LrlBRARY OK Tin: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. OIKT OK Mrs. SARAH P. WALS WORTH. Received October, 1894. Accessions No.ST.fp.jJ. ..... Class No. LIFE LESSONS SCHOOL OF CHRISTIAN DUTY. BY E. H. GILLETT, D.D., 14 AUTHOR OP "THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN HUSS," ETC. . PHILADELPHIA: PRESBYTERIAN PUBLICATION COMMITTEE, * 1334 CHESTNUT STREET, NEW YORK: A. D. F. RANDOLPH, 770 BROADWAY. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by ANSON D. F. KANDOLPH, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. THE aim of this volume is practical throughout. It is designed to conduct the mind of the reader on- ward from a state of religious indifference to a sober con- templation of the objects and duties of life, and to urge them upon the heart and conscience. Without entering minutely into the obligations that pertain to our several relations as social beings, its main theme is, Life and its Duties. Hence its title, LIFE LESSONS. Some portions of the volume have been published in different forms, and, by some readers, will doubtless be recognized. They have here been restored to their proper place in the chapters to which they belong. If the an- ticipations of the individual at whose instance the work has been prepared for publication shall be fulfilled in the useful service whieh it may render to the cause of Christ, the author's labor will be more than requited. CONTENTS. SERMON FAGtB I. A PICTURE OP HUMAN LIFB 7 II. Two TYPES OF HUMAN LIFE 14 III. THE VANITY OF LIFE 22 IV. THE TRUE DIGNITY OF LIFE 30 V. THE COMPASS OF LIFE 87 VI. DUTY, THE LAW OF LIFE 44 VII. LIFE-SERVICE DUE TO GOD 51 VIII. LIVING FOR OTHERS 57 IX. ATHEISTIC EVASION OF DUTY 65 X. THE GOOD OF LIFE 78 XL IGNORANCE OF THE GOOD OF LIFE 85 XII. NEED OF REVELATION 93 XIII. THE LAW OF NATURE f 106 XIV. THE REVEALED RULE OF LIFE 112 XV. TERMS OF THE LIFE ETERNAL 124 XVL THE FATAL LACK 131 XVII. LIFE FROM THE DEAD 137 XVIII. "THE WONDERFUL" 144 XIX. THE CHRISTIAN LIFE WHAT IT IMPLIES 161 XX. THE FIRST AIM OF LIFE 168 XXI. THE CONFLICT OF LIFE 175 XXII. LIFE AN EDUCATION 184 XXIIL-CULTURE OF A HOLY LlFE. . . 191 6 CONTENTS. SERMON PAOT3 XXIV. THE LIFE FOUNDED ON CHRIST 199 XXV. THB LIVING TEMPLE 213 XXVI. LIVING FOB THE UNSEEN 220 t XXVII. THE STANDARD OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 234 XXVIII. THE TENT AND THE ALTAR 244 XXIX. LIFE'S TEARS AND HARVEST 254 XXX. WALKING IN THE TRUTH 265 XXXI. CHARACTER 272 XXXIL SOCIAL DISCIPLINE ITS SIGNIFICANCE 282 XXXIII. INFLUENCE , . _, 290 XXXIV. THE TONGUE 305 XXXV. POWER OF EXAMPLE 319 XXXVI. POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY OF WEALTH 332 XXXVII. POWER OF ASSOCIATION ; OR, ON PITCHING Ooi's TENT TO- WARD SODOM 346 XXXVIII. BLESSINGS AND DUTIES. 363 XXXIX. VALUE OF TIME 381 XL. WASTE OF TIME 394 XLL THE PSALM OF LIFE ., . . 400 LIFE LESSONS. TJHITSI L A PICTURE OP LII " They walk on in darkness." PSALM Ixxxv. 5. IN one of our New England villages is a graveyard in most respects not unlike scores of others in which sleep the remains of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, belonging to past generations. Many a moss-covered gravestone is there, and " many a holy text " is sculptured on those monuments which, ever sinking deeper in the sod, or already fallen to the earth, seem themselves to envy the oblivion of the dust they cover, and by their own crumbling and decay, as well as their inscriptions, " teach the rustic moralist to die," But human enterprise has for many years been busy, encroaching upon that sacred enclosure. A valuable quarry, cropping out on the neighboring bank, offered that temptation which to the industry and thrift of our countrymen is irresistible. The rock was quarried and carried away, leaving as the excavation approached the graveyard, a precipitous wall from thirty to fifty feet high. Still pressing on, the laborers cleared the rock away, till only at a single narrow point could the grave- yard be approached, and at last, this too was assaulted, threatening to change the peninsular into a rock-walled island of the dead. 8 LIFE LESSONS. What a spectacle I Human enterprise sweepingHround such a spot as that, sparing it indeed, but leaving it iso- lated and inaccessible, chafing against it as a barrier, and shaking the sacred dust of its graves with the shock of its explosions, disturbing the hallowed silence appro- priate to it, by the echoes of rude voices and the din of pick and chisel, and desecrating, to the extremest verge of possibility, the scene where friendship had found sad pleasure to linger, and affection had been wont to weep ! From morning till night, human industry is intensely ac- tive, almost beneath the shadow of the monuments, but it has itself built up the wall, that keeps it, although so near, from all contact with them, or any chance to peruse the stone-graven lines that speak the solemn lessons of the grave. Unheeding toil takes no thought of the voices that seem flung back to it, in every echo of its blows, from those rocky walls within which the dust of the dead finds repose. Who can regard such a spectacle without feeling that it is emblematic that a painter, turning from the picture of Cole's " Voyage of Life," might have been warranted in selecting this as the picture of life itself its energy, activity, and enterprise, rolling on like a torrent, till it touches the realm of the dead, then pausing only to cir- cle around it, and sweep away every approach, every foot-path by which human thought draws near to medi- tate on human destiny, or by which the toiling laborer himself might mount up to read the lessons of his own mortality ? It is a sad truth, that the industry and energy of man too often work just to wall him out from ready access to the sphere of serious thought and religious meditation. He digs and mines and excavates, only to rear higher and A PICTURE OF LIFE. 9 render more insuperable the barriers that shut him out from converse with his higher interests or communion with his God. There he is his life long un<|er the very shadow of graves and monuments, the dust of the departed crumbling around him, as it shakes with the stroke of enterprise encroaching on its domain ; and yet every hour, as he plunges deeper for new treasures, he is but building higher that precipitous wall which shuts him out from access to what is so near, and casts ever deeper and darker shadows over his scene of toil. Thus he forgets where he is ; he forgets what he is. He heeds not that soon the waves of enterprise will roll and chafe around his own grave. If there is anything that may well occasion surprise it is the thoughtlessness of dying men their thoughtless- ness with regard to their spiritual and eternal interests. They traverse seas. They explore continents. They pry into ^he secrets of the wilderness. They climb the snow-capped mountains. They mark the transit of dis- tant planets. They unroll antique parchments and pore over moth-eaten volumes. They excavate buried cities like Nineveh and Pompeii. They decipher old inscrip- tions and scrutinize Egyptian hieroglyphs. They study the fossil autographs of dead ages, on the rocky pages of the earth, till the globe becomes their library, and cata- racts and currents cut the leaves of long sealed volumes that they may be read. They question the microscope for the minute wonders of creative skill in the structure of a sand grain, an animalcule, or a snow-flake. They dissolve air and water into their original elements, and unfold the laws that govern the combination of these ele- ments. They track the lightning to its lair, tame it and teach it, charged with messages, to leap along their iron 1* 10 LIFE LESSONS. wires. They penetrate the invisible realm of mind, search out its constitution, the order of its faculties, the methods of their operation, the laws by which they are governed. They give wing to fancy and revel in the strange, weird domain of imaginary existence, surrender- ing their being almost to the spell of fiction and romance, and yet while the mind is thus roused to intense activ- ity, while the waves of the sea of human thought roll on and cover almost every thing tangible or conceivable the one great theme which towers above others like the Alps above their valleys, is left, like a mountain island of the ocean, neglected and unexplored. Men are intent to study the world around, but not the world within them. They read the doorijbf nations and forget their own. They decipher old crumbling monuments of stone, but translate not the inscriptions on the living tablets of the heart. They linger spell-bound over the poet's page. They sit at the feet of the philosopher. They^ listen to the sagacity of statesmen. They are kindled to enthusi- asm by the creations of the artist, or by the magnificent span of cathedral domes, and yet when a " greater than the temple," a " greater than Solomon/ 7 he that " spake as never man spake," opens his lips to reveal the secrets, of the life eternal, they turn away, with stolid indiffer- ence or cold contempt. Can this be so ? Can it be that man can so regard all things else, and forget himself? Can it be that the one subject of thought, which to him is most important, most yital, which transcends every other, which confronts him perpetually wherever he turns, that is suggested in all the forms of nature, the buried seed, the fading flower, the ripening harvest that is whispered in all the seasons, in the springtime that bids him sow the seed, in the sum- A PICTURE OF LIFE. 1 1 raer that shows him a thousand symbols of that higher beauty which the soul may win, in the autumn with its harvests, asking him what from all his years angel reap- ers shall gather, in the winter that speaks of age that will need a shelter and support which nature cannot give can it be that this one subject thus suggested, and sug- gested ever also by his own experience, by the cravings of the soul, by the aspirations of hope, by irrepressible longings for immortality, nay, by his failing strength and tear-dimmed eye, by the badges of mourning, the funeral procession, the graveyard mound, the dull echo of the clods as they strike the coffin lid can it be that this one subject of his own personal spiritual destiny thus pressed on his notice, thus whispered in every breath, thus pho- tographed in every scene, is just the one of all others which he banishes from his thoughts, and which for him is left to stand amid the surging ocean-waves of human activity precipitous and inaccessible like the island of the dead ? It is a humiliating question to answer, but it is not a difficult one. The answer is before us, in what we see and hear and feel. That which justly claims human attention first, is neglected till the last. How it must be thrust upon men before they will entertain it ! How it comes knocking at the door, and is left unheeded ! How it speaks but gains no reply ! How men turn their back upon it, and haste away, one to his farm and another to his merchandise ! How thorough is their practical obliv- ion of their spiritual destiny! Sabbath after Sabbath traces solemn words on the memory, but the first ripple of week-day traffic rolls over them and shows that they have been traced on the sand. What a wondrous art of forgetfulness ! What a per- fection of heedlessness ! There, right before them, like 12 LIFE LESSONS. the Alps to the traveler's eye, looms up this great theme, in a grandeur and magnificence which pour contempt on all the little toys and vanities that rivet their gaze, and their busy ceaseless activity only clouds them about with dust, till they stand all unconscious beneath the awful shadow that comes down over them from those sublime heights to which thought should soar. Thus they often live, and thus, often too, they die. The voice that admon- ishes them to better things, is as the voice of one crying unheeded in the wilderness. Friends by their side drop away and disappear, but no earnest questioning peers into the nature of that unseen world that is brought so near. Their houses crumble over their heads and need constant repair, but they seek no title to " a house not made with hands eternal in the heavens." They are all absorbed in the petty losses and gains of business, and seek not to lay up treasures where moth and rust cannot corrupt. See them in varied spheres pursuing various objects, and only agreed in rejecting one, persistently pressed on their notice ! There they are, poring over the ledger. There they are, bending intent over "the chequered board ;" they have come back from a friend's grave, per- haps, to renew their game. The Sabbath comes that hallowed day which seems the golden link between earth and that better land of the eternal Sabbath, yet how its hours drag, and how amusements crowd out devotion, and how the sanctuary, visited possibly once, is thence- forth shunned ! It would seem as if religion was as repul- sive as a heathen Dagon as if the light which it kindles and flings in loving missionary beams of mercy along the pilgrim's way deep into the shadows of the dark valley, was unwelcome as if the language in which it speake A PICTURE OF LIFE. 13 of " the glory to be revealed in us," was that of unmean- ing speculation as if the best thing for a man, a possi- ble heir of immortal blessedness, was to keep himself as unconcerned and indifferent within the cheerless walls of his earthly prison-house, as the worms that crawl around him, or the spiders that spin their webs to curtain the barred windows of his ceil. Is this wise ? Is it rational ? Is it becoming ? Is it the part which he should act who knows, beyond all shadow of doubt, that soon his work on earth will be done, and the seed-time of the life immor- tal will have forever fled ? Should he give thought free range on all other topics, but forbid it to touch the one of most momentous concern ? Should the mind soar in every other sphere, but crawl only when it enters the sphere of spiritual truth and religious duty? Should years be piled on years in order to climb and grasp a wreath or fortune that ere long will slip like sand from the cheated fingers, and only the scattered dust and frag- ments of time be left for the foundations of the life ever- lasting ? Each one must answer these questions for himself. Each one knows how he has lived, and whether the guilt of inconsiderateness can be laid to his charge. You can look back and scrutinize what has secured your attention. You can see the current and direction of your thoughts and the channels they have traced. Have they been such as your calm judgment approves ? Are you satisfied, if the claims of religion have been uniformly and persis- tently neglected? Do you justify such neglect, or do you condemn yourself? Do you class yourself with the brute or with the man, with the unreflecting or the thoughtful ? Do you count your final destiny a matter of no account, or one of infinite moment ? II. TWO TYPES OP LIFE. u Better is it to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud." PROV. xvi. 19. OP that great Eoman Emperor, Augustus Csesar, it is related that on the morning of his death, sensible of his approaching end, he called for a mirror, and de- sired his gray hairs and beard to be decently arranged. Then asking of his friends whether he had played well his part in the drama of life, he muttered a verse from a comic epilogue, inviting them to greet his last exit with applause. Perhaps the world had never seen a greater ruler die. The Roman Empire, excluding the more barbarous na- tions, was the empire of the world. With some peculiar advantages, yet with art and arms, Augustus had grasped it and ruled it, and made it his own. He had acted an imposing part in the great drama of history. He had reached the highest point of mere earthly ambition. He had been neither a debauchee nor a tyrant. One might have said of him, that nothing that this world could give was wanting to render his lot enviable. Yet who does not gaze in pity on that an emperor's deathbed ? Who does not feel a painful contrast between his last hours, as he gazes at his gray locks in the mirror, and talks of having played his part well in the drama of life, and the exultant triumph of " such an one as Paul the aged," TWO TYPES OF LIFE. 15 writing with manacled hand from his chill prison, on the eve of martyrdom " I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness ? " One seems to be thinking of the applause of men. He wants the voice of praise and flattery to cheer his dying hour. The other is looking forward not to the praise of man, but to the " well done " of the great Judge. One feels that his jeweled crown will no longer cover that gray head, ripe for the sickle of the great Reaper. The other is assured of an everlasting crown, such as senates can- not grant, nor death take away. One looks back on a life of successful, but selfish ambition. The other has the testimony of a good conscience that he has lived to serve God. One has climbed the heights of power and surrounded himself with the pageants of wealth and feasts and splendor, only to die like a play-actor. The other has deliberately chosen a path which, through mobs, and prisons, and scorn, and hardships unnumbered, leads him to a martyr's death, but a martyr's triumph. Both wrought with rare ability and rare energy. Both exerted a powerful influence on the history of the world. Each in a measure attained his end. But in the final result the sceptered hand grasped a bubble, and the manacled hand grasped a crown. It might seem a vain question which of these men is most to be envied, for no one of us could by any possi- bility be the one or the other. Only one in all the mil- lions of the ancient world could have been an Augustus. Only a few could have been like Paul. Each of us has limitations, not of our own choice or appointment, affixed to his lot. But taking the two men as types of classes the successful man of the world and the self-denying 16 LIFE LESSONS. Christian, the one who lives to be applauded and dies thinking what men will say of him, and the one who is content to forego all if he may but have the testimony of a good conscience and the smile of God, and we can 4 say for ourselves which is to be preferred. There is a vast difference. It is plain to every one. In show and parade they are quite unlike, but if one glitters like isin- glass in the noonday of its own splendor, the other is no less a jewel though you have to mine for it in prisons, or wash off from it the mud of slander and contempt. There are some men who seern to have no ambition to be the one thing or the other. They live extempore. They have very little of plan or purpose. They play truant for seventy years, and never learn the first lesson of shaping life. They are like straws floating with the stream. The friendships they form, and the circumstan- ces in which they are placed mould them like wax. They have no more moral shape or stability than water poured into the hollow of a rock. They do not really live ; they just stagnate. Their hope is ease ; their dread, work or starvation. They are candidates for temptation and crime, and if saved from these, it is to sink into moral cyphers. They are men who think little, and who dream life away in a dull routine. Ingenuity itself would be taxed to put anything but their names on their gravestone. The biographer would only be able to write of them, they were born, they ate, they drank, they fell sick and died. No high purpose roused their energies. No noble or generous aim broke the even tenor of their selfishness. In the harvest-field of life, they are stalks that never headed. Morally considered, they are mere chaff and stubble. Does this seem like caricature or irony? It is the TWO TYPES OF LIFE. , 7 simple truth. There arc men who have no more idea ap- parently of shaping their lives by any recognized stand- ard than the ox that ploughs in the furrow. But is not this a crime against reason ? Is it not a criminal stu- pidity for any one capable of reflection to find himself in a world like this, arid never ask what am I here for ? Does it not become him as he opens Ids eyes thoughtfully to the light of this world, to consider with himself that he is here for some purpose worthy of the powers with which he is endowed, and the privileges with which he is favored ? Everything is valuable for what you can make out of it, or what you can do with it. So it is with human life, and there is nothing else that can be made either so worthless or so precious. You may cut the ivory into beautiful shapes. You may mint the gold into shining coin. You may chisel the marble till it seems to embody the grandest ideal of the majesty of intellect. You may polish the rough-looking stone till it glitters as a jewel fit for the brow of beauty, or the kingly crown. You may subject the tangled, rocky waste to culture, till it becomes a Central Park ; but neither ivory, nor gold, nor marble, nor fertile soil, nor diamonds of the mine have such a native capacity as these years of life. Char- ity can cut them into shapes as beautiful as the ministry of a Howard, or the pity of the Good Samaritan. Faith can mint them into deeds of piety and devotion, bearing the image and superscription of Jesus of Nazareth. Self- denial may chisel them into the statues of goodness rising to the stature of a perfect manhood in Christ Jesus. In- tegrity and fidelity to duty can make them resplendent with a loveliness, and precious with a value that belong not to even a Koh-i-Noor jewel, while he that cultivates them in the fear of God can turn the soil once covered !g LIFE LESSONS. with the weeds of vice and the brambles of sin, and the rocks of depravity, into an earthly Eden, in which the music of a conscience void of offense will chase all care and fear away, and over which angels will delight to, linger and to gaze. It is indeed a surprising thing to think of what the humblest life is capable. It does not need a throne for its pedestal. Its real value does not depend on its being conspicuously exhibited. The little flower that blooms in the wilderness is as exquisitely delicate and fragrant as if transplanted to royal gardens. The solitary trav- eller some Mungo Park perhaps alone is cheered by it, but the gaze and admiration of thousands would not add to it a single grace. So it is with the moral beauty of lowly life. Its value is in itself, not in being the centre of some elegant nosegay. To be is more than to seem. The great good man wants no echoes of mob applause. God's eye can supply the place of admiring crowds. You might put some Robinson Crusoe on a lone island of the sea, but even there, if his heart glows with love to God, and he learns submission to his lot, and soars on the wings of faith to the heights of holy thought and di- vine communings, how under the good man's tread, the lone isle becomes a Patmos, and his own heart a living temple, and his devout meditations the lofty worship of sanctuary service. Go into the obscurest walks of life ; leave senates and pageants and the echoes of fame far behind, and see what the most unpretending can do in works that cheer the sufferer, that strengthen, the tempted, that minister the oil of sympathy to bleeding hearts, that whisper hope to the despairing and whose spirit, in the fragrance of goodness is as " ointment poured forth." See that cheer- TWO TYPES OF LIFE. 19 ful self-denial that reminds one of the two mites of the poor widow that unswerving attachment to all the friends of Christ that recalls to mind the Moabitess of old exclaiming, " thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God," that gentleness and meekness and char- ity that calm the turbulence of passion, like oil poured on the troubled waves that tenderness of conscience which seems to hallow all around it, like " the burning bush," so that no sandaled foot may tread upon it that unwearied prayerfulness which sanctifies every duty and transforms it into an angel service that patience and submission which are the loftiest heroism, and which without a murmur exclaim, " not my will, but thine be done," that kindly beneficence which, radiant as the morning's light, carries hope and smiles to the home of sorrow, and that sublime faith which has power to change the shanty, the garret, or even the prison cell into a Bethel, and bring down all around them such a hallowed presence that angels seem to hover there, and unceiled rafters or damp walls seem to echo the voice of the mas- ter " my peace I give unto you." Here are attainments within the reach of all who are willing to walk by faith. Here is a success that is within your grasp, which no calamity can foil. I would not say, " Lives of great men all remind us We may make our lives sublime." I would put good in place of great. You do not want an emperor's chances, or a Paul's chances. You do not need purse or scrip, a scholar's lore, or an orator's elo- quence. You have now all that is essential ; you would have if you were only a poor Lazarus at the rich man's gate. 20 LIFK LESSONS. What then, with the help of God always, will you make of your own life ? What standard will you set up, what plan, what model will you adopt ? Will you say it is not worth caring for ? It is mere rubbish, seaweed,* vapor. True it is brief, transient. It fleets with every moment. But this only admonishes you to snatch the passing hour, to work while it is day. But it is a grand mistake to say it is valueless. There is nothing else on earth more precious. The man that built great Babylon accomplished less for himself than the man who by God's grace is built up on the foundation of Jesus Christ into a living temple. The time will soon come when the rich must leave all their possessions, and the king must lay down a sceptre which his dying grasp can hold no longer. Then the only treasure of the soul will be found in itself. All else, however inviting once, will be only like the blos- soms that fall off when the fruit ripens. We shall have only what we are. What we have made of our life will be all that we can carry with us out of this world up to the judgment seat. An emperor, breathing his last, comes down to the common level of mortals. The test of success will be what survives our dust. And that which is most precious does survive. And what is it ? The results, the harvest, for good or evil, for weal or woe, of these fleeting years. What shall these be ? They are your inventory for eternity. They are your portion forever, to rejoice in or regret. What they shall be, you are determining now, you are deter- mining even while you hesitate to determine. The artist who has a block of marble put into his hands that he may shape out of it a ISTimrod or an Angel, may defer to do anything, till to him, though he shapes no Nimrod out of it, the block is worthless. So, only worse, it may TWO TYPES OF LIFE. 21 be with you. For the block is crumbling. Every mo- ment chips off a minute fragment, and already perhaps its integrity is gone. It is time to determine between the Nimrod and the Angel, the Emperor and the Apostle. Yours is a solemn trust, a fearful responsibility. The burden is upon you and you cannot lay it off. An " in- heritance incorruptible " is staked upon the issue. Just to live involves the necessity of accepting or rejecting it? Shall it be yours ? This is the momentous question which you are to answer for yourself. The issue cannot be evaded. It must be met. Will you not meet it man- fully, fairly, intelligently? Your welfare demands it. Your reason demands it. Your conscience demands it. Your Maker and your Final Judge demand it. III. THE VANITY OP LIFE. " Vanity of vanities." EC. ii. 1. WITHOUT the Christian hope, and the truth upon which it is based, what is this world but empti- ness and vanity? Grand processions, mighty armies, the trains of enterprise and caravans of commerce sweep over it, but they flit by and vanish like shadows. Great men arise, and their names are borne on the echoes of fame around the globe ; but when the bubble of their greatness bursts, and the current of time rolls on, nothing is left but a transient and vanishing memory. There is a magnificent dirge-like music in that passage in which Jeremy Taylor describes the humiliating end of earthly hopes : " Many men, by great labors and affronts, many indig- nities and crimes, labor only for a pompous epitaph, and a loud title upon their marble ; whilst those, into whose possessions their heirs or kindred are entered, are for- gotten, and lie unregarded as their ashes, and without concernment and relation as the turf on the face of their grave. A man may read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of kings. In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery, where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time THE VANITY OF LIFE. 23 shall be no more. And where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grand-sire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change, from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men." You do not need to look up to the heavens in their magnificent array of revolving worlds to be prompted to ask, " Lord, what is man?" you may just look around you and see the various living forms that are flitting to dark- ness and oblivion, or you may look beneath your feet at the earth already furrowed by graves, yet ever opening to take new treasures of affection to its cold bosom ; and even then it will be difficult to repress the thought suggested by the exclamation of Edmund Burke, speak- ing of the sudden departure of his compeers and rivals, " What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" " We turn to dust, and all our mightiest works Die too. The deep foundations that we lay Time ploughs them up, and not a trace remains. We build on what we deem eternal rock, A future age asks where the fabric stood, And in the dust, sifted and searched in vain, The undiscoverable secret sleeps." What thoughtful mind can fail to be impressed by the lesson of human frailty that seerns traced out before our eyes wherever we turn ? Think of Nineveh's glory, and all the splendor of Assyrian kings, and then think of a Layard excavating the crumbling marbles on which Assyrian victories were inscribed. Think of Tyre, once mistress of the seas, whose merchants were princes, and then see the fisherman spread his nets on the rocks half 24 LIFE LESSONS. covered by the rubbish of her palaces I Think of Egyp- tian pyramids, the tombs of kings, and the rock-hewn vaults where the embalmed bodies of princes were laid, and then see the Arab strip them of their cerements to light his fire and cook his scanty meal ! Walk over the ' great battlefields a Waterloo, an Antietam, a Gettys- burg where beneath the green turf, with no memorial, unless perhaps a mound, the remains of thousands are sinking back to the decay that mingles them with their kindred dust, and who can withhold the exclamation, " Lord what is man !" All nature sympathizes with these sad objects. The withered leaf of autumn rustles upon' the listening ear parables of human decay. The flowing stream floats onward, and away forever the foam that once sparkled in bubbles brilliant as the hues of youthful hope. Setting suns are daily recurring emblems, and the shadows of night foreshadow the night of the grave. Who can look at the lonely monument that affection rears, and see it standing clear, and cold, and solitary, only now and then visited by the curious wanderer, who reads its inscription with little more emotion than a name on a box of merchandise, and not feel the force of those lines of Gray's elegy : " The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inexorable hour, The paths of glory lead but to the grave." What are all biographies, but more extended funeral inscriptions what is history but the graveyard of past activity in which philosophy loves to muse ? And what is all our learning, but threads which we spin off from THE VANITY OF LIFE. 2 $ the cocoons of dead men's thoughts which they wove around them with life-long toil, as the shrouds of their own mortality ? Surely, it is not mere fancy which reads parables, and more than parables in the life and the end of those who command the world's language. One after another rises and moves along before us on the stage of human action, but each, as he goes down amid the shadows of age, moralizes on the emptiness of the pageant in which he has played his part. I cannot envy the feelings or disposition of the man who sees without emotion the change that soon passes over all human greatness a Newton prying into the mysteries of the heavens, and ex- ploring spaces from which the swiftest beam of light, starting while he lies in his cradle, could not reach him before his body is laid in its grave, and yet at last with enfeebled intellect poring over a problem of which he can only say, "I knew it once" a Duke of Marlborough, the greatest general of his age, receiving almost royal honors and the world's applause, yet at last exhibited for so much extra by his servants to the curious visitor of those magnificent grounds which his taste and wealth had changed to an earthly Eden ; and finally, when death comes, and honors wait on his crumbling dust, and the funeral car is covered with shields whereon are inscribed those victorious battle-fields Blenheim and Ramillies, Lille and Tournay, Bethune and Ruremonde vanishing from among men, only to have the after world criticise the meanness that was combined with his valor, and the penuriousness and treachery that were allied with his sagacity or a William Pitt, as Prime Minister of Eng- land, wielding in his hand almost the destinies of nations, sinking in the midst of his years from his place of power 2 26 LIFE LESSONS. to the helplessness of an invalid, his body, within a fe^f hours of his decease, left unattended in a lonely tenement/ from which every living occupant had vanished or a Napoleon setting up or overthrowing thrones by a stroke , of his pen, at last a neglected prisoner on a far-off ocean island, forced there to speculate in bitterness on the in- stability of all human greatness, and the uncertainty of all human prospects. And what a sad story upon which Solomon, if living now, might well moralize comes to us from across