also the struggling, the humble, and the weak now existing 
 upon earth. Here, again, the analogy holds good between 
 the Church and the family. Never more than in the family 
 is the true entirety of our nature seen. Observe how all the 
 diversities of human condition and character manifest them- 
 selves in the family. 
 
 First of all, there are the two opposite poles of masculine 
 and feminine, which contain within them the entire of our 
 humanity which together, not separately, make up the 
 whole of man. Then there are the diversities in the degrees 
 and kinds of affection. For Avhen we speak of family affec- 
 tion we must remember that it is made up of many diversi- 
 ties. There is nothing more different than the love which 
 the sister bears towards the brother, compared with that 
 which the brother bears towards the sister. The affection 
 which a man bears towards his father is quite distinct from 
 that which he feels towards his mother ; it is something 
 quite different towards his sister ; totally diverse again, to- 
 wards his brother. 
 
 And then there are diversities of character. First the ma- 
 ture wisdom and stern integrity of the father ; then the ex- 
 uberant tenderness of the mother. And then one is brave 
 and enthusiastic, another thoughtful, and another tender. 
 One is remarkable for being full of rich humor, another is 
 sad, mournful, even melancholy. Again, besides these, there 
 are diversities of condition in life. First, there is the heir, 
 sustaining the nam'e and honor of the family ; then perchance 
 the soldier, in whose career all the anxiety and solicitude of 
 the family is centred ; then the man of business, to whom 
 they look up, trusting his advice, expecting his counsel ; 
 lastly, perhaps, there is the invalid, from the very cradle 
 trembling between life and death, drawing out aH the sym- 
 pathies and anxieties of each member of the family, and so 
 uniting them all more closely, from their having one* common 
 
558 The Christian Church a Family. 
 
 point of sympathy and solicitude. Now, you will observe 
 that these are not accidental, but absolutely essential to the 
 idea of a family ; for so far as any one of them is lost, so far 
 the family is incomplete. A family made up of one sex 
 alone, all brothers and no sisters ; or in which all are devo- 
 ted to one pursuit ; or in which there is no diversity of tem- 
 per and dispositions the same monotonous repeated identity 
 a sameness in the type of character this is not a family, 
 it is only the fragment of a family. 
 
 And precisely in the same way all these diversities of 
 character and condition are necessary to constitute and com- 
 plete the idea of a Christian Church. For as in ages past it 
 was the delight of the Church to canonize one particular 
 class of virtues as for instance, purity or martyrdom so 
 now, in every age, and in every individual bosom, there is a 
 tendency to canonize, or honor, or reckon as Christian, only 
 one or two classes of Christian qualities. For example, if 
 you were to ask in the present day where you should find a 
 type of the Christian character, many in all probability 
 would point you to the man who keeps the sabbath-day, is 
 regular in his attendance upon the services of the Church, 
 who loves to hear the Christian sermon. This is a phase of 
 Christian character that which is essentially and peculiarly 
 the feminine type of religion. But is there in God's Church 
 to be found no place for that type which is rather masculine 
 than feminine? which not in litanies or in psalm-singing 
 does the will of God, but by struggling for principles, and 
 contending for the truth that life whose prayer is action, 
 whose aspiration is continual effort ? 
 
 Or again, in every age, amongst all men, in the history of 
 almost every individual, at one time or another, there has 
 been a tendency towards that which has been emphatically 
 named in modern times hero-worship leading us to an ad- 
 miration of the more singular, powerful, noble qualities of 
 humanity. And wherever this tendency to hero-worship ex- 
 ists, there will be found side by side with it a tendency to 
 undervalue and depreciate excellences of an opposite charac- 
 ter the humble, rneek, retiring qualities. But it is precisely 
 for these that the Church of Christ finds place. " Blessed 
 are the meek, blessed are the merciful, blessed are they that 
 hunger and thirst after righteousness, blessed are the poor in 
 spirit." In God's world there is a place for the wren and the 
 violet, just as truly as there is for the eagle and the rose. 
 In the Church of God there is a place and that the noblest 
 for Dorcas making garments for the poor, and for Mary 
 sitting at the feet of Jesus, just as truly as there is for Elijah 
 
The Christian Church a Family. 559 
 
 Confounding a false religion by his noble opposition, for 
 John the Baptist making a king tremble on his throne, or 
 for the Apostle Paul " compassing sea ana land " by his 
 wisdom and his heroic deeds. 
 
 Once more, there are ages as well as times in our own in- 
 dividual experience, when we set up charity as if it were the 
 one only Christian character. And wherever this tendency 
 is found there will be found at the same time, and side by 
 side with it, a tendency to admire the spurious form of char- 
 ity, which is a sentiment and not a virtue ; which can sym- 
 pathize with crime, but not with law ; which can be tender 
 to savages, but has no respect, no care for national honor. 
 And therefore does this principle of the Apostle Paul call 
 upon us to esteem also another form or type of character, and 
 the opposite one ; that which is remarkable for in which pre- 
 dominates not so much charity as justice that which was 
 $een in the warriors and prophets of old ; who, perchance, 
 Aad a more strong recoil from vice than sympathy with vir- 
 tue ; whose indignation towards that which is wrong and 
 hypocritical was more intense than their love for that which 
 is good : the material, the character, out of which the re- 
 former and the prophet, those who are called to do great 
 works on earth, are made. 
 
 The Church of Christ takes not in one individual form of 
 goodness merely, but every form of excellence that can 
 adorn humanity. Nor is this wonderful when we remem- 
 ber who He was from whom this Church was named. It 
 was He in whom centred all excellence a righteousness 
 which was entire and perfect. But when we speak of the 
 perfection of righteousness, let us remember that it is made 
 not of one exaggerated character, but of a true harmony, 
 a due proportion of all virtues united. In Him were found, 
 therefore, that tenderness towards sinners which had no 
 sympathy with sin ; that humility which could be dignified, 
 and was yet united with self-respect ; that simplicity which 
 is ever to be met with side by side with true majesty ; that 
 love which could weep over Jerusalem at the very moment 
 when He was pronouncing its doom ; that truth and justice 
 which appeared to stand as a protection to those who had 
 been oppressed, at the same time that He scathed with in- 
 dignant invective the Pharisees of the then existing Jews. 
 
 There are two, only two perfect humanities. One has ex. 
 isted already in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
 other is to be found only in the collective Church. Once, 
 only once, has God given a perfect representation of Himself, 
 " the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image 
 
560 The Christian Church a Family, 
 
 of His person." And if we ask again for a perfect human!;;/, 
 the answer is, it is not in this Church or in that Church, or 
 in this man or in that man, in this age or in that age, but. in 
 the collective blended graces, and beauties, and humanities, 
 which are found in every age, in all churches, but not in every 
 separate man. - So, at least, Paul has taught us, " Till we dtt 
 come " collectively r , not separately " in the unity of the 
 faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect 
 man " in other words, to a perfect humanity " unto the 
 measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." 
 
 3. The last thing which is taught us by this definition is, 
 that the Church of Christ is a society which is forever shifting 
 its locality and altering its forms. It is the whole church, 
 " the whole family in heaven and earth." So, then, those who 
 were on earth, and are now in heaven, are yet members of 
 the same family still. Those who had their home here, now 
 have it there. 
 
 Let us see what it is that we should learn from this doctrine. 
 It is this, that the dead are not lost to us. There is a sense 
 in which the departed are ours more than they were before. 
 There is a sense in which the Apostles Paul or John, the good 
 and great of ages past, belong to this age more than to that in 
 which they lived, but in which they were not understood ; in 
 which the commonplace and every-day part of their lives hin- 
 dered the brightness and glory and beauty of their character 
 from shining forth. So it is in the family. It is possible for 
 men to live in the same house, and partake of the same meal 
 from day to day, and from year to year, and yet remain stran- 
 gers to each other, mistaking each other's feelings, not com- 
 prehending each other's character; and it is only when the 
 Atlantic rolls between, and half a hemisphere is interposed, 
 that we learn how dear they are to us, how all our life is 
 bound up in deep anxiety with their existence. Therefore it 
 is the Christian feels that the family is not broken. Think 
 you that family can break or end ? that because the chair 
 is empty, therefore he, your child, is no more ? It may be so 
 with the coarse, the selfish, the unbelieving, the superstitious ; 
 but the eye of faith sees there only a transformation. He is 
 not there, he is risen. You see the place where he was, but 
 he has passed to heaven. ~So at least the parental heart of 
 David felt of old. " by faith and not by sight," >vhen speak- 
 ing of his infant child. "I shall go to him, but he shall not 
 return to me." 
 
 Once more, the Church of Christ is a society ever altering 
 and changing its external forms. " The whole family " the 
 Church of the patriarchs, and of ages before them ; and ve* 
 
The Christian Church a Family. 561 
 
 the fiame family. Remember, I pray you, the diversities of 
 form through which, in so many ages and generations, this 
 Church has passed. Consider the difference there was be- 
 tween the patriarchal Church of the time of Abraham and 
 Isaac, and its condition under David ; or the difference be- 
 tween the Church so existing and its state in the days of the 
 apostles ; and the marvellous difference between that and the 
 same Church four or five centuries later ; or, once again, the 
 difference between that, externally one, and the Church as it 
 exists in the present day, broken into so many fragments. 
 Yet diversified as these states may bo, they are not more so 
 than the various stages of a family. 
 
 There is a time when the children are all 'in one room, 
 around their mother's knee. Then comes a time, still farther 
 on, when the first separation takes place, and some are leav- 
 ing their home to prepare for after-life. Afterwards, when 
 all in their different professions, trades or occupations, are 
 separate. At last comes the time when some are gone. And, 
 perchance, the two survivors meet at last an old, gray-hair- 
 ed man, and a weak, worn-out woman to mourn over the 
 last graves of a household. Christian brethren, which of 
 these is the right form the true, external pattern of a fam- 
 ily ? Say we not truly, it remains the same under all out- 
 ward mutations ? We must think of this, or else we may lose 
 heart in our work. Conceive, for instance, the feelings of a 
 pious Jew, when Christianity entered this world ; when all his 
 religious system was broken up the Temple-service brought 
 to a violent end ; when that polity which he thought was to 
 redeem and ennoble the world was cast aside as a broken 
 and useless thing. Must they not have been as gloomy and 
 as dreary as those of the disciples, when He was dead who 
 they " trusted should have redeemed Israel ?" In both cases 
 the body was gone or was altered the spirit had arisen. 
 
 And precisely so it is with our fears and unbelieving ap- 
 prehensions now. Institutions pass churches alter old 
 forms change and high-minded and good men cling to 
 these as if they were the only things by which God could 
 regenerate the world. Christianity appears to some men to 
 be effete and worn out. Men who can look back upon the 
 times of Venn, and Newton, and Scott comparing the de- 
 generacy of their descendants with the men of those days 
 lose heart as if "all things were going wrong. " Things are 
 not," they say, " as they were in -our younger days." No, 
 rny Christian brethren, things are not as they then were ; 
 but the Christian cause lives on not in the successors of 
 euch men as those ; the outward form is altered, but th 
 
 24* 
 
562 The Christian Church a Family. 
 
 spirit is elsewhere, is risen risen just as truly as the spirit 
 of the highest Judaism rose again in Christianity. And to 
 mourn over old superstitions and effete creeds is just as un- 
 wise as is the grief of the mother mourning over the form 
 which was once her child. She can not separate her affec- 
 tion from that form those hands, those limbs, those features 
 are they not her child ? The true answer is, her child is 
 aot there. It is only the form of her child. And it is as un- 
 wise to mourn over the decay of those institutions the 
 change of human forms as it was unwise in Jonah to mourn 
 with that passionate sorrow over the decay of the gourd 
 which had sheltered him from the heat of the noontide sun. 
 A worm had' eaten the root of the gourd, and it was gone. 
 But He who made the gourd the shelter to the weary the 
 shadow of those who are oppressed by the noontide heat of 
 life lived on : Jonah's God. And so, brethren, all things 
 change all things outward change and alter; but the God 
 of the Church lives on. The Church of God remains un- 
 der fresh forms the one, holy, entire family in heaven and 
 earth. 
 
 II. Pass we on now, in the second place, to consider the 
 name by which this Church is named. " Our Lord Jesus 
 Christ," the Apostle says, "of whom the whole family in 
 heaven and earth is named." 
 
 Now, every one familiar with the Jewish modes of thought 
 and expression will allow here that name is but another 
 word to express being, actuality, and existence. So when 
 Jacob desired to know the character and nature of Jehovah, 
 he said "Tell me now, I beseech thee, thy name" When 
 the Apostle here says, " Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the 
 whole family in heaven and earth is named" it v is but anoth- 
 er way of saying that it is He on whom the Church depends 
 who has given it substantive existence without whom it 
 could not be at all. It is but another way of saying what he 
 has expressed elsewhere " that there is none other name 
 under heaven given among men, whereby we may be saved." 
 Let us not lose ourselves in vague generalities. Separate 
 from Christ, there is no salvation ; there can be no Christian- 
 ity. Let us understand what we mean by this. Let us 
 clearly define and enter into the meaning of the words we 
 use. When we say that our Lord Jesus Christ is He " ol 
 whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named," w r e 
 mean that the very being of the Church depends on Christ 
 that it could not be without Him. Now, the Church of 
 Christ depends upon these three things first, the recognition 
 
The Christian Church a Family. 563 
 
 of a common Father; secondly, of a common humanity; and 
 thirdly, of a common sacrifice. 
 
 1. First, the recognition of a common Father. That is the 
 sacred truth proclaimed by the Epiphany. God revealed in 
 Christ not the Father of the Jew only, but also of the 
 Gentile. The Father of a " whole family." Not the partial 
 Father loving one alone the elder but the younger son 
 besides : the outcast prodigal who had spent his living with 
 harlots and sinners, but the child still, and the child of a 
 Father's love. Our Lord taught this in His own blessed 
 prayer " Our Father ;" and as we lose the meaning of 
 that single word our, as we say my Father the Father of 
 me and of my faction of me and my fellow-believers my 
 Anglicanism or my Judaism- -be it what it may instead of 
 our Father the Father of the outcasts, the profligate, of all 
 who choose to claim a Father's love ; so we lose the meaning 
 of the lesson which the Epiphany was designed to teach, and 
 the possibility of building up a family to God. 
 
 2. The recognition of a common humanity. He from 
 whom the Church is named, took upon Him not the nature 
 merely of the noble, of kings, or of the intellectual philoso- 
 pher but of the beggar, the slave, the outcast, the infidel, 
 the sinner, and the nature of every one struggling in various 
 ways. Let us learn then, brother men, that we shall have no 
 family in God, unless we learn the deep truth of our common 
 humanity, shared in by the servant and the sinner, as well as 
 the sovereign. Without this we shall have no Church no 
 family in God. 
 
 3. Lastly, the Church of Christ proceeds oat of, and rests 
 
 upon, the belief in a common sacrifice. 
 
 ******** 
 
 There are three ways in which the human race hitherto 
 has endeavored to construct itself into a family ; first, by 
 the sword ; secondly, by an ecclesiastical system ; and third- 
 ly, by trade or commerce. First, by the sword. The Assyri- 
 an, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman, have done their 
 work in itself a most valuable and important one ; but so 
 far as the formation of mankind into a family was the object 
 aimed at, the work of the sword has done almost nothing. 
 Then there was the ecclesiastical-system the grand attempt 
 of the Church of Rome to organize all men into one family, 
 with an ecclesiastical, visible, earthly head. Being Protest- 
 ants, it is not necessary for us to state our conviction that 
 this attempt has been a signal and complete failure. We 
 now come to the system of commerce and trade. We are 
 told that that which chivalry and honor could not do which 
 
564 The Christian Church a Family, 
 
 an ecclesiastical system could not do personal interest wifi 
 do. Trade is to bind men together into one family. When 
 they feel it their interest to be one, they will be brothers. 
 Brethren, that which is built on selfishness can not stand. 
 The system of personal interest must be shivered into atoms. 
 Therefore, we, who have observed the ways of God in the 
 .past, are waiting in quiet but awful expectation until He 
 shall confound this system as He has confounded those which 
 have gone before. And it may be effected by convulsions 
 more terrible and more bloody than the world has yet seen. 
 While men are talking of peace, and of the great progress of 
 civilization, there is heard in the distance the noise of armies 
 gathering rank on rank : east and west, north and south, 
 are rolling towards us the crushing thunders of universal 
 war. 
 
 Therefore there is but one other system to be tried, and 
 that is the cross of Christ a system that is not to be built 
 upon selfishness, nor upon blood, nor upon personal interest, 
 but upon love. Love, not self the cross of Christ, and not 
 the mere working out of the ideas of individual humanity. 
 
 One word only, in conclusion. Upon this, the great truth 
 of the Epiphany, the apostle founds a prayer. He prays, 
 " For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth 
 is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches 
 of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit 
 in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by 
 faith." This manifestation of joy and good to the Gentiles 
 was, according to him, the great mystery of love. A love, 
 brighter, deeper, wider, higher than the largest human heart 
 had ever yet dreamed of. But the apostle tells us it is, after 
 all, but a glimpse of the love of God. How should we learn 
 it more ? How should we comprehend the whole meaning 
 of the Epiphany ? By sitting down to read works of theolo- 
 gy ? The Apostle Paul tells us No. You must love, in 
 order to understand love. " That ye, being rooted and 
 grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all sainte 
 what is the breadth and length, and depth and height ; and 
 to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge." 
 Brother men, one act of charity will teach us more of the 
 love of God than a thousand sermons one act of unselfish- 
 ness, of real self-denial, the putting forth of one loving feeling 
 to the outcast and " those who are out of the way," will tell 
 us more of the meaning of the Epiphany than whole volumes 
 of the wisest writers on theology. 
 
The Law of Christian Conscience. 555 
 
 XVI. 
 THE LAW OF CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE. 
 
 "Howbeit there is not in every man that knowledge: for some with con- 
 science of the idol unto this hour eat it as a thing offered unto an idol ; and 
 their conscience being weak is defiled. But meat commendeth us not to 
 God : for neither, if we eat, are we the better ; neither, if we eat not, are we 
 the worse. But take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a 
 stumblingblock to them that are weak. For if any man see fhee which hast 
 knowledge sit at meat in the idol's temple, shall not the conscience of him 
 which is weak be emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols ; 
 and through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ 
 died ? But when ye sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak 
 conscience, ye sin against Christ. Wherefore, if meat make my brother to 
 offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother 
 to offend." 1 Cor. viii. 7-13. 
 
 WE have already divided this chapter into two branches 
 the former portion of it containing the difference betweer 
 Christian knowledge and secular knowledge, and the second 
 portion containing the apostolic exposition of the law of 
 Christian conscience. The first of these we endeavored to 
 expound last Sunday, but it may be well briefly to recapitu- 
 late the principles of that discourse in a somewhat different 
 form. 
 
 Corinth, as we all know and remember, was a city built 
 on the sea-coast, having a large and free communication with 
 all foreign nations; and there was also within it, and going 
 on amongst its inhabitants, a free interchange of thought, 
 and a vivid power of communicating the philosophy and 
 truths of those days to each other. Now it is plain, that to 
 a society in such a state, and to minds so educated, the Gos- 
 pel of Christ must have presented a peculiar attraction, pre- 
 senting itself to them, as it did, as a law of Christian liberty. 
 And so in Corinth the Gospel had "free course and was 
 glorified," and was received with great joy by almost all 
 men, and by minds of all classes and all sects ; and a large 
 number of these attached themselves to the teaching of the 
 Apostle Paul as the most accredited expounder of Christiani- 
 ty the " royal law of liberty." But it seems, from what 
 we read in this epistle, that a large number of these men re- 
 ceived Christianity as a thing intellectual, gind that alone 
 and not as a thing which touched the conscience, and s waved 
 and purified the arfections. Thus this liberty became to 
 
566 The Law of Christian Conscience. 
 
 them almost all they ran into sin or went to extravagance 
 they rejoiced in their freedom from the superstitions, the 
 ignorances, and the scruples which bound their weaker 
 brethren ; but had no charity none of that intense charity 
 which characterized the Apostle Paul, for those still strug- 
 gling in the delusions and darkness from which they them- 
 selves were free. 
 
 More than that, they demanded their right, their Christian 
 liberty, of expressing their opinions in the church, merely for 
 the sake of exhibiting the Christian graces and spiritual gifts 
 which had been showered upon them so largely; until by 
 degrees those very assemblies became a lamentable exhibi- 
 tion of their own depravity, and led to numerous irregulari- 
 ties which we find severely rebuked by the Apostle Paul. 
 Their women, rejoicing in the emancipation which had been 
 given to the Christian community, laid aside the old habits 
 of attire Which had been consecrated so long by Grecian and 
 Jewish custom, and appeared with their heads uncovered jn 
 the Christian community. Still further than that, the Lord's 
 Supper exhibited an absence of all solemnity, and seemed 
 more a meeting for licentious gratification, where "one was 
 hungry, and another was drunken" a place in which earth- 
 ly drunkenness, the mere enjoyment of the appetites, had tak- 
 en the place of Christian charity towards each other. 
 
 And the same feeling this love of mere liberty liberty 
 in itself manifested itself in many other directions. Hold- 
 ing by this freedom, their philosophy taught that the body, 
 that is, the flesh, was the only cause of sin ; that the soul was 
 holy and pure ; and that therefore, to be free from the body 
 would be entire, perfect, Christian emancipation. And so 
 came in that strange, wrong doctrine, exhibited in Corinth, 
 where immortality was taught separate from, and in opposi- 
 tion to, the doctrine of the resurrection. And afterwards 
 they went on with their conclusions about liberty, to main- 
 tain that the body, justified by the sacrifice of Christ, was no 
 longer capable of sin ; and that in the evil which was done 
 by the body the soul had taken no part. And therefore sin 
 was to them but as a name, from which a Christian conscience 
 was to be freed altogether. So that when one of their num- 
 ber had fallen into grievous sin, and had committed fornica- 
 tion, " such as was not so much as named among the Gen- 
 tiles," so far from being humbled by it, they w r ere " puffed 
 up," as if they were exhibiting to the world an enlightened, 
 true, perfect Christianity separate from all prejudices. . 
 
 To such a society and to such a state of mind the Apostle 
 Paul preached, in all its length, breadth, and fullness, the 
 
The Law of Christian Conscience. 567 
 
 humbling doctrines of the cross of Christ. He taught that 
 knowledge was one thing that charity was another thing; 
 that " knowledge puffeth up, but charity buildeth up." He 
 reminded them that love was the perfection of knowledge. 
 In other words, his teaching came to this : there are two 
 kinds of knowledge; the one the knowledge of the intellect, 
 the other the knowledge of the heart. Intellectually, God 
 never can be known. He must be known by love for, "if 
 any man love God, the same is known of Him." Here, then, 
 we have arrived in another way at precisely the same con- 
 clusion at which we arrived last Sunday. Here are two 
 kinds of knowledge, secular knowledge and Christian knowl 
 edge ; and Christian knowledge is this to know by love. 
 
 Let us now consider the remainder of the chapter, which 
 treats of the law of Christian conscience. You will observe 
 that it divides itself into two branches the first containing 
 an exposition of the law itself, and the second the Christian 
 applications which flow out of this exposition. 
 
 I. The way in which -the apostle expounds the law of 
 Christian conscience is this: Guilt is contracted by the 
 soul, in so far as it sins against and transgresses the law of 
 God by doing that which it believes to be wrong: not so 
 much wh^t is wrong as what appears to it to be wrong. 
 This is the doctrine distinctly laid down in the seventh and 
 eighth verses. The apostle tells the Corinthians these 
 strong-minded Corinthians that the superstitions of their 
 weaker brethren were unquestionably wrong. " Meat," he 
 says, " commendeth us not to God ; for neither if we eat are 
 we the better, neither if we eat not are we the worse." He 
 then tells them further, that " there is not in every man that 
 knowledge; for some, with conscience of the idol, eat it as a 
 thing offered unto an idol." Here, then, is an ignorant, mis- 
 taken, ill-formed conscience ; and yet he goes on to tell them 
 that this conscience, so ill-informed, yet binds the possessor 
 of it : " and their conscience beinu: weak, is defiled." For ex- 
 ample there could be no harm in eating the flesh of an ani- 
 mal that had been offered to an idol or false god ; for a false 
 god is nothing, and it is impossible for it to have contracted 
 positive defilement by being offered to that which is a posi- 
 tive and absolute negation. And yet if any man thought it 
 wrong to eat such flesh, to him it was wrong; for in that act 
 there would be a deliberate act of transgression a delibe- 
 rate preference of that which was mere enjoyment, to that 
 which was apparently, though it may be only apparently, 
 sanctioned by the law of God. And so it w T ould carry with 
 
568 77ie Law of Christian Conscience. 
 
 it all the disobedience, all the guilt, and all the misery whicli 
 belongs to the doing of an act altogether wrong ; or as St. 
 Paul expresses it, the conscience would become defiled. 
 
 Here, then, we arrive at the first distinction the distinc- 
 tion between absolute and relative right and wrong. Abso- 
 lute right and absolute wrong, like absolute truth, can each 
 be but one and unalterable in the sight of God. The one 
 absolute right the charity of God and the sacrifice of Christ 
 this, from eternity to eternity must be the sole measure of 
 eternal right. But human right or human wrong that is, 
 the merit or demerit of any action done by any particular 
 man must be measured, not by that absolute standard, but 
 as a matter relative to his particular circumstances, the state 
 of the age in which he lives, and his own knowledge of right 
 and wrong. For we come into this world with a moral 
 sense ; or to speak more Christianly, with a conscience. And 
 yet that will tell us but very little distinctly. It tells us 
 broadly that which is right and that which is wrong, so that 
 every child can understand this. That charity and self- 
 denial are right this we see recognized in almost every na- 
 tion. But the boundaries of these two when and how far 
 self-denial is right what are ,the bounds of charity this it ie 
 for different circumstances yet to bring out and determine. 
 
 And so it will be found that there is a different standard 
 among different nations and in different ages. That, for ex- 
 ample, which was the standard among the Israelites in the 
 earlier ages, and before their settlement in Canaan, was very 
 different from the higher and truer standard of right and 
 wrong recognized by the later prophets. And the standard 
 in the third and fourth centuries after Christ, was truly and 
 unquestionably an entirely different one from that recognized 
 in the nineteenth century among ourselves. 
 
 Let me not be mistaken. I do not say that right and 
 wrong are merely conventional, or merely chronological or 
 
 feographical, or that they vary with latitude and longitude. 
 do not say that there ever was or ever can be a nation so 
 utterly blinded and perverted in its moral sense as to ac- 
 knowledge that which is wrong seen and known to be 
 wrong as right ; or on the other hand, to profess that which 
 is seen and understood as right, to be wrong. But what I 
 do say is this: that the form and aspect in which different 
 deeds appear, so vary, that there will be forever a change 
 and alteration in men's opinions, and that which is really 
 most generous may seem most base, and that which is really 
 most base may appear most generous. So, for example, as 1 
 have already said, there are two things universally recog* 
 
The Law of Christian Conscience. 569 
 
 nized recognized as right by every man whose conscience 
 is not absolutely perverted charity arid self-denial. The 
 charity of God, the sacrifice of Christ these are the two 
 grand, leading principles of the Gospel; and in some form or 
 other you will find these lying at the roots of every profes- 
 sion and state of feeling in almost every age. But the form 
 in which these appear will vary with all the gradations which 
 are to be found between the lowest savage state and the 
 highest and most enlightened Christianity. 
 
 For example, in ancient Israel the law of love was ex- 
 pounded thus : " Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate 
 thine enemy." Among the American Indians and at the 
 Cape, the only homage, perchance, given to self-denial, was 
 the strange admiration given to that prisoner of war who 
 bore with unflinching fortitude the torture of his country's 
 enemies. In ancient India the same principle was exhibited, 
 but in a more strange and perverted manner. The homage 
 there given to self-denial, self-sacrifice, was this ?hat tht, 
 highest form of religion was considered to be that exhibited 
 by the 'devotee who sat in a tree until the birds had built 
 their nests in his hair until his nails, like those of the King 
 of Babylon, had grown like birds* talons until they had 
 grown into his hands and he became absorbed into the Di- 
 vinity. 
 
 We will take another instance, and one better known. In 
 ancient Sparta it was the custom to teach children to steal. 
 And here there would seem to be a contradiction to our prop- 
 osition here it would seem as if right and wrong were mat- 
 ters merely conventional ; for s-urely stealing can nevr be 
 any thing but wrong. But if we look deeper we shall see 
 that there is no contradiction here. It was not stealing 
 which was admired ; the child was punished if the theft was 
 discovered ; but it was the dexterity which" was admired, 
 and that because it was a warlike virtue, necessary, it may be, 
 to a people in continual rivalry with their neighbors. It was 
 not that honesty was despised and dishonesty esteemed, but 
 that honesty and dishonesty were made subordinate to that 
 which appeared to them of higher importance, namely, the 
 duty of concealment. And so we come back to the principle 
 which we laid down at first. In every age, among all na- 
 tions, the same broad principle remains, but the application 
 of it varies. The conscience may be ill-informed, and in this 
 sense only are right and wrong conventional varying with 
 latitude and longitude, depending upon chronology and ge- 
 ography. 
 
 The principle laid down by the Apostle Paul is this : A 
 
5 70 The Law of Christian Conscience. 
 
 man will be judged, not by the abstract law of God, not by 
 the rule of absolute right, but much rather by the relative 
 law of conscience. This he states most distinctly looking 
 at the question on both sides. That which seems to a man 
 to be right is, in a certain sense, right to him ; and that 
 which seems to a man to be wrong, in a certain sense is 
 wrong to him. For example: he says in his Epistle to the 
 Romans (ver. 14) that, "sin is not imputed when there is no 
 law," in other words, if a man does not really know a thing 
 to be wrong, there is a sense in which, if not right to him, it 
 ceases to be so wrong as it would otherwise be. With re- 
 spect to the other of these sides, however, the case is still 
 more distinct and plain. Here, in the judgment which the 
 apostle delivers in the parallel chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Romans (the xivth), he says, " I know, and am persuaded of 
 the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but 
 to him that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is 
 unclean:" In other words, whatever may be the abstract 
 merits of the question however in God's jurisprudence any 
 particular act may stand to you, thinking it to be wrong, it 
 manifestly is wrong, and your conscience will gather round 
 it a stain of guilt if you -do it. 
 
 In order to understand this more fully, let us take a few 
 instances. There is a difference between truth and veracity. 
 Veracity mere veracity is a small, poor thing. Truth is 
 something greater and higher. Veracity is merely the cor- 
 respondence between some particular statement and facts 
 truth is the correspondence between a man's whole soul and 
 reality. It is possible for a man to say that which, unknown 
 to him, is false ; and yet he may be true : because if deprived 
 of truth he is deprived of it unwillingly. It is possible, on 
 the other hand, for a man to utter veracities, and yet at the 
 very time that he is uttering those veracities, to be false to 
 himselfj to his brother, and to his God. One of the most sig- 
 nal instances of this is to be seen in the Book of Job. Most 
 of what Job's friends said to him were veracious statements. 
 Much of what Job said for himself was unveracious and mis- 
 taken. And yet those veracities of theirs were so torn from 
 all connection with fact and truth, that they became false- 
 hoods ; and they Avere, as has been said, nothing more than 
 " orthodox liars " in the sight of God. On the other hand, 
 Job, blundering perpetually, and falling into false doctrine, 
 was yet a true man searching for and striving after the 
 truth ; and if deprived of it for a time, deprived of it with all 
 his heart and soul unwillingly. And therefore it was that at 
 tost the Lord appeared out of the whirlwind to confound the 
 
The Law of Christian Conscience. 571 
 
 men of mere veracity, and to stand by and support the honor 
 of the heartily true. 
 
 Let us apply the principle further. It is a matter of less 
 importance that a man should state true views, than that he 
 should state views truly. We will put this in its strongest 
 form. Unitarianism is false Trinitarianism is true. But 
 yet in the sight of God, and with respect to a man's eternal 
 destinies hereafter, it would surely be better for him earnest- 
 ly, honestly, truly, to hold the doctrines of Unitarianism, 
 than in a cowardly or indifferent spirit, or influenced by au- 
 thority, or from considerations of interest, or for the sake of 
 lucre, to hold the doctrines of Trinitarianism. 
 
 For instance: Not many years ago the Church of Scot- 
 land was severed into two great divisions, and gave to this 
 age a marvellous proof that there is still amongst us the 
 power of living faith when five hundred ministers gave up 
 all that earth holds dear position in the Church they had 
 loved ; friendships and affections formed, and consecrated by 
 long fellowship, in its communion ; and almost their hopes 
 of gaining a livelihood rather than assert a principle which 
 seemed to them to be a false one. Now, my brethren, sure- 
 ly the question in such a case for us to consider is not this, 
 merely whether of the two sections held the abstract right 
 held the principle in its integrity but surely far rather, 
 this : who on either side was true to the light within, true to 
 God, true to the truth as God had revealed it to his soul. 
 
 Now it is precisely upon this principle that we are ena-^ 
 bled to indulge a Christian hope that many of those who in 
 ancient times were persecutors, for example, may yet be 
 justified at the bar of Christ. Nothing can make persecu- 
 tion right it is wrong, essentially, eternally wrong in the 
 sight of God. And yet, if a man sincerely and assuredly 
 thinks that Christ has laid upon him a command to perse- 
 cute with fire and sword, it is surely better that he should, 
 in spite of all feelings of tenderness and compassion, cast 
 aside the dearest affections at the command of his Redeem- 
 er, than that he should, in mere laxity and tenderness, turn 
 aside from what seemed to him to be his duty. At least, 
 this appears to be the opinion of the Apostle Paul. He tells 
 us that he was " a blasphemer and a persecutor and injuri- 
 ous," that " he did many things contrary to the name of Je- 
 sus of Nazareth," that "being exceedingly mad against the 
 disciples, he persecuted them even unto strange cities." But 
 he tells us further, that " for this cause he obtained mercy, 
 because he did it ignorantly in unbelief." 
 
 Now take a case precisely opposite : In ancient times the 
 
572 The Law of Christian Conscience. 
 
 Jews did that by which it appeared to them that they would 
 contract defilement and guilt they spared the lives of the 
 enemies which they had taken in battle. Brethren, the eter- 
 nal law is, that charity is right : and that law is eternally 
 right which says, " Thou shalt love thine enemy." And had 
 the Jews acted upon this principle they would have done 
 well to spare their enemies : but they did it, thinking it to 
 be wrong, transgressing that law which commanded them to 
 slay their idolatrous enemies not from generosity, but in 
 cupidity not from charity, but from lax zeal. And so do- 
 ing, the act was altogether wrong. 
 
 II. Such is the apostle's exposition of the law of Christian 
 conscience. Let us now, in the second place, consider the 
 applications, both of a personal and of a public nature, which 
 arise out of it. 
 
 1. The first application is a personal one. It is this : Do 
 seems to you to be right : it is only so that you will at 
 
 last learn by the grace of God to see clearly what is right. 
 A man thinks within himself that it is God's law and God's 
 will that he should act thus and thus. There is nothing 
 possible for us to say, there is no advice for us to give, but 
 this " You must so act." He is responsible for the opinions 
 he holds, and still more for the way in which he arrived at 
 them whether in a slothful and selfish, or in an honest and 
 truth-seeking manner ; but being now his soul's convictions, 
 ,you can give no other law than this " You must obey your 
 conscience." For no man's conscience gets so seared by do- 
 ing what is wrong unknowingly, as by doing that which ap- 
 pears to be wrong to his conscience. The Jews' consciences 
 did not get seared by their slaying the Canaanites, but they 
 did become seared by their failing to do what appeared to 
 them to be right. Therefore, woe to you if you do what 
 others think right, instead of obeying the dictates of your 
 own conscience ; w r oe to you if you allow authority, or pre- 
 scription, or fashion, or influence, or any other human thing, 
 to interfere with that awful and sacred thing responsibili- 
 ty. " Every man," said the apostle, " must give an account 
 of himself to God." 
 
 2. The second application of this principle has reference 
 to others. No doubt, to the large, free, enlightened mind of 
 the Apostle Paul all these scruples and superstitions must 
 have seemed mean, trivial, and small indeed. It was a mat- 
 ter to him of far less importance that truth should be estab- 
 lished than that it should be arrived at truly a matter of 
 far less importance, even, that right should be done, than 
 
The Law of Christian Conscience. 573 
 
 that right should be done rightly. Conscience was far more 
 sacred to him than even liberty it was to him a prerogative 
 far more precious to assert the rights of Christian conscience, 
 than to magnify the privileges of Christian liberty. The 
 scruple may be small and foolish, but it may be impossible 
 to uproot the scruple without tearing up the feeling of the 
 sanctity of conscience, and of reverence to the law of God, 
 associated with this scruple. And therefore the Apostle 
 Paul counsels these men to abridge their Christian liberty, 
 and not to eat of those things which had been sacrificed to 
 idols, but to have compassion upon the scruples of their 
 weaker brethren. 
 
 And this, for two reasons. The first of these is a mere rea- 
 son of Christian feeling. It might cause exquisite pain to 
 sensitive minds to see those things which appeared to them 
 to be wrong, done by Christian brethren. Now you may 
 take a parallel case. It may be, if you will, mere supersti- 
 tion to bow at the name of Jesus. It may be, and no doubt 
 is, founded upon a mistaken interpretation of that passage in 
 the Epistle to the Philippians (ii. 10), which says that " at 
 the name of Jesus every knee shall bow." But there are 
 many congregations in which this has been the long-estab- 
 lished rule, and there are many Christians who would feel 
 pained to see such a practice discontinued as if it implied a 
 declension from the reverence due to " that name which is 
 above every name." Now what in this case is the Christian 
 duty ? Is it this to stand upon our Christian liberty ? Or 
 is it not rather this to comply with a prejudice which is 
 manifestly a harmless one, rather than give pain to a Chris- 
 tian brother ? 
 
 Take another case. It may be a mistaken scruple ; but 
 there is no doubt that it causes much pain to many Chris- 
 tians to see a carriage used on the Loud's day. But you, 
 with higher views of the spirit of Christianity, who know 
 that " the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the 
 sabbath" who can enter more deeply into the truth taught 
 by our blessed Lord, that every day is ,to be dedicated tc 
 Him and consecrated to His service upon the high princi- 
 ple of Christian liberty you can use your carriage you can 
 exercise your liberty. But if there are Christian brethren 
 do whom this would give pain then I humbly ask you, but 
 most earnestly What is the duty here ? Is it not this to 
 abridge your Christian liberty and to go through rain, and 
 mud, and snow, rather than give pain to one Christian con- 
 science ? 
 
 To give one more instance. The words, and garb, and 
 
574 The Law of Christian Conscience. 
 
 customs of that sect of Christians called Quakers may be 
 formal enough ; founded, no doubt, as in the' former case, 
 upon a mistaken interpretation of a passage in the Bible. 
 But they are at least harmless ; and have long been asso- 
 ciated with the simplicity, and benevolence, and Christian 
 humbleness of this body of Christians the followers of one 
 who, three hundred years ago, set out upon the glorious en- 
 terprise of making all men friends. Now would it be Chris- 
 tian, or would it not rather be something more than unchris' 
 tiau would it not be gross rudeness and coarse unfeeling- 
 ness to treat such words, and habits, and customs, with any 
 thing but respect and reverence ? 
 
 Further : the apostle enjoined this duty upon the Corinth 
 ian converts, of abridging their Christian liberty, not mere- 
 ly because it might give pain to indulge it, but also because 
 it might even lead their brethren into sin. For, if any man 
 should eat of the flesh offered to an idol, feeling himself 
 justified by his conscience, it were well: but if any man, 
 overborne by authority or interest, were to do this, not ac- 
 cording to conscience, but against it, there would be a dis- 
 tinct and direct act of disobedience a conflict between his 
 sense of right and the gratification of his appetites, or the 
 power of influence ; and then his compliance would as much 
 damage his conscience and moral sense as if the act had been 
 wrong in itself. 
 
 In the personal application of these remarks, there are 
 three things which we have to say. The first is this: Dis- 
 tinguish, I pray you, between this tenderness for a brother's 
 conscience and mere time-serving. This same apostle whom 
 we here see so gracefully giving way upon the ground of 
 expediency when Christian principles were left entire, was 
 the same who stood firm and strong as a rock when any 
 thing was demanded which trenched upon Christian princi- 
 ple. When some required, as a matter of necessity for salva- 
 tion, that these converts should be circumcised, the apostle 
 says "To whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an 
 hour !" It was not indifference it was not cowardice it 
 was not the mere love of peace, purchased by the sacrifice of 
 principle, that prompted this counsel but it was Christian 
 'love that delicate and Christian love which dreads to tam- 
 per with the sanctities of a brother's conscience. 
 
 2. The second thing we have to say is this that this 
 abridgment of their liberty is a duty more especially in- 
 cumbent upon all who are possessed of influence. There are 
 some men, happily for themselves we may say, who are so in- 
 significant that they can take their course quietly in the val- 
 
The Law of Christian Conscience. 575 
 
 leys of life, and who can exercise the fullest Christian liberty 
 without giving pain to others. But it is the price which all 
 who are possessed of influence must pay that their acts 
 must be measured, not in themselves, but according to their 
 influence on others. So, my Christian brethren, to bring 
 this matter home to every-day experience and common life, 
 if the landlord uses his authority and influence to induce his 
 tenant to vote against his conscience, it may be he has se- 
 cured one voice to the principle which is right, or at all 
 events, to that which seemed to him to be right : but he has 
 gained that single voice at the sacrifice and expense of a 
 brother's soul. Or again if for the sake of insuring per- 
 sonal politeness and attention, the rich man puts a gratuity 
 into the hand of a servant of some company which has for- 
 bidden him to receive it, he gains the attention, he insures 
 the politeness, but he gains it at the sacrifice and expense of 
 a man and a Christian brother. 
 
 3. The last remark which we have to make is this : 
 How possible it is to mix together the vigor of a masculine 
 and manly intellect with the tenderness and charity which is 
 taught by the Gospel of Christ. No man ever breathed so 
 freely when on earth the air and atmosphere of heaven as the 
 Apostle Paul no man ever soared so high above all preju- 
 dices, narrowness, littlenesses, scruples, as he : and yet no 
 man ever bound himself as Paul bound himself to the igno- 
 rance, the scruples, the prejudices of his brethren. So that 
 what in other cases w T as infirmity, imbecility, and supersti- 
 tion, gathered round it in his case the pure high spirit of 
 Christian charity and Christian delicacy. 
 
 And now, out of the writings, and sayings, and deeds of 
 those who loudly proclaim " the rights of man " and the 
 " rights of liberty," match us, if you can, with one sentence 
 so sublime, so noble, one that will so stand at the bar of 
 God hereafter, as this single, glorious sentence of his, in 
 which he asserts the rights of Christian conscience above the 
 claims of Christian liberty " Wherefore if meat make my 
 brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world stand* 
 s^h, lest I make my brother to offend." 
 
5/6 Victory over Death. 
 
 XVII. 
 VICTORY OVER DEATH. 
 
 " The sting of death is sin ; aiid the strength of sin is the la\r. Bui 
 thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord ,7eso5 
 Christ."! Cor. xv. 56, 57. 
 
 ON Sunday last I endeavored to bring before you the 
 subject of that which Scripture calls the glorious liberty of 
 the sons of God. The two points on which we were trying 
 to get clear notions were these : what is meant by being unr 
 der the law, and what is meant by being free from the law ? 
 When the Bible says that a man led by the Spirit is not un- 
 der the law, it does not mean that he is free because he may 
 sin without being punished for it, but it means that he is 
 free because, being taught by God's Spirit to love what His 
 law commands, he is no longer conscious of acting from re- 
 straint. The law does not drive him, because the Spirit 
 leads him. 
 
 There is a state, brethren, when we recognize God, but do 
 not love God in Christ. It is that state when we admire 
 what is excellent, but are not able to perform it. It is a 
 state when the love of good comes to nothing, dying away 
 in a mere desire. That is the state of nature, when we are 
 under the law, and not converted to the love of Christ. 
 And then there is another state, when God writes His law 
 upon our hearts by love instead of fear. The one state is 
 this, " I can riot do the things that I would " the other 
 state is this, " I will walk at liberty ; for I seek Thy com- 
 mandments." 
 
 Just so far, therefore, as a Christian is led by the Spirit, he 
 is a conqueror. A Christian in full possession of his privileges 
 is a man whose very step ought to have in it all the elasticity 
 of triumph, and whose very look ought to have in it all the 
 brightness of victory. And just so far as a Christian suffers 
 sin to struggle in him and overcome his resolutions, just sc 
 far he is under the law. And that is the key to the whole 
 doctrine of the New Testament. From first to last the 
 great truth put forward is The law can neither save you 
 nor sanctify you. The Gospel can do both ; for it is rightly 
 and emphatically called the perfect law of liberty. 
 
 We proceed to-day to a further illustration of this subject 
 
Victory over Death. 577 
 
 of Christian victory. In the verses which I have read out, 
 the apostle has evidently tho same subject in his mind: 
 slavery through the law : victory through the Gospel. 
 " The strength of sin," he says, " is the law." God giveth 
 us the victory through Christ. And when we are familiar 
 with St. Paul's trains of thinking, we find this idea coming in 
 perpetually. It runs like a colored thread through embroid- 
 ery, appearing on the upper surface every now and then in a 
 different shape a leaf, it may be, or a flower ; but the same 
 thread still, if you only trace it back with your finger. And 
 this was the golden recurring thread in the mind of Paul. 
 Restraint and law can not check sin ; they only gall it and 
 make it struggle and rebel. The love of God in Christ, that, 
 and only that, can give- man the victory. 
 
 But in this passage the idea of victory is brought to bear 
 upon the most terrible of all a Christian's enemies. It is 
 faith here conquering in death. And the apostle brings to- 
 gether all the believer's antagonists the law's power, sin, 
 and death the chief antagonist of all: and then, as it were on 
 a conqueror's battle-field, shouts over them the hymn of tri- 
 umph " Thanks be to God, which giveth us tfie victory, 
 through our Lord Jesus Christ." We shall take up these 
 two points to dwell upon : 
 
 I. The awfulness which hangs round the dying hour. 
 II. Faith conquering in death. 
 
 That which makes it peculiarly terrible to die is asserted 
 In this passage to be guilt. We lay a stress upon this ex- 
 pression the sting. It is not said that sin is the only bit- 
 terness, but it is the sting which contains in it the venom of 
 a most exquisite torture. And in truth, brethren, it is no 
 mark of courage to speak lightly of human dying. We may 
 do it in bravado, or in wantonness ; but no man who thinks 
 can call it a trifling thing to die. True though tfulness must 
 shrink from death without Christ. There is a world of un- 
 told sensations crowded into that moment when a man puts 
 his hand to his forehead and feels the damp upon it which 
 tells him his hour is come. He has been waiting for death 
 all his life, and now it is come. It is all over his chance is 
 past, and his eternity is settled. None of us know, except 
 by guess, what that sensation is. Myriads of human beings 
 have felt it to whom life was dear ; but they never spoke out 
 their feelings, for such things are untold. And to every indi- 
 vidual man throughout all eternity that sensation in its full- 
 ness can come but once. It. is mockery, brethren, for a man 
 to speak lightly of that which he can not know till it corner. 
 
 25 
 
578 Victory over Death. 
 
 Now the first cause which makes it a solemn thing to die 
 is the instinctive cleaving of every thing that lives to its own 
 existence. That unutterable thing which we call our being 
 the idea of parting with it is agony. It is the first and 
 the intensest desire of living things, to be. Enjoyment, 
 blessedness, every thing we long for, is wrapped up in being 
 Darkness and all that the spirit recoils from, is contained in 
 this idea, not to be. It is in virtue of this unquenchable im- 
 pulse that the world, in spite of all the misery that is in it, 
 continues to straggle on. What are war, and trade, and la- 
 bor, and professions ? Are they all the result of struggling 
 to be great ? No, my brethren, they are the result of strug- 
 gling to be. The first thing that men and nations labor for 
 is existence. Reduce the nation or the man to their last re- 
 sources, and only see what marvellous energy of contrivance 
 the love of being arms them with. Read back the pauper's 
 history at the end of seventy years his strange sad history, 
 in which scarcely a single day could insure subsistence for 
 the morrow and yet learn what he has done these long 
 years in the stern struggle with impossibility to hold his be- 
 ing where every thing is against him, and to keep an ex- 
 istence whose only conceivable charm is this, that it is exist- 
 ence. 
 
 Now it is with this intense passion for being that the idea 
 of death clashes. Let us search why it is we 'shrink from 
 death. This reason, brethren, we shall find, that it presents 
 to us the idea of not being. Talk as we will of immortality, 
 there is an obstinate feeling that we can not master, that we 
 end in death ; and that may be felt together with the firmest 
 belief of a resurrection. Brethren, our faith tells us one 
 thing, and our sensations tell us another. When we die, we 
 are surrendering in truth all that with which we have asso- 
 ciated existence. All that we know of life is connected with 
 a shape, a form, a body of materialism ; and now that that is 
 palpably melting away into nothingness, the boldest heart 
 may be excused a shudder, when there is forced upon it, in 
 spite of itself, the idea of ceasing forever. 
 
 The second reason is not one of imagination at all, but 
 most sober reality. It is a solemn thing to die, because it is 
 the parting with all round which the heart's best affections 
 have twined themselves. There are some men who have not 
 the capacity for keen enjoyment. Their affections have noth- 
 ing in them of intensity, and so they pass through life withaut 
 ever so uniting themselves with what they meet, that there 
 would be any thing of pain in the severance. Of course, 
 with them the bitterness of death does not attach so much to 
 
Victory over Death. 579 
 
 the idea of parting. But, my brethren, how is it with human 
 nature generally ? Our feelings do not weaken as we go on 
 in life ; emotions are less shown, and we get a command over 
 our features and our expressions ; but the man's feelings are 
 deeper than the boy's. It is length of time that makes at- 
 tachment. We 'become wedded to the sights and sounds of 
 this lovely world more closely as years go on. 
 
 Young men, with nothing rooted deep, are prodigal of life. 
 It is an adventure to them, rather than a misfortune, to leave 
 their country forever. With the old man it is like tearing 
 his own heart from him. And so it was that when Lot quit- 
 ted Sodom the younger members of his family went on gladly. 
 It is a touching truth ; it was the aged one who looked be- 
 hind to the home which had so many recollections connected 
 with it. And therefore it is, that when men approach that 
 period of existence when they must go, there is an instinctive 
 lingering over things whicji they shall never see again. Every 
 time the sun sets, every time the old man sees his children 
 gathering round him, there is a filling of the eye with an 
 emotion that we can understand. There is upon his soul the 
 thought of parting, that strange wrench from all we love, 
 which makes death (say what moralists will of it) a bitter 
 thing. 
 
 Another pang which belongs to death we find in the sen- 
 sation of loneliness which attaches to it. Have we ever seen 
 a ship preparing to sail with its load of pauper emigrants to 
 a distant colony? If we have we know what that desolation 
 is which comes from feeling unfriended on a new and untried 
 excursion. All beyond the seas, to the ignorant poor man, 
 is a strange land. They are going- away from the helps and 
 the friendships and the companionships of life, scarcely know-' 
 ing what is before them. And it is in such a moment, when 
 a man stands upon a deck taking his last look of his father- 
 land, that there comes upon him a sensation new, strange, 
 and inexpressibly miserable the feeling of being alone in 
 the world. 
 
 Brethren, with all the bitterness of such a moment, it is 
 but a feeble image when placed by the side of the loneliness 
 of death. We die alone. We go on our dark mysterious 
 journey for the first time in all our existence, without one to 
 accompany us. Friends are beside our bed, they must stay 
 behind. Grant that a Christian has something like familiar- 
 ity with the Most High, that breaks this solitary feeling; 
 but what is it with the mass of men ? It is a question full 
 of loneliness to them. What is it they are to see ? What 
 are they to meet ? Is it not true, that, to tne larger numbei 
 
580 Victory over Death. 
 
 of this congregation, there is no one point in all eternity on 
 which the eye can fix distinctly and rest gladly nothing 
 beyond the grave, except a dark space into which they must 
 plunge alone ? 
 
 And yet, my brethren, with all these ideas no doubt vivid- 
 ly before his mind, it was none of them that' the apostle se- 
 lected as the crowning bitterness of dying. It was not the 
 thought of surrendering existence. It was not the parting 
 from all bright and lovely things. It was not the shudder of 
 sinking into the sepulchre alone. " The sting of death is sin." 
 
 Now there are two ways in which this deep truth applies 
 itself. There is something that appals in death when there 
 are distinct separate acts of guilt resting on the memory ; 
 and there is something, too, in the possession of a guilty 
 heart which is quite another thing from acts of sin, that 
 makes it an awful thing to die. There are some who carry 
 about with them the dreadful secret of sin that has been 
 done ; guilt that has a name. A man has injured some one ; 
 he has made money, or got on by unfair means ; he has been 
 unchaste ; he has done some of those thousand things of life 
 which leave upon the heart the dark spot that will not come 
 out. All these are sins which you can count up and num- 
 ber. And the recollection of things like these is that agony 
 which we call remorse. Many of us have remembrances of 
 this kind which are fatal to serenity. .We shut them out, 
 but it will not do. They bide their time, and then suddenly 
 present themselves, together with the thought of a judg- 
 ment-seat. When a guilty man begins to think of dying, it 
 is like a vision of the Son of Man presenting itself and call- 
 ing out the voices of all the unclean spirits in the man 
 " Art thou come to torment us before the time ?" 
 
 But, my brethren, it is a mistake if we suppose that is the 
 common way in which sin stings at the thought of death. 
 Men who have lived the career of passionate life have dis- 
 tinct and accumulated acts of guilt before their eyes. But 
 with most men it is not guilty acts, but guiltiness of heart 
 that weighs the heaviest. Only take yesterday as a speci- 
 men of life. What was it with most of us ? A day of sin. 
 Was it sin palpable and dark, such as we shall remember 
 painfully this day year ? Nay, my brethren, unkindness, 
 petulance, wasted time, opportunities lost, frivolous conversa- 
 tion, that was our chief guilt. And yet with all that, trifling, 
 as it may be, when it comes to be the history of life does it 
 not leave behind a restless undefinable sense of fault, a vague 
 idea of debt, but to what extent we know not, perhaps the 
 more wretched just because it is uncertain ? 
 
Victory over Death. 581 
 
 My Christian brethren, this is the sting of sinfulness, the 
 wretched consciousness of an unclean heart. It is just this 
 feeling, " God is not my friend ; I am going on to the grave, 
 and no man can say aught against me, but my heart is not 
 right ; I want a river like that which the ancients fabled 
 the river of forgetfulness that I might go down into it and 
 bathe, and come up a new man. It is not so much what I 
 have done ; it is what I am. Who shall save me from my- 
 self?" Oh, it is a desolate thing to think of the coffin when 
 that thought is in all its misery before the soul. It is the 
 sting of death. 
 
 Arid now let us bear one thing in mind the sting of sin 
 is not a constant pressure. It may be that we live many 
 years in the world before a death in our own family forces 
 the thought personally home : many years before all those 
 sensations which are so often the precursors of the tomb 
 the quick short cough, lassitude, emaciation, pain come in 
 startling suddenness upon us in our young vigor, and make 
 us feel what it is to be here with death inevitable to our- 
 selves. And when those things become habitual, habit 
 makes delicacy the same forgetful thing as health, so that 
 neither in sickness nor in health is the thought of death a 
 constant pressure. It is only now and then ; but so often 
 as death is a reality, the sting of death is sin. 
 
 Once more : we remark that all this power of sin to ago- 
 nize is traced by the apostle to the law " the strength of 
 sin is the law;" by which he means to say that sin would 
 not be so violent if it were not for the attempt of God's law 
 to restrain it. It is the law which makes sin strong. And 
 he does not mean particularly the law of Moses. He means 
 any law, and all law. Law is what forbids and threatens ; 
 law bears gallingly on those who want to break it. And 
 St. Paul declares this, that no law, not even God's law, can 
 make men righteous in heart, unless the Spirit has taught 
 men's hearts to acquiesce in the law. It can only force out 
 into rebellion the sin that is in them. 
 
 It is so, brethren, with a nation's law. The voice of the 
 nation must go along with it. It must be the expression of 
 their own feeling, and then they will have it obeyed. But 
 if it is only the law of a government, a law which is against 
 the whole spirit of the people, there is first the murmur of a 
 nation's disapprobation, and then there is transgression, and 
 then, if the law be vindicated with a high hand, the next 
 step is the bursting that law asunder in national revolution. 
 And so it is with God's law. It will never control a man 
 long who does not from his heart love it. First comes a 
 
582 Victory over Death. 
 
 sensation of restraint, and then comes a murmuring of tho 
 heart ; and last, there comes the rising of passion in its giant 
 might, made desperate by restraint. That is the law giving 
 strength to sin. 
 
 And therefore, brethren, if all we know of God be this, 
 that He has made laws, and that it is terrible to break them ; 
 if all our idea of religion be this, that it is a thing of com- 
 mands and hindrances thou shalt, and thou shalt not ; we 
 are under the law, and there is no help for it. We must 
 shrink from the encounter with death. 
 
 We pass to our second subject Faith conquering in 
 death. 
 
 And, before we enter upon this topic, there are two gen- 
 eral remarks that we hav.e to make. The first is, The ele- 
 vating power of faith. There is nothing in all this world 
 that ever led man on to real victory but faith. Faith is that 
 looking forward to a future with something like certainty, 
 that raises man above the narrow feelings of the present. 
 Even in this life he is a greater man, a man of more elevated 
 character, who is steadily pursuing a plan that requires some 
 years to accomplish, than he who is living by the day. Look 
 forward but ten years, and plan for it, live for it ; there is 
 something of manhood, something of courage required to 
 conquer the thousand things that stand in your way. And 
 therefore it is, that faith, and nothing but faith, gives victory 
 in death. It is that elevation of character which we get 
 from looking steadily and forever forward till eternity be- 
 comes a real home to us, that enables us to look down upon 
 the last struggle, and the funeral, and the grave, not as the 
 great end of all, but only as something that stands between 
 us and the end. We are conquerors of death when we are 
 able to look beyond it. 
 
 Our second remark is for the purpose of fixing special at- 
 tention upon this, that ours is not merely to be victory, it is 
 to be victory through Christ. " Thanks be to God which 
 giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 Victory, brethren, mere victory over death, is no unearthly 
 thing. You may get it by infidelity. Only let a man sin 
 long enough, and desperately enough, to shut judgment al- 
 together out of his creed, and then you have a man who can 
 bid defiance to the grave. It was so that our country's 
 greatest infidel historian met death. He quitted the world 
 without parade and without display. If we want a speci- 
 men of victory apart from Christ, we have it on his death- 
 bed. He left all this strange world of restlessness calmly, 
 
Victory over Death. 583 
 
 like an unreal show that must go to pieces, and he himself 
 an unreality departing from it. A skeptic can be a conquer* 
 or in death. 
 
 Or again, mere manhood may give us a victory. He who 
 has only learned not to be afraid to die, has not learned 
 much. We have steel and nerve enough in our hearts to 
 dare any thing. And, after all, it is a triumph so common as 
 scarcely to deserve the name. Felons die on the scaffold like 
 men ; soldiers can be hired by tens of thousands, for a few 
 pence a day, to front death in its worst form. Every minute 
 that we live sixty of the human race are passing away, and 
 the greater part with courage the weak and the timid as 
 well as the resolute. Courage is a very different thing from 
 the Christian's victory. 
 
 Once more, brethren, necessity can make man conqueror 
 over death. We can make up our minds to any thing when 
 it once becomes inevitable. It is the agony of suspense that 
 makes danger dreadful. History can tell us that men can 
 look with desperate calmness upon hell itself when once it 
 has become a certainty. And it is this, after all, that com- 
 monly makes the dying hour so quiet a thing. It is more 
 dreadful in the distance than in the reality. When a man 
 feels that there is no help, and he must go, he lays him down 
 to die quietly as a tired traveller wraps himself in his cloak 
 to sleep. It is quite another thing from all this that Paul 
 meant by victory. 
 
 In the "first place, it is the prerogative of a Christian to be 
 conqueror over doubt. Brethren, do we all know what 
 doubt means ? Perchance not. There are some men who 
 have never believed enough to doubt. There are some who 
 have never thrown their hopes with such earnestness on the 
 world to come, as to feel anxiety for fear it Should not all be 
 true. But every one who knows what faith is, knows too 
 what is the desolation of doubt. We pray till we begin to 
 ask, Is there one who hears, or am I whispering to myself? 
 We hear the consolation administered to the bereaved, and 
 we see the coffin lowered into the grave, and the thought 
 comes, What if all this doctrine of a life to come be but the 
 dream of man's imaginative mind, carried on from age to age, 
 and so believed, because it is a venerable superstition ? Now 
 Christ gives us victory over that terrible suspicion in two 
 ways first, He does it by His own resurrection. We have 
 got a fact there that all the metaphysics about impossibility 
 can not rob us of. In moments of perplexity we look bacK 
 to this. The grave has once, and more than once, at the 
 Redeemer's bidding, given up its dead. It is a world-fact 
 
584 Victory over Death. 
 
 It tells us what the Bible means by our resurrection not a 
 spiritual rising into new holiness merely that, but also 
 something more. It means that in our own proper identity 
 we shall live again. Make that thought real, and God has 
 given you, so far, victory over the grave through Christ. 
 
 There is another way in which we get the victory over 
 doubt, and that is by living in Christ. All doubt comes 
 from living out of habits of affectionate obedience to God. 
 By idleness, by neglected prayer, we lose our power of real- 
 izing things not seen. Let a man be religious and irreligious 
 at intervals irregular, inconsistent, without some distinct 
 thing to live for it is a matter of impossibility that he can 
 be free from doubts. He must make up his mind for a dark 
 life. Doubts can only be dispelled by that kind of active life 
 that realizes Christ. And there is no faith that gives a vic- 
 tory so steadily triumphant as that. When such a man 
 comes near the opening of the vault, it is no world of sor- 
 rows he is entering upon. He is only going to see things 
 that he has felt, for he has been living in heaven. He has 
 his grasp on things that other men are only groping after 
 and touching now and then. Live above this world, breth- 
 ren, and then the powers of the world to come are so upon 
 you that there is no room for doubt. 
 
 Besides all this, it is a Christian's privilege to have victory 
 over the fear of death. And here it is exceedingly easy to 
 paint what, after all, is only the image-picture of a dying 
 hour. It is the easiest thing to represent the dying Chris- 
 tian as a man who always sinks into the grave full of hope, 
 full of triumph, in the certain hope of a blessed resurrection. 
 Brethren, we must paint things in the sober colors of truth ; 
 not as they might be supposed to be, but as they are. Often 
 that is only a picture. Either very few death-beds are Chris- 
 tian ones, or else triumph is a very different thing from what 
 the word generally implies. Solemn, subdued, full of awe 
 and full of solemnity, is the dying hour generally of the holi- 
 est men : sometimes almost darkness. Rapture is a rare 
 thing, except in books and scenes. 
 
 Let us understand what really is the victory over fear 
 It may be rapture or it may not. All that depends very 
 much on temperament ; and after all, the broken words of 
 a dying man are a very poor index of his real state before 
 God. Rapturous hope has been granted to martyrs in pe- 
 culiar moments. It is on record of a minister of our own 
 Church, that his expectation of seeing God in Christ becarna 
 30 intense as his last hour drew near, that his physician waa 
 Compelled to bid him calm his transports, because ii> so ex- 
 
Victory over Death. 
 
 cited a state he could not die. A strange unnatural energy 
 was imparted to his muscular frame by his nerves over- 
 strung with triumph. But, brethren, it fosters a dangerous 
 feeling to take cases like those as precedents. It leads to 
 that most terrible of all unrealities the acting of a death- 
 bed scene. A Christian conqueror dies calmly. Brave men 
 in battle do not boast that they are not afraid. Courage is 
 so natural to them that they are not conscious they are do- 
 ing any thing out of the common way Christian bravery is 
 a deep, calm thing, unconscious of itself. There are more 
 triumphant death-beds than we count, if we only remember 
 this true fearlessness makes no parade. 
 
 Oh, it is not only in those passionate effusions in which the 
 ancient martyrs spoke sometimes of panting for the crushing 
 of their limbs by the lions in the amphitheatre, or of holding 
 out their arms to embrace the flames that were to curl round 
 them it is not then only that Christ has stood by His serv- 
 ants, an4 made them more than conquerors : there may be 
 something of earthly excitement in all that. Every day His 
 servants are dying modestly and peacefully not a word of 
 victory on their lips ; but Christ's deep triumph in their 
 hearts watching the slow progress of their own decay, and 
 yet so far emancipated from personal anxiety that they are 
 still able to think and to plan for others, not knowing that 
 they are doing any great thing. They die, and the world 
 hears nothing of them ; and yet theirs was the completest 
 victory. They came to the battle-field, the field to which 
 they had been looking forward all their lives, and the enemy 
 was not to be found. There was no foe to fight with. 
 
 The last form in which a Christian gets the victory over 
 death is by means of his resurrection. It seems to have been 
 this which was chiefly alluded to by the apostle here; for he 
 says, " When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption 
 .... then shall come to pass the saying w T hich is written, 
 Death is swallowed up in victory." And to say the truth, 
 brethren, it is a rhetorical expression rather than a sober 
 truth when we call any thing, except the resurrection, victory 
 over death. We may conquer doubt and fear when we are 
 dying, but that is not conquering death. It is like a warrior 
 crushed to death by a superior antagonist refusing to yield a 
 groan, and bearing the glance of defiance to the last. You 
 feel that he is an unconquerable spirit, but he is not the con- 
 queror. And when you see flesh melting away, and mental 
 power becoming infantine in its feebleness, and lips scarcely 
 able to articulate, is there left one moment a doubt upon the 
 mind as to who is the conqueror, in spite of all the unshaken 
 
 25* 
 
586 Victory over Death. 
 
 fortitude there may be ? The victory is on the side of death, 
 not on the side of the dying. 
 
 And, my brethren, if we would enter into the full feeling of 
 triumph contained in this verse, we must just try to bear in 
 mind what this world would be without the thought of a 
 resurrection. If we could conceive an unselfish man looking 
 upon this world of desolation with that infinite compassion 
 which all the brave and good feel, what conception could he 
 have but that of defeat, and failure, and sadness the sons 
 of man mounting into a bright existence, and one after an- 
 other falling back into darkness and nothingness, like soldiers 
 trying to mount an impracticable breach, and falling back 
 crushed and mangled into the ditch before the bayonets and 
 the rattling fire of their conquerors. Misery and guilt, look 
 which way you will, till the heart gets sick with looking at it. 
 
 Brethren, until a man looks on evil till it seems to bim al- 
 most like a real personal enemy rejoicing over the destruc- 
 tion that it has made, he can scarcely conceive the deep rap- 
 ture which rushed into the mind of the Apostle Paul when 
 he remembered that a day was coming when all this was to 
 be reversed. A day was coming, and it was the day of re- 
 ality for which he lived, ever present and ever certain, when 
 this sad world w r as to put off forever its changefulness and 
 its misery, and the grave was to be robbed of its victory, 
 and the bodies were to come forth purified by their long 
 sleep. He called all this a victory, because he felt that it 
 was a real battle that has to be fought and won before that 
 can be secured. One battle has been fought by Christ, and 
 another battle, most real and difficult, but yet a conquering 
 one, is to be fought by us. He hath imparted to us the vir- 
 tue of His wrestlings, and the strength of His victory. So 
 that, when the body shall rise again, the power of the law to 
 condemn is gone, because we have learned to love the law. 
 
 And now, to conclude all this, there are but two things 
 which remain to say. In the first place, brethren, if we would 
 be conquerors we must realize God's love in Christ. Take 
 care not to be under the law. Constraint never yet made a 
 conqueror : the utmost it can do is to make either a rebel or 
 a slave. Believe that God loves you. He gave a triumphant 
 demonstration of it in the cross. Never shall we conquer 
 self till we have learned to love. My Christian brethren, let 
 us remember our high privilege. Christian life, so far as it 
 deserves the name, is victory. We are not going forth to 
 mere battle we are going forth to conquer. To gain mas- 
 tery over self, and sin, and doubt, and fear: till the last cold- 
 ness, coming across the brow, tells us that all is over and 
 
Victory over Death. 587 
 
 our warfare accomplished that we are safe, the everlasting 
 arms beneath us that is our calling. Brethren beloved, do 
 not be content with a slothful, dreamy, uncertain struggle. 
 You are to conquer, and the banner under which we are to 
 win is not fear, but love. " The strength of sin is the law ;" 
 the victory is by keeping before us God in Christ. 
 
 Lastly, there is need of encouragement for those of U8 
 whose faith is not of the conquering, but the timid kind. 
 There are some whose hearts will reply to all this, Surely 
 victory is not always a Christian's portion. Is there no cold 
 dark watching in Christian life no struggle when victory 
 seems a mockery to speak of no times when light and life 
 seem feeble, and Christ is to us but a name, and death a real- 
 ity ? " Perfect love casteth out fear," but who has it ? Vic- 
 tory is by faith, but, O God > who will tell us what this faith 
 is that men speak of as a thing so easy ; and how we are to 
 get it ! You tell us to pray for faith, but how shall we 
 pray in earnest unless we first have the very faith we pray 
 for? 
 
 My Christian brethren, it is just to this deepest cry of the 
 human heart that it is impossible to return a full answer. 
 All that-is true. To feel faith is the grand difficulty of life. 
 Faith is a deep impression of God and God's love, and per- 
 sonal trust in it. It is easy to say, " Believe, and thou shalt 
 be saved," but well we know it is easier said than done. We 
 can not say how men are to yet faith. It is God's gift, al- 
 most in the same way that genius is. You can not work /of 
 faith; you must have it first, and then work/rom it. 
 
 But, brethren beloved, we can say, Look up, though' we 
 know not how the mechanism of the will which directs the 
 eye is to be put in motion ; we can say, Look to God in 
 Christ, though we know not how men are to obtain faith to 
 do- it. Let us be in earnest. Our polar star is the love of 
 the cross. Take the eye off that, and you are in darkness 
 and bewilderment at once. Let us not mind what is past. 
 Perhaps it is all failure, and useless struggle, and broken re- 
 solves. What then ? Settle this first, brethren, Are you in 
 earnest ? If so, though your faith be weak and your strug- 
 gles unsatisfactory, you may begin the hymn of triumph now^ 
 for victory is pledged. "Thanks be to God, which" not 
 shall give, but " giveth us the victory through our Lord Je- 
 sus Christ." 
 
588 Man s Greatness and God's Greatness. 
 
 XVIII. 
 MAN'S GREATNESS AND GOD'S GREATNESS. 
 
 "For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose 
 name is Holy ; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a 
 contrite and humble spirit." Isa. Ivii. 15. 
 
 THE origin of this announcement seems to have been the 
 state of contempt in which religion found itself in the days 
 of Isaiah. One of the most profligate monarchs that ever dis- 
 graced the page of sacred history sat upon the throne of Ju- 
 dah. His court was filled with men who recommended them- 
 selves chiefly by their licentiousness. The altar was for- 
 saken. Sacrilegious hands had placed the abominations of 
 heathenism in the Holy Place ; and piety, banished from the 
 State, the Church, and the royal Court, was once more as she 
 had been before, and will be again, a wanderer on the face of 
 the earth. 
 
 Now, however easy it may be to contemplate such a state 
 of things at a distance, it never takes place in a man's own 
 day and time, without suggesting painful perplexities of a 
 twofold nature. In the first place, suspicions respecting 
 God's character ; and, in the second place, misgivings as to 
 his own duty. For a faithless heart whispers, Is it worth 
 while to suffer for a sinking cause? Honor, preferment, 
 grandeur, follow in the train of unscrupulous conduct. To 
 be strict in goodness is to be pointed at and shunned. To 
 be no better than one's neighbors is the only way of being 
 at peace. It seems to have been to such a state as this that 
 Isaiah was commissioned to bring light. He vindicated 
 God's character by saying that He is " the high and lofty 
 One that inhabiteth eternity." He encouraged those who 
 were trodden down to perseverance, by reminding them that 
 real dignity is something very different from present success. 
 God dwells with him " that is of a contrite and humble spir- 
 it." We consider 
 
 I. That in which the greatness of God consists. 
 II. That in which man's greatness consists. 
 
 I. The first measurement, so to speak, which is given us of 
 God's greatness, is in respect of Time. He inhabiteth eter- 
 nity. There are some subjects on which it would be good 
 
Mans Greatness and God's Greatness. 589 
 
 to dwell, if it were only for the sake of that enlargement of 
 mind which is produced by their contemplation. And eter- 
 nity is one of these, so that you can not steadily fix the 
 tho'ughts upon it without being sensible of a peculiar kind 
 of elevation, at the same time that you are humbled by a 
 personal feeling of utter insignificance. You have come in 
 contact with something so immeasurable beyond the nar- 
 row range of our common speculations that you are exalted 
 by the very conception of it. Now the only way we have 
 of forming any idea of eternity is by going, step by step, up 
 to the largest measures of time we know of, and so as- 
 cending, on and on, till we are lost in wonder. We can not 
 grasp eternity, but we can learn something of it by perceiv- 
 ing that, rise to what portion of time we will, eternity is 
 vaster than the vastest. 
 
 We take up, for instance, the history of our own country, 
 and then, when we have spent months in mastering the mere 
 outline of those great events which, in the slow course of re- 
 volving centuries, have made England what she is, her earlier 
 ages seem so far removed from our own times that they ap- 
 pear to belong to a hoary and most remote antiquity. But 
 then, when you compare those times with even the existing 
 works of man, and when you remember that, when England 
 was yet young in civilization, the pyramids of Egypt were 
 already gray with 1500 years, you have got another step 
 which impresses you with a doubled amount of vastness. 
 Double that period, and you come to the far distant moment 
 when the present aspect of this world was called, by crea- 
 tion, out of the formless void in which it was before. 
 
 Modern science has raised us to a pinnacle of thought be- 
 yond even this. It has commanded us to think of countless 
 ages in which that formless void existed before it put on the 
 aspect of its present creation. Millions of years before God 
 called the light day, and the darkness night, there was, if 
 science speaks true, creation after creation called into exist- 
 ence, and buried in its own ruins upon the surface of this 
 earth. And then, there was a time beyond even this there 
 was a moment when this earth itself, with all its countless 
 creations and innumerable ages, did not exist. And again, 
 in that far back distance it is more than conceivable, it seems 
 by the analogy of God's dealings next to certain, that ten 
 thousand worlds may have been called into existence, and 
 lasted their unnumbered ages, and then perished in succes- 
 sion. Compared with these stupendous figures, 6000 years 
 of our planet sink into nothingness. The mind is lost in 
 dwelling on such thoughts as these. When you have pene 
 
5QO Mans Greatness and God's Greatness, 
 
 trated far, far back, by successive approximations, and still 
 see the illimitable distance receding before you as distant 
 as before, imagination absolutely gives way, and you feel 
 dizzy and bewildered with new strange thoughts, that have 
 not a name. 
 
 But this is only one aspect of the case. It looks only to 
 time past. The same overpowering calculations wait us 
 when we bend our eyes on that which is to come. Time 
 stretches back immeasurably, but it also stretches on and on 
 forever. Now it is by such a conception as this that the in- 
 spired prophet attempts to measure the immeasurable of God. 
 All that eternity, magnificent as it is, never was without an 
 inhabitant. Eternity means nothing by itself. It merely 
 expresses the existence of the high and lofty One that inhab- 
 itdth it. We make a fanciful distinction between eternity 
 and time there is no real distinction. We are in eternity 
 at this moment. That has begun to be with us which never 
 began with God. Our only measure of time is by the suc- 
 cession of ideas. If ideas flow fast, and many sights and 
 many thoughts pass by us, time seems lengthened. If we 
 have the simple routine of a few engagements, the same ev- 
 ery day, with little variety, the years roll by us so fast that 
 we can not mark them. It is not so with God. There 
 is no succession of ideas with Him. Every possible idea is 
 present with Him now. It was present with Him ten 
 thousand years ago. God's dwelling-place is that eternity 
 which has neither past nor future, but one vast, immeasurable 
 present. 
 
 There is a second measure given us of God in this verse. 
 It is in respect of Space. He dwelleth in the high and lofty 
 place. He dweHeth moreover in the most insignificant place 
 even the heart of man. And the idea by which the proph- 
 et would here exhibit to us the greatness of God is that of 
 His eternal omnipresence. It is difficult to say which con- 
 ception carries with it the greatest exaltation that of bound- 
 less space or that of unbounded time. When we pass from 
 the tame and narrow scenery of our own country, and stand 
 on those spots of earth in which nature puts on her wilder 
 and more awful forms, we are conscious of something of the 
 grandeur which belongs to the thought of space. Go where 
 the strong foundations of the earth lie around you in their 
 massive majesty, and mountain after mountain rears its 
 snow to heaven in a giant chain, and then, when this bursts 
 upon you for the first time in life, there is that peculiar feel- 
 ing which we call, in common language, an enlargement of 
 ideas. But when we are told that the sublimitv of those 
 
Mans Greatness and God's Greatness. 591 
 
 dizzy heights is but a nameless speck in comparison with the 
 globe of which they form the girdle ; and when we pass on 
 to think of that globe itself as a minute spot in the mighty 
 system to which it belongs, so that our world might be an- 
 nihilated and its loss would not be felt ; and when we are 
 told that eighty millions of such systems roll in the world 
 of space, to which our own system again is as nothing ; and 
 when we are again pressed with the recollection that beyond 
 those farthest limits creative power is exerted immeasurably 
 farther than eye can reach -or thought can penetrate; then, 
 brethren, the awe which comes upon the heart is only, after 
 all, a tribute to a portion of God's greatness. 
 
 Yet we need not science to teach us this. It is the thought 
 which oppresses very childhood the overpowering thought 
 of space. A child can put his head upon his hands, and 
 think and think till it reaches in imagination some far dis- 
 tant barrier of the universe, and still the difficulty presents 
 itself to his young mind, "And what is beyond that barrier ?" 
 and the only answer is, " The high and lofty place." And 
 this, brethren, is the inward seal with which God has stamped 
 Himself upon man's heart. If every other trace of Deity has 
 been expunged by the fall, these two, at least, defy destruc- 
 tion the thought of eternal time, and the thought of im- 
 measurable space. 
 
 The third measure which is given us of God respects His 
 character. His name is Holy. The chief idea which this 
 would convey to us is separation from evil. Brethren, there 
 is perhaps a time drawing near when those of us who shall 
 stand at His right hand, purified from all evil taint, shall be 
 able to comprehend absolutely what is meant by the holi 
 ness of God. At present, with hearts cleaving down to 
 earth, and tossed by a thousand gusts of unholy passion, we 
 can only form a dim conception relatively of that which it 
 implies. None but the pure can understand purity. The 
 chief knowledge which we have of God's holiness comes 
 from our acquaintance with unholiness. We know what 
 impurity is God is not that. We know what injustice is 
 God is not that. We know what restlessness, and guilt, and 
 passion are, and deceitfulness, and pride, and waywardness 
 all these we know. God is none of these. And this is our 
 chief acquaintance with His character. We know what God 
 is not. We scarcely can be rightly said to know, that is to 
 feel, what God is. And therefore this is implied in the very 
 name of holiness. Holiness in the Jewish sense means sim- 
 separateness. From all that is wrong, and mean, and 
 ase, our God is forever separate. 
 
592 Mans Greatness and God's Greatness 
 
 There is another way in which God gives to us a colicep 
 tion of what this holiness implies. Tell us of His justice, 
 His truth, His loving-kindness. All these are cold abstrac- 
 tions. They convey no distinct idea of themselves to ouf 
 hearts. What we wanted was, that these should be exhib 
 ited to us in tangible reality. And it is just this which 
 God has done. He has exhibited all these attributes, not 
 in the light of speculation, but in the light si facts. He 
 has given us His own character in all its delicacy of color- 
 ing in the history of Christ. Love, mercy, tenderness, 
 purity these are no mere names when we see them brought 
 out in the human actions of our Master. Holiness is 
 only a shadow to our minds, till it receives shape and sub- 
 stance in the life of Christ. All this character of holiness 
 is intelligible to us in Christ. "No man hath seen God at 
 any time, the only begotten of the Father He hath declared 
 Him." 
 
 -There is a third light in which God's holiness is shown to 
 us, and that is in the sternness with which He recoils from 
 guilt. When Christ died for man, I know what God's love 
 means ; and when Jesus wept human tears over Jerusalem, I 
 know what God's compassion means ; and when the stern 
 denunciations of Jesus rung in the Pharisees' ears, I can com- 
 prehend what God's indignation is; and when Jesus stood 
 calm before His murderers, I have a conception of what se- 
 renity is. Brethren, revelation opens to us a scene beyond 
 the grave when this shall be exhibited in full operation. 
 There will be an everlasting banishment from God's presence 
 of that impurity on which the last efforts have been tried in 
 vain. It will be a carrying out of this sentence by a law 
 that can not be reversed "Depart from me, ye cursed." 
 But it is quite a mistake to suppose that this is only a mat- 
 ter of revelation. Traces of it we have now on this side the 
 sepulchre. Human life is full of God's recoil from sin. In 
 the writhings of a heart which has been made to possess its 
 own iniquities in the dark spot which guilt leaves upon the 
 conscience, rising up at times in a man's gayest moments, as 
 it it will not come out in the restlessness and the feverish- 
 ness which follow the efforts of the man who has indulged 
 habits of sin too long in all these there is a law repelling 
 wickedness from the presence of the Most High which pro- 
 claims that God is holy. 
 
 Brethren, it is in these that the greatness of God consists 
 eternal in time unlimited in space unchangeable pure 
 in character His serenity and His vastness arise from His 
 own perfections. 
 
Mans Greatness and God's Greatness. 593 
 
 II. We are to consider, in the second place, the greatness 
 of man. 
 
 1. The nature of that greatness. 
 
 2. The persons who are great. 
 
 Now, this is brought before us in the text in this one fact, 
 that man has been made a habitation of the Deity " I dwell 
 with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit." There is 
 in the very outset this distinction between what is great in 
 God and what is great in man. To be independent of every 
 thing in the universe is God's glory, and to be independent 
 is mail's shame. All that God has, He has from Himself 
 all that man has, he has from God. And the moment man 
 cuts himself off from God, that moment he cuts himself off 
 from all true grandeur. 
 
 There are two things implied in Scripture, when it is said 
 that God dwells with man. The first is that peculiar pres- 
 ence which He has conferred upon the members of His church. 
 Brethren, we presume not to define what that Presence is, 
 and how it dwells within us we are content to leave it as a 
 mystery. But this we know, that something of a very pecu- 
 liar and supernatural character takes place in the heart of 
 every man upon whom the Gospel has been brought to bear 
 with power. " Know ye not," says the apostle, " that your 
 bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost ?" And again, in 
 the Epistle to the Ephesians '.' In Christ ye are builded for 
 a habitation of God through the Spirit." There is something 
 in these expressions which refuses to be explained away. 
 They leave us but one conclusion, and that is that in all 
 those who have become Christ's by faith, God personally and 
 locally has taken up His dwelling-place. 
 
 There is a second meaning attached in Scripture to the ex- 
 pression. God dwells in man. According to the first mean- 
 ing, we understand it in the most plain and literal sense the 
 words are capable of conveying. According to the second, 
 we understand His dwelling in a figurative sense, implying 
 this that He gives an acquaintance with Himself to man. 
 So, for instance, when Judas asked, "Lord, how is it, that 
 Thor wilt manifest Thyself to us and not to the world ?" 
 our Redeemer's reply was this " If a man love me he will 
 keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will 
 come uuto him and make our abode with him." In the 
 question it was asked how God would manifest Himself to 
 His servants. In the answer it was shown how He would 
 make His abode with them. And if the answer be any reply 
 to the question at all, what follows is this that God making 
 His abode or dwelling in the heart is the same thing exactly 
 as God's manifesting himself to the heart. 
 
594 Mans Greatness and God's Greatness. 
 
 Brethren, in these two things the greatness of man con 
 sists. One is to have God so dwelling in us as to impart His 
 character to us ; and the other is to have God so dwelling in 
 us that we recognize His presence, and know that we are 
 His and He is ours. They are two things perfectly distinct. 
 To have God in us, this is salvation ; to know that God is in 
 us, this is assurance. 
 
 Lastly, we inquire as to the persons who are truly great. 
 And these the Holy Scripture has divided into two classes 
 those who are humble and those who are contrite in 
 heart. Or rather, it will be observed that it is the same class 
 of character under different circumstances. Humbleness is 
 the frame of mind of those who are in a state of innocence, 
 contrition of those who are in a state of repentant guilt. 
 Brethren, let not the expression innocence be misunderstood. 
 Innocence in its true and highest sense never existed but 
 once upon this earth. Innocence can not be the religion of 
 man now. But yet there are those who have walked with 
 God from youth, not quenching the Spirit which He gave 
 them, and who are therefore comparatively innocent beings. 
 All they have to do is to go on, whereas the guilty man has 
 to stop and turn back before he can go on. Repentance with 
 them is the gentle work of every jiay, not the work of one 
 distinct and miserable part of life. They are those whom 
 the Lord calls just men which need no repentance, and of 
 whom He says, " He that is clean needeth not save to wash 
 his feet." 
 
 Now they are described here as the humble in heart. 
 Two things are required for this state of mind. One is that 
 a man should have a true estimate of God, and the other is 
 that he should have a true estimate of himself. 
 
 Vain, blind man, places himself on a little corner of this 
 planet, a speck upon a speck of the universe, and begins to 
 form conclusions from the small fraction of God's govern- 
 ment which he can see from thence. The astronomer looks 
 at the laws of motion, and forgets that there must have been 
 a First Cause to commence that motion. The surgeon looks 
 at the materialism of his own frame, and forgets that matter 
 can not organize itself into exquisite beauty. The meta- 
 physician buries himself in the laws of mind, and forgets that 
 there may be spiritual influences producing all those laws. 
 And this, brethren, is the unhumbled spirit of philosophy 
 intellectual pride. Men look at Nature, but they do not 
 look through it up to Nature's God. There is awful igno- 
 rance of God, arising from indulged sin, which produces an 
 unhumbled heart. God may be shut out from the soul by 
 pride of intellect or by pride of heart. 
 
Man's Greatness and God's Greatness. 595 
 
 Pharaoh is placed before us in Scripture almost as a type 
 01 pride. His pride arose from ignorance of God. " Who is 
 the Lord that I should obey his voice ? I know not the Lord, 
 neither will I let Israel go." And this was not intellectual 
 f pride ; it was pride in a matter of duty. Pharaoh had been 
 immersing his whole heart in the narrow politics of Egypt. 
 The great problem of his day was to aggrandize his own 
 people and prevent an insurrection of the Israelites ; and that 
 small kingdom of Egypt had been his universe. He shut his 
 heart to the voice of justice and the voice of humanity : in 
 other words, great in the pride of human majesty, small in 
 the sight of the high and lofty One-, he shut himself out 
 from the knowledge of God. 
 
 The next ingredient of humbleness is, that a man must 
 have a right estimate of himself. There is a vast amount of 
 self-deception on this point. We say of ourselves that which 
 we could not bear others to say of us. A man truly humbled 
 would take it only as his due when others treated him in the 
 way that he says that he deserves. But, my brethren, we 
 kneel in our closets in shame for what we are, and we tell 
 our God that the lowest place is too good for us : and then 
 we go into the world, and if we meet with slight or disre- 
 spect, or if our opinion be not attended to, or if another be 
 preferred before us, there is all the anguish of a galled and 
 jealous spirit, and half the bitterness of our lives comes from 
 this, that we are smarting from what we call the wrongs and 
 the neglect of men. My beloved brethren, if we saw ourselves 
 as God sees us, we should be willing to be anywhere, to be si- 
 lent when others speak, to be passed by in the world's crowd, 
 and thrust aside to make way for others. We should be wil- 
 ling to put others in the way of doing that which we might 
 have got reputation for by doing ourselves. This was the 
 temper of our Master this is the meek and the quiet spirit, 
 and this is the temper of the humble with whom the high 
 and lofty One dwells. 
 
 The other class of those who are truly great are the con- 
 trite in spirit. At first sight it might be supposed that 
 there must ever be a vast distinction between the innocent 
 and the penitent. It was so that the elder son in the parable 
 thought when he saw his brother restored to his father's 
 favor. He was surprised and hurt. He had served his fa- 
 ther these many years his brother had wasted his substance 
 in riotous living. But in this passage God makes no distinc- 
 tion. He places the humble consistent follower and the 
 broken-hearted sinner on a level. He dwells w T ith both with 
 him that is contrite, and with him that is humble. He sheds 
 
596 Man's Greatness and God's Greatness. 
 
 around them both the grandeur of His own presence, and tha 
 annals of Church history are full of exemplifications of this 
 marvel of God's grace. By the transforming grace of Christ, 
 men, who have done the very work of Satan, have become as 
 conspicuous in the service of Heaven as they were once con- 
 spicuous in the career of guilt. 
 
 So indisputably has this been so, that men have drawn 
 from such instances the perverted conclusion, that if a man 
 is ever to be a great saint, he must first be a great sinner. 
 God forbid, brethren, that we should ever make such an in- 
 ference. But this we infer for our own encouragement, that 
 past sin does not necessarily preclude from high attainments. 
 We must " forget the things that are behind." We must 
 not mourn over past years of folly as if they made saintliness 
 impossible. Deep as we may have been in earthliness, so 
 deep we may also be in penitence, and so high we may be- 
 come in spirituality. 
 
 We have so many years the fewer to do our work in. 
 Well, brethren, let us try to do it so much the faster. Christ 
 can crowd the work of years into hours. He did it with the 
 dying thief. If the man who has set out early may take his 
 time, it certainly can not be so with us who have lost our 
 time. If we have lost God's bright and happy presence by 
 our willfulness, what then ? Unrelieved sadness ? IN ay, breth- 
 ren, calmness, purity, may have gone from our heart ; but all 
 is not gone yet. Just as sweetness comes from the bark of 
 the cinnamon when it is bruised, so can the spirit of the cross 
 of Christ bring beauty and holiness and peace out of the 
 bruised and broken heart. God dwells with the contrite as 
 much as with the humble. 
 
 And now, brethren, to conclude, the first inference we col- 
 lect from this subject is the danger of coming into collision, 
 with such a God as our God. Day by day we commit sins 
 of thought and word of which the dull eye of man takes no 
 cognizance. He whose name is Holy can not pass them by. 
 We may elude the vigilance of a human enemy and place 
 ourselves beyond his reach. God fills all space there is not 
 a spot in which His piercing eye is not on us, and His uplift- 
 ed hand can not find us out. Man must strike soon if he 
 would strike at all; for opportunities pass away from him, 
 and his victim may escape his vengeance by death. There 
 is no passing of opportunity with God, and it is this which 
 makes His long-suffering a solemn thing. God can wait, 
 for He has a whole eternity before Him in which He may 
 strike. "All things are open and naked to Him with whom 
 we have to do." 
 
Mans Greatness and God's Greatness. 597 
 
 In the next place, we are taught the heavenly character 
 of condescension. It is not from the insignificance of man 
 that God's dwelling with him is so strange. It is as much 
 the glory of God to bend His attention on an atom as to 
 uphold the universe. But the marvel is that the habitation 
 which He has chosen for Himself is an impure one. And 
 when He came down from His magnificence to make this 
 world His home, still the same character of condescension 
 was shown through all the life of Christ. Our God selected 
 the society of the outcasts of earth, those whom none else 
 would speak to. 
 
 Brethren, if we would be Godlike, we must follow in the 
 same steps. Our temptation is to do exactly the reverse. 
 We are forever wishing to obtain the friendship and the in- 
 timacy of those above us in the world. To win over men 
 of influence to truth to associate with men of talent and 
 station and title. This is the world-chase, and this, breth- 
 ren, is too much the religious man's chase. But if you look 
 simply to the question of resemblance to God, then the man 
 who makes it a habit to select that one in life to do good to, 
 and that one in a room to speak with, whom others pass by 
 because there is nothing either of intellect, or power, or name, 
 to recommend him, but only humbleness, that man has 
 stamped upon his heart more of heavenly similitude by con- 
 descension, than the man who has made it his business to 
 win this world's great ones, even for the sake of truth. 
 
 Lastly, we learn the guilt of two things of which this 
 world is full vanity and pride. There is a distinction 
 between these two. But the distinction consists in this, 
 that the vain man looks for the admiration of others the 
 proud man requires nothing but his own. Now, it is this 
 distinction which makes vanity despicable to us all. We 
 can easily find out the vain man we soon discover what it 
 is he wants to be observed, whether it be a gift of person, or 
 a gift of mind, or a gift of character. If he be vain of his 
 person, his attitudes will tell the tale. If he be vain of his 
 judgment, or his memory, or his honesty, he can not help an 
 unnecessary parade. The world finds him out, and this is 
 why vanity is ever looked on with contempt. So soon as we 
 let men see that we are suppliants for their admiration, we 
 are at their mercy. We have given them the privilege of 
 feeling that they are above us. We have invited them to 
 spurn us. And therefore vanity is but a thing for scorn. 
 But it is very different with pride. No man can look down 
 on him that is proud, for he has asked no man for any thing. 
 They are forced to feel respect for pride, because it is thor 
 
598 The Lawful and Unlawful Use of Law. 
 
 oughly independent of them. It wraps itself up in the con 
 sequence of its own excellences, and scorns to care whether 
 others take note of them or not. 
 
 It is just here that the danger lies. We have exalted a 
 sin into a virtue. No man will acknowledge that he is vain, 
 but almost any man will acknowledge that he is proud. But 
 tried by the balance of the sanctuary, there is little to 
 choose between the two. If a man look for greatness out 
 of God, it matters little whether he seek it in his own 
 applause or in the applause of others. The proud Pharisee, 
 who trusted in himself that he was righteous, was condemned 
 by Christ as severely, and even more, than the vain Jews 
 who " could not believe because they sought honor from one 
 another, and not that honor which cometh from God only." 
 It may be a more dazzling and a more splendid sin to be 
 proud. It is not less hateful in God's sight. Let us speak 
 God's word to our own unquiet, swelling, burning hearts. 
 Pride may disguise itself as it will in its own majesty, but in 
 the presence of the high and lofty One, it is but littleness 
 after all. 
 
 XIX. 
 THE LAWFUL AND UNLAWFUL USE OF LAW. 
 
 A FRAGMENT. 
 
 "But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully." 1 Tim. i. 8. 
 
 IT is scarcely ever possible to understand a passage with- 
 out some acquaintance with the history of the circumstances 
 under which it was written. 
 
 At Ephesus, over which Timothy was bishop, people had 
 been bewildered by the teaching of converted Jews, who 
 mixed the old leaven of Judaism with the new spirituality of 
 Christianity. They maintained the perpetual obligation of 
 the Jewish law (ver. V). They desired to be teachers of the 
 law. They required strict performance of a number of 
 severe observances. They talked mysteriously of angels 
 and powers intermediate between God and the human soul 
 (ver. 4). The result was an interminable discussion at 
 Ephesus. The Church was filled with disputations and con- 
 troversies. 
 
 Now there is something always refreshing to see the 
 Apostle Paul descending upon an arena of controversy, where 
 
The Lawful and Unlawful Use of Law. 599 
 
 % 
 
 minds have been bewildered : and so much is to be said on 
 both sides that people are uncertain which to take. You 
 know at once that he will pour light upon the question, and 
 illuminate all the dark corners. You know that he will not 
 trim, and balance, and hang doubtful, or become a partisan ; 
 but that he will seize some grat principle which lies at the 
 root of the whole controversy, and make its true bearings 
 clear at once. 
 
 This he always does, and this he does on the present occa- 
 sion (ver. 5 and 6). He does not, like a vehement polemic, 
 say Jewish Ceremonies and rules are all worthless, nor some 
 ceremonies are worthless and others essential ; but he says, 
 the root of the whole matter is charity. If you turn aside 
 from this, all is lost ; here at once the controversy closes. 
 So far as any rule fosters the spirit of love, that is, is used 
 lawfully, it is wise, and has a use. So far as it does not, it is 
 chaff. *So far as it hinders it, it is poison. 
 
 Now observe how different this method is from that which 
 is called the sober, moderate way the ma media. Some 
 would have said, the great thing is to avoid extremes. If 
 the question respects fasting, fast, only in moderation : if 
 the observance of the sabbath-day, observe it on the Jewish 
 principle, only not so strictly. 
 
 St. Paul, on the contrary, went down to the root ; he said, 
 The true question is not whether the law is good or bad, but 
 on what principle ; he said, You are both wrong you, in 
 saying that the observance of the law is essential, for the 
 end of it is charity, and if that be got, what matter how ; 
 you, in saying rules may be dispensed with entirely and al- 
 ways, " for we know that the law is good." 
 
 I. The unlawful use, and 
 II. The lawful use of law. 
 
 I. The unlawful use. 
 
 Define law. By law, Paul almost always means, not the 
 Mosaic law, but law in its essence and principle, that is, con- 
 straint. This chiefly in two forms expresses itself 1st. a 
 custom ; 2d. a maxim. As examples of custom, we might 
 give circumcision, or the sabbath, or sacrifice, or fasting. 
 
 Law said, Thou shalt do these things ; and law, as mere 
 law, constrained them. Or again, law may express itself in 
 maxims and rules. 
 
 In rules, as when law said, "Thou shalt not steal" not 
 saying a word about secret dishonesty of heart, but simply 
 taking cognizance of acts. 
 I In maxims, as when it admonished that man ought to give 
 
6oo The Lawful and Unlawful Use of Law, 
 
 
 
 a tenth to God, leaving the principle of the matter unteue/k 
 ed. Principle is one thing, and maxim is another. A prin- 
 ciple requires liberality, a maxim says one-tenth. A princi- 
 ple says, " A merciful man is .merciful to his beast," leaves 
 mercy to the heart, and does not define how ; a maxim sayi>, 
 " Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out thy corn." 
 A principle says, " Forgive ;" a maxim defines " seven 
 times ;" and thus the whole law falls into two divisions : 
 
 The ceremonial law, which constrains life by customs. 
 
 The moral law, which guides life by rules and maxims. 
 
 Now it is an illegitimate use of law. First* To expect, 
 by obedience to it, to make out a title to salvation. 
 
 By the deeds of the law shall no man living be justified. 
 Salvation is by faith : a state of heart right with God ; faith 
 is the spring of holiness a well of life. Salvation is not the 
 having committed a certain number of good acts. Destruc- 
 tion is not the having committed a certain number of crimes. 
 Salvation is God's Spirit in us, leading to good. Destruction 
 is the selfish spirit in us, leading to wrong. 
 
 For a plain reason, then, obedience to law can not save, 
 because it is merely the performance of a certain number of 
 acts which may be done by habit, from fear, from compul- 
 sion. Obedience remains still imperfect. A man may have 
 obeyed the rule, and kept the maxim, and yet not be perfect. 
 " All these commandments have I kept from my youth up." 
 " Yet lackest thou one thing." The law he had kept. The 
 spirit of obedience in its high form of sacrifice he had not. 
 
 Secondly. To use it superstitiously. 
 
 It is plain that this was the use made of it by the Ephe- 
 sian teachers (ver. 4). It seefned to them that law was 
 pleasing to God as restraint. Then unnatural restraints 
 came to be imposed on the appetites, fasting ; on the affec- 
 tions, celibacy. This is what Paul condemns (ch. iv., ver. 8) : 
 " Bodily exercise profiteth little." 
 
 And again, this superstition showed itself in a false rever- 
 encewondrous stories respecting angels respecting the 
 eternal genealogy of Christ awful thoughts about spirits. 
 The apostle calls all these, very unceremoniously, " end- 
 less genealogies" (ver. 4), and "old wives' fables" (ch. iv., 
 ver. 7). 
 
 The question at issue is, wherein true reverence consists : 
 according to them, in the multiplicity of the objects of rever- 
 ence ; according to St. Paul, in the character of the object 
 revered God and right the true object. 
 
 But you are not a Avhit the better for solemn and reveren- 
 tial feelings about a mysterious, invisible world. To trem- 
 
The Lawful and Unlawful Use of Law. 60 1 
 
 ble before a consecrated wafer is spurious reverence. To 
 bend before the majesty of right is Christian reverence. 
 
 Thirdly. To use it as if the letter of it were sacred. The 
 law commanded none to eat the shew-bread except the 
 priests. David ate it in hunger. If Abimelech had scrupled 
 to give it he would have used the law unlawfully. 
 
 The law commanded no manner of work. The apostles in 
 hunger rubbed the ears of corn. The Pharisees used the 
 law unlawfully, in forbidding that. 
 
 II. The lawful use of law. 
 
 1. As a restraint to keep outward evil in check 
 
 ' The law was made for sinners and profane." .... Illus- 
 trate this by reference to capital punishment. No sane man 
 believes that punishment by death will make a nation's 
 heart right, or that the sight of an execution can soften or 
 ameliorate. Punishment does not work in that way. It is 
 not meant for that purpose. It is meant to guard society. 
 
 The law commanding a blasphemer to be stoned could not 
 teach one Israelite love to God, but it could save the streets 
 of Israel from scandalous ribaldry. 
 
 And therefore, clearly understood, law is a mere check to 
 bad men : it does not improve them ; it often makes them 
 worse ; it can not sanctify them. God never intended that 
 it should. It saves society from the open transgression ; it 
 does not contemplate the amelioration of the offender. 
 
 Hence we see for what reason the apostle insisted on the 
 use of the law for Christians. Law never can be abrogated. 
 Strict rules are needed exactly in proportion as we want the 
 power or the will to rule ourselves. It is not because the 
 Gospel has come that we are free from the law, but because, 
 and only so far, as we are in a Gospel state. " It is for a 
 righteous man" that the law is. not made, and thus we see 
 the true nature of Christian liberty. The liberty to which 
 we are called in Christ is not the liberty of devils, the liberty 
 of doing what we will, but the blessed liberty of being on 
 the side of the law, and therefore unrestrained by it in do- 
 ing right. 
 
 Illustrate from laws of coining, housebreaking, etc. We 
 are not under them ; because we may break them as we like ? 
 Nay, the moment we desire, the law is alive again to us. 
 
 2. As a primer is used by a child to acquire by degrees, 
 principles and a spirit. 
 
 This is the use attributed to it in verse 5 : " The end of 
 the commandment is chanty." 
 
 Compare with this two other passages " Christ is the end 
 
 26 
 
GO 2 The Lawful and Unlawful Use of Law. 
 
 of the law for righteousness," and " Love is the fulfilling of 
 the law ;" " Perfect love casteth out fear." 
 
 In every law there is a spirit ; in every maxim a principle ; 
 and the law and the maxim are laid down for the sake of con- 
 serving the spirit and the principle which they enshrine. 
 
 St. Paul compares God's dealing with man to a wise pa 
 rent's instruction of his child see the Epistle to the Gala 
 tians. Boyhood is under law ; you appeal not to the boy's 
 reason, but his will, by rewards and punishments : Do this, 
 and I will reward you ; do it not, and you will be punished. 
 So long as a man is under law this is salutary and necessary, 
 but only while under law. He is free when he discerns prin- 
 ciples, and at the same time has got, by habit, the will to 
 obey. So that rules have done for him a double work, taught 
 hini the principle and facilitated obedience to it. 
 
 Distinguish, however. In point of time, law is first in 
 point of importance, the Spirit. 
 
 In point of time, charity is the " end " of the commandment 
 in point of importance, first and foremost. 
 
 The first thing a boy has to do is to learn implicit obedi- 
 ence to rules. The first thing in importance for a man to 
 learn is, to sever himself from maxims, rules, laws. Why ? 
 That he may become an Antinomian, or a Latitudinariau ? 
 No. He is severed from submission to the maxim because 
 he has got allegiance to the principle. He is free from the 
 rule and the law because he has got the Spirit written in his 
 heart. 
 
 This is the Gospel. A man is redeemed by Christ so far 
 as he is not under the law ; he is free from the law so faf 
 as he is free from the evil which the law restrains; he 
 progresses so far as there is no evil in him which it is 
 an effort to keep down ; and perfect salvation and liberty 
 are when we who, though having the first-fruits of the 
 Spirit, yet groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, 
 " to wit, the redemption of our body " shall have been 
 freed in body, soul, and spirit, from the last traces of the 
 evil which can only be kept down by force. In other words, 
 90 far as Christ's statement is true of ?, " The Prince of this 
 arorld cometh, and hath nothing in me." 
 
Tlie Prodigal and his Brother. 603 
 
 xx. 
 THE PRODIGAL AND HIS BROTHER. 
 
 is And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I havo is 
 thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad : for this thy 
 bi other was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found." Luke 
 xv. 31,32. 
 
 THERE are two classes of sins. There are some sins by which 
 man crushes, wounds, malevolently injures his brother man , 
 those sins which speak of a bad, tyrannical, and selfish heart. 
 Christ met those with denunciation. There are other sins by 
 which a man injures himself. There is a life of reckless in- 
 dulgence ; there is a career of yielding to ungovernable pro- 
 pensities, which most surely conducts to wretchedness and 
 ruin, but makes a man an object of compassion rather than 
 of condemnation. 
 
 The reception which sinners of this class met from Christ 
 was marked by strange and pitying mercy. There was no 
 maudlin sentiment on His lips. He called sin sin, and guilt 
 guilt. But yet there were sins which His lips scourged, and 
 others over which, containing in themselves their own 
 scourge, His heart bled. That which was melancholy, and 
 marred, and miserable in this world, was more congenial to 
 the heart of Christ than that which was proudly happy. It 
 was in the midst of a triumph, and all the pride of a proces- 
 sion, that He paused to weep over ruined Jerusalem. And if 
 we ask the reason why the character of Christ was marked by 
 this melancholy condescension, it is that He was in the midst 
 of a world of ruins, and there was nothing there to gladden, 
 but very much to touch with grief. He was here to restore 
 that which was broken down and crumbling into decay. An 
 enthusiastic antiquarian, standing amidst the fragments of 
 an ancient temple surrounded by dust and moss, broken pil- 
 lar and defaced architrave, with magnificent projects in his 
 mind of restoring all this to former majesty, to draw out to 
 light from mere rubbish the ruined glories, and therefore 
 stooping down amongst the dank ivy and the rank nettles ; 
 such was Christ amidst the wreck of human nature. He was 
 striving to lift it out of its degradation. He was searching 
 out in revolting places that which had fallen down, that He 
 might build it up again in fair proportions,. a holy temple to 
 the- Lord. 
 
604 Tlie Prodigal and his Brother. 
 
 Therefore He labored among the guilty ; therefore He was 
 the companion of outcasts ; therefore He spoke tenderly and 
 lovingly to those whom society counted undone ; therefore He 
 loved to bind up the bruised and the broken-hearted ; therefore 
 His breath fanned the spark which seemed dying out in the 
 wick of the expiring taper, when men thought that it was too 
 late, and that the hour of hopeless profligacy was come. It 
 was that feature in His character, that tender, hoping, en- 
 couraging spirit of His which the prophet Isaiah fixed upon 
 as a characteristic. " A bruised reed will He not break." 
 
 It was an illustration of this spirit which He gave in the 
 parable which forms the subject of our consideration to-day. 
 "VVe find the occasion* which drew it from Him in the com- 
 mencement of this chapter, " Then drew near unto Him all 
 the publicans and sinners for to hear Him. And the Phari- 
 sees and Scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sin- 
 ners and eateth with them." It was then that Christ con- 
 descended to offer an excuse or an explanation of his conduct. 
 And His excuse was this : It is natural, humanly natural, to 
 rejoice more over that which has been recovered than over 
 that which has been never lost. He proved that by three 
 illustrations taken from human life. The first illustration in- 
 tended to show the feelings of Christ in winning back a sin- 
 ner, was the joy which the shepherd feels in the recovery of 
 a sheep from the mountain wilderness. The second was the 
 satisfaction which a person feels for a recovered coin. The 
 last was the gladness which attends the restoration of an 
 erring son. 
 
 Now the three parables are alike in this, that they -all 
 describe more or less vividly the feelings of the Redeemer 
 on the recovery of the lost. But the third parable differs 
 from the other two in this, that besides the feelings of the 
 Saviour, it gives us a multitude of particulars respecting the 
 feelings, the steps, and the motives of the penitent who is 
 reclaimed back to goodness. In the first two the thing lost 
 is a coin or a sheep. It would not be possible to find any 
 picture of remorse or gladness there. But in the third para- 
 ble the thing lost is not a lifeless thing, nor a mute thing, 
 but a being, the workings of whose human heart are all de- 
 scribed. So that the subject opened out to us is a more ex- 
 tensive one not merely the feelings of the finder, God in 
 Christ, but besides that,' the sensations of the wanderer him- 
 self! 
 
 In dealing with this parable, this is the line which we 
 lhall adopt. We shall look at the picture which it draws of 
 1. God's treatment of the penitent. 2. God's expostulation 
 
The Prodigal and his Brother. 605 
 
 with the saint. God's treatment of the penitent divides it- 
 self in this parable into three distinct epochs. The period 
 of alienation, the period of repentance, and the circumstances 
 of a penitent reception. We shall consider all these in turn. 
 
 The first truth exhibited in this parable is the alienation 
 of man's heart from God. Homelessness, distance from our 
 Father that is man's state by nature in this world. The 
 youngest son gathered all together and took his journey into 
 a far country. Brethren, this is ilie history of worldliness. 
 It is a state far from God ; in other words, it is a state of 
 homelessness. And now let us ask what that means. To 
 English hearts it is not necessary to expound elaborately the 
 infinite meanings which cluster round that blessed expres- 
 sion, " home." Home is the one place in all this world 
 where hearts are sure of each other. It is the place of con- 
 fidence. It is the place where we tear off that mask of 
 guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us 
 to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unre- 
 served communications of full and confiding hearts. It is 
 the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without 
 any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of 
 ridicule. Let a man travel where he will, home is the place 
 to which "his heart untravelled fondly turns." He is to 
 double all pleasure there. He is there to divide all pain. A 
 happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon 
 this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities. 
 
 And now, my brethren, if that be the description of home, 
 is God's place of rest your home ? Walk abroad and alone 
 by night. That awful other world in the stillness and the 
 solemn deep of the eternities above, is it your home ? Those 
 graves that lie beneath you, holding in them the infinite se- 
 cret, and stamping upon all earthly loveliness the mark of 
 frailty and change and fleetingness are those graves th? 
 prospect to which in bright days and dark days you can 
 turn without dismay ? God in his splendors dare we feel 
 with Him affectionate and familiar, so that trial comes soft- 
 ened by this feeling it is my Father, and enjoyment can be 
 taken with a frank feeling ; my Father ha? given it me, with- 
 out grudging, to make me happy? All that is having a 
 home in God. Are we at home there ? Why, there is dem- 
 onstration in our very childhood that we are not at home 
 with that other world of God's. An infant fears to be alone, 
 because he feels he is not alone. He trembles in the dark, 
 because he is conscious of the presence of the world of spirits. 
 Long before he has been told tales of terror, there is an in- 
 stinctive dread of the supernatural in the infant mind. It is 
 
606 The Prodigal and his Brother. 
 
 the instinct which we have from childhood that gives us the 
 feeling of another world. And mark, brethren, if the child 
 is not at home in the thought of that world of God's, the 
 deep of darkness and eternity is around him God's home, 
 but not his home, for his flesh creeps. And that feeling 
 grows through life; not the fear when the child becomes a 
 man he gets over fear but the dislike. The man feels as 
 much aversion as the child for the world of spirits. 
 
 Sunday comes. It breaks across the current of his world- 
 liness. It suggests thoughts of death and judgment and 
 everlasting existence. Is that home ? Can the worldly man 
 feel Sunday like a foretaste of his Father's mansion ? If we 
 could but know how many have come here to-day, not to 
 have their souls lifted up heavenward, but from curiosity, or 
 idleness, or criticism, it would give us an appalling estimate 
 of the number who are living in a far country, " having no 
 hope, and without God in the world." 
 
 The second truth conveyed to us in this parable is the un- 
 satisfying nature of worldly happiness. The outcast son 
 tried to satiate his appetite with husks. A husk is an empty 
 thing; it is a thing which looks extremely like food, and 
 promises as much as food ; but it is not food. It is a thing 
 which when chewed will stay the appetite, but leaves the 
 emaciated body without nourishment. Earthly happiness is 
 a husk. We say not that there is no satisfaction in the pleas- 
 ures of a worldly life. That would be an over-statement of 
 the truth. Something there is, or else why should men per- 
 sist in living for them ? The cravings of man's appetite may 
 be stayed by things which can not satisfy him. Every new 
 pursuit contains in it a new hope ; and it is long before hope 
 is bankrupt. But, my brethren, it is strange if a man has not 
 found out, long before he has reached the age of thirty, that 
 every thing here is empty and disappointing. The nobler 
 his heart and the more unquenchable his hunger for the high 
 and the good, the sooner will he find that out. Bubble after 
 bubble bursts, each bubble tinted with the celestial colors of 
 the rainbow, and each leaving in the hand which crushes it 
 a cold damp drop of disappointment. All that is described 
 in Scripture by the emphatic metaphor of" sowing the wind 
 and reaping the whirlwind," the whirlwind of blighted hopes 
 and unreturned feelings and crushed expectations that is 
 the harvest which the world gives you to reap. 
 
 And now is the question asked, Why is this world unsatis- 
 fying ? Brethren, it is the grandeur of the soul which God 
 has given us, which makes it insatiable in its desires with 
 an infinite void which can not be filled up. A soul which 
 
The Prodigal and his Brother. 607 
 
 was made for God, how can the world fill it ? If the ocean 
 can be still with miles of unstable waters beneath it, then 
 the soul of man, rocking itself upon its own deep longings, 
 with the Infinite beneath it, may rest. We were created 
 once in majesty, to find enjoyment in God, and if our hearts 
 are empty now, there is nothing for it but to fill up the hoi- 
 lowness of the soul with God. 
 
 Let not that expression filling the soul with God pass 
 away without a distinct meaning. God is love and good- 
 ness. Fill the soul with goodness, and fill the soul with 
 love, that is the filling it with God. If we love one another, 
 God dwelleth in us. There is nothing else that can satisfy. 
 So that when we hear men of this world acknowledge, as 
 they sometimes will do, when they are wearied with this 
 phantom chase of life, sick of gayeties and tired of toil, that 
 it is not in their pursuits that they can drink the fount of 
 blessedness ; and when we see them, instead of turning aside 
 either broken-hearted or else made wise, still persisting to 
 trust to expectations at fifty, sixty, or seventy years, still 
 feverish about some new plan of ambition -what we see is 
 this : we see a soul formed with a capacity for high and no- 
 ble things, fit for the banquet-table of God Himself, trying 
 to fill its infinite hollowness with husks. 
 
 Once more : there is degradation in the life of irreligion. 
 The things which the wanderer tried to live on were not 
 husks only. They were husks which the swine did eat. 
 Degradation means the application of a thing to purposes 
 lower than that for which it was intended. It is degrada- 
 tion to a man to live on husks, because these are not his true 
 food,, We call it degradation when we see the members of 
 an ancient family, decayed by extravagance, working foi 
 their bread. It is not degradation for a born laborer to 
 work for an honest livelihood. It is degradation for them, 
 for they are not what they might have been. And there- 
 fore, for a man to be degraded, it is not necessary that he 
 should have given himself up to low and mean practices. 
 It is quite enough that he is living for purposes lower 
 than those for which God intended him. He may be a man 
 of unblemished reputation, and yet debased in the truest 
 meaning of the word. We were sent into this world to love 
 God and to love man ; to do good to fill up life with deeds 
 of generosity and usefulness. And he that refuses to work 
 out that high destiny is a degraded man. He may turn 
 away revolted from every thing that is gross. His sensuous 
 indulgences may be all marked by refinement and taste, 
 His house may be filled with elegance. His library may be 
 
608 The Prodigal and his Brother 
 
 adorned with books. There may be the sounds in his man. 
 sion which can regale the ear, the delicacies which can stim- 
 ulate the palate, and the forms of beauty which can please 
 the eye. There may be nothing in his whole life to offend 
 the most chastened and fastidious delicacy ; and yet, if the 
 history of all this be, powers which were meant for eternity 
 frittered upon time, the man is degraded if the spirit which 
 was created to find its enjoyment in the love of God has set- 
 tled down satisfied with the love of the world, then, just as 
 surely as the sensualist of this parable, that man has turned 
 aside from a celestial feast to prey on garbage. 
 
 We pass on to the second period of the history of God's 
 treatment of a sinner. It is the period of his coming to him- 
 self, or what we call repentance. The first fact of religious 
 experience which this parable suggests to us is that common 
 truth men desert the world when the world deserts them. 
 The renegade came to himself when there were no more 
 husks to eat. He would have remained away if he could 
 have got them, but it is written, " no man gave unto him." 
 And this, brethren, is the record of our shame. Invitation 
 is not enough ; we must be driven to God. And the famine 
 comes not by chance. God sends the famine into the soul 
 the hunger, and thirst, and the disappointment to bring 
 back his erring child again. 
 
 Now the world fastens upon that truth, and gets out of it 
 a triumphant sarcasm against religion. They tell us that 
 just as the caterpillar passes into the chrysalis, and the 
 chrysalis into the butterfly, so profligacy passes into disgust, 
 and disgust passes into religion. To use their own phraseol- 
 ogy, when people become disappointed with the world it is 
 the last resource, they say, to turn saint. So the men of the 
 world speak, and they think they are profoundly philosophi- 
 cal and concise in the account they give. The world is wel- 
 come to its very small sneer. It is the glory of our Master's 
 Gospel that it is the refuge of the broken-hearted. It is the 
 strange mercy of our God that He does not reject the writh- 
 ings of a jaded heart. Let the world curl its lip if it will, 
 when it sees through the causes of the prodigal's return. 
 And if the sinner does not come to God taught by this dis- 
 appointment, what then? If affections crushed in early life 
 have driven one man to God ; if wrecked and ruined hopes 
 have made another man religious ; if want of success in a 
 profession has broken the spirit ; if the human life lived out 
 too passionately has left a surfeit and a craving behind 
 which end in seriousness ; if one is brought by the sadness 
 of widowed life, and another by the forced desolation of in- 
 
The Prodigal and his Brother. 609 
 
 voluntary single life ; if when the mighty famine comes into 
 the heart, and not a husk is left, not a pleasure untried, then, 
 and not till then, the remorseful resolve is made, " I will 
 arise and go to my Father:" well, brethren, what then? 
 Why this, that the history of penitence, produced as it so 
 often is by mere disappointment, sheds only a brighter lustre 
 round the love of Christ, who rejoices to receive such wan- 
 derers, worthless as they are, back into His bosom. Thank 
 God, the world's sneer is true. It is the last resource to turn 
 saint. Thanks to our God that when this gaudy world has 
 ceased to charm, when the heart begins to feel its hollow- 
 ness, and the world has lost its satisfying power, still all is 
 not yet lost, if penitence and Christ remain, to still, to hum- 
 ble, and to soothe a heart which sin has fevered. 
 
 There is another truth contained in this section of the 
 parable. After a life of wild sinfulness, religion is servitude 
 at first, not freedom. Observe, he went back to duty with 
 the feelings of a slave : " I am no more worthy to be called 
 thy son ; make me as one of thy hired servants." Any one 
 who has lived in the excitement of the world, and then tried 
 to settle down at once to quiet duty, knows how true that is. 
 To borrow a metaphor from Israel's desert life, it is a tasteless 
 thing to live on manna after you have been feasting upon 
 quails. It is a dull cold drudgery to find pleasure in simple 
 occupation when life has been a succession of strong emo- 
 tions. Sonship it is not ; it is slavery. A son obeys in 
 love, entering heartily into his father's meaning. A servant 
 obeys mechanically, rising early because he must ; doing, it 
 may be, his duty well, but feeling in all its force the irksome- 
 ness of the service. Sonship does not come all at once. 
 The yoke of Christ is easy, the burden of Christ is light ; 
 but it is not light to every body. It is light when you love 
 it, and no man who has sinned much can love it all at once. 
 
 Therefore, if I speak to any one who is trying to be relig- 
 ious, and heavy in heart because his duty is done too formal- 
 ly, my Christian brother, fear not. You are returning, like 
 the prodigal, with the feelings of a servant. Still it is a real 
 return. The spirit of adoption will come afterwards. You 
 will often have to do duties which you can not relish, and in 
 which you see no meaning. So it was with Naajnan at the 
 prophet's command. He bathed, not knowing why he was 
 bidden to bathe, in Jordan. When you bend to prayer, often 
 and often you will have to kneel with wandering thoughts, 
 and constraining lips to repeat words into which your heart 
 scarcely enters. You will have to perform duties when the 
 heart is cold, and without a spark of enthusiasm to warm 
 
 26* 
 
6 1 o The Prodigal and his Brother. 
 
 you. But, my Christian brother, onward still. Struggle to 
 the cross, even though it be struggling as in chains. Just 
 as on a day of clouds, when you have watched the distant 
 hills, dark and gray with mist, suddenly a gleam of sunshine 
 passing over reveals to you, in that flat surface, valleys and 
 dells and spots of sunny happiness, which slept before unsus- 
 pected in the fog, so in the gloom of penitential life there 
 will be times when God's deep peace and love will be felt 
 shining into the soul with supernatural refreshment. Let the 
 penitent be content with the servant's lot at first. Liberty 
 and peace, and the bounding sensations of a Father's arms 
 around you, come afterwards. 
 
 The last circumstance in this division of our subject is the 
 reception which a sinner meets with on his return to God. 
 " Bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring 
 on his hand, and Shoes on his feet, and bring hither the fat- 
 ted calf and kill it, and let us eat and be merry." This ban 
 quet represents to us two things. It tells of the father's glad- 
 ness on his son's return. That represents God's joy on the 
 reformation of a sinner. It tells of a banquet and'a dance 
 given to the long-lost son. That represents the sinner's 
 gladness when he first understood that God was reconciled 
 to him in Christ. There is a strange, almost wild, rapture, a 
 strong gush of love and happiness in those days which are 
 called the days of the first conversion. When a man who 
 has sinned much a profligate turns to God, and it becomes 
 first clear to his apprehension that there is love instead of 
 spurning for him, there is a luxury of emotion a banquet of 
 tumultuous blessedness in the moment of first love to God, 
 which stands alone in life, nothing before and nothing after 
 like it. And, brethren, let us observe : This forgiveness is a 
 thing granted while a man is yet afar off. We are not to 
 wait for the right of being happy till we are good : we might 
 wait forever. Joy is not'delayed till we deserve it. JustTso 
 soon as a sinful man trusts that the mercy of God in Christ 
 has done away with his transgression, the ring, and the robe, 
 and the shoes are his, the banquet and the light of a Father's 
 countenance. 
 
 Lastly, we have to consider very briefly God's expostula- 
 tion with a saint. There is another brother mentioned in 
 this parabfe, who expressed something like indignation at 
 the treatment which his brother met with. There are com- 
 mentators who have imagined that this personage represents 
 the Pharisees who complained that Jesus was receiving sin- 
 ners. But this is manifestly impossible, because his father 
 expostulates with him in this language, "Son, thou art evel 
 
The Prodigal and his Brother. 6 1 1 
 
 with me ;" not for one moment could that be true of the Phar- 
 isees. The true interpretation seems to be that this elder 
 brother represents a real Christian perplexed with God's 
 mysterious dealings. We haye before us the description of 
 one of those happy persons who have been filled with the 
 Holy Ghost from their mother's womb, and on the whole 
 (with imperfections of course) remained God's servant all his 
 life. For this is his own account of himself, which the father 
 does not contradict. " Lo ! these many years do I serve 
 thee." 
 
 We observe, then, the objection made to the reception of 
 a notorious sinner "Thou never gavest me a kid." Now, 
 in this we have a fact true to Christian experience. Joy 
 seems to be felt more vividly and more exuberantly by men 
 who have sinned much, than by men who have grown up 
 consistently from childhood with religious education. Rap- 
 ture belongs to him whose sins, which are forgiven, are 
 many. In the perplexity which this fact occasions, there is 
 a feeling which is partly right and partly wrong. There is a 
 surprise which is natural" There is a resentful jealousy 
 which is to be rebuked. 
 
 There is first of all a natural surprise. It was natural that 
 the elder brother should feel perplexed and hurt. When a 
 sinner seems to be rewarded with more happiness than a 
 saint, it appears as if good and evil were alike undistinguish- 
 ed in God's dealings. It seems like putting a reconciled en- 
 emy over the head of a tried servant. It looks as if it were 
 a kind of encouragement held out to sin, and a man begins 
 to feel, Well, if this is to be the caprice of my father's deal- 
 ing ; if this rich feast of gladness be the reward of a licen- 
 tious life, "Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and 
 washed my hands in innocency." This is natural surprise. 
 
 But besides this there is a jealousy in these sensations of 
 ours which God sees fit to rebuke. You have been trying to 
 serve God all your life, and find it struggle, and heaviness, 
 and dullness still. You see another who has outraged every 
 obligation of life, and he is not tried by the deep prostration 
 you think he ought to have, but bright with happiness at 
 once. You have been making sacrifices all your life, and 
 your worst trials come out of your most generous sacrifices. 
 Your errors in judgment have been followed by sufferings 
 sharper than those which crime itself could have brought. 
 And you see men who never made a sacrifice unexposed to 
 trial men whose life has been rapture purchased by Jhe 
 ruin of others' innocence tasting first the pleasures of sin, 
 and then the banquet of religion. You have been a moral 
 
612 The Prodigal and his Brother. 
 
 man from childhood, and yet with all your efforts you feel 
 the crushing conviction that it has never once been granted 
 you to win a soul to God. And you see another man mark- 
 ed by inconsistency and impetuosity, banqueting every day 
 upon the blest success of impressing and saving souls. All 
 that is startling. And then comes sadness and despondency ; 
 then come all those feelings which are so graphically depict- 
 'ed here : irritation " he was angry ;" swelling pride " he 
 would not go in;" jealousy, which required soothing "his 
 father went out and entreated him." 
 
 And now, brethren, mark the father's answer. It does not 
 account for this strange dealing by God's sovereignty. It 
 does not cut the knot of the difficulty, instead of untying it, 
 by saying, God has Bright to do what He will. He does not 
 urge, *God has a right to act on favoritism if He please. But 
 it assigns two reasons. The first reason is, "It was meet, 
 right that we should make merry." It is meet that God 
 should be glad on the reclamation of a sinner. It is meet 
 that that sinner, looking down into the dreadful chasm over 
 which he had been tottering, should feel a shudder of delight 
 through all his* frame on thinking of his escape. And it is 
 meet that religious men should not feel jealous of one anoth- 
 er, but freely and generously join in thanking God that 
 others have got happiness, even if they have not. The spirit 
 of religious exclusiveness, which looks down contemptuously 
 instead of tenderly on worldly men, and banishes a man for- 
 ever from the circle of its joys because he has sinned notori- 
 ously, is a bad spirit. * 
 
 Lastly, the reason given for this dealing is, " Son, thou art 
 always with me, and all that I have is thine." By which 
 Christ seems to tell us that the disproportion between man 
 and man is much less than we suppose. The profligate had 
 had one hour of ecstasy the other had had a whole life of 
 peace. A consistent Christian may not have rapture ; but 
 he has that which is much better than rapture : calmness 
 God's serene and perpetual presence. And after all, breth- 
 ren, that is the best. One to whom much is forgiven has 
 much joy. He must have it, if it were only to support him 
 through those fearful trials which are to come those haunt- 
 ing reminiscences of a polluted heart those frailties those 
 inconsistencies to which the habits of past indulgence have 
 made him liable. A terrible struggle is in store for him yet. 
 Grudge him not one hour of unclouded exultation. But re- 
 ligion's best gift rest, serenity the quiet daily love of one 
 who lives perpetually with his Father's family uninterrupt- 
 ed usefulness that belongs to him who has lived steadily, 
 
The Prodigal and his Brother. 613 
 
 ancl walked with duty, neither grieving nor insulting the 
 Holy Spirit of hie God. The man who serves God early has 
 the best of it ; joy is well in its way, but a few flashes of joy 
 are trifles in comparison with a life of peace. Which is best : 
 the flash of joy lighting up the whole heart, and then dark- 
 ness till the next flash comes or the steady calm sunlight 
 of day in which men work ? 
 
 And now, one word to those who are living this young 
 man's life thinking to become religious, as he did, when 
 they have got tired of the world. I speak to those who are 
 leading what, in the world's softened language of conceal- 
 ment, is called a gay life. Young brethren, let two motives 
 be urged earnestly upon your attention. The first is the 
 motive of mere honorable feeling. We will say nothing 
 about the uncertainty of life. We will not dwell upon this 
 fact, that impressions resisted now may never come back 
 again. We will not appeal to terror. That is not the 
 weapon which a Christian minister loves to use. If our lips 
 were clothed with thunder, it is not denunciation which 
 makes men Christians ; let the appeal be made to every 
 high and generous feeling in a young man's bosom. 
 
 Deliberately and calmly you are going to do this: to 
 spend the best and most vigorous portion of your days in 
 idleness, in uselessness, in the gratification of self, in the con- 
 tamination of others. And then weakness, the relics and 
 the miserable dregs of life you are going to give that sor- 
 ry offering to God, because His mercy endureth forever ! 
 Shame shame upon the heart which can let such a plan rest 
 in it one moment. If it be there, crush it like a man. It is 
 a degrading thing to enjoy husks till there is no man to give 
 them. It is a base thing to resolve to give to God as little 
 as possible, and not to serve Him till you must. 
 
 Young brethren, I speak principally to you. You have 
 health for God now. You have strength of mind and body. 
 IL^HI have powers which may fit you for real usefulness. 
 You have appetites for enjoyment which can be consecrated 
 to God. You acknowledge the law of honor. Well, then, 
 by every feeling of manliness and generosity remember this : 
 now. and not later, is your time to learn what religion 
 means. 
 
 There is another motive, and a very solemn one, to be 
 urged upon those who are delaying. Every moment of de- 
 lay adds bitterness to after-struggles. The moment of a 
 feeling of hired servitude must come. If a man will not 
 obey God with a warm heart, he may hereafter have to do it 
 with a cold one. To be holy is the work of a lonjr life. The 
 
6 1 4 John "s Rebuke of Herod. 
 
 experience often thousand lessbns teaches only a little of it; 
 and all this, the work of becoming like God,"the man who 
 delays is crowding into the space of a few years or a few 
 months. When we have lived long a life of sin, do we think 
 that repentance and forgiveness will obliterate all the traces 
 of sin upon the character? Be sure that every sin pays its 
 price : " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 
 Oh! there are recollections of past sin which come crowd- 
 ing up to the brain, with temptation in them. There are 
 old habits which refuse to be mastered by a few enthusiastic 
 sensations. There is so much of the old man clinging to the 
 penitent who has waited long he is so much, as a religious 
 man, like what he was when he was a worldly man that it 
 is doubtful whether he ever reaches in this world the full 
 stature of Christian manhood. Much warm earnestness, but 
 strange inconsistencies that is the character of one who is 
 an old man and a young Christian. Brethren, do we w r ish to 
 risk all this ? Do we want to learn holiness with terrible 
 struggles, and sore affliction, and the plague of much re- 
 maining evil ? Then wait before you turn to God. 
 
 XXI. 
 JOHN'S REBUKE OF HEROD. 
 
 "But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved by him for Herodiashis brother 
 Philip's wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done, added yet this 
 above all, that he shut up John in -prison." Luke iii. 19, 20. 
 
 THE life of John the Baptist divides itself into three dis- 
 tinct periods. Of the first we are told almost nothing, but 
 we may conjecture much. We are told that he was in the 
 deserts till his sho wing unto Israel. It was a period, proba- 
 bly, in which, saddened by the hollowness of all life in Is- 
 rael, and perplexed with the controversies of Jerusalem, the 
 controversies of Sadducee with Pharisee, of formalist with 
 mystic, of the disciples of one infallible rabbi with the disci- 
 ples of another infallible rabbi, he fled for refuge to the wil- 
 derness, to see whether God could not be found there by the 
 heart that sought Him, without the aid of churches, rituals, 
 creeds, and forms. This period lasted thirty years. 
 
 The second period is a shorter one. It comprises the few 
 months of his public ministry. His difficulties were over; 
 he had reached conviction enough to live and die on. He 
 
John "s Rebuke of Herod. 6 1 5 
 
 knew not all, but he knew something. He could not baptize 
 with the Spirit, but he could at least baptize with water. 
 It was not given to him to build up, but it was given to him 
 to pull down all false foundations. He knew that the high- 
 est truth of spiritual life was to be given by One that should 
 come after. What he had learned in the desert was con- 
 tained in a few words Reality lies at the root of religious 
 life. Ye must be real, said John. " Bring forth fruits meet 
 for repentance." Let each man do his own duty ; let the rich 
 impart to those who are not rich ; let the publican accuse 
 no man falsely ; let the soldier be content with his wages. 
 The coming kingdom is not a mere piece of machinery which 
 will make you all good and happy without effort of your 
 own. Change yourselves, or you will have no kingdom at 
 all. Personal reformation, personal reality, that was John's 
 message to the world. 
 
 It was an incomplete one ; but he delivered it as his all, 
 manfully ; and his success was signal, astonishing even to 
 himself. Successful it was, because it appealed to all the 
 deepest wants of the human heart. It told of peace to those 
 who had been agitated by tempestuous passion. It promised 
 forgetfulness of past transgression to those whose consciences 
 smarted with self-accusing recollections. It spoke % of refuge 
 from the wrath to come to those who had felt it a fearful 
 expectation to fall into the hands of an angry God. And the 
 result of that message, conveyed by the symbol of baptism, 
 was that the desert swarmed with crowds who owned the 
 attractive spell of the power of a new life made possible. 
 Warriors, paupers, profligates some admiring the nobleness 
 of religious life, others needing it to fill up the empty hollow 
 of an unsatisfied heart ; the penitent, the heart-broken, the 
 worldly, and the disappointed, all came. And with them 
 there came two other classes of men, whose approach roused 
 the Baptist to astonishment. 
 
 The formalist, not satisfied with his formality, and the 
 infidel, unable to rest on his infidelity they came too 
 startled, for one hour at least, to the real significance of life, 
 and shaken out of unreality. The Baptist's message wrung 
 the confession from their souls : " Yes, our system will not 
 do. We are not happy, after all ; w6~ are miserable. Proph- 
 et, whose solitary life, far away there in the desert, has 
 been making to itself a home in the mysterious and the in- 
 visible, what hast thou got to tell us from that awful other 
 world ? What are we to do ?" 
 
 These things belong to a period of John's life anterior to 
 the text. The prophet has been hitherto in a self-selected 
 
6 1 6 John "s Rebuke of Herod. 
 
 solitude, the free wild desert, opening his heart to the strange 
 sights and sounds through which the grand voice of orient- 
 al nature speaks of God to the soul, in "a way that books can 
 not speak. 
 
 We have arrived at the third period of his history. We 
 are now to consider him as the tenant of a compelled solitude, 
 in the dungeon of a capricious tyrant. Hitherto, by that 
 rugged energy with which he battled with the temptations 
 of this world, he has been shedding a glory round human 
 life. We are now to look at him equally alone ; equally 
 majestic, shedding by martyrdom almost a brighter glory 
 round human death. He has hitherto been receiving the 
 homage of almost unequalled popularity. We are now to 
 observe him reft of every admirer, every soother, every friend. 
 He has been hitherto overcoming the temptations of existence 
 by entire seclusion from them all. We are now to ask how 
 he will stem those seductions when he is brought into the 
 very midst of them, and the whole outward aspect of his life 
 has laid aside its distinctive and peculiar character ; when he 
 has ceased to be the anchorite, and has become the idol of 
 court. 
 
 Much instruction, brethren, there ought to be* in all this, 
 if we only knew rightly how to bring it out, or even to paint 
 in any thing like intelligible colors the picture which our 
 own minds have formed. Instructive, because human life 
 must ever be instructive. How a human spirit contrived to 
 get its life accomplished in this confused world : what a man 
 like us, and yet no common man, felt, did, suffered ; how he 
 fought, and how he conquered ; if we could only get a clear 
 possession and firm grasp of that, we should have got almost 
 all that is worth having in truth, with the technicalities 
 stripped off, for what is the use of truth except to teach man 
 how to live ? There is a vast value in genuine biography. It 
 is good to have real views of what life is, and what Christian 
 life may be. It is good to familiarize ourselves with the his- 
 tory of those wjiom God has pronounced the salt of the earth. 
 We can not help contracting good from such association. 
 
 And just one thing respecting this man whom we are to 
 follow for some time to-day. Let us not be afraid of seeming 
 to rise into a mere enthusiastic panegyric of a man. It is a 
 rare man we have to deal with, one of God's heroic ones, a 
 true conqueror ; one whose life and motives it is hard to 
 understand without feeling warmly and enthusiastically 
 about them ; one of the very highest characters, rightly 
 understood, of all the Bible. Panegyric such as we can give, 
 what is it after he has been stamped by his Master's 
 
John J s Rebuke of Herod. 6 1 7 
 
 eulogy " A prophet ? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a 
 prophet. Among them that are born of women there hath 
 not risen a greater than John the Baptist." In the verse 
 which is to serve us for our guidance on this subject there 
 are two branches which will afford us fruit of contempla- 
 tion. It is written, " Herod being reproved by John for He- 
 lodias." 
 
 Here is our first subject of thought. The truthfulness of 
 Christian character. 
 
 And then next, he " shut up John in prison." 
 
 Here is our second topic. The apparent failure of religious 
 life. 
 
 The point which we have to look at in this section of the 
 Baptist's life is the truthfulness of religious character. For 
 the prophet was now in a sphere of life altogether new. He 
 had got to the third act of his history. The first was per- 
 formed right manfully in the desert that is past. He has 
 now become a known man, celebrated through the country, 
 brought into the world, great men listening to him, and in 
 the way, if he chooses it, to become familiar with the polished 
 life of Herod's court. For this we read : Herod observed 
 John, that is, cultivated his acquaintance, paid him marked 
 attention, heard him, did many things at his bidding, and 
 heard him gladly. 
 
 For thirty long years John had lived in that far-off desert, 
 filling his soul with the grandeur of solitude, content to be 
 unknown, not conscious, most likely, that there was any thing 
 supernatural in him living with the mysterious God in 
 silence. And then came the day when the qualities, so 
 secretly nursed, became known in the great world : men felt 
 that there was a greater than themselves before them, and 
 then came the trial of admiration, when the crowds congre- 
 gated round to listen. And all that trial John bore unin- 
 jured, for when those vast crowds dispersed at night, he was 
 left alone with God and the universe once more. That pre- 
 vented his being spoilt by flattery. But now comes the 
 great trial. John is transplanted from the desert to the 
 town : he has quitted simple life ; he has come to artificial 
 life. John has won a king's attention, and now the question 
 is, Will the diamond of the mine bear polishing without 
 breaking into shivers ? Is the iron prophet melting into 
 voluptuous softness? Is he getting the world's manners 
 and the world's courtly insincerity ? Is he becoming arti- 
 ficial through his change of life ? My Christian brethren, we 
 find nothing of the kind. There he stands in Herod's volup- 
 tuous court the prophet of the desert still, unseduced by 
 
6 1 8 John 's Rebuke of Herod. 
 
 blandishment from his high loyalty, and fronting his patron 
 and his prince with the stern unpalatable truth of God. 
 
 It is refreshing to look on such a scene as this the highest, 
 the very highest moment, I think, in all John's history ; 
 higher than his ascetic life. For after all, ascetic life such as 
 he had led before, when he fed on locusts and wild honey, is 
 hard only in the first resolve. When you have once made 
 up your mind to that, it becomes a habit to live alone. To 
 lecture the poor about religion is not hard. To speak of un- 
 worldliness to men with whom we do not associate, and who 
 do not see our daily inconsistencies, that is not hard. To 
 speak contemptuously of the world when we have no power 
 of commanding its admiration, that is not difficult. But 
 when God has given a man accomplishments or powers 
 which would enable him to shine in society, and he can still 
 be firm, and steady, and uncompromisingly true ; when he 
 can be as undaunted before the rich as before the poor ; when 
 rank and fashion can not subdue him into silence : when he 
 hates moral evil as sternly in a great man as he would in a 
 peasant, there is truth in that man. This was the test to 
 which the Baptist was submitted. 
 
 And now contemplate him for a moment ; forget that he 
 is an historical personage, and remember that he was a man 
 like us. Then comes the trial. All the habits and rules of 
 polite life would be whispering such advice as this : " Only 
 keep your remarks within the limits of politeness. If you 
 can not approve, be silent; you can do no good by finding 
 fault with the great." We know how the whole spirit of a 
 man like John would have revolted at that. Imprisonment ? 
 Yes. Death ? Well, a man can die but once any thing, 
 but not cowardice not meanness not pretending what I do 
 not feel, and disguising what I do feel. Brethren, death is 
 not the worst thing in this life ; it is not difficult to die five 
 minutes and the sharpest agony is past. The worst thing in 
 this life is cowardly untruthfulness. Let men be rough, if 
 they will, let them be unpolished, but let Christian men in all 
 they say be sincere. No flattery, no speaking smoothly to a 
 man before his face, while all the time there is a disapproval 
 of his conduct in the heart. The thing we want in Christi- 
 anity is not politeness, it is sincerity. 
 
 There are three things which we remark in this truthful- 
 ness of John. The first is its straightforwardness, the second 
 is its unconsciousness, and the last its unselfishness. The 
 straightforwardness is remarkable in this circumstance, that 
 there is no indirect coming to the point. At once, without 
 circumlocution, the true man speaks. " It is not lawful for 
 
John 3 Rebuke of Herod. 619 
 
 thee to have her." There are some men whom God has 
 gifted -with a rare simplicity of heart, which makes them ut- 
 terly incapable of pursuing the subtle excuses which can be 
 made for evil. There is in John no morbid sympathy for the 
 offender : " It is not lawful." He does not say, " It is best to 
 do otherwise ; it is unprofitable for your own happiness to 
 live in this way." He says plainly, " It is wrong for you to 
 do this evil." 
 
 Earnest men in this world have no time for subtleties and 
 casuistry. Sin is detestable, horrible, in God's sight, and 
 when once it has been made clear that it is not lawful, a 
 Christian has nothing to do with toleration of it. If we dare 
 not tell our patron of his sin we must give up his patronage. 
 In the next place, there was unconsciousness in John's rebuke. 
 We remark, brethren, that he was utterly ignorant that he 
 was doing a fine thing. There was no sidelong glance, as 
 in a mirror, of admiration for himself. He was not feeling, 
 This is brave. He never stopped to feel that after-ages 
 would stand by, and look at that deed oi nis, and say, " Well 
 done." His reproof comes out as the natural impulse of an 
 earnest heart. John was the last of all men to feel that he 
 had done any thing extraordinary. And this we hold to be 
 an inseparable mark of truth. No true man is conscious that 
 he is true ; he is rather conscious of insincerity. No brave 
 man is conscious of his courage ; bravery is natural to him. 
 The skin of Moses's face shone after he had been with God, 
 but Moses wist not of it. 
 
 There are many of us who would have prefaced that re- 
 buke with a long speech. We should have begun by ob- 
 serving how difficult it was to speak to a monarch, how del- 
 icate the ^subject, how much proof we were giving of our 
 friendship. We should have asked the great man to accept 
 it as a proof of our devotion. John does nothing of this. 
 Prefaces betray anxiety about self; John was not thinking 
 of himself. He was thinking of God's offended law, and the 
 guilty king's soul. Brethren, it is a lovely and a graceful 
 thing to see men natural. It is beautiful to see men sincere 
 without being haunted with the consciousness of their sincer- 
 ity. There is a sickly habit that men get of looking into 
 themselves, and thinking how they are appearing. We are 
 always unnatural when we do that. The very tread of one 
 who is thinking how he appears to others, becomes dizzy 
 with affectation. He is too conscious of what he is doing, and 
 self-consciousness is affectation. Let us aim at being natural. 
 And we can only become natural by thinking of God and duty, 
 instead of the way in which we are serving God and duty. 
 
62O Johns Rebuke of Herod. 
 
 There was, lastly, something exceedingly unselfish in 
 John's truthfulness. We do not build much on a man's be- 
 ing merely true. It costs some men nothing to be true, for 
 they have none of those sensibilities which shrink from in- 
 flicting pain. There is a surly, bitter way of speaking truth 
 which says little for a man's heart. Some men have not 
 delicacy enough to feel that it is an awkward and a painful 
 thing to rebuke a brother: they are in their element when 
 they can become, censors of the great. John's truthfulness 
 was not like that. It was the earnest loving nature of the 
 man which made him say sharp things. Was it to gratify 
 spleen that he reproved Herod for all the evils he had done ? 
 Was it to minister to a diseased and disappointed misan- 
 thropy ? Little do we understand the depth of tenderness 
 which there is in a rugged, true nature, if we think that. 
 John's whole life was an iron determination to crush self in 
 every thing. 
 
 Take a single instance. John's ministry was gradually su- 
 perseded by the ministry of Christ. It was the moon wan- 
 ing before the Sun. They came and told him that, " Rabbi, 
 He to whom thou barest witness beyond Jordan baptizeth, 
 and all men come unto Him." Two of his own personal 
 friends, apparently some of the last he had left, deserted him, 
 and went to the new teacher. 
 
 And now let us estimate the keenness of that trial. Re- 
 member John was a man : he had tasted the sweets of in- 
 fluence ; that influence was dying away, and just in the prime 
 of life he was to become nothing. Who can not conceive the 
 keenness of that trial ? Bearing that in mind, what is the 
 prophet's answer ? One of the most touching sentences in 
 all Scripture calmly, meekly, the hero recognizes his des- 
 tiny " He must increase, but I must decrease." He does 
 more than recognize it he rejoices in it, rejoices to be noth- 
 ing, to be forgotten, despised, so as only Christ can be every 
 thing. " The friend of the bridegroom rejoiceth because he 
 heareth the bridegroom's voice, this my joy is fulfilled." And 
 it is this man, with self so thoroughly crushed the outward 
 self by bodily austerities, the inward self by Christian hum- 
 bleness it is this man who speaks so sternly to his sovereign,, 
 " It is not lawful." Was there any gratification of human 
 feeling there ? Or was not the rebuke unselfish ? Meant for 
 God's honor, dictated by the uncontrollable hatred of all evil, 
 careless altogether of personal consequences ? 
 
 Now it is this, my brethren, that we want. The world- 
 spirit can rebuke as sharply as the Spirit which was in John ; 
 the world-spirit can be severe upon the great when it is 
 
John 's Rebuke of Herod. 6 2 1 
 
 jealous. The worldly man can not bear to hear of another's 
 success, he can not endure to hear another praised for accom- 
 plishments, or another succeeding in a profession, and the 
 world can fasten very bitterly upon a neighbor's faults, and 
 say," It is not lawful." We expect that in the world. But 
 that this should creep among religious men, that we should 
 be bitter that we, Christians, should suffer jealousy to en- 
 throne itself in our hearts that we should find fault from 
 spleen, and not from love that we shoujd not be able to be 
 calm and gentle, and sweet-tempered, when we decrease, 
 when our powers fail that is the shame. The love of Christ 
 is intended to make such men as John such high and heaven- 
 ly characters. What is our Christianity worth if it can not 
 teach us a truthfulness, an unselfishness, and a generosity be* 
 yond the world's ? 
 
 We are to say something, in the second place, of the ap- 
 parent failure of Christian life. 
 
 The concluding sentence of this verse informs us that John 
 was shut up in prison. And the first thought which sug- 
 gests itself is, that a magnificent career is cut short too soon. 
 At the very outset of ripe and experienced manhood the 
 whole thing ends in failure. John's day of active usefulness 
 is over ; at thirty years of age his work is done ; and what 
 permanent effect have all his labors left ? The crowds that 
 listened to his voice, awed into silence by Jordan's side, we 
 hear^ of them no more. Herod heard John gladly, did much 
 good by reason of his influence. What was all that worth ? 
 The prophet comes to himself in a dungeon, and wakes to 
 the bitter conviction that his influence had told much in the 
 way of commanding attention, and even winning reverence, 
 but very little in the way of gaining souls; the bitterest, the 
 most crushing discovery in the whole circle of ministerial ex- 
 perience. All this was seeming failure. 
 
 And this, brethren, is the picture of almost all human life. 
 To some moods, and under some aspects, it seems, as it seem- 
 ed to the psalmist, " Man walketh in a vain shadow and dis- 
 quieteth himself in vain." Go to any church-yard, and stand 
 ten minutes among the grave-stones ; read inscription after 
 inscription recording the date of birth, and the date of death, 
 of him who lies below, all the trace which myriads h/ive left 
 behind of their having done their day's work on God's earth 
 that is failure or seems so. Cast the eye down the col- 
 umns of any commander's dispatch after a general action. 
 The men fell by thousands ; the officers by hundreds. Cour- 
 age, high hope, self-devotion, ended in smoke forgotten by 
 the time of the next list of slain : that is the failure of life 
 
622 Johns Rebuke of Herod. 
 
 once more. Cast your eye over the shelves of a public li- 
 brary there is the hard toil of years, the product of a life 
 of thought ; all that remains of it is there in a worm-eaten 
 folio, taken down once in a century. Failure of human life 
 again. . Stand by the most enduring of all human labors, 
 the pyramids of Egypt. One hundred thousand men, year 
 by year,, raised those enormous piles to protect the corpses 
 of the buried from rude inspection. The spoiler's hand has 
 been there, and the bodies have been rifled from their mau- 
 soleum, and three thousand years have written " failure " 
 upon that. In all that, my Christian brethren, if we look no 
 deeper than the surface, we read the grave of human hope, 
 the apparent nothingness of human labor. 
 
 And then look at this history once more. In the isolation 
 of John's dying hour there appears failure again. When a 
 great man dies we listen to hear what he has to say, we turn 
 to the last page of his biography first, to see what he had to 
 bequeath to the world as his experience of life. We expect 
 that the wisdom, which he has been hiving up for years, w r ill 
 distill in honeyed sweetness then. It is generally not so. 
 There is stupor and silence at the last. "How dieth the 
 wise man ?" asks Solomon : and he answers bitterly, "As the 
 fool." The martyr of truth dies privately in Herod's dun- 
 geon. We have no record of his last words. There were no 
 crowds to look on. We can not describe how he received 
 his sentence. Was he calm? Was he agitated? Did he 
 bless his murderer? Did he give utterance to any deep re- 
 flections on human life ? All that is shrouded in silence. 
 He bowed his head, and the sharp stroke fell flashing down. 
 We know that, we know no more apparently a noble life 
 abortive. 
 
 And now let us ask the question distinctly, Was all this 
 indeed failure ? No, my Christian brethren, it was sublimest 
 victory. John's work was no failure ; he left behind him no 
 sect to which he had given his name, but his disciples passed 
 into the service of Christ, and were absorbed in the Christian 
 Church. Words from" John had made impressions, and men 
 forgot in after years where the impressions first came from, 
 but the day of judgment will not forget. John laid the 
 foundations of a temple, and others built upon it. He laid it 
 in struggle, in martyrdom. It was covered up like the rough 
 masonry below ground, but when we look round on the vast 
 Christian Church we are looking at the superstructure of 
 John's toil. 
 
 There is a lesson for us in all that, if we will learn it. 
 Work, true work, done honestly and manfully for Christ, 
 
. John 's Rebuke of Hercd. 623 
 
 never can be a failure. Your own work, my brethren, which 
 God has given you to do, whatever that is, let it be done 
 truly. Leave eternity to show that it has not been in vain 
 in the Lord. Let it but be work, it will tell. True Chris- 
 tian life is like the march of a conquering army into a for- 
 tress which has been breached ; men fall by hundreds in the 
 ditch. Was their fall a failure ? Nay, for their bodies 
 bridge over the hollow, and over them the rest pass on to 
 victory. The quiet religious worship that we have this day 
 how comes it to be ours ? It was purchased for us by the 
 constancy of such men as John, who freely gave their lives. 
 We are treading upon a bridge of martyrs. The suffering 
 was theirs the victory is ours. John's career was no failure. 
 
 Yet we have one more circumstance which seems to tell of 
 failure. In John's prison, solitude, misgiving, black doubt, 
 seem for a time to have taken possession of the prophet's 
 soul. AH that we know of those feelings is this : John 
 while in confinement sent two of his disciples to Christ, to 
 say to Him, "Art thou He that should come, or do we look 
 for another ?" Here is the language of painful uncertainty. 
 We shall not marvel at this if we look steadily at the cir- 
 cumstances. Let us conceive John's feelings. The enthu- 
 siastic child of Nature, who had roved in the desert, free as 
 the air he breathed, is now suddenly arrested, and his strong 
 restless heart limited to the four walls of a narrow dungeon. 
 And there he lay startled. An eagle cleaving the air with 
 motionless wing, and in the midst of his career brought from 
 the black cloud by an arrow to the ground, and looking 
 round with his wild, large eye, stunned, and startled there ; 
 just such was the free prophet of the wilderness, when Her- 
 od's guards had curbed his noble flight, and left him alone 
 in his dungeon. 
 
 Now there is apparent failure here, brethren : it is not the 
 thing which we should have expected. We should have ex- 
 pected that a man who had lived so close to God all his life 
 would have no misgivings in his last hours. But, my breth- 
 ren, it is not so. It is the strange truth that some of the 
 highest of God's servants are tried with darkness on the dy- 
 ing bed. Theory would say, when a religious man is laid up 
 for his last struggles, now he is alone for deep communion 
 with his God. Fact very often says, " No now he is alone, 
 as his Master was before him, in the wilderness to be tempted 
 of the devil." Look at John in imagination, and you would 
 say, " Now his rough pilgrimage is done. He is quiet, out 
 of the world, with the rapt foretaste of heaven in his soul." 
 Look at John in fact. He is agitated, sending to Christ, not 
 
624 Johns Rebuke of Herod. 
 
 able to rest, grim doubt wrestling with his soul, misgiving 
 for one last black hour whether all his hope has not been de- 
 lusion. 
 
 There is one thing we remark here by the way. Doubt 
 often comes from inactivity. We can not give the philoso- 
 phy of it, but this is the fact, Christians who have nothing ic 
 do but to sit thinking of themselves, meditating, sentimental- 
 izing, are almost sure to become the prey of dark, black mis- 
 fivings. John struggling in the desert needs no proof that 
 esus is the Christ. John shut up became morbid and doubt- 
 ful immediately. Brethren, all this is very marvellous. The 
 history of a human soul is marvellous. We are mysteries, 
 but here is the practical lesson of it all. For sadness, for 
 suffering, for misgiving, there is no remedy but stirring and 
 doing. 
 
 Now look once more at these doubts of John's. All his 
 life long John had been wishing and expecting that the king- 
 dom of God would come. The kingdom of God is right tri- 
 umphant over wrong, moral evil crushed, goodness set up in 
 its place, the true man recognized, the false man put down 
 and forgotten. All his life long John had panted for that ; 
 his hope was to make men better. He tried to make the sol- 
 diers merciful, and the publicans honest, and the Pharisees sin- 
 cere. His complaint was, Why is the world the thing it is ? 
 All his life long he had been appealing to the invisible jus- 
 tice of Heaven against the visible brute force* which he saw 
 around him. Christ had appeared, and his hopes were strain- 
 ing to the utmost. " Here is the man !" And now, behold, 
 here is no kingdom of heaven at all, but one of darkness still, 
 oppression and cruelty triumphant, Herod putting God's 
 prophet in prison, and the Messiah quietly letting things 
 take their course. Can that be indeed Messiah ? "All this 
 was exceedingly startling. And it seems that then John be- 
 gan to feel the horrible doubt whether the whole thing were 
 not a mistake, and whether all that which he had taken for 
 inspiration were not, after all, only the excited hopes of an 
 enthusiastic temperament. Brethren, the prophet was well 
 nigh on the brink of failure. 
 
 But let us mark that a man has doubts that is not the 
 svil; all earnest men must expect to be tried with doubts. 
 All men who feel, with their whole souls, the value of the 
 truth which is at stake, can not be satisfied with a "perhaps." 
 Why, when all that is true and excellent in this world, all 
 that is worth living for, is in that question of questions, it is 
 no marvel if we sometimes wish, like Thomas, to see the prints 
 of the nails, to know whether Christ be indeed our Lord or 
 
John s Rebuke of Herod. 625 
 
 not. Cold -hearts are not anxious enough to doubt. Men 
 who love will have their misgivings at times ; that is not 
 the evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid 
 doubting way, content to doubt, proud of their doubts, mor- 
 bidly glad to talk about them, liking the romantic gloom of 
 twilight, without the manliness to say I must and will 
 know the truth. That did not John. Brethren, John ap- 
 pealed to Christ. He did exactly what we do when we 
 pray and he got his answer. Our Master said to his disci- 
 
 5les, Go to my suffering servant, and give him proof. Tell 
 ohn the things ye see and hear " The blind see, the deaf 
 hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the Gospel is preached." 
 There is a deep lesson wrapped up in this. We get a firm 
 grasp of truth by prayer. Communion with Christ is the 
 best proof of Christ's existence and Christ's love. It is so 
 even in" human life. Misgivings gather darkly round our 
 heart about our friend in his absence ; but we seek his frank 
 smile, we feel his affectionate grasp : our suspicions go to 
 sleep again. It is just so in religion. No man is in the 
 habit of praying to God in Christ, and then doubts whether 
 Christ is He " that should come." It is in the power of 
 prayer to realize Christ, to bring Him near, to make you feel 
 His life stirring like a pulse within you. Jacob could not 
 doubt whether he had been with God when his sinew shrunk. 
 John could not doubt whether Jesus was the Christ, when 
 the things He had done were pictured out so vividly in an- 
 swer to his prayer. Let but a man live with Christ, anxious 
 to have his own life destroyed and Christ's life established 
 in its place, losing himself in Christ, that man will have all 
 his misgivings silenced. These are the two remedies for 
 doubt activity and prayer. He w r ho works, and feels he 
 works he who prays, and knows he prays lias got the se- 
 cret of transforming life-failure into life-victory. 
 
 In conclusion, brethren, we make three remarks which 
 could not be introduced into the body of this subject. The 
 first is : let young and ardent minds, under the first impres- 
 sions of religion, beware how they pledge themselves by any 
 open profession to more than they can perform. Herod 
 warmly took up religion at first, courted the prophet of re- 
 ligion, and then when the hot fit of enthusiasm had passed 
 away, he found that he had a clog round his life from which he 
 could only disengage himself by a rough, rude effort. Breth- 
 ren whom God has touched, it is good to count the cost be- 
 fore you begin. If you give up present pursuits impetuously, 
 are you sure that present impulses will last ? Are you quite 
 certain that a day will not come when you will curse the 
 
 2T ' 
 
626 John 's Rebuke of Herod. 
 
 hour in which you broke altogether with the world ? Are 
 you quite sure that the revulsion back again will not be as 
 impetuous as Herod's, and your hatred of the religion which 
 has become a clog as intense as it now is ardent ? 
 
 Many things doubtless there are to be given up amuse- 
 ments that are dangerous, society that is questionable. What 
 we give up, let us give up, not from quick feeling but from 
 principle. Enthusiasm is a lovely thing, but let us be calm 
 in what we do. In that solemn, grand thing Christian life 
 one step backward is religious death. 
 
 Once more : we get from this subject the doctrine of a res- 
 urrection. John's life was hardness, his end was agony. 
 That is frequently Christian life. Therefore, says the apos- 
 tle, if there be no resurrection the Christian's choice is wrong ; 
 " If in this life only we have hope in Christ, then are we of 
 all men most miserable." Christian life is not visible success 
 very often it is the apparent opposite of success. It is the 
 resurrection of Christ working itself out in us ; but it is very 
 often the cross of Christ imprinting itself on us very sharply. 
 The highest prize which God has to give here is martyrdom. 
 The highest style of life is the Baptist's heroic, enduring, 
 manly love. The noblest coronet which any son of man can 
 wear is a crown of thorns. Christian, this is not your rest. 
 Be content to feel that this world is not your home. Home- 
 less upon earth, try more and more to make your home in 
 heaven, above with Christ. 
 