the ocean, setting before us the scenes that followed the re- cent departure from earth of one of England's most gifted minds, the critic humorist Thackeray, whose writ- ings have delighted both hemispheres, and whose words had such power to use his own language of another " to light up a rascal like a policeman's lantern." World- ly journalists could not but comment upon the change that passed over the scenes which he had made so at- tractive. Scarcely was the dwelling on which he had expended his taste, and which he had made so exquisitely inviting, complete, when its owner was called away, and in a few days more, those rooms in which he had spread around him the luxuries of thought, and in which he had enjoyed the pleasures of converse with the most gifted and intellectual, were filled with a lot of customers, a motley group, which only his pen could describe -stran- gers to one another, shrewd, coarse-minded men, hanging on the auctioneer's hammer, anxious to pick up at the lowest price the best bargains, and handling with busi- ness coarseness what the author's mind had linked to precious or sacred memories. Looking at such scenes as these, recurring every day, who that asks what is man ? docs not feel that if he is THE VANITY OF LIFE. 2? to judge him only by the show or pageant and its humili- ating sequel, he must concede that he is only the play- thing of chance, the bubble of time, the rocket of ambi- tion. Who is not ready to turn aside and exclaim with sadness, " and is this the sum, the scope, the goal of man's eager hope ? Does he shine for a moment only to give a meaning to the emblem of the glowworm spark ? Does he flourish for a moment, only to give the plucked and withering flower a deeper significance? Does he pass before our eyes and then vanish to be seen no more, only to humiliate his life by its contrast with that of the oak of centuries that spreads its broad arms over his grave, and survives every memorial of his crumbled dust ?" It is not strange that when a king of England with his barbarous chieftains were gathered to listen to the mes- sage of the first Christian missionary, who told them of the Great Father and the life eternal, one of the more serious, as a swallow entered the tent, flew about it and then sped away, should take up the parable and say " Lo ! King ! a symbol of our life here ! We are like the swallow that enters the tent, flies about and then soars away we know not whither. If these men can tell us of our future, or throw light on the unexplored dark- ness, let us hear their words." Does any onfc listen to that barbarous yet thoughtful chieftain without feeling that the words find* an echo in his own heart? What is life ? what is its meaning ? Is the grave the final boun- dary, the goal of human hope ? Do you say yes ? What a mortifying littleness then there is about it! How humbling are its vicissitudes and changes ! How unsat- isfactory its highest honors, its amplest fortunes ! How the very height to which the boldest and strongest climb, is but the edge of the precipice the Tarpeian rock 28 LIFE LES80NS. from which they must inevitably plunge to a deeper and deeper oblivion 1 The man who takes this view of life degrades his priv- ileges, degrades himself, and degrades God's purpose in his creation. Most appropriately may he say, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die, and so revel his few fleeting hours away hours that have no more meaning, and will have no future resurrection for judgment, when once they are gone. Or still more appropriately, scorn- ing all that he sees as the pageant of an hour, and feel- ing that reason itself, setting forth his capacity and his doom, his power to soar and the grave to which he is chained, is but the expositor of his conscious misery, he may exclaim " let me escape from this farce of existence and drown hope and disappointment alike in the stream of oblivion." But who can acquiesce in such a conclusion ? Who does not feel all the instincts of his being rising up to protest against it ? And who can take this view of life which the word of God reveals without feeling that that alone ennobles existence that that alone is worthy the end which God had in view in creating man that that alone gives dignity to the lowliest lot, and lifts man up to that platform of hope and effort and aspiration for which he was designed ? Then it is that we may hope to see realized what the seraphic Howe has so eloquently described " That lofty soul that bears about with it the living apprehensions of its being made for an everlasting state, so earnestly in- tends it, that it shall even be a descent and vouchsafe- ment with it, if it allow itself to take notice what busy mortals are doing in their (as they reckon them) grand negotiations here below. ... He hath still the image THE VANITY OF LIFE. 29 before his eye, of this world vanishing and passing away : of the other, with the everlasting affairs and concern- ments of it, even now ready to take place and fill up all the stage, and can represent to himself the vision (not from a melancholic fancy and crazed brain, but a rational faith and a sober well-instructed mind) of the world dis- solving, monarchies and kingdoms breaking up, thrones tumbling, crowns arid sceptres lying as neglected things. He hath a telescope through which he can behold the glorious appearances of the Supreme Judge ; the solemn state of his majestic person ; the obsequious throng of glorious celestial creatures, doing homage to their eternal King, the swift flight of his royal guards, sent forth into the four winds to gather the elect the universal silent attention the judgment set, the books opened, the frightful, amazed looks of surprised wretches, the equal administration of the final judgment, the adjudication of all to their eternal state, the heavens rolled np as a scroll, the earth and all therein consumed and burnt up." IV. THE DIGNITY OF LIFE. " The glory which thou gavest me, I have given them." JOHN xvii. 22. HT^HE vanity of man as mortal" is one thing, and JL his dignity as immortal is quite another. One is as the candlestick, the other is as the light set in it which gives it use and value. One is the perishing husk of the seed, the other is its living germ. One is the chaff and stubble, the other is the precious and garnered grain. Regard man's existence simply as bounded by the cra- dle and the grave, and wonderful as it is, it is still more pitiable. Its bloom is as the early cloud and the morn- ing dew. Its hopes are narrowed to the prospects of an uncertain to-morrow. Its soaring aspirations are chained down to the clod, or shut up like an eagle in a canary bird's cage. Make it gaudy as you will, and it is only like a garlanded victim, marching in pomp to the sacrifice. It is a magic lantern picture that vanishes forever when death puts out the light of genius and energy within. All the memorials that it can leave behind it are only like inscriptions traced on the sand that the rising tide will soon cover. The waves of oblivion are ever dashing their foam nearer and nearer. In a little while all will be buried or obliterated forever. How the great primae- val forests have been crushed down and compacted till in the coal mine of to-day you cannot discern limb or trunk, and only here and there is the imprint of the leaf that once spread out its gaudy beauty to the sun ! So it is with the generations of human genius* They overlie (30) THE DIGNITY OF LIFE. 3 1 and crush one another, and the scholar, digging up tho lessons of the past, is exploring fossils, is bringing up from unsunned depths what the world had forgotten. History has not pens enough to record more than just the outlines of national progress or decay, and if she had, her memo- rials would be given over to cobwebs, dust, and worms. A great ship goes down on the ocean, and the waves roll on over it with unbroken sweep just as they did be- fore. So it is on the sea of time with the great and gay, the man-of-war and the pleasure yacht. What if here and there there are a few floating spars! They only inspire sadness. They are fragments that tell of ruin, soon to be beached on the lone desert shore. Looking at man as mortal, there are beasts that survive him, and whose long-lived existence makes more humilia- ting the span of his uncertain three-score years and ten. There are trees that his hand plants that continuing after he has vanished, will perhaps be rooted and fed from the sod that covers his dust. His life is an apparition. His memory is the vanishing blaze of the meteor. And is this all for which man was designed ? Did He who placed him here and set him on the pinnacle of this lower world, only design him for the same doom with the clod he treads upon only endow him so wondrously that he might see his vanity and feel his misery, and gaze down helpless into the gulf of annihilation that awaits him ? Did he fit up this globe with all that it contains, and make man the lord of it, only that he might more keenly feel what a mere straw is his broken sceptre, and how hollow is the homage that just furnishes him his funeral equipage as life itself becomes a march toward the grave ? Did he make each dying seed with its living germ an emblem of the resurrection, only to suggest hopes 32 LIFE LESSONS. of immortality that are doomed to blight ? Did he frame the plan of our life so that these years should become an education for a future we are never to know ? Did he set an intelligent soul in this exquisite mechanism of the* body, as a mere engine to keep it in motion till it sinks with the worthless hulk to a common decay ? Did he endow it with faculties to look through nature up to nature's God, and with affections that can rejoice in His love and call him Father, only to leave it abandoned at last, a more than orphan outcast, only privileged to say to corruption " thou art my Father, and to the worm thou art my mother and my sister ?" Then indeed, human existence becomes a troubled dream, and all our inward agony of thought, our reproofs of conscience, our strivings and struggles after a higher life and a moral blessedness, are but a useless incubus of woe, a bitter nightmare for which the oblivion of the grave may be a welcome relief. Then does the globe itself be- come, instead of the perch from which we spread our wings for an immortal flight, the tomb of human aspiration, the slough of our despond in which hope sinks forever stifled. Then, as I walk the earth, it rings hollow to my tread, calling me down to its sunless realms. As I gaze on ruined desolation, it sympathizes with my woe. As I tread the empty halls where splendor revelled, the cheer- less echoes of my footstep are the funeral dirge that ac- companies my march to the tomb. The stars that look down upon me are the sentinels of my despair. History has no meaning. Probation and discipline, and retribu- tion are empty words. I am a floating atom drifting to oblivion. I am gifted with reason and consciousness only to read with keener sagacity and keener torture the humiliation and anguish of my final lot ? THE DIGNITY OF LIFE. 33 But is this the design of God ? Dare I impute such cruelty to his benevolence, such folly to his wisdom? Must I not feel that man is of higher destiny than the worm that crawls under his feet ? Must I not respect human life as I cannot that of the brute whose flesh feeds me, or the tree whose fuel warms me ? In a word, can I stop short of accounting man immortal, and recognizing in him one whom God deigns to own as a child ? " Shall man be left forgotten in the dust, When fate relenting bids the flower revive ? Shall Nature's voice, to man alone unjust, Bid him though doomed to perish, hope to live ? Is it for this fair virtue oft must strive With disappointment penury and pain ? No ! Heaven's immortal spring shall yet arrive, And man's majestic beauty bloom again Safe through the eternal year of love's triumphant reign." And now it is that I can recognize the dignity of man. I can discern the beautiful consistency, harmony and order of the divine plan that makes this life the seed- time of being, the germ of an immortal destiny. I do not need thrones and palaces or pompous pageant to con- fer distinction on the short-lived superiority of man to the brute. He is throned in his immortality. He is crowned by his destiny. His greatness is not measured by the toys and playthings of earthly ambition, by rank or title, or wealth or dominion. His own great birth- right of immortality pours contempt on all other legacies. By the side of that which is common to all, the things in which men differ are of small account. Human life is sacred because it is God's allotment of a probation on which the issues of the life immortal are suspended. 2* 34 LIFE LESSONS. Man is great as man, not because he is in high station, not merely because he has powers that can study the uni- verse, and weigh the mountains in scales, and survey the heavens, and unfold their mechanism, but because these powers are destined to an infinite and eternal develop- ment, because God owns him as a child, because heaven may be his home. Now you may see what he is, and what homage is paid him, and how time and nature, and revelation, declare his greatness. Mark his capacity and discern what it really is, and what is its scope not to build palaces or swift ships, to span rivers, to lay iron tracks, to tunnel mountains, to decipher the fossil rocks, to trace the pro- gress of art or pioneer its march, or classify the facts of history not to unfold the mysteries of his own being, or analyze the operations of his own mind but in doing all this to discipline his powers for a higher service, and by the consecration of all his aims make the ladder of human attainments, the ladder by which the soul mounts to a more comprehensive survey of the works and providence of God. He is great, not in the strength of affections that idolize child, or husband, or wife, or parent, or coun- try, and that welcome hardship and the risk of life to serve them, but in affections which cling to the Almighty Father and to a covenant God, and twine themselves with deathless tendrils to the props of the everlasting promise. Away then with all the baubles that amuse the fancy or minister to a shallow pride. Away with all distinc- tions that cover up the one grand distinction of man as the heir of immortality. Let rags and broadcloth be alike transparent that I may recognize the man the heart beneath them all, that God will deign to make his living temple, and that shall ring with songs of deathless THE DIGNITY OF LIFE. 35 praise when the last minster spire or cathedral dome is wrapt in the final flame. It is this recognition of man's immortality that justifies his position where God has placed him as the lord of this lower world. All things on earth are made for him. This globe is the stage on which he is nobly to act his part. All its changing phases are the revolving chart on which he is to study his Father's lessons. Its seeds and flowers and harvests, its clouds and sunshine, its mountains and valleys, its dawn and twilight, its silence and its song, its discord and its music, its rests and tem- pests are all of them emblems. He and he alone has a mind to read and a heart to feel them. How the great heavens seem to come down at his bidding to map them- selves on his eyeball 1 How the mountain ranges and the fossil strata keep back their secrets till he questions them ! How history unrolls its chart to his steady gaze till he sees in the light of revelation the grand outline of God's wonderful and eternal providence. How the dis- cipline of temptation and trial subdues his vain confi- dence, rasps away his follies, and perfects the jewel of his faith. How sun and stars to his thoughtful eye beam with a light which no prism can dissolve, and the shadows beneath which he walks, teach him to hold firmer by the word whicli is a lamp to his feet and a light to his path. It is to him, subordinate to God, that nature pays her homage. For him winds blow and waters roll. For him the mine has kept its treasures safe through uncounted ages. For him the earth is carpeted with verdure, and for him the forests and the harvests wave. The sea and land alike lay their treasures at his feet. Beast, bird and insect, defy one another, but yield to his control. Canvass and marble wait hig touch to plo\v with some 36 LIFE LESSONS. lofty ideal. Even the wilderness beckons him to its pos- session, and the ocean wave teaches hini daring. Society itself is, normally, the school of affection and of virtue. The family is God's nursery for the young immortal. The state is the gymnasium of civil integrity, ordained of God to school men in the alphabet of that very justice, and order, and legislation, and retribution, which illus- trate his own moral and infinite government. But the revelation of Jesus Christ in declaring the dignity of human nature, even in spite of the apostacy and the unspeakable ruin that must finally overtake the perverted guilty soul, leaves all else behind. An impris- oned monarch may buy his ransom by ceded kingdoms. An Inca of Peru may seek to redeem himself from arrest by halls piled up with solid gold, but the blood that flowed on Calvary is more precious than mines or empires, and that blood was shed as a propitiation for our sins. This is the last, great, crowning gift of divine love, declaring in the preciousness of our ransom the dignity and value of the soul. Eecognize then, your true, your real greatness, not that of beauty or wealth, or taste, or learning, or gifts ; not that of charities, or self-righteousness, or good deeds ; for in all these things, our highest attainments leave us whelmed in dust and humiliation leave us only to reflect on the vanity of man as mortal but consider your birth- right of immortality. Consider how God has put you here in training for the skies, how he seeks to reclaim you from all that is low, and sensual, and selfish, that he may lift you up to himself and teach you to set your affections on things above, that you may be, more than the heir of kings, more than the wielder of sceptres- God's own child. V. THE COMPASS OF LIFE. "A conscience void of offense." ACTS xxiv. 16. OUR life on earth has been often compared to a vessel on the ocean. We are afloat on the waves of time, and if we ever reach the port of peace, it will be, as the vessel reaches the harbor, not by drifting, but by steering aright. But the emblem of the vessel is only too weak. We bear with us a treasure richer by far than the holds of famed India fleets or Spanish galleons. A human soul freighted with the hopes the possibility of immortal blessedness, is such a prize for the great Infernal pri- vateer, as corsair or pirate never seized. Rich in facul- ties, affections, privileges, opportunities of sublime aim and virtuous effort, capable of doing and enduring and loving till its very presence is a joy and benediction, it would only be degrading it to class it with silver plate or CaHfornia gold. It is sad enough to look at the skeleton frame of a noble vessel flung crushed upon the rocks, its timbers sinking to decay, the ooze and mud of the sea carpeting deck and state-room but what is this to the sight of a soul flung wrecked and helpless on the rocks of eternal judgment, going down, amid the requiem of its own moans and anguish, to the deeps of gloom and darkness the prey of desolation and utter despair ? And the dangers that threaten the human soul are paral- (37) 3 8 LIFE LESSONS. leled by none which the sailor meets upon the sea. The records of probation would show a percentage of loss such as would force an underwriter to decline all risks of insurance. How few of life's voyagers reach the har- bor without loss and in triumph ! How many sink out- right how many are left castaways as it were on the desert shore ! There must be something terrific in a storm at sea, when the waves come rolling on like watery avalanches, and the oak-ribbed vessel quivers under the shock ; when the loud trumpet shout that should convey orders is drowned by the thunder's and the tempest's roar ; when the cordage snaps and the masts are swept by the board ! There is the great floating coffin that sinks in the trough of the sea as if it were a grave, and just beneath are those fathomless depths so deep that the light goes out as if in caverns, and there is no landmark, no beaten path, no glimmering lighthouse to guide the vessel's course. And yet there is another sea whose face is swept by fiercer tempests, whose deeps are more unfathomable, whose shores are all lined with broken spars, and whose bottom is covered with countless wrecks which no human eye may explore. To many it is one wide waste of waters, a scene of ever tossing agitation, tempestuous with tempta- tion, and its rock-bound shores stern as retribution wait to crush human hopes flung upon their mercy. Who can enter into that inward struggle through which the soul must pass to reach in triumph the peace of God, and see it whelmed beneath the waves, or striking on hidden rocks, or sinking visibly to the awful darkness beneath, and not feel that the perils of our life are not those of a Kane among Polar icebergs, or a Speke among barbarous THE COMPASS OF LIFE. 39 African tribes, or a Sedgwick and Wadsworth under the battle-field's bail of death, but rather are to be found everywhere, where a human spirit quails before the tempter, or wavers in its allegiance to God ? If a painter with the most consummate art should draw you two scenes one, that of a Columbus returning tri- umphant from his voyage of discovery, with the riches and treasures of a New World in the hold of his vessel, and the crowded docks alive with men shouting his wel- come home the other, that of some foundering Arctic, going down with its freight of human life amid the rush of waves, the blaze of lightnings and the thunder of the storm, the contrast would but symbolize the different fate of human beings, starting from the same harbor, with equal capabilities, with common hopes, and with the same favoring breeze. One passes away as it were in the triumph of a successful voyage, with words of lofty cheer in his feeblest whispers, while the port of rest greets and cheers his dying eye the other sinks silent and hopeless beneath the waves and storms of life, leav- ing no memorial perhaps behind but the bubble of his parting breath. One stands on Pisgah conversing with angels. The feet of the other stumble on the dark moun- tains. One leaves behind him such memories of good- ness as make every place of his earthly sojourn fragrant for generations the other is thought of only as a Pilate, a Gallio, or a Demas. What makes this difference? Why does the world never weary to hear of Mount Vernon, the tomb of Wash- ington ? Why does the latest generation keep still well- worn the path by which for centuries the noblest of earth have hasted to lay the freshest flowers on the graves of the martyrs ; while of one of the very ablest of England's 40 LIFE LESSONS. gifted statesmen (Walpole) the historian has been con- strained to say, " JSTo enthusiasm was ever felt for his per- son ; none was ever kindled by his memory. No man ever inquired where his remains are laid, or went to pay an , homage of reverence to his tomb. 77 The explanation is not far to seek. In one case duty ruled ; in the other only a selfish ambition, so inherently mean, that no poet 7 s strains could ennoble it, and no stars or ribbons blazon over its infamy. I do not wonder, in view of the con- trast between the soul walking the earth but treading on it with the high resolve of duty, and the soul mining mole-like among the low elements which are given up to clods and worms, that the poet Wordsworth should apostrophize that by which alone life can be redeemed from contempt : " Stern daughter of the voice of God, duty, if that name thou love, Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring and reprove ; Thou who art victory and law When earthly terrors overawe ; Give unto me, made lowly wise, The spirit of self-sacrifice." Who would not respond, "Amen ? 77 Who would not say, let duty be to me " victory and law Whem earthly terrors overawe." I Suppose a native of some heathen land should ap- proach the pilot of a vessel in a dark and stormy night, and see him often turning to gaze upon a glass-covered box, within which a long iron needle is poised! He THE COMPASS OF LIFE. 41 knows not what it is, and he cannot understand this fre- quent gaze. He inquires, and is told that under all changes, in every sea, and in every latitude, that iron needle will still point unwavering to the pole. When the darkness sets all human calculations at defiance, and the keenest sagacity cannot even guess whitherward the vessel moves, that little piece of senseless metal knows more than pilot, crew, and royal and scientific societies. "How wonderful," perhaps he replies ; " but is it ab- solutely infallible ?" Why, no ! Another piece of iron laid alongside of it, which the heedless observer might not detect, would turn it out of its course, and make it utterly untrustworthy. It might only mislead. It might just excite confidence only to betray it. And yet we do not throw it away. It is something above and beyond all reason and all calculation. Without it the sailor would be lost in the darkness. The clouds would spread like a pall over his vessel. But with the compass satisfied that no unwarranted attraction draws it aside he steers on by night and by day, in storm and sunshine, and feels assured that all is right. Well, conscience is the soul's compass. On our vogage it points steadily to the pole of truth. It is not indeed infallible. It may be drawn aside from its true direc tion. Persecutors have dipped their hands in innocent blood and thought they did God service. Men making gain by mean or mischievous pursuits have warped their conscience round into line with their business. Many a crime, many a strange fanaticism has pleaded conscience Men have engaged in the slave trade and persuaded themselves that they were carrying out the designs of the Almighty. But in every such case the conscience was not void of offence. It was affected by adverse in- y f * A ** 42 LIFE LESSONS. fluences, by self-interest, the love of pleasure or gain. The purse, with its metal contents perhaps, was too near this needle of the soul. But he that would be safe at last must regard it. He must steer his course by the intimations which it gives. It is possible that ships abandoned by polar navigators should drift down to some southern coast and be again recovered, but he who drifts on the sea of life is lost be- yond all recovery. And what is a career of pleasure but drifting with the breath of jesting and amusement, and what is a career of selfishness, but scudding without a helmsman before the blasts of passion and interest? Does any man imagine that thus he will ever reach the port ? No, he needs the compass, he needs it free from all disturbing influences, he needs to study and heed its pointing finger, and steer as it directs. Unless he does, ne is lost. The man without a conscience, if such a thing could be, would be the greatest wretch on earth the most amazing object of pity, and is he less so, who, with a conscience, heeds it not, or allows it to be subjected to influences that pervert it ? And yet what is any continuous course of evil but a steady, systematic perversion and offending of the con- science ? It is like a straining of the eye till the power of vision is lost. It is a tampering with those convic- tions of duty by which the soul is held back as by a cable from the maelstrom of perdition. What would you think of a man who on board a vessel should tamper with the compass, should allow scraps of iron to be left near it, and then throw some covering over them, that they might not be seen ? He would imperil the vessel and its cargo, his own life and the life of all THE COMPASS OF LIFE. 43 on board. And yet this is what that man does who al- lows his conscience to be perverted, who brings his purse or his business or his pleasure so near to it as to draw it from its true line. He imperils his soul with all its precious interests. He imperils his everlasting inher- itance and the welfare of all that are associated with him or are influenced by his example. Or what would you think of a man who should throw the compass overboard, and should choose to be drifted with the winds and currents whithersoever they might bear him, to strange seas or to hidden rocks. And yet this is no more than what that man does who throws conscience overboard, and allows himself to drift on the current of pleasure or be driven by the blasts of passion or interest. He is afloat on a stormy sea, and he will never reach the port. We need no spirit of prophecy to be assured that his life will be a tragedy, and that ere long he will become a sunk or stranded wreck. Above all things, then, tamper not with the con- science. Never allow it to be warped by unhallowed influences. A little thing, like a mote in the eye, may irritate, if not injure, it irreparably. One great attain- ment of Probation is a properly educated conscience. It is the monitor of duty ; it is that which echoes in the soul the voice of its Maker. If it speaks doubtfully, if you have stifled its utterance, if you have perverted it from its true direction and scope, then you are risking the results of life on a false compass false through your complicity, or by your own act. VI. DUTY THE LAW OF LIFE. " These things ought ye to have done." MATT, xx lii. 23. THE word ought implies duty. Is there such a thing as duty ? Is there any thing that should have con- trol of a man above his own personal interest above his pleasures and his tastes ? Thousands live as if they fully believed there was not. They are governed by self-interest. The great question with them the maelstrom that swallows up everything else is, What will contribute to my gain, to my pleasure ? The world they live in, and the world they live for, centers in self. Their morality if they are moral is a matter of education or taste. Not to be honest would be a loss of reputation or standing. Not to be sober would risk health and success in business. All their virtue is simply natural amiability, or a matter of habit or calculation. Such men often go through the world with a fair repu- tation, and do some good on their way good, however, not of the kind that springs from design, or holy purpose, but good like that of a wheel in a piece of mechanism for God's providence, without reference to their own plan, makes them wheels in the social organism. Sheltered by honorable associations, the tornado of temptation spares them. They stand visibly upright to the last, (44) DUTY THE LAW OF LIFE. 45 and no stain attaches to their names. But have they answered the end of life? Have they been governed by right motives? Have they built on the rock, or on the sand ? Sometimes they give back an answer themselves which contradicts their life. Sometimes, as remorse coils its folds about their sinking frame, they confess with in- ward agony that they have committed a great and life- long mistake. They spurn as mockery the soothing flattery that they have been upright and moral. The memory of their self-indulgence is to them like the " hand- writing on the wall." They see nothing high or noble or pure to redeem their life from the blight of a wasted probation. And yet men will say, If I interfere with no man's rights, may I not consult my own convenience or pleasure? May I not do what I will with my talents, my time, my - wealth ? What good will it do me to be a hermit, or an ascetic, to crucify ease or comfort or taste by self- denial ? Well, let us suppose that a man need recognize no law above his own convenience or interest/ What one may do, all may do. Duty is dispensed with. No man asks, What ought I to do? There is no ought in the case. Every man's interest, taste, or pleasure is his rule. What follows ? What is the result in the family, in society, in the state? You have dissolved the whole framework of social order. The parent neglects the child, and the child disobeys the parent. Every brother is a Cain, every mother is an Herodias, every neighbor is an Ish- mael. Will you remonstrate against this? How can you do it ? You must appeal to that obsolete principle of duty. You must recognize the fact that we are not 46 LIFE LE880NS. independent of one another that we owe to one another, without respect to what we receive, love and service. Introduce the principle into the State. It repeals every law, for civil legislation is swallowed up by individual caprice. It reduces social order to chaos. It inaugurates anarchy and revolution and endless civil feuds. It sanc- tions tyranny, and theft, and murder, and the will of the strongest. Ambition, avarice, and revenge abolish courts, and bludgeons and pistols take the place of sheriffs. And what becomes of patriotism? The State cannot claim that a man should forego ease or personal gain, to serve either in its councils or in its armies. But this is not all. If there is no such thing as duty, no promise is binding, no oath is inviolable. Why should a man observe truth or justice if there is no such thing as moral obligation independent of taste or interest? And without truth between man and man, where is so- ciety, where is the State? The drifting sand, every grain independent of its fellow, is cohesion and solidity itself, to a system in which every ruler is a Nero, and every subject an Ishmael. Yet all this flows forth as the legitimate result when you dispense with the cement and the authority 4>f duty. The veriest despotism that barbarism ever constructed could not hold together an hour without some respect for the obligations of duty. The Dey of Algiers, or even the King of Dahomey, is forced, in spite of the fiendliest passions, sometimes, at least, to keep his promise, to fulfill his engagements. There is, then, such a thing as duty. There is some- thing which claims the right to govern a man, above his own taste, or caprice, or interests. Nay, his 'own nature, seared and flawed by sin till it threatens to crumble to DUTY THE LAW OF LIFE. 47 absolute corruption, is still like the rock interfused