 Lastly, we have to learn from this, that devotedness to 
 Christ is our only blessedness. It is surely a strange thing 
 to see the way in which men crowded round the austere 
 prophet, all saying, " Guide us, we can not guide ourselves." 
 Publicans, Pharisees, Sadducees, Herod, whenever John ap- 
 pears, all bend before him, offering him homage and leader- 
 ship. How do we account for this ? The truth is, the spirit 
 of man groans beneath the weight of its own freedom. When 
 a man has no guide, no master but himself, he is miserable ? 
 we want guidance, and if we find a man nobler, wiser than 
 ourselves, it is almost our instinct to prostrate our affections 
 before that man, as the crowds did by Jordan, and say, " Be 
 my example, my guide, my soul's sovereign." That passion- 
 ate need of worship hero-worship it has been called is a 
 primal, universal instinct of the heart. Christ is the answer 
 to it. Men will not do ; we try to find men to reverence 
 thoroughly, and we can not do it. We go through life, find- 
 ing guides, rejecting them one after another, expecting no- 
 bleness and finding meanness ; and we turn away with a re- 
 coil of disappointment. 
 
John y s Rebuke of Herod. 627 
 
 There is no disappointment in Christ. Christ can be our 
 souls' sovereign. Christ can be our guide. Christ can ab- 
 sorb all. the admiration which our hearts long to give. We 
 want to worship men. These Jews wanted to worship man. 
 They were right man is the rightful object of our worship ; 
 but in the roll of ages there has been but one Man whom we 
 can adore without idolatry: the Man Christ Jesus. 
 
SERMONS 
 
 Jcmrtlj Seric0. 
 
 THE CHARACTER OF ELI. 
 
 "And the child Samuel ministered unto the Lord before Eli. And the 
 word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision." 
 1 Sam. iii. 1. 
 
 IT is impossible to read this chapter without perceiving 
 that it draws a marked contrast between the two persons 
 of whom it speaks Eli and Samuel. 
 
 1. They are contrasted in point of years : for the one is a 
 boy, the other a gray-headed old man ; and if it were for 
 only this, the chapter would be one of deep interest. For 
 it is interesting always to see a friendship between the old 
 and the young. It is striking to see the aged one retaining 
 so much of freshness and simplicity as not to repel the sym- 
 pathies of boyhood. It is surprising to see the younger one 
 so advanced and thoughtful as not to find dull the society 
 of one who has outlived excitability and passion. This is 
 the picture presented in this chapter. A pair of friends 
 childhood and old age standing to each other in the relation- 
 ship, not of teacher and pupil, but of friend and friend. 
 
 2. They are contrasted, again, in point of office. Both are 
 judges of Israel. But Eli is a judge rendering up his trust, 
 and closing his public career. Samuel is a judge entering 
 upon his office : and the outgoing ruler, Eli, is placed under 
 very novel and painful circumstances in reference to his 
 successor. He receives God's sentence of doom from the 
 lips of the child he has taught, and the friend he has loved. 
 The venerable judge of forty years is sentenced by the judge 
 elect. 
 
 3. Still more striking is the contrast in point of character. 
 
630 The Character of Eli. 
 
 A difference of character we expect when ages are so differ- 
 ent. But here the difference of inferiority is on the wrong 
 side. It is the young who is counselling, supporting, ad- 
 monishing the old. It is not the ivy clinging for its own 
 sake to the immovable wall, to be held up : but it is the 
 badly built, mouldering wall held together by the ivy, and 
 only by the ivy kept from falling piecemeal into ruin. 
 
 4. Once more : we have here the contrast between a judge 
 by office and a judge by Divine call. In the first days of 
 the judges of Israel we find them raised up separately by 
 God, one by one, one for each emergency. So that if war 
 threatened the coasts of Israel, no man knew whence the 
 help would come, or who would be Israel's deliverer. It 
 always did come : there was always one, qualified by God, 
 found ready for the day of need, equal to the need ; one 
 whose fitness to be a leader no one had before suspected. 
 But when he did appear, he proved himself to be Israel's 
 acknowledged greatest greatest by the qualities he dis- 
 played, qualities given unto him by God. Therefore men 
 rightly said he was a judge raised up by God. But it seems 
 that in later days judges were appointed by hereditary suc- 
 cession. When danger was always near, men became afraid 
 of trusting to God to raise up a defender for them, and making 
 no preparations for danger of invasion ; therefore, in the ab- 
 sence of any special qualification marking out the man, the 
 judge's son became judge at his father's death ; or the office 
 devolved on the high-priest. This was Eli's qualification, it 
 would seem. Eli was high -priest, and therefore he was 
 judge. He appears not to have had a single ruling quality. 
 He was only a judge because he was born to the dignity. 
 
 There is an earthly wisdom in such an arrangement nay, 
 such an arrangement is indispensable. It is wise after an 
 earthly sort to have an appointed succession. Hereditary 
 judges, hereditary nobles, hereditary sovereigns : without 
 them, human life would run into inextricable confusion. 
 Nevertheless, such earthly arrangements only represent the 
 heavenly order. The Divine order of government is the 
 rule of the wise and good. The earthly arbitrary arrange- 
 ment hereditary succession, or any other stands for this, 
 representing it, more or less fulfills it, but never is it perfect- 
 ly. And from time to time God sets aside and quashes the 
 arbitrary arrangement, in order to declare that it is only a 
 representation of the true and Divine one. From time to 
 time, one who has qualifications direct from God is made, in 
 Scripture, to stand side by side with one who has his qualifi- 
 cations only from office or earthly appointment; and then 
 
The Character of Eli. 631 
 
 the contrast is marvellous indeed. Thus Saul, the king ap- 
 pointed by universal suffrage of the nation, is set aside for 
 David, the man after God's own heart : and thus the Jews, 
 the world's hereditary nobles, descended from the blood and 
 stock of Abraham, are set aside for the true spiritual succes- 
 sion, the Christian Church inheritors by Divine right, not 
 of Abraham's blood, but of Abraham's faith. Thus the he- 
 reditary high - priests in the genuine line of Aaron, priests 
 by lawful succession, representing priestly powers, are set 
 aside at once, so soon as the real High-Priest of God, Jesus 
 Christ, whose priestly powers are real and personal, appears 
 on earth. 
 
 And thus by the side of Eli, the judge by office, stands 
 Samuel, the judge by Divine call : qualified by wisdom, in- 
 sight, will, resting on obedience, to guide and judge God's 
 people Israel. Very instructive are the contrasts of this 
 chapter: We will consider 
 
 I. Eli's character. 
 II. Eli's doom. 
 
 1. Eli's character has two sides; we will take the bright 
 side first. The first point remarkable in him is the absence of 
 envy. Eli furthers Samuel's advancement, and assists it to 
 his own detriment. Very mortifying was that trial. Eli 
 was the one in Israel to whom, naturally, a revelation should 
 have come. God's priest and God's judge" to whom so fitly 
 as to him could God send a message ? But another is pre- 
 ferred : the inspiration comes to Samuel, and Eli is super- 
 seded and disgraced. Besides this, every conceivable cir- 
 cumstance of bitterness is added to his humiliation God's 
 message for all Israel comes to a boy : to one who had been 
 Eli's pupil, to one beneath him, who had performed for him 
 servile offices. This was the bitter cup put into his hand to 
 drink. 
 
 And yet Eli assists him to attain this dignity. He per- 
 ceives that God has called the child. He does not say in 
 petulance " Then, let this favored child find out for himself 
 all he has to do, I will leave him to himself." Eli meekly 
 tells him to go back to his place, instructs him how he is to 
 accept the revelation, and appropriate it : " Go lie down : and 
 it shall be, if He call thee, that thou shall say, Speak, Lord ; 
 for thy servant heareth." He conducts his rival to the pres- 
 ence-chamber, which by himself he can not find, and leaves 
 him there with the King, to be invested with the order which 
 has been stripped off himself. 
 
 Consider how difficult this conduct of Eli's was. Remem- 
 
632 The Character of Eli. 
 
 ber how difficult it is to be surpassed by a younger brother, 
 and bear it with temper ; how hard it is even to be set right^ 
 with meekness; to have our faults pointed out to us: es- 
 pecially by persons who, in rank, age, or standing, are oul 
 inferiors. Recollect how in our experience of life, in all pro- 
 fessions, merit is kept down, shaded by jealousies. Recollect 
 how rare generous enthusiasm is, or even fairness ; how men 
 depreciate their rivals by coldness, or by sneering at those 
 whom they dare not openly attack. 
 
 It is hard to give information which we have collected 
 with pains, but which we can not use, to another who can 
 make use of it. Consider, again, how much of our English 
 reserve is but another name for jealousy. Men often meet 
 in society with a consciousness of rivalry ; and conversation 
 flags because they fear to impart information, lest others 
 should make use of it, and they should thus lose the credit 
 of being original. 
 
 One soldier we have heard of who gave up the post of 
 honor and the chance of high distinction to cover an early 
 failure of that great warrior whom England has lately lost, 
 and to give him a fresh chance of retrieving honor. He did 
 what Eli did : assisted his rival to rise above him. But 
 where is the man of trade who will throw in a rival's way the 
 custom which he can not use himself? Where is the profes- 
 sional man, secular or clerical, who will so speak of another 
 of the same profession, while struggling with him in honor- 
 able rivalry, or so assist him, as to insure that the brightest 
 lustre shall shine upon what he really is ? Whoever will 
 ponder these things will feel that Eli's was no common act. 
 
 Now, for almost all of us, there are one or two persons in 
 life who cross our path, whose rise will be our eclipse, whose 
 success will abridge ours, whose fair career will thwart ours, 
 darken our prospects, cross our affections. Those one or two 
 form our trial; they are the test and proof of our justice. 
 How we feel and act to them proves whether we are just or 
 not. It was easy for Eli to have instructed any one else 
 how to approach God. But the difficulty was how to in- 
 struct Samuel. Samuel alone, in all Israel, crossed his path. 
 And yet Eli stood the test. He was unswervingly just. He 
 threw no petty hindrances in his way. He removed alL 
 He gave a clear, fair, honorable field. That act of Eli's is 
 fair and beautiful to gaze upon. 
 
 2. Remark the absence of all priestly pretensions. 
 
 Eli might with case have assumed the priestly tone. 
 When Samuel came with his strange story, that he had heard 
 a voice calling to him in the dark, Eli might have fixed upon 
 
The Character of Eli. 633 
 
 him a clear, cold, unsympathizing eye, and said, " This is 
 excitement mere enthusiasm. I am the appointed channel 
 of God's communications ; I am the priest. Hear the 
 Church. Unordained, unanointed with priestly oil, a boy, a 
 child, it is presumption for you to pretend to communica- 
 tions from Jehovah ! A layman has no right to hear 
 Voices; it is fanaticism." Eli might have done this; he 
 would have only done what ordained men have done a 
 thousand times when they have frowned irregular enthusiasm 
 into dissent. And then Samuel would have become a mys- 
 tic, or a self-relying enthusiast. For he could not have been 
 made to think "that the Voice was a delusion. That Voice 
 no priest's frown could prevent his hearing. On the other 
 hand, Eli might have given his own authoritative interpreta- 
 tion to Samuel of that word of God which he had heard. 
 But suppose that interpretation had been wrong? 
 
 Eli did neither of these things. He sent Samuel to God. 
 He taught him to inquire for himself. He did not tell him 
 to reject as fanaticism the belief that an inner Voice was 
 speaking to him, a boy ; nor did he try to force his own in- 
 terpretation on that Voice. His great care was to put Sam- 
 uel in direct communication with God ; to make him listen 
 to God ; nay, and that independently of him, Eli. Not to 
 rule him; not to direct his feelings and belief; not to keep 
 him in the leading-strings of spiritual childhood, but to teach 
 him to walk alone. 
 
 There are two sorts of men who exercise influence. Tho 
 first are those who perpetuate their own opinions, bequeath 
 their own names, form a sect, gather a party round them 
 who speak their words, believe their belief. Such men were 
 the ancient rabbis. And of such men, in and out of the 
 Church, we have abundance now. It is the influence most 
 aimed at and most loved. The second class is composed of 
 those who stir up faith, conscience, thought, to do their own 
 work. They are not anxious that those they teach should 
 think as they do, but that they should think. Nor that tKey 
 should take this or that rule of right and wrong, but that th^y 
 should be conscientious. Nor that they should adopt their 
 own views of God, but that faith in God should be roused in 
 eamest. Such men propagate not many views; but they 
 propagate life itself in inquiring minds and earnest hearts. 
 
 Now this is God's real, best work. Men do not think so. 
 They like to be guided. They ask, What am I to think ? 
 and what am I to believe ? and what am I to feel ? Make it 
 easy for me. Save me the trouble of reflecting and the an- 
 guish of inquiring. It is very easy to do this for them ; but 
 
 27* 
 
634 The Character of Eli. 
 
 from what minds, and from what books, do we really gain 
 most of that which we can really call our own ? From those 
 that are suggestive, from those that can kindle life within us^ 
 and set us thinking, and call conscience into action not from 
 those that exhaust a subject and seem to leave it threadbare, 
 but from those that make us feel there is a vast deal more 
 in that subject yet, and send us, as Eli sent Samuel, into tho 
 dark Infinite to listen for ourselves. 
 
 And this is the ministry and its work not to drill hearts, 
 and minds, and consciences, into right forms of thought and 
 mental postures, but to guide to the Living God who speaks. 
 It is a thankless work ; for, as I have said, men love to have 
 all their religion done out for them. They want something 
 definite, and sharp, and clear words not the life of God in 
 the soul : and indeed, it is far more flattering to our vanity 
 to have men take our views, represent us, be led by us. 
 Rule is dear to all. To rule men's spirits is the dearest rule 
 of all ; but it is the work of every true priest of God to lead 
 men to think and feel for themselves to open their ears 
 that God may speak. Eli did this part of his work in a true 
 spirit. He guided Samuel, trained his character. But 
 " God's Spirit !" Eli says, " I can not give that. God's 
 voice ! I am not God's voice. I am only God's witness, 
 erring, listening for myself. I am here, God's witness, to 
 say God speaks. I may err let God be true. Let me be 
 a liar, if you will. My mission is done when your ear is 
 opened for God to whisper into." Very true, Eli was super- 
 seded. Very true, his work was done. A new set of views, 
 not his, respecting Israel's policy and national life, were to 
 be propagated by his successor ; but it was Eli that had 
 guided that successor to God who gave the views : and Eli 
 had not lived in vain. 
 
 My brethren, if any man or any body of men stand be- 
 tween us and the living God, saying, " Only through us the 
 Church can you approach God ; only through my conse- 
 crated touch can you receive grace ; only through my or- 
 dained teaching can you hear God's voice ; and the voice 
 which speaks in your soul in the still moments of existence 
 is no revelation from God, but a delusion and a fanaticism " 
 that man is a false priest. To bring the soul face to face 
 with God, and supersede ourselves, that is the work of the 
 Christian ministry. 
 
 3. There was in Eli a resolve to know the whole truth. 
 " What is the thing that the Lord hath said unto thee ? I 
 pray thee hide it not from me : God do so to thee, and more 
 also, if thou hide any thing from me of all the things that 
 
The Character of Eli. 635 
 
 He said unto thee." Eli asked in earnest to know the 
 worst. 
 
 It would be a blessed thing to know what God thinks of 
 us. But next best to this would be to see ourselves in the 
 light in which we appear to others : other men's opinion is a 
 mirror in which we learn to see ourselves. It keeps us hum- 
 ble when bad and good alike are known to us. The worst 
 slander has in it some truth from which we may learn a les- 
 son, which may make us wiser when the first smart is 
 passed. 
 
 Therefore it is a blessing to have a friend like Samuel, 
 who can dare to tell us truth, judicious, candid, wise ; one to 
 whom we can say, " Now tell me what I am, and what I 
 seem ; hide nothing, but tell me the worst." But observe, 
 we are not to beg praise or invite censure that were weak. 
 We are not to askYor every malicious criticism or torment- 
 ing report that were hypochondria, ever suspecting, and 
 ever self-tormenting ; and to that diseased sensibility it 
 would be no man's duty to minister. True friendship will 
 not retail tormenting trifles ; but what we want is one friend 
 at least, who will extenuate nothing, but with discretion tell 
 the worst, using unflinchingly the sharp knife which is to cut 
 away the fault. 
 
 4. There was pious acquiescence in the declared will of 
 God. When Samuel had told him every whit, Eli replied, 
 "It is the Lord." The highest religion could say no more. 
 What more can there be than surrender to the will of God ? 
 In that one brave sentence you forget all Eli's vat-illation. 
 Free from envy, free from priestcraft, earnest, humbly sub- 
 missive that is the bright side of Eli's character, and the 
 side least known or thought of. 
 
 There is another side to Eli's character. He was a waver- 
 ing, feeble, powerless man, with excellent intentions, but an 
 utter want of will ; and if we look at it deeply, it is will that 
 makes the difference between man and man ; not knowledge, 
 not opinions, not devoutness, not feeling, but will the pow- 
 er to be. Let us look at the causes of this feebleness. 
 
 There are apparently two. 1. A recluse life he lived in 
 the temple. Praying and sacrificing, perhaps, were the sub- 
 stance of his life ; all that unfitted him for the world ; he 
 knew nothing of life ; he knew nothing of character. When 
 Hannah came before him in an agony of prayer, he mis- 
 judged her. He mistook the tremulousness of her lip for 
 the trembling of intoxication. He could not rule his own 
 household ; he could not rule the Church of God a shy, sol- 
 itary, amiable ecclesiastic and recluse that was Eli. 
 
636 The Character of Eli. 
 
 And such are the really fatal men in the work of life, those 
 who look out on human life from a cloister, or who know 
 nothing of men except through books. Religious persons 
 dread worldliness. They will not mix in politics. They 
 keep aloof from life. Doubtless there is a danger in know- 
 ing too much of the world. But, beyond all comparison, of 
 the two extremes the worst is knowing too little of life. A 
 priesthood severed from human sympathies, separated from 
 men, cut off from human affections, and then meddling fatal- 
 ly with questions of human life that is the Romish priest- 
 hood. And just as fatal, when they come to meddle with 
 public questions, is the interference of men as good as Eli, as 
 devout and as incompetent, who have spent existence in a 
 narrow religious party which they mistake for the w r orld. 
 
 2. That feebleness arose out of original temperament. Eli's 
 feelings were all good : his acts were all wrong. In senti- 
 ment Eli might be always trusted : in action he was forever 
 false, because he was a weak, vacillating man. * 
 
 Therefore his virtues were all of a negative character. He 
 was forgiving to his sons, because unable to feel strongly the 
 viciousness of sin ; free from jealousy, because he had no 
 keen affections ; submissive, because too indolent to feel re- 
 bellious. Before we praise a man for his excellences, we 
 must be quite sure that they do not rise out of so many de- 
 fects. No thanks to a proud man that he is not vain. No 
 credit to a man without love that he is not jealous : he has 
 not strength enough for passion. 
 
 All history overrates such men. Men like Eli ruin families 
 by instability, produce revolutions, die well when only pas- 
 sive courage is wanted, and are reckoned martyrs. They 
 live like children, and die like heroes. Deeply true to na- 
 ture, brethren, and exceedingly instructive, is this history of 
 Eli. It is quite natural that such men should suffer well. 
 For if only their minds are made up for them by inevitable 
 circumstances, they can submit. When people come to Eli 
 and say, " You should reprove your sons," he can do it after 
 a fashion ; when it is said to him, " You must die," he can 
 make up his mind to die : but this is not taking up the cross, 
 Let us look at the result of such a character. 
 
 1. It had no influence. Eli was despised by his own sons. 
 He was not respected by the nation. One only of all he 
 lived with, kept cleaving to him till the last Samuel ; but 
 that was in a kind of mournful pity. The secret of influence 
 is will not goodness, not badness both bad and good may 
 have it ; but will. And you can not counterfeit will if you 
 have it not. Men speak strongly and vehemently when 
 
The Character of Eli. 637 
 
 most conscious of their own vacillation. The j commit them 
 selves to hasty resolutions, but the resolve is not kept ; and 
 so, with strong feelings and good feelings, they lose influence 
 day by day. 
 
 2. It manifested incorrigibility. Eli was twice warned; 
 once by a prophet, once by Samuel. Both times he answer- 
 ed submissively. He used strong, nay, passionate expres- 
 sions of penitence. Both times you would have thought an 
 entire reformation and change of life was at hand. Both 
 times he was warned in vain. 
 
 There are persons who go through life sinning and sorrow- 
 ing sorrowing and sinning. No experience teaches them. 
 Torrents of tears flow from their eyes. They are full of elo- 
 quent regrets. You can not find it in your heart to condemn 
 them, for their sorrow is so graceful and touching, so full of 
 penitence and self-condemnation. But tears, heart-breaks, re- 
 pentance, warnings, are all in vain. Where they did wrong 
 once, they do wrong again. What are such persons to do in 
 the next life ? Where will the Elis of this world be ? God 
 only knows. But Christ has said, " Not every one that 
 saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven." 
 
 3. It resulted in misery to others. 
 
 Recollect what this weakness caused. Those young men, 
 Eli's sons, grew up to be their country's plague. They sap- 
 ped the moral standard of their countrymen and country- 
 women. They degraded the ministry. " Men abhorred the 
 offering of the Lord." The armies of Israel, without faith in 
 God, and without leadership of man, fled before the enemy. 
 All that was Eli's doing. A weak man with good feelings 
 makes more misery than a determined bad man. Lender a 
 tyranny men are at least at rest, for they know the worst. 
 But when subjects or children know that by entreaty, or 
 persistence, or intimidation, they can obtain what they want, 
 then a family or a nation is cursed with restlessness. Better 
 to live under bad laws which are firmly administered, than 
 under good ones where there is a misgiving whether they may 
 not be changed. There is no wretchedness like the wretched- 
 ness caused by an undetermined will to those who serve un- 
 der it. 
 
638 Appointment of the First King in Israel* 
 
 n. 
 
 THE APPOINTMENT OF THE FIRST KING EN 
 ISRAEL. 
 
 "And Samuel said unto all Israel, Behold, I have hearkened unto you! 
 voice in all that ye said unto me, and have made a king over you. " 1 Sam. 
 xii. 1. 
 
 OUR subject to-day is the selection of the first king of Is- 
 rael. 
 
 We have arrived at that crisis in Israel's history when the 
 first shock occurred in her national life. That shock was be- 
 reft of part of its violence by the wisdom of a single man. 
 By the lustre of his personal character, by his institutions, 
 and by his timely concessions, Samuel won that highest of 
 all privileges which can be given to a mortal the power of 
 saving his country. He did not achieve the best conceiva- 
 ble ; but he secured the best possible. The conceivable best 
 was, that there should have been no shock at all, that Israel's 
 elders should have calmly insisted on a reformation of abuses : 
 that they should have come to Samuel, and demanded repa- 
 ration for the insulted majesty of Hebrew law in the persons 
 of the young judges, his sons, who had dared to dishonor it. 
 This would have been the first best. The second best was 
 the best practicable that the shock should be made as light 
 as possible; that Samuel should still control the destinies of 
 his country, select the new king, and modify the turbulence 
 of excess. So that Israel was in the position of a boat which 
 has been borne down a swift stream into the very suction of 
 the rapids. The best would be that she should be put back ; 
 but if it be too late for this, then the best is that there should 
 be in her a strong arm and a steady eye to keep her heal 
 straight. And thus it was with Israel. She plunged down 
 the fall madly, rashly, wickedly; but, under Samuel's con- 
 trol, steadily. This part of the chapter we arrange in two 
 branches : 
 
 I. Samuel's conduct after the mortification of his own re- 
 jection. 
 
 II. The, selection of the first monarch of Israel. 
 
 I. The tenth chapter broke off in a moment of suspense. 
 The people, having accepted Saul as their king, had been dis- 
 
Appointment of the First King in Israel. 639 
 
 missed, and Samuel was left alone ; but his feelings were very 
 different from those which he had in that other moment of 
 solitude, when he had dismissed the delegates of the people. 
 That struggle was past. He was now calm. The first mo- 
 ment was a terrible one. It was one of those periods in hu- 
 man life when the whole meaning of life is perplexed, its 
 aims and hopes frustrated; when a man is down upon his 
 face and gust after gust sweeps desolately over his spirit, 
 Samuel was there to feel all the ideas that naturally suggest 
 themselves in such hours the instability of human affection 
 the nothingness of the highest earthly aims. But by de- 
 grees two thoughts calmed him. The first was the feeling 
 of identification with God's cause. " They have not rejected 
 thee, but they have rejected Me." Had it been mere wound- 
 ed pride, or pique, or family aggrandizement arrested, or am- 
 bition disappointed, it would have been a cureless sorrow. 
 But Samuel had God's cause at heart, and this gave a loftier 
 character to his sadness. There was no envenomed feeling, 
 no resentment, no smarting scornfulness. To be part of a 
 great Divine cause which has failed, is an elevating as well 
 as a saddening sensation. A conviction mingles with it that 
 the cause ot God will one day be the conquering side. 
 
 The other element of consolation was the Divine sympa- 
 thy. If they had been rebellious to their ruler, they had 
 also been disloyal to Jehovah. An unruly subject has had 
 a poor school in which to learn reverence for things heaven- 
 ly. Atheism and revolution here, as elsewhere, went hand- 
 in-hand. We do not know how this sentence was impressed 
 by the Infinite Mind on Samuel's mind ; all we know is, he 
 had a conviction that God was a fellow-sufferer. This, how- 
 ever, was inferior, in point of clearness, to our knowledge of 
 the Divine sympathy : Jehovah, the unnameable and awful, 
 was a very different conception from " God manifested in 
 the flesh." To the Jew, His dwelling was the peak round 
 which the cloud had wreathed its solemn form, and the thun- 
 ders spent themselves ; but the glory of the life of Jesus to 
 us is, that it is full of the human. The many-colored phases 
 of human feeling all find themselves reflected in the lights 
 and shadows of ever-varying sensitiveness which the differ- 
 ent sentences of His conversation exhibit. Be your tone of 
 feeling what it may, whether you are poor or rich, gay or 
 sad in society or alone adored, loved, betrayed, misunder- 
 stood, .despised weigh well His words first, by thinking 
 what they mean, and you will become aware that one heart 
 in space throbs in conscious harmony with yours. In its 
 degree, that was Samuel's support. 
 
640 Appointment of the First King in Israel. 
 
 Next, Samuel's cheerful way of submitting to his fate is to 
 be observed. Another prophet, when his prediction was 
 nullified, built himself a booth and sat beneath it, fretting in 
 sullen pride, to see the end of Nineveh. Samuel might have 
 done this ; he might have withdrawn himself in offended dig- 
 nity from public life, watched the impotent attempts of the 
 people to guide themselves, and seen dynasty after dynasty 
 fall with secret pleasure. Very different is his conduct. He 
 addresses himself like a man to the exigencies of the mo- 
 ment. His great scheme is frustrated. Well, he will not 
 despair of God's cause yet. Bad as things are, he will try to 
 make the best of them. 
 
 Now remark in all this the healthy, vigorous tone of Sam- 
 uel's religion. This man, the greatest and wisest then alive, 
 thought this the great thing to live for to establish a king- 
 dom of God on earth to transform his own country into a 
 kingdom of God. It is worth while to see how he set about 
 it. From first to last, it was in a practical, real way by 
 activity in every department of life. We recollect his early 
 childhood ; his duty then was to open the gates of the tem- 
 ple of the Lord, and he did that regularly, with scrupulous 
 fidelity, in the midst of very exciting scenes. He was turn- 
 ing that narrow circumscribed sphere of his into a kingdom 
 of God. Afterwards he became ruler. His spirituality then 
 consisted in establishing courts of justice, founding acade- 
 mies, looking into every thing himself. Now he is deposed : 
 but he has duties still. He has a king to look for, public fes- 
 tivals to superintend, a public feast to preside over ; and 
 later on we shall find him becoming the teacher of a school. 
 All this was a religion for life. His spirituality was no fan- 
 ciful, shadowy thing ; the kingdom of God to him was to be 
 in this world, and we know no surer sign of enfeebled relig- 
 ion than the disposition to separate religion from life and 
 life-duties. 
 
 Listen: what is secularity or worldliness? Meddling 
 with worldly things? or meddling with a worldly spirit? 
 We brand political existence and thought with the name 
 " worldly " we stigmatize first one department of life and 
 then another as secular; and so religion becomes a pale, 
 unreal thing, which must end, if we are only true to our 
 principles, in the cloister. Spirituality becomes the exclusive 
 property of a few amiable mystics; men of thought and men 
 of action draw off; religion becomes feeble, and the world, 
 deserted and proscribed, becomes infidel. 
 
 IL Samuel's treatment of his successor, after his own rejeo 
 
Appointment of the First King in Israel. 64 1 
 
 tion, is remarkable. It was characterized by two things- 
 courtesy and generosity. When he saw the man who was 
 to be his successor, he invited him to the entertainment ; he 
 gave him precedence, bidding him go up before him ; placed 
 him as a stranger at the post of honor, and set before him 
 the choice portion. This is politeness ; what we allude to is 
 a very different thing, however, from that mere system of 
 etiquette and conventionalisms in which small minds find 
 their very being, to observe which accurately is life, and to 
 transgress which is a sin. 
 
 Courtesy is not confined to the high-bred; often theirs is 
 but the artistic imitation of courtesy. The peasant who 
 rises to put before you his only chair, while he sits upon the 
 oaken chest, is a polite man. Motive determines every 
 thing. If we are courteous merely to substantiate our 
 claims to mix in good society, or exhibit good manners 
 chiefly to show that we have been in it, this is a thing in- 
 deed to smile at ; contemptible, if it were not rather pitiable. 
 But that politeness which springs spontaneously from the 
 heart, the desire to put others at their ease, to save the 
 stranger from a sensation of awkwardness, to soothe the 
 feeling of inferiority that, ennobled as it is by Jove, mounts 
 to the high character of a heavenly grace. 
 
 Something still more beautiful marks Samuel's generosity. 
 The man who stood before him was v a successful rival. One 
 who had been his inferior now was to supersede him. And 
 Samuel lends him a helping hand gracefully assists him to 
 rise above him, entertains him, recommends him to the peo- 
 ple. It is very touching. 
 
 Curiously enough^ Samuel had twice in life to do a sim- 
 ilar thing. Once he had to depose Eli, by telling him God's 
 doom. Now he has to depose himself. The first he shrank 
 from, and only did it at last when urged. That was deli- 
 cate. On the present occasion, with a large and liberal full- 
 ness of heart, he elevates Saul above himself. And that we 
 call the true, high Gospel spirit. Samuel and the people did 
 the same thing they made Saul king. But the people did 
 it by drawing down Samuel nearer to themselves. Samuel 
 did it by elevating Saul above himself. One was the spirit 
 of revolution, the other was the spirit of the Gospel. 
 
 In our own day it specially behooves us to try the spirits, 
 whether they be of God. The reality and the counterfeit, as 
 in this case, are singularly like each other. Three spirits 
 make their voices heard in a cry for freedom, for brother- 
 hood, for human equality. And we must not forget, these 
 are names hallowed by the very Gospel itself. They are in- 
 
642 Appointment of the First King in Israel. 
 
 scribed on its forehead. Unless we realize them, we have no 
 Gospel kingdom. Distinguish, however, well, the reality 
 from the baser alloy. The spirit which longs for freedom 
 puts forth a righteous claim; for it is written, "If the Son 
 shall make you free ye shall be free indeed." Brotherhood 
 the Gospel promises brotherhood also "One is your Mas- 
 ter, even Christ ; and all ye are brethren." Equality yes. 
 " There is neither Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircum- 
 eision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." This is the grand 
 federation, brotherhood, emancipation of the human race. 
 
 Now, the world's spirit aims at bringing all this about by 
 drawing others down to the level on which each one stands. 
 The Christian spirit secures equality by raising up. The 
 man that is less wise, less good than I I am to raise up to 
 my level in these things. Yes, and in social position, too, if 
 he be fit for it. I am to be glad to see him rise above me, as 
 generously as Samuel saw Saul. And those that are above 
 me, better than I, wiser than I, I have a right to expect to 
 elevate me, if they can, to be as wise and good as themselves. 
 This is the only levelling the Gospel knows. What was the 
 mission of the Redeemer but this ? To raise the lower to 
 the higher, to make men partakers of the Divine nature His 
 nature, standing on His ground ; to descend to the roots of 
 society, reclaiming the outcasts, elevating the degraded, en- 
 nobling the low, and reminding, in the thunder of reiterated 
 " woes," those who had left their inferiors in the dark, and 
 those who stood aloof in the titled superiority of rabbi of 
 the account to be rendered by them yet. 
 
 And if we could but all work in this generous rivalry, our 
 rent and bleeding country, sick at heart, gangrened with an 
 exclusiveness which narrows our sympathies and corrupts our 
 hearts, might be all that the most patriotic love would have 
 her. Brethren in Christ, I earnestly urge again the lesson 
 of last Sunday. Not by pulling down those that are above 
 us, not by the still more un-Christlike plan of keeping down 
 those that are beneath us, can we make this country of ours 
 a kingdom of Christ. If we can not practise nor bear to have 
 impressed upon us, more condescension, more tenderness, and 
 the duty of unlearning much, very much of that galling, in- 
 sulting spirit of demarkation with which we sever ourselves 
 from the sympathies of the class immediately beneath us, 
 those tears may have to flow again which were shed over the 
 city which would not know the day of her visitation : lulled 
 into an insane security even at the moment when the judg- 
 ment-eagles were gathered together and plunging for thei? 
 prey. 
 
Appointment of the First King in Israel. 643 
 
 Once more : there is suggested to us the thought that Sam- 
 uel was now growing old. It seems by the eleventh and 
 thirteenth chapters, in connection with the text, tha^t the 
 cause which hastened the demand of the elders for a king 
 was the danger of invasion. The Ammonites and Philistines 
 were sharpening their swords for war. And men felt that 
 Samuel was too old for such a crisis. Only a few Sundays 
 ago we were considering Samuel's childhood, his weaning, 
 education, and call. Now he is old : his hair is gray, and 
 men beginning to feel that he is no longer what he was. A 
 
 high, great life : and a few chapters sum it all up. And such 
 n T / 
 is all me. 
 
 To-day we baptize a child ; in a period of time startlingly 
 short, the minister is called upon to prepare the young man 
 for confirmation. A little interval and the chimes are ring- 
 ing a merry wedding-peal. One more pause, and the winds 
 are blowing their waves of shadow over the long grass that 
 grows rankly on his grave. The font, the altar, and the 
 sepulchre, and but a single step between. Now we do not 
 dwell on this. It is familiar a tale that is told. 
 
 But what we mention this for is, to observe that though 
 Samuel's life was fast going, Samuel's work was permanent. 
 Evidence of this lies in the chapter before us. When Saul 
 came to the city and inquired for the seer's house, some young 
 maidens, on their way to draw water, replied ; and their re- 
 ply contained an accurate account, even to details, of the re- 
 ligious service which was about to take place. The judge 
 had arrived ; there was to be a sacrifice, the people would 
 not eat till he came, he would pronounce a blessing, after 
 that there would be a select feast. Now compare the state 
 of things in Israel when Samuel became judge. Had a man 
 come to a city in Israel then, there would have been no 
 sacrifice going on, or if there had, no one would have been 
 found so accurately familiar with the whole service ; for then 
 " men abhorred the offering of the Lord." But now the first 
 chance passer-by could run through it all, as a thing habitu- 
 al as a Church of England worshipper would tell you the 
 hours of service, and the order of its performance. So that 
 they might forget Samuel they might crowd round his suc- 
 cessor but Samuel's work could not be forgotten : years 
 after he was quiet and silent under ground, his courts in Bethel 
 and Mizpeh would form the precedents and the germs of the 
 national jurisprudence. 
 
 A very pregnant lesson. Life passes, work is permanent. 
 It is all going fleeting and withering. Youth goes. Mind 
 decays. That which is done remains. Through ages, through 
 
644 Prayer. 
 
 eternity, what you have done for God, that, and only that, 
 you are. Ye that are workers, and count it the soul's worst 
 disgrace to feel life passing in idleness and uselessness. take 
 courage. Deeds never die. 
 
 III. 
 PRAYER. 
 
 " And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, 
 my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me : nevertheless, not as I 
 will, but as thou wilt." Matt. xxvi. 39. 
 
 No one will refuse to identify holiness with prayer. To 
 say that a man is religious is to say the same thing as to say 
 he prays. For what is prayer ? To connect every thought 
 with the thought of God. To look on every thing as His 
 work and His appointment. To submit every thought, wish, 
 and resolve to Him. To feel His presence, so that it shall 
 restrain us even in our wildest joy. That is prayer. And 
 what we are now, surely we are by prayer. If we have at- 
 tained any measure of goodness, if we have resisted tempta- 
 tions, if we have any seTf-command, or if we live with aspira- 
 tions and desires beyond the common, we shall not hesitate 
 to ascribe all to prayer. 
 
 There is therefore no question among Christians about the 
 efficacy of prayer ; but that granted generally, then question- 
 ings and diversities of view begin. What is prayer? What 
 is the efficacy of prayer? Is prayer necessarily words in 
 form and sequence ; or is there a real prayer that never can 
 be syllabled ? Does prayer change the outward universe, or 
 does it alter our inward being ? Does it work on God, or 
 does it work on us? 
 
 To all these questions, I believe a full and sufficient answer 
 is returned in the text. Let us examine it calmly, and with- 
 out prejudice or prepossession. If we do, it can not be but 
 that we shall obtain a conclusion in which we may rest with 
 peace, be it what it eventually may. We will consider 
 
 I. The right of petition. 
 H. Erroneous views of what prayer is. 
 III. The true efficacy of prayer. 
 
 I. The right of petition. " Let this cup pass from me." 
 We infer it to be a right 1. Because it is a necessity of oul 
 human nature. 
 
The Son of Man feels the hour at hand : shrinks from it, 
 seeks solitude, flies from human society feels the need of it 
 again, and goes back to his disciples. Here is that need of 
 sympathy which forces us to feel for congenial thought 
 among relations ; and here is that recoil from cold unsympa- 
 thizing natures, which forces us back to our loneliness again. 
 In such an hour, they who have before forgotten prayer be- 
 take themselves to God : and in such an hour, even the most 
 resigned are not without the wish, "Let this cup pass." 
 Christ Himself has a separate wish one human wish. 
 
 Prayer, then, is a necessity of our humanity, rather than a 
 duty. To force it as a duty is dangerous. Christ did not ; 
 never commanded it, never taught it till asked. This neces- 
 sity is twofold. First, the necessity of sympathy. We touch 
 other human spirits only at a point or two. In the deepest 
 departments of thought and feeling we are alone ; and the 
 desire to escape that loneliness finds for itself a voice in 
 prayer. 
 
 Next, the necessity of escaping the sense of a crushing 
 fate. The feeling that al^ things are fixed and unalterable, 
 that we are surrounded by necessities which we can not 
 break through, is intolerable whenever it is realized. Our- 
 egotism cries against it ; our innocent egotism, and the prac- 
 tical reconciliation* between our innocent egotism and hid- 
 eous fatalism is prayer, which realizes a living Person ruling 
 all things with a will. 
 
 2. Again, we base this right on our privilege as Children. 
 "My Father" that sonship Christ shares with us reveals 
 the human race as a family in which God is a Father, and 
 Himself the elder brother. It would be a strange family, 
 where the child's will dictates ; but it would be also strange 
 where a child may not, as a child, express its foolish wish, 
 if it be only to have the impossibility of gratifying it ex- 
 plained. 
 
 3. Christ used it as a right, therefore we may. 
 
 There is many a case in life, where to act seems useless 
 many a truth which at times appears incredible. Then we 
 throw ourselves on Him He did it, He believed it, that is 
 enough. He was wise, where I am foolish. He was holy, 
 where I am evil. He must know. He must be right. I rely 
 on Him. Bring what arguments you may: say that prayer 
 can not change God's will. I know it. Say that prayer ten 
 thousand times comes back like a stone. Yes, but Christ 
 prayed-, therefore I may and I will pray. Not only so, but I 
 must pray; the wish felt and not uttered before God, is a 
 * Mesothesis. 
 
646 Prayer. 
 
 prayer. -Speak, if your heart prompts, in articulate words, 
 but there is an unsyllabled wish, which is also prayer. You 
 can not help praying, if God's Spirit is in yours. 
 
 Do not say, I must wait till this tumult has subsided and I 
 am calm. The worst storm of spirit is the time for prayer: 
 the Agony was the hour of petition. Do not stop to calcu- 
 late improbabilities. Prayer is truest when there is most of 
 instinct and least of reason. Say, " My Father, thus I fear 
 and thus I wish. Hear thy foolish, erring child let this 
 cup pass from me." 
 
 IL Erroneous notions of what prayer is. They are con- 
 tained in that conception which He negatived, "As I will." 
 
 A common popular conception of prayer is, that it is the 
 means by which the wish of man determines the will of God. 
 This conception finds an exact parallel in those anecdotes 
 with which Oriental history abounds, wherein a sovereign 
 gives to his favorite some token, on the presentation of which 
 every request must be granted. As when Ahasuerus prom- 
 ised Queen Esther that her petition should be granted, even 
 to the half of his kingdom. As when Herod swore to He- 
 rodias's daughter that he would do whatever she should re- 
 quire. It will scarcely be said that this is a misrepresenta- 
 tion of a very common doctrine, for they who hold it would 
 state it thus, and would consider the mercifulness and privi- 
 lege of prayer to consist in this, that by faith we can obtain 
 all that we wa.it. 
 
 Now, in the text it is said distinctly this is not the aim of 
 prayer, nor its meaning. "Not as I will." The wish of man 
 does not determine the will of God. 
 
 Try this conception by four tests. 
 
 1. By its incompatibility with the fact that this uniTerse 
 is a system of laws. Things are thus, rather than thus. 
 Such an event is invariably followed by such a consequence. 
 This we call a law. All is one vast chain, from which if you 
 strike a single link, you break the whole. It has been truly 
 said that to heave a pebble on the sea-shore one yard higher 
 up would change all antecedents from the creation, and all 
 ^consequents to the end of time. For it would have required 
 a greater force in the wave that threw it there and that 
 would have required a different degree of strength in the 
 storm that again, a change of temperature all over the 
 globe and that again, a corresponding difference in the tem- 
 peraments and characters of the men inhabiting the different 
 countries. 
 
 So that when a child wishes a fine day for his morrow's 
 
Prayer. 647 
 
 excursion, and hopes to have it by an alteration of what 
 would have been without his wish, he desires nothing less 
 than a whole new universe. 
 
 It is difficult to state this in all its force except to men 
 who are professionally concerned with the daily observation 
 of the uniformity of the Divine laws. But when the astron- 
 omer descends from his serene gaze upon the moving heav- 
 ens, and the chemist rises from contemplating those marvel- 
 lous affinities, the proportions of which are never altered, 
 realizing the fact that every atom and element has its own 
 mystic number in the universe to the end of time ; or when 
 the economist has studied the laws of wealth, and seen how 
 fixed they are and sure : then to hear that it is expected 
 that, to comply with a mortal's, convenience or plans, God 
 shall place this whole harmonious system at the disposal ol 
 selfish humanity, seems little else than impiety against the 
 Lord of law and order. 
 
 2. Try it next by fact. 
 
 Ask those of spiritual experience. We do not ask whether 
 prayer has been efficacious of course it has. It is God's or- 
 dinance. Without prayer the soul dies. But what we ask 
 is, whether the good derived has been exactly this, that 
 prayer brought them the very thing they wished for? FOT 
 instance, did the plague come and go according to the laws 
 of prayer or according to the laws of health ? Did it come 
 because men neglected prayer, or because they disobeyed 
 those rules which His wisdom has revealed as the conditions 
 of salubrity ? And when it departed, was it because a na- 
 tion lay prostrate in sackcloth and ashes, or because it arose 
 and girded up its loins and removed those causes and those 
 obstructions which, by everlasting law, are causes and ob- 
 structions? Did the catarrh or the consumption go from 
 him who prayed, sooner than from him who humbly bore it 
 in silence ? Try it by the case of Christ Christ's prayer 
 did not eucceed. He prayed that the cup might pass from 
 Him. It did not so pass. 
 
 Now lay down the irrefragable principle, "The disciple is 
 not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is 
 enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the 
 servant as his lord." What Christ's prayer was not effica. 
 cious to do, that ours is not certain to effect. If the object 
 of petition be to obtain, then Christ's prayer failed ; if the 
 refusal of His petition did not show the absence of the favor 
 of His Father, then neither does the refusal of ours. 
 
 Nor can you meet this by saying, " His prayer could not 
 succeed, because it was decreed that Christ should die ; but 
 
648 Prayer. 
 
 ours may, because nothing hangs on our fate, and we 
 of no decree that is against our wish." 
 
 Do you mean that some things are decreed and some are 
 left to chance ? That would make a strange, disconnected 
 universe. The death of a worm, your death, its hour and 
 moment, are all fixed, as much as His was. Fortuity, chance, 
 contingency, are only words which express our ignorance of 
 causes. 
 
 3. Try it by the prejudicial results of such a belief. 
 
 To think that prayer changes God's will gives unworthy 
 ideas of God. It supposes our will to be better than His, 
 the Unchangeable, the Unsearchable, the All -wise. Can 
 you see the All of things the consequences and secret con- 
 nections of the event you wish ? and if not, would you really 
 desire the terrible power of infallibly securing it ? 
 
 Consider, also, the danger of vanity and supineness result- 
 ing from the fulfillment of our desires as a necessity. Who 
 does not recollect such cases in childhood, when some curi- 
 ous coincidences with our wishes were taken for direct re- 
 plies to prayer, and made us fancy ourselves favorites of 
 Heaven, in possession of a secret spell. These coincidences 
 did not make us more earnest, more holy, but rather the re- 
 verse. Careless and vain, we fancied we had a power which 
 superseded exertion, we looked down contemptuously on 
 others. Those were startling and wholesome lessons which 
 came when our prayer failed, and threw our whole childish 
 theory into confusion. It is recorded that a favorite once 
 received from his sovereign a ring as a mark of her regard, 
 with a promise that whenever he presented that ring to her 
 she would grant his request. He entered on rebellion, from 
 a vain confidence in the favor of his sovereign. The ring 
 which he sent was kept back by his messenger, and he was 
 executed. So would we rebel if prayer were efficacious to 
 change God's will and to secure His pardon. 
 
 4. It would be most dangerous, too, as a criterion of our 
 spiritual state. If we think that answered prayer is a proof 
 of grace, we shall be unreasonably depressed and unreason- 
 ably elated depressed when we do not get w r hat we wish, 
 elated when we do ; besides, we shall judge uncharitably of 
 other men. 
 
 Two farmers pray, the one whose farm is on light land, 
 for rain ; the other, whose contiguous farm is on heavy soil, 
 for fine weather ; plainly one or the other must come, and 
 that which is good for one may be injurious to the other. 
 If this be the right view of prayer, then the one who does 
 not obtain his wish must mourn, doubting God's favor 3 or 
 
Prayer. 649 
 
 oelieving that he did not pray in faith. Two Christian 
 armies meet for battle Christian men on both sides pray 
 for success to their own arms. Now if victory be given to 
 prayer, independent of other considerations, we are driven 
 to the pernicious principle, that success is the test of right. 
 
 From all which the history of this prayer of Christ "deliv- 
 ers us. It is a precious lesson of the cross, that apparent 
 failure is eternal victory. It is a precious lesson of thia 
 prayer, that the object of prayer is not the success of its pe- 
 tition ; nor is its rejection a proof of failure. Christ's peti- 
 tion was not gratified, yet He was the One well-beloved of 
 His Father. 
 
 IIL The true efficacy of prayer * As Thou wilt." 
 All prayer is to change the will human into submission to 
 the will Divine. Trace the steps in this history by which 
 the mind of the Son of Man arrived at this result. First, we 
 find the human wish almost unmodified, that " that cup 
 might pass from Him." Then He goes to the disciples, and 
 it would appear that the sight of those disciples, cold, un- 
 sympathetic, asleep, chilled His spirit, and set that train of 
 thought in motion which suggested the idea that perhaps 
 the passing of that cup was not His Father's will. At all 
 events, He goes back with this perhaps "If this cup may 
 not pass from me except I drink it, Thy will be done." He 
 goes back again, and the words become more strong : " Nev- 
 theless, not as I will, but AS Thou wilt." The last time He 
 comes, all hesitancy is gone. Not one trace of the human 
 wish remains ; strong in submission, He goes to meet His 
 doom " Rise, let us be going : behold, he is at hand that 
 doth betray me." This, then, is the true course and history 
 of prayer. Hence we conclude 
 
 1. That prayer which does not succeed in moderating our 
 wish, in changing the passionate desire into still submission, 
 the anxious, tumultuous expectation into silent surrender, 
 is no true prayer, and proves that we have not the spirit of 
 true prayer. 
 
 Hence, too, we learn 
 
 2. That life is most holy in which there is least of petition 
 and desire, and most of waiting upon God : that in which 
 petition most often passes into thanksgiving. In the prayer 
 taught by Christ there is only one petition for personal good, 
 and that a singularly simple and modest one, " Give us this 
 day our daily bread," and even that expresses dependence 
 far rather than anxiety or desire. 
 
 From this we understand the spirit of that retirement fo? 
 
 28 
 
650 Prayer. 
 
 prayer into lonely tops of mountains and deep shades of 
 night, of which we read so often in His life. It was not st 
 much to secure any definite event as from the need of holj 
 communion with His Father prayer without any definite 
 wish ; for we must distinguish two things which are often 
 confounded. Prayer for specific blessings is a very different 
 thing from communion with God. Prayer is one thing, 
 petition is quite another. Indeed, hints are given us which 
 make it seem that a time will come when spirituality shall 
 be so complete, and acquiescence in the will of God so en 
 tire, that petition shall be superseded. " In that day ye 
 shall ask me nothing;" "Again I say not I will pray the 
 Father for you, for the Father Himself loveth you." And 
 to the same purpose are all those passages in which He dis- 
 countenances the heathen idea of prayer, which consists in 
 urging, prevailing upon God. " They think that they shall 
 be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like 
 unto them : for your Father knoweth what things ye have 
 need of before ye ask Him." 
 
 Practically then, I say, Pray as He did, till prayer makes 
 you cease to pray. Pray till prayer makes you forget your 
 own wish, and leave it or merge it in God's will. The Di- 
 vine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby 
 to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby 
 we learn to do without them ; not as a means whereby we 
 escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to 
 meet it. " There appeared an angel unto Him from heaven, 
 strengthening Him." That was the true reply to His 
 prayer. 
 
 And so, in the expectation of impending danger, our 
 prayer has won the victory, not w r hen we have warded off 
 the trial, but when, like Him, we have learned to say, "Arise, 
 let us go to meet the evil." 
 
 Now, contrast the moral consequences of this view of 
 prayer with those' which, as we saw, arise from the other 
 view. Hence comes that mistrust of our own understanding 
 which will not suffer us to dictate to God. Hence, that 
 benevolence which, contemplating the good of the whole 
 rather than self-interest, dreads to secure what is pleasing to 
 self at the possiVe expense of the general weal. Hence, that 
 humility which looks on ourselves as atoms, links in a mys- 
 terious chain, and shrinks from the dangerous wish to break 
 the chain. Hence, lastly, the certainty that the All-wise is 
 the All-good, and that " all things work together for good," 
 for the individual as well as for the whole. Then, the selfish 
 ery of egotism being silenced, we obtain Job's sublime spirit, 
 
Perversion, as shown in Balaam's Character. 65 1 
 
 " Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not 
 receive evil?" 
 
 There is one objection may be made to this. It may be 
 said, If this be prayer, I have lost all I prized. It is sad and 
 depressing to think that prayer will alter nothing, and bring 
 nothing that I wish. All that was precious in prayer iti 
 struck away from me. 
 
 But one word in reply. You have lost the certainty of 
 getting your own wish ; you have got instead the compen- 
 sation of knowing that the best possible, best for you, best 
 for all, will be accomplished. Is that nothing ? and will you 
 dare to say that prayer is no boon at all unless you can re- 
 verse the spirit of youi Master's prayer, and say, " Not as 
 Tkou wilt, but as /will?" 
 
 IV. 
 
 PERVERSION, AS SHOWN IN BALAAM'S 
 CHARACTER. 
 
 "And Balaam said unto the angel of the Lord, I have sinned , for I knew 
 not. that thou stoodest in the way against me: now therefore, if it displease 
 thee, I will get me back again. And the angel of the Lord said unto Balaam, 
 Go with the men : but only the word that I shall speak unto thee, that thou 
 shalt speak. So Balaam went with the princes of Balak. " Num. xxii. 34, 35. 
 
 THE judgment which we form on the character of Balaam 
 is one of unmitigated condemnation. We know and say 
 that he was a false prophet and a bad man. This is how- 
 ever, doubtless, because we come to the consideration of his 
 history having already prejudged his case. 
 
 St. Peter, St. Jude, and St. John have p issed sentence upon 
 him. " Having eyes full of adultery, and that can not cease 
 from sin ; beguiling unstable souls : a heart they have exer- 
 cised Avith covetous practices; cursed children: which have 
 forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the 
 way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of 
 unrighteousness, but was rebuked for his iniquity : the dumb 
 ass speaking with man's voice forbade the madness of the 
 prophet ;" " Woe unto them ! for they have gone in the way 
 of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for re- 
 ward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core ;" " But I have 
 a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that 
 hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a 
 stumbling-block before the children of Israel, to eat things 
 
652 Perversion, as shown in Balaam* Character. 
 
 sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication." And so we 
 read the history of Balaam familiar with these passages, and 
 coloring all with them. 
 
 But assuredly this is not the sentence we should have pro- 
 nounced if we had been left to ourselves, but one much less 
 severe. Repulsive as Balaam's character is when it is seen 
 at a distance, when it is seen near it has much in it that is 
 human, like ourselves, inviting compassion even admira- 
 tion : there are traits of firmness, conscientiousness, noble- 
 ness. 
 
 For example, in the text, he offers to retrace his steps as 
 soon as he perceives that he is doing wrong. He asks guid- 
 ance of God before he will undertake a journey : " And he 
 said unto them, Lodge here this night, and I will bring you 
 word again, as the Lord shall speak unto me." He professes 
 and in earnest " If Balak would give me his house full of 
 silver and gold, I can not go beyond the word of the Lord 
 my God, to do less or more." He prays to " die the death 
 of the righteous, and that his last end may be like his." Yet 
 the inspired judgment of his character, as a whole, stands re 
 corded as one of unmeasured severity. 
 
 And accordingly one of the main lessons in Balaam's his- 
 tory must ever be, to trace how it is that men, who to the 
 world appear respectable, conscientious, honorable, gifted, re- 
 ligious, may be in the sight of God accursed, and heirs of 
 perdition. Our subject, then, to-day is perversion : 
 
 L Perversion of great gifts. 
 II. Perversion of the conscience. 
 
 I. Of great gifts. 
 
 The history tells of Balak sending to Pethor for Balaam 
 to curse the Israelites. This was a common occurrence in 
 ancient history. There was a class of men regularly set 
 apart to bless and curse, to spell-bind the winds and foretell 
 events. Balaam was such an one. 
 
 Now the ordinary account would be that such men were 
 impostors, or endued with political sagacity, or had secret 
 dealings with the devil. But the Bible says Balaam's inspi- 
 ration was from God. 
 
 It did not arise from diabolical agency, or from merely 
 political sagacity : that magnificent "ode of sublime poetry, 
 given in chapter xxiv., is from God. 
 
 The Bible refers the inspiration of the poet, of the proph- 
 et, of the worker in cunning workmanship, to God. It 
 makes no mention of our modern distinction between that 
 inspiration enjoyed by the sacred writers and that enjoyed 
 
Perversion, as shown in Balaams Character. 653 
 
 by ordinary men, except so far as the use is concerned. 
 God's prophets glorified Him. The wicked prophets glori- 
 fied themselves ; but their inspiration was real, and came 
 from God, and these divine powers were perverted 
 
 1. By turning them to purposes of sell-aggrandizement. 
 Now, remember how the true prophets of Jehovah spoke. 
 
 Simply, with no affectation of mystery, no claims to mystical 
 illumination. They delighted to share their power with their 
 fellows ; they said, " The heart of the Lord was with them 
 that fear Him ;" that the Lord " dwelt with an humble and 
 contrite heart." They represented themselves as inspired, 
 not because greater or wiser than their brethren, but be- 
 cause more weak, more humble, and dependent upon God. 
 
 Contrast Balaam's conduct. Every thing is done to show 
 the difference between him and others to fix men's atten- 
 tion upon himself the wonderful, mysterious man who is in 
 communication with Heaven. He builds altars, and uses 
 enchantments. These were a priest's manoeuvres, not a 
 prophet's. 
 
 He was the solitary self-seeker alone, isolated, loving to 
 be separated from all other men; admired, feared and 
 sought. 
 
 Balak struck the key-note of his character when he said, 
 "Am I not able to promote thee unto honor?" Herein, 
 then, lies the first perversion of glorious gifts : that Balaam 
 sought not God's honor but his own. 
 
 2. By making those gifts subservient to his own greed. 
 
 It is evident that Balaam half suspected his own failing. 
 Otherwise what mean those vaunts, " If Balak would give 
 me his house full of silver and gold ?" Brave men do not 
 vaunt their courage, nor honorable men their honesty, nor do 
 the truly noble boast of high birth. All who understand 
 the human heart perceive a secret sense of weakness in these 
 loud boasts of immaculate purity. Silver and gold, these 
 were the things he loved, and so, not content with commun- 
 ion with God, "with the possession of sublime gifts, he 
 thought these only valuable so far as they were means of 
 putting himself in possession of riches. Thus spiritual pow 
 ers were degraded to make himself a vulgar man of wealth. 
 
 There are two opposite motives which sw"ay men. Some, 
 like Simon Magus, will give gold to be admired and wonder- 
 ed at; some will barter honor for gold. In some the two 
 are blended ; as in Balaam, we see the desire for honor and 
 wealth wealth, perhaps, as being another means of insuring 
 reputation. And so have we seen many begin and end in 
 our own day begin with a high-minded courage which flat- 
 
654 Perversion, as shown in Balaam s Character. 
 
 ters none ; speaks truth, even unpalatable truth ; but when 
 this advocacy of truth brings men, as it brought to Balaam, 
 to consult them, and they rise in the world, or in a court, 
 and become men of consideration, then by degrees the plain 
 truth is sacrificed to a feverish love of notoriety, the love of 
 truth is superseded, and passes into a love of influence. 
 
 Or they begin with a generous indifference to wealth- 
 simple, austere ; by degrees they find the society of the rich 
 leading them from extravagance to extravagance, till at last 
 high intellectual and high spiritual powers become the serv- 
 ile instruments of appropriating gold. The world sees the 
 sad spectacle of the man of science and the man of God wait- 
 ing at the doors of princes, or cringing before the public for 
 promotion and admiration. 
 
 II. Perversion of conscience. 
 
 1. The first intimation we have of the fact that Balaam 
 was tampering with his conscience is in his second appeal to 
 God. On the first occasion God said, " Thou shalt not go 
 with them ; thou shalt not curse the people ; for they are 
 blessed." Then more honorable messengers were sent from 
 Balak, with larger bribes. Balaam asks permission of God 
 again. Here is the evidence of a secret hollowness in his 
 heart, however fair the outside seemed. In worldly matters, 
 " think twice ;" but in duty, it has been well said, " first 
 thoughts are best ;" they are more fresh, more pure, have 
 more of God in them. There is nothing like the first glance 
 we get at duty, before there has been any special pleading 
 of our affections or inclinations. Duty is never uncertain at 
 first. It is only after we have got involved in the mazes and 
 sophistries of wishing that things were otherwise than they 
 are that it seems indistinct. Considering a duty is often 
 only explaining it away. Deliberation is often only dishon- 
 esty. God's guidance is plain, when we are true. 
 
 Let us understand in what Balaam's hollowness consisted. 
 He wanted to please himself without displeasing God. The 
 problem was how to go to Balak, and yet not to offend God. 
 He would have given worlds to get rid of his duty ; and he 
 went to God to get his duty altered, not to learn what his 
 duty was. All this rested upon an idea that the will of God 
 makes right, instead of being right as if it were a caprice 
 which can be altered, instead of the law of the universe, 
 which can not alter. 
 
 How deeply this principle is ingrained in human nature 
 you may see from , the Roman Catholic practice of indul- 
 gences. The Romish Church permits transgressions for a 
 
Perversion, as shown in Balaams Character. 655 
 
 consideration, and pardons them for the same. Such a doc- 
 trine never could have succeeded if the desire and belief were 
 not in man already. What Balaam was doing in this prayer 
 was simply purchasing an indulgence to sin. 
 
 2. The second stage is a state of hideous contradictions $ 
 God permits Balaam to go, and then is angry with him for 
 
 foiug. There is nothing here which can not be interpreted 
 y bitter experience. We must not explain it away by say- 
 ing that these were only the alternations of Balaam's own 
 mind. They were ; but they were the alternations of a mind 
 with which God was expostulating, and to which God ap- 
 peared differently at different times ; the horrible mazes and 
 inconsistencies of a spirit which contradicts itself, and strives 
 to disobey the God whom yet it feels and acknowledges. 
 To such a state of mind God becomes a contradiction. 
 " With the froward " oh, how true ! " thou wilt show thy- 
 self fro ward." God speaks once, and if that voice be not 
 heard, but is willfully silenced, the second time it utters a 
 terrible permission. God says, " Go," and then is angry. 
 Experience will tell us how God has sent us to reap the fruit 
 of our own willfulness. 
 
 3. We notice next the evidences in him of a disordered 
 diind and heart. 
 
 We come now^to the most difficult portion of the story: 
 " The dumb ass, speaking with man's voice, forbade the mad- 
 ness of the prophet." One of the most profound and pious 
 of modern commentators on this passage has not scrupled 
 to represent the whole transaction as occurring in a vis- 
 ion. Others have thought that Balaam's own heart, smiting 
 him for his cruelty, put, as it were, words into the ass's 
 mouth. 
 
 We care not. Let the caviller cavil if he will. There is 
 too much profound truth throughout this narrative for us 
 to care much about either the literal or the figurative inter- 
 pretation. One thing, however, is clear. Balaam did only 
 what men so entangled always do. The real fault is in 
 themselves. They have committed themselves to a false 
 position, and when obstacles stand in their way, they lay the 
 blame on circumstances. They smite the dumb innocent oc- 
 casion of their perplexity as if it were the cause. And the 
 passionateness the "madness" of the act is but an indica- 
 tion that all is going wrong within. There was a canker at 
 the heart of Balaam's life and his equanimity was gone; his 
 temper vented itself on brute things. Who has not seen the 
 like a grown man, unreasoning as a child, furious beyond 
 the occasion ? If you knew the whole, you would see that 
 
656 Perversion, as shown in Balaam's Character. 
 
 was not the thing which had moved him so terribly ; you 
 would see that all was wrong inwardly. 
 
 It is a strange, sad picture this. The first man in the 
 land, gifted beyond most others, conscious of great mental 
 power, going on to splendid prospects, yet with hopelessness 
 and misery working at his heart. Who would have envied 
 Balaam if he could have seen all the hell that was working 
 at his beart ? 
 
 > Lastly, let us consider the impossibility under such circum- 
 stances of going back. Balaam offers to go back. The an- 
 gel says, " Go on." There was yet one hope for him to be 
 true, to utter God's words careless of the consequences ; but 
 he who had been false so long, how should he be true ? It 
 was too late. In the ardor of youth you have made perhaps 
 a wrong choice, or chosen an unfit profession, or suffered 
 yourself weakly and passively to be drifted into a false course 
 of action, and now, in spite of yourself, you feel there is no 
 going back. To many minds, such a lot comes as with the 
 mysterious force of a destiny. They see themselves driven, 
 and forget that they put themselves in the way of the stream 
 that drives them. They excuse their own acts as if they 
 were coerced. They struggle now and then faintly, as Ba- 
 laam did try to go back can not and at last sink passive- 
 ly in the mighty current that floats them on to wrong. 
 
 And thenceforth to them all God's intimations will come 
 unnatwally. His voice will sound as that of an angel 
 against them in the way. Spectral lights will gleam, only 
 to show a quagmire from which there is no path of extrica^ 
 tion. The heavenliest things and the meanest will forbid 
 the madness of the prophet : and yet at the same time seem 
 to say to the weak and vacillating self-seeker, " You have 
 done wrong, and you must do more wrong." Then deepens 
 down a hideous, unnatural, spectral state the incubus as of 
 a dream of hell, mixed with bitter reminiscences of heaven. 
 
 Your secret faults will come out in your life. 
 we say to you be true. 
 
Selfishness, as shown in Balaam s Character. 657 
 
 V. 
 
 SELFISHNESS, AS SHOWN IN BALAAM'S 
 CHARACTER. 
 
 "Who can count the dust of Jacob, and the number of the fourth part ol 
 Israel ? Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like 
 his !" Num. xxiii. 10. 
 
 WE acquainted ourselves with the earlier part of Balaam's 
 history last Sunday. We saw how great gifts in him were 
 perverted by ambition and avarice ambition making them 
 subservient to the admiration of himself; avarice transform- 
 ing them into mere instruments for accumulating wealth. 
 And we saw how his conscience was gradually perverted by 
 insincerity, till his mind became the place of hideous contra- 
 dictions, and even God Himself had become to him a he ; 
 with his heart disordered, until the bitterness of all going 
 wrong within vented itself on innocent circumstances, and 
 he found himself so entangled in a false course that to go 
 back was impossible. 
 
 Now we come to the second stage. He has been with 
 Balak : he has built his altars, offered his sacrifices, and tried 
 his enchantments, to ascertain whether Jehovah will permit 
 him to curse Israel. And the Voice in his heart, through all, 
 says, " Israel is blest." He looks down from the hill-top, and 
 sees the fair camp of Israel afar oif, in beautiful array, their 
 white tents gleaming ' ; as the trees of lignaloes which the 
 Lord had planted." He feels the solitary grandeur of a na- 
 tion unlike all other nations people which "shall dwell 
 alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations." A na- 
 tion too numberless to give Balak any hope of success in 
 the coming war. " Who can count the dust of Jacob, and 
 the number of the fourth part of Israel?" A nation too 
 strong in righteousness for idolaters and enchanters to cope 
 with, "Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither 
 is there any divination against Israel ?" Then follows a per- 
 sonal ejaculation " Let me die the death of the righteous, 
 and let my last end be like his !" 
 
 Now to prevent the possibility of misconception, or any 
 supposition that Balaam was expressing words whose full 
 significance he did not understand that when he was 
 speaking of righteousness he had only a heathen notion of 
 
 28* 
 
658 Selfishness, as shown in Balaam s Character. 
 
 it we refer to the sixth chapter of Micah,from the fifth 
 verse. We will next refer to Numbers xxxi. 8, and Joshua 
 xiii. 22, from whence it appears that he who desired to die 
 the death of the righteous, died the death of the ungodly, 
 and fell, not on the side of the Lord, but fighting against the 
 Lord's cause. The first thing we find in this history of Ba- 
 laam is an attempt to change the will of God. 
 
 Let us clearly understand what was the meaning of all 
 those reiterated sacrifices. 
 
 1. Balaam wanted to please himself without displeasing 
 God. The problem was how to go to Balak, and yet not 
 offend God. He would have given worlds to get rid of his 
 duties, and he sacrificed, not to learn what his duty was, but 
 to get his duty altered. Now see the feeling that lay at the 
 root of all this that God is mutable. Yet of all men one 
 would have thought that Balaam knew better, for had he 
 not said, " God is not a man, that He should lie ; neither the 
 son of man that He should repent : hath He said, and shall 
 He not do it?" But when we look upon it, we see Balaam 
 had scarcely any feeling higher than this God is more in- 
 flexible than man. Probably had he expressed the exact 
 shade of feeling, he would have said, more obstinate. He 
 thought that God had set his heart upon Israel, and that it 
 was hard, yet not impossible, to alter this partiality. Hence 
 he tries sacrifices to bribe, and prayers to coax, God. 
 
 How deeply rooted this feeling is in human nature this 
 belief in God's mutability you may see from the Romish 
 doctrine of indulgences and atonements. The Romish Church 
 permits crime for certain considerations. For certain con- 
 siderations it teaches that God will forgive crimes. Atone- 
 ments after, and indulgences before sin, are the same. But 
 this Romish doctrine never could have succeeded, if the be- 
 lief in God's mutability and the desire that He should be 
 mutable, were not in man already. 
 
 What Balaam was doing in these parables, and enchant- 
 ments, and sacrifices, was simply purchasing an indulgence 
 to sin ; in other words, it was an attempt to make the Eter- 
 nal Mind change. What was wanting for Balaam to feeJ 
 was this God can not change. What he did feel was this 
 - God will not change. There are many writers who teach 
 that this and that is right because God has willed it. All 
 discussion is cut short by the reply, God has determined it, 
 therefore it is right. Now there is exceeding danger in this 
 mode of thought, for a thing is not right because God has 
 willed it, but God wills it because it is right. It is in this 
 tone the Bible always speaks. Never, except in one obscure 
 
Selfishness, as shown in Balaam's Character. 659 
 
 passage, does the Bible seem to refer right and wrong to the 
 sovereignty of God, and declare it a matter of will ; never 
 does it imply that if He so chose, He could reverse evil and 
 good. It says, " Is not my way equal ? are not your ways 
 unequal ?" " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ?" 
 was Abraham's exclamation in a kind of hideous doubt 
 whether the Creator might not be on the eve of doing injus- 
 tice. So the Bible justifies the ways of God to man. But it 
 could not do so unless it admitted eternal laws, with which 
 no will can interfere. Nay more, see what ensues from this 
 mode of thought. If right is right because God wills it, then, 
 if God chose, He could make injustice, and cruelty, and lying 
 to be right. This is exactly what Balaam thought. If God 
 could but be prevailed on to hate Israel, then for him to 
 curse them would be right. And again : if power and sov- 
 ereignty make right, then, supposing the Ruler were a demon, 
 devilish hatred would be as right as now it is wrong. There 
 is great danger in some of our present modes of thinking. It 
 is a common thought that might makes right, but for us there 
 is no rest, no rock, no sure footing, so long as we feel right 
 and wrong are mere matters of will and decree. There is no 
 safety, then, from these hankering feelings and wishes to alter 
 God's decree. You are unsafe until you feel, "Heaven and 
 earth may pass away, but God's word can not pass away." 
 
 2. We notice, secondly, an attempt to blind himself. One 
 of the strangest leaves in the book of the human heart is 
 here turned. We observe here perfect veracity with utter 
 want of truth. Balaam was veracious. He will not deceive 
 Balak. Nothing was easier than to get the reward by mut- 
 tering a spell, knowing all the while that it would not work. 
 Many a European has sold incantations to rich savages for 
 jewels and curiosities, thus enriching himself by deceit. 
 Now Balaam was not supernaturally withheld. That is a 
 baseless assumption. Nothing withheld him but his con- 
 science. No bribe on earth could induce Balaam to say a 
 falsehood to pretend a curse which was powerless to get 
 gold, dearly as he loved it, by a pretense. " If Balak would 
 give me his house full of silver and gold, I can not go beyond 
 the word of the Lord my God, to do less or more," was no 
 mere fine saying, but the very truth. You might as soon 
 have turned the sun from his course as induced Balaam to 
 utter falsehood. 
 
 Aud yet, with all this, there was utter truthlessness of 
 heart. Balaam will not utter what is not true ; but he will 
 blind himself so that he may not see the truth, and so speafc 
 a lie, believing it to be the truth. 
 
660 Selfishness, as shown in Balaam s Character. 
 
 He will only speak the thing he feels ; but he is not careful 
 to feel all that is true. He goes to another place, where the 
 whole truth may not force itself upon his mind to a hill 
 where he shall not see the whole of Israel: from hill to hill 
 for the chance of getting to a place where the truth may dis- 
 appear. But there stands the stubborn fact Israel is bless- 
 ed; and he will look at the fact in every way, to see if he 
 can not get it into a position where it shall be seen no long- 
 er. Ostrich-like ! 
 
 Such a character is not so uncommon as, perhaps, we think. 
 There is many a lucrative business which involves misery 
 and wrong to those who are employed in it. The man would 
 be too benevolent to put the gold in his purse if he knew of 
 the misery. But he takes care not to know. There is many 
 a dishonorable thing done at an election, and the principal 
 takes care not to inquire. Many an oppression is exercised 
 on a tenantry, and the landlord receives his rent and asks no 
 questions. Or there is some situation which depends upon 
 the holding of certain religious opinions, and the candidate 
 has a suspicion that if he were to examine, he could not con- 
 scientiously profess these opinions, and perchance he takes 
 care not to examine. 
 
 3. Failing in all these evil designs against Israel, Balaam 
 tries his last expedient to ruin them, and that partially suc- 
 ceeds. 
 
 He recommends Balak to use the fascination of the daugh- 
 ters of Moab to entice the Israelites into idolatry. (Num. 
 xxxi. 15, 16. Rev. ii. 14). He has tried enchantments and 
 sacrifices in vain to reverse God's will. He has tried in 
 vain to think that will is reversed. It will not do. He feels 
 at last that God has not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither 
 hath He seen perverseness in Israel. Now therefore, he 
 tries to reverse the character of these favorites, and so to re- 
 verse God's will. God will not curse the good ; therefore 
 Balaam tries to make them wicked ; he tries to make the 
 good curse themselves, and so exasperate God. 
 
 A more diabolical wickedness we can scarcely conceive. 
 Yet Balaam was an honorable man and a veracious man ; 
 nay, a man of delicate conscientiousness and unconquer- 
 able scruples a man of lofty religious professions, highly 
 respectable and respected. The Lord of heaven and earth 
 has said there is such a thing as " straining out a gnat, and 
 swallowing a camel." 
 
 There are men who would not play false, and yet would 
 wrongly win. There are men who would not lie, and yet 
 who would bribe a poor man to support a cause which he 
 
Selfishness, as shown in Balaam s Character. 66 1 
 
 believes in his soul to be false. There are men who would 
 resent at the sword's point the charge of dishonor, who 
 would yet for selfish gratification entice the weak into sin, 
 and damn body and soul in hell. There are men who would 
 be shocked at being called traitors, who in time of war will 
 yet make a fortune by selling arms to their country's foes. 
 There are men respectable and respected, who give liberally 
 and support religious societies, and go to church, and would 
 not take God's name in vain, who have made wealth, in some 
 trade of opium or spirits, out of the wreck of innumerable 
 human lives. Balaam is one of the accursed spirits now, 
 but he did no more than these are doing. 
 
 Now see what lay at the root of all this hollowness : self- 
 ishness. 
 
 From first to last one thing appears uppermost in this his- 
 tory Balaam's self; the honor of Balaam as a true proph- 
 et therefore he will not lie ; the wealth of Balaam there* 
 fore the Israelites must be sacrificed. Nay more, even in 
 his sublimest visions his egotism breaks out. In the sight 
 of God's Israel he cries, " Let me die the death of the right- 
 eous :" in anticipation of the glories of the eternal advent, 
 "I shall behold Him, but not nigh." He sees the vision of a 
 kingdom, a Church, a chosen people, a triumph of righteous- 
 ness. In such anticipations, the nobler prophets broke out 
 into strains in which their own personality was forgotten. 
 Moses, when he thought that God would destroy His people, 
 prays in agony " Yet now, if Thou wilt, forgive their sins ; 
 and if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book." Paul 
 speaks in impassioned words "I have continual sorrow in 
 my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from 
 Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, 
 who are Israelites." But Balaam's chief feeling seems to be, 
 "How will all this advance me?" And the magnificence of 
 the prophecy is thus marred by a chord of melancholy and 
 diseased egotism. Not for one moment even in those mo- 
 ments when uninspired men gladly forget themselves; men 
 who have devoted themselves to a monarchy or dreamed of 
 a republic in sublime self-abnegation can Balaam forget 
 himself in God's cause. 
 
 Observe, then : desire for personal salvation is not religion. 
 It may go with it, but it is not religion. Anxiety for the 
 state of one's own soul is not the healthiest or best symp- 
 tom. Of course every one wishes, " Let me die the death of 
 the righteous." But it is one thing to wish to be saved, an- 
 other to wish God's right to triumph; one thing to wish to 
 die safe, another to wish to live holily. Nay, not only 18 
 
662 Selfishness, as shewn in Balaam 's Character 
 
 this desire for personal salvation not religion, but if soured, 
 it passes into hatred of the good. Balaam's leeling became 
 spite against the people who are to be blessed when he is 
 not blessed. He indulges a wish that good may not pros- 
 per, because personal interests are mixed up with the failure 
 cf good. 
 
 We see anxiety about human opinion is uppermost. 
 Throughout we find in Balaam's character semblances, not 
 realities. He would not transgress a rule, but he would vio- 
 late a principle. He would not say white was black, but he 
 would sully it till it looked black. 
 
 Now consider the whole. 
 
 A bad man prophesies under the fear of God, restrained 
 by conscience, full of poetry and sublime feelings, with a full 
 clear view of death as dwarfing life, and the blessedness of 
 righteousness as compared with wealth. And yet we find 
 him striving to disobey God, hollow and unsound at heart ; 
 using for the devil wisdom and gifts bestowed by God ; 
 sacrificing all with a gambler's desperation, for name and 
 wealth : tempting a nation to sin, and crime, and ruin ; sepa- 
 rated in selfish isolation from all mankind ; superior to Balak, 
 and yet feeling that Balak knew him to be a man that had 
 his price ; with the bitter anguish of being despised by the 
 men who were inferior to himself; forced to conceive of a 
 grandeur in which he had no share, and a righteousness in 
 which he had no part. Can you not conceive the end of one 
 with a mind so torn and distracted? the death in battle; 
 the insane frenzy with which he would rush into the field, 
 and finding all go against him, and that lost for which he 
 'aad bartered heaven, after having died a thousand worse 
 than deaths, find death at last upon the spears of the Israel- 
 ites ? 
 
 In application, we remark: 1st. The danger of great pow- 
 ers. It is an awful thing, this conscious power to see more, 
 to feel more, to know more than our fellows. 
 
 2d. But let us mark well the difference between feeling 
 and doing. 
 
 It is possible to have sublime feelings, great passions, even 
 great sympathies with the race, and yet not to love man. 
 To feel mightily, is one thing, to live truly and charitably, 
 another. Sin may be felt at the core, and yet not be cast 
 out. Brethren, beware. See how a man may be going on 
 uttering fine words, orthodox truths, and yet be rotten at 
 the heart. 
 
The Transitoriness of Life. 663 
 
 VI. 
 THE TRANSITORINESS OF LIFE. 
 
 "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unco 
 wisdom." Psalm xc. 12. 
 
 THIS is the key-note of the 90th Psalm. It numbers sadly 
 the days and vicissitudes of human life ; but it does this, not 
 for the sake of mere sentiment, but rather for practical pur- 
 poses, that it may furnish a motive for a wiser life of the 
 heart. We know nothing of the Psalm except that it was 
 the composition of "Moses, the man of God." It was writ- 
 ten evidently in the wilderness, after years of apparently 
 fruitless wandering : its tone is that of deep sadness re- 
 trospective ; its images are borrowed from the circumstances 
 of the pilgrimage the mountain-flood, the grass, the night- 
 watch of an army on the march. 
 
 See here, again, what is meant by inspiration. Observe 
 the peculiarly human character of this Psalm. Moses, "the 
 man of God," is commissioned not to tell truths superhuman, 
 but truths emphatically human. The utterances of this 
 Psalm are true to nature. Moses felt as we feel, only God 
 gave him a voice to interpret, and he felt more deeply than 
 all, what all in their measure feel. His inspiration lay not 
 in this, that he was gifted with legislative wisdom ; but 
 rather in this, that his bosom vibrated truly and healthfully 
 to every note of the still sad music of humanity. We will 
 consider 
 
 I. The feelings suggested by a retrospect of the past. 
 II. The right direction of those feelings. 
 
 1. The analogies of nature which correspond with human 
 life. All the images in this Psalm are suggested by the cir- 
 cumstances of their forty years' pilgrimage. Human life felt 
 to be like a flood the withering grass a sleep broken the 
 pain the start death the awakening a night-watch a 
 tale told, whose progress we watched with interest, but of 
 which when done the impression alone remains, the words 
 are gone forever. These are not artificial images, but natu- 
 ral. They are not similes forced by the writer into his serv- 
 ice because of their prettiness, but similes which forced 
 themselves on him by their truthfulness. Now this is God's 
 
664 The Transitoriness of Life. 
 
 arrangement. All things here are double. The world with, 
 out corresponds with the world within. No man could look 
 on a stream when alone by himself, and all noisy companion- 
 ship overpowering good thoughts was away, without the 
 thought that just so his own particular current of life will 
 fall at last into the " unfathomable gulf where all is still." 
 
 No man can look upon a field of corn, in its yellow ripe- 
 ness, which he has passed weeks before when it was green, 
 or a convolvulus withering as soon as plucked, without ex- 
 periencing a chastened feeling of the fleetingness of all earth- 
 ly things. 
 
 No man ever went through a night-watch in the bivouac, 
 when the distant hum of men and the random shot fired told 
 of possible death on the morrow ; or watched in a sick-room, 
 when time was measured by the sufferer's breathing or the 
 intolerable ticking of the clock, without a firmer grasp on 
 the realities of life and time. 
 
 So God walks His appointed rounds through the year : and 
 every season and every sound has a special voice for the va- 
 rying phases of our manifold existence. Spring comes, when 
 earth unbosoms her mighty heart to God, and anthems of 
 gratitude seem to ascend from every created thing. It is 
 something deeper than an arbitrary connection which com- 
 pels us to liken this to the thought of human youth. 
 
 And then comes summer, with its full stationariness, its 
 noontide heat, its dust, and toil, an emblem of ripe manhood. 
 The interests of youth are gone by. The interest of a near 
 grave has not jet come. Its duty is work. And afterwards 
 autumn, with its mournfulness, its pleasant melancholy, tells 
 us of coming rest and quiet calm. 
 
 And now has come winter again. This is the last Sunday 
 in the year. 
 
 It is not a mere preacher's voice performing an allotted 
 task. The call and correspondence are real. The young 
 have felt the melancholy of the last two months. With a 
 transient feeling even amounting to a luxury the prophet- 
 ic soul within us anticipates with sentiment the real gloom 
 of later life, and enables us to sympathize with what we have 
 not yet experienced. The old have felt it as no mere ro- 
 mance an awful fact a correspondence between the world 
 without and the world within. We have all felt it in the 
 damp mist, in the slanting shadows, the dimmer skies, the 
 pale, watery glow of the red setting sun, shorn of half its 
 lustre. In the dripping of the woodland, in the limp leaves 
 trodden by heaps into clay, in the depressing north wind, in 
 the sepulchral cough of the aged man at the corner of the 
 
The Transitoriness of Life. 665 
 
 street under the inclement sky, God has said to us, as He 
 said to Moses, " Pause, and number thy days, for they are 
 numbered." 
 
 2. There is also a sense of loss. Every sentence tells us 
 that this Psalm was written after a long period was past. 
 It was retrospective, not prospective. Moses is looking 
 back, and his feeling is loss. How much was lost ? Into 
 that flood of time how much had fallen ? Many a one con- 
 sumed, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, by the wrath of 
 God. Many a Hebrew warrior stricken in battle, and over 
 him a sand-heap. And those who remembered these things 
 were old men " consuming" his strong expression, " their 
 strength in labor and sorrow." 
 
 Such is life ! At first, all seems given. We are acquiring 
 associations, sensations, new startling feelings ; then comes 
 the time when all give pleasure or pain by association by 
 touching some old chord which vibrates again. And after 
 that, all is loss something gone, and more is going. Every 
 day, every year this year, like all others. Into that flood 
 have fallen treasures that will not be recovered. Intimacies 
 have been dissolved that will not be reunited. Affections 
 cooled, we can not say why. Many a ship foundered, and 
 the brave hearts in her will be seen no more till the sea shall 
 give up her dead. Many a British soldier fallen before 
 Asiatic pestilence, or beneath the Kaffir assegai, above him 
 the bush or jungle is waving green, but he himself is now 
 where the rifle's ring is heard, and the sabre's glitter is seen, 
 no more. Many a pew before me is full, which at the begin- 
 ning of the year was filled by others. Many a hearth-stone 
 is cold, and many a chair is empty that will not be filled 
 again. We stand upon the shore of that illimitable sea 
 which never restores what has once fallen into it ; we hear 
 only the boom of the waves that throb over all forever. 
 
 3. There is, too, an apparent non-attainment. 
 
 A deeper feeling pervades this Psalm than that of mere 
 transitoriness : it is that of the impotency of human effort. 
 " We are consumed " perish aimlessly like the grass. No 
 man was more likely to feel this than Moses. After forty 
 years, the slaves he had emancipated were in heart slaves 
 still idolaters. He called them rebels, and shattered the 
 stone tables of the law, in sad and bitter disappointment. 
 After forty years the promised land was not reached. He 
 himself never entered it. 
 
 No wonder if life appeared to him like a stream, not mere- 
 ly transitory, but monotonous. Generation after generation, 
 and no change; much lost, apparently nothing was won. N0 
 
666 The Transitoriness of Life. 
 
 prospect of better time had been. " The thing that hath 
 been, it is that which shall be." Here, too, is one of the great 
 trials of all retrospect the great trial of all earthly life. 
 
 The cycles of God's providences are so large that our nar- 
 row lives scarcely measure a visible portion of them. So 
 large that we ask, What can we effect ? Yet there is an al- 
 most irrepressible wish in our hearts to see success attend our 
 labors, to enter the promised land in our own life. It is a 
 hard lesson : to toil in faith and to die in the wilderness, not 
 having attained the promises, but only seeing them afar off. 
 
 So in the past year, personally and publicly. Personally 
 we dare not say that we are better than we were at the be- 
 ginning. Can we say that we are purer? more earnest? 
 Has the lesson of the cross been cut sharply into our hearts ? 
 Have we only learned self-denial, to say nothing of self-sacri- 
 fice ? And stagnation thus being apparently the case, or at 
 most but very slow progress, the thought comes, Can such 
 beings be destined for immortality ? 
 
 On a larger scale, the young cries of freedom which caused 
 all generous hearts to throb with sympathy have been stifled ; 
 itself trodden down beneath the iron heel of despotism all 
 over Europe and rendered frantic and ferocious. Can we 
 wish for its success ? Are the better times coming at all ? 
 So does the heart sicken over the past. Every closing year 
 seems to say, Shall we begin the old useless struggle over 
 again ? Shall we tell again the oft-told tale ? Are not these 
 hopes, so high, a mockery to a moth like man ? Is all but a 
 mere illusion, a mirage in the desert? Are the waters of 
 life and home ever near, yet never reached, and the dry hot 
 desert sand his only attainment ? 
 
 Let us consider 
 
 H. The right use of these sad suggestions. " So teach us 
 to number our days." 
 
 " So," because the days may be numbered, as in this Psalm, 
 and the heart not applied to wisdom. There are two ways 
 in which days may be numbered to no purpose. 
 
 1. That of the Epicurean "Let us eat and drink; for to- 
 morrow we die." There is a strong tendency to reckless en- 
 joyment when the time is felt to be short, and religion does 
 not exist to restrain. 
 
 [For example. In times of plague Athens Milan Lon- 
 don danger only stimulates men to seize to-day the enjoy- 
 ments which may not be theirs to-morrow. Again, at the 
 close of the last century, when the prisons of Paris resounded 
 with merriment, dance, and acting, a light and trivial people, 
 
The Transitoriness of Life. 667 
 
 atheists at heart, could extract from an hourly impending 
 death no deeper lesson than this, " Let us eat and drink ; for 
 to-morrow we die."] 
 
 2. That of the sentimentalist. 
 
 It is no part of our Christian duty to think of decay in an 
 abject spirit. That which the demoniac in the Gospels did, 
 having his dwelling among the tombs, has sometimes been 
 reckoned the perfection of Christian unworldliness. Men 
 have looked on every joy as a temptation ; on every earnest 
 pursuit as a snare the skull and the hour-glass their com- 
 panions, curtaining life with melancholy, haunting it with 
 visions and emblems of mortality. This is not Christianity. 
 
 Rather it is so to dwell on the thoughts of death " that we 
 may apply our hearts unto wisdom." If the history of these 
 solemn truths does not stimulate us to duty and action, it 
 were no duty to remind ourselves of them. Rather the re- 
 verse. Better shut out such gloomy and useless thoughts. 
 But there is a way of dwelling amidst these facts which sol- 
 emnizes life instead of paralyzing it. He is best prepared to 
 meet change who sees it at a distance and contemplates it 
 calmly. Affections are never deepened and refined until the 
 possibility of loss is felt. Duty is done with all energy, then 
 only, when we feel, " The night cometh, when no man can 
 work," in all its force. 
 
 Two thoughts are presented to make this easier. 
 
 1. The eternity of God. "Before the mountains were 
 brought forth, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art 
 God." With God there is no Time it is one eternal Now. 
 This is made conceivable to us by a recent writer, who has re- 
 minded us that there are spots in the universe which have 
 not yet been reached by the beams of light which shone from 
 this earth at its creation. If, therefore, we are able on an 
 angel's wings to reach that spot in a second or two of time, 
 the sight of this globe would be just becoming visible as it 
 was when chaos passed into beauty. A few myriads of miles 
 nearer, we should be met by the picture of the world in the 
 state of deluge. And so in turn would present themselves 
 the spectacles of patriarchal life ; of Assyrian, Grecian, Per- 
 sian, Roman civilization ; and, at a short distance from the 
 earth, the scenes of yesterday. Thus a mere transposition in 
 space would make the past present. And thus, all that we 
 need is the annihilation of space to annihilate time. So that 
 if we conceive a Being present everywhere in space, to Him 
 all past events would be present. At the remotest extremi- 
 ty of the angel's journey, he would see the world's creation ; 
 
668 The Transitoriness of Life. 
 
 at this extremity, the events that pass before our eyes U, 
 day. Omnipresence in space is thus equivalent to ubiquity 
 in time. And to such a being, demonstrably, there would be 
 no Time. All would be One vast eternal Now. 
 
 Apply this to practical wisdom. And this comes in to 
 correct our despondency. For with God, " a thousand years 
 are as one day." In the mighty cycles in which God works, 
 our years and ages are moments. It took fifteen hundred 
 years to educate the Jewish nation. We wonder that Moses 
 saw nothing in forty years. But the thought of the eternity 
 of God was his consolation. And so, shall we give up our 
 hopes of heaven and progress, because it is so slow, when we 
 remember that God has innumerable ages before Him ? Or 
 our hopes for our personal improvement, when we recollect 
 our immortality in Him who has been our refuge " from 
 generation to generation ?" Or for our schemes and plans 
 which seem to fail, when we remember that they will grow 
 after us, like the grass above our graves ? 
 
 IL Next, consider the permanence of results. Read the 
 conclusion of the Psalm, " Prosper Thou the work of our 
 hands upon us, oh prosper Thou our handiwork." It is a 
 bright conclusion for a Psalm so dark and solemn. To cor- 
 rect the gloom that comes from brooding on decay, it is 
 good to remember that there is a sense in which nothing 
 perishes. 
 
 1. The permanence of our past seasons. Spring, summer, 
 autumn, are gone, but the harvest is gathered in. Youth and 
 manhood are passed, but their lessons have been learnt. The 
 past is ours only when it is gone. We do not understand the 
 meaning of our youth, our joys, our sorrows, till we look at 
 them from a distance. We lose them to get them back again 
 in a deeper way. The past is our true inheritance, which 
 nothing can take from us. Its sacred lessons, its pure affec- 
 tions, are ours forever. Nothing but the annihilation of our 
 being could rob us of them. 
 
 2. The permanence of lost affections. Over the departed 
 ones Moses mourned. But take his own illustration "A 
 tale that is told." The sound and words are gone, but the 
 tale is indelibly impressed on the heart. So the lost are not 
 really lost. Perhaps they are ours only truly when lost. 
 Their patience, love, wisdom, are sacred now, and live in us. 
 The apostles and prophets are more ours than they were the 
 property of the generation who saw their daily life " He 
 oeing dead, yet speaketh." 
 
 3. The permanence of our own selves " The beauty of 
 
The Transitoriness of Life. 669 
 
 the Lord our God be upon us." Very striking this. We 
 survive. We are what the past has made us. The results 
 of the past are ourselves. The perishable emotions, and 
 the momentary acts of bygone years, are the scaffolding on 
 which we build up the being that we are. As the tree is 
 fertilized by its own broken branches and fallen leaves, and 
 grows out by its own decay, so is the soul of man ripened 
 out of broken hopes and blighted affections. The law of our 
 humanity is the common law of the universe life out of 
 death, beauty out of decay. Not till those fierce young 
 passions, over the decay of which the old man grieves, have 
 been stilled into silence ; not until the eye has lost its fire, 
 and the cheek its hot flush, can " the beauty of the Lord our 
 God be upon us" the beauty of a spirit subdued, chastened, 
 and purified by loss. 
 
 4. Let us correct these sad thoughts by the thought of the 
 permanence of work. " Prosper thou the work of our hands." 
 Feelings pass, thoughts and imaginations pass : dreams pass : 
 work remains. Through eternity, what you have done, that 
 you are. They tell us that not a sound has ever ceased to 
 vibrate through space ; that not a ripple has ever been lost 
 upon the ocean. Much more is it true that, not a true 
 thought, nor a pure resolve, nor a loving act, has ever gone 
 forth in vain. 
 
 So then we will end our year. 
 
 Amidst the solemn lessons taught to the giddy traveller 
 as he journeys on by a Nature hastening with gigantic foot- 
 steps down to a winter grave, and by the solemn tolling of 
 the bell of Time, which tells us that another, and another, 
 and another, is gone before us, we will learn, not the lesson 
 of the sensualist enjoy while you can : not that of the feeble 
 sentimentalist mourn, for nothing lasts: but that of the 
 Christian work cheerfully. 
 
 " The beauty of the Lord our God be upon ua." 
 
 ^ Oh, prosper Thou our handiwork." 
 
67O Views of Death. 
 
 VII 
 VIEWS OF DEATH. 
 
 "Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happenetb 
 even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, 
 that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than 
 of the fool forever ; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be 
 forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool." Eccles. ii. 15, 16. 
 
 THIS is the inspired record of a peculiar view of life, 
 Paul, with his hopefulness of disposition, could not have 
 written it, neither could John, with his loving, trustful spirit. 
 We involuntarily ask who wrote this ? Was it written by a 
 voluptuary a skeptic or a philosopher? What sort of 
 man was it ? 
 
 We detect the sated voluptuary in the expressions of the 
 first eleven verses of this chapter. We see the skeptic in 
 those of the 19th to the 22d verses of the third chapter. 
 And the philosopher, who in avoidance of all extremes seeks 
 the golden medium, is manifested in such a maxim as " Be 
 not righteous overmuch ; neither make thyself overwise : 
 why shouldest thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch 
 wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die 
 before thy time ?" Or was it written by a man deeply arfd 
 permanently inspired ? 
 
 I believe it to have been written by none of these, or 
 rather by all four. It records different experiences of the 
 same mind different moods in which he viewed life in 
 different ways. It is difficult to interpret, or to separate 
 them ; for he says nothing by which they can be marked off 
 and made distinct from each other. Nowhere does Solomon 
 say, " I thought so then, but that was only a mood, a phase 
 of feeling that I have since seen was false, and is now cor- 
 rected by the experience and expressions of the present." 
 !Here is, at first sight, nothing but inextricable confusion and 
 false conclusions. 
 
 The clue to the whole is to be found in the interpreter's 
 own heart. It is necessary to make these few preliminary 
 remarks, as there is a tone of disappointment which runs 
 through all this book, which is not the tone of the Bible 
 in general. Two lines of thought are suggested by the 
 text. 
 
Views of Death. 071 
 
 I. The mysterious aspect presented by death. 
 II. That state of heart in which it is mysterious no 
 longer. 
 
 I. To Solomon, in his mood of darkness, " there is no re- 
 membrance of the wise more than of the fool forever." But 
 it is not only in moods of dark perplexity, it is always a 
 startling thing to see the rapidity with which the wisest and 
 the best are forgotten. We plough our lives in water, leav- 
 ing no furrow ; two little waves break upon the shore, but no 
 further vestige of our existence is left. 
 
 [An accident happens to one of England's greatest sons ; 
 an announcement is made which stagnates the blood in a 
 country's veins for a moment, and then all returns to its 
 former channel. (Tennyson. " In Memoriam." " Let them 
 rave," he sleeps well.) 
 
 Country church-yard yew-tree upheaving roots clasping 
 round bones a striking fact that vegetable life outlives and 
 outlasts animal life.] 
 
 There is something exquisitely painful in the thought that 
 we die out and are forgotten ; therefore it is, that in the 
 higher walks of life people solace themselves with the hope 
 of posthumous reputation ; they think, perhaps, that then 
 only their true worth will be known. That posthumous 
 reputation ! when the eye is forever closed, and the heart 
 forever chilled here what matters it to him, whether storms 
 rage over his grave or men cherish his memory ? he sleeps 
 well. The commentators on this book have disagreed among 
 themselves about Solomon's character some have even 
 doubted whether he was finally saved or no. What matters 
 it to him now what is said of him ? what does it signify to 
 him what posterity thinks of him ? And so with us all : to 
 the ear that is turned into dust the voice of praise or of cen- 
 sure is indifferent. One thing is certain. God says, " Time 
 is short, eternity is long." The solemn tolling of the bell 
 seems to cry, There is something to be done ; there is much 
 to be done ; do it ! and that quickly ! 
 
 Then again there are some who say, " What use is there 
 in doing any thing in this world ? It scarcely seems worth 
 while, in this brief span of life, to try do any thing." A 
 man is placed in a high situation, receives an expensive ed- 
 ucation at school and college, and a still more expensive one 
 of time and experience. And then, just when we think all 
 this ripe wisdom, garnered up from so many fields, shall find 
 its fullest use, we hear that all is over, he has passed from 
 
672 Views of Death. 
 
 among us, and then the question, hideous in its suggostive- 
 ness, arises, " Why was he then more wise ?" 
 
 Asked from this world's stand-point if there is no life 
 beyond the grave, if there is no immortality, if all spiritual 
 calculation is to end here, why, then the mighty work of 
 God is all to end in nothingness: but if this is only a state 
 of infancy, only the education for eternity, in which the sou! 
 is to gain its wisdom and experience for higher work, then 
 to ask why such a mind is taken from us is just as absurd as 
 to question why the tree of the forest has its first training in 
 the nursery garden. This is but the nursery ground, from 
 whence we are to be transplanted into the great forest of 
 God's eternal universe. There is an absence of all distinc- 
 tion between the death of one man and another. The wise 
 man dies as the fool with respect to circumstances. 
 
 In our short-sightedness we think there ought to be a cer- 
 tain correspondence between the man and the mode of the 
 man's death. We fancy the warrior should die upon the 
 battle-plain, the statesman at his post, the mean man should 
 die in ignorance : but it is not so ordered in God's world, for 
 the wise man dies as the fool, the profligate man dies as the 
 hero. Sometimes for the great and wise is reserved a con- 
 temptuous death, a mere accident ; then, he who is not sat- 
 isfied unless the external reality corresponds with the in- 
 ward hope y imagines that circumstances such as these can 
 not be ordained by Eternal Love, but rather by the spirit 
 of a mocking demon. 
 
 There is always a disappointment of our expectations. 
 Xo man ever lived whose acts were not smaller than him- 
 self. We often look forward to the hour of death in which a 
 man shall give vent to his greater and nobler emotions. 
 The hour comes, and the wise man dies as the fool. In the 
 first place, in the case of holiness and humbleness, thoughts 
 of deep despondency and dark doubt often gather round the 
 heart of the Christian in his last hour, and the narrow-minded 
 man interprets that into God's forgetfulness ; or else deliri- 
 um shrouds all in silence ; or else there are only common- 
 place words, words tender, touching, and gentle, but in 
 themselves nothing. Often there is nothing that marks the 
 great man from the small m&n. This is the mystery of 
 death. 
 
 II. It depends on causes within us and not without us. 
 Three things are said by the man of pleasure : 1. That all 
 things happen by chance. 2. That there is nothing new. 
 3, That all is vanity, and nothing is stable. 
 
Views of Death. 673 
 
 There is a strange special penalty which God annexes to 
 a life of pleasure : Every thing appears to the worldly 
 man as a tangled web a maze to which there is no clue. 
 Another man say3, " There is nothing new under the sun." 
 This is the state of the man who lives merely for excitement 
 and pleasure his heart becomes so jaded by excitement that 
 the world contains nothing for him which can aw r aken fresh 
 or new emotions. Then, again, a third says, "All is vanity." 
 This is the state of him who is afloat on the vast ocean of ex- 
 citement, and who feels that life is nothing but a fluctua^ 
 ting, changeful, heartless scene. 
 
 Some who read the Book of Ecclesiastes think that there 
 is a sadness and uneasiness in its tone inconsistent with the 
 idea of inspiration that it is nothing but a mere kaleido' 
 scope, with endlessly shifting moods. Therein lies the proof 
 of its inspiration. Its value lies as much in the way of warn- 
 ing as of precept. Live for yourself here live the mere life 
 of- pleasure, and then all is confusion and bewilderment of 
 mind ; then the view which the mighty mind of Solomon 
 took, inspired by God, will be yours : life will seem as noth- 
 ing, and death a mere mockery. Be in harmony with the 
 mind of Christ, have the idea He had, be one with Him, and 
 you shall understand the machinery of this world. " The 
 secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him." To the 
 humble pious heart there is no mystery. Tfoe world is intel- 
 ligible only to a mind in harmony with the Mind that made 
 it. Else all is confusion, unless you are in possession of His 
 idea, moved by His Spirit. 
 
 Hence it lies in a pure heart much more than in a clear 
 intellect, to understand the mystery of life and death. Solo* 
 mon's wisdom has left us only a confused idea. 
 
 Turn we now from the views of Solomon to the life of the 
 Son of Man. Men asked, "How knoweth this man letters, 
 having never learned ?" He gave a different explanation of 
 His wisdom. "My judgment is just; because I seek not 
 mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent 
 me." 
 
 He gives directions to us how to gain the same discern- 
 ment. "If any man will do His will, he shall know." 
 ******** 
 
 [One has just been taken from us to whom all eyes turned 
 ~-Sii' Robert Peel.] 
 
 29 
 
674, Waiting for the Second Advent* 
 
 vm. 
 WAITING FOR THE SECOND ADVENT. 
 
 " And the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God, and into the p* 
 tient waiting for Christ." 2 Thess. iii. 5. 
 
 THE two Epistles to the Thessalonians contain, more ex- 
 pressly than any other, St. Paul's views respecting the sec- 
 ond Advent of Christ. The first epistle was written to cor- 
 rect certain enthusiastic views respecting that coming. But 
 the second epistle tells us that the effort had failed. For in 
 the mean while, another epistle had been forged in St. Paul's 
 name, asserting that the day was near, and so opening the 
 floodgates of fanaticism. To counteract this, he tells them 
 not to be shaken in mind by any word or letter as from him, 
 as that the day of Christ was at hand. And, contrary to his 
 usual practice, he writes the salutation at the close with his 
 own hand, making it a test hereafter of the genuineness of 
 his epistles. 
 
 Let us try to paint a picture of the state of the Thessalo- 
 nian Church. Such phenomena had appeared as might have 
 been expected to arise from a belief that the end of the 
 world was near. Men forsook their stated employments ; 
 the poor would not work, but expected to be maintained by 
 their richer brethren. Men, being idle, spent their time in 
 useless discussions, neglected their own affairs, gossipped, 
 and indulged a prying curiosity, into the affairs of others. 
 Hence arose the necessity for the admonition " Study to be 
 quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your 
 hands, as we commanded you ;" and so the apostle had 
 said, "Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every 
 brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition 
 which he received of us. For yourselves know how ye 
 ought to follow us : for w r e behaved not ourselves disorderly 
 among you ; neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; 
 but wrought with labor and travail night and day, that we 
 might not be chargeable to any of you." 
 
 Moreover, two opposite lines of conduct were adopted by 
 persons of different temperament. Some greedily received 
 every w T ild tale and mysterious prediction of the Advent, 
 and listened eagerly to every fanatic who could work upon 
 
Waiting for the Second Advent. 075 
 
 the vulgar credulity. Others, perceiving that there was so 
 much imposture, concluded that it was safest to believe notl> 
 : ng ; and accordingly were skeptical of every claim to inspb 
 ration. In admonition of the first class, St. Paul says, " Prove 
 all things ; hold fast that which is good." In admonition of 
 the second, " Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesy- 
 ings." 
 
 The opposite tendencies of skepticism and credulity will 
 be found very near together in all ages. Some men refusing 
 to believe that God speaks in the signs of the times ; others 
 running after every book on prophecy, seeking after signs, 
 believing in miracles and imposture, mesmerisms, electro-biol- 
 ogies, winking pictures any thing provided it be marvellous 
 it is the same state of mind exactly ! 
 
 To meet the evil of this feverish, disturbed state of the 
 Thessalonian Church, St. Paul takes two grounds. He first 
 points out the signs which will precede the second Advent : 
 Self-idolatry, excluding the worship of God. Sinful human- 
 ity, " the man of sin," in the temple of God. And this self" 
 worship deceiving by a show of godliness, and a power ap- 
 parently miraculous (such as our present self-laudations, phi- 
 lanthropies, marvellous triumphs as with Divine power, over 
 the material world). Besides this, punishment of falsehood 
 on the rejection of the true. These signs worked then and 
 now. St. Paul discerned the general law of Christ's king- 
 dom and its development as applicable to all epochs down 
 to the last. But next, St. Paul called the Church away from 
 this feverishness to the real preparation for the Advent. 
 The Church was on the tiptoe of expectation, and prepared 
 in the way above described. St. Paul summons them to a 
 real but not excited preparation. And this in two things : 
 1. The love of God. 2. Patience of the saints. We con- 
 sider 
 
 I. Preparation for the Redeemer's coming: the love of 
 God. 
 
 1. The love of God is the love of goodness. The old Sax- 
 on word God is identical with Good. God the Good One 
 personified goodness. There is in that derivation not a mere 
 play of words there is a deep truth. None loves God but 
 he who loves good. To love God is to love what God is. 
 God is pure, and he who loves purity can love God. God is 
 true. God is just ; and he who loves these things out of 
 God may love them in God ; and God for them, because He 
 is good, and true, and pure, and just. 
 
 No other love is real ; none else lasts. For example, love 
 
076 Waiting for the Second Advent. 
 
 based on a belief of personal favors will not endure. Yon 
 may be very happy, and believe that God has made you 
 happy. While that happiness lasts you will love God. But 
 a time comes when happiness goes. You will not be always 
 young and prosperous. A time may come when misfortunes 
 will accumulate on you as on Job. At last, Job had nothing 
 left but life. The natural feeling would be," Curse God and 
 die." Job said, " Though He slay me, yet will I trust in 
 Him." Plainly Job had some other reason for his love than 
 personal favors. God, the all-pure, all-just, all-holy, adorable, 
 because all-holy. Or again, you believe that Christ's suffer- 
 ings have purchased heaven for you. Well, you are grate- 
 ful. But suppose your evidence of personal salvation fades, 
 what then ? 
 
 Here, however, let me make a remark. The love of good- 
 ness only becomes real by doing good. . Without this it re- 
 mains merely a sickly sentiment. It gets body and reality 
 by acting. For example, we have been prating since the 
 Great Duke's death, of duty. Know we not that by merely 
 talking of duty our profession of admiration for duty will 
 become a cant ? This is a truth a minister of Christ feels 
 deeply. It is his business to be talking to others of self-sac- 
 rifice and devotedness. He of all men feels how little these 
 words mean, unless they are acted out. For an indolent 
 habit of admiring goodness is got easily, and is utterly with- 
 out profit. Hence Christ says, " Not every man that saith 
 unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven ; 
 but he that doetli the will of my Father which is in heaven ;" 
 and hence, too, " If a man love me, he will keep my com- 
 mandments, and I will love him;" ""If ye know these things, 
 happy are ye if ye do them ;" " This is the love of God, that 
 we keep His commandments." The love of goodness is real 
 and healthy only when we do it. 
 
 2. The love of God is the love of man expanded and puri- 
 fied. It is a deep truth that we can not begin with loving 
 God, we must begin w r ith loving man. It is an awful com- 
 mand, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart 
 and soul and mind." It is awful and impossible at first. 
 Interrogate the child's conscience, he does not love God su- 
 premely ; he loves his mother, and his sister, and his brother 
 more. Now this is God's plan of nature. Our special hu- 
 man affections are given us to expand into a diviner charity. 
 We are learning "by a mortal yearning to ascend." Our 
 affections wrap themselves round beings who are created in 
 God's image ; then they expand, widen in their range ; be- 
 come less absorbed, more calm, less passionate, more philan- 
 
Waiting for the Second Advent. 677 
 
 thropic. They become more pure, less selfish. Love was 
 given, encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end .... 
 that seK' might be annulled. The testimony of St. John is 
 decisive on this point. To him we appeal as to the apostle 
 who knew best what love is. His love to God was unearth- 
 ly, pure, spiritual ; his religion had melted into love. Let us 
 listen to his account. " No man hath seen God at any time. 
 If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is 
 perfected in us ;" u He that loveth not his brother whom he 
 hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ?" 
 
 According to him, the thought of the invisible God is in- 
 tolerable. It would be shorn of its dazzling splendor by be- 
 ing exhibited in our brethren. So we can gaze on the re- 
 flected sunlight on the moon. According to him, it is 
 through the visible that we appreciate the invisible 
 through the love of our brother that we grow into the love 
 of God. 
 
 An awful day is coming to us all the day of Christ. A 
 day of triumph, but of judgment too. Terrible language de- 
 scribes it, " The sun shall be turned into darkness and the 
 moon into blood." God shall be felt as He never has been 
 yet. How shall we prepare for that august sight ? Not by 
 unnatural, forced efforts at loving Him whom no eye can see 
 and live ; but by much persistence in the appointed path of 
 our common affections, our daily intercourse, the talk man 
 holds with man in the hourly walk of the world's inter- 
 course. By being true to our attachments. Let not a hum- 
 ble Christian be over-anxious, if his spiritual affections are 
 not as keen as he would wish. The love of God is the full- 
 blown flower of which the love of man is the bud. To love 
 man is to love God. To do good to man will be recognized 
 hereafter as doing good to Christ. These are the Judge's 
 words : " Verily, I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto 
 one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it unto Me." 
 
 3. Personal affections. 
 
 [Guard what is now said from any appearance of repre- 
 senting it as actually attained by the person who describes 
 it. The love of God is a fearful and a lovely thing ; but 
 they who have reached it are the few.] 
 
 It is not merely love of goodness, but love of goodness 
 concentrated on the Good One. Not merely the love of 
 man, but the love of man expanded into the love of Him, of 
 whom all that we have seen of gentle and lovely, of true and 
 tender, of honorable and bright in human character, are but 
 the shadows and the broken, imperfect lights. 
 
678 Waiting for the Second Advent. 
 
 It is here that the Jewish religion is the chief trainer of 
 the world. Revelation began with the personality of God. 
 All the Jew's discipline taught him this : that the law of 
 right was the will of a lawgiver. Deliverance from Egyp- 
 tian slavery, or Assyrian invasion, was always associated 
 with the name of a deliverer. Moses and the prophets were 
 His messengers and mediators. "Thus saith the Lord," is 
 ever the preface of their message. 
 
 Consequently, only from Jews, and Christians trained 
 through the Old Testament to know God, do we hear those 
 impassioned expressions of personal love, which give us a 
 sublime conception of the adoration of which human hearts 
 are capable. Let us hear David " Whom have I in heaven 
 but Thee ? and there is none upon earth that I desire in 
 comparison of Thee ;" " My soul is athirst for God, yea, 
 even for the living God." And that glorious outburst of St. 
 Paul : " Let God be true, and every man a liar," which can 
 be understood only by those who feel that the desertion of 
 all, and the discovery of the falseness of all, would be as 
 nothing compared with a single doubt of the faithfulness of 
 God. 
 
 II. The other preparation is the patient waiting. 
 
 1. What is waited for? an Advent of Christ. We must 
 extend the ordinary meaning of this expression. There are 
 many comings of Christ. 
 
 Christ came in the flesh as a Mediatorial Presence. 
 
 Christ came at the destruction of Jerusalem. 
 
 Christ came, a Spiritual Presence, when the Holy Ghost 
 was given. 
 
 Christ comes now in every signal manifestation of redeem- 
 ing power. 
 
 Any great reformation of morals and religion is a coming 
 of Christ, 
 
 A great revolution, like a thunderstorm, violently sweep- 
 ing the evil away, to make way for the good, is a coming of 
 Christ, 
 
 Christ will come at the end of the world, when the Spirit 
 of all these comings will be concentrated. 
 
 Thus we may understand in what way Christ is ever com- 
 ing and ever near. Why it was that St. James said, " StaV 
 lish your hearts : for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh ;" 
 and " Behold, the Judge standeth before the door." And we 
 shall also understand how it was that the early Church was 
 not deceived in expecting Christ in their own day. He did 
 come, though not in the way they expected 
 
Waiting for the Second Advent. 679 
 
 2, What is meant by " waiting ?" 
 
 Now it is remarkable that throughout the apostle's writ- 
 ings, the Christian attitude of soul is represented as an atti- 
 tude of expectation as in this passage, " So that ye come 
 behind in no gift ; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ ;" and again, " We are saved by hope : but hope that 
 is seen is not hope : for what a man seeth, why doth he yet 
 hope for ? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we 
 with patience wait for it." Salvation in hope : that was 
 their teaching. Not a perfection attained, but a perfection 
 that is to be. 
 
 The golden age lies onward. We are longing for, not the 
 Church of the past, but the Church of the future. Ours is not 
 an antiquated, sentimental yearning for the imaginary perfec- 
 tion of ages gone by, not a conservative stagnation content 
 with things as they are, but hope for the individual and for 
 the society. By Him we have access by faith, and rejoice in 
 hope of the glory that shall be revealed. A better, wiser, 
 purer age than that of childhood. An age more enlightened 
 and more holy than the world has yet seen. " Behold, the 
 tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, 
 and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with 
 them, and be their God." It is this spirit of expectation 
 which is the preparation for the Advent. Every gift of no- 
 ble origin is breathed upon by hope's perfect breath. 
 
 3. Let us note that it is patient waiting. 
 
 Every one who has ardently longed for any spiritual 
 blessing knows the temptation to impatience in expecting it. 
 Good men who, like Elijah, have sickened over the degener- 
 acy and luxury of their times ; fathers who have watched 
 the obduracy and wild career of a child whom they have 
 striven in vain to lead to God ; such cry out from the deeps 
 of the heart, " Where is the promise of His coming ?" 
 
 Now the true preparation is, not having correct ideas of 
 how and when He shall come, but being like Him. " It is 
 not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Fa- 
 ther hath put in His own power ;" " Every man that hath 
 this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure." 
 
 Application. "The Lord direct you" unto this. 
 
 Consider what the Thessalonians must have felt in their 
 perplexity. Would that we had a teacher such as St. Paul, 
 ever at hand to tell us what is truth to distinguish be- 
 tween fanaticism and genuine enthusiasm between wild 
 false teaching and truth rejected by the many. " Here," 
 might they have said, " were we bewildered. How shall 
 we hereafter avoid similar bewilderments without an infalli* 
 
68o The Sinless ness of Christ. 
 
 ble guide ?" Instead of which St. Paul says, u The Lord di- 
 rect your hearts into the love of God, and into the patient 
 waiting for Christ." 
 
 God has so decreed, that except in childhood, our depend' 
 ence must be on our own souls. "The way of truth is slow, 
 hard, winding, often turning on itself." Good and evil grow 
 up in the field of the world almost inseparably. The scan- 
 ning of error is necessary to the comprehension and belief of 
 truth. Therefore it must be done solitarily. Nay, such an 
 infallible guide could not be given to us without danger. 
 Such a one ever near would prove not a guide to us, but a 
 hindrance to the use of our own eyes and souls. Reverence 
 for such a guide would soon degenerate into slavishness, pas- 
 siveness, and prostration of mind. 
 
 Hence, St. Paul throws us upon God. 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE SINLESSNESS OF CHRIST. 
 
 "Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin ig the 
 transgression of the law. And ye know that he was manifested to take 
 away our sins ; and in him is no sin." 1 John iii. 4, 5. 
 
 THE heresy with which the Apostle St. John had to con- 
 tend in his day was an error of a kind and character which 
 it is hard for us with our practical, matter-of-fact modes of 
 thinking, to comprehend. There were men so over-refined 
 and fastidious, that they could not endure the thought of 
 any thing spiritual being connected with materialism. They 
 could not believe in any thing being pure that was also 
 fleshly, for flesh and sinfulness were to them synonymous 
 terms. They could not believe in the Divine humanity, for 
 humanity was to them the very opposite of that which was 
 Divine : and accordingly, while admitting the Divinity of 
 Jesus, they denied the reality of His materialism. They 
 said of His earthly life exactly what the Roman Catholic 
 says of the miracle he claims to be performed in the Supper 
 of the Lord. The Roman Catholic maintains that it is sim- 
 ply an illusion of the senses ; there is the taste of the bread, 
 the look of the bread, the smell of the bread, but it is all a 
 deception : there is no bread really there, it is only the spir- 
 itual body of the Lord. That which the Romanist says now 
 of the elements in the Lord's Supper, did these ancient here- 
 
The Sinks sues s of Christ. 681 
 
 tics say respecting the body and the life of Jesus. There 
 was, they said, the sound of the human voice, there was the 
 passing from place to place, there were deeds done, there 
 were sufferings undergone, but these were all an illusion 
 and a phantasma a thing that appeared, but did not 
 really exist. The everlasting Word of God was making it- 
 self known to the minds of men through the senses by an 
 illusion ; for to say that the Word of God was made flesh, to 
 maintain that He connected Himself with sinful, frail hu- 
 manity this was degradation to the Word this was de- 
 struction to the purity of the Divine Essence. 
 
 You will observe that in all this there w r as an attempt to 
 be eminently spiritual ; and what seems exceedingly marvel- 
 lous, is the fact withal that these men led a life of extreme 
 licentiousness. Yet it is not marvellous, if we think accu- 
 rately, for we find even now that over-refinement is but 
 coarseness. And so, just in the same way, these ultra-spirit- 
 ualists, though they would not believe that the Divine Es- 
 sence could be mingled with human nature without degrada- 
 tion, yet they had no intention of elevating human nature by 
 their own conduct. They thought they showed great re- 
 spect for Jesus in all this : they denied the reality of his suf- 
 ferings ; they would not admit the conception that frail, un- 
 dignffied humanity was veritably His, but nevertheless they 
 had no intention of living more spiritually themselves. 
 
 It was therefore that we find in another epistle, St. John 
 gives strict commands to his converts not to admit these 
 heretics into their houses : and the reason that he gives is, 
 that by so doing they would be partakers, not of their evil 
 doctrines, but of their evil deeds. They were a licentious 
 set of men, and it is necessary to keep this in view if we 
 would understand the writings of St. John. It is for this 
 reason, therefore, that he says " That which was from the 
 beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with 
 cur eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have 
 handled of the Word of Life, declare we unto you." It is for 
 this reason that he, above all the apostles, narrates with scru- 
 pulous accuracy all the particulars respecting the Redeemer's 
 risen body that he joined in the repast of the broiled fish 
 and the honey-comb : and that he dwells with such minute- 
 ness on the fact that there came from the body of the Re- 
 deemer blood and water : " Not water only, but water and 
 blood ;" and it is for this reason that in speaking of Anti- 
 christ he says, " Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus 
 Christ is come in the flesh is not of God, and this is that spir- 
 it of Antichrist whereof ye have heard that it should come." 
 
 29* 
 
68 2 The Sinks sness of Christ. 
 
 So, then, we learn from this that the most spiritual of all 
 the apostles was the one who insisted most earnestly on the 
 materialism of the human nature of our Lord. He who 
 alone had penetrated into that realm beyond, where the 
 King was seen on His throne of light, was the one who felt 
 most strongly that in humanity there is nothing degrading. 
 In the natural propensities of human nature there is nothing 
 to be ashamed of: there is nothing for a man to be ashamed 
 of but sin there is nothing more noble than a perfect hu- 
 man nature. 
 
 My brethren, though the error of the ancient times can not 
 be repeated in this age in the same form, though this strange 
 belief commends itself not to our minds, yet there may be 
 such an exclusive dwelling upon the Divinity of Jesus as ab- 
 solutely to destroy His real humanity ; there may be such a 
 morbid sensitiveness when we speak of Him as taking our 
 nature, as will destroy the fact of His sufferings yes, and 
 destroy the reality of His atonement also. There is a way 
 of speaking of the sinlessness of Jesus that would absolutely 
 make that scene on Calvary a mere pageant in which He was 
 acting a part in a drama, during which He was not really 
 suffering, and did not really crush the propensities of His hu- 
 man nature. It was for this reason we lately dwelt on the 
 Redeemer's sufferings ; now let us pass onward to the fact of 
 the sinlessness of His nature. 
 
 The subject divides itself first, into the sinlessness of His 
 nature; and secondly, the power which He possessed from 
 that sinlessness to take away the sins of the world. 
 
 With respect to the first branch, we have given us a defi- 
 nition of what sin is " Sin is the transgression of the law." 
 It is to be observed there is a difference between sin and 
 transgression. Every sin is a transgression of the law, but 
 every transgression of the law is not necessarily a sin. Who- 
 soever committeth sin transgresseth also the law. Now 
 mark the difference. It is possible for a man to transgress 
 the law of God, not knowingly, and then in inspired language 
 w r e are told that " sin is noif imputed unto him." Yet for all 
 that, the penalty will follow whenever a man transgresses, 
 but the chastisement which belongs to sin, to known willful 
 transgression, will not follow. 
 
 Let us take a case in the Old Testament, which it may be 
 as well to explain, because sometimes there is a difficulty 
 felt in it. We read of the patriarchs and saints in the Old 
 Testament as living in polygamy. There was no distinct 
 law forbidding it, but there was a law written in the "fleshly 
 tables of the heart," against which it is impossible to trans 
 
The Sinlessness of Christ. 683 
 
 gress without incurring a penalty. Accordingly, though we 
 never find that the patriarchs are blamed for the moral fault, 
 though you never find them spoken of as having broken the 
 written law of God, yet you see they reaped the penalty that 
 ever must be reaped in the case of one, degradation : in the 
 case of the other, slavery. Jacob's many wives brought dis- 
 sension and misery into his household, though he did it inno- 
 cently and ignorantly, and he reaped the penalty quarrele 
 and wretchedness. In all this there is penalty, but there is 
 not sin in all this, and therefore there was not excited that 
 agony which comes from the pangs of conscience after will- 
 ful sin. 
 
 Every misery that falls on man has been the consequence 
 of transgression, his own trespass or those of others. It may 
 have been his parents, his grandparents, or his far-back an- 
 cestors, who have given him the disadvantages under which 
 he labors. How shall we explain the fact that misery falls 
 alike on the good and on the evil? Only by remembering 
 whether it comes as the penalty of transgression ignorantly 
 done: then it is but the gentle discipline of a Father's love, 
 educating His child, it may be warning the child and giving 
 him the knowledge of that law of which he was hitherto ig- 
 norant. This wretchedness of the patriarchs, what was it 
 but the corrective dispensation by which the world learnt 
 that polygamy is against the law of God ? So the child who 
 cuts his hand with the sharp blade of the knife has learnt a 
 lesson concerning his need of caution for the future, and if 
 well and bravely borne, he is the better for it ; but if there 
 has been added to that transgression the sin of disobedience 
 to his parent's command, then there is something inflicted 
 beyond the penalty; there "is all that anguish of conscience 
 and remorse which comes as the consequence of sin. Now 
 we have seen what transgression is, let us try and understand 
 what sin is. 
 
 My Christian brethren, it is possible for us to mistake this 
 subject by taking figurative expressions too literally. We 
 speak of sin as if it were a thing, as if we were endowed with 
 it, like memory, or judgment, or imagination, as a faculty 
 which must be exercised. Now let us learn the truth of 
 what sin is it " is the transgression of the law." There 
 must be some voluntary act, transgressing some known law, 
 or there is no sin. There were those in the days of St. John 
 who held that sin was merely the infirmity of the flesh ; that 
 if a man committed sin, and he was to know that it was the 
 working merely of his lower nature, not of his own mind 
 his faith would save him. 
 
684 The Sinlessness of Christ. 
 
 Another error was that of the Pharisees in the days of Jf;< 
 BUS ; and their error was precisely opposite. " Yes," said the 
 Pharisees, " sin is the transgression of the law. Holiness is 
 conformity to the law, and the lives of the Pharisees bein^ 
 conformable to the ceremonial law, we stand before the world 
 as, touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." 
 The Redeemer comes, and He gives another exposition of 
 ^in. " Sin is the transgression of the law," but there is a law 
 'written for the heart, as well as for the outward man. There 
 is a work to be done within as well as without. A murder 
 may be committed by indulging revenge and malice, though 
 the hand has never been lifted to strike. It is not the out- 
 ward act that constitutes alone the morality of Christ, it is 
 the feeling of the heart, the acts of the inner man. 
 
 But then there is another error from which we have to 
 guard ourselves. It is a sophistry in which some men in- 
 dulge themselves. They say, " Well, if the thought is as bad 
 as the act, why should we not therefore do the act ? I am 
 as guilty as if I had committed transgression ; why should I 
 debar myself from the enjoyment ?" "it is, I say, but sophis- 
 try, for no man that has any conscience can really so deceive 
 himself. The Redeemer's doctrine was that many a man 
 whose outward life was pure and spotless would have done 
 the transgression if he had had the opportunity. It is one 
 thing to say that he would have done it if he could, but it is 
 quite another thing to say that a man who has indulged the 
 thought, and has drawn back, is as guilty as if he had actual- 
 ly carried out the evil act. The difference lies in this the 
 one would have done it if he could, and the other could and 
 would not. 
 
 We read in the Bible of two men who exemplify this. They 
 both resolved to commit murder, and the opportunity w r as 
 given to each. Saul threw his javelin with right good will 
 at David's person ; he did all that resolution could do, it was 
 but what is called accident that left the javelin quivering in 
 the wall. Opportunity was given also to David.. He had 
 resolved to slay Saul, but when the tempting opportunity 
 came, when he was bending over Saul, full of the thought of 
 destroying his enemy, at the very last moment he paused 
 his conscience smote him he refused to strike. Which of 
 these was the murderer ? Saul was the murderer : he had 
 slain in his heart. It was but an accident that prevented it. 
 In the other case there had been the indulgence of a wrong 
 thought, but it was subdued. He might say, he might as 
 weM have slain his foe, but would you say that he was in the 
 same position as a murderer ? No, Christian brethren, let 
 
The Sinlessness of Christ. 685 
 
 there be no sophistry of this kind among us. It is but a sub- 
 tle whisper from our great adversary that would beguile us. 
 Generally there is first a rising of an inclination which is 
 often no sin. This passes on to a guilty resolve one step 
 more, and the man has committed the sin. 
 
 Now let us turn to the character of our blessed Redeemer, 
 and we shall find him doubly free from all this as free in de- 
 sire as free in act. The proof of his perfect purity is to be 
 found in the testimony of His enemies, of His friends, and of 
 those indifferent to Him. We have first the evidence of His 
 enemies. For three long years the Pharisees were watching 
 their victim. There was the Pharisee mingling in every 
 crowd, hiding behind every tree. They examined His disci- 
 ples ; they cross-questioned all around Him ; they looked into 
 His ministerial life, into His domestic privacy, into His hours 
 of retirement. They came forward with the sole accusation 
 that they could muster that He had shown disrespect to the 
 Roman governor. The Roman judge, who at least should 
 know, had pronounced the accusation null and void. There 
 was another spy. It was Judas. If there had been one act 
 of sin, one failing in all the Redeemer's career that betrayed 
 ambition, that betrayed any desire to aggrandize Himself 
 in his hour of terrible remorse Judas would have remembered 
 it for his own comfort ; but the bitterness of his feelings 
 that which made life insufferable was that he had " betray- 
 ed innocent blood." 
 
 Pass we on to those who were indifferent. And first we 
 have the opinion of Pilate himself Contemporary historians 
 tell us that Pilate was an austere and cruel man, a man of 
 firm resolve, and one who shrank not from the destruction of 
 human life ; but we see here that for once the cruel man be- 
 came merciful : for once the man of resolve became timid. It 
 was not merely that he thought Jesus was innocent ; the hard 
 Roman mind w r ould have cared little for the sacrifice of an 
 obscure Jew. The soul of Pilate was pervaded with the feel- 
 ing that spotless innocence stood before him, and this feel- 
 ing extended even to Pilate's wife : for we find that she sent 
 to him and said, " Have thou nothing to do with that just 
 man." It was not because he was going to pass an unjust 
 sentence he had often done so before but she felt that 
 here was an innocent one who must not be condemned. 
 
 Now let us consider the testimony of His friends. They 
 tell us that during their intercourse of three years His was 
 a life unsullied by a single spot : and I pray you to remem- 
 ber that tells us something of the holiness of the thirty pre- 
 vious years ; for no man springs from sin into perfect right 
 
686 The Sinlessness of Christ. 
 
 eousness at once. If there has been any early wrong-doing 
 though a man may be changed yet there is something 
 left that tells of his early character a want of refinement, 
 of delicacy, of purity; a tarnish has passed upon the bright- 
 ness, and can not be rubbed off. If we turn to the testimo- 
 ny of John the Baptist, His contemporary, about the same 
 j;e, one who knew Him not at first as the Messiah : yet 
 when the Son of Man comes to him simply as a man, and 
 asks him to baptize Him, John turns away in astonishment, 
 shocked at the idea. " I have need to be baptized of thee : 
 and comest thou to me ?" In other words, the purest and 
 the most austere man that could be found on earth was com- 
 pelled to acknowledge that in Him who came for baptism 
 there was neither stain nor spot that the water of Jordan 
 was needed to wash away. So we see there was no actual 
 transgression in our blessed Lord. 
 
 Now let us see what the inward life was; for it is very 
 possible that there may be no outward transgression, and 
 yet that the heart may not be pure. It is possible that out 
 wardly all may seem right, through absence of temptation, 
 and yet there may be the want of inward perfection. Of 
 the perfection of Jesus we can have but one testimony ; it 
 can not be that of the apostles, for the lesser can not judge 
 the greater, and therefore we turn to Himself. He said, 
 " Which of you can charge me with sin ?" " I and my Fa- 
 ther are one." Now we must remember that just in pro- 
 portion as a man becomes more holy does he feel and ac- 
 knowledge the evil that is in him. Thus it was with the 
 Apostle Paul; he declared, "I am the chief of sinners." 
 But here is One who attained the highest point of human 
 excellence, who was acknowledged even by His enemies to 
 be blameless, who declares Himself to be sinless. 
 
 If, then, the Son of Man were not the promised Redeemer, 
 He, the humblest of mankind, might justly be accused of 
 pride ; the purest of mankind would be deemed to be un- 
 conscious of the evil that was in Him. He who looked so 
 deeply into the hearts of others is ignorant of His own; the 
 truest of mankind is guilty of the worst of falsehoods ; the 
 noblest of mankind guilty of the sin of sins the belief that 
 He had no sin. Let but the infidel grant us that human na- 
 ture has never attained to what it attained in the character 
 of Jesus, then we carry him still farther, that even He whom 
 he acknowledges to be the purest of men declared Himself 
 to be spotless, which, if it were false, would at once do away 
 with all the purity which he grants was His. It was not 
 only the outward acts, but the inner life of Jesus which was 
 
The Sinlessness of Christ. 687 
 
 so pure. His mind regulates every other mind ; it moves in 
 perfect harmony with the mind of God. In all the just men 
 that ever lived you will find some peculiarity carried into 
 excess. We note this in the zeal of St. John, in the courage 
 of St. Peter, in the truth-seeking of St. Thomas. It was not 
 so with Jesus : no one department of His human nature ever 
 superseded another : all was harmony there. The one sound 
 which has corne down from God in perfect melody, is His life, 
 the entire unbroken music of humanity. 
 
 We pass on to our second subject the power there is in 
 the manifested sinlessness of Jesus to take away the sins of 
 the world. There are two aspects in which we are to con- 
 sider this: first in reference to man, and secondly in reference 
 to God. Our subject to-day will confine itself to the first ; 
 on the other, we simply say this : there is, in the eternal con- 
 stitution of the heavenly government, that which makes the 
 life and death of Jesus the atonement for the world's sins. 
 Human nature, which fell in Adam, rose again in Christ ; in 
 Him it became a different thing altogether in God's sight 
 redeemed now, hereafter to be perfected. 
 
 But we leave this for the present, and consider how the 
 world was purified by the change of its own nature. " If I 
 be lifted up I will draw all men unto me." There are three 
 ways by which this may be done by faith, by hope, and by 
 love. It is done by faith, for the most degrading thing in 
 the heart of man is the disbelief in the goodness of human 
 nature. We live in evil, and surrounded by evil, until we 
 have almost ceased to believe in greatness of mind or char- 
 acter. The more a man increases in knowledge of the world, 
 the more does he suspect human nature ; a knowing man, 
 according to worldly phraseology, is one that will trust no 
 one. . He knows that he himself has his price, and he beiieves 
 that he can buy any one else : and this may be called the 
 second fall of man that moment when all our boyish belief 
 in goodness passes away; when such degradation and an- 
 guish of soul comes on, that we cease to believe in woman's 
 purity or in man's integrity ; when a man has fallen so low 
 there is nothing in this world that can raise him, except 
 faith in the perfect innocence of Jesus. Then it is that there 
 bursts upon the world that of which the world never 
 dreamed entire and perfect purity, spotless integrity no 
 mere dreaming of philosophers and sages though the dream 
 were a blessed thing to have; the tangible living Being be 
 fore us, whom we can see, and touch, and hear, so that a man 
 is able to come to his brother with trust in elevated humanity 
 and to say, u This is He of whom the prophets did write." ' 
 
688 The Sinks sness of Christ. 
 
 But secondly, trust in Divine humanity elevates the 
 by hope. You must have observed the hopefulness of the 
 character of Jesus his hopefulness for human nature. If 
 ever there were one who might have despaired, it was He. 
 Full of love Himself, He was met with every sort of unkind- 
 ness, every kind of derision. There was treachery in one of 
 His disciples, dissension amongst them all. He was engaged 
 in the hardest work that man ever tried. He was met by 
 the hatred of the whole world, by torture and the cross ; and 
 yet never did the hope of human nature forsake the Redeem- 
 er's soul. He would not break the bruised reed nor quench 
 the smoking flax. There was a spark mingling even in the 
 lowest humanity, which He would fain have fanned into a 
 blaze. The lowest publican Jesus could call to Him and 
 touch his heart ; the lowest profligate that was ever trodden 
 under foot by the world was one for whom He could hope 
 still. If He met with penitents, He would welcome them ; 
 if they were not penitents, but yet felt the pangs of detected 
 guilt, still with hopefulness He pointed to forgiven human- 
 ity : this was His word, even to the woman brought to Him 
 by her accusers, " Go, and sin no more ;" in His last moments 
 on the cross, to one who was dying by His side, He prom- 
 ised a place in Paradise : and the last words that broke from 
 the Redeemer's lips what were they but hope for our hu- 
 manity, while the curses were ringing in His ears ? " Fa- 
 ther, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 
 
 Now it is this hopefulness that raises hope in us. Chris- 
 tian brethren, we dare to hope for that nature which Jesus 
 loved, we dare to forgive that nature which Jesus conde- 
 scended to wear. This frail, evil, weak humanity of ours, 
 these hearts that yield to almost every gust of temptation, 
 the Son of Man hoped for v/nem. 
 
 And thirdly, it is done also by love; hate narrows the 
 heart, love expands the heart. To hate is to be miserable ; 
 to love is to be happy. To love is to have almost the power 
 of throwing aside sin. See the power of love in the hearts 
 of those around Him. He comes to a desponding man, 
 nourishing dark thoughts of the world ; He speaks encourag- 
 ingly, and the language of that man is, " Lord, I will follow 
 thee whithersoever thou goest." He goes to a man who had 
 loved money all his life. He treats him as a man, and the 
 man's heart is conquered: "Behold, Lord, the half of my 
 goods I give to the poor." He conies to the coward, who 
 had denied Him, and asks him simply, "Lovest thou Me:" 
 and the coward becomes a martyr, and dares to ask to be 
 crucified. He comes to a sinful woman, who had spent 
 
The Sinlessness of Christ. 689 
 
 sums on the adornment of her person, and the ointment 
 which was intended for herself was poured in love upon His 
 feet, mingling with her tears. " She loved much," and much 
 was forgiven. 
 
 And it was not during the Redeemer's life alone that the 
 power of His love extended. It was manifested also after 
 His death. There was the healing act done on the man who 
 asked for alms. For this the apostles were carried before 
 the Sadducees, and the man on whom this miracle was done 
 stood by them, full of strength and courage. The day be- 
 fore he had been a miserable, cringing suppliant, beseeching 
 pity from the passers-by. But all the wailing tone is gone ; 
 the attitude of the suppliant has passed away, and the reno- 
 vated cripple fronts the supreme judicature of Israel with a 
 lion heart. Ask you what has inspired and dignified that 
 man, and raised him higher in the scale of humanity ? It 
 was the power of love. It is not so much the manifestation 
 of this doctrine or that doctrine, that can separate the soul 
 from sin. It is not the law. It is not by pressing on the 
 lower nature to restrain it, that this can be done, but it is by 
 elevating it. He speaks not to the degraded of the sinful- 
 ness of sin, but He dwells upon the love of the Father, upon 
 His tender mercies ; and if a man would separate himself 
 from the bondage of guilt, there is no other way than this. 
 My Christian brethren, forget that miserable past life of 
 yours, and look up to the streams of mercy ever flowing 
 from the right hand of God. 
 
 My brethren, it is on this principle that we desire to 
 preach to the heathen. We would preach neither high 
 Church nor low Church doctrine. We desire to give* Jesus 
 Christ to the world ; and in pleading for this Society* I will 
 not endeavor to excite your sympathies by drawing a pic- 
 ture of the heathen world suspended over unutterable mis- 
 ery, and dropping minute by minute into everlasting wretch- 
 edness. It is easy to do this ; and then to go away calmly 
 and quietly to our comfortable meals and our handsome 
 habitations, satisfied with having demonstrated so tremen- 
 dous a fact. But this we say, if we would separate the world 
 from sin, and from, the penalty of sin, and the inward misery 
 of the heart attendant on sin in this world and the world to 
 come, it is written in Scripture, "There is none other name 
 under heaven given among men, whereby we must be 
 saved," than the name of Jesus. 
 
 * Church Missionary Society. 
 
690 Christ's Way of Dealing with Sin. 
 
 X. 
 CHRIST'S WAY OF DEALING WITH SIN. 
 
 "And immediately, when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so rea- 
 soned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in 
 your hearts ? Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be 
 forgiven thee ; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk ? But that 
 ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins (he 
 saith to the sick of the palsy), I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, 
 and go thy way into thine house." Mark ii. 8-11. 
 
 THIS anecdote is doubtless a familiar one to ns all. 
 
 The Son of God was teaching in a house full of listeners, 
 round which crowds were pressing. The friends of a poor 
 palsied man desired His aid. It was scarcely possible for 
 one person to edge his way through the press, where all 
 longed to hear, and none of the crowd were likely to give 
 place; but, for the cumbrous apparatus of a pallet borne by 
 four, it was impossible. Therefore they ascended by the 
 outside staircase, which, in Oriental countries leads to the 
 flat roof, which they broke up, and let their friend down in 
 the midst, before Jesus. No doubt this must have struck 
 every one. But the impression produced on the spectators 
 would probably have been very different from that produced 
 on Christ. They that saw the bed descending from the roof 
 over the heads of all, and who had before seen the fruitless 
 efforts that had been made to get in, and now remembered 
 that he who had been farthest from Christ was unexpect- 
 edly in a few minutes nearest to Him, could not have with- 
 held that applause which follows a successful piece of dex- 
 terity. They would have admired the perseverance, or the 
 ingenuity, or the inventiveness. 
 
 On none of these qualities did Christ fix as an explanation 
 of the fact. He went deeper. He traced it to the deepest 
 source of power that exists in the mind of man. "When 
 Jesus saw their/<r^YA." For as love is deepest in the being 
 of God, so faith is the mightiest principle in the soul of man. 
 Let us distinguish their several essences. Love is the es- 
 sence of the Deity that which makes it Deity. Faith is 
 the essence of humanity, which constitutes it what it is. 
 And, as here, it is the warring principle of this world which 
 wins in life's battle. No wonder that it is written in Scrip 
 
Christ's Way of Dealing with Sm. 69.1 
 
 ture " This is the victory that overcometh the world, even 
 our faith." No wonder it is said, " All things are possible 
 to him that believeth." It is that which wrestles with diffi- 
 culty, remo\ 7 es mountains, tramples upon impossibilities. It 
 is this spirit which in the common affairs of life, known as a 
 " sanguine temperament," never says " impossible " and nev- 
 er believes in failure, leads the men of the world to their 
 most signal successes, making them believe a thing possible 
 because they hope it ; and giving substantial reality to that 
 which before was a shadow and a dream. 
 
 It was this " substance of things hoped for " that gave 
 America to Columbus, when billows, miles deep, rose be- 
 tween him and the land, and the men he commanded well- 
 nigh rose in rebellion against the obstinacy which believed 
 in " things not yet seen." It was this that crowned the 
 Mohammedan arms for seven centuries with victory : so 
 long as they believed themselves the champions of the One 
 God with a mission from Him, they were invincible. And 
 it is this which so often obtains for some new system of 
 medicine the honor of a cure, when the real cause of cure is 
 only the patient's trust in the remedies. 
 
 So it is in religion. For faith is not something heard of 
 in theology alone, created by Christianity, but it is one of 
 the commonest principles of life. He that believes a bless- 
 ing is to be got, that " God is a rewarder of them that dili- 
 gently seek Him," will venture much, and will likewise win 
 much. For, as with this palsied man, faith is inventive, ever 
 fertile in expedients like our own English character, never 
 knowing when it has been foiled ; and then nearest victory 
 at the very moment when the last chance has seemed -to fail. 
 We divide our subject into 
 
 I. The malady presented to Christ. 
 II. His treatment of it. 
 
 I. The malady, apparently, was nothing more than palsy. 
 But not as such did Jesus treat it. The by-standers might 
 have been surprised at the first accost of Jesus to the para- 
 lytic man. It was not, " Take up thy bed and walk ;" but 
 "Thy sins be forgiven thee." As with their faith, so it was 
 here. He went deeper than perseverance or ingenuity. He 
 goes deeper than the outward evil ; down to the evil, the 
 root of all evil, properly the only evil sin. He read in that 
 sufferer's heart a deeper wish than appeared in the outward 
 act, the consequences of a burden worse than palsy, the 
 longing for a rest more profound than release from pain 
 the desire to be healed of guilt. It was in reply to this tacit 
 
692 Christ's Way of Dealing with Sin, 
 
 application that the words "Thy sins be forgiven thee* 
 were spoken. 
 
 Now, sin has a twofold set of consequences. 1. The natu- 
 ral consequences. 2. The moral consequences. 
 
 1. By the natural, we mean those results which come in- 
 evitably in the train of wrong-doing, by what we call the 
 laws of nature visiting themselves on the outward condition 
 of a sinner, by which sin and suffering are linked together. 
 As for example, when an intemperate man ruins his health, 
 or an extravagant man leaves himself broken in fortune ; or 
 when tyrannical laws bring an uprising of a people against 
 a tyrant : these are respectively* the natural penalties of 
 wrong-doing. 
 
 Here, apparently, palsy had been the natural result of sin ; 
 for otherwise the address of Christ was out of place and 
 meaningless. And what we are concerned to remark is, 
 that these natural consequences of sin are often invisible as 
 well as inevitable. Probably not one of the four friends 
 who bore him suspected such a connection. Possibly not 
 even his physician. But there were two at least to whom 
 the connection was certain the conscience of the palsied 
 man himself, whose awakened memory traced back the trem- 
 bling of those limbs to the acts of a youth long past ; and to 
 the all-seeing eye of Him to whom past, present, and future 
 are but one. 
 
 And such experience, brethren, is true, doubtless, much 
 oftener than we imagine. The irritable temperament, the 
 lost memory which men bewail, the over-sensitive brain, as 
 if causeless who can tell how they stand connected with 
 sins done long ago? For nothing here stands alone and 
 causeless. Every man, with his strength and his weaknesses, 
 stunted in body or dwarfed in heart, palsied in nerve or 
 deadened in sensibility, is the exact result and aggregate of 
 all the past all that has been done by himself, and all that 
 has been done by his ancestors, remote or near. The Saviour 
 saw in this palsied man the miserable wreck of an ill-spent 
 life. 
 
 2. Now quite distinct from these are the moral conse- 
 quences of guilt : by which I mean those which tell upon 
 che character and inward being of the man who sins. In 
 one sense, no doubt, Jt is a natural result, inasmuch as it is 
 oy a law, regular and unalterable, a man becomes by sin 
 deteriorated in character, or miserable. Now these are two- 
 fold, negative and positive the loss of some blessing, or 
 the accruing of some evil to the heart. Loss as when by 
 sinning we lose the capacity for all higher enjoyments ; for 
 
Christ's Way of Dealing with Sin. 693 
 
 none can sin without blunting his sensibilities. He has lost 
 the zest of a pure life, the freshness and the flood of happi 
 ness which come to every soul when it is delicate, and pure, 
 and natural. This is no light loss. If any one here con- 
 gratulates himself that sin has brought to him no positive 
 misery, my brother, I pray you to remember that God's 
 worst curse was pronounced upon the serpent tempter. Ap- 
 parently it was far less than that pronounced on the woman, 
 but really it was far more terrible. Not pain, not shame 
 no, these are remedial, and may bring penitence at last but 
 to sink the angel in the animal, the spirit in the flesh ; to be 
 a reptile, and to eat the dust of degradation as if it were 
 natural food. Eternity has no damnation deeper than 
 that. 
 
 Then, again, a positive result the dark and dreadful lone- 
 liness that comes from doing wrong a conscious unrest 
 which plunges into business, or pleasure, or society, not for 
 the love of these things, but to hide itself from itself as 
 Adam did in the trees of the garden, because it dare not 
 hear the voice of God } nor believe in His Presence. Do we 
 not know something of a self-reproach and self-contempt, 
 which, alternating at times with pride, almost tear the soul 
 asunder ? And such was the state of this man. His pains 
 were but the counterpart and reflection of a deeper sorrow. 
 Pain had laid him on a bed, and said to him, " Lie there face 
 to face with God and think!" We pass on now to con- 
 sider 
 
 II. Christ's treatment of that malady. 
 
 By the declaration of God's forgiveness. Brethren, if the 
 Gospel of our Master mean any thing it means this the 
 blotting out of sin : " To declare His righteousness in the 
 remission of sins that are past." It is the declaration of the 
 highest name of God love. Let us understand what for- 
 giveness is. The forgiveness of God acts upon the moral 
 consequences of sin directly and immediately ; on the nat- 
 ural, mediately and indirectly. 
 
 Upon the moral consequences directly. Remorse passes 
 into penitence and.love. There is no more loneliness, for 
 God has taken up His abode there. No more self-contempt, 
 for he whom God has forgiven learns to forgive himself. 
 There is no more unrest, for " being justified by faith, we 
 have peace with God." Then the fountains of the great 
 deep are broken up, and unwonted Eappy tears can come 
 as with the woman in the Gospels. I pray you to observe 
 that this comes directly, with no interval " Being justified 
 
694 Christ V Way of Dealing with Sin. 
 
 by faith." For God's love is not an offer but a gift ; not 
 clogged with conditions, but free as the air we breathe. 
 
 Upon the natural consequences, not directly, but indirectly 
 and mediately. The forgiveness of Christ did riot remove 
 the palsy ; that was the result of a separate, distinct act of 
 Christ. It is quite conceivable that it might never have 
 been removed at all that he might have been forgiven, and 
 the palsy suffered to remain. God might have dealt with 
 him as He did in David's case : on his repentance there came 
 to him the declaration of God's pardon, his person was ac- 
 cepted, the moral consequences were removed, but the nat- 
 ural consequences remained. " The Lord hath put away thy 
 sin, nevertheless the child which is born to thee shall die." 
 
 Consider, too, that without a miracle they must have re- 
 mained in this man's case. It is so in everyday life. If the 
 intemperate man repents he will receive forgiveness, but will 
 that penitence give him back the steady hand of youth? 
 Or if the suicide between the moment of draining the poison- 
 ed cup and that of death repent of his deed, will that arrest 
 the operation of the poison ? A strong constitution or the 
 physician may possibly save life ; but penitence has nothing 
 to do with it. Say that the natural penal consequence of 
 crime is the scaffold : Did the pardon given to the dying 
 thief unnail his hands? Did Christ's forgiveness interfere 
 with the natural consequences of his guilt ? 
 
 And thus, we are brought to a very solemn and awful con- 
 sideration, awful because of its truth and simplicity. The 
 consequences of past deeds remain. They have become part 
 of the chain of the universe effects which now are causes, 
 and will work and interweave themselves with the history 
 of the world forever. You can not undo your acts. If you 
 have depraved another's will, and injured another's soul, it 
 may be in the grace of God that hereafter you will be per- 
 sonally accepted and the consequences, of your guilt inward- 
 ly done away, but your penitence can not undo the evil you 
 have done, and God's worst punishment may be that you 
 may have to gaze half frantic on the ruin you have caused, on 
 the evil you have done, which you might have left undone, 
 but which being done is now beyond y.our power forever. 
 This is the eternity of human acts. The forgiveness of God 
 the blood of Christ itself does not undo the past. 
 
 And yet even here the grace of God's forgiveness is not in 
 vain. It can not undo the natural consequences of sin, but it 
 may by His mercy transform them into blessings. For ex- 
 ample, suppose this man's palsy to have been left still with 
 him, himself accepted, his soul at peace. Well, he is thence 
 
Christ's Way of Dealing with Sin. 695 
 
 forth a crippled man. But crippling, pain are these neces- 
 sarily evils? Do we not say continually that sorrow and 
 pain are God's loving discipline given to His legitimate chil- 
 dren, to be exempt^from which were no blessing, proving 
 them to be " bastards and not sons?" And why should not 
 that palsy be such to him, though it was the result of his 
 own fault? Once, when it seemed in the light of the guilty 
 conscience only the foretaste of coming doom the outward a 
 type of the inward, every pang sending him farther from 
 God, it was a curse.^ Now, when penitence and love had 
 come, and that palsy was received with patience, meekness, 
 why may it not be a blessing ? What makes the outward 
 events of life blessings or the reverse ? Is it not all from 
 ourselves ? Did not dissolution become quite another thing 
 by the Fall changed into death; assuming thereby an en- 
 tirely altered character : no longer felt as a natural blessed 
 herald, becoming the messenger of God, summoning to high- 
 er life, but now obtaining that strange name the " king of 
 terrors ?" And in Christ, death becomes our minister again : 
 " Ours," as St. Paul says, " with all other things." The cross 
 of Christ has restored to death something more blessed than 
 its original peacefulness. A sleep now: not death at all. 
 And will not a changed heart change all things around us, and 
 make the worst consequence of .our own misdoing minister 
 to our eternal welfare ? So that God's forgiveness, assured 
 to us in the cross of Christ, is a complete remedy for sin, act- 
 ing on its natural consequences by transformation indirectly ; 
 on its moral results directly, by removing them. 
 
 Lastly, let us learn from this the true aim and meaning of 
 miracles. Let us attend to the account our Master gives us 
 of the reason why He performed this miracle. Read verses 
 9, 10. To say, "Thy sins be forgiven thee," was easy, for no 
 visible result could test the saying. To say, " Take up thy 
 bed and walk," was not apparently so easy, for failure would 
 cover with confusion. He said the last, leaving the infer- 
 ence If I can do the most difficult, then of course, I can do 
 the easier. Here we have the true character of a miracle : it 
 is the outward manifestation of the power of God, in order 
 that we may believe in the power of God in things that are 
 invisible. 
 
 Now contrast this with the popular view. Miracles arc. 
 commonly reckoned as proofs of Christ's mission, accrediting 
 His other truths, and making them, which would be other- 
 wise incredible, evidently from God. I hesitate not to say 
 that nowhere in the New Testament are they spoken of in 
 this way. When the Pharisees asked for evidences and 
 
696 Christ's Way of Dealing with Sm. 
 
 signs, His reply was, " There shall no sign be given you.* 
 So said St. Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians not si-ns. 
 but " Christ crucified." He had no conception of our modern 
 notion of miracles things chiefly valuable because they can 
 be collected into a portable volume of evidences to prov? 
 that God is love : that we should love one another: that He 
 is the Father of ail men. These need no proofs, they arc 
 like the sun shining by his own light. 
 
 Christ's glorious miracles were not to prove these, but 
 that through the seen the unseen might^be known ; to show, 
 as it were by specimens, the living Power which works in 
 ordinary as well as extraordinary cases. For instance here, 
 to show that the One who is seen to say with power, "Take 
 up thy bed and walk," arresting the natural consequences of 
 sin, is actually, though unseen, arresting its moral conse- 
 quences. Or again, that He who bade the waves " Be still " 
 in Galilee, is holding now, at this moment, the winds in the 
 hollow of His hand. That He who healed the sick and raised 
 the dead, holds now and ever in His hand the issues of life 
 and death. For the marvellous is to show the source of the 
 common. Miracles were no concession to that infidel spirit 
 which taints our modern Christianity, and which can not be- 
 lieve in God's presence, except it can see Him in the super- 
 natural. Rather, they were to make us feel that all is mar- 
 vellous, all wonderful, all pervaded with a Divine presence, 
 and that the simplest occurrences of life are miracles. 
 
 In conclusion. Let me address those who, like this suffer- 
 er, are in any degree conscious either of the natural or moral 
 results of sin, working in them. It is apparently a proud and 
 & vain thing for a minister of Christ, himself tainted with 
 sin, feeling himself, perhaps more than any one else can feel, 
 the misery of a palsied heart, for such a one to give advice 
 to his brother-men; but it must be done, for he is but the 
 mouthpiece of truths greater than himself, truths which are 
 facts, whether he can feel them all or not. 
 
 Therefore, if there be one among us who in the central 
 depths of his soul is conscious of a Voice pronouncing the 
 past accursed, the present awful, and the future terrible I 
 say to him, Lose no time in disputing, as these Scribes did, 
 some Church question, " whether the Son of Man hath power 
 on earth to forgive sins ;" nor whether ecclesiastical etiquette 
 permits you to approach God in this way or in that way a 
 question as impertinent as it would have been for the palsied 
 man to debate whether social propriety permitted him to ap- 
 proach the Saviour as he did, instead of through the door. 
 . My Christian brethren, if the crowd of difficulties which 
 
Regeneration. 697 
 
 stand between your soul and God succeed in keeping you 
 away, all is lost. Right into the Presence you must force 
 your way, with no concealment, baring the soul with all ita 
 ailments before Him, asking, not the arrest of the conse- 
 quences of sin, but the " cleansing of the conscience from 
 dead works to serve the living God ;" so that if you must 
 suffer you shall suffer as a forgiven man. 
 
 This is the time ! Wait not for another opportunity nor 
 for different means. For the saying of our Lord is ever ful- 
 filled, " The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the 
 violent take it by force." 
 
 XI. 
 REGENERATION. 
 
 "Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born 
 of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of God. That 
 which is born of the flesh is flesh ; and that which is born of the Spirit is 
 spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." John 
 iii. 5-7. 
 
 THE Church of England has apparently selected this pas- 
 sage for the Gospel of Trinity Sunday, because the influences 
 of the entire Godhead are named in different verses the re- 
 generating influence of the Spirit, the limitations of the Son 
 of Man, and the illimitable nature of the Father. 
 
 It is a threefold way in which God has revealed Himself 
 to man as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. First, as a Father 
 in opposition to that doctrine which taught that the whole 
 universe is God, and every part of the universe is a portion 
 of God. He is the Father who hath made this universe 
 God distinct from us : outside of us : the Creator distin- 
 guished from the creation. 
 
 Secondly, God has revealed Himself as a Son, as manifest- 
 ed in humanity, chiefly in Christ. Throughout the ages past 
 there has been a mediatorial humanity. Man is in a way 
 the reflection of God's nature the father to the child. Th'e 
 prophets, the lawgivers, and especially Moses, are called me- 
 diators, through whom God's name was known. The media- 
 torial system culminated in Christ, attained the acme of per- 
 fection in One the man Christ Jesus the express image of 
 His Father. The Son is the human side of the mind ofGod. 
 
 Thirdly, God has revealed himself as the Holy Spirit: not 
 as a Father external to us, nor as reflected in humanity still 
 
 30 
 
698 Regeneration. 
 
 outside us, but as God within us mingling with our being. 
 The body of man is His temple. " In Him we live and 
 move, and have our being." This is the dispensation of the 
 Spirit: He has told us that every holy aspiration, every 
 thought and act, that has been on the side of right against 
 wrong, is a part of His holy essence, of His Spirit in us. 
 
 This is the threefold manifestation made of Himself to us 
 by God. But this is not all, for this alone would not be the 
 doctrine of the Trinity. It is quite conceivable that there 
 might be one living force manifested in three different ways, 
 without its being a trinity. Let us try and understand this 
 by an illustration. 
 
 Conceive a circular thin plate of metal : above it you 
 would see it such ; at gome yards' distance, as an oval, side- 
 ways, edgeways, a line. This might be the account of God's 
 different aspects : in one relationship to us seen as the Fa- 
 ther, in another as the Son, in another as the Spirit ; but this 
 is not the doctrine of the Trinity, it is a heresy, known in 
 old times by the name of Sabellianism or modal Trinity, de- 
 pending on our position in reference to Him. 
 
 Further. This is not merely the same part of His nature, 
 seen in different aspects, but diverse parts of His complex 
 being persons: three causes of this manifestation. Just 
 as our reason, our memory, our imagination, are not the 
 same, but really ourselves. 
 
 Let us take another illustration. A single white ray of 
 light, falling on a certain object, appeal's red ; on another, 
 blue ; on another, yellow. That is, the red alone in one case 
 is thrown out, the blue or yellow in another. So the differ- 
 ent parts of the one ray by turns become visible ; each is a 
 complete ray, yet the original white ray is but one. 
 
 So we believe that in that Unity of Essence there are 
 three living Powers which we call Persons, distinct from 
 each other. It is in virtue of His own incommunicable Es- 
 sence that God is the Father. It is the human side of His 
 nature by which He is revealed as the Son, so that it was 
 not, so to speak, a matter of choice whether the Son or the 
 Father should redeem the world. We believe that from all 
 eternity there was that in the mind of God which I have 
 called its human side, which made it possible for Him to be 
 imaged in humanity ; and that again named the Spirit, by 
 which He could mix and mingle Himself with us. 
 
 This is the doctrine of the Trinity, explained now, not to 
 point the damnatory clause of the Athanasian creed, but 
 only in order to seize joyfully the annual opportunity of pro- 
 fessing a firm belief in the dogmatic truth of the Trinity. 
 
Regeneration. 699 
 
 We now pass on to notice more particularly the revela- 
 tion to us of one mode in which that blessed Trinity works. 
 "This will divide itself into two subjects. First, we shall en- 
 deavor to understand what is meant by the kingdom of 
 God ; and secondly, we shall consider the entrance into that 
 kingdom by regeneration. 
 
 Our blessed Lord says, " Except a man be born again, he 
 can not enter into the kingdom of God." Now that expres- 
 sion the kingdom of God is a Jewish one. Nicodemus 
 was a Jew ; and we must therefore endeavor to comprehend 
 how he would understand it. 
 
 By the kingdom of God, a Jew understood human society 
 perfected that domain on earth where God was visible and 
 God ruled. The whole Jewish dispensation had trained Nic- 
 odemus to realize this. The Jewish kingdom was a theocra- 
 cy, distinguished from an aristocracy and a democracy. There 
 were two main things observable in this. First, it was a 
 kingdom in which God's power was manifestly visible, by 
 miracles, marvels, the cloud and fire pillars, and by appear- 
 ances direct from the King of kings. The second matter of 
 importance in this conception of the Divine kingdom was 
 that it was a society in which a person ruled. God was the 
 ruler of this society ; her laws all dated from God's will, and 
 were right because the will of the Ruler was right. "Thus 
 saith the Lord," was the preface to personal messages from 
 their King. 
 
 Bear in mind, then, that this was Nicodemus's conception 
 of the kingdom, and we shall understand the conversation. 
 He had seen in the works of Christ the assertion of a living 
 Will ruling over the laws of nature. He had seen wonders 
 and signs. Therefore he said, " We know that Thou art a 
 teacher come from God :" he saw that Christ in these two 
 senses fulfilled the two requisites of a Divine mission. He 
 had seen a society growing up in acknowledgment of the 
 rule of a person : 'but Christ told him that something more 
 was needful than this: it was necessary that the subject 
 should be prepared for the kingdom. It was not enough 
 that God should draw nigh to man; but that man must 
 draw near to God. There must be an alteration in the man. 
 " Except a man be born again he can not enter the kingdom 
 of God." 
 