with silver veined with conscience. In spite of the most confirmed and desperate depravity, the soul bows uncon- sciously before the majesty of the truth it hates, and Felix trembles at the look of his prisoner, even while his words mingle their tones with the clanking of his chain. If you examine piecemeal a steam-engine, in its opera- tions, you come to what is called the governor, which is designed to regulate the engine in all its motions. You have no more doubt of its design than you have of the existence of the engine itself. So if you take the hu- man mind to pieces you find that this infinitely more curious and complicate than any structure that human genius ever contrived has its governor also. It has that which assumes to guide, and judge, and control all a man's actions that which grasps the helm of the mind as unhesitatingly and boldly as the captain of a vessel directs how it shall be trimmed issues its orders, as it were in conscious mastery looks the soul in the face when it yields to low, base self- interest, and says : " You mean, dastardly wretch ! blush to hold up your head among decent men. 77 That gov- ernor is the human conscience. A man may not like its control or company. lie may abuse it, and violate it, and spurn it, and stupify it with vice and drunkenness; he may put it under the heel of his lusts, and bore out its eyes with sophistry, and smother its voice with the loud tones of revel ; but, torn, bleeding, dishonored, gasp- ing in whispers it lives yet, and it claims its rightful throne, and it maintains still the tone of a king ; and sometimes it flings off all the murderous lusts that trampled on it, and rises up like a giant to reassert its control over a wrecked and trembling nature. It can 48 LIFE LESSONS. not be destroyed. It can not be exiled. To the very last, when the flesh crumbles, and the limbs shake with weakness, and reason itself is ready to give way, con- science speaks in the soul with a voice as much more, authoritative than all other voices, as God's thunders are louder than human revels. / And whence is conscience ? Is it an accident ? Was it dropped in as a fragment to fill up the seams or round out the intellectual or social nature of man ? Nay ; is it not the very substance of our moral nature, and does it not bear as plainly the stamp of design as the governor in a steam-engine? And was it not put there by the great Builder, and does not its very presence declare louder and plainer than words, that man, in all his facul- ties, tastes, sympathies, and purposes, is to yield to its control ? It is the constitutional sovereign of the empire of our faculties. To disregard it, is treason ; to disobey it, " is rebellion. To set up pleasure, or convenience, or gain, tor personal or selfish interest, in place of it, is to dethrone the rightful monarch ; it is, as it were, to release Barab- bas and crucify Jesus. Man, then, is made under law ; he is created subject to the law of duty. That law is supreme. It is as much above lust, passion, and interest as the laws of the United Slates are above the resolutions of a caucus of secession- ists as the laws of Sinai are above the rules of etiquette at Belshazzar's revels or Dives's feasts. If any man could yet doubt it, he would only need to compare the results of a life of duty with a life of pleasure the lofty heroism of a Daniel faithful to his God amid all the allurements of a heathen court, with the selfish aspirations of a Hainan climbing up to swing from his own gallows the sublime fidelity of a Washington to DUTY THE LAW OF LIFE. 49 the sacred trust his country reposed in him, with the baseness of an Arnold selling himself to a golden infamy the truthfulness of unswerving integrity under whose shadow the wronged finds shelter and the wretched pity, with the trifling, vain, heedless indulgence that degrades a man to the level of a peacock or a swine. Placed side by side, even a fool might be struck by the contrast. One is sunlight, the other fog ; one is the fragrance of Eden, the other a stench. The study of one inspires and thrills us beyond the note of drum or trumpet or martial strain ; the sight of the other makes us sick of human nature. We turn away as from a slough of filth and loathing. Yet one is duty incarnate, the other selfish- ness gone to seed. The great question, then, which is to determine the plan and destiny of a man's life is this : Shall I yield to the supreme law of duty ? Shall I bow to the mandate of conscience, and of God speaking through the con- science ? Shall I put base or selfish interest foremost, or shall I simply ask, " What ought I to do/ 7 and make the answer final ? On that decision depends more than pen can write or tongue can tell. On that hinge the results of probation and the issues of eternity. By that is to be determined whether these years shall be carved into the statuary of noble and godly deeds, or whether they shall be ground down to the sandy rubbish with which Satan strews the pathway of blinded thousands to hell whether your example shall be a moral lighthouse which the storm- tossed shall see and bless, or a rocket, whose charred remnant shall be trod under the heel of contempt, even by its once admirers whether you will mount upward or sink downward soar or crawl be Godlike or beast- 3 5 o LIFE LESSONS. like be the world's benefactor or its curse grow Tip to the stature of a sanctified manhood or be dwarfed and shriveled to the littleness of base and selfish aims. Can any man hesitate with such a choice before him ? He might almost as well hesitate between an angel's crown and a felon's cell, between the benediction of Heaven and the agonies of despair. And now the question meets him, What is duty ? It is not a difficult one to him who is ready to deny himself and take up his cross to one who has made up his mind fully to shrink from no task which he ought to meet to him who stands resolved to thread every deed and thought on the string of right. Such a man will soon find that all authority centers in the will of God, that morality has its true and eternal basis in religion, that he cannot begin his course without first asking, What do I owe to that great Being in whose hand my breath is, and whose are all my ways ? And he cannot long con- sider this without being brought to feel how grossly he has sinned already, and how much he needs the pardon- ing love and grace of God. And then may he find in the volume of God's revealed will a release from all his difficulties, and a solution of all his doubts. He will find provision made for all his need. The path of duty will open before him, and he will see that its very starting-point is just where the penitent sinner bows in humble confession before the cross of Christ. i VII. LIFE SERVICE DUE TO GOD. " Will a man rob God?" MAL. iii. 8. AS morality in a general sense is duty toward man, so religion is duty toward God. Both are demanded of us, and we cannot be just if we deny the claims of either. If we allow one and refuse the other, we stand condemned by our own act. We are inconsis- tent with ourselves. And yet there are thousands who claim and perhaps justly, as they understand it to be upright and moral, whose religion is but a form and many times a mockery. They are honest with men as they measure obligation. They are dishonest toward God. If they admit that they ought to obey and serve and love their Maker, it is an admission that dies on the lip and never affects the heart. With little or no anxiety they tread their own convic- tions under foot ; they press on in a course which their consciences condemn, and which conflicts with all the principles which they avow or even cherish in social intercourse. Such is the career of thousands and tens of thousands. They palliate it. They excuse it. They offset it by an array of their own virtues, their integrity or morality. But what is its character ? What is the proper name for it ? It is robbery robbing God. But "will a man rob God?" There is something atrocious in the very thought! To rob a stranger is (51) 52 LIFE LESSONS. criminal, and the law of the land reprobates it. To rob a neighbor is more repulsive. To rob a friend, one who has done us kindly offices, is still more heinous. To rob a parent is accounted the height of baseness as well as, guilt but to rob God, who is not only our great heavenly Friend, our Ruler, our Maker, but our Father in heaven, infinitely transcends it all. But can the charge be brought home to us ? Is it true ? What is the verdict of every unbiased conscience in view of the evidence ? Let us see. And first, can a man rob God? The whole universe is his, and man is his creature. You may say that he can carry nothing off the premises, and it is true. But can there be no robbery save that which succeeds ? The owner of property sits unseen by the intruder, sees him enter and seize his plunder, is ready to recover it again at the proper moment, or perhaps knows that the rob- ber is too weak to carry it off, will in fact drop exhaust- ed and helpless in the attempt. But is the deed any the less a crime for all this? So God's eye is on the culprit. He sees not only the outstretched arm, but also the very thoughts of the soul. He can resume anything that guilty man may choose to appropriate just when he will ; nay, he knows that life itself, like a palsied hand, must soon sink too enfeebled to grasp or retain its prize. But the spirit of the deed yet remains. If not successful, it is yet robbery. But God has so made man as a free and accounta- ble agent that he can at will retain and withhold what is due to God as his in right and justice. He is put in trust with that which belongs to God, and is justly to be rendered back to him which cannot be withheld from him or his service without great guilt. LIFE SERVICE TO GOD. 53 Man is God's creature, his intelligent creature, capable of studying, and by instruction of understanding the end of his being, and devoting himself toward its attainment. God has a supreme right to demand of every man that he shall enter into the divine design and co-operate heartily and steadily in carrying it out, and to withhold that devotion or co-operation is to rob him of the duty which an intelligent creature owes. Man is God's subject, made under law, born under au- thority, bound to obey and to render every duty of loy- alty and fidelity. He can rebel in spirit and purpose, and refuse obedience, and withhold loyalty. And what a robbery is this ! Ask the statesman or patriot. How can a value be fixed on that of which it is said " to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." Man is God's child, and owes him a child's duty of love and affection. That love and affection belong to God. They are his by right. No one can be justified can justify himself in withholding them. And what is their worth ? Love is the treasure of the heart : it is that which we prize the most. It is that on which God sets the highest estimate. A man might steal your purse or rob your dwelling, and you might perhaps forgive him, but suppose he stole away the affections of husband, wife or child, would you not feel that the robbery was one which no gold could compensate ? Would you not say that this was the very height and atrocity of rob- bery ? And what in the sight of Him who owns creation and can make millions of worlds at a breath, are all the treasures of mines and kingdoms, to the love and affec- tion of one who can say "My Father God?" That little prattler on your knee cannot think as you think. 54 LIFE LESSONS. cannot speak as you speak, cannot earn a penny to add to your store, but its smile is the sunshine of your home, and how much you should prize its unbotight kiss you may never know perhaps, unless called to look at death's, seal on its marble brow and its closed eyelids. Ah ! what a robbery, when God, with a God's authority and a parent's affection, says to his wayward child, my son give me thy heart, and the heart is denied ! God rightly claims your influence and example on his side. There is a controversy going on between sin and holiness, and he that is not with him is against him. The worldly wealth you may have to give to promote the spread of Christ's kingdom may be small, but a conse- crated life he has a right to claim a life of prayer, a life that commends religion to others, a life that tends to check the tide of overwhelming sin, and draw lost men to the cross of Christ. Here is something that you either give or withhold. If you withhold it, then you rob God. God rightly claims the service of your hands the consecration of all the fruits of your toil. These belong to him as the great proprietor, and you are but his stew- ard. Some men make an unwarranted distinction be- tween what they use for themselves and what they give away in charity. But God recognizes no such distinc- tion. What you expend for your own comfort you are to expend for him and his glory, as well as what you give to spread the Gospel. God entrusts his own wealth to you for both, to use in either case for him. His wealth furnishes that garment. His wealth spreads that table. Do you recognize it as his ? Is it consecrated ? is it all consecrated ? Do you read the image of God as well as of the goddess Liberty on the coin the image of Jesus LIFE SERVICE TO GOD. 55 overspreading that of the President or the Secretary of the Treasury? Or like Ananias and Sapphira, are you keeping back from God a part of what you acknowledge to be his ? If so you are robbing God. God rightly claims the service of your intellect. His name as owner is stamped on your every faculty, more than burnt or branded in. He is its absolute proprietor. Has it been devoted to his service ? Has it been enlisted in his army ? Has it taken the oath of allegiance ? Do you think, plan, purpose for the glory of God ? And if there is anything which is God's beyond dis- pute, it is these hours of probation. Every year, day, hour, moment, belongs to God. Have you given them to him not only the Sabbath, not only the hour of prayer, of consecrated thought and meditation, but each moment have you given it back with holy service ; have you used it as not your own, but entrusted to you that you might do the work of life, might prepare for eternity, might lay up treasure in heaven ? If in any of these respects you have failed, then you have robbed God robbed him not as a clerk robs his employer of money not as a traitor robs his country of loyalty not as a child robs a parent of the love and affection it owes but you have as it were robbed him of his own glory, you have lived as if He were such a being that he could claim nothing at your hands, and was only to be if not simply dreaded neglected and despised. The evidence is full and complete. It is writ- ten on the memory. It is traced on the conscience. It is recorded in the book of '-Omniscience. The stolen property is perhaps in your hands, or your spendthrift policy has not pawned it beyond recall as a witness against you. 56 LIFE LESSONS. What will you do ? Confess your sin. Look at it in its full enormity. See yourself at the mercy of an offended God. Confess your guilt at His bar. Select Christ as your advocate, and then plead the merits of 4 atoning blood. But is there nothing, hitherto withheld, that is to be rendered back to God ? Has he not a right to say " My son, give me thy heart ?" Can you evade the force of that appeal " if then I be a father, where is my honor ? and if I be a master, where is my fear 1" God is en- titled, as God, to your supreme love and your cheerful service. Will you withhold them ? And what is that but robbery ? " My Maker and my King, To thee my all I owe ; Thy sovereign bounty is the spring "Whence all my comforts flow. "Shall I withhold thy due? And shall my passions rove ? Lord, form this wretched heart ane\r, And fill it with thy love." VIII. LIVING FOR OTHERS. " Bear ye one another's burdens." GAL. vi. 2. BY the very constitution of society, as well as that of our own being, we are placed under obligation to seek and promote the welfare of others. Out of the cir- cumstances of our mutual relations, the sense of duty is necessarily evolved. These circumstances are not of our ordering. They are due to the design of the great Maker himself, who has ordered our lot. Kightly read by the thoughtful mind, they sustain by their analogy the natural authority of those divine injunctions which re- quire us to " deny ourselves," to " bear one another's burdens," to be " our brother's keeper," and, in a word, to discharge those missionary obligations, so often branded as fanatic, which the Gospel of Christ enforces upon us. Some beams of this great truth evidently dawned, be- fore the advent of Christ, on the heathen mind. It is significant that Cicero should write a treatise de officiis, and bring to view the mutual obligations of men and citizens that he should say so emphatically that " the true, the simple, the sincere was that which was most suited to the nature of man." * that self-interest should yield to justice, that we are not born for ourselves alone. * Quod yerum, simplex sincerumque sit, id esse naturae homiuis apti imam. 3* () 5 8 LIFE LESSONS. Such conclusions may have been drawn simply from the study of the constitution of man, or the constitution of society. But. whether the fact is recognized or not, these have God for their author, and the wise study of them reveals His design, and lends His sanction to the obligations that had, perhaps, been already inferred. The relations of parent and child, of ruler and subject, and, indeed, all those which grow out of our social exis- tence, must be referred to Him. Our well-being is iden- tified with the proper discharge of duties which we owe to others. This does not happen by chance. It is not a mere in- cident of our probation. Created as we are, social be- ings, our own natures could not 'be developed, except through intercourse with our fellow-beings. Nor is it left to our choice whether this shall be the case. We could not change the order of things if we would. So- ciety is constituted into families, neighborhoods and states. The family is the school in which first of all the race is trained. Each helps to educate the other. The child educates the parent as really as the parent does the child. A new order of affections, anxieties and ef- forts is called forth by the necessary discharge of pa- rental duty, and many a virtue is evoked by the discharge of parental fidelity in protecting, guarding and educating the child. First of all there is forethought for those who are en- tirely and absolutely dependent. The infant, unable to tell its wants, or even to know them itself, silently ap- peals for help and kindness and care. It is an appeal which no parent can resist. It comes with a kind of di- vine authority. In yielding to it, the parent is compelled to consider what is adapted to the circumstances of the LIVING FOR OTHERS. 59 child, to observe its varied wants and exposure, to study what is adapted to its bodily comfort and mental im- provement, to train and educate it for future usefulness and to take care of itself. Nor is this all. Each member of the household must be thoughtful for the welfare of others. This is the ne-t cessary law of the well-ordered and happy household. An exclusive selfishness is intolerable. It would turn the domestic scene into a theatre of hostile and war- ring passions. Perverted as humanity is, the family is the school in which we are placed first of all placed by God to unlearn the depravity of our selfishness, and make it part of our life to take forethought for others. Turning now to society at large, we find that for our own good we must toil and care for one another. So- ciety itself is a mutual league of help. There is no formal or expressed, but there is an understood alliance. We work, plan, invent, not for ourselves alone, but for one another. Others share the benefit of our industry and virtue, and we share the benefit of theirs. Life it- self is valuable or worthless, a joy or a burden, largely in proportion as we have around us those whom we love or whom we distrust. By society we are educated to that which we call public spirit, that is, a disposition which rises above considerations of narrow, private in- terest. Let society become organized, as it must be, into the form of government, and every citizen is trained to consider the claims of the state, or, as it is called, the commonwealth. By the very vote we are called upon to give, we are educated to think of the whole social body and what will be for their benefit. Nor is this all. Government represents the national 60 LIFE LESSONS. mind, studious not for the profit of those who compose the administration, but of those who compose the state. It has to consider the wants, the exposure, the burdens, the defence, the prosperity of all. So in the neighbor- 1 hood. Even our own peace, and prosperity, and security are the motive if all others are wanting, to study the in- telligence, morality and well-being of others. We want them educated and we build schools for them. We want them reformed, and we build penitentiaries and houses of refuge. We want them brought under religious re- straint, and we form bible and tract societies to furnish them religious reading, or build houses of worship in which they may be taught of God. And these social and civil duties are such that we neg- lect them at our peril. If we selfishly abandon all con- sideration for others, if we concentrate all care and anxiety on our own aggrandizement or emolument, we take the surest way to destroy our own security and com- fort. If we, in our avarice or selfishness, leave others to grow up ignorant or vicious if we leave them uncared for in their vagrancy or vice if we withhold the means needed for their reform, we educate society itself to be- come a den of human wolves we leave it to sink to a level with the revolting order or rather anarchy of sav- age life. All the forms of wickedness that fester in the lanes and alleys of great cities till they breed a moral pestilence all the crimes that, nursed in moral neglect and social corruption, at length stalk forth infernal Nim- rods, to rule and ruin, and trample on those who did not trample them out by kindness at the opportune moment all these are the penalty for remissness in social duty and social virtue. Again, the most attractive forms of human excellence LIVING FOR OTHERS. 61 are those which are produced from the soil of our social relations. Man is never so admirable as when he for- gets himself to bless others. There are no deeds that so kindle the heart to admiration and enthusiastic praise as those in which we bear others 7 burdens, or volunteer to suffer and endure in their behalf. It half redeems from rebuke the vices of the savage parent, when we see him risking his own life to save that of the child, and who can read without tears of sympathy of those strug- gles of honest poverty by which the self-denying parent endeavors to clothe, and feed, and educate a child? Those sleepless nights, those tiresome days, those anxious hours, those welcomed hardships adding new wrinkles to the brow, and bending the frame with other burdens than those of age these mark a heroism, hidden indeed from the eyes of the great crowd, but not less noble, gen- erous, or admirable than that which on battlefields wins the plaudits of the world. And what is the charm that invests the annals of philanthropy but just that cheerful charity which fore- goes ease, and gain, and selfish advantage, to promote the comfort and welfare of those who have no legal claim to such service? The deeds which redeem from con- tempt the broad desert of selfishness which constitutes the waste of human history, are those in which generous spirits, postponing all selfish considerations, have la- bored, suffered, endured hardship, or peril, or death for others. The world may not be commercially richer for the search for Sir John Franklin. Its map may not have been much altered by the generous valor of a Wilken- reid or Tell, and many a patriot and many a martyr may have fallen without seeing the cause consecrated by their blood triumphant. But we, at least, socially, morally, 6z LIFE LESSONS. spiritually, are the richer for them, and the portrait gal- lery of history holds upon its walls, bidding them gaze down upon us from the canvass, features that impress themselves upon our remembrance, and which force us, to aspire to a loftier standard of thought and en- deavor. Even war, with all its stern, forbidding aspects war that is wont, like the fabled Gorgon's head, to change the hearts of those that long gaze upon it into stone, finds here almost its only redeeming features. When men forget themselves for their country's sake, and for the love of others breast the surging tide of battle, and risk life and everything on earth at the call of patriotic duty, it is impossible for us not to admire and praise. Such deeds rise like the Alps above the lowlands and quag- mires of selfishness, and cold and dead must that heart be which does not gaze up to them with the awe and reverence due to moral greatness. Thus it will be found that in all the deeds or courses of action which most constrain to admiration, the real element that commands homage is the forgetfulness of self in order to promote the well-being of others. He that takes forethought for those who cannot or do not take forethought for themselves, for the widow and or- phan, or even for the depraved and vicious, is the moral hero. And yet without going out of our way we may find in our own homes, neighborhoods, communities, those who challenge our sympathy and care. God's providence, therefore, sets before us in nature the very lessons of His word of grace, teaches us to bear one another's burdens, incites us to self-sacrifice to promote their well-being, calls upon us as we have freely received freely to give, urges us to look not every man on his own things, but LIVING FOR OTHERS. 63 every man also on the things of others., echoes in our ears the great lesson no man, no true man, liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. To the disciple of Christ I need not say, your Master's example rebukes once and for ever everything like an absorbing selfishness. He went about doing good. Your business is to follow in His footsteps. You have no right to think only of your own ease and comfort. God is educating you every day by the lessons of your probation to care for the well-being and blessedness of others. While you are pleading to yourself your own ease or comfort, while you are careless whether your example cheers and encourages your Christian brethren, whether they find you at, or absent from, your post, you are vio- lating not only the solemn injunctions of your Master, but the very laws of the social constitution enacted by the Author of nature itself. But can it be a duty to study the social and moral wel- fare of others, and not their spiritual good ? Would you consider it a criminal neglect in a parent to clothe and feed his child, yet leave his mind untaught and his heart untrained ? Does that deserve the name of education which leaves uncared for all which constitutes man human and immortal ? Am I taking true forethought for one whom I send on a distant journey where he will be exposed to damp and cold, if I just furnish him with an umbrella to shield him from the present rays of a scorching sun? Surely, in truthful fidelity I must consider what he needs most, what he witt need. And what does man need most? What do you need yourself? Bound to eternity, bound a sinner to the judgment-seat, aspiring to ever- lasting blessedness in a holy world, what is it that is all essential what but a new heart, a regenerated and sano 64 LIFE LESSONS. tified spirit, full and free forgiveness through the chan- nels of mercy opened by sovereign grace. Your duty then, your highest duty, is to lead others to Christ to think of their welfare, not as creatures of to- day, but as heirs of eternity. They are ever with you. They are fellow-pilgrims. They are children of the same Father in heaven. As guilty and wretched, they are en- titled to your compassion. As human, they demand your sympathy, and the heart that denies that sympathy will be burdened thereby. It is made cold, stern, repulsive. The very features of it at last bear the imprint of their own cursed selfishness, while the loveliness of charity cannot remain hid even by the veil of its modesty. "As the rivers furthest flowing, In the highest hills have birth ; As the banyan, broadest growing, Oftenest bows its head to earth So the noblest minds press onward, Channels far of good to trace ; So the largest hearts bend downward, Circling all the human race." IX. ATHEISTIC EVASION OF DUTY. " The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." Ps. xiv. 1. THE only consistent method of evading the claims of duty, is that which is pursued by the Atheist. In denying the existence of a Supreme Ruler, he leaves man to all that measure of freedom in his self-will and his self-indulgence, which circumstances will allow. In- stead of quarrelling with specific obligations, or meeting and setting aside the claims of duty in detail he would annihilate at once the authority which enjoins them all. Instead of cutting down the tree under the shadow of which he cannot bear to sit piecemeal, instead of lopping off limb after limb, he strikes boldly at the trunk itself, and it is neither the fault of his will or purpose that he does not succeed. In all this though "a fool," he is a logical and consistent fool. He does not take the Uni- versalist's position and pretend that the Scriptures a bed of thorns to him in his sins is as soft as down, fighting with a thousand texts of Scripture and finding it but a cheerless task to smother them one after another, when they come to life again so soon. He does not stop at Deism still a half-way house on the road to a broad denial or evasion of duty finding in that the ground of a more than possibility, that all he dreads may be true but boldly, if not honestly, he strides at once to that (65) 66 LIFE LESSONS. position where alone he can consistently reject the claims enforced by conscience and the Bible. Calling himself an Atheist, with any life that he pleases to lead, he is incased and shielded from all assault. You may exhaust the magazine of motive, and you cannot reach him. He is proof against all. Archimedes said, Give me a pou sto, a place to stand, and I will lift the world. The Being of a God is pou sto, the place to stand, to move and con- trol the mind of man ; and when that is denied, your re- sources are gone, you have nothing on which to rest your lever. Sometimes a man is shrewd enough to see this, and in his aversion to duty he leaps at once into the for- tress of Atheism, and defies you. He puts himself be- yond the reach of argument or remonstrance. What can you say to him ? You might as well attempt to rea- son with one who denies your presence. He climbs the Babel tower of infidelity to its topmost turret, where no arrow of truth can reach him but if there be an earth- quake his grave would be the deepest as his fall would be greatest. But this much we may say for him, while he puts himself up so high so near the lightnings that it is the only place where with an impenitent heart, fully set in resistance to the claims of duty he can con- sistently be at peace. It is the only place where his life and principles will not quarrel. But to all this there is an offset. There is something horrid in the sublime theory upon which Atheism plants itself assuming thence to look down on the existence of a God as an idle fantasy. Grant the principle of the Atheist, and Nero's wish for Rome is realized for the universe. It has but one neck that may be severed at a blow, and without a God it is severed. You have noth- ing left but a headless trunk a mere carcass fit to moul- ATHEISTIC EVASION OF DUTY. 67 der and rot. Other errors rob us piecemeal this does its work by. wholesale. Others hew off here a thumb, or finger, or arm, or pluck out an eye, this tears out the living heart as it beats. It is a great loss to have one of God's grand and precious truths torn from us, but nothing to losing God himself. How do you think one of the blessed martyrs would have felt, to have been robbed, while hunted in mountain or glen, of any one of those pillars of immortal hope which he finds in the word of God ? any one of those beams that shone full from the Sun of Righteousness in upon the darkness of his bosom ? And yet, would it have been anything to be compared with having all those pillars wrested away, and the fabric overthrown or having that sun itself blotted out with all its beams in eternal night ? Atheism is con- sistent with itself when, as in the French revolution, it writes over the gateway to the grave, " Death is an eter- nal sleep." It is consistent with itself when it annals every restraint that is exercised over wicked men by the apprehension of a Supreme Judge and a final retribution. It is consistent with itself when it closes every temple of worship, and rends to atoms all those hallowed sym- pathies and hopes with which the soul of man is inspired to do and suffer on earth. It is consistent with itself when it leaves the unaided reason of man to grapple in blank despair with the fearful problems of his existence and destiny when it sends him to the grave with all the racking uncertainty and doubt that invest the possibili- ties of a hereafter when it robs the injured sufferer of the last hope of redress in the justice of heaven, and at the same time unbars the gates of every lawless passion and impulse, emancipating it from all sense of accounta- bility or dread of retribution. If thore is any one coh- 68 LIFE LESSONS. ception into which all these elements of the terrible, the sublime and the despairing, are compressed and combined, it is that this scheme of existence, this moral and physi- cal universe, is without a controlling mind without a God. We stand appalled at the blind working of this immense mechanism of worlds, where one jar or accident hurls the whole to atoms, and makes the vast chaos one common grave for all that lives. Suns and systems rush along no iron track with a speed that