 In other words, he distinguished between a kingdom that 
 is visible and a kingdom that is invisible. He distinguished 
 between that presence of God which man can see, and that 
 which man can only feel. This will explain apparent con- 
 tradictions in Christ's language. 
 
700 . Regeneration. 
 
 To the Pharisee, on one occasion, He said, " If I by the 
 finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God 
 is come unto you." But again He said, " It is not lo here, 
 nor lo there. For the kingdom of God is within you." 
 There is a kingdom, therefore, in which the Eternal Spirit 
 moves, whereof the senses take cognizance. Nicodemus saw 
 that kingdom when he gazed on the miracles and outward 
 signs, and felt that they w^ere evidences, and from these and 
 from the gathering society around the Lord, drew the con- 
 clusion that no man could do these things except God were 
 -with him. 
 
 There w r as the outward manifestation. But there is 
 another kingdom which is the peculiar domain of the Spirit, 
 which " eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered 
 into the heart of man to conceive," into which flesh and 
 blood can not enter. Of this kingdom Jesus said to Peter, 
 " Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath 
 not -revealed it." And of this St. Paul said, " Now this I 
 say, brethren, that flesh and blood can not inherit the king- 
 dom of God." 
 
 Unless an inward change takes place, though surrounded 
 by God's kingdom, we can not enter into it. The eye, the 
 ear, can take no cognizance of this; it must be revealed by 
 the Spirit to the spirit. 
 
 Pass we on, secondly, to consider the entrance into this 
 kingdom by regeneration. As there is a twofold kingdom, 
 so is there a twofold entrance. 
 
 1. By the baptism of water. 2. By the baptism of the 
 Spirit. Now respecting the first of these, commentators 
 have been greatly at variance. A large number of Prot- 
 estant commentators have endeavored to explain this pas- 
 sage away, as if it did not apply to baptism at all. But by 
 all the laws of correct interpretation, we are compelled to 
 admit that "born of water" has here a reference to baptism. 
 
 Into God's universe or kingdom \ve penetrate by a double 
 nature by our senses and by our spirit. To this double 
 nature God has made a twofold revelation. God's witness 
 to our senses is baptism ; God's witness to our spirit is His 
 Spirit. "He that believeth hath the witness in himself." 
 Now let us observe the strength of that expression of Christ, 
 " Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he can 
 not enter into the kingdom of God." A very strong expres- 
 sion, but not more so than the baptismal service of the Church 
 of England. "Born of water" is equivalent to regenera- 
 tion by baptism. 
 
 There are those who object to this formulary of our Church, 
 
Regeneration. 701 
 
 because it seems to them to tell of a magical or miraculous 
 power in the hands of the priest. In answer to them, we 
 point to this passage of the inspired Word of God : let us 
 try and understand in what sense it is true that a man is 
 born of water. Now we hold baptism to be the sign, or 
 proof, or evidence, of a spiritual fact. It is riot the fact, but 
 it substantiates the fact. 
 
 The spiritual fact is God's covenant. Let us take an il 
 lustration. The right of a man to his property is in right ot 
 his ancestor's will ; it is in virtue of that will or intention 
 that the man inherits that property. But because that will 
 is invisible, it is necessary that it should be made manifest 
 in visible symbols ; and therefore there is a piece of parch- 
 ment by which it is made tangible, and that, though only 
 the manifestation of the will, is called " the will " itself. 
 Nay, so strongly is this word w r ith its associations rooted in 
 our language, that it may never have occurred to us that it 
 is but a figurative expression ; and the law might, if it had 
 been so chosen, have demanded another expression of the 
 will. 
 
 There have been cases in which a high-minded heir-at-law 
 has accepted the verbal testimony of another to the inten- 
 tions of his ancestor, where there has been no outward 
 manifestation whatever, and so has given away the property 
 because the inward will of his ancestor was to him all in 
 all. 
 
 Similarly, baptism is the revealed will of God : that is, it 
 is the instrument that declares God's will. God's will is a 
 thing invisible ; verbally, the will runs thus " Fear not, lit- 
 tle flock, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the 
 kingdom." 
 
 And just as the instrument which declares a will is called 
 by a figure of speech " the will " itself, although it is but the 
 manifestation of it, so the ecclesiastical instrument which de- 
 clares regeneration is called regeneration in the Bible and in 
 our Church service. Baptism is " regeneration " as a parch- 
 ment is a " will ;" and, therefore it is that we read in this 
 passage, " Born of water ;" and therefore it is that St. Peter 
 says, " Baptism saves us ;" and St. Paul says, " Buried with 
 Christ in baptism." 
 
 Lastly, we pass on to consider the entrance into this king- 
 dom by a spiritual change. 
 
 The ground on which Christ states it is our human nature, 
 We have a twofold nature the nature of the animal and the 
 nature of God, and in the order of God's providence we begin 
 with the animal. " Howbeit," says St. Paul. " that is not first 
 
702 Regeneration. 
 
 which is spiritual, but that which is natural." Now the mo- 
 ment when these natures are exchanged is the moment of 
 spiritual regeneration. 
 
 A man is to be born of water, but far rather of the Spirit. 
 Of this expression there are several interpretations : first, 
 the fanatical one. Men of enthusiastic temperaments, chiefly 
 men whose lives have been irregular, whose religion has 
 come to them suddenly, interpreting all cases by their own 
 experiences, have said that the exercise of God's Spirit is ever 
 sudden and supernatural, and it has seemed to them that to 
 try and bring up a child for God, in the way of education, is 
 to bid defiance to that Spirit which is like the wind, blowing 
 " where it listeth ;" and if a man can not tell the day or hour 
 when he was converted, to those persons he does not seem to 
 be a Christian at all. He may be holy, humble, loving, but 
 unless there is that visible manifestation of how and when 
 he w r as changed, he must be still ranked as unregenerate. 
 
 Another class of persons, of cold, calm temperament, to 
 whom fanaticism is a crime and enthusiasm a thing to be 
 avoided, are perpetually rationalizing with Scripture, and 
 explaining away in some low and commonplace way the 
 highest manifestation of the Spirit of God. Thus Paley tells 
 us that this passage belongs to the Jews, who had forgotten 
 the Messiah's kingdom ; but to speak of a spiritual, regen- 
 erative change as necessary for a man brought up in the 
 Church of England, is to open the door to all fanaticism. 
 
 There is a third class, who confound the regeneration of 
 baptism with that of the Spirit, who identify, in point of 
 time, the being born of water and of the Spirit. And it 
 seems to them that regeneration after that is a word without 
 meaning. Of this class there are two divisions : those who 
 hold it openly in the Church of Rome, and those who do not 
 go to the full extent of Romish doctrine on this subject. 
 These will not say that a miracle has taken place, but they 
 say that a seed of grace has thus been planted. Whichever 
 of these views be taken, for all practical purposes the result 
 must be the same. If this inward spiritual change has taken 
 place at baptism, then to talk of regeneration after that must 
 be an impertinence. But, brethren, looking at this passage s 
 we can not be persuaded that it belongs to the Jew alone, 
 nor can we believe that the strength of that expression is 
 mere baptism by water. Here is recorded that which is 
 true not for the Jew or heathen only, but for all the human 
 race, without exception. " Except a man be born of water 
 and of the Spirit, he can not enter the kingdom of God." 
 
 In our life there is a time in which our spirit has gained 
 
Regeneration. 703 
 
 the mastery over the flesh ; it is not important t6 know 
 when, but whether it has taken place. 
 
 The first years of our existence are simply animal ; then 
 the life of a young man is not that of mere instinct, it is a 
 life of passion, with mighty indignations, strong aversions. 
 And then passing on through life we sometimes see a person 
 in whom these things are merged ; the instincts are there 
 only for the support of existence ; the passions are so ruled 
 that they have become gentleness, and meekness, and love. 
 Between these two extremes there must have been a middle 
 point, when the life of sense, appetite, and passion, which had 
 ruled, ceased to rule, and was ruled over by the life of the 
 spirit : that moment, whether it be long or short, whether it 
 be done suddenly or gradually, whether it come like the 
 rushing mighty wind, or as the slow, gentle zephyr of the 
 spring whenever that moment was, then was the moment 
 of spiritual regeneration. There are cases in which this 
 never takes place at all ; there are grown men and old men 
 merely children still -still having the animal appetites, and 
 living in the base, and conscious, and vicious indulgence of 
 those appetites which in the child were harmless. These are 
 they who have not yet been born again. Born of water they 
 may have been, born of God's eternal Spirit they have not 
 been ; before such men can enter into the eternal kingdom of 
 their Father, that word is as true to them as to Nicodemus 
 of old, " Marvel not that I said unto you, Ye must be born 
 again." Oh ! it is an awful thing to see a spectacle such as 
 that ; an awful thing to see the blossom still upon the tree 
 when the autumn is passed and the winter is at hand. An 
 awful thing to see a man, who ought to be clothed in Christ, 
 still living the life of the flesh and" of passion : the summer is 
 past, the harvest is ended, and he is not saved. 
 
 Now let us briefly apply what has been said. 
 
 1. Do not attempt to date too accurately the transition 
 moment. 
 
 ******** 
 
 2. Understand that the " flesh," or natural state, is wrong 
 only when out of place. In its place it is imperfection, not 
 evil. There is no harm in leaves or blossoms in spring but 
 in autumn ! There is no harm in the appetites of childhood, 
 or the passions of youth, but great harm when these are still 
 unsubdued in age. Observe, therefore, the flesh is not to be 
 exercised, but the spirit strengthened. This I say then, 
 " Walk in the spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the 
 flesh." 
 
 3. Do not mistake the figurative for the literal. 
 
704 An Election Sermon. 
 
 Baptism is regeneration figuratively : " The like figure 
 whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the put- 
 ting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good 
 conscience toward God), by the resurrection of -Jesus Christ" 
 ******** 
 
 The things to be anxious about are not baptism, not 
 confirmation ; but the spiritual facts for which baptism and 
 confirmation stand. 
 
 XII. 
 AN ELECTION SERMON. 
 
 A FRAGMENT. 
 
 "And they appointed two, Joseph called Barsabas, who was snrnamed 
 Justus, and Matthias. And they prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, which know- 
 est the hearts of all men, show whether of these two thou hast chosen, that 
 he may take part of this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by 
 transgression fell, that he might go to his own place. And they gave forth 
 their lots ; and the lot fell upon Matthias ; and he was numbered with the 
 eleven apostles." Acts i. 23-26. 
 
 THIS is the account of the earliest appointment of an apos- 
 tle or bishop over the Church of Christ. 
 
 It stands remarkably distinguished from the episcopal 
 elections of after ages. Every one acquainted with Church 
 history knows that the election of a bishop in the first 
 centuries, and indeed for many ages, was one of the bitterest 
 
 and fiercest questions which shook the Church of Christ. 
 ******** 
 
 [Appointment by the people Presbyters Various cus- 
 toms. Anecdote of Ambrose of Milan. Appointment by 
 the Emperor or Bishop of Rome. Quarrel of ages between 
 the Emperor and the Pope.] 
 
 Contradistinguished from this in spirit was the first ap- 
 pointment which ended in the selection of Matthias. Holy, 
 calm, wise presided over by an apostolic and Christian 
 spirit. 
 
 It will be obvious at once why this subject has been 
 selected. During the course of this week, England will be 
 shaken to her centre with the selection of representatives 
 who shall legislate for her hereafter, either in accordance 
 with, or in defiance of, the principles of her constitution. In 
 some places, as fiercely as the battle was formerly carried on 
 
An Election Sermon. 705 
 
 between Guelph and Ghibelline, or between faction and 
 faction in the choice of bishops, so fiercely will the contest 
 rage in the choice of representatives. 
 
 Delicate and difficult as the introduction of such a sub- 
 ject from the pulpit must be, yet it seems to me the im- 
 perative duty of a minister of Christ from which he can 
 not, except in cowardice, shrink to endeavor to make clear 
 the great Christian landmarks which belong to such an oc- 
 currence. But let me be'understood. His duty is not to in- 
 troduce politics in the common sense of the word, meaning 
 thereby the views of some particular party. The pulpit is 
 not to be degraded into the engine of a faction. Far, far 
 above such questions, it ought to preserve the calm dignity 
 of a voice which speaks for eternity, and not for time. If 
 possible, not one word should drop by which a minister's 
 own political leanings can be discovered. 
 
 Yet there must be broad principles of right and wrong in 
 such a transaction, as in any other. And, in discharge of 
 my duty, I desire to place those before you. We shall con- 
 sider 
 
 I. The object of the election spoken of in my text. 
 II. The mode of the election. 
 III. The spirit in which it was conducted. 
 
 I. The object of the election. To elect a bishop of the 
 universal Church. 
 
 It might be that in process of time the apostle so chosen 
 should be appointed to a particular city as St. James was 
 to Jerusalem. But it is plain his duty as an apostle was 
 owed to the general assembly and Church of Christ, and not 
 to that particular city; and if he had allowed local partiali- 
 ties or local interests to stand before the interests of the 
 whole, he would have neglected the duty of his high office. 
 
 Also, that if those who appointed him considered the in- 
 terest of Jerusalem in the first instance, instead of his quali- 
 fications as a bishop of the Church universal, they would have 
 failed in their duty. 
 
 In the third century, a bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, in a 
 celebrated sentence has clearly and beautifully stated this 
 principle "Episcopatus unus est, cw/ws," etc. The episco- 
 pate, one and indivisible, held in its entirety by each bishop, 
 every part standing for the whole. That is, if he were a 
 bishop of Carthage or Antioch, he was to remember that it 
 was not the interests of Carthage over which he had to 
 watch, but those of the Church of Christ; Carthage being 
 his special allotment out of the whole. And in a^ council 
 
 20* 
 
706 An Election Sermon. 
 
 he was to give his voice not for that which might be good 
 for the men of Carthage, but for the Church of Christ. 
 
 The application is plain. 
 
 The nation is one its life is a sacred life. The nation 
 is the Christian people, for whom Christ shed His blood- 
 its life is unity its death is division. The curse of a Chris- 
 tian^ is sectarianism the curse of a nation is faction. Each 
 legislator legislates for the country, not for a county or 
 town. Each elector holds his franchise as a sacred trust, 
 to be exercised not for his town, or for a faction of his town, 
 not for himself, or his friends, but for the general weal of the 
 people of England. 
 
 Let me expose a common fallacy. 
 
 We are not to be biased by asking what charity does a 
 candidate support, nor what view does he take of some 
 local question, nor whether he subscribe to tractarian or to 
 evangelical societies. We are, in our high responsibility, 
 selecting, not a president for a religious society, nor a patron 
 of a town, nor a subscriber to a hospital, but a legislator for 
 England. 
 
 II. The mode of the election. 
 
 It was partly human, partly Divine. The human element 
 is plain enough in that it was popular. The choice lay not 
 with the apostles, but with the whole Church. One hundred 
 and twenty met in that upper chamber : all gave in their lots 
 or votes. The Divine element lay in this, that it was over- 
 ruled by God. 
 
 Here is the main point observable. They at least took 
 for granted that the popular element was quite separate from 
 the Divine. The selected one might be the chosen of the 
 people, yet not the chosen of God. Hence they prayed, 
 " Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men, show 
 whether of these two Thou hast chosen." 
 
 The common notion is, vox populi vox Dei. In other 
 words, whatever the general voice wills is right. A law is 
 right because it is a people's will. I do not say that we 
 have got the full length of this idea in England. On the 
 Continent it has long been prevalent. Possibly it is the ex- 
 pression of that Antichrist " who showeth himself that he is 
 God;" self-will setting itself up paramount to the will of 
 God. 
 
 The vox populi is sometimes vox Dei, sometimes not. 
 The voice of the people was the voice of God when the chil- 
 dren of Israel rescued Jonathan from his father's unjust sen- 
 tence ; and when the contest between Elijah and the proph- 
 
An Election Sermon. 707 
 
 ets of Baal having been settled, they cried, " The Lord He is 
 God." 
 
 Was the voice of the people the voice of God when, in 
 Moses's absence, they required Aaron to make them a gold- 
 en calf for a god ? Or when, led on by the demagogue 
 Demetrius, they shouted, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians ?" 
 Or when, at the instigation of the priests, led blindfold by 
 them they cried, " Crucify Him ?" 
 
 The politicians of this world eagerly debate the question, 
 how best to secure a fair representation of the people's voice, 
 whether by individuals or by interests fairly balanced ? a 
 question, doubtless, not to be put aside. But the Christian 
 sees a question deeper far than the^s not how to obtain 
 most fairly an expression of the people's will, but how that 
 will shall truly represent the will of God. There is no other 
 question at last than this. 
 
 And we shall attain this, not by nicely balancing interest 
 against interest, much less by mano3uvring or by cunningly 
 devised expedient, to defeat the cause which we believe the 
 wrong one ; but by each doing all that in him lies to rouse 
 himself and others to a high sense of responsibility. 
 
 It is a noble thought, that of every elector going to vote, 
 as these men did, for the Church, for the people, for God, 
 and for the right, earnestly anxious that he and others should 
 do right. 
 
 Else to speak humanly this was an appeal to chance 
 and not to God ; and every election, by ballot or by suf- 
 frage, is else an appeal to chance. 
 
 All, therefore, depends upon the spirit in which the election 
 is conducted. 
 
 What constitutes the difference between an appeal to God 
 and an appeal to chance ? 
 
 III. The Spirit. 
 
 1. A religious spirit. "They prayed and said, Thou, Lord, 
 which knowest the hearts of all men, show whether of these 
 two Thou hast chosen." Now, we shall be met here at once 
 by an objection. This was a religious work the selection 
 of an apostle; but the choice of a representative is not a re- 
 ligious work, only a secular one. 
 
 Here we come, therefore, to the very pith and marrow of 
 the whole question. The distinction between religious and 
 secular is true in a sense, but as we make it, it is false. It is 
 not the occupation, but the spirit which makes the difference. 
 The election of a bishop may be a most secular thing. The 
 election of a representative may be a religious thing St, 
 
708 An Election Sermon. 
 
 Paul taught that nothing is profane. Sanctified by the 
 Word of God and prayer, St. Peter learned that nothing is 
 common or unclean. 
 
 * ******* 
 
 [Many relics remain to us from our religious forefathers 
 indicative of this truth : Grace before meals ; Dei gratia on 
 coins of the realms ; " In the name of God," at the commence 
 ment of wills, oaths in court of justice ; prayers in universi* 
 ties before election of scholar's : all proclaim that the sim 
 plest acts of our domestic and political life are sacred or 
 profane according to the spirit in which they are performed ; 
 not in the question whether they are done for the State or 
 the Church, but whether with God or without God.] 
 
 Observe : it is not the preluding such an election with 
 public prayer that would make it a religious act. It is re- 
 ligious so far as each man discharges his part as a duty and 
 solemn responsibility. 
 
 If looked on in this spirit by the higher classes, would the 
 debauchery and the drunkenness which are fostered by rich 
 men of all parties among the poor for their own purposes, be 
 possible? Would they, for the sake of one vote, or a hun- 
 dred votes, brutalize their fellow-creatures ? 
 
 2. It is implied in this, that it must be done conscien- 
 tiously. 
 
 Each Christian found himself in possession of a new right 
 that of giving a vote or casting a lot. 
 
 Like all rights, it was a duty. He had not a right to do 
 what he liked. His right was only the duty of doing right. 
 And if any one had swayed him to support the cause of 
 Barnabas or that of Matthias on any motives except this 
 one "You ought " he had so far injured his conscience. 
 
 The conscience of man is a holy, sacred thing. The worst 
 of crimes is to injure a human conscience. Better kill ths 
 body. Remember how strongly St. Paul speaks, " When ye 
 sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience.; 
 ye sin against Christ." And that sin, remember, consisted in 
 leading them to do a thing which, though right in itself, they 
 thought wrong. 
 
 Now there is an offense against the laws of the State which 
 all men agree in treating with a smile. 
 
 My brethren, bribery is a sin a sin against God. Not 
 because a particular law has been made against it, but be- 
 cause it lowers the sense of personal responsibility, blunts 
 the conscience, dethrones the God within the man's soul, and 
 erects selfishness, and greed, and interest, in His stead. ATM! 
 
An Election Sermon, 709 
 
 whether you do it directly or indirectly directly by giving, 
 indirectly by withdrawing, assistance or patronage vou sin 
 against Christ. 
 
 3. It was not done from personal interest. 
 
 There were two 'candidates, Barnabas and Matthias. Now 
 if the supporters of these two had been influenced chiefly by 
 such considerations as blood-relationship, or the chance of 
 favor and promotion, manifestly a high function would have 
 been degraded. 
 
 In secular matters, however, we do not judge so. A man 
 generally decides according to his professional or his person- 
 al interests. You know almost to a certainty beforehand 
 which way a man will vote, if you know his profession. If a 
 man be a fanner, or a clergyman, or a merchant, you can 
 pretty surely guess on which side he will range himself. 
 
 Partly, no doubt, this is involuntary the result of those 
 prejudices which attach to us all from association. But it is 
 partly voluntary. We know that we are thinking not of 
 the general good, but of our own interests. And thus a 
 farmer would think himself justified in looking at a question 
 simply as it affected his class, and a noble as it affected his 
 caste, and a working-man as it bore upon the working- 
 classes. 
 
 Brethren, we are Christians. Something of a principle 
 higher than this ought to be ours. What is the law of the 
 cross of Christ ? The sacrifice of the One for the whole, the 
 cheerful surrender of the few for the many. Else, what do 
 we more than others ? 
 
 These are fine words patriotism, public principle, purity. 
 
 Be sure these words are but sentimental expressions, ex- 
 cept as they spring out of the cross of Christ. 
 
 ******** 
 
 Application. 
 
 I have endeavored to keep entirely unseen my own politi- 
 cal views. I may have failed, but not voluntarily. 
 
 Remember, in conclusion, the matter of paramount import- 
 ance to be decided this week is, not whether a preponderance 
 shall be insured for one of the great parties which divide the 
 country or the other. That is important, but it is second- 
 ary. The important thing to be devoutly wished is, that 
 each man shall give his vote as these men did conscientious- 
 ly, religiously, unselfishly, lovingly. 
 
 Better that he should support the wrong cause conscien- 
 tiously than the right one insincerely. Better be a true 
 man on the side of wrong, than a false man on the side of 
 riijht. 
 
7io haze Blessing kis Sons. 
 
 XIII. 
 ISAAC BLESSING HIS SONS. 
 
 " And it came to pass, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, 
 so that he could not see, he called Esau his eldest son, and said unto him, 
 My son : and he said unto him, Behold, Jiere am I. And he said, Behold 
 now, I am old, I know not the day of my death : now therefore take, I pray 
 thee, thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and go out to the field, and take 
 me some venison ; and make me savory meat, such as I love, and bring it to 
 me, that I may eat ; that my soul may bless thee before I die. " Gen. xxvii. 1-4, 
 
 Ix chapter xxv. we find Abraham preparing for death by 
 a last will : making Isaac his heir, and providing for his 
 other children by giving them gifts while he yet lived, and 
 so sending them out into the world. In this chapter, the 
 heir himself is preparing to die. The rapidity with which 
 these chapters epitomize life, bringing its few salient points 
 together, is valuable as illustrative of what human existence 
 is. It is a series of circles intersecting each other, but going 
 on in a line. A few facts comprise man's life. A birth a 
 marriage another birth a baptism a will and then a 
 funeral : and the old circle begins again. 
 
 Isaac is about to declare his last will. It is a solemn act, 
 in whatever light we view it, if it were only for the thought 
 that we are writing words which will not be read till we are 
 gone. But it is solemn, too, because it is one of those acts 
 which tell of the immortal. First, in the way of prophetic 
 prescience. Is it not affecting to think of a human being, not 
 sick, nor in pain, with his natural force unabated, calmly sit- 
 ting down to make arrangements for what shall be when he 
 is in his last long sleep ? But the act of an immortal is visi- 
 ble also in that a dead man rules the world, as it were, long 
 after his decease. Being dead, in a sense he yet speaketh. 
 He is yet present with the living. His existence is protracted 
 beyond its natural span. His will is law. This is a kind of 
 evidence of his immortality : for the obedience of men to what 
 he has willed is a sort of recognition of his present being. 
 
 Isaac was not left without warnings of his coming end. 
 These warnings came in the shape of dimness of eyes and 
 failing of sight. You can conceive a state in which man 
 should have no warnings : and instead of gradual decay, 
 should drop suddenly, without any intimation, into eternity. 
 Such an arrangement might have been. But God has in 
 
Isaac Blessing his Sons. 7 1 1 
 
 mercy provided reminders. For we sleep in this life of ours 
 a charmed sleep, which it is hard to break. And if the road 
 were of unbroken smoothness, with no jolt or shock, or un- 
 evenness in the journey, we should move swiftly on, nothing 
 breaking the dead slumber till we awake suddenly, like the 
 rich man in the parable, lifting up our eyes in heaven or in 
 hell. Therefore God has given these reminders. Some of 
 them regular such as failing of sight, falling out of hair, de- 
 cay of strength, loss of memory which are as stations in 
 the journey, telling us how far we have travelled : others 
 irregular such as come in the form of sickness, bereave- 
 ment, pain like sudden shocks which jolt, arouse, and awaken. 
 Then the man considers, and like Isaac, says, " Behold, I am 
 old, I know not the day of my death." We will consider 
 
 I. Isaac's preparation for death. 
 II. The united treachery of Jacob and Rebekah. 
 
 1. Isaac's preparation for death. First, he longed fof the 
 performance of Esau's filial kindness as for a last time. Esau 
 was his favorite son : not on account of any similarity be- 
 tween them, but just because they were dissimilar. The re- 
 pose, and contemplativeness, and -inactivity of Isaac found a 
 contrast in which it rested, in the energy and even the reck- 
 lessness of his first-born. It w r as natural to yearn for the 
 feast of his son's affection for the last time. For there is 
 something peculiarly impressive in whatever is done for the 
 last time. Then the simplest acts contract a kind of sacred- 
 ness. The last walk in the country we are leaving. The 
 last time a dying man sees the sun set. The last words of 
 those from whom we have parted, which we treasure up as 
 more than accidental, almost prophetic. The winding up of 
 a watch, as the last act at night. The signature of a will. 
 In the life of Him in whom we find every feeling which be- 
 longs to unperverted humanity, the same desire is found : a 
 trait, therefore, of the heart which is universal, natural, and 
 right. " With desire I have desired to eat this passover with 
 you before I suifer. For I say unto you, I will not drink 
 henceforth of the fruit of the'vine until that day when I 
 drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom." It was the 
 jLast Supper. 
 
 2. By making his last testamentary dispositions. Appar 
 ently they were premature, but he did. not defer them: part- 
 iy because of the frailty of life, and the uncertainty whether 
 there may be any to-morrow for that which is put off to-day : 
 partly, perhaps, because he desired to have all earthly thoughts 
 done with and put away. Isaac lived thirty or forty years 
 
7 1 2 Isaac Blessing his Sons. 
 
 after this: but he was a man set apart: like one who in 
 Roman Catholic language had received extreme unction, and 
 had done with this world ; and when he came to die, there 
 Tvould be no anxieties about the disposition of property to 
 harass him. It is good to have all such things done with 
 before that hour comes: there is 'something incongruous in 
 the presence of a lawyer in the death-room, agitating the last 
 hours. The first portion of our lives is spent in learning the 
 use of our senses and faculties : ascertaining where we are and 
 what. The second, in using those powers, and acting in the 
 given sphere : the motto being, " Work, the night eometh." 
 A third portion, between active life and the grave, like the 
 twilight between day and night, not light enough for work- 
 ing, nor yet quite dark, which nature seems to accord for un- 
 worldliness and meditation. It is striking, doubtless, to see 
 an old man hale and vigorous to the last, dying at his work 
 like a warrior in armor. But natural feeling makes us wish, 
 perhaps, that an interval might be given : a season for the 
 statesman, such as that which Samuel had, on laying aside 
 the cares of office, in the schools of the prophets ; such as 
 Simeon had, and Anna, for a life of devotion in the temple ; 
 such as the laborer has when, his long day's work done, he 
 finds an asylum in the almshouse ; such as our Church de- 
 sires, where she prays a&rainst sudden death : a season of in- 
 terval in which to watch. And meditate, and wait. 
 
 II. The united treachery of Jacob and Rebekah. It was 
 treachery in both ; in one sense it was the same treachery. 
 Each deceived Isaac and overreached Esau. But it would 
 be a rough estimate to treat the two sins as identical. This 
 is the coarse, common way of judging. We label sins as by 
 a catalogue. We judge of men by their acts ; but it is far 
 truer to say that we can only judge the acts by the man. 
 You must understand the man before you can appreciate his 
 deed. The same deed done by two different persons ceases 
 to be the same. Abraham and Sarah both laughed when in- 
 formed that they should have a son in their old age. But 
 Sarah's was the laugh of skepticism ; the other, the result of 
 that reaction in our nature by which the most solemn 
 thoughts are balanced by a sense of strangeness or even 
 ludicrousness. The Pharisees asked a sign in unbelief : 
 many of the Old Te&tament saints did the same in faith. 
 Fine discrimination is therefore necessary to understand the 
 simplest deed. A very delicate analysis of character is nec- 
 essary to comprehend such acts as these, and rightly to ap 
 portion their turpitude and their palliations. 
 
Isaac Blessing his Sons. 7 1 3 
 
 In Rebekah's case the root of the treachery was ambition ; 
 but here we find a trait of female character. It is a woman's 
 ambition, not a man's. Rebekah desired nothing for herself, 
 but every thing for Jacob : for him spiritual blessing at all 
 events, temporal distinction. She did wrong, not for her 
 own advantage, but for the sake of one she loved. Here is a 
 touch of womanhood. The same is observable in the reck- 
 lessness of personal consequences. So as only he might gain, 
 she did not care. " Upon me be the curse, my son." And it 
 is this which forces us, even while we must condemn, to com- 
 passionate. Throughout the whole of this revolting scene of 
 deceit and fraud, we can never forget that Rebekah was a 
 mother. And hence a certain interest and sympathy are sus- 
 tained. Another feminine trait is seen in the conduct of Re- 
 bekah. It was devotion to a person rather than to a principle. 
 A man's idolatry is for an idea, a woman's is for a person. A 
 man suffers for a monarchy, a woman for a king. A man's mar- 
 tyrdom differs from a woman's. Nay, even in their religion, 
 personality marks the one, attachment to an idea or principle 
 the other. Woman adores God in His personality, man adores 
 Him in His attributes. At least that is, on the whole, the 
 characteristic difference. 
 
 Now here you see the idolatry of the woman : sacrificing 
 her husband, her elder son, high principle, her own soul, for 
 an idolized person. Remark that this was, properly speaking, 
 idolatry. For in nothing is a greater mistake made than in 
 the conception attached to that word in reference to the 
 affections. A mother's affection is called, by many religious 
 people, idolatry, because it is intense. Do not mistake. No 
 one ever loved child, brother, sister, too much. It is not the 
 intensity of affection, but its interference with truth and duty, 
 that makes it idolatry. Rebekah loved her son more than 
 truth, i. e.,more than God. This was to idolize. And hence 
 Christ says, " If any man love father or mother moro than me, 
 he is not worthy of me." You can only test that when a 
 principle comes in the way. There are persons who would 
 romantically admire this devotion of Rebekah, and call it 
 beautiful. To sacrifice all, even principle, for another what 
 higher proof of affection can there be ? Oh, miserable sophis- 
 try ! The only true affection is that which is subordinate to 
 a higher. It has been truly said, that in those who love lit- 
 tle, love is a primary affection ; a secondary one in those who 
 love much. Be sure he can not love another much who loves 
 not honor more. For that higher affection sustains and ele- 
 vates the lower human one, casting round it a glory which 
 mere personal feeling could never give. 
 
7 14 Isaac Blessing his Sons. 
 
 Compare, for instance, Rebekah's love for Jacob with thnt 
 of Abraham for his son Isaac. Abraham was ready to sacri- 
 fice his son to duty. Rebekah sacrificed truth ami duty to 
 her son. Which loved a son most ? which was the .noblei 
 love ? Even as a question of permanence, which would last 
 the longer? For consider what respect this guilty son and 
 guilty mother could retain for each other after this : would 
 not love turn into shame and lose itself in recriminations? 
 For affection will not long survive respect, however it may 
 protract its life by effort. 
 
 Observe, again : monsters do not exist. When you hear 
 of great criminality, you think of natures originally mon- 
 strous, not like others. But none are liars for the sake of 
 lying. None are cruel for cruelty's sake. It is simply 
 want of principle that makes glaring sins. The best affec- 
 tions perverted that is the history of great crimes. See 
 here : there is no touch of compunction from first to last. 
 The woman seems all unsexed. She has no thought of her 
 defrauded eldest son : none of her deceived husband. 
 There is an inflexible pursuit of her object, that is all. It 
 is wonderful how ambition and passion dazzle to all but the' 
 end desired. It is wonderful how the true can become 
 false, and the tender-hearted hard and cruel for an end. 
 Nor is this lesson obsolete. Are there no women who 
 would do the same now ? Are there none who would 
 sacrifice a son's principles or a daughter's happiness to a 
 diseased appetite for distinction ? Are there none who 
 would conceal a son's extravagance, foster it, furnish it 
 means unknown, or in an underhand way, in what is called 
 the manoeuvring of fashionable life ; and do that for family 
 advancement from which the strong sense and principle of 
 a father would recoil and revolt ? And all this, not because 
 they are monsters, but because their passion for distinction 
 is inflamed, and their affections unregulated. 
 
 Now look at Jacob's sin. He was not without ambition ; 
 but he had not that unscrupulous, inflexible will which 
 generally accompanies ambition and makes it irresistible. 
 A bad man naturally he was not : nor a false man : but 
 simply a pliable and weak man. Hence he became the 
 tool of another the agent in a plan of villainy which he 
 had not the contrivance to originate. He was one of those 
 who, if they could, would have what they wish innocently. 
 He would not play false, yet he would unjustly have. He 
 was rather afraid of doing the deceit than anxious that the 
 deceit should not be done. Here was the guilt in its germ. 
 He had indulged and pampered the fancy; and be sure he who 
 
Isaac Blessing his Sons. 715 
 
 wishes a temporal end for itself, does, or will soon, will the 
 means. All temptations and all occasions of sin are power- 
 less, except as far as they fall in with previous meditations 
 upon the guilt. An act of sin is only a train long laid, fired 
 by a spark at last. Jacob pondered over the desire of the 
 blessing, dallied with it, and then fell. Now observe the 
 rapidity and the extent of the inward deterioration. See 
 how this plain, simple man, Jacob, becomes by degrees an 
 accomplished deceiver ; how he shrinks at nothing ; how, 
 at first unable to conceive the plan devised by another, he 
 becomes at last inventive. At first the acted falsehood a 
 semblance ; then the lie in so many words ; then the 
 impious use of the name, "The Lord thy God brought it 
 me." How he was forced by fear and the necessities of 
 begun guilt into enormity : deeper and deeper. Happy the 
 man who can not, even from the faint shadows of his own 
 experience, comprehend the desperate agony of such a 
 state : the horror mixed with hardening effrontery with 
 which a man feels himself compelled to take step after step, 
 and is aware at last that he is drifting, drifting, from the 
 great shore of truth like one carried out by the tide against 
 his will, till he finds himself at last in a sea of falsehood, his 
 whole life one great dream of false appearance. 
 
 Let us apply this briefly. 
 
 Doubtless perverted good is always different from origi- 
 nal vice. In his darkest wanderings, one in whom the Spirit 
 strives is essentially different from one who is utterly de- 
 praved. Sensibility to anguish makes the difference, if 
 there were nothing else. Jacob, lying in this way, plunging 
 headlong, deeper and deeper, was yet a different man from 
 one who is through and through hollow. Grant this and 
 yet that fact of human pervertibility is an awful fact and 
 mysteiy. Innocence may become depraved: delicate purity 
 may pass into grossness. It is an appalling fact. Trans- 
 parency of crystal clearness may end in craft, double-deal- 
 ing, contrivance. Briefly, therefore 
 
 1. Learn to say " No." 
 
 2. Beware of those fancies, those day-dreams, which repre- 
 sent things as possible which should be forever impossible. 
 Beware of that affection which cares for your happiness more 
 than for your honor. 
 
 Lastly, in the hour of strong temptations, throwing our- 
 selves off self, distrusting ourselves, let us rest in Him who, 
 having been tempted, knows what temptation is ; who " will 
 not suffer us to be tempted above that we are able, but will 
 with the temptation also make way to escape, that we 
 be able to bear it." 1 
 
?i 6 Salvation out of tJte Visible Church. 
 
 xiv. 
 SALVATION OUT OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH. 
 
 "Now there was at Joppa a certain disciple named Tabltha, which by ra. 
 terpretation is called Dorcas : this woman was fail of good works and alms, 
 deeds which she did," etc. Acts ix. 36. 
 
 " There was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius, a centuri jn of the 
 band called the Italian band," etc. Acts x. 1. 
 
 Two events are connected with St. Peters stay at Joppa: 
 the miraculous restoration of Dorcas, and the vision which 
 prepared for the reception of Cornelius into the Christian 
 Church. The apostle was at Lydda, when he was summoned 
 by the news of the death of Dorcas to Joppa, about twelve 
 miles distant. Now observe here the variety of the gifts 
 which are bestowed upon the Christian Church. Four 
 characters, exceedingly diverse, are brought before us in 
 this ninth chapter : Paul, a man singularly gifted, morally 
 and intellectually, with qualities more brilliant than almost 
 ever fell to the lot of man ; Peter, full of love and daring, a 
 champion of the truth ; Ananias, one of those disciples of the 
 inward life whose vocation is sympathy, and who, by a single 
 word, " brother," restore light to those that sit in darkness 
 and loneliness ; lastly, Dorcas, in a humbler, but not less true 
 sphere of divine goodness, clothing the poor with her own 
 hands, practically loving and benevolent. 
 
 W, err in the comparative estimate we form of great and 
 small. Imagine a political economist computing the value 
 of such a life as this of Dorcas. He views men in masses : 
 considers the economic well-being of society on a large 
 scale : calculates what is productive of the greatest good for 
 the greatest number. To him the few coats and garments 
 made for a few poor people would be an item in the world's 
 well-being scarcely worthy of being taken into the reckoning. 
 Let the historian estimate her worth. The chart of time lies 
 unrolled before him. The fall of dynasties and the blending 
 together of races, the wars and revolutions of nations that 
 have successively passed across the world's stage these are 
 the things that occupy him. What are acts like hers in the 
 midst of interests such as these and of contemplations so 
 large ? All this is beneath the dignity of history. Or again, 
 let us summon a man of larger contemplations still To the 
 
Salvation out of the Visible Church. 7 1 7 
 
 astronomer, lifting his clear eye to the order of the stars, this 
 planet itself is but a speck. To come down from the universe 
 to the thought of a tiny earth is a fell descent ; but to de- 
 scend to the thought of a humble female working at a few 
 garments, were a fall indeed. 
 
 Now rise to the Mind of which all other minds are but 
 emanations and this conception of grand and insignificant 
 is not found in His nature. Human intellect, as it rises to 
 the great, neglects the small. The Eternal mind condescends 
 to the small ; or rather, with It there is neither great nor 
 email. It has divided the rings of the earthworm with as 
 much microscopic care as the orbits in which the planets 
 move : It has painted the minutest feather on the wing of 
 the butterfly as carefully as It has hung the firmament with 
 the silver splendor of the stars. Great and small are words 
 which have only reference to us. 
 
 Further still : judging the matter by the heart, ascending 
 to the heart of God, there is another aspect of the subject : 
 great belongs only to what is moral infinitude and eternity 
 are true of feelings rather than of magnitude, or space, or 
 time. The mightiest distance that mind can conceive, cal- 
 culable only by the arrow-flight of light, can yet be meas- 
 ured. The most vast of all the cycles that imagination ever 
 wanted for the ages that are gone by, can yet be estimated 
 by number. But tell us, if you can, the measure of a single 
 feeling. Find for us, if you can, the computation by which 
 we may estimate a single spiritual affection. They are abso- 
 lutely incommensurable these things together, magnitude 
 and feeling. Let the act of Dorcas be tried thus. When 
 the world has passed away, and the lust thereof, "he that 
 doeth the will of God abideth forever." The true infinite, 
 the real eternal, is love. When all that economist, historian, 
 philosopher can calculate, is gone, the love of Dorcas will 
 still be fresh, and living, in the eternity of the illimitable 
 Mind. 
 
 Observe, once more, the memorial v/hich she left behind 
 her. When Peter went into the upper chamber, he was 
 surrounded by the poor widows, who showed him, weeping, 
 the garments she had made. Tliis \vas the best epitaph : the 
 tears of the poor. 
 
 There is a strange jar upon, the mind in the funeral, when 
 the world is felt to be going on as usual. Traffic and pleas- 
 ure do not alter when our friend lies in the upper chamber. 
 The great, busy world rolls on, unheeding, and our egotism 
 suggests the thought, So will it be when I am not. This 
 world, whose very existence seems linked with mine, and to 
 
7 1 8 Salvation out of the Visible Church. 
 
 subsist only in mine, will not be altered by my dropping out 
 of it. Perhaps a few tears, and then all that 'follow me and 
 love me now will dry them up again. I am but a bubble on 
 the stream : here to-day, and then gone. This is painful to 
 conceive. It is one of the pledges of our immortality that 
 we long to be remembered after death ; it is quite natural. 
 Now let us inquire into its justice. 
 
 Dorcas died regretted : she was worth regretting, she was 
 worth being restored ; she had not lived in vain, because she 
 had not lived for herself. The end of life is not a thought, 
 but an action action for others. But you, why should you 
 be regretted ? Have you discovered spiritual truth, like 
 Paul ? Have you been brave and true in defending it, like 
 Peter ? or cheered desolate hearts by sympathy, like Ananias ? 
 or visited the widows and the fatherless in their affliction, 
 like Dorcas ? If you have, your life will leave a trace behind 
 which will not soon be effaced from earth. But if not, what 
 is your worthless, self-absorbed existence good for, but to be 
 swept away, and forgotten as soon as possible ? You will 
 leave no record of yourself on earth, except a date of birth, 
 and a date of death, with an awfully significant blank be- 
 tween. 
 
 The second event connected with St. Peter's stay at Joppa 
 was the conversion of Cornelius. 
 
 A new doctrine was dawning on the Church. It was the 
 universality of the love of God. The great controversy in 
 the early history of Christianity was, not the atonement, not 
 predestination, not even, except at first, the resurrection, but 
 the admissibility of the Gentiles to the Church of Christ. 
 It was the controversy between Christianity, the universal 
 religion, and Judaism, the limited one. Except we bear this 
 in mind, the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles will be 
 alike unintelligible to us. 
 
 The germ of this truth had been planted by Stephen. St. 
 Paul was now raised up as his successor, to develop it still 
 further. So that now a very important crisis had arrived. 
 For it has been well observed, that had St. Peter's accept- 
 ance of this truth been delayed by leaving it to gradual 
 mental growth, the effects would have been incalculably dis- 
 astrous to Christianity. A new apostle had arisen, and a 
 new church was established at Antioch ; and had St. Peter 
 and the rest been left in their reluctance to this truth, the 
 younger apostle 'would have been necessarily the leader of a 
 party to which the elder apostles were opposed, and the 
 Church of Antioch would have been in opposition to the 
 Church at Jerusalem : a timely miracle, worthy of God, pre- 
 
Salvation out of the Visible Church. 7 1 9 
 
 vented this catastrophe : at the very crisis of time St. Peter's 
 mind, too, was enlightened with the truth. 
 
 The vision was evidently in its form and in its direction 
 the result of previous natural circumstances. The death of 
 Stephen must have had its effect on the apostle's mind. 
 That truth for which he died, the transient character of 
 Judaism, must have suggested strange new thoughts, to be 
 pondered on and doubted on ; add to this, the apostle was 
 in a state of hunger. In ecstasy, or trance, or vision, things 
 meet for food presented themselves to his mental eye. Evi- 
 dently the form in which this took place was shaped by his 
 physical cravings, the direction depended partly upon his 
 previous thoughts concerning the opening question of the 
 Church. But the eternal truth, the spiritual verity conveyed 
 by the vision, was clearly of a higher source. Here are the 
 limits of the natural and the supernatural closely bordering 
 on each other. 
 
 And this is only analogous to all our life. The human 
 touches on the Divine, earth borders upon heaven the lim- 
 its are not definable. " I live," said St. Paul. Immediately 
 after, he corrects himself: "yet not I, but Christ liveth in 
 me." Man's spirit prays ; yet is it not " the Spirit making 
 intercession for us with groanings which can not be uttered ?" 
 As if the mind of man were hardly to be distinguished from 
 the mind of God. We are on the brink of the world unseen 
 on the very verge of the spirit-realm. Everywhere around 
 us is God. 
 
 Now the contents of this vision were a vessel let down 
 from heaven, full of animals, domestic and wild, clean and 
 unclean. This was let down from heaven, and taken up to 
 heaven again. All had come from God, so that the truth 
 conveyed was clear enough. These distinctions of clean and 
 unclean were but conventional and artificial, after all tem- 
 poral arrangements, not belonging to the unalterable. God 
 had made all and given all. The analogy was not difficult 
 to perceive. God is the Creator of mankind. He is the 
 universal Father. All have come from Him. Sanctified by 
 Him, there can be no man common or unclean. 
 
 Against even the first part of this St. Peter's -mind revolt- 
 ad " Not so, Lord." It is not a little remarkable that the 
 two first to whom this expansive truth was revealed were 
 bigoted men : St. Paul the Jewish, St. Peter the Christian 
 bigot. For St. Peter was a Christian, yet a bigot still. Is 
 this wonderful and rare ? or are we not all bigots in our 
 way, the largest-minded of us all? St. Peter was willing to 
 admit a proselyte : the admission of an entire Gentile was * 
 
720 Salvation out of the Visible Church, 
 
 stumbling-block; afterwards he could admit a Gentile, but 
 hesitated to eat with him. There are some of us who can 
 believe in the Christianity of those who are a little beyond 
 our own Church pale ; some who even dimly suspect that God 
 may love the Jew ; some, too, who will be ready, with quali- 
 fications, to acknowledge a benighted Roman Catholic for a 
 brother; but how many of us are there who would not be 
 startled at being told to love a Unitarian ? how many who 
 would not shrink from the idea as over-bold, that he who is 
 blind to the Redeemer's Deity, yet loving Him with all his 
 heart, may perchance have that love accepted in place of 
 adoration, and that it may be at our peril that we call him 
 " common or unclean ?" Oh ! there w r as a largeness in the 
 heart of Christ, of which we have only dreamed of as yet 
 a something, too, in these words, " God hath showed me that 
 I should not call any man common or unclean," which it will 
 require, perhaps, ages to develop. 
 
 At the same, or nearly the same time when this was taking 
 piace at Joppa, a manifestation, somewhat similar, was going 
 on at Caesarea, a day's journey distant. Remark here the 
 coincidence. There was an affinity, it seems, between the 
 minds of these two men, Peter and Cornelius a singular, 
 mysterious sympathy. Nay, more than that, very shortly 
 before, a similar phenomenon had been felt in the mind of St. 
 Paul, more than a hundred miles off, in a valley near Damas- 
 cus ; concerning all which we can say little, except that it is 
 very plain there is a great deal more going on upon earth 
 than our ordinary life conceives of. In the scientific world, 
 similar coincidences perpetually take place : discoveries, ap- 
 parently unconnected, without any apparent link between 
 the minds which make them, are announced from different 
 parts of the world almost simultaneously. Xo man, perhaps, 
 has been altogether unconscious of mental sympathies, coin- 
 cidences of thought, which are utterly inexplicable. All that 
 I deduce from this is the solemn awfulness of the universe in 
 which we live. We are surrounded by mystery. Mind is 
 more real than matter. Our souls and God are real. Of the 
 reality of nothing else are we sure : it floats before us, a fan- 
 tastic shadow-world. Mind acts on mind. The Eternal 
 Spirit blends mind with mind, soul with soul, and is moving 
 over us all with His mystic inspiration every hour. 
 
 In Csesarea there was a cohort of soldiers, the body-guard 
 of the governor who resided there. They were not, as was 
 the case in other towns, provincial soldiers, but, being a 
 guard of honor, were all Romans, called commonly the Ital- 
 ian band. One of the centurions of this guard was Cornelius 
 
Salvation out of the Visible Church. 721 
 
 " a devout man." A truth-loving, truth-seeking, truth-find- 
 ing man ; one of those who would be called in this day a 
 restless, perhaps an unstable man ; for he changed his religion 
 twice. He had aspirations which did not leave him content- 
 ed with paganism. He found in Judaism a higher truth, and 
 became a proselyte. In Judaism he was true to the light he 
 had : he was devout, gave alms, and even influenced some of 
 the soldiers of the guard, as it would appear (ver. 7). The 
 result was as might have been expected. "He that hath, 
 to him shall be given." Give us such a man, and we will 
 predict his history. He will be ever moving on ; not merely 
 changing, but moving on, from higher to higher, from light 
 to light, from love to love, till he loses himself at last in the 
 Fountain of Light and the Sea of Love. Heathenism, Juda- 
 ism, Christianity. Not mere change, but true, ever upward 
 progress. He could not rest in Judaism, nor anywhere else 
 on earth. 
 
 To this man a voice said, " Thy prayers and thine alms 
 are come up as a memorial before God." Prayers that we 
 can understand ; but alms are then works, after all, that by 
 which men become meritorious in the sight of God ? To 
 answer this, observe : Alms may assume two forms. They 
 may be complete or incomplete. Alms complete works 
 which may be enumerated, estimated deeds done and put 
 in as so much purchase ten times ten thousand such will 
 never purchase heaven. But the way in which a holy man 
 does his alms is quite different from this. In their very per- 
 formance done as pledges of something more ; done with a 
 sense of incompleteness ; longing to be more nearly perfect 
 they become so many aspirations rising up to God ; sacri- 
 fices of thanksgiving, ever ascending like clouds of incense, 
 that rise and rise in increasing volumes, still dissatisfied and 
 still aspiring. Alms in this way become prayers the high- 
 est prayers; and all existence melts and resolves itself into a 
 prayer. " Thy prayers and thine alms ;" or if you will, " Thy 
 prayers and thy prayers," are come up to be remembered ; 
 for what were his alms but devout aspirations of his heart to 
 God? 
 
 Thus, in the vision of the everlasting state which John saw 
 in Patmos, the life of the redeemed presented itself as one 
 eternal chant of grateful hallelujahs, hymned on harps whose 
 celestial melodies float before the Throne forever. A life of 
 prayer is a life whose litanies are ever fresh acts of self-devot- 
 ing love. There was no merit in those alms of Cornelius; 
 they were only poor imperfect aspirations, seeking the ear 
 of God, and heard and answered there 
 
 31 
 
722 Salvation out of the Visible Church. 
 
 All this brings us to a question which must not be avoided 
 the salvability of the heathen world. Let us pronounce 
 upon this, if firmly, yet with all lowliness and modesty. 
 
 There are men of whose tenderness of heart we can not 
 doubt, who have come to the conclusion that without doubt 
 the heathen shall perish everlastingly. A horrible conclu- 
 sion : and if it were true, no smile should ever again pass 
 across the face of him who believes it. No moment can, 
 with any possible excuse, be given to any other enterprise 
 than their evangelization, if it be true that eternity shall 
 echo with the myriad groans and agonies of those who are 
 dropping into it by thousands in an hour. Such men, how- 
 ever, save their character for heart at the expense of their 
 consistency. They smile and enjoy the food and light just 
 as gayly as others do. They are too affectionate for their 
 creed ; their system only binds their views ; it can not con- 
 vert their hearts to its gloomy horror. 
 
 We lay down two principles: No man is saved by merit, 
 but only by faith. No man is saved, except in Christ. 
 "There is none other name under heaven given among men 
 whereby we must be saved." 
 
 But when we come *o consider what is saving faith, we 
 find it to be the broad principle of trust in God, above all 
 misgivings, living for the invisible instead of the seen. In 
 Hebrews xi. we are told that Noah was saved by faith. 
 Faith in what ? In the atonement ? or even in Christ ? 
 Nay, but in the predicted destruction of the world by water ; 
 the truth he had, not the truth he had not. And the life he 
 led in consequence, higher than that of the present-seeking 
 world around him, was the life of faith, " by the which he 
 condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness 
 which is by faith." Salvation, therefore, is annexed to faith. 
 Not necessarily faith in the Christian object, but in the 
 truth, so far a> it is given. Does God ask more? 
 
 Again : the Word revealed itself to men before it was 
 manifested in the flesh. Before this universe was called into 
 being, when neither star nor planet was, the Father was not 
 alone. From all eternity He contemplated Himself in 
 Another Himself in Himself; else God had not been love. 
 For another is required for love. To lose and find one's self 
 again in another's being, that is love. Except this, we can 
 not conceive love possible to Him. But thus with the other, 
 which was His very self; in language theological, the Eter- 
 nal Son in the bosom of the Father; God thrown into objec- 
 tivity by Himself. There was a universe before created uni- 
 verse existed ; there was love when as vet there was none 
 
i Salvation out of the Visible Church. 723 
 
 except Himself on whom that affection could be thrown; 
 and the expression of Himself to Himself, the everlasting 
 Word, filled eternity with the anthem of the Divine solilo- 
 quy. Now this word expressed itself to man before it min- 
 gled itself with flesh. " Before Abraham was, I am." Read 
 we not in the Old Testament of revelations made to men in 
 visions, trances, day-dreams, sometimes in voices, articulate 
 or inarticulate, sometimes in suggestions scarcely distin- 
 guishable from their own thoughts? 
 
 Moreover, recollect that the Bible contains only a record 
 of the Divine dealings with a single nation ; His proceedings 
 with the minds of other people are not recorded. That large 
 other world no less God's world than Israel was, though in 
 their bigotry the Jews thought Jehovah was their own ex- 
 clusive property scarcely is scarcely could be named on 
 the page of Scripture except in its external relation to Israel. 
 But at times, figures, % as it were, cross the rim of Judaism, 
 when brought in contact with it, and passing for a moment 
 as dim shadows," do yet tell us hints of a communication and 
 a revelation going on unsuspected. We are told, for exam- 
 ple, of Job no Jew, but an Arabian emir, who beneath the 
 tents of Uz contrived to solve the question to his heart which 
 still perplexes us through life the co-existence of evil with 
 Divine benevolence; one who wrestled with God as Jacob 
 did, and strove to know the shrouded Name, and hoped to 
 find that it was love. We find Naaman the Syrian, and 
 Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian, under the providential and 
 loving discipline of God* Rahab the Gentile is saved by 
 faith. The Syrophenician woman by her sick daughter's 
 bedside, amidst the ravings of insanity, recognizes, without 
 human assistance, the sublime and consoling truth of a uni 
 versal Father's love in the midst of apparent partiality. The 
 "Light which lighteth every man that cpmeth into the 
 world" had not left them in darkness. 
 
 From all this we are constrained to the conviction that 
 there is a Church on earth larger than the limits of the 
 Church visible ; larger than Jew, or Christian, or the Apostle 
 Peter, dreamed ; larger than our narrow hearts dare to hope 
 even now. They whose soarings to the First Good, First 
 Perfect, and First Fair, entranced us in our boyhood, and 
 whose healthier aspirations are acknowledged yet as our in- 
 structors in the reverential qualities of our riper manhood 
 will our hearts allow us to believe that they have perished ? 
 Nay. " Many shall come from the east and west, and shall 
 pit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the king- 
 dom of heaven." The North American Indian who WOP 
 
724 The Word and the World. 
 
 shipped the great Spirit, and was thereby sustained in a life 
 more dignified than the more animalized' men amongst his 
 countrymen; the Hindoo who believed in the rest of God, 
 and in his imperfect way tried to " enter into rest," not for- 
 getting benevolence and justice these shall come, while 
 "the children of the kingdom" men who, with greater 
 light, only did as much as they " shall be cast out." 
 
 These, with an innumerable multitude whom no man can 
 number, out of every kingdom, and tongue, and people, with 
 Rahab and the Syrophenician woman, have entered into 
 that Church which has passed through the centuries, absorb- 
 ing silently into itself ail that the world ever had of great, 
 and good, and noble. They were those who fought the bat- 
 tle of good against evil in th^ir day, penetrated into the in- 
 visible from the thick shadows of darkness which environed 
 them, and saw the open Vision which is manifested to all, in 
 every nation, who fear God and work righteousness to all, 
 in other words, w r ho live devoutly towards God, and by love 
 towards man. And they shall hereafter " walk in white, for 
 they are worthy." * * * * It may be that I err in this. It 
 may be that this is all too daring. Little is revealed upon 
 the subject, and we must not dogmatize. I may have erred ; 
 and it may be all a presumptuous dream. But if it be, God 
 will forgive the daring of a heart whose hope has given birth 
 to the idea ; whose faith in this matter simply receives its 
 substance and reality from things hoped for, and whose con- 
 fidence in all this dark, mysterious world can find no rock to 
 rest upon amidst the roaring billows of uncertainty, except 
 " the length, and the breadth, and the depth, and the height, 
 of the love which passeth knowledge," and which has filled 
 the universe with the fullness of His Christ. 
 
 XV. 
 THE WORD AND THE WORLD. 
 
 "And ; t :ame to pass, that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul having 
 /assed through the upper coasts came to Ephesus ; and finding certain disci- 
 ples, he said unto them, Have } r e received the Holy Ghost since ye believed ? 
 And they said unto him, We have not so much as heard whether there be 
 any Holy Ghost," etc. Acts xix. 1, 2. 
 
 WE consider, to-day, the nineteenth chapter of the Acts 
 of the Apostles, but first we must make some preliminary 
 remarks. 
 
The Word and the World. 725 
 
 The second missionary journey of St. Paul was done, and 
 he had left Europe for Asia. The object of his travel was 
 threefold. 1. To complete, in the temple of Jerusalem the 
 vow which he had begun at Corinth (xviii. 18, 21). 2. To 
 visit Antioch, the mother-church of Gentile Christianity, 
 where his presence was much needed (xviii. 22). 3. To re- 
 visit the churches of Galatia, and strengthen those who had 
 been tempted by false teaching in his absence (xviii. 23). 
 
 The last two of these objects were connected with one sin- 
 gle point of interest. It was the Jewish controversy, which 
 was then at its height. The council of Jerusalem had de- 
 cided that a Gentile was not dependent for salvation on the 
 Jewish law (xv. 23-29). But another question remained 
 still open : Was a Christian who did not obey the law on 
 the same level as a Christian who did obey it ? Was it not 
 a superior religious standing-ground, to add the ritual life 
 to the life of faith? 
 
 With this question the whole of the Epistle to the Gala- 
 tians is occupied. That epistle does not deal with the ques- 
 tion, whether the ritual law is necessary for salvation ; but 
 with this whether a Gentile Christian became a higher man 
 than before by a ceremonial life ; whether, in St. Paul's words, 
 "having begun in the spirit," he could be "made perfect 
 through the flesh." 
 
 At Antioch that question assumed a practical form. The 
 Jewish and Gentile Christians had lived in harmony, until 
 certain zealous ritualists came from Jerusalem, where St. 
 James presided. Then a severance took place. The law-ob- 
 serving disciples admitted these new converts to be Chris- 
 tians, but would not admit their standing in the Church to 
 be equal to their own. They denied their complete brother- 
 hood. They refused to eat with them. A Christian, not ob- 
 serving the ceremonial law, was to a Christian who did ob- 
 serve it very much what a proselyte of the gate was to an 
 ancient Jew. 
 
 Two men of leading station yielded to this prejudice, 
 though it was destructive of the very essence of Christianity. 
 These were St. Peter and Barnabas. The " dissimulation," 
 as St. Paul calls it, of these two apostles suggests two in- 
 structive lessons. 
 
 The yielding of Barnabas reminds us of the insecurity of 
 mere feeling. Barnabas was a man of feeling and fine sensi- 
 bilities. He could not bear to have his relative Mark severe- 
 ly judged (Acts xv. 36-39, and Col. iv. 10). It pained him 
 to the heart to see that Paul, when he first essayed to join 
 himself to his disciples^ was misunderstood (Acts ix. 2^, 27). 
 
726 The Word and the World. 
 
 He was a " son of consolation." He sold his property to dis- 
 tribute to the Christian poor (Acts iv. 36, 37). He healed 
 many a broken heart. But he wanted just that firmness 
 which men of feeling so often want the power of standing 
 steadily by a principle. 
 
 The unsteadiness of St. Peter exhibits a different truth. 
 It tells that a fall, however it may qualify a man for giving 
 advice to others similarly tempted, does not qualify for future 
 consistency, nor for the power of showing mercy in the high- 
 est way. No doubt St. Peter's fall, after his conversion, pe- 
 culiarly fitted him for strengthening his brethren. But sin 
 weakens the power of resistance. He who yields once will 
 more easily yield the second time. He who shrunk from 
 standing by his Master found it fearfully easy to shrink from 
 abiding by a principle. Sin indulged breaks down the bar- 
 riers between good and evil, and turns strength into weak- 
 ness ! And failure does not make men merciful to others. 
 St. Peter is just as hard to the Gentile Christians, expelling^ 
 them from Christian society for that which he knew to be in- 
 different, as if he had always been firm in his own integrity. 
 He only can judge of error and show mercy, who has been 
 " tempted, yet without sin." This nineteenth chapter is di- 
 visible into three chief subjects : 
 
 I. The baptism of John's disciples. 
 II. The burning of the "Ephesian letters." 
 HI. The tumult occasioned by the worshippers of Diana. 
 
 I. When St. Paul came to Ephesus, he found twelve disci- 
 ples of John, bearing the name of Christians, but having a 
 very imperfect form of Christianity. Now the baptism of 
 John, which was all these men knew, means the doctrine of 
 John that cycle of teaching which is briefly symbolized by 
 the chief ritual act of the system. The system of John was 
 contained in a very narrow range of truth. It was such 
 truth as we might have expected from a man who had been 
 so disciplined. It was John's lot to be born into the world 
 in a period of highly-advanced society ; and in that hot-bed 
 of life-fictions, Jerusalem, the ardent mind of the young man 
 found nothing to satisfy the cravings of its desire. He want- 
 ed something deeper and truer than the existing systems 
 could afford him. He went to the Sadducee and the Phari- 
 see in vain. He found no life in the Jewish ritual no assist- 
 ance from the rabbis. He went into the wilderness to 
 commune with God, to try what was to be learned from Him 
 by a soul in earnest, without church, ministers, or ordi- 
 nances. The heavens spoke to him of purity, and the river by 
 
The Word and the World. 727 
 
 hisJ side of God's eternity. Locusts and honey, his only food, 
 taught him that man has a higher life to nourish than that 
 which is sustained by epicurean luxuries. So disciplined 
 John came back to his countrymen. As might be expected, 
 no elaborate theology formed any part of his teaching. " We 
 want a simpler, purer, austerer life. Let men be real. 
 Fruits worthy of repentance fruits, fruits, not profession. 
 A new life. Repent." That was the burden of John's 
 message. 
 
 A preparatory one evidently, one most incomplete in itself. 
 It implied the need of something additional, as St. Paul told 
 these converts. " John verily baptized with the baptism of 
 repentance, saying unto the people that they should believe 
 on Him who should come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus." 
 And none felt more distinctly than John that his was mere- 
 ly an initial work. That was a touching acknowledgment of 
 the subordinate part he had to perform in the construction of 
 the world's new life. " He must increase, but I must de 
 crease." The work of John was simply the work of the axe. 
 " The axe is laid to the root of the trees ;" to destroy, not to 
 build ; to cut up by the roots ancient falsehoods ; to tear 
 away all that was unreal ; to make a clearance that the light 
 of day might come in. A great work, but still not the great- 
 est. 
 
 And herein lay the difference between the two baptisms. 
 John baptized with water, Christ with the Holy Ghost and 
 fire. The one was simply the washing away of a false and 
 evil past ; the other was the gift of the power to lead a pure, 
 true life. 
 
 This was all that these disciples knew ; yet remark, they 
 are reckoned as Christians. They are called " certain disci- 
 ples " that is, of Jesus. They knew little enough of Chris- 
 tianity ; they had not so much as heard whether there be 
 any Holy Ghost. The doctrine of the Trinity they knew 
 not, nor that of sanctification, nor probably that of the atone- 
 ment. And yet in the Word of God they are called disci- 
 ples of Christ. 
 
 Let us learn from that a judgment of charity. Let not 
 the religious man be too prone to talk with contempt of a 
 legal spirit* Let him not sneer at "merely moral men." 
 Morality is not religion, but it is the best soil on which re- 
 ligion grows. He who lives an honest, sincere, honorable 
 life, and has strong perceptions of moral right and moral 
 wrong, may not have reached the highest stages of spiritual- 
 ity ; he may " know only the baptism of John ;" he may 
 aim as yet at nothing higher than doing his duty well, " ac* 
 
728 The Word and the World. 
 
 cusing no man falsely, being content with his wages," giving 
 one coat out of two to the poor; and yet that man, with 
 scanty theology and small spiritual experience, may be a 
 real ""disciple" in the school of Christ, and one of the chil- 
 dren of the Highest. 
 
 Nay, it is the want of this preparation which so often 
 makes religion a sickly plant in the soul. Men begin with 
 abundance of spiritual knowledge ; they understand well the 
 " scheme of salvation ;" they talk of religious privilege, and 
 have much religious liberty ; they despise the formal spirit 
 arid the legal spirit. But if the foundation has not been laid 
 deep in a perception of the eternal difference between right 
 and wrong, the superstructure will be but flimsy. I believe 
 it is a matter of no small importance that the baptism of 
 John should precede the baptism of Christ ; that is, that a 
 strict life, scrupulous regularity, abhorrence of evil perhaps 
 even something too austere, the usual accompaniment of sin- 
 cerity at the outset should go before the peace which comes 
 of faith in Christ. First the blade, then the ear, then the full 
 corn in the ear. You can not have the harvest first. There 
 is an order in the development of the soul, as there is in the 
 development of the year of nature, and it is not safe to force. 
 Nearly two thousand years were spent in the Divine gov- 
 ernment in teaching the Jews the meaning of holiness, the 
 separation of right from wrong. And such must be the or- 
 der of the education of children and of men. The baptism 
 of repentance before the baptism of the Spirit. 
 
 The result which followed this baptism was the gifts of 
 tongues and prophecy. On a former occasion I endeavored to 
 explain what is meant by the gift of tongues. It appeared, 
 then, that " tongues " were not so much the power of speaking 
 various languages, as the power of speaking spiritual truths 
 with supernatural and heavenly fervor. This passage favors 
 that interpretation. The apostle was there with twelve new 
 converts. To what purpose was the supposed use of various 
 languages among such a number, who already understood 
 one another? It would seem more like the showing off of 
 a new accomplishment than the humble character of Chris- 
 tian modesty permits. If this gift simply made them lin- 
 guists, then the miracle was of a temporary and earthly 
 character. But if it consisted in elevating their spiritual in- 
 tuitions, and enabling them to speak, " not in the words 
 which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost 
 teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual," then 
 you have a miracle celestial indeed, worthy of its Spirit- 
 Author. If it were only a gift of languages, then the mira- 
 
The Word and the World. 729 
 
 cle has nothing to do with us; but if it were the elevating 
 of the natural faculties by God's Spirit to a higher and di- 
 viner use, then we have a marvel and a truth which belongs 
 to all ages. The life is the light of men. Give life, and 
 light follows. Expand the heart, and you enlarge the intel- 
 lect. Touch the soul with love, and then you touch the lips, 
 with hallowed fire, and make even the stammering tongue 
 speak the words of living eloquence. 
 
 This was the gift of tongues that followed the reception 
 of the Divine Spirit. 
 
 II. The second subject in the chapter is the burning of 
 the " Ephesian letters." 
 
 Ephesus was the metropolis of Asia. Its most remarkable 
 feature was the temple of Diana one of the wonders of the 
 world. It contained a certain image, misshapen, of a human 
 form, reported by tradition to. have fallen from the skies; 
 perhaps one of those meteoric stones, which, generated in th.rf 
 atmosphere,. and falling to the ground, are reckoned by the 
 vulgar to be thunderbolts from heaven. 
 
 This image represented Nature, the prolific nurse and 
 source of all life, and the worship was a worship of Nature. 
 Upon the base of the statue w r ere certain mysterious sen- 
 tences, and these, copied and written upon papers and amu- 
 lets, were known far and wide by the name of " Ephesian 
 letters." This was the heathen form of magical superstition. 
 But it seems there was a Jewish practice of the occult art 
 besides. They used certain incantations, herbs, and magi- 
 cal formulas, said by tradition to have been taught by Sol- 
 omon, for the expulsion of diseases and the exorcism of evil 
 spirits. 
 
 The state of Ephesus, like that of Corinth and Athens, was 
 one of metropolitan civilization ; and it is nothing strange 
 that in such a stage of social existence, arts and beliefs like 
 these should flourish ; for there is always a craving in the 
 soul of man for something supernatural, an irrepressible de- 
 sire for communion with the unseen world. And where an 
 over-refined civilization has choked up the natural and 
 healthy outlets of this feeling, it will inevitably find an un 
 natural one. The restless spirit of those times, dissatisfied 
 with their present existence, in spite of itself feeling the deg- 
 radation of the life of epicurean indolence and selfishness, 
 instinctively turned to the other world in quest of marvels. 
 We do not wonder to find atheism and abject superstition 
 co-tenants of the same town or the same mind. We do not 
 Qiarvel that in the very city where reasonable Christianity 
 
 31* 
 
730 The Word and the World. 
 
 could scarcely find a footing, a mob could be found scream- 
 ing for two hours, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians !" that 
 when men had "not so much as heard whether there be any 
 Holy Ghost," wise men and men in authority should be be- 
 lievers in " the image which fell down from Jupiter." Ephe- 
 sus was exactly the place where Jewish charlatans and the 
 vendors of "Ephesian letters" could reap a rich harvest from 
 the credulity of skeptical voluptuaries. 
 
 It is difficult to know what to say about this Oriental 
 magic. ' Shall we say that it was all imposture ? or account 
 for its success by the power of a highly-excited imagination ? 
 or believe that they were really making use of some unknown 
 powers of nature, which they themselves in ignorance sup- 
 posed to be supernatural ? Little can now be decided. 
 That the magicians themselves believed in their own art is 
 plain, from the fact of the existence of these costly " Ephesian 
 letters," and scientific " curious books," which had appar- 
 ently reached the dignity of an elaborate system ; and also 
 from the fact that some of them, as the seven sons of Sceva, 
 believed in Christianity as a higher kind of magic, and at- 
 tempted to use its formula, as more efficacious than their 
 own. "We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth." 
 Had they been only impostors, they would have taken Paul 
 for an impostor too. 
 
 Here was one of those early attempts, which in after ages 
 became so successful, to amalgamate Christianity with the 
 magical doctrines. Gnosticism was the result in the East, 
 Romanism the result in the West. 
 
 But the spirit of Christianity brooks no amalgamation. 
 The essence of magic consists in this : the belief that by 
 some external act not connected with moral goodness, nor 
 making a man wiser or better communication can be in- 
 sured with the spiritual world ; and the tutelage of God or 
 some superior spirit be commanded for a mortal. It mat- 
 ters not whether this be attempted by Ephesian letters, 
 amulets, charms, curious books or by sacraments, or by 
 Church ordinances or priestly powers whatever professes to 
 bring God near to man, except by making man more like to 
 God, is of the same spirit of Antichrist. 
 
 The spirit-world of God has its laws, and they are unal- 
 terable. They are such as these : " Blessed are the pure in 
 heart, for they shall see God ;" "Blessed are the merciful 
 the peacemakers the meek the poor in spirit ;" " If any 
 man will do His will, he shall know ;" " 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 Word and the World. 73 1 
 
 This is Christianity, There is no way of becoming a par- 
 taker of "the powers of the world to come," except by hav- 
 ing the heart right with God. God's presence, God's pro- 
 tection, is the privilege of the humble, the holy, the loving. 
 These are the laws of the kingdom of God's Spirit, and no 
 magic can reverse them. The contest was brought to an 
 issue by the signal failure of these magicians to work a mir- 
 acle the man possessed leaped upon the exercisers, and they 
 fled wounded, upon which there was great consternation in 
 Ephesus. The possessors of curious books came, confessed 
 their guilt, and burnt them with their own hands in the 
 apostle's presence. 
 
 You will observe in all this the terrible supremacy of 
 conscience. There was struck a chord deep in the moral 
 nature of these men, and it vibrated in torture. They could 
 not bear their own secret, and they had no remedy but im- 
 mediate confession. It is this arraigning accuser within the 
 bosom that compels the peculator, after years of concealed 
 theft, to send back the stolen money to his employer, with 
 the acknowledgment that he has suffered years of misery. 
 It was this that made Judas dash down his gold in the 
 Temple, and go and hang himself. It is this that again and 
 again has forced the murderer from his unsuspected security 
 in social life, to deliver himself up to justice, and to choose 
 a true death rather than the dreadful secret of a false life. 
 Observe how mightily our moral nature works for health 
 and peace, if there be no obstruction ; but for disease and 
 torture, if it be perverted. But, anyhow, it works, and with 
 living, indestructible force, as the juices of vigorous life, if 
 obstructed, create and feed gigantic disease. 
 
 Consider, in the next place, the test of sincerity furnished 
 by this act of burning the Ephesian letters. First of all it 
 was a costly sacrifice. They were valued at fifty thousand 
 pieces of silver. In those days, copies were not multiplied 
 by printing ; and the possessor of a secret would take care 
 not to multiply it. Rarity created costliness. The posses- 
 sion of one such book was the possession of a fortune. Then, 
 again, there was the sacrifice of livelihood. By these books 
 they got their living. And a man who had lived to thirty 
 or forty years of age in this mode of life was not young 
 enough to begin the world again with a new profession. It 
 w r as to throw themselves almost into beggary. Moreover, 
 it w r as the destruction of much knowledge that was really 
 valuable. As in the pursuit of alchemy real chemical se- 
 crets were discovered, so it can not be doubted that these 
 curious manuscripts contained many valuable natural facts. 
 
732 The Word and the World. 
 
 To burn them was to waste all these to give the lore ao- 
 cumulated for years to the winds. 
 
 Once more: it was an outrage to feeling. Costly manu- 
 scripts, written with curious art, many of them probably the 
 heirlooms of a family, many which were associated with a 
 vast variety of passages in life, old feelings, old teachers 
 .and companions, these were to be committed mercilessly to 
 tthe flames. Remember, too, how many other ways there 
 were of disposing of them. Might they not be sold, and the 
 proceeds " given to the poor ?" Might they not at least be 
 made over to some relative who, not feeling any thing wrong 
 in the use or possession of them, would not have his con- 
 science aggrieved ? Or might they not be retained, the use 
 of them being given up, as curious records of the past, as the 
 treasure-stores of so much that was beautiful and wise? 
 
 And then conscience arose with her stern, clear voice. 
 They are the records of an ignorant and guilty past. There 
 must be no false tenderness ; the sacrifice must be real, or it 
 is none. . To the flames with them, till their ashes are strew- 
 ed upon the winds, and the smoke will rise up to heaven a 
 sweet savor before God. 
 
 Whoever has made such a sacrifice as this and every 
 real Christian in the congregation in some shape or other 
 has will remember the strange medley of feeling which ac- 
 companied the sacrifice. We should err if we expected such 
 a deed to be done with feelings entirely single. There is a 
 mixture in all such sacrifices. Partly fear constrained the 
 act, produced by the judgment on the other exorcists; part- 
 ly genuine remorse ; partly there was a lingering regret as 
 leaf after leaf perished in the flames ; partly a feeling of re- 
 lief, and partly a heavy sense of loss in remembering that 
 the work of years was obliterated, and that the past had to 
 be lived afresh as a time wasted ; partly shame, and partly 
 a wild tumult of joy, at the burst of new hope, and the pros- 
 pect of a nobler life. We can not, and dare not, too closely 
 scan such things. The sacrifice was made, and He who 
 knows the mixture of the earthly and the spiritual in His 
 creatures' hearts doubtless accepted the sacrifice. 
 
 There is no Christian life that has not in it sacrifice, and 
 that alone is the sacrifice which is made in the spirit of the 
 conflagration of the "Ephesian letters," without reserve, 
 without hesitation, without insincere tenderness. If the 
 slaveholder, convinced of the iniquity of the traffic in man, 
 sells the slaves on his estate to the neighboring planter, the 
 mark of sincerity is wanting ; or if the trader in opium or in 
 spirits quits his nefarious commerce, but first secures the 
 
The Word and the World. 733 
 
 value of all that remains in his warehouse or in his ships, 
 again there is a something which betokens the want of a 
 heart true and honest; or if the possessor of a library 
 becomes convinced that certain volumes are unfit for his 
 shelves, immoral, polluting the mind of him that reads them, 
 and yet can not sacrifice the brilliant binding and the costly 
 edition without an equivalent, what shall we say of these 
 men's sincerity ? 
 
 Two things marked these Ephesians' earnestness the vol- 
 untariness of their confession, and the unreserved destruction 
 of these records and means of evil. And I say to you, if there 
 be a man here before me with a sin upon his heart, let him 
 remember conscience will arise to do her dreadful work at 
 last. It may be when it is too late. Acknowledgment at 
 once, this is all that remains for him to relieve his heart of 
 its intolerable load. If he has wronged a man let him ac- 
 knowledge it and ask forgiveness; if he has defrauded him 
 of his due, or kept him from his rights, let him repair, restore, 
 make up ; or, if the guilt be one with which man inter- 
 meddleth not, and of wliich God alone takes cognizance, on 
 his bended knees this night, and before the sun of to-morrow 
 dawn, let him pour out the secret of his heart, or else, it may 
 be that in this world, and in the world to come, peace is ex- 
 iled from his heart forever. 
 
 III. We shall consider, thirdly, the sedition respecting Di- 
 ana's worship. First under this head let us notice the speech 
 of Demetrius in which observe : 
 
 1. The cause of the slow death which error and falsehood 
 die : shot through and through, they still linger on. Existing 
 abuses in Church and State are upheld because they are in- 
 tertwined with private interests. The general good is im- 
 peded by private cupidity. The welfare of a nation, the es- 
 tablishment of a grand principle, is clamored against because 
 destructive of the monopoly of a few particular trades. The 
 salvation of the world must be arrested that Demetrius may 
 continue to sell shrines of Diana. This is the reason why it 
 takes centuries to overthrow an evil, after it has been proved 
 an evil. 
 
 2. The mixture of religious and selfish feelings. Not only 
 " our craft," but also the worship of the great goddess Diana. 
 Demetrius was, or thought himself sincere ; a man really 
 zealous for the interests of religion. And so it is with many 
 a patriotic and religious cry. " My country " " my church " 
 " my reli'jion " it supports me. "By this craft we have 
 our wealth." 
 
734 The Word and the World. 
 
 3. Numbers are no test of truth. What Demetrius said, 
 and the town-clerk corroborated, was a fact that the whole 
 world worshipped the great goddess Diana. Antiquity, uni- 
 versality, popularity, were all on her side ; on the other, there 
 were only Paul, Gaius, Aristarchus. If numbers tested truth, 
 Apollos in the last chapter need not have become the brilliant 
 outcast from the schools of Alexandria, nor St. Paul stand in 
 Ephesus in danger of his life. 
 
 He who seeks Truth must be content with a lonely, little- 
 trodden path. If he can not worship her till she has been 
 canonized by the shouts of the multitude, he must take his 
 place with the members of that wretched crowd who shout- 
 ed for two long hours, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians !" 
 till truth, reason, and calmness were all drowned in noise. 
 
 Let us notice the judicious speech of the town-clerk, or 
 chamberlain more properly, in which observe 
 
 1. The impression made by the apostle on the wiser and 
 calmer part of the community. The Asiarchs, or magistrates, 
 were his friends. The town-clerk exculpated him, as Gallio 
 had done at Corinth. Herein we see the power of consis- 
 tency. 
 