mocks the grasp of our conception, and there is no engineer with his hand upon the throttle or the break. The structure of human society, of human justice and legislation, is with- out any divine sanction. Its corner-stone is crumbled, and every hour it runs the risk of destruction and ex- tinction. The security of an oath is but a fable and the ad- ministering it a jest. The laws of justice are but the rule of expedience, and crime is merely the blunder of him that commits it. All the punishment that the guilty needs to dread is just that which he has to fear from an equal, and all the encouragement that the innocent can hope, is that which is doled out to him in the scanty and fallible allotments of the accidents of human justice. You have taken away all that strength to resist, and that encouragement to endure, and that sense of respon- sibility forbidding to swerve, which are found in the thought, " Thou God seest me. 77 You have annulled all those cheerful, hopeful springs of effort which find their strength in the complacent smile of an approving God. In the. hour of calamity and darkening anguish, you have taken away the last resource on which the child of sorrow and affliction can lean. Life is only a brilliant dream, lighting its own way to the grave, kindled just ATHEISTIC EVASION OF DUTY. 69 long enough, to flash upon the gloom that is to cover it. Man is an orphan or a helpless child of uncertainty, want, guilt and anguish. The world is a desert and a graveyard. Eternity is a terrible unexplored chaos, the more terrible because unknown. The lofty hopes inspired by the Gospel are like itself, ignesfatui, brilliant only to mislead and betray. The fond affections that would follow their loved object to the grave, and will not desert it even then these are but the implements of our torment, the chains that we must wear to gall us. No hope lights up the parting hour of earth; no possible prospect of a blest reunion can extract its sting. We must stand shuddering over the fathomless gulf of anni- hilation, and feed our fancy on the shadows that imagi- nation summons out of its darkness. *' Behold, then, man, the creature of a day, Spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay, Trail as the leaf in Autumn's yellow bower, Dust in the wind, or dew upon the flower ; A friendless slave, a child without a sire, Whose mortal life and momentary fire Light to the grave his chance-created form, As ocean wrecks illuminate the storm. And when the gun's tremendous flash is o'er, To night and darkness sink for evermore." If a man can embrace such a theory a theory whose open arms wait to press him to its bosom of hidden daggers a theory that sacrifices all that we love, and scorns all that we respect, and blasts all that we hope, and desecrates all that we worship if he can embrace such a theory and find delight in it and feel no humilia- tion at the nothingness to which it reduces him, and no 7 o LIFE LESSONS, pain at the robhery which it inflicts, we will consent to except him from the common lot and sympathies of man, but in disavowing him, we must disavow his theory too, and own that such an attainment as his is beyond and above the reach of our envy. Such, then, is the gloomily sublime position which the Atheist occupies and often is proud to occupy, as though there were a merit and a triumph in the bold achieve- ment of mounting to that height of scepticism from which he looks down contemptuously on all that is dear, or honored, or sacred in the life and hopes of man. Then he lays claim to a mind more impartial, an intelligence more searching a science more extensive and accurate, than that of other men; he speaks in a tone of pity of their religious weakness and errors, their superstitious scruples, their bondage to worn out and obsolete notions. But what is his achievement, save the gloomiest conquest of all ? what his triumph but the triumph of despair ? If he has searched beyond the ken of others if he has read with a keener vision the mysteries of nature, if he has explored the realms of thought which others have never trod, what is the result that he brings back? what is the conclusion of all, that he is proud to an- nounce ? That there is no God ! " Are these the pompous tidings ye proclaim, Lights of the world, and demigods of fame ? Is this your triumph, this your proud applause, Children of Truth, and champions of her cause ? For this hath Science searched with weary wing, By shore and sea each mute and living thing. For this constrained to utterance earth and air, To waft us home the message of despair. Then let her bind the palm, her brow to suit, Of blasted leaf and death-distilling fruit ATHEISTIC EVASION OF DUTY. 7 i Then let her read, not loudly nor elate, The loom that bars us from a better fate. But fcad as angels for the good man's sin, Blush to record, and weep to give it in." The Atheist's presumed conquest is that of disaster and defeat, his boast is one over which his heart might break. But by what strange method is it that the Atheist climbs to this rocky height, where, like Satan on the throne of hell, he sits " supreme in misery " ? How are we constrained to wonder at the immensity of his re- sources, by means of which he can reach that position from which he can look down upon the being of a God as an exploded and obsolete notion from which he can look abroad through the immensity of suns and systems and feel warranted to declare, " They had no author ; they have no guide.' 7 Before such an immense and won- derful intelligence as this, all the learning and attain- ments of the greatest scholars and philosophers of the world, become diminutive and insignificant. The mind of Newton had a wonderful grasp and sagacity, but all that he attained only led him to bow the more reverently before the throne of the Great Ruler, and the poet has traced his epitaph in those words : " Sagacious reader of the works of God." Milton was read in classic lore, and he possessed a genius to make classic whatever flowed from his own pen ; but from his broad survey of earth and man he turned back, exclaiming : y " One Almighty is from whom All things proceed and up to Him return." ?2 LIFE LESSONS. Bacon, with an intellect that seemed made to pioneer the ages, uncovered with a mighty hand link after link in the chain of causation ; but instead of reaching the lofty position of the Atheist, he had to be content with a humbler measure of attainment, and the feeble light that he kindled was only enough to extort the confession : '' I had rather believe all the fables of the Legend, and the Alkoran, and the Talmud, than that this universal frame of things is without a God." But all these minds, great as we measure them, are but pygmies to the Atheist, and all their attainments leave them on the first round of that ladder to whose top he climbs ! Who does not wonder, then, by what power of genius that height is reached what hands have framed the lad- der or hewn the staircase, by which the brain of man, without reeling or growing dizzy, has mounted to it ? The basis on which the wisdom of all other philosophy has been constrained to rest, has been the existence of a great first cause on which all others depend ; but Atheism, outrivalling the Almighty himself, who hung the world on nothing, presumes to suspend all secondary causes on no hook at all, and sustains them all without an uphold- ing hand. What other minds consider as absurd, and repudiate as folly, the Atheist receives as reasonable, consistent and wise. He can believe in a design without a designer, a creation without a creator a government without a gov- ernor, a system without a devising and ordaining mind. What other minds in their paroxysms of unbelief are constrained to confess, they can only attain to doubt, he boldly and habitually denies, asserting as established that of which they can see not the barest possibility of proof or evidence. ATHEISTIC EVASION OF DUTY. 73 What other minds deem incredible, because outfaced and overwhelmed by a thousand contrary and invincible probabilities, he declares to be true, running in the teeth of other men's reason and common sense. While other men can go back in the history of the worlds only to the creating fiat of Jehovah, he can declare their eternal existence, or put the " genesis of chance " among the rationalities of his creed. While everything else in the universe animate or inani- mate, according to its grade and nature, declares like a witness, " there is a God/ 7 and the very structure of the Atheist's body and soul confirm the evidence, his voice rises discordant and gives them all the lie. What then must be that immense superiority of intelli- gence, that surpassing grasp of mind, that unparalleled learning, which shall warrant a man to take this position, with every sun and star in heaven looking down with an eye of rebuke upon him, and every sand grain and dew drop flashing back the remonstrance, and then and thus assert, there is no God ? Such a man should possess, in himself, not only the lore of ages, but the history of eter- nity, not a narrow acquaintance with a single world, but a minute familiarity with all worlds, not a shrewd suspi- cion of what the soul may be, but a positive knowledge of all its mysteries, its origin and destiny. He should have the power of reasoning surpassing any thing that mortal man has ever developed, a glance that can not only penetrate the mysteries of nature, but discern the secrets of eternity. And when you can bring me such an one denying that there is a God, in other words, pre- sent me with God himself in audible voice, disavowing his own existence, then, and not till then, will I consent, not to be an Atheist, for that would still be impossi- 4 74 LIFE LESSON'S. ble, but to confess that to be one admitted of some pal- liation. Surely that intelligence that presumes to have reached such a point as Atheism, has overshot its object, and only embarrassed itself by its presumption. It has assumed so much that we can yield it nothing. It has claimed such wisdom that with the warrant of God's word, we can call it nothing but fool. And what has it accom- plished, what has it aimed to accomplish, but to achieve death and demonstrate despair, and assure annihilation ? Sadly, sadly do we contemplate such triumphs if they were real, rejoiced rather to think and sing : " Thou art O God, the life and light Of all this wondrous world we see ; Its glow by day, its smile by night, Are but reflections caught from thee ; "Where'er we turn, thy glories shine, And all things fair and bright are thine." The absurdity of Atheism has but one parallel and that is the disastrous nature of the conclusions at which it seeks to arrive. But Atheism is not the product of intellect ; it does not, unless in some very rare cases, originate in the brain. The fool has said in his heart " there is no God. 77 He has gone down, down into the deepest, darkest cham- bers of imagery within, that there without discovering a blush, and hidden from the scrutiny of reason, he might assert, there is no such thing as light, " for God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. 77 It was in that den, where all manner of evil thoughts are born, thoughts that are robbers, and extortioners, and adulterers, and murderers, long before the guilty deed is done, it was ATHEISTIC EVASION OF DUTY. 75 there that Atheism drew its first breath. It was born of rebellion and of crime. The dreadful wish was father to the thought. Man hated God before he denied Him. He broke His law, before he attempted to dethrone Him. There must be a strong impulse to Atheism from within, before reason can be driven to the bold assertion that contemns the evidence without. The heart must be a tyrant before the head can become a slave to lie for its master. Then it puts into the lips of reason, words whose 1 utterance degrades it, sentiments with which reason has no relations but of antipathy. Of rabid scep- tics this has in many instances been the history. By some sin or course of sin they had first committed them- selves to a life with which Atheism alone was consistent, and they were impelled by all the memory of the past, and every foreboding of the future, to patch up some de- vice that could shield their conscience, and cry peace, peace, even though there was no peace. The true remedy for Atheism therefore, as might be supposed, is not evidence or argument addressed to the intellect, but moral truth and duty brought home to the conscience and the heart. The whole Bible has not an argument in it addressed to the reason of man to con- vince him of a God. That point is everywhere assumed. And there is no need of plausible suggestions to show that in this it is right. The man who will swallow the absurdities of Atheism, that will believe that any other intellect than his own is the crude product of chance, that will count the world and human existence things undesigned, must be impelled by a something within him too mighty for reason to mas- ter. The heart is wrong, and, first of all, he must be made to feel and confess it. We say to such a man, 7 6 LIFE LESSONS. look in upon your own being, and see if you have never felt that you were a sinner, if you have never heard a still, small voice speaking within you as experience never speaks, with a more than mortal majesty, reminding you of duty and enforcing it by something more terrible than the fear of human justice. Look and see if upon your whole moral nature there is not stamped a deep sense of accountability that you cannot shake off ; ask that nature, whether it be not true as the most noted of all French revolutionists was at last constrained to declare, that if there were no God, it behooved man to invent one ; ask yourself if the sense of your dependence and accounta- bility does not plainly declare, that your own soul is in an unnatural state, when it does not look up in glad and grateful recognition of a God above, in whom you live and move and have your being ; ask yourself if that life which religion, or the recognition of a God, calls upon you to lead, is not the one most suited to your state, condition and hopes ; ask whether the daily mercies that overflow your path do not call forth an involuntary and spontaneous burst of gratitude, and to whom does that gratitude refer, who is or can be its object but God. Surely that life of man out of which the element of religion is excluded is at war with reason, with conscience, with the peace, and condition and hopes of man. The suffrage of all ages condemns it. There is nothing to defend it but the absurdity of Atheism. Let one thing then remain fixed and solid among the eternal principles by which life is to be guided there is a God. There is a great eternal power above us all, under whose eye we live, whose will is our law, and to whose tribunal we are accountable. Live then under the solemn consciousness of this great and fearful truth, and ATHEISTIC EVASION OF DUTY. 77 in forming your purposes, and cherishing your hopes, let them never clash with it, for whosoever shall fall on this shall be broken, and on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder. It is only the perverse heart that rebels against the authority of God. It is only the guilty heart that wishes Him not to be. But holiness triumphs in the assurance that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. The soul panting for a higher than any earthly good, cries out for God, for the living God. The pure spirit exults to contemplate the perfec- tions of that great Being whose name is a terror to the evil-doer, but to whom the wronged, the sufferer, the peni- tent, humbled prodigal turn, casting themselves with hope and joyful trust on " the Fatherhood of God." X. THE GOOD OF LIFE. " What is good for man." EC. vi. 12. OUPPOSE a man -in the full vigor of his matured O faculties, but without previous knowledge or ex- perience, to be placed in just such a world as this. He cannot at first, at least converse with others, and so he is dependent for all he can discover on himself alone. What are the questions that will press themselves on th attention of such a man, and what are the conclusions he will be forced to adopt ? As he begins his explorations, he finds that this world is fitted up as a dwelling place, and an appropriate dwelling place, for man. It furnishes him food, shelter, and endlessly varied materials for his ingenuity to shape into forms for use and comfort and beauty. In the most secluded valley his prospect is as boundless as the distant stars, and his gaze pierces into the depths of immensity. The light is adapted to the eye, and the eye to the light ; the air to the lungs and the lungs to the air, food to the system and the system to food. Every joint of the body is a mechanism of most wonderful art, and the inexplic- able control of the will over the muscles is a perpetual miracle of goodness. The riches of the earth, in soil, mine, forest, vegetable and animal life, are inexhaustible, and all these are placed under the control of man. The broad domain is all his own. " What does all this mean/ 7 he asks. " I had no agency in placing myself here. I did not originate my (78) THE GOOD OF LIFE. 79 own being. And yet here I am in a world wondrously constructed, while I myself am a greater wonder still." Would not the conviction flash upon him inevitably " I am placed here for some purpose, and my first business is to know what that purpose is ? I can think and feel and reason ; I am not like the brute grazing yonder, that is only intent on its food. I am not like the acorn fall- ing unconscious to the earth, to root and germinate where it falls. The reason within me demands a prob- lem to grapple with, but where is one to be found like this why am I here, and what is the object of my creation ? Till this is solved, every other is impertinent. A traveller needs to know his goal before he sets out on his journey. I cannot take a step till I know my real mission." And now without any revelation as yet that speaks to him directly he seeks to know what that mission is. First of all he sees that it must be an important one that the world itself is evidently made for man. Every- thing is subservient to his comfort and advantage. He is the lord, the world is his domain. He is the flower of the stalk the apex of the pyramid. He is the central orb around which all the others revolve. Everything finds its highest use and value in serving him. Take him away, and the world is a kind of headless trunk. What is his inference? Is it not that the great Maker creates and works and governs with reference to man, that the end for which all these wonderful things exist, is to be sought where it centers in the man ? " Here, then," he says, " am I fearfully and wonder- fully made, and everything I see around me seems to say, we exist for you. The sun says, I shine for you. The flower says, I bloom for you. And the harvest says, I 80 LIFE LESSONS. wave for you, and the birds say, we sing for you. The world is the garden, but I am the vine, and by what I am, or what I can do or produce, creative wisdom is to be justified. " And what can I do or become ? I can live like the brute and die like the brute, but then all my superior faculties would be superfluous. I can live to eat and drink, and jest and sport years and opportunities away in wanton pleasure. But I feel that this would be making myself a barren fig-tree, useless alike to God and man. Better that I had never breathed. I can carve statues and pile up palaces, and build swift ships, but ere long the statues will crumble, and the palaces will fall, and the swift ships go to the bottom of the sea. I must do some other work than this. I must sculpture something beside marble. I must quarry something beside granite. I must build with something better than elm or oak or pine." And would not such a man then be driven to ask as Plato did what is the good ? What is the best thing ? What above all else is the richest jewel of this great mine of human enterprise? It is not beauty. That fades. It is not strength. That decays. It is not learning. Over-crowded memory lets it spill and waste. It is not honor or fame. A breath makes these, and at a breath they fade. It is not show or splendor. The pageant vanishes like a vapor, and moths consume the wardrobe. It is not even disciplined intellect. That may be the tool of ambition. It may be used to poison the fountains of human thought. The man that has it may curse it at last, if an evil heart makes it but an instrument of mischief, or if it gives him to see only too clearly what he is. THE GOOD OF LIFE. g t All these things are the hunk, but what is the grain ? Is there none? That cannot be. Winnow away the chaff and stubble, and what is left ? Let a man's body crumble, let his fortune be scattered, let the works he built go to decay has all then perished? Possibly. And yet if that man was true to conscience and to charity, every one feels that he was richer than his for- tune, and greater than all his works that he was the building and they the scaffolding that he was himself the treasure, and they the box that guarded it. The integrity that millions could not bribe, we all feel to be worth more than these millions. A Luther at the Diet of Worms, planting himself on the authority of Scripture alone, and declaring, " here I take my stand ; I cannot do otherwise ; God help me" a Bradford or a Winthrop sacrificing ease and comfort, and the luxuries of English homes for the perils of the wilderness with the privilege to worship God a Hampden standing up manfully to contest the tax of a few shillings, but which invaded the freedom of the English constitution a John Howard or Robert Raikes, or Oberlin or Felix Neff, studying out new methods of Christian charity and putting them into execution who does not feel that such men as these show us in what the worth of human existence con- sists, and how, just as rain and sunshine and damp soil and decaying matter are by Nature's chemistry changed into the majestic tree that spreads out its broad branches in bloom and strength and beauty, so by the true chemistry of virtuous aims, these hours of service, this soil of probation, and this wealth of transient privi- lege are transformed or absorbed, and so incorporated into that human career which by self denial and charity and holy purposes, is made a tree of life, and under the 4* g 2 LIFE LESSONS. shadow of which earth's weary pilgrims, invoking bless- ing on it, lie down to rest ? The world, too, whatever other ends it may be de- signed for and in everything from the insect to the , eagle, from the sand grain to the mountain, it glorifies the great Maker is specially designed to educate the soul. You go into a school-room, and though built of logs, yet by all its arrangements, you recognize its de- sign. There are benches, desks, books and diagrams, and charts, perhaps, on the walls. Is not the globe a broader school-room, with " tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, etc." ? Is it not cov- ered over with diagrams and parables and emblems? Is there a thing that blooms or fades that does not preach its silent sermon to the listening ear ? Do not the deep-set rocks and the giant mountains become to us speaking types of the deep-set foundations of justice, and the towering greatness of incorruptible virtue ? What is history, as generations make it and write it, but just the register of human attainment the scholarship of those who have learned to teach others and become eminent themselves, or who have excelled in mischief ? What do these centuries turn out but the graduates of probation and what is experience working out every day, even where human science is unknown, but new measures of moral attainment ? A man may succeed or fail in business, he may be distinguished or obscure, but one thing is always true of him, he is receiving a moral education. He is under discipline. He is studying the fruits of good and evil deeds. His eye is directed in- evitably at the career and fate of others, and he is forced to consider what will be the consequence of his own action. Thus is he forced to deliberate, to weigh mo- THE GOOD OF LIFE. 83 lives, to calculate results. This is true of all, and almost the only thing that is. How it proclaims the nature and scope of our existence here ! Just as the scholar would attain the ends of scholarship, just as he feels that for these he seeks the halls of science and learning, and that sportive indolence and dissipation are foreign to his pur- pose, and that rich dress and sumptuous feasts cannot promote it so we, pupils under God's tuition, are edu- cating for moral ends, are under discipline to learn lessons of truth and duty, to perfect ourselves in virtue, to become such in life and character as to justify the outlay for the advantages we enjoy, and the price of divine tuition. And what a new force and pertinency is given to this thouglit when we consider how short our stay here on earth is? A few years at school or college seem to those who look back on them from the distance as a type of life itself. We stay here only to be educated only to complete our moral lessons, only just long enough to make it plain that we have improved our privileges, or that we never would if they were prolonged a thousand years. And then we go away. We go as the scholar does, carrying away nothing but just his education itself. He sells his furniture, quits his room, parts, perhaps, with his books, breaks off from all his old associations, bids farewell to all his intimate companions, and goes forth without any visible remnant of all his toil and application, to what is as it were a new world. The result of all his efforts is to be found in himself alone, in his knowledge, his disciplined powers, his education in nothing you can weigh or handle, or offer for sale in the market. And who can fail to see the parallel of our life ? Is 84 LIFE LESSONS. it not stupid not to see the difference between a well- stored study and a well-stored mind? And is it not stupid not to see that our privileges on earth are valueless except as they educate the soul and discipline ' it for moral service, and fit it, as it bids farewell to earthly associations, to enter upon others more enduring, fitted already for the world for which it was preparing here. Now suppose a man reasoning from the facts of his own experience, to come to such a conclusion as this, and then to fall as it were accidentally upon the word of God, even without knowing it as yet to be divine what, as he peruses it, will be the impression it will make ? Will it not rivet his conclusions, yet infinitely enlarge his views ? Will it not put beyond all doubt the question as to life and its meaning? Will it not force him to say " I am here to prepare for a higher | life ? I am here a probationer for eternity. The great I end for which the world has been made and man placed on it, is to be attained by the shaping and education of the soul, and responsible for this, I am bound to make it my first and greatest care." Nay, will he not feel that the only real good of life must be sought in the attainment of the end for which it . was bestowed ? Must he not count everything else sub-y ordinate to this ? Must he not feel that it becomes him above all to apply himself to understand in what a proper education for eternity consists, and what is the . method by which it is to be secured ? XL IGNORANCE OF THE GOOD OF LIFE. " Who knoweth what is good for man in this life ?" EC. vi. 12. IF a little child should assume to set aside all control and educate and govern itself if it should be allowed to indulge without restraint its likes and dislikes it would shortly become a little willful tyrant, a specimen of ripe, full-grown depravity. His will would not only master his own judgment and conscience, but would spurn alike the counsel and the authority of others. He would present an embodied definition of the folly and the wick- edness of human nature left to itself. The result is due to two causes, though they co-operate as one, like the weight and the speed of stroke in the momentum of a murderer's club one is the child's abso- lute ignorance of what is best for itself, and the other is his indisposition to the good even when he knows it that is, his perverting persuasion that what he wishes is best, and that what he dislikes is evil. But men are only children of a large growth, and in them both these causes are also more or less at work. In our ignorance of what is best for us, we are too often like children, and in our attempt to make that our good, by the force of will, which can only tend to mischief, we act the part of children whose erring fancies tempt us to smile, or whose more deliberate errors we sternly correct. (85) 86 LIFE LESSONS. A child wants certain toys. He gets them ; per- haps pays an exorbitant price for them. How soon they lose all their charms, and are cast by as rubbish. Who does not read in that a parable of more advanced years, men seeking certain objects to insure their happiness, but soon satiated, and casting them aside as unsatisfactory. The child sees a beautiful butterfly and chases it. Only to secure it will fill his eager desire* He follows it perhaps in vain, or if he grasps it, he crushes the frail treasure which is cruelly injured. What is this but the chase of men for the objects of ambition. A little child has two large apples given it. Benjamin Franklin, to teach a lesson, says, give it another. In trying to grasp the third, it loses both. What is this but human avarice grasping more than it can hold, not satisfied with enough, and losing what it has to gain more ? Again, the child longs for some toy which it is not fit to manage, a knife or a pistol, or some such dangerous thing. It gets it only to maim itself and bitterly regret that its wishes were ever gratified, or that its parents ever indulged its wild humor. Still again, it longs for something that shall minister to its vanity, some ornament or some article of rich clothing. It moves abroad in its rich array, feeding on the admiration it excites, and its thoughts are set on the light trivialities of dress, or the praise or notice which these follies may secure. Who can tell the mischief that is thus done ? Who can tell how long that moral poison of vanity and self-conceit, that is thus introduced, will rankle in the soul ? But how much more dignified or becoming are the thoughts of thousands who are eager for display, or who seek the praise and honor of men ! IGNORANCE OF THE GOOD OF LIFE. 87 Many a one that attains these is intoxicated by them, and only acts the part of a gaudy human peacock, to the dis- gust of thoughtful and the pity of anxious observers. How often does one say to himself, if I could only at- tain such a position I should be satisfied and happy. He struggles for it. He sacrifices his peace to gain it. Perhaps he condescends to mean or dishonorable acts ; he risks and perhaps loses his reputation for fairness and honorable dealing to attain it. And after it is gained, it only draws him into the very path of the tempter. It throws him into the society of the unprincipled or in- temperate or profane to which he feels forced to conform. Henceforth his path is downward, and the career to ruin dates from the very success which he coveted. If his aims had been defeated, he might have died an honest man. It is the story of the gambler's first success over again. He is lured to his ruin. He sees what he calls good, and eager to grasp it plunges over a precipice. Many a man might have lived safe and useful in some humble sphere where Providence had cast his lot. He might have been happy there. But restless and dissatis- fied he flies from one object to another. He climbs some strange height to be dizzied there. He plunges into some mine of intrigue only to be smothered in its stifling damps. He hurries from one enterprise to another only to fail in all, and pile wreck on wreck. But suppose a man by shrewdness and energy to suc- ceed in all he undertakes suppose him to become all that his worldly ambition could covet. Is that best for him ? Has he the true good ? His short years know scarcely a sorrow or disappointment. He is like Job in his first prosperous estate. Thousands perhaps regard gg LIFE LE880NS. him with envy. They see not the secret cares that are wrinkling his brow. They read not the inward wretch- edness that can wring so little happiness out of such large possessions and such marked triumphs. But what does it all amount to when a few years are flown when the hand trembles and the steps totter. Perhaps this present good kept a future and eternal good out "of sight. Perhaps the man was so well satisfied with what he had, that he sought no more. He had houses, but no conscious title to a house not made with hands. He had wealth, and that deluded him into neglect of the treasure laid up in heaven. He had the respect of men, and that allowed him to think lightly of the honor that cometli from God only. Too late he wakes up to the fact that he is poor in all that constitutes the riches of the soul, unprosperous in all that constitutes true success. His prospect is dark as the grave that no promise illumi- nates. He has no hope. He has no trust or peace in God. He feels, if there is a judgment to come, he is all unprepared for it. If there is a future retribution, lie can only fear. How, perhaps, he envies the poor invalid that is dependent on charity for bread or a grain of comfort! How he exclaims " that I had never known such success as I have met with, such rewards as I have gained. In a harder lot I had been a better man. Un- der the smart of affliction, my pride had been humbled and I had been taught to rely on God." How this reminds us of the lament which Milton puts in the mouth of the great fallen arch-angel : "O had his powerful destiny ordained Me some inferior angel, I had stood Then happy; no unbounded hope had raised Ambition." IGNORANCE OF THE GOOD Off LIFE. 89 No man so far as worldly attainments or possessions are concerned can tell what is best for him. The tilings he covets most may do him the greatest harm. They may be the very ones which, if he could see the end from the beginning, he would pray to be delivered from. Sometimes his prize turns out to be an infernal machine. His arts of gain prove the rust that eats his soul as it were fire. The society which he successfully aspires to secure, is but an honorable escort to dissipation and perdition. His very genius, securing him the ap- plause of others, is only the rocket's blaze lighting him up to heights from which pitying eyes shall mark his fall. In the end it may even be, and sometimes is the case, that he would give all his wealth and honors just to be put back where he might begin anew a different life. Like Richard Cour de Lion at his father's bier, he feels all the sad regret compressed in those stinging, re- morseful words : "Alas, my guilty pride and ire! Were but this deed undone, I would give England's crown, ray sire, To hear thee bless thy son." If one thinks of the life to come, to how brief a space does this vain life, transient and fleeting as a vapor, shrink ! How unimportant appear its outward circum- stances ! What matters it to the sojourner for the night whether the roof that shelters him is canvas or a dome of gold ? What matters it to him that no sumptuous feast frowns contempt on his meaner fare ? These years fly by like the wastes of the traveller's journey, and as each day vanishes, how little concern does its show or parade excite ? For a little while to be cheered or hissed 90 LIFE LESSONS. for a little while to be in want or to abound, for a little while to stand on the pinnacle or in the valley what does this amount to ? And who knows which is best in the end ? To be where the lightning strikes to have that as an ornament which grows into a cross, heavy to be borne to be one of a circle which are linked together to drag one another downward who might not pray, from all this, " Good Lord deliver us ?" The steep path which energy may climb may be edged with the precipice. The sumptuous fare that appetite craves may confirm a glutton. The sunshine of prosperity may wilt and wither the fresh, green hopes that would have thriven in the shade. The wisdom of man is to confess that so far as worldly circumstances are concerned, he does not know what is best for him. A nation does not know. Judah in cap- tivity was learning lessons that restored her to the favor of her offended God. The civil war of England was the stern discipline that bore fruit a generation later in the Revolution Settlement and Act of Toleration. We are passing now through the Red Sea and Desert of our history. Who can tell whether hereafter even short- sighted men shall not pronounce it the most important and profitable period of our career, teaching us lessons that would have been too faint-lined unless written in blood ! So no man can say that his hardest trials are not the most profitable for him. No man can fix his heart on any worldly good whatever, whether of property or sta- tion or knowledge or power, and say, That will bless me ; that will make me ha,ppy. There is nothing left for us but to bow our ignorance in the dust before God's infinite wisdom, and to say like the child conscious of his weak- IGNORANCE OF THE GOOD OF LIFE. 91 ness, Lead me as thou wilt, I know not what to ask. Not my will, but thine. Yet is there no good that is such beyond all question- ing or doubt ? Is there not something attainable by man in this his brief, vain life, which by the concession of all is of vast importance, and of unutterable value some- ; thing which is not granted merely to a favored few, the exclusive favorites of fortune, but which the poor and rich, the learned and ignorant alike may be warranted to seek? Is there not something which is to all outward blessings like the wheat to the chaff, like the gold to the dross I Is there not something without which a Croesus is but an object of pity, and with which a Lazarus might be the envy of kings ? I had not completed writing the foregoing paragraph when I received a letter written by one who for mouths had been steadily looking forward to his decease, and who while yet he was able was dispensing charitably and wisely the wealth with which God had blessed him, in which he says " My flesh and strength are much wasted, and I am very feeble. I can only walk or tottle to my chair. . . . But I feel calm and resigned. . . . My Saviour appears beautiful and glorious to me. The Gos- pel and the promises thereof never looked better or brighter. There is full provision for all our wants." The questions of that paragraph were thus answered ere they were asked by this testimony from the bed of a dying saint. It was testimony from a truthful pen a pen tremulous in the feeble grasp that held it, but clear and unhesitating in its avowals. "Was there room longer to ask whether in this brief, vain life of man there is not something attainable which is of vast importance and infinite value ? Was there room to question the supe- yz LIFE LESSONS. riority to all things else of a living faith in the Son of God ? The testimony only added another drop to the full overflowing stream of evidence. It was but one more voice confirmatory of the chorus of the " great cloud of witnesses." We know, that ignorant as we are of what is best for us as to our outward lot, there is a good, the possession of which may well make the soul forget all earthly want. Most assuredly there is. There is a good without alloy which does not betray with a kiss, which does not offer a cup of blessing drugged with woe. It is religion pure and undefiled that religion which bears the fruits of hope, faith, love and joy. Its presence makes the heaven of the soul even in this vale of tears. It gives us God for our present and everlasting portion. It sanc- tifies sorrow, and roofs the wanderer's unsheltered head with the guardianship of Jehovah. It is a possession which no man ever regrets. It leaves no sting in the memory, no gnawing worm in the conscience. And it is offered to all. It is offered to you. It is urged upon your acceptance. You are besought by all that is precious in hope or fearful in judgment to make it yours. The price that purchased it was the blood of God's own Son. Are you eager for worldly good for ease or comfort? Let them go, till this is secured. They are but straws, while this is the everlasting crown, XII. NEED OF A EEVELATION. (t A light shining in a dark place." 2 PETER i. 19. EVEN a heathen, with the ripe fruits of Christian ex- perience before him, may feel and acknowledge that the true good of man is not of a material but a spiritual nature. He may be led freely to confess that the path of holiness is the path of blessedness. A voice within his own soul may respond its amen to this conviction. But without the results of a Christian life before him, would he ever have discovered the true good of man, or have been won by the attractions of holiness ? A man may accept unhesitatingly the results of astro- nomical research, and he may hold the convictions which the revelations of others have wrought in him, with un- shaken tenacity. He may see and feel their truth, while yet by his own unaided efforts he never could have at- tained to an apprehension of them. It is not so with the conclusions of our moral and spiritual astronomy ? Rea- son may be utterly inadequate to discern truths which when once disclosed, seem to carry their own evidence with them, and which the conscience of the little child accepts unquestioningly as the simplest spiritual axioms. Yet let us by no means depreciate that elementary knowl- edge of God that A, B, C, of theology or those mono- syllables which reason spells out on the pages of creation. All this is valuable. As reason's alphabet, it is inestiina- (93) 94 LIFE LESSONS. bly precious, and yet it is only an introduction to our ignorance. It gives hints and suggestions of problems, buried deep beyond the reach of reason's plummet. It catches a view of the great and ominous shadows, cast around our path., from the realities of the invisible world, and only spurs our curiosity and our interest too to know more about them than reason teaches. For beings that are by their very nature and constitution, accounta- ble, we are possessed even by reason's light, of a fearful mass of knowledge enough to make us tremble at what we are and are to be enough to render our guilt inex- cusable and our condemnation just but not enough to assure us of hope, or clearly define the objects of our faith. Our condition in the absence of revelation is that of a man groping in the dark, feeling his way, and by the slow and tedious process of touch, learning what the light might teach him in the twinkling of an eye. The Gospel is therefore preeminently "a light shining in a dark place. 7 ' The feebleness with which reason apprehends if at all some of the most important subjects of human thought and destiny, calls for a revelation that shall make them plain. Here in this world, with Nature's lamp only to guide, we are like the traveller groping his way at mid- night with a lantern in his hand, now climbing the almost precipitous height, now gliding along the edge of chasms, or sinking in the bog and marsh, till his limbs are weary and his patience worn out, and his success more than doubtful. We feel that we want the broad light of the noonday sun, flung in a flood of splendor over hill and valley, lofty crag and deep ravine, till the whole landscape stands out distinct to the eye, and the path we are to take is clearly and fully before us. It is true NEED OF A REVELATION. 95 there are some eyes that can see better in the dark than others ; there are some minds that might have read by reason's aid far more than others ; spelling out important truths inscribed in hieroglyphics on the ruins of this great temple of our human nature. But such minds are few, and even they see very indistinctly, and when pride does not forbid it, speak like Socrates of old with the full con- fession of their ignorance and doubt. Let one grope for a while under the guidance of the ancient philosophers, and he will begin to learn the value of a solid basis of knowledge and a definite apprehension of the state, object^ and prospects of human existence. There are questions Innumerable that throng about our path, asking for a solution, and the oracles of reason are well nigh dumb, or if they speak, they are but Delphic shrines. Even the probabilities, which we settle down upon, are shaken by counter-probabilities, or if undisputed, ask for a clearer confirmation. Reason tells me there is a God, but how worthless is that great fact, till I know what he is, and learn his disposition toward me ! By Nature's light I can discover my own dependence and subjection to law, but I ask, in vain, for the clear and definite idea of that moral government which is over me, and there is even room to question how far I shall be held responsible. From the works and providence of God I discern a gene- ral expression of his friendliness to virtue and reproba- tion of vice, but how far this is to take effect hereafter I cannot tell. Reason teaches me that I am a fallen being a transgressor of the law, and throws out many hints of how terrible a thing it is for any one to place himself in the way where the wheels of God's legislation shall roll over him, but she is silent when I ask, what is the penalty, how enduring, and in what shape will it come ? 96 LIFE LESSONS. No man needs a labored instruction in regard to the sin and misery of the world. The apostacy of man is sculp- tured deep on the heart and the life of the race. But there is a problem as to how this guilt and woe shall be removed and man stand justified before his Maker, which transcends all the powers of mortal discernment. My own constitution, speaking through its aspirations and instincts, tells me that I was made for happiness, but nature shows me nothing worthy to feed this inward hun- ger she opens no path to that blessedness for which I feel that I was made. Reason teaches me how guilt is incurred, and that condemnation may not improbably fall upon me, but says nothing of any full assurance of par- don and deliverance from the curse. No man needs to teach me that the world is full of want and anguish, mis- fortune, pain and disappointment, but I do ask for a solu- tion that shall reconcile all this with the character I love to ascribe to my Maker -and reason fails in the attempt to furnish it. Surmise and probability are not enough. Exposed every moment as we are to accident and death, we want a ground for the assurance that our present afflictions are light light because they shall work out for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. The light of nature suggests, and to some minds doubt- less, enforces the conviction of a future judgment, but the great features of this foreshadowed fact are only to be found on the pages of Revelation. We may gather up also many hints in regard to a future state from the aid of reason but still we want something to scatter the dimness of doubt, and bring life and immortality to light. We may puzzle ourselves not always vainly, but most un- satisfactorily, over the strange methods of that Provi- dence which distributes the allotments of life in seemingly NEED OF A REVELATION. 97 unequal measure but we feel that we want a revelation to clear up all, and make our faith intelligent and firm. The picture of a thoughtful man in the mazes of igno- rance, seeking to understand himself and God, but seek- ing in vain for the want of light, is exceedingly affecting. But is that of the thoughtless multitude less so, blindly acquiescent in their ignorance, and dropping into their graves insensible as the brutes, and making death, the catastrophe and issue of a dream? It is not in the nature of the human mind lightly to be satisfied on themes of such importance as those which should naturally form the burden of a Revelation, and which so intimately con- cern all that we have to hope or fear forever. We want the dim and shadowy outline to become distinct. We want the fleeting shapes and coloring that pass before us in the prospect, arrested, and fixed down visible and definite, giving substance to the transient imagery, that sweeps before the field of our reflection. For a mind constitutionally timid and distrustful, the light of Nature furnishes but a feeble solace. It is more inclined to look on the dark than on the light side, and dwell on the extent of our ignorance rather than the reach of our knowledge. What must be the reflections of such a mind scarcely venturing to rest on the bare probabilities with which it is forced to be satisfied? Yet with them alone, and holding them too by an uncertain tenure, it looks around it in the absence of revelation, upon the great mystery of life and probation. Every question it asks, every struggle after a firm foot- ing which it puts forth, only sinks it deeper in the mire. It dares not trust even its clearest and boldest reasonings. Perhaps it has once relied upon a fallacy, and past expe- 5 98 LIFE LESSONS. rience of its error confirms its tendency to doubt. It looks about it like a solitary traveller who has lost his way in the wilderness, and vainly searches after a fami- liar object, some track or tree, or distant hill-top that shall furnish a clew to extricate him from error. The questions are innumerable that throng upon the mind. It finds itself on this broad ocean of being, without chart or compass, or experience, with the broad bright heavens indeed above, but with none to translate their mysteries, with none to point to Bethlehem's guiding star. The facts that are plain only make the mystery of man's state still more wonderful and trying. He lives, to die. He looks forward, to fear. He reasons, to tremble. He hopes, to apprehend disappointment. " What am I," he asks, " what is the object of my being, what my state, what my relations to a surrounding universe, what my prospects for the present or the future ? My present home is a world of graves where the survivors dance over the dust of the departed, and where death and life meet in a strangely near relationship. I too am mortal, and when my body crumbles to the dust where will my spirit go ? Will that too be dissolved or absorbed, sent forth an everlasting and homeless wanderer, or impris- oned in chains of darkness ? If it survives, on what sort of a field will it enter, with what associates will it min- gle, or what will be the nature of its employment ; will it be happy or wretched, will it live over again such a life as it lived on earth, or a far higher and nobler one ? or possibly one far subordinate and degraded ? Shall it ascend or descend, rise to the angel or sink to the clod ? In what will the nature and object of it consist, will it be spiritual, refined, and holy, or polluted, sensual, and brutish ? Will it carry with it there the taint of earth, NEED OF A REVELATION. 99 and be followed by its works, and words, and thoughts, as persecuting avengers? What is the connection be- tween this life and that to come, and what shape shall be given to this, so that there shall be no room for after and vain regret ? Where can a sufficient guide be found in our error, a sufficient remedy in our disease, a support in the hour when heart and flesh shall fail ?" To these interrogations and a thousand others, reason makes no full, no clear reply. She surmises ; sums up probabilities ; forecasts results ; but pronounces nothing definite and certain, ventures no direct assertion, but leaves us still in the attitude of expectation and suspense. We know enough to excite our fears, to waken our curi- osity, to urge us to investigation, to excite our apprehen- sions, but just there Nature closes her volume, and leaves us in the dark. Something more is necessary now, than would have been if the moral order of the world had never been disturbed. The clearness of our own reason and judgment has been somewhat blinded in the shock. We have been disqualified for application to the problem by the same cause that has, if not created it, involved it in deeper difficulty. We cannot occupy with all the powers of the largest reason, the position which a sinless being might, nor are we prepared by nature's light to say what course the infinite wisdom of God will adopt, or what his measures will be in regard to us in this unprecedented state of things to which the world has been brought by sin. And as we might beforehand suppose the light of nat- ural reason insufficient, experience has proved it to be so. " The world by wisdom knew not God." Every page of the history of the race demonstrates our need of a revelation. Its enlightening, its purifying, its restraining influences were all called for. Read the popular mythol- loo LIFE LESSONS. ogies, we can hardly call them religious systems, of tbe Old World, and see what vast magazines they were, of wayward fancy and distorted truth, of cruel supersti- tion and grossest error, yet swaying the minds of men by , their strange and terrible spell. They were evidently the growth of darkness, of ignorant fear, or, possibly, sometimes of ingenious and tyrannic fraud. They were limited to no one age or nation. They disgraced the fame of Greece and the civilization and learning of Rome, as well as the pride of Egypt and the fame of the warrior race of Odin. In here and there an instance, no doubt, their authority was repudiated, but the exceptions were rare. Take up the writings of the wisest men of antiquity, and see how they stumbled on some of those elementary principles of religious knowledge which pass unquestioned even by the modern sceptic. These truths on which they doubted are some of them such that the simple statement of them carries with it well nigh the power of demonstration. And yet if no revelation came, no clear and plain instruction of God and His will, how long would these errors maintain their hold ? We know that of old they yielded only as Christianity progressed, and they yield to-day as they did then, not to the ridicule of a Lucian, or the contempt of philosophers, but to the light of the Gospel. The most odious and horrid vices disgraced the noonday of Roman and Grecian achieve- ment, and were intimately associated oftentimes with tbe celebration of their mysteries and religious rites. By* their most distinguished men, they were sometimes shamelessly avowed, and formed a fitting counterpart to a mythology which seemed the creature of a polluted fancy revelling in its own shame. If the light of reason could have sufficed, these things should have been as NEED OF A REVELATION. 101 transient before it as the mists of the morning. They should not have waited for the sun of Christianity to rise and dispel them. But they maintained their ground in spite of art, learning and culture, till this appeared. Nor need we be surprised at it. Look at the most eminent men of old and see whether their reason could have been more than a rushlight amid the darkness around them. "Epictetus bids you temporize and worship the gods after the fashion of your country ; Pythagoras forbids you to pray to God, because you know not what is con- venient. Plutarch commends Cato of Utica for killing himself amidst philosophic thoughts, with resolution and deliberation, after reading Plato on the immortality of the soul. Cicero pleaded for self-murder, in which he was seconded by Brutus, Cassius, and others who prac- ticed it. Customary swearing is commended sometimes by precept and often by example of their best moralists." Some maintained that right and wrong were mere con- ventionalities, just as the Lacedemonians legislated in- genious theft into repute. Surely, with all the wisdom of antiquity, the knowledge of God was not there, and where is the man to-day that can point to a tribe or nation that renounced idolatry till it came in contact with at least the reflected light of revelation. Then look at the sanctions and restraints of human law, and how weak they are as well as moral considera- tions generally, till they are enforced by the clearer declarations of revealed truth, quickening the public as well as private conscience to renewed sensibility, and rebuking all manner of crime by the solemn and fearful expectation of a just award, of sanctions that are drawn from beyond the grave. oar 102 LIVE LESSONS. Socially, intellectually and morally, man needs a reve- lation. Nature's light is insufficient. The world has proved it so. If it bad not, our own feelings would out- run the necessity of argument. We want light, light to shine in a dark place, light for our souls. And what is it that makes our want of a revelation so urgent ? The reasons may be found in God's character and man's condition. What reason teaches us of God forbids us to imagine that we are placed here except with a wise design. We see a plan apparent in all his works, and man, too, ex- cept he be a discord in the great harmony, has an end to subserve. Unlike the physical and brute creation he is to be intelligently active in attaining it, and instruction of some kind is highly necessary to this end. He must know God's design in order to be able to enter into it and cooperate with it, and the perfection of this design itself seems to imply that he should possess this know- ledge to such an extent as to render neglect inex- cusable. Then man's condition, also, is such as seems to call for the compassion of such a thing as reason is willing to conceive God to be. There are times when ignorance is woe, and doubt anguish, and when the mind hungering for knowledge is as much an object of pity, as the poor victim of disease, or the starving wretch pining for bread. And what other than this is the state of man when in the absence of revelation he becomes conscious of his want ? Place him where he is often found, in circumstances of bitter trial, where one by one each earthly hope fails him till they all give way, and the forlornness of his lot sinks deep into his soul, and with no light or hope from heaven what can he do ? He knows of nothing yet in reserve to NEED OF A REVELATION. 103 sustain him. The future is all blackness unpierced by a single cheering ray. No beam of hope traverses the . to nib or smiles upon him from beyond the grave. He is shut up "to a present robbed of consolation, or given over to a future bounded by despair. What is there now on earth to cheer or aid this struggling soul ? The stoicism of reason is a poor physician. It nauseates the mysteries of science. All the treasures of learning cannot charm away its anguish. It needs a divine consoler, it asks a guide who will show the way from earth to heaven. It is man's sensibility to his want and woe that urges the demand, a demand which human wisdom has proved it- self unable to supply. We feel, after all, that the sui- cide's argument cannot satisfy us, and it poorly reconciles us to our lot, if in the refuge of the grave we are to find nothing but its oblivion. What again must be the feelings of the sensitive mind, clinging with a lingering fondness to this its conscious being, yet girt about by the gloomy doubts that invest the hour of its departure from these scenes ? Have you read the story of the dying Hindoo questioning his jBrahmin teacher what would become of his soul after death? The doctrine of its transmigration from one body to another, now tenanting a beast, and now a rep- tile, was but a poor consolation. No wonder he asks, "what then will become of it," and with every new change continues still to ask, " what then ?" It is very pos- sible for persons even in a Christian land so to shut out the light that shines around them that their death too is heathenized, and like the dying Rabelais they feel if they do not exclaim, " I go to seek a great Perhaps" With- out a faith whose eye is enlightened by revelation, it must be so. How sad the farewell song of its departure : 104 LIFE LESSONS. " Over the dark, dark sea I must go, for the hour has come. But where shall my wandering spirit rest In its final home ? " My life is a dim Perhaps. From the rock of faith I'm driven, No shining light in my clouded breast, No star in heaven. " What if this vital force Shall be spent when this last breath flies, And thought and feeling vanish in night, As the lightning dies ! 44 Or what if the conscious soul Should be damned, as was taught of old. To live in body of bird or beast, Years manifold ! 41 Into the gloom I go, With perhaps alone before, The great sea rolling all around Without a shore. 44 Shall I rise to the Christian world, With the pure and the good to dwell, To live forever in joy and love ? I cannot tell. 44 Shall I be hurled in wrath To the penal flames below ; For endless years to suffer and sin ? It may be so. 44 Farewell my eyes now close On the light of the certain day ; And into the dark of death, my soul Plunges away." NEED OF A REVELATION. 105 Who does not feel all the sympathies of his soul drawn forth toward the tried and struggling spirit, arguing with doubt, but arguing in vain. What want can be more trying than the want of that revelation which can bring life and immortality to light, and which solving the puzzle of our being here, points us to the realms of glory, and a home in heaven. With this, and only with -this, can we hope for guidance for our stumbling steps. On our dark path to eternity reason alone is but a rushlight, and genius is but a glowworm's spark. What a question then, with the antecedent probabilities of divine mercy and human need, is this, Have we a light to cheer and guide us ? one that God Himself has kindled, one by the teachings of which the once troubled soul can exclaim : " But darkness and doubt are now flying away ; No longer I roam in conjecture forlorn ; So breaks on the traveller, faint and astray, The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn. See Truth, Love and Mercy, in triumph descending, And Nature, all glowing in Eden's first bloom ; On the cold cheek of Death, smiles and roses are blending, And Beauty Immortal awakes from the tomb." XIII. THE LAW OP NATURE. " The work of the law written in their hearts." ROM. ii. 15. HAS God given a law to men ? That is, has he made known rules of life or action for men to which penalties are annexed ? He has unquestionably enacted what is sometimes called " the law of nature/ 7 that is the law which the nature or constitution which he has given to man, requires or enforces. Such a law results from the very fact of creation. The Creator is necessarily to a certain extent a legislator. By calling a thing into being, he determines what it is, how it shall be constituted, upon what it shall act, and how it shall be acted upon. As created it has its quali- ties, capacities, adaptations, or in other words, its nature, and the conditions or modes in which these are designed to act are the law of the nature of the thing. It is the law of the seed to germinate, of the vine to produce grapes, of the oak to produce acorns. So if you take the human body, it has its laws of health- ful action. The eye is for sight. The lungs are to breathe, the feet are to walk. This is the law of their creation. Their proper and healthful action is dependent on certain conditions, or laws of health, which must be met or complied with, and the penalty of non-compliance (106) THE LAW OF NATURE. 107 is pain, disease, or feebleness. So there are physical laws of sobriety and temperance, the penalty of which is dis- sipation, suffering and infamy. These laws belong to the code of nature, and any man, except the fool, can read them by observation, and the fool reads them at last in his own experience as if they were written in large capitals. So there are laws which govern man's intellectual and moral nature. The mind must be used or it will rust. There is law and penalty. Certain Conditions in the use of the intellect must be observed, or it will be made nar- row, or bigoted, or sophistical. The moral nature has its laws. Integrity is required, or distrust will be pro- duced, conscience will reproach, the calm of the soul will be broken. There must be simplicity of purpose, or one must be double-minded. The will must be held in check, or a man will become its serf and the slave of passion. So each faculty of mind and of the moral nature has its own laws. They are cut into the very constitution of things like the name of a temple sculptured on its portico. Every thing that exists has its peculiar constitution and relations. The nature of the tree or shrub governs its growth and development. The instincts of the brute govern its action. The intelligence and conscience of man govern, or are designed to govern his acts and career. These laws, therefore, are very diverse. Some are simply physical, others are moral. Some secure inevita- bly the desired result ; others simply impose obligation on the creature, impelling him, but not absolutely neces- sitating him to act. But in either case they are alike the laws of the Great Maker. No man can doubt the io8 LIFE LESSONS. fact of his legislation. Intelligent creation is ipso facto legislation. But what is the character of this law of nature as regards men ? It is to man's constitution that we must turn for an answer. This shows the design of his being, and the design of the Creator suggests the end which man is to attain. If you look at any mechanism of man, you find out by study, or the explanation of others, the use for which it was designed. That designed use deter- mines how it is to be employed. A spade can be used as a bludgeon. But plainly this was not the design of its maker. Man can be perverted into a chattel, a glut- ton, a sensualist, a knave, but evidently this was not the design of his Maker. The plain and safe rule of inter- pretation here is, that a thing or being is designed for the highest and most useful purpose for which it could be employed. It would be absurd to suppose one to invent a curious and complicated machine exactly fitted to sow or reap, which should be employed to level furrows by dragging it over them, when a simple bush or roller would do as well. So if a man lives like a brute, it does not follow that he was meant for a brute, or that this is the law of his being. -If he has passions whose excessive indulgence would make him a glutton, a sot, or a tyrant, it does not follow, if it is possible for them to be checked and moderated, and answer a good purpose in a subordi- nate sphere, that they were meant for unlimited indul- gence, but rather the reverse. The design of the maker is to be learned by inquiry of what a thing is susceptible, or what is the highest and most important end which it can evidently subserve. That design, so far forth as it is manifest, is of the nature of law, and failure to attain it is of the nature of penalty. THE LAW OF NATURE. 