 2. The admitted moral blamelessness of the Christians. 
 Paul had not " blasphemed " the goddess. As at Athens, he 
 had not begun by attacking errors, or prejudices, or even su- 
 perstitions. He preached truth, and its effect began to be 
 felt already, in the decline of the trade which flourished by 
 the sale of silver models of the wondrous temple a statistical 
 fact, evidencing the amount of success. Overcome evil by 
 good, error by truth. Christianity opposed by the force of 
 governments, counterfeited by charlatanism, sneered at by 
 philosophers, cried down by frantic mobs, coldly looked at 
 from a distance by the philosophical, pursued with unrelent- 
 ing hatred by Judaism, met by unions and combinations of 
 trades, having arrayed against it every bad passion of human- 
 ity went swiftly on, conquering and to conquer. 
 
 The continental philosophers tell us that Christianity is 
 effete. Let this narrative determine. Is that the history of 
 a principle which has in it seeds of death ? Comes that from 
 the invention of a transient thought of man's, or from the 
 Spirit of the everlasting ages ? 
 
Solomon s Restoration. 735 
 
 XVI. 
 SOLOMON'S RESTORATION. 
 
 "Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things? yet among many 
 nations was there no king like him, who was beloved of his God." Nehem. 
 xiii. 26. 
 
 THERE is one study, my Christian brethren, which never 
 can lose its interest for us so long as we are men : and that 
 is, the investigation of human character. The deep interest 
 of biography consists in this that it is in some measure the 
 description to us of our own inner history. You can not un- 
 veil the secrets of another heart without at the same time 
 finding something to correspond with, and perchance explain, 
 the mysteries of your own. Heart answers here to heart. 
 Between the wisest and the worst there are ten thousand 
 points of marvellous resemblance ; and so the trials, the frail- 
 ties, the bitterness of any human soul, faithfully traced out, 
 ever shadow out to us a portraiture of our own experience. 
 Give but the inner heart-history of the most elevated spirit 
 that ever conquered in life's struggle, and place it before the 
 most despicable that ever failed, and you exhibit to him so 
 much of the picture of his own very self, that you perforce 
 command his deepest attention. Only let the inarticulate 
 life of the peasant find for itself a distinct voice and a true 
 biographer, let the inward struggles which have agitated 
 that rough frame be given faithfully to the world, and there 
 is not a monarch whose soul will not be thrilled w r ith those 
 inner details of an existence with which outw r ardly he has not 
 a single thought in common. 
 
 It "is for this reason that Solomon's life is full of painful 
 interest. Far removed as he is, in some respects, above our 
 sympathies, in others he peculiarly commands them. He 
 was a monarch, and none of us know the sensations which 
 belong to rule. He was proclaimed by God to be among 
 the wisest of mankind, and few of us can even conceive the 
 atmosphere in which such a gifted spirit moves, original, in- 
 quiring, comprehending, one to whom Nature has made her 
 secret open. He lived in the infancy of the world's society, 
 and we live in its refined and civilized manhood. 
 
 And yet, brethren, when we have turned away wearied 
 from all those subjects in which the mind of Solomon expati- 
 ated, and try to look inward at the man, straightway we 
 
7 36 Solomon s Restoration. 
 
 find ourselves at home. Just as in our own trilling, petty 
 history, so we find in him, life with the same unabated, mys- 
 terious interest ; the dust and the confusion of a battle, sub- 
 lime longings, and low weaknesses, perplexity, struggle ; and 
 then the grave closing over all this, and leaving us to marvel 
 in obscurity and silence over the strange destinies of man. 
 Humbling, brethren, is all this, at the same time that it is 
 most instructive. God's strange dealings with the human 
 heart, when shall they cease their interest for us ? When 
 shall it be that life, with all its mysteries, will tire us to 
 look upon? When shall it be that the fate of man shall 
 cease to wake up emotion in man's bosom. 
 
 Now, we are to bear in mind that the career of Solomon is 
 a problem which has perplexed many, and is by no means an 
 easy one to solve. He belongs to the peculiar class of those 
 who begin well, and then have the brightness of their lives 
 obscured at last. His morning sun rose beautifully ; it sank 
 in the evening, clouded, and dark with earthy exhalations 
 too dark to prophesy with certainty how it should rise on 
 the morrow. 
 
 Solomon's life was not what religious existence ought to 
 be. The life of God in the soul of man ought to be a tiling 
 of perpetual development ; it ought to be more bright, and 
 its pulsations more vigorous every year. Such, certainly, at 
 least to all appearance, Solomon's was not. It was excel- 
 lence, at all events, marred with inconsistc ncy. It was orig- 
 inal uprightness disgraced by a fall, and thac fall so prolong- 
 ed and signal that it has always been a disputed question 
 among commentators whether he ever rose from it again at 
 all. But the passage which I have selected for the text, in 
 connection with one or two others, seems to decide this ques- 
 tion. " Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things ?" 
 that is, marriage with foreign wives ? " Yet among many 
 nations was there no king like him who was beloved of his 
 God." Now there can be no doubt of the view given us in 
 this verse. Six hundred years after Solomon had been sleep- 
 ing in earthly dust, when all contemporaries were dead, and 
 all personal feeling had passed away, when history could 
 pronounce her calm verdict upon his existence as a whole, 
 Nehemiah, in this passage, gave a summary of his character. 
 He speaks to us of Solomon as a saint a saint in whom 
 saintliness had been wonderfully defaced imperfect, tempt- 
 ed, fallen ; but still ranked among those whom God's love 
 had pre-eminently distinguished. 
 
 Now let us compare with this the prophecy which iiad 
 been uttered by Nathan before Solomon was born. Thus 
 
Solomon s Restoration. 737 
 
 he spoke in God's name to David of the son who was to suc- 
 ceed him on the throne : " I will be his father, and he shall 
 be iny son. If lie commit iniquity, T will chasten him with 
 the rod of men," L e., the rod as a human being uses it, for 
 correction, not everlasting destruction " and with the stripes 
 of the children of men. But my mercy shall not depart away 
 from him, as I took it from Saul." In this we have a distinct 
 covenant, made prophetically. God foretold Solomon's terri- 
 ble apostasy ; and with it He foretold Solomon's restoration. 
 And there is one point especially remarkable. He parallels 
 Solomon's career with Saul's. Saul began well, and Saul 
 ended ill. Just so it was with Solomon. Here was the par- 
 allel. But farther than this, God distinctly warned, tho par- 
 allel did not go. Saul's deterioration from good was perma- 
 nent. Solomon's deterioration, dark as it was, had some 
 point of essential difference. It was not forever. Saul's life 
 darkened from morning brightness into the gloom of ever- 
 lasting night. Solomon's lite darkened too, but the curtain 
 of clouds was rolled aside at last, and bcfcro the night set in 
 the sun shone out in serene, calm brilliancy. 
 
 We take up, therefore, for our consideration to-day, the life 
 of Solomon in these two particulars. 
 
 I. The wanderings of an erring spirit. " Did not Solomon 
 king of Israel sin by these tilings '?" 
 
 II. The guidance of that spirit, amidst all its wanderings, 
 by God's love. " There was no king like unto him who was 
 beloved of his God." 
 
 I. " Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things ?" 
 This is the first point for us to dwell on the wanderings of 
 a frail and erring human spirit from the right way. That 
 which lay at the bottom of all Solomon's transgressions was 
 his intimate partnership with foreigners. " Did not Solomon 
 sin by these things ?" that is, if we look to the context, mar- 
 riage with foreign wives. The history of the text is this : 
 Nehemiah discovered that the nobles of Judah during the 
 Captivity, when law and religious customs had been relaxed, 
 had married wives of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab ; and 
 then, in his passionate expostulation with them, he reminds 
 them that it was this very transgression which led to the 
 fall of the monarch who had been most distinguished for 
 God's favor. In the whole Jewish system, no principle was 
 more distinct than this the separation of God's people from 
 partnership with the world. Exclusiveness was the princi- 
 ple on which Judaism was built. The Israelites were not to 
 mix with tlie nations; they were not to marry with them; 
 
Solomon s Restoration. 
 
 they were not to join with them in religious fellowship or 
 commercial partnership. Every thing was to be distinct 
 as distinct as God's service and the world's. And it was this 
 principle which Solomon transgressed. He married a prin- 
 cess of Egypt. He connected himself with wives from idola- 
 trous countries Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, 
 Hittites. And then Nehemiah's argument, built on the eter- 
 nal truth that friendship with the world is enmity with God, 
 is this : " Did not Solomon sin by these things ?" 
 
 That Jewish law, my brethren, shadowed out an everlast- 
 ing truth, God's people are an exclusive nation ; God's 
 Church is forever separated from the world. This is her 
 charter, " Come out from among them, and be ye separate, 
 saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing ; and I will 
 receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be 
 my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty." God's 
 people may break that charter, but they do it at their own 
 peril. And we may be very sure of this, when a religious 
 person begins to feel an inclination for intimate communion 
 with the world, and begins to break down that barrier which 
 is the line of safety, the first step is made of a series of long, 
 dark wanderings from God. We are to be separate, breth- 
 ren, from the world. Mistake not the meaning of that word. 
 The world changes its complexion in every age. Solomon's 
 world was the nations of idolatry lying round Israel. Our 
 world is not that. The world is that collection of men in 
 every age who live only according to the maxims of their 
 time. The world may be a profligate world, or it may be a 
 moral world. All that is a matter of accident. Our world 
 is a moral world. The sons of our world are not idolaters, 
 they are not profligate, they are, it may be, among the most 
 fascinating of mankind. Their society is more pleasing, more 
 lively, more diversified in information than religious society. 
 No marvel if a young and ardent heart feels the spell of the 
 fascination. No wonder if it feels a relief in turning away 
 from the dullness and the monotony of home life to the 
 sparkling brilliancy of the world's society. No marvel if 
 Solomon felt the superior charms of the accomplished Egyp- 
 tian and the wealthy Tyrian. His Jewish countrymen and 
 countrywomen were but homely in comparison. What won- 
 der if the young monarch felt it a relaxation to emancipate 
 himself from the thraldom of a society which had little to 
 interest his grasping and restless mind, and to throw himself 
 upon a companionship which had more of refinement, and 
 more of cultivation, and more of that enlargement of mind 
 which his own gifted character was so fitted to enjoy ? 
 
Solomon s Restoration. 739 
 
 It is no marvel, brethren. It is all most natural, all most 
 intelligible a temptation which we feel ourselves every 
 day. "The brilliant, dazzling, accomplished world what 
 Christian with a mind polished like Solomon's does not own 
 its charms ? And yet now, pause. Is it in wise Egypt that 
 our highest blessedness lies ? Is it in busy restless Sidon ? 
 Is it in luxurious Moab ? No, my Christian brethren. The 
 Christian must leave the world alone. His blessedness lies 
 in quiet work with the Israel of God. His home is in that 
 deep, unruffled tranquillity which belongs to those who are 
 trying to know Christ. And when a Christian will not learn 
 this when he will not understand that in calmness, and 
 home, and work, and love, his soul must find its peace when 
 he will try keener and more exciting pleasures when he 
 says, I must taste what life is while I am young, its feverish- 
 ness, its strange, delirious, maddening intoxication, he has 
 just taken Solomon's first step, and he must take the whole 
 of Solomon's after, and most bitter experience, along with it. 
 
 The second step of Solomon's wandering was the unre- 
 strained pursuit of pleasure. And a man like Solomon can 
 not do any thing by halves. What he did, he did thorough- 
 ly. No man ever more heartily and systematically gave 
 himself up to the pursuit. If he once made up his mind 
 that pleasure was his aim, then for pleasure he lived. There 
 are some men who are prudent in their epicureanism. They 
 put gayety aside when they begin to get palled with it, and 
 then return to it moderately again. Men like Solomon can 
 not do that. No earnest man can. No ; if blessedness lies 
 in pleasure, he will drink the cup to the dregs. Listen to 
 what he says : " I sought in mine heart to give myself unto 
 wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom ; and to lay 
 hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the 
 sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the 
 days of their life." That was a pursuit of pleasure which 
 was at least decided and systematic manly. Observe, 
 brethren, we have none of the cool, cautious sipping of en- 
 joyment there. We have none of the feeble, languid at- 
 tempts to enjoy the world which make men venture ankle- 
 deep into dissipation, and only long for courage to go a lit- 
 tle farther. It is the earnestness of an impassioned man, a 
 man who has quitted God, and thrown himself, heart and 
 soul, upon every thing that he tries, and says he will try it 
 fairly and to the full. 
 
 " Let us see what the world is worth." Perhaps some 
 minds amongst us now are not altogether strangers to a 
 feeling such as this. There is many a soul, formed for high- 
 
74-O Solomon s Restoration. 
 
 er and better things, that has, at one time or another, lost 
 its hold on God, and felt the impulse of its own desires urg- 
 ing it on forever, dissatisfied, restless, panting for a celestial 
 fruit which seems forbidden, and half expecting to find that 
 fruit in life's excitement. These are the wanderings of an 
 erring spirit. 
 
 But, my brethren, let us mark the wanderings of an im- 
 mortal soul infinite in its vastness. There is a moral to be 
 learnt from the wildest worldliness. When we look on the 
 madness of life, and are marvelling at the terrible career of 
 dissipation, let there be no contempt felt. It is an immortal 
 spirit marring itself. It is an infinite soul, which nothing 
 short of the Infinite can satisfy, plunging down to ruin an<d 
 disappointment. Men of pleasure, whose hearts are as ca- 
 pable of an eternal blessedness as a Christian's, that is the 
 terrible meaning and moral of your dissipation. God in 
 Christ is your only Eden, and out of Christ you can have 
 nothing but the restlessness of Cain ; you are blindly pursu- 
 ing your destiny. That unquenched impetuosity within you 
 might have led you up to God. You have chosen instead 
 that your heart shall try to satisfy itself upon husks. 
 
 There was another form of Solomon's worldliness. It 
 was not worldliness in pleasure, but worldliness in occupa- 
 tion. He had entered deeply into commercial speculations. 
 He had alternate fears and hopes about the return of his 
 merchant-ships on their perilous three-years' voyage to India 
 and to Spain. He had his mind occupied with plans for 
 building. The architecture of the Temple, his own palace, 
 the forts and towns of his now magnificent empire, all this 
 filled for a time his soul. He had beirun a system of nation- 
 al debt and ruinous taxation. He had become a slaveholder 
 and a despot, who was compelled to keep his people down 
 by armed force. Much of this was not wrong, but all of it 
 was dangerous. It is a strange thing how business dulls the 
 sharpness of the spiritual affections. It is strange how the 
 harass of perpetual occupation shuts God out. It is strange 
 how much mingling with the world, politics, and those things 
 which belong to advancing civilization things which arc 
 very often in the way of our duty deaden the delicate sense 
 of right and wrong. Let Christians be on their guard by 
 double prayerfulness when duty makes them men of business 
 or calls them to posts of worldly activity. Solomon did 
 things of questionable morality which he never would have 
 done if he had not had the ambition to distinguish himself 
 among the princes of this world. Business and worldliness 
 dried up the springs of his spirituality. It was the climax 
 
Solomon s Restoration. 74 * 
 
 of Solomon's transgression that he suffered the establishment 
 of idolatry in his dominions. 
 
 There are writers who have said that in this matter Solo- 
 mon was in advance of his age enlightened beyond the nar. 
 rowness of Judaism, and that this permission of idolatry was 
 the earliest exhibition of that spirit which in modern times 
 we call religious toleration. But, my brethren, Solomon 
 went far beyond toleration. It is written, when Solomon 
 was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods ; 
 for he went after Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Zidonians, 
 and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites. The 
 truth seems to be, Solomon was getting indifferent about re- 
 ligion. He had got into light and worldly society, and the 
 libertinism of his associations was beginning to make its im- 
 pression upon him. He was beginning to ask, Is not one re- 
 ligion as good as another, so long as each man believes his 
 own in earnest ? He began to feel there is a great deal to be 
 said for these different religions. After all, there is nothing cer- 
 tain ; and why forbid men the quiet enjoyment of their own 
 opinion ? And so he became what men call liberal, and he 
 took idolatry under his patronage. There are few signs in a 
 soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, 
 that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true the 
 real meaning of which is, that all religions are equally false. 
 
 II. We are to consider, in the last place, God's loving 
 guidance of Solomon in the midst of all his apostasy. My 
 Christian brethren, in the darkest, wildest w r anderings, a man 
 to whom God has shown his love in Christ is conscious still 
 of the better way. In the very gloom of his remorse there 
 is an instinctive turning back to God. It is enumerated 
 among the gifts that God bestowed on Solomon, that He 
 granted to him " largeness of heart." Now that largeness 
 of heart which we call thoughtfulness and sensibility, gen- 
 erosity, high feeling, marks out, for the man who has it, a 
 peculiar life. Life becomes an intense thing : if there be 
 guilt, then his life will be desolating remorse ; if love, then 
 the very ecstasy of blessedness. But a cool, commonplace 
 life he can not have. According to Scripture phraseology, 
 Solomon had a great heart ; and therefore it was that for 
 such a one the discipline which was to lead him back to God 
 must needs be terrible. " If he commit iniquity, I will chas- 
 ten him with the rod of men." That was God's covenant, 
 and with tremendous fidelity was it kept. 
 
 You look to the life of Solomon, and there are no outward 
 reverses there to speak of. His reign was a type of the reign 
 
742 Solomon s Restoration. 
 
 of the power of j.eace. No war, no national disaster, inter- 
 rupted the even flow of the current of his days. Xo loss of 
 a child, like David's, pouring cold desolation into his soul 
 no pestilences nor famines. Prosperity and riches, and the 
 internal development of the nation's life, that was the reign 
 of Solomon. And yet, brethren, with all this, was Solomon 
 happy ? Has God no arrows winged in heaven for the heart, 
 except those which come in the shape of outward calamity? 
 Is there no way that God has of making the heart gray and 
 old before its time, without sending bereavement, or loss, or 
 sickness? Has the Eternal Justice no mode of withering 
 and drying up the inner springs of happiness, while all is 
 green, and wild, and fresh outwardly ? We look to the his- 
 tory of Solomon for the answer. 
 
 The first way in which his aberration from God treasured 
 up for him chastisement, was by that weariness of existence 
 which breathes through the whole book of Ecclesiastes. 
 That book bears internal evidence of having been written 
 after repentance and victory. It is the experience of a ca- 
 reer of pleasure ; and the tone which vibrates through the 
 whole is disgust with the world, and mankind, and life, and 
 self. I hold that book to be inspired. God put it into the 
 heart of Solomon to make that experience public. But, my 
 brethren, by " inspired," I do not mean that all the feelings 
 to which that book gives utterance are right or holy feel- 
 ings. St. John could not have written that book. St. John, 
 who had lived in the atmosphere of love, looking on this 
 world as God looks on it calmly, with the deep peace of 
 heaven in his soul, at peace with himself, and at peace with 
 man could never have penned the book of Ecclesiastes. 
 To have written the book of Ecclesiastes a man must have 
 been qualified in a peculiar way. He must have been a man 
 of intense feeling large in heart, as the Bible calls it. He 
 must have been a man w r ho had drunk deep of unlawful 
 pleasure. He must have been a man in the upper ranks of 
 society, with plenty of leisure and plenty of time to brood 
 on self. Therefore, in saying it is an inspired book, I mean 
 the inspired account of the workings of a guilty, erring, and 
 yet, at last, conquering spirit. It is not w r ritten as a wise 
 and calm Christian would write, but as a heart would write 
 which was fevered with disappointment, jaded with passion- 
 ate attempts in the pursuit of blessedness, and forced to God 
 as the last resource. 
 
 My younger brethren, that saddest book in all the Bible 
 stands before you as the beacon and the warning from a God 
 who loves you, and would spare you bitterness if He could. 
 
Solomon s Restoration. 743 
 
 Follow inclination now, put no restraint on feeling say that 
 there is time enough to be religious by-and-by forget that 
 now is the time to take Christ's yoke upon you, and learn 
 gradually and peacefully that serene control of heart which 
 must be learnt at last by a painful wrench forget all that, 
 and say that you trust in God's love and mercy to bring all 
 right, and then that uuok of Ecclesiastes is your history. 
 The penalty that you pay for a youth of pleasure is, if you 
 have any thing good in you, an old age of weariness and re- 
 morseful dissatisfaction. 
 
 Another part of Solomon's chastisement was doubt. Once 
 more turn to the book of Ecclesiastes. "All things come 
 alike to all : there is one event to the righteous and to the 
 wicked ; to the good, and to the clean, and to the unclean ; 
 to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not." In 
 this, brethren, you will observe the querulous complaint of a 
 man who has ceased to feel that God is the Ruler of this 
 world. A blind chance, or a dark destiny, seems to rule all 
 earthly things. And that is the penalty of leaving God's 
 narrow path for sin's wider and more flowery one. You lose 
 your way ; you get perplexed ; doubt takes possession of 
 your soul. And, my Christian brethren, if I speak to any 
 such, you know that there is no suffering more severe than 
 doubt. There is a loss of aim, and you know not what you 
 have to live for. Life has lost its meaning and its infinite 
 significance. There is a hollowness at the heart of your ex- 
 istence. There is a feeling of weakness, and a discontented 
 loss of self-respect. God has hidden His face from you be- 
 cause you have been trying to clo without Him or to serve 
 Him with a divided heart. 
 
 But now, lastly, we have to remark, that the love of God 
 brought Solomon through all this to spiritual manhood. 
 "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, 
 and keep his commandments : for this is the whole duty of 
 man." In this, brethren, we have the evidence of his victory. 
 Doubt, and imprisonment, and worldliness have passed away, 
 and clear activity, belief, freedom, have taken their place. It 
 was a terrible discipline, but God had made that discipline 
 successful. Solomon struggled manfully to the end. The 
 details of his life were dark, but the life itself was earnest ; 
 and after many a fall, repentance, with unconquerable pur- 
 pose, began afresh. And so he struggled on, often baffled, 
 often down, but never finally subdued ; and still with tears 
 and indomitable trust, returning to the conflict again. And 
 so when we come to the end of his last earthly work, we find 
 the sour smoke, which had so long been smouldering in his 
 
744 Solomon s Restoration. 
 
 heart and choking his existence, changed into bright, clear 
 flame. He has found the secret out at last, and it has filled 
 his whole soul with blessedness. God is man's happiness. 
 " Fear God, and keep His commandments : for this is the 
 whole duty of man." 
 
 And now, brethren, let us come to the meaning and the 
 personal application of all this. There is a way let us not 
 shrink from saying it there is a way in which sin may be 
 made to minister to holiness. "To whomsoever much is 
 forgiven the same loveth much." There was an everlasting 
 truth in what our Messiah said to the moral Pharisees : 
 "The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of 
 God before you." Now these are Christ's words ; and we 
 will not fear to boldly state the same truth, though it be 
 liable to much misinterpretation. Past sin, brethren, may be 
 made the stepping-stone to heaven. Let a man abuse that 
 if he will by saying, " Then it is best to sin." A man may 
 make the doctrine absurd, even shocking, by that inference, 
 but it is true for all that. "All things work together for 
 good to them that love God." All things, even sin. God 
 can take even your sin, and make it work to your soul's 
 sanctification. He can let you down into such an abyss of 
 self-loathing and disgust, such life-weariness, and doubt, 
 and misery, and disappointment, that if He ever raises you 
 again by the invigorating experience of the love of Christ, 
 you will rise stronger from your very fall, and in a manner 
 secured against apostasy again. Solomon, king of Israel, 
 sinned, and, by the strange power of the cross of Christ, 
 that sin gave him deeper knowledge of himself, deeper 
 insight into the mystery of human life, more marvellous 
 power of touching the souls of his brother-men, than if he 
 had not sinned. But forget not this, if ever a great sinner 
 becomes a great saint, it will be through agonies which none 
 but those who have sinned knoAV. 
 
 Brethren, I speak to those among you who know some- 
 thing about what the world is worth, who have tasted its 
 fruits, and found them like the Dead Sea apples hollowness 
 and ashes. By those foretastes of coming misery which 
 God has already given you, those lonely feelings of utter 
 wretchedness and disappointment when you have returned 
 home palled and satiated from the gaudy entertainment, 
 and the truth has pressed itself icy cold upon your heart, 
 " Vanity of vanities " is this worth living for ? By all that, 
 be warned. Be true to your convictions. Be honest with 
 yourselves. Be manly in working out your doubts, as 
 Solomon was. Greatness, goodness, blessedness, lie not in 
 
Joseph's Forgiveness of his Brethren. 745 
 
 the life that you are leading now. They lie in quite a 
 different path : they lie in a life hid with Christ in God. 
 Before God is compelled to write that upon your heart in 
 disgust and disappointment, learn "what is that good for 
 the sons of men which they should do " all the days of 
 their life under the heaven. Learn from the very greatness 
 of your souls, which have a capacity for infinite agony, that 
 you are in this world for a grander destiny than that of 
 frittering away life in uselessness. 
 
 Lastly, let us le#rn from this subject the covenant love 
 of God. There is such a thing as love which rebellion 
 can not weary, which ingratitude can not cool. It is the love 
 of God to those whom He has redeemed in Christ. " Did 
 not Solomon, king of Israel, sin ? and yet there was no 
 king like him who was beloved of his God." Let that, my 
 Christian brethren, be to us a truth not to teach carelessness, 
 but thankfulness. Oh ! trembling believer in Christ, are 
 you looking into the dark future and fearing, not knowing 
 what God will be to you at the last ? Remember, Christ 
 " having loved His own who are in the world loved them to 
 to the end." Your salvation is in the hands of Christ; the 
 everlasting arms are beneath you. The rock on which your 
 salvation is built is love, and the gates of hell shall not 
 prevail against you. 
 
 XVII. 
 JOSEPH'S FORGIVENESS OF HIS BRETHREN. 
 
 " And when Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead, they said, 
 Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil 
 which we did unto him. And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying, 
 Thy father did command before he died, saying, So shall ye say unto Joseph, 
 Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin ; for 
 they did unto thee evil : and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the 
 servants of the God of thy father. And Joseph wept when they spake unto 
 him. And his brethren also went and fell down before his face ; and they 
 said, Behold, we be thy servants. And Joseph said unto them, Fear not : 
 for am I in the place of God ? But as for you, ye thought evil against me ; 
 but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is thiy day, to save much 
 people alive. Now, therefore, fear ye not : I will nourish you, and your little 
 ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them. " Gen. 1. 15-21. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY is a revelation of the love of God a de- 
 mand of our love by God based thereon. Christianity is a 
 revelation of Divine forgiveness a requirement thereupon 
 that we should forgive each other. 
 
 32 
 
746 JosepKs Forgiveness of his Brethren. 
 
 " A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one 
 another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another" 
 (John xiii. 34) ; " Ye call me Master and Lord : and ye say 
 well, for so I am. If I, then, your Lord and Master, have 
 washed your feet ; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. 
 For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have 
 done to you" (John xiii. 13-15) ; "Forgive us our debts, as 
 we forgive our debtors " (Matt. vi. 12) ; " Beloved, if God so 
 loved us, we ought also to love one another" (1 Johniv. 11) ; 
 " Fo?bearing one another, and forgiving one another, even as 
 God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you" (Ephes. iv. 32). 
 
 Now these duties of love, forgiveness, service, are called 
 " new commandments." But we should greatly mistake if 
 we suppose that they are new in this sense, that they were 
 created by the Gospel, and did not exist before. The Gospel 
 did not make God love us ; it only revealed His love. The 
 Gospel did not make it our duty to forgive and love ; it only 
 revealed the eternal order of things, to transgress which is 
 our misery. These belong to the eternal order and idea of 
 our humanity. We are not planted by Christ in a new ar 
 bitrary state of human relationships, but redeemed into the 
 state to which we were created. 
 
 So St. John says, " I write no new commandment unto you, 
 but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. 
 The old commandment is the word which ye have heard from 
 the beginning. Again, a new commandment I write unto 
 you, which thing is true in him and in you ; because the dark- 
 ness is past, and the true light now shineth " old, because 
 of the eternal order of love ; new, because shown in the light 
 of the love of Christ. Christianity is the true life the right 
 humanity. 
 
 Now the proof of this is, that ages before Christ appeared, 
 they who gave themselves up to God to be led instead of to 
 their own hearts, did actually reduce to practice, and mani- 
 fested in their lives, those very principles which, as princi- 
 ples, were only revealed by Christ. 
 
 Here, for instance, three thousand years before Christ, Jo- 
 seph, a Hebrew slave, taught by life's vicissitudes, educated 
 by God, acts out practical Christianity one of its deepest 
 and most difficult lessons. There is nothing in the New Tes- 
 tament more childlike than this forgiveness of his brethren. 
 Some perhaps may be shocked at dwelling on this thought : 
 it seems to them to derogate from Christ. This is as if they 
 thought that they honored Christ by believing that until He 
 came no truth was known that He created truth. These 
 persons tremble at every instance of a noble or pure life 
 
Josep/is Forgiveness of his Brethren. 747 
 
 which can be shown in persons not enlightened by Christian- 
 ity. But, in truth, this is a corroboration of Christianity. 
 Christianity is a full revelation of the truth of life, into which 
 every one who had been here had, in his measure, struck his 
 roots before. It is simply " the truth, the same yesterday, 
 to-day and forever." And all instances of such a life only 
 corroborate the truth of the revelation. 
 We divide our subject into two parts : 
 
 I. The petition of the brethren. 
 IT. Joseph's forgiveness. 
 
 1. The petition was suggested by their own anticipations 
 of vengeance. No\v whence came these anticipations ? I 
 reply, from their own hearts. Under similar circumstances 
 they would have acted so, and they took for granted that Jo- 
 seph would. We suspect according to our nature, we look 
 on others as we feel. Suspicion proves character, so does 
 faith. We believe and suspect as we are. But unless there 
 had been safety for them in Joseph's heart, a guaranty in the 
 nobleness of Joseph's nature, their abject humiliation would 
 have saved them nothing. Little they knew the power of 
 hate, the sweetness of revenge, if they fancied that a grudge 
 treasured up so many years would be foregone on the very 
 verge of accomplishment for the sake of any satisfaction, 
 prayer, apology. 
 
 Now the error of Joseph's brethren is our error towards 
 God. Like them, we impute to God our own vindictive feel- 
 ings, and, like them, we pray a prayer which is in itself an in- 
 sult or absurd. We think that sin is an injury, a personal 
 affront, instead of a contradiction of our own nature, a de- 
 parture from the Divine harmony, a disfigurement of what 
 is good. Consequently we expect that God resents it. Our 
 vindictive feelings we impute to God : we would revenge, 
 therefore we think He would. And then in this spirit, " For- 
 give us," means, " Forego thy vengeance. Do not retaliate. 
 I have injured Thee ; but lo ! I apologize, I lie in the dust. 
 Bear no malice, indulge no rancor, O God !" This is the 
 heathen prayer which we often offer up to God. And just 
 as it must have been unavailing in Joseph's case except there 
 were safety in Joseph's character, so must it be useless in 
 ours unless in God's nature there be a guaranty which we 
 think our prayers create. Think you that God, if revenge- 
 ful, can be bought off by prayer, by rolling in the dust, by 
 unmanly cries, by coaxing, or flattery ? God's forgiveness is 
 the regeneration of our nature. God can not avert the coi> 
 sequences of our sin. 
 
748 Joseph's Forgiveness of his Brethren. 
 
 We must get rid of these heathen ideas of God. God'a 
 forgiveness is properly our regeneration. You can not by 
 prayer buy off God's vindictiveness ; for God is not vin- 
 dictiveness, but love. You can not by prayer avert the 
 consequences of sin, for the consequences are boundless, 
 inseparable from the act. Nor is there in time or eternity 
 any thing that can sever the connection. If you think that 
 you can sin, and then by cries avert the consequences of 
 sin, you insult God's character. You can only redeem the 
 past by alteration of the present. By faith in God's love, 
 by communion with His Spirit, you may redeem yourself; 
 but you can not win the love of God by entreaty unless that 
 love be yours already yours, that is, when you claim it. 
 
 2. Next, observe the petition was caused by their father's 
 insisting on their asking pardon. 
 
 He recognized the duty of apology. For Jacob knew 
 that Joseph bore no malice. Not to change Joseph, but to 
 fulfill their obligations, he gave the charge that required sat- 
 isfaction. We know how false conceptions are of satisfac- 
 tion : in the language of the old duel, to give satisfaction 
 meant to give one who had been injured by you an opportu- 
 nity of taking your life. In the language of semi-heathen 
 Christianity, to satisfy God means to give God an equivalent 
 in blood for an insult offered. No wonder that with such 
 conceptions the duty of apology is hard almost impossible. 
 W"e can not say, " I have erred," because it gives a triumph. 
 Now the true view of satisfaction is this to satisfy, not re- 
 venge, but the law of right. The sacrifice of Christ satisfied 
 God, because it exhibited that which alone can satisfy Him, 
 the entire surrender of humanity. The satisfaction of an 
 apology is doing the right satisfying doing all that can be 
 done. 
 
 It may be our lot to be in Jacob's circumstances : we may 
 be arbiters in a dispute, or seconds in a quarrel. And remem- 
 ber, to satisfy in this sense is not to get for your friend all 
 his vindictiveness requires, or to make him give as little as 
 the other demands, but to see that he does all that should of 
 right be done. 
 
 His honor ! Yes ; but you can not satisfy his honor by 
 glutting his revenge, only by making him do right. And if 
 he has erred or injured, in no possible way can you repair his 
 honor or heal his shame except by demanding that he shall 
 make full acknowledgment. " I have erred" it is very hard 
 to say ; but because it is hard it is therefore manly. You are 
 too proud to apologize, because it will give your adversary an 
 advantage? But remember, the advantage is already given 
 
Joseph's Forgiveness of his Brethren. 749 
 
 to him by the wrong that you have done, and every hour 
 that you delay acknowledgment you retain your inferiority ; 
 you diminish the difference and your inferiority so soon as 
 you dare to say, " I did wrong ; forgive me." 
 
 3. Plea as servant of the same God (ver. 17). Forgive- 
 ness is not merely a moral but a religious duty. Now re- 
 member this was an argument which was only available in 
 behalf of the Jews. It could not have been pleaded for an 
 Egyptian. Joseph might have been asked to forgive on 
 grounds of humanity ; but not by the sanctions of religion, 
 if an Egyptian had offended him. For an Egyptian did 
 not serve the God of his fathers. 
 
 How shall we apply that ? According to the spirit in 
 which we do, we may petrify it into a maxim narrower than 
 Judaism, or enlarge it into Christianity. If by " servants 
 of the God of our fathers," we mean our own sect, party, 
 church, and that we must forgive them, narrow indeed is the 
 principle we have learnt from this passage. But Judaism 
 was to preserve truth Christianity to expand it. Christian- 
 ity says, just as Judaism did, "Forgive the servants of the 
 God." Its pleas are, " Forgive : for he is thy fellow-servant. 
 Seventy times seven times forgive thy brother" But it ex- 
 pands that word "brother" beyond what the law ever 
 dreamed of God is the Father of man. If there be a soul 
 for which Christ did not die, then that man you are not, on 
 Judaistic principles, bound to forgive. If there be one whom 
 the love of God does not embrace in the Gospel family, then 
 for that one this plea is unavailing. But if God be the 
 Father of the race, and if Christ died for all ; if the word 
 "neighbor" means even an .alien and a heretic; then this 
 plea, narrowed by the law to his nation, expands for us to all. 
 Because the servant of our Maker and the child of our Father, 
 therefore he must be forgiven, let him be whosoever he may. 
 
 II. Let us consider, in .the second place, Joseph's forgive- 
 ness. 
 
 1. Joseph's forgiveness was shown by his renunciation of 
 the office of avenger " Am I in the place of God ?" Now 
 this we may make to convey a Christian or a heathen sense, 
 as we read it. It might read we often do read it we often 
 say it thus : " I will not avenge, because God will. If God 
 did not, I would. But certain that He will do it, I can wait, 
 and I will wait, long years ; I will watch the reverses of for- 
 tune ; I will mark the progress of disease ; I will observe the 
 error, failing, grief, loss ; and I will exult and say, ' I knew it, 
 but my hand was not on him; God has revenged me better 
 
75 Joseph's Forgiveness of his Brethren. 
 
 than I could myself.' ' This is the cold-blooded, fearful feel 
 ing that is sometimes concealed under Christian forgiveness. 
 Do not try to escape the charge. That feeling your heart 
 and mine have felt, when we thought we were forgiving, and 
 were praised for it. That w r as not Joseph's meaning. Read 
 it thus : " If God does not, dare I avenge ? ' Am I in the 
 place of God ?' Dare I 
 
 " ' Snatch from His hand the balance and the rod, 
 Rejudge His justice, be the God of God ?' " 
 
 So speaks St. Paul, " Vengeance is mine." Therefore wait, 
 sit still, and see God's wrath ? No ! " Therefore, if thine en- 
 emy hunger, feed him ; if he thirst, give him drink." This is 
 the Christian revenge. 
 
 I say not that there is no such thing as the duty of re- 
 dressing wrongs, especially those of others. There is a keen 
 sense of w r rong, a mighty demand of the heart for justice, 
 which can not be put aside. And he who can not feel indig- 
 nation against wrong can not, in a manly way, forgive injury. 
 But I say, the only revenge w r hich is essentially Christian is 
 that of retaliating by forgiveness. And he who has ever 
 tasted that Godlike feeling of forbearance when insulted ; 
 of speaking w r ell of one who has slandered him (pleasure all 
 the more exquisite if the slanderer does not know it) ; of 
 doing service in requital of an injury; he, and only he, can 
 know how it is possible for our frail humanity, by abnegating 
 the place of God the Avenger, to occupy the place of God 
 the Absolver. 
 
 2. Joseph forgave, or facilitated forgiveness, by observing 
 the good results of what had seemed so cruel (ver. 20). 
 Good out of evil that is the strange history of this world, 
 whenever we learn God's character. No thanks to you. 
 Your sin dishonored you, though it will honor God. By our 
 intentions, and not by the results, are our actions judged. 
 Remember this tenaciously : forgiveness becomes less diffi- 
 cult, your worst enemy becomes your best friend, if you trans- 
 mute his evil by good. No one can really permanently in- 
 jure us but ourselves. No one can dishonor us : Joseph was 
 immured in a dungeon. They spat on Christ. Did that sully 
 the purity of the one, or lower the Divine dignity of the 
 other? 
 
 3. He forgot the injury. He spake kindly to them, com- 
 forted them, and bade them fear not. An English proverb 
 has joined forgiving and forgetting. No forgiveness is com- 
 plete which does not join forgetfulness. You forgive only so 
 far as you forget. But here we must explain, else we get 
 
Joseph's Forgiveness of his Brethren. 751 
 
 into the common habit of using words without meaning. 
 To forget, literally, is not a matter of volition. You can by 
 will remember you can not by an act of will forget you 
 can not give yourself a bad memory if you have a good one. 
 In that sense, to forget is a foolish way of talking. And 
 indeed to forget in ihe sense of oblivion would not be truly 
 forgiving ; for if we forgive only while we do not recollect, 
 who shall insure that with recollection hate shall not return ? 
 
 More than that. In the parable of the forgiving debtor, 
 you remember his sin in this sense was not forgotten. Fresh 
 sin waked up all the past. He was forgiven ; then he was 
 reminded of the past debt, and cast into prison. Not for his 
 new offense, but for his old debt, was he delivered to the 
 tormentors it was not forgotten. But the true Christian 
 forgiveness, as here in Joseph's example, is unconditional. 
 Observe he did not hold his brethren in suspense; he did 
 not put them on their good behavior; he did not say, "I 
 hold this threat over you if you do it again." That is for- 
 giving and not forgetting. But that was a frank, full, free 
 remission consoling them trying to make them forget 
 neither by look or word showing memory, unless the fault 
 had been repeated. It was unconditional, with no reserve 
 behind. That was forgiving and forgetting. 
 
 To conclude. Forgiveness is the work of a long life to 
 learn. This was at the close of Joseph's life. He would not 
 have forgiven them in youth not when the smart was fresh 
 ere he saw the good resulting from his suffering. But 
 years, experience, trial, had softened Joseph's soul. A dun- 
 geon and a government had taught him much; also his fa- 
 ther's recent death. Do not think that any formula will 
 teach this. No mere maxims got by heart about forgiveness 
 of injuries no texts perpetually on the tongue will do this 
 God alone can teach it : By experience ; by a sense of human 
 frailty ; by a perception of " the soul of goodness in things 
 evil ;" by a cheerful trust in human nature ; by a strong sense 
 of God's love ; by long and disciplined realization of the aton- 
 ing love of Christ : only thus can we get that free, manly, 
 large, princely spirit which the best and purest of all the pa- 
 triarchs, Joseph, exhibited in his matured manhood. 
 
752 A Thanksgiving Day. 
 
 xvni. 
 A THANKSGIVING DAY. 
 
 "Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said nnto him, BehoV), 
 &OU art made whole : sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. The 
 man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus, which had made hinj 
 whole." John v. 14, 15. 
 
 THE man to whom these words were spoken had been 
 lying, only a few days before, a helpless, hopeless sufferer 
 among the porches of Bethesda, together with a number of 
 others affected in a similar manner. By a singular, unex- 
 pected, and miraculous event, he was rescued from his calam- 
 ity, while the remainder were left to the mercies of public 
 charity, or to avail themselves of the mysterious spring of 
 Bethesda. 
 
 It was a time of festival in Jerusalem, the streets were 
 probably echoing with the voice of mirth and festivity, with 
 the sounds of them that kept holiday : but it was to this con- 
 gregation of the sick and the miserable that the Redeemer 
 bent his steps; it was what might have been expected from 
 the Son of Man "The whole need not a physician, but they 
 thr-t are sick." It was the office of the Man of Sorrows to 
 ooothe the wretched ; and of all the crowded scenes that day 
 enacting in the Holy City, the "great multitude of impotent 
 folk, of blind, halt, withered," found that their abode was the 
 most congenial atmosphere t<> the soul of the Redeemer. 
 
 And in all this we have but a miniature representation of 
 the world as it is now. Jerusalem contained within its walls, 
 within its proud battlements, and amidst its stately temples, 
 as much wretchedness and as much misery, separated only 
 by a thin partition from its abodes of luxury and state, as 
 our own metropolis does now. It is a miniature representa- 
 tion of the world in this, so full of outward show and of in- 
 ward wretchedness. It is a representation of the world we 
 live in, inasmuch as it is a place where selfishness prevails; 
 for there was affixed a certain condition to the healing of the 
 spring, that the man should be the first ; if he were not the 
 first, no miracle took place, and there was one more friend- 
 less wretch. 
 
 This man had no one to give him the little assistance re- 
 quired. For thirty-eight years he had been lingering here, 
 and there appeared to have been no visitor who would sup 
 
A Thanksgiving Day. 753 
 
 ply what was wanting of the ties of blood or relationship. 
 It is, I say, but a representation of what this world is, when 
 the love of God has not touched the heart of man. It is a 
 representation of the world, too, in this, that with suifering 
 there is frequently appointed the remedy. The remedy is 
 often found side by side with the pain it may relieve, if we 
 could but make use of it. It is so in both bodily and spirit- 
 ual maladies there is a remedial system, a pool of Bethesda, 
 everywhere springing up by the side of sin and suffering. 
 
 It is a representation of the world, also, that the presence 
 of the Son of Man should be felt rather in scenes of sorrow 
 than of joy. It is not in the day of high health and strength, 
 when our intellect is powerful, our memory vigorous, when 
 we feel strong in. our integrity and our courage, but when 
 our weakened powers have made us feel that we are " a 
 worm and no man ;" when our failing faculties convince iis 
 that, except for our connection with immortality, our minds 
 would be as nothing; when we feel temptation getting too 
 strong for us, and that we are on the brink of falling then 
 it is that we are taught there is a strength not our own, be- 
 yond any thing that we possess of our own. It is then that 
 the presence of the Son of Man is felt ; then is the day of our 
 merciful and mysterious deliverance. 
 
 And there is another resemblance to be noted. The Sa- 
 viour of the world went into the Bethesda porches, and out 
 of the great number of sufferers he selected one not because 
 of his superior righteousness, not for any merit on his part, 
 but for reasons hidden within His own Almighty Mind. So 
 it is in the world one is taken, another is left ; one nation 
 is sterile, another is fertile ; one is full of diseases from which 
 another is exempted ; one man is surrounded with luxuries 
 and comforts, another with every suffering which* flesh is heir 
 to. So much for the miniature of the world exhibited by 
 the pool of Bethesda. 
 
 Now in connection with this subject there are two branch- 
 es in which we will arrange our observations. 
 
 I. The cause of this man's disease. 
 II. The history of his gratitude. 
 
 I. Concerning the cause of his disease, we are not left in 
 any doubt, the Redeemer's own lips have told us what it was 
 " Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." So we 
 see there was a strange connection between this bodily mal- 
 ady and moral evil, a connection that would have startled all 
 around if it had been seen. No doubt the men of science, 
 versed in the healing art. would have found some cause for 
 
 32* 
 
754 A Thanksgiving Day. 
 
 his malady connected with the constitution of his bodily 
 frame ; but the Redeemer went beyond all this. Thirty- 
 eight years before, there had been some sin committed, pos- 
 sibly a small sin, in our eyes at least, of which the result had 
 been thirty-eight years of suffering ; and so the truth we 
 gather from this is, there is a connection between physical 
 and moral evil ; a connection, my Christian brethren, more 
 deep than any of us have been accustomed to believe in. 
 
 But most assuredly, many of the most painful forms of dis- 
 ease that come upon the body depend upon the nervous con- 
 stitution ; and the nervous system is connected inseparably 
 with the moral state more than men suppose. Often where 
 we have been disposed to refer the whole to external causes, 
 there has been something of moral disorder in the character 
 which makes that constitution exquisitely susceptible of suf- 
 fering and incapable of enjoyment. Every physician will 
 tell us that indulged passions will lead to a disturbed state 
 of body ; that want of self-control in various ways will end in 
 that wretched state when the light that falls on the eye inflicts 
 torture, the sounds that are heard in the ear are all discord, 
 and all this beautiful creation, so formed for delight, only 
 ministers to the sufferings of the diseased and disorganized 
 frame. Thus we see that external suffering is often connect- 
 ed with moral evil, but we must carefully guard and modify 
 this statement, for this is not universally the case ; and it is 
 clear this was the Saviour's opinion, for when the disciples 
 came to Him on another occasion asking whether the blind 
 man or his parents did sin, He answered that neither had 
 sinned, plainly showing that there was sometimes physical 
 suffering for which there was no moral cause. In that case 
 it was not for his own sin, or even that of others it baffled 
 all the investigations of man to explain it. 
 
 Now, we must remember this when we see cases of bodily 
 suffering : we must consider that there is a .great difference 
 between the two senses in which the word punishment is 
 used. It may be a penalty, it may be a chastisement : one 
 meaning of punishment is, that the law exacts a penalty if it 
 is broken notice having been given that a certain amount 
 of suffering would follow a certain course of action. All 
 the laws of God, in the physical world, in the moral world, 
 or in the political world, if broken, commonly entail a penal- 
 ty. Revolutions beset a nation, shaking its very founda- 
 tions, owing to some defects in the justice or wisdom of its 
 government, and we can not say that all this comes from the 
 dust, or springs out of the ground. There are causes in the 
 history of past events that will account for it. The philo- 
 
A Thanksgiving Day. 755 
 
 sophical historian of future years will show the results of. 
 some political mistake, continued perhaps for centuries, by 
 the rulers of this nation. So in the moral and in the physi- 
 cal world there are laws, as it were, that execute themselves. 
 If a man eat a deleterious herb, whether he does it willing- 
 ly or unconsciously, the penalty will fall on his body. If a 
 man touch the lightning-conductor, not knowing that the air 
 is charged with electricity, no holiness on his part will pre- 
 vent the deadly stroke. But there is another kind of law, 
 written in the hearts of men, and given to the conscience, 
 when the penalty is awarded as the result of moral trans- 
 gression, and then it becomes a chastisement, and the lan- 
 guage of Scripture then becomes the language of our hearts. 
 It is the rod of God that hath done all this. 
 
 There is another thing that we must bear in mind, that 
 there are certain evils which fall upon man over which he 
 can have no control. They come as the result of circum- 
 stances over which he has no power whatever. So, we read 
 in the Second book of Kings, the child of the Shunammite 
 went out amongst the reapers ; he was suddenly seized with 
 a deadly pain in his head, was taken to his mother, sate upon 
 her lap, and died at noon. A sunstroke had struck that 
 child ; but to say that from any fault of his he was selected 
 as the object of suffering, when the rest of the reapers were 
 spared, would be as unjust as to say that those upon whom 
 the Tower of Siloam fell were sinners above all the Gali- 
 leans. 
 
 Moreover, to understand this we must recollect that the 
 laws of God and the penalties of God are not miracles. If 
 the penalty comes as the consequence appointed by God 
 Himself, to follow certain sins, it is a natural punishment, but 
 if it comes with no connection, it is then an arbitrary punish- 
 ment. So, if a man educates a child ill, and he turns out a 
 bad man, there is the natural connection between the penalty 
 arid the guilt. But if a man, pursuing his journey, is struck 
 with lightning, there is no penalty there. Now, in the Old 
 Testament we find a natural punishment falling on Eli. He 
 allowed his children to grow up without correction, and the 
 contempt and scorn of the whole nation fell upon that family, 
 and the father actually died in consequence of the shock of 
 his children's misconduct. But if the father had died in bat- 
 tle, or by an accident, then it would have been unjust to say 
 that there was any connection between his misconduct and his 
 sudden death ; it would have been an arbitrary connection. 
 
 The punishments of God are generally not arbitrary : each 
 Jaw, as it were, inflicts its own penalty. It does not execute 
 
756 A Thanksgiving Day. 
 
 one that belongs to another. So, if the drunkard lead a life 
 of intoxication, the consequence will be a trembling hand 
 and a nervous frame ; but if he be drowned in the seas when 
 sailing in the storm, he is punished for having broken a natu- 
 ral law, not a moral law of God. Let us then bear in mind 
 that if the ship convey across the ocean the heavenly-mind- 
 >ed missionary and the scoffing infidel, if the working of the 
 vessel be attended to, and there is nothing unusual in the 
 winds and the waves, they will convey the one to his desti- 
 nation as safely as the other. 
 
 Now, the application we must make of all this is, if a man 
 perish when out on a sabbath-day, we have no right to say 
 that he dies because he has broken the sabbath. If famine 
 or pestilence visit the land, it may be explained by the in- 
 fringement of some of God's natural laws; the earth may 
 not be rightly cultivated, sanitary means have not been 
 taken to stop the pestilence ; but we have no right to say 
 that they come in consequence of political relations which 
 are not to our mind, or of regulations of policy of which we 
 disapprove. 
 
 There is one thing more. It is perfectly possible that 
 transgressions against the natural laws of God may, in the 
 end, become trespasses against His moral law, and then the 
 penalty becomes chastisement. The first man that drank the 
 fermented juice of the grape was perfectly innocent, even if 
 it caused intoxication ; but when he found how it affected 
 his brain, it became sin to him thenceforward. The first 
 time that a man enters into society which he finds hurtful 
 to his religious feelings, he may have done it innocently ; 
 but when he sees how it lowers the tone of his character, he 
 must mingle amongst them no more. So want of cleanli- 
 ness in some Alpine regions may result from ignorance of 
 the laws of nature ; but when, in more crowded populations, 
 it is ascertained that it is productive of disease, and injurious 
 to those around them, then the infraction of the natural law 
 is stigmatized as a higher degree of turpitude. That which 
 was a penalty becomes something more of chastisement from 
 the wrath of God. So it is that science goes on enlighten- 
 ing men more and more as to the laws of God's physical 
 world, and telling them what they must and what they must 
 net do, in order to lessen the amount of bodily suffering 
 around us. 
 
 My Christian brethren, we have spoken of these things at 
 some length, because all these considerations have been 
 brought into our view by that pestilence,* from which w 
 * The cholera. 
 
A Thanksgiving Day. 757 
 
 celebrate our deliverance this day ; partly the result of 
 causes over which man has no control, and partly the result 
 of the disregard of natural laws ; partly, also, from the pres- 
 ence of moral evil amongst us. That these three distinct 
 classes of causes have been present may be proved by trac- 
 ing its history. They who have made it their duty to trace 
 out its progress tell us that its origin was in 1818, in Bengal, 
 when it arose during the overflow of the River Ganges ; and 
 then, dividing into two streams of pestilence and death, it 
 passed through the world ; one going to the east, the other 
 to the west. The eastern current passed on till it reached 
 the shores of China ; the western moved slowly on with gi- 
 gantic tread, decimating nations as it went, cutting off nine 
 thousand of the British army ; and passing through Persia 
 and Arabia, it destroyed twelve thousand of the pilgrims to 
 Mecca, till it paused mysteriously and strangely on the very 
 verge of Europe as if the voice of God himself had said, 
 "There is danger near ; set thine house in order." By 1830 
 it had reached the metropolis of Russia. In 1831 it was 
 doing its dreadful work in our own capital, while eighteen 
 thousand fell in Paris alone ; and it then passed on, as a 
 winged messenger, across the ocean to America. 
 
 There was then a strange disappearance of the pestilence 
 for four or five years, till 1837, when it appeared first in the 
 southern parts of Europe, and gradually rolled its relentless 
 course onward to our shores. In all this you will perceive 
 something over which we have no control. It has pursued 
 its way not guided by moral evil or by physical causes, but 
 by some cause, explain it as you will as electricity, or any 
 other conjecture it is one that baffles every effort to stay 
 its progress. It has taken the same road, too, that it took 
 on its former visitation. The common food of man seems 
 changed into something poisonous, the very air is charged 
 with contagion ; every thing proclaims it as a visitation from 
 the Almighty. And in the very character of the disease 
 there is something that marks it out from all other diseases: 
 it has been truly said, that in its worst cases there is but one 
 symptom, and that one is death. A man is full of health 
 and strength, and in two hours he is gone. It is a disease 
 which in its best form is terrific. That being who just now 
 stood before you in perfect health, is in a moment a cold, 
 livid, convulsed mass of humanity, fighting with the foe 
 that threatens to overcome him. 
 
 But yet we find, in spite of all this, that in the progress of 
 this strange disease, great mistakes have been made by man. 
 From the circumstance of the poorer classes being the chief 
 
758 A Thanksgiving Day. 
 
 sufferers, they fancied that it was inflicted by the higher; 
 and, in some places they rose against them, accusing them of 
 poisoning the wells. And we find Christians so mistaken as 
 to look on all this suffering, not as the natural connection 
 between sin and its penalty, but as having some arbitrary 
 connection with the sin of others, from which they them- 
 selves and their own party are free. 
 
 But, in the next place, we find that it really has been 
 caused in some degree by the transgression of the laws of 
 nature ; for whatever may have been the secret origin of the 
 disease, whatever may be the mystery of its onward course, 
 still we know that there are certain conditions usually neces- 
 sary to make it destructive. So we find that in India it was 
 the natives who for the most part suffered, those whose con- 
 stitutions had less stamina than our own. And here we see 
 that debility produced by over-work, bad air, crowded dwell- 
 ings, have been the predisposing causes ; and this tells us, 
 if ever visitation could speak, that affliction cometh not out 
 of the dust, neither does sorrow spring from the ground. It 
 has no direct connection with moral character, except on pe- 
 culiar points. Place a worldly man and a holy man in tiie 
 same unfavorable circumstances for receiving the disorder, 
 and you will not find the one has any charm to escape the 
 fate of the other. 
 
 But we do find that this disease is increased and propa- 
 gated by human selfishness. We read of the crowds at 
 Bethesda, of whom it was said, there was no man to put 
 them into the water ; and so it is now. The poor, the helpless, 
 the neglected, have been the chief sufferers. Out of two hun- 
 dred and forty-three who in this place have suffered from that 
 and similar causes, one hundred and sixty-three were re- 
 ceiving parish relief. And in this there is something that 
 tells us not merely of ignorance, but of selfishness ; for when 
 commissioners went through the length and breadth of the 
 country to examine into the statistics of the disease, we were 
 met by the startling fact that medical science, that careful 
 nursing, could do nothing while our crowded graveyards, our 
 teeming and airless habitations, our worn-out and unhealthy 
 population, received and propagated the miasma ; and ev-ry 
 time that a man in the higher classes perished, it was as if 
 the poor neglected man had spoken from the grave ; or, as 
 if God himself had been heard to speak through him. He 
 seems to say, " I can prove to you now my relationship. 
 You can receive evil from me, if nothing else has ever passed 
 between us ; the same constitution, the same flesh and blood, 
 the same frame were once ours ; and if I can do it in no oth 
 
A Thanksgiving Day. 759 
 
 et way, I can prove, by infecting you, that I am your broth 
 er still." 
 
 Once more : it has been produced in a degree by moral 
 evil ; vice has been as often the predisposing cause as any 
 other external circumstance, in certain cases. I say in cer- 
 tain cases, not in all. A man might have been a blasphem- 
 er, or a slanderer, but neither of these sins would affect 
 him ; but those sins which are connected with the flesh, sen' 
 suality, drunkenness, gradually pervade the human frame, 
 and fit it for the reception of this disease. 
 
 II. But we will pass on to consider the history of this 
 man's recovery, and of his gratitude. The first cause for 
 gratitude was his selection. He alone was taken, and others 
 were left. He had cause for gratitude, also, in that he had 
 been taught the connection between moral evil and its pen- 
 alty. He had been taught the certainty of God's laws, how 
 they execute themselves, and, more blessed than all, he had 
 been taught that there was a Personal Superintendence over 
 all the children of men. The relief had come from the per- 
 sonal interposition of the Son of Man. He went and told the 
 Jews that it was Jesus who had done this. And this ex- 
 plains to us the meaning and the necessity of a public ac- 
 knowledgment of our gratitude. It is meant to show this 
 nation that it is not by chance, nor by the operation of 
 science, nor by the might of man, that we have been rescued, 
 but that our deliverance comes direct from God. 
 
 Let us observe the popular account (for John gives us the 
 popular account) of the angel troubling the water. It mat- 
 ters not whether it is scientifically to be proved or not, the 
 secret causes lie hid beyond our investigation ; but this you 
 can observe, that it was a religious act, that it was not done 
 by chance, that there were living agents in the healing pro- 
 cess. The man of science in the present day would tell you 
 what were the ingredients in the spring how it told on the 
 cellular tissue, or on the nervous fabric ; but whatever he 
 may make of it scientifically, it is true morally and relig- 
 iously ; for what is every remedy but the angel, the messen- 
 ger of God sent down from the Father of all mercy, the 
 Fountain of all goodness ? So when we celebrate a day of 
 national thanksgiving, it is but the nation's voice, arising in 
 acknowledgment of a Parent's protection that these things 
 come not by chance, but that there is personal superintend- 
 ence over this world, and this deliverance is the proof of a 
 Father's love. 
 
 Once more : a day of thanksgiving is meant to be a wan* 
 
760 A Thanksgiving Day. 
 
 ing and a reminder against future sins. " Sin no more, lest 
 a worse thing come unto thee." And it has ever been so, 
 that the result of panic has been reaction. After excitement 
 comes apathy ; after terror has been produced, by danger 
 especially, comes indifference, and therefore comes the warn- 
 ing voice from the Redeemer "Sin no more, lest a worse 
 thing come unto thee." 
 
 But we may perhaps say, "J!/// sin did not produce this 
 disease. It was no doing no fault of mine ; it came from 
 causes beyond my control. The pestilence now has wreaked 
 its vengeance ; I find I had nothing to do with it, and I may- 
 dismiss the subject from my mind." My brethren, let us 
 look into this a little more deeply. It was not directly your 
 sin that nailed your Redeemer to the cross, but the sin of 
 the cruel Pharisees, of the relentless multitude ; yet it is 
 said, "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." It 
 arises all from this circumstance, brethren there are two 
 worlds, a world of evil and a world of good. The Son of 
 Man came as the perfect and entire representation of the 
 kingdom of holiness. He came in collision with the world 
 of evil ; He died for sinners for the sins of others of all 
 who partake of the nature of moral evil : and therefore by 
 their sin they nailed the Redeemer to the cross. All those 
 who opposed themselves to Jesus would have opposed them- 
 selves to Moses, Zacharias, and Abel ; they allowed the deeds 
 of their fathers, and were partakers of the blood of all the 
 prophets that had been slain upon the earth. 
 
 The men who join in a crowd, aiding and abetting the 
 death of any individual, by the law of every country are 
 held guilty; and now, though there may have been no dis- 
 tinct act of selfishness by which any man has perished at 
 your hands; though there have been no distinct want of 
 care for the poor still I may fearlessly ask you all, Christian 
 brethren, does not your conscience tell you how little the 
 welfare and the comfort of others has been in your thoughts? 
 As far as we have taken a part in the world's selfishness ; as far 
 as we have lived for self and not for our neighbors ; as far 
 as we have forgotten the poor sufferers lying in the porches 
 af Bethesda not directly, but indirectly, all that has fallen 
 upon this land may have been sent as a chastisement to us. 
 
 And there is this to be explained " Sin no more ;" mean- 
 ing apparently, that if a man did not sin, nothing more 
 would happen. Are we to understand, then, that if a man 
 has been blameless he will never suffer from sorrow or sick- 
 ness? or that if a man will avoid sin, he will never be visit' 
 ed by death ? To have said that would have been to contra 
 
Christian Friendship. 761 
 
 diet the history of the Redeemer's own life and death. He 
 died, though He sinned not. How then, brethren, can we 
 understand it? Why, we can understand it but in this way, 
 by recalling to our memory what has been already said of 
 the difference between the punishment and the penalty. If 
 a man live a humble and holy life in Christ Jesus, there is no 
 promise that if plague visits his land it shall not come nigh 
 him. Live in purity, live in unselfishness; there is no 
 promise that you shall not be cut down in a day ; there is 
 nothing in religion that can shield you from what the world 
 calls trouble from penalty ; but there is this that which 
 would have been chastisement is changed into penalty. 
 
 The Redeemer suffered death as a penalty ; but by no 
 means as chastisement ; on the contrary, it was the richest 
 blessing which a Father's love could bestow upon His well- 
 beloved Son, in whom He was well pleased. So it will be 
 with every one of us. He who lives to God, rests in his Re- 
 deemer's love, and is trying to get rid of his old nature to 
 him every sorrow, every bereavement, every pain, will come 
 eharged with blessings, and death itself will be no longer the 
 king of terrors, but the messenger of grace, the very angel 
 of God descending on the troubled waters, and calling him 
 to his Father's home. 
 
 XIX. 
 CHRISTIAN FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 "Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the 
 Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before 
 him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name." 
 Mai. iii. 16. 
 
 THE first division of our subject is suggested by the word 
 " then." When ? They did thus in the times of Malachi. 
 It is only in reference to those times that we can extract the 
 true lesson from the conduct of the holy men whose behav- 
 ior he praises. We will consider 
 
 I. The times of Malachi. 
 II. The patience of the saints in evil times. 
 
 I. Not much is known of the Prophet Malachi, or his exact 
 date. We are sure, however, that he was the last prophet 
 of the old dispensation. He lived somewhere between the 
 restoration from captivity and the coming of Christ. 
 
762 Christian Friendship. 
 
 Thus much we know of those times from history : The 
 Jews were restored. From chap, iii., ver. 1 0, we learn that the 
 Temple had been rebuilt. But Israel's grandeur was gone, 
 although still enjoying outward prosperity. The nation had 
 sunk into a state of political degradation, and had become 
 successively subject to the Persians, Syrians, Romans. It is 
 precisely that political state in w r hich national virtues do not 
 thrive, and national decay is sure. * * * * 
 
 Italy Spain. 
 
 They had a glorious past. They had the enlightenment of 
 a present high civilization. But with this there was a want 
 of unity, manhood, and simple virtues. There was just suf- 
 ficient gallingness in the yoke to produce faction and sullen- 
 ness ; but not enough curtailment of all physical comforts 
 to rouse the nation as one man to reconquer freedom. It 
 was a state in which there was no visible Divine interfer- 
 ence. 
 
 Compare this period of Israel's history with all w r hich had 
 preceded it. These four hundred years belong to profane 
 history. The writings of that period are not reckoned in- 
 spired, so widely do they differ from the Scripture tone. 
 There were no prophets, no flood of light, " no open vision." 
 The Word of God was precious as in that time between the 
 death of Joshua and the calling of Samuel.* Except this soli 
 tary voice, prophecy had hushed her harp. 
 
 Now, what was given to Israel in that period ? 
 
 I reply, retrospect, pause, and prospect. 
 
 Retrospect, in the sublime past which God had given her 
 for her experience. " They have Moses and the prophets, let 
 them hear them." On them they were to live their nation's 
 sacred history ; God's guidance and faithfulness ; the sure 
 truth that obedience was best. 
 
 Prospect, in the expectation of better times. 
 
 Dim, vague hints of the Old Testament had pointed them 
 to a coming revelation a day in which God should be near- 
 er to them, in which society should be more pure. An ad- 
 vent, in short. 
 
 And between these two there was a, pause. 
 
 They were left by God to use the grace and knowledge al 
 ready given by Him. 
 
 Now this is parallel to God's usual modes of dealing. Foi 
 example, the pause of four hundred years in the land of 
 Egypt, between the bright days when Abraham talked with 
 God, and the deliverance by Moses. 
 
 The pause in Canaan when the Israelitish commonwealth 
 * Four hundred and thirty-one years. 
 
Christian Friendship. 763 
 
 was left, like a building, to settle down before being built 
 higher, between the times of Joshua and of Samuel. 
 
 The pause in the captivity, and now again a pause. 
 
 A pause after each revelation until the next. 
 
 So, in the natural world. Just as in summer there is a 
 gush of nature's forces and a shooting forth; and then the 
 long autumn and winter, in which is no growth, but an op- 
 portunity, taught by past experience, for the husbandman to 
 manure his ground, and sow his seed, and to wait for a new 
 outpouring of life upon the world. 
 
 And just as in human life, between its marked lessons 
 there is a pause, in which we live upon past experience 
 looking back and looking on. Experience and hope, that is 
 human life : as in youth,^ expecting manhood, and then look- 
 ing for future changes in our condition, character, so in all 
 God's revelation system there have been periods of " open 
 vision," and periods of pause waiting ; when men are left 
 to experience and hope. 
 
 It is in vain that we have studied God's Word if we do 
 not perceive that our own day and circumstances are parallel 
 with those of the prophet MalachL We live in the world's 
 fourth great pause. 
 
 Miracles have ceased. Prophecy is silent. The Son of 
 God is ascended. Apostles are no longer here to apply in- 
 fallible judgment to each new circumstance as it arises, as 
 St. Paul did to the state of the Corinthian Church. 
 
 But we are left to the great Gospel principles which have 
 been already given, and which are to be our food till the 
 next flood of God's Spirit, the next revelation that which 
 the Scripture calls " the second advent." 
 
 And the parallel holds in another respect. The Jews had 
 but undefined hints of that which was to be. Yet they knew 
 the general outlines and character of the coming time ; they 
 knew that it would be a searching time, it was to be the 
 " Refiner's " day ; they knew that He should turn the hearts 
 of the fathers to the children : and they knew that the mes- 
 senger age must be preceded by a falling back on simpler 
 life, and a return to first principles, as Malachi had predicted, 
 and as John the Baptist called them to. They knew that it 
 was an age in which the true sacrifice would be offered. 
 
 And so now we know not yet what shall be ; " but we 
 know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for 
 "ve shall see Him as he is." " And every man that hath this 
 nope in Him purifieth himself." 
 
 We know that it will be the union of the human race 
 they will be "onefold" , 
 
764 Christian Friendship. 
 
 This is the outline and character of the revelation ; and 
 we may work, at least, towards it. " Ye are not in darkness, 
 that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the 
 children of the light, and the children of the day." " Where- 
 fore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even 
 as also ye do." To strive after personal purity and attempt 
 at producing unity, that is our work. 
 
 We rest on that we have, and hope for that we see not. 
 And only for the glimpse that hope gives us of that, is life 
 worth having. 
 
 II. Let us consider the conduct of different classes in these 
 evil times. 
 
 1. Some lived recklessly. 
 
 Foremost among these were the priests, as has been al- 
 ways found in evil times. The riot of a priest is worse than 
 that of the laity. Mutual corruption. Against the priests 
 Malacbi's denunciations are chiefly directed. 
 
 He speaks of the profanation of the sacred places (chap. 
 i. 6, 7). Of sacrifice degraded (ver. 12, 13). Vice honored 
 (chap. ii. ] 7). In that they called good evil and evil good. 
 By these men belief in God was considered ridiculous. 
 
 And then it was that one of those glorious promises was 
 made, to be fulfilled in after-times. Malachi foresaw that 
 the Gentiles would take up the neglected service (chap. i. 10. 
 11), and the vision of a universal kingdom of God became 
 the comfort of the faithful few. 
 
 2. Others lived uselessly, because despondingly. 
 
 The languor and despair of their hearts is read in the 
 words (chap. iii. 14, 15); and indeed it is not surprising: to 
 what point could good men look with satisfaction ? The na- 
 tion was enslaved, and worse they had become slaves in 
 spirit. Their ancient purity was gone. The very priests 
 had become atheists. Where was the promise of His coming? 
 Such, too, is the question of these latter times. And our re- 
 ply is from past experience. 
 
 That dark day passed, and a glorious revelation dawned 
 on the world. From what has been, we justly infer what 
 will be. Promises fulfilled are a ground of hope for those 
 yet unfulfilled. Where is the promise now of holier times ? 
 Yes, but remember the question seemed to be just as unan- 
 answerable then; it was just as unanswerable in the days of 
 the Judges, and in the captivity in Egypt and in Babylon. 
 
 This "Scripture was written for our admonition, on whom 
 the ends of the world are come." Then the consolation of 
 St. Peter becomes intelligible, " We have a more sure word 
 
Christian Friendship. 765 
 
 of prophecy ; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as 
 unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, 
 and the day-star arise in your hearts." 
 
 3. But in these evil times there were a few who com- 
 pared with one another their hopes, and sought strength in 
 Christian communion and fellowship. Of them the text 
 speaks. 
 
 This communion of saints is twofold : it includes church 
 fellowship and personal friendships. 
 
 It is plain that from church fellowship they could gain lit- 
 tle in those days. Unity there was not, but only disunion. 
 Over that state Malachi lamented in that touching appeal 
 " Have we not all one Father ? hath not one God created us ? 
 why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, 
 by profaning the covenant of our fathers ?" Israel had for- 
 gotten that she was a family. 
 
 And it is true that in our day church fellowship is almost 
 only a name. The Christianity of the nation does not bind 
 us as individuals. Well does the Church ? Are there many 
 traces of a common feeling? When church privileges are 
 insisted on to produce unity, do they not produce division? 
 Are not these words of the prophet true of us ? Where are 
 the traces ot Christian brotherhood ? 
 
 Here in this town ? here in this congregation ? at the 
 holy supper which we join in to-day? Shall we meet to get 
 private good, or to feel we are partakers of the same Body 
 and the same Blood ? Therefore to insist on church union 
 as the remedy would be to miss the special meaning of this 
 verse. The malady of our disunion has gone too deep to be 
 cured by you or me. 
 
 We will consider it, therefore, in reference to Christian 
 friendship. We find that within the outward Jewish Church 
 there was an inner circle, knit together by closer bonds than 
 circumcision or the passover by a union of religious sym- 
 pathies. " Then they that feared the Lord spoke often one 
 to another:" they " thought upon His name." 
 
 Let us consider the blessing of Christian friendship. It 
 euch times it discharges a double office. 
 
 1. For the interchange of Christian hope and Christian 
 feeling. It is dreary to serve God alone ; it is desolate to 
 have no one in our own circle or family from whom we can 
 receive sympathy in our hopes. Hopes die. 
 
 2. It is a mighty instrument in guarding against tempta 
 tion. It is a safeguard, in the way of example, and also as a 
 standard of opinion. We should become tainted by the 
 world if it were not for Christian friends. 
 
766 Reconciliation by Christ. 
 
 In conclusion, cultivate familiar intimacy only with those 
 who love good and God. 
 
 Doubtless there are circumstances which determine inti- 
 macies, such as rank, station, similarity of tastes. But one 
 thing must be paramount to and modify them all com- 
 munion in God. Not in a sectarian spirit. We are not to 
 form ourselves into a party with those who think as we do, 
 and use the formulas that we do. But the spirit of the text 
 requires us to feel strongly that there is a mighty gulf be- 
 tween those who love and those who do not love God. To 
 the one class we owe civility, courtesy, kindness, even tender- 
 ness. It is only those who love the Lord who should find in 
 our hearts a home. 
 
 XX. 
 RECONCILIATION BY CHRIST. 
 
 "And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by 
 wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled." Col. i. 21. 
 
 THERE are two, and only two kinds of goodness possible : 
 the one is the goodness of those who have never erred ; the 
 other is the goodness of those who, having erred, have been 
 recovered from their error. The first is the goodness of those 
 who have never offended ; the second is the goodness of those 
 who, having offended, have been reconciled. In the infinite 
 possibilities of God's universe, it may be that there are some 
 who have attained the first of these kinds of righteousness. 
 It may be that amongst the heavenly hierarchies there are 
 those who have kept their first estate, whose performances 
 have been commensurate with their aspirations, who have 
 never known the wretchedness, and misery, and degradation 
 of a Fall. But whether it be so or not is a matter of no* 
 practical importance to us. It may be a question specula- 
 tively interesting, but it is practically useless, for it is plain 
 that such righteousness never can be ours. The only religion 
 possible to man is the religion of penitence. The righteous- 
 ness of man can not be the integrity of the virgin citadel 
 which has never admitted the enemy ; it can never be more 
 than the integrity of the city which has been surprised and 
 roused, and which, having expelled the invader with blood 
 in the streets, has suffered great inward loss. 
 
 Appointed to these two kinds of righteousness there are 
 
Reconciliation by Christ. 767 
 
 two kinds of happiness. To the first is attached the blessing 
 of entire ignorance of the stain, pollution, and misery of guilt 
 a blessed happiness : but it may be that it is not the great- 
 est. To the happiness resulting from the other is added a 
 greater strength of emotion ; it may not have the calmness 
 and "peace of the first, but, perhaps, in point of intensity and 
 fullness it is superior. It may be that the highest happiness 
 can only be purchased through suffering : and the language 
 of the Bible almost seems to authorize us to say, that the 
 happiness of penitence is deeper and more blessed than the 
 happiness of the righteousness that has never fallen could 
 be. 
 
 There are two kinds of friendship that which has never 
 had a shock, and that which, after having been doubted, is 
 at last made sure. The happiness of this last is perhaps the 
 greater. Such ^eems to be the truth implied in the parable 
 of the prodigal son : in the robe, and the ring, and the fatted 
 calf, and the music, and dancing, and the rapture of a father's 
 embrace : and once more, in those words of our Redeemer, 
 " There is more joy among the angels of heaven over one 
 sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons 
 that need no repentance." All these seem to tell of the im- 
 measurable blessedness of penitence. Arid this, then, is oui- 
 subject the subject of reconciliation. 
 
 But the text divides itself into- two branches: 
 
 I. Estrangement. 
 II. Reconciliation. 
 
 Estrangement is thus described: "You that were some- 
 time" (that is, once) "alienated and enemies in your mind 
 by wicked works :" in which there are three things. The 
 first is the cause of the estrangement wicked works ; the 
 second is the twofold order ; and thirdly, the degree of that 
 estrangement; first of all, mere alienation, afterwards hostili- 
 ty, enmity. 
 
 And, first of all, we consider the cause of the estrange- 
 ment "wicked works." Wicked works are voluntary 
 deeds ; they are not involuntary, but voluntary wrong. 
 There is a vague way in which we sometimes speak of sin, 
 in which it is possible for us to lose the idea of its guilt, and 
 also to lose the idea of personal responsibility. We speak of 
 sin sometimes as if it were a foreign disease introduced into 
 the constitution : an imputed guilt arising from an action 
 not our own, but of our ancestors. It is never so that the 
 Bible speaks of sin. It speaks of it as wicked works, volun- 
 tary deeds,^ voluntary acts ; that you, a responsible individ- 
 
768 Reconciliation by Christ. 
 
 ual, have done acts which are wrong, of the mind, the hand, 
 the tongue. The infant is by no means God's enemy ; he 
 may become God's enemy, but it can only be by voluntary 
 action after conscience has been aroused. This our Master's 
 words teach, when He tells us, " Suffer little children to 
 come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." And 
 such again is the mystery of Christian baptism. It tells us 
 that the infant is not the' child of the devil, but the child of 
 God, the member of Christ, the heir of immortality. Sin, 
 then, is a voluntary action. If you close your ear to the 
 voice of God, if there be transgression of an inward law, if 
 you sacrifice the heart and intellect to the senses, if you let ease 
 or comfort be more dear to you than inward purity, if you 
 leave duties undone, and give the body rule over the spirit 
 then you sin ; for these aro voluntary acts, these are wicked 
 works. 
 
 The result of this is twofold. The first step is simply the 
 step of alienation. There is a difference between alienation 
 and hostility : in alienation we feel that God is our enemy j 
 in hostility we look on ourselves as enemies to God. Alien- 
 ation " you that were sometime alienated " was a more 
 forcible expression in the apostle's time than it can be to us 
 now. In our modern political society, the alien is almost on 
 a level with the citizen. The difference now is almost noth- 
 ing ; in those days it was very great. The alien from the 
 Jewish commonwealth had no right to worship with the 
 Jews, and he had no power to share in the religious advan- 
 tages of the Jews. The strength of .the feeling that was ex- 
 isting against the alien you will perceive in that proverbial 
 expression quoted by the Redeemer, " It is not meet to take 
 the children's bread, and cast it to the dogs" In the Roman 
 commonwealth, the word had a meaning almost stronger 
 than this. To be an alien from the Roman commonwealth 
 was to be separated from the authority and protection of 
 the Roman law, and to be subjected to a more severe and 
 degrading kind of penalty than that to which the Roman 
 citizen was subject* The lash that might scourge the back 
 of the alien offender might not fall on the back of a Roman 
 citizen ; and this it was that caused the magistrates of Phil- 
 ippi to tremble before their prisoners when the Apostle 
 Paul said, " They have beaten us openly, uncondemned, be- 
 ing Romans." The lash was the alien's portion. 
 
 On reference to the second chapter of the Ephesians we 
 find a conception given of alienation in the twelfth verse, 
 where the apostle, speaking of the Ephesian converts, says, 
 "That at that time ye were without Christ, bejng aliens 
 
Reconciliation by Christ. 7^9 
 
 from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the 
 covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in 
 the world." This, brethren, is alienation, exclusion to 
 have no place in this world, to be without lot or portion in 
 the universe, to feel God as your enemy, to be estranged 
 from Him, and banished from His presence : for the law of 
 God acts as its own executioner within our bosoms, and 
 there is no defying its sentence ; from it there can be no ap- 
 peal. 
 
 My Christian brethren, hell is not merely a thing here- 
 after, hell is a thing here ; hell is not a thing banished to 
 the far distance, it is ubiquitous as conscience. Wherever 
 there is a worm of undying remorse, the sense of having 
 done wrong, and a feeling of degradation, there is hell be- 
 gun. And now respecting this. These words, " banishment 
 from God," "alienation," though merely popular phrases, 
 are expressions of a deep truth it is true they are but pop- 
 ular expressions, for God is not wrath. You are not ab 
 solutely banished from God's presence. The Immutable 
 changes not. He does not become angry or passionate 
 whenever one of the eight hundred million inhabitants of 
 this world commits a sin. And yet you will observe there 
 is no other way in which we can express the truth but in 
 these popular words. Take the illustration furnished to us 
 last Sunday : it may be that it is the cloud and the mist that 
 obscure the sun from us : the sun is not changed in conse- 
 quence : it is a change in our atmosphere. But if the phi 
 losopher says to you, the sun in its splendor remains the 
 same in the infinite space above, it is only an optical delu- 
 sion which makes it appear lurid : to what purpose is that 
 difference to you? to you it is lurid, to you it is dark. If 
 you feel a darkness in your eye, coldness in your flesh, to 
 what purpose, so far as feeling is concerned, is it that philos- 
 ophy tells you the sun remains unchanged ? And if it be that 
 God in the heaven above remains love still, and that love 
 warms not your heart ; and that God is Light, in whom is 
 no darkness at all, yet He shines not in your heart ; my 
 Christian brethren, let metaphysics and philosophy say what 
 they will, these popular expressions are the true ones, after 
 all ; to you God is angry, from God you are banished, God's 
 countenance is alienated from you. 
 
 The second step of this estrangement reaches a higher de- 
 gree still ; it is not merely that God is angry, but that we 
 have become enemies to God. The illustration of the pro- 
 cess of this we have seen in our common everyday life. 
 
 It is sometimes the case that strength of attachment set- 
 
 33 
 
770 Reconciliation by Christ. 
 
 ties down to mere indifference, even changes to hatred. The 
 first quarrel between friends is a thing greatly to be dread- 
 ed ; it is often followed by the cessation of all correspond- 
 ence, the interruption of that intercourse which has gone on 
 so long. Well, a secret sense of self-blame and of wrong 
 will intrude, and the only way in which w r e can escape it is 
 by throwing the blame elsewhere. You see by degrees a 
 cankered spot begins, and you look at it and touch it, and 
 irritate it until the mortification becomes entire, and that 
 which was at first alienation settles down into absolute ani- 
 mosity. 
 
 And such is it in the history of the alienation of the soul 
 from God. The first step is to become indifferent, com- 
 munion is interrupted, irregularity is begun, sin by degrees 
 widens the breach, and then between the soul and God there 
 is a great gulf fixed. Observe by what different ways dif- 
 ferent classes of character arrive at that. Weak characters 
 have one way, and strong and bold characters have another. 
 The weak mind throws the blame on circumstances ; unable 
 itself to subdue its own passions, it imagines there is some law 
 in the universe that so ordains it ; insists that the blame is on 
 circumstances and destiny, and says, "If I am thus it is not 
 my fault ; if I am not to gratify my passions, why were they 
 given to me ? ' Why doth He find fault, for who hath re- 
 sisted His will?' " And so. these weak ones become by de- 
 grees fatalists ; and it would seem, by their language, as if 
 they were rather the patient victims of a cruel fate, the 
 blame belonging not to them, but to God. 
 
 The way in which stronger and more vicious characters 
 arrive at this enmity is different. Humiliation degrades, 
 and degradation produces anger; you have but to go into 
 the narrow and crowded streets of the most degraded por- 
 tions of our metropolis, and there you will see the outcast 
 turning Avith a look of defiance and hatred on respectability, 
 merely because it is respectable : and this, brethren, many 
 of us have seen, some of us have felt, in our relation towards 
 God. That terrible demon voice stirs up within us, " Curse 
 God and die." Haunted by furies, we stand, as it were, at 
 bay, and dare to bid defiance to our Maker. Nothing so 
 proves the original majesty of man as this terrible fact, that 
 the creature can bid defiance to the Creator, and that man 
 has it in him to become the enemy of God. 
 
 We pass on, in the next place, to consider the doctrine of 
 reconciliation. We need scarcely define what is meant by 
 reconciliation. To reconcile is to produce harmony where 
 there was discord, unity where before there was variance. 
 
Reconciliation by Christ. 771 
 
 We accept the apostle's definition of reconciliation. He saya 
 that " Christ hath made of twain one new man, so making 
 peace." Now the reconciliation produced by Christ's atone- 
 ment is fourfold : 
 
 In the first place, Christ hath reconciled man to God, 
 
 In the second place, He hath reconciled man to man. 
 
 In the third place, He hath reconciled man to himsell 
 
 And in the fourth place, He hath reconciled man to duty. 
 
 In the first place, the atonement of the Redeemer has rec- 
 onciled man to God, and that by a twofold step : by exhibit- 
 ing the character of God ; and by that exhibition changing 
 the character of man. 
 
 Brethren, the sacrifice of Christ was the voice of God pro- 
 claiming love. In this passage the apostle tells us that 
 " Christ has reconciled us to God in the body of His flesh 
 through death." We will not attempt to define what that 
 sacrifice was we will not philosophize upon it ; for the 
 more we philosophize the less we shall understand it. We 
 are well content to take it as the highest exhibition and the 
 noblest specimen of the law of our humanity that great 
 law, that there is no true blessedness without suffering, that 
 every blessing we have comes through vicarious suffering. 
 All that we have and enjoy comes from others' suffering. 
 The life we enjoy is the result of maternal agony; our very 
 bread is only obtained after the toil and anguish of suffering 
 myriads ; there is not one atom of the knowledge we possess 
 now which has not, in some century of the w r orld or other, 
 been wrung out of Nature's secrets by the sweat of the brow 
 or the sweat of the heart. The very peace which we are en- 
 joying at this present day, how has that been purchased ? 
 By the blood of heroes whose bodies are now lying moulder- 
 ing in the trenches of a thousand battle-fields. 
 
 This is the law of our humanity, and to this our Redeemer 
 became subject the law of life, self-surrender, without which 
 reconciliation was impossible. And when the mind has com- 
 prehended this, that the sacrifice of Christ was the manifesta- 
 tion of the love of God, then comes the happy and blessed 
 feeling of reconciliation. When a man has surrendered hi in- 
 self in humbleness and penitence to God, and the proud spirit 
 of self-excuse has passed aw r ay : when the soul has opened 
 itself to all His influences and known their power : when the 
 saddest and bitterest part of suffering is felt no longer as 
 the wrath of the Judge but as the discipline of a Father : 
 when the love of God has melted the soul, and fused it into 
 charity : then the soul is reconciled to God, and God is 
 reconciled to the soul : for it is a marvellous thing how tha 
 
/7 2 Reconciliation by Christ. 
 
 change of feelings within us changes God to us, or rather 
 those circumstances and things by which God becomes visi- 
 ble to us. His universe, once so dark, becomes bright : life, 
 once a mere dull, dreary thing, " dry as summer dust," 
 springs up once more into fresh luxuriance, and we feel it to 
 be a divine and blessed thing. 
 
 We hear the voice of God as it was once heard in the 
 warden of Eden whispering among the leaves : every sound, 
 once so discordant, becomes music, the anthem of creation 
 raised up, as it were, with everlasting hallelujahs to the 
 eternal throne. Then it is that a man first knows his im- 
 mortality, and the soul knows what is meant by infinitude 
 and eternity ; not that infinitude which can be measured by 
 miles, nor that eternity which can be computed by hours ; 
 but the eternity of emotion. Let a man breathe but one 
 hour of the charity of God, and feel but one true emotion of 
 the reconciled heart, and then he knows forever what is 
 meant by immortality, and he can understand the reality of 
 his own. 
 
 The second consequence of the Redeemer's atonement is 
 the reconciliation of man to man. Of all the apostles, none 
 have perceived so strongly as St. Paul that the death of 
 Christ is the reconciliation of man to man. Take that one 
 single expression in the Epistle to the Ephesians " For He 
 is our peace who hath made both one." Observe, I pray 
 you, the imagery with which he continues, " and hath broken 
 down the middle wall of partition." The veil or partition 
 wall between the court of the Jew and Gentile was broken 
 asunder at the crucifixion. St. Paul saw in the death of 
 Christ a spiritual resemblance to that physical phenomenon. 
 Christ was not only born of woman, but under the law ; and 
 He could not become, as such, the Saviour of the world ; but 
 when death had taken place, and He was no longer the Jew, 
 but the Man, no longer bound by limitations of time, and 
 place, and country, then He became, as it were, a Spirit in 
 the universe, no longer narrowed to place and to century, 
 but universal, the Saviour of the Gentile as well as the Mes- 
 siah of the Jew. 
 
 Therefore it was that St. Paul called the flesh of Christ a 
 veil, and said the death of Christ was the taking down of 
 "the middle wall of partition" between Jew and Gentile: 
 and therefore it is by the sacrifice of Christ, and by tha" 
 alone, man can be thus reconciled to man : and on no other 
 possible basis can there be a brotherhood of the human race. 
 You may try other ways: the men of the world have tried, 
 and doubtless will go on trying, until they find that there is 
 
Reconciliation by Christ. 773 
 
 no other way than this. They may try by the principle of 
 selfishness, the principle of moral rule, or the principle of 
 civil authority. Let the political economist come forward 
 with his principle of selfishness, and tell us that this is that 
 by which alone the wealth of nations can accrue. He may 
 get a nation in which there are a wealthy few and miserable 
 many, but not a brotherhood of Christians. Suppose you 
 say, men should love one another. Will that make them 
 love one another ? You may come forward with the crush- 
 ing rule of political authority. Papal Rome has tried it and 
 failed. She bound up the masses of the human race as a 
 gigantic iceberg ; but she could give only a temporary prin- 
 ciple of unity and cohesion. 
 
 Therefore we turn back once more to the cross of Christ : 
 through this alone we learn there is one God, one Father, 
 one baptism, one Elder Brother in whom all can be brothers. 
 But there is a something besides, a deeper principle still. 
 We are told in this passage we can be reconciled to man by 
 the body of Christ through death. And now, brethren, let 
 us understand this. By the cross of Christ the apostle 
 meant, reconciled by the spirit of the cross. And what was 
 that spirit ? It was the spirit of giving, and of suffering, and 
 of loving, because He had suffered. Say what we will, love 
 is not gratitude for favors which have been received. Why 
 is the child more beloved by the parent than the parent by 
 the child? Why did the Redeemer love His disciples more 
 than they loved their Master ? Benefits will not bind the 
 affection; you must not expect that they will. You must 
 suffer if you would love; you must remember that "it is 
 more blessed to give than to receive." The Apostle Paul 
 felt this when he said reconciliation was produced through 
 the body of the flesh of Christ by death. 
 
 Once more : man becomes by the Redeemer's atonement 
 reconciled to himself. 
 
 That self-reconciliation is necessary, because we do not 
 readily forgive ourselves. God may have forgiven us, but 
 we can not forgive ourselves. You may obtain a remission 
 of the past, but you can not forgive yourself and get back 
 the feeling of self-respect, unity within, rest, by sitting still 
 and believing tliat God has forgiven you, and that you have 
 nothing left to look for ? My brethren, there is a spirit of 
 self-torture within us which is but a perversion of nobleness, 
 a mistake of the true principle. When you have done 
 wrong, you want to suffer. Love demands a sacrifice, and 
 only by sacrifice can it reconcile itself to self. Then it is 
 that the sacrifice of Christ replies to this, answers it, satisfies 
 
774 Reconciliation by Christ. 
 
 it, and makes it plain. The sacrifice of Christ was suffering 
 in love, it was surrender to the will of God. The Apostle 
 Paul felt this : when that Spirit was with him he was recon- 
 ciled to himself. He says, "I am crucified with Christ, 
 nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." If 
 ever you devoted yourself to another's happiness or amelio- 
 ration, so far and so long as you were doing that you forgave 
 yourself; you felt the spirit of inward self-reconciliation ; and 
 what we want is only to make that perpetual, to make that 
 binding which we do by fits and starts, to feel ourselves a 
 living sacrifice, to know that we are, in our highest and best 
 state, victims, offered up in love on the great altar of the 
 kingdom of Christ, offered by Him to God as the first-fruits 
 of His sacrifice ; then we are reconciled to ourselves " by the 
 blood of His flesh through death." 
 
 And lastly, through the atonement of the Redeemer, man 
 becomes reconciled to duty. There is no discord more terri- 
 ble than that between man and duty. There are few of us 
 who fancy we have found our own places in this world ; onr 
 lives, our partnerships, our professions, and our trades, are not 
 those which we should have chosen for ourselves. There is 
 an ambition within us which sometimes makes us fancy we 
 are fit for higher things, that we are adapted for other and 
 better things than those to which we are called. But we 
 turn again to the cross of Christ, and the mystery of life be 
 comes plain. The life and death of Christ are the reconcilia- 
 tion of man to the duties which he has to do. You can not 
 study His marvellous life without perceiving that the whole 
 of its details are uncongenial, mean, trivial, wretched cir- 
 cumstances from which the spirit of a man revolts. 
 
 To bear the sneer of the Sadducee and the curse of the 
 Pharisee ; to be rejected by His family and friends ; to be 
 harassed by the petty disputes and miserable quarrels of His 
 followers about their own personal precedence ; to be treated 
 by the government of His country as a charlatan and a dema- 
 gogue ; to be surrounded by a crowd of men, coming and 
 going without sympathy ; to retire and find His leisure in- 
 truded on and Himself pursued for ignoble ends these were 
 the circumstances of the Redeemer's existence here. Yet in 
 these it was that the noblest life the world has ever seen was 
 lived. He retired into the wilderness, and one by one put 
 down all those visions that would have seduced Him from 
 the higher path of duty ; the vision of comfort which tempt- 
 ed Him to change the stones of this world into bread the 
 vision of ambition which tempted Him to make the king- 
 doms of this world His own by seeking good through evil; 
 
Reconciliation by Christ. 775. 
 
 the vision which tempted Him to distrust God, and become 
 important by pursuing some strange, unauthorized way of 
 His own, instead of following the way of submission to the 
 will of God. 
 
 He ascended into the transfiguration mount, and there His 
 Spirit converses with those of an elder dispensation, who had 
 fought the fight before Him, Moses and Elias, and they spoke 
 to Him of the triumph which He had to accomplish in death 
 at Jerusalem. And He went down again with calm, serene, 
 and transfigured faith, and there, at the very foot of the 
 mount, He found His disciples engaged in some miserable 
 squabble with the Scribes and the Pharisees about casting 
 out a devil. And this life of His is the only interpretation 
 of this life of ours the reconciliation of our hearts with what 
 we have to do. It is not by change of circumstances, but 
 by fitting our spirits to the circumstances in which God has 
 placed us, that we can be reconciled to life and duty. If the 
 duties before us be not noble, let us ennoble them by doing 
 them in a noble spirit ; we become reconciled to life if we 
 live in the Spirit of Him who reconciled the life of God with 
 the lowly duties of servants. 
 
 And now one word in conclusion. The central doctrine of 
 Christianity is the atonement. Take that away and you ob- 
 literate Christianity. If Christianity were merely the imita- 
 tion of Christ, why then the imitation of any other good man, 
 the Apostle Paul or John, might have become a kind of 
 Christianity. If Christianity were merely martyrdom for 
 truth, then, with the exception of a certain amount of degree, 
 I see no difference between the death of Socrates and the 
 death of Jesus Christ. But Christianity is more than this. 
 It is the At-one-ment of the Soul. It is a reconciliation which 
 the life and death of Christ have wrought out for this world 
 : the reconciliation of man to God, the reconciliation of man 
 to man, the reconciliation of man to self, and the reconcilia- 
 lion ol' Jnan jo duty. 
 
776 The Pre-eminence of Charity. 
 
 XXI. 
 THE PRE-EMINENCE OF CHARITY. 
 
 " And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves : for charitj 
 shall cover the multitude of sins." 1 Peter iv. 8. 
 
 THE grace of charity is exalted as the highest attainment 
 of the Christian life by St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John. 
 These three men were very different from each other. Each 
 was the type of a distinct order of character. And it is a 
 proof that the Gospel is from God, and that the sacred writ- 
 ings are inspired from a single Divine source, that personal 
 peculiarities are not placed foremost in them, but the fore- 
 most place is given by each to a grace which certainly was 
 not the characteristic quality of all the three. 
 
 It is said in these modern days that Christianity was a 
 system elaborated by human intellect. Men, they say, philos- 
 ophized and thought it out. Christianity, it is maintained, 
 like ethics, is the product of human reason. Now had this 
 been true, we should have found the great teachers of Chris- 
 tianity each exalting that particular quality which w r as most 
 remarkable in his ow r n temperament. Just as the English 
 honor truthfulness, and the French brilliancy, and the Hin- 
 doos subtlety, and the Italians finesse and naturally, be- 
 cause these are predominant in themselves we should have 
 found the apostles insisting most strongly on those graces 
 which grew most naturally in the soil of their own hearts. 
 
 Indeed, in a degree it is so. St. John's character was ten- 
 der, emotional and contemplative. Accordingly, his writings 
 exhibit the feeling of religion and the predominance of the 
 inner life over the outer. 
 
 St. Paul was a man of keen intellect, and of soaring and 
 aspiring thought which would endure no shackles on its free- 
 dom. And his writings are full of the two subjects we might 
 have expected from this temperament. He speaks a great 
 deal of intellectual gifts; very much of Christian liberty. 
 
 St. Peter was remarkable for personal courage. A soldier 
 by nature : frank, free, generous, irascible. In his writings, 
 accordingly, we find a great deal said about martyrdom. 
 
 But each of these men, so different from each other, exalts 
 love above his own peculiar quality. It is very remarkable. 
 Not merely does each call charity the highest, but each names 
 
The Pre-eminence of Charity. 77'; 
 
 it in immediate connection with his own characteristic virtue, 
 and declares it to be more Divine. 
 
 St. John, of course, calls love the heavenliest. That we 
 expect from St. John's character. "God is love. He that 
 dv/elleth in love dwelleth in God ;" " No man hath seen God 
 at any time : if we love one another God dwelleth in us." 
 
 But St. Paul expressly names it in contrast with the two 
 feelings for which he was personally most remarkable, and, 
 noble as they are, prefers it before them. First, in contrast 
 with intellectual gifts. Thus, "Covet earnestly the best 
 gifts : and yet show I unto you a more excellent way : 
 though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels, and 
 have not charity, it is nothing." Gifts are nothing in com- 
 parison of charity. Again, " We know that we all have 
 knowledge : knowledge puffeth up, but charity buildeth up." 
 Knowledge is nothing in comparison. 
 
 Next, in comparison of that liberty which was so dear to 
 him. Christian liberty permitted the converts the use of 
 meats, and the disregard of days from which the strict law 
 of Judaism had debarred them. Well, but there were cases 
 in which the exercise of that liberty might hurt the scruples 
 of some weak Christian brother, or lead him to imitate the 
 example against his conscience. "If thy brother be grieved 
 with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably" Liberty 
 said, You have a right to indulge ; but Charity said, Refrain. 
 
 So that, according to St. Paul, there is one thing, and one 
 only, to which Christian liberty must be sacrificed. That 
 one is Christian love. 
 
 Now let us see how St. Peter does honor to the same 
 grace, at the expense of that which we should have expected 
 him to reckon the essential grace of manhood. Just before 
 the text, we find the command, " Be sober, and watch unto 
 prayer." This is a sentence out of St. Peter's very heart. 
 For in it we have prayer represented as the night-watch of a 
 warrior, armed, who must not sleep his watch away. " Be 
 sober, and watch" the language of the soldier and the sen- 
 tinel ; words which remind you of him who drew his sword to 
 defend his Master, and who in penitence remembered his own 
 disastrous sleep w^hen he was surprised as a sentry at his 
 post. But immediately after this "And, above all things, 
 have fervent charity amongst yourselves." Sobriety, self- 
 rule, manhood, courage, yes ; but the life of them all, says 
 St. Peter, the very crown of manhood, without which sobriety 
 is but prudent selfishness, and courage is but brute instinct 
 is love. 
 
 Now I take that unanimity as a proof that the Gospel cornea 
 
 33* 
 
778 The Pre-eminence of Charity. 
 
 from one Living Source. How came St. Peter and St. John, 
 so different from each other, and St. Paul, who had had 
 almost no communion with either of them, to agree, and 
 agree so enthusiastically, in this doctrine love is over all 
 and above all; above intellect, freedom, courage unless 
 there had streamed into the mind and heart of each one of 
 them light from One Source, even from Him the deepest prin- 
 ciple of whose being, and the law of whose life and death, 
 were love ? 
 
 We are to try, to-day, to understand this sentence of 
 St. Peter. It tells us two things 
 
 I. What charity is. 
 II. What charity does. 
 
 I. It is not easy to find one word in any language which 
 rightly and adequately represents what Christ and His apos- 
 tles meant by charity. All words are saturated with some im- 
 perfect meaning. Charity has become identified with alms- 
 giving. Love is appropriated to one particular form of hu- 
 man affection, and that one with which self and passion mix 
 inevitably. Philanthropy is a word too cold and negative. 
 
 Let us define Christian charity in two sentences: 1. The 
 desire to give. 2. The desire to bless. 
 
 ]. The desire to give. Let each man go deep into his own 
 heart. Let him ask what that mysterious longing means 
 which we call love, whether to man or God, when he has 
 stripped from it all that is outside and accidental ; when he 
 has taken from it all that is mixed with it and perverts it. 
 Not in his worst moments but in his best, what did that 
 yearning mean ? I say it meant the desire to give. Not to 
 get something, but to give something. And the mightier, the 
 more irrepressible this yearning was, the more truly was his 
 love love. To give whether alms in the shape of money, 
 bread, or a cup of cold water, or else self. But be sure, 
 sacrifice, in some shape or other, is the impulse of love, and 
 its restlessness is only satisfied and only gets relief in giving. 
 For this, in truth, is God's own love, tha w T ill and the power to 
 give. " It is more blessed to give than to receive." There- 
 fore God is the only blessed One, because He alone gives and 
 never receives. The universe, teeming with life, is but God's 
 love expressing itself. He creates life by the giving of Him- 
 self. He has redeemed the world by the giving of His Son. 
 " God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten 
 Son." The death of Christ was sacrifice. The life of God ia 
 one perpetual sacrifice, or giving of Himself and shedding 
 forth of His Spirit. iClse it would not be love. 
 
The Pre-eminence of Charity. 779 
 
 And so, when the poor sinful woman gave her costly oint- 
 ment with a large profuseness, Christ saw in it an evidence 
 of love. " She loved much." For love gives. 
 
 2. The desire to bless. All love is this in a degree. Even 
 weak and spurious love desires happiness of some kind for 
 the creature that it loves. Almsgiving is often nothing 
 more than indolence. We give to the beggar in the street, 
 to save ourselves the trouble of finding out fitter objects. 
 Still, indolent as it is, it is an indolent desire to prevent pain. 
 
 What we call philanthropy is often calm and cool too 
 calm and cool to waste upon it the name of charity. But it 
 is a calm and cool desire that human happiness were possi- 
 ble. It is, in its weak way, a desire to bless. -Now, the love 
 whereof the Bible speaks, and of which we have but one 
 perfect personification viz., in the life of Christ is the desire 
 for the best and true blessedness of the being loved. It 
 wishes the well-being of the whole man body, soul, and 
 spirit ; but chiefly spirit. 
 
 Therefore, He fed the poor with bread. Therefore, He 
 took His disciples into the wilderness to rest when they were 
 weary. Therefore, " He gave Himself for us, that we, being 
 dead unto sin, might live unto righteousness." For the king- 
 dom of God is not bread only and repose, which constitute 
 physical happiness, but goodness, too ; for that is blessed- 
 ness. 
 
 And the highest love is, therefore, the desire to make men 
 good and Godlike ; it may wish, as a subordinate attainment, 
 to turn this earth into a paradise of comfort by mechanical 
 inventions ; but far above that, to transform into a kingdom 
 of God, the domain of love, where men cease to quarrel and 
 to envy, and to slander and to retaliate. " This, also, we 
 wish," said St. Paul, " even your perfection." 
 
 Concerning this charity we remark two points.: 1. It is 
 characterized as fervent. 2. It is capable of being cultivated. 
 
 1. "Fervent." Literally intense, unremitting, unwearied. 
 Now, there is a feeble sentiment which wishes well to all so 
 long as it is not tempted to wish them ill, which does well to 
 those who do well to them. But this, being merely senti 
 rnent, will not last. Ruffle it and it becomes vindictive. In 
 contrast with that, St. Peter calls Christ's spirit, which loves, 
 those who hate it, " fervent " charity, which does not tire, 
 and can not be worn out ; which loves its enemies, and does 
 good to them that hate it. For Christian love is not the 
 dream of a philosopher, sitting in his study, and benevolent- 
 ly wishing the world were better than it is, congratulating 
 himself, perhaps, all the time on the superiority shown by 
 
780 The Pre-eminence of Charity. 
 
 himself over other less amiable natures. Injure one of these 
 beaming sons of good-humor, and he bears malice : deep, un- 
 relenting, refusing to forgive. But give us the man who, in 
 stead of retiring to some small, select society, or rather as- 
 sociation, where his own opinions shall be reflected, can mix 
 with men where his sympathies are unmet, and his tastes 
 .are jarred, and his views traversed, at every turn, and s'till 
 'can be just, and gentle, and forbearing. 
 
 ' Give us the man who can be insulted and not retaliate ; 
 meet rudeness and still be courteous; the man who, like the 
 Apostle Paul, buffeted and disliked, can yet be generous, 
 and make allowances, and say, "I will very gladly spend and 
 be spent for you, though the more abundantly I love you, 
 the less I be loved." That is " fervent charity." 
 
 2. Again, it is capable of being cultivated. We assume 
 that, simply because it is enjoined. When an apostle says, 
 "Save fervent charity among yourselves," it is plain that it 
 would be a cruel mockery to command men to attain it if 
 they could do nothing towards the attainment. It would be 
 the same insult as saying to the deformed, "be beautiful." 
 For it is wanton cruelty to command where obedience is im- 
 possible. 
 
 How shall w r e cultivate this charity ? 
 
 Now, I observe first, love can not be produced by a direct 
 action of the soul upon itself. You can not love by a resolve 
 to love. That is as impossible as it is to move a boat by 
 pressing it from within. * The force with which you press on 
 is exactly equal to that with which you press back. The re- 
 action is exactly equal to the action. You force backward 
 exactly as much as you force on. There are religious per- 
 sons who, when they feel their affections cooled, strive to 
 warm them by self-reproach, or by unnatural effort, or by the 
 excitement of what they call revivals trying to work them- 
 selves into a state of warm affection. There are others who 
 hope to make feeble love strong by using strong words. 
 Now, for all this they pay a price. Effort of heart is fol- 
 lowed by collapse. Excitement is followed by exhaustion. 
 They will find that they have cooled exactly in that propor- 
 tion in which they warmed, and at least as fast. 
 
 It is as impossible for a man to work himself into a state 
 of genuine fervent love as it is for a man to inspire himself. 
 Inspiration is a breath and a life coming from without. 
 Love is a feeling roused not from ourselves, but from some- 
 thing outside ourselves. There are, however, tw r o methods 
 by which we may cultivate this charity. 
 
 1. By doing acts which love demands. It is God'? mer- 
 
The Pre-eminence of Charity. 78 1 
 
 ciful law that feelings are increased by acts done on princi- 
 ple. If a man has not the feeling in its warmth, let him not 
 wait till the feeling comes. Let him act with such feeling 
 as he has ; with a cold heart if he has not got a warm one ; 
 it will grow warmer while he acts. You may love a man 
 merely because you have, done him benefits, and so become 
 interested in him, till interest passes into anxiety, and anx- 
 iety into affection. You may acquire courtesy of feeling at 
 last, by cultivating courteous manner. The dignified polite- 
 ness of the last century forced man into a kind of unselfish- 
 ness in small things, which the abrupter manners of to-day 
 will never teach. And say what men will of rude sincerity, 
 those old men of urbane manners were kinder at heart with 
 real good will, than we are with that rude bluffness which 
 counts it a loss of independence to be courteous to any one. 
 Gentleness of manner had some influence on gentleness of 
 heart. 
 
 So, in the same way, it is in things spiritual. If our hearts 
 are cold, and we find it hard to love God and be affectionate 
 to man, we must begin with duty. Duty is not Christian 
 liberty, but is the first step toward liberty. We are free 
 only when we love what we are to do, and those to whom 
 we do it. Let a man begin in earnest with I ought he 
 will end, by God's grace, if he persevere, with the free bless- 
 edness of I will. Let him force himself to abound in small 
 offices of kindliness, attention, affectionateness, and all those 
 for God's sake. By-and-by he will feel them become the 
 habit of his soul. By-and-by, walking in the conscientious- 
 ness of refusing to retaliate when he feels tempted, he will 
 cease to wish it : doing good and heaping kindness on those 
 who injure him, he will learn to love them. For he has 
 spent a treasure there : "And where the treasure is, there 
 will the heart be also." 
 
 2. The second way of cultivating Christian love is by con- 
 templating the love of God. You can not move the boat 
 from within ; but you may obtain a purchase from without. 
 You can not create love in the soul by force from within it- 
 self- but you may move it from a point outside itself. God's 
 love is the point from which to move the soul. Love begets 
 love, Love believed in, produces a return of love : we can 
 not love because we must. " Must " kills love ; but the 
 law of our nature is that we love in reply to love. No one 
 ever yet hated one whom he believed to love him truly. 
 We may be provoked by the pertinacity of an affection 
 which asks what we can not give ; but we can not hate the 
 true love which does not ask but gives. Now this ifl ths 
 
782 The Pre-eminence of Charity. 
 
 central truth of Christ's Gospel : " We love Him because H 
 first loved us ;" " Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought 
 also to love one another ;" " God is love." 
 
 It is the one, almost only" struggle of religious life, to be- 
 lieve this. In spite of all the seeming cruelties of this 
 life ; in spite of the clouded mystery in which God has 
 shrouded Himself; in spite of pain and the stern aspect 
 of human life, and the gathering of thicker darkness and 
 more solemn silence round the soul as life goes on, simply to 
 believe that God is love, and to hold fast to that, as a man 
 holds on to a rock with a desperate grip when the salt surf 
 and the driving waves sweep over him and take the breath 
 away I say that is the one fight of Christian life, compared 
 with which all else is easy: when we believe that, human af- 
 fections are easy. It is easy to be generous, and tolerant, 
 and benevolent, when we are sure of the heart of God, and 
 when the little love of this life, and its coldnesses, and its un- 
 returned affections, are more than made up to us by the cer- 
 tainty that our Father's love is ours. But when we lose 
 sight of that, though but for a moment, the heart sours, and 
 men seem no longer worth" the loving : and wrongs are mag- 
 nified, and injuries can not be forgiven, and life itself drags 
 on, a mere death in life. A man may doubt any thing and 
 every thing, and still be blessed, provided only he holds fast 
 to that conviction. Let all drift from him like sea-weed on 
 life's ocean. So long as he reposes on the assurance of the 
 eternal faithfulness of the Eternal Charity, his spirit at least 
 can not drift. There are moments, I humbly think, when we 
 understand those triumphant words of St. Paul, "Let God be 
 true, and every man a liar." 
 
 II. What charity does. 
 
 It covereth a multitude of sins. 
 
 Xow the only question is, whose sins does chanty cover? 
 Is it that the sins of the charitable man are covered by his 
 charity in God's sight ? Or is it the sins of others over 
 which charity throws a mantle so as not to see them ? 
 
 Some wise and good men have said the first. Love oblit- 
 erates sin in the sight of God ; and assuredly it might be 
 this that St. Peter meant. No doubt whole years of folly 
 we outlive " in His unerring sight, who measures life by 
 love." Recollect our Master's own words "Her sins, which 
 are many, are forgiven her : for she loved much." 
 
 Nevertheless, that does not seem to be the meaning of 
 this passage. A large number of deep thinkers have been 
 convinced^that St. Peter is here describing Christianity, and 
 
The Pre-eminence of Charity. 783 
 
 the description which he gives of it as most characteristic is, 
 that it hides out of sight, and refuses to contemplate, a mul- 
 titude of sins which malevolence would delight to see. It 
 throws a veil over them and covers them. At all events, 
 this is true of Christian charity : and we shall consider the 
 passage in that sense to-day. 
 
 There are three ways, at least, in which love covers sin. 
 
 1. In refusing to see small faults. Every man has his 
 faults, his failings, peculiarities, eccentricities. Every one of 
 us finds himself crossed by such failings of others, from hour 
 to hour. And if he were to resent them all, or even notice 
 all, life would be intolerable. If for every outburst of hasty 
 temper, and for every rudeness that wounds us in our daily 
 path, we were to demand an apology, require an explanation, 
 or resent it by retaliation, daily intercourse would be impos- 
 sible. The very science of social life consists in that gliding 
 tact which avoids contact with the sharp angularities of 
 character, which does not argue about such things, does not 
 seek to adjust or cure them all, but covers them, as if it did 
 not see. 
 
 Exceedingly wise was that conduct of the Roman pro 
 consul at Corinth which we read of in the Acts. The Jews, 
 with Sosthenes at their head, had brought a charge of heresy 
 against the Christians, and tried it at the Roman law. Gal 
 lio perceived that it was a vexatious one, and dismissed it ; 
 drove them from the judgment-seat. Whereupon the Greeks, 
 indignant at the paltry virulence of the accusation, took Sos- 
 thenes, in his way from the judgment-seat, and beat him even 
 in Gallio's presence. It is written, " Gallic cared for none of 
 these things." He took no notice. He would not see. It 
 was doubtless illegal and tumultuous, a kind of contempt of 
 court a great offense in Roman law. But Gallic preferred 
 permitting a wholesome outburst of healthy indignation, to 
 carrying out the law in its letter. For he knew that in that 
 popular riot human nature was throwing off an incubus. It 
 was a kind of irregular justice, excusable because of its 
 provocation. And so Gallio would not see. He covered the 
 transgression in a wise and willful blindness. 
 
 That which the Roman magistrate did from wise policy, 
 the Christian spirit does in a diviner way. It throws over 
 such things a cloak of love. It knows when it is wise not to 
 see. That microscopic distinctness in which all faults ap- 
 pear to captious men, who are forever blaming, dissecting, 
 complaining, disappears in the large, calm gaze of love. 
 And oh ! it is this spirit which our Christian society lacks, 
 and which we shall never get till we begin each one with his 
 
784 Tlie Pre-eminence of Charity. 
 
 own heart. What we want is, in one word, that graceful 
 tact and Christian art which can bear and forbear. 
 
 That was a rude, " unpardonable " insult offered by Pe- 
 ter to his Master w T hen he denied Him. In His hour of trial, 
 he refused to seem even to know Him. We should have said) 
 I will never forget that. The Divine charity covered all. 
 Ask ye how ? " Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me ? Feed 
 my sheep." 
 
 2. Love covers sin by making large allowances. In all 
 evil there is a " soul of goodness." Most evil is perverted 
 good. For instance, extravagance is generosity carried to 
 excess. Revenge is sometimes a sense of justice which has 
 put no restraint upon itself. Woman's worst fault is per- 
 verted self-sacrifice. Incaution comes from innocence. Now 
 there are some men who see all the evil, and never trace, 
 never give themselves the trouble of suspecting the root of 
 goodness out of which it sprung. There are others who love 
 to go deep down, and see why a man came to do wrong, 
 and whether there was not some excuse, or some redeeming 
 cause : in order that they may be just. Just, as " God is 
 just, and the just ifier of him that believeth in Jesus." 
 
 Not as the passage is sometimes quoted just, and yet the 
 justifier ; as if there were some difficulty in reconciling God's 
 justice and God's mercy : but just and the justitier, just and 
 therefore the justitier. Merciful because just. 
 
 Now human life, as it presents itself to these two different 
 eyes, the eye of one who sees only evil, and that of him who 
 sees evil as perverted good, is two different things. Take 
 an instance. Not many years ago, a gifted English writer 
 presented us with a history of ancient Christianity. To his 
 eye the early Church presented one great idea, almost only 
 one. He saw corruption written everywhere. In the his- 
 tory of the ascetics, of the nuns, of the hermits, of the early 
 bishops, he saw nothing noble, nothing aspiring. Every- 
 where the one dark spectacle of the Man of Sin. In public 
 and in private life, in theology and practice, within and with- 
 out, everywhere pollution. Another historian, a foreigner, 
 has written the history of the same times, with an intellect 
 as piercing to discover the very first germ of error, but with 
 a calm, large heart, which saw the good out of which the er- 
 ror sprung, and loved to dwell upon it, delighting to trace 
 the lineaments of God, and discern His Spirit working where 
 another could see only the spirit of the devil. And you rise 
 from the two books with different views of the world ; from 
 the one, considering the world as a devil's world, corrupting 
 towards destruction; from the other, notwithstanding all, 
 
The Pre-eminence of Charity. 785 
 
 feeling triumphantly that it is God's world, and that His 
 Spirit works gloriously below it all. You rise from the study 
 with different feelings : from the one, inclined to despise your 
 species ; from the other, able joyfully to understand in part 
 why God so loved the world, and what there is in man to 
 love, and what there is, even in the lost, to seek and save. 
 
 Now that is the " charity which covereth a multitude of 
 sins." 
 
 It understands by sympathy. It is that glorious nature 
 which has affinity with good under all forms, and loves to 
 find it, to believe in it, and to see it. And therefore such 
 men God's rare and best ones learn to make allowances ; 
 not from weak sentiment, which calls wrong right, but from 
 that heavenly charity which sees right lying at the root of 
 wrong. So the Apostle Paul learned to be candid even to- 
 wards himself. " I obtained mercy, because I did it igno- 
 rantly, in unbelief." His very bigotry and persecuting spirit 
 could be justified by God, and by men who see like God. It 
 was wrong, very wrong ; he did not palliate it ; he felt that it 
 had made him " the chief of sinners," but he discerned that his 
 had been zeal directed wrongly not hate, but inverted love. 
 
 So too, over the dark grave of Saul the suicide, the love 
 of friendship could shed one ray of hope. He who remem- 
 bered of Saul only his nobler nature and his earlier days, 
 when his desolate character was less ambiguous the man 
 after God's own heart whose love refused to part with the 
 conviction that that light which was from God was not 
 quenched forever, though it had set in clouds and thick dark- 
 ness dared to say, "Saul and Jonathan were lovely in their 
 lives, and in their deaths they were not divided." Would 
 you or I have dared to hope over a grave like Saul's? So, 
 too, over the grave of the prophet whose last act was disobe- 
 dience, love still dared to hope, and the surviving prophet 
 remembered only that he had shared the gift of prophecy 
 with himself. "Alas, my brother /" A sinner, who had died 
 in sin, but as our own burial service nobly dares to say, in 
 the hope of intense charity, " To rest in Thee, as our hope w 
 this our brother doth." And so, lastly, in the blackest guilt 
 the earth has seen in memory of which we, in our Christian 
 sharity, after eighteen hundred years, brand the descendant 
 Tews with a curse, which is only slowly disappearing from 
 our minds there was one Eye which could discern a ground 
 on which to make allowance, "Father, forgive them; for they 
 know not what they do." 
 
 Let us dismiss from our minds one false suspicion. The 
 man who can be most charitable is not the man who is mm- 
 
786 The Pre-eminence of Charity. 
 
 self most lax. Deep knowledge of human nature tells us \\ 
 is exactly the reverse. He who shows the rough and thorn) 1 
 road to heaven is he who treads the primrose path himself. 
 Be sure that it is the severe and pitiless judge and censor of 
 others 1 faults on whom, at a venture, you may most safely fix 
 the charge, " Thou art the man !" I know not why, but un- 
 relenting severity proves guilt rather than innocence. How 
 much purity was proved by David's sentence of an imagin- 
 ary criminal to death ? How much by the desire of those 
 Pharisees to stone the woman taken in adultery ? Convicted 
 by their own consciences, they went out one by one; yet 
 they had longed to stone her. No : be sure you must be 
 free from sin in proportion as you would judge with the al- 
 lowance and the charity of Christ Jesus. " Tempted in all 
 points, yet without sin." " Wherefore also, He is a merciful 
 High-priest." 
 
 3. Lastly, charity can tolerate even intolerance. Let no 
 man think that he can be tolerant or charitable as a matter 
 of self-indulgence. For real charity and real toleration he 
 must pay a price. So long as they are merely negative so 
 long as they mean only the permission to every one to think 
 his own thoughts and go his own way the world will bear 
 them. But so soon as charity becomes action, and toleration 
 becomes earnest, basing themselves on a principle, even this 
 the conviction that at the root of many an error there lies 
 a truth, and within much evil a central heart of goodness, 
 and below unwise and even opposite forms, the same essen- 
 tial meaning so soon charity and toleration exasperate the 
 world secular, or so-called religious. 
 
 For instance, if, with St. Paul, you affirm, " He that ob- 
 eerveth the day, observeth it to the Lord ; and he that ob- 
 serveth not the day, to the Lord he observeth it not," toler- 
 ating both the observance and the non-observance, when you 
 perceive the desire of doing God's will existing in both, you 
 can not avoid the charge of being careless about the question 
 of the sanctities of a day of rest. Or if, with St. Paul, you say 
 of some superstitious idolatry, that men ignorantly worship 
 God in it, their worship being true, their form false you can 
 not avoid the stigma of seeming for the time to be tending 
 to that idolatry. Or if, with the Son of God, you recognize 
 ihe enthusiasm of nature, which passion had led astray in de 
 vious paths, you can not escape the imputation of being " a 
 friend of publicans and sinners." This is the price which a 
 man must pay for charity. His Master could not escape the 
 price, nor can he. 
 
 And then comes the last and most difficult lesson of love 
 
T/ie Unjiist Steward. 787 
 
 to make allowances even for the uncharitable. For surely 
 below all that uncharitableness Avhich is so common, there is 
 often a germ of the life of love ; and beneath that intoler- 
 ance, which may often wound ourselves, a loving and a can 
 did eye may discern zeal for God. Therefore St. Paul saw 
 even in the Jews, his bitterest foes, that " they had a zeal for 
 God, but not "according to knowledge." And therefore St. 
 Stephen prayed, with his last breath, " Lord, lay not this sin 
 to their charge." Earth has not a spectacle more glorious 
 or more fair to show than this love tolerating intolerance ; 
 charity covering, as with a veil, even the sin of the lack of 
 charity. 
 
 XXII. 
 THE UNJUST STEWARD. 
 
 " And the lord commended the unjust steward because he had done wisely : 
 for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children 
 of light. And I say unto you, 'Make to yourselves friends of the mammon 
 of unrighteousness ; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting 
 habitations." Lukexvi. 8, 9. 
 
 THERE is at first sight a difficulty in the interpretation 
 of this parable ; apparently there is a commendation of evil 
 by Christ. We see a bad man is held up for Christian imita- 
 tion. Now let us read the parable. 
 
 "And He said also unto his disciples, There was a certain 
 rich man, which had a steward; and the same was accused 
 unto him that he had wasted his goods. And he called him, 
 and said unto him, How is it that I hear this of thee ? give 
 an account of thy stewardship ; for thou mayest be no longer 
 steward. Then the steward said within himself, What shall 
 I do? for my lord taketh away from me the stewardship : I 
 can not dig ; to beg I am ashamed. I am resolved what to 
 do, that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may re- 
 ceive me into their houses. So he called every one of his 
 lord's debtors unto him, and said unto the first, How much 
 owest thou unto my lord? And he said, A hundred meas 
 ures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and sit 
 down quickly, and write fifty. Then said he to another, And 
 how much owest thou? And he said, A hundred measures 
 of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and write 
 fourscore. And the lord commended the unjust steward be- 
 cause he had done wisely : for the children of this world are 
 in their generation wiser than the children of light." 
 
788 The Unjust Steward. 
 
 The difficulty we have spoken of passes away when we 
 have learned to distinguish the essential aim of the parable 
 from its ornament or drapery. There is in every parable the 
 main scope, and the ornament or drapery. Sometimes, if we 
 press too closely the drapery in which the aim and intention 
 of the parable is clothed, we get quite the contrary of our 
 Redeemer's meaning. For example, in the parable of the un- 
 just judge there is the similarity, that both God and the un- 
 just judge yield to importunate prayer ; but there is this 
 difference, that the judge does it from weariness, and God 
 from love. The judge grants the widow's request, lest, he 
 says, " by her continual coining she. weary me ;" and God 
 answers the petitions of His people from, love : and encour- 
 ages earnestness and sincerity in prayer because it brings 
 nan nearer to Him, elevating and ennobling him, while it 
 makes him feel his entire dependence on God. 
 
 So here in this parable : it is the lord it is not Christ, but 
 the master who commended the unjust steward. And he 
 did so, not because he had acted honorably, faithfully, grate- 
 fully, but because he had acted wisely. He takes the single 
 point of prudence, foresight, forecast. 
 
 Let us consider the possibility of detaching a single quali- 
 ty from a character, and viewing it separately. 
 
 So do we speak in everyday life. We quote a passage ad- 
 miringly, from an infidel writer for example, Gibbon ; but 
 thereby we do not approve his infidelity. We may admire 
 the manly bearing of a prisoner in the dock or on the scaffold, 
 while we reprobate the crime which brought him there. We 
 may speak enthusiastically of a great philosopher ; we do not 
 therefore say he is a great man, or a good man. Perhaps we 
 are charmed by a tale of successful robbery ; we wonder at 
 its ingenuity, its contrivance, feel even a kind of respect for 
 the man who could so contrive it : but no man who thus re- 
 lates it is understood to recommend felony. We admire the 
 dexterity of a juggler as dexterity. 
 
 So it was with "this parable of Christ. He fastened on a 
 single point, excluding all other considerations. The man 
 had planned, he had seen difficulties, overcome them, marked 
 out his path, held to it steadily, crowned himself with suc- 
 cess. So far he is an example. The way in which he used 
 his power of forecasting may have been bad ; but forecast it- 
 self is good. Our subject to-day includes : 
 
 I. The wisdom of this world. 
 II. The pattern of Christian consistency. 
 
 I The wisdom of this world. There are three classes 
 
The Unjust Steward. 789 
 
 of men. Those who believe that one thing is needful, and 
 choose the better part, who believe in and live for eternity ; 
 these are not mentioned here : those who believe in the 
 world and live for it ; and those who believe in eternity, and 
 half live for the world. 
 
 Forethought for self made the steward ask himself, "What 
 shall I do ?" Here is the thoughtful, contriving, sagacious 
 man of the world. In the affairs of this world, the man who 
 does not provide for self, if he enter into competition with 
 the world on the world's principles, soon finds himself thrust 
 aside ; he will be put out. It becomes necessary to jostle 
 and struggle in the great crowd if he would thrive. With 
 him it is not, first the kingdom of God ; but first, what he 
 shall eat, and what he shall drink, and wherewithal shall he 
 be clothed. 
 
 Note the kind of superiority in this character that is com- 
 mended. There are certain qualities which really do elevate 
 a man in the scale of being. He who pursues a plan steadi- 
 ly is higher than he who lives by the hour. You can not but 
 respect such a one. The value of self-command and self-de- 
 nial is exemplified in the cases of the diplomatist who mas- 
 ters his features while listening ; the man of pleasure who is 
 prudent in his pleasures ; the man of the world w r ho keeps his 
 temper and guards his lips. How often, after speaking hastily 
 the thought which was uppermost, and feeling the cheek 
 burn, you have looked back in admiration on some one who 
 held his tongue even though under great provocation to speak. 
 
 Look at some hard-headed, hard-hearted man, with a front 
 of brass, carrying out his worldly schemes with a settled plan, 
 and a perseverance which you perforce must admire. There 
 may be nothing very exalted in his aim, but there is some- 
 thing very marvellous in the enduring, patient, steady pur- 
 suit of his object. 
 
 You see energies of the highest order are brought into play. 
 It is not a being of mean powers that the world has beguiled, 
 but a mind far-reaching, vast ; throwing immortal powers on 
 things of time; on a scheme, perhaps, which breaks up like a 
 cloud-phantom or melts like an ice-palace. 
 
 It is a marvellous spectacle a man reaching forward to se- 
 cure a habitation, a home, that will last. A man counting his 
 freehold more his own than the pension for life : sagacious, 
 meeting with entire success : the success which always attends 
 consistency in any pursuit. If a tradesman resolve to save 
 and be frugal, barring accidents, he will realize a competency 
 or a fortune. If you make it your business to please, you 
 will be welcome in society. So we find it in this parable, 
 
790 The Unjust Steward. 
 
 This man, one of the world, contrived to secure for himself fi 
 home. And the children of this world are consistent, and 
 force the world to yield them a home. It is no use saying 
 the people of the world are not happy. 
 
 I shall now endeavor to explain this parable. The term 
 " steward " is not to be taken exactly in its modern meaning. 
 The tenants paid their rents, not in money, but in kind, that 
 is, in produce, and the rent was a certain proportion of the 
 crop, and would therefore vary according to the harvest. 
 Say, for illustration, the landlord here called " the lord " 
 received as rent the tenth part of the crop ; then, if the 
 produce of an olive-yard was a thousand measures of oil, 
 " the lord " was entitled to a hundred measures. And sim- 
 ilavly in the case of an arable farm, a rent of a hundred meas- 
 ures of wheat would represent a crop of a thousand measures. 
 According to the parable, it appears that it depended on the 
 good faith of the tenant to state truly the amount gathered 
 in ; and against false returns the chief check was provided in 
 the steward. If he acquiesced in the deception, there was 
 generally no detection or check. We read in this case he 
 permitted the bill to be taken, and an account given, in the 
 one instance of eight hundred, in the other, of five hundred 
 instead of a thousand measures. Thus he got gratitude from 
 the tenants, who considered him a benevolent man, and count- 
 ed his expulsion an injustice. We have here a specimen of 
 the world's benevolence and the world's gratitude. Let us 
 do the world justice. Gratitude is given profusely. Help 
 a man to build his fortune, and you will win gratitude. 
 
 The steward got commendation from his lord for his world- 
 ly wisdom. Such is the wisdom of this world wise in its 
 contriving selfishness; wise in its masterly superiority; wise 
 in its adaptation of means to ends ; wise in its entire success. 
 
 But the success is only in their generation, ana their wis- 
 dom is only for their generation. If this world be all, it is 
 wise to contrive for it and live for it. But if not, then con- 
 sider the word is, " Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be 
 required of thee ; then whose shall those things be that thou 
 bast gotten ?" 
 
 II. In contrast with the wisdom of the children of this 
 world, the Redeemer shows the inconsistencies of the chil- 
 dren of light. "The children of this world are wiser in their 
 generation than the children of light." 
 
 This is evidently not true of all. There have been men 
 who have given their bodies to be burned for the truth's sake ; 
 men who have freely sacrificed this present world for the 
 
The Unjust Steward. 791 
 
 next. To say that the wisest of the sons of this world is half 
 as wise as they, were an insult to the sanctifying Spirit. 
 
 But " children of light " is a wide term. There is a dif- 
 ference between life and light. To have light is to perceive 
 truth and know duly. To have life is to be able to live out 
 truth and to perform duty. Many a man has clear light who 
 has not taken hold of life. Many a man is the child of light 
 who does not walk as the child of life. 
 
 So far as a man feels that eternity is long, time short, so 
 far he is a child of light. So far as he believes the body noth- 
 ing in comparison with the soul, the present in comparison 
 with the future ; so far as he has felt the power of sin, and 
 the sanctifying power of the death of Christ ; so far as he 
 comprehends the character of God as exhibited in Jesus 
 Christ he is a child of light. 
 
 Now the accusation is, that in his generation he does not 
 walk so wisely as the child of the world does in his. The 
 children of the world believe that this world is of vast im- 
 portance. They are consistent with their belief, and live for 
 it. Out of it they manage to extract happiness. In it they 
 contrive to find a home. 
 
 To be a child of light implies duty as well as privilege. 
 It is not enough to have the light, if we do not " walk in the 
 light." " If we say we have fellowship with Him, and walk 
 in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth." . 
 
 And to hold high principles and live on low ones is Chris- 
 tian inconsistency. We are all more or less inconsistent. 
 There is no man whose practice is not worse than Ins pro- 
 fession. No one who does not live below his own standard. 
 But absolute inconsistency is, when a man's life, taken as a 
 whole, is in opposition tc his acknowledged views and prin- 
 ciples. If a man say that 'it is more blessed to give than to 
 receive," and is forever receiving, scarcely ever giving, he is 
 inconsistent. If he profess that to please God is the only 
 thing worth living for, and his plans, and aims, and contriv- 
 ances are all to please men, he is wise for the generation of 
 the children of the world ; for the generation of the " chil- 
 dren of light" he is not wise. See, then, the contrast. 
 
 The wisdom of the steward consisted in forecasting. He 
 felt that his time was short, and he lost not a moment. 
 Every time he crossed a field it was with the feeling, This is 
 no longer mine. Every time he left his house he felt, I shall 
 soon leave it to come back no more. Every time he went 
 into a tenant's cottage he felt, The present is all that may be 
 given me to make use of this opportunity. Therefore, he 
 Bays with dispatch, "Take thy bi)! 3 and write down," 
 
79- The Unjust Steward. 
 
 Now the want of Christian wisdom consists in this, that 
 our stewardship is drawing to a close, and no provision if 
 made for an eternal future. We are all stewards. Every 
 day, every age of life, every year, gives us superintendence 
 over something which we have to use, and the use of which 
 tells for good or evil on eternity. 
 
 Childhood and manhood pass. The day passes : and, as its 
 close draws near, the Master's voice is heard "Thou mayest 
 be no longer steward." And what are all these outward 
 symbols but types and reminders of the darker, longer night 
 that is at hand? One by one, we are turned out of all oui 
 homes. The summons comes. The man lies down on his 
 bed for the last time; and then comes that awful moment, 
 the putting down the extinguisher on the light, and the grand 
 rush of darkness on the spirit. 
 
 Let us now consider our Saviour's application of this parable. 
 
 " And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the 
 mammon of unrighteousness ; that, when ye fail, they may 
 receive you into everlasting habitations. He that is faithful 
 in that which is least is faithful also in much : and he that is 
 unjust in the least is unjust also in much. If therefore ye 
 have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will 
 commit to your trust the true riches ? And if ye have not 
 been faithful in that which is another man's, who shall give 
 you that which is your own ?" 
 
 There are two expressions to be explained. 
 
 1. " Mammon of unrighteousness." Mammon is the name 
 of n Syrian god, who presided over wealth. Mammon of un- 
 righteous** ss means the god whom the unrighteous worship 
 wealth. 
 
 It is not necessarily gold. Any wealth ; wealth being 
 weal or well-being. Time, talents, opportunity, and author- 
 ity, all are wealth. Here the steward had influence. 
 
 It is called the mammon of unrighteousness, because it is 
 ordinarily used, not well, but ill. Power corrupts men. 
 Riches harden more than misfortune. 
 
 2. " Make friends of." This is an ambiguous expression. 
 Those who know it to be so scarcely are aware how widely 
 it is misunderstood. To make friends of, has, in English, two 
 meanings. To make friends of a man, in our idiom, is to con- 
 vert him into our ally. We meet with those .who imagine 
 that the command is to make riches our friends instead of 
 our enemies. 
 
 But the other meaning is " of," i. e., out of, by the use of, 
 to create friends in a word, to use these goods of time in 
 such a way as to secure eternal well-being. 
 
The Unjust Steward. 793 
 
 "Make to yourselves friends." I will explain "friends" 
 as a home. There may seem to be great legality in this in 
 junction. 
 
 Yet on this subject the words of Scripture are very strong. 
 " Sell that thou hast, and give unto the poor, and thou shalt 
 have treasure in heaven ;" "Provide yourselves bags that wax 
 not old ; a treasure in the heavens, that fadeth not away ;" 
 "Lay. up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither 
 moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break 
 through and steal." Do not be afraid of the expression. 
 Let itT stand in all its bold truthfulness. Goodness done in 
 Christ secures blessedness. A cup of cold water, given in 
 the name of Christ, shall not lose its reward. 
 
 Merit in these things there is none. Oh, the man who 
 knows the torment of an evil heart, and the man who is 
 striving to use his powers wisely, is not the man to talk of 
 merit in the sight of God. There is no truth more dear to 
 our hearts than this not by merit, but by grace, does heaven 
 become ours. 
 
 But let us put it in another way. Wise acts, holy and un- 
 selfish deeds, secure friends. Wherever the steward went 
 he found a friend. The acts of his beneficence were spread 
 over the whole of his master's estate. Go where he would, 
 he would receive a welcome. In this way our good actions 
 become our friends. 
 
 And if it be no dream which holy men have entertained, 
 that on this regenerated earth the risen spirits shall live 
 again in glorified bodies, then it were a thing of sublime an- 
 ticipation, to know that every spot hallowed by the recol- 
 lection of a deed done for Christ, contains a recollection 
 which would be a friend. Just as the patriarchs erected an 
 altar when they felt God to be near, till Palestine became 
 dotted with these memorials, so would earth be marked by a 
 good man's life with those holiest of all friends, the remem- 
 brance of ten thousand little nameless acts of piety and love. 
 
 Lastly, they are everlasting habitations. 
 
 If the children of the world be right, it is not all well with 
 them; but if the children of light'be right, it is well ever- 
 lastingly. 
 
 Nothing is eternal but that which is done for God and 
 others. That which is done for self dies. Perhaps it is not 
 wrong: but it perishes. You say it is pleasure, well enjoy 
 it. But joyous recollection is no longer joy. That which 
 ends in self is mortal ; that alone which goes out of self into 
 God lasts forever. 
 
794 The Orphanage of Moses. 
 
 XXIII. 
 THE ORPHANAGE OF MOSES. 
 
 A SERMON PREACHED ON BEHALF OF THE ORPHAN SOCIETY. 
 
 " And when she had opened it, she saw the child : and, behold, the babe 
 wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews' 
 children. Then said his sister to Pharaoh's daughter, Shall I go and call to 
 thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? 
 And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Go. And the maid went and called tha 
 child's mother. And Pharaoh's daughter said unto her, Take this child away, 
 and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took 
 the child, and nursed it." Exod. ii. G-9. 
 
 THIS is the account given of the discovery of a foundling 
 orphan. Moses was an orphan o/o^avoc, bereaved; ordi- 
 narily it means one bereaved by death. But it matters not 
 whether it is by death or otherwise ; it is truly an orphan 
 if it be in any manner deprived of a parent's care. Here 
 the child Moses was not bereaved by death, but by political 
 circumstances. 
 
 In the book from whence our text is taken, we are told that 
 three laws were enacted against the liberties of Israel: 
 
 1. To keep down the population the political economy 
 of those days devised, as a preventive check, the slaughter 
 of the males. 
 
 2. To prevent their acquiring any political importance, 
 the officers set over them were Egyptians. No Israelite was 
 eligible to any office not even as a taskmaster. 
 
 3. To prevent their acquiring knowledge, they were pro- 
 hibited from the slightest leisure : their lives were made 
 bitter with hard bondage, in brick and mortar. 
 
 No penal statutes were ever more complete than these, 
 If any penal statutes could have prevented the growth of 
 this injured nation, these must have succeeded. Numerically 
 limited, rendered politically insignificant, and intellectually 
 feeble, the slavery of Israel Avas complete. 
 
 But wherever governments enact penal laws which are 
 against the laws of God, those governments or nations are, 
 by the sure and inevitable process of revolution, preparing 
 for themselves destruction. As when you compress yielding 
 water, it burst at last. 
 
 Pharaoh's laws were against all the laws of Nature, or, 
 
77te Orphanage of Moses. 795 
 
 more properly speaking, against the laws of God : and Na- 
 ture was slowly working against Pharaoh. He had made 
 God his enemy. 
 
 Against these laws of Pharaoh a mother's heart revolted. 
 She hid her child for three months. Disobedience to this 
 Egyptian law, we read, was faith in God so says the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews. " By faith Moses, when he was born, was 
 hid three months of his parents, because they saw he was a 
 proper child ; and they were not afraid of the king's com- 
 mandment." 
 
 At last concealment was no longer possible, and the 
 mother placed her child in an ark among the reeds of the 
 river Nile. And there a foundling orphan he lay, who was 
 to be the future emancipator and lawgiver of Israel. 
 
 In order to understand these verses, I divide them into 
 two branches : 
 
 I. The claims of the orphan. 
 II. The orphan's education. 
 
 And first. By apparent accident, if there be such a thing 
 in this world of God's, the daughter of Pharaoh came down 
 to the river to wash, and, among the reeds she saw the chest 
 in which lay the child. 
 
 Now the first claim put forward on her compassion was 
 the claim of infancy. 
 
 The chest was opened. The princess "saw the child." 
 That single sentence contains an argument. It was an 
 appeal to the woman's heart. " It mattered not that she was 
 a princess, nor that she belonged to the proudest class of the 
 most exclusive nation in the world. Rank, caste, nationality, 
 all melted before the great fact of womanhood. She was a 
 woman, and before her lay an outcast child. 
 
 Now, let us observe, that feeling w r hich arose here was 
 spontaneous. She did not feel compassion because it was 
 ner duty so to feel, but because it was her nature. The law 
 'of Egypt forbade her to feel so for a Hebrew child. 
 
 We commit a capital error when we make feeling a matter 
 of command. To make feelings a subject of law destroys 
 their beauty and spontaneity. 
 
 When we say ought that a woman ought to feel so and 
 BO we state a fact, not a command. We say that it is her 
 nature, and that she is unnatural if she does not. There is 
 something wrong her nature is perverted. But no com- 
 mand can make her feel thus or thus. Law, applied to feel- 
 ing, only makes hypocrites. 
 
 God has provided for humanity by a plan more infallible 
 
796 The Orphanage of Moses. 
 
 than system, by implanting feeling in our natures. It was a 
 heathen felt thus. 
 
 Do not fancy that Christianity created these feelings of 
 tenderness and compassion by commanding them. Chris- 
 tianity declares them, commands them, and sanctions them, 
 because they belong to man's unadulterated nature. Chris* 
 tianity acknowledges them, stamps them with the divine 
 seal; but they existed before, and were found even among 
 the Egyptians and Assyrians. What Christianity did for all 
 these feelings was exactly what the creation of the sun, as 
 given in the Mosaic account, did for the light then existing. 
 There was light before, but the creation of the sun was the 
 gathering all the scattered rays of light into one focus. 
 Christian institutions, asylums, hospitals, are only the reduc- 
 tion into form of feelings that existed before. 
 
 So it is, that all that heathenism held of good and godlike, 
 Christianity acknowledges and adopts centralizes. It is 
 human Christian ours. 
 
 2. Consider the degiadation of this child's origin. "This 
 is one of the Hebrews' children." The exclusiveness of the 
 Egyptian social system was as strong as that of the Hindoo. 
 There was no intermixture between caste and caste between 
 priest and merchant. This child was, moreover, a Hebrew 
 a slave an alien reckoned a hereditary enemy, and to be 
 crushed. 
 
 In these rigid feelings of caste distinction the princess 
 was brought up. The voice of society said, It is but a 
 Hebrew. The mightier voice of nature no, of God spake 
 within her, and said, It is a human being bone of your 
 bone, and sharing the same life. 
 
 That moment the princess of Egypt escaped from the 
 trammels of time-distinctions and temporary narrowness, 
 and stood upon the rock of the Eternal. So long as the 
 feeling lasted, she breathed the spirit of that kingdom in 
 which there is " neither Jew nor Gentile, barbarian, Scythian, 
 bond, nor free." So long as the feeling lasted, she breathed 
 the atmosphere of Him who " came not to be ministered unto 
 but to minister." 
 
 She was animated by His Spirit who came to raise the 
 abject, to break the bond of the oppressor. She felt as He 
 felt, when she recognized that the very degradation of the 
 child was a claim upon her royal compassion. 
 
 3. The last reason we find for this claim was its unpro- 
 tected state it wept. Those tears told of a conscious 
 want the felt want of a mother's arms. But they sug- 
 gested to the Egyptian princess the remembrance of a 
 
The Orphanage of Moses. 797 
 
 danger of which the child was unconscious helpless ex< 
 posure to worse evils famine ; the Nile flood ; the croco- 
 dile. And the want of which the exposed child was con< 
 scious was far less than the danger of which it was uncon 
 scions. 
 
 Such is the state of orphanage. Because it is unprotected, 
 it is therefore exposed to terrible evils. There are worse 
 evils than the Nile, the crocodile, or starvation. 
 
 Suppose the child had lived. Then, as a boy in the hands 
 of a taskmaster or slave-driver, he would have become cal- 
 lous, hard, and vicious, with every feeling of tenderness dried 
 up. Nothing can replace a parent's tenderness. It is not 
 for physical support merely that parents are given us, but 
 for the formation of the heart. He wept now; but the 
 fountain of the orphan's tears would have been withered and 
 drie^i up, and instead of the tender man which he afterwards 
 became, he would have become a hard-hearted slave. 
 
 Let us suppose, again, the case of a girl orphaned. Then 
 you have the danger infinitely multiplied. There would have 
 been no one in all the land of Egypt to redress the wrongs 
 done to a Hebrew maiden. There are men in this world to 
 whom, putting religion out of the question even, the very fact 
 of wanting protection is cause sufficient for them to render 
 protection. There are men to whom defenselessness is its 
 own all-sufficient plea : there are men in whose presence the 
 woman and the orphan, just because they are unshielded by 
 any care, are protected more than they could be by any 
 laws. 
 
 But remember, I pray you, that there is another spirit in 
 the world the spirit of oppression, and even worse ; the 
 spirit against which Jewish prophets rose to the height of a 
 divine eloquence when they pleaded the cause of the father- 
 less and the widow; that spirit which in our own day makes 
 the daughter of the poor man less safe than the daughter of 
 the rich ; that spirit of seduction, than which there is nothing 
 more cowardly, more selfish, more damnable. For alas! it 
 is true that to say that a girl is unprotected, fatherless, and 
 poor, is almost equivalent to saying that she will fall into sin. 
 
 II. We pass on now to consider the orphan's education; 
 and first I notice that it was a suggestion from another. 
 
 The princess felt compassion, and so far was in the state 
 of one who has warm feelings, but does not know how to do 
 good. Brought up in a court, born to be waited on, nursed 
 in luxury, ignorant of life and how the poor lived, those feeL 
 ings might have remained helpless feelings. 
 
798 The Orphanage of Moses. 
 
 Then, in the providence of God, one stood by who offered 
 a suggestion how she might benefit the child, " Shall I go and 
 call a nurse ?" In other words, she suggested that it would 
 be a princely and noble thing for Pharaoh's daughter to 
 adopt and educate it. 
 
 And now observe the value of such a suggestion : what 
 we want is not feeling emotions are common, feelings super- 
 abound. In the educated classes, feeling is extremely refined, 
 but is much occupied with imaginary and unreal troubles; 
 and the reason why, with such warm feelings so little good is 
 done, is that we want the suggestion how to do it. 
 
 Observe how differently the Bible treats this, from what 
 the painter or the novelist would have done. A painter 
 would have shown the majesty and beauty of the royal 
 actor. A romance would have given a touching history of 
 womanly sentiment. But the Bible, being a real book, s^ays 
 little of the emotion merely mentions it and passes on to 
 the act to which the feeling was meant to lead. 
 
 Brethren, we often make a mistake here ; we are proud of 
 our emotions, of our refined feeling, of our quick sensibilities ; 
 but remember, I pray you, feeling by itself is worthless it is 
 meant to lead to action, and if it fails to do this it is a danger 
 rather than a blessing ; for excited feeling that stops short 
 of deeds is the precursor of callousness and hardness of heart. 
 Your sensibility is well but what has it done? 
 
 We feel the orphan's claims, and now comes the question, 
 how shall we do them good ? 
 
 Let us observe that Moses was nursed by a Hebrew matron. 
 She was one of his own grade. It would have been a capital 
 error to have given him to an Egyptian nurse. Probably, 
 the princess left to herself would have done so. But then 
 he would have been weaned from his own race. In heart, 
 sympathies, feelings, he would have been an Egyptian. Nay, 
 he would have been more exclusive; for the hardest are 
 almost always those who have been raised above their for- 
 mer position. The slave's hardest taskmaster is a negro. The 
 one who is most exclusive in his sympathies is usually the 
 raised merchant, or the one recently ennobled. 
 
 This great thing is to emancipate the degraded through 
 their own class. Only through their own class can they be 
 effectually delivered; the mere patronage of the great and 
 rich injures character. 
 
 So it was with Judaism; so it was with Christianity. 
 The Redeemer was made of a woman " born under the law 
 to redeem them that were under the law." He who came 
 **' Breach t ne Gospel to the Door, was born of a poor woman, 
 
The Orphanage of Moses. 799 
 
 But it was not only a Hebrew nurse to whom Moses was 
 given, it was a mother his own mother who nursed him ; 
 and from her he heard the story of his people's history. 
 From her he learned to feel his country's wrongs to be his 
 own. In the splendor of Pharaoh's court he never could 
 forget that his mother was a slave, and that his father was 
 working in brick and mortar, under cruel taskmasters. 
 
 From the princess he gained the wisdom of Egypt he 
 was taught legislative science. From hardship he learned 
 endurance and patience. Instruction ends in the school-room, 
 but education ends only with life. A child is given to the 
 universe to educate. 
 
 Now let us see the results of this training on his intellect- 
 ual and moral nature. 
 
 1. Intellectually. We will only notice the spirit of inquiry 
 and habit of observation. To ask " Why ?" is the best 
 Christian lesson for a child. Not the " why " which is the 
 language of disobedience, but that " why " which demands 
 for all phenomena a cause. It was this which led Moses on 
 Mount Horeb to say, "I will turn aside and see this great 
 sight, why the bush is not burned." So it was that Moses 
 found out God. 
 
 2. In the moral part of his character we note his hatred of 
 injustice and cruelty; ever was he found ranged against 
 oppression in whatever form it might appear. He stood 
 ever on the side of right against might, whether it was to 
 avenge the wrong done by the Egyptian to one of his 
 Hebrew brethren, or to rescue the daughter of the priest of 
 Midian from the oppressing shepherds. He became, too, a 
 peacemaker. Thus we get a glimpse of the moral and 
 intellectual nature of the man who afterwards led Israel out 
 of Egyptian bondage, and who, but for the education he had 
 received, might have become as degraded as any of the 
 nation he freed from slavery. 
 
 At the present day, that child who might have become so 
 degraded, stands second but to One in dignity and influence 
 in the annals of the human race. Take, for one example, the 
 Jewish sabbath. Thousands upon thousands of that nation, 
 fond of gain and mammon as they proverbially are said to be, 
 yet gave up their gains yesterday, and voluntarily surren- 
 dered that one day in addition to this day which, by the law 
 of the land, they are obliged to keep holy. And all this in 
 obedience to the enactments of that orphan child, who three 
 thousand years ago commanded the sabbath-day to be kept 
 holy. In those days the Pharaohs of Egypt raised theii 
 memorials in the enduring stone of the pyramids, which still 
 
8oo The Orphanage of Moses. 
 
 remain almost untouched by time. A princess of Egypt 
 raised her memorial in a human spirit, and just so far as spirit 
 is more enduring than stone, just so far is the work of that 
 princess more enduring than the work of the Pharaohs ; for 
 when the day comes when those pyramids shall have crum- 
 bled into nothingness and ruin, then shall the spirit of the 
 laws of Moses still remain interwoven with the most hallowed 
 of human institutions. So long as the spirit of Moses influ- 
 ences this world, so long shall her work endure, the work of 
 that royal-hearted lady who adopted this Hebrew orphan 
 child. 
 
 It now only remains for me to say a word on the claims 
 of that institution for which I am to plead to-day the Fe- 
 male Orphan Asylum in this town. It was established in 
 1823, and for years its funds flourished; lately they have 
 fallen off considerably, and that not in consequence of fault 
 in the institution itself, but simply for this cause, that of 
 those who took it up warmly once, many have been removed 
 by death, and many have altered their place of residence, and 
 also because many fresh calls and institutions have come for- 
 ward, and thus have excluded this one. The consequence 
 has been a sad falling off of funds. Last year the expend- 
 iture exceeded the receipts by one hundred pounds. 
 
 Within the walls of that institution, now almost dilapida- 
 ted and falling into decay, there are twenty-four female or- 
 phan children, received from the age of six to sixteen ; not 
 educated above their station, but educated simply to enable 
 them "to do their duty in that state of life to which it has 
 pleased God to call them." 
 
 And now I earnestly desire to appeal to you for this object 
 by the thoughts that have to-day been brought before you. 
 Because they are children, I make an appeal to every moth- 
 er's and woman's heart ; because they are females, young 
 and unprotected, I make an appeal to the heart of every man 
 who knows and feels the evils of society ; because they be- 
 long to the lowest class, I make an appeal to all who have 
 ever felt the infinite preciousness of the fact that the Saviour 
 of this world was born a poor man's child. 
 
 My beloved Christian brethren, let us not be content witb 
 feeling ; give, I pray you, as God has prospered you. 
 
Christianity and Hindooism. 80 1 
 
 XXIV. 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HINDOOISM. 
 
 A FRAGMENT OF AN ADVENT LECTURE. 
 
 " Hear, O Israel : The Lord our God is one Lord : And thou shalt love 
 the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
 might." Deut. vi. 4, 5. 
 
 IT is ray intention, in giving the present course of lectures, 
 to consider the advent of our Lord in connection with the 
 cause of missionary labors. This connection is clear. His 
 advent is the reign of God in the hearts of men ; and it is 
 the aim of the missionary to set up that kingdom in men's 
 hearts. There is also a more indirect connection between 
 the two, because at this time the Church Missionary Society 
 is celebrating its jubilee. It is now fifty years since the first 
 mission was established at Sierra Leone, where, although 
 they who composed that little band were swept oif one 
 after another by jungle fever their groans unheard, them- 
 selves unwept, and almost unhonored yet there rose up 
 other laborers after them ; and a firm footing was at length 
 gained in that dark heathen land. 
 
 On the Epiphany of next year we are to celebrate this ju- 
 bilee in Brighton ; and it has seemed to me a good prepara- 
 tion, that we should occupy, in thought, some field of mis- 
 sionary exertion, and look at the difficulties which those 
 have had to contend against, who have gone out in that 
 work. There can be no doubt as to which shall be first cho- 
 sen for our contemplation. India, with its vast territories 
 and millions of people, comes first, both as being one of our 
 own possessions, and by the heavy responsibilities attaching 
 to us on account of it. 
 
 We propose, therefore, to give some account of Hindoo 
 superstition ; and here I would remark, there are three v. ays 
 of looking at idolatry. 
 
 I. There is the way of the mere scholar that of men who 
 read about it as the school-boy does, as a thing past a cu- 
 rious but worn-out system. This scholastic spirit is the 
 worst ; for it treats the question of religious worship as a 
 piece of rmtiquariariism, of no vital consequence, but just cu- 
 rious and amusing. 
 
 34* 
 
8o2 Christianity and Hindoo ism. 
 
 II. There is the view taken by the religious partisan. 
 There are some men who, thinking their religion right, de- 
 termine therefore that every one who differs from tnem is 
 wrong. They look with scorn and contempt on the religion 
 of the Hindoo, and only think how they may force theirs 
 upon him. In this spirit, the world can never be evangel- 
 ized. A man may say to another, " I can not understand 
 your believing such folly," but he will not convince him so 
 of his error. It is only by entering into the mind and difi> 
 culties of the heathen that we can learn how to meet them 
 and treat them effectually. 
 
 III. There is the way of enlightened Christianity. In this 
 spirit stood St. Paul on the hill at Athens. The beauty of 
 Greek worship was nothing to him. To him it was still idol- 
 atry, though it was enlightened ; but he was not hard 
 enough not to be able to feel for them. He did not denounce 
 it to them as damnable; he showed them that they were 
 feeling after God, but blindly, ignorantly, wrongly. " Whom 
 ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you." 
 
 The religion on which we are going to dwell to-day is 
 one of the most subtle the world has ever received. It has 
 stood the test of long ages and of great changes. The land 
 has in turn submitted to the Macedonian, the Saracen, the 
 Mohammedan conqueror; yet its civilization, and its ways 
 of thinking, have remained always the same in stagnation. 
 We marvel how it has happened that their religion has re- 
 mained sufficient for them. Let us look at it. 
 
 L We take, as the first branch of our subject, the Hin- 
 doo conception of Divinity. We start with the assertion, 
 that the god whom a man worships is but the reflection of 
 himself. Tell us what a man's mind is, and we will tell you 
 what his god is. Thus, amongst the Africans, the lowest 
 and most degraded of mankind, forms of horror are rever- 
 enced. The frightful, black, shapeless god, who can be 
 frightened by the noise of a drum, is their object of worship. 
 
 Our Scandinavian forefathers, whose delight was in the 
 battle and the sea-fight, worshipped warlike gods, whose 
 names still descend to us in the names given to the days of 
 the week ; they expected after death the conqueror's feast in 
 Walhalla, the flowing cup, and the victor's wreath. 
 
 Look at Christianity itself. W r e profess to worship the 
 Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we do not all worship 
 the same God. The God of the child is not the God of the 
 man. He is a beneficent being an enlarged representation 
 (to him) of his own lather. The man whose mind is cast ia 
 
Christianity and Hindooism. 803 
 
 a #tern mould worships a God who sits above to administer 
 justice and punishment. The man who shrinks from the 
 idea of suffering worships a placable God, who combines the 
 greatest possible amount of happiness for the race with the 
 least possible amount of pain. 
 
 [Now, consider the man who worships God as He appears 
 in Jesus Christ.] 
 
 There are two things distinctly marked in the Hindoo re- 
 ligion : The love of physical repose ; and mental activity^ 
 restlessness, and subtlety. Theirs are ideas passing through 
 trains of thought which leave our European minds marvel- 
 ling in astonishment. 
 
 Their first principle is that of God's unity. We are told 
 by some that they have many gods, but all those who have 
 deeply studied the subject agree in this that they really 
 have but one. This Hindoo deity is capable of two states 
 1. Inaction; 2. Action. The first state is that of a dream- 
 less sleep, unconscious of its own existence ; all attributes 
 have passed away it is infinite nothing. We remark in men 
 generally a desire for rest ; in the Hindoo it is a desire mere- 
 ly for indolence. Far deeper lodged in the human breast 
 than the desire of honor or riches is seated the desire for 
 rest : there are, doubtless, eager, earnest spirits, who may 
 scorn pleasure, but, nevertheless, they long for rest. Well 
 and rightly has the Hindoo thrown this idea on God ; but 
 he has erred in the character of that repose. 
 
 There are two kinds of rest: 1st. There is the rest de- 
 sired by the world. 2d. There is the rest we find in Christ. 
 The active mind, if out of its proper sphere, corrodes itself, 
 and frets itself with plans and projects, finding no rest. The 
 rest of Christ is not that of torpor, but harmony ; it is not 
 refusing the struggle, but conquering in it ; not resting from, 
 duty, but finding rest in duty. 
 
 The sabbaths of eternity have kept the Supreme Mind in 
 infinite blessedness : on our restless, unquiet, throbbing 
 hearts, God has been looking down, serene and calm. When 
 chaos took lovely form and shape, then that rest began 
 not in the torpor of inaction, but in harmonious work. " My 
 Father worketh hitherto." God works in all the smallest 
 objects of creation, as well as in the largest. Even in mid- 
 night stillness harmonious action is the law ; when every 
 thing seems to slumber, all is really at work, for the spirit of 
 life and the spirit of death are weaving and unweaving for- 
 ever. 
 
 We remark that to this god of Hindostan there rises no 
 
804 Christianity and Hindooism. 
 
 temple throughout the length and breadth of the land. If 
 you ask in astonishment, why is this? the Hindoo replies, 
 " Pure, unmixed Deity is mind, and can not be confined to 
 place ;" and well does he here teach us that God is a Spirit : 
 but in his idea there is an exhibition of a god without quali- 
 tiesa deity whom man may meditate on, and be absorbed 
 in, but not one to be loved or adored. 
 
 Here is his first error ; here we can teach him something 
 that God is a personal Being. 
 
 Personality is made up of three attributes consciousness, 
 character, will. Without the union of these three, the idea 
 is imperfect. Personality the Hindoo Deity has none ; there- 
 fore he can not be loved. 
 
 Now when we look at God as revealed in Jesus Christ, 
 He appears to us as having a mind like ours ; the ideas of 
 number, of right and wrong, of sanctity, are to God precisely 
 what they are to man. Conceive a mind without these, ana 
 it may be a high and lofty one, but there can be no com- 
 munion with it. But when Christ speaks of love, of purity, 
 of holiness, we feel that it is no abstraction we worship. 
 
 II. We shall consider as the second branch of our subject 
 the Hindoo theory of creation. 
 
 We have spoken of the Hindoo Deity as capable of two 
 states that of perfection, or rest ; that of imperfection, or 
 unrest. The Hindoo thinks that a time arrives when rest 
 becomes action, and slumber becomes life ; and when, not 
 willing to be alone, feeling solitary in his awaking, God 
 wishes to impart life ; therefore He creates. 
 
 Here again, we recognize a partial truth. In the Scrip- 
 tures we never read of a time when God was alone. What 
 is love but this, to find ourselves again in another? The 
 " Word," we read, " was with God " before the world began. 
 What the word is to the thought, that is Christ to God. 
 Creation was one expression of this of His inmost feelings 
 of beauty and loveliness ; whether it be the doleful sighings 
 of the night-wind, or the flower that nestles in the grass, 
 they tell alike of love. So has He also shown that love on 
 earth, in the outward manifestation of the life of Christ not 
 only in the translated Word which we have beautiful as it 
 is, but in the living Word. Read without this, history is a 
 dark, tangled web, philosophy a disappointing thing. With- 
 out this light society is imperfect, and the greatest men small 
 and insignificant. From all these we turn to Christ ; here is 
 that perfect Word to which our hearts echo, where no one 
 syllable is wrong. 
 