109 Here then is man made, not like a stone, subject to the simple law of gravitation ; not like a human machine to expedite the processes of industry, of science, or of art ; not like the brute, to be subjected to a superior will and intelligence, guided only by blind instinct, but with an intelligence that allies him to his Maker ; with a sense of right and wrong that enables him to sit in judgment on human action, others, and his own ; with a power of rea- son and judgment that qualifies him to trace causes to results, and determine the consequences of different courses of action ; with sagacity to perceive what is wisest and safest among proposed measures ; with a will that can carry his designs into execution, and renders him accountable for his acts ; with capacities and means to make others happy, or influence them to what is pure and good ; with susceptibilities for virtuous enjoyment infinitely superior to all the pleasure of sense ; with a power of thought to soar into the great realm of the un- seen, and power of feeling to be moved by all that is great, or good, or sublime in moral action ; and with such possi- bilities of intellectual and moral growth and development, that his standing point on earth seems but an eagle's perch for far loftier flights ; and all these wheels, all these complicated mechanisms of his moral being are so adjusted to each other, and to the sphere in which he is to act, that he is stupid, beyond comprehension, who does not respond to the sentiment of the psalmist, " I am fear- fully and wonderfully made ;" or who does not while lie responds, stand awestruck before the majestic design of his Maker, sculptured as it were in legible letters in his own constitution. That design reveals law the highest law of Nature that law that should govern the purposes and aims of 110 LIFE LESSONS. every man. He who degrades himself by low, base, or selfish aims, who uses his intelligence to make himself only a lettered brute ; his sense of right and wrong to con- demn others and not judge himself ; his reason and judg- ment to excuse his evil or plead the cause of vice ; his sagacity to discern how his own selfish lust and passions may be gratified ; or his will to execute purposes that build up his despotic supremacy, on the ruin of others' in- dependence ; or his sensibility to the good and great as a foil to his own baseness of heart, such a man violates the very law of Nature. He has no right to pervert his intellect, his conscience, or his affections. He has the capacities which, rightly used, can approximate him to an angel, and he violates the law of his creation and consti- tution, when he uses them to assimulate him to a despot, or a sot, a brute or a devil. Every step in this direction is a step in transgression. Every leaning to such a result is a leaning against the sharp piercing point of the statute of the Eternal Lawgiver. Now some may object to this law, on the ground that it is not proclaimed. But here we ta,ke issue with them. We say it is proclaimed, even by the light of Nature. You might as well take the statute book of the state, that condemns your crime, with you into the cell or dungeon, and because of the darkness' and gloom which your wick- edness has brought upon you, say that there is no law because you cannot read it. Man's sin has blinded him to the law of Nature, and his guilt has made its republi- cation by revelation necessary. But though republished, and more fully and clearly drawn in the Bible, it does not follow that it has not been proclaimed. Laws in various ages have been variously published, sometimes graven in stone, sometimes by the voice of the herald, sometimes by THE LA W OF NATURE. ! i ^ reports of others, sometimes by obscure handwriting on pillars, sometimes as unwritten, or common law. The law of Nature is the common law of the universe. It is writ- ten at least in the conscience. It is embodied even in the moral judgments we form of one another, and the man who complains that it is not published, and imagines that he has reason for what he says, only argues that his own sin or moral blindness has blurred and blotted the hand- writing till his own copy is almost or quite illegible. We admit that it is sometimes almost illegible. But the fault is not in the proclamation or publication, but the guilty suppression of it. This suppression, extensive, general, and, we may say, universal, has made a fuller and clearer republication important, but that republica- tion could not be claimed. God has graciously made it, but that grace was not our due. And if now by the light of the revised statute, we can better read the old, spelling it out letter by letter, we only infer, first the great evil of the sin that obliterated the old, and then the infinite obligation which is imposed by the giving of the new. XIV. THE REVEALED RULE OP LIFE. " Thy testimonies are wonderful." Ps. cxix. 129. HAVE we in our hands an actual revelation from God? Have we the authentic utterance of His will and character and purpose ? There are several works in the world that lay claim to the character of sacred books, but I presume no one who has the faintest knowledge of their real character would allow consideration, even for a moment, to the claims of any but the Bible. Some flaw as scientific error, imperfect morality, absurd legends stamps all but this as counterfeit. The Bible, and the Bible only, can plausibly challenge attention as a revelation from God. What is it, then ? It will help us to weigh its eviden- ces if we know what it is. We can understand at least what interest, in examining its evidences, its contents excite. The Bible, then, is made up of history, doctrine, morality or laws of duty, devotional utterances, prophecy and the declared purposes of God's providence and grace. It is first of all history. This is the largest element of the whole. Here are sixty-six separate books or treatises, written by nearly forty different authors, arid their dates are spread, as near as we can judge, over the (112) THE REVEALED 1WLK OF LIFE. 113 space of fifteen centuries. The earliest writers had been dead more than a thousand years before the last took up his pen. Each was independent of the others. The styles are distinct, and the volume cannot have been forged by a single hand. Nor can it have been got up by collusion or conspiracy, for the different writers be- longed to diverse ages, and could never have met and consulted together. Yet they have written conjointly the most wonderful history in the world, fully as remarkable for its unity as for its diversity. It gives us the first, the earliest, and the only record that we have of the creation of the globe and its inhabitants. It gives us the sketch of succeeding centuries, and an authentic narrative of the peopling of the world, through a period which all other histories abandon to myths and fable. Nowhere else can we learn anything of the actual origin of the race. Nowhere else can we trace the original divisions and settlement of the human family. Nowhere else during this period can we feel that we tread the solid ground of reality. But on this common trunk of all history, a peculiar history is grafted. It is the history of God's dealings with men, and the successive steps by which He has car- ried forward his providential design for the restoration of a fallen race. Here we have the central line of march of the world's progress, the great highway into which all the lanes and by-roads of history converge. Here is the channel of the river of which other histories are but eddies, or at the best, tributary rivulets. This keeps ever distinctly in view the sublime object of original creation and subsequent redemption. Elsewhere, even from the pens of Gibbon and Macaulay, of Bancroft and Prescott and Motley, we have only fragments chipped off from the 11 4 LIFE LESSONS. obelisk of time. Here we have time's very statue flung out in bold relief on the background of eternity. Other writers give us links, but here by prophecy and history combined, we have the great chain which reaches down from the staple of creation to the final regeneration and completed judgment of the world. Men are learning at last that the cross of Calvary is the pivot of the destiny of the race. Christianity is the motive and moulding power of the world. The real history of time is just the history of the process by which it has been evolved and brought to bear upon individuals and nations. The forays of a Nimrod, the conquests of an Alexander, or the triumphs of a Caesar, are but episodes, incidental chapters, subordinate in importance to Abraham's faith, Moses 7 leadership, Daniel's career, or the labors of Christ and his apostles. The Jewish theocracy was the scaffold- ing to the Gospel temple. The history of their erection gives us the channel current of time, while other writers have busied themselves with the waves or foam. Here then, is the most wonderful and unique history the true history of man the true history of the race the true history of its relation of God. Prom first to last there is one object in view and with this the recov- ery of the world through the mediatorship of the prom- ised Messiah, before us ; every fragment of this volume takes its place in a pre-arranged and divine harmony. The book of Leviticus is no superfluity. The ceremonial law prefigured the facts of our redemption. The book of Ruth is not an episode. It is an important link in the chain by which the genealogical descent of the Mes- siah is traced in accordance with prophecy. The book of Daniel is no digression. It sets up a notable land- mark in our progress from Eden to Calvary. THE REVEALED RULE OF LIFE. 115 Thus, sift it as you will, the Bible history has from first to last a wonderful unity, not formal, not paraded or obtrusive, but real and radical. It is written by nearly two score authors of different ages, and yet but for the varied style, it would seem that a single mind guided the pen. The sublime simplicity of the books of Moses, the rigid annalism of Judges, the ceremonial pre- ciseness of Chronicles, the graphic imagery of the Pro- phets, the simple narrations of the Galilean fishermen, and the earnest, glowing utterances of Paul all blend together in harmony like the colors of the rainbow in simple light, so that one idea, running along beneath all forms of expression and all shades of thought, masters unconsciously annalist and preacher, poet, seer and evan- gelist, insomuch that they elucidate in wonderful corres- pondence the same great theme, conspire unwittingly to unfold the same great plan by which infinite wisdom is carrying forward to its conclusion the purposes of human redemption. Where is there another such history as this so grand in conception, so perfect in outline, so triumphant in con- clusion where each book, though a fragment in itself, fills its own niche in the perfect structure, and all har- monize together like the varied limbs of a living creature, instinct with the same spirit and vitalized by the same energy? Who is not constrained almost to exclaim al- ready, Human pens may have written it, but the Eternal Mind was its author ! But the Bible is not mere history. It presents the doctrines of religion, the facts of theology, the elements of the grandest and most perfect system of religion ever propounded to man one that has no rival, or the shadow of a rival in all human speculation. The most elaborate n6 LIFE LESSONS. systems of Deism, or natural religion, are to the Gospel system only as a worm to a man, only as the wigwam of a savage to a civilized home. This system, historically presented in detached portions, but harmonious to the eye of the devout student who takes it into view in its proper connections, is simple but sublime. A child shall appre- hend it, while an angel cannot comprehend it. " God is a spirit !" what a flood of light does this throw on the nature of God and the worship he requires ! "Our Father which art in heaven !" what lessons are unfolded in a word concerning the character of God and our rela- tions to him ! " By nature the children of wrath I" " The carnal mind enmity against God I" " The heart deceit- ful above all things, and desperately wicked !" What volumes of meaning concerning man's apostasy from God, and its bitter fruits ! "Our hearts condemn us, and God is greater than our hearts and knoweth all things !" What a humiliating exposure of our condition as trans- gressors of the divine law, and expectants of deserved vengeance ! " God so loved the world as to give his only begotten and well-beloved Son I" " While we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly P* Who can fathom the grandeur of this demonstration of divine grace toward us, this wonderful display of infinite compassion for the guilty. " He is able to save to the uttermost all that come to God by him !" How amazing the extent, how glorious the sufficiency of that mediatorship by which Christ becomes our perfect Redeemer! And then a judgment to come, the blessedness of heaven, the retri- butions of the world of woe how they stand forth sub- limely conspicuous on the pages of the Bible, casting into shadow all the high thoughts of the proud, all the splen dor and pomp, all the crowns and dominions of earth . THE REVEALED RULE OF LIFE. 117 How wonderful the volume that thus boldly presumes to draw the curtain of the eternal world, and lets frail, toiling, trifling, dying man walk on in the full blaze of the infinite glories, so that if he will, his pathway to the grave shall be irradiated with the light of immortality, and the night of Probation's day shall be the twilight dawning of heaven ! But the Bible is also a code of law, a system of morals, claiming the divine sanction for its injunctions. And here, simply as a moral text-book, it has in all literature, not a peer or rival. The skeptic has acknowledged its superiority, and with the sagacious wisdom of a Franklin, the polite suggestions of a Chesterfield, the teachings of Socrates and Seneca, codes of law, codes of honor, sen- tences, maxims and proverbs, all at his command, has thrown them aside that he might put into the hands of his children the words of the Author of the Sermon on the Mount. The instincts of his affection were truer than the elaborate pleadings of his perverted reason. As you read this book, you feel all evil rebuked, as if an all- seeing eye were looking right through the soul, till all wicked designs, fraudful deception and selfish schemes are searched out by its beams, and the very chambers of sheltered darkness and sin have all their imagery ex- posed. This book the good love it ; the bad hate it. To the one it is a guide, to the other a detector : so that in spite of themselves, the instincts of sin, strangely unite with the sympathies of holiness to attest its power ; the first trembling at its rebukes, the last strengthened by its sanctions. Of the prophecies of this book, I have not space here to speak at length. But when you read them, and note the austere standard of duty, which the overpowering 118 LIFE LESSORS. glory of the divine character portrayed, the thunders of rebuke that roll forth with each succeeding sentence, the stern denunciations of iniquity that" they utter, the glow- ing and superhuman imagery with which they are often clothed, you feel that either these are expressions of the sublimest impudence of which man could be guilty, or the very messages that have come down to the world from the throne of God. But what shall be said of the devotional spirit and breathing of this volume ? In this respect it is neither surpassed nor equalled by any other. Good men have written good books books that set forth truth and duty eloquently that kindle the soul to flaming zeal, or bow it in deepest self-abhorrence that inspire it with Godly aims, arouse the energies of its consecrated powers as the notes of drum or trumpet stir the soul to harsher deeds of arms. I would depreciate none of them. I would bless God for such messengers of piety and devo- tion as Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress, 77 Baxter's " Saint 7 s Rest' 7 and " Dying Thoughts, 77 Howe 7 s " Blessedness of the Righteous, 77 Rutherford's Letters, Romaine on Faith, Legh Richmond's Tracts, and scores of others, and I would lend them new wings to visit on angel errands the homes of God's sorrowing or toiling ones ; but all of them are only in the presence of the Bible like planets around a central sun. They shine only by a borrowed light, and if I must have but one I say give me that which makes my day rather than that which merely adorns my night ; give me the diadem instead of the single gem. For who can go up with Abraham to Moriah, or with Moses to Sinai and Pisgah, or hear David sing in memory of his own past, " The Lord is my shepherd," or pray the words the Saviour taught, or lean with the THE 11EVEALED RULE OF LIFE. u 9 beloved disciple on Jesus 7 bosom at the supper, or yield himself to the upward currents of devotion poured forth in the aspiring praise and supplication of the Apostle Paul, and not feel himself wafted above the world, borne as it were on eagle wings to a height where the eloquence of a Chatham or Webster, the genius of a Milton, the philosophy of a Bacon, shrink to the sparkling insignifi- cance of sand grains gazed at from the mountain's brow ? Our sweetest lyrics have been gathered from the Hebrew Psalms. One of our greatest statesmen pronounced that beginning, " I love thy kingdom, Lord/ 7 unsurpassed in literature ; and where can the bowed, crushed, broken heart find such expressions as in the Penitential Psalm ! And now is it wonderful that such a volume should have had such a history that it should stand for cen- turies as it stands to-day, as powerful as it is venerable the spiritual battery to electrify nations and the world the moral lighthouse to illuminate the career of individ- uals and of governments the lever to lift fallen humanity from the pit of its misery the guide-book of the erring and the lost, to bring them back to their Father's house ? It helps us to know the book better to know what it is if we turn and see what it has been, where it has gone and what is has done. It has enlightened ignorance, dispelled doubt, chased away superstitious fear, and been a fountain of light and hope to the despairing. It has transformed character, changed the lion to the lamb, the brute to the angel, and the humbling confession of the penitent publican has been wrung by it from the tongue of the desperado in guilt, the felon in his cell, and the blasphemer breathing out once the vernacular of hell. Men whose vileness has been proof against all human persuasion have been subdued by the power of the cross. 1 20 LIFE LE880N8. Robust and hard-hearted iniquity has been made to trem- ble like Felix before Paul. Lips slimy with oaths have become redolent of praise. Tongues loaded with impre- cation have caught the music of the new song, and over the form of the prostrate persecutor angels have bent, to soar aloft with the exulting announcement, " behold he prayeth." Human eloquence has never won such victories, or ex- ulted in such triumphs as have been achieved by the liv- ing words of the Bible. It has slain the enmity of the human heart. It has disarmed the persecutor and sub- dued the strength of malice by a stronger love. It has gone into dens of vice and pollution and turned the foul spirits out. It has entered the temple of the soul and overturned the tables of the money-changers, and restored the prostrate and neglected altar. It has laid conse- crating hands on the faculties and powers of the whole man, till, instead of the slave of selfish gain, he became " eyes to the blind and feet to the larne." It has touched the indolent spirit and made it flame forth with active, self-denying love. It has sent those whose educated tastes led them to spurn all contact with vulgarity, into street:?, and lanes, and alleys, and hovels, where they might stretch out to the wretched and degraded the hand of sympathy and of brotherhood. It has evoked the sublimest illustrations of moral heroism, and you may safely credit the generous self-denial, the large-hearted charity, the bravest and the gentlest deeds that have en- riched the story of the 'past, to the power of the Bible. Evangelists, missionaries, martyrs, drank from this in- spiring fountain, and along every nerve thrilled the new energy which made them more than conquerors amid hard- ship, peril, dungeon and the flames. THE REVEALED RULE OF LIFE. 121 No other book lias ever wrought out such results. Into the solitary bosom, into the social circle, and into the broad sphere of our common humanity, it has borne the whispered message of the angel of the covenant. As it spoke, Care smoothed his wrinkled brow, Pain forgot his agony, Age shook off the burden of years, Sorrow dis- cerned rainbow hues, memorials of the everlasting cov- enant in its falling tear drops, while Passion hushed its raging waves, and the dying sufferer seemed to catch echoes from the music of the golden harps mingling with the pathos of love's last earthly farewell. Human affec- tion borrowed an unutterable sweetness and grace as les- sons from this book subdued every tone, while the timid spirit, through the inbreathed energy of divine truth, be- came more than a Leonidas, became a Christian martyr. Where is the institution of humanity or benevolence not indebted to it? Where is the Christian state which it- has not brought under infinite obligation ? Where is the legislation that it has not leavened, the schools and colleges and asylums which it has not nurtured ? It has been the strength of the world's strongest men. It has furnished the watchwords and mottoes that have kindled the enthusiasm of the Christian heart. The stars and stripes ? Here is the star of Bethlehem, the glorious salvation of Him by whose stripes we are healed. The Bible has been Protean, not to curse but to bless. It has been the Christian's guide-book, the soldier's armor, the sufferer's consolation, the believer's charter to a heavenly birthright. It was Luther's armory, Baxter's panoply, Bvmyan's library, Knox's battle-axe, the pilgrim's guide- book, and everywhere for all time the herald of pure learning, social morals, just laws and religious life. It lit the star in the west that guided the Mayflower. It sent G 122 LIFE LESSONS. Elliott and Brainerd to the savages of the wilderness, and over broad continents and the islands of the sea it has kindled the pioneer watchfires of the millennial advent. But, is this all ? Nay, there is scarcely a great writer, or great thinker, or great actor of these last centuries, whose debt to the Bible, in a mere intellectual point of view, is not immense. It has quickened the life of na- tions, and given to enterprise a new, if not original, im- pulse. Milton studied its grandest lyrics before he penned his own immortal song. Bacon gathered its brightest gems to set in the frame of his own golden thought. Addison in every page betrays his obligation to its lofty morality as well as its majestic diction. Cow- per suifused his lines with odors from the bruised flowers of Gethsemane, and who doubts that Washington was a braver and abler leader, and Wilberforce a more reliable statesman, and Chalmers a mightier thinker, through the power of this book? Thus through literature, legislation, moral reform and all industrial enterprise its spirit has gone abroad. Not a sail unfurled upon the sea but owes something to its influence. Not a law on the statute book but has felt its shaping pressure. Not an iron wire that thrills with the mandate of a nation's will, or an iron track which bands a continent together, that exists independent of the impulse which the Bible has ministered. And how endeared it is to millions of hearts ! It is cherished with unutterable affection by those who would feel its loss like the blotting of the sun from heaven. They heard it read in early years by saintly lips now sealed in the silence of the grave. Its very words have that familiar yet solemn tone which distinguishes them from all others. They have been preached in the pulpit, T1IE KEVEALED RULE OF LIFE. 123 they have been paraphrased in song. The music of their speech has been heard at the bridal and at the burial, in the sanctuary and by the fireside. The volume itself was, perhaps, the very earliest memorial which affection bestowed, as hope gives the fond assurance that it shall be the last to fall from the trembling hand. A solemn awe, a reverential fear attended its first perusal, and every subsequent call to listen to its words has confirmed the impression that was then made. Its sentences are imbedded in the memory. Its promises are enshrined in the heart. What childhood repeated, age loves to re- hearse, and graven on countless tombstones are traced the holy texts " that teach the rustic moralist to die," or speak the sacred hope of blessedness beyond the grave. Thus highly is it prized. And is it all a mistake ? Is this book the delusion of the soul ? Is it a false guide ? Is it a forged charter ? We may, at least, presume not, so long as, " What none can prove a forgery, may be true, What none but bad men wish exploded, must." XV. TERMS OP THE LIFE ETEKNAL. "What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" MARK r. IT. WHAT a wonderful book the Bible is ! The mar- vel of literature, the text-book of the world ! Where is there anything like it in all the writings of men ? It is the only book extant that can be called a book for all, or that is equally adapted to all. You put it into the child's hand, and he grows old reading it, but it has new charms to the last, and is unexhausted still. The hoary head bends over it not less intent than the eyes that gleam out under the fair young brow tracing lines that have been traced a hundred times, but which are still as fresh and bright as ever. Childish sim- plicity is taught the deepest truths, and readily appre- hends them, while separate books or even chapters of the volume task the ingenuity and exhaust the learning of deep-read scholars. The peasant pores over it in his hovel and the nobleman in his palace, and it is alike a teacher for both. The thankful heart finds in it the lan- guage of praise, and the penitent heart adopts its forms of contrition. The soldier reads it in the camp, or in the intervals of battle, and the widow reads in it as she comes back from the new-made grave, " The Lord is thy husband." The patriarch of four-score reads it by his (124) TERMS OF THE LIFE ETERNAL. 125 fireside, and the lisping prattler on his knee is charmed by its stories from the old man's lips. How could you teach youth a simpler petition than our Lord's prayer, and how could the profoundest learning frame anything more comprehensive, appropriate or sublime ? Suppose you invited all the wisdom and genius of the world to-day to combine their energies to produce a text- book of morals and religion which should go alike to the Englishman's castle and the Hottentot's kraal, with Kane to the Polar Seas, and Livingston to African deserts, that the professor of law should tell his students to read for its style, and the very infidel should teach his child for its sublime morality a book that should do more than the wisdom of all codes to shape the legislation of na- tions, and more than all science to overthrow the temples and the idols of pagan nations a book that a mother should put in her boy's knapsack when he goes forth to the scenes of battle, and to which she turns herself for consolation when she learns that he sleeps with the un- tombed dead a book that shall guide the footsteps of erring youth, and pillow the hope of the departing spirit a book that shall cheer the prisoner in his cell, and that shall raise up Judsons for the heathen, and Howards for jails, and Wilberforces for the enslaved African a book in which a Newton, a Herschel, a Brewster, and a Mitchel shall devoutly confess they discover truths more glorious than their telescopes reveal, and which shall have power to change the savage to a man and does any one imagine that the ripest civilization of the nine- teenth century, garnering up all the lore and experience of ages could produce such a book ? Philosophers read Lord Bacon, and scholars study Plato, and in these men you find the ripest thought of centuries and of generations ; 126 LIFE LESSONS. but what are they to the laborer or the school-boy nay, how their brightest thoughts die out as a meteor-flash, when you read the wonderful parables of the man of Nazareth, or listen to the utterances of his Sermon on the Mount ! No wonder that the book is cherished. No wonder that precious memories of it are twined about the past, and that the brightest rainbow hues of the future are borrowed from the hopes it inspires. It is associated with all that is dearest to the human heart. The old family record grows almost sacred, interleaved with these pages. The dying parent goes to this fountain to find words of farewell counsel to those he leaves behind. Here is what we repeat at the bridal, here is what we read at the burial. Here is the chapter for family devo- tion, and here the text for the sanctuary. The richest bequest of parental piety comes from the teachings of this book, and with the last memorial of the departed we trace on the tombstone some " holy text" which it has enshrined. What is the meaning of all this in connection with a book penned largely by shepherds and fishermen? There is but one answer. Here is God's text-book for the race, adapted to every capacity and to every lot. This tree of wisdom beneath whose shadow we gather to learn lessons beyond all that was taught in Platonic groves, is a tree of God's planting. It is rooted in the soil of the distant centuries. It spreads its fibres beneath Sinai and Calvary. The Spirit of God breathes through its whis- pering leaves, and the songs of prophets, and apostles, and martyrs yet wake living echoes beneath its branches. The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, and its fruit is the fruit of the tree of life. Humanity itself pants for a place beneath its shade. TERMS OF THE LIFE ETERNAL. 127 And what is the object of it ? Not to teach art or science or philosophy not to please or entertain, but to educate the soul for heaven. It answers for every man the question " Good master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" It answers it for the Jew. It an- swers it for the pagan. It answers it for the Christian. Different classes want different text-books, but here all are taught from one. The shepherd boy and the King of Israel, the fisherman and the pupil of Gamaliel, Nico- demus and Zaccheus, Milton and the ploughboy, Job and the jailer of Philippi, may take their place on the same benches, and say alike, "A greater than Solomon is here I" Just as a well-arranged text-book carries a pupil on step by step to the highest problems, so God by revela- tion has educated the race. The types and shadows of the old ceremonial law were the alphabet of the atone- ment the rudiments of the Gospel. In the profoundest sense the law was a schoolmaster, a child-guide to lead us to Christ. The commandment of duty comes logically before the sense of transgression, and with the confes- sion of sin comes that cry for mercy which the Gospel answers. And as it is with the race, so it is with the individual. If the Jews were taught as children, so is the doubting, trembling inquirer even now. Does he ask, What shall I do to inherit eternal life? he is told to keep the command- ments. This is first of all. Why? Because it is wisest. Because no man is capable of seeing the beauty and grace, and feeling the preciousness of the Gospel till he has tried to render obedience, and has been humbled into the dust by his confessed failure. He needs to know the law to feel its spirituality, to understand its extent, 128 LIFE LESSONS. to know what it requires, and to feel how far he has come short. It was to this end, that Christ would sweep aside from the eyes of the young man his blinding self- flattery, and show him to himself. For this he gives him to understand that his wealth is yet his idol, dethroning and shutting God out of his heart. He is not fitted to follow the Saviour, till he can learn to sacrifice all else to do it. This is the first great lesson. In vain is the Gospel preached to you if you refuse to learn this. We say, if you will attain eternal life by your own exertions, keep the commandments. You are bound to do it. Every fibre of your conscience responds to- the claim thrills with the sense of obligation. You are bound to love God with your whole heart, to keep His commandments to seek His glory. You are bound to hold all you have and are subject to His command. You are bound to subdue every unhallowed and selfish passion, to drive out every evil thought, to love your neighbor as yourself. You are bound to have a heart holy and pure and free from sin. You have no more right to do wrong, to speak or do, or even think or wish, an evil thing, than an angel in heaven. The very same law binds you that binds the seraph, that binds the highest archangel. Back of all the sophistries of the heart, beneath all the apologies with which con- science is overlaid, you can read upon it, as if graven with a pen of iron and the point of a diamond Keep the commandments. Breathe out your soul in prayer. Make your life a hymn of praise. Let all your affections be set on things above. Live as Christ did. Carry heaven's own atmosphere of holiness and charity with you to your daily tasks. Turn every hour into a season of worship, of holy service. Act, speak, think always TERMS OF THE LIFE ETERNAL. 129 just as you should to be ready to stand at the bar of a heart-searching God. Make every moment of these years a fitting introduction to that glorious sequel, " Well done, good and faithful servant." Why not ? Are you not bound to do it ? Has not God a right to demand it ? Has He not in fact de- manded it ? Can He be God, the God of his creatures, and require less? What is the use of a conscience if it does not say Amen to the justice of this com- mand? Begin this obedience, then. Begin it now. Do you fancy it is an easy thing ? Try it ! Commit your whole soul to it, and see whether you are ever like to reach heaven. Ah ! then you will see what you never saw, per- haps, before. You will find that you have an evil heart of unbelief, of disobedience, of rebellion. You will find that the law is wide and broad. You will find the truth of St. Paul's words, " By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified." Every step of your effort will carry you lower down in your own self-esteem. You will see what you have done what you have failed to do, what disobedience you are guilty of, what fatal infirmity clings to your sin-palsied soul. You will be brought to the verge of despair. You will be cast down into the dust before God. You will see the just terrors of a holy, but a violated law. You will begin to feel what a trans- gressor deserves. But there is no Gospel hope for you till you are brought to that point till that holy law you have broken has struck your hand loose from all your false props, so that no human hope is left you on which to lean. Then pos- sibly you may be ready to cry out " Lord, save or I perish !" Then you may exclaim, with the tremulous C* 130 LIFE LESSONS. emotion of a sinner just ready to sink to hell, " God be merciful to me a sinner/ 7 Ah ! this is the extremity to which every sinner needs to be brought. Then, perhaps, he will plead for mercy. Then, perhaps, angels bending over him with agonizing ' sympathy, may shout back to heaven the glad intelli- gence " Behold, he prayeth !" Then, too, you will be prepared to appreciate the Gos- pel. You will see the love of G-od, and his readiness to forgive, manifested in that provision by which He can be just, and yet the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. And it may be that then the glory of Redemption will burst upon your view. It may be that Christ will ap- pear no longer as " a root out of dry ground without form or comeliness" but as " the chief among ten thou- sand, and the one altogether lovely/ 7 and you will no longer wonder that Paul should exclaim, overwhelmed by the grandeur and grace of the scheme of Redemption, " God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. 77 XVI. THE FATAL LACK. " One thing thou lackest." MARK x. 21. ONE thing thou lackest! One thing! Only one? What is that among many? Perhaps it is one among fifty, all of equal importance, but neither essential, and so may be dropped out of account. But sometimes the lack of just one thing, is virtually the lack of all. A ship on the ocean might lose a sail or even a mast, and still keep on its way. But what if it should lose its rudder ? One might chip off great blocks from a large granite arch, and the pile might still stand firm ; but what if it should lose its keystone ? So a man may lack many things. He may have a scant wardrobe. He may lack many a comfort. He may be exposed to hardships, but what if he lacks religious faith ? What if he lacks the warrant to say, God and Heaven are mine ! Is it not like the loss of the rudder ? Is it not like the loss of the keystone ? The one thing which meets man's great want, which alone fits him to live and prepares him to die, without which he is orphaned from hope, and with which no calamity can more than temporarily depress him, the one thing which leads him to live with a right purpose, which consecrates all his aims, which gives him a constant refuge, which gilds with light the darkest clond, which 132 LIFE LESSONS. brings relief to fear and foreboding, which brings with it down to the darkened stormy spirit the light and peace of God, which makes the weary journey of life a pilgrim- age to heaven, and which alone teaches the triumphant song, " death ! where is thy sting ? grave ! where is thy victory ?" the one thing that does all this, is religi- ous faith, the faith by which being justified, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. It is but one thing, but how many ends does it sub- serve ! The light of the sun is but one thing, yet what would the world be^without it, but a drear, barren, fro- zen desert ? It thaws the ice. It softens the clod. It kindles life in the sleeping seed. It calls up the grass blade. It opens the bud. It spreads out the leaf. It ripens the harvest, and it cheers all nature and air the scenes of human life with its genial beams. What that is to this visible world, that the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus is to the redeemed soul. Will you put out that light ; or will you thut yourself from it ? Yet without that faith which a lost and ruined sinner is called to exercise in the Lord Jesus Christ as his Saviour, he shuts out by the clouds of his guilt those beams of love and grace which alone will thaw his cold and frozen heart, and turn it into the Eden of peace and holiness. So the air you breathe is but one thing. Yet what would life be without it ? You would only gasp and die ! Every thing would sink to the motionless repose of the grave. In one instant the earth would be wrapped in the pall of death. Yet what is the soul without the atmosphere of faith and prayer ? " Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, The Christian's native air." THE FA TAL LA CK. 133 Let him lack that alone, and of what avail is all else ? A man rich, and wise, and learned, and honored, and robed, and sceptered if you please, that cannot pray ! who denies himself the atmosphere of spiritual life, whose instinctive longings make him gasp for the unseen blessedness, but who gasps only to die ! The lack of one thing then may be a fatal lack ! It may be as that of a tree without roots, a desert without water, a house without foundations, a painting without colors, a state without laws, a world without a God ! Religious faith, though but one thing, implies much. It implies knowledge of God, the sense of guilt, repent- ance, faith in Christ as the only Saviour, a new heart, pardon, peace, and the hope of eternal life. It may be compared to a crown, with all these jewels in it. The lack of one is, for the most part, the lack of all. What is it then to lose the crown itself? Without religion, or religious faith, you have no proper sense of your condition and guilt in the sight of God. If you had, you would not continue in it. But what means this lack ? A man unused to the cold of the polar regions sinks down under it, becomes almost or quite insensible. He feels an irresistible inclination to sleep. You know his danger and what do you do ? You try to rouse him. You tell him to sleep is to die. He needs to know and realize his danger, or he is lost. Is it not so with the sinner? He is disinclined to bestir himself, to awake, to repent. He would be let alone, and sink to lethargy. What is the result ? So without religion, there is no repentance. And what is a sinner without repentance ? You visit a prisoner in his cell. He is guilty and depraved. You seek to soften 1 3 4 LIFE LESSONS. his hard heart. You array before him the features of his crime. But you make no impression. You feel that that iron insensibility is a coat of mail wrapped about his sin, and while it remains unpierced, you have no hope of him. But are not you a sinner against the Majesty on high ? And has your heart never been melted in shame and sor- row under it ? Have you never thought of that wonder- ful, infinite goodness of your heavenly Father against which you have sinned ? Have you refused to look on that infinite loveliness and gentleness that have been arrayed before you from early years ? Has nothing, not even the love of Jesus, or the pathos of that deathless affection exhibited on the cross, been enough to win your heart ? Must we not say, in vain is all else, genius, art, energy, worldly blessings, while that heart, hard as the granite, is impervious to the love of God ? Again, faith in Christ as the only Saviour is a necessity, the one thing needful. A man, we will suppose, has fallen into a deep pit. He cannot climb up its steep sides ; he cannot contrive by any art of his own to escape. But from above a rope ladder is let down to him, evi- dently by some friendly hand. He sees no one, but he hears a voice calling to him, and telling him to lay hold of it, and climb up by it. What shall he do ? What must he do ? Suppose he should call out, will it hold me ? and gets no answer. Suppose he waits long, and watches to see whether it will be withdrawn. How you stand ready to rebuke his folly, and tell him, linger not ; it is your only hope. But sin has plunged every one of us into the pits of guilt and hopeless condemnation, from which there is no escape by any art or device of our own. We have fallen THE FA TAL LA CK. 1 3 5 to the depths of guilt, of ingratitude and disobedience, from which we can be delivered only by help from above. How we are constrained to look up and see if any one appears to help us ! And while we watch, behold a lad- der let down to us, a ladder shaped as if from the cross, and a voice is heard bidding us cling to it, and climb by it. Is it rejected? What a lack there is of this obedi- ent faith! We are left without atonement, without a Saviour, without help or relief, arfd sink only to despair. Again. Pardon is needed. A man becomes a crimi- nal or a traitor, and so is outlawed. He shrinks away in fear of apprehension. What is necessary to calm and disperse his fears but pardon ? And have not all of us incurred the guilt of rebellion against the King of kings ? Is it not written, he that believeth not, is condemned already ? But upon a man without religion, or religious faith, that condemnation still abides. Nothing but the grace of a pardoning God can ever take it away. But to lack pardon, to remain here and drift on to Eternity and the judgment seat unforgiven, to have the load of guilt still resting with crushing weight upon the soul whenever it ventures to think, or is made to feel, what can compensate for all this ? There is the v guilty one, under sentence of the court. See him, while the words keep ringing their echoes in his ear, trying to master and control himself! What will all else avail him? Well- born, well-bred, gifted with genius and taste, with friends, that yet plead for him in vain, with wealth that yet will not buy his ransom ; what does all this avail without pardon ? What is the lack of religious faith then but the lack of what is vital, of what you need most, the sense of your con- dition as a sinner, a penitent spirit ; the faith that can say 136 LIFE LESSONS. Christ is mine ; peace with God your Maker ; the sense of pardoning love, and the hope of immortal blessedness ? These constitute the life of the soul, and how does Scrip- ture describe your condition except as that of one dead in trespasses and sins ? One thing ! But who can tell its importance ? You stand by the bier of one you loved. You lean down orer the coffin lid. What do you see ? The form and features, the same that have long been familiar, all are there. There is the brow calm, but still suggestive of the thoughts that once glowed beneath it. There is the eye, closed indeed, but the same that once beamed with love. There are the lips that once breathed forth the music of speech and the tones of affection. But though you call there is no answer, though you gaze there is no answering smile ! What does it mean ? One thing is lacking. Only one but that is life. Here is an emblem of the soul without faith. Is it an emblem of your soul ? Is it true of you that you have not the life of God in you ? Can you be content with such a lack ; you who labor to supply the ten thousand wants of your perishing body ; you that spare no pains to secure a single comfort ; you to whom the Lord of Life comes with the offer to supply your greatest need ? Are you amid these solemn privileged scenes an atten- dant as it were, at your soul's funeral ? . Oh that you might heed now His words, the words of Him who once by the bier of the dead, said, Arise I XVII. LIFE FROM THE DEAD. " The power of God to salvation." ROM. i. 16. NOT long since I heard a man describe the manner in which he arrested a thief who attempted by night to rob his money drawer. The criminal was a young man whom he had befriended, and whose character, till that time, had been regarded as reputable. When detected, he begged piteously that he might not be exposed. But he was given over to the police and lodged in prison. The man whom he had attempted to rob went the next morn- ing to see him, and he found him a picture of despair. His pale lips, his tortured features, his agonizing look, told of the terrible anguish that he was enduring. Surely it was a fearful sight. The man who had been ready to shoot him down on the spot when he arrested him, was melted to pity. Every revengeful feeling was gone. But he knew not what to do. He wished to be merciful, and yet he felt that he must not defraud justice. He wanted, if possible, to save the young criminal, and restore him to the paths of integrity and usefulness. He could refuse to appear against him, but the question was would this answer ? It might save him from being sentenced to prolonged imprisonment, and from attendant disgrace, but would it make him that he should be would it save him ? (137) 138 * LIFE LE880NS. There were two things that he needed to be saved from condemnation, and to be saved from himself, and a complete salvation would include both. If, released from prison, he should carry back with him into society all the vices of the past, it would only be to plunge into deeper ruin. The loss of character and self-respect and self-control ; the habits of evil, strengthened by indul- gnce and familiarity with sin all would combine to precipitate his fate. Thus we see that if a man has done evil, two things are necessary to his recovery deliverance from the con- demnation which that wickedness brings with it, and deliverance from the wickedness itself. Both are njeces- sary to a complete salvation, and that complete salvation is what every sinner needs. In the first place, sin is the violation of law, and that violation calls for sentence and penalty. This is the universal rule. In God's domain, penalty is just as sure as sin. It may be speedy, or it may be slow, but it is sure to come. Just as sure as the seed ripens to the harvest, just as sure as the stone falls to the earth when you let go your hold of it, just so sure is the penalty of violated law. All nature and all history are alike crowded with the evidence and the warnings of this truth. If frost will wither leaf and flower, if dissipation will ruin health, if lack of principle will incur contempt and loss of character, every violation of God's statutes is sure to be visited with judgment. Human courts may not take the matter up. Public opinion may overlook it. The guilty deed may be buried in darkness it may have been done by stealth, without a human witness ; but it cannot finally escape. The soul will witness against itself. Memory will keep the guilty record. The hour LIFE FROM TIIE DEAD. 139 of reflection will come at last, and if a too early death adjourns it over to the unseen world it will be only so all earthly analogies teach us to make the final reckon- ing more terrible. Besides, no sin, no evil thought or desire can escape the notice or fail to meet the disapprobation of God. It cannot escape his notice, for to his eye every thought and feeling is as palpable as the hills and rocks are to us. It cannot escape his disapprobation, for everything every moral act is to him either good or evil, either to be approved or disapproved. It is, therefore, forever under his judgment. And that judgment, covering every deed of life, is an eternal judgment. It is the judgment of an eternal God the same yesterday, to-day and for- ever. So that he that belie veth not is condemned already. Sin implies condemnation. And what is the condemnation that God pronounces on sin ? It is the condemnation of the law against every violation of it. It is the sentence due to a disregard of the end for which man was made ; due to treason against God's authority ; due to the abuse of his goodness ; due to the contempt of his mercy ; due to the debasement and degradation, and ruin of a soul entrusted as an infinite treasure to our keeping. And let the sinner himself say what that ought to be ! Say what is due to your own guilt for defeating the end of your being, for turning as it were, to a crawling worm, what should have soared beyond the eagle's flight on the wings of faith and love ; for having transformed God's temple into an idol's shrine ; for having stifled in the dust of sensuality and worldli- ness, aspirations that should have stopped at nothing short of a heavenly birthright as a child of God ? What do you deserve for having dethroned God in your affec- 140 LIFE LESSONS. tions, for having trodden under foot the blood of redemp- tion, for having grieved the Spirit that would convince you of sin and lead you to the mercy-seat as a suppliant ? What do you deserve for restraining prayer and- with- holding praise, for giving to the creature what is due only to the Creator ; for spurning the duties and the priv- ileges of an heir of heaven ; for disqualifying your soul utterly for the service and worship of the sanctuary above ! If some one had undermined and blown up with gun- powder some great structure like St. Paul's Cathedral, or the Tower of London, what would have been said of him ? But the ruin of a soul is more than the ruin of a tower or cathedral, for it is designed as God's spiritual temple. What could sting and torture you more than to have some worthless favorite steal away the affections of husband, or wife, or child ? What robbery could com- pare with it ? Yet what is the condemnation due to rob- bing God of your love, turning his glorious name by your sin into a word of terror, offering him scarce the mockery of a passing recognition, and living without any reference to his will ? Condemnation for all this is ensured by God's own jus- tice. The law does not go beyond what a properly en- lightened conscience approves. And yet its sentence the sentence that overhangs all sin that is suspended over the head of every transgressor is fearful indeed. He is to be shut out from the glory he scorned. He is to be denied the mercy he refused to seek. He is to hear the words, " depart ye cursed." His lot is to be with the enemies of God forever. He is given over to everlasting self-accusation, to bitter remorse, to the anguish of des- pair. The wrath of God abideth on him. There is no place for him in all the realms of light and glory, in all LIFE FROM THE DEAD. 141 the mansions that Christ has gone before to prepare. There is not a pure heart in heaven, not a sinless or ran- somed spirit before the throne, with which he can sympa- thize. His portion is with those that forget God, that are cast into outer darkness, that are left to reap the eternal harvest of their own sin, to eat of the fruit of their own way. All is summed up in this, the soul that sin- neth it shall die ! It is dead thenceforth to all that con- stitutes the proper life of the soul, dead to the joys of holiness, to the attractions of Christ, to the life of the redeemed. Who can contemplate this unmoved, and yet who can call it in question ? Who is not forced to confess, " all this by shutting God out of my soul, and taking the world in, do I deserve all this is my rightful portion ?" But where is deliverance ? The law cannot be re- pealed or set aside. It is as eternal as God himself. His existence as a Holy being makes the law of holiness the law of the universe. That law is imprinted on every man's conscience, like letters so inwoven into a flag that the flag must perish before the letters will fade. The conscience must be annihilated before it can fully and finally give up its trust. You must lose your conscious- ness as a moral agent before you can cease to feel the obligations which bind you as a creature of God to his service. And as sure as the law exists, so sure is its penalty, unless deliverance can be found, which, without putting aside the law, provides pardon for the guilty. Is there such deliverance ? Does it not become every one to ask ? Is not this the one great want of guilty man ? There is the tribunal before you, only a little way off. You are moving toward it every day. Each passing moment, each returning Sabbath, biings you nearer. 142 LIFE LESSONS. There is the judge, before whose presence the heavens and the earth shall flee away. The hour is at hand when your doom must be determined. Can you doubt what it must be, if you can offer there no plea for mercy ? Is it not time to ask whether you can find such a plea ; whether pardon may be secured, whether deliverance is possible ? What sort of conduct is that which says, " I know that God is holy and that I am a sinner against him, and that I must be arraigned at His bar, and that no man can say how soon the summons may come, but I am resolved to give no heed to it, to dream on to the last, to rush blindly upon that awful future, and take all the consequences ?" Is this language, though practically the language of thou- sands, that of wisdom or folly, that of prudence or despe- ration? Is it possible that you can be guilty of it? Should not rather everything else yield to the question of your salvation ? Should not all the powers of reason and reflection be concentrated here? Have you any right to rest content till you know that there is no such thing as salvation from condemnation ? Either there is, or there is not. If there is not, then all the messages that suggest it are false, and all the hopes that aspire to it are vain, and all the thousands who have cheered themselves in the joyous confidence that God had forgiven their sins, have been mistaken* We may sit down in the dust and wrap around us the mantle of despair, or we may madly make the most of the few transient joys that flash like fire-flies through the twilight of our woe, and say to ourselves, " let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die!" We may stupify con- science and brutify reason, and settle down to an irresist- ible fate, but surely, even there, our very despair would bear about it some shreds of sense and propriety, and LIFE FROM THE DEAD. 143 we might have the consolation of feeling that we endure and await nothing which it was possible to avert. But if deliverance from condemnation is possible, where is one who oflims to exercise the reason and the thought- fulness of a man who can afford to regard it with indif- ference ? Who should not inquire into it, and learn how he may himself be saved ? But the very end and scope of the Gospel is to declare that deliverance found, and to reveal its method. A Sa- viour has come to our world, and we are taught that whosoever believeth in him is not condemned. The con- victed jailer, like the thousands on the day of Pentecost, cries out, inquiring what he must do to be saved, and the reply is ever, " believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." Hear the Apostle himself, once a persecutor, exclaiming, " There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus, that walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit." And as the centuries pass, thousands take up the strain, and other thousands catch it from their dying lips, and roll it on till to-day from distant lands, from souls once bound down in heathen despair, comes up the fresh and living testimony, the testimony of what they know, and what they have felt themselves, that it is gloriously true. " There is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." Have you no desire for this deliverance ? The Gospel comes to tell you of it. Jesus is speaking of it to you through human lips. Do you listen indiiferent ? XVIII. "THE WONDERFUL." " His name shall be called Wonderful." Is. ix. 6. A WONDERFUL Being must He be, one for whom no history of man can find a precedent or a paral- lel, who presumes to interpose in behalf of a lost race, and who in doing it, proclaims Himself " mighty to save." He must be one who is warranted to interpose one who while he pities the lost, is fitted to appear in their be- half before the. majesty on high one so lowly that he can take us by the hand one so exalted that He can bear us with Him to heaven. And as such is Christ revealed to us. Scripture showers upon Him titles which it would be impious to address to a creature. He is " the Wonderful, the Coun- sellor, the mighty God, the Father of Eternity (everlast- ing Father), the Prince of Peace." He is " the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last," " the King of kings and the Lord of lords." In Him dwells " all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." He is " head over all things to the Church," " the word that in the beginning was with God, the word that was God." He is the Son of man, yet the " Lord of the Sabbath." He is " God manifest in the flesh," and has " power on earth to forgive sins." He heals the diseased, gives sight to the blind, raises the dead, quiets the storm, feeds the multitude, lays down (144) " 7777? WONDERFUL." 145 His life and takes it again. He needs no one to tell Him of the human heart, for " He knows what is in man." He is " the Messiah that was to come," who could tell His hearers " all things," who could say, " before Abra- ham was, I am," thus claiming the Jehovah-power of the great I AM. He is the one whom " all men are to honor even as they honor the Father," the one " to whom every knee is to bow and every tongue confess." It is He who alone has ever ventured or felt warranted to say, " Ye believe in God believe also in me." We may not speak of any one's falling asleep in Moses, or Paul, or David, but we do speak of their " falling asleep in Jesus." He is " th resurrection and the life." He is that Shepherd who gives his flock that follow Him " eternal life," and He has such power that no one can pluck them out of His hand. Such are only a few of the passages in which the great- ness of Him who " thought it not robbery to be equal with God," though He took upon Him the form of a ser- vant, is described to us. In these I can see nothing by which to institute a human comparison. We are dealing with the infinite and the divine, and no mortal measure can span its compass. To make Jesus merely a greater Enoch, or Isaiah, or Peter, is to do violence not merely to the history of His sinless and heavenly life, but to every description of Him in the Bible which does not speak specifically of His human nature, His growing in wisdom and stature. We may, then, assume His divinity while we proceed to consider the appropriateness of His name as " Won- derful." And surely each attribute, each office, each quality is the more wonderful when you throw around it the vesture of the infinite, when you clothe it with the 7 146 LIFE LESSONS. divine. It is more wonderful when you multiply it by the measurelessness of deity, by the limitless and the eternal. Christ is the Wonderful then for the offices, and the variety of them which He assumes and discharges. He is the second Adam, for as the first was the father of the dying and introduced death into the world, so He is the Father of the living, for He is the resurrection and the life, and "whosoever believeth on Him shall never die." He stands, therefore, as a new Adam at the head of a regenerated race. He is " the Amen, the faithful and true witness." All that He has testified of God, of heaven, of hell, of sin and judgment, shall be verified. Heaven and earth may pass away, but not one jot or tittle of all He has ever uttered. He is the sinner's Advocate ; for " if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, even Jesus Christ, the righteous." He is the Angel of the Covenant ; for through Him a covenant of mercy is made and confirmed between God and man. He is " the arm of the Lord to be revealed " to all nations, the exhibition of His power and grace combined. He is " the Author, and at the same time, He is the Finisher of our Faith. He originates and He per- fects it. He leads us to the strait gate, and He brings us to the gates of glory. He says, at first, " Come unto me ye that labor and are heavy laden," and at last, " Come ye blessed of my Father." He is the Branch, that is to grow up out of His place, that is to build the temple of the Lord, and that is to give salvation to Judah and safety to Israel, and is to be known as " the Lord our Righteousness." So He was foretold and so was it fulfilled. "THE WONDERFUL." 147 He is the Bread of Life. It is the truth that is sym- bolized to us by His broken body and flowing blood, that is our nourishment. Our souls would die if they could not look to a crucified Saviour and be fed. He is the Captain of our Salvation. He leads the way as we march through temptations and trials to the noblest conquest. He marshals all the means that are necessary to secure our salvation, and then as our Cap- tain makes the traces of His own footsteps our path to triumph. He is the Chief Shepherd ; for while his servants watch for souls as those that must give account ; while they are diligent to lead their flock, He is diligent to lead them. He watches over all. He is the Consolation of Israel. He consoles His Church in all her trials and disasters. He makes light arise upon her darkness. He gives the oil of joy for mourning and the garments of praise for the spirit of heaviness. He is the Chief Corner-stone, the foundation on which prophets and apostles, evangelists and martyrs, and the whole structure of the Church from first to last reposes. He is the Counsellor. "In Him are hidden all the treasures both of wisdom and knowledge." He can give that counsel which can meet all the wants and emergen- cies of life, the counsel that is always suited to all our wants. He is that David, beloved one, of whom David was the type, that should save the flock of God and be their Shepherd. He is the Soot and Offspring of David, his descendant and his original to whom David could say at once, my son and my king. He is the Day spring from on high that hath visited us, that chases away our night 148 LIFE LESSONS. of ignorance and despair, and brings us the dawn of heaven. He is the Sun of Righteousness that rises on us with healing in His beams. He brings us the noonday of hope and life, He makes this desert, this wilderness, this vale of tears, radiant with the light of heaven. And yet He is the Star that should come out of Jacob, and the Sceptre that should arise out of Israel. He is the bright and the morning star, the Star of Bethlehem, for He leads our way in the darkest night to the hope of sal- vation. He is the light of the world, without which the gloom of ignorance and guilt, and foreboding, and con- demnation, and error, and delusion, would have covered the nations. He is the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, the true fountain of enlight- ened reason, and piety, and devotion, without whom we should ever, living and dying, only stumble on the dark mountains ; the true light in which there is no admixture of falsehood or error. He is the brightness of the Father's glory, the revealed image of Him who dwells in light which no man can approach unto, the truth and holiness and love of God transcribed in living expressions upon the tablet of that human nature which Christ assumed, for " he that was in the bosom of the Father, he alone hath declared Him." He is the desire of all nations, the one whom all nations need and long for, for u the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now," and " the earnest expectation of the creature wait- eth for the manifestation of the sons of God." He is God's elect one, chosen for this, that " He shall not fail or be discouraged, till He have set judgment in the earth, and the isles shall wait for His law." He is a witness to the people, the faithful and true Witness who testifies to a sinful, guilty, and dying world the things of " THE WONDERFUL" 149 God. He is our forerunner ', who has gone before us, en- tering into that which is within the veil, the object of our hope, and requiring us to meet no foe, but what He has already met and vanquished. He is our leader, who marks with His blood-stained footsteps the path of our cross and self-denial. He is our example, the pattern for our lives, the perfect standard, the one who could say, " I have given you an example that ye should do, as I have done unto you." He is our Lord, the Lord of all, the Lord of glory, the Lord God of the holy prophets, the Lord God Almighty, and yet our servant, for He " came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give His life a ransom for many." He is " the chief among ten thousand, the one altogether lovely ;" He is " the Rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley," for in Him greatness and humility, majesty and loveliness are combined. He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, and yet the Lamb, the Lamb of God ; for while His power is resistless and ter- rible, and He can prevail where no others can, yet " as a lamb was he led to the slaughter, and as a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so opened he not his mouth." And with all His meek innocence, He is our Passover, our Paschal Lamb, whose blood of sprinkling, like that of the Passover of old on the door posts of the dwelling, stays for us the hand of the avenging and destroying angel of jus- tice. He is the ivay, the truth and the life. By Him we come to God, by Him we have the promise, and through Him we live. He is that eternal life, the foun- tain of living waters, " of which if a man drink he shall never thirst, but live forever." He is our Shiloh, our peace, the Prince of Peace, who could say, " Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth give I unto you ;" for it is through Him I 5 o LIFE LESSONS. that the offending rebel is reconciled to his offended Sov- ereign ; through Him that he attains to " that peace that passeth all understanding." He is our high priest and Intercessor, for He " enters for us into the holiest place," and presents the sacrifice in the name of His whole peo- ple. He is Himself the voluntary sacrifice for our guilt, He is our ransom, He is our Deliverer, He is our Jesus, Saviour, He is our Redeemer, " the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world." He is the Good Shepherd " that lays down his life for the sheep." He finds us captives, He breaks our chains, He pays our forfeit, " not by corruptible things as silver and gold, but by His own precious blood." He pledges His life to secure our ransom. Thus He becomes the horn of our salvation, the strength and security of it. He becomes our Mediator, standing between us and God, to open the way for our petition, and hand us down our pardon from the throne, screening from our eyes through the veil of His own flesh, that terrible majesty which no man can see and live. Thus, too, He becomes tJie door through which alone we can enter the home of heaven, the dwelling of our Father from which by sin we are self- exiled, and within which alone we find peace, and pardon, and blessedness. Thus, too, He becomes the Resurrection and the Life, the Prince of Life, and bestows upon His followers immortality, and makes " death to be swallowed up of life." He is the Sock, the Rock of Ages. Who- soever builds his hopes on Him is safe. He is, moreover, our prophet, for he speaks to us the word of G-od, he draws the veil of eternity and lets us look beyond the grave, at the judgment and the scenes behind that are to follow it. He is our King " the King of Israel," "the King of saints," " the King of kings," "THE WONDERFUL." 