Christianity and Hindooism. 805 
 
 There are two Hindoo theories of creation : the gross 
 view held by the many ; the refined one held by the philoso- 
 pher and the Brahmin. Yet these two so mix and intermin- 
 gle that it is difficult to give to European minds a clear no- 
 tion of either of them separately. We will leave the popular 
 view for another time, and we will try to deal now with the 
 metaphysical and transcendental one. It is this creation 
 is illusion the Deity awaking from sleep. The universe is 
 God: God is the universe; therefore He can not create. 
 The Hindoo says, You, and I, and all men, are but gods 
 ourselves in a wretched state of dream and illusion. We 
 must try to explain this in part by our own records of times 
 which we can all remember, when we have lain in a state 
 between dreaming and waking a phantasmagoric state, 
 changing, combining, altering, like the kaleidoscope, so that 
 we hardly knew realities from unrealities. " Such," says the 
 Hindoo, " is your life a delusion." I merely tell of this be- 
 cause it colors all Hindoo existence ; the practical results we 
 shall consider another time. For this the visionary con- 
 templator of Brahm, and the Fakeer, sit beneath the tree, 
 scarcely eating, speaking, or thinking ; hoping at length to 
 become absorbed into that calm, dreamless, passive state 
 which to them represents perfection. 
 
 One truth we tind acknowledged in this theory is the un- 
 reality of this world. Nobly has the Hindoo set forth the 
 truth that the world is less real than the spirit. "What is 
 your life ? it is even a vapor." Ask you what we are to live 
 for ? The child, on whose young face the mother now gazes 
 so tenderly, changes with years into the man with furrowed 
 brow and silvered hair ; constitutions are formed and broken, 
 friendships pass, love decays, who can say he possesses the 
 same now that blessed him in his early life ? All passes 
 whilst we look upon it. A most unreal, imaginative life. 
 The spirit of life ever weaving the spirit of death ever un- 
 weaving; all things putting on change. 
 
 In conclusion, we observe here a great truth the evil of 
 self-consciousness. This self-consciousness is all evil. He 
 who can dwell on this and that symptom of his moral nature 
 is already diseased. We are too much haunted by ourselves ; 
 we project the spectral shadow of ourselves on every thing 
 around us. And then comes in the Gospel to rescue us from 
 this selfishness. Redemption is this to forget self in God. 
 Does not the mother forget herself for a time in the child ; 
 the loyal man in his strong feelings of devotion for his sover 
 eign ? So does the Christian forget himself in the feeling that 
 he has to live here for the performance of the will of God. 
 
806 Rest. 
 
 [And now contrast the Hindoo religion with the Chris 
 tian.] 
 
 The Hindoo tells us the remedy for this unreality is to be 
 found in the long unbroken sleep. The Christian tells us the 
 remedy is this, that this broken dream of life shall end in a 
 higher life. Life is but a sleep, a dream, and death is the 
 real awaking. 
 
 XXV. 
 
 REST. 
 
 "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give 
 you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me : for I am meek and 
 lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.'' Matt. xi. 28, 29. 
 
 No one, perhaps, ever read these words of Christ without 
 being struck with their singular adaptation to the necessities 
 of our nature. We have read them again and again, and we 
 have found them ever fresh, beautiful, and new. No man 
 could ever read them without being conscious that they rea- 
 lized the very deepest and inmost want of his being. We 
 feel it is a convincing proof of His divine mission that He 
 has thus struck the key-note of our nature, in offering us rest. 
 
 Ancient systems were busy in the pursuit after happiness. 
 Our modern systems of philosophy, science, ay, even of theol- 
 ogy, occupy themselves with the same thought ; telling us 
 alike that " happiness is our being's end and aim." But it is 
 not so that the Redeemer teaches. His doctrine is in words 
 such as these : " In the world ye shall have " not happiness, 
 but " tribulation ; but be of good cheer, I have overcome 
 the world ;" " In Me ye shall have peace." Not happiness 
 the outward well-being so called in the world but the in- 
 ward rest which cometh from above. And He alone who 
 made this promise had a right to say, " Take my yoke upon 
 you, and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart ; and 
 re shall find rest unto your souls." He had that rest in Him- 
 self, and therefore could impart it; but it is often offered by 
 '*H'ii who have it not themselves. There are some, high pro- 
 fe -sors of religion too, who have never known this real rest, 
 un 1 who at fifty, sixty, seventy years of age, are as much 
 slives of the world, as when they began, desiring still the 
 honors, the riches, or the pleasures it has to give, and utterly 
 neglecting the life which is to come. 
 
Rest. 807 
 
 we turn to the history of Christ we find this repose 
 characterizing His whole existence. For example, first, in 
 the marriage-feast at Cana, in Galilee. He looked not upon 
 that festivity with cynical asperity ; He frowned not upon 
 the innocent joys of life : He made the wine to give enjoy- 
 ment, and yet singularly contrasted was His human and His 
 Divine joy. His mother came to Him full of consternation, 
 and said, " They have no wine :" and the Redeemer, with 
 calm self-possession, replied, " Woman, what have I to do 
 with thee ? mine hour is not yet come." He felt not the de- 
 ficiency which He supplied. 
 
 We pass from the marriage-feast to the scene of grief at 
 Bethany, and still there we find that singular repose. Those 
 words which we have seen to possess an almost magical 
 charm in soothing the grief of mourners congregated round 
 the coffin of the clead " I am the resurrection and the life : 
 he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he 
 live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never 
 die " speak they not of repose ? But in the requirements of 
 these great matters many men are not found wanting ; it is 
 when we come to the domesticities of their existence that 
 we see fretting anxiety comes upon their soul. Therefore it 
 is that we gladly turn to that home at Bethany where He 
 had gone for quiet rest. Let us hear his words on the sub- 
 ject of everyday cares : " Martha, Martha, thou art careful 
 and troubled about many things ; but one thing is needful." 
 
 We pass on from that to the state in which a man is tried 
 the most : and if ever we can pardon words of restlessness 
 and petulance, it is when friends are unfaithful. Yet even 
 here there is perfect calmness. Looking steadfastly into the 
 future, He says, "Do ye now believe? Behold, the hour 
 eometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every 
 man to his own, and shall leave Me alone : and yet I am not 
 alone, because the Father is with Me." 
 
 Once more, we turn to the Redeemer's prayers. They 
 are characterized by a calmness singularly contrasted with 
 the vehemence which we sometimes see endeavoring to lash 
 itself into a greater fervor of devotion. The model prayer 
 has no eloquence in it ; it is calm, simple, full of repose. 
 
 We find this again in the 17th chapter of St. John. If a 
 man feels himself artificial and worldly, if a man feels rest- 
 less, we would recommend him to take up that chapter as 
 his best cure. For at least one moment, as he read it, he 
 would feel in his soul calmness and repose ; it would seem 
 almost as if he were listening to the grave and solemn words 
 of a divine soliloquy. This was the mind of Him who gave 
 
8o8 Rest. 
 
 this gracious promise, u Come unto Me all ye that labor and 
 are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." We repeat these 
 words as a matter of course ; but I ask, Has that repose been 
 found ? has this peace come to us ? for it is not by merely 
 repeating them over and over again that we can enter into 
 the deep rest of Christ. 
 
 Our subject this day will be to consider, in the first place, 
 the false systems of rest which the world holds out, and to 
 contrast them with the true rest of Christ. The first false 
 system proposed is the expectation of repose in the grave. 
 When the spirit has parted from the body after long- 
 protracted sufferings, we often hear it said that the release 
 was a happy one ; that there is a repose in the grave ; that 
 there " the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are 
 at rest." ^ay, at times, perhaps, we find ourselves hazard- 
 ing a wish that our own particular current of existence had 
 come to that point, when it should mingle with the vast 
 ocean of eternity. 
 
 There is in all this a kind of spurious Pantheism, a sort of 
 feeling that God is alike in every heart, that every man is 
 to be blessed at last, that death is but a mere transition to a 
 blessed sleep, that in the grave there is nothing but quiet, 
 and that there is no misery beyond it. And yet one of the 
 deepest thinkers of our nation suggests that there may be 
 dreams even in the sleep of death. There is an illusion 
 often in the way in which we think of death. The counte- 
 nance, after the spirit has departed, is so strangely calm 
 and meek that it produces the feeling of repose within us, 
 and we transfer our feelings to that of the departed spirit, 
 and we fancy that body no longer convulsed with pain, those 
 features so serene and full of peace, do but figure the rest 
 which the spirit is enjoying ; and yet, perhaps that soul, a 
 few hours ago, was full of worldliness, full of pride, full of 
 self-love. Think you that now that spirit is at rest that it 
 has entered into the rest of Christ ? The repose that be- 
 longs to the grave is not even a rest of the atoms composing 
 our material form. 
 
 There is another fallacious system of rest which would 
 place it in the absence of outward trial. This is the world's 
 peace. The world's peace ever consists in plans for the re- 
 moval of outward trials. There lies at the bottom of all 
 false systems of peace, the fallacy that if we can but produce 
 a perfect set of circumstances, then we shall have the perfect 
 man ; if we remove temptation, we shall have a holy being: 
 and so the world's rest comes to this merely happiness and 
 outward enjoyment. Ay, my Christian brethren, we carry 
 
Rest. 809 
 
 these anticipations beyond the grave, and we think the 
 heaven of God is but like the Mohammedan paradise a 
 place in which the rain shall beat on us no longer, and the 
 sun pour his burning rays upon us no more. Very often it 
 is only a little less sensual, but quite as ignoble as that fabled 
 by Mohammed. 
 
 The Redeemer throws all this aside at once as mere illu- 
 sion. He teaches just the contrary. He says, " Not as the 
 world giveth, give I unto you." The world proposes a rest 
 by the removal of a burden. The Redeemer gives rest by 
 giving us the spirit and power to bear the burden. "Take 
 my yoke upon you, and learn of Me, and ye shall find rest 
 unto your souls." Christ does not promise a rest of inaction, 
 neither that the thorns shall be converted into roses, nor that 
 the trials of life shall be removed. 
 
 To the man who takes this yoke up in Christ's spirit, 
 labor becomes blessedness rest of soul and rest of body. 
 
 It matters not in what circumstances men are, whether 
 high or low, never shall the rest of Christ be found in ease 
 and self-gratification ; never, throughout eternity, will there 
 be rest found in a life of freedom from duty : the paradise 
 of the sluggard, where there is no exertion ; the heaven of 
 the coward, where there is no difficulty to be opposed, is not 
 the rest of Christ. " Take my yoke upon you." Nay, more 
 if God could give us a heaven like that, it would be but 
 misery ; there can be no joy in indolent inaction. The curse 
 on this world is labor ; but to him who labors earnestly and 
 truly it t^irns to blessedness. It is a curse only to him who 
 tries to escape from the work allotted to him, who endeavors 
 to make a compromise with duty. To him who takes Christ's 
 yoke, not in a spirit of selfish ease and acquiescence in evil, 
 but in strife and stern battle with it the rest of Christ 
 streams in upon his soul. 
 
 Many of us are drifting away from our moorings ; we are 
 quitting the old forms of thought, and faith, and life, and are 
 seeking for something other than what satisfied the last gen- 
 eration : and this in a vain search for rest. 
 
 Many are the different systems of repose offered to us, 
 and foremost is that proposed by the Church of Rome. Let 
 us do her the justice, at all events, to allow that she follows 
 the Redeemer in this it is not happiness she promises, she 
 promises rest. The great strength of Romanism lies in this, 
 that she professes to answer and satisfy the deep want of 
 human nature for rest. She speaks of an infallibility on 
 which she would persuade men, weary of the strain of doubt, 
 to rest. It is not to the tales of miracles, and of the per- 
 
8 10 Rest. 
 
 sonal interference of God Himself; but to the promise of an 
 impossibility of error to those within her pale, that she owes 
 her influence. And we say, better far to face doubt and 
 perplexity manfully; to bear any yoke of Christ's than be 
 content with the rest of a Church's infallibility. 
 
 There is another error among many Dissenters ; in a dif- 
 ferent form we find the same promise held out. One says, 
 that if we will but rely on God's promise of election our 
 soul must find repose. Another system tells us that the 
 penalty has fallen upon Christ, and that if we believe we 
 shall no longer suffer. Narrowing their doctrines into one, 
 as if all the want of the soul w r as to escape from punishment, 
 they place before us this doctrine, and say, believe that, and 
 your sdul shall find repose. 
 
 We have seen earnest men anxiously turning from view 
 to view, and yet finding their souls as far from rest as ever. 
 They remind us of the struggles of a man in fever, finding no 
 rest, tossing from side to side, in vain seeking a cool spot on 
 his pillow, and forgetting that the fever is within himself. 
 And so it is with us; the unrest is within us: we foolishly 
 expect to find that tranquillity in outward doctrine which 
 alone can come from the calmness of the soul. 
 
 We will not deny that there is a kind of rest to be found 
 in doctrine for a time : for instance, when a man, whose only 
 idea of evil is its penalty, has received the consoling doctrine 
 that there is no suffering for him to bear: but the unrest 
 comes again. Doubtless, the Pharisees and Sadducees, when 
 they w r ent to the baptism of John, found something of repose 
 there ; but think you that they went back to their daily life 
 with the rest of Christ ? We expect some outward change 
 will do that which nothing but the inward life can do it is 
 the life of Christ within the soul which alone can give repose. 
 There have been men in the Church of Rome and in the 
 ranks of dissent who have indeed erred grievously, but yet 
 have lived a life of godliness. There have been men in the 
 true Church as Judas, who was a member of the true 
 Church who yet, step by step, have formed in themselves 
 the devil's nature : the rest of Christ pertains not to any one 
 outward communion. 
 
 Before we go farther, let us understand what is meant by 
 this rest ; let us look to those symbols about us in the world 
 of nature by which it is suggested. It is not the lake locked 
 in ice that suggests repose, but the river moving on calmly 
 and rapidly in silent majesty and strength. It is not the 
 cattle lying in the sun, but the eagle cleaving the air with 
 fixed pinions, that gives you the idea of repose combined with 
 
Rest. 811 
 
 strength and motion. In creation, the rest of God is exhibit- 
 ed as a sense of power which nothing wearies. When chaos 
 burst into harmony, so to speak, God had rest. 
 
 There are two deep principles in nature in apparent con- 
 tradiction one, the aspiration after perfection ; the other, 
 the longing after repose. In the harmony of these lies the 
 rest of the soul of man. There have been times when we 
 have experienced this. Then the winds have been hushed, 
 and the throb and the tumult of the passions have been blot- 
 ted out of our bosoms. That was a moment when we were 
 in harmony with all around, reconciled to ourselves and to 
 our God ; when we sympathized with all that was pure, all 
 that was beautiful, all that was lovely. 
 
 This was not stagnation, it was fullness of life life in its 
 most expanded form, such as nature witnessed in her first 
 hour. This is life in that form of benevolence which expands 
 into the mind of Christ. And when this is working in the 
 soul, it is marvellous how. it'distills into a man's words and 
 countenance. Strange and magical is the power of that col- 
 lect wherein we pray to God, " Who alone can order the un- 
 ruly wills and affections of sinful men, to grant unto His 
 people that they may love the thing which He commands, 
 and desire that which He promises; that so among the 
 sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may 
 surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found." 
 There is a wondrous melody in that rhythm ; the words are 
 the echoes of the thought. The mind of the man who wrote 
 them was in repose all is ringing of rest. We do not won- 
 der when Moses came down from the mount on which he 
 had been bowing in adoration before the harmony of God, 
 that his face was shining with a brightness too dazzling to 
 look upon. 
 
 Our blessed Redeemer refers this rest to meekness and low- 
 liness. There are three causes in men producing unrest: 1. 
 Suspicion of God. 2. Inward discord. 3. Dissatisfaction 
 with outward circumstances. For all these meekness is the 
 cure. For the difficulty of understanding this world, the 
 secret is in meokness. There is no mystery in God's deal- 
 ings to the meek man, for "the secret of the Lord is with 
 them that fear Him, and He will show them His covenant ;" 
 there is no dread of God's judgments when, our souls are 
 meek. 
 
 The second cause of unrest is inward discord. We are 
 going on in our selfishness. We stand, as Balaam stood, 
 against the angel of the Lord, pressing on whilst the angel 
 of love stands against us. tust as the dove struggling 
 
812 Rest. 
 
 against the storm, feeble and tired, is almost spent, until 
 gradually, as if by inspiration, it has descended to the lower 
 atmosphere, and so avoided the buffeting of the tempest* 
 above, and is then borne on by the wind of heaven in entire 
 repose: like that is the rest of the soul. While we are un- 
 reconciled, the love of God stands against us, and, by His 
 will, as lon<* as man refuses to take up that yoke of His, he 
 is full of discord; he is like the dove struggling with the 
 elements aloft, as yet unconscious of the calm there is below. 
 And you must make no compromise in taking up the burden 
 of the Lord. 
 
 Lastly, unrest comes from dissatisfaction with outward 
 circumstances. Part, perhaps the greater part, of our misery 
 here comes from over-estimation of ourselves. We are slaves 
 to vanity and pride. We think we are not in the right sta- 
 tion ; our genius has been misunderstood ; we have been 
 slighted, we have been passed by, we have not been reward- 
 ed as we ought to have been. So long as we have this false 
 opinion of ourselves, it is impossible for us to realize true 
 rest. 
 
 Sinners, in a world of love, encircling you round on every 
 side, with blessings infinite upon infinite, and that again mul- 
 tiplied by infinity : God loves you : God fills you with en- 
 joyment ! Unjustly, unfairly treated in this world of love ! 
 Once let a man know r for himself what God is, and then in 
 that he will find peace. It will be the dawn of an everlast- 
 ing day of calmness and serenity. I speak to some who 
 have felt the darkness, the clouds, and the dreariness of life, 
 whose affections have been blighted, who feel a discord and 
 confusion in their being. To some to whom the world, 
 lovely though it be, is such that they are obliged to say, "I 
 see, I do not feel, how 7 beautiful it is." 
 
 Brother men, there is rest in Christ, because He is love ; 
 because His are the everlasting verities of humanity. God 
 does not cease to be the God of love because men are low, 
 sad, and desponding. In the performance of duty, in meek- 
 ness, in trust in God, is our rest our only rest. It is not in 
 understanding a set of doctrines ; not in an outward compre- 
 hension of the " scheme of salvation," that rest and peace are 
 to be found, but in taking up, in all lowliness and meekness, 
 the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 "For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth 
 eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and hoi) 
 place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, 
 to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of 
 the contrite ones." 
 
The Humane ^uuty. 813 
 
 XXVI. 
 THE HUMANE SOCIETY. 
 
 A SERMON PREACHED ON ITS BEHALF. 
 
 "While he yet spake, there came from the ruler of the synagogue's house 
 certain which said, Thy daughter is dead ; why troubles! them the Master 
 any further? As soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, he saith 
 unto the ruler of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe. And he suffered 
 no man to follow him, save Peter, and James, and John the brother of James. 
 And he cometh to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and seeth the 
 tumult, and them that wept and wailed greatly. And when he was come in, 
 he saith unto them, Why make ye this ado, and weep? the damsel is not 
 dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. But when he had put 
 them all out, he taketh the father and the mother of the damsel, and them that 
 were with him, and entereth in where the damsel was lying. And he took 
 the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi ; which is, being 
 interpreted, Damsel, (I say unto thee,) arise. And straightway the damsel 
 arose, and walked; for she was of the age of twelve years. And they were 
 astonished with a great astonishnient. . And IIP charged them straitly that 
 no man should know it ; and commanded thr.t something should be given her 
 to eat." Mark v. 35-43. 
 
 I PLEAD to-day for a society whose cause has not been ad- 
 vocated in this chapel for many years. It is now exactly ten 
 years since a collection was made in Trinity Chapel for the 
 Humane Society. 
 
 Its general objects, as every body knows, are the preser- 
 vation of the life of drowning persons, by precautions pre- 
 viously taken, and by subsequent remedies. But this vague 
 statement being insufficient to awaken the interest which the 
 society deserves, I propose to consider it in its details, and 
 to view these as in the pulpit we are bound to do from 
 the peculiar Christian point of view. 
 
 It is remarkable that there is a Scripture passage which, 
 point by point, offers a parallel to the work of this Society, 
 and a special sanction and a precedent, both for its peculiar 
 work and the spirit in which it is to be done. I shall con- 
 sider 
 
 I. This particular form of the Redeemer's work. 
 II. The spirit of the Redeemer's work. 
 
 I. We find among the many forms of His work 
 1. Restoration from a special form of death. I can not 
 class this case with that of Lazarus. 
 
8 14 The Humane Society. 
 
 The narrative seems to distinguish this from the other mir- 
 acle. Christ says, " She is not dead, but sleepeth." Hence 
 this particular case was one of restoration from apparent 
 death. The other case was that of restoration from real 
 death. 
 
 Here, then, is our first point of resemblance. 
 
 Before this society was formed, persons apparently suffo- 
 cated were left to perish. Myriads, doubtless, have died who 
 might have been saved. But the idea of restoration was as 
 far from them as from the friends of Jairus. They would 
 have laughed the proposer " to scorn." But, Christlike, this 
 society came into the world with a strange message re- 
 vealed by science, but vitalized by love a Christlike mes- 
 sage : " Be not afraid : he is not dead, but sleepeth." 
 
 Now the sphere of the society's operations is thus defined : 
 " To preserve from premature death persons apparently 
 dead from either drowning, hanging, lightning, cold, heat, 
 noxious vapors, apoplexy, or intoxication." They are, con- 
 sequently, large, taking cognizance not merely of cases of 
 drowning only, but all of the same generic character sus- 
 pended animation, apparent deatji, asphyxia. 
 
 [Causes foul air, in drains and brewers' vats, accidental 
 hanging, mines, cellars, wells.] 
 
 In England their causes are more peculiarly extensive, be- 
 cause of our sea-girt shores, and because of the variable 
 climate, which to-day leaves the ice firm and to-morrow has 
 made it rotten and unsafe. 
 
 2. Here was the recognition of the value of life. The force 
 of the whole petition lay in one single consideration " she 
 shall live." 
 
 It has been often said that Christianity has enhanced the 
 value of life, and our charitable societies are alleged in evi- 
 dence ; our hospitals ; the increased average of human life, 
 which has been the result of sanitary regulations and im- 
 provements in medical treatment. But this statement needs 
 some qualification. 
 
 The value attached to life by the ancient Egyptian was 
 quite as great as that attributed to it by the modern English- 
 man. When Abraham went into Egypt he found a people 
 whose feeling of the sacredness of life was so great that they 
 saw God wherever life was ; and venerated the bull, and the 
 fish, and the crocodile. To slay one of them was like mur- 
 der. 
 
 And again : it could not be said that we owe to Christian- 
 ity the recognition of the honor due to one who saves life. 
 
The Humane Society. 8 1 5 
 
 The most honorable of crowns was that presented to one who 
 had saved the life of a Roman citizen. 
 
 Nay more: instead of peculiarly exalting the value of life, 
 there is a sense in which Christianity depreciates it. " If a 
 man hate not his own life he can not be my disciple.'' The 
 Son of Man came to be a sacrifice : and it is the peculiar dig- 
 nity of the Christian that he has a life to (jive. 
 
 Therefore we must distinguish. 
 
 It is not mere life on which Christianity has shed a richer 
 value. It is by ennobling the purpose to which life is to be 
 dedicated that it has made life more precious. A crowded 
 metropolis, looked at merely as a mass of living beings, is no 
 more dignified, and far more disgusting, than an ant-hill with 
 its innumerable creeping lives. Looked on as a place in 
 which each individual is a temple of the Holy Ghost, and 
 every pang and joy of whom has in it something of infinitude, 
 it becomes almost priceless in its value. 
 
 And again : Christianity differs from heathenism in this, 
 that it has declared the dignity of the life of man not mere- 
 ly that of certain classes. It has not " saved citizens," but 
 saved 'men. 
 
 [Consider the worth of a single soul.] 
 
 Hence this is appropriately called the Humane Society, 
 that word originally "meaning human. It is no Brahminical 
 association, abstaining from shedding animal blood and living 
 on no animal food, but it recognizes the worth of a life in 
 which God moves, and which Christ has redeemed. 
 
 It is human life, not animal, that it cares for. The life of 
 man as man, not of some peculiar class of men. 
 
 3. We consider the Saviour's direction respecting the 
 means of effecting complete recovery. He " commanded that 
 something should be given her to eat." 
 
 Observe His reverential submission to the laws of nature. 
 He did not suspend those laws. It did not seem to Him that 
 where law was, God was not ; or that the proof of God's 
 agency was to be found only in the abrogation of law. He 
 recognized the sanctity of those laws which make certain 
 remedies and certain treatment indispensable to health. 
 
 [Sanitary regulations are as religious as a miracle.] 
 
 And in doing this He furnished a precedent singularly close 
 for the operations of this society. It is one great part of the 
 object of its existence to spread a knowledge of the right 
 methods of treatment in case of suspended animation. It 
 has compiled and published rules for the treatment of the 
 
816 The Humane Society. 
 
 drowned, the apparently suffocated, and those struck by sud 
 den apoplexy. 
 
 And consider the indirect results of this, as well as the 
 direct. 
 
 Such cases occur unexpectedly. No medical aid is near. 
 Friends are alarmed. Presence of mind is lost. The vulgar 
 means resorted to from superstition and ignorance are almost 
 incredible. But gradually the knowledge is spread through 
 the country of what to do in cases of emergency. Many 
 here would be prepared to act if a need arose. I have been 
 present at such a case, and have seen life saved by arresting 
 the rough treatment of ignorance acting traditionally. But 
 in that and most cases, the knowledge had been gained from 
 the publications of this society. 
 
 An immense step is gained by the systematic direction of 
 attention to these matters. Every one ought to know what 
 to do on a sudden emergency, a case of strangulation, of suf- 
 focation, or of apoplexy ; and yet, this forming no definite 
 part of the general plan of education, there are comparative- 
 ly few who have the least idea what should be done before 
 medical aid can be obtained. Probably thousands would be 
 helpless as a child, and human life would be sacrificed. 
 
 IL We consider the spirit of the Redeemer's work. 
 
 1. It was love. 
 
 It was not reward not even the reward of applause 
 which was the spring of beneficence in the Son of Man. He 
 desired that it should be unknown. He did good because it 
 was good. He relieved because it was the expressu n of His 
 own exuberant loving-kindness. 
 
 2. It was a spirit of retiring modesty. 
 
 He did not wish that it should be known. But his disciples 
 have made it known to the world. 
 
 Now observe, first, the evidence here afforded of His real 
 humanity. Why did Christ wish to conceal, and the apostles 
 wish to publish abroad his miracles ? Take the simple view, 
 and all is plain. Christ, the man, with unaffected modesty, 
 shrank from publicity and applause. The apostles, with 
 genuine human admiration, record the deed. But seek for 
 some deeper and more mysterious reason, and at once the 
 whole becomes a pantomime, an unreal transaction acted on 
 this world's stage for effect, as though we should say that He 
 was wishing to have it known, but for certain reasons He 
 made as if He wished it to be concealed. Here, as usual, the 
 simple is the sublime and true. 
 
 Observe, however, secondly : That publication by the apos- 
 
The Humane Society. 817 
 
 ties sanctions and explains another part of this society's 
 operations. Its office is to observe, to record, and to reward 
 acts of self-devotion. Certain scales of reward are given to 
 one who risks his life to save life, to the surgeon whose skill 
 restores life, to the publican who opens his house to receive 
 the apparently dead body. And every year lists of names 
 are published of those who have been thus distinguished by 
 their humanity. The eyes of the society are over all Eng- 
 land, and no heroic act can pass unnoticed or unhonored by 
 them. 
 
 Now distinctly understand on what principle this is done. 
 It is an apostolic office. It is precisely the principle on which 
 the apostles were appointed by God to record the acts and 
 life of Christ. Was this for Christ's sake? Nay, it was for 
 the world's good. That sacrifice of Christ recorded, pro- 
 nounced Divine, has been the spring and life of innumerable 
 sacrifices and unknown self-devotion. 
 
 And so the rewards given by this society are not given as 
 recompense. Think you that a medal can pay self-devo- 
 tion ? or a few pounds liquidate the debt due to generosity ? 
 or even, that the thought of the reward would lead a man to 
 plunge into the water to save life, who would not have 
 plunged in without any hope of reward ? No ! But it is 
 good for the world to hear of what is generous and good. 
 It is good to appropriate rewards to such acts, in order to 
 set the standard. It is right that, in a country where enor- 
 mous subscriptions are collected, and monuments are erected 
 to men who have made fortunes by speculation, there should 
 be some visible, tangible recognition of the worth and value 
 of more generous deeds. 
 
 The medal over the fire-place of the poor fisherman is to 
 him a title / and, truer than most titles, it tells what has been 
 clone. It descends an heirloom to the family, saying to the 
 children, Be brave, self-sacrificing, as your father was. 
 
 3. It was a spirit of perseverance. 
 
 They laughed Him to scorn, yet He persisted. Slow, calm 
 perseverance amidst ridicule. 
 
 In the progress of this society we find, again, a parallel. 
 When the idea of resuscitation was first promulgated, it was 
 met with incredulity and ridicule. Even in 1773, when Dr. 
 Hawes laid the first foundation of the Humane Society, it 
 was with difficulty he could overcome the prejudice which 
 existed against the idea, and he had to bear the whole cost 
 of demonstrating the practicability of his theory. For one 
 whole year he paid all the rewards and expenses himself, and 
 then, attracted by the self-sacrificing ardor with which he 
 
 35 
 
818 Three Times in a Nations History. 
 
 had given himself up to the idea of rescuing human life, 
 thirty -two gentlemen, his own and Dr. Cogan's friends, 
 united together in furtherance of this benevolent design, and 
 thus laid the foundation of the Humane Society. 
 
 Here note the attractive power of self-denying work; the 
 Redeemer's life and death has been the living power of the 
 world's work, of the world's life. 
 
 XXVII. 
 THREE TIMES IN A NATION'S HISTORY. 
 
 " Ant 1 >vhen he v, r as come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, say- 
 ing, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which 
 belong unto thy peace ! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days 
 shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and 
 compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even 
 with the ground, and thy children within thee ; and they shall not leave in 
 thee one stone upon another because thou knewest not the time of thy vis- 
 itation." Luke xix. 41-44. 
 
 THE event of which we have just read took place in the 
 last year of our Redeemer's life. For nearly four years He 
 had been preaching the Gospel. His pilgrim life was draw- 
 ing to a close ; yet no one looking at the outward circum- 
 stances of that journey would have imagined that He was 
 on His way to die. It was far more like a triumphal journey, 
 for a rejoicing multitude heralded His way to Jerusalem with 
 shouts " Hosanna to the Son of David !" He trod, too, a 
 road green with palm branches, and strewn with their gar- 
 ments ; and yet in the midst of all this joy, as if rejoicing 
 were not for Him, the Man of Sorrows paused to weep. 
 
 There is something significant and characteristic in that 
 peculiar tone of melancholy which pervaded the Redeemer's 
 intercourse with man. We read of but one occasion on 
 which He rejoiced,- and then only in spirit. He did not 
 shrink from occasions of human joy, for He attended the 
 marriage-feast; yet even there the solemn remark, appa- 
 rently out of place, was heard " Mine hour is not yet come." 
 There was in Him that peculiarity which we find more or 
 less in all the purest, most thoughtful minds a shade of 
 melancholy ; much of sadness ; though none of austerity. 
 For, after all, when we come to look at this life of ours, what- 
 ever may be its outward appearance, in the depths of it there 
 is great seriousness; the externalities of it may seem to be 
 
Three Times in a Nations History. 819 
 
 joy and brightness, but in the deep beneath there is a strange, 
 stern aspect. It may be that the human race is on its way 
 to good, but the victory hitherto gained is so small that we 
 can scarcely rejoice over it. It may be that human nature 
 is progressing, but that progress has been but slowly mak- 
 ing, through years and centuries of blood. And therefore 
 contemplating all this, and penetrating beyond the time of 
 the present joy, the Redeemer wept, not for Himself, but for 
 that devoted city. 
 
 He was then on the Mount of Olives ; beneath Him there 
 lay the metropolis of Judea, with the Temple in full sight ; 
 the towers and the walls of Jerusalem flashing back the 
 brightness of an Oriental sky. The Redeemer knew that she 
 was doomed, and therefore with tears He pronounced her 
 corning fate : " The days shall come that thine enemies shall 
 cast a trench about thee, and shall not leave in thee one 
 stone upon another." These words, which rang the funeral 
 knell of Jerusalem, tell out in our ears this day a solemn les- 
 son ; they tell us that in the history of nations, and also, it 
 may be, in the personal history of individuals, there are three 
 times a time of grace, a time of blindness, and a time of 
 judgment. 
 
 This then, is our subject the three times in a nation's 
 history. When the Redeemer spake, it was for Jerusalem 
 the time of blindness ; the time of grace was past ; that of 
 judgment was to come. 
 
 We Uke these three in order: first, the time of grace. 
 We find it expressed here in three different modes: first, 
 " in this thy day ;" then, " the things which belong to thy 
 peace ;" and thirdly, " the time of thy visitation." 1 -" And from 
 this we understand the meaning of a time of grace ; it was 
 Jerusalem's time of opportunity. The time in which the Re- 
 deemer appeared was that in which faith was almost worn 
 out. He found men with their faces turned backward to the 
 past, instead of forward to the future. They were as chil- 
 dren clinging to the garments of a relation they have lost ; 
 life there was not, faith there was not only the garments 
 of a past belief. He found them groaning under the domin- 
 ion of Rome ; rising up against it, and thinking it their 
 worst evil. 
 
 The coldest hour of all the night is that which immediately 
 precedes the dawn, and in that darkest hour of Jerusalem's 
 night her light beamed forth ; her wisest and greatest came 
 in the midst of her, almost unknown, born under the law, to 
 emancipate those who were groaning under the law. His life, 
 the day of His preaching, was Jerusalem's time of grace. 
 
820 Three Times in a Nation s History. 
 
 During that time the Redeemer spake the tilings which be 
 longed to her peace : those things were few and simple. He 
 found her people mourning under political degradation. He 
 told them that political degradation does not degrade the 
 man ; the only thing that can degrade a man is slavery to 
 sin. He told men who were looking merely to the past, no 
 longer to look thither and say that Abraham was their father, 
 for that God could raise up out of those stones children to 
 .Abraham, and a greater than Abraham was there. He told 
 them also not to look for some future deliverer, for deliver- 
 ance was already come. They asked Him when the king- 
 dom of God should come ; He told them they were not to 
 cry, Lo here ! or,lo there I for the kingdom of God was with- 
 in ; that they were to begin the kingdom of God now, by 
 each man becoming individually more holy, that if each man 
 so reformed his own soul,, the reformation of the kingdom 
 would soon spread around them. They came to Him com- 
 plaining of the Roman tribute ; He asked for a piece of 
 money, and said, " Render unto Caesar the things that be 
 Caesar's, ami to God the things that be God's;" plainly tell- 
 ing them that the bondage from which men were to be de- 
 livered was not an earthly, bat a spiritual bondage. He 
 drew the distinction sharply between happiness and blessed- 
 ness the two things are opposite, although not necessarily 
 contrary. He told them, "" Blessed are the meek 1 Blessed 
 are the poor in spirit !'* The mourning man, and the poor 
 man, and the persecuted man these were not happy, if hap^ 
 piness consists in the gratification of all our desires; but they 
 were blessed beyond all earthly blessedness, for happiness is 
 but the contentment of desire, while blessedness is the satis- 
 faction of those aspirations which have God alone for their 
 >nd and aim. 
 
 All these things were rejected by the nation. They were 
 rejected first by the priests. They knew not that the mind 
 of the age in which they lived was in advance of the tra- 
 ditional Judaism, and, therefore, they looked upon the Re 
 deemer as an irreverent, ungodly man, a sabbath-breaker. 
 He was rejected by the rulers, who did not understand that 
 in righteousness alone are governments to subsist, and, there 
 fore, when He demanded of them justice, mercy, truth, they 
 looked repon Him as a revofutionizer. He was rejected like- 
 wise by the people that people ever ready to listen to any 
 demagogue promising them earthly grandeur. They who on 
 this occasion called out, "Hosanna to the Son of David," and 
 were content to do so, so long as they believed He intended 
 to lead them to personal comfort and enjoyment, afterwards 
 
Three Times in a Nations History. 821 
 
 cried out, " Crucify Him ! crucify Him !" " His blood be on 
 us, and on our children ;" so that His rejection was the act 
 of the whole nation. Now, respecting this day of grace we 
 have two remarks to make. 
 
 First : in this advent of the Redeemer there was nothing 
 outwardly remarkable to the men of that day. It was al- 
 most nothing. Of all the historians of that period, few in- 
 deed are found to mention it. This is a thing which we at 
 this day can scarcely understand ; for to us the blessed advent 
 of our Lord is the brightest page in the world's history : but 
 to them it was far otherwise. Remember, for one moment, 
 what the advent of our Lord was to all outward appearance. 
 He seemed, let it be said reverently, to the rulers of those 
 days, a fanatical freethinker. They heard of His miracles, 
 but they appeared nothing remarkable to them ; there was 
 nothing there on which to fasten their attention. They heard 
 that some of the populace had been led away, and now and 
 then, it may be, some of His words reached their ears, but to 
 them they were hard to be understood full of mystery, or 
 else they roused every evil passion in their hearts, so stern 
 and uncompromising was the morality they taught. They 
 put aside these words in that brief period, and the day of 
 grace passed. 
 
 And just such as this is God's visitation to us. Generally, 
 the day of God's visitation is not a day very remarkable out- 
 wardly. Bereavements, sorrows no doubt, in these God 
 speaks ; but there are other occasions far more quiet and un- 
 obtrusive, but which are yet plainly days of grace. A scruple 
 which others do not see, a doubt coming into the mind re- 
 specting some views held sacred by the popular creed, a sense 
 of heart-loneliness and solitariness, a feeling of awful misgiving 
 when the future lies open before us, the dread feeling of an 
 eternal godlessness, for men who are living godless lives now 
 these silent moments unmarked, these are the moments in 
 which the Eternal is speaking to our souls. 
 
 Once more : that day of Jerusalem's visitation her day 
 of grace was short. It was narrowed up into the short 
 space of three years and a half. After that, God still plead- 
 ed with individuals ; but the national cause, as a cause, wa? 
 gone. Jerusalem's doom was sealed when He pronounced 
 those words. Again, there is a lesson, a principle for us : God'? 
 day of visitation is frequently short. A few actions often 
 decide the destiny of individuals, because they give a desti- 
 nation and form to habits ; they settle the tone and form of 
 the mind from which there will be in this life no alteration. 
 So it is in the earliest history of our species. In those rnys- 
 
822 Three Times in a Nations History. 
 
 terious chapters at the commencement of the book of Gene- 
 sis, we are told that it was one act which sealed the destiny 
 of Adam and of all the human race. What was it but a very 
 few actions, done in a very short time, that settled the destiny 
 of those nations through which the children of Israel passed 
 on their way to Canaan ? The question for them was simply, 
 whether they would show Israel mercy or not ; this was all. 
 
 Once more : we see it again in the case of Saul. One cir- 
 cumstance, at the most, two, marked out his destiny. Then 
 came those solemn words, " The strength of Israel can not lie 
 nor repent. The Lord hath rent the kingdom from thee this 
 day." From that hour his course was downward, his day 
 of grace was past. 
 
 Brethren, the truth is plain. The day of visitation is aw- 
 fully short. We say not that God never pleads a long time, 
 but we say this, that sometimes God speaks to a nation or to 
 a man but once. If not heard then, His voice is heard no 
 more. 
 
 We pass on now to consider Israel's day of blindness. Ju- 
 dicial blindness is of a twofold character. It may be pro- 
 duced by removing the light, or by incapacitating the eye to 
 receive that light. Sometimes men do not see because there 
 is no light for them to see ; and this was what was done to 
 Israel the Saviour was taken away from her. The voice of 
 the apostles declared this truth : " It was necessary that the 
 word should first have been spoken to you ; but seeing ye 
 put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlast- 
 ing life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles." 
 
 There is a way of blindness by hardening the 'heart. Let 
 us not conceal this truth from ourselves. God blinds the eye, 
 but it is in the appointed course of His providential dealings. 
 If a man will not see, the law is he shall not see ; if he will 
 not do what is right when he knows the right, then right 
 shall become to him wrong, and wrong shall seem to be right. 
 We read that God hardened Pharaoh's heart ; that He blind- 
 ed Israel. It is impossible to look at these cases of blindness 
 without perceiving in them something of Divine action. 
 Even at the moment when the Romans were at their gates, 
 Jerusalem still dreamed of security; and when the battering* 
 ram was at the tower of Antonia, the priests were celebrating, 
 in fancied safety, their daily sacrifices. From the moment 
 when our Master spake, there was deep stillness over her 
 until her destruction ; like the strange and unnatural stillness 
 before the thunder-storm, when every breath seems hushed, 
 and every leaf may be almost heard moving in the motion- 
 less air ; and all this calm and stillness is but the prelude lo 
 
Three Times in a Nations History. 823 
 
 the moment when the east and west are lighted up with the 
 red flashes, and the whole creation seems to reel. Such was 
 the blindness of that nation which would not know the day 
 of her visitation. 
 
 We pass on now to consider, lastly, her day of judgment. 
 Her beautiful morning was clouded, her sun had gone down 
 in gloom, and she was left in darkness. The account of the 
 siege is one of the darkest passages in Roman history. In 
 the providence of God, the history of that belongs, not to a 
 Christian, but to a Jew. We all know the account that he 
 has given us of the eleven hundred thousand who perished 
 in that siege, of the thousands crucified along the sea-shore. 
 We have all heard of the two factions that divided the city, 
 of the intense hatred that made the cruelty of Jew towards 
 Jew more terrible than even the vengeance of the Romans. 
 This was the destruction of Jerusalem the day of her ruin. 
 
 And now, brethren, let us observe, this judgment came in 
 the way of natural consequences. We make a great mistake 
 respecting judgments. God's judgments are not arbitrary, 
 but the results of natural laws. The historians tell us that 
 Jerusalem owed her ruin to the fanaticism and obstinate 
 blindness of her citizens ; from all of which her Redeemer 
 came to emancipate her. Had they understood, " Blessed 
 are the poor in spirit," " Blessed are the meek," and " Blessed 
 are the peacemakers ;" had they understood that, Jerusalem's 
 day of ruin might never have come. 
 
 Now let us apply this to the day we are at present cele- 
 brating. We all know that this destruction of Jerusalem is 
 connected with the second coming of Christ. In St. Matthew 
 the two advents are so blended together that it is hard to 
 separate one from the other ; nay, rather, it is impossible, be- 
 cause we have our Master's words, " Verily, I say unto you, 
 this generation shall not pass till all be fulfilled." Therefore 
 this prophecy, in all its fullness, came to pass in the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem. But it is impossible to look at it without 
 perceiving there is also something farther included ; we shall 
 understand it by turning to the elucidation given by our 
 Lord Himself. When the apostles asked, Where shall all 
 these things be ? Hi* reply was, in effect, this : Ask you 
 where ? T tell you, nowhere in particular, or rather, every- 
 where ; for wheresoever there is corruption, there will be 
 destruction " where the carcass is, thither will the eagles be 
 gathered together." So that this first coming of the Son of 
 Man to judgment was the type, the specimen of what shall 
 be hereafter. 
 
 And now, brethren, let us apply this subject still more 
 
824 Three Times in a Nation s History. 
 
 home. Is 'there no such thing as blindness among our- 
 selves? May not this be our day of visitation ? First, there 
 is among us priestly blindness ; the blindness of men who 
 know not that the demands of this age are in advance of 
 those that have gone before. There is no blindness greater 
 than that of those who think that the panacea for the evils 
 of a country is to be found in ecclesiastical union. But let 
 us not be mistaken : it is not here, we think, that the great 
 danger lies. We dread not Rome. Xo man can understand 
 the signs of the times, w r ho does not feel that the day of 
 Rome is passing away, as that of Jerusalem once did. But 
 the danger lies in this consideration we find that w r here the 
 doctrines of Rome have been at all successful, it has been 
 among the clergy and upper classes ; while, when presented 
 to the middle and lower classes, they have been at once re- 
 jected. There is, then, apparently, a gulf between the two. 
 If there be added to the difference of position a still further 
 and deeper difference of religion, then who shall dare to say 
 what the end shall be ? 
 
 Once more : we look at the blindness of men talking of 
 intellectual enlightenment. It is true that we have more 
 enlightened civilization and comfort. What then ? will that 
 retard our day of judgment? Jerusalem was becoming 
 more enlightened, and Rome w r as at its most civilized point, 
 when the destroyer was at their gates. 
 
 Therefore, let us know the day of our visitation. It is not 
 the day of refinement, nor of political liberty, nor of advan- 
 cing intellect. We must go again in the old, old way ; we 
 must return to simpler manners and to a purer life. We 
 want more faith, more love. The life of Christ and the 
 death of Christ must be made the law of our life. Reject 
 that, and we reject our own salvation ; and, in rejecting that, 
 we bring on in rapid steps, for the nation and for ourselves, 
 th day of judgment and of ruin. 
 
Inspiration. 825 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 INSPIRATION. 
 
 "We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and! 
 not to please ourselves. Let every one of us please his neighbor for his good 
 to edification. For even Christ pleased not himself; but, as it is written, 
 The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me. For whatsoever 
 things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through 
 patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope." Rom. xv. 1-4. 
 
 WE will endeavor, brethren, to search the connection be- 
 tween the different parts of these verses. 
 
 First, the apostle lays down a Christian's duty "Let 
 every one of us please his neighbor for his good to edifica- 
 tion." After that he brings forward as the sanction of that 
 duty, the spirit of the life of Christ "For even Christ 
 . pleased not Himself." Next, he adds an illustration of that 
 principle by a quotation from Psalm. Ixix : "It is written, 
 The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me." 
 Lastly, he explains and defends that application of the 
 psalm, as if he had said, u I am perfectly justified in apply- 
 ing that passage to Christ, for ' whatsoever things were 
 written aforetime were written for our learning.' " 
 
 So that in this quotation, and the defense of it as con- 
 tained in these verses, we have the principle of apostolical 
 interpretation ; we have the principle upon which the apos- 
 tles used the Old Testament Scriptures, and we are enabled 
 to understand their view of inspiration. -This is one of the 
 most important considerations upon which we can be at this 
 moment engaged. It is the deepest question of our day : 
 the one which lies beneath all others, and in comparison of 
 which the questions just now agitating the popular mind 
 whether of Papal jurisdiction or varieties of Church doc- 
 trine in our own communion are but superficial : it is this 
 ffgrand question of inspiration which is given to this age to 
 solve. 
 
 Our subject will break itself up into questions such as 
 these : What the Bible is, and what the Bible is not ? 
 What is meant by inspiration ? Whether inspiration is the 
 same thing as infallibility? When God inspired the minds, 
 did He dictate the words ? Does the inspiration of men 
 mean the infallibility of their words ? Is inspiration the 
 Bame as dictation ? Whether, granting that we have the 
 
 .35* 
 
826 Inspiration. 
 
 Word of God, we have also the words of God ? Are the op- 
 erations of the Holy Spirit, inspiring men, compatible with 
 partial error, as His operations in sanctifying them are com- 
 patible with partial evil ? How are we to interpret and ap- 
 ply the Scriptures ? Is Scripture, as the Komanists say, so 
 unintelligible and obsciire that we can not understand it 
 without having the guidance of an infallible Church ? Or is 
 jit, as some fanciful Protestants will tell us, a book upon 
 ^which all ingenuity may be used to find Christ in every sen- 
 tence ? Upon these things there are many views, some of 
 them false, some superstitious ; but it is not our business 
 now to deal with these ; our way is rather to teach positive- 
 ly than negatively : we will try to set up the truth, and 
 error may fall before it. 
 
 The collect for this day leads us to the special considera-, 
 tion of Holy Scripture ; We shall therefore take this for our 
 subject, and endeavor to understand what was the apostoli- 
 cal principle of interpretation. 
 
 In the text we find two principles : first, that Scripture is 
 of universal application ; 
 
 And second, that aH the lines of Scripture converge to- 
 wards Jesus Christ. 
 
 First, then, there is here a universal application of Scrip- 
 ture. This passage quoted by the apostle is from the sixty- 
 ninth Psalm. That was evidently spoken by David of him- 
 self. From first to last, no unprejudiced mind can detect a 
 conception in the writer's mind of an application to Christ, 
 or to any other person after him ; the psalmist is there full 
 of himself and his own sorrows. It is a natural and touching 
 exposition of human grief and a good man's trust. Never- 
 theless, you will observe that St. Paul extends the use of 
 these words, and applies them to Jesus Christ. Nay, more 
 than that, he uses them as belonging to all Christians ; for, 
 he says, " Whatsoever things were written aforetime, were 
 written for our learning." Now this principle will be more 
 evident if we state it in the words of Scripture, " Knowing 
 that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpreta- 
 tion:" those holy men spake not their own limited individual 
 feelings, but as feeling that they w r ere inspired by the Spirit 
 of God. Their words belonged* to the whole of our common 
 humanity. No prophecy of the Scriptures is of any private 
 interpretation. Bear in mind that the word prophecy does 
 not mean what we now understand by it merely prediction 
 of future events in the Scriptures it signifies inspired teach- 
 ing. The teaching of the prophets was by no means always 
 prediction. Bearing this in mind, let us remember that the 
 
Inspiration. 8? 7 
 
 ftpostle says it is of no private interpretation. Had the Psalm 
 applied only to David, then it would have been of private 
 interpretation it would have been special, limited, particu- 
 lar ; it would have belonged to an individual ; instead of 
 which, it belongs to humanity. Take again the subject of 
 which we spoke last Sunday the prophecy of the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem. Manifestly that was spoken originally at 
 Jerusalem ; in a manner it seemed limited to Jerusalem, for 
 its very name was mentioned ; and besides, as we read this 
 morning, our Saviour says, " This generation shall not pass 
 until all be fulfilled." 
 
 But had the prophecy ended there, then you would still 
 have had prophecy, but it would have been of private that 
 is, peculiar, limited interpretation ; whereas our Redeemer's 
 principle was this : that this doom pronounced on Jerusalem 
 was universally applicable, that it was but a style and speci- 
 men of God's judgments. The judgment-coming of the Son 
 of Man takes place wherever there is evil grown ripe, when- 
 ever corruption is complete. And the gathering of the 
 Roman eagles is but a specimen of the way in which 
 judgment at last overtakes every city, every country and 
 every man in whom evil has reached the point where there 
 is no possibility of cure. 
 
 So that the prophecy belongs to all ages, from the de- 
 struction of Jerusalem to the end of the world. The words 
 of St. Matthew are universally applicable. For Scripture 
 deals with principles ; not with individuals, but rather with 
 states of humanity. Promises and threatenings are made 
 to individuals, because they are in a particular state of 
 character ; but they belong to all who are in that state, for 
 " God is no respecter of persons." 
 
 First, we will take an instance of the state of blessing. 
 
 There was blessing pronounced to Abraham, in which it 
 will be seen how large a grasp on humanity this view of 
 Scripture gave to St. Paul. The whole argument in the 
 Epistle to the Romans is, that the promises made to Abra- 
 ham were not to his person, but to his faith ; and thus the 
 apostle says, "They who are of faith, are blessed with faith- 
 c -.il Abraham." 
 
 We will now take the case of curse or threatening. Jonah, 
 by Divine command, went through Nineveh, proclaiming its 
 destruction ; but that prophecy belonged to the state in 
 which Nineveh was ; it was true only while it remained in 
 that state ; arid therefore, as they repented, and their state 
 was thus changed, the prophecy was left unfulfilled. From 
 this we perceive the largeness and grandeur of Scripture in* 
 
828 Inspiration. 
 
 terpretation. In the Epistle to the Corinthians, we find the 
 apostle telling of the state of the Jews in their passage to- 
 wards the promised land, their state of idolatry and glut- 
 tony, and then he proceeds to pronounce the judgments 
 that fell upon them, adding that he tells us this not merely 
 as a matter of history, but rather as an illustration of a prin- 
 ciple. They are specimens of eternal, unalterable law. So 
 that whosoever shall be in the state of these Jews, whosoever 
 shall imitate them, the same judgments must fall upon them, 
 the same satiety and weariness, the same creeping of the 
 inward serpent polluting all their feelings ; and therefore he 
 says, "All these things happened unto them for ensamples." 
 Again, he uses the same principle, not as a private, but a 
 general application ; for he says, " There hath no temptation 
 taken you but such as is common to man." 
 
 We will take now another case, applied not to nations, 
 but to individuals. In Hebrews xiii. we find these words 
 from the Old Testament, " I will never leave thee nor for- 
 sake thee ;" and there the apostle's inference is that we may 
 boldly say, "The Lord is my helper, I will not fear what 
 men shall do unto me." Now, when we refer to Scripture, 
 we shall find that this was a promise originally made to 
 Jacob. The apostle does not hesitate to take that promise 
 and appropriate it to all Christians ; for it was made, not to 
 Jacob as a person, but to the state in which Jacob was ; it 
 was made to all who, like Jacob, are wanderers and pilgrims 
 in the world ; it was made to all whom sin has rendered out- 
 casts and who are longing to return. The promises made to 
 the meek belong to meekness ; the promises made to the 
 humble belong to humility. 
 
 And this it is which makes this Bible, not only a blessed 
 book, but our book. It is this universal applicability of 
 Scripture which has made the influence of the Bible uni- 
 versal : this book has held spell-bound the hearts of nations, 
 in a way in which no single book has ever held men before. 
 Remember, too, in order to enhance the marvellousness of 
 this, that the nation from which it emanated was a despised 
 people. For the last eighteen hundred years the Jews have 
 been proverbially a by-word and a reproach. But that con- 
 tempt for Israel is nothing new to the world, for before even 
 the Roman despised them, the Assyrian and Egyptian re- 
 garded them with scorn. Yet the words which came from 
 Israel's prophets have been the life-blood of the world's de- 
 votions. And the teachers, the psalmists, the prophets, and 
 the lawgivers of this despised nation spoke out truths that 
 have struck the key-note of the heart of man ; and this, not 
 
Inspiration. 829 
 
 because they were of Jewish, but just because they were of 
 universal application. 
 
 This collection of books has been to the world what no 
 other book has ever been to a nation. States have been 
 founded on its principles. Kings rule by a compact based on 
 it. Men hold the Bible in their hands when they prepare to 
 give solemn evidence affecting life, death, or property ; the 
 sick man is almost afraid to die unless the book be within 
 reach of his hands ; the battle-ship goes into action with 
 one on board whose office is to expound it ; its prayers, 
 its psalms are the language which we use when we speak to 
 God ; eighteen centuries have found no holier, no diviner 
 language. If ever there has been a prayer or a hymn 
 enshrined in the heart of a nation, you are sure to find its 
 basis in the Bible. There is no new religious idea given 
 to the world, but it is merely the development of something 
 given in the Bible. The very translation of it has fixed 
 language and settled the idioms of speech. Germany and 
 England speak as they speak because the Bible was trans- 
 lated. It has made the most illiterate peasant more familiar 
 with the history, customs, and geography of ancient Palestine 
 than with the localities of his own country. Men who know 
 nothing of the Grampians, of Sriowden, or of Skiddaw, are 
 at home in Zion, the Lake of Gennesareth, or among the rills 
 of Carmel. People who know little about London, know 
 by heart the places in Jerusalem where those blessed feet 
 trod which were nailed to the cross. Men who know noth- 
 ing of the architecture of a Christian cathedral, can yet tell 
 you all about the pattern of the holy temple. Even this 
 shows us the influence of the Bible. The orator holds a 
 thousand men for half an hour breathless a thousand men 
 as one, listening to his single word. But this Word of God 
 has held a thousand nations for thrice a thousand years spell- 
 bound ; held them by an abiding power, even the universal! 
 ty of its truth ; and we feel it to be no more a collection of 
 books, but the book. 
 
 We pass on now to consider the second principle contained 
 in these words, which is, that all Scripture bears towards 
 Jesus Christ. St. Paul quotes these Jewish words as fulfilled 
 in Christ. Jesus of Nazareth is the central point in which 
 all the converging lines of Scripture meet. Again we state 
 this principle in Scripture language : in the book ot Revela- 
 tjon we find it written, " The testimony of Jesus is the spirit 
 of prophecy," that is, the sum and substance of prophecy, 
 the very spirit of Scripture is to bear testimony to Jesus 
 Christ. We must often have been surprised and perplexed 
 
830 Inspiration. 
 
 at the way in which the apostles quote passages in reference 
 to Christ which originally had no reference to Him. In our 
 text, for instance, David speaks only of himself, and yet 
 St. Paul refers it to Christ. Let us understand this. We 
 have already said that Scripture deals not with individuals, 
 but with states and principles. Promises belong to persons 
 only so far as they are what they are taken to be ; and con- 
 sequently all unlimited promises made to individuals, so far 
 as they are referred merely to those individuals, are necessa- 
 rily exaggerated and hyperbolical. They can only be true 
 of One in w^hom that is fulfilled which was unfulfilled in 
 them. 
 
 We will take an instance. We are all familiar with the 
 well-known prophecy of Balaam. We all remember the 
 magnificent destinies he promised to the people whom he 
 was called to curse. Those promises have never been fulfill- 
 ed, neither from the whole appearance of things does it seem 
 likely that they ever will be fulfilled in their literal sense. 
 To whom, then, are they made ? To Israel ? Yes ; so far as 
 they developed God's own conception. Balaam says, "God 
 hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath He seen per 
 verseness in Israel." Is this the character of Israel, an idol- 
 atrous and rebellious nation ? Spoken of the literal Israel, 
 this prophecy is false ; but it was not false of that spotless- 
 ness and purity of which Israel was the temporal and imper- 
 fect type. If one can be found of whom that description is 
 true, of whom we can say, the Lord hath not beheld iniquity 
 in him, to him then that prophecy belongs. 
 
 Brethren, Jesus of Nazareth is that pure and spotless One. 
 Christ is perfectly, all that every saint was partially. To 
 Him belongs all : all that description of a perfect character 
 which would be exaggeration if spoken of others, and to this 
 character the blessing belongs ; hence it is that all the frag- 
 mentary representations of character collect and centre in 
 Him alone. Therefore, tho apostle says, "It was added until 
 the seed should come to whom the promise was made." 
 Consequently St. Paul would not read the Psalm as spoken 
 only of David. Were the lofty aspirations, the purity and 
 humbleness expressed in the text, true of him, poor, sinful, err- 
 ing David? These were the expressions of the Christ within 
 his heart the longing of the Spirit of God within Him ; but 
 they were no proper representation of the spirit of his life, 
 for there is a marvellous difference between a man's ideal 
 and his actual between the man and the book he writes a 
 difference between the aspirations within the man and the 
 character which is realized by his daily life. The promises 
 
Inspiration. 831 
 
 are to the Christ within David ; therefore they are applied to 
 the Christ when He comes. Now, let us extract from that 
 this application. 
 
 Brethren, Scripture is full of Christ. From Genesis to 
 Revelation every thing breathes of Him, not every letter of 
 every sentence, but the spirit of every chapter. It is full of 
 Christ, but not in the way that some suppose ; for there is 
 nothing more miserable, as specimens of perverted ingenuity, 
 than the attempts of certain commentators and preachers to 
 find remote, and recondite, and intended allusions to Christ 
 everywhere. For example, they chance to find in the con- 
 struction of the temple the fusion of two metals, and this 
 they conceive is meant to show the union of Divinity with 
 Humanity in Christ. If they read of coverings to the* taber- 
 nacle, they find implied the doctrine of imputed righteous- 
 ness. If it chance that one of the curtains of the tabernacle 
 be red, they see in that the prophecy of the blood of Christ. 
 If they are told that the kingdom of heaven is a pearl of great 
 price, they will see it in the allusion that, as a pearl is the 
 production of animal suffering, so the kingdom of heaven is 
 produced by the sufferings of the Redeemer. I mention this 
 perverted mode of comment, because it is not merely harm- 
 less, idle, and useless ; it is positively dangerous. This is to 
 make the Holy Spirit speak riddles and conundrums, and the 
 interpretation of Scripture but clever riddle-guessing. Put- 
 ting aside all this childishness, we say that the Bible is full 
 of Christ. Every unfulfilled aspiration of humanity in the 
 past; all partial representation of perfect character; all sac- 
 rifices, nay even those of idolatry, point to the fulfillment of 
 what we want, the answer to every longing the type of 
 perfect humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 Get the habit a glorious one of referring all to Christ. 
 How did He feel ? think ? act ? So then must I feel, and 
 think, and act. Observe how Christ was a living reality in 
 St. Paul's mind. "Should I please myself?" "For even 
 Christ pleased not Himself;" "It is more blessed to give 
 than to receive." 
 
832 The Last Utterances of Christ* 
 
 XXIX. 
 THE LAST UTTERANCES OF CHRIST. 
 
 "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finishscU 
 ind he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost." John xix. 30. 
 
 THERE are seven dying sentences of our Lord's recorded 
 \\\ the Gospels; one recorded conjointly by St. Matthew and 
 St. Mark, three recorded by St. Luke, and three by St. John. 
 That recorded by the first two evangelists is, "My God, my 
 God, why hast thoa forsaken me ?" Those preserved by St. 
 Luke only are, " Verily, I say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be 
 with me in paradise;" " Father, forgive them, for they know 
 not what they do ;" and, " Father, into Thy hands I com- 
 mend my Spirit." The three recorded by St. John are these : 
 " I thirst ;" " Behold thy mother ; behold thy son ;" and 
 lastly, " It is finished." And these seven group themselves 
 into two divisions: we perceive that some of them are the 
 utterances of personal feeling, and others are the utterances 
 
 of sympathy for others. 
 These are, 
 
 therefore, the two divisions of our subject to 
 day 
 
 I. The natural exclamations of the Man. 
 II. The-utterances of the Saviour. 
 
 The first of those which we class under the exclamations 
 of the Man, referring to His personal feelings, is," I thirst;" 
 in answer to which they gave Him vinegar to drink. Now 
 upon first reading this, we are often tempted to suppose, from 
 the unnatural character of the draught, that an insult was 
 intended; and therefore we rank this among the taunts and 
 fearful sufferings which He endured at His crucifixion. But 
 as we become acquainted w T ith Oriental history, we discover 
 :hat this vinegar was the common drink of the Roman arm; . 
 their wine, and therefore was the most likely to be at hanu 
 when in the company of soldiers, as He then was. Let it be 
 borne in mind that a draught was twice offered to him: once 
 it was accepted, once it was refused. That which was re- 
 fused was the medicated potion wine mingled with myrrh 
 the intention of which was to deaden pain, and therefore 
 when it was presented to the Saviour it was rejected. And 
 the reason commonly assigned for that seems to be the true 
 
The Last Utterances of Christ. 833 
 
 one : the Son of Man would not meet death in a state of stu- 
 pefaction, He chose to meet His God awake. 
 
 There are two modes in which pain may be struggled with 
 through the flesh, and through the spirit; the one is the 
 office of the physician, the other that of the Christian. The 
 physician's care is at once to deaden pain either by insensi- 
 bility or specifics; the Christian's object is to deaden pain 
 by patience. We dispute not the value of the physician's 
 remedies, in their way they are permissible and valuable ; but 
 yet let it be observed that in these there is nothing moral ; 
 they may take away the venom of the serpent's sting, but 
 they do not give the courage to plant the foot upon the ser- 
 pent's head, and to bear the pain without flinching. There- 
 fore the Redeemer refused, because it was not through the 
 flesh, but through the Spirit, that He would conquer ; to 
 have accepted the anodyne would have been to escape from 
 suffering, but not to conquer it. But the vinegar or sour 
 wine was accepted as a refreshing draught, for it would seem 
 that He did not look upon the value of the suffering as con- 
 sisting in this, that He should make it as exquisite as possible, 
 but rather that He should not suffer one drop of the cup of 
 agony which His Father had put into His hand to trickle 
 down the side untasted. Neither would He make to Him- 
 self one drop more of suffering than His Father had given. 
 
 There are books on the value of pain; they tell us that if 
 of two kinds of food the one is pleasant and the other nau- 
 seous, we are to choose the nauseous one. Let a lesson on 
 this subject be learnt from the Divine example of our Master. 
 
 To suffer pain for others without flinching, that is our 
 Master's example ; but pain for the mere sake of pain, that is 
 not Christian ; to accept poverty in order to do good for oth- 
 ers, that is our Saviour's principle ; but to become poor for 
 the sake and the merit of being poor, is but selfishness after 
 all. Our Lord refused the anodyne that would have made 
 the cup untasted which His Father had put into His hand 
 to drink, but He would not taste one drop more than His 
 Father gave him. Yet He did not refuse the natural solace 
 which His Father's hand had placed before Him. 
 
 There are some who urge most erroneously the doctrine 
 of discipline and self-denial. If of two ways one is disagree- 
 able, they will choose it, just because it is disagreeable; be- 
 cause food is pleasant and needful, they will fast. There is 
 in this a great mistake. To deny self for the sake of duty is 
 right to sacrifice life and interests rather than principle is 
 right; but self-denial for the mere sake of self-denial, torture 
 for torture's sake, is neither good nor Christlike. Remem- 
 
834 7^ Last Utterances of Christ. 
 
 ber, He drank the cooling beverage in the very moment of 
 the sacrifice ; the value of which did not consist in its being 
 made as intensely painful as possible, but in His not flinching 
 from the pain, when love and duty said, Endure. 
 
 His second exclamation was, " My God, my God, why hast 
 Thou forsaken me ?" We will not dive into the deep mysteries 
 of that expression we will not pretend to be wiser than 
 what is written, endeavoring to comprehend where the human 
 is mingled with the Divine we will take the matter simply 
 as it stands. It is plain from this expression that the Son of 
 God felt as if He had been deserted by His Father. We 
 know that He was not deserted by Him, or else God had 
 denied Himself, after saying, " This is my beloved Son, in 
 whom I am well pleased." And they who maintain that 
 this was real desertion, attribute that to the Lord of Love 
 which can alone belong to Judas the desertion of innocence 
 therefore we conclude that it arose from the infirmities of 
 our Master's innocent human nature. It was the darkening 
 of His human soul, not the hiding of God's countenance. He 
 was worn, faint, and exhausted ; His body was hanging from 
 four lacerated w^ounds; and more than that, there was much 
 to perplex the Redeemer's human feelings, for He was suffer- 
 ing there, the innocent for the guilty. For once God's law 
 seemed reversed ; and then came the human cry, " My God, 
 my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ?" 
 
 And now, brethren, observe in this, that it arose apparently 
 from the connection of the Redeemer's death with sin. When 
 the death-struggle of the flesh begins, and w r e first become 
 aware of the frailty of our humanity, then the controversy of 
 God with the soul is felt to be real by reason of our con- 
 sciousness of sin ; then is felt, as it were, the immense gulf 
 that separates between the pure and the impure. In the 
 case of the Son of Man this was, of course, impossible ; con- 
 sciousness of sin He had none, for He had no sin ; but there 
 was a connection, so to speak, between the death of Christ 
 and sin, for the apostle says, " In that He died, He died unto 
 sin once." " He died unto sin ;" there w r as a connection be- 
 tween His death and sin, though it was not His own sin, but 
 the sin of the whole world. In that moment of the apparent 
 victory of evil, the Redeemer's spirit, as it would appear, felt 
 a darkness similar to ours when sin has hidden our conscious- 
 ness of God. When death is merely natural, we can fee 1 
 that the hand of God is there; but when man interferes, and 
 the hand of God is invisible, and that of man is alone seen, 
 then all seems dark and uncertain. The despondency of 
 the Redeemer was not supernatural, but most natural dark- 
 
The Last Utterances of Christ. 835 
 
 ness. The words He used were not his own, but David'? 
 words ; and this proclaims that suffering such as He was then 
 bearing had been borne before Him the difference was in de- 
 gree, not in kind. The idea of piety struggling with, and victo- 
 rious over evil, had been exhibited on earth before. The idea 
 was imperfectly exhibited in the sufferings of Israel regard- 
 ed as typical of Christ. In Christ alone is it perfectly pre- 
 sented. So also that wondrous chapter, the fifty-third of 
 Isaiah, justly describing both, belongs in its entireness to 
 Christ : He therefore adopted these words as His own. 
 
 The last personal ejaculation of our Redeemer was, 
 " Father, into Thy hands I commend my Spirit." We take 
 this in connection with the preceding ; for if we do not, the 
 two will be unintelligible, but taking them together, it De- 
 comes plain that the darkness of the Redeemer's mind was 
 but momentary. For a moment the Redeemer felt alone 
 and deserted, and then, in the midst of it, He cried out, 
 "Father, into Thy hands I commend my Spirit." In that 
 moment He realized His inseparable union with the Father. 
 
 And now I would observe, if I may do it without being 
 misunderstood, that the Redeemer speaks as if not knowing 
 where He was going " Into Thy hands," that is sufficient. 
 It is as well to look at these things as simply as possible. 
 Do not confuse the mind with attempting to draw the dis- 
 tinction between the human and the Divine. He speaks 
 here as if His human soul, like ours, entered into the dark 
 unknown, not seeing what was to be in the hereafter : and 
 this is faith, or, if it were not so, there arises an idea from 
 which we shrink, as if He were speaking words He did not 
 feel. We know nothing of the world beyond, we are like 
 children ; even revelation has told us almost nothing con- 
 cerning this, and an inspired apostle says, " We know not 
 yet what we shall be." Then rises faith, and dares to say, 
 " My Father, I know nothing, but, be where I may, still I 
 am with Thee;" "Into Thy hands I commend my Spirit." 
 Therefore, and only therefore, do we dare to die. 
 
 We pass on, secondly, to the consideration of those utter- 
 ances which our Master spake as the Saviour of the world. 
 The first is, " Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
 :hey do." From this expression we infer two things : first, 
 that sin needs forgiveness ; and, secondly, that forgiveness 
 can be granted. 
 
 Sin needs forgiveness, or the Redeemer would not have so 
 
 E rayed. That it needs forgiveness we also prove, from the 
 ict that it always connects itself with penalty. Years may 
 separate the present from your past misconduct, but the re- 
 
836 The Last Utterances of Christ. 
 
 membrance of it remains; nay, more than that, even those 
 errors which we did ignorant! y carry with them their retri- 
 bution ; and from this we collect the fact that even errors, 
 failures in judgment, need God's forgiveness. Another 
 proof that sin needs pardon is from the testimony of con- 
 science. In all men it speaks, in some in but a feeble w r his- 
 per, in others with an irregular sound, now a lull, and then a 
 storm of recollection ; in others, conscience is as a low per- 
 petual knell, ever sounding, telling of the death going on 
 within, proclaiming that the past has been accursed, the pres- 
 ent withered, and that the future is one vast terrible blank. 
 
 In these several forms, conscience tells us also that the 
 sin has been committed against our Father. The perma- 
 nence of all our acts, the eternal consequences of every small 
 thing done by man, all point to God as the One against 
 whom the sin is committed ; and, therefore, that voice still 
 speaks, though the thing we have done never can be undone. 
 The other thing that we learn from that utterance of Christ 
 is, that the pardon of sin is a thing possible, for the utterance 
 of Christ was the expression of the voice of God it was 
 but another form of the Father saying, " I can and I will for- 
 give." 
 
 Remark here a condition imposed by Christ on the Divine 
 forgiveness when He taught His disciples to pray : " If ye 
 forgive men from your hearts, your Father will forgive you; 
 but if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in 
 heaven forgive you." It is natural to forgive on a dying 
 bed ; yet that forgiveness is only making a merit of necessity, 
 for we can revenge ourselves no more. There is abundance 
 of good-natured charity abroad in the world; that charity 
 which is indiscriminating. It may co-exist with the resent- 
 ment of personal injury, but the spirit of forgiveness which 
 we must have before we can be forgiven, can be ours only 
 so far as our life is a representative of the life of Christ* 
 Then it is possible for us to realize God's forgiveness. 
 
 The second utterance which our Lord spake for others 
 rather than Himself was, "To-day shalt thou be with me in 
 paradise." 
 
 Now, what we have here to observe on is the law of per- 
 sonal influence ; the dying hour of Christ had an influence 
 over one thief he became converted. The first thing we 
 remark is, that indirect influence often succeeds where di- 
 rect influence has failed. Thus, when the Redeemer select- 
 ed His disciples, and endeavored to teach them His truth, 
 that was direct influence ; but when He prayed for them, and 
 those disciples heard Him, and then came to Him with this 
 
The Last Utterances of Christ. 837 
 
 petition, "Lord, teach us to pray," that was indirect in- 
 Duence; and so in this instance, while praying for Himself, 
 He did influence the mind of the dying thief, though that 
 influence was indirect. Indirect influence is often far more 
 successful than that which is direct ; and for this reason, 
 the direct aims that we make to convert others may be con- 
 tradicted by our lives, while the indirect influence is our very 
 life. What we really are, somehow or other, will ooze out, 
 in tone, in look, in act, and this tells upon those who come in 
 daily contact with us. The law of personal influence is mys- 
 terious. The influence of the Son of God told on the one 
 thief, not on the other ; it softened and touched the hearts 
 of two of His hearers, but it only hardened others. There 
 is much to be learnt from this, for some are disposed to write 
 bitter things against themselves because their influence on 
 earth has failed. Let all such remember that some are too 
 pure to act universally on others. If our influence has failed, 
 the Redeemer's was not universal. 
 
 The third utterance of our Master on the cross, for others, 
 not for himself, was, " Behold thy mother!" He who was dy- 
 ing on the cross, whose name was Love, was the great philan- 
 thropist, whose charity embraced the whole human race. 
 His last dying act was an act of individual attachment ten- 
 derness towards a mother, fidelity towards a friend. Now 
 some well-meaning persons seem to think that the larger 
 charities are incompatible with the indulgence of particular 
 affections ; and therefore, all that they do, and aim at, is on 
 a large scale they occupy themselves with the desire to 
 emancipate the whole mass of mankind. But, brethren, it 
 not unfrequently happens that those who act in this manner 
 are but selfish after all, and are quite inattentive to all the 
 fidelities of friendship and the amenities of- social life. It 
 was not so, if we may venture to say it. that the Spirit of the 
 Redeemer grew, for as He progressed in wisdom and knowl- 
 edge, He progressed also in love. First, we read of His ten- 
 derness and obedience to His parents, then the selection of 
 twelve to be near Him from the rest of the disciples, and 
 then the selection of one, more especially, as a friend. It 
 was through this, that, apparently, His human soul grew in 
 grace and in love. And if it were not so with Him, at all 
 Events it must be so with us. It is in vain for a man in his 
 slying hour, who has loved no man individually, to attempt 
 \o love the human race ; every thing here must be done by 
 legrees. Love is a habit. God has given to us the love of 
 relations and friends, the love of father and mother, brother, 
 sister, friend, to prepare us gradually for the love of God ; if 
 
838 The Last Utterances of Christ. 
 
 there be one stone of the foundation not securely laid, the 
 superstructure will be imperfect. The domestic affections 
 are the alphabet of love. 
 
 Lastly, our Master said, " It is finished," partly for others, 
 partly for Himself. In the earliest part of His life, we read 
 that He said, " I have a baptism to be baptized with ;" to 
 Him, as to every human soul, this life had its side of darkness 
 and gloom, but all that was now accomplished: He has drunk 
 His last earthly drop of anguish, He has to drink the wine 
 no more till he drink it new in his Father's kingdom. It was 
 finished ; all was over ; and with, as it were, a burst of sub- 
 dued joy, He says, " It is finished." 
 
 There is another aspect in which we may regard these 
 words as spoken also for others. The way in which our Re- 
 deemer contemplated this life was altogether a peculiar one. 
 He looked upon it, not as a place of rest or pleasure, but 
 simply, solely, as a place of duty. He was here to do his 
 Father's will, not his own ; and therefore, now that life was 
 closed, he looked upon it chiefly as a duty that was fulfilled. 
 We have the meaning of this in the seventeenth chapter of 
 this Gospel : " I have glorified Thee on earth, I have finished 
 the work w r hich Thou gavest me to do." The duty is done, 
 the work is finished. Let us each apply this to ourselves. 
 That hour is coming to us all ; indeed it is, perhaps, now 
 come. The dark night settles down on each day. 
 
 "It is finished." We are ever taking leave of something 
 that will not come back again. We let go, with a pang, 
 portion after portion of our existence. However dreary we 
 may have felt life to be here, yet when that hour comes the 
 winding up of all things, the last grand rush of darkness on 
 our spirits, the hour of that awful sudden wrench from all 
 we have ever known or loved, the long farewell to sun, moon, 
 stars, and light brother men, I ask you this day, and I ask 
 myself, humbly and fearfully, What will then be finished ? 
 When it is finished, what will it be ? Will it be the butter- 
 fly existence of pleasure, the mere life of science, a life of un- 
 interrupted sin and selfish gratification ; or will it be, " Fa- 
 ther, I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do ?* 
 
 THE END, 
 
THE STUDENT'S SERIES. 
 
 BURY'S HISTORY OF ROME. To the Death 
 
 of Marcus Aurelius. Illustrated. 
 LODGE'S MODERN EUROPE. $1 50. 
 WESTCOTT A HORT'S GREEK TEXT OF 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT. $1 00. 
 MANUAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 
 
 By PHILIP SMITH. Two Parts. Illustrated. 
 
 $1 50 each. 
 SKEAT'S ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY. 
 
 $1 25. 
 THE STUDENT'S CLASSICAL DICTIONARY. 
 
 Illustrated. $1 25. 
 ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE EAST. By 
 
 PHILIP SMITH. Illustrated. $1 25. 
 HISTORY OF GREECE. By Dr. WILLIAM 
 
 SMITH. Illustrated. $1 95. 
 COX'S GENERAL HISTORY OF GREECE. 
 
 With Maps. $1 25. 
 
 LIDDELL'S HISTORY OF ROME. HIM. $1 25. 
 MERIVALE'S GENERAL HISTORY OF 
 
 ROME. With Maps. $1 25. 
 
 RAWLINSON'S ANCIENT HISTORY. $t 25. 
 LYELL'S GEOLOGY. Illustrated. $1 25. 
 
 GIBBON'S DECLINE AND FALL OF THB 
 ROMAN EMPIRE. Illustrated. $1 25. 
 
 HISTORY OF FRANCE. By the Rev. W. H. 
 JKRVIS.M.A. Illustrated. $1 25. 
 
 HUME'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Illus- 
 trated. New Edition. $1 50. 
 
 STRICKLAND'S QUEENS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 Illustrated. $1 26. 
 
 HALLAM'fr MIDDLE AGES. $1 25. 
 HALLAM'S CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF 
 
 ENGLAND. $1 25. 
 OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. By PHILIP 
 
 SMITH. With Maps and Illustrations. $1 25. 
 NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY. By PHILIP 
 
 SMITH. With Maps and Illustrations. $1 25. 
 LEWIS'S HISTORY OF GERMANY. With 
 
 Maps and Illustrations. $1 50. 
 
 12MO, CLOTH. 
 
 THE STUDENT'S SMALLER SERIES. 
 
 SCRIPTURE HISTORY. Illustrated. 60 cents. 
 HISTORY OF GREECE. Illustrated. 60 
 
 cents. 
 
 HISTORY OF ROME. Illustrated. 60 cents. 
 COX'S SCHOOL HISTORY OF GREECE. 
 
 With Maps. 60 cents. 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Illustrated. 60 ct. 
 
 ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE EAST. Illus- 
 trated. 60 cents. 
 
 SEEMANN'S MYTHOLOGY. HIM. 60 cents. 
 
 MERIVALE'S SCHOOL HISTORY OF ROME. 
 With Eleven Maps. 75 cents. 
 
 16MO, CLOTH. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. 
 
 f The above works are for tale by all booktellers, or they will be ttnt by HARPER & BROTHERS, to any 
 eddrcu on receipt of price at quoted. If ordtrtd ttnt by mail, 10 per cent, thould be added to tk 
 price to covtr cott of fotage. 
 
RETURN TO the circulation desk of any 
 University of California Library 
 
 or to the 
 
 NORTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 Bldg. 400, Richmond Field Station 
 University of California 
 Richmond, CA 94804-4698 
 
 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 
 2-month loans may be renewed by calling 
 (510)642-6753 
 
 1-year loans may be recharged by bringing 
 books to NRLF 
 
 Renewals and recharges may be made 
 4 days prior to due date 
 
 DUE AS STAMPED BELOW 
 AUG Z 2004 
 
 DD20 6M 9-03 
 
U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 

 l-i 
 
 BHB 
 
 I 
 
 lili 
 
 \m