151 to whom we owe perfect and entire allegiance. He is our Lawgiver his life and example and instructions and commands are our highest law, and to present them secures the acknowledgement of their justice. He is our Judge ; his words judge us now, and in the Last Day the world shall be arraigned at his bar. Thus do we see how appropriate, from the varied titles and offices of Christ, is the language of the text, in which he is described. He is truly " the Wonderful" in whom all these things meet. But he is " the Wonderful," in the second place, because of the life which he led of self-denial and benevolence. Look at that life, incomparable and unparalleled in all the records of time. See how every thought, word and deed was made to point to the specific end of his mission, the glory of God and the salvation of the race. The Lord of Angels takes the form of a servant ; the Maker of the world had not where to lay his head. He whose word stills the troubled elements of nature, and hushes the tempest to repose, sleeps fatigued in the vessel, or sits down weary to rest himself at Jacob's well. If he could say " before Abraham was, I am," almost in the same breath he speaks of tearing down the temple of his body. The King of kings becomes the man of sorrows. The pro- prietor of the universe accepts the hospitality of the hum- ble family of Bethany. He who controls the seasons, and could perfect or blast the harvests, hungers and thirsts. He whose eye could take in the universe at a glance, comes down to the falling sparrow and the fading lily for his lessons. The poor Syrophenician woman ; the centurion ; blind Bartimeas ; the little children, whose bearers, as they presented them for a blessing, were re- buked by his disciples ; the poor widow of Nain and 152 LIFE LESSONS. that other who cast "but two mites into the treasury while the rich cast in of their abundance ; and that other still who prevailed on the hard and unrelenting judge ; the beggar at the rich man's gate ; the penitent prodigal ; the poor humbled publican ; the weeping sisters at the tomb of their brother Lazarus none of these are beneath the notice of that Eye that sees through the darkness of the grave, his own resurrection, and the bringing home of innumerable sons and daughters unto glory. Thus the whole life of Jesus is a continuous miracle, a wonder of self-denying benevolence. There is no turning aside, no digression through human weakness, but he presses on straight forward to the accomplishment of his life-work. Every step in his career was wonderful. The powers of earth and hell, the Scribes and Pharisees combined with the hosts of darkness Pilate and Satan in league do not force him to swerve from his career. Persecution fronts him as he goes. Treachery delivers him to the enemy. Death with all its lingering tortures of cruci- fixion stares him in the face, but still he presses on, and the last words of prayer for his murderers sealed the per- fect and beautiful consistency of a life devoted to God's glory and the good of man. But Christ is " the Wonderful" from the lessons which he taught. He is the great Teacher, and all the records of the world present us none who can boast of what his forerunner John declared himself unworthy to do. No one that has ever lived could say, " I am worthy to un- loose his sandals." " He spake as never man spake" was the testimony of his prejudiced hearers. Human lips never uttered before or since a sermon to be com- pared with that upon the Mount. His parables are cyclopedias of truth, every sentence a volume. He spake " THE WONDERFUL." 153 as one having authority, and not as the Scribes. Throngs followed him by thousands, and yet he shunned observa- tion and rebuked praise. No shady grove or porticoed temple, like that of Athenian philosophers, was selected as the special site of instruction ; the seashore, bordered by the harvest field, the mountain side, the desert, the streets of the city, were hallowed by words too powerful and sacred to need halls or temples of human fabric to lend them a sanction. He spoke beneath the dome of heaven, and no encircling walls were to confine a speech that was to go abroad through all the earth, and its sound to the end of the world. And the place where he spoke was typical of the truth he uttered. It was open to all. It was free to all. It acknowledged no peculiar respect for birth, race or clime. The great Teacher, first of all, glanced over the partition walls of nations and religions, and taught what he alone had compre- hended the religious unity of the race. And then look into this truth which his prescient mind directed in purpose to Jew and Samaritan, to the age that then was, and the ages that were to come. It is the truth of heaven. It is solid instruction. It is fact/ not theory. The earnest glance of this Teacher pierced through all speculation, all sophistry, and swept them aside, that he might gather the wheat into the garner. From what lips but his did such words, such truths, such les- sons, ever proceed just what we want to know, just what we should know, truths that take hold on eternal things, that open the volume of our immortal destiny, that reveal God to us as King, Father, Judge, and Proprietor of all that open bright prospects of pardon and hope and bless- edness for the penitent, and gloomy abysses of despair unutterable for the guilty truths that dawn upon our 7* 154 LIFE LESSONS. night like a heavenly morning, that kindle the whole soul in all its faculties to a new life truths that seem by an electric power to reach at once distant continents and far-off ages, that have nations for an audience and centu- ries to echo their tones that ring on like the pealing thun- der along the hills, till they lose themselves in eternity truths that do not sleep in the soul that receives them like dry logic, or fruitless science, but are a seed, a leaven, a life within ; that renovate the whole nature ; that like Christ, their Author, cast out demons, and restore a man to himself, to his home, and his God. Where is the teacher whose words work such a transformation, make fishermen apostles, change the persecutor into the herald of the cross, burn into the hearts of thousands with such intensity that the martyr's flames are unheeded ; that in some obscure dwelling sink deep in the soul of its humble occupant long centuries after they were uttered, and make men of feeble, unlettered simplicity like the im- prisoned Madiai, calmly defiant of tyrannic power, might- ier in the strength of their disci pleship to Jesus, than all the terrors of sovereign and intolerant authority ? Wonderful Teacher ! No man ever spake like this man. The person, the utterance, the manner, the circum- stances, are all pa.ssed away. The eloquence of the occa- sion has fled. We may indeed conceive the charm of that personal presence his finger points to the lily while he declares that Solomon was never arrayed like it. The sower was on the hillside before Him when he made his seed to typify the word of God. He sat by Jacob's weir when he spoke of the living water. All this has passed away, but the eloquence of truth remains. Through the middle ages Aristotle had his commentators and in- terpreters in the schools and universities of Europe. His " THE WONDERFUL." '55 name now has lost its power ; but millions are listening to-day to hundreds and thousands that speak in the Sa- viour's name, $nd reiterate his lessons. And the time will come, it is coming now, when on continents and islands, on every shore and in every clime, Christ's truth shall spread, and he become the Teacher of a renovated world ; a ransomed race shall be his disciples. But He is "the Wonderful," for the ends that He seeks to accomplish. What these are, as they reach be- yond time and interweave themselves with the interests of God's universal government, it is not for us to declare. But we may speak of what is now revealed, the mystery of godliness, " God manifest in flesh." The Gospel is a wonder, its author is the Wonderful. He sought no selfish aim. The world has seen ambition and grasping avarice and self-seeking intellect elsewhere ; for a won- der, it saw in Him of these no trace. His object was one that lofty minds may have dreamed of, but it towered above all they could hope to realize, like the Alps above molehills. He fixed His purpose on the renovation of the human heart and race, the re-building of its ruins, its redemption from sin's thraldom, its translation to an angel's sphere. And if the steps that He took to this end were arduous, they were firm and wise ; they were fact, not fancy ; they were cut in the granite, and a race might mount by them. Let a man look at that end which the Saviour had in view, for which He laid aside His glory, for which He took our nature, for which He taught, suffered and died, for which He chose His dis- ciples and sent them abroad with His great commission, and he will call that mind "wonderful" which originated the vast and glorious plan ; how much more when it solved the problem of devising means for its accomplish- 156 LIFE LESSONS. ment, when it called into being the mechanism and mo- tives, arid opened the way by which it might be secured -when life is sacrificed and death with ignominy and torture are welcomed to secure its accomplishment. An- gels may wonder, but we will adore. We can join with the poet : " And who is great ? Alas ! the teeming earth has seen but one. The lowly Bethlehem shadowed his infant brow, the manger there Pillowed his infant head. Yet who like him Has come from palaces and walked the land AVith such a crown upon his golden hair ? Is greatness from the glory of our sires Or the emblazoned page of heraldry ? His Father was the God of all the earth His generation from eternity. Is it from life, or life's great deeds, that stir The heart to admiration, prayers, and tears? His was a life devoted to the world A life that battled with eternal death. Is it from glory ? His was that of good Not marshalled by the clarion and the trump, But by the silent gratitude of earth. Is it from eloquence ? His wondrous lips Stirred the great elements, and mount and sea Trembled before his words, and wind and storm Sank at that magic utterance Be still. He spake, and thrones before his startling voice And kings that filled them in their robes and crowns, Shook like an aspen in the coming storm. Is it from power ? His sceptre was o'er all, And the wide world bowed to his lifted hand. Is it from lofty love that love for man That dares the tempest of a maddened earth, The malediction of the human heart "THE WONDEEFUL." 157 For which it bows it to the sepulchre ? His was the great philanthropy of God. Alone He trod the winepress, and alone In red Gethsemane he bowed and bled Great drops of agony, and cleansed the world." It is easy now to discern why the Saviour is called "the Wonderful/ 7 or rather why He is "the Wonderful." It was for a wonderful end the salvation of undone and ruined men. When we look at this we find every- thing full of wonders. The soul of man is a wonderful thing. It has wonderful capacities, a wonderful lot on earth, a wonderful destiny hereafter. Its estrangement from God is wonderful, its degradation and sin are won- derful, but its restoration is a still greater wonder it is a miracle of grace. It needed a wonderful mind to con- trive it, a wonderful power to execute it, and the history of the results that follow it, is a history of wonders. The redeemed soul exclaims with Wesley : " See a bush that burns with fire, Unconsumed amid the flame, Turn aside the sight admire, I that living wonder am." It was to rescue us, to work in us a wonderful trans- formation, that this wonderful Jesus-Saviour appeared. It was to ransom the captive, to give sight to the blind, to make the dead in trespasses and sins live, to make this worm of the earth, covered with the slime of sin, a white-robed angel to bring the lost wanderer back to his Father's house. We needed one, wonderful to save combining almost conflicting elements in harmony our King and our Brother, our friend and our judge human 1 5 8 LIFE LESSONS. and yet divine sinless, yet compassionate to the guilty- authorised to forgive, yet purchasing our pardon with his blood. We needed One to whom kings should bow, and who yet would hear and receive the beggar One infinite in perfection, yet a perfection transcribed upon a human life that we might imitate One who could suffer like us and be tried like us, but whose flowing blood could cleanse a world. Such a One "the Wonderful 77 has been provided. To the strange depth of our guilt and woe, a strange arm has reached a strange deliver- ance. Consider again what our feelings should be to this wonderful Saviour. They should be those of wonderful love. It is for us that His life was wonderful, His teach- ings wonderful, His death wonderful. For us he com- bined all those strange titles and offices in himself. For us he led that strange career of self-denying benevolence, humility and reproach. For us he spake as never man spake. For us He laid down his life amid the torture and shame of the cross. What ought our feelings to be toward Him our Friend, Redeemer, Brother, Saviour ? What gratitude, devotion, attachment should we exhibit ! And what sort of a remembrance should that be of Him, which we cherish, when assembled at His table, and handling the emblems of His broken body ! "He that loveth me will keep my commandments," said Christ. " He will, he does," should be the echo of every Christian heart the history of every Christian life. Wonderful Jesus, we will obey Thee. " Remember thee thy death, thy shame Our sinful hearts to share memory leave no other name But His recorded there." "THE WONDERFUL." 159 Reflect, also, how wonderful and entire should be our faith and trust in this wonderful Saviour. He is worthy of it in all its fulness. Think of what all these titles mean, and what they make Him, as an object of confi- dence. He is " able to save to the uttermost." He can fulfil all our hope. Think of his truth and fidelity. He will not falsify that wonderful promise worthy of its wonderful author " Whosoever cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out." Think of the wisdom of His teach- ings the sagacity of Omniscience that can lead the lost wanderer home. Where is there such a guide ? Think of His power no one can pluck us out of His hand. Think of that love that pillowed on its bosom the beloved disciple, that wept with the weepers at Lazarus 7 grave, that met the abandoned outcasts with a mingled truth and kindness that broke their hearts. Will you not lean in humble and implicit trust on the Saviour's arm ? Will you not commit your soul into the Saviours hands ? Will you not forego every vain reliance on your- self, and rest your hope in the Saviour's blood ? Consider, too, how wonderful must be the condemnation of those who refuse such a wonderful Saviour ! Now you have presented to your view a great and wonderful Re- deemer. He is able to save to the uttermost all that come to God by Him. Spurn His offer, let it alone till death withdraws it forever, and what becomes of you? The condemnation of the cities of the plain was wonder- ful, but they will rise up in judgment to condemn you. And, finally, ask what that world must be where He that is " the Wonderful/ 7 shall be fully revealed to our perfect vision. That will be glorious and wonderful indeed. There we shall " behold Him, whom not having seen we love, and in whom believing, we rejoice with joy 160 LIFE LESSONS unspeakable and full of glory. The wonders of His being will be there unfolded, and to our adoring gaze they will appear more wondrous still. We shall appre- ciate the meaning of that name as we cannot now. A wonderful scene indeed transpires when, unseen by the outward eye, the King of kings comes down to feed the famished soul with the bread of life. Pardoned rebels gather to the table to meet the smile, and cherish the memory of their dying, risen Lord. Hopes full of immortality cluster around the sacred emblems of His broken body. But there is another scene to come, of which this is but a feeble type. From the east and the west, from the north and the south, shall come the thronging myriads of ransomed spirits, to sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God. And "the Wonderful" will be there, the Redeemer with* His redeemed, and at that table of infinite love and perfect holiness, Eternity itself will be the feast-day of the soul. Every want will be met, every desire satisfied. Even now the Saviour Himself is giving out His invitation to meet Him there. Will you not accept it ? XIX. THE CHRISTIAN LIFE WHAT IT IMPLIES. "Be ye therefore perfect." MATT. v. 48. IT is an old saying, too little regarded by many, that we have but one life to live. It is common sense, it is wisdom, it is religion, therefore, to make the most of it. To accomplish this is the true philosophy of life. What rule, standard, model, then, shall we adopt ; for there is an infinite variety. You turn with disgust and loathing from the type of life set before you in the drunkard, the glutton, and the sensualist. You do not want a trough for a table, a sty for a dwelling, or a gutter for a bed. And yet, perhaps, you are lured by feasts, pageants, Brussels carpets and four-story palaces. You have a taste for flutter and fashion. You adore ease and comfort. But is there not something better than all this ? Which would read best on a grave-stone, a rich merchant, a smart lawyer, a greedy pleasure seeker, or an earnest and devoted Christian? Who commands the most re- spect, even from a godless world, the man that prays, or the -man that jests ? And which is the greatest and no- blest achievement, to train the soul for heaven and enrich it with memories of goodness and self-denial ; or to eat, drink, sleep, and drift with the fashions ? I have no hesitation in saying with the poet, "A Chris- (1G1) 162 LIFE LESSONS. tian is the highest style of man." Plaster the body with tinsel ; teach it genteel manners ; store the mind with learning ; educate it to exquisite taste ; make a man upright and moral, a true friend and kind neighbor, and you yet fall vastly short of the Christian standard. You have fashion's idol, but the soul of piety is not in it. You may have the golden candlestick but no light ; the frame, but not the picture. It is well to be moral and upright, but principle with- out religion has simply the force of education and habit. These plant it like a cedar post in the earth, but re- ligion makes it live and grow, and turns it into a cedar of Lebanon. There can be no solidity of character, it is true, without morality. A man becomes like a tree with a hollow trunk, fair without, but ants, squirrels, and rot- ten wood inside, and reeling till it falls prostrate beneath the tornado. And yet moral principle is to Christian faith only as the dry channel of an aqueduct to the living fountain that can fill it and supply the thirst of thousands. Aspiring merely to morality, I level the arrow of effort at a height like that of the " Crow's Nest," but concen- trating my energies on a life like Christ's, I lay my hand on a crown of hope beyond the stars. Piety implies morality, and morality of the highest standard. Without this, it is but like a body bled to death, or a frame with the bones expunged. But a Christian life requires not only fair morals, but a re- newed heart ; not only just dealings with men, but truth and duty to the God of truth ; not only integrity and justice, but charity, humility, and holy consecration. Morality says, " do no man any wrong." Religion says, " do all men good." Morality says, " keep off the stains of vice," Religion says, " put on the robes, not of virtue THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 163 only, but of angelic holiness." Morality bids, " pay your debts to your neighbor." Religion urges, " accept as a bankrupt sinner the free grace of God in Christ, and live as one bought with a price, no longer your own." We feel that it would be a great thing to bring the mass of men up to even the lower standard. They suffer themselves to be governed by their pleasures and their tastes, till a slave-driver's whip and chains could not im- pose a more hopeless bondage. They have no higher aim in life than just self-gratification. They can hate, envy, cheat, deceive, offend, riot, carouse, all within the limits of a morality that keeps their names out of the newspapers, and their persons from the police courts. They drift through life with no more moral pilotage than what is necessary to keep clear of the rapids of vice or the snags of the law. Some, again, belong to that class whom Cowper de- scribes, " whose ambition is to sink." All that consti- tutes the dignity of the human soul reflection, conscien- tiousness, soberness of purpose, is thrust aside to give place to recklessness, frivolity, amusement. The soul is disfigured, like an Indian tattooed for his war-dance. To say a funny thing, however stupidly foolish, to master the legerdemain of fashion, to win some frivolous game, to gain admission to some gay circle, this is the height of their aspirations. It seems as if the instincts of but- terflies and peacocks had been lodged by mistake in human bodies, or as if the owners of soul were ashamed of their property, and panted to supplant the image of God by some gross caricature. To bring such persons up to a decent moral standard, would be carrying them not above the tops of the Alps or the Andes, it is true, but it would be lifting- them out 164 LIFE LESSONS. of mines and caves to the light of day, out of quagmires to the solid ground. A strictly moral man ought to be sober enough to see that there is something serious in life, that it means more than an empty pageant or a reel- ing dance. He ought to be prepared to say, " this valley of existence" bounded by the mountain ranges of an eter- nity past and an eternity to come, with only the gates of death and the bar of judgment for its outlet, is not the place for an heir of immortality to doze and carouse, jest and banter. The great heavens over us stretch them- selves out to an immensity which they beckon the am- plitudes of our expanding thoughts to fill. This soul itself, the wonder of creation's wonders, within whose im- palpable grasp whole centuries are gathered up, and millions of memories are stored, which by a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen, travels back from the seen to the unseen, from na- ture to God, which soars aloft till poised on the brink of its own doom, it speculates on eternal ages when every earthly memorial of itself has vanished this soul, capa- ble of knowing God, and filling an angel's sphere, is too great and glorious a thing to be kicked about as the foot- ball of fashion, too capacious to be measured by the jester's standard." But Christianity is not content with this. It demands more. Its aim is loftier, more comprehensive. It de- mands, to attain its objects, the enlistment of all the powers of the soul. For some men, to attain a fortune, may be a high aspiration ; for others, the fame of successful gen- eralship ; for others still, a reputable character ; but he who aims just to live a truly Christian life, aspires to a higher and more arduous as well as a holier attainment. Such a life implies the subordination of all selfish pas- THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 165 sions and lusts to the divine will. This is the true mas- tery. A man does not own himself till God owns him, and that ownership is solemnly acknowledged. He is a slave to his baser nature, even though his chains are in- viting as diamond rings and bracelets of gold. While a passion against which reason revolts domineers over him while a lust which conscience rebukes scoffs at con- science, he is a bond-slave of satan. He is ruled by a tyrant as vile and base as his own deformity. To over- come this tyrant, it is not enough to make a declaration of independence. A more than " seven years' war" must follow it, a life-long struggle to establish the ascendancy of virtue and the law of God. He who maintains it to the end, who " falls but fights anew" till even death becomes his standard-bearer and waves over his pros- trate dust the flag of triumph he is the true hero. " He that ruleth his own spirit is better than he that taketh a city." The man who turns his own soul into a battle- field for God. resolved never to shrink or flee till the victory is won, is braver than the veteran of a hundred fights. How easy to love those that love you! How hard to turn your other cheek to the smiter ! How easy to glow with indignation at even imagined wrong ! How hard, but how noble to forgive as you would be forgiven yourself! A Hannibal in boyhood vows upon the altar eternal hostility to the Roman people. Jesus on the cross prays for his murderers, "Father, forgive them." All ambitions are mean and contemptible by the side of that which would enthrone the purity, meekness, humility and charity of the Gospel within the soul. A Christian life implies, moreover, a humbling accep- tance of Christ's Redemption as the only ground of hope for the sinner. It costs something for proud human na- 166 LIFE LESSONS. ture to stoop to this. It costs something to strip off the robe of pride, of trust in our own fancied goodness, and falling prostrate in the dust confess that in ourselves we have nothing to avert the descending stroke of divine justice, and that as helpless suppliants, as guilty wretches, all our appeal must be simply to sovereign mercy. Yet this a Christian life requires, and the man who stoops to this, humbles himself only to be exalted. He is not only pardoned, but he is delivered from his own pride. He has the greatness of one who forms a low estimate of himself. ' He has attained to this to see his own heart as it appears before God to know the weakness and depravity of his fallen nature. It is a knowledge beyond any that is taught in the schools beyond the knowledge of the student, or the artist, or the historian, or the phi- losopher it is the knowledge of his need, and the knowl- edge of his Redeemer. A Christian life implies, again, a consecration to a holy service, to the work of God. In whatever it is engaged, it serves him. To stand by the anvil, to follow the plough, to serve at the counter, to sweep the streets, be- comes a hallowed employment, for it is cheerfully per- formed at the mandate of duty ; it is done to glorify him by whom it is imposed. It is done because it is due because he that does it confesses that he is not his own, but the creature of God, the redeemed of grace, a pen- sioner on the divine beneficence, and so with holy aims, he strives to put God's will in all things in place of his own, turning life into a prayer, and making each daily blessing a note in the sweet music of adoration, each hardship a step by which he climbs up toward God. A Christian life is one that necessarily seeks to do good. And herein it finds a field for glorious achievement. Not THE CHRIH TIAN LIFE. 1 67 in days like these may any one speak in scorn of the blood- stained banner that waves over the soldier of freedom arid native land, but the expansive aims of a true philan- thropy reach abroad to take the whole world in the embrace of their sympathies. One cannot love God with- out loving his brother also, and when you look on the humblest hero of charity, out of love to God seeking to teach the ignorant or uplift the degraded, what a shriv- elled and contemptible caricature of greatness is the richest miser, the greatest warrior, the most surprising genius, a Croesus, a Pharaoh, a Caesar, by his side. A Christian life is the only one worth living on earth. Any other soon foams away to dregs and such dregs ! what they are, let a Dives, a Chesterfield, a Byron tell ! Back of all the show and pageant, behind the close-drawn curtain, there are just " the tawdry ornaments, the tallow candles, the wires and pulleys," which the English noble- man described. A bubble's life is dignity to this. An actor's part is sincerity to this. To be true, earnest, effective to make existence here anything else than tragedy or mockery, rubbish or crime, we must adopt the Christian's standard. XX. THE FIRST AIM OF LIFE. " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness." MATT. vi. 33. SOME of the gravest mistakes of human life grow out of one fundamental error putting first something that should be put second, or putting second what should be first. There can properly be only one thing put first, and that is, religion the fear of God. It is the founda- tion of character, and effort, and happiness. Nothing else will endure and sustain the superstructure of a true life. Few, perhaps, will dispute this in words, but they do in deeds. They seem to me like one who in the winter time, when he proposes to build himself a magnificent palace, goes, not to the granite quarry, but, to the moun- tain glacier, and hews out, perhaps, enormous blocks of beautiful ice, and lays them deep and firm as a founda- tion. On this, he piles all his life-wrought materials, and within the structure he places all his treasures. Every thing he has, and his life itself, are staked on the durability of the ice blocks. For months there is, per- haps, no sign of yielding, but, at last, it may be suddenly, the whole structure sinks into a mass of rubbish. Is this fancy ? Is it not rather parable coined out of fact ? What is the foundation on which thousands build ? (168) THE FI118T AIM OF LIFE. 169 What lies at the base of all their schemes and efforts ? Are they not building on to-morrow's uncertainty, on some dream of success, on some fond imagination, ice- blocks all, that will melt under the heat of trial, and leave all that rests on them to sink to ruin ? No one can build, no one has a right to build, till he can build on the Rock of Ages. We are all building, whether we know it or not, for eternity. We may put up wigwams or hospitals, tents or temples, but our aims and deeds, whatever they are, are the soul's palace, under the shelter or shadow of which it will dwell forever. The question with what we build is a grave one, but the ques- tion on what we build comes first. It matters little whether I use hay, wood and stubble, or marble and granite, if in either case they rest on quicksand. A great genius with splendid attainments makes a more imposing ruin, but a ruin nevertheless. He seems to me, without religion, like a magnificent arch supported on a wooden frame, with the keystone left out. It may stand for years, but its fate is just as sure as that of the props that support it. Your first great duty is to shape your life to the great end for which it was given. Let religion draw the out- line and then fill it up wisely and well. See that its scope is right. You may journey at railroad speed, but if you go the wrong way, there is no progress. You may toil long and hard, but if you weary yourself with vanity, it will amount to nothing. A life made up of rambling and zigzag will do very well if it ends where it began. One who spends his life in gazing at rockets will see little of stars and sun. Thousands live extem- pore, watching for the next meteor of politics, gain or fashion. Their future, so far as they note it, is just a 8 170 LIFE LESSONS. mirage of fancy, all this side the grave. They never ask, why am I here, what is my proper business, what is the great end I should ever keep in view ? They ramble on with little thought of where their last yesterday will leave them. Life has no more shape to it than the gravi- tation of indolence, taste or circumstance gives it. Or, if there is a plan, how often is it a false one ! It would make a meteor of what should be a star. It would debase an heir of heaven to a millionaire, a tidewaiter, or a fop. It would draw off talent and probation and even the river, " the streams whereof make glad the city of God," into currents to turn the machinery that saws logs and weaves cotton. It would put the Bible under foot that it may stand on it and so reach higher to grasp the prize which the Bible forbids to seek. It would sub- stitute gold for grace, and gain for godliness. It would fill God's temple with money-changers. It would sacri- fice the soul's everlasting birthright to pamper the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life. This is a " Comedy of Errors " beyond any that the genius of the great dramatist ever invented ; comedy that runs into deepest tragedy, that begins with a jest and ends with a sigh, that lulls to heedlessness and wakes to remorse. All this would not be of so much account if you could satisfy yourself that there was no God to judge you, no future existence for the soul, no high and glorious destiny to which God invites it, no capability by God's grace of turning this life into an introduction to the everlasting blessedness of heaven. But if any one to gratify you should attempt to prove this, with what horror would you regard him ! You would feel that his argument was atheism and his logic despair. With a shudder you THE FIRST AIM OF LIFE. 171 would say, " to corruption thou art my father, and to the worm thou art my mother and my sister." Ah ! it is not in man calmly and complacently to look upon such a doom. The soul shrinks from it as the flesh does from torture. We feel that we were made for something better. The instincts of our being crave im- mortality. There are moments when the bounds of time seem to us like the shell of the bird ere it spreads its wings. We can rise heavenward. The stars seem but the milestones of everlasting progress. The soul aspires to freedom from its fleshly chain. This life is the child- hood of being, this world the perch whence we are to soar away. Shall man then, when the light of revelation confirms all this and more, be content with a meaner ambition than the heathen artist who said, " I paint for eternity ?" Shall you, a child of God, be content with the heritage of a slave? Will you, with lips that can lisp "Our Father/' pawn your birthright for a prodigal's portion ? Will you, who may be even now a king and priest unto God, kindle the fires of Baal and do sacrifice to mam- mon ? With joys even now offered, sweeter than Eden's fragrance, and with treasures in the love of God richer than gems and gold from uncounted mines, will you choose rather the sands of the world's deserts, and its apples of Sodom that are ashes to the taste ? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Sixty centuries empannelled on the jury give in that ver- dict. It pronounces him